A Radical Plan
Base10 has been a frequent critic of the Central Intelligence Agency--usually for good reason. Jack Kelly over at the Post-Gazette thinks that we should just blow it up. Not literally--of course. He thinks it's time to eliminate the agency and start over. Kelly points out the CIA's pitiful record at predicting geopolitical events:

The CIA could be right (that Iran could not develop nukes for 10 years), and the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and the IAEA could be wrong (predicting that Iran could have nukes in several months). 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.

Kelly also wonders whether the CIA is at war with the White House:

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.

Kelly may be right. The CIA is not working.
- posted by Base10 @ 11:13 AM