Blackwater at Khost
When news of the attack at the CIA based in Khost, I suggested that Blackwater contractors were likely among the victims (recall that Erik Prince boasted of being involved in such operating bases in his Vanity Fair interview).
Sure enough… (h/t Susie)
Jeremy Wise, the former Navy SEAL killed in a suicide bomber’s attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan last week, was working for Xe, the Moyock, N.C.-based security company previously known as Blackwater.
Wise’s Xe affiliation is disclosed in an obituary published in today’s Virginian-Pilot.
Wise was one of eight people killed in the Dec. 30 blast in Khost province. News reports Tuesday identified the suicide bomber as a Jordanian double agent and said seven of the victims were CIA-affiliated. The eighth was a Jordanian military officer.
CNN had reported earlier that two of the CIA casualties were Xe contractors. Asked about the report, a Xe spokeswoman declined to comment.
I’m curious whether we’ll ever find out how much of what Pat Lang calls “a dearth of tradecraft” can be attributed to the CIA, and how much to Blackwater.
I’ll go one step further, I’d bet those blackwater folks were the primary targets. After all, they’re doing most of the dirty work.
Boxturtle (Dept of Extreme Prejudice may soon become a cabinet level post)
I would bet it was simply an attack on Americans who were not obvious military but intelligence. The suicide bomber was a Jordanian asset, after all, must have had some knowledge he was working with intel personnel. Probably didn’t matter that he was taking out CIA, DIA, contractors, whatever; probably mattered far more that they were working on specific al Qaeda targets.
Maybe I’m watching too much FoxTV, but that attack reads to me as a well planned attack against a hardened target. I think it unlikely that once on the base, the attacker took the first target of oppertunity. He knew where he was going and he knew who he expected to find there.
For once I’m with CIA/Blackwater: We need to find the people who planned that attack fast. Somebody there is smart enough to be very dangerous.
Boxturtle (Expects the skies over Khost have more drones then sparrows)
There is the big question, however, as to why this person suicided bombed the place, rather than telling AQ everything the Americans had on them, as a typical double agent would do. If you assume there was something about the people at the base that was particularly special that merited killing them rather than counteracting their intelligence programs, it does suggest a more specific attack.
It suggests that the PR coup of taking out a CIA/Blackwater/Xe cell by one of its own, a local, was worth more politically than the loss of an obviously successful agent. It could also be that there was no other way to stop an action, or that the double agent suspected he was found out and that his self-destruction was Plan B.
Why? I’d guess for revenge against murderous torturers. The people he blew up may have not been his actual torturers, but the governments and agencies they represented were. While I don’t advocate bombing anyone, being against murder whether by suicide belt or pilotless drone and missile, one can understand the motivations of someone who might make such a choice.
CIA Bomber Coerced to Work for Jordan Spy Agency
Al-Balawi’s family has been warned not to talk to the press. It seems highly likely that they were threatened, as part of the “persuasion” to within three days to get the “doctor [who] also spoke openly about wanting to die in a holy war” to flip sides.
I’ve had occasion in my work as a clinician aiding those who have been tortured in foreign lands and fled to the United States for political asylum to have met some of the victims of the Jordanian Mukhabarat. Their torture was brutal beyond belief, permanently injuring them. The GID loves to play the game of “owning you”, breeding informants as fast as they can. If some of these informants then turn against them when they get the chance, so much the worse for everyone involved.
Everyone in the Middle East and workers in the human rights field are well-aware of the Jordanians’ wide-spread use of torture. While I certainly can’t prove al-Balawi was tortured, it makes more sense given what we know than any other theory out there. But you won’t here that mentioned, except in code words, like “coerced” or “persuaded”.
For those who want to read more about the Jordanians and torture, they could start with this recent report by Human Rights Watch:
Torture and Impunity in Jordan’s Prisons
In 2007, the Washington Post called Jordan’s spy agency a “holding cell for the CIA.”
The double agent probably had very little on the CIA so the amount of information he could bring back was likely very limited. Taking out a lot of the people (station chief and other experts) was the best he could probably do.
I think that’s a bad assumption. Whatever he was up to, it was important enough that high level folks in Washington were informed that this was going on. And whatever it was, it was happening out of Khost because that’s where he was sent.
I’m thinking he trashed a very important operation, along with the key operative and the key supervisor.
Boxturtle (AQ likely got good value for this suicide)
You are misunderstanding what I am saying. The suicide bomber probably had very little information about the CIA operation that he could pass back to Al Qaeda.
But the whole POINT of having double agents is to get information. You know, you figure out precisely what the CIA has on AQ. You include some disinformation. That stuff would normally be more useful than offing 8 enemies.
But for some reason, the NORMAL use of double agents was different here.
THough I sort of wonder whether al Qaeda had discovered the Jordanian was a double agent and threatened him (his family?) to make him do this.
You’re assuming they didn’t already get the CI on what CIA had on OBL.
Recruiting double agents to act as assassins is not unknown. Sometimes, the agent is motivated to be so martryed, ideologically or financially. Sometimes he or she is coerced, usu. through threats to loved ones or blackmail
I guess we are all speculating. My feeling is that most of the information that a double agent of this kind could obtain about the CIA would only be useful to mount an attack on their facilities and their people. So why not let him do the job itself.
And the amount of disinformation that anyone can supply to the other side is always limited.
The double agent was already sympathetic to AQ. And there is nothing that AQ could threaten him with that the Jordanians had not already threatened him with.
Excellent point EW!
Wasting a double agent inside your most dangerous foe seems to be short-sighted, but perhaps AQ & Co. thought it worth it, or were indeed short-sighted, or perhaps the result of lower level AQ/Taliban commanders “tactical” decisions.
Oh, I think it was a pointed hit — but I disagree with BoxT as to whether BW/Xe personnel were the target. I do think it was a hit on intelligence.
We know this much:
– people at the site were analysts;
– the station chief on site was supposedly an expert within CIA on OBL;
– they wanted to go after al Qaeda’s top tier leaders;
– Jordan’s intel apparatus was convinced their asset had been fully “persuaded.”
We (the public) don’t know:
– how much the Jordanian intel officer and apparatus had told this asset;
– how much the asset already knew about the facility attacked;
– how much trust the American intel personnel had for this asset;
– what the full mission was of this facility (rather close to Pakistan border, yes?).
Ostensibly at a site with analysts there will be some level of security, and perhaps that’s what the known/unknown BW/Xe contractor(s) were doing on site.
And perhaps it had become known to the asset that the target wasn’t just al Qaeda’s top tier, but OBL himself — and that right there might be enough to sacrifice not only other al Qaeda (which I suspect happened since Jordan was convinced this asset was fully on board), but a personal sacrifice via suicide bombing.
What we do know…
Al-Balawi had been a doctor working with Palestinians in the refugee camps and those injured in the Israeli seige/attack on Gaza. It’s not clear that he was previously an Al Qaeda sympathizer, but was reportedly pro-“jihad”, which in and of itself doesn’t mean that much. It’s unclear if he wrote articles for radical Islamist websites before or after he was “coerced” to flip. the Guardian article today implies it was after the flip, to establish al-Balawi’s credentials with Al Qaeda.
What can we conclude? Al-Balawi was not initially a terrorist or Al Qaeda (unless you believe the GID has been penetrated -a faint possibility). When the doctor got the chance, he told Al Qaeda of the GID approach and they convinced or “persuaded” him too to cooperate with them. How much he did so willlingly we’ll never know, or motivated by a torture experience (my speculation) or threats to his family, etc.
With al-Balawi as a tool, Al Qaeda leaders couldn’t pass up a chanc to kill such high-level a group of officials. Indeed, the US officials have been doing the same toward Al Qaeda leadership for some time.
This gruesome game of assassination, torture and revenege must end. Unfotunately all signs are that it will continue.
So here’s another question…
Is it possible that even al-Balawi was unaware he was “rigged”?
What if he’d been coerced, bugged during his interactions with Jordanian intel, instructed to go and meet with his handler, but unfortunately rigged without his own knowledge to be used as a human weapon?
/tinfoil
They’re learning enough about our own methods, including cellphones and drones, that they could do the same things.
After the Hassan-Ft. Hood situation I’m less inclined to believe that being a doctor makes one less suspicious, too. One might even become more radicalized because of one’s practice.
Don’t forget that al Zawahiri is a doctor.
I believe this is exactly what is happening. I doubt Dr. Balawi was pressured by anyone. I believe he decided to take-out the whole CIA station in Afghanistan because he was smart enough to figure out how to pull it off and he wanted to do it because he hates what CIA & Blackwater do to civilians with drone attacks. I suspect we’ll see a lot more well educated and professional people acting as suicide bombers this year.
Lots of questions about what happened, lots of mis and disinformation.
This is important:
“There is the big question, however, as to why this person suicided bombed the place, rather than telling AQ everything the Americans had on them, as a typical double agent would do.”
Is this a typical ‘cold war’ espionage environment?
If either the players or this situation is significantly different, there is a ‘different’ “typical”.
From the Soviet perspective: was their experience in Afghanistan a typical cold war experience?
Our friends at that time made it most unpleasant for the Soviets in many of the same ways now visited upon us.
We seem to have forgotten the rules we helped establish here 30 years ago.
There was no dearth of tradecraft.
Unfortunately, it was the other side that knew what they were doing.
A contradiction in terms, I think. In any case, his hosts were toast as soon as the double agent decided he would trade his life for theirs, assuming those are the facts. We shouldn’t dwell on them, though. The past is past, not prologue. We should look only forward to the new and shining light ahead, and to the word that will ease our sorrows, enrich our souls, but not our pocketbooks, and make government work again.
Protest Murderous CIA Drone Attacks
When: Saturday, January 16, 2010, 1:00pm – 4:00 pm
Where: CIA Headquarters (Langley, Virginia)
Bring flowers to present to the spooks in attendance.
Hmmm. Given that the bomber was a double agent who would have had pretty good knowledge of those at the base, the choice of targets becomes very interesting.
Another possibility instead of Pat’s “a dearth of tradecraft” is as I commented there, the fact that as the NYT reported last night, there was involvement in this op all the way up to and including the White House:
There was involvement in this op all the way up to and including the White House.
