[Switiespils]

You're a goddamn mentalist...

[zatronanec]

Another junk piece in today's LA Times!

U.S. to increase focus on Al-Qaida in Iraq

BAGHDAD -- U.S. commanders plan a summer of stepped up offensives against al-Qaida in Iraq as they tailor strategy to their expectation that Congress soon will impose a timeline for drawing down U.S. forces here.

The emphasis on al-Qaida, described by commanders in interviews here this week, marks a shift in U.S. plans away from Shiite militias and death squads inside Baghdad. It reflects the belief of some senior officers in Iraq that the Shiite militias likely would reduce their attacks once it became clear that a U.S. pullout was coming. By contrast, they believe al-Qaida in Iraq could be emboldened by a pullout plan and must be confronted before one is in place.

When the administration began sending additional troops to Iraq, U.S. commanders spoke frequently of the threat posed by the Shiites' al-Mahdi Army, and they issued thinly veiled threats against its leader, the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Although military leaders say Shiite militias loyal to al-Sadr remain a priority, al-Sadr has tacitly cooperated with the U.S. troop buildup, telling his followers to avoid confronting U.S. troops. He is also a key supporter of the U.S.-backed government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Now, with the final infantry troops of the Bush administration "surge" strategy having arrived in Iraq, the military is increasingly focusing firepower against the Sunni side of Iraq's civil war, especially al-Qaida in Iraq.

"These operations are more on towards Qaida because they . . . are the ones that are creating the truck bombs and car bombs that are having an effect . . . on the populace," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day military operations, said in an interview this week. "So we are going after the safe havens that allow them to build these things without a lot of interference."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...=la-home-world

I hope Glenn Greenwald is on the case to expose this outbreak of Bush propaganda at another major US newspaper!

[poispanna]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
I hope Glenn Greenwald is on the case to expose this outbreak of Bush propaganda at another major US newspaper!
I just received this PM from a Thomas Ellers. Seems you need to be a bit more cautious in disparaging Greenwald


Greenwald only has a New York Times Best Selling Book on the Bush Administration and its abuses of power. And he has one of the most-read blogs on the Interent, after 9 months of blogging. And Senators read from his blog at Senate hearings and his posts lead to front-page news stories in major newspapers. Don't mess with big bad Glenn.

[xtrudood]

Now, with the final infantry troops of the Bush administration "surge" strategy having arrived in Iraq, the military is increasingly focusing firepower against the Sunni side of Iraq's civil war, especially al-Qaida in Iraq. I hope the Sunnis and AQ wear different hats so we can tell them apart lest we attribute the deaths of Sunni insurgents to AQ...

I think thats Oerdin's point

and it looks like we've taken sides in a civil war

****

[mygalinasoo]

I'll quote your article again

Now, with the final infantry troops of the Bush administration "surge" strategy having arrived in Iraq, the military is increasingly focusing firepower against the Sunni side of Iraq's civil war, especially al-Qaida in Iraq. Thats the exact opposite of taking sides?

[nursopoutaras]

you're excused, but the article you posted says we're focusing firepower against the Sunni side of "Iraq's civil war" - that certainly includes Sunni insurgents, true? Or do they all wear different hats? Or maybe there are no Sunni Iraqis fighting us?

[lungumnentibe]

then why did you post it? Is the article more "in depth" than just calling all enemy casualties AQ in Iraq when its obvious we're still fighting various factions from nationalists to "rejectionists", etc...? Clearly we cant do a head count to find out who is who, but that doesn't mean labeling the dead as AQ is accurate.

[casinobonbiner]

Posted on Fri, Jun. 29, 2007
Bush plays al Qaida card to bolster support for Iraq policy
Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 29, 2007 01:18:13 PM

WASHINGTON — Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.

The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn't reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.

Bush called al Qaida in Iraq the perpetrator of the worst violence racking that country and said it was the same group that had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

"Al Qaida is the main enemy for Shia, Sunni and Kurds alike," Bush asserted. "Al Qaida's responsible for the most sensational killings in Iraq. They're responsible for the sensational killings on U.S. soil."

U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al Qaida are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al Qaida in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn't controlled by bin Laden or his top aides.

Bush's references to al Qaida came just days after Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George Voinovich of Ohio broke with Bush over his Iraq strategy and joined calls to begin an American withdrawal.

