France Bashers, Take Note:
This article from NY Magazine suggests that perhaps France has been more helpful to the US's counter-terrorism efforts (albeit behind-the-scenes) than it lets on.
Check out Reason Number 3.
I've copied the pertinent part of the article below. I don't know if it's BS or not, but it sure has ruined my day, as I love France-bashing as much as the next jeune fille, uh, I mean gal.
- 3. The French Have Saved Us.
“Don’t think because nothing hit New York, nothing was tried,” says Swetnam, who used to be a CIA officer and a special consultant to the first President Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. “Plenty was tried, but everything was thwarted. And this might surprise you, but French intelligence was key.”
There have been at least four attempts uncovered in the past two years to strike the U.S., he says, including specific attacks on New York, but the plans were intercepted and the operations preempted. “The last one was a big attempt to strike our financial centers. A year before that, they were putting together a ricin attack. Both attacks were planned and staged from Great Britain,” says Swetnam. Also, adds Redlener, “attacks on American and international schools overseas have been detected in advance and prevented.”
How is that possible, when the CIA’s intelligence-gathering is supposedly in a shambles? Because of good friends in shadowy places. “The French intelligence services have been just phenomenal,” says Swetnam. “We wouldn’t have captured those cells in Great Britain if it wasn’t for the French, as well as the British and Germans.” Even the ISI—Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, which once used drug money to help finance the Taliban in Afghanistan—has become a crucial U.S. partner in the spy game. “They’re really a bad intelligence service, in terms of morals, but really effective,” says Swetnam.
For a while, it looked like the CIA was hopelessly unprepared to infiltrate Al Qaeda. The agency had spent decades developing satellite and radio-intercept technology, because that was how secrets were transmitted during the Cold War. “It was right to do that at the time,” says Johnson. “But we didn’t transition quickly enough when the nerve center of the enemy changed from the halls of the Kremlin to mountain caves in Afghanistan. All of a sudden, we have to figure out how to intercept messages transmitted from mouth to ear.”
That requires a formidable Arabic-speaking spy force, which would take years to build from scratch. But the French already have one, retained from their days as colonial masters of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, not to mention their mandates over Syria and Lebanon. French intelligence knows how to root out Arabic-speaking insurgents. And while Jacques Chirac may not lend us any French soldiers, he’s apparently been generous with the French spy network.
PS -- Ty, your GD mailbox is full.
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