Blumenthal: Killling the CIA

In Goss, Bush found the perfect hatchet man to take vengeance on a despised agency. Now Goss is gone, scandal looms -- and the CIA is ruined.

By Sidney Blumenthal

May. 11, 2006 | The moment that the destruction of the Central Intelligence Agency began can be pinpointed to a time, a place and even a memo. On Aug. 6, 2001, CIA director George Tenet presented to President Bush his presidential daily briefing, a startling document titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Bush did nothing, asked for no further briefings on the issue, and returned to cutting brush at his Crawford, Texas, compound.

(snip)

Regardless of anodyne assurances offered in his forthcoming congressional testimony, Hayden will preside over the liquidation of the CIA as it has been known. The George H.W. Bush CIA headquarters building in Langley will of course remain standing. But the agency will be chipped apart, some of its key parts absorbed by other agencies, with the Pentagon emerging as the ultimate winner.

The militarization of intelligence under Bush is likely to guarantee military solutions above other options. Uniformed officers trained to identity military threats and trends will take over economic and political intelligence for which they are untrained and often incapable, and their priorities will skew analysis. But the bias toward the military option will be one that the military in the end will dislike. It will find itself increasingly bearing the brunt of foreign policy and stretched beyond endurance. The vicious cycle leads to a downward spiral. And Hayden's story will be like a dull shadow of Powell's -- a tale of a "good soldier" who salutes, gets promoted, is used and abused, and is finally discarded.

No president has ever before ruined an agency at the heart of national security out of pique and vengeance. The manipulation of intelligence by political leadership demands ever tightened control. But political purges provide only temporary relief from the widening crisis of policy failure.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/05/11/cia/

and no one will do anything about it.

a nasty chill down the spine of every American As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.

Since when does a Federal agency direct it's employees to be "loyal" to an administration and not the country . The CIA's job has changed from collecting intelligence to producing propaganda

after what he did to Plame and Brewster Jennings? * has no respect for words in the form of diplomacy. All he and his minions know are the sword. He has no respect for human life because he isn't human

another gesture at attacking his father in a classic Freudian obsession.

"In Goss, Bush found the perfect hatchet man to take vengeance on a despised agency. Now Goss is gone, scandal looms -- and the CIA is ruined."

George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA and it makes sense that his son, who obviously hates his father, wants to destroy the agency that propelled his father to the White House.

"Junior" has a history of going "mano a mano" with Poppy as far as going into the oil business (and ironically being bailed out by the father he was trying to outdo and destroy), going into politics, being a President who wasn't a "wimp" like his father, taking out Saddam when his father stopped short in 1991, etc.

This gesture of controlling and destroying the CIA is not at all a surprise to me.