Category: Terrorism

Another Glorious Saudi Foreign Policy Triumph

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The House of Saud has announced a new Muslim coalition to fight terror.

One small problem though, 2 of the more important members of the coalition, Pakistan and Lebanon, have denied being members of the coalition, while Indonesia and Malaysia have indicated that their roles would be far more circumscribed than announced:

Earlier this week Saudi Arabia announced a new 34-country coalition of Muslim nations to fight terrorism, but two of the key countries have said they had no idea they were involved.

The countries from Asia, Africa and the Arab world were combining their efforts to combat extremism, according to the Saudis, who have faced mounting pressure to step up efforts in addressing the threat of extremism.

………

But following the statement at least two governments have claimed they were not aware of their own involvement. Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary, Aizaz Chaudhry, has been quoted as saying he only learnt of his country’s inclusion in the alliance from news reports.

He is said to have phoned the country’s ambassador in Saudi capital Riyadh – where a joint operations centre is planned – for clarification. Senior officials claimed they were not consulted beforehand.

………

Lebanon was also equally baffled country following the announcement, according to Lebanese media outlet Naharnet. The Prime Minister Tammam Salam reportedly welcomed the news, saying: “Lebanon is at the forefront of the confrontation with terrorism.”

In contrast the Foreign Ministry was adamant they had no “memo or phone call mentioning this coalition.” They added they had :”No knowledge whatsoever of the issue of forming an Islamic anti-terror coalition.”

The office also questioned whether the move encroached on their ‘constitutional jurisdiction on foreign affairs’.

Indonesia was also said to be still deciding whether to join, while Malaysia ruled out any military intervention.

This is not surprising.

The non-Arab Muslim nations have very little interest in being part of an endeavor directed by the House of Saud, and majority Shia Lebanon would not be a big supporter of this initiative, since it would likely involve efforts to extend Sunni hegemony in the region.

Gratuitous Star Trek Reference of the Day

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Courtesy of Bear who Swims:

………

 The hopeless non-sense spoken by everyone about recent terror attacks miss a single point:

 We can minimize attacks, but we can’t stop them

 .………

 Yes we can improve intelligence, control weapons, strike an bases.  And a good strategy might improve safety, limit gun crime, prevent radicalization.

 But it won’t stop it all.  As the font of much wisdom pointed out “Four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man.”

In case you are wondering, this was said by to the Kang* who was Kang before there was Kang and Kodos on The Simpsons.

*My bad, I got the dialogue in the ST:TNG episode Day of the Dove wrong. I am not worthy.

Another Myth Disproven

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The FBI has now made official statements (as opposed to the leaks that they have been feeding the press) regarding the San Bernardino shooters, and there was no proclamation of support for ISIS or any other terrorist group on social media:

There is no evidence a married couple who killed 14 people in California this month were part of a terrorist cell, the head of the FBI said on Wednesday, echoing investigators’ views that the pair were inspired by, rather than organized by, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

………

However, he said that while the perpetrators of the Dec. 2 shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. — Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29 — had expressed support for “jihad and martyrdom” in private communications, they never did so on social media.

Just days after the attack, authorities said they were looking into an apparent Facebook post in which Malik had pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Multiple U.S. media outlets reported Malik had expressed “admiration” for al-Baghdadi, but it was under an account that used a different name. The messages were reportedly deleted before the attack, and Facebook quickly removed the account in the wake of the shooting.

Seriously, why does the press continue acting as the FBI’s stenographer when the senior officials who leak this crap could not be trusted if they said the sky was blue?

When you get repeatedly burned by a source, they are no longer a source, they are just a random asshole for whom you refuse to take off the record statements.

They Don’t Even Care How it Looks

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The Senate Intelligence Committee issued its torture report.

The unclassified summary was released redacted to the point of incoherence.

The full report was sent to the wWhite House which promptly locked it away and forbade anyone from reading it, regardless of their security clearance.

It’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear saying, “La, la, la, I can’t hear your!”

