UNEASY SENSE
OF DÉJÀ VU
INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTER-TERRORISM EXPERTS:
LEAVE NO “DOT”
UNCONNECTED
TWO OF THE
ONLY KNOWN RECENT PHOTOS OF
ABU BAKR
AL-BAGHDADI THE LEADER OF THE
ISIS FORCES
FIGHTING IN IRAQ AND SYRIA
TAGS:
IRAQ IN TURMOIL, BRUTAL FIGHTING IN ALL REGIONS,
ISLAMIC
STATE IN IRAQ AND AL-SHAM (ISIS), SUNNIS FIGHT SHI’ITES,
POTENTIAL
OF WIDER CONFLICT IN MIDDLE EAST, NYPD INTEL
AND
COUNTER TERRORISM DIVISIONS TAKING ALL THREATS SERIOUSLY,
CONNECTING
THE “DOTS”, CIA & FBI 9/11/2001 INTELLIGENCE FAILURES
(With updated links)
(Tuesday June 17, 2014 NY, NY) As the fractured nation of Iraq is engulfed
in blood and flames as warring factions and tribes, Sunnis battle Shi’ites and
an influx of outside fighters comprised primarily of members of the malignant bastard
off spring of al Qaeda know by the acronym ISIS (called the Islamic State
in Iraq and al-Sham) has emerged as a fierce fighting force lead by Baghdadi who had been held captive at the
now-closed detention facility Camp Bucca (named in honor of FDNY Fire Marshall
and Army Reserve Intelligence Officer Ronnie Bucca) near Umm Qasr in Iraq from
some point in 2005 until his release in 2009.
Ominously upon his release he told his captures, “I’ll see you guys in
New York”. Perhaps it was one last jab
in the eyes of those who had held him imprisoned; perhaps simply an idle empty
threat. However, given his rapid rise
from relative obscurity in terrorist circles to the head of the largest, best
organized, financed, armed and capable terrorist group in Iraq and across the
border in Syria, some are beginning to realize he might actually gain a global
reach in the not too distant future.
Mayor de Blasio was questioned
by the press earlier today about the “threat”
made by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and replied that New York City - meaning he and
his staff along with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton - are well
aware of all threats and that constant vigilance is the rallying cry. Bratton noted that he would not add
additional Officers and Detectives to the 1,300 member Intelligence Division
but would increase a much higher Police visibility particularly around
“symbolic targets” and that the rapid response and surge forces of NYPD’s
Atlas, Cobra, and Hercules Units would be increasingly deployed. Bratton noted that “Terrorists conduct their
own surveillance of potential targets” and that any show of force could be
sufficient to hamper a potential terrorist’s act or at least make them think
twice. On some level simply by following
the news across the world via the Internet, anyone with bad intentions in mind
has to realize that we are a vastly different City then we were on September
11, 2001, that we are a somewhat hardened target in our airports and other
points of entry.
As any New Yorker who lived
through that dreadful Tuesday in September 2001 and can still vividly recall
the sights, sounds and smells of that
cataclysmic event knows, we as a City will always be the primary target of
terrorists of every cause. The toppling
of our Twin Towers with cunning efficiency put al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden on
our map. Al Qaeda remains a threat but
it is their off-shoot, splinter organizations that have morphed into a legion
of potential terrorists willing to come to America and deliver 9/11-type
destruction or something even worse.
In the immediate wake of 9/11
when Michael Bloomberg was elected Mayor of New York City he appointed Ray
Kelly as the NYPD Commissioner. Kelly
rapidly set in motion initiatives and enlisted former and active CIA and FBI
agents to form NYPD’s own “mini-CIA”.
Kelly was determined to never again have the fate of his City in the
inept hands of do-nothing career bureaucrats in the federal and military
intelligence complex padding their pensions in Washington, DC. His innovations were so novel and effective
for an urban Police Department that his Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Divisions
serve as templates for many other major cities in America and abroad. Kelly designed and initiated never before
seen Police operations throughout the five boroughs and, with the cooperation
of such entities as Interpol, Scotland Yard, and the Israeli Mossad, elevated
NYPD’s Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Divisions into forces with a global
reach.
