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Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Adam Nathan and Tony Allen-Mills
A DEDICATED special forces unit is being assembled alongside the SAS and SBS to infiltrate and destroy Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
The unit, nicknamed the “X-men�, has already begun recruiting and is expected eventually to comprise some 600 men and women from all three armed services and the intelligence agencies.
Particular efforts will be made to recruit people of Arabic appearance in addition to members of ethnic minority communities and Muslims. The unit would be expected to operate around the world as well as to counter the terrorism threat in Britain itself.
Much of the core of the unit will be made up of undercover surveillance operators who have honed their skills fighting terrorists in Northern Ireland.
More than 150 members of the 14th Intelligence and Security Company, have already left Northern Ireland and are forming the nucleus of the new unit.
The company was involved in the bugging of Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, during the 1998 Good Friday peace negotiations.
Other Northern Ireland veterans who are experts at undermining terrorist groups using moles and informers are also likely to be recruited.
The move was hinted at in last weeks announcement by Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, on the restructuring of the armed forces. We are increasing the strength of our special forces and investing in new equipment for them, he said.
The government will make a separate move in its anti-terrorism efforts tomorrow when ministers launch a leaflet telling members of the public how they can prepare for a terrorist attack. The advice, to be sent to all homes in England and Wales over the next few weeks, will suggest people stay upwind of any release of gas or radiation and remain indoors in the event of nuclear detonation.
If they believe they have been infected by biological warfare agents, they are advised to ring NHS Direct rather than spread germs by going to hospital. They should wash with soap and water if they come into contact with a suspicious substance.
The advice is part of a 5m publicity drive by the government to prepare for the possibility of an attack by Al-Qaeda or other groups.
The leaflet provisionally entitled Go In, Stay In, Tune In suggests people should stay indoors and listen to the BBC for further instructions in an emergency. Households are advised to stock up on tinned food, a first aid kit, a battery-powered radio and a mobile phone and charger.
The terrorist threat, particularly with the Olympics approaching, is still considered severe. It has emerged that the US Olympic committee was among leading American sports bodies that were warned last week Al-Qaeda may be planning to attack a sporting event at home or abroad this year.
A new security focus on sports stadiums has been prompted by a growing US conviction that Al-Qaeda will attempt to disrupt either the Athens Olympics or the US presidential campaign with an attack designed to inflict mass casualties.
Everybody feels (Al-Qaeda) are trying to mount another attack, said Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, which last week called for a restructuring of US intelligence agencies. And everybody feels that they are doing their best to make it chemical, biological or nuclear because it kills more people and thats their goal.
We are in danger of letting things slide. Time is not on our side.
July 25, 2004 at 03:37 PM in Reconnaissance and Surveillance Regiment, Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) | Permalink | TrackBack (259) | Top of page | Blog Home
The New York Times > National > Correcting the Record on Sept. 11, in Great Detail
By PHILIP SHENON
his article was reported by Philip Shenon, Douglas Jehl and David Johnston and written by Mr. Shenon.
WASHINGTON, July 24 — When the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States set to work early last year to prepare the definitive history of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, it seemed that much of the hard work of the so-called 9/11 commission was already done, because so much of the horrifying story seemed to be known.
At the time, it was understood that all of the hijackers had entered the country legally and done nothing to draw attention to themselves; Osama bin Laden had underwritten the plot with his personal fortune but had left the details to others; American intelligence agencies had no warning that Al Qaeda was considering suicide missions using planes; President Bush had received a special intelligence briefing weeks before Sept. 11 about Al Qaeda threats that focused on past, not current, threats.
But 19 months later, the commission released a final, unanimous book-length report last Thursday that, in calling for a overhaul of the way the government collects and shares intelligence, showed that much of what had been common wisdom about the Sept. 11 attacks at the start of the panel's investigation was wrong.
In meticulous detail, the 567-page report, including 116 pages of detailed footnotes in tiny, eye-straining type, rewrote the history of Sept. 11, 2001, correcting the historical record in ways large and small and shattering myths that might otherwise have been accepted as truth for generations.
The commission's report found that the hijackers had repeatedly broken the law in entering the United States, that Mr. bin Laden may have micromanaged the attacks but did not pay for them, that intelligence agencies had considered the threat of suicide hijackings, and that Mr. Bush received an August 2001 briefing on evidence of continuing domestic terrorist threats from Al Qaeda.
"Our work, we believe, is the definitive work on 9/11," said Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who was chairman of the commission, and whose consensus-building talents are credited by other commissioners as the reason the panel's report was unanimous. If there are unanswered questions, Mr. Kean said, it is mostly because "the people who were at the heart of the plot are dead."
The Hijackers
For the commission of five Democrats and five Republicans, the work of correcting the record began with an understanding of how 19 young Arab terrorists managed to enter the United States unnoticed, hiding in plain sight in the weeks and months before they joined in an attack that left more than 3,000 people dead.
This was the subject of the first of what would be series of riveting public hearings held by the commission this year. The first fact-finding hearing in January showed just how wrong - and self-serving -much of the government's information about the Sept. 11 plot had been. And it suggested just how aggressive the commission intended to be in setting the record straight.
Immediately after Sept. 11 and in the months that followed, the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other counterterrorism agencies defended their failure to detect the plot by insisting that the hijackers had gone out of their way to enter the United States legally and to avoid detection in the months preceding the attacks.
"Each of the hijackers, apparently purposely selected to avoid notice, came easily and lawfully from abroad," Louis J. Freeh, the former director of the F.B.I., testified to Congress in October 2002. "While here, the hijackers effectively operated without suspicion, triggering nothing that alerted law enforcement."
But in its final report, the commission found that as many as 13 of the hijackers had entered the United States with passports that had been fraudulently altered, using criminal methods previously associated with Al Qaeda.
The commission found that the visa applications of many of the hijackers had been filled out improperly; in several cases, the hijackers had provided demonstrably false information on the forms. The names of at least three of the terrorists were found after Sept. 11 in the databases of American intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.
After entering the United States, several of the hijackers should have drawn the attention of law enforcement agencies but did not.
Mohamed Atta, the plot's Egyptian-born ringleader, overstayed his tourist visa. One of the terrorist pilots, Ziad al-Jarrah, attended school in 2000 in violation of his immigration status, which should have been enough to block him from re-entering the United States; he left and re-entered the country at least six more times before Sept. 11.
Imagining the Unimaginable
In trying to explain why the nation had left itself so vulnerable on Sept. 11, the leaders of the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies have insisted publicly that they never considered the nightmare of passenger planes turned into guided missiles.
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center," Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said in May 2002. As recently as this April, in testimony to the Sept. 11 commission, Mr. Freeh said that he "never was aware of a plan that contemplated commercial airliners being used as weapons."
But in its investigation, the commission found that an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been imagined, repeatedly. The commission said that several threat reports circulated within the government in the late 1990's raised the explicit possibility of an attack using airliners as missiles.
Most prominent among those reports, the commission said, was one circulated in September 1998, based on information provided by a source who walked into an American consulate in East Asia, that ''mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city." In August of the same year, it said, an intelligence agency received information that a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command had gone so far as to develop exercises to counter the threat and, according to a Defense Department memorandum unearthed by the commission, planned a drill in April 2001 that would have simulated a terrorist crash into the Pentagon.
Bin Laden's Role
American intelligence agencies had known for years that the United States had much to fear from Osama bin Laden, but it was fear based more on Mr. bin Laden's power as a global symbol of Islamic fundamentalist rage than as a terrorist logistician.
A senior State Department official testified to the Senate in 2001 that the bin Laden terror network was "analogous to a multinational corporation, bin Laden as C.E.O.," leaving the details of the terrorist attacks to others.
But the commission found that far from being the disengaged leader of his terror network, Mr. bin Laden was described by captured Qaeda colleagues as a hands-on executive who wanted to be involved in almost every detail of the Sept. 11 plot, choosing the hijacking team himself and selecting targets. He was reported to have been eager to hit the White House.
The report describes information obtained from the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mr. bin Laden's former chief of operations, who said that "bin Laden could assess new trainees very quickly, in about 10 minutes, and that many of the 9/11 hijackers were selected in this manner."
American intelligence analysts had long believed that Mr. bin Laden had a vast personal fortune that bankrolled Al Qaeda; news accounts described the bin Laden fortune as totaling as much as $300 million, with real estate holdings in London, Paris and the Cte d'Azur.
But the commission reached a far different conclusion, finding that Mr. bin Laden was cut off from his family's wealth after the early 1990's and that he financed Al Qaeda's operations through a core group of wealthy Muslim donors, mainly in the Persian Gulf. The report said that from 1970 to 1994, Mr. bin Laden received about $1 million a year from family funds - a sizable sum, but not nearly enough to finance such an ambitious terrorist network.
