Memo To LulzSec--Quit Screwing With Our Lives!

Like many people around the world, the Geek regularly uses the CIA's website.  In particular, he employs the resources of the World Fact Book section of the site.  It is an excellent, short compass presentation of critical basic intelligence regarding every country in the world.  As such, the Agency provides a very useful service at no direct expense to numerous people who want quick, reliable information which is both accurate and endowed with genuine utility.

In a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack today, the adolescent cyberthugs of LulzSec took down cia.gov for more than an hour.  Other than giggles it is hard to see what the group believes they accomplished by this action.  Far more certain is the contention that the DDoS attack inconvenienced any number of journalists, academics, students, bloggers, and others who had a genuine need or desire to  avail themselves of the information that LulzSec in its infinite wisdom determined was unfit for public consumption presumably due to its source.

To the unenlightened critters of LulzSec and the similarly oriented Anonymous "hacktivist" collective, the Agency is an unmitigated evil, the spawn of imperialist secrecy and corporate greed.  The reality is far, far different.

Get a grip on this LulzSec!  The Agency exists to serve the public.  While secrecy surrounds it and is quite essential for much of what it does, the Agency can and always has made products which are available to the general public and quite useful to that public.

Get a grip on this too, you key pushing punks at LulzSec.  Many Agency tasks do not require covert or clandestine means.  Most, say eighty-five percent of all the raw catch the Agency uses, comes from open sources.  This means that much of the Agency's collated and analyzed product need not be classified--and isn't.  Did you get that, cyber-twits?  Much of what the hated CIA does is there for any and all to use.

The implication is the Agency is able to provide useful accurate information to the general public as well as the president or secretaries of defense or state.  The Agency is, in fact, our agency.  Recognizing this, the Agency has long made non-classified product available to the public at large.  Often this was done without charge even in the old days of paper and ink.  Now much of the open product is immediately accessible on the web.

This open presentation of product is a very real benefit to Americans and all those around the world who care to click their way to cia.gov.  The teenage fanatics at LulzSec are either unaware of the utility and usage of the Agency's site or are so blinded by whatsoever ideology propels these jejune and puerile minds that they don't give a damn.

Further these cretins are hypocritical to the max.  LulzSec, Anonymous and the like claim they are crusaders for openness, transparency, and an absence of secrets.  When they whack at the Agency as they did today with a DDoS, they are preventing open access to information by anyone, anywhere in the world, who has access to the web (and lives in a country which does not block sites like cia.gov.)  The fine group calling itself LulzSec by its act today has both indicted and convicted itself of hypocrisy in the first degree.

The Geek doesn't know what the punishment for hypocrisy in the first degree should be but as far as he personally is concerned, the idea of breaking a laptop or two over the heads of each and every member of LulzSec would be a fine place to start.  Usually the Geek is not given to wanting law enforcement to put the cuffs on people (he is too much of an anarchist at heart for that), but when a self-appointed bunch of cyber censors takes it upon itself to interfere with the free flow of information, he finds himself rooting for the cops and wishing very much to see each and every member of LulzSec doing the perp walk.

Caught In A Morass Of Delusions

Over the weekend Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari told the Guardian that the American war in Afghanistan was destabilizing his country.  Presumably with a straight face he averred that absent the war being waged by the US, Pakistan would be a fountainhead of democracy, free enterprise, and tranquility with nary a problem of the social, economic, political, or religious sort.

Continuing the exercise in monumental dementia, the head of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which is the  organization that not only cranked up Taliban in the first place but has done everything in its considerable power to prop up, assist, hide, and facilitate in all respects not only Taliban but other, to use the Pakistani term, "anti-Indian assets," was in Washington today.  The ISI chief, LtGen Ahmad Sujah Pasha, was passing on an ultimatum which was decreed by the most powerful man in Pakistan today.

No.  Not the president.  Rather the armed forces chief of staff, Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.  General Kayani no doubt with the complete support and approval of LtGen Sujah Pasha has demanded an end to most Predator strikes, a reduction in force of both CIA and Special Operations personnel, and an abandonment of the Agency's attempts to penetrate the assorted "anti-Indian assets" established and to some extent controlled by ISI.

The purported basis for the virtual ending of the effective use of CIA personnel as well as the training program being operated by Special Forces troopers for the Pakistani Frontier Force was the arrest of CIA contract employee Raymond Davis.  Davis, you will certainly recall was busted on a murder rap after having blown away two Pakistanis usually characterized as "muggers."  Davis executed a good shoot on two men who were almost certainly assets of ISI who were assigned to harass Davis if not do more.

Davis, a former Green Beret fluent in Pushtu had been working out of the consulate in Kandahar tasked with penetrating Lashkar-e-Taiba.  LeT is another of those "anti-Indian assets" such as the Haqqani network both established and protected/facilitated by ISI.  CIA attempts to penetrate these groups without authorization from ISI, which is the only possible way to play the game given that ISI is not given to cooperation against its own goons.

ISI along with the Pakistani armed forces lives in a delusional universe where the most important consideration, the prime directive, is to defeat India in the next war.  These men are all of the view that another war with India is not only inevitable, it is desirable and will be won by the Mighty Warriors of the Koran if only the Pakistanis have sufficient strategic depth, a large nuclear arsenal, and the means of waging war on all levels from local terrorism to nuclear Armageddon.

To this end, the Pakistani military and its supporters in the country's elite have bent every effort toward the blessed day when war again breaks out.  The mere fact that this orientation has distorted the country's economy, suppressed domestic political freedoms, truncated education, imported Wahhibism and all that implies, fostered social divisions, and fractured the political structure is of no consequence.  Nor is it worthy of considering all available evidence indicating India has no desire for war, no plans of initiating war, and well understands that war would be very bloody, extremely destructive, and might take decades for recovery--and that is for the winner.

The Pakistani military is so consumed by its delusions that it sincerely believes that the US has two goals in mind currently: (1) Suppressing totally Pakistani influence in Afghanistan while allowing Indian influence to increase without limit, (2) Suppress Pakistan's nuclear capability while allowing that of India to cruise along unimpeded.  Therefore, the Agency and Special Forces operations in Pakistan are actually oriented toward one or the other of these two goals.

The military is supreme in Pakistan and President Zardari knows this.  His civilian government like all those which have gone before stays in office at the let and sufferance of the military.  Of course, it helps that Mr Zardiri like his predecessors lacks moral courage, lacks the capacity to take on the military, to enlist the citizenry of the long suffering nation in a hard trek back to some sort of political sanity.

The position of the US is of no aid in this matter.  While different administrations may from time to time weakly chastise the Pakistani government as the Obama administration did last week, the various extortion efforts made by Islamabad always result in more cash flowing to Pakistan's coffers.

When the end of the Cold War opened the door for the US to reappraise its long standing hostility to India and friendship with Pakistan, it took the chance.  There was a definite tilt to India during the years of Bill Clinton.  The Pakistanis were left comparatively speaking high and dry.  They were given a fresh start and a brand new chance following 9/11.

The W. Bush administration made the horrid decision that we could do nothing in Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan.  This choice was made despite the definite knowledge extant inside the Beltway of the relationship between ISI and both Taliban and al-Qaeda.  The choice was made despite the awareness of history, awareness that the decision made by Reagan to hand off the endgame in Afghanistan to the Pakistanis had resulted in the creation of Taliban.  (The junior partnership of CIA in this creation should not be seen as mitigation of primary ISI culpability.)

The fateful decisions made by Bush/Cheney--not only the involvement of Pakistan, the paying of bribes to Pakistan, but also and more importantly, the changing of the mission from one which was primarily punitive to one of "nation-building"--cast our policy in a way which could do nothing but impair our interests in the region and block our goal of defeating violent political Islam in both Afghanistan and across the border in the FATA and adjacent regions of Pakistan such as Kandahar and Quetta.

Even now with the Pakistani president and chief of staff undertaking efforts of both rhetorical and practical nature to impair further the American efforts and policies, the US, at least publicly, continues to dance to the tune called in Islamabad.  The US ambassador has called for a "renewal."  Cameron Munter is of the view, if his public pronouncements are to be taken at face value (admittedly a dangerous activity when assessing the words of a diplomat) the US and Pakistan are on the same side facing the same enemy: violent political Islam.

Of course we are, provided one is willing to define the intelligence service of our "ally" here as something other than the founder, protector, and aid of nearly every Islamist group the US is fighting.  That can be done, but only if the US is willing to join Pakistan in the deadly morass of delusions.  Unfortunately, it appears that the Obama administration is willing to do so.

What Kind Of War Will We Be Fighting?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently called for an evaluation of the role, mission, and configuration of the Marine Corps. At roughly the same time he suggested the Navy needed to reconsider its needs and, presumably, its role in future wars. While being less direct (in recent weeks) regarding both Army and Air Force, the soon to be outgoing SecDef has clearly questioned the current postures and mission orientation of both services.

The subtext of Dr Gates' push to reconfiguration consists of two questions. What kind(s) of war will the US be fighting in the next couple of decades? What is the current and projected state of play regarding the relative supremacy of offense and defense?

No aspect of human endeavor better fits the Hegelian dialectic then does the relation of offense and defense in warfare. Every new thesis of offense calls an antithesis of defense into existence. And, the new defense summons a synthesis of offense. So the wheel turns.

