The Fight Against Terrorism

[lofter1]

Press secretary to the president of Pakistan
tells ABC Osama bin Laden will not be captured
if he agrees to live 'peaceful life'

rawstory.com (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Press_secretary_to_president_of_Pakistan_0905.html )
Ron Brynaert
September 5, 2006

Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan, press secretary to the president of Pakistan, tells ABC News that -- if found -- Osama bin Laden won't be arrested, as long as he promises to behave like a "peaceful citizen."

"If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden 'would not be taken into custody,' Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, 'as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen," report Brian Ross and Gretchen Peters at ABC's blog, The Blotter (http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/09/bin_laden_gets_.html).

"No, as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen, one would not be taken into custody," said Khan. "One has to stay like a peaceful citizen and not allowed to participate in any kind of terrorist activity."

"The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a 'peace deal' with the Taliban," reports ABC.

Pakistan will also be returning many Taliban prisoners and seized weapons.

According to VOA (http://www.redbolivia.com/noticias/News%20in%20English/25668.html), "security experts say Afghan insurgents and remnants of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network have managed to establish several bases in the region."

Earlier today, President Bush cited Pakistan's help in working together "to stop the world's most dangerous men from getting their hands on the world's most dangerous weapons," in a speech on the global war on terror he gave in Washington, D.C. to the Military Officers Association of America.

"Working with Great Britain and Pakistan and other nations, the United States shut down the world's most dangerous nuclear trading cartel, the AQ Khan network," Bush had said (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060905-4.html). "This network had supplied Iran and Libya and North Korea with equipment and know-how that advanced their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons."

The president also said that "we're working with friends and allies to deny the terrorists the enclaves they seek to establish in ungoverned areas across the world."

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, famously known as the "father of Pakistan's nuclear program," was dismissed from his position as Science Adviser to President Musharraf in January of 2004 but was never arrested. A month later, after apologizing to the nation on television, Musharraf pardoned A.Q. Khan.

Reports of al Qaeda in Pakistan

It has recently been reported that al Qaeda's production company, As Sahab, is based in Pakistan.

"Five years after 9/11, Pakistan appears to have replaced Afghanistan as the group's center of gravity," reported CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/09/05/tracking.terror/). "Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are widely believed to be in the more remote parts of this country."

"Waziristan is one of the places where bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are thought to have hidden out and where As Sahab produces its work," wrote Henry Schuster for CNN.

Two-and-a-half years ago, after reports surfaced that al-Zawahiri had been "captured or killed" in Pakistan, Shaukat Sultan Khan, then spokesman for the Army, said that nobody could "be confident" about such news.

"It can't be said with certainty who is here and who is not here," said Shaukat Sultan Khan in March of 2004 (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/22/ltm.05.html).

ABC'S Report

"In effect, the Pakistani government said today as long as bin Laden and the Taliban promise to behave they can stay in Pakistan and will not be taken into custody," reported Brian Ross on ABC's broadcast Tuesday evening.

ABC noted that the deal with Taliban militants "comes just six months after President Bush said Pakistani President Musharraf was committed to victory against terrorists."

"Mr. President and I reaffirmed our shared commitment to a broad and lasting strategic partnership," Bush had said in a joint press conference (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/03/20060304-2.html) with Musharraf held during his March visit to Pakistan. "And that partnership begins with close cooperation in the war on terror."

In that press conference, a reporter asked the president if the United States was "getting the access and the help that it needs to go after al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."

"The best way to defeat al Qaeda is to find -- is to share good intelligence to locate them, and then to be prepared to bring them to justice," Bush had said.

News that Pakistan will "in effect" leave Osama bin Laden alone if he behaves "peacefully" in the region is certain to cause a stir less than a week before the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Democrats, as well as many Republicans, may characterize Pakistan's stance as going against President Bush's 2001 declaration that nations which harbor terrorists should be considered "hostile."

"Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make," Bush told the world (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html) on September 20, 2001. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

"From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime," Bush had declared.

After Bush's speech today, Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, accused the president of losing "focus" on the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

"Because President Bush lost focus on the killers who attacked us and instead launched a disastrous war in Iraq, today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen still find sanctuary in the no man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they still plot attacks against America," said Kerry (http://apnews.myway.com//article/20060905/D8JV0N9G0.html).

[lofter1]

It seems that the "opposition" is using the 5th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to bolster their image in the eyes of their sympathizers (and simultaneously sticking their finger in the eyes of their foes) ...

Al-Jazeera broadcasts Al-Qaeda video
preparing 9/11 attacks

www.breitbart.com (http://www.breitbart.com)
Sep 07, 2006

The Arab television channel Al-Jazeera broadcast a video which it said showed Osama bin Laden (http://search.breitbart.com/q?s=%22Osama+bin+Laden%22&sid=breitbart.com) and suicide candidates of Al-Qaeda preparing the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States.

Al-Jazeera had said earlier it would broadcast "a video that included scenes showing for the first time Al-Qaeda leaders preparing the September 11 attacks and practicing for their execution."

http://www.breitbart.com/images/2006/8/7/060907192013.3btecvzo/SGE.LFT81.070906191930.photo00.quicklook.default-186x245.jpg

The video showed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and two of the 19 Islamist militants that took part in the attacks, Saudi nationals Hamza el-Ramdi and Wael el-Shemari.

They spoke of the situation faced by Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya.
Fifteen of the 19 attackers on September 11 were Saudis, and Al-Jazeera said it had only aired a few minutes of a document which it said lasted about an hour and a half.

The footage also showed hand-to-hand combat practice between people who wore masks over their heads.

The television station also broadcast a recording attributed to the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (http://search.breitbart.com/q?s=%22Al-Qaeda+in+Iraq%22&sid=breitbart.com), Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, in which he said he was sure of victory against US-led forces in the country.

The recording was posted on an Islamist Internet site as well, but its authenticity could not be immediately established.

In the Internet statement, Muhajer also urged Sunni Muslims (http://search.breitbart.com/q?s=%22Sunni+Muslims%22&sid=breitbart.com) to kill at least one US citizen within the next two weeks.

"Oh followers of (Taliban leader) Mullah Mohammed Omar (http://search.breitbart.com/q?s=%22Mullah+Mohammed+Omar%22&sid=breitbart.com), oh sons of (Al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden, oh disciples of (slain Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader) Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi ... I urge each of you to kill at least one American within a period not exceeding 15 days," Muhajer said.

The two broadcasts came four days before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Muhajer added: "I do not doubt for an instant victory" against US-led forces in Iraq, calling President George W. Bush a "liar" and a "dog."

"Do not be proud of the number and the equipment" (of your army), Muhajer said.

"The was has just begun." Muhajer had already issued a public statement in June, a few days after his predecessor Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was killed in a US air strike in Iraq.

©2006 BREITBART.COM, LLC.

[lofter1]

10 Ways to Avoid the Next 9/11

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/09/opinion/10precede_190.jpg

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10precede.html)
Op-Ed Contributors
September 10, 2006

If we are fortunate, we will open our newspapers this morning knowing that there have been no major terrorist attacks on American soil in nearly five years. Did we just get lucky?

The Op-Ed page asked 10 people with experience in security and counterterrorism to answer the following question: What is one major reason the United States has not suffered a major attack since 2001, and what is the one thing you would recommend the nation do in order to avoid attacks in the future?

Giving Muslims Hope (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10kean.html)
By THOMAS H. KEAN and LEE H. HAMILTON

We Can't Kill an Ideology (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10mahle.html)
By MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE

How War Can Bring Peace (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10goldsmith.html)
By JACK L. GOLDSMITH and ADRIAN VERMEULE

Walking the Terror Beat (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10sheehan.html)
By MICHAEL A. SHEEHAN

The President's Plan (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10townsend.html)
By FRANCES FRAGOS TOWNSEND

Don't Forget Our Values (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10fisher.html)
By JOSCHKA FISCHER

What Really Scares Us (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10gibson.html)
By WILLIAM GIBSON

Less Political Correctness (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10ron.html)
By RAFI RON

Qaeda Set the Bar High (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10ervin.html)
By CLARK KENT ERVIN

Keep American Muslims on Our Side (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10stern.html)
By JESSICA STERN


Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

[Edward]

New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060911fa_fact3


THE MASTER PLAN
by LAWRENCE WRIGHT
For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning.
Issue of 2006-09-11
Posted 2006-09-04

Even as members of Al Qaeda watched in exultation while the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon burned on September 11, 2001, they realized that the pendulum of catastrophe was swinging in their direction. Osama bin Laden later boasted that he was the only one in the group’s upper hierarchy who had anticipated the magnitude of the wound that Al Qaeda inflicted on America, but he also admitted that he was surprised by the towers’ collapse. His goal, for at least five years, had been to goad America into invading Afghanistan, an ambition that had caused him to continually raise the stakes—the simultaneous bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in August, 1998, followed by the attack on an American warship in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, in October, 2000. Neither of those actions had led the United States to send troops to Afghanistan. After the attacks on New York and Washington, however, it was clear that there would be an overwhelming response. Al Qaeda members began sending their families home and preparing for war.

Two months later, the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which had given sanctuary to bin Laden, was routed, and the Al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora were pummelled. Although bin Laden and his chief lieutenants escaped death or capture, nearly eighty per cent of Al Qaeda’s members in Afghanistan were killed. Worse, Al Qaeda’s cause was repudiated throughout the world, even in Muslim countries, where the indiscriminate murder of civilians and the use of suicide operatives were denounced as being contrary to Islam. The remnants of the organization scattered and were on the run. Al Qaeda was essentially dead.

From hiding places in Iran, Yemen, Iraq, and the tribal areas of western Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s survivors lamented their failed strategy. Abu al-Walid al-Masri, a senior leader of Al Qaeda’s inner council, later wrote that Al Qaeda’s experience in Afghanistan was “a tragic example of an Islamic movement managed in an alarmingly meaningless way.” He went on, “Everyone knew that their leader was leading them to the abyss and even leading the entire country to utter destruction, but they continued to carry out his orders faithfully and with bitterness.”

In June, 2002, bin Laden’s son Hamzah posted a message on an Al Qaeda Web site: “Oh, Father! Where is the escape and when will we have a home? Oh, Father! I see spheres of danger everywhere I look. . . . Tell me, Father, something useful about what I see.”

“Oh, son!” bin Laden replied. “Suffice to say that I am full of grief and sighs. . . . I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains.”

In the view of Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian who had been a member of Al Qaeda’s inner council, and who is a theorist of jihad, the greatest loss was not the destruction of the terrorist organization but the downfall of the Taliban, which meant that Al Qaeda no longer had a place to train, organize, and recruit. The expulsion from Afghanistan, Suri later wrote, was followed by “three meager years which we spent as fugitives,” dodging the international dragnet by “moving between safe houses and hideouts.” In 2002, he fled to eastern Iran, where bin Laden’s son Saad and Al Qaeda’s security chief, Saif al-Adl, had also taken refuge. There was a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. In this moment of exile and defeat, he began to conceive the future of jihad.

Suri was born into a middle-class family in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958, the year of bin Laden’s birth. Red-haired and sturdily built, he has a black belt in judo; his real name is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar. He became involved in politics at the University of Aleppo, where he studied engineering. Later, he moved to Jordan, where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that opposed Syria’s dictator, Hafez al-Assad. In 1982, Assad decided that the Brotherhood posed a threat to his authority, and his troops slaughtered as many as thirty thousand people in the city of Hama, one of the group’s strongholds. The ruthlessness of Assad’s response shocked Suri. He renounced the Brotherhood, which he held responsible for provoking the destruction of Hama, and took refuge in Europe for several years. In 1985, he moved to Spain, where he married and became a Spanish citizen; two years later, he found his way to Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden.

The two men have had a contentious relationship. Although Suri became a member of Al Qaeda’s inner council, he grew disillusioned by the fecklessness and the disorganization that characterized Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan. “People come to us with empty heads and leave us with empty heads,” he wrote. “They have done nothing for Islam. This is because they have not received any ideological or doctrinal training.”

In 1992, he moved back to Spain, where he helped to establish a terrorist cell that played a part in the planning of September 11th. Two years later, Suri moved to England. He soon became a fixture in the Islamist press in London, writing articles for the magazine Al Ansar, which promoted the insurgency in Algeria that resulted in more than a hundred thousand deaths. The magazine’s editor was Abu Qatada, a Palestinian cleric who has been characterized as Al Qaeda’s spiritual guide in Europe. Al Ansar was, in many ways, the first jihadi think tank; Suri and other strategists suggested tactics for undermining the despotic regimes in the Arab world, and they promoted attacks on the West even as American and European intelligence agencies were largely unaware of the threat that the Islamist movement posed.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who is currently the press aide to the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, Prince Turki al-Faisal, met Qatada and Suri in the early nineties. They struck him as far more radical than Osama bin Laden; at the time, Al Qaeda was primarily an anti-Communist organization. “Osama was in the moderate camp,” Khashoggi recalled recently. He coined the phrase “Salafi jihadis” to describe men, such as Abu Qatada and Suri, who had been influenced by Salafism, the puritanical, fundamentalist strain of Islam. “Osama was flirting with these ideas,” Khashoggi said. “He was not the one who originated the radical thinking that came to characterize Al Qaeda. He joined these men, rather than the other way around. His organization became the vehicle for their thinking.”

Suri later wrote about bin Laden’s conversion to his ideas, which took place after bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, in 1996. Salafi jihadis spoke with him about a situation that angered him deeply: the presence of American troops on the holy soil of the Arabian Peninsula. Corrupt Islamic scholars had lent their authority to the Saudi royal family, the jihadis argued, and the royal family, in turn, had given legitimacy to the American incursion. There were two possible solutions: either attack the royal family—which would likely anger the Saudi people—or strike at the American presence. “This would force the Saudi family to defend it, thereby losing its own legitimacy in the eyes of Muslims,” Suri writes. “Bin Laden chose the second option.”

Suri believed that the jihadi movement had nearly been extinguished by the drying up of financial resources, the killing or capture of many terrorist leaders, the loss of safe havens, and the increasing international coöperation among police agencies. (The British authorities were pursuing him as a suspect in the 1995 Paris Métro bombings.) Accordingly, he saw the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, in 1996, as a “golden opportunity,” and he went there the following year. He set up a military camp in Afghanistan, and experimented with chemical weapons. He also arranged bin Laden’s first television interview with CNN. The journalist Peter Bergen, who spent several days in Suri’s company while producing the segment, and who recently published an oral history, “The Osama bin Laden I Know,” recalled, “He was tough and really smart. He seemed like a real intellectual, very conversant with history, and he had an intense seriousness of purpose. He certainly impressed me more than bin Laden.”

In 1999, Suri sent bin Laden an e-mail accusing him of endangering the Taliban regime with his highly theatrical attacks on American targets. And he mocked bin Laden’s love of publicity: “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause.” In his writings, Suri rarely mentioned Al Qaeda and disavowed any direct connection to it, despite having served on its inner council. He preferred to speak more broadly of jihad, which he saw as a social movement, encompassing “all those who bear weapons—individuals, groups, and organizations—and wage jihad on the enemies of Islam.” By 2000, he had begun predicting the end of Al Qaeda, whose preëminence he portrayed as a stage in the development of the worldwide Islamist uprising. “Al Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be,” he writes. “It is a call, a reference, a methodology.” Eventually, its leadership would be eliminated, he said. (Suri himself was captured in Pakistan in November, 2005. American intelligence sources confirmed that Suri is in the custody of another country but refused to disclose his exact location.) In the time that remained to Al Qaeda, he argued, its main goal should be to stimulate other groups around the world to join the jihadi movement. His legacy, as he saw it, was to codify the doctrines that animated Islamist jihad, so that Muslim youths of the future could discover the cause and begin their own, spontaneous religious war.

In 2002, Suri, in his hideout in Iran, began writing his defining work, “Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance,” which is sixteen hundred pages long and was published on the Internet in December, 2004. Didactic and repetitive, but also ruthlessly candid, the book dissects the faults of the jihadi movement and lays out a plan for the future of the struggle. The goal, he writes, is “to bring about the largest number of human and material casualties possible for America and its allies.” He specifically targets Jews, “Westerners in general,” the members of the NATO alliance, Russia, China, atheists, pagans, and hypocrites, as well as “any type of external enemy.” (The proliferation of adversaries mirrors Al Qaeda’s hatred of all other ideologies.)

