Steve, I am standing on my chair applauding that!. Well said.

Tempest,

Problem is you’re treading into a dangerous grey area in terms of definintion of the word “unnaccountable” and blurring it in with the factor of third-party spin on the resultant intel product.

Oversight on the Intelligence Agencies in both the UK and US is maintained, quite strenuously (though more visibly in the US naturellement!), by Committees made up of elected representatives. In the UK this is Parliaments’ Intelligence and Security Committee, in the US its, I believe, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Obviously, due to the nature of the work these agencies do, such Commitee rulings are, for the most part, going to be reactive in nature. There is no way around that without providing, in this country, five sitting MP’s with minute-by-minute briefings on intel ops on a global basis. Would be great for them if they were John le Carre fans I suppose, but, the operational security vulnerability makes the whole thing plainly ludicrous!.

As to the general operational methodologies, who knows!?, might not even be uniform across different officers in the same department!. Journalists don’t seem to be able to manage not to insert a little of their own, or institutional, bias in their work so I’d not be suprised too much if something similar happened in the Intelligence world. Then again though that is precisely the reason that, when forming an intelligence analysis, the orchestrating body is meant to use numerous sources and look for correlations and discrepancies.

It was always a risk that Bush or Blair’s minions would plant evidence to support their claims.

I’d flip that around on you Alex. Wasn’t it always likely that some people would have claimed that irrespective of what US or UK forces found in Iraq?. Certainly people were stopping just short of accusing Blair and Bush of doing precisely the above one week after the end of the fighting!.

Personally I think Robin Cook has highlighted, perfectly, the naivete of many people over this issue. Rumsfeld made his “WMD’s may have been destroyed prior to the war” speech on the basis of a HUMINT report from a senior Iraqi scientist. This scientist stated that “a couple of days before the fighting started” he was told to destroy nerve agents and all materials relating to them. If we are to accept this as credible, as the good Mr Cook MP seems willing to in order to support his position that none were left etc, it makes one fact so perfectly clear it astounds me – there WERE WMD’s present in Iraq, in quantity, right up to March 2003 just as all the various Agencies reported. Media doesnt seemed to have made that leap in logic yet though – which is a bit of a shame!.

Sorry for interupting your conspiracy theories and machiavellian plots lads…please carry on! 😀

Kev

Oh, Steve, what have I started?

Nuts….you love it really! 😀

I don’t perceive that that terrorism is being stamped on hard. Perhaps the answer to that lies in the allusion you make to special operations which are not public knowledge.

The nature of terrorism is such that hitting it isnt necessarily always “spectacular” and, quite often, if a spectacular media event ensues its because the anti-terrorist forces have failed in their task. Basically preventing an attack taking place simply means that absolutely nothing untoward occurs – a difficult thing for the media to report in a fashion that sells its publications! Preventing those attacks and disrupting terrorist preparations though, for me anyway, do still fall in the category of “hitting terrorists hard”.

As to who would consider terrorism to be right one only has to look at the terrorists, their backers and the ever growing number of people prepared to strap a few pounds of explosive on their backs and die for their cause. They may be wrong, evil, misguided or any other epithet you choose but at the moment their resolve seems strong.

This to me though is the same as empathising with the murderer who was just listening to what “the voices in his head” told him to do or the paedophile who was himself abused as a child. The objective judgement on their legitmacy can only be made by society as a whole – be that society local, national or global in nature. I believe, firmly, that the greater view would be that these terrorist actions are reprehensible in the extreme. Just like Vortex said therefore the discussion should no longer be as to the legitimacy of what these people are doing, rather, how we can stop them as quickly and finally as possible.

]Maybe so, but for these terrorists this is their ‘war’. It’s not World War II but it’s about as big as they can make it at the moment.

Again I’d dispute that as it lends itself to the argument that all Al Qaeda terrorists are “soldiers” in some fashion. I’d agree with the idea that Al Qaeda have struck at more military targets than other terrorist networks – the US embassies in 93 could be considered legitimate targets, the USS Cole was a legitimate military target, even the Pentagon was a prime C4I target even if it was hit after a terrorist event in the hijacking. All of these were hit unconventionally, but, they were politico-military targets and, from a strictly military viewpoint, valid and not acts of real terrorism.

