Key Players – Page 231 – Public Intelligence Blog

India-Pakistan: According to a 109 page Indian interrogation report of the Pakistani-American jihadist, David Headley, officers through senior field grade ranks in Pakistan's intelligence services were involved directly in the 2008 Mumbai militant attacks and intended to control a further split in Kashmir-based militant groups by providing them with a victory, The Guardian reported yesterday, 18 October.

Headley, a Pakistani American originally named Daood Gilani, undertook surveillance missions of the LeT targets in the 2008 Mumbai operation, He said he regularly reported to the ISI, but the Indian interrogation report suggests that supervision of the terrorists by the ISI was often chaotic. Headley also opined that the senior officers of the agency were unaware of the Mumbai operation beforehand.

According to the Indian interrogation report and The Guardian, Headley said he met once with a Pakistan Army “Colonel Kamran” and had a series of meetings with two majors named “Sameer Ali” and “Iqbal” from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). A fellow terrorist met with Colonel Shah.” At least one of eight surveillance missions in India as paid for by the ISI, who paid him $25,000.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The Guardian does not admit that the Indian interrogation report might have been leaked deliberately. In any event, the publication of key excerpts will help justify to the international community the grounds for Indian suspicions and caution in dealing with Pakistan.

Headley might have told the truth, but the Pakistanis he dealt with certainly did not use their real names or affiliations. Headley's confession of involvement in the Mumbai attacks is sufficient to convince India that Pakistanis and Pakistan itself bear ultimate responsibility for the more than 160 dead in Mumbai in 2008.

The most plausible statement by Headley is that he was told the reason for the Mumbai attacks was to unite Kashmiri militant factions that were splintering and to move militant activity out of Pakistan and against India. Otherwise, Headley has a bit for Pakistan and a bit for India.

His allegations, as reported, will reinforce India's conviction that Pakistani officials continue to support the anti-Indian Islamic terrorists. On the other hand, Pakistanis will see other comments as exonerating the Pakistani government from blame by perpetuating the notion of rogue operations within the Pakistani intelligence service.

Any long time student of the Pakistani military hierarchy knows that rogue operations by serving senior field grade officers are all but impossible. Headley told his interrogators what they wanted to hear and hardened viewpoints already set in stone.

Phi Beta Iota: Pakistan is not Israel, India is not the USA, and Mumbai is not the USS Liberty. All signs point to a major decisive Indian attack on Pakistan. As our esteemed colleague notes, there is no such thing as a “rogue” element among Pakistani military officers. They got used to fooling the Americans working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ripping the USA off of billions intended for Afghanistan, and got cocky about fooling India. Right about now, we hope someone in India is planning the complete eradication of the ISI Headquarters building, in a replay of the successful and measured attack by the USA on the Libyan intelligence headquarters. If Pakistan has a brain, it will eat this one and stand down. At the same time, India needs to be smarter about a regional water authority–Kashmir is about water, not about ethnic anything.

2010/10/192010/10/19

Journal: CIA Officer Blew Off Warning in Jordon Weeks in Advance of Jordanian Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan that Killed Seven

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Government, Methods & Process, Officers Call

Leon Panetta — Click to See Panetta Various Disguises

C.I.A. Was Told About Bomber of Afghan Base, Inquiry Finds

By MARK MAZZETTI

The New York Times Published: October 19, 2010

WASHINGTON — Three weeks before a Jordanian double agent set off a bomb at a remote Central Intelligence Agency base in eastern Afghanistan last December, a C.I.A. officer in Jordan received warnings that the man might be working for Al Qaeda, according to an investigation into the deadly attack.

But the C.I.A. officer did not tell his bosses of the suspicions — brought to the Americans by a Jordanian intelligence officer — that the man might try to lure Americans into a trap, according to the recently completed investigation by the agency.

The internal investigation documents a litany of breakdowns leading up to the attack at the Khost base that killed seven C.I.A. employees, the deadliest day for the spy agency since the 1983 bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut. Besides the failure to pass on warnings about the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the C.I.A. investigation chronicled major security lapses at the base in Afghanistan, a lack of war zone experience among the agency’s personnel at the base, insufficient vetting of the Jordanian, and a murky chain of command with different branches of the intelligence agency competing for control over the operation.