And yet, at the same time, he bitterly blames Al Qaeda for dragging the entire jihadi movement into an unequal battle that it is likely to lose. Unlike most jihadi theorists, Suri acknowledges the setback caused by September 11th. He laments the demise of the Taliban, which he and other Salafi jihadis considered the modern world’s only true Islamic government. America’s “war on terror,” he complains, doesn’t discriminate between Al Qaeda adherents and Muslims in general. “Many loyal Muslims,” he writes, believe that the September 11th attacks “justified the American assault and have given it a legitimate rationale for reoccupying the Islamic world.” But Suri goes on to argue that America’s plans for international domination were already evident “in the likes of Nixon and Kissinger,” and that this agenda would have been pursued without the provocation of September 11th. Moreover, the American attack on Afghanistan was not really aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden; its true goal was to sweep away the Taliban and eliminate the rule of Islamic law.

In Suri’s view, the underground terrorist movement—that is, Al Qaeda and its sleeper cells—is defunct. This approach was “a failure on all fronts,” because of its inability to achieve military victory or to rally the Muslim people to its cause. He proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms “leaderless resistance”), which will wear down the enemy and prepare the ground for the far more ambitious aim of waging war on “open fronts”—an outright struggle for territory. He explains, “Without confrontation in the field and seizing control of the land, we cannot establish a state, which is the strategic goal of the resistance.”

Suri acknowledges that the “Jewish enemy, led by America and its nonbelieving, apostate, hypocritical allies,” enjoys overwhelming military superiority, but he argues that the spiritual commitment of the jihadis is equally formidable. He questions Al Qaeda’s opposition to democracy, which offers radical Islamists an opportunity to “secretly use this comfortable and relaxed atmosphere to spread out, reorganize their ranks, and acquire broader public bases.” In many Arabic states, there is a predictable cycle of official tolerance and savage repression, which can work in favor of the Islamists. If the Islamists “open the way for political moderation,” Suri writes, they will “stretch out horizontally along the base and spread. So they once again exterminate and jihad grows yet again! So then they try to open things up once again, and Islam stretches out and expands again!”

The Bush Administration has declared a “war of ideas” against Islamism, Suri observes, and has had some success; he cites the modification of textbooks in many Muslim countries. This effort, he writes, must be countered by the propagation of the jihadi creed—and this is what his book attempts to do, offering a minutely detailed account of the tenets of Salafi jihadism. Suri urges his readers to reject their own repressive governments and to rise up against Western occupation and Zionism. Although the leaders of Al Qaeda have long excused the slaughter of innocents, and many of its attacks have been directed at other Muslims, Suri specifically cautions against harming other Muslims, women and children who may be nonbelievers, and other noncombatants.

Suri addresses the issue of Israel, writing that “the Zionist presence in Palestine” is an insult to Muslims; but he also excoriates the secular Palestinian National Authority that governs the country. “Armed jihad is the only solution,” he advises. “Every mujahid must wage jihad against all forms of normalization—its institutions, officials, and advocates . . . destroying them and assassinating those who rely on them . . . while paying attention not to harm Muslims by mistake.”

There are five regions, according to Suri, where jihadis should focus their energies: Afghanistan, Central Asia, Yemen, Morocco, and, especially, Iraq. The American occupation of Iraq, he declares, inaugurated a “historical new period” that almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement just when many of its critics thought it was finished.

The invasion of Iraq posed a dilemma for Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics. Shortly before the invasion, in March, 2003, bin Laden issued his own list of targets, which included Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—not Afghanistan or Iraq. Presumably, he regarded the chances of a Taliban resurgence as remote; moreover, he was aware that an Iraqi insurgency could ignite an Islamic civil war and lead to ethnic cleansing of the Sunni minority.

The American occupation posed a major opportunity, however, for a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A former prisoner and sex offender, he was a Bedouin from Jordan. Neither an intellectual nor a strategist, Zarqawi acted largely on brute impulse, but he was a reckless warrior who gained the respect of the Arab mujahideen when he arrived in Pakistan, in the early nineties. In Peshawar, he met a Palestinian sheikh named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who transformed him from a foot soldier in jihad to a leader who, for a time, rivalled bin Laden.

Maqdisi was already one of the most renowned ideologues of the radical Islamist movement. Incisive, unpredictable, and sharp-tempered, he has a spiritual authority and an originality that make him stand out among jihadi thinkers. His puritanism has led him to denounce many Arab rulers. In “The Evident Sacrileges of the Saudi State,” his widely circulated book, Maqdisi declared a fatwa excommunicating the Saudi royal family—in essence, a license for any Muslim to murder them. (The book influenced the men who bombed a Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh, in 1995, and also those who attacked American troops in Khobar the following year.) “Maqdisi is the most influential jihadi thinker alive,” Will McCants, a fellow at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center, told me.

Maqdisi and Zarqawi formed an immediate bond, an alliance of the man of thought and the man of action. In 1993, they returned to Jordan to start an Islamist group; the following year, both men were picked up by Jordanian authorities, who seized their weapons—grenades and a machine gun—and imprisoned them.

Jordanian prisons were full of radicals and prospective recruits, who were drawn to the cerebral sheikh and his ruthless assistant. Zarqawi soon emerged as the leader of the Islamist group, while Maqdisi continued to be the voice of authority. His decisions were often controversial; for instance, when Hamas began its suicide operations against Israel in 1994, Maqdisi denounced the attacks as un-Islamic—a position that Zarqawi supported at the time.

In March, 1999, Jordan’s new king, Abdullah II, granted amnesty to political prisoners. Zarqawi went to Afghanistan, but his defiant mentor chose to stay in Jordan, where he felt that he was doing productive work. He was soon back in prison.

Unruly and independent, Zarqawi refused to swear fidelity to bin Laden, and established his own camp in western Afghanistan, populated mainly by Jordanians, Syrians, and Palestinians. He was bluntly critical of Al Qaeda’s decision to wage war against America and the West rather than against corrupt Arab dictatorships.

After September 11th, Zarqawi and his followers were flushed out of Afghanistan by the invasion of the coalition forces. He took refuge in Iran and, eventually, in the Kurdish region of Iraq. In April, 2003, after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, he set up a new terror group, al-Tawid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Jihad). Unlike the senior members of Al Qaeda, Zarqawi was obsessed with fighting the Shiites, “the most evil of mankind,” thinking that he would unite the much larger Sunni world into a definitive conquest of what he saw as the great Islamic heresy. That August, shortly after he began his Iraq campaign, he bombed a Shiite mosque, killing a hundred and twenty-five Muslim worshippers, including the most popular Shiite politician in the country, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who, had he lived, would probably have become Iraq’s first freely elected President.

In a letter to bin Laden in January, 2004, which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence, Zarqawi explained that “if we succeed in dragging [the Shia] into the arena of sectarian war it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger.” He said that he would formally pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda if bin Laden endorsed his battle against the Shiites. Bin Laden told Zarqawi to go ahead and “use the Shiite card,” perhaps because his son Saad and other Al Qaeda figures were being held in Iran, and he hoped that Zarqawi would persuade the Iranians to hand them over; he hesitated, however, to formally ally himself with Zarqawi.

Meanwhile, Zarqawi’s operatives had spread into Europe, where they forged documents and smuggled illegal aliens into the continent while gathering recruits for Iraq. One of his lieutenants, Amer el-Azizi, is a suspect in the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid. Like Zarqawi’s organization, the Spanish cell included former prison inmates and operated more like a street gang than like the highly bureaucratic Al Qaeda. Zarqawi and his men were putting into action the vision that Abu Musab al-Suri had laid out for them: small, spontaneous groups carrying out individual acts of terror in Europe, and an open struggle for territory in Iraq.

Suicide bombings became a trademark of Zarqawi’s operation, despite Maqdisi’s condemnation of the practice. And Zarqawi soon improvised a more gruesome signature: in May, 2004, he was filmed decapitating Nicholas Berg, a young American contractor. The footage was posted on the Internet, and it was followed by other beheadings, along with bombings and assassinations—hundreds of them.

Within radical Islamist circles, Zarqawi’s gory executions and attacks on Muslims at prayer became a source of controversy. From prison, Maqdisi chastised his former protégé. “The pure hands of jihad fighters must not be stained by shedding inviolable blood,” he wrote in an article that was posted on his Web site in July, 2004. “There is no point in vengeful acts that terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them.” Maqdisi also advised jihadis not to go to Iraq, “because it will be an inferno for them. This is, by God, the biggest catastrophe.”

Zarqawi angrily refuted Maqdisi’s remarks, saying that he took orders only from God; however, he was beginning to realize that his efforts in Iraq were another dead end for jihad. “The space of movement is starting to get smaller,” he had written to bin Laden in June. “The grip is starting to be tightened on the holy warriors’ necks and, with the spread of soldiers and police, the future is becoming frightening.” Finally, bin Laden agreed to lend his influence to assist Zarqawi in drawing recruits to his cause. In October, 2004, Zarqawi announced his new job title: emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

From that time until he was killed by American bombs, in June, 2006, Zarqawi led a murderous campaign unmatched in the history of Al Qaeda. Before Zarqawi became a member, Al Qaeda had killed some thirty-two hundred people. Zarqawi’s forces probably killed twice that number.

In July, 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue and second-in-command, attempted to steer the nihilistic Zarqawi closer to the founders’ original course. In a letter, he outlined the next steps for the Iraqi jihad: “The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate. . . . The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq. The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before—the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.”

Zawahiri advised Zarqawi to moderate his attacks on Iraqi Shiites and to stop beheading hostages. “We are in a battle,” Zawahiri reminded him. “And more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”

Zarqawi did not heed Al Qaeda’s requests. As the Iraqi jihad fell into barbarism, Al Qaeda’s leaders began advising their followers to go to Sudan or Kashmir, where the chances of victory seemed more promising. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, was confronting a new problem, which one of its prime thinkers, Abu Bakr Naji, had already anticipated, in an Internet document titled “The Management of Savagery.”

Naji’s identity is unknown. Other Islamist writers have said that he was Tunisian, but a Saudi newspaper identified him as Jordanian. Will McCants, the West Point scholar, has translated Naji’s work. He said that “Abu Bakr Naji” might be a collective pseudonym for various theorists of jihad. But, he added, Naji’s work has appeared on Sawt al-Jihad, the authoritative Al Qaeda Internet magazine, meaning that it reflects the prevailing views of the organization. Other analysts are cautious about giving too much weight to Naji’s words. Speaking at a conference earlier this year, David Kilcullen, the chief counterterrorism strategist at the U.S. State Department, highlighted the tendency of extremist movements to fragment into splinter groups based on ideological differences. “It’s important to realize that there are numerous competing points of view within the movement,” he said. “Not everything published in jihadist forums has the approval of the senior leadership.”

Naji’s document, which appeared in the spring of 2004, addresses the crisis and the opportunity posed by the tumult in the Arab world. “During our long journey, through victories and defeats, through the blood, severed limbs and skulls, some of the movements have disappeared and some have remained,” he writes. “If we meditate on the factor common to the movements which have remained, we find that there is political action in addition to military action.” Many Islamist groups have disparaged the notion of politics, considering it “a filthy activity of Satan,” but understanding the politics of the enemy, Naji suggests, is a necessary evil. “We urge that the leaders work to master political science just as they would work to master military science.”

Naji argues that Al Qaeda’s public image has suffered among Muslims because the organization has failed to carry the battle to the media. “The first step in putting our plan in place should be to focus on justifying the action rationally and through the Sharia,” he says. “Second, we must communicate this justification clearly to the people and the masses such that any means or attempt to distort our action through the media is cut off.”

The media is especially important in the chaotic period that the jihadi movement has entered, when people are understandably offended by the carnage. “If we succeed in the management of this savagery, that stage—by the permission of God—will be a bridge to the Islamic state which has been awaited since the fall of the caliphate,” he proclaims. “If we fail—we seek refuge with God from that—it does not mean an end of the matter. Rather, this failure will lead to an increase in savagery.”

Naji writes in the dry, oddly temperate style that characterizes many Al Qaeda strategy studies. And, like all jihadi theorists, he embeds his analysis in the tradition of Ibn Taymiyya, the thirteenth-century Arab theologian whose ideas undergird the Salafi, or Wahhabi, tradition; bin Laden frequently refers to Ibn Taymiyya in his speeches. The remarks of bin Laden and Zawahiri play only a modest part in Naji’s work. Indeed, Naji is a more attentive reader of Western thinkers: the thesis of “The Management of Savagery” is drawn from the observation of the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in his book “Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (1987), that imperial overreach leads to the downfall of empires.

Naji began writing his study in 1998, when the jihad movement’s most promising targets appeared to be Jordan, the countries of North Africa, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—roughly the same countries that bin Laden later named. Naji recommended that jihadis continually attack the vital economic centers of these countries, such as tourist sites and oil refineries, in order to make the regimes concentrate their forces, leaving their peripheries unprotected. Sensing weakness, Naji predicts, the people will lose confidence in their governments, which will respond with increasingly ineffective acts of repression. Eventually, the governments will lose control. Savagery will naturally follow, offering Islamists the opportunity to capture the allegiance of a population that is desperate for order. (Naji cites Afghanistan before the Taliban as an example.) Even though the jihadis will have caused the chaos, that fact will be forgotten as the fighters impose security, provide food and medical treatment, and establish Islamic courts of justice.

After coalition forces overran Al Qaeda compounds in Afghanistan in late 2001, they seized thousands of pages of internal memoranda, records of strategy sessions and ethical debates, and military manuals, but not a single page devoted to the politics of Al Qaeda. Alone among Al Qaeda theorists, Naji briefly addresses whether jihadis are prepared to run a state should they succeed in toppling one. He quotes a colleague who posed the question “Assuming that we get rid of the apostate regimes today, who will take over the ministry of agriculture, trade, economics, etc.?” Beyond the simplistic notion of imposing a caliphate and establishing the rule of Islamic law, the leaders of the organization appear never to have thought about the most basic facts of government. What kind of economic model would they follow? How would they cope with unemployment, so rampant in the Muslim world? Where do they stand on the environment? Health care? The truth, as Naji essentially concedes, is that the radical Islamists have no interest in government; they are interested only in jihad. In his book, Naji breezily answers his friend as follows: “It is not a prerequisite that the mujahid movement has to be prepared especially for agriculture, trade, and industry. . . . As for the one who manages the techniques in each ministry, he can be a paid employee who has no interest in policy and is not a member of the movement or the party. There are many examples of that and a proper explanation would take a long time.”

Fouad Hussein is a radical Jordanian journalist who met Zarqawi and Maqdisi in 1996, when, he writes, “a career of trouble led me to Suwaqah Prison.” He had published a series of articles criticizing the Jordanian government, and, in response, the authorities locked him up for a month. Since Zarqawi and Maqdisi were being held at the same jail, Hussein sought out interviews with them; eventually, Zarqawi served him tea while Maqdisi talked politics. Zarqawi mentioned that he had been in solitary confinement for more than eight months and had lost his toenails as a result of being tortured. The next week, Zarqawi was sent to solitary again, and his followers staged a riot. Hussein became the negotiator between the prisoners and the warden, who relented—an episode that cemented Hussein’s standing among the radical Islamists.

In 2005, Hussein produced what is perhaps the most definitive outline of Al Qaeda’s master plan: a book titled “Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al Qaeda.” Although it is largely a favorable biography of Zarqawi and his movement, Hussein incorporates the insights of other Al Qaeda members—notably, Saif al-Adl, the security chief.

It is chilling to read this work and realize how closely recent events seem to be hewing to Al Qaeda’s forecasts. Based on interviews with Zarqawi and Adl, Hussein claims that dragging Iran into conflict with the United States is key to Al Qaeda’s strategy. Expanding the area of conflict in the Middle East will cause the U.S. to overextend its forces. According to Hussein, Al Qaeda believes that Iran expects to be attacked by the U.S., because of its interest in building a nuclear weapon. “Accordingly, Iran is preparing to retaliate for or abort this strike by means of using powerful cards in its hand,” he writes. These tactics include targeting oil installations in the Persian Gulf, which could cut off sixty per cent of the world’s oil supplies, destabilizing Western economies.

In an ominous passage, Hussein notes that “for fifteen years—or since the end of the first Gulf War—Iran has been busy building a secret global army of highly trained personnel and the necessary financial and technological capabilities to carry out any kind of mission.” He is clearly referring to Hezbollah, which has so far focussed its attention on Israel. According to Hussein, “Iran has identified American and Jewish targets around the world. This secret army is led by two professional Lebanese men who have pledged full allegiance to Iran and who hold enough of a grudge against the Americans to qualify them to inflict damage on Jewish and American interests around the world.”

