There's been a Chechen presence in North Ossetia for some time, so I'm not too surprised to see all the usual trappings of Basayev's Riyadus Salikhin - death squads, hostages, and suicide bombers comprised of the widows of dead Chechen al-Qaeda fighters. Basayev's career within the Chechen hierarchy, one must remember, really took off after he held a whole town hostage during the initial Chechen war in the early 1990s.
Judging from recent events, I'd say that he's pushing for an all-out offensive against Russian targets, probably with al-Qaeda's help and unquestionably with their funding. Multiple attacks in Moscow, the airliner bombings, and now this, it's all adding up for a very disturbing picture.
UPDATE: Back from class, though little appears to have changed and we now have anywhere between 100-400 hostages, none of whom have anything whatsoever to do with Russian policy in Chechnya. They're basically just props that Basayev is using to convey his message and if Kavkaz hasn't posted their usual gloating screed I expect it's only a matter of time.
The recent pattern of Chechen attacks in Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Kabardino-Balkaria mark part of the larger shift in the Chechen insurgency away from a national independence struggle into part of an effort by Basayev and Co to carve out their own little emirate in the North Caucasus. This has actually been going on since at least 1999, when Khattab invaded Dagestan and became extremely blatant during the Moscow theater seige, but thus far Basayev seems to have been relying on Chechen apologists in the West and the typical Western short attention span to cut him some slack. Now he's not even trying to be subtle, however, as one can discern from things like blowing up airliners or having his goons take hundreds of kids hostage.
To put this inside a broader framework that I mentioned earlier, over the last several months Russia has initiated a series of moves that look a great deal like preparations for a full-scale invasion of Georgia in order to neutralize the Chechen/al-Qaeda base that's been set up in the Pankisi Gorge. Basayev may well have launched this most recent terrorist campaign in hopes of deterring such an attack.
More on this a little later.
UPDATE: Back again.
Basically, Georgia under Shevardnadze turned a blind eye to Chechen activities in the Pankisi Gorge and in return Russia sponsored the creation of a number of pro-Russian separatist enclaves around the country, in many cases supporting them with Russian troops and equipment. The US helped to assist in Shevardnadze's ouster earlier this year and the new Georgian president Saakashvili took power announcing, among other things, a change in his predecessor's policies towards Pankisi and the other separatist enclaves. First he retook Ajaria (which Russia agreed to ditch in return for cooperation on the Chechen situation) and has more recently sought to consolidate several other enclaves.
Unfortunately, the raid into Ingushetia earlier this summer, which was planned and directed from Chechen bases in Pankisi, pretty much set back all of the progress that had been made in repairing Georgian-Russian relations. Both Putin and Saakashvili have been hinting that war is inevitable over the last several weeks and there have been clashes between Georgian troops and fighters loyal to the Russian-backed separatist enclave of South Ossetia. One thing that should be noted is that if Putin does attack Georgia, he sure as hell isn't going to stop at Pankisi - the whole republic is going to be conquered and annexed as part of the Russian Federation, probably in the same brutal way that Chechnya has been. Now Basayev is likely aware of all of this and recognizes the dangers inherent to losing Pankisi, so he may be launching this terror offensive as part of a bid to deter Putin. Whether it'll work or not, I have no idea.
Finally, as I've said time and time before, I do not in any way condone what the Russians do in Chechnya. The Russian actions in Chechnya are worse than simply brutal - they are counter-productive to any kind of stabilization of the situation and the sooner the Kremlin recognizes that the better. However, that does not change the fact that Basayev is in cahoots with al-Qaeda or that he and his jackboots are part of the same terrorist coalition that attacked the US on 9/11.
Like most people who live in the New York area, I regard the upcoming Republican Convention with unalloyed dread. It's not so much the Convention itself, of course, as the attempt to restage The Battle in Seattle, this time in Manhattan. This isn't going to work, not with the NYPD, but there will be quite a show, even if nothing really bad happens.
Then there is this consideration: where are the rabbles of yesteryear?
Until quite recently, all major cities had a floating population of pickup workers and petty thieves, always ready for anything. They could easily be launched against public institutions by demagogues with a sense of timing. You still have this situation in third-world countries and in some shabbier American neighborhoods. For the most part, however, the only place we see a traditional urban mob is on The Simpsons. If Dr. Frankenstein worked in Manhattan, you might be able to get an injunction to close down his monster-factory, but the only people likely to lay siege to it would be a dozen LaRouchies, and no way could they get a permit to carry torches.
What do we have now? We have performance artists, and an equal number of videographers to take their pictures. Then we have the anarchists, who seem less like traditional revolutionaries than like people who have turned political protest into an extreme sport. Then there is the fact the action will be in Midtown Manhattan, where nobody lives. How do you stage a proper urban riot without cavalry hacking at the rioters through the streets of their own hovels?
