BRITISH troops set to deploy to southern Afghanistan this spring could sustain losses on a scale not seen since the Falklands war, military intelligence officers have warned. They say insurgent forces in the south are preparing for a large offensive by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, backed by sophisticated weapons and training from Iran.
The warnings follow an increase in fighting in southern Afghanistan over the past year. Several thousand people, including about 100 US soldiers, have been killed. The insurgents regard the withdrawal of 2,000 US troops as a key victory and are expected to press home their advantage against the British-led Nato force.
An advance party of British troops from 16 Air Assault Brigade will fly to Afghanistan this week to begin preparing for the deployment.
A new terror group linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawiâs Al-Qaeda in Iraq has emerged in southern Afghanistan and is imitating his methods. Messages from the group, Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, have appeared on the same jihadist internet sites as those of Zarqawiâs terror group.
The Taliban has regrouped, adapting its tactics to a classic insurgency campaign. There has also been a surge in suicide bombings and in roadside bombs similar to those introduced to Iraq last year.
US intelligence officers in southern Afghanistan and at the Coalition Joint Task Force headquarters in Bagram, north of Kabul, are blaming Iran for the increase in the use of sophisticated technology.
The Iranians sure get around, don't they.
The British troopsâ anti-narcotics operations could also provoke attacks from local warlords. The Dutch will decide on February 2 whether to withdraw their contingent because of warnings from military intelligence about the risks. They are expected to do so.
The plan is for just over 3,000 of the 6,000-strong Nato force to come from the UK, with Canada and the Dutch supplying the remaining troops. A British battle group commanded by 16 Air Assault Brigade and led by 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment will take over Helmand province from the Americans. Briefings to officers from 3 Para highlighted the possibility of casualties on a par with those during the 1982 Falklands conflict, when 255 British servicemen died.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
01/01/2006 13:19 ||
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#1
Seems to me that NATO forces had no problem expressing solidarity with Uncle Sam as long as there were no casualties. As soon as their people start dying, these fellas start leaving. Uncle Sam lost 526 killed during the first operations of the European Theater - the Torch landings. Maybe we should have pulled out there and then. Or maybe we should have pulled out after the debacle at Kasserine Pass, where 1800 GI's were killed. I guess the word "mutual" in mutual defense treaty means something different to Europeans.
#2
Mutual defense to the Europeans (excluding the UK forces) means "run away, run away. The Tranzi ownership of Europe is complete and total. It will last until islam takes over. The US needs to look west. Europe is morbid. The smart Euros will flee to the western hemisphere.
Iran is indeed busy. It now has US forces on two sides of it's borders. It's actions are now transparent and overt. That the Europeans are afraid to confront Iran or it's proxies shows just how weak they are and how rudderless their foreign polices is.
#6
true - in the worst case we all die, instantly, from aneurisms.... has about as much chance as their scenario...
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 16:39 Comments ||
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Charles Lindburgh? The flying gentleman with the German patronym who thought Hitler was the cat's pyjamas? No, I wouldn't say he was a traitor as such; rather, he was an American patriot who preferred America to join the fight on the side of evil. There is a difference, dontchaknow.
Rights groups have demanded an inquiry into the conduct of Egyptian police, after at least 23 Sudanese were killed at a squatter camp in Cairo. The Egyptian Government says it regrets the deaths at the camp early on Friday morning, but defends the way the police ended a three-month sit-in by some 3,500 Sudanese. The protesters were demanding resettlement in the West.
In the evening, Egyptian and other sympathisers gathered near the site of the deserted encampment for a vigil in memory of the dead, many of them children crushed to death when police fired tear gas and water cannon into crowds of Sudanese. "We've come to stop the killing of poor people," one of the people at the vigil, Mohamed Sallam, said.
"When you kill little babies, things have changed," Wael Khalil said, a protester from the Egyptian opposition movement Kefaya. "We will try you, and you won't be able to travel abroad again," he added, addressing Egyptian police commanders. Minor scuffles later broke out with riot police who were sent to observe the vigil. Some of the protesters taunted the police, pointing at them and chanting: "There are the murderers".
The international group Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for an independent investigation into the deaths, which took place near the Cairo offices of the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. The United Nations had said the Sudanese were mostly economic migrants, not people in danger of persecution if they went back to Sudan. "President Hosni Mubarak should urgently appoint an independent commission to investigate the use of force by police against Sudanese migrants," the New York-based HRW said. "The high loss of life suggests the police acted with extreme brutality ... A police force acting responsibly would not have allowed such a tragedy to occur," Joe Stork, deputy director of HRW's Watch's Middle East division, said.
Eleven Egyptian groups blamed the Ministry of the Interior for the events and also called for an inquiry. "It (the Ministry) knows no way to deal with people, whether citizens or refugees, other than by beating, crushing, extrajudicial killing, or transfer to illegal detention centres," they said in a joint statement.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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Eleven Egyptian groups blamed the Ministry of the Interior for the events and also called for an inquiry. "It (the Ministry) knows no way to deal with people, whether citizens or refugees, other than by beating, crushing, extrajudicial killing, or transfer to illegal detention centres," they said in a joint statement.
If they're right, we won't be seeing any more such statements.
#2
What marvelous changes have taken place in this post-9/11 world! That Egyptians might even consider expecting American-style rights... let alone demand them ... would never have occurred to anyone except a few madmen in the old days. How proud Osama bin Laden must be of the effect of one of his little projects.
Only a few days have passed since Um Ali, wife of Abdul Rahman Al-Mutib, number four on the Saudi's most wanted list, had called for her husband to return to his family through Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. However, Mutib's death was officially announced, Wednesday, following a violent clash with Saudi security forces that left five police officers and wanted militant, Mohamed Al-Suwalimi dead.
The past two days have been distressful for the 20-year old widow. They had spent two years as a married couple before he disappeared leaving his three-year-old daughter and his son, Ali who he had never seen. Um Ali patiently awaited the Interior Ministry's statement that would confirm or negate rumors of her husband's death. She had sensed that the front-page news on Asharq Al-Awsat had been true that her husband had sustained injuries as he was chased by a helicopter, after leaving Al-Suwaylimi. Her father-in-law was summoned to Al-Qassim to confirm that the body was that of his son's.
"Yeah. That's him. I recognize the elbow..."
The young mother recalled memories of family outings before her husband disappeared. She told Asharq Al-Awsat, "I'll keep my husband's prayer beads that my daughter used to use as a necklace. He used to tell her that this was an eternal present from him to her." Um Ali's words were full of sorrow as she spoke about her husband, who she claims had his thinking distorted, transforming him into an unrecognizable character. She stated that the criminal who appeared on television was not her affectionate husband who she would turn to whenever she had any problems.
That happens when they get religion, doesn't it?
Um Ali added that she wished her husband would have heard her pleas and those of her children for him to return home so that his children would not lose their father. She further expressed deep regret for the deaths of the five security officers who were killed during the confrontation with Mutib and Suwaylimi. She wished that her husband would have considered the children and wives of those martyrs who, like Um Ali and her children, have been left alone. After watching hours of news and hearing about the detaining of wanted terrorists, Um Ali continued to watch as her husband was killed. She had previously stated to Asharq Al-Awsat that after such a long time, she had lost hope that her husband would ever surrender, especially when it seemed he did not care for the future of his children. She also asserted that she is confident that her husband was being manipulated psychologically to participate in attacks and not to surrender.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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two years as a married couple before he disappeared leaving his three-year-old daughter
Sounds like grounds for an honor killing to me.
#2
Twenty year old girl with two children under the age of four. And two years of that time her husband was not totally absent (I assume that he disappeared after she conceived the son, or went on frequent, extended "business trips".) So who gets the lovely widow now - does father-in-law take her in and support her as her husband should have done, or does she get sent back to daddy sans offspring, to try again before the bloom of youth is gone?
The bad part is that we can't tell at this distance how much of this is the usual hysterical Bangla politicking and how much is true. I suspect there's a certain level of truth to it...
Leaders of the Awami League (AL) led 14-party opposition combine yesterday said the process is underway to grant amnesty to the militants in a bid to use them in favour of the BNP-Jamaat coalition in the next elections. Militants are kept in comfort in the name of 'long-time remand' and they would be released prior to the next election to be used against the opposition, the 14-party leaders said at a press briefing at AL's central office on Bangabandhu Avenue. "Militant kingpins will not be arrested as the process of granting general amnesty to militants is underway," AL General Secretary and 14-party co-ordinator Abdul Jalil said at the briefing.
Eid al-Adha's coming up in a month or so. Everybody likes to grant amnesties in the Islamic world...
See what I mean? It does seem a lengthy period, but at the same time diligent investigators could in fact be wringing the last drops of information from them, using the liberal application of fine Moroccan leather.
He described the BNP-Jamaat-led ruling coalition as the main patron of Islamist militants, and said the government is protecting the militants to ruin the country's democratic process.
I have no doubt there are ties between the Jamaatis and the terrs. I don't know what they are, or how deep they are...
The AL general secretary called upon the prime minister to stop the farce of so-called 'remand' and 'TV drama' acted by the militants. "Resignation of the government is the only way to solve the present crisis," Jalil said, urging people to strengthen the ongoing anti-government movement.
They invariably come up with that solution. But that's the same solution the MMA comes up with in Pakland.
AL Presidium Member Tofail Ahmed said instead of recording confessional statement of Ataur Rahman Sunny under Section 164, the government is staging drama on the TV by airing statements of militants. "There will be no legal value of the statement of the arrestee after the four-month remand," said AL leader and lawmaker Suranjit Sengupta. He said the present government would not try the militants, as they are the masterminds of militancy in the country.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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British police will be able to arrest anyone for any criminal offence, including minor misdemeanours such as dropping litter, under new laws which come into force on Sunday. Until now police have had the power to arrest only those suspected of committing an offence carrying a sentence of at least five years in prison. The new law requires only that the police have reasonable grounds for believing that a person's arrest is necessary. This can include a suspect's refusal to give his name and address.
I don't think they're allowed to thump knobs on their heads yet, though...
The changes are part of the Serious and Organised Crime Act 2005, which removes the distinction between "arrestable" and "non-arrestable" offences. Offences that have until now been non-arrestable include impersonating a police officer, not stopping a vehicle when ordered to do so and making or selling an offensive weapon. Police will in future be allowed to photograph suspects on the street where they have been arrested or issued with a fixed penalty notice, rather than back at a police station.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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#1
More proof Chimpy McBushHitler is running a POLICE STATE!!!!!
Oh, wait....
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
01/01/2006 0:07 Comments ||
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United Nation's food aid to North Korea has been stopped after Pyongyang said it no longer needed emergency shipments despite concerns that many people are still going hungry. The secretive Stalinist state announced in August that from the end of 2005 it would no longer require food aid from the World Food Programme (WFP) and other international humanitarian agencies, asking for development assistance instead.
The United States said on Thursday that it had been forced to suspend food aid to North Korea because of Pyongyang's decision to stop UN distribution of international food assistance. South Korean government officials say Pyongyang apparently wants to build the foundation of its agriculture through long-term investment rather than stop-gap emergency aid. Analysts said the proportion of WFP aid in relation to assistance from South Korea and China had also diminished enough to give North Korea room to reject supplies direct from the United Nations. South Korea has provided the North with 500,000 tonnes of rice and 350,000 tonnes of fertiliser this year.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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#1
Good on em! Must be a New Year's weight loss resolution.
#3
Maybe like the Cubans during the Reagan -Bush years - claimed the reason why local markets are perennially visibly devoid of foodstuffs for family, women and kiddies is that the Government absolutely and unconditionally had to make sure available food supplies didn't spoil [quality control]!? There was in fact allegedly food for everyone in Fidel's Cuba - as good Socialists and anti-US patriots you just had to wait many many years in order to see the awesome bounty. let alone taste, of superior Fidelian Socialism.
#4
Methinks has more to do wid Kimmie and MadMoud mil confronting the USA this year so Hillary can save her POTUS resume - iff not resolved by Dubya by 2007 Der MarxStaat StalinFrau Hillary will have to settle for staying a NY Senator for a long while.
#1
Pure jealousy. I'm sure they're wading through these "unprofessional" upstarts looking for the anti-US / anti-war gem that they can regularly refer to. And the odd snippet that can be twisted to their agenda, of course.
The MSM reading the blogs is beautiful irony, regardless. Their impending demise is there for all of the connected world to see.
Despite his history as a convicted killer and radical Islamic fighter, Lionel Dumont had a real knack for charming the ladies.
Flashing a tender smile and soft brown eyes, the former French Catholic schoolboy seduced women in many parts of the world, using them as unwitting accomplices as he dodged arrest warrants and met clandestinely with Islamic radicals in at least 10 countries.
Two female German tourists whom he wooed separately on the beaches of Thailand served as cover for his travels as he secretly developed plots to transfer weapons and launder money, according to court testimony and European terrorism investigators.
At Dumont's trial in this northern French city in December, both women testified that they still could not believe their smooth-cheeked Romeo was an Islamic radical, even after they learned he was arrested two years ago in Munich in an international counterterrorism operation. "He's open and warm," said Celia dos Santos, 37, a travel agent who married Dumont, now 34, in a ceremony in Malaysia and brought him home to meet relatives in Germany and Portugal. "I would never think that he was involved in a terrorist act."
European counterterrorism officials and experts say Dumont is a prime example of how al Qaeda and other radical groups are drawing heavily on Islamic converts, who are increasingly taking on leadership roles in plotting strategy and launching attacks.
After converting to Islam in 1991, according to investigators, Dumont fought in Bosnia, was involved in a plot to bomb a gathering of leaders of the Group of Seven industrial nations in France in 1996 and spent years raising money and organizing cells in Europe and Asia.
Converts are prized by radical Islamic groups because they can usually operate freely in Europe, Asia and North America without arousing the suspicion of police. They are also often eager to accept dangerous assignments as a way to prove their devotion, experts said.
"What is new is that with al Qaeda, converts are now considered full members," said Olivier Roy, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research and an authority on Islamic radicalism. "For al Qaeda, converts are not just tools to get past security. It's a way for them to become a global movement. In just about every al Qaeda cell over the past eight years, we have seen converts. It's structural, not just accidental."
Many converts have become trusted operatives at the highest levels of al Qaeda. Christian Ganczarski, a Polish-born German who trained in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden, was arrested in Paris in June 2003. Investigators said he was in direct contact with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, and helped plan at least two attacks in Africa.
Dhiren Barot, a British citizen and alleged ringleader of a scheme uncovered in 2004 to attack financial targets in New York and Washington with weapons of mass destruction, was born to Hindu parents but converted to Islam at age 20. U.S. investigators say Barot took orders from Abu Feraj Libi, a high-ranking al Qaeda planner captured in Pakistan last year.
Other converts who allegedly reported to the top tier of al Qaeda include Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, and Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian-born resident of London, both of whom are accused by Pentagon officials of planning "dirty bomb" attacks and other plots against the United States. Richard Reid, convicted of trying to blow up an American Airlines jet in December 2001 with explosives stuffed in his shoes, is another convert who was assigned his mission by top al Qaeda leaders.
Converts are still commonly recruited as foot soldiers as well. On Nov. 9, Muriel Degauque, a 38-year-old Belgian and former Catholic, achieved the distinction of becoming the first female Muslim suicide bomber from Europe when she attacked a U.S. patrol in Iraq, wounding one soldier and killing herself, according to Belgian officials.
