rant · moment 15 of 25
Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Queen and the Alex Station CIA Failures
from Babies in a Volcano · #53
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
8 minTim speculates about the real-life CIA figure behind Zero Dark Thirty's lead character, her marriage to an anti-Israel CIA analyst, and the Alex Station unit's failures to stop Bin Laden, wondering if incompetence gets rewarded in intelligence work.
- 38:10Tim describes Michael Schur as ideological and claims he was forced into the CIA because of his anti-Israel views.
- 38:41Alex Station supposedly got bin Laden eventually, but Tim questions how real the whole operation actually was.
- 39:30Alex Station failed to share pertinent information with other government members, yet many involved agents got promoted anyway.
- 40:11These CIA guys are like babies in a volcano—they make mistakes but become hardened operatives who will get their hands dirty.
- 41:21The military had a straight-up Satanist and defended him, saying he's open about it and their guy.
- 42:32When diving into government operations like Project Monarch—supposedly the continuation of MK Ultra—the mind control and assassin stuff seems crazy.
- 43:10Ruby just walks into a bunch of cops and shoots Oswald right off, which is very weird given the circumstances.
- 43:53The CIA doesn't need to create assassins since enough genuine ones exist, but some perpetrators' actions are so specific they're hard to explain.
- 44:31Crazy people don't usually write things to the stage of actually killing anyone; the Secret Service tracks obsessives but real operatives are different.
- 45:04A lot of mass shooting perpetrators tried to get into the military first, raising questions about whether they entered secondary government programs instead.
- 45:26Tim mentions Dave McGowan, a writer who died of cancer in his 50s and wrote books about these kinds of conspiracies.
Alex StationJohn Hinkley Jr.Omar MateenDave McGowanMichael SchurJames HolmesJack RubyRonald ReaganSirhan SirhanOswald