In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Bush's "winning" the war on terror.Damn this is a mess that Bush has made so much more messier that even messy marvin would be disgusted. Kerry needs not only to win, but he needs to be really really good.
- 3 years later and the second biggest airport in the New York area is not safe
P.A. chief: Airport security is brokenThe chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has sent a stinging letter to federal aviation officials, charging there are "serious weaknesses" in the airline security system at Newark Liberty International Airport that must be fixed immediately.
In his letter, Anthony Coscia, the bistate agency's chairman, tells a top U.S. security official he is concerned about a confidential report that shows that checkpoint screeners missed one in every four fake explosives or weapons smuggled through the airport in covert federal tests this past summer.- We can't decide if we're freeing terrorists or turning peaceful people into terrorists... not a good selection of choices.
Ex-Guantanamo detainee turns to terrorism
Did he deceive the Pentagon or was he pushed to extremes?In the tribal area of Waziristan, Pakistani helicopter gunships and commandos hunt one of the country's most wanted militants — Abdullah Mehsud — a feared Taliban commander who is allegedly tied to al-Qaida. Mehsud's men recently took Pakistani soldiers and two Chinese engineers hostage.
...
The Mehsud story is more than a bit embarrassing for the United States. Until last March, Mehsud was in prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — having been captured fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, a Pentagon review board decided to release him, ruling Mehsud was not a security threat.
"It is obvious now you can say that the Americans made a mistake," says Maj. Gen. Niaz Khattak, a Pakistani general now leading the manhunt.
In fact, some villagers now consider Mehsud a hero because he seems to have outwitted the Americans and tricked them into releasing him.
Experts say it's possible Mehsud was always a hardcore militant and deceived his captors.
"The other possibility is that the two years in captivity was itself a radicalizing experience," says terrorism expert Brian Jenkins.- And Bush's method of attacking terrorism is mired in cold war thinking... he only fights states... not terrorists (and giving up on finding terrorists to go find another state to attack).
Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars CollideIn the second half of March 2002, as the Bush administration mapped its next steps against al Qaeda, Deputy CIA Director John E. McLaughlin brought an unexpected message to the White House Situation Room. According to two people with firsthand knowledge, he told senior members of the president's national security team that the CIA was scaling back operations in Afghanistan.
That announcement marked a year-long drawdown of specialized military and intelligence resources from the geographic center of combat with Osama bin Laden. As jihadist enemies reorganized, slipping back and forth from Pakistan and Iran, the CIA closed forward bases in the cities of Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Kandahar. The agency put off an $80 million plan to train and equip a friendly intelligence service for the new U.S.-installed Afghan government. Replacements did not keep pace with departures as case officers finished six-week tours. And Task Force 5 -- a covert commando team that led the hunt for bin Laden and his lieutenants in the border region -- lost more than two-thirds of its fighting strength.
The commandos, their high-tech surveillance equipment and other assets would instead surge toward Iraq through 2002 and early 2003, as President Bush prepared for the March invasion that would extend the field of battle in the nation's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
...
The contention that the Iraq invasion was an unwise diversion in confronting terrorism has been central to Kerry's critique of Bush's performance. But this account -- drawn largely from interviews with those who have helped manage Bush's offensive -- shows how the debate over that question has echoed within the ranks of the administration as well, even among those who support much of the president's agenda.
Interviews with those advisers also highlight an internal debate over Bush's strategy against al Qaeda and allied jihadists, which has stressed the "decapitation" of the network by capturing or killing leaders, but which has had less success in thwarting recruitment of new militants.
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Bush's focus on the instruments of force, the officials said, has been slow to adapt to a swiftly changing enemy. Al Qaeda, they said, no longer exerts centralized control over a network of operational cells. It has rather become the inspirational hub of a global movement, fomenting terrorism that it neither funds nor directs. Internal government assessments describe this change with a disquieting metaphor: They say jihadist terrorism is "metastasizing."
The war has sometimes taken unexpected turns, one of which brought the Bush administration into hesitant contact with Iran. For a time the two governments made tentative common cause, and Iran delivered hundreds of low-level al Qaeda figures to U.S. allies. Participants in Washington and overseas said Bush's deadlocked advisers -- unable to transmit instructions -- closed that channel before testing Iran's willingness to take more substantial steps. Some of al Qaeda's most wanted leaders now live in Iran under ambiguous conditions of house arrest.
- rob 11:16 AM - [PermaLink] -
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