In France, which has 5 million Muslims, the most in a European country, authorities have dealt with radical Islamic converts for years but say the problem is becoming worse, fueled in part by a religious and political backlash over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
"The converts are undeniably the hardest ones," anti-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere told the French newspaper Le Figaro in October, a few days after police arrested two converts in a town south of Paris on suspicion of terrorist activity. "The conversions today are more rapid, and their engagement is more radical."
Estimates vary on the number of Islamic converts in the country -- from 30,000 to 100,000 -- but only a small percentage are believed to embrace radicalism. Experts said many of the converts adopt Islam as a way to confront personal problems, such as drug addiction or involvement in crime, but others see it as a political cause akin to the radical left-wing terrorism that took root in Europe in the 1970s.
Pascal Mailhos, director of the French national police intelligence agency, said in an interview with Le Monde newspaper in November that there were about 5,000 Muslims in France who had adopted extremist beliefs. Of those, about 400 are converts, he said.
"The phenomenon is on the rise, and we are very alarmed," Mailhos said. "The process is often very quick and offers these dysfunctional young adults a new way of organizing their lives."
Lionel Dumont was 20 years old and living an aimless life in the industrial rust belt of northern France when he decided to renounce his Catholic upbringing and become a Muslim. Friends said he was looking for spiritual reassurance, but during his trial, Dumont brushed aside efforts to explain his decision. "There is no explanation," he testified.
His beliefs deepened in the early 1990s while he performed his obligatory French military service as an armorer and sharpshooter in the army, based in Djibouti and Somalia. On his return to France, he became more active in a mosque in the town of Roubaix, where he met Christopher Caze, a medical student.
Ethnic wars were raging in the Balkans at the time, and Caze, a fellow convert, persuaded Dumont to join him on a mission to Bosnia, where the pair enlisted in an international brigade of Muslim fighters. A charismatic but deeply violent man, Caze made an impression on Dumont and others by playing soccer with the severed heads of Serbs killed in battle, according to French court documents.
Dumont testified that he also traveled to military camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1990s, although little is known about his time there. Returning to France, he joined a radical group led by Caze known as the "Roubaix gang," which robbed armored cars and attempted a car-bomb attack on a G-7 jobs summit in the city of Lille in March 1996. Most of the gang members, including Caze, were killed in shootouts with police. But Dumont fled to Bosnia.
In 1997, he was arrested in the town of Zenica and sentenced to 20 years for fatally shooting a Bosnian police officer at a gas station. Around the same time, he was convicted in absentia in France for his role in the Roubaix gang's activities. Five days before he was scheduled to be extradited to France, he escaped from his jail cell while his guards were watching a European Cup soccer match on television.
At his trial this month, Dumont said he then began extensive international travel, using fake passports to go to Italy, Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary. By 2002, he had landed in Asia, where he shuttled among Malaysia, Japan, Thailand and Indonesia.
Dumont said he sold used cars in Japan and Southeast Asia while he was on the run, but he denied being involved with radical causes after the Sept. 11 attacks. "I preferred the paradise beaches of Thailand to Tora Bora," he testified, referring to the mountainous area in Afghanistan where al Qaeda fighters battled U.S. allies.
Asian investigators, however, have said they suspect he was setting up a terrorist cell in Japan, as well as raising and laundering money for radical groups in the region.
While they say there is still much they do not know about his activities, they characterize him as a mid-level planner and recruiter who was able to blend into Asian society as a white-skinned European tourist. They said he used several false passports to avoid international warrants for his arrest issued by France, Bosnia and Interpol, as well as a global order from the U.S. Treasury to freeze his assets.
In 2002, according to authorities in Malaysia, Dumont met twice in that country with a fellow Bosnian war veteran named Andrew Rowe, a British convert of Jamaican descent. Rowe was also a global traveler, visiting Afghanistan, Chechnya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco over a seven-year period, according to investigators. They say they believe he and Dumont were planning a major attack in Europe, perhaps in London.
In August 2003, the pair met again in a hotel in Frankfurt. Dumont was spending time there with his new German wife, who was still unaware of his real identity and background, according to court testimony.
Two months later, Dumont and Rowe reconvened in Frankfurt. By this time, however, Rowe was being followed by British and German investigators. Police had raided his home in London while he was traveling and found instructions on how to fire mortar shells, as well as a code book for transmitting instructions using text messages.
After the rendezvous in Frankfurt, investigators tailed Rowe westward across Europe and arrested him as he tried to board an English Channel tunnel train on the French coast. They reported finding rolled-up socks in his luggage bearing traces of explosive material, including TNT.
At his trial on terrorism charges in London in September, Rowe testified that he went to Frankfurt to receive instructions for the delivery of explosives and weapons from Eastern European sources to Muslim fighters in Chechnya, but he denied being involved in terrorist activities. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
British investigators said they suspected Rowe and Dumont were in the late stages of planning an attack but said they had been unable to determine the details. "We don't know when, what or where he was going to attack, but the public can be reassured that a violent and dangerous man has been brought to justice," Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch, said after Rowe's conviction.
Two months after Rowe's arrest at the French border, German and British investigators tracked down Dumont in Munich and arrested him while he was taking a shower. He has admitted meeting with Rowe but said the Briton was just an acquaintance.
At his trial last month, Dumont said he regretted his involvement with the Roubaix gang and tried to play down his conversion to Islam.
He told jurors he realized his life story read like "a novel," but asked for leniency, saying he didn't want to "rot in jail." He also showed he hadn't lost his romantic touch, blowing a kiss to one of the German women after she testified that she still loved him.
The jury wasn't impressed. On Dec. 16, it convicted him for his role in the armed robberies in France in 1996 and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
01/01/2006 10:31 ||
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The talk at the White House in the days and weeks after 9/11 was all about suitcase nukes and germ warfare and surprise decapitation strikes. Every morning, as they crossed West Executive Drive on their way to work in the West Wing, Bush administration staffers recall seeing a plain white truck with a galvanized metal chimney. Sensors sniffing for pathogens or radioactivity, they guessed, though they couldn't be sure. Like just about everything else at that spooky time, the purpose of the truck was a secret.
Such chilling sights are not likely to inspire thoughtful ruminations about the separation of powers or the true meaning of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. The message to White House lawyers from their commander in chief, recalls one who was deeply involved at the time, was clear enough: find a way to exercise the full panoply of powers granted the president by Congress and the Constitution. If that meant pushing the boundaries of the law, so be it. The Bush administration did not throw away the Bill of Rights in the months and years that followed; indeed, NEWSWEEK has learned, ferocious behind-the-scenes infighting stalled for a time the administration's ambitious program of electronic spying on U.S. citizens at home and abroad.
On one day in the spring of 2004, White House chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a bedside visit to John Ashcroft, attorney general at the time, who was stricken with a rare and painful pancreatic disease, to tryâwithout successâto get him to reverse his deputy, Acting Attorney General James Comey, who was balking at the warrantless eavesdropping. Miffed that Comey, a straitlaced, by-the-book former U.S. attorney from New York, was not a "team player" on this and other issues, President George W. Bush dubbed him with a derisive nickname, "Cuomo," after Mario Cuomo, the New York governor who vacillated over running for president in the 1980s. (The White House denies this; Comey declined to comment.)
In a perfect democracy trying to strike a balance between civil liberties and national security, there would be reasoned, open debate between representatives of the different branches of government. But human nature and politics rarely work in neat and orderly ways. In moments of crisis, presidents, if they believe in executive power (and most inevitably do), will do almost anything to protect the country. Only after the crisis ebbs does the debate begin over the proper means and ends, and by then the people and their representatives are often shocked to find what the president has done in the name of protecting them. More than four years after September 11, America finds itself debating some of the oldest issues in our history: how to balance liberty and security, how much power we should cede to the White House and whether what the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dubbed "The Imperial Presidency" amid Watergate is a good thing, a bad thing or something in between. That the war on terror is unconventional and seemingly endless adds to the difficulty and raises the stakes.
After 9/11, President Bush and his top advisers faced, they believed, a mortal yet invisible enemy. The mightiest armed forces in the world were not effective against such a shadowy foe. Nor were human spies much help. Movies and novels notwithstanding, the CIA had rarely (if ever) penetrated a terrorist cell. America's one true weapon was technology. Spy satellites and the massive computers of the National Security Agency (so secret it was nicknamed "No Such Agency") were able to pluck telephone and e-mail conversations out of the air and ether. The NSA could cock a giant ear to America's enemiesâand, ideally, overhear their plots.
As communications were increasingly digitized and encrypted, intelligence experts sometimes warned that the NSA was going deaf. Rare public statements by top NSA officials seemed to give credence to that worry. It appears, however, that the NSA was secretly working on sophisticated "data mining," computer programs that could sift through vast amounts of information searching for patterns and connectionsâin effect, "Googling" America's enemies. After 9/11, the government was criticized for not "connecting the dots," linking and following up on clues, like phone calls from hijackers hiding in the United States to their terror masters abroad. With the NSA's computers fully cranked up, Bush administration officials hoped, they would find other terrorist "sleeper cells" before they could strike again.
Still, there was a catch. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA required intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant before eavesdropping on communications involving "U.S. persons." A reaction to CIA and FBI snooping on Americans at home and abroad, FISA was written for the cold war. It contemplated eavesdropping on telephone calls from, say, a KGB agent posing as a diplomat in Eastern Europe and a traveling American businessman. It was not meant for the instantaneous data mining of thousands of phone calls or e-mails as they flashed through the switches of American telecommunications companies. A secret court, set up by FISA, almost never turned down a government application for a warrant. But applying for one could require scores of pages of documents, several signatures, up to the attorney general's, and precious time. The law did allow for retroactive approval (within 72 hours). But as the NSA's computers tracked phone calls from Afghanistan and Pakistan to possible Qaeda sympathizers in America in those fevered days after 9/11, any red tape seemed like an unpardonable snare.
It does not appear that President Bushâdetermined to stand tall in the war on terrorâor Vice President Cheney, a staunch believer in executive power, hesitated to circumvent FISA. Asserting the broad warmaking powers conferred on the president by Article 2 of the Constitution and by a post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing the use of force to combat global terror, Bush repeatedly approved of what the NSA calls a "special collection program" that eavesdroppedâwithout warrantsâon about 500 Americans a day.
When the story of the NSA's program broke in The New York Times on Dec. 16, there was an immediate uproar in the press and on Capitol Hill. The reaction was predictably partisan. Most Republicans and conservatives defended Bush for safeguarding the country (though warrantless spying gave libertarians some pause). Most Democrats and liberals cited the eavesdropping program as more damning evidence that Bush and Cheney, already caught countenancing torture and jailing detainees without any legal rights, were running roughshod over civil liberties.
For all its histrionics, the debate was narrow and somewhat vacuous. It is still hard to know if America has not been attacked for the past four years because (1) the Bush administration has waged an effective war on terror or (2) the threat is not as severe as originally thought. The answer may be a bit of both. Likewise, it is unclear whether the eavesdropping has done much to thwart terrorist plots or, on the other hand, whether it has truly robbed Americans of their privacy. Much of the eavesdropping is by a computer searching for key words, not a human being listening to a private conversation.
One thing is certain. The current debate over national security and civil liberties is not new. It follows a predictable pattern of a democracy in wartime. Through two centuries, the reactions and overreactions of American presidents to enemies at home and abroad have caused some sickening lurches, but the ship of state seems to have a self-righting mechanism. To understand the current struggleâand judge how seriously to take the Bush and Cheney bids for powerâit is useful to compare this battle to all the balancing acts that have come before. The facts change, but the pattern varies little:
IN NATIONAL CRISES, PRESIDENTS REACH FOR POWER.
Though the choice is rarely statedâor perhaps even consciousâa president will almost always choose to violate individual rights over the risk of losing a war. When the French threatened American sovereignty on the high seas in 1798, John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, blatantly punishing free speech as traitorous. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus (the rule giving citizens a right to take their grievances to court). During World War I, Woodrow Wilson allowed officials to prosecute anyone for criticizing the government. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt allowed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to promiscuously wiretap, and ordered Japanese-Americans placed in internment camps. As the Vietnam War dragged on and domestic dissent arose, Richard Nixonâciting his Demo-cratic predecessors FDR and Lyndon Johnsonâauthorized bugging and wiretapping against domestic "subversives." None of these steps, it should be pointed out, made the nation appreciably safer.
It is still not clear how far President Bush went after 9/11 to ramp up the national-security machine. Clearly the president wanted to unleash the intelligence services as well as the military, which had grown cautious after Vietnam and Watergate. The full dimensions of this secret program have only slowly leaked out. The legal justification, in addition to the commander in chief's warmaking power under the Constitution, was a congressional resolution that was shouted through in September 2001, three days after the attacks. Most members of Congress seem to have assumed they were voting to authorize an attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But a former White House official involved in the drafting, who did not wish to be identified discussing internal matters, said the understanding in the administration was that the president was seeking "an express grant of authority from Congress to maximize the power that could be used"âmeaning all kinds of power to seek out, detain and kill terrorists.
CONGRESS LIES LOW AND GOES ALONG.
Typically, in times of national peril, Congress gets swept along on a wave of patriotism. During the Korean and Vietnam wars, presidents did not even bother to get Congress to pass a formal declaration of war. After Vietnam and Watergate, Capitol Hill briefly reasserted itself with the War Powers Actâbut no Congress and no president has ever wanted to put the act to the test. In the first and second gulf wars, Bush father and son relied on less-stringent congressional resolutions. The White House official involved in the September 2001 resolution authorizing force against terrorism recalls very little push back from the Hill. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter wanted to limit the scope of the measure, but he was successfully rolled.
Given Congress's pliability, several commentators have wondered why the White House did not ask Congress to amend FISA to allow the sort of warrantless data mining and eavesdropping that has set off the current flap. A White House official who declined to be identified discussing internal deliberations says that the administration feared a congressional debate would have tipped off the terrorists to secret "sources and methods" used by the NSA and other spy services.
A more subtle factor is also at work. The executive branch is always reluctant to ask Congress for permission if, by the very asking, that means conceding that the legislative branch has the power to say no. Presidents prefer to keep warmaking powers generalâand unquestioned. By the same token, congressmen often do not wish to know exactly what the spooks are up to in the name of national security. Allen Dulles, the legendary CIA director in the 1950s, once said that he always "told the truth" to Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Richard Russell; "that is," Dulles added with a wink, "if Dick wants to know!"
When the NSA eavesdropping story leaked, the Bush administration immediately claimed that it had briefed congressional leaders on several occasions. But the briefings appear to have been sketchy and ultra-secretive. Sen. Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader at the time, recalled being briefed in 2002 and again in 2004. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, he was reluctant to get into classified details, but he did say, "The presentation was quite different from what is now being reported in the press. I would argue that there were omissions of consequence." At his briefing in the White House Situation Room, Daschle was forbidden to take notes, bring staff or speak with anyone about what he had been told. "You're so disadvantaged," Daschle says. "They know so much more than you do. You don't even know what questions to ask."
THE BUREAUCRACY PUSHES BACK.
