I had been having some second thoughts about yesterday’s post about the CIA Deputy Chief resigning. My thought was, maybe a shakeup is necessary at the CIA; they certainly have had some big failings in the last few years. Josh Marshall brought an interesting perspective to this question today:

But the larger point is simple and clear. On every significant point of conflict between the Bush administration and the country’s cadre of intelligence professionals, the Bush political appointees turned out to be wrong. Often very wrong, and with disastrous consequences. Sometimes the intel folks were wrong too; but when that was so, the appointees were always more wrong.

This is not argumentative or hyperbole or even up for much serious dispute.

And the upshot of all that we’ve seen, the result of all those struggles over the last three years is that the ‘appointees’ are purging the ‘professionals’. Another way to put it is that the folks who were always wrong and often catastrophically wrong are rooting out the folks who were often right and sometimes somewhat wrong. The answer to politicized intelligence, it turns out, is a more thorough politicization of intelligence and the elimination of those who resisted political pressure.

If you think this is just a Washington squabble or political debating point you’d be mistaken. Because your lives, and those of your families and friends, may very well be on the line.