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fear
Ice climber
hartford, ct
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Jun 28, 2016 - 09:07pm PT
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Need more common sense bomb control.
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perswig
climber
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Jun 29, 2016 - 03:38am PT
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Goddammit, my blurry pre-java eyes misread "OT" as "TR".
Shoulda known better.
Dale
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Jun 29, 2016 - 07:53am PT
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Me too! Thought it was a new route on the Column. Well, maybe the Column of Perfidy.
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10b4me
Mountain climber
Retired
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Jun 29, 2016 - 08:01am PT
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Me too! Thought it was a new route on the Column. Well, maybe the Column of Perfidy.
Come on Reilly, Scorched Earth is on El Cap, not the Column.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jun 29, 2016 - 11:31am PT
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Come on Reilly, Scorched Earth is on El Cap, not the Column.
But what about Mideast Crisis and Saddam Hussein? After all, people would have difficulty scorching sand.
In truth, much of the middle east (well the near east, e.g. Asia minor and the eastern Mediterranean is surprisingly green. In any case, Erdogan's response will be interesting, no doubt.
John
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crusher
climber
Santa Monica, CA
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Jun 29, 2016 - 01:56pm PT
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I'm curious too. IMO, he's been spending too much time and energy fighting the PKK and not enough on his porous borders and ISIS or related members/fighters. Duh - the PKK are fighting ISIS and at this point Turkey is completely losing it's biggest ecomony in tourism. So time to pick your battles and get going already.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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In 2002 the CIA had a straightforward plan to take out al-Zarqawi. Dick Cheney interfered, backed up by George Tenet in order to make the case that there were Jihadists supposedly connected to Saddam Hussein, thereby creating ISIS/L and screwing up Iraq & the mideast completely.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-secret-history-of-isis/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-secret-history-of-isis/transcript/
Below is the first 60% of the transcript. It's more engaging to watch than read.
NADA BAKOS:
When he [Zarqawi] does go to Kandahar to try to meet with bin Laden, he’s rejected. At this point, Zarqawi is so low on the totem pole, as to something that was just beneath him.
BRUCE HOFFMAN, Author, Inside Terrorism
Neither Osama bin Laden nor his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, were terribly impressed with him. He seemed and acted like a thug. He was not very sophisticated. In fact, they considered him a rather poor recruit to Al Qaeda.
NARRATOR: Zarqawi would leave Kandahar determined to continue jihad and to prove bin Laden wrong. In 2002, he saw his chance. As President Bush signaled Saddam Hussein had to go, Zarqawi moved to a terrorist camp in northern Iraq. It set off alarm bells at the CIA.
CIA operations officer Sam Faddis, who ran a kill/capture team, was assigned the case.
SAM FADDIS, CIA, 1988-2008:
Headquarters is extremely, extremely interested. I mean, the number one time-sensitive priority as of June ‘02, when I left headquarters, was go collect on this Islamic extremist enclave along the Iran-Iraq border.
NARRATOR: It didn’t take long for Faddis to find Zarqawi and learn what was going on in the camp.
SAM FADDIS:
We literally had guys that were working for us that were inside the camp. They were working on chemical and biological weapons. They were doing a lot of work with cyanide-based things.
NARRATOR: At CIA headquarters, it was a threat they could not ignore if American troops were to invade Iraq.
MICHAEL SCHEUER, CIA, 1982-2004:
If we took Saddam out, Zarqawi was going to cause a lot of problems. He was someone who we would have wanted dead if we had the opportunity and the wherewithal to do it.
NARRATOR: And Sam Faddis had a plan to do just that.
SAM FADDIS:
I mean, a handful of aircraft, tomorrow, with the specificity that we have in their locations, will end this threat. And we will finish these guys.
NADA BAKOS:
This seemed like the perfect moment. We know where they are. You know, we know what they’re up to. This seemed like the right time to target them and to go after them.