One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a highly redacted executive summary of its investigation into the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The 525-page summary was shocking in many of its details, revealing the torture and rape of detainees held in CIA custody and encompassing treatment far in excess of even the torture techniques formally authorized by the Bush administration.

Despite the passage of 12 months, the actual report, comprising 6,700 pages, still has not been made publicly available. In fact, reading it appears to be prohibited among officials in the executive branch. Nearly a month and a half after the report’s initial release, it had not even been taken out of the package in which it was delivered to the Department of Justice and Department of State, according to government lawyers. Even the organization that was the subject of the report, the CIA, tightly controlled internal access and made “very limited use” of it, as had the Department of Defense, the lawyers said in a court filing.

That shunning of the torture report appears to be ongoing and very much by design: It turns out the Department of Justice has “refuse[d] to allow executive branch officials to review the full and final study,” Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy wrote in a letter last month to the attorney general and FBI director, urging that they or their “appropriately cleared” underlings read the full report.

“The legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of executive branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it,” they added.

Elizabeth Beavers, a policy coordinator focusing on torture at Amnesty International, believes that no one in the Obama administration, including at the Department of Justice, has read the full report. “They appear to be taking a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ [stance] with regards to the proof of criminal acts it may contain,” she said. But “for the administration not even to read the whole report, and to look the other way while it is possibly buried or even destroyed, sets a dangerous precedent by excusing major crimes like torture and forced disappearance.”

It appears that Obama is still insisting on ignore the most depraved excesses of the state security apparatus, and someone in his administration is trying to insure that they never have direct knowledge of what was done.

They must think that they won’t be subject to the International Criminal Court if they are willfully blind.

Admittedly, my knowledge of international law is limited, but I do not think this argument would wash in The Hague.

There is No Moderate Opposition in Syria

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In looking for rebels to supply, the government seems to be unable to fine forces that are not affiliated with terrorists:

Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists.

But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.”

The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict.

Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict.

We have created a situation where the government of President Bashar Assad is the closest we have to a non terrorist non jihadi alternative.

We have lost.  Let’s cut our losses and get the f%$# out.

The New York Daily News Gets It

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Calling out Wayne LaPierre

The New York Daily News continues its naming and shaming of the reptilian National Rifle Association:

………

 Murder here is easy to commit — because weapons and ammunition that tear at human flesh are easily obtainable. And once murder is committed, it is far harder to solve than it should be — because the devices that are repositories for incriminating evidence are increasingly beyond the reach of law enforcement.

 Police on Thursday reported that all four weapons used by killer Syed Farook and his wife-accomplice, Tashfeen Malik — two assault rifles and two handguns — were bought legally.

 The two had a guerrilla-sized stockpile at home: a staggering 2,000 rounds of 9-mm. bullets and 2,500 rounds of .223-caliber rifle ammunition.

 Also in the home: 12 pipe bombs and hundreds of tools that could be used to build IEDs or pipe bombs.

 In what country is it legal to collect enough weaponry to go to war? In ours, thanks to gun laws crafted and protected by lawmakers obedient to the National Rifle Association.

(emphasis mine)

On their cover, they call Wayne LaPierre a terrorist.

I agree.

What’s more, the News understands that the apocalyptic language and policies of the NRA are not effectively opposed by the standard civil and polite hand wring that we see on the editorial pages of other papers.

H/t David Harris Gershon at Daily Kos.

This is the Least Surprising News of the Day

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Russia accused Turkey of buying ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever oil. Turkish President Erdogan called this a false slander.

But guess what? Putin is ready to give the world pictures:

Russia’s defense ministry said on Wednesday it had proof that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his family were benefiting from the illegal smuggling of oil from Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq.

Moscow and Ankara have been locked in a war of words since last week when a Turkish air force jet shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian-Turkish border, the most serious incident between Russia and a NATO state in half a century.

Erdogan responded by saying no one had the right to “slander” Turkey by accusing it of buying oil from Islamic State, and that he would stand down if such allegations were proven to be true. But speaking during a visit to Qatar, he also said he did not want relations with Moscow to worsen further.

