For the past several months I’ve maintained that the problem with all of the post-9/11 analyses seek to blame this or that agency for failing to stop the terrorist attacks is that Americans are being hypocritical about what they want law enforcement and intelligence agencies to do and how to act. So, for example, as a nation we’re outraged by racial profiling but we’re also angry that the FBI didn’t start hauling in Arab flight students for questioning after a Phoenix FBI agent warned of the possibility of terrorists training in such schools.
Nothing illustrates this sort of problem than a new report which actually criticizes the Central Intelligence Agency for, get this, being unwilling to work with “unsavory characters.” Here’s CNN’s report,
The subcommittee’s chairman also said CIA officials are not doing enough to allow field officers to recruit unsavory characters to infiltrate terrorist organizations, the chairman of a House homeland security panel said Tuesday.
Congress last year ordered the CIA to do business with these sorts of people, but it is apparently angry that the CIA is not being active enough in recruiting unsavory characters.
Now the CIA used to regularly work with the scum of the earth. Latin American torturers, people with ties to organized crime, people who themselves engaged in terrorist attacks against America’s enemies. And when that sordid past was well-documented in books published in the 1960s and 1970s, a hue and cry went up to stop the CIA from recruiting and protecting such despicable people.
In fact, one of the themes of the post-9/11 blame game was how and why the United States helped fund and train Afghanistan’s Mujahadeen fighters, including cooperating with Osama bin Laden, before he became so obsessively anti-America.
And yet, here we are in 2002 with a member of Congress complaining that the CIA doesn’t do enough to go out and recruit people who themselves have criminal and, in many cases, terrorist pasts.
My prediction: sometime within the next 10-15 years there will be a major scandal involving the CIA’s cooperation with an “unsavory individual” and Americans and Congress will all wonder how the CIA could have possibly gotten so far off track.