capt. Bringdown Isles

[matthew]

The Surge: a special report by Patrick Cockburn
It was supposed to mark a decisive new phase in America's military campaign, but six months after George Bush sent in 20,000 extra troops, Iraq is more chaotic and dangerous than ever. In a special despatch, Patrick Cockburn reports on the bloody failure of 'the surge'
Published: 07 August 2007

The war in Iraq passed a significant but little remarked anniversary this summer. The conflict that President George Bush announced was in effect over on 1 May 2003 has now gone on longer than the First World War. Like that great conflict almost a century ago, the Iraqi war has been marked by repeated claims that progress is being made and that a final breakthrough is in the offing.

In 1917, the French commander General Robert Nivelle proudly announced that " we have the formula for victory" before launching the French armies on a catastrophic offensive in which they were massacred. Units ordered to the front brayed like donkeys to show they saw themselves as being like animals led to the slaughter. Soon, the soldiers broke into open mutiny.

On 10 January this year, President Bush announced that he too now believed he had the formula for victory. In an address to the American nation, he announced a new strategy for Iraq that became known as "the surge" . He said he was sending a further 20,000 US troops to Iraq. With the same misguided enthusiasm as General Nivelle had expressed in his plan, President Bush explained why "our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed" and why the new American formula would succeed: in the past, US and Iraqi troops had cleared areas, but when they moved on guerrillas returned. In future, said Bush, American and allied troops would stay put.

As if the US was not facing enough enemies in Iraq, Bush pointed to Iran and Syria as the hidden hand sustaining the insurgency. "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq," he said. "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops."

He added in his State of the Union address on 23 January that "Shia extremists are just as hostile to America [as al-Qa'ida], and are also determined to dominate the Middle East". The implication was that US troops were going to move into areas such as Sadr City, home to two million Shia Iraqis, in pursuit of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Six months after the surge was actually launched, in mid- February, it has failed as dismally as so many First World War offensives. The US Defense Department says that, this June, the average number of attacks on US and Iraqi forces, civilian forces and infrastructure peaked at 177.8 per day, higher than in any month since the end of May 2003. The US has failed to gain control of Baghdad. The harvest of bodies picked up every morning first fell and then rose again. This may be because the Mehdi Army militia, who provided most of the Shia death squads, was stood down by Sadr. Nobody in Baghdad has much doubt that they could be back in business any time they want. Whatever Bush might say, the US military commanders in Iraq clearly did not want to take on the Mehdi Army and the Shia community when they were barely holding their own against the Sunni.

The surge is now joining a host of discredited formulae for success and fake turning-points that the US (with the UK tripping along behind) has promoted in Iraq over the past 52 months. In December 2003, there was the capture of Saddam Hussein. Six months later, in June 2004, there was the return of sovereignty to Iraq. "Let freedom reign," said Bush in a highly publicised response. And yet the present Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, claims he cannot move a company of soldiers without American permission.

In 2005, there were two elections that were both won handsomely by Shia and Kurdish parties. "Despite endess threats from the killers in their midst," exulted Bush, "nearly 12 million Iraqi citizens came out to vote in a show of hope and solidarity that we should never forget."

In fact, he himself forgot this almost immediately. A year later, the US forced out the first democratically elected Shia prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, with the then US Ambassador in Baghdad, Zilmay Khalilzad, saying that Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, and doesn't accept that Jaafari should form the next government".

Fresh US initiatives in Iraq seemed to succeed each other about every six months. Just as it was becoming evident in the US that the surge was not going anywhere very fast, there came good news from Anbar province in western Iraq. The Sunni tribes were rising against al-Qa'ida, which had overplayed its hand by setting up an umbrella organisation for insurgents called the Islamic State of Iraq. In Sunni areas, it was killing rubbish collectors on the grounds that they worked for the government, shooting women in the face because they were not wearing veils, and trying to draft one young man from each family into its forces. Sunni tribal militiamen backed by the US fought al-Qa'ida in insurgent strongholds such as Ramadi, and attacks on American troops there fell away dramatically.

The US administration could portray this as a fresh turning-point. It had always pretended that the insurrection in Iraq was conducted largely by al-Qa'ida. In reality, Anthony H Cordesman, an Iraqi specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, points out that al-Qa'ida's attacks make up only 15 per cent of the total in Iraq, although they launch 80 to 90 per cent of the suicide bombings.

