Tag: Intelligence

Worst Defense Attorney Lawyers Ever

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Today in complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy, counsel for the psychologists designed the CIA torture program are attempting to defend themselves against a civil suit by comparing themselves to the manufacturer of Zyklon-B, whose product was used in Nazi death camps:

As the recently departed White House press secretary demonstrated earlier this year, making comparisons to the Nazi regime’s murderous use of poison gas is rarely a good idea. That’s one reason it was so surprising that ahead of a crucial court hearing this week, defense lawyers for the two psychologists behind the CIA’s torture program compared their clients to the contractors who supplied the Nazis with Zyklon B, the poison gas used at Auschwitz and other concentration camps to murder millions of Jews and other prisoners in the Holocaust.

Psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen were the architects of the CIA’s torture program. Now, in a groundbreaking lawsuit, three survivors and victims of the torture program are seeking to hold Mitchell and Jessen accountable.

This Friday in federal court in Spokane, Washington, Mitchell and Jessen’s lawyers will argue that they can’t be held responsible for their actions. In an extraordinary legal filing, Mitchell and Jessen claim they aren’t legally responsible to the people hurt by their methods because they “simply did business with the CIA pursuant to their contracts.”

A key part of Mitchell and Jessen’s argument hinges on the claim that poison gas manufacturers weren’t held responsible by a British military tribunal for providing the Nazis with the gas because the Nazi government, not contractors, had final say on whether to use it. They argue that they are like a corporate gassing technician who was charged with and acquitted of assisting the Nazis because “even if [Mitchell and Jessen] played an integral part of the supply and use of” torture methods, they had no “influence” over the CIA’s decision to use them and can’t be accountable.

In fact, the Nuremberg tribunals that judged the Nazis and their enablers after World War II established the opposite rule: Private contractors are accountable when they choose to provide unlawful means for and profit from war crimes. In the same case that Mitchell and Jessen cite, the military tribunal found the owner of a chemical company that sold Zyklon B to the Nazis guilty — even though only the Nazis had final say on which prisoners would be gassed.

The military tribunal made clear that “knowingly to supply a commodity to a branch of the State which was using that commodity for the mass extermination of Allied civilian nationals was a war crime, and that the people who did it were war criminals for putting the means to commit the crime into the hands of those who actually carried it out.”

There is a saying among lawyers, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on you side, pound the table.”

These sadistic psychologists are pounding the table here.

This is F%$#ed Up

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Various aspects of the US State security apparatus have been leaking so egregiously that the Manchester police has stopped sharing data with US agencies over the concert bombing:

Police investigating the Manchester Arena bomb attack have stopped sharing information with the US after leaks to the media.

UK officials were outraged when photos appearing to show debris from the attack appeared in the New York Times.

It came after the name of bomber Salman Abedi was leaked to US media just hours after the attack, which left 22 dead.

Theresa May said she would tell Donald Trump at a Nato meeting that shared intelligence “must remain secure”.

………

Greater Manchester Police hope to resume normal intelligence relationships – a two-way flow of information – soon but is currently “furious”, the BBC understands.

Its chief constable Ian Hopkins said the recent leak had caused “much distress for families that are already suffering terribly with their loss.”.

The force – which is leading the investigation on the ground – gives its information to National Counter-Terrorism, which then shares it across government and – because of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement – with the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

………

BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera says UK officials believe that US law enforcement rather than the White House is the likely culprit for the leaks.

The leaks do sound a lot like the FBI: The organization has a long tradition of grandstanding with the press.

And I would note that it has happened before, and it only seems when it’s the FBI that’s involved in the investigation:

Lord Blair, who was the head of the Metropolitan Police at the time of the bombings in London on 7 July 2005, said a similar leak had happened then.

“It’s a different world in which the US operate in terms of how they publish things and this is a very grievous breach but I’m afraid it’s the same as before,” he said.

This is why my money is on the leaker being in the FBI.

This is the One Case Where the “Tricky Dick Defense” Actually Works

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Everyone is having conniptions because Donald Trump had a discussions with Russian officials describing credible reports that he had received regarding of ISIS plans to use a laptop bomb to take down a plane.

This may be stupid, but it’s not illegal, because POTUS is the ultimate classification authority in the United States, which means that he can tell whoever he wants whatever secrets he wants, and it’s legal, “Because the President is doing it.”

This does not apply to the multitude of crimes that Richard Milhous Nixon actually committed, but it does apply here.

His decision to go into detail about this with the Russians is a matter of politics and policy, but there is no violation of the law here, though there would be if any other individual in the US did so without authorization.

