A cache of weapons used to construct homemade bombs in Afghanistan, November 2010. Photo: ISAF/Flickr
The signature insurgent weapon of Iraq and Afghanistan is proving more durable than either war. Every month, outside either the U.S. former warzone or its remaining active one, militia groups construct approximately 600 cheap, homemade bombs to hide in ditches, roadsides, culverts and vehicles — nearly twice as many as they did two years ago.
That’s the latest assessment of the Pentagon’s task force to stop the bombs, known as the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization or JIEDDO. For the past two years, nations beyond Iraq and Afghanistan have tallied between 500 and 600 bombs per month. On any average month during that period, the bombs kill 310 people and injure 833, far from the lands that birthed the homemade bombs.
That’s a new high. According to a JIEEDO report from 2010 (.pdf), insurgents outside Iraq and Afghanistan rarely constructed more than 300 bombs per month between September 2008 and September 2010. More often, the monthly bomb total hovered around 250. The improvised explosive device — a cheap family of weapons that can be built with minimal technical savvy and for less money than an iPhone — is killing and wounding more people as time goes on.
In an undated photograph, Osama bin Laden watches a video of himself in the Abbottabad compound he would ultimately die in. Photo: U.S. government
There was more evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction than there was that a mysterious, tall man the CIA spotted pacing around a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was Osama bin Laden. In a brand new book about the raid that ultimately killed al-Qaida’s leader, Michael Morrell, the CIA’s former second in command, tells author Mark Bowden, “the case for WMD wasn’t just stronger — it was much stronger.” Gulp.
That anecdote, and other new details Bowden unearths for his new book The Finish, published today, shows just how closely the raid came to never happening at all. It seems like the easiest of calls in hindsight, but several national-security veterans inside the Obama administration had misgivings about the raid. They argued that it would be preferable to bomb the compound, thereby sparing SEALs the danger of fighting inside the compound, or believed a drone strike could limit the U.S. liability if the intel was wrong. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, contended that what sounds a lot to Bowden like a Raytheon’s Small Tactical Munition — an unproven, 13-pound bomb capable of being launched from a drone — could be a magic bullet.
The special operations forces conducting the mission also labored under a shadow: the failures of their predecessors in 1980 to rescue Iranian hostages, and in the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia. The only reason anyone ever refers to the bloody 1993 battle with the forces of a Mogadishu warlord is because of Bowden, whose definitive book of that title (later a movie) has become an iconic military tome. It also gives Bowden the perspective to see how the Joint Special Operations Command reconfigured itself into a powerful intelligence apparatus able to quickly exploit new information while conducting Abbottabad-style raids in Afghanistan at a furious clip.
But there’s a darker side to the raid that gets less attention. Bin Laden was unarmed when killed, leading some to question whether he could have been taken alive. Torture played at least some role in developing the intelligence leading to bin Laden. And the CIA helped collect DNA intelligence in the city from a doctor conducting vaccinations, which has had negative ramifications for public health in Pakistan. Bin Laden might be dead and Bowden’s book might be published, but the circumstances of the Abbottabad raid are likely to be debated for years — making it a perfect opportunity for Danger Room to ask Bowden about The Finish.
Danger Room: Was there a good argument for simply not raiding the Abbottabad compound?
Mark Bowden: Not a very good one. This was the argument [Vice President Joe] Biden made. His feeling was the risk of things going wrong was so great, the downside potential was so big, that it warranted delaying until they could be more certain, at the very least, that bin Laden was actually living there. The downside of that: As planning for this raid continued, more and more people were brought into the loop. By they time they launched it, in May [2011], there were probably hundreds of people who knew. I think Obama was correct in assessing that the secret would not hold. And then they would have let this opportunity slip through their fingers.
I do think it’s important to note that one of the reasons why Obama decided to launch SEALs was that there was always the potential that they could raid the compound and discover bin Laden wasn’t there at all. If all went well, they could have gone in there and got out and left without hurting anybody. If they did it smoothly enough, then other than people in the neighborhood wondering what the hell happened, they could get in and out without causing any problems.
This is a video, posted on Monday to Facebook, of one of Syria’s stronger rebel factions setting a marijuana field ablaze. The incineration of the weed underscores a basic problem for the U.S.’s approach to Syria’s bloody civil war.