As with many a development in Iraq portrayed as a sign of progress by the White House, the recruitment of Sunni tribal militias by the US is not quite what it seems. In practice, it is a tactic fraught with dangers. In areas where they operate, police are finding more and more bodies, according to the Interior Ministry. Victims often appear to have been killed solely because they were Shia. The gunmen from the tribes are under American command, and this weakens the authority of the Iraqi government, army and police – institutions that the US is supposedly seeking to foster.

A grim scene showing Sunni tribal militiamen in action was recorded on a mobile phone and later appeared on Iraqi websites. It shows a small, terrified man in a brown robe being bundled out of a vehicle by a group of angry men with sub-machine guns who cuff and slap him as he cowers, trying to shield his face with his hands. One of his captors, who seems to be in command, asks him fiercely if he has killed somebody called "Khalid" . After a few moments he is dragged off by two gunmen to a patch of waste ground 30 yards away and executed with a burst of machine-gun fire to the chest.

It is a measure of the desperation of the White House to show that the surge is having some success that it is now looking to these Sunni fighters for succour. Often they are former members of anti-American resistance groups such as the 1920 Revolution Brigade and the Army of Islam – Bush has spent four years denouncing these groups as murderous enemies of the Iraqi people. To many Iraqi Shia and Kurds, who make up 80 per cent of all Iraqis, the US appears to be building up its own Sunni militia. So, far from preventing civil war (a main justification for continued occupation), the US is arming sectarian killers engaged in a murder campaign that is tearing Iraq apart.

The White House says it is too early to know if the surge is succeeding, and that it will wait for a security report due next month from General David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq, and the US Ambassador to the country, Ryan Crocker. But the new strategy was never going to turn the tide in Iraq. Its main advantage for Bush is that it puts off the moment when failure has to be admitted, a potentially disastrous confession for Republicans standing for election next year. If an American withdrawal can be postponed until after the poll, then the neo-cons can blame the Democrats for a stab in the back, pulling out the troops at the very moment when victory was almost in their grasp.

I was in Baghdad in January, when Bush made his State of the Union speech outlining his plans for the surge. Iraqis were pessimistic from the beginning about its chances of success. A friend called Ismail remarked gloomily: "An extra 16,000 [sic] US troops are not going to be enough." A Sunni, he had recently fled his house in the west of the capital because he was frightened of being arrested and tortured by the paramilitary police commandos – like most Sunni, he regarded them as uniformed Shia death squads.

Baghdad was paralysed by fear. Drivers were terrified of being stopped at impromptu checkpoints where they might be dragged out of their cars and killed for belonging to the wrong religion. Conversation was dominated by accounts of narrow escapes. Most people had at least one fake ID card so they could claim, depending on circumstance, to be either Sunni or Shia. This might not be enough; some Shia checkpoints had a list of theological questions drawn up by a religious scholar that they would use to interrogate people.

It was extraordinary how little control the US forces and the Iraqi army exercised over the very centre of the capital. There was black smoke rising from Haifa Street, a two-mile-long Sunni corridor just north of the Green Zone, which US forces had repeatedly invaded but failed to secure. When a helicopter belonging to the security company Blackwater was shot down or crash-landed in the al-Fadhil district in the centre of Baghdad, the survivors were executed by insurgents before US forces could get to them.

[matthew]

Part 2:

The Sectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni began in August 2003 when al-Qa'ida suicide bombers started targeting Shia civilians. It escalated over the next two years, but it was the bomb that destroyed the Shia shrine at Samarra on 22 February 2006 that unleashed a Shia pogrom in Baghdad in which 1,300 Sunni were killed in days.

A struggle for the capital was waged between the two sects for the rest of the year, and by January 2007 the Shia had largely won it. My surviving Sunni friends were terrified that the Mehdi Army, often used as a catch-all phrase to describe Shia militiamen of all descriptions, would launch a final "battle of Baghdad" to wipe out the remaining Sunni enclaves.

A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents. Outside Kurdistan, it has no dependable allies. Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers, and reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high-quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US, which were passed on or sold to insurgents.

