Results tagged “Barrack Obama” from SpyTalk

Mumbai Latest Proof that Terror World Has Changed Much Since 9/11

By Jeff Stein | November 30, 2008 1:34 PM | | Comments (1)

If nothing else,  Mumbai closes the chapter on the circa-9/11 terror era, at least for Americans.

The period following Sept. 11, 2001 airline hijackings, in fact, looks like the good ol' days, in light of how al Qaeda has metastacized into the hydra-headed terrorism monster we face today.

Back then, with the remains of the Twin Towers still smoldering, the thinking was that all we had to do was roll up our sleeves  to make fast work of  Osama bin Laden and his gang of cave dwellers. But the fugitive Saudi millionaire's escape into the snows of the Hindu Kush, with the help of the Pakistani army, showed that we were playing in a far more complicated game.

Mumbai puts an exclamation point on it.

Until Mumbai, when it emerged that the terrorists were singling out U.S., along with British and Israeli citizens, most Americans were probably only dimly aware that the beta version of al Qaeda had long been eclipsed by an even more lethal 2.0.

Today, al Qaeda affiliates and wannabees are roiling a crescent-shaped swath of the world ranging from the Philippines across the Indian subcontinent through the Middle East to the westernmost tip of North Africa.  Its émigrés have launched attacks from or in Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. 

But the terror hasn't really touched Americans in demonstrative numbers. Whether by good fortune or the skills of our counterterrorism warriors, or both, we have escaped the Muslim fundamentalist plague infesting the rest of the world.

Mumbai should make clear that our luck may be running out. Luxury hotels where Americans stay cannot be protected in any meaningful sense.

And another thing: That CIA renditions,  Predator missile strikes in Pakistan and more U.S. troops in Afghanistan may not only not solve the problem, they may aggravate it. 

Guns are so 2001-2002.

And back then we had the world's goodwill from the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

The Bush administration squandered it Iraq, immeasurably making the challenge more difficult. 

We can never get that back. 

The election of  a very smart black man with Hussein in his name as President of the United States amounts, at this late point,  to only a slim chance at a fresh start. 

Tags: al Qaeda, Barrack Obama, Bush, counterterrorism, Mumbai, terrorism

Who Will Run CIA?

By Jeff Stein | November 6, 2008 3:48 PM | | Comments (1)

With snow already falling in Afghanistan, Barack Obama's not likely to wait long to pick America's next top spy.

For my two cents, it's as hard to imagine the president-elect keeping Mike Hayden at the CIA as it is him picking Anthony Lake for the job, no matter how much we're hearing about Obama naming Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar to top national security posts.

Notwithstanding Hayden's restoration of calm professionalism at the agency after years of turmoil, he was a loyal soldier in the Bush administration's secret warrantless wiretapping program, as director of the NSA before moving to the CIA. 

That will never sit well with most Democrats, at least some of whom will think of Hayden, fairly or not, as a potential fifth columnist. 

Obama will want somebody he knows and trusts running herd on the agency's spies 
and analysts.

Tags: Barrack Obama, Chuck Hagel; Richard Lugar; Nancy Peosi, CIA, John Brennan; Anthony Lake; PFIAB, Michael Hayden, Silvestre Reyes, Tim Roemer

Continue reading Who Will Run CIA?.

Georgetown's Old Spies Shuffle to the Polls

By Jeff Stein | November 4, 2008 3:31 PM | | Comments (2)

The eyes are less steely, and the once strong chins now sag with flesh.  I recognized the faces of some of these old spies as they gathered to vote at Christ Church in Georgetown this morning.  

I did not know their names, but I'd seen a few at a gathering honoring the late uber-spy of the cold war, the late former CIA Director Richard M. Helms, at a Georgetown University gathering last year.

They are on their last legs, these men and women, who parachuted into occupied France, liberated Europe, and stayed on to help win the Cold War. 

Even with their walking canes and feeble hands, and without a lapel flag pin among them, they still look like a tough enough bunch.

Indeed  they, along with their past contemporaries from the State Department, make up a considerable, if fading, segment of the "Georgetown cocktail set" that Republican presidential candidates going back to Richard M. Nixon love to bash.

Ironically, Sen. John McCain drank again from that bitter well, even as he called for refashioning the CIA into something resembling the OSS, the World War Two spying and sabotage outfit that some of these very same Georgetowners served so well and honorably.

To be sure, there remains a recalcitrant bunch among some of the old hands. 

Last week some CIA old boys I know were circulating vitriolic, even racist comments and articles about Barrack Hussein Obama, one of which obsessed on the bloodlines of the likely next president of the United States.

"He has no real identity.  He is half-white, which he rejects," it said.

"The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya.  Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.

"What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is 'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships.  He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave.  Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners.  Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.

"Let that sink in:  Obambi is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners.  Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah."

Another that made the rounds, from the mad-dog Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, likened the huge, multiracial crowds that turned out for Obama to the "Arab street."

"We associate them with the temper of Third World societies," wrote Fouad Ajami, the frequent TV pundit and professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. 

"We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right."

Much e-mailed chortling greeted that from among these former intelligence professionals, some of whom keep a hand in training the current generation of spies.

One dissenting voice finally piped up, from a retired CIA station chief  who had served the spy agency for 24 years, in such cold war cockpits as Prague, Berlin, Beirut, and Tehran. He also served in high CIA managerial posts. I'm not identifying him because it's a private list.

"I do see a yearning among thoughtful people in this nation for something other than the same old crap we always get from the Republicans and the Democrats alike," he wrote, "and I see Obama as the sort of person who might attract that yearning.  

"Much as I admire Fouad Ajami, he, too, should stick to foreign affairs - in the Middle East!!  What he doesn't understand is that there is absolutely no parallel between an American crowd and the 'Arab street.'  They differ in literally every conceivable respect except numbers! The only thing [equivalent] we have here in America is a large pool of devout racists, some of whom, under sufficient, intemperate incitement, might decide to take this matter into their own hands."

And that's something the CIA's old boys know something about. 

As they shuffled toward the polling lines outside Christ Church in Georgetown Tuesday morning, I thought I could see it in their eyes. 

Tags: Barrack Obama, CIA, cold war, elections, John McCain, OSS, racists, voting