I haven't updated in ages, so this page is just a few current thoughts on current mass media trends.

United 93

27 April 2006

It is a fact of history that the passengers and crew United Airlines Flight 93 were the first Americans to give their lives in defense of this country -on American soil, OUR soil- since the Revolutionary war. Of course, in the first few months following 9/11, some tried to degrade their heroic sacrifice to "victim" status by claiming they didn't die fighting their attackers but were murdered by a shadowy fighter jet to protect an old, white building in Washington DC. Titles like "HEROS STABBED IN BACK BY USAF LUFTGANSTERS" still exist today on real websites. Since the moonbats already get too much attention, we'll ignore them.

This isn't hyperbole. I am a Pennsylvania native who currently lives about two hours from the field outside Shanksville over which the events detailed in the movie United 93 took place. PA might be a blue state but only by a tiny margin. Most Pennsylvanians take the events aboard Flight 93 as well as all of those on 9/11/01 very seriously; in fact we take it very personally.

Check out any of the cable or news channels, read the current entertainment headlines in the print media and what jumps out at you over and over? "Is it too soon?" "Are Americans ready for such a film?" It seems the media is worried that Hollywood's first feature film concerning the actual events of 9/11/01 will "rub raw wounds", filling Americans with "grief" and "sadness". Gosh, I'm TOUCHED the media so feels our pain. In fact the mass media is going out of it's Social Collectivist way to convince Americans NOT to watch what critics universally describe as a "minute by minute account, done with attention to detail, with respect and with love" because it'll make us Prols remember our pain.

A few years ago, Michael Moore produced a work of pure paranoid delusion called Farenheight 911 in an effort to con us grieving Americans - with the still raw emotional wounds - into believing that our own Commander in Chief colluded with terrorists to murder over 3,000 men, women and children in order to drum up a profit for his buddies in "Big Oil". Where was the concern for our collective emotional health? Who in the media asked "Are Americans READY for this??" Was this abortion of a campaign ad/terrorist recruitment film supposed to bring JOY to the American heart and BALM our "raw wounds"?

Not only did the TV and print media not show one iota of concern for that hallucinogenic smutfest's emotional impact on the general public, they gleefully gave it free publicity day after day after day, thus drumming up ticket sales. Terrorists and socialists worldwide flocked to see it. To add insult to injury, Hollywood, in the best interests of the American people, rewarded Moore with an Oscar for "Best Documentary" - thus giving a work of fiction a patina of legitimacy by labeling it a work of "fact".

The mass media's negative hype campaign is not going to stop me from going to see United 93. I will also buy the DVD for my grandchildren to see when they're old enough. It is the duty of all civilized, emotionally functional humanity to remember the events of 9/11/01, just as it was our duty to witness the actocities as they unfolded. It is our duty to ourselves, to our descendants and most of all to the dead who have been giving their lives since Usama bin Laden and company fired the first salvo of the War on Terror into our own homes.

Will the same Hollywood mass media which had no compunction about inflicting F911 on the public, acclaimed "fact" and gave it it's highest award be as generous with United 93, a "minute by minute account, done with attention to detail, with respect and with love"? I'll be waiting to see.

Mary, Mary (McCarthy)

26 April 2006

I'm as much at a loss to explain Mary McCarthy's high position in the Central Intelligence Agency as her amazing decision to let her entire career and place in history leak away like the air from a slashed tire.

In her statement to the 9/11 Commission, Ms McCarthy states that "a vibrant warning system is dependent upon access to the full array of terrorism intelligence. Without systematic sharing of intelligence across agency boundaries in accessible, integrated databases the warning function cannot be reliable", and this is absolutely true.

Several paragraphs later, McCarthy states that "Unlike other functions of democratic government, the conduct of intelligence is purposely-and with the consent of the public-carried out in secret, out of the view of public and without much public debate. Instead, Americans rely on their representatives in Congress to ensure that the intelligence function is performed, not only in a way that keeps us safe, but also in a way that is consistent with our democratic values", and this is mostly true, though you probably noticed that first she states that intelligence must be done out of sight of the public, contrary to the precepts of a totally transparent, Democratic government and then demands congress oversee all intelligence to ensure it's transparent and compatible with "democratic values".

Beginning in the same time period that she's testifying before the 9/11 Commission or shortly after, Ms. McCarthy began leaking classified national intelligence and national security information to a press hostile to the war on terror. Talk about contradictions and hypocrisies - she's a walking definition of both.