The Iraq Connection
The Bush administration has long maintained that there was a close working relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. In October 2002, with the invasion of Iraq only months away, President Bush said in a speech in Cincinnati that ''high-level contacts" between Iraq and Al Qaeda "go back a decade," and that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
As recently as last month, Vice President Dick Cheney said there was reason to believe a disputed Czech intelligence report that Mohamed Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001, suggesting a tie between Iraq and the Sept. 11 plot.
But in its most contentious effort to set the record straight about the origins of the plot, the bipartisan commission's final report found no evidence of close collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, appearing to undermine a justification for the Iraq war.
The commission found no credible evidence to suggest that the Prague meeting took place and no evidence of any kind to show Iraqi involvement in attacks by Al Qaeda against the United States. While there had indeed between periodic contacts in the late 1990's between Al Qaeda representatives and Iraqi officials, principally in Sudan, the commission found, those contacts did not amount to much.
"To date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship," the commission wrote.
A footnote buried on page 470 of the commission's report provided a clue to some of the false claims: "Although there have been suggestions of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda regarding chemical weapons and explosive trainings, the most detailed information alleging such ties came from an Al Qaeda operative who recanted much of his original information."
The commission attempted to lift suspicion that the leaders of another Arab government, that of Saudi Arabia, had underwritten Al Qaeda, and to knock down widely circulated theories that the Bush administration had improperly assisted the Saudis by allowing members of the extended bin Laden clan to flee the United States on charter flights at a time when all commercial air traffic was shut down after the attacks.
''Saudi Arabia has long been considered the principal source of Al Qaeda financing," the commission wrote in its final report. "But we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization."
The Evidence
In the first hours after the Sept. 11 attacks and ever since, the White House has consistently insisted that President Bush and his deputies had no credible evidence before the attacks to suggest that Al Qaeda was about to strike on American soil.
But the assertion has been questioned as a result of the commission's digging. After its most heated showdown with the Bush administration over access to classified information, the commission pressured the White House to declassify and make public a special intelligence briefing that had been presented to the president at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, a month before the attacks.
The existence of the document - but not its detailed contents - had been known about since 2002, when the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush had received an intelligence report before Sept. 11 warning of the possibility that Al Qaeda might hijack American passenger planes.
In testimony this April to the Sept. 11 commission, before it was made public, Ms. Rice insisted that the report was "historical."
"It did not, in fact, warn of attacks inside the United States," she testified. "It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information.''
But there were gasps in the audience in the hearing room when she disclosed the name of the two-page briefing paper: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S."
The document was made public several days later and contained passages referring to F.B.I. reports of "suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." It noted that a caller to the United States Embassy in the United Arab Emirates that May had warned that "a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S.," planning attacks with explosives.
The commission's final report revealed that two C.I.A. analysts involved in preparing the brief had wanted to make clear to Mr. Bush that, far from being only a historical threat, the threat that Al Qaeda would strike on American soil was "both current and serious."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
July 25, 2004 at 03:29 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (54) | Top of page | Blog Home
Telegraph | News | Terrified publishers won't print truth about Islam, says author
By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
(Filed: 25/07/2004)
A distinguished writer and academic has accused leading publishers of turning down his latest book because it is too critical of Islam.
David Selbourne, who has written more than a dozen books, and his literary agent suspect that publishers are shunning The Losing Battle With Islam because it could provoke anger from Islamic extremists and other critics.
Among the subjects covered in the book is the "negative impact" of actions by Muslims in recent decades. It suggests that Islam is not a religion of peace, balance and compassion, as many of its adherents claim.
The book also discusses the fatwa that was issued against Salman Rushdie, the novelist, by the Ayatollah Khomeini, after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Mr Selbourne writes of the "cruel bounty repeatedly offered for his [Mr Rushie's] head".
Six publishers, including Penguin, HarperCollins and Heinemann, have turned down the book in the past five months.
Mr Selbourne, who is British but lives in Italy, said that he believed that the reason for the repeated rejection was clear.
"The reaction of the publishers is unprecedented. The subject is very contentious. I think there are some people who have fixed views which don't permit them to look at the matter dispassionately.
"It is controversial because it is a record - written without fear or favour - of what has actually happened during the Islamic revival. My book has been turned down because there is hesitation about looking at these matters squarely in the face, especially in Britain."
In the past, Mr Selbourne, whose previous publishers have included MacMillan, Cape, Penguin and Little, Brown, has had little difficulty getting his work into print.
His book The Principle of Duty, published in 1994, was influential in Tony Blair's circle and was highly praised by Michael Howard, who was a Conservative Cabinet minister at the time. More recently Mr Selbourne has been advising David Willetts, the shadow works and pensions secretary, on future Tory strategy.
Mr Selbourne added: "Many people don't want to face up to the scale of the challenge that the non-Muslim world is facing.
"There is a lot of hidden sympathy for attacks on the West by Islam, even though people who have this sympathy wouldn't always admit it."
Mr Selbourne, who was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford, has a reputation as a skilled, knowledgeable but abrasive award-winning writer.
His new book looks at the development of Islam from 1947 to the present day, concentrating on the period from 1990.
"I believe the book is a scrupulous analysis of the effect of the Islamic revival. It is precisely the book I would have wanted to read if I hadn't written it myself. It isn't a polemic against Islam although much of what Muslims have done has had a negative impact. For some, it will look like a negative portrayal of Islam, but it is a necessary work."
In his book, Mr Selbourne questions whether Islam should be regarded as a "religion of peace". He writes: "If Islam were truly a religion of compassion, mercy, patience, balance and peace - as most Muslims and a shrinking minority of non-Muslims denote it - many of the acts which have been recorded in this work, whether carried out by Muslims or against them, would not have taken place."
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, who published three of Mr Selbourne's books before becoming his literary agent six years ago, said that he shared the author's belief that the book had been rejected because of its controversial nature.
The publishers either declined to comment on their reasons for rejecting the book or were unavailable for comment, although those who did reply all claimed that they had not been afraid to publish the book. Instead, they gave different reasons, ranging from the book not being right for them to there being too many books on Islam. The book is being read by a seventh publisher.
"David is an extremely distinguished, polemical writer. It has surprised me that it wasn't accepted, but it appears that some publishers regard it as too much of a hot potato," said Mr Sinclair-Stevenson.
Additional reporting by Neha Okhandiar
July 24, 2004 at 11:03 PM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Australia's Iraq war case damned
Australia relied on "thin, ambiguous and incomplete" intelligence to go to war in Iraq, according to an inquiry.
But the independent report by Philip Flood, a diplomat and former spy master, clears Prime Minister John Howard of "politicising" intelligence.
Its conclusions echo those reached by separate US and UK inquiries prompted by the failure to find the banned Iraqi weapons that formed the case for war.
Australia sent 2,000 troops to Iraq last year; 900 are still in the area.
Prime Minister Howard commissioned Mr Flood's inquiry in March, on the recommendation of a parliamentary committee investigating the role Australia's spy agencies had played in the build-up to war.
The BBC's Sydney correspondent, Phil Mercer, says the Flood report, like its US and British equivalents, blames intelligence failures on spy agencies, sparing the politicians.
Investigators attached to Mr Flood's team interviewed Mr Howard, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Defence Minister Robert Hill.
Bali failure
The Flood report also says that Australia, like other countries in the region, was not aware enough of the threat posed by Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the militant group which has been blamed for the bomb attacks in Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people, many of them Australian tourists.
The report says Australia's spies should have known more about the "terrorist capabilities and intentions" of JI.
But it says that there is no evidence Australia had any specific warning of the Bali attack.
Recommendations
Prime Minister Howard has hailed the report for clearing his government of allegations it interfered with pre-war intelligence on Iraq to fortify its argument for backing the US-led war.
Mr Howard is set to face the electorate in September or October this year in a campaign which pits him against the staunchly anti-war Labor Party leader, Mark Latham.
Mr Latham has pledged to withdraw what remains of Australia's Iraq contingent if he wins the election.
The Flood report makes several recommendations for the reform of Australia's spy agencies - all but one of which Mr Howard has said he will implement.
Mr Howard says he will not rename the prime minister's intelligence advisers, the Office of National Assessments (ONA).
The report also calls for intelligence assessments to be more transparent and accountable and for the ONA's budget to be doubled to A$25m ($18m) a year.
July 24, 2004 at 02:39 PM in Iraq | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home
CIA's role in 9/11 commission | csmonitor.com
By Faye Bowers | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – As much as any government body, the Central Intelligence Agency sits at the center of the 9/11 commission report - and its calls for reform.
