Three attacks inside what should have been secure areas (Fort Hood, NWA and Khost) raise two related questions. The first is how good are the intelligence services of the opposition? The second, not necessarily related to the first, is how good is American counterintelligence?
It may be past time to stop thinking of the enemy as a bunch of ignoramuses in a cave (“isolated extremist”) who are enaged in a largely do-it-yourself jihad and to begin regarding them as having access to, or perhaps being by directed intelligence operatives of the highest caliber, capable of recruiting a medical doctor within the US Army; capable of putting a man with explosive underwear in an airplane; capable of sending a man with a suicide vest into a CIA base in Afghanistan.
These operations all required a degree of professionalism, patience and attention to security that really can’t be ascribed to a bunch of 8th century cavemen picking lice out of their beards. Put it this way: considering the attacks of the last three months, how infeasible would it be for the enemy, if that word can still be used, to send a suicide bomber to a high school graduation? A prom? To a dinner party of prominent people or to simply launch a Mumbai style attack inside a shopping mall?
If they can attack Fort Hood, why should a high school be any safer? Because it’s a gun-free zone?
Without classified information, we can’t answer the question of how good the enemy is. It’s now an article of liberal faith that terrorism isn’t really state sponsored but really something spontaneous. In that world, the opposition consists entirely of amateurs. Second, it’s a law enforcement problem and must therefore be combatted with the same attention to rules of evidence, etc that attend LE problems. Be that as it may, the nature of the enemy is hard to characterize from open source information.
But the second question: how good is American counterintel? has partial answers from what we now know about Hassan, Mutallab and what we will be learning about Khost. The answer is probably not good enough. Hassan practically announced his attention to kill Americans from the housetops. Mutallab was denounced by his own father and had a profile just short of a billboard saying “I am an extremist” on his back.
The “system worked” but no one could connect the dots. Why David Broder just wrote in the Washington Post that Napolitano’s potential was “unlimited”. Broder wrote of her performance in the face of the underwear bomber’s challenge:
It must have been a frantic time for her. She was in San Francisco, far from her Washington office, and she must have had a sleepless night. But her eyes were bright, and her voice was calm. Everything appeared to be completely normal, except that her usual sense of humor was absent, as it should have been, given the circumstances.
The Washington elite is still judging competence by public relations skill, where good on camera == good at the job. It’s lived too long in a bubble if it can conclude, as Marc Ambinder did that responding to the NWA attack was a question of appropriate messaging. In that world, it’s all about talking points, all about image, all about messaging. If the last three attacks convey anything, it is that while messaging is important, it is not all important.
There is a reason why Obama hasn’t given a public statement. It’s strategy.
Here’s the theory: a two-bit mook is sent by Al Qaeda to do a dastardly deed. He winds up neutering himself. Literally.
Authorities respond appropriately; the president (as this president is wont to to) presides over the federal response. His senior aides speak for him, letting reporters know that he’s videoconferencing regularly, that he’s ordering a review of terrorist watch lists, that he’s discoursing with his secretary of Homeland Security.
But an in-person Obama statement isn’t needed; Indeed, a message expressing command, control, outrage and anger might elevate the importance of the deed, would generate panic (because Obama usually DOESN’T talk about the specifics of cases like this, and so him deciding to do so would cue the American people to respond in a way that exacerbates the situation).
Just recently the BBC announced that President Obama was “rallying the CIA” after the Afghanistan bomb attack. That’s all to the good, but the CIA needs more than comforting, or “healing” in the face of traumatic losses. It needs more than words and the question is whether anyone can provide anything beyond that.
Barack Obama has sent a letter of support to the CIA after seven staff were killed by an Afghan bomber – one of the worst attacks in its history. The US president’s condolence message praised the work of those killed.
In the early part of its war against Nazi Germany, Great Britain suffered a number of humiliating defeats. The HMS Royal Oak was sunk at its anchorate in Scapa Flow. The HMS Hood blew up after a few minutes against the Bismarck. The fabled fortress of Singapore fell in a few weeks to a force 1/3 the size of the British force. And while Churchill provided words of inspiration at these low moments, at no point did anyone think that words sufficient. But then the Britons of 70 years ago had the wisdom to know they were up against a capable, determned foe. They did not fool themselves into thinking that nothing was wrong and try to manage the problem with press releases.
America has never lost a major warship at sea since the Second World War, but it came close to losing the USS Cole in Aden. America never suffered an attack on its homeland in World War 2, but it suffered September 11. And yet these attacks are airily brushed off. Vice President Dick Cheney said, “We are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe … why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.”
Maybe one shouldn’t go that far, but neither ought one go to the lengths of saying that Janet Napolitano is a person of “unlimited potential” just because she exuded warmth in Mexican restaurant. There are self-evidently serious shortcomings in the intelligence apparatus, problems which cannot be fixed by talking points. Whatever the personal charms of Janet Napolitano may be, Washington isn’t doing well enough at a practical level in a conflict it largely refuses to even acknowledge.
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Janet Napolitano is a person of “unlimited potential”
The phrase “potential energy” has two parts. We may consider each in sequence. In the sense that potential energy is a measure of how much will be released by a rock falling off of a table then yes Napolitano has vast potential. There may be no absolute limit to how low she could go. In the sense that energy refers to a capacity to achieve useful work then there is no evidence that I am aware of that she has any energy at all. She may be more like a bureaucratic black star floating through the Adminosphere and draining energy from all that pass near.
Some words would be useful to the CIA. Words like, “Attorney General Holder has been told to end investigations of interrogation and rendition policies that were carried out under proper legal directive” would help. Even better would be, “Find the people responsible for this and kill them.” That would be almost as good as, “I can hear you.”
The US’s elites, but esp. the liberal side, simply no longer believe that there is a reality that cannot be made to conform to one’s wishes. They really do think that good intentions are enough, and good things always follow from good intentions. You see it in their approach to both domestic and foreign matters, and in their criticizing the opposition not on the basis of inferior results but impure motives (racism, not wanting good things, etc.).
Results no longer matter to them.
So, looking good on camera or giving a nice self-esteemy pep-talk counts for more than actually supporting and empowering those whom we depend on, and who in turn depend on the leaders.
I include much of the top echelon of the US’s intelligence, counterintelligence, and foreign affairs bureaucracies. I hope all those people at CIA who leaked and connived to bring down Bush are happy with what they got. Cold comfort for me to see how they screwed their own agency, but something.
‘Al Qaeda is just a few primitives in caves’ because we want them to be that. Iran or Syria or Saudi money have nothing to do with it… sure. A guy almost blows up a plane and Obama’s first reaction is to call it isolated even tho it’s obvious someone either taught him how to make the explosive sor, more likely, fitted him out—so there was some sort of support network and “isolated” makes no logical sense.
The health care monstrosity will better everyone’s lot because we want it to. The Stimulus bill created jobs because we wanted it to. AGW exists and is an existential threat, but CO2 restrictions can painlessly solve it. On and on. History, experience, facts, and logic count for nothing… even, less than nothing, because to raise them indicates one is not believing strongly enough. So in raising them one is interfering with progress by faith.
We have some strange brew of Tinkerbelle plus Marx in charge in Washington. Just believe hard enough and it will be so. If not, it’s because someone had doubts, they must be found and either expunged or re-educated. That’s the current US government.
I don’t know how it’ll crash and burn, or how bad it will be. Some BCers are pretty apocalyptic.
But if this goes on long enough, it will inevitably lead to some very, very bad things. Reality cannot be denied indefinitely.
I am not an engineer but I’ve worked with quite a few, and one expression of Murphy’s Law is “Nature sides with the hidden flaw,” which means in any system if there is a flaw it will eventually be tested and the system found wanting. A government unable to deal with reality or logic or think in terms of purposes and ends (rather than intentions and appearances) must eventually encounter disaster.
Speaking strictly from a military point of view, which is where I have personal experience, the counter-intelligence folks are completely ham strung by politically correct considerations. As was evident from Major Hassan’s treason, if there is the slightest chance that a charge of racism or discrimination can be leveled, an entire investigation can and frequently has been derailed. Several years ago it was so bad that people of certain protected ethnicities who performed critical and sensitive work dealing with material at the Top Secret SCI level were kept in their position after performing erratically, performing inadequately, and showing poor judgment and instability in their off base lifestyles. These people should have been removed summarily as security risks but were not. In addition to the “Get Out of Jail Free” card for religion / ethnicity, this kid gloves treatment seems to go with rank. The higher the rank, the less likely a serious investigation will be undertaken and the less likely career damaging actions may be taken. I’ve known highly skilled, straight arrow E-4 and E-5 intelligence analysts who had their Top Secret clearances suspended on accusations of having used illegal controlled substances at a party. No drugs were found. Blood and urine tests found no evidence of drug use, but they were still performing weeds and seeds detail for months as the investigation, which eventually went nowhere, ran on and on. All the while, their highly trained talents could have been used in support of combat operations in Southwest Asia. Other analysts had to work extremely long shifts to cover for the lost man-hours. I hope none if the wrong people wound up dead due to exhausted analysts making a bad call. On the other hand a certain commander, a Colonel, became involved in an ongoing, long term, and VERY thinly veiled homosexual relationship with the civilian spouse of another officer on base when said officer deployed to the sandbox for a lengthy tour, and suffered no repercussions. No court martial. No article 15, and no loss of access to extremely sensitive information or command of ongoing intelligence operations. Talk about conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline! I guess I should be grateful no child molestation or frolicking with enlistees was involved! This was widely known among the officer corp. including the commander’s subordinates. If CID / OSI / Counter Intelligence Corp (CIC) can’t get their acts together to get rid of people like Hassan or other flagrant low hanging fruit, the entire system is broken. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. This should have been obvious since the Robert Hanssen case, but just as with airport security, there has been a lot more kabuki than effective action or prevention.
“Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,”
Thus spoke the U.S. Army Chief of Staff following the worst criminal massacre of U.S. forces on U.S. territory in modern history. The Army CID, Air Force OSI, and career counter intelligence agents have some very sharp people, but they’re never given the necessary backing to really protect our forces or sensitive information. Real security and counter intelligence would step on lots of toes, hard! It’s all so icky in such a civilized society. Our military and intelligence organizations are hamstrung by the same political correctness that is more quickly than ever strangling our society. This attitude will end up killing several thousand or tens of thousands of the wrong folks sometime in the near future. It’s past time to take off the gloves and get serious…
This comment withdrawn. Sam W
OT: I must add my condolences on the loss of your companion. I am quite sure that they can think and do appreciate how we feel. This thread closed too soon.
I can just read the blog and not comment, not subscribe. Perhaps that would be best.
Twenty years ago, after the Marine barracks loss in Lebanon, I observed several men, who phenotypically were clearly from the Middle East, photographing public buildings in my university town, including the campus ROTC. I immediately called in the license plate number to the nearest FBI office and was told that the Bureau was not interested in my information because photography was not illegal. I knew at the time that my duty was to deal with the car’s occupants personally, but I wasn’t prepared for the legal consequences. The hour will soon arrive when Whiskey’s predictions come true and legal consequences of direct citizen action will be nonexistent.
1. How good is enemy’s intel? Good enough to continue waging Jihad against us for the foreseeable future. This isn’t due primarily because of their intel, but rather a mix of factors which renders Islamic intel super potent. Keep in mind that our government was and remains utterly compromised by Muslim infiltration and Muslim sympathizers. With Obame installed, this goes all the way to the top, though GWB was also a megaphone for Islamic (and especially Sunni) propaganda.
Think of it. Going back to pre-9/11 and continuing (astoundingly) even through today, 1/1/2010, ALL government agencies from local police and civic governments up to the FBI CIA DHS Congress DoS DoD turn to Jihad front groups (CAIR MSA ISNA etc) for guidance and insights on handling Jihad! Michael Scheuer, the supposed “expert” on al qaeda before 9/11 still believes with every naive bone in his body that the long maleable litany of Islamic grievances which Muslims cultivate for infidel consumption, or sometimes use to rally the troops (Crusades, Colonialism, Israel/Palestine, infidel armies in Arabia, etc) are the fundamental driving impulse for Islamic Jihad. This is absurd. Without the core tenets of world domination, terror and death worship, and congenital antipathy for infidels to plug into, these manufactured pretexts could never result in global terror (aka Jihad).
Islamic Jihad will be the strangest war America will ever fight. Our enemy understands us better than we understand the Muslims, and with our intelligence hopelessly blinded by our enemy’s 100% successful infiltration, it’s inevitable for terror hits, even deep within our supposedly inviolate sanctuaries, to continue, That is until the Muslim moles and their friends are eradicated from their positions of power or influence.
So answering question #1 (how good is their intel?) begs another question which answers #2: How good does Muslim intel have to be if American intel is an unwitting but completely owned subsidiary of Islamic Jihad?
It seems to me that what Napolitano demonstrated is that she is able to keep doing her thing, untouched by a change in the situation.
… and the band played on.
Contrary information simply does not register.
To quote Churchill again: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.”
What the Christmas near-disaster says about the country and its preparedness is beyond horrible.
Yes, Mumbai style attacks — I can imagine such targets as The Mall of America, Disneyland, sports arenas, convention centers, freeway interchanges — can all be carried out with fairly low tech means.
