Miguel A. Guanipa, in the course of analyzing Obama’s vulnerabilities in the presidential campaign, debunks the conventional leftwing meme that it is American action which produces terrorism, the contemporary political equivalent of the medieval belief in the spontaneous generation of pests and vermin from decaying matter.

With the irreverent chutzpah of a snickering 8 year old tattler telling on his older sibling, Obama indulged an excitable crowd of adoring fans with the rather overused and unproven refrain that — contrary to McCain’s beliefs — Al Qaeda was not present in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. …

To suggest that American intervention begets more terrorism denotes a subtle endorsement of the novel diplomatic principle that a policy of retreat and noninvolvement would automatically yield better relations with the consistently volatile potentates of Middle Eastern regimes. This simple-minded sequitur continues to galvanize radical leftwing Democrats, who are already sold on the proposition that there is an inverse link between the number of terrorists in the world and the level of what is generally considered by them to be America’s modest record of charity and good will through its international relations role.

It is true that terrorism did not make the headlines as frequently when the United States remained basically uninvolved in the political affairs of countries that harbored terrorist organizations. This does not mean that the latter were heretofore virtually nonexistent and suddenly sprang up in response to the United States’ unjustified military intervention in other countries’ affairs.

This is not only a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for the existence of terrorism, it also dishonors the sacrifices of those who have the courage to be proactive about it, and what is worse, it casts them as the culprits in front of a global audience.

By effectively engaging the terrorists, America has simply forced them to expose their clandestine operations, which only the ill-informed would deny have long been in existence. Until they reached an apex of sorts on September 11, 2001, the media had decided that such operations scarcely merited their attention. Since then, simply recycling the same old tune, that it is our fault terrorism has become such a problem around the world, no longer represents a viable argument against intervention anytime the sitting president perceives a clear threat to national security.

USS Benfold (DDG 65) Guided Missile Destroyer

If you are the US Navy, whom do you make a signalman on a destroyer going potentially into harm’s way in the Persian Gulf? Why Hassan Abu-Jihaad, of course!

But, I suppose, excluding someone from a high security assignment just because he has converted to Islam and was calling himself “father of Jihad” would be profiling, and we can’t possibly do anything so politically incorrect.

AP:

U.S. Navy commanders were wary as their ships headed to the Persian Gulf in the months after a terrorist ambush in 2000 killed 17 sailors aboard the USS Cole.

Passing the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, busy shipping lane that often invited challenges from Iran, was never easy. Ship commanders decided to travel quickly at night after conducting a drill. Sailors took up machine gun positions and shut valves and hatches to limit damage in case of attack.

“We really weren’t sure what to expect,” said Lt. Commander Jay Wylie, who was on board the USS Benfold.

No one expected to find a threat from within.

But federal authorities say there was. A Benfold signalman, Hassan Abu-Jihaad, had provided suspected terrorist supporters in London with sensitive details of when U.S. ships would pass through the strait and their vulnerability to attack, prosecutors say.

Testimony last week in Abu-Jihaad’s trial has provided a window into the fears of top Navy officials after an explosives-laden boat rammed the Cole as it refueled in a Yemen harbor. It also revealed how heightened vigilance after Sept. 11 triggered an investigation that began in Connecticut and expanded to London before Abu-Jihaad and others were arrested.

Abu-Jihaad, 32, of Phoenix, has pleaded not guilty to federal charges alleging he provided material support to terrorists and disclosed classified national defense information.

Prosecutors rested their case Friday. Abu-Jihaad does not plan to take the stand Monday when his attorneys call one witness before closing arguments.

Abu-Jihaad, an American born Muslim convert, changed his name from Paul Hall in 1997. A year later, he was granted security clearance that gave him access to secrets, according to Navy officials.

Abu-Jihaad was one of the first sailors Petty Officer Josh Kelly met when he boarded the Benfold. Abu-Jihaad was chatty about where the ship was headed, Kelly says.

“We always wonder where we were going,” Kelly testified, noting the stress of life at sea.

But advance movements were a closely guarded secret. Dennis Amador, a quartermaster and Abu-Jihaad’s supervisor, told his wife where he was in code.

“We in the Navy are taught from the minute we come in that loose lips sink ships,” he said.

