More on the CIA Purges…

The Langley Lobotomy
By David Ignatius, November 30, 2004, The Washington Post

“Driving past the George [H. W.] Bush Center for Intelligence, as the CIA headquarters is officially known, you can't help wondering how on earth America's spy service has become the favorite whipping boy of the right wing.”

“It's crazy for a nation at war to be purging its spies. But that's what has been happening in the weeks since former representative Porter Goss [Toady-FL] and a phalanx of conservative congressional aides took over at the CIA. What makes the putsch genuinely scary is that it seems to be driven by an animus toward the CIA that could do real damage to the nation's security.”

“ … certainly the CIA could improve its performance: It is too risk-averse, too prone to groupthink, too mired in mediocrity. But the cure for these problems is hardly to send in a team of ideologues from Capitol Hill and drive out the agency's most experienced intelligence officers.”

“ … But I doubt that performance issues are what's really motivating this housecleaning. The CIA, after all, did a better job of recognizing the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, than did the FBI, the Pentagon, or the National Security Council. And while the CIA could certainly improve its operations in Iraq, the agency at least understood that the United States would face a bloody postwar insurgency there. If performance were the yardstick, surely it would be the official who bungled postwar planning for Iraq, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who would be out on his ear.”

“ … Even Sen. John McCain, who should know better, has joined in the public flaying of the CIA, calling it "dysfunctional.” Doesn't he see that the current assault on career intelligence officers is like the post-Vietnam attacks on an unpopular U.S. military?”

“What's disturbing is that all this is happening under the eye of a reelected President Bush. Does the man who campaigned as a resolute wartime leader really think it makes sense for conservative Republicans to gut the CIA and derail the intelligence reform bill? Why does he find it so hard to speak up for the politically battered officers who staff the George Bush Center for Intelligence? If there's a logic here, other than misguided partisan politics, it escapes me.”

Yo, Dave, this administration is not a member of the "reality-based community." Have you forgotten that little nugget of truth?