Intelligence only works if the folks working on it are themselves intelligent. But when rendered limited by preconceptions and political correctness (not to mention any hidden agendas contrary to the country’s welfare) then someone like Napolitano’s “unlimited potential” scares the hell out of me.
I speculate that the quantity of the enemy’s intel is less than ours.
In quality, however, they are way more effective. Why? Mindset. In particular, disregard for the rights of others.
We need to become more effective. Joining up computer systems, important and all as it is (given the number of jihadis), is second fiddle.
Here is an interesting article on how the Israelis boost effectiveness. In a word, it’s called profiling.
But behind the Israeli processes, there is also a mindset – that the right to life trumps everything.
One of the West’s many problems is the rights industry, and it’s handmaiden, PC.
There is some evidence that the rights industry is being exposed as a crock that has got us to where we are.
We need to prioritise our rights and allow some to trump others. There are very few absolute rights.
ADE
The people in charge, like Napolitano and Holder were chosen for their doctrinaire inflexibility. If they were capable of changing their minds or behavior, they would not have been chosen. They will have to be replaced, which means replacing the people who chose them as well. If the ballot box doesn’t work, other means will have to be explored.
The sad thing about this situation is that these people are True Believers, and when the excrement does hit the the fan, their reaction will be something along the lines of “This can’t be happening! How were we supposed to know? It’s not my fault!”
Richard: Fort Hood was a gun free zone too. As astonishing as it is to believe, the men and women in the room with Hasan were as defenseless as a kindergarten class. The military men and women. Another symptom of the sickness.
The recent attacks show a remarkable appreciation for our weaknesses – but the successful destruction of the leadership team at FOB Chapman was a masterpiece of intel + bold action. There are thousands of passenger aircraft that must be defended, and hundreds if not thousands of potential traitors within the armed forces. So, in a way, the odds in each of THOSE two cases favor the attacker.
But to find and kill the masterminds sent to find and kill the AQ leadership – and to do it in a way that does not tip them off and which in fact engenders their confidence – THAT’S a masterpiece.
These guys are, it goes without saying, very dangerous manmade overseas contingency facilitators.
Honestly, the first thought that popped into my head when I heard about Napolitano’s “the system worked” statement was:
Yeah, if “the system” = “American citizens, you are on your own,” then the system worked. The system was not about protecting us; it was about Big Sis and her compadres continuing to draw their paychecks and enjoy the power & prestige of their positions. Have there been mass firings of top- and mid-level incompetents in the wake of NWA? Fort Hood? Nope. They still have their jobs = “the system worked.”
IOW here is the naked reality: The fundamental mission of U.S. intelligence and domestic security apparatus is no longer intelligence or domestic security. It is jobs protection for the honchos.
Everywhere the left infects, it paralyzes the system, through bureaucratic sclerosis of lawyers, regulations, PC and caving to (already owned by the left) unions. It subverts the mission from whatever the fundamental function is supposed to be (teaching kids how to read and write … building reliable, affordable cars … preserving the security on an American military base … preventing Americans from being slaughtered in their own cities) into an unspoken but fully and universally understood new directive: If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your head down and trap shut, bub. The original mission is carried out on the institutional level only as kabuki, and by fewer and fewer individuals within the organization as time goes on.
General Casey’s statement about how the loss of “diversity” would be “worse” than the loss of 13 troops (and one unborn baby) to a terrorist is about as obvious a tell as you could get re: the mindset of the command structure about the de facto mission of the organization.
I’m concerned that, in a very real and practical sense, American citizens are now on their own within the borders of the U.S., which have been breached, almost certainly to a much higher degree than most can guess. American troops have it worse. As a private citizen if I think that the person I’m working or living alongside is a homicidal nutjob and the management or landlord is doing nothing about it, I at least have the option to change jobs or residences. Our troops have no such option.
When the government that was instituted to secure its citizens’ God-given rights to life and liberty is no longer as an institution capable of or interested in securing life and liberty … and the citizenry eventually wakes up to this reality ….
AR #3 : Don’t forget Sandy Burglur. I you or I had been convicted of the type of security breaches that he was, we would still be in Leavenworth. The elites believe that the rules don’t apply to them. They don’t realize (or don’t care) that the rules are there for a reason and that we all (including them) may suffer if the rules are ignored.
wretchard, “why not a high school” (or Times Square, or the mall, etc) – AQ attacks on America, so far, have chosen targets which (given their world view) are directly related to their announced objectives. I’m not sure that mass-casualty attacks which lack a proximate relation to their objective are in the cards.
Before WWII a man walked into a British embassy in Eastern Europe with the pilot’s manual for a Messerschmitt BF-109 fighter plane. He said they could copy it but he needed it back in a couple of hours so he could return it without the real owner knowing. The reaction of the embassy staff was “Why would we want a copy of that thing?”
Around that same time period a man walked into a British embassy in another Eastern European nation and offered them the fuel injection unit from a DB-601 engine, the power plant for the BF-109 fighter. He got the same reaction.
Latest word is that the UnderooBomber’s father warned the U.S. Embassy not just because he saw his kid reading the wrong kind of comic books but because his son had called him from Yemen, saying that it would be his last communication and that “they” were removing the SIMM card from his cellphone.
There is a pattern here, or rather a series of overlapping patterns. In any bureaucracy there is a natural compartmentalization, because people learn very quickly that there are so many worthless slugs around that you can end up doing not only your own job but a bunch of others as well. There also is the knowledge that if you accept work outside your narrowly defined area you may have to exert all the effort but will receive none of the credit – indeed, your superiors may well consider it a negative that you gave them more headaches. And there is the fact that bureaucracy means always being able to say it’s your job but never having to explain why you refuse to do it – so you not only have to do the work but also fight off the “real” owners.
But a relatively new factor is the “Me Generation” aspect. So many people today are so interested in self promotion – and self delusion – that they refuse to acknowledge another specialty may be needed or may have something to contribute.
When at the Pentagon I conducted my own analysis on my own time and concluded that the U.S. policy toward launch of U.S. satellites on Chinese boosters was fatally flawed. And almost no one gave a rat’s rump. All the factors mentioned above featured in that attitude. I was a non-intel guy doing intel analysis, connecting dots I was not even supposed to have access to. I finally was called to testify before a Congressional investigating committee in November 1998. So the truth may come out, eventually, but all too often it is too late.
After that first offer at the embassy, the next time the British got to examine the fuel injection unit from a BF-109 was when one was shot down over England.
Reality has not been a consideration in Washington since at least Clinton,s first election. The only thing that counts is votes and the more you can buy the better.
Where are the WTC bombers from 1993? In jail talking to idiot lawyers and e mailing their families.
Where are the the planners of the 2001 WTC attack? In NY awaiting the same fate. Remember this is almost 7 years after they were captured. I would think that any relevant intelligence could have been extracted in 2 or 3 years.
What ate the Rules of Engagement? I’m not there but I will guess that some overt physical act is required, A line of men with supplies and weapons including RPGs coming over from from Iran to Afghanistan would not qualify. How about attacker that run from an ambush directly into any religious site? I think that the chance of permission to engage is near zero.
Why are SEALs awaiting court-marshal? Some ticket punchers would not risk a promotion for good men that MIGHT have have made a small error in judgment.
Unless our government starts making rational, not PC decisions we have just seen the beginning of a very long and dangerous era.
I am really tired of all talk and no action from our elected officials, and senior officers in the military. These people need to remember their duty is to the Constitution and the people and not to their nest star or election.
A story in the WSJ says the bomber in Khost was let into the base by a local recruit. Goes to W’s and others point that our intel systems are easily penetrated.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126235171131012657.html?mod=article-outset-box
When you have afgan nationals wandering about every FOB and COP in the country this kind of crap is bound to happen. The astaninan’s are the janitors, and on up the chain of support for the military and can be turned if not already turned by the Taliban and Al Q keep the afgani off the bases and you have security from the suicide bombers.
“to begin regarding them as having access to, or perhaps being by directed intelligence operatives of the highest caliber”
I think the problem is that the operations on our side are run by morons, whose sole ability is bureaucratic maneuvering.
“Afghanistan Suicide Bomber May Have Been Helped by CIA Informant
KABUL–The suicide bomber who killed eight Americans, including seven CIA officers, this week might have been able to get through multiple layers of security at the U.S. compound aided by an Afghan informant with the agency, a Western official said Friday. If this is true, it suggests insurgents had turned the tables on the CIA and been able to place their own agents close to the facility the CIA used to cultivate informants.
On Wednesday, CIA officials had invited the attacker onto the base with the hopes of recruiting him as an informant. They used an Afghan intermediary to arrange the meeting. The attacker arrived, wearing an Afghan army uniform, officials said.
The assault shows a strategy the insurgency has increasingly employed here in recent months: using the uniforms and vehicles of the Afghan army and police to carry out attacks…
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com …
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2418927/posts
Teresita’s predictions for 2010:
1. North Korea sells carbon credits for hard currency: For every family using an SUV in America, Kim Il Jong pledges, for a nominal fee, to match them with one family using bicycles in Pyongyong. Obama praises the initiative as a great move forward in US-NoKo relations and the future of the Earth’s biosphere.
2. Whiskey on the Belmont Club has no more time for his elaborate analyses of the psychosexual roots of Islamo-fascism after his wife insists (upon pain of withholding sexual intercourse) that he needs to actually contribute to their upkeep of the household by helping her keeping it clean and by getting a, you know, job. President Obama invites Whiskey to a “beer summit” where they bond after Barry relates a very similar tale.
3. China passes Japan to become the second-largest economy in the World . . . for about five minutes. In the wake of Israeli airstrikes intended to set back the Iranian nuclear timetable, the regime in Iran starts a general war in the Middle East in retaliation, but the real purpose is to rally the people to the side of the Ali Khameni and avoid going the route of Romania with the collapse of Communism in the West. Although the US blocks the land route to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States by a large presence in Kuwait, Iran unleashes her large stockpile of missiles, shutting down all traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Oil goes to $200 a barrel overnight and the world is plunged into an economic Depression. The Obama Administration blames “eight years of bankrupt foreign policies of the Bush Administration.”
4. Six thousand participants of the international climate summit in Shanghai are medevac’ed to the United States for respiratory ailments soon after passing a protocol by which American industry was to be sharply curtailed to balance the pollution emitted by developing nations such as China. President Obama comments that the Shanghai Protocol goes a long way toward reversing Anthropogenic Global Warming and that China’s support was refreshing following last year’s disappointing summit in Copenhagen.
5. Bob al-Harb’s participation in the Elephant Bar is curtailed when his wife files for divorce upon discovering that most of their money that was going to be used to develop the back 40 went to someone named Michelle Lynn Darmstadt of Pennsylvania to hush up the affair. President Obama comments that Bob “acted stupidly.”
gokart-mozart,
You may be right for now, but there are an awful lot of wannabe jihadis out there who are just waiting to become heroes. They could be put into action at any time. A series of relatively small mall attacks could do serious economic damage if people are afraid to visit even a small shopping center in the suburbs or relatively quiet towns. The big attacks may attract recruits, but they also get the full force of our response. What happens when a whole series of smaller incidents, only loosely connected, begin to affect lives throughout the country. Think of the beltway sniper times 50. The jihadi web sites are not just looking for brilliant strategists and technicians. They are also building an army of cannon fodder recruits throughout the world.
We need to keep all possibilities on the table. Anyone who thinks he has the single right approach is too narrow minded to be directing our security efforts.
Read Phyllis Chesler’s post here at PJM on the psychology underlying the radicalization of privileged young Muslims. We have to keep our minds opened to all dangers. Just because one tactic is not being used right now, we should not downplay the possibility that it is being held in reserve for the next stage in the battle.
President Obama and the Democrats do not believe we are at war. Iran declared war on us in 1979 when they captured the US embassy in Teheran and held our diplomats captive for 444 days. Radical Islam has been at war with us for more than three decades, blowing up airplanes, bombing barracks, killing Americans worldwide, yet nothing disturbs the tranquility of those who choose not to see. Muslims are at war with us, and they know it and act accordingly; we deny we are at war and act accordingly. The Northwest Airlines would-be bomber boasted of hundreds of guys just like him preparing to give their lives for Allah, and yet the Obama administration treats him as they would a common criminal, turning him over to the civilian justice system where he is now lawyered up and not talking. Nothing will change until some catastrophe, like a Mumbai-style attack on a mid-town NYC luxury hotel or a Beslan-style attack on an elementary school, and even then I expect a great many liberal Democrats to blame us for provoking the religion of peace. We are terror-stricken at the thought of touching a murdering terrorist’s Koran without rubber gloves for fear of being accused of insensitivity. The insanity will end only with the deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Americans, and the deaths of millions of Muslims. And in the not too distant future.
The presidential jihad thrust
Is that civilian courts
Are where we place our binding trust
And where we show our warts
For warts and all is what we are
Free people with a heart
So we’re prepared to go real far
To show we do our part
To keep civility alive
And thus not waterboard
No matter that we won’t survive
It’s war that we’ve abjured
Thanks for the post Richad.
When Dick Cheney says, “We are at war and [it] doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society,” he is hinting at a crucial difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
The Republicans are fighting America’s external enemies. The Democrats are fighting America.
I refreshed my memory of our species’ hunting instincts by rereading Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape. Morris’ book defines Man’s acuity in group hunting, and the social and evolutionary demands it placed on our animal, but it was his description of our primal predatory drives that convinced me of my conclusion: the modern “progressive” movement (ie. the American “Democrat(ic)” Party) has, for at least fifty years, been focused on hunting-down and harnessing Americans, rather than on liberating them.
