Thompson: Iran Helping Kill U.S. Troops
IRVING, Texas (AP) - Fred Thompson, the politician and actor considering a White House bid, said Friday he favors helping the Iranian people overthrow the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if the chance arises.
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7/7 ‘mastermind’ is seized in Iraq
Sean O’Neill, Tim Reid and Michael Evans (H/T: A J Strata)
The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans.
Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay.
Abd al-Hadi was taken into CIA custody last year, it emerged from US intelligence sources yesterday, in a move which suggests that he was interrogated for months in a “ghost prison” before being transferred to the internment camp in Cuba.
Abd al-Hadi, 45, was regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s most experienced, most intelligent and most ruthless commanders. Senior counter-terrorism sources told The Times that he was the man who, in 2003, identified Britain as the key battleground for exporting al-Qaeda’s holy war to Europe.
Abd al-Hadi recognised the potential for turning young Muslim radicals from Britain who wanted to become mujahidin in Afghanistan or Iraq into terrorists who could carry out attacks in their home country. He realised that their knowledge of Britain, possession of British passports and natural command of English made them ideal recruits. After al-Qaeda restructured its operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas he sought out young Britons for instruction at training camps. In late 2004 Abd al-Hadi met Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, from Leeds, at a militant camp in Pakistan and, in the words of a senior investigator, “retasked them” to become suicide bombers.
They were sent back to Britain where they led the terrorist cell that carried out the 7/7 bombings, killing 52 Tube and bus passengers.
Pakistani intelligence sources said that Abd al-Hadi was also in contact with Rachid Rauf, a Birmingham man now in prison in Pakistan and alleged to be a key figure in last summer’s alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners in mid-flight. ...
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Al Qaeda-Cowed Nation Indicts U.S. Soldiers
Jules Crittenden
It was only a matter of time. Charges of homicide and “crimes against the international community” from a Spanish court against LTC deCamp, Maj. Philip Wolford and Sgt. Shawn Gibson in the death of Jose Cuoso in the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad, April 8, 2003.
This is absurd, and shows a gross disregard for the facts. Unfriendly investigations by Reuters, Reporters Sans Frontieres and the Committee to Protect Journalists, in addition to the U.S. military’s own investigation, failed to turn up evidence of murder. Despite RSF’s sensational claim and CPJ’s insinuations to the contrary, none were able to demonstrate anything but an accident of war. There was a negligence on the part of U.S. military planners to mark the Hotel Palestine as a sensitive site, but that hardly makes these three soldiers guilty of murder.
Like every non-Iraqi in Baghdad that day, Cuoso chose to put himself in harm’s way. He may have thought he was safe in the Hotel Palestine. He learned otherwise. There is no safe place in a war zone. Just ask Julio Anguito Parrado. The day before Cuoso was killed, Parrado and German newsman Christian Liebig stayed behind when our armored column left to attack Baghdad. They thought it would be too dangerous. They were killed when an Iraqi anti-tank missile hit the brigade’s tactical operations center in the rear assembly area. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be an investigation into Parrado’s death.
In the Hotel Palestine incident, the fault lies with Iraqi soldiers and irregulars who chose to use civilian buildings, civilian vehicles and civilian clothes, who were swarming on the east bank of the Tigris and firing from there all morning. Those of us who were on the ground had never heard of the Hotel Palestine, unlike everyone else who had access to TV. It was not marked on Wolford’s maps. The entire city was a free-fire zone, and U.S. soldiers were at liberty to put rifle bullets, tank rounds, artillery or aerial bombs into any structure that presented a threat. ...
CPJ makes a big deal about how visible the Hotel Palestine sign is from the Jumhuriya bridge. Everything was covered with dirt from heavy dust storms when we were there, and it was a hazy day. In any case, we had been fired on from a number of high-rise civilian buildings that day. ...
Read the whole thing. Jules was imbedded with the U. S. unit involved during the invasion and knows the Soldiers involved personally.
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Saudis bust seven terror cells, arrest 172
Allahpundit
I’ve read the AP, BBC, and Reuters reports on this story and nowhere does it say the cells were linked, so this may have been a sort of “Five Families” operation to hit a bunch of different people simultaneously while their guard was down. Come to think of it, none of them specify when the arrests were made, either. It could be that they’ve been busting people continuously over the past six months and only chose to go public today.
172 people, though. That’s a lotta jihad. From Reuters:
[...]
