bjfinste- "Boy he really hit that one w/the thick part of the bat, it looks like it'll defy gravity, and right @ center field too. I think thats the game as its going, going, going.....awwww he caught it! Well Ralph lets see who's up next?"
StevieD-
AT LEAST BUSH ATTENDED THE SECURITY BREIFINGS.
j/k -figured that was the standard conservative response.
6"5": Give that man a Cigar! I totally agree. Can you imagine what the Arab World- not to mention Al Jazeera- would be saying if Gore was elected w/Lieberman as VP? Don't think we're ready, or them, for President Hillary anytime soon :scared Before we throw in the towel one must admit that we don't know all he facts and we never will. In all fairness, I don't see how we can blame Bush for 9/11 and not ourselves for lapses in security, i.e., Overstaying on Visas, Airport Screeners, etc. (Oh Yeah, I forgot about M. Moore)
http://www.sfu.ca/casr/index.htm
Improvements in Western Intelligence
May 14, 2004
By Fred Burton
Western tensions over the safety of corporate assets in the Middle East -- particularly in Saudi Arabia -- have ratcheted higher during the past month amid a stream of government security warnings and several deadly attacks and militant shootouts.
Though the concerns and the level of violence within Saudi Arabia are hardly unprecedented, the credibility of alerts issued by the United States and other Western governments is on the rise. Consider the following examples:
April 13: The United States issued a Warden Message cautioning Westerners about threats against diplomatic and other official facilities and neighborhoods in Riyadh. Two days later, a U.S. travel warning "strongly urged" Americans to leave the kingdom. On April 19 and 20, Saudi officials announced seizures of vehicles carrying explosives. On April 21, a car bomb was detonated in front of a Saudi intelligence facility in Riyadh, killing several people.
April 27: Jordanian officials claimed to have foiled an al Qaeda chemical bomb plot targeting the country's intelligence services. The plot allegedly involved trucks packed with 20 tons of explosives.
April 29: The U.S. State Department issued a worldwide caution, warning of deep concerns over the safety of U.S. interests abroad -- and noting that government officials have not ruled out a nonconventional al Qaeda attacks in the United States or elsewhere. On May 1, gunmen killed five Westerners -- including two Americans -- at the offices of Swiss oil contractor ABB Lummus in Yanbu. The shooters later were praised in a statement, purportedly from al Qaeda's top official in Saudi Arabia, carried on the Islamist Web site Sawt al-Jihad.
European security services recently have announced several militant roundups and "foiled plots" against specific targets. On April 21, British newspapers reported the discovery of a bombing plot against a football stadium -- possibly the field used by Manchester United -- and the arrest of 10 suspects. A well-placed counterterrorism source later told Stratfor that the sweep -- the second major roundup in Britain in less than a month -- was conducted less to thwart a specific attack than as a very public pre-emptive action to reassure citizens of their safety. On May 4, Turkish police said they detained 16 suspected members of the al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Islam, accused of planning bombing attacks against the NATO summit that is scheduled to take place in Istanbul in June.
The contrast with past intelligence warnings is stark: In December 2003, the State Department authorized the voluntary departure of diplomats' family members -- but more than a month after the bombing of a Western housing compound in Riyadh killed 17 people. A similar communiqu?, which ordered the departure of nonessential U.S. personnel and their dependents, was issued May 13, 2003 -- a day after another housing compound bombing that claimed 34 lives.
Taken together, the recent incidents indicate the United States and its allies are armed with increasingly actionable intelligence from their sources in the Middle East, Pakistan and elsewhere. Although al Qaeda might remain, in the intelligence community's words, a "ghost" or an elusive hydra, the community's failures prior to the Sept. 11 attacks no longer can justify ongoing complacency toward its warnings about the risks of attacks. The government alerts also cannot be dismissed merely as attempts to elicit "chatter" or otherwise improve officials' view into th! e threat from radical Islam.
These events indicate that at least some parts of the U.S. counterterrorism community have reached a crucial milestone in their operational and analytical capabilities -- which aids their ability to predict al Qaeda's next moves and other emerging threats. It is in light of this assessment that threats issued specifically against the domestic United States, in addition to Western assets overseas, could be viewed as credible.
Security Cooperation: An Improving View
One of the first questions this assessment raises is whether this same level of intelligence capability exists globally, or merely in a few isolated regions?
While it is clear some weaknesses remain -- for example, Washington had no warning prior to the March 11 train bombings in Madrid -- it appears that U.S. counterterrorism collection has improved greatly in the past few months. Sour! ces in Washington tell Stratfor that both human intelligence and technical collection capabilities -- such as wiretaps and other methods -- significantly have increased in conjunction with coordinated intelligence and law enforcement efforts around the world. Western intelligence services and analytical think tanks -- such as MI6, the Center for Strategic International Studies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation -- along with the services of "friendly" Middle Eastern nations such as Jordan, specifically have aided Washington's tactical and strategic capabilities and helped in interdicting attacks.
Moreover, foiled attacks and post-op investigations in other countries, such as Britain and Spain, have yielded a flurry of data: Pocket litter from detainees, phone numbers, forensic evidence, fingerprints, travel documents and other items can be shared with allied intelligence services to generate new leads for counterterrorism officials to run down.
It! is conceivable these achievements prompted the allegedly planned or actual attacks against the allied intelligence services in Riyadh and Amman in recent weeks.
