Mourning the Dead

Marc Ambinder, over at sister publication The Atlantic, has an excellent post up about the difficulties for the Central Intelligence Agency of mourning 8 CIA officers reported to have been killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, war dead the administration is not acknowledging; who may have participated in a Predator drone program that killed many civilians; and that the American public may not particularly understand:

The death of eight CIA officers would be the agency's worst toll since the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, when at least six officers were killed. Robert Baer, the now ubiquitous former CIA officer who spend years hunting down the Beirut bombers, has written that the agency never recovered from the loss of life that day. In an environment where the CIA is under extreme pressure from all corners, the Afghanistan massacre begins history as a tragedy that even under ordinary conditions the agency would find it hard to bear. Leon Panetta, the CIA director, must now add, to the mountain of pressing concerns, the grief counseling for thousands of employees.

I'm not going to opine on the Predator program, or whether the CIA should be publicly understood as combatants. I think Marc is right to focus on the fact that these deaths will have an enormous ripple effect through an agency that's already under tremendous strain. If the administration wants the CIA to function effectively, they should at least acknowledge that internally.