Those details were kept locked in a safe with a red sticker marked secret. But when the charts and travel plans were laid out, Abu-Jihaad could see them in his job as a signalman, Navy officials say.

The Benfold and other ships left San Diego in March 2001. Their first stop was Hawaii, where the sailors were treated to a luau feast.

As the ship headed toward the Middle East, Abu-Jihaad began to send e-mails to Azzam Publications, a Web site that authorities say provided money and equipment to terrorists.

While the Cole was the worst nightmare for commanders, Abu-Jihaad called it a martyrdom operation in one of his e-mails to Azzam and praised “the men who have brong (sic) honor … in the lands of jihad Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, etc.”

Abu-Jihaad signed the e-mail: “A brother serving a kuffar nation,” meaning nonbeliever or infidel, according to testimony. He also ordered graphic videos from Azzam that depicted Muslim fighters in Chechnya and Bosnia.

Newsbusters notes the discrepancies between the current version of the facts as defined by the establishment media and some previous reporting.

While it is currently conventional wisdom in the media that there was no Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, as evidenced by the media’s failure to correct Barack Obama’s recent claim that “there was no such thing as Al-Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq,” for several years dating back before the Iraq invasion, there have been media reports of former Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s connections to Osama bin Laden, and his use of Iraq as a base to plot terror attacks against other countries before the war. In fact, four years ago, the NBC Nightly News claimed not only that there was an Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before the invasion, busy plotting attacks against Europe, but that the Bush administration intentionally “passed up several opportunities” to attack terrorist bases in Iraq “long before the war” in 2002 because of fear it would “undercut its case” for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

On the March 2, 2004 NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw introduced the report: “[Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] is widely believed to have ties to Al-Qaeda, and the Bush administration apparently passed up several opportunities to take him out well before the Iraq war began.”

And on the January 27, 2003 NBC Nightly News, after revelations of a plot to attack targets in Europe with the poison ricin, which was believed to have been hatched by Zarqawi in Iraq, correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported that “U.S. Special Forces had plans to launch a covert raid against the Kirmadara complex [in northern Iraq], but Pentagon officials say it was called off because the Bush administration feared it would interfere with upcoming UN weapon inspections.”

Although some have tried to argue that Zarqawi did not declare allegiance to bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organization until after the Iraq invasion, as far back as April 4 and May 16, 2001, AP’s Jamal Halaby reported that Jordanian authorities suspected Zarqawi, also known as Ahmad Fadeel Al-Khalayleh, of plotting attacks in Jordan, and relayed that Zarqawi was “believed to be in Afghanistan.”

On November 9, 2002, a London Times article by Roger Boyes and Daniel McGrory, citing Hans-Josef Beth of the German secret service BND, claimed that Zarqawi “used London as his base until Osama bin Laden ordered him to move to Afghanistan in 2000 to run one of al-Qaeda’s training camps.”

On December 18, 2002, after the arrests of several terror suspects in France amid fears of a chemical weapon attack, Sebastian Rotella of the Los Angeles Times reported that “A top Al Qaeda suspect said to be commanding a campaign targeting Europe is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian reputedly knowledgeable about chemical warfare, according to German and Italian intelligence officials.”

On December 19, 2002, Knight Ridder’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported, citing Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu al Ragheb, that Zarqawi was behind the murder of American diplomat Lawrence Foley, and was believed to be “an ally of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.” Ragheb further contended that Zarqawi “was probably in northern Iraq working with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Muslim extremist group.” Jordanian officials were also cited as claiming that the men suspected of carrying out Foley’s murder met Zarqawi “in Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.”

Obama’s complaining captain story when fact checked by AP had some problems.

THE FACTS:

The Obama campaign offered no details to support the captain’s story, making it impossible to verify. A spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about who the captain was and when and how the candidate learned about the allegation.

ABC News said it talked to the unidentified captain, whose account of shortages in Afghanistan was for the most part accurately summarized by Obama, although not verified.

The captain said, however, that the unit did not go after the Taliban for the purpose of getting their weapons, but sometimes used those weapons when some were captured.

The Pentagon has acknowledged forces are stretched, but spokesman Bryan Whitman said that without knowing more, he could not comment on the veracity of Obama’s claim, except to say: “I find that account pretty hard to imagine.”

Whitman contended “all of our units and service members that go into harm’s way are properly trained, equipped and with the leadership to be successful for the mission that they’ve been given.”

