Antiwar.com Blog

Chapter 7 meticulously chronicles the arrival and actions of the nineteen hijackers. Little interesting information is found in the chapter. However, one is surprised by the remarkable ease at which many of the men moved around and in and out of the United States. Also, beyond stopping each at the border, it seems little could have been done once the men were inside the U.S. Their lives consisted of time at the mosque, the gym and flight training, setting off few alarms at the FBI or CIA.

The government has attempted to adjust its law enforcement capabilities to these simple methods of assimilating and moving about the country [read: PATRIOT Act]. However, this chapter’s narrative suggests that new methods of hiding and concealing identities will adapt to anything the government implements. This scenario suggests more should be done on the policy front; i.e. altering those policies that anger individuals enough to lead them to commit suicide in response.

Chapter 8 is best summed up by its conclusion:

“We see little evidence that the progress of the plot was disturbed by any government action. The U.S. government was unable to capitalize on mistakes made by al Qaeda.Time ran out.” (page 294)

Entitled “The System Was Blinking Red,” the chapter details a plethora of missed opportunities. Simply, various government bureaucracies failed to connect the dots. This problem stemmed from a few issues. One was a problem of information sharing. The report describes a meeting between CIA and FBI who were separately investigating the attack on the USS Cole. Each attendee held information, that if put together, would have suggested al Qaeda was planning something in the US. However, due to technical issues between bureaucracies, the information was never shared:

“It is now clear that everyone involved was confused about the rules governing the sharing and use of information gathered in intelligence channels.”(page 288)

Upon investigation, each member of this meeting told the commission that if they had seen the others’ info, action would have been taken.

The government also struggled with the new and unseen threat of domestic terrorism:

The September 11 attacks fell into the void between the foreign and domestic threats. The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to U.S. interests there.The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. (page 290)

Despite the above setbacks, DCI Tenet still claimed that the “system was blinking red.” Here’s a quick overview of some of the warnings the administration received in 2001:

“In the spring of 2001, the level of reporting on terrorist threats and planned attacks increased dramatically to its highest level since the millennium alert.” (page 272)

“On May 17, based on the previous day’s report, the first item on the CSG’s agenda was ‘UBL: Operation Planned in U.S'”(page 273)

“One al Qaeda intelligence report warned that something ‘very, very, very, very’ big was about to happen, and most of Bin Ladin’s network was reportedly anticipating the attack.” (page 274)

“On June 30, the SEIB contained an article titled ‘Bin Ladin Threats Are Real.’ Yet Hadley told Tenet in July that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz questioned the reporting.”(page 276)

“To give a sense of his anxiety at the time, one senior official in the Counterterrorist Center told us that he and a colleague were considering resigning in order to go public with their concerns.” (page 276)

Unfortunately, no one in the government was “looking for foreign threats to domestic targets” and “time ran out.” (page 280)

OK, too much is happening, so I’m doing an Iraqi mayhem post.

Moqtada al Sadr’s militants have torched the headquarters of Iraq’s South Oil Company on Thursday and set the company’s warehouses and offices on fire.

Rebels mortared the American “embassy” in Baghdad, wounding two Americans and damaging the roof. Negroponte was elsewhere.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani is still in London. Since nothing important was happening in Iraq, he had eye surgery on Monday. Interestingly, all four of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah’s have business outside of Iraq.

Sources in Najaf state that all four clerics of the Maraji are out of Iraq.

Ayat Najafi has left for Iran.
Ayat Hakim has left for Germany.
Ayat Sistani is in London.
Ayat Fayadh has left Najef, his whereabouts and destination are uclear. Fayadh was born in Pakistan.

Thanks grrpy and Angry Arab.

UPDATE: The US military is using AC-130 gunships on the Old City of Najaf.

UPDATE: US warplanes bomb Fallujah. Again.

Iraqi Olympic soccer player, Ahmed Manajid, angered by George Bush using the team in a (fatuous – read the article to see how stupid it is) campaign commercial said:

“How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?” Manajid told me. “He has committed so many crimes.”

The Bush campaign was contacted about the Iraqi soccer player’s statements, but has yet to respond.

To a man, members of the Iraqi Olympic delegation say they are glad that former Olympic committee head Uday Hussein, who was responsible for the serial torture of Iraqi athletes and was killed four months after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, is no longer in power.

But they also find it offensive that Bush is using their team for his own gain when they do not support his administration’s actions in Iraq. “My problems are not with the American people,” says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. “They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?”

