Reference Materials - Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward - Nov. 10th

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For additional materials, please scroll down to the materials for our 4/8/2009 meeting 18.5 months ago, when we focused on Newsweek’s Cover Story of 2/9/2009 titled “Obama’s Vietnam” in response to the President’s first surge in Afghanistan.

We concluded (1) that we can’t just fight a war every place Al Qaeda acquires another sanctuary (already including Somalia and Yemen as of 18.5 months ago), (2) that fighting such wars is counter-productive since such wars are one of the primary reasons for the existence of Al Qaeda, (3) that fighting such a war in Afghanistan is probably doomed to fail since Afghanistan has defeated every foreign invader beginning with Alexander the Great and continuing through the Soviet occupation in the 1980’s with 110,000 troops on the ground, and (4) that infiltrating Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations will be much more effective than fighting such wars if only America can re-grow its human-intelligence capability that was destroyed by President Clinton’s Executive Order barring the recruitment of spies and double agents who had committed violent illegal acts – which provoked the resignation of his first CIA Director (R. James Woolsey, Jr.) in protest that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations do not trust anyone who has not committed violent illegal acts at their direction.

Accordingly, we launched one of our Six-Degrees-Of-Separation e-mail campaigns urging every American to send the following e-mail to President Obama –-

President Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President:

Re: Human Intelligence and Afghanistan

R. James Woolsey Jr.’s 26 December 1994 letter resigning as CIA Director stated that he believed that the new Executive Order banning the use as agents of anyone who had committed a violent illegal act would make it impossible to gather sufficient intelligence about terrorist organizations since they typically do not trust a new member until s/he has committed at least one violent illegal act at the direction of the terrorist organization.

The President who signed that Executive Order and provoked that resignation left office in January 2001 and, presumably, that Executive Order and the policy it represented have been reversed.

Accordingly, we believe that the American people are owed an explanation why our human intelligence capabilities, together with other programs that have been put in place since 9-11-2001, are not sufficient to protect America and its allies from potential attacks from terrorist organizations based in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And whether fighting an air war against the areas of Pakistan that are not controlled by its central government (thereby risking the extension of Fundamentalist-Islamic rule installed earlier this year in the Swat Valley to all of Pakistan) and trying to subjugate Afghanistan as a base to fight that air war when Afghanistan has never been conquered successfully for any length of time throughout recorded history, add to or detract from our overall intelligence capabilities to detect and prevent terrorist attacks on America and its allies.

Thank you for your consideration.
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