Bill Roggio (The Fourth Rail) to Iraq...
... he's leaving in a week and still could use some additional support - details here. I am sure a couple of bucks from SWJ / SWC members would be greatly appreciated. The link provides the PayPal information.
Here are some additional details:
A Journey to Anbar Province
By Bill Roggio
In the coming weeks I will be taking part in an opportunity that, while not risk free, is more than I can pass up. To make it happen, I will need assistance and good fortune. I'd like your assistance in sending me to Iraq.
A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to visit and tour the operations environment I've been covering here for the last year. That invitation, from senior Marine officers with the Regimental Combat Team - 2, 2nd Marine Division, presents an opportunity for me to provide first hand reporting from Iraq, as well as to continue to provide context to the reports coming from other sources as I've done here at the Fourth Rail.
Current planning centers on leaving in mid-November, and I plan to be out of country for a month and in theater as long as possible. I will be taking an unpaid leave of absence from my current employment, and hopefully returning to find that I'm still employed. And I'll need lots of assistance to make this a reality. Foremost is a means to defer the significant cost of going. Additionally I am seeking the media credentials necessary for entry into Iraq.
My daily reporting on the war will continue, although not here at the Fourth Rail. Along with Steve Schippert and Marvin Hutchens, I will continue to provide high value media content, along with other extensions to the coverage I have offered here. We will soon be announcing the launch of a new site focused on national and international security threats and the U.S. led war on terror. Some time before my departure I will move my coverage to that site – ThreatsWatch.Org.
Further details on the trip, financial and otherwise, are available on request. Offers of assistance should be emailed to:
billroggio@gmail.com
And for those seeking to make a financial contribution, you may do so via PayPal or if you prefer another means, please contact me at the above email address.
Military Blogger: His Way of Serving
23 Nov. Philadelphia Inquirer (Made the Early Bird too) - Military Blogger: His Way of Serving (Bill Roggio at the The Fourth Rail and Threats Watch.
Quote:
Roggio, 35, left for Iraq on Saturday, but he's not in uniform. He's a military blogger - milblogger for short - embedded with the Second Marine Division in western Iraq. The Marines invited Roggio to spend a month with them after they and thousands of others took note of his work at The Fourth Rail (
www.billroggio.com), one of several milblogs following events in Iraq.
Bill Roggio Reports from Iraq...
... on Threats Watch:
3 Dec. - The Teufelhunden of the 3/6
2 Dec. - The Ramadi Debacle
1 Dec. - The Sulemani
30 Nov. - Transferring Control
Check it out and kudos to Bill for going in harm's way in search of the stories that do not make the MSM....
Covering Roggio's coverage of war
This is my post on the Washington Post story this moring about Bill Roggio's work with Marines in Iraq. My closing paragraph:
The media has not done a poorer job of reporting a war since the Tet offensive in Vietnam where they turned a rout of the communist forces into a victory. They are making the same mistake again. They are attributing significance to the fact of an attack rather than the results of an attack. One of the easiest things to do in war is launch a failed attack. Anybody can do it. Yet in their reporting of the war, the violence of a failed attack is treated as a failure of US forces to prevent it. This is an impossibly stupid standard, but it seems to be the one that all the major media follow. Roggio is a rare exception. That is what makes his reporting so important.
Post Election Developments
28 Dec. Threats Watch by Bill Roggio - Post Election Developments.
Quote:
... The much touted “rise in post election violence” is merely a resumption of the insurgency, parts of which conducted a cease fire for the election, and other parts of which had their operations interrupted by the tough security restrictions in place during the election.
WaPo's Preemptive Strike Against Bill Roggio
30 Dec. Real Clear Politics Op-Ed - WaPo's Preemptive Strike Against Bill Roggio.
Quote:
It was the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by shooting. The targets of Washington Post reporters Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck were two of journalism's favorites: Web loggers and the U.S. military.
"Bloggers, Money, Now Weapons in Information War," read the headline over their story, which appeared last Monday. "U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage," the subhed said.
"Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey less than two months ago when a Marine officer half a world away made him an offer he couldn't refuse," the story began.
The insinuation of the headline and the lead is that Mr. Roggio was recruited and paid by the Marines to write favorable things about military operations in Iraq.
Drive-by shootings are notoriously inaccurate, and the story by Mr. Finer and Mr. Struck, which ran last Monday, contained so many errors it should be an embarrassment to the Washington Post...
