Carrying Water And Doublethinking

Leon Panetta is an old Chicago pol.  He came of political age as a cog in the oldest, longest running, smoothest operating machine in the US--the Cook County Democratic Party.  As such, he knows well the primary duty of a machine man--loyalty to the Boss.  By definition the Boss is the Nice Young Man From Chicago, Barack Obama.

Only the overarching requirement of loyalty could have impelled the new Secretary of Defense as he moved from his old job of DCIA to announce that the defeat of al-Qaeda was "within reach."  Only days later Mr Panetta demonstrated the requisite degree of doublethink when he thundered against the possibility of doubling the 400 billion dollar cut in the next decade's defense budget under the debt ceiling increase deal.

Given that the American participation in the Great Adventure in Regime Change in Iraq is in its death throws and the rush to the exit has started in Afghanistan, the new SecDef is perfectly well aware that the costs of war will go down as well which will allow for significant decreases in the Pentagon expenditures without a single real cut in procurement or force size.  And, if his statement regarding the impending end of al-Qaeda is taken at face value, the need for the large security establishment created in the immediate wake of 9/11 and the consequent decisions of George W. Bush evaporates as well.  If al-Qaeda does well and truly turn its collective toes to the sky, the need for mountains of money marked "For the Pentagon" goes away.

Presumably, the end of al-Qaeda would allow the US to return to the (relatively) lower levels of defense appropriations which characterized the days prior to 9/11.  In that case, Panetta should quit his bitchin' and find a few additional programs to cut so as to please his Boss properly.

Of course, the Panetta Dictum regarding the morbidity of al-Qaeda like the rumors of Mark Twain's death is greatly exaggerated.  Al-Qaeda is not dead.  It is not on some sort of Islamic life support.  It is not even gravely ill.

The real deal of which Leon the Loyal must be completely aware considering his previous job as well as his daily access to the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief (as well as the Presidential Intelligence Brief) is that al-Qaeda has morphed.  It has changed profoundly from its original form.  Most critically, it is far more of a threat in its current incarnation than it was in the Bad Old Days.

In the far distant Eocene of 2001, al-Qaeda was a small, hierarchical organization with a tight command and control system.  It was dependent upon Osama bin Laden as inspiration, decision maker, leader, and chief fund raiser.  None of this obtains today.  Nor has it obtained for some time.  Long before bin Laden went to Paradise, the "Base" had fissioned, decentralized, become far more of an idea than an institution.

Just as American doctrine and tactics changed under the stresses of real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so also have the operational concepts and organizational methods of the al-Qaeda predicated practitioners of violent political Islam.  Arguably, the Mighty Men of the Koran have changed more radically and more effectively than have the armed forces of the US.

The most obvious feature of the new, improved "al-Qaeda" is the spawning of franchises.  Both al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) are obvious spin-offs or imitators of the famed original.  "Allied" groups such as al-Shabaab in Somalia may not use the old brand name but exist as self-conscious copies of Osama's group.  It is a brute fact that AQAP has become a larger threat to the civilized states than the ragged band of drone pressed fugitives headed by al-Zawihiri lurking in either the stone huts of the FATA or living in relative comfort in anonymous houses in some sprawling Pakistani city.

The far more important change in the universe of violent political Islam is the transformation of the old al-Qaeda brand into a metaphysical idea.  This coupled with the elevation of bin Laden from a jihadi ideal to the Perfect Martyred Warrior of the Prophet has provided the intellectual substrate for the emergence of powerfully motivated "lone wolf" terrorists.

In this context it is important to recall that war, all war, exists first as an idea.  It matters not in the least what type of war or what level of intensity, war is first and foremost an intellectual construct.  The now dead or captured theorists of Islamist martyrdom operations along with bin Laden have provided a basic set of ideas which define asymmetrical warfare from the point of view of the advocate of violent political Islam.  These ideas have been enlarged, filled out, and spread by the assorted jihadist websites as well as videotaped sermons (and hectoring) by Muslim clerics.  Many of these Men of the Islamic Cloth are quite unknown in the West.  Others, most notably Anwar al-Awlacki, are nearly household names throughout the civilized states.

Self-radicalization facilitated by the web and the arguments of clerics great and small, well known and unknown alike has become the major feature of the current version of al-Qaeda.  Individuals or very small groups of self-radicalized adherents of violent political Islam represent a very real threat to the civilized states as well as a quite meaningful challenge to security and law enforcement agencies.  The several high profile arrests of wannabe "martyrs," the spectacular failures of the Underwear Bomber and the Times Square Bomber, or the quick police follow-up on the alert gun shop clerk in Kileen, Texas do not militate against the reality of the jihadist threat or the thinness of the margin between tragedy and tragedy narrowly averted.

