Tomgram: Engelhardt and Turse, The CIA Surges

Posted by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse at 5:30pm,
January 10, 2010.

The Shadow War
Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan

By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse

It was a Christmas and New Year’s from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect every obvious clue to a (literally) seat-of-the-pants al-Qaeda operation. It hardly mattered that the underwear bomber’s case -- except for the placement of the bomb material -- almost exactly, even outrageously, replicated the infamous, and equally inept, “shoe bomber” plot of eight years ago.

That would have been bad enough, but the New Year brought worse.