Where is Osama bin Laden?
01.30.2008 - 10:25 AMThe United States is at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against the dispersed cells of al Qaeda and Islamist affiliates around the world. Is the CIA also at war, or is it business as usual at the agency?
The CIA proudly announced last week that it has opened a new office building designed according to state-of-the-art “green” principles. Fifty percent of the building has been constructed from “waste diversion from landfill.” Among other achievements, the new campus features such high-tech wonders as “bike racks” and 22,000 square feet of “vegetated roof.”
The interior has facilities worthy of a James Bond movie, including not only “low-flow” toilets but also “waterless urinals.” For the first time, CIA agents will also be cleared to use “individual lighting controls” in their cubicles; formerly, in the tightly run agency, the light switches were under the control of top spymasters.
The new CIA facility “is an ecologically sensitive building – reducing our impact on the global environment while improving the quality of the workspace for the individual,” crows a ranking CIA official.
Congratulations are due the CIA for investing its time, effort, and materials “in creating a comfortable workplace that fosters efficiency and collaboration while respecting our natural resources.”
But Connecting the Dots has only one question for the CIA as it celebrates its new “ecologically sensitive” and “comfortable workplace”: Where is Osama bin Laden?
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January 30th, 2008 at 11:40 AM
Perhaps somewhere in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region enjoying the comforts of an “ecologically sensitive” cave where he no doubt also has “waterless urinals.”
January 30th, 2008 at 12:26 PM
Is this a piece from Onion.com? I sometimes can’t believe what I’m reading. The people employed by the CIA are the typical pseudoeducated individuals who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and our elite educational institutions. They are the ambitious ones who put their wet finger into the air to see which way the wind blows. These folks must be treated as idiots until proven otherwise.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:28 PM
Using what we might call a form of tomographic analysis, let us consider this: the constituency that CIA is trying to impress with this approach to intelligence is permitting CIA to pass waterless urinals off AS an approach to intelligence.
That constituency, we may be sure, is not the president (by law, CIA’s primary customer and raison d’etre). It is abundantly plain that CIA has not oriented itself on the president’s priorities for some time now.
We are well-advised to think about who the constituency is. We can also say this: for intelligence to get away with functioning as a giant, politicized irrelevancy, the consequences of this unsound orientation must be minimal, or at least postponed. Intelligence is nothing — worse than nothing; it’s an evil — when it consists merely of stroking the political preconceptions of its de facto customers. When this codependent relationship produces disaster, it’s intelligence that will take the fall.
It’s to be hoped that the leadership at CIA really does prize waterless urinals, because the time is coming when that is all the comfort they will have.
January 30th, 2008 at 6:56 PM
However and under whatever circumstance the CIA’s urine is collected, it eventually finds a way to fall on our heads out here in flyover country.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:19 PM
The ‘cryptic somewhere on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, is extremely vague; that’s kind of like saying some where between San Diego and El Paso, TX. Is it in Waziristan, along with
Beitullah Mehsud, in Bannu province, as Sebastian Junger’s recent VF story on Afghanistan suggests, Bajaur where some mid level AQ operatives were clipped two years ago. The proper parallel seems to be those N. Carolina mountains where Eric Rudolph was hiding out
for half a decade.
January 31st, 2008 at 7:42 PM
What a deeply depressing story! Add to that the daily press releases full of post-modernist buzzwords, and it paints a very disturbing picture about our intelligence agencies. While I’m sure there are numerous outstanding public servants at the CIA, the never-ending turf battles, along with the inherent culture of government bureaucracy, make outstanding results nearly impossible. Check out Col. Austin Bay’s timely article, “A Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs.” Such a “revolution” is desperately needed for our intelligence agencies. Here’s the link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/a_revolution_in_diplomatic_aff.html