The celebration of the defense got a boost recently with the widespread and breathless discussion of the new Chinese wonder weapon, a highly accurate anti-ship ballistic missile. The couch potato admirals, not all of whom were Chinese, gleefully decided the new, untested missile would make US naval force projection utterly impossible within a thousand klicks or so of the Chinese landmass.

Any number of pundits who have never heard a shot fired in anger weighed in with a pornographically precise description of just how the new system would neutralize the Nimitz class carriers should any make so bold as to come over to the Chinese half of the Pacific Ocean. The first incoming conventional warhead would "kill" the Nimitz class as a weapons system by wrecking its capacity for air operations. The second would nail the ship's propulsive system turning the monumentally expensive and complex ship into a umpteen thousand ton hulk. Then, missile number three would speedily dispatch the hulk to Davy Jones' locker.

Badda-bing! That's all she wrote. End of the US as the number one maritime power. Might as well surrender to the Trolls of Beijing now and avoid the mess later.

Of course this dystopian view depends upon a number of assumptions--all of them quite questionable.

The first is that the US Navy knows utterly nothing about how to play hide-and-seek in the vast expanses of the ocean. Next, the it's-all-over-with crowd seems to believe that there is no way the US could possibly exploit any of the numerous opportunities to perturb, spoof, spiel, or otherwise degrade the extensive C4ISR system(s) which would be required to support the missile. Finally, the proponents of imminent American naval defeat ignore the demonstrated ABM and ASAT capacities of the Aegis supported Standard missile as well as the improvement curve expected over the next few years.

(Oh, yes, they also failed to note the status of directed energy weapon research, development, and deployment as if that is somehow less relevant than the still far from IOC ready Chinese ship-killer.)

The saga of the Chinese super-weapon or at least its portrayal in assorted American and foreign media should be seen as an excellent illustration of an important ground truth. The Hegelian dialectic, the yin and yang of offense and defense is never a finished process. It is always the big wheel that keeps on moving.

The same is true with respect to amphibious forcible entry. In his assessment of the Marine Corps need for a review of its main missions, Dr Gates contended that the days of storming the beach were over. The secretary averred improvements in anti-ship missile technology assured that an invasion force would have to "away all boats" forty or more miles offshore. This, of course, was an order of magnitude greater distance than required during WW II or, sixty years ago next month, the last great amphibious operation in US history, the one at Inchon, Korea.

To Dr Gates the takeaway was self-evident. The distance, and the time required to transit it would be too great. In the future, large scale operations across a contested beach would be impossible at any acceptable loss rate.

Surely with his vast experience, Dr Gates knows better. He has both seen enough and, in all probability, studied enough to understand that there is no such critter as a stasis imposed by the unconquerable defense or the irresistible offense.

Being a contemporary of the Geek, the secretary must recall, for example, the confident expressions by experts of high rank and great experience of a belief that the helicopter was too slow, too low flying, too fragile to survive in a combat zone. He should remember the pronouncements to the effect that the Marine's doctrine of "vertical envelopment" would prove impossible at any acceptable loss rate.

The experts were wrong as battlefields from Vietnam to Afghanistan have shown. The great wheel of offense versus defense rolled on. Improvements in one drove improvements in the other. There is no reason to believe this dynamic will suddenly and abruptly change.

History is filled with other examples, very well known examples. The combination of artillery, machine guns, field fortifications, and barbed wire made ground offensives impossible. Sure, until the armored fighting vehicles were developed. The battleship was supreme. Sure, until the airplane and submarine proved otherwise.

Submarines were queens of the sea. You bet. Until effective technologies of detection and engagement were developed. The bomber would get through. Yes, until radar, controlled figher interception, and surface to air missiles arrived on the scene.

Technological lurches in and off themselves are not necessary and sufficient reasons to demand a review and reconfiguration of missions and mission postures. The only truly necessary and sufficient reason for this to occur is found in the nature of the wars most likely to be fought in the next few years, say the next couple of decades.

Way back when, well, at least before 9/11, a faculty member at the National War College challenged the Geek to make one of his (in)famous "fearless predictions." The Geek obliged, opining that the most probable type of war for the US over the next generation or two would be that of an interventionary nature. The kind of war now called "overseas contingency operations."

While the probability of a peer-to-peer conflict with, say, China could not be ruled zero, such was diminishingly small. Rather it was likely to highly likely that the US would find it necessary to involve itself in messy little, frustratingly inconclusive interventions ranging from the punitive to the humanitarian to the stability enhancing to the counterinsurgent. Nasty little wars of policy which would be critical to national and strategic interests but not in themselves existential or total.

To date the prediction has been borne out. Further, there is no reason to see the situation altering in any fundamental fashion for the next two decades. Not even an attack on Iran would result in a total war of national survival for the US. The probability of a peer-to-peer mid- to high-intensity war with China or Russia is no more probable today than it was fifteen years ago. Nor, absent some form of unilateral disarmament is such going to loom larger in the real world over the next two decades.

This global reality does demand a more effective configuration of American forces: Marines, Navy, Army and Air Force. The necessity and desirability of such a reconfiguration has gained greater salience from the experiences of the past ten years. Further stimulus comes from the only partially acknowledged fact that the advocates of violent political Islam have not lost their appetite for armed confrontation with the US and other civilized states nor their ability for horizontal escalation.

The Marine Corps can be employed as an example of the necessary reconfiguration of doctrine, force structure, and posture. It should be recognized that the Marines are quite unlikely to be engaging in amphibious forcible entries in the next few years. This assertion is based not on changes in anti-ship missile technology or the increasing availability of inexpensive, effective anti-ship missiles but rather on the nature of likely wars.

In this context it is necessary to remember that the Marine Corps has a wide, extensive, and highly successful experience with interventionary operations, particularly counterinsurgency. For most of the past one hundred years, the Marines have been more often employed in low intensity interventionary operations than in assaulting heavily defended beaches. To put it in perspective, the USMC spent less than three years seizing beaches during WW II and Korea while Marines fought for six years in South Vietnam and nearly that long in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan as in the earlier "Banana Wars" of the Twenties and Thirties, the Marine Corps demonstrated the value of its tightly disciplined, flexible, down and forward approach to leadership in counterinsurgency. In all these deployments the Marines demonstrated a very rapid learning curve, a high degree of innovation, and a genuine competence at working with indigenous forces. The Marines have often exasperated higher command with their independence ("hell, the Marines are fighting their own war out there,"), but none have questioned their effectiveness.

In other interventionary operations, the Marine Corps' combination of high discipline, unit coherence, and integrated air and ground capabilities provided the necessary combination of lethality and restraint to accomplish difficult missions. (In this context it is helpful to remember the Marine operation in Lebanon in 1957.)

Had a Marine force been tasked with the neutralization of Somalian warlords in 1993, there would have been no possibility of the mission destroying "Blackhawk down" debacle. The very nature of Marine force posture and doctrine would have prevented the mounting of such a poorly planned and inadequately supported operation as that undertaken by Special Forces personnel at that time. (All that is necessary to keep in mind is that the Marines have organic armor, rotary wing and fixed wing as well as the necessary integrated command, control, and communication capabilities.)

In short, the Marine Corps brings to the table all the features and capacities necessary for short, sharp, constrained lethality operations. For humanitarian relief operations when risk of armed opposition exists, (bare in mind that Pakistani Taliban has threatened attack on relief personnel during the current flood) or a punitive expedition (such as the invasion of Afghanistan should have been) or stability enhancement deployments such as Lebanon in 1957 (or, absent the critical mistakes of mission definition and rules of engagement, Lebanon in 1982), the Marine Corps should be the lead force.

True, leaning on the Corps would violate the totem of "jointness" which has ruled supreme for the past several decades. If Dr Gates is serious he should kick start a review on "joint and combined operations" with a goal of eliminating those which are not genuinely required by the nature of the operation. He knows, (it is flatly impossible that he doesn't) the "joint and combined" fetish is driven not by any real strategic, operational, or tactical requirements but rather by the budgetary process.

And, that, bucko, is a very, very poor way to plan and conduct military operations.

While the Deep Thinkers of the national security community are at it, they might consider the need for reconfiguring the American special and black operations capacities. As events of recent vintage in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and North or Northwest Africa have shown, there is an increasingly blurred line between the operational divisions of CIA and the blacker portions of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Complicating this is a corollary merging of the intelligence collection functions of CIA's HUMINT component and the equivalents in SOCOM.

Blurring, merging, overlapping between black or paramilitary operations and HUMINT collection is both dangerous and counterproductive. Almost as bad is the insensible, unplanned and reactive melding of the Agency's paramilitary or black operations capacities with any similar capacities in SOCOM. Clear lines of command, responsibility and tasking are necessary for effectiveness. So also is common doctrine, shared mindset and world view.

The separation with careful coordination between intelligence collection and operational execution is also utterly essential. As the record of WW II in Europe demonstrates convincingly, a carefully orchestrated and coordinated separation of intelligence and operations is utterly essential. Otherwise the spooks and the black ops types not only step on each others cloaks, but get stabbed with one another's daggers.

There are many other areas where our forces doctrines, structures, orientations and postures can be and should be re-evaluated and reconfigured. Dr Gates is definitely on the side of the angels when he urges such.

However, it is mission critical that any review, any reconfiguration, any structure, posture and doctrine changes be based not on changes in technologies, new turns on the wheel of offense and defense but on a realistic understanding of the nature of the wars we will be fighting in the years to come. To suggest otherwise is to assure an ultimate failure in the process.