"The only way they think they can rally people is by blaming al Qaida," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center who's critical of the administration's strategy.

Next month, the Senate is expected to debate the Iraq issue as it considers a Pentagon spending bill. Democrats are planning to offer at least three amendments that seek to change Iraq strategy, including revoking the 2002 resolution that authorized Bush to use force in Iraq and mandating that a withdrawal of troops begin within 120 days.

Bush's use of al Qaida in his speech had strong echoes of the strategy the administration had used to whip up public support for the Iraq invasion by accusing the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of cooperating with bin Laden and implying that he'd played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Administration officials have since acknowledged that Saddam had no ties to bin Laden or 9-11.

A similar pattern has developed in Iraq, where the U.S. military has cited al Qaida 33 times in a barrage of news releases in the last seven days, and some news organizations have echoed the drumbeat. Last month, al Qaida was mentioned only nine times in U.S. military news releases.

In his speech, Bush referred only fleetingly to the sectarian violence that pits Sunni Muslim insurgents against Shiite Muslim militias in bloody tit-for-tat attacks, bombings, atrocities and forced mass evictions from contested areas of Baghdad and other cities and towns.

U.S. intelligence agencies and military commanders say the Sunni-Shiite conflict is the greatest source of violence and insecurity in Iraq.

"Extremists — most notably the Sunni jihadist group al Qaida in Iraq and Shia oppositionist Jaysh al-Mahdi — continue to act as very effective accelerators for what has become a self-sustaining struggle between Shia and Sunnis," the National Intelligence Council wrote in the unclassified key judgments of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq published in January. Jaysh al Mahdi is Arabic for the Mahdi Army militia of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

The council comprises the top U.S. intelligence analysts, and a National Intelligence Estimate is the most comprehensive assessment it produces for the president and a small number of his senior aides. It reflects the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

In his speech, Bush made other questionable assertions.

He claimed that U.S. troops were fighting "block by block" in Baqouba, a city northeast of Baghdad, as part of an offensive to clear out al Qaida fighters.

But Gen. Raymond Odierno, the U.S. ground commander in Iraq, said earlier this month that 80 percent of the insurgents American troops expected to encounter in Baqouba had fled before the operation began, including much of the insurgent leadership.

There was little heavy fighting. Out of 10,000 U.S. troops involved, only one has been killed.

Bush categorically blamed al Qaida for the Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Askariya mosque, a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra whose destruction accelerated sectarian bloodshed.

But no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, and U.S. officials say there's no proof that al Qaida in Iraq was responsible, only strong suspicions.

Critics of the war are questioning the administration's increasing references to al Qaida.

"We cannot attribute all the violence in Iraq to al Qaida," retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq before becoming an opponent of Bush's strategy there, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday. "Al Qaida is certainly a component, but there's larger components."

(Mike Drummond of The Charlotte Observer in Baghdad and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this report.)

McClatchy Newspapers 2007 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17471.html

[replicajoy]

I guess I can't laugh at Oerdin for regurgitating that McClatchy piece that's already been fisked in the blogosphere, then...

[Ivanaishere]

Yesterday they said they killed Iranian back militants, so I gues that's how it goes now. We're fighting al-Qaeda and Iranian back militants. The 80% of Iraqis who want us gone and the majority who think it's okay to kill Americans haven't taken up arms against us at all.

[soajerwaradaY]

We're fighting al-Qaeda and Iranian back militants.

That would make sense, given that the al-Qaeda types and Iranian-controlled Shia groups are the ones causing most of the trouble at the moment. The other Shia groups are sitting tight and waiting until the Americans leave so they can ethnically cleanse the Sunnis, while the Sunnis are cooperating with the Americans so they can get weapons and training that might help them avoid being ethnically cleansed by the Shia when the Americans leave. The American commanders are willing to look the other way while the mainline Sunni/Shia prepare for a civil war because they know there's no way in hell they're going to have the time and support needed to actually prevent one. The only thing they can hope to achieve is ****ing up al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Iranian-backed groups before Reid & Pelosi force a withdrawal.

