Dating back to last season, the Wolverines have now lost three straight for the first time since 1979.
Under the late Bo Schembechler , that group lost to Purdue, Ohio State and Southern California in the Rose Bowl to finish with an 8-4 record.
For Michigan and coach Lloyd Carr, who was already played to mixed feelings among the school's massive fan base, this loss was as crushing as it was embarrassing. There is simply no excuse for such an upset and Michigan's two turnovers, two kicks blocked, ill-timed penalties and defensive and offensive mistakes played a huge role here.
It is a result that will rock the program, renew calls for Carr to hang it up at season's end and snuff out any chance of a current assistant coach to step up and take over this vaunted power.
"I think it begins with being a prepared team," Carr told the Michigan radio network. "And that's my responsibility. I did not have the team prepared."
(MANDI WRIGHT/Detroit Free Press)
U-M's Mike Hart sits dejected on the bench with seconds to go in a 32-34 loss against Appalachian State at Michigan Stadium.
"It's probably the biggest loss in Michigan history, biggest win for them," Michigan running back Mike Hart told the News on the field after the game. "We lost a game to lesser opponent. We've got to come out and get better. We have a long season ahead of us. I don't know what happened."
Appalachian State's Corey Lynch picks the football off the turf after blocking a field goal attempt by Michigan kicker Jason Gingell with six seconds remaining in the game. Gingell, holder Zoltan Mesko (41) and Appalachian State's Jerome Touchstone pursue Lynch on the game's final play which seal the shocking upset 34-32. Losing to a non-Division I team, despite the fact that the Mountaineers are defending I-AA national champions, has to be the worst upset in the history of Michigan Stadium. Michigan had been ranked No. 5 in the Associated Press preseason poll. It was the Wolverines season opener, Saturday, September 1, 2007.
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Part 1 (pages 1-25, 3.52 MB)
Part 2 (pages 26-39, 1.84 MB)
Part 3 (pages 40-59, 3.67 MB)
Part 4 (pages 60-96, 4.45 MB)
Part 1 (Adams-Harrison, pages 97-117, 1.10 MB)
Part 2 (Hart-Saigh, pages 118-135, 763 KB)
Part 3 (Savoy-Zirbel and Recruits, pages 136-146, 426 KB)
Part 1 (Coach Lloyd Carr, pages 147-155, 618 KB)
Part 2 (Assistant Coaches, pages 156-167, 1.58 MB)
Part 1 (Support Staff, pages 168-177, 1.02 MB)
Part 2 (Athletic Medicine, pages 178-183, 581 KB)
Part 3 (Academics, pages 184-190, 899 MB)
On the left and the right, George Tenet has been skewered for his role in the Iraq war, and this memoir has been universally trashed.
The left sees him as part of the disingenuous Bush team that distorted intelligence to get America into an unnecessary and unwinnable war, and besmirched the nation's honor through secret prison sites, rendition, and the "aggressive" interrogation of terrorist suspects. If George Tenet had been a man of mettle, instead of a political crony, he might have prevented such folly.
The right attacks him for dissembling about Baathist Iraq's role in supporting terrorism and, more specifically, CIA analysis about the contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime before and after 9/11. He also gets whacked for allowing, if not encouraging, the CIA to become an anti-Bush bastion, actively working against the policies of the president.
Both sides find him whiny and self-serving. Both sides give him and the CIA some credit for responding quickly to Osama bin Laden after 9/11 in Afghanistan, where the CIA provided the plans and personnel for America's first response. Left-wing and right-wing journalists generally give Tenet some credit for restoring morale at Langley, at least before Iraq bummed everybody out.
The real story of George Tenet is much worse than the usual animadversions. No other director so abysmally failed to undertake the longstanding need for reform in the CIA. No other director had such an enormous opportunity to restructure the place into an organization possibly capable of penetrating al Qaeda, clerical Iran, and other hard targets. But in operations, if not in analysis, Langley remains a decrepit institution, incapable of fulfilling basic counterterrorist, espionage, and covert-action tasks.
