Posted on 06/17/2006 11:21:32 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - Buoyed by the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, U.S. government officials hope the exposure of his radical network through hundreds of raids across Iraq will help them eliminate key tentacles of the amorphous al-Qaida organization.
These officials say the raids have led to solid insights into al-Qaida in Iraq and provided new clues about how the group trades information with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida central.
They also are learning who is connected to whom and how external support is funneled through Iraq from across the Middle East, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iran.
Several officials requested anonymity while the investigations were unfolding.
In a press conference in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said Thursday that 452 U.S. and coalition raids had been conducted since al-Zarqawi was killed June 7. The information is mounting: Military and other investigators are collecting documents, computers, weapons and DNA.
The work comes at a time when al-Qaida in Iraq is in flux as it adjusts to operating without its charismatic leader. U.S., Iraqi and coalition forces are hoping to seize the opportunity to unravel al-Qaida's complicated web.
Officials are also working to understand the group's purported new leader and whether he has the connections and credibility to assume al-Zarqawi's iconic role.
The enthusiasm of President Bush and other senior officials is tempered by the knowledge that al-Zarqawi's death crimps but hardly kills his organization. Authorities also are watching to see if al-Zarqawi's wish-for martyrdom attracts more fighters into the jihadist fold.
The U.S. military has identified an Egyptian, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who is believed to also use the name Abu Hamza al-Mujaher, as al-Zarqawi's successor in Iraq and presumably in operations beyond.
The president's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has cautioned against jumping to conclusions while the organization is adrift.
If in fact the new leader is al-Masri, authorities are only in the early stages of figuring out what he will mean for al-Qaida.
Al-Masri, whose name means "the Egyptian," is a former member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He has long-standing ties to al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri. Al-Masri has been fighting in Iraq since at least 2003 and engaged in the battle of Fallujah in 2004.
Al-Zarqawi, a Sunni Muslim, was known for his gruesome attacks Iraq's Shiite population — a tactic that put him at odds with al-Qaida's central leadership. But al-Masri could be more receptive to guidance from Afghan-Pakistani border, given his long-standing ties to al-Zawahri, a fellow Egyptian.
Early estimates do not predict significant change in Iraq. "We think he will probably continue on with the same tactics and techniques that Zarqawi did," Caldwell said.
Al-Masri was the point man for getting foreign fighters into Iraq. It was a critical position that would have allowed him to build relationships with numerous foreign contacts.
It remains to be seen how he will oversee the loose network outside of Iraq that al-Zarqawi established. The 39-year-old was believed to have links to radicals in more than 40 countries on at least five continents.
U.S. officials said the bulk of al-Zarqawi's reach outside of Iraq was centered in his home of Jordan, which was his primary target outside Iraq. Lesser extensions included his operatives in Europe, where he was believed to have just a handful.
At a Senate hearing Tuesday, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, could not say for certain how many fighters have been trained by al-Zarqawi and may have returned to their home countries; some estimates suggest they could number in the low hundreds.
Redd said authorities have indications of plots "at least hatching" outside Iraq. "And some of those may have been far enough that we'll see them," he said.
In many ways, those plots typify the new al-Qaida, which has evolved from a centralized group rooted in Afghanistan to an amorphous ideology dispersed worldwide.
During a speech in April, Gen. Michael Hayden, the newly appointed CIA director, said the war in Iraq motivates jihadists, but their failure there would weaken the movement globally.
"The loss of key leaders like bin Laden, Zawahri and Zarqawi — especially if they were lost in rapid succession — could cause the jihadist movement to fracture even more into smaller groups, and would probably lead to strains and disagreements," said Hayden, who at the time was the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official.
Press Conferences Yield New Information on Zarqawi Killing & Successor (updated)
By Andrew Cochran
**************************** AN EXCERPT **************************
One leading expert in Washington, Alexis Debat of ABC News and the Nixon Center, told me yesterday that the Pentagon and NSC are determined to not discuss this individual as "the terrorist leader" as was done with Zarqawi, in order to avoid pressure to focus resources on a single individual, when in fact al-Qaida in Iraq is not only source of the violence there. Gen. Caldwell also discussed the numerous raids following the Zarqawi killing and arrests and deaths of terrorist suspects: 452 raids, 759 suspects captured, 104 insurgents killed, and 28 significant arms caches found. Of the raids, 255 were joint U.S.-Iraqi operations, with 143 by Iraqi forces alone.