No, not because the U.S. suddenly decriminalized marijuana. It’s because the Farouq Brigades, generally considered a competent and media-savvy rebel militia, is promoting its willingness to destroy a drug crop. That’s an action usually identified more with Islamic militant groups than secular ones. And it goes to show how little the U.S. still knows about the Syrian opposition, even as Washington debates directly arming the rebels.
It’s a problem that cuts across political boundaries. The Obama administration is helping Persian Gulf states maintain a weapons pipeline to the rebels, even as Pentagon officials acknowledge the risk of those weapons spreading outside Syria to destabilize the region. Supporters of broadening U.S. aid to the rebels, like Rep. Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, concedes that he doesn’t know what the true agendas of the rebels are, beyond overthrowing dictator Bashar Assad. Mitt Romney wants to only arm those rebels who “share our values.”
Easier said than done. It’s not necessarily that the U.S. lacks data on the various Syrian factions. Some groups, like the Farouq Brigades, put out a ton of information on websites and Facebook page. It’s just that there aren’t clear conclusions to be drawn from the data about the factions’ intent for a post-Assad Syria. “It’s very complicated, trying to say how Islamist these specific groups are,” says Jeffrey White, a former U.S. defense intelligence officer who studies the Syrian civil war at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The Pentagon has picked next summer’s Man of Steel film to be the cinematic debut of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, shown here in a 2011 ceremony at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Photo: Flickr/DVIDS
Faster than a sluggish bureaucracy. More powerful than enemy radar. Able to scale tall buildings with a single engine. Up on the screen in the forthcoming Superman reboot, it’s — it’s — it’s the debut of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons program in human history.
Long before the family of stealth jets known as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will ever fly a combat mission, the F-35 will appear in theaters for the first time next summer in Man of Steel, Zach Snyder’s anticipated re-imagining of the Superman franchise. It’s perhaps the best cinematic debut possible for an aircraft program that’s suffered numerous budgetary and engineering woes.
“It was a target of opportunity,” Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room. When the filmmakers visited California’s Edwards Air Force Base in January to get shots of military aircraft for a scene, they were excited to learn that the base hosted a complement of F-35s for flight testing. The base arranged for two of them to be towed into the shot.
“They liked the idea of having the most modern, the newest fighter aircraft in the background,” says Strub, who was on location with Man of Steel at Edwards. The F-35 had been digitally rendered in movies previously, including a scene in The Avengers when the Hulk tears it apart, but this was its first screen test for the actual plane. And it took only a few hours to film.
Morten Storm is either a serial liar or a former mole within al-Qaida for the CIA. And if Storm isn’t a serial liar, he just accused his handlers in U.S. and Danish intelligence of helping him arrange a marriage for Anwar al-Awlaki, the group’s notorious YouTube preacher, that would lead to the violent death of both husband and wife.
Storm’s wild claims have come in a series of interviews with Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. His latest: serving as a matchmaker for his friend Awlaki. In 2009, Awlaki wanted a third wife, a “convert, a European Muslim.” But Storm, at that point already allegedly an informant for the West, saw an opportunity to get Awlaki a wife who would inadvertently lead the CIA to him, via a tracking device smuggled in her luggage. Once the two met, it would be a matter of time before a drone strike sealed their fate.
That was supposed to be what happened to a 23-year-old Croatian woman named “Aminah,” whom Storm found on Facebook. An al-Qaida sympathizer who frequented a pro-Awlaki Facebook group, she seemed perfectly expendable to Storm. “The idea was to find someone who shared [Awlaki's] ideology and mentality,” Storm told the Danish paper, “so that both of them would be killed in an American drone attack.” That’s what would have happened, Storm claims, had the plan not abruptly fallen apart.
To be clear: Storm may not be telling the truth. Neither Danger Room nor other media have independently confirmed his story. The CIA declined to comment. Storm has also been accused of making the whole thing up to become famous. Jyllands-Posten reports Storm wants recognition for turning on al-Qaida. If Storm’s story is true, it would be a scandal in Denmark, which has a government that affirms it does not engage in “operations aimed at taking civilian lives.”
