Hey cicerone imposter, I go even further than you do when you talk about increase or decrease of troops, because by decrease I mean get out of Dodge completely and by increase I mean restructure and increase the military so that it can handle taking charge of the country.
We agree; half way solutions will never work in Iraq.
Hey Cycloptichorn, where do you guys get these usernames, you make me feel very unimaginative. I don't think that Bush will start getting as desperate as that, but then again, I don't think he is as dumb or as crazy as a lot of people do. Maybe I will change my username to "Man of Steel", what do you think?
You can also change your avatar to the man of steel.
Nah, the ladies here are already too bedazzled with me as it is.
Vinny Z wrote:Hey Cycloptichorn, where do you guys get these usernames, you make me feel very unimaginative. I don't think that Bush will start getting as desperate as that, but then again, I don't think he is as dumb or as crazy as a lot of people do. Maybe I will change my username to "Man of Steel", what do you think?
That's cool. It will reset your post count, but when it's so low it's no big deal.
The name stems from college... go Horns!
Bush is trapped right now. Noone wants to be in such a bad situation. Dangerous times with anyone at the helm, not just Bush personally. I find it to be worrying.
Cycloptichorn
Hi Cyclo, Yeah, things are just dandy. Just returned from a ten day cruise to the Caribbean where the climate is tropical to home where it's freezing! I had my annual check up with my doctor this morning, and have a dental appointment at 11AM for the quarterly cleaning. I don't ever remember having two doctor appointments in one day, but if we live long enough...
What Congress Can (And Can't) Do on Iraq
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Washington Post
Tuesday, January 16, 2007; Page A19
Congressional Democrats (and Republicans) who oppose President Bush's decision to send additional American troops to Iraq may frustrate his plan, but not -- as suggested by Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn -- by imposing 21,500 strings on the 21,500 new troops. Just as there are constraints on the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief, there are limits on Congress's ability to direct presidential action. In particular, Congress cannot use its power of the purse to micromanage the president's execution of his office. Indeed, although the prosecution of the Iraq war looms large in today's political discourse, the consequences of substantive decisions related to the war are dwarfed by the imperatives of protecting the integrity of the core rules governing interactions between the executive and legislative branches, which are rooted in our distinctive constitutional fabric.
This constitutional fabric features two coordinate political branches, with unique responsibilities and independent legitimacies. Thus, even if one assumes that, as critics allege, the November election results were a call for disengaging from Iraq, efforts by some congressional Democrats to chastise the president through a resolution of "no confidence" in his Iraq policy have no place in our constitutional culture. The Framers did not establish a parliamentary system.
This does not mean, of course, that Congress is powerless. It could -- if the leadership mustered veto-proof majorities -- immediately cut off funding for U.S. operations in Iraq. Alternatively, Congress could refuse to pass new appropriations once the current ones expire. The refusal to pay for particular policies -- whether in war or peace -- has been the most important check on executive power in the Anglo-American political tradition, dating to the British Parliament's ancient insistence on the right to seek redress of grievances before voting supplies (i.e., money) to the monarch. Under our constitutional system, however, the power to cut off funding does not imply the authority to effect lesser restrictions, such as establishing benchmarks or other conditions on the president's direction of the war. Congress cannot, in other words, act as the president's puppet master, and so long as currently authorized and appropriated funding lasts, the president can dispatch additional troops to Iraq with or without Congress's blessing.
The precise line between congressional and presidential authority is sometimes unclear, and no court has jurisdiction to rule on the issue. The analysis, however, is straightforward. When the two political branches exercise their respective constitutional powers in a way that brings them into conflict -- a scenario clearly envisioned by the Framers -- the relevant constitutional principle is that neither branch can vitiate the ability of the other to discharge its core constitutional responsibilities. Just as the president cannot raise his own funds (by obtaining loans unauthorized by Congress, for example), the legislature cannot attach conditions to federal spending that would destroy the president's authority to direct the military's tactical and strategic operations. This balance makes perfect sense; if Congress could closely direct how the executive branch spends appropriated funds, it would vitiate the president's core responsibilities as chief executive and commander in chief, transforming him into a cipher. This outcome would fundamentally warp the Framers' entire constitutional fabric.
