“All these conspiracy theories have the two basic problems: one, they believe the government is competent. And two, they believe the government can keep a secret.” – Richard Clarke

Laura Rozen has another article with a new example of the CIA torture briefing timeline being garbage.

If you remove a classified document from a file, you have to log it. The Congressional briefing materials were classified, so there should be a log showing when they were removed, who removed them, and when they were returned. If you are giving a classified briefing, everyone in the briefing area has to be identified and logged to ensure they possess the proper clearance to hear the briefing. This is the normal, standard process, and those logs should exist. If they don’t exist, as seems to be case, then the CIA has major classified control issues in addition to its other problems. These are standard government office procedures, not special intelligence requirements.

The CIA can’t even create a frame-up that will stand up to minimal scrutiny, so why should anyone accept that they are competent enough to make the country safe. Nothing that was under the control of the Hedgemony for eight years can be assumed to be functional. The widespread practice of replacing professionals with political appointees has led to the general loss of effective government functions.

It looks like Bibi didn’t get the reception in Washington he was looking for: Israeli Official: 2-State Focus “Stupid”.

Immediately after saying that the official started backpedaling and spinning, realized he had screwed up, major league. It was amended to mean that the idea is great, swell, wonderful, but there’s no need to concentrate on it when there are other paths to peace, [editor: that include a lot of dead bodies, which is a requirement for Israeli politicians these days.]

The Iranians are inching their way to more sophisticated weapons: Iran tests new surface-to-surface missile.

The big advance is that this is a solid fuel rocket. Their current missile with the same range [approximately 1200 miles] is liquid fuel which forces it to have static launch sites, and makes it very dangerous to transport if fueled.

If certain governments stopped talking constantly about attacking them, the Iranians might not see the need to spend the money on new weapons.