It's all very inauthentic, if you ask me.
Indeed.
Oh, and there should be an upcoming piece in NRO that should be of interest to readers.
This is the first double suicide bombing in Israel for quite some time, though I'm not certain whether or not this means that Hamas or Islamic Jihad have been able to reestablish their infrastructure in the West Bank following over a year's worth of heavy attrition by the Israeli military. The Hamas central command has pretty much been destroyed and while operations have been decentralized to local leaders, the Israelis have done a pretty good job of rounding them up or killing them as well. We should know within the next month or so whether this was simply a lucky shot (from the terrorists' perspective) or the part of a larger offensive.
The Moscow bombing is a bit more troubling, because after the double plane bombings Russian security forces (whose interrogation tactics make what happened at Abu Gharib look like Sesame Street by comparison) should have been on high alert, given possible intelligence that there may have still been potential suicide bombers in the capital. These suicide bombers, of course, are members of Shamil Basayev's Riyadus Salikhin suicide squad and I believe that this is their second attack in Moscow this year (the February 2004 Moscow metro bombing). Widespread (and accurate) beliefs about Russian corruption aside, Putin doesn't exactly run a free society and if suicide bombers can go after Moscow, they can hit any Western capital too.
One thing I'm hearing that I found interesting is the theory that it might be possible for female suicide bombers to conceal explosives in their vagina. Now I'm not trying to be crude here, but anybody know whether or not this is a feasible way of bringing in explosives for use in a terrorist attack? I know that the PKK and the Tamil Tigers have made extensive use of female suicide bombers, but I never recalled reading anything about this. Anybody want to weigh in on this one?
UPDATE: A reader points me to this story from the Moscow Times.
Here are the relevant excerpt after the author explains why Putin would never actively conceal a terrorist attack perpetrated by Chechens:
The FSB seems at first to have truly believed that terrorism was not involved in the crashes. But everything changed when it was determined that female passengers with Chechen surnames had been on both flights, and that their relatives had neither inquired about them nor claimed compensation.
The bodies of the two Chechen women were blown to shreds, perhaps an indication that they were suicide bombers. But how did they smuggle explosives through airport security and onto the planes?
The suspected terrorists boarded flights at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, the most modern in Russia. Domodedovo boasts security procedures and equipment on par with leading airports worldwide. If terrorists have found a way to breach security here twice in one day, they could repeat this feat anytime, anywhere, in Russia or in the West.
The FSB is now trying to determine whether the terrorists had help from someone on the inside. Another theory being investigated is that the bombs were smuggled aboard and concealed not at Domodedovo, but at some other Russian airport with lax security. According to this theory, the terrorists simply boarded the planes in Moscow and detonated the bombs in midair.
A straight breach of security at Domodedovo with no accomplice on the airport staff is the worst-case scenario.
Experts have long entertained the possibility that explosives could be smuggled inside the body cavities of terrorists. Females would enjoy an obvious natural advantage in carrying out this task. Once the plane was off the ground, the terrorist would go to the bathroom, extract the explosive, wire it to a battery from a watch or CD player, and install an electric detonator concealed in his or her hand luggage. Chemical detonators requiring no batteries could also be used. Hexogen is a more powerful explosive than the soap-like solid TNT, and it is a powder, easy to conceal in a body cavity.
The explosions that brought down both planes last Tuesday occurred in the tail, in the vicinity of the lavatories.
We may soon be required not only to remove our shoes when we go through airport security, but to submit to body cavity searches. Modest people and orthodox believers of all faiths would face a very serious dilemma. Passengers might also be routinely X-rayed -- a health hazard. Beefed-up security at the world's airports could mean that we will have to turn up not two or three hours before a flight, but five or six.
You can always take a train, of course, but trains are also blown up occasionally with terrible loss of life. The terrorists would seem to be winning the battle, depriving people around the world of their most advanced means of transportation.
Ledeen weighs in on the Larry Franklin/AIPAC story ...
Required reading on the subject, as he makes a lot of good points. A definite question to be asked is why this was leaked to the press if it is such a big deal. Consider for a moment that if Feith or anybody else at the OSP was actually involved in anything illicit, they have now had ample time to flee the country, destroy any incrimidating evidence, or develop alibis. If this is supposed to be a genuine counter-intelligence operation, it looks like the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
Ledeen should have a piece in NRO tomorrow on the Franklin situation. Judging from today's media reports, I think my suspicion that this is a final attempt by opponents of the neocons at the Pentagon in general and the OSP in particular to discredit them now that a Bush reelection is looking more and more likely over the last several weeks. Near as I can tell, their position is that if their secularized conception of Satan the Bush administration must return to power for 4 more years, the perfidious Jews neocons must not be prevented from returning with it.
Who knows, maybe if they do manage to kick the neocons out they can go back to focusing on al-Qaeda?
