Here's an investigation into a shadowy French intelligence organization called the "Alliance Base". In spite of France's non-participation in the Iraq war the Alliance Base has been cooperating with the CIA in the war on terror. Here's the money quote:

Funded largely by the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, Alliance Base analyzes the transnational movement of terrorist suspects and develops operations to catch or spy on them.

Alliance Base demonstrates how most counterterrorism operations actually take place: through secretive alliances between the CIA and other countries' intelligence services. This is not the work of large army formations, or even small special forces teams, but of handfuls of U.S. intelligence case officers working with handfuls of foreign operatives, often in tentative arrangements.

Such joint intelligence work has been responsible for identifying, tracking and capturing or killing the vast majority of committed jihadists who have been targeted outside Iraq and Afghanistan since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to terrorism experts.

The CIA declined to comment on Alliance Base, as did a spokesman for the French Embassy in Washington.

Most French officials and other intelligence veterans would talk about the partnership only if their names were withheld because the specifics are classified and the politics are sensitive. John E. McLaughlin, the former acting CIA director who retired recently after a 32-year career, described the relationship between the CIA and its French counterparts as "one of the best in the world. What they are willing to contribute is extraordinarily valuable."

The rarely discussed Langley-Paris connection also belies the public portrayal of acrimony between the two countries that erupted over the invasion of Iraq. Within the Bush administration, the discord was amplified by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has claimed the lead role in the administration's "global war on terrorism" and has sought to give the military more of a part in it.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 12:41 AM

 
Here's a report on the ongoing FBI investigation into the Pakistani men who were recently arrested in Lodi CA over terrorism concerns. They had attended terrorist training camps while visiting Pakistan. A curious thing has happened, small planes have been seen flying over the Lodi area since the arrests. While many believe the planes are related to the investigation, no one's talking. Here's the money quote:

A Cessna 182 flies over Lodi. The plane, which is owned by a Delaware company, is one of at least two that have been circling over the city for nearly four weeks. (Courtesy photo by Ken Cantrell) The city is small enough that when a medical helicopter makes one pass overhead, citizens look up. When gang problems flare and local police officers team up with the California Highway Patrol to make use of a helicopter, police dispatchers are besieged with calls from citizens.

So, when white planes began circling over Lodi about four weeks ago -- around the same time scores of FBI agents converged on the city to conduct a terrorism investigation -- people took notice.

"He's doing something. He's doing some reconnaissance," said Lodi resident and pilot Arlene Farley, who even got out binoculars to peer up at one of the planes.

What the planes are doing remains a mystery, though most people believe the activity coincides with the FBI investigation that led to the arrests of five Lodi men. In other parts of the country, small planes have flown in circles over cities also under investigation on ties to domestic and international terrorism.

How long will the planes stay in Lodi?

What are they doing?

Where are they from?

Can they really see anything from that high up in the sky?

Assuming they're government-run, how much are they costing taxpayers?

Some of those questions go unanswered as local and federal officials remain mum.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:28 PM

 
Here's a piece by news correspndent Riz KHan who has worked for the BBC and CNN. He has decided to go to work for al-Jazeera because as he says he feels it has been misunderstood in the West. The accusations in the West of anti-U.S. bias don't detract from the fact that al-Jazeera is widely respected in the middle East for stirring things up in an area of the world with not much press freedom. Here's the money quote:

For more than a decade, both the BBC and CNN ruled the sphere of international news -- and I was one of the few lucky enough to work extensively for both of them during that time. Then, in the mid-'90s came a TV upstart from Qatar, a tiny country in the Gulf. Few channels have raised temperatures the way Al Jazeera has in both the West and the Middle East.

Only one problem . . . no one outside the Arab-speaking world understands it. So, how has it become one of the best recognized brands on earth? Well, it has hoards of unsolicited spokespeople for and against it. Yes, probably mostly against it but, again, I wonder how many of them have actually watched it and -- more importantly -- understood exactly what was being said. I, for one, don't speak Arabic and I'm in no position to judge it with honest, firsthand objectivity . . . so I keep an open mind.

However, I travel a lot and make a point of informally canvassing the opinion of people on how they view the television industry. Put into perspective, Al Jazeera is highly watched and at least quietly respected for stirring things up -- especially in countries where freedom of the press is at best a discretionary term.

Consistently, I listened to Middle Easterners complain about how they felt Western networks had sold out on the way they covered the news, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. They felt that Al Jazeera was filling the gap.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:53 PM

 
Here's an important review of a new play "Nine Parts of Desire" by an Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo. The reviewer, Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout finds that the play which is about the reaction of various Iraqis from different walks of life to the Iraq war, is remarkably objective in that the characters (all played by Raffo herself), express different points of view about the war. This is opposed to most contemporary drama on political themes which almost uniformly supports the political Left. Here's the money quote:

You see a lot of plays when you're a drama critic, and you don't always get to pick them. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of us have a way of sinking deeper into the velvet-lined ruts of our own well-established tastes when left exclusively to our own devices. To be a working drama critic, on the other hand, is to engage with what's out there, good and bad alike. Just because I expect to be exasperated by a show, or bored silly, doesn't mean I can afford to pass it by. Besides, I've been a critic long enough to know that only a fool writes his review on the way to the show. I can't tell you how often I've been surprised at the theater--both ways.

