17 ms·
Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop
- cpr 8y agoAs soon as a writer mentions the CIA in conjunction with fighting the "terrorists", you know they're clueless or a shill. Standard Operating Mockingbird fare.
- some_account 8y agoIm just skipping all American articles about terrorism and how terrorists hate America because of the freedoms, and now America has to go bomb someone to make the world a better place. My iq drops 50 points from that garbage. We live in a world where people are so dumbed down or busy all the time that nobody even seem to reflect on the madness of this thinking.
- sjg007 8y agoIQ tests are based on pattern recognition and abstraction. So your comment being as meta as it is probably means your iq hasn’t dropped. I do understand that it’s a figure of speech in this case but to go more meta it is a lazy argument... perhaps indicative of low iq! Fun right?
- boomboomsubban 8y agoAs much as I hate the CIA and the War on Terror, the subject seemed involved in the hunt for Bin Laden and it seems accurate to call him a terrorist. The article was at least somewhat critical of the War on Terror, less ridiculous than I entered expecting it to be.
- jacquesm 8y agoSome interesting reading on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...
- boomboomsubban 8y agoNot really, it still seems like the CIA was searching for him in the 00's, and CIA connections wouldn't make him any less of a terrorist.
- John_KZ 8y agoWhen did this turn from a fact to an allegation? Jesus they really are rewriting history.
- boomboomsubban 8y agoAt what point was it presented to you with evidence? I also remember hearing this often around 2001, but I can't recall any specifics showing the link. Frankly, the CIA deserves the blame even if they didn't specifically assist Bin Laden. They certainly assisted many other people that were equally terrible, and their actions led to the instability that allowed such groups to flourish.
- pizza 8y agowell.... it's not like he was out of the spotlight, many years earlier than then 1993 newspaper profile of him.. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anti-soviet-warrior-puts-his-army-on-the-road-to-peace-the-saudi-businessman-who-recruited-mujahedin-1465715.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anti-soviet-warrior... a picture of the newspaper article itself for history's sake/ in case that link ceases to work in the future; https://i.imgur.com/HLndqdZ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HLndqdZ.jpg
- boomboomsubban 8y agoHow does this show any link to the CIA? He was the son of a billionaire, I doubt he would need help from a spy agency to get a puff piece written on page ten.
- jacquesm 8y agoYou can see it happening right before your eyes. Quite interesting. F'ing scary too.
- diminoten 8y agoJust such soft slippers we get to wear, on our way down the stairs. I get how it's preferable to the boots our ancestors had to wear on their way up the stairs, but comments like yours make me wonder about that.
- matt4077 8y agoDid you miss the part where that writer wrote 4000 words savagely criticizing the “war on terror”?
- Voyage_wanderer 8y agoI followed the guy on twitter for half a year. Shallow, rumbling and full of shit. It’s kinda sad picture, with all the big words. Counterterrorism, CIA, Police, and now mass media via new Yorker.
- fapjacks 8y agoJust my opinion, but virtually every person I've ever met working in "State Department" operations is some breed of unlikable. "Shallow ... and full of shit" (with an enormous ego) could be a one-liner describing a lot of those folks. That's not to say they're all seedy spies. They just share aspects of a certain profile that isn't what you'd consider to be a paragon of wholesome goodness. And this is going to sound weird, but usually also a kind of ironic naivete about the world that reminds of you of the goody-two-shoes from school. The kind of person that tattles as an adult.
- itronitron 8y agoWell, I agree that there are certainly some of those but they tend to be the most visible as a result of their personal characteristics that you mention, and that is true for many organizations. For a variety of reasons, the people that are doing the interesting stuff typically don't draw much attention to themselves.
- fapjacks 8y agoCertainly. I made friends from those days that I still hang out with today, and who made me reconsider whether or not I'd ever join one of those organizations. But I was speaking in sweeping generalities that represent my own experiences in dealing with those folks over a number of years.
- Retric 8y agoMost intelegent people realize counter terorism is a vast waste of resources and do something else with their lives. What's left is people that have a specific bent.
