US Embassy opening in Baghdad delayed indefinitely
09 Oct 2007 19:26:31 GMT
Source: Reuters
Alert Me | Print | Email this article | RSS [-] Text [+]

By Sue Pleming
WASHINGTON, Oct 9 (Reuters) - The opening of the mammoth new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has been delayed indefinitely while its Kuwaiti contractor fixes a punch list of problems, the State Department said on Tuesday.
The sprawling complex, whose cost is edging toward $750 million, was set to open last month but U.S. lawmakers say shoddy work by the contractor and poor oversight by the State Department have delayed it.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack rejected claims of inadequate oversight and said there was no indication how long it would be before the new embassy opened.
"I can't tell you when the embassy is going to open," said McCormack. "We don't have an answer."
McCormack said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was prepared to "cut everybody involved some slack" if the delay fell within the norms of opening a large embassy complex but would demand answers if it dragged on too long.
"Anytime you have a large construction project you have punch list items, and we shall see in, I would hope, the not-too-distant future whether or not ... these delays ... fall outside the norms that one might expect for this kind of project," McCormack said.
"We're not going to buy ourself a turkey here. We're going to make sure that we get what we paid for," he said.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, who heads an oversight committee in Congress, sent a letter to Rice on Tuesday asking her to explain the delay and accusing her department of incompetence and inadequate oversight.
OVER BUDGET
Congress originally allocated nearly $600 million to build the biggest U.S. Embassy in the world but Waxman said the project was now $144 million over that budget.
In addition, he said new documents showed hundreds of violations of fire codes and other regulations and electrical problems throughout the complex.
"These problems were so severe and widespread that the inspectors concluded that none of the buildings on the new embassy compound could be approved for occupancy," wrote Waxman, a staunch critic of the State Department's oversight of its contractors in Iraq.
McCormack said original specifications of the contract changed after it became clear that more office and living space was needed for civilian and military staff.
"It is not a cost overrun. It is an additional contract requirement," he said.
Waxman, in turn, accused the State Department of misleading his committee over the status of the embassy project at a hearing on July 26 when he said senior officials dismissed issues raised by his committee as minor problems.
"It would appear to be gross negligence if the department's senior management were unaware of the defects at the embassy when they testified before the committee," he said.
"Increasingly, it appears that the State Department's efforts in Iraq are in disarray," added Waxman, referring to an investigation involving U.S. security contractor Blackwater.
Asked about Waxman's comments that the State Department's efforts were in disarray, McCormack replied: "That is just a ridiculous statement."
Waxman has opened an inquiry into accusations that the State Department's inspector general interfered with investigations into waste and fraud involving the construction of the embassy. The inspector general rejected these claims.

The Geopolitical Foundations of Blackwater
October 09, 2007 1735 GMT

By George Friedman

For the past three weeks, Blackwater, a private security firm under contract to the U.S. State Department, has been under intense scrutiny over its operations in Iraq. The Blackwater controversy has highlighted the use of civilians for what appears to be combat or near-combat missions in Iraq. Moreover, it has raised two important questions: Who controls these private forces and to whom are they accountable?

The issue is neither unique to Blackwater nor to matters of combat. There have long been questions about the role of Halliburton and its former subsidiary, KBR, in providing support services to the military. The Iraq war has been fought with fewer active-duty troops than might have been expected, and a larger number of contractors relative to the number of troops. But how was the decision made in the first place to use U.S. nongovernmental personnel in a war zone? More important, how has that decision been implemented?

The United States has a long tradition of using private contractors in times of war. For example, it augmented its naval power in the early 19th century by contracting with privateers -- nongovernmental ships -- to carry out missions at sea. During the battle for Wake Island in 1941, U.S. contractors building an airstrip there were trapped by the Japanese fleet, and many fought alongside Marines and naval personnel. During the Civil War, civilians who accompanied the Union and Confederate armies carried out many of the supply functions. So, on one level, there is absolutely nothing new here. This has always been how the United States fights war.

Nevertheless, since before the fall of the Soviet Union, a systematic shift has been taking place in the way the U.S. force structure is designed. This shift, which is rooted both in military policy and in the geopolitical perception that future wars will be fought on a number of levels, made private security contractors such as KBR and Blackwater inevitable. The current situation is the result of three unique processes: the introduction of the professional volunteer military, the change in force structure after the Cold War, and finally the rethinking and redefinition of the term "noncombatant" following the decision to include women in the military, but bar them from direct combat roles.