At a briefing in Moscow, defense ministry officials displayed satellite images which they said showed columns of tanker trucks loading with oil at installations controlled by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and then crossing the border into neighboring Turkey.

The officials did not specify what direct evidence they had of the involvement of Erdogan and his family, an allegation that the Turkish president has vehemently denied.

“Turkey is the main consumer of the oil stolen from its rightful owners, Syria and Iraq. According to information we’ve received, the senior political leadership of the country – President Erdogan and his family – are involved in this criminal business,” said Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov.

“Maybe I’m being too blunt, but one can only entrust control over this thieving business to one’s closest associates.”

“In the West, no one has asked questions about the fact that the Turkish president’s son heads one of the biggest energy companies, or that his son-in-law has been appointed energy minister. What a marvelous family business!”

………

The Russian defense ministry also alleged that the same criminal networks which were smuggling oil into Turkey were also supplying weapons, equipment and training to Islamic State and other Islamist groups.

“According to our reliable intelligence data, Turkey has been carrying out such operations for a long period and on a regular basis. And most importantly, it does not plan to stop them,” Sergei Rudskoy, deputy head of the Russian military’s General Staff, told reporters.

The defense ministry said its surveillance revealed hundreds of tanker trucks gathering at Islamic State-controlled sites in Iraq and Syria to load up with oil, and it questioned why the U.S.-led coalition was not launching more air strikes on them.

“It’s hard not to notice them,” Rudskoy said of the lines of trucks shown on satellite images.

Russian officials said their country’s bombing campaign had made a significant dent in Islamic State’s ability to produce, refine and sell oil.

Oh, snap!

Germany Finally Does Something Useful for Greece

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It appears that Germany had combed through the data that it has managed to obtain from various tax havens, and has turned over to Greece the names of over 10,000 tax cheats:

Germany has handed Athens the names of more than 10,000 of its citizens suspected of dodging taxes with holdings in Swiss banks.

The inventory, which details bank accounts worth €3.6bn – almost twice the last instalment of aid Athens secured from creditors earlier this week – was given to the Greek finance ministry in an effort to help the country raise tax revenues.

They could have done this at the beginning of the whole crisis, and done a lot more to help both the Greek people and the Euro Zone.

The Germans wanted their pound of flesh, though, so it’s taken 3 years for them to turn over this data.

Oh Crap………

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Turkish Radar Track


Competing Russian Radar Track

The Turks just shot down a Russian SU-24 near the Turkish border:

NATO faced being thrust into a new Middle Eastern crisis on Tuesday after warplanes from member state Turkey shot down a Russian jet that Turkish officials said had violated their country’s airspace on the border with Syria.

 The incident marked a serious escalation in the Syrian conflict that is likely to further strain relations between Russia and the NATO alliance.

 Russian officials confirmed that a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft was shot down Tuesday morning but insisted it had not violated Turkey’s airspace.

 Russia’s Defense Ministry said one of at least two pilots probably died during the incident, and a marine also was killed by apparent Syrian insurgent fire during a helicopter rescue operation to retrieve the downed airmen.

 The downing brings renewed attention to a scenario feared for months by the Pentagon and its partners: a potential conflict arising from overlapping air missions over Syria — with Russia backing the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a U.S.-led coalition conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State.

………

Russian President Vladimir Putin had strong words for Turkey, calling the incident a “stab in the back.”

By way of scale, that little bit of Turkey is in dispute is about 2 miles wide, while the Russians are maintaining that the Turkish aircraft entered Syrian airspace during the shoot-down.

This is a F%$#ing mess, and the US is between a rock and a hard place.

The Turks are clearly providing tacit support to Jihadis, including (in the past, at least) ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever, but they are also NATO allies, which means that the US is treaty bound to support them.

Particularly when juxtaposed with the fact that the elements of the US military and foreign policy establishment are still aggressively supporting the idea of the violent overthrow of the Syrian government, (which worked so f%$#ing well in Libya) this has all the makings of a fiasco.

