You do realize that being sarcastic does not negate the original argument. Sarcasm by its nature is a strawman argument.
My quote on another topic about sarcasm:
CIA bomber in video with Hakeemullah Mehsud
- Thread starter TruthSeeker
- Start date
You do realize that being sarcastic does not negate the original argument. Sarcasm by its nature is a strawman argument.
My quote on another topic about sarcasm:
H2O3C4Nitrogen
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Expert: CIA missed glaring red flags on double-agent bomber
From Nic Robertson, CNN Senior International Correspondent
Amman, Jordan (CNN) -- In the murky world of spying, where choices are generally among shades of gray, success, by definition, goes unnoticed.
Failure, however, is catastrophic.
So how did a Jordanian doctor play double agent, outsmart his CIA handlers, and end up killing seven Americans and a Jordanian military officer at a remote base in Afghanistan?
"This is the biggest deception ever of intelligence agencies, whether CIA or Jordanian intelligence," said Hassan Hanieh, a former Islamic extremist who now studies jihadist movements. "From the beginning, he was deceiving them."
In a videotape released after the December 30 attack, the double agent, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, said his suicide bombing was retaliation for the death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Mehsud was killed in a missile strike in August, an attack thought to have been carried out by an American drone aircraft.
Al-Balawi had been recruited as a counterterrorism intelligence source, with U.S. and Jordanian intelligence agencies apparently believing he had given up his Islamic extremist views. They were using him to hunt Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, a former U.S. intelligence official told CNN last week.
Hanieh told CNN he has read the bomber's radical blogs and says intelligence agencies made an obvious mistake in believing al-Balawi had changed.
"We have never seen in the history of al Qaeda a person who changed his ideas completely in this sudden way -- a person who writes jihadi stuff, then suddenly switches sides," Hanieh said.
Video: CIA murder suspect
Video: Bombing suspect vows revenge
RELATED TOPICS
Afghanistan
Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi
Central Intelligence Agency
Al Qaeda
And Ali Shukri, a former adviser to Jordan's late King Hussein, said the suddenness of al-Balawi's apparent reversal should have sent up red flags among the spies. Al-Balawi was in Pakistan only a few months before he began feeding his handlers high-grade tips.
"This is always a red flag," said Shukri, a veteran of Middle East espionage. "For someone who has been doing this to be turned is not an easy thing to do."
Sources familiar with intelligence operations in Jordan say al Qaeda takes at least a year to screen new recruits. The terrorist organization checks out their family backgrounds, gets input from fellow jihadists who know them -- and never trusts anyone who has been arrested, as al-Balawi had been.
A Jordanian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said last week that authorities in Jordan arrested al-Balawi more than a year ago, but released him because of a lack of evidence. Al-Balawi had written about his arrest on his blog, and ignoring that was another fatal error by the intelligence agencies, sources said.
Shukri said al-Balawi's handlers should have asked whether he was "really on the inside, that much on the inside? Or was it a counterintelligence operation?"
Al-Balawi's family has said he was under pressure by Jordanian intelligence to infiltrate al Qaeda, making him potentially unreliable. Shukri said al-Balawi's handlers might have dropped their defenses, tempted by the prospect of striking a major blow against al Qaeda.
"Sometimes rules are broken," he said. "When you put something on a fast track, you tend to break rules. Maybe this is what happened here."
If true, that would violate another of the basic lessons of spycraft: Patience and caution are everything.
CIA duped
From Nic Robertson, CNN Senior International Correspondent
Amman, Jordan (CNN) -- In the murky world of spying, where choices are generally among shades of gray, success, by definition, goes unnoticed.
Failure, however, is catastrophic.
So how did a Jordanian doctor play double agent, outsmart his CIA handlers, and end up killing seven Americans and a Jordanian military officer at a remote base in Afghanistan?
"This is the biggest deception ever of intelligence agencies, whether CIA or Jordanian intelligence," said Hassan Hanieh, a former Islamic extremist who now studies jihadist movements. "From the beginning, he was deceiving them."
