by Wayne White
This weekend’s US capture of Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqai’I, better known by his alias, Anas al-Libi, might net only limited information of current intelligence value while potentially resulting in militant Islamist payback in what remains a very fragile Libya. Of no less than three al-Qaeda operatives bearing the alias [...]]]>
by Wayne White
This weekend’s US capture of Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqai’I, better known by his alias, Anas al-Libi, might net only limited information of current intelligence value while potentially resulting in militant Islamist payback in what remains a very fragile Libya. Of no less than three al-Qaeda operatives bearing the alias al-Libi (simply “the Libyan” in Arabic), Anas al-Libi could be the least significant overall. And should a Libyan militant Islamic group or militia decide to retaliate for this bold US grab, they are capable of doing significant harm.
Anas al-Libi’s former association with al-Qaeda is well-known, as are standing US indictments against him for actions related to the horrific 1998 East Africa bombing. Yet, relatively little seems to be known about how active he remained over the past few years. So the information he has might not be particularly useful if, for example, he was not knowledgeable about or involved in last year’s Benghazi consulate attack or other recent operations. US authorities apparently believe he has been working to expand al-Qaeda’s network in Libya (although perhaps not a certainty since he has been living in Tripoli without security).
By contrast, Abu Yahya al-Libi, killed by an American drone strike in northwest Pakistan in June 2012, stayed very close to both Osama Bin Laden and his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He remained a key ideological hardliner within the core al-Qaeda leadership as well, right up to the time of his death. Abu Abdullah al-Libi, the former commander of the extremist al-Qaeda linked Libyan Fighting Group, participated in the overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi. Since then he had moved on to Syria with some of his veteran Libyan fighters to join the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihad against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He quickly rose in stature within the al-Qaeda associated ISIL until he was one of its top commanders (some say its leader). Abu Abdullah al-Libi, however, reportedly was killed in fighting in northern Syria last month.
The operation to snatch Anas al-Libi has placed Libya’s weak central government in a difficult position. Although Prime Minister Ali Zeidan contacted Washington late on Oct. 6 asking for clarifications concerning the kidnapping, he stated today that Libyan-US relations would not be affected. Yet, he probably fears potential blowback because such unilateral US action is embarrassing (regardless of whether the US struck based on advance warning or an existing understanding regarding such security operations), and his government probably does not have much of an ability to prevent militant retaliatory action.
Vast areas of the country remain under the control of various militias (some of them extremist), tribes, or other local authorities such as those in charge of Libya’s third largest city, Misrata. Much of the government’s own security is provided by militias that did not stand down following Muammar Qadhafi’s ouster, and a variety of key assets (such as the country’s vital oil installations) currently are not under effective government control.
Some such militias allied to the government provide the only security available for high value targets like official buildings and embassies, but they have been of uneven reliability. Libyan security was unable to stop an angry mob from storming the Russian embassy compound in Tripoli on October 2 after a Russian woman killed a Libyan. No Russian embassy personnel were killed or injured, but the mob broke into the compound, one attacker was killed, and there was quite a bit of damage. Had a determined, well-armed extremist militia done so, the results would have been far worse. Citing fears that the Libyan government is unable to protect its staffers, Moscow ordered the embassy completely evacuated the next day.
A senior Libyan government security official who used to command an Islamist militia appeared supportive of the raid on Sunday, but said it reflected badly on the lack of such knowledge and power on the part of his own government. He warned there that would be a “strong reaction” by militant Islamists to “take revenge” for the al-Libi capture, and predicted contrary to American hopes: “This just won’t pass.” Meanwhile, various Libyan jihadists have taken to the Internet calling for the kidnapping of US and allied citizens as well as attacks on oil infrastructure, ships and aircraft.
Al-Qaeda figures like Anas al-Libi with blood on their hands should be targeted, regardless of whether they remain active, in order to remind other key operatives of their potential fate — no matter how much time passes. Yet, even in all-out conventional conflicts, actions from isolated attacks to major military campaigns are judged upon their plusses and minuses. It remains to be seen whether, on balance, scooping up al-Libi at this particular time in a friendly, but very shaky, Libya turns out to be a wise move.
