Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop | Hacker News Reader

Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop

newyorker.com

157 pointsivank62 comments

> “We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

This quote really exemplifies the failures of “nation building” from 2000-2010. It was always a hopeless quest with misguided and unmeasurable goals.

How much money was wasted, how many lives lost, in a hopelessly misguided pursuit to “stabilize” a country the US destabilized in the first place?

Even more so when you consider those borders were invented in the last century.

Heck of a lot of Europe's borders were invented in the last century as well.

https://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/1900/index.html

Europe had its share of violence too, perhaps that's one reason why?

I believe the poster was referring to England and France being party to a secret agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire after World War I, despite overtly backing Arab revolt with promises of independence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement for those interested.

That was what I was referring to indeed. Our borders in Europe have also been drawn up "artificially" (borders as a concept did not exist until relatively recently anyway), but there's quite a difference between two foreign countries imposing themselves and europeeans conflicts settling their own borders.

It's just the BS you sell when your cronies first get rich by supplying the military and then get rich again by supplying the rebuild. The destruction and lives lost are externalized costs of doing business. And terrorism is big business for those guys.

From the horse’s mouth: https://youtu.be/omnskeu-puE

You probably meant "From 2000 BC to 2010".

But today's the year 2018, so why drop the 8?

Skinner always drives with the windows down: he tries to maximize the number of encounters people have with the police in which they feel neither scrutinized nor under suspicion. “You sometimes hear cops talk about people in the community as ‘civilians,’ but that’s bullshit,” he said. “We’re not the military. The people we’re policing are our neighbors. This is not semantics—if you say it enough, it becomes a mind-set.”

ain't that the truth.

Every time I see police in riot gear surrounding or walling off peaceful protesters, I wonder how much less likely it would be for the protest to turn violent if the officers were in dress blues instead.

Agreed. It's possibly also why attitudes towards the police seem a bit better in the UK (and much of Europe) compared to the US, because the police in these areas aren't dressed like they're going into a war zone or carrying weapons.

Well, in France, since the 2015 attacks, there are cops with military weapons when they are a lot of people in the same place (not necessarly during protests). Also whatever the protest, here in France you'll always have a group of cops in full riot gear nearby.

I was quite impressed by this when I was in Paris ~2 years ago. A drunken mob of about 50 people had massed outside my hotel to celebrate a soccer victory, and they were blocking the street, being loud and a little aggressive, and doing some petty vandalism. In the US I feel like this would have induced an aggressive police response.

Instead what happened is the Paris police closed the street a few blocks up, massed a response force nearby out of sight, and waited to see what happened. Eventually the mob dissipated, and two street sweepers and a team of cleaners came through and cleaned the entire area up. The following morning it was if the event had never happened.

I followed the guy on twitter for half a year. Shallow, rumbling and full of shit. It’s kinda sad picture, with all the big words. Counterterrorism, CIA, Police, and now mass media via new Yorker.

Just my opinion, but virtually every person I've ever met working in "State Department" operations is some breed of unlikable. "Shallow ... and full of shit" (with an enormous ego) could be a one-liner describing a lot of those folks. That's not to say they're all seedy spies. They just share aspects of a certain profile that isn't what you'd consider to be a paragon of wholesome goodness. And this is going to sound weird, but usually also a kind of ironic naivete about the world that reminds of you of the goody-two-shoes from school. The kind of person that tattles as an adult.

Most intelegent people realize counter terorism is a vast waste of resources and do something else with their lives. What's left is people that have a specific bent.

Are you sure you mean the State Department? The State Department handles diplomacy, not usually spying or defense. (Though I'm sure there are CIA spies working under diplomatic cover)

The staffers I've known at State were academic types or bureaucrats. If I were to criticize them, I would say they were excessively cynical, not naive.

Working for State is a euphemism. It's who certain people claim to be working for when they actually work in intelligence or covert operations. For example overseas embassy CIA staff.

In my experience it's quite common and usually said in a way to indicate they don't actually work for State but can't/won't say who they actually work for.

It is fiction, but take a look at 'Patriot' on Amazon Prime.

Also, the character James Reese from 'From Paris with Love'.

Agreed, and anecdotally, I had a college roommate obsessed with wanting to become a CIA operative.

I had to call the police on him after he stole my TV when moving out.

did he make it to the CIA?

If by CIA you mean Criminal Internment Area, I'd wager yes.

In 8th grade, during one of my classes, we all took a 'career aptitude test' and several of the other students were openly asking each other, and the teachers, how they should answer the questions so that they could become a spy. I think, or at least hope, that they all lost interest before going to college.

I feel like I know exactly what you mean. That character is epitomized in Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad.

Did you finish the series? Because "ASAC Schrader" ultimately comes off a bit better than his initial caricature...

