US Strike on al-Qaeda Safe House on Afghanistan Border
ABC News is reporting that a US air strike on a village at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border may have killed 5 high-ranking al-Qaeda figures, including the organization's #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
On CNN, Wolf Blitzer speculated that since Zawahiri has been releasing video tapes (one just a week ago), the CIA may have found a way to trace the delivery of the cassettes back to the village.
I am going to hold off any comment about the possibility of Zawahiri being dead. There have been other strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions against supposedly big fish of al-Qaeda that have turned out to be no such thing. This time the leaks seem also to come from Washington counter-terrorism sources, so maybe there is something to them. On the other hand, the US intelligence people may have decided that Zawahiri has been making too much noise and that starting a rumor that he may have been killed will hurt his charisma at least in the short term.
This world is murky.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/13/2006 01:07:00 PM
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4 Comments:
Just the Speculations, Ma'am
May, could, would, should.
Are Wolf and ABC purely speculative entities now, fact-free and emotive, led on by faceless, nameless anonymous "intelligence" sources?
Can we speak of "intelligence" agencies whose role seems at most to be to blow up possible sources of otherwise irreplaceable and potentially exploitable "humint" from a known location?
Is any sort of idiocy and blindness good if it involves a high-explosive "smart" bomb dropped from a high-performance airplane from a high altitude? Did they need to get permission from "the top" to drop? Did the lawyers approve?
Why couldn't they just go in and seize/kidnap/arrest the guy? Or is that what they did, and then bombed to cover up? Hope springs eternal, but usually baselessly.
GWOT and experiment planning
Good reader and viewer is supposed to understand jokes, romantic and scary plot developments, he just knows what is going on without necessarily being able to explain why exactly certain scene is funny, romantic or scary. On the next level, expert reader and critics know certain theory which helps them to explain the internals behind what they see in the text, on the screen or on the stage.
Same thing with PR. With certain experience and knowledge of the region, telling PR operation from quality journalism and scholarly research is actually easy, you just know that certain news story does not smell good and it cannot be true. The challenge is to document this process properly for future verification.
So, when supposed killing of Al-Queda's Zawahiri in Pakistan was announced, Juan Cole made a documented guess that it was not the case. Now we know that there was no kill, it was 100% pure PR.
This is how planned experiment works - by making conclusions aka predictions - and then comparing predicted results with experimental ones. Yes, blogging is an ideal way for systematic PR research!
1. US kills 18 chasing shadows
2. Juan Cole. US Strike on al-Qaeda Safe House on Afghanistan Border
Correction..
GWOT and experiment planning
Good reader and viewer is supposed to understand jokes, romantic and scary plot developments, he just knows what is going on without necessarily being able to explain why exactly certain scene looks funny, romantic or scary. On the next level, serious readers and expert critics know certain theory which helps them to explain the internals behind what they see in the text, on the screen or on the stage.
Same thing with PR. With certain experience and knowledge of the region, telling PR operation from quality journalism and scholarly research is actually easy, you just know that certain news story does not smell good and it cannot be true. The challenge is to document this process properly for future verification.
So, when supposed killing of Al-Queda's Zawahiri in Pakistan was announced, Juan Cole made a documented guess that it was not the case. Now we know that there was no kill, so news stories on Zawahiri were 100% pure PR.
This is how planned experiment works - by making conclusions aka predictions - and then comparing predicted results with experimental ones. Yes, blogging is an ideal way for systematic PR research!
1. US kills 18 chasing shadows
2. Juan Cole. US Strike on al-Qaeda Safe House on Afghanistan Border
It always makes good sense to wait a few days before swallowing any US government propaganda shamelessly shilled by Wolf Blitzer and his ill-informed ilk. His pledge to the bungling Bush Bunch: You say it and I'll relay it. If others decry it, I'll deny it.
Headline in the Los Angeles Times (January 14, 2006)not long after Blitzer's sourceless speculation: "Pakistan Protests U.S. Attempt on Al Qaeda's No. 2, Says It Missed, Killed Innocents."
Oops!
Gee, we used to have George "Can't Identify Anything" Tenet supplying building coordinates for the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade Yugoslavia as well as the "Shock and Awe" Badhdad neighborhood address for three dozen cruise missles targeting the absent Saddam Hussein and sons way back at the beginning of this Iraq disaster. Tenet has departed, though, so I wonder who supplies the US military (and Wolf Blitzer) with all the bad info now?
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