It's All a Conspiracy: The Gaza Attacks

I was staying off Twitter because the Israel-Gaza tragedy was just too painful to watch unfold, but I took a peek, and this is the first thing I saw and now I need to vent because soulless media gadfly Mike Cernovich spewing standard conspiratorial garbage to his 1.1 million followers really pisses me off.

No, no, no, not everything is a freaking conspiracy. Intelligence work is hard. It’s not like the movies. Your targets are NOT radioing to each other: “We will all attack these 20 listed locations with these exact troops on Oct 6.” It's almost never that simple.¹

Instead, you use various means (wiretaps, etc) to intercept some (but far from all) snippets, like "I will be at the place at the agreed time." Great, right? Except the intelligence analysts intercepting those snippets are also intercepting snippets that mean nothing at all, like: “I will see Ahmed about the thing.” This is just a personal message about a loan Ahmed made because he lost a lot of money gambling. It has nothing to do with anything. So, Mr. Intelligence Analyst, which snippets do you kick upstairs to your bosses? Trying to decide which bits of information mean something and which are distractions—keeping in mind that you have only heard a fraction of what's been said, and only when your enemy screws up, AND keeping in mind that some of what you hear is deliberate disinformation—is a herculean task.

Imagine a nightmare jigsaw puzzle. You have 10,000 pieces piled on your table. What you don’t know is there exist 1000 pieces that describe the enemy's plans. In fact, you don’t even know that there is a plan. (After all, most weeks, nothing big is happening.) As it turns out, you have managed to grab 100 key snippets of the enemy’s 1000-piece plan! Yay you! But again, those important 100 are scattered among the 10,000 on your table, with no easy way to tell which is which. So your job is to somehow toss the 9,900 useless pieces and then extrapolate the real puzzle from the 100 pieces you have left. If there even is a real puzzle, because remember, often nothing at all is going on. Good luck!

In the real world, intelligence fails a big chunk of the time. The US was pretty sure Japan would attack in December 1941, but didn't realize it was Dec 7 at Pearl Harbor (they thought the Philippines was the most likely target). Stalin had intelligence suggesting Germany would attack in June 1941, but he decided it wasn't convincing. This is partly because he had received warnings about earlier attack dates that hadn't happened. (Avoiding false alarms sometimes leads leaders to ignore real ones.) And don’t forget 9/11. The FBI was on the trail of the hijackers but didn’t have quite enough pieces to figure out what was going to happen.

Now, instead of an intelligence failure, which is normal, Cernovich and his scabrous ilk want us to imagine that Israeli intelligence officers would knowingly let an attack go through that would kill hundreds of their fellow citizens. What’s his evidence? Nada, zilch. It’s all just vibes from watching too many James Bond films. And it wouldn't be one psychopath covering up the truth; it would have to be at least dozens of people keeping a secret forever, a secret that would destroy their careers and lives if the Israeli people ever found out.

In the real world, not Cernovich’s fantasies, I could imagine Mossad² agents keeping a secret about a strike on an Iranian nuclear facility. They would have strong patriotic reasons to keep that kind of secret. Allowing their own people to be attacked? That same patriotism makes the idea that they would carry out such an ugly deception impossible to swallow.

It's also madness that conspiracy nuts imagine governments are both ultra-competent in knowing what their enemies are up to but, at the same time, complete dingbats when it comes to things like organizing healthcare, preventing illegal immigration, or managing the DMV. Schrödinger’s government.

The reality is intelligence services are like everything else. Sometimes they do an ok job, and sometimes they screw up. This time they screwed up, with tragic results.

1. Although sometimes you get lucky. The Russians, unused to radio, were communicating with each other on the open airwaves at the start of World War One, which helped the Germans win the Battle of Tanneberg in 1914.

2. Not “Massad,” despite what Cernovich’s gibbering toady “John Smith” thinks.