THE SOURCE

The Washington Post relays the shocking manner in which the U.S. military is conducting operations in Iraq, relying on a masked informant whose information seems sketchy at first.

"All of the village, they are terrorists," The Source told two journalists after he finished.

Asked how he knew, he said: "I have one guy here, and he passed along the information to me."

Asked how he could be sure, he said: "Yes, they are terrorists. They all have the long beard. They had the beard, but some of them they shaved."

The Source declined to give his name. He then asked: "Is the commander going to pay me any money? If you are an informant, they are supposed to give you money."

But perhaps it's not so surprising when you consider it was a similiar charlatan named Ahmed Chalabi who insisted there were WMD in Iraq and on whom the Bush administration made its laughable case.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports the following:

Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks, despite repeated pleas from the unit's leaders for reinforcements, a senior C.I.A. officer with extensive counterterrorism experience has told Congress.

The bin Laden unit is stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work ...

Doesn't sound like much of a coherent foreign policy or intelligence plan.