Thursday, November 27, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Deja vu all over again. CIA setting itself up for another Bay of Pigs, demanding that Obama cede conventional control of military to spooks. Kennedy 2
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
Let’s say that on Jan. 21 a massive car bomb meant for Osama bin Laden goes off in a Pakistani village, killing 120 local citizens but missing the elusive al Qaeda leader, who was riding in another vehicle.
In an elaborate press conference, the president of Pakistan blames the CIA. On an easel next to him is a three-by-five foot photo of the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, who is sent packing.
President Obama, in office for mere hours, finds out that the CIA did, in fact, plant the bomb, based on what it thought was solid intelligence that bin Laden was in the car.
How will the new president react?
That’s much on the mind of intelligence officials awaiting the Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration of Obama, a short-time U.S. senator with no discernable record and little demonstrated interest, so far, in intelligence issues.
“I was with a group of intelligence officers today,” Roger Cressey, a counterterrorism official in the Clinton White House, said on MSNBC Thursday night, “and I think the most important thing for the president to say is, ‘We’ve got your back.’ That ‘we want you to take risks — risks that conform with our law and our values as a country.’
“What the intelligence community is afraid of more than anything is the game of ‘Gotcha,’” Cressey said. “Which is, if they make a mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, the White House doesn’t support them, they’re left out to dry, and Congress crushes them. And then you get into that risk-averse mentality, which we saw for awhile. So that is what they want. They want support, so they know that the president is going to be behind them. But also that he’s going to lead them.”
CIA spokesman George Little parried a query about the agency’s expectations of Obama, but said, “Risk-taking is, of course, an essential and inherent part of what we do.
“CIA officers work hard every day to confront national security challenges, such as terrorism and weapons proliferation, with a level of creativity, agility, and sense of mission that the American people undoubtedly expect — and do so in accord with U.S. law,” Little said.
The bin Laden car bomb scenario, of course, isn’t far fetched.
In Beirut in 1985, the CIA hatched a plot to kill Sheikh Fadlallah, a leading figure in the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement of Lebanon, with a car bomb, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. The bomb killed 80 people, but not Fadlallah.
But the CIA, at least back then, wasn’t adverse to hiring killers.
In 1969, CIA Beirut station chief Robert Ames recruited a spy at the highest levels of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a charismatic terrorist by the name of Ali Hassan Salameh, AKA The Red Prince.
Three years later Salameh was an architect of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.
How would it play out today if something like that came out? Will Obama permit his CIA to recruit a stone-cold al Qaeda killer, not to mention stand by it if something goes wrong?
(The Israelis took care of the Salameh problem by killing him, according to various accounts.)
Or how about this scenario: The CIA, which has been trying to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, gets caught shipping centrifuges to Iran?
How will the new president react?
Such questions will only be answered when the new president enters the White House and “takes off the gloves,” in one of those tiresome post-9/11 phrases, with the world’s nasty boys.
I have no doubt the Chicago-made man will do it, and be smarter at it than his feckless predecessor.
And when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, that he’ll stand up and take it like a man, as John F. Kennedy did in April 1961, after he green-lighted his predecessor’s ridiculous plan for the CIA to invade Cuba with a force of 1,511 men.
“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” Kennedy said at a White House press conference, adding, “I am the responsible officer of the government.”
But the best favor a President Obama could do for the CIA is to nix such hare-brained schemes before they hatch, as Kennedy later wished he’d done with the Bay of Pigs caper.
For inspiration, he could take a page from the late Sen. Barry Goldwater. In 1985 the colorful Arizonan was presiding over the Senate Intelligence Committee when a CIA official mentioned the agency was thinking about overthrowing the leftist government of Suriname.
Goldwater was incensed. The CIA should be worrying about bigger things than a tiny country in South America.
“That,” Goldwater said, “is the dumbest f***** operation I’ve ever heard of in my life.”
“Do you really need this?” he asked President Reagan.
The idea was dropped.
Obama will need such friends of his own.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Never mind reality, al CIAda is STILL coming to getcha!
US facing second wave of 9/11 attacks
NEXT FEATURE
Boy hailed as Buddha's reincarnation
Thousands of people flocked to see a boy who reappeared after missing for more than a year and who some believe is a reincarnation of Buddha.
Al-Qaeda is reportedly planning a terrorist attack against the United States which will "outdo by far" the attacks of September 11 in 2001.
Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London reports a senior Yemen official close to Al-Qaeda as warning of a new wave of terror attacks against the western nation.
The source, who is not named, is quoted as being "very close to Al-Qaeda"
The newspaper is edited by Abdel al-Bari Atwan, who was the last journalist to edit Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.
The newspaper report, contained on the front page, suggests bin Laden has ordered a large scale attack against the United States which would "outdo by far" the attacks of September 11.
It comes as reports in Britain say there is clear evidence that thousands of extremists are living inside the United Kingdom.
In a message to loyalists, bin Laden is reported to have asked that his followers ignore all efforts to reconcile with Governments and other political parties - in effect keeping extremists isolated.
The newspaper's source said it was likely a sign of an imminent attack may be sent within the coming weeks.
The September 11 attacks against the United States killed nearly 3,000 people.
Russia's Pravda breaks the media silence and states the obvious
The basic truth is that Al Qaeda does not exist and never has. Al Qaeda is a manufactured enemy who was created by the Bush Administration in order to have an excuse to wage a war for the control of the world’s oil resources.
Did an American even hear the words “Al Qaeda” before 9-11? Or were we told that its alleged leader Osama Bin Laden has family who themselves have personal business relationships with George W. Bush’s family and that both families had financially profited considerably from the “War on Terror”?
If “Al Qaeda” was such an organized group terrorists as we are being told then why weren’t we the people notified of this evil threat when the US Cole was bombed a few months before 9-11? “Al Qaeda” is nothing more than a broad euphemistic umbrella classification used to group any Middle Eastern fighter under the Sun as an enemy. The most diabolical aspect of this public relations stunt is that it enables the current Administration to label any group it feels necessary to attack to appear to be related to an unprovable organized enemy while at the same time actually increasing its approval ratings by exploiting the basic primal fears of the American public. Furthermore when one realizes the questionable motivations that this Administration has used previously to attack an enemy, as what is now surfacing about the Iraq War, one begins to get the strange feeling that this Orwellian double-speak is nothing more than a smoke and mirror illusion whose true intentions would of made Goebbels himself jealous.
Think about it: How could a bunch of technologically unadvanced group of people from third-world nations such as “Al Qaeda” ever have any real central organization structure? If they had any real organization they would have most certainly attacked us again after September eleventh. Where are all the terrorist cells in this country? Contrary to what has been implicitly presented in the media there HAS NEVER been a single domestic terror cell caught since Bush has been in office! The majority of suspects that have been arrested and detained in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 with the exception of a handful have not been charged with crimes in anyway associated with terrorism. All of their crimes are minor and for the most part are ! related to immigration violations of some sort. There is some ambiguity in all of this though because to this day the Ashcroft Justice Department has been less than forthcoming with the specifics of these arrests. Why would this be the case if the justifications for these arrests were really legitimate? We have been bombarded by the media with every indignity from the duck-tape chronicles to the crop dusting threat. You would think that with all this seeming sensitivity by our government about informing the general populace about possible terror threats, especially when some of their sources came from “unnamed and confidential secondary sources”, that the Ashcroft Justice Department would have gone out of it’s way to mention to the public any terrorist connections that the people detained after 9-11 had and would of sworn by it on a stack of Bibles.
