One Sucker's Saga, Part IX: Bumbling Like a Fox

There's one Arab terrorist with a sense of humor, and he said, "I bet I can get them all to take their shoes off at airports." If the next one is called, because of his M.O., The Underwear Bomber, we'll know I'm on to something.

Calvin Trillin on The Daily Show, June 16, 2006

Sometimes I feel I am absolutely alone in wondering why professed failures in intelligence gathering has led to rewarding those intelligence services with greater and greater resources and authority. Shouldn't failures be rewarded with punishments? That's how it works in most of the real world around me. Yet again and again, this attack or that was just barely detected before it could be stopped. Part of this is undoubtedly sampling error; no thwarted attack should be discussed publicly for a raft of reasons, therefore only the missed attacks get discussed, creating a seemingly overweighted sample of failure. I recognize this. Without knowing the success rate relative to the failure, one cannot really speculate on the nature of the actual threat.

Still, all of these very public failures have a few things in common. They serve to give the US intelligence community in general an air of incompetence, something which has to demoralize the low-level analysts poring over raw data looking for patterns and clues. At the same time, these failures are painted as reasons not to bolster our intelligence resources, but to expand ( the increasing intrusion of many other branches of government into our and the world's affairs. )