It seems to me there is a distinct possibility that the folks on the ground were given their explicit no-tradecraft marching orders on how to conduct themselves by the high mandarin muckity-muck armchair warriors back in DC.
Something like: “Don’t worry about tradecraft. This is the biggest deal evah! Maybe even OBL! Throw him a party with broads and booze! He’ll love it!”
This is a lack of tradecraft in that at some point there should have been
‘pushback’ against any ‘high level meddling/micromanaging’ that prevented the ‘job’ from being done correctly. Such pushback no longer present in the system anymore, having been purposefully removed by previous administrations by sacking and promoting to prevent it.
No pushback means never having to say “I was informed of this possibility and still …”.
The primary target here WAS NOT anyone who was unlucky and was too close at the wrong time.
The primary target was further disruption of the ‘fishing expedition’.
The fishing expedition being intelligence operations in the area.
Those watching the fishing expedition from afar, having plans to benefit from it, also got the intended message.
So what about the “review” that Panetta had said was occuring to make sure that Blackwater was not “involved in operations”. Totally BS?
For any interested, I have Dr. Drew Westen for an hour long chat on Obama Nation right now at FDL
(deleted because editing was removing the paragraph changes, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I’m reposting below.)
Juan Cole has a very article about this problem. Someone in a tribal faction wants power. Tells CIA/Blackwater that the other faction are Al Qaeda. Gets them killed. Causes civilians to die as well. Locals get outraged. The snitch gains power.
http://www.salon.com/news/afghanistan/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/01/04/afghanistan_disasters
Not surprising, but still so idiotic that it makes me want to scream. From the “Bomber Coerced” article:
>Al-Balawi’s “information led to drone-launched missile strikes that led the CIA to kill a number of ‘al-Qaida leaders’.”
The internal quotes around al-Qaida leaders are mine, of course. Gee, I wonder if there were exactly 30 of them. So not only did he take out 6 CIA, one Blackwater, and one Jordanian intelligence officer, he may have also encouraged us to bomb non-threatening Afghanis or perhaps dissident or disillusioned al-Qaida.
I wonder whether we’ll ever hear which drone attacks his misinformation was linked to. That’s the kind of news that undercuts the very idea of the CIA, so probably not.
I’d wondered about the tradecraft thing for a while. I mean, at least since the Abu Omar thing in Milan, ostensible CIA have been caught in the open doing things that I, a normally devious All-American girl, would not have done.
Since that incident my guess has been the influence of outside contractors.
Had a recent discussion about the purge during the first four years of the GWB administration. It was suggested a loss of institutional knowledge happened as people were replaced with the kind of folks Kyle Sampsom/Monica Goodling-types would have hired — people who graduated from acceptable schools, whose ideologies were specific. We could be seeing more evidence of how broad the impact of that purge was, leaving only people who are not the very best in their industry to fill key intelligence roles.
Hence the “dearth of tradecraft” we may be seeing.
MadDog (22) – I tend to think this was more focused than a random hit. Demanding to search this guy at the facility would have been the worst of tradecraft, tipping off any nearby locals to a heightened concern for the occupants. It could have been remedied by a meeting offsite at a pre-secured location and the understanding that the asset would be screened at that location by security. (This should have been SOP.)
I am itchy with curiosity as to who selected the station agent. There are some other issues in play here. The selection process might also go to tradecraft.
Not buying that. *g*
Searching non-Americans entering any US base/outpost is the SOP. Twouldn’t be the norm to “not search”.
See scribe at (41), and then read Pat Lang’s piece which EW linked.
Be sure to read the comments at PL’s site.
There were multiple failures, including the lack of checking. Intel industry people are openly acknowledging this. Should have been SOP, and if it was, it didn’t happen.
Been there, done that. My commentary on this is also in Pat’s very post. *g*
And there is a dearth of reporting on just why there was no search.
Pat’s post dealt with the premise that the fault lay locally and was onerous example of poor tradecraft/security.
I raised the possibility that the local folks on the ground were either intimidated by involved DC-based higher-ups (even up to the White House) or perhaps even directly ordered to stand-down the traditional tradecraft/security procedures.
In the end, there has yet to be an answer why there were broken tradecraft/security procedures.
Your sentence containing the word FUBAR is the truth.
This FUBAR was likely watched live at the location where those responsible for causing it work.
I saw your comment, and your point is taken — but if higher ups from intel were watching, then the FUBAR is institutionalized. I don’t know that we can yet say that. We haven’t seen/heard enough to indicate this.
But I noted Phil Giraldi was in the thread too. So far he’s not let me down; each time he’s said something, invariably there’s been secondary validation.
“I saw your comment, and your point is taken — but if higher ups from intel were watching, then the FUBAR is institutionalized. I don’t know that we can yet say that. We haven’t seen/heard enough to indicate this.”
Take it to the bank!
The FUBAR is institutionalized- at the highest levels.
From my comment at 46:
“What happened to people like General Eric Shinseki, Army Secretary Thomas White, and General Tommy Franks have been duly noted by all participants at equal and lower levels.”
I did not provide the links, but it was: tell the truth ( and be proven right ) and lose your job. In Franks case, get with the Bushco wisdom and then keep your job ( and Franks had been right and Bushco was wrong).
Lotsa Abu Gonzo and Doug Feith characters still in charge and doin the best they can.
“and doin the best they can.” Shudder.
I wonder if President Obama was watching in Hawaii via some special closed circuit satellite hookup. The technology is doable. Would have been a hell of a shock to watch, given expectations.
“We could be seeing more evidence of how broad the impact of that purge was, leaving only people who are not the very best in their industry to fill key intelligence roles.”
A primary contributing condition to the present situation.
What happened to people like General Eric Shinseki, Army Secretary Thomas White, and General Tommy Franks have been duly noted by all participants at equal and lower levels.
Some qualified individuals have become frustrated and left, some unqualified individuals have replaced them, and qualified individuals view the situation and opt out by not applying to join the team.
An additional point to ponder. The Jordanian double agent simply could not have known that he wouldn’t be searched.
I can’t imagine that either his Jordanian or CIA/Blackwater handlers would say something like: “Don’t worry, we’ll never search you!”
I think this is an important point for the following reasons:
If the Jordanian double agent didn’t know that he wouldn’t be searched, then his planned suicide bombing didn’t necessarily have a guaranteed, and even perhaps, specific target of the Khost CIA/Blackwater folks (and also not the Afghanistan deputy CIA station chief who seems to have arrived just because of the value of the information to be gained).
The Jordanian double agent may have expected to be searched and therefore to have only been targeting sentries/guards doing the searching.
This means that the supposedly “clever, diabolical and informed” targeting of the Khost CIA/Blackwater folks was instead more likely to be a “low level, everyday-type suicide bombing operation” against the Khost outpost that might, just might “fill an inside straight”.
Given that strong likelihood of being searched, I think it doesn’t make enough sense to assume that this was anything but a matter of luck on the part of Jordanian double agent and his real allies.
Yes, attacking a “known” CIA outpost. But not hitting the specific “valuable” CIA/Blackwater targets that were killed and injured.
I haven’t seen anything contradicting this:
“The meeting also included a high-level CIA officer who had traveled to the remote base from Kabul. It is unclear whether that person was among those killed.”
from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126246258911313617.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_news
If the implication — that detonation occurred prior to the station chief’s attending — is accurate, would this fit your scenario?
Also: my own experience with dealing with presshounds reporting on cases in which I’ve been intimately includes:
[a] the vast majority of published stories where the reporter has relied on first-hand reports from third parties contain at least some serious inaccuracy, whether due to misunderstanding or deliberate spin [sometimes both],
[b] many published stories from the ‘front’ — sometimes even when the reporter is able to rely on her own unfiltered, first-hand, eye-witnessed information — get tarted up, in service of someone’s agenda or ego
[as if long-time readers here need reminding], and
[c] double-agent is a term carrying a lot of romance.
I still am leary of describing this as a “clever, diabolical and informed” targeting of the Khost CIA/Blackwater folks or even the visiting deputy CIA station chief, but like you, I do agree that we really know actually very little from the “reporting”.
Maybe the Jordanian military officer was the target and this has nothing to do with the US??
Another possibility though one would think AQ & Co. would find him a fairly easy target back in Jordan.
Since the Jordanian officer was flown specifically to Afghanistan for the meet, it seems to say more was targeted.
Much about this story is still hidden behind a cloudbank of fog, and perhaps even our own disinformation.
“Another possibility though one would think AQ & Co. would find him a fairly easy target back in Jordan.
Since the Jordanian officer was flown specifically to Afghanistan for the meet, it seems to say more was targeted.
Much about this story is still hidden behind a cloudbank of fog, and perhaps even our own disinformation”
I agree — look at everything leaked to the press as possible disinformation. I am sure that at some juncture a reporter will sort this out to some extent — but it is far too soon and still too kineic to fully sort out. But remember there are six or eight survivors of this who were wounded, but quickly received medical care and have been returned to the US. So at some juncture one or another of these could become a Journalists source.
I put considerable weight on the fact that the Jordanian Intelligence Officer who traveled to Khost for the meeting was first cousin to the current King, and related to many in the Jordanian Royal Family, and as well, was a direct descendent of the Prophet. The King apparently met the remains at Amman’s airport, and attended the funeral.
I think it possible that initially this was a primarily Jordanian operation — al-Balawi was the source being run by the Jordanian Officer (royal family — direct line of descent from the Prophet) who served as traditional Case Officer in this operation. The recruitment of Dr. al-Balawi probably was a project of the Jordanian Officer/King’s Cousin, and in the culture of Islam it was probably assumed that the blood status of that Officer confered some degree of psychological control over the recruited source, al-Balawi.
Laying that as groundwork, I can generate a number of thesis as to what might have gone down. In Islamist terms, the Prince/Case Officer would have been understood as a traitor to Islam — much more so because of his blood status. Among al-Quada believers, it would be assumed it was a deeply religious obligation to take him out, to kill him off. If that could be done so as to sow distrust among Jordanian Intelligence, CIA, and any other services — all the better. I think it is possible to arrange the widgets of information available around this thesis. (again, many of those widgets may be disinformation — we can’t know yet.)