During Bush's tenure, decisions on the rules of spying and interrogation have been exceptionally closely held, generally the work of a small group of White House and Justice Department lawyers with an expansive view of presidential power. For the most part, lawyers from the State Department and uniformed military services have been cut out. But as the rules were implementedâpermitting, for example, the "water boarding" or indefinite secret detention of a terror suspectâother government lawyers sometimes protested. At the outset, at least, the complaints were private and handled within channels. Though "bureaucrat" can be a bad name, government careerists are sometimes the only ones who will uphold standards of fairness or decency. They know, too, that they can be left holding the bag if later congressional hearings look into dubious secret operations.
At the Justice Department, it was a former prosecutor, James Comey, who forced the White House to back away from the so-called Torture Memo, which appeared to give intelligence agencies a license to use any interrogation method that did not cause the extreme pain associated with organ failure. Comey was the No. 2 man at the department at the time. Although the details are unclear, it appears that Comey's objections were also key to slowing the warrantless-eavesdropping program in 2004 for a time. According to several officials who would not be identified talking about still-classified matters, Comey (among other government lawyers) argued that the authority for the programâthe 2001 "use of force" resolutionâhad grown stale. It was time to audit the program before proceeding in any case, Comey said.
But in March 2004, White House chief of staff Card and White House Counsel Gonzales visited Ashcroft, the seriously ill attorney general, to try to get him to overrule Comey, who was officially acting as A.G. while Ashcroft was incapacitated. Ashcroft refused, and a battle over what to do broke out in the Justice Department and at the White House. Finally, sometime in the summer of 2004, a compromise was reached, with Comey onboard: according to an account in The New York Times, Justice and the NSA refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether "probable cause" existed to start monitoring someone's conversations.
Bureaucrats frustrated by their political bosses have one time-honored weapon: the leak. Though it is unclear exactly how the NSA eavesdropping story made its way to The New York Times (last week, the Justice Department launched a formal leak investigation), the sources were probably officials disgruntled for reasons of morality and public-mindedness and possibly less-noble motivations (turf battles, score settling).
THE PUBLIC AND THE POLITICIANS REACTâAND OVERREACT. Historically, wartime encroachments on civil liberties have spawned backlashes. Lincoln was accused of dictatorship and his Republican Party lost seats in the congressional elections of 1862 and 1864. Wilsonian excesses during and after World War I helped provoke the modern civil-liberties movement, and Nixon's abuses of power spawned a host of Watergate reformsâincluding FISA.
This winter, Capitol Hill will without question see a debate over Bush administration infringements on civil liberties. As 9/11 recedes in public memory and Bush has slipped in the polls, public attitudes are shifting. Still, Bush does not show any sign of backing down from any of his covert programs.
There is a risk that Bush will overplay his hand. Some White House insiders have been urging the hardliners to take a less confrontational stance, if only for tactical reasons. The courts generally give great deference to the executive branch on national-security questions, but there have been signs of restiveness lately even among the president's staunchest supporters on the federal bench. The Supreme Court is signaling in subtle and complex ways that it may rein in the Bush team's absolutists by, for instance, requiring that detainees be afforded more legal rights.
The American public may be less than sympathetic to the targets of the Bush antiterror crackdown. But if the administration is shown to have violated the civil liberties of mainstream peace groups or (heaven forbid!) members of the press, the outcry could produce an overreaction. After the reformers got through with the intelligence community post-Watergate, Richard Nixon acerbically commented, "They cut the balls off the CIA." He was not entirely exaggerating. The investigations and reforms of the 1970s and 1980s unquestionably made CIA officials in the 1990s more risk averse.
As young up-and-comers, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney were back-to-back White House chiefs of staff in the Ford administration. They got their hands on power just as the "Imperial President" was being cut down to size. For the past 25 years, both men have wanted to restore executive power. When 9/11 came along, they seized the moment. It would be the height of irony if, by taking too hard-line a stance now, they ended up undermining the power of the president.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
01/01/2006 13:05 ||
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#1
A bit of better than average propaganda by Newsweek. Lots of good information, but if you look for it, you are never disappointed by the lie that will be buried within.
The legal justification, in addition to the commander in chief's warmaking power under the Constitution, was a congressional resolution that was shouted through in September 2001, three days after the attacks. Most members of Congress seem to have assumed they were voting to authorize an attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.....
When the NSA eavesdropping story leaked, the Bush administration immediately claimed that it had briefed congressional leaders on several occasions. But the briefings appear to have been sketchy and ultra-secretive [um, Duh] Sen. Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader at the time, recalled being briefed in 2002 and again in 2004. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, he was reluctant to get into classified details, but he did say, "The presentation was quite different from what is now being reported in the press. I would argue that there were omissions of consequence.". At his briefing in the White House Situation Room, Daschle was forbidden to take notes, bring staff or speak with anyone about what he had been told. "You're so disadvantaged," Daschle says. "They know so much more than you do. You don't even know what questions to ask."
poor widdle Tom!
Not to say the Dem's won't milk every last drop of this in sad and pathetic attempt to relieve the glory of their Watergate days, but they can see that not only do the majority of sane Americans not care that Bush did this, but they are annoyed that the NYT and Dems are giving the terrorists information.
So this is a pretty little Newsweek tale makes nice but assures the deranged faithful that the Dems who were informed about this program were, again tricked, tricked by the stupid evil genius chimp.
#2
Newsweek is part of the donks Public Relations committee, along side the rest of the MSM.
Posted by: Captain America ||
01/01/2006 16:29 Comments ||
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#3
I would think the "absolutists" and "hard-liners" are the people on the anti-wiretapping side of this, since they are the ones who are against bending the rules. They are the ones who want to hold a "hard line" on the rules about warrants. But then it wouldn't do to call them the absolutists and hardliners, because MSM dictionaries specify these terms can only be used for their political enemies.
#4
Newsweak takes every opportunity to trash American values and Christianity. Remember the revelations a year or so ago that they were trashing America in their foreign editions? I cancelled my subscription years ago after I realized how they trash Christianity every year on the week before Easter.
A former CIA counterterrorism officer who tracked Osama bin Laden through the mountains of Afghanistan says the U.S. spy agency could need a decade to build up its clandestine service for the U.S. war on terrorism.
Gary Berntsen, a decorated espionage officer who led a paramilitary unit code-named "Jawbreaker" in the war that toppled the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks, said CIA Director Porter Goss faces an uphill battle to fill the agency's senior ranks with aggressive, seasoned operatives.
"He's probably more aggressive than most of the senior officers in the clandestine service. So I think he's having to pull them along a bit," Berntsen said in an interview.
"(Goss) is trying to improve the situation. But it's going to be tough. The rebuilding is going to take years. A decade, at least," he told Reuters late last week.
The CIA, widely criticized for lapses involving prewar Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, has seen its clandestine staff dwindle to less than 5,000 employees from a peak of over 7,000, intelligence sources say.
Experts blame a post-Cold War downturn in recruitment for a current lack of seasoned clandestine operatives that has been exacerbated by a rush to lucrative private sector jobs in recent years.
"We have a smaller number of really, really aggressive, creative members of our leadership in the senior service," said Berntsen, who recently published a book about his exploits in the war on terrorism, titled "Jawbreaker" (Crown Publishing).
Former CIA Director George Tenet told the Sept. 11 commission in April 2004 the CIA would need five years to produce a clandestine service fully capable of tackling the terrorism threat.
Goss later said at his September 2004 Senate confirmation hearings that rebuilding the clandestine operation would be "a long build-out, a long haul."
President George W. Bush issued an order last year that called for a 50 percent increase in CIA clandestine officers and analysts to be completed "as soon as feasible."
"The CIA is moving aggressively to rebuild and enhance its capabilities across the board," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.
But intelligence sources say the rebuilding process has been complicated by disaffection for Goss' leadership within the clandestine service.
Years of double-digit growth in federal spending on intelligence that followed the Sept. 11 attacks may also be about to end.
John Negroponte, the new U.S. director of national intelligence, has endorsed an intelligence budget for fiscal year 2007 that is relatively flat, with current spending levels believed to total about $44 billion for the 15-agency intelligence community. Fiscal 2007 begins in October.
Berntsen, 48, who also led the CIA Counterterrorism Center's response to the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, sued the CIA in July, accusing the spy agency of trying to stop him from publishing his book.
Gimigliano said the CIA reviewed Bernsten's book before publication only to ensure that it contained no classified information.
In the book, Berntsen says his Jawbreaker team tracked bin Laden to Afghanistan's Tora Bora region late in 2001 and could have killed or captured the al Qaeda leader there if military officials had agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S. troops.
But the troops were never sent and bin Laden was able to escape, he said.
His account contradicts public statements by Bush and former Gen. Tommy Franks, who maintained that U.S. officials were never sure bin Laden was at Tora Bora.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
01/01/2006 12:34 ||
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#1
I'd turn the job over to another agency rather than keep the CIA going as is, since it is concerned only with overthrowing one government, the one elected by the American people.
#4
it goes even further, back to Frank Church. Donks preening for accolades on the torn intelligence networks and agents who go along to get along. I would've cleaned house on the (unforseen) fall of the USSR, our greatest enemy at the time.
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 18:50 Comments ||
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#5
Many of the agencies are going through an evolution to a more agressive, action oriented, organization. This is a different war, blaming it on the Dems, Clinton or Carter won't make it better. Removing or retiring those who will not flex and respond to the new threat is the answer. Throwing the whole org out and starting over will only fail. Our agencies met and defeated the worlds threats for the last 50 years, they will rise to this threat as well. Our nation depends on them and the real leaders in there know it and will never give up on the fight.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
01/01/2006 21:04 Comments ||
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...but won't, naturally.
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | January 1, 2006 Jacoby - Globe's token conservative.
EVER SINCE 9/11, we learned last month, federal officials have been monitoring radiation levels around a number of American mosques. It is an understandable precaution, given Al Qaeda's interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, and its history of mass murder.
Understandable -- but also troubling. In a nation as tolerant as this one, nobody can be happy about the need to focus self-defensive attention on mosques. Unfortunately, we are at war with violent Islamist radicals, and they are not above using mosques to incubate terrorism. If there is evidence of heightened radioactivity around a Muslim facility, the government should be aware of it, and should find out -- lawfully, of course -- whether it represents a threat.
The federal monitors have been checking for physical radiation, but there are other ways in which mosques can be radioactive.
Last year, for example, Freedom House issued a report on the extent to which Saudi publications in US mosques promote Wahhabism, the harsh, supremacist version of Islam that is the established creed in Saudi Arabia. Many of these publications, it turned out, were riddled with religious bigotry. They advocated contempt for ''infidels," portrayed America as alien territory, and urged Muslims to prepare for jihad. Considering the use of such teachings in recruiting terrorists, one might well view the presence of this literature in the library of an American mosque as ''radioactive," and a legitimate cause for concern.
Which brings us to the roiling controversy over the mosque being built by the Islamic Society of Boston -- a controversy made all the worse by an abusive lawsuit the Islamic Society has filed against its critics.
When completed, the $24 million mosque will be the largest Muslim house of prayer in the Northeastern United States. The Islamic Society has pledged that it will also be a center for moderation, peace, and dialogue among different religious communities. It was in part on the strength of that pledge that the Islamic Society was allowed to buy the land for the mosque from the city for a fraction of its fair market value. But lying to infidels is OK...
But for more than two years, questions have been raised about just how committed the Islamic Society really is to moderation and interfaith understanding. Beginning with reports in the Boston Herald, news outlets, citizen groups, political officials, and private citizens have been pointing out disturbing signs of extremist ''radioactivity" around the Islamic Society and its leadership. To mention only a few:
The society's original founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, is now serving a 23-year prison term for his role in an assassination plot. The Treasury Department identified him as a fund-raiser for Al Qaeda, and he has publicly proclaimed his support for two notorious terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Yusef al Qaradawi, who for several years was listed as a trustee in Islamic Society of Boston tax filings and on the Islamic Society website -- the Islamic Society now claims that was due to an ''administrative oversight" -- is a radical Islamist cleric who has endorsed suicide bombings and the killing of Americans in Iraq. In 2002, he was invited to address an Islamic Society fund-raiser, but had to do so by video from Qatar -- he has been barred since 1999 from entering the United States.
Another Islamic Society trustee, Walid Fitaihi, is the author of writings that denounce Jews as ''murderers of the prophets" who ''brought the worst corruption to the earth" and should be punished for their ''oppression, murder, and rape of the worshipers of Allah." After Fitaihi's words were reported in the Boston press, the Islamic Society was urged to unequivocally repudiate them. It took seven months before it finally did so. I'm surprised they did it at all.
When Ahmed Mansour, an Egyptian-born Muslim scholar, examined the Islamic Society's library in 2003, he found books and videotapes promoting hostility toward the United States and insulting other religions. Among the publications on hand were several of those listed in the Freedom House report.
Individually, none of these points proves that there is anything amiss with the Islamic Society. Taken together, they give rise to obvious questions and concerns. Surely the Islamic Society, which emphasizes its commitment to moderation, tolerance, and dialogue (riiiight), should be at pains to answer those questions and allay those concerns. Instead it accuses its critics of defamation, and has sued many of them for -- of all things -- conspiring to deprive Boston-area Muslims of their religious freedom.
But the last thing Muslims in Boston or anywhere else need is a leadership that treats legitimate public misgivings as an anti-Muslim ''conspiracy," or that launches specious lawsuits in order to intimidate those looking into its record. The Islamic Society's overreaction does rank-and-file Muslims no favors -- and gives all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, another reason to wonder about its motives. An infection that will grow and get worse over time...
#1
I think a bigger question is why the major media outlets - almost all of them - refuse, distort and lie concerning matters detrimental to the interests of our freedom and democracy.
Why is it that there is not one paper that I can order to be sent to my doorstep that I can rely on as being fair and factual? I suppose the WSJ still has reasonable reporting, yet their editorial page is reportedly one of the most liberal to be found.
Why is this? Who owns major stock in these companies? What percentage of them are owned by foreign interests?
Not one paper. Not one. Even papers in smaller markets in conservative areas have been gobbled up by papers like Knight Ridder and their editorial direction has shifted to the same lies and distortions. And this even as their stock and circulation is spiraling downward beyond control.
Why is it that the same lies and distortions I read in the NYT, WAPO, LA Times and other major papers are exactly the same stories that I can read in any paper across America?
American news outlets have become as dishonest as rags such as the Enquirer. Sensational headlines that distort the facts contained within the text. Ommission of facts that don't support inconvenient points of view. The headlines of NYT and WAPO are no more meaningful or honest than stories of Brad and Jen and Jonbenet's murder we read at the checkstands.
Why is it that I can't read a paper in a small town in Kansas or Idaho or Wyoming that will present views that can only be found on blogs?
I used to think that this was perhaps just because they simply reprinted the garbage from the wires. But with the advent of the internet - this can not be the case.
It's time someone looked at the ownership of these papers - and looked deep into the connections that make every newspaper in America almost idential copies of each other.
How can it be possible that not ONE paper has an editorial staff willing to tell the truth on the Plame/Wilson, Nancy Pelosi and Murtha family connections, the islamist connections behind CAIR, and the zillions of other distortions that we are subjected to?
Such blanket uniformity is downright strange in a country as large and diverse as America. I hope that in 2006 - someone will discover the reasons why this is the case.
#2
Soon there will be more moskkkks and more bigotry and treason.
It all started by letting Edward Said preach hate to the "intelectuall Left" at the Universities.
After the Mosssskkkkk density exceeds 3 per neighborhood in Urban areas, they will start civil disorder type actions like they did in France.