To maintain the integrity of this original design, the Supreme Court has long ruled, in such cases as United States v. Klein (1872) and United States v. Lovett (1946), that Congress cannot attach unconstitutional conditions to otherwise proper legislation, including spending bills. As explained by Professor Walter Dellinger -- President Bill Clinton's chief constitutional lawyer at the Justice Department -- "road as Congress' spending power undoubtedly is, it is clear that Congress may not deploy it to accomplish unconstitutional ends." This includes restricting the president's authority as commander in chief to direct the movement of U.S. armed forces. In that regard, Dellinger quoted Justice Robert Jackson -- who said while serving as President Franklin Roosevelt's attorney general: "The President's responsibility as Commander-in-Chief embraces the authority to command and direct the armed forces in their immediate movements and operations, designed to protect the security and effectuate the defense of the United States."
Although this system may seem unsatisfactory to those who disagree with President Bush's Iraq policy, it has two great virtues. First, it bolsters the Constitution's fundamental design -- the separation of powers between the coequal branches of government. The Framers vested executive authority in a president for a reason. As Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers: "Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks." Second, requiring Congress to exercise its power in dramatic ways ensures political accountability. If Congress believes the war is lost, or not worth winning, it must take responsibility for the consequences of forcing a U.S. withdrawal. Otherwise, it must leave the president to direct the war and to bear responsibility for the decisions he has made and will make.
The writers are Washington lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
And this is the one weakness in the Constitution when we have a president that ignores professional advise and does what he pleases without the brains to know when to stop our losses.
The Next Stop
Is Iraq a distraction from the war on terror? No, say Afghanistan's ambassador and the Joint Chiefs chairman.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Opinion Journal
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Following President Bush's speech last week, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United Nations allowed himself this thought: Everything the president proposes doing in Iraq would also be welcome in Afghanistan.
For more than five years the U.S. has waged war in that landlocked, mountainous country. And at least since the liberation of Iraq, the White House has faced criticism that it is distracted from the war on terror in the country that hosted Osama bin Laden when he planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The president is facing a fresh round of such attacks now that he is "surging" American troops in Iraq in an effort to stabilize Baghdad. And in the process he's watching as his case for using democracy as a weapon against terrorism is swept away.
Zahir Tanin, Afghanistan's ambassador in New York, isn't one of those critics. He stopped by The Wall Street Journal's offices Thursday and, in offering his thoughts on the current situation in his country, ended up presenting a counterargument to those who would discount the importance of establishing legitimate democratic governments as bulwarks against terrorism. The Afghanistan of his youth, he said, looked nothing like the chaotic nation that the world saw after the fall of the Taliban. Kabul, where he was born, was once a "cosmopolitan city," he said. But decades of war, including years of Soviet domination, left the country in tatters and ripe for terrorists and the Taliban to assert their supremacy. By 2001 Afghanistan had become "a disrupted state."
His choice of words is instructive. In the war on terror the U.S. is facing an enemy that's not moored to a civilian population and doesn't feel bound by international conventions. But it is an enemy with territorial ambitions and intentions of disrupting the normal operations of civil society. Mr. Tanin, who was living in London and working for the BBC when the Taliban fell, sees progress made over the past five years and isn't now one of the president's critics. Elections have been held, roads have been built linking some of the larger cities, a small national military is taking shape, and a commercial economy, though still tiny, is up and running. All are buffers against the Taliban's return and a strong argument against the voices who've said for years that democracy can't be "imposed."
But has the U.S., by being in Iraq, shortchanged Afghanistan and handed the Taliban an opportunity to re-emerge?
Here we can turn to Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who was also in New York late last week. At an event sponsored by the Oxonian Society, Gen. Pace offered a few facts to rebut the claim that the administration is distracted. Approximately 80% of Afghans are illiterate, he said, suggesting that rebuilding the country will require building a viable public education system just as much as launching military offensives.
But combat operations are far from being wrapped up. He noted that there are now two types of Taliban operating in the country. The first is the faction led by Mullah Omar, which would like to retake control of the country. The second, which the general calls "the small-t taliban," is really a bunch of drug lords trying to protect their turf. Neither group is good for the country. But, Gen. Pace said, even as the illicit heroin trade remains a significant portion of the economy--at $2 billion a year--it hasn't grown in recent years, even as the overall economy has.
Come spring, he said, there will be a military offensive. The question is this: "Will it be ours or theirs?" He wouldn't say precisely what the U.S. is planning once the winter snows begin to recede. But it's clear by raising the question that he's watching what's happening on the ground there even as the U.S. surges in Iraq. The general was, however, willing to draw a direct parallel between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the U.S. is pushed out of Iraq, he said, the next stop for al Qaeda and other insurgents is Afghanistan. If the U.S. is pushed out of Afghanistan, he said to a hushed room in New York on Friday, the next stop is here.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
cicerone imposter wrote:And this is the one weakness in the Constitution when we have a president that ignores professional advise and does what he pleases without the brains to know when to stop our losses.
