Thursday, January 07, 2010

CIA catastrophe

It has been reported that a Jordanian doctor named Khalil al-Bardawi, also known as Khorasani, detonated himself as a suicide bomber at a meeting with CIA operatives in Camp Chapman in Khost in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border on Monday, killing 7 CIA agents and one Jordanian agent.
This is a very interesting as well as catastrophic event for several reasons. First, it shows the close association between he CIA and Jordanian intelligence. The Jordanian agent killed was Ali bin Zaid, said to be a cousin of King Abdullah of Jordan, who attended his funeral.
Second, it shows that the Jordanian was bringing a supposedly double agent to the CIA, a confessed al Qaeda operative and dedicated jihadist, who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets and who had been in Jordanian custody, to be debriefed by the CIA. He claimed to have information on the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin-Laden's second in command, who like al-Bardawi is a Jordanian doctor. The Jordanians had been instrumental in providing information that had allowed the tracking down and killing of al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, who was also a Jordanian, and they had been involved in "rendition" of US captives in Jordanian facilities. So presumably, the CIA trusted such a high placed Jordanian agent as bin Zaid.
But, how is it that so many CIA operatives were present for this debriefing, it must have been considered very important, Usually for security purposes only a few people are present at such debriefings, and to have 8 people there was exceptional. Not only does it show the potential importance of the information that al-Bardawi was going to give, but it also shows an elementary lack of security.
How was it possible that such a self-proclaimed jihadi extremist as al-Bardawi, who had on many occasions published tracts testifying to his commitment to killing Americans, could be so trusted that he was able to enter the highly secure Chapman base with a suicide bomb belt strapped to his waist? Was he subjected to no security check at all, any simple frisk should have detected this belt.
So this once again shows CIA stupidity in failing to use positive security testing in all cases. If you or I tried to enter this base, we would get nowhere, but how they allowed such an extremist in with a suicide bomb defies imagination. It is a far worse failure than what happened on NorthWest flight 253 on Christmas day, and seven US agents were killed including the head of the unit at the Chapman base.
In his meeting with his intelligence chiefs yesterday Pres. Obama discussed this incident, as well as the attempted plane sabotage, although in his short speech afterwards he did not mention it.
If there is a war on terror, which Obama does not acknowledge, then al Qaeda scored two big victories last week, they killed 7 CIA agents and caused the US to panic and spend huge amounts of dollars to try to achieve flight security. However, what is the point of closing the door after the horse has bolted. There will be no more shoe bombers, there will be no more panty-bombers, but there will be other kinds of bombers and the US is not prepared for that since they are busy fighting "last year's war."

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