Intelligence 'reform'

Yup, something else the Chimp touches goes to shit. Good read from David Ignatius via Laura Rozen.

[. . .]

The intelligence-reform impulse led President Bush, after some foot-dragging, to back the recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by creating a director of national intelligence to oversee the nation's 15 spy agencies and appointing veteran diplomat John Negroponte to fill the post. But before the new structure was in place, the president tapped Republican Rep. Porter Goss as director of the CIA. Goss was accompanied by a team of right-wing congressional staffers, quickly dubbed the "Gosslings" at Langley, who set out to cuff the CIA's headstrong Directorate of Operations into line.

[. . .]

The aim was to revitalize U.S. intelligence. But rather than consolidate and streamline the overlapping agencies, the new system has added even more boxes to the organization chart. The result has been a further layering of the intelligence community's bureaucracy and further demoralization among career intelligence officers. "Adding more layers causes indecision and confusion in the ranks, and leads to a wait-and-see, risk-averse attitude," warns Richard Stoltz, a former head of the CIA's clandestine service.

[. . .]

The really dangerous problems, though, lie in the heart of the CIA -- the Directorate of Operations (DO), which recruits the spies and runs the covert actions. The Gosslings have made a real mess of things, driving out a half-dozen top officers, most recently the DO's No. 2 official, 35-year veteran Robert Richer. Why these inexperienced congressional staffers thought they had better judgment than career professionals, many of them former military officers, is beyond me. [my ems]

[. . .]

I wonder if we'll have any working infrastructure left by the time we get Chimpy out. If any of you remember, this is the same course the Agency took in the waning years of Vietnam, finally ending with their failure in predicting the fervor and consequences of the Fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran. We've made enemies of most of the Islamic world, the time we need the folks at Langley to be at peak effectiveness. The Chimp's policies have made them less effective and distracted. Way to go, idiots.

Update:

A somewhat related post at Steve's.

And BTW, Blogger sucks wet monkey ass this morning.