U.S. Troops Hunt "Al-Qaeda" In Raids In Iraq

[Gold9472]

U.S. Troops Hunt al-Qaida in Raids in Iraq

http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8I4P4IG0.html

By KIM GAMEL Associated Press Writer

June 09,2006 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. troops conducted nearly 40 raids Friday in Iraq, taking advantage of information gleaned from searches following Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death, a military spokesman said, also revealing new information about the man believed poised to take the terror leader's place.

Fearing reprisals, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also imposed a driving ban in Baghdad and in Diyala, fearing insurgents will seek to avenge his death.

U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the military spokesman, also said that al-Zarqawi was alive when Iraqi police arrived at the strike scene and that U.S. forces also saw him alive.

"He mumbled something, but it was indistinguishable and it was very short," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said at a news conference.

U.S. and Polish forces arrived intending to provide unspecified medical treatment, and al-Zarqawi was put on a stretcher, Caldwell said. The terrorist "attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher, everybody reached to insert him back. ... He died a short time later from the wounds suffered during the air strike.

"We did in fact see him alive," Caldwell said. "There was some sort of movement he had on the stretcher, and he did die a short time later."

Caldwell said the U.S. military was still compiling details of the airstrike, including the exact amount of time Zarqawi was alive afterward. He said an initial analysis of Zarqawi's body had been done but he was not certain whether it constituted a full autopsy.

In an interview earlier Friday with Fox News Channel, Caldwell was more descriptive of Zarqawi's actions before he died.

"He was conscious initially, according to the U.S. forces that physically saw him," Caldwell told Fox. "He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realizing it was U.S. military."

At the news conference, the spokesman also provided a revised death toll from the attack.

U.S. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said at the time that the American airstrike targeted "an identified, isolated safe house." Four other people, including a woman and a child, were killed with al-Zarqawi and Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the terrorist's spiritual consultant.

Caldwell said it now appears there was no child among those killed. He cautioned that some facts were still being sorted out but said that three women and three men, including al-Zarqawi, were killed.

Hours after the bombing, U.S. troops carried out 17 simultaneous raids Wednesday near Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province. The region is in the heartland of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency and has seen a recent rise in sectarian violence. Baqouba is 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Those raids provided the information leading to the searches overnight Thursday.

In the 39 raids, troops "picked up things like memory sticks, some hard drives" that would allow American forces to begin dismantling al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, Caldwell told the British Broadcasting Corp.

He said the latest information was helping U.S. forces unravel the source of al-Qaida's weapons and financing.

Earlier, Caldwell had said U.S. forces waited to kill al-Zarqawi before carrying out the other raids, in an apparent effort not to spook the Jordanian-born terrorist.

"We had identified other targets that we obviously did not go after to allow us to focus on al-Zarqawi. Now that we got him, we will go after them," Caldwell told the BBC.

As Iraqi and U.S. leaders cautioned that al-Zarqawi's death was not likely to end the bloodshed in Iraq, Caldwell said another foreign-born militant was already poised to take over the terror network's operations.

He said Egyptian-born Abu al-Masri would likely take the reins of al-Qaida in Iraq. He said al-Masri trained in Afghanistan and arrived in Iraq in 2002 to establish an al-Qaida cell.

The U.S. military did not further identify al-Masri and his real identity could not immediately be determined. But the Central Command has listed an Abu Ayyub al-Masri as among its most wanted al-Zarqawi associates and placed a $50,000 bounty on his head.

Al-Masri, whose name is an obvious alias meaning "father of the Egyptian," is believed to be an expert at constructing roadside bombs, the leading cause of U.S. military casualties in Iraq.

The midday driving ban in Baghdad lasted four hours. All traffic was banned in Diyala from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. for three days starting Friday.

The Baghdad ban fell when most Iraqis go to mosques for Friday prayers. Bombers have previously targeted Shiite mosques with suicide attackers and mortars hidden in vehicles.

Iraqi authorities imposed the vehicle ban as a security measure "to protect mosques and prayers from any possible terrorist attacks, especially car bombs, in the wake off yesterday's event," an official from the prime minister's office said, referring to al-Zarqawi's death. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to media.

Al-Zarqawi, who had a $25 million bounty on his head, was killed at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday after an intense two-week hunt that U.S. officials said first led to the terror leader's spiritual adviser and then to him.

