Last week, John McCain's top adviser, Charlie Black, made news when he said a terror attack would be a "big advantage" to McCain's chances of winning the election in November. Republican really think that. The sick thing is that it's the Bush administration's failure to destroy al Qaeda that makes another attack even possible. A blockbuster in today's New York Times explains how the Bush and his top aides have continuously screwed up the anti-terror efforts:
The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for “the base,” has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.
Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.
Publicly, senior American and Pakistani officials have said that the creation of a Qaeda haven in the tribal areas was in many ways inevitable — that the lawless badlands where ethnic Pashtun tribes have resisted government control for centuries were a natural place for a dispirited terrorism network to find refuge. The American and Pakistani officials also blame a disastrous cease-fire brokered between the Pakistani government and militants in 2006.
But more than four dozen interviews in Washington and Pakistan tell another story. American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the C.I.A. in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the C.I.A., including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas.
These screw-ups are the people who claim they'll make us safer. It's never been true (although the media laps it up and too many Democrats still cower at the idea of standing up to Bush's failed national security policies.)
It wasn't just the in-fighting, that undermined the anti-terror efforts. As many predicted back during the rush to war in 2002, Iraq was a major distraction from the effort to destroy the real enemy who attacked the U.S. in 2001:
Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.
The Bush administration is a national security disgrace. John McCain backed Bush's policies all the way. This is their failure.
Of course, for Republicans, there is a silver lining. If something really bad happens, like another terrorist attack on the U.S., it could help McCain. Maybe that's been part of the strategy all along.
Highly classified intelligence documents relating to two of the most sensitive issues involving Britain's security interests - al-Qaida in Pakistan and the situation in Iraq - have been found on a train near London, it was disclosed last night.
The documents, including one marked Top Secret, are believed to be detailed and up-to-date assessments by Whitehall's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).
They were found on Tuesday and handed to the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, who reported the loss. The BBC said the documents were left on the train by a senior intelligence officer.
It's increasingly clear that despite having somehow gained a reputation for foreign policy expertise, Senator McCain doesn't have a grasp on the most basic -- and important! -- details of Iraq or even the greater Middle East. Joe mentioned this yesterday, but it's really impossible to overstate how significant an issue this is.
Of course, regular AMERICAblog readers already know this -- two weeks ago, regarding McCain's ludicrous claim that Iraq is in danger of being taken over by al Qaeda, I wrote, "Considering [McCain's] evident lack of intellectual curiosity on the economy, health care, science, and a whole host of other issues, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that he has an understanding of the *military* but not any sophisticated *Middle East foreign policy* knowledge . . . if McCain says this is what he thinks, I'm sort of inclined to take him at his word. And if [a different candidate] were to demonstrate such a lack of basic knowledge, it would be viewed as a huge gaffe. Because, y'know, it is."
McCain is at it again, this time telegraphing his profound lack of understanding of the regional dynamics. He recently claimed, multiple times, that Iran is training al Qaeda elements from Iraq. Iran, of course, is a Shia theocracy, and al Qaeda a Sunni terrorist group. This is like claiming that the RNC is training Democratic congressional candidates. Seriously -- this is a HUGE error. Not a single other government official or expert has claimed anything like this. It wasn't a momentary gaffe or slip; again, he said it multiple times. It's increasingly clear that he truly doesn't understand the situation . . . five years into the war.
Two final thoughts: If McCain is in a position to decide whether to, say, order a military strike on Iran, it would probably be good if he didn't think (erroneously!) that Iran supports al Qaeda. Secondly, it's nice to see the press picking up on this -- a pretty straightforward piece from AP here, for example. And if people discover that McCain doesn't understand the issue he claims as his greatest strength, he's finished.
Did they think the Hamburglar was there or something? Why is George Bush trying to divert America's attention from his scandalous failures at home? Isn't that how their tired old story went during the Clinton years? Either way, the hyped attack was yet another flop.
The attack was the fourth known strike by the US inside Somalia since it backed Ethiopia's invasion of the country in December 2006. All have been aimed at men Washington believes to be responsible for terrorist attacks in East Africa. None has been successful.
Unbelievable. Seriously. Leaking national security info to Fox News and destroying a year-long surveillance of Al Qaeda should put someone from the Bush Administration in jail. We are in greater danger because of the continued incompetence of George Bush and his minions. From the Washington Post:
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.
The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.
Okay, so we know that SITE has some amazingly important intel. They pass it on to the Bush administration. And, it ends up on Fox News:
Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.
By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.
Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.
So, how is it that the first thing some Bush staffer does -- and it had to be a high level Bushie -- how is it that the first thing they can think to do upon getting highly classified intel about al Qaeda is to call Fox News?