What is the professional advice that you think the president is ignoring
and ought not ignore?
Monday, January 15, 2007 NEW YORK POST
IRAQ: WHY THE MEDIA MISSTEP
Saddam: His shills still aid reporters.
January 15, 2007 -- JUST outside Um al-Qasar, a port in south east
Iraq, a crowd had gathered around a British armored car with a crew of
four. An argument seemed to be heating up through an interpreter.
The interpreter told the Brits that the crowd was angry and wanted
U.K. forces out of Iraq. But then a Kuwaiti representative of Amnesty
International, accompanied by a journalist friend, approached - and
found the crowd to be concerned about something quite different.
The real dispute? The day before, a British armored vehicle had an
accident with a local taxi; now the cab's owner, backed by a few
friends, was asking the Brits to speed up compensating him. Did these
Iraqis want the Brits to leave, as the interpreter pretended? No, they
shouted, a thousand times no!
So why did the interpreter inject that idea into the dialogue? Shaken,
he tried a number of evasions: Well, had the Brits not been in Iraq,
there wouldn't have been an accident in the first place. And, in any
case, he knows that most Iraqis don't want foreign troops . . .
*
Since 2003, Iraq has experienced countless similar scenes, with
interpreters, guides and "fixers" projecting their views and
prejudices into the dialogue between Iraqis and the outside world.
Immediately after liberation, interpreting and "fixing" for the
Coalition and for hundreds of foreign media people became a cottage
industry, employing thousands. Most of those were former Ba'athist
officials, often from the Ministry of Information or media companies
owned by Saddam Hussein and his relatives. Some tried to curry favor
with the new masters; others decided to wage political guerrilla war
against the "invaders" by misleading them. Both ended up offering a
twisted view of post-liberation Iraq.
The industry geared itself to meeting demand. In 2004, for example,
many journalists coming to Baghdad wanted to interview the "militants"
who were attacking U.S. soldiers. The industry obliged by arranging
interviews.
One popular interviewee was one "Abu Muhammad," who claimed to be a
fisherman by day and "a killer of Americans" by night. One U.K. paper
paid $2,000 (a tidy sum in the cash-starved Baghdad of those days) for
an exclusive with Abu Muhammad, who later took up a full chapter in a
book published in London. The scam ended when someone found out that
Abu Muhammad was, in fact, a busboy at a local hotel who'd grown a
beard and was "fishing" Western journalists, splitting the proceeds
with his cousin, who acted as interpreter and guide.
>From 2004 onward, the situation improved. A new generation of Iraqi
journalists with no Ba'athist background started to help Western
colleagues. And Americans and Brits began hiring interpreters from
outside Iraq, notably from ethnic Arab communities back home.
The new interpreters had some handicaps: They did not understand many
Iraqi expressions and nuances; and Iraqis recognized them as
non-Iraqis and were suspicious. Still, they were an improvement, for
few had hidden agendas.
*
Covering Iraq has never been easy. The country had been closed to
global media since the 1950s. Few Western journalists had traveled
there, and those few mostly did so under official supervision. The
only American journalist one can think of who had systematically
remained interested in and knowledgeable about Iraq, for 40 years, was
The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland. Not knowing Iraq, having no
contacts there and not speaking the local Arabic would be handicaps in
the best of times. It was more so in the context of a controversial
war.
>From the start, the war was also waged in Western circles, with their
pro- and anti-war camps. A newspaper that had opposed the war would
not tolerate "positive reporting" from Baghdad. One young British
reporter who didn't understand that was surprised to see himself
shifted to Paris to become a European correspondent. He had made the
mistake of reporting that Iraq looked almost like a success, given
where it had come from.
With the bulk of the media having opposed Saddam's ouster, negative
reporting from Iraq became the norm. (Afghanistan gets a better press;
Western elites are at worst ambivalent about the Taliban's fall.)
Another problem is that Iraq has become the focus of anti-American
passions. Millions want Iraq to fail so that the United States will be
humiliated. And Iraqis watch satellite TV - including channels from
Iran, Egypt and Qatar that make a point of presenting post-liberation
Iraq as a tragic quagmire. When CNN and the BBC send a similar
message, Iraqis can be persuaded that their country is lost.
