Long Knives at Langley

Powerline reports that they're finally taking out the trash at the CIA:

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Fabulous news. I've long thought (and written) that the CIA was politicized, Clintonized, and determined to undermine any foreign policy it disagrees with. Trouble is, the CIA is not charged with making policy; it is charged with reporting facts to the President and other executive employees who themselves make policy. Too many times liberals in the CIA have sought to change the facts to further their own political ends; how many times do we need to read some anonymous liberal CIA analyst stating, in his opinion, that an offer from Saddam Hussein to sponsor and host Al Qaeda does not in fact constitute an attempt at cooperation between the two?

You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts. Too many Clintonoid CIA liberals want just that, and I'm thrilled that Goss (and Bush) have the courage to can them.

The purge will of course be portrayed as a horrible politically-motivated sacking of our best and brightest. But many of these folks violated their oaths -- and occasionally federal law -- to leak to the press and to friendly liberal Democrats.

Political appointees serve at the pleasure of the President. Bush's move is of course political, but so was their nonstop spoonfeeding of classified information to Seymore Hersh. You can't take the politics out of politics, after all, but you can take serial leakers out of sensitive positions.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. They'll be happier working for the liberal media as advisors and on-screen experts, anyway.

Must-read Update: Steve sends along this terrific Q-and-O link. The lefties are in a lather (what else is new?), but it seems Clinton did something similar.

There weren't any blogs then, of course, but I doubt that these newfound admirers of the adversarial-model of the CIA weren't as upset by the Clinton Purges.

posted by Ace at 01:32 PM

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