Goss Putsch: Bush's War on Intelligence

Peter Goss’s resignation at the CIA can always be held up as the one bright spot in his disastrous year-long tenure: at least he had the dignity to quit before entirely destroying the agency, though he was well on his way to doing to Langley what Bush has done to Baghdad (reshape in a carcass’ image). And his resignation isn’t nearly as telling as the realignment taking place beyond the CIA’s control. What Richard Nixon couldn’t do (control the CIA and the FBI), Bush appears to be accomplishing pretty effectively and out of sight, until today, of the national press, hung over though it still is from its whoring approval of Bush’s little comedy routine at the Correspondents dinner and its Peter Lorre-like excoriation of Stephen Colbert’s routine. (Missed in all the clammy reporting about Colbert’s performance was any sense of irony that the president could devote so much attention to his comedy routine by preparing it since last January, yet couldn’t be bothered with reading a one-page policy brief or, what was certainly no joke, except perhaps for the president, his President’s Daily Briefings). Leave it to the likes of War and Piece or our earthy Micromegas to do what the press is once again too dyspeptic with deference to do responsibly. So to return to the Goss flush: The whole story smells of scandal, but it should not fog up the deeper scandal: Bush is diminishing the CIA to a vassal second-rate agency, because his real interest in intelligence is with Rumsfeld’s remaking of Pentagon spying into an international and domestic multinational enterprise (to hell with Posse Comitatus). Read the rest...