I have never worked in intelligence. The closest thing I got to it was having the CIA ask me to go to Iraq and report on what I saw there. I didn't go, because I was uneasy about it because I am a journalist. I am a very patriotic American, and I had good contacts with the Iraqis in Washington, just as I had once had good contacts with the Libyan before President Reagan booted them out. But yesterday, a columnist, Rachel Marsden, did a good review of the movie, "Zero Dark Thirty," and I wanted to post her analysis because it is very close to one I did for a character in a novel I am working on. Richard Sale
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"Chastain's CIA officer says to the agency director that she's "done nothing else" over her 12 years with the agency besides work on the bin Laden case. Unlike with James Bond films, information doesn't just fall into someone's lap, or come as the result of a one-night stand with a source after a few well-shaken martinis. Chastain's character spends years vetting little bits and pieces of information as they trickle in. At one point she's devastated to learn that a lead in which she had invested enormous time and resources pursuing might ultimately be a dead end. "Confirmation bias" -- assessing a theory or a piece of information as valid because you desperately want or think it to be, and excluding other information for the same reason -- is mentioned several times throughout the film as an impediment to good intelligence work." Marsden
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It is true that the movies distort intelligence work but it is not quite so pedestrian as Marsden portrays it to be. pl