The introduction of the professional volunteer military caused a rethinking of the role of the soldier, sailor, airman or Marine in the armed forces. Volunteers were part of the military because they chose to be. Unlike draftees, they had other options. During World War II and the first half of the Cold War, the military was built around draftees who were going to serve their required hitch and return to civilian life. Although many were not highly trained, they were quite suited for support roles, from KP to policing the grounds. After all, they already were on the payroll, and new hires were always possible.

In a volunteer army, the troops are expected to remain in the military much longer. Their training is more expensive -- thus their value is higher. Taking trained specialists who are serving at their own pleasure and forcing them to do menial labor over an extended period of time makes little sense either from a utilization or morale point of view. The concept emerged that the military's maintenance work should shift to civilians, and that in many cases the work should be outsourced to contractors. This tendency was reinforced during the Reagan administration, which, given its ideology, supported privatization as a way to make the volunteer army work. The result was a growth in the number of contractors taking over many of the duties that had been performed by soldiers during the years of conscription.

The second impetus was the end of the Cold War and a review carried out by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin under then-President Bill Clinton. The core argument was that it was irrational to maintain a standing military as large as had existed during the Cold War. Aspin argued for a more intensely technological military, one that would be less dependent on ground troops. The Air Force was key to this, while the Navy was downsized. The main consideration, however, was the structure of the standing Army -- especially when large-scale, high-intensity, long-term warfare no longer seemed a likely scenario.

The U.S. Army's active-duty component, in particular, was reduced. It was assumed that in time of war, components of the Reserves and National Guard would be mobilized, not so much to augment the standing military, but to carry out a range of specialized roles. For example, Civil Affairs, which has proven to be a critical specialization in Iraq and Afghanistan, was made a primary responsibility of the Reserves and National Guard, as were many engineering, military-intelligence and other specializations.

This plan was built around certain geopolitical assumptions. The first was that the United States would not be fighting peer powers. The second was that it had learned from Vietnam not to get involved in open-ended counterinsurgency operations, but to focus, as it did in Kuwait, on missions that were clearly defined and executable with a main force. The last was that wars would be short, use relatively few troops and be carried out in conjunction with allies. From this it followed that regular forces, augmented by Reserve/National Guard specialists called up for short terms, could carry out national strategic requirements.

The third impetus was the struggle to define military combat and noncombat roles. Given the nature of the volunteer force, women were badly needed, yet they were included in the armed forces under the assumption that they could carry out any function apart from direct combat assignments. This caused a forced -- and strained -- redefinition of these two roles. Intelligence officers called to interrogate a prisoner on the battlefield were thought not to be in a combat position. The same bomb, mortar or rocket fire that killed a soldier might hit them too, but since they technically were not charged with shooting back, they were not combat arms. Ironically, in Iraq, one of the most dangerous tasks is traveling on the roads, though moving supplies is not considered a combat mission.

Under the privatization concept, civilians could be hired to carry out noncombat functions. Under the redefinition of noncombat, the area open to contractors covered a lot of territory. Moreover, under the redefinition of the military in the 1990s, the size and structure of the Army in particular was changed so dramatically that it could not carry out most of its functions without the Reserve/Guard component -- and even with that component, the Army was not large enough. Contractors were needed.

Let us now add a fourth push: the CIA. During Vietnam, and again in Afghanistan and Iraq, a good part of the war was prosecuted by CIA personnel not in uniform and not answerable to the military chain of command. There are arguments on both sides for this, but the fact is that U.S. wars -- particularly highly politicized wars such as counterinsurgencies -- are fought with parallel armies, some reporting to the Defense Department, others to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The battlefield is, if not flooded, at least full of civilians operating outside of the chain of command, and these civilian government employees are encouraged to hire Iraqi or other nationals, as well as to augment their own capabilities with private U.S. contractors.

Blackwater works for the State Department in a capacity defined as noncombat, protecting diplomats and other high-value personnel from assassination. The Army, bogged down in its own operations, lacks the manpower to perform this obviously valuable work. That means that Blackwater and other contract workers are charged with carrying weapons and moving around the battlefield, which is everywhere. They are heavily armed private soldiers carrying out missions that are combat in all but name -- and they are completely outside of the chain of command.

Moreover, in order to be effective, they have to engage in protective intelligence, looking for surveillance by enemy combatants and trying to foresee potential threats. We suspect the CIA could be helpful in this regard, but it would want information in return. In order to perform its job, then, Blackwater entered the economy of intelligence -- information as a commodity to be exchanged. It had to gather some intelligence in order to trade some. As a result, the distinction between combat and support completely broke down.

