Warning - Bob Woodward “Channeling” in progress:

“Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.

For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a “Churchillian” vision of “victory” in Iraq and defend the country’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. “A constitutional order is emerging,” he said.

Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said “the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible,” adding that he could not “point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around,” according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.

“The government is unable to govern,” Hayden concluded. “We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function.”

Later in the interview, he qualified the statement somewhat: “A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable,” he said, “in the short term.”

Hayden’s bleak assessment, which came just a week after Republicans had lost control of Congress and Bush had dismissed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the study group’s intensive examination of the Iraq war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating.”

In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing.

Among the 79 specific recommendations the Iraq Study Group made to Bush was withdrawing support for the Maliki government unless it showed “substantial progress” on security and national reconciliation. And it recommended changing the primary mission of U.S. forces from combat to training Iraqis so that combat units could be withdrawn by early 2008.”

And so the drum beat for retreat continues. Yet remember at all points we have the CIA playing footsies with both sides of the Iraq question. Whether it’s Tenet’s “Slam Dunk”, or Plame’s manipulation of intel and even Hayden’s blurps, the CIA - more than in any time in it’s history has done a great disservice in it’s mission to the President and the nation.

Saying that, the ridiculous revival of the Iraq Surrender Group plan to bail out of the conflict is laughable now as it was when it was released.

The President will be speaking on Iraq at 10:30am today and again, the right thing to do is to wait until September to see what General Patraeus and the troops accomplish by then.

Meanwhile Jules Crittenden slams the lame MSM reporting - for which “Channeling Bob” is a member. Next to the CIA they run a close second in likewise disservice to this country during a war.