Who knew? Clearly if the Pentagon doesn't think its day care is sufficiently safe, then Bush's claims that the world is safer today is obviously flawed.
The Pentagon day care center is the bellweather by which all security should be measured.
Dress Code May Hinder Their Work, Air Marshals Say
Beards are out. So are jeans and athletic shoes. Suit coats are in, even on the steamiest summer days.That dress code, imposed by the Department of Homeland Security, makes federal air marshals uneasy - and not just because casual clothes are more comfortable in cramped airline seats. The marshals fear that their appearance makes it easier for terrorists to identify them, according to a professional group representing more than 1,300 air marshals.
Sheer genius.
Matthew Yglesias isn't happy that the SSCI Report was in the form an image, rather than a text document. Complains Matthew:
Which leads to the question, why did we need some folks at MIT to put this together? Why didn't the committee release it this way? The document in question, pretty clearly, was typed up on a computer and the technological process for turning a word processor file into a searchable PDF is neither difficult to master, nor some kind of high-level secret. Instead, though, the committee had someone print out a copy of the report, literally black out the redactions (instead of doing virtual redaction on the computer), and then scan the whole thing to create a non-searchable image file.
I have to agree that it makes no sense that the document is released as a image, rather than text. However, I think Matthew goes overboard on his explanation as to why:
I can't help but think that the staff was deliberately trying to create a hard-to-use public version of the text so as to leave reporters maximally dependent onspinbriefings from the staff rather than on the primary document. And as I've previously stated, an awful lot of stuff has been redacted -- I think there are people who don't really want us to know what this thing says.
In this case it is better to apply Occam's Razor: it was done this way because no one really thought about/the people who did aren't as techno-saavy as we in the Blogosphere would like them to be. (And to be fair, Matthew does offer the idea that it was prepared by "morons").
The honest to gosh truth of the matter is that most people do not use technology very well. I marvel at watching acquaintances and colleagues use multiple steps to do something simple with Word or IE when only one or two steps would be necessary. I am amazed that the e-mail memos I receive on campus from administrative types are almost always in the form of a Word attachment, rather than just having the text of the message in the e-mail itself. Even my students (who, at their ages, ought to be more on top of things technology-wise) often demonstrate woefully abilities (like the very sharp grad student who didn't know that Word could be set to save things are one works, and so when the student got a Blue Screen of Death, the paper being worked on was gone).
I have found that the younger one is (and I think Matthew is over 10 years my junior) the more likely one is to be impatient with the lack of technological smarts by others (or, at least, to assume that the whole world knows by now how to do this stuff). And the more one uses computers, the more one just doesn't get the seeming ineptitude of others.
Regardless, I do find the PDF released by the Senate to be annoying and a (a text version is here via Matthew from Josh Marshall).
Saudis: Bin Laden aide surrenders
A close associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was flown from Iran to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday after surrendering to security officials at the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, a Saudi Interior Ministry official said.Khaled al-Harbi was believed to have been living near the Afghan-Iranian border.
Video aired by the Arabic television network Al-Arabiya Tuesday showed al-Harbi being carried from a plane and placed in a wheelchair.
Others blogging on this: The Command Post, Stephen Green, and Jeff Quinton.
Thanks to Jeff and Barry Ritholtz for e-mail notification of the story.
Update: James Joyner has more.
Iraq Militants Threaten to Kill U.S. Hostage -- TV
A brief video showed a blindfolded man dressed in camouflage carrying a Marine Corps identity card that named him as Wassef Ali Hassoun. It also showed other official documents with his name.[...]
Hassoun is the latest foreigner to be kidnapped in Iraq. Earlier, Al Arabiya television broadcast a video from unidentified Iraqi gunmen who said they had kidnapped a Pakistani driver working for the U.S. military and who they threatened to behead unless Iraqi prisoners were freed.
Saturday, Jazeera aired a video tape allegedly from a group headed by al Qaeda-linked operative Abu Musab al Zarqawi in which it said it had kidnapped three Turks and threatened to behead them unless Turkish companies quit Iraq.
Ok, so this means that the terrorists have a US Marine with a Arab-sounding name, a Pakistani and three Turks (both muslim countries) and they are threatening to behead them all. Perhaps I don't understand their PR campaign here, but surely beheading muslims will be somewhat counter-productive. At a minimum it would help demonstrate that this is clearly a war waged by jihadist fanatics against the whole world, including non-jihadist muslims.
Indeed, along those lines, the AP has the following:
The masked gunmen, who held assault rifles across their chests, said they would behead the Pakistani within three days unless the Americans freed prisoners held at Abu Ghraib and three cities of central Iraq--Balad, Dujail and Samarra. The gunmen said they captured the Pakistani near the U.S. base at Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad.The hostage, who gave his name as Amjad, urged Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to close the Pakistani Embassy in Iraq and to ban Pakistanis from coming to Iraq.
"I'm also Muslim, but despite this they didn't release me," he said, bowing his head. "They are going to cut the head of any person regardless of whether he is a Muslim or not."
Hat tip: Jeff Quinton.
I don't wish to be overly glib about a topic as signficant as the treatment of prisoners, but really, many in the press need to whip out Webster's (or better yet, some good histories on warfare) and look up "torture." Don;t they realize that they diminish the singificance of the word, not to mention deflect potentially important attention from allegations of abuse by defining the term in an overly broad fashion?
Here's an example from
WaPo's Reliable Source column by Richard Leiby (hat tip to Michelle Malkin). From the column we have:
United we stand: In a just-revealed notation on a 2024 memo about interrogation tactics, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld indicated that making terrorism detainees stand for up to four hours was no biggie in the physical stress department. "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," Rummy scrawled. "Why is standing limited to four hours?"Yesterday, underlings were happy to confirm that their 71-year-old boss does, indeed, toil for hours without sitting. Evidently he enjoys it. "There is no chair at his desk in his office," spokeswoman Hollen Wheeler told us. "When he works, he stands. When he reads or writes, he uses a stand-up desk all day. . . . Maybe that's a tribute to his health. He's in great shape."
But what about when Rumsfeld relaxes? "When he has lunch with people he sits down," said a defense official who asked not to be identified. "But what he does when he eats alone, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if he stood."
Further proof that one man's torture is simply another man's posturing.
Please. So making someone stand up for more than four hours should be defined as "torture"? Perhaps not fun, but torture? I think not.
I do understand the difference between working in an office and having to stand in front of interrogators. Still, I have a hard time seeing it as particularly extreme.
James Joyner points to the following NYT piece, Iraqis, Seeking Foes of Saudis, Contacted bin Laden, File Says, which shows, yet again, that claims by the administration of Iraq-al Qaeda communication and cooperation are not the stuff of fantasy, but of stark reality.
Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq.
Indeed, it has long struck me that the appropriate approach for opponents on the war to take on the Saddam-al Qaeda ties is not to insist that cooperation between the two sides was nonexistent, but rather that it was unimportant. Of course, I don't accept that position, but it is more intellectually honest than to insist that no ties existed. Of course, the problem for critics of the war is that to admit al Qaeda-Saddam ties of any consequence is to concede that there might have been some justification for the invasion on war on terror grounds.
I would also note that the reporters at the Times need to read their own columnists, because the following statement is inaccurate, as the Commission reached no such conclusions, rather a staffer did:
Last week, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks addressed the known contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which have been cited by the White House as evidence of a close relationship between the two.The commission concluded that the contacts had not demonstrated "a collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Bush administration responded that there was considerable evidence of ties.
The piece does refer to the commission document as a "staff report" six paragraphs from the bottom of the story in a thirty-two paragraph piece.
At any rate, I would encourage the reading of the entire story. And as James notes is his post, even the anti-Iraq war (indeed, anti-Bush terrorism policy) author of the book, Imperial Hubris corroborates this information in his first book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes.
Update/Correction: In the original version of this post, I cited the book Imperial Hubris as corroborating the NYT piece--right author, wrong book. I have fixed the reference above.
I meant to comment on this earlier, but didn't get around to it. Bill Safire's column from Monday points out something that was not clear in the reporting last week on the "no al Qaeda ties" meme: The Zelikow Report
"Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie" went the Times headline. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" front-paged The Washington Post. The A.P. led with the thrilling words "Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. . . ." This understandably caused my editorial-page colleagues to draw the conclusion that "there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. . . ."All wrong. The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission's runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow.
Setting aside the "runaway staff" quip, it is significant that the memo that caused all that buzz last week was not the work of the entire Commission, but rather was a staff memo with interim conclusions. However, this was not the way the info was reported. Instead, it was presented, writ large, as a conclusion of the Commission itself.
Not only was the initial reporting of the contents of the memo skewed (it was reported by many as simply "commission finds no ties between al Qaeda and Saddam" instead of noting that the specific issue was 911 ties), but the authority of the memo was inflated, to say the least.
Slain South Korean Spoke Arabic, Was Devout Christian
On Monday, Kim Sun-il stood gesticulating as he shouted desperately at the camera, "I don't want to die."On Wednesday, the Arabic interpreter and devout Christian who dreamed of missionary work in the Arab world knelt silently and impassively before his Muslim militant captors beheaded him.
The scenes from videotapes aired on Arabic television station Al Jazeera were broadcast repeatedly on South Korean television, sending a chill through many people who already had reservations about the government's plan to send troops to Iraq.
All very tragic, and yet again underscoring the barbaric nature of this enemy. One wonders if the beheading routine will continue, or if they will have to find new and more terrible methods of execution to maintain the attention of the public/to maintain the appropriate level of fear.
The good news in all of this is that it seems that on balance these groups have been degraded to the point that their main mode of attack is kidnapping and murder, rather than large scale attacks. I think this is a potentially significant fact, though it is no solace to the families of the victims.
U.S. Revises Up 2024 Terrorism Deaths to 625
The Bush administration on Tuesday will say terrorism killed 625 people in 2024, more than double the 307 deaths it cited in a faulty report used to argue it is winning the war on terrorism, a U.S. official said.The revisions to the April "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report have embarrassed the Bush administration and dented its argument that Washington is prevailing in the war on terrorism, a key part of President Bush's re-election strategy.
[...]
The U.S. official, who asked not to be named, said deaths from international terrorist attacks last year remained below 2024's total of 725 fatalities.
The official said the key reason for the sharp revision in the number of deaths was the U.S. government's failure to count a series of deadly attacks in November and December last year, including bombings in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
He said the number of international terrorist attacks last year was revised up to 208 from the 190 the State Department initially reported. Some of the attacks involved large numbers of deaths.
He said the number of attacks in 2024 was also revised up to 205 from the 198 originally reported.
Not a surprise, I'm afraid: Al-Qaida: Saudis Aided American Abduction
The al-Qaida group responsible for abducting and killing an American engineer says it was aided by sympathizers in the Saudi security forces, a claim that was denied by Saudi authorities.[...]
It said Saudi security forces provided uniforms and police cars to militants who then set up a fake checkpoint to kidnap Paul M. Johnson Jr. The militants say they posed as police to stop Johnson's car, anesthetized him and carried him to another car.
I would note, however, that this does not help the argument that the Saudis killed al-Moqrin after he killed Johnson because of the collaboration by som security forces with al Qaeda. Indeed, it is clear that not all the security forces are traitors, otherwise I am guessing that al-Moqrin would still be alive.
Still, there is little doubt that there are serious, serious problems within the Kingdom.
James Joyner reports that Algeria's al Qaeda leader has been killed.
Unfortunately this appears to be the only way to deal with this group.
Saudis: Hostage's Slayers Die in Shootout
Saudi TV broadcast pictures Saturday of four bloodied bodies that authorities identified as the reputed leader of al-Qaida in the kingdom and three other militants killed in a gunbattle after dumping the mutilated body of an American hostage.
The photo of the body (here) looks like the mug shots they were showing on the news last night.
From the NYT: Acting on Threat, Saudi Militant Group Kills Captive American
First off, indeed:
"The murder of Paul shows the evil nature of the enemy we face," President Bush said. "There's no justification whatsoever for his murder, and yet they killed him in cold blood. And it should remind us that we must pursue these people, and bring them to justice before they hurt other Americans."
And hopefully so:
Saudi Arabia's security forces arrested 10 supporters of Mr. Muqrin's, Al Arabiya television reported on Saturday, according to Reuters. Al Arabiya, quoting security sources, said the arrests took place on Friday night in Riyadh. It said the 10 people seized were believed to be part of the same cell as Mr. Muqrin.
And one would like to think that this is true, however I find this to be a dubous proposition:
Mr. Muqrin's death would remove the source of much of the recent bloodshed, with no obvious replacement. "Al-Muqrin is the last well-known leader of Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia," said Mushairy al-Zaidy, a journalist and specialist in extremist groups, speaking on Al Arabiya. He noted that two other leaders had been killed in the past three months, leaving Mr. Muqrin the most prominent of the 18 wanted terrorists still at large. "There is no one as important to replace him," he said.
I suppose it depends on what "well-known" means and how significant notoriety is. Hopefully there isn't anyone to replace him, but one fears that replacements are readily available. Still, it does mark progress.
Last night I heard at least two different individuals on two different news networks question why it was that the Saudis could kill al-Moqrin after Johnson was killed, but not before. The implication was clear, and in at least of the cases quite explicit: the Saudis simply didn't care about saving Johnson, even though they probably could have,
Now, such speculation strikes me as highly problematic for at least two reasons. First, within hours of the event there was hardly sufficient information to lead to such a conclusion. Second, it strikes me that the Saudis had every incentive to stop the Johnson killing, as if the terrorists are successful in scaring off US workers from the oil industry, the the Saudi economy will suffer. As much as we need Saudi oil, they need as well to help get the oil out of the ground, among other things.
It seems that with the scant information available, that the logical conclusion is that something about the disposal of the body or the delivery of the video tipped off the Saudi security forces leading to al-Moqrin's whereabouts and his subsequent death.
al-Qaida Leader Killed in Saudi Raid
A U.S. official confirmed that al-Moqrin has been killed. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.To establish identities, one Saudi official said forensic tests would be conducted on three bodies of militants killed in a shootout in a downtown neighborhood shortly after the discovery of Paul M. Johnson Jr.'s body.
The killing of Abdulaziz al-Moqrin, 31, would be a coup for the Saudi goverment, which has been under intense pressure to halt a wave of attacks against Westerners in the kingdom.
Sadly, too late to save Paul Johnson, but good news nonetheless. It is also good, from a general War on Terror perspective, that the Saudis are being quite proactive in fighting al Qaeda.
Unconfirmed Reports Say Saudi Qaeda Leader Killed -TV
Al Arabiya television said it had unconfirmed reports that the top al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, was killed Friday.The television, which is majority owned by Saudis, did not give any details. Muqrin's group had earlier beheaded American engineer Paul Johnson in Riyadh. Shortly afterwards, Saudi forces killed three militants in a shootout in the capital.
Reuters reports:
Saudi security forces killed three suspected militants in the Saudi capital Riyadh Friday, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television said.It said the three were killed in the al-Malazz district but gave no further details. The area has been the scene of a massive security search after al Qaeda militants shot dead a U.S. contractor there last week.
The television did not say whether the militants were killed during a search for the body of U.S. hostage Paul Johnson, who al Qaeda said it beheaded earlier Friday.
President Bush Salutes Soldiers in Fort Lewis, Washington:
I also am mindful of this: When the President of the United States speaks, he must mean what he says.I mean what I said, and the Taliban found that out, thanks to the United States military and our friends.
Reuters now has the details
Al Qaeda militants beheaded an American engineer they had held hostage since last week after the Saudi government failed to meet its demands to release jailed militants, an Islamist Web site said Friday."As we promised the mujahideen, we have beheaded the American hostage Paul Marshall after the deadline that the mujahideen gave to the tyrannical Saudi government passed," a statement signed by the Organization of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said on al Islah Web site.
The Web site showed three pictures of what appeared to be Paul Marshall Johnson's severed head. One showed the bloodied head propped up on the back of a body in an orange uniform with a knife on the face.
A second picture showed a hand lifting up the head and a third image showed the body and the severed head from a different angle.
"This act of revenge is to heal the hearts of believers in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula," the statement said.
James Joyner has some additional info as well.
This, along with the Nick Berg beheading, is a quintessential example of true terrorism: the use of kidnapping and execution via beheading amount to nothing more than an attempt to induce sufficient fear in the population that it will induce calls for policy change in the Middle East and, more specifically, to dissuade westerners from working in the Middle East. The events themselves, though horrific and utter tragedies for the families, aren’t by any means enough to affect the oil industry or the rebuilding in Iraq.
One thing is for sure: these lunatics are willing to damage the economies of their homelands (or, more broadly, the lives of Arabs and muslims) to damage the US. How much better of would “their people” be if similar amounts of energy was put into making the Middle East a better place to live for all.
MSNBC and CNN in breaking news banners are reporting that al Qaeda has beheaded hostage Paul Johnson.
The source of the story is al Arabiya.
UPDATE: Barry Ritholtz, via e-mail, notes that the same story has hit the Dow Jones newswire
The bottom line about this entire discussion is that the way in which one views the war is going to affect the way one views this report. This fact is going to be radically amplified if one's goal is to bolster one's "side" (i.e., pro-Bush or anti-Bush). Indeed, the "Spy v. Spy" version of the argument, which I am trying to avoid (but it is quite easy to get sucked into) can rapidly boil down to an argument not about facts, or even reasonable inference, but about who said what--as in: "oh yeah? Well, Bush said...".
Now, I am not saying that what the President has said isn't relevant--it is, especially if the goal is to determine his understanding of the situation,or his honesty or in other issue directly relevant to Bush. However, what Bush has or has not said is not directly relevant to 1) what the 911 Commission report actual says, 2) what the reality of Saddam regime-al Qaeda connections may have been, or 3) the press spin on this issue.
Briefly, I will say that in regards to #1, there are certainly statements made by the Bush administration that no doubt exaggerated the connection--which I think was a result of a combination of rhetoric, politics and actual belief. In regards to #3 it is pretty clear that many in the press, who appear to be anti-war, anti-Bush, or both, lead rather vigorously on the issue of the Commission's statement that there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in regards to 911. As I noted the other day, this was heralded as no connection whatsoever, but that isn't what the report says. Indeed, in paying attention to the reporting, the cycle went like this: first the report was that there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, then it was simply reiterating what was already known for anyone paying attention, that there is no evidence that Saddam helped with 911, and then ended up with the more nuanced (if I may use the term) position that combined the lack of 911 connection with the fact there was some evidence of numerous communications between Saddam and al Qaeda. Even NPR yesterday morning admitted that there were some "sketchy" connection between the two. Now, that is hardly a ringing endorsement, but when the banner headlines had been "NO CONNECTIONS" any admission of contact was something of a concession that really we remain at the status quo ante: we know that there were some contacts between the regime and al Qaeda, but we disagree on what that might mean.
Speaking for myself (and I note that because if you want to argue with me, argue with me--don't argue as if I a spokeman for the administration who is responsible for everything ever said by the admin--it isn't that I don't want to hear it, or that it is unimportant--it is just on this topic, and practically all others, I am tired of comments that amount to nothing more than acting like I am the White House Press Secretary (no, lest I be misunderstood, I am not griping at you, Bret--but others))...anyway, speaking for myself I find it highly plausible that in a situation in which al Qaeda, over a decade, had been getting bolder and bolder in successfully attacking the United States, with 911 being the crescendo. To me, I find it highly plausible that in thaht context that bin Laden would be willing to work with a secular regime like Saddam's if it furthered his goals of striking at the West. Further, Saddam, who was suffering under no-fly zones and sanctions, might agree to such an alliance if conditions were ripe. That it had no happened yet does not mean that it could not, or would not. As such, on going communication between the regime and al Qaeda suggests that such an outcome was possible. It is made further possible by the fact that there is clear evidence that Saddam would support terrorism if it served his purposes.