What puts Al Qaeda back in the swamp with all the other terrorist scum though is its love of the “spectacular” the WTC and Bali being prime examples. This is not the activity of a combattant at war and has no relation to the strikes on industrial cities in WW2 Germany, or the Dams Raid as they were not designed to kill large numbers of civillians rather that the tools of war at the time didnt allow for pinpoint strikes in defended areas so area bombing was necessary to hit certain industrial targets. The WTC was a callous strike calculated to cause to most numbers of casualties and generate the most publicity possible.

The terrorists could try striking at an Army or Air Force base but would they be effective in their terms? You mention the USS Cole, they managed to hit her where she was but could they ever hope to have done the same at a Naval facility in the US?

Here though the lines blur, I hate using semantics as thats what I usually crucify Garry for!, is an unconventional attack on a military base an act of terrorism? I, starkly, remember being told when I signed up at HMS Raleigh “Congratulations gentlemen – you are all now targets for the IRA”. We knew that threat existed and it was countered in the same way any military formation goes about reducing any threat. As to them taking a crack at Naval shipping closer to the US I’ve just done a little research and I could come up with something nasty fairly easily – as a hint look at this photo:

This is a shot taken from one of the manmade islands built to carry the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel and US Route 13. It is on their website clear as day and they even advertise a guidebook that identifies all the USN ships that come out from Norfolk for you!. I won’t go into detail about they way I’d choose to mount that attack for the obvious reasons – but the vulnerability is surely there for anyone that cares to look to fill in the blanks!. My answer to your question would therefore be yes they could, but are choosing the attrocity where they can plan in depth and are settling for simplistic suicide attacks against easy targets now that their command, control and logistics has been so heavily disrupted.

Of course not but the end result was the same, except their deaths were slower. They were casualties as soon as they had to leave their land due to the effects of Agent Orange.

Well I think intent counts for a lot here especially when you are comparing the defoliation plan to terrorist attrocities. Also it does seem a little weak to compare people who’ve had their crops destroyed to people on a hijacked airliner thats being flown into a building!.

Again, read the literature written by those who were there. Every dead Vietnamese was recorded as a Vietcong or NVA. Whether or not the intention was there the statisticians tried to reap the benefits.

Kev, I’d have no problem with this IF you weren’t trying to establish a parrallel between statisticians inventing body counts to justify collateral damage to the deliberate and callous targetting of civillians by a terrorist organisation.

Absolutely I’m glad those weapons were used. My point was that Vortex couldn’t allude to the efficacy of pinpoint bombing carried out by the Americans without accepting that they were responsible for the two biggest area bombings of the war.

Forgive me if I think this is a clear contradiction Kev!. You first say that Vortex cant claim the efficacy of American bombing when they resorted to the A-bomb and yet you believe it was an absolutely valid and efficient tactic towards getting the war ended??? Huh? 🙂

None of course. But how long will it be before the total deaths from these current incidences reach that of the 11th of September? The happy side effect from America’s point of view is that no more incidents have occurred in the US.

Well lets not forget the other happy side effect is that none have hit the UK yet either, or France or New Zealand or…or…or!. We’re all naturally primarily concerned with our own countries first so I’m not sure what point your going for there!?. How long, at a rough estimation, we’re looking at to balance the low-order strikes we’ve been seeing to 9/11 I’d guess about three to four years if you want a direct comparison IF they can keep up the momentum month-on-month. I’d say IF attacking Afghanistan has given us up to 48 months of breathing space to hunt down Al Qaeda’s heirarchy and structures and knock bits off them so that a major strike like 9/11 never happens again we’ll, I’m afraid, I’d call that a win for the good guys even if there are losses from low-order terrorist attacks in the interim.

But they are being effective still. Flights stopped to Kenya, travel advisories against travel to an increasing number of countries, embassies being closed, a rising death toll. This is evidence that they are far from beaten.

Comparitive to 9/11 ALL of the above taken together has a very low order of significance. Terrible to put it that way because people have died, but, 9/11 showed an advanced level of C3I which had to be eliminated at the rush because that “intelligence” allows small forces to act in a manner disproportionate to their size.

The local attacks with some fanatic strapping on a belt and merrily going off to see Allah in Paradise is scary, naturally, but there will always be an element like that in any society that can be engaged to perform the most attrocious acts. They are a threat, but, only quite a small one. Its when those people can be trained, focussed, armed and skillfully deployed that the big problems arise. That is not happening anymore!.

