Kenneth R. Timmerman debunks the partisan Institute for Defense Analysis study, at Newsmax, with chapter and verse from his new book.

I have written about the Harmony data base of captured Iraqi military and intelligence documents in my recent book, “Shadow Warriors: Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.”

One of the most damning documents to emerge from the Harmony data base, I wrote, was a Jan. 18, 1993 order from Saddam Hussein, transmitted to the head of Iraqi intelligence, “to hunt the Americans that are in Arab lands, especially in Somalia, by using Arab elements or Asian (Muslims) or friends.”

In response, the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service informed Hussein that Iraq already had ties with a large number of international terrorist groups, including “the Islamist Arab elements that were fighting in Afghanistan and [currently] have no place to base and are physically present in Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt.” In other words, al-Qaida.

The authors of the IDA study note that Saddam’s Iraq “was a long-standing supporter of international terrorism,” and that these particular documents provided ‘detailed evidence of that support.’”

The study also points out that the captured documents “reveal that Saddam was training Arab fighters (non-Iraqi) in Iraqi training camps more than a decade prior” to the 2003 war.

But the study shies away from identifying them as al-Qaida terrorists, even though many of them were members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri, became the deputy leader of al-Qaida in 1998.

While the IDA study includes no information that would show operational ties between Saddam’s regime and the 9/11 hijackers, it reveals that Saddam personally gave orders on Sept. 17, 2001 to his general military intelligence directorate to recruit Iraqi officers for “suicide operations” against the United States.

The 112-page Harmony data file ISGQ-2005-00037352 contains Saddam’s order, as well as personal pledges to carry out suicide operations from more than one hundred “volunteers,” including a brigadier general.

In the order he issued just one week after the 9/11 attacks, Saddam stated that the volunteers should sign pledges “to be written in blood,” presumably their own.

Four years before this order, Saddam announced with great fanfare that he had tasked a prominent Iraqi calligrapher to produce a Quran written with his own blood. Saddam reportedly had doctors draw his blood for the task.

Several other key documents are glaringly absent from the IDA report and provide direct evidence of Saddam Hussein’s deep involvement with al-Qaida and its component organizations.

Among them is a 1999 notebook kept by an unidentified Iraqi intelligence official that detailed meetings between top Iraqi leaders and visiting Islamic terrorists. (Harmony document ISGP-2003-0001412).

One Baghdad visitor was Maulana Fazlur Rahman a signer of Osama bin Laden’s infamous 1998 fatwa calling on Muslims to “murder Americans.” Another was Afghan mujahedin leader Gulbudin Hekmatyar, who was also supported by Iran.

Roy Robison, a former U.S. government contractor who published an analysis of Saddam’s relationship to al-Qaida last year, argues that when Rahman met with Iraqi Vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan in 1999 “he did so as the father of the Taliban and as a leader of the World Islamic Front which declared war on the U.S the year before.”

Another document not included in this latest report was a review by Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) of their ongoing ties with Osama bin Laden and other opponents to the Saudi regime (Harmony document ISGZ-2004-009247).

This document reads like a memorandum for the record, written in early 1997, tracing the beginnings of the Iraqi regime’s relationship to Osama bin Laden.

In a letter dated Jan. 11, 1995, Saddam Hussein personally authorized the General Director of Intelligence to establish direct contact with bin Laden in Sudan, the report states.

The initial meeting with bin Laden took place just one month later, on Feb. 19, 1995, and included an offer by Iraq to provide bin Laden with broadcasting facilities and a discussion of plans “to perform joint operations against foreign forces in the land of Hijaz [ie, Saudi Arabia].

Following bin Laden’s expulsion from Sudan, in July 1996, the memo states that the Iraqi intelligence service is “working to revitalize this relationship through a new channel.”

The IDA report includes in its supporting documentation a detailed report by the Iraqi general director of intelligence in response to an “action directive” issued by Saddam on Jan. 18, 1993, ordering his intelligence service to establish relations with terrorist groups around the world and to develop the “expertise to carry out assignments.”

