Wolfowitz for CIA Director!

LI is sad, today, about the resignation of Porter Goss. For years our opinion of the CIA has been like Cato's opinion of Carthage: Delenda est CIA. Destroy the fucking place lock stock and barrel. Birthed by a clearly illegal extension of executive authority -- the very decree by which Truman founded the CIA was secret for years - the CIA has been one of the great anti-communist machines, its purpose being to manufacture paranoia in order to keep the perpetual war ethos alive.

Goss was, if anything, a product of that. But he was something more. He was a product of the Bush culture. High idealism, in the Bush culture, is yoked to that pure strain of incompetence which brings a smile to Three Stooges fans everywhere. And thus, upon an agency that has long outlived its usefulness, Bush sicced a man destined, in a mere two years, to gut the place.

According to Dana Milbank's post mortem story:

"In public, Goss once acknowledged being "amazed at the workload." Within headquarters, "he never bonded with the workforce," said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July.

"Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers," Brennan said. "Turf battles continue" with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community "because there's a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA's future." Brennan added: "Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.""

Now, anyone who trawls through the Net knows that the rumored understory is that it was Porter's dedication to pussy in the limo and call girl scandal that completed his downfall. The WAPO, a company town paper that has no desire to insult the Bush Court, headed by a genuinely likeable, and funny, oh so funny king, doesn't entertain these rumors... at least yet. But the story of Goss's tenure, from his attempt to transform the CIA into a retirement haven for Republicans to his own brand of isolationism, cutting off America's intelligence interaction with foreign intelligence agencies, brought the rare hurray to our lips. If the CIA can't simply be destroyed by Congressional writ -- after all, in Bush's America, Congress is a mere advisory board, delegated to the lesser job of larding the wealthy with tax dollars -- the second best thing is to have it commit hari-kari. Putting Goss and his minions (with their incredible, frat boy names -- that a man named Dusty Foggo was his close friend and fellow limo user shows something about the culture. I'm just not exactly sure what. Are we merely the dream of Thomas Pynchon?)operated upon the place the way termites treat a Stativarius.

Thus, we are completely saddened by Goss' departure. Surely, there is only one man out there who can complete Goss' valuable work. One man out there whose career shows an almost mystical level of incompetence. One man out there with the idealism to mistreat and mutilate experience in the quest for his own personal contact high.

Paul Wolfowitz, come home!