Senior members of the CIA say they accept the criticism. They also ask that the strides they've made in the nation's war on terrorism since the attacks of 9/11 be taken into account before any major changes are made.
"The fight we're in now, the war we're in now looks significantly different than it did three years ago," says one senior CIA official. "This agency is fundamentally different. Our partners, and this is hugely critical, are fighting this war differently than they did with us three years ago. The target ... is profoundly different than it was three years ago primarily as a result of global disruption operations," the official says.
The senior official, and two others, emotionally defended the agency's performance - and their cooperation with sister agencies.
"This target is personal for us," says the official. "We lost 3,000 fellow Americans. We've lost officers in this agency. Our sister services in this town lost officers. I waited to hear if my brother was alive. All right?" he asks, his voice cracking.
The officials also agreed changes need to be made but at the right pace and with respect for the war that is currently being waged. "We are now involved in a slugfest with an enemy that we faced before Sept. 11 and that we face even more significantly now," the senior official says.
He outlined the progress they've made: Some two-thirds of the Al Qaeda leadership has been apprehended, the planning and training facilities in Afghanistan are closed, and Pakistan is no longer aiding the group.
The capture of key operatives has provided invaluable intelligence information, enabling officials to thwart a number of attacks in the US and elsewhere. The March 2003 capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was cited as the most important catch. The official went on to say that he remembered "hearing" a senior Al Qaeda official say that "the loss of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was like the melting of an iceberg. We can never replace him."
The senior official ticked off other major losses Al Qaeda has suffered:
Yemen was an operational hub for Al Qaeda, and today the top six to 10 leaders there are "all off the table."
Saudi Arabia was also a key hub. A year ago, more than a half dozen Al Qaeda leaders operated in Saudi Arabia. Today, "every single one of them is off the streets," he says. "Every one."
He says that although serious damage has been inflicted on Al Qaeda, it still continues to find ways to attack in the way it did three years ago.
He describes the two parallel tracks they are following: Remnants of the Al Qaeda leadership continue to plot attacks against the US; and amorphous groups spread over much of the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia are inspired by Al Qaeda to carry out additional attacks.
In terms of the threats leading up to the November presidential election, he says he wouldn't "characterize what we have now as chatter. I think we have some fairly specific information that Al Qaeda wants to come after us."
July 24, 2004 at 02:38 PM in CIA | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
TheStar.com - World creeping closer to `oil shock'
Energy crisis could loom, experts say
Politics, corporate moves are factors
DAVID OLIVE
BUSINESS COLUMNIST
Are we running out of oil? Are we in danger of another energy crisis of the magnitude of the 1970s "oil shocks" that condemned us to a decade of economic stagnation? And with our desultory regard for conservation and alternative energy sources, are we risking ever greater oil dependence on the volatile Middle East?
Yes, yes and yes.
Of course we're running out of oil and natural gas; they're non-renewable resources, and the rate of discovery of so-called "elephants" has been on the decline for decades since the halcyon days of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea. Worse, the more recent discoveries have been made in some of the world's most remote and politically unstable places among them, Nigeria, Sudan, Russia, Indonesia and the former Soviet republics of central Asia.
The critical issue is how soon will the oil run out? It's estimated that we've already exhausted about half of the original 2 trillion barrels of oil on Earth, which is a bit alarming given the relatively primitive state of global industrialization in the early decades of oil exploration. We're sure to run through the remaining half of the Earth's oil endowment much faster, especially with the emergence of China, India and other developing world nations as dynamic, oil-hungry economies.
The two factors weighing most heavily on fretful energy forecasters are geopolitics and the behaviour of oil-producing corporations.
Political instability:
An otherwise sanguine Martin Wolf of U.K.'s Financial Times, who expects current high oil prices to spur discoveries that will ease the world oil price, as in the past, acknowledges that, "After Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. entered an ideological conflict with the world's oil superpower (that is, the Middle East), which itself is politically riven." The test of wills between the White House and several Mideast regimes "should make us all very nervous," says Wolf, especially given the increasingly precarious state of the ruling House of Saud.
The obvious parallel is the 1979 collapse of the Shah of Iran, whose regime, like the current regime in Riyadh, was a U.S. ally with only fragile local support. "If a collapse of the Saudi regime removed the country's supply from world markets, even temporarily, 10 per cent of global output would vanish," Wolf notes.
The weak Saudi government, Osama bin Laden's principal target, is highly vulnerable. "Just one successful Al Qaeda attack on the giant production facilities of Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi could produce a global recession," writes Don Coxe, chairman of Chicago's Harris Investment Management, in Maclean's.
The political uncertainties radiate outward from Riyadh. In Iraq's botched occupation, saboteurs have prevented the world's No. 2 nation in oil reserves from returning even to its prewar output of 2.5 million barrels per day, with the White House's promise of a quick ramp-up to 6 million barrels per day now regarded as a distant dream.
Libya is back in business again, now that dictator Moammar Gadhafi has repudiated his nuclear-weapons ambitions, ending an 18-year U.S. embargo against the world No. 9 oil-reserve holder. Here again, though, the caprice of Gadhafi is a real concern. That also applies to the ever-shifting dictates of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and kleptocratic dictators in central Asia. Government by fiat is a mighty deterrent for even the world's largest oil companies to commit to multibillion-dollar exploration programs in regions were governments routinely renege on deals, and expropriation and eviction are real prospects.
Oil companies' retreat:
With oil prices now 30 per cent higher than the average for 2000-2003, and Canadian pump prices approaching $1 per litre, oil companies should, by tradition, be deploying their windfall profits into the search for new reserves.
But that's not happening this time. Increased worldwide spending this year on exploration and production (E&P) is projected at just 9 per cent less than half the increase following previous oil-price jumps. ExxonMobil Corp. and ChevronTexaco Corp. are among the oil majors who've refused to boost their E&P budgets this year. Which means junior and mid-sized producers account for most of this year's modest increase in E&P activity.
As noted, the oil majors are super-cautious about committing to mega-projects in unstable regions. They're also jittery about a sudden, sharp decline in oil prices that would make a hash of their long-term payout projections understandably, given that as recently as the late 1990s, oil slumped to about $10 (U.S.) a barrel, or just one-quarter of today's price.
The oil majors have learned from their earlier misplaced exuberance. "What they're saying," analyst Paul Sankey of Deutsche Bank Securities told the Wall Street Journal last month, "is, `we've blown it in the past, we're not going to do that again.'"
And, as never before in modern times, the industry's decision-making power is concentrated in very few hands. A rash of late-1990s mergers among top-tier oil producers created a tight fraternity of about half a dozen companies large enough to take on the biggest projects.
Merger architects like Lee Raymond of the former Exxon Corp. and Sir John Browne of BP PLC (which triggered the takeover boom by absorbing Amoco Corp. and Arco Corp.), initially hailed their combinations as super-producers uniquely capable of opening up the world's most daunting regions to oil and gas production.
Instead, the new giants have focused on paying off their acquisition-related debt, cutting personnel and other costs, shedding marginal properties and buying back their own stock in order to boost share prices to which executive pay is tied.
The charitable view is that Big Oil is merely reacting to investor expectations. "CEOs are listening to what institutional shareholders want," Lehman Brothers Inc. analyst James Crandell told Business Week in June. "Production growth is a secondary goal, if it's a goal at all."
The less charitable view is that consumers are now at the mercy of a cabal of like-minded Big Oil CEOs who are no longer forced to bet their companies on a potential giant discovery as the plucky Arco did in Prudhoe Bay in partnership with Exxon because of a tacit understanding among today's majors that they won't compete for the kinds of projects that once could make a company.
Chemical producer Jon Meade Huntsman of Utah, whose firm has been whipsawed by soaring oil prices, along with airlines, power utilities and other sectors, complains in Business Week that "we've got (an oil) monopoly that's, in effect, more dangerous than during the Rockefeller era" of the early 20th century.
The current oil price surge has been a boon to alternative-energy entrepreneurs seeking financing for their projects. And concerns about global warming and energy self-sufficiency have put alternatives to fossil fuels on the national agenda of countries like Canada, where in the recent federal election campaign both the Liberal and NDP platforms promised outsized commitments to wind power.
But these are long-term solutions, at best. After decades of research, fuel cells have yet to show any sign of becoming a practical alternative to the internal combustion engine. Electricity generated from solar panels is about 10 times more expensive than power generated by traditional means. Wind-turbine technology has dropped significantly in price, and is now competitive with natural-gas-fired power plants.
But it's still no match for coal-generated power in price. Thirty-four years since the first Earth Day put environmental awareness on the map, alternatives to fossil-fuel energy will account for only an estimated 6.7 per cent of U.S. energy consumption this year.
