by J. P. Freire
Washington Examiner
1/3/10
After the single most deadly day for the CIA since eight officers were killed in Beirut in 1983, an official tells the Daily Mail he’s tired of the double standard:
One day the President is pointing the finger and blaming the intelligence services, saying there is a systemic failure,’ said one agency official. ‘Now we are heroes. The fact is that we are doing everything humanly possible to stay on top of the security situation. The deaths of our operatives shows just how involved we are on the ground.’
But CIA bosses claim they were unfairly blamed at a time the covert government agency has been stretched further than ever before in Afghanistan and Pakistan…
…Obama’s going to have a hard time ducking blame if every time he throws the agency under the bus, CIA officials push back. But especially interesting is this tidbit:
The president complained that a warning from the former London engineering student’s father and information about an al Qaeda bomb plot involving a Nigerian were not handled properly by the intelligence networks.
But CIA officials say the data was sent to the US National Counterterrorism Centre in Washington, which was set up after the 9/11 attacks as a clearing house where raw data should be analysed.
The problem isn’t so much that the president has blamed the CIA — it’s that a blame-game is being played at all. This is the squabbling of disorder — not of problem-solving…
The article continues at the Examiner.
