Missive #252

“In his explosive New York Times bestseller, top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA’s efforts to root out the world’s deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

I didn’t think this book was as good as his The Perfect Kill but it did confirm what I thought about the CIA. It no longer serves a useful purpose in providing security for the United States. This doubly true with the wide open border that the Biden administration has fostered.A veteran case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, Baer witnessed the rise of terrorism first hand and the CIA’s inadequate response to it, leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This riveting book is both an indictment of an agency that lost its way and an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism, and includes a new afterword in which Baer speaks out about the American war on terrorism and its profound implications throughout the Middle East.

“Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field
officer in the Middle East.”
–Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker

From The Preface
This book is a memoir of one foot soldier’s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks. It’s a story about places most Americans will never travel to, about people many Americans would prefer to think we don’t need to do business with.

This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again. But I hope this book will accomplish one more purpose as well: I hope it will show why I am angry about what happened to the CIA. And I want to show why every American and everyone who cares about the preservation of this country should be angry and alarmed, too.

The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see.” — Book promo @ goodreads.com

I have been doing other ‘stuff’ and have been ignoring the second slideshow that I was working on. Then the past couple of weeks I have been getting updates to WordPress, Astra and all the other plugins that I have. Among those is my Media Library and the Slideshow. Therefore I was expecting changes and sure enough there were some that caused me some headaches on Thursday when I went back to work on that project. It was easier yesterday and should be for the rest of the project, now that I know what I’m doing once again. Unless the plugins are ‘improved’.

I also started to do the month end housecleaning chores yesterday but didn’t get much past the bathroom. I have had a leaking toilet bowel seal for the past month so ordered a new seal which arrived last week. The replacement should have taken five minutes but I managed to stretch that out to over three hours before finally finding out how to insert the new seal. It is a very simply job when you know what you are doing; which I didn’t. I’ll finish the house cleaning and the slideshow today —— maybe.