David McCloskey

speaker

17,419 appearances 73 recordings 5 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 2d ago

David McCloskey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 67 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 10.

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The Rest Is Classified · 192. 9/11: The War on Terror (Ep 6) · 9 Sep 2026 podcast

Agent who ends up matched

killing himself and seven other CI officers at Coast Afghanistan in two thousand and nine. matched

You know, we we we talked in the wash up for that episode about how matched

When these failures happen, it's kind of like a plane crash where there's a lot of different stuff that goes wrong, right? matched

And you can point to a lot of structural and organizational factors that feed into the intelligence failure. matched

So they're not the most proximate cause or the sexiest things to talk about, but they do play into the nature of the intelligence failure. matched

And when the 9-11 commission matched

produced its report, it organized these failures into four categories. matched

It said there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. matched

And I leave management last because it's kind of the operational side of things and we'll come to that in a moment. matched

Start with imagination. matched

always found the line to be a bit galling, to be honest with you, because matched

They bring up a good point, which is that matched

This kind of attack was not entirely unprecedented. matched

I mean, you had the USS coal bombing. matched

The year before you have Hezbollah in Lebanon using suicide truck bombs. matched

So, you know, the commission's not entirely wrong that perhaps there could have been more clarity that this was a tactic that Al-Qaeda could have used against the US. matched

But the reason I find the line to be a bit of a throwaway is that it makes it sound like national security bureaucracies or spy services. matched

need to somehow develop plans to stop all manner of potential hypothetical plots. matched

To me, it feels less like a failure of imagination and more like a failure to actually crack open a plot by having a well-play source inside Al-Qaeda, or, as we'll come to, matched

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