The LA Times is reporting that Alain Chouet, the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service, has, in an interview last week, revealed previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French intelligence, demonstrating once again the lengths the Bush Administration was willing to go in ignoring powerful counter-evidence when it brazenly referred to attempts by the Iraqi regime to purchase uranium in Niger. Isn’t it convenient the way this wonderful new French revelation confirms what retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the domestic opponents of the US invasion of Iraq, have been saying all along?

But there are some who have noted the possibility of a connection between Joe Wilson and French Intelligence, and who contend that French Intelligence may have been conducting a disinformation operation against the Bush Administration focussed on the Iraqi Niger uranium purchase for a considerable period of time.

See also Jack Cashill and Fedora and Anchoress

Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes a Jack Kelly column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which lists notable CIA failures:

it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the warning signs of 9/11 and Saddam’s WMDs —

and then turns to the most spectacular failure of the Agency: its failure to stop, or punish, some Agency officers’ more-recent activities:

“The CIA’s war against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years,” wrote lawyer and Web logger John Hinderaker in The Weekly Standard.

The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the Bush administration by former Democratic officeholders, and permitted a serving analyst, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book bashing the president.

The principal CIA weapon has been the leak. Reporters for ABC, The New York Times and The Washington Post didn’t have to do even the minimal legwork Mr. Laurin did to out the CIA’s clandestine “rendition” program. It was handed to them by “current and former intelligence officials.”

“So the CIA established policies that it knew would be controversial and would damage American interests if revealed, and then leaked the existence of those policies to The Washington Post for the purpose of damaging the Bush administration,” Mr. Hinderaker wrote.

A rogue CIA that subverts American democracy has long been a staple of moonbat mythology. How ironic that the rogues in the CIA should turn out to be leftists who harm America to benefit Democrats.

Kelly then refers to a conclusion reached by others:

In the 1990s, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed abolishing the CIA. That seemed far out then. It doesn’t seem so far out now. It might be easier to start from scratch than to clean up the mess the CIA has become.

“The CIA is in deep crisis,” Mr. Hinderaker said. “It is not at all clear that its survival is in the national interest.”

But the problem is even more extensive. The pouting spooks’ war against the Bush Administration has been being waged simultaneously openly and covertly, since at least the beginning of 2003, when the public announcement of the organization of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) occurred. As we have previously reported:

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

The recent leak involving CIA terrorist renditions to Poland was supplied to the press by Marc Garlasco, currently an analyst with the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, but formerly a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, who resigned shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War.

Daniel Henniger in a well-worth reading editorial in today’s WSJ considers the possibilities of the motivations for the MSM’s obsessive coverage of L’Affaire Plame:

Two reasons emerge. The first is if Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Karl Rove for violating this law, Mr. Rove likely would resign and the Bush presidency would be significantly damaged. The alternative explanation is that the press is merely pursuing a possible violation of federal law and any damage to the presidency is therefore the self-inflicted wound of Ms. Plame’s outer. If it is the former, then the conservative paranoia about the press isn’t paranoia. If the latter, then the Beltway press has lost its mind; they are making the practice of journalism more litigious for all the rest of us.

Editor & Publisher is previewing an article from next Sunday’s New York Times to be titled “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Michael Crowley evidently concludes that blogs on the Right do a better job of using their on-line soap-boxes to influence the public debate, while liberal blogs primarily just talk to liberal audiences. We knew that already.

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Ho, ho! The contemptible Atrios is blogging indignantly, in his usual foul-mouthed manner, and in extreme looney-tune-leftist paranoid mode about how it wouldn’t even matter

If all the wingnut blogs disappeared tomorrow it really wouldn’t have any impact on the national discourse. Sure they’re there and the Right is better at using them but they don’t really *need* them

Because we’ve got on our side, according to the addled Atrios,

both the massive right wing media

(Let’s see: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News [sort of], and the Manchester Union-Leader]

and the mainstream media.

Welcome NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, 5000 other papers, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, HBO and Showtime, Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the NY Review of Books, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and these days, Fly Rod & Reel and Field & Stream, all former leftist MSM stalwarts to the Right!

Poor Little Atrios alone on the barricades with only, what? the Daily Worker? Mother Jones? CounterPunch? on his side.

The headlines read:

Washington Post: DeLay’s Felony Charge Is Upheld

San Francisco Chronicle: DeLay can’t avoid trial over charges

Houston Chronicle: Ruling diminishes likelihood DeLay regains leader’s post

when what they should be saying is:

BBC: DeLay conspiracy charge dropped

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And I’m not the only one who noticed. Daniel J. Solove made precisely the same point today. Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.