Article

2005-04-10 Iraq-Jordan

Mark Steyn: Iraq's new honchos have our spies to thank

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by tipper 2005-04-10 11:28:39 AM|| || Front Page|| [7 views since 2007-05-07] Top

How about if that $30 billion was allocated to, say, a program for subsidized bicycling helmets for grade-schoolers or some other federal boondoggle, and they bulldozed Langley, and gave the CIA director 20,000 bucks to put all his agency's global ''analysis'' up on a blog -- spook.com -- and invite comments from readers around the world? It couldn't possibly be less informed than the CIA's decades-long record of incompetence in the Middle East.

Ouch!

And probably a great idea.

Hell, for $20,000 I'd run the blog.... :-D

(Though to be honest, the money would be better spent on Fred running it.)

Posted by Barbara Skolaut 2005-04-10 12:41:56 PM|| 2005-04-10 12:41:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#2 Steyn: Whatâs startling about the glimpses we get of CIA operations -- that red-hot presidential briefing from August 2001, Joseph C. Wilson IVâs non-fact-finding mission to Niger -- is how generalized it all is: Anybody who watches cable news or reads an occasional foreign paper would know as much.

When I first read the news on the subject, my thought was - this is how the CIA goes about finding out about uranium exports to Iraq - send a guy out there to go on binge-drinking sessions (albeit of tea), interviewing one corrupt Third World apparatchik after another? Don't we have any Nigerien guys on the payroll in Iraq to give us this information, rather that rely on some State Department amateur? Where are our !@#$% bought-and-paid-for agents on the ground? If we wanted an all-electronic spy service, we'd close down the CIA and re-allocate its funding to the NSA.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2005-04-10 2:07:26 PM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2005-04-10 2:07:26 PM|| Front Page Top

#3 Da man.

Posted by .com 2005-04-10 2:14:19 PM|| 2005-04-10 2:14:19 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 What happened to the efficiently eeevil CIA I've heard about as a kid and admired secretly from behind Iron Curtain? Did they all go through a re-education and sensitivity training somewhere in Berserkly in the meanwhile?

Posted by Sobiesky 2005-04-10 2:17:05 PM|| 2005-04-10 2:17:05 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 Sob - got it in one.

Of course, 8 years of Clintoon Democrats as bosses didn't help either.

Posted by Barbara Skolaut 2005-04-10 2:18:59 PM|| 2005-04-10 2:18:59 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 Tenet "learned" from The Master. It's all the in the fingers.

Posted by .com 2005-04-10 2:23:02 PM|| 2005-04-10 2:23:02 PM|| Front Page Top

Though to be honest, the money would be better spent on Fred running it.

Who's to say it's not already? ;)

Posted by someone 2005-04-10 6:50:14 PM|| 2005-04-10 6:50:14 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Sobiesky: What happened to the efficiently eeevil CIA I've heard about as a kid and admired secretly from behind Iron Curtain? Did they all go through a re-education and sensitivity training somewhere in Berserkly in the meanwhile?

Efficient is not a word I would use in association with Uncle Sam's intelligence services. A lot of the people we get are walk-ins - people who show up wanting to hand the crown jewels over to us. That doesn't require a lot of skill from the spy recruiters. When I think of the CIA, I think of a bunch of bumblers with high-level Soviet moles embedded inside the organization. Forget the stuff you read in Robert Ludlum novels - real life is more like a Le Carre novel, right down to Uncle Sam poaching spies (highly-placed sources in the Soviet bloc) from friendly intelligence agencies.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2005-04-11 12:00:37 AM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2005-04-11 12:00:37 AM|| Front Page Top