To date the only really suspicious activity of people detained after 9-11 were a group of Israelis who were caught in Jersey City, New Jersey filming themselves in the foreground of the burning World Trade Center with “looks of jubilation on their faces”. It was later confirmed that two of the gentlemen detained had known Mossad ties. While they were detained it is of no matter now as they were subsequently released from jail a few! weeks later and were allowed to go back to Israel with no questions asked by the direct authorization of the Justice Department. I guess they were just dropping off a box of cigars to Governor McGreevy?
What is even more illuminating about all of this is that to this day nobody has taken responsibility for the attacks of 9-11, including “Al Qaeda”. The only thing to link these attacks to anyone is the video tape of Osama Bin Laden that was conveniently found in a cave in Afghanistan that had him talking about the physical structure of the World Trade Center and the plane strike. The audio quality of this tape is so poor that any objective Arab-speaking analyst who was asked to give their opinion was unable to do so! as they claimed that just about all the words on it were inaudible. I believe an objective investigation into this original tape’s authenticity could verify if this admission is in fact genuine and could shed some light on the truth of the existence of “Al Qaeda”. But even if this tape is genuine what would this really prove? As I have already mentioned it is common knowledge that Osama Bin Laden is connected to George W. Bush’s family by a minimum of two degrees of separation. So in the grand scheme of things what does this really matter? That the Cobra Commander said he did it?
In summary, “Al Qaeda” does not exist nor has it ever. If it really existed to anywhere near the extent that we have been told then there would have been an attack on our homeland. Of course this proof of a negative is used by the Administration to justify themselves to the American public that they are doing their jobs, but when one realizes that “Al Qaeda” is really nothing more than an artificially manufactured enemy then what job are they really doing other than capitalizing off of people’s fears? What other issue does the present Administration have to offer the average working-class citizen other than security? And if security is really only a Red Herring platform issue, then of what use are they to begin with? In addition, ! if there were any degree of truth in the strength of “Al Qaeda” or even of their very existence then there would have been a much larger resistance in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. If an organization structure existed within “Al Qaeda” then you would have seen the Iraqi resistance be a much more conventional ! one. They would have had the communication capability and weapons arsenal to mount a more traditional counter-offensive against our troops and they would have been successful doing it because our force’s numbers are so minimal. This would have been a prime opportunity to defeat “the great satan” in front of the entire world. Their motivation to do so would have been so strong that in order for them to of not of done this one must make the quantum leap and conclude that “Al Qaeda” is much to do about nothing and always has been. The emperor is naked and running through the courtyard with a great big barrel of oil.
Original article posted here.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
More black ops, false flags and setting up Iraq for the slaying
Secret papers claim the feared assassin was hired to find links between Saddam and al-Qa'ida. Robert Fisk reports
Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only – state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida.
President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa'ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq's claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam's own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the "treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country".
The final hours of Abu Nidal, the mercenary whose assassinations and murderous attacks in 20 countries over more than a quarter of a century killed or wounded more than 900 civilians, are revealed in the set of intelligence reports drawn up for Saddam's "presidency intelligence office" in September of 2002. The documents state that Egyptian and Kuwaiti intelligence officers had asked Abu Nidal, whose real name was Khalil al-Banna, to spy for them "with the knowledge of their American counterparts". Five days after his death, Iraq's head of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, told a press conference in Baghdad that Abu Nidal had committed suicide after Iraqi agents arrived at the apartment where he was hiding in the city, but the secret reports make it clear that the notorious Palestinian had undergone a long series of interrogations prior to his violent demise. The records of these sessions were never intended to be made public and were written by Iraqi "Special Intelligence Unit M4" for Saddam. While Abu Nidal may have lied to his interrogators – torture is not mentioned in the reports – the documents appear to be a frank internal account of what the Iraqis believed his mission in Iraq to be. The papers name a Kuwaiti major, a member of the ruling Kuwaiti al-Sabbah family, as his "handler" and state that he was also tasked to "perform terrorist acts inside and outside Iraq". His presence in the country "would provide the Americans with the pretext that Iraq was harbouring terrorist organisations," the reports say.
"Coded messages indicate that the Kuwaitis asked him indirectly to find out whether al-Qa'ida elements were present in Iraq. Our conclusions were confirmed when he Abu Nidal started to mitigate his actions with irrational answers when asked about the data against him. He attempted to sidetrack his answers by not being specific and referring to historical matters. It was noted by the investigators that he went from short, ambiguous and unclear replies to generalities ... he seemed perturbed ... But once he became convinced of the weight of the evidence against him concerning his collusion with both the American and Kuwaiti intelligence apparatuses in co-ordination with Egyptian intelligence, he realised that his treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country had been exposed ..."
Abu Nidal was no stranger to Iraq. He had operated from Baghdad, Damascus and the Libyan capital of Tripoli when the regimes wanted to use him as a "gun for hire". It was Iraq which paid him to organise the attack on the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, in 1982, an attempted assassination which prompted Israel to accuse Yasser Arafat of responsibility and to begin its disastrous invasion of Lebanon, and Colonel Muammur Gaddafi later established a close relationship with Abu Nidal. In 1985, his crazed gunmen attacked Israeli-bound passengers at Rome and Vienna airports, killing a total of 18 people. His biographer Patrick Seale, who suggests that for some time Abu Nidal even worked for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, has written of how, when he feared treachery in his own ranks, a suspected spy would be buried alive, fed through a tube for days and then – if Abu Nidal's "court" deemed death appropriate – a bullet would be fired down the tube.
His own interrogation at the hands of Saddam's secret police, will therefore appear equally appropriate punishment for so cruel a man. Among the other crimes of which he was accused in the Iraqi intelligence report was the preparation of 14 booby-trapped suitcase bombs to be used on foreigners – Swiss and Austrian, according to the intelligence file – in the northern Kurdish area of Iraq, at the time a US-supported "safe haven", and an attempt to recruit new members for his so-called Fatah Revolutionary Council among Palestinians wounded by the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza who were recovering in Baghdad hospitals.
There are some oddities in the report and some unanswered questions. It says, for example, that Abu Nidal originally infiltrated Iraq from Iran on a false Yemeni passport years earlier, but that this was facilitated by his own representative in Kuwait, named as Nabil Uthman. Abu Nidal was said to have communicated to Kuwait via coded messages sent through Lebanon and Dubai. The papers give his date of birth as 1939 – he is believed to have been born in Jaffa in what was then Palestine in 1937 – and state that he resided in Libya in 1984 but "had no links with the Libyan authorities". He is also stated to have been imprisoned by the Egyptian security services for two months. The man who is said to have provided Abu Nidal with a "safe house" in Baghdad was interrogated in 2002 alongside the Palestinian and is named as Abdulkareem Mohammed Mustapha.
Could Abu Nidal really have entered Iraq from Iran, whose own intelligence services, would surely have questioned him? Could Abu Nidal have lived in secret in the Baathist state of Iraq without Saddam's own mukhabarat finding him? And for how long was he interrogated? The documents give us no answers to these questions.
His end is, however, recorded bleakly. "Upon being asked to accompany those charged with guarding him to a more secure location to continue the interrogation procedures, he requested that he be allowed to change his clothes. On entering his bedroom, he committed suicide. Unsuccessful attempts were made to resuscitate him ..." Nothing is known of the fate of Abdulkareem Mustapha, only that he was "submitted to court". But we do know where Abu Nidal now lies.
