Damn it!

[laughingimp]

Cheney said that if there had been secret wiretapping of suspected terrorists before Sept. 11, 2001, it "might have been able to pick up on two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon."

From the Chicago Tribune article "Bush, VP in 2-front attack on war critics," link here, registration required.

Damn it, the evidence was already there.

Comments

[cathouse_blues]

Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to recruit interpreters (and it's interpreters we need, not translators)? There's a reason the military puts such a huge recruitment bounty on those who manage to pass the DLAB with high enough scores to qual for Grade 4 languages. And much as we would like to recruit native or first gen speakers, proper vetting is damn difficult. Trust me; it would be nice to set up a desk in the middle of Dearborn and put up a sign, but that's just not feasible.

I can't tell you what's going on with military analysts because I was HumInt, not SigInt, so analysis was none of my fargin' business. As for agents on the ground, the Company has indeed been caught with its pants down. To be fair, though, the Middle East is notoriusly difficult to penetrate, and I suspect we'd have to send in natives or first gens to pull it off - and you're back to the vetting problem.

[laughingimp]

Oh, I completely understand how difficult this is. My point is, doubling the work load of the translators we do have is going to make America's ability to process intel worse, not better.

[cathouse_blues]

Not to be picky, but we need far more interpreters than we need translators.