Garry

Gloat? I believe the whole idea behind the attack was to get him while he was weak. Gloating now about how weak he really was would be perhaps a sign that the urgency you claimed was never there in the first place, but if you feel the need, go right ahead.

Well you suggested I was gloating when I mentioned that I was correct in the assumption that the US and UK could do a better job of Baghdad than the Russians could do in Grozny!.Your exact words were “So the Iraqis lack a bit of spine, of course it is a little soon to gloat now isn’t it?” from a post made on the “Should France and Germany Have a Say” thread dated 11th April 2003 .

Do you not like the term you used now? As to the Iraqi’s not fighting hard enough for Saddam, or some perceived weakness in the Iraqi armed forces, wouldnt that be a greater incentive for Hussein to have accelerated his WMD projects?. The precedent here is, surely one you would be most familiar with, that of the Russian Federation concentrating its resources on its strategic weapons to cover the capability gaps that had developed in its conventional arms through underfunding. The situation is obviously different but the net result of using an unconventional arms capability to cover a weakness in the conventional area certainly has parallels.

Quite true and if you stack people in a tall pile you could kill every man, woman and child in the world with 1 litre of Petrol… as long as they were allowed to burn… what is your point?

Point is Garry that 10,000 litres of bio agent is a legitimate weapon of mass destruction, a truly horrendous weapon, and it was accepted by all of the signatories to UN1441 to be held by Hussein in Iraq.

Threat to whom?

Right now its a threat to no-one, thankfully, if Hussein where still in power its a threat to anyone he can reach within a matter of days of his order being given. It doesnt take too long to dig something up and transfer material to a transport vessel to go into freefall bombs or rocket warheads!.

Anthrax is treatable. While dangerous to animals and humans and able to live in soil for quite some time it does very little to oil.

So if he dropped that over a few Saudi oil facilities the 1500 or so infected oil workers would be off work for a couple of days, take a few aspirin, then be as right as rain would they? The Saudi medical infrastructure (or anyone elses for that matter) could suddenly cope with several hundred to a thousand cases of severe disease infection simultaneously could they?

We have your word that there are unweaponised WMD products in small tankers in the ground…

I’m trying to illustrate Garry that making sweeping generalisations,like bemoaning the fact that no WMD’s have been paraded for the world media in Iraq yet, is not necessarily a sensible thing to do BECAUSE of the difficulties involved in such a search. A search that many thought that the UN could perform with 60 or so scientists in a country the size of Iraq WITH Saddam still in power manipulating it all! Don’t you see how ludicrous that situation would have been now?

And in 10-15 years time assuming the sanctions are lifted how will things have changed? …ohh that’s right in 10-15 years time the Yanks will have given up all their WMDs and have no armed forces left.

How relevent is the US’s strength here?. The problem is that there was no chance of sanctions still being in place in 10 years…too many people were decrying the suffering of the Iraqi populace ignorant of the fact that Saddam was manipulating things to make damn sure that they reacted in that fashion. We all saw the evidence of the regime trying its best to re-equip using the food-for-oil programme money – 2000 pickup trucks bought for “food distribution” that are immediately painted green and fitted with pintle mount ATGMs and machine guns on arrival! Yeah right he wouldnt immediately rearm with the best kit he could lay his hands on when the sanctions were lifted!.

What about all the other little dictatorships with WMDs… are they to be invaded too? Why is Saddams anthrax sooo much more deadly than anyone elses?

Who cares? What possible relevance does that have to this discussion?. I’m talking about Iraq and WMD’s here not going off on some kind of tenuous little tangent!.

You stated that Saddam with WMDs was too dangerous a thing to allow so close to your oil fields… if anything would make someone use WMDs surely it would be an invasion that was undertaken with the stated purpose of removing the government.
The ease with which Iraq was defeated and lack of any real evidence of WMDs suggests the pretext that Iraq was just too dangerous to be left in saddams hands was bollocks.