I do think it possible that this action may have been in the planning stages for some time. One has to ask — what was it about a meet between al-Balawi and his case officer that would draw so many CIA and other services personnel to observe/participate in the meet? I am sure CIA is now busy going back and scrubbing all information they ever got from the source, al-Balawi — including any other sources he may have recruited for his Case Officer or CIA. They probably had convinced the case officer and CIA’s station chief, plus DC based anaylists that al-Balawi’s information was good as gold. Now, I suppose, they can’t trust any of it, they can’t know what was corrupt, and what was for real. (Something tells me that some of Obama’s current anger at the connect the dots capacity of the Counterterrorism Center could be a lot less about underwear bombing, and a lot more about comprehending how corrupt al-Quada information might be, given al-Balawi’s efforts. I would imagine that at least some propositions that went into formulating his Afghanistan Policy are tainted by corrupt intelligence that leads back to al-Balawi.)
One reason CIA and other intelligence operations are Compartmentalized is to avoid this sort of corruption. A case officer runs his al-Balawi and unknown to him, a parallel compartment is running another operation, and neither case officer knows about the other operation. The Anaylist is then charged with putting quite independent eyes on the information take, actually looking for discontinuities. The “Bad Tradecraft” is all about the clear lack of such practice in Khost. You do it this way primarily to avoid corruption in your higher level databases on which you base analysis.
As for putting responsibility — Frankly, I put the responsibility right back on Bush and Cheney, largely because they are exhibit one for using what proported to be intelligence as a political tool. They didn’t give a damn whether it was a good product, they only cared about how it could be used to serve their policy agenda. Tenet served those interests (even though I think he knew the difference and had a tiny conscience), and Porter Goss had few if any redeaming qualities. I suspect Gates knows the difference, but whether or not he has the guts to tutor Obama, don’t know. The people Obama needs to bring in to consult are some of the types who have gone public over the years — Mel Goodman, Drumheller, maybe Baer, — the really retired types who were trained old school, and show a respect for classical intelligence arts.
Thanks for your feedback, Sara.
Have you seen anything at all which suggests involvement by DIA? That’s a piece I haven’t seen and since missing now puzzles me. There had been a steady collapse of the wall between CIA and DIA during the Bush/Cheney years, which I suspect is the reason why there hasn’t been compartmentalization of CIA. But if the compartment isn’t in place now, where’s DIA in all this?
And continuing in that vein, what does it say about the Bush/Cheney years of total mismanagement that the CIA has such a paucity of information on the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri?
Almost 8 long years of supposed focus on AQ & Co., coupled with endless prisoner-taking, endless “enhanced interrogation”, and yet the CIA readily admits they have had zero information on Osama Bin Laden’s or Ayman al-Zawahiri’s whereabouts for years!
For all those long Bush/Cheney years of GWOT chest-beating and GWOT self-congratulations, it is readily apparent that they left a bare CIA cupboard for the incoming Obama adminstration.
The only thing that Bush and Cheney were successful at was failure. And epic failure at that!
Thus, they were wildly successful!
“The only thing that Bush and Cheney were successful at was failure. And epic failure at that!”
Cheney is/was an epic CIA hater, goes way back to 1975 when Bill Colby dropped the “Family Jewels” on the Church Committee, when Cheney was in the Ford Administration, but it also includes the fact that CIA developed an analysis of the state of things in Vietnam about 1967 that saw no victory exit from Vietnam, and refused to change its analysis after the Nixon/Kissinger Team took over in 1969. I don’t see things that happened during Bush43/Cheney as simply failure — I think he always wanted to destroy the agency. What better way to do that than to leave Obama (or as they actually predicted a year before the election, Hillary Clinton,) with a profoundly corrupted system. And yes, part of that corruption probably does involve the seeding of the system with burrowed in loyalists and outside contractors who owe a certain degree of financial and other sorts of loyalty to the Bush/Cheney crowd.
Rayne says…”Have you seen anything at all which suggests involvement by DIA? That’s a piece I haven’t seen and since missing now puzzles me.”
No, but from what I can tell DIA is not involved with the search for bin Laden and his subsidary groups holed up in North Waziristan, which seems to be what Khost and the CIA operated Predator/Reaper program is all about. DIA seems to be engaged in serving special forces and other Army/Marine units on the ground in Afghanistan.
It appears to me there is a rather fuzzy bright line between what has been put on CIA’s plate, and what has been given to DOD, and I suspect it has to do with the Pakistani Army’s fairly long term relationship with DOD, and the CIA’s less integrated relationship. If DOD doesn’t know exactly what CIA is doing with its drones, it makes for a slightly easier military to military relationship.
Although, Darth had started earlier while Tenet was around, Porter Goss and his ‘Goss-lings'(i.e. Foggo…) delivered the coup de grace…!
Ditto; as soon as I heard this news and info about Obama seeming ‘angry’, it seemed more likely to be about this than about the shoe-bomber. (Although the shoe-bomber story has all kinds of elements that would make it a Tea Bagger’s Tailor-Made Nightmare, and is an easy tale for the Fox viewers to get behind, the suicide bombing in Afghanistan seems far more costly and dire.)
But am I the only one who found it downright strange that Cheney was so off-the-dime on slamming Obama regarding that shoe-bomber problem?
I hope that none of this involves at lest a second ‘double agent’.
And I also hope that none of this can be attributed to Cheney’s stay-behinds.
But it is worrying.
All the more reason for Obama to clean house, and thoroughly.
And the Jordanians are running for the exits (via TPM):
This special scapegoating of Blackwater instead of the CIA strikes me as the colonists saying “the king wouldn’t do this; if only we could get past that evil Lord North.” I don’t see much reason to separate Blackwater from its CIA bosses along these lines.
Like Rayne, I’d guess the targetting was of high level intelligence people, regardless of exact affiliation. I’d also guess that however much the bomber knew, that it’s unlikely he knew who was Blackwater and who was CIA, and even less likely that he cared.
I just received an e-mail from an old roommate who is a military doctor. In his 40’s, a wife and 3 kids, and he’s been sent to a hospital in Helmand. Not that those details mean it’s any harder on him than on all the people over there. I hope he’s safe.
MadDog, I agree that it’s unlikely anyone said “you won’t be searched.” But it’s possible that he’d not been adequately searched on a previous entry, and took the chance – thinking he had a shot at getting in, and if not, he’d just take out the sentries at the checkpoint.
To be clear, I’m not scapegoating BW. Rather, the inclusion of BW people among the victims may point to the intent of the attack.
Take the possibliity–raised above–that this was an operation getting closer to OBL himself. Who’s going to take him out? Are you going to leave assassinating (or capturing) OBL to a drone attack? Or are you going to send people in directly?
This article makes for interesting reading. According to it, the BW guy killed was a perimeter guard who did not frisk the double agent. Instead, because the guy had been there before and everyone knew everyone else, the guard escorted him in, whereupon he was blown up, too.
This article also says he was not frisked when entering and was escorted in by the contractor security guards.
I think, in this instance, a lot of the scapegoating can be dumped in a big steaming pile right on the front porch in Moyock, NC.
The “official line” is that Xe’s role is only security, so it would be mandatory that a story like that is out there to account for the two Xe personnel dying.
This hurts our relationship with Jordan intel a great deal. Someone knew that.
Dr. Westen stated today in regards to Obama:
And then your comment:
We have so many horror stories of defense and intel gone wrong due to private contractors. Government (the lack there of) will be the problem if we continue to allow such contracts to screw everything up.
I’m not clear how this would have been different if perimeter security were run by, say, special forces, or normal MP’s, rather than XE people, which is essentially saying higher-paid ex-special forces and ex-MP’s. What’s the difference?
To me, the big differences have been two: #1 people like Prince make millions, a portion of which is churned back into lobbying and political activity; and #2 the laws governing them have been ambiguous, though that is easily handled by congress if anyone wants to do so; and the ambiguity could wind up meaning they have less protection, not more. Other than that, I really don’t distinguish between Blackwater and government personnel. They’re trained exactly the same; as individuals, they are often the same people at different stages of their career; they ultimately answer in more or less the same way.
That Times of India article seems off-kilter in a number of ways. And a couple days (Jan. 03) behind the current rumormill curve.
First, they describe the suicide bomber as “a previously trusted Pakistani informant of the Waziri tribe who was often picked up from a border crossing by a trusted Afghan security director named Arghawan and driven to the base”.
That doesn’t comport with the latest that he was a Jordanian doctor doing double agent duty.
And secondly, India news media has a very long tradition of blaming stuff like this on Pakistan just as this report does.
Big grain of salt advised! *g*
I agree on that to a degree, but the fact of the suicide double agent’s nationality and the fact of no frisking by the Blackwater guard are separate and not interdependent in any way.
The whole “no frisking” aspect has the ring of SNAFU-truth, as does the whole idea of shipping in a bunch of people at all levels to debrief a double agent.
The way you would do it would be to put one guy or at most two in a room with the double agent, as much to protect the identities of the others on your team interested in what he has to say as anything else. When you’re running a double agent, you want his entree into your side to be as compartmented as possible, because you know he is going to have to report plausibly to the other side, and you want to control exactly what facts he learns so you can control what the other side learns and therefore affect its decision-making by rationing its information.
The others on your team who are interested can watch the debrief on closed circuit tv and phone in questions if they want.
The fact that he came with a suicide vest tells me the CIA team had fallen down badly on compartmenting him in the past and that he was able to communicate this to his handlers on the other side and that he had every expectation of similar failures of compartmentalization continuing.
that BW didn’t frisk him is just stupid/sloppy. Your tax dollars at work.
Of course this all goes to show how really vital it is to subcontract out high security contracts to outsiders, who are always more competent than government employees, right?
OK, /s
Bob in AZ
Sure. I think your insight that BW/XE people might be there was excellent.
