[George Smiley:] “[They] do want money. Lots of money. I should have mentioned that. In that respect, secret services and their customers are like anyone else, I’m afraid. They value most what costs most, and Merlin costs a fortune. Ever bought a fake picture?”

“I sold a couple once,” said Toby with a flashy, nervous smile, but no one laughed.

“The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt it. Silly, but there we are.”

As part and parcel to my self-acquired authority and under my regimen as the Prince Of The Sonoran Desert, you are hereby “pardoned” and with the caveat of “Don’t do it again!”.

And with the Gang of Six exorcising our health care reform, their single iota of ganglion will eventually surface for a VAT or Value Added Tax in order to meet their nonsensical “cost controls”. In response, our “intelligence” should be focused on a One Percent Federal Sales Tax. Now, I am off on a ‘tangent’.

Jaango

eCAHN is right about the satellite stuff. Tim Weiner’s book about the history of the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” has a lot of great detail in it about that stuff.

Blub@10, that’s a great idea. There should be a “government pronouncements” section, penned off from real journalism. Sometimes reporters have the task of writing up speeches. Why? It’s a weird custom — sometimes I do it too — and ought to be separated from pieces that apply scrutiny to government pronouncements. Besides, I don’t see why my time is well served by transcribing stuff and why an interested reader wouldn’t prefer to see the full text of a speech or a release. The follow-on piece would be one that compared/contrasted the claims made in those speeches/releases with the accumulated body of knowledge on the topic at issue. Just some thoughts riffing off your very good comment.

Jaango@77, could I at least serve my time at a Club Fed? I throw myself at the mercy of the court of public opinion.

More results from spiegel.de »

Well,type der Spiegel into your search engine.

Their is an online English version.

It has this story.

Death Squad
Blackwater Accused of Creating ’Killing Program’

A memo obtained by SPIEGEL indicates that cooperation between the CIA and private security firm Blackwater was deeper than previously known. SPIEGEL has uncovered further details about a plan to set up squads for targeted killings of suspected al-Qaida leadership in Afghanistan. more…

Policy comes before intel.

Journalists are just not that smart. They don’t understand intelligence; neither its collection nor use to develop policy and make decisions, so can’t present an intelligible story to readers.

The result is that readers have to try to evaluate judgments made by the intelligence and policy makers based on intelligence which, by nature, boils down to probability theory, through the fuzzy prism of a story line created by a confused journalist.

A journalist who gives deference to a government agent, be he a policy maker, military, or other executive or bureaucrat, is either lazy or stupid. In either case, the journalist has never really taken the time to study and understand the subject.