from the Centre For American
Progress ….. 

‘Tomorrow, the House of
Representatives will spend the day debating
the Iraq war. Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), however, appears
unwilling to address the administration's strategy in Iraq directly. Instead,
Boehner has crafted a resolution that focuses on the "war on terror"
— Iraq
isn't even mentioned until the eighth paragraph. But in attempting to
divert the debate, Boehner stumbled into the real issue. The Iraq war is
undermining the ability of the United States to defeat international
terrorists. In a new survey released today, the Center for American Progress
and Foreign Policy magazine polled more than 100
of America’s top foreign-policy experts, conservatives and liberals; 84
percent said America was not winning the "war on terror." The
message is clear: to effectively address the threat of international
terrorists, America must change course in Iraq. The Center for American
Progress has
a plan. 

The data tells the story of the current war on terror. The pessimism of
the experts surveyed is backed up by empirical data. Using the Bush
administration's own statistics, the problem of international terrorism is
worse now than it was in 2001. According to State Department data, the
number of significant international terrorist attacks tripled to 650 in 2004.
(The 175 international terrorist attacks in 2003 was itself a 20-year high.)
Another Bush administration agency, the National Counterterrorism Threat
Center, f ound that 3,192
incidents of international terrorism occurred last year, resulting in the
"deaths, injury or kidnapping of almost 28,500 people." While the
threat of international terrorism is diffuse, our military resources are concentrated
in Iraq.

A lesson can be
learned from the current mess in Afghanistan. The consequences of the
administration's focus on Iraq, instead of the broader threat of terrorism, is
on display in Afghanistan. In The New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid
describes a resurgent Taliban: "As
recently as a year ago, the main Taliban groups were composed of a few dozen
fighters; now each group includes hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with
motorbikes, cars, and horses. … There have been forty suicide bombings
during the past nine months, compared to five in the preceding five
years." The problem, according to the Washington Post's William M.
Arkin, is that, "The Bush administration naturally searched for an al
Qaeda-Iraq connection to match its flawed assumption about its roots. And though
it paid lip service to nation building, the task was seen as secondary to the
big war."

Redeployment of
American troops will define success in Iraq. Boehner's resolution frames redeployment
as a defeat in the war on terrorism. Not so. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT)
explains, "Getting
out of Iraq will define success in Iraq." Iraqis, including the new
prime minister, agree and are saying that Americans must begin to leave.
Nearly nine
in 10 Iraqis approve a timeline for U.S. withdrawal (PDF), and 70 percent
of the Iraqi public supports the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces by the end of
2007. Once redeployment is complete, we will be able to refocus our military
and strategic resources to combat terrorism effectively.’

‘Washington is failing to make progress in the global war
on terror and the next 9/11-style attack is not a question of if, but when.
That is the scathing conclusion of a survey of 100 leading American
foreign-policy analysts.  

In its first "Terrorism Index,"
released yesterday, the influential journal Foreign Policy found
surprising consensus among the bipartisan experts.  

Some 86 per cent of them said the world has
grown more, not less, dangerous, despite President George W. Bush's claims that
the U.S. is winning the war on terror.

The main reasons for the decline in security,
they said, were the war in Iraq, the detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo
Bay, U.S. policy towards Iran and U.S. energy policy.  

The survey's participants included an ex-secretary
of state and former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and National
Security Agency, along with prominent members of the U.S. foreign-policy
establishment.  

The majority served in previous administrations or in senior military
ranks.’ 

War
On Terror Called Failure

‘The Bush administration finally
took action against alleged terrorists living in plain sight in Miami, but they
weren't the right-wing Cuban terrorists implicated in actual acts of terror,
such as blowing a civilian Cuban airliner out of the sky. They were seven young
black men whose crime was more "aspirational than operational," the
FBI said.

As media fanfare over the arrests
made the seven young men, many sporting dreadlocks, the new face of the
terrorist enemy in America, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conceded that the
men had no weapons or explosives and represented "no immediate
threat." 

But Gonzales warned that these
kinds of homegrown terrorists "may prove to be as dangerous as groups like
al-Qaeda." [NYT, June 24, 2006]

For longtime observers of
political terrorism in South Florida, the aggressive reaction to what may have
been the Miami group's loose talk about violence, possibly spurred by an FBI
informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative, stands in marked contrast to the US
government's see-no-evil approach to notorious Cuban terrorists who have lived
openly in Miami for decades. 

For instance, the Bush
administration took no action in early April 2006, when a Spanish-language
Miami television station interviewed Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who offered
a detailed justification for the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines
flight that killed 73 people, including the young members of the Cuban national
fencing team.

Bosch refused to admit guilt, but
his chilling defense of the bombing - and the strong evidence that has swirled
around his role - left little doubt of his complicity, even as he lives in
Miami as a free man, protected both in the past and present by the Bush
family.’ 

Terrorists in Miami, Oh
My!

‘An Italian court has requested the extradition of 26 CIA agents for their alleged role in the abduction of a Egyptian Muslim cleric in 2003, the Repubblica newspaper reported on Friday. The court in Milan, which is leading the investigation, sent an extradition request to the public prosecutor’s office which would then pass it to Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, the daily said. Mastella should then in turn send it to his US counterpart. 

There was no comment from the Milan court. The case threatens to further sour relations between Italy and the United States after the decision by Romano Prodi’s left-wing government to withdraw Italy’s troops from Iraq. Milan’s public prosecutor had already issued extradition requests for 22 of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents, but they were blocked by the justice ministry of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a close ally of US President George W. Bush.

In February 2003, the former imam, or prayer leader, Osama Mustafa Hassan, an Egyptian also known as Abu Omar and a terror suspect, was abducted in Milan by CIA agents and taken to Egypt. Omar, who was living in asylum in Italy at the time, was allegedly taken to a nearby US air base for interrogation and later transferred via Germany to Egypt, where he is still in prison. He claims to have been tortured in Egypt.

Under Italian law, such an abduction is illegal and anyone involved could face a jail sentence.

The case has rocked the Italian military intelligence service (Sismi), which denied knowledge of the abduction. An investigation has revealed that at least some members of Sismi took part in the operation.

Italian Court Demands CIA Extraditions