Oh and John McCain kicked ass tonight at the convention. I very much doubt we've seen the last him.
It's really too bad that we never got a chance to meet while I was in DC, I have a feeling that it would have been interesting if nothing else ;)
As far as having respect for people with whom one disagrees, I think that this whole idea of AEI/neocons interpreting the world in "allied/enemy" camps is overstated. If you are determined only to work with people with whom you agree in Washington, you aren't going to get very far in the policy-making arena. Period. That goes for neocons, liberals, realists, or any other ideological position you want to set up. Based on my own peripheral view, Ledeen appears to have quite good and mutually respectful relations with people on the other side of the Atlantic, and I very much doubt they all share his views on Iraq.
This is far from the scurrilous, malicious attack that Rubin presents, which might be excused as a heat of the moment defense of friends, had it not come months afterward, after her charges, ignored by everyone but Buchanan, Raimondo and Rockwell, finally gained some currency by being taken up by Teddy Kennedy.
Prior to that point, Kwiatkowski and her charges, regardless of their merits or lack thereof, pretty well occupied the political fringe as far as the power politics in Washington are concerned. Based on what I've read on Mark Shea's blog, I know that you have some respect for Pat Buchanan, but surely you know that he isn't anything resembling a major player in Washington these days. So as long as her charges remained in that niche, my impression isn't that they weren't all that important, especially given all of the other kook stuff that is said concerning the Pentagon in certain quarters these days. The moment that Kwiatkowski's charges found themselves a patron in Ted Kennedy, a senior member of the Democratic Senate leadership, Rubin had to answer her charges. If you think his charges are malicious (and I don't know enough about Kwiatkowski to comment one way or another), all I can say is that it would be entirely understandable given just how much Rubin and all the other very good people involved in pre-war planning process have had their names dragged through the mud over the last two years. Given some of the things that Ledeen, for example, has been accused of (forging the Niger documents and then attempting to pass them off as genuine to the US government, using his family connections to get his daughter a "cushy job" - in the middle of a war zone like Baghdad!) in the past I'm simply amazed that he is able to confront his critics with the civility that he does.
This is yet another reason why Kwiatkowski's account is more compelling (to me at any rate)--the fairly tactical way it was rebuffed. Instead of a way that said the truth was what was important.
Well, if you want to run Kwiatkowski's charges by me I'll be happy to answer what I can, either here or via e-mail. Of course, I could be naive, wrong, or lying, but then that's the same can be said of Kwiatkowski. In the end, people have to make a judgement call as far as what they want to believe.
But having met individuals from the NESA, while having the utmost respect for them (so much I wont identify them) nothing in discussing the Iraq situation with them disabused me of the idea that in fact there was a willingness to cherry pick evidence to fit a preordained conclusion--Saddam was bad and had to go, and the question of the letter of the law was irrelevant.
Well, I hope then you'll be kind enough to understand that I'm behooved not to reveal the people I spoke with in DC on the subject. However, let me point out that cherry-picking intelligence is an entirely different matter from deliberate falsification of data and then lying about it to the general population in order to lull them into ruse under which to prosecute their war (both of which the OSP has been accused of engaging in by any number of people).
On the issue of Saddam Hussein, if you want to ask me whether or not there were people who had their knives out for him for years on end - the answer is definitively yes. That's been the situation since the Gulf War and Saddam did nothing to gain himself any friends inside the Beltway when he tried to assassinate the first President Bush, adopted a shell game approach with regard to the UN inspectors, and essentially engaged in a low-level anti-aircraft campaign against the US as far as patrol of the no-fly zone is concerned. Even the CIA analysis wing and the State Department, once upon a time, wanted Saddam to get the boot and helped initiate a coup attempt against him during the mid-1990s that I'm sure you're familiar with. This failed coup attempt is the root of all the animosity between Chalabi and the CIA, in case anybody is curious. The fact that there were already any number of people ready to go after Saddam Hussein in no way changes the nature of his threat.
The context in which this came up was a discussion of Just War Doctrine, in which my assertion that war was only a remedy for an imminent threat, or a punitive remedy, for a situation which could be solved in no other way, was sort of palmed off as a legalism.
Well, you and I are on the same page on this one, which is why the al-Qaeda link is so important to me in establishing whether or not US military intervention in Iraq constituted a Just War. Next time you talk to your NESA buddies, ask them about Wurmser and Maloof's research, or what Ibn Sheikh al-Libi or Muammar Ahmed Yousef told US interrogators. I don't know how much they may be able to tell, as there's still a lot that I don't know, but based on what I do know about those three areas of interest, combined with the US intelligence consensus that Iraq possessed WMD arsenals (that was the CIA, not the neocons, on that one, just read the Senate Select Intelligence Committee Report), Abu Zubaydah saying that Zarqawi had good ties with the Iraqis, Zarqawi being in Baghdad and masterminding poison plots in Europe, Russia, and the US, Abu Wael, ad infinitum, and I don't see how anyone can come to a conclusion that the standing Iraqi regime had to go in the interest of US national security. No standing al-Qaeda ally should be allowed to exist, not after 9/11. And that's exactly why we need to press aid for the pro-democracy forces inside Iran as well, before it's too late. I believe the Vatican has even gone as far as to say that if Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaeda that intervention in Iraq would constitute a Just War, just as Afghanistan.