Obama said the platoon was supposed to have 39 soldiers. A platoon does not have to consist of 39, but can have between 16 to 40 soldiers, according to standard Army unit organization. It is also commanded by a lieutenant and not a captain.

According to the ABC report, the captain was a lieutenant when he took command of the rifle platoon.

Reuters reporting the Pentagon response:

The Pentagon on Friday cast doubt on an account of military equipment shortages mentioned by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama during a debate with rival Hillary Clinton.

During the face-to-face encounter on Thursday evening, Obama said he had heard from an Army captain whose unit had served in Afghanistan without enough ammunition or vehicles.

Obama said it was easier for the troops to capture weapons from Taliban militants than it was “to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief,” President George W. Bush.

“I find that account pretty hard to imagine,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters.

“Despite the stress that we readily acknowledge on the force, one of the things that we do is make sure that all of our units and service members that are going into harm’s way are properly trained, equipped and with the leadership to be successful,” he said.

Whitman’s remarks were unusual as the Pentagon often declines to talk about comments from political campaigns.

At last night’s democrat debate, Barack Obama claimed rifle platoons are being split and sent to two different countries, and apparently unarmed American soldiers have to capture enemy weapons in order to arm themselves.

0:34 video

You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon,” he said. “Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

Dividing a rifle platoon in the way Obama describes is the sort of thing that simply does not happen. It seems to be not uncommon for US soldiers to pick up AK-47s, and to use them by choice, as the AK offers advantages with respect to reliability and penetration. I expect there is going to be a lot of blogospheric coverage and debunking of this one.

But ABC News claims to have verified Obama’s story by speaking to the Army captain who was his actual source.

I called the Obama campaign this morning to chat about this story, and was put in touch with the Army captain in question.

He told me his story, which I found quite credible, though for obvious reasons he asked that I not mention his name or certain identifying information.

Short answer: He backs up Obama’s story.

The longer answer is worth telling, though.

The Army captain, a West Point graduate, did a tour in a hot area of eastern Afghanistan from the Summer of 2003 through Spring 2004.

Prior to deployment the Captain — then a Lieutenant — took command of a rifle platoon at Fort Drum. When he took command, the platoon had 39 members, but — in ones and twos — 15 members of the platoon were re-assigned to other units. He knows of 10 of those 15 for sure who went to Iraq, and he suspects the other five did as well.

The platoon was sent to Afghanistan with 24 men.

“We should have deployed with 39,” he told me, “we should have gotten replacements. But we didn’t. And that was pretty consistent across the battalion.”

He adds that maybe a half-dozen of the 15 were replaced by the Fall of 2003, months after they arrived in Afghanistan, but never all 15.

As for the weapons and humvees, there are two distinct periods in this, as he explains — before deployment, and afterwards.

At Fort Drum, in training, “we didn’t have access to heavy weapons or the ammunition for the weapons, or humvees to train before we deployed.”

What ammunition?

40 mm automatic grenade launcher ammunition for the MK-19, and ammunition for the .50 caliber M-2 machine gun (“50 cal.”)

“We weren’t able to train in the way we needed to train,” he says. When the platoon got to Afghanistan they had three days to learn.

They also didn’t have the humvees they were supposed to have both before deployment and once they were in Afghanistan, the Captain says.

“We should have had 4 up-armored humvees,” he said. “We were supposed to. But at most we had three operable humvees, and it was usually just two.”

So what did they do? “To get the rest of the platoon to the fight,” he says, “we would use Toyota Hilux pickup trucks or unarmored flatbed humvees.” Sometimes with sandbags, sometimes without.

Also in Afghanistan they had issues getting parts for their MK-19s and their 50-cals. Getting parts or ammunition for their standard rifles was not a problem.

“It was very difficult to get any parts in theater,” he says, “because parts are prioritized to the theater where they were needed most — so they were going to Iraq not Afghanistan.”

“The purpose of going after the Taliban was not to get their weapons,” he said, but on occasion they used Taliban weapons. Sometimes AK-47s, and they also mounted a Soviet-model DShK (or “Dishka”) on one of their humvees instead of their 50 cal.

The Captain has spoken to Sen. Obama, he says, but this anecdote was relayed to Obama through an Obama staffer.