At a speech in Beaverton, Ore., last Friday, Bush attached himself to the Iraqi soccer team after its opening-game upset of Portugal. “The image of the Iraqi soccer team playing in this Olympics, it’s fantastic, isn’t it?” Bush said. “It wouldn’t have been free if the United States had not acted.”

Sadir, Wednesday’s goal-scorer, used to be the star player for the professional soccer team in Najaf. In the city in which 20,000 fans used to fill the stadium and chant Sadir’s name, U.S. and Iraqi forces have battled loyalists to rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr for the past two weeks. Najaf lies in ruins.

“I want the violence and the war to go away from the city,” says Sadir, 21. “We don’t wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away.”

Manajid, 22, who nearly scored his own goal with a driven header on Wednesday, hails from the city of Fallujah. He says coalition forces killed Manajid’s cousin, Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was fighting as an insurgent, and several of his friends. In fact, Manajid says, if he were not playing soccer he would “for sure” be fighting as part of the resistance.

“I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?” Manajid says. “Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq.”

The truth hurts, doesn’t it, Shrubbie? Funny how people can hate you just because you kill their cousins and friends.

Blustery threats are issuing from the Puppets who claim “Iraqi forces” are going to storm the Imam Ali shrine “within hours” and teach the Mahdi Army and Moqtada al Sadr a lesson.

To prevent an imminent attack on his forces, who are holed up in the revered Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, al-Sadr must immediately disarm his Mahdi Army militia and hand over its weapons to the authorities, Minister of State Qassim Dawoud said.

The cleric must also sign a statement saying he will refrain from future violence and release all civilians and Iraqi security forces his militants have kidnapped. In addition, al-Sadr must hold a news conference to announce he is disbanding the Mahdi Army.

“The military action has become imminent,” Dawoud told reporters. “If these conditions are not met, then the military solution will prevail.”

After hearing Dawoud’s threat, Sheik Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for al-Sadr in Baghdad, called for talks to quickly “stop the bloodbaths in the holy city of Najaf.”

“What we want is for the parties to sit down and cooperate. To ask a side, or the Sadrist movement, to disarm, I think is not logical and not right. They should rather sit around a negotiating table and determine what’s right and wrong,” he told Al-Arabiya television.

In the chaos that is Najaf, it is difficult to separate truth from bluster and confusion, so lets look at a few of the claims making the rounds this morning.

I’m no military strategist, but inside the Imam Ali Shrine compound are at least 2,000 Iraqis who are acting as human shields, probably more. The 2,000 figure was reported last weekend as Shi`a and Sunni muslims from all over Iraq began arriving in Najaf after Friday sermons. Al Sadr’s forces are supposed to number about 2,000, or they were last I saw a count. Allegedly, American tanks have Sadr’s forces “trapped” in the shrine complex. If that were true, who did this?

A mortar attack on a police station in the Iraqi city of Najaf has killed seven people and wounded 21 others, police said.

Police told reporters three mortar bombs hit the station in quick succession, although they added it was not near the city’s holy sites where a radical Shiite Muslim cleric and his militia are engaged in a two-week battle with US forces.

It was unclear how many of the victims were police from the mortar attack.

Not near the holy sites. How “trapped” are Sadr’s men if they can mortar the police station and kill at least seven police?

Go here and look at this Imam Ali mosque complex. How many troops would it take to “storm” this enormous shrine which encloses at least 4,000 people happily waiting to die as martyrs? True, they are not heavily armed and armored, but they have AK47s, RPGs, the advantage of an urban battlefield which is also a holy site, damaging which will have to give attacking Muslim troops at least a little hesitation.

Who will die for Allawi and the occupiers as their Muslim Storm Troopers? Who are the “Iraqi troops” fighting alongside the Americans? Clearly, they are the only organized Iraqi militia still allied with the Americans – the Kurdish peshmerga. If the peshmerga attack the shrine of Ali for the Americans, it may well be a fatal blow for Arab-Kurd relations, already strained by the Kurdish participation in the siege of Fallujah. If the attack incites a violent Shia reaction, the Kurds may well end up paying the price for the folly of collaborating with the hated occupation. It is difficult to imagine how the Americans and Allawi’s thugs might be persuading the peshmerga to do their bidding, but if they succeed in using them for this attack all of the Kurdish eggs will be in the Occupation’s basket, and considering the tradition of American sellouts of the Kurds that is not a good place to store anything valuable or fragile.

