The Madness of King George

L'état, c'est lui.

C-Plus Caligula's CIA lackey, Porter Goss, has tightened restrictions on what CIA employees, both current and retired, are allowed to say about the Lunatic-in-Chief, as long as they are contracting with the agency.

National Journal:

The CIA has imposed new and tighter restrictions on the books, articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who are still contractors with the intelligence agency. According to several former CIA officials affected by the new policy, the rules are intended to suppress criticism of the Bush administration and of the CIA. The officials say the restrictions amount to an unprecedented political "appropriateness" test at odds with earlier CIA policies on outside publishing.

The move is a significant departure from the CIA's longtime practice of allowing ex-employees to take critical or contrary positions in public, particularly when they are contractors paid to advise the CIA on important topics and to publish their assessments.

All current and former CIA employees have long been required to submit manuscripts for books, opinion pieces, and even speeches to the agency's Publications Review Board, which ensures that the works don't reveal classified information or intelligence sources and methods. The board has not generally factored political opinions into its decision-making, former CIA officials say. But in recent years, former employees have written memoirs and opinion pieces challenging the CIA and the Bush administration, particularly for its use of prewar intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The board did not find that any of those pieces revealed secrets, a fact that makes the CIA's new review standards troubling, former officials and intelligence-community analysts said.

Many of those experts believe that public criticism provides an important source of alternative analysis -- something the CIA needs to understand terrorism, global disease, and other emerging threats. But the White House and CIA Director Porter Goss view spies-turned-authors as political liabilities who embarrass an already battered administration, former officials said.

There was a time when respect for law and the good of the American people were supposed to be the primary concern of American presidents and their administrations. Under King George, or Der Führer, or Kommandant, or whatever you want to call the Lunatic-in-Chief, if the entire nation must be sacrified to prop him up, so be it.

We had a nice country once; one we could be proud of. And that was only a few short years ago....