Take the modern progressives’ talking points one by one, and view them from a “predator-prey” perspective, and you’ll see sugar coated baits carefully selected to lure particular, predisposed social constituencies into the predator’s electoral traps. “Gay Marriage” offers succor to the adolescent-adult who self-identifies first as “Gay.” This addled constituent can be counted on to seek state-affirmation in lieu of gaining it the old fashioned way in local troop society. “Universal Healthcare” appeals to those maladjusted’s in the primate hierarchies who rely on “grooming invitation afflictions” for social affirmation. They cannot merit grooming in their local economies and societies, so, like wild oxen drawn to their domestication by entering a farmer’s fenced corn-field, they flock dumbly into the state’s “grooming” proxies. And, corrupting CRA credit-regulations and Joe Biden’s “Silent Racism” lure un-actualized so-called “black” citizens into the Democrats’ maze of victimology and statist rewards. In a society like America’s that de-emphasizes race in its cooperative “hunt relations” (ie. its capitalist economy) social “race-predators” targeting maladjusted individuals who want to partake in the rewards of the “the hunt” without actually, you know, “hunting” bu that have minority skin-tones, can be relied on to “hunt” using their sharpened “race-card” weapon. It’s their modern equivalent to the prehistoric fire-sharpened wooden spear, only it’s aimed at Americans today.
What lends saliency to this contrast of the two parties’ preferred preys is the long history of inter-species parasitism, predation and piracy among the Birds. Modern humans are not alone in having proliferated a spectrum of social-roles, from archetypal ones like that of wet-nurse and hunter, to modern analogs like the propane delivery guy and the local grocer, all of which represent symbiotic relationships, of which, many could be termed “predatory.” The birds did this, too. But, never in my lifetime has a single American political party so baldly, so audaciously, labored at herding so many of America’s freeborn citizens’ into statist corrals with the aim of bleeding, sacrificing, fleecing or “feeding-off” them.
I’d like to see this partisan difference drawn out more in the 2010 elections. One party wants the American family to be as free and unencumbered as possible, and its future electoral gains are tied to increasing our citizens’ freedoms. The other party is busy hunting, sorting trapping and cornering us into hierarchies of confining factions (“the Rich”, the “Blacks”, the “Gays”, “the Other,” “the Bankers,” “the Prey”), with the aim of pitting us against each other.
Draw-out this contrast, and then ask the citizen to vote: the way she votes will tell us a lot about how she views her nation. Is it a corpse and is she a scavenger? Or is it a thriving human society, and she a functional member of it? This distinction should be getting a lot more play.
…there are an awful lot of wannabe jihadis out there who are just waiting…
I believe this is correct. I also believe these domestic jihadis-in-waiting may also be part of a foreign network. Al Qaeda is obviously one such network, but what of Hizbollah? One can’t discount the possibility that there are so-called sleeper cells already placed that have ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which, some of us know, has already been at war with us longer than al Qaeda.
“Terrorists in our midst” is no mere hyperbole. This group exists in my native state, midway between where I write these words and the still-gaping hole in New York City.
http://homelandsecurityus.com/?p=3346
As Glen Beck recently stated, How is it I can buy a book from Amazon.com, be entered in their database, and 5 years later buy another book from Amazon, and they know who I am, what type of books I enjoy reading, and my credit card number?
I find the same is true for my internet use. Why is it advertisements come up on my browser page that target me for more purchases based on recent purchases online? Example, I purchased some fishing equipment recently, and for some strange reason I now have window advertisements popping up on my browser page from Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shop, even similar fishing equipment to what I purchased? Somebody knows something about me somewhere. I’m on a database and they know a good deal about me. Kinda scary.
How is it such a thing isn’t happening in our intel on terrorist suspects? How is it this Nigerian could walk onto a plane without a red flag popping up? Ever see the Jason Bourne movies?
If Amazon.com can do it, why can’t airport security do it?
Perhaps a more accurate desciption would be to say that they were air brushed away.
Rust never sleeps, but that doesn’t make it intelligent.
Rightwing Realist:
It’s not just Amazon, and it’s not just 5 years. I moved to Baltimore in 2004. When I applied for a Maryland driver’s license, they asked if I was still 6’1″ and 160 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. They still had my vital statistics on file from the last time I had lived in Maryland, which was 1979. By 2004, my hair was mostly gray, and my weight was quite a bit more than 160, but I was impressed that their computers still had me on file.
If so proverbially incompetent an organization as the DMV can keep accurate (though outdated) records over a quarter century, why can’t our security agencies track terrorists efficiently? (Not that the Maryland DMV was the least bit incompetent or inefficient when I went to them in 2004, but such agencies do have that reputation.)
“If Amazon.com can do it, why can’t airport security do it?”
No profit motive.
I continue to take some comfort in the belief that God is on our side, and whenever possible He will intercede to make up for intellience that isn’t and a Leader who doesn’t.
I read something recently talking about how lucky Obama is, successfully side-stepping all these attempted disasters. I don’t think Obama is lucky at all. I think that God reached out and sniffed the crotch-bomber’s fuse, and that God has been reaching out since He helped the passengers on Flight 93 wrest control away from those Muslim lunatics on 9/11 … and that Obama benefits from these small (and large) miracles just by being in the same neighborhood.
Patton would approve.
We need to stop thinking of Al Qaeda and the Taliban as reactionaries. They are revolutionaries. They are leading an anti-Western modernizing revolution. If you look hard, they resemble the Communists. Think about it.
Communism in practice thrived in the non-Western world. It became a vehicle for nationalist, anti-colonial struggle for people who wanted to overthrow their local overlords. That’s what Al Qeada sells, too. The Taliban overthrow the traditional power structure when they take over an area. They kill or intimidate the local tribal elite. That’s not reactionary.
In Iraq, we won in part because the tribal elite realized what was happening and switched sides. They were going to be killed by the revolutionaries even if the rebels won.
We need to look at Al Qeada and the Islamists as revolutionaries, not as throwbacks. They are modernizers, and use modern methods. Many of them are highly educated. I think ideologically they are closer to Fascists than Communists, with an emphasis on an imagined past that never existed. The main thing is that they are seeking to move the Islamic world forward by overturning the existing order. Fortunately their appeal is limited to the Muslim world.
Even so, we need to understand that appeal as we understood the Communist threat. It’s not just the call of the past, but a better future for Muslims.
It’s not just the fault of the various intel agencies. As a nation, we don’t want to think we are at war. Part of that is the fault of the leadership, and part of that is our own fault. We have become extremely lazy and self-centered (not a national self-centered, but on an individual level.) Then combine that with the fact that we don’t want to acknowledge that basic Islam, not just a small subset, is a major part of the problem. I think that it’s going to take at least one more major attack (something on the level of 9/11, not just an individual airliner being blown up) or a number of smaller attacks, to shake us out of our lethargy.
“If Amazon.com can do it, why can’t airport security do it?”
If Amazon.com had to be staffed by SEIU members they couldn’t do it either.
“When people are running around screaming and shouting and you can remain calm, cool and collected. You probably just don’t realize the seriousness of the situation.”
We’ve had individuals with Islamic names shoot relatively small groups of people, and that has been brushed off as single deranged individuals. I heard people say a Beslan or Mumbai style massacre won’t happen in the US. They didn’t expect it in Mumbai or Beslan either. Of course if something like that does happen in the US, don’t expect the left to acknowledge it even if their own children die.
# 35 vanderleun
“If Amazon.com can do it, why can’t airport security do it?”
No profit motive.
To your answer, I would add something to the effect that in addition to an economic motive to do the job well being lacking in the current regime; there is a direct ideological motive to do the exact opposite. Not only in the sense of directly blocking any activities that would defend us [ in another thread, I mentioned in another context that mechanisms of a coup d' etat which involve using the system to paralyse the actions of those who would defend against the coup for the critical period],which is happening, but also in a deeper sense.
Basic rule of nature deliberately ignored by our collectivist would-be-tyrants as a matter of ideological faith: You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize. Ignoring that rule is critical to being a Democrat in all aspects of society; be they economic, sociological, or political. We have been under attack by Islam since the Carter years. Our military and security forces are under the control of elected politicians who direct the bureaucracy.
Since the first attacks and clumsy counterstrokes; has any politician or bureaucrat EVER suffered any punishment or sanctions for failing to defend this country? Have any gone on to bigger and better political/bureaucratic positions with concurrent rewards in increased power and money [illegal or otherwise]?
Conversely, have the Left ever allowed anyone on the sharp end of the stick to be rewarded for protecting us? And have those who do protect us and fight the enemy been punished by the Left for doing their job in time of war?
This is perhaps a good time to note this; because yesterday a Federal judge threw out all of the Obama regime’s legal charges against the Blackwater operatives who defended themselves from an attack on their convoy in Iraq. In the course of the dismissal the judge [Urbina] noted that the Federal government had recklessly and deliberately violated the defendents’ constitutional rights, and [from the Times of London] “The explanations offered by the prosecutors and investigators in an attempt to justify their actions… were all too often contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility,” Urbina wrote.
He added: “The court must dismiss the indictments against all of the defendants.” . I quote the Times, by the way, because the story is being carried there, and is being buried by the government controlled media here.
If the government deliberately decides the act of defending yourself from a grenade and small arms attack in a war zone to be worthy of both premeditated murder charges … and even Federal firearms charges [this was in Bagdhad, mind you, not DC], what is the goal of the prosecution? Especially when concurrent to this is a decision to deliberately violate the Constitution? Similarly, what is the goal of the prosecution of the SEALS who captured the terrorist planner of the Fallujah Bridge massacre?
Those defending us are, as noted by Morton Doonslag above, are ordered to take direction from our enemies. But what of those who give those orders?
While I cannot say how I know; I will say that I know with a certainty that the foreign component of the enemy has a large and growing infrastructure of both operatives and support personnel active within this country. They have not been building it up at great cost and effort for decades without plan or purpose. I personally suspect that they will not be called into action until they judge that the domestic political component is no longer effective in pursuing the Jihadi‘s goals or in office.
If the Obama regime should actually decide to use the simple retail technology we have been referencing for intelligence purposes; I ask the BC-er’s in this Year Two of Anno Obama, who do you think it most likely that they will direct their efforts against?
Or perhaps it is already being done. I personally was the lead off speaker at the local July 4 Tea Party. Across the highway from the park where it was being held were a number of non-local, non-reporter people using long lensed cameras to take pictures of the participants. I opened my speech with a greeting to them, pointing them out to my fellow patriots.
Subotai Bahadur
Attacks on soft targets (schools, malls,etc.) ,would considering the current mood,
cause A) vigilantism , B) a serious revolt against complacent and inept politicians in my opinion. From a cost/benefit analysis it wouldn’t be a great move for Al Qaida.
The likely perps in such a scenario would be wannabes ,sexually frustrated strangers in a strange land, offended by moral laxity, brainwashed by Wahhabi imams in their mosque. Whoever does something like that, it’s going to piss a lot of regular folks off. People get outraged when soldiers get gunned down at home . Shoot some kids and all bets are off.
The term “political correctness” should be shelved because it trivializes the way our entire society is bound under legal and cultural constraints.
Who is to blame for 9/11? Frank Church is close to the top of the list, but I have almost never seen his name mentioned. Church was a senator from Idaho, not California or any place in the Northeast. The idea that we are the bad guys, our government is the enemy, and what goes on overseas is none of our business and probably our fault if it’s bad for us is a bone-deep part of our culture.
Americans are *not*, as many seem to believe, a particularly martial and warlike people. They aren’t all that much different from Europeans. CIA has always been a Woodrow Wilson style internationalist organization. The Constitution is not a suicide pact- but plenty of people believe it is.
The American system is simply not designed to deal with problems like this, in fact it is specifically designed not to do so. Political correctness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Broder’s column is surprising in how open he is about his motive- “Janet Napolitano is a friend of mine and a good liberal so it’s OK.” Peggy Noonan has spent plenty of column inches brown-nosing the establishment but she has at least pretended it’s about something else. The establishment has been circling the wagons around something generally refered to as “Obama” since around September of 2008, but this thing is only casually related to the individual person Barack Obama, who has been chosen to represent it.
Sometimes my comments don’t post but simply disappear.
No fan of Napolitano here. She should have been fired after her comments about how troops returning home should be on watchlists. But the thing with that is that she was only echoing what I’m sure is the view of a good part of the current administration. It seems to be hard to blame one person for the views of the entire team.
And on this “the system worked thing”, Napolitano wasn’t the only one saying that, was she? Didn’t press secretary Robert Gibbs come out with the exact same verbage? I suspect Napolitano sucked it up and went out there and said what they told her to say. She might be a casualty of a bonehead strategy that she was put up to.
The problem is Obama’s boxed himself into a rather dodgey position. He’s got close close Gitmo, and he’s got to offer terrorists the civil rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. No waterboarding or unseemly attempts to extract information from the “alleged suspects”. The country that was the biggest hope for taking the Gitmo “detainees” was, drumroll: Yemen. Now this episode over Detroit comes along and blows all these memes up. All of them. It even exposes them all as not merely wrong but harmful. There’s six or seven years of passionate, angry, take-it-to-the-streets investment at stake here, and certain folks aren’t going to be happy.