The important point is that the U.S. military went to war with the Army the country gave it. We recall no great objections to the downsizing of the military in the 1990s, and no criticisms of the concepts that lay behind the new force structure. The volunteer force, downsized because long-term conflicts were not going to occur, supported by the Reserve/Guard and backfilled by civilian contractors, was not a controversial issue. Only tiresome cranks made waves, challenging the idea that wars would be sparse and short. They objected to the redefinition of noncombat roles and said the downsized force would be insufficient for the 21st century.

Blackwater, KBR and all the rest are the direct result of the faulty geopolitical assumptions and the force structure decisions that followed. The primary responsibility rests with the American public, which made best-case assumptions in a worst-case world. Even without Iraq, civilian contractors would have proliferated on the battlefield. With Iraq, they became an enormous force. Perhaps the single greatest strategic error of the Bush administration was not fundamentally re-examining the assumptions about the U.S. Army on Sept. 12, 2001. Clearly Donald Rumsfeld was of the view that the Army was the problem, not the solution. He was not going to push for a larger force and, therefore, as the war expanded, for fewer civilian contractors.

The central problem regarding private security contractors on the battlefield is that their place in the chain of command is not defined. They report to the State Department, not to the Army and Marines that own the battlefield. But who do they take orders from and who defines their mission? Do they operate under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or under some other rule? They are warriors -- it is foolish to think otherwise -- but they do not wear the uniform. The problem with Blackwater stems from having multiple forces fighting for the same side on the same battlefield, with completely different chains of command. Indeed, it is not clear the extent to which the State Department has created a command structure for its contractors, whether it is capable of doing so, or whether the contractors have created their own chain of command.

Blackwater is the logical outcome of a set of erroneous geopolitical conclusions that predate these wars by more than a decade. The United States will be fighting multidivisional, open-ended wars in multiple theaters, and there will be counterinsurgencies. The force created in the 1990s is insufficient, and thus the definition of noncombat specialty has become meaningless. The Reserve/Guard component cannot fill the gap created by strategic errors. The hiring of contractors makes sense and has precedence. But the use of CIA personnel outside the military chain of command creates enough stress. To have private contractors reporting outside the chain of command to government entities not able to command them is the real problem.

A failure that is rooted in the national consensus of the 1990s was compounded by the Bush administration's failure to reshape the military for the realities of the wars it wished to fight. But the final failure was to follow the logic of the civilian contractors through to its end, but not include them in the unified chain of command. In war, the key question must be this: Who gives orders and who takes them? The battlefield is dangerous enough without that question left hanging.

International

Pressure on Turkish PM to order Iraq invasion

09 October 2007 09:22

Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came under intense pressure on Monday night to order an invasion of northern Iraq following the deadliest attacks for over a decade on the Turkish military and civilians by separatist Kurdish guerrillas.

Erdogan, who has resisted demands from the Turkish armed forces for the past six months for a green light to cross the border into Iraqi Kurdistan, where the guerrillas are based, called an emergency meeting of national security chiefs to ponder their options in the crisis, a session that some said was tantamount to a war council.

A Turkish incursion is fiercely opposed by Washington since it would immensely complicate the United States campaign in Iraq and destabilise the only part of Iraq that functions, the Kurdish-controlled north.

Two Turkish soldiers were killed on Monday in booby trap explosions laid by guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) -- fighters classified as terrorists by Ankara, Washington and the European Union. Those casualties followed the killing of 13 Turkish soldiers in the south-east on Sunday when PKK forces outgunned a Turkish unit of 18 men without sustaining any casualties, according to the Kurds.

Last week, in an ambush also ascribed to the PKK, gunmen sprayed a bus with automatic fire in the same region, killing 13 civilians, including a boy of seven.

The Turkish media described the toll from the attacks as the worst in 12 years in a conflict spanning several decades that has taken almost 40 000 lives.

Erdogan is known to think little of the invasion option, making the pragmatic calculation that it would probably fail. Western diplomats in Ankara agree that an invasion could be counter-productive. The Turkish military raided Iraqi Kurdistan dozens of times in the 1990s but were unable to suppress the insurgency.

After a Cabinet meeting dominated by the Kurdish conflict, Cemil Cicek, the Turkish government spokesperson, said on Monday: "What is at issue here is how much any action we decide to take would bring us closer to a result." He did not rule out an invasion but queried its "usefulness".

