Bush's Biggest Mistake

Will probably be keeping George Tenet on as DCI. If Stephen Grey is correct the CIA has been severely compromised by interference from lawyers.

[T]he CIA’s ability to covertly transport terrorists – a process known as rendition – has been hobbled by boneheaded legal restrictions and laughably poor spycraft. These legal restrictions were imposed during the Clinton era but never lifted by President Bush.

“One CIA pilot told me that in the mid 1990s, when Clinton was president, that the lawyers began to take over. Previously, they used to take CIA planes into hangars all the time, re-spray them, and come out with a different tail number. That way none of the tracing of CIA planes I’ve been doing since 9/11 would have been possible. The idea of flying around with one tail number for three years would have been thought completely nuts,” Grey told me. “But [Clinton-era] lawyers said they needed to stay legal. They even insisted that, to comply with FAA regulations, they needed stewardesses.”

Yes, stewardesses on CIA planes.

With these Clintonian legal rules, it was easy for amateur “plane spotters” around the globe to track the movements of the so-called secret CIA planes. Those plane spotters later pooled their information with Grey, who broke the news in a series of headlines damaging to Bush.

Other CIA mistakes – some of shockingly simple minded – continued well into the Bush years.

The CIA has been leaking secrets like mad. Could it be that some of these lawyers have loose lips? I can practically guarantee that they would be predominantly liberal, opposed to Bush's policies.