Political wind

Political wind, Turkey, War on Terror

News from the Global War on Terror

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Al Qaeda in Iraq nabbed in large numbers:

April 30, 2007 — U.S. forces grabbed 72 suspected insurgents and seized nitric acid and other bomb-making materials yesterday in raids targeting the al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist group. The raids occurred in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, and in Salahuddin province, to the northwest, the U.S. military said.

The detainees included 36 people with alleged ties to al Qaeda in Iraq who were seized in Samarra, a Salahuddin city 60 miles north of Baghdad. In Karmah, an Anbar city 50 miles west of the capital, U.S. forces found 20 five-gallon drums of nitric acid and other bomb-making materials.

Huge rally against Islamist as single choice for Turkey’s presidential election:

Protests Sunday against an Islamist government in Turkey

Hundreds of thousands of secularist Turks took to the streets for the second time in two weeks yesterday after a dramatic intervention by the military in an attempt to stop Abdullah Gul becoming the first Turkish President with an Islamist past. Demonstrators in Istanbul carried blood-red national flags and posters of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of a secular Turkey. Banners read: “Sharia (Islamic law) shall not rise to the Presidential Palace.”

The protests came after the military gave warning that it would act to defend secularism – although the two events were not apparently coordinated. The developments, however, herald a week of high tension in which the Constitutional Court is due to rule on a challenge to Friday’s inconclusive first round of the presidential election.

The second round, in which Mr Gul is the only candidate, is scheduled for Wednesday – unless the court annuls the process beforehand.

7/7 ‘mastermind’ seized while entering Iraq from Iran now at Gitmo:

The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans. Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay.
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He had a close link with another arrested al-Qaeda figure and, the sources said, would have “a wealth of information”. He is thought to have been in contact with Osama bin Laden before his capture and might be able to provide information about his leader’s whereabouts.
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“Abd al-Hadi was trying to return to his native country, Iraq, to manage al-Qaeda’s affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against Western targets,” [Pentagon spokesman Brian] Whitman said. He added that he was a key al-Qaeda paramilitary leader in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, and between 2002 and 2004 led efforts to attack US forces in Afghanistan with terrorist units based in Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia arrests 172 al Qaeda in plot with 9/11 similarity:

Saudi Arabia arrests 172 al Qaeda

CNN’s Nic Robertson reported many of those arrested were Saudis who had recently return from fighting Americans in Iraq.

Annie Jacobsen asks a good question: Where were the suicide pilots trained? Editor’s note: All four of the 9/11 hijacker pilots received aviation training in the United States.

US aircrews show Taliban no mercy

Caught in the middle of the Helmand river, the fleeing Taliban were paddling their boat back to shore for dear life.

Smoke from the ambush they had just sprung on American special forces still hung in the air, but their attention was fixed on the two helicopter gunships that had appeared above them as their leader, the tallest man in the group, struggled to pull what appeared to be a burqa over his head.

As the boat reached the shore, Captain Larry Staley tilted the nose of the lead Apache gunship downwards into a dive. One of the men turned to face the helicopter and sank to his knees. Capt Staley’s gunner pressed the trigger and the man disappeared in a cloud of smoke and dust.

By the time the gunships had finished, 21 minutes later, military officials say 14 Taliban were confirmed dead, including one of their key commanders in Helmand.

The mission is typical of a new, aggressive, approach adopted by American forces in southern Afghanistan and particularly in Helmand, where British troops last year bore the brunt of some of the heaviest fighting since the fall of the Taliban in 2001… FULL REPORT AND VIDEO AT THE LONDON TELEGRAPH

9/11, Iraq, Political wind

Tenet withheld al Qaeda and Iraq intel from Presidents

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In was reported this morning that then CIA director George Tenet did not include Iraq in their threat-brief to the incoming Bush administration so Vice President elect Richard Cheney requested a briefling from outgoing Defense Secretary William Cohen. In addition, a high-ranking former official opined that, “Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president [Clinton] and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence.” That same official added, “whatever his book says, he was not much of a CIA chief. Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush — denigrating good intelligence to sate the former’s cowardly pacifism…” That report and those opinions are not from conservatives seeking to discredit George Tenet in advance of his book At the Center of the Storm being released tomorrow. This morning, the Washington Post reported:

White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, according to a new book by former CIA director George J. Tenet.

Although Tenet does not question the threat Saddam Hussein posed or the sincerity of administration beliefs, he recounts numerous efforts by aides to Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to insert “crap” into public justifications for the war. Tenet also describes an ongoing fear within the intelligence community of the administration’s willingness to “mischaracterize complex intelligence information.”

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat,” Tenet writes in “At the Center of the Storm,” to be released Monday by HarperCollins. The debate “was not about imminence but about acting before Saddam did.”
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In their threat briefings for the incoming Bush administration in late 2000, Tenet writes, CIA officials did not even mention Iraq. But Cheney, he says, asked for an Iraq briefing and requested that the outgoing Clinton administration’s defense secretary, William S. Cohen, provide information on Iraq for Bush.

Also this morning, Former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer added:

“…what troubles me most is Tenet’s handling of the opportunities that CIA officers gave the Clinton administration to capture or kill bin Laden between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time we had intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts, Tenet was briefed by senior CIA officers at Langley and by operatives in the field. He would nod and assure his anxious subordinates that he would stress to Clinton and his national security team that the chances of capturing bin Laden were solid and that the intelligence was not going to get better. Later, he would insist that he had kept up his end of the bargain, but that the NSC had decided not to strike.

“Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence. “We could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to corroborate Bin Ladin’s whereabouts,” Tenet now writes. That of course is untrue, but it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fallout if an attempt to get bin Laden failed…
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“Tenet now paints himself as a scapegoat for an administration in which there never was “a serious consideration of the implications of a U.S. invasion,” insisting that he warned Bush, Cheney and their Cabinet about the risks of occupying Iraq. Well, fine; the CIA repeatedly warned Tenet of the inevitable disaster an Iraq war would cause — spreading bin Ladenism, spurring a bloody Sunni-Shiite war and lethally destabilizing the region.
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“They’re all culpable, of course. But Tenet’s attempts to shift the blame won’t wash. At day’s end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he’s saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.
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“…Sadly but fittingly, “At the Center of the Storm” is likely to remind us that sometimes what lies at the center of a storm is a deafening silence.”

George Tenet admits he withheld intelligence about Iraq from the administration at least once. Several Clinton administration officials say Tenet’s failure to properly characterize CIA intelligence caused them to not strike bin Laden well in advance of 9/11. Michael Scheuer obviously believes George Tenet failed to report to the Clinton administration solid intelligence and lacked the moral courage to disagree with senior members of the Bush administration.

Michael Scheuer spared nearly no one (except himself) during his bashing of George Tenet yet I am left wondering most about Tenet’s book and this obvious swipe at Cheney, “Policymakers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts.” CIA Director George Tenet failed to provide President elect George W. Bush an initial, unfiltered set of facts and it appears likely that even then his opinion of one man precluded that from happening. So why should we believe what George Tenet says about Richard Cheney now?