Of course, crowd sourced terror does not exist alone.  In addition to the ideological support provided by the memes originating with al-Qaeda 1.0 and the effective tools of self-radicalization and not completely irrelevant instruction in the practical considerations of waging one man wars on the West, there exist potent and growing al-Qaeda facsimiles.  AQAP has been acknowledged properly as the single largest threat.  AQIM is growing.  Rapidly.

The senior French investigative judge holding the counterterrorism brief has issued a reassuring nostrum to the effect that AQIM does not represent a threat to Europe.  This pronouncement is rather like patting the hoi polloi gently and telling them not to worry their pretty little (empty) heads about terrorism, that the adults in the government know better.  In this way M.Marc Trevidic echoed Panetta's declaration of al-Qaeda's impending death.  Feel good words which belie the substance of reality.

AQIM has extended its reach to Nigeria.  Kidnapping Europeans.  This is an expansion of their reach with the view to forcing changes in European policy.  In short, it is terror of the violent political Islamic sort.  Operations in Nigeria taken in conjunction with the local Islamist group would have been unthinkable a year ago.  Now, the action shows a growing potential to strike Europeans if not Europe.  There is every reason to believe that by this time next year AQIM will rival AQAP as a threat to the West generally.

Al-Shabaab may have evacuated Mogadishu, but that is not a sign of its defeat regardless of what the imitation government of Somalia may say.  Rather, the real potential of al-Shabaab was demonstrated by its set of highly lethal attacks in Uganda last year.  Al-Shabaab has tight links with AQAP as well as a ready source of English speaking recruits in Somali refugee communities in the US.  It is one more rapidly growing threat.

Of his two contradictory statements, Panetta was much closer to the truth when he warned against overly dramatic cuts in the Pentagon budge.  He must know that ten years from now the US will be engaged heavily even if not with conventional forces on the ground.  He must be aware perfectly that the war against the advocates of violent political Islam will be ongoing in 2022 as it is today.  Probably on a larger scale geographically.

Panetta may be a good machine politician, but he is also an American.  Doublethink like loyalty to a misguided Boss has its limits.  When push comes to shove as it must in the next few months, it is likely that the Secretary of Defense will fight with all the political skills he possesses to assure the the US has the means necessary to continue the fight against the forces of violent political Islam until the civilized states finally win.

Leon Panetta came a very long way during his years as DCI.  That was a surprise to any and all who have personal acquaintanceship with the mindset of typical Chicago pols.  It has been obvious that Panetta has learned that there is a wide and dark world out there,  that the limits of Cook County are not the limits of the US, that the interests of the machine are transcended by the interests of the US.  If a bit of experience can manufacture that level of miraculous transformation, it is not impossible that a few months running the Pentagon and talking more and more often with commanders responsible for the lives of those under them will carry the transformation to the next step--a Leon Panetta who is willing and ready to drop his Boss's water bucket in the higher cause of the country as a whole.

A Couple Of Good Personnel Choices

President Obama--or, to err on the side of accuracy--Secretary of Defense Robert Gates deserve a strong thumbs-up for two specific decisions on personnel.  One is the move of Leon Panetta from CIA to SecDef.  The other is tabbing Marine LtGen John Allen to take over the supreme command in Afghanistan.

Panetta, like Gates, has a long and distinguished record in Washington.  More to the point, Panetta has spent the last two years immersed in the realities of the threats confronting the US now or in the near to mid-term.  It is this latter consideration which makes Panetta the only real contender to follow Gates to the Pentagon.  With his knowledge of the dark sides of the world, Panetta is best equipped to argue budget cuts which will leave the US in the best possible position to honor commitments and defend its national and strategic interests.  Panetta is prepared in all essential respects to hold an open debate on American priorities and absolute requirements as the budgetary considerations demand a shrinkage of the Pentagon's budget by at least four hundred billion dollars over the next decade.

The great fear of Gates and all other reasonably knowledgeable observers has been an across the board cut which would result in all defense capacities being hollowed out equally.  This would leave the US without sufficient capabilities in any area either to honor obligations to treaty partners or to deter and defeat threats to national interests.  It would leave the US without the muscle necessary to support diplomacy in all its myriad forms.