************************AN EXCERPT ******************************
Of Terrorist Succession – After Zarqawi
**********************AN EXCERPT *****************************
Debate and disagreement rages over the death of Zarqawi and what it means to the jihad and the continuation of the violence in Iraq. Who is the successor to Zarqawi, and does his death mean that the “insurgency” in Iraq will end? In a sense, does it matter who replaces Zarqawi? Will someone new have a difficult time coalescing the “insurgents” around him and having them follow him?
This post is not about the papers found in the “safe house” in which Zarqawi was obliterated. What I am interested in here is the line of succession of al Qaeda in Iraq, as well as what it tells us about the al Qaeda organization in general. I am also fascinated by the recent disclosure of the 1600 page treatise (the al Qaeda Manifesto?) written by Spanish-Syrian strategist Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (to date, I’ve only read excerpts).
Know the Enemy
David Horowitz
June 23, 2002
********************************* *****************************
The war we have joined is defined by three simple but brutal facts. Our enemy is able to penetrate our borders and strike us in our homes; he can strike us with weapons of mass destruction; and he has made clear his intention is not to change our policies or to force our withdrawal, but to obliterate us and destroy our civilization.
Because of these facts, the imperative of defending ourselves as quickly and effectively as possible is more important in this war – by a factor so great as to be impossible to calculate -- than any we have ever fought.
In all wars the first essential is to know your enemy. Everything you can do to thwart his objectives or to protect your life and the lives of your countrymen depends on this knowledge. But if the war is a war of terror, in which stealth warriors target civilians, the importance of this knowledge is even greater still –again by a factor so large as to be impossible to calculate.
Who, then, is the enemy that has struck us and who threatens our destruction? Officially he has been defined in terms that invoke “terror” and “evil,” that are generic and that really describe the means by which he has chosen to fight the war, and not why he is fighting or how we have become his enemy. They do not tell us who he is. This failure to name our enemy is already a source of great weakness in erecting our defenses.
This ignorance is the most pressing danger to us, after the threat itself. Already, in attempting to establish security perimeters at our borders, and in our airports and harbors, we have denied ourselves the ability to target the specific groups who have targeted us.
The policy that will not identify the enemy by name is a policy that asks us to fight in the dark. Yet every terrorist who slips through these nets is capable of killing tens of thousands of innocent Americans.
Yet, we already know who our enemy is, no matter how many choose to deny it. Almost a year has passed since the attacks on Wall Street and the Pentagon -- the twin symbols of American wealth and power. We have seen the face of the enemy, even if we are still reluctant to name him. We are at war with radical Islam (not all of Islam but with Islamic radicals). And we are – or should be – at war with their allies, the international radical left. Both see us as the embodiment of evil – racism, oppression, on the one hand, and the frustrations of Islamic societies on the other. Both, therefore, seek our destruction.
The publication of a new al-Qaeda manifesto, translated by the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) makes its agendas abundantly clear. The statement called, “Why We Fight America,” and was issued by al-Qaeda spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith and appeared on an al-Qaeda website hosted by Center for Islamic Research and Studies.
The al-Qaeda statement begins by asking why the world is surprised by what happened on 9/11 – pretty much the question that Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy and sundry professors at anti-American rallies on college campuses across the country asked within weeks of the horrific attack. And the answer is pretty much the same for both as well:
“What happened to America [on 9/11] is something natural, an expected event for a country that uses terror, arrogant policy, and suppression against the nations and the peoples, and imposes a single method, thought, and way of life, as if the people of the entire world are clerks in its government offices and employed by its commercial companies and institutions.”
Anyone who was surprised by 9/11, the al-Qaeda statement continues, does not understand the root causes of the attack and in particular “the effects of oppression and tyranny on [the victims’] emotions and feelings.” Instead, such people must think, “that oppression begets surrender, that repression begets silence, that tyranny leaves only humiliation.”
