There are a few other interesting things that I’ve been following. One of them being the recent actions of US military contractors in Iraq who, in two separate instances last week, opened fire in Baghdad leading to standoffs between Iraqi Security forces and the contractors themselves (which were from Blackwater Security). Chris Hedges of the Philadelphia Inquirer penned a great piece about contractors in Iraq in the paper’s Sunday edition entitled What if our mercenaries turn on us?. It’s certainly worth a look. My favourite quote from the article has to be…

“We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of defense,” said House defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D., Pa.). “How in the hell do you justify that?”

Another story that I’ve been following has to do with the plot uncovered to blow up JFK Airport. Despite the hysteria caused by the uncovering of this plot, there are crucial aspects of it that some in the media are attempting to point out. The first is that the plotters themselves were ‘more talk than action’, a point disregarded, of course, by those claiming that had the plot been carried out it would had led to “unfathomable damage, deaths and destruction”. The plotters were, of course, linked to radical Islamic groups, such as the one that attempted to engineer a coup attempt in Trinidad and Tobago. But according to the authorities, the plotters were never successful at securing the support of the group and thus discussed looking at grouos overseas for funding, as they had no money.

Interestingly, according to experts, the plot, which was immediately characterized as being potentially cataclysmic, was somewhat overblown…

“The premise is right out of a disaster movie: Ignite the massive fuel tanks required to keep an international airport up and running each day, stand back, and watch a chain reaction of explosions throughout the labyrinth of pipelines running underneath the tarmac.

But aviation experts cautioned Saturday that the alleged plot targeting John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York would have faced many hurdles, not least of which is the fact that jet fuel does not easily explode.

“The level of catastrophe that may be created is much more limited than most people would expect,” said Rafi Ron, former head of security at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. “The fuel that we are talking about is mostly jet fuel, which, unlike the gasoline most people put into their cars, is not that susceptible to explosion.”

That difficulty apparently concerned one of the alleged plotters — an engineer who, federal authorities said in their complaint, explained to his associates that the tanks at JFK would probably require two explosions to provide enough oxygen to ignite the fuel.

But even then, aviation security experts said, fire would not have spread through the pressurized pipelines that bring fuel out to airplanes parked at gates.

“The probability that an explosion would travel through the pipeline and destroy targets along the tarmac is almost nil,” said Ron, now president of New Age Security Solutions in Rockville, Md. “The exception would be pipelines that are not in use and contain vapor.”

Jet fuel is similar to kerosene and, unlike gasoline, requires very high temperatures to burn. Unless it is in vapor or mist form — which can occur in a plane crash — jet fuel does not explode. Additives raise the flashpoint of jet fuel, further reducing the likelihood that it will burn, experts said.”

Despite this reality, what has been overlooked is the fact that the plotters themselves obviously lacked the knowledge to properly understand this reality. That said, how serious of a threat was it? I’ll not, nor ever, argue that the intent was there, but that intent must be examined. Was this a plot engineered by foreign terrorists? No, it was not. It was one dreamed up by, among others, a retired 63 year old airport cargo worker with no money and no training in such activities, and certainly not provided him by any terrorist organization. One of the individuals involved also expressed that the attack not result in the taking of life.

The interesting thing about this plot is that it does not involve principles with ties to know groups elsewhere. That they sought assistance and, in the only noted case where contact was made, or at least that has been reported, their overtures were spurned. It shows that this was a case of domestic criminality, one most likely fostered by events abroad and disillusionment, not the direct influence of foreign terrorist organizations looking to strike within the United States. And that, amongst all of the fear mongering, is something that must not be overlooked.

The last story of interest has to do with a CIA analysis in 2002 that, not surprisingly, predicted a variety of “worst case scenarios”, among them “anarchy in Iraq” and “global apathy towards the United States”. From The Washington Post…

“On Aug. 13, 2002, the CIA completed a classified, six-page intelligence analysis that described the worst scenarios that could arise after a U.S.-led removal of Saddam Hussein: anarchy and territorial breakup in Iraq, a surge of global terrorism, and a deepening of Islamic antipathy toward the United States.

Titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq,” the paper, written seven months before the war began, also speculated about al-Qaeda operatives taking “advantage of a destabilized Iraq to establish secure safe havens from which they can continue their operations,” according to a report about prewar intelligence recently released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The report said the CIA paper also cautioned about outcomes such as declining European confidence in U.S. leadership, Hussein’s survival and retreat with regime loyalists, Iran working to install a friendly regime “tolerant of Iranian policies,” Afghanistan tipping into civil strife because U.S. forces were not replaced by United Nations peacekeepers and troops from other countries, and violent demonstrations in Pakistan because of its support of Washington.

Before the war, while the Bush administration was putting a spotlight on the CIA’s intelligence on Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be wrong, it either buried or ignored the agency’s more accurate assessments of the problems that could emerge in the aftermath of regime change in Iraq, the Senate report said.

At the time the “Perfect Storm” report was finished, the administration was already heading toward the decision to invade. A CIA assessment completed on Aug. 8, 2002, and also sent to the White House, found that while “on the surface, Iraq currently appears to lack both the socio-economic and politico-cultural prerequisites that political scientists generally regard as necessary to nurture democracy . . . we believe that Iraq has several advantages that, if buttressed by the West, could foster democracy in post-Saddam Iraq.”

It warned, however, that chances of even partial success would require “long-term, active U.S./Western military, political and economic involvement.”

On Aug. 14, 2002, a day after the “Perfect Storm” paper was sent to the White House, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice held a meeting of the national security team to draft a presidential directive titled “Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy,” according to the book “Plan of Attack” by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. It talked of freeing Iraq and preventing it from “breaking out of containment and becoming a more dangerous threat to the region and beyond.”

The directive also spoke of cutting “Iraq’s links to and sponsorship of international terrorism,” liberating the Iraqi people and assisting them “in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy.”

The CIA “Perfect Storm” paper, carrying a series of warnings about how such goals might go seriously awry, had been requested in the summer of 2002, along with others on Iraq, by then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. But, according to then-CIA director George J. Tenet, it was relegated to the back of a thick briefing book handed out to President Bush’s national security team for a meeting on Sept. 7, 2002, at Camp David, where the Iraq war was Topic A.

One paper in the front part of the briefing book “listed things that would be achieved by removing Saddam — freeing the Iraqi people, eliminating WMD, ending threats to Iraq’s neighbors, and the like,” Tenet writes in his book, “At the Center of the Storm.” Another paper in the middle of the briefing materials, Tenet writes, talked generally about how the United States would deal with post-Hussein Iraq, including a plan to retain but reform of much of the government bureaucracy.

In the “Perfect Storm” paper, CIA analysts offered what they described as “near-term tactical moves” that the administration could make to minimize the worst-case scenarios that the report presented. Among them were taking “concrete diplomatic steps toward Arab-Israeli peace” and providing “back-channel assurances to Tehran on the duration and extent of U.S. force deployments” — actions that were not taken.

Tenet concedes that he did not press the “Perfect Storm” worst-case analyses at meetings. “There was, in fact, no screaming, no table-pounding,” he writes. “We had no way of knowing then how the situation on the ground in Iraq would evolve.”

Nor, he adds, was the CIA privy to subsequent administration actions in Iraq “that would help make many of these worst-case scenarios almost inevitable.”