Is the CIA a hopeless cause?

So now that El Baradei and the IAEA have accepted their Nobel Prize, it's now been revealed that Iran is merely months away from building a nuclear weapon.

Is anyone alarmed by this?

Whatever happened to the predictions by the CIA that Iran was years, perhaps a decade away from the bomb? Does anyone in the press remember this? No. They're too busy running cover for defeatist Democrats who were stupid enough to go on the record in public appearances where they showed the world how, well, defeatist they really are. It's good for us to know how they really feel - and their words should be shouted from the rooftops, as the Republicans are doing now with their new commercial. But what of Iran? What of the CIA's assessment?

Is this just another in a long line of intelligence screw ups? Or is it something more?

Jack Kelly, of the Post-Gazette, thinks it's the latter, and he lays out a case in his latest editorial.

On Aug. 2, Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reported that "a major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years."

On Dec. 5, the Jerusalem Post reported that Mohammed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb."

My, how time flies. It hasn't seemed as if 10 years have elapsed since last summer.

The CIA could be right, and the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and the IAEA could be wrong. But given the CIA's forecasting record -- it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the warning signs of 9/11 and Saddam's WMD -- that's not the way to bet.

Intelligence analysis isn't the only thing the CIA does sloppily. The Bush administration suffered major embarrassment when it was disclosed that the United States was holding top al-Qaida suspects in "secret prisons" in eastern Europe and North Africa.

A Swedish journalist who prepared one of the first stories on the CIA flights that transported al-Qaida captives told Josh Gerstein of The New York Sun the CIA did a poor job of covering its tracks.

"I would say they didn't give a damn," Fredrik Laurin told Mr. Gerstein. "If I was an American taxpayer, I'd be upset."

For a show broadcast in May of last year, Mr. Laurin traced the tail number of a Gulfstream jet used to transport captives to a clearly phony company in Massachusetts.

"You weren't able to trace the name to any living individual," Mr. Laurin said. "They were all living in post office boxes in Virginia.

"If that's all the imagination they can drum up at Langley, I'd fire the bunch," Mr. Laurin added.

But if the CIA hasn't been very good at ferreting out the secrets of our enemies, or keeping our own, it has shown a talent for playing politics.

"The CIA's war against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years," wrote lawyer and Web logger John Hinderaker in The Weekly Standard.

And it will continue to be a great untold story, because the media are not interested. In fact, this is the only war they are enthusiastic about, because it's the one that provides them with all the security leaks they need.

The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the Bush administration by former Democratic officeholders, and permitted a serving analyst, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book bashing the president.

The principal CIA weapon has been the leak. Reporters for ABC, The New York Times and The Washington Post didn't have to do even the minimal legwork Mr. Laurin did to out the CIA's clandestine "rendition" program. It was handed to them by "current and former intelligence officials."

"So the CIA established policies that it knew would be controversial and would damage American interests if revealed, and then leaked the existence of those policies to The Washington Post for the purpose of damaging the Bush administration," Mr. Hinderaker wrote.

A rogue CIA that subverts American democracy has long been a staple of moonbat mythology. How ironic that the rogues in the CIA should turn out to be leftists who harm America to benefit Democrats.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, sees little hope the agency can be reformed:

The CIA's "muscle-bound bureaucratization, combined with the failure of the press to accurately represent to the public the Agency's actual problems ... holds out little hope that we will see the innovation needed to combat bin-Ladenism," he wrote last year.

"For almost a decade now the CIA put a low priority on recruiting human sources abroad," agreed Robert Baer, another former CIA Middle East operative and author of "See No Evil." "The CIA was more concerned about being politically correct."

"The problem with the CIA is that the senior executives responsible for production of intelligence just aren't good enough," said Herbert Meyer, assistant to legendary CIA Director William Casey.

In the 1990s, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed abolishing the CIA. That seemed far out then. It doesn't seem so far out now. It might be easier to start from scratch than to clean up the mess the CIA has become.

"The CIA is in deep crisis," Mr. Hinderaker said. "It is not at all clear that its survival is in the national interest."

I disagree with abolishing the agency. I do think it can be salvaged. But Congress needs to get involved, and quickly. Only then can the agency's mandate be evaluated, assessed, and re-tuned.

Because what are we faced with now? We have the EU cracking down on our allies in a ridiculous show of hypocrisy and terrorist sympathy. We have millions of dollars down the drain in blown airlines and prisons. We have real agents in danger. We have a serious problem with losing allies if we can't be trusted to keep the conditions of their help a secret. We have lost intelligence from the lack of prisoner interrogations.

And now we have Iran...months away from the bomb. Does anyone realize what will happen once they get one? They're not part of the Axis of Evil for nothing.