Senators Clash With Nominee About Torture

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by queequeger

I don't mean to be contrary (and I will likely read Yon's book... it's in my queue ), but all my coworkers and I laugh when people (or new guys) say AQI 'controls' a city.

This is some sort of appeal to authority I don't understand. Your coworkers are whom I should give a fuck about? Apparently they take a counter-opinion to the National Intelligence Estimate you couldn't be bothered to take my homework of. Can you ask them on what basis, and report back to the thread, or something?

I'm not contesting that AQI can pull of large scale attacks on civilians. I'm contesting that they're a threat to US forces, and that they are Al Qa'ida.

Maybe we can ask for membership cards before we kill them.

So, if the reason we stay is 'to eliminate Al Qa'ida strongholds,' we can leave. In sincerity, as soon as we walk out the door, AQI will be completely eradicated.

They killed everybody in the town, if you'd have bothered to read my links.

They killed everybody in the town.

[queequeger]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Your coworkers are whom I should give a fuck about?

My coworkers (and I) are military intelligence collectors and analysts, and fluent arabic linguists (among other things).

The fact is, while I do make a point of reading about this subject A LOT, so much of the things I've read distort the information they receive or receive previously distorted information. A lot of the time we're told by some local schmo 'those al-qa'ida guys over there are killing everyone,' and it turns out to be some other group. A lot of the time, we never get a chance to verify the information before we, well, kill everyone that's shooting.

The number of attacks on US forces that can be verified to come from Al-Qa'ida are slim to none. We're talking single percentage points. The number against civilians is somewhat higher, which is why I say if we're actually trying to stabilize the country we do need to count them amongst our enemies. But, that being said, they have a pretty tedious hold on what little ground they actually DO control, and the whole of Iraq is against them.