Meanwhile, Washington must increase its vigilance and security substantially relating to the US mission in Tripoli in particular. The US probably should do likewise regarding its assets in Egypt. The lengthy Egyptian-Libyan border is highly porous, and Egypt’s ruling military still has not gotten a solid hold on the Egyptian security situation. Consequently, Egypt offers another fluid environment possibly of interest to Libyan extremists seeking payback.
]]>via USIP
On April 22, Canadian authorities arrested two men who allegedly planned to derail a U.S.-bound passenger train. Officials said al Qaeda elements in Iran gave “direction and guidance” to Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35. But police have not found evidence of Iranian state sponsorship. And Tehran [...]]]>
via USIP
On April 22, Canadian authorities arrested two men who allegedly planned to derail a U.S.-bound passenger train. Officials said al Qaeda elements in Iran gave “direction and guidance” to Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35. But police have not found evidence of Iranian state sponsorship. And Tehran has denied any connection to the plot.
What has been the relationship between Iran and al Qaeda?
Iran and al Qaeda have had a complex and rocky relationship for two decades. The Shiite theocracy and the Sunni terrorist organization are not natural allies. Al Qaeda’s hardline Salafi/Wahhabi interpretation of Islam believes that Shiites are heretics. In 2009, a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula proclaimed that Shiites, particularly Iranians, posed more of a danger to Sunnis than Jews or Christians. Iran has likewise been hostile toward al Qaeda and its former Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.
But countries and movements with seemingly inimical views can work together when circumstances warrant. The 9/11 Commission reported that Iran and al Qaeda contacts go back two decades, beginning when Osama bin Laden was based in Sudan. The report also noted “strong but indirect evidence” that al Qaeda played “some as yet unknown role” in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, by the Iran-supported Saudi Hezbollah. A number of the 9/11 hijackers traveled through Iran to Afghanistan, although there is no evidence that Tehran was aware of the plot.
Some of the best information available on the al Qaeda-Iran relationship was found during the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Documents “show that the relationship is not one of alliance, but of indirect and unpleasant negotiations over the release of detained jihadis and their families, including members of Bin Laden’s family,” according to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. “The detention of prominent al Qa`ida members seems to have sparked a campaign of threats, taking hostages and indirect negotiations between al-Qa`ida and Iran that have been drawn out for years and may still be ongoing.”
Iran and al Qaeda are clearly at odds in the Syrian civil war. Bashar Assad’s regime is Iran’s key Arab ally, and Tehran is expending considerable effort to prop up Damascus. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has joined the anti-Assad insurgency. Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, has urged fighters from around the region to join the battle against Assad. The Nusra Front, one of Syria’s strongest rebel groups, recently pledged its allegiance to al Qaeda.
Are there known al Qaeda elements in Iran? Where?
Hundreds of al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan fled west to Iran after the U.S.-led coalition intervention in October 2001, and many were detained by Iranian authorities in eastern Iran, near the Afghanistan and Pakistan border. Iran claims to have extradited more than 500 to their home countries in the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
Some high-profile detainees, including top al Qaeda strategist Saif al Adel and Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, were held with their families under house arrest in Iran, possibly as insurance against al Qaeda attacks on Iranian interests or for use as bargaining chips. Al Adel and Abu Ghaith were given greater freedom to travel in exchange for the 2010 release of an Iranian diplomat who had been held in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Abu Gaith was captured in Jordan by the United States in February 2013.
It’s unclear how close an eye Iranian security services are keeping on al Qaeda elements currently living in eastern Iran. The remote area along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is sparsely populated and home to the Baloch ― a Sunni ethnic group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against Pakistan and Iran. A 2011 U.S. Treasury Department report accused Tehran of having a secret deal with al Qaeda that allows the group to funnel funds and operatives through Iranian territory. But the report did not cite Iranian officials for complicity in terrorism.
Canadian police said there is no evidence of Iranian sponsorship so far. What is known about Iran’s role?
