Hi!

Did you see tonight on 60 Minutes what the CIA is up to with respect to Dr. Chalabi? The CIA is blaming him (an Iraqi national, a leader of an opposition party in Iraq) for their screw-ups with respect to how easy this war would go, and how quickly the Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians would just lay down and roll over for the US.

Does it not occur to the CIA that blaming a single man for their own intelligence failures tells volumes about the inadequacy of that organization's intelligence skill? Did it not ever occur to the CIA to, oh, I dunno, confirm the reports of Chalabi with other reliable sources before acting upon them?

Basically, our CIA is a complete joke. It can monitor all sorts of mundane information (and probably not all that well), and it can instigate all sorts of nastiness globally, but when it really matters, the CIA fails time and again.

Good thing we're spending so much annually on having an effective intelligence gathering organization. What kind of trouble would we be in without the CIA?!?

Oh, wait, I forgot... it's drug money which finances the CIA. Well, OK, then, as long as we're not paying for the CIA with our taxes or anything...

=-John-=