Republican Clowns Want You To Think Women Don't Have What It Takes To Protect America

Yesterday and again earlier today, we looked around the Republican Party war against women. Some interesting reporting from Toby Harden at Real Clear Politics, The CIA's Real Drone Queens, leads one to conclude there certainly is not discrimination against women in the CIA workplace-- and that the basis of the relentless Republican attacks against women's capacity is completely misplaced and just plain wrong, based on nothing but Bronze Age prejudices. Who's knew?

The CIA is now almost 50% female. Its director is a man but the next three posts below him are filled by women. They are instrumental in waging the CIA’s anti-terrorist war, playing a disproportionate role in some of the most lethal and morally ambiguous tasks of an organisation that has long been regarded as a bastion of outdated machismo.

More enlightened employment practices have contributed to this. But could it be, as some senior intelligence officers argue, that the true-life drone queens are simply better than men at stalking terrorists and deciding when and how they should die?

“It's a reality,” said Bruce Riedel, who spent 29 years in the CIA and later became an adviser to Obama. “Girl power. That’s what they call it within the CIA.” Women, he posited, tend to be better “at seeing connections than most of their male counterparts” when they are dealing with data.

“I’ve seen it, particularly on issues where there’s a tremendous need for precision in remembering enormous amounts of very detailed information. It seems there’s an advantage in having female chromosomes.”

Cindy Storer, formerly one of the CIA’s senior al-Qaeda analysts, was part of a “band of sisters”-- in the words of General Michael Hayden, the director from 2006-9-- who contributed to bin Laden’s demise. Bin Laden first came to her attention in 1992, when her job was to monitor jihadist veterans of the Afghan war with the Soviets.

“My role was to say, holy crap, this is a terrorist group and this is how they’re structured, this is what they do and this is where they are.” Storer believes that the success of female CIA officers could be down to “brain science.”

“Men tend to be linear thinkers-- it’s the hunter-gatherer thing, right? Women tend to be all over the place and can hold a whole bunch of different stuff in their minds at the same time. Some people will say that women tend to be more patient and tenacious . . . The men I worked with, I did see a difference, with women being more comfortable with ambiguity. A lot of the men wanted things to be in neat boxes.”

...Storer said she and her compatriots had sometimes been denigrated for adding a feminine touch to their austere workplaces. “After 9/11 . . . we still made birthday cakes for each other. It’s not like you stop being a woman.”

Avril Haines, 43, is the CIA’s deputy director. She studied judo in Japan, worked as a car mechanic in Chicago and once hosted erotica readings at a Baltimore cafe. As Obama’s top foreign policy lawyer, she would often be summoned in the middle of the night to help decide whether a terrorist on Obama’s “kill list” should be killed by a drone strike.

Now Haines can sometimes be seen at Starbucks, buying an iced latte. Waiting outside is a black armoured Jeep bristling with aerials and manned by security officers wearing earpieces. If need be, Haines can make secure phone calls from the vehicle and watch video of drone strikes.

Under Obama, 349 drone strikes in Pakistan have killed almost 4,000 people, an estimated quarter of them innocent civilians. It is five years since Obama’s visit to CIA headquarters to meet the real “drone queens” for the first time. Several have risen to more senior positions in the CIA’s killing apparatus.

The next time Obama authorises a strike in Pakistan, the odds are that it will be a woman who gives the green light moments before death is delivered from a drone stationed several miles away.

Now juxtapose what we just read with Heidi Przybyla's report for Bloomberg about how Republican Party hacks are manufacturing fears of women being too incompetent to deal with terrorism. The Republicans are trying to paint Democratic women, particularly Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kay Hagan, Michelle Nunn and Jeanne Shaheen as unable to deal with the fears the right wing media has been using to terrorize low-info voters, stuff like ISIL and Ebola particularly.

At least 60 terrorism-- or national security-related ads have aired in congressional contests in such states as Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina. They’re running with the most intensity since President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, when the airwaves were full of ads depicting Democrat John Kerry as weak on national security, data provided by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group show.

Of the top five Democratic targets, four are women.