The bitch of it all is the failure will not be evident until too many body bags come home in a war not yet fought. And, by then, it is way too late.

ADMIN NOTE: Comments are invited, welcomed and will be posted but due to spam comments the Geek has been forced to take defensive measures. He apologizes for any inconvenience or frustration.

And, Now, It's Yemen Again

Either or both CIA and the WaPo have determined Yemen is tomorrow's news. Baying along is Amnesty International, once more ever-so-concerned that somehow, someone may be killed by an American munition without benefit of arrest, trial, appeal, and the other features of justice.

American, particularly CIA, neutralization efforts have taken the fun out of being an al-Qaeda heavyweight either in Afghanistan or the FATA of Pakistan. The ever present Predators have proven spectacularly successful at what is politely referred to as "organizational disruption" in both venues. The result, as intended, has been the lowering of both the will and ability of al-Qaeda to mount offensive operations on its own.

One result has been the redirection of al-Qaeda personnel and efforts from direct leadership to behind the scenes training, planning, and advising. The small number of al-Qaeda (fifty to one hundred) remaining in Afghanistan still represent a significant but indirect threat as they use their experience to gin up the locals, to churn out more effective Taliban and Haqqani network tactical commanders, more competent bomb makers, more industrious and able recruiters. In this role al-Qaeda can hope to serve as a potent force multiplier.

Another, equally predictable result of the increased US pressure both on the ground in Afghanistan and in the air over the FATA has been horizontal escalation. The Geek has posted many times on the potentials for geographic spread by al-Qaeda. The most likely venues for such horizontal escalation have been North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. Of these alternatives, the one having the most threat enhancing potential is the last, the Arabian Peninsula.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been in existence for well over a decade. Osama bin Laden launched his war against the US and the West from the wide sands of the Peninsula. His motive was the perceived "infidel" occupation of the Peninsula, particularly Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden's goal was and is the forced ejection of the American "infidels" and the local "apostates" from the Kingdom of the Two Mosques. His "declaration of war against the American people" of fifteen or so years ago made both motive and goal explicit.

Yemen has been a preferred center of operations for bin Laden and his organization from its earliest days. The country has been a collection of nations in contest for statehood. Tribal in nature, contentious in politics, feudal in loyalties, divided in all essential respects for the past half century, the barren, impoverished dry mountains and parched deserts of Yemen are inherently ungovernable.

The Yemeni are also given to deep religious enthusiasm, which is not surprising given the economic, social, cultural nature of the place. Insofar as there is a glue which might bind Yemenis together across the chasms of family, clan, tribe, region, relative poverty, or political affiliation, it is found in religion. The Yemeni have taken their Islam hot, black, and strong since the days of the Houthi overthrow.

The message of bin Laden as well as the ascetic personality of the messenger himself have struck a deep and resonate chord with many in Yemen, a chord which resounds all the stronger as Osama is a local boy who has made good, very good. This reality has made Osama bin Laden a very real actor in Yemeni politics since before the suicide bombing of the USS Cole linked Yemen, al-Qaeda, and terrorism at the shoulder and hip.

The government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh has played a very delicate, not to say duplicitous game over the past decade, balancing its precarious hold on what passes for central power domestically with the demands of the US or Saudi Arabia. This means the Saleh regime has tacked violently and unpredictably between apparent cooperation with the US and Saudi Arabia on one course and seeming agreement with the stance of al-Qaeda on the other.

The Yemeni government is not only fighting a recurrent defensive insurgency in the south (Always have to remember that Yemen was two countries for the best part of a half century, and the relation between North Yemen and the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen was not peaceful.) but also a renewed offensive insurgency waged by the recrudescent Houthis in the mountains of the far north. In this setting AQAP has a measure of power far greater than might be expected given its current manpower is in the three to five hundred range.

It is not going too far to assert that AQAP can be the kingmaker, or, to err on the side of accuracy, the regicide if pushed too far by either the Sanaa government or the outsiders. If the Saleh regime were to fall, AQAP has both the will and ability to take over either directly (unlikely) or as the force in the backroom (likely) with the Houthi rebels as the stooges in front.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Yemen is a far better base for a violent political Islam advocacy group than is either Afghanistan or the FATA. Geographically, Yemen is in the center of things, well, the important things that is. It is coterminous with Saudi Arabia. It fronts the Gulf of Aden and the (very) narrow strait connecting the Gulf with the Red Sea and thus the southern approach to the Suez Canal. Right across the way is the failed state of Somalia and the less than stable Eritrea.

That's not a pretty picture.

Equally unpretty is the nature of the terrain of Yemen itself. Most of the place rather resembles a mating of the backside of the moon and the uplands of Hell. It makes the FATA and most of Afghanistan look like Iowa in comparison. This means it is a fine place for a small guerrilla force provided the troops and leaders are well motivated. Equally it makes the physical geography a counterinsurgent's worst nightmare.

The long (1,450 klicks) border with Saudi is unsealable. So is the border with Oman, a country with little credible military capacity. The road network makes that of Afghanistan look like it is covered by an Interstate highway system. (Only ten percent of the seventy thousand klicks of tracks is paved.) You get the picture.

The long and short of reality is simply this: Even if the US had the political will to take on yet one more ground conflict, the physical terrain of Yemen militates against the American way of war, even the "new" one of light, lean, and mean.

Nor is the human terrain any less unpromising. The Yemeni population is as experienced with unending war as that of Afghanistan. If anything, more Yemenis have a direct contact with the physical and psychological realities of protracted and asymmetrical conflict than the folks of Afghanistan. (It is hard to find twelve consecutive months of Yemeni history since 1960 when the bullets were not flying somewhere in the country.)

While Yemen has not had a Taliban of its own, there is a strong current of intense and severe Salifist Islam. Exacerbating the tendency for religiously based true belief is the very young population--the median age is not quite eighteen years. Strong religious identification plus youth equals "extremism."

Nor is the "extremist" propensity modified by the high level of illiteracy (fifty percent for the total population, thirty percent for men) and an equally high level of unemployment. The wealth of the country is highly maldistributed and employment opportunities at home nearly zilch.

Worsening the domestic economic situation is the rapid depletion of the minimal oil reserves of Yemen. The same applies to water. Water has always been scarce (the place is a desert after all), but population growth and urbanization have made the situation far worse. Water is lacking; economic diversification has been a flop; agricultural yields are slipping.

Really looking good, isn't it?

The central government is corrupt, inefficient, filled with cronies, timeservers, inept graduates of pathetic post-secondary educational institutions. The army is no better being poorly equipped, very poorly officered, lacking any real capacities in such features as logistics, transportation, intelligence, heavy weapons, and aviation. Neither army nor government is up to the task of defeating AQAP or the Houthis or the southern insurgents even if political will to do any of these existed in more than fits and starts.

The US has only recently restarted its defensive efforts in Yemen. The Agency's capabilities in country are minimal given the degree of threat. The Predators have been absent for years with the result that when it was necessary to attempt a hit on a senior AQAP command center late last year the only available option was a cruise missile strike. The result was negative to say the least.

The December strike killed forty-one people including a provincial official seeking to negotiate a cease fire and a passel of children. Worse, the raid had no plausible deniability as cluster bomb unit sub-munitions were found and easily identified as American in origin. Leaving aside the issue of covertness, cruise missiles have been proven repeatedly to be a bad choice for this type of mission. They arrive too late, are not subject to terminal maneuver, spread death over too wide an area, inflict too many collateral casualties, and cannot be called off at the last moment should new information make such desirable.

And, the footprint cruise missiles leave invite the rancorous attention of international do-gooder outfits such as Amnesty International . Amnesty International and similar organizations do not have an accurate understanding of the type of war fought by AQAP and others of the violent political Islamic sort. They simply don't get the fact that entities such as AQAP or the original al-Qaeda do not observe tidy geographically defined "war zones."

Nor does Amnesty International and the other high minded, lofty thinking folks of other NGOs or the UN really grok on the reality that the proponents of violent political Islam choose the place, methods, and means of waging their idea of war on the states and peoples who have been declared enemies of Islam. In this dynamic the US and other states who find themselves in the impact zone have no realistic option except to fight the attackers where they are. Responsible, reactive governments have no choice beyond that of using means and munitions which will kill or otherwise neutralize the attackers at the lowest cost in either collateral casualties or third government destabilization.

Predators, ground commands of special forces, covert and clandestine intelligence operators all constitute appropriate, low signature, low footprint means. All are effective in identifying, killing or otherwise removing bad actors from the board, perturbing hostile organizations. All are good ways to do the job at the lowest cost in unwanted and counterproductive "side effects."

The American born clerical advocate of violent political Islam, Anwar al-Awlaki is a declared enemy of the US. He has been directly, substantially, and materially connected to armed attacks on the US. He is an effective recruiter, motivator, trainer, and superintendent of armed attacks on US territory and citizens. He is in Yemen.

In a perfect world it would be possible to convince the Yemeni government to arrest al-Awlaki and extradite him to the US for trial. In this same world, a world where unicorns frolic and lions do recline with lambs, Awlaki could have a full, fair, transparent trial, file appeals endlessly, and finally, perhaps, reside in a not frightfully uncomfortable federal slammer.