In fact, according to al-Qaeda, humiliation, deprivation and oppression inspire righteous rage against the oppressor. And this righteous indignation is what al-Qaeda’s war is about.
Of course, unlike the Western left, al-Qaeda does not wage its war in the name of an international proletariat and its goal is not a secular socialist utopia. Al-Qaeda’s war is about the future world reign of Islam.
The al-Qaeda statement asks: How can a Muslim accept humiliation and inferiority “when he knows that his nation was created to stand at the center of leadership, at the center of hegemony and rule, at the center of ability and sacrifice? … When he knows that the [divine] rule is that the entire earth must be subject to the religion of Allah – not to the East, not to the West – to no ideology and to no path except the path of Allah?…”
Credulous apostles of appeasement in the West like Ted Turner and Cherie Blair (wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair) are so superior in their own minds to the Muslims who hate them that they don’t consider the possibility that the Islamic faithful could actually mean what they say.
Justifying Arafat’s suicide brigades, Blair said, “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress.” This is an inanity heard nightly on cable talk shows from the left. It is the propaganda line of Machiavellian spokesmen for the terrorist cause like PLO spokesman Abudl Rachman and westernized apologists like Hussein Ibish who equate the terrorists’ terror with the victims’ response.
But it ignores what the combatants say about themselves and their inspiration, and patronizes them in the process.
The Middle East Research Institute has also translated an interview given to the Arab press by a mother of a suicide bomber, who has nothing to say about root causes like poverty, or thwarted national desires or “social injustice.” (Indeed when the al-Qaeda spokesman speaks of his “nation” he clearly means the entire world of Islam, and not any particular state whether Afghanistan or Palestine or Saudia Arabia or Iraq.)
What she says is this:
"I am a compassionate mother to my children,… Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr’s death for the sake of Allah... Jihad is a religious obligation incumbent upon us, and we must carry it out.
"I sacrificed Muhammad as part of my obligation. This is an easy thing. There is no disagreement [among scholars] on such matters. The happiness in this world is an incomplete happiness; eternal happiness is life in the world to come, through martyrdom. Allah be praised, my son has attained this happiness...
"I prayed from the depths of my heart that Allah would cause the success of his operation. I asked Allah to give me 10 [Israelis] for Muhammad, and Allah granted my request and Muhammad made his dream come true, killing 10 Israeli settlers and soldiers. Our God honored him even more, in that there were many Israelis wounded. When the operation was over, the media broadcast the news. Then Muhammad's brother came to me and informed me of his martyrdom.
"I began to cry, ‘Allah is the greatest,’ and prayed and thanked Allah for the success of the operation. I began to utter cries of joy and we declared that we were happy. The young people began to fire into the air out of joy over the success of the operation, as this is what we had hoped for him."
The will to genocide is not specific to the martyrs who blow up little children, but is shared by the community of radical Islam. It comes not from despair, but from a hope of heaven – from extending the territory of Islam and doing Allah’s will. Nothing could be more obvious to anyone paying attention. That is, to anyone paying attention without the screen of liberal arrogance, which denies what it has seen in order to explain it. And thereby understand it. And thereby surrender to it.
The hope for heaven – or for the global reign of Islam as the path to heaven -- is generically the same fanatical inspiration that caused believers in socialism (a heaven on earth) to kill tens of millions of innocent unbelievers during the 20th Century.
It is the same faith that causes progressive fellow travelers like Ted Turner, Barbara Kingsolver and Edward Said to support the agendas of America’s enemies. And of perverse America-haters, like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky to support any anti-American war.
The present war against us may be about humiliation and a sense of inferiority stemming from Islam’s centuries of eclipse, but it is not about despair. The new statement from al-Qaeda is not addressed to people who have nothing. Quite the opposite It is an incitement to people who have something -- and who might be reluctant to give up what they have -- to sacrifice life itself for the glory of Islam: “As long as the Muslim knows and believes … he will not – even for a single moment -- stop trying to achieve [the universal triumph of Islam], even if it costs him his soul…his time, his property and his son, ...”
This is not a war about land in the Middle East or the structure of a Palestinian state, or a U.S. military presence in the Arabian peninsula. It is a war about redemption.