I was replying to comments like those at #1, #47, that BE were somehow more valuable targets, more out of control (or more deserving of opproprobrium) than CIA. And I somehow misread Earl of Huntington’s post at #12 – in my mind, he had said “the PR value of taking out a Blackwater/XE …” I had somehow missed or edited out the fact that he wrote CIA/BW/XE. So I put him in the “special scapegoating” category when he wasn’t, and tried to respond to a sentiment that actually had little presence here. Anyway.
This I could agree with “if” the Jordanian double agent had previously been to the Khost base/outpost.
The reports I’ve seen thusfar are not clear if he had ever previously been at the Khost base/outpost.
I heard Baer saying that it isn’t clear yet whether the guy was sent through a metal detector, which he should have been but possibly was not; however, it was equally unclear that that standard precaution (as opposed to frisking, etc) would have revealed anything.
It’s a bit of a tough situation, when you have a guy who already is only working for you bc of “coercion” (likely involving his family) and you add treating him like dirt onto the pile. So what do you do – you want intel and sources and you also want to recruit, but bc of things you are doing (like supporting corrupt govs, bombing civilians, taking druglord sides, occupying Muslim lands with armies who hate the Muslims in those lands, etc.) you don’t necessarily get droves of informants, flocking to your door.
You’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t in the care and handling of the informants you do get.
As Sara has done above, Baer made the point about how many people were involved in the meeting (he indicated it should have been 2 max – the Jordanian handler and his US counterpart). Also, he made a point on language that I hadn’t heard made so starkly before. He indicated that CIA had NO Pashtun speakers, and had to rely on translators who were using Dari which was way less than ideal. After all this time – no Pashtun speakers? I wondered if he had that right.
“Also, he made a point on language that I hadn’t heard made so starkly before. He indicated that CIA had NO Pashtun speakers, and had to rely on translators who were using Dari which was way less than ideal. After all this time – no Pashtun speakers? I wondered if he had that right.”
Yes, but Balawi was from Jordan, thus an Arabic speaker. Just found a piece in a google of Pakistani News to the effect that his wife and children live in Turkey, his wife being born there. She denied he had any relationship with Jordanian Intelligence, certainly none with CIA, and that he had left her about a year ago, claiming he was going abroad to study surgery, and planned to return to Turkey to establish a surgical speciality clinic. She said she had not heard from him for a year. Sounds like a really close marriage!!
If true, this is absolutely stunning. It’s certainly not new; when it was the Russians trying to run Kabul, our embassy in Kabul had NO ONE who spoke Russian. How dumb-ass can you get?
But I’m skeptical. The Bushie’s Afghan expert, Zalmay Kalilzad, spoke Pashtun. One would think he would have helped the CIA recruit some Pashtun speakers. Hamid Karzai, who used to be an American citizen, speaks Pashtun. One might think he would help them recruit a few assets.
I suppose the CIA is relying on Pashtun-speaking Blackwater subcontractors.
Again, if this is true, I am incredulous. Inexcusably dumb-ass. Beyond absurd. Absolutely incompetent. We can’t blame Cheney anymore; we have Richard Holbrooke on the job in that area, and he’s no dummy. Who has the Afghan desk in the CIA?
Bob in AZ
I just had a chilling thought, recalling a child who spoke English; her parents did not. One of her teachers commented wryly about how cheerfully the parents smiled at the parent-teacher-child conference: the teacher attempted to convey to the parents that the child was not doing well in school, was not meeting expectations, and was occasionally disruptive. The parents smiled cheerfully, apparently under the impression that their daughter was a budding genius.
The daughter was the interpreter between the parents and the teacher.
We can all safely assume the translations were… revised between the teacher and the parents.
Now, if you spoke Pashtun and genuinely wanted the US to do well, you’d bust your ass to ensure that there were multiple Pashtun speakers — and damn good ones, familiar with the history, clan relationships, foods, holidays, calendars, etc, etc, etc.
If one wanted to retain control and power, it would be simplest to ensure that one was a very good translator.
And even better to be one of very few — in fact, one of only a handful — of translators.
Just a thought…
As I understood what he said, even the translators the CIA was using didn’t speak Pashtun – they communicated with the Pashtun speakers using Dari. It really startled me – I was doing other things with the radio on in the background and might have not caught the context, but it caught my attention.
This is not surprising. Most Americans refuse to learn a foreign language. When NSA was recording conversations between people speaking Arabic, they didn’t have anyone who could interpret what the speakers were saying. Sibel Edmonds, who was born in Iran and lived in Turkey for many years, is fluent in Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi. She and another woman who was born and raised in Turkey were the only people the FBI could find in the US who could translate the conversations into English. Edmonds subsequently realized the other woman was deliberately mistranslating conversations in Turkish in a manner that concealed conversations about bribes paid by the Turkish government to representatives and senators in Congress.
The rest as they say is history.
With the exception of Spanish, it’s a bloody miracle our government has any idea what people are saying when they speak a foreign language, particularly Pashtu.
This is not really true. Both Defense and State have language schools. I know the former ambassador to Indonesia, who went through several months of training in Malay before going there. We do some training, we have people. We don’t do enough.
But the problem is deeper, not amenable to simple solutions and simple scorn that no one has solved it. As a culture, we’re not curious enough, so we don’t have enough people routinely learning other languages as 12-year olds. Virtually every high school in the country when I was growing up offered 1-4 languages, in order – French, Spanish, German, Latin. If you only offered two, it was the first two. There was no variation from this. The languages have changed a bit — mandarin Chinese is more likely to be offered that Latin today.
(I just checked a decent local high school web page – Naperville North – and found they’ve actually kept Latin — they offer the traditional 4, plus Chinese.)
But there is no, say, pocket of schools who teach Hindi (which would nearly solve the problem, since my understanding is that Hindi and Pashto are close enough that you can often understand, and certainly learn very quickly.) There is no city that has followed up on a sister-city arrangement by putting Farsi in the curriculum, an important world language, and also filled with Dari cognates, so that a student schooled in Farsi would have much less trouble picking up Dari. Likewise with Turkish. Where is the urban high school that has decided to take advantage of its population from the Phillipines to offer Tagalog instruction? Or Swahili? (There are a handful of places that offer Swahili, actually, because of the outgrowth of old Black Nationalist pushes.)
It’s crazy to me.
I was a Foreign Service brat and I learned Spanish at the same time I learned English. I can travel anywhere in the Spanish speaking world and not be recognized as a US citizen. I think of Europe and how common it is for people to speak many languages fluently and wish we were like that.
There is now enough neurological evidence to show that language acquisition is most easily achieved prior to adolescence, at which time many changes occur in the brain.
Back in the late 1990s, with the increased use of PET scans and growing use of MRI’s, it had been discovered that people who learn multiple languages in childhood literally ‘store’ that info in different parts of the brain than do people who learn a ‘second language’. In early learners, the words are stored in the same region of the brain; after adolescence, they are stored in different regions and connections have to be made between the two that are — if you go down to the micro-level inside a neuron cell — more metabolically ‘costly’ because the information requires more metabolic energy to link and access.
A simpler (but not 100%) analogy:
Storing all your ‘economics books’ together on one shelf of a library, both the English and German versions, means they are located in one spot. you can select either an English or German version.
Locating them by: German books in Section A, English books in Section B means that you have to walk between the two areas to get the identical info in the two languages.
I recall having a bit of a squabble early in Obama’s presidency with a *very* conservative friend; she was peeved beyond belief that Obama had said that his educational reform policies involved ‘more language learning’. She views that as incredibly wasteful, has no idea why any kid in Oregon, Idaho, or Wyoming needs to learn Japanese, or Hindu, or … you get the picture. In her mind, this is just one more example of Obama’s ‘wastefulness’ and ‘big government’.
I icily (but frankly) pointed out to her that with respect to my interactions with people involved in education, engineering, software development, and medical research, at the highest levels of achievement I’d been struck by the number of individuals who are multilingual.
This was complete news to her.
It never dawned on her that if you want to sell to Japan, it might be good to have at least a passing familiarity with Japanese.
She’s 800% pro-military, and despised Bush for never getting OBL.
The idea that maybe military, as well as business, might require good language skills was complete and total news to her.
So expect the Tea Party contingent to throw a hissy-fit if they hear that Obama is trying to fund language studies. OMG!!
The description is pretty accurate as I can switch from English to Spanish and back in mid thought or sentence almost like they are one big language rather than dos separados.
Many thoughts and expressions don’t translate very well. Translating colloquial American English comic expressions into French is just short of impossible, for example.
There is no down side to knowing more than one language.
Que lastima.
Sorry, but I can’t work my keyboard for accents, etc.
And FYI re: Tagalog and schools:
Seattle Schools Tagalog forms for parents.
Just to show you what one single school district (Seattle) tries to do in terms of public outreach to parents whose native language is not English, in an effort to build the kinds of school-home linkages and relationships that have been shown to directly improve and enhance student learning.
Note that the languages they are dealing with include: Amharic, Somali, Vietnamese, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, and English (translators work with parents to develop these goals, IIRC).
And an outreach form in Tagalog, to parents.
Looks like Tagalog for “No Child Left Behind” is being translated as: “Walang Batang Maiiwan”
Why is the MSM saying “seven CIA officers” when at least two were not CIA, but Xe/Blackwater?
When we discuss the torture memos and whose asses are coverd, we are careful to point out the differences between military, CIA and contractors, but now it seems that Xe=CIA.
To me Xe = mercenaries = enemy combatants = non-humans with no rights as defined by the USDOJ.
O/T
Yikes! Can this be true?
Bob in AZ
What an interesting place to find that tidbit. Wish we had a second source.
[edit: btw, the original full piece at this link. Consider the source.]
This stuff has been being yammered for well over a year now; wake me up when Big Bull Durham hands up an indictment of someone on or around the “Principal’s Committee” okay?
Take it with a real big grain of salt!
The “original” source for that bit of hyperbole is Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ on the “Journal Editorial Report” hosted by Paul Gigot on Faux News.
This is the transcript source.
You know, there is some possibility this is legit, even though it’s through a Murdoch mouthpiece. Could be somebody’s way of signaling “duck and cover.”