Just thinking out loud here — just “airing” a theory, as our pal Sully might say — but most of the Saudi oil fields are in areas populated by the country’s Shiite minority. If Iran’s worried about a U.S. or Israeli attack and looking to lash back at the Sunnis, Saudi oil would be a prime target, with some of the local Shiites perhaps being willing to shelter Iranian saboteurs who have already infiltrated the area. The Beeb and the AP note Al Qaeda’s jihad against the Saudis but notably don’t draw the inference Reuters did about which group was meant by the reference to “the deviant ideology.” It’s worth keeping an eye on this to see if any news trickles out about some of the suspects being Shiite or linked to Hezbollah. ...
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172 Militants Planning Attack on Oil Fields Arrested in Saudi Arabia
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi police arrested 172 Islamic militants who were on the verge of carrying out a series of terror attacks on oil facilities, military zones and public figures, the Interior Ministry said Friday. A spokesman said all that remained in the plot "was to set the zero hour."
An Interior ministry statement said police seized weapons and more than 20 million riyals ($5.33 million) in cash, from seven armed cells.
"Some had been training on the use of weapons, and some were sent to other countries to study aviation in preparation to use them to carry out terrorist operations inside the kingdom," the statement said.
U.S. officials characterized the plot as "extremely serious" and said a connection to senior Al Qaeda leadership — Usama bin Laden or Ayman Al-Zawahiri — had not been ruled out.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that the plot was very similar to Sept. 11, by having militants train as pilots to use planes in the attacks and hitting several targets simultaneously.
"They had reached an advance stage of readiness and what remained only was to set the zero hour for their attacks," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Mansour al-Turki told the Associated Press in a phone call. "They had the personnel, the money, the arms. Almost all the elements for terror attacks were complete." ...
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Saudis say they've busted massive terror plot
(CNN) -- Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry has confirmed the arrests of scores of suspects in an anti-terror sweep related to a terror plot involving attacks on senior officials and government oil, military and security installations, according to a statement posted on the state-run Saudi Press Agency Web site.
A Saudi intelligence official said Friday that the nine months-long terror sweep by Saudi security forces netted 172 militants -- members of cells that make up the al Qaeda network the Saudis have been tracking for years.
The operation was launched with intelligence gleaned from the interrogations of suspects arrested in the unsuccessful February 2006 strike on an oil processing facility in the desert kingdom, an official told CNN.
Some of those arrested had trained abroad as pilots so they could fly aircraft in attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil fields, the Interior Ministry said Friday, according to The Associated Press.
The intelligence official said some of those arrested in the latest roundup had flight manuals, but "they have no real flight training capabilities."
The Interior Ministry did not say the militants would fly aircraft into oil refineries, but it said in a statement that some detainees had been "sent to other countries to study flying in preparation for using them to carry out terrorist attacks inside the kingdom," according to AP. ...
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Iraq vs. Saddam: Behind the scenes
Michelle Malkin
Ed Adams at the ABA Journal e-mailed me an interesting story from the May issue about conversations behind the scenes between the judges on the Iraqi High Tribunal and the American legal advisers to the court. "Contrary to the view held by many in the international community that the proceedings were merely a show trial," Adams notes, "the Iraqi judges seriously debated a wide range of legal issues, according to the American advisers to the court:"
During training sessions for the judges in London, the judges questioned even the legality of their own tribunal.
They pressed their instructors about how history would judge their efforts, including asking what the reaction would be if they acquitted one or more defendants. (One of the eight defendants in Saddam’s trial was eventually acquitted.)
And far from being a rubber stamp for occupying forces, the Iraqi judges rejected a number of requests from their American legal advisers.
The article also scrutinizes Ramsey Clark and the clown anti-war lawyers who exploited the case: ...
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US Nabs Iranian Smuggling Ring In Baghdad
A J Strata
This is another indication that Iran is basically at war with America (and has declared so themselves):
US forces on Friday detained four members of a gang suspected of smuggling armour-piercing bombs from Iran to Iraq and sending back militants for “terrorist training”, the military said.
A statement from US command in Iraq said the suspects were picked up in an early morning raid on the east Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, a known stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
“The individuals targeted during the raid are suspected members of a secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of weapons and explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, from Iran to Iraq,” it said.
The EFP is a form of roadside bomb in which the detonation of an explosive charge inside a steel tube causes a copper disk to deform into a fist-sized chunk of supersonic molten metal that can scythe through armoured vehicles.
American commanders say the design is exclusively Iranian and in January alleged that at least 170 US troops had been killed by EFPs since May 2004.