In the imperfect world any and all of these are either impossible or very unlikely. Even if the Yemeni government could be motivated to find and arrest the radical cleric, the political realities of the place would demand that Awlaki be tried in Yemen and, if convicted, be jailed there until he either "escaped" or was given amnesty. He would be out of prison and back on the internet faster than a camel can spit.

This means that if the US government, (which is to say the Obama administration) desires to secure the US against further, future harm from Awlaki, it must either apprehend or kill the man. As the probability of quietly arresting Awlaki is slim to none, the option of killing him looms large.

Of course, dispatching ole Anwar with a Hellfire launched from a Predator does constitute, at least in the estimate of Amnesty International and other citizens of Unicorn Land, an "extra-judicial killing." As the Geek is not a lawyer, for which he thanks the mercies of the universe, he is not prepared to dispute the point. He is, however, prepared to assert that a dead Awlaki constitutes little threat to any American.

Coming from Apache ancestry, the Geek is aware of the dangers of a mentality such as that epitomized by the old cliche, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." At the same time he is aware from both personal and vicarious experience that the decision to kill a specific, named enemy is not taken lightly even during a declared war. (Recall that the decision to kill Admiral Yamamoto during WW II as he flew between Japanese bases far from the frontline was made at the highest levels of government after a lengthy debate within the senior circle of the FDR administration.)

There is no reason to believe that the standards, the strictures, or the processes of review are any less stringent today. There is no reason to assume as Amnesty International apparently has that the US government, or its covert service, or its military has stooped to the level of the enemy or has adopted the arrogance without either rules or limits which characterize the way in which Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, Taliban, al-Qaeda, or AQAP wage war.

The realties of Yemen, the realities of American political will, the realities of violent political Islam demand that the US use covert or clandestine means to defend our country and its citizens, our allies, and our interests. This means we must do things, use means, employ weapons or methods which some of tender hearts and high minded sentiments find disturbing, even repugnant.

But, these easily offended sensitive souls have to get a firm grip on the situation in Yemen and elsewhere. We are under attack. We cannot fight back using either conventional or tidy, open, and transparent methods. But, we can and must fight effectively without compromising our basic values.

This is what we have been doing. And, must do more of.

ADMIN NOTE: Because Get a Grip has been victimized by spammers it is necessary to take defensive measures including moderation and the anti-spam verification. The Geek apologizes for the inevitable, unavoidable inconvenience.

Wins(?) And Losses (?) In Spookworld

The wild and wacky world of spooks has been getting a fair amount of probably unwelcome play in the world's media of late. First, there is the ongoing Affair of the Dead Hamas Gunrunner in Dubai. This has been joined by the Snatch of Taliban's Number Two Heavyweight in Pakistan. The second, at least can be seen legitimately as a victory for the guys down the hall in black-ops. The first may be another black eye for the Masters of the Mossad.

Arguably the world is better off now that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has gone to his reward. The late Mr Mabhouh was a talented, highly motivated, true believing thug of the blackest sort, a specialist in the arts of clandestine killing, fomenting terror, and supplying war. Powered by hate, zeal, and revanchism, he stood behind killings, kidnappings, and the knifefighting sort of war which has long characterized the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The Israelis no doubt wanted him dead. There is no doubt but that the government, intelligence services, and people of Israel are very happy that Mr Mabhouh is now examining the root systems of daisies up close and personal. But, there is doubt that the government of Israel and its legendary intelligence service, the Mossad, are responsible for the Mabhouh Hit.

This is not to say it is impossible for the Mossad to have shown the awesome combination of arrogance and amateur tradecraft which is so evident in the events surrounding the death of al-Mabhouh. The mind rebels against the notion that the often highly competent Mossad could have been so indifferent to the presence and capacities of closed circuit surveillance television systems as to leave a virtual minute-by-minute record of the eleven person team's presence and actions. The mind also boggles at the Mossad being so totally out-to-lunch as to counterfeit passports so poorly (not using an alphanumeric coding for example) as to invite easy identification.

(A side question: How come the eagle-eyed pass control officials of Dubai missed the glaring errors on the passports, particularly those purportedly issued by the Irish and German governments? Given that governments notify each other as to the format of passports, it is hard to understand how these obviously false documents got by the border guards and customs men.)

Balancing these concerns is historical reality. From time to time the Mossad, apparently driven by a misplaced belief in its own press releases, has performed with exceptional arrogance and ineptitude. One occasion was the unfortunate hit conducted in Norway on an innocent Lebanese waiter misidentified as a terrorist figure of note. Another was the badly botched assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997 which left the Israelis covered with embarrassment, the head of Mossad sacked, and Jordan's king outraged.

Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister in 1997. He is PM again today. The Mossad director back then was an overly muscular sort. So is Meir Dagan, who has been capo of Israel's spooks for eight years now.

Mossad has enjoyed a great deal of presumed success in eliminating Israel's enemies using clandestine and covert means. They have not been immune to allowing success to be imputed improperly to their efforts rather than pointing out the potential for internecine rivalries to have been behind the death of one enemy or another. Indeed, the Israelis have turned the reputation of the Mossad into an impressive weapon in their psychological warfare arsenal.

As a result it would not behoove the Israeli government to deny involvement in the death of al-Mabhouh. At the same time the customs of international protocol prohibit claiming responsibility. So, the Israeli ForMin was right in neither denying nor accepting Mossad's role in the killing.

As long as studied ambiguity surrounds the Dubai Affair, no government other than that of Dubai is going to be particularly perturbed by the demise of Mr Mabhouh. He was a throughly unpleasant character with whom one dealt only because state policy required. If the Dubai chief of police had not been so personally annoyed by the blatant nature of the killing and the almost defiant way in which it was conducted, it is doubtful that anyone in the United Arab Emirates would have been disturbed by the event.

However, the chief has put his head on the line in the case so now other governments must as well. The British are taking the matter seriously. So also are the Irish and Germans. This means, at the least, a great show of "getting to the bottom of matters" must be made over the next few days and weeks. Ultimately, this may very well rebound to the overall diplomatic and political disadvantage of Israel--particularly if Mossad was involved even indirectly.

If Mossad was carrying out the instructions of its government, some very real soul searching is necessary. No, there is no need to contemplate the ethics of the killing: it was well deserved by the recipient. Rather, the "Institute" must re-examine its tendency toward an unfortunate and periodic exhibitionism. There is a reason for clandestine and covert operations--not to get caught, not to be indicted, and, most assuredly, not to be convicted even in the court of public opinion.

The "win" column for the spooks is headed by the capture of Mullah Baradar by a combination of CIA and the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI.) Baradar has been on the top of the capture list since December for the US. Killing him would have been OK but catching him was far preferable. Finally, a fortuitous happening apparently allowed CIA to connect all the relevant dots and, with ISI in tow, take the Mullah into durance vile.

The Pakistanis had a couple of good reasons to cooperate whole heartedly in the take down as not only has the US finally agreed to furnish them with (unarmed) small UAVs but Islamabad has come to realize that only by cooperating can they keep themselves in play for influence in Afghanistan following the defeat of Taliban. It appears the Pakistani government has decided that the US is likely to achieve its minimum necessary strategic goal of not-losing in Afghanistan and now is looking at how best to play the endgame.

Baradar is currently in Pakistani hands with CIA playing an observer role. This implies that the interrogation will be more robust than if the mullah were in American custody. The consequences in terms of organisational disruption for Taliban are likely to be severe and quite negative. Taken together with the ongoing Predator strikes and the offensive in Helmand province, the future for the Fearless Thugs of Taliban does not look as bright as it did a month or two ago.

It is unfortunate that the same cannot be said of Hamas in the aftermath of the killing of al-Mabhouh. But, in the world of spooks one out of two ain't half bad.

You Gotta Give al-Qaeda Credit

The 30 December hit on Forward Operating Base Chapman which resulted in the deaths of several highly experienced CIA officers including the Chief of Base (COB) represents a triumph for the Glorious Warriors of Martyrdom. The use of the Jordanian medic and long standing jihadi, Human al-Balawi, constituted an excellent example of a penetration operation conducted with both fine planning and exceptional attention to detail as well as a degree of patience which would have done credit to the Chinese.

The successful detonation of the bomb concealed on his person by the physician turned suicide bomber also represents a dramatic failure by CIA in following the basic rules of tradecraft. There is nothing mysterious about tradecraft. It is a combination of slightly paranoiac commonsense and good criminal procedure.

First and foremost tradecraft depends upon never trusting anyone--other than one's closest associates--completely. Or, to use the translated Russian proverb so beloved by Ronald Reagan, "Trust--but verify." In working a human source--which is what al-Balawi was supposed to be--it is an imperative that the source have face time only with his controller. Sure, there can be very occasional exceptions to that basic requirement, but the idea of allowing a double agent--which is what al-Balawi was--in close proximity with several officers including the COB is a major lapse.

No matter what hopes might have been placed on al-Balawi's capacity to play pointer to senior al-Qaeda personnel, no matter what assurances might have been provided by the General Intelligence Department in Jordan as to al-Balawi's new allegiances, he should have been handled only by his controller with other interested people viewing discretely. If it was absolutely essential, a second person, even the COB, might have entered the room with al-Balawi.

There is no doubt but most if not all double agents are prickly characters in need of constant reassurances, unending absolution, and careful psychological manipulation. Often the demands of a double are outrageous. Whenever possible they should be complied with. But, never, repeat never, at the risk of compromising security or the integrity of the totality of the operation.