Journalists don't like bloggers because they fact-check journalists. Bloggers like Bill Roggio and Michael Yon, a former Special Forces soldier who embedded with a Stryker battalion in Mosul, expand the threat posed by the new media. They're reporting news, and doing it better than "professional" journalists are.
Messrs. Finer and Struck weren't reporting news when they slimed Bill Roggio. They were launching a preemptive strike against a new, but increasingly muscular, competitor.
The SWJ / SWC contributed a small ammount to Bill prior to his trip and we are glad we did.
al-Qaeda Jailbreak in Yemen
Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail - al-Qaeda Jailbreak in Yemen.
Quote:
The escape of twenty three al-Qaeda members from a Yemeni prison raises serious questions about the nation’s ability and commitment to fight the terrorist organization. Earlier in the week, Yemen announced the jailbreak, and Interpol immediately issued an "urgent global security alert" seeking the arrest of the terrorists.
The escapees included Jamal Badawi, the leader of the cell responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen in 2000, which killed 17 U.S. sailors, and Fawaz al-Rabe'ie, the leader of the cell that attacked the French oil tanker Limburg in 2002. Badawi has a $5 million bounty on his head. There is also the possibility that Jaber Elbaneh, a member of the "Lackawanna Six" al-Qaeda cell from Buffalo, New York, may have been one of the escapees. Elbaneh has been indicted in U.S. criminal court for conspiring to provide aid to a foreign terrorist entity and also has a $5 million reward for his capture.
The details of the prison break are emerging, and it becomes clear there was assistance from within Yemen’s security services, and Yemen’s amnesty program for al-Qaeda members is seriously flawed. Yemen’s security services are believed to be riddled with Islamist and al-Qaeda sympathizers, and weapons used in an attack on a U.S. consulate in Jeddah in 2004 have been traced back to the Yemeni Defense Ministry...
"Civil War" & Where's Zarqawi?
The Fourth Rail blog - "Civil War" & Where's Zarqawi? by Bill Roggio.
Quote:
As further sectarian violence surfaces in Iraq, the predictions of civil war increase. Over the past few days, scores of bodies have been uncovered in the Baghdad area, many showing signs of torture and execution-styled murders. In an attempt to improve the standing of the Iraqi Police, an agreement has been struck for the Iraqi Army and police forces to conduct joint operations. This is a clear indication the Interior Ministry is under pressure to clean up its police forces, as well as an admission that the Iraqi Army is viewed in a far better light by the Iraqi people than the police forces.
But sectarian violence, while a troubling and a destabilizing development, does not equate to civil war. Many established democracies are rife with sectarian strife, including India, the Philippines and Indonesia. This isn't intended to excuse the killings in Iraq, but it should be understood that there are very real problems throughout the world in established democratic countries. al-Qaeda is attempting to stir up sectarian violence and create the conditions for a civil war, but the political process, while frustratingly slow, is moving forward and the Iraqi Army and police forces, while far from perfect, have not cracked...
Joint Urban Warrior Small Wars Conference (JUW 06)
From Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail.
Quote:
I have been invited to attend the Joint Urban Warrior (JUW 06) Small Wars Conference in Potomac, Maryland as a blogger and journalist. The event is hosted by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Joint Forces Command. I will attend the conference on Monday and Tuesday (April 2 & 3), and will also participate on a panel. If you will be at the conference, send me an email...
More than 220 participants are expected to attend JUW 06 Small Wars, including representatives from all the uniformed services, several multinational partners, NATO, and the intelligence and interagency communities. JUW 06 Small Wars is structured as a set of lessons learned sessions (US and Multinational) based on recent real-world urban operations, followed by extensive focus area workshops. Participants will apply those lessons and insights in the workshops, supplemented by an extensive body of knowledge from previous war games, as well as Service, Joint, Multinational, and Interagency lessons learned.
With thanks to the Wargaming Division of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, and Dave Dilegge and Bill Nagle at the Small Wars Journal.
Fourth Rail - Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq
Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq
Quote:
Further evidence of Iran's support of the Shia death squads and Sunni al-Qaeda has emerged. At the end of December, two Iranian agents of the Quds force were arrested in a SCIRI compound in Baghdad. The Iraqi government was angry over the arrests, as the Iranians were part of a diplomatic delegation, and the agents were later released and deported.
But the Washington Post reported the two Iranian intelligence agents captured in Baghdad possessed "weapons lists, documents pertaining to shipments of weapons into Iraq, organizational charts, telephone records and maps, among other sensitive intelligence information... [and] information about importing modern, specially shaped explosive charges into Iraq." One was "the third-highest-ranking official of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' al-Quds Brigade."
