In See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, author Bob Baer recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, he explains how terrorism works on the inside and provides an explanation of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA's efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists. In the wake of September 11, Americans were left wondering how such an obviously long-term, globally coordinated plot could have escaped detection by the CIA and taken the nation by surprise. What could have led the nation's intelligence community to drop the ball? Talk to Bob Baer about the war on terrorism.
Missed the chat? Read the transcript below:
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dallas texas: why did it take the World Trade Centre for america to wake up and do somthing about air travel safty when they had plenty of wake up calls in the past.but just ignored them.if you ask me this could have all been prevented with proper safty personal
Robert Baer: My best guess is that we had a long siesta. At the end of the Cold War, all believed that there was no threat on this side of the ocean. We were complacent. That's the only way to describe it -- and not just the CIA. The entire federal government, the press and academics are also to blame.
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Kansas City, Missouri: What goes through these people's mind that foces them to want to blow theselves and other people up?! What can we do as Americans do to help educate ourselve about Middle East and future?!
Robert Baer: The problem is a combination of extreme desperation and a messianic religion that permits suicide, which is unlike Christianity.
The best way to educate ourselves is to listen to these people. We know they're terrorists, but they don't. That doesn't mean we can't listen to them. We need to keep our fingers crossed that there's some nonviolent solution to this problem.
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Alpharetta, GA: Why did the CIA fail to provide info to our government about this plot? Why were we not better prepared. I will say the way we shut down the commercial flights on 9/11 probably saved many lives.
Robert Baer: I think that the problem is that the CIA stopped collecting information in the Gulf, and in particular Saudi Arabia, and that we didn't have human sources inside the mosques of Saudi and in Europe where these young men were being recruited. There were too many people involved in this plot not to be able to penetrate it at some stage. When I was at the CIA I remarked that we had no information on Saudi Arabia.
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Alexandria, VA: How is it possible for the CIA to have few if any Arab speakers?
Robert Baer: The CIA actually has put a lot of people through Arabic, but once the Harvard Business School to management took over and the Arabists were promoted into management, their language abilites were squandered. What has to happen is that all officers should be promoted only on the basis of recruiting and handling agents, and not on their management skills. This would really help the CIA do better.
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