Side Tracks

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Spock.

28 pages? How about the UBL docs.. or the Iraq docs

While Bush haters, 9/11 truthers, and transparency lovers push for the release of the 28 pages from a 2003 Senate report that many believe will implicate the Saudis in 9/11, there's another trove of yet-to-be-analyzed docs that may shed some light on the GWoT: the bin Laden docs captured at Abbotabad.

Some of them trickled out a few years ago and a few more came out recently in the NYC trial of yet another African Embassy bomber suspect.  Here's the Long War Journal:

“Our groups inside Afghanistan are the same for every season for many years now,” Rahman wrote. “We have groups in Bactria, Bactica, Khost, Zabul, Ghazni and [Wardak] in addition to the battalion in Nuristan and Kunz,” the US government’s translation reads. Bactria and Bactica are probably poor translations of Paktia and Paktika, two provinces where al Qaeda’s allies are known to have a strong presence. Also, Kunz is likely Kunar.

Therefore, Rahman indicated that al Qaeda had a presence in at least eight Afghan provinces. The size of these “groups” was not disclosed. But earlier in the letter, Rahman mentioned that al Qaeda has “a full battalion in Nuristan and Kunar.” A translator or analyst from the US government estimated that this battalion consisted of “around 70 individuals.”

In other words, the notion that "Core AQ" has been run out of Afghanistan into the Pakistan-drone kill box only to be 'decimated' might not be exactly true. Other docs mention ties to Iran, if only from an enemy of my enemy fashion. Here's Stephen Hayes:

Hayes said the initial "scrub" of the bin Laden documents by the CIA was very successful, producing 400 intelligence reports and leading to U.S. actions around the world against al Qaeda. "Then it all stopped. The CIA basically sat on the documents. ...

I think it's because the Obama administration didn't want to know what was in them," said Hayes, adding that the documents would have had "tremendous implications" for U.S. foreign policy overall. "Once you've exposed these documents in al Qaeda's own hand, it requires the administration to act on them. And the president's argument all along has been that the war on terror is ending," said Hayes.

Emphasis added.  It's appropriate that Hayes is weighing in here--he was at the forefront to get the captured Iraqi regime documents released. Eventually they were, via a DoD web portal, only to be shut down later after the New York Times used them to reprint some sensitive nuclear information. Who knows what else those docs might show.  But by all means, we need those 28 pages!

Of course Hayes and his friend Joscelyn, along with Fox and other conservatives, were among the only outlets to report the suggested bin Laden connection with Iran...


Maybe that's because the mainstreamers want nothing to do with upending Obama's legacy project of normalizing relations with both commie Cuba and radical Iran (with neither of them reforming first).  Today we learn the new rulers of Yemen have approved direct flights from Iran.  So it appears our government has picked a devil in dealing with the other devils.  Maybe there are some documents supporting that premise somewhere. 

22 Years Ago Today...

...the War on Terror, as we know it, began. Few realized it at the time, especially when the Waco standoff started only days later and stretched out for 2 months. Several years later a Kuwaiti-born Muslim, Abdul Basit Karim, aka Ramzi Yousef, was convicted of the crime and sent to the federal Supermax prison in Colorado for life, to be forgotten. He had acquired his bomb-making skills via higher education in Britain.


So what do we really know about that attack? Here's a summary at the time...

 

It's amazing that 1) the FBI knew of the bombing plot but pulled out their agent, 2) afterwards a mysterious master bomb-maker shows up along with an Iraqi and the plot gets pushed to a new level, as if they'd been tipped. There was no 2/26 Commission, mainly because Bill Clinton was president. There wasn't a full investigation of the 1993 attack by the 9/11 Commission, mainly because Bill Clinton still had dreams of returning to the White House for a third term via his wife. Without extreme public scrutiny and/or the retirement of the Clintons, the truth will not be coming out.

Meanwhile, two decades later another Kuwaiti-born Muslim, also schooled in Britain, is suspected of being the guy waving the knife at the West in videos before cutting the head off another helpless victim as he represents a Jihadist organization Ramzi Yousef could only dream of.   Pretending he only needed a job or that Bush lied or that the Crusades prompted him to sharpen his knife is just a pitiful reminder of where we stand in this fight. 

