This is worth parsing. Is it really incompetence? Or is it actually a very high level of foresight? As a general rule, the only thing people are evered fired for is breaking the law. While there are exceptions to this, in an organization like the CIA, such would be aking to admitting terminal liability at the next level within the organization.
(This seems to be why companies like GM never admit to an engineering flaw; or why wall street firms are never prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.)
I believe that if a CIA director were actually oblivious to such a flagrant violation of law/ethics/trust/separation of powers, whatever you want to call it; then that would be incompetence. If after faced with the facts, he refused to immediately produce the perpetrators, that makes it malevolent, he is now a co-conspirator.
Of course, I don't really believe it is incompetence, but rather, as you say the result of careful planning, or very competent crisis handling.
If we can't prevent guys like Brennan from playing the "I didn't know... honest!" gambit, then at least that could trigger the "incompetence response" which would be immediate dismissal, and hopefully change the rules of the game a bit, even if it allowed the criminal a comparably graceful exit.
Plausible deniability is a term coined by the CIA in the early 1960s to describe the withholding of information from senior officials in order to protect them from repercussions in the event that illegal or unpopular activities by the CIA became public knowledge.
You are dealing with purposeful behaviour. One mans 'obliviousness' is another man's 'innocence'. In other words, it helps to not mis-understand this situation as the work of the ill-informed or 'incompetent'. It sort of does a dis-service to the complexity of the problem, here.
(And I'm certainly not arguing about the existence of a problem).
> One mans 'obliviousness' is another man's 'innocence'. In other words, it helps to not mis-understand this situation as the work of the ill-informed or 'incompetent'.
What do you propose? Just because some people understand it as a deception or a possible deception, that understanding is not universal. Plenty of people accept these "ignorance" claims making it so that executives are able to effectively use the plausible deniability gambit. How else can we work around it?
(This seems to be why companies like GM never admit to an engineering flaw; or why wall street firms are never prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.)