[quote]The CIA’s Baghdad station has become the largest in agency history, eclipsing the size of its post in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, a U.S. official said. But sources said the agency has struggled to fill a number of key overseas posts.
Many of those who do take sensitive overseas assignments are willing to serve only 30- to 90-day rotations, a revolving-door approach that has undercut the agency’s ability to cultivate ties to warlords in Afghanistan or collect intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency, sources said.
There is such a shortage of Arabic speakers and qualified case officers willing to take dangerous assignments that the agency has been forced to hire dozens – if not hundreds – of CIA retirees, and to lean heavily on translators, sources said. The agency has also had to use soldiers for tasks that CIA officers normally perform, sources said.
Even without the personnel challenges, Iraq and Afghanistan are seen as so dangerous that it is difficult for agency officers to venture outside guarded districts and compounds without security details, making covert meetings with informants extremely difficult, sources said.[/quote]
The latest terror attack appears to have been committed by a terrorist who had been released early on terror charges at a conference on rehabilitation of young criminals. He’d been invited there presumably as an example of successful rehabilitation.
These guys want to die and become martyrs, after killing as many people as possible. Being liberal and tolerant with them is madness. You might as well try to negotiate with a kamakaze pilot.
I agree with you. Most of the time they don’t change back once they’re radicalized (there are notable exceptions though). The issue is how do you legally hold them indefinitely once their sentence is up? You could make the sentences longer, but it’s hard to justify a life sentence for an aspirational plot that was never carried out. It’s a bit of a rubix cube.
At the original sentence he was given an indefinite term. That was changed to a fixed term of 16 years on appeal. Then, for some reason, he was let out on license after just 8 years. He obviously managed to fool the board that he was reformed.
Interestingly, the Parole Board are claiming they played no role in his early release. According to them he had to be released half way through his 16 year sentence under British law.
What is the point of a 16 year sentence, if you only have to serve 8? Shave a year or two off a sentence for good behavior if you must, but halving it, especially for a terrorist, is just insane.
It’s bizarre. He was considered a high-enough risk at his original trial for the judge to order him to be detained indefinitely. And he ends up getting released after 8.
He presumably fooled Cambridge University criminology department as they invited him to their Learning Together conference on youth rehabilitation. To which he brought a fake suicide vest (to ensure he got shot) and a big knife.
I’ve known a lot of idiots who have gotten PhDs through sheer perseverance rather than intellect. I bet Cambridge is full of them. I’m sure they desperately wanted to believe the narrative of the reformed radical in order to fit their pre-existing social agenda and ignored all the obvious evidence that pointed to the contrary.
Perseverance goes a long way and sometimes rewards when it shouldn’t; especially in fields that require high intelligence. I don’t want a doctor who persevered to get his medical degree with his scalpel inside my intestine I’d prefer one who was just really gifted.
I hope this is a wake up call. Islam is a problem right now. People need to get the courage to discuss the problems of Islam. No ones first thought was “is it an Orthodox Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, atheist, Taoist, etc”
Always a problem around Easter and Christmas time.
It’s no longer a unreasonable phobia of Islam when it’s happening so much around the world. It’s very reasonable for the people there that day.
The El Paso shooting which killed 11 times more people was done by a white man who opposed Latino migration into the U.S. The Christchurch killing count was 51, with the same motive of opposing immigration by brown people… Andrew Brevik killed 77 people in Norway, also to protest immigration. After we throw the right-wing racist nuts in jail, we can worry about the Islamists…who of course should also be locked up. Priorities.
And Islamic radicals killed almost 3,000 on 9/11 and almost 150 people in Paris in 2015.
I don’t see why we have to wait to do one, before we can do the other. Also, I hate to say it, but religious ideology is harder to shake than political ideology (I think it’s because the faith in what they’re doing is right runs deeper since it’s tied to their belief in God, and there’s all those promised rewards in the afterlife).
