Politico:
Times UK
Pelosi calls Iraq a 'failure'
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said twice Sunday that Iraq "is a failure," adding that President Bush's troop surge has "not produced the desired effect."
"The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq," Pelosi said on CNN's "Late Edition." "They have not done that."
The speaker hastened to add: "The troops have succeeded, God bless them."
Pelosi's harsh verdict is a reminder of the dilemma for Democrats as they head into this fall's presidential and congressional elections:
They need to make the case that the country needs to depart from the direction set by Bush. Yet they don't want to look like naysayers at a time when Iraq has become more stable, albeit still violent.
Republican strategists say one of their few chances to avoid a blowout in November is to paint Democrats as defeatists.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sparked a furious response from the right last year when he said the Iraq war "is lost."
Al-Qaeda leaders admit: 'We are in crisis. There is panic and fear'Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an "extraordinary crisis". Last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military "created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight". The terrorist group's security structure suffered "total collapse".
These are the words not of al-Qaeda's enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province -- once the group's stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.
The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.
That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. "I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector," the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.
According to Nancy Pelosi, I guess the Wilderness to Petersburg was a pretty pointless failure.
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RAF experts eavesdropped on radio traffic in Afghanistan — and heard Taliban fighters speaking in Brummie and Yorkshire accents.
The voices were detected during top secret spy-in-the-sky surveillance missions over lawless Helmand province.
The revelation proves that growing numbers of British-born Muslims are moving to Afghanistan to fight along side the Taliban.
The conversations were overheard and recorded recently by RAF radio operator linguists on board Nimrod planes in the region, it was revealed yesterday.
The Taliban spoke mainly in Afghan Persian or Pashto — but occasionally lapsed into their home language.
Senior RAF sources said that at those points they spoke in “plain English” with distinctive “Bradford and West Bromwich accents”.
A source said: “The mission specialists could easily jam the Taliban transmissions — but the RAF believes listening in to their plans is much more productive.
“It was quite startling to hear English being spoken with clear Bradford and West Brom accents.
“They reverted to English when they couldn’t remember the Afghan Persian or Pashto — the two local languages — for certain words.”
From http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article786803.ece
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