www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Spooks, Spies, Thugs and Bureaucrats Looking for ways to maintain a strong, effective intelligence network without wasting tax dollars, cheating citizens, or endangering personnel...

Who doesn't want our security and intelligence services to be strong, efficient, and effective? However,
what we don't want are overpaid, underworked, dishonest partisans abusing our people and Constituion!

Click Here for my page about government unions..."

"...we have to question everything that comes out of our intelligence agencies," Stone replied. "If you haven't learned that by now, you've got a long way to go still." "So they're lying?" Maher asked. "Intelligence agencies are not reliable. They've been screwing with America going back to the Vietnam War, going back to the Iraq Wars, "...it all adds up into this ball of wax that becomes enormous. And then they have people like you, who are skeptical generally, believing it. I would really triple-check everything, every one of those sources."   Film producer Oliver Stone in a discussion with HBO's Bill Maher on Friday evening, August 21, 2020

The Secret Service's most spectacular failure:
The attempted assassination of President Donald J. Trump on 07/13/2024

Discgraced Director Kimberly Cheatle

"Saturday's attempted assassination was the worst security failure by the Secret Service in its history.   But no one in any position of authority in the agency or outside of it will be held accountable in any way whatsoever."   - Matt Walsh on 07/17/2024         It nearly happened again, two months later, on September 15, 2024!!   On 09/16/2024 Madeline Halpert, BBC News, wrote this:   "A gunman hid for nearly 12 hours in bushes before Donald Trump played an unscheduled game of golf at his oceanfront club in Florida - leaving locals stunned at what authorities say appears to be the second attempt to assassinate the former president in as many months."

The FBI has failed the American people in a number of ways:

On 15 May, 2023 (Monday) Special counsel John Durham released his report on the Trump-Russia probe. To nobody's surprise, Durham found that the FBI had no reason to launch a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Durham accused the bureau of failing to uphold its "important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report."

On 15 September, 2021 (Wednesday) US Gymnastics stars Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols testified before a Senate committee on the FBI’s handling of the Larry Nassar investigation. Nassar, a former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor, was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison, after more than 150 women and girls said he sexually abused them over the past two decades. The Justice Department's inspector general found FBI officials investigating the allegations violated the agency's policies by making false statements and failing to properly document complaints by the accusers.

The FBI is a partisan organization that does not have the best interests of our country in mind:

On Friday, February 02, 2018, the president authorized the release of a House memo that suggests the FBI was politically biased when it requested a FISA warrant to surveil members of Donald Trump's election team. Weeks earlier, it was revealed that FBI agent Peter Strzok, whose text messages (some with an FBI lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair) suggested the Bureau might want to lean against Donald Trump.

Comey

Strzok

After witnessing the 2018 testimony of James Comey, Peter Strzok, and other FBI agents is there any doubt that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a partisan, politicized activist organization? These overpaid, underworked beuaracrats have spent their careers taking from the American taxpayer without fear of repercussion.   Ed. Note: After mounting public pressure the FBI finally got around to firing Strzok on August 10, 2018 although initially only wanting to demote him. Unfortunately, at that time, countless other FBI partisans remained on the payroll and in the retirement system. The FBI is full of cheats, crooks, and partisans - we may never be able to trust them again...

Finally, will we ever be allowed to know if FBI director James Comey's commited crimes during the 2016 election cycle? It's astonishing that the world's premier law enforcement organization would allow even the slightest bit political bias in its operations but yet that's what all of the evidence points to...

In early 2018 the FBI failed to follow-up on disturbing tips about a 19-year-old Floridian who had posted violent social media notes. That FBI lapse cost 17 lives in the Parkland (Florida) high school shooting Valentine's Day, 2018.

On July 16, 2018 James Kuntsler wrote about the FBI in his Blog:

"So, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page declined to testify before a congressional committee because she didn't feel like it. Apparently we're now a rule-of-law-optional nation. Until recently, we were merely reality-optional. That was fun, but when officers of the country's leading law enforcement agency go optional on standard legal procedure, like answering subpoenas, then we're truly in the land where anything goes (and nothing matters)."
 