- 8y ago
- jedmeyers 8y ago“the agency was using National Geographic maps from the nineteen-sixties, with names for landmarks and villages that didn’t correspond to those used by the locals.” I call disinformation on this one, since agency has been involved in counter-USSR operations in that area in the eighties their maps should have at least been from that time period, not the sixties. “the Kalashnikov, a Soviet-developed assault rifle that can penetrate a person’s torso from more than half a mile away.” I have yet to meet a person who can throw a Kalashnikov with a bayonet attached for half a mile. Such poor writing. “designed for use in war zones”, “high-powered weapons” For some reason one can always tell when a piece writer got their hands on a Common Sense Gun Control Thesaurus.
- emj 8y agoI do not doubt some people were using unclassified public domains maps. CIA should use Openstreetmap so they can all share the same info, just add a "NOT_FOR_TERRIES" the the entries that should be kept secret. Getting names of landmarks right is really hard unless you have people on the ground that are specifically looking for that, and who are supposed to update maps. I don't know how the military/intelligence community works, but have they really invested manpower into this? This is from experience with mapping around lake Victoria and Haiti, the map might look ok but when you put your boots on the ground things are different. Especially since official vs. local names can differ so much.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jedmeyers 8y ago“Getting names of landmarks right is really hard unless you have people on the ground that are specifically looking for that, and who are supposed to update maps” Isn’t the purpose of intelligence agencies to collect intelligence, such as landmark names and maps?
- emj 8y agoYes of course, and I have no insight into how they worked with maps (except remote imaging), I just know that the amount of hours you need to invest per village with 300+ pop is quite large. There are also several organizational issue with maps, how do you keep them secret, what do you map, where do you map, if caught with a map are you a spy. Basically why would you give a beat cop a top secret map, my comment about Openstreetmap was a joke but it highlights the bigger problem that maps are a social good and that is not always the goal of the intelligence community in hostile environment.
- Karishma1234 8y agoI am only quoting Nissim Nocholas Taleb "Opposite of reading is not not-reading, it is reading something like Newyorker".
- chatmasta 8y ago> “We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?” This quote really exemplifies the failures of “nation building” from 2000-2010. It was always a hopeless quest with misguided and unmeasurable goals. How much money was wasted, how many lives lost, in a hopelessly misguided pursuit to “stabilize” a country the US destabilized in the first place?
- HIPisTheAnswer 8y agoYou probably meant "From 2000 BC to 2010". But today's the year 2018, so why drop the 8?
- s3m4j 8y agoEven more so when you consider those borders were invented in the last century.
- strictnein 8y agoHeck of a lot of Europe's borders were invented in the last century as well. https://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/1900/index.html https://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/1900/index.html
- jessaustin 8y agoEurope had its share of violence too, perhaps that's one reason why?
- JamesLeonis 8y agoI believe the poster was referring to England and France being party to a secret agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire after World War I, despite overtly backing Arab revolt with promises of independence.
- throwawaymanbot 8y agoGreat Story, Smart Guy! One of the best New Yorker Articles I have read this year.
- hprotagonist 8y agoSkinner always drives with the windows down: he tries to maximize the number of encounters people have with the police in which they feel neither scrutinized nor under suspicion. “You sometimes hear cops talk about people in the community as ‘civilians,’ but that’s bullshit,” he said. “We’re not the military. The people we’re policing are our neighbors. This is not semantics—if you say it enough, it becomes a mind-set.” ain't that the truth. Every time I see police in riot gear surrounding or walling off peaceful protesters, I wonder how much less likely it would be for the protest to turn violent if the officers were in dress blues instead.
- CM30 8y agoAgreed. It's possibly also why attitudes towards the police seem a bit better in the UK (and much of Europe) compared to the US, because the police in these areas aren't dressed like they're going into a war zone or carrying weapons.
- baud147258 8y agoWell, in France, since the 2015 attacks, there are cops with military weapons when they are a lot of people in the same place (not necessarly during protests). Also whatever the protest, here in France you'll always have a group of cops in full riot gear nearby.
- Thriptic 8y agoI was quite impressed by this when I was in Paris ~2 years ago. A drunken mob of about 50 people had massed outside my hotel to celebrate a soccer victory, and they were blocking the street, being loud and a little aggressive, and doing some petty vandalism. In the US I feel like this would have induced an aggressive police response. Instead what happened is the Paris police closed the street a few blocks up, massed a response force nearby out of sight, and waited to see what happened. Eventually the mob dissipated, and two street sweepers and a team of cleaners came through and cleaned the entire area up. The following morning it was if the event had never happened.