Gates has been in favor of an open debate, a far reaching one by necessity over the stance of American military forces.  Such a debate will be messy, unpleasant, ideological in all too many ways, and, unless undertaken with a leadership both well informed and willing to lead, inconclusive.  Panetta should be able to perform the function of debate facilitator quite well.  Given that he can combine the expertise of having run a large, complex, and sensitive agency with knowledge of the world and previous experience with both the Office of Management and Budget and the Appropriations Committee, it is hard to see any other person so well equipped to handle the delicate and highly important matter of guiding the Pentagon budget to a soft landing.

While unknown outside the Marine Corps and the small number of mavens of small wars, LtGen Allen is an excellent choice to run operations in Afghanistan during what will prove to be the make or break end stage of the war.  When the Geek encountered Allen in the context of an advanced service school many years before the man got his first star let alone his third, the Geek was quite impressed by the officer's quick and probing mind.  That the mind was far more than merely quick or probing was demonstrated by Allen's success in recruiting critical tribal leaders so as to shift Sunni tribes from leaning to the insurgents in Iraq to siding with the US.  This act was central to the development of the Awakening Councils and the Sons of Iraq, both of which proved to be very important components of the victory over the various insurgent combines.

While the tribal politics of Afghanistan are not so regimented or predictable as was the case in Iraq, there is very good reason to believe that LtGen Allen's skills in this area will serve the cause of defeating the insurgents with high efficiency.  It is also probable that General Allen will be able to establish a relationship with Hamid Karzai which more closely resembles that which existed between Stanley McChrystal than the current troubled one with David Petraeus.

It rather appears that LtGen Allen combines much of the warfighting nature of McChrystal with many of the political skills possessed by General Petraeus.  This will do much to assure the US and its allies including Afghanistan are more rather than less likely to come out on top in the war.  Potentiating this is the fact that the war in Afghanistan is now an all Marine operation at the highest levels with a Marine as CENTCOMCINC and another running the shop in Afghanistan.  This will do much to smooth any of the frictions which normally exist between major commands and theater commands.

Robert Gates has performed many outstanding services to We the People over his long career.  However, few equal let alone surpass this last day effort--choosing two perfect candidates for two very tough jobs.  The outgoing Secretary of Defense deserves more than the usual gratitude for the care with which he has prepared for his leaving office with wars in progress and a budget which must be cut without damage to the core interests of the US.

Making Political Predictions Is Harder Than Weather Forecasting

The Obama White House and the Republican House can agree on one thing: Our intelligence community failed to predict in acceptable detail the unfolding of political events in Tunisia and Egypt.  Both usually hostile parties also have agreed that each fears a repeat of the perceived "failure" with respect to other Mideastern countries such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan.

As usual, consumers of intelligence seem to think that there is a direct, linear relation between money appropriated for the collection, processing, and dissemination of intelligence and the quality of the final product.  There is a general belief that the vast amount of money spent on the US intelligence community should bring a result of unmatched accuracy and timeliness.  If the real world were only that easy, if the mythic relation between bucks and product actually existed, no one would be happier than the spooks.  Their lives would be so much easier and the rewards so much greater.

The problem comes in that the Mideast has been lurching along the ragged edge of political catastrophe every day for years now.  The basic problems--the absence of faith in the future, the alienation of a large "youth bulge," the existence of illegitimate, ineffectively repressive authoritarian regimes--all have been around for years, even decades.  Along the way, any number of sparks as compelling as the self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor have come and gone without consequence.

What was the difference this time?

Any number of had hoc working groups will or have been convened throughout the intelligence community to consider just that.  Different answers will come back and be fed up the chain of command.  Strong recommendations to follow the social networks more closely will undoubtedly top the list.  Special studies will be commissioned on relevant topics such as the percentage of internet competent youth, the number of citizens in country "X" or "Y" who belong to which social network.  What topics are trending in which direction.  All the usual suspects will be monitored closely.

And, who knows, maybe something useful will come from all the effort.

However intense and broad the after action effort might be, there will be some key factors which cannot be nailed down, cannot be put into a new, improved analytical protocol.  Highest on the list of these is the matter of political will.

What factors, for example, fed into Ben Ali's apparently snap decision to cash in his chips?  Did the choice rest with him alone?  Or was it due to the stance taken by the Tunisian Chief of Staff against allowing the army to be used as the Giant Foot squashing the unrest?  If it was the latter, what were the inputs to his decision?

