Topic: Decline of the West
The United States spends a cool $40 billion per year on intelligence—not, obviously, of the IQ variety, or we wouldn’t have Obamacare, but to find out what’s going on around the world in counties and regions deemed vital to the national interest. So how well is that investment (as the Obama Administration prefers to call spending) paying off? Check it out:
CIA Director Leon Panetta helped touch off an avalanche of erroneous expectations Thursday when he testified that there was a "strong likelihood" that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would step down by the end of the day.
Within minutes, senior aides to Panetta sought to tamp down the impact, saying he was merely referring to media reports. But by then, the comments had ricocheted around the Internet, underscoring U.S. confusion about events unfolding in Egypt, as well as the perils of publicly weighing in on such developments while serving as director of CIA.
Now when I put these two things together in my head, they simply do not add up: (1) We’re spending—excuse me, investing—$40 billion so that Leon Panetta & Co. can gather and evaluate intelligence; (2) Leon Panetta is apparently getting his information from CNN. Call me hypher-critical, but somehow this story fails to inspire confidence in the (perhaps mislabeled) intelligence community…