MoDo celebrates Easter as always: a turn at stylish whining.
"Good Riddance, Carrie Mathison"
This "Carrie Mathison" is the lead character, played by Claire Danes, in the "Homeland" television series. Here's the core sentiment, dressed up as a logical argument:
“The problem is that [corporate media] portray most women in such a one-dimensional way; whatever the character flaw is, that’s all they are,” said Gina Bennett, a slender, thoughtful mother of five who has been an analyst in the Counterterrorism Center [at C.I.A.] over the course of 25 years and who first began sounding the alarm about Osama bin Laden back in 1993.
“It can leave a very distinct understanding of women at the agency — how we function, how we relate to men, how we engage in national security — that is pretty off,” Bennett said. She was sitting in a conference room at Langley decorated with photos of a memorial for the seven C.I.A. officers — including Bennett’s close friend Jennifer Matthews — who were blown up in 2009 by a Jordanian double agent [at Camp Chapman] in Khost, Afghanistan.
Agreed Sandra Grimes, a perky 69-year-old blonde who helped unmask her C.I.A. colleague Aldrich Ames as a double agent for the Russians after noticing that he had traded up from a battered Volvo to a Jaguar: “I wish they wouldn’t use centerfold models in tight clothes. We don’t look that way. And we don’t act that way.”
One can take exception to characterizing Claire Danes as a "centerfold model." What? She's supposed to be a dumbass with big tits?
Claire's gracefully flat chested and absolutely lovely. IB from Lycée Français de Los Angeles, two years at Yale drama. A film "Juliet" for the ages and IQ=140.
Which altogether put her at the center ring of my notion of a female intelligence stratosphere. For more of the same try Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.
The big point: Dowd interviews C.I.A. women, writes up a recent history. But what's important is complaining about sexy spies on the t.v.
MoDo glorifies the C.I.A.'s Jennifer Mathews -- dead at Camp Chapman in Khost -- but she carefully avoids addressing what that C.I.A. crew had been doing through the years.
MoDo gives a clear miss to what happened back then. That the hunt for bin Laden was stymied for years as they got lost doing torture.
That C.I.A. crew are seen today, officially, as American heroes. After all, the 7 of them were killed by an al-Qaeda suicide bomber. Their C.I.A. bosses in Pakistan are never mentioned.
Heroes, yes to the trumpets; but of torture? Letting torture screw up finding bin Laden? Not a word.
Still, a somewhat different opinion exists. If does rely on facts. Timeline.
That will be presented below the fold, if you are interested. Also a skosh more about Claire & Friends....
The full story about tracking bin Laden came out when C.I.A. helped put together "Zero Dark Thirty."
They talked to Mark Boal and told this nice man everything important. For whatever reason, the C.I.A. people did not coordinate their responses to Boal's questions. He got to see several of the surviving pro-torture people. He also got to see the later no-torture, law enforcement oriented people. And he sorted it out.
Boal's screenplay is history. Yes, it is about history. As it stands, equally, it is history.
The screenplay is where the truth about hunting bin Laden came together. The core of the pro-torture crew had been killed at Camp Chapman. Their managers were gone, sent home. No one in the no-torture team put together a history of what had happened in the 8 years prior to their own arrival in Pakistan.
No one at C.I.A. seems to have connected the dots -- certainly no one had said anything about it.
The Moroccan Banker's Boxes
What Mark Boal came to understand and C.I.A. was more than happy to tell him was that finding Osama/Usama bin Laden came down to one discovery: the family identity of bin Laden's personal courier whose nom de guerre was "Abu Ahmed."
Unfortunately from the afternoon of September 11, 2001 through 2009 the hunt for bin Laden was dominated by the C.I.A.'s pro-torture faction. This was the group that created the Hell hole at Guantanamo. They kidnapped/renditioned thousands of individuals and had them tortured in Egypt, Poland, Syria, Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, and Thailand that we know of.
No significant progress was made finding the family names, the true identities of individuals with direct connections to bin Laden. They all used aliases. The aliases were all that anyone knew, once they disappeared into al-Qaeda.
The pro-torture crew dealt with current events. With al-Qaeda operations. So all they got were the aliases. They had no history on identities and apparently no interest in developing a database or even a filing system.
History existed, of course. A fair amount of it was written down.
In the months after the 9/11 attacks our allies provided copies of their intelligence reports related to al-Qaeda. These documents reached back to the early 1990s and the pages went to banker's boxes. The boxes were sent the pro-torture crew.