Wait, yesterday, Bush's Homeland Security adviser said the Osama Bin Laden was "virtually impotent." Yet, today, Bush's National Intelligence Director testified that Bin Laden's forces pose a real threat. What is it? And, if we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here, how can they still be a real threat? That can only happen because of Bush's failed leadership. On many levels, unfortunately, it's Bin Laden who is claiming "Mission Accomplished":
Six years after the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network is bleeding the U.S. military in Iraq while regrouping with an avowed aim of another strike on the United States.
U.S. intelligence agencies and other analysts say security improvements and international efforts against al Qaeda have helped prevent another major U.S. attack.
But the network's ability to attack the West is rebounding, they say, and already it has met what some analysts describe as a goal of luring the United States into a damaging Middle East war that would cripple U.S. influence in the region.
Al Qaeda has inspired cells and sympathizers who may be unable to strike on the scale of September 11 but can nevertheless cause death and destruction.
"They have regained a significant level of their capability," National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell said of al Qaeda during a Senate hearing on Monday, the eve of the sixth anniversary. "The threat is real," he said.
So, six years later, despite all the tough guy talk, the terrorists who attacked America are still a real threat. Plus, they've lured us into an intractable war in Middle East. And, of course, Bin Laden is still free to taunt us. So who exactly is "virtually impotent" these days? Not Bin Laden.
Washington Monthly put its October cover story online today, and it is fantastic. (And not just because I'm quoted.) I'll comment on it and excerpt it briefly, but really, go read the article.
Back? Okay. The author, Andrew Tilghman, is a former reporter for Stars and Stripes, an independent military-focused newspaper, and spent nine months in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. It was clear to me when we spoke that he had an excellent basis of knowledge about the conflict, and he asked all the right questions to get at the specifics of the topic.
And he got fascinating answers from a variety of sources, which he weaved into a solid and damning assessment of the hyping of al Qaeda by military and administration leaders for political and/or careerism aims. To wit:
With disproportionate resources dedicated to tracking AQI, the search has become a self-reinforcing loop. The Army has a Special Operations task force solely dedicated to tracking al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Defense Intelligence Agency tracks AQI through its Iraq office and its counterterrorism office. The result is more information culled, more PowerPoint slides created, and, ultimately, more attention drawn to AQI, which amplifies its significance . . .
[T]he bar for labeling an attack the work of al-Qaeda can be very low. The fact that a detainee possesses al-Qaeda pamphlets or a laptop computer with cached jihadist Web sites, for example, is at times enough for analysts to link a detainee to al-Qaeda. "Sometimes it's as simple as an anonymous tip that al-Qaeda is active in a certain village, so they will go out on an operation and whoever they roll up, we call them al-Qaeda," says Rossmiller. "People can get labeled al-Qaeda anywhere along in the chain of events, and it's really hard to unlabel them." Even when the military backs off explicit statements that AQI is responsible, as with the Tal Afar truck bombings, the perception that an attack is the work of al-Qaeda is rarely corrected.
The author actually talked to regional and intelligence experts -- not to be confused with "political" or "military" commentators -- including names you probably recognize, like Juan Cole, Pat Lang, and Larry Johnson, as well as some you won't but should, like Malcolm Nance, a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker. Nance is also the author of The Terrorists of Iraq, which is easily the best book written on the Iraq insurgency and a must-read for anybody seriously interested in the issue.
The size and impact of al Qaeda in Iraq is hugely overblown by the media, elected figures, and military officials. Further, and perhaps even more importantly, its purported strength is essentially the only security-related reason claimed by the administration for maintaining our occupation. Political manipulation by government and military leaders -- combined with a lack of knowledge of situational specifics on the part of commentators and the public -- results in a profound general misunderstanding of the facts on the ground.
Incidentally, according to General Petraeus the surge is aimed at al Qaeda, a group about which he is severely deluded. It's all such a debacle.
(Apologies in advance, as this is a little longer than I usually prefer, but occasionally the Big Lies need to be debunked. Back to regularly scheduled brevity next time, I promise.)
While I'm hating on Hitchens, it's worth pointing out that his inane review of Harry Potter wasn't even the worst thing he published that day. In Slate, he embarrasses himself further with a profoundly misbegotten analysis of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Hitchens may have been a great thinker at one point, but that time has long passed; what he is now, rather than a sharp analyst, is a sharp arguer. Without the benefit of actually being right on the facts, a skilled debater can still make a case by setting the argument on his or her own terms, skewing or framing the question so wrong becomes right and the ridiculous appears to make sense. There are few better than Hitchens at rigging an argument in this way, and he does it with frequency (and relatively impunity) on Iraq. He argued yesterday that it is a "self-evident fact" that so-called "al Qaeda in Iraq" is "a branch of al Qaeda itself." I suppose he claims it's "self-evident" because, well, the words match. One would think a professed disciple of Orwell wouldn't stoop to such foolishness, but there it is nonetheless.