"The corpse of Sabri al-Banna", the final report concludes, "was buried on 29/8/2002 in al-Karakh's Islamic cemetery in Baghdad. Until a final resting place is found, a marker designates the place of burial and it was documented on video as well as on still photographs as 'M7'." No "final resting place" for this savage man appears ever to have been found.
Years of terror: A man as feared as Bin Laden
Abu Nidal, was once as feared as Osama bin Laden. His most notorious attacks included:
- 1978 His "Black June" movement blamed for murdering PLO members in London, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Kuwait and Rome.
- 1982 Israeli ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, shot in Mayfair, leaving him permanently paralysed.
- 1984 Jordanian airliner attacked by rocket on take-off from Athens. Assassinations included the British cultural attaché in Athens and the British deputy high commissioner in Mumbai.
- 1985 Egyptian airliner hijacked – six passengers murdered and 60 killed when the plane is stormed by Egyptian commandos
- 1985 Gunmen massacre 18 and wound 120 in attacks on El Al ticket desks at Vienna and Romeairports, bottom left.
- 1986 Machine-gun attack kills 22 in a synagogue inIstanbul; at least 20 passengers and crew are killed when Pan Am jet hijacked in Karachi, bottom right.
- 1988 Nine killed and 98 wounded when gunmenattack the Greek cruise ship the City of Poros.
Original article posted here.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Unintelligent: Theft of bomb making material. weazl suspects "intelligence" perhaps to be used in an "operation" Don't expect perps to be found.
Enough Semtex to make 56 bombs the size of the one used in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has been stolen from a French castle.
The 28 kilograms of the explosive were discovered to be missing yesterday along with an unknown quantity of detonators, but the Interior Ministry said they could have been taken more than a week ago.
The Lyon depot is situated in a disused 19th century castle at Corbas near Lyon and is used by a civil defence unit to store explosives needed for bomb disposal workers.
“A theft of explosives used by bomb-disposal experts to destroy munitions retrieved from former battlefields has taken place,” said a statement from the Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.
The statement said there had been “security failings” which gave the thieves their chance.
The Semtex is now being searched for by French anti-terrorist police who fear it could be used to attack civilian targets. Semtex is favoured by terrorists because it is powerful, has no smell and is almost impossible to detect.
“The investigation has to find out how they could have been stolen,” a police source said, adding that the authorities were taking the theft “very seriously.”
The incident comes just weeks after a French special forces soldier fired live bullets into a crowd of families attending a demonstration at a base open day in the country’s southwest.
Original article posted here.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
More psy ops bullshit: the dead boogieman is dying
From ANI
Washington, July 2: Two officials of the US' intelligence agency CIA have claimed that Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was on death bed as he suffered from a terminal kidney disease, and may live only for a few months.
The intelligence agency also managed to get the names of some of the medications Bin Laden was taking.
One of the two CIA officials familiar with the report that came out six-nine months ago, quoted it as saying, "Based on his current pharmaceutical intake we would expect that he has no more than 6-18 months to live and impending kidney failure."
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was the first person to claim that Laden suffered from kidney disease and was on dialysis.
"It's trying to make a diagnosis from thousands of miles away with only fragments of the medical chart," the Time magazine quoted Paul Pillar, the former top analyst and deputy director of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, as saying.
Frances Fragos Townsend, who was chief of the White House Homeland Security Council said, "I've read all the same conflicting reports that people have talked to you about. I never found one set of reporting more persuasive than another."
Original article posted here.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
If you thought there was any doubt about "terrorism" being a fraud, look who the Bush criminals are paying now: AL CIAda
Former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit. (Motti Kimche) | ||
| Former Israeli spymaster: We have year to hit Iran nukes Israel must destroy Iran's nuclear program within the next 12 months or risk being attacked with an atomic bomb itself, the former head of the Mossad told the British Sunday Telegraph. "As an intelligence officer working with the worst-case scenario, I can tell you we should be prepared," Shabtai Shavit, who served as Mossad chief from 1989 to 1996, told the British paper. "We should do whatever necessary on the defensive side, on the offensive side, on the public opinion side for the West, in case sanctions don't work. What's left is a military action."
Shavit added that a victory by Democratic nominee Barack Obama in the November presidential election would significantly lower the chances that the U.S. would approve of military action against Iran. "If [Republican candidate John] McCain gets elected, he could really easily make a decision to go for it," Shavit told the paper. "If it's Obama: no. My prediction is that he won't go for it, at least not in his first term in the White House." Shavit told the Telegraph, however, that Israel would not hesitate to go it alone, with or without U.S. support. "When it comes to decisions that have to do with our national security and our own survival, at best we may update the Americans that we are intending or planning or going to do something," Shavit told the paper. "It's not a precondition, [getting] an American agreement," he said. Meanwhile, Iran's foreign minister said on Sunday he did not believe Israel was in a position to attack the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program. "They know full well what the consequences of such an act would be," Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki told reporters. Speculation about a possible attack on Iran because of its disputed nuclear ambitions has risen since a report this month said Israel had practiced such a strike, prompting increasingly tough talk of retaliation, if pushed, from Tehran. Mottaki said Israel was still dealing with the consequences of its 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and was also suffering a "crisis of deepening illegitimacy" in the Middle East region. "That's why we do not see the Zionist regime in a situation in which they would want to engage in such an adventurism," he said when asked about the possibility of an Israeli attack. U.S. reportedly escalating covert operations against Iran Meanwhile, U.S. congressional leaders agreed late last year to President George W. Bush's funding request for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New Yorker magazine published online on Sunday. The article by reporter Seymour Hersh, from the magazine's July 7 and 14 issue, centers around a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which by U.S. law must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees. "The Finding was focused on undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change," the article cited a person familiar with its contents as saying, andinvolved "working with opposition groups and passing money." Hersh has written previously about possible administration plans to go to war to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including an April 2006 article in the New Yorker that suggested regime change in Iran, whether by diplomatic or military means, was Bush's ultimate goal. Funding for the covert escalation, for which Bush requested up to $400 million, was approved by congressional leaders, according to the article, citing current and former military, intelligence and congressional sources. Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. U.S. Special Operations Forces have been conducting crossborder operations from southern Iraq since last year, the article said. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of "high-value targets" in Bush's war on terrorism, who may be captured or killed, according to the article. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which include the Central Intelligence Agency, have now been significantly expanded, the article said, citing current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature, it said. Among groups inside Iran benefiting from U.S. support is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People's Resistance Movement, according to former CIA officer Robert Baer. Council on Foreign Relations analyst Vali Nasr described it to Hersh as a vicious organization suspected of links to Al-Qieda. The article said U.S. support for the dissident groups could prompt a violent crackdown by Iran, which could give the Bush administration a reason to intervene. None of the Democratic leaders in Congress would comment on the finding, the article said. The White House, which has repeatedly denied preparing for military action against Iran, and the CIA also declined comment. The United States is leading international efforts to rein in Iran's suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, although Washington concedes Iran has the right to develop nuclear power for civilian uses. Iran: If Israel attacks us, we'll respond with missiles Meanwhile, the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned that if his country is attacked, Tehran would strike back by barraging Israel with missiles and controlling a key oil passageway in the Persian Gulf, according to a state newspaper report published on Saturday. The report in the conservative Jam-e-Jam comes after the disclosure of a recent Israeli military exercise over the Mediterranean Sea that was seen as sending a message to Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari told the Iranian paper that there were strong deterrents against striking Iran including the country's missile power, the vulnerability of Israeli and U.S. forces in the region and the low probability of a successful attack. Iran has spread its nuclear facilities over various parts of the large country and has built key portions underground to protect if from possible Israeli or American airstrikes. But Jafari warned that if attacked, Iran would strike back, including choking off the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow outlet for oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf. "Naturally, any country coming under attack will use all of its capacity and opportunities to confront the enemy. Given the main route for energy to exit the region, one of Iran's steps will definitely be to exercise control on the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz," Jafari told Jam-e-Jam, which is affiliated with Iran's state-run radio and television network. In 2006, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also threatened to disrupt the world's oil supply if the United States attacked Iran. Iran is the world's fourth largest oil producer, and about 60 percent of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. "Should a confrontation erupt between us and the enemy, the scope will definitely reach the oil issue. ... Oil prices will dramatically increase. This is one of the factors deterring the enemy from taking military action against the Islamic Republic of Iran," Jafari was quoted as saying. Original article posted here. | ||
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
New York Time's take on CIA torture (though the whole premise of "911 Mastermind" is absurd)
A sketch of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, standing, during his arraignment this month.