"Postscript: I'm advised that Lisa Page did finally testify in closed session while I was out of the country last week. However, it took an extraordinarily long time for her to comply with the request, as detailed in this Tweet from Rep. Mark Meadows. - Remarkably, we learned new information today suggesting the DOJ had not notified Lisa Page of Congress' outstanding interview requests for over 7 months now. The DOJ/FBI appear to be continuing their efforts to keep material facts, and perhaps even witnesses, from Congress."

Clarification:

First a clarification: I am in complete support of a strong military and effective civilian intelligence networks. What I am opposed to, and will continue to work against, is inefficient, incompetent, wasteful, and corrupt government operations at any level - including the military and intelligence services. I felt this clarification important because so many, as of 2013, seemed to be cheering the likes of Snowden (pictured at left), Manning (below), and other cowards and creeps who were betraying the American people and our country for nothing more than a little fame and fortune. Of course, although I'm opposed to the government spying on its own citizens, it's clear that an equal concern is that our government be efficient, competent, frugal, and accurate - there's no room for deadbeats, cheats, liars, traitors, or charlatans in any branch of government - including our intelligence services. And, obviously, the amount of damage Snowden, Manning, and their ilk have done to our intelligence agencies' sources, methods, and assets is immeasurable so everything must be done to discourage this kind of behavior.

Anyway, after stewing over our nation's intelligence failures, for a very long time (Bay of Pigs, JFK's assassination, J. Edgar Hoover running roughshod over our Constitution, the Iranian hostage crisis, 911, etc.), I decided to create this page in February, 2005. Then, on March 31, 2005, the president's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction was released substantiating my claims (and that of everyone else) that America's "intelligence" agencies were colossal failures. Unfortunately this same report was used by President George W. Bush to hide the fact that he had decided to invade Iraq long before his intelligence services even began to come to any conclusions - a sad, pathetic, and immoral chapter in our country's history - because, as I've suggested above, the need is for accurate, honest intelligence assessments - not guesswork and wishful thinking. There's no doubt that in this competitive, technological age that America's military and intelligence organizations need to remain strong, efficient, and effective because, most certainly, our adversaries will continue seeking every advantage.

Click Here for the bad guys...

Click Here for my page on Military Madness...

Click Here for my page on War and Terrorism...

Click Here for more info about my favorite country...

Click Here for my page about overpaid government employees and their unions...

"We love cell phones. We love them to death. For all kinds of reasons. I mean, can you imagine? Suppose twenty years ago Congress had proposed a law saying every citizen had to wear a radio transponder around his neck, all day and all night, so the government could track him wherever he went. Can you imagine the outrage? But instead the citizens went right ahead and did it to themselves. In their pockets and purses, not around their necks, but the outcome is the same." - Lee Child, in one of his Jack Reacher novels, A Wanted Man, pp. 187-188

Post: U.S. Intelligence Grows Beyond Control Published July 19, 2010 on FoxNews.com Associated Press

"WASHINGTON -- Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, top-secret intelligence gathering by the government has grown so unwieldy and expensive that no one really knows what it cost and how many people are involved, The Washington Post reported Monday."

"A two-year investigation by the newspaper uncovered what it termed a 'Top Secret America' that's mostly hidden from public view and largely lacking in oversight."

"In its first installment of a series of reports, the Post said there are now more than 1,200 government organizations and more than 1,900 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in some 10,000 locations across the U.S."

"Some 854,000 people -- or nearly 1 1/2 times the number of people who live in Washington -- have top-secret security clearance, the paper said."

The Post said its investigation also found that:

--In the area around Washington, 33 building complexes -- totaling some 17 million square feet of space -- for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since 9/11.

--Many intelligence agencies are doing the same work, wasting money and resources on redundancy.

--So many intelligence reports are published each year that many are routinely ignored.