First they will burn your cars, then they will sue the hell out of anyone who dares complain and then they will declare Boston as "Dar El Islam"
All you have to do is read the Quran, its all in there black on white, you got to be stupid to listen to their pacifying talk.
They are from an alien culture which does not recognize civil liberties and the rights of individual citizens.
They will drag you with them, kicking and screaming, back to the 12th century Islamic Challifat.
I predict a great future to prayer carpet dealers in Boston.
#3
2b: all the media in America is owned by only a few individuals who sponsor "different" newspapers, radio, television (which are not really in competition with each other) . . . follow the money. There are very few true competing sources now. And all media is a for-profit business venture, and reflects the values/belief of the business owners. The idea that journalists somehow "protect" our right to know, or that they offer objective information is another "selling point" made popular during the Vietnam war, and before that, if you got straight info it was more a reflection of the culture of the times. News is here to make money. For the owners, the ability to manipulate world affairs and public opinion is the "bright spot" in an otherwise dull news day. The fact that we get reliable information at all is due to the work of some journalists that haven't had to sell out to the directives of the editors/publishers.
About this: "When completed, the $24 million mosque will be the largest Muslim house of prayer in the Northeastern United States . . ."
Does this strike anyone as a bit odd? That's a lot of dough for a poor, oppressed bunch of people. What the Islamics are doing in Europe, they're doing here. The author is correct: " . . . we are at war with violent Islamist radicals, and they are not above using mosques to incubate terrorism." That's pretty much an understatement.
#4
the WSJ news pages are slanted liberal, the editorial page is conservative (except on immigration)
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 12:47 Comments ||
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#5
so how did they get a sweetheart deal on public property? Sounds like the ACLU et al would be all over that.Oh, I forgot, they only protest when something's good for America
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 12:55 Comments ||
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#6
The ACLU isn't against religion - just Christianity and Judism. The cult of Islam is ok with them.
Ittehad Tanzimat Madaris Deeniya (ITMD) urged the Supreme Court to stop the government from deporting foreign madrassa students. âThe ITMD has rejected the governmentâs decision to repatriate the foreign students. We also decided to mobilise people against the repatriation and force the government to reverse its decision,â Qazi Abdul Rashid, the Wafaqul Madaris Al-Arabia deputy general secretary, told reporters. Wafaqul Madaris Al-Arabia is one of the five wafaqs in the ITMD.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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Law enforcement agencies on Saturday arrested 21 foreign students in seminaries in Islamabad and Rawalpindi for overstaying their visas and warned another 94 with valid visas to leave the country as soon as possible, sources told Daily Times on Saturday. They said the arrested students would soon be deported and no police case of overstaying was lodged against the students.
The law enforcers and officials of the district administration visited 27 seminaries in the twin cities and checked visas and other travel documents of foreign students. Most of the arrested students are from Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, sources said. The Interior Ministry directed intelligence agencies to compile a record of foreigners studying in the International Islamic University (IIU) and living in its hostels or in private accommodation, they said. The ministry also sought information about foreign IIU students who had completed their studies but were still in Pakistan without valid visas or travel documents, they added.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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I thought at first it was going to say...University of Wisconsin at Madison...*&#^&#^#!
Iraqâs electoral commission repeated a call yesterday for the countryâs political groups to remove from their tickets former 90 members of Saddam Husseinâs Baath party so that it can go ahead and issue final election results next week. They include two leading members of former Shiite Prime Minister Iyad Allawiâs secular Iraqi National List. The executive director of de-Baathification commission, Ali Al-Lami, told The Associated Press that Allawiâs list had the largest number in the group of 90 candidates that must be removed from tickets that ran in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. He said they included Adnan Al-Janabi and Rasem Al-Awadi, the director said. Allawiâs list had the largest number with 15. They were followed by the Saleh Al-Mutlaqâs Sunni Arab National Dialogue with five, the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance with four and the main Sunni Arab Accordance Front with two.
The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq has not said how many of the 90 people were likely to be elected when final results are released in early January. âWe informed all the election lists about this decision after we received it from the court, and some of these lists are working on it. They have to present us their lists with their replacements before we declare the results,â Adel Al-Lami, a senior member of the IECI told The AP.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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I'll add an additional call to remove any person with Tehran on his/her speed dial...
I snipped this from the long piece Dan Darling offered us on the Iran nuke issue and posted it separately.
Austrian Ambassador to Israel Kurt Hengl notes that the EU has been focused on the Palestinian elections, and contributed to the Quartet statement last week calling for a Hamas-free Palestinian Authority, though it didn't refer to the terror organization by name. (The Quartet is composed of the EU, US, UN and Russia.)
Noting Europe's role as the leading financial backer of the Palestinians, Hengl described the declaration as "a warning to the Palestinians that they don't chop down the tree on which they're sitting." Having militant groups sitting in governments complicates Europe's efforts on the one hand to discourage violence but on the other hand to continue to have dialogue with Middle Eastern governments, he explained.
The issue has been one of the chief factors to keep Hizbullah off Europe's terror list, despite Israeli protestations, Hengl said. "According to what I am looking at from here, it seems to me that Hizbullah is a candidate for being put on Europe's terror list, but I don't have all the insight to which our people in Brussels and our political and security directors have." He also noted that groups aside from Hizbullah often take responsibility for attacks, which complicates the proper assigning of blame, which can also happen after Palestinian attacks.
Even so, he said, Palestinians must act against terror. "I think it's impossible to speak of Israel [making] one-sided concessions when a young officer is blown up in Tulkarm."
Still, Hengl indicated that Europe questions the security issues Israel has raised in connection with the convoys scheduled to run between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He pointed out that they will be limited to a handful of buses, searched and then accompanied by the IDF. "Let it start," he said. "We could not imagine that there is a real security problem."
In any case, the willingness of Israel to have EU monitors stationed at the Rafah border between Gaza and Rafah as part of the same crossing agreement has contributed to a "fantastic improvement" in EU-Israel relations.
He also stressed the positive effect of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. "The triggering of this is definitely the disengagement from Gaza. For Europeans, the fact that you hold onto the Gaza Strip, with 1.5 million Arabs who don't want to see you, and for me personally, to see that there are young Israeli soldiers being killed there, just for what, for tomatoes and flowers to be shipped to Europe? It is a difficult position."
He recalled being overwhelmed when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told a meeting of European officials that it had been a mistake to settle Gaza. "I said, my God, who is this? Is this our dear prime minister?" The change in Sharon is just one of many evolutions Hengl has observed since his first tour here during the Yom Kippur War, during which he tracked the IDF's advances on a map that still hangs on the wall of his Ramat Gan office.
"It was really like an annex of good old Europe. A lot of people were speaking German," he related, though he recounted that at that time his neighbors in Tel Aviv wouldn't speak to him in German because of their association of the Austrian government with the Holocaust.
He described Israel now as much more "Mediterranean." But the country has remained European enough to make Israel the only true partner in the EU's neighborhood program to develop stronger ties with non-European Mediterranean countries. Israel, he said, "is the only country with which Europe really wants to have a full-speed approach, in technology, in research, in human rights, in democracy, in all that modern life is.
"The contacts and the mutual interests are not only much closer, but [Israel is] the only country in a certain way... which is very much European," he explained.
Posted by: Steve White ||
01/01/2006 14:44 ||
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Sanctimonious, condescending and undiplomatic: a perfect represemtative of the country that sent him.
Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah yesterday held talks with Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas in Riyadh on the situation in Palestine and Iraq as well as the tension between Syria and Lebanon. Speaking to Arab News, Palestine Ambassador Mustafa Deeb said the talks also covered the financial crisis facing the Palestinian Authority.
Asked for some more money, did they?
âKing Abdullah has given his instructions to rapidly support the Palestinian Authority in order to carry out its mission effectively,â said Deeb, who had attended the talks. He said the Palestinian president thanked the Kingdom for its continuous support. King Abdullah is an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause. He has raised the issue at international forums and during his meetings with world leaders.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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How come I have this vague feeling of a Deja-Vu ?
Am I hallucinating or have I been transmogrified into a sneak preview of a moronic sequel to Dune ?
is Abdullah re-establishing the new house of Harkonen ?
Mustafa (Muad-) Deeb
Help.....
A little more coherent than last time but the man is still a raving lunatic ...
Hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said the Nazi attempt to eradicate Jews in the Holocaust was "myth," has now charged that European countries sought to complete the genocide by establishing Israel, a Jewish state in the midst of Muslim countries.
"Don't you think that continuation of genocide by expelling Jews from Europe was one of their (the Europeans') aims in creating a regime of occupiers of Al-Quds (Jerusalem)?" the official Islamic Republic News agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. "Isn't that an important question?"
Ahmadinejad said Europeans had decided to create a "Jewish camp" as the best means for ridding the continent of Jews and said the camp, Israel, now enjoyed support from the United States and Europe in what he termed the slaughter of Muslims.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
01/01/2006 18:12 ||
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Ahmadinejad sez creation of Israel completes the Holocaust
Scooter McGruder sez Ahmadinejad fellates goats.
#3
âOn the political level, the participants discussed the characteristics of the New World System, which they believe is based on the racist principles of confrontation with the civilizations that describe Arab culture as aggressive and violent, based on an "alleged Islamic fundamentalism.ââ
Actually, it is the analysis of the empirical evidence (blood and splatter) and the frequency of that evidence that makes us wonder whether Arab culture on whole is aggressive and violent. As far as Islam goes, it leaves its own trail of evidence in its Koranic imperatives.
Every new group canât help but sound like a line from Life of Brian: âthe Permanent Conference to Confront the Zionist Cultural Invasionâ.
#11
Schroeder, Carter, Clinton -- what's the difference? They're all "former" but don't recognize their "dustbin of history" fates. They're about as meaningful as UNESCO. It's all blather that impresses no one except their groupies.
State Prosecutor Said Mirza revealed Friday that the arrest of Monzer Jamil Assad, a cousin of the Syrian president, at Rafik Hariri International Airport was in compliance with an arrest warrant issued in absentia by a judge in Damascus on murder charges. The warrant had been turned into an international arrest warrant by Interpol.
Mirza explained that the State Prosecutor's Office has prepared a letter to be sent to the Syrian Judiciary to officially inform it of Assad's arrest. The letter also stipulates that Syria can extradite Assad by submitting a request according to the judicial cooperation agreement between the two countries.
The General Security Corps arrested Assad after he tried to flee the country. He will be detained until his handover to Syrian authorities. The judiciary, two months ago, issued an accusatory statement instructing the referral of three suspects for trial on charges of the theft of antiquities from the home of Jamil Assad, the father of Monzer Jamil Assad, in Aley.
Meanwhile, Syrian reports announced that Monzer had left the town of Qordaha, in Lattakia on the Syrian coast, for Paris, more than three months ago after announcing the abduction of his 16-year-old son Hafez following a shoot out on the Mezzeh highway. Monzer's arrest in Beirut was not officially acknowledged by Syria, but a Syrian source said any pursuit of Monzer was based on smuggling operations and that Damascus would not overlook "irresponsible and illegal activities, regardless of the actor." According to reports, Monzer accused Syria's secret service of kidnapping his son and bodyguard to pressuring him regarding a dispute over the inheritance of his late father, a member of the Syrian Parliament and brother of late President Hafez Assad.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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If he dies in custody he'll take the blame for all the car booms
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 3:34 Comments ||
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...Monzer had left the town of Qordaha, in Lattakia on the Syrian coast, for Paris, more than three months ago after announcing the abduction of his 16-year-old son Hafez following a shoot out on the Mezzeh highway.
In the middle of telling the Iraqi Baathist remnants they're probably going to have to beat it, his kid gets kidnapped and he has to go to - Paris?
As the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora slammed Friday the Al-Qaeda claim that it attacked Israel from Lebanon as a "hoax," the Lebanese Army discovered and dismantled two rockets mounted for firing at Israel in South Lebanon. "Just carefully study the posted statement and you will see it was posted by amateurs," said Siniora after a meeting with Speaker Nabih Berri, referring to the statement posted Thursday on an Islamic Web site that was signed by "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," claiming responsibility for the latest rockets attacks on Israel from Lebanon.
"It is a fabrication and a joke," said Siniora, who also stressed the importance of not "over blowing" the issue and repeated his calls for greater vigilance over finding the real perpetrators of the attack on Israel Tuesday via three "Katyusha" rockets to which Israel responded with air strikes on a base of the pro-Syrian Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) located on the southern outskirts of Beirut. Following Siniora's remarks, the Lebanese Army is currently exerting greater control around the borders with Israel and through its presence there discovered "two Katyusha rockets primed for launching at Israel from South Lebanon" said security officials to the media under conditions of anonym
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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It looks like Siniora just realized that if this rocketry hobby of lebanese terrorist clubs goes on, Israel will have to have a little "demolition squad spree" amongst some Lebanese government owned civilan infrastructure.
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 11:56 Comments ||
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A Russian proposal to form a joint venture with Iran to enrich uranium on Russian soil deprives Tehran of its nuclear rights and is unacceptable, Iran's hardline media said on Saturday. Diplomats and analysts say Iran's ultra-conservative press often reflects the uncompromising official stance on the nuclear programme and is also often used to spell out the country's negotiating position on the issue. The Russian plan, which is backed by the European Union and Washington, is designed to allay international concerns that Tehran could produce its own highly enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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Fred and other Rantburgers,
is it only my overactive imagination or do other rantburgers also notice the ominous (apathetic ?) silence of the west in general and US in particular, as the Iranians cross one redline after the other in their untiring race to the coveted nuke ? Do people ignore the fact that once they have reached their nuclear goal, the entire middle east will be severely destabilized with dire consequences to any american plans in Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan and maybe the entire asian continent.
What would prevent Ahmadinagad from "donating" to Al Qaida a few nuclear devices to be smuggled into key cities in Europe and the US. What could the US do when a nuke goes off in NY ? blame Iran ? how would they prove this was an Iranian warhead ?
Can you imagine the new levels of grovelling and arab-asslicking that would be reached by the European Dhimmies once they learn about hidden arab nukes in Paris and Berlin?.
Has Dubia finally lost his Iron Balls(TM) ?
I do admit that we Israelis may not have a good way of dealing with this situation with minimal collateral damage. However,I am afraid that once we see that we are alone in this and once we consider the risk of a nuke on Tel-Aviv, we will start something that will ignite the entire region in a bloody conflagration (of the kind that glows in the dark).
Any comments ?
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 10:06 Comments ||
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"Has Dubia finally lost his Iron Balls(TM)?"
No, I think when he says Iran will NOT be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, I think he means it; and he'll do whatever it takes to make sure they don't.
Just my hunch...
Posted by: Dave D. ||
01/01/2006 11:07 Comments ||
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Dave D.
I certainly hope what you say is right.
All I can add is: It's damn inconvenient to feel Ahmadinagad's stale breath on the nape my neck !
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 11:14 Comments ||
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"All I can add is: It's damn inconvenient to feel Ahmadinagad's stale breath on the nape my neck!"
Yes, I imagine that must be a distinctly uncomfortable feeling.
I think we've all known-- for all of the past 26 years-- that this showdown would someday come. Now it looks like it will come this year. I hope that when it does, it is sufficiently violent that it convinces the Arab/Islamic world to abandon utterly its dreams of conquering the Infidels.
I hope.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
01/01/2006 11:36 Comments ||
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Dave
Being a old staunch infidel myself I cannot but agree with you wholeheartedly.