Quite frankly,the 911 Commission report itself in fact can be seen to bolster this position. From page 5 of the report (and I have included the entire paragraph, which includes info that both sides could use in their argument-i.e., no cherry-picking (indeed, this paragraph contains all the document's references to Iraq):
Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite
his opposition to Hussein’s secular regime. Bin Laden had in fact at one time sponsored
anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with
Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Laden to cease this support and arranged for contacts
between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three
visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested
space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq
apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al
Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear
to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Laden associates have
adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible
evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.
For one thing, this all demonstrates that bin Laden was indeed willing to consider working with Saddam. And it also shows that Saddam was at least willing to listen. A gigantic smoking gun? No. Setting the stage for potential collaboration if circumstances allowed? Not an unreasonable conclusion. Enough in and of itself to go to war? No. A piece of a puzzle that might have led to weight to a case for war? Yes. Does the the 911 Commission's conclusion emphatically destroy the claim that there have been contacts between the two sides that could have resulted in collaboration. Absolutely not.
Now granted, if you are against the war, or view the War on Terror as a more law enforcement problem, you remain unconvinced. That is a legitimate position. However, for either side to act as if this is a slam-dunk (to borrow a phrase) that proves their position, then I would argue that this is a partisan response to the material, and not a reasonable one.
James Joyner has a new TCS: Tech Central Station column on the Saddam-al Qaeda connection debate.
It must be good, because he cites me!
And, more importantly, it does a good job of placing the issue of Saddam and Islamic terrorism in the proper context.
Air Defenses 'Unprepared' for 9/11 - Report
U.S. fighter jets had virtually no chance to shoot down or intercept four hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2024, because of confusion and poor communication among "unprepared" officials responsible for America's air defenses, a special commission said on Thursday.
1. This strikes me as a rather obvious fact that I would say I pretty much figured out on my own either on 9/11 itself, or certainly by 9/12.
2) This shouldn't be a surprise. While it is reasonable to state that after the first two aircraft had hit the WTC that an order would have gone out to shoot down other aircraft, BUT the fact of the matter is the surprise nature of the attack and the mindbending idea of shooting down civilian aircraft full of US citizens would have certainly created sufficient confusion that in the amount of time in question it strikes me as almost impossible to expect that the outcome would have been any different.
I say this not to defend anyone or to support the administration. I just think to act all surprised and dramatic that it wasn't automatic and easy for military jets to take out airliners in a narrow window of time in which a paradigm shift took place on what hijackers do with airplanes is just a bit over the top.
I have a great deal of faith in the US military and the Air Force in particular, but I don't expect miracles, which is what it would've taken to have gotten to the Pentagon jet in time (which is essentially what we are talking about--as it was impossible to stop the WTC jets and the Pennsylvania jet was taken out by the passengers).
Yahoo! News - 9/11 Panel Says Iraq Rebuffed Bin Laden
Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaida target the United States.
There is a problem with that paragraph: the administration has blatantly stated that Saddam was not involved in 911 (although I will grant that Cheney made statements that left the connection nebulous). In other words, al Qaeda ties and 911 ties are separate issues. However, the report does address broader al Qaeda issue:
The Iraq connection long suggested by administration officials gained no currency in the report."Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded," the report said. "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida also occurred" after bin Laden moved his operations to Afghanistan in 1996, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," it said.
"Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq," the report said.
Part of the problem with all of this, and why the debate no doubt will continue, is that the we treat "al Qaeda" like it is a strong institution like the Lions Club that has bylaws, a governance structure and clear membership lists. However, this is not the case: is it is a somewhat elusive and loosely constructed group of terrorists. For example, James Joyner noted a piece in the online version of Foreign Policy entitled Think Again: Al Qaeda by Jason Burke. Note the first question:
“Al Qaeda Is a Global Terrorist Organization”No. It is less an organization than an ideology. The Arabic word qaeda can be translated as a “base of operation” or “foundation,” or alternatively as a “precept” or “method.” Islamic militants always understood the term in the latter sense. In 1987, Abdullah Azzam, the leading ideologue for modern Sunni Muslim radical activists, called for al-qaeda al-sulbah (a vanguard of the strong). He envisaged men who, acting independently, would set an example for the rest of the Islamic world and thus galvanize the umma (global community of believers) against its oppressors. It was the FBI—during its investigation of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa—which dubbed the loosely linked group of activists that Osama bin Laden and his aides had formed as “al Qaeda.” This decision was partly due to institutional conservatism and partly because the FBI had to apply conventional antiterrorism laws to an adversary that was in no sense a traditional terrorist or criminal organization.
Although bin Laden and his partners were able to create a structure in Afghanistan that attracted new recruits and forged links among preexisting Islamic militant groups, they never created a coherent terrorist network in the way commonly conceived. Instead, al Qaeda functioned like a venture capital firm—providing funding, contacts, and expert advice to many different militant groups and individuals from all over the Islamic world. [itals mine]
Indeed, right after 911 Secretary of State Powell often noted that al Qaeda was like a "holding company" that helped interested parties commit acts of terror.
So, you therefore get debates on how to categorize Ansar al Islam and al-Zarqawi -- ideologically he fits in this broad umbrella of al Qaeda's ideological perspective, but he is also described as a rival to bin Laden.
Setting aside presidential politics in this discussion, part of the problem has always been, vis-a-vis terrorism and Iraq, general confusion over what "al Qaeda" means and how much of a true organization it represents, and how much of it is simply a question of a network of terrorist loosely aligned and how much of it means Osama bin Laden specifically. The term is often used, by all sides of the issue, as if it represents a mythical nation-state with whom we are at war. Reality is far more complex than that.
One thing that this report indicates is that for those who said that bin Laden would never deal with the secularist Saddam were wrong: we have here bin Laden directly asking Saddam for support. For those who thought that Saddam would jump at the chance to aid bin Laden we find that they were wrong as well: Saddam rejected the opportunity.
I supported the war for a variety of reasons, and still do. Chief amongst the reasons I thought it was a good idea are similar to those of Thomas Friedman: I think that a secular, even quasi-democratic, successful Arab state will do more to curtail the long-term growth of terrorism than anything else that we could do. From there the fact that I fully believed the regime to have WMDs (and I am still not convinced that they weren't there at all) and the fact that the Iraqi state was a supporter of terrorism, even if there was no direct aid to bin Laden, is indisputable in my mind.
IN re: terrorism,I would cite: Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas was given sancutary in Iraq and allowed to train terrorists, Abu Nidal had sanctuary in Iraq, Saddam was paying the families ofsuicide bombers $25k for successful attacks, and the fact that some Saddam supporters, including some clearly trained by Saddam's regime, to engage in suicide bombing show that the regime was willing to use the ideology of radical Islam to its own ends.
Spanish Judge Ties Suspects To 9/11
A Spanish investigating judge today said he had concluded a comprehensive, eight-year probe into Islamic extremist activity in Spain, and his report will likely lead to formal charges and trials for 15 suspected militants accused of helping to plan the Sept. 11, 2024, terrorist attacks in the United States, according to media reports here citing the unreleased document.The judge, Baltasar Garzon, did not make his conclusions public, but the Spanish news reports, citing court sources, said 14 people now in custody and one man free on bail face terrorism charges for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Under Spain's legal system, judges have wide latitude to conduct lengthy investigations. The results form the basis of prosecutions, indictments and trials.
Among those named in the report is Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, also known as Abu Dahdah, the alleged leader of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network in Spain. The news reports said he would be charged with 3,000 counts of murder for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Spanish investigators have said that a principal suspect charged in the March train bombings in Madrid, a Moroccan immigrant named Jamal Zougam, was a follower of Yarkas. Yarkas has been jailed since November 2024.
Another judge, Juan del Olmo, is investigating the train bombings.
Here's the Atta connection:
In March and April, Spanish investigators, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the leader of the Sept. 11 hijack team, Mohamed Atta, was known to have visited Spain twice in the months before the attacks, in January and July 2024. On July 7, 2024, with the attack planning in its final stages, Atta flew from Miami to Madrid on an American Airlines flight using an Egyptian passport and a U.S. visa, a Spanish investigator said. Atta traveled to Salou, a beach resort in the Catalan region, and stayed one night, July 17, at the small Montsant Hotel, paying $30 with a credit card for a room.Atta also traveled in July to Tarragona, where much of the final planning for the Sept. 11 attacks is believed to have taken place. Investigators have said he rented a car and are trying to trace his credit card records to determine his movements. Atta left Spain for Miami on July 19, an investigator said.
Most interesting and concerning.
Somali Charged with Plotting to Blow Up Ohio Mall
A Somali man living in Ohio was charged with plotting with al Qaeda supporters to blow up a shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio, Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Monday.According to an indictment unsealed in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday, Nuradin Abdi, 32, attended a camp in Ethiopia for military-style training in "preparation for violent jihad."
Ashcroft said after receiving his training in Africa, Abdi returned to the United States and he and others "initiated a plot" to blow up a Columbus area shopping mall.
Robert Jacob Murdered on Video.
The video was reportedly shown on al Jazeera.
Not surprsingly, the video is allegedly on the internet as well. Wizbang
has the linkage.
Pakistan Arrests 10 al-Qaida Suspects
Pakistani authorities have arrested 10 suspected al-Qaida members, including a nephew of detained terror mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has been in U.S. custody the past year, the interior minister said Sunday.[...]
Among them was Masrab Arochi, a nephew of former al-Qaida No. 3 Mohammed, who was captured in March 2024 in a city near the Pakistani capital. Arochi had a $1 million bounty on his head, Hayat said, and is believed to have been behind several attacks in Pakistan.
[...]
A tenth suspect arrested in the past 24 hours was identified as the mastermind of two sectarian attacks in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta in the past few months that left scores dead. Hayat did not reveal his name.
Two Are Said to Tell of Libyan Plot to Kill Saudi Ruler
While the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was renouncing terrorism and negotiating the lifting of sanctions last year, his intelligence chiefs ordered a covert operation to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia and destabilize the oil-rich kingdom, according to statements by two participants in the conspiracy.Those participants, Abdurahman Alamoudi, an American Muslim leader now in jail in Alexandria, Va., and Col. Mohamed Ismael, a Libyan intelligence officer in Saudi custody, have given separate statements to American and Saudi officials outlining the plot.
Mr. Alamoudi, has told Federal Bureau of Investigation officials and federal prosecutors that Colonel Qaddafi approved the assassination plan. Mr. Qaddafi's son, in an interview in London, called the accusation "nonsense."
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
(Kind of sounds like the title of a Klingon sitcom).
Karzai Shows He'll Cast Lot With a Corps of Warlords
President Hamid Karzai has accepted the support of powerful mujahedeen leaders for the presidential elections scheduled for September, indicating he will continue an alliance with them in a future government. His move has dismayed many Afghans who were hoping that the nation's first democratic elections would herald an end to the power of the warlords, who have dominated politics for the past decade.Mr. Karzai is far and away the leading candidate to win a five-year term as president, with Afghanistan's first pre-election opinion survey putting his approval rating at 85 percent. The leaders of the powerful Northern Alliance faction have already said they will not field a candidate and will support Mr Karzai, who is scheduled to meet with American soldiers at Fort Drum, N.Y., on Tuesday to personally thank them for their help in Afghanistan.
Mr. Karzai met last Thursday with the former president and leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami party, Burhanuddin Rabbani; the leader of the Ittehad-e-Islami, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf; and with some of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders, including Gov. Ismail Khan of Herat Province. All pledged support for him. The education minister, Yunus Qanooni, also publicly expressed his support this week. The defense minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, and four other important Pashtun mujahedeen party leaders have done the same, presidential aides said.
[...]
Technocrats in the government, who have battled with the mujahedeen leaders to push through reforms, particularly in the areas of disarmament and reform of the police, military and intelligence service, expressed their concern that without a genuine popular mandate, the future president would not be able to achieve much change.
Arrested Man Was Planning More Attacks-Italy Minister
One of three men arrested in Italy on suspicion of international terrorism is believed to be one of the "principle executors" of the Madrid bombings and was planning other attacks, Italy's interior minister said on Tuesday.
Saudi Commandos Free Hostages in Copter Raid
Saudi commandos jumped from helicopters to storm a housing complex Sunday and free dozens of foreign hostages from militants who had killed at least 17 people in an assault on the vital Saudi oil industry.Security sources said several hostages were killed during the rescue operation at the upmarket Oasis compound to end a 25-hour drama in the oil city of Khobar in eastern Saudi Arabia. The final death toll was not immediately clear.
An Internet statement purporting to come from Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network said it carried out the unprecedented hostage-taking, which raised the stakes in a battle the world's biggest crude exporter has waged against the group for a year.
A later statement signed by the "al Qaeda network in the Arabian Peninsula" vowed to rid the peninsula of "infidels."
In a dramatic end to the standoff, television pictures showed helicopters dropping commandos onto the roof of the complex. After freeing about 50 hostages, Saudi forces arrested several gunmen, including their leader.
Muslim Cleric Al-Masri Charged by U.S.
Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, arrested at his London home early on Thursday, was indicted on hostage taking and other "terrorism charges" in an 11-count indictment in Manhattan federal court, officials said.The indictment, which was returned by a federal grand jury on April 19, charges Abu Hamza al-Masri with hostage taking in connection with an attack in Yemen in December 1998 that resulted in the death of four hostages.
Families Heckle Giuliani at 9/11 Hearing.
I can understand the grief, and further, there were clearly failures in the system, but this isn't constructive in any sense of the term. The need to blame clearly is subverting reason.
Pejman notes the following WSJ piece on the USA Patriot Act by Michael Mukasey, chief judge of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
Judge Mukasey notes what I have long-thought, that the very name of the law is part of the problem (I have long maintained that it is "creepy"):
I think one would have to concede that the USA Patriot Act has an awkward, even Orwellian, name, which is one of those Washington acronyms derived by calling the law "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Interrupt and Obstruct Terrorism." You get the impression they started with the acronym first, and then offered a $50 savings bond to whoever could come up with a name to fit. Without offering my view on any case or controversy, current or future, I think that that awkward name may very well be the worst thing about the statute.
Indeed.
In regards to what the Act does, there is an interesting note on the wire-taps, which I was aware of:
I think most people would have been surprised and somewhat dismayed to learn that before the Patriot Act was passed, an FBI agent could apply to a court for a roving wiretap if a drug dealer switched cell phones, as they often do, but not if an identified agent of a foreign terrorist organization did; and could apply for a wiretap to investigate illegal sports betting, but not to investigate a potentially catastrophic computer hacking attack, the killing of U.S. nationals abroad, or the giving of material support to a terrorist organization. Violations like those simply were not on the list of offenses for which wiretaps could be authorized.As well as the now-infamous "Wall":
Well, there is one documented incident involving an FBI intelligence agent on the West Coast who was trying to find two men on a watch list who he realized had entered the country. He tried to get help from the criminal investigative side of the FBI, but headquarters intervened and said that was not allowed. That happened in August 2024. The two men he was looking for were named Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. A few weeks later, on Sept. 11, they were at the controls of the airplane that struck the Pentagon. This provision of the statute, permitting information sharing, could not pass Congress without an agreement that it would sunset on Dec. 31, 2024, and so unless that provision is changed, come Jan. 1, 2024, we will be back to the rules that prevailed in August 2024.
And on the "Sneak and Peak" Warrants that I was only semi-aware:
The statute also codifies the procedure for issuing and executing what are called "sneak and peek" warrants that allow agents, with court authorization, to enter premises, examine what is there and then leave. These warrants had been issued by courts before the Patriot Act was passed, including my own court--although I have never issued one myself--on the fairly simple logic that if it is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment to enter premises and seize things, it should also be reasonable to enter premises and not seize things. The statute permits agents to delay disclosure of their presence to the person who controls the premises, again with court authorization. Here too, the logic seems obvious: If you leave behind a note saying "Good afternoon, Mr. bin Laden, we were here," that might betray the existence of an investigation and cause the subjects to flee or destroy evidence. There are analogous provisions that were in existence long before the Patriot Act permitting a delay in notifying people who are overheard on wiretaps, and for the same reason.And about the much-feared library-record subpoenas:
What about the section the librarians were so concerned about, Section 215? Well, it bears some mention that the word library appears nowhere in that section. What the section does authorize is the issuance of subpoenas for tangible things, including business records, but only upon approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Such a subpoena can direct everyone, including the record keeper, not to disclose the subpoena to anyone, including to the person whose records were obtained. That section also specifically forbids investigation of a citizen or a lawful alien solely on the basis of activity protected by the First Amendment. It requires that the Justice Department report to Congress every six months on subpoenas issued under it. At last report, there have been no such subpoenas issued to libraries. Indeed, there have been no such subpoenas, period.Let me hasten to add that it is not impossible to imagine how library records might prove highly relevant, as they did in one case, very much pre-9/11--the case of the "Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski. Some of you may recall that Kaczynski was apprehended soon after a newspaper agreed to publish his manifesto, and was caught based principally on a tip from his brother, who read the manifesto, and recognized the rhetoric. But one of the ways that tip was proved accurate was through examination of library records, which disclosed that the three arcane books cited in the manifesto had been checked out to Ted Kaczynski from a local library--a devastating bit of corroborative circumstantial evidence.
Indeed, while I have been open to the idea that there is something wrong with the Patriot Act, I have yet to be given information that would persuade me of its evils. Rather, I have noted that many people take whatever they don't like about the War on Terror (such as the prison camps in Guantanamo or the holding of Jose Padilla) as being a result of the Patriot Act. I had a mini-argument with a student in one of my classes about how are rights are being taken away because of the Patriot Act, and when I asked what specifically was concerning her, she cited Guantanamo--and that was it.
As the sub-title of the column note: "Before attacking the Patriot Act, try reading it.
Bush to Seek $25 Bln More for Iraq, Afghanistan
President Bush will ask Congress for an additional $25 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, breaking a pledge not to seek more money before the November election, congressional aides said on Wednesday.White House budget director Joshua Bolten and other senior administration officials have started briefing key lawmakers on the revised spending plan, which would add the money to Bush's proposed budget for fiscal 2024 starting Oct. 1.
[...]
The $25 billion would come on top of Bush's two previous spending bills for Iraq and Afghanistan totaling some $160 billion.
Joe Carter notes more insanity from Ted Rall. I normally think things like what I am about to say are trite and a poor excuse for rational discourse, but one does wonder why Mr. Rall continues to live in a country defended by what he sees as the moral equivalent of the Nazi SS. The man's bile is so remarkable that one has to wonder if it isn't all an act designed to acquire as much attention as possible.
Normally I avoid Rall--but this (in the context of his Pat Tillman toon being pulled from MSNBC.com) seemed worthy of comment:
Rall said in the cartoon that Tillman -- who gave up a $3.6-million National Football League contract to join the military and then died last month -- "falsely believed Bush's wars against Iraq and Afghanistan had something to do with 9/11. Actually, he was a cog in a low-rent occupation Army that shot more innocent civilians than terrorists to prop up puppet rulers and exploit gas and oil resources.[...]
Rall, who risked his life in Afghanistan himself as a visiting cartoonist/writer after 9/11, told E&P: "The word 'hero' has been bandied about a lot to refer to anyone killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. But anyone who voluntarily goes to Afghanistan or Iraq [as a soldier] is fighting for an evil cause under an evil commander in chief."
"Tillman gave up millions of dollars," Rall added. "To that extent I think he's admirable, but the cause is not. ... He would have been a better person and a better husband if he took the $3.6 million and played football and left the poor and beleaguered people of Afghanistan and Iraq alone."
First, I can accept an argument that states that the Iraq war has nothing to do with 9/11, or even with the war on terror (I disagree, but can see a reasonable argument for the position), but to claim the conflict in Afghanistan has nothing to do with 9/11 is patently false. Further, regardless of what one thinks about Bush, to pretend that the Afghan people were better off under the Taliban is insane.
And, while it is accurate to say that anyone who goes to Afghanistan is risking one's life, to compare going over as an Army Ranger vs. as a "cartoonist/writer" is perhaps one of the most absurd comparisons I have seen in some time.