I doubt there have ever been any wars where everyone had all the manpower he wanted, all the weapons, and all the supplies, every day all the time. It also must be something of a first for the United States to have arrived at a level of materialistic self congratulation that the improvised use of captured enemy weapons is taken as proof of our own inadequacy and imperfection.

Can you picture Robert E. Lee telling General Pendleton: “Just abandon those Yankee cannons our men captured. We wouldn’t want people thinking the Confederacy couldn’t supply every item of equipment our soldiers require?” Or General MacAuliffe at Bastogne telling one of Thomas E. Dewey’s staffers about US soldiers scrounging German rifles and machine guns as a grievance?

Greg Miller, at the LA Times, reports that a multi-hundred million dollar CIA program to create shell companies in agreeable European locations designed to supply non-official cover in the War on Terror has been concluded to have been ill-conceived, and all but two of the companies have been closed down. The leaked story indicates that the ultimate decision, which sounds sensible enough, was arrived at via the Agency’s customary processes of cat fighting and back biting.

But critics called the arrangement convoluted, and argued that whatever energy the agency was devoting to the creation of covers should be focused on platforms that could get U.S. spies close to their most important targets.

“How does a businessman contact a terrorist?” said a former CIA official involved in the decision to shut down the companies. “If you’re out there selling widgets, why are you walking around a mosque in Hamburg?”

Rather than random businesses, these officials said, the agency should be creating student aid organizations that work with Muslim students, or financial firms that associate with Arab investors.

Besides broad concerns about the approach, officials said there were other problems with the companies. Some questioned where they were located. One, for example, was set up in Portugal even though its principal targets were in North Africa.

The issue became so divisive that the agency’s then-director, Porter J. Goss, tapped the official then in charge of the CIA’s European division, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, to lead an in-house review of the NOC strategy.

Mowatt-Larssen sided with critics of the approach and began pulling the plug on the companies before he left the agency to take a senior intelligence post at the Department of Energy, officials said. Mowatt-Larssen declined to comment.

The agency is in the midst of rolling out a series of new platforms that are more narrowly targeted, officials said. The External Operations and Cover Division has been placed under Eric Pound, a veteran foreign officer who was CIA station chief in Athens during the 2004 Olympics.

But the agency is still struggling to overcome obstacles, including resistance from many of the agency’s station chiefs overseas, most of whom rose through the ranks under traditional cover assignments and regard the NOC program with suspicion and distrust.

In one recent case, officials said, the CIA’s station chief in Saudi Arabia vetoed a plan to send a NOC officer who had spent years developing credentials in the nuclear field to an energy conference in Riyadh.

The NOC “had been invited to the conference, had seen a list of invitees and saw a target he had been trying to get to,” said a former CIA official familiar with the matter. “The boss said, ‘No, that’s why we have case officers here.’

Dafydd ap Hugh has devised an interesting little exercise in ethical theory, which –if nothing else– will give all our liberal friends another opportunity to feel morally superior.

You are a CIA station chief in an undisclosed, secret CIA prison in Poland (with Warsaw’s consent). A prisoner is brought to your location, picked up by the Germans in Afghanistan and transferred to U.S. custody six days ago. We’ll call him Mahmoud.

Mahmoud was not previously known to any intelligence agency before his capture (he was not the main target of the raid). He doesn’t appear to be a big fish. But when he was grabbed, he had a laptop with him, and he was in the process of trying to erase the hard drive. Most of the information is irretrievably gone, a little bit remains; and within that remaining little bit, your techies manage to extract references to a huge attack planned for somewhere on the American mainland. From the timeframe discussed, it appears to be one to three months away. You don’t know anything more than that.

You do not know for sure whether Mahmoud has more detailed information about the attack, but he evidently knew enough to try to erase the drive, even at risk of his own life. He has already been interrogated by the Marines and by CIA personnel where you are, but it’s clear he has more information that he’s holding back. The timeframe is tight enough that you must make a decision immediately, but not so tight that there would be no time to act on any information.

So what you know is this:

A major attack is planned somewhere in the continental United States;

Mahmoud may or may not be a major player, but he appears to know something significant about it;

However, he might not know enough to allow authorities to thwart the attack. But on the other hand, he might;

He would not talk under ordinary interrogation. You might be able to break him given time, but every week that passes makes it less likely his intelligence can be used to stop the attack.

