Your Cover's Blown

And now, the most important reason for Americans not to put their lives on the line as covert agents: CIA ineptitude.

From today's Chicago Tribune article "Internet blows CIA's cover":

She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.

Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.

The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. [...]

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Given the astonishing incompetence outlined in this article, normally you'd expect some heads to roll . . . because Americans won't stand for this, dammit!

But those days are gone. Unfortunately, as with so many catastrophes before, Americans will quite willingly stand for this, and the heads that roll will be those of the agents themselves, not their superiors'.

If I were to publish a US government affairs newsletter, I can think of no better title these days than The New Low. That's all we're getting: An uninterrupted stream of New Lows. So when will the country hit rock bottom? What qualifies for rock bottom now, anyway?