Everyone sing along! Al Qaeda’s connected to the Colombian FARC, the Colombian FARC’s connected to the Mexican Sinaloa, Sinaloa is connected to the Chinese Triads, the Triads are connected to Hezbollah, Hezbollah’s connected to the Mexican Zetas, which all ends up in the streets of Los Angeles.
Next week, U.S. and Mexican military commands will secretly get together to practice cross-border operations, including scenarios that involve the massive movement of Mexican citizens into Arizona as a result of a magnitude 7.8 Southern California earthquake, and suspected outbreaks of diseases caused by terrorist use of biological weapons.
I get an email newsletter everyday from THE SOURCE, produced by something called The Intelligence Community, LLC, which markets itself as "the largest LinkedIn group for National Security professionals" and is building a business based upon nonpartisan expertise and insight. Yesterday's piece screaming ISIS just eight miles from Texas caught my eye, because this "community" of current and former government intelligence people must know something—my membership fee told me. And yet when I dug deeper, what I discovered was just an ecosystem of viral idiocy, of which Gawker is often criticized as being a part. And I learned another lesson: how the fight for eyeballs drives stupid stories, makes us all dumber and just increases the power of the permanocracy.
You'd think that with all of the problems in the Middle East, thousands of Russian nuclear weapons pointed at us, and over a billion Chinese people, the most prevalent language specialty in the U.S. intelligence community would be Arabic or Russian or Chinese. But a birdie recently told me that it is Spanish. Not Spanish because there are so many Spanish-speaking Americans (10 percent of the U.S. population, or more than 37 million), but intelligence quality Spanish, that's intended for a special world. Linguists and translators and liaison officers are needed not only to wage war against narcoterrorism, apparently, but also for that big contingency when Mexico becomes the next ungoverned pin on the geostrategist's map.
