corrente

This time it's that most mild-mannered, and we do mean "mannered," of right-wing pundits, the ever affable David Brooks, who, in his latest column, takes a pistol in hand and proceeds to blow America's brains out, metaphorically speaking. I will resist the obvious snark and not suggest where the metaphorical pistol might better have been aimed.

The column starts promisingly enough:

Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies.

"Fair enough," says I to myself, "good for Brooks, he is going to make a useful distinction between Democrats and foreign infidels." Have we been conditioned to expect too little accommodation from our American right wing, or what? Silly me, for expecting even that little.

His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Tom has already clued you (here) into the "purge" recently begun by Porter Goss, our new CIA chief, who was confirmed because he convinced congress he would be sufficiently independent of White House demands to shape intelligence to serve any Bush administration political needs of the moment. Well, true to form, Brooks gives you a version of America's intelligence needs exclusively from the point of view of the White House. And it ain't pretty.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side, Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

Where to begin? How about here? C.I.A. officials are sworn not to serve the President, though many of them may serve at the pleasure of a President, they are sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

Got that Brooks? The U.S. Constitution, fought and paid for, over and over again, by the blood of patriots, all kinds of patriots, none of whose moldering remains are you fit even to contemplate.

And then there is the little matter of who pays the salaries of everyone at the CIA. We do. We, the people of these United States. Hey, buckco, remember us? And to whom does the information gathered by the CIA ultimately belong? If you don't know the answer by now, go shoot your own brains out.

Sorry about that. Mustn't get too angry. What was it that was leaked again? Pre-war intelligence estimates? Brooks doesn't specify estimates of what, but I think we can guess. Since those estimates, and not the estimates of the White House, have turned out to be the more accurate, shouldn't we have an opportunity to know that? Does not an informed electorate need to know about the possibility that our policy in Iraq may be turning both Arabs and Muslims around the world against us? Not in Brook's version of America. And though it's true that some prominent ex-CIA personnel came out for Kerry, please note, that "ex." Some of them resigned before the natural end of their careers because they couldn't support Bush policies in good faith. But what would a David Brooks know about "good faith."

As the presidential race heated up, the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss. As Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."

Those of you who saw Steve Croft's piece on Scheuer last night on "Sixty Minutes" know that Scheuer's critique extends to Clinton, Clarke, Tenant, and, indeed, his harhest criticisms are aimed at the C.I.A., which might account for his willingness to finger their willingness to undercut Bush. No matter to Brooks; Scheuer dared to criticize the invasion of Iraq as irrelevant to combating Jihadist terrorism, except to the extent it confirm's Bin Laden's version of the world, therefore Scheuer is bad. But there is worse news, according to Brooks.

Nor is this feud over. C.I.A. officials are now busy undermining their new boss, Porter Goss. One senior official called one of Goss's deputies, who worked on Capitol Hill, a "Hill Puke," and said he didn't have to listen to anything the deputy said. Is this any way to run a superpower?

Clearly not. On the other hand, if we're talking about a democratic republic...Oh, dear, silly me, again. I keep forgetting, WE'RE AT WAR!!!!

Note that nowhere does Brooks stop to consider whether or not the information "leaked" to the press was true, and whether or not its status as "classified" has more to do with covering asses than with protecting this country. No such possibility exists in Brooks's America. Not when a rightwing Republican is in the White House.

In fact, "we, the people," scarecely exist there either, except as Brooksian social types. Now that there's been an election and we, the people, have fulfilled our part in the democratic pageant, "we" can and should be safely relegated to the role of passive audience. It's all about the Bush administration now, and the Republican congress, and of course the rightward yapping of the attack poodles. All that's left for us citizens to do is sit back and enjoy the show.

If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart.

The answer is to define carefully what the president expects from the intelligence community: information. Policy making is not the C.I.A.'s concern. It is time to reassert some harsh authority so C.I.A. employees know they must defer to the people who win elections, so they do not feel free at meetings to spout off about their contempt of the White House, so they do not go around to their counterparts from other nations and tell them to ignore American policy.

In short, people in the C.I.A. need to be reminded that the person the president sends to run their agency is going to run their agency, and that if they ever want their information to be trusted, they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data.

You'd think this administration, from Colin Powell to the President himself had not been caught out knoodling with the "information" supplied them by the CIA in order to insist Iraq was a threat to us, that time was on their side, not ours, that to delay invasion was certain to be more dangerous to our security than was going ahead with an invasion with too few troops, too poorly equipped, and with no discernible plan for the post-invasion occupation of a country of twenty-five million, nor that every detail of the intelligence used to bolster these assertions by the first Bush administration has been shown to be in error, and all of this while the whole world was watching. Don't worry, David Brooks has an answer for such quibbles.

This is about more than intelligence. It's about Bush's second term. Is the president going to be able to rely on the institutions of government to execute his policies, or, by his laxity, will he permit the bureaucracy to ignore, evade and subvert the decisions made at the top? If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk.

Nice touch, that reference to Tenant's promise to the President that the sufficiency of intelligence to back an invasion of Iraq amounted to a slam-dunk. "What," Brooks seems to be saying, "we he-men be embarrassed by our own mistakes? You kidding? We don't need no stinkin' reality."

Interestingly, this is the column at the end of which Brooks apologizes for having misrepresented a comment by John Kerry as being something (an early approval of Bush's Tora Bora policy) that it wasn't. In view of the views expressed in the rest of the column, how believable is the apology?