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heh, like I said - the military doesn't want them afterwards. Bill Hicks had a bit about the military's esprit de corps, and how nonsensical it seemed to him -

heh, like I said - the military doesn't want them afterwards. Bill Hicks had a bit about the military's esprit de corps, and how nonsensical it seemed to him - an organization tasked with killing people and breaking things so fixated on old fashioned ideas like honor and a sense of duty. Well the US military has a very long institutional memory and rarely does anything without good reason: the morality conditioning is a very effective, functionally useful, program. They can drop 150 18-year-olds into a distant village for months with little to no supervision and it doesn't devolve into a 24/7 machete-rapefest. Look at what happened in East Germany when an army with no such program rolled in... industrial scale inhumanity. Same thing frequently pops up in Africa when one tribe temporarily becomes king of the hill. Anyway, the "clandestine services" are morally bankrupt and the DoD is aware of how dangerous a game it is to play with people they've invested a lot of time on. This is obviously just a guess... assuming this took place on US soil: it sounds to me like that dude worked for somebody doing something "extra-legal" and it wasn't the USG. Israeli is a pretty big fan of honeytraps and blackmailing intelligence assets. So that is where I'd put my money. Also: the civilian side of the US intel industry puts almost zero effort into OPSEC. Just search LinkedIn for prior military who list "remote sensing" or whatever the current euphemism is for NSA stingray tender, you'll get a results page full of laughably low effort cutouts.

wahern 5y ago
> assuming this took place on US soil IIRC, Europe was mentioned. That doesn't necessarily exclude other countries, including the U.S., but this organization had relationships with and members retired from high-ranking government offices, including CIA directors, defense secretaries, Pentagon leadership, etc. IOW, not the kind of place that would consort (at least knowingly and in the office) with people who directly participated in intelligence operations against the U.S. At least until the Trump Administration current and former officials were still rather hostile to the threat of intelligence operations against them.

wahern 5y ago

> assuming this took place on US soil IIRC, Europe was mentioned. That doesn't necessarily exclude other countries, including the U.S., but this organization had relationships with and members retired from high-ranking government offices, including CIA directors, defense secretaries, Pentagon leadership, etc. IOW, not the kind of place that would consort (at least knowingly and in the office) with people who directly participated in intelligence operations against the U.S. At least until the Trump Administration current and former officials were still rather hostile to the threat of intelligence operations against them.