Flit(tm)

Who Are the Sycophants?

I can't imagine anybody examining the CIA cleanup initiated by the new chief, Porter Goss without at least mentioning Imperial Hubris, the extraordinarily unprofessional spectacle of a serving CIA agent being unleashed on the administration he's supposed to be serving. Yet David Wise manages to do just that in his LA Times piece entitled Sycophant Spies.

Even if you buy into the line that the level of CIA leaking and the one sidedness of those leaks against the President are just par for the course, nobody can find any historical precedent for a CIA agent publicly writing his tell all book while collecting a CIA paycheck while being fully authorized to do not only a book, but a book tour. This article is positively orwellian in both spin and in the classic sense of losing inconvenient facts down the memory hole. I'd fisk in detail but I find I haven't the heart for it.

David Wise no doubt has sources to protect and he's enlisted in the war against Porter Goss' cleanup to preserve his ability to gain inside information at the CIA. In a very real sense, he's a sycophant to his sources. In a normal world, he'd be heaped with scorn and suffer significant career damage. We don't live in a normal world.