The Morons Protecting Us
From a piece by Lisa Myers, Jim Popkin, and the NBC News Investigative Unit, a transcript from the court case brought by Bassem Youssef, the FBI's highest-ranking Arab-American agent, who alleges he's been blocked from advancement in the Bureau:
He's fluent in Arabic, ran the FBI's offices in Saudi Arabia and is a terrorism expert. In fact, Youssef's undercover work helping to infiltrate the terror organization of the so-called "blind sheik," Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, earned him the intelligence community's most-prestigious award, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal.But now, for the first time, Youssef is speaking out against the agency he loves.
"I don't believe that the FBI's doing everything it can to combat terrorism," the 18-year FBI veteran tells NBC News.
He's not kidding. Check out what these highly-placed nimrods have to say for themselves:
Dale Watson, now retired, was the FBI's top counterterrorism official before and after 9/11.In a deposition taken on Dec. 8, 2004, Youssef’s lawyer Stephen Kohn asked Watson: “Do you know who Osama bin Laden's spiritual leader was?"
Watson: Can't recall.
Lawyer: And do you know the differences in the religion between Shiite and Sunni Muslims?
Watson: Not technically, no.
John Lewis was until recently the FBI’s deputy assistant director of counterterrorism. During his deposition on May 17, 2005, he was asked if he knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis.
Lewis: You know, generally. Not very well.
Lawyer: Was there any relationship between the first World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks?
Lewis: I'm aware of no immediate relationship other than all emanates out of the Middle East, al-Qaida linkage, I believe. Not something I've studied recently that I'm conversant with.
Yeah? Well, I'm not "conversant" with professional hockey, either...which is why I don't earn a living doing radio and TV commentary on the games: "The man in the red shirt just used his...thingie to steal the whatchamacallit away from the man in the green shirt, but then another man in a green shirt stole it back and cracked the first guy on the head with his...thingie."
Too bad the terrorism thingie has a little more consequence. Well, then again, it is good to know that our government's focusing on what really matters -- abstinence only education programs that have been shown not to work.
And when Jack Hanna says that "wild animals are like a loaded gun - you never know when they're going to go off", he just reveals his gross ignorance of firearms, among the most reliable machines on Earth. Guns go off when someone pulls the trigger, and they shoot people when another person points them at one.
Sorry - it's just that jumping from FBI gaffe to abstinence education was a bit of a stretch.
But, you know what? I know that abstinence doesn't work.
It didn't work for Mary!
Radwaste at December 6, 2006 2:14 AM
I like your title, "The Morons Protecting Us".
Many government agencies seem to weed out the aggressive and motivated people, leaving those not "conversent" in how to go get things done without tem times more people and money than needed.
doombuggy at December 6, 2006 5:14 AM
The FBI's charter is domestic. They're not supposed to be worrying about problems in distant lands. For that matter, the CIA's not supposed to be doing operations, either.
Listern, the last thing we want to do is encourage these little weasels. The CIA, FBI and NSA are all bullshit agencies who've done nothing to earn our trust... Nothing. They're careerist assholes who follow the blowing wind. They know that you really liked those old Sean Connery movies, and they've figured out how to use that faith of yours to build their surburban Viginia lifestyles.
They're fuckups, and in a righteous America, they'd all be unemployed. All of them.
Crid at December 6, 2006 5:50 AM
So, Crid, what do you suggest for an investigative agency? CNN?
As I have seen when people cite popular news media on every topic from heart attacks to global warming to gay marriage, not one clue as to how things work comes through the boob tube or over the radio waves. I suggest that this is the same when the public talks about the FBI and CIA. You can see things go the other way when people talk about Ventura County and the Scott estate, Ruby Ridge and Waco; all of a sudden the cops are perfect heroes doing their sworn duty -- and still, nobody has got up off the couch.
Radwaste at December 6, 2006 2:44 PM
Regarding the FBI not worrying about problems in distant lands...it might be a good idea, these days, to learn Arabic to stop problems in our own land. I'd paste in a link, but I'm on the Internet equivalent of a hammer and chisel at the moment.
And by the way, anybody who can advise me on how to keep two web pages open on the counterintuitive horror that is a PC, please feel free to drop in a note below...and please put "PC Help" at the very very top of your post. As I was intimating, if there were an Internet hell, I would be in it at the moment.
Ever try deleting 6,000 plus pieces of spam on a really slow dialup connection? Try to avoid it!
