The devil is in the details

And along with it, quite often, is the truth. Time reports that

[a]fter nearly 60 years at the pinnacle of American intelligence - and at the elbow of Presidents - the CIA director is no longer automatically welcome at the President's National Security Council (NSC) meetings. John Negroponte, the new director of National Intelligence, has taken his chair. ...

Negroponte will participate in meetings of the NSC and its domestic counterpart, the Homeland Security Council (HSC). Meanwhile, CIA Director Porter Goss "will attend NSC and HSC meetings at the direction of the President."

Negroponte, the twit who ran the contra war out of Honduras, during which time he called Hurricane Joan, which devastated Nicaragua, "a contra victory," is successfully consolidating his control over intelligence services. The deeper meaning of this is that in the face of its manifest failures in producing accurate intelligence and even greater failures in actually paying attention to it in the odd cases when it got it, the White House is becoming even more insular, more determined than ever to ignore the world in order to fit information into a pre-existing ideological framework where "the intelligence and facts [can be] fixed around the policy."

The bad news, the danger, in that, is obvious. However, there might be yet one more bit of truth hidden in those details: I've argued before, most recently a couple of weeks ago, that people tend to become more conservative when they are under stress. The CIA, for all its failings and all its evils over the years, was at least nominally independent of the Executive. Kicking the CIA out of the NSC meetings and pulling it off supplying the daily intelligence briefing in favor of aggressive ideologues like Negroponte reflects a circle-the-wagons mentality that is the mark of people who feel pressured, not who feel confident.

We might be having more of an effect than even Shrub's plummeting approval numbers already indicate.

Hope springs eternal and all that.