Sunday, January 15, 2006

The spies who couldn't shoot straight.

In the middle of a firestorm about NSA spying, comes a failed attack in Pakistan.
Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was supposedly in the village of Damadola.
Unfortunately, the intelligence was wrong. He was not in the village when the CIA-ordered airstrike killed 18 people - none of them terrorists.
Senator Evan Bayh told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that the problem was that the Pakistani government was unable to control that part of the country. Wrong. The problem is that America is firing blind - it cannot find its enemy, so it shoots anything that rustles in the grass.
The apologists who have been touting the Iraq war as being about fighting the enemy over there so that we don't have to fight them over here, have been silent on the correlation between the NSA story and the Pakistani tragedy.
One says that they may be here anyway - why else spy on US phone calls? The other says we don't know where they are, and can't keep them under observation for very long.
That doesn't sound reassuring. The news that the terrorists are switching to disposable cell phones is even more depressing. How do we fight an enemy we can't find?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

its too early to say that he wasnt there, who were the bodies that were taken away?

Local officials say 18 civilians were killed, but Pakistani intelligence sources were quoted as saying the actual death toll was higher and included 11 militants - seven of Arab origin, and four Pakistanis. A report in The New York Times said that the bodies of the seven Arabs were taken away by a local cleric who had been at the dinner but left before the air strike

Heres a link to an article published on the Independent news website:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article338846.ece

smalltownhick said...

Which means what?
That the expected target wasn't there, but luckily they hit militants?

Anonymous said...

Other expected targets were there. Whose side are you on anyway?

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1517986


Pakistani authorities tell ABC News they have confirmation that Mursi was among those on the guest list for the late-night meeting. The authorities say al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was also expected to attend but apparently changed his mind.

Doesn't sound like bad intelligence to me. Just more Bush hating BS.