Amy Alkon at December 6, 2006 3:12 PM
Oh yeah...and I mean two pages so I can jockey back and forth between them...copy and paste and post stuff with links.
I have had Macs since 1984. I sometimes forget exactly how easy they are until I get on a Gatesmobile.
Amy in technohell at December 6, 2006 3:15 PM
> suggest for an investigative
> agency? CNN?
Do you think we'd have been any less safe? What did those fuckers ever do for you, Raddy? Specific citations. Justify their budgets... Don't just talk about how it's a pleasant fantasy... What do you think they've *done* with your money? Why do you think so?
Foolish taxpayers presume that these agencies are doing something useful... They see no reason to demand metrics of performance. Just to ice the cake, they put up with unpublished budgets.
This is not government service, it's prayer! We're praying that secret men will secretly take our money and secretly spend it on good things. In the olden days, civilizations countermanded every particle of decency and rationality they'd ever held to sacrifice virgins to volcanos. Nowadays we follow the same inclination by mailing checks to Langley, Fort Meade and DC.
Crid at December 6, 2006 5:45 PM
Any, no offense but you do seem to have a few doofuses commenting. My daughter is an FBI agent and turned down an opportunity to learn Arabic. She had concluded that the FBI, like the Army, does not promote people who develop specialized skills. Administration is the path to promotion and we can see where that leads.
Mike K at December 6, 2006 8:30 PM
Crid, you are so right on. Its like the Wizard of Oz: we prop these guys up behind a curtain and assume they are doing a job.
doombuggy at December 6, 2006 8:36 PM
So how do you propose to find out whether an investigative agency is doing its job?
The US Navy, for instance, gathers information on every other nation directly. I, myself, have seen periscope pictures of the Russian coastline from far closer than diplomatic arrangements permit, and I have been within 200 feet of an actual russian submarine at sea - but I'll be damned if I'll say where, when and how. It's not fantasy that a revealed military capability means that tool is lost and your side loses when, not if, diplomats get their military in a shooting war. It is fantasy that the niceties of "justice" and "fair play" have a role on the battlefield.
I know the frustration of not having the successes of the FBI, CIA, etc., to point to to reassure me - even as I have seen agents capture an escaped felon - but do you really think they're doing nothing? Why?
It's an ego thing, to be insulted and outraged that you don't get told of everything an agency is required by law to suppress. That's just too bad.
Radwaste at December 7, 2006 3:12 AM
> So how do you propose to...
Nonresponsive. You answered a question with a question. I'm saying we're not getting any service from them *now*.
> The US Navy, for instance, gathers information
> on every other nation directly
So does the Bureau of Weights and Measures. I'm not against information, I'm against spooks. And black budgets. In any case, it was Rumseld who's been working to consolidate these efforts into the military. WIth Gates in his chair, those efforts will almost certainly be reversed. It's 1947 again in Washington.
> do you really think they're doing nothing?
Nothing at honest price. Nothing we can't do without. Nothing for which I wouldn't rather have the money spent elsewhere.
> It is fantasy that the niceties of "justice" and
> "fair play" have a role on the battlefield.
Preposterous. So Abu Ghraib was not a problem for you?
> the frustration of not having the successes
> of the FBI, CIA, etc., to point to
Raddy! *What successes?* How can a guy who deals with nuclear physics be so patient with unprovables and untestables?
It's not "too bad," Raddy. It's *insane.* It's immoral, and it's profoundly stupid. A situation this fucked up can only happen because it appeals to the worst of our nature.
Crid at December 7, 2006 4:23 AM
I think the Mormons do a good job of protecting us.
Riding bicycles on the highway, wearing white shirts and ties, knocking on strangers doors, and carrying Bibles isn't to smartest thing you could do in my neigborhood. Thanks, Mormons, for making yourselves the target of thugs instead of folks like me.
Roger at December 7, 2006 9:37 AM
Amy,
If you're still struggling with PC-Mac issues, here's a good hint: the control key on a Windows machine does most of the same thing as the Apple(aka command) key on an OS X machine. To create multiple browser windows, hit control and N at the same time. Other keys are similar (copy control-c, paste control-v, etc).
