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| Government Corruption |
| Sam Faddis - 'Why the CIA No Longer Works‐and How to Fix It' |
| 2023-11-30 |
| [Imprimis] The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 3, 2023, during a conference on "U.S. Intelligence: History and Controversies." We need the CIA, but we also need to recognize the uncomfortable reality that the CIA is not performing at the level we require. It is not keeping us safe. It must be repaired, and it must be repaired quickly. The CIA was created after World War II with one overriding primary mission—to prevent a reoccurrence of what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. We were never going to allow an enemy to surprise us on that scale again. We were never going to find ourselves blind regarding a threat of that magnitude and immediacy. We would be forewarned and forearmed. Then came 9/11. Members of Al Qaeda hijacked four airliners. They crashed three of them into their targets. They were prevented from succeeding with the fourth only by the heroism of the brave American passengers. Al Qaeda was not some unknown entity. It had been around for years. Osama Bin Laden had threatened to attack us on our own soil for years. Al Qaeda had blown up two of our embassies in East Africa. Al Qaeda had almost sunk the USS Cole in Yemen. Al Qaeda had tried once before to take down the World Trade Center. Yet we had not a single source inside that organization capable of warning us of the 9/11 attacks that would kill almost 3,000 Americans. On May 2, 2011, U.S. special operations personnel attacked a compound in Pakistan and killed the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. That operation in and of itself was clearly a success. But the fact that it took us almost ten years after 9/11 to find and kill Bin Laden should give us pause. Bin Laden fully understood the technical capabilities of American intelligence. After his escape from Afghanistan, he established himself in a compound with no internet service. He had no cell phone. He communicated with his organization via a courier system and dealt with those couriers face to face. There were no emails, text messages, or phone calls for us to intercept. Finding Bin Laden meant getting a source inside Al Qaeda at a level high enough to know his physical location. It took almost a decade for the CIA, with all its resources, to acquire such a source, even though this was probably the CIA’s single highest priority. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #5 Appropriate when information was a physical resource, not so much now that it flows everywhere. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-11-30 16:54 |
| #4 Fix it with fire. |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2023-11-30 11:10 |
| #3 /\ If you control the budget and people, you control the agency. The DNI controls neither. It is by design, a political fig leaf. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-11-30 04:47 |
| #2 So, like, DNI was created because.... |
| Posted by: DooDahMan 2023-11-30 04:43 |
| #1 Bin Laden fully understood the technical capabilities of American intelligence. After his escape from Afghanistan, he established himself in a compound with no internet service. He had no cell phone. He communicated with his organization via a courier system and dealt with those couriers face to face. There were no emails, text messages, or phone calls for us to intercept. May help explain or confirm the 'intelligence gaps' theory of 7 October 2023. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-11-30 04:34 |