Imagine a resident of, say, Mandali or Nasseriah, who is told day and
night that Iraq is sinking in a sea of fire and blood. He looks around
and sees no evidence of that - but one can't blame him if he thinks
that what the media say must be true in other parts of Iraq.
The fact that more than 90 percent of the violence that dominates
reporting from Iraq takes place in five neighborhoods in Baghdad, plus
one of the 18 Iraqi provinces, is neither here nor there. The
perception is that all of Iraq is lost.
The old rule in the news business still holds: "If it bleeds, it
leads." Stories about suicide attacks and carnage are more attractive
than boring stuff about the emergence of a pluralist political
consciousness and the mushrooming of thousands of small businesses.
Even the violence can't be properly covered. Reporters have no access
to those who cause it and can only guess at their motives.
For a Western journalist who speaks no Arabic and has no contacts in
the country, there are two options: embed with a U.S. or British
military unit, or rely on Iraqi aides. Being embedded means seeing
things through a narrow, and necessarily biased, angle. Relying on
hired Iraqis means becoming a secondhand dealer in information that
one cannot verify.
*
Last month, Iraq received the U.N.'s special environmental prize for
reviving parts of the marshes drained by Saddam, thus saving one of
the world's most precious ecological treasures. Almost no one in the
media noticed.
Also last month, the Iraqi soccer squad reached the finals of the
Asian Games - beating out Japan, China, South Korea and Iran. Again,
few in the West noticed.
In 2006, almost 200 major reconstruction projects were officially
completed and 4,000 new private companies registered in Iraq. But few
seem interested in the return of private capitalism after nearly 50
years of Soviet-style control.
Iraq's new political life is either ignored or dismissed as
irrelevant. The creation of political parties (some emerging from
decades of clandestine life), the work of Iraq's parliament, the fact
that it is almost the only Arab country where people are free to
discuss politics to their hearts' content - these are of no interest
to those determined to see Iraq as a disaster, as proof that toppling
Saddam was a modern version of the original sin.
Iraq may still become any of those things - but right now it is none
of them. When the real history of the Iraq war is written, posterity
might marvel at the way modern media were used to manufacture that
original sin.
ican wrote: What is the professional advice that you think the president is ignoring and ought not ignore?
1. General Shinseki
2. The commission on Iraq
3. The American People (61%)
cicerone imposter wrote:ican wrote: What is the professional advice that you think the president is ignoring and ought not ignore?
1. General Shinseki
2. The commission on Iraq
3. The American People (61%)
I did not ask:
Who are the professional advisers that you think the president is ignoring and ought not ignore?
I did ask:
What is the professional advice that you think the president is ignoring and ought not ignore?
By the way, I am surprised that you think that the advice of 61% of the American people is professional advice!
ican, Go and learn what advise were provided to Bush by 1, General Shinseki, 2. the Iraq Commission, and 3. The American People.
December 2006
"Saddam's Iraq and Islamic Terrorism: What We Now Know"
Stephen F. Hayes
Senior Writer, The Weekly Standard
Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism, Hillsdale College
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and DePauw University. Before joining The Weekly Standard, he was a senior writer for National Journal's Hotline. He also served for six years as Director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, Reason and many other publications. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including NPR's Talk of the Nation, FOX News Sunday, CNN's Late Edition, and NBC's Meet the Press. He is the author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America and of a forthcoming biography of Dick Cheney to be released this spring.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on November 9, 2006, at Hillsdale College, during the author's two-week residency to teach a seminar on investigative journalism.
I woke up early on the morning of October 26, 2003. I was in Baghdad, staying at the famous al Rashid Hotel. From that hotel, CNN broadcast images of the first Gulf War to the entire world. In January 1993, as George H.W. Bush prepared to leave office and Bill Clinton prepared to assume the presidency, an American-made missile (TK) crashed into the lobby of the al Rashid, destroying the piano in the Western-style lounge.
On this day, I prepared for another long day hopping from helicopter to helicopter following Paul Wolfowitz around. Wolfowitz, regarded by many as the intellectual architect of the war, was in Iraq for the second time since the beginning of the war. I had also been with him on his first trip in July, when Iraq was still relatively calm, and attacks against coalition troops were sporadic and usually unsuccessful. We had even walked through downtown Mosul, in northern Iraq, without our bulletproof vests and helmets.
