Captain Wissam Eid Was The Genius Who Crunched The Data

More nuggets from the CBC report on the role of the late Captain Wissam Eid (the report is a page turner, I’m telling you):

The Eid report was entered into the UN’s database by someone who either didn’t understand it or didn’t care enough to bring it forward. It disappeared. […]A year and a half later, in December 2007, when the Eid report finally resurfaced, the immediate reaction of the UN telecom team was embarrassment. And then suspicion.

Eid claimed to have performed his analysis using nothing but Excel spreadsheets and that, said the British specialist, was impossible.

No one, he declared, could accomplish such a thing without powerful computer assistance and the requisite training. No amateur, which is how the specialists regarded Eid, could possibly have waded through the millions of possible permutations posed by the phone records and extracted individual networks.[…]

A deputation of telecom experts was dispatched to meet Eid. They questioned him and returned convinced that, somehow, he had indeed identified the networks himself.

Eid appeared to be one of those people who could intuit mathematical patterns, the sort who thinks several moves ahead in chess. Even better, he was willing to help directly. He wanted Hariri’s killers to face justice, Hezbollah’s warning be damned.

Just in case you don’t know it, captain Eid was also assassinated.