NARRATOR: The attack plan was fast tracked from the CIA to the White House. But as America prepared to take out Saddam Hussein, the president was told that hitting Zarqawi could cause a problem.
COLIN POWELL, Secretary of State, 2001-05:
I remember there were discussions about attacking various camps that we thought bad guys were hanging out in, and I think the one you’re referring to, we made a judgment that, “Let’s not start the war before we’re ready.”
NARRATOR: When news of the decision reached CIA headquarters, there was frustration.
NADA BAKOS: Oh! I couldn’t believe it. We have a prime opportunity to take out a jihadist that we know poses a threat to our allies, in addition to American forces once they invade.
SAM FADDIS:
There was nobody on that team who felt like Washington had made the right decision. There’s another country getting up, ready to go up in flames. We’re giving them time and space. This will turn out very badly. We need to get them, get rid of them right now.
NARRATOR: But as Vice President Dick Cheney headed to the CIA, he was preparing to do something else with Zarqawi, use him to connect bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to make the case for war.
CRAIG WHITLOCK: Vice President Cheney came to the CIA, asking lots of questions. He wanted to know, is— not only, “Is there a connection between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden,” but “We want there to be a connection between the two.”
NARRATOR: The CIA officers believed there was no evidence of a connection.
SAM FADDIS:
No. Never. We never found any indication that Zarqawi was in Baghdad working for Saddam or linked up with Saddam.
NARRATOR: The vice president and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, pushed back.
NADA BAKOS:
It was pretty intense. We were lined up on one side of the table. Vice President Cheney and Scooter Libby were on the other side. And they walked in with a lot of questions and being very skeptical as to the intelligence that we had been gathering up to that point.
NARRATOR: Cheney seemed to want Zarqawi to be the link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
NADA BAKOS: The vice president’s frustrated. His questions are all about Zarqawi and his connection to Saddam, and whether or not they had discussed 9/11, and if Saddam had participated.
NARRATOR: Bakos says the vice president didn’t like the answer.
NADA BAKOS:
We tried to explain over and over again that it would be impossible for him logically to be working with Saddam.
MICHAEL SCHEUER:
There was no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in Iraq that we could find. And Zarqawi’s the kind of guy Saddam would kill without a moment’s— without a moment’s thought.
NADA BAKOS:
And the response to that was met with skepticism, lots of questions, and a lot more frustration.
NARRATOR: But at the White House, the allegations would not go away. They would appear again as Colin Powell prepared for a speech at the United Nations designed to convince the public to support the war.
COLIN POWELL:
The speech supposedly had been prepared in the White House and the NSC. But when we were given what had been prepared, it was totally inadequate, and we couldn’t track anything in it. And when I asked Condi Rice, the national security adviser, “Where did this come from,” it turns out the vice president’s office had written it.
NARRATOR: Powell would turn to the CIA to vet the speech.
NADA BAKOS:
We had a copy of the speech that was sent over from the White House that Powell was preparing. And one of our senior analysts was working on it, editing, working on the language to ensure that it reflected our analysis.
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...
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NADA BAKOS:
We’re sitting in our room at CTC watching the television with a copy of the speech in our hand.
COLIN POWELL:
What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
NADA BAKOS:
When he got to our portion, it went off our script fairly quickly. And we were looking around at each other, saying, “Where’s he at? Where’s he at?” We’re flipping through pages. And so, you know, right away, we could tell that this wasn’t reflecting the language that we had used.
NARRATOR: Powell used Zarqawi to make the connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
COLIN POWELL: Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate, collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.
NADA BAKOS:
It drew conclusions that— and language we would not use. So we were very, very, very careful about describing the relationship as we saw it, and it seemed to overinflate and not reflect our analysis.
INTERVIEWER: How did that happen, Nada?
NADA BAKOS:
Within the process of how it went— you know, where it went back to the White House and who worked on it after that, I don’t know how it was changed, or by who.
