My World Earth: 'Clueless' CIA were conned by suicide bomber's.Lies to enter miliatary base to detone bom.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

'Clueless' CIA were conned by suicide bomber's.Lies to enter miliatary base to detone bom.

The Chapman forward operating base was located next to Khost airfield on the border with Pakistan

Jordanian royal guard carrying the coffin of Captain Ali bin Zeid, who was killed in Afghanistan alongside seven CIA operatives in a suicide bombing

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Al-Balawi was brought in for debriefing after he claimed to have information on the whereabouts of bin Laden's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, above

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Attacker was not searched as he entered U.S. base
* He came from same town as Al-Qaeda chief in Iraq

The suicide bomber who killed eight people in a CIA base in Afghanistan had told the Americans he could help them find Osama Bin Laden’s deputy.

Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a doctor, won the trust of first Jordanian intelligence, then the CIA, by posing as a prominent Al Qaeda defector.

The 36-year-old was not even searched when he arrived at the supposedly high-security base in Khost province to meet top agents.

Seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed when he detonated explosives strapped to his body. At least six more people were wounded.

The details of how the CIA were fooled emerged as the Pentagon’s intelligence chief in Afghanistan issued a report blasting the ‘clueless’ work of U.S. spy agencies there.
Major General Michael Flynn offered a bleak assessment of the CIA’s role in the eight-year conflict. He described intelligence officials on the ground as ‘ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers.’

An operations officer was quoted as admitting: ‘I don’t want to say we’re clueless, but we are. We’re no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment.’

The suicide bombing last Wednesday was the second worst attack in the CIA’s history and dealt a devastating blow to its battle against militants in Afghanistan’s mountainous border areas.

It came a year after Jordanian authorities first arrested Balawi, who worked at a clinic in a Palestinian refugee camp and had built a reputation as a leading jihadist through fiery articles on websites linked to Al Qaeda.

One said: ‘Do people want us to carry bouquets of flowers? No, by Allah, we will carry weapons and we will wear military bandoliers and explosive devices.’

The Jordanians were so confident of him that they arranged for him to go to Afghanistan to recruit other militants as double agents.
He had also offered to locate Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and was taken to the CIA’s forward base to brief agents there. He exploded his bomb within minutes of the start of the meeting.

The disaster is a massive blow to Jordan – the intelligence officer who died was a relative of King Abdullah.

The country’s pro-U.S. government had flatly denied any connection to the CIA attack to avoid angering other Arab countries and its own population.

Jordan has consistently given the U.S. intelligence on militants and helped track down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in an American airstrike in June 2006.

Coincidentally, he was born in the same Jordanian town as suicide bomber Balawi.

Jordan has also acted as a proxy jailer for the CIA, interrogating several alleged Al Qaeda militants who were flown on rendition flights from Guantanamo Bay.

General Flynn’s dismissive report on intelligence-gathering, issued by the Centre for New American Security thinktank, said the CIA was spending too much time and effort on targeting Al Qaeda leaders.

He wrote: ‘Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.’

A revised war policy unveiled by President Barack Obama last month involves sending in 30,000 more U.S. troops and expanding a counterinsurgency campaign to win Afghan public support and sideline a resurgent Taliban.

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