RUTHFULLY YOURS

THE MEDIA DOWNPLAYS THE FACT THAT THE CIA KILLER WAS A PALARAB

Posted By Ruth King on January 6th, 2010

From The Times
January 6, 2010

Jordanian suicide bomber who killed CIA agents ‘was triple agent’

Al-Balawi practised medicine at this UN clinic in the Hittin Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan

Rana Sabbagh-Gargourin in Amman

The Jordanian suicide bomber who killed several CIA agents in Afghanistan last week fooled Amman’s intelligence agency into believing that he was a reliable informant spying on the al-Qaeda leadership.

But Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was a triple-agent leading an extraordinary life on the front line of America’s war against militant Islam. An investigation by The Times has revealed that the trainee doctor became an open and public supporter of al-Qaeda, secretly pretended to work for Jordanian intelligence but ultimately sacrificed his life for the cause of jihad.

On December 30 al-Balawi infiltra-ted Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province near the Pakistan border. He detonated explosives strapped to his body and killed seven CIA agents and his Jordanian handler, Ali bin Zaid, an army captain and distant cousin of King Abdullah II. The Hashemite monarch, his wife, and other Royal Family members attended bin Zaid’s funeral on Friday.

A Jordanian official admitted yesterday that al-Balawi had provided the country’s General Intelligence Department (GID) with valuable “tips” a few months ago “that allowed us to abort a terrorist operation that would have threatened the security and stability of our country”.

The official said that al-Balawi had been interrogated by officers from the GID in March 2009 because of suspicions about his activities. He had been released because the inquiry found “nothing relevant”.

“Months later he contacted us via e-mail and provided information about ill intentions against Jordan, and allowed us to foil terrorist operations targeting the Kingdom. So we decided to pursue our contacts with him on a friendly basis to safeguard our country,” the official told The Times.

Jihadist websites, however, revealed that al-Balawi was working for his handlers’ enemies. They said that the GID, believing the bomber to be its double agent, took him to eastern Afghanistan, to help to track Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician and said to be second-in-command of al-Qaeda, who US intelligence officials believe is hiding in the lawless border region. Jordan has had strong intelligence co-operation with the CIA since 9/11. Its counter-terror teams operating inside the Iraqi border helped US forces in 2006 to track and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was with the same aim in mind that Jordan is thought to have monitored al-Balawi, who was an aspiring doctor.

According to records of the Jordan Medical Association, al-Balawi graduated from Istanbul University in 2002. He then worked as an intern in two hospitals, one run by the Muslim Brotherhood charity. He went on to practise medicine in a clinic in Hittin Palestinian refugee camp near Zarqa in Jordan, also the home town of al-Zarqawi.

Al-Balawi became attracted to militant Islam and moderated the online radical Islamic forum, Hisbah.net, based in Yemen, often saying that his ultimate dream in life was to die as a martyr in the holy war against the US and Israel. In an interview on September 26 last year al-Balawi said he had “been moulded on the love for jihad since my childhood”. He vowed to “take up arms, and to wear an explosive belt, to avenge the killing of children and women in the Gaza War”.

He also said that he decided to leave his pro-jihadist writings in favour of “real jihad on the ground, because I came to realise that preaching about jihad is not enough … You have to carry out jihad in practice.”

He said he hoped to meet all jihadist writers who shared his vision and contributed to jihadist websites “in al-Fardous” — the Arabic for Paradise.

Mohammad Abu Rumman, a prominent Jordanian analyst of radical Islamic movements, said that al-Balawi, a member of the younger generation of jihadists, was heavily influenced by Osama Bin Laden, al-Zarqawi, the US-led war on Iraq and the 2008 Israeli attack against Gaza.

“He is one of the key al-Qaeda spokesmen,” said Abu Rumman. “He always called for jihad against the Americans and the Israelis.” Jihadist websites said al-Balawi was also nicknamed “the doctor of Mujahidin”. They said that he was the first Arab to join the ranks of the Taleban in Pakistan. Al-Balawi was born in Kuwait on December 25, 1977, and moved to Jordan with his family after Iraq invaded in 1991 — a time when many Jordanians were forced to flee the emirate. His father owns two pharmacies in Zarqa. The al-Balawi Bedu tribe is from Tabuk, in western Saudi Arabia, and has branches in Jordan, the West Bank and the Sinai Peninsula. Al-Balawi, also known as Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, was married to a Turkish woman, said by relatives to be a journalist, and had two young daughters. His immediate family lives in Nuzha, a mixed middle and working-class neighbourhood in Amman.

A high school friend, Mohammad Yousef, said al-Balawi told family and friends in March that he was going to Turkey to take an exam that would have allowed him to practise medicine in the US. Instead, he went to Afghanistan, where he joined other Arab fighters with al-Qaeda.

From Times Online
January 5, 2010

US spies in Afghanistan are clueless, says intelligence chief
Jenny Booth
America’s deputy chief of military intelligence in Afghanistan has issued a damning indictment of the work of US spy agencies, calling them clueless and out of touch with the Afghan people.

Major General Michael Flynn described US spies as “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced… and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers”.

The bleak assessment of the intelligence community’s role in the eight-year-old war came in a report issued by the Center for New American Security, a US think tank. It comes less than a week after the CIA suffered one of the most damaging blows in its history, when a suicide bomber killed seven of its operatives at Camp Chapman, a high security CIA base near Khost in eastern Afghanistan.

