The question here though is how much the new leadership will actually try to correct intelligence failures and how much it is being chosen simply to “yes-man” everything Bush says.
A lot of the things that are perceived as CIA failures (lack of WMDs, not realizing ahead of time that Chalabi had connections to Iran) are things for which the CIA actually arguably took the correct side. They were more cautious on WMD than Bush, who took a lot of information from the Office of Special Plans, who tended to be much more credulous of any claim of WMD activity.
The CIA also was against us installing Chalabi, which was one of the reason that neocons such as Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, and Joel Mowbray hated the CIA so much.
(Jack Kelly, for example, wrote a column about CIA incompetence that was simply shocking in its elision of these facts
http://newsandopinion.com/1104/jkelly111704.asp )
The question is whether the goal of the changeover is really to improve the CIA’s intelligence gathering capabilities or whether the goal is to bring it in line with the administration’s policies (i.e. make it more likely to interpret all intelligence so as to support whatever the administration want to believe).
Considering that Bush’s track record for the first term has been to fire or not fire people based mainly on perceived loyalty rather than competence, I am not at all convinced that he is interested in making the CIA more reliable if it would result in the CIA questioning the beliefs he bases his policy on.

Put another way, when Bush starts removing people like Douglas Feith (who was part of the Office of Special Plans), or puts the same level of scrutiny on the performance of Defense Personnel such as Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz that he does on the CIA, I’ll start to be convinced that he is actually trying to correct the problems in the intelligence community rather than trying a power grab.

I don’t know how Office of Special Plans at Pentagon connected with collecting intelligence. All I know that CIA missed AlQueda, 9/11, WMD and who knows what else. As I recall, fall of Soviet Union also came as a complete surprise to the Ivy League elitists in Langley.

Tenet was total embarrassment, the fact that El Presidente kept him so long is a very large negative in my book.

There is a reasonable chance that general purge at CIA will do them good.

Mik, it’s not juts about collecting intelligence, it’s about interpreting it. The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was in charge, as I recall, of interpreting intelligence and gathering together intelligence gleaned from various sources, and they used it to create the most alarmist scenario they could about Iraq.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
“There is a reasonable chance that general purge at CIA will do them good.”
No, not if the goal of the purge is to get rid of anyone who challenges Bush’s beliefs rather than to get rid of incompetents.
I’ll say it again: the CIA are the ones who distrusted Chalabi and who were skeptical of the Iraq WMD intelligence. If Bush purges them, but not the Pentagon of people such as Scooter Libby and Douglas Feith (as well as Donald Rumsfeld, who, according to a James Fallows article cited by Mr. Auster cut off anyone who tried to plan for the post-war), then it is clear that he is purging based on the fact that the CIa is not ideologically pure enough, not because they were incompetent. In that case, we are likely to get the CIA making more and worse errors in the future.
Does anyone believe that a CIA filled with neoconservatives who were willing to believe anything that an anti-Saddam exile told them would have been more accurate in its assessment of Iraq’s WMD capacity?

What Mr. Jose says is very interesting. I don’t have an opinion on whether he’s correct or not as I don’t know enough of the underlying facts. But he’s making a reasonable argument.

The problem is that through selective leaks, anaonymous comments, and even published books, the internationalist-left bureacracy of the CIA and State Department have been at war with the Bush administration.

The CIA has a life-long history of misinterpreting the capabilities and postions of our enemies.
The attempt to blame president Bush for the belief that Iraq had WMD’s, a belief shared by intelligence agencies around the world, would be laughable, were it not so damning to the CIA and international press.

If the Bush administration relied too heavily ion the DIA and NSA, it was because of the failures of the CIA to adapt to the new threats.
The fact that the CIA effort to neutralize Bin Laden was led by Mike Shuerer, an apologist for Islamists, is appalinig. That Mr. Schuerer and his supportes at the CIA then spent thislast year writting a book and using the media to attack the President is intolerable.
We are dealing with a rogue agency that must be put under control. It is not living up to its charter, and is endangering the US.

I wonder what role did Scheuer and his Arabist crew play in the failure to get Bin Laden at Tora Bora.

Mr. Jose,

I’m only a mildly interested observer of CIA implosion. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Al I can say that try as I might I cannot think about any CIA successes in the last 20 years (doesn’t mean there are none) and I can list half dozen of horrible failures in the same period.

Perhaps compare to Immigration and Naturalization Service or IRS or Postal Service CIA does its job well. Compare to DoD, CIA sucks.

From what I gather, Rummy formed OSP because he wanted independent analitical unit. I pass no judgement on quality of OSP output.

An article in Guardian (wouldn’t we expect full objectivity from Guardian on matters of US defense and intelligence policies) sets its bias by stating in the beginning:

“(OSP) was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration”.

At the very least, anyone who calls Rummy and Cheney (and presumably other neocons) hardline conservatives is not very well versed in US politics.

The rest of the article debunks yellow cake story. Final verdict is probably still out, but I’m satisfied from 9/11 commission and others that there was something real behind yellow cake story.

Bush admin is as transparent as old Soviet Politburo, so it never clear who is responsible for what, especially failures:

1. Challabi - he looks like slimeball, but who doesn’t in that “ready-for-democracy” hellhole. It is interesting that CIA had absolutely no information about Sunny uprising, but found time and energy to slime Challabi with some fantastical accusations.

2. Many in admin had an opinion that US should install some Iraqi interim gov immediately. State and CIA fought DoD and as result no interim gov was installed. Bremer improvised some idiotic counsel that never had any respect.
Bremer had counsel rubber-stamp an idiotic constitution written by 30 year old assistant law proff at NYU Noah Feldman, an arabist and moslem apologist.

By the way, Challabi, slimeball he is, was urging to put Iraqi face on occupation right away.
He proven to be right here.

3. Don’t know about post-war planning. Do know that DoD (this is Rummy budget) paid Challabi group to do all kind of post-war planning work. They even setup proto-ministries of education, energy, etc.

Most people agree that CIA should supply data and interpretations free of political pressure and biases. It is not so easy remove all biases from analysis, but it is easy for data collection. CIA would have more leeway in their analysis if they just deliver more stupid data. Having failed so badly in this basic fuction, they have no reason to complain.

A man who says Islam is the problem (and was saying it before a lot of others), as Scheuer did, is hardly an Arabist.

The problem with the CIA purge is that it’s getting rid of the people who were more often right than wrong. This isn’t to say some reform was needed, but this reform isn’t it.