Broken agency

Spencer Ackerman, writes in The Nation about the CIA:

[T]he agency was clawing for self-preservation during a delicate moment. The 9/11 attacks temporarily made Bush a political giant. It took years before the press absorbed, thanks to the 9/11 Commission, that the CIA had given strategic warning to the White House in the summer of 2001 that there would be a terrorist attack. In the meantime, the standard line in the media--which Bush was eager to exploit--was that 9/11 was an intelligence failure. Tenet, a consummate careerist, decided to let the White House have its way with the Iraq intelligence. Tenet's successor, a Bush loyalist named Porter Goss, was even worse: he not only purged officials deemed politically suspect but also informed the agency in an e-mail shortly after Bush's re-election that its job was to "support the administration and its policies in our work." It is hard to dismiss Goodman's conclusion that the agency "no longer knows how to provide truth to power and lacks the courage to do so."

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But nothing fundamental will change until America decides to abandon the hegemony business. Covert action is part of the imperial cast of mind: its implicit premise is that America, by virtue of its position of dominance, has the right to recast the world according to its prerogatives. The failures of the CIA are failures, in the final analysis, of the impossible--failures to read people's minds, predict the future or determine the shape of history. Calls for "strengthening" or "unleashing" the CIA are indicative of this uncritical imperial mind-set and will forever miss the point that the agency's failures are in fact failures of policy. John McCain is a case study in misdiagnosis. The GOP presidential candidate advocates establishing a "modern day OSS [that] could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines."