Author: Eric Garris

Our friends at Just Foreign Policy have an easy way to tell your representative in Congress that you don’t want Obama to escalate US intervention in Afghanistan. You could add that we should get out completely!

Do it today!

When I blogged and posted a copy of The Baghdad Mosquito yesterday I had no idea I was spreading classified material.

The Baghdad Mosquito is a daily newsletter produced under the auspices of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq. It is distributed via e-mail to an elite group of military officers and policy planners and is posted on the military’s classified Web server.

The March 5 edition contains a reprint of Scott Horton’s article from Antiwar.com, “Finding Ways to Stay in Iraq.” (It is reprinted without the copyright note and The Baghdad Mosquito was not given reprint permission). It was run to show that an Iraq newspaper, Al Nour, had reprinted it in full, to the surprise of the editors of The Mosquito. The Mosquito editors commented:

Summary: A US Political analyst believes that the policies of the Bush administration are being repeated in Iraq; however, the administration is trying to ‘beautify’ the policies in an attempt to fool the world. The analyst claims that Obama is ‘playing with slogans’.

[Mosquito Note: The rest of the article was taken from another website and translated into Arabic. The author at Al Nour removed the names (other than Scott Horton) from the original article. The rest of the content remained the same. The following is the text of the article written by Mr. Scott Horton that was published on Antiwar.com. It is unusual for Al Nour to publish this type of article. The article is written from a very left-wing liberal point of view. Al Nour is usually a non-biased newspaper that publishes news stories rather than extremely biased editorials.]

The staff at The Baghdad Mosquito have become aware of the fact that we obtained a copy of their publication. They have made the following “request”:

Please delete the copy of the product that you have, and I would appreciate if you would ask Mr. Horton to do the same. Additionally, please do not distribute the product further.

The email is signed: V/R, Baghdad Mosquito Staff.

Since this is only a request, and not an order from any governmental body, we have no intention of removing the post at this time (but you might want to grab a copy of the pdf, just in case…)

The Baghdad Mosquito has been published daily since late 2003. I was unable to find another copy anywhere on the web via a Google search, although copies are clearly distributed to non-military people like Daniel Pipes.

Scott Horton (of Antiwar Radio) got an unusual readership for his article, “Finding Ways to Stay in Iraq.”

Al Nour newspaper in Iraq translated and ran the article in full. This was a shock to the editors of The Baghdad Mosquito, which is published by the Multi-National Forces (occupation) in Iraq.

The March 5 issue headlines Scott’s article on the front page: “Scott Horton: New US President Plays With Slogans And Iraq Is Being Fooled.” The entire article is reprinted in The Mosquito, with the following introduction:

Summary: A US Political analyst believes that the policies of the Bush administration are being repeated in Iraq; however, the administration is trying to ‘beautify’ the policies in an attempt to fool the world. The analyst claims that Obama is ‘playing with slogans’.

[Mosquito Note: The rest of the article was taken from another website and translated into Arabic. The author at Al Nour removed the names (other than Scott Horton) from the original article. The rest of the content remained the same. The following is the text of the article written by Mr. Scott Horton that was published on Antiwar.com. It is unusual for Al Nour to publish this type of article. The article is written from a very left-wing liberal point of view. Al Nour is usually a non-biased newspaper that publishes news stories rather than extremely biased editorials.]

Ron Paul on the myth of Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.

Thanks to Lew Rockwell.

So says Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, on last night’s Daily Show.

“General Odierno says he would like to see 35,000 troops there (Iraq) in 2015. What that means is that we may be just halfway through this thing.”

A very sobering interview, especially for one on Jon Stewart’s show.

On PBS tonight, NOVA is presenting “The Spy Factory,” based on James Bamford’s excellent book, The Shadow Factory.

PBS says the NOVA program:

chronicles the NSA’s role in eavesdropping both before and after 9/11. Drawing on dozens of interviews with agency insiders and probing publicly available sources as well as transcripts of terrorist trials and an FBI chronology of the terrorists’ movements, NOVA assembles a detailed picture of events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

The program sheds light on the vital data known inside the NSA but only partly relayed to other agencies. The trove of information the NSA had access to in advance included Osama bin Laden’s now-disconnected direct satellite phone, which the NSA tapped starting in 1996. Exclusive footage shows the three-story house in Yemen that served as Al Qaeda’s communications and logistics headquarters. The NSA was listening in on phone communications to and from the house for years prior to the 9/11 attack.

Three times the size of the CIA and far more secret, the NSA is comprised of top linguists, mathematicians, and technologists trained to decipher all kinds of communications—epitomizing the hidden world of high-tech, 21st-century surveillance. To show how this eavesdropping operates, NOVA follows the trail of just one typical e-mail sent from Asia to the U.S. Streaming as pulses of light into a fiber-optic cable, it travels across the Pacific Ocean, coming ashore in California, and finally reaching an AT&T facility in San Francisco, where the cable is split and the data sent to a secret NSA monitoring room on the floor below. This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic.

Thus, since 9/11, the agency has turned its giant ear inward to monitor the communications of ordinary Americans, many of whom are on the government’s secret watch list, now more than half-a-million names long.

But how effective is this monumental monitoring effort in countering security threats? The NSA is faced with an enormous and ever-expanding archive of phone calls and e-mail messages. Many experts in data mining and analysis are skeptical about the value of collecting so much information without the ability to understand it, as it may lead to critical clues being lost in the static.

Among those interviewed on “The Spy Factory” are former NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts and officials, many speaking publicly for the first time. Among these is Mark Rossini, the senior FBI agent in the CIA’s Osama bin Laden tracking unit. For the first time, Rossini tells how intelligence agency turf wars prevented him from notifying his FBI superiors that Al Qaeda terrorists were heading for the U.S. with valid visas in early 2000.

Surprisingly, the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into the NSA’s role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and FBI. Traditionally, the NSA didn’t share its raw data with those other agencies, an institutionalized reluctance that played a critical role in the failure to stop the 9/11 plotters.

In what Bamford calls “one of the largest ironies in the history of American intelligence,” he notes that weeks before the attacks, the terrorists were staying in a hotel near NSA headquarters in Maryland, almost within sight of the office of then-NSA Director Michael Hayden. Hayden, who was later appointed director of the CIA by President Bush, was never held accountable for his agency’s failure, and after 9/11 he spearheaded the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping activities in the name of making the nation safe from terrorists.

Addressing the question, Are we any safer now than we were before?, Bamford says, “We should have been safe the way it was. NSA had all the information that it needed to stop the 9/11 hijackers. It had laws that allowed it to track the hijackers.” Bamford adds that those same laws also protected the privacy of ordinary Americans in ways that have since vanished.

The show will be repeated throughout the week on most PBS stations. Check your local listings. The show will also be available on the PBS website later this month.