You have to talk to bad people and people who know bad people to learn about bad people and what they plan. And that doesn’t make the people you talk to trustworthy or good people just because they are talking to you.

We call them barbarians and crazies, but our opposition has dedicated and skilled people working against us. Our enemies are smart, patient, and competent. The only thing we can do to fight it is be smart, patient, competent, skilled and dedicated. Even then, sometimes even the best get complacent or screw up. In war that gets people killed – no matter what side they are on. Our job is to make the other guy complacent and let him screw up.

The best vengeance is continuing on. The CIA folks (or any of our people over there) get targeted precisely because they were doing their jobs… so if you really want to screw over the other side, then we keep up the pursuit.

Risk is required to succeed. We can “what if…” or “they should have…” this all we want but at the end of the day our very well trained, very competent people did their best. We can nitpick and cry for vengeance from our living rooms thousands of miles away and worlds apart… and yet every day every soldier and civilian, CIA agent, DEA agent, PRT and NGO member over there is running a risk of death and injury ranging from disease to mortar bomb, suicide bomber to helo crash. And they have done it for YEARS. Maybe they screw up something and it kills them, maybe they do everything right and still die. If we want good intel, if we want to win this damn thing, then we have to have people like those CIA agents meeting shady characters and asking them questions. And that cannot be done from DC or ensconced in a fortress cut off from the outside.

Finally, we has been very lucky. We are fortunate that we have not lost MORE intelligence officers doing what can be one of the most dangerous invisible jobs on earth. THANK GOD the CIA Wall of Honor, the DIA Patriot’s Memorial, the NSA Cryptologic Memorial are not thousands of names long. Thank god our intelligence folks aren’t killed more often, because we send them to places where normal people from this country don’t want to be, ask them to do things they can’t talk about but necessary. Our intel people push on in silence, unrecognized, nearly faceless because they have to be, blamed for every failure and rarely able to show their successes, no Memorial Days, no Veterans Days, no parades, no telling the kids what they did at work today, only criticisms, blame, stupid conspiracy theories, threats of prosecution, dumb cliche movies, and a public that is hypnotized into believing “Intelligence Work” either means a suave man with a martini and a gun or evil nitwits reading your email for nebulously nefarious reasons.

We are lucky – not just because there have not been more lost in the line of a quiet and under appreciated duty. We are lucky because we continue to find such people for the work.

Stupidity is self punished by the opportunity it provides a ruthless opponent.

Mourn. Grieve. Get back on the job. Learn from the mistake. Neither speak of it outside the family, nor EVER forget it.

Focus. On. Relentless untiring sure delivery of death to the enemy. Not to his innocent relatives. Let the enemy bear the blood guilt of blood feud.

We have a whole lot more rat killin’ to do. So yes, this isn’t over.