The CIA: "We call 'em as we see 'em. And what we don't see, we make up."

By Rob Janicki
The Obama administration on Wednesday announced several major personnel changes. One particular high level cabinet change practically begs for review and analysis.

Apparently generally screwing up intelligence gathering along the way for the past two years, and in the Middle East recently in particular, warrants a promotion for Director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, to Secretary of Defense. Panetta is the latest example of the Peter Principle in action.

The CIA, under Panetta's pathetic leadership, has become virtually a nonentity and a joke in the world wide intelligence community. Panetta's incompetence in leading CIA intelligence collecting caught the Obama administration completely off guard repeatedly in the Middle East. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Syria immediately come to mind in the faltering CIA effort to reasonably foresee dynamic and tumultuous events before they unfolded on an unsuspecting world audience . Not a clue about any of these outbreaks was seen by the CIA, as the resulting dithering by Obama clearly has demonstrated.

Of course it could be reasonably argued that with absolutely no comprehensible foreign policy doctrine in place in the Middle East, the Obama administration is no worse off with its complete and utter failure of intelligence gathering to predict the multiple national outbreaks of violent civil unrest across that region. In other words, the Obama administration has risen to its very own level of incompetence in the gathering of intelligence and thus nothing should be expected of it in its failure to have previously developed a coherent foreign policy for the Middle East.

One can only wonder just how badly Panetta will screw up the Dept. of Defense in the remainder of Obama's term as president, compared to what he has already demonstrated at CIA.