The Enemy Within
Last night I wrote of the Bush Pentagon's inexplicable failure to mine the motherlode of Saddamite documents that were found in the wake of the toppling of the Hussein regime that would vindicate beyond any possible doubt the President's decision to invade Iraq. This morning, via Brother Trunk, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly explicates this failure by detailing another: the failure of the Bushies to ever clean out the Clintonoid holdovers from the Defense and Intelligence bureaucracies and the resulting internecine war launched by the latter against the former to cover up their own complicity in leaving America vulnerable to Islamist attack and undermine their successors' efforts to win the war they bequeathed them:
That just makes the active undermining, as opposed to the passive variety, all the more egregious:
I would say that there's no doubt at all that the CIA's survival is not in the national interest, because its denizens have subordinated the national interest to their own personal power lusts.
Thus the irony of their obsession with "Vietnamizing" the GWOT and "Nixonizing" George W. Bush. What is crystal clear is that it is the American Left which has become a far more sinister version of what they once attributed to Tricky Dick. It is the American Left which thinks nothing of misusing and abusing the CIA in the very same way they once condemned via the infamous Church Commission. It is the American Left which thinks nothing of employing dirty tricks, law-breaking, and even selling out their own country if it will work to their political advantage. And how inevitable in retrospect to see that the latter is the natural outcome of the former. Looks like it's time for another Commission - or simply starting from scratch.
But that will require apocalyptic political combat, given what Dubya's domestic enemies have been willing to do to him essentially unopposed. And that brings us full circle back to where we came in.
To win the shooting war against our enemies overseas, the President has to be willing to win the political war at home. In five years he has shown as scant a willingness to engage in the latter as he has robust a determination to engage in the former. Given all the shooting that is still left to be done, he, and we, simply cannot afford the luxury of such an imbalance any longer.
On August 2, Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reported that "a major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years."Some readers may consider the title of this post provocative. But it's difficult for me to ascribe this pattern of "incompetence" to sloppiness, indifference, and "not giving a damn." It looks to me like deliberate sabotage of a policy CIA lefties do not like. Given the context - war, and the President being, after all, Commander-in-Chief - the term insubordination comes to mind, and that used to be considered a bad thing. At least before traitorism for political gain became acceptable on one side of the aisle.
On December 5, the Jerusalem Post reported that Mohammed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb."
My, how time flies. It hasn't seemed as if 10 years have elapsed since last summer.
The CIA could be right, and the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and the IAEA could be wrong. But given the CIA's forecasting record - it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the warning signs of 9/11 and Saddam's WMD - that's not the way to bet.
Intelligence analysis isn't the only thing the CIA does sloppily. The Bush Administration suffered major embarrassment when it was disclosed that the United States was holding top al-Qaida suspects in "secret prisons" in eastern Europe and North Africa.
A Swedish journalist who prepared one of the first stories on the CIA flights that transported al-Qaida captives told Josh Gerstein of The New York Sun the CIA did a poor job of covering its tracks.
"I would say they didn't give a damn," Fredrik Laurin told Mr. Gerstein. "If I was an American taxpayer, I'd be upset."
For a show broadcast in May of last year, Mr. Laurin traced the tail number of a Gulfstream jet used to transport captives to a clearly phony company in Massachusetts.
"You weren't able to trace the name to any living individual," Mr. Laurin said. "They were all living in post office boxes in Virginia.
"If that's all the imagination they can drum up at Langley, I'd fire the bunch," Mr. Laurin added.
That just makes the active undermining, as opposed to the passive variety, all the more egregious:
But if the CIA hasn't been very good at ferreting out the secrets of our enemies, or keeping our own, it has shown a talent for playing politics.
"The CIA's war against the Bush Administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years," wrote lawyer and Web logger John Hinderaker in The Weekly Standard.
The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the Bush Administration by former Democratic officeholders, and permitted a serving analyst, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book bashing the President.
The principal CIA weapon has been the leak. Reporters for ABC, the New York Times and the Washington Post didn't have to do even the minimal legwork Mr. Laurin did to out the CIA's clandestine "rendition" program. It was handed to them by "current and former intelligence officials."
"So the CIA established policies that it knew would be controversial and would damage American interests if revealed, and then leaked the existence of those policies to the Washington Post for the purpose of damaging the Bush Administration," Mr. Hinderaker wrote.
A rogue CIA that subverts American democracy has long been a staple of moonbat mythology. How ironic that the rogues in the CIA should turn out to be leftists who harm America to benefit Democrats....
In the 1990s, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed abolishing the CIA. That seemed far out then. It doesn't seem so far out now. It might be easier to start from scratch than to clean up the mess the CIA has become.
"The CIA is in deep crisis," Mr. Hinderaker said. "It is not at all clear that its survival is in the national interest." [emphasis added]
I would say that there's no doubt at all that the CIA's survival is not in the national interest, because its denizens have subordinated the national interest to their own personal power lusts.
Thus the irony of their obsession with "Vietnamizing" the GWOT and "Nixonizing" George W. Bush. What is crystal clear is that it is the American Left which has become a far more sinister version of what they once attributed to Tricky Dick. It is the American Left which thinks nothing of misusing and abusing the CIA in the very same way they once condemned via the infamous Church Commission. It is the American Left which thinks nothing of employing dirty tricks, law-breaking, and even selling out their own country if it will work to their political advantage. And how inevitable in retrospect to see that the latter is the natural outcome of the former. Looks like it's time for another Commission - or simply starting from scratch.
But that will require apocalyptic political combat, given what Dubya's domestic enemies have been willing to do to him essentially unopposed. And that brings us full circle back to where we came in.
To win the shooting war against our enemies overseas, the President has to be willing to win the political war at home. In five years he has shown as scant a willingness to engage in the latter as he has robust a determination to engage in the former. Given all the shooting that is still left to be done, he, and we, simply cannot afford the luxury of such an imbalance any longer.
posted by JASmius at 7:22 AM
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