Intelligence does not always mean brainy.

Charlie Wilson wasn’t a spook, but he used the stuff of spooks to create such an explosive blowback situation in Afghanistan that the war he fueled altered modern life — and not at all for the good.
Wilson is a Custer-like asshole who convinced all of DC the CIA could beat the Russkies using local folks — the mujahedeen — and of course, the rest is 9/11 history.

(Illustration found here).

President-Elect Obama’s selection for CIA director of Leon Panetta, who’s been doing something or another in DC since 1966, has caused a hissy-fit — Dianne Feinstein and John Rockefeller got miffed and a shitload of so-called “intelligence experts” claimed Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff has no ‘Intell’ experience, but nobody seems to notice the obvious — the US spy agency apparently does such shitty/slip-shod work, any serious insights out of McLean, VA can’t be trusted.
Nothing says it better:

• The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy.
  Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already become victims.
  Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The United States deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for its militarized opponents only an “asymmetric strategy,” in the jargon of the Pentagon, has any chance of success.
  When it does succeed, as it did spectacularly on September 11, it renders our massive military machine worthless: The terrorists offer it no targets.
  On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we are “a beacon for freedom” and because the attackers were “evil.”
  In his address to Congress on September 20, he said, “This is civilization’s fight.”
  This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp events as only a conflict over abstract values — as a “clash of civilizations,” in current post-cold war American jargon — is not only disingenuous but also a way of evading responsibility for the “blowback” that America’s imperial projects have generated.

So wrote Chalmers Johnson in The Nation, Oct. 15, 2001.
And in the CIA-operated “Charlie Wilson’s War” and its subsequent terrorist/insurgent blowback, it was all on the hush-n-hush, everybody a culprit except for the US public.

• What is truly mind-boggling about Wilson’s extraordinary saga is that not one word of it leaked to the press.
  He credits this to the bipartisan spirit in Congress at the time. “It never leaked because nobody wanted it to,” he says.
  “Everybody was pulling for [the mujahedin]. It was amazing and will never, never, ever happen again.”

Pulling for Afghan insurgents/warlords?
Wilson is full of shit — It was besting the Soviets, and when the Russkies rumbled across Friendship Bridge, the US did the same, disappearing, leaving behind not only a pile of trouble, but a shitload of weapons, a vortex of a vacuum, from which sprang forth al-Qaeda.
And in a seemingly apparent attempt to reverse/and-or revitalize this so-called ‘intelligence agency,’ Obama has apparently picked a guy who can manage money, at least on paper, and maybe can help manage a company infested with a mantra for black operations and subversion.

(Illustration found here).

And this, the US top spy agency with some nasty “family jewels” once stored in a locked vault.

Enter stage left, Leon Panetta, supposedly set to take over an agency riddled with problems, and drag the US away from the horror of torture, rendition and all the other immoral/illegal stagecraft allowed by Decider George’s tenure at the helm.

If nothing else, Panetta appears as one to remove the global veil of the US being inhumane.

(Illustration found here).

In a short piece early last year at Washington Monthly, he pared it down to the bottom line: Fear.

• Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful.
  It makes the end justify the means. And why not?
  If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what’s wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?
  The simple answer is the rule of law.
  Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation.
  It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that.
  This new nation would recognize that every individual has an inherent right to personal dignity, to justice, to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.
  We have preached these values to the world.
  We have made clear that there are certain lines Americans will not cross because we respect the dignity of every human being.
  That pledge was written into the oath of office given to every president, “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.”
  It’s what is supposed to make our leaders different from every tyrant, dictator, or despot. We are sworn to govern by the rule of law, not by brute force.
  We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values.
  But that is a false compromise.
  We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t.
  There is no middle ground.
  We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

One of the dream-like aspects of the last eight years has been the visual ugliness of indeed the Ugly American, creating a shitstorm in just about every corner of the planet.
The CIA’s latest venture: drugging Afghan warlords with sex-inducer viagra.
In a post last month at Politicol News:

• So instead of gutting the country of warlords the CIA chooses to make them happy by allowing an entire male population to be sexually promiscuous and a mob that could turn into rapists.
  This western drug induces the authority and rape crimes are used by the culture against women as the majority of Afghan tribal leaders have four wives.
  This patriarchal society puts women in their place, and Afghan women become the victims of rape and abuse due to the enhancement pharmaceutical drugs.
  Its nice to know taxpayers dollars are going to the ability of a Taliban war lord to maintain his erections for 24 hours or more.

Leon has a rough row to hoe.