The political leadership of

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“The political leadership of the administration,” says Post columnist Jim Hoagland today, “declared war on the careerists at the CIA soon after Bush’s election. There should be no surprise that analysts who feel their insights have been scorned and attacked would use this opportunity to get even.” But let’s not forget how much of a soldier Hoagland was in that war. In a choice example, see this column from last October 20th on Bush’s now-newly-controversial October 7th speech on the Iraqi threat. The material for the October 20th speech never would have made it out of the CIA had not President Bush’s “determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator” brought a such a “cultural change” to the Agency.

Too true, Jim.

One coup brought about by the “cultural change” was the president’s ability to use in his October 7th speech “an agency finding that Iraq is developing ‘a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles’ to deliver chemical and biological weapons on U.S. targets.” Those would, of course, be the chemical and bio-spewing UAVs which even most of the maximalists now believe never existed. Hoagland thought that Tenet might still be part of the problem, holding the Agency back from truly embracing the new ways.

This is how war is waged inside the CIA: The upstarts who are challenging the agency’s long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq are being accused of “politicizing intelligence,” a label that is a reputation-killer in the intelligence world. It is also a protective shield for analysts who do not want, any more than the rest of us, to acknowledge that they have been profoundly and damagingly mistaken.

The “politicization” accusation suggests that those who find Iraqi links to al Qaeda are primarily interested in currying favor with the Bush White House. It comes primarily from those who won favor in the Clinton years with an analysis based on the proposition that an Arab nationalist such as Saddam Hussein would never cooperate with the Islamic fanatics of al Qaeda. They are now out in the cold in the Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz era.

Can we take the quotes off ‘politicizing’ now?

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