In addition to a variety of Palestinian groups, the document lists the Hezb Islami of Afghanistan, the Islamic Scholars Group of Pakistan, the Jam’iyat “Ulama Pakistan, all of which subsequently became affiliated with al-Qaida.

The authors of the IDA report note in the abstract accompanying their work that the captured documents provide “evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including . . . Islamic terrorist organizations.”

While the documents “do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al-Qaida network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al-Qaida,” and to provide financing and training of these outside groups.

“This created both the appearance of and, in some ways, a ‘de facto’ link between the organizations,” the report’s authors stated. …

Contrary to the accounts that have appeared in mainstream media outlets, the Harmony documents and the IDA report show beyond any doubt that Saddam Hussein was willing to fund, train, and use Islamic terrorists, including groups affiliated with al-Qaida, to carry out his long-standing plans against the United States and U.S. allies in the region.

A 2002 annual report to the Iraq Intelligence Service M8 directorate of liberation movements shows that the IIS hosted 13 terrorist conferences during the year, and that Saddam personally received 37 congratulatory messages from international terrorist groups. The annual report also noted that the IIS had issued 699 passports to terrorists during the year.

“Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al-Qaida [such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri], or that generally shared al-Qaida’s stated goals and objectives,” the IDA report states.

But an element of competition also kept Saddam from too much direct involvement with al-Qaida, the IDA report states.

While both Saddam and bin Laden wanted to drive the West out of Muslim lands and to create a single powerful state that would replace America as a global superpower, “bin Laden wanted — and still wants — to restore the Islamic caliphate while Saddam, despite his later Islamic rhetoric, dreamed more narrowly of being the secular ruler of a united Arab nation,” the report’s authors state.

The relationship between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden bore some resemblance to the Cali and Medellin drug cartels.

While the seemingly rival cartels were vying for market share, “neither cartel was reluctant to cooperate with the other when it came to the pursuit of a common objective,” the report’s authors state.

“Recognizing Iraq as a second, or parallel, “terror cartel” that was simultaneously threatened by and somewhat aligned with its rival helps to explain the evidence emerging from the detritus of Saddam’s regime,” the IDA report states.

One terror tie apparently put to rest in this latest report are the suspicions that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

Analysts such as Laurie Mylroie have argued for years that Saddam’s regime was behind the 1993 attack, and cited as evidence the fact that a key member of the plot, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Iraq immediately after the bombing.

As I reported in Shadow Warriors, Saddam Hussein recorded all meetings in his presidential office, and the Harmony data base includes tapes from a series of meetings during 1993 that discussed the interrogation of Yasin.

Saddam “discusses the possibility that the attack was part of the ‘dirty games that the American intelligence would play if it had a bigger purpose,’” and expresses concern that Yasin might be an American agent, the IDA report states.

According to Saddam, Yassin was “too organized in what he is saying and [he] is playing games, playing games and influencing the scenario” during his interrogations by Iraqi intelligence. Saddam ordered that the interrogations continue but “actually warns against allowing Yasin to commit suicide or be killed in jail,” the report states.

Saddam believed that “the most important thing is not to let the Arabic public opinion [believe] we are cooperating with the US against the opposition. I mean that is why our announcement [that Yasin is being held] should include doubts . . . [about] who carried out this operation. Because it is possible that in the end we will discover — even if it is a very weak possibility — that a fanatic group who carried it organized the operation.”

Saddam and his advisors were hoping to use the interrogations of Yasin, and whatever information they could gather from him about the organizers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to enhance their position in world public opinion.

If handled correctly, Saddam said, Yasin’s confessions “will benefit us greatly; it will benefit us in our issue in the matter of the stance that the U.S. has taken against us.”

Richard Miniter, at PJM, tells you what the MSM will not about the scope, details, and omissions of the Institute for Defense Analysis study whose recently leaked executive summary was widely reported to have shown that there was “no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.”

Miniter provides considerable details on Iraqi officials’ meetings with al Qaeda, Iraqi funding of al Qaeda affilates, Iraqi provided training, and al Qaeda personnel carrying Iraqi passports or obtaining refuge in Iraq.