In Egypt, what forces are at work in the minds of the armed forces supreme command?  To what extent are the assorted generals and field marshals operating in the context of the Young Officers' coup of 1952?  To what extent are they motivated by the sense of the armed forces as the ultimate repository of Egyptian sovereignty?  To what extent are they focused upon the threat presented by the Muslim Brotherhood?  Or, to what extent do they fear the potential unreliability of their own troops if these are ordered into robust action against the demonstrators, which now include the Muslim Brotherhood?

Then, of course, there are the imponderables of personal relationships.  No new effort at collection, no new approach to analysis can or will penetrate the mysteries of the personal.  The web tying Mubarak and the other senior officers of the military together are highly personal, long standing, and quite probably immune to rational understanding.

The same applies to an  even greater extent with the processes at work in the mind of Mubarak himself.  There is no way of knowing in advance when or even if he will hit a personal tipping point, a point where retirement with a couple of billion dollars in hand is an opportunity he is no longer willing to refuse.

We know now--but not at the time--that Ben Ali got on the plane out of Tunisia only with the utmost of regret and only at the whip of his banshee wife's tongue.  The same unknown, perhaps it is an unknowable unknown, applies to Mubarak  When or will he bow to the pressure and surrender power to the military?  No intelligence agency will be able to answer that question other than retrospectively.

No president likes it.  No politician either.  But, the reality is that the world is not predictable in detail.  This governing ground truth has become more potent with the growth of emergent systems, non-linear self-organizing collections of the disaffiliated, the disaffected, the disenchanted.  The capacities of self-organizing systems, self-organizing groups, have been magnified greatly by the explosive development of horizontal communications methods including but not limited to the social networks.

This implies it will be harder for intelligence agencies dealing with inherently orderly but highly unstable political and social systems such as those in Egypt to get ahead of the wave when some event goes viral.  An event which once would have rolled by unnoticed will have the ever greater potential to become the cliched firebell in the dark.  The difficulty will be that of identifying the one critical event among a host of other, seemingly just as compelling ones, which serves as the trigger, which launches the wave.

To maintain that such an identification will be almost impossible is not to admit defeat but rather to accept reality.  It implies that either decision makers must accept a world of teeming false positives or resign themselves to being caught by apparent surprise.  A second implication is that analysts must be willing to run more professional risks by either pointing a finger at an event which proves not be the dread trigger--or, as the alternative, be willing to admit the trigger event which went by unhighlighted.

In short, these are not happy times to work in the intelligence racket.  Even compared to a few years back, the world has become not so much more unstable as it has grown more volatile.  The volatility of self-organizing groups empowered by horizontal communication systems is with us to stay.  It will not admit of mastery by intelligence agencies soon if ever.

Islamabad At Its Annoying Best

In a combination of hyper-nationalistic snit and one more extortion attempt, the Pakistani government has shut down the supply route running through the Khyber Pass.  While this is only one route, it is the easiest, fastest land line of communication supporting the war in Afghanistan.  Should the Pakistani blockade prove long lasting, the results would be harmful but not fatal to our military operations.

The Pakistani action has been taken in retaliation for the killing of three Frontier Corps troops manning a checkpoint two hundred meters from the international border with Afghanistan.  The killings (along with the wounding of the other three paramilitary personnel at the site) occurred as American forces were engaging a Taliban unit preparing and firing mortars from a location near or even on the imaginary line dividing Afghanistan from its neighbor.  At the completion of a firing run the helicopters may--or may not--have swung briefly into the airspace of Pakistan.

It was at this point that the six hearties of the Frontier Corps opened fire on the gunships with small arms.  The "air weapons team" then returned fire pursuant to self-defense rules of engagement.  The results were unfavorable for the men downrange.

The Pakistani interior minister frothed about the need to determine if Pakistan and the US were allies or actually enemies.  Of course, in the view of the majority of Pakistanis surveyed in recent months, the answer is already known--the US is Enemy Number One.

The closure as well as the event which apparently precipitated it both occurred as CIA director Leon Panetta is in country meeting with his ISI counterpart as well as President Zardiri and PM Gilani.  The prime minister reportedly told Panetta he was "profoundly concerned" about this most recent incident as well as the air weapons team attacks on Haqqani network trigger pullers a few days ago.

The irony of this development is found in fortuitous timing.  A bit of video potentially exceptionally embarrassing to the government and army of Pakistan has surfaced on Facebook with a consequent spread to the MSM.  The video is explicit but nowhere near as grisly as others showing Taliban executions.  It shows men in Pakistani uniforms, using the standard military small arm, the H&K G3, lining up and shooting down a half dozen men in civilian clothes who are blindfolded with hands tied behind their backs.  Near the end of the five and a half minute clip, a troopie is seen administering the mercy shot to those still living.

