The CIA we have now (that your benjamin is so busily selling down the river for short-term political gain) is Bush pere's CIA, not Clinton's.

And I have to ask: why do you say we need one right now? It only gets in the way of what we already know is the right thing to do. Just like Congress, the Liberal Media, Yurp, the UN, Mother Teresa, and every other laughable, ideologically suspect entity in the world, the CIA's only possible use is as a scapegoat to prevent our easily duped constituents from losing faith in us when we encounter the inevitable bump in our pre-ordained and fabulously successful road.

Hiding behind "facts" and feeling insecure without checks and balances in place means you've already accepted failure as an option. America doesn't need a loser in command. A leader is one who leads, not one who follows.

Giovanni

New Yorker article [link|http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact|http://www.newyorker...nt/?031027fa_fact] about why this administration has had such bad intel. Specific discussion about the CIA evaluating the assumption that Chalabi would be popular in post-Saddam Iraq.

A lot of these Politics and Regional/World Conflict threads really belong in the PHB forum.

An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call \ufffdbranches and sequels\ufffd\ufffdthat is, \ufffdplan for what you expect not to happen.\ufffd The official said, \ufffdIt was a \ufffdwhat could go wrong\ufffd study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What\ufffds Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don\ufffdt have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?\ufffd

The people in the policy offices didn\ufffdt seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study\ufffds exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. [my emphasis] \ufffdTheir methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,\ufffd the official told me. \ufffdYou need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.\ufffd