THE PILLAR GANG

Today’s (2/17) Wall Street Journal has an op-ed by a CIA intelligence officer, Guillermo Christensen, entitled Un-Intelligence.  The article exposes the self-serving attack on President Bush and the War in Iraq by a fellow CIA officer named Paul Pillar in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

Pillar is now being lionized by the left for his anti-Bush screed – but you first learned about him here at To The Point in October 2004.

Porter At The Pass revealed that Paul Pillar and his left wing cabal at the CIA, which I named The Pillar Gang, was conducting a covert campaign of leaks and disclosures to damage George Bush’s chances of re-election and help John Kerry’s.

As explained in "Porter At The Pass":

Most folks think the CIA is a right-wing outfit. It is not. The CIA has been dominated by incompetent left-wing hyper-liberals for years… The CIA lives in a left-wing world, the same left-wing world as the State Department. 

Both worship at the Shrine of Accommodation, Appeasement, and Compromise. Both Langley and Foggy Bottom bureaucrats hate George Bush for alienating the Euroweenies and taking the fight to the Moslem terrorists. Both are working overtime to do what they can to secure Bush’s defeat.

The leader of this effort at the CIA is Paul Pillar. His 1983 book, Negotiating Peace was a paean to appeasement with the Soviets.

Now the Pillar Gang hates George Bush because he won’t appease the terrorists.  Porter Goss is doing all that is humanly possible to rid the CIA of leftists who focus more on hurting the White House than defending their country. Let’s hope he has enough time.

It takes a long time to turn around a bureaucracy, longer than the proverbial aircraft carrier.  The CIA has been institutionally left for so many years, and Porter will have had little more than four years to redirect it by the end of the Bush Presidency in January 2009.

Lefties like Pillar are betting their farm that one of their ideological own, ideally Hillary, will be the next president, who will re-ensconce them at Langley and they can be back in the appease-America’s-enemies business.

The good news is that President Condi will dash the Pillar Gang’s dreams and keep Porter right where he is.  That will give him until 2016 – long enough to cleanse and change even the CIA for the better.