It was a false sense of stability. Things had gotten worse in the three months between that trip and this one. The night before we arrived at the al Rashid, a Black Hawk helicopter had been shot out of the sky by insurgent rockets. I spoke with my wife from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, and she was nervous. Her colleagues at CNN had heard rumors of threats against the al Rashid and she knew we were headed to Baghdad. "You're not staying at the al Rashid, are you?" I told her we were. There's nothing to worry about, I said. I'm traveling with the No. 2 official from the Defense Department. If ever a location would be under the tightest of security, it would be the al Rashid.
At 5:59 a.m., we got our wake-up call. My roommate, James Kitfield from the National Journal, volunteered to take the first shower. I had been out later than he had the night before, sipping a few Heineken tallboys at the al Rashid bar with other reporters, officials from the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Iraqis such as Kanan Makiya, who had returned to their country with the hope of making it hospitable to democracy.
As Kitfield headed to the shower, I found that I couldn't sleep. I stood at the picture window of our room on the 11th floor. In the distance on my left, I could see Saddam Hussein's old parade grounds. I had long been fascinated by the monuments that mark the beginning and end of the parade route--identical sets of arms holding two swords that cross over the street. The blades form arches, maybe ten stories high. The street below those swords is paved with the helmets of dead Iranian soldiers--casualties of the Iran-Iraq War that consumed much of the 1980s. The burly arms that hold the swords were said to be exact replicas of Saddam Hussein's--down to the hair follicles.
I surveyed this hideous manifestation of Saddam's megalomania and began to devise a plan. We were not scheduled to visit the parade grounds--an oversight, in my view. So I thought about the best way to convince Wolfowitz and his aides that a short side-trip would be worth the time.
As I looked out over downtown Baghdad, I noticed a bright blue box sitting under some trees just beyond the wall that separates the al Rashid Hotel grounds, along with the secure Green Zone, from the rest of Baghdad. That it was out of place--a small patch of color in a landscape that was otherwise desert brown to the horizon--seemed curious but not threatening.
A moment later, I watched as the first rocket left the blue trailer and whizzed over the wall toward the hotel. Then came another, and another, and another, and another, and another--flares of orange on a straight-line trajectory into the lower floors of the hotel. I suppose I expected them to stop, figuring whoever was shooting would have to pause and reload. So for probably 15 or 20 seconds, I stood at the window and watched. I looked in vain for the people firing at us. And the rockets just kept coming.
It finally occurred to me that standing in front of a window was not a good place to be, so I turned and ran out of the room. In the time it took for me to get from the window to the door--maybe two seconds--one of the rockets hit our floor. The hallway was filled with smoke, so, taking my cues from two soldiers crawling on their knees and elbows, I dropped to the floor. The door to my room shut behind me. Remembering that Kitfield was still in the shower, I pounded on the door to get his attention, but he was already on his way out, wearing only a towel. He joined me in the hallway, and we waited until the concussive blasts had ended.
The hallway had already begun flooding. Six rooms down from ours, an internal wall had been blown into the hall by the rocket. The smoke seemed to be getting thicker, and there were shouted warnings of a "big fire," though I never saw one. I stopped in the room next door to ours, where NBC News cameraman Jim Long and veteran Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski were standing in front of the window. Long was shooting video of the smoke near the blue trailer.
I walked down the hall to survey the damage. It was restricted to one room, but extensive. Water on the 11th floor was more than ankle-deep. The man staying in the room that was hit, Lt. Col. Charles Buehring, was a top adviser to L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator of Iraq. Buehring did not survive his injuries. As I walked down the 11 flights of stairs to the lobby, I noticed a small drop of blood near the fourth-floor landing. By the time I reached the ground floor, the white tiles were mostly covered with red footprints--some showing the treads of shoes, others the imprints of bare feet. In all, 16 al Rashid guests were injured.
The preliminary investigation would reveal that the attack could have been far worse. The blue trailer held 40 anti-tank rockets--20 Russian and 20 French. Just 29 of the 40 rockets fired. Seventeen of those 29 hit the building. And only six of the 17 rockets that hit the building exploded. So six out of 40 did what they were supposed to do.
