Page 109 - Human Intelligence News Today

So, ithink, clearly, the taliban are now running the country, which they are, anything that we want to do on principle becomes much more difficult. having human intelligence on the ground becomes much more dangerous. being reliant on drones — well, human beings make decisions based on flawed information because a drone is 30,000 foot in the air. you know? we are losing our ability to fight forward terrorism thats coming out of afghanistan. it may not make a difference in our societies overnigh...

What we believed to be osama bin laden that was reported at that time to president clinton and the cia said it takes three to seven hours for fighter jets to get the, the check technology clearly evolved over that time. however, thats in essence over the horizon monitoring will look like briefly intelligence we are giving up is our human intelligence. weve been discussing about signal intelligence capabilities and their intelligence capabilities but the reality is what works best in afghanistan ...

>> well, i think the u.s. capabilities that we would have are certainly less. director burns is right. as jim mentioned, there are going to be difficulties in getting the intelligence that we need in order to carry out precision strikes. the over the horizon capability from an intelligence standpoint has been around for a while. its well over 20 years old. it predates 9/11 by a few years. and its more robust form and it was used to great effect in iraqi freedom as well as in nascent form in dese...

Prevent it? >> i mean, i think the first question is whether you have a conversation with the taliban. remember what i just said a conversation with the taliban about how they improve security around the perimeter. these people are not professional security managers. i dont know how well that conversation would have gone, whether they would have listened. how you would have interacted with them. on this question you ask, john, about specificity of intelligence, let me tell you how this works. we...

Were talking a classic counterterrorism operation in this case now it could be a drone strike. it would be a commando raid. it could be any number of things. there are a lot of options the president has in these cases but all of this depends on intelligence and it has to be precise intelligence in order to get to that last mile of really what are we doing here and what -- is this leadership? is this another type of target? so it depends on the targets that they have and it depends also on how ea...

Right? you have massive, thousands of afghan civilians crowded against just a few entry points to the airport, so this is a target that is fixed, and very, very vulnerable, and then you have an attacker in isis-k as your previous report revealed, which is at war with both us but also the taliban, so this makes it an extremely lucrative target for isis-k and a target that will persist as long as the conditions persist so long as those people crowd against the airport, frankly as long as the evacu...

Risking their lives to pull them into freedom and isis-k will meet them as their enemy. whether it takes ten days or ten years we will hunt down the perpetrators of this atrocity and we are going to kill them. i know that your previous correspondent was saying that counter terrorist operations is difficult and it is true that without troops on the ground, human intelligence is degraded and its gotten markedly better, and the counter terrorism operations are sustained in dozens of countries acros...

Out of afghanistan within the next couple of days? the human intelligence is all but gone. how reliant can we be on making sure a vacuum is not created where terror groups are able to continue to wreak havoc in the region without the human intelligence on the ground that we need especially from our own intelligence agencies like the cia. >> look, the different forms of intelligence, i think its clear that human intelligence, as you point out, will be the most difficult form to continue when we d...

United states has a long history of trusting, iran, pakistan, which was not necessarily forthcoming when it came to the capturing, killing of osama bin laden and russia is involved. how is it that the united states can rely on these countries to help with human intelligence. >> we cant count on them. so this is not a matter of 100% reliance but it is a question of gaining sufficient human intelligence so you mitigate the threat so you can reduce the threat. you can improve intelligence, but it w...

There is still a desperate scramble in kabul to get some of the last people on some of the last planes out. but if youre in a place like kandahar or jalalabad which is between pakistan and the capitol, theyre saying we cant get to you, were going to try to find a way but you need to destroy anything that tied you to us, move if you have to, if youre neighbors know who you worked for and go dark. meaning hope the taliban are too busy trying to govern and hunt higher targets so you could survive u...