Seymour Hersh says it plainly:

There's a lot of anxiety inside ... our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So there's a tremendous sense of fear... One of the things that you could say is, we have been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government.

...What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. ... the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people - serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been "diminish the agency."

Read the whole thing if you can.

I'd agree with it mostly.

My difference would be that it's not a cult, it's more like a Company.

When Clinton took over in '92, he moved a lot of the old Reagan-Bush operatives out. Some of these people were holdovers from the Nixon-Ford era when Poppy's faction ruled the roost. Tenet changed all that and modifed the CIA into an intelligence operation working closely with the NSA and other branches of government. Read Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies.

No more. Now it's just another arm of the Carlyle Group, where the heads of the old Company went to hide until the light of democratic scrutiny went out again.

More later on where the Strong Arm of the old Company went to, and how it's being resurrected now the lights are out indeed.

Thanks to Truthout for the link.