An editorial in Investors' Business Daily sums it up: Enemy No. 1: Anwar The American. They are talking about Anwar al-Awlaki, the American mouthpiece and top English-language recruiter for al-Qaeda who found himself more comfortably in Yemen than America after 9-11. The IBD editorial takes no prisoners with its open.
Upstaging Osama Bin Laden as the most dangerous man in the world may be an American recruiter for al-Qaida: Anwar Awlaki. So why's he talking to Al-Jazeera instead of interrogators? (Emphasis added.)
Any other questions?
You can read the rest if you like. You should actually.
But please, let me know when you can answer the first question.
A interesting and important update to today's DailyBriefing. The ink's not even dry on the French deal to sell Russia helicopter carrier warships and President Medvedev declares NATO a "threat."
5. As France finalizes deal to sell Russia helicopter carrier warships, President Dmitri Medvedev declares NATO "Russia's greatest threat" and welcomes leaders of the Palestinian terrorist group HAMAS to the Kremlin.
And note Russia welcoming Hamas' senior leadership to Moscow today. Just for amusement, the observant might also note that Iran's Supreme Leader welcomed the top leadership of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Tehran today as well.
The January 18th Daily Briefing highlighted the resurgence of piracy off of the coast of Somalia. Actually, the observation made related to the paying of a ransom to the pirates and that paying rewards begets more piracy. Apparently, a total of $9 million was paid in ransoms in the hijacking of the Greek tanker.
The most recent incident has Somali pirates attacking a Cambodian cargo ship. At this writing, there are few details on what happened.
As Jorrie told local San Antonio television station KSAT-12 some of the basics of his company's work. With al Qaeda trumpteting its involvement in Yemen based terrorism, as things heat up in the Horn of Africa region, it is companies like this one that are on the line. This disconnect, if there is one, is that ESPADA is based in San Antonio. Then again, the historic military presence in the city makes almost anything possible.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Jim Jorrie and I are friends and we operate in similar circles.
Some semblance of reality may have set in regarding the "closing" of the terrorist holding prison at Guantanamo. A task force led by the Department of Justice has concluded that 47 prisoners should be held indefinitely without trial. While there is objection and "dismay" being expressed from certain quarters, it seems clear that people are taking a deep breath.
"Just as important as closing the prison quickly is closing it right, and that means putting an end to the illegal policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial," said the ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero.
There will likely be more to this story as time progresses. For now, maybe this will lead to a reconsideration of holding the trials for the September 11th mass murderers in Manhattan.
A big part of today's DailyBriefing is the developing story that the authors of a grotesquely incorrect 2007 National Intelligence Estimate is about to get revised. Finally. And begrudgingly at that.
U.S. intelligence agencies are quietly revising their widely disputed assertion that Iran has no active program to design or build a nuclear bomb. Three U.S. and two foreign counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK that, as soon as next month, the intel agencies are expected to complete an "update" to their controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Tehran "halted its nuclear weapons program" in 2003 and "had not restarted" it as of mid-2007. The officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information, say the revised report will bring U.S. intel agencies more in line with other countries' spy agencies (such as Britain's MI6, Germany's BND, and Israel's Mossad), which have maintained that Iran has been pursuing a nuclear weapon.
What the November 2007 Iran NIE (PDF) said was the following (and unsubstantiated anywhere beyond the initial report paragraph).
A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran's announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work.
The principal authors - Department of National Intelligence employees previously transfered from the State Department - made point that Iran actually had a weapons program, but only in the false context that it had halted it in 2003. They were making political hay and, at the time, trying to derail what they perceived as a possible Bush attack inside and on Iran. That this perception was itself also patently false is of no consequence. What was written is what was written, and it armed Iran's Russian and Chinese allies to undercut any diplomatic efforts - diplomatic efforts - through the UN and the UN Security Council.
Why do I say the NIE will be "begrudgingly" revised? Pay attention to the last sentence from Mark Hosenball at Newsweek.
Yet two of the U.S. sources caution the new assessment will likely be "Talmudic" in its parsing. They say U.S. analysts now believe that Iran may well have resumed "research" on nuclear weapons--theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb--but that Tehran is not engaged in "development"--actually trying to build a weapon. "The intelligence community is always reluctant to make a total retreat because it makes them look bad," says the third American.
Well, that's just too bad. It's not about who's right, but about what's right. Get that backwards and you are incapable of adjusting and playing a game of career defense instead of intelligence offense. This is pervasive throughout the intelligence community (and others, mind you) and leads to intelligence failures and the compounding of errors for the sake of some fool's efforts to cover a turd in the sand.
If you're not man enough to admit when you got it wrong, you're not man enough for intelligence. The end.
Just hours after the public version of the 2007 NIE on Iran was released, John Batchelor and I spoke about it on his radio program - and its intended and unintended consequences.
You'll see, regarding the handcuffing of sanctions, that this analysis was spot on. And the after-effects remain. To wit, China still balking on Iran sanctions.
Important archives regarding the 2007 Iran NIE are referenced in today's DailyBriefing. And, at risk of seeming like I am tooting my own horn, the news today of its revision is a passive admission by its authors that I was spot on in my criticism and analysis. Some archives reproduced below.
In a December 2007 RapidRecon entry, I asked the following very straight-forward question which still remains.
