1 Boring Old Man

Who are all these people? How are they related? How are they different? How did it get so damn messy under Mr. Bush? I guess we’re going to have to sort them out now to understand the current scandal. At this moment, the N.S.A. Internet site is down, kaput [for hours]. I guess they’re cleaning it up.

The only thing that I personally know at this point is that the Neoconservatives were down on the C.I.A. before Bush ever came into office. They believed that the C.I.A. was leading us astray by focusing on Al Qaeda instead of States [like Iraq and Iran]. Early in this game, the darling of the neoconservatives, Laurie Mylroie, summarized their views in her book, Bush vs. The Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department tried to stop the War on Terror. Certainly, the Administration’s battles with the C.I.A. are now a matter of public record culminating in the Plame Affair. In the early part of the Bush Administration, there were all sorts of reworking of our Intelligence Agencies with them setting up a few of their own as well as changing others. The National Security Agency used to be the arm that kept up with Intelligence outside of our borders. Now they’re all connected in some fashion. The only other thing I recall is that there was a lot of criticism after 911 that they weren’t coordinated. Sounds like they’re way too coordinated now.

I hope the more informed bloggers will begin to sort this out for us. It’s really hard to follow what Bush has done here. It’s easy to see that he’s basically ignored judicial review of what these people are doing. But I [and others] suspect that he’s recreated the Intelligence Community in his own image, and that we’re going to learn that there’s a lot more to this story than we already know.