THE PATH TO GUANTÁNAMO The house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, where Abu Zubaydah was seized in 2002.
The media operations hangar at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
INFORMATION Ramzi bin al-Shibh, seized as a terrorist suspect in 2002, soon cooperated with his interrogators.
The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”
Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers.
A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. “They’d have long talks about religion,” comparing notes on Islam and Mr. Martinez’s Catholicism, one C.I.A. officer recalled. And, the officer added, there was one other detail no one could have predicted: “He wrote poems to Deuce’s wife.”
Mr. Martinez, who by then had interrogated at least three other high-level prisoners, would bring Mr. Mohammed snacks, usually dates. He would listen to Mr. Mohammed’s despair over the likelihood that he would never see his children again and to his catalog of complaints about his accommodations.
“He wanted a view,” the C.I.A. officer recalled.
The story of Mr. Martinez’s role in the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, including his contribution to the first capture of a major figure in Al Qaeda, provides the closest look to date beneath the blanket of secrecy that hides the program from terrorists and from critics who accuse the agency of torture.
Beyond the interrogator’s successes, this account includes new details on the campaign against Al Qaeda, including the text message that led to Mr. Mohammed’s capture, the reason the C.I.A. believed his claim that he was the murderer of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the separate teams at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons of those who meted out the agony and those who asked the questions.
In the Hollywood cliché of Fox’s “24,” a torturer shouts questions at a bound terrorist while inflicting excruciating pain. The C.I.A. program worked differently. A paramilitary team put on the pressure, using cold temperatures, sleeplessness, pain and fear to force a prisoner to talk. When the prisoner signaled assent, the tormenters stepped aside. After a break that could be a day or even longer, Mr. Martinez or another interrogator took up the questioning.
Mr. Martinez’s success at building a rapport with the most ruthless of terrorists goes to the heart of the interrogation debate. Did it suggest that traditional methods alone might have obtained the same information or more? Or did Mr. Mohammed talk so expansively because he feared more of the brutal treatment he had already endured?
A definitive answer is unlikely under the Bush administration, which has insisted in court that not a single page of 7,000 documents on the program can be made public. The C.I.A. declined to provide information for this article, in part, a spokesman said, because the agency did not want to interfere with the military trials planned for Mr. Mohammed and four other Qaeda suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The two dozen current and former American and foreign intelligence officials interviewed for this article offered a tantalizing but incomplete description of the C.I.A. detention program. Most would speak of the highly classified program only on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Martinez declined to be interviewed; his role was described by colleagues. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A., and a lawyer representing Mr. Martinez asked that he not be named in this article, saying that the former interrogator believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. The New York Times, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked undercover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news articles and books, declined the request. (An editors’ note on this issue has been posted on The Times’s Web site.)
The very fact that Mr. Martinez, a career narcotics analyst who did not speak the terrorists’ native languages and had no interrogation experience, would end up as a crucial player captures the ad-hoc nature of the program. Officials acknowledge that it was cobbled together under enormous pressure in 2002 by an agency nearly devoid of expertise in detention and interrogation.
“I asked, ‘What are we going to do with these guys when we get them?’ ” recalled A. B. Krongard, the No. 3 official at the C.I.A. from March 2001 until 2004. “I said, ‘We’ve never run a prison. We don’t have the languages. We don’t have the interrogators.’ ”
In its scramble, the agency made the momentous decision to use harsh methods the United States had long condemned. With little research or reflection, it borrowed its techniques from an American military training program modeled on the torture repertories of the Soviet Union and other cold-war adversaries, a lineage that would come to haunt the agency.
It located its overseas jails based largely on which foreign intelligence officials were most accommodating and rushed to move the prisoners when word of locations leaked. Seeking a longer-term solution, the C.I.A. spent millions to build a high-security prison in a remote desert location, according to two former intelligence officials. The prison, whose existence has never been disclosed, was completed — and then apparently abandoned unused — when President Bush decided in 2006 to move all the prisoners to Guantánamo.
By then, whether it was a result of a fear of waterboarding, the patient trust-building mastered by Mr. Martinez or the demoralizing effects of isolation, Mr. Mohammed and some other prisoners had become quite compliant. In fact, according to several officials, they had become a sort of terrorist focus group, advising their captors on their fellow extremists’ goals, ideology and tradecraft.
Asked, for example, how he would smuggle explosives into the United States, Mr. Mohammed told C.I.A officers that he might send a shipping container from Japan loaded with personal computers, half of them packed with bomb materials, according to a foreign official briefed on the episode.
“It was to understand the mind of a terrorist — how a terrorist would do certain things,” the foreign official said of the discussions of hypothetical attacks. Thus did the architect of 9/11 become, in effect, a counterterrorism adviser to the American government he professed to despise.
A Break in Pakistan
When Mr. Martinez flew to Pakistan early in 2002, he was joining an increasingly desperate campaign to catch and question anyone who might know the plans for the next terrorist attack.
Months had passed since Sept. 11, 2001, without a single senior Qaeda figure being taken alive. Intelligence agencies were alarmed by the eavesdropping “chatter” about threats. But without a high-level terrorist in custody, the government had few sources to warn of plots in progress.
Then, in February 2002, the C.I.A. station in Islamabad, Pakistan, learned that Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda’s logistics specialist, was in Lahore or Faisalabad, Pakistani cities 80 miles apart with a combined population of more than 10 million. The hunt for the terrorist’s electronic trail grew intensive.
Armed with Abu Zubaydah’s cellphone number, eavesdropping specialists deployed what some called the “magic box,” an electronic scanner that could track any switched-on mobile phone and give its approximate location. But Abu Zubaydah was careful about security: he turned his phone on only briefly to collect messages, not long enough for his trackers to get a fix on his whereabouts.
That was when Mr. Martinez arrived, beginning what would be an unlikely engagement with the world’s worst terrorists.
The son of a C.I.A. technician who worked on the agency’s secret communications and eventually became a senior executive, Mr. Martinez grew up in Virginia, majored in political science at James Madison University and went directly into the C.I.A. training program not long before his father retired. He wound up in the agency’s Counternarcotics Center, learning to sift masses of phone numbers, travel records, credit card transactions and more to search for people.