No word form Senator Surrender (Reid) how deploying troops out of Baghdad would help stop this kind of international recognized war crime (you think landmines are bad!). Senator Surrender is also doubtful to have any explanation on how Iran could be included in the concept of “sectarian civil war”, which he and other Surrendercrats claim all that is going on right now in Iraq. Someone might suggest to Speaker Squeaker she head back to Damascus right away and ask her good buddy Assad what he thinks this is all about.
More here on how the cell was sending those in the ‘civil war’ to Iran for training. This is clearly an act of war which needs to be addressed forcefully so as to put an end to the risk to our troops in Iraq. And while Bush deals with Iran maybe the Dems should start working on their surrender plans for Ahmedinejad….
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Big fish: Senior AQ commander Abdul Hadi al Iraqi captured
Allahpundit (H/T: Michelle Malkin)
Biiiiig fish. Not only did he operate both in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’s been in the crosshairs since the very beginning — or even before the beginning, actually. Click and scroll down towards the bottom and you’ll find him listed just a few lines below Osama himself in Executive Order 13224, executed by Bush on September 23, 2001 to block assets held by certain groups and persons in connection with 9/11. Or click and scroll just a bit and you’ll find him named, again a few lines below Osama, in a UN document posted a month before 9/11 regarding terrorists operating in Afghanistan. Newsweek published a blockbuster article about him last April that claimed he was dispatched to Iraq, where he was born, along with Saif al-Adel by Osama himself to set up AQ’s organization there after the homegrown insurgency had already broken out. ...
Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi was captured by the CIA as he was attempting to travel back to his native country, Iraq. He was going to Iraq, officials say, to “manage” al Qaeda’s operations, including plots on Western interests outside of Iraq.
He was captured by the CIA in late 2006…
During his time with the CIA, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi was interrogated and revealed useful information about al Qaeda plots, which, officials say, have been disrupted as a result.
Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi had met with al Qaeda members in Iran, officials also said.
The left’s not going to like those boldfaced parts given their obvious implications for where the “real” war on terror is and Iran’s role in it. Expect some Pretty Vicious Rants questioning not only the timing but the whole damned storyline, notwithstanding Newsweek’s well sourced report from a year ago. It stands to reason that al-Iraqi would be traveling through Iran given that it’s the shortest route between Iraq and Afghanistan; it also stands to reason that if we know he’s been there, so do the Iranians and they’re letting it happen. (Which isn’t a surprise given the reports lately of Iran helping Sunni jihadis in Iraq, of which this is only the latest.) ...
Read the whole thing. Ed Morrissey has more here.
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Go, Joe!
Dafydd ab Hugh
I've been reading the speech that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 75%D) gave on the Senate floor, passionately arguing against the surrender bill that the fatuous Democratic majority in Senate and House have just passed (Power Line has the complete transcript). And I came across this passage that quite literally made my mouth fall open.
It's so obvious once Lieberman points it out... but I must confess, I never realized it until I read Lieberman saying it. You will be as stunned as I, I predict (all emphasis added):
In his speech Monday, the Majority Leader described the several steps that this new strategy for Iraq would entail. Its first step, he said, is to "transition the U.S. mission away from policing a civil war -- to training and equipping Iraqi security forces, protecting U.S. forces, and conducting targeted counter-terror operations...."
There is another irony here as well. For most of the past four years, under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the United States did not try to establish basic security in Iraq. Rather than deploying enough troops necessary to protect the Iraqi people, the focus of our military has been on training and equipping Iraqi forces, protecting our own forces, and conducting targeted sweeps and raids -- in other words, the very same missions proposed by the proponents of the legislation before us.
That strategy failed -- and we know why it failed. It failed because we didn't have enough troops to ensure security, which in turn created an opening for Al Qaeda and its allies to exploit. They stepped into this security vacuum and, through horrific violence, created a climate of fear and insecurity in which political and economic progress became impossible.
For years, many members of Congress recognized this. We talked about this. We called for more troops, and a new strategy, and -- for that matter -- a new secretary of defense. And yet, now, just as President Bush has come around -- just as he has recognized the mistakes his administration has made, and the need to focus on basic security in Iraq, and to install a new secretary of defense and a new commander in Iraq -- now his critics in Congress have changed their minds and decided that the old, failed strategy wasn't so bad after all.
What is going on here? What has changed so that the strategy that we criticized and rejected in 2006 suddenly makes sense in 2007?
Uh... yeah. What?