Iran, he continues, has been cultivating good relations with other Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas. “Iran views these parties as its entrenched wings in occupied Palestine,” Hussein writes, asserting that the peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh in February, 2005, were secretly aimed at countering Iranian influence on the Palestinian resistance. “Al Qaeda interpreted this as the first step toward launching an attack on Iran,” Hussein claims. Both the U.S. and Israel view Hezbollah, the Islamist group in Lebanon, as a creature of the Iranian state, and are intent on eliminating it. “The military campaign against Iran will begin when the United States and Israel succeed in disarming Hezbollah,” Hussein predicts.

Hussein claims, without offering evidence, that Iran already has thirty thousand intelligence agents in Iraq. “Since the Americans have not succeeded in eliminating the Sunni resistance, how can they deal with the situation if the Shiites join the resistance? Iran plans to incite its proponents in Iraq to join the anti-U.S. resistance in the event that the United States or Israel launches an attack on Iran. Iran plans to open its border to the resistance and provide it with what it needs to achieve a swift and major victory against the Americans.” Al Qaeda, he writes, also expects the Americans to go after Iran’s principal ally in the region, Syria. The removal of the Assad regime—a longtime goal of jihadis—will allow the country to be infiltrated by Al Qaeda, putting the terrorists within reach, at last, of Israel.

Hussein observes that Al Qaeda’s ideologues have studied the failure of Islamist movements in the past and concluded that they lacked concrete, realistic goals. Therefore, he writes, “Al Qaeda drew up a feasible plan within a well-defined time frame. The plan was based on improving the Islamic jihadist action in quality and quantity and expanding it to include the entire world.”

Al Qaeda’s twenty-year plan began on September 11th, with a stage that Hussein calls “The Awakening.” The ideologues within Al Qaeda believed that “the Islamic nation was in a state of hibernation,” because of repeated catastrophes inflicted upon Muslims by the West. By striking America—“the head of the serpent”—Al Qaeda caused the United States to “lose consciousness and act chaotically against those who attacked it. This entitled the party that hit the serpent to lead the Islamic nation.” This first stage, says Hussein, ended in 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad.

The second, “Eye-Opening” stage will last until the end of 2006, Hussein writes. Iraq will become the recruiting ground for young men eager to attack America. In this phase, he argues, perhaps wishfully, Al Qaeda will move from being an organization to “a mushrooming invincible and popular trend.” The electronic jihad on the Internet will propagate Al Qaeda’s ideas, and Muslims will be pressed to donate funds to make up for the seizure of terrorist assets by the West. The third stage, “Arising and Standing Up,” will last from 2007 to 2010. Al Qaeda’s focus will be on Syria and Turkey, but it will also begin to directly confront Israel, in order to gain more credibility among the Muslim population.

In the fourth stage, lasting until 2013, Al Qaeda will bring about the demise of Arab governments. “The creeping loss of the regimes’ power will lead to a steady growth in strength within Al Qaeda,” Hussein predicts. Meanwhile, attacks against the Middle East petroleum industry will continue, and America’s power will deteriorate through the constant expansion of the circle of confrontation. “By then, Al Qaeda will have completed its electronic capabilities, and it will be time to use them to launch electronic attacks to undermine the U.S. economy.” Islamists will promote the idea of using gold as the international medium of exchange, leading to the collapse of the dollar.

Then an Islamic caliphate can be declared, inaugurating the fifth stage of Al Qaeda’s grand plan, which will last until 2016. “At this stage, the Western fist in the Arab region will loosen, and Israel will not be able to carry out preëmptive or precautionary strikes,” Hussein writes. “The international balance will change.” Al Qaeda and the Islamist movement will attract powerful new economic allies, such as China, and Europe will fall into disunity.

The sixth phase will be a period of “total confrontation.” The now established caliphate will form an Islamic Army and will instigate a worldwide fight between the “believers” and the “non-believers.” Hussein proclaims, “The world will realize the meaning of real terrorism.” By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.”

Al Qaeda’s version of utopia has drawn the allegiance of a new generation of Arabs, who have been tutored on the Internet by ideologues such as Suri and Naji. This “third generation of mujahideen,” as Suri calls them, have been radicalized by September 11th, the occupation of Iraq, and the Palestinian intifada. (Suri wrote this before the current struggle in Lebanon.) Those jihadis fighting in the conflict in Iraq have been trained in vicious urban warfare against the most formidable army in history. They will return to their home countries and add their expertise to the new cells springing up in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many European nations.

With a few troublesome exceptions, America has been free of the kind of indigenous Islamist terrorism that has recently visited Britain. It is a tribute to the American Muslim community, which is more integrated into American society than its counterparts in Europe. Relatively few Muslims in the U.S. have been imprisoned, and the typical Muslim household earns more than the national average. The situation in Europe is starkly different, which means that it will be an ongoing source of trouble, and may continue to be a launching pad for the kind of attacks against America represented by the alleged plot to blow up as many as ten airliners over the Atlantic.

In 2002, the Dutch government commissioned a study of the recruits to the Islamist movement. The report, titled “Recruitment for the Jihad in the Netherlands,” divides the jihadis into three groups. First are young men of Dutch descent who have converted to Islam—a phenomenon, noticed elsewhere in Europe, in which traditional forms of worship have lost their allure and radical Islam functions as an all-encompassing identity and as a form of protest. Many of these conversions take place in prison. The second category is composed mainly of illegal Arab immigrants who have little knowledge of the culture and language of their host country. The third and largest category is made up of the sons and grandsons of predominately Moroccan immigrants, native speakers of Dutch who speak little or no Arabic. This group, caught between cultures, identifies most profoundly with radical Islam.

After the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, in Amsterdam in 2004, the government published another study, “From Dawa to Jihad,” detailing the threats from radical Islam. This study notes a sharp difference between “traditional” radical political Islam and what the authors term “radical-Islamic puritanism,” which characterizes the new generation. Traditional radical Islam was homogeneous and organized; it had a detailed ideology with a specific vision of a non-Western alternative society. There was, in theory, a peaceful path to this idealized vision, but the traditional radical thinkers believed that this path had been cut off by the West, making jihad—which they saw as a political struggle carried out on the battlefield—the only alternative. The ideology of the new generation, comprising a mixture of ethnic identities, is alarmingly vague. Their only political goal is a return to the ideals of the seventh-century Prophet and his early successors; they spout messianic slogans about the caliphate and imposing Sharia, without a clear idea of what those goals entail. They categorically reject the possibility of a peaceful path. They believe that the world is divided between “sons of light” and “sons of darkness,” and that a fight to the end is the will of God.

Al Qaeda’s apocalyptic agenda is not shared by all Islamists. Although most jihadi groups approve of Al Qaeda’s attacks on America and Europe, their own goals are often more parochial, having to do with purifying Islam and toppling regimes in their own countries which they see as heretical. Many of these groups would be happy to see Al Qaeda disappear, so that their campaigns can be understood as nationalist guerrilla struggles with specific political goals.

This rupture has grown increasingly apparent in the past five years. Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, publicly denounced the September 11th attacks and condemned Al Qaeda’s use of suicide bombers, even though the tactic was employed in the 1983 attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the barracks of American and French troops in Lebanon, both of which are believed to have been carried out by Hezbollah. After September 11th, leaders of the Egyptian Islamist organization, Gama’a Islamiya, which has worked closely with Al Qaeda in the past, publicly condemned Al Qaeda’s tactics and its goals of worldwide jihad. Even some of Zawahiri’s former colleagues in the Egyptian terror group he formed, Al Jihad, argue that Al Qaeda has undermined the cause of Islam by instigating anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and the West.

It is notable how seldom these ideologues refer to the words of bin Laden or Zawahiri, the nominal leaders of the movement, perhaps because the declarations of Al Qaeda’s leadership are directed more at Americans and Europeans than at the jihadis. “Beware the scripted enemy, who plays to a global audience,” David Kilcullen, the counterterrorism strategist at the State Department, wrote in a paper now being used by the U.S. military in Iraq as a handbook for dealing with the insurgency. Al Qaeda, he wrote, propagates a “single narrative” aimed at influencing the West; but each faction within the jihadi movement has its own version of this narrative, often sharply different from the message being put forward by bin Laden and Zawahiri.

Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the work of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following. “The data don’t get to the top, because the decision-makers are not looking for that kind of information,” a policy analyst who works closely with the American intelligence community told me. “They think they know better.”

As the writings of Abu Musab al-Suri, Abu Bakr Naji, Fouad Hussein, and others make clear, the tradition of Salafi jihad existed before bin Laden and Al Qaeda and will likely survive them; yet, from the beginning of the war on terror, the strategy of the Administration has been to decapitate Al Qaeda’s leadership. Bruce Hoffman, who is the author of “Inside Terrorism” and a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, told me, “One of the problems with the kill-or-capture metric is that it has often been to the exclusion of having a deeper, richer understanding of the movement, its origins, and our adversaries’ mindset. The nuances are absolutely critical. Our adversaries are wedded to the ideology that informs and fuels their struggle, and, by not paying attention, we risk not knowing our enemy.”

[Edward]

U.S. May Lose War on Terror, Historian Says

BY DANIEL FREEDMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
September 13, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/39539


The victor of the war on terror is far from clear, the historian Bernard Lewis told a Hudson Institute conference.

The British-born professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton said Monday that he was "more optimistic about the future of our struggle" in the early 1940s — when the French had capitulated to the Germans, when Stalin was Hitler's ally, and when America was still neutral — than he is today.

"Hitler would have won under these conditions," Mr. Lewis said, citing America's inability to clearly define the war on terror and exactly who its enemy is. The professor, whose vision of the future of the Middle East and knowledge of Islam has guided President Bush's foreign policy, also cited as challenges the multilateralism that hamstrings America's ability to fight the war and the strong political opposition to policies designed to defeat the enemy, such as detaining terrorists without trial.

During the darkest days of the fight against Nazism, Mr. Lewis said, he "had no doubt that in the end we would triumph." He does not "have that certitude now," he said.

Mr. Lewis told the center-right think tank's conference on the United Nations that he agrees with a former communist dissident and current Israeli parliamentarian, Natan Sharansky, that the only real solution to defeating radical Islam is to bring freedom to the Middle East. Either "we free them or they destroy us," Mr. Lewis said.

The contention, especially popular in diplomatic circles, that Arabs aren't suited to democracy and that the West's best hope lies with friendly tyrants shows an ignorance of the Arabs' past and contempt for their present and future, and is "demonstrably absurd in historical terms," Mr. Lewis said.

Mr. Lewis said a great deal of material exists — from Arabs, from Persians, and from Turks — that can form the basis for democracies in the region. He quoted from a 1786 letter to the king's court in France from the French ambassador to Istanbul explaining why the Ottoman Empire was slow in making decisions. The ambassador reported that unlike in France, where the king made a decision and that was it, "here the sultan has to consult" and so it "takes time to get things done."

Mr. Lewis said he places no hope in the United Nations being part of the solution. He "first realized the U.N. was hopeless" after the partition of Palestine, he said. Palestine was a "triviality" compared to the partition of India that took place a year earlier, in 1947, he added. Millions of refugees were created and yet India and Pakistan formed a working relationship and sorted out the problems.

The key difference, Mr. Lewis said, was that "in the partition of India, the U.N. was not involved. "The United Nations failed to act after the Arab states invaded Palestine, and then treated Jewish and Arab refugees differently, leaving problems that remain today, he said.

[lofter1]

THE MASTER PLAN

For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning

... Al Qaeda’s twenty-year plan began on September 11th, with a stage that Hussein calls “The Awakening.” The ideologues within Al Qaeda believed that “the Islamic nation was in a state of hibernation,” because of repeated catastrophes inflicted upon Muslims by the West. By striking America—“the head of the serpent”—Al Qaeda caused the United States to “lose consciousness and act chaotically against those who attacked it. This entitled the party that hit the serpent to lead the Islamic nation.” This first stage, says Hussein, ended in 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad.

The second, “Eye-Opening” stage will last until the end of 2006, Hussein writes. Iraq will become the recruiting ground for young men eager to attack America. In this phase, he argues, perhaps wishfully, Al Qaeda will move from being an organization to “a mushrooming invincible and popular trend.” The electronic jihad on the Internet will propagate Al Qaeda’s ideas, and Muslims will be pressed to donate funds to make up for the seizure of terrorist assets by the West.

The third stage, “Arising and Standing Up,” will last from 2007 to 2010. Al Qaeda’s focus will be on Syria and Turkey, but it will also begin to directly confront Israel, in order to gain more credibility among the Muslim population.

In the fourth stage, lasting until 2013, Al Qaeda will bring about the demise of Arab governments. “The creeping loss of the regimes’ power will lead to a steady growth in strength within Al Qaeda,” Hussein predicts. Meanwhile, attacks against the Middle East petroleum industry will continue, and America’s power will deteriorate through the constant expansion of the circle of confrontation. “By then, Al Qaeda will have completed its electronic capabilities, and it will be time to use them to launch electronic attacks to undermine the U.S. economy.” Islamists will promote the idea of using gold as the international medium of exchange, leading to the collapse of the dollar.

Then an Islamic caliphate can be declared, inaugurating the fifth stage of Al Qaeda’s grand plan, which will last until 2016 ...

The sixth phase will be a period of “total confrontation.” The now established caliphate will form an Islamic Army and will instigate a worldwide fight between the “believers” and the “non-believers.” Hussein proclaims, “The world will realize the meaning of real terrorism.”

... By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.”

The Apocalypse Will Be Blogged

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/12/opinion/Hay600.jpg
Thomas Porostocky and Lars Klove

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/opinion/12precede.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

By BERNARD HAYKEL and SAUD AL-SARHAN
September 12, 2006


Op-Ed Contributors


NEARLY every organ of the American news media marked the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 yesterday. But the Web sites affiliated with many of militant jihadism’s top thinkers, including Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Sulayman al-Alwan, remained silent. That shouldn’t surprise us: the Salafi strain of Islam, to which most jihadis subscribe, prohibits commemorating anniversaries.


Celebrations other than the holidays of Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha are considered reprehensible adaptations of non-Muslim ways. What’s more, the jihadis normally use the lunar calendar, by which the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, fell on July 19.


Perhaps more remarkable was the fact that this year, a number of Web sites affiliated with Al Qaeda did commemorate the day — no doubt because they knew Americans would. Osama bin Laden and his associates have generally referred to the Sept. 11 attacks as “the attacks on Manhattan,” “the invasion of Manhattan” or the “attacks of Jumada,” the lunar month in which they occurred. But this year, a number of jihadi sites have referred instead to Sept. 11.


Some messages yesterday were clearly meant for Western consumption, reminding the United States that Al Qaeda is still active and bent on future attacks, and even posting images overlaid with threats in English.


http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/12/opinion/Hay2.190.jpg
Screen captures from jihadi Web sites
commemorating the anniversary.

What follow are excerpts, translated from the Arabic, from texts posted on jihadi Web sites about the anniversary.


•


A jihadi Web site associated with Al Qaeda posted the following plea beneath images of the American, Israeli and Danish flags. The text was interspersed with animated images of American company logos, including one with a row of praying Muslims dressed as Coca-Cola bottles.

With God’s help and yours, let us make the fifth anniversary of the events of Sept. 11 the beginning of a boycott of all Zionist-American products that are sold in Arab and Muslim countries. Many continue to buy these products despite all they see and hear about the killing, torture and destruction that Muslims are faced with due to the Crusader and Zionist-American war. Let us boycott these products because we do not need them, nor are they to be considered absolute necessities. Here is a list of the companies and products that should be boycotted:



Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Nike, Mars, McDonald’s ... “Pepsi” stands for “Pay Every Penny to Save Israel.” ...


I’m against America even if it turns this life into a paradise



I’m against America even if a mufti issues a fatwa in its favor from within the glorious Kaaba
I’m with Osama no matter where he might be, so long as he carries a banner on the battle front
I’m with Osama whether he gains a quick victory or attains the rank of the martyrs.

•


A submission to a Qaeda Web site called for readers to sign their names to the following statement:

In the name of God the merciful and the compassionate, Monday morning is the fifth anniversary of the glorious attacks on New York and Washington accomplished by the 19 heroes of the Muslim community — may God have mercy on them and raise them to the highest rank for their sacrifice. They pressed America’s nose into the ground and allowed the whole world to witness the destruction of its economic and military citadels. In so doing, they crushed the myth with which America had terrorized the world, namely that it was the greatest power on earth and no one was strong enough to confront, let alone make an enemy, of it....