I also think such a showdown may even proove to be (in the long term) beneficial to those arabs who can still think for themselves.
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 11:42 Comments ||
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We haven't heard from you in a while, EoZ. You've been missed. The debate here has been whether Dubya is in the process of getting his ducks in a row to do something along the lines of decapitating and disarming the Mad Mullah regime one dark night (destroying Republican Guards in their barracks, assassination of key Mullahs, partial destruction of underground nuclear facilities, but not a boots-on-the-ground invasion followed by nation building) or whether Israel will have to make her own war. Nobody seems to think the Europeans will do anything more than look for more reasons to talk, even as more and more of Europe comes within reach of Iran's latest iteration of nuclear-capable missiles. My own key question has been where that first Iranian missile will land after being deflected by Israel's improvement on the Patriot anti-missiles, and whether Sharon will wait for that first missile to be launched before taking the war to the Mullahs.
So no, the whole world isn't ignoring Israel's predicament. Rantburgers, at least, have been paying very close attention.
#8
I'm having trouble separating rhetoric from facts, I think that Dubyah has a real fear that it's all a smokescreen along the lines of Saddam's supposed WMD's, and he necessarily must tread very carefully through this particular minefield.
The only "Proof" of Nuclear Weapons Building is their own word, since no inspections are permitted it's near impossible to tell if they're lying or not.
I personally think it's a trap to get the US to respond with a full scale attack, that the Mullahs can then use to whip up fury against us, and by NOT biting Dubyah has infuriated them.
Far safer to arm Israel (500 and 1000 pound "Bunker Busters" etc., and then if (Very big IF) they're not lying, while Israel pounds them into sand, we (The US) can shift focus toward Saudiland and end the threat permanently (Just as the munitions run low in Israel, we take up the slack)
Taking turns pounding the "Nuke" sites makes a tremendous statement, but only if you're hitting the right places.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
01/01/2006 11:59 Comments ||
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Trailing Wife
I "disappeared" for a while since I have opened a new bussiness which kinda sucks up all my available free time. Good to know I've been missed.
As for Dubia I hope he is indeed getting all his marbles arranged.
Technically, I dont think the US can or should sustain a full boots-on-the-ground operation in Iran. To be effective, it will have to be a short decapitation (maybe combined airstrike + special forces at key sites) followed by a political coup and regime change. Any direct occupation by American forces will be strategically and politically unwise and may also spread US forces too thin.
As for Israel, I dont think we can afford to wait till the Iranian cruise missiles show as blips on our radar screens. It will have to be done at a much earlier date. However, unfortunately, Sharon is too occupied with the coming elections to do something. OTH some successful counter- operation may be all he will ever need to win the coming election (as stupid as this may sound).
Whatever happens, I wish you and all fellow Rantburgers a Happy New Year and a great and fruitfull 2006.
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 12:21 Comments ||
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then the Borg has to be wiped out
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 12:23 Comments ||
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Frank
Who's the Borg ??
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 12:26 Comments ||
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"However, unfortunately, Sharon is too occupied with the coming elections to do something."
How sure are you that this is so? Bush, also, gives the appearance of being preoccupied (NSA surveillance "scandal", etc.), but my guess is they are both focusing on the Iranian problem nearly full-time.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
01/01/2006 12:38 Comments ||
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Dave
you may be right but only time will tell if this is indeed so.
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 12:49 Comments ||
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Star Trek reference - in response to your comment about some of the Arabs being outside the hive mindset....
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 12:54 Comments ||
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RJ said: "The only "Proof" of Nuclear Weapons Building is their own word, since no inspections are permitted it's near impossible to tell if they're lying or not."
I offer two observations...
First, the IAEA did find a number of reasons which clearly pointed to the fact that the Iranians were on track for weapons, not just a nuke power plant to supplement their 100 years worth of proven oil reserves. Though el Baradai tried to downplay it in every way he could, there were too many eyes on the inspection team who weren't stooges for him to cover up the evidence. Their obvious real intent is what brought the EU3 into play in the first place - otherwise it would've been left to the IAEA and the UNSC to which it reports. And knowing full well the Iranian intent, that alone makes the following year+ of EU3 "negotiations" a classic example of the utter failure of their dearly held and, particularly in this case, extremely dangerous "soft power" foolishness. The old saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.", constantly used against the US due to penis power envy, comes to mind... When all they have is knee pads, everything looks like a stiffy. Sucks to be them, LOL.
Secondly, your point regards Bush's position today, after the SNAFU of Tenet's CIA intel failure ("slam dunk" indeed) on Iraq's WMD materials, is spot on, indeed. He must have rock-solid proof of the Iranian intent to hold back the baying BDS hounds. Whether before or after action is not as important as finding proof even the tools will have to believe - and presuming it occurs before he leaves office... the bandying about of various dates and deadlines on the Iranians' capabilities are all over the map. Bush has found himself between a rock and a hard place not only on the intel question, but domestically with the US Senate pulling all of the teeth from the House Resolution to stop Iran from getting nukes "by all reasonable means". I am beginning to accept the fact that the current marriage of convenience between the forces seeking the fall of the US must be addressed in extra-legal ways... Though, for the world at large, the Islamofascists are the most obvious threat - the most dangerous to the US, by far, is the internal threat and it must be dealt with immediately, else the larger WoT is irrelevant.
#16
This whole thing is a distraction. Since when did the "War on Terror" become the "War on WMD Proliferation"?
If Iran suddenly gave in on the WMD issue, or if USA managed to destroy its nuclear capabilities but without removing its leadership -- do you think that this will be a huge victory for our side, rather than a mere retention of the status quo? Iran hasn't needed WMDs in order to export terror and Islamofascism the last three decades.
Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq, people started thinking that WMDs were the thing to target, not governments that supported and financed terror and the Islamofascist ideology that promoted it.
Fact is that an Islamofascist Iran without WMDs would still need to be crushed (or atleast contained, as it currently isn't).
Fact is that an Islamofascist Iran without WMDs would still need to be crushed (or atleast contained, as it currently isn't).
I agree, but the nuke/WMD issue makes it important when and how and by whom. We already know the Dhimmi sheep will come bleating about "over-reaction" and "Let the UN do its' work" and yadd yadda yadda. Liars, suckers and Donks will come ankle-biting when they offered no other alternatives. Time to crush a few empty skulls (rhetorically speaking, of course).
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 19:39 Comments ||
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I fail to see how liars, suckers and Donks could do any more ankle-biting than they already do. They're complaining about the White House counting web visitors, government web sites using cookies, and the government listening in on the international communications of suspected terrorists. Obviously GWB has become Big Brother, just 21 years late. There's no chance they can triumph over Big Brother.
#20
"Fact is that an Islamofascist Iran without WMDs would still need to be crushed (or at least contained, as it currently isn't)."
True... sort of. A few observations...
What the addition of the WMD threat does is compress time and make the regime change needed in Iran at least a tad more urgent and puts it on a schedule of the best available intel estimates of their acquisition.
Why?
For one - magnified lethality by several thousand times. To ignore this aspect of the addition of deliverable WMDs to the inventory of Islamic terrorists is simply dumb.
It also increases the likelihood of even bolder acts and the export of even more terror since they apparently believe this will make them invulnerable once acquired.
The odds of them using WMDs once they are acquired is certainly great enough to take on the face value of their threats. They have made their intentions clear enough.
Agreed, even without WMDs, they must be removed from power, just as the House of Saud, if global Islamic terrorism is to be checked. Would that more governments came forward and assisted openly, actively, seriously... instead of posturing in the UN and press and cutting favorable under the table deals which merely undermine the WoT at every turn.
With WMDs, they are far more lethal, emboldened, and, thus, far more dangerous.
An attitude in the "at least contained, as it currently isn't" leads to another point...
Who is actually actively doing something about Islamic terrorists? Very few, publicly, actually. Perhaps, no make that probably, very few more even behind the scenes. Most of those who might have been expected to both take it seriously as well as actively oppose it are either sitting on their hands or buying it off / appeasing it.
Nations supposedly act in their own interests. That is rational, but ignores the short-term vs the long-term consequences. In the short-term, perhaps they improve their economy with a shady dual-sue tech deal here and a little arms treaty busting there. But long-term all of these are, whether large or small, cumulatively suicidal acts. World-wide, the number of nations willing to forgo immediate gain for future security has dwindled to a tiny few.
It's also rather clear that those few who are actively opposing Islamic terror have not lost focus, nothing of the kind -- they've become more focused, in fact. The Iranians, in a remarkable show of underestimating the resolve of the leadership of those few, have accelerated the showdown, in fact.
I know Seafarious was all over this yesterday, but it's too much fun to let drop...
Syrian lawmakers have voted unanimously to call on the government to put Abdel-Halim Khaddam, the former vice-president, on trial for treason after he publicly broke with Bashar al-Assad, the president. "We call on the justice minister to try Abdel-Halim Khaddam for grand treason and to take the necessary measures," Mahmoud al-Abrash, the parliament speaker, said at the end of a televised session on Saturday.
Since he's now (somewhat) safely ensconced in Gay Paree, that will presumably involve sending somebody there to boom his car or help him commit suicide. That may be too much even for the Frenchies. Their military could end up mistaking Damascus for Ivory Coast or someplace.
Speaking from Paris, Khaddam on Friday launched an unprecedented attack on al-Assad, saying he had threatened Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who was assassinated in February. Khaddam, who moved to Paris after resigning in June, accused the government of making political blunders in Lebanon and of failing to deliver economic and political reforms at home, leaving millions of Syrians to go hungry.
That confirms the story about Pencilneck threatening Hariri, of course. The rest of it's self-evidently true — the regime's bitch isn't that it's true, but that he's talking about it.
Legislator Umeima Faddoul told the parliament session: "I ask the Syrian leadership to try him ... for humiliating 10 million Syrians when he said half of the Syrian people are eating from the garbage. I tell him, those who eat from the garbage are traitors like you ... Treason is the darkest shade of black."
So he admits that they're eating from the garbage?
Khaddam, a veteran aide to the president's father, the late Hafez al-Assad who ruled Syria for 30 years, would not speculate on who had ordered al-Hariri's murder, saying "we must wait" for the results of a UN inquiry that has already implicated senior Syrian officials.
So far who dunnit looks pretty obvious. I suppose he could have cheesed off the local crooks, but that wouldn't account for the subsequent booms of people who griped about the Syrians. For that matter, it wouldn't account for the people who were boomed before Hariri, to include Hariri's teevee station.
Legislator after legislator stood up in parliament to accuse Khaddam of corruption and treason during four decades as a senior official in Syria.
So why didn't they hang him at any point during those four decades? Presumably he was available...
Some also accused him of betraying his country by moving to France.
Where he's (somewhat) out of reach of the car boomers' corps...
"You don't deserve to be a Syrian," said a lawmaker, who did not give his name. "You can go to hell because no Syrian will forgive you, who hoped to return to your country one day on an American tank."
Or a French tank...
Another lawmaker said: "His comments last night constitute a criminal offence that reaches the level of treason and we demand he be put to trial before the Syrian security high court."
Recipe for rabbit stew: First catch a rabbit...
Khaddam's comments are likely to intensify international pressure on Damascus which has been mounting since the Beirut truck bombing that killed Hariri and 22 others. Syria has denied involvement but pulled its troops out of Lebanon in April after a 29-year military presence.
Gone before 9-11-06.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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This story needed your special touch, Fred.
Khadem's actions are interesting. I find myself wondering what caused him to go public just now? It seems as if he was living peacefully enough in Paris, though we observers can never fully know just how safe he was.
Nevertheless, he is no dummy and surely knew that this type of interview would effectively sever his ties with Syria and possibly make his life insurance actuary very unhappy. He prolly could have continued to keep his head down and his mouth shut, but he didn't.
So then, why?
Was he good friends with Tueni? As I recall, Tueni was also hanging in Paris before he returned to his car bomb. IIRC, much of the Syrian resistance is sheltering in Paris.
Was he hoping the UN investigation would be effective? This could be a puzzle piece critical to the report. Unfortunately I think the UN doesn't really care and doesn't want to do anything about this. But maybe Khadem did.
Some sort of ego trip? He's been a bigshot in Syrian politix for 40 years. Maybe he misses the limelight and feels overlooked in Paris.
At any rate, here's hoping that ol' Pencilneck gets his just desserts, and soon.
#3
Actually, the Frenchies have a certain talent for beating up third world ratholes.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 10:40 Comments ||
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"You can go to hell because no Syrian will forgive you, who hoped to return to your country one day on an American tank."
How Ironic. But unfortunatly he cannot go to hell because the Syrian Immigration and Naturalization Office refuses him entry into Syria.
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
01/01/2006 10:57 Comments ||
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Syrians have an interesting definition of treason: Telling the truth.
Quelle surprise.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
01/01/2006 12:03 Comments ||
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That may be too much even for the Frenchies.
I doubty it. It may be enough to let the U. S. loose, but no French tanks. It's bring them too close to being allies. And what's in it for them?
There's a lot here that's worth reading, though Bergen clearly has an axe to grind on a number of topics - the idea that Zarqawi wasn't working with al-Qaeda before 2004 is pure twaddle, for instance. I tend to agree with him that it's a good idea to know what the bad guys say about one another, but in so doing you have to account for the Islamist tendency towards mendacity, delusion, and the like that we've all noted here, so caveat emptor. I've tried to edit out the most glaring examples of stupidity.
At a 2002 press conference, President Bush remarked that Osama bin Laden was "a person who's now been marginalized." Some have even joked that bin Laden is, in fact, Bin Forgotten. Far from being marginalized, al-Qaeda's leader continues to exert considerable authority over the global jihadist movement, which he had a large role in creating. It's not simply that each day that bin Laden remains a free man is a morale booster for his followers around the world, but also that al-Qaeda's leader continues to supply the overall strategy for his organization's actions and for the broader ideological movement it has spawned.
Since the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden has released around 20 statements on video or audiotape, which have reached audiences of tens of millions via the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other television networks, and which have had a direct effect on world events. The attacks in London in July that killed 56âincluding the four suicide bombersâwere a response to bin Laden's repeated calls to fight countries participating in the coalition in Iraq, as were the attacks in Madrid a year earlier that killed 191. An indicator of bin Laden's continued influence is that in 2004 the most feared insurgent commander in Iraq, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, pledged his allegiance to al-Qaeda's leader. For millions of Muslims around the world, bin Laden remains an inspirational figure. A worldwide opinion poll taken by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2004 found that he is viewed favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (55 percent), and Morocco (45 percent)âall key U.S. allies in the war on terrorism.
Despite his impact on history, bin Laden remains shrouded in a fog of myth, propaganda, and half-truths. For eight years I have been interviewing people close to him and gathering documents in order to fill out the picture of this mysterious man. Some questions I have attempted to answer: What is he really like? Was al-Qaeda a formally planned organization? Was bin Laden ever associated with or sympathetic to Saddam Hussein? Was he at Tora Bora in 2001? What is his significance today, and his possible legacy?