"But one thing is certain: spy work depends, as much as anything, on a large flow of funds for keeping foreign palms greased. It is an enormously expensive business, and it requires layers and layers of ostensibly unconnected cutouts for the millions to flow properly and without detection." - Russ Baker in his book, Family of Secrets p. 42

Secret Service

As I suggested at the top of this page, the Secret Service, like most of America's intelligence community, has been involved in serious security lapses over the years. Here are a few examples for those who have forgotten;

In June 2022, a member of the US Secret Service Counter Assault Team was detained by the Israeli national police in Jerusalem after he allegedly assautled a woman outside of a bar. Earlier in 2022, two Secret Service employees were sent home from South Korea following an altercation with a cab driver and two Korean nationals. In another incident that year, four Secret Service employees were put on leave after being accused in a federal invetigation of being duped by two men claiming to be Department of Homeland Security agents.

Julia Pierson, Director of the United States Secret Service, was forced to resign on October 1st, 2014 due to a White House Security breach on September 19th of that year. There
were other breaches, too, but that particular one involved an intruder who sprinted across the White House lawn and was able to enter the North Portico doors with a knife...

In April 2012 President Obama's trip to Cartagena, Colombia, intended to showcase new trade initiatives with Latin America, was totally overshadowed by a drinking and prostitution scandal involving a dozen Secret Service agents. At the time, Secret Service director Mark Sullivan adamantly asserted before Congress that this type of behavior, by Secret Service agents, "...just is not part of our culture." However, later in the year the Inspector General's report on the situation revealed that one of the agents who was in Cartagena during the scandal and picked up a prostitute "...admitted to soliciting a prostitute on two previous occasions, once in El Salvador in 2008/2009 and one time in Panama in 2009."The report also mentioned allegations of similar misconduct by agents on trips to Romania and China.

In 2011 a classified booklet containing President Obama's schedule, down to the minute, along with details on his security contingent, was found lying in a Canberra, Australia, gutter during an Obama visit to that country.

In a December 7, 2009 interview with CNN, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan assured citizens that, "Agents are always there by the president. We don't trust just magnetometers," he said. He also said that in the past 30 years there have been vast improvements in security around the White House complex and elsewhere, including the extensive use of cameras and other tactical elements. Hmmm....

In November 2009 this happy couple made their way into an official White House state dinner without an invitation! The same Secret Service that requires tourists to wait in miserable lines for a White House tour allowed these two to skip on through for an evening of high statesmanship with the President of the United States and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Of course the Secret Service has failed our country countless times in other ways over the years. One of their most shocking derelictions of duty was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Then, less than two decades later, in 1981, President Reagan was nearly killed when a deranged gunman shot the president while he was leaving a Washington D.C. hotel after a speaking engagement.

BBC Tuesday, December 29, 2009:

"The president criticised 'systems failure' over bomb plot President Barack Obama has said a systemic failure allowed a known extremist with explosives to get onto a US-bound plane last week. Mr Obama said he considered the intelligence and security failures to be 'totally unacceptable'. The US needed to learn from the incident and act quickly to fix flaws in the system, he said."

"A Nigerian man accused of attempting to blow up the plane as it came in to land was restrained by passengers. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, allegedly tried to detonate explosives in his underwear. There were nearly 300 people aboard the plane. A Yemen-based offshoot of al-Qaeda has claimed it planned the failed attack, and Yemeni officials say the group could be planning more attacks."

"When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, a systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable."

"In a blunt statement, Mr Obama said he wanted to talk to the American people because some preliminary information about the attack had raised serious concerns. 'It has been widely reported that the father of the suspect in the Christmas Day incident warned US officials in Africa about his son's extremist views,' he said. 'It now appeared that weeks ago, that info was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the subject on the no-fly list,' he said. 'We need to learn from this episode and act quickly to fix flaws in the system," Mr Obama said, adding that there was no excuse for such a failure.'"

Some Intelligence Successes! At left is a photo from the FBI's page immediately after Usama Bin Laden was killed by Navy Seals on May 1st, 2011.

More good news!

On January 20, 2011 the FBI arrested over 125 people engaged in Mafia activities in
New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Italy - one of their largest mob busts ever!

CIA

Appointed by Barack Obama, John O. Brennan was CIA director from 2013 to 2017. Years earlier, while under a polygraph examination, Brennan admitted voting for a communist in the 1976 presidential elections. In 2018 President Donald Trump revoked Brennan's security clearance. The question remains - how was a communist sympathizer allowed to become director of the CIA?

