Rewarding Incompetence

Rewarding Incompetence

Lack of accountability is pervasive among public officials and agencies.
Lowry's observations apply as well to the FBI. (RICH LOWRY, "THE CIA'S HOLIDAY,"
New York Post, August 25, 2007) The US Court awarded $101 million to four men
framed by an FBI informant with the knowledge of supervising agents. FBI agents
in the troubled Boston office permitted a malicious prosecution for ethnic
reasons. Their motto is "Mess up, move up."
The award is taxpayer funds. The wrongdoers suffered no legal or
administrative penalties. The loud and clear message is that the taxpayer will
pay for misconduct of public officials. Among politicians it is worse. How much
malfeasance is inspired by elected officials who encourage abuses of power?

Roy Bercaw, Editor, ENOUGH ROOM

THE CIA'S HOLIDAY
New York Post
By RICH LOWRY

August 25, 2007 -- THE new report from the CIA's inspector general about the spy
agency's pre- 9/11 failings could be titled, "What We Did During Our Holiday
From History."

The stretch from the end of the Cold War to the 9/11 attacks was supposed to be
a shiny new era of globalized peace and prosperity, to which an intelligence
service was considered quaintly irrelevant. The CIA conformed to the zeitgeist
by remaining quaintly irrelevant.

George Tenet presided over the agency, failing his way to the second-longest
tenure of any director of central intelligence, a Presidential Medal of Freedom
and a $4 million book advance. He made the Peter Principle work for him not just
by advancing to his level of incompetence, but by benefiting from it handsomely.

[...]

More scandalous is how the CIA has escaped serious reform even today. Two CIA
directors in a row have resisted the IG report's recommendation for an
accountability board to evaluate CIA officials' pre-9/11 performance. That word
- not "board," but "accountability" - raises hackles at Langley, where everyone
is above-average at fighting al Qaeda. As many as 60 CIA employees knew that two
of the hijackers were in the U.S. before 9/11 and no one managed to get the word
to the FBI, yet CIA Director Michael Hayden thinks holding anyone accountable
for that or other failures would be "distracting."

And so the band plays on.