(Update: Facebook has removed the video.  What a bunch of socially unconscious wimps!)

If the video is confirmed in its authenticity, which is far from improbable, the consequences for Pakistan and, by implication, the US-Pakistani joint "war on terror" will be major.  US law prohibits granting aid to military forces whose members engage in war crimes.  The extra-judicial shooting of actual or suspected guerrillas does constitute a war crime no matter how justifiable by the doctrine of military necessity it may appear in the eyes of those ordering the summary execution.

The Pakistani armed forces are very heavily dependent upon American largess.  So far the money, weapons, and equipment have flowed without cease no matter how uncooperative or inefficient the recipient may be in prosecuting operations against Taliban and all the others dedicated to violent political Islam.  It will be difficult to the point of impossibility to continue flooding Pakistan with weapons in the face of the behavior captured in this video.

Rumors and similar undocumented tales of Pakistani army violations of the laws and customs of land warfare have abounded for some time now.  It is easy to pass off stories of abuses as insubstantial or fabricated, but doing such when it is possible to go to the videotape is not so easy.

The Obama administration may hope the stories of Pakistani abuses will fail to have legs this close to the midterm elections.  The administration may hope as well that the Republicans will let sleeping atrocity tales remain unawakened.  Both of these hopes are well grounded.

The tape and the others like it which may well surface in days and weeks to come do present an opportunity for the administration to push back against the annoying extortion tactics of Islamabad.  It is quid pro quo time.

The quid is simple.  The Pakistanis stand down from their hyper-nationalistic dudgeon and either get on the stick in North Waziristan or let us do the job without the niggling annoyances of episodic governmental blathering.

The quo is equally simple.  We will not make a federal case (literally) from the video and any others yet to come.  We will also make every effort to block any aid cutoff should push come to shove in Congress.

Admittedly, that sort of trade off is shabby in its ethical base.  All that can be said in support of the idea or any other resembling it is that such deal making is sanctioned by the requirements imposed by the need to abate the nuisance presented by groups motivated by the imperatives of political Islam.

The unfortunate, even tragic, reality is that of Pakistan's inherent instability.  A halt to our bribes, particularly the one represented by military aid, would result with the predictability of the law of gravity in the collapse of the government.  If not collapse, the government would have to transmogrify itself into a simulacrum of Taliban in order to remain intact and in power.

This would render continuation of the war in Afghanistan both nugatory and impossible.  It would also breed a greater international threat from the advocates of violent political Islam.

A collapse or Taliban tilting of the Islamabad regime would require prompt neutralization of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, stockpile of fissile materials, and the means of making more.  Neutralization of these assets and facilities is a non-trivial undertaking. Quite the contrary: It would be a major military and diplomatic challenge.  However global security and stability make the effort an absolute imperative.

There is a chance that cooler, saner minds will prevail.  The Pakistani Army high command is realpolitik enough to see what is at stake with both the blockade (and its rhetorical blanket) and the release of the incriminating video.  If not Leon Panetta personally then certainly the Agency of which he is head is equally rooted in the soil of realism and well understands the implications of too hasty movement by either party in this dispute.

The wild card, even the joker, in the deck is represented by the "progressives" both in the US and Western Europe.  For these people (and it appears President Obama as well), the war in Afghanistan is anathema.  The same groups are the most likely to be loudly horrified by the video of Pakistani infantrymen gunning down civilians--even if it could be proven that each bullet catcher was a card carrying martyr-in-waiting.

The global Left as well as the vocal segment of the easily offended global Muslim community will demand that somebody do something!  Calls for investigation, trials, punishment of the guilty will resound through both new and traditional media.  Fingers will be pointed at the US unless the administration takes swift, certain, and transparent action against the offenders in Pakistan.  Failure to do so, failure to stop the military aid, will be seen as complicity in the crime.

It might get very, very ugly.

This alone is reason for the cooler, saner minds in both Washington and Islamabad to end the contretemps with the utmost speed.  Unless this happens or something else emerges to grab attention, the consequences may be delayed but they will not be denied.

The message for Islamabad is short.  We must hang together in this or we will be hung separately.

ADMIN NOTE: There are anti-spam defenses in place which can be frustrating and irritating but press on as the Geek invites, welcomes and will post all on topic comments.

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.