In the meantime, a nasty combination of political hurdles, arguably misplaced Big Oil priorities, stunted conservation efforts, and unanticipated soaring demand from China and the Indian subcontinent is conspiring to bring on a full-blown crisis.
Without a meaningful increase in investment to develop new energy sources, the world could face a severe supply shortage by 2020, British energy consultant John Westwood of Douglas-Westwood Ltd. told the Wall Street Journal last month.
"As far as we're concerned, this is not the real crunch," Westwood said of the current oil-supply squeeze. "This is just a practice."
July 24, 2004 at 09:01 AM in Middle East | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
Veteran Irish republican Cahill dies
By Peter Griffiths
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Veteran Irish republican leader Joe Cahill, who escaped execution to become a commander of the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrilla group, has died. He was 84.
"Joe was the father of this generation of republicans," Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said in a statement on Saturday. "He spent a lifetime in struggle."
Cahill, honorary vice president of the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, was a republican icon who rose to the rank of IRA chief of staff during more than 60 years in the movement.
He died in Belfast on Friday after a short illness.
Cahill was one of six IRA men sentenced to hang in 1942 for the murder of a policeman. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but he was released after only eight years under an amnesty related to the World War Two peace treaty.
In 1973, he was arrested aboard a cargo ship carrying five tonnes of weapons and explosives from Libya to Ireland.
"You do me an honour," he told the judge as the three year sentence was passed.
Born Belfast in 1920, Cahill joined the republican movement as a teenager.
He was a founding member of the Provisional IRA, the paramilitary group which emerged in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s after the original IRA lost popular support.
Over the next 30 years, more than 3,600 people were killed during the bitter conflict between Irish nationalists, seeking a united Ireland, and loyalists who want to maintain British rule.
Around half of those deaths were blamed on the IRA, which called a ceasefire in 1994.
Cahill, a married father of seven, expressed "regret" for those killed and once said: "In any war situation, innocent lives are lost."
He took part in negotiations leading to the historic 1998 Good Friday peace accord which was hailed as the document which ended the conflict.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration was criticised in 1994 for granting Cahill a visa to enter the country to explain the impending IRA ceasefire to supporters.
In 2003, Cahill attended talks to revive the stalled peace process in Northern Ireland after the government resumed direct rule in a row over continuing paramilitary activity.
July 24, 2004 at 08:47 AM in IRA | Permalink | TrackBack (50) | Top of page | Blog Home
July 23, 2004 at 11:07 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (1) | Top of page | Blog Home
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission), an independent, bipartisan commission created by congressional legislation and the signature of President George W. Bush in late 2002, is chartered to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks. The Commission is also mandated to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.
The Commission has released its final report, available below in PDF format. The report is also available in bookstores nationwide and from the Government Printing Office.
July 22, 2004 at 10:18 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Hijackers passed through Iran but no direct Tehran-9/11 connection: CIA
Thu Jul 22, 2:19 PM
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Members of al-Qaeda, including some of the September 11 hijackers, passed through Iran but no connection has been made between Tehran and the attacks, a senior CIA (news - web sites) official said.
The CIA official, in a briefing for reporters on Wednesday, said eight of the eventual September 11 hijackers were among the members of al-Qaeda who had passed through Iran.
"We think it was because they had passports that the Iranians would not stamp for whatever reason," the official said.
"I don't think that we know that this was a deliberate Iranian policy, that is, a sanctioned policy at the highest levels of the Iranian government," the official added.
"It is clear that Iran has been on the state sponsor of terrorism list for a long time and deservedly so," the official said at the briefing ahead of the release of the report of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
But, the official added, "We can't make any connection to 9/11 here..."
Asked about the relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda, the official said "like all intelligence issues there's some murkiness here.
"There have been al-Qaeda people who have stayed for some time in Iran and it's hard, and because they have been in touch with colleagues outside of Iran at times when operations have occurred, it's hard to imagine that they were unwitting of those operations.
"And it's not hard to make the leap that they may have had some at least operational knowledge. It's harder to make the leap that they were directing operations like that," the official said.
Noting Iran's hostility to the Taliban who ruled Afghanistan (news - web sites) pre-September 11 and sheltered al-Qaeda, the official said "in that period it's a little hard to see Iran as an ally of al-Qaeda."
"But it's a friendly neighborhood for terrorists to move through."
Compared to countries like Egypt, Jordan or Turkey, the official said Iran's "determination to go after (terrorists) is just not as robust."
In its report, the 9/11 Commission said Iran may have provided transit for at least eight of the men who carried out the September 11 attacks.
The commission quoted the captured 9/11 planner Ramzi bin al-Shibh as saying that at least eight hijackers transited Iran on their way to and from Afghanistan, "taking advantage of the Iranian practice of not stamping Saudi passports."
The report said circumstantial evidence suggested that senior operatives of the Iranian-supported group Hezbollah closely tracked the travel of some hijackers into Iran in November 2000. But it said this may just be coincidence.
"In sum, there is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al-Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers," the report said.
But it added: "We found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack" by 19 men.
"At the time of their travel through Iran, the al-Qaeda operatives themselves were probably not aware of the specific details of their future operations."
The panel concluded that "we believe this topic requires further investigation by the US government."
President George W. Bush (news - web sites) has said the United States would continue to probe whether Iran played any role in the September 11 strikes.
July 22, 2004 at 09:11 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home
BBC NEWS | Americas | 9/11 inquiry blames US 'failure'
The US commission investigating the 11 September attacks has blamed US leaders for failing to comprehend the gravity of the threat posed by al-Qaeda.
Chairman Thomas Kean spoke of a failure of "policy, management, capability and, above all, imagination".
The measures adopted by the US from 1998 to 2001 did not disturb or even delay the plot, the final report says.
The commission recommends a wide-ranging overhaul of US intelligence services and congressional oversight.
"Where government needs to act, we will," President George W Bush said after receiving his copy of the report which comes after two years of exhaustive investigation.
Intelligence bodies have come under harsh criticism for failing to avert the airliner hijackings, in which about 3,000 people died.
An airport surveillance video of some of the hijackers has added to dismay over the ease with which planes were seized.
But no single individual is to blame, said Mr Kean, launching the report signed by all its members.
"Yet individuals and institutions cannot be absolved of responsibility," he said.
Bob Hughes, the father of a victim of the attacks, said "there is plenty of blame to go around".
"There's really no closure for me and my wife," Mr Hughes said.
Among the report's recommendations are:
the creation of a national counter-terrorism centre "unifying strategic intelligence and operational planning against Islamist terrorists across the foreign-domestic divide"
the establishment of a new national intelligence director to unify the intelligence community
QUICK GUIDE
What is al-Qaeda?
creating a "network-based information sharing system that transcends traditional governmental boundaries"
strengthening congressional oversight
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds says the measures proposed in the report amount to the most significant change since the CIA itself was founded after World War II.
Shake-up
The bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States published the final report - almost 600 pages long - following testimony from more than 1,000 witnesses and examination of as many classified documents.
"The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise," the 10-member panel said.
The report said "Islamist extremists had given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers".
But "terrorism was not the overriding national security concern for the US government under either the [former President Bill] Clinton or pre-9/11 Bush administration," it says.
"The United States government was simply not active enough in combating the terrorist threat before 9/11," Mr Kean said.
He added that it had been impossible to determine whether the 11 September attacks could have been prevented - it was "possible", but this could not be borne out by facts.
An attack of even greater magnitude is now possible and even probable. We do not have the luxury of time. We must prepare and we must act," Mr Kean said.
The report carries political weight and as such it cannot be ignored, says the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington.
Mr Bush's challenger in the November elections, John Kerry, has already said that if elected, he will immediately convene an emergency bi-partisan security summit bringing to map out and implement a reform programme.
July 22, 2004 at 05:19 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home
Can spy agencies ever work together? | csmonitor.com
Despite failed attempts to reform intelligence structure in the past, the 9/11 report may ensure change happens this time.
By Peter Grier and Faye Bowers | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - Systemic reform of US intelligence may - repeat, may - be something whose time has come.
For decades the CIA and other national intelligence agencies have periodically drawn scrutiny for perceived shortcomings. At times the spotlight has been followed by bureaucratic shake-up. But Langley's spies, the analysts of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other US intelligence personnel have avoided some of the largest suggested changes, such as the establishment of a more powerful national intelligence director.
This time, change at the top might happen. The 9/11 commission is set to recommend a new structure of control for US intelligence - and panel members have vowed to keep pushing. In an election year both President Bush and presumptive challenger John Kerry may find it hard to oppose them, given the commission's revelations about pre-Sept. 11 intelligence stumbles.
"These commissions go back 40 years or so, and almost all come up with the same conclusion," says former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner. "In this instance we have a convergence."