That day changed the world, even by the admission of our enemies, and created ... a world divided into two camps, as our sheik and leader Osama bin Laden — may God protect him — has stated: “A camp of belief and another camp of hypocrisy and disbelief.” Choose for yourself, o Muslim, which camp to belong to: that of belief, Islam and jihad under the banner of the holy warriors or that of hypocrisy and unbelief under the banner of America, the crusading West and those hypocrites who have banded with them. Our congratulations to all and we beseech God to show us in America another black day like that blessed Tuesday.
•



A poster calling himself Abu Lujayn Ibrahim contributed the following to a Saudi site that often posts jihadi material but is not controlled by Al Qaeda.


The text was interspersed with gruesome photographs of dead and mutilated children in the Middle East.

Before my eyes is a veil that does not permit me to see those killed in the twin towers, nor to remember them on this day. Indeed, I don’t see those killed in the twin towers nor remember them on this day! Do you know why?



Because their fallen are not purer or better than our fallen. And because the blood of my Muslim brothers and that of my family in Palestine ... and in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in every location in which Muslim blood is shed has blocked my vision ...filled my retinas with black lines so that I can see only our martyrs and injured being slain by America’s weapons and its support .... Yes, Sept. 11 is the anniversary of the fall of American arrogance into history’s garbage dump, and of the rebellion against injustice.
•



Hamid ibn Abdallah al-Ali is a Kuwaiti ideologue of jihadism — the only Qaeda intellectual to have posted a text specifically for the Sept. 11 anniversary.


The sheik cites an article by Leonard Peikoff, heir and executor to Ayn Rand, that appeared as an advertisement in The New York Times shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

In his article “End States that Sponsor Terrorism,” Leonard Peikoff, one of the leading ideologues of American extremism, concluded that America’s policy of appeasement toward the Muslim world led to Sept. 11. For 50 years, he writes, American administrations have relinquished their true ownership rights over Muslim oil resources, which they discovered and developed the technology to extract. The solution, according to Mr. Peikoff, is for the United States to eliminate the states that sponsor terrorism with the most lethal weapons at its disposal.



This is exactly the kind of rotten thinking that animates those living in the extreme west of the globe, from where they spread their rot to the rest of the world — these politicians of underdevelopment, criminality and mass extermination of humanity. This is the arrogance of fascism, of which Bush has accused Muslims recently: in this case it is the fascism of the cross standing on the tribunes of oil. In short, it means that they own our oil that is in our land; they own our blood, which they can shed at will; they own our present and future, and they have the right to change our history and our education!...
Hunger, disease, thirst and regional wars instigated by poverty all stem from the greed of the West, its thirst for plunder and desire to control the world’s wealth. These in turn lead to a rate of destruction every year that equals the destruction World War II effected over six years.
The mercenaries who dominate the World Trade Organization ... the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ...the bloodsuckers of the world’s poor, the immiserators of nations and the thieves, murderers, shedders of blood: these are the ones who control the international political system. They are the ones who spread their armies throughout the world, terrorizing and stealing the wealth of nations while enslaving them. They are the ones who are exterminating the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and other places. They are the ones who ally themselves to the despotic rulers in order to suck the blood of the people, using companies that are owned by the leaders of their countries and headed by murderers and criminals.•

This essay, called “The Day Smoke and Dust Covered New York’s Sky,” was posted to a Qaeda-affiliated Web site:

What a beautiful morning it is today, an amazing morning when we witnessed this great power flailing in every direction as if it were a slaughtered headless animal....



Some believe that if Bush were to leave then the situation would improve and become stable. But the eternal truth is that there is no difference between Bush and the one who preceded him, or the one who will succeed him, and for a very simple reason: cloning is an inherent property of the American presidential personality. Every new president is a perfect copy of the previous one...
Three children, 10 or 11 years old, who watched the recently released film “United 93” at the theater zealously and gleefully cheered when the plane hit the tower, as if they were watching a goal being scored in a soccer match against an opposing team. What is it that makes these children so happy about this crash that they stand up and strongly applaud? Ask yourselves, oh Americans, what is it that made those 19 young men engage in such a legendary and miraculous act...?
Naturally, you will not bother to investigate, because you are not concerned with the reasons, and even if you find the answer you are incapable of understanding it. Therefore, nothing will change, and your troops will continue to invade our lands in order to teach us lessons about the virtues of American freedom and the well-known methods for spreading them, like flushing the Quran down the toilet, or one of your soldiers’ stepping with his filthy foot on the face of a prisoner, having placed a metal chain like a dog leash around his neck, as we saw in Abu Ghraib.
You will witness anew men as brilliant as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and as determined as Muhammad Atta, whom you saw on the monitoring screens full of self-assurance in his blue shirt.... Who knows, perhaps we will see another glorious day soon!

Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Islamic studies at New York University, is the author of ’’Revival and Reform in Islam.’’ Saud al-Sarhan is a Saudi Arabia-based analyst of Islamist groups.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

The following passage gets to the crux of the matter:

Jihadists are all about DEATH -- they have no plan / thought regarding the future (beyond Virgins & Paradise).

Jihadists are like a cancer, which has no good purpose but to suck life from the host -- in this case the host being Planet Earth ...

Is this the 21st Century version of Nihilism?




THE MASTER PLAN

For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning.

After coalition forces overran Al Qaeda compounds in Afghanistan in late 2001, they seized thousands of pages of internal memoranda, records of strategy sessions and ethical debates, and military manuals, but not a single page devoted to the politics of Al Qaeda. Alone among Al Qaeda theorists, Naji briefly addresses whether jihadis are prepared to run a state should they succeed in toppling one. He quotes a colleague who posed the question “Assuming that we get rid of the apostate regimes today, who will take over the ministry of agriculture, trade, economics, etc.?”

Beyond the simplistic notion of imposing a caliphate and establishing the rule of Islamic law, the leaders of the organization appear never to have thought about the most basic facts of government.

What kind of economic model would they follow? How would they cope with unemployment, so rampant in the Muslim world? Where do they stand on the environment? Health care?


The truth, as Naji essentially concedes, is that the radical Islamists have no interest in government; they are interested only in jihad. In his book, Naji breezily answers his friend as follows:
“It is not a prerequisite that the mujahid movement has to be prepared especially for agriculture, trade, and industry. . . . As for the one who manages the techniques in each ministry, he can be a paid employee who has no interest in policy and is not a member of the movement or the party. There are many examples of that and a proper explanation would take a long time.”

[lofter1]

FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL)

New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death



Jake Plummer is outraged over the treatment of Pat Tillman: (http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/09/15/jake-plummer-is-outraged-over-the-treatment-of-pat-tillman-they-knew-it-was-friendly-fire-then-it-makes-you-sick/)
They knew it was friendly fire then–it makes you sick


By: John Amato
September 15th, 2006


http://static.crooksandliars.com/2006/09/Jake-Plummer.jpg


On HBO’s Inside the NFL (http://www.hbo.com/infl/), Peter King interviewed Denver QB Jake Plummer about the horrific treatment the Tillman family have received over Pat’s death. There have been four investigations into what really happened to him and now a fifth one is getting close to being completed. How reprehensible has this been for the Tillman family? Pat is killed and they were repeatedly lied to. The family is not speaking out, but Plummer is. Good for him. Somebody has to.


Video (http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Inside-the-NFL-Pat-Tilman-Plummer2.wmv)-WMP Video (http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Inside-the-NFL-Pat-Tilman-Plummer2.mov)-QT (rough transcript)


King: When you first heard that they hid these irregularities, were you outraged?


Plummer: It just made you feel kinda sick that they’d cover up something like that to–for whatever reason. We were all led to believe he died in leading his troops up the hill and then they come tell us it wasn’t–it was friendly fire. What can you do– you’re at their mercy and..you just feel for the family …

http://static.crooksandliars.com/2006/09/PatTillman.jpg

[Ninjahedge]

I feel bad for him.

The thing that gets me is that this was not something that could have been 100% the fault of anyone. It looks like things could have been done differently (mission-wise) but friendly fire is somethnig yuo have to deal with.

I think the only reprehensable thing that they did was not allow the FAMILY the choice of how they wanted their child represented. I do not see how a FF incident could have ruined morale in Afghanistan. Why they felt it necessary to lie about it was just plain chicken.......poop.

[Transic]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-harris18sep18,0,622365.story?track=mostviewed-homepage

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.

By Sam Harris, SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason." His next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," will be published this week by Knopf. samharris.org.
September 18, 2006

TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

[lofter1]

When 300,000 + citizens took to the streets of NYC in March 2003 this was one of the outcomes of the upcoming war that people feared ...

As Rumsfeld says, "Stuff Happens"

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html?ref=world)

By MARK MAZZETTI
September 24, 2006


WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.


The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.


The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government.


Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.


An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.


The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.


More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.


Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.


National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.


Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.


Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.


Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.


Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.


“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”


That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.


The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”


On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”


The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.


The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.


It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.


In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.


But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.


In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.


“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.


For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.


Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.


The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.


The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”


More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Ninjahedge]

Oops.

[Edward]

Confiscate a tube of hair gel, but leave tons of toxic poisonous stuff unguarded? I am at a loss to find right words to describe this idiocy.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/opinion/25mon1.html
Editorial
Chemical Plants, Still Unprotected
Published: September 25, 2006

Congress still has done nothing to protect Americans from a terrorist attack on chemical plants. Republican leaders want to give the impression that that has changed. But voters should not fall for the spin. If the leadership goes through with the strategy it seems to have adopted last week to secure these highly vulnerable targets, national security will be the loser.

The federal government is spending extraordinary amounts of money and time protecting air travel from terrorist attacks. But Congress has not yet passed a law to secure the nation’s chemical plants, even though an attack on just one plant could kill or injure as many as 100,000 people. The sticking point has been the chemical industry, a heavy contributor to political campaigns, which does not want to pay the cost of reasonable safety measures.

The Senate and the House spent many months carefully developing bipartisan chemical plant security bills. Both measures were far too weak, but they would have finally imposed real safety requirements on the chemical industry. The Republican leadership in Congress blocked both bills from moving forward. Instead, whatever gets done about chemical plant security will apparently be decided behind closed doors, and inserted as a rider to a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill.

It is outrageous that something as important as chemical plant security is being decided in a back-room deal. It is regrettable that Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, the chairwoman of the committee that produced the Senate bill, does not carry enough influence with her own party’s leadership to get a strong chemical plant security bill passed. The deal itself, the likely details of which have emerged in recent days, is a near-complete cave-in to industry, and yet more proof that when it comes to a choice between homeland security and the desires of corporate America, the Republican leadership always goes with big business.

Any federal chemical plant law should make it clear that states have the right to impose stricter requirements to protect their citizens from harm. The Senate and House bills said this, but the rider apparently will not. A reasonable law would make it clear that the secretary of homeland security can order chemical plants to adopt specific safety measures, like replacing highly dangerous chemicals with ones that pose less of a danger to people in the surrounding area. The House bill did this, but the rider apparently will not give the secretary this basic power.

It is likely that the backroom deal will also exempt water treatment and drinking water facilities from regulation, meaning that millions of Americans could needlessly be put at risk of an attack on a chlorine tank, and that it will make the rules about when and how chemical plants must submit safety plans hopelessly vague.

It is not too late to abandon this bad deal and pass a strong law. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, just 25 percent of those asked approved of the job Congress is doing. Its handling of the chemical plant security issue gives a good indication why.

[lofter1]

Pirates of the Mediterranean


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/29/opinion/30harris_large.jpghttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif
Anthony Russo


NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/opinion/30harris.html)
By ROBERT HARRIS
September 30, 2006


Op-Ed Contributor


Kintbury, England


In the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.


The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.


Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”


Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”


What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.


But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.


“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”


Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.


Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.


But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.


Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.


An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.


In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.


It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.


It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.


The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.


Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[ablarc]

Again a clear-eyed view from Britain:



In the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart...in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,”
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.


...loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack...such was the panic that ensued...that the people were willing to compromise these rights. But it was too late to raise such questions...powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned.
Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street. –Joseph Goebbels


Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11...An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

...the beginning of the end of the Roman republic...It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction...unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.
That's US.


a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect.
^ Profound, terrifying and tragically true.

Seems we have already lost and are at the brink of a new Dark Age. That is the natural state of human affairs, anyway. The reason: the barbarians are within --and they are us.

All of us. From George W. Bush and his lackeys to the politically correct apologists for the enemy outside: we're all part of the denial. Denial of truth, denial of civilization's lessons and accomplishments.

But cheer up: we all know civilization wasn't perfect, we can all recite its hypocrisies and its shortfalls (ad nauseam). And now we can all look forward to living in an alternative vision. Our children's children will see that the Caliphate delivered them from the ravages of Western civilization.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: deliberate, continued, and dishonest; but the myth: persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
--John F. Kennedy


* * *

Three Georges:

Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously--and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply. --George W. Bush

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. –George Santayana

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history. –George Bernard Shaw


...and one Dwight:

How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without? --Dwight D. Eisenhower

[Gregory Tenenbaum]

Christopher Hitchens predicts that in the ongoing war we should be prepared to lay sacrifice each week to a small town, school - that number of people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ812FesQAQ&mode=related&search=

Terrifying :eek:. Except that it came from Hitchens' :confused: mouth.

[lofter1]

Ahhh, those Brits ... so pessimistic. What we need is some good American optimism:

In Bill’s Fine Print, Millions to Celebrate Victory


NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/washington/04victory.html?hp&ex=1159934400&en=66d37a6cabf29680&ei=5094&partner=homepage)
By THOM SHANKER
October 4, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — As the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

The original legislation empowered the president to designate “a day of celebration” to commemorate the success of the armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to “issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe that day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

The celebration would honor the soldiers, sailors, air crews and marines who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would be held in Washington, with the $20 million to cover the costs of military participation.

Democrats called attention to the measure, an act that Republicans are likely to portray as an effort to embarrass them five weeks before the midterm election. The Democrats said both the original language and the extension were pushed by Senate Republicans. A spokesman for the Republican-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee said it was protocol not to identify sponsors of such specific legislation.

The overall legislation was approved in the Senate by unanimous consent and overwhelmingly in the House after a short debate.

Democrats nevertheless said they were not pleased.

“If the Bush administration had spent more time planning for the postwar occupation of Iraq, and less time planning ‘mission accomplished’ victory celebrations, America would be closer to finishing the job in Iraq,” said Rebecca M. Kirszner, communications director for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

Lt. Col. Brian Maka, a Pentagon spokesman, said late Tuesday that the event was envisioned as an opportunity for “honoring returning U.S. forces at the conclusion” of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. “As the funds were not used in F.Y. 2006,” the official said, using the initials for fiscal year, “the authorization was rolled over into F.Y. 2007.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL)

New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death

After Pat’s Birthday

http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegrounduploads/kevin_pat_350.jpg
Courtesy the Tillman Family
Pat Tillman (left) and his brother Kevin stand in front
of a Chinook helicopter in Saudi Arabia before their
tour of duty as Army Rangers in Iraq in 2003.

By Kevin Tillman (http://www.truthdig.com/about/staff/86)

truthdig.com/report (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday)
Posted on Oct 19, 2006

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.
t’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,
Kevin Tillman

[Jake]

Bomb plot earns terrorist life in prison
Nov. 7, 2006. 04:30 PM
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON — An Al Qaeda operative was sentenced to life in prison today for plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange and other U.S. financial targets and blow up landmark London hotels and train stations with limousines packed with gas tanks, napalm and nails.

Born in India and raised in London, Barot began plotting in 2000 to attack a host of financial industry targets in the United States. Investigators said he shelved the plan after the Sept. 11 attacks, focusing his efforts on ways to detonate limousines loaded with gas, napalm and nails.

Investigators said Barot travelled the world to gain terrorist training, meeting terror leaders including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Investigators uncovered some of the evidence stored on computers seized at the home of an alleged Al Qaeda computer expert in Pakistan in July 2004, prosecutors said. Additional clues were found in the garages and homes of Barot's seven alleged accomplices. The plans were designed to cause maximum carnage, the judge told Dhiren Barot, who stared blankly ahead as he learned he would not be eligible for parole for at least 40 years, one of the harshest sentences ever meted out in a British court.

Barot, 34, a British convert to Islam, remains wanted by the United States and Yemen on separate terror-related charges. Under British law, he could be temporarily transferred to the United States to stand trial. His targets included landmark London hotels such as The Ritz and The Savoy, and railway stations such as London's Waterloo, Paddington and King's Cross, prosecutor Edmund Lawson said at the two-day sentencing hearing. Barot fantasized about blowing up a subway train as it travelled in a tunnel below the River Thames, an attack that could "cause pandemonium . . . explosions, flooding, drowning," according to documents filed with the court.

