Linkmeister

The only problem I have with this story is that there'll be a replacement for him. It seems like the CIA hasn't been at all competent since Henry Kissinger was using it to destroy South and Central America, one country at a time. How many more billions of dollars are we spending this year so that they can finally email each other? How many other intelligence agencies are there (of the, what, eleven that we're paying for) that suck so much? How many of them are responsible, more or less directly, for blowing up the Chinese embasy, or an aspirin factory? Leaving aside Iraq entirely. . .

Better to defund the thing than reform it.

I never imagined that I'd be defending the CIA, but it's apparently come to that. We need a civilian-led agency with accountability and oversight. Most of the other spy agencies are run by the Pentagon, and I don't have a lot of faith in their ability to recognize civil liberties in the US.

The CIA has certainly done some terrible things in the past, but in the run-up to Iraq it now appears that it was right in saying the war was unnecessary, and it was overruled by the warhawks at the White House.

It also needs to be run by a professional manager with experience in the intelligence biz, but not by a General who'd probably just hand over more of its work to DIA and who knows what other black groups under Rumsfeld's control.

State has the INR, about which I know next to nothing, which makes me believe it isn't the complete and total disaster that the CIA is. The NSA isn't military, and seems to be run by mathematicians, making me inclined to trust it. 8^)

There is reason to believe that some of the people at the CIA didn't want a war in Iraq, but the evidence made public doesn't indicate that it was anything like a majority (leaving aside entirely their motivation for not supporting it; I cannot begin to believe that it was motivated by creditable analysis; Tenent didn't build his dossier on pixie dust and DIA fairytales). Even stipulating that the CIA was anti-war, and for the right reasons, it just means that they got rolled, and then started sniping at the policy two years later. You see more benefit in that than I do. I wonder if they'd have ended up leaking their (objectively) useless dissent, if the war had gone perfectly, and 80% of the population now favored it.

I don't want the CIA knocking off foreigners. Even though they're good at that (or, at least, have been) bad things always seem to follow. So what else point is there to a civilian run foreign intel. agency? I don't like the FBI, but I don't see a great alternative to it, right now. The CIA I'd like wiped from the pages of history.