Al Qaeda proper attacked us on 9/11, al Qaeda is responsible for various terrorism in the Middle East and beyond, and it is a funded, organized, and hierarchical -- if decentralized -- entity that looks to export violence against, primarily, the U.S. and Arab regimes. I'm leaving out a lot, but those are the broad strokes. These guys are primarily located in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, and they're overwhelmingly Sunni. The Iraq group is simply not made up of the same people from Afghanistan and Pakistan. While some may have come to fight, the vast majority of those who call themselves al Qaeda in Iraq have no real ties to bin Laden. More importantly, though, AQI is a tiny percentage of the Iraq insurgency, and continuing the Iraq war *helps* al Qaeda by providing a never-ending recruitment video and the potential for live "training." So with apologies for the long explanation, it's far from "self-evident" that al Qaeda proper and al Qaeda in Iraq are the same thing or the same threat.
Hitchens goes on to prove his point by thrashing to death one straw man ("It is argued, first, that there was no such organization before the coalition intervention in Iraq.") which is an argument about the idiocy of going to war, and how it had nothing to do with real efforts against terrorism, not an argument about the presence of self-proclaimed al Qaeda in Iraq today. He then says it's wrong to claim that al Qaeda Iraq is different than al Qaeda proper, and that it's wrong to say that the "real" fight against al Qaeda is in Afghanistan rather than Iraq.
Of course, he's wrong, and those disdained assessments are generally correct. His argument ultimately begs the question: he claims it's wrong to say that the invasion of Iraq created the problem of al Qaeda, which works if (and only if) one assumes that AQI and AQ-proper are one and the same. The invasion of Iraq did indeed create al Qaeda in Iraq, and the idea of "we're fighting them there so they can't come here" has been debunked over and over -- it's really embarrassing that he'd use such a trope.
Additional proof of connections between the two groups is, apparently, that they're both nasty and vicious -- no, I can't explain what that has to do with the actual question at hand -- and the lack of support of AQI by many Sunnis in Anbar is also presented as evidence that AQI is our primary enemy and connected to al Qaeda as we generally think of it. Wha??
He saves the worst for last, though, claiming,
The third assumption, deriving from the first two, would be that if coalition forces withdrew, the AQM gangsters would lose their raison d'être and have nothing left to fight for. I think I shall just leave that assumption lying where it belongs: on the damp floor of whatever asylum it is where foolish and wishful opinions find their eventual home.
Well, he certainly beat the hell out of that straw man! If anybody *actually thought* that, it would be pretty silly. The real argument goes something like, "If coalition forces withdraw, AQI would lose recruiting power, funding, and attention, and immediately be wiped out by Iraqis who overwhelmingly hate them. Only through our presence does AQI remain popular and sympathetic enough to continue to exist."
But that line of reasoning is way harder to counter than a ridiculous made-up argument, so it goes unmentioned -- again, the classic Hitchens move of presenting a case in a way that only allows for his predetermined conclusion to prove correct. He continues to equate "being bad" with "being a real threat" and his writings suffer greatly as a result. It's one thing, though, to be wrong, and another to constantly dismiss legitimate views in favor of destroying imaginary ones. Really just embarrassing.
Oh, and while yesterday's review had the "I" pronoun nine times in 2000 words, this one raises the stakes: seven "I" in just 1000 words. Just in case, y'know, you forgot who it's all about.
The pro-Iraq war GOP candidates, who vowed to stay George Bush's course in Iraq, also debated attacking terrorists earlier today:
Republican presidential contenders waded into a Democratic foreign policy row on Sunday, and argued over how far the United States should go in striking terrorist targets abroad.
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said last week he would be willing to launch strikes against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan if Islamabad took no action.
This discussion has captivated the foreign policy experts. But the rest of us need to keep in mind one thing: The only reason there is even a discussion about capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan is that our current president, George Bush, never captured or killed Osama Bin Laden. In the 2008 election, the candidates are still discussing how far they would go to get the mastermind of the plot that killed three thousand Americans -- on American soil -- almost six years ago. Every single time someone says the terms "Bin Laden" or "Al Qaeda," it highlights Bush's failed policies. Those terms should be history by now.
The GOP candidates support Bush's Iraq war strategy -- the very strategy that let Bin Laden not only stay free, but it's the strategy that's reinvigorated Al Qaeda. At the debate, in a Bush-like moment, Mitt Romney linked 9/11 to the Iraq war. There is now a connection. Except, the terrorists who masterminded 9/11 have become the beneficiaries of Bush's Iraq war.
What more can George Bush to do screw with the 9/11 families? It's bad enough that Bush stayed on vacation even after learning on August 6, 2001 that Bin Laden was "determined to attack in US." No, now he's trying to rub salt in their wounds by not inviting any of the families to the signing of the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations. (That's legislation the GOP Congress would never ever enact.)
