It is time for serious soul-searching regarding the role of the CIA and the intelligence community. Last month’s operational and intelligence failures led to the deaths of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan and might have resulted in nearly 300 deaths on a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit.

It is particularly shocking that President Barack Obama’s chief of counterterrorism, John Brennan, conceded that the latter failure was caused by the fact that there was “no one intelligence entity or team or task force assigned responsibility for doing a follow-up investigation” of the considerable intelligence that was collected.

It is unbelievable that the President had to order the creation of a system for tracking threat reports. The failures beg the question of what have we learned since 9/11.

Previous CIA failures regarding the unanticipated decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq War demonstrate a $75 billion intelligence enterprise that can provide neither strategic nor tactical warning to policymakers and is reluctant to provide uncomfortable truth to power.

The serious problems that need to be addressed include the important nexus between intelligence and policy — and the need for a CIA that is not beholden to policy or political interests; the militarization of the intelligence community – which must be reversed; the lack of Congressional oversight – which must be corrected, and the decline of operational tradecraft – which must be investigated.

Before addressing reform in Part II, however, we must first confront the mythology that surrounds the intelligence enterprise.

The Greatest Myth: The 9/11 Commission offered insight into the systemic problems of the CIA and the intelligence community. The Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 solved the problems that had been exposed by the 9/11 Commission by creating a director of national intelligence, the so-called intelligence tsar.

In fact, the 9/11 Commission failed to use the powers it had been given to explore the reasons for the 9/11 intelligence failure.

It deferred unnecessarily to the White House’s use of “executive privilege,” and failed to stand up to CIA Director George Tenet, who refused to permit commissioners to debrief prisoners held by the CIA. The commission failed to use its subpoena powers and lacked experience in the world of the intelligence community.

The CIA’s Inspector General concluded that the 9/11 failure was about personal failures, accountability and bureaucratic ineptitude. The same could be said for the Christmas Day events. The commission focused on larger issues: budgets and funding, organizational problems and structural fixes.

The Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 actually made a bad situation worse. It created a new bureaucracy under a director of national intelligence (DNI) beholden to the White House, as well as a centralized system that stifles creative thinking and risks more politicized intelligence.

The DNI was not given the authority to challenge the Pentagon’s control of key intelligence agencies and their budgets, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was not given a central depository to fill the analytical gaps between domestic and international terrorist threats.

Thus, the major problems exposed by 9/11 – the lack of a centralized repository of data and the need for more, rather than less, competitive analysis on terrorism – was repeated in the Christmas Day failure.

Finally, by making the DNI responsible for the daily briefing of the President, it ensured that the “tsar” would have little time to conceptualize and implement the strategic reforms that were needed.

President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to request a National Intelligence Estimate before making his decision late last year to increase military forces in Afghanistan revealed his lack of respect for the work of the intelligence community.

Myth Number Two: The intelligence community is a genuine community that fosters intelligence cooperation and the sharing of intelligence information. The intelligence community has never functioned as a community.

With the exception of the production of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), which are indeed a corporate product of the community, there is limited sharing of the most important and sensitive documents collected by the various intelligence agencies, and very little esprit de corps within the community.

There have always been deep rivalries between civilian and military agencies, with the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research often lined up against the Defense Intelligence Agency and the four military intelligence branches.

This division was particularly profound during the debates over Soviet military power and the verification of Soviet and American arms control agreements, with military intelligence consistently exaggerating the strength of the Soviet military and opposing the disarmament agreements of the 1970′s and 1980′s.

The 9/11 and Christmas Day failures revealed continued parochialism and lack of cooperation within the community.

The intelligence community suffers from an inability to learn from its failures and successes. The CIA needs to emulate the U.S. Army, which routinely conducts after-action reports and boasts a Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The center has a small staff, takes advantage of teams of experts to investigate specific issues, and maintains a direct line of communication to senior military leaders to understand what needs to be examined.

Conversely, the CIA has resorted to a culture of cover-up to conceal failures such as the collapse of the Soviet Union; 9/11; the Iraq War; the Christmas Day event; and the suicidal bombing of the CIA’s most important facility in Afghanistan.

