Intelligence

For more than a decade, conservative social theorist Charles Murray has made a living pushing the boundaries of politically acceptable debate about the welfare state. But nothing the contrarian thinker has written in the past drew the level of vitriol now engulfing "The Bell Curve," his new best-selling book linking IQ to race and poverty. Murray has spent the better part of the past two weeks fending off accusations that he and his late co-author, Richard J. Herrnstein, are reactionary racists.

He is the well-dressed player sitting on the Clippers' bench, the sage veteran offering advice and encouragement during this playoff push for his teammates and coaching staff. But make no mistake, Chauncey Billups said, it has been killing him not to be dressed in a uniform and playing and helping the Clippers with his skills on the court. Billups hasn't played in a game since suffering a season-ending left Achilles' tendon injury Feb. 6 at Orlando. The 14-year veteran guard now says it was easier for him to not play when "I didn't travel.

The average man and the average woman have about the same level of intelligence, but men account for a higher proportion of both geniuses and the mentally deficient, according to a new study of IQ test results. Seven of every eight people in the top 1% on IQ tests are men, accounting for their overrepresentation in the elite ranks of the sciences and mathematics where such genius is crucial, University of Chicago researchers report today in the journal Science.

WASHINGTON — The CIA takedown of an Al Qaeda plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner involved an international sting operation with a double agent tricking terrorists into handing over a prized possession: a new bomb purportedly designed to slip through airport security. U.S. officials Tuesday described an operation in which Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, working closely with the CIA, used an informant to pose as a would-be suicide bomber. His job was to persuade Al Qaeda bomb makers in Yemen to give him the bomb.

The preflight intelligence Here are some key pieces of information known to U.S. intelligence officials before the failed Christmas Day bombing attack that, they said, should have kept suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off a U.S.-bound jetliner: The United States had electronic intercepts linking an individual with the partial name Umar Farouk to Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen. The National Security Agency had learned that the Yemeni group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was planning an operation using a Nigerian.

Reporting from Washington The nation's top intelligence official sought Monday to rebut a Washington Post series charging that intelligence agencies have become bloated and inefficient, insisting they "are achieving untold successes every day." David C. Gompert, the acting director of national intelligence, contended in a statement that the intelligence agencies strive to be efficient, and that some overlap is by design. "We work constantly to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, while preserving a degree of intentional overlap among agencies to strengthen analysis, challenge conventional thinking, and eliminate single points of failure," he said.

The debate over "The Bell Curve" continues on your editorial pages, but I have yet to hear or read of anyone challenging some unstated premises: Intelligence equals success and success equals wealth. How many intelligent people would be successful if "cunning" were filtered out of their personalities? Is intelligence at the top of the list of most admired virtues? Why, because it creates wealth? If the goal were to develop a happier and wiser society, would intelligence be vying for the top spot with wisdom, honesty and compassion?

Shortly before a double agent for Al Qaeda detonated a suicide bomb and killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan last week, a U.S. general issued a report excoriating American military intelligence-gathering for being too focused on targeting enemy combatants at the expense of understanding civilians and the environment around them. Though unrelated, both developments highlight deep and enduring problems for the United States eight years into the war. The suicide bomber was a Jordanian doctor recruited to infiltrate Al Qaeda at the highest level.

Re "CIA doubts didn't deter Feith's team," Feb. 10 When the CIA's intelligence didn't match the go-to-war agenda of Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul L. Wolfowitz, they invented their own through secret "intelligence" gathering at the Department of Defense. As a result, billions of dollars have been spent, more than 3,100 American lives lost and America's reputation throughout the world has been so damaged that it will take generations to repair, all because of their lies.

Most of the new federal agencies created in the wake of 9/11 have become familiar names: the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, for example. But here's one you've probably never heard of: the Information Sharing Environment. Hidden in the office of the director of national intelligence, the ISE is a task force whose goal is to get all of the agencies involved in fighting terrorism to share information seamlessly, a job whose importance was highlighted by the Nigerian who allegedly attempted to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day. In its four years of existence, the ISE has pushed 17 federal agencies to pool their intelligence, make their databases mutually accessible and share as much information as possible with local law enforcement officials.