NARRATOR: Powell now says the speech was approved by CIA chief George Tenet, but he doesn’t remember the details about Zarqawi.
COLIN POWELL: I— I don’t— I don’t remember. Zarqawi was not anything uppermost in my mind. It was not a significant part of the speech for me. It was almost a passing reference.
NARRATOR: But it was more than a passing reference. Seven minutes of Powell’s speech were devoted to Zarqawi. His name is mentioned 21 times. Powell transformed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the eyes of the world.
COLIN POWELL:
From his terrorist network in Iraq, Zarqawi can direct his network in the Middle East and beyond.
NADA BAKOS: I can’t even imagine what that did for Zarqawi’s ego, to be— you know, here he is, his name is spoken at the U.N. Now he’s showing bin Laden and Al Qaeda who he really is, right? He’s become this iconic person without ever really doing anything.
NARRATOR: In the days that followed the speech, Zarqawi disappeared.
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NEWSCASTER: A rapid series of 40 explosions lit up Baghdad in the early morning hours.
NEWSCASTER: Military officials have been using the term “shock and awe” to describe the assault on Iraq.
NARRATOR: Zarqawi watched the American shock and awe campaign. And as the occupation began, Zarqawi waited for an opportunity. Before long, the man George W. Bush picked to run Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, gave him one.
PAUL BREMER, Iraq Administrator, 2003-04:
[May 15, 2003] And those who were on high before, in particular the Ba’athists—
NARRATOR: He promised to purge the Iraqi government.
PAUL BREMER:
—who used their power to oppress the Iraqi people, will be removed from office.
NARRATOR: He also issued an order that disbanded the entire Iraqi military.
DEXTER FILKINS, The New Yorker:
You had something on the order of 250,000 Iraqi men, military age, all trained in using weapons. Suddenly, they were all out of a job.
NARRATOR: The powerful message, Saddam and his Sunni-controlled army were no longer in charge.
PAUL BREMER: The army was the central instrument of Saddam’s repression of the Kurds and the Shia. I think the decision not to recall Saddam’s army, from a political point of view, is the single most important correct decision that we made in the 14 months that we were there.
NARRATOR: But on the ground, the American military commanders could feel the effects.
Gen. DAVID PETRAEUS, Cmdr., 101st Airborne, 2002-04:
The effect, frankly, was devastating. I think that’s where the seeds of what became the Sunni insurgency were largely planted.
EMMA SKY, Iraq Coalition Authority, 2003-04:
We had, you know, long lines of soldiers demanding money, demanding to be rehired. There was that whole sense of, you know, that militaries, defeated militaries, should be treated with respect. And that’s not what happened.
DAVID PETRAEUS:
Week after week after week, the big demonstrations got larger and larger. There was enormous concern because the demonstrations were out of hand. There were actually killings.
NADA BAKOS, CIA, 2000-08:
They feel like they’re going to go by the wayside, that they’re going to be not only the minority population but treated as if they don’t matter. So this is— they were easy targets for Zarqawi to recruit.
NARRATOR: Now Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had his opportunity. In the weeks that followed, the insurgency began.
RICHARD BARRETT, MI5/MI6, 1975-2004:
When these sorts of attacks began, nobody was quite clear, I think, where they were coming from, who was behind them and how sustainable they were.
NEWSCASTER: There has been another spasm of violence in Iraq.
NEWSCASTER: A car bomb killed at least five Iraqis in the center of Baghdad.
NARRATOR: In Washington, they insisted everything was under control.
NEWSCASTER: There’s an absence of authority, a vacuum of authority for most people.
DONALD RUMSFELD, Defense Secretary:
I picked up a newspaper today, and I couldn’t believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about, “Chaos!” “Violence!” “Unrest!” And it just was Henny Penny, the sky is falling! I’ve never seen anything like it. Just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country.
EMMA SKY:
Willful denial is one way of putting it. I mean, I remember, you know, thinking at the beginning, this is really, really strange. It’s one thing to analyze the situation and then spin it. It’s another thing then to start to believe your spin.
