I have just received word that the New York Times is preparing to go public with a list of names of Americans covertly working in Afghanistan providing force protection for our troops, as well as the rest of our Coalition Forces.  If the Times actually sees this through, the red ink they are drowning in will be nothing compared to the blood their entire organization will be covered with.  Make no mistake, the Times is about to cause casualty rates in Afghanistan to skyrocket.  Each and every American should be outraged.

As chronicled here, here, here, and here the Central Intelligence Agency via the New York Times has been waging a nasty proxy war against the Department of Defense over its use of former military and intelligence personnel to do what the CIA is both incapable and unwilling to do: gather the much needed intelligence that keeps our troops safe.

According to Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius, “[T]he U.S. military has long been unhappy about the quality of CIA intelligence in Afghanistan,” and the senior military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj Gen Michael T. Flynn went so far as to publish a stunning report calling for, “sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself.”

The report goes on to quote General Stanley McChrystal who stated that, “Our senior leaders – the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States – are not getting the right information to make decisions with … The media is driving the issues.”

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THE STORY ANN COULTER SAID SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING FOR EVERY BUREAUCRAT IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Many of the people mentioned still work at the Department of Defense. They are civil service employees who are almost impossible to fire, demote, or shift to other jobs. In my book, SPEECH-LESS: Tales of a White House Survivor, I show how nameless big government bureaucracies can treat America’s heroes.

The Pentagon’s press operation was run by a very large staff of civil servants and military personnel.  Maybe twenty or thirty public affairs specialists sat among a maze of carrels while the director of the room sat in a glass cage and watched over them.  It was reminiscent of a secretarial pool from the 1950s or ‘60s, without the Smith-Corona typewriters. I sometimes expected to see Lucille Ball walk in with a steno pad looking for Mr. Mooney. 

Most of the press officers were probably Democrats, but the problem was not that they were partisans. The problem was that those who wanted to help were given no direction and the rest were mostly inert. Many would come in around 8:30 or 9 and breeze out by 4:59 pm.  Nothing would prevent their on-time departure – not some major crisis abroad, not even a war.  At night, that giant room was so deserted that tumbleweeds blew by desks. A sizable number of them lacked any sense of urgency or interest in what the administration was doing.  One Pentagon reporter compared prying information from them to going on an Easter egg hunt..  Sometimes you’d want to put a mirror under their noses to see if they were breathing.

Forget about their being proactive.  They rarely, if ever, came up with an interesting new story to pitch to a reporter.  Their job was to wait for the phone to ring and hold morale-building events.  There was almost always a party going on with cakes and cookies and people telling jokes and giving each other awards.  There was an annual chili cook-off. If ever you needed a sugar fix, you could find something almost any day in the press room….

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