The Iraq war and the political controversies surrounding it have distorted the conversation in Washington. Never has intelligence been so central to foreign-policy discussions; never has the emphasis been so misplaced. "Better" CIA analysis would not have prevented the Iraq war; the best possible CIA analysis will have little or no impact on whether (not when) an American president decides to attack Iran's nuclear-weapons facilities.
The 2008 campaign is upon us, and we can rest assured that every serious candidate--with the possible exceptions of John McCain and Fred Thompson--will call for better American intelligence and more money for the CIA. (McCain has expressed serious reservations about the general competence, and ideological neutrality, of the Agency. Thompson, who was once on the Senate's intelligence oversight committee, knows the organization has unresolved systemic problems. Both men seem to know that more money is not the answer.)
The Democrats are unlikely to be so astute. Barack Obama recently suggested that he would, as president, create a "Shared Security Partnership Program" that would "forge an international intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure to take down terrorist networks from the remotest islands of Indonesia, to the sprawling cities of Africa." Obama's program could actually be a subtitle for Tenet's book, since Tenet and his CIA spent an enormous amount of time on liaison relationships, building them up (as Tenet puts it) so the United States could draw down on the "goodwill" and "trust"--and on the large amounts of cash and security goodies delivered by the CIA since 9/11.
It's a decent bet that the CIA and the Pentagon have, in the war on terror, probably already delivered at least $5 billion in goods, cash, and manpower to "allied" intelligence and internal-security services. Obama would put these "partnerships" into overdrive.
Two things are certain. First, such liaison-building has the lifespan of a tsetse fly. Throughout At the Center of the Storm Tenet, Vice President Cheney, and other senior officials are having to visit the Middle East--usually Pakistan and Saudi Arabia--to fortify longstanding intelligence relationships, which Tenet sees as the cornerstone of national security. It's a very good bet that the French, Germans, and Italians have kicked out of their countries more clumsy (often misdirected) CIA officers than have the Saudis, the Pakistanis, and the Egyptians.
It's also a very good bet that CIA goodies proffered to these countries are small compared with the support given to the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Egyptians. Yet the intelligence and political relationship that the United States has with the Europeans is vastly more reliable, even with the turbulence provoked by the Iraq war. Vice presidents don't have to fly off to Europe to ensure "allied" intelligence and security services act responsibly. Personal "trust" among security VIPs of various countries isn't a particularly lasting foundation; shared Western culture and self-evident mutual interest are the bonds that matter.
Second, such extra liaison cash will further fatten Langley's domestic bureaucracy and overseas stations and bases, and attenuate the CIA's espionage ethic. Clandestine human intelligence collection, if done "unilaterally," is in constant tension with any liaison relationship since unilateral espionage operations can greatly anger foreign intelligence and security services if they discover undeclared CIA operations on their soil.
Since the overwhelming number of CIA case officers serve overseas with weak official covers, and since helpful foreign internal-security services in counterterrorism tend to be accomplished in counterespionage, allied governments in the war on terror can usually shut down unilateral American operations if so inclined. It's doubtful that the CIA is actually running unilateral agents of any great note in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan: The environment is tough, and case officers with official cover in such places stick out like sore thumbs. And the CIA, according to active-duty case officers, remains extremely wary of deploying nonofficial cover officers (NOCs) to hostile environments. According to these same officers, the CIA has refused to develop any NOC-based counterterrorist strategy in the Middle East. But whatever the CIA is doing in these countries from official facilities could dry up if the host service wanted to get unpleasant.
An inevitable byproduct of this liaison-centered intelligence is greater CIA caution overseas. And Langley is already an enormously cautious organization. Since the death of John Michael Spann in November 2001, have we heard about any CIA deaths in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or elsewhere, in the war on terror? It's unpleasant to say this, but if the Clandestine Service were seriously engaged on the ground against our enemies, operatives would be dying and the outside world would be hearing about it. Tenet, who brags about everything conceivable in this memoir, would have anonymously underscored the deaths of CIA operatives--and would have been right to do so. He does not do so.
