The killing in Afghanistan of the 7CIA agents who were al Qaeda experts was a huge US intelligence disaster. Never in war was the US intelligence blinded this way but once before during the Cold War, when all the US agents in Russia were outed.

The CIA couldn’t guess that an al Qaeda agent would give good information to get his follow members killed as a ruse to get up close to important CIA agents. During the Cold War the US was unable to connect the dots, until Robert Henssen made a careless mistake, that a Russian spy could religiously attend mass and try to get fellow CIA agents to go to Opus Dei meetings and anti-abortion-pro-life events.

The ray of hope is at least the American people know some of what happened unlike during the Cold War disasters.

But this hope won’t mean much if the US keeps responding to every low tech al Qaeda success with a massive increase in expenditures as we know one of al Qaeda’s goals is to bankrupt the US. On the Internet and papers one can call al Qaeda dangerous, and elsewhere that the US is heading toward bankruptcy, but most don’t deal with both points simultaneously.

Friends of the dead killed by a fellow members ruse and their relatives’s might start to worry about al Qaeda volunteering people for Jihad against their permission. The outfitting a 7-year-old with down syndrome as a remotely detonated bomb, is a new wave of al Qaeda celebrating its member’s support. We got start reminding people who like al Qaeda’s power that they are personally threatened by al Qaeda as well.