In a videotape released after the December 30 attack, the double agent, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, said his suicide bombing was retaliation for the death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Mehsud was killed in a missile strike in August, an attack thought to have been carried out by an American drone aircraft.
Al-Balawi had been recruited as a counterterrorism intelligence source, with U.S. and Jordanian intelligence agencies apparently believing he had given up his Islamic extremist views. They were using him to hunt Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, a former U.S. intelligence official told CNN last week.
Hanieh told CNN he has read the bomber's radical blogs and says intelligence agencies made an obvious mistake in believing al-Balawi had changed.
"We have never seen in the history of al Qaeda a person who changed his ideas completely in this sudden way -- a person who writes jihadi stuff, then suddenly switches sides," Hanieh said.
Video: CIA murder suspect
Video: Bombing suspect vows revenge
RELATED TOPICS
Afghanistan
Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi
Central Intelligence Agency
Al Qaeda
And Ali Shukri, a former adviser to Jordan's late King Hussein, said the suddenness of al-Balawi's apparent reversal should have sent up red flags among the spies. Al-Balawi was in Pakistan only a few months before he began feeding his handlers high-grade tips.
"This is always a red flag," said Shukri, a veteran of Middle East espionage. "For someone who has been doing this to be turned is not an easy thing to do."
Sources familiar with intelligence operations in Jordan say al Qaeda takes at least a year to screen new recruits. The terrorist organization checks out their family backgrounds, gets input from fellow jihadists who know them -- and never trusts anyone who has been arrested, as al-Balawi had been.
A Jordanian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said last week that authorities in Jordan arrested al-Balawi more than a year ago, but released him because of a lack of evidence. Al-Balawi had written about his arrest on his blog, and ignoring that was another fatal error by the intelligence agencies, sources said.
Shukri said al-Balawi's handlers should have asked whether he was "really on the inside, that much on the inside? Or was it a counterintelligence operation?"
Al-Balawi's family has said he was under pressure by Jordanian intelligence to infiltrate al Qaeda, making him potentially unreliable. Shukri said al-Balawi's handlers might have dropped their defenses, tempted by the prospect of striking a major blow against al Qaeda.
"Sometimes rules are broken," he said. "When you put something on a fast track, you tend to break rules. Maybe this is what happened here."
If true, that would violate another of the basic lessons of spycraft: Patience and caution are everything.
CIA duped
Barrett
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Low blow for the CIA
By Mahir Ali
Seldom before has the Central Intelligence Agency experienced such a lethal dose of blowback. The earliest reports following a suicide bombing at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost on Dec 30 suggested eight fatalities among agency operatives.
That would have made it the deadliest attack since the same number of CIA officers were killed when the US embassy in Beirut was bombed back in 1983.
The Afghan Taliban were quick to claim that the perpetrator was an officer of the Afghan National Army.
As the picture became clearer (although several aspects of it remain hazy), several intriguing details began to emerge. The deceased, it turned out, included five bona fide CIA employees plus two men hired from Xe, the firm better known as Blackwater. The eighth victim was an officer of Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate — and a distant cousin of King Abdullah.
Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid was apparently “running” Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian doctor of Palestinian origin who evidently gained access to the base without being searched. (Although CIA chief Leon Panetta has said that Balawi was about to be searched when he blew himself up, that seems unlikely on the face of it, given that he managed to murder relatively senior agents without harming any of the guards on the periphery of the base.)
The encounter was not unplanned on the CIA’s side. In fact, it was rather tantalised by the prospect: the agency’s deputy chief of mission had arrived from Kabul specifically for a purpose, and the White House had been informed. Balawi had purportedly claimed that he had lately met Al Qaeda’s deputy head Ayman al-Zawahiri and wished to convey information on his whereabouts.
Not surprisingly, Al Qaeda too claimed credit for the attack, followed by the Pakistani Taliban — whose version of events was buttressed by a video dated Dec 20 that showed Balawi fraternising with Hakeemullah Mehsud and vowing vengeance for the killing of Baitullah Mehsud last August by a missile fired from a CIA drone.
Following the Chapman base attack, the CIA too promised to exact revenge, and drone strikes have been stepped up in the past fortnight.