The President can authorize any release of classified data that is not constrained by other laws (For example, if there were a release of medical data, he might be in violation of the HIPAA statute).*

That is the beginning and the end of the law here.

This does not mean that his discussion wasn’t f%$#ing stupid, it appears that the intel came from another nation,† and his behavior would make other nations more reticent about intelligence sharing, but it is not illegal.

This is a tempest in a teapot over what is what I would call masturbatory intelligence outrage:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

 The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

 The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

 “This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

………

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

“Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive, and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

That “Former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team?”

That would be former SecDef Bob Gates, the unofficial mascot of what Ben Rhodes calls “The Blob”, the interventionist foreign policy conventional wisdom, which is itching for some sort of war with Russia.

With all the damage that Trump and his Evil Minions™ are doing to our economy, our environment, and our civil rights, the hysteria of America’s always wrong foreign policy establishment should not be a primary concern.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
†My guess is that the source is Israel, simply because it sounds like the sort of thing that the Mossad would catch, but this is a completely uninformed guess.

Quote of the Day

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But I do think one thing that has happened is that during the Cold War, for good or ill, Americans believed that they were the force of good. That belief is a lot harder to sustain in this day and age, for a range of reasons (not least the warrantless wiretapping and torture that Hayden facilitated). So just maybe the values remain the same, but America has changed?

—Marcy Wheeler, noting that Hayden’s blame of millennials for leaks is not based in reality.

I am Surprised and Impressed

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It appears that Wikileaks is exercising a bit more due diligence in its releases, as it is making the CIA hacks leaked to it available to the tech firms that were targeted before making them available to the general public:

Technology firms will get “exclusive access” to details of the CIA’s cyber-warfare programme, Wikileaks has said.

 The anti-secrecy website has published thousands of the US spy agency’s secret documents, including what it says are the CIA’s hacking tools.

 Founder Julian Assange said that, after some thought, he had decided to give the tech community further leaks first.

 “Once the material is effectively disarmed, we will publish additional details,” Mr Assange said.

 ………

 Mr Assange said that his organisation had “a lot more information on the cyber-weapons programme”.

 He added that while Wikileaks maintained a neutral position on most of its leaks, in this case it did take a strong stance.

 “We want to secure communications technology because, without it, journalists aren’t able to hold the state to account,” he said.

 Mr Assange also claimed that the intelligence service had known for weeks that Wikileaks had access to the material and done nothing about it.

 He also spoke more about the Umbrage programme, revealed in the first leaked documents.

 He said that a whole section of the CIA is working on Umbrage, a system that attempts to trick people into thinking that they had been hacked by other groups or countries by collecting malware from other nation states, such as Russia.

 “The technology is designed to be unaccountable,” he said.

 He claimed that an anti-virus expert, who was not named, had come forward to say that he believed sophisticated malware that he had previously attributed to Iran, Russia and China, now looked like something that the CIA had developed.

This is why cyber security needs to be completely separate from any intelligence agency.

Otherwise, there is too much pressure to cover up the bugs so that the folks on the other side of the office spy on the rest of us.

Any hole which the CIA, NSA, DIA, or other TLA* can exploit can also be exploited by criminals, the Chinese, the Russians, terrorists, or the New England Patriots.

*Three letter acronym.

Quote of the Day

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Let me just say at the outset that I will read any story anywhere that contains the phrase, “once stabbed a guy in the head with a broken margarita glass.” (It’s like Raymond Chandler rewritten by Carl Hiassen.)

—Charlie Pierce on the rather colorful history of white supremacist, bar brawler, mobbed up stock scammer, CIA informant,  and Trump staffer Felix Sater.

I have to disagree with Charlie Pierce on this:  Carl Hiassen would not write this, it’s simply too fantastic and unbelievable, even for Hiassen.

Heck, this is too weird for Kafka.

Eric Arthur Blair Rotational Momentum Exceeds Energy Released at Hiroshima

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The CIA has just awarded Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz al-Saud the George Tenet Medal for his efforts in fighting terrorism:

The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, received a medal on Friday from the CIA for his distinct intelligence-related counter-terrorism work and his contributions to ensure international peace and security.

 The medal, named after George Tenet, was handed to him by CIA Director Micheal Pompeo after the Crown Prince received him in Riyadh on Friday in the presence of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman al-Saud, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense.

 The Crown Prince said in a press statement after receiving the medal that he appreciated the CIA honor, stressing that his efforts were guided by the leaders of Saudi Arabia headed by King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, as well as the efforts of the Kingdom’s security forces.

I guess that someone at the CIA is glad for the self licking terror ice-cream cone that is the House of Saud.