Major General Flynn’s report blames what he calls America’s “vast intelligence apparatus” for focusing too much on gathering information on insurgent groups, while remaining “unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade”.

It quotes one operations officer saying that the US was unable to make informed decisions about what to do in Afghanistan because of a lack of much-needed intelligence about the country.

“I don’t want to say we’re clueless, but we are. We’re no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment,” the officer said.

President Obama’s revised strategy, issued last month, will see 30,000 more American troops sent to Afghanistan and an expansion of a counterinsurgency campaign aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan public and sidelining a resurgent Taleban.

But, writes Major General Flynn, the intelligence community had not been interested in counter-insurgency. Instead it had “fallen into the trap” of waging an “anti-insurgency campaign” aimed at capturing or killing mid-to-high level militants, while remaining oblivious to the people it was supposed to be helping.

Flynn’s report said the intelligence community had enough analysts in Afghanistan but “too many are simply in the wrong places and assigned to the wrong jobs”.

The report describes the main problems as “attitudinal, cultural, and human,” saying US intelligence community had “a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders”.

It highlights tensions between military and intelligence agencies and calls for changes such as a focus on gathering more information on a wider range of issues at a grassroots level.

An operations officer in one US task force was quoted in the report as questioning why the intelligence community was unable to produce more information about the Afghan population.

“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” Major General Flynn wrote in the report with his chief adviser, Captain Matt Pottinger.

“US intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency.”

Al Jazeera and the New York Times reported this morning that the bomber who blew up the CIA agents last week was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old doctor from Zarqa in Jordan. He had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence and brought to Afghanistan in an attempt to infiltrate al-Qaeda there and track down Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to Western intelligence sources.

The CIA has declined to comment on the reports.

The bombing killed four CIA officers and three contracted security guards working for the spy agency, along with a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, who had been the double agent’s handler.

The security breach was a major blow to the CIA, which has been pursuing a policy of hunting down and killing Taleban and al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and tribal areas in neighbouring Pakistan, partly through the use of unmanned drone aircraft.

The drone strikes – many of which have killed significant numbers of civilians – have fuelled public anger in Afghanistan and have been criticised by the Afghan government and by human rights groups.

CIA officials have yet to reply to requests for comment on Major General Flynn’s report. An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, defended the focus on insurgents, saying: “You can’t be successful at counterinsurgency without a profound understanding of the enemy.”

From The Times
January 6, 2010

Ignorant CIA should copy Raj agents to avoid failure says spy chief
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
The job description reads like a modern-day blend of Shackleton and the Raj: US officials are looking for “the best, most extroverted and hungriest analysts” to revolutionise the way they foster intelligence on Afghanistan’s volatile frontlines.

In a scathing attack on Nato’s failures, the top US intelligence officer in Afghanistan is demanding urgent changes to the way the military does business.

After the death last week of seven CIA agents in the country, when an al-Qaeda suicide bomber infiltrated their base, Major-General Michael Flynn describes the agency as “ignorant”, “disengaged” and unaware of the power structures it seeks to influence. In a report released by a Washington think-tank, he called for a return of district level experts, reminiscent of Britain’s Raj-era political agents. The work, he said, would be “among the most challenging and rewarding … an analyst could tackle”.

Based in the provinces, with orders to travel in and out of Afghanistan’s most dangerous districts, applicants would endure near constant danger. But, General Flynn insisted: “The stakes are too high … for us to fail.

“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.

“The vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate.”

He called for teams of analysts to focus on specific areas, and “write comprehensive district assessments covering governance, development and stability”.

Crucially, General Flynn and his two co-authors argued that analysts’ reports should be made readily available to soldiers and civilian development workers. His report warned that most of Nato’s intelligence officers were “ignorant of local economics and landowners”.

“US intelligence officers can do little but shrug in response to high level decision makers seeking knowledge, analysis, and information,” General Flynn said. “It is little wonder then that many decision makers rely more upon newspapers than military intelligence.”

Only a handful of Nato soldiers speak Pashto, the language of the Taleban, and few spend more than a year in Afghanistan at a time.

General Flynn warned that Nato had concentrated too much on plotting out terrorist networks to launch kill-and-capture missions at the expense of understanding the local people they were trying to win over.

But in a rare example of an operation in which intelligence was working, he said US Marines in Nawa, Helmand, had managed to build up a detailed picture of the people around them. “As the picture sharpened, the focus honed in on what the battalion called ‘anchor points’ — local personalities and local grievances that, if skilfully exploited, could drive a wedge between the insurgents and the greater population.”

Such knowledge was the currency of Britain’s Raj-era political officers, who — armed with little more than wit and a keen sense of adventure — often disappeared into the hills for years at a time, penning detailed dispatches to their political masters in Delhi and London.

“The collection of information is one of the most important military duties,” wrote Winston Churchill in his first-hand account of a British campaign along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published in 1897, includes reams of colourful detail about local tribal dynamics.

General Flynn argued that soldiers needed to learn from recent mistakes. He cited one example in which local women destroyed a new well in their village because it denied them a chance to walk to the river each day and gossip.

His warning was clear: “Without the ability to capture this simple history, prosaic as it may be, others are doomed to repeat it.”

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