The cover story in the February 2010 edition of Middle East Magazine, “Hunting Bin Laden“, leads with the statement that time may be running out for Osama bin Laden. It goes on to say.
“Over the last two years or so, the elusive leader of Al Qaeda has seen dozens of his lieutenants and allies assassinated one after the other in Afghanistan and Pakistan in a whirlwind of attacks, often in the dead of night, by remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The stealthy craft, operated by the Central Intelligence Agency and the US air force, have become a weapon that has revolutionised warfare.”
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Anyone studying military history could not agree more. The technological advances developed by the U.S. military since the first Gulf War have been staggering. The combination of global positioning systems, laser guidance, detailed maps, radar, J-Stars, and moving target indicators made the delivery of bombs by piloted aircraft extremely accurate. Now, with unmanned aircraft, tactical and strategic bomb delivery is ever more a major force multiplier. Make a note here, however, that accurate and timely intelligence is the difference maker between bombing mistakes and successful air strikes.
The article alleges that American intelligence has improved over the last two to three years because of improved cooperation from Pashtun tribes.
“As the US braces for a major escalation in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is engaged in a new drive to kill or capture Bin Laden, declaring that he is the key to defeating Al Qaeda as a global threat.”
“That may be a rather fanciful rationale, but eight years after the Americans let him slip through their fingers at his Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, his last confirmed location on or about 16 December, 2001, they admit they haven’t a clue where he is now. The best guess is that he’s holed up in the lawless Waziristan tribal belt that runs along the rugged border with Afghanistan.”
In a posthumously released video message, the suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. employees on Dec. 30 said that his original target had been his handler from Jordanian intelligence, and that an invitation to meet C.I.A. officers at a remote base in Afghanistan had been an unexpected boon.
“We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah, who brought us, through his accompaniment, a valuable prey: Americans, and from the C.I.A.,” said the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian physician who carried out the attack, in a 44-minute video posted on extremist Web sites Sunday.
FOR THE RECORD: Director Panetta has either not seen (because his staff filters his incoming) or has ignored direct offers of help, including one faxed to every seventh floor fax around his personal office.
Phi Beta Iota: CIA Director Leon Panetta is in way over his head, he's not even useful to the President, much less anyone else. He has been deceived by his own people and has no idea how many sordid details of incompetence and plain misrepresentation are being withheld from him. CIA has too many complacent over-promoted people who don't speak a foreign language, don't really understand foreign cultures, and have gotten by for decades on scraps from the table of foreign liaison and the tried and true practice of pretending that anyone who will take money is a valuable asset–all the while ignoring open sources and keeping the analysts locked in a closet far removed from reality. His whining about public and professional observations of “poor tradecraft” inspired a riposte on “poor management.” A careful examination of the individuals who died would have shown that only two of them should have been there at all, the Jordanian and one case officer–analysts, especially materal women with no field or combat experience, have no business being on the front lines. By the by, has anyone introduced secure video teleconferencing to the process of analyst-asset interaction? CIA is once again playing the numbers game, pretending that warm bodies and mediocre meaningless reports add up to “presence.” Slow burn, once again.
Somalia Anti-Pirate Patrol: A Danish destroyer, HDMS Absalon, sank a pirate mothership in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast after allowing the crew to leave, a NATO spokes person said Monday. The mothership was fired on and sank after its crew members were transferred to a smaller boat in tow, which was allowed to return to the mainland.
Piracy is off to a slow start this year. An Australian source reported 17 acts of attempted and successful ship seizures this year through 1 March. Six ships and 140 seafarers plus a British couple are in pirate custody at this time, awaiting ransom payments. Ransom demands have increased to $7 million, but it is not clear that payments have gone above $4 million, about the same as last year.
Niger: Update. Today, the junta announced formation of a 20-member provisional government to guide the country to future elections, Reuters reported. Mahamadou Danda will continue as prime minister, and junta chief Major Salou Djibo appointed five military officers to the government, including General Mamadou Ousseini as Defense Minister.
The new military ruler said millions of people are threatened by famine in Niger, Reuters reported. Addressing the nation on state television, Major Djibo said all means were urgently being deployed to tackle the famine, which “threatens the existence of millions of Nigeriens in virtually all regions.”
Easing of famine will be the first test of the sincerity of the new caretakers, who claim to have seized power to take better care of the people, among other justifications.
The attached opinion piece by Juan Cole is an excellent summary of how the self destructive nexus of Israeli and US foreign policies has pushed both countries into the grand-strategic equivalent of a psycho ward.
Chuck SPinney
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The Decline of the Israeli Right and the Increasing Desperation of the ‘Anti-Semitism' Charge
The great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, even as Israel's reputation in the world is sinking. As rightwing policies more visibly fail, the Likudniks are flailing around making fools of themselves by smearing critics of those policies as racists. (Anyone who knows how Likud supporters talk among themselves about Arabs and other outsiders can only be amused at their impudent hypocrisy in playing the race card.)
The mess that Mossad's mercenaries (some of them possibly from the Fateh Palestinian faction also opposed to Hamas) made of a routine political assassination in Dubai of a Hamas agent funneling arms from Iran is a blow against Ithe image of daring, stone-cold competence cultivated by the Israeli security establishment. The killing went smoothly, but it transpires that the assassins had not only stolen the passport identities of British and Irish citizens, but those of several Israeli dual citizens originally from the UK, as well. Mossad thus made potential problems for those passport holders for the rest of their lives, since Interpol will be interested every time the numbers pop up at an airport check-in.
My good friend Werther has been beavering away again in the US manure pile and this time has resurrected Engels' theory of False Consciousness to help explain the mismatch between ideology and reality that has become enshrined in contemporary American political psychology.
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False Consciousness
By Werther*
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.”
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
EXTRACTS:
Or so the conventional wisdom.
Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation has written an interesting refutation of that widely held notion. [1] He asserts that the last 30 years' of so-called free market doctrine have not aided, but rather retarded the cause of small business. Intriguingly, he cites, but does not expand upon, the following finding: “One recent study, based on data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, placed the United States second to last out of 22 rich nations in the percentage of workers who run their own businesses. Only Luxembourg ranked lower.” . . .
Lynn argues that a key inflection point in government policy towards small business came in 1981, when the Reagan administration essentially stopped enforcing anti-monopoly and small business-protection statutes.
Phi Beta Iota: Reagan, whom we generally admired, also busted labor with his unconstitutional use of the military to break the air-traffic controller strike. We ureg one an all to read the entire Op Ed and the three linked references. American anti-intellectualism and American delusion are cresting at precisely the time we need ground-truth, truth at any cost.