If there was no way around allowing al-Balawi to not only meet in person but be in close physical proximity to a number of officers, then there should have been an appropriate trade-off. Imagine this dialogue:

Al-Balawi, "I must see them all. My information is too important."

Case officer controller, "Sure thing, but I have to pat you down first. Nothing personal, but I gotta follow regulations or my ass is grass. I'm sure you understand."

But this elementary precaution--a technique which was common in previous combat zones--was not followed. Presumably this lapse was due to the Agency's "lust for knowing" and the concomitant deep desire to finally put paid to some of the most obnoxious and able of al-Qaeda's senior personnel.

It is easy to understand how lust could overpower the necessary caution of tradecraft when one considers that the Chief of Base had spent eight years as a full time chaser of Islamist jihadists. There is no doubt but she wanted desperately to nail one or more al-Qaeda heavyweights to the barn door.

Another factor which might have contributed to the temporary (but quite fatal) lapse of reason is the nature of the relationship between CIA and Jordan's GID. It has existed for years. Since long, long before al-Qaeda came into existence, since before the Six Day War, the Agency has had a fine working relationship with GID. The relation has survived any number of political strains as well as the death of King Hussein. Undoubtedly there was a great desire not to give any offense to a close ally, particularly given the ability and critical utility of the GID to US intelligence services.

Yet the Jordanians had only had possession of al-Balawi for a little less than a year. Considering the depth of al-Balawi's public commitment to Islamism, to jihad, as well as the fact that he loathed, hated, detested Israel to a degree which bordered on monomania, nine or ten months is a remarkably short time to accomplish a 180 degree reversal in a man's values and motives.

Al-Balawi and his al-Qaeda controllers were able to deceive Jordan's intelligence personnel completely. This is to the credit of the enemy. That the Agency took GID assurances at face value is a discredit to the American spooks.

"Trust--but verify!"

Presumably the Agency did some verification. It is self-evident that whatever independent measures might have been employed by Langley, they were not enough. Admittedly, how much is enough is a very subjective judgement call based upon a large number of contextual and personal considerations. The still small voice embodied in tradecraft always whispers, "Err on the side of caution."

In this case the Agency's people in the field did not. They died as a result.

Death in the world of the spooks is a reality. There is a wall filled with commemorative plaques in Langley which attests to that ground truth. Just like any military service, an intelligence organization sucks it up and presses on after taking losses. As is the case in the military it is essential that the dead be memorialized not simply with plaques, medals, or speeches but by an accurate understanding of what went wrong so that proper action can be taken to prevent future losses.

In this case the lessons learned are simple. The first is one must always follow the most cautious application of tradecraft. The second is: "Trust--but verify!"

Connecting The Dots Ain't That Easy

In the never ending and totally predictable political sports of Pointing The Finger and Passing The Blame as well as Cover Your Posterior, the expectable has happened. The President of the United States has moved to exonerate Janet Napolitano and her Heimatsicherheitsamt while shifting the onus to "systemic failure" in general and CIA in particular. His flunkies (unidentified but termed "senior") opined that the dots were all there but no one connected them properly until after Christmas Day.

Yup, the dots were all there. No doubt about it. The Underwear Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was surrounded by dots. The National Security Council intercepts referred to "the Nigerian" and, famously, Abudulmutallab's father warned the US embassy personnel in Nigeria of his fears regarding his son's "radicalization." All these occurred in a context which gave Yemen pride of place as the new center of Islamist jihadi terrorism.

Lots of dots.

The problem is not that there were too few dots. Rather the difficulty which confronts every intelligence agency analyst (beyond too many layers of "coordination" and "review") is simply that their universe is comprised of nothing but dots. Lots of dots. Oodles and gobs of dots. Often the dots are smudgy, hazy or flatly contradictory. The venue of an intelligence analyst is rather like one of those French pointillist paintings viewed from close up.

Dots on top of dots. Dots of different sizes. Dots of different colors. Nothing but dots. It is enough to drive one dotty on the best of days. And, the best of days are few and very far between.

It is simple, attractive, and a species of cheap shot for some "senior" administration official or other political hack to tie the tail of blame to the cat of intelligence. It is also, in the longer run, not constructive. As the record shows from the Vietnam War period, unjustified criticism like rejecting intelligence appreciations which do not match political or personal expectations leads to a weakening of the intelligence process and a pollution of the intelligence product.

This does not mean that room for improvement does not exist. It always does. New and more effective ways to see significant patterns in the blizzard of dots as well the distribution of product to all consumer agencies are always both necessary and under development. (Not that most of these mean the view from the worm's eye level of the analyst becomes necessarily more prescient, more precise, or more rapid since the production of dots always exceeds the development of new "dot management" techniques.)

There is little, if any, utility in more presidential or congressional reviews or investigations. All these do (if history is the reliable guide it normally is) will be the manufacture of new, redundant, and typically encumbering levels of "review" and "coordination."

In the case of the Underwear Bomber like that of the Shoe Bomber eight years ago, the combination of inept bomb manufacture and passengers possessed of a healthy instinct for self-preservation and quick reflexes made up for deficiencies in "dot management." The realities of life indicate that the same sort of terminal protection will have to suffice in the future as it has in the past.

This gloomy view is not predicated upon any lack of respect for the always developing capacity of the intelligence community or a similar absence of faith in new security technology, but rather in the historically rooted contention that the bad guys, the Islamst jihadist terrorists, have the initiative. Fortunately, the most recent example of al-Qaeda skill shows that while the initiative is there and is powerfully reinforced by the processes of ideological radicalization, the skill level is low--at least in the critical area of explosive detonation. The extent to which this fortunate low ability level is the consequence of the American and other countries' efforts to disrupt and destroy terrorist entities is arguable.

The Underware Bomber is behind us. But the problem of connecting dots is not. This reality is equally present in countering the ongoing threats of terror and formulating a policy regarding Iran and its regime.

The one year deadline set by President Obama is about up. Certainly, the Iranians have made no move toward compliance with the relevant UN Security Council demands. If President Obama is to be taken at his word, push-comes-to-shove time will be upon us long before the first birds of Spring--even here in the Southwest.

Connecting the dots on Iran is even more difficult than identifying the right "Nigerian" and pointing at the correct Christmas Attack chattered about on numerous al-Qaeda oriented websites. It is also (pace those on board NW 253) far more important to the future of the US and the world generally.

Complicating the problem of connecting the massively differing and contradictory dots from within Iran is the twin difficulty of connecting the dots which might indicate the direction which will be taken by both Russia and China without whose cooperation more sanctions will be as much of a waste as their predecessors have proven to be. The questions of just what the Men of the Kremlin and the Gnomes of Beijing are up to equals in importance the questions regarding the stability and desperation of the Mullahs in Tehran.

While a fair amount of public speculation has occurred regarding the relations of sanctions, the opposition, and the mullahocracy, there has been no duplication of that with respect to the latest Russian gambit and the ever more in-your-face attitude of the Chinese government. Yet the stances of both Russia and China are central to connecting the dots on the matter of Iranian political will in the face of domestic opposition which is not fading away and the seemingly resolute rhetoric emanating from the Obama White House.

One factor that cannot be in doubt is the evident belief on the part of both Vladimir Putin and the Chinese leadership alike holding that President Obama is fundamentally weak of both mind and will.

In his effort to hold the pending Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty hostage, Vladimir Putin is betting that the airhead Obama vision of a nuclear weapons free world is so compelling to the president that further concessions can be wrested from the American side. This cynical but far from unrealistic opinion is reinforced by the strong US need for full Russian compliance with any new sanction regime imposed upon Iran. Given the continued asymmetry between American and Russian nuclear capacities, the gambit is well worth the gamble.

If anything the Chinese are playing a stronger hand that the Russians. Their cooperation is utterly essential. Considering that China dictated the course of play in Copenhagen earlier this month and came away victorious and giving proper thought to the amount of US debt held by Beijing, their diplomats play a very strong hand. Further militating against any genuine cooperation with the US on the Iran question is both their investments in the country and their disapproval of internal opposition (to say nothing of external support for such opposition).

Right now, some very unfortunate analysts are trying to connect the dots on the questions of "Probable Russian (Chinese) Courses of Action In Response to An American Course of Action." As neither country is transparent, the dots will be notable in both their density and contradictory nature. In that the success or failure of Obama administration policy regarding Iran hangs on the final pattern discerned (or imposed) by the analysts, this task is more difficult and far more critical than was that of identifying the Underwear Bomber before he boarded the flight to Detroit.

Now, unfortunately, the assorted analytical prognosticators are laboring under the added pressure of investigations and reviews--and damnation from the All Highest. Their efforts and our future would have been far better served if Mr Obama had stuck to improving his golf game rather than attacking those whose efforts are so critical to his policies.

Israel Declared Terminal--More Or Less

There is a yarn running around the web. The yarn first came out last March and died quickly and very quietly. However, it is back with a vengeance spurred no doubt by the Goldstone Report and its adoption by the UN Human Rights Council.

The original source of the yarn in both its original and latest incarnations is Press TV, the state owned organ of the mullahs of Tehran. It has been picked up and built upon by both Arab and Far Left sites. The links are examples. A more inclusive list would tire the Geek's arthritic fingers.

Allegedly, per a man named Franklin Lamb, who is identified by Press TV as "an international lawyer," CIA did a study on the future of Israel. The study concluded that even with US support and assistance Israel as it currently exists has a life expectancy of no more than twenty years.

