Left-wing author & journalist Robert Dreyfuss published an attack on Porter Goss a few weeks ago (10/Nov/2005) in the liberal American Prospect , which, nonetheless, supplies excellent backgound (and plenty of insider gossip) on the war inside the CIA:

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball… Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated (sic).

CIA doves were accustomed to looking upon themselves as an enlightened guild of mandarins, the permanent professionals who advised unsophisticated and temporarily-elected executive administrations on the realities of international affairs, of how it really was, and on what was done and not done, old boy. The Bush administration was determined to govern, and the willingness of some of its conservatives to challenge the hegemony of entrenched liberal bureaucracies in the State Department and the CIA was revolutionary. Establishment members of the notoriously liberal CIA mandarinate found themselves being ignored by a bunch of arriviste Republicans, and they were absolutely furious. Like many liberal academics, they had resided for so long in a self-reinforcing community of the like-minded, in which their own viewpoint and prejudices flourished unchallenged, that they firmly believed in their own intellectual superiority and privileged access to objective truth. Unwelcome conservative dissent, particularly dissent arriving from positions of superior authority accompanied by demands for re-evaluations of cherished liberal articles of policy faith were perceived as outside pressure tampering with Agency process :

The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis.

Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn’t want to hear the truth. “How do you think they feel?” asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. “They’re watching a ****ing idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!”

This outrage at the perceived slighting of professional expertise and interference with analytic process is what has led some very angry CIA officers and analysts to apply their skills and connections as participants in an organized operation aimed at destroying and removing specific adversaries including the Vice President, and at crippling an elected administration.

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Not everyone with a CIA background shares Dreyfuss’ view of the Goss revolution as unmitigated disaster. Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA operations officer and Intelligence author, who has a recently created blog writes:

Goss is doing what George Tenet could not and would not do, shedding the organization of the “old think” that led the Agency into playing it safe in the 1990s. After the Iran-Contra and Ames spying scandals, the Agency lost so much political standing that it began to implode organizationally and philosophically. Afraid to take risks that might offend Washington politicos and European allies after overstepping its legal bounds in the Iran-Contra era, gutted of the clandestine operators who knew how to run secret wars, exhausted from reform whiplash, and demoralized by criticism and poor performance, the CIA simply became unable and unwilling to get down and dirty to do the hard part to fight a real war on terrorism.

The CIA senior leaders today are those who came of age as managers during the 1990s and many unfortunately bring with them the mind-set of caution and political correctness. The culture of the Agency, particularly that of the Directorate of Operations, places a premium on organizational loyalty. The “old boy” network sticks together and resists changes that might alter its collective power and influence. The upheaval at Langley is a direct result of DCI Goss challenging the status quo, breaking some china and hitting the cultural brick wall.

Hat tip to Tom Maguire.

MSM Anti-Bush Administration Intel Operation collaborator Dana Priest, author of the Washington Post’s earlier “secret prisons” CIA leak story, has a new one this morning, based on “new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials.”

In other words, leaked by the cabal of disgruntled State Department and Intelligence Community doves, referred to felicitously by William Safire as “a flock of pouting spooks,” who vigorously supported John Kerry in the last election, and who have since been waging an active Intelligence operation seeking to bring down the Bush Administration, whose greatest success, so far, has been achieved in connection with L’Affair Plame by the indictment of one of their key opponents: Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby.

It seems that in May of 2004 the CIA released (those dastards!) a German citizen previously detained for five months, and then had the unmitigated gall to request the German government to cooperate by keeping secret informnation shared in relation to the case. (How dare they!)

Some might consider the release by US authorities to evidence the existence of fair and rational process in the secret US battle against terrorism, of proof that allegations are investigated, and suspects established to be innocent released, but not Dana Priest. To La Priest, the release:

offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

How stupid does Ms. Priest think Washington Post readers are exactly? It would be a lot fairer too, let me suggest, if Priest also operated openly, and told the world just who it is that planted this story, including savory tidbits of inside gossip about “a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC’s al Qaeda unit,” who it is who is recklessly prepared to discredit and compromise US efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on large Western civilian population targets in order to avenge in-house slights, bring down rivals, and gain partisan political advantage.

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Some earlier related posts are linked here.

The third-year students at Yale Law find the dominium of orthodoxy at their elite school troubling.

