Friday 25 February 2011

Intelligence and Other Failures

Once again we have clear evidence of the incompetence and ignorance of our so called Intelligence Community.  The wave of popular uprisings which started in Tunisia in January are still spreading far and wide throughout the Middle East.  Now just ask yourself what advance warnings about any of these uprisings were given by any of the secret intelligence services?  Now some information is kept secret, but if the UK government had been told that a popular uprising in Egypt or LIbya was only days away would they not have made some efforts to secure the safety of UK citizens working there or on holiday there?  By all accounts the UK government was caught completely unawares and completely unprepared for any of the ongoing events.  Even the much vaunted Israeli intelligence services have been found out as incompetent and just plain ignorant.  
It’s not as if this was just a one off mistake.  The various intelligence services have substantial previous - and all of it bad.  Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam’s Iraq was full of?  We were repeatedly assured that “intelligence” told us that Iraq absolutely and most definitely had loads of these WMD and they were just itching to unleash it all on us.  Why we even went to war - a brutal and costly war - just to get rid of all these WMD.  Yet hey what - there were no WMD, none, zero, nada, zilch.  And please,  someone tell me where the hell this Osama Bin Laden is.  Just what do these guys get paid for?  And, incidentally, they tend to get paid substantial amounts of our money.
One should not single out the so called Intelligence Community for our wrath.  The supposed experts on the economy and the financial world have just as long a record of failure.  Care to name anyone in the Bank of England or the UK Treasury who warned us in advance of the coming financial tsunami?  It was the same in the USA and in other major countries.  The world of academia should not escape censure either.  With one or two notable exceptions the ivory towers of our most prestigious and expensive centres of learning were full of professors and other experts assuring us all that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
What is trully outrageous about all these intelligence and economic failures is that the very people who failed to foresee any of this are still in place.  Still in their highly paid jobs, mostly at our expense,.  And probably even worst and most infamous of all, they are still trotted out to lecture the rest of us on how to solve the current mess.  How can this be?  One thing is for sure there does not seem to be much in the way of competition at the top of the tree.  Success or failure clearly makes no difference - you just carry on as before and we poor mugs are supposed to just mind our manners and not dare to question our betters.  The Arab world is showing the way.  We need a bit more popular uprisings here in the UK and the rest of the western world.  Let’s make the bankers - and all the others who have failed us - pay.

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