Thursday, January 07, 2010
It isn't logical, dammit.
One thing is surprising: the CIA types like Brennan and Negroponte don't grasp the basic idea of police work.
Journalists (to their credit!) keep hitting the CIA types with one question: "You talk about noise in the system, you talk about connecting the dots, but in this case you had the terrorist's own father speaking directly to a CIA agent. He gave the CIA the son's name and passport number. That's not noise, that doesn't require any connection." And the CIA types sort of yawn condescendingly, as if the journalist isn't qualified to ask such eyes-only classified questions.
If their mindset can't tell the difference between a direct reliable report and a statistical model, their mindset is totally fucked.
I can certainly understand how you'd miss a surprise attack with no available information, but I can't forgive missing a direct report.
Consider Kaczynski the Unabomber. He's superintelligent, superparanoid, knows exactly how the System ensnares us, took absolutely unique steps to live entirely outside the System for many years. And it worked for many years. The FBI admitted that they might never have caught him, except that his own brother finally tipped them off. At that point they had a name and a biography, so they were able to find Kaczynski quickly.
That's logical. The current mess isn't. ¶ 5:23 PM
Journalists (to their credit!) keep hitting the CIA types with one question: "You talk about noise in the system, you talk about connecting the dots, but in this case you had the terrorist's own father speaking directly to a CIA agent. He gave the CIA the son's name and passport number. That's not noise, that doesn't require any connection." And the CIA types sort of yawn condescendingly, as if the journalist isn't qualified to ask such eyes-only classified questions.
If their mindset can't tell the difference between a direct reliable report and a statistical model, their mindset is totally fucked.
I can certainly understand how you'd miss a surprise attack with no available information, but I can't forgive missing a direct report.
Consider Kaczynski the Unabomber. He's superintelligent, superparanoid, knows exactly how the System ensnares us, took absolutely unique steps to live entirely outside the System for many years. And it worked for many years. The FBI admitted that they might never have caught him, except that his own brother finally tipped them off. At that point they had a name and a biography, so they were able to find Kaczynski quickly.
That's logical. The current mess isn't. ¶ 5:23 PM