Regarding the thread topic - it does seem outrageous that we have people high up in our foreign policy, intelligence (or un-intelligence, as Crid might say) and law enforcement departments (whatever one may think of them) are not conversant with Islam and the larger conflicts of our times. I mean, really, what do these people do all day? And shouldn't we be training people to speak Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, etc. as fast as possible? If the quotations posted above are from the best and brightest in these departments, Crid may be completely right that the FBI, CIA, et al. need to be torn down and replaced with... what, I'm not sure.
justin case at December 7, 2006 11:12 AM
Crid, if you can't understand that we can't tell everybody what we're doing all the time, I have no hope for you. I'm pretty sure you don't have any idea what the CIA and FBI are doing by your language, and automatically, that's bad - to you, and to everybody else, but for a different reason: the pressure to be seen doing something leads to stupid situations.
Industrial espionage really exists. So does national espionage. So you're mad, probably, at the current Administration, just like someone just like you has been mad at all the previous ones. (If you want to be outraged, try Eisenhower. His Feds "disappeared" people from sites like SRS back when the "Cold War" was a big deal and the US Army was the obvious security force.) Business secrets, national secrets are both the product of competition - sometimes by madmen, sometimes not. Go ahead and publish your own private information on the Web. All of it. Bank accounts, work schedule, family pictures.
Since the world is a friendly and wonderful place, you should have no problems. After all, a whole nation has a lot more to lose than one guy, and they don't need to keep secrets. We need to tell everybody where our aircraft carriers and subs are all the time so we can show others how honest we are, right? And other nations would do the same. Right?
And no, Crid, honor has no place on the battlefield, because the first job is to kill so many of the enemy that they can't continue, and "fair" means they die, we don't. That's why we can't have what so many want in Iraq - we have installed heavily armed police limited by orders, which is why so many Iraqis are still alive.
Radwaste at December 7, 2006 4:40 PM
> if you can't understand that
> we can't tell everybody what
> we're doing all the time
Again, Raddy, the problem isn't information, it's people. Careerist people. Paid with black budgets.
> you're mad, probably, at the
> current Administration
All sane men are; but no one you know has defended it as aggressively against withering tides.
More to the point, you've got it ass-backwards; The spook agencies *hated* Dubya, always. They were against the invasion from the word go. Their own competence had been gravely (I think irrevocably) insulted by 9/11. Their glory days of Cold War (and concurrent Middle Eastern) subterfuge had long since ended without achivement in other venues. And Rumsfeld (with others) did his best to nail the coffin. Bush gave Tenet the Medal of Freedom anyway... If not to mock him, then perhaps just to mollify the minions.
I think Bush figured out that 9/11 was the product of the policies that were not merely constructed by his father's generation for an earlier time, but literally administered by his father. Bush 41 had been congressman, ambassador to the UN, and Director of Central Intelligence in the '70s. This is one of the great personal dramas of American politics. When Wolfowitz (or whomever) convinced Bush that our foreign policy could no longer be executed by having the CIA hire effective tyrants overseas, Dubya had the good sense to listen. For all his faults, that makes him a singularly admirable figure in the baby boom generation. No other nation in the world plays fair like that. And for a time, we were the only country with the balls to.
But of course Gates and Baker'll put a stop to that, won't they? Wikipedia offers this note about Gates: "In addition to questions about Iran-Contra affair, Senate members questioned the nomination [to DCI in '91] because Gates allegedly passed intelligence to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war."
Beautiful.
> honor has no place on
> the battlefield...
Dude, you're Frank Burns. You're Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, trying to sound tough and manly before feeling up Hot Lips in a tent: 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do... It's a cold world out there, honey.'
Crid at December 7, 2006 5:49 PM
Is Buzzflash out to lunch with reports that the majority of Iraqis and Americans both think that U.S. troops in Iraq are a bad idea ? Are 16 American intelligence agencies likewise wrong ?
Whatever else may be said about Iraq, one thing does not seem plausible : take troops trained in assault and use them as police in a place where they do not speak the language and are constrained from using individual initiative by the nature of their enforced obedience to overbearing authority.
In the wake of revelations that no planning was done for occupying Iraq, insisting that it must continue is to deny simple analysis : there is no demonstrated reason to believe they can or will impose self reliance. Ahhhh. Wabbit.
opit at December 8, 2006 8:22 AM
Tags on a PC Sorry, forgot. Firefox, Seamonkey ( both are Mozilla apps ) and Opera all allow you to keep open more than one window open at one go. So does IE 7 but it's been crashing more than I like.
opit at December 8, 2006 8:50 AM
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