On November 9, 2012, CIA Director David Petraeus announced his resignation - admitting to an extramarital affair, which media learned was with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Apparently an extensive exchange of personal emails between Petraeus and Broadwell were revealed over the course of an FBI investigation. In a letter to CIA employees, Petraeus stated, "Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position as D/CIA. After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation."

CIA erased waterboarding videos
Friday, December 07, 2007
by Lewis Page, The Register

CIA Director Hayden and President Bush

The director of the CIA has admitted that videotapes of American intelligence operatives using harsh interrogation methods on terrorist suspects have been destroyed. The interrogations in question are said to have taken place in 2002, when the US intelligence community had been unleashed by a vengeful president in response to 9/11. At that point, the CIA was specifically authorised by George Bush to use a range of interrogation measures not permitted to other US agencies. The most famous of these means is so-called "waterboarding", where a prisoner is made to feel that he is drowning by having water poured onto a gag. Many commentators consider this to be torture, and in fact the method has now become so controversial that - reportedly - it is no longer allowed to the CIA, which has eased off substantially from its aggressive posture in the year or so immediately after 9/11. It is thought that the 2002 tapes may have shown the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first terror suspect seized by the CIA in the post-9/11 era. Zubaydah, under severe questioning, was said to have led the US to his comrade Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh, harshly-questioned/tortured in his turn - and possibly also in the now-destoyed tapes - supposedly gave information which led to the capture in 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed is also said to have provided a great deal of key information after his capture.

On June 22, 2007 the CIA made public documents that detailed illegal and scandalous activities it had engaged in over 30 years ago. These "revelations" were in preparation for even more documents to be released that detailed admissions about wiretapping of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches, surveillance, assassination plots and other illegal (and immoral) activities. CIA Director Michael Hayden said that these documents were "unflattering" (to say the least!) but part of CIA history. I guess the big surprise is that any spy agency would even consider engaging in such disclosure. However, it was to nobody's surprise that these "unflattering" activities took place - despite the propaganda we've received, for decades, telling us how moral and lawful our spook agencies were compared to the rest of the world. The big question, of course, is what are our spy agencies up to these days anyway? At the time of this CIA "disclosure" there were still questions about its involvement with extraordinary rendition (extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another), the torture of prisoners, and the possibility of domestic spying (although that's probably more of the NSA's illegal domain than the CIA's...). Maybe we'll have the answers in another three decades from now?

September 06, 2006:

President Bush gave a speech that covered a lot of ground concerning Guantanamo Bay, the CIA, and the "war" on terrorism in general. Some of his speech acknowledged our use of "alternative" interrogation methods and the CIA's secret detention system. Although I was suspicious of his motives, a lot of the detail he provided was a welcome change to the secrecy and illegal practices of his administration's previous five years. Of course there was no mention of American military bases in Arab countries, Israel's theft and occupation of Palestinian lands, or the other reasons terrorism remains such a threat to our country...

FBI

AP NATIONAL NEWS WASHINGTON, Mar. 8, 2007:

"An internal Justice Department report accuses the FBI of underreporting its use of the Patriot Act to force telecommunications and financial firms to turn over customer information in suspected terrorism cases, according to officials familiar with its findings.

"Shoddy bookkeeping and records management led to the problems, said one government official familiar with the report. The official said FBI agents appeared to be overwhelmed by the volume of demands for information over a two-year period.

"'They lost track,' said the official who like others interviewed late Thursday spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had not been released.

"The errors are outlined by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in an audit to be released on Friday. The audit requirement was added to the Patriot Act by Congress over the objections of the Bush administration.

"The FBI reported to Congress in 2005 that its agents had delivered a total of 9,254 national security letters seeking e-mail, telephone or financial information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents over the previous two years. That was the first year the Bush administration publicly disclosed how often it uses national security letters to obtain records. The numbers from previous years have been classified.