POLITICS AND THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD
Term limited by the City
Charter Bloomberg left the Mayor’s Office which is now occupied by the Liberal
Democrat Bill de Blasio. De Blasio
brought one time Rudy Giuliani’s Police Commissioner Bill Bratton back to One
Police Plaza. Bratton returned to a vastly different City then the one he left
20 years ago. Besides the dramatic and historic
reductions in all major types of crime from petty theft to murder, New York
City was once again the Big Polished Apple, the world’s number one tourist
destination, and a more livable City in virtually every Police Precinct. On top of that the NYPD now has a proactive,
sometimes aggressive, but always within the constraints of the law, concerted intelligence
gathering and analysis and counter terrorism apparatus of their own. Kelly had dispatched NYPD to overseas
locations including London, Tel Aviv, Qatar, Oman, and many other places that
had their own robust anti-terrorism forces.
Information was collected and disseminated in “real time” and, if proved
“actionable” appropriate measures were taken.
DIFFERENT EYES MISSING THE SAME BALL
When Ray
Kelly said his good byes to NYPD his three most trusted Intelligence and
Counter Terrorism Deputy Commissioners resigned as is normal when there is a
regime change in City Hall. Into the
breach Bratton appointed one of his long time flunkies, John Miller, a former
journalist of extremely dubious qualifications for any job in law enforcement
much less the position Bratton put him in.
Miller was installed as Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counter
Terrorism. Miller’s first foray into
reshaping the NYPD Divisions that were his domain was to suspend the practice
of having NYPD Detectives assigned to posts overseas. Next, with the aid of a liberal court, some
of the surveillance and intelligence gathering operations were eliminated. Miller saw his mandate as being that of a
corporate raider determined to “slim down” the well-oiled machinery Kelly had
taken 12 years to carefully and meticulously construct. What has not been widely reported in the
media are the other more damaging and, in some cases, demoralizing alterations
Bratton and Miller have inflicted on the Intel and CT Divisions. Speaking not for attribution for professional
and personal security reasons, a Detective, a self-characterized “charter member” of Kelly’s
revamped Intel Division revealed that, “We are losing resources. Some of our operations have been drastically
reduced because some number cruncher in 1PP says we are getting too much over
time. What they fail to realize is the
nature of what we do. We do not run
operations on nine- to- five schedules.
It has been sad in a way to see all we had built up under Bloomy and
Kelly being dismantled now. I pray every
night that we are not hit again because of something we didn’t do”.
NEW YORK CITY’S TERRORISM HISTORY
On February 26, 1993 a small
band of Muslim extremists who were the vanguard of a little known group that
was the nascent cluster of men who would go on and create al Qaeda, drove a
rented U-Haul van into the parking garage beneath the North Tower of the World
Trade Center and ignited a powerful 1,500 pound homemade bomb consisting of
fertilizer and diesel fuel. The Tower
shrugged the subterranean concussive force off like a dog shakes a flea off its
back. There were sadly six casualties
and over 1000 injured. Within days it
was business as usual for most of the people who were living or working in the
WTC.
After two years on the run
while plotting further terrorist attacks the methodical and diabolic man who
had led the first attack on the WTC, Ramzi Yousef, was captured in 1995 after a
tip off in Pakistan and quickly extradited to New York City to stand on trial
in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York a short walk from
the WTC. One of the federal agents
accompanying Yousef in the last leg of his long journey removed Yousef’s
blindfold as their helicopter flew over the Twin Towers. The agent said, “See, they’re still
there”. Ominously Yousef replied, "Next
time we'll bring them both down."
And that, as history knows, they did.
As the al Qaeda movement grew
out of the remnants of various religious, tribal and ethnic fighters drawn to
Afghanistan to repel the invasion forces of the mighty Soviet Union, they
became a force to be reckoned with.
Buoyed by their defeat of the USSR and enjoying the protection of the
unofficial governing authority of the Taliban, they set their sights ever
higher. The spiritual and financial
titular head of al Qaeda, Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden actually “declared
war” on the United States and US interests all over the world. In his call to jihad he would not distinguish military troops from civilians. He wanted to provoke a fight with the United
States in a gambit he’d hoped would become a raging inferno of Muslims fighting
infidels. After striking two American embassies in
Africa and a Navy ship in the port of Aden, a 19 man suicide team infiltrated
the United States living to all outward appearances as assimilated to life here
until the day they boarded 4 airplanes and used them as bombs that felled the
Twin Towers, damaged the Pentagon with the fourth plane crashing in a field in
rural Pennsylvania after the passengers on board moved to retake control of the
doomed airliner.