The U.S. military earlier had displayed images of the battered face of al-Zarqawi and reported that he was identified by fingerprints, tattoos and scars. But Caldwell said Friday that authorities made a visual identification of al-Zarqawi upon arriving at the site of the airstrike.

Biological samples from his body were delivered to an FBI crime laboratory in Virginia for DNA testing. Results were expected in three days.

Violence was unabated Thursday and Friday:

--Gunmen kidnapped Muthanna al-Badri, director general of state company for oil projects, or SCOP, while he drove Thursday from the ministry to his home in a predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baghdad, ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said Friday.

--A fire fight Friday west of Baqouba killed five civilians and wounded three, and demolished five houses, according to regional authorities. The circumstances were unclear.

--The torso of a man wearing a military uniform was found floating in a river Friday morning near Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, a morgue official said.

--Police found five unidentified bodies late Thursday of men who had been shot in the head in eastern Baghdad.

--Gunmen opened fire on Friday's funeral procession for the brother of the governor of the northern city of Mosul. Zuhair Kashmola was killed by gunmen on Thursday.

[Gold9472]

"fearing insurgents will seek to avenge his death."

Hmmm...

[Gold9472]

Al-Zarqawi’s final marching orders

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13249280/

6/10/2006

NEW YORK - Before his death, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had recruited hundreds of people who received terrorist training in Iraq and then returned to their home countries to await orders, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

Citing high-ranking security officials in Jordan, the Times said that in addition to recruiting volunteers and suicide bombers to fight in Iraq, Zarqawi had recruited some 300 people who received terrorist training in Iraq before returning home to await orders to carry out strikes.

Zarqawi was killed in an air strike by U.S. warplanes on a village north of Baghdad on Wednesday.

The Jordanians’ assessment of Zarqawi’s reach was the first to offer firm numbers and details about such training, the Times said.

The officials all spoke on condition that they not be identified due to the covert nature of their work.

Awaiting orders in Europe?
While U.S. counterterrorism officials said they too had seen movement of terrorists from other countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt into Iraq for training under Zarqawi and his associates, they said they believed the number of those trained and sent home to await orders was probably significantly lower than 300, the Times said.

“My sense is that the next step might have been mobilizing his recruitment networks to attack Europeans,” the Times quoted Steven Simon, a former National Security Council staff member now at the Council on Foreign Relations, as saying. “That’s one reason I think his death makes a difference.”

The Times said that Jordanian intelligence officials had been particularly focused on Zarqawi, who was born there. Their scrutiny increased after he took credit for sending suicide bombers into three Jordan hotels last December, killing dozens, it said.

Efforts to supercede al-Qaida
The officials said Zarqawi had managed to set up logistical operations in Syria, Iran and Libya that funneled volunteers into Iraq, and that as the insurgency became increasingly driven by Iraqis, he wanted to spread it global reach and mount a challenge to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri as the leader of a global terrorist war.

European authorities have identified dozens of young militant Muslim men who have either left to fight in Iraq or were prevented from doing so, and U.S. forces in Iraq have at least three French nationals among the dozens of foreign fighters they have captured there, the Times said.

German authorities also have arrested 18 suspected members of Ansar al Islam and the Zarqawi network since December 2004, including three Iraqis charged with plotting to assassinate former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi during a visit to Germany last year.

[Gold9472]

Hmmm...

[Gold9472]

BACK TO THE BUNKER

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/02/AR2006060201410.html

By William M. Arkin
Sunday, June 4, 2006; Page B01

On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.

But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe.

After 9/11, The Washington Post reported that President Bush had set up a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington on a rotating basis to ensure the continuity of national security. Since then, a program once focused on presidential succession and civilian control of U.S. nuclear weapons has been expanded to encompass the entire government. From the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration to the National Archives, every department and agency is now required to plan for continuity outside Washington.

Yet according to scores of documents I've obtained and interviews with half a dozen sources, there's no greater confidence today that essential services would be maintained in a disaster. And no one really knows how an evacuation would even be physically possible.

Moreover, since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the definition of what constitutes an "essential" government function has been expanded so ridiculously beyond core national security functions -- do we really need patent and trademark processing in the middle of a nuclear holocaust? -- that the term has become meaningless. The intent of the government effort may be laudable, even necessary, but a hyper-centralized approach based on the Cold War model of evacuations and bunkering makes it practically worthless.

That the continuity program is so poorly conceived, and poorly run, should come as no surprise. That's because the same Federal Emergency Management Agency that failed New Orleans after Katrina, an agency that a Senate investigating committee has pronounced "in shambles and beyond repair," is in charge of this enormous effort to plan for the U.S. government's survival.

