Reply #12: I wonder if this ed. has anything to do with Goss' resignation?

[sofa king]

This morning, just before I went to bed, I was plumbing Google News when I came up with this smear-job editorial, which suddenly spawned in half a dozen newspapers at once:

http://www.postchronicle.com/news/security/article_21217378.shtml

The CIA Needs To Get Rid Of Empty Suits, Political Hacks & '60s Retreads
by Jim Kouri
May 5, 2006

An anti-war heckler on Thursday amply illustrates what passes for an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency these days. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, during a speech, was confronted by a former CIA analyst who accused him in a question-and-answer session of lying about Iraq prewar intelligence.

...

Once upon a time, the CIA recruited men and women from the U.S. military or law enforcement, at least for covert or clandestine operations. Now they recruit on university campuses where students have been deluged with Marxist-Stalinist propaganda for four or five years -- perhaps more if they have advanced degrees. Catch terrorists? These fools couldn't catch a bus without help, let alone a terrorist or terrorist conspiracy. In a nutshell: They got no street smarts.

One complaint often heard privately within law enforcement circles is that the Central Intelligence Agency has morphed over the years into a Liberal think-tank, rather than maintaining its role as a strategic and tactical intelligence agency. Police commanders, who've always dreaded dealing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, find the FBI preferable to dealing with over-educated policy wonks who have forgotten what they're supposed be doing.

The ballooning of the editorial looked strange to me somehow. I thought to myself that this was a pretty extreme response to one guy who had the balls to confront the Secretary of Defense on a series of valid issues--issues valid enough that Rumsfeld had to lie about them, which is the coin of the realm these days when it comes to what's true and what isn't.

I don't know if this has anything to do with Goss' departure, but like I said it already had my attention before I learned that Goss was out.

Want to know what I really think about Goss leaving? I think his job is done. I can think of another time when the corrupt Republican Party was seeking to sanitize the CIA in order to cover up their crimes. They appointed a political hack to the job with the mission of restoring that agency's credibility. I think that's what Goss was doing, too: restoring the credibility of the CIA by destroying all information that they could possibly use against the Bush Administration and the Republican Party, while simultaneously stacking the Agency with politically reliable operatives for future use.

Goss has done that, and now it's time to step away and await a Presidential pardon.