I. THE MAN Osama bin Laden grew up during the 1960s and 1970s in Jidda, a port on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia, 30 miles from Mecca. He came of age as the Muslim world was experiencing an awakening known as the Sahwa. This peaked in 1979 with a series of seismic events that profoundly influenced bin Laden and other future members of al-Qaeda: the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by the cleric Ayatollah Khomeini; the armed takeover of Islam's holy of holies, the mosque in Mecca, by Saudi militants; Egypt's cease-fire agreement with Israel; and the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden to Jamal Ismail, a Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera television, 1998: As it is well known, my father, Sheikh Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, was born in Hadramawt [in southern Yemen]. He went to work in Hejaz [in Saudi Arabia] at an early age. Then God blessed him and bestowed on him an honor that no other building contractor has known. He built the holy Mecca mosque and at the same timeâbecause of God's blessings to himâhe built the holy mosque in Medina. When he found out that the government of Jordan announced a tender for restoration work on the Dome of the Rock Mosque [in Jerusalem], he gathered engineers and asked them, "Calculate only the cost price of the project." He was awarded the project.
Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden's brother-in-law: [Osama] likes his father very much. He considered him as a model. He was not with his father much, because his father died when he was 10 years old. And, also, the father didn't meet his children much. He was very busyâa lot of children, a lot of housesâso he just met them officially. There are 54 children, and he had 20-plus wives. Osama's mother is Syrian; he's the only child from his mother and Muhammad bin Laden.
Brian Fyfield-Shayler, a British citizen who lived in Saudi Arabia and taught English to a number of the bin Laden boys: All the sons are very good-looking. I don't think that I have ever met any ugly bin Ladens. Osama's mother, I am told, was a great beauty. Since his father never had more than four wives at any one time, he was constantly divorcing the third and the fourth and taking in new ones. This was an anachronism even in the 1950s and 60s.
This was my fourth year teaching, when [Osama] came along [in 1968, when he was 11]. Osama was one of 30 students. He [used to sit] two-thirds of the way back on the window side that looked out onto sports fields and playing grounds. Why did I remember Osama? First of all, I would have noticed because of his name, because of the family, and, of course, when you walked into a class of anyone of his age, he was literally outstanding because he was taller than his contemporaries, and so he was very noticeable. His English was not amazing. He was not one of the great brains of that class.
It was big news, national news, when [Osama's father] was killed [in a plane crash in 1967]. And for the next year at least the future of the business [hung in the balance]. There were a lot of projects that were not completed, and it was the major construction company of Saudi Arabia, so it was of huge importance, and there was probably only Salem [Osama's oldest brother] and three or four brothers at that period who were of an age even to take on the mantle. Salem was educated at Millfield [a boarding school in England]. Salem was a fraction younger than me, but not much. I was introduced to him by mutual friends. He was very Westernized. His English was beautiful; it was very fluent, very characterful.
A relative of the bin Laden family: Salem was a unique individual by any standard. By Saudi standards he was off the charts. Very charismatic, amusing, no facial hair. He played guitarâ60s hits like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" He acted as sort of a court jester to King Fahd and was part of Fahd's inner circle. Sometimes he overstepped with the king. One time he buzzed the king's camp in the desert with one of his planes, which went down badly, but he was always taken back into the fold. Salem took control of the business beginning in '73â'74. If King Fahd wanted a palace built, Salem would build it for him.
This raises the question of how much money Osama bin Laden inherited from his family. Certainly far less than the $200 million or more mentioned in the media after 9/11. In fact, according to someone designated by the family to speak to me, bin Laden benefited from the distribution of his father's estate according to Sharia law, which says that sons receive twice as much as daughters. However, with 54 children, even Muhammad bin Laden's vast fortune did not go too far. Until Osama's family cut him off, in 1994, he had probably received something like $20 million.
Christina Akerblad, former owner of the Hotel Astoria in the town of Falun, Sweden, recalling how in 1970 Salem bin Laden, in his mid-20s, and his younger brother Osama paid a visit: They came with a big Rolls-Royce, and it was forbidden to park the car outside the building in this street. But they did it, and [my husband and I] said to them, You have to pay [a fine] for every day and every hour you are staying outside this hotel, but they said, "Oh, it doesn't matterâit's so funny to go to the police station and to talk with the police. We will stay where we are." It was like a joke to them. They had so much money they didn't know how much money they had. I asked them how they had managed to come to Sweden with this enormous Rolls-Royce. They said, "We have our plane."
They stayed one week. They were dressed very exclusive. They had two double rooms. They slept in one bed and on the other bed they had their bags. On Sunday, I had no cleaner at the hotel, so I took care of the room myself, and I was shocked because in the big bag they had lots of white, expensive shirts from Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. When they had [worn] the shirt once, they dropped it. So the cleaner had taken these shirts to wash them, but they said, "No, we are just using them once, so you can [have] them if you want."
Khaled Batarfi, three years younger than bin Laden, met him when Osama was in his teens and they lived next door to each other in Jidda: I was the soccer captain even though Osama was older than me. Because he was tall, he used to play forward to use his head and put in the goals. I was a tough guy then and Osama was the peaceful one. He was very shy, very observant. He liked Western movies. One of the TV series he liked was Fury. [It ran on NBC from 1955 to 1960.] He used to watch that, and he liked karate movies. Bruce Lee. He liked to go climbing mountains in the area between Syria and Turkey. He loved horse riding.
He would fast every Monday and Thursday. [Such] fasting is an extra thing, because it's what the Prophet used to do, but you don't have to do it. [Osama's mother] is a moderate Muslim. She watches TV. She [has] never been very conservative, and her [current] husband's like that; their kids are like that. So Osama was different, but then, he was different in a quiet way. He would bother his brothers sometimes for looking at the maid or things like that. Of course, he woke them for prayers in the morning, and that was goodânobody complained. But sometimes he was kind of upset if something is not done in an Islamic way. "Don't wear short sleeves, don't do this, don't do that." At 17 he married his cousin in Latakia [in Syria]âa beautiful resort, I hearâthe daughter of his uncle, the brother of his mother. And then he went to the university and I saw less of him.
Jamal Khalifa, recalling his years with bin Laden at Jidda's King Abdul Aziz University: In '76, I met Osama. He was in a different college, in economics. I was in science, but our activities were the same. I was almost 20, and he was 19. At that time we were religious and very much conservative. Of course, no girlsâdon't even talk about itâand no photographs. That's why I don't have any pictures with Osama. I was photographed in high school, but when I became religious I threw everything away.
We [discussed] polygamy, and we recalled our fathers, how they practiced polygamy. We found that they were practicing it in a wrong way, where they married and divorced, married and divorcedâa lot of wives. Some of those practicing polygamy will, if they marry the second one, neglect the first oneânot the Islamic way at all. And we look at polygamy as solving a social problem, especially when it's confirmed that there are more women than men in the society. It's not fun, it's not a matter of just having women with you to sleep withâit's a solution for a problem. So that's how [Osama and I] looked at it, and we decided to practice [polygamy] and to be a model.
Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who knew bin Laden in Jidda: Osama was just like many of us who become part of the [Muslim] Brotherhood movement in Saudi Arabia. The only difference which set him apart from me and others, he was more religious, more literal, more fundamentalist. For example, he would not listen to music. He would not shake hands with a woman. He would not smoke. He would not watch television, unless it is news. He wouldn't play cards. He would not put a picture on his wall. Even though he comes from a rich family, he lives in a very simple house.
Khaled Batarfi: Did you know he went to America? He took his [first] son, Abdallah, because Abdallah has problems with his headâit was deformedâso he took him for a medical trip.
Even after his marriage, for a year or so he was still living in his mother's house. Later on, after he got his first child, it seems like it was too tight a place for him, especially since he was planning to marry another woman. So they moved to a building in the Al-Aziziyah district [in Jidda]. He gave each wife an apartment. I visited him once and I saw that they were bare apartments. I mean, I wouldn't live there myself. Very humble.
Carmen bin Ladin (a frequent alternative spelling), former wife of Yeslam bin Ladin, Osama's older half-brother, in her 2004 book, Inside the Kingdom: One day, Yeslam's younger brother Osama came to visit. Back then he was a young student attending King Abdul Aziz University in [Jidda], respected in the family for his stern religious beliefs, and recently married to a Syrian niece of his mother's.
Catching sight of Osama and his [adult] nephew Mafouz, I smiled and asked them in. "Yeslam is here," I assured them, but Osama snapped his head away when he saw me and glared back towards the gate. "No, really," I insisted. "Come in."
In Saudi culture, any man who might one day become your husband is not supposed to see you unveiled. Osama was among those men who followed the rule strictly.
Wisal al Turabi, wife of Hassan Turabi, who became the de facto leader of Sudan after a coup in 1989. In the early 1990s the Turabi and bin Laden families socialized together in Khartoum: I met [one of bin Laden's wives], Umm Ali [i.e., the mother of Ali], in her house. I didn't see her children, but she said the children were in another room trying to learn the Koran. She was a university lecturer. She was very knowledgeable, because she studied in Saudi Arabia. She used to go to Saudi Arabia and come during her holidays to stay in Khartoum. She was teaching Islam to some families in Riyadh [an upscale neighborhood in Khartoum].
Three of his wives are university lecturers; the first one is not. He has four wives. And he married the other three because they were spinsters. They were going to go without marrying in this world. So he married them for the Word of God. In Islam we do this. If you have a spinster, if you marry her, you will be rewarded for this in the afterworld, because you will bring up your offspring as Muslims.
Noman Benotman, a Libyan former jihadist, remembers that bin Laden lived a life far removed from that of the average billionaire's son: He's living a normal life, the life of poor people. I saw him many times. You see his kidsâyou will never, ever in your life think those kids are bin Laden's kids; [rather] they are people from the poorest family in the world. I saw them. You wouldn't believe itâthey're kids running around in old clothes. He always tells his followers, "You should learn to sacrifice everything from modern life, like electricity, air-conditioning, refrigerators, gasoline. If you are living the luxury life, it's very hard to evacuate and go to the mountains to fight."
Abu Jandal, bin Laden's former chief bodyguard, in an interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, 2004: His wife Umm Ali asked Sheikh Osama for a divorce when they still lived in Sudan. She said that she could not continue to live in an austere way and in hardship. He respected her wish and divorced her in accordance with the Koranic verse "Husband and wife should either live together equitably or separate in kindness." The other wives stayed with him, however, although they come from distinguished families and are highly educated.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was a profoundly shocking event for bin Laden, as it was for thousands of other devout young Muslims, who were drawn to the Afghan jihad during the 1980s. It was the first time since World War II that a non-Muslim power had invaded and occupied a Muslim nation. Indeed, for bin Laden it was the most transformative event of his life. A key to this transformation was his encounter with the charismatic Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was the critical force both ideologically and organizationally for the recruitment of Muslims from around the world to engage in the Afghan struggle against the Soviets. Azzam became bin Laden's mentor, and in 1984 they founded the Services Office, an organization dedicated to placing Arab volunteers either with relief organizations serving the Afghan refugees who had flooded into Pakistan, or with the Afghan factions fighting the Soviets.
Osama bin Laden in 1997: The news was broadcast by radio stations that the Soviet Union invaded a Muslim country; this was a sufficient motivation for me to start to aid our brothers in Afghanistan. In spite of the Soviet power, God conferred favors on us so that we transported heavy equipment from the country of the Two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia] estimated at hundreds of tons altogether that included bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches. When we saw the brutality of the Russians bombing the mujahideen positions, by the grace of God, we dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places.
Hutaifa Azzam, the son of Abdullah Azzam: Anyone who wanted to know anything about Afghanistan connects with my father. [He and Osama] met in the summer of 1984 in Jidda. Their relationship was very strong. I was very close to Osama. I still remember him driving a Land Cruiser, desert color; he took us to his farm, 40 kilometers from Jidda. We used to go there hunting.
A vital project of Azzam and bin Laden's Services Office was Jihad magazine, which the organization started up in the fall of 1984. A bimonthly, it was effectively the house organ of the Services Office, which would morph, in part, into al-Qaeda.
Abdullah Anas, one of the founders of the Services Office: The main aim of Azzam to build or to create the Jihad magazine is to inform the Arab world what is happening in Afghanistan; informing them, help funding, recruit people. [Eventually we printed] 70,000 copies an issue. And most of them go to the United States, because we had 52 centers in the United States. The main office was in Brooklyn, also Phoenix, Boston, Chicago, Tucson, Washington, D.C., Minnesota, and Washington State. Every year Azzam used to go to United States. The wealthy of United States can help much more than Muslims who are living in poor countries or under dictatorship.
In 1991, Basil Muhammad, a Syrian journalist, published The Arab Volunteers in Afghanistan, in which he wrote that bin Laden had first ventured into Afghanistan in 1984. Bin Laden told Muhammad: I feel so guilty for listening to my friends and those that I love to not come here [to Afghanistan] and stay home for reasons of safety, and I feel that this delay of four years requires [my own] martyrdom in the name of God.
Jamal Ismail, who was an editor of Jihad magazine: Coming to Peshawar on a visit in 1984, I met Mr. Osama bin Laden, one of the main financiers of the Services Office. I knew from the beginning that he was not willing to drink any soft drinks from American companiesâPepsi, Coca-Cola, Sprite, 7-Up. He is trying to boycott all American products because he believes that without the Americans Israel cannot exist.
Jamal Khalifa, who joined his university friend bin Laden in Afghanistan: When we decided to work in Afghanistan, early '85, he told me, "What if you marry my sister Shaikha?" I told him, "Osama, we are going to war. We are going to die, and you're asking me about marriage?" So he insisted and I told him, "O.K., look. If I came back and did not die, I will do it."
[Despite the fact that he was married to bin Laden's sister, Jamal Khalifa was angry about what he regarded as his friend's foolhardy plan to set up his own military operation in Afghanistan. In 1986, bin Laden established a base next to a Soviet military post at Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan. Khalifa knew that bin Laden had no military experience, and he was concerned that young Arabs under bin Laden's command were being sent on kamikaze missions against the Soviets.]
I decided to go myself [to Jaji] to see what's going on there. I stayed three days. I started to ask the people how it's going. They said every day, We have plenty of shaheeds [martyrs]âpeople dying. I said, "Why? They are not trained and they are very young. They don't have experience and they are facing the Soviets. It's not a joke."
So I sat down with Osama in his tent underground. I told him, "Everybody is against this idea. Why are you here? Don't you know that this is very dangerous?" He said, "We came to be in the front." I said, "No, we did not come to be in the front. We came to [act as supporters of the] Afghans." I told him, "Every drop of blood bleeds here in this place. God will ask you about it in the Hereafter. Everybody saying this is wrong, so Osama, please leave the place right now." Everybody was hearing our argument; our voices become hard. I was really very angry; this is our first time to be like this. I told him, "Look, you will leave the place or I will never see you again." He told me, "Do whatever you want." So I left.
Bin Laden's military ambitions and personality evolved in tandem. He became more assertive, to the point that he ignored the advice of many old friends about the folly of setting up his own military force. That decision also precipitated an irrevocable (but carefully concealed) split with his onetime mentor, Abdullah Azzam.
Hutaifa Azzam: You could say that bin Laden separated from my father in 1987. Bin Laden said that he wanted to make special camps for the Arabs only, where we can start our own jihad and we give the orders. We will gather all the Arabs in Afghanistan in one area in Jalalabad [in eastern Afghanistan]. My father was against that. He was shocked. So in 1987, Osama decided to separate and create special camps for the Arabs.
Bin Laden, demonstrating the zeal of a fanatic, told the Syrian journalist Basil Muhammad that he hoped his new base would draw heavy Soviet fire: God willing, we want the Lion's Den [in Jaji] to be the first thing that the enemy faces. Its place as the first camp visible to the enemy means that they will focus their bombardments on us in an extreme manner.
