The Biggest Lies in Government Turned on Their Head

A guy I know who has done management training for the government for many years favorite joke to tell is 'the two biggest lies in government are 'hi we are from the Inspector Generals office and we are here to help' and 'We are damn glad to have you''.

The very point of an IG is to have someone challenging every decision for its practicality, fairness, and legality from an external perspective. While overwhelmingly fair, their independence frees them from the compromises and concessions we all make in the course of program implementation and to ask the hard questions. We all do resent the IG folks judging our every decision, but the overwhelming majority respect them and accept their importance to the process of providing superior service to the American people.

That is why this article scares the crap out of me:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=110161&f=19

"Some agency officers believe the aggressive investigations by Mr. Helgerson amount to unfair second guessing of intelligence officers who are often risking their lives in the field."
"These are good people who thought they were doing the right thing," said one former agency official. "And now they are getting beat up pretty bad and they have to go out an hire a lawyer."

First, the job of the IG is to 'second guess' decisions. If a spook shoots a prisoner it may have been justified, they may be a 'bad apple' or they also may have not been given proper rules of engagement or training or given a faulty decision matrix. If we just say 'well he was an agent so it has to be the first case' the organization is completely failing its mission. If the IG is conducting inappropriate witch hunts Hayden can appeal to the President, but his not wanting to 'blow this out of proportion' is just an admission nothing improper is happening there.

Also, to the unamed official horrified that spooks are having to hire lawyers I would note that - horror - people are rightly and wrongly
accused of crimes every day and forced to retain lawyers. But if the agents were so unsure of the legality of their orders when they got them the time to ask questions was before doing whatever they did, not after.