They created ISIS, they sponsored bin Laden, and now one of their over-privileged Princes gets an award named for George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, arguably the worst* DCIA ever.

*There is a case to be made that Allen Dulles was far worse, particularly he shaped the organization that has been f%$#ing up the world since its founding.

Still a Few Bugs in the System

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Some neuroscientists decided to see if the latest neuroscience tools could handle a simpler case than the human brain.

They chose a 40+ year old CPU, and they failed abysmally:

In 2014, the US announced a new effort to understand the brain. Soon, we would map every single connection within the brain, track the activity of individual neurons, and start to piece together some of the fundamental units of biological cognition. The program was named BRAIN (for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), and it posited that we were on the verge of these breakthroughs because both imaging and analysis hardware were finally powerful enough to produce the necessary data, and we had the software and processing power to make sense of it.

But this week, PLoS Computational Biology published a cautionary note that suggests we may be getting ahead of ourselves. Part experiment, part polemic, a computer scientist got together with a biologist to apply the latest neurobiology approaches to a system we understand far more completely than the brain: a processor booting up the games Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. The results were about as awkward as you might expect, and they helped the researchers make their larger point: we may not understand the brain well enough to understand the brain.

On the surface, this may sound a bit ludicrous. But it gets at something fundamental to the nature of science. Science works on the basis of having models that can be used to make predictions. You can test those models and use the results to refine them. And you have to understand a system on at least some level to build those models in the first place.

 ………

That’s where Donkey Kong comes in.

Games on early Atari systems were powered by the 6502 processor, also found in the Apple I and Commodore 64. The two authors of the new paper (Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording) decided to take this relatively simple processor and apply current neuroscience techniques to it, tracking its activity while loading these games. The 6502 is a good example because we can understand everything about the processor and use that to see how well the results match up. And, as they put it, “most scientists have at least behavioral-level experience with these classical video game systems.”

So they built upon the work of the Visual 6502 project, which got ahold of a batch of 6502s, decapped them, and imaged the circuitry within. This allowed the project to build an exact software simulator with which they could use to test neuroscience techniques. But it also enabled the researchers to perform a test of the field of “connectomics,” which tries to understand the brain by mapping all the connections of the cells within it.

To an extent, the fact that their simulator worked is a validation of the approach. But, at the same time, the chip is incredibly simple: there is only one type of transistor, as opposed to the countless number of specialized cells in the brain. And the algorithms used to analyze the connections only got the team so far; lots of human intervention was required as well. “Even with the whole-brain connectome,” Jonas and Kording conclude, “extracting hierarchical organization and understanding the nature of the underlying computation is incredibly difficult.”

Remember, in a microprocessor, a transistor is a transistor is a transistor, in the brain, neurons and ganglia vary from cell to cell.

This is a valid test of the software, the 6502 is arguably the most thoroughly understood CPU in existence, and Donkey Kong is arguably one of the best understood pieces of software in existence.

And they still could not do it on a  processor that can access only 64K of RAM.

We are much further from mapping the brain in any detail than is implied in the mainstream media reports.

She Would Say That, Wouldn’t She?*

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Over at the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist (and former Ombud for the NY Times)  suggests that we should stop using the term “Fake News”, particularly when applied to major metropolitan newspapers like the Post.

It appears that she is mightily offended that people are calling out the WaPo for publishing fake news (the non-existent Vermont Power hack) just because they, well, you know, published fake news.

She thinks that the term has, “Had its 15 minutes of fame.”

Let’s be clear: If you have an anonymous source, and they burn you repeatedly, and you don’t burn the source, and you keep going back to the well for more quotes from them, as the Post has done with the US state security apparatus since its founding (with a few notable exceptions), it’s fake news.

Use the same standards as libel for public figures: A reckless disregard for the truth, and a quick Google gives us this

Disregard of the truth or falsity of a defamatory statement by a person who is highly aware of its probable falsity or entertains serious doubts about its truth or when there are obvious reasons to doubt the veracity and accuracy of a source [the knowingly false statement and the false statement made with reckless disregard of the truth , do not enjoy constitutional protection “Garrison v. Louisiana , 379 U.S. 64 (1964)”

The Washington Post is not just regularly burnt by its sources in intelligence, it is routinely burnt by these sources.

The reporters know this, the editors know this, and Margaret Sullivan knows this, and they just don’t care.

This is the very epitome of fake news.

*This is a reference to Mandy Rice-Davies and the Profumo Affair, who when told that Lord Astor denied having ever met her, much less f%$#ed her, replied with a rather similar quote.