It would mark a shift in strategy if Iran was actively involved in the planning of al Qaeda attacks. Canadian officials have claimed that al Qaeda leaders in Iran gave the two men considerable independence in planning and carrying out the alleged plot. The Iranian government probably would not have allowed them that operational freedom. Based on the evidence released by Canada, Tehran was probably not involved in any significant way.
The costs would not have been worth the benefits to Iran either. Any proven Iranian role in a terrorist attack that derailed a passenger train would have further strengthened international opinion against Tehran. It is already isolated and faced with many layers of economic sanctions. The timing is also awkward. Iranian complicity could jeopardize negotiations over its controversial nuclear program with the United States and five major world powers. At the same time, Iranian strategy has been opaque even to those who have observed Iran for decades.
– Matthew Duss is a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.
- Photo: Al-Qaida leaders Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden and Suleiman Abu Ghaith in 2002.
]]>On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened itsnotorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of [...]]]>
On January 11th, 11 years to the day after the Bush administration opened itsnotorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date — a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.
The sad fact is that Zero Dark Thirty could have been written by the tight circle of national security advisors who counseled President George W. Bush to create the post-9/11 policies that led to Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed “black sites” that added up to an offshore universe of injustice, and the grim torture practices – euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — that went with them. It’s also a film that those in the Obama administration who have championed non-accountability for such shameful policies could and (evidently did) get behind. It might as well be called Back to the Future, Part IV, for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems stuck forever in that time warp moment of revenge and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.
As its core, Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11. Zero Dark Thirty – for anyone who doesn’t know by now — is the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA agent who believes that information from a detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden. After weeks, maybe months of torture, he does indeed provide a key bit of information that leads to another piece of information that leads… well, you get the idea. Eventually, the name of bin Laden’s courier is revealed. From the first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to the compound where bin Laden is hiding. Of course, you know how it all ends.
However compelling the heroine’s determination to find bin Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.
Here, then, are the seven steps that bring back the Bush administration and should help Americans learn how to love torture, Bigelow-style.
First, Rouse Fear. From its opening scene, Zero Dark Thirty equates our post-9/11 fears with the need for torture. The movie begins in darkness with the actual heartbreaking cries and screams for help of people trapped inside the towers of the World Trade Center: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?… It’s so hot. I’m burning up…” a female voice cries out. As those voices fade, the black screen yields to a full view of Ammar being roughed up by men in black ski masks and then strung up, arms wide apart.
The sounds of torture replace the desperate pleas of the victims. “Is he ever getting out?” Maya asks. “Never,” her close CIA associate Dan (Jason Clarke) answers. These are meant to be words of reassurance in response to the horrors of 9/11. Bigelow’s first step, then, is to echo former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s mantra from that now-distant moment in which he claimed the nation needed to go to “the dark side.” That was part of his impassioned demand that, given the immense threat posed by al-Qaeda, going beyond the law was the only way to seek retribution and security.
Bigelow also follows Cheney’s lead into a world of fear. The Bush administration understood that, for their global dreams, including a future invasion of Iraq, to become reality, fear was their best ally. From Terre Haute to El Paso, Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, Americans were to be regularly reminded that they were deeply and eternally endangered by terrorists.
Bigelow similarly keeps the fear monitor bleeping whenever she can. Interspersed with the narrative of the bin Laden chase, she provides often blood-filled footage from terrorist attacks around the globe in the decade after 9/11: the 2004 bombings of oil installations in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 22; the 2005 suicide bombings in London that killed 56; the 2008 Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad that killed 54 people; and the thwarted Times Square bombing of May, 2010. We are in constant jeopardy, she wants us to remember, and uses Maya to remind us of this throughout.
Second, Undermine the Law. Torture is illegal under both American and international law. It was only pronounced “legal” in a series of secret memorandums produced by the Bush Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of the administration. (Top officials, including Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, evidently even had torture techniques demonstrated for them in the White House before green-lighting them.) Maintaining that there was no way Americans could be kept safe via purely legal methods, they asked for and were given secret legal authority to make torture the go-to option in their Global War on Terror. Yet Bigelow never even nods toward this striking rethinking of the law. She assumes the legality of the acts she portrays up close and personal, only hedging her bets toward the movie’s end when she indicates in passing that the legal system was a potential impediment to getting bin Laden. “Who the hell am I supposed to ask [for confirmation about the courier], some guy at Gitmo who’s all lawyered up?” asks Obama’s national security advisor in the filmic run-up to the raid.