Were being very selective in what we’re choosing to remember here aren’t we Garry!. I said, clearly and repeatedly, that when he had chance to fully rearm (i.e to pre 91 levels) THEN he’d be a threat to the world economy. I used 10 to 15 years as an arbitrary value for the aquisition of new tech aircraft, missiles, tanks and ships. If it turns out we’ve gone in and knocked him out before he was ready so much the better.In fact that was precisely what I told PLAWolf all those months ago that I wanted to see as less of our people would come home dead that way.

IF we’d have waited perpetually as the French and Russians wanted us to do (well at least until Hussein had cleared off his debts to THEM of course!) and he had rearmed (prob buying French and Russian arms of course – which might have made you happy eh?) it wouldnt have been twenty odd days and a mere two heavy divisions needed to do the job would it?. It would have been a damnsight more and would have had to try and assemble under a constant, developed, WMD threat. That would have been better in some way would it? Easy to play armchair general when its not your troops doing the fighting eh?

Be a bit stupid to invade a country on the pretext of saving the people from a dictatorship and then keep the country under a foreign military government and guard only oil facilities while it is decided which oil contracts the invading country’s companies would like.

The pretext, diluted or twisted by individual politicians or the media, was to find WMD’s and material that the entire UN agreed existed when they signed on to UN1441. WMD’s that were not being turned up by UNMOVIC because Saddam Hussein was not giving them up as he was obliged to do under UN687. In effect we went in BECAUSE the UN WASN’T doing its job and backing up its own decrees. Why wasnt it doing so? Largely because France and Russia had outstanding debts and oil interests with the Hussein regime and the last thing they wanted to see was that regime slipping out of their grasp – enter that veto you love so much. We see now that their interest was no more humanitarian than just that by their desire to attack the US being more important to them than helping the Iraqi populace by getting the sanctions lifted. Those are the simple facts Garry distilled down to their most basic form!.

The objectives of the attacks and those items put under US/UK protection first showed the world what the US and UK were interested in all along. Why legitimise what they have done?

Like I said above, all those who were wringing their hands about the plight of the poor Iraqi citizenry in the face of American and British evil are now showing their true natures. If they were really concerned about those people the sanctions would be gone, theyre not, so we are left with the only logical conclusion being that they just wanted to rein in the US all the way through and now consider that more important than helping people dig themselves out of a hole. Nice morals some people have, shame others can’t afford the price of them!.

You invaded without the UN, yet you claimed to be invading in its name… now that you’ve had your fun, and blown up some things and tested some weapons you want the world to come in and fix things up…. fix it yourself… I’m sure the most juicy contracts will be “won” by American companies already anyway.

FUN, fun???!. Christ Garry we lost people in this mess and you call it FUN for fcuks sake?!. It was done under UN authority even if today’s UN didnt agree with the things that they’d already agreed some twelve years earlier. The simple fact was that the invasion was legitimate under UN Resolution 687 as Saddam Hussein failed to abide by the terms of his surrender agreement. Failing in those terms, in any war that concludes in a termed surrender, allows for the continuation of hostilities to resolve the situation.

As for us fixing things up ourselves, well, didnt the UN just all start bleating and flapping about when that was proposed by the Yanks? Didnt they argue and whinge about not being given a great enough role in the postwar reconstruction?. Can’t have it both ways pal!.

Har Har very clever Mr Hubers sir! 🙂

I used the phrase “unweaponised WMD product” to relate to material produced for use in a WMD role that had yet to be weaponised ie loaded into rocket warheads or dispensing systems. That definition is correct and accurate.

I put it to you that raw uranium ore still in the earth in deepest Niger or Donald Ducks bottom wipings are just a little bit more distant from being able to be called “WMD product”. So far in fact that applying the term “product” to them is a gross misrepresentation and the closest you could associate them with WMD’s is to call them “raw materials”. A raw material being a lot less significant than a refined product!.

You started with the pedantry first remember! 🙂

Interesting that Saddam was such a huge threat to the world that he wouldn’t use these huge stocks of WMDs in his own defence… why?

Am I OK to gloat about the fact I was right on the “no need for Baghdad to turn into Grozny” thing yet Garry?.

OK let me paint a picture for you. UNSCOM say there is 10,000 litres of unnaccounted-for Anthrax culture in Iraq (note thats UNSCOM and was repeated by Hans Blix’s UNMOVIC post 1441 ok?!) now a couple of hundred millilitres in an aerosol dispenser is enough (according to the Porton Down mob) to infect about a thousand people under correct conditions of dispersal and proximity. So you have a theoretical maximum of about 5000 casualties per litre of weaponised material – now times that by 10000 litres and you arrive at a big number. 10000 litres of Anthrax is therefore a “significant potential threat” you would agree?