“Deuce had a reputation as one of those eggheads who could sit down with a lot of data and make sense out of it,” said one former C.I.A. officer who knew him well. In the agency’s great cultural divide, he was a stay-at-home analyst, not an “operator,” one of the glamorous spies who recruited foreign agents overseas. His tool was the computer, and until the earthquake of 9/11 his expertise was drug cartels, not terrorist networks.
After the attacks, officials recognized that tracking drug lords was not so different from searching for terrorist masterminds, and Mr. Martinez was among a half dozen or so narcotics analysts moved to the Counterterrorist Center to become “targeting officers” in the hunt for Al Qaeda.
Colleagues say Mr. Martinez, then 36, threw himself into the new work with a passion. On a wall at the American Embassy in Islamabad, he posted a large, blank piece of paper. He wrote Abu Zubaydah’s phone number at the center. Then, over a week or so, he and others added more and more linked phone numbers from the eavesdropping files of the National Security Agency and Pakistani intelligence. They excluded known institutions like mosques and shops and gradually built a map of the network of contacts around Abu Zubaydah.
“It was a spider’s web,” said one person who saw the telephone chart. “Aesthetically it was quite pretty.”
Using the numbers, and premises linked to them, Mr. Martinez and his colleagues sought to identify Abu Zubaydah’s most likely hide-outs. They could not reduce the list to fewer than 14 addresses in Lahore and Faisalabad, which they put under surveillance. At 2 a.m. on March 28, 2002, teams led by Pakistan’s Punjab Elite Force, with Americans waiting outside, hit the locations all at once.
One of the SWAT teams found Abu Zubaydah, protected by Syrian and Egyptian bodyguards, at a handsome house on Canal Road in Faisalabad. It held bomb-making equipment and a safe loaded with $100,000 in cash, according to a terrorism consultant briefed on the event. Photographs of the raid reviewed by The Times last month showed Abu Zubaydah, a cleanshaven 30-year-old Palestinian, shot three times during the raid, lying face down in the back of a Toyota pickup before he was taken to a hospital.
At first, Abu Zubaydah fell in and out of consciousness, emerging occasionally to speak incoherently — once, evidently imagining himself in a restaurant, ordering a glass of red wine, a C.I.A. official said. The agency, desperate to keep him alive, flew in a Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon to consult. Within a few days, Abu Zubaydah was flown to Thailand, to the first of the “black sites,” the agency’s interrogation facilities for major Qaeda figures.
Thailand, which had long faced Muslim insurgents in its south, became the first choice because C.I.A. officers had a very close relationship with their counterparts in Bangkok, according to one American intelligence official. At first, the official said, “they didn’t even tell the prime minister.”
Inside a ‘Black Site’
It was at the Thai jail, not far from Bangkok, that Mr. Martinez first tried his hand at interrogation on Abu Zubaydah, who refused to speak Arabic with his captors but spoke passable English. It was also there, as previously reported, that the C.I.A. would first try physical pressure to get information, including the near-drowning of waterboarding. The methods came from the military’s SERE training program, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, which many of the C.I.A.’s paramilitary officers had themselves completed. A small version of SERE had long operated at the C.I.A.’s Virginia training site, known as The Farm.
Senior Federal Bureau of Investigation officials thought such methods unnecessary and unwise. Their agents got Abu Zubaydah talking without the use of force, and he revealed the central role of Mr. Mohammed in the 9/11 plot. They correctly predicted that harsh methods would darken the reputation of the United States and complicate future prosecutions. Many C.I.A. officials, too, had their doubts, and the agency used contract employees with military experience for much of the work.
Some C.I.A. officers were torn, believing the harsh treatment could be effective. Some said that only later did they understand the political cost of embracing methods the country had long shunned.
John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer who was the first to question Abu Zubaydah, expressed such conflicted views when he spoke publicly to ABC News and other news organizations late last year. In a December interview with The Times, before being cautioned by the C.I.A. not to discuss classified matters, Mr. Kiriakou, who was not present for the waterboarding but read the resulting intelligence reports, said he had been told that Abu Zubaydah became compliant after 35 seconds of the water treatment.
“It was like flipping a switch,” Mr. Kiriakou said of the shift from resistance to cooperation. He said he thought such “desperate measures” were justified in the “desperate time” in 2002 when another attack seemed imminent. But on reflection, he said, he had concluded that waterboarding was torture and should not be permitted. “We Americans are better than that,” he said.
With Abu Zubaydah’s case, the pattern was set. With a new prisoner, the interrogators, like Mr. Martinez, would open the questioning. In about two-thirds of cases, C.I.A. officials have said, no coercion was used.
If officers believed the prisoner was holding out, paramilitary officers who had undergone a crash course in the new techniques, but who generally knew little about Al Qaeda, would move in to manhandle the prisoner. Aware that they were on tenuous legal ground, agency officials at headquarters insisted on approving each new step — a night without sleep, a session of waterboarding, even a “belly slap” — in an exchange of encrypted messages. A doctor or medic was always on hand.
The tough treatment would halt as soon as the prisoner expressed a desire to talk. Then the interrogator would be brought in.
Interrogation became Mr. Martinez’s new forte, first with Abu Zubaydah; then with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the Yemeni who was said to have been an intermediary between the 9/11 hijackers and Qaeda leaders, caught in September 2002; and then with Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi accused of planning the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000, who was caught in November 2002.
Mr. bin al-Shibh quickly cooperated; Mr. Nashiri resisted and was subjected to waterboarding, intelligence officials have said. C.I.A superiors offered Mr. Martinez and some other analysts the chance to be “certified” in what the C.I.A. euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation methods.”
Mr. Martinez declined, as did several other C.I.A. officers. He did not condemn the tough methods, colleagues said, but he was learning that his talents lay elsewhere.
Another Suspect Is Seized
The hunt for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed involved the entire American intelligence establishment, with its billion-dollar arrays of spy satellites and global eavesdropping net. But his capture came down to a simple text message sent from an informant who had slipped into the bathroom of a house in Rawalpindi, near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
“I am with K.S.M.,” the message said, according to an intelligence officer briefed on the episode.
The capture team waited a few hours before going in on the night of March 1, 2003, to blur the connection to the informant, a walk-in attracted by the offer of a $25 million reward. The informant, described by one American who met him as “a little guy who looked like a farmer,” would later get a face-to-face thank you from George J. Tenet, then the C.I.A. director, at the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, intelligence officials say, and he was resettled with his reward money under a new identity in the United States.
Within days, Mr. Mohammed was flown to Afghanistan and then on to Poland, where the most important of the C.I.A.’s black sites had been established. The secret base near Szymany Airport, about 100 miles north of Warsaw, would become a second home to Mr. Martinez during the dozens of hours he spent with Mr. Mohammed.
Poland was picked because there were no local cultural and religious ties to Al Qaeda, making infiltration or attack by sympathizers unlikely, one C.I.A. officer said. Most important, Polish intelligence officials were eager to cooperate.
“Poland is the 51st state,” one former C.I.A. official recalls James L. Pavitt, then director of the agency’s clandestine service, declaring. “Americans have no idea.”
Mr. Mohammed met his captors at first with cocky defiance, telling one veteran C.I.A. officer, a former Pakistan station chief, that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer — the experience of his nephew and partner in terrorism, Ramzi Yousef, after Mr. Yousef’s arrest in 1995.
But the rules had changed, and the tough treatment began shortly after Mr. Mohammed was delivered to Poland. By several accounts, he proved especially resistant, chanting from the Koran, doling out innocuous information or offering obvious fabrications. The Times reported last year that the intensity of his treatment — various harsh techniques, including waterboarding, used about 100 times over a period of two weeks — prompted worries that officers might have crossed the boundary into illegal torture.