Myth Number Three: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence offers a genuine possibility for exercising central control over the intelligence community. The creation of the DNI has worsened the malaise within the CIA without reform for either the agency or the intelligence community.

The fact that the President had to meet with more than 20 intelligence principals to discuss the Christmas Day failure points to the crazy-quilt bureaucratic structure created in the wake of 9/11, as well as the lack of centralized authority and responsibility within the community.

The Pentagon has veto power over the DNI with respect to transferring personnel and budgetary authority from individual agencies into joint centers or other agencies. This fact undermines the possibility of any legitimate reform process.

The first DNI, John Negroponte, became frustrated and left suddenly in December 2006 for a lesser position at the State Department. His two successors have been retired naval admirals, Mike McConnell and Dennis Blair; neither has an understanding of the importance of strategic and long-term intelligence.

The DNI spends far too much time preparing for his daily briefing of the President, which should be in the hands of the CIA, and the issue of cyber-security, which should be in the hands of the NSA.

Instead of pursuing reform, Negroponte, McConnell and Blair have built a huge, lumbering and bloated bureaucracy that includes a principal deputy director, four deputy directors, three associate directors and no fewer than 19 assistant deputy directors.

The DNI has a huge budget (over $1 billion) and has taken its management staff from the CIA and INR, thus weakening the overall intelligence apparatus. There has been no real accountability of the DNI; Congressional intelligence oversight committees have failed to monitor the DNI’s hiring of contractors with extravagant salaries.

Myth Number Four: The CIA is not a policy agency, but is chartered to provide objective and balanced intelligence analysis to decision-makers without any policy axe to grind.

This is possibly the most harmful myth of all, because CIA’s covert action, which has registered a series of strategic disasters over the past 60 years, is part of the policy implementation process.

As a result, much clandestine collection over the years has been designed to collect information that supports policy.

The CIA was unfairly described 30 years ago as a “rogue elephant out of control.” In fact, the CIA is part of the White House policy process. Various presidents have authorized regime change in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam, which have had disastrous consequences for U.S. interests.

The White House authorized assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo and South Vietnam, and provided legal sanction for the CIA to create secret prisons, conduct torture and abuse, and pursue renditions, often involving totally innocent people without recourse to judicial proceedings.

Myth Number Five: The 9/11 and Christmas Day failures were due to the lack of sharing intelligence collection. The conventional wisdom is that the 9/11 intelligence failure was caused primarily by the failure to share intelligence, particularly the failure of the CIA to inform the FBI of the presence of two al-Qaeda operatives in the United States.

In actual fact, the problem was far more serious; it was a problem of sloppiness and incompetence in dealing with sensitive intelligence information.

It has been established that 50-60 analysts and operatives from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA had access to information that Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had links to al-Qaeda, had entered the United States long before 9/11.

These analysts and operatives failed to inform leading officials at their own agencies of the two al-Qaeda operatives, who fell through the cracks of the system. Eight years later, the Nigerian bomber similarly escaped detection despite excellent intelligence collection that was seen by most intelligence agencies.

There is still an inadequate flow of information between intelligence agencies. The United States lacks one central depository for all information on national and international terrorism, and the proliferation of intelligence agencies makes sharing of intelligence products even more cumbersome.

The DNI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) were created after 9/11 to make sure that intelligence was shared, but this led to a downgrading of the CIA and the lack of a single agency responsible for analyzing intelligence on terrorism.

Tremendous amounts of useful intelligence are collected, but intelligence analysis has not been appreciably improved.

The NSA had information on the Nigerian bomber that wasn’t shared with the CIA and the FBI; the CIA prepared a biographic study of the Nigerian bomber, which it didn’t share with NCTC. The State Department did not pursue whether the Nigerian bomber had a U.S. visa, let alone a multiple-entry visa, in his possession.

The so-called intelligence community lacks an effective computer system to coordinate all intelligence information, although it does have access to the State Department’s consular database-listing visa holders, which it failed to consult.

The DHS’s customs and border units had sufficient intelligence to interrogate the bomber when he landed in Detroit; its Transportation Security Agency lacked intelligence to keep him from boarding a plane to Detroit.

