Congress: Provide us with an overview of the role your agency would play in a potential war in Iraq.
CIA: No.

In other news, the Pentagon order a lot of sunblock. Hmm.

According to Crusade, the Dominos that provides for the White House and State Department knew when the war was comin' in '91, orders went from the average of 15 a night to more than 120.

CIA needs to go away. Simple as that, and acting that way twoards S.I.C who are all old school Senators from both sides, will not help matters at all.

True. On the other hand, when the Director lets you know a week in advance that he's already got an appointment at that time with the Pres, doing a Congressional briefing on Iraq, and will be talking to another security group in Congress later in the day on that same topic, but offers to send some major officers instead to meet with the SIC, it's a bit disingenuous for the SIC to get all huffy when he doesn't actually show up.

The CIA needs to go away???

I read down to the bit about the conflict after I posted.

Guess they need to sync thier Lotus Notes more often.

Yea, CIA needs to go, be disbanded/Reorganized/Something different. It's a dinosaur, a true relic of the Cold War, heck has CIA scooped anything that's happened in the last 14 years?

I understand that in the current CIA climate there are more people there making sure CIA doesn't do anything "bad" than field ops.

Example of CIA's sucktude - No Pashtun speakers on the payroll as of Spet 11th 2001. CIA culled the humint groups during the '90s and focused on sigint alot more.

Humint - Human Intellegence - James Bond/Mike Spann/Flint
Singint - Signals Intellegence - KH-11

So if we need more humint, how does disbanding the only group that has any experience in the field whatsoever help? Reform yes, disband no.

NSA, FBI, SpecOps all have experiance in humint, and yea, disbanding CIA is drastic, but like Department of Transportation and Department of Interior the entire organization is flawed.

The CIA - a monolithic foriegn intelligence agency - is flawed in the current dynamic situation the US is facing. The current CIA, since September 11th has only a handful of human agents in the field according to most reports. Why is it that Mossad with a 2002-2003 budget of 400 million dollars has a much more robust human intellgence network than CIA?

Fold CIA's electronics over into a joint Agency with the remains of NSA, DIA's Elint and Singint, ONI and NRO.

Move CIA's Humint into a joint operation with FBI or Special Ops Command.

Move Directorate of Science and Technology over to a joint group at NSA (who has thier own IC fabs) along with FBI.

Reform won't work because the entire CIA structure is so 1940s Wild Bill Donovan it isn't reformable.

Doyce, I promise I'll stop talking politics today ;)

Naw, feel free to rant...Doyce can take it :)

NSA specializes in Sigint. They have minimal humint experience. Even they will admit that.

FBI is domestic. They have had zero experience in recruiting foreign nationals outside the US or working outside interpol channels until very recently. Their mindset is as police, not spies.

SpecOps as you call them are of tactical mindset and mainly concerned with military matters. They have no strategic view of politics, being very limited in their focus.

Someone needs to keep their eye on the overall picture, both political and military. The CIA needs a overhaul of policy and leadership after being emasculated in the last decades. They are too risk averse now to be effective.

Actually, it would be refreshing to see at least *some* heads roll in CIA/FBI/NSA. It's hard to feel sympathy for Dubya's desire to hire/fire at will in the new DHS when nobody at the top has been asked to fall on their sword for 9/11.