The Degradation of the Nation's Intelligence Apparatus under Bush

President Sluggo may be grabbing for all the extra-legal spying power he can get his hands on. But for all his zeal for pushing the envelope on domestic spying, our country's intelligence apparatus is in horrendous shape.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their syncophants selectively puffed up the shreds of intelligence that suggested Iraq had WMDs. They sought to institutionalize this stovepiping so that misleading or flat-out bogus intelligence could be rushed to the fore, bypassing the standard review process. Then they outed CIA operative Valerie Plame to punish Joseph Wilson for pointing out that the Niger yellowcake story was simply not true.
Porter Goss set out to purge the CIA of those with whom he disagreed, which cost the agency some of its most experienced top-level management. Intelligence gathering and analysis requires a diversity of views, and is incompatable with blind loyalty.
Yesterday, as the New York Times reports, the FBI other federal agencies raided the home and office of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the CIA's No. 3 official under Goss:

The searches, including the one at agency headquarters in McLean, Va., were carried out by agents of the F.B.I. and investigators from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the Internal Revenue Service, all of which are involved in the inquiry, officials said.

Apparently, the politicization of the agency descended to the most tawdry level:

The searches were conducted at the request of federal authorities in San Diego, who are pursuing leads in a case that began with the prosecution of Mr. Cunningham, the Republican on the House Appropriations Committee who resigned and pleaded guilty to taking more than $2 million in cash and gifts in return for helping supporters obtain contracts.

NSA head General Michael V. Hayden, who has been picked by Bush to lead the CIA, has spent the week under fire for his agency's data mining program in which millions of phone records have been compiled.
We've seen relentless attempts to gather electronic data on U.S. citizens, selective use and abuse of intelligence to lead us into war, purges of career professsionals who dare to disagree and even garden variety corruption. What we haven't seen is any progress in tracking down the folks who attacked us 1,705 days ago.