The Daily Background

At 1:45PM today, the President called an impromptu press conference to make an announcement. The press had been alerted shortly beforehand, and given no clue as to what the the press conference might be about, except that it had something to do with a staff announcement. Turns out that the CIA’s Porter Goss has resigned today, the President says. Goss of course is a Bush appointee who was woefully unqualified for his job as the head of the CIA, taking over after Tenet left. I’ll update with links ASAP.

Update: AP has the bare facts. More links to come.

Update 2: A bit of background. Goss was of course a rich white man who was woefully unqualified to be the Director of the CIA. In fact, he admitted on camera for one of Michael Moore’s producers when making Fahrenheit 9/11 that he would be unqualified for the job (although this segment didn’t appear in the film, I’ve personally seen the raw footage). About a year later though, he was offered it by the President, and promptly took the offer.

The announcement today was entirely unexpected, and nobody seems to have an opinion on it yet. The President today seemed to indicate that Goss was to have been a transitional CIA Director (almost as if to say “okay, but now I’m going to appoint the real head of the CIA). There have been reports recently that Goss received orders from the White House to purge the CIA of liberals by any means necessary.

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