Continuity programs began in the early 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war moved the administration of President Harry S. Truman to begin planning for emergency government functions and civil defense. Evacuation bunkers were built, and an incredibly complex and secretive shadow government program was created.

At its height, the grand era of continuity boasted the fully operational Mount Weather, a civilian bunker built along the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge, to which most agency heads would evacuate; the Greenbrier hotel complex and bunker in West Virginia, where Congress would shelter; and Raven Rock, or Site R, a national security bunker bored into granite along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Camp David, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would command a protracted nuclear war. Special communications networks were built, and evacuation and succession procedures were practiced continually.

When the Soviet Union crumbled, the program became a Cold War curiosity: Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered Raven Rock into caretaker status in 1991. The Greenbrier bunker was shuttered and a 30-year-old special access program was declassified three years later.

Then came the terrorist attacks of the mid-1990s and the looming Y2K rollover, and suddenly continuity wasn't only for nuclear war anymore. On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 67, "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations." No longer would only the very few elite leaders responsible for national security be covered. Instead, every single government department and agency was directed to see to it that they could resume critical functions within 12 hours of a warning, and keep their operations running at emergency facilities for up to 30 days. FEMA was put in charge of this broad new program.

On 9/11, the program was put to the test -- and failed. Not on the national security side: Vice President Cheney and others in the national security leadership were smoothly whisked away from the capital following procedures overseen by the Pentagon and the White House Military Office. But like the mass of Washingtonians, officials from other agencies found themselves virtually on their own, unsure of where to go or what to do, or whom to contact for the answers.

[MikeJr.]

Dosn't look good, does it?

[Gold9472]

Nope.

[AuGmENTor]

U.S. Troops Hunt al-Qaida in Raids in Iraq

http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8I4P4IG0.html

By KIM GAMEL Associated Press Writer

June 09,2006 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. troops conducted nearly 40 raids Friday in Iraq, taking advantage of information gleaned from searches following Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death, a military spokesman said, also revealing new information about the man believed poised to take the terror leader's place.

Fearing reprisals, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also imposed a driving ban in Baghdad and in Diyala, fearing insurgents will seek to avenge his death.

U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the military spokesman, also said that al-Zarqawi was alive when Iraqi police arrived at the strike scene and that U.S. forces also saw him alive.

"He mumbled something, but it was indistinguishable and it was very short," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said at a news conference.

U.S. and Polish forces arrived intending to provide unspecified medical treatment, and al-Zarqawi was put on a stretcher, Caldwell said. The terrorist "attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher, everybody reached to insert him back. ... He died a short time later from the wounds suffered during the air strike.

"We did in fact see him alive," Caldwell said. "There was some sort of movement he had on the stretcher, and he did die a short time later."

Caldwell said the U.S. military was still compiling details of the airstrike, including the exact amount of time Zarqawi was alive afterward. He said an initial analysis of Zarqawi's body had been done but he was not certain whether it constituted a full autopsy.

In an interview earlier Friday with Fox News Channel, Caldwell was more descriptive of Zarqawi's actions before he died.

"He was conscious initially, according to the U.S. forces that physically saw him," Caldwell told Fox. "He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realizing it was U.S. military."

At the news conference, the spokesman also provided a revised death toll from the attack.

U.S. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said at the time that the American airstrike targeted "an identified, isolated safe house." Four other people, including a woman and a child, were killed with al-Zarqawi and Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the terrorist's spiritual consultant.

Caldwell said it now appears there was no child among those killed. He cautioned that some facts were still being sorted out but said that three women and three men, including al-Zarqawi, were killed.

Hours after the bombing, U.S. troops carried out 17 simultaneous raids Wednesday near Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province. The region is in the heartland of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency and has seen a recent rise in sectarian violence. Baqouba is 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Those raids provided the information leading to the searches overnight Thursday.

In the 39 raids, troops "picked up things like memory sticks, some hard drives" that would allow American forces to begin dismantling al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, Caldwell told the British Broadcasting Corp.

He said the latest information was helping U.S. forces unravel the source of al-Qaida's weapons and financing.

Earlier, Caldwell had said U.S. forces waited to kill al-Zarqawi before carrying out the other raids, in an apparent effort not to spook the Jordanian-born terrorist.

