On Saturday, David Brooks trashed whatever credibility he may have had left as an 'independent' voice rather than a Bush Admin mouthpiece when he savaged the CIA's attempt to defend itself against the assault of blame marshalled by the BA to get itself off the hook for its refusal to respond to their warnings before 9/11 and its analysts' conclusions that Iraq posed no threat. The neocon cabal, in thrall to nutbag Laurie Mylroie and her whacko conspiracy theories of Saddam as the Professor Moriarty of terrorism, set up, out of Cheney's office and under Doug Feith's supervision, two agencies--the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (C-TEG) and the Office for Special Planning (OSP)--to do an end-run around the CIA's experienced analysts by 'stovepiping' raw, unconfirmed intelligence straight to them. Whatever they found that fit Mylroie's tinfoil-hat paranoia, they believed without question and made policy without bothering to confirm whether or not it was true, which explains how ace con-artist Ahmad Chalabi came to dominate the neocons' unreal version of Iraq's reality.

The Company rapidly became the scapegoat for the Admin's refusal to face facts after Dick and W's Excellent Adventure in Iraq turned into a quagmire of quicksand, and the Mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing Noise Machine was only too happy to trumpet that political twist. I said months ago, after the notorious outing of CIA covert-op Valerie Plame by the Bush Admin for political reasons, that the CIA wasn't going to stand for watching itself be politicized out of existence and its operatives blown for a few quick political brownie points. The absurd, not to say insane, appointment of GOP hack Porter Goss to head the CIA was bound to intensify the hard feelings and petrify the polarization between old hands who believed the CIA's analysis role was to be as non-partisan and accurate as possible, and the neocon newbies from C-TEG and OSP who saw analysis as another word for 'rationalizing what the Admin wants to do'.

And they didn't stand for it. When Porter Goss began to do the job he was appointed to do--turn the CIA into an Imperial foreign-policy spin machine--they began to fight back. Brooks makes not the slightest attempt to so much as acknowledge that they might have had some legitimate reasons to protect themselves from this politicization. No, to Brooks, the CIA's only job is to 'serve the president', and they should be ashamed of themselves for serving the truth instead.

President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

Oh goodness me, the dastardly crime of 'undermining' the Emperor's Admin by defending oneself against its on-going assaults and scapegoating to cover its own mistakes and blindnesses is one we should never have to suffer in the Imperium. Why, the Imperial Viziers actually felt they had to hide their political agenda for fear the CIA would out them because they were all, you know, Kerry moles.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

... Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

'Insubordination'? What an odd word to use. And 'brazen' at that. Oh, and the truth 'violate[s] all standards of honorable public service'. Uh-huh. Right.

Ordinarily this would be a typically laughable piece of Brooksian idiocy and a good example of why I haven't bothered to read him but 3 or 4 times since the NYT caved under Grand Vizier Rove's insistence that they hire him, but his fawning over Imperial policy toward the Company and his automatic acceptance of its rank politicization are the above-the-water tips of icebergs looming off the Imperial bow.

Newsday reported yesterday (link thanks to The Agonist) that Goss has been ordered to 'purge the agency' of any officers considered 'disloyal to Bush'.

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Brooks' job on Saturday was to lead this story away from its Soviet-style 'off with their heads' quality into Imperial Spinland where it could be interpreted as punishment for 'brazen insubordination', and now we can begin to understand why he chose that word. The Bush Admin is going to use the blame-the-CIA-for-9/11-and-Iraq meme as an excuse to turn the whole agency into a larger version of C-TEG and the OSP: an NKVD-style political network whose job is to 'serve the Emperor' and his Presidium by endorsing--and enforcing--what they've already decided to do.

Given this, it would make sense if the first old CIA hand to go was the covert op director who kept telling them his Iraq network couldn't find any evidence that Hussein had WMD's or any capability to produce them, and that everything Chalabi was telling them was false. And guess what?

One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.

But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division....

The Emperor is, in sum, wasting no time consolidating his power, and in a few short months, we'll all have forgotten that there was ever a difference between the CIA and the KGB.

No wonder the Emperor got along so well with Putin. Birds-of-a-feather.