Undoubtedly some recent criticism of the performance of US intelligence is unfair. Agents and analysts provide disciplined estimates - not magic. US policymakers will always have to make crucial security decisions based on uncertain information about adversary intentions.
Moreover, some of the intelligence community's most crucial misestimates prior to Sept. 11 were widely shared. As Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon has noted, most European and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies believed that Saddam Hussein had continued to work on biological and chemical weapons following his defeat in the first Gulf War.
But both the Senate Intelligence Committee report released this month, and 9/11 commission staff reports, have documented numerous instances in which miscommunication, bureaucratic wrangling, or sheer ineptitude hampered the nation's antiterror efforts before the fall of 2001.
For instance, one 9/11 panel staff study notes that at one point a CIA analyst passed along to the FBI office in New York the name of a suspected Al Qaeda operative with a US visa, to see whether that person was still in the US. No one followed up - and the US missed a chance to find Sept. 11 hijacker Khalid al-Midhar, who was indeed in the country.
Now the 9/11 panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is set to release its final report Thursday. Panelists and staff members have long hinted at what one of the report's main recommendations will be: establishment of a national intelligence director, on the level of a Cabinet officer, who has budget authority over the CIA, the DIA, and all other intelligence arms.
The panel will also almost certainly urge greater development of human intelligence sources, and in general greater cooperation among the nation's intelligence personnel. These are all points many experts have long supported. "We need a whole new intelligence architecture," agrees Richard Shultz, an international security expert at Tufts University's Fletcher School in Medford, Mass.
Still, change won't be easy to come by. As Mr. Shultz points out, beefing up human intelligence will likely require that the CIA drop certain requirements on the nature of intelligence assets. By necessity that would involve dealing with more unsavory characters. "Advertising in The Economist is not going to do it," he says.
But as former DCI Stansfield Turner points out, the establishment of a new, more powerful intelligence chief is not as revolutionary a change as some might think. To some extent, that position already exists.
By law the head of the CIA is also Director of Central Intelligence, with nominal authority over other agencies. During his years at the agency, Turner was given budget authority over the DIA and Pentagon intelligence arms, per order of President Carter. That authority was rescinded by the next chief executive, Ronald Reagan.
Thus the Bush White House would not have to wait for Congress to pass a law establishing a post above that of the current director, says Turner. The president could restore power to the DCI with a stroke of a pen. "That could be done with an executive order," he says.
To this point the White House has not taken a direct stand on the 9/11 panel's proposed changes. Officials have sounded a vaguely positive note - thus White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that Bush "is open to additional ideas."
But the reality is that budget authority equals power in Washington, and the Pentagon would be loath to cede budget authority over the DIA without a fight.
Such a battle "would break so much china I don't think it's going to happen," says Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst on Iraq. More logical changes, suggest Ms. Yaphe, might look at how functions are grouped within the CIA.
July 21, 2004 at 08:53 PM in US | Permalink | TrackBack (40) | Top of page | Blog Home
TheStar.com - Why tyrants rule Arabs
For 60 years, the West has propped up Arab despots, creating poverty and illiteracy where education once thrived
GWYNNE DYER
It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: Only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison's sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about 150 titles per million Greeks. Why is the Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts and sciences?
The first-order answer is poverty and lack of education: Almost half of Arabic-speaking women are illiterate.
But the Arab world used to be the most literate part of the planet; what went wrong? Tyranny and economic failure, obviously. But why is tyranny such a problem in the Arab world? That brings us to the nub of the matter.
In a speech in November, 2003, President George W. Bush revisited his familiar refrain about how the West has to remake the Arab world in its own image in order to stop the terrorism: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe ... because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty" as if the Arab world had wilfully chosen to be ruled by these corrupt and incompetent tyrannies.
But the West didn't just "excuse and accommodate" these regimes. It created them, in order to protect its own interests and it spent the latter half of the 20th century keeping them in power for the same reason.
It was Britain that carved the kingdom of Jordan out of the old Ottoman province of Syria after World War I and put the Hashemite ruling family on the throne that it still occupies.
France similarly carved Lebanon out of Syria in order to create a loyal Christian-majority state that controlled most of the Syrian coastline and when time and a higher Muslim birth rate eventually led to a revolt against the Maronite Christian stranglehold on power in Lebanon in 1958, U.S. troops were sent in to restore it. The Lebanese civil war of 1975-'90, tangled though it was, was basically a continuation of that struggle.
Britain also imposed a Hashemite monarchy on Iraq after 1918, and deliberately perpetuated the political monopoly of the Sunni minority that it had inherited from Turkish rule.
When the Iraqi monarchy was finally overthrown in 1958 and the Baath party won the struggle that followed, the CIA gave the Iraqi Baathists the names of all the senior members of the Iraqi Communist party (then the main political vehicle of the Shias) so they could be liquidated.
It was Britain that turned the traditional sheikhdoms in the Gulf into separate little sovereign states and absolute monarchies, carving Kuwait out of Iraq in the process. Saudi Arabia, however, was a joint Anglo-U.S. project.
The British Foreign Office welcomed the Egyptian generals' overthrow of King Farouk and the destruction of the country's old nationalist political parties, failing to foresee that Gamal Abdul Nasser would eventually take over the Suez Canal. When he did, the foreign office conspired with France and Israel to attack Egypt in a failed attempt to overthrow him.
Once Nasser died and was succeeded by generals more willing to play along with the West Anwar Sadat, and now Hosni Mubarak Egypt became Washington's favourite Arab state. To help these thinly disguised dictators to hang on to power, Egypt has ranked among the top three recipients of U.S. foreign aid almost every year for the past quarter-century. And so it goes.
Britain welcomed the coup by Col. Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 1969, mistakenly seeing him as a malleable young man who could serve the West's purposes.
The United States and France both supported the old dictator Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, and still back his successor Ben Ali today. They always backed the Moroccan monarchy no matter how repressive it became, and they both gave unquestioning support to the Algerian generals who cancelled the elections of 1991. They did not ever waver in their support through the savage insurgency unleashed by the suppression of the elections that killed an estimated 120,000 Algerians over the next 10 years.
"Excuse and accommodate"? The West created the modern Middle East, from its rotten regimes down to its ridiculous borders, and it did so with contemptuous disregard for the wishes of the local people.
It is indeed a problem that most Arab governments are corrupt autocracies that breed hatred and despair in their own people, which then fuels terrorism against the West, but it was the West that created the problem and invading Iraq won't solve it.
If the U.S. really wants to foster Arab democracy, it might try making all that aid to Egypt conditional on prompt democratic reforms. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
July 20, 2004 at 11:55 AM in Middle East | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
Telegraph | News | SAS ordered into Saudi Arabia to shield embassy
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 23/06/2004)
A 25-man SAS team has been sent to Saudi Arabia to bolster security at the British embassy and plan a possible mass evacuation of foreigners, defence sources said last night.
The squad is backed by many more special forces troopers in neighbouring Qatar. This force would be summoned if the 20,000 British citizens in Saudi had to be withdrawn in a hurry.
The members of the SAS team are counter-revolutionary warfare specialists and were deployed last week.
The larger SAS force has been given diplomatic clearance by the Saudi authorities to move straight into the country should any threat develop against the embassy, which is seen as a prime target for Saudi militants linked to al-Qa'eda.
The kingdom has been shaken by a series of attacks in recent months that culminated last week in the beheading of Paul Johnson, an American expatriate worker.
The Saudi leader of the terrorists was later killed as he attempted to dispose of the body.
The deployment is the clearest sign yet that Britain is extremely worried about the worsening security situation in Saudi Arabia, despite assurances from officials that they have the whip hand over home-grown religious zealots.
This month, a television cameraman was killed and a BBC journalist, Frank Gardner, was wounded in a terrorist attack in the Saudi capital.
Two Britons were killed and 15 injured in a bomb attack on a British compound in Riyadh in May last year.
Security agencies have noted that terrorists have been able to strike even in well-protected areas, such as the Riyadh compounds and in al-Khobar, where large numbers of foreign contractors work.
There is a growing sense that al-Qa'eda poses a major threat to the Saudi regime.
"There is very serious nervousness about the situation in Saudi Arabia," one British official said.
Last night the Ministry of Defence dismissed the suggestion that the SAS were protecting the British embassy but would not deny their presence in Saudi Arabia.
The SAS troops, armed with MP5 machineguns and Glock 17 pistols, wear civilian clothes. They have been given clearance by the Saudi authorities to shoot any attacker who tries to kidnap or ambush embassy staff.
They are working closely with Saudi special forces and have surveillance equipment and hi-tech sensors.
A TEAM of Arabic-speaking intelligence officers recruited from Britain's Muslim community will help the SAS.
