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On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
[...]
There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.
Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:35PM
Spot on. I wasn't smart enough to envision ISIS, certainly not smart enough to paint any details of what it has become. But, I was among those who wrote letters to GWB before the invasion, warning of destabilizing the region further.
Of course, everyone said that we were going to build a nation. What nonsense - there are no nations in the region, because it is inhabited by tribal people. Tribalists have no loyalty to kings, presidents, parliaments, or anything else. Tribalists only bow to the most ruthless dictator for the moment, while plotting how to take his place.
Saddam Hussein, as evil as he was, was almost the perfect ruler for the region. Assad is cut from the same cloth.
Had we succeeded in toppling Assad, today Syria would be entirely under ISIS/ISIL/Daesh control.
I say, "Thank God for Putin!" I wish we had a leader of his caliber. Unfortunately, there are none in sight.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 19 2015, @09:37AM
You are a brave man to say that openly, and I applaud that. As someone living in a country which only gained its independence from the USSR 24 years ago, I'd be appreciative if you didn't encourage our bear neighbour too much.
I highly recommend, at least as a starting point for further reading and discussion, /The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom/ by Adam Curtis. (There are 3 active torrents of the 3 parts we grabbed from kat, A8254654411F03A13E086F625863273C44634A44 9B53C8306AD9A4F2DD6B7A98896A7D09027FED90 117805357FC5D621486B61A6DCDDC9581C84E414, we're still seeding them.) It's chocka full of interesting historical snippets, although some of the analyses and logical deductions (in part 3 particularly) I completely disagree with. The insight into modern Russia and Putin was very interesting. In essence, Putin being in power, and thus the threat he is to my domicile's continued existence, was the US's fault too. Gee - thanks Bush (senior)!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:01PM
Downloading - thank you for the links.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:41PM
Tribalists do have a loyalty: to their tribe, which is another way of describing a really really extended family. That kind of loyalty is not unusual, nor is it non-existent in the US - many Irish-Americans still identify with the Irish in Ireland, for example, even to the point of supporting the IRA.
But you're right that the British and French made huge mistakes when drawing up the map of the region: If you compare this map [vanityfair.com] based on current cultural differences and boundaries, or this map [wikimedia.org] by T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) to the map that they actually drew, it seems like the British diplomats who drew the maps were completely, obviously, disastrously wrong. Which isn't surprising, given the many other massive strategic mistakes made by all the players after World War I.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.