Tenet's character--and, more important, the character of the senior cadre that Tenet has promoted--was revealed in all its tepidness by his commentary on Michael Scheuer's recommendation to try to capture or assassinate Osama bin Laden in 1998 using friendly Afghans. The plan no doubt had great faults; but Scheuer, who was in charge of the CIA's bin Laden unit, was ahead of his time. Scheuer may be an oddball neo-isolationist, but he was unquestionably correct to recommend that we do something lethal, regardless of possible collateral damage, as soon as possible.
Tenet sided with the "pros." He writes:
I took [Scheuer's] recommendation seriously, but six senior CIA officers stood in the chain of command between Mike and me. Most of them were seasoned operations officers, while Mike was an analyst not trained in conducting paramilitary operations.
What's striking is that Tenet still defends that decision, citing the sagacity of rank. It's doubtful that those six case officers, or the progeny they have promoted, are now any bolder. "Seasoning" in the Operations Directorate does not make men adventurous. Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, two counterterrorist officials on the Clinton National Security Council staff, recently recommended in the New York Times that the CIA be given responsibility for paramilitary strikes into Pakistan to kill al Qaeda personnel, since the Pentagon has proven too cautious in planning and recommending such operations. Credit goes to Benjamin and Simon for seeing past mistakes and for fearing the future, but it's unlikely that the senior cadre in the Clandestine Service's Near East Division, or even in the marginally more adventurous Counterterrorism Center, will jump at the task.
Barack Obama may discover--and Tenet's book is an excellent primer on the subject--that his favored kind of "partnership program" leads the CIA into a close--at times blinding--embrace of the intelligence and security services of the three countries Obama regularly (and correctly) criticizes for abetting the growth of Islamic extremism: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
The CIA and the State Department are virtual twins in their tendency toward "clientitis"--the inclination to see the world as a host country does--and the process was occurring inside the CIA before the end of the Cold War. The post-9/11 world and George Tenet accelerated the process. Under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he even transformed the long-standing PLO liaison relationship into an open foreign-policy role--the first time, I believe, that any Western intelligence service has so publicly elevated itself into foreign policy and politics.
Tenet's performance here was distressing:
I would walk into [Yasser] Arafat's headquarters and there would be forty or fifty people all talking at the same time, yelling, laughing, telling lies to each other because they didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings by telling the whole truth, and I would think to myself, This is just like the Greeks I knew growing up in Queens.
No, George: Fatah, the trailblazing mother ship of Middle Eastern terrorism, doesn't have much in common with Greek Americans. The nature and range of Fatah's mendacity are of a different species. But that Washington's political class would even think of using the CIA, which at its core is supposed to be an espionage and covert-action service, as an adjunct to the State Department tells a lot about why Washington has shown so little sustained, serious interest in ensuring that the CIA can execute its core missions.
However much one might approve of CIA officials doing what they can to solve the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio, this Foggy Bottom trend with Langley, of a part with its growing liaison equities, does not bode well for a service tasked to penetrate the inner circles of al Qaeda. The thousands of officers being added to the CIA are not there for liaison work: Even when bloated, such dealings do not demand a big staff. Tenet brought a flood of new people into the CIA, and Congress paid for them, in great part to improve the quality and quantity of clandestine human-intelligence collection.
After 9/11, fear of weapons of mass destruction focused minds on the here and now, and the advantages that rough foreign security services provide the United States can be significant. But these liaison "partnerships" are not cost-free, especially when the autocrats in question have done so much to fuel anti-American Islamic radicalism. With Tenet, however, there really is no problem here since he pays the thinnest lip service in At the Center of the Storm to the idea of reform or self-government in the Middle East.