Can the Obamanauts come and give any credence to the thought that Bush and Cheney might have been right on these things? I don’t see how. It would take a big man to do so.
If all of this proves anything, it’s that Cheney is sorely missed. As an old-timer in DC, he knew the weak links in the system, but he was able to bypass, bully or BS them to do whatever it took to keep the US safe. That’s why he’s so hated.
Bush is a decent man whose courage eventually waned, but it was Cheney propping him up and minding the store.
37. john lynch:
We need to look at Al Qeada and the Islamists as revolutionaries, not as throwbacks. They are modernizers, and use modern methods. Many of them are highly educated. I think ideologically they are closer to Fascists than Communists, with an emphasis on an imagined past that never existed.
…….
After the US invaded Iraq the communists marched side by side in the streets with the jihadists in the USA and Europe.
RE: #41 – Subotai Bahadur
Reports now at WND that FBI took another into custody the day of the arrest, an “Indian man”, but denies it has anything to do with flight 253.
See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=120631
Is this the FBI not wanting to take responsibility, trying to pass the buck to TSA or CIA? Or is there more to it? What is your read?
Goddamnit, for the hundredth time, this entire thing is a GRU operation.
LNG tankers from Yemen to dock in Boston Harbor, what could go wrong?
Kae Arby: America has never lost a major warship at sea since the Second World War, but it came close to losing the USS Cole in Aden.
You forgot the USS Stark by an Iraqi fighter using two French Exocet missiles in 1988. A classmate died on that ship. One of the missiles was a dud. If it detonated, the ship would have gone down. We forgave Saddam because he thought it was an Iranian frigate, and Iran was our enemy at the time too.
Only one passenger of 253 on board did anything when the jihadi went pop. One! The rest just sat frozen in a moment of inertia, waiting to die.
That seven CIA field agents can get themselves blown up by a jihadi in a war zone says that the West is in over their heads in this struggle. Outclassed and outmatched heavily due to our own paradigm.
This “war” is like sorority sister meets gangsta crack dealer in da hood to buy a high. She has no idea what could go wrong until she’s robbed, raped, murdered and dumped in an alley.
The West is losing badly and many in the West no longer even care.
Since the first attacks and clumsy counterstrokes; has any politician or bureaucrat EVER suffered any punishment or sanctions for failing to defend this country?
Innocent Americans are punished because the guilty are not. (Not all Muslims are guilty, neither are all who are guilty Muslim.)
Relative to “those who do protect us and fight the enemy [being] punished by the Left for doing their job in time of war…” I did note with satisfaction that “yesterday a Federal judge threw out all of the Obama regime’s legal charges against the Blackwater operatives who defended themselves from an attack on their convoy in Iraq.” Perhaps the tide is slowly turning.
I remember that in December of 2006 ABC news ran a report that al Qaeda No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri released a tape in which he reminds Democrats that they are in power only because Al Qaeda got them elected.
Oh how short our memories are.
Morton Doodlsalg @ 8 writes: “Our enemy understands us better than we understand the Muslims,…”
Hell, they understand us better than we understand OURSELVES. They know how to play us. Made a mistake on 9/11, Bush reacted more strongly than they expected, more strongly than Clinton would have (they based their thinking on all the non-responses from the 1990s). With that one exception, they have always either accomplished their purpose (Spanis election sin 2004) or at least suffered no significant downside.
LOTM #1; To David Broder Janet Napolitano is
“one of us” and her critics are “aliens”.
This is the same thing that still makes some people insist that Alger Hiss was falsely accused by Whitaket Chambers, no matter how many times Chambers testimony gets corroborated
via independent sources.
Marty #2: You are echoing a talk by Dr. Peter Breggin given (as I recall) about 1979. Namely that conservatives operated from fear, liberals operated from showing good intentions
(or what they deemed to be good intentions)
regardless of consequences. The fact that others might not consider their intentions good eluded them and they all too often went into denial about consequences stemming from
their efforts rather than from elsewhere.
RWE #18: Did you ever read “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest”? How the Fumbling Bumbling and Incompetent refused to even consider looking into a *prima facie* case of
computer penetration by hostile forces because
the alert came from a minor monetary charge
on a lab’s network billing? This made it
no more than a case of petty theft and therefore outside FBI purviews.
Even after the Prof who made the initial discovery managed to track down the perp(s)
and confirm they were being paid by GRU, it seemingly took a bit of Nahn Cee’s Divine Intervention to shut down the espionage.
Your stories about Bf109 and DB601 injectors
reflect both bureaucratic inertia AND denial
of reality.
Dan @ 49
Are you referring to the whole of Al Qaeda and related groups, or just the recent business in Afghanistan?
I don’t know, but I suspect you’re pretty much right. GWB was right about there being an Axis of Evil, he just didn’t include everyone he should have. Of course, back then he said he saw a trustworthy partner in Putin.
Maybe he was more clear-headed than I’m giving him credit for, but just didn’t think we (the world) could deal with a US president speaking the whole truth. Such as, whether certain elements of Islam want to re-start the war between Islam and the West that raged for 1300 years until Islam was just too weak to call it a war, anymore. Or Germany acting through its large corporations to support Saddam’s chemical WMD program and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. France, most particularly Chirac, having been in bed with Saddam’s Iraq for a generation. Egypt and Saudi Arabia encouraging vicious anti-SEmitism and anti-Americanism while smiling and pretending they didn’t/don’t. Pakistan’s ISI.
The world is not as we wish it, it’s as we find it. We (US) need to deal with these people in the interests of the US, not pretend there’s some sort of “Family of Man” that just needs our gentle encouragement for all to be peace and light forever.
The KGB: Masters of the Soviet Union by Peter Deriabin, New Lies for Old by Anatoliy Golitsyn, and Inside Soviet Military Intelligence and Spetznas by Viktor Suvorov. At least one of them is free:
http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov8/index.html
Thank you.
Dave @ 56
Thanks, I’ll look up that Breggin piece if it’s on the internet.
I am not so sure conservatives operate based on fear so much as realism and caution. Maybe I’m reacting to the word “fear,” as in the 2002-2004-2006-2008 election cycles the Dems accused the GOP of fear-mongering, which implied there was no basis for it and suggested the GOP knew it and was therefore dishonest about it. Which strikes me as further denial of reality by the libs, but, hey, maybe I’m being too sensitive.
#48 Right Wing Realist:
While WND is not always the most reliable of sources [not totally crazy, just that they sometimes go with a story before it is ready to go]; I have seen these separately at other more reputable sources.
We are forced into whipping out Occam’s Razor.
If it is a multiple failure of security, at all points up and down the line; the regime’s entire theoretical construct of events collapses into ruin. It would be a ruin so vast that even the media working as hard as it could would not be able to cover the gluteal musculature of so many people of such girth at one time. How many times in our history has the government lied to people “for their own good”. They may be rationalizing that it is “to prevent panic” or to “prevent the racists of flyover country from committing genocide on innocent people in this country”; but there is the larger motive of political self-preservation that must be taken strongly into account in the calculations.
Countering that, we have the testimony of a number of people who are known to have been in a position to be eyewitnesses to what they claim to have seen. We have them speaking up despite opposition from the Federal government. I have heard that the FBI tried to coerce the witnesses into retracting their statements about the attempt to get the man aboard the plane without a passport. We have them speaking up despite the fact that making statements that may blow the covers of Jihadi‘s identities and tactics may expose them and their families to fatal retaliation. And they do so in the knowledge that the US government will do absolutely nothing to protect them in such a case. There is no immediate personal gain apparent for these witnesses to put themselves on the line over this.
In the absence of detailed follow up by unbiased investigators, of the statements of the eyewitnesses, the fact that the Federal investigators were not in a position to have first hand knowledge of what happened at Schipol Airport OR on board the plane, and using the classic parser of truth, Cui Bono?, I think that Occam’s Razor slices so as to give the balance of the benefit of the doubt to the eyewitnesses.
It is subject to further investigation and proof or disproof; but the investment that the regime has in keeping the belief that a) we are really not at war, b) those who attack us are either loners or incompetent cave dwellers, c) that the regime is competent to protect us and therefore needs to be trusted and supported in this and all things, and d) “LOOK! Squirrel!” being a successful part of their basic methodology [movie reference that] as a viable position to hold means that I will give credence to a conditional assumption that we are in fact being lied to by the government.
This is reinforced by the incident on the same flight two days later where another as yet unidentified Nigerian “businessman” reprised many of the “Undie-bomber’s” actions, causing a security alert and emergency landing and isolation of the plane. After the alert, he fell into a media black hole; which itself is atypical. I have discussed that here before on another thread.
How dumb do they think we are? Pretty dumb, and they are depending on it.
This is going to be an interesting year, in Chinese terms; and a whole lot of carefully constructed and maintained pleasant fantasies that the Left has used to guide their lives and control ours may come tumbling down.
Subotai Bahadur
Marty #59: “Fear” was the word Breggin used and I thought it best to quote. Only problem with fear is when it turns to phobia. Conservatives have certain tendencies in that direction of course, but liberals seem to be reality-phobic to the nth degree.
And do the phobic tend to accuse the non-phobic
of being even more phobic than they are? Does an usurus horriblus move his bowels in the confines of the timbered regions?
Wretchard, “Maybe one shouldn’t go that far”.
That comment perplexes me. Is there something wrong with calling a spade a spade? After all, that is precisely the source of the problem. National security conflicts with Obama’s mission. As he put it just prior to the election, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America”. (h/t to Glen Beck)
Why shouldn’t Cheney go that far? As Powerline observes in a post yesterday, given the most recent Rasmussen poll results on national security/terrorism issues, Cheney clearly won the debate with Obama in the court of public opinion.
I do not see how “Bush ran out of courage”. He pretty much went as straight ahead as he could. The international and American left were just forced to shut up for about a year and a half. It is a disservice to Bush to claim this, and it is, perhaps, a unintentional buy-in to the leftist narratives all to common of the last 3 or 4 years by some on the Right. Such should be resisted. Bush was a fine president and,actually, he surpassed what could be expected in the current environment. The left went all out. They engaged in a propaganda war unlike anything seen since WW2. We may never know what lese they did, but it certainly involved illegal contacts and promises with external powers, some of who were eniies, braibs and intimidations. Tey ay well have cuase our financial problems intentional; they certainly are the cause of them no matter what the intentions. GWB did a bang up job throughout his terms and we should not be cnfused about that.
Cheney? Certainly a gret American. and the characterziation about him as being an insier who knew how to get around the system is app.
One is reminded of a crusty and efficient country sheriff or a Master Chief. He is, of course, right about everything he has said.
Marty
“Chirac, having been in bed with Saddam’s Iraq for a generation”
there was quite a jealousy plot for that, becuz Chesney wanted to be in the same bed too, until he got bored of the bad temper of the bed owner.
Well what Chirac had done for Iraq was allowed by the rules then, as an intermediary he sold a civil nuclear reactor, surveyed by the official organisation of IAEA, also he would have been stoopid to refuse to sell planes too, I bet that America, GB… were the other competitors for this juicy marcket too, nothing else was sold after that the UN embargo was decreated at the request of America.
All the conspiraties allegated about french WMD and or “oil for food” businesses (most of the UN members had their hands stuck in the big cheat, that I recall was an american initiative, and also a grantee) were mere invention to discredit us in order to stop our bard de Villepin to veto the 2nd Iraq war at the UN.
The WND article is interesting. There are definitely some oddities about this event as it’s been described.
I read that a security official in Holland commented that the attack was both professional and amateur. Professional because it used a kind of explosive that is complicated to make. Amateur because the detonation didn’t work and was probably not designed correctly.
How is it possible that the explosive could be designed by an AQ expert in Yemen but the detonator didn’t work? Maybe this was intended to be a kind of dry run and the Nigerian was just intended to be captured. Maybe he was just an a amateur recently recruited to be cannon fodder.
The WND article quotes a passenger as saying that another man on the flight was videoing the flight from start to end. If that man was an accomplice what would be the point of video if the flight was supposed to go down?
Few other questions:
Why wait until the flight is about to land to try to blow it up? Why not make it go down over the ocean where it will be difficult or impossible to determine what happened. Maybe they wanted us to know what happened, I guess.
The Nigerian man seems to be spilling his story very quickly and I assume without being water-boarded. Why is that?
Lot of questions.
From the outset, Milli Vanilli had a problem. Part of his party was strong on national security and the other part of his party hated anything to do with national security. If Milli Vanilli exhibited any genius it was in maintaining the loyalty of a party that — should have been irreconsiliably divided — by convincing both sides he was their candidate.
No one seemed to notice. He wasn’t vetted. The press gave him a free pass. Who would have thought a well-spoken Ivy Leaguer might not be up to the job? (I’m an Ivy Leaguer, a graduate of his undergraduate alma mater and knew better.) For decades his party had nearly deified JFK and he was simply portrayed as another JFK, but even better, of a different ethnicity.
Once elected the whole idea was to downplay national security and war at all cost, Find other issues that will buy the administration popularity. Buy popularity. The mere mention of terrorism brought war to mind and the triggered the possibility of separation. Terrorism became an Orwellian unword. Acts of terrorism became “man-made disasters” and the strategy on selecting war strategies was to stall until some other issue…like healthcare diverted folks attention.
