An internal memo shows that Porter Goss has made it official: the politicization of the CIA is now his policy.

"As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road."

Oh, they're clarified. Beyond doubt.

1. Intel that doesn't match Administration policy will be buried


2. Analysis that doesn't 'support' Admin goals will be trashed


3. The services of agents, analysts, and assets who can't come up with information supporting Admin policies--no matter how loopy, Admin beliefs--no matter how disconnected from reality, and Admin goals--no matter how anti-democratic or Imperial, will be dispensed with


4. Following Bush policies in other areas of govt, screw-ups, incompetence, massive failure, and being immensely wrong will now mean promotion and success


5. Using raw, unconfirmed data that can be interpreted in the Admin's favor will be encouraged; it will not be confirmed because it favors the Admin view and must, therefore, be true, so confirmation won't be considered necessary
   

Another word for this is 'propaganda'.

Yes, it's true that Director-Hack Goss included this:

"We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.''

--but it's a meaningless sop, a transparent attempt to stop the flow of blood from the coup, and everybody knows it. Bush wants the CIA brought under his heel. The new templates are C-TEG and OSP--propaganda units run by naive amateurs who 'support' the Emperor by telling him what he wants to hear--and anybody who doesn't 'get it' will be gone. The professionalism in the agency that John Deutsch worked so hard to create is history and the cowboys of the Nixon era are back, only this time as fantasists and fairy-tale writers.

In comments to my last post on this issue, Eric Martin of TIA posted a letter from a friend of his that said, in part:

I am afraid the President will not heed your suggestion to inform the CIA that he wants only information from it. This is because the President has already defined what he wants from the intelligence community, and, much to the dismay of any thoughtful American, it isn't information. Information is what the intelligence community tried to provide, and the Administration refused to accept. Rather, the Bush Administration wants the CIA to act as an advocate on behalf of Bush's policies, regardless of what the information that the CIA gathers suggests about whether those policies are wise or unwise.

The intelligence community does serve the Executive. But it does so by gathering information, not by advocating for the Executive's policies. The American public is better served by a CIA whose role is to gather all the intelligence relevant to proposed Executive policies and present it for consideration than by a CIA whose role is to gather only intelligence that supports the President's policy aims and ignore, even discard, intelligence that does not. Even a lawyer, whose job it is to advocate for one position regardless of the facts, cannot simply ignore or discard inconvenient facts. Why would we want our intelligence community (or even our President) to do so?

David Kinnecome (New York)

That about covers it. But Mr Kinnecome doesn't make it plain what 'advocacy' really means, so I will: it means the CIA is now nothing but a propaganda agency. It will exist to serve up excuses and phony analysis. Networks will be dismantled--who needs them? Nobody's listening anyway, and besides, we've got all these neat gadgets like satellites and stuff, so we don't really need human intel. In fact, we don't need intel at all. We'll just do what Chalabi did and make stuff up--tell the neocons what they want to hear and they'll believe anything. They're so gullible, those guys. Really. Makes you wonder how they manage the wherewithal to be up and around.

So the Agency is about to be sent back into the Dark Ages of Allen Dulles' obsession with the Soviets and his insistence that his agents provide proof of his paranoid fantasies about them, only instead of the Commies being at the center, it will be 'state-sponsored terrorism' because that's what Laurie Mylroie blames. The mischief Dulles did has never been completely understood, unfortunately, but you can lay at his feet all the 'supporting material' that bolstered the Cold War:

1. The so-called 'missile gap'? Dulles made it up. It didn't exist. In fact, his own agents were reporting that the US had a 2-1 advantage in numbers and an even bigger advantage in another way--our missiles worked.


2. The Soviet 'plans for world domination'? They didn't exist. They were forgeries. Dulles had them made up when his agents couldn't find any such plans because there were no such plans. As Hedrick Smith and ex-Ambassador Averill Harriman tried to tell us, the Russians have a historic fear of being 'encircled' by enemy states; they had no plans to dominate anything, it was all rhetoric designed for the home market--you know, like a Bush stump-speech. But that didn't suit Dulles' faith-based belief so he chucked it and invented material to prove what he believed.


3. The 'space-based weapons'? A Dulles fantasy. They didn't exist, they were nowhere near existing. He made it up.

That's what we can look forward to from now on: national policy, especially foreign policy, that's based on and built on lies and manufactured 'evidence' that the CIA--and other intel groups; Condi will be doing the same thing at State--will be expected to produce whether or not it actually exists.

And the media will no doubt continue to swallow the fantasies whole and help BushCo get the nation all worked up over imaginary 'threats'.

Canada's looking better and better, isn't it?