Side Tracks

Best played in double drop D (for you guitarists).  Young was known as an anti-establishment hippie rebel, so some might think it weird for a conservative blogger to be featuring him, but good musical riffs are apolitical.  In the final analysis he pursued his American dream and got very rich and famous using his God-given talent, whether you like his politics or not.  That's one of those 'shared values' we keep hearing about. 

Yes, but it IS Islamic

The brouhaha continues over what America should call the violent extremists wreaking havoc across Arabia in the name of Islam.  Reacting to the criticism mainly from the right, Obama and his press staff have lately been twisting themselves into pretzels trying to pretend there is no Islamic connection to Islamic terrorism.  Who knows whether they truly believe that or are just trying to punt the problem to Billary or Bush III.

But the words spoken in his recent Countering Violent Extremism conference (which was supposed to blur the lines by also pointing to domestic right wing terrorists as well) suggest the president might be going off the deep end with his blind apologias coming down through the clouds from his judgmental perch atop Mt Nuance.

Here's what he said about the role of Muslims in the founding of America:

He seems to be saying Muslims were involved in the very founding of this nation.  Not to say there weren't any Islamic immigrants in the late 1700s, there just weren't enough to make much of an impact on the founding. Of course he knows this.

As a professor he also knows that America's first real engagement with organized Islam occurred when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with the Envoy from Tripoli to Great Britain, who schooled them about paying the jizya tax if we expected our new independent American-flagged merchant vessels to get a free pass into and out of the Mediterranean:

That this might not be so easy was discovered by Jefferson and John Adams when they went to call on Tripoli's envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked him by what right he extorted money and took slaves in this way. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Medieval as it is, this has a modern ring to it. Abdrahaman did not fail to add that a commission paid directly to Tripoli—and another paid to himself—would secure some temporary lenience. I believe on the evidence that it was at this moment that Jefferson decided to make war on the Muslim states of North Africa as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

So in truth our first significant encounter with Islam was defeating violent extremists in North Africa legitimizing their barbarity through the Koran, which led to several Barbary Wars against terror.  In other words, nothing much has changed since then, except the players.

Of course this is a piece of history that our lecturer-in-chief will not expose because it might suggest that a fundamental interpretation of Islam calls for people to do exactly as the Barbary Pirates and AQ and ISIS have done.  And it will continue to happen unless, as Egyptian PM al-Sissi has suggested, a reformation occurs within Islam.  Maybe the president can't admit that (he can only condemn Christians) but living in denial will not change anything either.  

But maybe he's not living in denial.  Maybe, with no more elections to win and the likelihood of no more major quasi-socialist policy initiatives being passed through Congress to pad his legacy, Obama has nothing left but to troll the GOP in search of incendiary reactions the Democrats can then use as fund-raising fodder.  Would he stoop so low to play games with national security like that?  You be the judge.

But it seems clear he was playing games with the Executive Actions on pardoning millions of illegal aliens, which almost surely had to be intentionally messed up--nobody could be that stupid.  If so, the only explanation that makes sense is that he was throwing it against the wall knowing it would be struck down only to get juicy "anti-immigrant" sound bites that Wasserman-Shultz could use as more fund-raising fodder to stoke up donors for Billary along with producing anger throughout the illegal alien community. especially when the GOP fails to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

WMDs in Iraq again

What the heck is the NY Times doing?  This is the second major story they've printed in the past six months about WMDs being found in Iraq..

The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Now let's be clear, nobody is saying these were the stockpiles of WMDs Bush and most of the western powers were using as a casus belli for war.  At the same time, the conventional wisdom hasn't changed since 2008 and it states that Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house and there were no WMDs found in Iraq. None, nada, zilch.  Then along comes the Times...

The analysis of sarin samples from 2005 found that the purity level reached 13 percent — higher than expected given the relatively low quality and instability of Iraq’s sarin production in the 1980s, officials said. Samples from Boraks recovered in 2004 had contained concentrations no higher than 4 percent.

