Today's Washington Post adds one more to the long list of Bush administration screwups, this one all the worse because it goes to the heart of our efforts to monitor al Qaeda and bin Laden:
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.
Forehead, meet hand. Here, you have a number of pathologies working at once. An administration with a record of mishandling classified information, and at times using it for political purposes, takes a hot secret and plasters it all over town, blowing an intelligence-gathering operation in the process.
Then there's the contracting issue. With the Blackwater scandal, Congress is finally starting to debate why it is the government uses contractors for ... just about everything, including fighting wars. And it's pretty clear that the contracting system that has emerged is not a system for actually getting things done. Instead, it has become a way to transfer politically and logistically difficult tasks into a kind of bureaucratic netherworld where they are insulated from scrutiny and accountability.
But this goes both ways. Contractors should be accountable - they shouldn't be allowed to screw up (in Blackwater's case, indiscriminately killing people), then just walk away. But the government should be accountable too. If a contractor is producing valuable intelligence, the government should handle it professionally - not screw the contractor and walk away.
This is Management 101. But the official response that the Post's Joby Warrick got from the intelligence community amounted to "move along, nothing to see here." (Today, the White House promised, yes, a leak investigation.)
"We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Sadly, we're still in "heckuva job" mode.
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How do we know that this now outted Little Intelligence Company That Could isn't actually a competitor with one of the Administration's friends who somehow accidentally got the Spying Contract instead...
or maybe they are just people going after the reward money on Bin Laden's head and the administration is screwing them out of it...
Or maybe the administration never knew that this company was working for the United States.
It is also highly plausible that no one in the Administration knew precisely where the intel came from or that it was secret.
This could get so Kafka-out-of-control with the system of corrupt checks'n'balances that they have set up.
Just like some movie where the machine starts to eat itself and everyone but its own citizens gets a piece.
Perhaps we shall see different, divergent Artificial Intelligences arise from this conflict of cognitive dissonance, to war with each other over silly things like information purity.
Wanna take it on?
You see, this is exactly what "Ike" Eisenhower warned us about, all those years ago. It's come true with a vengeance, and everybody's hands are soaked with gold and with blood. Our own gold... and our own soldiers' and reservists' blood.
Dig just a little bit, and you'll see how the Justice Department has tried to make sure that nothing will move forward in the court system for six years or more.
Probe through the voting records that are still part of the Congressional Record, and you'll find Senators and Congressmen alike, Republican and Democrat alike, voting billions of dollars into their own pockets.
Of course it takes no probing at all to know what the Executive Branch has been up to ...
It might surprise you, though, just how many Supreme Court justices are millionaires and just how many of them ... well, you get the idea.
You've got the greatest story of both this century and the last. You've got a story that could actually save this country ... could actually force the rats and the rot and the decay and the corruption into the cleansing light.
Wanna go for it?
Or are you simply (blunt-but-true-words warning...) "Mister Goebbel's lackey?"
of reasons..
How much more do we have to tolerate before this nightmare of an administration ends? I can't take another year of this. Someone get me some antidepressants.
Nothing in this country is changing in any direction other than the worse until we get rid of the idiot.
And sadly, the idiot's idiots still don't want that idea on the table.
They'd rather sit through another year and and a season of this crap.
Meanwhile, they may as well just paint a great big ole target around all of us.
Sadly, we're stuck in the cave-in mode.
And until we get outta that mode, we're stuck all around.
Heckuva country we are right now, ain't it?
Well said. A pointed and scathing indictment of the incompetent, scheming imbeciles in the White House.
Is there STILL some reason not to begin impeachment proceedings????? Is TREASON a high enough crime? The pattern is there. They did the same thing with Plame and Brewster Jennings. Now they appear to be burning a source of intel against Al Quaeda. How much does it take? Start the investigation already. Today!!!!
With most administrations, we expect an occasional mistake. With this administration, we expect an occasional job-done-right. Can't think of any off hand, but they must have done something right in the past 6 and 1/2 years. Nope, still can't think of anything they've done right. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow.
they really don't care about how this negatively affects our safety.