A senior official said they would act as "eyes and ears" for the SAS team inside the local community. "They will provide vital feedback from the streets and will give us a major foothold in the war against al-Qa'eda," he said.
MI5 and MI6 made strenuous efforts to recruit Arabic-speaking officers from within the British community after the rise of Islamic terrorism and the September 11 attacks.
A room in the embassy has been turned into an operations centre for the SAS team. A Royal Military Police close-protection team has also deployed to the embassy and will act as bodyguards for the ambassador.
Since arriving in Riyadh, the SAS team has been studying the types of target that al-Qa'eda has hit so far in an attempt to identify a pattern of operation.
Members of the team are working around the clock to ensure the safety of diplomatic staff and their families.
They are shadowing British diplomats travelling outside the embassy compound and ensuring that routes used by embassy drivers are changed daily. Anyone who leaves the embassy is offered protection.
The SAS team is making daily security assessments and briefing staff about potential threats as well as identifying weaknesses in protection at the building.
Embassy staff have been advised not to use local buses, to avoid using taxis and not to go shopping on Friday, the Muslim holy day.
Despite the reputation of the SAS, one source expressed concern about the difficulties of tracking al-Qa'eda and working out what it was planning to attack.
"We are always several steps behind them," he said. "They have the initiative because they have been preparing for so long.
"It is clear that safe houses, weapons caches and targets are all pre-determined. There is very little left to chance with these people. Their attacks are ugly but very clinical."
The team has already recommended that stronger defences, including metal mesh netting such as that used to protect police stations in Northern Ireland, be installed to protect the embassy against rocket and mortar attacks.
The Foreign Office is considering that but is reluctant to make the embassy into a fortress and is also considering proposals to move its location.
Contingency plans have already been drawn up to pull out British nationals if al-Qa'eda launches a big attack. The SAS team will be responsible for putting them into practice.
The SAS will act as a forward co-ordination cell for any emergency evacuation. Despite Foreign Office warnings that non-essential staff should leave, more than 20,000 British nationals are still in Saudi Arabia.
A key task for the SAS will be to identify assembly points in the event of an incident.
So many aircraft would be needed to fly the Britons to safety that they would initially be taken to a nearby third country to keep an air bridge free.
A team of Arabic-speaking intelligence officers recruited from Britain's Muslim community will help the SAS.
A senior official said they would act as "eyes and ears" for the SAS team inside the local community. "They will provide vital feedback from the streets and will give us a major foothold in the war against al-Qa'eda," he said.
MI5 and MI6 made strenuous efforts to recruit Arabic-speaking officers from within the British community after the rise of Islamic terrorism and the September 11 attacks.
July 19, 2004 at 08:57 PM in SAS | Permalink | TrackBack (45) | Top of page | Blog Home
Thu Jul 15, 2004 02:39 PM ET
By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - With al Qaeda and Iran now topping an already hefty "hit list" of Israel's enemies, analysts say Mossad may have too many missions and too few spies to carry them out.
Two Israelis jailed by an Auckland court Thursday for trying to obtain a New Zealand passport by assuming the identity of a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy victim displayed the rashness of intelligence agents under pressure to perform, experts say.
"When you step up the war on terrorism abroad, the stakes are higher. Professionalism can suffer," said a Mossad veteran involved in the 1973 killing in Norway of a Moroccan waiter mistaken for a top Palestinian guerrilla wanted by Israel.
At the time, Mossad was hunting the masterminds of a Palestinian attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes died.
These days, experts say, the agency is racing to stop attacks by al Qaeda -- a diffuse network notoriously hard to penetrate and anticipate -- and keep an eye on arch-foe Iran's atomic program, making for heavier risks and likelier mistakes.
"New Zealand is famed for being politically moderate and its citizens are welcomed everywhere. They could be very useful for Mossad," said intelligence analyst Yossi Melman of the Haaretz newspaper. "A government-issue passport is much more foolproof than a forged one, of course."
New Zealand suspended high-level contacts with Israel on Thursday, saying there were "very strong reasons" to believe Uriel Zoshe Kelman and Eli Cara were government spies.
"We don't think this was an isolated act," New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff told Israel Radio after all high-level contacts with the Sharon government were frozen.
Israel kept mum. "The only rule in these cases is: Don't get caught," ex-Mossad agent Gad Shimron told Israeli television.
According to former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, such scandals are no gauge of the agency's real feats.
"Mossad is one of the best intelligence agencies in the world," Yatom said. "Yet even the best agencies are bound to suffer mishaps. Because of the secret nature of intelligence gathering, most ... achievements are never made public."
BACK ON THE COUNTERTERRORISM TRAIL
Yet many intelligence experts say Mossad has lost its edge since the 1960s and 1970s, when it assassinated Arab guerrilla leaders and abducted Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann for trial, earning a reputation for ruthlessness and ingenuity.
In recent decades, the Jewish state has been more worried about arms programs in the Arab world and Iran -- the main purview of Israeli Military Intelligence, leaving Mossad to deal primarily with Palestinian threats abroad and back-door diplomacy.
But Mossad got a new mandate in 2002, after al Qaeda bombed an Israeli-owned hotel and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner in Kenya. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Mossad chief Meir Dagan to hunt down the perpetrators worldwide.
At least two Lebanese accused by Israeli security sources of al Qaeda ties have since died in booby-trooped blasts that locals blamed on Mossad. The agency has also tried to boost recruitment with a new Web site advertising "special tasks."
Thirty years after the Norway killing, the Mossad veteran and five other agents who took part in the incident are still barred from entering the country.
"Our zest to get the enemy at all costs sometimes costs us dearly in terms of international standing," said Yigal Eyal, a counterterrorism lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
July 19, 2004 at 08:49 PM in Middle East | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home
DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, July 18 - On Iraq and illicit weapons, the intelligence agency that got it least wrong, it now turns out, was one of the smallest — a State Department bureau with no spies, no satellites and a reputation for contrariness.
Almost alone among intelligence agencies, this one, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or I.N.R., does not report to either the White House or the Pentagon. Its approach is purely analytical, so that it owes no allegiance to particular agents, imagery or intercepts. It shuns the worst-case plans sometimes sought by military commanders.
"They are willing to take on the accepted analysis and take a second, harder look," said Alfred Cumming, a former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is now an intelligence and national security specialist at the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress.
With just 165 analysts, the bureau is about one-tenth the size of the Central Intelligence Agency's analytical arm. But its analysts tend to be older (most are in their 40's and 50's), more experienced and more likely to come from academic backgrounds than those at other agencies, and they are more often encouraged to devote their careers to the study of a particular issue or region.
"They have a reputation for having personnel who have skills in one specific area, as opposed to being utility infielders," said Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
That panel's otherwise scathing report on prewar intelligence on Iraq not only spared the Bureau of Intelligence and Research from most of its harsh criticisms, but also explicitly endorsed the dissent it had inserted into the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, challenging as unsubstantiated the view of other agencies that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
In addition, where the 2002 assessment included a prediction by other agencies that Iraq could develop a nuclear weapon within a decade, the State Department bureau said pointedly that it was unwilling to "project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening."
The bureau was apparently still wrong, along with other intelligence agencies, in asserting that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. But Congressional officials say that over all, its recent record on Iraq has been better than that of its larger rivals, including the C.I.A., with more than 1,500 analysts, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, with more than 3,000.
The example of the State Department bureau, Congressional officials say, is being closely studied as the White House and Congress debate what changes may help intelligence agencies avoid additional failures.
Among other recent successes, the bureau's admirers say, was a classified report in 2003 that criticized the Bush administration view that a victory in Iraq would help spread democracy across the Arab world. It also predicted correctly that Turkey might not permit American troops to cross its territory en route to Iraq and dismissed as "highly dubious" a British contention, now discredited, that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from Niger.
Not surprisingly, the praise that has been directed at the bureau, including a widely noticed column in May by David Ignatius in The Washington Post, has prompted some backbiting at other intelligence agencies from officials who argue that its successes are being exaggerated.
"Everyone has to get it right once in a while," a senior Defense Department official said with some sarcasm.
"It's not in my interest to trash a fellow member of the intelligence community," another senior intelligence official said of the bureau. "But those who think they get it completely right are not completely familiar with the record."
Not even the State Department bureau's admirers say that it alone represents the answer to the kinds of shortcomings discussed in the Senate report, which criticized as unreasonable and unfounded most of the conclusions reached by intelligence agencies on issues related to Iraq and its illicit weapons.
The bureau, with about 300 people in all, including support staff, is too small to shoulder the kind of analytical burden placed on the C.I.A. and the even larger analytical branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Its bureaucratic distance from spymasters at the C.I.A., the signals-intelligence mavens at the National Security Agency and the satellite gurus at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency means that it has little interaction with those who actually collect information around the world, intelligence officials say.
