Welcome to the weekly standard podcast. I'm your host Michael Graham with us from the Weekly Standard and the foundation for the defense democracies of Tom Jocelyn and Tom of Senior on TV a lot lately because a lot of stuff happening in your wheelhouse including the debate over who is and isn't al-Qaeda. So can you tell me who this course on group is and how I got on their mailing list? Well the name course on group is really throwing everybody for a loop but really it's just al-Qaeda.
It's just the al-Qaeda organization. All the leaders of the course on group are senior al-Qaeda operatives. They were sent to Syria by the head of al-Qaeda, I'm an old out here and they were doing the bidding of al-Qaeda. They were planning mass casualty attacks in the West and they were trying to use Syria as a launching pad.
So putting aside all the terminology, the real fact of matter is they were just in play al-Qaeda. I saw a comment from Susan Rice about the essentially the destruction of core al-Qaeda. If I understand the White House right there, some certain part of al-Qaeda that has been either destroyed, decimated, etcetera. How is that different from Coruson group?
Well I mean part of the confusion over what the Coruson group is is caused by the administration persistently saying that basically there's this core of al-Qaeda in South Asia that's been decimated. Well this group in Syria was core al-Qaeda or is core al-Qaeda. In fact I'm following one of them on Twitter right now and translating the tweets. These are guys who are core al-Qaeda as they come.
And the idea that there's this core of al-Qaeda in South Asia and everything else that's going on is something else. It's sort of the lynch pin of the Obama administration's approach to describe a terrorist threat. But quite frankly it's wrong. As we've seen with this group in Syria this is core al-Qaeda.
If you know the biographies of these guys they're all core al-Qaeda. They're all core al-Qaeda figures in Yemen, in North Africa, you know East Africa throughout different countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. So the idea that you have this small contained group of al-Qaeda operatives who are just waiting to be thrown to death in South Asia and everything else is sort of something else is just wrong. Well then let me ask it the way I think normal people would ask it and as you know Tom I'm not a normal person myself but I admire them tremendously.
The group of people who share the vision that al-Qaeda promoted and is willing to kill, you know conduct terror attacks or in the case of ISIS military raids on behalf of that vision. Is that group bigger or smaller than it was in 2009 when President Obama took office? That group is bigger. That group is sort of you're talking about basically the spread of the ideology which is what al-Qaeda has been about from its founding in 1988.
Really a lot of what al-Qaeda has tried to do is spread its jihadist ideology throughout the Muslim world. And they've had more success at doing that than a lot of people in the US want to do them credit for at least a lot of people in the US government. And so that pool is definitely much deeper today than it was in 2009 or certainly since September 11th 2001 which is what's troubling. But even within that pool the specific al-Qaeda organization if they're alive and has been able to replace its ranks and it's not nearly as definitely as President Obama and the surrogates have tried to cling.
So I appreciate you speaking of the ideology but there is a loosely affiliated group that has actually they communicate somewhat and obviously not every single member communicates with every other member. But that I guess the word would be network or that maybe Amlay of terrorism or something where there are actual people who've been in an al-Qaeda training camp or who have studied under al-Qaeda member. Is that trying to give their administration a little more credit and more focus? Is that group bigger or smaller since 2009?
Well of course it's tough to say but it depends on how you put together the evidence and I think the evidence if you do the patient sort of careful investigation that group of factors bigger. And part of the reason there's so much confusion is that the administration has tried to pretend that the regional branches of al-Qaeda. These are sort of groups that run different regions around the globe. There are at least five of them that are officially recognized as being al-Qaeda branches in East Africa.
You have al-Qaeda, you have al-Qaeda, you have al-Qaeda in Pennsylvania and you have the Nuzr Front in Syria, you have al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb and now you have a new branch called al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent. The administration has tried to claim that basically those branches are not really full blown al-Qaeda, they're something else. But in fact they are all part of this international network of al-Qaeda runs. They head that each one of these branches swear they're personal biot or both of allegiance to the Ayman al-Qaeda.
And as they say in their own rhetoric, this biot actually hangs around their neck. In other words if I violate them you have the right to take off my head. And so it's a very serious matter for them. And the idea that they're not full blown al-Qaeda just because they're not stationed in Pakistan or because they're doing something other than trying to attack the West on a day-to-day basis, it's just a phony reading of the record really.
Well what kind of attacks would they be plotting? Like for example you mentioned Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent. What would they be working on? Well see here's what's amazing about this.
So the administration says Al-Qaeda decimated Al-Qaeda Corps, decimated Afghanistan, Pakistan. Well even if you take them at their definition of Al-Qaeda Corps, which I don't, but even if you did, there's evidence to believe that's very wrong. In fact just earlier this month Al-Qaeda announced a new branch called Al-Qaeda Indian subcontinent and immediately claimed responsibility for a couple of attacks. Now what's very interesting is that Al-Qaeda and Indian subcontinent is put out this press release.
It's a nine-page PDF file online on Twitter and elsewhere. Basically explaining what happened during one of these attacks, what they claimed happened during one of these attacks. And they say they were in the process of hijacking two Pakistani frigates and then using their missiles to attack both a US warship slash oil tanker and the other one being Indian warship. And they claim that basically the operatives responsible for this plot who were gunned down by Pakistani security forces during the hijackings or attempted hijackings were all in fact serving numbers of the Pakistani Navy.