"We had identified other targets that we obviously did not go after to allow us to focus on al-Zarqawi. Now that we got him, we will go after them," Caldwell told the BBC.

As Iraqi and U.S. leaders cautioned that al-Zarqawi's death was not likely to end the bloodshed in Iraq, Caldwell said another foreign-born militant was already poised to take over the terror network's operations.

He said Egyptian-born Abu al-Masri would likely take the reins of al-Qaida in Iraq. He said al-Masri trained in Afghanistan and arrived in Iraq in 2002 to establish an al-Qaida cell.

The U.S. military did not further identify al-Masri and his real identity could not immediately be determined. But the Central Command has listed an Abu Ayyub al-Masri as among its most wanted al-Zarqawi associates and placed a $50,000 bounty on his head.

Al-Masri, whose name is an obvious alias meaning "father of the Egyptian," is believed to be an expert at constructing roadside bombs, the leading cause of U.S. military casualties in Iraq.

The midday driving ban in Baghdad lasted four hours. All traffic was banned in Diyala from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. for three days starting Friday.

The Baghdad ban fell when most Iraqis go to mosques for Friday prayers. Bombers have previously targeted Shiite mosques with suicide attackers and mortars hidden in vehicles.

Iraqi authorities imposed the vehicle ban as a security measure "to protect mosques and prayers from any possible terrorist attacks, especially car bombs, in the wake off yesterday's event," an official from the prime minister's office said, referring to al-Zarqawi's death. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to media.

Al-Zarqawi, who had a $25 million bounty on his head, was killed at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday after an intense two-week hunt that U.S. officials said first led to the terror leader's spiritual adviser and then to him.

The U.S. military earlier had displayed images of the battered face of al-Zarqawi and reported that he was identified by fingerprints, tattoos and scars. But Caldwell said Friday that authorities made a visual identification of al-Zarqawi upon arriving at the site of the airstrike.

Biological samples from his body were delivered to an FBI crime laboratory in Virginia for DNA testing. Results were expected in three days.

Violence was unabated Thursday and Friday:

--Gunmen kidnapped Muthanna al-Badri, director general of state company for oil projects, or SCOP, while he drove Thursday from the ministry to his home in a predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baghdad, ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said Friday.

--A fire fight Friday west of Baqouba killed five civilians and wounded three, and demolished five houses, according to regional authorities. The circumstances were unclear.

--The torso of a man wearing a military uniform was found floating in a river Friday morning near Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, a morgue official said.

--Police found five unidentified bodies late Thursday of men who had been shot in the head in eastern Baghdad.

--Gunmen opened fire on Friday's funeral procession for the brother of the governor of the northern city of Mosul. Zuhair Kashmola was killed by gunmen on Thursday.
Makes you wonder if they didn't have this guy in one of those secret prisons, and they just trundled him out to kill him so they could show SOME progress

[PhilosophyGenius]

McGovern could be right when he predicted an attack in Europe followed by war. This story could be plant to preempt the theorists. Just a little theory of mine.

[Gold9472]

Al-Qaida in Iraq threatens ‘major attacks’
In statement, terror group insists it is still strong after al-Zarqawi's death

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13256559/from/RS.3/

6/11/2006

CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida in Iraq vowed Sunday to carry out “major attacks,” insisting in a Web statement that it was still powerful after the death of leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The statement did not name a successor to al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last week. But it said the group’s leadership “renews its allegiance” to Osama bin Laden.

It vowed “to prepare major attacks that will shake the enemy like an earthquake and rattle them out of sleep.”

The authenticity of the statement could not be independently confirmed. It was posted on an Islamic militant Web forum where the group has posted statements in the past.

The statement was issued in the name of al-Qaida in Iraq but was put out by the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of five insurgent groups that al-Zarqawi helped create.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed overnight by F-16 jets dropping two 500-pound bombs.

The statement said al-Qaida in Iraq’s leadership met after al-Zarqawi’s death and “agreed to continue jihad (holy war) and not be affected by his martyrdom.”

“The organization has strengthened its back, regained its footing and has been renewed from fresh blood,” it said, listing previous prominent members who had been killed without setting back the group’s attacks.

“For those who were waging holy war for the sake of al-Zarqawi, al-Zarqawi is dead. But for those who were fighting for the sake of God, God is alive and eternal,” it said.

The phrase echoed the words used by the Prophet Muhammad’s successor, Abu Bakr, after the prophet’s death in the 7th century to urge Muslims to continue spreading Islam.