[Olphander]

The WaPo Article on her background:

Pentagon Shadow Loses Some Mystique
Feith's Shops Did Not Usurp Intelligence Agencies on Iraq, Hill Probers Find

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 13, 2004; Page A11

In February 2002, Christina Shelton, a career Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was combing through old intelligence on Iraq when she stumbled upon a small paragraph in a CIA report from the mid-1990s that stopped her.

It recounted a contact between some Iraqis and al Qaeda that she had not seen mentioned in current CIA analysis, according to three defense officials who work with her. She spent the next couple of months digging through 12 years of intelligence reports on Iraq and produced a briefing on alleged contacts Shelton felt had been overlooked or underplayed by the CIA.

Her boss, Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy and the point man on Iraq, was so impressed that he set up a briefing for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was so impressed he asked her to brief CIA Director George J. Tenet in August 2002. By summer's end, Shelton had also briefed deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Shelton's analysis, and the White House briefings that resulted, are new details about a small group of Pentagon analysts whose work has cast a large shadow of suspicion and controversy as Congress investigates how the administration used intelligence before the Iraq war.

Congressional Democrats contend that two Pentagon shops -- the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group -- were established by Rumsfeld, Feith and other defense hawks expressly to bypass the CIA and other intelligence agencies. They argue that the offices supplied the administration with information, most of it discredited by the regular intelligence community, that President Bush, Cheney and others used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

But interviews with senior defense officials, White House and CIA officials, congressional sources and others yield a different portrait of the work done by the two Pentagon offices.

Neither the House nor Senate intelligence committees, for example, which have been investigating prewar intelligence for eight months, have found support for allegations that Pentagon analysts went out and collected their own intelligence, congressional officials from both parties say. Nor have investigators found that the Pentagon analysis about Iraq significantly shaped the case the administration made for going to war.

At the same time, the Pentagon operation was created, at least in part, to provide a more hard-line alternative to the official intelligence, according to interviews with current and former defense and intelligence officials. The two offices, overseen by Feith, concluded that Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda were much more closely and conclusively linked than the intelligence community believed.

In this sense, the offices functioned as a pale version of the secret "Team B" analysis done by administration conservatives in the mid-1970s, who concluded the intelligence community was underplaying the Soviet military threat. Rumsfeld, in particular, has a history of skepticism about the intelligence community's analysis, including assessments of the former Soviet Union's military ability and of threats posed by ballistic missiles from North Korea and other countries.

Rumsfeld's known views -- and his insistence before the war that overthrowing Hussein was part of the war on terrorism -- only enhanced suspicion about the aims and role played by Feith's offices.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), a member of the intelligence panel, charged that Feith's work "reportedly involved the review, analysis and promulgation of intelligence outside of the U.S. intelligence community."

Levin pressed Tenet on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee: "Is it standard operating procedure for an intelligence analysis such as that to be presented at the NSC [National Security Council] and the office of the vice president without you being part of the presentation? Is that typical?"

"My experience is that people come in and may present those kinds of briefings on their views of intelligence," responded Tenet, who said he had not known about the briefings at the time. "But I have to tell you, senator, I'm the president's chief intelligence officer; I have the definitive view about these subjects. From my perspective, it is my view that prevails."
Hussein's Role

Feith, who worked on the NSC staff in the Reagan administration, is a well-known conservative voice on Israel policy who once urged the Israeli prime minister to repudiate the Oslo peace accords. His views are a source of tension between him and foreign policy officials at the State Department and elsewhere who advocate concessions be made by Palestinians and Israel to achieve a peace settlement.

No sooner had Bush announced that the United States was at war on terrorism than it became Feith's job to come up with a strategy for executing such a war.

"We said to ourselves, 'We are at war with an international terrorist network that includes organizations, state supporters and nonstate supporters. What does that mean to be at war with a network?' " Feith said in an interview.

But Feith felt he needed to bring on help in the Pentagon for another reason, too, said four other senior current and former Pentagon civilians: the belief that the CIA and other intelligence agencies dangerously undervalued threats to U.S. interests.