We add one more point:

You already have solid evidence that he participated in some attacks on American troops that resulted in fatalities. So if we want to try him later at a military tribunal, we don’t need a confession to convict him; we already have ample forensic evidence.

You ask the DCI whether you can waterboard him; word comes from the White House via the DCI that you are authorized to waterboard Mahmoud, but you must use your own discretion whether you actually do it: You are the only one close enough to the scene to make that call. You get the impression that the president will stand behind you, whatever you decide… but of course, that only applies to this particular president. You don’t know who will be president in 2009.

So the question is, do you order Mahmoud to be waterboarded?

via Patterico and the News Junkie.

But, are we only allowed to water-board him?

Jonah Goldberg puts the pious party’s torture meme into perspective.

Less than five minutes.

That’s the total amount of time the United States has waterboarded terrorist detainees. How many detainees? Three. Who were these detainees?

A group of activists demonstrates “waterboarding,” a technique that has been used on prisoners by government agencies, in New York’s Times Square January 11, 2008. The interrogation practice has been at the center of a bitter dispute about what constitutes torture.

One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks” according to the 9/11 Report, and the head of al-Qaeda’s “military committee.” Linked to numerous terror plots, he is believed to have financed the first World Trade Center bombing, helped set up the courier system that resulted in the infamous Bali bombing, and cut off Danny Pearl’s head.

A second was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the head of al-Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf. He allegedly played a role in the 2000 millennium terror plots and was the mastermind behind the USS Cole attack that killed 17 Americans.

The third was Abu Zubaydah, said to be Osama bin Laden’s top man after Ayman al Zawahri and al-Qaeda’s chief logistics operative. It is believed that Zubaydah essentially ran al-Qaeda’s terror camps and recruitment operations. After he was waterboarded, Zubaydah reportedly offered intelligence officers a treasure trove of critical information. He was waterboarded just six months after the 9/11 attacks and while the anthrax scare was still ongoing.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who witnessed the interrogation, told ABC’s Brian Ross: “The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

He divulged, according to Kiriakou, “al-Qaeda’s leadership structure” and identified high-level terrorists the CIA didn’t know much, if anything, about. It’s been suggested that Zubaydah and al-Nashiri’s confessions in turn led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And that’s it. Less than five minutes, three awful men, five years ago.

Read the whole thing.

The operational alliance between the radical left and the mainstream media was demonstrated in its most conspicuous form today, when a bogus exercise in propaganda by a collection of radical leftists (funded by the usual gang of wealthy poseurs) was served up as supposed “news” by AP

A study by two nonprofit (but highly partisan) journalism organizations (funded by George Soros, Barbara Streisand, and other less-than-disinterested parties) found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

and the New York Times.

Big Lizards explains who is behind this.

“A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations…”

The Fund for Independence in Journalism says its “primary purpose is providing legal defense and endowment support for the largest nonprofit, investigative reporting institution in the world, the Center for Public Integrity, and possibly other, similar groups.” Eight of the eleven members of the Fund’s board of directors are either on the BoD of the Center for Public Integrity, or else are on the Center’s Advisory Board. Thus these “two” organizations are actually joined at the hip.

“Fund for Independence in Journalism…”

The Center is heavily funded by George Soros. It has also received funding from Bill Moyers, though some of that money might have actually been from Soros, laundered through Moyers via the Open Society Foundation.

Other funders include the Streisand Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts (used to be conservative, but in 1987 they veered sharply to the left, and are now a dyed-in-the-wool “progressive” funder), the Los Angeles Times Foundation, and so forth. The Center is a far-left organization funded by far-left millionaires, billionaires, and trusts.

Selective quotations and old leftist lies (including Joe Wilson’s) are simply repackaged in an on-line database by a gang of “progressives” funded by the usual suspects, and this exercise in self-gratification is treated as “news.”

From a Marine Corps site: a music video tribute to the troops.

Stratfor’s Fred Burton and Scott Stewart assess the accuracy of their 2007 predictions and survey probable developments in the year to come.

Given the relative ease of getting an operative into the United States, the sheer number of soft targets across the vast country and the simplicity of conducting an attack, we remain surprised that no jihadist attack occurred on U.S. soil in 2007. However, we continue to believe that the United States, as well as Europe, remains vulnerable to tactical-level jihadist strikes — though we do not believe that the jihadists have the capability to launch a strategically significant attack, even if they were to employ chemical, biological or radiological weapons.

