
Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop - ivank
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home
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chatmasta
> “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?

~~~
tempodox
It's just the BS you sell when your cronies first get rich by supplying the
military and then get rich again by supplying the rebuild. The destruction and
lives lost are externalized costs of doing business. And terrorism is big
business for those guys.

~~~
eeks
From the horse’s mouth: [https://youtu.be/omnskeu-
puE](https://youtu.be/omnskeu-puE)

------
hprotagonist
_Skinner 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
Agreed. 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
Well, 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
I 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.

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Voyage_wanderer
I 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
Just 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.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Agreed, and anecdotally, I had a college roommate obsessed with wanting to
become a CIA operative.

I had to call the police on him after he stole my TV when moving out.

~~~
ekianjo
did he make it to the CIA?

~~~
MisterTea
If by CIA you mean Criminal Internment Area, I'd wager yes.

------
cpr
As 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
Im 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
IQ 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?

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jedmeyers
“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
I 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.

~~~
jedmeyers
“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
Yes 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.