Hat tip: The American Mind.
Turkey arrests suspected Al-Qaeda linked militants with NATO bomb plans
Turkish anti-terrorist police have detained several militants with links to the Al-Qaeda Islamic extremist network who were preparing to carry out bomb attacks against a NATO summit in Istanbul next month.Sixteen suspects were detained in the northwestern city of Bursa after police tracked them for a year as they hatched plans to attack the Istanbul summit but also a nearby synagogue, Bursa governor Oguz Kagan Koksal told a press conference Monday.
I'm with Stephen Green: there's no way to know whose account is accurate (go here to see what the story is), but I lean towards Bush. Just partisan politics? No -- I have always found Clinton's claim that terrorism was a huge priority to for him to be difficult to accept, and further it was hard to believe that he told Bush that bin Laden was the "#1 problem" for the new administration.
Why?
Because there is little empirical evidence to suggest the Clinton administration was making terrorism and OBL a top ten priority, let alone anywhere near number one.
Just consider the reactions (or lack thereof) to the Cole, the embassy bombings, and the Khobar Towers, to name three examples.
Kevin Drum argues that the situation in Fallujah leads to the following:
The conclusion is obvious to anyone willing to accept hard facts: conventional military force is simply not the right weapon for the war on terror.
My initial reactions are as follows:
1) Regardless of whatever very real criticisms that can be levelled at the handling of Fallujah, considering that the situation has not come to full completion, one cannot draw any hard and fast conclusions at this point, especially one that is as encompassing as the one he draws.
2) Indeed, one cannot generalize to the entire war on terror from the events in one city.
3) Military action has worked out fairly well in Afghanistan in terms of destroying the Taliban as a governing body, and eliminating Osama bin Laden's training camps.
4) Really, conclusions regarding the effects of the war in Iraq vis-a-vis the war on terror are wholly premature.
5) The only real measure of the efficacy of the general policies in place would be a) number of major attacks on the US since 911 (that would be zero), b) the number of major international attacks since 911 (there have been some, most notably the Bali attack, the Madrid bombing and the attacks in Saudi Arabia--although the degree to which US failing are responsible for any of these is questionable), and/or c) the number of al Qaeda operative and leaders arrested (not to mention assets and such seized)--and there have been a number of those, owing in many cases to military action.
6) Since Kevin states that "George Bush has fought this war foolishly, but that's been clear for over a year at least" it seems that he really isn't reaching conclusions based on careful consideration of Fallujah, but rather simply restating an opinion that he has had before the invasion of Iraq even started, and using Fallujah as an excuse to do so.
Indeed, quite the opposite to Kevin's "obvious" conclusions, it would seem that if one looks at the facts, the militarized approach to the WoT has been successful, albeit not perfect--but what is?.
I will concede that Kevin does note that military action will be necessary at times, and that he is talking primarily about troops on the gound--which really is mostly a criticism of the Iraq policy, not so much the more general conclusion that "convention military force is simply not the right answer." And, I suppose, it depends on how one defines "conventional military force." If he means an invading force, then again, this is a critique of Iraq as part of the war on terror, not on the way the war on terror has been prosecuted in general. However, that conclusion is hard to reach as well, since he argues that Bush doesn't understand how to fight this war, so I suppose he is including Afghanistan and all of the points made above (#5). There have been successes in the WoT and, to borrow a phrase, "anyone willing to accept the hard facts" has to come to the same conclusion. It may be that Kevin's argument is that a different approach would have been more successful, or, it may be that he see not successes at all. Still, his critique is clearly aimed at Iraq--if so, fine, but then the intellectually honest thing to do is not to conflate all of the anti-terror policies of this administration into Iraq, or, even worse, simply into Fallujah.
More Agents Track Castro Than Bin Laden
Not surprising, but rather ridiculous, to be sure. Given that Castro isn't going anywhere until he sheds this earthly existence, it seems to me that we are spending far too much money and time trying to make his life difficult, when we would dimish his power, and improve the living conditions for many Cubans if we would just lift the sanctions and allow Cuba to economically liberalize.
Really, what is the point of being so obssessed with Castro at this point? He is hardly a national security threat at this point. Further, on a practical level, what are the sanctions doing for the US at this point?
Rantisi Killing Boosts Hamas' Popularity
Hamas has become more secretive and strapped for cash, but also more popular as a result of Israel's attempt to crush the group, including the assassination of two leaders in a month.
1) The event just happened, so I am not sure we know the full effects yet, 2) if they are "strapped for cash" doesn't that beg the question of how popular they are, and 3) by what measure does the reporter assess this new found popularity?
I must confess that I have a hard time criticizing Israel for adopting a policy of targeting and taking out the leaders of an organization whose stated policy goals are the elimination of Israel. Certainly it would be hypocritical of the US to do anything but accept this policy move by the Israelis, given our own policies towards al Qaeda, for example.
There can be no doubt that the assassination of Rantisi will result in a likely short-term escalation, or, at least, a retaliation by Hamas. However, it isn't like there is going to be a negotiated solution with Hamas. From the perspective of either Hamas itself, or the Israeli government, I am not sure how the relationship can be defined as anything but war.
Indeed, from Hamas' own web site we find the following from their statement of purpose:
[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad: "Allah is the all-powerful, but most people are not aware."[...]
There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. The initiatives, proposals and International Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.
One has to admit, that leaves little room for a peaceful solution.
Those outside of Palestine who decry the attack, and the view of the conflict as war, will point to the fact that Hamas has engaged in social policy in Gaza, as noted in this CNN story: Hamas: A study in contrast. All well and good: Hamas has built schools. Not getting into issues of curriculum for the moment, and whether or not said school help to create militants for the future, it is noteworthy that the building of schools hardly balances off the practice of suicide bombings. The Nazis had school and Stalin built hospitals. I don't think either fact produced sufficient karma, shall we say, to balance off their other murderous endeavors. If Hamas wants to aid the social welfare of Palestinians, all well and good--then do so and stop the madness of sending their members across the border with bombs strapped to them so that they can kill unsuspecting civilians at bus stops and pizza parlors.
More on Hamas:
Hamas Leader Killed in Israeli Strike
An Israeli missile strike killed Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi as he rode in his car Saturday evening, hospital officials said. Rantisi's son Mohammed and a bodyguard were also killed in the attack.
Robert Tagorda has an excellent post on Gorelick over at Priorities & Frivolities. I had meant to note it yesterday, but wasn't at the computer much at all yesterday evening.
At any rate, he notes the following testament that Gorelick gave to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on 10/25/95:
The resulting overlap in the concerns and activities of the intelligence and law enforcement communities has prompted some people to suggest that we should simply merge the two communities in an effort to achieve greater efficiency in the fight against international crime. We believe this would be a serious mistake. There are ample reasons, grounded in history and constitutional principles, to maintain a clear demarcation between the missions and authorities of the two communities. Nevertheless, given the increasing threat that international crime poses to our national security and domestic tranquility, we clearly must develop new methods to improve the coordination and operation between the two communities so that each is able to perform its functions as efficiently and effectively as possible, consistent with the Constitution and existing statutes and Executive Orders. This is one of the central challenges we in law enforcement and in the intelligence community face today.
As Robert noted in a comment to one of my posts yesterday, while Gorelick did not create "The Wall", she does bear a great deal of responsibility in strengthening it, or, as I heard on TV several times this morning made it "higher and thicker".
Clearly this wall made it difficult to connect those now infamous dots. Those seeking to understand our counter-terrorism failures have to look long and hard at the Wall. Further, those who are certain that the USA Patriot Act is nothing less than the greatest threat to US civil liberties ever devised should note that if the Patriot Act is allowed to wholly expire, parts of the Wall get put back into place.
Also, I would note, that those who think that the Bush administration could have done something dramatic and effective as a result of the 8/6/01 PDB should consider the current criticisms of the Patriot Act and consider the hue and cry that would have emerged had Bush proposed anything remotely like it pre-911.
And, I agree with Robert--a key issue here is less the idea of blaming Gorelick as it is why the press, and indeed, the 911 Commission itself, is not more intensely dealing with this issue, which is a clear example of established policy that hampered domestic counter-terrorism. This is a far more concrete area for investigation than speculating about how some piece of data should have been interpreted pre-911.
Megan McArdle has an excellent post on Hindsight Bias from a couple days ago.
The concept is defined as follows:
Robert Schiller has an excellent quote on the subject in his book, Irrational Exuberance:The reason for overconfidence may also have to do with hindsight bias, a tendency to think that one would have known actual events were coming before they happened, had one been present then or had reason to pay attention. Hindsight bias encourages a view of the world as more predictable than it really is.Investors who succumb to hindsight bias, or managers who manage by it--or voters who vote on it--get significantly worse outcomes than those who fight it; it leaves them prone to making mistakes, because they put too great a faith in their powers of judgement.
This leads to the following fair question and assessment:
You're George Bush in August 2024. Tell me, specifically, what you would have done based on that memo, that would have a reasonable chance of apprehending the hijackers. "Put the government on alert" is glaringly insufficient. The memo says that Al Qaeda may want to hijack an airplane to secure the release of militants, or that it may aim to make some sort of attack in Washington. Given that you do not know which of these, if either, is true, nor when, where, or how the attack will come; given that the "chatter" to which opponents of Mr Bush like to refer has more often not presaged an attack (as we have seen with the numerous "Orange Alerts" and so forth); and given that any measures you take will be expensive and anger some subset of the population, what do you do? If your answers include, with astonishing foresight, such unprecedented things as strip searching passengers on domestic flights or ordering pilots not to open cockpit doors even after hijackers have begun killing passengers, please explain which of the tens of thousands of domestic flights taking off in the United States each day you plan to target; where you will get the extra personnel to do so; how you will respond when the ACLU and the airlines get a preliminary injunction against you for flagrantly violating passengers' civil rights; how you plan to sell the massive delays to the millions of angry passengers; what you are going to do about the inevitable Democratic charges of racial profiling; and how long you plan to keep this up, given that you have no idea whether an attack is due this week, this year, or at all? You must also include a section explaining what you are going to do about the North Korea expert shouting in your ear that you really need to pay attention to this intelligence saying that crazy Cousin Kim may have nukes.In short, unless you're the kind of genius who manages your own small affairs with 20/20 foresight, this sort of blame game strikes me as pure partisan grandstanding. And if we cannot remove the taint of partisanship from the 9/11 commission, at least we can expect better of ourselves, and our commentariat, than to crassly exploit those tragic events for electoral advantage. Some things are just more important than scoring a win for the team.
Indeed.
Two issues about "The Wall" worth noting:
It just seems fair to note that 1) the Bush administration did not seek to change the guidlelines, and that 2) Gorelick is correct that she is not the creator of the basic rules in question.
Source: WaPo
Al Qaeda Unchecked for Years, Panel Says
U.S. intelligence services failed to recognize the emergence of the al Qaeda terrorist network until more than a decade after it was founded in 1988, playing down a tide of reports that documented the danger posed by the group, according to findings released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2024, attacks.The CIA's Counterterrorist Center never developed a plan to deal with the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons despite growing evidence during the 1990s that terrorist groups had attempted or were planning such plots, the commission's staff also found.
CIA Director George J. Tenet acknowledged yesterday that he did not brief President Bush, FBI leaders or Cabinet members after he was informed in late August 2024 of the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, who would later be charged as a conspirator in the terror attacks. The briefing for Tenet was titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."
Not surprisingly, Kevin Drum ain't impressed with Ashcroft's revelation about the Gorelick memo:
The fact that Ashcroft was so pleased with himself makes it obvious that he declassified this memo for the sole purpose of embarrassing Gorelick, an action that continues a Bush administration pattern of casually declassifying anything that helps their political cause but refusing to declassify anything that might hurt them.
Now, I will agree that the way Ashcroft noted the memo was clearly a "gotcha" aimed at Gorelick, and, further, that the administration engages in the politics of advantage in regards to some, if not many, of its decisions to release information. As such that just proves that the administration is populated by politicians, not unlike, well, all administrations. Still, I am not going to say that they Bush administration does everything simply in a quest for Truth.
However, Kevin's response, to some degree like Matthew Yglesias' which I blogged on earlier today, vexes me, given that Gorelick's memo is clearly quite relevant to the important to the 911 Commission's work. It is clear that to understand 911 we have to understand how the FBI and CIA operated specifically on the issue of counter-terrorism. This memo is very much about the rules that bound the actions of those institutions and the culture of both pre-911. To pretend that the memo is just the Bush administration playing politics and therefore to ignore the significance of its contents, is to say that one really doesn't want to understand why 911 happened, and how to prevent such attacks in the future, but rather one simply hopes that the commission damages the Bush administration.
The Gorelick memo is whole lot more important than how much time Bush spent in the Alabama Air National Guard, for example.
NRO has the Gorelick memo here in PDF format.
I have read over it and it is clear that this type of approach made "connecting the dots" rather difficult.
Clearly pre-911 we simply were nowhere near a war footing and it took the horrific events of that day to change mindsets.
I really do think that that those were righteously indignant about the PDB ought, for consistency's sake, be outraged about this as well.
And, I would note, I am not pointing a finger at Gorelick. I am noting that it is clearly the case that in out desire not to taint criminal investigations that we hampered ourselves in the areas that would have helped us figure out 911 prior to the attacks. To simply blame to Bush administration is to miss the broader picture as a result of partisan myopia.
I will comment more fully on the document later.
Sean Hackbarth of The American Mind has a very nice post on the 911 commission that is worth a read
Matthew Yglesias responds to those (which I would count myself, I suppose) who are somewhat incredulous that while the Blogosphere and the press went ga-ga over the PDB, there isn't a commensurate interest in the Gorelick memo/the whole "wall" bit:
One of the difficulties I think a lot of people on the right have in grasping what's going on at the 9/11 Commission is that Bill Clinton isn't running for president. I have no interest -- not even a partisan interest -- in denying that Clinton and his appointees messed up in a variety of ways. Not even a partisan interest, let me say again, because Bill Clinton isn't running for president. My interest as a patriotic American is purely in bringing the facts to light so we can make changes for the better. My partisan interest is, especially, in bringing to light facts that reflect poorly on George W. Bush and his appointees -- the various ways in which they disimproved on the inadequate Clinton-era set-up.So, again, Bill Clinton not running for president.
The emphasis is his, by the way.
Now, I agree that there are many on the right who have had (and still have) an unhealthy fixation concerning President Clinton. And, yes, some are interested in simply finding a way to blame Clinton. This is, of course, not the point of the commission, nor should it be. However, if indeed, as Matthew states, the goal here is to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, the it strikes me that the Gorelick memo and any and all policies that made it difficult for the FBI and CIA to communicate on issues of anti-terror policy, especially potential domestic attacks. However, what Matthew seems to be saying, is that since Bush is up for re-election, then having the panel and commentators behave in a partisan manner is acceptable. I do understand that part of his point is that since Bush is up to re-hired or fired that his behavior in office is more significance in the short term than was Clinton's. However, again, if the goal is find out what went wrong, why and therefore what to do about it, it seems that the eight years of the Clinton administration are rather vital to the work of the commission, and that an over-focus on the eight months of the Bush administration simply because he is running for President means that adequate information isn't be gathered and that analysis could therefore end up overly focusing on the too small a slice of time and policy.
Yes, the information gleaned by this commission will have potentially dramatic effects on Bush's re-election, and rightfully so. However, the purpose of the commission is not to help us figure out whether Bush should be re-elected or not; its purpose is to tell us why we didn't learn about the planes flying into the WTC until after they had hit. As such, to weight the analysis, commentary and focus to the Bush administration just because he is running for re-election and Clinton isn't is to allow partisan filters to dominate a process that really ought to be nonpartisan.
Further, I am not sure that is has been demonstrated that the Bush administraton "disimproved on the inadequate Clinton-era set-up"--indeed, to establish the degree to which the Bush administration may have doen thing worse than the Clinton folks requires a thoroughly examination of both administrations.
UPDATE: This post is parked in the Beltway Traffic Jam.
Tenet: U.S. is 5 years from proper intelligence
The CIA, FBI and the State and Defense departments all kept databases, but "none were interoperable or broadly accessible.""Most profoundly, we lacked a government-wide capability to integrate foreign and domestic knowledge, data, operations and analysis. Warning is not good enough without the structure to put it into action," Tenet said.
Tenet said that intelligence officials were not able to turn their knowledge of the threat into an "effective defense of the country."
"Doing so would have complicated the terrorist calculation of the difficulties in succeeding in a vast open society, that in effect, was unprotected on September 11th," Tenet said.
We knew this over a year ago, but it is worth noting again. Since the only way to thwart an ongoing operation in the US to gather the right information and then analyze it correctly,. it is clear that the federal government was woefully incapable of doing what needed to be done.
Intelligence Sharing: Rule Created Legal 'Wall' to Sharing Information
The wall, which has since been demolished by a special appeals court ruling, was part of a body of law that was little known to the public. It involved secret testimony and decisions by a special federal court that ruled on the requests of government investigators to install wiretaps or other listening devices on people suspected of being involved in espionage. The 1978 law that created the court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set a lower threshold for counterintelligence agents to obtain permission for secret surveillance of espionage suspects than was required for investigators in criminal cases.To prevent criminal investigators from using the intelligence act to seek warrants, officials and courts gradually created a rule keeping the two spheres largely separate. It was known in the government as the wall.
And if you want a 911 connection:
Confusion over how to interpret the wall also figured in the dispute of why the F.B.I. refused the request of its agent Colleen Rowley to seek a court authorization to explore the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested in August 2024 on immigration violations. Inspection of the computer would have disclosed information showing that Islamic extremists were taking flight lessons in the United States.
For Members of Panel, Past Work Becomes an Issue in the Present
When her turn came at the hearing Tuesday morning to question Ms. Reno and Louis J. Freeh, who was director of the F.B.I. when Ms. Gorelick was in the Justice Department, she disqualified herself."Because I worked closely with Director Freeh and Attorney General Reno, I've decided not to participate in this questioning at all," Ms. Gorelick said. "As my colleagues know, the vast preponderance of our work, including with regard to the Department of Justice, focuses on the period of 1998 forward, and I have been and will continue to be a full participant in that work."
In the same vein, when she questioned Mr. Ashcroft, she did not mention his testimony about her memorandum. And at the end of the day, she declined to comment to reporters about Mr. Ashcroft's statement.
[...]
In an interview in January, Ms. Gorelick, who has been questioned formally by the commission staff about her time in the Justice Department, said potential conflicts and recusals were the price the commission had to pay for having members and staff assistants with extensive experience in national security.
On the one hand, I suppose the recusal makes some sense, but on the other isn't her knowledge of those persons and events part of the reason she is on the commission?
Captain's Quarters has an excellent run-down of the Gorelick situation.
I am wondering when a) the press is going to catch on to this story, as it is an important one if the goal here is to figure out what went wrong pre-911, and b) when the memo in question hits the press and if it received the same kind of scrutiny that the PDB did.
We shall see.
James Joyner a press conference round-up.
And, I agree with Robert Prather
If he held more of these press conferences he would be better at them.
My initial reactions to the Bush statement:
What is Jaimie Gorelick doing on this commission, given that she served in the Reno Justice Department? Especially given the revelation that she was authoring memos on FBI-CIA comunication?
The attorney general sounded almost contemptuous as he spoke of a "legal wall" put into effect in 1995 to separate criminal investigators from intelligence agents in an effort to safeguard individual rights.Far from protecting individual rights, Mr. Ashcroft asserted, the wall has been an obstacle to protecting the American people.
Referring to the 1995 document that constructed the figurative wall, Mr. Ashcroft went on to say, "Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission."
Mr. Ashcroft was a referring to Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic member of the independent, bipartisan, 10-member commission, who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.
Regardless of one's position on either administration, or of the proceedings, it strikes me as odd that she is on the Commission, as she is part of that which she is supposed to be investigating.
