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To: John Carragher who wrote (13619)	10/29/2004 10:41:47 AM
From: Smiling Bob	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17683

Al Qaeda claimed responsibilty for 9/11 How many of these "75%" were even found in Iraq? Nothing showing here google.com Bush now claims that 75 percent of the group’s key members are out of commission. Some experts say that number is meaningless WEB EXCLUSIVE By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball Newsweek Updated: 4:58 p.m. ET Sept. 8, 2004 Sept. 8 - Without any public explanation, President George W. Bush last week increased the estimate of Al Qaeda leaders who have been killed or captured after receiving a revised U.S. intelligence analysis delivered the day before his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, NEWSWEEK has learned. advertisement In his nationally televised speech to the convention last Thursday night, Bush for the first time claimed that “more than three quarters of Al Qaeda’s key members and associates have been detained or killed.” For the past year, the president and senior administration officials have repeatedly used a lower figure to measure the U.S. government’s progress in the war on terror. Bush in his State of the Union speech last January asserted that “nearly two thirds” of Al Qaeda’s “known leaders” had been captured or killed. Pressed to explain how and when the estimate went up, a White House official told NEWSWEEK that the revised figure was based on a new CIA analysis that had been repeatedly sought by the White House in recent months and was provided to presidential aides only on Sept. 1, the day before Bush addressed the convention. But the official insisted the timing had nothing to do with the need to have new numbers for Bush’s convention speech. “This was being watched for some time irrespective of the political calendar,” said the official. White House and U.S. intelligence officials declined to provide any back-up data for how they developed the new number—or even to explain the methodology that was used, which they said was classified. The absence of any explanation, as well as the timing, prompted some counterterrorism experts to deride the figure as “meaningless” and predict the revision could fuel allegations that the administration is massaging terrorism data for political purposes. TERROR WATCH Current Column \| Archives • Terror Watch: Surprise Claim on Saddam The Duelfer report alleges that Saddam gave funds to a listed terror group. But the claim does little to advance the White House case for war • Terror Watch: Cheney’s Debate Misrepresentations on Iraq In his debate with John Edwards, Dick Cheney had a brand-new version of the events that led to war “It’s like a shell game,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former top CIA counterterrorism official. “This kind of thing is susceptible to all kinds of manipulation.” An official with the recently disbanded 9/11 commission also dismissed the new number, noting that it was impossible to get a firm handle on precisely the number of Al Qaeda “leaders” that were in place at the time of the September 11 attacks—the definition that the CIA says it used as its baseline for the estimate. “It was meaningless when they said two thirds and it’s meaningless when they said three fourths,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. “This sounds like it was pulled out of somebody’s orifice.” Intelligence sources said that the CIA assessment of how much of the Al Qaeda leadership was out of commission included not only Al Qaeda operatives who were directly killed or captured by U.S. forces operating around the world, but also included those captured by authorities in Pakistan, Britain and Saudi Arabia. The CIA also did not make any change in the methodology which would have led to the recent upward revision of the figure, an official said. But the president’s explanation in his speeches of what he is describing has changed: When Bush first used the “nearly two thirds” estimate in a nationally televised speech on Sept. 7, 2003 and again during his Jan. 20, 2004, State of the Union, he referred to Al Qaeda’s “known leaders.” In his speech to the convention last week, he referred to Al Qaeda’s “key members and associates”—a seemingly much larger number. Indeed, the “known leaders” of Al Qaeda prior to September 11 probably refers to a group that is no larger than about 20 to 25, according to Cannistraro. But the “key members and associates” formulation that Bush used in his convention speech could be a number that ranks in the hundreds if not thousands, depending on how “associates” is defined. A U.S. intelligence official pointed to one explanation for the increase—a number of highly publicized recent arrests of Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, including Mohammed Neem Noor Khan, a computer and communications specialists who is believed to have been a conduit for messages from Osama bin Laden to operatives in the West, and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian national who had been wanted by the FBI for participation in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. Another significant development was the arrest last month in Britain of Dhiren Barot, an Al Qaeda facilitator who is believed to have conducted surveillance on possible terror targets in New York, Washington and New Jersey. But it’s far from clear that any of these figures would qualify as “known leaders” of Al Qaeda, the formulation that was used by the president to measure progress prior to last week’s convention speech. Cannistraro noted that the term “leaders” generally implies an ability to exercise “command and control” over an organization. While the U.S. counterterrorism effort has unquestionably netted major “leaders” of Al Qaeda—such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, the operational commander of the group—it has not yielded anybody of a comparable leadership level for some time. In any case, Cannistraro noted, “when you say three fourths have been caught,” it leaves out an important point that wasn’t addressed by the president: “Every one of these people have been replaced.” © 2004 Newsweek, Inc. 216.239.39.104