"Fine's report, according to officials, says the numbers of national security letters, or NSLs, between 2003 and 2005 were underreported by 20 percent. "

FBI director defends bureau over test cheating

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel - Thursday, July 29, 2010 p. 8A (by The Associate Press) "WASHINGTON - FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress on Wednesday that he does not know how many of his agents cheated on an important exam on the bureau's policies, discussing an embarrassing investigation that raises questions about whether the FBI knows its own rules for conducting surveillance on Americans." "The cheating investigation has heightened skepticism that the FBI understands its own policies."

CNN
August 17, 2006:

A federal judge ruled that the U.S. government's domestic eavesdropping program is unconstitutional and ordered it ended immediately! Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the Bush Administration disagrees with the ruling and has appealed - much to everyone's "surprise..." "Government spying on innocent Americans without any kind of warrant and without congressional approval runs counter to the very foundations of our democracy. We hope that Congress follows the lead of the court and demands that the president adhere to the rule of law." - Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director

Once Again, FBI Caught Breaking The Law In Gathering Phone Call Info;
But Real Issue Is Why Telcos Let Them
from the surprise-surprise dept
by Mike Masnick at techdirt.com January 19, 2010

(Telephone wiretapping bug)

"A few years back, we found out that the FBI regularly violated the Patriot Act, issuing "National Security Letters" to access information that they had no right to access. So it should come as no surprise that during that same period, the FBI was also regularly violating the law to get phone call records without following the proper procedures, even beyond the problem with the NSLs. In fact, it appears the FBI may have violated the law in about half of all of these cases. Basically, it sounds like the FBI just went to phone companies, said the magic word ("terrorism!!") and the phone companies just handed over records -- even without using NSLs, but instead using an "exigent circumstances letter," which could be used even more easily than an NSL, but which required an NSL to follow it up eventually. The FBI is now basically admitting to screwing up and that using these "ECLs" without followup NSLs almost certainly violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The FBI's excuse? They're claiming that the process was "good-hearted but not well-thought-out." Doesn't that make you feel better?"

J. Edgar Hoover building

CNN March 9, 2007

The FBI is guilty of "serious misuse" of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act, a government audit said Friday.

The Justice Department's inspector general looked at the FBI's use of national security letters, in which agents demand personal and business information about individuals -- such as financial, phone, and Internet records -- without court orders.

The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes or obtained information they weren't supposed to.

As many as 22 percent of national security letters were not recorded, the audit said.

"We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI's national security letter authorities," Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report.

CNN
March 13, 2008
Report: FBI abuse of investigative tool continued in 2006
From Terry Frieden

"The FBI continued in 2006 to badly mishandle letters that it uses to obtain personal records without a court order, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday."

"The new report cites 'issuance of NSLs [national security letters] without proper authorization, improper requests and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records due to FBI errors or mistakes made by NSL recipients.'"

"But a top department official said significant progress has been made in the past year toward correcting those errors."

"Inspector General Glenn Fine said it's too soon to tell if the problems will be eliminated."

Rocky Mountain News
May 20, 2006:
By Katherine Shrader, AP
"CIA putting spooks on fast track"

• "The CIA is pushing its spooks into the field faster, giving 85 percent overseas assignments within a year after they finish training."
• "In the past, newly hired operatives have complained that they complete training at the CIA's faciltiy, called The Farm, and land behind desks."
• "By next year, the CIA plans to have tripled the number of spies collecting intelligence around the world, compared with 2001."
• "The CIA held 865 recruiting events in the 2005 budge year, up from 340 the previous year."
• Air Force General Michael Hayden (incoming spy chief) said, "This is the youngest analytic work force in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency." "In more disapointing language, this is the least experienced analytic work force in the history of the CIA."

Business Week
August 21/28, 2006 p. 13:
"In the Dark about Outside Snoops"

"Five Years After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Intelligence community has so many outside contractors working for it that the government doesn't know the exact number. Nor does the top brass know exactly what all these companies are doing. (Such work can include everything from threat analysis to translation services.) This summer, staffers at the Office of the Director of National Inteligence, which briefs the President daily, began taking an inventory. 'We're trying to identify those contractors who are doing core intelligence work,' says a senior intelligence official. Up to now, he says, there wasn't 'a good way of counting them or identifying what kind of work they're doing.'"

