Insurgent

I was struck by this tidbit in Slate's "Today's Papers":

The LAT leads with a few small barriers in the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. For one thing, he appears to have a better intel network than the U.S. or Iraq. "They are watching every time we recruit an Iraqi to come back and inform to us about where he has been and what he has seen," said one U.S. counterintel official. "And every time we have been able to do that, the person has ended up dead."

The tone of this quote is as if the U.S. counterintel official is surprised.

This is a counterinsurgency. By definition, the war is being fought in their country, on their terms. By definition, you cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys just by looking at them. I suspect that there is not a single aspect of American or Iraq official operations that has not been penetrated by insurgents.