A US Army unit evidently captured this in-production insurgent video near Dulab, Iraq, and supplied the soundtrack and a different ending from the one originally intended.

5:52 video

CAUTION: A bit gory.

The latest report is that the US airstrike missed “three top al-Qaeda leaders” hiding in Somalia.

Earlier posting.

And apparently, when we do catch them, we’re still playing catch-and-release. It sounds like it was Hassan Abassi that Condeleezza Rice ordered released.

American officials say the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force is active in Iraq. A senior military official said last week that one of the Iranians seized in Baghdad late last month was the No. 3 Quds official. He said American forces uncovered maps of neighborhoods in Baghdad in which Sunnis could be evicted, and evidence of involvement in the war during the summer in Lebanon.

That Iranian official was ordered released, by Ms. Rice among others, after Iran claimed he had diplomatic status.

Iraqi Jihadi Iinsurgents released a video on Wednesday showing the preparation, and launching, of missiles containing chemical weapons. Story at MEMRI.

The Salahaldin Al-Ayoubi Brigades, the military wing of JAMI, Al Jabha Al-Islamiyya l’il-Muqawama Al-‘Iraqiyya, announced via Islamist websites that today, January 10, 2007, it had fired four missiles loaded with chemicals at a U.S. base near Samara, Iraq. The organization posted a film showing militants wearing gas masks and filling the missiles with a liquid which the organization claims are chemicals.

Hat tip to AJStrata.

Alan Peters tells us that Iran was really found with its hand in the cookie jar this time.

Reports from Tehran state that Iran’s top IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) strategist, Hassan Abbasi, was captured in the recent raid on the Islamic Iran’s office in Erbil, Iraq.

Referred to inside Islamic Iran as the Regime’s version of Kissinger, Abbasi works directly as special advisor for the dead or dying Supreme Ruler in Iran – Ali Khamenei.

His attitude to the main competitor for the Supreme Leadership position, Hashemi Rafsanjani, as the telephone report elaborated, is “like a knife and cheese”, meaning he hates Rafsanjani.

Abbasi has in the past indicated he has already chosen and set up attack capability on a large number of targets inside the USA and said the Islamic regime would wipe out the Western culture – as a whole – and replace it with Islam.

He also runs the “Freedom Organizations” an umbrella group, coordinating and networking every “anti-imperialism” terror group around the globe. Be it the IRA in Ireland or Japanese cults or Puerto Rican gangs in the USA. Anyone who is ready to disrupt their country and governments through acts of terrorism.

As the Islamic Regime’s top tactician and strategist, his being found and caught in Iraq comes as little or no surprise when reorganization of the jihadists in Iraq has to be done to meet President Bush’s new initiative.

In the past Abbasi was closely linked to the Islamic Regime’s former MInister of Defense, Shamkhani and authored much of the plans to block the Persian Gulf as well as plans to insert the Ghods Brigades into Iraq via the Basra area and the Northern Kurdish borders.

He has long established ties to the Kurds, who cooperate with him as part of the Freedoms Organizations in their quest for a Kurdish homeland.

Doug Hanson explains why.

Acting without the restraints imposed by nominal allies, Admiral Fallon and PACOM have been closing the gate on Iran from the east. India’s strategic partnership with the US should be recognized as PACOM’s singular achievement to date in the War on Terror. By the use of solid statesmanship, military exchanges and defense cooperation, the US has taken away the largest potential market for Persia’s vast energy resources. Not only that, but a sea change of geo-political alignments has taken place that will be effective in countering any new alliances composed of both old and new enemies with access to Central Asia and the Pacific Rim.

This is only the most visible example of PACOM’s successes. Steady progress has also been made on the direct action front against terror groups such as Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, where it was reported last month that Filipino forces had killed the group’s leader, Khadaffy Janjalani, in a firefight in September. US Special Forces advisors, and civilian support to Filipino law enforcement agencies and the court system are gradually paying off.

In short, Admiral Fallon has been masterful in executing both our long-range strategic goals and in conducting the close fight by rolling up terror groups in the Pacific.

Whether the Coalition does in fact, embark on extensive naval and air campaigns against Iran or another rogue state is a matter of conjecture. We can be reasonably sure however, that Admiral Fallon will bring a singular focus and vision to achieving victory in the Central Region, free of CENTCOM’s institutional inertia and bias.