US commanders are often cheery believers in their own propaganda, even as the ground is giving way beneath their feet. In Baquba, a provincial capital north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders praised their own achievements at a press conference held over a video link. Chiding media critics for their pessimism, the generals claimed: "The situation in Baquba is reassuring and is under control but there are some rumours circulated by bad people." Within hours Sunni insurgents, possibly irked by these self-congratulatory words, stormed Baquba, kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.

The surge got under way in February, and from the beginning the sceptics seemed to be in the right. Its most positive impact was that Muqtada al-Sadr decided not to risk an all-out military confrontation between his Mehdi Army and the US army. He sent many of his senior lieutenants out of Baghdad, stood down his men and disappeared, either to Iran, as the US claimed, or to the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf, according to his followers.

The Sunni bore the brunt of the surge in Baghdad. Districts like al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad were sealed off. But this probably achieved less than was intended, because Adhamiyah is a commercial district in which half the people who work there live elsewhere. Joint security stations were set up in every neighbourhood manned by US and Iraqi forces, but these posts seem ineffectual and tie down troops.

There was intense pressure on the US military and the civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge was visibly succeeding. US embassy staff complained that when the pro-war Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving, they were forced to doff their helmets and body armour when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator's assertions. When Vice-President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone, the sirens giving warning of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were kept silent during an attack, to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America.

By the end of May, I found it a little easier to drive through Baghdad, but the danger was still extreme. I sat in the back of the car with my jacket hanging inside the window so it was difficult for other drivers to see me. We were pulled over by an army checkpoint. A soldier leaned in and asked who I was. We were lucky. He looked surprised when told I was a foreign journalist, and said softly: "Keep well hidden."

Back in my hotel, I phoned an Iraqi friend in the Green Zone who was close to the government. "Be very careful," he warned. "Above all, do not trust the army and police." There was an example of what he meant a few days later when a convoy of 19 vehicles carrying 40 uniformed policemen arrived in the forecourt of the Finance Ministry. They entered the building and calmly abducted five British security men, who have not been seen since. The kidnappers may be linked to a unit of the Mehdi Army.

The surge has changed very little in Baghdad. It was always a collection of tactics rather than a strategy. All the main players – Sunni insurgents, Shia militiamen, Iraqi government, Kurds, Iran and Syria – are still in game.

One real benchmark of progress – or lack of it – is the number of Iraqis who have fled for their lives. This figure is still going up. Over one million Iraqis have become Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) since the Samarra bombing, according to the Red Crescent. A further 2.2 million people have fled the country. This exodus is bigger than anything ever seen in the Middle East, exceeding in size even the flight or expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. A true sign of progress in Iraq will be when the number of refugees, inside and outside the country, starts to go down.

****

The surge was never going to bring Iraq nearer to peace. It always made sense in terms of American, but not Iraqi, politics. It has become a cliché for US politicians to say that there is a "Washington clock' and a " Baghdad clock", which do not operate at the same speed. This has the patronising implication that Iraqis are slothful in moving to fix problems within their country, while the Americans are all get-up-and-go. But the reality is that it is not the clocks, but the agendas, that are different. The Americans and the Iraqis want contrary things.

The US dilemma in Iraq goes back to the Gulf War. It wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 but not at the price of the Shia replacing him; something the Shia were bound to do in fair elections, because they comprise 60 per cent of the population. Worse, the Shia coming to power would have close relations with Iran, America's arch-enemy in the Middle East.

This was the main reason the US did not press on to Baghdad after defeating Saddam's armies in Kuwait in 1991. It then allowed him savagely to crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions that briefly captured 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces.

Ever since 2003, the US has wrestled with this same problem. Unwittingly, the most conservative of American administrations had committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing the minority Sunni Baathist regime.

The Bush family has always been close to the Saudi monarchy, but George W Bush dismantled a cornerstone of the Sunni Arab security order. This is why the US and Britain opted for a thoroughgoing occupation of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They put off elections as long as they could. When elections were held in 2005 and voters overwhelmingly chose a Shia-Kurdish government, Washington tried to keep it under tight control.

"The US and Britain have a policy of trying to fill the vacuum left by the Baath disappearing, but it is unsuccessful," says Ahmed Chalabi, out of office but still one of the most astute political minds in Iraq. " Now the Americans and British want to disengage, but if they do so the worst fears of their Arab allies will come to pass: Shia control and strong Iranian influence in Iraq."

The hidden history of the past four years is that the US wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents but does not want the Shia-Kurdish government to win a total victory. It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other.