In this it exactly parallels the Communist threat from the past. In the eyes of the Communists, America stood in the way of heaven – a socialist paradise in which racism, sexism, and economic inequality would vanish from the earth. In the eyes of radical Islam, America -- the Great Satan -- stands in the way of Islam’s rule, and thus of human redemption and it is for this reason America must be destroyed.
Thus, the al-Qaeda proclamation: “America is the head of heresy in our modern world, and it leads an infidel democratic regime that is based upon separation of religion and state and on ruling the people by the people via legislating laws that contradict the way of Allah and permit what Allah has prohibited.
This compels the other countries to act in accordance with the same laws in the same ways … and punishes any country [that rebels against these laws] by besieging it, and then by boycotting it. By so doing [America] seeks to impose on the world a religion that is not Allah’s…”
Americans wake up! Your enemies hate you for who you are. They hate you because you are democratic, and tolerant and unbelieving. They hate you because you are Christians: “America’s standing with the Christians of the world against the Muslims has stripped the camouflague from its face.” And they hate you because are Hindus and Buddhists and secularists and Jews.
This war is not a war we are facing. It is a war we are in. Americans have hardly begun to understand this, but the enemy is already keeping score: “We have not reached parity [with America’s alleged attacks on Muslims. [Therefore], we have the right to kill 4 million Americans – 2 million of them children – and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted Muslims because of the [Americans’] chemical and biological weapons.”
Americans have also only begun to understand that if radical Islam is one face of our enemy, the other is the radical left. For two hundred years the radical left has believed in a religion promising a heaven on earth whose end justifies any means. That is why progressives like Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot killed so many innocent people.
That is why radical leftists in America and other European countries have joined in denouncing America’s war of self-defense and in abetting the Arab crusade to obliterate Israel and (in the process) exterminate the Jews of the Middle East.
How serious are some American leftists about abetting the war to destroy their own country? Attorney Lynn Stewart is a veteran of the radical left going back to the 1960s and is the lawyer for the “blind sheik” who led the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
Six people were killed in the attack and 1,000 injured. Stewart is associated with the Center for Constitutional Rights and has been a supporter of Communist causes and Arab terrorists for her entire professional life. Recently, the Attorney General indicted Stewart for helping the “blind sheik,” who is now in prison, to communicate with his terrorist followers in the Middle East and further their bloody agendas.
A chorus from the left has attacked Attorney General Ashcroft for infringing on the civil liberties of the imprisoned terrorist and his “lawyer.” Stewart has been defended as a persecuted civil libertarian by the left-wing National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, The Nation and other institutions of the “progressive” left.
In 1995, Lynn Stewart was interviewed by the New York Times, which reported her radical beliefs. "Ms. Stewart suggested that violence and revolution were sometimes necessary to right the economic and racial wrongs of America’s capitalist system.” Among other things, Lynn Stewart said this: “I don’t believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence. That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, and sexism, and the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support.”
The World Trade Center is an institution which perpetuates capitalism and -- in the eyes of the left -- racism and sexism as well. According to every leftist – from the Nation magazine to the Chomsky fifth column (the distance is not great) --, America is a land of capitalism, racism and sexism, and the enforcer of capitalism, racism and sexism globally. This is the world that the Islamicists call Dar Al-Harb: The world of darkness. The world that is not socialist (for the leftist believers) and that is not Islam (for the faithful).
According to Lynn Stewart and the al-Qaeda spokesman, the people who dwell in Dar Al-Harb and support its profane agendas deserve to die. This is what the present “war on terror” is about. Americans better understand it sooner than later.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri's Knights under the Prophet's Banner: the al-Qaeda Manifesto
*********************************** An excerpt **************************
To understand al-Qaeda, one must read the books of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's principal ideologue and chief strategic thinker. After Osama bin-Laden, Al-Zawahiri is the most-wanted Middle Eastern terrorist. The FBI has a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture or arrest.
In 2001, Al-Zawahiri published Knights under the Prophet's Banner (Fursan Taht Rayah Al-Nabi) even as the empire he built with Bin-Laden, and Taliban leader Mullah Omar crumbled under the weight of U.S. air, special operations forces, as well as the Northern Alliance assaults. (1) Initially serialized in the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper in 12 installments beginning in early December 2001, Knights under the Prophet's Banner can now be found in the back alleys of any major Arab city. (2) The word "knights" in the title refers to the members of the jihadist movement while evoking the image of the knights of the crusades.
