There was an interesting article out in the NYP that goes back and looks at how Osama Bin Laden escaped Tora Bora in 2001. Most of the article rehashes the fact that the US relied on its allies in Afghanistan to block his escape, and the US relied on its ally Pakistan to block his escape, but now we get an interesting little accusation about how OTHER allies, NATO, allowed Bin Laden to escape.

One, the US unwisely trusted Pakistan to patrol its border. Two, NATO allies objected to the use of “GATOR” mines, which are dropped from planes and could have sealed up the Tora Bora area. But mostly, Fury says the decision to let Afghan allies form “the tip of the spear” was the biggest mistake. “The idea worked like a charm when we faced a common foe, the oppressive Taliban . . . but they were fighting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden . . . we might as well have been asking for them to fight the Almighty Prophet Mohammed himself.”

In all my reading, research, conversations, etc., I have never heard about NATO blocking the use of GATOR mines. That would have been a great way to prevent Osama Bin Laden’s escape, but America’s allies let them down at every turn in 2001. I believe it, but I doubt we’ll hear Obama talk about how relying on allies isn’t as useful as it was 60yrs ago.

Similarly, I doubt that we’ll see anyone on the political left recognize that Germany and France are looking to pull out of Afghanistan rather than send more troops and do more fighting as the Obama campaign expects (according to Sen Obama, he’ll encourage them to do this by offering more foreign aid, but in the VP debate Sen Biden admitted that the very first thing a President Obama will do is CUT foreign aid.)

Amy Proctor points out another rod by which to measure it:

How do you know things are going really well in Iraq? The State Department doesn’t have to threaten to draft employees to fill positions in Iraq anymore. All 300 jobs are now filled with willing volunteers.

Recall how in Kenneth Timmerman’s The Shadow Warriors, the author describes how State Department officials, as well a some in the CIA and political appointees held over from the Clinton Administration, have worked to undermine the Bush Administration out of political partisanship over professionalism and patriotism.
Read the rest of this entry »

When Charlie Gibson interviewed Sarah Palin he did his absolute dead level best to pin her to the wall by using her comments about God and prayer against her.

This video puts her comments into perspective with a little bit of historical review.

I wrote about Douglas Feith’s 60 Minutes interview when it aired.

Wednesday, Feith enjoyed a 3 hour interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show (Pt1, 2, 3. Transcript here).

Friday, I bought the book from Borders bookstore in Westwood. Check out the website for the book. There are important documents to peruse through, there.

Douglas Feith’s website (check out the documents and myths vs. facts pages).

Also blogging:
American Power
Hugh Hewitt

Continuing the story about the CIA officer who had found a possible underground nuclear site in Iraq:

The man running the site was an Iraqi general, identified in the Company X report as PEAIR/13. According to the Eastern Europeans who had worked with him, he was “not young, but looked younger then he was.” He wore a military uniform “with no indication of rank on it; he was also a senior member of the Baath party who often traveled by helicopter.” Later the Eastern European project manager identified him as “Saddam’s cousin.”

By early June 2004, they were ready to make a foray to the area. Traveling with LYHUNT/101, they drove in through Turkey to Mosul, where they were met by another Company X associate, a number of Iraqi shooters from Baghdad, and a contingent of Kurdish peshmergas. By now, security had become an issue throughout Iraq.

The first surprise when they reached the site was the chemical plant in the valley on the far side of the Jebel Makhoul. It didn’t fit with the description of the facilities they had heard from other engineers who had worked in the area in the 1980s, until they realized it had been built later. After the 2003 war, it had been looted right down to the rebar.

When they reached the hillside overlooking the Tigris, they found what appeared to be a large cistern. “It had some interesting features,” the former CIA officer said. “It was fed by a 24-inch pipe that drew water from five miles up the river.” Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting segment of the great book Shadow Warriors is about the discoveries of Company X in Iraq regarding the “missing” WMD in Iraq. I’m gonna split this up into two parts seeing as how it is quite long but well worth the time to read:

The most intriguing evidence of hidden Iraqi WMD stockpiles, however, did not come from any of these sources. It came from a source that Hoekstra had developed all on his own: a former top CIA operations officer, who had returned to Iraq after the war and stumbled onto information pointing to a vast and previously unknown site, buried deep beneath a hillside north of Baghdad, where former Iraqi officials alleged Saddam had pursued nuclear weapons wrok in the utmost secrecy. Read the rest of this entry »

A great section of author Kenneth Timmerman’s new book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender is the section about a supposed failing of the Bush administration. That failing being the fact that Bush didn’t purge the CIA and other segments of the government of liberal influences as Clinton did of conservative influences when he came in. Who was at fault for this?

Carl Levin understood that no president could govern effectively without putting his own highly skilled political appointees into key government positions. Although their numbers were small – the congressional “Plum Book” that was published every time a new president came into office listed just 7,000 in the year 2000 – they were critical. These were the men and women who gave direction to the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Effective political appointees were essential for any president to transform his political vision into action. Without them, a president was like a cork bobbing in the ocean, swept by the wind and the currents. Read the rest of this entry »

Fool me once, shame on you

Fool me twice, shame on us

Yeah, I know it’s a month late (maybe more), but it’s time to talk about what’s gonna happen in Iraq over the next year (2/08-2/09). In September of 2007 (almost half a year ago), President Bush concurred with General Petraeus and gave the order to begin withdrawing US forces from Iraq. A few weeks later, the first units packed up. Thousands made it home before Christmas. Tens of thousands more will be home before the November election in 2008. Lately, there’s been talk of a pause in the withdrawal schedule so that gains and momentum in the field wouldn’t be lost, but it is just a pause-not an end, and further troop level reductions are expected to follow. Read the rest of this entry »

Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender, a book by Kenneth Timmerman, is chock full of facts on how various people within our State Department and Intelligence agencies undermined the war. As I did with The Looming Tower I am going to take excerpts from the book for the readers to check out and digest. The first one being about those sixteen words and the Niger deal. You know those words. Tenet wrote in his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA:

Later some would allege that this handful of words was critical to the decision that led the nation to war. Contemporaneous evidence doesn’t support that, but just try convincing people of that today.

But as Timmerman notes:

Read the rest of this entry »