Other planned attacks involved a radioactive dirty bomb and exploding a gasoline tanker. "The conspiracy was in its final stages," Lawson said. The prosecutor said Barot submitted detailed proposals in February 2004 to Al Qaeda financiers in Pakistan. It said the limousine plan required a six-man team and would kill hundreds. Barot estimated the cost at the equivalent of about $130,000. Proposals for the British attacks and strikes against the International Monetary Fund in Washington, the Citigroup headquarters in New York and the Prudential building in Newark, N.J., were sent like "corporate reports going to head office," Judge Neil Butterfield said.

Prosecutors acknowledged they had no firm timeframe for the attacks. Barot's lawyer, Ian MacDonald, pleading for leniency, said today the plans were "rough and exploratory" and far from fruition. Details of the planned attacks in London resurrected fears of the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings that killed 52 people aboard three subways and a bus last year.

The bombings deepened divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims, provoking an angry debate in Britain over religious tolerance and ethnic assimilation. "There are thousands and thousands of ordinary, decent, hardworking, law-abiding Muslims — British citizens just like you — who have to live their lives under a deep cloud of suspicion and distrust caused by you and others like you," Butterfield said. Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain said he feared the case would add to prejudice against Muslims. "I think there is concern about wider public attitude toward Muslims, attitudes that already had the whiff of the lynch mob about them," Bunglawala said. The sentence was unusually harsh in Britain, where only around 25 people have received terms that condemn them to die behind bars.

By comparison, an IRA hitman who in 1984 tried to assassinate former prime minister Margaret Thatcher with a bomb was sentenced to life without possibility of parole for 35 years. The severe punishment was well deserved, said Peter Clarke, Britain's top anti-terrorist detective: "He is a long-term, dedicated, committed member of Al Qaeda."

A videotape shot while Barot was visiting New York in March 2001 was among evidence uncovered in the haul. The shaky footage, shown on screens in the courthouse, zoomed in on the World Trade Center's twin towers as a man is heard mimicking the sound of an explosion. It was found spliced into a videotape copy of the movie "Die Hard With A Vengeance." "It is memorable for its macabre prophecy," Lawson said.

Barot is not believed to have had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. Officials in the United States said previously they would consider extraditing Barot once the British case against him was concluded. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan could not say today if they intended to proceed with the request. The Associated Press, The British Broadcasting Corp., and Times Newspapers Ltd. successfully challenged a court ruling that threatened to prevent news media reporting details of Barot's sentencing hearing.

Butterfield had ruled that publishing details of the case could prejudice trials of Barot's co-defendants, scheduled to take place in London next year.





I find it downright appaling that this person may one day walk the streets again, even at 70 something.

How can something like this constitute anything less than life in prison?

[Transic]

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=247968254375265

John Conyers And The Muslim Caucus

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 11/9/2006

Congress: The likely new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says he's just fighting bigotry in leading a Democrat jihad to deny law enforcement key terror-fighting tools. But he is in the pocket of Islamists.

John Conyers, son of a leftist Detroit union activist, represents the largest Arab population in the country. His district includes Dearborn, Mich., nicknamed "Dearbornistan" by locals fed up with cultural encroachment and terror fears from a steady influx of Mideast immigrants.

Conyers, who runs an Arabic version of his official Web site, does the bidding of these new constituents and the militant Islamist activists who feed off them. They want to kill the Patriot Act and prevent the FBI from profiling Muslim suspects in terror investigations. They also want to end the use of undisclosed evidence against suspected Arab terrorists in deportation proceedings.

And the 77-year-old Conyers has vowed to deliver those changes for them.

"The policies of the Bush administration have sent a wave of fear through our immigrant communities and targeted our Arab and Muslim neighbors," he growls.

He'll soon be in a position to act on his promises. And he has the full backing of the expected speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wants to criminalize FBI and Customs Service profiling of Muslim terror suspects.

"Since Sept. 11, many Muslim Americans have been subjected to searches at airports and other locations based upon their religion and national origin," she said. "We must make it illegal."

Conyers, a lawyer by trade, last decade pushed through a bill to help stop what he called "DWB," driving while black. He dubs post-9/11 profiling "flying while Muslim."

Pelosi has also promised Muslims she'll "correct the Patriot Act," one of the most valuable tools the FBI has in ferreting out jihadist cells lurking in Muslim communities.

Conyers is one of the top recipients of donations from the Arab-American Leadership PAC. And not surprisingly, he has a long history of pandering to Arab and Muslim voters.

During the first Gulf War, for instance, Conyers fought FBI outreach efforts in the Arab and Muslim community in Detroit that were designed to gather intelligence on potential cells and protect the home front. Conyers and other Detroit-area Democrats at the time, David Bonior and John Dingell, threatened to hold hearings unless the FBI stopped counterterrorism interviews.

The FBI met with them privately to explain the national security benefits of outreach, but could not allay their concerns. In the end, the FBI backed off. Today, Hamas, Hezbollah and the al-Qaida-tied Muslim Brotherhood are all active in the area.

Expect Conyers and Pelosi to kick open the doors of Congress to Islamists from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other militant groups. They will have unfettered access, even though many of their leaders have been tied to terrorism (some CAIR officials have landed in the big house).

In 2003, Conyers hosted the first dinner on the Hill that celebrated the end of Ramadan for such Muslim leaders. It's now a tradition. Incoming Democrat freshman Keith Ellison, a Louis Farrakhan disciple and first Muslim member of Congress, will no doubt expand the invitation list.

Conyers has also sponsored one of the Islamists' favorite bills in Congress. HR 635, which has 40 co-signers, would create a select committee to investigate President Bush for allegedly manipulating prewar intelligence and torturing al-Qaida detainees. The goal of his bill is to build grounds for impeachment.

Conyers led the defense of Bill Clinton in last decade's impeachment hearings and is clearly out for blood. So are many of the constituents he serves.

[Ninjahedge]

Congress: The likely new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says he's just fighting bigotry in leading a Democrat jihad to deny law enforcement key terror-fighting tools. But he is in the pocket of Islamists.


OK, I stopped reading there.

1st off, it starts with a dismissive speculatory statement implying that whoever this individual might be, and the position he would hold, that it is not important or representary of the overall.

2nd, the word "jihad" is used to describe his actions. You might as well just call it a "Jesus Killing Crusaide" to get the implied message across a little more forcefully.

3. They are calling things like the Patriot Act a "law inforcement tool". Well, in that case, so is a car battery. The question is not whether or not a baseball bat can be used to "straiten out" a known convict. Or, hell, a "suspected" convict, but rather if that bat, being swung by the wrong person, or in the wrong direction, wil hurt more than it "helps".

4. "In the pocket of Islamists". I call BS. I know it is an editorial, but this is just plain namecalling. It has no merit or weight to its accusations and directions and should not be treated with the respect the paper it is printed on would receive.

[perla1]

My dear nation! The day we promised came sooner than we hoped and faster than we reckoned. The first good tidings on the manifest victory have been heralded, healing our chests and pleasing our souls and friends, while infuriating our enemies.

Here is the state of Islam in the land of two rivers, whose structure is getting stronger, whose flagpole is raising higher, and whose banner is fluttering with the might of the Exalted as a sign of disgrace to the humiliated.


Here are your enemies staggering from the adversities, tribulations, and agonies that befell them like mountains to the extent that they stand helpless to endure or even put out their fires. Today, they are carrying their belongings and roaming to escape. Their tent has bended over, their cooking pots have flipped over, and the storms of the Mujahideen uprooted them, destroyed their pillars, and tore down their dreams over their heads to the extent that they decided to leave. While clinching on their defeat, they became impatient and unable to stay longer.


With regard to all of this, I cannot but thank the most stupid and ominous president of the state of slaves and drugs, America, recognized throughout its history.


This president who gave us this great historic opportunity and brought in his soldiers and experts to engage in direct fighting. The two groups engaged in a manner that we never imagined. With God's help and might, a simple and almost illiterate monotheist Iraqi peasant, blew up with his explosive charge the phony US civilization. The dreams of Uncle Sam have been shattered along with the pieces of the bodies of their soldiers and experts in the land of oil and water.


As I would like to remind this obeyed foolish, that he reinstated the old Persian imperialism in a short period , so he was toward his country worse than Gorbatshuv was toward his Union.


Later, and thirdly, he turned to the Sham [Syria and Lebanon] and terrorized its tyrant [reference to Bashar Al Asad of Syria], who is a Rafidi [term used to describe a Shiite] and a Nusayri [one of Shiite’s factions]. The blockade continued until he [Bashar Al Asad of Syria] had to open his country to hundreds and thousands of Persians to acquire citizenship in it, [so that they can] support the charlatan agent of the anti-Christ, Nasr Allat [a common nickname for Hasan Naserallah of Hizbollah in Lebanon, which means the supporter and worshipper of Idol’s], who has recently had an alleged victory over the Roman military.

Hence, the Old Persian Empire has become complete, extending from the countries behind the river, Iran and Iraq, which is home to Al-Mada'in [an old city which was the pride of Persia back when Persia’s empire were at it’s strongest], to the Sham [Syria and Lebanon].


So, the question is: Will the Persian Magus return the favor to the stupid Bush-who revived their old glory without having to fire one bullet or sacrifice one soldier? I wonder whether the wise of Romans realize that they have become slaves and mercenaries for Persia, and that they are fighting Persia’s battles for free.


The American people have put their feet at the beginning of the right path to save themselves from their predicament, and they have begun to realize the treachery and subservience of their president and his clique to Israel. Thus, they voted with some sense in their latest elections.


I wonder if politicians will keep the promises they made to their citizens and relieve the pain of mothers by saving their sons from the lions of the Land of the Two Rivers.

Are they going to redress the huge deficit of budget, which was wasted away in a stupid losing war? Will they realize that the tax payers are actually paying the price for the bullet with which their sons are being killed with in the quagmire of Iraq?


I urge you, the lame duck, not to escape quickly as your lame defense secretary did, because we have not quenched our thirst from your blood yet. O’ coward, stand firm in the battlefield. We know that the Romans are not ashamed of defeat.


Today we announce the end of a stage of Jihad and the start of a new one, in which we lay the first cornerstone of the Islamic Caliphate project and revive the glory of religion.

And as the moment of truth and determination has fell upon us, I tell the venerable Shaykh, the brave hero, the Qurayshi Hashemite, who is of a Husayni origin [attributes to the tribe and family of the prophet], the commander of the faithful [Like Mullah Muhammad Omar in Afghanistan], Abu Umar al-Baghdadi:


I pledge allegiance to you, to hear and obey, during good and bad times, and in pleasant and unpleasant situations, and this is a promise not to dispute with whom are worthy of the right doing, and to say the truth wherever we are, and not to fear the criticism of anyone in the cause of God.


And I announce the integration of all the formations that we have established, including the Mujahideen Shura Council, on behalf of my brothers in the council, under the authority of the Islamic State of Iraq, putting at your disposal and direct orders 12,000 fighters, who constitute the army of Al-Qa'ida. All of them have pledged an allegiance to die in the cause of God, as well as more than 10,000 others who are still not fully prepared materially [financially].

[lofter1]

But what GOOD will you do?

[lofter1]

CBS, NY Times, USA Today parroted Gonzales's claim that Padilla case is moot,
omitted contrary argument

In their coverage of the indictment of suspected terrorist Jose Padilla, CBS News and The New York Times reported as fact Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's disputed assertion that the indictment renders moot Padilla's legal challenge of his detention as an enemy combatant ...

Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/03/us/04detain.xlarge1.jpg
Jose Padilla, fitted with blacked-out goggles, was videotaped by the government
when he was allowed outside solitary confinement to see a dentist.


nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/us/04detain.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1165208400&en=02ab7b458c838c22&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin)
By DEBORAH SONTAG
December 4, 2006


One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C.


That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.


“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”


http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/03/us/04detainl.arge2.jpghttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif
In the videotape, Mr. Padilla's feet were shackled.


Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.


Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.


The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/03/us/04detain.large3.jpg
The date of the tape has not been disclosed.


To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial scheduled for late January.


Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct,” saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy combatant.


Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”


A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”


“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”


In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”


Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.


Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”


Ali al-Marri, a Qatari and Saudi dual citizen and the only enemy combatant currently detained in the United States, has made similar claims of isolation and deprivation at the brig in South Carolina. The Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Vician, said Sunday that he could not comment on the methods used to escort Mr. Padilla to the dentist. Blackened goggles and earphones are rarely employed in internal prison transports in the United States, but riot gear is sometimes used for violent prisoners.


One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.


In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”


Federal prosecutors and defense lawyers are locked in a tug of war over the relevancy of Mr. Padilla’s military detention to the present criminal case. Federal prosecutors have asked the judge to forbid Mr. Padilla’s lawyers from mentioning the circumstances of his military detention during the trial, maintaining that their accusations could “distract and inflame the jury.”


But defense lawyers say it is unconscionable to ignore Mr. Padilla’s military detention because, among other reasons, it altered him in a way that will impinge on his trial.


Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”


“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.


Mr. Padilla’s status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy combatant last fall. At the time, the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention — and thus the issue of the president’s authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him indefinitely without charges — when the Bush administration pre-empted its decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.


Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.


Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a “North American terror support cell” that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas “to participate in violent jihad” and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.


Michael Caruso, a public defender for Mr. Padilla, pleaded “absolutely not guilty” for him to charges of conspiracy and of providing material support to terrorists. Mr. Padilla faces two charges that each carry a maximum penalty of 15 years.


Over the summer, Judge Marcia G. Cooke of United States District Court in Miami threw out the most serious charge, of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country, saying that it replicated accusations in the other counts and could lead to multiple punishments for a single crime. This was a setback for the government, which has appealed the dismissal.


Mr. Padilla’s lawyers say they have had a difficult time persuading him that they are on his side.


From the time Mr. Padilla was allowed access to counsel, Mr. Patel visited him repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court.


But, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit, his client is nonetheless mistrustful. “Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme,” Mr. Patel said.


Mr. do Campo said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative, and that he expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about sports and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears.


But the defense lawyers’ questions often echo the questions interrogators have asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the lawyers said.


Dr. Hegarty said Mr. Padilla refuses to review the video recordings of his interrogations, which have been released to his lawyers but remain classified.


He is especially reluctant to discuss what happened in the brig, fearful that he will be returned there some day, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit.


“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” Mr. Patel said. “The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Things have gotten really out of whack ...



FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL)

New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death

Military Christianism Watch (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/12/military_christ.html)

Andrew Sullivan
13 Dec 2006 04:44 pm

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/images/kevin_pat_350_1.jpg (http://time.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/kevin_pat_350_1.jpg)


A reader pointed me to this stunning passage (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=tillmanpart1) in an ESPN.com story about the death of Pat Tillman:
[Lt. Col. Ralph] Kauzlarich, [formerly the Army officer who directed the first official inquiry,] now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.



In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."



Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans' religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system . So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know ... [T]here [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, 'OK, it was an unfortunate accident.' And they let it go. So this is —[B] I don't know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."
What has happened to the U.S. military under Bush? Are non-Christians now unwelcome?

(Family photo of Kevin and Pat Tillman, from Kevin Tillman. Kevin's open letter about the war can be read here (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/10/quote_for_the_d_25.html).)

[Ninjahedge]

They are grasping at straws.

When you have nothing else to turn to, turn to Religion.

[JCMAN320]

'Blind sheik' ailing, triggering fears of attack

Terrorist cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, the imprisoned spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers who once lived and preached in Jersey City, may be nearing death — leading to fears that his demise could trigger an attack on the United States, officials said today.

There is no credible indication that an attack on the U.S. is imminent, said several law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation.

In a two-page bulletin, dated Dec. 8, the FBI reported to federal intelligence officials that Rahman, known as "the blind sheik," was rushed from prison to a Missouri hospital two days earlier for a blood transfusion. There, doctors discovered a tumor on Rahmans liver, according to the bulletin, which was described to The Associated Press by a law enforcement official.

Officials said the bulletin served merely as a reminder that Rahman had called for retaliation by terror sympathizers if he died in prison. It cited a May 1998 press conference where al-Qaida members distributed his last will and testament, in which Rahman pleaded for followers to extract the most violent revenge should he die in U.S. custody.

The FBI did not have immediate comment today.

Rahman was sentenced to life in prison after his 1995 conviction for his advisory role in a plot to blow up New York City landmarks, including the United Nations.