"The strategic thinking was the Middle East is going down the tubes. It's getting worse, not better," said one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely with Feith's offices. "I don't think we thought there was objective evidence that could be got from CIA, DIA, INR," he added, referring to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's main intelligence office, and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Feith's office worked not only on "how to fight Saddam Hussein but also how to fight the NSC, the State Department and the intelligence community," which were not convinced of Hussein's involvement in terrorism, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Feith set up the first of his two shops, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, to "study al Qaeda worldwide suppliers, chokepoints, vulnerabilities and recommend strategies for rendering terrorist networks ineffective," according to a January 2002 document sent to DIA.

The group never grew larger than two people, said Feith and William J. Luti, who was director of the Office of Special Plans and deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.

The evaluation group's largest project was what one participant called a "sociometric diagram" of links between terrorist organizations and their supporters around the world, mostly focused on al Qaeda, the Islamic Resistance Movement (or Hamas), Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. It was meant to challenge the "conventional wisdom," said one senior defense official, that terrorist groups did not work together.

It looked "like a college term paper," said one senior Pentagon official who saw the analysis. It was hundreds of connecting lines and dots footnoted with binders filled with signals intelligence, human source reporting and even thirdhand intelligence accounts of personal meetings between terrorists.

One of its key and most controversial findings was that there was a connection between secular states and fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.

If anything, the analysis reinforced the view of top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul N. Wolfowitz and Feith, that Hussein's Iraq had worrisome contacts with al Qaeda over the last decade that could only be expected to grow.

The evaluation group's other job was to read through the huge, daily stream of intelligence reporting on terrorism and "highlight things of interest to Feith," said one official involved in the process. "We were looking for connections" between terrorist groups.

From time to time, senior defense officials called bits of intelligence to the attention of the White House, they said.

Feith said the worldwide threat study itself never left the Pentagon. It helped inform the military strategy on the war on terrorism, but it was only one small input into that process, he said.

Mainly, the work of the evaluation group, Luti said, "went into the corporate memory."
'Very Helpful'

In the summer of 2002, Shelton, who had been working virtually on her own, was joined by Christopher Carney, a naval reservist and associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Together they completed their study on the links between al Qaeda and Iraq.

"It was interesting enough that I brought it to Secretary Rumsfeld because Secretary Rumsfeld is well known for being a particularly intelligent reader of intelligence," Feith said.

Rumsfeld told Feith, " 'Call George and tell him we have something for him to see,' " Feith said. On Aug. 15, 2002, a delegation from Pentagon was buzzed through the guard station at CIA headquarters for the Tenet meeting. Shelton and Carney were the briefers; Feith and DIA Director Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby accompanied them.

"The feedback that I got from George right after the briefing was, 'That was very helpful, thank you,' " Feith said.

CIA officials who sat in the briefing were nonplussed. The briefing was all "inductive analysis," according to one participant's notes from the meeting. The data pointed to "complicity and support," nothing more. "Much of it, we had discounted already," said another participant.

Tenet, according to agency officials, never incorporated any of the particulars from the briefing into his subsequent briefings to Congress. He asked some CIA analysts to get together with Shelton for further discussions.

Feith also arranged for Shelton to brief deputy national security adviser Hadley and Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

"Her work did not change [Hadley's] thinking because his source for intelligence information are the products produced by the CIA," White House spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Nor did the briefing's content reach national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney or Bush, according to McCormack and Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems. (In November 2003, a written version of her PowerPoint briefing, a version submitted to the intelligence committees investigating prewar intelligence, was published in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.) The briefing openly challenged the prevailing CIA view that a religion-based terrorist, Osama bin Laden, would not seek to work with a secular state such as Iraq. "They were the ones who were intellectually unwilling to rethink this issue," one defense official said. "But they were not willing to shoot it down, either."

Whatever the agency really thought of Shelton's analysis, on Oct. 7, 2002, CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin sent a letter to the Senate intelligence committee which, in a general sense, supported her conclusion: "We have solid evidence of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade," it said. ". . . Growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's link to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action."
A Nondescript Name

In August 2002, as the possibility of war with Iraq grew more likely, Luti's Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (NESA) was reorganized into the Office of Special Plans and NESA. Its job, according to Feith and Luti, was to propose strategies for the war on terrorism and Iraq.

It was given a nondescript name to purposefully hide the fact that, although the administration was publicly emphasizing diplomacy at the United Nations, the Pentagon was actively engaged in war planning and postwar planning.