That all being said, we don't leave in a majority Catholic society and I strongly suspect that most American Catholics are unfamiliar with the finer points of Just War Doctrine. That being understood, I think it's extremely arrogant for us to expect non-Catholics like Jews (secular or religious) or Methodists or members of any other Christian denomination to frame their policy-making in conjunction with Catholic Just War Doctrine. So secular arguments like grand strategy, humanitarian intervention, ect, are introduced into equation. I don't see why this is such an intellectual hurdle for many Catholics to accept as the question is not so much whether the issue of war in Iraq was going to be framed within the context of our beliefs as it is whether or not the issue of war in Iraq is compatible with Catholic beliefs, no matter what you think of neoconservativism. I hold that it is, which is why I stress the al-Qaeda connection so much in my blogging on the topic.
Finally, let me address this issue:
Nevertheless, palming someone of, in a public venue suited for making ones case, does not particularly acquit one of the sort of suspicions that Kwiatkowski raises--that the OSP was put together for a purpose, a purpose O'Neill, Clarke, Woodward, PNAC, a Clean Break, and manifold other sources amply attest to--that Iraq was an agenda much more suited to Israels interests than the United States. Cole is hardly the first to come up with this analysis.
I'll take these issues one-by-one:
O'Neill - He simply says that there war plans for Iraq in existence at the beginning of 2001. I sure to heck hope there were, given the way contingency planning works in the military and Iraq actively shooting at US planes that were patrolling the no-fly zone at the time.
Clarke - Is inconsistent on the issue of Iraq and in my view his book has some severe contradictions with earlier statements he made, entirely apart from his apparent inability to understand the Mylroie thesis with respect to Study of Revenge. For example, he believes that Mylroie holds that the real Ramzi Yousef is living in Baghdad circa 2001, which is something you won't find anywhere if you take the time to read her actual book and subsequent work on the subject. This ignores Clarke's own suspicion that you can read in documents recovered by the 9/11 commission that bin Laden might flee to Iraq after the attacks or his insistence in attacking the al-Shifa plant in Sudan on the grounds that it was making VX precursors as part of a joint project between Iraq, Sudan, and al-Qaeda. On an unrelated note, Clarke also holds that the surviving al-Qaeda leadership is now based in Iran, which confirms something that Ledeen has been saying for several years now despite the protestations of the CIA, so I would think carefully on that note before you just dismiss him and other neocons as a source.
PNAC - See above on the people who had knives out for Saddam pre-9/11. I never denied that they existed, but I think you need to recognize that these people had to convince other people in Washington in order to get the kind of Congressional majority that was needed to authorize the president on use of force against Iraq.
Clean Break - This deals by and large with the now-defunct Oslo Peace Processor, if memory serves. I fail to understand exactly what this has to do with the US going to war with Iraq.
On the more substantive issue of whether or not Israeli interests were considered in going to war with Iraq, of course they were. So were other countries in the region, but since considering the interests of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, et al before going to war in their backyard aren't the source of Nativist-style "dual loyalty" accusations like those that Cole and his fellow travelers like to hurl against the Pentagon neocons they don't get nearly as much attention. Far more damaging, in my view, is how these charges get repeated in the Middle East, with both Salafist and just general anti-American periodicals always eager to repeat claims made by a bonafide Western "expert" on such charming subjects as how Jews secretly rule the world.
Now did the fall of Saddam Hussein help Israel? Of course it did. The near-term threat of WMDs against Israel was removed, Hamas lost a major patron and most of the remaining pseudo-Marxist terrorist groups like Abu Nidal lost a safe haven, among other things. Then again, it also aided Syria by making Assad the undisputed top Baathist in the Middle East and aided Iran by removing the chief enabler of Mujahideen-e-Khalq. A unified free Iraq also aided Turkey in its own struggle against Kurdish separatists because it removed the chance of the PUK and KDP declaring independence on their own (they already administered pseudo-states) and thereby inspiring Turkish Kurds to do the same. It also benefited the Saudis by removing the greatest military threat to Saudi Arabia in the region other than Iran. I can go on, if you like. The reason why Saddam's downfall can be seen as benefitting a lot of countries in the region is precisely because his government was and had been an international pariah. As such, the benefits of removing it were readily argued to regional governments during the run-up to war.
