A Hulu miniseries based upon the book by Texas Lawrence Wright is mostly a whitewash to paint the FBI as the unsung heroes in trying to stop what lead to the 9/11 attacks. Whitewash? I call it a whitewash because they’re still no more competent than when they were J. Edgar Hoover’s personal spy agency given their track record of harassing minorities, harassing the Green Movement, failing to fight our overlooked, home-grown terrorists (namely followers of the Turner Diaries) and often skirting our Constitution to “catch” bad guys, again, see minorities.
The main hero is John O’Neill, a longtime vet with the FBI’s counter-terrorism division in NYC. Spoiler alert, he died in the WTC attacks which gave him posthumous saint status despite juggling his wife and two mistresses, having a caustic personality, a love of spending gov’t money on “entertaining,” and being careless with government property containing top-secret information. It also begins sometime around 1998, before the African embassy bombings which were trial balloons by al-Qeda before they went for something larger.
The villains are a special group within the CIA led by Martin Schmidt. He’s nicknamed Manson due to all of his staff being women. Schmidt’s team gathers intelligence on al-Qeda and bin Laden’s activities. They refuse to share what they know with O’Neill’s team for one major reason, the FBI will nab the low-level operatives and the more vital targets will disappear, forcing the CIA to start over. A valid concern yet Wright paints them as disconnected from reality when they don’t tell the FBI about known al-Qeda operatives entering America via Saudi passports.
Overall, we know how this is all going to end since History is 20/20 in hindsight and now it’s easier to see the pieces falling into place today while they couldn’t 17 years ago. To me the miniseries does do one thing correctly and overlooks another. I’ll go with the latter first, and it was brought up by the Special Agent Ali Soufan character, one of only eight FBI employees who spoke fluent Arabic; the FBI remains unprepared to fight al-Qeda, ISIS/ISIL, etc because it continues to staff itself with people whose backgrounds are better suited to battling the Mafia and Soviet spies, either are gone or fading away. What I did like from Wright’s story was pointing out the incredibly cynical attitude of the W administration through Condi Rice. As the W/Cheney thugs are moving into the White House, Rice removes Richard Clarke’s access to the POTUS since “this administration doesn’t want to swat at flies,” and on the day of the 9/11 attacks, Rice order Clarke to find a way to pin this on Iraq. Wright forgot to bring up how nobody was allowed to interrupt W’s month-long vacations at his phony ranch during August 2001. Never mind the memo’s title saying “bin Laden planning an attack within the US.”
Was Looming worth watching? It was as entertaining as it was frustrating. American intelligence and counter-intelligence needs serious overhauling, namely the creation of a true counter agency, the FBI isn’t any good at this. We need more people to learn Arabic, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish; hiring those fluent in German, French and Italian is pointless. The one thing we’ll never hear is the government telling the people how long this asymmetrical war with al-Qeda, the Taliban and ISIS/ISIL will take. It’s going to be generations and as the Soufan character explained, we need greater familiarity with what is in the “Koran” to battle the extremists, Arabic culture is a must too. They’re quite like our KKKristians. They’ve never truly read the book, they just obey the misinterpretations of the assholes they listen to.