Myth Number Six: The CIA successfully recruits foreign assets. The CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS) relies on walk-ins and rarely recruits major espionage assets. The most successfulwalk-ins, moreover, such as Col. Oleg Penkovsky, often have great difficulty in getting CIA operatives to accept them.

The NCS has had little success in recruiting assets in the closed world of terrorism or in closed societies such as China, Iran and North Korea. Many of the agents recruited from Cuba, East Germany and the former Soviet Union were double agents reporting to their host governments. The suicide bomber in Afghanistan last month was a double agent.

The CIA has to rely on foreign intelligence liaison sources for sensitive intelligence collection and even the recruitment of foreign assets. There are few al-Qaeda operatives who have been killed or captured without the assistance of foreign liaison, particularly the Pakistani intelligence service.

But the suicide bomber at the CIA base in Afghanistan last month was recruited with the help of the Jordanian intelligence service, an extremely risky way to recruit assets; he was brought onto the base without proper inspection and met with more than a dozen officers.

The loss of top-ranking CIA operations officers in Afghanistan points to the need for a review of CIA clandestine operations. The current CIA director, a former congressman, has surrendered to the clandestine culture and cadre; he is unlikely to lead a reform movement.

And President Obama’s appointment of former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, a master of the CIA cover-up over the past two decades, points to a continued cover-up.

Instead of a CIA outside the policy community telling truth to power, providing objective and balanced intelligence to policymakers and avoiding policy advocacy, as President Harry S. Truman wanted, we now have the CIA as a paramilitary organization.

Indeed, there has been a trend toward militarization of the entire intelligence community. In the Bush administration, the CIA was significantly weakened, with a director, Michael Hayden, who was a four-star general.

The Obama administration appointed a retired admiral to be the director of national intelligence, a retired general to be national security adviser, and retired generals to be ambassadors to key countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

By placing the position of the DNI in the hands of the military, the Bush and Obama administrations completed the militarization of the CIA and even the intelligence community itself, where active-duty and retired general officers run the Office of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.

The Pentagon is responsible for nearly 90 percent of all personnel in the intelligence community and 85 percent of the community’s $75 billion budget.
The absence of an independent civilian counter to the power of military intelligence threatens civilian control of the decision to use military power and makes it more likely that intelligence will be tailored to suit the purposes of the Pentagon. This is exactly what President Truman wanted to prevent.

Finally, the Congressional intelligence oversight process has made no genuine effort to monitor CIA’s flawed intelligence analysis or its clandestine operations, and failed to challenge the illegal activities of the CIA that were part of the policy process.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has sat on her hands while CIA Director Leon Panetta methodically dismantled and marginalized the oversight responsibilities of the Office of the Inspector General.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. [This story originally appeared at Truthout.org.]

NOW on to the BUMPING UP of Larry Johnson’s EXCEPTIONAL essay that sensible people everywhere should read. We realize that the KoolAid dipsomaniacs are unable to see, let alone comprehend, but we’ll persist.

By LARRY JOHNSON, originally published on November 11, 2008:

If you enjoyed the George W. Bush era, you are gonna love the Barack Obama regime, because Obama is relying on some of the same folks who helped create the mayhem and failures in the CIA. That’s right, boys and girls. Take a look at today’s Wall Street Journal:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party. . . .

The intelligence-transition team is led by former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan and former CIA intelligence-analysis director Jami Miscik, say officials close to the matter. Mr. Brennan is viewed as a potential candidate for a top intelligence post. Ms. Miscik left amid a slew of departures from the CIA under then-Director Porter Goss.

Advisers caution that few decisions will be made until the team gets a better picture of how the Bush administration actually goes about gathering intelligence, including covert programs, and there could be a greater shift after a full review.

The Obama team plans to review secret and public executive orders and recent Justice Department guidelines that eased restrictions on domestic intelligence collection. “They’ll be looking at existing executive orders, then making sure from Jan. 20 on there’s going to be appropriate executive-branch oversight of intelligence functions,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview shortly before Election Day.

Putting John Brennan in charge of this effort is mind numbing. Brennan was one of the George Tenet toadies who defended the former CIA Director when I, along with a group of other retired CIA officers, demanded that Tenet donate part of the proceeds of his book to the families of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq and to return his medal of freedom.

