RISKS MAY BE
GREATER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT
NYC – WE HAVE
SEEN THIS BEFORE
Hand written
note from alleged ISIL operative
in Chicago
TAGS:
ISIL THREATS, ISIL MEMBERS FROM WESTERN
COUNTRIES,
ISIL AS AN ARMY WITH TERRITORY,
ISIL
“TOO RADICAL” FOR al QAEDA, NYC SECURITY,
SYRIA,
IRAQ, ISIL TACTICS OF BARBARIANS
(Sunday August 24, 2014, NY,NY
) Earlier today retired Four Star
General and former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) told CNN that in his estimation a terrorist attack
on our homeland by the extremist group ISIL that now occupies a large swath of
land over Syria and Iraq “will come sooner rather than later.” He continued, "Isis is a very powerful
local organization and probably a reasonably powerful regional terrorist
organization but it's one that has global ambitions and it has the tools."
Considering even the most conservative estimates regarding how many members of
ISIL come from Western countries and have “Western passports that allow them to
travel back to their home country be it England or the United States”, there
may be upwards of 300 such members who are receiving the training and
experience to export the ISIL brand of terrorism to their country of
origin. That fact and that fact alone
should be sufficient motivation to reassess all domestic security
measures in our air and sea ports as well as in areas known to have “target
rich environments”, such as New York City.
Several recent events have illustrated areas of vulnerability in NYC
that clearly need to be addressed quickly.
As was the state of
effectiveness and efficiency prior to September 11, 2001, we cannot rely on the
federal and military intelligence apparatus to be up to their assigned
tasks. They have burnt us once before
and, as former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly had vowed in 2002, “that will never
be the case again.” While Bill Bratton
has since replaced Kelly, some inside the secretive world of the NYPD
Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Divisions, have expressed no small amount of
concern over the recent security breaches at the George
Washington and Brooklyn
Bridges as well as at the Freedom
Tower.
INTELLIGENCE FAILURES AT THE CIA
From the Russian aggression in
Crimea, to the increasingly violent quagmire in Afghanistan and the rapid rise
of the most savage terrorist entity in modern times, ISIL, it is the disturbing
fact that each of these events caught our CIA and virtually all of the other 20
or so other “intelligence” units throughout the military, Homeland Security and
National Security Agency apparatus once again flatfooted and asleep at the
wheel. At this time of escalating
threats to our national interests abroad as well as repeated direct messages
from ISIL vowing to bring death and destruction to our shores, it has become
all too obvious that the pre- 9/11/01 mentality has become endemic among those
responsible for our intelligence gathering and analysis. Crisis after crisis seems to have erupted out
of a geopolitical vacuum or from the ascendency of a “new” faction of Islamic
extremists, jihadists, or some off shoot mutant fundamentalist radicals that
have flourished in Syria and Iraq since the withdrawal of United States troops
in 2011. Blame Obama, blame Bush, blame
whoever you’d like but this is really not the time for the blame game and
second guessing. However the powder kegs
around the world were initially ignited; by whatever volatile winds of
extremist nihilism, xenophobia, religious and ethnic hatred are fanning the
raging flames across boarders in the Middle East and the South Asia
subcontinent, we find ourselves exactly where we are. Now the monumental task
of what to do – of weighing the efficacy of what we can and cannot do – against
the heavier danger of doing nothing, is the driving force. Now that the United States has been forced
from the torpor of “letting the chips fall where they may” policies after our
puppet regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq have spit in our faces year and after
year. This Administration will have their hands forced to some additional
action beyond bombing strikes, sending in “Military Advisors” (can anyone say
Vietnam in 1964) ostensibly to “train up” an inept and disloyal Iraqi military
and security force just as has been the failures in similar efforts in
Afghanistan.
TERROR AS A TACTIC
By their very nature
terrorists aim is to foment terror and fear in their enemies. Terror is the tactic, instilling fear the
objective. We have learned so much about
terror and asymmetrical warfare since the days after September 11, 2001 yet our
government, the Administration with all the many and varied tools at their disposal
from aggressive diplomacy, sanctions and military intervention still has the
awkward gait of a drunk stumbling from bar to bar on a binge. This Administration has lurched from hotspot
to localized flare ups, from drawing red lines and lines in the sand only to stand
motionlessly ambivalent as those ultimatums were trampled for the entire world
to see.
After three years of brutal
civil war in Syria, that shows no indications of ending anytime soon, President
Obama was presented with several opportunities to make good on his
threats. In each case, except for providing
some “overseers” when President Assad’s chemical weapons caches were destroyed,
America has done nothing, made no effort to assist those who should be our
natural allies, the rebels fighting the Assad regime. No, we are not and cannot be the world’s police
force and arms dealer however, there are circumstances to at least demonstrate
to our enemies and the wider world that our word still means something and that
we are always at the ready to back them up.
Ultimatums ignored without reciprocal action leave America looking weak
and, if there is one trait we most certainly do not possess, that is “weakness”. Our Military is the best fighting force ever
assembled, equipped, trained, and mobile than any other in history.
Now, after over 13 years of
continuous warfare in our roaming battle to eradicate and dismantle terrorist sects
where ever we locate them, we face an adversary who have mastered the tactic of
terror and savagely shown the world exactly what they are capable of and are
now directly engaging the United States in an evil propaganda campaign that has
finally caught the attention of President Obama and his Administration.