Any restructuring, the bureau's admirers say, should preserve debate and rivalry among the intelligence agencies' analytical branches, which in addition to the State Department agency and the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence include most of the Defense Intelligence Agency; an element of the geospatial agency, which interprets satellite imagery; the intelligence office in the Department of Energy; and analytical offices in the military services.
"The analysts at I.N.R. are a curmudgeonlike group who delight in being different and getting to the body of something and not caring what other people think," said Carl W. Ford Jr., a former career C.I.A. official who led the State Department bureau from 2001 until he retired in late 2003.
But still, Mr. Ford added in an interview, "It is important for all of us in the intelligence community to talk about where we went wrong."
In retrospect, Mr. Ford and current State Department officials say, the bureau should have extended its doubts about others' assessments of Iraq's nuclear program to the issue of chemical and biological weapons. They also credit experts at the Department of Energy, who also operate independently of the White House and the Pentagon, for taking the lead in challenging the C.I.A.'s view on a critical question related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
The C.I.A. and other agencies concluded that aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq were intended for use in centrifuges as part of that nuclear program; the Energy Department and the bureau strongly disagreed. But senior State Department officials say they believed that a combination of experience and independence gave their analysts the confidence to challenge the judgments of the C.I.A., the dominant agency within the community.
"We're not flogging the fruits of anybody's collection system," a senior State Department official said. "For us it's information, not looking to advance N.S.A.'s budget or C.I.A.'s saying, `Golly, gee whiz, look what we've got.' "
Altogether, the team of State Department analysts most directly involved in assessing Iraq's political structure, economy, conventional military forces and supposed illicit weapons numbered no more than 10 people, said State Department officials, but many had more than a decade of experience in the subjects on which they were focusing.
Those officials refused to identify the analyst whose dissent on Iraq's nuclear program proved particularly prescient, but said the official had worked on the subject for more than 12 years under a supervisor who had twice as many years of expertise.
As an example of the kind of analyst the State Department bureau embraces, the State Department officials pointed to Thomas Fingar, who was Mr. Ford's principal deputy and is awaiting Senate confirmation to lead the bureau as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. Mr. Fingar has spent 19 years at the bureau, having been recruited from Stanford University, where he had spent the previous decade as a political scientist.
In recounting where their bureau got it right on the question of Iraq, State Department officials acknowledge that the success was hollow, in large part because Secretary of State Colin L. Powell ultimately sided with the C.I.A. and not with his own intelligence shop.
In February 2003, Mr. Powell spent several days at C.I.A. headquarters reviewing intelligence in preparation for his Feb. 5 speech to the United Nations Security Council, in which he laid out the administration's case for a possible war against Iraq. Mr. Powell did not invite any officials from the bureau to accompany him as part of the review, and his speech endorsed the very view on Iraq's nuclear weapons from which the bureau had dissented so strongly.
"After reviewing all of the intelligence provided by the Intelligence Community," the Senate committee wrote in its report, the panel "believes that the judgment in the National Intelligence Estimate, that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, was not supported by the intelligence."
"The committee agrees with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research alternative view that the available intelligence `does not add up to a compelling case for reconstitution.' "
July 19, 2004 at 08:33 PM in CIA | Permalink | TrackBack (35) | Top of page | Blog Home
BY JENNY BOOTH, TIMES ONLINE
These are the main points of the Home Office's five year strategic plan on law and order, Confident Communities in a Secure Britain, which was launched by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, today
PLEDGE TO CUT CRIME
Target to cut by 15 per cent, or 885,000 offences, the 5.9 million offences reported in England and Wales in 2002-03
Pledge that by 2007-08 the number of crimes which are detected will increase to 1.25 million, from 1.07 million last year
In the 1960s, the decade that Tony Blair has blamed for today's high crime, the number of serious crimes reported each year doubled, rising from around 15 to 30 crimes per 1000 of population.
The rising trend began in 1954, when the figure was 10 per 1000. Reported serious crime peaked in 1992 at 110 per 1000 and today is around 80 per thousand.
TARGETING OFFENDERS, NOT OFFENCES
Under a new prolific offender programme, 5,000 serial offenders, blamed for 9 per cent of crime, will be fitted with a satellite tracking device
Freed paedophiles and other serious offenders will also be fitted with trackers
1,000 drug addicts will be entering drug rehabilitation each week, by the end of 2007-08
In 66 high crime areas, problem drug users will be monitored individually through the justice system
Organised criminals will lose the right to silence and the right to jury trial, and can have their assets seized
The programme to protect witnesses in court cases will be expanded
In the 1960s, Britain's prison population averaged 30,000, compared to more than 75,000 today.
STRONGER POLICE PRESENCE
Civilian police wardens will quintuple in numbers to 20,000 by 2008, thanks to 50m extra from the Treasury
Police numbers will remain at the record high of 138,000. Measures to cut red tape will free 12,500 officers for frontline duties.
The Government will consult on setting up a new police improvement agency.
A non-emergency phone number to contact the police will be set up alongside the existing 999 system
During the 1960s police numbers in England and Wales rose from around 80,000 to 100,000.
ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
The Together campaign will be expanded from its ten pilot areas to a further 50 areas, where the police will be expected to work with the community to cut anti-social behaviour, town centre disorder, fly-tipping and graffiti
Communities will get new powers to request information and action from the police
Youth inclusion and early intervention programmes will be rolled out nationwide
Anti-social behaviour orders were introduced in 1998, but have so far only been used 1,337 times, according to recent figures. Curfews, acceptable behaviour contracts and on-the-spot fines have also had a lukewarm reception
ASYLUM AND IMMIGRATION
Electronic border controls will be introduced to cut down on illegal entry and exit from Britain
July 19, 2004 at 07:17 PM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home
Monday 19 July 2004
Prime Minister's speech at launch of the Home Office and Criminal Justice system strategic plans
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Today sees the publication of the third 5 year strategy – this time for the Criminal Justice System and Home Office. The NHS strategy built on the investment and reforms of the past seven years; and indicated a step change to a de-centralised, non-monolithic consumer and patient driven NHS. The result will be an NHS true to its founding principle of healthcare available according to need not wealth; but radically changed for the world of the early 21st century.
Likewise the education strategy signalled a move to a new era of secondary education beyond the traditional comprehensive model towards independent specialist schools.
Todays strategy is the culmination of a journey of change both for progressive politics and for the country. It marks the end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order.
The 1960s saw a huge breakthrough in terms of freedom of expression, of lifestyle, of the individuals right to live their own personal life in the way they choose. It was the beginning of a consensus against discrimination, in favour of womens equality, and the end of any sense of respectability in racism or homophobia. Not that discrimination didnt any longer exist or doesnt now but the gradual acceptance that it was contrary to the spirit of a new time. Deference, too, was on the way out and rightly. It spoke to an increasing rejection of rigid class divisions.
All of this has survived and strengthened in todays generation. But with this change in the 1960s came something else, not necessarily because of it but alongside it. It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility. But in the 1960s revolution, that didnt always happen. Law and order policy still focussed on the offenders rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality. All through the 1970s and 1980s, under Labour and Conservative Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice. Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility. The worst criminals became better organised and more violent. The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense. And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others. All of this was then multiplied in effect, by the economic and social changes that altered the established pattern of community life in cities, towns and villages throughout Britain and throughout the developed world.
Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus. People do not want a return to old prejudices and ugly discrimination. But they do want rules, order and proper behaviour. They know there is such a thing as society. They want a society of respect. They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge; where those that play by the rules do well; and those that dont, get punished.
For me this has always been something of a personal crusade. I got used to the society of fear in the 1980s canvassing on the Holly Street estate in Hackney (now thankfully greatly improved); when people were too scared to open the door and the letterboxes had burn marks round them where lighted rags had been shoved through them.
Later still, as an MP, I realised to my shock that this wasnt confined to inner-city London. In the shire county of Durham, it was the same. I wrote a piece about it in The Times in April 1988, the first time I remember using the phrase anti-social behaviour.
Then as Shadow Home Secretary, I had the chance to campaign on it. At the time the shift in Labours stance on law and order was seen as clever politics. Actually I just worked through instinct; and discovered that all over progressive politics, including in the 1960s generation, the same anger and concern was felt.
But in Government, of course, the issue is not what to say, but what to do. Looking back, of all the public services we inherited in 1997, the one that was most unfit for purpose was the criminal justice system. Police numbers were falling. Though recorded crime had begun to fall, it was still double what it had been in the 1970s. Detections and convictions were going down. Trials often collapsed. Fines were often not paid. Probation training had stalled. 1 in 6 CPS posts were vacant. There were literally no computers for frontline prosecution staff. But above all, there was a resigned tolerance of failure, a culture of fragmentation and an absence of any sense of forward purpose, across the whole criminal justice system. And anti-social behaviour was a menace, without restraint.