The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget, but by the CIA. Iraqi independence is far more circumscribed than the outside world realises. The US is trying to limit the extent of the Shia-Kurdish victory, but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the struggle for Iraq, Washington is ensuring that this bloodiest of wars goes on, with no end in sight.

The real death toll

More lies have been told about casualties in Iraq and the general level of violence there than at almost any time since the First World War. In that conflict, a British minister remarked sourly that he suspected the military authorities of keeping three sets of casualty figures: "One to deceive the Cabinet, a second to deceive the people and a third to achieve themselves."

The American attitude to Iraqi civilian casualties is along much the same lines. The Baker-Hamilton report drawn up by senior non-partisan Democrats and Republicans last year examined one day in July 2006, when the US military had reported 93 attacks on US and Iraqi forces. Investigation by US intelligence agencies revealed that the real figure was about 1,100.

The Iraqi government has sought to conceal civilian casualty figures by banning journalists from the scenes of bombings, and banned hospitals and the Health Ministry from giving information. In July, AP reported, 2,024 Iraqis died violently, a 23 per cent rise on June, which was the last month for which the government gave a figure.

This is almost certainly an underestimate. In a single bombing in the district of Karada in Baghdad on 26 July, Iraqi television and Western media cited the police as saying that there were 25 dead and 100 wounded. A week later, a list of the names of 92 dead and 127 wounded, compiled by municipal workers, was pinned up on shuttered shopfronts in the area.

The US military began the war by saying that it was not keeping count of Iraqi civilians killed by its troops. It often describes bodies found after a US raid as belonging to insurgents when the local Iraqi police say they are civilians killed by the immense firepower deployed by the American forces. Almost the only time a real investigation of such killings is carried out is when the local staff of Western media outlets are among the dead.

[matthew]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/IWODMla3IWk" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/IWODMla3IWk</a>

[Tripp]

Blackwater Air Force??

[matthew]

From The Sunday Times
September 2, 2007
Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran
Sarah Baxter, Washington

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

One Washington source said the “temperature was rising” inside the administration. Bush was “sending a message to a number of audiences”, he said &#65533; to the Iranians and to members of the United Nations security council who are trying to weaken a tough third resolution on sanctions against Iran for flouting a UN ban on uranium enrichment.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week reported “significant” cooperation with Iran over its nuclear programme and said that uranium enrichment had slowed. Tehran has promised to answer most questions from the agency by November, but Washington fears it is stalling to prevent further sanctions. Iran continues to maintain it is merely developing civilian nuclear power.

Bush is committed for now to the diplomatic route but thinks Iran is moving towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. According to one well placed source, Washington believes it would be prudent to use rapid, overwhelming force, should military action become necessary.

Israel, which has warned it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, has made its own preparations for airstrikes and is said to be ready to attack if the Americans back down.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which uncovered the existence of Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, said the IAEA was being strung along. “A number of nuclear sites have not even been visited by the IAEA,” he said. “They’re giving a clean bill of health to a regime that is known to have practised deception.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, irritated the Bush administration last week by vowing to fill a “power vacuum” in Iraq. But Washington believes Iran is already fighting a proxy war with the Americans in Iraq.

The Institute for the Study of War last week released a report by Kimberly Kagan that explicitly uses the term “proxy war” and claims that with the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda in Iraq “increasingly under control”, Iranian intervention is the “next major problem the coalition must tackle”.

Bush noted that the number of attacks on US bases and troops by Iranian-supplied munitions had increased in recent months &#65533; “despite pledges by Iran to help stabilise the security situation in Iraq”.

It explains, in part, his lack of faith in diplomacy with the Iranians. But Debat believes the Pentagon’s plans for military action involve the use of so much force that they are unlikely to be used and would seriously stretch resources in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[matthew]

Let me add:

Dr. Kimberly Kagan is the wife of Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute - Frederick is a principle architect of the infamous "Surge". Frederick is the brother of Robert Kagan, and son of Donald Kagan. Both Donald and Robert are leading members of the Project for the New American Century.

[matthew]

(only a year old, but I just found this piece and it still timely as nothing has changed and this was not widely reported. Gwynne Dyer has almost replaced Howard Zinn as my hero. Dyer is definitely my favourite historian-journalist. He is a Newfie as well, but living in the UK.)