The office staff never numbered more than 18, including reservists and people temporarily assigned. "There are stories that we had hundreds of people beavering away at this stuff," Feith said. ". . . They're just not true."

The office's job was to devise Pentagon policy recommendations for the larger interagency decision-making on every conceivable issue: troop deployment planning, coalition building, oil sector maintenance, war crimes prosecution, ministry organization, training an Iraqi police force, media strategy and "rewards, incentives and immunity" for former Baath Party supporters, according to a chart hanging in the special plans office, Room 1A939, several months ago.

The insular nature of Luti's office, and his outspoken personal conviction that the United States should remove Hussein, sparked rumors at the Pentagon that the office was collecting intelligence on its own, that it had hired its own intelligence agents. Even diehard Bush supporters, some of whom were critical of Feith's and Luti's management style, were repeating the rumors.

Yesterday, Rumsfeld addressed the controversy, saying critics of the Office of Special Plans had a "conspiratorial view of the world." Shelton's analysis, he emphasized, was shared with the CIA, and White House briefings were not unusual.

"We brief the president. We brief the vice president. We brief the [CIA director]. We brief the secretary of state. . . . That is not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer

[xquFzpNw]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
We're fighting al-Qaeda and Iranian back militants.

That would make sense, given that the al-Qaeda types and Iranian-controlled Shia groups are the ones causing most of the trouble at the moment. No, it's just the new propaganda line from an Administration floundering for anything they hope might get them a little bit more support. It's just more doublespeak from Big Brother. I thought I made that rather clear.

I believe Pace said only a couple months back that there is absolutely no evidence that Iran is aiding the Iraqi insurgents or al-Qaeda or any of the groups the U.S. is fighting. The foreign minister of Afghanistan also said a couple weeks ago that the claims by the U.S. that Iran is aiding the Taliban are complete fabrications.

The incredulousness of some people.

[SM9WI8oI]

Not at all. In fact it's so far off base that it is hardly worth responding too. It's the same crap in the same can with a different label on it. This is just marketing to try to spin things and nothing more.

[slarceSelia]

The fact, Drake, that some Sunnis have temporarily accepted our aid does not mean that we have a truce with "the Sunnis," vague or otherwise. AQI is a tiny organization. Since the invasion, the number of estimated insurgents has grown from 5,000 to 70,000. AQI, on the other hand, has never been estimated to be more than a few hundred foreign fighters.

As for the "Iranian" backed militants, the Shia's we're fighting are Sadr's people. The Iranian back militia is the Badr Brigade, whom we are not fighting.

Every Sunni we kill is automatically drafted into AQI by the U.S. Every Sadrist we kill is automatically funded by Iran, by U.S. government definition.

The fact that military in Iraq denies that Iran is supplying the insurgency against the U.S. is more telling than the lapdogs of the Administration wailing that they are.

[Hetgvwic]

Here's another one for che...

Iran 'baring its teeth' in Afghanistan, officials say

KABUL (AFP) - In public, Afghanistan has played down US and British allegations that Iran is feeding weapons to Taliban insurgents, but in private, officials here say the charges are true -- and worrying.

A serious debate is under way in President Hamid Karzai's administration about Iranian support to both the Taliban and emerging opposition political parties, several officials told AFP.

The government is in a difficult position: it is unwilling to sour relations with another neighbour or become involved in the heated US-Iran dispute, but it is also afraid Afghanistan will again become a battleground for more powerful nations.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said this month that given the large number of weapons coming into Afghanistan from Iran, it was hard to believe "that it's taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian government."

The charge is denied by Tehran as "100 percent lies."

"We are seriously following the reports with concern," said Afghan foreign ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen. "We want to continue our friendly relations with Iran."

Karzai has said there is no proof the Iranian-marked weapons are provided by Tehran.

"Iran and Afghanistan have never been as friendly as they are today," he said earlier this month.

But a defence ministry general said the government had "evidence", including documents, to prove the weapons were coming into the country for the Taliban, with Tehran's knowledge.

The official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, would not give further details.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070701...s_070701045517

[herbalviagra]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Why are you talking to me? You know I'm not allowed to talk back... You most certainly are. You just can't be your normal irritating self using lies and half truthes to disguise and agenda. In short your perfectly free but you just have to pretend you are a normal person. I'm sure you can manage it.