An Interesting Perspective on Russia’s Goals in Syria

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I hadn’t thought about it before, but there are thousands of Russian Jihadis in Syria, and should they win, whey will come back to the Caucuse:

I find nothing sinister or difficult to understand in Russia’s increased involvement in Syria. In June, extremists declared the Dagestan Governorate of the Islamic State in Russia’s southernmost republic. Think about this for a sec. Russian jets started flying missions three months later.

This is a legitimate security issue for Russia, as things like Chechnya and Beslan show.

It doesn’t matter if  the fighters are fighting with ISIS, or al Nusra, or the Kurds, or the Turkomen.

If they win, they will be back in Gorzny and Moscow with their new friends.

For all the crap about “Fighting them there” that we have in the US, the Russians actually have a real problem with people bringing terrorism back.

Important

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Over at the New York Times, Kamel Daoud observes that Saudi Arabia is actually what ISIS intends to become.

This is particularly noteworthy because it appears in the New York Times:

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

One might counter: Isn’t Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime.

………

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

I think that there is a slow change in attitude towards our “allies” in Riyadh, though it does not yet seem to have penetrated the psyche of the western foreign policy establishment.

Hopefully, this means that the Overton window has shifted, and our policy of blindly following the initiatives of the House of Saud will become a bit less automatic.

That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

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President Obama just called the Republican cowardice explosion over Syrian refugees a sign that they were afraid widows and orphans:

President Obama is lashing out at Republican politicians who oppose allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S., accusing them of being “scared of widows and orphans.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning in the Philippines, Obama scoffed at attempts to block refugees following the Paris terror attacks as “political posturing” that “needs to stop.”

“Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America,” Obama said of Republicans. “At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

Obama apparently directed his ire at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who said Tuesday he opposes allowing people fleeing the conflict in Syria to resettle in the U.S., even “orphans under five.”

………
“We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic,” he said. “We don’t make good decisions if its based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.”

What is going on with the refugees right now is cowardice, naked pants-soiling cowardice, and it’s nice to see Obama calling it out.

I Would Call Chuck Schumer a Schmuck, but a Schmuck has a Head

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The distinguished gentleman from New York just came out publicly against allowing Syrian refugees into the United States.

I’m sure that if he had been alive in 1939, he would have been comfortably playing Mahjong with friends while the passengers on the MS St. Louis were sent back to die at the hands of the Nazis:

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, on Tuesday said it may be necessary to halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.

Republicans immediately seized on Schumer’s comment, which breaks with other Democrats who have argued against halting the program.

Schumer, however, declined to take the option off the table ahead of a special briefing scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on the process that is now used to vet refugees entering the United States.

“We’re waiting for the briefing tomorrow, a pause may be necessary. We’re going to look at it,” he said.

Schumer is widely expected to become leader of Senate Democrats in the next Congress, after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) retires.

A spokeswoman for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) highlighted Schumer’s statement as an example of “bipartisan concern” over refugees.

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) signed a letter to President Obama Monday calling on him not to allow another Syrian refugee into the country unless federal authorities can guarantee with 100-percent assurance they are not connected to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Other Democrats have rejected freezing Obama’s plan to resettle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the current fiscal year.

What a toxic combination of stupidity, cowardice, and evil.

His position is deeply wrong, and will be seized on by Islamist terrorists as a recruiting tool.

I wish that I was registered to vote in New York so that I could vote against him.

It Is Official

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Russia has formally declared that Metrojet Flight 7K9268 was taken down by a bomb:

Russia the first time on Tuesday that a bomb aboard a Russian charter jet full of vacationers had destroyed the aircraft that crashed more than two weeks ago on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and the Kremlin responded immediately by escalating airstrikes across Syria.

The Russians said they were coordinating their military campaign with France in sharply ratcheting up attacks on Syrian territory, especially areas held by the Islamic State, the militant group that has asserted responsibility for destroying the Russian jetliner and for the deadly attacks across Paris on Friday.