Brennan was part of the group of the insiders who saw no problem with George Tenet helping cook the intelligence and mislead the American people about the threat in Iraq. Here’s what Tim Shorrock wrote about that dust up:

Tenet’s ties with contractors were underscored last week in a dispute between two groups of former CIA officials over Tenet’s legacy. On April 28, six former intelligence officers wrote to Tenet, saying he shared culpability with President Bush and Vice President Cheney for “the debacle in Iraq,” and suggesting he donate half the royalties from his book to Iraq war veterans and their families. All of the signatories had severed their ties to U.S. intelligence, although three of them, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro, work as consultants for news organizations, corporations and government agencies outside of intelligence.

A few days later, six recently retired officers responded. They called the first letter a “bitter, inaccurate and misleading attack” on Tenet and pointed out that it was drafted by officers who “had not served in the Agency for years.” Tenet, his supporters said, “literally led the nation’s counterterrorism fight.” And three of its six signatories were directly involved in that fight — as contractors. They included John Brennan of the Analysis Corp.; Cofer Black, Tenet’s former counterterrorism director and vice chairman of Blackwater, the private military contractor; and Robert Richer, the former deputy director of the CIA’s clandestine services. Richer recently left Blackwater to become the CEO of Total Intelligence, a new company formed with Black and other ex-CIA officials to provide intelligence services to corporations and government agencies.

In the immediate aftermath of 9-11 Brennan was in charge of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (which was replaced subsequently by the National Counter Terrorism Center) and failed to give the U.S. State Department the correct statistics on the number of terrorist attacks in 2003. He forgot to count an entire month’s data. I discovered the error and alerted folks at State Department.

Professors Alan Krueger and David Laitin independently discovered the discrepancies and published an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here’s a link for a comprehensive article discussing that intelligence failure.

So you think I am being too hard on Brennan? Sure, anyone can make a mistake. However, he was back in the news in 2005. I learned in March of that year that the State Department was not going publish the CIA stats on terrorism because the number of attacks had dramatically increased and the Bush Administration thought that made it look like they were losing the war on terror. John Brennan was part of that effort to keep the truth from the American public. Here’s the piece I wrote to help draw attention to this issue back in 2005:

The numbers are in and the news is not good for U.S. efforts to contain and reduce the threat of international terrorism. 2004 marked the highest number of significant incidents of terrorism since the intelligence community started keeping statistics in 1968. (An incident is counted as significant if an attack results in the death, injury or kidnapping of one or more persons or property damage in excess of $10,000). Attacks jumped from 175 in 2003 to 651 in 2004. This surpasses the previous high of 273 significant attacks in 1985.

The bad news kept on coming. One thousand nine hundred and seven (1907) people died in international terrorist attacks last year. This marks the second highest death toll since 1968; falling short of the infamous record of 2001.

Unfortunately, former 9-11 Commission Staff Director, Phil Zelikow, and chief of the National Counter Terrorism Center, John Brennan, tried with some success to confuse the press and suggest that the numbers do not matter. In a deft display of obfuscation and spin Messrs. Zelikow and Brennan made several points. It started with Zelikow’s claim that:

The compilation of data about terrorist attacks is not a required part of the report, but traditionally had been provided by the State Department, going back to the years in which the State Department was basically the public voice of the U.S. Government on international terrorism, generally. . . . But what’s important for our purposes is what the law said the NCTC should do. It said the NCTC was the primary organization for analysis and integration of — and I’m quoting from the law now — “All intelligence possessed or acquired by the United States Government pertaining to terrorism or counterterrorism.” The law further stated that the NCTC would be the United States Government’s “shared knowledge bank on known and suspected terrorists and international terror groups, as well as their goals, strategies, capabilities, and networks of contact and support.” (Phil Zelikow)

State Department’s role as the lead for coordinating international terrorism was established by a National Security Decision Directive signed by President Reagan in early 1986. This was in response to an interagency fight that broke out during an effort to apprehend the terrorists responsible for the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. While flying over Italy in late 1985 in pursuit of Abu Abbas, a State Department official and a CIA officer argued heatedly over who was in charge of the mission. Recognizing the need for a clear chain of command the Department of State was put in charge of coordinating the efforts of CIA, DOD, and FBI efforts to track and deal with terrorism. The first man put in charge of this effort was L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer.

