CIA plans to purge its agency

(Hat Tip: Power Line.)

It's about time! And glad I am that Porter Goss, the new DCI, can get it done. I had begun to believe that he'd be hoist on Hatch's petard--specifically the Hatch Civil Service Act. But evidently Porter Goss is an expert on the kind of psychological warfare that anyone who works long enough in any office comes to learn about, often expensively.

But Porter Goss has a mission that goes beyond purging the agency of mutineers and malcontents. The agency, he has always said, has relied too much on taking other agencies' intelligence take. I would have to agree. You don't build respect or reliability by saying, "I am absolutely sure because such-a-woman told me that such-a-man said positively...!" (Hat Tip: Ayn Rand, in a paraphrase from The Fountainhead.) You have to go out and see for yourself.

Porter Goss obviously comes to the job with a plan to reform the agency that he developed in his long years as Chairman of the House Committee on Intelligence. That is the real story here, that even John Hinderaker at Power Line missed. I agree with John: "cleaning up the CIA will be a lot harder than cleaning up Fallujah." But Bush couldn't have picked a better man than Goss to do the job--a man with ideas of his own, and good ideas, too.