The lack of nuance and contradiction in his assessment of Arafat, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, the Saudi royals, the Hashemites of Jordan, and Hosni Mubarak ("He has a tremendous amount of wisdom, but although a serious man, he also had a lighter side") is well below the bland, standard CIA writings on these subjects: His account of the nature and evolution of Islamic radicalism takes up less than a page in a 549-page book. Yet some of America's intelligence relationships ought to become subjects of open, vigorous debate since they directly affect national security. If the Democrats want to have a debate about rendition, they should openly question the nature and depth of CIA liaison work.
Still, there is no reason to believe that Hillary Clinton wouldn't throw more cash at the CIA, either, and probably pump up liaison work. It's the easy, quick thing to do. The argument that money spent on intelligence is a pittance compared with money saved on defense is appealing to everyone, but especially to those who'd rather spend as little as possible on the military. Good intelligence, if left politically untwisted, is supposed to save us from bad wars, and much of the current Democratic critique of the Iraq war hinges on this view.
Under the Democrats, and perhaps under certain Republicans--Mitt Romney seems seriously enamored of the idea that the Clandestine Service is malnourished--the CIA is likely to grow even bigger than Tenet envisioned, and Tenet's plans had the Clandestine Service back up to Cold War levels. In an ironic twist, the intelligence contretemps surrounding the Iraq war has made Democrats more reliable supporters of the CIA than Republicans.
As an institution, the CIA has certainly tried through leaks to walk away from its formative and approving role in rendition and the aggressive interrogation of suspected terrorists. The odds are excellent that senior operational personnel were as responsible as anyone in Dick Cheney's office in devising the most controversial aspects of America's response to 9/11. Tenet does not talk about this, but you can infer from his defense of the practices that the Clandestine Service (and probably Tenet himself) were instrumental, as they were in quickly offering a blueprint for a CIA/Special Forces incursion into Afghanistan, and in putting forth the manner and methods used to prosecute the intelligence war against al Qaeda.
We're now beginning to hear stories of senior officers retiring because of their opposition to the "illegal" activities of the Bush administration since 9/11. Buyer be warned: Case officers in general, and operatives raised in the Near East Division in particular, are not tender-hearted. They would probably much prefer to have foreigners aggressively interrogate terrorist suspects than do it themselves, but few harbor doubts about the occasional utility of rough questioning. That is one big, unspoken reason why liaison relationships with Middle Eastern regimes have grown so enormously since Islamic terrorism started targeting the United States.
If there is any real damaging politics going on at the CIA, it is here: Agency personnel, good bureaucrats that they are, don't like to be on the losing side. Since late 2003, the CIA had known that Iraq was going south: This didn't take great perceptive powers or access to classified information; officers just needed to be free from the authority of Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever loyalty the CIA as an institution may have to President Bush is countered by the institution's stronger desire to survive the Iraq war, and the dark sides of the war on terror, unscathed.
The CIA has been wrongly attacked over the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq. Without numerous deep, verifiable penetrations into Saddam Hussein's inner circle, CIA analysts could not have known that Saddam had changed gears on WMD development. We know for a fact that many of Saddam's senior officials thought he still had WMD stockpiles in March 2003. Totalitarian regimes are the hardest targets--"walk-ins," volunteers, are the only way you strike gold with them--and we did not have these kind of agents against Saddam Hussein.
Take away the disputed language in the intelligence estimate, take away any allusion that any senior official may have made to an Iraqi-delivered "mushroom cloud," take away Joe Wilson IV and Niger, take away any errant Iraqi information, take away the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, and the Senate ballot authorizing the war would not have changed by a single vote. We would still have had the powerful arguments put forth by the former Clinton official Kenneth Pollack in The Threatening Storm, without doubt a vastly more influential work than anything Ahmad Chalabi ever whispered into Dick Cheney's ear.
The most honest response to the intelligence estimate came initially from Hillary Clinton. She didn't read it before voting in favor of the war. She didn't need to. Over the years she and her husband had, no doubt, thoroughly discussed the evidence as we knew it. Like the larger issue of Saddam's bellicose appetite, it was damning. So it is embarrassing to see George Tenet try, ex post facto, to rework the language of the intelligence estimate so that more doubt is expressed. It has been similarly disheartening to see senior administration officials casting blame on the "slam-dunk" CIA director and his agency. It didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now--except in how the affair has spooked and hyperpoliticized the CIA.