The subsequent investigation at first focused on a senior Iraqi regime official and his contact at the hotel, the head of catering at the al Rashid, who, it turns out, had long been an informant for Iraqi intelligence. But then came a surprise: Everywhere investigators looked, they turned up evidence that pointed to a collaborative effort between Saddam loyalists and Islamic fundamentalists affiliated with al Qaeda. It was the kind of cooperation--between secularists and Islamic radicals--that the U.S. intelligence community had long assured us would never happen. And yet it did. Again and again and again. And it is still happening throughout Iraq today.
I did not come here today to defend the Iraq War, although I am certainly willing to do that. I know people of goodwill disagree about the necessity and conduct of that war--and President Bush was reminded of that fact on November 7. Rather, I'd like to look at a fundamental misconception about that war--particularly among elites--and consider what it says about our conduct of the Global War on Terror and our prospects for winning.
For five years, beginning just days after the attacks on September 11, one question has dominated the national debate: Is Iraq part of the War on Terror or a distraction from it? This was debated prior to the 2002 elections, when Congress voted by heavy margins to authorize war. It was a central issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. And, in a sense, it was one of the primary issues in the recent congressional elections. And yet, as much as this is the fulcrum of the national debate on U.S. foreign and defense policy over the last half decade, few people have addressed it seriously.
War opponents have taken to making claims that are demonstrably false. Representative Jack Murtha, a longtime hawk and leading critic of the Iraq War, appeared on Meet the Press last spring. He told Tim Russert: "There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went there. None. There was no connection with al Qaeda. There was no connection with terrorism in Iraq itself." Before that, a Kerry campaign spokesman told us, "Iraq and terrorism had nothing to do with one another. Zero." Network television anchors tell us the same thing. A high-profile Washington Post columnist described Iraq's connections to terrorism as "fictive." And on it goes.
The Bush Administration has neglected to respond to those challenges. What is the truth about Iraq and terrorism? Why doesn't the public hear about it? And why does it matter?
Failed Intelligence
In the months and years before the Iraq invasion, the U.S. intelligence community--with a few notable exceptions--believed that secularist Iraqis would never work with radicals like Osama bin Laden and that fundamentalists would never cooperate with an infidel like Saddam Hussein.
On what did they base these opinions? Not much.
Before 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community never penetrated the senior leadership of either Iraq or al Qaeda--two of America's most dangerous and determined enemies. Think about that. Bob Woodward interviewed the head of the Iraq operations group at the CIA, who told him that CIA reporting sources inside Iraq before the war were thin. How thin? "I can count them on one hand," he said, "and still pick my nose."
In July 2004, a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded: "The Central Intelligence Agency did not have a focused human intelligence collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until 2002. The CIA had no [redacted] sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism." And that same report quoted an unnamed Intelligence Community official who made this breathtaking admission: "I don't think we were really focused on the [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that."
Again, think about that. Saddam Hussein claimed that the Mother of All Battles, as he called the Gulf War, never ended. His government harbored several of the world's most notorious terrorists--Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal among them. Within days of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, his government facilitated the escape from U.S. authorities of the Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for that bombing. Less than two months later, his intelligence service botched an attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush on a visit to Kuwait. By the late 1990s, he was supplying chemical weapons expertise to terrorist-friendly Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan. He wired $150,000 to his intelligence chief in Prague to blow up the U.S. government's headquarters of Radio Free Europe. An Iraqi government-run newspaper called Osama bin Laden an "Arab and Islamic hero" and there were several credible reports--including some from open sources--that Saddam Hussein offered bin Laden safe haven in 1998.
All of this, and yet the U.S. intelligence community wasn't "really focused on the [counterterrorism] side" of the threat from Iraq. I'd submit to you that that was an oversight.
Let's spend a moment on two of those matters:
On October 2, 2002, a young Filipino man rode his Honda motorcycle up a dusty road to a shanty strip mall just outside Camp Enrile Malagutay in Zamboanga City, Philippines. The camp was host to American troops stationed in the south of the country to train with Filipino soldiers fighting terrorists. The man parked his bike and began to examine its gas tank. Seconds later, the tank exploded, sending nails in all directions and killing the rider almost instantly.
The blast damaged six nearby stores and ripped the front off of a cafe that doubled as a karaoke bar. The cafe was popular with American soldiers. And on this day, SFC Mark Wayne Jackson was killed there and a fellow soldier was severely wounded. Eyewitnesses immediately identified the bomber as a known Abu Sayyaf terrorist.
