<Newsweek Poll: Americans Want Probe Into Intelligence Failings

I may be overreacting, but I think these folks blow some big ones, and keep doing it. And worse. As with all bureaucracies left alone with unlimited budgets, I think they have become to inbred, complacent, and inefficient.

They may well have NOT blown WTC. I don't know. I do know they missed the Indian surprise nuclear test blasts, for instance. I understand building a nuke ain’t done overnight, ain’t done in a vacuum, and leaves some traces. I wouldn’t have expected to know, I would have expected them to know.

The Iranian overthrow of the Shah of Iran came as a complete surprise to ‘em. Shouldn’t have. Just read Woodward’s book on the CIA during the Casey regime, and the info re the Iranian situation was there.

They do some good electronic surveillance, maybe a lot more. And, they miss some big, complicated projects.

And, there's some good reasons why they miss a lot. A lack of accountability, of effective oversight and supervision is only one.

What’s the message to the troops from the Ruby Ridge affair? The FBI shot and killed a woman way, way outside the ROE, then covered their mistakes in the affair by lying to investigators and destroying documents. They were sued. The US taxpayer paid, as I recall, around $4 million to a pretty unsavory guy.

The result for personnel was a letter of reprimand for two people. Destroyed their careers, you might say. Yep, I suppose it did. The message? Might be to cover your ass better, because the next letter could be serious. Might be that it really takes a big, big screwup to get fired. Almost impossible. A dead woman, $4 million payout, won't do it.

Every time someone talks about oversight, the response is there would be leaks. Can’t trust anyone to know, they tell the world. Let's talk about LEAKS.

Leaving them alone has resulted recently in:

Aldrich Ames, the CIA Russian desk manager, who would have been an find, and gave the Russians everything he had.

Hanssen, the FBI guy who gave ‘em anything the FBI had, and earlier

the Walkers, Pollard, and a bunch whose names I don’t remember. Some CIA guy who was trained in EVERYTHING the CIA had going in Moscow, then fired.

It doesn’t look like there is much the badguys didn’t know even while it was going on.

Any incidental leak from effective oversight might not do the damage that not having effective accountability is doing.

Regarding the current “flap” over intelligence, Tom Ridge should know everything they want. In hindsight I don’t fault ‘em for not really seeing it coming, based on what I know now.

But, I sure expect Tom Ridge to know what the signs were, who knew what, and how that could have been collated so as to result in being able to head that off.

He should be able to meet with any responsible official for dinner tonight and not only tell ‘em what happened and what the clues might have been, but what is being done now to tip off the authorities as to the next one.

If he can’t do that now, if he doesn’t have it in his hip pocket, he should be fired.

The ramblings of some captured al-Qaeeda can’t be their best source for a complicated plot like WTC, especially one which was telegraphed by the bombings years ago. I get tired of hearing things like “Warning - suspect an attack on banks in the Northeast”, to find out some prisoner has mumbled something about a bank plot. There may have been more information, but the “warning” wasn’t detailed enough to lend one to suspect the papers were wrong when the gave the source.

I gotta stop.

Arf