What has changed, of course, is that President George W. Bush has changed! He was finally persuaded that we could not win a "war of attrition" (to use a term that might resonate with older readers); it failed under Gen. William Westmoreland, and it was failing under Gens. George Casey and John Abizaid. Rather, Bush was finally convinced by Fred Kagan, Gen. Jack Keane, and Gen. David Petraeus that we needed a true counterinsurgency strategy, one that focused on restoring basic security to Iraq area by area... that is, turning red to pink and pink to white.
And -- like a weathercock with its arrow reversed -- the Democrats in Congress instantly and automatically point the opposite direction from the prevailing winds from the White House. ...
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Is the War on Terror Over?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Do we still need to fight a war on terror?
The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11.
The British Foreign Office has scrapped the phrase "war on terror" as inexact, inflammatory and counterproductive. U.S. Central Command has just dropped the term "long war" to describe the fight against radical Islam.
An influential book making the rounds - "Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them" - argues that the threat from al-Qaida is vastly exaggerated.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, goes further, assuring us that we are terrorized mostly by the false idea of a war on terror - not the jihadists themselves.
Even onetime neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama, who in 1998 called for the preemptive removal of Saddam Hussein, believes "war" is the "wrong metaphor" for our struggle against the terrorists.
Others point out that motley Islamic terrorists lack the resources of the Nazi Wehrmacht or the Soviet Union.
This thinking may seem understandable given the ineffectiveness of al-Qaida to kill many Americans after 9/11. Or it may also reflect hopes that if we only leave Iraq, radical Islam will wither away. But it is dead wrong for a number of reasons. ...
Hat tip: Dan Riehl, who offers his thoughts here.
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Video: Bill O’Reilly, defeatist?
Bryan Preston (H/T: Dan Riehl)
Bill O’Reilly talked Iraq withdrawal with Rend al-Rahim, a former Iraqi ambassador to the US, and to many ears O’R comes off as defeatist on the war. I’ve watched it a couple of times and I’m not sure what I think about it. He definitely seems to advocate “retreating and regrouping” at the end, though in the strategic context of Iraq that doesn’t make a lot of sense–when we retreat, it will be the Iranians and Syrians who do the regrouping and the marauding while we descend into recriminations over What Went Wrong. Iraq after a hasty US retreat would become a Somalia writ large. Getting out prematurely won’t unify us, won’t heal anything and will end up leaving Iraq in total chaos. I doubt that that’s what O’Reilly has in mind, though I’m sure he is fed up with the war. That much came through loud and clear. So as I said, I’m just not sure what to think about it. So I thought I’d post it and let you all chew on it.a
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How do you know when you’ve lost?
Bruce Kesler (H/T: Lorie Byrd)
How do you know when you've lost? When you're dead or you've surrendered. Otherwise, you're in the fight.
How do you know that you're going to lose? When your death or surrender are certain.
If you're not certain, and the stakes are worth it, you continue to fight.
If you don't believe the stakes are worth it, then quit.
If those on your side don't recognize who the enemy is, they'll walk away or fritter away possibilities by turning on each other.
The Democrat leadership is certain that the United States, and those in Iraq who struggle to build, will fail. The Democrats don't believe the stakes there and consequent are worth having either an open mind or perseverance.
There is no one knowledgeable who agrees with the Democrats. Regardless of whether a critic or supporter of U.S. strategy and tactics, all those knowledgeable recognize that the consequences of bugging out would be even worse than what's there now. The Democrat leaders seek to cloak their irresponsibility in formulas for a small residual force -- that would be overwhelmed by the challenges -- or regional states' cooperation -- by sworn adversaries and accommodators with little record of being or incentive to be constructive. ...
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Iran May Be Closer To Nukes Than Thought
U.S. Intelligence Moves Up Worst-Case Scenario Date To 2010, But Says Iran Will Likely Take Longer
(CBS) CBS News has learned that a new intelligence report says Iran has overcome technical difficulties in enriching uranium and could have enough bomb-grade material for a single nuclear weapon in less than three years.
U.S. intelligence officials caution that before Iran could meet or beat that 2010 date, it would have to make further technical progress in operating a uranium enrichment plant now under construction, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.
Hat tip: Allahpundit, who comments here.
The former Tennessee senator accused Tehran of "playing a larger part in killing our soldiers" in neighboring Iraq.
Many Iranians don't like their government, "and I think we ought to capitalize on that," Thompson told The Associated Press. "There is a chance they may mobilize themselves, and we need to assist them if that happens." ...
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