White house orders CIA Director Goss to purge.

Yeah, the CIA did such a bang up job in the run up to 9/11 that we don't want to upset the apple cart.

 

Especially when that guy, you know the one in charge of the Bin Laden task force, said Bin Laden is at this hunting camp lets bomb the ******** out of it; right then.

 

Learn to read. "WASHINGTON - The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers thought to have been disloyal to President Bush..."

What does that have to do at all with performance?

 

If only the intel community had written a PDB entitled, "Bin Laden determined to strike within the United States," then maybe Bush would have pulled out all the stops to try to prevent 9/11. Alas, the intel community f'ed up.

 

Which reminds me that a lot of critics of the CIA feel that it's biggest problem is that it is too beholden to whoever is in the Whitehouse. The head of the CIA does what the President wants and tells him what he wants to hear.

 

More "yes men" for the president. Remember, W is a guy that can't think on his feet, and took one foreign trip (to Mexico) before he was president. The guy has no intellectual curiousity. His "yes men" will tell him what he wants to hear, and we will continue our American misadventures based the gut instinct of a guy that doesn't know the world.

 

The resignations of Stephen Kappes, deputy director for operations, and Michael Sulick, the associate deputy director, were announced yesterday evening by Mr. Goss after several days of rumors and speculation...

...The two men were "the strongest leadership the DO has had in many, many years...

Mr. Kappes, for example, was the agency's point man in the negotiations with Libyan intelligence chief Musa el-Kusa, which resulted in Libya's acknowledgment and abandonment of efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons.

Well, see, that was his mistake; getting Libya off our scope before we could get in there, shoot some folks, lay the groundwork for more attacks, and, most importantly, secure that oil. They probably HATE Kappes for that work.

Seriously.

 

There are a number of folks at Langley that need to be in unemployment line for their dismal performance; let's let Mr. Goss do what the President asked him to do: fix the agency! Nobody believed this could be done without quite a few terminations!

 

Well, this guy was hired to do just this, why the surprise and why did he get confirmed?

 

Congressional Democrats didn't make a stand on Goss because they didn't think it was a good use of political capital in the months before a presidential election. This conclusion seems to have been based in part on the assumption that some form of national intelligence reform would pass Congress in the near term, in which case, the important fight would have been over the nominee for new intelligence chief position. However, that bill seems to be stalled.

Edited to add that it was widely assumed that Goss would do exactly what he was told and nothing more, which looks to have been a pretty good guess. I don't know that there's much surprise about it. Outrage, mostly, that people are being removed not because of their performance but because they are regarded as being insufficiently subservient.

 

Solid reply, but you must know I was being thick, taking the piss, whatever you like.

See, what smacks us in the face after all the replies here about security and failures is the fact that to the Dems, political capital was more important than these very same issues. If we were really, really worried about security and failures, then screw political capital or even at least use that same capital to make the world better. That may not look good in the headlines, but it will or should have allowed these people sleep well at night.

Oh well, I shouldn't be all that shocked.