It is presumably no coincidence that the base was used to gather information employed in choosing targets for drone attacks, although its focus was on the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. Of course, that’s where the Mehsud Taliban have been driven in the wake of the Pakistan Army’s operation in South Waziristan. Has this helped to tighten the nexus between the militant factions? Was the Balawi operation a joint venture? Did Al Qaeda chip in?
Whether or not he met al-Zawahiri, Balawi wasn’t clueless about Al Qaeda — reports suggest that for about a year he had been feeding Sharif Ali fairly accurate information about low-level operatives. But, although he has been described as a double or even a triple agent, his final act suggests he never had any doubt about which side he was on. And chances are that Baitullah Mehsud was incidental to his incendiary resolve.
Balawi was arrested in Jordan, apparently on the basis of his contributions to jihadist websites, during Israel’s assault on Gaza last year, but released after three days. Whereupon he left for Pakistan. Which isn’t a good sign these days. It’s unclear whether he was let off lightly by the Jordanians and allowed to travel because he had promised to spy for them and their American friends, although that seems likely.
What he did thereafter, where he went, whether he travelled back to Jordan in the interim, and whether he had any previous direct contact with the CIA — all that is so far a mystery. Amman could probably shed some light on some of these areas, but it is being characteristically coy.
Although close collaboration between Jordan’s intelligence services and the secret police on the one hand and American agencies on the other is hardly a secret, with Jordan having served as a destination for rendition flights and a torture site for their occupants, Abdullah’s government is understandably not keen to publicise the more sordid aspects of its relationship with the US. (It has claimed that Sharif Ali was in Afghanistan as part of a “humanitarian mission”.)
Chances are the CIA will henceforth be a little more wary about Jordanian tips and informants, but what it really needs to worry about is the relative ease with which an individual clad in low-tech weaponry was able to strike such a devastating blow against an agency with the latest technology at its command. The loss of life has also entailed a loss of intelligence: for instance the Khost base chief, one of two women killed in the explosion, was a veteran of the CIA’s Al Qaeda-tracking Alec Station who reportedly boasted an encyclopaedic knowledge of its top leadership.
But well before George Bush’s war on terror thrust it into a particularly nasty role, the CIA had been involved in activities that extended beyond espionage and intelligence analysis, ranging from assassination programmes to the routine destabilisation of governments deemed to be inadequately subservient to Washington’s diktat.
Its deployment in the AfPak theatre is far from the first time it has served as an instrument of war: from Angola to Vietnam to El Salvador (and in numerous other countries) it has dedicated itself to all manner of nefarious activities, with Operation Phoenix merely the most notorious of its initiatives. And it was, of course, intricately involved in the mayhem in Afghanistan in which the Taliban and Al Qaeda were incubated.
The reprehensible nature of its adversaries in the present instance hardly means the CIA’s character has changed or its tactics can be condoned.
Reacting to the Khost tragedy, Panetta said in a message to employees: “Those who fell yesterday were far from home and closer to the enemy....” Which prompted the thought: had CIA operatives, over the decades, stayed closer to home, the US may well have had far fewer enemies.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect...s/14-mahir-ali-low-blow-for-the-cia-310-zj-10
By Mahir Ali
Seldom before has the Central Intelligence Agency experienced such a lethal dose of blowback. The earliest reports following a suicide bombing at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost on Dec 30 suggested eight fatalities among agency operatives.
That would have made it the deadliest attack since the same number of CIA officers were killed when the US embassy in Beirut was bombed back in 1983.
The Afghan Taliban were quick to claim that the perpetrator was an officer of the Afghan National Army.
As the picture became clearer (although several aspects of it remain hazy), several intriguing details began to emerge. The deceased, it turned out, included five bona fide CIA employees plus two men hired from Xe, the firm better known as Blackwater. The eighth victim was an officer of Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate — and a distant cousin of King Abdullah.
Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid was apparently “running” Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian doctor of Palestinian origin who evidently gained access to the base without being searched. (Although CIA chief Leon Panetta has said that Balawi was about to be searched when he blew himself up, that seems unlikely on the face of it, given that he managed to murder relatively senior agents without harming any of the guards on the periphery of the base.)