The reasoning according to Lamb and his assorted interpreters residing behind the pessimistic assessment is predicated upon two factors. One of these is the increasing willingness of Americans generally to accept a "one-state" as opposed to the current "two-state" solution to the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second is demographics, specifically the great disparity between Arab and Israeli lactation rates.

These two factors combine in a synergistic fashion with the American emphasis on democracy to assure that Israel will become a secular or at least a non-Jewish state governed by the Arab Muslim majority. Lamb and others take notice of the number of Israelis who hold dual citizenship--including some half million who are Americans as well as Israelis.

Commentators argue that the coming Arab majority will push many Israelis to invoke the other half of their dual citizenship capacity to leave Israel for the US, Russia, and other destinations. The initial CIA report purportedly makes reference to the "unexpectedly" rapid collapse of the White minority regime in South Africa and the equally "unexpected" implosion of the former Soviet Union to justify the conclusions of the impending death of Israel.

Leaving aside the degree of "unexpectedness" in both cited historical precedents, it is fair to look at the differences between Israel and either South Africa under White rule or the Soviet Union. While those who are passionately anti-Israel might wish it otherwise, the Jewish state is not dependent upon pure coercion to maintain its coherence. Both White dominated South Africa and the old Soviet Union were completely dependent upon the power of the state to coerce their citizens into obedience.

For many decades the Soviet Union and South Africa also relied upon the appeal of a specific ideology. In both cases the faith attenuated over time leaving only naked force to continue the status quo.

Israel relies upon both ideology and religious conviction to uphold social and political coherence within its population. The secular ideologies of democracy, free enterprise, and liberal institutions such as an independent judiciary, a free press, and universal education link well with the ancient tenets of a faith which has been tested repeatedly during centuries of persecution and attempted eradication. The several pillars of belief which unify the Israeli population also connect the Israelis with both coreligionists and ideological affiliates around the world.

This means that the government of Israel does not have to rely upon force alone to maintain its existence--or that of the state. Force is needed not for domestic security and regime maintenance purposes but rather for deterring or defeating external threats. This is not at all akin to the situations which existed in the years prior to collapse in either South African or the Soviet Union.

The Geek has to admit he has read some really, really out-to-lunch assessments coming from CIA. To the best of his knowledge and belief he has never run across one which ignored basic realities such as the vast gulf between the internal dynamics of Israel and both South Africa and the Soviet Union which are alleged to exist in the cited report. While it is possible that the Agency has been hiring the mentally incompetent in recent years, it does seem unlikely.

Rather the eager resuscitation of the March Press TV story is based in the reinvigorated desire on the part of the anti-Israel players around the world to further the cause of delegitimizing the Jewish state. The Goldstone Report, or to err on the side of accuracy, the adoption and forwarding to the Security Council of a resolution based on a part of the Report by the UNHRC, has given a new and improved impetus to the campaign of delegitimization.

The Obama administration and many on the Left of the American political spectrum are both frustrated with the state of play in the Mideast and willing to see Israel as the reason. It is as if the administration and others expect "more" from the civilized, Western Israelis than they do from the comparatively speaking uncivilized Arabs.

Leaving aside the arrogance and patronization implicit in this attitude, the emphasis on Israel's responsibility for the deadlock in the "peace process" is simply factually wrong. While the Israelis are far from guiltless in the blocking of peace, the Arabs still hold the record for both poor negotiating capacities and sheer cussed intransigence.

The Arabs--and not simply those who fall under the rubric of "Palestinians"--now want the US and the West to carry their water. The desire, hope, and apparent strategy of the Arab and Muslim countries is to force the West generally and the US in particular to wash their collective hands of the latest incarnation of the eternal "Jewish question."

Israel has never been seen as "legitimate" in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim countries. Nor will it ever be perceived of as being such. Not as long as the Koran is read and believed.

Now the Arab and Muslim states hope to transmit their view of Israel's inherent lack of legitimacy to the people and governments of the West. The recent growth of Israel bashing and flat out antisemitism in many Western countries has undoubtedly given much encouragement to the men behind the new strategy.

Antisemitism is never far below the surface in any Western country including the US. (The Geek remembers well when his best friend in high school was rejected by an Ivy League college because the institution had already admitted its full quota of "those of the Hebrew faith.") It is easy to invoke a stylishly covered form of antisemitism by re-branding Israel as "fascist" or "Nazi" or "apartheid."

It is even easier to indict Israel as a genocidal power intent on committing crimes against humanity. This is the true import of the UNHRC adoption of a carefully selected portion of the Goldstone Report. It is also the import of the presumably "leaked" CIA "death-of-Israel" study.

The play given to the Lamb revelations by Press TV and other Arab/Muslim outlets both on the web and in more traditional modes is to be expected. After all, these states and people have opposed Israel since the very earliest days of Zionism. Having proved repeatedly their own incompetence at ejecting the Israelis by force or terror, it is not surprising they now hope to make the West--most importantly, the US--the executioner of Arab dreams.

What is truly pathetic--not surprising--simply pathetic is the eagerness with which the American political Left has embraced the Arab/Muslim cause.

It is pathetic because Israel was established by European Leftists. It's vision was that of European Socialists. The country initially prospered because of Leftists. Its strongest supporters in the US were from the Left. During the Eisenhower administration the Democratic Party, particularly the Left segment, repeatedly excoriated the President for his principled refusal to supply weapons to the new state of Israel. When Ike blew the whistle on the Franco-British-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, the Democratic standard bearer, Stevenson, criticized the decision harshly.

Even during the Great Land Grab War of 1967, the American (and European) Left loudly sang the praises of the IDF. The Arab states got no comfort from the democratic Left anywhere outside of France. They certainly received no support from the American Left. The Yom Kippur War six years later saw the same resounding support for Israel from the American Left--even the farthest fringes.

With a remarkable amnesia, the Left has abandoned this heritage. With an utter lack of both consistency and principles, the Left, even the moderate Left, has rushed to the cause of "Palestine" and the "Palestinians." They have warmly embraced the feudalists of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and the authoritarians of Egypt, Syria, and Iran. They have kissed and made up with the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah--and of Fatah (or the Palestinian National Authority, if you insist.)

In the process, the Left has given the finger to the Israelis, to democracy, liberal institutions, and social justice. If that isn't pathetic, then the Geek does not know the meaning of the word.

Let's Feed CIA To The "Progressives"

While President Obama is hiding behind Attorney-General Holder in this despicable affair, there is no getting around the unpleasant thought that the special prosecutor taking out after alleged CIA abuses and abusive officers (or contractors) is a matter of heaving a sacrifice to the progressive base and Progressive Caucus in Congress. All in the name of getting health care reform through even absent the so-called "public option."

The heavily redacted but still usable CIA Inspector General's report which serves, in part, to justify the special prosecutor's proceedings shows questionable tactics to be sure. But, more importantly it shows positive results. Even the MSM including those usually eager to join in eviscerating the Agency are willing to acknowledge this fact.

True, the negative leads, but for those willing to wade on through to the end, the accomplishments of the interrogation are noted. The Agency should have and did investigate the way over the edge zeal of some employees and contractors. The worst offenses were apparently stopped.

That should have been that. The episodes were finished, over, done with. Even the Nice Young Man From Chicago seemed to go along with that during his high visibility visit to Langley some months ago. At that time he seemed, appeared to, kind of, sort of, commit himself and his administration to not persecuting (oops! Bad Geek!) that is prosecuting officers and others who complied with the legal opinions issued by the relevant lawyers for guidance. There was no mention of going after those who might have, in the very real heat of the moment, let the need for actionable information outweigh the fine points of legal debate.

The Geek is not without personal familiarity with the difficulties of interrogating very highly motivated, very experienced individuals deeply hostile to the US. While his approach did not include the various techniques authorized by the Bush/Cheney administration legal personnel let alone include the objectionable add-ons mentioned in the IG's report, he is not prepared to condemn those who went over the edge.

There is no reason to disbelieve that the urgencies of the moment seemed in the best judgement of those conducting the interrogations to demand the use of every means short of damaging physical torture necessary to acquire the necessary information. These people were not simple minded sadists, nor were they threatening for the joy of doing so. No. They were under the clear pressure of time and the urgent need to both protect the US and Americans from possible harm and to better understand the structure and nature of the command and operational echelons of al-Qaeda and Taliban.

As is the general case in military jurisprudence regarding both proportionality and the infliction of civilian casualties, the central matter is intent. If the commander and those under his command had no intent to use disproportionate means nor inflict civilian casualties, than any harm which occurs is held to be incidental, not intended: not a crime.

Poor supervision, lack of clear guidance as mentioned in the IG report do not constitute a criminal intent. Nor do the methods employed in and of themselves. In this matter, the matter of interrogating hostile prisoners, the core issue up and down the chain of command as well as on the part of the person conducting the interrogation is simply intent.

There is no indication of any intent to violate either law or customs of war. While the actual conduct of interrogations may not be the most sharply defined area of the laws and customs of war, and the Agency is not one which is specifically military, the same thinking should, no, must be employed.

That was the case during the Bush/Cheney administration. And, it appeared to be the case with the Obama administration until the past few days. The current Director of Central Intelligence must have been very well aware of the new direction in which the wind was blowing.