From his base in Jaji, bin Laden fought a key military engagement with the Soviets during the spring of 1987. This was a critical turning point in his life, when he left behind his role as a donor and fund-raiser for the mujahideen and launched his career as a holy warrior.
Essam Deraz, an Egyptian writer and filmmaker, covered the battle of Jaji: They picked the site at Jaji because it was on the front lines. In '87, it was a very important battle. The Arab group fought against Russian commandos. Not more than 50 or 60 young Arabs, 21, 22 [years old]. Most of them students at the universities. [Bin Laden] fought in this battle like a private. The Russian bombing went on for one week. It was clear now he'd be the leader. I was near him in the battleâmany monthsâand he was really brave. That's why he got respect from Afghans and Arabs.
Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistani air-force officer who fought alongside bin Laden: I participated in the Jaji battle. I was introduced to [bin Laden]. First of all he's not a genius. He was 30 when I met him. He prayed a lot, always smiling. As a personality I never thought he would make a place in historyâhe is not charismatic. He is not very intelligent, but he is the most dedicated and self-sacrificing person, to a degree that is unparalleled.
Khaled Batarfi, who remained in touch with bin Laden's mother during the Soviet-Afghan war, noted her growing concerns about her son, especially after Osama supposedly suffered the effects of a Soviet gas attack: The situation became worse when [Osama] went to jihad. In the beginning it wasn't for jihad, it was going there just to support, so that was starting to worry his mother, and then he decided to become a fighter, and his motherâoh, God, it went from bad to worse. And then she heard about the chemical gas Russians used against mujahideen, and her son was affected. Since then, she was [watching] TV, waiting for bad news.
It was not an accident that bin Laden's split from Abdullah Azzam began around the time of his first meeting with the Egyptian jihadist Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 1986. For bin Laden, the slightly older, cerebral Zawahiri (a surgeon by training) must have presented an intriguing figure. Zawahiri had first joined a jihadist group at 15 and had recently served three years in Egypt's notorious prisons for his jihadist activities. For Zawahiri, bin Laden was on his way to becoming a genuine war hero, and his deep pockets were well known. In 1987, Zawahiri set up his own jihad group, which was soon supported by bin Laden.
On May 29, 1988, Salem, Osama's brother, crashed a plane in San Antonio, Texas, and died on impact. Although Salem did not see much of Osama, because Salem was running the family business and was far more fun-loving and Westernized than his austere younger half-brother, his death was a blow to Osama.
Alia Ghanem, Osama bin Laden's mother: His older brother Salem was like a father to him after the death of their father, Muhammad. Salem's death saddened Osama a great deal.
A bin Laden relative: If Salem had still been around, no one would be writing books about Osama bin Laden. Salem had a volcanic temper and had no problem about rocking the boat. He would have personally flown to Sudan [where Osama lived in the mid-90s]. Salem would have grabbed Osama by the lapels and taken him back to Saudi Arabia.
II. AL-QAEDA Three months after the death of Salem, bin Laden took what would turn out to be a momentous step: secretly founding his own jihadist group, al-Qaeda, in clear opposition to his mentor Abdullah Azzam. Azzam advocated a traditional, fundamentalist interpretation of the nature of jihad: the reclamation of once Muslim lands from non-Muslim rule in places such as Palestine, what was then the Soviet Union, and even southern Spain, which had been under Muslim rule five centuries earlier.
The predominantly Egyptian militants who surrounded bin Laden at the end of the 80s advocated something more radical: the violent overthrow of governments across the Muslim world they deemed "apostate," a concept of jihad that Azzam and many of his followers rejected, as they wanted no part in conflicts between Muslims. The split between Azzam and bin Laden may have even cost Azzam his life; he was assassinated by unknown assailants in November 1989, a year after the founding of al-Qaeda.
In some circles it has become fashionable to suggest that bin Laden has not been especially significant to the global jihadist movement, or that al-Qaeda has always been only a loose-knit collection of like-minded Islamist militant groups, or even that al-Qaeda was a fabrication of U.S. law enforcement. The fullest exposition of this point of view was made in 2004 in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, written and produced by Adam Curtis, which argued that "beyond his small group bin Laden had no formal organization, until the Americans invented one for him."
Curtis asserts that al-Qaeda was "invented" during the Manhattan trial of four men accused in the bombings of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998. The star witness was former bin Laden aide Jamal al-Fadl. Curtis says, "The picture al-Fadl drew for the Americans of bin Laden was of an all-powerful figure at the head of a large terrorist network that had an organized network of control. He also said that bin Laden had given this network a name, al-Qaeda.⊠But there was no organization. These were militants who mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden for funding and assistance. He was not their commander. There is also no evidence that bin Laden used the term 'al-Qaeda' to refer to the name of a group until after 11th September, when he realized that this was the term the Americans had given it."
All of these assertions are nonsense. There is overwhelming evidence that al-Qaeda was founded in 1988 by bin Laden and a group of a dozen or so other militants, and that the group would eventually become the global organization that implemented the 9/11 attacks. Below is a document discovered by Bosnian authorities in a 2002 raid on the offices of an Islamic charity. Extraordinarily, these are the founding minutes of al-Qaeda, from a meeting that took place over the course of one weekend in August 1988.
Document labeled "Tareekh Osama [Osama's History]/54/127â127a": The brothers mentioned attended the Sheikh [bin Laden's] house. Most of the discussion was about choosing an Advisory Council. The meeting was held for two days in a row and the Advisory Council [met] on Friday, with the following brothers. [A list of nine names follows, headed by those of Osama bin Laden and Abu Ubaidah Al Banjshiri, al-Qaeda's military commander.]
The Sheikh decided to engage the Council in making a change. The meeting stayed from sunset until two at night. And on Saturday morning, 8/20/1988, the aforementioned brothers came and started the meeting, and the military work was suggested to be divided in two parts, according to duration:
âLimited duration: They will go to Sada Camp [on the Afghan-Pakistani border], then get trained and distributed on Afghan fronts, under supervision of the military council.
âOpen[-ended] duration: They enter a testing camp and the best brothers of them are chosen to enter Al-Qaeda Al Askariya (the Military Base).
Al-Qaeda is basically an organized Islamic faction; its goal will be to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious.
Requirements to enter Al-Qaeda:
âMembers of open duration [meaning open-ended commitment].
âListening and obedient.
âGood manners.
âReferred from a trusted side.
âObeying statutes and instructions of Al-Qaeda.
The pledge [to join al-Qaeda]:
The pledge of God and his covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for his superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.
Work of Al-Qaeda commenced on September 10 1988, with a group of 15 brothers.
Just over 13 years after its founding, al-Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks.
III. BIN LADEN AND SADDAM HUSSEIN
Osama bin Laden in 1999: A year before Hussein entered Kuwait, I said many times in my speeches at the mosques, warning that Saddam will enter the Gulf. No one believed me. I distributed many tapes in Saudi Arabia. It was after it happened that they started believing me and believed my analysis of the situation.
Khaled Batarfi recalls talking to bin Laden on the subject: Last time I saw [Osama] was 1990, six months before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It was in Mecca, in a friend's house, where a group of intellectuals meet every Friday. And he came and talked about jihad in Afghanistan and told us then that he'd speak to us about Saddam. He said, "We should train our people, our young, and increase our army and prepare for the day when eventually we are attacked. This guy [Saddam] can never be trusted." He doesn't believe [Saddam is] a Muslim. So he never liked him or trusted him.
Abu Jandal, from an interview with Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, 2004: [Bin Laden] called on the Saudi government to allow for the recruitment of youths in order to defeat the Iraqi invasion. His intentions were geared toward ending the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and rescuing the Iraqi people from the domination of the Ba'th Party [Saddam Hussein's nationalist-socialist organization]. Sheikh Osama bin Laden was dreaming of this. He said he was ready to prepare more than 100,000 fighters in three months. He used to say: "I have more than 40,000 mujahideen in Saudi Arabia alone." These were trained in Afghanistan.
According to bin Laden, he proposed this to a senior official in the Saudi government. He told him, "We are ready to get the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait." But the state policy had already been decided and U.S. forces had to be called in to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait.
Prince Turki, former head of Saudi intelligence and current ambassador to the United States, told the Arab News in 2001: [Bin Laden] believed that he was capable of preparing an army to challenge Saddam's forces. He opposed the Kingdom's decision to call friendly forces [500,000 U.S. military personnel]. By doing so, he disobeyed the ruler and violated the fatwa of senior Islamic scholars, who had endorsed the plan as an essential move to fight [Saddam's] aggression.
I saw radical changes in his personality as he changed from a calm, peaceful, and gentle man interested in helping Muslims into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance.
Abdel Bari Atwan, the Palestinian editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, interviewed bin Laden in 1996: The Palestine Liberation Organization used to be considered an atheist organization by Osama bin Laden because they sided with the Soviet Union. He considers [the late P.L.O. leader Yasser] Arafat a traitor. And a secularist. He hated his guts. He also didn't like Saddam Hussein. And he still considered Saddam Hussein as a man who is a secular, but he didn't actually insult Saddam Hussein the way he insulted Yasser Arafat. He didn't like him, and he told me he wanted to kick him out of Iraq, as he considered the Ba'th regime to be an atheist regime. He considered Saddam Hussein an atheist, and he hates an atheist.
Hamid Mir, bin Laden's Pakistani biographer, spoke to him in 1997: He condemned Saddam Hussein in my interview. He gave such kind of abuses that it was very difficult for me to write, [calling Hussein a] socialist motherfucker. [He said], "The land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother." He also explained that Saddam Hussein is against us, and he discourages Iraqi boys to come to Afghanistan.
In February 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, bin Laden released an audiotape in which he said, "Needless to say, this crusade war is primarily targeted against the people of Islam. Regardless of the removal or the survival of the socialist [Ba'th] party or Saddam, Muslims in general and the Iraqis in particular must brace themselves for jihad." Bin Laden went on to observe that "socialists are infidels," implying that Saddam was an apostate from Islam, the gravest charge bin Laden could make against a fellow Muslim.
IV. JIHAD In the years after bin Laden left Afghanistan, after having helped to drive out the Russians, an armed fundamentalist movement, the Taliban, meaning "religious students," gradually took over the country. The Taliban emerged in Kandahar in 1994 under the leadership of an enigmatic, reclusive leader, the one-eyed Mullah Omar. The Taliban enjoyed quite a high degree of popularity and legitimacy in their earlier years as they brought order and a measure of peace to a country that had suffered through a decade and a half of civil war. The Taliban were, at least initially, also seen as incorruptible and little interested in assuming power for themselves.
During the early 1990s, bin Laden was based in Sudan. Coming under increasing pressure from the U.S. and Saudi governments, the Sudanese finally expelled him in 1996. Bin Laden chose to return to Afghanistan, the scene of his earlier battlefield exploits. The fact that the Taliban were consolidating their hold on Afghanistan just as bin Laden re-based himself there was a fortunate coincidence, which he would exploit masterfully. He entered into a powerful symbiotic relationship with Mullah Omar: al-Qaeda provided the Taliban with some much-needed cash and zealous Arab fighters, while the Taliban provided bin Laden with a sure refuge and carte blanche to build up al-Qaeda's training camps.
Abdel Bari Atwan met bin Laden in November 1996, six months after bin Laden had settled in Afghanistan: I was taken with different people to Tora Bora, the mountain overlooking Jalalabad. There was snow at that time. It was very coldâfreezing. And then to the favorite cave of Osama bin Laden. And actually it was a very simple cave, and he was waiting. Then we had dinner. Dinner was really awful. There were about 12 people in that cave. The dinner was rotten cheese, this Egyptian cheese. It's salty cheeseâreally very bad. And then there were potatoes soaked in cottonseed oil. And also there were about five or six fried eggs, and bread, which was really caked with sand. So I think this is their typical food. They eat very little. It's bin Laden who actually loves to live such a harsh life with his followers.
We didn't talk about his personal life. We never talked about his wives or something like that, because it is a taboo. He took me on a tourist tour in Tora Bora. We walked for about two hours together. We left the cave about eight o'clock in the morning. It was freezing. And so we went around, and the sun started and it was really beautiful, and he showed me the houses of some of his people, their mud-brick houses there above the snow. They were trying to have their own community, grow their foods, and they are marrying each other. It's like an oasis in Afghanistan. He was in perfect health. He never complained about how high it was in the mountains and it was freezing. He had dry mouth most of the time. I noted that he drinks a lot of water and tea.
He told me how he hated Americans, and he wanted to defeat them even in his agriculture project. So he was actually the happiest man on earth when he managed to produce a sunflower which is a record in its size, much bigger than the American sunflower. He said, "Even I defeated them in agriculture."
Abu Jandal: Sheikh Osama gave me a pistol and made me his personal bodyguard. The pistol had only two bullets, for me to kill Sheikh Osama with in case we were surrounded or he was about to fall into the enemy's hands, so that he would not be caught alive. I was the only member of his bodyguard who was given this authority, and I was to use this pistol. I took care to keep the two bullets in good condition and cleaned them every night, while telling myself, "These are Sheikh Osama's bullets. I pray to God not to let me use them."
On May 26, 1998, bin Laden held a press conference to announce that he had "formed with many other Islamic groups and organizations in the Islamic world a front called the International Islamic Front to do jihad against the Crusaders and Jews." Also present were the sons of Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, "the Blind Sheikh," who is jailed in the United States on terrorism charges. At the press conference, Sheikh Rahman's sons distributed small cards containing their father's "will," which was in the form of a fatwa to attack civilian targets in the United States. The fatwa exhorts Rahman's Egyptian followers, several of whom are al-Qaeda leaders, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, to "bring down [U.S.] airplanes, burn their corporations, sink their ships."
The significance of Sheikh Rahman's will to al-Qaeda has hitherto not received sufficient attention. This will/fatwa seems to be the first time that a Muslim cleric had given his religious sanction to attacks on U.S. aviation, shipping, and economic targets. It would turn out to be a ticking time bomb which exploded on October 12, 2000âwhen a suicide attack blew a hole the size of a small house in the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailorsâand again, with even greater ferocity, on 9/11.
Sulayman Abu Ghaith, al-Qaeda's spokesman, recalling 9/11: I was sitting with the sheikh [bin Laden] in a room. Then I left to go to another room, where there was a TV set. The TV broadcasted the big event. The scene was showing an Egyptian family sitting in their living roomâthey exploded with joy. There was a subtitle that read, "In revenge for the children of Al Aksa [the Palestinians], Osama bin Laden executes an operation against America." So I went back to the sheikh, who was sitting in a room with 50 or 60 people. I tried to tell him about what I saw, but he made a gesture with his hands, meaning, "I know, I know."
Bin Laden on a videotape that appeared as the U.S. bombing campaign against the Taliban began, on October 7, 2001. It was the first time he had been seen since 9/11: There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America tastes now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation [the Islamic world] has tasted this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years.
Hamid Mir: [Bin Laden] watches TVâCNN, BBC. I have seen with my own eyes Osama bin Laden watching CNN. I'll tell you a very interesting thing. When I met him after 9/11, he said, "I was watching you on the Larry King show a few days ago, and you told Larry King that when Osama bin Laden talks on religion he is not convincing, but when he talks on politics he is very much convincing, so today I will convince you on some religious issues." So I said, "O.K., you watched the Larry King show?" He said, "Yes, I am fighting a big war, and I have to monitor the activities of my enemy through these TV channels."
