C.I.A. to White House: Drop Dead

Analysis in this a.m.'s NYTimes says that "tensions" between the Bush White House and the Central Intelligence Agency have reached the point where there's barely any attempt to disguise the disdain each feels for the other. "Viciousness and vindictiveness" were the words used by a recently retired CIA official to describe the current state of the relationship.

And why would the CIA be feeling snappish? Could have something to do with El Presidente's campaign to finger the agency's estimates of Saddam's WMD as the proximate cause for his going to war. (Never mind that Bush had been purposed on war with Iraq from Day One.) The implied scape-goating of the CIA continued apace at last Thursday's presidential debate: "My opponent looked at the same intelligence I looked at," President Bush said several times in the debate, implying about as much negative import to the CIA that produced that intelligence as to Kerry, who read it.

The rest of us peons out here in the deliberate dark can benefit from the bad relationship. If we pay attention. Because there's been a fairly steady drip, drip of leaked documents showing the mendacity of the Bushies, and those leaks appear to be coming from the CIA. For example, the recent disclosure of details of a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in July 2004, saying that about the best we could hope for in Iraq through the end of 2005 would be a "tenuous stability." The worst we might see? Well, we're kind of already seeing it, aren't we?

Other disclosures have included specific new details contained in two other classified documents, prewar assessments on Iraq done in January 2003 warning of "a surge in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and the possibility of an anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The intelligence warnings appeared to have been much sharper than was acknowledged in the more upbeat forecasts provided before the war by Mr. Bush and top deputies including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary."

We can only hope we'll learn more in the next 30 days about what we've suspected all along.

The CIA leaks have rattled the Bushies enough for their great defender, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, to publish an editorial last Wednesday under the headline, "The C.I.A.'s Insurgency." It opined that Mr. Bush "now has two insurgencies to defeat: the one that the C.I.A. is struggling to help put down in Iraq, and the other inside Langley against the Bush administration."

Never suspected I'd reach the point where I would actually be rooting for the CIA.