Snark of the Day

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The most remarkable thing about the government’s assessment released on Friday is that more than a quarter of the report is merely an annex dedicated to the colossal significance of the RT (Russia Today) television network. These seven pages written by the U.S. intelligence community comprise what is perhaps the greatest and most generous Christmas gift in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, which celebrates the birth of Christ on Saturday, Jan. 7.

—Moscow Times. American Unintelligence on Russia (Op-ed)

Heh.

This is Literally the Smallest Surprise of the Year

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Remember when Barack Obama said that Snowden should have gone through “Proper channels” to report abuses by the NSA?

Well, it turns out that Snowden’s “Proper Chanel” was just fired for illegal retaliation against a whistle-blower:

NSA oversight and whistleblowing through proper channels: both pretty much worthless.

Members of the intelligence community and members of its supposed oversight have said the same thing repeatedly over the past few years: oh, we’d love to cut Edward Snowden a break, but he should have taken his complaints up the ladder, rather than outside the country.

………

During a day-long conference at the Georgetown University Law Center, Dr. George Ellard, the inspector general for the National Security Agency, spoke for the first time about the disclosures made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In addressing the alleged damage caused by Snowden’s disclosures he compared Snowden to Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent and convicted spy who sold secrets to the Russians.

[…]

“Snowden, in contrast, was manic in his thievery, which was exponentially larger than Hanssen’s. Hanssen’s theft was in a sense finite whereas Snowden is open-ended, as his agents decide daily which documents to disclose. Snowden had no background in intelligence and is likely unaware of the significance of the documents he stole,” Ellard suggested.

These are the words of the “proper channel.” Ellard went on to state that had Snowden approached him with his concerns he would have pointed to the series of judicial rubber stamps that backed up the government’s post-9/11 national security assertions as they approved more and more bulk surveillance.

That Inspector General — the official channels, the oversight — is now (mostly) on his way out of the agency for actions undertaken in direct conflict with his position, as reported by the Project for Government Oversight.

[L]ast May, after eight months of inquiry and deliberation, a high-level Intelligence Community panel found that Ellard himself had previously retaliated against an NSA whistleblower, sources tell the Project On Government Oversight. Informed of that finding, NSA’s Director, Admiral Michael Rogers, promptly issued Ellard a notice of proposed termination, although Ellard apparently remains an agency employee while on administrative leave, pending a possible response to his appeal from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

“Bring your complaints through the proper channels,” said the proper channel, all the while making sure whistleblowers regret blowing the whistle. Ellard still has an appeal left to reclaim his position as a dead end for whistleblowers, but it seems unlikely the agency will be interested in welcoming a liability back into the fold. Ellard didn’t just violate standard government policies on workplace retaliation but a fairly-recent presidential directive as well.

It’s a pity that there isn’t criminal liability attached to such behavior.

I am With Marcy Wheeler on This

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In the New York Times, noted national security journalist Marcy “Emptywheel” Wheeler observes that. “I Despise Donald Trump, but He’s Right to Be Skeptical of C.I.A. Leaks.”

She also calls out the Gray Lady for its fake news in the lead-up to the Iraq war, in its own pages.

I’m thinking that the editors had a fit over that:

………
 Trump is not quite right when he claims that, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Neither the entire intelligence community nor even everyone at the C.I.A. was wrong about the Iraq intelligence. Rather, leaks like the ones we’re seeing now ensured elected officials didn’t hear from the skeptics who got it right.

That time, as members of Congress were demanding the Bush administration show its case for war, anonymous officials told this newspaper that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq could only be used for nuclear enrichment. By the time Congress got a report, a month later, saying that might not be the case most members never read it; they had already been convinced that the case for war was a “slam dunk.” 

 ………

These leaks are important. By all means, take them seriously. But they raise questions about why the C.I.A. wants to short-circuit the deliberation Obama ordered as much as they raise alarm about Putin’s role in Trump’s victory. Letting the C.I.A. dictate outcomes with leaks corrupts any democratic accountability it has.

Putin must not get to pick our next president. At the same time, elected representatives — whether Congress, President Obama, the 538 electors or the person who takes a vow to protect and defend the Constitution on Jan. 20 — must maintain control over our powerful intelligence community, even while alarming leaks attempt to wag the dog. 

(emphasis mine)

Her theory (see her blog) is that someone in the CIA is trying to obscure the likely origins of Russian operations: Hostile actions taken by the US state security apparatus, particularly the CIA, intended to destabilize and overthrow Russian allies.

It’s pretty clear that the CIA never stopped making war on Moscow after the end of the USSR, and it appears that the Russian state security apparatus is now returning the favor.