The timing of such a highly orchestrated announcement, after an outraged France had already started striking Islamic State targets and had called for a united front against the group, suggested that the Kremlin was using the moment to help rebuild frayed relations with the West.

The Kremlin also announced that President Vladimir V. Putin and his French counterpart, François Hollande, had spoken by telephone, had agreed to coordinate military attacks in Syria and will meet on Nov. 26 in Moscow.

It is not a surprise that they have made it official, and they do deserve props for waiting until they had some data, as opposed to, for example CNN, where they freak out over a mouse fart in DC.

Two Suggestions for Dealing with the Paris and Lebanon Attacks

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Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically — a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said the attackers were all armed with assault rifles and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. Inside the hall, 89 people, who had been listening to a rock band, had been shot to death.

Meanwhile, we see very little coverage of what happened the day before in Beriut:

A fiery double suicide bombing terrorized a mostly Shiite residential area of southern Beirut on Thursday, ripping through a busy shopping district at rush hour. The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 43 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in the worst attack to strike the city in years.

 The Islamic State extremist group, which controls parts of neighboring Syria, claimed responsibility for the attack. The group portrayed its motives as baldly sectarian, saying it had targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it views as apostates. It mentioned almost as an afterthought that it had targeted Hezbollah, the Shiite militant organization that backs the Syrian government in the civil war raging next door.

 Hezbollah maintains tight security control in the district that was hit, and the bombing seemed aimed at hurting the group by attacking civilians in an area where it has many supporters. But the stricken area also typifies working-class Beirut, where Palestinians, Christians and Syrian refugees (mostly Sunnis) live, work and shop.

First, I think that we need to understand that this is state sponsored terrorism:

It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla…er…indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away.

It’s been known for years that these regimes, in particularly the House of Saud, have been ATMs for the terror movement for decades.

To that particularly unsavory lot, we need to add our NATO ally Turkey, where the increasingly autocratic and delusional Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had decided to throw in for Sunni fundamentalist hegemony for his neighbor to the south, which is also his goal for Turkey.

Quiet diplomacy is not working with these folks. They need to be named, shamed, and sanctioned.

Additionally, changing the goal in Syria, and actively supporting the Assad regime as the best of a bad lot, which has the advantage of being true, and also has the effect of thwarting the goals or Turkey and the potentates on the Persian Gulf, and letting them know that they have crossed a line.

The fact that the Assad regime is that best alternative for the Syrian people and the world is a very real indictment of Western foreign policy.

Kept Us Safe, My Ass

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Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of Evil Minions™ have always claimed that their actions were justified, because they, “Kept us safe.”

Of course, this ignores 911, which is a lot like saying, “Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play Our American Cousin?

Well, in Politico, a bit of fish wrapper that charlie Pierce calls, “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”, we now have an (unquestionably self-serving) account from fromer intelligence personnel claiming that the administration steadfastly ignored clear signs of an imminent and catastrophic terrorist attack on America soil:

“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.” The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.

 But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until now—or been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.

 The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called “the Blue Sky paper” to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat—“getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” “And the word back,” says Tenet, “‘was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’” (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didn’t get the new threat: “I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties—they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.”
That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed. Tenet picked up the white phone to Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you,’” Tenet remembers. “It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now. We have to get there.’”

 Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. (George W. Bush was on a trip to Boston.) “Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

 “What happened?” I ask Cofer Black. “Yeah. What did happen?” he replies. “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.” Remarkably, in her memoir, Condi Rice writes of the July 10 warnings: “My recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day.” Having raised threat levels for U.S. personnel overseas, she adds: “I thought we were doing what needed to be done.” (When I asked whether she had any further response to the comments that Tenet, Black and others made to me, her chief of staff said she stands by the account in her memoir.) Inexplicably, although Tenet brought up this meeting in his closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commission, it was never mentioned in the committee’s final report.

What a surprise.

Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f%$#ed up during the execution.

Of course they f%$#ed up the the prelude to the September 11 attacks.

They f%$#ed everything up.