Mr. Zelikow is misleading the media by asserting that the State Department “traditionally compiled the data”. That is simply not true. The State Department never was in charge of collecting or compiling the statistics. It simply coordinated the process of assembling the data in order to provide the Congress and the American people with a comprehensive view of international terrorist activity. Since 1986 the Counter Terrorism Center at the CIA had the task of compiling the data and writing the narrative analysis. Don’t take my word for it, just ask the former Chiefs of the Counter Terrorism Center starting with Dewey Claridge and ending with Cofer Black.

By splitting the statistics on terrorism from the country reports, Zelikow is creating the kind of stovepiping of information which the 9-11 Commission claimed helped undermine US efforts to detect and defeat Al Qaeda’s effort to launch their suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There is nothing in the new law requiring this move.

John Brennan, the head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, made the unbelievable admission that when the CIA shifted responsibility for counting terrorist incidents to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) in the fall of 2003 only three part time people were assigned to the task. Brennan said:

To ensure a more comprehensive accounting of terrorist incidents, we in the NCTC significantly increased the level of effort from three part-time individuals to 10 full-time analysts, and we took a number of other steps to improve quality control and database management. This increased level of effort allowed a much deeper review of far more information and, along with Iraq, are the primary reasons for the significant growth in a number of terrorist incidents being reported.

The American people are asked to believe that nobody at TTIC understood in the aftermath of 2001 that we needed to keep a comprehensive count of terrorist events. Implicit in this criticism is a smear on the good work done previously at the Counter Terrorism Center. CTC did not consider counting terrorism events an afterthought. They used a sound methodology of monitoring news media reports, FBIS reports, and cables from US Embassies and Defense Attaches to identify possible acts of international terrorism. An act of violence did not necessarily mean that terrorism was involved. Instead expert analysts from CTC and State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) would meet periodically to review and decide what incidents represented acts of international terrorism.

This process broke down when the responsibility for doing this was shifted from CTC and put under Mr. Brennan’s stewardship at the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in late 2003. Mr. Brennan in fact shares much of the responsibility for the debacle with the statistics that were misreported in the report issued in April 2004. He did not ensure that his part time employees could count.

With the beefed up work force at NCTC we now know that 10 analysts were involved in counting 651 significant international terrorist attacks in 2004. Geez, I guess that means it took each analyst one year to keep track of 65 attacks.

Brennan asks the media and the American people to believe that the rise in attacks is simply the result of better counting by more people. Not true. An independent data source from RAND-MIPT shows a similar dramatic rise in attacks and deaths. This is not an artifice of methodology. Something bad is going on out there.

Two countries account for a major portion of the increased terrorist activity—the Kashmir region of India and Iraq. With respect to Kashmir, it is important to note that since 1998 this area has consistently appeared in the appendix in Patterns of Global Terrorism that described significant incidents. I have used this data in briefing for foreign governments during that period to point out that not only was India being repeatedly attacked by Islamic jihadists (who were funded and trained by Pakistan), but that the people of Kashmir repeatedly suffered one of the highest death tolls of any country in the world from terrorist attacks. The sad fact is that media, and to a lesser extent the U.S. Government, tended to ignore these attacks.

It is worth recalling that the cruise missiles fired by President Clinton in August of 1998 in retaliation for the Al Qaeda bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania struck a camp in Afghanistan and killed members of one of the groups that carried out attacks in the Kashmir as well as two Pakistani intelligence officers. In the war against Islamic extremists Kashmir matters.

