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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."