Their operation was centered in Pakistan, mainly useful for being outside the United States. The banker's boxes -- all of the source documents -- went off to file rooms in Pakistan.
The pro-torture team operated with procedures that essentially ignored these documents. They went on year after year discounting the value of these item-level histories.
Keep in mind that getting the crew out to Pakistan cut off leaks to American press. Bully for that. It also cut them off from technology, 100% of it.
At no point did the pro-torture crew follow standard procedure and have the contents of these banker's boxes transcribed to computer files, or even translated to English. They had no idea what a linguistic search system provides. (E.g.: Oracle Text with multiple language tools.)
These were not law enforcement people. They had no idea what a COPLINK system can provide. They had no interface to Interpol and the associated databases. Their contacts to F.B.I. were mostly limited to scheduled meetings across tables, not the stuff of day-to-day interaction. We know now from the Senate torture report that F.B.I. and C.I.A. managements never did a technology and asset review.
The banker's boxes might as well have been lost.
If Obama hadn't shut down torture in 2009 and the crew in Pakistan had not lost 7 members at Camp Chapman, the procedures of the pro-torture crew could have gone on unchanged for another decade. C.I.A. could have left the banker's boxes off in storage, unread, unresearched, out of operational use. And bin Laden would still be sitting in his villa at Abbottabad, today, pampered by wives and servants.
The Moroccan banker's boxes detailed the whole of the family history of this "Abu Ahmed." His connection to bin Laden was identified. He had a brother who had been killed in Afghanistan. Moroccan authorities knew their Islamist radicals.
After losing 7 at the Camp Chapman disaster, team management in Pakistan was replaced. A no-torture system came in. The new managers set about getting standard procedure implemented. They put research and analysis on the banker's boxes #1.
Recovering the family identity for "Abu Ahmed" fell out within weeks. Reading old police reports is kinda dull but that was the job that got results, not torturing people.
"Zero Dark Thirty" presents the track down in some detail. Once the courier's phone was traced, surveillance was initiated. And bin Laden sat right there. Biggest house on the block, right down the lane.
If Obama hadn't shut down torture in 2009, CIA might never have reopened that Moroccan gold mine. OBL could still be directing Al Qaeda to attack American targets. Do imagine Big Boy taking over for al-Baghdadi as a caliph for ISIS.
Seal Team 6 would not have returned on May 2, 2011, with a ton of hard drives, papers, notes, and rolodex from bin Laden's office.
Until Megan Ellison used her Annapurna Pictures operation to bring us ZDT we had no unclassified verification that Cheney's Folly -- authorizing torture -- had sabotaged the hunt for UBL. Now, it is there for everyone to see.
Now, the Morocco analyst in 2010 is depicted in the ZDT CIA-approved story telling as she walks up with her discovery -- not messaging 2002 or 2003 computer image files -- having to hand carry the original Moroccan documents to show what she has found. We all get to see how the Moroccan intel was handled.
In a competent operation that connection would have popped out immediately. One SQL query to an Oracle database with a CONTAINS clause would have returned the courier's identity and his family relationships. In readable pseudo-code:
SELECT
--document-tracking-system-key
--fact-table-identifiers
FROM
--hunt-for-UBL-text-warehouse
WHERE CONTAINS
(text,Abu-Ahmed-in-Arabic,1) >0 -- أبو أحمد
ORDER BY
--score
Maureen Dowd has no idea how bin Laden was found. She attacks a Claire Daines character with no idea what's going on there. It is possible that she doesn't know what Claire looks like. Computer technology ??? Fergeddaboudit.
That's why we need blogs. Online resources that connect dots, construct realistic histories. Stick to facts.
Really. Want to know what is happening? DKOS goes somewhere in the research stack.
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Note: There's a common misunderstanding of what happened with "My So-Called Life" and the ABC network. Daines's first show was a hit with a youth demographic but then ABC delayed renewal. By the time ABC got around to it, Danes's agent had landed her "Romeo + Juliet" opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and parts in other movies: "To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday," "I Love You, I Love You Not," "Home for the Holidays," and "How to Make an American Quilt."
Hollywood lined up ASAP to make Daines a star. Timing is everything.
While we're visiting "My So-Called Life": Jared Leto (Oscar, 2013) did pretty good. And the writer from the series, Winnie Holzman, you know from doing "Wicked."
ABC had them all in a sit-com hit at pennies-on-the-dollar and blew it.
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