And, doubtless, primary ground force reliance will be not on the Army, but on the USMC.

Hollywood Reporter:

FBI memo to Hollywood: If it’s not too much trouble, could you please portray our counterterrorism efforts with a bit more realism?

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

AP reports:

A senior al-Qaida suspect wanted for bombing American embassies in East Africa was killed in a U.S. airstrike, a Somali official said Wednesday, a report that if true would mean the end of an eight-year hunt for a top target of Washington’s war on terror.

There was no immediate confirmation from the U.S. In Washington, a U.S. intelligence official said the U.S. killed five to 10 people in an attack on an al-Qaida target in southern Somalia but did not say who was killed. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the operation’s sensitivity, said a small number of others present, perhaps four or five, were wounded.

The report came as U.S forces apparently launched a third day of airstrikes in southern Somalia. Witnesses said an AC-130 gunship attacked a suspected al-Qaida training camp. At least four separate strikes were reported Wednesday around Ras Kamboni, on the Somali coast and a few miles from the Kenyan border.

Also Wednesday, Somalia’s Deputy Prime Minister said American troops were needed on the ground to root extremists from his troubled country, and he expected the troops soon. It was the first indication that the U.S. military may expand its campaign.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who allegedly planned the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, was killed in a U.S. airstrike early Monday morning local time, according to an American intelligence report passed on to the Somali authorities.

“I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage,” Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president’s chief of staff, told The Associated Press. “One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead.”

If confirmed Mohammed’s death would be a major victory for the U.S. in its hunt for the 1998 embassy bombers. The strike was part of the first U.S. offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed there in 1993.

A number of readers have disagreed with my previous post disapproving of the then-impending execution of Saddam, which provokes further reflection on the subject.

I must confess that I thought allowing the execution right in the middle of our own Christmas season was in execrable taste.

It’s true that old Saddam was a brigand, and I’ve remarked before that the United States would have been justified in executing the old scoundrel out of hand when we reduced him to possession in the aftermath of the second war he provoked. But, the difference is, at the time, it would have been in hot blood.

I find the practice of housing and feeding and medicating a prisoner for years, and then cold-bloodedly turning him over to his approximately equally barbarous political adversaries for a farce of a show trial, followed by a rapid hanging, shabby behavior for a great power.

Saddam’s regime doubtless was a ruthless dictatorship, which suppressed revolts with brutal violence, but our own experience in Iraq seems to suggest that Iraqis are in general a bunch of belligerent and bloodthirsty primitives, bigoted, unruly, and inclined to violence. Preventing wholesale participation in the favorite local sport of homicidal feuding probably would require anyone in charge to resort to a fair quantity of brutal violence just to get the locals’ attention.

Saddam was, doubtless, a bloody-handed villain, but there do not seem to be a lot of leaders from the school of non-violence operating successfully in the Islamic Middle East these days. As thugs and villains go, Saddam was not really the worst of the lot. Nobody hanged Yassir Arafat (which seems a great pity to me). They gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Compared to the Ayatollas of Iran or Arafat, Saddam struck me as rather comical. He loved weapons, and obviously delighted in posing as a military leader, but he was spectacularly incompetent. Saddam resembled the perennial “loudest Mick in the bar.” He was the kind of overly-keen, self-admiring bully who makes a point of picking fights with larger and more talented opponents.

In his wars with the United States, Saddam presented a truly remarkable combination of hyperbolic braggadocio and complete military non-performance. He would say everything possible to provoke his adversary’s uttermost wrath, then do absolutely nothing effective at fighting. But, like Monty Python’s Black Knight (to whom Armed Liberal yesterday compared AP), Saddam persistently refused to acknowledge that he was defeated.

When you’ve knocked your adversary flat, and he is at your mercy, and time has gone by, and your temper cooled down, it seems unchivalrous to me to do what was done here.

If the US really wanted to execute Saddam, we should have done it ourselves, and we should have done it right away.

Turning a helpless old man over to his cowardly political rivals to be slaughtered, so as to spare oneself responsibility was, I thought, a cowardly form of trimming typical of leaders of modern democracies.

Saddam was, I thought, at his best, at his execution. He held up manfully in the face of death, and I liked his final contemptuous snort of derision at the hostile crowd’s chanting of the name of that jackanapes “Muqtada.”

