Those of us on the center-right have a tendency to ignore or at least downplay the way that government waste, incompetence, and inefficiency extends into the national security side of government as well as other areas. The Washington Times reports that the CIA is suing a former intelligence officer who is the author, under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones, of the book The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. The Times article says that among the book's disclosures is that "despite being limited solely to collecting secrets outside the country, 90 percent of CIA employees live and work entirely inside the United States."
The book was published by Encounter Books, a non-profit publisher whose 2009 tax return shows that it is largely funded by the conservative Bradley Foundation and that lists as directors the conservative columnist George Will and the Princeton professor Robert George, none of which you'd exactly expect to see at the top of the list of those facilitating a CIA author publishing in violation of his pre-publication review agreement.
The two top Amazon.com reviews for the book (here and here) are both written by reviewers who identify themselves as former intelligence officers who also happen to be top-ranked Amazon.com reviewers and are both really hair-raising and worth the reads. The book just sold out at Amazon in the time it took me to write this blog post.