Leon Panetta is a consummate Washington insider. He well knows how the game is played. He knows that the progressives in and out of congress are in a hissy-fit over the presumed junking of the "public option" in the health care overhaul bill. He knows that bones have to be thrown to the ravening horde of progressives in return for any backsliding on letting the federal government take over health care.

Not only did this ultimate insider not act to protect the Agency--his Agency--he acted to presage the current Roman circus. He ran panting and sweating to Congress and media over a program which never was, breathless with indignation and fermenting in purity of mind and soul.

Leon The Gutless is more than simply willing to see the emasculation of the Agency even though the threats it confronts daily are not waning but rather still waxing. He is willing to place the Agency on the chopping block if it will protect the president from the ire of the "progressives."

Without even the transient justifications which allowed William Colby to turn over the "family jewels" to the Church and Pike committees a third of a century ago, Panetta is willing to see the long knives plunged into the back of a very, very important outfit: CIA. This is not only politics at its most base, it is a short-sighted act of self-inflicted defeat for the nation. In a time of war.

President Obama knows all of this. His spineless hiding behind the man he appointed Attorney-General is the act of a politician from Chicago--not an American president. The President is ably supported in his exercise in feeding the base by two other unscrupulous politicians for whom the success of the Agenda of Transformation is far, far more important than the well-being and safety of Americans and America.

To call it shameful is entirely too mild, too forgiving. But, to be accurate would require a mastery of epithet far surpassing the Geek's ability.

A Disturbing (To Some) Fable

The first red of the dawn sun was breaking over the low hill at the east end of the valley. To each side the higher cliffs were already brilliant in the new day. A group of men are assembling in the courtyard surrounded by a low stone wall. To one side a stone and adobe building spreads. From a door a tall, thin man emerges.

He walks to the front of the group, now formed in three rough lines. The man spreads a rug before him. The others do likewise. Facing the sun which has now fully risen, the wraith like man keels. The men behind him do the same. The man slowly bows his forehead to the ground.

A convulsion runs though his bent body. His legs kick straight out behind. He falls, rolls to one side. The men behind him do not notice immediately.

A second later the man's body shudders again. His head blows apart, a melon under an invisible sledge hammer. Behind him a scream echoes to the mountains.

A kilometer or more away five men pack up their specialist equipment. The trigger puller, his spotter, the three man security detail, prepare to pull out of the hide they have occupied since the CIA officer and his two local "assets" piloted them in two nights earlier with assurances the target would be arriving.

"I've got an "abu" in the local force." The CIA man had said. "He hasn't been wrong yet. You can bet on it."

The trigger puller remembered thinking, "Yeah. I am. My life. And the lives of the other guys too."

It was high step it time now. High pucker factor. It won't take the turbans long to be out for blood. Two or three klicks down the mountain. A race between the team getting to the extraction point and the bad guys finding them.

A voice from hundreds, thousands? of miles away whispered in the team leader's ear. "The imagery is good. Looks like a clean cancel. An attaboy all the way around. Haul ass!"

"Roger that," the team leader whispered in reply. The team was already fast walking down the scree covered, bush laden slope.

And, so it might have been. This would have been one of the most desired outcomes had CIA gone beyond the initial planning stages and, after gaining all the requisite approvals from the Executive and Legislative branches, put the planning to work in the real world. This would have been the endgame of the program Congress never knew about.

Where's the problem? Who would not have approved of a well-thought out program to kill the leadership cadre of al-Qaeda or Taliban?

There was--and is--no need for the statutorily responsible committees of Congress to have been briefed on any tentative, never developed, never proposed for execution program to kill (or capture--have to put that option in for the squeamish) the command echelon of a group which has attacked the United States, killed its citizens, sent seismic waves of shock though its social, political and economic institutions. If the plan, the program had been fully developed on paper then there might have been a need to brief the Gang of Eight on its existence, its potential benefits--and risks.

There would have been a need to debate any ethical considerations, to discuss the legality of assassination. To consider the possible impact of the US effort and involvement, either direct or indirect, becoming public knowledge.

But, the idea of pushing the cancel button on al-Qaeda heavies up close and personal on the ground rather than through the distant, sanitary method of Predator delivered Hellfire missiles needed to be presented and approved if and only if its development had gone beyond, far beyond the very preliminary stages. Such was apparently not the case. The idea went nowhere.

CIA is no stranger when it comes to assassination. It took very heavy hits in public from the Church Committee for the planned attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. Lost in the chest-pounding over the morality of such efforts was a basic reality: The CIA did not initiate the plans for these killings and many in the Agency did not approve of killing high level political leaders fearing the destabilising consequences of doing so.

No such qualms existed with respect to the targeted killing of lower level political and military personnel. The Quang Ngai Special Platoon program and its very controversial follow-on, the Phoenix program did assassinations as part of the total effort to disrupt the organisation of the Viet Cong and National Liberation Front. On some occasions these assassinations were very effective. On others they were counterproductive.

If anyone at CIA reviewed the history of these activities during the Vietnam War they would have seen the plethora of problems concerning mounting operations intended to kill (or capture) designated hostile personnel. A review of the Israeli experience would have demonstrated the same mix of success and disaster, problems overcome and difficulties which killed the operation deader than the intended target ever could be.

Hard target kills are no easier from the ground than they are from the air. The same difficulties of information acquisition and rapidity of operation exist. The same problems of killing only the desired target exist as to the complications if the wrong person is aced or there is too much collateral death.

Ground operations carry a very real problem of deniability. No matter how carefully personnel are selected, trained, equipped, sanitised and inserted the chance of a team member being captured or a dead body being recovered and identified at least as to nationality exists. Nor does the use of foreign personnel obviate the difficulties. Further, foreign personnel often lack the reliability and motivation of US forces.

On balance there are any number of very sound reasons to consider and reconsider ground based hits. If the clandestine service people reviewed the mixed record of US activities in Vietnam they would have seen the pitfalls far outnumbered (and certainly outweighed in effectiveness) the successes. An unbiased appraisal of the overly celebrated Israeli "hit teams" would have reinforced this impression.

Quite simply, air delivered death is preferable to the ground borne sort. Predators with Hellfires may have the risk of killing the wrong person or too many people, but they are inherently non-provable. Absent a shot down pile of wreckage there is no way of verifying the sneaky Americans were out and about snuffing the odd hostile here and there.

Leon Pinetta's partisan effort to protect Nancy Pelosi from the consequences of shooting off her mouth in finest Joe Biden style along with the concomitant Progressive Caucus driven hue and cry for hearings on how that horrible CIA did this without telling us has two destructive results. The first is to assure that we will never use a ground team to target Osama or any of his senior level ilk. The second is worse.

Should anyone at any time in any place dust Osama or Omar or any of the assorted Abduls, Mohammads, and Abu Ya Fools who constitute the command echelon of any Islamist jihadist group, the soft-hearted and feeble minded as well as Islamist apologists everywhere will blame the US for the death. Uncle Sam will be excoriated not only in Islamist polluted countries but elsewhere for having stooped to assassination.

Suicide bombers are OK. Snipers are evil. An interesting way to parse violence and death.

Everyone Line Up--It's Time To Bash CIA

The Geek is glad he is not in the spook business. It's getting more dangerous to work for CIA than it is to go out for a meal in Peshawar. Try to do the job of obtaining time sensitive intelligence according to the rules du jour and some day you'll be looking for a lawyer as the Justice Department of a new administration tries to hang your butt from the highest yardarm to the applause of the "progressives" within We the People.

Then, if in a time of great panic such as the immediate aftermath of 9/11, should you be so bold as to come up with an idea for a "needed capacity" to counter terrorism and have the effrontery to keep it concealed from Congress at the direction of a secrecy freak Vice-President, the politicos of the Democratic Party and a goodly chunk of the MSM will howl as if you had both burned the Constitution and plotted a coup d'etat. It doesn't matter if the still undescribed program never went beyond the initial planning stage and that only in fits and starts. No siree, all that matters is that the evil three initial agency and the troglodyte veep were involved.

The performance of CIA Director Leon Panetta in this flap is, to say the least, both suspicious and unseemly. Mr Panetta, who has an unexcelled record in partisan politics of the most bare knuckled sort, seems to have moved with a speed and directness which was as unwarranted by the presumed threat to the Union as it is compelled by the needs of the Democratic Party, particularly the need to provide cover to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi concerning her allegations of having been kept in the dark and fed only horse poo-poo regarding waterboarding and the rest of the "intensive interrogation" panoply.

On the other hand if you play by all the Congressionally mandated rules such as those prohibiting using unseemly individuals as humint sources and, as a result, do not accurately predict hostile actions, then you will stand both accused and convicted of the high crime and misdemeanor of "intelligence failure." Or, because the rules established by Executive and Congress alike prohibit assassination, some high profile political figure will lambaste you for having failed to protect the Republic and, thus, failing to fulfill your oath of office.

It is no wonder that Janet Reno in one of her few trenchant comments accurately characterised CIA as suffering "battered child syndrome." Those folks just can't win no matter what they do.

The American intelligence community generally and CIA in particular have shown a distressingly high number of institutionally driven failures over the past several decades. Most of these have originated from a proliferation of intelligence community members, which brings with it turf battles, institutional agendas and related negative features. Still other failures have resulted from the excess of caution which has struck the agencies generally and CIA in particular in the years since the Vietnam War. Layers of committees, liaison groups, ad hoc working groups have conspired with the growth of a CYA bureaucratic mentality to make assessments ever more fuzzy, increasingly Delphic, and decreasingly useful to decision makers.