Just as new policies were put in place to legalize torture, so the detention of terror suspects without charges or trials (including people who, we now know, were treated horrifically despite being innocent of anything) became a foundational act of the administration. Specifically, government lawyers were employed to create particularly tortured (if you’ll excuse the word) legal documents exempting detainees from the Geneva Conventions, thus enabling their interrogation under conditions that blatantly violated domestic and international laws.
Zero Dark Thirty accepts without hesitation or question the importance of this unconstitutional detention policy as crucial to the torture program. From the very first days of the war on terror, the U.S. government rounded up individuals globally and began to question them brutally. Whether they actually had information to reveal, whether the government had any concrete evidence against them, they held hundreds — in the end, thousands – of detainees in U.S. custody at secret CIA black sites worldwide, in the prisons of allied states known for their own torture policies, at Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo, which was the crown jewel of the Bush administration’s offshore detention system.
Dan and Maya themselves not only travel to secret black sites to obtain valuable information from detainees, but to the cages and interrogation booths at Bagram where men in those now-familiar orange jumpsuits are shown awaiting a nightmare experience. Bigelow’s film repeatedly suggests that it was crucially important for national security to keep a pool of potential information sources — those detainees — available just in case they might one day turn out to have information.
Third, Indulge in the Horror: Torture is displayed onscreen in what can only be called pornographic detail for nearly the film’s first hour. In this way, Zero Dark Thirty eerily mimics the obsessive, essentially fetishistic approach of Bush’s top officials to the subject. Cheney, former Secretary of DefenseDonald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff David Addington, and John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel, among others, plunged into the minutiae of “enhanced interrogation” tactics, micro-managing just what levels of abuse should and should not apply, would and would not constitute torture after 9/11.
In black site after black site, on victim after victim, the movie shows acts of torture in exquisite detail, Bigelow’s camera seeming to relish its gruesomeness: waterboarding, stress positions, beatings, sleep deprivation resulting in memory loss and severe disorientation, sexual humiliation, containment in a small box, and more. Whenever she gets the chance, Bigelow seems to take the opportunity to suggest that this mangling of human flesh and immersion in brutality on the part of Americans is at least understandable and probably worthwhile. The film’s almost subliminal message on the subject of torture should remind us of the way in which a form of sadism-as-patriotic-duty filtered down to the troops on the ground, as evidenced by the now infamous 2004 photos from Abu Ghraib of smiling American soldiers offering thumbs-up responses to their ability to humiliate and hurt captives in dog collars.
Fourth, Dehumanize the Victims. Like the national security establishment that promoted torture policies, Bigelow dehumanizes her victims. Despite repeated beatings, humiliations, and aggressive torture techniques of various sorts, Ammar never becomes even a faintly sympathetic character to anyone in the film. As a result, there is never anyone for the audience to identify with who becomes emotionally distraught over the abuses. Dehumanization was a necessary tool in promoting torture; now, it is a necessary tool in promotingZero Dark Thirty, which desensitizes its audience in ways that should be frightening to us and make us wonder who exactly we have become in the years since 9/11.
Fifth, Never Doubt That Torture Works. Given all this, it’s a small step to touting the effectiveness of torture in eliciting the truth. “In the end, everybody breaks, bro’: it’s biology,” Dan says to his victim. He also repeats over and over, “If you lie to me, I hurt you” — meaning, “If I hurt you, you won’t lie to me.” Maya concurs, telling Ammar, bruised, bloodied, and begging for her help, that he can stop his pain by telling the truth.
