Posted on 12/02/2008 6:23:19 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
The guy pictured below in the tie-less bad Don Johnson/"Miami Vice" look from the '80s is Drew Parenti, FBI Special Agent in Charge of Sacramento.
But this brown-nosing uber-panderer isn't auditioning for the role of Crockett or Tubbs (either of whom frankly would be more competent at dealing with the enemy). No, he doesn't have a tie on because Muslims--the most extreme among them--don't respect ties. It's Western garb, and they want the world to know, Ahmadinejad-style, that they reject all things western. So congrats, Agent Parenti, you're now a graduate of the Islamist School of Barbaric Fashion.
And if pandering at an Al-Qaeda fundraising mosque isn't enough, Special Agent Parenti keeps a Muslim prayer mat in his office to impress Muslims. Awww, isn't that special. If it were the 1930s, I suppose he'd keep SS paraphernalia in his office. Or maybe a special "Jewish leather" lampshade:
For months, Sacramento's top FBI agent kept a Muslim prayer rug in his office.
It was for Imam Mohamed Abdul Azeez, religious leader of the SALAM Islamic Center in Sacramento, who attended a citizens' academy with Drew Parenti at the FBI office.
(Excerpt) Read more at debbieschlussel.com ...
The FBI just isn’t what it once was. Too many @$$ kissers.
If you want to get in the head of an Islamist.... a promminent muslim might be the place to start. You may catch more flies with honey, but you won't catch a muslim with pork blood.
But, there are some that want this guy to strap a cross to his back and scream I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian... yeah, that'll net you some info. Ever wonder why he's their "top agent?"
These are the type of people GWB should have fired when he first came into office in 2001.
His administration could have and probably would have been a success (domestically speaking) considering the thousands of spiteful, anti-Bush leaks which were made by disgruntled liberals who were allowed to stay over from the Clinton (and even Carter) administrations.
It’s not just legacy here either. These anti-WOT types compromised our national security with a thousand paper cuts........ with help from the anti-GOP NYTimes, WaCompost, etc.
Dress, or no dress, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover ought to kik this guy’s ass.
Another success-in-the-making from the guys who brought you the Ruby Ridge and Waco triumphs...
Now, the imam and the FBI agent plan to travel around California and the nation, to show other communities how to build similar partnerships.
... to wipe your feet on when come in from outside.
Wouldn’t want to get the floor dirty.
Thank you for bringing logic into this
It is incredible how woefully ignorant people on this board are of the intelligence collecting process and how you get GOOD intelligence that leads to arrests of the big boys
You must establish trust and rapport to get the good info that is needed. You won’t always get information from intense interrogation in your face yelling and throwing crap across the room
And if you aren't approachable, how is an informant going to be able to talk to you. If you act like an @sshole, you will feed into everything his fellow travelers told him about you.
Of course many found a "friend" in the agent; he spoke their speak and walked their walk.... now they'll speak his and hopefully get some 9/11 wantabes of the street..
Back in the "good old days" a bad guy could tell who these guys were from their clothes.
Never been either, but I've known a number of these guys. Nonetheless I am sitting here wearing an identical shirt!
Because he blackmailed J. Edgar Hoover?
Exactly.
It happens with what we do in Afghanistan and Pakistan
People wonder why we were quickly able to move into Afghanistan right after 9/11. Literally on 9/12 we had intel on the ground working with assets we established during the 1980s
Throughout the 1990s the CIA wisely kept contacts and when 9/11 hit boom we were on the ground planning the counter attack
You think they walked around with pork and their “I hate Muslim” badges in the 1980s?
I agree. Pre-9/11, the FBI was clueless on Islam.
Anybody ever once read any stories about agents keeping a Bible in their office to impress Christians?? Or a Southern Flag hanging on the wall to impress (please,, don’t get offended,, no harm intended) to impress rednecks??
How about an NRA sticker to impress gun owners??
I just cannot remember ever reading any stories like that.
And post 9-11 the majority of Americans are clueless on Islam.
If Hoover was still in charge, the guy would have been rejected for hire. The background check would have uncovered a sympathetic attitude toward an enemy of the United States.
Domestic anti-terrorism efforts are highly dependent on information voluntarily provided by the American Islamic community.
If a potential terrorist is not directly affiliated with with a known radical group or with someone who is, they're likely to be completely below the radar of domestic surveillance, and the only way you're going to discover their existence is if someone - almost certainly someone in their community - notices something and is willing to tell someone else about it.
That potential informant may have very mixed feelings about what they're about to do - even if they would be perfectly willing to inform on someone they're reasonably certain is connected with a terrorist plot, they may be unwilling to blow the whistle on someone who might be involved in such activities, especially if they expect that person to be humiliated or abused during the investigation, or if they suspect that the investigation might be so ineptly handled that they will exposed as the source of the information which initiated it.
So there are two things I certainly would want the FBI to facilitate.
The first is a well-publicized conduit in the community to law enforcement; it's important that if someone in the community sees something they feel ought to be reported that they have a reasonably clear idea of who was in their own community can pass that information on to where needs to go. And the less well a potential informant is integrated into the wider US society (for example because they don't speak English, or because they socialize almost entirely of their own community) the more important it is to have someone within their community to serve as a conduit for such information. And that's almost certainly one of the things that picture is about: if someone wants such information passed along - even anonymously - they need to know exactly who to go to, or at least who to ask someone else to go to.
The second is for the people conducting the investigation to be very aware that most of the reports they receive will be discovered to involve either innocuous behavior or to be a lot more talk than action, and that unless investigations and interviews are conducted with an eye toward minimizing the distress of informants, suspects, and the many other people who may be interviewed an investigation can be counterproductive and shut off the flow of future information. And that's almost certainly one of the things that the relationship suggested by that picture is about: having sufficient feel for a community in which you are working to be able to minimize the extent to which its members are distressed in the course of conducting investigations.
Because if you don't have such sources, and you can't handle them well, you're essentially flying blind in your efforts to thwart domestic terrorism.
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