One longs for the days when a brilliant senior analyst such as Dr Sherman Kent, the Director of the Office of National Estimates, could write an assessment which ran counter to the desires of the chief consumer of intelligence, the president, which was clear, internally consistent, well-documented, and absolutely bang-on. That the president decided to reject the intelligence and follow his own inclinations is not the responsibility of either Dr Kent or CIA.

During the Vietnam War, CIA became increasingly the non-team player of the spook community. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon became ever more frustrated with the Agency's lack of team spirit and finally stopped reading product they did not find agreeable. As a result CIA massaged the data, weakened the conclusions, and fuzzed up the analyses in an attempt to meet with presidential favor. This was a blunder of world class proportions.

Another blunder which severely damaged, even permanently impaired the Agency was the Congressional hue and cry over actions taken by CIA at the behest and direction of presidents ranging from Eisenhower to Nixon and including Democratic icon JFK. These actions and programs were quite understandable and even appropriate in the context of the Cold War as perceived by the the men in the Oval. Nonetheless in the wake of the defeat in Vietnam and the self-inflected wound of the Watergate Affair, the revelations of the so-called "family jewels" to the Church and Pike Committees filled the nostrils of Americans with a foul stench.

The stench adhered improperly to the Agency which did the work not the presidents who ordered the work be done. An uncritical media and less than candid politicians were ready, no, eager to portray the CIA as a policy making body rather than the policy executing entity it actually is. The end result was to convince We the People that the folks in Spookville were a bunch of dangerous rogues who needed the closest supervision by the presumably responsible adults of Congress.

Without close supervision and a tight leash, the people of CIA were a clear and present danger to the Republic. We the People were quite willing to believe this utterly wrong view since to most of us the activities of an agency tasked with, among many other things, espionage and clandestine activities, must be filled with psychological monsters of the worst sort. After all, who other than a warped individual would deal in treachery, suborn treason, steal secrets and, when ordered to do so, conspire to overthrow the government of a foreign power?

Given the abuse which included the infamous action by President Carter and his CIA Director, Stan Turner, in ridding the Agency of its "deadwood," which included some of the most experienced covert and clandestine operators, it is not surprising that the spooks coiled in on themselves. CIA went into a form of fetal position with committees proliferating and caution becoming the watchword.

The Reagan administration slowed but did not reverse this trajectory. CIA was used properly in the opening years of the proxy war in Afghanistan but its assets were wasted on the poor policy choices made by the Reaganites in Central America. By the time the dust was settling and the Cold War entering the pages of history, CIA was remembered for its failures (eg it didn't get the implosion of the Soviet empire right) rather than its successes (for example, don't turn Afghanistan over to the Pakistanis.)

Now CIA gets some grudging credit for the results of such direct actions as the use of armed Predators in the FATA. (An interesting side note. In the old days, CIA did the same sort of thing in, for example, Southeast Asia, using its paramilitary capacity. This was latter the recipient of much congressional opprobrium during the days when Frank Church rode high.) On the other hand, CIA is damned for having used unsubtle techniques to obtain time sensitive information from captured enemy personnel and running "secret" prisons in assorted distant places.

Unfortunately, it will be a mort of years before currently classified intelligence estimates regarding critical topics such as pre-invasion and post-invasion Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the totality of the hostile Iranian programs will be available to historians. Starting twenty and more years after the fact, historians came into possession of Vietnam era estimates and prognostications. Those of CIA are, retrospectively, the most accurate and honest of all the products of all the competing members of the "intelligence community."

The same may well be true regarding contemporary topics of concern. It may prove that the controversial actions of intensive interrogation, off-shore prisons, extraordinary renditions, and even the unknown but never brought to the real world program presently causing such bloviation were necessary, even essential.

In short, Congress and Attorney General Holder are poorly advised to start bashing and seeking indictments when so little is known not only about the programs, but, more importantly, the results of these taken in the context of the gestalt of the intelligence picture over the past decade or so. The Republic is less endangered by the spooks than it is by politicians and media in need of a quick fix of publicity and artificially engendered public fears.

The High Minded Are At It Again--For Good And Ill

The Geek rarely agrees with the sentiments expressed by the High Minded and Lofty Thinking of the world. Personal and professional experience extending over many decades spent mucking about in the dreck of realpolitick have made him suspicious of those afflicted by Idealism.

There are times, however, when a finely honed sense of realism, of at least a realistic appreciation of US national and strategic interests forces the Geek (uncomfortably) to share a bed with at least some of the High Minded wallahs of the world. The most recent enforced bed-sharing comes about as a result of the impending Durban II conference starting Monday in Geneva.

Iain Levine, the program director for Human Rights Watch is dead on target with his call for the Obama administration to participate in the conference despite the strong reservations held by the US regarding even the latest revision of the Outcome Document. Levine is particularly correct when he cautions against surrendering the field to Iranian Orator-in-Chief Ahemdinejad.

To be absent from the gathering is a backhanded form of appeasement. By refusing to challenge the anti-libertarian philosophy expressed by the likes of Ahmedinejad is to hold silence in the face of evil. And, as was once famously said, "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to keep silent."

Racism wherever and whatsoever color practiced is an evil. This is equally true whether the hydra headed beast goes under the name of Jim Crow laws or anti-Semitism or countering "religious defamation." Ahmedinejad is no better than such legendary American bigots as George Wallace and Senator Bilbo. Suppression of free expression under the rubric of protecting religion is no better, no less evil than book burning of so-called "Jewish" literature by the Nazis.

US national interest demands that we not remain silent in the face of the new forms of racism, the latest expressions of anti-Semitism, the post-modern assault on free expression. US national interest demands that we not allow forces and countries hostile to us and the rest of the West hijack concepts and ideals for which countless lives have been lost over generations. The US has a responsibility not only to its own interests but to the best hopes of people everywhere that we not abandon the Geneva arena to the forces of a repressive crew fearful of the exchange of ideas and the existence of people not under their sway.

A realistic appreciation of America's place in the world now and in the future demands that we do no less than wage the good fight in Geneva. The oppressed of the world can and should expect no less of us.

Comes now Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. By definition (or at least job title) the Austrian born Nowak is one of the High Minded and Lofty Thinking. He has made the news by accusing President Obama of having broken international law by refusing to prosecute those intelligence officers who acted in good faith under the legal guidance provided by the Department of Justice and engaged in the forms of intensive interrogation which may legitimately be defined as torture.

The president made the controversial decision to publish the critical memos from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department which gave the color of law to techniques which are both inherently very harsh and capable of abuse so as to cross the hazy border into the land of torture. In the wake of these disclosures (to say nothing of the disgustingly sanitary and pettifogging language in which they are couched) the High Minded of the US and other countries have been baying after the blood of those who employed the approved techniques.

The Geek can testify from personal experience that none of the techniques are at all pleasant. Quite the contrary, taken alone or in concert, they are all highly unpleasant. They are meant to be. They are, literally, calculated to make spies talk. That is why they are employed as a part of training for men at risk for capture, to give them some taste of what might come so that they are better equipped to resist.

In a training setting there is no way these techniques can be considered as torture. The person on whom they are inflicted knows damn well that he is not going to die. He has cost the government too much time and money to train to be allowed to die before getting to the field. On top of this he knows he can cry "Uncle" at any time and the game is over--along with his field career (perhaps.)

The situation in one of the now (in)famous CIA black prisons is quite different. The captive has no reasonable expectation that the Americans will suffer him to live. And, the only avenue available to the captive to end the torment is betrayal of his cause and colleagues.

The Geek would not have used these means of persuasion even if ordered. Way back when, the Geek knew others in his line of work who made the opposite choice, but he was certain that his methods, while slower, were more certain of producing useful catch.

Having said that, it necessary to assert that the Geek is not given to judging whether or not the intensive methods were necessary or justifiable in their recent application. Only by finding out if time-sensitive, actionable intelligence which was effectively employed by US or friendly forces to interdict a threat can a decision on utility and necessity be rendered.

Criminal prosecutions such as those demanded by the High Minded are not the proper way to find out what benefits may have accrued by increased national security from the use of means which (arguably) equal torture. Neither trials nor public Truth and Justice Commissions will be able to ascertain with effect the necessity of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, monotonous diet or any of the other techniques.

Once Janet Reno, the Clinton administration's Attorney General remarked that CIA exhibited "battered child syndrome." It was a place of fearful people, inhibited from taking actions necessary to secure information let alone perform clandestine operations necessary for the protection of American national and strategic interests. What Herr Nowak and others of the High Minded and Lofty Thinking brigade want is the production of a climate which brings not only CIA but all components of the US Intelligence Community back to the level of battered children.

Intelligence officers must not be risk averse if they are to perform their jobs effectively. They must do unpleasant things with unpleasant people in unpleasant parts of the world. The collection of much (perhaps most) of the truly critical intelligence information regarding the capabilities and intentions of the adversaries demands working with people in very base conditions and for ends which can objectively be evaluated as base.

After all the stock in trade of the intelligence officer is the inducement of betrayal, the suborning of treason. This is not a pleasant reality to contemplate. It is hard enough for those who have been there and done it to acknowledge. It is infinitely harder for the High Minded who live in a shielded world to consider as either necessary or proper.