So they're saying that they have infiltrated the Pakistani Navy at a very deep level. You know I haven't been able to verify everything Al-Qaeda is saying with regard to that plot right now. Some of it certainly does ring true. And any event we know is that the details here are very disturbing.
Basically this could be one of those things, the next big thing. People are talking about Khorasan group today in Syria and the threat that they post to the West. This could be a thing we're talking about a year or 18 months from now or even sooner where people are like oh boy what happened here. You know God forbid there's another successful major attack.
But if there is, Tom, isn't this entire conversation about who's on what team of the baseball cards of Al-Qaeda, you know, was this pre-X-Men Al-Qaeda, post-X-Men Al-Qaeda. Isn't it all going to seem so foolish because we know that there's a group of people. They have a general shared view. They've been sharing some of their training, some of their ideas, some of their people.
And if one of these subgroups attacks us, it's a win for Al-Qaeda period and it's dead Americans and dead Westerners period. Well I think that's certainly true. I mean obviously you deal with even the ideological threat even if it doesn't come from the specific organizations per se. But I think overall if you go through my writing carefully and see what I constantly beam the drum on is that this is constant bias in the U.S.
to basically say that I'm out of the area ahead of Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda senior leadership don't have any sway anymore, don't have any pull and they're sort of out of the game. This is constant drum beat of this. The problem with that is there is persistent consistent evidence through the years that's not true. And in fact if we've learned anything from recent events in Syria with the so-called Coruscant group, this is a group of operatives.
And take a step back to second like we'll think about this. This is a group of al-Qaeda operatives that came from North Africa, Chechnya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They came from all different areas, under the orders of Imald Al-Hiri and then converged together in Syria to perform this sort of elite group that could plant back into the West. That picture is exactly the opposite of a guy who's out of the game.
The Imald Al-Hiri has no control and no power at all and then he's basically doing nothing. In fact all of these operatives from around the world converged in Syria under his orders to plot against the West. And this is important because you can go through especially U.S. intelligence community assessments even earlier this year, head of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others, saying that basically without hearing his cohorts we're just providing ideological inspiration and they weren't really operational anymore.
Well, we've just witnessed now in the last two weeks a very stunning display of just how operational without hearing really is. One last question the president said that it was James Clapper who failed to perceive the ISIS threat. And there's a lot of conversation from people who are sort of defending where we are saying no one could have seen ISIS coming. This is a surprise what the heck happened.
When did you follow the stuff regularly? When did you start seeing the Al-Qaeda in whether it's Syria or the Levant or whichever version of it you want to go with? When did you start seeing this new grouping of Al-Qaeda players on the field? Well, you can go back.
There's a piece that Bill Rogio and the colleague of the one word journal and I wrote co-author for the weekly standard in February of 2012 called Sertutik Retreat. This was just over a month after the last U.S. combat boots left the ground in Iraq. And basically we started blowing the whistle then.
The things were going to spiral out of control. You can read that we said it right then and there. That this war is not over and that this is going to get worse. And there's a series of other articles and warnings issued and that's not to trump it.
I think the data were obvious. The Pentagon released the one point, an assessment saying in the 10 months after the American troops left Iraq, that basically Al-Qaeda in Iraq is on a state of Iraq which was sort of a precursor to ISIS today. And ISIS grabbed this organization and it's really a continuation of it. The number of attacks by the organization in Iraq almost doubled in the 10 months after American forces left in December 2011.
From about 75 per week in January 2012 to about 140 per week 10 months later. So this has been, there's plenty of indications to show that this thing was spiraling out of control and was getting bad very quickly. It really comes down to whether or not you want to see that and do anything about it or not. I think the real story here is that the president's self and the media advisers really just didn't want to see that.
So when he says that Clapper missed it, there in fact was plenty to see. It's just that the White House wasn't willing to look at it. Yeah, you know, I mean intelligence assessments, one of the things with them is that, you know, basically, you can get a mixed bag. I mean, you know, at the highest level, some of these officials were downplaying what was going on.
But underneath that, undercurrent underneath that, really if you look at the evidence, the actual intelligence, I don't think I think that's unambiguous that in fact there was a whole stream of evidence saying this was happening going back a couple of years. You know, this was not something that was all of a sudden out of blue. And, you know, I'm sure some intelligence officials also were providing stark warning to the president whether you want to listen to them or not. You know, you know, at the DIA, you know, General Flynn there was basically, you know, forced out of the defense intelligence.
He's one of the few intelligence officials who was really consistently, you know, warning people about what was going on in the world. So, you know, ultimately, to my mind, you know, some officials probably downplaying others probably got it right. But at the end of the day, the president is the ultimate consumer of intelligence. And if he's not waiting into that intelligence and evaluating for himself and figuring out what's going on in the world, then that's his problem, his fault, not his circuits.
Tom Johnson with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Weekly Standard, thanks so much for joining us on this podcast. Thank you, Michael. You've been listening to the Weekly Standard podcast, please be sure to check Weekly Standard dot com regularly for podcast updates. I'm your host, Michael Graham.