When The Cost Is Admission

The new head of all things spooky has never been a spook.

At this point in our history and hysteria that is probably a good thing.

Vice President Biden paid the price of admission during the process of administering the oath of office.

The oath Leon Panetta took as a prerequisite to becoming the new CIA director.

Biden laid out some non-revisionist history during the ceremony:

Biden said [Obama's presidential orders have] reversed "policies that, in my view and the view of many in this agency, caused America to fall short of its founding principles and which gave Al-Qaeda a powerful recruiting tool."

"We expect you to be able to look around corners occasionally, to imagine the unexpected. We expect you to provide independent analysis and not engage in group-think," Biden said.

"And we expect you to tell us the facts as you know them, wherever they may lead, not what you think we want to hear," he added.

(Raw Story, italics added). Various and sundry blogs have pointed out the mad cow disease that has infected spookdom these past 8 years.

Chief spook Panetta gave some of the flavor he expected:

Panetta said he was committed to providing "the very best intelligence, independent judgments not influenced by the politics of the situation, but truly real, objective information that can be presented to the president and the policymakers of this country so that they can protect the American people."

The remarks alluded to charges that the administration of former president George W. Bush "cherry-picked" intelligence on Al-Qaeda's supposed links to Iraq's Saddam Hussein to justify the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq.

(ibid). The fact is that big brother hijacked spookiness some years back, and white ops lost out to black ops. Lawlessness was an agent of decay.

The admission is the price of moving on, but after paying that price the moving on is not automatic. It takes actual moving on.

And that takes accountability.

Without accountability for violations of the law, the vehicle of intelligence has no gas in it and it won't go where we need it to go.

It will still be stuck in big brother's muddled "intelligence" and will continue to bring Americans down into the banana republic ideology our ancestors rejected.