The Hunt for Bin Laden

Over the weekend, I finally finished Robin Moore's The Hunt for Bin Laden -- Task Force Dagger (2003), which I bought in hard cover not long after it came out because it not only looked interesting (I'd read a review) but because I thought it might be a fun source of light research for The Enclave. Moore, "the first and only civilian ever allowed to go through the grueling Special Forces qualification course at Fort Bragg" is the author of The Green Berets.

The book covers the first engagement in American's War on Terror: the special forces twelve-man teams that infiltrated into different strategic areas of Afghanistan shortly after Sept 11, 2001 and aided the Northern Alliance in its battle against the Taliban. Sixty-two days later, with the liberation of Kabul, the campaign was over and won. A group of only a few hundred men had decisively defeated an enemy force of one hundred thousand. The book takes you right into the heat of battle, from the eyes of the Green Berets who fought it, and shares the successes and the foibles of their effort.

Unfortunately, it was only as I was looking up the Amazon url for this review that I discovered some of it was made up. Not by Robin Moore, but by one of his sources, Jack Idema (refered to in the book sometimes as the mysterious Jack and others as Keith Idema) who apparently did extensive editing on the ms Moore and his co-writer produced. This Jack claimed to be a Green Beret, and while he was apparently accepted into the program, he ended up being kicked out. There are all sorts of one-star reviews at Amazon, decrying the book, including one which claimed Moore has since disavowed the book. Not wanting to rely solely on Amazon reviewers, I investigated further...

Wikipedia confirms the controversy and also that Moore has disavowed the book. Citing Robert Young Pelton's book, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, the article states, "Though [the Special Forces soldiers] never met or talked to Idema, and despite the fact that almost ten members had carefully detailed their actions to Moore at K2, the first chapter puts forth an account of the team's infill into Afghanistan that the men tell me has been entirely fabricated."

Nor was it just Moore he snookered. Apparently he spent a good deal of time conning a lot of people in the press as the Wikipedia article documents, including Dan Rather (that probably wasn't all that hard). Idema was convicted in 2004 of running a private Afghan prison and torturing Afghani's, but even before that he had a long history of crime.

That'll teach me to buy a book and take years to get around to reading it. Now I'm wondering if any of it is valid.

Probably some of it is, at least on the general level. One of the things that I was most struck by was how the SF guys would get into position on the ground and then call in the air support -- bombers, fighters, gunships, etc -- is probably ... Since I have a few friends who work on various weapons systems (as does my hubby) it was cool to see how it all works in action.

However, this revelation does explain the sometimes almost incoherent writing, and the weird episodes with "Jack". Though I'm told that Jack rewrote the manuscript in order to give himself a greater role, he failed in that attempt. The parts that centered on him seemed out of left field, having nothing to do with the rest of what was going on. He's the incredible young recruit who loved Moore's ballad The Green Beret and read the book which led him into becoming a Green Beret himself. Later, as "Keith Idema," he appears as the "retired" Green Beret savior of the National Geographic documentary maker Gary Scurka (with whom he'd actually entered the country); still later, he's the legendary superspy/soldier/advisor to the NA in Afghanistan... "Are there many men who call themselves Jack?" Moore supposedly muses, "Or is there only one incredible guy?" There's even an Epilog, all about Jack, which is really out of left field. I read it wondering, "Who is this guy? Why are you telling me about him sitting around in this bar lamenting the loss of the war and ruminating on how great he is? I don't recall him doing anything to speak off in the rest of the narrative..."

So, it's too bad. Lies infiltrate truth and the whole is tainted. After the controversy, publisher Random House quietly let it go out of print and the whole book died into obscurity. But it's also an excellent illustration of how the cosmic system works. Satan loves to take the truths of God and infiltrate them with lies. Just a few and then you don't know what is true and what is not, or you've gotten pointed off in the wrong direction, operating on assumptions that are false, while they seem true...

There are some other books to read about the war, and I may, but right now I still have some books on my shelf. But maybe I'd better check their Amazon entries before I start reading...

Torture

I'm sorry, but I'm having a hard time taking this whole torture kerfluffle seriously. Slapping someone's face? Putting them in a small space with an insect? (and interrogators weren't even allowed to make them think it was a stinging insect). The attention grasp? Simulating drowning after telling the terrorist prisoner that they aren't going to actually be drowned? Please. Anyone who's watched 24 knows what torture is.

House Speaker Pelosi admits to having been briefed that waterboarding was a technique that was used, and had been approved by the "Bush (Boo! Hiss! Yowl! Shriek!) Administration" lawyers, but said she didn't know anyone had actually used it! Um... so why did she think they were briefing her, then? Why did she think they wanted her to know they were approved in doing this to gain important intelligence about upcoming plots from high level terrorists? She was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and she doesn't know what's going on with the interrogations? (I wrote this post last week, and it's come out now from the CIA briefers that they told her specifically her about procedures that had already been used on Abu Zubaydah...And she's still denying it...)

In reading The Hunt for Bin Laden yesterday, I happened to come across a definition of actual torture. (leave aside the beheadings and all that which the Taliban were perpetrating on the Afghani's) After several successful campaigns wherein the Taliban fighters had surrendered in the thousands, they were being held in a place called Qala-i-Jagi or "Fortress of War." Robin Moore, the author, describes it as something that "could have been a huge castle and its defenses transplanted from central Europe...surrounded by mud-brick walls up to ten meters thick, [with] moats, ramparts and walls almost twenty feet high with parapets across the top."

Two undercover CIA operatives were sorting through the various "detainees," many of whom unbeknownst to the operatives had been able to smuggle weapons into their prison situation on account of the fact that the Northern Alliance victors did not like to touch their enemies and thus didn't search them very well. They also expected them to follow the cultural protocol of not fighting back once they'd given up. But the al Quaida terrorists held allegiance to a standard that superseded local cultural norms and there was an uprising. One of the CIA guys, Mike Spann, was captured.

Moore describes his death thus:

Spann's body would bear out the worst of the rumors -- he had been captured alive and tortured by the AQ. Both of his legs had been broken below the knees in a typical al-Qaida torture method. What was not reported was that he had been alive for quite some time after. Two bullets had been placed in the small of his back, on either side of his spine. A final bullet, which killed him, had been inflicted some time later, in the back of his neck, probably as he knelt down with his hands tied behind his back.

That was al-Qaida. Power Line blog posted a link to a Times Online article about a video of an Abu Dhabi Prince (one of 22 royal princes) shown

"mercilessly and repeatedly beating a man with a cattle prod and a nailed board, burning his genitals and driving his Mercedes over him several times."

He did this because he thought the man had cheated him in a grain deal.

People who would do these sorts of things can only be laughing at us for our handwringing over the benign activities we've engaged in to extract valuable information from vicious, violent men. Ann Coulter's two columns, here and here, discuss our "terrible" deeds in amusing detail. As PowerLine blogger John Hinderaker concluded in his post on the Abu Dhabi prince,

"These are the people Barack Obama thinks will be impressed by his repudiation of one of the most effective terrorism-fighting tactics used by the Bush administration. I think, rather, that they'll conclude he's a fool."

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