His health has deteriorated in recent years, and he was transferred in September 2003 from the federal Supermax prison in Colorado, where the countrys most notorious inmates are held, to the U.S. Medical Center for Prisons in Springfield, Mo. Prisons officials have said Rahman has suffered from diabetes, which has threatened the loss of his limbs.

Associated Press

[ManhattanKnight]

January 13, 2007

Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees

By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the American Bar Association, said: “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”

In an interview on Friday, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said he had no problem with the current system of representation. “Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases,” he said.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson’s view. His comments “do not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its leadership,” a senior Pentagon official said. He would not allow his name to be used, seemingly to lessen the force of his rebuke. Mr. Stimson did not return a call on Friday seeking comment.

The role of major law firms agreeing to take on the cases of Guantánamo prisoners challenging their detentions in federal courts has hardly been a secret and has been the subject of many news articles that have generally cast their efforts in a favorable light. Michael Ratner, who heads the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based human rights group that is coordinating the legal representation for the Guantánamo detainees, said about 500 lawyers from about 120 law firms had volunteered their services to represent Guantánamo prisoners.

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Lawyers expressed outrage at that, asserting that they are not being paid and that Mr. Stimson had tried to suggest they were by innuendo. Of the approximately 500 lawyers coordinated by the Center for Constitutional Rights, no one is being paid, Mr. Ratner said. One Washington law firm, Shearman & Sterling, which has represented Kuwaiti detainees, has received money from the families of the prisoners, but Thomas Wilner, a lawyer there, said they had donated all of it to charities related to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Mr. Ratner said that there were two other defense lawyers not under his group’s umbrella and that he did not know whether they were paid.

Christopher Moore, a lawyer at the New York firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton who represented an Uzbeki detainee who has since been released, said: “We believe in the concept of justice and that every person is entitled to counsel. Any suggestion that our representation was anything other than a pro bono basis is untrue and unprofessional.” Mr. Moore said he had made four trips to Guantánamo and one to Albania at the firm’s expense, to see his client freed.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to President Bush on Friday asking him to disavow Mr. Stimson’s remarks.

Mr. Stimson, who was a Navy lawyer, graduated from George Mason University Law School. In a 2006 interview with the magazine of Kenyon College, his alma mater, Mr. Stimson said that he was learning “to choose my words carefully because I am a public figure on a very, very controversial topic.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Dis-Bar that MF ^^^

Bush World Order: Habeus corpus tossed out. Suspects are guilty until proven innocent. No Due Process.

To hell in a handbasket ...

[hobo]

The U.S.A. is the triumphant single `superpower`.The cold-war lasted many years and the country still retains huge defensive/offensive capabilities.It is the worlds most affluent country.The working population of the States pay vast amounts of taxes of which a massive percentage goes towards defences.New York City,because of its large amount of skyscrapers all together within such a small area should have been the globes most protected territory.The safety of passengers using aeroplanes (and trains)
should be paramount.The responsibility of the passengers safety is that of the planes manufacturers and also the airlines that use the planes.These should have ensured that for anyone to try to hijack a plane would not be possible.
It should also not have been possible for any plane at all to be able to approach N.Y.C.
Thus,money was not a problem,neither was armaments.Considering theres the
availability of modern day technology including satellites and early-warning systems etc.how was it allowed to be possible for a small group of foreign extremists to knock out the `Big Apples` two front teeth ?

[Ninjahedge]

Rhetorical question, it seems, but here is an answer:

It is VERY difficult in a non-elevated state to be able to act with surest definition and cause to a perceived threat that is that close.

The ball was dropped on the investigation side, as direct intervention at time of implimentation is more than just "risky".

The assasin should have been taken out before he eve got on the field. We should not be asking why he was not sniped before he could make his shot.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Steve Chapman

Never mind what we said about spying


Published January 21, 2007

Is President Bush surrendering in the war on terror? For more than a year, the administration has insisted that preserving its "terrorist surveillance program," which involves unfettered and unauthorized wiretapping of Americans suspected of communicating with Al Qaeda operatives abroad, was, in the words of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, "a vital tool" for us "to stay a step ahead of a deadly enemy that is determined to strike America again." Now, Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales says the program will not be renewed.

Before, we were told it was impossible to combat terrorism within the confines of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which places such investigations under the review of a special intelligence court--a process Gonzales portrayed as cumbersome and obsolete.

But that was in the past. "Any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," wrote Gonzales in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Did we say impossible? We meant easy!

This about-face must be causing massive cognitive dissonance within the administration and among conservatives who regard any check on executive power as a favor to Al Qaeda. From the moment the secret National Security Agency program was revealed by The New York Times in 2005, Republicans treated its critics as foolish appeasers.

Never mind that it apparently violated the law, and never mind that it let the government spy on Americans right here at home, without bothering to get the search warrants that are normally required. Issues of legality, constitutionality and privacy cut no ice with the administration and its supporters. Either you were for the program, or you preferred to expose us to catastrophe.

During last fall's campaign, Bush mercilessly ridiculed congressional critics. "They must not think we're at war," he charged. "When the Terrorist Surveillance Program was brought to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, the vast majority of Democrats voted against it." So when, exactly, did the war end?

Even stalwart administration allies are asking that question. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal, which defended the program from the start, declared itself "baffled by Mr. Bush's surrender" and warned that the "administration has some explaining to do--not least to its own officials who spent months saying FISA warrants were dangerously restrictive."

Contrary to the president's suggestions, critics were never against surveillance of Al Qaeda confederates in the United States. They only wanted the government to do what cops normally do when they want to eavesdrop: go to a judge and explain why the person targeted warrants investigation. In an emergency, FISA even allows the NSA to install the wire-tap first and seek approval within 72 hours. But that wasn't good enough for the administration.

The attorney general now says the NSA no longer has to operate as it did because the Justice Department worked with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to devise a faster, more flexible way to get a judge's approval of wiretaps. But if there is a way to do that, why did the administration wait five years to propose it?

Congress, after all, has amended FISA several times since it was enacted. Yet the White House chose to circumvent the law and create a secret program that, if the president had his way, would still be spying on Americans without our knowledge.

We don't know exactly how the program will operate under the court's supervision, because Gonzales refuses to say. But apparently the administration has succumbed to the once-intolerable burden of demonstrating to judges that certain people pose a danger before they are bugged.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, says Justice Department officials assured him the eavesdropping will proceed on the basis of old-fashioned individualized warrants, not simply a blanket court approval of what the NSA was doing. Other sources told The Washington Post that such warrants are one part of the new system. So apparently we can fight Al Qaeda without giving up our privacy protections.

Maybe we were misled before, or maybe we're being misled now. But the next time the president tries to sell us on the idea that some expansion of executive power is critical to fighting terrorism, I hope he'll throw in the Brooklyn Bridge.

----------

E-mail: schapman@tribune.com

[ZippyTheChimp]

January 20, 2007

Two Governors Appeal for Antiterror Aid

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

HOBOKEN, N.J., Jan 19 — Warning that it would be a “grave mistake” to further reduce antiterrorism financing to the nation’s busiest urban center, Govs. Eliot Spitzer of New York and Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey pressed the Bush administration on Friday for a substantial increase in federal money to improve security for the region’s highways and mass transit lines.

Appearing at a news conference in Hoboken Terminal that tens of thousands of commuters to Manhattan pass through each day, Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Corzine released a letter to the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, saying that their efforts to deter another terror attack had been set back by substantial cuts in financing for counterterrorism announced in June.

Since the June announcement, the federal government has changed the guidelines used to determine aid, combining parts of New York and New Jersey, and officials in both states have said they worry that new classification system could foreshadow additional cuts.

Mr. Chertoff said this month that the new classification system would not necessarily mean that the region would receive less money because it would be distributed based on risk.

“To say, for example, the risk for New York is at this level and the risk if you cross the Hudson River is at a much lower level doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Mr. Chertoff said.

But Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Corzine, both Democrats, said they wanted to speak out now, while the financing levels are being determined in Washington.

“There could be a temptation through combining the risk analysis, to reduce the overall level of funding awards,” the letter says. “That would be a grave mistake and would only serve to undermine the public’s confidence.”

Federal antiterrorism aid to New York City dropped to $127 million from $204 million in the 2006 fiscal year.

New Jersey fared slightly better: aid to its six densely populated northern counties climbed to $34.3 million, up from $19.4 million. For the rest of the state, there was a sharp cut in grants, to $17.7 million, down from $36.3 million last year.

The news conference was the first joint public appearance of the two governors since Mr. Spitzer took office. While Mr. Corzine has had several border disputes with Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, and previous New York and New Jersey governors have periodically jousted over Port Authority spending and sports franchises, Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Corzine say they have a cordial working relationship.

Neither Mr. Corzine nor Mr. Spitzer would cite a specific dollar amount they sought from Washington, but said that five years after the 9/11 attacks, the region’s infrastructure remained vulnerable.

“I feel kind of like a college student calling home and saying, ‘Just send money,’ ” Mr. Spitzer said.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[ManhattanKnight]

Dis-Bar that MF



February 3, 2007

Official Quits After Remark on Lawyers

By SARAH ABRUZZESE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — The senior Pentagon official who set off a controversy last month with remarks suggesting that corporations should consider severing business ties with law firms that represent Guantánamo Bay detainees has resigned.

The official, Charles D. Stimson, deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, said that it was his decision to resign and that he was not asked to leave by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, said Bryan Whitman, a spokesman for the Pentagon.

“He determined that it was going to hamper his ability to be effective in this position,” Mr. Whitman said.

Mr. Stimson’s comments in an interview on Jan. 11 on Federal News Radio angered many lawyers and caused the Defense Department to distance itself publicly from his remarks.

In the interview, Mr. Stimson named more than 12 firms that are defending detainees.

“I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms,” Mr. Stimson said.

Mr. Stimson, a former Navy defense lawyer, wrote an apology published in The Washington Post, saying the remarks did not reflect his “core beliefs.”
On Jan. 24, the Bar Association of San Francisco requested that the State Bar of California investigate Mr. Stimson for possible violations of California ethics rules, the San Francisco group’s Web site says.

The president of the American Bar Association, Karen J. Mathis, said that she could not comment on the resignation, but that by reacting to his comments “the American public reaffirmed its commitment to a core principle of our justice system: that every accused person deserves adequate legal representation.”

Mr. Whitman said Mr. Stimson did a lot for the department “with respect to setting policy standards, increasing transparency and working with international organizations and allies, with respect to the nature of our detention operations.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Adios, A**Hole :cool:

Now let's make sure there's no "early retirement" compensation package / pension / etc. in place -- no need for this slug to feed off our tax dollars ad infinitum.

[lofter1]

The neo-cons are SO desperate to justify themselves that they can't think straight ...

Dispatch From Gomorrah,
Savaging the Cultural Left

nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/books/06kaku.html)
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
February 6, 2007

Books of The Times

THE ENEMY AT HOME

The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11

By Dinesh D’Souza 333 pages. Doubleday. $26.95.
With this book, Dinesh D’Souza, the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has officially become the Ann Coulter of the think tank set.


His new book, “The Enemy at Home,” is filled with willfully incendiary — and preposterous — assertions that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11”; that the left is “secretly allied” with the movement that Osama bin Laden and Islamic radicals represent “to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy”; and that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.”


He writes that American prisons at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib “are comparable to the accommodations in midlevel Middle Eastern hotels” in terms of cleanliness, food and amenities, and argues that abuse at Abu Ghraib did not reflect a disregard for human rights, but rather “the sexual immodesty of liberal America.” (“Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of blue America.”)


Whereas “Illiberal Education,” the book that made Mr. D’Souza a conservative star back in 1991, had some illuminating points to make about the excesses of political correctness on college campuses, this embarrassing volume is an out-and-out partisan screed made up of illogical arguments, distorted and cherry-picked information, ridiculous generalizations and nutty asides. It’s a nasty stewpot of intellectually untenable premises and irresponsible speculation that frequently reads like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of the crackpot right. It gives conservatism a bad name while viciously throwing oil on the partisan fires already burning in red state, blue state America.


Mr. D’Souza’s central thesis is an absurd one, constructed around two clashing arguments: 1) that the American left is allied to the Islamic radical movement to undermine the Bush White House and American foreign policy; and 2) that “the left is the primary reason for Islamic anti-Americanism as well as the anti-Americanism of other traditional cultures around the world” because “liberals defend and promote values that are controversial in America and deeply revolting to people in traditional societies, especially in the Muslim world.”


By “cultural left,” Mr. D’Souza says he does not mean the entire Democratic Party or all liberals, but he includes on his list of “domestic insurgents” not just the usual lefty suspects, like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, but also mainstream politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert Byrd and Jimmy Carter, and journalists like Garry Wills, Seymour Hersh and several New York Times columnists.


To flesh out his theories, Mr. D’Souza tosses out lots of assertions based on false information, partial truths and unrepresentative anecdotes. For instance, he repeatedly asserts that Osama bin Laden hates America because “the cultural left has fostered a decadent American culture,” not because of United States foreign policy. He says Muslims couldn’t possibly have seen a threat to Islam in the presence of United States troops in Saudi Arabia, because the American base there “is more than five hundred miles from Islam’s holy sites”; nor could they be driven to suicide attacks by the Israeli-Palestinian situation because Israel is but “a small irritant within the vast expanse of Islamic territory.”


He ignores the host of experts like the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer and the terrorism analyst Peter Bergen who have cited, as Mr. bin Laden’s chief grievances against America, the continued presence of American troops on the Arabian peninsula after the first gulf war, the United States’s sustained support of Israel and its backing of regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, regarded as apostates by Al Qaeda. He also ignores the observation made by Lawrence Wright in his energetically researched book “The Looming Tower” that Mr. bin Laden does not seem driven by a hatred of American culture, but has even allowed his younger sons to play Nintendo and has shown Hollywood thrillers to trainees in Qaeda camps.


As for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. D’Souza writes that “the important point is that 50 million Afghans and Iraqis are free, and for the first time in their history, they have a chance to control their own destiny,” and further that “liberals tend to emphasize the negative and take genuine relish in the failures of American foreign policy.”


He ignores the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan, which many Bush critics pin on the administration’s decision to shift its focus to Iraq. He ignores the plethora of reports about deepening sectarian divisions in Iraq and a worsening security situation. And he ignores polls indicating that a majority of Americans — not just leftists or liberals — disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war.


For that matter, Mr. D’Souza leaves out anything that might reflect poorly on the current Bush administration, while zeroing in on anything that might reflect poorly on Democrats or liberals. He excoriates Bill Clinton for not doing enough to get Mr. bin Laden, but says little about the failures of the Bush White House to bear down on Al Qaeda in the wake of early 2001 warnings from the counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke and an Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily brief titled “Osama bin Laden Determined to Attack the U.S.”


He similarly denounces liberals for promoting ideas like women’s rights around the world: this meddling, he argues, angers Muslims who see such foreign forms of liberation as undermining their religion and traditional family values. But he praises the Bush administration for trying to export democracy to Iraq.


In the course of this book, Mr. D’Souza rages against the separation of church and state in American public life, and denounces what he calls “Secular Warriors” who are “trying to eradicate every public trace of the religious and moral values that most of the world lives by.” He contends that freedom in America “has come to be defined by its grossest abuses” and complains that in movies and television shows, “the white businessman in the suit is usually the villain,” “prostitutes are always portrayed more favorably and decently than anyone who criticizes them” and “homosexuals are typically presented as good-looking and charming, and unappealing features of the gay lifestyle are either ignored or presented in an amusing light.”


In this shrill, slipshod book, Mr. D’Souza often sounds as if he has a lot in common with those radical Middle Eastern mullahs who are eager to subject daily life to religious strictures and want to curtail individuals’ freedoms and civil liberties.


It’s an interpretation he does not deny: “Yes,” he writes, “I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[JCMAN320]

Gov tells feds: Hands off N.J. chem plant rules

Friday, February 09, 2007
By RON MARSICO
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

New Jersey should be allowed to maintain stricter chemical plant security rules than the federal government, Gov. Jon Corzine said in a letter released yesterday.

Corzine sent the correspondence to Michael Chertoff, the U.S. Homeland Security secretary, outlining the state's position that upcoming federal rules to safeguard the nation from attacks or disasters at chemical plants likely would not be sufficient for New Jersey.

"New Jersey's critical infrastructure concentration and high population density may have no comparison in the United States," Corzine wrote on Wednesday to Chertoff, who has lived and worked in the Garden State.

