The Central Incompetence Agency

One-stop shopping for poor prognostication:

ON SATURDAY, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson gave the Democratic party's weekly radio address and excoriated President Bush for not having fired Karl Rove and others in connection with the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the press. This followed Johnson's appearance before a panel of House and Senate Democrats on Friday, where he made similar criticisms of the president. A self-described Republican, Johnson argued that the failure of the president to fire Rove and anyone else supposedly involved in the leak had severely damaged national security and would certainly hamper future efforts to recruit informants in the war on terror.

Well, it's good to see that the former CIA employee is now worried about the war on terror. But it's a bit late. On July 10, 2001--two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--Johnson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times ("The Declining Terrorist Threat") in which he argued that Americans were "bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism" and, in truth, had "little to fear" from terrorism. And, in turn, he rebuked his former colleagues in the national security bureaucracy for using the "fiction" of the terrorist threat to pump up their budgets.

Nor was this Johnson's first foray into dismissing bin Laden and al Qaeda. Johnson, who also served as the deputy director for the office of counterterrorism at the State Department in the early 90s, was interviewed by PBS's Frontline for its 1999 program, "Hunting for bin Laden." According to Johnson, Americans had

"tended to make Osama bin Laden sort of a superman in Muslim garb," when in reality he is "more of a symptom of a problem" than a looming threat. And while bin Laden "would like to kill Americans . . . wanting to is different from being able to, having the full capabilities in place." By Johnson's lights, "Osama bin Laden . . . has not been a very effective organizer or leader. He talks a great game."

The Democratic party wants to use Larry Johnson as a seemingly safe mouthpiece to attack to the president. But, in doing so, they have adopted someone who fits perfectly the profile of the pre-9/11 CIA: see no evil, hear no evil. As documented in report after report, the CIA's directorate of operations had no assets in al Qaeda and CIA's analysts were asleep at the switch when it came to analyzing the scale of the threat posed by bin Laden.

So let's take a moment to tally up the Clinton Administration's legacy, shall we? They left us with:

1. A Justice Department which incinerated the children alive it did not hold at gunpoint and deport to Cuba

2. A State Department which believed its function was to represent the world's interests in the United States and not American interests in the world

3. A CIA which refused to gather intelligence and apparently viewed analysis as synonymous with "discarding intelligence out-of-hand"

4. A National Security Advisor who cannot be trusted with national security

5. A Commander-in-Chief who loathed the military

Is it any wonder these clowns couldn't protect America?

Here's what Dubya must do to fix this, given he's ignored many of these issues for four years now:

1. Abandon the Homeland Security ruse and refocus the FBI on its counterterrorism mission. The FBI's mission should be exposing any terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. and breaking them up before they can successfully strike. Let the states handle kidnappers and other criminals. Reserve court access to U.S. citizens, turn over terrorists to DoD as prisoners of war, and deport anyone who doesn't belong here otherwise.

2. Condi Rice needs to purge Foggy Bottom from stem-to-stern. Start with anybody who defends China or France and Prince Bandar's boytoys.

3. Abolish the CIA. Replace it with a special military unit reporting to the President which won't forget its mission or get caught up in Washington politics. And here's an idea: base it overseas. These guys spend too much time drinking coffee with Beltway reporters. They can brief POTUS via encrypted communications from anywhere in the world.

4. Make the theft and destruction of Top Secret documents a capital offense. You'll only have to send one idiot to Old Sparky, believe me.

5. Never elect another Democrat to the presidency. Anybody who gets the Democrat nomination for president these days loathes the military. It is the only way they'll get the nomination.