Jeffrey Bell looks at the Bush Administration’s record and identifies its lack of attention span as a key problem: the pattern is excellent initial judgment, strong will, fair to decent early execution, culminating in distraction and in an ultimate failure to finish.

Reagan made some unusually good calls. Speaking as a Reaganite, I believe Bush did too, particularly in his first three years in the White House. But too often, he didn’t let his bet ride. At other times he was proven right, but became distracted or forgetful when it was time to get to completion, to bank his winnings. We’ve seen how this worked to undo or render negligible some of his bravest and most innovative domestic moves, such as the first-term tax cuts and the faith-based initiative. The same failure to follow through demoralized Bush’s supporters and threatened his achievements in foreign policy as well.

He also, correctly, identifies the mishandling of the Plamegame as key ingredient in the dégringolade.

A somewhat bigger turning point, it seems to me, was the fall 2003 appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor to investigate the public disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. Looking back on it, several elements of this episode appear truly absurd, indeed almost comical: the indictment and conviction of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice, even though the prosecutor had concluded there was no underlying crime; the fact that the prosecutor seemingly pursued only people who were hawkish on Iraq and never people who were dovish on Iraq; the fact that from the beginning, even before Fitzgerald’s appointment, all of the key players knew that the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, was the original source of the leak to columnist Robert Novak, rather than anyone in the White House. If nothing else, the criminal investigation cursed and complicated several years of the life of Karl Rove, the president’s most gifted and most combative political adviser, who it turned out had nothing to do with disclosing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson.

In part because the Plame affair succeeded in criminalizing or semi-criminalizing effective defenders of the Iraq invasion, in part because the weapons of mass destruction were missing–perhaps even in part because the partisan polarization that predated 9/11 was never destined to go away for long–the administration lost its voice. This affected not so much voters’ support for Bush’s handling of Iraq–that would have plummeted during the Iraq bungling of 2004-06 no matter what the administration had said about it–as the president’s ability to persuade the country that U.S. involvement in Iraq is a difficult but indispensable part of battling jihadism worldwide.

The loss of voice that began to be apparent in the second half of 2003 opened a wide avenue for a liberal Democratic storyline, which quickly dovetailed with the realist storyline of Republican critics such as Brent Scowcroft, not to mention the storyline of members of the permanent government inside the national security apparatus in Washington: World war? What world war? What war at all, other than Afghanistan and the one blundered into by George W. Bush in Iraq? Yes, 9/11 was terrible, but the Bush “obsession” with Iraq, obvious to insiders long before the actual invasion, enabled the perpetrators of 9/11 to escape the clutches of allied forces in the Afghan mountains, and has resulted in inexcusable neglect of the war in Afghanistan ever since.

That it has been possible for critics to isolate Iraq as an issue–making it into a giant, stand-alone Bush blunder–accounts in large part for the failure of the president to get much benefit in public opinion from the turnaround achieved by his appointment of General Petraeus. Improved prospects for getting the United States out of a difficult situation with only limited damage doesn’t change the “fact” that our being there at all is a mistake. Even a completely unpredicted Bush success–the lack of new terrorist attacks against the American mainland since September 2001–lends further plausibility to the Democratic storyline. In the words of the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh in a C-SPAN interview, after all, 9/11 was “not that big a deal.” In the revealing words of John Edwards, the war on terrorism is nothing more than a bumper sticker.

Read the whole thing.

Leading New York Times traitor James Risen is facing a federal investigation for being the beneficiary of further Intelligence Community anti-Bush Administration leaking.

A federal grand jury has issued a subpoena to a reporter of The New York Times, apparently to try to force him to reveal his confidential sources for a 2006 book on the Central Intelligence Agency, one of the reporter’s lawyers said Thursday.

The subpoena was delivered last week to the New York law firm that is representing the reporter, James Risen, and ordered him to appear before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 7.

Mr. Risen’s lawyer, David N. Kelley, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan early in the Bush administration, said in an interview that the subpoena sought the source of information for a specific chapter of the book “State of War.”