The prime minister, however, is being challenged by the army command, which earlier this year demanded his authority to invade. He is also vulnerable to a mounting public clamour to act because of the upsurge in guerrilla activity and the heavy casualties being suffered. Hardline Turkish nationalists entered Parliament in Ankara following elections in July and they are also baying for Kurdish blood.

Following the soldiers' deaths on Sunday, Erdogan signalled a shift in policy without specifying how. "Our campaign against terrorism will continue in a different manner," he said. The Turkish military has just declared 27 "security zones" on the Iraqi and Iranian borders off-limits to civilians, suggesting to some that it might be gearing up for an invasion.

But despite the rising violence, Erdogan has opted for politics in his attempts to defuse the conflict with the Kurds. His Justice and Development party (AKP) enjoyed a stunning success among the Kurdish minority, concentrated in the south-east, in the July elections and he has also focused on political pacts with Baghdad to get the better of the guerrillas.

Last week Iraqi and Turkish interior ministers signed an accord aimed at combating the PKK by trying to cut the rebels' funding and logistics, and agreeing to extradite captured "terrorists". The accord, however, took three days to thrash out; Turkish insistence on a "hot pursuit" formula, allowing cross-border raids, was denied, and scepticism is high as to whether Baghdad can deliver.

Officially, Ankara refuses to recognise or deal with the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, although there have been back-channel attempts over the past year to engage with Massoud Barzani, the president of the Iraqi Kurdish region.

Erdogan's options are also constrained by strong US hostility to an invasion. While Turkish public opinion has been strongly anti-American since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, much of the logistical support for the US troops goes to Iraq via Turkey. Relations are also under severe strain because of US congressional moves to brand the 1915 massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as "genocide".

Erdogan sent aides to Washington on Monday to lobby Congress on the "genocide" resolution. Ankara is also warning that it could block the logistical support to the US in Iraq if the resolution is passed.

PKK guerrillas
The Kurdish separatist guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' party, or PKK, have been at war with the Turkish state since the early 1980s. Although it is now said to favour home rule within Turkey over secession, the PKK has historically pursued the breakaway of Kurdish-dominated south-east Turkey as a prelude to unifying Kurdish lands in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Turkey pursued a scorched earth policy in the 1980s and 1990s, destroying thousands of villages, sending millions of Kurds west and leaving about 37 000 dead. Turkey's biggest coup came in 1999 with the capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who was jailed for life. - Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

Beginning on October 22, student groups across the nation will hold Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on their campuses. These protest weeks will feature a series of events designed to bring a message to these academic communities that challenges most of what students are taught about the so-called War on Terror both in the classroom and on the quad.

The Week’s events will include speeches about Islamo-Fascism by prominent figures, including former Senator Rick Santorum (Penn State, Temple and UPenn), Sean Hannity (Columbia), Ann Coulter (Tulane and USC), Dennis Prager (UC Santa Barbara), Robert Spencer (Brown, Dartmouth, University of Rhode Island, and DePaul), Daniel Pipes (Northeastern and UPenn), David Horowitz (Columbia, Emory, Ohio State, Michigan and Wisconsin), Michael Ledeen (Maryland), Nonie Darwish (UCLA and Berkeley), Wafa Sultan (Stanford) and radio talk show hosts Melanie Morgan (San Francisco State), Michael Medved (University of Washington), Martha Zoeller (Georgia Tech), Alan Nathan (George Mason), Mark Larson (to be named) and many others.

A major theme of the Week will be the oppression of women in Islam. The photo accompanying this article, which shows a teenage girl buried before being stoned to death for alleged sexual offenses, will serve as the poster for the protest Week. The stoning took place in Iran.

The plight of Muslim women will be featured at “teach-in” panels and also at sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments, designed to protest the absence of courses that focus on Islamic gynophobia. The silence of Women’s Studies departments in the face of this oppression is a national outrage. College students are offered the opportunity to study the “oppression” of women in Boston and Beverly Hills in hundreds of Women’s Studies courses across America. But there is not a single course we are aware of that addresses the real oppression of women in Teheran and Riyadh.

In Saudi Arabia, to take one horrendous example, Saudi police recently shot to death schoolgirls who were fleeing a burning building without their veils. Better that they should be dead than seen.

A pamphlet on the subject of women’s oppression in Islam, written by Robert Spencer and Phyllis Chesler will be distributed on campuses (and posted on Frontpage next week), along with a petition protesting the campus blackout of this issue.