Brennan’s response on Iraq is more puzzling:

QUESTION: Do you regard the Iraq numbers that you just gave us — for which, thank you — as comparable? And the reason I ask is that I’ve got to figure that if there’s one piece of real estate that the U.S. intelligence community has devoted enormous resources to in the last two years, it’s got to be — two-and-a-half years — it’s Iraq. Therefore, do you think those figures are comparable, ’03 to ’02?
MR. BRENNAN: In terms of what the term you’re using — “comparable” — to sort of denote here, I’m not certain. The rigor that we applied worldwide for the 2004 data also applied to Iraq. So it was Iraq, Kashmir, and others. So that number, I think, is the result of exhaustive search and research on that. Also, as I pointed out, the number of civilians that have come not just from the United States, but also from other countries — the number of individuals who, in fact, are in different places in Iraq that have been involved in some of the attacks that have taken place there, I think that is the reason why, in fact, we’re seeing an increase in that number.

Although Brennan is not certain about the comparability of the numbers we do not have to rely on him. Data maintained by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is reported on at least a weekly basis to the Secretary of Defense, shows clear unambiguous data that the level of terrorist activity in Iraq mushroomed in 2004. In fact, the highest level of attacks ever recorded in Iraq occurred in December 2004.

Iraq is relevant to the threat of international terrorism principally because it is serving as a drawing card for jihadists throughout the Islamic world. I have had recent discussions with senior government officials representing three countries in the Persian Gulf. To a man they were alarmed by the images coming out of Iraq showing US soldiers abusing muslim women and the shooting of unarmed insurgents. The perception of the United States as an invader is inciting terrorism in the region, not quelling it. Several commented on the perceived parallel of the U.S. presence in Iraq as comparable to what the Soviets did in Afghanistan during the 1980s. They worry that we are sowing the seeds of future jihadist terrorism.

The real news from the press conference of Messrs. Zelikow and Brennan is that they have not finished counting the incidents from last year and that the numbers are likely to go up when revised statistics are issued in June. Moreover, both conceded that events in Russia and Philippines, where several hundred were killed, were excluded from the data.

I welcome Mr. Brennan’s commitment to look at the methodology and recommend corrections. The failure to count attacks inside Russia by Chechen separatists, for example, needs to be re-examined. While ten years ago there was no evidence that the Chechen were receiving outside assistance, that is not the case today. In fact Chechen fighters in the battle of Anaconda in Afghanistan in March 2002 killed American soldiers. The Chechen movement has clear economic and military ties to international jihadists. In future reports it would be entirely appropriate to classify as international attacks something carried out by any group with established ties to groups outside of their country.

There is no single statistic that can tell us what is happening in the war on terrorism. Reporting multiple attacks does not necessarily mean that casualties will follow. As Brennan and Zelikow correctly note most of the casualties were caused by a relatively small number of attacks. But, those attacks were carried out by Islamic extremists that have clear ties with Al Qaeda.

In light of this it is breathtaking that someone with Zelikow’s intellect can argue that numbers don’t matter. The following exchange occurred during the Wednesday afternoon press conference:

QUESTION: Um, 651 attacks in 2004, compared to 175 attacks in your report in 2003. That’s a sharp increase in terrorist attacks. What does that tell us about the war on terrorism — the global war on terrorism and the cooperation? . . . .
MR. ZELIKOW: I mean, the short answer is it doesn’t tell us anything about the war on terror. The statistics are simply not valid for any inference about the progress, either good or bad, of American policy. I think that’s the honest answer. If you just look at what the statistics are and what kind of inferences can legitimately be drawn from them, I can’t come up with a defensible inference.

Here’s the bottom line. Numbers do matter. If more people are being killed in Iraq and India then we need to ensure that US policy for combating terrorism is focused on those areas. To pretend that the threat of terrorism is as great in Brazil as in Iraq is delusional. And to pretend that objective facts say nothing about the reality of terrorism perhaps shows us why the US effort to deal with Islamic extremists is going in the wrong direction.

Friends in the intelligence community tell me that Zelikow, when confronted with the higher numbers, tried to have those numbers suppressed. Once word of this leaked out Zelikow shifted gears to damage control and constructed the artificial and misleading explanation that NCTC is now doing something new that was never done before. Oh yeah, and it is mandated by law.

Sadly this simply shows how uninformed Zelikow is about the history of counter terrorism policies and procedures during the last 25 years, notwithstanding his post as staff director of the 9-11 Commission. Maybe this explains why the Commission had such difficulty identifying who failed in their duty to prevent those terrible attacks in September 2001. Phil Zelikow by his own admission has trouble making sense of numbers.

