Jews on the brain.

WE all know that something was seriously wrong with the CIA's counter-terrorism operation in the 1990s--and now thanks to Michael Scheuer we are beginning to see what that something was. Scheuer ran the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 until 1999. Last year, while still employed by the CIA, he published a book harshly critical of the Bush administration's War on Terror, Imperial Hubris. The book offered something less than a coherent argument. Sometimes Scheuer would call for raining mass fire and slaughter upon the Arab world--and then at other times he would argue that al-Qaeda was an essentially rational organization with limited demands that the United States could and should appease.

Frankly, the book was a mess. But since Michael Scheuer was always consistently anti-Bush (he likes to say that the president "would not know an American founder from an Atlantic flounder"), the mess received an enthusiastic response from the American media.

There's something else about which Scheuer is consistent: his conviction that U.S. foreign policy is controlled by ... guess who?

At a recent Council on Foreign Relations event in New York, Scheuer described the U.S.-Israeli relationship as "probably the most successful covert-action program in the history of man." The Israelis, he asserted, "control the important political debate in a country of 270 million people....I wish our clandestine service could do as well."

Challenged to elaborate, Scheuer explained, "Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum [is] here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries."

Scheuer worries that he will be abused in the media for expressing his views candidly. Things, it seems, have come to a pretty pass if a man can be accused of anti-Semitism merely for suggesting that the U.S. is controlled by a secret Jewish conspiracy.

It says something alarming about U.S. intelligence agencies that a man who was entrusted with the job of defending the United States from its al-Qaeda enemy should instead have so thoroughly internalized and accepted that enemy's beliefs.