How many times does the American public need to be told that torture did notyield the results the government promised? How many times does it need to besaid that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, 183 times obviously didn’t work? How many times does it need to be pointed out that torture can — and did — produce misleading or false information, notably in the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan who ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and who confessed under torture that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Sixth, Hold No One Accountable. The Obama administration made thedetermination that holding Bush administration figures, CIA officials, or the actual torturers responsible for what they did in a court of law was far more trouble than it might ever be worth. Instead, the president chose to move onand officially never look back. Bigelow takes advantage of this passivity to suggest to her audience that the only downside of torture is the fear of accountability. As he prepares to leave Pakistan, Dan tells Maya, “You gotta be real careful with the detainees now. Politics are changing and you don’t want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes…”
The sad truth is that Zero Dark Thirty could not have been produced in its present form if any of the officials who created and implemented U.S. torture policy had been held accountable for what happened, or any genuine sunshine had been thrown upon it. With scant public debate and no public record of accountability, Bigelow feels free to leave out even a scintilla of criticism of that torture program. Her film is thus one more example of the fact that without accountability, the pernicious narrative continues, possibly gaining traction as it does.
Seventh, Employ the Media. While the Bush administration had the Fox television series 24 as a weekly reminder that torture keeps us safe, the current administration, bent on its no-accountability policy, has Bigelow’s film on its side. It’s the perfect piece of propaganda, with all the appeal that naked brutality, fear, and revenge can bring.
Hollywood and most of its critics have embraced the film. It has already been named among the best films of the year, and is considered a shoe-in for Oscar nominations. Hollywood, that one-time bastion of liberalism, has provided the final piece in the perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture policy. If that isn’t a happily-ever-after ending, what is?
Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days and the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.
Copyright 2013 Karen J. Greenberg
]]>The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill injects some badly needed context into the media frenzy over David Petraeus’s CIA resignation by examining the four-star General’s legacy against the backdrop of an increasingly militarized intelligence agency:
As head of US Central Command in 2009, Petraeus issued execute orders that significantly broadened the ability [...]]]>
The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill injects some badly needed context into the media frenzy over David Petraeus’s CIA resignation by examining the four-star General’s legacy against the backdrop of an increasingly militarized intelligence agency:
]]>As head of US Central Command in 2009, Petraeus issued execute orders that significantly broadened the ability of US forces to operate in a variety of countries, including Yemen, where US forces began conducting missile strikes later that year. During Petraeus’s short tenure at the CIA, drone strikes conducted by the agency, sometimes in conjunction with JSOC, escalated dramatically in Yemen; in his first month in office, he oversaw a series of strikes that killed three US citizens, including 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In some cases, such as the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, commandos from the elite JSOC operated under the auspices of the CIA, so that the mission could be kept secret if it went wrong.
As reported last Friday in the Huffington Post by M.J. Rosenberg, Robert Baer, a former CIA operations officer (1976-97), told radio talk show host Ian Masters on July 12:
There is almost “near certainty” that [Israeli Prime Minister Bernjamin] Netanyahu is “planning an attack [on Iran] … and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he’s also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict…”
Baer is now expressing astonishment that anyone could have construed his comments as predicting an Israeli strike against Iran. In Time Magazine today, Baer offers his version of the unfolding of events since the radio interview was picked up and publicized:
Last week, my friend Ian Masters, who hosts the Los Angeles talk-show Background Briefing, called me up to talk about the Arab spring, and especially what would happen if Israel were to attack Iran. He was struck by the comments of recently retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan, saying that an increasingly paranoid and isolated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was considering launching a reckless attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and doing that soon… I noted there have been other recently retired senior Israeli security officials who’d said much the same thing, including the well-respected chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi.
Then “as these things go on radio, fact quickly turned to speculation,” Baer explains:
Warming to the subject, I chattered on about how I’d heard there was a “warning order” at the Pentagon to prepare for a conflict with Iran. I was about to add that that this was not unusual; there are warning orders all the time, and it could have nothing to do with Israeli or anything it was or wasn’t planning for Iran. (Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, after all, is accusing Iran of being behind the sharp uptick in deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.) But time was short, and the host needed to finish up for the next guest.
According to Baer, the easygoing banter had no reliable basis in fact, and was purely speculative:
This was a wide-ranging speculative conversation on a local radio station, two like minds kibitzing, as media pundits so often do, with no inside information to back our interpretations of the significance of the flood of former senior Israeli security officials warning that Netanyahu is crazy and likely to do something rash. “If I was forced to bet,” I ventured, “I’d say we’re going to have some sort of conflict in the next couple of months, unless this is all just a masterful bluff — which I can’t believe the Iranians would succumb to — I think the chances of it being a bluff are remote.” Not exactly claiming to know any more than any other tea-leaf reader.
