ABOLISH THE CIA
The Weekly Standard argues that the CIA is being blamed for the wrong reasons.

The report of the Senate Committee on Intelligence published on July 9 will probably be the first salvo in a barrage against Tenet over the Iraq war intelligence. However, Tenet's February 5, 2004, speech on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction will likely stand the test of time and prove a truer, more measured, historical document than the assessment of the Senate's intelligence committee. It is easily Tenet's finest speech and it is, amazingly, the only serious defense so far given by any Bush administration official against the charges of conspiracy, deceit, and incompetence surrounding the WMD issue. And once the Senate's unclassified and classified report become public knowledge, and outsiders can properly assess the historical knowledge of the staffers and senators who wrote it, Tenet could well ask for an apology...

It is [admittedly] absolutely true that George Tenet's CIA failed to penetrate Saddam Hussein's inner circle. And only penetrations at the highest political and scientific levels could have possibly given us evidence that Saddam Hussein had decided to give up his billion-dollar, decades-long quest to develop weapons of mass destruction. (And note the plural "penetrations": Against such a proficient counterespionage regime, there would have to be more than one penetration, assessed for protracted periods of time, before it would be possible to believe that the information from these assets was not disinformation.) But it is also true that the CIA failed to penetrate Moscow's inner circle in the Cold War and that the great agents we did have (the most valuable were probably scientists) were all volunteers. The CIA was not similarly lucky with Saddam Hussein's regime, whose Orwellian grip on Iraqi society was as savage as Joseph Stalin's on the USSR. It's a very good bet that the CIA has not had a single penetration in the inner circle of any of its totalitarian adversaries. The same is probably true for the French, British, and Israeli foreign intelligence services. In other words, one simply cannot judge the caliber of a Western espionage service by its ability to penetrate the power circles of totalitarian regimes. The difficulties are just overwhelming.

One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that George Tenet failed and the CIA will continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. But the odds are poor that the White House, Congress, and the press will condemn the Agency for its failure to develop a workable strategy and tactics against the Islamic terrorist target. The politically charged Iraq war, like Iran-contra before it, will now dominate Washington's view of the Agency.

They have their own ideas for reform:

The entire system for finding, training, and deploying overseas case officers of this type needs to be completely overhauled. The "farm," the legendary training ground for case officers in the woody swamps of Virginia, ought to be abandoned. It has never had much relevance to the practice of espionage overseas. It is a symbol of the Agency's lack of seriousness. This new cadre needs to be a breed apart. Their operational half-life in the field might be at most ten years. It is hard to imagine them married and with kids. It is also hard to imagine their coming into being unless these jihadist moles are well paid. A starting salary of a quarter of a million dollars a year would be reasonable. Outsiders will know such a change is afoot when there are rumors of case officers' regularly dying abroad.

But this is not likely to happen, they conclude, and I agree.

The CIA maintains a certain mythical existence in the movies: James Bond, Mission Impossible, etc. We don't know what's really going on, by definition, because the CIA is secret. Secrecy is inherently undemocratic. How can the people be in charge of what they don't know. Thoughtful Americans, especially on the left, but some (like me) on the right too, are worried about what crimes may be being done in our name, for our sake, without us knowing about it. However, there's also the danger that incompetence and complacency are the real problem. And what do you do about that, in a secret organization?

So I say, abolish it. That will frighten people: what unknown threats might the CIA be protecting us from? Given the evidence of CIA violence, torture and other sins, given the CIA's seeming incompetence, given the compromise to democracy and transparency implied by a secret organization, I say: let's take the chance.