The book begins with Al-Zawahiri saying: "I have written this book ... to fulfill the duty entrusted to me towards our generation and future generations. Perhaps I will be unable to write afterwards in the midst of these circumstances and changing conditions." According to Al-Zawahiri, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks were just an opening salvo against the Christian and Jewish "infidels."
Al-Zawahiri sees the United States, Israel, and Israel's Western and Arab allies as the "first force" and Islamic militant movements that depend on God alone the "second force." He believes the United States is removing Islam from power through rigged elections, brutality, and force. He views treaties, peace negotiations, and bans on weapons as steps in the direct occupation of Muslim land by U.S. forces. To Al-Zawahiri, jihad is an ideological struggle for survival--a war with no truce. He believes the Islamic jihadist movement should strike Islam's enemies, using the Luxor incident of 1997 as the means and as an example) He supports the growth of jihad among youths and numbers his success in the tens of thousands of young men in Arab prisons around the Middle East.
They do not desire... nor want your assistance Ms Blair. THEY ARE DEMANDING YOUR HEAD!
He's not pulling any punches in that article, thanks for posting, yes, it's terribly important for every citizen of the West to understand this message.
"The hope for heaven – or for the global reign of Islam as the path to heaven -- is generically the same fanatical inspiration that caused believers in socialism (a heaven on earth) to kill tens of millions of innocent unbelievers during the 20th Century."
RS, anything missing in translation?
I doubt that, about the only way to be a "former member" is to be dead. If you die, you're obviously not a member. If you try to quit, they kill you.
Guys read the full Newsweek article....and ask yourself who is "Ali"..
He's a famous boxer, who formerly went by the name Cassius Clay.
Walked right into that one..
I am the greatest! :-p
************************************AN EXCERPT *******************************
June 17, 2006 - U.S. authorities had intelligence that a team of Al Qaeda-linked terrorists had infiltrated the United States and planned a 2003 attack on the New York City subway system with homemade cyanide bombs, federal and local counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged to NEWSWEEK. But the officials say the plot was called off at the last minute by Al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri-for reasons that remain unclear.
Details of the purported cyanide plot are revealed by author Ron Suskind in his book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” to be published on June 20. According to a source familiar with the book’s content, Suskind reports that American authorities first learned about the cyanide plot from an informant inside Al Qaeda known as “Ali.” According to the book, Ali fed Washington critical information about Al Qaeda between late 2002 and early 2005, until U.S. officials decided that it was too dangerous to the informant to continue to use his reporting.
How an Al Qaeda cell planned a poison gas attack on a NY subway
??? Not hardly even in a black hood.
Off topic: A terrific new freeper, Ikez78, has uncovered some interesting information; it's fully sourced here:
Big news last night in the Saddam - al Qaeda connection. al Baghdadi is a man leading the insurgency in Iraq currently. He was a Republican Guard officer for Saddam, companion of Zarqawi since the start of the war AND HAS BEEN FRIENDS WITH BIN LADEN SINCE MEETING HIM IN AFGHANISTAN http://markeichenlaub.blogspot.com/2006/06/abu-abdullah-rashid-al-baghdadi-former.html
My best guess is it's gotta be a guy handling the money. He would be in a position to know whose projects are getting priority. Whose projects have been cancelled etc.
"WASHINGTON - Buoyed by the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, U.S. government officials hope the exposure of his radical network through hundreds of raids across Iraq will help them eliminate key tentacles of the amorphous al-Qaida organization."
"These officials say the raids have led to solid insights into al-Qaida in Iraq and provided new clues about how the group trades information with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida central. "
"They also are learning who is connected to whom and how external support is funneled through Iraq from across the Middle East, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iran. "
No wonder the DNC, the rats in Congress and maggots of the MSM are upset about the Zotting of Zark Pig. Suddenly, this data shows why it was important to take out Saddam, kill thousands of Zark's little pigs and continue battle the WOT instead of "Nuancing at some table in Paris.
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