And when Masters asked me when I thought this hypothetical attack might hypothetically occur, I blithely suggested September. I was only adding two plus two: a September attack would allow Netanyahu to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and wreck plans for a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood, which is slated for September. I would have added that in the Middle East, two plus two rarely adds up to four. But I was definitely out of time.
Baer insists his offhand remarks not only were taken out of context, they were disseminated as though he were “some sort of unimpeachable authority, talking with the certainly of an insider looped into the plans and intentions of the key decision-makers.”
…what I’d said was a tedious rehash of various media reports. I would have forgotten it altogether were it not for the blogosphere’s version of a Pacific hurricane. I don’t know where it started, but soon the choice bits of our conversation were being rebroadcast as a danger signal flashing bright red: “Former CIA Official: Israel Will Bomb Iran in September,” read the headline in the Huffington Post.
This was followed by hate mail, accusations that he had “gone rogue” and become “a loose cannon,” and a tweet by former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley that Baer didn’t know what he was talking about:
Crowley is right about me speculating about things I don’t know a lot about. (Isn’t that what commentators do more often than not?) … I wondered why Crowley and everyone else didn’t notice I hadn’t drawn a government check in more than 12 years, and therefore wasn’t bringing any inside knowledge to the subject. And I’d certainly never claimed a back-door access to Netanyahu’s inner circle that would give me any privileged knowledge about a planned attack.
But Baer has apparently staked his entire post-CIA career on being taken for an expert on matters about which, he now confesses, he doesn’t know very much. Baer’s claim that he doesn’t promote himself as an expert with inside knowledge or privileged access, however, rings hollow.
After leaving the CIA in 1997 after two decades as an operative in India, North Africa, Central Asia, Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Iraq, Baer’s first literary venture was his memoir See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, published in January 2002. The book was generally well received. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Baer proffered a plausible explanation, based on personal experience, of how and why the U.S. government could have allowed such a catastrophic attack to take place on U.S. soil. The book won praise from New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote its Foreword and gave See No Evil his endorsement with the review quote, “Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.”
Saudi Arabia was the subject of Baer’s second book, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, published in July 2003. Baer then tried his hand at writing a novel, Blow the House Down (2006), a supposedly fictional “alternative account” of how the events of 9/11 had transpired, with Iranian involvement as its major premise.
“The scenario that he sets forth reads in these pages like an alarming hodgepodge of the plausible, the speculative and the absurd,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in an acerbic New York Times book review. “…(I)f Mr. Baer’s intention in his new novel is to goad readers into a serious consideration of Iran’s possible terrorist connections (a timely subject, given current worries about Iran’s nuclear program), he fails in this mission by cavalierly mixing fact and fiction, the credible and the preposterous.”
While promoting the novel, Baer hinted that his “alarming hodgepodge” of speculations about Iran ought to be taken more seriously than those of a thriller novelist. Baer told Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, April 17, 2006) that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”
Baer apparently concluded that mixing the plausible and the speculative with the absurd would be more easily tolerated in pseudo-punditry than in fiction. In September 2008, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, Baer’s fifth book, was published. Baer outlined three policy options the U.S. has for dealing with Iran” 1) permanently stationing U.S. troops in Iraq; 2) instigating a Shia-Sunni civil war; or 3) negotiating with Iran: “(T)reat it like the power it has become, and see what it has to offer.” Baer himself recommended the third strategy. While not an unreasonable approach, it contrasted sharply with other assessments Baer was offering about Iran.
An op ed piece for the New York Daily News, “Bet on Israel Bombing Iran” (Sept. 27), 2008, offers an interesting parallel to the current kerfuffle. Baer wrote, “What many Americans miss is that Iran is a threat to Israel’s very existence, not an imagined danger used by politicians for political advantage. Every Israeli city is within range of Iranian/Hezbollah rockets. To make matters worse, since the July 2006 34-day war, Hezbollah may have as much as trebled the number of rockets it has targeted on Israel.”