CIA Director Porter Goss resigned without notice on May 5, 2006. At that time, the Bush Administration scrambled to fill the post with either a military official or similarly minded ideologue while America's intelligence community remained at odds with itself (it was revealed that longstanding feuds and turf wars between military intelligence, the CIA, and even the FBI were still occurring at times). One interesting idea surfaced, during all of this turmoil, that the CIA was being forced back to its "roots" as a coordinator of human intelligence. Additionally, it was also suggested that the CIA will maintain its informal role as the eyes and ears for the White House when it comes to monitoring military adventures. Strange days, indeed, when our own elected government needs a multi-billion dollar intelligence network to keep tabs on our own military. Of course history repeats itself here...

The two and a half years leading up to November 22, 1963 [the assassination of President Kennedy], had been tumultuous ones. The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, designed to dislodge Fidel Castro and his Cuban revolution from its headquarters ninety miles off the Florida Keys, was an embarrassing foreign policy failure. Certainly in terms of lives lost and men captured, it was also a human disaster. But within the ruling American elite it was seen primarily as a jolt to the old boy's network - a humiliating debacle, and a rebuke of the supposedly infallible CIA." - Russ Baker
from his book, Family of Secrets, p. 44

An ax to grind...

The Complaint:

What American doesn't want their country to be safe, secure and strong?  I'm no exception - other than I'd add that I think our country should also be frugal, fair, decent and Democratic. Unfortunately our nation's "intelligence" services have taken us in the opposite direction - The CIA, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, military intelligence agencies, and a dozen other "security" organizations have long histories of falsifying information, lying to the American people, harassing innocents, promoting drug trade, torture and other illegal activities.

What really hurt is the failure of these organizations to protect us from 9-11 and dozens of other attacks both on and off our shores in the late 90s and early 2000s. Despite the government's propaganda (remember President Bush telling us that CIA employees, right after 911, were working late nights and having to eat pizza at the office?) most of the folks who "work" for these agencies have much better pay, benefits and working conditions than the average American - evidence the huge number of applicants lined up for these jobs each year. The point is, despite very nice jobs and careers, these secret agencies insist on more and more funding while protecting us even less and less.

Yep, I'll admit I have an "ax to grind" when it comes to overpaid, under worked bureaucrats - especially when they continue to not only sully the good name of the American people, but promote hostility and insecurity both at home and abroad. Admittedly, the vast number of folks who apply for any job, inside or outside of government, have good intentions but it's clear that freedom from oversight and accountability can turn any group of employees, or an entire organization, into something to be ashamed of.

And, I'm not the last to have recognized these problems either. Things got so bad (and embarrassing) for President George W. Bush, in early 2005, that he nominated John Negroponte as our nation's first director of National Intelligence! This added layer of bureaucracy, it was hoped, would reduce the waste, redundancy and lethargy in our country's dozen or so intelligence agencies. Problem is, this is the same John Negroponte who did nothing to stop Honduran death squads while he was our Ambassador down there. This is also the same Negroponte who was our ambassador to Iraq after we illegally invaded and trashed their country!

Certainly there must be some honest, hardworking people capable of taking these kinds of jobs without us reducing ourselves to the hiring of questionable characters like Negroponte? There are scores of honest, capable technicians, managers and leaders deserving of these jobs - let's target them for service to our country and let the Negropontes of the world find employment elsewhere...

The Hope:

Maybe with some luck a spook or two, in one of our nation's spy agencies, will stumble onto this page and mention to his or her coworkers that their customers (the American people!) aren't too pleased with their performance lately [Note: there was a time in our country's history that the military and spy agencies weren't allowed to turn on our own people...]. Or, even better, maybe one of our nation's elected officials will catch wind of this page, or others like it, and start demanding some truth and accuracy out of these spy groups?

Of course I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for any meaningful changes in how these agencies operate. Nevertheless, every journey begins with the fist step - in time the American people may be able to turn these dozen or so bureaucratic coffee clutches into honest, hardworking organizations that provide good service to not only the American people, but humankind in general. We can only hope...