As far as Cole goes, he doesn't just note that removing Saddam Hussein serves Israeli interests. Rather, he postulates a deliberate conspiracy between American neoconservatives, SISMI (and did I mention he accuses them of masterminding the Bologna massacre?), the Likud party, and both Iraqi and Iranian exile groups to use American troops to destroy Israel's enemies so that Israel can annex the West Bank and southern Lebanon amidst the chaos. You want to believe that, fine, but be aware that it's both wrong and a hideous slander against people who are working extremely hard to protect the United States. In particular, Cole's assertion that Ledeen and Rubin want regime change in Iran so that Israel can reconquer southern Lebanon under Likud auspices (guess building nukes, harboring the surviving al-Qaeda leadership, and brutalizing its own populace doesn't count for much in his book) is both slander and nothing short of a revival of the old Nativist "dual loyalty" charge. You want to talk about a vile, scurrilous attack, Al, there's one for you. And this is hardly the first time that Cole has exhibited this kind of behavior, take a look to read up sometime on his attempt to connect the Abu Gharib prison scandal to Israel.
Now I know that you're not Cole, Al, but given how influential he is within US anti-war circles and his willingness to engage in these kinds of tactics against some of the finest people I have ever met doesn't exactly cause me to leap up in acceptance at his assertions or those of his fellow travelers. But like I said, I try to keep an open mind.
First of all, concerning Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski and Al's comments, regardless of what one might think of neoconservativism, its philosophical underpinnings, and/or the war in Iraq, there is a very big difference between disagreeing with someone's ideas and attempting to slander them (believe me, I am extremely familiar with how this line is drawn). As Al and I are both Catholics (as is Kwiatkowski, I believe), I presume we are both familiar with scriptural injunctions concerning bearing false witness against one's neighbor.
Here's what Rubin says in his NRO article combined with what I already know:
* Kwiatkowski was not involved in any of the Iraq policy planning, but was in fact an Africa specialist in issues relating to Morocco and Western Sahara who never even went to the Office of Special Plans (OSP). * Kwiatkowski got the ranks and services of various people inside the Office of Special Plans. * Kwiatkowski and Steinberg misrepresented information concerning Uri Raanan. * Kwiatkowski said that the OSP is a propaganda unit, which is demonstrably untrue. * Kwiatkowski claimed that there was a purge of non-neoconservative desk officers within International Security Affairs, which is also demonstrably untrue. * Many of the people whom Kwiatkowski claimed worked at the OSP did not, but in fact worked in other Pentagon departments or had retired from government. * Kwiatkowski didn't get the escort ratio between the number of visitors and guests at the Pentagon right. * Kwiatkowski alleged that everybody involved in the OSP was a "chickenhawk," which here again is demonstrably untrue in addition to being altogether irrelevant. * Kwiatkowski does not regard either bin Laden or North Korea as posing a serious threat to US national security. * Kwiatkowski claimed that members of the OSP referred to themselves as the "cabal," which is simply not the case. There people in the analysis wing of the CIA who call them that, but they never refer to themselves by that term.
Now all these claims carry at tad more weight in my view as far as Kwiatkowski's claims are concerned than whether or not she chose to break her story to LaRouche's rag. However, actually having met at least some of the people who are purported to have formed this vast conspiracy to falsify evidence leaves me deeply skeptical as to the claims of their detractors. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee also found no evidence that intelligence agencies were pressured by this alleged cabal to alter their findings with respect to pre-war intelligence, which should pretty handily pop a major anti-war meme that people in Cheney's office forced the CIA kicking and screaming to alter their data. I'm still waiting for apologies to be extended towards all the very good people in government who were needlessly slandered in these pointless and internationally damaging accusations. Same goes for apologies from Joe Wilson, who seems to have headed back underground ever since that same report combined with another released by the British government fairly thoroughly shredded his own credibility. That man and others like him have done incalculable damage to US international relations as a result of their accusations and since they called the tune I'm more than happy to have them pay the piper.
And while we're on the subject of blame on this stuff, no media organization has admitted how well played they were by current/former CIA analysis types who sought to cushion the blow from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report by blasting Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC). Basically, they told media outlets (or at the very least left them with the distinct impression) that the only reason that the US invaded Iraq was the result of what Chalabi and his defectors had to say. They suckered a lot of people on that line, myself included, but once you take the time to look through the US and British government inquiries into pre-war intelligence you'll notice just how little Iraqi defectors had to do with the overall picture that was formed by the CIA and MI6. Look over the familiar news stories and then go back and read both the US and the British reports and you'll see what I mean.
