Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball. The former Florida congressman, who had an undistinguished career as a CIA operations officer in the 1960s, came to the agency in September 2004 after serving seven years as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. With his staff in tow -- a collection of Capitol Hill aides nicknamed the Gosslings -- Goss bowled into the CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters, scattering senior officials like so many duckpins. In mid-September, Robert Richer, the newly installed deputy director of operations and a former Near East Division chief, quit in disgust. The newspapers duly reported Richer's departure. But he is only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg. Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only...

Bill Frist -- senator, majority leader, and would-be president -- has a far bigger scandal lurking in the wings than whether or not he illegally sold stock in his family's health-care company, Hospital Corp. of America (HCA). It's one that goes back to the very start of his political career in the early 1990s. Investigative journalists looking, belatedly, at Frist's ties to HCA ought to take notice. In 1993, Frist, then a millionaire heart surgeon whose father and brother were billionaires, was hardly on the political radar in Tennessee. At the time, the Volunteer State was represented in the Senate by Jim Sasser, a wily Democrat who'd established himself as a leading expert on health-care policy. In the spring of '93, Sasser began holding investigative hearings into Medicare fraud by doctors, hospitals, and other health-care providers. Medicare fraud was becoming an enormous issue, one that generated the creation of special FBI task forces and other investigations, and Sasser wanted...