The chapter asserted that the C.I.A. had unsuccessfully tried, beginning in the Clinton administration, to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program. None of the material in that chapter appeared in The New York Times.

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs.

The Wall Street Journal does not take the same view of the NIE we have. Rather than the public signal of a private rapprochement with Iran, the Journal’s editor think the report merely represents one more major assault on Administration policy by the Intelligence Community’s entrenched left, this time supinely announced from the defeated White House itself.

This interpretation is very pessimistic, and not impossible.

President Bush has been scrambling to rescue his Iran policy after this week’s intelligence switcheroo, but the fact that the White House has had to spin so furiously is a sign of how badly it has bungled this episode. In sum, Mr. Bush and his staff have allowed the intelligence bureaucracy to frame a new judgment in a way that has undermined four years of U.S. effort to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

This kind of national security mismanagement has bedeviled the Bush Presidency. Recall the internal disputes over post-invasion Iraq, the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi by the State Department and CIA, hanging Scooter Libby out to dry after bungling the response to Joseph Wilson’s bogus accusations, and so on. Mr. Bush has too often failed to settle internal disputes and enforce the results.

What’s amazing in this case is how the White House has allowed intelligence analysts to drive policy. The very first sentence of this week’s national intelligence estimate (NIE) is written in a way that damages U.S. diplomacy: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Only in a footnote below does the NIE say that this definition of “nuclear weapons program” does “not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.”

In fact, the main reason to be concerned about Iran is that we can’t trust this distinction between civilian and military. That distinction is real in a country like Japan. But we know Iran lied about its secret military efforts until it was discovered in 2003, and Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, with 3,000 centrifuges, in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. There is no civilian purpose for such enrichment. Iran has access to all the fuel it needs for civilian nuclear power from Russia at the plant in Bushehr. The NIE buries the potential danger from this enrichment, even though this enrichment has been the main focus of U.S. diplomacy against Iran.

In this regard, it’s hilarious to see the left and some in the media accuse Mr. Bush once again of distorting intelligence. The truth is the opposite. The White House was presented with this new estimate only weeks ago, and no doubt concluded it had little choice but to accept and release it however much its policy makers disagreed. Had it done otherwise, the finding would have been leaked and the Administration would have been assailed for “politicizing” intelligence.

The result is that we now have NIE judgments substituting for policy in a dangerous way. For one thing, these judgments are never certain, and policy in a dangerous world has to account for those uncertainties. We know from our own sources that not everyone in American intelligence agrees with this NIE “consensus,” and the Israelis have already made clear they don’t either. The Jerusalem Post reported this week that Israeli defense officials are exercised enough that they will present their Iran evidence to Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he visits that country tomorrow.

For that matter, not even the diplomats at the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency agree with the NIE. “To be frank, we are more skeptical,” a senior official close to the agency told the New York Times this week. “We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.” Senator John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, is also skeptical enough that he wants Congress to establish a bipartisan panel to explore the NIE’s evidence. We hope he keeps at it.

All the more so because the NIE heard ’round the world is already harming U.S. policy. The Chinese are backing away from whatever support they might have provided for tougher sanctions against Iran, while Russia has used the NIE as another reason to oppose them. Most delighted are the Iranians, who called the NIE a “victory” and reasserted their intention to proceed full-speed ahead with uranium enrichment. Behind the scenes, we can expect Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to expand their nuclear efforts as they conclude that the U.S. will now be unable to stop Iran from getting the bomb.

We reported earlier this week that the authors of this Iran NIE include former State Department officials who have a history of hostility to Mr. Bush’s foreign policy. But the ultimate responsibility for this fiasco lies with Mr. Bush. Too often he has appointed, or tolerated, officials who oppose his agenda, and failed to discipline them even when they have worked against his policies. Instead of being candid this week about the problems with the NIE, Mr. Bush and his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, tried to spin it as a victory for their policy. They simply weren’t believable.

It’s a sign of the Bush Administration’s flagging authority that even many of its natural allies wondered this week if the NIE was really an attempt to back down from its own Iran policy. We only wish it were that competent.