Lastly, on the issue of intelligence, the more I learn about it the more skeptical I am that it was manipulated with respect to Iraq. To be fair, I was already a skeptic of charges like this because a lot of the charges that are tossed around are either internally inconsistent (if we invaded Iraq knowing full well that there weren't going to be any WMDs, why in God's name didn't we plant some?) or else ignore incidents of past evidence to the contrary. This is entirely apart from the more elaborate anti-war conspiracy theories that are floating around. The latest, concocted by a University of Michigan professor we all know and love, holds that the fabrication of pre-war intelligence was all part of an elaborate multi-phase plan between the Israeli Likud party, the US neoconservative movement, the Italian intelligence agency SISMI (and I notice the bogus claim that they carried out the Bologna massacre has been revived in US liberal circles), and a number of Iraqi and Iranian exile groups to involve the US in a series of wars so that Israel could annex the whole of the West Bank as well as southern Lebanon. And yet we're told that neocons are the ones who have to resort to unrealistic and ill-formed conspiracy theories to support their beliefs because they think that there's a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda?
As far as the latter position goes, Abdullah Azzam's son seems to think it adds up, among other things. As to the former, if you want to believe that the sole or leading motivation behind the people inside the US who pushed for the Iraq was due to the desire on behalf of the Likud party and its supporters in Washington to have the US eliminate its enemies in the Middle East using 9/11 as a pretext, go right ahead. But please, before one starts connecting the dots between the evil neocons and their backers/handlers in various governments (I'm actually quite interested to see whether or not I'll ever make one of these charts, seeing how I'm now "tied to AEI and Michael Ledeen"), take a look at what it is your proposing for a moment.
Now I don't believe that Kwiatkowski goes as far as Professor Cole does with respect to the conspiracy theory she's constructed (if I'm wrong on this one by all means correct me), but a lot of what she's saying doesn't sound to me as though it holds water, no more than the CIA analysis wing's claim that Saddam Hussein's secularism served as an obstacle concerning cooperation with bin Laden or al-Qaeda ever did, at least to me. As a result, when I see her and the same usual suspects (oh, and did I mention that Pat Lang, who is frequently cited in these types of intel stories by the press, can be tied far more directly to the Syrian government than any of the civilian officials at the Pentagon ever could be to Israel?) going after Feith et al. with assistance from their fellow travelers at the CIA analysis wing, I can't help but shake my head in a mixture of humor and slight disgust.
Oh, and Wurmser and Maloof were correct in their research as well.
Okay, now I'm getting e-mail about this, this, and finally this ...
You can read Ledeen's responses to the issues at hand here, here, here, and here. If you want my opinion, Ledeen has a lot better track record than all three of these other news outlets put together. His point that the FBI doesn't send out press releases before they go about arresting somebody (especially, one would think, on issues of potential espionage, especially if we're talking about a close ally like Israel) is well-taken, which makes me think that his hunch that this is more internal government in-fighting than anything else makes a great deal more sense to me than the kind of elaborate conspiracy scenarios that some are implying here. If I were of the conspiratorial sort myself, I might suspect that this is one final attempt by opponents of the neocon movement to attempt a coup de grace against the good people in Feith's office prior to the election. There's been quite an industry inside Washington that's mobilized against the neocons since the war in Iraq ended, perhaps with their hated enemy defeated these people will have to go back towards doing their real jobs of fighting al-Qaeda.
Oh, and here's a good primer on some the very people who are once again talking to the press, abeit anonymously.
A couple of quick points on all of this for those who are interested (and incidentally, thanks for the more polite e-mail this time around), as I really do hope that this is my last blog on this topic:
* I know absolutely nothing about this and it never came up during the course of my work for Ledeen. Period. And if it had did, I'll be quite frank and say that I probably wouldn't talk about it.
* This story strikes me as quite odd for a number of reasons (among those cited by Ledeen), not the least of which being that the "secrets" concerning the US policy options towards Iran have been widely disseminated in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. This includes the options of a preemptive attack on Natanz, aggressive support for Iranian dissident groups, or even remobilizing the MEK to aim at Iran. All of this was known to anybody who'd been following the issue of Iran and bothered to pick up one of America's major newspapers.
* The amount of scurrilous accusations that have been hurled against Undersecretary Feith's office over the two years is simply staggering (even worse, they are 99% of the time unable to answer the charges because the information contained therein is classified). And while they were more or less exonerated of the most grievous of these charges by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the US's pre-war intelligence on Iraq (including the claim that Ledeen forged the Niger uranium documents, not that their critics will ever admit it), I have yet to see any of their detractors acknowledge as much.
* Please pare me the (crypto or otherwise) claims that Ledeen, Feith et al are nothing more than a front for Israel/Likud. As I plan to mention in my still-to-be-edited Winds of Change blog, if anyone at AEI ever mentioned Israel or anything relating to its foreign or domestic policy while I was there, I cannot recall it off memory (same goes with Ghorbanifar). Ledeen's main interest, other than the general terrorism stuff that he and I live for, was writing up a book about the history of Naples. If you want to believe that the neocons have a direct line to Ariel Sharon or the Likud party and are in lockstep alliance with him, go right ahead. You're still wrong.
