The CIA’s Crisis

Here’s a quote to get you sitting up straight:

"If I were at the CIA now and was asked to work on an National Intelligence Estimate [on Iraq], my first response would be, ‘How the f*** do I get out of this?’ The most courageous, honest person in the place would be reluctant to do it because every time someone says the emperor has no clothes he gets his head lopped off."

That’s a former "senior CIA official" talking to Ken Silverstein, in a new blog post. There seems to be a real crisis at the CIA, especially with respect to Iraq. Honest assessments of the situation are ignored and their authors punished. And so our intelligence on the ground has deteriorated to the point of useless. Money quote:

The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq‚Äîassessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as "Aardwolfs," were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author ‚Äî who I’m told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer ‚Äî was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd within the Bush administration. "He was a good guy," one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, "well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator."

This cannot be good news for the effort in Iraq. We need empirical clarity if we are to make good policy. But empiricism has been replaced by blind ideology.