I Didn’t Think That It Was Possible, but Donald Trump Just Disappointed Me

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Maddow has some more on this sorry excuse for a human being

OK, not just disappointed. I am also horrified, but I kind of expect to be horrified by him.

I did not expect to be disappointed, because my expectations are so f%$#ing low, but the inverted traffic cone has outdone himself.

Specifically, Trump’s appointee as deputy national security adviser, Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland, who is infamous for outing her brother as gay to her family while he was dying of AIDS:

In between Twitter claims that he lost the popular vote due to voter fraud instead of due to alienating over half the nation by being the dictionary definition of “The Worst,” President-elect Donald Trump somehow finds time to fill out his staff with people you wouldn’t trust to pick up dog sh%$.

As the Washington Blade reports, Trump’s pick for deputy national security adviser is basically a monster. Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland, FOX News contributor and former Pentagon official during the Reagan administration, outed her gay brother, who was dying of AIDS, to their family.

The Blade is referring to a 2006 New York Magazine article, when McFarland was gearing up to challenge Hillary Clinton for her Senate seat, which unearthed a 1992 letter to her then-estranged parents:

“Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other?” she wrote. “He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.”

McFarland tried to downplay the letter at the time, claiming it was a form of therapy to deal with abuse she and her siblings had suffered at the hands of their parents—abuse both her parents and at least one of her siblings denied.

“It’s a complete fabrication,” Tom Troia told the New York Post back in 2006 regarding his sister’s allegations. “If I had one word to describe my sister, it would be ‘evil.’”

………

Former Geroge W. Bush National Security Council member Peter D. Feaver told The Times McFarland’s job is supposed to be “the place where bad ideas die,” but as Donald Trump’s other appointees make glaringly clear, there is no longer such a place.

(%$ mine)

There is also the long history of resume padding, as Maddow discusses above, but that doesn’t disappoint me:  I expect sh%$ like that from a Trump administration.

Knowing is Worse than Not Knowing

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Remember when I said that I would not be speculating on Trump cabinet appointments because it just made thing worse and drove me crazy?

I may have been excessively optimistic.

Trump has announced that he will be nominating a racist dirtbag for US Attorney General (Jeff Sessions), a right wing lunatic who was fired as head of the DIA for his incompetence and an abusive management style as National Security Adviser (Michael Flynn), and a Teabagger who is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers as  as C.I.A. Director (Mike Pompeo).

Charlie Pierce has the details.

Of particular note here is that this appears to be putting the stake through the heart of whatever faint hope there was that Trump would not buy into the mindlessly bellicose national security consensus.

We are in for more, and possibly stupider, wars during the Trump Administration.

This is Unconscionable

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“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘F%$# this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘F%$# it, who cares?’”

 “I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added. A second Special Forces soldier commented that one Syrian militia they had trained recently crossed the border from Jordan on what had been pitched as a large-scale shaping operation that would change the course of the war. Watching the battle on a monitor while a drone flew overhead, “We literally watched them, with 30 guys in their force, run away from three or four ISIS guys.”

The term for this is, “Going The Good Soldier Švejk.”

Expanding on this, Jack Murphy notes that the CIA continues to be uninterested in fighting ISIS, instead focusing on overthrowing the Assad regime, while different CIA task forces are fighting each other:

One of the major points of this article is that the CIA doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq. By the end of 2014 there were only twenty CIA targeting officers and analysts were dedicated to IS. By early 2016, it was not much better. Instead, the CIA neurotically focused on removing Assad from power by any means possible. This laser focus was established by Brennan. I surmise this focus is shared by most in the Obama Administration

In spite of this focus, the CIA’s efforts in Syria is plagued by bureaucratic infighting. The CIA has three elements jockeying for power. The Syria Task Force is similar to the Iraqi Task Force and Iranian Operations Group that preceded it. It is Brennan’s baby. Damascus X is the Syrian CIA station now operating in Amman. And then there is the CTC/SI (Counterterrorist Center/Syria-Iraq), which is tragically focused on the Assad government rather than the terrorists. I have seen this kind of food fight for resources and prestige in the CIA and even in the DIA during the fat money days of the GWOT. I’m sure this cat fight is even more intense in today’s leaner fiscal environment.

The buck on this stops at Barack Obama’s desk.

It is clear that he has been passive, and allowed the US state security apparatus to set their own, frequently conflicting priorities, and Obama’s passivity with regard to this is the main cause.

It doesn’t help that current DCIA, John Brennan, was a former station chief in Saudi Arabia, and has relentlessly supported Saudi policy goals ever since.

This is not as much of a clusterf%$# as the invasion of Iraq, yet, but it really is a level of incompetence simply buggers the mind.