Any discussion of Tar & Roses must begin, as your dinner probably will, with what is probably its simplest appetizer, a concoction of popcorn tossed with brown sugar, lardons and chile, like a bowl of Cracker Jack with chewy cubes of bacon instead of peanuts. (Why can't there be chewy cubes of bacon and peanuts? That is an excellent question.) The popcorn falls solidly into a genre new in Los Angeles cooking, something we may call an elevated bar snack, a staple of the many, many gastropubs that have come to dominate casual dining here over the last couple of years.

MEXICO CITY — Tomas Borge, last living founder of Nicaragua's Sandinista movement and one of its most hard-line enforcers as it battled U.S.-backed forces for decades, has died. He was 81. In Nicaragua, the government of President Daniel Ortega declared three days of national mourning and Borge's remains lay in state at the National Palace of Culture. Borge died Monday night in a military hospital in Managua, Ortega's office said. No cause of death was given, but Borge had been ill for some time, suffering pneumonia, lung disease and other ailments.

David Coppedge's co-workers at one of the nation's most prominent scientific institutions didn't have to guess his theory as to how the universe was created. He offered to lend them DVDs advocating intelligent design. An evangelical Christian, he also asked that the holiday potluck at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory be renamed the Christmas potluck and sparred with at least one colleague over their divergent views on Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. Coppedge's zest for hot-button topics rankled some co-workers at the facility in La Cañada Flintridge, who complained about him to management.

Sometimes an old movie line says it best. Such a line came to mind when I read the Assembly speaker's assertion that political money doesn't influence legislative voting. "I know people love to try to create that impression," Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) was quoted as saying in a Times article Sunday about AT&T's wide-ranging lobbying operation. "But the reality is, that's not the way things happen. People give money because of whatever reasons motivate them, and we evaluate legislation regardless.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will reorganize its spy service to target national security threats around the globe after a decade of focusing chiefly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior defense official said Monday. The official said several hundred case officers and analysts at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency would be shifted to the new Defense Clandestine Service. The fledgling service is supposed to work closely with CIA officers based at U.S. embassies overseas to collect and distribute intelligence on foreign terrorist networks, nuclear proliferation and other difficult targets, the official said.

Have you ever been frightened by a dumpling? Truly, genuinely scared? Because the juicy crab and pork buns at Wang Xing Ji - smoking-hot dumplings the size of water balloons, sneakily full of boiling juice - could probably be weaponized. You could deploy them as grenades, I'm pretty sure, lobbing the heavy spheroids over battlements. Or you could employ them as sub-lethal projectiles, splatting them into the enemy at will, although the sticky broth is undoubtedly prohibited in an obscure codicil of the Geneva Conventions.

The Obama administration pledged Thursday to close gaps in the intelligence system that enabled a suspected terrorist carrying explosives to board a U.S.-bound plane, and vowed to create a better system for sharing and analyzing the information that floods the intelligence community. The White House based its assertions on the early findings of two inquiries into what it calls the "human and systemic failures" that took place in the run-up to a Nigerian man's alleged attempt to blow up a plane carrying nearly 300 people from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas.

Security and intelligence lapses allowed a suspected terrorist to board a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day, President Obama said from Hawaii today, interrupting his vacation to speak about the failed bombing attempt. "A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable," Obama said. The president said he learned in the last 24 hours that information about the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been passed to "a component of our U.S. intelligence community" weeks ago, but that the information was not effectively distributed and the Nigerian man was not added to a "no-fly" list.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan police and army have won praise for fighting off one of the war's most ambitious insurgent strikes, but the marathon siege of key diplomatic, government and military installations in Kabul also highlighted worrisome weaknesses, including glaring intelligence failures. With evidence pointing to a virulent Taliban offshoot known as the Haqqani network as the perpetrators of the tightly coordinated assaults, the prospect of protecting Kabul appears even more difficult.

As the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 nears its time in the congressional spotlight, supporters and detractors alike are fine-tuning their arguments in preparation for another battle over how the Internet will be influenced by federal legislation. The core objective of CISPA is simple: Opening up greater means for communication between private entities and the federal government on issues of cybersecurity and national security. “Today the U.S. government protects itself using classified and unclassified threat information that it identifies from attacks on its networks,” a staffer on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said, introducing the legislation on a conference call April 10. “However, the majority of the private sector doesn't get access to this information because the government has no mechanism today for effectively sharing.” The points of contention reside within the details of the bill.