Source: Ashcroft Faults Clinton Era at 9/11 Panel (NYT).
Two things are exceedingly clear to me at this point. If the purpose of this commission was to actually find information, then
1) All of the testimony should have been in private in a more congenial setting than a hearing--with the culmination of the commission's work being an extensive annotated report.
and
2) The commissioners should not be appearing on TV chat shows. I find it remarkable that immediately after hearing testimony, without any time to think about what they have heard, these folks are on Hardball or Larry King Live doing insta-analysis.
This has truly become a side-show.
Ashcroft is currently making his opening statement before the 911 Commission and his indentification of what he calls "The Wall" before law enforcement and intelligence is precisely where the main problems in domestic counter-terrorism were pre-911. If one is looking to explain why the dots weren't connected, this is place to look--not in the lack of a magical interpretatin of the August 6, 2024 PDB.
The issues in question, which aren't new, underscore what I mean, at least in significant part, in the law enforcement paradigm v. the war paradigm tension that I have discussed before.
In large measure the way the Commission treats Freeh (in terms of questios asked) we should be able to take some measure of the degree to which the 911 commissioners really are looking for answers versus simply trying to assign blame. Clearly the situation with the FBI was a major problem vis-a-vis terrorism.
Even so, I think Freeh is The New York Times > largely correct here:
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh defends the bureau's efforts to combat terrorism before the 2024 attacks but says the government was not then ready to commit the resources necessary to fight a war against al-Qaida.Freeh, in an opinion piece published in Monday's editions of The Wall Street Journal, said that ``short of total war'' the FBI did what it could given the budget and manpower it had to work with at the time.
And the pre- v. post-911 mentality is quite evident here:
The FBI's counterterrorism budget also reflected those pre-Sept. 11 priorities, Freeh said. For example, he said the FBI asked for 1,895 special agents, analysts and linguists in budget requests for fiscal years 2024 through 2024.``We got 76 people for those critical years,'' Freeh said.
In the weeks after Sept. 11, Congress hurriedly approved money for 823 counterterrorism positions and the numbers have steadily climbed since then.
``The al-Qaida threat was the same on Sept. 10 and Sept. 12,'' Freeh said. ``Nothing focuses a government quicker than a war.''
My main problem, starting mostly with the Clarke testimony and following up through this weekend with the PDB debate is that critics expect that the administration should have have picked up on clues and drawn conclusions regarding that which would become 911 when the previous administration didn't either (And, please, don't play the Millennium attack card, as that represents a specific, actionable date--comparing that to vague warnings is a true apples-to-oranges comparison). In other words, it Bush's response to the August 6, 2024 PDB enraged you, then if you are going to be consistent, you need to send some rage in the direction of the previous administration, so to speak. I agree that there were substantial failures under the watch of both administrations regarding terrorism. Although, as I have noted, I am not surprised at the government's failure, as some seem to be. To pretend that the problem of terrorism, or that the 911 planning, started in January of 2024 is ludicrious.
But to reiterate: if the criticism of Bush is that he should have figured out the al Qaeda plot, then then I want to know why Clinton isn't equally culpable. If the criticism are truly more than a simply partisan attack, explain to me why Clinton isn't getting his share of attack.
As I have stated before, I subscribe to the idea that it took a massive event, like 911, to alter the mentalities of both the public, but also the vast majority of public officials, to think differently about the threat of terrorism. I am not saying that that fact is a good thing, nor am I arguing that I am glad that that is case. Nonetheless, I see it as a fact. It is clear that, with a few exceptions, terrorism was not on the front-burner in American politics or security policy. Indeed, the focus for national security threats was focused primarily on "rogue nations" (hence, the discussion of missile defense). The evidence is clear: if either party has been intensely interested in al Qaeda specifically, or terrorism in general, it would have been an issue in 2024 presidential campaign. Yet, it wasn't.
To argue that Bush dropped the ball assumes that Clinton actually handed one off.
Mostly I judge the last two presidents vis-a-vis anti-terrorism policy based on how they responded to actual attacks. In this regard, President Clinton's record is woeful (e.g., the lack of responses to the 1993 WTC bombing, the Khobar Towers attack, the Cole attack and so forth). On the other hand, I have been largely (although by no means perfectly) pleased with President Bush's response to 911. And I fully understand that many disagree with me on this point.
However, what I would like to see in the public discourse:
1) I would like to see Kerry tell us what he plans to do about terrorism, aside from saying he is going to acquire more foreign help--which is far too vague for my tastes.
and
2) I would like to see logically consistent critiques across administrations on the issue of anti-terror policy.
Ok, my early afternoon pipe dream is over and I have a textbook to review...
UPDATE: This is my entry in OTB's Beltway Traffic Jam.
Quite frankly, the real problem in terms of anti-terror policy is clearly less in the area of the interpretati of PDB's, but rather in domestic intelligence gathering--as this NYT piece notes: The New York Times > Washington > Disclosures Put F.B.I.'s Actions Under Scrutiny
investigations were stymied by miscommunication, dead ends, bureaucratic and legal obstacles and unclear priorities, officials say. And it is still unclear what the bureau's response was to a classified White House memo in July 2024, which officials said directed all 56 field offices to increase surveillance of suspected terrorists.
In re: the PDB, Oliver Willis states:
So, they knew hijackings were possible - yet seemingly issued no major alert to the airlines or the public. Whereas with the millenium threat, we all knew that something was up. Let's see how this plays out.
The first thing that comes to mind is that every time we go from Yellow to Orange on the Homeland Security Threat Level, what is the response? Basically the criticism is that the warnings are too vague and lack any actual specific threat. So, we are to believe that a vague piece of intel that al Qaeda might want to hijack planes supposedly was going to be treated with care and thoughtfulness by the public? More likely the reaction would have been "tell us something we can use" and/or panic and less people flying, which would have damaged the airlines, and Bush would've been blamed for being a scaremonger. Really, these counterfactual critiques are sillier the more one thinks about it.
Further, if we recall last Christmas when flights from Europe were cancelled the whole affair was treated with skepticism--as if the administration was overreacting and basing its actions on overly vague information. And that was post-911, when the idea of terrorist using airplanes in nefarious ways had been burned into our brains.
The second thing is that the millennium threats contained very specific information, not the least of which was a date to work with. From Richard Clarke on down I have found the comparison of a potential threat on a specific date: New Year's Eve 1999 versus a non-time-specific threat to be a rather poor one. The difference between one day (and even days around a specific date) are far more actionable than "it could be anytime."
Third, it was known that "hijackings were possible" prior to the August 6, 2024 PDB. And as James Joyner points out, Senator Bob Graham noted in an interview in 2024, that the hijacking speculation was three years old at the time it was put in that memo.
Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen earlier. "The particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing that day was about three years old," Graham said. "It was not a contemporary piece of information."
So, really, the alleged "gotcha!" that this PDB is supposed to provide is a phantom.
Hat Tip: The Moderate Voice (where you will find a ton of PDB-related quotes).
James Joyner has found a May 2024 story in which Senator Bob Graham corroborates what Rice said in her testimony.
I find the following from Kevin Drum rather ironic:
Treating 9/11 as just another way to hammer his political opponents was an act of unsurpassed callowness, the response of a man who is congenitally unable to view anything except in terms of smallminded partisan advantage. Instead of using 9/11 as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to unite the nation, George Bush viewed it as a way to pick up a few seats in the House. It is this, more than any other single thing, that I most hold against him.
I have found Kevin to be one of the more readable, and reasonable, of the major liberal bloggers, although I have found his criticism of the President increasingly shrill, especially since the whole National Guard brouhaha and continuing into the Rice tesimony and PDB business. Indeed, the post I quote above is a good example--why is it not possible that Bush is doing what he thinks is right vis-a-vis 911? It is wholly fair for Drum to disagree with Bush's approach, but where is the evidence that Bush's response has been "small-minded partisan[ship]"?--indeed, how should we identify such a response?
And given that once the shock had worn off that there was a philosophical divide in the country over how to define the war on terror, and, therefore, how to execute it.
James Joyner notes the Damned if You Do/Damned if You Don't Syndrome that faces the administration, and really counter-terrorism policy writ large. The post reminds me of aRich Lowry column from about two weeks or so ago, in which he started the piece by stating
It seems one of the least plausible criticisms of a president who's often portrayed as one of the world's greatest warmongers since Caesar Augustus -- that George Bush has been too weak on the War on Terror.
Indeed.
Really, all of this discussion has re-inforced the idea that we have to act pre-emptively, and take the war to the terrorist and those states which sponsor terror, as we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the hopes of both disrupting the terrorist as well as drawing them into fight there, rather than here. This type of activity really creates the best opportunity for stopping attacks in the US. It is quite difficult to stop terrorists once they are in place, as if they are willing to die in their act of terror, they are rather difficult to deter. The best strategy is, therefore, to try and root them out of their training bases abroad, put pressure of varying types on governments who might aid them, and to help foster secular, non-radical governments in places like Iraq. Sitting back and hoping that better bureaucracies, or smarter politicians will "connect the dots" next time strikes me as a poor strategy--indeed, one doomed to fail.
If the goal here (which I am not sure that it should be) is to assign blame, then could someone tell me whether the 1993 WTC attack, the attack on the Khobar Towers, the attacks on the African embassies and the attack on the Cole or the controversial PDB equals more of a red flag, and therefore what administration is therefore the one that could be more fairly seen to have dropped the ball?
Ok, that is actually two questions.
James Joyner has a PDB Roundup for anyone who needs even more reaction to this document.
And, I concur with his assessment of the 911 Commission:
These things invariably become finger-pointing, ass covering exercises despite the theoretical objective of discovering what went wrong so as to fix the process. They’re never very helpful, which is doubly true during a presidential election year. And they’re downright unhelpful when there’s a war on.
He also notes a quote from Jeff Jarvis that is worth repeating:
I'm no Bushie but I'm sick of the attempt to find an enemy within when the enemy is clearly without.
Even Josh Marshall (via Jarvis) notes
I think it's fair to say there's nothing thermonuclear, shall we say, in the August 6th Presidential Daily Brief released this afternoon by the White House. But Condi Rice's claim that the information contained in it was primarily of an historical nature seems at least to leave out some key points.
While clearly much (most?) of the wrangling over the PDB is partisan in nature, much of the debate may also be ideological. Part of what defines a conservative in the political vernacular of the United States is skepticism about government, while liberals tend to think that given the right people and information that practically any problem can be solved by government. Clearly the argument that is emerging concerning the PDB is that if we had just had smarter, more insightful individuals in government (the White House in specific), then they would have figured out what the Bush administration missed (e.g., Kevin Drum's query about what kinds of questions were asked by the President upon reading the PDB, etc.).
Do we really think that Al Gore would have prevented these attacks? Certainly that seems to be the subtext of these criticisms.
Of course, a key problem with such an argument is that the planning for 911 took place during the Clinton administration, as did numerous attacks on US interests by al Qaeda. However, said brain trust apparently wasn't very good at dealing with this intelligence either. A notable exception would be New Year's Eve 1999--but there at least a specific date made the interdiction of attacks easier. Prior to the moment that the planes hit the WTC, what made 911 a day different than any other day?
However, one's view of government clearly colors how one interprets these events. As a conservative (and as a student of government, here and abroad), I am highly skeptical of the ability of governments to successfully execute policy. Hence, I am unsurprised by governmental failures. I am not saying that policy can never be successful--it can. However, it rarely is an efficient process, and the more complex the undertaking, the more likely failure is to happen. At a minimum I know full well that government is not very good at processing information. If one wants an excellent illustration of this, just look at the federal budget--how it is compiled, how it is evaluated and whether anyone on the planet, let alone those who actually vote on the thing and implement it, have read all of it. However, it would seem that from the liberal point of view the problem isn't government and its complexity, but rather the people who occupy government at a given moment. Now, I am not saying that that doesn't matter--it does. But, I do not think, and believe that empirical evidence backs my position, that government becomes more efficient and efficacious just because one set of persons occupy positions of power. Part of the problem with the partisan criticisms that are flying about at the moment is that they ignore the fact that 1) the civil servants involved, i.e., the vast majority of persons in this equation, are careerists and so in that regard not that much changed from Clinton to Bush, and 2) many of the upper-level policy actors (the CIA Director, the FBI Director, Clarke, etc.) had not changed from Bush to Clinton--and if the objection is that the Bushies didn't listen to Clarke and Tenet, one has to acknowledge that the Clintonistas didn't either. In short: to pretend as if the failure that occurred (and there clearly was a failure) is limited to the Bush administration is to simply be viewing the world through the eyes of partisanship alone.
And no, I am not arguing that government always fails. Although I would note that that tends to be the default position. I am not an anti-government libertarian, but I am highly skeptical about the ability of governments to do what they set out to do. Hence, I am not surprised wen governments fail. Liberals in the US context tend to be more optimistic about the abilities of government, and hence are more shocked when it fails. And, as noted, that failure is usually attributed not to systemic problems of governing huge numbers of people, but, rather, to those who are doing the governing. Hence, the fault must lie with Bush and Rice must be a "moron", etc. (And further, if Kerry were President we would have 10 million jobs and other countries would be magically willing to send more troops to Iraq).
Could it be, that as I argued earlier in the week, that government is a lumbering beast with multiple parts that are characterized more my lack of communication and inertia than by rapid data processing and alacrity of action? We are talking here about millions of pieces of information, being handled by thousands of persons, operating in hundreds of offices and locations across the country and around the world. While "connecting the dots" sounds like a child's game, it is far from such.
The sad thing is: security is one of the things that government does relatively well.
And, it is worth noting, the idea that bin Laden would want to attack America was hardly news in 2024. Don't forget the 1998 Fatwah that he issued, which included the following:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."
Source: Osama bin Ladin's Fatwah
If the PDB had a less provocative (especially in retrospect) title, i.e., "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." would the critics be as able to interpret the contents as they have?
Not surprisingly, Kevin Drum sees the PDB as potentially giving serious clues to the NYT attacks.
He is also not impressed with the content, style, length or writing level of the document itself. I am not sure what he was expecting.
In a second post he wonders
Even giving them every benefit of the doubt, don't you think they could have connected these dots beforehand? They were afraid of an al-Qaeda air attack in Genoa and an al-Qaeda airplane hijacking in America. Doesn't it make sense to put the two together and wonder if Osama might also be contemplating air attacks in America?Just something to think about. It makes me wonder what kind of questions Bush asked when the PDB was presented to him and what kind of actions he authorized. Maybe the commission will ask about that when he and Dick meet with them.
To which I would state: let's try to be rational, non-partisan and realistic here for a moment: prior to 911 the idea of hijacing did not conjure flying plane loads of passengers into buildings, it conjured someone wanted to go somewhere, or maybe wanting to steal the plane. There is no way a reasonable, fair-minded person could expect the President (andy President) to have read that PDB prior to 911, even with other pieces of information, and starting asking "Hey! You think they might want to fly some planes into the WTC and Pentagon?"
Again, all of these interpretations are coming about with the benefit if hindsight.
And if we are going to try and assign blame, let's be equal opportunity: it isn't like some of this information doesn't date back to the prior administration.
C. W. Fisher sees the PDB differently than I do. He notes:
But what about the part where it says the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
The problem is: that isn't any actionable information. So while the critics of the administration may think they have found a smoking gun, the question remains: what would they have done with the information in the PDB aside from letting the FBI continue their surveillance?
Note the following from the PDB itself:
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar' Abd aI-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
And, from the memo, it would seem that there was ongoing information gathering:
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks
with explosives.
Rice said:
It [the PDB] did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.
And, if you read the PDB, that is an accurate characterization. There is discussion of a possible attempt to free the "Blind Shayk" in 1998 (that would be historical), which is the closest thing to a specific threat mentioned. There is vague reference to possible attacks with explosives, or other planning, but where is the actionable intelligence? Certainly not in this briefing. Further, as already noted, the memo states that the FBI was still investigating. What is it about this memo that is supposed to have stirred specific action?
This stuff only looks remarkable because 911 happened. Pre-attack it was likely one of dozens, if not hundreds, of potential problems that US law enforcement and intelligence were worried about.
The whole situation is analogous to the death threats any President receives--they are numerous and they usually amount to nothing. However, once an attempt has been made it is easy to go back and look at those threats to understand which one was the "real" one--and then to wring hands over the fact that the threat wasn't properly assessed. And I agree that there were real mistakes made prior to 911, but there is nothing in this document that screams "they are going to hijack planes and fly them into the WTC and Pentagon." Mr. Spock and Sherlock Holmes working together couldn't have deduced that from this document.
Again, murder mysteries are easy to figure out once you've read the end of the book.
Hat tip: Byan at Arguing with signposts.
Well, it reads like Condi said it would--a summary of historical data lacking actionable information.
One very interesting story from the post mentioned below is this piece from CNN: Yemeni sources cite at least 3 failed plots prior to Cole bombing
At least three plots against American targets in Yemen failed in the past year before last month's suicide bombing of the USS Cole, Yemeni sources close to the investigation said Saturday.
The three attacks are detailed as follows:
In the first week of November 1999, Yemeni authorities foiled plans to blow up a convoy of U.S. military personnel heading to Yemen's National Center for the Removal of Land Mines hours before the operation was to be carried out, the sources said. Yemeni security forces discovered the explosives -- planted about 1.5 kilometers (one mile) away from the hotel where the Americans were staying -- and defused them, sources said.[...]
[...]
When that attempt fell apart, the sources said the suspects made plans to attack the Royal Hotel, near the port in Aden, where most of the American servicemen were staying. It wasn't immediately clear when that operation was to be carried out, and no details were available on why it failed.
An attack similar to the one carried out on the Cole was aborted in January when the attackers realized their boat had been overloaded with explosives and was not seaworthy, the sources said. The U.S. television network ABC, citing intelligence sources, has reported that the target of that attack was the USS The Sullivans, a destroyer that refueled in Yemen on Jan. 3.
The Galvin Option has a well-research, link and and quote-filled run-down of the US response to the Cole bombing. It is worth a read. At best it show how governmental inertia makes decisive action difficult as I blogged earlier this week, and at its worst it makes the Clinton administration look remarkably ineffective on the question of terrorism, and hence places Mr. Clarke's assertions about terrorism policy in the Clinton administration in a rather bad light.
Hat tip: HobbsOnline.
The CSM has a great round-up of assessments of Rice's testimony from major newspapers with links to various stories.
Professor Bainbridge has two excellent posts on the Condi v. Ben Veniste encounter yesterday. The first has the transcript and discusses Chris Matthews' treatment of the interchange (I concur with Bainbridge: Matthews seemed to miss the point) and the second post has an interesting discussion of compound questions during questioning.
Bryan of Arguing with signposts notes this NYT piece, Same Room, Different Views for Relatives of 9/11 Victims, which actually notes that indeed, the 911 families are not a monolithic group. For example:
But John Owens of Mineola, N.Y., whose brother, Peter, died in the World Trade Center, and April Gallop of Woodbridge, Va., an executive assistant for the Army who was injured at the Pentagon, might as well have been watching from Venus and Mars.Three hours of long questions and longer answers could not have struck them more differently. Mr. Owens nodded his head in agreement and several times applauded, while Ms. Gallop shook her head disapprovingly and often appeared skeptical.
"I came here to show support for President Bush," Mr. Owens said.
and
"She is someone who can be trusted," said Ernest Strada, the mayor of Westbury, N.Y., for the last 23 years, as he left the hearing room. His son, Thomas, was killed at the trade center."She answered candidly," Mr. Strada said. "She didn't try to dodge the questions. She serves our country well. She serves the administration well."
Ben Veniste seemed to me to be more interested in building a case, as in a court of law (specifically by the use of "yes" and "no" questioning), than he was in fact finding. Given that the goal of the commission is supposedly informational, not the building of a case for or against someone, this struck me as a rather over-the-top confrontation approach.
Really, if there is a lesson is all of this testimony, and of the events of 911 itself, it is that to get the government moving in a dramatic fashion it takes a singluar, likely tragic, event.
