Thank You, Frank Rich

It may well be that I am not reading the right articles at the right time, but I have found the new coverage from all corners on the Porter Goss resignation very dissapointing. As I stated here previously, the problem is the gross incompetence of officials in our government, up to the very highest levels.

However, news coverage is either matter-of-fact reporting or a focus on the more salacious tidbits.

Frank Rich finally took the time in Sunday's Week In Review to step back and refocus on the actual problems (Times Select subscription required), the root causes.

From the article:

What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security.

And later...

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

Also, I hadn't heard this, but apparently:

The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

(Frank Rich attributes that last piece to James Bamford in The Washington Post)

So thank you so much Mr. Rich for finally saying what no one else has seemed to be willing.