As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi has noted: intelligence community have failed to adapt their intelligence-collection practices and operations to meet the challenges of the “new world disorder” in which we live. It boils down to the fact that the FBI and the U.S. This is a problem the agency must address if it is ever going to be successful in finding and neutralizing terrorist cells overseas. Compromising encryption technology will do nothing to solve the intelligence community’s human-intelligence deficit. The CIA’s failure to field agents under nonofficial cover, or to recruit enough reliable local informants on the ground who could communicate securely with CIA handlers outside Yemen, is symptomatic of the agency’s failure to break with its reliance on embassy-based operations throughout that part of the world. Among those removed were senior officers who worked closely with Yemen’s intelligence and security services to target al-Qaeda operatives and disrupt terrorism plots often aimed at the United States. The spy agency has pulled dozens of operatives, analysts and other staffers from Yemen as part of a broader extraction of roughly 200 Americans who had been based at the embassy in Sana, officials said. This problem is true for Yemen as well, as a recent Washington Post story highlighted: intelligence community’s emphasis should be on the spy on the ground who actually gathers critical information and makes any penetration of a terrorist organization possible. Notice his reference to technology “databases” rather than the importance of the human element. “The concern is in Syria,” he explained, “the lack of our footprint on the ground in Syria - that the databases won’t have the information we need.” Steinbach testified about this before the House Homeland Security Committee earlier this month. government intelligence personnel operate - is increasingly difficult in the areas of the Middle East and southwest Asia undergoing often violent political change. embassies as bases from which CIA and other U.S. Overseas, the Cold War style of spying - relying on U.S. The Justice Department’s refusal to investigate the New York Police Department’s mass surveillance and questionable informant-recruitment tactics among immigrants in the Arab- and Muslim-American communities has only made matters worse. The FBI, for example, targets the very Arab-American and Muslim-American communities it needs to work with if it hopes to find and neutralize home-grown violent extremists, including promulgating new rules on profiling that allow for the potential mapping of Arab- or Muslim-American communities. government’s counterterrorism policies have made that next to impossible.
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