And EW broke $120,000!
that is a real crying shame let me tell you
some blackwater mercenary scum got their just desserts
boohoohoo i am really broken up over this let me assure you
and can we all cut out calling the blackwater mercenary scum this xe crap or whatever the douchebags are hiding behind today ??? thanks
Ease up. The company’s legal name is Xe. I think we’re all grown up enough to know that BW => Xe.
We should be broken up about the fact that children are left without parents because of this mess, whether they were children of CIA or contractors. That is the real tragedy here. There are far too many children around the world who’ve lost parents as a result of poor foreign and economic policy; they represent the long reach into the future of these systemic failures.
There is no end of innocent children to feel broken up about. The children of 9/11 victims. The children of U.S. soldiers and agents. The children of both Israeli and Palestinian fighters. The children of KSM and Aafia Siddiqui. The children of those falsely targeted by US drones and Hellfire missiles. Hungry children, the children of the sick uninsured, of those who died in American deserts, fleeing poverty and joblessness. The children of all who believed that this world should be run in the name of justice, equality, and non-belligerence, but instead found out the world was run instead by exploiters, the greedy, the seekers after power, the vengeful and the ignorant.
oh gawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwd i knew, just knew, that somebody would have to bring up ‘oh the children don’t forget the children’.
gag me with a fork.
who cares ???
you sign up for $100,000 or $150,000 or whatever exorbitant total those dirty filthy mercenary scum rake in from the USA Taxpayers and that would be the risk that you take.
jeebus.
the children the children
that makes me puke.
when i served as an 11BPH with the 2/327/101 i made sure that i was not married, did not have any dependents so that i could go anywhere and do anything so i never had to worry about the children the children.
what about all of the Iraqi and Afghani and Pakistani children that the usa has left parentless ??? huh ???
and these blackwater douchebags are actively helping and abetting with that.
go cry me a river deep and wide enough for all of us to swim across while we all play the world’s saddest song on the world’s smallest violin.
the children the children
and one more thing.
if i were still active duty i would not be shooting at any taliban or al-q types or iraqis – i would be gunning for any mercenary that i could see in my sights.
they are dirty filthy scum and it will forever be a huge stain on the usa that it allowed these evil pos to ever do what they have done.
if i were in charge i would immediately shut down all blackwater facilities and immediately indict every single blackwater personnel and make their lives a living hell.
and don’t ever tell me to ease up again.
Note the point made at (86) — we pay our soldiers chickenshit, we provide them with crappy services a la KBR, and they are going to become mercenaries when they leave the service. They are not all of them scumbags. It’s like expecting people to turn down a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s paying four or five times more with better perks than a job flipping burgers at the local mom-and-pop restaurant. It’s economics in the absence of any other disincentives to make that move.
The problem with BW/Xe is its leader, who gave Cheney and the rest of the students of Iran Contra the vehicle they did not have during Reagan’s term in office. The problem has been our government, which ran black ops using Erik Prince as an asset. The problem is that our government has been taken over by these people and not purged to remove their corporatist-forever-war programs and policies, corrupting anything effective and constructive the remaining government may try to do.
The fix is not as easy or as simplistic as shooting mercenaries, which is about as legal as mercenaries shooting civilians without cause. And the underlying problem with the event in Khost has little to do with mercenaries and everything to do with the aforesaid policies.
Well, in this Dec 19, 2009 NPR interview on Fresh Air Jeremy Scahill informs Terri Gross that “Xe” has changed its name again: now it is “U. S. Training Center.”
Scahill prefers to continue to use the name “Blackwater” nevertheless.
If Blackwater CIA assets were part of the group killed in the suicide bombing are they too given anonymous fallen stars on the CIA memorial wall? If yes, I wonder how morale will hold up at the CIA? Or is Blackwater now unofficial cover for CIA officers these days?
That CIA agents and operatives (Xe) would be in such close proximity of each other, in a war zone, hot spot, all dealing with cajoled a double agent reeks of piss poor common sense not to mention trade craft. That said, I wouldn’t have the cajones to do what our agents do.
One is compelled to wonder (speculate idly) whether the dead woman described lately as a mother of three and expert on Osama bin Laden who’d been in on the hunt for him since before 9/11, etc., might be the same person as the red-headed woman who was so gung ho for discarding all the trappings of civilization in hunting terrorists while working in Langley and then becoming one of Bushie’s favorite briefers on terrism, too.
Kinda reminds me of Bushie’s initial name for operations in Afghanistan: “Infinite Justice” or something like that, the name they dropped when someone told them it was blsasphemous and likely to make the going even tougher.
Again, idle speculation and curiosity on this point. But, since CIA is such a small community and the counter-terra part of it a subset within that small community, I suppose it can’t hurt to ask. And, if tese two were the same person, if she didn’t bother to change her hair color before going into the field, well … that speaks to bad tradecraft and arrogance.
When will the powers that be realize that American military association with mercenaries like Blackwater is dangerous to the well-being of volunteer GIs. Mercenary criminal actions excused by our government place a bounty on the heads of common soldiers, confirm “just” immorality in the fog of war and project the idea of war as macho “fun”.
Mercenary businesses are one more abuse of capitalism. How quickly the American public accepted the idea of mercenaries! My father’s WWII generation is dishonored.
Palli,
According to the Virginian-Pilot article linked above, one of the two XE people had only left the Navy 4 months ago. Seriously, what’s the difference? Blackwater/XE is just military people in different clothes.
and minus the Congressional oversight (not that “oversight” is fashionable these days)
Yes, there is a small difference because while there is no draft there is high unemployment- at least it is a job and 3 square meals. The military service is sold to people at a vulnerable age as a way to see the world, get money for college, learn self-discipline and/or a productive skill and gain the respect of peers and elders. It appears that the GI ranks are now the farm team for the mercenary legions without court marshalls. I hardly think the mercenaries give a damn, or know a damn, about world peace and justice. (Four years into the Iraq war I met a mercenary who got his money and quit, my skin crawls remembering. Society is no better for his work and much less safe here at home.)
But don’t interpret my comments as anything but despair for the fools who fall for military advertising.
When I hear a president laud the Peace Corps and NGO volunteers with the same respect they give soldiers, I’ll be more comfortable. I laud the commitment of a Rachel Corey not the didactic training and group madness of a soldier under fire.
Rayne said all this better at #90. But military training for GIs is not what it could should be…but then is high school education?
Scahill in the same interview:
Accepting your idea that a key difference is lesser oversight, I’m not sure how Congress would have ensured that newly minted BW employee Wise would search the informant on the way into Chapman; or why you think he’d have done so 4 months ago, when he was a Navy Seal. Seriously, you’re alleging that the tight relationship with BW somehow caused the incident. Others have made the same claim here. Why do you believe so? I can’t see the point.
Privatization does not result in any “better” security. So why waste time or the reduced government oversight or the intel risks as such companies end up representing multiple nations, including non-allies?
Obviously, BW does not reduce security risk. So why even have them?
The problem with military subcontractors is not only the lack of oversight, and the muddy legal situation. There is also likely a problem with command-and-control. Furthermore, there are major problems when one subcontractor has a virtual monopoly in certain kinds of situations.
To my mind, this whole situation requires a Congressional investigation. There are major national security issues involved.
Bob in AZ
Those are all good points.
I don’t think they relate very well to this particular situation, over which several posters have been bashing BW. But you’re right to call for a congressional investigation, and I’d like to see American and host country laws applied to contractors by the same standards that they apply to military and other gov’t employees. And I think the divided chain of command issue is real, as I see myself when watching contractors in my very different line of work.
On the other hand, I can well imagine you lose a lot of talent and experience if you tell Special Forces – you guys are great, and you’ll be making $37K/yr. for the rest of your sorry risky lives. Perhaps there’s a way to deal with these issues inside the military. In general, I don’t believe outsourcing is always a bad thing, but the devil is in the details. And neither our government nor our voting public is very devoted to sorting through details. This is another discussion, though.
There are a number of issues here.
1. Pay scale. The military needs to adjust its pay scales to make high-skilled and high risk positions compensated appropriately. At the present time, high-skilled and high-risk positions are grossly underpaid, making them easy pickings for subcontractors.
2. Contractual obligations. Present contracting, apparently, is extremely lax. The DOD is not overseeing its own contracts effectively, and is apparently a lousy contract manager. Can you imagine someone at Ford letting out subcontracts with such sloppy oversight and results management?
3. Legal issues. Congress has to get a grip on this, as does the DOJ. In fact, I suspect that the DOJ needs a whole new department just for military contracting. IIRC, the Bushies went whole hog with military subcontracting to AVOID legal oversight.
Bob in AZ
It’s not just the DOJ, although the DOJ has problems.
It’s the State Department, which to the best of my knowledge was the first entity involved in the follow-up after Nisour Square and which offered immunity in exchange for a statement from the alleged shooters. Until that problem is fixed — the SOP should be to detain contractors until an investigation has been completed, with no offers of immunity — there will be more episodes like the ruling last week.
I’ve already asked Sen. Levin to look into the problem of immunity offers. It might be nice if a few other people also sent letters to Levin as Senate Armed Services Committee Chair and to the reciprocal chair in the House. Ditto the chairs for the Intelligence Committees in both houses.
Correct. Not that I have any love for DOJ, or they have earned any respect, but this case was well and truly buggered by State when it got to the traditional prosecution arm of DOJ. The only question is what role DOJ had in advising State early on when they took the actions that had what can only be considered the intentional effect of screwing the pooch.
How much consultation could happen inside 30 minutes or less?
Because that’s the time window as I understand it, from the time the last bullet was fired to the DOS taking action.
Was either pre-planned response — in which case advance consultation in case of a situation would make some sense — or it was utter incompetence/stupidity on the part of DOS.
And as I further understand it, the point of contact in DOS is still with DOS but has been elevated to another role.
I would bet this was not the first time State pulled this move; but it is speculation on my part. This is a situation that simply had to have been foreseen as a distinct possibility, if not a certainty, of occurring and would likely have been gameplanned out.
Hmmm… why does the name ‘Alice Fisher’ come to mind….?
But IIRC, Liz Cheney was at that time overseeing the Dept of State Near East section.
