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Remember That Old Commercial For A Brokerage House?


Remember that old commercial where the guy is sitting with his broker who starts to talk and the restaurant or bar falls utterly silent, people turn their heads, stop chewing on their food and halt sipping their drinks in mid-swig? Then at the end a voiceover intones with deep meaning, "when E.F. Hutton talks, people listen."

Well, same goes for Ahmed Rashid.


Sean Paul Kelley September 11, 2006 - 6:19pm
Sean Paul Kelley's diary | printer friendly version | digg

So whose side, Sean,

is this asshole on?

If he wants to get me into a mosque, he can f**k himself.

I'll ski into a cypress on Lake McQueeney.

mauberly September 11, 2006 - 11:22pm
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Ian elaborates on the essay more

in this post and I will elaborate a bit on it tomorrow. But Rashid is decidedly a very secular Muslim and on "our" side, although he is no fan of Musharraf's, I would suppose. He literally wrote the book on the Taliban and also on the IMU, led by Juma Namangani of Uzbekistan.

Sean Paul Kelley September 12, 2006 - 12:03am
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I did not

realize he was the guy who wrote the book. I read quite a bit of it in '02. He is clearly writing with the enthusiasm of an author, parts of whose last paragraph appear to be coming true: "that Pakistan will face a Taliban style Islamic revolution which will further destabilize it and the entire region."

He has a writer's stake in the outcome.

He seems to have called the market.

mauberly September 12, 2006 - 7:43pm
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hi-tech Hezbollah

Sep 9, 2006

How hi-tech Hezbollah called the shots
By Iason Athanasiadis

BEIRUT - Hezbollah's ability to repel the Israel Defense Forces during the recent conflict was largely due to its use of intelligence techniques gleaned from allies Iran and Syria that allowed it to monitor encoded Israeli communications relating to battlefield actions, according to Israeli officials, whose claims have been independently corroborated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

"Israeli EW [electronic warfare] systems were unable to jam the systems at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut, they proved unable to jam Hezbollah's command and control links from Lebanon to Iranian facilities in Syria, they blocked the Barak ship anti-missile systems, and they hacked into Israeli operations communications in the field," Richard Sale, the longtime intelligence editor for United Press International, who was alerted to this intelligence failure by current and former CIA officials, told Asia Times Online.

The ability to hack into Israel's military communications gave Hezbollah a decisive battlefield advantage, aside from allowing it to dominate the media war by repeatedly intercepting reports of the casualties it had inflicted and announcing them through its television station, Al-Manar. Al-Manar's general director, Abdallah Kassir, would not comment on the information-gathering methods that had allowed it to preempt Israel's casualty announcements, but he admitted he was in constant contact with Hezbollah's military wing.

more
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI09Ak01.html


In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning. ~ Carl Sandburg

Tina September 11, 2006 - 11:43pm
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