"I wonder if the actual case is more like the opposite-- that the CIA is increasingly in solidarity with the left."

I'll have to disagree with this point, the CIA has always leaned to the right. Some of my best friends now work for the agency and while they have always had their run-ins with any adminstration (lack of funding, tying agents hands) its safe to say that a good deal of them like the Bush adminstration and the types of steps he's taking to change the way the agency used to be run, cold war mindset.

B_Nay,

Thanks for your input, but I'm sorry, I can't take your evidence as dispositive.

Exhibit A: They sent an untrained partisan hack, Joe Wilson, known to be reliably in the bag for knocking down any Niger uranium story, to "investigate" a very important charge.

You tell me how, precisely, that happens in an agency (or at least a department of an agency) which is not controlled by liberals at its highest levels.

Ace: I don't think it's liberals. I think it's mostly old line conservatives and a few liberals who are upset at the turning over of the table. These people get very territorial, even about opinions. I can't see the kind of fundamental shift in policy regarding Iraq and other threats to security as making many people happy in any beauracracy, let alone one where people's lives and national security are on the line. Leftists are only agreeing with these guys because of who they disagree with. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

The true enemy of any bureaucracy is change. The very word strikes fear into the heart of pencil pushers everywhere. Anybody here who hasn't read the excellent Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister books or seen the TV series should go read and/or watch them. It's about British snafus in government, but all the same stuff goes on here--it's just a slightly different hierarchical structure.

I'm increasingly with Mark Steyn on this one: What has the CIA done for us lately that should cause us to spare them? They've been an end-to-end fiasco for some years, most especially 2001. Now, if they seem to feel beleaguered, we should consider destroying them institutionally and ruining such of them as we need to, individually, before they can think to engineer their institutional survival by criminal means. There must surely be records, histories, and even some living memory of the early years of the original OSS from which we can draw in order to begin again.

If a President can't clean up such a decrepit institution because of civil service protections and whatnot, then we've lost the unitary, vigorous Executive that the writers of the Constitution desired and we've gotten in its place a bureaucracy that is at best a durable dead weight and at worst a coup d'etat waiting to happen.

Smack-- We just happened to watch a Yes, Prime Minister collection the other day and there was a great one about whether England should side with the Americans in expelling Communist rebels from some tiny island nation, or back the commies and profit from secret contracts with them...of course the venal cabinet wanted the latter, and dripped with sarcasm about the Americans, but the decent PM figured it out by the end. Quite topical.

Doug-- Okay, one thing the CIA's done for us lately is infiltrating and exposing AQ Khan's nuke bazaar. I expect they do a bunch of cool stuff like that we never hear about but only gets reported to the Congressional oversight committees. We hear the failures but only rarely the successes.

But yeah, thorough reforms are in order. I tend to believe the bureaucratic-inertia arguments being made here as explanations for a lot of the CIA's apparent foot-dragging. It's sure possible that it's full of cosmopolitan smarty-pants Ivy League liberals which tend to give it an institutional bias leftward, much like the State Department, though the few people I know connected with CIA aren't like that at all.

Here's a link to an article by Herb Meyer about the need to create "an OSS within the CIA" of competent spies as opposed to bureaucrats and clock punchers: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005243

Interesting. I mention Herbert Meyer and he writes a column on this subject in today's NRO. Perhaps I have the power to alter the future with my musings upon this blog. Woohoo! Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/meyer200407140848.asp

MR. PAUL ANKA ALERT! Meyer's column includes this wonderful metaphor for the CIA's role:

"Here's why it matters so much: The CIA is to our government what radar is to the crew of a 747: It's the instrument they rely upon to spot trouble up ahead, before it's visible, and in plenty of time to deal with it. In other words, it's the CIA's job to project the future, clearly enough and soon enough, so that the president can change the future before it happens.

Never Fly Without Radar
You don't fly with a broken radar, period. If it malfunctions, you stop whatever you are doing and you get it fixed. Nothing could possibly be more important — especially when you expect to be flying through a lot of turbulence and heavy traffic. Well, our country is at war, and our radar is broken."

That's just the way it f'n is. But do you look at the runway? Ace: low hanging fruit for you.

I just put up the last of a three part series regarding the Tyranny of Bureaucracies.

Excerpt:

"The government is keen to treat the symptoms of an illness rather than treat the cause of the illness. After all, to fix the problem is to eliminate their purpose of existence. Bureaucracies need problems to continue festering so they can keep fixing them. The biggest case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy ever documented, although largely ignored."

I beleive out-of-control bureaucracies pose the largest threat to our liberties--even larger than terrorism in that it is the bureaucracies that largely refrain our leaders from taking decisive action on matters of extreme public importance.

