41

In the USA.

42

Doing what? Stop resisting.

43

Nah. The biggest problem was, how many Arabic speakers was the Defense Language Institute or what have you turning out before 9/11, let alone Pashto, Dari or Urdu?

44

Poor Communication

Rank and File Culture

New Horizons

A caveman could pull one over on an Awkward Squad.

1 Like
45

Dari will take you the farthest throughout the Persian region.

1 Like
46

Wow, you read the article and this is your answer. ^^^ That is wrong.

47

Sorry…I’ll just show my self out.

2 Likes
48

Such wasted opportunity to learn something real world for a change. smh lol

1 Like
49

You’re so far out of your lane you’re standing in oncoming traffic.

50

I think @TommyLucchese is about to become a teacher. lol

51

The article is full of serious misconceptions about how Al Qaeda worked. Like one of the biggest problems is that your traditional Moslem terrorist groups were almost to a man laughably incompetent. The first WTC bombing, the guy got caught because he tried to get his deposit back on the U-Haul he blew up.

The people who had figured that Al Qaeda represented something different, sort of a media brand that co-opted local Moslem resentments into a transnational movement, were running around with their hair on fire.

What if I told you that Osama bin Laden never planned an operation in his entire life or even had operational control of AQ? Or that the man that conceived of, planned and executed 9/11 wasn’t even a member of Al Qaeda, but just s guy who delivered a great sales pitch to UBL and was rewarded with a blessing, money and someone expendable goons and that’s it? All without the knowledge of Ayman al Zawahiri, the operational commander of AQ Central, or the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar?

2 Likes
52

This should be good. Popcorn? :popcorn:

1 Like
53

The article is full of crap.

1 Like
54

It was called Thin Thread

https://www.salon.com/2016/05/12/the_nsas_stunning_911_failure_how_big_money_contractors_made_us_more_vulnerable_to_attack/

On September 12, 2001, Bill Binney snuck back into work at the NSA dressed like cleaning staff so he could try to help understand who had attacked the United States. A top NSA mathematician, Binney had rolled out a sophisticated metadata analysis system called ThinThread, only to have it canceled less than a month before 9/11. Top executives at the agency had decided a clunky program called Trailblazer, contracted out to the intelligence contractor giant SAIC, would be NSA’s future, not the cheaper, more effective and privacy-protective ThinThread.

1 Like
55

I am familiar with SAIC.

56

Rank and File Culture.

57

It was horrible…fBI in Minnesota that investigated the flight school out there, didn’t communicate with other FBI offices. So other offices didn’t put the picture together until afterward. That walk of separation was the main cause of said failure. This again according to an actual FBI agent that gave me the straight story at a family dinner about a year later. I could not agree with you more!

58

How do you mean?

59

UBL was never ever near as popular in Afghanistan as people in America would be led to believe. The vast majority of them couldn’t give a ■■■■ less about him.

He was just another Arab elite making his money go farther in a semi-lawless, indigent region fill with desperate peasants. Most village elders smell that kind of dirtbag from a mile away. They don’t trust the Taliban, AQx, the Tajiks, Kuchi, or us.

If they had their own means of weaponry, there wouldn’t be a “taliban” left in the nation. We won’t supply them because they’d turn those weapons on us just as fast. None of us are welcome there, they’re just outgunned.

1 Like
60

If friends weren’t involved, the better, cheaper system would have prevailed. This falls under my points of the Rank and File Culture aspect of the CIA’s Intel Community’s past failures.