No way were any contractors going to get the full weight of the law; somehow, someone within DoJ was sure to learn that something had to be ‘fixed’ so that any Dept of State subcontractors would be trouble-free, surely…?
HuffPo says that Scarborough says that there is a video tape of the explosion. If so maybe that will answer a lot of questions like was it a vest or underwear or shawl or backpack, and how was it detonated (remotely or self-triggered).
The Joe Scarborough discussion this morning said that the tape shows three guards approaching the bomber immediately after he exited a vehicle with his hand in his pockets. Three security guards approached while insisting he show his hands, and then he detonated killing all three guards.
Reports are that two BW mercenaries were killed and speculation has been that maybe BW was just providing security guards for the base, so who was this third guard?
My guess is that the three guards were not BW, or else we’d be hearing three BW were killed.
Here’s a non-western media take on Khost…
Whole lotta chest-thumpin’ in that article – more than would be sensible for someone not bullshitting their audience. Where and how much bullshitting – good question.
Good bullshit has many fathers; all of them illegitimate.
What’s the maximum effective range of BS…? Zero meters, Drill Sarge…! ;-)
Oof, there’s even video of it…!
Pat Lang did mention first… ‘Never trust a spy’…
Major ‘Fail’…
Completely O/T, but this is the first place I thought to share this:
The NY Times currently has a classic headline:
Young Pianist Thrust into Elite Group:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/arts/music/07gilmore.html?hp
Reminds me of the guy in the bar making wishes of a hard-of-hearing genie, who wound up with a 12-inch pianist.
It’s not quite the Sun-Times after the resignation of the Air Force rep to the Joint Chiefs of Staff some years ago — “Air Head Fired!” I’m a little surprised this headline passed muster. I wonder how long they’ll, umm, keep it up.
Took me 5 minutes to understand wtf you were talking about, because I’ve always pronounced it PYAN-ist rather than PEE-an-ist.
One of Blackwater/Xe’s subsidiaries is TIS-Total Intelligence Solutions. It contains many former CIA ,including Cofer Black and Robert Richer-although he recently left the company.
Cofer Black and Richer’s history and ties to Jordan are well documented.
Here’s some info:
re: Total Intelligence Solution’s Robert Richer:
“Take the case of Jordan. For years,Robert Richer worked closely with King Abdullah, as his CIA liaison. As journalist Ken Silverstein reported, “The CIA has lavishly subsidized Jordan’s intelligence service, and has sent millions of dollars in recent years for intelligence training. After Richer retired, sources say, he helped Blackwater land a lucrative deal with the Jordanian government to provide the same sort of training offered by the CIA. Millions of dollars that the CIA ‘invested’ in Jordan walked out the door with Richer – if this were a movie, it would be a cross between Jerry Maguire and Syriana.
In a 2007 interview on the cable business network CNBC, Cofer Black was brought on as an analyst to discuss “investing in Jordan.” At no point in the interview was Black identified as working for the Jordanian government. Total Intelligence was described as “a corporate consulting firm that includes investment strategy,” while “Ambassador Black” was introduced as “a 28-year veteran of the CIA,” the “top counterterror guy,” and “a key planner for the breathtakingly rapid victory of American forces that toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
Excerpt, Scahill, ‘We Need to Appoint a Special Prosecutor”,
Need a Special Prosecutor for Blackwater and Other CIA …Aug 31, 2009 … Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a special prosecutor just to …. The Progressive Mind » We Need a Special Prosecutor for …
original.antiwar.com/…/we-need-a-special-prosecutor-for-blackwater/ – Cached
Just in, via Scahill on Twitter, an AFP story:
Late to the thread, but while there is not a lot of real info available yet, you get the feeling that Obama may have been putting the same kind of pressure on CIA that Bush did – produce, get me a head on a stick, make me a winner – and the CIA seems vulnerable to being pushed into bad actions (like running torture prisons and arranging to torture guys who visit spoof sites, stray Canadians, and guys with “el” in their name) when the pressure is on to make the President look good.
Obama’s been wanting something to prove he made the right decision in Afghanistan (btw, why the hell do we keep getting told that Iraq has been a big ol success and that’s what we are shooting for in Afghanistan -an succcess *like* Iraq).
It sounds as if possibly, with kind of pressure the Jordanian handler and US was putting on for info on Zawahiri (interesting how he keeps being mentioned more than Bin Laden as the main guy they wanted al-Balawi to dish on)and more and more scrutiny and protests stemming from drones that were hitting civilians, al-Balawi wasn’t going to be able to play games for an extended period of time, so the decision to try to operate as a suicide bomber at a strategic meeting may have been in the works from the beginning of his AQ contacts after the Jordanian coercion.
I remember hearing awhile ago – maybe on an NPR report – about comments ostensibly from an AQ spokesmen to the effect of, “you have your drones, but we have our suicide bombers” There is a hell of a lot of messaging going on by finding someone willing to be a suicide bomber in a meeting with the drone bombers.
Rayne – I think it’s all a shocking loss for the CIA and for the family members, but it comes across very offkey to say that bc of the American orphans no one should say anything negative about the mission; while the fact that Muslim children are routinely killed, maimed and orphaned by the “mission” doesn’t rate any equivalent response.
Yet more evidence that OBL is dead and our government knows it. Recall, for example, that BO never mentioned OBL during his West Point speech.
Mary (104) — I understand your point, but being the stepmother of a vet, I happen to understand the pressures which drive some former military to pursue careers in PMCs/PSCs. They aren’t all scum, nor is calling for violence against mercenaries as a solution acceptable.
Your (106) — believe that CTuttle at (80) has a link to video. It may clarify the point about metal detector usage.
In re: translators — there was a recent change in the advanced training program related to training of interpretors; believe that Pashto and Dari were among the language sets affected by what looked to be an expanded program. DOD appears to be responding to the shortage, not certain if CIA or DOS is.
Several articles that I read this morning about “al Balawi” today stated that he had been promoting jihad online.
A couple of interesting articles about al balawi
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126264256099215443.html#mod=todays_us_page_one
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/How-Did-the-Double-Agent-Bomber-Fool-the-CIA-2080
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6977047.ece
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”.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/01/20101653827519489.html
ot
This guy is truly whack shit
He makes so many false claims about Iran. No challenges from the Cspan host. No challenges
Ew I keep hearing the number 30 dead so often it is truly eerie
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/01/06/WJE/A/28045/Kenneth+Timmerman+Foundation+for+Democracy+in+Iran+Executive+Director.aspx
Are you referring to this?
Timmerman mentioned 30 dead in some incident amongst his lies and then another report I heard this morning mentioned another 30 people killed in another bombing.
I believe Ew and this Raw story mention this “30” something phenomena
Anyone want to bet Cheney isn’t de facto the man calling the shots on US foreign policy?
Hope this isn’t a dupe.
AP: Blackwater settles series of civil lawsuits
Link.
German parliament to investigate alleged CIA murderplot
Link.
If it is confirmed that al-Balawi was in fact a triple agent, this raises questions about the CIA’s ability to infiltrate Al Qaeda, and turn former member into assets. The Washington Post quoted two former US government officials as saying that al-Balawi lured the CIA agents to meet him, claiming to possess new information about the Al Qaeda leadership. The two sources also claimed that al-Balawi was allowed to enter the US base without being searched due to his credibility with US and Jordanian intelligence.
Jordanian authorities have denied that al-Balawi was a double or triple agent, saying that he was an occasional asset of Jordanian intelligence with no formal role as an intelligence officer.
A former US counter-terrorist agent also told the Washington Post that al-Balawi “was someone who had already worked with us” and that he was jointly managed by the US and Jordanian intelligence agencies, and had provided them with “actionable intelligence.”
Another of al-Balawi’s brothers who works as an engineer in Dubai and who preferred not to disclose his name, told the AFP news agency that his brother Humam was “very angry” at the Israeli military operations conducted against the Gaza Strip. He said “The Israeli military operation in Gaza affected Humam and he wanted to join doctors of the Jordan Medical Association as a volunteer and go to Gaza.”
Silobreaker
Published 41 mins ago by Asharq Al-Awsat
@122
Asharq Al-Awsat Visits Home of CIA Triple Agent
Amman, Asharq Al-Awsat-The Jordanian authorities have imposed a security cordon around the family home of Humam Khalil al-Balawi, the alleged triple agent who killed seven CIA officers in a suicide attack at a US base in Afghanistan. This residence is located in the residential…
READ FULL ARTICLE
Please redo the link because it isn’t working.
Asharq Al-Awsat Visits Home of CIA Triple Agent – 57 minutes ago
By Mohamed Al-Du’ma Amman, Asharq Al-Awsat-The Jordanian authorities have imposed a security cordon around the family home of Humam Khalil al-Balawi, …
Asharq Alawsat – 1099 related articles »
NOTE: This is a very interesting piece, with some info I had not read elsewhere.
Suicide bomb kills 8 in eastern AfghanistanAFP
January 7, 2010, 11:08 pm
KABUL (AFP) – A suicide bomber killed eight people and wounded 24 others in an eastern Afghan town on Thursday, an official said, hours after a provincial governor survived a blast in a nearby Taliban hotspot.
A bomber on foot detonated his explosives-filled jacket in front of a branch of the Kabul Bank in downtown Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, at 4:30pm (1200 GMT), said Rohullah Samon, a spokesman for the Paktia governor.
“This was a suicide attack. So far we know that eight people are dead, but that figure could change,” he said, adding that the target appeared to be a private security convoy passing at the time.
“The head of a security company… was moving with his convoy (of vehicles) when he was attacked by a suicide bomber wearing a suicide vest,” Samon said.
The dead included the security company manager, two of his guards, a butcher, two young girls and two other civilians.
“All were killed on the spot… 24 other civilians were wounded,” he added.
The militant group claimed responsibility for the Gardez attack, and also an incident earlier Thursday when a bomb planted in a rubbish bin wounded the acting governor of eastern Khost province and six other officials.
“The explosives were placed in a dustbin behind the compound wall outside the governor’s house,” the interior ministry said in a statement.
Shards of glass injured seven people including acting governor Tahir Khan Sabari, the statement added.
