Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Larry Johnson, a strange spokesman for Dems

Gary Schmitt:

ON SATURDAY, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson gave the Democratic party's weekly radio address and excoriated President Bush for not having fired Karl Rove and others in connection with the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the press. This followed Johnson's appearance before a panel of House and Senate Democrats on Friday, where he made similar criticisms of the president. A self-described Republican, Johnson argued that the failure of the president to fire Rove and anyone else supposedly involved in the leak had severely damaged national security and would certainly hamper future efforts to recruit informants in the war on terror.

Well, it's good to see that the former CIA employee is now worried about the war on terror. But it's a bit late. On July 10, 2001--two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--Johnson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times ("The Declining Terrorist Threat") in which he argued that Americans were "bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism" and, in truth, had "little to fear" from terrorism. And, in turn, he rebuked his former colleagues in the national security bureaucracy for using the "fiction" of the terrorist threat to pump up their budgets.

...

The Democratic party wants to use Larry Johnson as a seemingly safe mouthpiece to attack to the president. But, in doing so, they have adopted someone who fits perfectly the profile of the pre-9/11 CIA: see no evil, hear no evil. As documented in report after report, the CIA's directorate of operations had no assets in al Qaeda and CIA's analysts were asleep at the switch when it came to analyzing the scale of the threat posed by bin Laden.

Johnson apparently also speaks for the rogues in the CIA who oppose the Bush administration and its conduct of the war, like Valerie Plame.