In the first few years we took some important first steps. We stopped the fall in police numbers, once free of the spending constraints of the first two years. We halved the time to bring persistent juvenile offenders to justice. We introduced the first testing and treatment orders for drug offenders. We introduced and implemented a radical strategy on burglary and car crime which cut both dramatically. We toughened the law.
As a result, on the statistics we are the first Government since the war to have crime lower than when we took office. But thats the statistics. Its not what people feel.
Building on these foundations, we started to become a lot more radical in our thinking. We introduced the first legislation specifically geared to ASB. We asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them. The latest Criminal Justice Act is a huge step forward. We put a 1 billion investment into CJS technology. We have introduced mandatory drug testing at the point of charge in high crime areas. We have established the first DNA database. There will be a new framework for sentencing. Probation and prisons are to be run under one service. Community penalties are being radically re-structured. And we have 12,500 more police than in 1997. There is a real feeling within the CJS that change is happening.
But as fast as we act, as tough as it seems compared to the 1970s or 1980s, for the public it is not fast or tough enough.
What we signal today is a step-change. It has three components to it.
First, we seek to revive community policing. People want not just the bobby on the beat, but a strong, organised uniformed presence back on the streets. And the local community itself wants a say in how they are policed. They want to be in charge. Our proposals for police, CSOs and neighbourhood action do that.
Second, we are shifting from tackling the offence to targeting the offender. There will be a massive increase in drug testing and drug treatment, with bail and the avoidance of prison being dependent on the offenders co-operation. Sentencing and probation will likewise focus on the offender; and just paying the penalty will not be enough. For as long as they remain a danger, the most violent offenders will stay in custody.
Thirdly, we are giving local communities and police the powers they need to enforce respect on the street. ASB measures will be strengthened. Summary justice through on-the-spot fines, seizure of drug dealers assets, closure of pubs, clubs and houses that are the centre of drug use or disorder, naming and shaming of persistent ASB offenders, interim ASBOs, will be rolled out. Organised criminals will face not just the pre-emptive seizure of their assets, but will be forced to cooperate with investigations and will face trial without jury where there is any suggestion of intimidation of jurors. Abuse of court procedures, endless trial delays, the misuse of legal aid will no longer be tolerated.
The purpose of the CJS reforms is to re-balance the system radically in favour of the victim, protecting the innocent but ensuring the guilty know the odds have changed.
I know this is a lot to promise and to deliver. But there is change underway. For the first time in years, peoples fear of crime, and of ASB and of their satisfaction levels with the CJS are moving in the right direction. I want this to be a major part of our offer to the people of Britain in the time to come. We cant do it on our own. We need the police to use the powers. We need the public to get engaged. But for the first time in my political lifetime the politicians, police and public are on the same side. We are providing help with the causes of crime: big investment in the poorest communities; extra family support for the most disadvantaged families; the New Deal; Sure Start; more drug treatment.
We understand criminal behaviour often has complex and tragic antecedents. But out first duty is to the law-abiding citizen. They are our boss. Its time to put them at the centre of the CJS. That is the new consensus on law and order for our times.
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July 19, 2004 at 07:12 PM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
By Kathy Marks in Sydney and Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
16 July 2004
New Zealand suspended high-level diplomatic relations with Israel yesterday after two suspected Mossad agents were jailed for six months for passport fraud.
Uriel Zoshe Kelman and Eli Cara were sentenced at Auckland High Court for trying to obtain a passport in the name of a wheelchair-bound man with cerebral palsy. Minutes later, New Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, launched a blistering attack on Israel, saying its actions had "seriously strained" relations between the two countries.
A furious Ms Clark said her government regarded "the act carried out by the Israeli intelligence agents as not only utterly unacceptable but also a breach of New Zealand sovereignty and international law".
The affair is being cited as the biggest diplomatic row to hit New Zealand since the Rainbow Warrior debacle of 1985, when the country severed relations with France after French secret agents sunk the Greenpeace flagship in Auckland Harbour.
Kelman, 30, and Cara, 50, were arrested in March after a passport officer became suspicious of a telephone call. He noted that the caller had an American or Canadian accent and called the disabled man's father. The pair had obtained the man's birth certificate and were using it in their attempt to secure a passport. One claimed to be a travel agent from Sydney, although there was no evidence that he operated a business in Australia.
The men's motives were not clear, but a New Zealand passport is regarded as anodyne and guarantees visa-free access to many countries.
Two other Israelis believed to be involved in the attempted fraud left the country before it was uncovered, police said. One was named as Zev William Barkan, 36; the identity of the other man was not known. The four had travelled in and out of New Zealand on numerous occasions in the past four years.
Kelman and Cara denied being members of Mossad, but Ms Clark made clear that she had no doubts about their identities. "New Zealand condemns without reservations these actions by agencies of the Israeli government," she said.
She announced diplomatic sanctions including the suspension of high-level visits to Israel by New Zealand government officials and a veto on a request by the Israeli President, Moshe Katsav, to visit the country next month.
The Wellington government also cancelled talks planned between the two foreign ministries later this year and said any Israelis visiting New Zealand on government business would have to apply for a visa. Approval of the appointment of a new Israeli ambassador to New Zealand has been put on hold.
The two men both admitted trying to obtain a New Zealand passport illegally, which carries a maximum penalty of five years. They also admitted working with organised crime gangs to obtain a false passport.
The relatively light sentence was handed down after they changed their plea to guilty at a court hearing two weeks ago. As well as being jailed they were ordered to give $50,000 (17,500) to the Cerebral Palsy Society of New Zealand.
Silvan Shalom, Israel's Foreign Minister, said Israel would work to restore diplomatic relations with New Zealand, adding: "Israel has a long tradition of excellent relations with New Zealand, and we will do everything necessary - together with the New Zealand government - to restore relations."
* The Israeli army said yesterday that it was treating as a matter of "high importance" figures showing the alarming incidence of suicide by serving soldiers. A report in the Maariv newspaper said 43 soldiers committed suicide last year, compared with 30 killed in combat, a 30 per cent rise on 2002.
July 18, 2004 at 09:54 PM in Middle East | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
1991: First Gulf war ends
1995-1998: Iraq plays cat and mouse with UN inspectors, hiding weapons
December 1998: Inspectors withdraw, saying Iraq not co-operating
September 11, 2001: More than 3,000 killed in suicide attacks on America. US suspects link to Iraq
March 2002: Internal Whitehall report says military action against Iraq would be illegal without evidence of WMD
April 2002: Blair and Bush meet in Crawford, Texas, and discuss invasion
September 12, 2002: Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefs Blair on new intelligence that Saddam is producing biological and chemical agents
September 24, 2002: Blair publishes dossier on Iraqs WMD.
November 2002: Weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix return to Iraq
March 2003: Blix finds little evidence of any WMD. March 20, 2003: War begins. Three weeks later, Saddams regime falls
May 29, 2003. Andrew Gilligan tells Radio 4s Today programme that Downing Street sexed up September 2002 dossier
July 2003: Dearlove secretly withdraws intelligence about Saddams chemical and biological production as unreliable. But a MiG fighter is found buried in sand in Iraq.
July 17, 2003: Dr David Kelly commits suicide after being outed as Gilligans source of information
January 28, 2004: Hutton inquiry into Kellys death clears government of wrongdoing
July 14, 2004: Butler inquiry exposes dubious intelligence used to justify war. It suggests that finding other weapons buried in Iraq still cannot be discounted. Tony Blair still insists he was right to topple Saddam
July 18, 2004 at 11:42 AM in Iraq | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home
The five members of the Butler committee fought “line by line” over their report. According to sources close to the committee, two members wanted the report to be much more critical.
Field Marshal Lord Inge and Michael Mates, the Conservative MP, thought the failures they uncovered merited hard-hitting conclusions. But Ann Taylor, a Labour former chief whip and a supporter of Tony Blair, resisted strongly.
They fought over virtually every phrase which was potentially critical of the government, an insider said. Taylor had had her arm twisted (by Downing Street) to the point that it nearly snapped off.
The result was a compromise: damning revelations were swaddled in diplomatic language. Despite that, the flaws laid bare were damaging for Blair and his key advisers and in particular for John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee, and MI6.
Scarlett still aims to take up his appointment next month as the new chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, and the Butler report urged that he should not be forced to give up the post. However, some senior insiders believe it will be hard to restore the reputation of the service under his leadership.
July 18, 2004 at 11:39 AM in Iraq | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home