The new data became grounds for concern. “Borak rockets will be more hazardous than previously assessed,” one internal report noted. It added a warning: the use of a Borak in an improvised bomb “could effectively disperse the sarin nerve agent.”

Of course none of which Saddam declared to Hans Blix before the invasion.

So two questions. One, with ex-Ba'athist regime thugs reportedly working with ISIS on military strategies what are the chances they've stashed some of this material away for later use, perhaps even privately threatening to use it here or there if we do this or that?  That could explain the presidential foot-dragging, assuming one were inclined to believe Obama has a desire not to foot drag.

Two, how will this go over politically? The Washington Post is already asking how Jeb Bush will handle his brother's failure to find WMDs in Iraq, but that would also bring in Hillary's yes vote in 2002. Many experts believe Hillary lost to Obama in 2008 because of her Iraq vote. Would she dare come out and blame her vote on Jeb's brother, especially with some WMDs found in Iraq and stuff like this still on the internet?



Maybe a revelation about some WMDs being found in Iraq helps.  She's a hawk figure and a lawyer, she could craftily say Duyba and Cheney still misled her but she also knew there was some danger there, therefore she and the First Man are the only candidates able to fix it, etc.  Might work.  Why else would the Times pursue this?

Comparative Outrage

Here's a family member of the three Muslims killed in North Carolina talking to CNN's Jake Tapper...



So it's "open season" on Muslims in America due to American Sniper and all the murders taking place everywhere, like the beheading of the woman in Oklahoma and the police attacks in New York, and yeah, no.  By the way, Tapper went way out of his way to show a sympathy he would have given almost nobody else.

Contrast her comments with those of another Muslim woman, this one released from an Israeli prison a few years ago for assisting in the murder of Israelis in a pizzeria bombing that took the lives of 8 children...



No remorse.  She would do it again, for her Muslim faith.   She is not alone.  

Seemingly confused about all of this, Tapper's network called it a bad week for "religion".   

As to the first woman, there's just something not right with those comments.  Despite the grief.  

Another Ali

One might think that understanding a terror group like al Qaeda would require some historical background.  Yet most seemed satisfied with the abbreviated picture provided by the 9/11 Commission Report, never wondering much about how the two WTC attacks tied together.  After all, there was that August 2001 PDB thing that Bush ignored.

But the history remains, waiting to be uncovered.  For instance, there was that whole thing with Ali Mohammad, an Egyptian double crosser, a story few have ever heard.  And Emad Salem, the Egyptian mole planted in the Brooklyn cell by the FBI but pulled before the group set off a bomb in the WTC on February 26, 1993.  Weird, wild, stuff, to the curious at least.  Not so much for the media, but perhaps they were distracted by the Waco standoff that began only days after the first WTC attack.

But the passage of time is producing more history.   About a year ago it was revealed that the FBI's Los Angeles office might have had a mole in contact with bin Laden way back in the early 90s:

On Wednesday, though, U.S. law enforcement sources were looking into a report in the The Washington Times and then elsewhere that the FBI had actively placed the source in direct contact with bin Laden and hid that fact from both the 9/11 Commission and congressional investigators. In fact, testimony in the lawsuit indicates the source had already met with bin Laden by the time an FBI agent recruited him.

In January 1993, a month before the first World Trade Center bombing, FBI agent Bassem Youssef began recruiting two sources from Los Angeles with strong ties to Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh” who masterminded that first attack on New York City, Youssef testified nearly four years ago in his discrimination case against the FBI. Within two years, one of the sources was handing over “highly sensitive information on the entire network in the U.S. as well as abroad,” Youssef told a federal jury in Washington on Sept. 15, 2010.

None of this was in the commission report because the FBI deemed it irrelevant. Today, another revelation emerged:

An American citizen who underwent al Qaeda training only to later quit the extremist group revealed he was asked to carry out a mid-air assassination against Hosni Mubarak back in 1995. Ihab Mohammad Ali, testifying against alleged al Qaeda leader Khaled al-Fawwaz, says he was asked by Osama bin Laden to use his private plane to ram a plane carrying the Egyptian president.

