Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Monday I noted the report of a leaked memo and a senior CIA employee seeking to score political points against the President.
Today, OpinionJournal has more on the story. Not surprisingly, the bits the leaker and the media culled from the report are only a small part of the story. The OpinionJournal editors come to the same conclusion many of us have - Porter Goss has some work to do.
OpinionJournal: The CIA's Insurgency - The agency's political disinformation campaign.:
The document's after-thought sentence reads: "In addition, rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare against the new government or coalition forces." We highlight that phrase about "existing terrorist" groups because critics of the war like to claim that there were no terrorists in Iraq before the war; now we know that in January 2003 even the CIA said there were.
Notably, too, the leakers of this document somehow overlooked the many predictions it made that did not come true. Those include: sectarian violence, seizure of the oil fields in the north by Kurds and in the South by Shiites, a humanitarian and refugee crisis, and the possible use by Saddam of "chemical or biological weapons against his own people and coalition forces." Worst of all, the document anticipated that the Iraqi police and regular army could be relied upon to provide order in Iraq after the invasion. Deputy Director John McLaughlin personally assured Mr. Bush on this one--which we now know to be a mistake as large as predicting that finding Saddam's WMD would be a "slam dunk."
Our point here isn't to assail everyone at the CIA, which includes thousands of patriots doing their best to protect America. But clearly at senior rungs of the agency there is a culture that has deep policy attachments that have been offended by Mr. Bush, and these officials want him defeated. American voters need to understand this amid this election season. As for Mr. Goss, his task is to tell the Pillars of Langley to shut up--or quit and run for office themselves.