Fighting Terror: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

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In his latest column, Congressional Quarterly‘s Jeff Stein revisits the Silvestre Reyes Shia-or-Sunni fiasco (which his previous column had sparked).

The incoming House intelligence committee chairman isn’t the only person who doesn’t know his ABCs, Stein reports:

Former Army intelligence Col. Rich Reynolds, who spent over two decades in the Middle East, told me he was startled recently to hear about several young CIA intelligence analysts at the CIA headquarters who were completely unfamiliar with Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The analysts’ current area of responsibility? Lebanon.

Likewise, a young intelligence analyst specializing in terrorist finances at the Department of Homeland Security was baffled a few weeks back by a question about hawalas, the ubiquitous Arab shops that work like an informal Western Union network to transfer money around the Middle East.

Experts think hawalas are one of al Qaeda’s prime channels for moving cash.

“What’s a hawala?” she asked.

Another young CIA analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a former White House National Security Council official who continues to work on intelligence matters, seemed totally surprised to learn that the terrorist group most responsible for killing Americans before 9/11 was not al Qaeda or a Palestinian faction but Hezbollah. The Iran-backed Shiite“Party of God” killed more than 300 Americans in suicide bombings in Beirut and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and 1990s.

I guess we’ll find out if it’s true what they say — what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

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