The bungling by the CIA is chronicled in a history of the agency by Pulitzer prize-winning Tim Weiner, who has covered intelligence matters for The New York Times for two decades.

His book draws on 50,000 documents in CIA archives and more than 300 interviews with staff, past and present, including 10 former directors.

Weiner concludes that “the most powerful nation in the history of Western civilisation has failed to create a first-rate spy service”, a failure, he argues, that is a danger to American security.

He paints a portrait of a rogue agency that failed to predict every big international event from the outbreak of the Korean War to the fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11. ~theage.com.au

Judging from Larry C. Johnson and Valerie Plame this book doesn’t surprise me much. Especially in light of the fact that the only thing the CIA seems to be good at is political ‘active measures’.

• The CIA’s War Against President Bush
• Leaking At All Costs, What the CIA is willing to do to hurt the Bush administration.
• More on the CIA war against Bush

But wait, there’s more!

The book, Legacy of Ashes, details how the CIA relied from the outset on low-level sources and ill-trained officers. In 1953, its first officer in Moscow was so inept that he was seduced by his Russian housemaid — really a KGB colonel — and blackmailed.

Almost every agent parachuted into eastern Europe early in the Cold War was captured and killed.

During the Korean War, the CIA station chief concluded that nearly every Korean agent either “invented his reports or worked in secret for the communists”.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Robert Gates, then the agency’s head and now the Defence Secretary, was at a family picnic.

A friend asked: “What are you doing here?” Mr Gates said: “What are you talking about?” She replied: “The invasion.” Mr Gates responded: “What invasion?”

Weiner lays the blame on the CIA’s leaders, including some senior officials who have since been revealed as alcoholics, and others who became mentally ill.

The book has infuriated some former CIA officers who insist that the agency needs support, not denigration. ~theage.com.au

Islamo-terrorism is a joke to former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson. (I wonder how much of this is endemic in the agency?) Two attempted car bombs and a burning car crashing into an airport building elicits only derision from the former watchdog of secret intelligence.

Preliminary, unconfirmed reports indicate a nuclear blast has occurred at Glasgow’s international airport. No one has seen the mushroom cloud or heard the blast, but something by God is happening and it must be terrible. There is smoke and fire. In fact, a car is on fire. It must be Al Qaeda. Only Al Qaeda knows how to set themselves on fire inside a car. Please. Flee to the hills (leave you doors unlocked). Oh the humanity! ~Larry C. Johnson

There is something to be learned here. Larry Johnson made a strong vitriolic defense of Valerie Plame, suggesting that Bush be impeached for outing a, “secret agent.”

GLASGOW, Scotland – A Jeep Cherokee trailing a cascade of flames rammed into Glasgow airport on Saturday, shattering glass doors just yards from passengers at the check-in counters. Police said they believed the attack was linked to two car bombs found in London the day before.

Britain raised its terror alert to “critical” — the highest possible level — and the Bush administration announced plans to increase security at airports and on mass transit.

Five bystanders were wounded, though none seriously, police said. ~news.yahoo.com

Experts on terrorism say it’s just a joke! There is no terrorism, it’s all just an effort to create a culture of fear by the Bu$hies.

(Photo: Timesonline)

Incredibly, there has been no real investigation of why we were asleep at the wheel before 9/11. May I suggest that there is a very good reason and he has ‘outed himself’.

“Judging from news reports and the portrayal of villains in our popular entertainment, Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism.

“None of these beliefs are based in fact. … While terrorism is not vanquished, in a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are still aimed across the continents, terrorism is not the biggest security challenge confronting the United States, and it should not be portrayed that way.”

–Larry C. Johnson, “The Declining Terrorist Threat,” New York Times, July 10, 2001. Johnson, a former CIA officer, was deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993.

~slate.com via Ace of Spades

Let’s take a look at that last bit, shall we?

Johnson, a former CIA officer, was deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993.

Only a committed and hardened leftist can take an attempted mass murder by Islamist terrorists and see only the infamous, “culture of fear.” (That’s the neo-con culture of fear not the global-warming culture of fear by the way.)

You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas?  A Cadillac Escalade.  The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive.  If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed.  Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second.  Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary.  If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED.  Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.

The fact that “officers courageously disabled the trigger by hand” coupled with the report of the smoke in the car leads me to believe that the mad London “bomber” tried to construct a Molotov cocktail of sorts and lit a cloth fuze.  Fortunately he left the windows in the car up and there was not enough oxygen to really get the fire going.  Looks like the brave British police reached in and snuffed the flame.

Judging from the overreaction to this non-incident I think we can safely conclude that Osama Bin Laden will remain holed up in Pakistan and let the fear mongers at CNN, MSNBC, and FOX do the dirty business of scaring the shit out of people.  ~Larry Johnson, Daily Kos

With a percentage of the population as delusional as this is there any hope for the left?

Repeat after me: “There is no terror. There are no terrorists. Go back to sleep.”

UPDATE:  Ahh, the panic continues.  Yuppie terrorists are on the loose.  Now we’re being told there are two cars (both Mercedes I might add) with a Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of propane tanks, some petrol, a light bulb (or maybe light bulb filaments), etc.  A propane tank explosion makes a hell of a noise but does not create widespread shrapnel dispersion.  Busted eardrums and broken glass are more likely.  Getting these tanks to explode is difficult.   The ones I have witnessed occurred when a house under construction caught on fire.  But there is nothing in two 25lb propane tanks inside a Mercedes that will detonate with sufficient force to shred the automobile and send hundreds to meet their Allah, God, Buddha, or whatever.  Still a crock of hype and over-reaction.  Let the police do their job.  Investigate the culprits and get these nitwits out of circulation before they harm themselves.    ~Larry Johnson, Daily Kos

At this point we should be asking ourselves why we need a spy agency that leaks like a drunken sailor. (My apologies to Naval personnel.)

