For example:
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The appointment would put someone in place at the top of the C.I.A. who is not identified with the agency's failures, unlike the acting director, John E. McLaughlin, who has been deputy director since 2000.
Yes, but Goss should be identified with the agency's failures. Goss has been Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee since 1997, the committee which is charged with, you know, oversight of the intelligence community. Since 2001, the executive branch has been on the same team as him and since 2003 all 3 branches of government have been on his side. What's he done about all these problems we keep hearing about? Not too much, apparently, as unless there's a dress with a stain on it he's not very interested.
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Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation.
Bumiller also goes on to quote Carlin Levin:
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Mr. Goss angered Democrats in June when he criticized Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent, on the House floor, and he has also participated in a Bush campaign conference call with reporters.
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"It's a very troubling issue, and the stakes here are huge," Mr. Levin said. "Does North Korea have a nuclear weapon, does Iran have a nuclear weapon? Are they on their way to getting nuclear weapons? We have to be sure that whoever is giving us intelligence is giving us objective analysis and is not shaping it to support administration policy."
But, she manages to leave out the connection between those two paragraphs which provides the context for Senator Levin's comments. Fortunately, we have Mike Allen and Pincus at the Washington Post to fill in the missing bits:
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On June 1, Goss took part in a Bush-Cheney conference call with reporters to critique Kerry's first national security speech. He described one of Kerry's nonproliferation proposals as "naive," and answered "clearly yes," to a question about whether Bush's policy toward North Korea was producing results. North Korea, he said, is "no longer making the progress they were making at Yongbyon [their key nuclear production site] and other places because we have called their bluff."
In fact, since the Bush administration confronted the Pyongyang government, North Korea has thrown out inspectors, removed nuclear fuel from internationally monitored storage, and may have increased the size of its nuclear arsenal, according to U.S. intelligence.
But, the readers of the liberal New York Times need not have these pesky details, even though without them Bumiller's story is almost incoherent.