Yeah, I Live Here Too
I don't entirely disagree with my comrade's post on the CIA, but I have several points to make.
(1) Yes, it is (I would imagine) understood that the point of having a secret intelligence agency is that, when it's working, you don't know that it's working. The CIA is a mysterious piece of machinery under the hood of my car, or inside my computer - I barely knew it was there until it started acting up. That doesn't mean, however, that the CIA should be exempt from public scrutiny. Whether current investigations are proceeding in ideal fashion or not (and I frankly haven't been paying enough attention to have an opinion), I believe that public investigation of CIA failures not for the purpose of assigning blame, but for the purpose of assessing what went wrong and how such catastrophe can be averted in the future is necessary. The CIA may be an exemplary organization and my understanding of its inner workings is nonexistant, but: if I were informed about a theoretical government office which had important work to do in secret, which was frequently successful but occasionally un-, and which was never held up for public investigation of how its failures came about, I might worry that such an organization would shrug off its periodic failures as inevitable without attempting to learn from such events. I'm not interested in getting people fired; but I'm not enough of an optimist in human behavior to assume that even the CIA would change its ways without being told to by a more powerful body to whom it's answerable.
(2) By the same token, most people who have either being paying sufficient attention over the last few years is probably aware of two facts: (a) Any attempt to blame the CIA for failure to discover WMDs is pure political hogwash, since it has been readily apparent from the beginning that the CIA was not a big booster of the intelligence upon which our administration siezed, and it certainly did not endorse the fashion in which that intelligence was used, and (b) the CIA can't reasonably be blamed (from Pacepa's list of current indictments of the agency) for failure to anticipate 9/11. On that mark, here's an interview from Salon, and here is the only worthwhile piece of investigative journalism Time has done in years.
(3) The upshot of the two links just posted is that, as regards 9/11, the blame cannot be laid at the feet of the CIA, or any other individual intelligence agency, but we can reasonably postulate that had the various national agencies been willing and able to fully share both their intelligence and their suspicions, they might have more successfully anticipated what was coming - this is, after all, the ostensible reason we have a Department of Homeland Security, mismanaged and laughable as its actual incarnation might be. And also, as Time so ably points out, it was the administration that ignored the entire possibility of Osama bin Laden as a threat until days before 9/11, it was the administration that disregarded the advice of the departing Clintonians, who had all become frightfully obsessed with Al Qaeda - which is why partisan critiques of Clinton that claim he ignored the terrorist problem make my blood boil. But that's for another post.
So, returning from digression, I understand Ion Mihai Pacepa's concerns (and, more locally, The Virginian's), but I believe that (a) perceptive individuals who have been paying attention to the news over the last few years (and in that category I hopefully submit there ought to be the sort of people thinking of becoming CIA assets) will recognize that many of the current attempts to scapegoat the CIA are political posturing, and (b) public scrutiny of our intelligence agencies is in fact necessary, although such scrutiny can be co-opted for political gain and clumsily utilized.
