CIA in a quagmire

Or something – they are certainly not covering themselves with glory. They’re leaking at all costs in what increasingly appears to be an effort to take down the president, even if it hurts their own efforts:

The twin leaks to the Times and the Post have severely impaired the agency’s ability to carry out renditions, transport prisoners, and maintain secret detention facilities. It is striking that top-level CIA officials are evidently willing to do serious damage to their own agency’s capabilities and operations for the sake of harming the Bush administration and impeding administration policies with which they disagree.

Powerline has an update to that first piece.

Meanwhile, the Plame/Wilson Nonsense is still around, and will be for as long as there is any hope that the “right” people – any Bushies – can be taken down from the non-scandal, and as long as none of the “wrong” people – members of the press or the Wilson’s themselves – can get hurt by it. As we see here, Andrea Mitchell is still hanging on by her fingernails.

New Question: Should Kristof have been fired by the Times instead of Miller?

Thomas Joscelyn brings you Anatomy of a link.

One a slightly different, but really not, topic – Rep Weldon makes this observation: “In America, I should not have to resort to writing a book to get the intelligence agencies to do their jobs,”

You’d think.