Crescent Moon Street

The book's original title was not 'Half Moon Street' - it was 'La Calle De La Media Luna,' which means 'Crescent Moon Street.' 

And the beginning of the film contains the following sentence '...Just remember when you write your reports, that at the Institute here, we are dependent on our special relationship with the Middle East.'

...And seconds later, after those words have been uttered, a car-bomb goes off in the street outside.

What is it, about Arabic and Muslim culture, that
intelligence services seem to think accounts for the fact
that radicalized extremists, are so able to think for themselves
and to act on their own?

Now a question that needs to be asked today is, are there really any investigative journalism resources left, that have the capacity to discern facts from the slant or the the sheer deliberate distortion and obfuscation?

You see the real importance of this relates to whether or not, so much water has already passed under the bridge of 'special relationships' that even massive organisations like MI6 really have the capacity anymore to comprehend what is going on - past the walls of self-inflicted confusion they themselves raised when they decided it would be okay to get kids from out of academia funded by Saudi money and Qatari money and Bahrain money and so on.

This morning, we saw another 'lone wolf' radicalized extremist Muslim, shoot and kill eight people in Munich. And that would make, in all now, something like ten thousand and seventy-three lone wolves so far... Well it isn't but seriously folks, this is the essence of the so-called fallacy of Sorites, in which you never can see the actual boundary between one discrete thing or state/condition and the other (thing/state/condition), so that you can mislabel the real condition with some cover-all description.

How many 'lones' make a group...?

During the immediate post WWII period of the Cold War, it was easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, and information, intelligence, and strategic data were all obvious elements. And you either 'had' as in possessed them in varying in degrees or you lacked them in varying degrees - it wasn't as if you couldn't tell what constituted them!

An old-school Embassy 'plant.' Doesn't exist anymore.

One of interesting features of the movie Half Moon Street is that it becomes obvious to the viewer, that the government and the bureaucracies of administration and even the upper echelons of society, are completely without comprehension of the seriously dangerous things that are going on 'hidden in open view' as it were. And even the movie itself, on account of the need to keep the audience cognizant of the driving forces for the action and the conflict requiring artistic resolution within the story-line, employs the device of familiar Cold War embassy competition and diplomatic opposing agenda to give a reason to the violence and crisis.

Today, the obscuring of truth is not carried out by embassy officials government-to-government. It is carried out expressly by those charged with the duty and responsibility to expose with clarity, any hidden dangers: the media, journalists, and the intelligence services.

How far has this gone towards becoming a severe problem of itself?

Would, for example, Boris Johnson see the need for an entirely new and separate and highly secret intelligence agency, whose main function would be to actually have the capacity to work out the truth on the ground somewhere, and then hand over all the relevant facts and materials that could be used to base genuinely-informed government and significant business foreign policy on? 

Donald Trump seems to think so - it's implicit in his words 'until we can find out what is going on.' These words mean that he thinks, and his advisers think, that for example, Washington itself, doesn't know what is going on...

Which is a very scary thing, if it is true. 

But I will just leave you with this name - 'A. Q. Khan.' And ask you to consider very carefully, what you think might be the game plan in Turkey. 'Lone wolf' eh? That's how you get a hundred thousand Muslims out onto the streets in half an hour. They're all lone wolves who just do stuff that they make up in their own minds without ever following orders or obeying anyone. Not that they don't practice obedience five times a day, do they.