Full Story Online….

See Also:

Journal: The Truth on Khost Kathy

Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA (With RECAP Links)

2010/10/192010/10/19

Journal: Taliban Ramps Up North, Holds South + RECAP

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

Taliban Influence Grows in North

Insurgents Attack, Recruit, Adjudicate, Countering NATO's Advance in South

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan—The Taliban's influence in northern Afghanistan has expanded in recent months from a few hotspots to much of the region, as insurgents respond to the U.S.-led coalition's surge in the south by seizing new ground in areas once considered secure.

Taliban militants stop traffic nightly at checkpoints on the road from Kabul to Uzbekistan, just outside Baghlan province's capital city of Pul-e-Khumri, frequently blowing up fuel convoys and seizing travelers who work with the government or the international community.

In many areas here and the rest of the north, the Taliban have effectively supplanted the official authorities, running local administrations and courts, and conscripting recruits.

– – – – – – –

The Taliban have consolidated their war gains by tapping into broad disillusionment with the incompetence and venality of Afghan government officials.

“People don't love the Taliban—but if they compare them to the government, they see the Taliban as the lesser evil,” said Baghlan Gov. Munshi Abdul Majid, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai.

Full Story Online…

Phi Beta Iota: Based on what we now know about Viet-Nam, we predict that the military-industrial complex will declare victory in November 2012, and inform the new President that the US military has been entirely “used up” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and therefore we need to increase the Pentagon budget to rebuy the military from scratch.

See Also (RECAP Last Six Months):

Continue reading “Journal: Taliban Ramps Up North, Holds South + RECAP”

2010/10/182010/10/18

Secrecy News Headlines: Iraq + Lies Leading to Iraq

04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Media, Military, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

** DOD SEES NO INTEL COMPROMISE FROM WIKILEAKS DOCS
** REVISITING THE DECISION TO GO TO WAR IN IRAQ

It is to be expected that national intelligence services will sometimes fail to identify and discover a threat to the nation in a timely fashion. But when intelligence warns of a threat that isn’t really there, and then nations go to war to meet the phantom threat — that is a serious, confounding and deeply disturbing problem.

But in a nutshell, that is the story of the war in Iraq, in which the U.S. and its allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq because of the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction — a threat that proved illusory.

A new book published in the United Kingdom called “Failing Intelligence” provides a remarkable account of the British experience of how intelligence on the Iraqi WMD program was shaped and packaged to support the decision to go to war in Iraq. The book’s author, Brian Jones, was the chief specialist in weapons of mass destruction on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff. He was also a skeptic of the stronger claims made about the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. The book documents his mostly unsuccessful attempts to register that skepticism, to moderate the extreme claims made by government officials, and later to hold those officials accountable for their actions.

He provides a detailed first-hand account of how his efforts were consistently deflected in the rush to war, and how intelligence declined into propaganda. It’s a grim but instructive case study in the overlapping failure of intelligence gathering, intelligence production, and intelligence oversight.

The National Security Archive has recently published three richly informative collections of declassified U.S. and British government documents on the lead-up to the Iraq war (including several key documents cited or relied upon by Brian Jones).

“The more deeply the processes of creating the government reports on the alleged Iraqi threat are reconstructed — on both sides of the Atlantic — the more their products are revealed as explicitly aimed at building a basis for war,” wrote John Prados of the National Security Archive and journalist Christopher Ames in an analysis of the documents.

“In the light of a decision process in which no serious consideration was given to any course other than war, the question of whether American and British leaders set out to wage aggressive war has to be squarely faced,” they wrote.

Review: Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush

Review: VICE–Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

Review: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Review: Shooting the Truth–The Rise of American Political Documentaries

Review: Grand Theft Pentagon–Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror

2010/10/182010/10/18

Reference: Humanizing “The Man”

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Officers Call, Strategy

Humanizing “The Man:” Strengthening Psychological and Information Operations in Afghanistan
by A. Lawrence Chickering

In this paper, I will argue there are three great challenges the coalition forces need to overcome in their search for narratives that resonate with Afghans and that ultimately will promote support for the coalition and for the government. First is the traditional and tribal Afghan antagonism to outsiders. Second is the lack of a stake that ordinary Afghans have in the larger system. And the third involves a conflict in impact of major activities in the country, a conflict between programs that empower Afghans and programs that disempower them.