The Guardian thinks the same thing, simultaneously rejoicing over “howling neocons” and patting on the back principal author Thomas Fingar, and co-authors Vann Van Diepen and Kenneth Brill, for effectively neutering the Bush Administration with respect to Iran during its final 13 months in office.

Valerie Plame’s pal Larry Johnson posts a letter from “a group of distinguished intelligence and military officers, diplomats, and law enforcement professionals” to the Senate Judiciary Committee “strongly urging that (they) not send Mukasey’s nomination to the full Senate before he makes clear his view on waterboarding.”

If anyone ever cared to investigate who was involved in leaking national security information to the New York Times and Washington Post, I’d suggest waterboarding some of the people on this list of signatories.

Brent Cavan
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

Ray Close
Directorate of Operations, CIA for 26 years—22 of them overseas; former Chief of Station, Saudi Arabia

Ed Costello
Counter-espionage, FBI

Michael Dennehy
Supervisory Special Agent for 32 years, FBI; U.S. Marine Corps for three years

Rosemary Dew
Supervisory Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI

Philip Giraldi
Operations officer and counter-terrorist specialist, Directorate of Operations, CIA

Michael Grimaldi
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Federal law enforcement officer

Mel Goodman
Division Chief, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Professor, National Defense University; Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy

Larry Johnson
Intelligence analysis and operations officer, CIA; Deputy Director, Office of Counter Terrorism, Department of State

Richard Kovar
Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence, CIA: Editor, Studies In Intelligence

Charlotte Lang
Supervisory Special Agent, FBI

W. Patrick Lang
U.S. Army Colonel, Special Forces, Vietnam; Professor, U.S. Military Academy, West Point; Defense Intelligence Officer for Middle East, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); founding director, Defense HUMINT Service

Lynne Larkin
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA; counterintelligence; coordination among intelligence and crime prevention agencies; CIA policy coordination staff ensuring adherence to law in operations

Steve Lee
Intelligence Analyst for terrorism, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

Jon S. Lipsky
Supervisory Special Agent, FBI

David MacMichael
Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council, CIA; History professor; Veteran, U.S. Marines (Korea)

Tom Maertens
Foreign Service Officer and Intelligence Analyst, Department of State; Deputy Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, Department of State; National Security Council (NSC) Director for Non-Proliferation

James Marcinkowski
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA by way of U.S. Navy

Mary McCarthy
National Intelligence Officer for Warning; Senior Director for Intelligence Programs, National Security Council

Ray McGovern
Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; morning briefer, The President’s Daily Brief; chair of National Intelligence Estimates; Co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Sam Provance
U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst, Germany and Iraq (Abu Ghraib); Whistleblower

Coleen Rowley
Special Agent and attorney, FBI; Whistleblower on the negligence that facilitated the attacks of 9/11.

Joseph Wilson
Foreign Service Officer, U.S. Ambassador and Director of Africa, National Security Council.

Valerie Plame Wilson
Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations

Tom Maguire, the Blogosphere’s specialist in Plamegame coverage, already has his copy of Valerie Plame Wilson’s book, and is commenting on his first pass through the pages.

Earlier posting.

Get out your handkerchiefs. Valerie Plame Wilson’s book, telling how her villainous elected opponents tried hijacking control of the US foreign policy from her friends in the State Department and the CIA, and had the effrontery to question the bona fides of her husband’s testimony on Iraqi uranium deals with Niger, appears today.

Mrs. Wilson herself will be promoting sales by blogging on the Huntington Post, sharing Oprahesque accounts of her adventures at the Agency, her courage in facing post-partum depression, and her struggles with the anxieties produced by the sudden arrival of celebrity and book-contract-induced wealth.

The aptly-named leftwing Crooks-and-Liars blog has a couple of video excerpts (here) from Mrs. Wilson’s 60 minutes interview with Katie Couric, which are worth watching. Couric simply accepts Valerie Wilson’s assertion of her alleged covertness, but during the second excerpt she actually asks a few questions featuring a modicum of skepticism. C&L’s Logan Murphy is moved to indignation by Couric’s failure to deliver a 100% loyal interview.

