Cheney's CIA "hit"-paraders as laughable stumblebums

Their incompetence remains breathtaking.

Strike that. It's more breathtaking than ever, and, as the years pass, I'm sure, it'll come to be known as surpassing even the metaphysical Platonic Ideal of breathtaking incompetence.

I write, of course, of the Bush administration, which, for all its manly swagger and muscular chest-pounding, couldn't even assemble your plain, everyday, garden-variety hit-squad -- any kind of rudimentary assassination team, that is, that could shoot straight enough to avoid hitting its own ass.

Breathtaking? Nay, mind-boggling is the adjective that leaps from today's Washington Post page that reports that even though George W. Bush signed a "secret document" in September 2001 authorizing the CIA "to use deadly force against bin Laden as well as other senior members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups," the administration's secret pursuit of the baddest of bad guys went absolutely nowhere.

For just a minute, forget all the brouhaha about the program's probable illegality of non-disclosure to Congress. Instead, just ponder its utter, ineffable, and absolutely farcical ineptitude:

"The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency's back burner for much of the past eight years ... never progressed beyond concepts and feasibility studies...; was active in fits and starts [but] was essentially killed in 2004 because it was deemed ineffective."

Three years within which to reverse that ... and yet, no go.

Said a CIA spokesman, the Bush-Cheney superspooky operation "never took a single terrorist off the battlefield." And added an intelligence official, if we ever do need to whack someone, "smart minds will figure out a better way to do it."

Here's my take. Sure, Cheney loved skulduggery and cloak-and-daggery stuff and all that; undoubtedly part of the reason why he told the CIA to withhold disclosure. But more than that he was simply, immeasurably embarrassed.

Comments

[John Lovejoy]

I lthink the Bushies never had a plan to take out Bin Laden. Later, someone else took him out (Benazir Bhutto referred to "the man who murderd Osama Bin Laden" during a David Frost interview. The man's been dead for years. But "his" voice on audio tapes has served to keep the masses scared out of their wits.

[Dan Van Riper]

As time goes on and an empire becomes more and more complicated, and the empire lies to itself more and more, there are fewer and fewer persons who are able to understand how the empire works or are even willing to try to understand.

After a while there are no more competent persons who are willing to run the empire. That's when the idiots and the looters take over. Not too long after that happens, the empire starts to collapse. (Read about the Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire, for example.)

Yeah, I have a lot of complaints about Mr. Obama's policies. But no one can deny his tremendous competency. Will his administration merely be a brief respite from the idiots and losers before The Collapse comes down on us? Or is he competent enough to save the country... by radically changing course and managing properly?