As Robert Tagorda notes:
First, as Richard Clarke himself observed, "when you recommend an air defense system for Washington before there has been a 9/11, people tend to think you're nuts." In other words, it was hard to move the security and intelligence bureaucracies back then. Rice would have needed to invest significant time and resources to follow up on questionably "actionable" information.
George Will made the point on Hannity's radio show this afternoon that one of the most significant characteristics is the prevalence of inertia. He described it as a "muddled mess," a "blunt instrument" and a "river of fudge."
Quite so.
Are we really to believe that what happened vis-a-vis terrorism (such as the invasion of Afghanistan) could have been mobilized without the events of 911? It strikes me as a logical stretch.
As a matter of analytical clarity, I find the identification of a relatively small number of individuals as being referred to as the "families of 911 victims." It started with the Bush campaign's 911 ads and hit full strength when Clarke "apologized to the victims' families" and today with the reportage that "victims' families" where in attendance.
Given that the actual number of persons who qualify as belonging to the group properly defined as member of victims' families likely numbers in the 10,000+ range, the idea that any one subset of that number has the right to be considered by the press as a representative group is simply incorrect at best, and disingenuous at worst.
UPDATE: This post is today's entry in the Beltway Traffic Jam
Here's the CSM's take on Rice's testimony:
In a moment of high political theater even by Washington standards, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice offered the most vigorous defense yet of the Bush administration's understanding of the terrorist threat in the months leading up to 9/11 - an appearance that may blunt some of the criticism leveled by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, even while ensuring that the controversy continues to dominate the national spotlight in the short term.
The whole piece is of interest, including the observations of several national security experts.
I have missed the testimony, having been in class all day. However, James Joyner has a link round-up of newstories, while Jay of Accidental Verbosity did some simu-blogging, and Jeff Jarvis makes a few comments as well.
Pasco: Group wants painkiller case thrown out
Paey, 45, of Hudson, had written fraudulent prescriptions for the painkillers Percocet and Lortab. He has been using a wheelchair and in chronic pain since the mid 1980s, when he was injured in a car accident. Paey subsequently.[...]
Because he obtained more than 28 grams of the painkillers, he became eligible for a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison for each count of trafficking. His sentencing is set for April 16. After Paey was first arrested in March 1997, prosecutors offered him house arrest and probation. He turned down the offer. Paey's first trial resulted in a mistrial, but he was convicted later. That conviction was thrown out due to improper statements by attorneys during the trial. He was then offered a five-year sentence, which he turned down.
[...]
The jury found that Paey forged the prescriptions of Dr. Steven Nurkiewicz, his doctor in New Jersey. Because Paey could not find a doctor to treat him, Nurkiewicz continued to write prescriptions and treat Paey after he moved to Florida in 1994.
Now, I am not defending forging prescriptions, but I have a hard time accepting the idea that the individual in question harmed society to the point that he deserves 25 years in prision. Ceratinly if the goal here is to truly affect the consumption of narcotics in the society, I have a hard time seeing how this helps.
Hat tip for the story: Mark A. R. Kleiman
As Dennis Prager notes:
Islamic terror is caused by Muslims, not, as Islamic and leftist apologists would have it, by the non-Muslims against whom it is directed. In our morally confused world, Spain, Israel and America are blamed for having their men, women and children blown up: What did these countries do to arouse such enmity among otherwise tolerant Arabs and Muslims?Palestinian terror provides the answer. About 25 percent of Palestinians are Christian, yet if there are any Palestinian Christian suicide bombers, I am unaware of them. Now why is that? Don't Muslim and leftist apologists incessantly tell us that the reason for Palestinian terror is "Israeli occupation and oppression"? Why, then, are there no Palestinian Christian terrorists? Are Christian Palestinians less occupied?
Setting aside theological deabtes for a moment, it is clearly true that different sets of beliefs and ideas, when put into practice, matter greatly.
Rooftop Report and Kristopher of The World Around You report that Rice will indeed testify in public, under oath to the 911 Commission.
Says Reuters.com
The White House reversed itself on Tuesday and offered to have national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testify publicly under oath about the Sept. 11 attacks before the 9-11 commission.The White House released a letter to the independent commission from legal counsel Alberto Gonzalez outlining the offer. It also said it would make President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney available to speak before a joint private session of the full panel.
Both offers were on condition that they would not set a precedent under the constitutional separation of executive and legislative powers, an administration official said.
George Shultz makes an excellent point in today's OpinionJournal:
In the 1990s, the problem began to appear even more menacing. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were well known, but the nature of the terrorist threat was not yet comprehended and our efforts to combat it were ineffective. Diplomacy without much force was tried. Terrorism was regarded as a law enforcement problem and terrorists as criminals. Some were arrested and put on trial. Early last year, a judge finally allowed the verdict to stand for one of those convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Ten years! Terrorism is not a matter that can be left to law enforcement, with its deliberative process, built-in delays, and safeguards that may let the prisoner go free on procedural grounds.
The problem with the law enforcement approach is that it requires waiting until an attack happens, and then affording rights and privileges to the accused. Hence, warfare is the better paradigm:
In war, you have to act on both offense and defense. You have to hit the enemy before the enemy hits you. The diplomacy of incentives, containment, deterrence and prevention are all made more effective by the demonstrated possibility of forceful pre-emption. Strength and diplomacy go together. They are not alternatives; they are complements. You work diplomacy and strength together on a grand and strategic scale and on an operational and tactical level. But if you deny yourself the option of forceful pre-emption, you diminish the effectiveness of your diplomatic moves. And, with the consequences of a terrorist attack as hideous as they are--witness what just happened in Madrid--the U.S. must be ready to pre-empt identified threats. And not at the last moment, when an attack is imminent and more difficult to stop, but before the terrorist gets in position to do irreparable harm.
Notice that this doesn't mean invading the whole world, as some interpret the "war paradigm".
The rest of the piece deals with rogues states, and specifically Iraq and is worth a read.
thedailytimes.com - Oxycontin overtakes heroin as narcotic of choice for state's addicts
The prescription painkiller OxyContin has overtaken heroin and other street drugs as the narcotic of choice for addicts seeking help at Tennessee's methadone clinics.And it can be more dangerous than other drugs.
''A lot of people are losing limbs, getting infections and even their heart valves are getting infected,'' said Dr. Steven Ritchie, medical director of state methadone clinics in Nashville and Memphis. The problem is that the drug was designed to be absorbed by the body over 12 hours, so some of its substances don't completely dissolve when addicts inject it.
I watched the last half of the Clarke MTP interview last night.
I came away with the following:
1) He has a rather high opinion of himself. Whether he speaks about the Bush administration (especially) or the Clinton administration, he speaks of himself as the guy with the answers, who, had his recommendations been executed, would have led us to a far more successful war against al Qaeda--indeed, we might have gotten them back in the late 90s.
2) While he argues that one of his main motivations in writing the book was to show how the war in Iraq has gotten us off the track, he almost never actually talks about that. Rather, he speaks about failings in the Bush administration during its first eight months of existence.
3) As Russert ably noted, Clarke is much more prepared to cut the Clinton administration slack. He noted this clip for a recent Kratuhammer column:
in a March 2024 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country."What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened."
It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest?
[...]
Clarke's answer is unbelievable: "Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. . . . There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals."
This is significant for two reasons. First, if the Clarke of 2024 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week -- the one who told the Sept. 11 commission under oath that "fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly [there was] no higher priority" -- is a liar.
Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. He savages Bush for not having made al Qaeda his top national security priority, but he refuses even to call a "mistake" Clinton's staggering dereliction in putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia(!) above fighting al Qaeda.
4) Clarkes practically pretends as if the Afghanistan invasion never took place, and that Bush skipped from 911 to Iraq. Given that Clarke says he argued for more stringent force to be used against the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, you'd think he'd at least acknowledge that particular success.
5) His main failing, if what he wanted to do, whether it is criticize Iraq, or criticize the Bush administration in general, is that he is so incredibly forgiving of the Clinton administration's war on terror, and therefore it damages his analytical credibility. I have no doubts--none--that there were failings in the Bush administraton prior to, and even after, 911. However, a comprehensive critique of anti-terrorism poliy can't let the Clinton administraion off because they were busy in Kosovo and with the Middle East Peace process and then turn around an expect that a new administration should have come in and been super-aggressive in terms of anti-terror policy. The whole eight years and numerous major attacks v. eight months and none, also damages his argument.
I would note that to question Mr. Clarke's consistency between his book, press interviews, testimony and past statements when he was with the White House is not a "smear campaign" or "character assassination".
To wonder about his motives, is not out of line, when it is clear that he does stand make a great deal of money, and has gained a substantial amount of notoriety from these events.
It is not below to belt to note that Mr. Clarke was not always perfect in his own judgements, especially if he wishes to claim that he knew best and no one would listen.
When you say that you know best, people will wonder if they really should listen to you. They want proof that you should be trusted over others.
When you claim to be "the witness" it is not unreasonable to consider your impeachability.
Since veracity and reliability is an issue, and since different people have clearly different interpretations of the events in question, one way we decide who to listen to is to ask how trustworthy they are and to inquire as to their motives.
Character assassination is saying that they guy cheats on his taxes, kicks his dog, drinks too much or asking him "have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
Nothing of this nature has happened.
To ask if he knows what he is takling about when he speaks, however, is fair game.
(note: this was originally simul-blogging, hence the tense, but it wasn't ready to post before I left for church)
Clarke is on MTP claiming that there is "no inconsistency" between what he has said recently and the now-famous backgrounder. And that the reason he didn't resign rather than give it is because he wanted to finish his report on cyberterrorism.
Further, he seems to be arguing that he (and a few others) understood threat of terrorism pre-911, and the President wouldn't listen. And further, he clearly is a critic of the war on Iraq and thinks that it has damaged the war on terror. I find that to be a fair position, but he ignores the invasion of Afghanistan, the defeat of the Taliban, and the death or capture of a substantial number of al Qaeda leaders which took place between 911 and the war in Iraq.
Quite frankly, the idea that terrorism became a more urgent issue after 911 seems a rather likely outcome of the attack. One thing that is obvious, and fair, that came out of the pre-Clarke testimony on the 911 Commission is that there was a radical shift in policy POV on terrorism post-911. Anyone who claims that they were in a post-911 mindset prior to 911 is almost certainly remembering themselves rather fondly, to put it mildly.
He stated: "They didn't allow me to brief him [the President] on terrorism"--but only on cybersecurity. There is no chance that he is bit resentful of what he sees as slights by his former colleagues? Or that he is unhappy that his job changed?
He points to Berger working hard to prevent attacks prior to December 1999. Gee, I wonder why they did that? I don't suppose that knowing about a credible threat on 12/31/99 might have had something to do with that fact?
There were clearly failures prior to 911. Indeed, it is a long list. If that is what Mr. Clarke wants to talk about, I have no problem with that. However, to present the information as if the Clinton administration did all they could, and then the Bush admin dropped the ball (especially if one reviews this timeline). Further, to say Iraq is a failure is a legitimate line of argument, but to say that and ignore everything else that has happened leads one to assume certain agendas, rather than pure policy analysis. And, really, the reason that critics of the Bush administration have jumped on this stuff is because it seems to make the argument that they want to make for political reasons: Bush is a failure on security, so vote for Kerry.
"This is about how the war in Iraq has damaged the war on terror"--so Clarke said about 26 minutes into the broadcast. Ok, well and good: but if that is the thesis, why is none of the discussion about how the war in Iraq has damaged the war on terror? Why is is all about how Bush ignored Clarke, or how he was stopped from briefing the President, or how terrorism wasn't an "urgent" issue prior to 911. There is a serious logical disconnect her are a lack of clarity of argument.
Here's the bottom line on Clarke: if one comes out and declare's oneself the Great Bearer of Truth, then it is natural for one's veracity and reliability to be questioned. And so, when persons like Senator Daschle claim that the White is simply trying to smear Clarke and not rebut him on the facts, I would note two things. First, when someone claims to bear witness to an event of great importance, it is not unusual to wish to know about the reliability of said witness. Second, I would disagree that all the the White House has done is question Clarke's character, there have been substantive information released that have thrown serious doubts on Clarke's account of things. Certainly the Shays letter and the attachments certainly call into question Clarke's pre-911 positions.
Indeed, Dean Esmay makes an excellent point about the White House's defense:
Face it, too: just by defending themselves against Clarke's accusations, the Bushies look bad. This would be true of any administration of any party on almost any subject. They can either answer it, in which case they get mocked and look bad, or they can ignore it, in which case they look worse. And this would be true no matter what the subject was.
The sad thing is that someone who was in his position undoubtedly could tell us quite a bit about what went wrong in our anti-terrorism approach. However, he seemed more bent (or, at least, the media seemed especially bent) on using a critique of the Bush administration's pre-911 policy stances to criticize the war in Iraq. That is a non sequitur. Further, if what he really wanted to do was affect policy and bring to light failures of the system, I am not sure that writing a book was the best way to do it, Since part of the reason people write books (and by no means the only one) is to make money (and there is nothing wrong with that) it does tend to raises questions about motivations. Plus, the odds are that if one is going to write a book about oneself, the tendency is to present oneself in the best possible light--or, at least, in a distorted fashion.
And the partisan filter in operation here is remarkable, and a tad sad in my opinion, as it demonstrates how we are all susceptible to our points of view short circuiting our judgement and reason. For example, Stephen Green and Kevin Drum are both smart guys, yet they can read this piece and have radically different responses. Or, Brad DeLong who sees impeachable offenses via Clarke's book, while Glenn Reynolds sees someone who lacks credibility. It is rather difficult for all of those position to be equally correct.
I think that Dan Drezner has had one of the fairest evaluation of Clarke, but it is still fairly negative, but then again perhaps I am predisposed to see a negative view as a fair one.
On balance, these kinds of books, or even interviews with persons like Clarke, as I noted in a comment a few days ago, are problematic if what one wants is a true evaluation of a particular policy or set of events. One point of view is wholly insufficient. Further, since, as noted above, an individual is prone to see himself in a distorted way (either more positive or negative than is warranted), it is difficult to take one person's account as the account. It certainly hardly rates as a comprehensive, dispassionate and scholarly approach to policy analysis.
UPDATE: This is my entry in today's Beltway Traffic Jam
Writes Pejman:
Remember the common line that every Washington memoir can be subtitled If Only They Had Listened To Me, and you will go a long way towards understanding the basis and foundations for Clarke's allegations.
Stephen Green points to this Time piece Richard Clarke, at War With Himself, in which Romesh Ratnesar notes
While the discrepancies do not, on their own, discredit Clarke's larger arguments, they do raise questions about whether Clarke's eagerness to publicize his story and rip the Bush Administration have clouded his memory of the facts.
Perhaps the most interesting element of the piece is how Ratnesar notes discrepancies between Clarke's own book and Clarke's various tv interviews.
Most notablely:
Perhaps Clarke's most explosive charge is that on Sept. 12, President Bush instructed him to look into the possibility that Iraq had a hand in the hijackings. Here's how Clarke recounted the meeting on 60 Minutes: "The President dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this'.....the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this.'" After Clarke protested that "there's no connection," Bush came back to him and said "Iraq, Saddam — find out if there's a connection." Clarke says Bush made the point "in a very intimidating way." The next day, interviewed on PBS' The NewsHour, Clarke sexed up the story even more. "What happened was the President, with his finger in my face, saying, 'Iraq, a memo on Iraq and al-Qaeda, a memo on Iraq and the attacks.' Very vigorous, very intimidating." Several interviewers pushed Clarke on this point, asking whether it was all that surprising that the President would want him to investigate all possible perpetrators of the attacks. Clarke responded, "It would have been irresponsible for the president not to come to me and say, Dick, I don't want you to assume it was al-Qaeda. I'd like you to look at every possibility to see if maybe it was al-Qaeda with somebody else, in a very calm way, with all possibilities open. That's not what happened."How does this square with the account of the same meeting provided in Clarke's book? In that version, Clarke finds the President wandering alone in the Situation Room on Sept. 12, "looking like he wanted something to do." Clarke writes that Bush "grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room" — an impetuous move, perhaps, but hardly the image that Clarke depicted on television, of the President dragging in unwitting staffers by their shirt-collars. The Bush in these pages sounds more ruminative than intimidating: "I know you have a lot to do and all, but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way." When Clarke responds by saying that "al-Qaeda did this," Bush says, "I know, I know, but see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred....." Again Clarke protests, after which Bush says "testily," "Look into Iraq, Saddam."
Nowhere do we see the President pointing fingers at or even sounding particularly "vigorous" toward Clarke and his deputies. Despite Clarke's contention that Bush wanted proof of Iraqi involvement at any cost, it's just as possible that Bush wanted Clark to find disculpatory evidence in order to discredit the idea peddled by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Baghdad had a hand in 9/11. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush rejected Wolfowitz's attempts to make Iraq the first front in the war on terror. And if the President of the United States spoke "testily " 24 hours after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, well, can you blame him?
And this is just plain bizarre:
As for the President, Clarke doesn't even try to read Bush's body language; he just makes the encounters up. "I have a disturbing image of him sitting by a warm White House fireplace drawing a dozen red Xs on the faces of the former al-Qaeda corporate board.....while the new clones of al-Qaeda....are recruiting thousands whose names we will never know, whose faces will never be on President Bush's little charts, not until it is again too late." Clarke conjured up this chilling scene again on 60 Minutes. Only in this version he also manages to read Bush's mind, and "he's thinking that he's got most of them and therefore he's taken care of the problem."
Stephen is correct: the whole thing is worth your time.
Daniel W. Drezner has started reading Clarke's book, and has some interesting comments. He also posits a hypothesis to explain Clarke's behavior:
it's hard not to believe that Clarke's evaluation of presidential performance is directly correlated with how well those presidents treated Clarke.
Read the entire post.
Glenn Reynolds has an excellent summation of the Clarke situation, specifically as to his credibility, which is well encapsulated by this:
The other possibility is that Clarke held an important national security job for years while being dumb as a post, so dumb that he would write a book making explosive accusations against the White House while knowing -- or forgetting? -- that all sorts of contradictory evidence was on the record and bound to come out. Otherwise, wouldn't he at least have tried to explain this stuff up front?As I've said before, I think there's a lot to complain about regarding pre-9/11 antiterror policy, by both Clinton and Bush. (Read this piece by Gerald Posner). And a lot of people probably should have been fired. But Clarke is now saying that his real problem is with the invasion of Iraq, even as he focuses on pre-9/11 events.
A useful critique would be nice, but Clarke seems to be producing incoherent grandstanding.
I still maintain that the main issue here is media coverage of the event, and there can be no doubt that they have made the 911 hearings seem as if they were created just so that Richard Clarke could tell us how the Bush administration fouled up.
Yet, given the glaring inconsistencies in his own record, one wonders why the media haven't made that part of the story.
As Chris Lawrence rightly notes
the general reaction to today's Richard Clarke testimony can be summed up as something of a redux of the David Kay testimony a few months back: everyone was able to take away something to reinforce their preexisting views, and a few blowhard politicos got to spend a lot of time listening to themselves talk.
although I will say that Kay was far easier to take seriously than Clarke. And I would also add that if Chris is correct, then the mainstream media reaction is telling.
And again, it is difficult to disaggregate Clarke from the coverage of Clarke. For while the press yesterday kept noting how Clarke said:
Under questioning, Clarke said the Clinton administration had "no higher priority" than combatting terrorists while the Bush administration made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" in the months before Sept. 11, 2024.
they did not at all question the statement. Nor did they play Powell, Albright, Tenet , et al. clips over and over as they did Clarke's. Why? Likely because they all largely agreed that mistakes were made, but they didn't finger one administration over another.
