Langly Blues

This excellent piece on WSJ should be read by anybody worried about all the people who quit the CIA under Porter Goss.

If one used Ms. Harman's idea of lost collective experience and soberly assessed the number of operatives now serving in the CIA who offer no real value against any hard target -- they either lack the skill; are permanently compromised by overseas postings with bad cover; are too old to work against young-man targets (which is emphatically the case with the Islamic militant target); or are too encumbered with family to be deployed sensibly as nonofficial cover officers against this threat -- the Bush administration and Congress should want to shed about 15,000 years of "experience" (multiplying the number of years in service by the number of irretrievably mediocre case officers). If this number seems shockingly large, then that only underscores how surreal the discussion has been in Washington about the depth of Langley's systemic problems.