I call him Milli Vanilli, but he does to some extent have his own ideas and is not a total creation of others. Why do we no so little about his life? We know so little so he can become anything in an instant. We know so little because he hadn’t done much of anything. No one at Columbia during this period remembers him. Much of him is however a creation, but we are slowly seeing what was behind the curtain. He doesn’t like the military — it creates heroes of folks who like their guns and Bibles, the wrong kind of people — and he views all wars as nuisances at best, and contrivances by the wrong kind of politicians to draw attention from the true purpose of government, at least.
He simply wishes that the terrorists and wars would go away. They get in the way of the agenda.
The problem is the terrorists and the war won’t go away, and he can only lipsyc for so long.
Sadly in the meantime he may have done lasting damage.
#66: “Professional because it used a kind of explosive that is complicated to make. Amateur because the detonation didn’t work and was probably not designed correctly.”
I’ve looked at maybe 6 different youtube demonstrations of the behavior and force of PETN explosions, without fail each begins with a period of sizzling flame terminated with a powerful explosion. I don’t know any more about this explosive, but based on the evidence in those Youtube videos, the notion that the device malfunctioned is, perhaps, totally incorrect. It may be that the heroic Flying Dutchman may have interceded with zero time to spare. The comfort therefore derived from this narrative of the bungled terror attempt (the same is, I believe, true of the “Shoe Bomber” attempt described as a fizzled bomb) is totally delusional.
Anybody with a little more expertise care to weigh in?
This issue touches on one of Wretchard’s several points above about the inadvisability of thinking of our enemy as incompetent lice-eating vermin in caves… They are not incompetent, and many of our lice-eating verminous enemies live in lavish million square foot palaces dotted throughout Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE, and in penthouses in Paris, London, and New York.
Subotai @ 41 “Similarly, what is the goal of the prosecution of the SEALS who captured the terrorist planner of the Fallujah Bridge massacre?”
The SEALS are taking their right for a SCM in lieu of an Art 34 Mast in order to make sure their names are cleared. Ill be surprised if this goes to trial.
America has never lost a major warship at sea since (WW-II)
Thresher, OK probably not hostile. Liberty, certainly not friendly. Pueblo.
gokart-mozart,
Claiming that they do not attack target “X” a school, mall or public gathering is proof of a symbolic targeting strategy has very little consistency and almost no predictability. It is like trying to solve a problem with two independent variables. If they do attack one of mentioned target set on Wednesday then the same analysts who were concocting a theory of the superior symbolism of the WTC over the Mall of America on Tuesday would on Thursday cite the new event as proof of the soundness of their theory.
Yes they do choose symbolic targets. They do understand the intended effects of their terror. They can observe resources being expended to defend targets they are not attacking and to their purposes that is not a failure on their part but a success.
Marie Claude,
It does nothing for the honor of France to try and defend Chirac and Villepin by saying that everyone was doing it. You would do your own position more good if you shrugged Gallicly and noted that everyone has politicians and sometimes they get caught.
Dick Cheney is the boss you want to have, knowing you could get your butt kicked.
My concern at the moment is that there is no way to secure the US Mail. It is incredibly easy to sabotage or paralyze and it is crucial to the economy.
MD, it hadn’t occurred to me that the bomber might simply have lost his nerve. If so that would account for his loquaciousness after capture.
This has happened in Israel where various suicide bombers have changed their minds while on their operation. The handlers there try to stay with the bomber for as long as possible before the attack for this reason.
At any rate the Nigerian does seem like cannon fodder and a recent recruit, much like the suicide bombers in Israel.
Suicide attacks are used because the attackers need little training. The volunteers are typically conned into believing that they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife and their families will be rewarded monetarily after their deaths.
In essence a complicated suicide attack like this one is a contradiction in terms. The bomber needs to be both well trained and well motivated, but of course will not survive the operation. A strategy like that, much like the Kamikazes, can never succeed in the long run.
First off, I bet that all our intel people are now operating as if they might need a criminal defense attorney at any time for any action they take. After the latest episode with the Navy Seals being charged because they punched someone in the mouth I don’t blame them. That is not conducive to good intel.
Second, David Broder’s comments about Janet Napolitano say a whole bunch about David Broder and his character or lack of whichever applies.
PETN is difficult to detonate, as dropping it or setting it on fire will typically not cause an explosion. But there is an additional hurdle: in this case, it seems, the bomb was not made of PETN itself, but the stuff was prepared by nitrition by concentrated nitric acid from precursor. (Bomber had not thermal, but chemical burns.) Nitrition is also a difficult step, it takes time to produce real explosive, and reaction is exothermic: it generates lots of heat, which can prevent mixing of ingredients. So the bomb was an experimental design for this specific occasion. And you are right that quick reaction of this Dutchman saved lots of lives. Shoebomber used different design, a small primer made of acetone peroxide, which can be detonated by ignition. These Yemen “experts” are really amateurs and can be taken as experts only by comparison to total ignoramuses around them. Their “expertise” comes from Internet instructions send by Al-Qaeda gurus. Not very reliable stuff, taken from university texbooks which deliberately omit practically important details.
Thrasymachus @ 43: The establishment has been circling the wagons around something generally refered to as “Obama” since around September of 2008, but this thing is only casually related to the individual person Barack Obama, who has been chosen to represent it.
LOL, excellent!
–
David Broder sez: In the years I have known her, she (Incompetano) has managed every challenge that has come her way with the same calm command that she showed in this instance.
Dave, did you ever think maybe it’s drugs, likely Valium or maybe she’s snorting some of Pelosi’s excess botox.
(calmly) Dave, I can’t open the pod doors for you.
So much for calm.
–
Hey, my post showed up right away and I got the edit widget, too, first time in a while.
So I’ll add, what a treacley, awful editorial for Broder. I think he’s just about taken that next step down into senility. Doesn’t anybody ever retire anymore?
–
Sergey, so you’re saying, the pantybomb was an “experimental” binary?
I guess it’s like the Israeli’s say, we’re lucky to have the Islamics as our enemies.
Still, it raises some new issues in detection, I guess. Don’t want to have dozens more idiots castrating themselves on final approach, takes all the fun out of air travel.
Bogie Wheel,
The Army CoS Casey’s statement was the most reprehensible thing I have heard from a 4 star officer in my lifetime. It is far worse than the SEAL prosecution. The later might be wrong but I have heard it defended by decent people like Max Boot. The former, as a response to a combat event, was incompatible with any function of military management. That is true even if you sincerely do want to change the culture of the organization for a greater good.
If Obama had truly wanted to indicate that he gave a damn about the troops he would have responded, in some appropriate manner, with an indication that he knows that under current DoD structure the CoS is a purely administrative slot but that the POTUS as NCA is directly in command of the troops and cares about them. If such a Mutt and Jeff were acted out with a wink to boost BHO’s credibility that would have been OK. The gesture even if contrived would have been good. As it is both Casey and Obama were serious in seeing nothing wrong with a senior officer responding that way.
I do not know General Casey. He may be a fine man with a fine record. In an off the record statement to staff or congressional aides the statement might have been understandable. In these circumstances I think it should earn him a trip to talk to Trump.
Igniting the “PETN” in the bathroom would have prevented intervention by the flying Dutchman. Bless HIS tartan knickers.
It is hard to imagine that the motive was not to make the plane crash.
More detail from an interview of Haskel…
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_kurt_hask.html
LOTM
I don’t care if you mock at de Villepin, he is just a booffon, But Chirac is a state man, and he didn’t conturn the UN rules like certain of your people like todisplay. He was all but behind the UN rules, also the motive of France Veto.
For the rest, there are papers which said that the US used more oil for food than we ever did, besides our needs are much lower.
There was an article in our papers during the “hot” time of the 2nd Iraq war, an american oil tank was stuck in Fos sur Mer, because of french union strike in the harbour, already the oil tanker had been paralysed there, and the american companie was complaining for them to the french authorities.
So that means, that, you people, are very cautious to trade indirectely, even with the unauthorised states, I’m sure that the harbour of Fos sur Mer was alredy used by your ships during the embargo, but the only one that officially made business with Saddam was France!
I have a personnal annecdote with more precise details of the earlier eighties in NW Paris surburb, some Americans had an office in front of my hubby’s business, a discret place with a common parking. They were supposed to sell “Cryo genie” products to peculiar customers, like, Russians, Chineses, Cubans, Koreans, Arabs… (curiously not with the French !) the ones that could usually be labelled as potential terrorists, or as official enemies. The american guis weren’t of the normal standing way of living for such a business holder, they had a high standing of living, festing with Champagne when they got a marcket signed… in the Hotel Restaurant that my hubby was directing there, just in front of their office.
So I believe that that wasn’t an isolated situation, you are able to make business with whatever country, but under a hidden name, and many countries have such “letter boxes” where you are supposed to make a normal commercial business.
already the oil tanker had been paralysed “three weeks” there
The hypothesis of this essay fails to disprove the capability of diverse organizations that have excelled in one arena and that is indoctrination. The most dangerous creature is man. We are inventive and determined. If Americans were determined to kill and destroy Muslims then I am sure we would do a more competent job. Timothy McVeigh with very little support took down a federal building because he had the determination and will.
This essay presents the idea of very coordinated and planned from a central authority to make these attacks. However, that assumption fails to consider the most important characteristic is will to do the deed. Most Americans are apathetic and too involved in their personal lives to risk everything to attack the enemy. We have delegated that to intelligence agencies and the military.
There is great reluctance to attack the mindset and indoctrination aspect since that conflicts with our ideal of free will and religion.
The reluctance to profile is because we already visited that on ourselves and do not wish to put that tool at the government beck to target the terrorist. After all as DHS has already considered that any 2A activist, or other right wing groups are a danger to our nation.
To a certain extant that is true. These people that DHS targeted are a danger to the liberal society that Obama espouses and could quite easily flip from political means to violent means. I would be very scared of Americans who decided to take matters in our hands. I know what the average American can do once they release their inhibitions. There is a ruthless side to Americans that is very repressed, but it exists.
So since I believe that ordinary Americans such as those who post here are very capable of deadly deeds if they choose, I do not believe that central coordination and intelligence is necessary for these Muslim fanatics to make successful attacks.
The failure of the Christmas bombing was due to the fast reaction by a passenger and a lucky failure of ignition of the PETN.
The real question; are we willing to accept the risks of a successful attack in order to preserve our freedoms. The chances are that any determined person will succeed if they are willing to sacrifice themselves. Muslim ideology indoctrination is death worship rather than the worship of life of western society.
I personally do not want western society to emulate death worship despite some fringe elements that already do.
I world eliminate all these excessive checks at airports and do behavior profiling and I would pay more attention to males of certain background and race. It must be kept in mind that women, children and western European racial types can also be indoctrinated. Israelis use the behavior since cretin clues combined with other clues provide a better probability of deterring or stopping a potential suicide attack.
I put more trust in ordinary passenger who are now trained to take action if the see a threat. I have no objection to most people being armed on planes. But realized that all that will not prevent a successful sabotage of a plane. There are too many ways to destroy a plane in the air.
FT Hood would not have the carnage if the other soldiers had been armed. The successful suicide bomb that killed eight CIA agents because they failed to search the new potential recruit was fatal. I would have thought that in Afghanistan the CIA would have been more paranoid. I guarantee that that will not happen again despite the potential of insult.
The action that AQ before 9/11 was the killing of the lion of Afghanistan with inserting an agent with a camera who assassinated the lion that was the west more powerful asset in Afghanistan.
That type of sneaky action always has a good probability of success. As people get relaxed they are more vulnerable to such attacks.
I do not think we really want our population to be on war mode like a soldier in the field. I can just see a student dropping a pile of books and the over twitchy reaction could kill that student. To live in our population we have to detune our perceptions of threat or we hurt too many innocents.
Our society has inculcated several precepts and the concept that is better to attack a killer than be passive is one that is getting indoctrinated in us at a very basic level. Those who have CCW already have accepted that concept.
The increasing number of clerks that shoot back at robbers is an indication of this idea.
A Bombay attack would not be as successful in the US. That is why bombs are preferred because they cause the damage before people can react.
The recent attack on the Yemeni terrorists in Yemen is a good thing because it visits the same kind of destruction on those that train in these bombings. Obama to his credit did not stop this operation.
As to the problem of underwear bombers, as long as the bombs fail to ignite we can stop these. I suspect the PETN got moist and failed to ignite.
I do believe that these fanatics will continue to perfect this technique, but PETN is not as good as explosive as C4 or dynamite or TNT. The reason Nobel did so well is that he finally perfected a reliable explosive. But we can detect those types of explosives.
Chemical sniffers will help detect these explosives and so can dogs trained to detect PETN. A group of dogs are better than any body scanner that will not be accepted by the passengers.
TSA is a joke and should be dumped.
RWR and vanderleun,
While I don’t want to minimize our security failures, it is only fair to note that the security agencies do have harder task than Amazon–most of us, when logging back in, do want to be found. So we willingly give Amazon a globally unique identifier, which helps them keep one John Smith separate from the next.
I take it both of you gentlemen join me in not wanting some kind of global-government-assigned unique identifier to be foisted on us, but that does make it a bit harder to distinguish one Ahmed Mohammed from the next, when the one doesn’t want to be separately identified.
