Intelligence Bulletin #2
BY Herschel Smith
17 years, 9 months ago
The Intelligence Bulletin is an aggregation and commentary series, and this is the second entry in that series.
Intelligence Bulletin #2 covers the following subjects: [1] victories and violence in Sunni areas, [2] Baghdad security operations: promise and problems, [3] Iraq awash in munitions, [4] distributed operations and snipers on the roof tops, [5] HUMINT and information warfare in Iraq, [6] update on Austrian sniper rifles in Iraq, [7] U.S. military preparedness degraded (special ops to grow?), [8] hard times at Walter Reed and the VA, [9] U.S. funding Iranian insurgency, and [10] update on international legal war against the CIA.
Victories and Violence in Sunni Areas
There is indication that AQI — and those who have chosen to align with them — may be wearing out their welcome in Iraq. On Wednesday there was significant combat action near Fallujah, and the remarkable thing about this action was that it didn’t involve U.S. forces.
Iraqi security forces killed dozens of al Qaeda militants who attacked a village in western Anbar province on Wednesday, during fierce clashes that lasted much of the day, police officials said on Thursday …
Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf said foreign Arabs and Afghans were among some 80 militants killed and 50 captured in the clashes in Amiriyat al Falluja, an Anbar village where local tribes had opposed al Qaeda.
A police official in the area, Ahmed al-Falluji, put the number of militants killed at 70, with three police officers killed. There was no immediate verification of the numbers.
A U.S. military spokesman in the nearby city of Falluja, Major Jeff Pool, said U.S. forces were not involved in the battle but had received reports from Iraqi police that it lasted most of Wednesday. He could not confirm the number killed.
Another police source in Falluja put the figure at dozens.
“Because it was so many killed we can’t give an exact number for the death toll,” the police source told Reuters.
Witnesses said dozens of al Qaeda members attacked the village, prompting residents to flee and seek help from Iraqi security forces, who sent in police and soldiers.
Stars and Stripes gives us a similar recent report on population involvement in defeating the insurgency in the Sunni town of Hawijah. It is so significant that large portions are reproduced below.
… even for a city with a “roughneck
On March 2, 2007 at 8:35 pm, Michael Fumento said:
Seymour Hersh over the decades has proved extremely reliable. If he says there’s not a cloud in the sky, you can be sure of the need for an umbrella!
On March 6, 2007 at 6:34 pm, Dave N. said:
It’s good to see that some of the political energy opposing the war on terror may be channeled into investigating and improving the long-troubled VA. Losing veterans’ paperwork is terrible; sadly, it’s not a new error (or tactic?). I recall there was a fire back in the 1950’s in a St. Louis military medical records archive, that conveniently destroyed the records of many veterans.
The VA should come clean by having a non-partial (i.e. conducted by an outside group) census taken of all living US veterans, and surviving spouses of deceased veterans. They should be asked things like:
Before and during their discharge process, were they ever in any way intimidated or warned against making any service-related medical claims?
Were they ever offered any service-related medical claim compensations or “deals” that turned out to have short-changed them, compared with what they were legally entitled to?
Were they able to obtain competent legal representation for any service-connected medical claim case they brought? Is there anything in the Code of Federal Regulations, regarding compensation of lawyers representing veterans presenting claims to the VA, that would tend to make it difficult for disabled veterans to find such representation?
That would be just a start. The results of such a census of veterans might be pretty shocking to the country. I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even a Congress that wants to puff about improving the VA probably wouldn’t dare to look into it too deeply.
It’s one thing to fire people who have only been working with the VA for a short time. It’s another thing entirely, to really dig down and discover the structural and organizational reasons for why the veterans have problems with the VA. For some of those reasons, Congress needs to look no farther than the laws, regulations, budgets, and systems they themselves have created over many decades.
On April 5, 2007 at 8:53 am, mark said:
The new Clinton bill calls for a pre evaluation of soldiers before deployment. The Regimental Surgeon of the U.S. Marines in Iraq, Dr.Manuel Tanguma has already devised a plan of evaluating and fitting soldiers with a medical device proven to help prevent concussion in the NFL. MGH and Harvard professor Dr. Jeffery Shaefer suggests an MRI confirmation of an orthopedic TMJ/TMD therapy will greatly benefit the troops. The forces on the helmet chin strap in football have been found to be identical to those causing the rash of mtbi in our soldiers. Last week a confirmation from Walter Reed medical center, confirmed the project was put on the back burner because of their extensive managerial problems. This, proven procedure, will help our soldiers, for more information supporting this developing story contact mpicot@mahercorlabs.com or go to http://www.mahercor.com