A former senior Near East Division operative says, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
Behind-the-lines counterterrorism operations are just too dangerous for CIA officers to participate in directly. When I was in the Directorate of Operations, the Agency would deploy a small army of officers for a meeting with a possibly dangerous foreigner if he couldn't be met in the safety of a U.S. embassy or consulate. Officers still in the clandestine service say that the Agency's risk-averse, bureaucratic nature-which mirrors, of course, the growing physical risk-aversion of American society-has only gotten worse.
The whole article is at: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/gerecht.htm
Cheers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message ----- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 5:35 PM Subject: Re: What is the moral course
> Wojtek:
>
> >At 04:11 PM 9/14/01 -0400, Yoshie wrote:
> >>>At 08:18 PM 9/13/01 -0400, Yoshie wrote:
> >>>>If the U.S. government had possessed an "effective
> > >>>intelligence/information system," however, it could have prevented
at
> > >>>least the attack on the Pentagon. Evidently it didn't.
> > >>
> >>>They should have learned one from the Israelis. There is still time.
> >>>
> >>>wojtek
> >>
> >>Apparently Yitzhak Rabin -- as well as those who died in a pizzeria
> >>bombing, etc. -- failed to benefit from the vaunted Israeli expertise.
> >
> >Yoshie, let's face it. The Palestinian yahoos that blow themselves in
the
> >public places in Israel are nothing more than pathetic explosive
streakers
> >that cause relatively little damage. Add to it expertise and
coordination
> >- and you will get the WTC on a sunny Tuesday morning. Do you really
doubt
> >that killing the brains behind the WTC operation could have saved 5,000
> >lives?
>
> I'm simply saying that they weren't able to identify the brains
> behind the WTC bombings -- that's why they couldn't prevent them, &
> the bombings happened, no? I do not believe that they will be able
> to do so in the future either.
>
> Besides, the national security state, such as it is, doesn't exist to
> _prevent_ terrorism. If prevention is what they are after, they will
> do everything in their power to undo the material conditions that
> breed deranged malcontents, be they Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin
> Laden. Instead, they deal with & even reward deranged malcontents on
> a daily basis, _as long as they aim their guns at the right targets
> (e.g., the Soviets in Afghanistan)_, so to speak.
>
> Anyhow, _to the National Security State_, the Pentagon bombing is a
> far larger problem than the WTC bombings, since it exposed the
> hitherto unseen vulnerability at the heart of the NSS, thus
> undermining everyone's belief in the mighty power of the U.S.
> government (at the very moment when the U.S. economy was entering
> into a perhaps protracted recession). That is what will shape the
> nature of U.S. response, which will likely be a war (bombings, ground
> troops, etc.), not a criminal justice operation (investigating,
> identifying, indicting, extraditing, prosecuting, trying, sentencing,
> etc.). Why? They need to restore confidence in American military
> might. Criminal justice can't do that.
>
> Yoshie