Be that as it may and for whatever reasons, both sides appear to have created positions that make a violent conflict inevitable. In 1991, the last violent takeover over of the Imam Ali Shrine occurred when Saddam Hussein put down the last of the Shi`a revolt encouraged by George I by slaughtering thousands of Shi`a inside the mosque, even allegedly using poison gas. Will George II follow Saddam down this historic path?

Reagan-era hawk Edward Luttwak calls for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in today’s NYT. Sort of.

[F]ew Americans are prepared to simply abandon Iraq. For one, they are rightly concerned that to do so would be a mortal blow to America’s global credibility and encourage violent Islamists everywhere. An outright withdrawal would leave the interim government and its feeble forces of doubtful loyalty to face the attacks of vastly emboldened Baath regime loyalists, Sunni revanchists, local and foreign Islamist extremists and the ever-more numerous Shiite militias. The likely result would be the defection of the government’s army, police and national guard members, followed by a swift collapse and then civil war. Worse might follow in the Middle East – it usually does – even to the point of invasions by Iran, Turkey and possibly others, initiating new cycles of repression and violence.

Thus the likely consequences of an American abandonment are so bleak that few Americans are even willing to contemplate it. This is a mistake: it is precisely because unpredictable mayhem is so predictable that the United States might be able to disengage from Iraq at little cost, or even perhaps advantageously.

Luttwak goes on to explain why a U.S. threat to withdraw might force all quarrelsome parties – Shi’ite, Sunni, Arab, Kurd, Iranian, Turk, etc. – to root for the USA. And if they didn’t, Luttwak says, then we would have to leave. Are any of the president’s advisers thinking along these lines?

Whatever you think of Moqtada al Sadr, you have to admire the deft manueuvering that keeps everyone off-balance with the wrong foot forward. While practically all the news reports on this development claim some variation on the Mahdi Army surrenders/Sadr Agrees to Peace Plan theme, take a look at what the spokesman for Sadr actually said.

A spokesperson for rebel leader Moqtada Sadr expressed surprise on Wednesday at threats of an imminent attack on his militia by Iraqi forces, saying the Shiite cleric had agreed to demands made by peace mediators.

“We are surprised by the declaration and threat by the minister of defence … because we have given our full accord to the initiative presented by the delegation,” Ahmed Shibani said on Al-Jazeera television.

Defence minister Hazem al-Shaalan vowed that a “decisive” battle would be launched against Sadr militiamen, who he said must surrender within hours in the central holy city of Najaf, where heavy fighting raged earlier on Wednesday.

Shibani said: “The delegation came with three demands, including that the mehdi army hands (the security of) the old city to the suitable party…and that the Sadr movement participates in the political process.”

He added that the Sadr movement was ready to take part in the political process “if it is honest”.

“We discussed these points and 10 other points that had been discussed with (national security advisor) Muaffaq al-Rubaie, and our efforts were successful. The delegation went back satisfied,” he said.

But the government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was “blocking” any peaceful resolution of the crisis, he said.

“We are ready to meet the delegation anytime…we pledge to (organise) a meeting between Moqtada Sadr and the delegation” on the condition of “putting an end to the bombardment of the old city of Najaf and the end of the siege”, he said.

Isn’t that positively Bushista in it’s vagueness larded with conditions? It’s almost worthy of that old liar extraordinaire, Ariel Sharon.

The fierce fighting has threatened a peace initiative spearheaded by emissaries from Iraq’s key national conference, who travelled to the shrine late on Tuesday, only to be snubbed by Sadr who said “aggression by the Americans” had made it unsafe for him to appear.

Rajaa Habib al-Khuzai, a former member of Iraq’s former governing council, one of those who went to Najaf, said the head of the mission, Sheikh Hussein al-Sadr, would meet Allawi to ask for a ceasefire for a subsequent trip.

Khuzai also told Al-Jazeera: “All what Shibani said was true. The mediation did not fail. On the contrary, it was a success. The meeting was positive.”

She also denounced the threats by the defence minister of an imminent offensive, saying: “It is regrettable because there was an agreement this morning.”

So, now what? This looks like a clear win for Sadr and the Iraqis who opposed “Allawi’s” assault with his proxy American troops. The ball is in the Puppets’ court. Meanwhile, the American military is left in the ludicrous position of assaultus interruptus, again.