Yet, as Dean Esmay points out:
I noticed this AP [same as the one noted above-,Ed.] story this morning. The first paragraph:For a dozen years, he worked quietly in the shadows of the White House. But Richard Clarke stole the spotlight at an extraordinary series of hearings into the Sept. 11 attacks, claiming President Bush hadn't done enough to protect the country from terrorists.Then, almost two dozen paragraphs appear after that, all talking about how people were congratulating and high-fiving Clarke for his bravery, and talking about how Republicans seemed to be upset and questioning his objectivity while Democrats praised him.Then, the very last two lines, buried at the very bottom of the story where most people will never read to the end of
Former Republican Sen. Slade Gorton asked Clarke if there was "the remotest chance" that the attacks could have been prevented if the Bush administration had adopted his aggressive counterterrorism recommendations upon taking office in January 2024."No," Clarke said.
"No," Clarke said.
That's the very last line of the story. "No," Clarke said.
However, is that the way the press is covering the story?
The idea that the Clinton administration had terrorism as their top priority doesn't track very well. For one thing, there seemed to be precious little response to terrorism under the Clinton administration, and that which existed was more along the lines of law enforcement. Further, the Shays letter clearly demonstrates that Clarke wasn't exaclty Mr. Fixit on this topic, despite the fact that it was his job.
Not to mention the fact that Clarke's own words from 2024 contradict some of his testimony, including the quote above about the Clinton administration:
QUESTION: What is your response to the suggestion in the [Aug. 12, 2024] Time [magazine] article that the Bush administration was unwilling to take on board the suggestions made in the Clinton administration because of animus against the — general animus against the foreign policy?CLARKE: I think if there was a general animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the same team in place. That doesn't sound like animus against uh the previous team to me.
JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?
CLARKE: All of that's correct.
Amazing.
Betsy Newark points to a letter (dated today) to the 911 commission by Representative Chris Shays (R-CT), Chair of the Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Nataional Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations. And, yes, Shays is a Republican, but not the most conservative in the lot, and no firebrand.
The letter is in PDF and for some reason I am having trouble capturing text. However, the letter and the attachments are worth a read. Clearly, Shays is none too impressed with Mr. Clarke, noting, among other things that "Mr. Clarke said it would be 'silly' to articulate a national strategy" to fight terrorism and that "In lieu of a threat assessent or stratgey, he offered a laundry list of terrorist groups, as if the fight against global terrorism were nothing more than a hunt for common criminals." Shays asserts that "Clarke was part of the problem before September 11 because he took too narrow a view of the terrorism threat."
He does note that Clarke was obsessed with al Qaeda, but not with their support mechanisms (i.e., states and terror networks in general).
Indeed, Shays notes that he wrote a letter to Condoleeza Rice on January 22, 2024 to "express our concerns about Mr. Clarke's narrow view of the terrorist threat and the urgency of mounting a strategic response." The PDF linked above contains that letter (and some other materials). In that letter Shays outlines his concerns concering what he saw was Clarke's lack of interest in a comprehensive approach to the terrorist question.
In his testimony today Clarke stated that he was never untruthful when he served in the White House, and that the only difference between the info in the transcript noted earlier and his book is one of "tone" and "emphasis."
Hmmm.
(If Brett (scroll down) still wants to send me a copy of Clarke's book, I will look forward to reading it... ;)
A background briefing that Clarke gave to the press in 2024 seems to vitiate his testimony today.
Dodd Harris and Rosemary Esmay are both discussing this.
Further, one would think that good journalist would use this kind of info in reporting the Clarke story.
UPDATE: Stephen Green and Glenn Reynolds have weighed in as well.
Glenn Reynolds wants to know why Bush didn't deploy the Texas Rangers (no, not the baseball team--they would've gotten their butts kicked) to Afghanistan in 1998. Further, he wish to know why Bush didn't stop his campaign to personally respond to Cole bombing, not to mention why he didn't take a bullet for Lincoln.
Hat tip: OTB.
...the United States was too timid in its policy toward al Qaeda and accused the Bush administration of failing to treat terrorism as an urgent matter before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Here's the sound bite of the day:
"The Bush administration saw terrorism policy as important but not urgent, prior to 9/11,"
Regardless of how Clarke intended that statement, it is clearly being spun that Bush should have done more, and therefore 911 is at least partially his fault. I can guarantee you that is how Terry McAuliffe will present it.
USAT provides the following timeline:
Feb. 26, 1993: Attack: A truck bomb explodes at the World Trade Center in New York City; six are killed, and more than 1,000 are injured.June 1995: President Clinton issues a directive declaring terrorism "a potential threat to national security" and pledging to "deter and pre-empt" would-be terrorists.
Early 1995: Ramzi Yousef, suspected mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, is arrested in Pakistan and sent to the USA for trial.
Nov. 1995: Attack: A van bombing at Army training headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, kills seven people, including five Americans, and injures 31.
Jan. 1996: The U.S. government asks Qatar for help in capturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected of plotting to plant bombs on U.S. airliners, but he disappears. He later becomes a key planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.
May 1996: Osama bin Laden leaves Sudan for Afghanistan before he can be expelled.
June 25, 1996: Attack: A truck bomb destroys the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; 19 Americans are killed, and 372 are injured.
Aug. 1996: Bin Laden issues a public declaration of jihad against U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
Feb. 1998: Bin Laden expands his public declaration for Muslims to kill Americans, military or civilian, anywhere in the world.
Spring 1998: The Saudi government thwarts an effort by bin Laden to attack U.S. forces there.
May 1998: The Clinton administration issues a new directive on terrorism; Clinton designates CIA Director George Tenet to work with the Saudis on terrorism.
Aug. 7, 1998: Attack: Near-simultaneous truck bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania kill more than 200 and injure more than 4,500.
Aug. 20, 1998: Clinton orders cruise-missile strikes on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and suspected sites in Sudan.
Sept. 1998: The Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, reneges on a promise to expel bin Laden from Afghanistan.
Dec. 1998: Intelligence places bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, but no strikes are ordered because of fears about the quality of intelligence and possible civilian casualties.
Feb. 1999: A military strike against bin Laden in Afghanistan is aborted because of the presence of officials from the United Arab Emirates.
May 1999: Another opportunity to strike bin Laden in Afghanistan is missed following concerns about intelligence and civilian casualties.
Dec. 1999: A man allegedly planning to bomb Los Angeles International Airport is arrested in Port Angeles, Wash.
Oct. 12, 2024: Attack: An explosive-laden boat rams the USS Cole in the harbor in Aden, Yemen; 17 U.S. sailors are killed, and 39 are injured.
Sept. 10, 2024: Officials agree on a three-year, three-phase strategy to remove bin Laden from Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban.
Sept. 11, 2024: Attack: Hijacked jets flown into World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field; almost 3,000 are killed.
I would add October 1993 and the Blackhawk Down incident.
From Players in Blame Game, Little Offense
If blame is the Washington sport, then Day One of the new round of 9/11 commission hearings was structured like the Super Bowl.[...]
But the players did not clash. Despite some sniping and testiness, the surprising theme was unity.
Democrats and Republicans alike -- past and present secretaries and deputy secretaries of state and defense -- spoke little of Clinton vs. Bush and lots about Before vs. After.
And this is clearly the case. Everyone can look back through the lenses of 911 and argue that what was done after the attack could have been done before, but clearly this is not the case:
At the time, said the Democrat Albright, "it was very hard to get congressional support for military action . . . because I think there was a whole question about how serious this all was."Republican Rumsfeld echoed thus: "Unfortunately, history shows that it can take a tragedy like 9/11 to awaken the world to a new threat."
I will say, however, that less extreme measures than invading Afghanistan could have been undertaken, as I still argue that the there was insufficient responses to a series of attacks in the 1990s (e.g., the first WTC attack, the Cole, the African embassies and the Khobar Towers). Although, really, less than placing blame, I would argue that there is a lesson in the past which is that lack of response can lead to heightened attacks.
One can disagree with the logic, but that is a substantial portion of the reason that the Bush administration began thinking pre-emptively: the idea that trying to remove the conditions that would allow for the growth of terrorist and their capabilities, rather than waiting and dealing with the perpetrators of an attack after it takes place.
Indeed, this is the crux of the military v. criminal justice paradigms in the war on terror, in my opinion: do you act before or after you are attacked? Of course, the problem with pre-emptive action is that you have to base your decisions as to whom you will attack on intelligence and surmise--and thefore can make mistakes--while the cj approach allows you to at least know that an attack did take place. Both approaches have a price--I simply prefer paying the former, rather than the latter.
House hikes reward for bin Laden
The U.S. House unanimously approved a doubling of the reward the government is offering for the capture of Osama bin Laden to $50 million.
So, if the paltry $25 million wasn't enough...
Gee whiz, I have now known about this story for roughly 24 hours and the basic info (they are fighting, they may have Zawahri surrounded...) hasn't really changed.
Can't they hurry it up so as to fulfill my need for instant news gratification?
Qaeda Deputy May Be Surrounded - Pakistan Official
A senior Pakistani government official said on Thursday al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahri may have been surrounded near the Afghanistan border.
"A pitched battle is going on there. The way these people are resisting, we think there is someone important over there. We think al-Zawahri may be holed up there," the official told Reuters.
This was foolish, and wrong, of the PP: Spain Campaigned to Pin Blame on ETA.
In the first frantic hours after coordinated bomb blasts ripped through several packed commuter trains Thursday morning, the government of outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar undertook an intense campaign to convince the Spanish public and world opinion-makers that the Basque separatist group ETA had carried out the attacks, which killed 201 people and wounded more than 1,500.Beginning immediately after the blasts, Aznar and other officials telephoned journalists, stressing ETA's responsibility and dismissing speculation that Islamic extremists might be involved. Spanish diplomats pushed a hastily drafted resolution blaming ETA through the U.N. Security Council. At an afternoon news conference, when a reporter suggested the possibility of an al Qaeda connection, the interior minister, Angel Acebes, angrily denounced it as "a miserable attempt to disrupt information and confuse people."
"There is no doubt that ETA is responsible," Acebes said.
Within days, that assertion was in tatters, and with it the reputation and fortunes of the ruling party.
No wonder they lost the election. This was a wholly improper way of handling the situation, and they deserved to be punished at the polls.
The whole article is worth a read.
Moroccan Group Suspected in Madrid Attacks
Spanish investigators suspect a militant Moroccan group linked to al Qaeda was behind the Madrid train bombings that killed 201 people, El Pais newspaper reported on Wednesday.[...]
El Mundo newspaper, quoting police sources, said police were hunting for 20 Moroccan citizens in connection with the Madrid attacks. It said the same people were also suspected by Morocco of having participated in bombings in Casablanca last May which killed 45 people, including 12 suicide bombers.
This would've happened anyway, with the Socialists beating the PP in Spain, and I agree with Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman (although not with his entire post) that at least part of the PP's problem, indeed maybe the largest part, was the way Aznar and the government dealt with the whole ETA v. al Qaeda issue just prior to the election. It was clear that they kept the "ETA is the prime suspect" thesis going for political purposes.
Still, regardless of the nuances of electoral politics, there can be no doubt that al Qaeda will interpret this as a clear victory.
Spain Will Loosen Its Alliance With U.S., Premier-Elect Says
Spain's newly elected Socialist prime minister pledged Monday to shift allegiance away from Washington to Paris and Berlin, a move that could lead to a reduction of American influence in Europe on a range of issues.
Reports WaPo: Al Qaeda Implicated In Madrid Bombings
Investigators believe the train bombings that killed 200 people here last week were the work of a multinational cell of al Qaeda loyalists, some of whom entered Spain specifically to carry out the attacks and who are now the target of an international effort to identify and capture them, according to European and Arab intelligence officials.The officials said the preliminary investigation and interrogation of five arrested suspects -- three Moroccans and two Indians -- as well as other evidence indicated that the Thursday morning rush-hour bombings were carried out by the al Qaeda network, marking the first time the group has struck in Europe.
[...]
Officials said they believed the group that carried out the bombing was composed of Islamic radicals, possibly including Saudi nationals, as well as other North Africans besides the arrested Moroccans. The operation included residents of Spain as well as operatives who entered the country specifically for the attacks, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Madrid Suspect Linked to 9/11 Figure
One of the three Moroccans arrested in the Madrid train bombings was a follower of a suspected al-Qaida member jailed in Spain for allegedly helping plan the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, according to court documents reviewed by The Associated Press. It was the latest suggestion that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist group may have been involved in the bombings.
A Sept. 17, 2024 indictment calls Jamal Zougam — arrested in Thursday's attacks — a "follower" of Imad Yarkas, the alleged leader of Spain's al-Qaida cell who was jailed for allegedly helping plan the Sept. 11, 2024, attacks on New York and Washington. Yarkas, whose alias is Abu Dahdah, remains in Spanish custody.[...]
Spain's El Pais newspaper, citing the interior ministry, reported all three Moroccans have links to Yarkas. Authorities in Morocco said they could not comment on the report.
Mark Kleiman has an interesting write-up on the Spanish election results.
As Kleiman notes, one issue, which I alluded to earlier today, that is gnnig to have to be sorted out: did voters vote for the Socialists because they were voting to pull out of the war on terror (at least in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan), or were they voting in anger to the way the PP handled the bombing and the evidence of al Qaeda over ETA.
Also, the degree to which it now enters into US politics is interesting: the Kerry camp will likely argue that Iraq was a distraction from fighting al Qaeda, allowing them to attack Spain. The Bush camp will argue that the Madrid attack proves that there is a global war on terror, and the Bush is, indeed, a "war president" and further that the Iraq connection in the al Qaeda tape proves that Iraq is an legitimate part of the war on terror.
Hat tip: Zygote-Design.
Exit Polls Give Conflicting Results in Spain
Exit polls forecast conflicting results in Spain's general election Sunday, thrown wide open by a purported al Qaeda video stepping up claims the group was behind the Madrid bombings that killed 200 people.
Two polls gave the opposition Socialists the most votes, while another put the ruling Popular Party (PP) -- favorite in opinion polls up to a week ago -- in front.[...]
Analysts had warned the PP could be rocked if voters believed Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda had mounted its first attack in Europe and in reprisal for Spain's support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq that most Spaniards opposed.
If the PP takes a serious hit, it could could signal voter backlash over Iraq and also a sign that many Spanarids blame the bombings on Spanish cooperation in Iraq.
And, quite frankly, it did appear from the coverage that the government was far too interested in blaming ETA, even when the evidence suggested otherwise.
Some Spaniards were vitriolic in accusing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of "manipulating" public opinion by spending three days blaming the bombings on the Basque separatist group ETA, despite denials from the guerrillas.Aznar, retiring as prime minister and hailing a solid economy and greater clout for a country restored to the international mainstream three decades after Franco's dictatorship ended, had taken a tough line against ETA.
Playing politics over the evidence of something like the bombings is not smart, nor the right thing to do.
Howard Dean said on MTP today that fighting the war in Iraq had “nothing to do with terrorism.”
If so, why is al Qaeda fighting us in Iraq and why would al Qaeda care if Spain helped us or not?
If one wants an example of a case that has “nothing” to do with terrorism, try Haiti. I suspect that al Qaeda will not be bombing France because they helped up to invade Haiti.
"We claim responsibility for what happened in Madrid just two and a half years after the attacks in New York and Washington," said the man, according to a government translation of the tape, which was recorded in Arabic. "This is an answer to your cooperation with the Bush criminals and their allies."
It sounds almost too perfect, i.e., like a Hollywood writer (and not a particularly good one) penned the script.
Still, if authentic, it signals that at least one al Qaeda cell believes that Iraq is part of the war on terror, and not a distraction.
Spain Says Al Qaeda Tape Claims Bomb Blasts
A tape purportedly from al Qaeda said the militant group had blown up Madrid trains in retaliation for Spanish cooperation with the United States and threatened more bloodshed, Spanish officials said on Sunday.The video tape was recovered by police from a waste paper bin on the outskirts of the Spanish capital after a Madrid television station received a call from a man with an Arabic accent saying the tape was there.
Again, as I noted earlier, if al Qaeda had no interest whatsoever in Saddam's regime in Iraq, why punish Spain for helping the US?
This is going to be increasingly problematic, as terrorist use drug revenues to fund their activities. From Sunday Observer of Sri Lanka:
The quantum of heroin flowing into Sri Lanka and other South Asian countries has increased after the cessation of hostilities in Afghanistan, where farmers have returned to their lucrative poppy cultivation on a larger scale than ever before.
Ousted terror groups like al-Queda and the Taliban are accused of financing farmers in the mountainous region to grow this lucrative cash crop because of the potential of earning easy money.
Reuters reports: Spain Holds 3 Moroccans, 2 Indians in Bomb Probe
Three Moroccans and two Indians were arrested in Madrid as part of the investigation into train bombings that killed 200 people, Spain's Interior Minister Angel Acebes said on Saturday.
"Sixty hours after the brutal attack we now have five detentions," the minister told a news conference.All the detentions were made "for presumed implication in the sale and falsification of the mobile phone and cards found in the bag that did not explode," Acebes said.
[...]
Acebes said some of those arrested may have links to Moroccan militants, but it was too early to say for sure.
This continues to look less and less like an ETA, or, at least an ETA exclusive, event.
The CSM has an excellent round-up of news stories on the Madrid bombing, specifically focusing on the ETA v. al Qaeda question.
An interesting bit raises a question about the al Qaeda connection:
A group called the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade did claim reponsibility for the bombing in the name of Al Qaeda. The group sent a letter sent to the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi saying it had carried out the bombings. Bloomberg News reports that the newspaper's editor, Abdel Bari Atwan, told Sky News that the letter "uses similar language and the same style of Al Qaeda." The Arabic statement also refers to an attack on the US that is almost ready. The statement hasn't been verified as an Al Qaeda message.CNN reports there are some doubts about these Al Qaeda claims. Intelligence officials have said the group does not speak for Al Qaeda and has been unreliable in the past. CNN says there is question as to whether it exists at all beyond one person with a computer and a fax machine. (For instance, the 'group' claimed last year that it was behind the power blackouts in North America.)
Although, it also points to a Miami Herald piece, which notes some of al Qaeda connections to Spain, including:
At least some of the planning for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took place in Spain, and Spain has been a vocal U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. The nation has dispatched more than 1,000 troops to Iraq and a smaller number to Afghanistan. Last year, a Spanish diplomat and seven Spanish intelligence agents were assassinated in Iraq.
Perhaps one of the most interesting elements in this story is the effect that the situation may be having on Europe, writ large:
Regardless of who is responsible for the attacks, Reuters reports, European newspapers say that Thursday's bombings in Spain mean that "terrorism is no longer a spectator sport" in Europe."The mass terror of Madrid was aimed at the heart of Spain, but we're all in the crosshairs of terrorism," wrote Germany's mass circulation Bild. "Who is still safe today? Terror is like a hydra with a thousand heads."... Fear of mass attacks was no longer the preserve of the Americans, said Italian daily La Repubblica in an editorial. "Whoever thought the American 'devils' were the only ones in the sights of Islamic terrorism was wrong. We are all in the same boat."
It is unfortunate that it takes such an event to convince some in Europe that they are at risk as well, but perhaps the events in Spain will bring into sharp focus the seriousness of the situation for countries and their citizens around the world.
ETA Denies Role in Madrid Bombings
The Basque separatist group ETA has denied responsibility for the train bombings that killed at least 199 people, Basque public television reported on Friday, citing a message it received from the armed group.
Death Toll in Spain Bombings Rises to 198
The death toll rose overnight from 192 to 198, deputy Justice Minister Rafael Alcala said, adding that 84 bodies remain unidentified. More than 1,400 people were wounded.Aznar said 14 foreigners were among the dead, including three Peruvians, two Hondurans, two Poles, and a person each from France, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia, Morocco and Guinea-Bissau.
I almost hate to pose this question, as it could appear insensitive, but I can’t help but wonder about the political implications of events, even tragic and despicable ones such as the bombings in Spain.