A purported Taliban spokesman, calling himself Zabuhulla Mujahid and speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location, told AFP the militants were responsible for both the Gardez and Khost attacks.
“We detonated the bomb that hit the meeting hall of the governor’s house in Khost,” he said, later adding about Gardez: “We killed four people and wounded three, including the head of the security company.”
Khost is on Afghanistan’s southeastern border with Pakistan and sees a high rate of Taliban activity.
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‘Yemen to let US set up air base on its soil’ | Rebel News …Jan 7, 2010 … Yemen’s government is to allow the US to set up a military base on its territory, a political analyst says. The US can no longer rely on …
http://www.rebelnews.org/…/161454-yemen-to-let-us-set-up-air-base-on-its-soil – 10 hours ago
This isn’t from the radio interview I heard parts of, but it does have the same info on Pashto (sorry for my spell-fail above) speakers, along with other info:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8444345.stm
emph added.
Related – The US war in Afghanistan kills three children a day.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g-ao0otxrmV-E3rPJ8_3y7COdOxA
The good news is that we only directly kill about 40% or so of them. The rest are mainly killed by the Taliban in things like suicide bombings that are done by … guys who want us to stop occupying Afghanistan.
However, I have heard that our military forces train their own guys to speak local languages, IIRC. As the article states, there is an over-reliance in the CIA on techint over humint. My guess is that they have gotten used to outsourcing “specialty” skills like languages, which represents a serious security problem. Military Special Ops apparently does things differently.
Bob in AZ
I doubt we still have no Pashto speakers. For one thing, I know several myself. I don’t if this is real, but I’m amused enough to post it:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/gov/1492172465.html
A craigslist ad for Pashto/Dari speakers to make $200-250,000 for working for the US in Afghanistan. “must be a us citizen”. (Posting now expired, but the text was available on google.)
I’m much more concerned about Leen’s links to article about Balawi. How could a hard-bitten, cynical, worldly CIA agent EVER trust a guy who widely proclaimed on internet forums his aspiration to die as a suicide bomber? And clearly they knew about this. I think they don’t understand the ranges of human nature.
Perhaps they are such hedonists themselves that they don’t understand people who motivated by non-material goals. Thus, they can imagine that torture leads quickly to a captive blurting out the truth, rather than to a new spew of lies. Thus, threats to someone’s family will somehow permanently turn a Jihadi into a double-agent. Perhpas our people understand ‘family’, but not other non-material ties. More likely, they’ve read somewhere that ‘in pre-modern cultures, family is all-important’, and they treat this the way a high-functioning autistic person treats social rules — they can’t integrate it into a coherent view of other people, so they treat it as an algorithm – “Muslims will act the way you want them to if you can hold their family against them.”
Someone in the turcopolier comments was asking whether the best and brightest had all been purged by the Bushites and replaced with Monica Goodling-type hires. I’m not a great believer in “the best and the brightest”, but I’m very concerned that we’ve now got a bunch of Monica Goodlings all over our intelligence bureaucracies.
By “we” Baer is speaking more specifically about CIA in the field in Afghanistan. Not translators at NSA or working for the military etc. He may not be right, but he’s quoated by the BBC saying it in the link and I remember hearing this in the NPR interview yesterday as well. Are the Pashto speakers you know going to be able to pass a CIA security clearance? I would bet that’s a different hurdle than most of the slots for Pashto speakers for NGOs and diplomatic and military positions.
I don’t know anything about the languages, but Baer did also mention that we opt in for Dari speakers as our default, but that there were significant defects in using Dari speakers to translate for English speakers what a Pashto speaker trying to use Dari is saying.
On how and why to trust Balawi, I’m guessing we won’t ever get the real story bc I’m guessing it involves Jordanian assurances they were going to do very horrible things to his family (as you also seem to think). YOu can see a quickie cultural dip saying “threaten their family” and you’ll get cooperation. That’s not likely to ever be admitted – that the US was knowingly relying on direct violations of CAT (which prohibit threats to family) to get its “intel.” The fruits of “enhanced interrogation” techniques. What they were looking for with Abu Omar b4 the Italian prosecutor got invovled – let the Egyptians torture him into “turning.”
Re: the Goodlings, in general I think you have to look to what the leadership will attract. We’ve had 8 years of Bush being the magnet. Now its Obama, but with an entrenched decade of Bushcos, partly in the agencies and more so in the outsource community and sitting in all kinds of think tank, political appointment and advisory positions.
And what Obama leadership has done is probably best reflected by Panetta become a torture cover up apologist, Brennan regaining old power and surpassing it, and someone like Matthew Hoh walking away.
“I don’t know anything about the languages, but Baer did also mention that we opt in for Dari speakers as our default, but that there were significant defects in using Dari speakers to translate for English speakers what a Pashto speaker trying to use Dari is saying.”
Dari is very close to Farsi, the language of Iran, and CIA as well as State had significant programs teaching Farsi over many years, with lots of opportunity with postings in Iran to use and improve language skills. In Afghanistan Dari is spoken in the north and the west. It is also something of a classical language, given the large Persian literary tradition that dates back centuries. When Afghanistan had a royal court, the court language was Dari, even though the Pashto language was received language of the King and family.
The American problem with language, in my mind, goes back to Congress. We did make a good and useful effort to vastly improve Foreign Language Skills through the National Defense Education Program, immediately after Sputnik in the 1950’s and during the Eisenhower Administration. Between aboug 1958 and the mid 70’s, Congress funded training of language instructors for both High Schools and Colleges — area studies programs at the College and University level, all in support of rough standards, one had to have 2 years of a foreign language from HS to get into College, and a BA/BS required a similar 2 years of language study in Colleges and Universities that accepted Federal Funds. Ditto with most Grad School programs. That all ended in the mid 70’s when the combination of Congress and the Nixon Administration reduced and then eliminated first the funding, and then the requirements. NDEA did not produce particularly fluent foreign language speakers, but it certainly did breech the psychological barrier to attempting to study a foreign language. The politics of zeroing out funding for NDEA are fascinating — essentially it was a collaboration between parts of the “left” who in the 70’s were committed in rhetorical terms to “relevant education,” and the technocratic budget cutters around Nixon who had great distain for the fact that many NDEA supported scholars studied the Humanities — Literature, History and Art, and stuff like that. NDEA was killed by a left/right collaboration.
Another great failure was the rules against exploiting Peace Corps experience and language training. To get the first Peace Corps bill passed, Kennedy had to agree to a 5 year freeze on former PCV’s being hired by agencies of the US Government (read State and CIA). For all I know that rule may still be in place. Point is, a returned PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) has 2 years of partial emersion in a foreign language and culture, and while they are probably not “fluent” they are well advanced, and could have been a universe from which to draw higher language skills. For instance, between 1962 and 1973 we sent seventy five PCV’s to the Pushto speaking parts of Afghanistan yearly — meaning we would have had a universe of 750 partially advanced Pushto speakers in 1973-74 from which to draw some for advanced training. But by law, a returned PCV could not be hired until they had been returned for 5 years. Not a very good skills/personnel approach.
That large Persian (i.e., Farsi) literary tradition includes the national epic, the Shah Nameh, which occupies in Farsi literature something of the status of Shakespeare in English literature.
Farsi also has a stratified appearance in Iran: Cultivated Farsi is elegant, laced with literary allusions, and is spoken by educated, upper class Iranians. There is also colloquial Farsi, of which there are several local dialects, such as “Dezfulli,” to which I was exposed during my work in Iran, before their revolution. To illustrate the significance of this, one of our American archaeologists had become fluent in Dezfulli, and insisted on speaking it in his interactions with government officials in Tehran, where a more refined version of Farsi was spoken. It was as if a foreigner had learned fluent English in Appalachia, and then used this dialect of English in negotiating contracts in government offices in Washington, DC. I’m told the effect is something like fingernails on a blackboard. I was never fluent in Farsi, but I could “hear” the difference between the educated Farsi of Persian scholar Jeremy Clinton at Princeton, and the hillbilly Farsi of my archaeological colleague.
Bob in AZ
Sara,
Thanks for your excellent summary of history regarding foreign language training in the US. This is something Congress needs to take a new look at, and restore some of the old (and maybe some new) NDEA program funding.
Bob in AZ
I happen to know a gentleman (now elderly) who was once in a situation where ‘two kids in t-shirts’ were posing as employers wanting to interview prospective employees. At least, that was what the gentleman was told by an alarmed subordinate, who could not imagine that two youngsters ‘in t-shirts’ could possibly be looking for employees, let alone able to pay them.
The gentleman went out to the lobby area to check out the two in t-shirts; he happened to know a parent of one (Ken Allen, father of Paul Allen), and he knew that the other ‘kid’ had a parent who was a Regent of the University of Washington (Seattle; FWIW, Ken Allen happened to be the Director of UW Libraries, and Mary Gates was a Regent of that university).
After speaking with the two t-shirted younguns, the gentleman said that he had trouble conceiving of what kind of company they had in mind, as the only ‘computer company’ he really understood was IBM, but he’d no recollection of IBM talking about ‘writing software’. He recalls having a devil of a time trying to conceive of what ‘a computer/software’ company might be like, or what kind of employees would be best for such an endeavor.
After talking with the very young Paul Allen and Bill Gates, however, he recommended that they interview liberal arts majors: literature, comp lit**, romance languages, and history, history, history. Technical skills are relatively easy to pick up, but his recollection about talking with the young Allen and Gates is that what they needed were creative thinkers, and people who could bring an openness to solving novel, unexpected, unanticipated complex problems.
It’s reasonable to see that over the years, Allen and Gates hired some creative thinkers.
It seems to have turned out well enough…
Ditto Apple, Adobe, and other software enterprises.
Since the period that Sara mentions, when language learning budgets were cut, new discoveries about the neurology of learning and teaching second languages make a solid case for introducing ‘foreign’ languages starting in kindergarten.
Evidently, the Nixon-era 1970s decisions were made in complete ignorance of the neurobiology of language learning.
Here’s hoping that the topic will be revisited, and the discussion based on far better research and data.
Bobschacht’s rumination about whether the CIA has really simply turned into a ‘aggregator’ is worrisome.