NARRATOR: In August, the biggest bombing yet.
NEWSCASTER: A massive explosion in the Jordanian embassy—
NEWSCASTER: —mayhem from Baghdad—
NEWSCASTER: Terrorists exploded a truck outside the compound—
DEXTER FILKINS:
This Iraqi runs in, and I said, “What happened?” And he said, “It was hit by a suicide bomber.” I think that was the first one. To think that after that, there would be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of suicide bombers, thousands even, it’s amazing.
NEWSCASTER: The bloodshed in Iraq—
NARRATOR: It was Zarqawi’s first major attack. Then, less than two weeks later, a bomb at the United Nations headquarters.
BRUCE HOFFMAN, U.S. Military Adviser, 2004-05:
Zarqawi had a strategy. He’s just trying to leave it so that it’s only the United States military left, and it’s a black and white conflict. And this will enable him then to rally considerably more support to himself and to his cause.
NEWSCASTER: Forty people have died today in a series of simultaneous bombings—
DEXTER FILKINS:
The immediate effect of that was the U.N. left, and all the NGOs were gone within a few weeks, all of them. And so it essentially left the Americans alone. That was it. It’s just you. It turned Baghdad into a kind of— this eerie militarized ghost town.
NEWSCASTER: A U.S. vehicle was on patrol when it came under attack.
NEWSCASTER: Violence has returned with a vengeance.
NEWSCASTER: Last night, two more soldiers—
NEWSCASTER: —exploded in violence today.
NEWSCASTER: The most deadly was a car bombing, killed at least 11 people.
NARRATOR: In Washington, Bakos and other analysts sifted the evidence from the bombings. Soon, President George W. Bush received a briefing document written by Bakos but without her name attached. It outlined Zarqawi’s role in the bombings.
NADA BAKOS:
I wrote a Presidential Daily Brief based on intelligence that we had received that Zarqawi was responsible for some of the major initial attacks in 2003, that he was still there and that he was looking to foment civil war.
NARRATOR: The information made its way to Scooter Libby in the vice president’s office. Bakos says she was at her desk at the CIA, her private phone rang.
NADA BAKOS: I received a phone call at my desk, to my own line, from Scooter Libby’s office. To call an individual analyst is only about pressuring them, intimidation. We write these anonymously. When they go to the White House, our names are not attached to the brief. And I immediately told him I couldn’t discuss any of this and hung up.
NARRATOR: At the vice president’s office, they weren’t done with Bakos. She and her supervisor were summoned for a face-to-face meeting with Libby.
NADA BAKOS:
We were there because they wanted to figure out how they could poke holes in the analysis.
NARRATOR: The questions centered around Bakos’s conclusion that there was an organized insurgency led by Zarqawi.
NADA BAKOS:
There was a lot of consternation in the administration using the term “insurgents” because it would look as if the Iraqis weren’t embracing what we were doing. Insurgency implies that they’re fighting against us.
BRUCE HOFFMAN:
Certainly, in the fall of 2003, the United States was in denial that an insurgency was brewing. In fact, that terminology was almost outlawed. No one could use it.
NARRATOR: We wanted to ask the vice president and his chief of staff about these matters, but neither would agree to be interviewed.
NEWSCASTER: Four car bombs went off almost simultaneously.
NEWSCASTER: The attacks came during the busy Baghdad commute.
NEWSCASTER: And at least 35 people have been killed in a huge car bomb attack in Baghdad.
NARRATOR: In Iraq, with America’s top leaders in denial, Zarqawi was free to raise the stakes.
RICHARD CLARKE, U.S. Counterterror Adviser, 1992-2001:
I think the senior leadership of the Bush administration was slow to realize, A, that there was an insurgency, and B, that there was an evil genius behind it, and C, that evil genius was Zarqawi.
NICK BERG:
[subtitles] My name is Nick Berg. My father’s name is Michael.