Many campuses will show the uncut version of the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which has been suppressed by ABC under pressure from the Clintons in order to help Hilary’s presidential run. This is the most spectacular episode of political censorship in recent memory. It is also relatively unreported, although the Los Angeles Times carried an informative story which you can read here. The Path to 9/11 was a film that cost $40 million to make and was seen by 28 million viewers, yet ABC has refused to release the DVD. Other films being shown during the Week are Obsession, Suicide Killers, Islam: What the West Needs to Know, Islam v. Islam and Chris Burgard’s Border.

The purpose of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is as simple as it is critical: to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the "war on terror" and that global warming is a greater danger to Americans than global jihad and Islamic supremacism.

Nothing could be more politically incorrect than to point out these unpleasant facts. But nothing could be more important for American students to hear. In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves.

Already, CAIR and the Muslim Students Association -- which are fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas -- are planning to hold counter- demonstrations during the Week called “Peace Not Prejudice.” Since the Islamic radicals whom these organizations represent and defend are among the most prejudiced people on earth, and since their own sponsoring organizations, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, have declared a global war against the West, this can only be regarded as high-order satire. The Muslim Students Association is welcome to sign our petition denouncing Islamo-Fascism and defending the dignity of all individuals, infidels included. It can be accessed here.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a protest against the censorship that has come to America, and whose chief enforcer is the progressive left. Anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the terrorist campaigns that are being waged against America, Europe and Israel and against non-radical Muslims in places such as Darfur, is automatically labeled an “Islamophobe.” It is by this means that the enemy seeks to paralyze the defenses of its intended victims. The progressive left is the enabler and abettor of the terrorist jihad. It has forged an “unholy alliance” with the most retrograde and reactionary forces in the world today. The institutional base of the left is the university system, from whose classrooms it is conducting a behind-the-lines psychological warfare campaign against its own countrymen and the democratic, secular and tolerant society they have created. It is time for Americans to rally in their own defense and answer the corrosive lies and libels whose goal is to sap their will to fight. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is the beginning of that answer and the first line of that defense.

David Horowitz

Students interested in organizing Islamo-Fascism Awareness Weeks on their campuses, and students seeking help obtaining speakers and literature should contact Jeffrey@horowitzfreedomcenter.org. Information about Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, including petitions, pamphlets, information about films is available at www.terrorismawareness.org. A list of campuses holding events can be found here. A calendar of events can be located here.

Radio talk show hosts willing to speak at their local campuses should contact sara@horowitzfreedomcenter.org

Qaeda Goes Dark After a U.S. Slip
Enemy Vanishes From Its Web Sites

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 9, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/64163

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden's first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda's internal security division that the organization's Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America's Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda's internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America's intelligence community saw. "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."

By Friday evening, one of the key sets of sites in the Obelisk network, the Ekhlaas forum, was back on line. The Ekhlaas forum is a password-protected message board used by Qaeda for recruitment, propaganda dissemination, and as one of the entrance ways into Obelisk for those operatives whose user names are granted permission. Many of the other Obelisk sites are now offline and presumably moved to new secret locations on the World Wide Web.

The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda's Obelisk system in real time. "It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes," Mr. Grace said yesterday.

The head of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors Jihadi Web sites and provides information to subscribers, Rita Katz, said she personally provided the video on September 7 to the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.

Ms. Katz yesterday said, "We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies."

Yesterday a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, Carl Kropf, denied the accusation that it was responsible for the leak. "That's just absolutely wrong. The allegation and the accusation that we did that is unfounded," he said. The spokesman for the director of national intelligence, Ross Feinstein, yesterday also denied the leak allegation. "The intelligence community and the ODNI senior leadership did not leak this video to the media," he said.

Ms. Katz said, "The government leak damaged our investigation into Al Qaeda's network. Techniques and sources that took years to develop became ineffective. As a result of the leak Al Qaeda changed their methods." Ms. Katz said she also lost potential revenue.

A former counterterrorism official, Roger Cressey, said, "If any of this was leaked for any reasons, especially political, that is just unconscionable." Mr. Cressey added that the work that was lost by burrowing into Qaeda's Internet system was far more valuable than any benefit that was gained by short-circuiting Osama bin Laden's video to the public.

While Al Qaeda still uses human couriers to move its most important messages between senior leaders and what is known as a Hawala network of lenders throughout the world to move interest-free money, more and more of the organization's communication happens in cyber space.

"While the traditional courier based networks can offer security and anonymity, the same can be had on the Internet. It is clear in recent years if you look at their information operations and explosion of Al Qaeda related Web sites and Web activities, the Internet has taken a primary role in their communications both externally and internally," Mr. Grace said.