Yale Law School’s almost universal disapproval of the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, yet again, the stark lack of ideological diversity here in New Haven… Notably lacking among Yale’s professors has been any vigorous defense of Judge Alito or of the conservative judicial philosophy he’s believed to hold. No one has stepped forward to defend or even suggest that the country would be better off with another Roe vs. Wade skeptic on the court who is also an “originalist” (believes the Constitution should be interpreted as it was originally written) and a federalist (believing in strict separation of federal and state powers). Such ideas supposedly belong to conservative extremists, who are considered beyond the pale at Yale Law School… We don’t say this to whine about being underrepresented as conservatives at Yale Law School. But the school’s lack of diversity increasingly represents a scholarly and pedagogical problem for Yale. For example, the Rehnquist court was a revolution in the country’s jurisprudence. Except as fuel for denunciations of the court’s conservative majority, these developments have gone largely unnoticed in the scholarship of Yale Law’s professors…. There is something odd when a major strain of American jurisprudence can’t find a single defender at the country’s top law school.

The Yale branch of the Federalist Society constitutes the solitary voice of heresy able to be heard within the Gothic corridors of the nation’s highest rated institution of legal education.

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Juan Non-Volokh links an article by Yale Law Professor Peter Schuck in the American Lawyer on the lack of viewpoint diversity at elite law schools. Professor Schuck observes:

… a teaching institution that constructs an ideologically one-sided faculty, whether liberal or conservative, seriously abdicates its pedagogical responsibilities. Professors have a sacred duty to their students and to each other to affirm-and also to exemplify-core academic and intellectual values. We should convey to our students an abiding respect, even awe, for the complexity of law in society, and we should exhibit the ideological humility that this complexity implies. Any professors worthy of the title have strong views, of course, but they should also have a keen sense that those views may be wrong, or based on incomplete evidence, or highly reductive. Even if we are utterly convinced of the correctness of our positions, we should teach as if we aren’t-as if there are serious counterpositions to be entertained and explored, as if even the truth cannot be fully apprehended until it is challenged by the best arguments that can be marshaled against it. And although scrupulous teachers can sometimes challenge their own deepest convictions in class, most of us need competing points of view-on our own faculties, debated before our own students-to keep us intellectually honest and to enrich learning.

I fear that I may getting behind on my daily acts of Unbelief [Arabic: kufr], so I’m linking this site featuring a catchy tune titled “Islam’s Not For Me,” and “Mohammed’s Believe It Or Else” comic book.

Scott Johnson of Power-Line quotes Peter Mulherin on the political circumstances of the president’s opponents:

The Democrat Party has just entered the McGovern Zone. The nation is at war against deadly enemies and the Democrats are going into an election committed to capitulation. They are gambling everything on failure in Iraq. If, in six months, successful elections have been held in Iraq and we have begun reducing our troop levels there, only a few hardcore nutjobs will still cling to the idea that Iraq is a hopeless quagmire. That idea is all the Democrats have to offer and when it dies the Democrat Party itself will be teetering on the edge of extinction.

and recommends statesmanship:

After entering the McGovern Zone in 1972, however, the Democrats had a field day courtesy of Watergate in 1974. The recurring CIA leaks, pseudo-scandals and media hostility undermining the Bush administration are also reminiscent of the forces with which Nixon contended following his landslide reelection. Under the circumstances, it seems to me that the statesmanship of President Bush’s Naval Academy speech represents the best course for him to take and to persist in.

We disagree. In political contests, as in war, either you are on the offensive, or you are on the defensive. If President Bush is going to avoid repeating the history of Nixon’s second term, if he is going to avoid being reduced to impotence, and possibly even destroyed, by an endless series of leaks, opportunistic charges, and trumped-up prosecutions, fanned by the opposition media sooner or later successfully into a major scandal, what he needs to do is to pursue not the way of the statesman, but –as we previously suggested– the Chicago Way. What he needs to do is to take to heart the advice provided by Sean Connery’s Jim Malone to Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987):

Connery: lf you open the ball on these people, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won’t give up the fight until one of you is dead.

Costner: l want to get Capone. l don’t know how.

Connery: Here’s how you get Capone: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?

The way to avoid being destroyed by leaks and pseudo-scandals in endless succession is to prosecute the leakers, to identify the organized campaign against the administration by disaffected active and retired government employees as the scandal and criminal conspiracy it is, to fight it in the public debate arena, and to identify laws which have been broken and prosecute the guilty parties.