Download the Full Article: Humanizing the “Man”

Phi Beta Iota: The four levels of war and peace were best explained by Edward N. Luttwak, see Review: Strategy–The Logic of War and Peace, Revised and Enlarged Edition. We raise this point, as we raised it while teaching at a Civil Affairs course at Fort Bragg, because no amount of good intentions at the operational and tactical levels of war can overcome flagrant irresponsibility and immorality at the strategic level, or the lack of anything other than killing tools at the tactical level. War and Peace are a whole. If you cannot start with morality and a just cause, and if you cannot implement a Whole of Government strategy that leads to an outcome of peace and prosperity for those you wish to win over, then everything in the middle is waste–wasted blood, wasted treasure, wasted spirit. And if everything you do on the battlefield and in your supply line is rife with corruption–e.g US funding the Taliban, never mind–then you are thrice cursed and unlikely to prevail.

Review: Modern Strategy

Search: Strategic Analytic Model

Search: four levels intelligence analysis

2010/10/16

Journal: Deja Vu on FBI Ignoring Advance Warnings

03 India, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Officers Call

Years before 26/11, Headley wives told US of his LeT links (Indian Express)

FBI ignored Headley wife's warning on LeT (Times of India)

U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack (New York Times)

FBI knew Headley had LeT links in 2005 (Hindustani Times)

Phi Beta Iota: The FBI has two walk-ins on 9/11 in advance of the event, one in Newark, NJ and the other in Orlando, FL. In both instances, because the FBI did not recognize any of the names being reported, it blew off the walk-in. Something similar appears to have happened here, BUT there is also yet another instance of a US person being in the employ of the US Government (similar to the botched car bomb attack on the World Trade Center) and their activities being a) sanctioned by one US agency and b) not being reported to other US agencies or to allies. The US secret world is HOSED strategically, operationally, tactically, and technically….. it is cultural “unfit for duty.” We continue to believe that an Open Source Agency and a Multinational Decision-Support Centre with reach-back to at least 90 countries is the way to kick-off 21st Century Intelligence. See the Virtual Cabinet series at the Huffington Post for the larger context within which we believe US intelligence must be reinvented.

2010/10/162010/10/16

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Russia, Venezuela, Economy, Arms

06 Russia, 07 Venezuela, Strategy

Venezuela-Russia: Russia does not plan to cut military-technical cooperation with Venezuela, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said on 15 October Interfax reported. He spoke at a press conference following talks with Venezuelan President Chavez. Medvedev called changes in the economic sphere “very serious and of a tectonic character,” and includes nearly all sectors of mutual interest. This includes real investment, primarily in the energy sector, he said.

Prime Minister Putin announced that Russia has sold 35 tanks to Venezuela. That is enough to equip a Russian-style battalion.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: Chavez justifies a more than $4 billion arms spending spree since 2005 based on the threat of a US attack. He intends to purchase Kilo-class submarines and S-300 air defense missiles. Russia canceled its longstanding contract for similar missiles with Iran. A major concern is that Venezuela will be a conduit for Russian arms to reach Iran because of the closeness of Chavez' connection with Ahmadi-Nejad in opposing the US.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: What is really important about the above is the Russian reference to “tectonic character” of the economic shift. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese are stupid, and they will murder, kidnap, and/or torture Wall Street executives and their families if selected “corrections” are not made. The era of US “empire” is not only over, the irresponsibility of the last eight years has deprived the USA as a whole of a more measured transition. In Latin America, the USA has disgraced itself and lost a century of opportunity.

Review: Open Veins of Latin America–Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Review: SAVAGE CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF DEMOCRACY–Latin America in the Third Millennium

Category: Key Players

Journal: India Strike on Pakistan Grows More Likely