The encounter was not unplanned on the CIA’s side. In fact, it was rather tantalised by the prospect: the agency’s deputy chief of mission had arrived from Kabul specifically for a purpose, and the White House had been informed. Balawi had purportedly claimed that he had lately met Al Qaeda’s deputy head Ayman al-Zawahiri and wished to convey information on his whereabouts.
Not surprisingly, Al Qaeda too claimed credit for the attack, followed by the Pakistani Taliban — whose version of events was buttressed by a video dated Dec 20 that showed Balawi fraternising with Hakeemullah Mehsud and vowing vengeance for the killing of Baitullah Mehsud last August by a missile fired from a CIA drone.
Following the Chapman base attack, the CIA too promised to exact revenge, and drone strikes have been stepped up in the past fortnight.
It is presumably no coincidence that the base was used to gather information employed in choosing targets for drone attacks, although its focus was on the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. Of course, that’s where the Mehsud Taliban have been driven in the wake of the Pakistan Army’s operation in South Waziristan. Has this helped to tighten the nexus between the militant factions? Was the Balawi operation a joint venture? Did Al Qaeda chip in?
Whether or not he met al-Zawahiri, Balawi wasn’t clueless about Al Qaeda — reports suggest that for about a year he had been feeding Sharif Ali fairly accurate information about low-level operatives. But, although he has been described as a double or even a triple agent, his final act suggests he never had any doubt about which side he was on. And chances are that Baitullah Mehsud was incidental to his incendiary resolve.
Balawi was arrested in Jordan, apparently on the basis of his contributions to jihadist websites, during Israel’s assault on Gaza last year, but released after three days. Whereupon he left for Pakistan. Which isn’t a good sign these days. It’s unclear whether he was let off lightly by the Jordanians and allowed to travel because he had promised to spy for them and their American friends, although that seems likely.
What he did thereafter, where he went, whether he travelled back to Jordan in the interim, and whether he had any previous direct contact with the CIA — all that is so far a mystery. Amman could probably shed some light on some of these areas, but it is being characteristically coy.
Although close collaboration between Jordan’s intelligence services and the secret police on the one hand and American agencies on the other is hardly a secret, with Jordan having served as a destination for rendition flights and a torture site for their occupants, Abdullah’s government is understandably not keen to publicise the more sordid aspects of its relationship with the US. (It has claimed that Sharif Ali was in Afghanistan as part of a “humanitarian mission”.)
Chances are the CIA will henceforth be a little more wary about Jordanian tips and informants, but what it really needs to worry about is the relative ease with which an individual clad in low-tech weaponry was able to strike such a devastating blow against an agency with the latest technology at its command. The loss of life has also entailed a loss of intelligence: for instance the Khost base chief, one of two women killed in the explosion, was a veteran of the CIA’s Al Qaeda-tracking Alec Station who reportedly boasted an encyclopaedic knowledge of its top leadership.
But well before George Bush’s war on terror thrust it into a particularly nasty role, the CIA had been involved in activities that extended beyond espionage and intelligence analysis, ranging from assassination programmes to the routine destabilisation of governments deemed to be inadequately subservient to Washington’s diktat.
Its deployment in the AfPak theatre is far from the first time it has served as an instrument of war: from Angola to Vietnam to El Salvador (and in numerous other countries) it has dedicated itself to all manner of nefarious activities, with Operation Phoenix merely the most notorious of its initiatives. And it was, of course, intricately involved in the mayhem in Afghanistan in which the Taliban and Al Qaeda were incubated.
The reprehensible nature of its adversaries in the present instance hardly means the CIA’s character has changed or its tactics can be condoned.
Reacting to the Khost tragedy, Panetta said in a message to employees: “Those who fell yesterday were far from home and closer to the enemy....” Which prompted the thought: had CIA operatives, over the decades, stayed closer to home, the US may well have had far fewer enemies.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect...s/14-mahir-ali-low-blow-for-the-cia-310-zj-10
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