His cooperation came in fits and starts, and interrogators said they believed at times that he gave them disinformation. But he talked most freely to Mr. Martinez.
An obvious chasm separated these enemies — the interrogator and the prisoner. But Mr. Martinez shared a few attributes with his adversary that he could exploit as he sought his secrets. They were close in age, approaching 40; they had attended public universities in the American South (Mr. Mohammed had studied engineering at North Carolina A&T); they were both religious; and they were both fathers.
Mr. Mohammed, according to one former C.I.A. officer briefed on the sessions, “would go through these emotional cycles.”
“He’d be chatty, almost friendly,” the officer added. “He liked to debate. He got to the stage where he’d draw parallels between Christianity and Islam and say, ‘Can’t we get along?’ ”
By this account, Mr. Martinez would reply to the man who had overseen the killing of nearly 3,000 people: “Isn’t it a little late for that?”
At other times, the C.I.A. officer said, Mr. Mohammed would grow depressed, complaining about being separated from his family and ranting about his cell or his food — a common theme for other prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, who protested when the flavor of his Ensure nutrition drink was changed.
Sometimes Mr. Mohammed wrote letters to the Red Cross or to President Bush with his demands; the letters went to C.I.A. psychologists for analysis.
And there were the poetic tributes to Mr. Martinez’s wife, scribbled in Mr. Mohammed’s ungrammatical English and intended as a show of respect for his interrogator, according to a colleague who heard Mr. Martinez’s account.
But as time passed, Mr. Mohammed provided more and more detail on Al Qaeda’s structure, its past plots and its aspirations. When he sometimes sought to mislead, interrogators often took his claims immediately to other Qaeda prisoners at the Polish compound to verify the information.
The intelligence riches ultimately gleaned from Mr. Mohammed were reflected in the report of the national 9/11 commission, whose footnotes credit his interrogations 60 times for facts about Al Qaeda and its plotting — while also occasionally noting assertions by him that were “not credible.”
The interrogations the commission cited began just 11 days after Mr. Mohammed’s capture and ended just days before the commission’s report was published in mid-2004. Together they amount to a detailed history of Mr. Mohammed’s initiation into terrorism along with his nephew, Mr. Yousef; his plotting of mayhem from Bosnia to the Philippines; and his alliance with Osama bin Laden, to whom the egotistical Mr. Mohammed was reluctant to defer.
Mr. Mohammed also claimed a role in a long list of completed and thwarted attacks. Human rights advocates have questioned some of Mr. Mohammed’s claims, including the beheading of Mr. Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, suggesting that they may have been false statements made to stop torture.
But Mr. Martinez told colleagues that Mr. Mohammed volunteered out of the blue that he was the man who killed Mr. Pearl. The C.I.A. at first was skeptical, according to two former agency officials. Intelligence analysts eventually were convinced, however, in part because Mr. Mohammed pointed out to Mr. Martinez details of the hand and arm of the masked killer in a videotape of the murder that appeared to show it was him.
“He was a leader,” said a foreign counterterrorism official briefed on the episode. “He wanted to demonstrate to his people how ruthless he could be.”
Divergent Paths
On June 5, Mr. Mohammed made a theatrical return to the public eye at his Guantánamo Bay arraignment, with a long, graying beard and a defiant insistence that the American military commission could do no more to him than give him his wish: execution and martyrdom.
His interrogator has moved on, too. Like many other C.I.A. officers in the post-9/11 security boom, Mr. Martinez left the agency for more lucrative work with government contractors.
His life today is quiet by comparison with the secret interrogations of 2002 and 2003. But Mr. Martinez has not turned away entirely from his old world. He now works for Mitchell & Jessen Associates, a consulting company run by former military psychologists who advised the C.I.A. on the use of harsh tactics in the secret program.
And his new employer sent Mr. Martinez right back to the agency. For now, the unlikely interrogator of the man perhaps most responsible for the horrors of 9/11 teaches other C.I.A. analysts the arcane art of tracking terrorists.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Robert Fisk calls the CIA on its Al CIAda propaganda (a bit)
Last week the head of the CIA claimed it was winning the battle. Nonsense, argues Robert Fisk. The extremists in the Middle East are growing stronger
So al-Qa'ida is "almost defeated", is it? Major gains against al-Qa'ida. Essentially defeated. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," the CIA's boss, Michael Hayden, tells The Washington Post. "Near strategic defeat of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qa'ida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qa'ida globally – and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam." Well, you could have fooled me.
Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military – the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden's boasts – and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we've won?
Less than two years ago, we had an equally insane assessment of the war when General Peter Pace, the weird (and now mercifully retired) chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning but we are not losing". At which point, George Bush's Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, said he agreed with Pace that "we are not winning but we are not losing".
James Baker, who had just produced his own messy report on Iraq then said – reader, please do not laugh or cry – "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token, I'm not sure we're winning." Then Bush himself proclaimed, "We're not winning; we're not losing." Pity about the Iraqis. But anyway, now we really, really are winning. Or at least al-Qa'ida is "almost" – note the "almost", folks – defeated. So Mike Hayden tells us.
Am I alone in finding this stuff infantile to the point of madness? As long as there is injustice in the Middle East, al-Qa'ida will win. As long as we have 22 times as many Western forces in the Muslim world as we did at the time of the Crusades – my calculations are pretty accurate – we are going to be at war with Muslims. The hell-disaster of the Middle East is now spread across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Lebanon. And we are winning?
Yes, we've bought ourselves some time in Iraq by paying half of the insurgents to fight for us and to murder their al-Qa'ida cousins. Yes, we are continuing to prop up Saudi Arabia's head-chopping and torture-practising regime – no problem there, I suppose, after our enthusiasm for "water-boarding" – but this does not mean that al-Qa'ida is defeated.
Because al-Qa'ida is a way of thinking, not an army. It feeds on pain and fear and cruelty – our cruelty and oppression – and as long as we continue to dominate the Muslim world with our Apache helicopters and our tanks and our Humvees and our artillery and bombs and our "friendly" dictators, so will al-Qa'ida continue.
Must we live this madness through to the very end of the Bush regime in Washington? Is there no one in that magnificent, imperial city who understands what "we" are doing out here in the Middle East? Why on earth does The Washington Post even give room to the fantasies of a functionary from the CIA, the very organisation that failed to prevent 9/11 because – if we are to believe what we are told – a phone call in Arabic about crashing planes into the twin towers hadn't been translated in time? Are we going to bomb Iran? Is this what we are waiting for now? Or is it to be another proxy Iranian-American war in Lebanon, fought out by Hizbollah and the Israelis? And does Mike believe al-Qa'ida is in Iran?
Israel continues to build settlements for Jews – and Jews only – on Arab land. And Washington does nothing. Illegal though these settlements are, George Bush goes along with it. They fuel anger and frustration and a righteous sense of grievance – and Washington will not prevent this outrage from continuing. I open my Arab papers each morning to find new reasons why the Bin Ladens of this world will not go away.
Take the story that came out of Gaza this week. Eight Palestinian students won grants from the Fulbright scholarship programme to study in the United States. You'd think, wouldn't you, that it was in the interest of America to bring these young Muslim people to the land of the free. But no. Israel won't let them leave Gaza. It's all part of the "war on terror" which Israel claims it is fighting alongside America. So the US State Department has cancelled the scholarships. No, it's not worth turning yourself into an al-Qa'ida suicide bomber for such a nonsense. But it would be difficult to find anything meaner, pettier, more vicious than this in yesterday's papers.