Three weeks later, a promotional blurb for lecture by Baer with the title “Iran’s Grip on America’s Future,” for the Commonwealth Club of California on Nov. 5, 2008, breathlessly hyped the event:
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from and meet the man who was the basis of George Clooney’s character in “Syriana” — and find out why reality is even more riveting than film. Considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Middle East, Baer will explore the gap of information between what is going on in Iran and what Americans know. Bear [sic] visited Iran to interview suicide bombers [sic], a grand ayatollah, the hard-line chief of staff of Iran’s military forces and the terrorist chief of Hezbollah. Baer will discuss how and why Iran will control the most vital oil and gas trade routes, how it became a hero to the Palestinian Sunnis, and how it plans to seize oil from the Persian Gulf.
Yet in an Inter Press Service interview in Jan. 2009, Baer told Omid Memarian that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was “totally out of the question.” Commenting on a New York Times report that US President George W. Bush had vetoed such an attack despite the urging of Israeli leaders to launch one, Baer emphasized the futility of a military approach to resolving the clashes of interest between the U.S. and Iran:
We could bomb Tehran, but what does that get you? Nothing…You can bomb all military bases in Iran over a period of two weeks, but Iran is still there – it still has the ability to project power, project its will and maybe even come out of that type of conflict even stronger.
Baer is currently promoting his sixth book, The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story, published earlier this year, and co-authored with his wife Dayna. The couple met in Sarajevo, while both working for the CIA and married to other spouses. In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on NPR back in March, Baer described writing the book as a “purgative.” (Apparently the first five books hadn’t done the job.)
After Baer said that he and the U.S. intelligence community had been taken by surprise by the “Arab spring,” Gross asked him, “So, do you expect you’re going to be surprised by Iran?” Baer responded, “I think now the street rising in Tehran is a neocon fantasy. I talked to people com[ng out] of Tehran, it’s not quite as bad as the exiles say. Yes, the regime has repressed the street and this Green Revolution, but I think what we’re going to see in Iran is a much more stable state…”
Exactly what that might mean for Iran’s future wasn’t at all clear, but then again, as we’ve just found out in Time today, Baer really doesn’t know what he’s talking about anyway. He is, however, selling his books.
]]>Here’s an excerpt:
Given the broad consensus that Osama bin Laden and Co. carried out the 9/11 attacks, it’s easy to understand that mentioning his group continues to elicit strong emotions — among them fear, anger, and a resulting desire to continue to wage war against Al Qaeda.
So when hawks are trying to drum up support for a war in the Middle East, it’s natural for them to try to connect the target country with Al Qaeda. This pattern was easily observable in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Cliff May, having already morphed from a journalist into the president of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies by 2002, opted to paint with a broad brush: linking people together because they think alike. They’re “Jihadists,” he wrote, and that was enough to slap bull’s eyes on a wide variety of Arab and Muslim heads.
The Jihadist framework even allowed him, as he outlined in a September 2002 column for the Scripps Howard News Service, to “easily accommodate true religious fanatics such as Osama bin Laden as well as those like Saddam Hussein…”
[...]
As his [new NRO article conflating Iran and Al Qaeda] draws to a close, May gets even more specific about the “Jihadi” connections: Iran, he says, is working toward fulfilling Al Qaeda’s “mission”:
Al-Qaeda and the terrorist groups it leads have a mission. Iran’s revolutionary theocrats and the terrorist groups they instruct have goals and a strategy to achieve them.
Then comes a thinly veiled threat of a military attack against Iran: “Iran’s rulers should be under the guns — metaphorically for the present….” But the present, too, shall pass. And when it does, May, pressed by Glenn Greenwald, has made his policy preferences clear.
The “Al Qaeda link” lives on, with just as little evidence as there was in Iraq. Secular Arab nationalists, Sunnis, Shiites — all the same: “Jihadis.” “Al Qaeda and Iran,” the mantra goes, and emotions will run high. It remains to be seen if the U.S. public will fall for the ruse again.
Read the whole piece here at AlterNet.
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