Michelle Malkin takes a characteristically thorough look at Paul Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia until just a year ago. There is much speculation that he is the source of the recent NIE leak. This is far from the first time such suspicions have surrounded him.

Pillar served at a high level in the CIA, and has elite educational credentials. Jack Risko of Dinocrat actually read Pillar's book Negotiating Peace, which was likely at least partly derived from his doctoral dissertation at Princeton, as well as other publications done in a scholarly mode.

Jack drew a picture of a man intellectually committed to the proposition that there is no winning with terrorism. He seems to believe that war is self—defeating. His research examined negotiations as a settlement to conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Algeria.

There's no place for victory in an analytical framework based on those precedents. Our own Clarice Feldman wrote about him early this year,

He opposed tough approaches to terrorism as too simplistic, arguing for  international cooperation and diplomacy. He obviously would be a man more comfortable with John Kerry or any other Democrat in the White House than he would be with the President America twice elected.

We have long known that a cadre of professionals in the CIA opposes the President's policies, and we have seen that they are willing to leak cherrypicked intelligence to undermine support for President Bush.

So far there is no conclusive evidence of Pillar's personal culpability in the disposition of top secret information, which is a crime I must assume. But he puts a human face on the sort of CIA official who might well strongly oppose the President.

Peter Mulhern in an AT article today laments the sorry history of our elite experts getting it wrong. The CIA mandarinate thought there was no winning the Cold War, and focused on getting the best deal out of detente. Pillar worked his way up through this organization.

Thomas Lifson   8 27 06