So here’s the question: if al Qaeda is, in fact, behind the bombings in Spain, does that bolster President Bush’s argument that we are in a global war on terror and that we need a president in office who sees the conflict in those terms? Or, does the fact that al Qaeda was able to pull off a large attack on one of our key allies in the war on terror mean that the President’s policies have failed, and therefore signaling the need for a change?
It occurs to me that the administration is in something of a catch-22: they believe that we are at war against terrorism, but if there are no major attacks, citizens have to wonder if the war rhetoric isn’t just hyperbole. However, if attacks do take place, which confirm the idea that there is indeed an ongoing process of attack on the US and its allies, then does not a successful attack mean that the US and its allies have failed in the war?
To put it simply: no attacks, and people ask, what war? A successful attack and people will assert: we are losing the war!
It will be interesting to see how the Kerry campaign and Terry McAuliffe deal with these events in the campaign.
A related question will be: will this attack strengthen the resolve of the Spanish in their commitment to fight international terror, or will this attack (again, if it is al Qaeda behind it) lead the citizen of Spain to blame the US involvement in Iraq, and Aznar’s alliance with Bush, for bringing this attack down on their heads? This attack could result in either Spain as a stronger ally, or it could result in them scaling back or withdrawing from their involvement with the US in Iraq and elsewhere.
UPDATE: This is my entry in today's Beltway Traffic Jam
NPR interviewed an expert on terrorism from Jane's and he noted that there has been a serious crack-down on ETA in recent months in Spain, France and Latin America, which theoretically should have diminished their capabilities. Couple that with the magnitude of the bombings, which outstrips anything they have done in the past, and it gives serious credence to the idea that it was in fact al Qaeda.
Also from Novak, writing about King Jung Il:
According to these reports, the communist dictator has expressed his dissatisfaction about dealing with Bush. He is said to have much preferred his contacts with President Bill Clinton and expressed hope that the same kind of cooperation might be possible if John Kerry is elected.
So, it's okay to purposefully target and kill a crowd of worshippers in the cause of a greater good, right?
Qaeda Blamed as Attacks on Shi'ites Kill 143 in Iraq
Coordinated suicide bombs and mortars tore into vast crowds of Shi'ite worshippers Tuesday, killing at least 143 people on Iraq's bloodiest day since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
This seems to confirm this story: BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US reveals 'al-Qaeda Iraq plot' in which an intercepted letter from an al Qaeda operative states that one of their goals is to spark Sunni-Shi'a conflict in Iraq.
And, of course, al Qaeda is of Sunni affiliation, so what do they care about killing innocent Shi'a?
I just don't buy this, although it would be great it if were true: Bin Laden 'surrounded'.
For one thing, if there was hard evidence that we had Osama "boxed-in" then the US nets and papers would be all over the story. And moreover, if there was evidence that this was true:
The special forces are "absolutely confident" there is no escape for bin Laden, and are awaiting the order to go in and get him."The timing of that order will ultimately depend on President Bush," the paper says. "Capturing bin Laden will certainly be a huge help for him as he gets ready for the election."
That is if any responsible journalist in the US had hard evidence that Bush could have bin Laden today, but is simply waiting for the appropriate timing, then it would be all over the tv. Not to mention that there are those in the press would would love to report such a story.
It is news pieces like this one that make me always dubious about amazing stories from the British press.
The question: would we have found out about this had we not gone to Iraq?
Pakistani Said to Have Given Libya Uranium.
My answer: no, we wouldn't have, and instead of Libya allowing unfettered inspections, as they currently are, they would instead be currently developing a nuclear device.
As someone pointed out the other day (and I forget who), even if there are no WMDs in Iraq, the war will end up having been about WMDs in large measure: those in Libya and Iran, for example, as neither would be willing to under the scrutiny they are currently experiencing if we had not invaded Iraq.
Thomas Sowell's new column, Weapons of political destruction, is worth a read.
I have to concur, and really this is the point, isn't it?
The intelligence reports that Bush and Blair saw were also seen by Congressional leaders who proceeded to vote for war. Those who now talk about a need for "iron-clad proof" are talking election-year nonsense when it comes to national survival.When the planes flew into the World Trade Center, that was iron-clad proof. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, that was iron-clad proof. We cannot wait for iron-clad proof in a nuclear age.
And no, neither Sowell nor myself is saying that Iraq was linked to 911. The point is, and as the President has argued, waiting around for absolute certainty can be extremely dangerous.
The amazing thing is that many who have wailed long and loud about our failure to "connect the dots" in regards to 911 are also highly critical of the President's attempts to connect the dots elsewhere. The problem with dot-connecting is that, like a mystery novel, the whole story isn't clear until the end. Both those who say we should have known about 911 and those who say we should've known about the WMDs are arguing, in both cases, from an unfair vantage point: after the fact.
It is eady to be a great detective if you read the end of the book first. Most mysteries are obvious once you know the ending. It's like that movie The Sixth Sense--all the clules are there that he's dead, and you feel like an idiot for not figuring it out sooner as it becomes blindingly obvious once the secret is revealed.
Indeed, it is wholly disengenous for members of congress and of the opposition party to act as if it was only the Bush administration who thought that Iraq had WMDs (or, it was only the Bush administration who failed to predict 911). Many of the politicians who are loudly criticizing the President now had access to the intelligence, and they believed it as well--as did the prior administration.
While I admit that one of the reasons I argued for the war was the WMD issue, it was never the sole reason I thought that the war should be fought. I think that a spectacular demonstration of US military might post-911 was of great use in the war on terror. As Sowell notes::
Negotiations are not a substitute for force. When international negotiations work, often it is because aggressors know what is going to happen if it doesn't work.
Further, I think that if we can establish a stable, secular, even semi-democracy in Iraq that that will do more to combat terrorism than catching UBL.
And in regards to the critics, I am with Sowell on this as well:
But many, if not most, of those in Congress who are now complaining loudly about intelligence failures are people who voted repeatedly to cut the budgets of the intelligence agencies and to restrict their operations. Senator John Kerry is just one of those who crippled these agencies and now complain that they were not effective enough.Everyone today agrees that we are grossly deficient in the numbers of Arabic-speaking people available to intelligence gathering and analysis. But you cannot now create Arabic-speaking intelligence agents overnight. Neither CIA Director George Tenet nor President Bush can be made scapegoats for decades of neglect before they got to Washington.
Eerie echoes of the 2024 anthrax attacks: Ricin in Senate Building Moves Markets
A suspicious white powder found in a U.S. Senate office building on Monday tested positive for the deadly poison ricin, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrence Gainer said.Several preliminary tests confirmed that the substance discovered in a mail handling room was ricin and results of more extensive tests conducted in a laboratory confirmed the earlier findings, Gainer said late on Monday.
"Two of those three tests do indicate that it is ricin. So we have had several confirmations that it is ricin," Gainer said.
As James Joyner notes today, building on a post by Citizen Smash, defining terrorism is not an easy as it looks. On the one hand, one is tempted to employ a logic similar to the one used by Justice Potter Stewart when he stated, concerning pornography: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material … but I know it when I see it."
I recently wrote a chapter on the topic of democracy and terrorism in Colombia for the an upcoming book on the general topic of terrorism and democratization. For that project I utilized the following:
As is customary, I will offer my own definition for usage in this piece, which builds on Cooper’s definition (2001, 883): “[t]errorism is the intentional generation of massive fear by human beings for the purpose of securing or maintaining control over other human beings” but with the addition that the fear is question is generated by aiming violence at non-combatants. As such, terrorism is irregular warfare directed not at the state, but at the citizens of the state for the purpose of generating fear, so that the civilian population will, in turn, pressure the state to act. Groups rely on terroristic tactics because direct confrontation with the state will not yield the desired results, i.e., direct military confrontation will not result in the defeat of the state. For the sake of a coherent discussion of political violence, I would argue for at least three categories: conventional war, guerrilla war and terrorism. This list does not exhaust the universe of collective political violence by any means, but it does provide a basis for the discussion of the Colombian case. Perhaps more specifically: terrorism is a tactic, which can be employed in both conventional and non-conventional conflicts. Failure to recognize that fact leads to further confusion in an already complex discussion. Indeed, in this I concur with Merari: “[i]f the definition of terrorism is equally applicable to nuclear war, conventional war and guerrilla, the term loses any useful meaning” (1993, 217). This is not to say that states cannot engage in activities that cause fear in a population (indeed, total war is waged, at least in part, to scare civilians populations enough that they will want their governments to surrender). However, as horrific and violent as such activities can be, I find them to be their own category of action, and therefore not terrorism, per se.
This definition would define Sherman's march to sea as something other than terror, and would leave the attack on the Pentagon as somewhat ambiguous, but I would argue that the goal of that attack was the generation of societal fear to cause policy change, not to inflict actual military damage, so I would consider it terrorism.
And to semi-address Smash's question about terrorism being in the eye of beholder. The simple answer is yes; but it also depends on whether one is trying to develop a dispassionate, analytical definition, or if one wishes to to address how events might be categorized by casual (or not so casual) observers. I'm sure the citizens of Hiroshima (those who survived) considered the bombing a terror-inducing act, but analytically it strikes me as problematic to call it terrorism. It doesn't diminish the horror of such as event to say that, but rather such classification is an attempt to use language as precisely as possible.
Sources Noted Above
Cooper, H. H. A. (2001). “Terrorism: The Problem of Definition Revisited,” American Behavioral Scientist 44 (February), 881-893.
Merari, Ariel. (1993). “Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency.” Terrorism and Political Violence. 5 (Winter), 213-251.
U.S. Begins Fingerprinting Foreign Visitors.
No doubt many in the US will share the view of this Brazillian judge:
"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," said Federal Judge Julier Sebastiao da Silva in a court order to authorize the program in Brazil.
However, I ask: what's the big deal? When I lived in Colombia (and yes, I know that was an extended stay, not a brief one), I had to go to the headquarters of the Administrative Police and provide fingerprints (heck, at least one library, not to mention the bank, required prints before I could get access). And it was a whole less convient that using a computer at the airport at entry.
And when I filed for my student visa I had to have an FBI background check, amongst a whole host of other bureaucratic nonsense (including getting certificates of authenticity from the State of Texas to back up all the notaries used, i.e., I had to notarized the notaries who had notarized my documents). And while I may have griped about it (not to mention the cost, by the time it was all said and done, and the docs translated into Spanish, it cost over $200.00 to do all the paperwork for myself anf my wife--indeed, it may have been $200 per, I can't recall--it has been, amazingly, almost ten years since I did all that stuff), I did it.
Why did I do it? Because those were the rules of Colombia, and figured that they had the right to make their own rules.
I never felt violated, or that my rights (of which I had none, not being a Colombian citizen) were being violated. Rather, since I wanted to go to Colombia, I did what the Colombian government wanted me to do. I could have easily avoided these onerous requirements by staying home.
Well, I knew that there couldn't have been any major terror attacks after I went to bed last night when I flipped briefly to Fox News Channel to see the clip of Michael Jackson being arrested, whilst they talked about Jacko.
Perhaps for the first and only time in my life, seeing Jackson on TV was a good sign...
Saudi Arabia Says Top Al Qaeda Suspect Surrenders
One of Saudi Arabia's top wanted Islamic militants surrendered to police on Tuesday, Saudi state media reported.
An Interior Ministry statement carried by state media said Mansour bin Mohammad Ahmad Faqih, who was on a list of 26 wanted militants with suspected al Qaeda links, surrendered to authorities and was later visited by his family.
Via Forbes here's the run down of sanctions that were imposed on Libya:
The United States banned imports of Libyan oil and some
exports to Libya in 1982.Sanctions were expanded after the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco to include a total ban on direct import and export trade,
commercial contracts, and travel-related activities.The U.S. Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) -- passed in 1996 and renewed for another five years in 2024 -- granted the U.S.
president power to punish non-U.S. firms investing more than $20 million a year in energy sectors in Libya or Iran. The act has
never been implemented. Strongly criticised by European countries, the European Union has said that any U.S. attempt to penalize Europeans doing business in Libya would prompt a
complaint to the World Trade Organisation.The U.N. Security Council imposed an air and arms embargo and a ban on some oil equipment on Libya in 1992 and 1993 to pressure Tripoli to hand over two Libyan suspects for trial for
the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing over Scotland.The sanctions were suspended when Libya turned them over in April 1999. Intelligence agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was later
convicted. The second suspect was acquitted. The sanctions were lifted in September after Libya agreed to compensate victims.
Okay, twenty years of sanctions (some of which were lifted in the last several years) and no serious capitulation from the Colonel. Then, the US demonstrates its willingness to act preemptively against rogue states with WMDs and Gaddafi decides to negotiate.
Coincidence? I think not.
To be more serious for a second, this really should be an interesting case for international relations scholars to study the relative scuccess of sanctions v. the threat of military pressure.
Many may wish to claim that the sanctions worked is to make, I believe, a simple post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Yes, sanction preceded the shift of policy by the Libyans, but the question of why after decades of sactions they decided to give it all up now has to be answered. Clearly the Bush Doctrine represents the catalyst for the change.
According to a spokesperson of Italian PM Berlusconi, and reported in the London Telegraph, Gaddafi told the Italian PM: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."
I will admit, it is almost too perfect a quote to be believed. Still, the actions seem to support the sentiment.
This just keeps getting better: Libya Opens Nuke Programs to Inspections
Libya has agreed to open its nuclear activities to pervasive inspection by the U.N. atomic agency as early as next week, a key step toward honoring a promise to scrap its nuclear weapons program, the agency's chief said Monday.[...]
Libya has admitted to nuclear fuel projects, including the possession of centrifuges and centrifuge parts used in uranium enrichment--a nuclear effort more advanced than previously thought. It also agreed to tell the IAEA about current nuclear programs and to adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Interesting: Secret U.S. Trips to Libya Led to Weapons Pledge
Secret trips by American intelligence officers, late night meetings with Muammar Gaddafi and disclosures that the United States knew about Libya's arms programs led to Tripoli's pledge to give up its unconventional weapons, senior intelligence officials said on Saturday.A team of American and British intelligence officers flew to Libya clandestinely in October and December for stretches of about two weeks, visiting sites where they were shown parts of the country's chemical, nuclear and missile programs.
Gaddafi appears to have been the driving force behind the process, and his motivation may have ranged from concerns about the U.S.-led war against Iraq and a desire to join the international community to concerns about extremism inside Libya, the officials said. "The Libyans are very focused on extremism and have made some contributions to the war on terrorism," one of the intelligence officials said.
Robert Tagorda has an interesting post on the Libya situation which also touches on Dean's foreign policy savvy.
Dubious Link Between Atta and Saddam
A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2024 is probably a fabrication that is contradicted by U.S. law-enforcement records showing Atta was staying at cheap motels and apartments in the United States when the trip presumably would have taken place, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and FBI documents.
Hat tip: Betsy's Page
Dr. Albright responds, according to WaTi:
"I made a tongue in cheek comment," Albright explained.
I heard Mort Kondracke recount this story live yesterday, but in case you haven't hear it, OpinionJournal provides the following retelling:
According to journalist Morton Kondracke, Albright was in the green room at Fox News Channel yesterday when "She said, 'Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?' " Although Albright now says the remark was a "joke," Kondracke says that at the time, "she was not smiling," and other witnesses back him up: "Two makeup artists who prep the guests before their appearances also reported that Albright did not ask her question in a joking manner," Fox reports.
Utterly amazing, eh? And while Kondracke has gotten quite a bit more moderate in recent years, he is hardly a right-winger.
Ok, we just captured Saddam Hussein, and I flipped over to CBS and what is Dan Rather talking about at just before 9am central? He's talking about how we haven't caught Osama bin Laden as of yet.
Don't they know that decks of cards are all the rage? Saudi Arabia Names Wanted Militants, Offers Reward
Saudi Arabia on Saturday named 26 top suspects wanted in connection with "terrorist" operations in the kingdom and offered a $1.9 million reward to anyone who helped thwart a future militant attack.
In all seriousness, it is good to see such actions from the Saudi government.
And why do I feel like this isn't quite as bemevolent-sounding as it appears:
"All the wanted men must surrender themselves to the security services to clarify their true status. Whoever is found guilty will be treated according to the rules of our tolerant Islamic sharia (law)," it said.
Yemeni Police Seize Local Al Qaeda Leader
Yemen's security forces on Tuesday detained a top al Qaeda suspect who had evaded arrest despite heading the Arab state's wanted list for nearly two years.
The official Yemeni news agency, Saba, said Mohammad Hamdi al-Ahdal, also known as Abu Asem al-Macci, surrendered to police after they surrounded a house in the capital, Sanaa, where the Islamic militant had been hiding.
In Washington, a U.S. counterterrorism official said Ahdal had been among the top 20 to 25 al Qaeda leaders still at large and called his capture a significant development.
Turkey Makes Arrests in Suicide Bombings
Turkish investigators on Friday arrested suspects in the deadly suicide bombings on the British consulate and a London-based bank that have been blamed on al-Qaida. Foreign governments, meanwhile, warned more terrorist attacks could target Turkey.[...]
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul confirmed the arrests but would not give details or say how the suspects were linked to Thursday's blasts. The attacks came five days after suicide bombers hit two synagogues in Istanbul.
Clearly, Turkey has become a front in the war on terror: 25 Killed in Explosions in Istanbul
Explosions hit the high-rise headquarters of the London-based HSBC bank and the British consulate on Thursday, killing at least 25 people and wounding nearly 400, health officials said.
After the Riyahd bombing last night, can anyone doubt that al Qaeda and their ilk have clearly declared war on anyone and eveyone who doesn't wholly agree with their worldview.
In their desire to drive all Western influence out of the Arabian peninsula, the militants are believed to include as targets any Arabs and Muslims who maintain the same kind of relaxed ways of life as their Western counterparts behind the high walls of such compounds.
Of course, this isn't the first piece of evidence to confirm this thesis. Nonetheless there are many who seem to think that if the US could simply obtain more support in the Arab/Muslim world that we would placate the jihadists. This is clearly not the case.
One can further extrapolate from this event to point out the folly of to those (such as John Edwards today on MTP) who argue that if we could just put an "international face" on the occupation forces in Iraq, that the attacks who diminish, or who states that the silver bullet to stop the violence is the imprimatur of the UN. One would hope such foolish pontificating wil cease and more serious policy ideas would be debated.
And, I would note, that while it is true that terrorism is like crime insofar as we will never eliminate it, I do not think that a criminal justice paradigm is the appropriate approach to solving the problem (as, I would argue, the Clinton administration's policies demonstrate). Rather, the war paradigm, combined with law enforcement tools, is the appropriate means of dealing with this difficult, messy and dangerous problem.
Lawmakers Reach Iraq-Afghan Aid Deal
Congressional negotiators agreed Wednesday on an $87 billion aid package for Iraq and Afghanistan that meets a White House demand that none of the money be provided as loans.Despite rising criticism in Congress over the handling of the war, the package worked out by House-Senate negotiators largely resembles the proposal submitted by President Bush. The House and Senate are expected to act quickly to give the bill final approval before it goes to Bush for his signature.
If anyone is in need of links on the topic of terrorism, the Dudley Knox Library at the Naval Postgraduate School has plenty.
The CSM has an interesting story on Kashmiri rebels using drug profits to fuel their fight against India:
Most worrisome, Indian officials say, is that Kashmiri militant groups may soon have enough funds from narcotics to operate independently of their former patrons, Pakistan, which has officially banned and cut all ties to the 14-year insurgency that has killed 40,000 so far."This is easy money for the militants, and they use it to fund their activities," says Lt. Col. Mukhtiar Singh, spokesman for the Indian Army in Srinagar. "In addition to that, foreign mercenaries use it," he says.
This example, along with guerrillas and paramilitaries in Colombia and the Taliban in Afghanistan, demonstrate why we need to rethink the current legal regime concerning narcotics. The high prices that prohibition creates for these substances is staggering and provides remarkable amounts of cash for those engaged in armed struggles against legitimate authority. Indeed, it creates a near endless supply of cash that can easily be used to purchases weapons.