FAILURE AS A STRATEGY
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/failure-as-a-strategy.html
“The recent al Qaeda sponsored attempt to blow up an Northwest Airways flight is an example of an interesting, but likely inadvertent strategy: failure. Given the earlier example of 9/11, even failed attacks provide the following benefits:
New and sweeping rules on airline passengers (most inane) and beefed up security.
New military/intelligence efforts launched against Yemen.
A potential substantive review and expansion of the broken no-fly lists and other substantial/expensive “systemic” overhauls.”
Professor, having all the military armed is not the answer (and would be a big mistake- there are many accidents in Iraq and Afghanistan) but Guardian Angels could. Even in Iraq where we were armed at all times, being in a formation meant you were not security minded so we posted GA’s on rooftops to watch over those in formation. I would not be surprised if PMO started doing this on bases.
It is our belief in civilized behavior that is keeping Muslims in America alive at present- but we do like a straight-up fight. If Beslan type attacks start occurring in the US, we may have to inter the Muslim population just to keep them alive. Remember, most of the military volunteers in America serve for 4-6 years then get other jobs but probably still know how to shoot effectively. That is the sleeping giant that needs to remain at rest for Muslims. Allah help them if the snooze button breaks.
“Our well intentioned leaders see radical Islam more as an alternative world view that has grievances, rather than a sick, perverted Nazi-like creed that wants to take the world back to a 7th century theocracy, where freedom is denied, heretics and gays stoned, and women relegated to servile status–all overseen by rather creepy autocrats that destroy almost any modern institution they encounter.”
victor davis hanson
#82 Langley makes an excellent point. The viral nature of Islam assures that these attacks continue, and whether successful or not in terms of violence, look at the ominous asymmetry of resources pledged by both sides as a result:
Muslim: one way ticket. A few dollars in raw bomb materials, and about $1.99 for dirty panties, $0 on detergent (frugal!). Add to this few years of phone/internet expenses for a few dozen people, and a few years of ultra-cheap salaries as well for Imams, recruiters, and handlers in the USA, London, Yemen. Add additional few dozen airfares over two years for all recruitment training indoctrination personnel … Cost of knickerbomber plot? probably under $250,000 total (very generous). Ditto ‘shoebomber’. As for 9/11, cost estimates were placed around $2 million total as I recall.
Compare this to $trillons already squandered “winning Muslim hearts and minds” (not working out too well….), and hunreds of billions more as “security” is “beefed up” after this latest “wake-up call”, and, well, you get the picture. This is just a portion of the cost of hosting Muslims on our soil and permitting them to travel here with virtually zero restrictions, (aside from aforementioned billions in “security” …
How long can this insane asymmetry continue? You tell me. On 9/12/2001 I never could have imagined the sum of our response in 9 years would look like this. Not in a trillion years.
Bottom line here is that we are standing around fat, dumb and happy while people with nothing to lose, who have already resigned themselves to death, have a go at us.
That’s just plain stupid.
There has to be far more pain applied to the actual perpetrators, not their fall guys, or sooner or later they are going to get lucky.
We gotta put some SOCOM people on the ground in Yemen but what is the connection between Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the so-called Palestinians?
The keys are Saudi Arabia and Iran and the murderous death cult they promulgate and we are not doing anything about it.
We are swatting at flies and ignoring the elephant in the kitchen.
These people need to be intimidated into impotence or killed, preferrably the latter because it is more permanent.
FYI — reports are trickling in that a home invasion has happened at Kurt Westergaarde’s ( the cartoonist who did the ‘turban bomb’ cartoon which set off the Motoons Riots) . Apparently three perps have been caught. Details are sketchy — I found this at Gates of Vienna. I hope he’s safe!!
Per Wretchard’s question about their competence as enemies, I think this just magnifies our vulnerability to Islamic terror, and the force-multiplication of resident Muslim populations which make terror projection possible. I think Muslim prove over and over that they are operationally only semi-competent. But that doesn’t matter. They are competence enough and prevalent enough (imo much more salient) to continue waging Jihad. What chance would Islamic World have of projecting terror into our sanctuaries without an installed Muslim base already in situ?
In this Jihad Muslim expertise lays in the following categories:
Haressing entropy — it’s not too difficult to destroy stuff.
Controlling populations under their thumb. Bullies are good at this.
This is bad enough, but how are these ‘skills’ different than those of any gang of thugs?
True Muslim genius lay in:
Coöpting our sytems (civic,technical) and converting them into powerful weapons against us. Who else has the evil genius of turning fuel laden planes into 300 ton guided missiles, aid into terror, civil rights into subversion?) and
Who else but Muslims construct their society like terror franchises? Muslim communities across time, geography, and civilizations are like petrie dishes in which the virus-like culture of Jihad can grow and replicate perpetually.
RAH @80 and SpeakEasy @ 83: If ONLY the mindset of the typical American was that of a prepared warrior!I’m going to quote verbatim a letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe, ptinted on 12/28/09:
“I am a math teacher at Brockton High School, the site of a school shooting earlier this month. Current school security procedures lock down school populations in the event of armed assault. Some advocate abandoning this practice as it holds everyone in place, allowing a shooter easily to find victims. An alternative to lockdown is immediate exodus via announcement. Although this removes potential hostages and makes it nearly impossible for the shooter to acquire preselected targets, it unfairly rewards resourceful children who move to safety off-site more shrewdly and efficiently than others. Schools should level playing fields, not intrinsically reward those more resourceful. A level barrel is fair to all fish. Some propose overturning laws that made schools gun-free zones even for teachers who may be licensed to securely carry concealed firearms elsewhere. They argue that barring licensed carry only ensures a defenseless, target-rich environment. But as a progressive, I would sooner lay my child to rest that succumb to the belief that the use of a gun for self-defense is somehow not in itself a gun crime. – Doug Van Gorder, Quincy”
Condoning attitudes such as this surely means that the end of our Republic is near. I have been so apoplectic after reading this letter that I have been at a loss as to how to reply. Hopefully the words will come soon.
Consider the Undie Bomber. He had to be recruited, and then vetted as a possible infiltrator. He had to be minded, so he did not call home too much and give things away (he nearly did). He had to be given a device, which would both evade scrutiny AND blow up the plane. He had to be given cash to buy his ticket, and had a minder who talked him on the plane sans-passport, indicating knowledge that his father had put him on the terrorist watch list.
This all puts together a good but not invincible human organization. Possibly with information about Undie Bomber’s father warning the CIA/State, or simply prediction if he had contacted Nigerian authorities and they had someone leak.
What was lacking in the plot was a bomb that would function properly as well as evade, and more control over the bomber (i.e. his phone call home). There reputedly was a man on the plane video taping (and perhaps streaming) the attack, and also someone who talked Abumutallab on the plane.
By contrast the CIA FOB bombing had no glitches that prevented the attack from being carried tout to devastating effectiveness. The latter shows the enemy had good intel on the targets (all killed, effectively ending CIA action in Afghanistan for probably a year or more), and technical means (a concealable bomb that worked).
Technical expertise can be bought. There are plenty of Pakistani, Saudi, Russian, and other military-spy experts in explosives who can fashion one. What is notable is the strength of the human network — including measures to get the Undie Bomber on board without his passport.
If I read Wretchard correctly, he is pointing out the traditional strengths against AQ by the US, i.e. technical expertise in code breaking and technology, given the relatively even playing field of technology as a commodity, make the US relatively weak on the human network dimension. Where clearly we are beaten.
We are going to have to submit to full body scans and abusive flight rules because the US cannot and will not create a human network, stretching from early warning to profiling. We fear more offending than denying enemy agents and rely absolutely on technical means.
The one exception seems to be Times Square, which had according to Fox News swarms of NYPD and FBI agents actively seeking suspicious people without qualms. That sort of vigilance is hard to keep up.
interesting no one seems to have taken up the first basic question of the essay: which foreign intelligence agencies help al qaeda, and do they moles within our counterintel?
88. Fonman:
that letter to the editor sounds more like well hidden sarcasm exposing the stupidity of fantasy liberal world views of how things work.
than an actually obtuse liberal loon willing to sacrifice his child on the alter of pc ridiculousness.
read it again, I thought I saw someone deliberately tweaking the religion of p.c. , I could be wrong I suppose, but read it again….
rumcrook @ 91
No, sad to say, it was written by a real person and it was in earnest. It has caused some controversy, too. Surprise surprise.
Google the teacher’s name and the high school name, and you will get follow-up articles about the letter and the ensuing brouhaha.
UP @66…
Langley @82…
I submit that the use of a ‘Sgt Shultz’ delivery pup with a binary explosive combo strapped to his crotch was and is brilliantly 100% successful.
The aim of this attack is against our psyche, our privacy and privates: what a fantastic way to bleed the West forever.
The fantastic heat of nitration HAD to be known by his handlers: yet they instructed the fool to proceed with the package next to his package.
Long before the PETN would detonate this fool would have been screaming and hopping all over the cabin.
////
Much in the manner of the shoe-bomber AQ is using the most expendable players — of whom interrogation can yield nothing.
The attack was planned to fail: it works better in discovery than in execution.
BTW, this line of strategy is completely in line with GRU/KGB deep thinking. It is not a tactic taught in a service academy.
The intent of the Al Q group is, as it has always been, is to make the West so angry at, and suspicious of, Muslims, that it will intern/slaughter/deport all of them Westerners can get their hands on. They desperately want to be segregated from the West’s alluring call of sexual freedom, individual responsibility, and women’s rights. I have no doubt that if the Al Q lot could stage a dozen simultaneous Beslans in America, they would do it in a heartbeat and consider the likely extermination of most American Muslims as a win-win situation.
Unfortunately, I see no way to prevent it. Muslims who don’t reject Islam are part of them and subject to/deserving of the same treatment the other groupo gets. Muslims who do deny the group are supposed to be killed according to their own religion’s tenets. Inertia is the strongest, most consistent force on earth. Most Western Muslims will remain Muslims, Al Q will eventually get lucky, a scene of extraordinarily ugly carnage will follow, and the reprisal will be uglier. Bet on it.
bogie @ 92
Tis satire…http://www.saysuncle.com/2009/12/28/insanity/
read comment 40
mac @94…
Your notion is better phrased as:
The intent of the Al Q handlers — GRU or KGB — is, as it has always been, is to make the West so angry at … Muslims….
The economic key being to alienate Western economies from Muslim crude oil and to allow Putin & Co to free-ride the energy trade for a century.
7. riddle:
Or worse…prosecuted.
More Off Topic rants.
Kailua held hostage. Day 8!
So I am coming back from my swim around Popoia Island 1/2 hour ago and all the roads are blocked off. Teh Won decided to have shave ice at Island Snow:
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Kailua&state=HI&address=450+Kawailoa+Road&zipcode=96734
Cops and SS everywhere. The whole road sealed off in front of the store.
I am getting very tired of this imperial arrogance.
When he got here on the 23rd he closed off an entire subdivision and the beach in front of it.
He got a private tour of Haunama Bay Tuesday and on Thursday the closed the Imax theater so he could see Avatar.
Is this typical for presidents?
Will this hubris have a price?
RE #88 Fonman re: “But as a progressive, I would sooner lay my child to rest that succumb to the belief that the use of a gun for self-defense is somehow not in itself a gun crime.” – Doug Van Gorder
How noble of Mr. Van Gorder to offer his child instead of himself. He probably aborted his other children too…’till he got the one he liked!
I find it hard to believe its in earnest becuase he takes an argument to its absolute most absurd conclusion, for instance the partial illusion to shooting fish in a barrel and the unfair nature of some children being more industrious or smarter or luckier in getting out of the building fast, thierfore its bad becuase they dont have an equal shot (no pun intended) in getting killed,
and actually say he would actually rather sacrifice his child to a horrific death rather than stop an evil doer with a gun
its so silly as to constitute either parody or someone so ridiculous they cant be taken seriously.
rumcrook @ 100
I thought the letter might have been written in irony too.
However, since Progressives have become a parody of themselves it is hard to tell.
Marie Claude, bad dealing in Iraq is old news. Iran is where things are happening now. (And neither France–nor the EU as a whole–are much helping matters.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703558004574581860997747456.html
Sirus
I have read this article and commented there too (I think it’s N° 11)
uh, Dubai is a nice place for all the traffics
LL@52
In some geographical/political areas of the west, it more resembles bikers in a daycare.
As regards the failed airplane bombing:
In some respects the nature of the official reaction reflects aspects of their limited contemporary world view.
If you have a message and your thread is being hijacked by trolls the first response is to not feed them, in time message recipients will reflexively scroll past them.
The second response is to delete them.
Delete is not synonymous with destroy.
Doesn’t mean they cease to exist, rather they cease to exist within the thread.
From a particular mindset, it’s one and the same.
MC @ 65
Chirac was and is a crook, going back to when he was Mayor of Paris; Villepin was his ventriloquist’s dummy..
I didn’t suggest he broke any laws in doing the Osirak deal with Saddam… Just because something isn’t illegal doesn’t make it a good idea or constructive.
The US should get over expecting eternal gratitude from France and other Europeans.
France and the rest of the EU should get over the fact that the US exists and had a very successful 20th Century. Doing things primarily to undermine the US and demonstrate independence from it, even things that are counter to Europe’s own interests, is getting old.
