CIA Screws Up Again?

Two things happened this week that let me return to the central thesis of Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, which states that the agency has a record of gross incompetence and failure, and officials and agents conduct themselves with a "swagger and hubris" that is disproportionate to their actual accomplishments.

The first incidence, was that of the underwear-bomber who set his genitals on fire aboard a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.  According to ABC News, the accused  made a final telephone call to his father, who found the conversation so disturbing that he "approached Nigerian officials who took him directly to the CIA's station chief in the Nigerian capital."  The alert prompted, "Officials to put Abdulmutallab's name into a database of more than half a million others that the U.S. suspects of ties to terrorism, but they did not put him on the country's no-fly list."  On the day of Abdulmutallab’s departure, his $2,800 airline ticket was paid for with cash, with the accused having no luggage except a single backback.  The latter created no red-flags for either the airlines or US security.

The second incidence, involved a suicide bomber disguised as an Afghan soldier, who managed to kill seven CIA agents at the agency's base in Afghanistan.  The incident represents the agency’s worst loss of publicly-identified personnel since a 1983 attack in Lebanon conducted by Hezbollah guerrillas.  The Times of London reports that:

The bomber, claimed by the Taleban to be one of its members, entered Forward Operating Base Chapman and detonated explosives attached to his body in the compound’s gym. US officials said that the CIA had mounted an internal investigation into the security breach... Four other agents have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, according to the CIA, though the secretive nature of its operations means that there may have been more.

The history of the agency has been noted as a colossal failure-after-failure and an extravagant waste of capital.  Their most recent misadventures involve torturing terrorist suspects across the globe, obtaining useless and counter-factual data from paid Iraqi agents, and their pre-911 intelligence gathering services were determined to be severely compromised by foreign agents.  Little appears to have changed and their gross incompetence, as far as we can discern, is insuring that America's efforts in its 'Global War on Terrorism' remains a fantastic failure.