* There are people inside the State Department and the analysis wing of the CIA who have long had knives out for Feith and other neocons both in and outside the government for a number of reasons. Anybody who is remotely familiar with the policy battles inside of Washington should be aware of this and take it into account when they read about charges being made by State people and then corroborated by unnamed intelligence officials. Does it mean the charges are false? No, the charges are true or false on their merits. But this should be taken into account whenever one reads these kind of stories.
* Speaking of CIA/State animus, where did that whole "Chalabi spied for Iran, Pentagon neocons duped" story that popped up for its 15 minutes of fame earlier this summer go?
* I fail to see what a potential espionage case involving Israel has, if at all, to do with the Plame inquiry. Maybe somebody can explain this one to me.
UPDATE: Ledeen has some more here. Worth reading, as it explains why he doesn't talk to the Washington Monthly.
Extremely recommended, though I have to note that most of this isn't getting the coverage that it should, though a lot of media outlet's have been more than happy to report Mike's criticism of the war in Iraq. One point that Reilly makes that needs to be driven home, however, is that whatever one may think of the neocons or their plan for democratizing the Middle East, it's either that, essential withdrawl from the region (which means that bin Laden or his successors will overthrow the standing governments and fight a conventional war with us further down the line), or we more or less adopt the same tactics of our enemies against them. Right now, those are our only options.
Concerning the Islamic Supreme Council of America ...
In the interest of full disclosure, I have some small familiarity with ISCA's executive director Jamaluddin Hoffman. They've been getting some bad press recently over allegations concerning their ties to the Uzbek government that I've gotten some e-mail on, so I figured I'd post what I know about them.
Link I said, my knowledge of ISCA is fairly peripheral, but if the brutal nature of the Uzbek government or Karimov's crackdown on dissidents has anything to do with their agenda, it never came up in any of my conversations with ISCA members. I would probably say that Nathan over at Argus is better suited to qualify on whether or not they are in fact involved with the Uzbek government in any official capacity, but the section their website certainly doesn't look like that of a lobbying group. Indeed, the ISCA section on Iraq looks a lot more informative than anything to do with Uzbekistan.
Near as I can tell, ISCA is a traditional Muslim organization that has risen up inside the US to counter the influence of the Wahhabis. If somebody wants to charge that they're an Uzbek front, you're going to have to do a great deal of intellectual gymnastics to persuade anyone that CAIR or AMC aren't Saudi fronts, as their ties to the Saudi government and its symbiotic religious leadership are a matter of public record. But entirely apart from ISCA's political leanings, one fact is indisputable: ISCA and its leader was out sounding the alarm bell against Islamic extremism in the US and the threat it posed to years before 9/11. So for all the American critics of Islam who ask where all of the moderates are to condemn these atrocities, here's a group that was doing it years ahead of time.
Now I'm far from being an unbiased observer on this issue, as I myself view the ISCA as the best starting point for an Islamic Counter-Reformation (the rise of Wahhabism can be equated, to a certain degree, with the Reformation). But bashing them as being no better than shills for a despotic regime is hardly going to solve accomplish that. If anything, it's just going to play into bin Laden's main argument, that co-existence between the West and Islam is impossible and that one must ultimately destroy the other. The Christian Counter-Reformation helped to put an end to religious warfare in Europe (abeit there were a lot of other factors) and gave us among other things the Jesuit Order, whose tradition of education I now benefit from. Who knows what an Islamic equivalent might produce, if we only let them try?
I had meant to have my piece in Winds of Change done this week, but the more I re-read it the less and less I liked it so it's now being revised. It appears, at least for the moment, that the cause of the Russian flight crashes were two Chechen female suicide bombers, which almost certainly means that they were part of Shamil Basayev's Riyadus Salikhin suicide bombing squad. Putin, I notice, has decided to tone down his hawkishness towards Georgia since the bombings occurred. This is good policy for a number of reasons, Russian domestic politics notwithstanding.
While there is a very good argument to be made that the conflict in Chechnya is never going to end so long as the Pankisi Gorge remains a haven for Chechen insurgents (thereby playing the role Cambodia served for the Viet Cong or Pakistan for the Afghan mujahideen), I am more and more of the opinion that this can be resolved, possibly even by the Georgians internally, without starting yet another bloody war in the Caucasus. Now under Shevardnadze, who turned a blind eye to Chechen activities in Pankisi, this would not have been the case, but the new US-backed appears to recognize that if you lie with the dogs you end up getting fleas and has begun the slow process of bringing Georgia's rebellious (and in many cases Russian-backed, as part of Moscow's payback to Shevardnadze over Pankisi) back under the authority of the new central government.
