Isn't this water that is alread over the dam. We are already in a war that the "military in the end will dislike". Are we now worried that the militarization of the CIA is going to get us in a lot more wars that the penatagon doesn't like? Who is going to fight all these wars?

The militarization of intelligence under Bush is likely to guarantee military solutions above other options. Uniformed officers trained to identity military threats and trends will take over economic and political intelligence for which they are untrained and often incapable, and their priorities will skew analysis. But the bias toward the military option will be one that the military in the end will dislike.

They are practically emptying the jails to find people to fight the wars we already have. How are we supposed to guard against the possibility that Bush and Cheney might militarize the government? Read warnings as such in Salon.com ?

"The George H.W. Bush CIA headquarters building in Langley will of course remain standing. But the agency will be chipped apart..."

I wonder what Bush 41 thinks of the destruction and humiliation of the agency he once ran. Is this yet another example of the son trying to prove he's stronger than his father?

Blumenthal seems to think we should be boohooing over the destruction of the CIA! Whether it's the CIA and the Cold War or the Pentagon and the War on Terror, I could care less. "National security" doesn't mean my security or the security of ordinary Americans. It's the security of profiteers and exploiters that's really the concern of the U.S. government.

I like Blumenthal, enjoy what he writes. But this has me puzzled. He writes:

"On April 21, 2005, his mission dictated by Bush's political imperatives, Goss became CIA director."

As I understand it, Goss became director of the CIA in September of 2004.

Before they turn out the lights at the CIA, wouldn't be nice if they mentioned the name of the people who really mailed the anthrax in conjunction with the 9/11 attack? We know from the analysis, that it was more of an "us" than a them. That is why Steven Hatfill was a suspect for so long. Wouldn't be considerate, if only for Steven Hatfill's sake, to mention who the real culprits were? We know that the antrax could not have been weaponized in a kitchen or a barn, it was done at a huge specialized facility, like one the military might run.

The analytical side of the CIA, if the reports of the recently retired members are any example, has been the one segment of the government that has put professionalism and truth over politics. The loss of this valuable resource will be a loss for all of us. There needs to be an organization that speaks only about the verified facts to power -- not political bias, not rationals for any political stance -- just what is known. It is not a job that I could do being far to partisan. But, it is a valuable and essential function.

The destruction of the CIA and its replacement by military or political operatives is frightening to the extreme.

Assuming the facts are correct, and it certainly rings true, this is a brilliant piece of analysis and summation.

I wish I could be be .01 per cent the researcher and writer that Mr. Blumenthal is.

It is a huge loss for the national welfare if a functioning intelligence agency is gutted/subverted. The damage to our future wrought by Bush's machinations appear to be deeper and more long lasting than even a profound pessimist could imagine. I think I will go stock my emergency supplies larder.

He destroys the CIA at the precise moment when its analytical directorate has, finally, become useful, and its covert ops are a joke. Thanks, George, you're one in a million (thank God).

...can now supplant the Office of Special Plans and the Bureau of Implausible Pretexts. And we will now have the DIA and the, uh...DIA South? Only from this bunch of strutting, narcissistic imbeciles such as Albert Pike warned us about could such lunacy have oozed. I think Blumenthal may be pretty much on the money here, and we can only hope that the cyst at the center of our present administration ruptures before permanent and catastrophic damage is done. Meanwhile we can thank our lucky stars Great Britain hasn't yet given up on bringing us back into the Empire, because GCHQ is going, quite seriously, to have to shoulder a great deal more of our intelligence gathering than it already has (and if you think it hasn't you just don't have the right hookup to the "Donut"). We can also thank the great outlaw spirit of this nation that the NSA has never allowed a director since Canine to actually know what's going on in there (and again, if you don't think this is so, well, bite me, I'm tired of trying to prove stuff I can't even talk about). None of this means the impending collapse of the CIA (or, more likely, its being subsumed by the DIA) is OK. It's not even close to OK. The writer who seems to think it is, the one who believes our intelligence community is only serving the current administration and its covey of vampires and assorted perverts, is an example of cynicism run amok. The CIA ought to be saved or at least salvaged, and it can be, but the only sure way is to break the back of the current administration, which means delivering a coup de grace upon the sitting President, a la Nixon (only a much bigger, heavier, coup, or perhaps a coupe) and enduring the subsequent and necessary constitutional crisis this is going to cause.

Thanks to Blumenthal for an excellent and very important piece of work. Now why don't the rest of you do what you need to do to bring about an end to the insanity? For starters, get over the partisanship (also pled by another respondent to this article), get offa your Harvard-Berkley axis of evil asses and stand with your convervative bretheren who have already smelled the cyanide leaking out of the White House. To quote Steve Earle, "The Revolution Starts Now...".