Attacks on US leaders stir fears over moles

[JohnyCanuck]

Pentagon officials have expressed concern that insurgents may be staging attacks in Iraq based on inside information about US operations after recent strikes against three prominent Americans.

<snip>

A defence analyst, Charles Pena, of the Cato Institute, said it was disturbing how many times insurgents had been able to target prominent Americans.

"That's something you cannot do that many times, I would argue, simply through sheer luck and coincidence. They have to be getting some kind of information," Mr Pena said.

"I hate to say this, but it's only a question of time before a high-ranking and high-profile figure gets nailed by the insurgents.

www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/13/1076548226814.html

Now if Rummy got bumped off by the insurgents on a visit to Iraq, should that be considered just another sign of the great progress being made by the occupation forces?

[Art_from_Ark]

1. Either that, or these guys stand out in a crowd

It's kind of hard to be inconspicuous when you don't look, act, or talk like the local people

[JohnyCanuck]

2. It's more than just looking different.

It appears from what the article is saying is that the authorities are concerned that insurgents are getting inside info on the movements of prominent US personel within Iraq so that they can be in a position to launch an attack. From what the article claims the number of these types of attacks are high enough that it looks like more than just coinicidence is involved.

A defence analyst, Charles Pena, of the Cato Institute, said it was disturbing how many times insurgents had been able to target prominent Americans.

"That's something you cannot do that many times, I would argue, simply through sheer luck and coincidence. They have to be getting some kind of information," Mr Pena said.

[Art_from_Ark]

3. Think of it this way

These guys stand out in a crowd. They are instantly recognizable as Westerners and are thus, assumably, immediately targeted. They are birds in a gilded cage.

[JohnyCanuck]

4. Pentagon officials apparently aren't quite so sure.

Sure US personnel are noticeably different than Iraqis, but, assuming the author of the article was not trying to mislead anyone, Pentagon officials are still concerned that the rate of attacks on high ranking personnel tends to indicate that the Iraqi insurgents might be getting insider information on the movements of these same high ranking personnel.

Presumably they have some rough idea at the rate at which lower ranking US personnel come under attack and the type of attacks they are usually subjected to in the performance of their regular activities. I imagine it's more than just the frequency of the attacks that's leading them to consider that information might be leaking out. It's probably likely that they are also comparing things like the degree of planning that went into these attacks and the expertise and skill level of the attackers involved. Was the attacker an Iraqi farmer equipped with an RPG taking a pot shot at a passing hummer after becoming pissed off at US troops for breaking down his door at 3:00am and pinning him down on the floor with a boot on his neck, or did the attackers show signs in their use of weapons and tactics of perhaps having Iraqi army special forces type training and the ability to use somewhat more sophisticated plans of attack.

Of course it appears that it is still a judgment call, as there has yet to be any firm proof offered (or publicly acknowledged) of information leaks, but the officials expressing concern are the ones supposedly with expertise in this area and are presumably either inside Iraq dealing with the situation at first hand or obtaining information from military and intelligence sources within Iraq and using that information to try and understand what's going on.

[teryang]

5. I think you would be hard pressed

...to find Iraqis who didn't have a grudge against Americans at this point. Could you put together a team of Iraqis in your colonial administration office which didn't include a least one person who hadn't experienced a death in the family or some privation over the last twelve years which wasn't arguably attributable to American policies or actions?

[bemildred]

6. Today's "No shit Sherlock" award. nt

[Peregrine]

7. It doesn't take a genius

to know when security is tightened at Bagdad International, someone important is about to arrive. Nor is it difficult to follow a freeking motorcade.

[JohnyCanuck]

8. Tell it to the Pentagon. They're the ones expressing concern.

You guys who seem to want to dismiss out of hand there might be a possiblility the Iraqis are somehow getting hold of inside info on US personnel movements remind me of the Germans high command in WWII. The Germans were so convinced of their ingenuity and the superior technology of their enigma encryption machine that they ignored the evidence in front of them and refused to consider the possibility that the allies had broken the codes and were reading their signals on a regular basis. It seldom pays to underestimate your enemy.

[Vitruvius]

9. In addition, Nazi Germany was RIDDLED with spies;

the spies were a.) greedy crooks spawned by the greedy & crooked Nazi system -- who were willing to take money from the Allied intel services, and b.) a few Germans who were disgusted with the Nazi wars-of-aggression.

A greedy, crooked system that wages wars-of-aggression, e.g. for oil (as in the Nazi invasion of Russia and the U.S. invasion of Iraq) may well be riddled with spies.

Immoral systems beget immoral people, some of them spies.


P.S: As for the German Enigma encryption machine, the Nazi bureaucracy treated the question of whether the Allies could crack it as a bureaucratic turf war, rather than as an objective question to be dealt with on the basis of the facts. And the bureaucrats behind the the "Enigma" machine won -- on purely bureaucratic grounds -- and the official position of the Nazi bureaucracy thru the end of WWII was that the machines were unbreakable. Lucky for us.

Incidentally, the British code crackers (Bletchley Park) had to break the Enigma machines anew every day, because the Nazis changed the keys every day. To do so, Bletchley Park relied upon phrases that they knew would appear in many of the messages; each decryption machine searched the Enigma keyspace and scanned over intercepted messages until the chosen phrase popped out en clair, which meant that the day's key had been found. Almost half the breaks were on the phrase "Heil Hitler" -- because no Nazi dared leave it out.

So every time I see "Heil Hitler", I smile -- for that foul phrase was a tremendous help in breaking the WWII German command cipher and winning the war.