plural

RANT

I keep hearing
people talking about 9/11 talk about intelligence failures
about how the C.I.A. et al should have prevented the attacks

this is bullshit

and just opening your mouth to argue differently shows you to be a fucking moron
and someone who doesn't have a clue about the realities of intelligence work
[go on, open your mouth, you know you cant help yourself]
[but you had better clean off the dog shit from your shoes first]
[unless you like that sort of thing]

The job of the CIA (et al) is to attempt to protect the United States from those who would harm her
Attempt being the keyword

They are charged with trying to find out what other people are doing
people who are rather intent on keeping us from finding that information out.

It isn't like the movies
It isn't like the time you caught your boyfriend boffing your sister
[btw that really was an accident]
[he slipped on a banana peel and stuck his dick in your sister]
[whoops, damn if that aint embarrassing]

Our enemies are professionals
[hell we trained half of em ourselves]

They know how to maintain information security
and they are not particularly pleasant to people who betray them

We see movies with fancy spy satellites
and secret agents who focus more on style than secrecy

James Bond doesn't exist, and most "Spies"
do not carry guns and fancy gadgets
they carry diplomatic passports

The second undersecretary of ass wiping at the US embassy to Botswana isn't a diplomat
he is a CIA field officer

his job is to recruit locals to gather information
that his masters in Washington might find useful

if he gets caught
they don't torture him
they don't kill him
[granted it has happened]
[but for the most part it doesn't]

they put his ass on a plane back to Washington
then the US government will lodge a formal protest
declaring that he was absolutely not spying
and
in retaliation send one of their embassy flunkies home
not even someone important
and
especially not someone who they thought was spying
as it is far more valuable to follow that person
than to send them home

I hear about communications from field agents
saying there are more Arabs than usual taking flight lessons

first, before 9/11 if the FBI went around interrogating Arab
just because they were in flight school
your liberal ass panties would be all bunched up your ass

it just wasn't enough to act on given the political climate
besides which

If I told you before 9/11 that there were more Arabs
in truck driving schools than last year
you would say "so fucking what, maybe it is a growth industry"

and considering good airline pilots can make six figures
[an amount of money which almost no one earns in the Arab world]
it isn't too much of a stretch to figure that they were just trying to improve their lives
by learning how to get a more profitable job.
[at least that's what your shit-streaked panties would be screaming at CNN]

second, if you had a clue about intelligence work
you would also know
that 80% of the billions of piece of information you get are worthless
of the remaining 20% of the incoming information
80% of it is false
and 18% of it is incomplete
the remaining two percent we were lucky as hell to get.

this isn't like going to your local library and researching fairies or some shit
life in the intelligence business is more about what you do not know
that what you do know
and trying to make the best choices from the little that you know

hell, during the cold war
there were Russian politicians that we didn't even know their wives names
[I use the term loosely to refer to members of government]
hell in some cases we didn't even know if they had a wife.

what is the importance of that you might ask?
why should we care?

well it is part of developing a proper psych profile
if they aren't married they might be gay which may be exploitable
[it especially was in the extremely homophobic soviet empire]
if they are married you can learn a great deal about what type of person they are by how they interact with their spouse
if they have sexual deviancy
all of these trivial pieces of information
allow you to understand your enemy better
and if you understand you enemy, you can better guess
[and that is all it is guessing]
how they might respond to an event
and if you can guess well enough how they will respond
then you can plan against that and be ready for them

every little bit of information is a puzzle piece
the puzzle has ten billion pieces
half of which are probably locked away in the mind of one or two individuals
you can not, will not, unless you get incredibly lucky
ever have enough pieces to understand the layout of the whole puzzle
all you can do
is fit together pieces
and make educated guesses

and
if any of you fucks
think you can do it better
how come you didn't stop the attacks

what's that? its not your job?
blow it out your ass
if you could have done a better job and didn't
then you could have prevented the attacks and didn't
so
all that blood is on your hands
not the CIAs

which not surprisingly isnt that far from the truth

now