'It took me by surprise,' said 52-year old Ali while testifying in New York federal court. 'I responded, "Well, wouldn't I be killing myself?"'

Weird.  So there was an unknown mole named Youseff and a terrorist named Yousef, and now an unknown mole named Mohammad Ali and a triple agent named Ali Mohammad.  Scant few Google stories on Ihab Mohammad Ali, odd considering his aviation and terrorist background:

Ali, who had also instructed members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that was later absorbed into al Qaeda, on reading flight maps and interpreting air traffic control radio transmissions. The group claimed responsibility for various bombings and attacks throughout the 1990s while it was fighting the Mubarak regime.

That would be the same EIJ who sent some leaders to Baghdad for a meeting before the US invaded in 2003.  The same EIJ who sent anthrax scare letters to Canadian authorities before 9/11 and before the US anthrax letter attacks.

So with all the talk since 9/11 of planes being used as weapons here's a pilot named Mohammad Ali, an EIJ terrorist who hobnobbed with bin Laden and taught jihadists about aviation and interpreting ATC lingo (which could come in handy in a 9/11 type attack) and the public has never been told until now.

It's a big story, after all, a plot to crash his aircraft into Hosni Mubarek's jet in 1995, performing a suicide attack at altitude (gotta love Ali's alleged response). Sounds kind of far-fetched, but then again so did Jack Cashill and James Sanders' scenario in their book "First Strike" about the demise of TWA 800 back in 1996.  If Ali is correct, the terrorists were actually discussing the Cashill/Sanders theory a year before 800.  Not fit to print, though.

At any rate, if this slow-walking history from the 90s seems strange it's really not.  Perhaps one day the true path to 9/11 will become clear but one thing seems clear already--especially with certain political figures from the 90s still vying for ultimate power--it's going to remain slow for awhile.

Losing Yemen

Still some confusion over how the Obama administration pulled out of our embassy in Yemen a few days ago.  There was initial reporting by Fox and others that authorities at the airport in Sana'a requested our embassy Marines hand over their personal weapons to the terrorists before boarding aircraft out of the country (embassy vehicles were seized upon departure).

Obviously the symbolism of this did not sit well in all quarters. Everything we do on the world stage sends a message, so what message does it send to have a terror group disarming our Marines?

But the early accounts have been challenged.  State spokesgal Jen Psaki tried to beat back the flames today, reading the Marine Corps' explanation, calling the earlier reporting 'false', which promoted this exchange with reporters (for some reason C-SPAN would not allow embedding).

Notice at the end of the clip she was asked who was in authority at the airport and she passed the question without taking a breath.  That matters to this story.    

AP's Matt Lee wasn't satisfied with Psaki's initial answer and tried again.   Obviously she wasn't going to give away precise details on how we extricate personnel from embassies in hostile territory, but she opened the door by saying it "didn't go according to plan".

So, the Marines say the 'advanced plan' was to go to the airport and destroy the personal weapons, presumably as a condition of flying out.  Psaki wouldn't elaborate but she admitted the operation didn't come off as planned.  Why not?  She wouldn't say.   National security and such.

Nobody bothered to ask whether the plan might have been to have air assets come in and remove the embassy personnel and equipment and fly everything to the waiting ships offshore.  Admiral Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, could have perhaps shed some light on this but alas, there has been no Pentagon briefing the past two days.

So questions remain.  Does this set precedent?  Do we always make these kinds of deals abandoning our facilities?  Who made the actual call to disarm at the airport and why?  Or was it ad-hoc?  Why did the Army and CNN make it sound like our departure was ignominious if it wasn't?  Was any of the planning, either ahead of time or perhaps at the airport, done through negotiations with the Houthis that CNN reported yesterday control the airport and obviously control the capital?  Would this amount to negotiating with terrorists?  Does leaving our guns scattered on the tarmac amount to giving them concessions, which the administration claims we never do?  

Or are the Houthis not actually terrorists, but like the Taliban better classified as "armed insurgents" despite their marching through the streets echoing the Tehran chant? 


