You have an excessively high opinion of the CIA, Mossad, etc. They are government bureaucracies. They don't work like Mission Impossible, with cutting edge technology and split second timing bringing about astounding results with the precision of high tech machinery. That's for-the-movies fantasies, They operate on the SNAFU principle like all government bureaucracies, see e.g., Catch 22. Or The Quiet American. They hire clowns like the late E. Howard Hunt. They miss connections. They fail to grasp obvious points. They ignore the research available from their own analysts (often quite good). They operate like rather lethal Keystone Kops who sometimes succeed because they are often up against bureaucracies as stupid as they and a lot less wealthy. A tolerably close look at even the declassified information available about any CIA covert operation will bear this out. It's true in Operation Phoenix they did succeed in decapitating the NLF by bribing poor villagers to reveal the identities and locations of top guerrilla cadre and help to kill them, but this is hardly the stuff of legend with cold, ruthless, utterly competent professionals do deeds of James Bond derring-do. The long and short of it, Shane, is you've been watching too many movies.
--- Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> Monbiot:
> "...you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
> their pals are
> all-knowing...You must believe that the impression
> of cackhandedness
> and incompetence they have managed to project since
> taking office is
> a front.."
>
> Nonsense, like all the "BinLaden did it" lone-nut
> conspiracytheorists
> propound. All you have to believe is that the
> imperialist ruling
> class might
> have highly skilled, totally professional,
> experienced and expert villains
> who have, over generations, managed *from behind the
> scenes* the
> apparatuses of murder and mass-deception, known as
> CIA, Mossad, MI-5,
> et. al. Granting this, the strange "coincidence" of
> an organization
> organized under the auspices (and thereby totally
> open to penetration by
> CIA-Mossad agents of influence) of US Intelligence;
> carrying out a
> classical (see Conrad's "Secret Agent") terrorist
> provocation, that could
> succeed only through the immobilization of the
> entire US domestic
> air-defense system; and the subsequent cover-up of
> the catastrophic
> failure of US defenses (without even a scapegoat!),
> it doesn't take a
> Joe Leaphorn to realize that "there are no
> coincidences" here.
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of
> Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems mystical,
> mystifying, even
> downright silly.
>
> When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of
> Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently
> true." (N.
> Weiner)
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