NARRATOR: Zarqawi would now send a message to the American people.
BRUCE HOFFMAN:
Zarqawi had already captured people’s attention from the succession of suicide bombings. Now he cultivated a different means to do so. And with someone like Nicholas Berg, I think very tragically, he found exactly the kind of person he wanted, an American, a do-gooder, who was also Jewish.
NARRATOR: That’s Zarqawi in the middle.
DEXTER FILKINS:
If you watch it really closely, it’s a Zarqawi show. He’s standing there. He’s reading in his guttural voice. He’s reading this document.
ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI:
[subtitles] You will see nothing from us except corpse after corpse and casket after casket of those slaughtered in this fashion.
DEXTER FILKINS:
Then he’s finished reading— and I’ll never forget this. He finishes reading, and he just hands the script to an aide, who kind of takes it. It was like a CEO handing his briefcase to his aide. And then he pulls out the machete.
WILL McCANTS, Author, The ISIS Apocalypse:
It’s the only beheading video I’ve ever watched — the first and last — because it was so horrifying. You can hear all the noises of the poor man’s death, and Zarqawi standing over the mutilated body delivering his message to the world.
RICHARD CLARKE:
The fact that Zarqawi was killing people personally made him far more appealing to the 20-something Sunni in Saudi Arabia or Iraq or even in Europe, the foreign fighter kind of guy that you want to go join if you’re one of those young disaffected Sunnis.
NARRATOR: Finally, Zarqawi had the full attention of the Bush administration. The American government placed a $25 million bounty on Zarqawi.
PETER BAKER, Author, Days of Fire:
But it basically puts the same price on his head that Osama bin Laden has on his, and it basically elevates him now to enemy number one for the United States.
NARRATOR: Bin Laden had once rejected Zarqawi. Now he couldn’t ignore him.
NADA BAKOS:
It’s shortly after that that the relationship changes. Zarqawi is the new start-up, and bin Laden wants to invest. He wants Zarqawi to use the Al Qaeda brand. So since Al Qaeda hadn’t done anything since 9/11, this was a perfect opportunity for Bin Laden to get back in the game.
NARRATOR: For Zarqawi, it was the seal of approval, and in a letter to bin Laden obtained by American intelligence, he outlined what he planned to do next.
ZARQAWI LETTER TO BIN LADEN:
“As the decisive moment approaches, we feel that our body has begun to spread into the security vacuum.”
DEXTER FILKINS:
What Zarqawi says in the letter is, “We have one choice, and that is to start a sectarian war,” and basically to set all of Iraq on fire and to draw in the whole world.
ZARQAWI LETTER TO BIN LADEN:
“If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis.”
WILLIAM McCANTS, Author, The ISIS Apocalypse:
We’re going to foment a civil war, and this will cause the Shia to overreact. They are going to go after the minority Sunni population, and then the Sunnis are going to have to turn to us, the jihadists, to defend them.
NARRATOR: Now Zarqawi acted. He initiated unprecedented unrestrained violence against the Shia.
NEWSCASTER: One hundred seventy people died in that weekend truck—
NEWSCASTER: —daily life in Iraq.
NEWSCASTER: —kidnappings and thousands of killings every month.
NEWSCASTER: The killings have created a climate of fear.
NEWSCASTER: A wave of sectarian killing across Iraq left at least—
NARRATOR: Zarqawi was becoming known by a new name, “the sheikh of the slaughterers.”
NEWSCASTER: A suicide car bombing killed 12—
PATRICK SKINNER, CIA, 2003-10:
Once he pivoted to Shia, Baghdad was just hammered with huge car bombs, but also just daily assassinations— of families, of neighbors. Then you started having those torture cells, the beheading videos. The invasion toppled the government, but Zarqawi ripped the country in half.