When France or, more so, Germany sells weaponizable technology to actors like Saddam and teh Iranian mullahs, secure in the belief that if there is ever a security threat it will be the US that will take responsibility, they act like spoiled 8-year olds.
If teh US resented France’s actions in 2002-2003, and it did, part of thecause was many in teh US unreasonably expected France to give us one in return fro 1918 and 1944. Thatw as silly.
But it’s not like Chirac or Villepin, who had spent the previous several years working with Germany and Russia to weaken and then get rid of them post-1991 sanctions and inspections, ever tried to make a case that they and the others would now cooperate in preventing Saddam from maintaining or re-establishing a WMD capability and therefore the US need not fear Saddam so equipping teh terrorists being trained in Iraq.
There was plenty to talk about, and given France’s record, it should have said something to that effect (except Chirac had no such intention, of course).
More maturity would be good, on both sides of the pond.
These operations all required a degree of professionalism, patience and attention to security that really can’t be ascribed to a bunch of 8th century cavemen picking lice out of their beards.
Nonsense. The attack on the CIA outpost was one of the simplest tricks in the book, one that almost any seventh century mind could have thought of.
It is the simplest of operations to claim to be an “informant”, strap on a ready-made bomb belt under a readily available Afghan military uniform, get waved through by a bunch of trusting souls, and then KABOOM! That’s a trick at the level of a six year old child on a playground, not one that requires any level of real sophistication.
It is shocking that the CIA could have fallen for such a simple ruse. It’s practically along the lines of, “Look at my thumb. Gee you’re dumb.”
Dhimmitude is the purpose of terrorizing: you make people so scared that they can no longer resist and defend themselves. How do the jihadis do this? The same way the Japanese attempted to do it in 1945: sending the message at Iwo Jima and Okinawa that they would never surrender and would kill as many Americans as they could before dying. When you receive that message, and you foresee a home island defended by several million suicide fighters, you reach for the nearest weapon of mass destruction, which in the case of 1945 was the atom bomb. The message that bomb delivered was a response to the Japanese message: “You want to die wholesale? We will accommodate.”
When Americans start killing jihadis wholesale without fear of the bad opinions of others, at that point dhimmitude will have been conquered and the jihadis along with it. It’s very simple: kill them all and stop being afraid. Or: stop being afraid, and then kill them all. It doesn’t make any difference in which order those two items come.
If you can’t deal with the truth of the above, then you can’t defend yourself.
Alexis, this is not true. First, the bomber had good intel about the targets. They did not just blow up low level people, but the CIA’s entire Afghan Task force. That seems the result of outstanding intel.
Which goes to Dan’s question: Does AQ/Taliban have infiltration into our people, and what agencies are helping them?
To answer the latter, certainly PARTS of Pakistan’s ISI, Saudi intel, ALL of Iran’s, and parts of Egypt’s are likely to be organizing and assisting against us. Of them, ISI and the Iranians are the most deadly. The latter have had a comprehensive plan and actions in Iraq to attack and kill Americans, including taking them into custody and executing them in Iran after torture. Iran has also conducted bombing operations against the US Military since the 1980s with impunity. The ISI helped AQ of course extensively and parts of still do.
Are US intel agencies infiltrated? Absolutely. The need to get language and cultural help guarantees this. While we have been unable to infiltrate the enemy. This mirrors WWII. The Germans and Japanese ran efficient spy rings, right up to the end of the war, while our efforts there were disastrous. BUT … US codebreaking advantages were decisive. The Jihadists know this and so simply have couriers instead of coded messages. Slower, but effective.
#70 Lifeofthemind . . .
You list a number of possible targets, noting their symbolic value. If I were President, my approach would be quite different than the one we seem to be pursuing.
I would have made it very clear to my Saudi friends, my Kuwaiti friends, my Pakistani friends, and all my other friends of like Islamic minds that if the U.S. gets hit, Islamic targets or political centers like Riyahd would be destroyed.
There is no reason not to be vicious with these vicious murderous supremacist. “Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.” The jihadist so-called terror campaign needs to be put in its proper perspective. The terrorists are in the same category as the rats, slugs, and rabbits who eat the plants in my garden. They are vermin.
PC doesn’t work for me.
In the wake of 9/11/01, GWB told the nations of the world that “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”
He immediately backtracked–Saudi, Egypt, Paki ISI, others came later.
Maybe we should go back to that first reaction and consider why it was felt to be unworkable, and then work on it.
There have been few if any insurrections or terror campaigns that succeeded without external support from state actors. We need to think on that, as well.
Of course, we won’t because we have to devour ourselves over health care and global warming and jockeying for the next election cycle.
Al Qaeda in and of itself, even with some state supporters, is not all that fearsome. But our govts (by “our” I am not just referring to the US, but most of the EU and others, as well) are so dysfunctional and corrupt (morally and financially, and the moral rot is worse) that bin Laden my yet be proven right as to who is the weak horse.
108:
It doesn’t require good intel. It doesn’t even require knowing who the CIA operatives are, although it’s quite probably that their identities are common knowledge in that region. All that’s necessary is to let the other side contact one of your own guys, let them think your guy is an informant, rig him up with a jacket when meeting with CIA operatives, and KABOOM! They’re dead.
It’s a very simple operation. In fact, the reason why the operation is so devastating is precisely because of the low level of intelligence needed to pull it off, for it signals to everybody in the region that the CIA is incompetent.
One sad upside to this bombing is that the CIA’s capabilities will be routinely underestimated in the near future.
42. trangbang68:
That may be the plan. What do you do when vigilantism gets er, robust?
You call out the national guard…at least. And the mission would not be to stop the acts that caused the vigilantism, but the vigilantees, themselves.
Smooth. “Lay down and take it while we cannot protect you, but stand up on your hind legs and you will become the target.”
Whenever I read that, I can’t help but think of Tuco, disguised as a Confederate soldier, shouting the same thing. Then, as the Union soldiers brush the grey dust off their uniforms, Clint Eastwood as Blondie leaning over and saying “God is not on our side, because God is not on the side of idiots.”
Well, if God is not on the side of idiots, He sure is letting them breed profusely. Will 2010 see the resurgence of the anit-idiotarian movement? God (on our side or not) I hope so…
This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 1/2/2010, at The Unreligious Right
# 88
I read that idiot who advocated that all should get killed equally . Typical leftist drivel about equal outcomes even if it means death to all children.
He was castigated and I think he career will take a down turn. What parent want a teacher who believes that their child should be killed rather than escape to live?
Regrettably it was not satire
Marty,
Chirac was a politician, that made “clientelism”, like many other politicians in the world. The trial against him as “cheating” was initiated by the socialists that had made voted a law that forces the political parties to decleare all their revenues and rewards during the Mitterrand times. It was ment to overthrow him of the political ring. But in that case all the mayors, deputees…congressists around the world should also be tried in court.
Osirak didn’t disturb America wat the times it was constructed, only Israel.
When France or, more so, Germany sells weaponizable technology to actors like Saddam and teh Iranian mullahs,
4. An American company, Pfaulder Corporation of Rochester, New York, supplied the Iraqis with a blueprint in 1975, enabling them to construct their first chemical warfare plant. The plant was purchased in sections from Italy, West Germany and East Germany and assembled in Iraq. It was located at Akhashat in north-western Iraq, and the cost was around $50 million for the plant and $30 million for the safety equipment.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/040.html
uh, France didn’t sell any arm or any uranium stuff to Iran since the Shah was removed, I haven’t investigated tfor the others !
The US should get over expecting eternal gratitude from France and other Europeans.
you are not living in a real world, your participation into WW1 and WW2 was,nt of mere compassion for us, but for your own interests too, it saved America from a certain bankruting, causse by your recession of the thirties. Thus the economical machine could fonction at high speed, and the aftermaths of WW2, in creating the Nato alliance wasn’t but for the same purpose, but at the same time your industry was only focusing on military expenses, this is what it cause your actual misfortune, all your domestic industries went away to China.
Now it is irrealist to expect “gratitude” as a mere from new generations from Europe, we are business partners, competitors, but not on our knees.
Which wasn’t understood here, that that you new wars weren’t for defending our common cultural values but for the interest of a few lobbies, also incredible that Mitterrand participated to the first gulf war, but I guess that Bush Father was a better communicator, and the Wolfowitz gang wasn’t around him
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/index-la.html
Why are the people in your country only focusing on how much France should bow to your “generosity” ? you conveniently repaid us our “generosity” that was passed under the bus since the 18th century.
But in spite of our many biquerings, we are of the same world, and if a mjor threat wants to destroy us we will fight it together, as already our renseignments did and still do before 9/11. (our services had worn your government of a possible attack the, but pfttt, it came from those insignifiant French !
A few more things written by the “satirist”. Many will be surprised:
http://www.patriotledger.com/opinions/x1599182255/YOUR-OPINION-Better-to-spread-rights-than-to-hoard-them
Sorry folks,
This is the piece I wanted everyone to see. In my opinion, the satire is not so thinly disguised:
http://www.patriotledger.com/opinions/letters_to_the_editor/x511159927/YOUR-OPINION-Our-nation-s-diversity-an-asset
My finance and I just returned from a two week holiday with my family in southwest Louisiana. I live in Washington state and travel home each year for the Christmas and New Year holidays. We flew direct flights from Seattle to Houston, which is the norm for my holiday travels.
Yesterday (1 Jan 2010), exactly one week following the attempted downing of an airliner above Detroit, we were surprise when the ticket agents in the main terminal at IAH did not check our ID’s as we checked three bags and had our boarding passes issued. When questioned, the agent insisted that it wasn’t necessary to confirm our identities.
We proceeded to our departure gate and, upon arrival at the TSA checkpoint, we informed the security personnel of the security oversight we had just observed. The response from the TSA person was a casual “Sorry.”
When we arrived at our departure gate I reported the lack of security to the airline’s gate agent. After hearing my story the agent simply attributed this to “human error”. I responded that this was negligence, not human error. His demeanor did not change.
We are grateful to have arrived home safely. I have very little confidence in the security measures the airlines & TSA have in place.
#108 Whiskey
To your list of foreign intelligence agencies cooperating against us I would add, as has been mentioned by another commenter, the GRU [Russian Military Intelligence, who actually did a lot more of the spying against us than the KGB] and at least 3 segments of Chinese Intelligence. One can, of course, include the intelligence organs of their client states, and of entities whose existence is a result of anti-American impetus. The Russian and the Chinese involvement will probably become more blatant as time goes on because there is no downside to being caught. What is Obama going to do to the Russians and Chinese in retaliation …. bleed on them?
In the shadow war; we are outnumbered,our command is compromised as far as loyalties are concerned, and the middle and lower levels have a reasonable fear of being prosecuted if they do their jobs against our enemies. We are defeating ourselves.
Subotai Bahadur
Keelie aka philip @ 117/118: I stand corrected. Mr. Van Gorder not only appears to be one of us, but capable of the most sublime satire as well. As a former subscriber to the Patriot Ledger (I left MA and moved back to the United States, specifically NH), I think their Op-Ed pages are in good hands with his frequent contributions.
Alexis, it DOES require good intel to kill the top 8 CIA operatives in the region. Without good intel, the suicide bomber (a “rare” asset in that he could be expected to be used only once, and would in fact be the ONLY means of penetration into the deepest part of the command bunker) would be “wasted” from the Taliban’s point of view.
Consider what happened — the guy waited until ALL of the CIA people at the base were present and THEN blew himself up. Inside the inner part of the bunker.
This meant the bomber had to know WHO he would blow up. Not just some random sentry or people inside the compound, but people who had the ability to do the MOST damage to the Taliban, by identifying targets and working informant networks.
Our Troops know we are at war.
Many civilians know we are at war.
What is it going to take for a MAJORITY of Americans (and others internationally) to realize that we are at war, and to then make the committment to fight a WAR, and endure the sacrifices this entails?
If the CIA operation was so compromised as to allow “wave through” clearance to a double agent – then how many times have they been played? If the GRU was indeed playing them – via Taliban proxy – why kill the tools off now.. and not just continue the charade?
MC @ 116
I had previously written @ 105 that the US should NOT expect eternal gratitude from you Europeans, half your post @ 116 says you didn’t read what I wrote. A couple of posts back I wrote much the same thing as you wrote, here.
As for the rest, I wasn’t suggesting every governmental and corporate entity in the US was pure, only that Chirac was corrupt, as in stealing the furniture and running his government as a crony operation (not that some US administrations haven’t done the same). And, his history of seeking close relations with Saddam affected the way the US viewed his opposition to the US enforcing the post-Gulf War UN resolutions in 2002-03, this was understandable and logical. If he sincerely wanted to avoid the US going into Iraq, part of that had to be to recognize his continued opposition to the Post-Gulf War sanctions regime was a big factor in US fears about WMD. And if he wanted the US to desist, he would have to commit to changing course and working with rather than against the US ad UK. Of course, he didn’t, which made his opposition rather inexplicable and led in turn to all sorts of craziness on both sides of the Atlantic.
Maybe you’re a Gaullist? I assume so from your stances, here. Of course, it took a Socialist (Mitterand) for France to ever coopertate with the US and oppose Soviet expansionism. The Gaullists, tho called “Right,” always seem to look first for how to stick a thumb in the US’s eye, then consider whether it was in France’s interest to do so.
