Notes on the 'War on Terror'

Just a few quick bits I haven't really been able to place anywhere else.

The Times(UK) reports that Iraqi oil production is in decline. It's currently at about a half of prewar levels.

MSNBC is reporting that the DoD admitted in a letter "that it had wrongly added peaceful demonstrators to a database of possible domestic terrorist threats." MSNBC let's them walk on this one, referring to it as a mistake.

Stars and Stripes reported that "Insurgent attacks in Iraq reached a postwar high in the four months preceding Jan. 20, according to a Iraq progress report issued Friday by the Pentagon."

In the same story,

But when asked to describe the individuals attacking coalition forces, 88 percent of Iraqis in the mostly Sunni areas of Tikrit and Baqouba called them either “freedom fighters” or “patriots.” Even in the more mixed Sunni-Shiite areas of Baghdad and Kirkuk, about 53 percent of Iraqis polled chose either the patriot or freedom fighter characterization.

We had this a week ago from Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen, the Pentagon's deputy director for the war on terrorism. Thirty new terrorist organizations have emerged since the September 11, 2001, attacks, outpacing U.S. efforts to crush the threat.

And to back that up, a Spanish investigation into the Madrid bombings "concludes the Islamic terrorists who carried out the blasts were homegrown radicals acting on their own rather than at the behest of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network."

(I had a big rant here, but it was wordy and said nothing new so I pulled it down. Short version: If we had poured troops into Afghanistan to catch Bin Laden rather than holding them out to prepare for an unrelated war in Iraq, the US would be in a far stronger position internationally and in relation to the terror groups.)

Oh, and I forgot. The Bush administration has appointed their former travel booker, a 28 year old with no managerial or security experience to a key position in the Department of Homeland Security. His job is to bring together expert advice on threats to infrastructure and terrorists using WMD's.