—————————

Also Valerie Plame’s buddy, Intel Community leftist Larry Johnson, offers a hair-raising (and characteristically foul-mouthed) story of poor Valerie, a mother with two pre-school children, abandoned to the mercies of Al-Qaeda by the Bush Administration and the CIA.

What am I talking about? In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were enroute to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame. The FBI informed Valerie of this threat. This was just more “good” news piled on the fact that her intelligence career was in shambles, that intelligence assets she had recruited/managed were destroyed, and that she was unable to rebut publicly false and malicious smears of her character and reputation by a bunch of partisan Republican hacks. As the mother of two pre-school children, her first thoughts were about protecting her kids. She took the threat seriously and asked for help.

When the White House learned of these threats they sprung into action. They beefed up Secret Service protection for Vice President Cheney and provided security protection to Karl Rove. But they declined to do anything for Valerie. That was a CIA problem.

Valerie contacted the office of Security at CIA and requested assistance. They told her too fucking bad and to go pound sand. They did not use those exact words, but they told her she was on her own. …

So if you have wondered why Joe and Val are a little pissed off, this might help shed some additional light on the matter. Not only did the Bush Administration out a covert intelligence officer working on the most sensitive national security issues in a time of war, but when that officer faced a direct threat to her life and her family’s safety because of that public exposure, they did not do a goddamn thing to help. I don’t know about you, but that fries my ass.

Since Mrs. Wilson appeared on 60 minutes very recently, demonstrably she was not, in fact, assassinated by Al Qaeda. The absence of reports of any attack suggests that Al Qaeda never actually tried. And, why should they? Mr. & Mrs. Wilson have been of great service to them, and have done great harm to the US cause. I would expect Al Qaeda to want to give both of them a medal, not to desire to harm them.

On Thursday last, the New York Times reported that CIA Director Michael Hayden has initiated an unusual investigation into the activities of the CIA’s Inspector General’s Office.

According to the Times, all this stems from criticism by that office of the CIA’s performance pre-9/11, and from “aggressive investigations” of “detention and interrogation programs and other matters.”

But, as MacRanger points out, it was Inspector General John L. Helgerson who personally recruited the same Mary O. McCarthy who was fired in April of 2006 for leaking information on covert counter-terrorism operations to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

AJStrata thinks the Times is spinning, and agrees that this story is really about CIA internal efforts finally to do something about the partisan leaks of highly classified national security information to the press by adversaries of the Administration within the agency.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we aren’t beginning to see some reciprocity, in the form of the Agency actually doing something about the most outrageous leaks, in return for the Bush Administration’s surrender, its abandonment of efforts to reform the Agency, and the reinstatement of Stephen R. Kappes and Michael Sulick.

No longer pouting, but smiling with content, Bush administration adversaries in the CIA put their feet up and reminisce contemptuously about Porter Goss and his associates, referred to as “Goslings,” who tried to change the agency’s culture and were defeated.

“From day one, Goss and his people seemed to be punching above their weight,” reports Jeff Stein.

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post is a leftwing editorialist I don’t commonly agree with, but I think the opening, at least, of today’s column hits the nail on the head.

The last two times the Pew Research Center asked people to describe President Bush in a single word, chief among the overwhelmingly negative responses was the word “incompetent.”

What makes that particularly fascinating is that it’s a realization that the public has reached pretty much on its own.

Unfortunately, Froomkin then goes right off into leftwing subjectivity land, repeating the usual memes about unsatisfactory management of the war in Iraq, failure to perform Moses-level miracles on flooded New Orleans, and (quelle horreur!) actually trying to appoint Republicans to DOJ positions.

Froomkin essentially takes the opposite of the facts as his basis to lambaste Bush.

Iit’s well past time to ask ourselves: What has Bush done to our government?

Bush’s two top advisers — Vice President Cheney and just-departed political guru Karl Rove — made little secret of their desire to have the wider federal bureaucracy serve their purposes. But just how much has the exertion of absolute White House political control, through a network of loyalists put in key positions, damaged government agencies’ ability to accomplish the tasks the American people expect of them?