Christ, even Lieberman tried to reason with his best friend to no avail. CQ Today (sub. req.) has the story:
Family members of Sept. 11 victims are unhappy they were not invited to Friday’s signing ceremony for legislation implementing recommendations of the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks.
Lawmakers who steered the measure through Congress will be on hand for the White House event, but expressed concern that family members who lobbied for the legislation will be absent.
“We would very much like to be by the president’s side as he shows his support by putting his signature on the bill,” said Carie Lemack, president of Families of Sept. 11. Her mother, Judy Larocque, was killed when the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center.
Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, appealed unsuccessfully to the White House on Thursday for a last-minute invitation to family members, according to Leslie Phillips, a spokeswoman for the senator.
No wonder Bush very much doesn't want to be anywhere near the 9/11 families. After all, Bush never caught the guy who masterminded the attacks. And, Al Qaeda, which Bush promised to destroy, has only gotten stronger.
We've all learned that invoking "September the 11th" and Al Qaeda are just political lines for Bush.
It's a rhetorical question. Of course, the answer is no. In the column today, Froomkin outdoes himself -- and that's a pretty high standard:
Like any terrorist organization, al-Qaeda wants attention. It wants to be perceived as powerful. And it particularly wants Americans to live in fear.
Could al-Qaeda possibly have found a better publicist than President Bush?
At a South Carolina Air Force base yesterday, Bush mentioned al-Qaeda and bin Laden 118 times in 29 minutes, arguing that the violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion in Iraq would somehow come to America's shores if U.S. troops were to withdraw.
But the majority of that violence in Iraq is caused either by Iraqis murdering each other for religious reasons or by Iraqis trying to throw off the American occupation. The group that calls itself al-Qaeda in Iraq is only one of a multitude of factions creating chaos in that country, and the long-term goals of its Iraqi members are almost certainly not in line with those of al-Qaeda HQ (which is safely ensconced in Pakistan).
Furthermore, the administration's own intelligence community has concluded that the war in Iraq has helped rather than hurt al-Qaeda.
What effect would a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq really have on al-Qaeda? Is it true that "surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaida would be a disaster for our country," as Bush admonished yesterday?
Bush's predictions about the region have been uniformly abysmal, so the opposite may be at least as likely. And in that scenario, a U.S. troop withdrawal would rob al-Qaeda of its greatest recruiting tool. It would also free American and Iraqi fighters to hunt down bin Laden and his fellow vermin wherever they are and give them what they deserve -- which is not publicity, but ignominy and extinction.
Throughout the Senate debate, Republicans are invoking the specter of Al Qaeda. That's a vintage Bush/GOP talking point. Only problem is that while the U.S. has been totally distracted by the Iraq war that Bush and the GOP Senators continue to defend, Al Qaeda has been getting stronger. Might do those GOP Senators some good to read the front page article in today's NY Times about the Al Qaeda resurgence in Pakistan. It's another manifestation of Bush's failed policies and you'd think this would be a concern for Republicans:
President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged Tuesday that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan had failed, as the White House released a grim new intelligence assessment that has forced the administration to consider more aggressive measures inside Pakistan.
The intelligence report, the most formal assessment since the Sept. 11 attacks about the terrorist threat facing the United States, concludes that the United States is losing ground on a number of fronts in the fight against Al Qaeda, and describes the terrorist organization as having significantly strengthened over the past two years.
The GOP Senators aren't challenging Bush on his failure to vanquish Al Qaeda. No, they're too busy helping Bush stay the course in Iraq, which, in turn, continues to strengthen Al Qaeda. But, hey, they still have the Al Qaeda talking point.
Sound familiar? So is Bush canceling his vacation in August, or is he taking the month off along with the Iraqi parliament, just like he did before Osama attacked us the first time (after he'd received the same kind of intell. report)? Even more disturbing, AP reports that "The terrorist network Al-Qaida will likely leverage its contacts and capabilities in Iraq to mount an attack on U.S. soil, according to a new National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the American homeland." Al-Qaeda is planning on using what it learned in Iraq against us at home. George Bush's little adventure in Iraq quite literally trained Al-Qaeda to better kill us here at home. That should be the message every single Democrat talks about on the Senate floor in the next 24 hours during the overnight Iraq debate. The world is no longer a safer place, a better place, without Saddam Hussein. Not only aren't the Iraqi people safer, we're not safer.
Smart move. Bush and the Republicans need to be hit repeatedly on this point. They let Osama slip away. They chose to invade Iraq, where Al Qaeda never was, rather than go after Al Qaeda itself. And now Al Qaeda is stronger. Of course it is, we've ignored them for 6 years - well, other than training them in Iraq.
