Word: stations
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...Earth scientists have discovered a way to solve the planet's energy crisis: harvest an element called helium-3 from the Moon. Apparently this vast effort requires only one human: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who's nearing the end of a three-year contract working alone in a station on the lunar surface. All that time alone, with only a talking computer and some old TV shows as company, has made Sam edgy; he can't wait to be picked up and taken back to Earth, to his loving wife and child. His anxiety escalates to horror when he discovers...
...usual petty Washington bureaucratic maneuvering, with no real consequence. But for the CIA the stakes are critical - existential, even, if you share my pessimism about its future. The CIA was given charge of spying overseas in the 1947 National Security Act, with unique authority to appoint chiefs of station. The act also put the CIA in charge of dealing with foreign intelligence services. The intent of the act was to make one agency responsible for coordinating all intelligence to prevent anything falling through the cracks, another Pearl Harbor. The CIA certainly has let things fall through the cracks...
...would be justified in asking itself, What will stop Blair from taking another key station - Baghdad, for instance? Blair is a Navy officer, and the suspicion is that his grab for Kabul has something to do with a plan for the Pentagon to assume the CIA's authority. What's more, it's not as if Blair's argument is without merit. We are in the middle of two inconclusive wars, and the Pentagon needs good, detailed tactical intelligence on these two countries, so why shouldn't Blair cater to the Pentagon's needs, possibly even appoint a uniformed military...
...that independence is key. What few people understand is that a CIA station chief in every country in the world has the authority to send back to Washington and disseminate around the government what is essentially finished analysis. This happened in Iraq in mid-2003, when the CIA station in Baghdad sounded the alarm that the invasion was about to go very badly. When the White House and the Pentagon's civilian management read the Baghdad chief's conclusions, they raged, dismissing the analysis as "defeatist," even going so far as to accuse the chief of being a closet Democrat...
Knox's measured explanation of her sometimes bizarre behavior in the hours and days after the murder certainly helped her defense. What the press called "cartwheels" in the police station during questioning, she explained as stress-reducing yoga; she said photographs of her making out with Sollecito in the yard outside the cottage as police inspected the murder scene simply reflected her state of "shock" and his efforts to console her with "cuddling." (Read a story about the Italian media's obsession with the Knox case...