Personally, I think hanging Muqtada, and breaking up that Mahdi Army of his, would have been a great deal more to the point than taking poor old Saddam out of his cell and dispatching him.

Saddam may have been guilty of sufficient crimes against the United States to justify our executing him. But we neither immediately condemned him upon capture, nor tried him and proved a case against him ourselves. He may have been guilty of crime against Iraq, but this Iraqi government is full of homicidal criminals, and it is the sheerest hypocrisy to treat that trial as a meaningful process. The shouting mob at the hanging, and the shouting mob at the trial, the hangmen, and the court official were all the same mob.

Jules Crittenden compares the New York Times report of 16,273 Iraqi deaths by violence in 2006 to the infamous Lancet study which estimated 655,000 Iraqi deaths in three years, and wonders: doesn’t this mean that the Iraqi casualty rate has dramatically declined from more than 200,000 per year to 16,000? And doesn’t this mean we’re winning?

The Washington Post reports:

Two senior Iranian operatives who were detained by U.S. forces in Iraq and were strongly suspected of planning attacks against American military forces and Iraqi targets were expelled to Iran on Friday, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

The decision to free the men was made by the Iraqi government and has angered U.S. military officials who say the operatives were seeking to foment instability here.

“These are really serious people,” said one U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They were the target of a very focused raid based on intelligence, and it would be hard for one to believe that their activities weren’t endorsed by the Iranian government. It’s a situation that is obviously troubling.”

More details here:

Two Iranians detained by U.S. forces in Iraq were senior members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards and had coordinated attacks against coalition troops and Iraqi civilians, the head of an Iranian opposition group said Thursday.

The White House said earlier this week that U.S. troops had caught a group of Iranians in a raid on suspected insurgents in Iraq. Two of the men had diplomatic immunity and were released them to Iran, but the other two were kept in custody.

Maryam Rajavi, who heads the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NICR), an anti-regime umbrella group based in Paris, said the two men being held were senior members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Qods force and were responsible for sectarian attacks in Iraq.

She cited the group’s intelligence officials as the source of the information.

It was not possible to independently verify Rajavi’s claim, but the group has provided relatively accurate information on developments in Iran over the past several years, including details on the country’s secretive nuclear program.

In Washington, a Pentagon official said Thursday that U.S. forces had found “indications and evidence that all of the people rounded up, including the two Iranians, are involved in the transfer of IED technologies from Iran to Iraq.”

IED stands for improvised explosive devices, or small bombs that are commonly used in attacks in Iraq.

The U.S. military has confirmed that troops found documents, but it was not clear if any actual explosives were found.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information has not yet been made public, said that U.S. forces are currently working out ways to turn over the Iranians to the Iraqis, but that has not been resolved as yet.

In Baghdad, a spokesman for Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said Monday that the two detained Iranians were in the country at his invitation.

But U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell confirmed Thursday that the detained men were part of a group of 10 suspects taken into custody after the raid on Dec. 21. They were being interrogated by U.S. intelligence, he said.

U.S. officials have charged that Iran provides training and other aid to Shiite militias in Iraq, including equipment used to build roadside bombs. Tehran denies this and says it only has political and religious links with Iraqi Shiites.

There is good reason to suppose that significant Shi’ite elements of the Iraqi government are working with Iran, but why is the Kurdish President of Iraq inviting Iranian agents provocateurs into the country to organize acts of terrorism? So much for naive Wilsonianism.

Saddam Hussein was a pertinacious enemy of the United States, a notorious sponsor of international terrorism, and had the effrontery to attempt the assassination of a president of the United States. He brought his own downfall upon himself by persisting in violating the ceasefire agreement which ended the Gulf War.

If the US general in command of the unit which captured Saddam had promptly hailed him before a drumhead courtmartial, stood him up against a wall, and shot him at dawn, I don’t see how anyone could complain of the injustice of US actions.

Turning the vanquished dictator, however, to the petty political opponents he had always previously defeated to be hanged after a show trial is a policy unworthy of a great power. The 19th century was usually more civilized. Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena. Even Mexico’s Santa Anna was accorded refuge in New Jersey, where he repaid America’s clemency by introducing Americans to chewing gum.

The United States finds itself divided at home over the war in Iraq. Surely Saddam could be useful in clearing up Americans’ confusion about his role in terrorism and about those missing WMDs, and in elucidating his own plans for the current insurgency. Why not offer the condemned prisoner a deal?