One week before the attack, Abu Sayyaf leaders had promised a campaign of terror directed at the "enemies of Islam"--Westerners and the non-Muslim Filipino majority. And one week after the attack, Abu Sayyaf attempted to strike again, this time with a bomb placed on the playground of the San Roque Elementary School. It did not detonate. Authorities recovered the cell phone that was to have set it off and analyzed incoming and outgoing calls.
As they might have expected, they discovered several calls to and from Abu Sayyaf leaders. But another call got their attention. Seventeen hours after the attack that took the life of SFC Jackson, the cell phone was used to place a call to a top official in the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Hisham Hussein. It was not Hussein's only contact with Abu Sayyaf.
One Philippine government source told me: "He was surveilled, and we found out he was in contact with Abu Sayyaf and also pro-Iraqi demonstrators. [Philippine Intelligence] was able to monitor their cell phone calls. [Abu Sayyaf leaders] called him right after the bombing. They were always talking."
A subsequent analysis of Iraqi embassy phone records by Philippine authorities showed that Hussein had been in regular contact with Abu Sayyaf leaders both before and after the attack that killed SFC Jackson. Andrea Domingo, immigration commissioner for the Philippines, said Hussein ran an "established network" of terrorists in the country. Hisham Hussein and two other Iraqi embassy employees were ordered out of the Philippines on February 14, 2003.
Interestingly, if the Iraqi regime had wanted to keep its support for Abu Sayyaf secret, the al Qaeda-linked group did not. Twice in two years, Abu Sayyaf leaders boasted about receiving funding from Iraq--the second time just two weeks after Hisham Hussein was expelled. The U.S. intelligence community discounted the claims.
Then there is the case of Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who had come to the United States six months before the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In the days after the attack, Yasin was detained twice by the FBI. Although he offered investigators details of the plot, he was released on the assumption that he would be a cooperative witness. Released. Twice. The second time the FBI even drove him home. According to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, Yasin promptly "fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance." His travel was arranged by the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan. In 1994, a reporter for ABC News went to the home of Yasin's father in Baghdad and spoke with neighbors who reported that Yasin was free to come and go as he pleased and was "working for the government." So an Iraqi participant in an al Qaeda attack on the U.S. mainland fled to Iraq--with Iraqi government assistance--after those attacks.
These are just two examples among hundreds of things that we knew about Iraq and terrorism before the war. And we knew these things despite the woeful state of our intelligence operations in Iraq. You might say these are things we learned almost by accident.
Ignorance as Policy
We now know much more about Iraq and terrorism. In the three-and-a-half years since the war began, the U.S. government has collected more than two million "exploitable items" from Iraq. That's a term of art to describe documents including payroll logs, audio and videotapes, strategy memos between senior Iraqi regime officials, letters between government agencies and computer hard drives of top Iraqi ministers. In these documents we have an extraordinary history of prewar Iraq. In these documents we can get answers to the many outstanding questions of what Saddam Hussein was doing in the years leading up to the most recent Iraq War and, in some cases, what he was doing once the war began. It is such a potential treasure trove that you would think the U.S. government would have doubled or tripled its teams of analysts and translators in order to mine this information for clues about Saddam's weapons, his secret allies, and his relations with a wide variety of terrorists.
But the U.S. intelligence community, now led by John Negroponte, has steadfastly resisted serious attempts to exploit and release the information captured in postwar Iraq. As of March, three years after the war began, the U.S. intelligence community had fully translated and analyzed less than five percent of the documents captured in postwar Iraq. In some cases, they actually fought efforts to increase their budgets--something that is unheard of in the intelligence bureaucracies. At one point, a little more than a year into the document exploitation project, senior intelligence officials tried to have the project shut down altogether.
Why is this? Why would our intelligence community choose ignorance? There are several complicated reasons. But I suspect the most important one is simple. In those years that the U.S. intelligence community wasn't "really focused" on Iraqi terrorism, the Iraqi regime had been.
Consider just a couple examples of what we have learned from a review of just the small percentage of documents that have been translated.
In 1995, a senior Iraqi intelligence official met with Osama bin Laden. After the meeting, Saddam Hussein agreed to broadcast al Qaeda propaganda on Iraqi government-run television and to let the relationship develop through discussion and agreement.
In 1998, a confidante of bin Laden visited Baghdad as a guest of the Iraqi regime, staying in the Iraqi capital for two weeks at government expense. The document corroborated telephone intercepts the U.S. government had not previously been able to understand.
And what about the two items I mentioned before--Iraq's support for Abu Sayyaf and its relations with Abdul Rahman Yasin?
