Stygius

Al-Qaeda's "long war"

Is al-Qaeda outthinking our government? Depends on your reading of this Christian Science Monitor piece.

[A] letter that has been translated and released by the US military indicates that Al Qaeda itself sees the continued American presence in Iraq as a boon for the terror network, which has recently shown signs of expanding into the Palestinian territories and North Africa.

The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness ... indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest," says the writer, who goes by the name Atiyah. The letter, released last week, was recovered in the rubble of the Iraqi house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by a US bomb in June.

 

NIE: Iraq war worsens terror threat

New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

From four years to five

I've just been rereading my post from September 11, 2004. I find there's little more I can say today.

Fear & Failure

The Cunning Realist:

I was in New York on 9/11, and had previously worked at a firm that was one of the largest WTC tenants. I was not close friends with anyone who died, but I knew several of them, including a fraternity brother from college. I remember having two thoughts on 9/11: we have to get the bastards who did this, and we can't let them succeed by making us afraid. Five years on, we know how the former has worked out while we've been bogged down in Iraq. And in light of the divisive and desperate demagoguery we've heard especially during the past few weeks (with worse to come if this is correct), how are we doing on the latter?

Oh my...

From The Blotter:

Osama bin Laden, America's most wanted man, will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a "peaceful life," Pakistani officials tell ABC News.

The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a "peace deal" with the Taliban.

If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden "would not be taken into custody," Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, "as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen."

This is the press secretary to the president of Pakistan.

In addition to the pullout of Pakistani troops, the "peace agreement" between Pakistan and the Taliban also provides for the Pakistani army to return captured Taliban weapons and prisoners.

"What this means is that the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism director.

A Pakistan-Taliban peace agreement?

Air Safety: Management Breakdown

It's been a consistent theme for years that asinine policies at TSA undermine the Federal Air Marshals. In an impressive investigative report, Denver's Channel 7 talks to some marshals.

All of the air marshals attacked management for systematically exposing their covert status, willingly compromising their undercover assignments, and ultimately risking the safety of air passengers from coast to coast.

"Our anonymity is the only thing we have as a defense. Without anonymity, we might as well wear our guns on the outside of our shirts and announce where we're sitting," said an air marshal in Las Vegas.The air marshals said policies and procedures established at headquarters are compromising their security in airports, on airplanes and in the hotels where they stay.

Basayev dead

CNN.com:

Russia's most wanted man, Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, has been killed by the country's special forces, the state security chief has told President Vladimir Putin. 

FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev said on Monday that Basayev, who claimed responsibility for the 2004 Beslan school attack in which 331 people, half of them children, were killed, was planning an attack to coincide with Russia hosting the G8 summit of world leaders this weekend.

Transnational Zarqawi

Talk of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's global pretensions is not new. However, the New York Times talks to Jordanian intelligence officials in an examination of Zarqawi's reach outside of Iraq, and gets some interesting inside information:

He sought volunteers to fight in Iraq and others to become suicide bombers there, but he also recruited about 300 people who came to Iraq for terrorist training and sent them back to their home countries, where they await orders to carry out strikes.

There have been scattered reports that Iraq had become a training ground, but Jordan's assessment was the first to offer firm numbers.

Of a range of intelligence experts in the United States, Europe and Jordan interviewed about Mr. Zarqawi's reach, only the Jordanians offered such detail.

Given that old, inconvenient NBC News  story that the US had a bead on Zarqawi long before it invaded Iraq, but didn't dare act since it would have undermined the rationale for the preferred invasion, this report shows two things: first, the profound mendacity of the Bismarck poseurs in the Bush Administration; and second, the transnational threat --much fed by the Bush's manufacturing  a failed state in Iraq -- that al-Qaeda in Iraq continues to demonstrate, and thus the danger of arguing about pulling out without addressing that threat.

Zarqawi dead

Although we've had false alarms before, al-Qaeda's Iraq wing is confirming that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed in a US airstrike. May he roast in hell.

Reuters:

Al Qaeda in Iraq pledged to continue fighting.

"We tell our prince, Sheikh bin Laden, your soldiers in al Qaeda in Iraq will continue along the same path that you set out for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," said a statement on an Islamist Web site.

Casey said the body of Zarqawi, thought to be in his late 30s and who had a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head, had been identified and that details of the circumstances of his death would be revealed later on Thursday.

The New York Times has a few more details:

Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an American air strike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6.15 p.m. local time on Wednesday, top United States and Iraqi officials said today.

At a joint news conference with Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said Zarqawi's body had been positively identified by fingerprints, "facial recognition" and "known scars." He said seven of Zarqawi's associates had also been killed in the strike.

The US is trying as much as possible to let Prime Minister Maliki shore up his government's legitimacy and credibility with this.

General Casey said an American air strike had targeted "a single dwelling in a wooded area surrounded by very dense palm forest" eight kilometers, or five miles, north of the city of Baquba, and that "precision munitions" had been used, a phrase that usually refers to laser-guided bombs or missiles. An unconfirmed report on Iraq's state-owned television channel, al-Iraqiya, said the attack had been carried out by American attack helicopters.

Mogadishu chaos

Make sure this is on your radar screen.

Update: The Sunday New York Times has a more detailed piece on the dynamics of the conflict, and the US's complex relationship with the clan warlords fighting Islamist elements.