The rest of her statement is a testimony to a mind dried completely out by administrative matters. The summaries of her actual testimony before the 9/11 Commission are incoherent and lead one to suspect the woman has no clue what she's talking about, because people who know what they're talking about are coherent when talking about their subject of expertise.

McCarthy's assertion that data mining current news sources looking for trends which might lead to clues to the enemy's next moves can "overpower an agency's top analysts, pushing them toward the daily 'take' on the situation, and away from the heavy lifting of warning analysis", is completely wrong. It IS part of the heavy lifting. Ant it CAN overwhelm those at the top of the food chain. That's why there are others who do the actual heavy lifting.

Trolling the news and getting the "take" on a situation, combined with boots on the ground updates of what the regular Muhammads in the tea shops are saying as they solve all the problems of the Arab world, checking hunches (leaps of logic or faith or whatever you want to call them) and gathering all possible documentation in order to create hypotheses which fit the current facts is a very good way to predict imminent threat, yet she argues against such finger-on-the-pulse methods of predicting imminent threats.

OK, people who do that, like me, are in the category she describes as "marginalized" due to the fact that the bigshot analysts like her ignore us - like she did when we warned her office in 1998 and 1999 of the impending attack on the US - but what she never once does in this pedantic statement is mention any coherent plan of improving Agency organization or incorporating intelligence gathering profitably. Why? She's clueless. The more successful gatherer/analysts (one should be functional in both spheres) tend not to use her dry, mathamatical methodology because it does not and never has worked to predict human behavior except in the sense that even a stopped clock is right twice a day - or in this case once a decade or so.

To be fair, in a statement of record, one can't compromise sensitive intelligence gathering methods. Even I didn't mention anything above that was compromising. It's just that she doesn't sound like she KNOWS any real intelligence gathering methods.

So why did McCarthy leak a bogus story revealing sensitive operational procedures that it's obvious from her testimony to congress she knows nothing about? She certainly didn't go through whistleblower procedure. She didn't confess until after she was caught and flunked a lie detector test. This means she knew her actions were illegal and never intended to disclose them, so the whistleblower defense doesn't fly.

This is getting too long and I can rant about styles and schools of information gathering at book length - or at least novella length - in very short order. I will say that as an historian, I am ashamed of her blindered approach to intelligence analysis. If human societies can be thought of as motaphorical "forests" then the Muhammads in the tea shops solving all the problems of the Arab world are the trees which compose it. Since it only takes one tree afire to set off a catastrophic wildfire, it's suicide not to see the trees for looking at the whole forest, as Ms McCarthy proposes.

Should McCarthy be indicted, she might say in her own defense that human events don't happen in a vacuum. She's be correct if she did. It only takes one leak to change the course of a war, or a couple of terrorists using airliners as homicide bombs of mass destruction to start, but things like this don't happen without a network of "like thinking" individuals - even favorite authors - to support the ideological conclusions of the perpetrator in question. Even the Unibomber left his Manefesto to posterity in the belif that if only people read it, people would support his position.

The 9/11 hijackers had a support network of like thinking individuals to keep them from losing their nerve. Likewise, Ms. McCarthy had a support network of "like thinking individuals" like Joe Wilson, Priest's husband and Pol Pot fan William Goodfellow and his crew from the Center for International Policy, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which claims her own former employees as well as current employees of the CIA dedicated to leaking national security data as a "higher mission", other adherents to the now infamous Rockefeller Memo et al as the support network to keep her from losing her own nerve on her own "higher mission".

McCarthy was a special assistant to President Clinton and a senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council until 2001. She was PART of the "intelligence failures" that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur. In fact, public documents show she's PART of the "intelligence failures" that led both the Clinton and Bush administrations to conclude Saddam had massive caches of WMD. (Note I don't say Saddam had NO WMD, because even Kay found some: just no massive stockpiles)

The only conclusion I can come to regarding McCarthy's current situation is that she's a duplicitous dupe; incompetent, smart but lacking one iota of common sense, who outsmarted herself while being outmaneuvered by her own support network. Even if being caught red handed doesn't land her a conviction, the United States in particular and intelligence community in general is better off without her.

When high-level, career intelligence professionals charged with gathering and disseminating intelligence to keep our nation secure puts personal ideology and partisan politics over human lives, we should be afraid. Very afraid.