It is true that, throughout the inspections, I believed the Iraqis could have acted faster and shown more transparency.

I was never completely certain as to why they did not. In part, I believe they wanted to preserve their dignity: respect is the most valuable currency in Middle Eastern negotiations, and it would have been unacceptable for the Iraqis to appear intimidated or humiliated by the inspections.

It may have been the persistent suspicion that the UN inspections were an instrument for intelligence gathering, in preparation for war.

Or perhaps they simply believed that because there were no WMDs to be discovered, the truth would eventually prevail.

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January 11, 2002, the first detainees arrived at Camp X-Ray.

The camp sparked controversy before it was even built.

Read about the initial decision to build the detention facility and view images from 2002 to today.

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CP Note: 2011 marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

The surface parallels are easy to spot: both surprise attacks, both by air, both shocks to the world.

The article below breaks the surface and drills in, going back and forth between Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and Usama bin Laden,their reasons and motivations for planning and executing Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and the manhunts that followed.

Yamamoto

Much of what the admiral said went against the tide of popular opinion. Once the emperor agreed to make war against the United States, Yamamoto immediately ended his personal opposition, for he would never speak against the Chrysanthemum Throne. He set aside his feelings and accepted who he was—the sword of the emperor, and the one man in Japan who was capable of bringing the United States to its knees.

“What a strange position I find myself in now,” he wrote an old friend. “Having to make a decision diametrically opposed to my own personal opinion, with no choice but to push full-speed in pursuance of the decision.”

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War began when most of us were asleep, which is how most wars begin.

A few insomniacs at Camp New Jersey claimed to have heard the growl of Tomahawk cruise missiles 250 feet overhead as they motored toward Baghdad before dawn on Thursday, March 20. The vast majority, however, got word through the soldier grapevine or from television: several satellite dishes had sprouted around the camp. In the public-affairs tent, Bush’s announcement from the Oval Office replayed endlessly on the Samsung multisystem: “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance. . . . We will accept no outcome but victory.”

Trey Cate stared at the screen and murmured, “This is going to be a weird war. We’re going to live it and watch it at the same time.”

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McGinnis yelled again: “The grenade is in the truck!”

Then Newland could hear it ricocheting around the turret, a heavy metallic drum.

McGinnis tried to grab it so he could toss it back out before it blew, but he missed. He stood as if he were going to leap out of the top of the Humvee, but instead he dropped down from his fighting position into the truck.

Newland thought McGinnis was trying to escape the grenade. But he wasn’t. McGinnis had realized that his teammates hadn’t spotted it, and so he was chasing it.

Newland couldn’t move quickly enough to get out of the truck with its combat-locked doors, and none of the guys quite understood what was going on because McGinnis hadn’t dived out.

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CP Note: The November 25, 2001 revolt at Qala-i-Jangi played a key role in the decision to build a remote holding site for specific operatives. This piece discusses the decision on where to build that facility.  

On December 11, 2001, in what appears to have been a case of conscious indirection, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld told journalists that the administration was still mulling the decision about where to hold detainees. Afghanistan, U.S. shipboard, the detainees’ countries of origin, and locations in the United States were all under consideration.

In fact, by early December, Guantánamo had emerged as the administration’s clear first choice.

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The November 25 prisoner revolt at Qala-i-Jangi near Mazar-i-Sharif in the north shocked coalition authorities into recognizing that the old traditional ways of Afghanistan would not work in this new campaign.

In the words of a Special Forces captain present, [it was] “a full-scale battle.”

CIA officer Mike Spann was the first to die when the detainees attacked, thus tragically becoming the first American killed in the fighting in Afghanistan.

After several days of intense fighting the butcher’s bill was tallied: Several hundred enemy fighters had been killed and scores more wounded, a few holdouts surrendered, and many Northern Alliance soldiers had died or were wounded.

The Qala-i-Jangi fight was a catalyst, in some measure, for two immediate U.S. reactions: First, it was painfully apparent that captured enemy combatants would have to be handled more professionally. Interrogation was obviously impossible under such circumstances and information was sorely needed on the movements of high-value al-Qaeda targets and possible future terror attacks. This could not be done successfully in-country to the extent necessary. Nor was it realistic to expect that surrendered fighters would remain quiescent, cooperative prisoners. Secondly, the leadership realized that slapdash prisoner handling like at Qala-i-Jangi was unacceptable: It led to unnecessary casualties on both sides. [More...]

Admiral Bill McRaven stepped out of one of the low, Quonset-like tents beside hangar five at Jalalabad airbase in Afghanistan; he was standing forty miles north of the Pakistani frontier.

McRaven had been in the close confines of the Joint Operations Center (JOC) for almost twelve hours, and he needed some air.

The admiral, like the other members of the expedition, had been awake for most of the last two days, first on a flight from Norfolk, Virginia—a sixteen-hour marathon with two midair refuelings—and then during the hurried preparations to put together the JOC, from which he would monitor the progress of Neptune’s Spear.

As they had done during the Maersk Alabama operation, the Twidgets from Det Alpha went to work with a vengeance, unloading pallets of gear from the airplanes, setting up inflatable tents to shelter Web servers and crypto gear, and stringing hundred of yards of cable to connect tons of communications gear and downlinks to plasma-screen monitors and teleconferencing equipment that gave the commander of JSOC the ability to speak with the White House, the Pentagon, and CIA in real time.

Det Alpha joked that the admiral could talk to anyone he wanted, except Osama bin Laden— and that was because Osama didn’t own a functioning telephone.

If he did, Det Alpha could make it ring on his nightstand and reverse the long-distance charges when he answered. These guys were the SEAL Team Six of cyberspace.

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