In immediate retrospect the
entire federal and military intelligence apparatus including the FBI, CIA, NSA,
and DOD saw too clearly and too late many signs that something big was being
planned by terrorists. Perhaps the most
infamous of the “dots” that the CIA, FBI and NSA failed to address properly was
a National Security Estimate (NSE) dated August 8th, 2001 titled
“Bin Laden hopes to use airplanes as missiles”.
After his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice briefed our
vacationing president at his Crawford, Texas ranch, our president went out to
play cowboy not lifting a finger to the dire warnings just presented to him in
his NSE. And once again, we all know
what happened a scant six weeks later.
WE STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND
We have spent the years since
9/11 engaged in warfare of one type or another in various places. We quickly drove al Qaeda and their Taliban
hosts into the Hindu Kush mountains on the rugged border between Afghanistan
and Pakistan and could have completely routed them had the Cheney/Bush administration
not turned their focus to the war they really wanted, the first “pre-emptive” war
in American history; a war of choice, sold to the public on blatant falsehoods
that has cost us over 4500 killed in action with well over 20,000 casualties of
varying severity. Our efforts in Iraq
have cost over $1.7 trillion dollars; yes “T” as in trillion. Now we are witnessing that beleaguered
country descending into bloody anarchy, fierce sectarian fighting, and reports
of mass executions not seen since the gory breakup of the former Yugoslavia in
1995.
What best categorizes our
experience in Iraq is failure; failure at the highest levels of our government
and military. We have the best trained,
best equipped and a highly motivated Army and Air Force and Naval Fleet
including the Marine Corps as well as the most lethal Special Operation Forces
ever. However, from the Cheney/Bush
White house and all through their neo-conservative chicken hawks, a fundamental
lack of knowledge regarding the Middle East, its history and people, its religious,
sectarian factions, and their view of the Western world particularly the former
“Colonial Powers” that redrew the map of that region after World War II. Time and again we try to solve with simple
arithmetic what is a very complex calculus.
A powerful example of our inability
to understand the region can be attributed to our own history. As far as countries go, we are an infant,
just 238 years old. Among the factors
motivating the various combatants, insurgents, jihadis, and militias are animosities that date back to the 6th
century. The schism between Shi’ite and
Sunni Muslims that has animated the violence in the region for centuries seems
difficult for Americans to imagine. Some of what we are witnessing today in
Iraq is its disintegration from the totalitarian state that was held together
by the iron fisted rule of Saddam Hussein reverting into a trisected area that is more
akin to the ancient maps that once defined observed homelands for the Kurds in
the north, the Shi’ite and Sunnis in the central and western expanse. Ultimately this might be the future of a
broken fractured Iraq as the world has known it since 1932.
DÉJÀ VU UNHEEDED AT OUR OWN PERIL
Amid all the bloodletting and
atrocities on all sides, beneath the gunfire and artillery shells, one can hear
the undercurrent of a threat directed at the United States. Some in the intelligence community liken it
to the “chatter” they uselessly intercepted in the months before 9/11 yet, even
after all that transpired in September 2001; our collective intelligence machinery
is churning out information that is once again falling on apparently deaf
ears. Confidentially speaking earlier
today with a veteran CIA analyst with years of experience in the Middle East,
the threat was put into stark terms.
“What we are seeing today is basically like “al Qaeda version 6.0”. They have metastasized from their point of
origin, have sprouted a number groups of well trained, battle tested fighters
and they have a number of affiliated members who could easily gain access to
the United States. They have widely
recruited ‘non-Muslim looking’ men with passports from European countries. That they are determined and tenacious is
well known. They are also very patient
because they realize how high the stakes are if they are able to pull off
another strike similar to 9/11/2001”, commented the analyst.
Here the Brooding Cynyx have
long warned of the dangers of complacency
and apathy. Our collective memories
are short; our views of the wider world remains myopically distant despite the
rapidity of information and the mobilization of all the assorted animosities of
those who chose to bear arms against their blood enemies. The United States for a variety of reasons is
cast as an enemy across the Muslim/Islamic world and their intentions are well
known.
The disjointed battle lines in
Iraq today must only be defended by the people of Iraq. Our embassy in Baghdad, probably the best
protected acreage in the entire country, is having its Marine Corps security
forced enhanced as the ISIS and other insurgents push towards the capital. Here
in NYC the specialized division of the NYPD are on a “quiet alert” footing but,
as another Intel Detective commented, “We always are. We are always on a quiet alert. We are determined to protect this City and
her people. We also add a bit of prayer
to the scenario because it can’t hurt. Right”?
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Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved
