President Bush congratulates his newly-appointed CIA Director, J. Porter Goss

It is a capital mistake to theorize before
one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories,
instead of theories to suit facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Scandal In Bohemia"

Sherlock Holmes, that champion of logic and deductive reasoning, would need a sedative if he saw what was going on in the current American government. The New York Times writes up a comically deadpan story about Bush's newly-appointed CIA director J. Porter Goss and his Orwellian Memo To The Gang At Spooksville:

"As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road."

While his words could be construed as urging analysts to conform with administration policies, Mr. Goss also wrote, "We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.''

In any other presidential administration, this example of doublethink would have been rightly branded as blatant, shifty-eyed mendacity. But it appears that we have stepped across the threshold into a new and inarguably crazier world. Porter Goss brings to his beleagured agency an all-encompassing (some might call it a global) test of the integrity of intelligence work: if you want to know if something is good for America and / or the world, just ask yourself, "is it good for the Bush administration?"

Thus the thorny task of "reforming" the CIA just got a lot easier, and the job of your average CIA analyst just got a lot easier as well. After all, CIA analysts used to have to struggle with burdensome facts and the mercurial nature of reality. Now all they have to figure out is what the White House wants to hear.

The Republicans have tightened their grip on the three branches of government, but they want more than that. They want to control the sectors of power and influence where they have traditionally felt shut out: academia, journalism and the bureaucracy. Goss' memo only points the direction this administration will take over the next four years. And it won't be pretty.