"Our state needs to retain the ability to go beyond any federal security baseline standard to ensure that our preparedness safeguards our citizens," added the governor, who also pushed chemical security initiatives while a U.S. senator.

New Jersey's rules, for example, require dozens of larger chemical plants to examine the adoption of "inherently safer technology," which involves using processes or materials less vulnerable to a possible attack.

Russ Knocke, a DHS spokesman, said the agency's rules will be designed to achieve safeguards in a variety of areas, including preventing internal sabotage and creating enhanced perimeter security at chemical plants.

"We certainly appreciate the work that states like New Jersey have done," Knocke said. "But ultimately, state laws cannot conflict with federal authority when it comes to chemical plant security strategies."

The chemical industry has lobbied to keep states from being allowed to supersede federal rules with tougher standards. Corzine's letter was submitted just within the comment period as the U.S. government readies specific rules to implement a new federal chemical security law passed last year.

New Jersey passed a tougher law in recent years than proposals currently under consideration by Chertoff, and Corzine cautioned: "It would be a terrible mistake to undermine the great work that New Jersey has done, or the future flexibility to implement additional security measures."

[lofter1]

Could be a collision of Constitutional proportions brewing there ^^^

[Ninjahedge]

Federal does not have the right to superceed on this.

This is a state right, one where stricter measures are allowed for the safety of its people.

Might be a detriment to NJ's industry base though.

[lofter1]

Federal does not have the right to superceed on this.

That's how most of us read the Constitution -- but not necessarily how it is read by the boys in the White House.

Wouldn't be surprised if there is some wording in the Patriot Act that they can point to to say "We control on this matter". And GWB seems to think that he can draw up a "Presidential Directive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_directive)" that supercedes everything.

[TimmyG]

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- New York City will be protected by a ring of devices to detect nuclear or dirty bombs before the end of the year, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.
A dirty bomb is one that spreads radiation without employing a nuclear explosion.
The Department of Homeland Security hopes the circle of sensors will give warning if a bomb is transported into the city by land.
Most previous detection efforts have focused on preventing a bomb from being smuggled into the city by sea.
Under the "Securing the Cities" initiative, detectors will be placed along highways, at truck stops, in weigh stations and at other sites on the perimeter of New York, as well as locations closer to the city center, an official said. Locations will not be made public "for obvious reasons," the official said.
The department's proposed 2008 budget would provide $30 million for the project, in addition to the roughly $16 million that has already been invested. The New York project will serve as a test for other cities, the official said.
Homeland Security is building the network in cooperation with the New York Police Department and other state and local governments in New York and New Jersey. Local governments will respond to any alarms.
"We expect to have this operational this year," the official said. He said the participants are working to establish protocols on how to operate the system and respond to alerts.

[lofter1]

Oh, good ... I feel better now.

Those Homeland Security guys have a pretty good track record, right?

[JCMAN320]

State will expand chemical rules

Saturday, March 17, 2007
BY DEBORAH HOWLETT
Star-Ledger Staff

Gov. Jon Corzine said yesterday the state will impose strict safety rules on nearly twice as many chemical and industrial plants in New Jersey as it currently does.

The governor called the expansion a "major step forward" in reducing the potential threat of a terrorist attack.

"We are blessed with both a chemical and petroleum-based in dustry," Corzine said. "And that's good. We want to keep it. But we also want to protect the public from the threats associated with it."

The new rules would require 94 facilities -- chemical plants, oil refineries, industrial food processors and even water treatment plants -- to find safer ways to handle the potentially lethal chemicals they use or use less dangerous chemicals al together.

Currently, 42 chemical plants abide by such standards imposed after 9/11.

Hal Bozarth of the Chemical Council of New Jersey said manufacturers have willingly gone along with the standards, spending $150 million the past five years to make plants safer and more secure.

"We've been glad to do everything we could," Bozarth said. The new standards aren't likely to be a major issue, he said, but the process has just begun and the rules haven't yet been published for review.

Lisa Jackson, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, acknowledged the state has successfully worked with industry to set standards, but the expansion of the program necessitated the more formal rule-making process.

"Now is the time to go forward with regulations," Jackson said. "Those regulations will reflect reality."

New Jersey has the toughest chemical plant regulations among all states, according to Bozarth, but that could change under new federal regulations currently in the works. The federal Department of Homeland Security is expected to adopt rules in early April that might negate state rules like those New Jersey has imposed.

"It's another example of the current administration in Washington actually implementing its anti- regulatory policies under the guise of homeland security," Corzine said.

The federal pre-emption of state rules, Corzine said, was an effort by President Bush to appease the chemical industry, which has supported the single federal standard because it presents "a level playing field" for manufacturers nationwide.

Corzine said North Jersey is far different from western Nebraska and should have different rules. He pointed out the federal government, under Bush, cited a stretch of the Turnpike near the airport in Newark as the most dangerous two-mile stretch of road in the country because of the threat of a terrorist attack on chemical plants.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) will hold a committee hearing Monday in Newark to address the issue of federal pre-emption on chemical plant security. Corzine is expected to testify.

State Homeland Security Director Richard Canas said while the new rules may address safety issues, they are of critical importance in dealing with a potential terrorist attack. A rupture of one 90-ton tank of chlorine along the Turnpike, whether accidental or intentional, could spread a toxic cloud over a 25-mile radius.

"There is a crossover between safety and security," Canas said.

The new rules would require all 94 facilities to undergo recurring state reviews. The changes that might be required could range from re-routing a pipe to reconfiguring production so that a plant doesn't need to store vast amounts of chlorine.

The department will also issue an administrative order for one- time reviews of safety and security at another 330 facilities.

The new state regulations will be published in early May and then will undergo a six-month period of public comment before being formally adopted by the Department of Environmental Protection.


Deborah Howlett may be reached at (609) 989-0273 or dhowlett@star ledger.com.

[PhilosopherWarrior]

I am a NYC native. Greetings to all and in the hope of being part of our city's public dialogue, I shall add to this discussion.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War and the WORLDWIDE OIL EMBARGO was a real declaration of war.. if not the archaic custom of formal diplomatic State
documents, but the real ACTS of War. At the time the Soviet Empire was actively fomenting ideological "fronts" and States throughout the world. The Baathist ideology THEN was a grave danger to western economic vitality in the mid east. Iraq, Syria,Egypt and rab/islamic society identified and supported those socialist/nationalistic agendas. The growing religious resentment ( this is also another discussion ) was aided and abetted by the education and exposure to marxism ( see Michelle Aflack of Lebanon ) and the fervor of revolution was seized by the islamic "back-to-god" impulse.

As far as our Nation and our civilization ( loosely labelled "euro-judeo-christian-democratic constitutions)is concerned..
regardless of the past generations mistakes...
are critically threatened by opposition organizations ( from State dictators to fiery imams) who CAN and WILL blackmail and terrorize every citizen that stands against them.
The bin Laden manifesto printed in the London Times is a rambling declaration of armed aggression against Israel, America, and every other peoples that do not accept the error of their decadence and submit to a global caliphate.
Read it yourselves. He rambles on and includes great riffs on technology, industrialisation ( the obligatory marxian "alienation" ) and the decadence of "the great evil" of american society. He expresses explicit aims that , in addition to the dominance of orthodox Islam, the destruction of the economic democratic "engine" that IS American/Western civilization MUST and WILL be accomplished.

The strategy of demoralisation, and the tactics of violent, random destruction and savage opppression IS explicit and is a successful one for an "insurgency".
The strategy DEPENDS on a multifaceted and focused propaganda effort. It could NOT be effective without the aid and support by covert domestic "agents". The western media has been instrumental in the dissemination of the marxian perspective in academia for decades... It has been the driving force and the main weapon used against us since the seventies.

As long as the "cachet" of revolution and the visceral passion of resentment
and jealousy can be tapped the weapons of fear and cowardice will win.

It seems as if their are many who would rather hide and let the thugs have their guns, bombs, and TV cameras.

[Ninjahedge]

Did you cut-paste that from another site?

You could at least do us the favor of removing the line-breaks you have in there so it is easier to read when our browser windows are not set to the same width as yours!!!

:rolleyes:

[ZippyTheChimp]

April 27, 2007

Saudis Arrest 172 in Anti-Terror Sweep

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, April 27 — Saudi security officials said Friday that they had broken up a vast terrorist ring, arresting 172 men who planned to blow up oil installations, attack public officials and military posts, and storm a prison to free terrorist suspects.

The wide-ranging plot was uncovered over seven months, officials said, as one lead yielded another, allowing the authorities to seize a cache of weapons buried in the desert and more than $5.3 million in cash.

The government referred to the ring as a “deviant group,” the phrase often used to describe the ideology of Al Qaeda.

“This did not happen overnight,” said Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. “This gives you the idea that terrorists are still trying to re-establish the activities in the kingdom. It is still a war going on.”

Officials said that the suspects had trained abroad, in Somalia, Afghanistan and especially Iraq. The chaos in Iraq has fueled radical ideology among the region’s youth while providing an environment for militants to train, officials and analysts here said.

“It is the beginning of jihadi operations leaking out of Iraq,” said Abdul Aziz al-Qassim, a retired Saudi judge and moderate Islamic activist. “It is clear that this is some of the effects of what is happening in Iraq, in terms of training and in terms of learning from the Iraqi experience.”

An Interior Ministry statement said there were seven cells scattered around the country, comprised mostly of Saudi nationals. Some suspects had begun training to use weapons and others had been sent abroad to learn to pilot aircraft, though the authorities did not say what, specifically, the pilot training was intended for.

The statement also said that some weapons had been stored near targets and that one group was on the verge of launching its attacks.

In images broadcast on state television, investigators were shown digging up arms in the desert, including plastic explosives, handguns and rifles wrapped in plastic sheeting.

“One of their main targets was to carry out suicide attacks against public figures and oil installations and to target military bases inside and outside,” the statement said.

In Washington, American intelligence officials said it appeared that the Saudis had disrupted a plot by Al Qaeda. One intelligence official said the plot was “well beyond aspirational,” but declined to say how close the militants were to launching the operation.

General Turki said the investigation was an ongoing operation in the kingdom’s battle against an entrenched ideology that promotes terrorism and seeks to recruit young people. The official statement repeatedly referred to “takfir ideology,” a view that effectively allows one Muslim to declare another Muslim an apostate, or nonbeliever, and then kill that person.

“We have never actually said we have reached an end,” General Turki said in an interview. “We always confirm that security forces’ efforts are not enough. Not unless you really tackle the ideology that is inspiring these people in order to be involved in these activities.”

The Saudi leadership was forced to address the rise of radical, violent Islamic thinking within its borders after the 9/11 attacks, where 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi.

But the kingdom has had its own history of violence and at one time — after the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by militants in 1979 — found security in supporting some of the most radical Sunni Muslim religious voices. At the time, Saudi officials were also concerned about the Islamic revolution in Iran, which brought a Shiite government to power.

But in recent years, the ideology promoted by Al Qaeda has called for bringing down the royal family, saying it is un-Islamic. Security was stepped up markedly here after the American Consulate in Jidda was attacked and a housing complex for foreigners was bombed.

In recent months there has been a failed attempt to blow up an oil installation, the murder of three French citizens and the beheading of a state security officer, all actions that the authorities here link to the ongoing struggle with the most radical ideology. Officials have decided that in addition to relying on the security forces, they will try to “re-educate” those suspected of terrorist links.

The approach has led to a joke going around Riyadh that says the best way to get a job and a new house is to join Al Qaeda — and then repent to the government. General Turki said that when officials change the minds of those caught, the prisoners also end up as useful informers.

“If they change their view, they work against the ideology, they help you, they tell you things,” he said. “They tell you how you can improve your actions to prevent the continuation of the ideology.”

The case announced on Friday showed just how much of a challenge the government faces. The number of people was large, officials acknowledged, and came just six months after another 136 people were arrested in a similar sweep and charged with plotting similar crimes, the general said.

“The fact that these young men were recruited points to a huge failure in fighting Al Qaeda,” said Faris bin Hizam, a writer specializing in Al Qaeda. “Fighting Al Qaeda involves a security side and an ideological side. The security side is successful but the other side of combating Al Qaeda is ideological and it is not successful.”

The announcement of the plot was made on Friday, the day of prayer and rest, when all offices are closed. What was most unnerving to some was the government’s description of one of the cells: Officials said it was made up of 61 men, mostly Saudis, who had traveled with their leader to Islam’s holiest site, in Mecca, where “they promised to obey him and promised complete obedience.”

“Al Qaeda is no longer an organized structure,” said Mr. Qassim, the retired judge. “It became an ideology and a system of work. This is Al Qaeda now.”

Reporting for this article was contributed by Mona el Naggar.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Transic]

But of course, it's all a false flag operation designed to distract all of us from the "real problems" that are happening.:rolleyes:

[Ninjahedge]

But of course, it's all a false flag operation designed to distract all of us from the "real problems" that are happening.:rolleyes:

Do you have something to add to this besides putting speculated words into the mouths of the people you disagree with?

[Transic]

It is the truth. But, OK, you don't think it is. I can't convince you otherwise.

[Ninjahedge]

It is the truth. But, OK, you don't think it is. I can't convince you otherwise.

Then stop trying. Especially with drive-by tags intended to try and invalidate an entire postulation simply by associating it with something totally unrelated and politically striating.

Statements are only as distracting as we let them to be.

[ZippyTheChimp]

July 13, 2007

When Orange Is an Agent of Government, Guess Who Bears the Brunt?

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Yesterday might well have been called Orange Day in New York. It was the anniversary of the Orange riots of 1870 and 1871: battles in the city between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics on July 12 of each of those years. Some accounts put the total death toll at 75.

In another sense, every day is Orange Day in New York.

That is the shade of the terror alert we live with, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded system of threat levels. Orange signifies a “high” risk of attack, a status that the city shares only with airliners. The rest of the country is deemed safer, its risk pegged at yellow, or “elevated.” Aren’t we the lucky ones?

Yet odds are that the average New Yorker spends more time wondering about the latest colors from Dolce & Gabbana than from Washington.

Given how the system was used in the past — abused is more like it, critics say — it became fodder for late-night television comics. Many stopped taking it seriously. The government clearly heard them laughing. Can anyone remember the last time it put the country on its color-coded yo-yo, going up and down, up and down?

Now, colorlessly, the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, offers a different sort of warning. He has a “gut feeling,” he said this week, about a heightened terror risk this summer. Not that there is “any specific, credible information about an imminent threat against the U.S.,” Mr. Chertoff acknowledged yesterday on NBC’s “Today” program. Just, you know, a gut feeling.

At a news conference yesterday, President Bush was asked what his own gut told him. “My gut tells me that — which my head tells me as well — is that when we find a credible threat, I’ll share it with people to make sure that we protect the homeland,” Mr. Bush said.

So here we are, once again trying to decipher Delphic pronouncements from those charged with keeping us safe. Given New York’s exalted orange status, who has more reason to keep eyes peeled than us? But what exactly are we supposed to look for or to do? Rummage through the sock drawer for scraps of plastic sheeting and maybe a discarded roll of duct tape? Avoid ballparks and movie theaters? Keep off buses and subways?

Mr. Chertoff’s “gut feeling” is an echo of vague admonitions from his Homeland Security predecessor, Tom Ridge, and from other senior officials. You may recall back-to-back warnings issued in May 2002. Vice President Dick Cheney said a new Al Qaeda attack was “almost certain,” and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, called suicide bombings in this country “inevitable.”

No sensible person doubts that we face real threats from Islamic fanatics. It is why most New Yorkers have accepted with little protest glancing blows to civil liberties in the form of increased camera surveillance on streets and random bag inspections in the subways. The failed car bombings in London and Glasgow — a plot hatched by doctors, no less, the British authorities say — are sobering reminders of the risks.

Still, “gut feelings” and other unspecific warnings may only reinforce a sense many people already have that the government’s message amounts to little more than: Always be afraid, be very afraid. A similar theme is echoed by some presidential candidates, not the least of them New York’s former mayor.

The thing is, though, Al Qaeda’s leaders are supposed to be the ones running scared, not New Yorkers, who at times find themselves whipsawed emotionally when it comes to terrorism threats.

Last month, for example, law enforcement officials disclosed what they called a plot to blow up fuel pipelines and storage tanks at Kennedy International Airport. The potential devastation was described as “unfathomable.” But then officials suggested that everyone take a deep breath; the plot was barely embryonic, they said, and system safeguards would have prevented any explosion from turning into a catastrophe.

Many New Yorkers probably share the view of Representative Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He wrote to Mr. Chertoff, reminding him that “words have power” and must be chosen “wisely.”