TOO BRUTAL FOR al QAEDA
In the years since al Qaeda
launched their wickedly planned and methodically executed attack on America of
9/11/01, it has been determined that there were likely no more than 30 members
of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted inner circle, including the 19 hijackers, who
had a role in the planning, plotting and financing of that operation or had any
prior knowledge about the bigger picture.
As is the case with most successful “underground” terrorist groups, the
watchword for the brand of tradecraft they practice is one of compartmentalization. By rigorous adherence to this principal, no
one person in the groups or terrorist cell knows anyone outside their small
cell and they certainly have little or no “actionable intelligence” or simple
information regarding the chain of command, operational structure, and ultimately,
the plot they are expected to carry out.
al Qaeda became masters of communicating via couriers who were just
links in a chain unaware of any other links besides perhaps the links they were
positioned between in a long serpentine chain that spanned from the Middle East
to the rugged Afghanistan – Pakistan border region. We witnessed what this
committed cadre of a few dozen well financed zealots where able to accomplish.
The unbridled savagery the
world is witnessing today at the hands of a group that has come to be known as Islamic
State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was spawned in Syria, has rampaged their
way through northern Iraq, seizing cities, towns, villages while practicing
some of the most widespread, unchecked barbarism the world has seen in modern
history. There has never been an
organization quite like ISIL. One
significant difference between ISIL and their one-time supporters, al Qaeda, is
that they constitute an army, and a very well equipped, organized army at that.
Several months ago al Qaeda officially severed their ties with ISIL stating that
they were too brutal for their tastes and that says quite a bit about ISIL’s
tactics, ideology, and objectives. They are determined to create
a modern day “Caliphate” in the Middle East. They also control some of the
most valuable of Iraq’s oil and natural gas infrastructure and by most
accounts, they are reaping approximately $1 million a day from the sales of
those precious resources.
While al Qaeda was rapidly
scattered after our Military routed the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan by
December 2001, ISIL
is by their own definition a nation-state.
They are not living in warrens of caves nor are they hiding their
actions and intentions from the world; quite the contrary. They are using social media to spread their
message and to evoke the level of fear throughout the Middle East and the
Western world that even at their heyday, al Qaeda was unable to. ISIL has conducted atrocities including
genocide against minority Christians sects in the north of Iraq, have raped,
pillaged, mass executed and buried alive those unfortunate enough to be in
their forward march towards Baghdad and into central Iraq. The gruesome videotaped execution of American
journalist, James Foley, who had been missing since Thanksgiving 2012, was
broadcast to the world along with a very direct
message to President Obama and Americans at large.
A WAR WITHIN
ISIL is composed of Sunni
Muslims, the denomination that had long been oppressed and often violently suppressed
by the Shi’ite Muslim dominated regime of Saddam Hussein. But ISIL is more than a Sunni insurgency having
risen to the de facto “government” in the vast areas under their iron-fisted
rule from Syria to Iraq. In their
assessment, the traditional border between those two countries no longer
exists; they view it as an embryonic Caliphate with their ambitions growing day
by day. In a cruel twist of fate,
virtually all of their military hardware and technology is American made and
had been provided to the regime that followed the fall of Hussein. The Iraqi “army” if one can even call it that
despite our having spent well over $750 million to “equip and train” them,
abandoned their posts leaving behind all their equipment as ISIL pushed towards
them.
The majority of those who ISIL
has killed have been other Muslims. Some
Middle East experts have noted that they (ISIL) are only “Sunni in name”; that
their barbaric savagery can in no way be justified in the Koran; not even in
its most extreme interpretations.
EXPORTING TERROR
Like every other terrorist from
Iraq to Yemen, from Somali to Afghanistan possessed of whatever radical extremist
affiliation or ideology, ISIL is determined to draw us into a direct fight with
them in the territory they control as well as perpetrate acts of terrorism here
in the United States. General Hayden’s
comments from this morning were particularly alarming given the amount of knowledge
and information he brings to the table as a commentator. After the beheading of
the American journalist James Foley late last week, someone in some way
associated with ISIL Tweeted two photographs of buildings in Chicago. One of
the tweets showed a hand written note in Arabic that was a warning to America
that they are “already here.” We have
also seen video clips of purported high ranking ISIL operatives claiming their
desire “To fight our troops, the same troops we humiliated before in Iraq” and
to “Raise the flag if ISIL on top of the White House.” These might appear of their face as ludicrous
attempts to evoke fear among us but, we cannot forget that several times
between 1997 and 2000 Osama bin Laden “declared war” on the United States
adding that he “will not differentiate between soldiers and civilians.” The intelligence community, except for one
man in the CIA, Michael Scheuer,
who had served as the Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station (aka "Alec
Station"), from 1996 to 1999, the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the
Counterterrorist Center, paid attention. For all the ensuing talk after 9/11/01
about “connecting the dots”, sharing information freely among agencies, and the
endemic failures that had run rampant throughout the federal government, is
becoming alarmingly evident that some lessons may not have been learned as well
as they should have been.
Let’s hope we don’t have to
once again find out the hard way.
Copyright The
Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved
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