I did a few internships in college with the State Department, in an agency similar to the one mentioned in the article. You describe it very accurately, and summarize my primary reason for not returning full-time after I graduated. In my opinion, the clearance process selects for three things: 1) those who are extremely rule-abiding -- often, as you describe, the "goody-two-shoes" from school. For example, most of these people have never touched drugs (since the clearance process involves polygraphs on drug use, as well as constant drug checks), and they often have strong disdain for those who have. These are not qualities I think one should have when they are dealing with diverse types of people and organizations. Someone in this position should have knowledge and nuance when it comes to drugs, even if they personally have never used them. Also, they definitely select for people who are exactly the "tattle tales" you allude to. I won't get into the details of the sort of questions they ask that select for such things, but I'm sure you can use your imagination. 2) People who are not receiving offers elsewhere in industry. The clearance process takes forever, sometimes can be up to three years to get a clearance. For college students, they would "expedite" it to take 6 months, but regardless -- most people with any marketable skills get snatched up by a better-paying, faster moving organization. 3) Most importantly, I think it selects for the type of egotistical person you are describing. Many of the people I encountered during my time there were very macho, patronizing types, who think they've "seen it all". To be sure, some of them have been through a lot of difficult things, and I don't mean to downplay the things they've seen. But there are probably a good number who haven't, and just like to act as though they're really tough. My theory on this is that people with smaller egos get more nervous during the polygraph process and are thus more likely to fail (since nerves are often the reason people appear to be lying, due to fast heart-rate, twitches, etc).

This seems like a recipe for disaster.

I read "The Wise Men" and was under the impression that the State department was staffed with incredibly smart folks who served out of a sense of duty to the Country rather than as a job of last resort.

Makes me wonder: how do you think the State Department would have changed under the leadership of Tillerson and now Pompeo?

It wouldn't have. The culture of the organization (and by proxy the culture across all of those organizations -- including allied/FiveEyes nations) is seen as one of its greatest assets, and they go to great lengths to preserve that culture and boot outsiders. If I hadn't been part of a completely third party organization, there's no way I'd have been in those positions for as long as I was ("those positions" here not implying I performed the same function, but rather a job that was critical to their continued presence abroad, with my clearance under the control of that external third party -- sorry for the lack of specificity). No leader will have been able to change their culture, and any leader making headway into changing the culture will not have lasted very long.

Well, I agree that there are certainly some of those but they tend to be the most visible as a result of their personal characteristics that you mention, and that is true for many organizations. For a variety of reasons, the people that are doing the interesting stuff typically don't draw much attention to themselves.

Certainly. I made friends from those days that I still hang out with today, and who made me reconsider whether or not I'd ever join one of those organizations. But I was speaking in sweeping generalities that represent my own experiences in dealing with those folks over a number of years.

Can you link some examples? Just browsed his feed and he seems pretty normal.

I can’t without going back, I stopped following him at about his graduation from police academy time. He says all the right things, however there are little details which just wouldn’t add up. Like his work history :). Why there is the restart from 0 every time he changes his course? And the guy is undeniably an attention seeker.

Weird. I had the opposite experience. He's seemed to be working pretty hard to enforce the law with empathy while also trying to understand the broader implications for our society.

Well. At about every sail club there is a guy who knows and says all the right things. Helpful and willing to share, bringing an owe. Until he gets at helm. Over my brief following I had the growing suspicion that He is the guy. I might be wrong, but his sublime attention seeking become too annoying...

Just think about the article. You are frikking street cop fresh from the Academy. He just graduated. How being featured in New Yorker will help you working with other cops? It won’t. So, apparently guy is not thinking about his job...

Fair point!

He has theories about how policing should be done, and unlike most people with theories about how policing should be done, he is actually working as a police officer to see how things are in real life. And he's reporting back to the rest of us about it.

No offense to your sailing club experience, but I don't think you're in much of a position to judge him. Not that you have to follow him on Twitter, of course...

As soon as a writer mentions the CIA in conjunction with fighting the "terrorists", you know they're clueless or a shill. Standard Operating Mockingbird fare.

Im just skipping all American articles about terrorism and how terrorists hate America because of the freedoms, and now America has to go bomb someone to make the world a better place. My iq drops 50 points from that garbage. We live in a world where people are so dumbed down or busy all the time that nobody even seem to reflect on the madness of this thinking.

IQ tests are based on pattern recognition and abstraction. So your comment being as meta as it is probably means your iq hasn’t dropped. I do understand that it’s a figure of speech in this case but to go more meta it is a lazy argument... perhaps indicative of low iq! Fun right?

As much as I hate the CIA and the War on Terror, the subject seemed involved in the hunt for Bin Laden and it seems accurate to call him a terrorist. The article was at least somewhat critical of the War on Terror, less ridiculous than I entered expecting it to be.

Some interesting reading on this subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...

Not really, it still seems like the CIA was searching for him in the 00's, and CIA connections wouldn't make him any less of a terrorist.

When did this turn from a fact to an allegation? Jesus they really are rewriting history.

You can see it happening right before your eyes.

