America’s counter-jihad chief 4

The Head of Counterterrorism at the CIA is a Muslim. He can only be known by his cover-name, Roger.

The Washington Post carried a complacent profile of him last March.

On the whole, it depicts Roger as a rather dear, unpredictable, extremely focussed eccentric, relentlessly pursuing Osama bin Laden.

The leader of the hunt for Osama bin Laden … a gaunt figure standing [smoking] in a courtyard near the center of the agency’s Langley campus … in his late 50s … stubble on his face and the dark-suited wardrobe of an undertaker… a collection of contradictions … chain-smoker who spends countless hours on a treadmill … surly yet able to win over enough support from subordinates and bosses to hold on to his job … operational talents, encyclopedic understanding of the enemy and tireless work ethic … irrascible … eschewed any evidence that he had a life outside the agency … main addition to the office a hideaway bed. … completely absorbed by the job … arriving for work before dawn to read operational cables … staying well into the night if he left at all …

But it also includes these snippets:

He also married a Muslim woman he met abroad, prompting his conversion to Islam. Colleagues said he doesn’t shy away from mentioning his religion but is not demonstrably observant. There is no prayer rug in his office, officials said, although he is known to clutch a strand of prayer beads. …

He was given a series of high-profile assignments, including chief of operations for the CTC, chief of station in Cairo, and the top agency post in Baghdad at the height of the Iraq war.

Along the way, he has clashed with high-ranking figures, including David H. Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, who at times objected to the CIA’s more pessimistic assessments of those wars. Former CIA officials said the two had to patch over their differences when Petraeus became CIA director. …

Roger is seen by some as culpable for one of the agency’s most tragic events — the deaths of seven CIA employees at the hands of a suicide bomber who was invited to a meeting at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009.  An internal review concluded that the assailant, a Jordanian double-agent who promised breakthrough intelligence on al-Qaeda leaders, had not been fully vetted, and it cited failures of “management oversight”. But neither Roger nor other senior officers were mentioned by name.

One of those killed, Jennifer Matthews, was a highly regarded analyst and protege of Roger’s who had been installed as chief of the base despite a lack of operational experience overseas. A person familiar with the inquiry said that “the CTC chief’s selection of [Matthews] was one of a great number of things one could point to that were weaknesses in the way the system operated.” …

It must be remembered that the Obama policy of stealth in regard to the jihad was to isolate bin Laden from the rest of Islam and designate him as America’s enemy, leaving Obama free to cultivate close relations with other jihadist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and states such as Saudi Arabia.

Roger the Muslim was the perfect agent for pursuing this pull-the-wool-over-the-eyes-of-the-people policy. He still is.

Posted under Commentary, Islam, jihad, Muslims, United States, War by Jillian Becker on Saturday, November 17, 2012

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