Al-Qaeda and Iraq: Suspicions Confirmed
20 November 2006
By Gwynne Dyer

Saying "I told you so" usually just annoys people, so I try to avoid it.  The milk has been spilled, and it won't help to rub their noses in it (to mix a metaphor).  But in this case I just have to say:  I told
you so.

Last week Omar Nasiri, a Moroccan who spent seven years infiltrating al-Qaeda as a double agent working for the French and British
intelligence services, told the BBC's Newsnight programme that al-Qaeda deliberately fed false information to the US government in order to encourage it to invade Iraq.  According to Nasiri (a pseudonym),  Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and was captured in the US invasion of that country five years ago, told his US interrogators that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the terrorist organisation to plan attacks with chemical and biological weapons.

That was exactly what poor old Colin Powell, US Secretary of State
at the time, told the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003, when he was trying to get the UN to back the invasion of Iraq. He said that "a senior terrorist operative" who "was responsible for one of al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan" had told US interrogators that Saddam Hussein had offered to train al-Qaeda in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

With the wisdom of hindsight it is obvious that either the US was
lying, or else that the "senior terrorist operative" had lied to the US,
since Saddam didn't have any chemical and biological weapons.  Practically everybody else in the region has them -- Iran, Syria, Israel, Egypt --  and the US knew that Saddam had once had them too because it helped him to get them (during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s). What nobody knew at that time was that Saddam really had destroyed them all as ordered after the Gulf War of 1990-91.

So American forces scooped up  Ibn Sheikh al-Libi in Afghanistan in
November, 2001, and sent him off to Egypt to be tortured (because the US itself doesn't do torture) in the presence of American interrogators.  And Libi told his lie about Saddam Hussein's complicity with al-Qaeda, which Colin Powell seized on as justification for the US attack on Iraq.

How do we know that  Libi lied under torture?  Well, we know that
part of al-Qaeda training focussed on withstanding interrogation and giving false information.  We know from Colin Powell that some senior al-Qaeda operative did give information that later turned out to be deliberately misleading.  And now we know, from Omar Nasiri's testimony, that Libi had declared that Iraq was al-Qaeda's main target well before he was captured.

Nasiri told Newsnight that months before the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Aghanistan, he had been in a mosque where the question was asked "Where is the best country to fight the jihad?" and Libi had replied that Iraq was the chosen country because it was the "weakest."  By "weakest," he presumably meant that its economy was crumbling under UN sanctions, its once-high living standard was falling fast, and its ruler, Saddam Hussein, was both incompetent and deeply unpopular.  So Iraq was the right place to start the jihad.

For the extremists of al-Qaeda, the "jihad" had to be waged first and foremost against the existing governments of Muslim countries, to
replace them with regimes made up of people like themselves who truly knew and obeyed the will of God. Al-Qaeda, a largely Arab organisation operating from exile in Afghanistan, was looking for a first foothold back home in the Arab world, and Libi was saying that the leadership had chosen Iraq as the best place to start. So when he was faced with Egyptian torturers and American interrogators a few months later, the obvious thing would be to tell them lies that would persuade the US to invade Iraq.

I'm not saying that that's why the US invaded Iraq.  The invasion
was already being advocated and planned by the neo-conservatives who surrounded George W. Bush even before he won the presidency, for ideological and geo-strategic reasons that had nothing to do with
terrorism.

Why Bush himself went along with it is an enduring mystery, and Maureen Dowd's hypothesis that it's really driven by Oedipal conflict ("Dad didn't take Baghdad, but I will") is as good as any. But the invasion would have happened without Libi's lies. It would even have happened without 9/11, if the neo-cons had got their way.

The point is that al-Qaeda wanted to attack Saddam itself, but was happy to have the US invade Iraq and overthrow him instead because it knew that in the long run it would benefit from the ensuing war of resistance against foreign occupation.  I have been saying this all along, because I know a little about how Salafists think, and quite a lot about how terrorist strategies work.  However, Nasiri's revelations are the first circumstantial evidence that al-Qaeda leaders actively tried to encourage the US invasion.

Every day that US troops have been in Iraq since March, 2003 has
been a day when they served the purposes of al-Qaeda.  Every day that they remain, they will continue to serve its purposes.