Look at the below picture:

This is a 20,000 litre tank on the back of a two axle medium truck. The “significant potential threat” I spoke of would just about half fill this one, fairly modest, truck. I’m now going to take my half-filled truck and bury it somewhere inside a country the same size as France, furthermore I’m going to restrict knowledge of what happens to it to a dozen people or so in my regime and shoot anyone else with indirect knowledge.

So, in summary, we have an unweaponised WMD product in a small tanker, buried somewhere in a country with hundreds of sq miles of desert with only a handful of people knowing exactly where and what it is – people who are going to be difficult to catch or dead already….and you think it is going to be an easy job finding it Garry?

People where very swift to discredit the discovery of the mobile biochem weapons labs as the “smoking gun”, but, to me this is utterly fantastic!. What possible reason is there to have a mobile biological production facility (let alone three!) other than to clandestinely make biological weapons? Weapons that by UN687 he wasnt allowed to posses and was meant to have declared to UNMOVIC under UN1441.

…yet in ten or fifteen years he was going to be so dangerous and ruin the world economy and hold the world to ransom…

In 10-15 years – with the sanctions lifted – Iraq would have been the prosperous, well armed, little dictatorship and who knows what its clandestine little production facilities would be churning out. They paid little heed to the UN unless there were 100,000 troops on the border, so, after “beating the UN” again who would have stopped them? The French asking nicely? Please………!

I guess the justification now is that what is done is done and the right thing to do now is ignore the fact that the US and the UK were wrong and lets just do what is best for the Iraqi people…

Proof we were wrong??? Beyond the fact that WMD’s havent been found in a timeframe GarryB feels is sufficient (based on what experience I’m unsure?!) what reason do you have to say we were wrong to go in?

It is alright… the oil is safe. I am sure the Americans will take good care of it.

Be a bit stupid if they didn’t seeings the Iraqi’s are depending on it to rebuild their country.

…but it is the bad old UN that is not playing ball and lifting sanctions when the US asks… after all it is the role of the UN to listen to and obey the US…

Well seeings it was the privations and suffering that would be “inflicted up the poor helpless Iraqi citizens” during the evil American attacks on their country that led most of the naysayers to condemn the US and UK with such vitriol it seems frankly unfathomable that its the morally correct masses that are now happy to see a prolonging of just that suffering. Weren ‘t people calling the US and UK hypocritical before the war? Enough of that to go around quite a way it seems!.

Kev

This is the problem with the American attitude to any world event. There is the wrong view and the American view.

If the question is “should terrorism be stamped on hard” how can anyone disagree with the “American view”?. The method of doing the stamping may be questionable and questioned, but, who would argue that terrorists should be left to persue their aims unchallenged? Who would argue that terrorism is a legitimate means for pursuing political goals? Who would argue that terrorism is “right”.

During World War Ii didn’t the USAAF carry out a follow up operation to Hamburg after the previous nights bombing by the RAF?

I think that the important part of what you wrote above is the “During World War II…” part. I think that comparing the actions of national military forces commited to total warfare, in an era prior to precision guided munitions, to terrorists striking at soft-targets because their easy to hit and will cause maximum publicity and outrage is just a little disingenuous.

Wholesale areas of Vietnam were bombed by B-52’s, other areas sprayed with defoliating agents, I’m sure others can come up with other examples

Are you proposing that the spraying of Agent Orange was INTENTIONALLY done to kill Vietnamese civillians? Thats a fairly extreme claim!. I think that B-52’s unloading on the jungle was a fairly wasteful tactic if it was intended to kill the maximum number of civillians as well – surely carpet bombing Hanoi would have been more efficient if the aim was as you say!.

and if you want to go the whole hog how many civilians died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

I’d encourage you to read up on the anticipated consequences if Operations OLYMPIC and CORONET (the invasion of the Japanese home islands) had been undertaken. Its tragic how many died in the nuclear attacks, furthermore, the after effects and lingering deaths following on from those weapons have been terrible. They are nothing…absolutely NOTHING compared to the deaths and horrors that a land invasion would have created. Certainly Japan would not be the same country that we see today had things gone differently.