The Central Intelligence Agency has many problems, a number of which George Tenet compounded. It did not need to add poor political judgment. Once political leaking becomes routine, it's hard to break the habit, no matter who is in the White House.
So it's difficult to conceive of Langley's army of case officers doing all that much in the fight against Islamic extremism and the war in Iraq, or against Iran's nuclear-weapons program, or against China, where Langley has long had problems. At the Center of the Storm provides a good guide to why the CIA, when it comes to espionage and covert action, is little changed since 9/11. If there is any truth to the Democratic charge that the United States is no more safe today than before 9/11, it is in part because the CIA, the lead agency in counterterrorism, has failed to adapt to the post-9/11 world. Even before then, George Tenet put his money on liaison relationships with Middle Eastern autocracies as the best means to save us from attack. Since there is so little else at Langley to fall back on, let us hope that this time around he is right.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Iran, and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, have been actively involved in supporting Shia militias and encouraging sectarian violence in Iraq since the invasion of 2003-and Iranian planning and preparation for that effort began as early as 2002. The precise purposes of this support are unclear and may have changed over time. But one thing is very clear: Iran has consistently supplied weapons, its own advisors, and Lebanese Hezbollah advisors to multiple resistance groups in Iraq, both Sunni and Shia, and has supported these groups as they have targeted Sunni Arabs, Coalition forces, Iraqi Security Forces, and the Iraqi Government itself. Their infl uence runs from Kurdistan to Basrah, and Coalition sources report that by August 2007, Iranian-backed insurgents accounted for roughly half the attacks on Coalition forces, a dramatic change from previous periods that had seen the overwhelming majority of attacks coming from the Sunni Arab insurgency and al Qaeda.
The Coalition has stepped-up its efforts to combat Iranian intervention in Iraq in recent months both because the Iranians have increased their support for violence in Iraq since the start of the surge and because Coalition successes against al Qaeda in Iraq and the larger Sunni Arab insurgency have permitted the re-allocation of resources and effort against a problem that has plagued attempts to establish a stable government in Iraq from the outset. With those problems increasingly under control, Iranian intervention is the next major problem the Coalition must tackle.
Editor's note: The Iraq Report is a regular feature at www.weeklystandard.com and offers detailed reportingand analysis of ongoing Coalition military operations both in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. To read the full report in pdf click here or on the image below.
Previous Iraq Reports:
Iraq Report I: From "New Way Forward" to New Commander, March 1, 2007
Iraq Report II: The Baghdad Security Plan begins., March 15, 2007
Iraq Report III: The Anbar Awakening., April 5, 2007
Iraq Report IV: The Battle for Diyala, May 7,2007
Iraq Report V: The Real Surge, July 6, 2007
...How serious is the threat? U.S. intelligence officials believe a resurgent Al-Qaeda may have people in the U.S. engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S. The lack of precise tactical detail is perhaps the reason why Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he had a "gut feeling" recently, but did not adjust the threat level. On top of that, one of the nation's top counter terrorism officials puts this all into context.
Ret. Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, the Head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, told Newsweek magazine, another attack on America is "inevitable".
"We have very strong indicators that al-Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to [try to] attack, and we are pretty sure about that. We know some of the precursors ... they would like to come West, and they would like to come as far West as they can," he says.
It's not just his words that bring this home. The fact that he said anything at all is telling, because he's the E.F. Hutton of the intelligence community.
He never talks just to hear himself.
Dave Sandford/Getty Images
Joba Chamberlain has 17 strikeouts and has allowed just four hits in 10 innings pitched thus far for the Yankees.