[matthew]

Excerpt from the BBC documentary, "The Power of Nightmares", titled <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/c3defm8SQ9o" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/c3defm8SQ9o</a>

[matthew]

The Government Accidentally Reminds You: We Still Live In A Dangerous World

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets
Firm Says Administration's Handling of Video Ruined Its Spying Efforts

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; Page A01

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.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

SITE -- an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities -- was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.

"We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.

Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.

She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Administration and intelligence officials would not comment on whether they had obtained the video separately. Katz said Fielding and Bagnal made it clear to her that the White House did not possess a copy at the time she offered hers.

Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations."

Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. "It is you who deserves the thanks," he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director's office.

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.

A small number of private intelligence companies compete with SITE in scouring terrorists' networks for information and messages, and some have questioned the company's motives and methods, including the claim that its access to al-Qaeda's network was unique. One competitor, Ben Venzke, founder of IntelCenter, said he questions SITE's decision -- as described by Katz -- to offer the video to White House policymakers rather than quietly share it with intelligence analysts.

"It is not just about getting the video first," Venzke said. "It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intelligence gets to where it needs to go in the intelligence community and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations."

[matthew]

'Cause this is what I do when I am bored. Actually, I have been staying away from the politics of late, but I had to respond to these Bush War supporters I witnessed, once again, minimizing the death toll of the Invasion of Iraq. Shameless repost? Yeah, pretty much, 'cause I sincerely doubt that anyone will be back to contest my post and it will likely fall off the board and be purged in a deletion by the administrators...So, I save it here..?

The number of Iraqi's killed isn't even remotely close to that number, even the left-wing Iraq body count puts the number between 75,000 and 82,000. Also the only people deliberately killing Iraqi's are insurgents and terrorists.- Bush-supporting shithead

While the occupation forces are only directly responsible for a portion of the total deaths (though there is nothing to ever absolve the invading governments of their hand in all deaths that followed), the number of deaths attributable to the Invasion are considerably higher than is generally accepted by the media or most people.

I would caution against selecting a single number as the definitive high simply because you believe it to be biased ("left-wing"). Last year The Lancet medical journal quite controversially put the total casualties (not all of them violent) at over half a million.

October 2006: the Lancet, one of the most distinguished peer-reviewed medical journals in the world  (http://www.thelancet.com/), working with researchers from the Bloomberg School of Medical Health at Johns Hopkins University (http://www.jhsph.edu/), funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies (http://web.mit.edu/CIS/), claimed that more than 655,000 Iraqis had died in "excess" since the Invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Their study gave a range between 426,369 and 793,663. The study was reviewed by at least four independent experts and was found to have excellent methodology (Incidentally, it is the exact same methodology from which is derived most death tolls.  The examples are endless and include the official number of dead under Hussein's rule, Afghanistan, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, etc. I have yet to witness any Bush supporters critical of those numbers. In fact, they often cite the numbers which support the case against Saddam Hussein.) and it was claimed that there was a ninety-five percent chance that the numbers fell within this range. While the numbers were "in excess" of the death toll of Hussein's final years in power, thirty-one percent of the estimate were found to be violent deaths caused by the Coalition Forces.

President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair attempted to cast doubt on the number and were somewhat successful simply because no one wanted to believe the toll could be so high. No one seems to mind that neither of them ever bothered to substantiate their claims or reveal their own numbers (body counts are only given to the public when they politically expedient, such as when one has to put a shine to a new PR stunt such as the Surge. When the US wishes to paint a picture of progress in Iraq, charts and figures pour out of General Petraeus and others. Any other time of the year the Pentagon claims "We don't do body counts"). There were no statements to support why the numbers were so easily dismissed or why Bush claimed it was not "a credible report". But then Bush never bothered to back his December 12, 2005 claim that "I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," either. Nor could anyone explain why, if Bush was even remotely close to being correct (which he was not), the expert medical journal would have mistakenly overestimated the number at twenty-two times greater than that only a year later. It is certainly complicated and there has been much attention and criticism paid to the study, but nothing suggests any numbers as low as the absolutely preposterous claim from Bush, or even the estimates of Iraq Body Count (IBC). Unlike IBC,, which is a website that popped up during the Invasion, Lancet, an 183 year old medical journal, is actually looked to for scientific and statistical data beyond the specific conflict. An error of this scale, or as of yet unexplained political hack job, would have risked forever discrediting the journal. The IBC database is limited to only those deaths which are reported and corroborated by two English-language media articles which necessarily define the deaths as "civilian" - it is a low estimate at very best. Most Iraqi deaths are not reported in the media, let alone Western media, and when they are there is little to distinguish between civilians and insurgents or terrorists. Iraq's own government acknowledged between 100,000-150,000 violent killings from March 2003 to November 2006.

