Charlie Rose

mark23  02/13/2011 12:13 PM Report

Bergen is absolutely right about how the Intelligence community has basically become a sea of accountants, and they have spent lots of money on technology, at the same time hiring mostly white people to collect intelligence about a country halfway around the world. Now, maybe the CIA and other organizations are doing some sort of footwork on the ground in Afghanistan or Pakistan the public is not aware of, but if you at the bottom line, where did the money go, it's been thrown at office workers in cubicles back home. Has that been an effective use of our defense spending?

Jopa09  02/11/2011 12:16 AM Report

I was astonished when Peter Bergen estimated that al-Qaeda consists of about 200 people and that US spent over $500,000,000,000 (yes astronomical number of 500Billion dollars) to fight them. Would we better off by buying them all out for a good price of 2.5B per head? Who would resist this offer? We would also saved all our and NATO troops killed during this 10 years of senseless operations, not counting many thousands of locals killed as well.

Money talks...

REMant  02/10/2011 02:09 PM Report

I don't know that I would compare al-Qaeda to the German SDS etc, who later formed the Greens, and have had considerable influence and acceptance, even if the religion they espouse, however radically interpreted, were not also widely shared.