Does Mike Hayden read this stuff? Or is he, like most of Washington, so frightened of Israel that he wouldn't say boo to a goose? Doesn't the CIA realise – or imagine – that as long as we allow the Middle East to fester under a cloak of injustice, al-Qa'ida will continue? Why are our forces – and this is a question I was asked in Baghdad – in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria (yes, US special forces have a base near Tamanraset), Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Tajikistan? (Yes again, French bomber pilots are based at Dushanbe to fly "close air support" for our lads in Afghanistan.)
And as long as we have stretched this iron curtain across the Middle East, we will be at war and al-Qa'ida will be at war with us. This new iron curtain, by the way, starts up in Greenland and stretches down through Britain and Germany, through Bosnia and Greece to Turkey. What is it for? What's on the other side? Russia. China. India.
These are questions we do not ask; certainly they're not the kind of questions that The Washington Post would dare to put to Mike and his chums at the CIA. Yes, we huff and we puff about democracy and freedom and human rights, though we give little enough of them to the Muslim world. For the kind of freedom they want – the kind of freedom that allows outfits like al-Qa'ida to flourish – is freedom from "us". And this, I fear, we do not intend to give them.
Mike Hayman may think the Muslim world is "pushing back" al-Qa'ida's "form of Islam", but I doubt it. Indeed, I rather suspect al-Qa'ida is growing stronger. Mike says they're defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But are they defeated in London? And Bali? And in New York and Washington?
Original article posted here.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
A perfect example of the fraudulence that is Al CIAda and the honeypot enticements and entrapments from the government masking itself as terrorists
22 May 2008
A masters student at the University of Nottingham who was arrested under the Terrorism Act under suspicion of possessing extremist material was studying terrorism for his dissertation, Times Higher Education can reveal.
Academics and students have expressed concerns about the police’s handling of the case, which saw police searching campus property.
Rizwaan Sabir, a 22-year-old who was studying in the politics department, was arrested along with a 30-year-old member of staff. Both were released without charge on 20 May after having been held in custody for six days.
Mr Sabir’s lawyer, Tayab Ali of McCormacks solicitors in London, told Times Higher Education that as preparation for a PhD on radical Islamic groups, Mr Sabir had downloaded an edited version of the al-Qaeda handbook from a US government website. It is understood that Mr Sabir sent the 1,500-page document to the staff member - who was subsequently arrested - because he had access to a printer. Mr Ali said: “The two members of the university were treated as though they were part of an al-Qaeda cell. They were detained for 48 hours, and a warrant for further detention was granted on the basis that the police had mobile phones and evidence taken from computers to justify this.”
The case highlights concerns that new anti-terrorism legislation allowing detention for 28 days without charge would lead to people’s being held for extended periods on the “flimsiest of evidence”, Mr Ali said.
“Why did it take so long for the police to reach the conclusions they did?” Mr Ali asked. “These are not unqualified police, they are the top counterterrorism command for the region. They should know the difference between a book that is useful for terrorism and one that is not.”
Academics at Nottingham have expressed deep concerns about the arrest’s implications for academic freedom. Bettina Rentz, a lecturer in international security and Mr Sabir’s personal tutor, said: “This case is very worrying. The student downloaded publicly accessible information and provoked this very harsh reaction. Nobody tried to speak to him or to his tutors before police were sent in. The whole push from the Government is on policy relevance of research, and in this case the student’s research could not be more policy relevant.”
Alf Nilsen, research fellow in law and social sciences, said: “What we’re seeing here is a blatant attack on academic freedom – people have been arrested for being in possession of legitimate research materials. How can we exercise our academic freedom if we are at risk of being arrested for possession of subversive material? This sets a very alarming precedent. Academic freedom on campus should be guaranteed for all staff and students regardless of their ethnic or religious backgrounds.”
Dr Nilsen added: “I perceive the current incident at Nottingham to be occurring in tandem with several other attempts by UK authorities to increase surveillance of the academy and, in particular, non-Western students and staff, and moreover as an episode that is symptomatic of a more general curtailment of civil liberties in UK society, which seems to particularly affect and victimise non-Western citizens.”
Students at Nottingham are circulating a petition asking for the university to guarantee that the freedom of academics and students will be protected. It asks the university to acknowledge its “disproportionate response” to the possession of legitimate research materials.
A spokesman for Nottingham confirmed that the police had been called after material was found on the computer used by a junior clerical member of staff. “There was no reasonable rationale for this person to have that information,” he said. “The police were called in on the basis of reasonable anxiety and concern. In response to that, the police made a connection with a student who, we understand, was impeding the investigation and arrested that person.”
He added that the edited version of the al-Qaeda handbook was “not legitimate research material” in the university’s view.
A Nottinghamshire police spokesman said the police had applied for a warrant to extend the detention. “The judge was satisfied with the evidence presented and granted the extension,” he said.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Promoting the mythology of "bad intelligence", rather than something worse (but more true)
By Mark M. Lowenthal
The U.S. intelligence community has failed. We have failed as a public institution and as a profession. We have failed not because of 9/11, or Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, or Iran's supposed WMD, or the horror stories about renditions and detentions. We have failed because we have not explained ourselves adequately and comprehensibly to the public -- describing our role, the limits within which we work and our view of what can be reasonably expected from us. We have failed because we have allowed ourselves to be caricatured, vilified and misrepresented by people who do not know us, do not like us and do not understand us -- or simply see us as convenient fall guys.
We have been, in a word, supine. And the net result has been a misguided restructuring of the entire intelligence community, based on faulty premises. Inside the community, our passivity has meant crippled morale; outside the community, it has meant a severely diminished view of the value of the crucial, difficult tasks we perform. And we have allowed others to burden us with entirely false and unrealistic expectations.
This is not meant as a critique of the current director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell; his predecessor, John D. Negroponte; or their staffs. They have done the best they could within a dysfunctional structure. But the fact remains that intelligence is now largely fated to be seen as a failed institution. It has also become a highly politicized one, which further dooms its future effectiveness. And that is a problem for all Americans, not just former intelligence analysts like myself.
The intelligence community's crucible was largely forged by two very different events: the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the failure to find WMD in Iraq. But the lessons that outsiders have learned from these two watersheds have often been glib, fatuous and contradictory.
In 9/11, intelligence was excoriated for "failing to connect the dots" -- a demeaning, inapt concept that, unfortunately, has entered the popular lexicon. But in Iraq, intelligence was blamed for connecting too many dots.
In 9/11, intelligence did not warn intensely enough. But in Iraq, intelligence warned too intensely.
In 9/11, intelligence was faulted for a "failure of imagination." But in Iraq, intelligence had too vivid an imagination.
In 9/11, the failure to share intelligence was seen as a major problem. But in Iraq, too much information -- such the fabricated reports about mobile bioweapons labs from the Iraqi defector infamously code-named "Curveball" -- was shared.
The subtext here, as we say in intelligence analysis, is that intelligence needs to be right all of the time. But it can't be, no matter how blithely the critics expect otherwise. And it's past time we all got used to that.
I understand why people are disappointed over the way the intelligence community handled 9/11 and Iraq. But that dismay should have been tempered by an understanding of what intelligence can and cannot do -- an explanation that the intelligence community has failed to provide.
