A little perspective on Tennet Sometime back I posted the following and referred to super spy Meyer who was gracious enough to endorse what I wrote:

We are faced with the reality of gathering intelligence from inside a tribal culture both in Iraq and the entire Middle East. This is why we are continually surprised by Muslim groups. Going back to WWII and the Cold War you will note that dam near every spy of note on both sides were people who turned against their own governments. Note the Burgess-Maclean "Cambridge Group" etc. in Britain and all the Hiss-Rosenberg etc. guys in the Roosevelt administration. We had many top Nazis and Kremlin people feeding us from inside their governments too. We had no actual spies crack those countries. We had racial similarities, language skills, and people who could easily assimilate into the cultures of both Germany and Russia who could spy, but no outside spies were able to get anywhere. We and they had handlers to work with the turncoats. I cannot recall any story of a U.S. spy penetrating Japan; we cracked their codes, not their political structure. We penetrate only with "handlers".

Think of a Muslim country where we have both physical dissimilarities and a serious language gap. It's not easy to find Westerners capable of putting on a show. The main impediment to "spying" is the nature of Muslim culture itself. Muslims marry within their extended family almost exclusively (cousins). They trust no one outside of their own families. They will kill any outsider who gets too close or nosey. This is extreme tribalism. It is impossible to crack these "tribes" from the outside. The only way we can get intelligence is to have somebody "turn". It seems that the pressure from inside the Muslim community is too great for this to happen.

Most every voter's approval of the castration of our own intel, starting with the Church Commission back in 1976 in order to rein in FBI activities that were clearly out of control at the time, is the problem. We, the voters, did not insist on looking at the FBI and CIA again. We made sure we had a weak intelligence service. It will take ten years minimum to get intel working on the ground within any Muslim Tribal Society. Somebody has to "turn" a person within a family in order to get reliable intelligence. Don't look for this to happen any time soon. We have a horrible reputation of running away and leaving people to die in torture chambers. And if Kerry or Hillary Clinton ever get elected that is just what will happen, and every highly placed Muslim knows this and spreads the word.

Muslim tribes throw in with each other under the banner of their religion to accomplish multi-tribal goals that are usually restricted to kicking somebody's ass. Robert Kaplan's must read book called "Eastward to Tartary" relates incident after incident where they were suddenly stopped by little local tribes armed to the teeth who wanted money. He pointed out that Muslim young men who had no money couldn't marry because of dowry requirements, and their religion forbad sex. They have no other way to express their manhood other than fighting and profiting from confrontation with outsiders. These "tribes" will only join with each other under the banner of religion, and then only for the purpose of violence. I'm afraid we are going to continue being "surprised" by Muslim tribes who join together for a time. That is their tradition.

There is another point, elequently stated on NRO this morning, by Herb Meyer who is THE intel expert of experts, who makes the point that intel is largely a function of "insight", of spotting what is obvious and connecting the dots. It's a good read.

Nothing has changed. People who talk about "live intel" don't know what they are talking about. Two emailers who claimed to be former CIA told me that "every good spy in history" was a turncoat from within. Remember that the load of Communist spies in the Roosevelt Administration were all Harvard, Yale, and other Americans who turned. This won't stop congressional posturing screaming for the impossible.