Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

OBAMA SECRETLY ENDS PROGRAM THAT LETS PILOTS CARRY GUNS TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM HIJACKERS

The One is giving us "change" all right.  Here's the Washington Times editorial  via Michelle Malkin:

 After the September 11 attacks, commercial airline pilots were allowed to carry guns if they completed a federal-safety program. No longer would unarmed pilots be defenseless as remorseless hijackers seized control of aircraft and rammed them into buildings.

Now President Obama is quietly ending the federal firearms program, risking public safety on airlines in the name of an anti-gun ideology.   [more . . .]

WHY IS THE CIA SO DYSFUNCTIONAL?

In answering the question, Michael Ledeen draws on Ishmael Jones’s excellent book The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture.

Things are really, really bad over at the CIA, so much so that according to Ledeen, the book

. . . paints a devastating and alarming picture of a vast bureaucracy he calls “a corrupt, Soviet-style organization.” He warns that the CIA must “either be restructured as an American organization — which encourages achievement, creativity, and accountability — or it must be dismantled.

Ledeen continues:

I don’t know any other author who has told this devastating story so calmly and so convincingly. He thinks the Agency should be broken up into its component parts and integrated into other Agencies, from State to Defense.

Read on for specific, and depressing revelations...  (Incidentally, here would be a good place for McCain/Palin to exercise their commitment to "reform."  Shake up the CIA but good!!)

DISMAYING: THE IGNORANCE OF OUR INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

Dean Barnett isn't impressed by the insights or even the studiousness of our intelligence services.  It's been his observation that "Anything that happened in the Islamic world was by definition a reaction to something America or the West did. They had no understanding of our enemy and, more damningly, zero comprehension that they had to get one. Fast."

He writes further:

IN TODAY’S NEW YORK TIMES of all places, my well-founded skepticism has been validated. Jeff Stein, the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, writes how he’s made a habit in recent years of concluding interviews with government officials by asking them if they know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. The results have been uniformly dismaying if not surprising. A sample:

A few weeks ago, I took the F.B.I.’s temperature again. At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.