DEXTER FILKINS, Author, The Forever War:
God, the horrible, horrible years in Iraq when there were, you know, hundreds and hundreds of car bombs and suicide bombings. It was incredible what they did. I mean, it was murderous. It was psychopathic. It was horrific, but it was really extraordinary.
NARRATOR: For Osama bin Laden, the violence against fellow Muslims was too much. Bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, dispatched this letter to Zarqawi.
ZAWAHIRI LETTER TO ZARQAWI:
“Many of your Muslim admirers are wondering about your attacks on the Shia. The sharpness of this questioning increases when the attacks are on one of their mosques.”
NADA BAKOS:
So the response from Al Qaeda was, “Stop doing what you’re doing. Killing Shia and other Muslims aren’t going to achieve the objective that we need. This isn’t the path that we want you to take, and we’re telling you to stop.”
ZAWAHIRI LETTER TO ZARQAWI:
“My opinion is that this matter won’t be acceptable to the Muslim populace, however much you have tried to explain it, and the aversion to this will continue.”
NEWSCASTER: One hundred seventy people died in that weekend truck bombing—
NARRATOR: But Zarqawi disagreed. His plan for a Sunni resurgence relied on brutal sectarian violence.
NEWSCASTER: Attacks are constant and often grisly.
NARRATOR: And he would respond to Zawahiri and bin Laden with one devastating attack. He blew up an important Shia shrine, the Golden Dome in Samarra.
ALI SOUFAN, Author, The Black Banners:
Samarra was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the sectarian war.
PATRICK SKINNER, CIA, 2003-10:
He just took down the biggest revered shrine in Iraq. And immediately, it was within 12 hours that everything in Iraq changed. It wasn’t, you know, it went from good to bad, it went from horrible to unbelievably horrible.
NARRATOR: It was all-out civil war. Tens of thousands would die.
DAVID PETRAEUS:
And that set off a cycle of violence between Sunni and Shia that Al Qaeda tried to fuel as much as they possibly could, Zarqawi directing it, of course, very capably.
NADA BAKOS, CIA, 2000-08:
Zarqawi achieved what he wanted to achieve. He had fomented anger and fear and frustration enough that populations felt pitted against each other.
NARRATOR: As the civil war raged, Zarqawi decided to do something bold. He would reveal his face on camera.
ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI:
[subtitles] The only thing they will get from us is a slashing sword!
BRUCE HOFFMAN, U.S. Military Adviser, 2004-05:
He understood the power of the Internet. It showed him using an American automatic weapon— not necessarily using it correctly, but he did use it in a way that I think established his flair for publicity.
NADA BAKOS:
It’s propaganda. It’s recruitment. It shows what their intention is. He’s wanting other people to join him. He’s building his army at this point.
NARRATOR: In the video, Zarqawi made a surprising proclamation. He would create an Islamic state, the first step toward a global caliphate.
ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI:
[subtitles] —an Islamic state in which the word of God will reign supreme.
PATRICK SKINNER, CIA, 2003-10:
He was never content just to be the thug from Zarqa and he wasn’t content just to be the guy who beheaded Nick Berg, he wanted to rule a caliphate.
NARRATOR: It was something bin Laden hadn’t yet pushed for.
RICHARD BARRETT, U.N. Counterterror, 2004-13:
Al Qaeda saw that time as a long way off, and Zarqawi was very, very much more impatient and said, “This we can— we can do now. “
NARRATOR: For Zarqawi, the creation of the caliphate would be the fulfillment of a prophecy.
WILL McCANTS, Author, The ISIS Apocalypse
: That religious vision promises the return of God’s kingdom on earth, the reestablishment of the early Islamic empire, the empowerment of Sunni Muslims around the world, that the reestablished caliphate will eventually take over the entire globe, and then the entire world will come crashing to an end.
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>> It goes on to Zarqawi's successor in the growth of ISIS/L, the success in the US surge in 2006-2009 to stop the terrorists, and then the ISIS/L regrowth after we left after 2011, the spread into Syria, & Obama's lack of success to stop it.
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