"DNI Clapper Looks Stumped by ABC’s Sawyer" - Shear

"Mr. Clapper appeared to know less than even the casual television viewer during an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, the anchor of World News Tonight."  Shear

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Well, hardly anyone is perfect.  He's a process person.  Enough said.  pl 

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/dni-clapper-looks-stumped-by-abcs-sawyer/?partner=rss&emc=rss

 

Comments

[Grimgrin]

Speaking of process people, how does one get to be an apparatchik? It seems like a decent enough job. Well until everything goes tits up, but at that point you go home, tend a garden and drink yourself to death, which isn't the worst fate imaginable.

On the other hand here's the plot that's been referenced:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8218219/Christmas-bomb-plotters-were-radicalised-in-jail.html

It's not as if the dude missed 9/11. A bunch of British Muslim petty criminals got some big ideas and were arrested, and the article is making the implicit case that this was so important to American security that the DNI being informed about it after a delay of more than a few hours was unacceptable.

[jonst]

I'll make a wild guess...in this case it was the London incident getting all the consideration it merited from Clapper.

[William R. Cumming]

Will the newly empowered Republican House of Representatives majority take on the INTEL community's dysfunction under President Obama next year?

[Basilisk]

I guess it's possible that a Director of National Intelligence could have interests beyond hanging on every syllable of television-inspired "security theater."

Watch for the Brits to release the twelve for lack of evidence in twenty-one days (the half-life of interest in this kind of stuff).

All this wailing about "Clapper knows less than the average television viewer" leaves me cold.

Maybe the "average television viewer" doesn't know as much as one would think.

[Neil Richardson]

Dear Col.Lang:

Doesn't Clapper read NID and PDB every morning?

[J.]

@cumming, come on, William, the "newly empowered" Repubs are going after one enemy of the state - Obama. They won't go after the intel community, which did after all develop and implement its processes as directed by the former Republican administration.

[Fred]

Ten years after 19 guys with $3 Walmart boxcutters hijacked and crashed 4 planes the major combat power of the US armed forces are still tied up in two wars and every square inch of the Repulic has identical 'condition yellow' risks from the same 'terrorists'.

Diane Sawyer is asking the wrong questions, mostly because she knows she'd be out of that multi-million dollar job if she aked inteligent ones.

[Patrick Lang]

NR

For his staff not to have called to brief him was seriously stupid. pl

[William R. Cumming]

J. Thanks but that is not how Washington operates. Flank attacks are more likely to be successful. Death by a thousand cuts.