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Saturday's Washington Post had an article which quotes the usual unnamed intelligence sources saying that they are surprised to discover that al Qaeda has "reconstituted" itself. This surprise derives from, inter alia, the computer data found recently in Pakistan, intelligence sources (both ours and friends'), and simply looking at the range of activities in which the terrorists engage. This surprise is, as usual, unsettling, since it has been quite clear for some time now that al Qaeda and the other major terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jamaa, etc. — are all working together, and have been ever since...

Last week's 9/11 Commission report had a considerable amount of new news about the connections between al-Qaeda and Iran. Earlier leaks had flagged the discovery that Iranian border guards had assisted at least eight of the 9/11 terrorists as they crossed Iran on their suicidal mission; the report added the detail that their passports were not stamped. It is possible this was an oversight, or that the guards were bribed. Such things happen. But it's more likely that there was active co-operation, especially since it turns out that al-Qaeda personnel were trained by Iranians and Iranian surrogates, first in Iran...

The 9/11 Vision - Better, but not there yet National Review Michael Ledeen Jul 23, 2004 Well, it's better than the Intelligence Committee thing, anyway. You can actually read this one, sometimes with pleasure, which is a rarity for documents of the genre. And it's got lots of information, some of which is a mystery. To start with, this commission is explicit about Iran's ongoing intimate relationship with al Qaeda. We know — and the report confirms — that Iran was up to its neck in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Saudi Arabia, and the report cryptically adds...

The organizers of the Council on Foreign Relations special task force to promote the appeasement of Iran must be cursing their uncommonly bad luck. They scheduled a meeting in Washington today to call for increasing normalization of relations between the United States and Iran. With a fine eye for dark comedy, the Council persuaded two relics of the catastrophic Carter years to appear: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates. The principal advocate of the policy, however, is undoubtedly the president of the Council, Richard Haas, who has long seen rapprochement with the mullahs as an "historic opportunity" for the United...

A Proper Policy The Jerusalem Post Michael Ledeen July 02, 2004 Properly understood, the recent little contretemps between Iran and Great Britain tells us a lot, both about Iran's regional strategy and Great Britain's ongoing appeasement of the mullahs. There was considerable befuddlement among the chattering classes when the Iranians seized some British patrol boats (originally misidentified as "warships") and arrested some sailors and officers in the Shatt al-Arab waterway that divides Iran and Iraq. After all, that would seem to constitute a causus belli, and one wouldn't think that the Iranian regime was looking for a fight with the...

May 28, 2004, 9:20 a.m. The Chalabi Story Intelligence failure in CYA mode. We're going to hear a lot about Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress (which he heads), and his supporters (soon to be labeled "dupes" and "fools" if not something far worse) in Washington. The FBI is said (by, among others, the notorious liar Sidney Blumenthal, who is now sliming away for Salon and the Guardian) to have opened an investigation into the source(s) of the "leak" of "highly classified information" from somebody to Chalabi. From there it is said to have arrived in the hands of the...

The Agency Rides Again - Angleton on Chalabi Michael Ledeen/NRO Like everyone else, I've been reading the stories about my friend Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, and the accusations that he's an Iranian spy. I don't believe it, but before launching a tirade against the misnamed Central Intelligence Agency I thought I'd better check with the greatest unliving expert on intelligence, the late James Jesus Angleton. He was the longtime chief of CIA counterintelligence, and knew everything there was to know about spying, so I dusted off the ouija board and got him on the second try. JJA:...

Kristof's Iran National Review Online Michael Ledeen May 17, 2004 New York Times columnist ignores the people’s plight. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has been to Iran for a few days, and he's full of deep thoughts about it. But, in keeping with the ideology of his social set, they are his thoughts, not those of the Iranian people. To be sure, he quotes Iranians — he's astonished to discover that they do not fear being named — including some senior ayatollahs, to demonstrate the contempt of the people for the regime. Ayatollah Taheri calls the ruling mullahs...

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?" It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them." The fascists believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust race (or nation), would easily dominate us and impose their will on us. The terror...

<p>Much is being made about the irony of an Iranian envoy arriving in Iraq to help negotiate a solution to the U.S. standoff with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. How could we allow a charter member of President Bush's "Axis of Evil" to negotiate a "peace" with the thuggish Sadr and his band of fanatical militants?</p>

From Tyranny to Freedom Democracy in Iraq has precedent. April 07, 2004 NRO Recent acts of barbarism against Coalition forces in Iraq have revived an old and enormously important debate: Are these terrorists the products of fanatic tyrannies, or are the tyrannies the logical expression of the true nature of the peoples of the region? This is not an academic exercise, for many argue that our foreign policy depends on the answer. If we believe that the barbarism is the result of the likes of Saddam Hussein and the Iranian mullahs, then the war against terrorism should concentrate on regime...