Aggregation works for Arianna, but it’s not a good model for the CIA. Yikies…
Fascinating thread.
** EW will perhaps be interested to know this little detail.
Apologies – this thread, because it discusses the importance of learning languages, as well as the problems of organizations in recruiting ‘creative thinkers’, brought to mind the old story of two ‘kids in t-shirts’, because it’s a fun story.
But it also suggests that an organization’s ability to identify, recruit, promote, and manage creative thinking can come out of the most strange and unexpected places. Also, the gentleman didn’t understand very well what the young entrepreneurs meant by ‘computer languages’ [he thought their was only one: COBOL], which at that time were not widely taught, although Washington State University started a Computer Science program in the 1970s. (Paul Allen had attended, but then dropped out, of WSU.)
“Apologies – this thread, because it discusses the importance of learning languages, as well as the problems of organizations in recruiting ‘creative thinkers’, brought to mind the old story of two ‘kids in t-shirts’, because it’s a fun story.”
No apology needed the comment is on point.
” But it also suggests that an organization’s ability to identify, recruit, promote, and manage creative thinking can come out of the most strange and unexpected places.”
This is also a very important and on point statement.
The comparative advantage if one organization is marginally better than another can become large over time if this factor remains present.
The accumulated negative effects of poor recruiting ( and the converse retaining poorly performing employees) are frequently present/aggravating factors in the demise of failed companies.
From your comment at 149:
“Evidently, the Nixon-era 1970s decisions were made in complete ignorance of the neurobiology of language learning.”
Keep in mind two points: first-why this and other similar decisions were made by the Nixon administration: Divide and conquer political calculation for the most part, in some cases personal retribution and score settling.
Second- that many Bush era officials got their start in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove,just to start to name names.
The full realization of the effects of these policies is now upon us.
(Also your lead @ 134)
You are missing the point, which Mary reminded you @ 133: We are talking about the *CIA* here, not DOD or State.
Sounds to me like the CIA has become merely an intelligence “aggregator” rather than a true producer of Intel. Perhaps this was due to Rumsfeld’s determination to replace CIA with DIA, perhaps robbing the CIA of critical resources (including staff).
Bob in AZ
“Sounds to me like the CIA has become merely an intelligence “aggregator” rather than a true producer of Intel. Perhaps this was due to Rumsfeld’s determination to replace CIA with DIA, perhaps robbing the CIA of critical resources (including staff).”
For CIA the problem really is with recruitment. Back when the agency was small, perhaps the first ten years, they did have rules in place that required all new officers to study a language — or languages to a reasonable level of fluency. In the 50’s we still had communities of 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants who still retained some language from family and community that could be built upon — for instance Polish and Hungarian communities in places like Cleveland and Chicago. CIA could and did recruit from these communities. In large measure because of the chase for hidden foreign agents led by James Jesus Angelton, the CIA Counterintelligence Chief, the recruitment from immigrant communities was curtailed, and has never been restored.
Congress knows this is a problem, and virtually every appropriations bill notes languages as a “priority” but they have never strengthened the language so as to enforce it. If you have read Bob Baer’s autobiography, you will note CIA invested 3 years in training him in Arabic — which is how it needs to be done. Before he ever had a foreign station assignment, he spent a year at an Egyptian University, and two years in North Africa working undercover so as to enhance his Arabic Language Skills. That is the kind of investment that must be made — and Congress has to fund it, and demand it. In all too many cases, Congress has handed off the money for this priority, and then CIA officials have reprogramed it away from sophisticated language and cultural training efforts.
I screwed up – I was thinking of Urdu, not Pashto, as being fairly recognizable for Hindi speakers.
Pashto is another Persian language, like Dari. But in looking over vocabularies, it’s not nearly close enough to Dari for that to be of significant use in picking up Pashto.
If Dari and Farsi are like Spanish and Italian (often mutually comprehensible, and fairly easy to pick up one just by talking, if you already know the other well); then Pashto is like French — you can see the relationships, and some words are the same if you consider accent. But many are different enough, and the way the pronunciations have changed, you couldn’t get along in one by knowing the other without extensive training.
That seemed to be Baer’s point – that the CIA field operatives in Afghanistan don’t have Pashto speakers and are relying on Dari as their intermediary language – I think (don’t quote me) he said soemthing like, “and Dari is mostly incomprehensible to a Pashto speaker”
Doesn’t everybody speak Dari in Wisconsin?
(Sorry, couldn’t stop myself)
rotl, I’m very aware that many school districts have outreach to parents who speak foreign languages. This isn’t relevant to a discussion of what languages are taught. Nor is the existence of ESL programs in those districts. The issue isn’t whether we manage to accommodate immigrants as they mainstream into English, but whether we teach people to acquire another language. And whether we can get past the ancient list of spangerfrelatin and offer at least somewhere amonst our 100,000 high schools a range of languages so that we have at least some students fluent in most every lingua franca. I know what you’re talking about in reference to language acquisition at different ages. While younger is even better, at the high school level, you’re still able to acquire language pretty easily – that’s why migrants typically speak with the accent of whatever group they were with when they were teenagers. Realistically, we’re never going to see a Farsi program in a grade school. But it’s dumb to have the broad range of language offerings we have in colleges (you could learn in some American college pretty much any language spoken by more than 10,000 people) and not start some students by high school.
Where do you find fluent speakers? Where do you find people fluent enough, then teach them how to teach? Where do you allocate budgets? What do ESL instructors know about the complications of teaching language skills?
We overlook a lot of resources that we already possess.
I think that Sara has shed some light on why.
We fear people living in our own midst; ironically, they may be our saving grace where languages and cultural knowledge are concerned.
We fail to fully leverage the considerable resources that we have.
Of some interest perhaps…
The Department of Defense actually conducted one of the best “experiments” in language learning back in the 1980’s (Reagan Era) though of course they did not realize they were conducting an experiment.
Reagan vastly increased the number of American Military Personnel in Germany in the last years of the Cold War — moving perhaps fifty thousand more troops into German Bases along with their dependents without increasing the supply of housing or the appropriations for Base Schools. The upshot was that thousands of families had to “live on the Economy” which meant live in a German rental, and send kids to German village schools.
They arranged things so that kids who went to German Schools aged 7-15 also had a Saturday School at the base school for English, American History and the like — but otherwise the kids just went to school with the German Kids — in German, and guess what, the little 7 to 12 year olds became quite fluent in about 3 months. Full immersion actually worked very well. Those between 12 – 15 did less well. There was a follow-up test of the full immersion students about 5 years after they left Germany, and even though they had little chance to use the language, they retained a good deal of it.
Believe me, DoD never intended this experiment — they just didn’t appropriate the funds to expand the American Base Schools, a deliquency that created the experiment.
Sara – Bob (currently in AZ) and others – thanks for the whole range of the language discussion, from past policy issues to more specific discussions of who speaks what – where – why etc. in Afghanistan, Iran etc.
I know nada about languages, but have a sister who is fluent in several and teaches ESL and I’m a bit fascinated by it all. I remember asking Pat Lang a question in his comments a long time ago about the issue of spellings (from al-Qaeda to Al-Qaida and Quatani to Khatani etc.) and how someone like me could get it right when we have no language skills in those areas and he made some points about how hard it is to get it right even when you speak the languages, bc of issues relating to written translations and alphabets, etc.
That came back to mind when I read that the Underboom Bomber was assumed to not have a vis bc a search was done under a different spelling. Lawrence Wright also makes a point in his book about honorifics and the like and how we often assume an “alias” designation for things that are deemed ordinary in other parts of the world. Without some good understanding of all this, it seems like it would be “difficult” at best to work with any kind of a watchlist – add in one that puts Elf on a terroist par with al-Qaeda and one where entities like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood
and the Republican Partyhave both terroist and political party aspects and you really begin to understand, even in this day and age of computer enhanced info sorting, why throwing everything at the wall isn’t always going to be the best working approach.I know when I try to use “real” names (that I often can’t pronounce anyway – I am a Kentucky girl after all) to explain, say, a GITMO case, to someone not super immersed (other than to think that everyone at GITMO is a terrorist) I give up on names and say, “let’s just call him Fred” It’s odd to see how even that shift, (So Fred was visiting his parents in Pakistan …) makes a difference in how *the story* is followed.
Yes, I have vast sympathy for the poor clerk in State probably, who misspelled the name while doing the visa search. (or it might have been a misspelling in the cable from Nigeria — who knows). Spelling is not one of my strengths, though I agree that a system such as google’s fuzzy approach to searches would be a true asset in that program.
But I am also fascinated with languages — took two years of Latin in High School, not because I wanted to know Latin, but because I wanted to read Roman History. My real language study was in College when I was an exchange student in Denmark for a year, and learned enough Danish in 3 months of full immersion — one month living in a Danish Bakery with the owner’s family, and another month on a fairly large farm with the cows, geese, pigs, and fields of sugar beets — to attend a Socialist College sponsored by the Social Democratic Party and the Trade Unions, and study for 6 months in Danish. Then I went to Austria, and repeated the same process for 4 months in a UN Refugee camp, trying to learn some German.
This made me a strong proponent of full immersion language programs — if you get to the point that you can have reasonable conversations, you can always add on to that more formal study. Of course German and Danish do not present one with the problems of a different alphabet (except Danish has three extra vowels). The problem for Americans is the immersion business, you simply cannot easily hear other languages spoken without special efforts (short wave radio for instance) and it is difficult at times to find something of interest to even read. (had to special order weekly copies of Der Spiegel when the wall came down as I really wanted to read the details in German.) In the last week I have been reading daily all the stuff on the attempted murder of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish Cartoonist — all the lovely little side-bar stories about Denmark’s Somali Community, and how they are dealing with the matter. Of course the Internet solves many of these problems — radio Danmark is accessable, as are all the newspapers, as are TV programs. But before the Internet, one had to special order a newspaper two weeks in advance, meaning stories were weeks old when you got them. Books — well you had to go to Denmark to buy them. Not one firm in the US had arrangements to order. If you want to retain any language once you have suffered through learning it, you really do need something interesting to read.