Engelhardt: In addition to the Central Intelligence Agency, the gang of 16 includes the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the NSA (surveillance and code-breaking), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO - satellites), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA - mapping), all under the aegis of the Pentagon, as well as the intelligence agencies of each of the Armed Services and the Coast Guard. Our second defense department, the Department of Homeland Security, has its own expanding intelligence arm with a mouthful of a name: the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. (No self-respecting agency in our government would be without one!) So do the FBI, the State Department, the Energy Department, the Drug Enforcement Department, and the Treasury Department. But the iconic 16 (or 17) don't include numerous other intelligence groupings tucked away in the government. Some outsiders doing the counting have come up with upwards of 30 entities in the IC. That assumedly represents a whole heap of secret knowledge and, certainly, a whole heap of taxpayer money.

What, you thought C.O.N.T.R.O.L. and U.N.C.L.E. were fiction?

Let's see...

There's the CIA and NSA. There's all kinds of agencies within "military intelligence." The Department of State has some authority here. Treasury runs the Secret Service, which has some overseas capacity.

Huh, I'm running out of steam. Are they counting the NYPD these days?

That kind of megapwnage in the first comment is just unseemly.

I'm sorry.

We could still speculate on the dozen or so that aren't in the official 16.

I know that nothing should surprise me anymore, but listening to/reading about the administration and its allies blasting through the NIE to preserve their anti-Iran momentum is kind of breathtaking.

I was equally surprised when I did some research long years ago into how many agencies had armed & badged agents with powers of arrest. This was before the Homeland Security shakeup of federal agencies and offices, so it may be more consolidated now, but really, yeah: the federal government is extremely feudal. They duplicate all functions, many times over, in every realm. It opened my eyes somewhat to the objections of the average gubmint-gonner-take-mah-guns-n-land crowd, even if it did not cause me to share their paranoia. The federal government really does, from a certain angle and in specific lighting, resemble nothing so much as an excuse to create as many armed bands as possible.

Jesus, did you hear the Bush press conference? Even by BUsh standards it was remarkably incoherent. He really seemed to warm up when he talked about the competition of campaigning, although he did managed to put down Candy Crawley. It was truly bizarre. "We know that Iran is trying to enrich uranium, and that's a necessary step in making a bomb."

Sadly, the OVP evidently considers itself an intelligence agency.

The figure 16 is a deliberate misdirection. There is a seventeenth, directed to assess domestic pwnage events. They are all scrambling to their offices as I type this. It's been a while since there's been pwnage of this magnitude, so the technicians are understandably excited.

16 and none of them managed to get this report out sooner? We need a 17th.

Mr. B. once gained massive cool points from his AF buddies by, ahem, somehow acquiring an NSA plaque that had previously occupied a wall in (I think it was) the Pentagon.

12, see 11. That would be the very sort of pwnage #17 is tasked with preventing.

9 makes me happy. Apparently the release of the report really *wasn't* some kind of crazy-ass reverse-psychology administration plot. Yay!

15: If it was, do you honestly think they'd tell Bush?

Crap. Why are you determined to mess with my head today, Apo?

did you hear the Bush press conference?

Just excerpts, but that's what I had most in mind. I always have to stop listening when I hear that characteristic Bush tone of voice &mdash the dismissive, sneering tone a stupid person saying stupid things uses when he thinks his listeners are stupid. To me, that's the essence of this administration.

If Ronald Reagan was right about one thing, it's that a federal bureaucracy is the closest thing to immortal you'll find in this vale of tears.

15:Well, ok release forced by anti-Bush subverters, obstructers, and America-haters but maybe as a last-ditch panicky total-desperation move to stop a war that won't be stopped? I mean, if there wasn't gonna be a war, why would they (for a vulnerable & professional 'they') release it? What happened the last time counter-propaganda got leaked, besides Valerie?

I said this did not cheer me up, and that is not entirely due to my anhedonia.

18: Christ, yes. I think that's what my mother tries and fails to articulate when she says she can't be in the room when he's on TV.

Three years ago I considered it shocking that my father would discuss politics long enough to state that he did not vote for Bush and did not at all like, agree with or think well of Bush. Saturday, he stood and dictated a letter to his Blue Dog congressman while I typed it up for him and sent it via the congressman's website. In the middle of it my father took a hard left and - outside the context or content of the letter - went on a miniature diatribe about Bush. It was a genuinely heartwarming moment.

OT: Anyone listening to the NPR democratic candidates debate on the radio? Discussing Iran policy at the moment.

CIA and cast of thousands:"Dude, you ain't gonna blame us for this one." Reminds me so much of the run-up to Iraq, and making the President look a fool is not something career Executive Branch Intelligence officials do unless the costs of being blamed are more damaging to their careers than the costs of being disloyal.

OTOH like soldiers, deciding war or not war, determining policy is very much not their jobs, and they take the distance from politics very seriously. It is extremely important to people like Plame that they retain their credibility and reputation for objective disinterested analysis.

Even by BUsh standards it was remarkably incoherent.