According to a usually reliable French investigator and author, Spanish authorities are now convinced that the Madrid massacre was organized by our old friend, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi has also been credited for being one of the major organizers of the terror war against the Coalition in Iraq, and was named by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation to the Security Council prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom as a key al Qaeda leader, with ties to the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. A busy and very wicked man, in short. As memories are short, let's review the bidding...

Drifting, Dangerously March 17, 2004 National Review Online/ Michael Ledeen We must support freedom. ROME, ITALY — There are two competing explanations for the Spanish vote on Sunday: Either the Spaniards were intimidated by the terrorists, or they punished Aznar for trying to trick them into thinking it was the Basques, when he had strong evidence that the jihadists were involved. I rather think it was the latter — it would be hard for me to think of Spaniards as easily intimidated — but whichever is correct, the political consequences are the same. The terror masters believe that they have...

Iraq's Terror Sources Reside Next Door March 03, 2004 The New York Sun Michael Ledeen What does the terrible slaughter in Karbala and Baghdad demonstrate? Just ask Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite religious leader: It shows that the Americans are unable to protect the faithful, to close the borders, to stop the terrorism. Or, you could ask the Iranian interior minister and the foreign minister, who for perhaps the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic were hard at work on one of the holiest days in the Shiite calendar. They, too, blamed America for the massacre...

March 02, 2004, 7:14 p.m. Listen to the Iranians, They Know Returning to a conversation. Monday night, following the gruesome massacres in Najaf and Baghdad at Shiite holy places, Iranians took to the streets all over the country: Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz above all. The demonstrations had a double-pronged message. First, that the people care more about freedom than about the celebration of Ashoura, the grave day of mourning for the murder of Hossein, the grandson of Mohammed, and dozens of his followers. And second, to accuse the regime of having orchestrated the slaughter in Najaf and Baghdad. The first...

The Iranian regime is in open battle with its own people. Iran is now racing, literally hell-bent toward two dramatic confrontations: one within the country, between forces of tyranny and forces of democracy and/or reform. The other rages outside the country, a desperate war against the United States, its Coalition allies, and the Iraqis who support us. Both derive from the fundamental weakness of the fundamentalist regime, which has lost the support of the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people, and is increasingly defining itself a pariah state because of its support for terror and its brazen pursuit of atomic...

So now comes David Kay, a good man, a person I like a lot, with a lot to say. He set out to find large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and didn't. He says there's evidence that some stuff may have gone to Syria, but nothing like the quantities he expected to find. He has no doubt that Saddam had — or rather had ordered, and was told he had — a full-blown WMD program. But there's no sign of it, at least so far as David Kay and his CIA minions could find. So what happened? David now...

The Seventh Level Americans appeasing evil.Support the movement at:ActivistChat.com and gotamullah.com!Sorry to say, I haven't reread Dante's "Inferno" for some years, but I still remember his description of a very low and extremely unpleasant level of hell that houses traitors. Surely abject appeasers of evil qualify for the same treatment, and we must note grimly that three prime candidates have recently come forward to swell the ranks of that overheated realm: Senator Joe Biden of Delaware (D.), Senator Arlen Specter (R.), of Pennsylvania, and Congressman Bob Ney of Nebraska (R.). All have undertaken to "improve relations" between the United States...

Now that Iran says it will allow outside experts to inspect its nuclear sites, it might behoove other governments to listen to the words of an expert inside Iran. In a public session of the Iranian Parliament on Nov. 24, Ahmad Shirzad, a deputy from the city of Isfahan, attacked the regime's nuclear policies, provoking a controversy that has not yet died down. Mr. Shirzad is no novice in these matters. The son of President Ali Khatami remarked once that "If there are three persons in Iran able to address atomic questions from a specialist point of view, Mr. Shirzad...

Now that Iran says it will allow outside experts to inspect its nuclear sites, it might behoove other governments to listen to the words of an expert inside Iran. In a public session of the Iranian Parliament on Nov. 24, Ahmad Shirzad, a deputy from the city of Isfahan, attacked the regime's nuclear policies, provoking a controversy that has not yet died down. Mr. Shirzad is no novice in these matters. The son of President Ali Khatami remarked once that "If there are three persons in Iran able to address atomic questions from a specialist point of view, Mr. Shirzad...