If only Don Adams were alive to see this

28 December 2005

Last year, it turned out that our MPs knew how to beat the crap out of prisoners in Abu Ghreib but had trouble keeping the prisoners from escaping.

Now, we learn that the CIA agents who abducted Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr from Italy left their cell phones turned on, then used those cell phones to call both the US consulate and their friends back home—allowing the Italian police to identify them and reconstruct a minute-by-minute timetable of the abduction.

So amateurish was the Milan rendition that the Italian lawyer for Robert Seldon Lady, whom prosecutors identify as the former CIA chief in Milan, says Lady’s primary defense will be that he was too good a spy to have been involved with something so badly planned and carried out.

Yeah, that strategy never fails to impress the judge.

Is there anyone left in the Directorate of Operations who (a) is competent, (b) has a job that doesn’t involve waterboarding, and© hasn’t pissed off the Vice-President?

• Later: Dang, I’m in the wrong line of work
• Earlier: “Yes, Detective Fontana, that’s the work of an Intelligent Bomber”