Easha Anand describes some of the changes over the years in men’s clothing stores and other traditional near-campus resources. I can sum it up for him: the storefront at College & Chapel which in my day contained Johnny’s Pipe Center (which blended the best pipe tobacco in the world until Johnny passed away late in the 1960s) had become a vendor of tatoos and body piercings the last time I was in New Haven. It had had a long intermediate career selling caramel corn.

Latest Michael Moore/Ken Burns Documentary: Fahrenheit 1861.

Hat tip to Franco Aleman.

And you thought they had over-the-top Xmas light displays on houses in your town!

The equipment of the celebrated Ithaca Gun Company was sold at auction in a going-of-business auction sale last Tuesday.

The Ithaca Gun Company was founded in Fall Creek, NY in 1883 by the renowned American arms designer William Henry Baker, in partnership with Leroy & Lou Smith, George Livermore, J.E. VanNatta, and Dwight McIntire. Originally called “W.H. Baker and Company, Gun Works,” the name was changed, and the first Ithaca Gun catalogue appeared in 1885, advertising “the celebrated Ithaca gun, the strongest, simplest, and best American gun manufactured.” Famous models included the Flues, Knickerbocker, and N.I.D. (“New Ithaca Double”), and the heavy-duty Magnum 10 double-barreled models; the Ithaca single-barreled trap guns, and the popular Model 37 pump-action Featherlight. Ithaca made the least expensive of America’s classic double-barreled shotguns. Field grade Ithacas were inexpensive, but they were rugged and simple, and were famous for their fast lock-time.

Ithaca guns were used by Annie Oakley, John Phillip Souza (Ithaca’s most opulent productions were once called their “Souza-grade”), George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower, and admired by such well-known sporting writers as Charles Askins, Elmer Keith, and Michael McIntosh. I shot a goodly number of ruffed grouse and ducks, when I was young, with a slick-handling Model 37 12 gauge.

The Ithaca Company has died twice previously, and the famous Ithaca name has been revived each time. We are living in a period when appreciation for, and collector interest in, classic American firearms is at an all time height. So, who knows? Springsteen could be right:

Maybe ev’rything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe ev’rything that dies someday comes back.

The BBC reports that a pack of exceptionally feisty Asian squirrels operating in a village park in the Russian Far East near Manchuria, tore to pieces, and apparently ate, a dog which had been barking at them. Passer-bys were too late to intervene. It is alleged that Siberian squirrels are exceptionally hungry this year.

Brendan O’Neill, deputy-editor of spiked, a British online magazine “with the (?) modest (?) ambition of making history as well as reporting it,” and apparently (sort of, kind of) on the political Right, falls into an ecstatic state of higher consciousness at the marvellous complexity of it all, or perhaps he was merely stoned.

The Belgian brunette didn’t only blow up herself in Baghdad – she also blew to bits the various stereotypes of Islamic terrorists…

The life and death of Muriel Degauque should make all sides of the war and terror debate stop and think – about contemporary terrorism, the nature of the Iraqi insurgency, and disaffection among sections of society in the West. So come on then, what was Degauque? An Islamo-fascist, a freedom fighter – or something else?

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O’Neill should have read The Radical Loser by Hans Magnus Enzenberger. Hat tip to Franco Aleman.

Anti-Republican elements in the Justice Department (could those be the same ones who picked Fitzgerald as special prosecutor?) have leaked a 2003 memo “endorsed” by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, which opines that the Texas legislature’s redistricting plan, since upheld twice by a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, may violate the Voting Rights Act, to the Washington Post.

Post staff writer Dan Egger artfully mixes generous helpings of inflammatory charges by democrat partisans, conceptually promoting an internal staff memo advancing one point of view to the level of statutory law, with the minimum essential inconvenient facts, and reference to the (partisan) indictment of Representative Delay, topped by the censorious conclusion of a purportedly objective outside expert,

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law (as an adjunct) at American University (who) said it was ‘highly unusual’ for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.”

And voila! we have a brand-new Bush Administration Conspiracy to Violate the Law.

Armando over at Daily Kos is gloating, and has overnight collected some 122 moonbat comments remarking gleefully on the Bush Administration’s “arrogance and contempt for democracy.”