Antiwar.com Blog

The loudest applause during Wesley Clark’s speech last night came at the end of this:

Under John Kerry we will attack and destroy the terrorist threats to America. He’ll join the pantheon of great wartime Democrats.

Great Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, who led us to victory in World War 1. Great Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who turned back the tide of fascism to win World War II. Great Democrats like John Kennedy, who stood firm and steered us safely through the Cuban Missile Crisis. And great Democrats like Bill Clinton, who confronted ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and with diplomacy — backed by force — brought peace to a shattered land.

Read the whole putrid thing.

Titled "Responses to Al Qaeda’s Initial Assaults," the fourth chapter of the 9/11 report follows the government’s slow appreciation of Osama bin Ladin’s threat to America. Overall, the chapter demonstrates the internal conflicts within various government agencies on how to respond to the growing threat of terrorism. 1996 saw the first concerted effort to focus on Bin Ladin with the formation of the CIA’s "Bin Ladin Unit." It was set up "to analyze intelligence on and plan operations against Bin Ladin." (page 109). Once Bin Ladin moved back to Afghanistan the Bin Ladin unit was able to use CIA contacts [tribals] in the regions to get fairly reliable information on his location. However, action could not follow until the US charged him with a crime:

"The eventual charge, conspiring to attack U.S. defense installations, was finally issued from the grand jury in June 1998—as a sealed indictment.The indictment was publicly disclosed in November of that year." (page 110)

The first plan to capture or kill Bin Ladin was ready by early 1998:

"Tenet apparently walked National Security Advisor Sandy Berger through the basic plan on February 13. One group of tribals would subdue the guards, enter Tarnak Farms [a Bin ladin hideout] stealthily, grab Bin Ladin, take him to a desert site outside Kandahar, and turn him over to a second group.This second group of tribals would take him to a desert landing zone already tested in the 1997 Kansi capture. From there, a CIA plane would take him to New York, an Arab capital, or wherever he was to be arraigned." (page 112)

Due to a concern for civilian casualties and a belief that the capture plan was too flawed, the CIA did not go ahead with the operation. This plan was the last before the embassy bombings of 1998. In response, President Clinton ordered a Tomahawk missile strike on a suspected Bin Ladin camp. Although the missiles hit their targets, Bin Ladin escaped the attack reportedly because he was tipped off by Pakistani military intelligence. As readers may recall, these attacks occurred during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, leading some pundits to claim that the action was meant to distract the American public. The commission claims that such sentiments affected the way America approached Bin Ladin in the following years:

"The failure of the strikes, the ‘wag the dog’ slur, the intense partisanship of the period, and the nature of the al Shifa [supposed chemical plant in Sudan] evidence likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against Bin Ladin. Berger told us that he did not feel any sense of constraint." (page 118).

Continue reading “Notes on Chapter 4 of the 9/11 Report”

John Kerry: “I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president.”

You defended this country from what? Those Vietnamese peasants who were pillaging Boston?

Paul McGeough turns in a tour de force of an article, tying together some previously confusing information about events in Al Anbar province, like the sudden escalation of violence in Ramadi last week and the kidnapping of the governor of Al Anbar province’s sons. McGeough clearly has extensive contacts to have assembled the wealth of sourced information included in this article as well as the scoop he wrote last week on Allawi personally shooting prisoners.

Juan Cole’s comment (I’m hoping Professor Cole reads this post and comments on the McGeough article, though his expertise centers in the Shi`a and this is a Sunni affair) on the kidnapping incident “The provincial governors have largely been chosen in a complicated process over which the Americans and British had a great deal of influence, and many guerrillas consider them puppets,” implies that the governor’s sons were kidnapped as punishment for collaboration. McGeough, however, indicates that it is also a tribal clash:

At the centre of it all are the Al-Kharbits, deemed by experts in tribal affairs from Amman to Washington to be one of the most important tribal clans in all of Iraq.

The old man is one of their sheiks. And two days ago there was payback for his expulsion – the three sons of the provincial governor, Abdul Karim Burghis al-Rawi, were kidnapped in a brazen daylight attack on his Ramadi home. The house was torched and nothing has been heard on the fate of the sons – aged 15 to 30.

Before the US invasion the Al-Kharbit sheiks regularly made secret trips to Amman to brief US intelligence agents on events in Iraq, they plotted their own coup against Saddam and they ferried CIA agents into Iraq. But what seemed to be a genuine love affair was reduced to hatred two days after the fall of Baghdad, when the US bombed the home of the clan’s then sheik of sheiks, Malik Al-Kharbit, killing him and 21 of his immediate relatives.

In the doomsday language of the tribes “Blood was spilled.”

The new paramount sheik is 47-year-old Mudher Al-Kharbit, a nephew of the bespectacled old man the tribe says has been exiled. Al-Kharbit’s bitterness is multiplied by what he says has been an American refusal to apologise for the 22 deaths.

Here’s one more nugget from McGeough’s article:

An observer said: “He [Al-Kharbit] feels that he is losing his grip on the tribe. He has to go back to them with one of two things. Either the US is listening to him – or it’s not, in which case the response in Al-Anbar will be: ‘Let’s give them hell.’

“And that’ll make Falluja look like a tickle. The absurdity of all this is that the Americans were talking about the Sunni Triangle before the war.

“Al Kharbit and his tribe were the only people who didn’t fire a shot at the Americans and they allowed US Special Forces into the country three months before the war started.”

There is an old Arab saying – “he killed him and then walked at his funeral”. In the absence of a halfway house, it remains to be seen who’ll be behind the cortege at the end of the Ramadi stand-off – Washington or the tribes.

An echo, not a choice:

We will double our Special Forces, and invest in the new equipment and technologies so that our military remains the best equipped and best trained in the world. This will make our military stronger so we’re able to defeat every enemy in this new world.

But we can’t do this alone. We have to restore our respect in the world to bring our allies to us and with us. It’s how we won the World Wars and the Cold War and it is how we will build a stable Iraq.

With a new president who strengthens and leads our alliances, we can get NATO to help secure Iraq. We can ensure that Iraq’s neighbors like Syria and Iran, don’t stand in the way of a democratic Iraq. We can help Iraq’s economy by getting other countries to forgive their enormous debt and participate in the reconstruction. We can do this for the Iraqi people and our soldiers. And we will get this done right.

A new president will bring the world to our side, and with it — a stable Iraq and a real chance for peace and freedom in the Middle East, including a safe and secure Israel. And John and I will bring the world together to face our most dangerous threat: the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon.

With our credibility restored, we can work with other nations to secure stockpiles of the worlds most dangerous weapons and safeguard this dangerous material. We can finish the job and secure all loose nukes in Russia. And we can close the loophole in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that allows rogue nations access to the tools they need to develop these weapons.

That’s how we can address the new threats we face. That’s how we can keep you safe. That’s how we can restore America’s respect around the world.

Could David Duke have picked a better prime-time speaker for tonight’s Democratic convention than Al Sharpton? The only thing worse than Sharpton’s barking screed – which Doris Kearns Goodwin, in a rare moment of lucidity, compared to nails on a chalkboard – was the delegates’ reaction: euphoria. After watching this sorry spectacle, I’m quite happy that the Democrats renounced the antiwar movement. I only hope these imbeciles cheering Sharpton find the next four years of Bush-Cheney even more excruciating than I will. And as I watch that slick little creep (and Bush operative) Ralph Reed on Chris Matthews’ show now, I know the next four years are gonna be hell.