I met three [of his] sons. Muhammad, Ali, Saad, [who] is in Iran [now]. [Saad was] 16. I had a picture with Saad sitting with his father, and a gun is lying in his lap, and I asked bin Laden, "He is a young boy. Why is he carrying a gun?" And he said that this is his own decision. So I asked a question to Saad: "Are you following the footsteps of your father?" And he answered very confidently, "No. I am following the footsteps of my Prophet."
[Bin Laden] told me that "I became father of a girl after 9/11, and I gave her the name of Safia." I said, "Why Safia?" And he said, "I gave her the name of Safia, who killed a Jew spy in the days of Holy Prophet Muhammad, so that's why." I said, "What is the age of your daughter?" He said, "Just one month. She will kill enemies of Islam like Safia of the Prophet's time." So you are visualizing a one-month-old girl as Safia, who should kill lots of Jews. This is the mind-set.
V. TORA BORA The question of whether the United States missed an opportunity to capture or kill bin Laden during the battle of Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan, in December 2001, became an issue in the razor-close 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. During the September 30, 2004, presidential debate, the Democratic contender, Senator John Kerry, said, "He escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora. We had him surrounded." Writing in The New York Times a little more than two weeks later, General Tommy Franks, a Bush supporter and the overall commander of the Tora Bora operation, wrote, "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora." At a town-hall meeting in Ohio around the same time, Vice President Cheney said Kerry's critique of the Tora Bora campaign was "absolute garbage." President Bush himself weighed in on the question of bin Laden's Tora Bora presence, or lack thereof, at a campaign rally a week before the election, saying: "[It's part of Kerry's] pattern of saying anything it takes to get elected. Like when he charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said, 'The senator's understanding of events does not square with reality,' and intelligence reports place bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time."
However, according to a widely reported background briefing by Pentagon officials in mid-December 2001, there was "reasonable certainty" that bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora, a judgment based on intercepted radio transmissions. General Franks himself recounted in his autobiography, American Soldier, that in December 2001 he briefed President Bush, saying, "Unconfirmed reports have it that Osama has been seen in the White Mountains, Sir. The Tora Bora area." In June 2003, I met with several senior U.S. counterterrorism officials, who explained, "We are confident that [bin Laden] was at Tora Bora and disappeared with a small group." The following accounts further establish that bin Laden was at Tora Bora.
Abu Jaafar al-Kuwaiti, an eyewitness, in an account posted to al-Qaeda's main Web site in 2002: November 14, 2001. Mujahid Sheikh Osama bin Laden and his special group arrived to the area 9,000 feet above sea level in the Tora Bora mountains with its extreme terrain and cold weather. We were with him. This position had more than 15 trenches to protect the mujahideen from the insane American strikes that started five days before. The trenches were built by our hands and effort and by our brothers, the Afghan mujahideen. Then we witnessed the increase in flights of [U.S. Predator drones] that did not leave the area night or day.
[On December 9], at a late hour of the night, we were awakened to the sound of massive and terrorizing explosions very near to us. It was the place where the trench of Sheikh Osama bin Laden was. The night was very long and very worrisome [as we waited] for what the morning would bring [to] see what this barbaric raid had done.
[In the morning] we received the horrifying news! The trench of Sheikh Osama had been destroyed; the trench where Sheikh used to come out every day to check the mujahideen situation and follow the news of the battle. [But] God kept Osama bin Laden alive, because he left the bunker only two nights [before] to an area only 200 meters away.
Abdellah Tabarak, bin Laden's Moroccan bodyguard: Following the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, I left Kandahar in the company of bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a number of guards. During the month of Ramadan in the same year, we entered Tora Bora, where we stayed for 20 days. From there Ayman al-Zawahiri fled, accompanied by Uthman, the son of Osama bin Laden. Afterwards, bin Laden fled with his son Muhammad, accompanied by Afghan guards, while I fled with a group made up mainly of Yemenis and Saudis in the direction of Pakistan. We were arrested by the Pakistani authorities at a border checkpoint, and they handed us over to the U.S. authorities, who deported us to the Guantánamo detention camp, in Cuba.
Osama bin Laden on an audiotape that aired on Al Jazeera on February 11, 2003: Now, I am going to tell you a part of that great battle [of Tora Bora] so that I [will] prove to you how cowardly [the Americans] are. We were only 300 fighters. We had already dug 100 trenches, spread out in a space that didn't exceed one square mile. On the morning of the 17th of Ramadan [December 3, 2001], very heavy bombing started, especially after the American leadership made sure that some of the leadership of al-Qaeda were in Tora Bora, including myself and the mujahid brother Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. The bombing became around the clock. Not a second would pass without a fighter plane passing over our heads day and night. American forces were bombing us by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate caves.
[That was] in addition to the forces [of the Northern Alliance], whom they pushed to attack us for a continuous month. We fought back against all their attacks. And we defeated them every time. In spite of all that, American forces did not dare to go into our posts. What sign is more than that for their cowardice? With all its forces that were fighting against a small group of 300 mujahideen in the trenches, inside one square mile, in minus 10 degrees of temperature. The result of the battle was that we lost 6 percent of our force [18 men].
Abdel Bari Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden at Tora Bora in 1996: I wasn't surprised [that Osama was in Tora Bora in 2001]. I expected him to be there. I was in the Gulf region, and I met somebody from al-Qaeda, and he told me that Osama bin Laden was injured during the Tora Bora bombing, and he was operated on his left shoulder. And then when I saw his first videotape, immediately after Tora Bora, I said something is wrong with his left shoulder. His left shoulder was very stiff, and he couldn't move his left hand. And many people from al-Qaeda actually were extremely furious I said that [publicly], because they don't want him to be reported as injured.
Why did the U.S. military not seal off the Tora Bora region, instead relying only on a handful of Special Forces on the ground? Part of the answer is that the U.S. military was a victim of its own success. Scores of Special Forces calling in air strikes, in combination with thousands of Afghans on the ground, destroyed the Taliban army in a few weeks of fighting. However, this approach was a failure at Tora Bora, where large numbers of Americans on the ground were needed to throw up an effective cordon around al-Qaeda's leaders. Apologists for the U.S. military failure at Tora Bora will no doubt provide some compelling reasons why this was the case, including a lack of airlift capabilities from the former U.S. air base known as K2, in neighboring Uzbekistan. However, such explanations are hard to square with the fact that scores of journalists managed to find their way to Tora Bora, a battle covered on live television by the world's leading news organizations. Sadly, there were more American journalists on the ground at the battle of Tora Bora than there were U.S. soldiers. The battle was a missed opportunity to bring bin Laden to justice.
And where is he today? The short answer is that no one really knows. Most analysts believe that he is somewhere in Pakistan, possibly in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. Almost all of the key al-Qaeda leaders who have been captured since 9/11 have been found in Pakistan. However, judging from his most recent videotape appearance, it seems unlikely that al-Qaeda's leader has spent four years cowering in a cave. On the tape he appears healthy, rested, well informed, and well dressed. Wherever he may be, the hunt for bin Laden, for now, has hit a brick wall.
VI. THE IRAQ WAR
Bin Laden reveled in American reverses in Iraq in a "Message to the Iraqi People," on a tape released by Al Jazeera on October 18, 2003: Thank you for your jihad, and may God help you. Be glad of the good news: America is mired in the swamps of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush is easy prey. Here he is now in an embarrassing situation, and here is America today being ruined before the eyes of the whole world. O youth of Islam everywhere, especially in [Iraq's] neighboring countries, jihad is your duty and rightness is your path.
The centerpiece of the Bush administration's brief for going to war in Iraq was Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003. In it Powell tried to make the case for an emerging alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in the person of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants.
Sayf Adel, al-Qaeda's military commander, describing how Zarqawi left Iran for Iraq in 2002 as the United States was gearing up for the invasion of Iraq: Abu Musab [Zarqawi] and his Jordanian and Palestinian comrades opted to go to Iraq. Their skin color and Jordanian dialect would enable them to integrate into the Iraqi society easily. Our expectations of the situation indicated that the Americans would inevitably make a mistake and invade Iraq sooner or later. Such an invasion would aim at overthrowing the regime. Therefore, we should play an important role in the Resistance.
Contrary to what the Americans frequently reiterated, al-Qaeda did not have any relationship with Saddam Hussein or his regime. We had to draw up a plan to enter Iraq through the North, which was not under the control of [Saddam's] regime. We would then spread south to the areas of our fraternal Sunni brothers. The fraternal brothers of the Ansar al-Islam [a Kurdish jihadist group based in northern Iraq] expressed their willingness to offer assistance to help us achieve this goal. The goal was to go to Sunni areas in central Iraq and begin to prepare for confrontations to face the U.S. invasion and defeat the Americans.
In early 2004, U.S. intelligence intercepted a letter from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to bin Laden in which Zarqawi proposes a strategy for carrying forward the jihad. He suggests unleashing a civil war between Sunnis and Shia, something bin Laden historically rejected because he hoped to restore a unified caliphate, and also because senior al-Qaeda leaders are living under some form of arrest in largely Shia Iran: You [Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri], gracious brothers, are the leaders, guides, and symbolic figures of jihad and battle. We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you, and we have never striven to achieve glory for ourselves. All that we hope is that we will be the spearhead, the enabling vanguard, and the bridge on which the [Islamic] nation crosses over to the victory that is promised and the tomorrow to which we aspire. This is our vision. If you are convinced of the idea of fighting the sects of apostasy [the Shia], we will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders, and indeed swearing fealty to you publicly and in the news media. If things appear otherwise to you, we are brothers, and the disagreement will not spoil [our] friendship. Awaiting your response, may God preserve you.
Hutaifa Azzam has known both bin Laden and Zarqawi for more than 15 years: [Zarqawi had] no relations with Osama until he left to Iraq. His relation with Osama started one year [ago, in 2004], through the Internet.
An unlikely supporter of this view is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who told a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on October 4, 2004: In the case of al-Qaeda, mostâmy impression is, most of the senior people have actually sworn an oath to Osama bin Laden, and even, to my knowledge, even as of this late date, I don't believe Zarqawi, the principal leader of the network in Iraq, has sworn an oath.
Thirteen days later, Zarqawi issued an online statement in the name of his Tawhid group, pledging allegiance to bin Laden. Zarqawi adopted a new name for his group: al-Qaeda in Iraq. And so, nearly two years after Bush officials had first argued that Zarqawi was part of al-Qaeda, the Jordanian terrorist finally got around to swearing allegiance to bin Laden: [Let it be known that] al-Tawhid pledges both its leaders and its soldiers to the mujahid commander, Sheikh Osama bin Laden (in word and in deed) and to jihad for the sake of God until there is no more discord [among the ranks of Islam] and all of the religion turns toward God.
By God, O sheikh of the mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey. If you forbade us something, we would abide by your wishes. For what a fine commander you are to the armies of Islam, against the inveterate infidels and apostates!
Zarqawi's total commitment to al-Qaeda was proved this past November when suicide bombers dispatched by him attacked three hotels frequented by Americans in Amman, killing 57 people, most of them Jordanians. A fourth bomber, a woman, who failed to detonate the explosives strapped to her and who was later apprehended, turned out to be the sister of Zarqawi's senior aide Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, who had been killed in Iraq in 2004 by American forces.
VII. BIN LADEN'S LEGACYBin Laden has increasingly positioned himself as the elder statesman of jihad, the big-picture guy who directs overall political strategy. That new role was amply demonstrated by a bin Laden videotape that aired on Al Jazeera and other TV networks on October 29, 2004, four days before the U.S. presidential election. In a Halloween parody of an Oval Office address, bin Laden spoke directly to the American people from behind a desk, dressed formally in gold robes, without a gun at his sideâa rare sight. For the first time he made an unequivocal public admission of his own involvement in the 9/11 plot, and he responded directly to the Bush administration's frequent claim that al-Qaeda is attacking the United States because of its freedoms rather than its foreign policies: You the American people, I talk to you today about the best way to avoid another catastrophe and about war, its reasons and its consequences. And in that regard, I say to you that security is an important pillar of human life, and that free people do not compromise their security. Contrary to what Bush says and claims, that we hate [your] freedom. [So] why did we not attack Sweden? I wonder about you. Although we are [now in] the fourth year after 9/11, Bush is still exercising confusion and misleading you and not telling you the true reason [why you are being attacked]. Therefore, the motivations are still there for what happened to be repeated.
We agreed with the leader of the [9/11 hijackers], Mohammed Atta, to perform all the attacks within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration were aware of what was going on.
Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.
Abdel Bari Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden in 1996: There will be different evaluations of Osama bin Laden. Some people will consider him a heroic phenomenon, a mighty little David who challenged the might of Goliath. Other people will say he was disastrous. September 11 managed to actually drag the Americans into the region and occupy Iraq.
I believe Osama bin Laden is the one who actually opened the American eyes to their mistake to support rotten, corrupt dictatorships [in the Arab world]. Before, they were happy to deal with these rotten dictatorships. They were happy to keep the region as it is. But after September 11 the Americans awakened to the fact that they are siding with these regimes which create huge frustration and radicalism and are actually fueling Islamic fundamentalism against the West.
Noman Benotman, who fought alongside al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the early 90s: Bin Laden now is driven by his tactics, not strategyâthe tactics have taken over the strategy. It's always about just kill, shoot, destroy, bomb, in Afghanistan, in Iraq; now it's in America, in Europe. You can't talk to these people. It's killing, shooting, sacrificing. My point of view is bin Laden himself and his group will achieve nothing. They will fail to achieve what they are asking for, and bin Laden, his credibility, it's decreasing, not increasing. What has been increasing is this kind of new tacticâthe suicide attacks.
Jamal Ismail: If bin Laden is killed, there is no charismatic personality to be like him among jihadi leaders. Ayman al-Zawahiri is an intellectual, and he has many opponents, before and after he joined al-Qaeda. His leadership is challenged by other jihadis from Egypt, but no one can challenge bin Laden's leadership, even if he differs with him on some issues. I believe all the jihadi organizations respect bin Laden more than any other leader.
Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of Pakistan's leading journalists, interviewed bin Laden twice in the late 1990s: Bin Laden sees himself as a man who would sacrifice his life for his beliefs. He would like to go down fighting; he would like to become a martyr. He won't surrender. I believe that he will be a much more popular man for many Muslims once he becomes a martyr, because Mr. bin Laden as a dead man would be even more potent than when he is alive.
Abu Jandal, bin Laden's former bodyguard: In the case of his death, I think he will be a symbol for all those who follow him, especially in the case of his assassination. He will be an idol for all those who believe in his ideas. He will be a great inspiration for them to follow in his footsteps. His death will be a great force for stirring up everybody's emotions and enthusiasm to follow him on the path of martyrdom.
In case of his arrest, the situation might be a bit different. It might lead to a strong psychological defeat for the group's members and many Muslims.
Khalid Khawaja, who fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan: He will never be captured. He's not Saddam Hussein. He's Osama. Osama loves death. Bin Laden has played his role. Osama has woken up the sleeping bin Ladens.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
01/01/2006 14:45 ||
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#1
So he was actually the happiest man on earth when he managed to produce a sunflower which is a record in its size, much bigger than the American sunflower. He said, "Even I defeated them in agriculture."
Don't let Kimmie hear that - he'll have to one-up Osama.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
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