Homeland Insecurity - Part Tres

When I want your opinion, I'll tell you what it is:

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Raise your hand if you ever considered the CIA (once headed by George H. W, Bush) a "hotbed of liberals".

I'm finally getting a handle on the definition of "liberal": it's anyone who presents inconvenient facts to public servants and the American people. Tell me what I want to hear, or you're gone. At least, we can be comforted that the same approach worked well for Saddamm Hussein:

From interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he said, his team learned that sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a ``vortex of corruption,'' when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-driven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others.

After the onset of this ``dark ages,'' Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.

``The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process,'' Dr. Kay said. ``The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programs.''

. Similarities to a missile defense system are purely coincidental. Whatever it takes to keep the Maximum Leader happy and not purging.