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The new Terrorist Threat Integration Center at an undisclosed location in the northen Virginia suburbs on Washington, Sept. 21, 2004. While most intelligence agencies look more drab than James Bond, the anti-terror center has adopted the spy agency look. Each office is essentially a vault, with a coded lock to get in. The external windows are bullet- and blast-proof, cast to standards set after the Oklahoma City bombing. (AP Photo Lawrence Jackson)
Aug. 27, 2007 - Al Qaeda has an active plot to hit the West. The United States knows about it but doesn’t have enough tactical detail to issue a precise warning or raise the threat level, says Vice Admiral (ret.) John Scott Redd, who heads the government’s National Counterterrorism Center. In an interview at his headquarters near Washington, D.C., Redd told Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball and Jeffrey Bartholet that the country is better prepared than ever to counter such threats. But he also believes another successful terror attack on the U.S. homeland is inevitable.
Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: People in various agencies have said that since Tora Bora in 2001, they at no time have had even 50-percent confidence that they knew where Osama bin Laden was on any particular day, and therefore they have been unable to mount any operations to go get him. Is that wrong?Why do people believe bin Laden’s still alive?
Well, I guess the question is, why do you believe he’s dead? I think we’re into the longest period we’ve gone without hearing from him, but we’ve done this before. Back in ’05, I think [the length of time we didn’t hear from bin Laden] may have been a week shorter than [the period of his silence] now. So, yeah, we haven’t heard from him [since spring 2006]. People are starting to say, “He’s dead. He’s dead.” Quite frankly, we think that if he had died it would have become known. It would be very hard to keep that from leaking out.
Also, there are periodic rumors about him suffering from this disease or that disease, needing dialysis, having to get some exotic drug. Is any of that credible?
The short answer is, we don’t know. There are those sporadic reports indicating illness, indicating incapacitation, but nothing firm.
Tim Sloan / AFP-Getty ImagesBush visits the National Counterterrorism Center, flanked by Redd and CIA Director Michael Hayden
Ayman al-Zawahiri seems to have much more freedom of expression, as it were, which implies more freedom of movement. His tapes now are reasonably well produced.
We saw almost a 300-percent increase in media stuff in 2006 out of all of Al Qaeda, and I think this year we are heading toward that mark already, or getting ahead of that. They are becoming more sophisticated. They are not relying on Al Jazeera or you folks to get the message out. They are using the Internet. They’ve got a fairly well-oiled, if you will, media group. They are doing things like going after a different audience or going after a larger audience, by using subtitles.
English-language…
German, Italian, a number of different things. So they have become more sophisticated.
So they actually upload this stuff on the Internet directly?
Well, Ayman al-Zawahiri doesn’t sit there and say, “Press and upload.”…But you know, what you see is sort of a desire to put themselves on the map. So Zawahiri, I think he had 15 videos last year—and he’s almost there [this year]. He’ll certainly get there this year, if not more, but you’re also seeing a broader spectrum of [Qaeda] people talking about subjects. To be crass about it, it kind of reminds me of a CEO in a start-up company in Silicon Valley. What do you want to do? You want your name out there. So you put out press releases. It helps your funding base—in that case, capitalists, in this case, people who fund Al Qaeda.
While we’re on this topic, what can you tell us about Pakistan’s release of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, who allegedly was a top Al Qaeda communications and computer guy and is now roaming free?
Obviously, we’re not exactly happy about that. We have a legal system, and the Pakistanis have a legal system, which was designed for a different era. I won’t go into their legal system because I am not an expert on it, but the [Pakistani] Supreme Court said, “You’ve got to release this guy,” and, you know, he’s out for a variety of reasons.
What does the progression of terror cases in Britain tell you? Two years ago terrorists actually managed to kill some people. This year it’s these two clowns in Glasgow. They were doctors and engineers who seemed to have some connection to Pakistan and/or Iraq, yet they couldn’t build a bomb. What does this tell you about the evolution of the organization, the evolution of the front-line terrorists?
It shows you the advantage of having a safe haven—a place where you can take someone and not just say, “Here is the formula. Godspeed and go do something,” but rather, “Let’s [try] it. Let’s make it. Let’s see it go bang.”