"[A]sk yourself why Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was in North Korea to watch every rogue state's weapons farm team hold an intramural scrimmage with their first nuclear bomb test detonation."
Crickets from the 2007 NIE authors at the time and since. Now, perhaps, they are forced to get it right, even though they are loathe and unlikely to overtly admit being dead wrong. We are not. They were wrong and we were right. Save face if you must, but let's just start getting it right.
UPDATE: I overlooked a simple yet critical part of the 2007 NIE for ThreatsWatch readers: the NIE's politically motivated authors. From Sweetness & Light, meet the three primary authors of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran: "[H]yper-partisan anti-Bush officials" Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Often it is astounding how accurately you can "see the future" by looking back at some of the observations made in the past, even while noting that those observations might have been controversial "back then." It was about four and a half years ago that a wave of political correctness shrouded Congress when it first tried to avoid the impression that we were engaged in a war against all of Islam. Then, for the first time, emerged the concept of the "global struggle against violent extremism" to replace the Global War on Terrorism.
In a Washington Post article, Terrorism as Virus, the War Against Islamist Militancy was actually described by drawing parallels between terrorism and a mutating virus or metastasizing cancer. Indeed, the realization that the threat of al Qaeda spawned global terrorism was not a conventional one, and was one that lacked a singular identity, structure or geographic center led to the observation of it being more like a social contagion. The authors posed that dealing with the global spread of Islamic Militancy with similar context as the World deals with the spread of the H1N1 virus or the fear of a Global Pandemic would lead to asking similar questions.
1. What is the nature of the ideology, how does it spread and what population segment(s) are most vulnerable?
2. What are the dynamics that cause it to spread?
3. What is the long-term approach to stemming its spread?
Whether you, the reader or my colleagues, find this view dissonant in any way, the fact is that the jihad against the West is spreading "like a virus."
Still another report published six years ago, the Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project spoke to a number of factors that predicted the future spread and emergence of Islamic Militancy. Among those observations was this:
The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years. Facilitated by global communications, the revival of Muslim identity will create a framework for the spread of radical Islamic ideology inside and outside the Middle East, including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Western Europe, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong. This revival has been accompanied by a deepening solidarity among Muslims caught up in national or regional separatist struggles, such as Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir, Mindanao, and southern Thailand, and has emerged in response to government repression, corruption, and ineffectiveness. Informal networks of charitable foundations, madrassas, hawalas1, and other mechanisms will continue to proliferate and be exploited by radical elements; alienation among unemployed youths will swell the ranks of those vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.
It went on to project that in the years ahead, al Qaeda could be superseded by other, similar, extremist groups with greater decentralization.
So out of the "global struggle against violent extremism" came the DoD FY 2010 Budget Request Summary Justification clearly referred to what had been the Global War on Terrorism as the "Overseas Contingency Operation."
In August 2009, John Brennan the President's Assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and presented A New Approach to Safeguarding America Admittedly, some of the elements outlined in this speech make sense, especially those that target economic development in areas of the world that are subject to violence and extremist tendencies. But the predicate principle of the speech was this:
Today--as the President's principal advisor on counterterrorism--I want to outline the President's efforts to safeguard the American people from the transnational challenge that poses one of the greatest threats to our national security--the scourge of violent extremists who would use terrorism to slaughter Americans abroad and at home.
Mr. Brennan went on and stated the assessment of al Qaeda:
Al Qaeda and its affiliates are under tremendous pressure. After years of U.S. counterterrorism operations, and in partnership with other nations, al Qaeda has been seriously damaged and forced to replace many of its top-tier leadership with less experienced and less capable individuals. It is being forced to work harder and harder to raise money, to move its operatives around the world, and to plan attacks.
And the focus of this policy was to push the Taliban out of their lairs in Afghanistan to prevent the return of al Qaeda. He also said that casting the "conflict" as a "global war" played into the "warped narrative" of al Qaeda and that it reinforced al Qaeda's view that it was a global entity. Struck from the Presidential vernacular also was the word "jihad" and thus emerges the concept of an "Overseas Contingency Operation" to fight violent extremists.
Not calling it what it is can be a misleading and potentially damaging. Attempting to separate al Qaeda from the Taliban, or posing that the Pakistani group, Lashkar e-Taiba is an unaligned with al Qaeda as was stated by Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism in an address at the CATO Institute seems to ignore the existence of al Qaeda or al Qaeda clones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria (and North Africa), infiltrations in Europe and in Southeast Asia. Again, while debated, the al-Suri approach of a decentralized model of self-sustaining and autonomous cells driven by a common ideology behind the al Qaeda jihad is difficult to deny. In fact there is some evidence and belief that al Qaeda has cells in or influences groups in as many as 60 countries. And this discounts the likely existence of "sleeper cells."
It is hard to see this global battle against Islamic extremism as anything but a Global War on Terrorism. No matter what you call it, terrorism is spreading, as they wrote in August 2005, like a virus.
From an article published in GSN Magazine comes a list of most of the explosives and explosive materials (detonators and blasting agents) that are covered by federal law.
If for no other reason than as a placeholder and a reference, Federal Register.
February 2, 2010 [Listen Here]
What on Earth can Usama bin Laden, the mystical calculus of climate change and US Homeland Security have in common? Does bin Laden really agree with the President of the United States on matters weather? How is it that the...
February 2, 2010