Iraq Body Count and Bush's claims can be put into a realistic context with a simple comparison. Bush claimed that there had been 30,000 +/- violent deaths in Iraq between 2003 and the end of 2005. This would mean that this invasion, and the genocidal sectarian civil war which followed involved fewer killings than day to day life in the United States during the same time period. Compare Bush's claim to the 49,416 murders in the U.S. from 2003-2005. IBC's numbers for 2003-2006 fell between 69,000 and 76,000. During the same time ~66,450 people were murdered in the United States.

I am not defending any specific study, but it is quite clear that several hundred thousand people have died in Iraq since the Invasion. As you mention, IBC is now claiming "75,564 – 82,331" as the low and high estimates for violent deaths between March 2003 and October 2007. If we add the 17,000 murders (there seems to be another mild upward trend) that would likely have occurred in the U.S. by year's end to the 2006 toll, you would still have United States almost tied to Iraq with 83,450 violent deaths since 2003.  Though the U.S. is an exceedingly violent nation and Iraq only has one tenth its population, Iraq remains an actual war zone, which at times suffers more than a hundred violent deaths a day for weeks on end. The Iraq war zone simply "outperforms" the U.S. which averages out to forty-six a day.

The number broke 100,000 some time ago. People accepted the government's suggestion that the higher numbers could be dismissed entirely not because there was any evidence they should, but because they wanted to.

[Just Some Girl]

Extraordinary Rendition.

Really, really not good. (Or particularly surprising.)

[matthew]

Thought y'all might dig this post from this moron on this political forum I sometimes post on (though with less frequency with every passing month). This gal works on Giuliani's campaign in NJ and is a former substitute teacher (though she cannot spell "desperately"):


"I'm Worried...
Although I'm a Rudy gal and would vote for him in a NY minute if he gets the nomination, I think he has a lot of flaws, as do the rest of the candidates (on both sides). Honestly, I think that each candidate on both sides has something to offer and are all impressive; however, I feel more comfortable with a Republican President, even though I'm socially liberal, since we are still at war, and face many international issues and crises.

However, when I say we are at a crisis point, I truly think we are: A) the war, B) the treat of terrorism, C)border control, D) education, etc., etc. And when America has been in crisis points before, we seemed to always have leaders that transcended what was ever expected of them - e.g., Lincoln, FDR and Reagan. But I'm not so sure any of the candidates will prove to be that incredible leader that we so desparately need."

This woman is the epitome of vacuousness and she never breaks from her tireless efforts to delight the world with her insipid observations of the world. Most of them are prompted by alarmist Fox News Klaxon-Styled Reports (not a cheap insult, but the truth - she belongs to the Fox flock). She reminds me of Rev. Lovejoy's wife shrieking, "Won't someone please think of the children!" She is gullible and ignorant and jumps when told. I had to explain to her that O'Reilly was lying and that Nas had no gun conviction, that U.S. airports were not installing foot baths in washrooms for Muslim travelers (a single cab company was installing facilities in their employee room in a single airport and it was paid for by the taxi drivers and had nothing to do with the airport or federal or state funds), etc. I find her to be a great example of common yet abject stupidity.

I am a big fan of empty dogmatic praise of former leaders: "Lincoln, FDR and Reagan". Yeah, I totally remember Lincoln transcending expectations. 

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

Jamie Leigh Jones was a 20-year-old woman working in Iraq for a subsidiary of Halliburton when she was drugged and brutally gang-raped by several co-workers.

The next day, Halliburton told her that if she left Iraq to get medical treatment, she could lose her job.1

Jamie's story gets even more horrific: For the last two years, she's been asking the US government to hold the perpetrators accountable. But the men who raped her may never be brought to justice because Halliburton and other contractors in Iraq aren't subject to US or Iraqi laws. They can't be tried for a crime in any court.2

This is one of the most disturbing stories we have come across in a while. We're calling on Congress to investigate Jamie's case, hold those involved accountable, and bring US contractors under the jurisdiction of US law so this can't happen again. If hundreds of thousands of us speak out against this outrageous story, we can force Congress to take action.