Now, prior to these plane bombings the Russians had been threatening to invade Pankisi, and probably the rest of Georgia along with it, as a means of ending Chechen infiltration. That the same kinds of explosives that were apparently employed on these planes were also used in the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that helped to escalate but did not cause the start of the current conflict in Chechnya is likely to stir up all kinds of theories as to whether or not the Russians blew their own planes up as a means of gaining a pretext for war with Georgia. As in the case of the theory that the Russians blew up their own apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 for similar reasons with regard to launching military operations in Chechnya, there are a couple of problems here. Russia doesn't need a pretext to attack Pankisi or Georgia, they already have a very well-established one with respect to the issue of the Chechen infiltration that's been going on over the last several years. If Putin wanted a pretext to use to invade Georgia, he could have used any of the Chechen attacks that have been carried out inside of Moscow or the recent incursions into Ingushetia and Dagestan as an excuse.
What I'm far more concerned about, are theories that one of the planes might have been intended to target Putin directly. Al-Qaeda figures like Ghailani and Khan who've been captured in Pakistan over the last several months have told their interrogators that the next major round of al-Qaeda attacks are going to be kicked off following either a new message from bin Laden or a major assassination of some kind. Certainly the President of the Russian Federation would qualify as far as the former category is concerned.
As far as my database is concerned, editing it (which it is very much in need of, for those who have received preliminary or incomplete draft copies) is ongoing and has temporarily been shelved to make way for some major research I'm currently doing on the GIA and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. One of the problems with the database in its current information is that I was so anxious to get my hands on as much information as possible that I didn't put it through any kind of a real vetting process or start looking for contradictory data or the reliability of the information. Some major errors that were noted by one astute reader regarded the composition of the radioactive material that was planted in Moscow by the Chechens during the mid-1990s, for example, originally came from something that Russian intelligence services tried to pass on to the US. Those who already have a copy of the database can look at it, know that it's wrong, and understand a little bit better why the US and other Western countries frequently accuse Russian intelligence of passing on misleading or false evidence to support their claims.
Concerning my earlier remarks on the Swifties, preliminary data appears to indicate that my opinion was incorrect. Perhaps I'll continue thinking pessimistically in this regard, thereby ensuring that they continue to do well ...
Oh, and to the gentleman who was kind enough to write me that e-mail in a quite nasty tone about the FBI probe of a possible Israeli spy at the Pentagon (and yes, the Israelis do spy on us from time to time and we on them, the same is also true in the case of us and the UK, in case anybody is curious, though beyond this general principle I don't know anything of substance about the case), I have to say that I am reasonably certain that this is not in anyway connected to Michael Ledeen except perhaps via the "Kevin Bacon method" of establishing ties between individuals. Ignoring the fact that Ledeen does not work at the Pentagon in any kind of official capacity that I am aware of. I plan on getting into this in more detail in my Winds of Change stuff, but it has never ceased to amaze me how the most foaming critics of the American neoconservative movement are willing to twist and turn in an effort to connect prominent people in and outside of government to Israel, the Likud party hierarchy, or Mossad in a manner that they would never accept from the Bush administration with regard to Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda. The allegation has even been made by certain University of Michigan professor (who is no doubt disappointed that the most recent report on Abu Gharib didn't implicate Israeli intelligence in anything remotely resembling the way that he was so sure that it would, though perhaps he can console himself by blaming it all on the neocons over at the Pentagon) that the real reason that Michael Ledeen or Michael Rubin are adamantly against the current regime over in Tehran (Iranian complicity in the murder of over 300 Americans in a series of undeclared act of war or its brutal repression of its own citizenry not being considered good enough in of themselves in his mind) is so that Israel can retake southern Lebanon. Like I said, if only these same people applied the same standard to Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda that they do to their own allegations. Just based on the e-mail I get, a good percentage of this stuff reads like the Nativist propaganda and accusations of "dual loyalty" that were hurled against Catholics (and are now being revived against Muslims, abeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum) during the 1800s. There are a great many things that may be said about Israel or its policies, but they should be said within the realm of serious discourse, not this kind of conspiracy-mongering.
Addendum: Just so nobody interprets the above the wrong way, I was not referring strictly to liberals or Democrats, the vast majority of whom (at least in my experience) do not hold to those kinds of views on the issue of neocons and Israel. While I myself have noted with a bit of irony the odd alliance that has arisen between the paleocon right and the far left in the US when it comes to bashing Israel.
I'm still monitoring the news reports and I'll wait until the preliminary investigation is completed until making any conclusions, but I wouldn't rule out a Chechen connection to any of this at the early stages, as Basayev has attempted to raise his profile over the summer with the raid into Ingushetia and other recent incidents of violence in neighboring Russian republics in recent weeks.
Of course, we are dealing with Russian equipment, so I suppose it's not all that improbable that two planes could crash simultaneously due to poor maintenance.
Also, the whole idea of one plane blowing up after another reminds me a lot of the original concept behind the proto-9/11 Oplan Bojinka.
