According to Thomas Powers, in his book Intelligence Wars, "the National Security Agency... has only one Pashto speaker, a problem solved by sending transcripts of intercepted communications to Pakistan for translation by the ISI (blognote: the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence is the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA), an organization with a long history of involvement with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Some intelligence officials even believe that it was the ISI who warned bin Laden to get out of Khost (Afghanistan) before American cruise missiles struck in August 1998 in retaliation for the embassy bombings."
Guess who was President in 1998, and whose party had, for five years, been controlling things like the NSA budget... (Hint: neither of the Bushes, nor the Republicans.)
(Just in case you think nothing changes, as little as twenty years ago the NSA was known in Washington as "No Such Agency", and its budget wasn't even revealed to Congress. Now it has its own website...)
I suspect that Pashto problem is a little 'oops' that won't be touted by Hillary when she runs for president...
07 September 2006
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