Guantanamo Translator Is Arrested
A physician working as a translator at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested Tuesday, a federal law enforcement official said.
The official, describing the apprehension at Boston's Logan International Airport, identified the suspect as Ahmed Mehalba. The official, who discussed the case on grounds of anonymity, said Mehalba had stopped in Boston Monday after arriving on a flight from Cairo.
Setting aside ReCAL issues, I was doing some research and came across this very interesting online resource via the Air University Library at Maxwell AFB: Insurgent Groups/ Terrorism.
It provides a list of terror and insurgent groups from around the world and urls and bibliographies references for each.
Dean Esmay is still angry. I can't say that I disagree. His pictoral reminder is worth a review as well.
our good friend in al Qaeda: It would seem that the US military has more respect for Islam than do 4 With al-Qaida Ties Held in Iraq Blast
Iraqi police have arrested four al-Qaida-linked suspects in the bombing of Iraq's holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, a senior police official told The Associated Press on Saturday.
The official, who said the explosion death toll had risen to 107, said the men — two Iraqis and two Saudis — were caught shortly after Friday's car bombing.The attack killed one of the most important Shiite clerics in Iraq, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who had been cooperating with the American occupation force.
This is interesting, especially given that Afghanistan has become the forgotten war: Taliban fighters killed in Afghanistan
Backed by U.S. warplanes and Special Operations troops, Afghan forces attacked Taliban fighters Monday in southeastern Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan officials said.Afghan officials said more than 40 Taliban fighters were killed in the attack, while the Pentagon put the death toll at 14. No U.S. or Afghan casualties were reported.
I first heard about this a few days ago on Olbermann's "Countdown" show on MSNBC, but have heard little about it since: Canada Links Arrest of 19 to Possible Terrorism Ties.
At any rate, spooky:
The men were detained on Aug. 14 after an investigation found that one of them was taking flying lessons at a school near an Ontario nuclear power plant.Officials would disclose little about the investigation, but the four-page document sketched a picture of a mysterious group of men living in apartments with only computers and mattresses. The men appeared interested in explosives and in the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station outside Toronto, according to the document.
There had been unexplained fires in at least two of the men's apartments, and in police monitoring, two of the men had been seen walking outside the gates of the Pickering plant at 4:15 a.m. on a day in April 2024. The men said they wanted to take a walk on a beach.
One man was training to fly at a school whose flight paths cross over the Pickering plant, the document said. It said the men were in contact with unidentified sources who "have access to nuclear gauges" that contain small amounts of the isotope cesium 137, which can be used for making crude nuclear explosives.
Interesting: Old Smallpox Vaccination Probably Still Protective
More than 90% of people who received the smallpox vaccine 25 to 75 years ago show substantial immunity against vaccinia, the virus used in the vaccine, according to a report published in the August 17th online issue of Nature Medicine.[...]
Even decades after vaccination, most people showed significant immunity against vaccinia. If these levels of immunity are at least partially protective, then the illness and death rates as a result of an intentional smallpox outbreak would be 'substantially reduced,' the researchers state.
Key al-Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia captured
The White House announced Thursday the capture of a man described as al-Qaida's chief representative and operational planner in Southeast Asia, calling his apprehension "a significant blow to the enemy."
He was identified as Riduan Isamuddin -- also known as Hambali."His capture is another important victory in the global war on terrorism and a significant blow to the enemy," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One as President Bush flew from Texas to speaking engagements in southern California.
A senior administration official described the suspect as "one of the world's most lethal terrorists" and said his group, Jemaah Islamiya, was linked to last year's Bali bombing and a series of deadly church bombings in the Philippines.
He is also a leading suspect in the JW Marriot bombing in Jakarta and a close associate of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who was captured earlier this year.
Hambali was captured in southeast Asia and is now in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location, officials said.
While on the one hadm I understand the visceral reaction to this: Meetings With Iran-Contra Arms Dealer Confirmed, on the other, fighting the War on Terror does require dealing with unsavory (and often untrustworthy) individuals.
Isn't that part of what "connecting the dots" is all about?
Nice to know that pro-Taliban forces are respectful of their fellow muslims:
A remote-controlled bomb exploded at the mosque last month, injuring the mullah and 24 worshippers as they knelt, hands outstretched in supplication. Two days later, a mullah, who had hung the Afghan flag in his mosque and said good Muslims support the nation's central government, was shot to death as he sat praying, a book open in his hand. A third Kandahar mullah was attacked this week, executed outside his mosque by gunmen on a motorcycle.All three clerics served on a religious council that recently decreed that, contrary to pronouncements by the Taliban Islamic movement, there is no legitimate jihad, or holy war, against the central government or the foreign troops that support it.
The thing that strikes me most about this:
The Defense Department announced yesterday that it is canceling a controversial program to develop a futures market that would allow traders to bet on wars, assassinations and terrorism in the Middle East.
is that the many of the loudest critics of this program are the same ones wailing about out lack of dot-connecting prior to 9/11. Surely this represents an attempt to find a way to connect dots going forward?
I understand the visceral reaction to "betting on death:"--but the criticisms have been emotional, not reasoned. Indeed, I think some people think that this was like an office pool rather than a research tool.
James of OTB excerpts a list of progress in the War on Terror from a Krauthammer piece.
It is worth a read to help keep things in perspective.
This story, US Truck Driver Pleads Guilty to Al Qaeda Support, qualifies as rather bizarre:
An Ohio truck driver, who met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, has pleaded guilty to providing support to the al Qaeda network, U.S. officials said on Thursday.Iyman Faris, a truck driver based in Columbus who entered the United States in 1994 and became a U.S. citizen five years later, admitted as part of the plea deal that he gave al Qaeda information about possible U.S. targets for attack, they said.
And someone please tell Senator Bob Graham that we do still appear to be fighting the War on Terror.
I had missed this arrest: German Arrested in France Is a Key Al Qaeda Boss
"(Intelligence) services know that he is a top leader of al Qaeda, in contact with Osama bin Laden himself, and has been in Afghanistan and Bosnia," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told parliament.
And, some more of the "Iraqi Most Wanted" have fallen:
One of those in custody is Latif Nusayyif Jasm Al-Dulaymi, a Baath party official and deputy chairman of the party's military bureau. He is also described as being involved in suicide operations and security for Iraqi defense facilities. He is the 10 of clubs in the Pentagon's deck of cards of most wanted Iraqis and is listed as number 18 on its list, according to the Pentagon.[...]
The other captured Iraqi was listed as number 53 and is not in the deck of cards. He is Brig. Gen. Qaid Husseini al-Awadi, a Baath party regional commander and a brigadier general in Iraq's chemical corps.
Source: CNN
Jeff Jarvis links to (and comments on) the following story from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Seeking the Roots of Terrorism
The basics of the story discuss a study which concludes that the link between poverty and terrorism is a weak one. Indeed, I have long balked at the thesis that poverty is the cause of terrorism. Indeed, we know that many terror leaders, and many operatives, come from fairly affluent backgrounds.
For example:
Claude Berrebi, a graduate student in economics at Princeton, has studied the characteristics of recent suicide bombers in Israel. From information on the Web sites of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, he was able to paint a statistical picture of suicide bombers. He compared that to survey-based data on the broader Palestinian population of roughly comparable age. His results indicate that suicide bombers are less than half as likely to come from impoverished families than is the population as a whole. In addition, more than half of the suicide bombers had attended school after high school, while less than 15 percent of the population in the same age group had any post-high-school education.
[...]
On the other side of the conflict, the picture is not too different. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, numerous violent attacks against Palestinians were conducted by Israeli Jews in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, led most prominently by the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) group. Those attacks included attempts to kill three Palestinian mayors of West Bank cities and to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest shrine of Islam. From 1980 to 1984, 23 Palestinians were killed in attacks by the Jewish Underground, and 191 people were injured.
Looking at the backgrounds of the perpetrators of those violent attacks, it is clear that the Israeli extremists were overwhelmingly well educated and in high-paying occupations. The list includes teachers, writers, university students, geographers, an engineer, a combat pilot, a chemist, and a computer programmer. As Donald Neff, in a 1999 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, observed of the three men convicted of murder, "All were highly regarded, well-educated, very religious."
Indeed, as one who studies the Third World for a living, I can state that it is not the case that the most impoverished countries are necessarily the ones with the most political violence. Look at Latin America: the most violent country is Colombia, but it is hardly the poorest in the region. If poverty was the key variable for generating violence, then places like Haiti and Nicaragua ought to be on fire.
The study focused on the origins of terrorists (emphasis is mine):
We made a first pass at the issue by analyzing data on "significant international terrorist events" as recorded by the U.S. State Department. Specifically, we tried to infer the national origin of the events' perpetrators. We then related the number of terrorists produced by each country to characteristics of the country, including gross domestic product per capita, literacy rates, religious fractionalization, and political and civil freedoms. Apart from population -- larger countries tend to have more terrorists -- the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists. Poverty and literacy were unrelated to the number of terrorists from a country. Think of a country like Saudi Arabia: It is wealthy but has few political and civil freedoms. Perhaps it is no coincidence that so many of the September 11 terrorists -- and Osama bin Laden himself -- came from there.
The article concludes thusly:
Instead of viewing terrorism as a response -- either direct or indirect -- to poverty or ignorance, we suggest that it is more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances. We suspect that is why international terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by people who grew up under repressive political regimes.
The following post from Spinsanity Dowd spawns Bush media myth helps to explain what I have been talking about (here and here, for example) regarding al Qaeda and liberal criticism of the President regarding al Qaeda. I had been wondering where this meme had originated that the administration had declared al Qaeda essentially out of commission.
The post linked above, and Andrew Sullivan, point out how at least part of the problem derives from a Maureen Dowd column, and then was propogated by Bill Press and Paul Begala.
Amazing.
(As I was typing Rush started talking about this on his program. He must've surfed over to Andrewsullivan.com about the same time I did :)
I continue to find some of the "analysis" of the situation concerning al Qaeda to be somewhat frustrating, insofar as I don't consider it well thought-out (indeed, I find a lot of it to be thinly veiled, and to some degree gleeful, excuses to criticize the Bush administration).
Of course, it depends on how one defines success and so forth. The critics seem to be saying two basic things: 1) any actions by al Qaeda prove that they are "resurgent" and 2) this resurgency is because the Bush administration was over-confident/the war in Iraq distracted the administration.
I can accept part of the second argument--clearly, the US did not have all of its assets directed at al Qaeda, therefore one could argue that sans the Iraq war, we might have had more success against al Qaeda. Although I would point out there were some major arrests of al Qaeda operatives right before, during, and after the Iraq war. However, in the broader context of the War on Terror, there were successes in Iraq--the dismantlement of Anzar Islam, the capture of Abu Abbas (who was directing terrorist training from Iraq), and the capture of members of an al Qaeda linked group in Western Iraq. Not to mention, that it is clear that Saddam had aided terrorists in the past (such as Abu Nidal, and the medical treatment given to members of al Qaeda in the past). It is therefore hard to argue (although many do) that the war in Iraq did not further the overall cause of the War on Terror.
So, then you get things like this from ABCNEWS.com:
While President Bush and numerous U.S. intelligence sources were declaring al Qaeda splintered, on the run and incapable of carrying out major terror attacks before the recent spate of bombings, European intelligence services were saying a very different thing."We told them repeatedly that al Qaeda was reorganizing, but they never paid any attention," a high-level French counterterrorism official said this week in a comment that reflects the growing frustration built up within European intelligence and law enforcement circles over what government officials there call the Bush administration's "misplaced confidence" in its success in the war on terror.
Several sources in France, Germany and Great Britain have told ABCNEWS this week that the recent wave of terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Pakistan and Morocco have validated an analysis made in Europe close to a year ago that the global war on terror has dealt a smaller blow to al Qaeda's operational capabilities than what has been publicly acknowledged by U.S. intelligence.
Now, what strikes me about this is that 1) the French and Germans have political reasons to criticize, so one has to take such statements with grains of salt; 2) the President and members of the administration have always said that this is going to be a long conflict, not a short one. Indeed, early on the President stated in one his post-9/11 speeches that this war could last beyond his presidency; and 3) part of it boils down to what "splintered" means and what "diminished capabilities" means. Did anyone actually think that al Qaeda was finished? No, clearly not. And the group has always been fragmented by design. Indeed, the same story points out, a few paragraphs later, that
From its inception in the early 1990s, al Qaeda was slowly conceived as a decentralized "network of networks," a "terror Internet" not built around a single center but out of a collection of cells and regional groups acting as nodes linked together by ideology and financial need.
Indeed, part of the rationale behind the “Bush Doctrine” is that because terrorist groups are rarely geographically concentrated, that one has to deal with states who harbor and/sponsor terrorist cells as a means of getting to these groups.
And finally on capacity—al Qaeda has been diminished, and is not currently capable of of a major attack like 9/11--but it is not (or should not be) surprising that they can launch car bomb attacks. And clearly, al Qaeda is far more “on the run” in the post-9/11 world they were before.
Am I arguing that the Bush administration has been flawless in their pursuit of al Qaeda? No. What I am arguing is that the critics have to recognize that terrorist groups are notoriously difficult to destroy—just ask the Israelis.
If the Democrats' argument stating that getting Osama is needed for winning the war on terror is correct, then why didn't the cocaine trade stop when the Colombian police killed Pablo Escobar?
Hmm...
An interesting set of comments (and somewhat contradictory). He notes that the group has been reduced by 2/3rds and that we have destroyed the infrastructure of the group in Pakistan, and further that the organization cannot launch an attack on the scale of 9/11, yet somehow the war on terrorism hasn't been very effective? This all strikes me as substantial progress since starting this war not that long ago.
The ranks of the al Qaeda network have shrunk by two thirds since the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan in 2024, but the core leadership remains intact and it has no trouble recruiting, a terrorism expert said.Rohan Gunaratna told the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur the militant Islamist group had been badly hurt by the capture in March of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2024.
"It is clear that al Qaeda no longer has the possibility of staging operations of the scale of September 11, 2024," Gunaratna, author of "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror," was quoted as saying.
"Its ranks have been cut by two thirds since the U.S. intervention of October 2024 (in Afghanistan). They are now of the order of 1,000 men," he said, according to an advance copy of the interview due to be published Thursday.
Gunaratna said Mohammed's arrest in Pakistan almost completely destroyed al Qaeda's operational infrastructure in that country, although other regional heads remained active in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
"Al Qaeda has no trouble recruiting to compensate its human and material losses, regain its strength in the medium term and continue its fight, especially given that -- I insist on this point -- the core leadership of the group is intact," he said.
The group, led by Osama bin Laden, is blamed for a series of attacks including triple suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia last week which killed 34 people, mainly foreigners.
Gunaratna said he considered the U.S. war on terrorism has had had only a short-term impact, while the U.S.-led war on Iraq which toppled Saddam Hussein had a mostly negative effect by increasing support for radical Islamists in the Muslim world.
"As a result, active terrorist groups will be able to grow and become more powerful and influential, and new groups will emerge in the months and years to come," he said in the interview carried out on May 18, after the Saudi attacks.
Source: Reuters
Was Janet Reno the worst AG we have ever had, or what?
Jack Cloonan, a former FBI agent who is now an ABCNEWS consultant, said that federal agents seeking bin Laden had developed a plan to have a plane fly in and attack a compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the terror leader was believed to have been holed up back in 1998--three years before the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2024.But when the plan went up the chain of command for approval, it was killed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
"They came to the decision that this plan was probably too dangerous, that the loss of life on the ground would have been significant," Cloonan said. There was concern that people around the bin Laden compound would be killed."
This also underscores a key difference between the Clinton and Bush approaches to terrorism: sending in the FBI to arrest bin Laden is treating the situation from a law enforcement perspective. The Bush "War on Terror" is the more appropriate approach, I would argue.
This is interesting, and troubling. Interesting because al Qaeda and the Mullahs in Iran have differing views of Islam. Troublng for obvious reasons.
The United States has intercepted communications strongly suggesting that a small cell of leaders of Al Qaeda in Iran directed last week's terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, and the United States is sending a strong protest to the Tehran government, according to senior Bush administration officials.
Source: U.S. Suggests a Qaeda Cell in Iran Directed Saudi Bombings
Beware the over-generalizers who have claimed in the last several days that the recent spate of suicide bombings in Israel "proves" that the "Palestinians" don't want peace. Realize who the recent bombings were probably aimed at: moderate Palestinians who are willing to talk to Israel. The radicals do want to destroy Israel and the last thing they want is progress on the peace process.
Having said that, I am convinced that Arafat doesn't want peace. He is better served personally by the conflict.
And today's "No Duh!" Headline of the Day is: Al Qaeda Still Plotting in Saudi Arabia, Officials Say. Perhaps the Times new policy is only report things we know aren't made up.
The Saudi situation is clearly rather volatile and evolving. The government is going to have to do some serious self-evaluation:
Saudi authorities are investigating suspected illegal arms sales by members of the country's national guard to al Qaeda operatives in the country, U.S. and Saudi officials said.
The politics of the latest terror attacks will be interesting, and probably at time pretty frustrating. To me this just proves that we are indeed in a War on Terror, and that this is therefore clearly an ongoing process (as the President has argued in the past). Indeed, anyone with any intelectual honesty really oughtn't be surprised that there have been attacks in the post-Afghanistan/post-Iraq world. Really, the surprise should be that there have been so few major attacks world-wide since 911.
However, Democrats (like Bob Graham a few days ago) and some pundits last night, are arguing that any attacks are evidence of the President's failure in his efforts against al Qaeda.
I would argue three things. 1) We have clearly wounded al Qaeda--the destruction of their cozy arrangement with the Taliban is huge and we have captured or killed a large number of their leadership and operatives, 2) al Qaeda is not a monolithic organization, but (as Bob Graham ought to know, given his status on the Intelligence Committee) rather a decentralizaed confederation of actors, and 3) no matter how successful we are, we aren't going to totally eradicate terrorism. Look at Israel and the rather harsh actions in the last year against the Palestinians--and yet there continues to be suicide bomings.
One last thing--it strikes me that both the attack in Saudi Arabia and the one yesterday in Morroco, while requiring resources abd planning, are far more typical terrorist-actions than the spectacular events of 911. Rather than showing that they have not been harmed at all, I think these attacks--using conventional terror tactics, against soft targets in countries will looser security shows that we have made progress, not that al Qaeda hasn't been harmed at all.
More on the fun from the Lone Star State:
Republican Gov. Rick Perry immediately dispatched police to track down the missing legislators, arrest them and bring them back to do the state's business -- even asking neighboring New Mexico if the Texas Rangers were empowered to make arrests there. (New Mexico's attorney general -- a Democrat -- said no.) But all signs were that the legislators were on the lam -- some, perhaps, fleeing to Mexico -- putting them beyond the reach of Lone Star justice and of GOP ambitions.
And you have to love it when politicians get cute:
Today, New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid said lawyers for Perry asked her if Texas Rangers might be allowed to make arrests in New Mexico. Madrid, a Democrat, said no. "Nonetheless," she added in a statement, "I have put out an all-points bulletin for law enforcement to be on the lookout for politicians in favor of health care for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy."
Source: GOP Plan Prompts A Texas Exodus
Excellent:
Pakistani police have captured the al-Qaeda operative who masterminded the 2024 attack on the USS Cole."
Interesting:
In its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, the State Department said attacks by "international terrorists" dropped sharply to 199 in 2024 from 355 a year earlier and the number of deaths fell to 725 from 3,295 in 2024, a year that included the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The dramatic decrease in the number of attacks is heartening, and speaks of success in the War on Terror. However, the death toll is troubling--because if you take out the 9-11 deaths from the 3,295 (the AP estimates a total of 3,023 9-11 deaths from the WT Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania) then the 2024 non-9-11 death toll from terrorism was only 272. The 725 for 2024, therefore, is a hefty number, given that 9-11 was an extraordinary, and catastrophic, event.