Their (and mine!) Disclaimer:

Spy agencies are fond of reminding us is that their "successes" are secrets that can never be revealed and that we should be thankful for what they've done so far. Nevertheless, the horror of their huge failures (the ones that have surfaced, despite their best efforts to keep them secret), continue to astound and amaze us. So, we can only imagine how many tragedies and atrocities they've covered up at great expense to America. We shovel billions and billions of dollars their way, each and every year, yet have little clue as to what they're up to or what's been accomplished. Most neighborhood garage sales are run with more efficiency and honesty than these guys.

As for my own disclaimer, I'll admit that I don't know it all, either. I have no inside information, no access to "deep throat," and certainly no special abilities or insights that would make me an expert on the subject. Nevertheless, I really do love my country and have been deeply saddened by all the damage we've done, and the losses we've endured, while defense contractors, bureaucrats and spies line their pockets at our expense.

- Roger J. Wendell
Golden, Colorado

Their Record:

Expert: CIA missed glaring red flags on double-agent bomber.
From Nic Robertson, CNN Senior International Correspondent - January 12, 2010

"Amman, Jordan (CNN) -- In the murky world of spying, where choices are generally among shades of gray, success, by definition, goes unnoticed."

"Failure, however, is catastrophic."

"So how did a Jordanian doctor play double agent, outsmart his CIA handlers, and end up killing seven Americans and a Jordanian military officer at a remote base in Afghanistan?"

"'This is the biggest deception ever of intelligence agencies, whether CIA or Jordanian intelligence,' said Hassan Hanieh, a former Islamic extremist who now studies jihadist movements. 'From the beginning, he was deceiving them.'"

"In a videotape released after the December 30 attack, the double agent, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, said his suicide bombing was retaliation for the death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Mehsud was killed in a missile strike in August, an attack thought to have been carried out by an American drone aircraft."

"Al-Balawi had been recruited as a counterterrorism intelligence source, with U.S. and Jordanian intelligence agencies apparently believing he had given up his Islamic extremist views. They were using him to hunt Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, a former U.S. intelligence official told CNN last week."

"Hanieh told CNN he has read the bomber's radical blogs and says intelligence agencies made an obvious mistake in believing al-Balawi had changed."

"'We have never seen in the history of al Qaeda a person who changed his ideas completely in this sudden way -- a person who writes jihadi stuff, then suddenly switches sides,' Hanieh said."

More examples:

• Sadly, London's transit system was completely disabled by bombings on Thursday, July 7th (2005). Not only did their (and ours!) spy agency have no clue it wasn't until the following Tuesday that they announced an idea as to who the perpetrators were!
• During the summer of 2005 we learned that America's spy agencies still continued their illegal activities unabated. Reports have it that American agents took a suspect off the streets of Milan without government authorization. In response, the Italian government called for the arrest of 13 CIA agents responsible for the illegal act. Obviously the American government will never respond but it's interesting that even our allies are starting to complain about the lawlessness of our spy agencies!
• It even gets worse! In late 2005 the European Union asked for investigations into rumors that the CIA had some secret encampments on the continent somewhere. It was also rumored that the CIA conducted secret over flights across European territory without authorization - it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out! Even if there's no truth to it it's very sad that our allies trust us so little that they'd allow such accusations to surface - certainly our spy agencies can do a better job of marketing and image-making??
• Obviously September 11th, 2001 was an unbelievably horrible failure in itself. However, what many don't remember are the Anthrax attacks that killed Postal workers a short time after that. Yet, four years later (at about the time I updated this web page) the FBI had only one person "of interest" in the case - no arrests, no suspects, no ideas...
• How about some more "ancient" history? Remember the "Weathermen" and the "Weather Underground" from the 60s through the late 70s? The FBI engaged in so many illegal activities, in pursuit of these people, that almost nobody was prosecuted for the countless bombings and similar acts that were committed throughout that period! All that time, money, and effort spent for nothing more than to intimidate peaceful activists while the violent ones slipped away...

Click Here for Matt Damon's NSA speech in the movie Good Will Hunting...

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