Eh, whatever. France used to be a great power, both militarily and to a degree morally, but the military and economic power ended at Verdun in 1916, and the moral strength was dissipated over the following 50 years. France could reclaim much of its greatness by weighing morality along with narrow self interest, and becoming again something of an exemplar of its original Revolutionary (pre-Terror) ideals. But, it chooses not to, prefering to wallow in corporatist corruption and dreams of elite gloire thru manipulating the EU. Not worthy of a great people, but it’s not my country or my choice.
Ah, well. LIfe goes on.
“The US should get over expecting eternal gratitude from France and other Europeans.”
ol right it doesn’t mean that you are not !
I have read your post, and brought some complement of information that you seem to ignore.
Chirac wasn’t seeking more close ties with Saddam that your elites didn’t.
Irak wasn’t a french lawn, but an English’s and American’s.
The UN vote wasn’t saying that no war would be necessary, but that you had to wait until the UN investigators found WMD there, as they were the motive for you to go on a 2nd trip there.
And did you find these WMD ?
Chirac is,’t the twisted man that was pictured by your medias, he knows quite well the arab world for having freely served in Algeria war as a lieutnent, when the golden palaces of ministeries waited for him. Not only for military service, he went freely to Alger after his terms as a solider.
Besides, he has enough education for whinning, or making some advertisement of his actions, not alike a Sarkozy or a Berlusconi that are only parading.
Chirac was in the meanwhile involved with the EU (especially Germany) for expending the idea of an european army, that would replace NATO forces. But your administration had not but the will to instigate some inner quarrels among the EU members about it. It is so that Bush administration bypassed the EU rules to drag the new eastern republics into the war Alliance, without that the deal was discussed withGermany and France.
So the Veto at the UN was more a deceiption vote that a censure vote. BTW Germany was more against this war, it even wasn’t present for the first one.
De Gaulle had good reasons to mistrust the US and the Brits since he was working with them in WW2
the rest is your ranting is mere bitterness
Any nation aimes for its own interests, you never forgot yours
and I can return you the compliment, the moral America died with your fathers in WW2.
Now, as far as our role in EU it’s the rules, each country fares for its own goods.
I expect that the same competion exists in the US between your different states, and personnalities
And Chirac isn’t more a crook than the Brits Ministers, than Berlusconi, than some of your politicians, he didn’t led us to wrong adventures, the only default we can repproach him is that he was to gentle with his comrads, some of them abused him, but his soldier past learnt him to not complain and to not betray his clan. He was much better at leading soldiers and at winning an election campain
Besides, he has enough education for NOT whinning, or making some advertisement of his actions
Okay, okay, Marty and Marie Claude, as the offspring of a Free French nurse and an American Army officer, I would prefer not to see war break out between our countries until after we’ve brought the Third Jihad to a standstill.
Marty, patience, it is clear to me at least that completely digesting long Belmont Club postings is required or easy for a participant whose first language isn’t English. Patience.
Marie Claude, you must remember that there is some resentment here over France’s conduct before, during, and after the Iraq War.
Now Iraq is pretty much history, let us focus on attitude adjustment for the governments of the US, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Then we can all take extended leave in Tahiti.
Limpe6
I guess that Marty didn’t appreciate the links I brought, but it doesn’t help to ignore the truth.
Now, I don’t aim to deny America’s role in the world equilibrium, but I still will defend my nationals personnalities, especially if they are wrongly undermined, and for whom I still have respect, it’s too bad that they are not the ones that you prefer. Nevermind history will sort the good ones in a few decades
“Hassan practically announced his attention to kill Americans”
Did you mean attention or INTENTION? I suspect it should be the latter.
Another writing error….
“just because she exuded warmth in Mexican restaurant.”
Something is missing. I think the intention was “in A Mexican restaurant”.
MC @ 126 The UN vote wasn’t saying that no war would be necessary, but that you had to wait until the UN investigators found WMD there, as they were the motive for you to go on a 2nd trip there.
And did you find these WMD ?
The Duelfer Report is the best place to answer this simple question. Briefly, investigations and interrogations after the overthrow of Saddam documented the fact that Saddam intended to re-build his WMD capabilities as soon as the Oil-for-Food sanctions finally fell apart. The US demanded Saddam come clean, and argued its case in the UN Security Council for a year before acting. The French government was exposed as supporting Saddam all along, making all this time spent before the UN completely pointless.
Preserving and Restoring WMD Infrastructure
and Expertise
There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial,
body of evidence suggesting that Saddam
pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return
to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving
assets and expertise. In addition to preserved
capability, we have clear evidence of his intent to
resume WMD as soon as sanctions were lifted. The
infrequent and uninformed questions ascribed to him
by former senior Iraqis may betray a lack of deep
background knowledge and suggest that he had not
been following the efforts closely. Alternatively,
Saddam may not have fully trusted those with whom
he was discussing these programs. Both factors were
probably at play. All sources, however, suggest that
Saddam encouraged compartmentalization and would
have discussed something as sensitive as WMD with
as few people as possible.
• Between 1996 and 2002, the overall MIC budget
increased over forty-fold from ID 15.5 billion to ID
700 billion. By 2003 it had grown to ID 1 trillion.
MIC’s hard currency allocations in 2002 amounted
to approximately $364 million. MIC sponsorship of
technical research projects at Iraqi universities skyrocketed
from about 40 projects in 1997 to 3,200
in 2002. MIC workforce expanded by fi fty percent
in three years, from 42,000 employees in 1999 to
63,000 in 2002.
• According to a mid-level IIS offi cial, the IIS successfully
targeted scientists from Russia, Belarus,
Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, China, and several
other countries to acquire new military and defenserelated
technologies for Iraq. Payments were made
in US dollars. The Iraqi Government also recruited
foreign scientists to work in Iraq as freelance
consultants. Presumably these scientists, plus their
Iraqi colleagues, provided the resident “know how”
to reconstitute WMD within two years once sanctions
were over, as one former high-ranking Iraqi
official said was possible.
In addition, Libya gave up their WMD programs and the AQ Khan proliferation network was exposed and destroyed as a direct outcome of our actions in Iraq. These are all good outcomes.
Right now I suppose you could argue that there are no “WMD’s” in Iran, despite their open declarations of uranium enrichment and open testing of mid-range ballistic missiles. So, does that mean we need to wait until our enemies are all set to go to nuclear war with us before we can act?
Ahhh, here’s a blast from the past on the subject of Saddam’s WMD’s, back before the Defense of Marriage Act, back before this poor guy turned into a butt-nut Bush-hater: Andrew Sullivan: READ THE (WMD) REPORT
The administration claimed that Saddam had used WMDs in the past, had hidden materials from the United Nations, was hiding a continued program for weapons of mass destruction, and that we should act before the threat was imminent. The argument was that it was impossible to restrain Saddam Hussein unless he were removed from power and disarmed. The war was based on the premise that Saddam had clearly violated U.N. resolutions, was in open breach of such resolutions and was continuing to conceal his programs with the intent of restarting them in earnest once sanctions were lifted. Having read the report carefully, I’d say that the administration is vindicated in every single respect of that argument. This war wasn’t just moral; it wasn’t just prudent; it was justified on the very terms the administration laid out. And we don’t know the half of it yet.
THE MONEY QUOTES: If you don’t have time, here are my highlights. First off:
We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.
Translation: Saddam was lying to the U.N. as late as 2002. He was required by the U.N. to fully cooperate. He didn’t. The war was justified on those grounds alone. Case closed. Some of the physical evidence still remains, despite what was clearly a deliberate, coordinated and thorough attempt to destroy evidence before during and after the war. Among the discoveries:
* A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.
* A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.
* Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.
* New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
* Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).
* A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
* Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.
* Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km – well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
* Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles –probably the No Dong — 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.
Would you be happy, after 9/11, if the president had allowed such capabilities to remain at large, and be reinvigorated, with French and Russian help, after sanctions were removed? I wouldn’t. But the New York Times and Dominique de Villepin would have happily looked the other way rather than do anything real to enforce the very resolutions they claimed to support.
The Taliban aren’t supermen. Not even close.
The attack upon the CIA officers in Afganistan was less about enemy intelligence and more about the stupidity and vulnerability of our own side. We need to expect suicide bombers who are coached by their trainers to claim to be an informant and then blow themselves up when they meet CIA officers; that’s part of the environment of Middle Eastern culture ever since the Society of Assassins were headquartered at Alamut. We must expect this.
The Taliban use lots of suicide bombers; if suicide bombers were such a prized asset, why have they been used so promiscuously in the past two years? This was a known member of the Taliban who offered to flip. He wore a suicide belt under an Afghan uniform when he met the CIA officers. The rest is history. It’s no different from the time when two al-Qaeda “journalists” hid a bomb in their photographic equipment to kill Massoud.
The moral of the story is to check every journalist or professed turncoat for explosives before he meets someone important. If the bomb sniffing dogs don’t like the man, don’t let him in. It’s that simple.
By the way, if the bait is good enough, almost any intelligence agency can get hooked on debriefing a possible turncoat.
Tony
Yet Tony Blair admitted that the report on the WMD was a mere construction, but deposing Saddam was a justification by itself, and new motives would be “found” for that
Why should I argue over Iran ?
Iran has always been considered as a vicious islamic republic by us since your good services helped to remove the Shah
and Saddam was harming his population but not the foreigners since most of his army was destructed by the alliees in the first gulf war, and that he couldn’t replace his arms under the UN embargo (or supposed to)!
Saying that we sold arms to Saddam during the embargo is a mere lie and still in the vein of the propaganda launched against us for the UN vote.
You can play the blind and the deaf monkey on the motives for Irak war, the objective truth is beyonds official discourses. Most of the normal persons know that, and a fortiori their governments representatives. One day you really will have to forget your tales, because they don’t make illusion anymore
Tony: There was one person who really and truly thought that Saddam Hussein had WMDs that he could use on short notice. His name was Saddam Hussein. The Master of Miscalculation.
No-fly zones, Oil For Food, etc provided excellent cover for wheeling and dealing in
verboten items that could be used for terrorist purposes. And there was a lot of that going on. It was a matter of time before Iraq provided/enabled means of some form of sneak WMD attack.
Saddam assumed that meant he had an arsenal at his disposal and could use portions of same to stop an invasion. War-fighting is
different from terrorism and Saddam never could figure that one out. Which is why he wound up getting a “suspended sentence”.
My last is in moderation. Those who wish can read it on my blog.
Actually from the next thread, my bad.
Now for Dubya’s Great Iraq Blunder; This is one of semantics.
He kept saying; “Either Saddam Hussein will disarm or the United States will lead the coalition that disarms him”.
He SHOULD have said: “Either Saddam Hussein will turn himself in or the United States will
raise a posse and bring him in.”
Oh the hooting and hollering that would have greeted this cowboy lingo! However, it would have distinctly communicated the both the what and the why of the mission to Iraq.
Then, not finding a ready-to-shoot arsenal would not have mattered so much. And the occupation (Uncle Sam’s weak point) would probably have found its Petraeus quite a bit sooner.
Ideas have consequences and words have impact.
Live and learn.
The ideas that “Iraq had no WMD’s” and “Saddam posed no threat” are fictions of Bush-haters. Saddam’s WMD’s were globally accepted realities throughout the ’90′s, the reason for 16 UN Security Council sanctions and the basis of American policy under Clinton.
Is the world better off without Saddam, without Libya’s WMD programs, without the AQ Khan wmd network? Or would the world be better right now if Gore managed to steal the American election in 2000 and continued Clinton’s feckless war of pinpricks until the French and Russians finally delivered the result they’d been paid for by Saddam’s Oil for Food billions and ended the sanctions?
Tony I feel sorry for you, you will never experience true freedom, your are an hostage of the history scum dusts
tony @ 132, 133, 139
I am no Bush hater. I voted for him twice, and I frequently defended him against his enemies, who hated him because they hate America.
But he was a miserable strategist who failed to grasp the opportunity handed to him by fate. He did not even name, much less attack, our real enemies – the Saudi Arabia-Yemen-Pakistan group. Instead, he concocted the fiction that they were our “friends”, engaged in some kind of crazy joint enterprise, and chose to take what seemed then to him the easy route of knocking over Saddam.
Now Saddam, I grant you, was wearing a “kick me” sign before and after 9/11. He was a nasty man and a miserable ruler, and if the job of President was that of dispensing perfect justice all over the planet, you could make the case that invading Iraq was a wise thing to do.
But the actual effect of invading Iraq was to waste our blood and treasure, and to weaken the martial spirit of the nation, so that when the real war begins, as it must, we will be much less likely to prevail.
And, you will protest, I’m ignoring Iran. That’s true, because it is my view that if there were American governors installed in Riyadh, S’ana, and Rawalpindi by July 4, 2002 that the martial ardor of the mullahs would have been considerably dampened. Even if it were not, with large American army groups to the East and West, Teheran’s military choices would have been severely constrained.
When George W. Bush addressed the joint session on September 16, 2001, he could have asked for the sun, the moon, and the stars and been granted it that very night. Instead, he failed to understand the enemy, failed to imagine victory, and instead asked for Iraq, which by any stretch of the imagination was a misconceived and foolish adventure which gained the Iraqi people a dead Saddam and gained us nothing.
The United States chose to adopt the rhetoric of war (“no quarter”),
but then they whine when 13 Crusaders are rightfully offed at a military base.
Has it now become unacceptable to kill your soldiers in a war that you’ve declared?