The most recent play to surprise me was a one-woman show called "Nine Parts of Desire." In it, Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American actress and playwright, portrays nine characters based on a large and diverse group of real-life Iraqi women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of 'N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade. As interesting (and timely) as it sounded on paper, though, I hesitated before going to see "Nine Parts of Desire," because I feared that its perspective on life in Iraq would prove to be both predictable and tendentious. Specifically, I assumed that the characters would give every indication of having been carefully chosen (and their utterances no less carefully edited) so as to support a particular point of view about the war in Iraq, and that this point of view would be well to the left of center.

Why did I make these assumptions about a play I hadn't seen? Because I've seen, read and heard about enough contemporary American and British plays to know that the political point of view of most of their authors is well to the left of center. Henry Luce, the founder and publisher of Time and Life, was once asked why he hired so many liberals to write for his magazines, given that his own political views were unabashedly conservative. "For some goddamn reason," he replied, "Republicans can't write." Well, they've learned how, but for some other goddamn reason, they don't write plays. Of the 200-odd new plays I've seen in my two years as a working critic, not one could be described as embodying a specifically right-wing political perspective, nor do I know any New York-based playwrights or actors who are openly conservative.

For this reason alone, the odds were good that "Nine Parts of Desire" would reflect in a more or less explicit way the political consensus of what New Yorkers working in theater like to call "the theater community," and that it would do so in a way so blatant as to kill any semblance of drama. Yet it didn't. Never did I feel, not even for a moment, that Ms. Raffo was making her characters tell us what we--or she--wanted to hear. Some of them supported the war, others opposed it. Most expressed no settled opinion about the war, even though its continuing effects permeated their lives, and it soon became clear that her purpose in writing "Nine Parts of Desire" had been not to make a statement about the American presence in Iraq, but simply to suggest something of what it feels like to live there.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:51 PM

 
Here's an important update on the status of the search for Osama bin Laden. He is compared to another insurgent who battled the British in the 1930's and 1940's in Afghanistan known popularly as the Fakir of Ipi. The Fakir was never caught and the British eventually lost interest in finding him. The article goes on to compare the hunt for bin Laden in the same light. The search isn't going anywhere and the recent arrests of al-Qaeda bigwigs has been described by knowledgeable observers as overhyped. Here's the money quote:

He was a legendary jihadi leader who preached holy war, took on the greatest power of his day and caused thousands of deaths in terror strikes. But as British imperial forces hunted for him year after year in the 1930s and '40s, Mirza Ali Khan simply disappeared into the folds of what are now the Pakistani tribal regions. The search for Khan, who was better known to his British pursuers as the Fakir of Ipi, petered out as the decades passed and people lost interest. "The fakir was never captured," says Pakistani scholar Husain Haqqani. "People say he died of natural causes in 1960."

Is this to be Osama bin Laden's fate as well—an enduring case of justice denied? As the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks draws closer, some critics fear that bin Laden too could slip into the mists of history unless U.S. policy—and luck—changes. "Our teams are getting nowhere," says Gary Schroen, a highly decorated former CIA officer who oversaw CIA operations in the region until August 2001 and still works on contract for the agency (he was in Pakistan in March). As the British found out, the steep, cave-pocked mountains of Waziristan, where many believe bin Laden to be, make up the most difficult military terrain imaginable. "That is an area where, if the people don't want you to be caught, you can stay for a very long time," says Haqqani, a former diplomat now at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. "Even with modern surveillance technology, bin Laden could end up being like the Fakir of Ipi."

Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri told reporters last week that he believed bin Laden has been on the run since the capture earlier this month of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the latest culprit to be identified as Al Qaeda's "No. 3." But Schroen says that both the Pakistanis and the Bush administration have expressed too much confidence that al-Libbi's arrest could lead the hundreds of Special Forces, CIA, FBI and other counterterror officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Qaeda chieftain.

