The American Spectator

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Langley Long Gone

5.16.06 @ 12:01AM

GOOGLE OBJECTS
Re: The Prowler's Internet Nationalization:

I'm writing to advise you that Google Inc. is not a financial supporter of MoveOn.org as your article of May 15 entitled "Internet Nationalization" asserts. As a result it is unequivocally incorrect to state that MoveOn has received "...more than $1 million from Google and its lobbyists..." I am requesting that your article be updated to reflect this.

It is wholly accurate to say that network neutrality is an issue of great importance to our users and to Google as a result. Broadband providers should not be permitted to use their market power to control what consumers see and do online. For 100 years telephone companies have been prohibited from telling consumers who they can call. For two decades Internet carriers have been prohibited from dictating what users do online. Broadband carriers should not now be allowed to pick winners and losers in the competitive Internet market.
-- Jon Murchinson
Google Corporate Communications

This disconnect between Republicans and their own self interest is precisely why the GOP is so often referred to as the "stupid party." I am, frankly, of the opinion that they will never learn.
-- Ken Shreve

PASSIVE NONAGGRESSION
Re: Jed Babbin's The Producers of Intelligence:

The real mystery here is the passivity of the Bush administration to the mutiny of the bureaucracy in the CIA. How, one wonders, can the administration consult with the CIA on whatever problems it is facing today?

After all, that is the provenance of the Wilson Plame Affair. There was a report circulated in Washington -- apparently from the Brits -- that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa in 1999. What did Cheney do? What I hope anybody else on the reading list for that report would have done. He asked our guys "is this true?"

Except that our guys were so affronted at this request -- for reasons that are unclear to a civilian -- that either they undertook a grotesquely inadequate effort by sending a family-member out on a junket or developed an operation to damage the questioner.

Why this response to a request from the Vice President has not resulted in everyone in the CIA chain of command involved with processing this request being fired is a mystery to me. But it certainly makes it easy to understand why Rumsfeld wants his own intelligence agency.

Mission statement for the CIA: "We are the CIA -- recalcitrant, incompetent, mutinous. Ask us as for intelligence and we will finish your career."

The CIA lost its war on 9/11. Its job is to protect the country and it failed. Sheer luck for the CIA that the civilians on Flight 93 did their job for them or the Capitol would be gone. And that even more damaging weapons weren't used. About the attack itself, the CIA was clueless. Clueless. And after that failure, the CIA has the gall to send an amateur -- the husband of one of its officers -- on a mission to Africa to find out whether Saddam was trying to buy uranium. Hard to think of a better example of slackness and indifference.

The default position should be that people should go. Hayden's attitude to employees should be "convince me that you are not part of the failure here."
-- Greg Richards

Well, why is it nobody's willing or able to clean out the Augean Stables of Langley? Let us speculate.

The CIA is an institution whose business is collecting other peoples' closely-guarded secrets and screwing them. The Agency's charter, and the law of the land, define and delimit the Agency's domain of targets to what might broadly be called offshore entities, but wait -- CIA is, after all, an institution. Institutions have all those well-known tendencies to self-aggrandizement and self-preservation, do they not?

Well then -- we've built a survival machine, taught it to operate in secret, and asked it to collect other peoples' closely-guarded information and to screw them.

Letter to the Editor

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