Yes. Don't worry thought. Torchwood is going back to fix that, and correct all the numbers mentioned above.

"though"

I confess, I enjoy Torchwood.

22: Thanks for the heads up, Parsimon. Senator Clinton's dulcet tones!

This just out from our favorite nutter-pundit, Stormin Abhoretz:

I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/podhoretz/1474

Does this mean no internment for Ogged?

Was Commentary ever a reputable publication? This was also them.

Watch my head spin, after reading the Obama & Edwards comments on the NIE:

Why so much effort to discredit a war that was unlikely to take place?

But if the war is gonna happen, aren't Obama/Edwards/everyone really going out on a limb, taking a huge risk by taking the Scott Ritter position? Do they think they can run against the war, while the war is going on and American boys are under fire? That would be...interesting. Do they think Iran won't retaliate? An attack without retaliation, either in Iraq or elsewhere, would probably lead to a landslide win for Democrats, and a very strong position for Iran and the Iraqi Shia in the next administration.

And everybody says there will be no war. Bill Arkin, for instance. Bush & the Repub candidates and neo-cons must just grovel go beta accept their total humiliation and loss of respect and slink away into oblivion. They will do it, they have no choice. Huzzah!!

They will do it, they have no choice.

If the generals tell them they can't have a new war this year, they can't have one. It's really that simple. All the neocons in D.C. aren't going to be enough no matter how much they work out.

Although Apo's pwnage more or less covered it, there's a handy one-stop shop for the official Intelligence Community here: http://www.intelligence.gov/.

Dear god, the music on that site is just embarrassing.

On a related note, I have a theory that the more likely a group is to be referred to as a "community" the less likely it is to have any common experience or world view. I formed this hypothesis while thinking about the "gay community" and the "intelligence community." The hypothesis received some dramatic confirmation when an important person at a then local synagogue told me that there were "many ways of being a part of the Jewish community" and that one of them was not attending services, not identifying as a Jew, and not hanging out with other Jews.

34: That sounds right, and is probably related to the need of chiefs to lay claim to the largest possible number of Indians.

Rob helpy-chalk is banned from the Unfogged community!

One way of being part of the Unfogged community: not commenting, not identifying as an Unfoggetarian, and not going to UnfoggeDCon.

"Apparently John Negroponte was forced out as Director of National Intelligence last year because he refused to go along with this fraudulent scheming by Bush and Cheney, and the earlier NIE also disagreed with the claim that Iran was arming Shi'i militants in Iraq."

Has this been pwned? Where it this from, umm Econospeak, Barkley Rosser quoting Gareth Porter from whatever IPS is.

Guy at Thoma's says Bush sat on this for a year, and Bush decided to release this publicly. One says as a reward to Iran for controlling Iraqi Shia militias, another guy wonders why Bush released it now.

I don't want bad things to happen, but I seem constitutionally unable, or unwilling, to believe good things will happen. I am not disappointed when good things happen, y'all remember the 2006 election night.

I don't understand why they have been fucking with Iran for five years, or why they would stop. I don't know anything.

8: At a briefing once for a major Washington demonstration, I was told that the federal and local agencies who police those things always make sure to have someone from the Fish and Wildlife Service on the scene, because they have the loosest rules on when they can make arrests. I don't want to know what their detention facilites are like.

I was told that the federal and local agencies who police those things always make sure to have someone from the Fish and Wildlife Service on the scene, because they have the loosest rules on when they can make arrests.

This is true at the state and local level as well. In one area I am familiar with, employees of the state department of natural resources (game wardens and wildlife biologists, both of whom have law enforcement powers) operate under very loose rules for entering private property in the line of duty. Basically, if a piece of property is considered wildlife habitat, a DNR employee can enter it without a warrant. And if he happens upon evidence of criminal wrongdoing, well, he is authorized to seize evidence and make arrests, whether or not the offense is a violation of game laws. This makes game wardens particularly useful for searching out meth labs and pot patches.

This is a seriously under-reported story (or, at least underreported in the media I read; maybe Harpers or the Utne Reader has covered it).

Full listing of Intelligence Community members. And, yes, "Intelligence Community" is an official term -- it even has an official logo.

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

My new favorite: "When you absolutely have to know where stuff is."

Ok, Steve Clemons, Pat Lang, Juan Cole, Fred Kaplan give very strong arguments that there will not be an attack on Iran during the remainder of the Bush administration. I will be officially wrong in Jan 2009.
Until then, I will speculate no more on the subject.

xposted from Ezra's.

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

A friend of mine works there. It's pretty much what you'd expect--all maps, all the time.

I said to Mr. B., "there's a national geospatial intelligence agency?"

"Yeah," he said in one of those "duh" voices.

Sometimes he's a little freaky.

My new favorite: "When you absolutely have to know where stuff is."

"... but you don't want to be very certain about how fast it's going."

I have a sneaking suspicion that before about, say, 1962, the NGIA was known as something like "the Bureau of Maps" until some Macnamara type decided to change the name to something more whizzy.