Mystery solved

Another Bush appointee failed, and damaged a federal agency in the process. Where's the mystery in that?

Porter Goss said Saturday that his surprise resignation as CIA director is "just one of those mysteries," offering no other explanation for his sudden departure after almost two years on the job.

But look here Scoob -- a clue!

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

"Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers," (former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July John O.) Brennan said. "Turf battles continue" with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community "because there's a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA's future."

Goss, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, was handpicked by the White House to purge what some in the administration viewed as a cabal of wily spies working to oppose administration policy in Iraq.

The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department's more optimistic scenarios.

So Goss wasn't sent to the CIA to make the agency better at protecting the American people, he was sent there to purge anyone who disagreed with the administration's predetermined policy to invade Iraq. As a result,

"Unfortunately, Goss is going to be seen as the guy who oversaw the agency victimized by politics," said Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the European division. "His tenure saw the greatest loss of operational experience" in the operations division since congressional hearings on CIA domestic spying plunged the agency into crisis, he said.

And the CIA is just another federal agency damaged by the paranoid politics of George W. Bush.