Can you sign the petition? The text is in the blue box at the right. Clicking below will add your name.

http://pol.moveon.org/contractors_accountable/o.pl?id=11800-7577225-PCdXzC&t=3

After you sign, please forward this email to friends, family and colleagues—we all need to speak out together.

When you get an email from us, it doesn't usually include a graphic description of a brutal attack. But when we heard this story, we knew we had to do something about it.


Here's how Jamie described what happened after the attack:

I awoke the next morning in the barracks to find my naked body battered and bruised. I was still groggy from whatever had been put in my drink. I was bleeding... After getting to the clinic and having a rape kit performed...I was locked in a container with no food, no way to call my parents, and was placed under armed guard by Halliburton.3

Jamie's attackers aren't the only ones exploiting a legal loophole to get away with their violent crimes. Another female employee of Halliburton says she was raped by her co-workers in Iraq.4 Employees of Blackwater, another private contracting firm in Iraq, were accused of killing innocent Iraqi civilians, and that incident turned into an international scandal. Worst of all, they may never be punished.5

Private contractors in Iraq are making massive amounts of money, operating above the law and are accountable to no one. This has to stop.

Congress needs to act now to bring these contractors under the rule of law. If they don't, nothing will prevent a case like Jamie's from happening again. No man or woman working in Iraq should have to fear that they can be attacked without consequences.

Please sign on to the petition: "Congress must investigate the rape of Jamie Leigh Jones and others, hold those involved accountable, and bring US contractors under the jurisdiction of US law." Clicking below adds your name:

http://pol.moveon.org/contractors_accountable/o.pl?id=11800-7577225-PCdXzC&t=4

Thanks for all you do,

–Nita, Wes, Karin, Marika, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
  Friday, December 14th, 2007

Sources:


1. "Halliburton hit in rape lawsuit," New York Daily News, December 11, 2007
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3274&id=11800-7577225-PCdXzC&t=6

2. "Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR," ABC News, December 10, 2007
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=3977702

3. Jamie's Journal, The Jamie Leigh Foundation
http://www.jamiesfoundation.org/Jamie.htm

4. "Female ex-employees sue KBR, Halliburton—report," Reuters, June 29, 2007
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3275&id=11800-7577225-PCdXzC&t=7

5."Blackwater Probe Narrows Focus to Guards," Associated Press, December 8, 2007
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3276&id=11800-7577225-PCdXzC&t=9

PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

[Just Some Girl]

I'm sure some of you are already on this, but here's the latest from my AVAAZ peeps:

Last week, Kenya held a national election tainted with vote-tampering. It ended in a claim of victory for incumbent President Mwai Kibaki over the challenger Raila Odinga who had led the polls -- now Kenya's future hangs in the balance. Violence has broken out across the country, with roving gangs of machete-wielding youth terrorizing the population. Suddenly, this hopeful country could be sliding toward genocide.

We must not sit back and watch this nightmarish scenario unfold -- but we need to act fast. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has flown into Nairobi, joining the African Union in an effort to broker a power-sharing agreement and review the election results. But if talks are to succeed, foreign governments must avoid prematurely recognizing a fraudulently elected government and locking in their power. That's where we come in.

Please send a note to your foreign minister today, asking them to withhold recognition of any Kenyan government until agreement is brokered and the election results are independently reviewed – you can do so using our simple online tool at the link below (and when you're done, please forward this email to friends and family):

http://www.avaaz.org/en/kenya_free_and_fair/5.php

It's too early to tell how far the situation in Kenya could deteriorate -- and we just can't afford to wait and find out. Please send a note to your foreign minister today.

With hope,

Paul, Ricken, Ben, Galit, Milena, Pascal and the whole Avaaz team

Here are some links to more background -

The election commissioner admits he was pressured into declaring Kibaki's victory, and does not know who truly won:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200801030055.html

Kenya's attorney-general also just called for an independent review of the election results:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7169720.stm

Reuters on mediation efforts by Tutu and the African Union:
http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL02368842.html

[Just Some Girl]

gaaaah! The "send a message" links don't work (or are maybe too busy right now). Way to go, AVAAZ. How am I supposed to save Kenya this way?!! Hmmm?!!!!