In return for Saddam agreeing to testify fully and frankly about his regime’s relationship with Islamic terrorist groups, possible ties to the 9/11 conspiracy, about his WMD programs, and the evacuations to Syria, if he discloses pre-invasion plans for the current insurgency, and calls for Ba’athists generally to make peace with the new parliamentarty regime, we could offer him clemency and asylum in exile. The information he could provide would be a lot more valuable than the pathetic spectacle of his execution.

Mumin Salih thinks the US has already lost:

Who can forget the scenes of jubilant Iraqis in the streets of Baghdad in 2003? Who can forget the cheerful Iraqis around the falling statue of Saddam, symbolising the fall of the dictator’s regime?

Indeed, the majority of Iraqis were supportive to the efforts of liberating Iraq from the tight grip of Iraq’s worst dictator. That includes the vast majority of Kurds (about 20% of the total population) and the Shia (about 60% of the total population) as well as many sunni Arabs (about 20% of the total population). All these groups had suffered badly and sadly at the hands of Saddam’s Baath regime. They considered the war as a liberation war, rather than an occupation of Iraq. The American and British forces fought skilfully and won an easy military victory with minimal losses. Although Saddam and his Baath regime collapsed having provided minimal resistance, the jubilation soon started to fade away as the situation deteriorated rapidly. With so many killed, kidnapped and so many scandals spreading around, even the most sincere supporters of the war had to reconsider their positions and admit that Iraq is in a miss. But did it have to be?

But he believes a firmer approach would have worked better.

Let us make a hypothetical assumption that the control of post war Iraq was given to a ruthless general, say one with an Arab mentality similar to any Arab dictator like the late Hafez Al Asad of Syria or Saddam Hussein himself. Let us call that hypothetical personality General Ruthless and, based on the past experiences of the Middle East, let us see how he would have handled the post war Iraq.

From the outset, General Ruthless would make it clear he doesn’t tolerate any leniency in the liberated country. He would enforce a curfew for the first few days while his forces establish their hold on the country, he might give his forces the power to capture or even shoot looters and others who do not comply with law…

The outside world would only know very little about what is happening because General Ruthless would impose complete censorship on reports coming out of the country. Any leaks of bad news would be strongly denied.

Suicide bombing, kidnappings and other terrorists’ activities that flourished in real life, would become harder to carry out and would not get the wide publicity they enjoyed in the real war scenario. Lack of reporting would deny the terrorists of an important source of information and feedback. The few terrorists’ activities that do get through would go largely unnoticed and unreported, therefore have little influence on public opinion inside and outside the country. People would perceive a sense of reasonable stability, which encourages more people to turn to work confirming the sense of stability even further. On the other hand, terrorists would get frustrated because the lack of media coverage denies them an important communication tool with regard to the full impact of their activities. It becomes even harder for them to recruit young Iraqis.

General Ruthless might even take steps to deny the terrorists any access to the Internet or satellite television, denying them of their most important weapon- propaganda. After all, the Internet is an American property.

General Ruthless’ harsh measures would undoubtedly result in angry criticism from various groups inside and outside America, but nothing in the scale of criticism we have seen in the real life scenario, stability of Iraq would silence many fierce opponents. Such heavy handed approach would undoubtedly result in considerable loss of lives but, again, nothing on the scale we saw in the real life scenario.

America started losing the war before it even started, the slow build up to the war that preceded the military operations only played in the hands of the anti-war groups worldwide. General Ruthless wouldn’t allow this to proceed in the way it did. It was clear, then and now, that the secular Baath regime started to make alliances with the Islamic radical groups and actively sought the destruction of American targets by all means, therefore it has become a serious threat. America has the right to defend its people and its interests. Playing polite and trying to make it a legal war was like a joke and led America to nowhere. How many wars in history we agree to be legal wars? ..

I am afraid even the ruthlessness of General Ruthless would have scored more success and caused less damage than the Americans had done. This purely hypothetical assumption only exposes the weaknesses of the West more than it reflects the wisdom of our hypothetical ruthless General. If America cannot win this war then it is hard to believe it can win any war. America’s failure in Iraq may leave a long lasting scar, but the Americans have can only blame themselves before blaming the others.