Quite interesting. F'ing scary too.

At what point was it presented to you with evidence? I also remember hearing this often around 2001, but I can't recall any specifics showing the link.

Frankly, the CIA deserves the blame even if they didn't specifically assist Bin Laden. They certainly assisted many other people that were equally terrible, and their actions led to the instability that allowed such groups to flourish.

well.... it's not like he was out of the spotlight, many years earlier than then

1993 newspaper profile of him.. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anti-soviet-warrior...

a picture of the newspaper article itself for history's sake/ in case that link ceases to work in the future; https://i.imgur.com/HLndqdZ.jpg

How does this show any link to the CIA? He was the son of a billionaire, I doubt he would need help from a spy agency to get a puff piece written on page ten.

Just such soft slippers we get to wear, on our way down the stairs. I get how it's preferable to the boots our ancestors had to wear on their way up the stairs, but comments like yours make me wonder about that.

Did you miss the part where that writer wrote 4000 words savagely criticizing the “war on terror”?

“the agency was using National Geographic maps from the nineteen-sixties, with names for landmarks and villages that didn’t correspond to those used by the locals.”

I call disinformation on this one, since agency has been involved in counter-USSR operations in that area in the eighties their maps should have at least been from that time period, not the sixties.

“the Kalashnikov, a Soviet-developed assault rifle that can penetrate a person’s torso from more than half a mile away.”

I have yet to meet a person who can throw a Kalashnikov with a bayonet attached for half a mile. Such poor writing.

“designed for use in war zones”, “high-powered weapons”

For some reason one can always tell when a piece writer got their hands on a Common Sense Gun Control Thesaurus.

I do not doubt some people were using unclassified public domains maps. CIA should use Openstreetmap so they can all share the same info, just add a "NOT_FOR_TERRIES" the the entries that should be kept secret.

Getting names of landmarks right is really hard unless you have people on the ground that are specifically looking for that, and who are supposed to update maps. I don't know how the military/intelligence community works, but have they really invested manpower into this? This is from experience with mapping around lake Victoria and Haiti, the map might look ok but when you put your boots on the ground things are different. Especially since official vs. local names can differ so much.

“Getting names of landmarks right is really hard unless you have people on the ground that are specifically looking for that, and who are supposed to update maps”

Isn’t the purpose of intelligence agencies to collect intelligence, such as landmark names and maps?

Yes of course, and I have no insight into how they worked with maps (except remote imaging), I just know that the amount of hours you need to invest per village with 300+ pop is quite large. There are also several organizational issue with maps, how do you keep them secret, what do you map, where do you map, if caught with a map are you a spy. Basically why would you give a beat cop a top secret map, my comment about Openstreetmap was a joke but it highlights the bigger problem that maps are a social good and that is not always the goal of the intelligence community in hostile environment.

Lots of places have multiple names. Especially in the Arab world, I would expect many places to have a "formal name" that might appear on a government map but that differs from how locals refer to it.

I'm alo not sure if the purpose of intelligence agencies is to collect the names of landmarks either. And speaking as someone who works with maps, it wouldn't surprise me at all if various agencies used severely outdated maps. In fact, I'd be shocked if they were efficient about that kind of thing.

Of I was CIA, I would fund openstreemap. Wait...

Wait, the map is not the territory?

> I have yet to meet a person who can throw a Kalashnikov...

It’s a figure of speech called a metonym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy. Quote: “Tools/instruments: Often a tool is used to signify the job it does or the person who does the job, as in the phrase "the press" (referring to the printing press), or as in the proverb, "The pen is mightier than the sword."

And what you are doing is a bad-faith method of disrupting debate called “pedantic illiteracy”.

Thank you, learned a new phrase. And 'pedantic illiteracy' really hit the nail on its head, social media comments at large follows this pattern. Econ Twitter, starting with Tyler Cowen, is full of these people.

Thank you!

“ Although police-issue bulletproof vests can stop rounds fired from a handgun, they are useless against assault rifles. “After seeing what little kids can get their hands on, I went out and bought hard plates,” designed for use in war zones, McClellan told me. The plates cost him more than five hundred dollars—a week’s salary. “

“Designed for use in war zones” described his body armor, not a gun. And it was armor he acquired after confiscating a Kalashnikov from a dealer.

Your comments read like nitpicking as applied to a light skimming. If you can’t criticize in good faith, why comment at all?

The nitpicking is somewhat understandable, in that TFA highlights "assault rifles" as having anything to do with the vests. Any rifle (other than e.g. a .22) can do what "assault" rifles are described as doing. In fact most hunting rifles are a lot better at penetrating armor than an AR-15 is.

I don't know much about guns but my impression is that rifles seem to be categorized likely use case (e.g. sport rifles, hunting rifles, assault rifles) and in this case assault rifle seems to match both the use case he was talking about and also is an apt descriptor of the specific gun that led him to buy it. I don't really understand why assault rifle is inaccurate in this case.

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