The checks and balances between the three branches of government provided for in the constitution is supposed to refrain runaway politcal power, not runaway bureaucratic power.

See-Dubya said, "Doug-- Okay, one thing the CIA's done for us lately is infiltrating and exposing AQ Khan's nuke bazaar. I expect they do a bunch of cool stuff like that we never hear about but only gets reported to the Congressional oversight committees. We hear the failures but only rarely the successes."

Yes, SD, I'll grant you all of that. Thanks also for the link, which I'll follow later.

If you read this later, I'd appreciate a thumbnail account of the aftermath of the AQK discovery, a story I didn't follow at all. Is AQK cooperating in cleaning up the mess he made or is there some other reason why the U.S. has allowed him to keep body and soul together? Thanks.

Doug--Your second question: AQK's alive (I assume he's still alive, he's supposed to be in hiding) because Musharraf is too weak to do anything to him. AQK's a national hero in Pakistan 'cause he built their nuke program. Had Musharraf done anything but pardon him, Mush would have been (at best) too weak to continue to fight the Taliban or (at worst) deposed or assassinated himself--and he's survived two attempts already.

I totally agree that AQK walking around rich and intact is a great commercial for the illicit proliferation industry. But I figure the powers that be have calculated that making an example of him is less important than stability in Pakistan, the world's only Islamic nuclear power (besides France), right now. In any case he's bottled up and not selling stuff anymore.

I'm at work right now but I'll put up a couple links here to the AQK saga later on tonight.

A lot can go wrong during 8, 12, or nearly 16 years (depending upon whom, other than Clinton, one should include in the reckoning) of diplomatic and military leadership by Presidents who are soft regarding foreign affairs. For instance, in regard to proliferation, I've long thought we should have offered rewards and (capital) punishments to induce nuclear physicists in other countries to move to the United States. Our government's decent forbearance in not insisting that the physicists either uproot themselves and come here or consider themselves marked men looks like an example of what Machiavelli calls "cruel pity," decent fellow-feeling that permits a disastrous result through inaction.

I wonder if anyone is known to have started a betting pool yet on the question as to which city in the world will be the third to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon.

Doug--"Machiavelli?" Was that a codeword? Have the Top Shelf New Jersey Blackmail Whores gotten to you as well?

I am sorta kinda writing something on the subject of rogue nuclear scientists. To see how they used to be dealt with, check out a recent book called Raid on the Sun, about the Israeli plastering of Osirak. One of Saddam's scientists went to bed with a Top Shelf Paris Murder Whore and woke up with his throat cut.

I'm just reportin', not advocatin', mind you.

Anyway, if they're here, they can still send out secrets. Remember Wen "Top Shelf Los Alamos Espionage Ho" Lee?

Doug: AQKhan story link: here.

Also, Here's a great wrap-up (in .pdf format, for a conference at Stanford) by NY Times reporter David Sanger, who broke a lot of these stories: http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/3889/Khan_network-paper.pdf

The Khan ring included Malaysians, Swiss, Germans...it was frickin' SPECTRE. So yeah, I give the CIA some major credit for this one, even if Blofeld, um, Khan is still around for the sequel.

--See Dubya

[Edited by Ace to put link into linkable form, in order to avoid sidebar bloat.]

See-Dubya, here in the real Louisiana, the crooked officials' self-confidence is shown more by their lack of code. Our former Governor Edwin Edwards is reported to have once said, "I won't get thrown out of office unless they catch me in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." Once, when he was accused of having accepted a bribe, he denied he'd been bribed but said, "Yeah, I took the money."

But as for "Machiavelli," in certain circles worldwide that's shorthand for "Modernity is the choice of one man." Check out Thoughts on Machiavelli by Leo Strauss.

That's hilarious about Saddam's scientist. Thanks to having spent a little too much time with Machiavelli's books, I do love me some spectacular execution.

You mean like "Remirro D' Orco spectacular"? Or "Pazzi conspiracy pinata spectacular"? I'm a big Machiavelli fan too, but I never got around to reading Strauss. I guess I'll never make a 33rd degree neo-con.

I remember hearing that when Edwards was running against David Duke, signs went up saying "Vote For the Crook! It's Important!" Hmm, wasn't there some La politician who actually was caught with a dead girl at a whorehouse not too long ago? Or am I remembering the plot of some stupid movie?

My favorite LA governor was Jimmie Davis. Great, underappreciated country singer. His stump speech was just an incoherent, semi-mystical evangelical Christian sermon. Nice guy, too, from what I hear.