Now I thought America had declared a war on terrorism. So far you’ve caught a few hundred Taleban, some of whom you treat humanely while others you do not. What else has been achieved? A few suspected al-qaeda were killed by a UAV. Anything else? Is America’s resolve catching those behind Bali, Kenya, Casablanca, Riyadh? Or has there been a significant increase in suicide bombings?

One question Kev – how many 9/11 scale incidents have occured since the Taleban got booted out of Afghanistan?. Prior to that the Al Quaeda movement had the resources, organisation and space to commit attrocities on an unprecedented scale or with extreme skill and cunning – referring to WTC and the USS Cole consecutively. Now what are they doing? Hitting soft-targets in states that are easy to operate in with a handful of suicide-bombers here or a car-bomb there?. Either this or using people, too stupid or poorly trained to read the shelf-life date on a missile tube, to try and bring down an airliner in a repeat run of tactics used in Rhodesia back in the 70’s!

You can criticise a tangible lack of evidence paraded in front of the global media as a lack of progress if you wish Kev, but, a lot is going on outside of the spotlight which IS having an effect on international terrorism. I know, personally, for instance of a couple of MIOPS interceptions performed by RN ships under Operation Oracle and NATO SNFM tasked vessels that have found weapons on ships in the Eastern Med/Gulf regions and have sent a message that, illegal, arms trafficking will be jumped on hard if found. This isn’t dazzlingly interesting to the general populace obviously but it is one more difficulty that terrorists have to overcome in pursuit of their ends and such measures have a cumulative effect.

Vortex,

Collateral damage to bombing another civilian area? Sad that such things are even thought of as excuses…Does it even matter?

With the exception of Israel terrorist attacks are almost always targetted for some specific reason. It IS therefore quite feasible to have a form of “collateral damage” from a terrorist attack even if the implications from it are of somewhat lesser significance to the attacker than in other circumstances. I can’t remember how many times the IRA “apologised” for killing “innocent bystanders” (usually the Catholics they were allegedly fighting for) in the pursuit of their operations.

Because of such lack of resolve…this is going to be a long war

I think perhaps Vortex some of you guys should be prepared for another nasty reality to bite you – there is no such thing as a short anti-terrorist campaign utterly irrespective of the levels resolve displayed by the involved authorities.

Arthur,

Good point on the 10 “own goals”!.

I know what you’re saying about the IRA not going in for retaliation attack cycles in the main, though there are certain notable examples of just that pattern, what I was referring to though was the notion that hitting Afghanistan was going to eradicate the Al Quaeda terrorist organisation once and for all. By discussing the ongoing terrorist activity closer to home I was attempting to make the point that Kev made so much clearer and more adequately – that the nature of the enemy isnt such that one nice big stand-up fight was ever likely to resolve the situation. That’s not to say though, I hasten to add, Afghanistan was a waste of time and effort as, quite clearly, it wasn’t.

Ben,

I phrased that poorly and you’re quite right to pick me up on my words. I had limited amount of time to make that post and didn’t notice the blunder after I’d posted it – sorry for that.

What I was meaning, of course, was that the terrorists clearly didnt use the same logic that Keltic had proposed in that Spain’s support for the Iraq War had made their interests an “enemy” to be more robustly targetted when a nation that was very vocal in its opposition to the US/UK/Spanish sponsored actions, more likely to be considered a “friend” by them, also found its citizens victimised.

Apologies again for the clumsy language. 5/10 must try harder on my part!.

Keltic,

If you choose to look on this one Moroccan incident in isolation I could understand your point that Spain, at Aznar’s whim, had set itself up as a greater target on the global terrorist shooting range. Thing is though there is a global context here with the events in Saudi, Kenya, Mombassa, Bali and god knows in however many other places forming pieces of the same picture.

To therefore take this one incident, state it as being an attack focussed on Spanish interests and hold Aznar directly responsible for it seemed more to do with your personal antipathy for Aznar and less the unbiased and considered views you usually post.

Of course I’m not, for a second, saying its inappropriate for you to come on here and have a damn good, old fashioned, rant at someone who winds you up – after all there is a well developed tradition of that on these boards – its just that some annoying twerp is likely to pop up and disagree with you somewhere along the line!.