To whom does the CIA report? They are the creatures of the Administrative branch and I for one do not beleive for a second that the CIA told Congress they were destroying the tapes, but didn't bother notifying the President.

So, getting rid of the CIA would pretty much have no effect, as far as I can see.

Also, gotta echo Tlaloc. Hitchens is well beyond his expiration date and has been blatantly wrong about so much for so long it's hard to believe anyone thinks his drunken rants are worth the very skilled prose he uses to put them together. Amazing that anyone listens to him at all. But I guess there's still that 28% crowd who think Bush is doing a fantastic job and moving the country in the right direction. Does seem like a pretty niche market, though. And quite looney, I might add.

Seriously why does anyone take hitchens seriously at this point? Has he not embarrassed himself nationally enough times quite yet? Is the surly drunken lout routine that funny?

The guy can be a decent writer but he's a certified idiot when it comes to evaluating reality. He's been wrong time and again at a rate that slightly exceeds the current men in the oval office.

Electrons need to be much cheaper before anymore get wasted on him.

The CIA's genuine ethical lapses - waterboarding, tape destruction - as well as competence lapses - the Iraq NIE - which have earned it the ire of the left. Most of these are the result of pressure from the White House and Pentagon, or else were actually mandated by these agencies.

The Second thing is the NIE on Iran, and the CIA's **entirely accurate** pessimistic portrayals of Iraq at certain points. These have been - and still are- being used by right-wingers in an all-out effort to destroy the CIA - not for the things they got wrong, but for what they got right - for attempting to impose a degree of reality on a circus freakshow at Rumsfield's Pentagon.

The simplistic idiots you cite - and you as well fail to highlight this to your shame, James - fail to notice that the DOD already commands the vast majority of the staff and budgets of the intelligence community. The Pentagon signed off on this NIE. Nay, said NIE is largely the product of the Pentagon itself - under the newly sane leadership of Bob Gates.

The right has the CIA painted as an enemy of blind paranoia and mindless aggression as a foreign policy. To the extent that said factors lead one to want to lie about what's going on in the world, that's a sign that the CIA is doing its job, and doing it well.

It's the idiot right-wingers who are analytically broken.

And the one other reform needed is to have a couple of public lynchings for leaking to press. Spies operate in shadows and we absolutely need to shut down the leaks.

And I'd like to preemptively target one particular solution - people (like Ed Morrissey and Don Rumsfeld) who think everything can be solved by putting the entire intel schmear under the Pentagon have an embarrassingly narrow and juvenile understanding of the process and basic purpose of national-level intelligence to begin with. That dog just won't hunt.

Regards, C

This sounds right to me. Still, we could send tha analysts to State and the operatives to Defense.

I'm not sure whether splitting off the two is a good idea, but de facto, they're already split within CIA. Ideally, we'd have an agency where the two were integrated, so that the ops people were better informed and the analysts had a better grasp on where the intel was coming from.

I think revamping the organization might be a good idea, but revamping it would be a waste of time and money if there wasn't a clear plan in place as to how to do it.

I do think in a lot of ways the CIA sees itself as being above the law, and that doesn't sit comfortably with me.

Sorry -- an editing lapse. I was going to go back and clean yours up and didn't.

I didn't read you as saying abolition was ludicrous so much as Hitchen's idea that the CIA was "politicizing the recent Iran NIE with an anti-war bias."