COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

A good discussion from down under.

IT was said after the September 11 attacks and it's being said again: the failure of the US to obtain agents who can infiltrate terror gangs is frustrating its efforts to combat these enemies.

Former president George Bush, father of the White House incumbent and a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, joined in warning after the 2001 atrocities that the US was suffering from a gap in old-fashioned human intelligence, as opposed to technology.

Yep. And that came about as a result of a long series of policy decisions at the very top. Now, the technology is really cool. But we could have been, and should have been expanding our Arab language capabilities, and doing more to cultivate sources within the Arab world. Yes, especially uncouth and unsavory sources, because they're the ones that get admitted to the super secret clubs.

Well, them and John Walker Lindh.

Here's Dick Cheney on Sept. 17th, 2001.

"If you're going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you're not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you're going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities."

Now, here's a dirty little not-so-secret:

The reason we captured Saddam is because we figured out some guy knew where he was and some Shiite-American translator contractor we hired, someone who hadn't sat through exhaustive classes on the law of land warfare, and threatened to beat the crap out of him. That translator later went on the mission, and he's the reason that Saddam had a bloody lip in that famous photo of him being captured, after Saddam insulted him.

War is Hell, said Sherman, and there is no use trying to refine it.

Remarkably, the article makes zero mention of the Clinton administration's restrictions on CIA recruiting.

"Deutch and Nora, Clinton's anti-intelligence plants, implemented a universal 'human rights scrub' of all assets, virtually shutting down operations for 6 months to a year. This was after something happened in Central America (there was an American woman involved who was the common law wife of a commie who went missing there) that got a lot of bad press for the agency.

"After that, each asset had to be certified as being 'clean for human rights violations.'

"What this did was to put off limits, in effect, terrorists, criminals, and anyone else who would have info on these kinds of people."

Roger says the CIA, even under new leadership, has never recovered from the "Human Rights Scrub" policy.


(I hate to source it to Newsmax, but I was hearing noises about this long before 9/11.)

Yet, here's something from way back in 1995!

The new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), John Deutch, has proven to have a bigger appetite for currying favorable reviews in the press and on Capitol Hill than even Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. Toward this transparent end, Dr. Deutch has recently been much in evidence, for example, in: reorganizing his agency (putting in charge a gaggle of left-leaning congressional staffers); quantifying and assigning blame for the Aldrich Ames debacle; and decrying and forbidding the CIA's use of unsavory characters as foreign espionage resources in Guatemala and elsewhere.

Far less clear is whether the net effect of such self-promotion will be the reliable acquisition and timely, accurate analysis of intelligence on behalf of the U.S. government. Unfortunately, the early indicators suggest that the CIA and, to varying degrees, its sister agencies in the intelligence community are suffering under a steady diet of heavy-handed, politically correct micro-management. Morale is plummeting (the DCI was recently booed by his employees at a large agency function); sources are drying up (even those agents deemed pristine enough to meet Deutch's standards are understandably growing increasingly reluctant to share information with the current Agency team), sensitive collection methods are being compromised (not least by the indiscriminate sharing of classified data with the United Nations and other undisciplined multilateral "users" of U.S. intelligence); critical counter-intelligence techniques are being selectively applied (Clinton political appointees are being excused from routine polygraphing); and analyses appear to be increasingly slanted to tell Administration policy-makers what they want to hear (assuming, that is, they are willing to listen at all).

More background here.

Of course, you still have the IDIOT media making hay out of a story about some local CIA boss telling his underlings to bring back Saddam's head in a box of dry ice.

Look, you don't have to take everything frigging LITERALLY, you pantiwaisted ink slathering swillers of whiskey sours at Michael's and the Rainbow Room! It's just the way real men - men who've never paid five dollars to check a coat and umbrella in their lives - talk to one another when engaged in serious work as opposed to (irony) commentary (/irony).

I myself made many remarks about wanting Saddam's and Zarqawi's heads impaled on pikes outside the gate, or lashed to the hood of my Humvee as I drove through Ramadi.

I was speaking figuratively! Well. Mostly.

If I had pikes available, plus the small matter of actual posession of their disembodied heads, I would have put them to good use, I'm sure.

You just gotta know how to COMMUNICATE!

Call it "branding."

Splash, out

Jason