I realize that irony never takes a day off, but does the fact that as soon as the President signed a ‘secret’ approval to mount a ‘covert’ operation against Iran that the CIA sent out press releases and called news organizations to broadcast that fact– does that make anyone question the ‘intelligence’ of this agency?

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. ~blogs.abcnews.com

The CIA has been completely compromised. It is more than useless. It seems to be actively undermining national security and engaging in partisan politics. When we look at the CIA’s record in the last seven years we see incompetence, intransigence, and downright insubordination bordering on subversive treason.

This is apparently a spy agency that has decided that it’s operations now include influencing domestic politics ‘for the greater good’ and has begun to act as a covert agency of the Democratic party rather than of the United States. It is now a political agency and as such should be stripped of it’s civil service status and gutted immediately, if not sooner.

Case in point: Valerie Plame.

I cannot think of a more perfect example of CIA incompetence (or of domestic covert political operations) than Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson’s self-inflicted tragedy. The evidence of a political agenda is undeniable. Valerie Plame ‘selected’ her husband to ‘investigate’ (i.e. discredit) administration claims regarding Iraq seeking nuclear materials. Conflict of interest on multiple levels.

Here we have a perfect example of selective outrage about leaks. Valerie Plame essentially outed herself. The left has proclaimed that leaking covert information is tantamount to treason and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney should be frog-marched out of the white house in handcuffs. And yet leaking the existence of entire secret operations before they have even begun probably deserves a medal. Something is fishy here.

While Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson are obvious liberal partisans there are also several other examples of CIA officials coming forward to attack the Bush Administration who have even more leftist leanings.

Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern have both used their credentials as former CIA ‘analysts’ to give weight to their partisan (and leftist) attacks on the Bush Administration and conservatives in general. I am left to wonder just how many leftist moles are burrowed into that organization. Has it been completely compromised?

So what is going on at the CIA? Well, if Ray can be believed at all this statement might be an indication of both what kind of people fill this organization and what kind of political game they’ve decided to play with intelligence ‘for the greater good’.

He continued by speaking about former President Lyndon B. Johnson waging war in Vietnam. McGovern said one of his fellow agents, Sam Adams, researched Vietnam’s army size and uncovered about 500,000 fighting against the U.S. Army.

McGovern said the Army, in a secret memo, told Adams the press would have a field day with those numbers. However, Army generals told Adams to report the number of people in the Vietnamese army at about 200,000.

McGovern said both he and Adams deeply regretted not giving that memo to the press because many lives, both American and Vietnamese, could have been saved. ~collegian.psu.edu

Leaks in the service of the beliefs of partisan agents and analysts save lives? Ray McGovern seems to have inadvertantly explained the rationale for the CIA’s current policy of leaking damaging information in order to impact domestic politics.

Ray seems to say that speaking ‘truth’ in order to correct a ‘wrong’ is so important that it’s worth breaking the law. Let me point out that the ‘leak’ about Valerie Plame was also true. She did send her husband on a mission to discredit the Administration. This is valuable and proper information needed to put Wilson’s bizzare accusations into context.

Larry Johnson himself explains the concept of how the CIA uses covert action and how it relates to influencing domestic politics, only he accuses avowed/known politicians, doing their job as politicians, i.e. engaging in politics, of somehow using covert techniques.

AMY GOODMAN: Larry Johnson, before the indictment came down, you accused Vice President Cheney, the Bush administration, of engaging in a covert action against the American people. Explain.

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah. It has the hallmarks. Covert action is – in the past, the C.I.A. has used it overseas as a way to shape public opinion. Usually in my – the experiences I have had, it has been used – we used the truth. In other words, you didn’t have to go out and manufacture lies in order to deceive people. You would focus upon, you know – there were efforts to get the vote out in Greece and in other places to get the focus on some communist subversion, to use old-style Cold War language. In this case, when we look back at the case of how the facts were fixed around the intelligence leading up to the war, it is classic covert action. In other words, this government deliberately deceived its own people. ~democracynow.org

There’s a difference between politicians arguing their case and the CIA selectively using intelligence to game the system. We expect the CIA to wage an information war in order to give the United States and advantage in war etc, but we do not expect it to do so domestically and in such a political manner.

What we may have is a rogue liberal agency.

The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center has spent more than $15 million in the past three years funding studies, reports and conferences produced by former Democratic administration officials and other critics of the Bush administration.
The latest effort was a $300,000 grant by the CIA to the Atlantic Council for a study co-authored by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official who wrote a best seller accusing the Bush administration of failing in the war on terrorism by invading Iraq.

…Bush administration officials say the CIA’s funding of counterterrorism studies and conferences through the center, known as the CTC, raises questions about whether the agency is violating its charter by getting involved in activities that influence U.S. policy.

The funding also raised questions among administration and congressional officials involved in intelligence activities about whether the CIA selectively funds counterterrorism studies and conferences at liberal or Democratic-oriented research organizations, while shunning activities at Republican-oriented, conservative centers.

An investigation by The Washington Times of the CIA’s funding of think tanks shows that the CTC’s academic outreach program has not funded any studies or conferences at conservative organizations. ~washtimes.com

The following is very revealing when we consider that the CIA cannot as of yet produce any solid info about Valerie Plame’s ‘covert’ status.

A CIA spokesman said Miss Mitchell was unavailable for comment.

The spokesman initially suggested that Miss Mitchell was an undercover agent, but changed that characterization when told that Miss Mitchell identified herself publicly at conferences and within international organizations as a CIA analyst. ~washtimes.com