Jihadists have shown a historical fixation on using toxins and poisons. As Stratfor repeatedly has pointed out, however, chemical and biological weapons are expensive to produce, difficult to use and largely ineffective in real-world applications. Radiological weapons (dirty bombs) also are far less effective than many people have been led to believe. In fact, history clearly has demonstrated that explosives are far cheaper, easier to use and more effective at killing people than these more exotic weapons. The failure by jihadists in Iraq to use chlorine effectively in their attacks has more recently underscored the problems associated with the use of improvised chemical weapons — the bombs killed far more people than the chlorine they were meant to disperse as a mass casualty weapon.

Al-Zawahiri’s messages over the past year clearly have reflected the pressure that the group is feeling. The repeated messages referencing Iraq and the need for unity among the jihadists there show that al-Zawahiri believes the momentum has shifted in Iraq and things are not going well for al Qaeda there. Tactically, al Qaeda’s Iraqi node still is killing people, but strategically the group’s hopes of establishing a caliphate there under the mantle of the Islamic State of Iraq have all but disappeared. These dashed hopes have caused the group to lash out against former allies, which has worsened al Qaeda’s position.

It also is clear that al Qaeda is feeling the weight of the ideological war against it — waged largely by Muslims. Al-Zawahiri repeatedly has lamented specific fatwas by Saudi clerics declaring that the jihad in Iraq is not obligatory and forbidding young Muslims from going to Iraq. In a message broadcast in July, al-Zawahiri said, “I would like to remind everyone that the most dangerous weapons in the Saudi-American system are not buying of loyalties, spying on behalf of the Americans or providing facilities to them. No, the most dangerous weapons of that system are those who outwardly profess advice, guidance and instruction …” In other words, al Qaeda fears fatwas more than weapons. Weapons can kill people — fatwas can kill the ideology that motivates people.

There are two battlegrounds in the war against jihadism: the physical and the ideological. Because of its operational security considerations, the al Qaeda core has been marginalized in the physical battle. This has caused it to abandon its position at the vanguard of the physical jihad and take up the mantle of leadership in the ideological battle. The core no longer poses a strategic threat to the United States in the physical world, but it is striving hard to remain relevant on the ideological battleground.

In many ways, the ideological battleground is more important than the physical war. It is far easier to kill people than it is to kill ideologies. Therefore, it is important to keep an eye on the ideological battleground to determine how that war is progressing. In the end, that is why it is important to listen to hours of al-Zawahiri statements. They contain clear signs regarding the status of the war against jihadism. The signs as of late indicate that the ideological war is not going so well for the jihadists, but they also point to potential hazards around the bend in places such as Pakistan and Lebanon.

15 of 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and a recent West Point study, reported by Reuters, demonstrates that spoiled Saudi young men, free to live a life of idleness funded by the Kingdom’s oil exactions on the civilized world’s economy, make up the leading portion of Al Qaeda’s membership.

Most al Qaeda fighters in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and Libya and many are university-aged students, said a study released on Wednesday by researchers at the U.S. Army’s West Point military academy.

The study was based on 606 personnel records collected by al Qaeda in Iraq and captured by coalition troops in October. It includes data on fighters who entered Iraq, largely through Syria, between August 2006 and August 2007.

The researchers at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center found that 41 percent of the fighters were Saudi nationals.

Libyan nationals accounted for the second largest group entering Iraq in that time period with about 19 percent of the total, followed by Syrians and Yemenis each at 8 percent, Algerians with 7 percent and Moroccans at 6 percent. …

According to the study, the average age of the 606 fighters who entered over that one-year period was 24-25. One was 15 years old.

The authors called that finding “worrisome.”

“The incitement of a new generation of jihadis to join the fight in Iraq, or plan operations elsewhere, is one of the most worrisome aspects of the ongoing fight in Iraq,” they wrote.

“The United States should not confuse gains against al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi franchises as fundamental blows against the organization outside of Iraq. So long as al-Qa’ida is able to attract hundreds of young men to join its ranks, it will remain a serious threat to global security.”

The researchers found that of the 157 fighters who listed an occupation, 43 percent said they were students.

“Universities have become a critical recruiting field for al Qaeda,” the study said.