A story in Sunday's Washington Post depicting Guantanamo prisoner files in "disarray" is wrong, says the former Pentagon official in charge of terrorist detainee affairs.

According to the Jan. 25 account, Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, "said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases."

Only "threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee" persuaded the CIA to "cough up a sentence or two," Stimson was quoted as saying.

But in a brief interview to double-check his statement Monday afternoon, Stimson maintained, "I never said they were in disarray."

The increasingly bold attacks on NATO supplies in Pakistan should be cause for serious worry, U.S. counterterrorism operatives are saying.

The attacks mean that Islamic extremist fighters in the region are adopting the tactics that their fathers and uncles employed more than a quarter century ago -- with CIA backing - to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The objective: to choke off supplies to occupying troops on the ground.

"The bad guys understand our operations and what our lifelines are all about," said an analyst with counterterror experience in the region.

Pentagon Counterterror Teams Go Deep  

It's interesting to speculate on why the expanded operations of Pentagon counterterror teams surfaced in the New York Times today. But one of them has to be that the noses of CIA and State Department officials remain severely out of joint from an initiative launched right after the  9/11 attacks by President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe," write Times reporters Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti.

"By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda's extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military's vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan."

According to the Times, a 2004 order identified "15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said."  

Soon enough, American ambassadors, who are supposed to be the top U.S. official in a foreign country, grew increasingly annoyed by Pentagon "cowboys" zipping in and out, congressional committees heard.

But if only because the State Department, and the CIA, couldn't keep DoD out of their sandboxes, they have been supporting the operations, the Times said.

A number of CIA veterans, however, say that the military teams are too often ill equipped for the missions, in terms of language abilities and knowledge of local customs and mores.

And they wonder what will happen when - inevitably, they say - a solider in mufti is caught red-handed in a place like Pakistan or Turkey, where nationalist feelings run high. Show trials - and the threat of executions (not to mention waterboarding) - are not out of the question.

Not that CIA assassins or kidnappers would be treated any better - or  know their way around a foreign country better -- than a veteran Army Special Forces operative, they also concede.

In any event, there's plenty of work to go around to keep everybody busy.

"It is far too easy to criticize CIA," a longtime Special Forces and Delta operative told me last year, "but all their renditions have resulted in far less than 100 detentions.  For an outfit like al Qaeda, which trained tens of thousands in Afghanistan, that doesn't amount to many at all."

Manchurian Candidates, Saudi Style

Tucked into the back of Sunday's New York Times Magazine is a fascinating piece on the Saudi way of dealing with former al Qaeda operatives (some captures, some inherited from Guantanamo).

"Brainwashing lite," the Chinese might call it. Or "re-education," what the North Vietnamese termed the communist dogma they poured into the heads of the southern brethren they defeated in 1975, usually in brutal work camps.

The Saudies have a kinder, gentler way. They board their charges in comfortable seaside dormitories, give them electronic toys and stipends, and talk them out of jihad by challenging their religious rationales for choosing guns and bombs.   

It seems to work, by the students' accounts, anyway.

Writer Katherine Zoepf, who visited the classes, quotes Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, who says the methods are "consistent with Saudi history, in that you try through nonviolent means to cajole, to bribe, to buy off the opposition."

After first denying that an American raiding party had crossed into Syria, the U.S. command now admits that it sent U.S. Special Forces in hot pursuit of armed Islamist militants who have been using Syria as a sanctuary.

Indeed, it's now claiming  that one of those captured in the raid was was Abu Ghadiya,  "the senior leader of al Qaeda's extensive network that funnels foreign fighters, weapons, and cash from Syria into Iraq," according to an unidentified senior intelligence official.

According to the Long War Journal's Bill Roggio: 

The raid to capture Ghadiya occurred in the town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, just five miles from the Iraqi border. Four US helicopters crossed the border and two of the helicopters landed to drop off special operations forces, who then proceeded to clear structures.

[Update: A CIA team led the raid, McClatchy reported.]

Last week U.S. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, who is responsible for Anbar province, which extends from Baghdad to the Syrian border, turned up the volume on a longstanding complaint that Syria had become "a sanctuary" for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

"Has the Syrian border stopped you from going after insurgents?" Kelly was asked in an interview  which didn't appear -- a bit awkwardly -- until Monday, in US News & World Report.

"We don't go across the border," Kelly said, "for sure."

Right. Let's call that inoperative.

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days.

The FBI denied Rossini and Miller permission to participate in the book or the PBS "NOVA" documentary, which is also being written and produced by Bamford, on grounds that the FBI "doesn't want to stir up old conflicts with the CIA," according to multiple reliable sources.

The attack on the American Embassy in Yemen serves notice that the recent claims of al Qaeda's demise were premature.

Only two days ago, the State Department's top counter-terrorism official claimed that al Qaeda was "imploding" and had "no popular appeal." 

The Islamic Army is the core of the coalition of 'nationalist-jihadist' insurgency factions which have expressed interest in joining the political process (the Reform and Jihad Front, the Political Council of the Iraqi Resistance) and is one of the key factions believed to have joined up with the Awakenings Councils / Sons of Iraq in force.  Its public break with [al Qaeda in Iraq] in April 2007 was probably the most important turning point in the transformation of the Sunni insurgency.