First consider 9/11. No one has yet revealed the one or two or 10 things that, had they been done differently, might have prevented the attacks. In my view, and in the view of many of my colleagues, even the missed "operational opportunities" identified by the 9/11 Commission would have done little more than force al-Qaeda to send different terrorists into the United States, especially considering the legal rules at play at the time. Even if every "dot" had been connected, they would not have led to the tactical intelligence needed to stop those four planes on that Tuesday morning.
This is a profoundly disturbing message to send. Political leaders and the public would rather believe that al-Qaeda's attacks exploited flaws that have been found and fixed, letting us all return to our pre-9/11 feeling of safety. It is too disturbing to hear the truth: Despite what we have learned, despite the changes that we have made, it could indeed happen again. And it is both comical and distressing to see members of Congress declare that, with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004, the United States was once again safe.
Iraq, to my mind, was the more serious intelligence failure. Our analysis was wrong. That said, we did not go to war in 2003 because of a faulty National Intelligence Estimate. (NIEs are the consensus judgments of the 16-member intelligence community, as produced by the National Intelligence Council, which I helped lead during the Bush administration's first term.) Indeed, the notorious October 2002 NIE warning that Iraq possessed WMD had virtually no effect on anyone's decision about whether to go to war. It probably did not influence President Bush or other senior policymakers, who had pretty much made up their minds to invade Iraq months earlier. It had no effect on the Senate: As The Washington Post reported in 2004, no more than six senators read beyond the five-page executive summary of the NIE, although 77 senators voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Nor did the NIE have much effect on the United Nations: The Security Council declined to support the hawkish U.S. and British position despite the NIE's alarming (and alarmist) assessment of Iraq's arsenal.
The real problem with U.S. intelligence on Iraq is simply that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to envision an NIE based on good intelligence that would have come up with the correct answer. The best my fellow analysts could have done, I think, would have been to offer three analytical options: Saddam Hussein has WMD; he does not have WMD; or we simply do not know. And of course, given his track record of gassing Kurds, attacking neighbors and resisting U.N. weapons inspections, the most likely of the three still would have been that he had WMD. But analytical responses that cover the waterfront of possibilities are not seen as very useful to policymakers, for obvious reasons. Moreover, even if we had concluded that we just didn't know what Iraq had, Bush would have probably favored going to war anyway, and Congress would have gone along, largely out of political expediency.
The shock of 9/11 and the debacle over Iraqi WMD created an instant consensus that U.S. intelligence was seriously flawed and needed to be overhauled. The 9/11 Commission, which pushed hard for a new director of national intelligence to quarterback the sprawling intelligence community, offered recommendations for intelligence reform that had no logical connection to the story told in its bestselling but overrated final report. Meanwhile, the problems inherent in the new structure that the commission proposed were glossed over. The resultant intelligence-reform legislation was crafted by staffers on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee who had scant working knowledge of the way intelligence functions. Senior members of the intelligence community spent hours with the Senate staffers, trying to bring them up to speed on what intelligence is and how it works. (I speak from personal experience.)
To avoid repeating old blunders, much attention has been lavished on intelligence analysis. Standards of tradecraft and integrity have been introduced, and the NIEs have received various technical fixes. But the intelligence community's batting average has not gone up. And it won't, even though this was the unstated intention of all the changes.
Why won't the analysts' success rate change? Simply because there is not vast room for improvement. A lot depends on the nature of the issue and the question being asked. The intelligence community will do reasonably well at explaining whether China will become a major rival because "Whither China?" is a large, open-ended question that relies less on hard intelligence than on good suppositions. But determining where and when the next terrorist attack will come? That requires penetrating deep into closed al-Qaeda circles and depends on some awfully lucky breaks in data collection. The best that the U.S. government can reliably produce is some incremental improvements in analysis -- none of which will guarantee that the nation will not be surprised again.
The pressure to avoid another 9/11 or Iraq is so intense that the intelligence community is expending great effort to little gain. The state of the NIEs is a perfect example. The collectors of intelligence now have to swear by their sources, all of which will be thoroughly scrubbed. The push for consensus among the intelligence community's often squabbling agencies will end. But none of this will assure that the reliability of the estimates themselves will increase. More importantly, none of this will increase the likelihood that policymakers, in the executive branch or Congress, will read these often ponderous, densely written tomes.
The blunt truth? The intelligence community would be far better off scrapping NIEs altogether and going to a streamlined, better written product similar to the sharper assessments produced in Britain and Australia. And if we are going to be serious about improving intelligence analysis, we have to stop publishing the end products -- even in redacted forms that can show up in the pages of this newspaper. More than anything else, this certainty that internal assessments will wind up on public display stifles the vibrant, edgy, out-of-the-box analysis that everyone says they want -- until it disagrees with their political point of view, of course.
Intelligence is not in the business of prediction or forecasting. Intelligence tends to do worse on the "big events" (Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall) because these events, by their very nature, are counterfactual or surprising. Nor can intelligence eliminate the element of surprise.
Intelligence is actually good at something that can seem awfully mundane: keeping policymakers generally well-informed on a recurring basis so that they can make decisions with a reasonable sense of confidence. Given the frequency with which this occurs -- as opposed to the headline-grabbing crises -- this is no small service. Unfortunately, it is also no longer one that many people seem to value.
Mark M. Lowenthal is president and chief executive of the Intelligence & Security Academy LLC. From 2002-05, he was an assistant director of central intelligence and vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
Original article posted here.Saturday, May 17, 2008
Friday, May 16, 2008
How do we get the Europeans to get to be as scared as we are? How can we get Americans afraid without killing them? Well, here's an idea . . .
The championships, which begin on June 7 and are hosted by Switzerland and Austria, are in a "terrorist danger zone" and police are monitoring closely a number of internet chat forums linked to the terror group.
Juerg Buehler, a security expert with the Swiss federal police, said: "The Euro 2008 tournament is a potential target cited by the Islamist terrorist network."
Messages have been posted on "sos minbar" and "As-Sahab", two Islamist websites used by al-Qa’eda and its followers.
Mr Buehler said: "We are taking these threats seriously. We are on alert and we are following these jihad forums very closely. It is through these that Osama bin Laden’s agents awaken dormant cells.
"The situation is serious even if it is frustrated people hiding behind these sites."
According to the official, one site said: "Let’s transform the two most secure countries in Europe into hell, like the hell in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Other messages said: "The hour has come for fighters of the faith. They must make themselves heard" and "Austria must withdraw from Afghanistan".
A Swiss police spokesman Guido Balmer stressed that there was "no concrete evidence" that an attack was being planned but said all threats were taken seriously.
He said: "The tournament is a potential target, as are the Olympics and other big sporting events. They are in terrorist danger zones. But it is wrong to say that we have firm intelligence of a specific plot. We don’t have concrete evidence of preparation or planning. There are many discussions on Islamist websites which we are monitoring.
"A major event such as Euro 2008 could well be a rewarding goal from the perspective of terrorists."
More than five million people are expected to attend Euro 2008.
Sixteen teams are competing and the first match is in the Swiss city of Basle. There are eight venues in Switzerland and four in Austria.
Switzerland has been widely accused of Islamophobia in the Muslim world, notably because of opposition to the construction of mosque minarets in several Swiss cities.
Austria could also be a target because of the presence of its troops in the international force in Afghanistan.
Counter-terrorism experts say Islamist forums regularly carry threats of attacks which have to be studied, though few are to be taken seriously.
A little ancient history: