Tag Archives: Central Intelligence Agency

The Coalition’s Flawed Endgame Strategy for the Islamic State

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 6, 2016

After some (perhaps wilful) confusion over the timing, the operation to expel the Islamic State (IS) from Raqqa City, its Syrian capital, got underway this morning, running concurrent with the effort to evict IS from its Iraqi capital, Mosul. There are deep concerns about the methods adopted in both cases. The ground forces the U.S.-led Coalition has chosen to support in Raqqa cannot lead to sustainable stability in Syria, something that is essential to defeat IS. While the Mosul operation has proceeded generally to plan, there are increasing signs of trouble within the operation itself and the most troubling aspect—the aftermath—still appears to be unplanned. Beyond this is the continued assault on Aleppo City by Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its Russian and Iranian patrons that is systematically destroying the forces needed if there is to be any settlement to Syria’s war that ends the space given to international terrorists. Continue reading →

The Other Side of the “Torture” Debate

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 11, 2014

As a final act while the Democrats hold their majorities in Congress, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a report on December 9, the “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program”, known to the Twitterverse as the “Torture Report”. This has reignited the debate about America’s use of harsh interrogation methods, the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), against al-Qaeda operatives in the shadow of the 9/11 massacre. The politics surrounding this matter—even on basic questions, such as whether discomfort works to induce cooperation in detainees—are poisonous, and the publication of this partisan Committee Study has done nothing to assist this environment. One means of trying to get at the truth is to examine a counterpoint, the 2012 book, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, a memoir by Jose Rodriguez, the man who oversaw the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Centre from 2001 to 2004. Continue reading →

Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 9, 2014

Released on December 21, 2007, twenty-eight years to the month after the Soviet Union launched Operation STORM 333, decapitating the Afghan government and plunging the country into a decade-long war, Charlie Wilson’s War tells a story centred on Representative Charles Wilson of Texas (Tom Hanks), a conservative Democrat, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Right-wing Christian socialite in Houston who has taken the Afghans to her bosom because of her hatred for communism, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a blue-collar case officer at the CIA who is the epitome of the adage that one can get anything done in Washington so long as one does not care who gets the credit. Between them they cajole Congress into moving its appropriations from $5 million to $500 million, which will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Saudis, to help the Afghan resistance combat the Red Army’s occupation of their country. Continue reading →

Obama’s Training of Syrian Rebels: Another Exercise in Public-Relations

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 2, 2014

Bashar az-Zoubi, leader of Liwa al-Yarmouk, the biggest brigade in Deraa and one of the biggest on the Southern Front. He is one of the main people President Obama’s ostensible switch to focussing on the south of Syria is supposed to benefit.

At the beginning of last month, the first solid evidence was presented of Syrian insurgents being trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. Continue reading →