The CIA is going through an identity crisis. Their new director, George Tenet, has defined a new mission for the agency: to focus on "hard targets" in terrorism, weapons proliferation, and drug trafficking. He said: "This is, at the end of the day, an espionage organization ... We must generate information that is unique and makes a contribution against each of those targets. Otherwise, we don't know why we're here."

An interesting admission. Essentially, he's saying that the CIA is an intelligence-gathering organization only "at the end of the day" (presumably they're doing something else during the rest of the day). Next he admits that they must "generate" unique information, not simply do the usual hum- drum job of gathering it. We always suspected that the CIA's "facts" were the product of wild imagination. The new CIA director, however, is not satisfied with the low quality of narrative in recent intelligence reports. Maybe the CIA ought to apply for funds from the imperiled National Endowment for the Arts. That ought to soothe Senator Jesse Helms' ruffled feathers.