There is no evidence that bin Laden's entourage reacted in panic to the al-Libbi news. According to two Taliban operatives interviewed by NEWSWEEK, whose accounts could not be independently verified, bin Laden has been safely ensconced in a secret, well-protected base along the northern Afghanistan-Pakistan border for more than a year. One source cites bin Laden's security guards, and another cites people in contact with them, as saying that most of the leader's meetings with even trusted aides take place outside the base. "The point is to keep everyone, even his most trusted people, confused as to his real whereabouts," says one of these Taliban officials, whose nom de guerre is Ali Khail. And al-Libbi's proximity to bin Laden was hyped, he says. (Khail, a mujahedin commander during the Soviet war who is now a Taliban propaganda and intel operative, claims to have contacts in bin Laden's camp.) A former senior Taliban intelligence officer who today remains part of the ousted fundamentalist regime's intelligence network concurs: "Libbi doesn't know that much to endanger the sheik [bin Laden]," he says.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 1:23 AM

 
Here's a piece by the conservative pundit Mark Steyn about the strategy of Islamists hitting the U.S. on 9-11. It actually made sense to the Islamists because they learned useful things about the West, such as the diasarray of the Western aliance, the flexibility of Western immigration rules and the respect accorded Islam in the West. Here's the money quote:

When bin Laden started yakking on about his “war aims” — taking back Spain, the restoration of the Caliphate — it was easy to scoff, yeah, dream on, loser. But a cursory glance at demographics quickly made it clear that, insofar as Europe has a future, it’s likely to be an Islamic one. That being so, why louse things up by flying planes into buildings? Why not just lie low and in the fullness of time everything you want will come your way? The Wahhabists have successfully radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Albania to Indonesia; they’ve planted their most radical clerics as in-house padres throughout U.S. prisons and even the armed forces. Why screw things up by doing something so provocative it meets even Bill Cohen’s criteria for a response?

Here’s why. It’s always useful to test the limits of your adversaries, and, though it cost them their camps in Afghanistan and much of their leadership, the 9/11 attacks exposed many useful tidbits about the decadence of the West — the worthlessness of the post-modern NATO “alliance” and the active hostility of many of its key members to the United States, the immense deference accorded not just to Islam but to the most radical Islamic groups, especially when it comes to immigration and other aspects of national security. Many Islamists might have suspected all this, but it’s heartening to have it confirmed: If the “sleeping giant” is hard to wake up, his European pals aren’t sleeping so much as in irreversible comas.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 11:31 PM

 
Here's a disturbing scenario whereby the office of the president receives a message from anonymous middle eastern sources. It points out the resolve Iran will show in responding to an attack on its military facilities and contrasts this with the U.S. which values life above all else, making it weaker than Iran in the long run. Here's the money quote:

"When the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, we tested you by holding your diplomats hostage for 444 days under Jimmy Carter while you, the great superpower, remained helpless and humiliated. When 241 US Marines were blown up in Beirut in 1983, Ronald Reagan turned tail and ran away. We observed how Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter made a deal with North Korea that any child could see was meant to be broken. Now that they have announced they violated that agreement and have nuclear weapons and missiles, we observe your confusion and helplessness.

"You claim to be a super power but your foreign policy is amateurish and your society is weak because your values are corrupt. You lack resolve and you cannot bear the pain of real sacrifice. After we understood your weakness, we began our long-term program to become stronger than you.

"We have learned from the Soviet experience during the Cold War. Over the years, we have implanted many sleeper cells all over your country. Your internal security and border control are weak and allow millions to illegally enter your country and to vanish from sight. If you cannot block massive amounts of drugs from flowing into your country, you certainly cannot block WMD components, which occupy far less volume. Today, our agents are multi-ethnic, men and women, and various ages, so that they resemble ordinary Americans and are nearly invisible. Your country is easy to penetrate and easy to hide out in for long periods.

"We now have developed the ability to inflict any degree of damage on your country that we choose. We can strike anywhere, and in the process, multiply the effects by also paralyzing your population through terror. We can do it anonymously, so you will not know for certain against whom to retaliate because you have so many enemies. Sleeper agents eliminate our need to depend on long-range missiles that also reveal their country of origin when fired.

"We have a variety of WMD in position and are constantly increasing their lethality, along with improved battle tactics. We will retain power in reserve so that you will never know just how much additional damage we could inflict, and any attack on Muslims anywhere will bring additional retaliation on your soil. We have enough power in place now to quickly reduce America to Third World status. The same technology infrastructure that allows you to project power abroad becomes your great internal vulnerability. We have long analyzed your entire internal infrastructure, from your economic vulnerabilities to the psychology of terror, and we know very well how to exploit them all to our advantage.

"Any attempt on your part to root out our sleeper cells would fail because they are so well hidden and also because it might trigger painful retaliation. This means that we can hurt you far more than you can hurt us. Even if you kill millions of us, it will not save you from a devastating response by our sleeper cells on your people. We also have the capability in an extreme situation to simultaneously attack your troops and bases throughout the Middle East while creating havoc inside your country.

"How many millions of Americans are you willing to sacrifice in a war with us? This is our version of the mutual assured destruction policy of the Cold War, but with a big difference. Unlike the Soviets, we do not fear death, while you are terrified over incurring small loses. Even exterminating Iran still leaves over 1.2 billion enraged Muslims in the world seeking vengeance, plus a devastating cutoff in your oil imports.

"Despite your great offensive power, including nuclear weapons, you are actually more vulnerable than we are, and this is now going to cost you dearly. You have foolishly waited too long to confront us and now it is too late for you to safely do so.
- posted by Purple Unicorn @ 9:51 PM