Friday, October 07, 2005

Middle east roundup post

Lots of news out of the middle east lately but nobody has collected some of the more relevent bits into one place so they can be groked as a whole. Plowing through all this will take a while and you'll really need to read all the pieces I'm going to link, BUT in doing so a puzzle starts to come together that the MSM is failing to recognize.

A) Gaza withdrawl - self explanatory, covered by MSM.

B) Palestinian looting/destruction of left behind infrastructure - covered by MSM.

C) Subsequent Hamas rocket attack and IDF retaliation - covered by MSM

D) Hamas announces cease fire - covered by MSM

E) Sunnis drop objection to Iraq constitution vote - covered by MSM

F) Lebanon requests FBI assistance in journalist bombing probe - covered (minimally) by MSM

G) The Iraq insurgency is collapsing rapidly - NOT covered by MSM at all.
    1Must read MICHAEL YON(The Battle For Mosul IV) I'm not going to excerpt Yon because I want you to read his whole dispatch. There's too much there to distill into snappy excerps.

ROBERT BROWN INTERVIEW

One of the great pieces of information we got recently is 80 percent of the al Qaeda network in the north has been devastated. And those are not our figures, those came from the last six leaders in Mosul , al Qaeda leaders that we captured; they informed us of that. We also had a letter that was captured from Abu Zaid (sp) going to Zarqawi . We recently killed Zaid (sp) and we had that letter, and it also talked about the desperate situation for the al Qaeda and the insurgents in Mosul and in the north. And then also, sources we have inside the al Qaeda network up here have also informed us of that. [Avengers note: this is the first time I've heard anyone mention that WE have penetrated AQ operations]
...
Like when we first got here in October, there was -- no hotline existed. We opened a hotline; we got about 40 calls a month prior to January. The last six months, we're up to 400 calls a month. Every day the citizens are stopping us on the street telling us where a potential suspicious individual is who may be a terrorist, and telling us where they tried to plant IEDs and those type of devices. So the population is clearly very confident.
...
Right now, 80 percent of the folks on the street in Mosul and Nineveh province in the north here say that they will vote. And very interesting -- these are -- many of the folks I talked to are Sunnis who are very upset that they were lied to last election, told not to vote, and they were very excited to vote this election.
...
COL. BROWN: We did face well-trained foreign fighters prior to January elections. We have not faced well-trained foreign fighters since. Since February of this year until now, we have not seen any well-trained, in fact, very poorly trained foreign fighters. So whoever was training them before, I don't know, but apparently they've lost their support and they're not able to train them and they've -- you know, now we're getting much younger -- we had 15- to 17-year- olds, very young. You know, we were estimating -- it's kind of hard, you know, when you see the remains of a suicide bomber, there's not much left. But from captured ones, and then reports from these folks, they were very young, 15- to 17-years-old; not well trained. And we have not seen well-trained foreign fighters at all since February. So wherever they were training before, I don't know, but it's sure not -- they're not doing it anymore that I'm aware of because they're not coming here and we have not seem them.


H) Kuwait is softening its stance towards Israel and softening its support for the Palestinians. The New York Times ran this! Can you fucking believe that? NYT This is a story that basically supports the whole "neocon" game plan of how things were expected to start playing out in the middle east!

This is a lot of stuff, particularly if you go read the whole Yon dispatch and all of Brown's interview WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. Think on this for a day "grok" the totality. We'll come back to it tomorrow.

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