A fax from the Iraqi Embassy in the Philippines to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad, dated June 6, 2001, confirms that the Iraqi regime had been providing arms and weapons to Abu Sayyaf--the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines responsible for the death of Mark Wayne Jackson.
Iraqi financial records confirm that the government supported, harbored and financed Abdul Rahman Yasin, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, throughout the 1990s.
Who Cares?
Skeptics ask: Isn't this just history? Why does this matter now?
To answer that question, let us return to Baghdad. It is April 2003, just days after U.S. Marines toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. David Dunford, a career foreign service officer, was working alongside other Americans and several Iraqis in the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs building. Dunford had been recruited to come to Iraq to help the Iraqis set up a new Ministry.
The team sifted through the detritus of the bombed-out building. Walls were black from smoke. One office had a pile of ashes in the middle, all that was left of the files of one senior ministry official. Elsewhere, they found employment records, personnel documents, and other relatively unimportant documents.
But there were important ones, too. Dunford and his Foreign Ministry team unearthed a memo from the director of Iraqi Intelligence to other senior Iraqi regime officials. An Iraqi translated it for them on the spot. Dated February 2003, a month before the beginning of the war, it read like a blueprint for the insurgency. Dunford and his colleagues turned it over to the CIA and heard nothing about it ever again, despite several requests for more information.
This description comes from Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who saw a copy of the document months after it was found. "The document," Bremer said, "listed orders for point-by-point strategy to be implemented after the probable collapse of the regime beginning with the order of "Burn this office."" Bremer continued: The document called for "a strategy of organized resistance which included the classic pattern of forming cells and training combatants in insurgency. "Operatives" were to engage in "sabotage and looting." Random sniper attacks and ambushes were to be organized. The order continued, "Scatter agents to every town. Destroy electric power stations and water conduits. Infiltrate the mosques, the Shiite holy places."
Let's remember the chronology. The document was written shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq and found immediately after. It was provided the same day to an intelligence team called the "fusion cell" in Baghdad. Thus we had documentation in April 2003 that an insurgency had been planned. And yet Donald Rumsfeld and others said repeatedly throughout that spring, and the following summer and fall, that there was no insurgency.
I called David Dunford to talk about what he found. As an aside, I should point out that Dunford is a strong critic of the Bush Administration and its foreign policy. He has had harsh words for the "ideological" components of the reconstruction.
I knew about the insurgency memo from an Iraqi who worked with Dunford. The Iraqi told me about another document found in the same batch of files. I did not mention the second document to Dunford when we spoke. I started the conversation by asking about the insurgency memo. Dunford remembered finding it, but told me that he did not recall details about it. Then, without prompting, he added this: "I do remember one document that we found that was a list of jihadists, for want of a better word, coming into Iraq from Saudi Arabia before the war. That suggested to me that Saddam was planning the insurgency before the war."
The jihadist document listed "hundreds and hundreds" of fighters who had come from several countries in the region, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Syria. There were other similar lists found throughout Iraq. I spoke to one intelligence official who described footlockers full of such documents sitting untouched at a U.S. military base in Baghdad.
A similar set of documents was examined by the Pentagon and discussed in a long report called the "Iraqi Perspectives Project." That book-length treatment of the former Iraqi regime, written by military historians led by Dr. Kevin Woods, reported that the Saddam Fedayeen--one of several domestic Iraqi terrorist groups--began training young recruits in 1994. That year, they turned out 7,200 would-be Iraqi terrorists.
Four years later, the program expanded: "Beginning in 1998, these camps began hosting Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, 'the Gulf,' and Syria." It is not clear from available evidence where all of these non-Iraqi volunteers who were "sacrificing for the cause" went to ply their newfound skills. Before the summer of 2002, most volunteers went home upon the completion of training. But these camps were humming with frenzied activity in the months immediately prior to the war. As late as January 2003, the Arab volunteers participated in a special training event called the "Heroes Attack."
Who are these Arab volunteers? Are they still working with former Iraqi regime officials? How many of them are in Iraq, taking shots at our soldiers? And why doesn't anybody care to find out?
I'd like to finish with another paragraph from the "Iraqi Perspectives Project," this one also based on a captured Iraqi document. I hope you'll bear with me as I quote verbatim. As I read, I'd like you to think about the conventional wisdom, as articulated by Representative John Murtha and others, that until the U.S. invasion, Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism:
"The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for 'special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].' Preparations for 'Blessed July,' a regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion."
