>Now I'm imagining that the intelligence officer in charge of that
>(still-hypothetical) covert station is probably perennially
>frustrated. "Your reports are constantly too late to do any good!"
>Well, no shit, buddy. These people make decisions fast, and when we
>know about them at all it's because we see the fuckin' metagate opens
>right before they cram half the IPSF through it. We can't collect
>comms traffic to do sigint on because the Psi Corps still hasn't
>figured out a way to intercept lens traffic, now have they? And that's
>on top of the fact that both Hutchins' bastard and his little... gloom
>cookie teenaged sidekick have parapsychic talents that apparently
>involve matter transportation across interstellar distances!
>
>(And then the drinking starts.)

I just think that Earthforce thinks prolonged exposure to Babylon station sends the spooks they put there crazy, so they put the crazy spooks there anyway. Thus, you get a lot of really top-notch intelligence, but since all of it concerns teenagers in school uniforms, wild-psi creatures of varying stripe, and the occasional heavily-armed rock band, it immediately gets trashed along with news that the IPO is currently deep in diplomatic negotiations with the king of the potato people.

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"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends