Category Archives: Intelligence

Updated: 'The System' Did It

Free Markets, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

“A nimble adversary” is how Obama characterized a bunch of rag-tag terrorists—Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—who had resorted to recruiting for their mission a clumsy, inept boy, about whom ample warnings existed in “The system.”

Mr. Abdulmutallab was not placed on the no-fly list “despite the government’s having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States.”

Inflating 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s abilities does wonders to lessen our failings, which are legion.

Remember and rehearse: What failed was the (intelligence) system. No flesh-and-blood was involved in the many monumental mistakes. All there was was an amorphous thing called “The system.”

Pray tell if you know of a private company, subject to market forces, getting away with assigning blame to their “system,” rather than to its constituent parts—individual operators. Such a firm would be without customers.

(And people who know they’d get fingered and fired from their private-sector jobs for such failings are clamoring for a public option to serve as competition to the health care insurance industry.)

Under the stumble-bumble Bush administration, we experienced, and forgave, the criminal negligence that facilitated the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil.

Condy Cow (CC) ignored “a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets,” stating that it belonged to the realm of analysis, and wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.'”

We’re still debating the same disconnected darn dots.

CC then blamed her ineptness on the need to reform Washington’s atrophied alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. Ten years on, the Obama administration is doing the same, although to his credit, the president has taken responsibility for the failures; says they embarrassed him, and accuses his people of letting him down (brownie point for Barack).

The bare-bones truth is that the National Security Council, headed by Rice, was an office created to advise the president on anything relating to national security and to facilitate inter-agency cooperation. “If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she oversaw.”

The same goes for the people (the same folks, really) operating “The System” today.

On Condy’s watch America experienced perhaps the worst intelligence lapse ever: Remember the Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memorandum about the bin Ladenites who were training in U.S. flight schools? Agent Ken Williams’ report was very specific. Over and above the standard sloth the memo met in the Washington headquarters, it transpired that the FBI was as concerned about ‘racial profiling’ then as it is today.

Since Bush, the way we talk about security failures has changed little, bar some semantic tweaks. Neither will it. There are simply no incentives in a government “system” to make it amenable to corrective feedback. The reason nothing changes is because of the nature of “The System.”

Update (Jan. 8): And the concept of terrorism in its aspirational stage? What state-speak is that?

Triple Agent, Or Agent Of Allah?

Homeland Security, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Terrorism, The West

AGENT OF ALLAH. He was supposed to be a double agent. Jordan’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, was confident that they had “flipped” “suicide bomber Humam Muhammed al-Balawi, the Jordanian double agent who killed seven CIA operatives and his Jordanian handler” in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, on December 30, as reported by ABC.

But al-Balawi was just flipping the bird to Jordan and, more poignantly, to the US.

Al Balawi was born in Kuwait in 1977, raised in Jordan and attended medical school in Turkey. He had been arrested by Jordan’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, more than a year ago. Believing they had flipped al Balawi and made him a double agent, the Jordanians released him from prison and sent him to Afghanistan to penetrate al Qaeda by pretending to be an aspiring foreign jihadi.

The naive, American, CIA operatives salivated, setting up a meeting with “the supposed informant” at the “C.I.A.’s Forward Operating Base Chapman in the southeastern province of Khost” (NYT). Having strapped explosives to his body, Al Balawi blew himself up, taking with him one of the spy agency’s elite teams.

Al Balawi had “strong jihadi credentials” for a reason. He was a strong Jihadi.

This is what I’m getting at: The liberal aims to make humanity over in his image. As the creed of left-liberalism sees it, each and every individual has the potential to be a liberal. When operating from the foolish and infinitely arrogant premise that every Muslim is no more than a lesser Westerner struggling to unleash his inner liberal—you’re bound to play footsie with fanatics.

Muslims such as Al Balawi simply possess stronger core beliefs than the average CIA operative can fathom—even the “elites” among them.

Updated: Retards Redesign High School In Their Image

Education, Government, Intelligence, Science

I can’t say it often enough: “Homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America.”

How does one cluster of severely compromised pedagogues and parents deal with the reality of aggregate IQ differences between white students, on the one hand, and blacks and Latinos, on the other?

Why, by eliminating the harder subjects with which the stupider students can’t cope. Why allow the smart student to learn science if the stupid can’t?

How do these cretins hope to help fat students? By prohibiting track-and-field meets for the fit? Ugly students, of course, can be pacified by disfiguring pretty ones. That was easy.

The adults described in “Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs,” “working” as they are to cripple clever kids and knee-cap the workforce, have clearly themselves been subjected to the kind of “education” that eliminates the gifted for the sake of the gimps.

They should be subjected to something far worse.

If you have kids in the public school system; remove them forthwith!

Update (Jan. 6): The retards, as expected, are doing the exact opposite of what that genius Thomas Jefferson instructed:

Geniuses, currently the recipients of two pennies out of every 100 educational dollars, must be “raked from the rubbish,” wrote Jefferson in “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Jefferson (he was not perfect) favored a very limited (only three years gratis) public education for Virginians. Unlike Education Secretary Rod Paige, whose most important contribution to literacy was to call the NEA (America’s largest teacher union) a “terrorist organization,” Jefferson understood that not every child can learn “Greek, Latin, Geography, and higher branches of arithmetic.” He did, however, insist that all must know “reading, writing, common arithmetic,” and history (nothing, you will note, about “social science” and “self esteem”). “History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future,” Jefferson noted.

Updated: Jihadis Really Really Hate Us

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, Journalism, Terrorism

Says John Brennan, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in an interivew with CNN’s Gloria Borger: “We have made quite a bit of progress this year in degrading the capabilities of Al Qaida organization. We’ve taken the battle to them. We have eliminated a number of their senior leaders and operatives. But that doesn’t mean that they still don’t have a capability of carrying out attacks. And that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to look for ways and vulnerabilities in our system to get their operatives either here to the United States or in other places to carry out these attacks.”

Replies MICHAEL SCHEUER, the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999: “Mr. Brennan is blowing smoke. You have some dead bodies — I agree with that; it’s all to the good — but no impact on the overall organization. … I think it’s stronger than it was at 9/11, certainly because the support and opposition across the Muslim world to American foreign policy is far greater today than it was in 9/11.”

I’ve covered Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, favorably: “When I think of a libertarian-leaning patriotic warrior, I think of Michael Scheuer. The chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer is also the man behind the enhanced interrogation methods, which the hard-left and their friends on the libertarian left would have you believe are as heinous as the war crime at Hiroshima.”

Still, I’m not sure what he’s advising.

“Yemen is bin Laden’s ancestral home,” Scheuer comments. “More Yemenis than any Arab nationality fought against the Soviets. There would have been more Yemenis in the 9/11 attacks, except they couldn’t get visas as easily as the Saudis.”

And he recommends that, “We stop depending on surrogates. We stop depending on Pakistan. We stop depending on Yemen and use our own strong right arm. There is no — there’s no clause in the Constitution that says President Obama can delegate the defense of America to a Yemeni dictator.”

I don’t know what that means. Do you? Gloria doesn’t inquire. Like most journalists today, she possesses very little intellectual curiosity.

Update (Jan. 4): Is there a reason to so carefully distinguish “Islam” from “Jihadist Islam”? The latter is a redundancy. Jihad is part of Islam.