So you thought Barack Obama would bring change to the abuses at CIA? Think again. He’s relying on folks who helped debase and embarrass the CIA. That’s not change I want to believe in.

My, Barack Obama’s advisers and officials are contributing quite a little heap of embarrassments to his campaign, aren’t they? 

First, there was Austan Goolsbee’s little chat with the Canadians about NAFTA (Obama didn’t mean it) that the bad Canadians totally misunderstood and twisted out of context.  Then Samantha Power told a far right British paper that Hillary Clinton is a ‘monster‘ before remembering to add (too late, said the reporter) that it was "off the record."  In all the outcry over the insult, Obama’s supporters seemed not to have noticed or to have cared that she also announced that his firm commitment to prompt troop withdrawals wasn’t nearly as firm as progressives assume. 

Then intelligence adviser/former Bush Administration official John O. Brennan announced that he was afraid he just didn’t  agree with Obama on telecom immunity.   And I don’t even need to mention the Rev. Wright.

Then there’s this (via Memeorandum):

Last Thursday the Obama campaign was up in arms over the news that the Illinois senator’s passport information had been breached….Well, be careful what you wish for.

Turns out, one of the three people who accessed the candidate’s files works for… wait for it… Obama foreign policy advisor, John O. Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp. Brennan’s employee was the only one of the three who was not fired, merely disciplined and, CNN’s Zain Verjee reports, the unnamed employee also accessed John McCain’s files. In a separate breach, Hillary Clinton’s passport information was also breached. (Swampland)

None of this proves that Brennan was involved or even that the breach amounted to misfeasance by the employee.  Still, there is an irony in the revelation after all the (usual) outrage by Obama’s supporters over the breach of his file. 

I am merely mentioning this in passing as a further instance of ways in which Obama’s "brilliantly run campaign"—which I have heard people, people I thought were sensible, seriously argue is evidence that he is qualified to run the country—seems to be imploding.

Of  more concern to Democrats should be right-wing blogger’s Ed Morissey’s report that Obama military adviser, Gen. Tony McPeak, has made statements concerning Iraq that appear to be completely in line with McCain’s and rather far from the views of the progressives who support Obama.  McPeak is the same adviser who just compared Bill Clinton to Joseph McCarthy.

Morissey says:

In an interview with the Oregonian, posted here but confirmed by me through its purchase from the archives, McPeak essentially makes the exact same argument that John McCain makes about staying in Iraq — and which Obama ridicules:

Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?

Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We’ll be there a century,  hopefully. If it works right.

Isn’t this the exact argument McCain has made repeatedly, and which Obama derides as “a hundred-years war”? Of course it is….McCain and McPeak both argue for a big footprint in the Middle East for a very long time in order to protect American interests and to overawe the other nations there into behaving themselves.

This should raise some eyebrows on the Obama campaign’s willful deception on this point….He meant exactly the same thing as McCain. What’s more, he underestimates democracy. He wanted the Bush administration to install a military dictator with whom we could work in order to establish our Middle East footprint..  (Hot Air)

You can read the interview yourself, since the link is provided in the posting.

My question is this:  If McPeak said all this, isn’t it further evidence that Obama has surrounded himself with advisers whose views are wildly opposed to those of the progressives who are pushing for his nomination and whose methods are far from consistent with the ‘New Politics’ for which they idealistically long? 

I’d say that it was evidence. 

As Larry Johnson said some time ago:

These people cannot be trusted to accurately represent their candidate’s public positions on key issues and Senator Obama wants the American people to trust his judgment in selecting folks to run the bureaucracies that he already admitted he can’t run?  God save us.

Instead of recognizing that he is not exactly the candidate they imagine, they go on rationalizing on his behalf and making up explanations for him so he doesn’t have to.  Bear in mind, these are intelligent, even brilliant people.  I have said it before; I see the man’s appeal, and he’s incredibly attractive and of course an unparallelled maker of speeches, but isn’t this cause for concern? 

I suspect that by the time they finally let this information in, it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

Memeorandum has commentary on the passport story.

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