Turning to the op-ed by the former CIA officer, Mr. Brown, he is certainly harder on his former colleagues than is warranted. The notion that all else since 9/11 is a failure because bin Laden is not dead or in custody is surely an exaggeration and in any case, it’s not at all clear that it’s CIA’s fault.

In fact, a little googling on his part would remind him that a small number of CIA officers, comprising a half dozen teams, swooped into Afganistan and within weeks of 9/11 forged alliances with local Afgans and had al Qaeda and the Taliban running for their lives. The failure to block their exit in the mountains around Tora Bora was absolutely not the fault of anyone at CIA. And let’s remember also that CIA contrived a number of plans to capture or kill bin Laden up to 2000 — Michael Scheuer claims he knows of 13 such plans, and several were well documented by the 9/11 Commission — that were never put into operation.

Brown’s broader critique is a bit nebulous. Are we to believe seriously that penetrating opaque governments and societies like North Korea or the old Soviet Union or Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria, places where swift and secret death was or is the typical punishment for any hint of spying for the regime’s enemies, would be made easier with the help of assorted entrepreneurs, scientists, and free lance journos? There is a lot of expertise in our nation that might be tapped better on a host of issues, and the fact is that the intel community does a great deal of that. Of what use all such inputs might be to recruiting agents in Pyongyang is another matter.

Applying these ideas to the terrorism threat strikes me as even less likely to be fruitful; what CIA needs most in that regard is Pashtun tribesmen willing to rat out al Qaeda and other radicals. Good luck with that.

Overall, what Brown doesn’t get into at all — and this is where his experience could be enlightening — is the problem of overly high expectations of intelligence. CIA and other intelligence agencies are very good at finding out specific things, when they have the time and resources. In 1996-2000, they did a great job of tracking bin Laden’s movements and gaining a pretty good sense of al Qaeda’s activities even though he was headquartered at his “farm” outside Khandahar deep in Taliban country.

They also did a fair job of penetrating Kremlin secrecy on targeted matters — so they were able, for example, to give President Kennedy the timely, critical information that the Soviets had not yet completed the delivery of operational missiles to Cuba in 1962.

But they are magicians who can divine information that is kept closely secret, and they are not soothsayers when it comes to big trends in the world.

Whenever we don’t know in advance something we wish we’d known, we tend to call it an “intelligence failure,” and blame anonymous CIA officers who are the only people unable to defend themselves.

Too bad none of us have any intention of ever working for those guys.

Seriously, I’ve never heard a good counter-argument. Jimmy the Dhimmy, Kranky Kritter, someone, please straighten me out here.