All of these questions need to be answered to determine the truth, but the symbolism will be clear to the street--our Marines were forced out of town and made to give up their weapons in the process, yet another sign of weakness on the international stage.  Bin Laden once called America a "paper tiger", which eventually culminated in 9/11.  Then Bush came in and said "bring it on".  Obama seems to be sending signals everywhere that he'll sue for peace at just about any cost.   After all, we did the Crusades. 

Still some mystery....

...in the raid to kill Usama bin Laden.   This was illustrated by an expansive NBC News story about Air Force Special Operations Weathermen:

“I guarantee you there were guys out there,” said one senior official, who requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to discuss the bin Laden mission. Special Operations Command declined to comment directly, as did Sawtelle, the officer then in charge of the SOWTs at Hurlburt Field.

But the need for data was obvious. Pakistan’s ground weather stations are spotty and far-flung, producing forecasts too vague for military use. To compensate, at least one environmental observer was on the flight path into Pakistan, while a second dug into the mountains surrounding Abbottabad, providing environmental “overwatch” on the compound, according to military sources.

It’s unclear how they landed in those positions. SOWTs are trained to jump from tens of thousands of feet, glide through the night and hit an X anywhere on the map. But they’re equally adept at flying commercial with an Osprey backpack, North Face boots and a cover story.

Now, yes, that's interesting to say the least, assuming this story isn't complete horse manure.  If they were indeed in there then as the story indicates they were either dropped off by lead aircraft (never mentioned) or hiked into position after some kind of clandestine entry.  Assuming truth was it necessary to reveal the role of this unit to the public?  

Side Tracks

A Question for King Abdullah

Not surprisingly he's pissed about his pilot, and some reports say he's ready to strap in a fighter jet and do a few sorties himself.

But maybe, after the initial anger subsides, someone can ask about this...

She is the daughter of one of the most notorious dictators in the world, and a woman who has openly pledged her support for ISIS. But that doesn't mean Raghad Saddam Hussein doesn't have an eye for design, as she hopes to prove with her new jewellery range - complete with pieces unshamedly inspired by her despot father, as well as the husband he had murdered.

The Daily Mail asks, why is she still there?  Raghad was the subject of a Interpol Red Notice several years ago, and was listed on Iraq's most-wanted terrorist list. But here she is, living the QVC Kardashian life in Amman, Jordan, while praising ISIS and dropping more clues about their origins:

She expressed delight after militants captured Tikrit, her father’s hometown, last year, telling Jordanian newspaper Al-Quds: 'These are victories of my father’s fighters and my uncle Izzat Al-Douri.'

Does the fact Jordan won't give her up suggest they might fear a reaction from the hinterlands about sending a Hussein back to the Persians?  Or is it that that she's a dangerous character with some kind of dangerous leverage?  Or she herself is leverage against their neighbors?  Or is it just mercy for a spoiled twit who wouldn't understand the game of Risk much less be able to run a country or an insurgency? 

Someone could ask.  After all, someone thought she was worth putting on a list and she seems to have an endless supply of cash and that whole affair with her husband defecting to...Jordan, back in 1995, was just plain weird.

Blasting the Strawmen

Since Obama has no more elections to win he's of no mind to give pre-Superbowl interviews to anyone who might ask tough questions. It's all about controlling the national narrative now.  

To help, CNN broadcast an interview yesterday with the plagiarist, a preview of the attack strategy to be used in defining the narrative.   Discussing the threat of Islamic terrorism, Obama basically downplayed the whole thing then blamed Bush... again (shown in bold)...

"The truth of the matter is that they can do harm. But we have the capacity to control how we respond in ways that do not undercut what's the essence of who we are. That means that we don't torture, for example, and thereby undermine our values and credibility around the world," Obama said.

"It means that we don't approach this with a strategy of sending out occupying armies and playing whack-a-mole wherever a terrorist group appears because that drains our economic strength and it puts enormous burdens on our military."

