The header picture gave me two major shocks. One was seeing FBI agents kneeling.
The other and bigger stunner was just how FAT two of them were. I mean they are pig FAT! They probably were grateful for a chance to get off their feet they were so FAT!
Personal bit of history. there was a point in my life, right after I got out of the Marine Corps where I strongly considered joining the Bureau.
During the 1990s a lot of Marine Corps Officers got RIFFed out (Reduction in Fleet Force) due to the end of the Cold War. They hadn’t done anything wrong, they basically lost the lottery and got told, “Sorry, don’t need you. Go home.”
And a lot of those guys joined the FBI. I knew a bunch of them.
If you had asked me at the time about my opinion of the average FBI agent I would have said something like, “A-Jay squared-away, Ricky-tick.” For those who don’t speak Marine, this is a compliment implying the individual in question is clean-cut, athletic, trim, well presented with a highly professional manner.
“Physical fitness and physical agility were favored attributes of FBI Agents at that time (1990s). Physical training — both with and without firearms — was part of the daily work schedule. Agents worked 10 hour days on the basis that two hours each day would be spent on physical fitness. Peer pressure was a primary motivating factor for remaining in top physical condition. Most major Field Offices had work-out equipment, weights, and locker rooms with showers for agent use during the day or after-hours. Smaller offices that lacked such facilities arranged for private gym memberships for agents. Fitness was a job requirement, and maintaining fitness was part of the workday.
The FBI’s Special Agent force was mainly composed of “Alpha” personalities – male and female. When I walked through the offices of the FBI in the 1990s, you noticed the Special Agents, and they stood apart physically and by their bearing from the intel analysts and support staff. You respected them because the way they behaved earned your respect.“
What happened to the FBI?
Robert (fucking) Mueller is what happened.
You see along with the Marine Corps Ooh-Rah Grunt attitude and hard charger personality, came their prejudices as well. None of them wanted to bare the stain and humiliation of being an “office-pogue.” If it was known that you knew how to type there would be a general suspicion that you were some kind of closeted degenerate. If you were comfortable with computers, you might have genuine trust issues coming from the other Agents. It could actually harm your career with the Bureau because your boss would instinctively prefer somebody more computer illiterate over you. At the turn of the century, the FBI’s idea of realtime data transfer was “bang on side of cave with rock, once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no.'”
Nobody really cared so long as the Bureau got the job done or at least appeared to do so.
On September 11, 2001, it no longer appeared like it was doing so.
9-11 has been described as the greatest intelligence failure in American history, (by people who never heard of Pearl Harbor).
Mind you this was primarily a failure of the CIA. No one at the Company had wanted anything to do with the Middle-East since Iraq invaded Kuwait. Nobody there wanted anything to do with predicting what the Arabs would do.
However, there was a big chunk of blame that could be reasonably assigned to the FBI. And yes, a lot of that had to do with their corporate culture regarding modern data-mining.
The problem is that Mueller threw the baby out with the bathwater. To carry out his switch from “crime-fighting to crime prevention,” he brought in so many Gamma Male Special Agents to run the computers that he disastrously changed the FBI’s culture.
Because along with Gamma Males comes SJWism.
When I was thinking about joining the Bureau, I got in touch with a friend who was a Special Agent and who had occasionally tried to talk me into working at Quantico permanently.
But this time he told me, “forget it. They don’t want men like you anymore.”
I had no idea how right he was.
Bullet dodged.
The Dark Herald 
So, can the FBI be salvaged? Or is it just one more agency not fit for purpose and it’s budget better spent elsewhere. Out here in Australia we’re discovering that ASIO our intelegence agency considers right wingers a greater threat than the lefties rioting and third world imports with a record of shooting police in the head and planning attacks on military bases. SJW infiltration. Like the FBI I think it all started after 2001.
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Which I am willing to bet is when the data miners were brought in.
And now they’ve had 20 years to move up in the organization.
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Why wouldn’t the CIA want to know what is going on in the middle east? It fuels Europe’s and Asia’s economies , and the Arabs have used oil as a weapon to fuck with us before. That is not including the many lovely years of hijackings from the seventies into the eighties. So why ignore the region?
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There’s doing your job according to the people outside the organization and doing your job according to the people inside the organization. These are often different and the CIA is infamous for it.
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You’re thinking like a senisble man and not a bureaucrat. If you aren’t looking at the problem then it’s not your fault when it blows up.
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It sounds like I would have been a perfect fat match for the FBI back then! But after a couple of years of Bill Clinton I recognized what is now called the swamp and didn’t want to have anything to do the federal government. Today under Trump that would be a different story but too late for me.
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