How many long-time senior career employees have been marginalized, micromanaged or driven out of government?

Unfortunately, the real reason Americans think Bush is incompetent is precisely the reverse. Americans have concluded that Bush is incompetent because he cannot defend his own Attorney General when he tries to replace some federal attorneys. They believe that he is a weak leader because he could not compel large portions of the State Department and the Intelligence community to support his policies.

This president did not succeed in replacing disaffected senior officers in the CIA or reforming the Agency, and when National Security information was leaked repeatedly in the New York Times and Washington Post, no one was ever prosecuted or punished.

On the other hand, his adversaries successfully managed to criminalize even questioning the bona fides of Ambassador Wilson’s testimony, and succeeded in convicting the Vice Presidential Chief of Staff of perjury in a case where no crime could possibly ever have occurred. It was George W. Bush himself who appointed the man who aimed the torpedo at the midships of his administration. Bush made James B. Comey (Martha Stewart’s nemesis) Deputy Attorney General, and when John Poindexter (angry at not being reappointed) called for a washbowl and a towel and recused himself, James B. Comey selected the special prosecutor.

Bush is not incompetent because he tyrannically remodeled the bureaucracy. He is incompetent because he has failed to get control of the government he was elected to head, and because he has failed both to punish his enemies and to defend himself and his friends.

Michael J. Sulick in 2005

The question about who’s really in charge in Washington has been settled. The amateurs who came to town after the election of the year 2000 and started interfering with the professionals and experts making up the real government have been put in their place or made to resign, and it’s back to business as usual in the interval of waiting for the next democrat party administration to arrive.

Ken Timmerman reports:

The Central Intelligence Agency announced on Friday that it was calling back from retirement a controversial former operations officer to head the National Clandestine Service, three years after he left the Agency to protest reforms being put in place by then-CIA Director Porter Goss.

Michael J. Sulick was associate deputy director for operations at the time he resigned in November 2004 along with his boss, Stephen R. Kappes.

The Wall Street Journal called their bitter fight with Porter Goss and his aides over Agency reform “an insurgency,” although both Kappes and Sulick were praised by Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, who became a fierce critic of Goss and his reforms.

Sulick’s return was praised by John McLaughlin, who as acting CIA director in July 2004 was involved in his earlier appointment, prior to the clash with Goss.

“Mike Sulick’s return is a big plus for the agency,” McLaughlin told NewsMax. “He is open to new ideas, but espionage in the classic sense has been around since biblical times and — while novelty is always welcome — there’s a lot to be said for the proven experience that Mike Sulick brings to the table. “

The National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations, is the Agency’s elite corps of spies.

When Goss took over the Agency in September 2004, he sought to revitalize the clandestine service and weed out “dead wood” operators who were the product of an “old boys network” that failed to recruit spies in difficult overseas environments.

But he ran into fierce opposition from Kappes, Sulick and other products of the CIA “old guard,” who objected to Goss’s efforts to reform the operations directorate and bring it under his control.

As I will reveal in my upcoming book, “Shadow Warriors: Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender,” Kappes had been implicated in a serious security breach at a CIA station overseas, but was never disciplined by the Agency.

Furthermore, both he and Sulick were engaged in activities to lobby members of Congress in their own districts that violated U.S. law. When Goss tried to discipline them, the two men resigned in protest.

Sulick’s message sends a “terrible message” to CIA officers who are trying to do their job and stay out of politics, and suggests that the CIA bench is so thin they have no other candidates for the critical job as head of the Clandestine Service, former agency officers said.

Goss was trying to change the “culture” of the DO, where Clandestine officers were promoted for the number of foreign sources they recruited, not the quality of their information.

Sulick and Kappes earned a reputation as political infighters, who fiercely opposed the policies of the Bush administration in the war on terror and the war in Iraq.

“Sulick’s appointment is an unbelievable slap at the president,” a congressional source told NewsMax over the weekend.

Michael J. Sulick bio.