My World Earth: Top general blasts US Afghan intelligence gathering- 7 CIA killed by suicide bomber.-US spy work in Afghanistan rapped

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Top general blasts US Afghan intelligence gathering- 7 CIA killed by suicide bomber.-US spy work in Afghanistan rapped

The bomber's Jordanian handler, Ali bin Zaid, was a member of the Jordanian royal family

The CIA logo at their headquarters in Langley, Virginia

The problem is a lack of information from the field, the report charged

President Barack Obama's top military spy chief in Afghanistan has blasted US intelligence-gathering there as an ignorant, flawed operation "starved" of information which could help wage a successful war against insurgents.

In an extraordinarily blunt report, Major General Michael Flynn recommended radical changes to an "intelligence apparatus (which) still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade."

And the problems he stressed in the document -- entitled "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan" -- are less environmental than "attitudinal, cultural and human."

"Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from the people in the best position to find answers... US intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency," the report said.

"The problem is that these analysts -- the core of them bright, enthusiastic and hungry -- are starved for information from the field, so starved, in fact, that many say their jobs feel more like fortune telling than serious detective work."

The report, co-authored by Flynn advisor Marine Captain Matt Pottinger and Paul Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was published on Monday on the website of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think-tank.

It was released a day ahead of a key meeting Tuesday between Obama and his top national security advisors to explore why US intelligence authorities failed to prevent an attempted Christmas Day bombing of a US-bound airliner by a suspected Al-Qaeda militant.

It also follows last week's suicide bombing at a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan that killed eight people and raised questions about how a reported Al-Qaeda triple agent duped Western intelligence services.

The severity of the report's tone -- Flynn described it as "unconventional" -- is sure to raise eyebrows in Washington and among its allies at a time when the US military is ramping up involvement in Afghanistan to wage war against a persistent Taliban-led insurgency.

It also comes as US intelligence in general comes under microscopic scrutiny in the wake of the botched attack on a US airliner.

Obama called for exhaustive reviews of intelligence and security operations after a Nigerian man allegedly boarded an Amsterdam-Detroit flight with explosives and tried to blow up the plane.

The man was grabbed by fellow passengers after the explosives failed to detonate.

CIA bomber 'was Jordanian double agent'.

The suicide bomber who killed eight people at a CIA base in Afghanistan was a Jordanian-born double agent invited to the outpost because he claimed to have vital information about Osama bin Laden's right-hand man.

The attack at the military base in Khost, east Afghanistan, last week killed seven CIA employees and the Jordanian intelligence officer who was the bomber's handler.

The bomber, a 36-year-old doctor named as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence after being arrested a year earlier. He was thought to have been persuaded to support US and Jordanian efforts against al-Qaeda, and was brought to Afghanistan to infiltrate the organisation by posing as a foreign jihadi.

Al-Balawi was invited to Camp Chapman, on the Afghan-Pakistan border, because he said he had acquired information to track down Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, according to The New York Times.

He was not searched because his Jordanian handler, Ali bin Zaid, who is also a member of the Jordanian royal family, identified him as an agent, the newspaper reported. He detonated the explosive shortly after his debriefing began in the gym of the military base, wounding six employees in addition to the eight dead.

It is thought that he was sent on his suicide mission by al-Zawahiri.

Mr bin Zaid is a relative of Jordan's King Abdullah II who, with other members of the royal family, attended a wake for Mr bin Zaid at the Royal Palace at the weekend.

Jordan's state news agency Petra identified Mr bin Zaid as an army officer on a humanitarian mission in Afghanistan. It said he was killed "as a martyr while performing the sacred duty of the Jordanian forces in Afghanistan".

In an interview with a jihadi website in September 2009, al-Balawi said he went to Afghanistan to fight, and exhorted others to violence, according to SITE Monitoring Service, a terrorist watch group that reads and translates messages on extremist forums.

"No words are more eloquent than those proven by acts, so that if that Muslim survives, he will be one who proves his words with acts. If he dies in the Cause of Allah, he will grant his words glory that will be permanent marks on the path to guide to jihad, with permission from Allah;" he wrote.

The attack at Khost was the biggest loss of life for the CIA since the 1983 bombing of the agency's Beirut station, which killed 17 officers.

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