Iraq is a giant university for bombmakers.
But, see, they don’t have to [make] it there. They just buy the explosives. It’s HBX or C4. There’s so much explosive material around there.
But if they wanted to teach people, they certainly could.
But you don’t have to make C4. You put a detonator in it with a 99-percent likelihood that sucker is going to go off. And they are very good at that.
Is there evidence, though, that they are training people in Iraq to do operations abroad?
AQI has done—certainly under Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi—“external operations” [in Jordan]. I am not going to comment on the most recent U.K. thing and whether there was a connection.
The Europeans have been concerned about traffic between Iraq and Europe.
There’s always a concern. Frankly, with what is going on inside Iraq right now, it is probably fair to say that Abu Ayyub al-Masri [the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq] pretty much has his hands full, although not completely.
Tell us about the threat that emerged earlier this year.
We’ve got this intelligence threat; we’re pretty certain we know what’s going on. We don’t have all the tactical details about it, [but] in some ways it’s not unlike the U.K. aviation threat last year. So we know there is a threat out there. The question is, what do we do about it? And the response was, we stood up an interagency task force under NCTC leadership. So you have all the players you would expect: FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA, DoD, the operators—the military side comes into that—participating in an integrated plan, but integrated in a much more granular and tactical way than we’ve ever done before. This is my 40th year in government service, 36 in uniform and almost four as a civilian. This is revolutionary stuff, and it is affecting the way we do business.
Earlier this summer, there was talk that people were picking up chatter that reminded them of the summer before 9/11. The Germans basically said this is like pre-9/11. They said, “We are very worried.” What do you make of this?
We have very strong indicators that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to [try to] attack, and we are pretty sure about that. We know some of the precursors from—
Attack Europe?
Well, they would like to come West, and they would like to come as far West as they can. What we don’t know is…if it’s going to be Mark Hosenball, and he’s coming in on Flight 727 out of Karachi, he’s stopping in Frankfurt, and he’s coming on through with his European Union passport, and he’s coming into New York, and he’s going to do something. I mean, we don’t have that kind of tactical detail. What we do have, though, is a couple of threads that indicate, you know, some very tactical stuff, and that's what—you know, that’s what you’re seeing bits and pieces of, and I really can’t go much more into it.
But this did not affect our threat level. We didn’t change our code.
We’re pretty high-threat right now. Until you know something that is going to make a difference, you know, you don’t necessarily change the threat level. What that does is really stir a lot of people up and get them ticked off, but it probably doesn’t accomplish very much.
And you don’t as of today see any particular reduction in that threat?
It’s still there. It’s very serious, you know, and we’re watching it. We’re learning more all the time, but it’s still a very serious threat.
Last thing: Are we winning or losing the war on terrorism?
This is a long war. People say, “What is this like?” I say it’s like the cold war in only two respects. Number one, there is a strong ideological content to it. Number two, it is going to be a long war. I’ll be dead before this one is over. We will probably lose a battle or two along the way. We have to prepare for that. Statistically, you can’t bat 1.000 forever, but we haven’t been hit for six years, [which is] no accident.
I will tell you this: We are better prepared today for the war on terror than at any time in our history. We have done an incredible amount of things since 9/11, across the board. Intelligence is better. They are sharing it better. We are taking the terrorists down. We are working with the allies very carefully. We are doing the strategic operational planning, going after every element in the terrorist life cycle. So we have come a long way. But these guys are smart. They are determined. They are patient. So over time we are going to lose a battle or two. We are going to get hit again, you know, but you’ve got to have the stick-to-itiveness or persistence to outlast it.
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Reggae band UB40 -- in 1987, at left and more recently, above -- is releasing an album that's financed by Ingenious Media, a boutique investment bank.
China’s pollution problem, like the speed and scale of its rise as an economic power, has shattered all precedents.
China’s industrial growth depends on coal, which is plentiful but polluting, from strip mines like this one in Shenmu, Shaanxi Province.
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