Blaming Bush is the gift that keeps on giving with his base, but Democrats as a whole need to downplay terrorism.  Clinton did it in the 90s despite bombings, attacks and bin Laden's multiple declarations of war against America.  When challenged on it later by Fox's Chris Wallace he went ballistic, all while trying to make sure ABC News spiked its terrorism docudrama "the Path to 9/11".  It's hard to focus the country on taxing the rich and downsizing the Defense Department if Islamist terrorists are posing an existential threat against Western Civilization.

In 2004 John Kerry tried the tactic again, suggesting to the NY Times that terrorism should be treated as kind of nuisance.  That's one reason why the Dems don't want Bibi Netanyahu coming to Congress to remind people of the harsh realities.  It's also likely one of the main reasons Obama sent nobody to the anti-terrorism march in Paris.  In his old new narrative AQ is a nuisance, still on the run, and we need to fight them with smart power, using pinpricks and FBI agents like Clinton, and hey, deploying lots of troops to combat this diminishing threat is hard on the troops not to mention stupid like Bush.  That's basically his foreign policy in a nutshell.  

But Zakaria wasn't the annual pre-Superbowl interview, it was with the most friendly Obama mirror of all--NBC News.  Savannah Guthrie, a nice pleasant female anchor, was chosen to ask the questions.  Yet she seemed to put a small chink in the narrative by daring to call it a 'strawman argument'. Watch the reaction around the 1:35 mark...

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He looked rather peeved at this interruption, after all, he was getting to the crux of the narrative.  Oddly enough he mentioned that leaving (Iraq) caused the problem because the country wasn't ready to fight for itself, without blaming himself for leaving.  Suddenly now staying for years is the right thing to do.  Later in the interview the CinC actually said he is NOT downplaying terrorism by downplaying terrorism, but in a much more nuanced way than in the Zakaria interview (after the 11 minute mark).

Perhaps he felt like Guthrie might actually challenge him a little more and re-calibrated, although he did get in his "shoot first aim later" Bush-McCain-Romney bash comment in both interviews without challenge.

As to the strawman, not only Zakaria carried this theme on Sunday, but the Washington Post also featured a touching story on how Obama is deeply affected by the casualties of war:

Discussions of war and peace in Washington often revolve around abstract questions of policy and national interest. Rarely mentioned are the human costs of war and how they weigh on a commander in chief. “It’s probably the least appreciated and most difficult part of leadership,” said Michele Flournoy, who served at the top levels of Obama’s Pentagon. “It’s not an abstraction, and, if you have any doubt, it eats at you, because the human costs are very real.”

At the end of Zakaria's interview he had asked Obama to recommend a book. Without hesitation Obama recommended a book called "Redeployment" by Phil Klay. This was clearly not spontaneous, evident by the way Obama reacted to the question and the fact CNN put a cover of the book on the screen while they were talking.  Sorry, the control room isn't that good, so they were helping him make his point.

The book happens to be about a soldier's perspective on the cost of war. Clearly a good thing for a Commander-in-Chief to be reading and promoting, right? Right, unless he's doing it in cahoots with the MSM to fight a war against domestic political foes critical of his response to increasing terrorism.

So based on Obama's reaction one has to wonder if Guthrie went off the script when she blurted out 'strawman', which forced an abrupt interruption by the president, while later asking tough questions about whether terrorism was as defeated as he claims.  

Meanwhile, the 2016 budget came out today.  It has no chance of passage, but we'll see if media puppets the talking points of the wise and caring president trying to help the 'middle class' despite the same guy hardly mentioning the middle class before the mid-terms last November.

Back then the WH needed the black vote, so the press focused on Ferguson and New York and "reverend" Al coming in and out of the White House and pounding his fist, all while his fellow Democrats kept a 10 foot pole between themselves and the White House because they were so afraid of how the middle class might vote.  Where is Ferguson now?  

Now the WH needs to tamp down the threat of terrorism again, just like 2012 before Benghazi, so we'll see if the press comes along and helps like Candy Crowley did in the second debate.  The CNN and the WaPo examples would suggest that yes, nothing will change, but perhaps Savannah Guthrie's small but surprising 'truth to power' moment indicates that a few networks might try salvage a smidgen of credibility going into 2016.  Yes, right, we've been fooled before.

Side Tracks

Enjoy the game.