“What color code in the Homeland Security Advisory System is associated with a ‘gut feeling’?” Mr. Thompson wrote.

Actually, there might be two colors: black and blue. They’re what you get when you’ve been bruised.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Punzie]

Yet odds are that the average New Yorker spends more time wondering about the latest colors from Dolce & Gabbana than from Washington.
Annoying analogy and untrue. Mr. Haberman seems to be out of touch with New York demographics.

(Does he get kickbacks for product placement?)

[Ninjahedge]

Annoying analogy and untrue. Mr. Haberman seems to be out of touch with New York demographics.

(Does he get kickbacks for product placement?)


Actually, I spent more time wondering about who Dolce and Gabbana was than the current terror threat color.

So, he is right in that sense.

Would you rather he have said they are wondering what the lates colors were in the generic fasion industry? This was a sarcastic satirical comment Rap, why are you focusing on that?

[lofter1]

I get annoyed as well at the NY Times articles which are often geared to those who earn mega-bucks (the Dolce Gabbana comment fits into that category), i.e.: suggestions of entryway tables costing $2,500, minor clothing items costing $300 +, etc. etc.

It's the business of the Times to generate ad dollars, but in these times of income discrepancy it gets annoying.

Back to Mr. Chertoff's gut:

He's an idiot. And looks like a cadaver. Dump Him.

[eddhead]

To an extent, I believe we may be losing sight of the forrest for the trees. True, the Dolce and Gabbana comments were gratuitous, but the overall gist of the message is on target in my view. There are too many unactionable comments, gradings, and shades of the rainbow eminating from our government.. exactly what do they expect us to do with these ramblings? It is all about warnings and CYA's with no recommendations.

[JCMAN320]

NJ sharing in $64.2M for mass transit, port security

by The Associated PressThursday August 16, 2007, 6:05 PM

New Jersey will get a share of nearly $64.2 million in U.S. Homeland Security funds aimed at securing mass transit and ports in the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan regions, state officials said today.

"The funds will help continue efforts with our regional partners to improve security for hundreds of thousands of commuters," said Richard L. Canas, state Homeland Security and Preparedness director.

The exact amount going to New Jersey, which has yet to be determined, is in addition to a Homeland Security grant of more than $61 million announced last month. That money, directed toward New Jersey police, fire and emergency personnel, is a sizable increase from last year's $52 million anti-terrorism allotment.

In the latest disbursement, New Jersey will get a portion of about $37.2 million being divided for mass transit protection. NJ Transit, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority are among the agencies eligible for grants. Also eligible are regional systems in Westchester County, N.Y., and Connecticut.

That money is in addition to $61 million already awarded to the three states for mass transit security in the coming year.

The latest grant includes $14.9 million in port security grants that is being directed to the northern New Jersey-New York City area. It comes in addition to $27.3 million already announced for the region.

New Jersey is also getting a share of an additional $5.9 million in transit security grants in the Philadelphia area and part of nearly $6.2 million in port security grants for the ports around the Delaware Bay.

Those sums are in addition to the more than $9.7 million for transit security and almost $13.3 million for port security already announced for those areas.

[lofter1]

Will this situation make the illicit use of opiates an act of terror punishable by the laws under the Patriot Act?


Taliban Push Poppy Production to a Record Again


NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26heroin.html?hp)
By DAVID ROHDE
August 26, 2007


LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, Aug. 25 — Afghanistan produced record levels of opium in 2007 for the second straight year, led by a staggering 45 percent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province, according to a new United Nations survey to be released Monday.


The report is likely to spark renewed debate about the United States’ $600 million counternarcotics program in Afghanistan, which has been dogged by security challenges and endemic corruption within the Afghan government.


“I think it is safe to say that we should be looking for a new strategy,” said William B. Wood, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, commenting on the report’s overall findings. “And I think that we are finding one.”


Mr. Wood said the current American programs for eradication, interdiction and alternative livelihoods should be intensified, but he added that spraying poppy crops with herbicide remained “a possibility.” Afghan and British officials have opposed spraying, saying it would drive farmers into the arms of the Taliban.


While the report found that opium production dropped in northern Afghanistan, Western officials briefed on the assessment said, cultivation rose in the south, where Taliban insurgents urge farmers to grow poppies.


Although common farmers make comparatively little from the trade, opium is a major source of financing for the Taliban, who gain public support by protecting farmers’ fields from eradication, according to American officials. They also receive a cut of the trade from traffickers they protect.


In Taliban-controlled areas, traffickers have opened more labs that process raw opium into heroin, vastly increasing its value. The number of drug labs in Helmand rose to roughly 50 from 30 the year before, and about 16 metric tons of chemicals used in heroin production have been confiscated this year.


The Western officials briefed on the report said countrywide production had increased from 2006 to 2007, but they did not know the final United Nations figure. They estimated a countrywide increase of 10 to 30 percent.


The new survey showed positive signs as well, officials said.


The sharp drop in poppy production in the north is likely to make this year’s countrywide increase smaller than the growth in 2006. Last year, a 160 percent increase in Helmand’s opium crop fueled a 50 percent nationwide increase. Afghanistan produced a record 6,100 metric tons of opium poppies last year, 92 percent of the world’s supply. Here in Helmand, the breadth of the poppy trade is staggering. A sparsely populated desert province twice the size of Maryland, Helmand produces more narcotics than any country on earth, including Myanmar, Morocco and Colombia. Rampant poverty, corruption among local officials, a Taliban resurgence and spreading lawlessness have turned the province into a narcotics juggernaut.


Poppy prices that are 10 times higher than those for wheat have so warped the local economy that some farmhands refused to take jobs harvesting legal crops this year, local farmers said. And farmers dismiss the threat of eradication, arguing that so many local officials are involved in the poppy trade that a significant clearing of crops will never be done.


American and British officials say they have a long-term strategy to curb poppy production modeled after successful, decade-long efforts in Pakistan and Thailand. About 7,000 British troops are gradually extending the government’s authority in some areas, they said. And the United States Agency for International Development is mounting a $160 million alternative livelihoods program in southern Afghanistan, most of it in Helmand.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/26/world/26heroin1_lg.jpg
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
A chili farm in Lashkar Gah, a pilot project for lucrative crops, is guarded night and day from thieves.

Loren Stoddard, director of the aid agency’s agriculture program in Afghanistan, cited American-financed agricultural fairs, the introduction of high-paying legal crops and the planned construction of a new industrial park and airport as evidence that alternatives were being created.

Mr. Stoddard, who helped Wal-Mart move into Central America in his previous posting, predicted that poppy production had become so prolific in Helmand that the opium market was flooded and prices were beginning to drop.


“It seems likely they’ll have a rough year this year,” he said, referring to Helmand’s poppy farmers. “Labor prices are up and poppy prices are down. I think they’re going to be looking for new things.”


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/26/world/26heroin2_600.jpg
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Locals, human and bovine, at an American-financed agricultural fair
in Helmand Province that showcased alternative crops.


On Wednesday, Mr. Stoddard and Rory Donohoe, the director of USAID’s Alternative Livelihoods program in southern Afghanistan, attended the first “Helmand Agricultural Festival.” The $300,000 American-financed gathering in Lashkar Gah was an odd cross between a Midwestern county fair and a Central Asian bazaar, designed to show Afghans an alternative to poppies.


Under a scorching sun, thousands of Afghan men meandered among booths describing fish farms, the dairy business and drip-irrigation systems. A generator, cow and goat were raffled off. Wizened elders sat on carpets and sipped green tea.


Some wealthy farmers seemed genuinely interested. Others seemed keen to attend what they saw as a picnic.


When Mr. Stoddard and Mr. Donohoe arrived, they walked through the festival surrounded by a three-man British and Australian security team armed with assault rifles.


“Who won the cow? Who won the cow?” shouted Mr. Stoddard, 38, a burly former food broker from Provo, Utah. “Was it a girl or a guy?”


After Afghans began dancing to traditional drum and flute music, Mr. Donohoe, 29, from San Francisco, briefly joined them.


Afghans gave the fair mixed reviews. Haji Abdul Gafar, 28, a wealthy land-owner, expressed interest in some of the new ideas.


Saber Gul, a 40-year-old laborer, said he was too poor to take advantage. “For those who have livestock and land, they can,” he said. “For us, the poor people, there is nothing.”


Local officials said all the development programs would fail without improved security.


Assadullah Wafa, Helmand’s governor, said his own police were too weak to take and hold territory, and he praised British military attempts to extend his authority. Mr. Wafa said four of Helmand’s 13 districts were under Taliban control. Other officials put the number at six.


Mr. Wafa, who eradicated one-quarter of the acres of the governor in neighboring Kandahar Province, called for Western countries to decrease the demand for heroin.


“In the international legal system, both the growing and consuming are against the law,” he said. “The world is focusing on the production side, not the buying side.”


The day after the agricultural fair, Mr. Stoddard and Mr. Donohoe gave a tour of a $3 million American project to clear a Soviet airbase on the outskirts of town and turn it into an industrial park and civilian airport.


Standing near rusting Soviet fuel tanks, the two men described how pomegranates, a delicacy in Helmand for centuries, would be flown out to burgeoning markets in India and Dubai. Animal feed would be produced from a local mill, marble cut and polished for construction.


“Once we get this air cargo thing going,” Mr. Stoddard said, “it will open up the whole south.”


That afternoon, they showed off a pilot program for growing chili peppers on contract for a company in Dubai. “These kinds of partnerships with private companies are what we want here,” Mr. Donohoe said. “We’ll let the market drive it.”


As the Americans toured the farm, they were guarded by five Afghans and five guards from the British security firm. The farm itself had received guards after local villagers began sneaking in at night and stealing produce. Twenty-four hours a day, 24 Afghan men with assault rifles staff six guard posts that ring the farm, safeguarding chili peppers and other produce.


“Some people would say that security is so bad that you can’t do anything,” Mr. Donohoe said. “But we do it.”


Mr. Wafa, though, said the effort remained too small and was “low quality.”


“There is a proverb in Afghanistan,” he said. “By one flower we cannot mark spring.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Jasonik]

When the Terrorists Were 'Our Guys'

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
February 22, 2008 (http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/022108a.html)

In 1976, when George H.W. Bush was CIA director, the U.S. government tolerated right-wing terrorist cells inside the United States and mostly looked the other way when these killers topped even Palestinian terrorists in spilling blood, including a lethal car bombing in Washington, D.C., according to newly obtained internal government documents.

That car bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, on Washington’s Embassy Row, killed Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, while wounding Moffitt’s husband.

It soon became clear to the FBI and other federal investigators that the attack likely was a joint operation of DINA, the fearsome Chilean intelligence agency of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, and U.S.-based right-wing Cuban exiles.

But Bush’s CIA steered attention away from the real assassins toward leftists who supposedly killed Letelier to create a martyr for their cause. Eventually, the CIA’s cover story collapsed and – during the Carter administration – at least some of the lower-level conspirators were prosecuted, though the full story was never told.

Recently obtained internal FBI records (http://www.consortiumnews.com/fbi-doc.pdf) and notes of a U.S. prosecutor involved in counter-terrorism cases make clear that the connections among Bush’s CIA, DINA and the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM) – which supplied the trigger men for the Letelier bombing – were closer than was understood at the time.

DINA provided intelligence training for CNM terrorists who acted like a “sleeper cell” inside the United States; federal prosecutions of right-wing Cuban terrorists were routinely frustrated; and the CIA did all it could to cover for its anticommunist allies who were part of a broader international terror campaign called Operation Condor.

Beginning in late 1975, Operation Condor -- named after Chile's national bird -- was a joint operation of right-wing South American military dictatorships, working closely with U.S.-based Cuban and other anticommunist extremists on cross-border assassinations of political dissidents as far away as Europe.

This meant that during George H.W. Bush’s year at the CIA’s helm, the United States both harbored domestic terrorist cells and served as a base for international terrorism. Yet no U.S. official was ever held accountable -- and in many cases, just the opposite.

George H.W. Bush rose to be Vice President four years later and to be President eight years after that, with his son now sitting in the Oval Office. Former President Bill Clinton has said his wife's first act (http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/123107.html) as President would be to dispatch him and George H.W. Bush on a worldwide fence-mending tour.

The Letelier Plot

Regarding the DINA-CNM alliance, Chile’s star assassin Michael Townley told FBI interrogators after his arrest in 1978 that Cuban exiles involved in the Letelier murder had received DINA training, including CNM member Virgilio Paz, who “attended a one-month ‘quickie’ intelligence course sponsored by DINA,” the internal FBI report (http://www.consortiumnews.com/fbi-doc.pdf) said.

Townley, a fiercely anticommunist American expatriate who had emerged as DINA’s chief overseas assassin, told the FBI that Paz’s training was personally approved by DINA’s director, Col. Manuel Contreras, who – the CIA later acknowledged – was an asset of the U.S. spy agency.

Paz lived at Townley’s residence during his three-month stay in Chile and DINA paid for Paz’s frequent calls back home to the United States, Townley said, recalling that Paz left Chile close to his son Brian’s birthday on June 6, 1976.

About a month later, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, DINA’s director of operations, summoned Townley to a meeting near St. Georges School in suburban Santiago. Townley recalled driving his DINA-supplied Fiat 125 sedan to the early-morning meeting and taking a thermos of coffee.

Espinoza asked Townley if he’d be available for a special operation outside Chile. Townley complained “that he had spent a majority of 1975 in Europe on DINA missions and that he felt he was neglecting his family with constant travel on behalf of DINA,” according to the FBI report.

(Only later would investigators learn that Townley had been working with European neo-fascists in hunting down Chilean dissidents in Europe, including Christian Democratic leader Bernard Leighton, who was severely wounded along with his wife in an assassination attempt in Rome on Oct. 6, 1975.)

In late July 1976, Townley said he drove a stubby metallic green MG 1300 to a second meeting and spoke with Colonel Espinoza outside the car. Espinoza informed Townley that his mission would be the assassination of Orlando Letelier, who had emerged as an articulate critic of Pinochet’s dictatorship and was putting an unwanted spotlight on Chile’s central role in the spreading human rights calamity across South America.

Espinoza said Paraguayan travel documents would be used for the operation and the preferred method of death was an arranged traffic accident while Letelier was alone.

“Colonel Espinosa [sic] instructed him [Townley] that Cuban exile terrorists were to be utilized to carry out the actual assassination, and that his and [his DINA accomplice’s] role would be to plan the assassination and then withdraw leaving its execution to the Cubans,” the FBI report said.

“Based on his [Townley’s] recent favorable association with Paz and the latter’s recent training under DINA sponsorship, he [Townley] told Colonel Espinosa [sic] that he believed the assassination in the United States might be arranged,” the FBI document said.

The CORU Umbrella

By June 1976, CNM also had joined in another campaign of right-wing terrorism, this one organized by Cuban exile Orlando Bosch under an umbrella group called the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), which targeted Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

According to the federal prosecutor’s notes, the CORU organizational meeting in the Dominican Republic in June 1976 brought together CNM and four other exile groups, including the “Force Fourteen (F-14, led by a CIA asset),” meaning the U.S. spy agency surely knew about CORU’s plans from the start.

In early July 1976, after getting the assignment to murder Letelier, Townley said he contacted Paz and other CNM members to assist him.

First, however, Townley and his DINA accomplice, Chilean Army Lieutenant Armando Fernandez Larios, went to Paraguay to arrange visas for a trip to the United States, using the false names, Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral.

Their cover story was that they were investigating suspected leftists working for Chile’s state copper company in New York and that – while in the United States – they would meet with Bush’s CIA deputy, Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters.

A senior Paraguayan official, Conrado Pappalardo, urged U.S. Ambassador George Landau to cooperate, citing a direct appeal from Pinochet. An alarmed Landau recognized the visa request as highly unusual, since such operations were normally coordinated with the CIA station in the host country and were cleared with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Though granting the visas, Landau took the precaution of sending an urgent cable to Walters and photostatic copies of the fake passports to the CIA. Landau said he received an urgent cable back signed by CIA Director Bush, reporting that Walters, who was in the process of retiring, was out of town.

When Walters returned a few days later, he cabled Landau that he had “nothing to do with this” mission. Landau immediately canceled the visas, but the U.S. government apparently never delivered a specific warning to DINA to call off the operation.

To this day, it remains unclear what – if anything – Bush’s CIA did after learning about the “Paraguayan caper.”

Nevertheless, Townley said he and DINA’s Col. Espinoza worried about delays in getting the original visas, which suggested that the Paraguayan approach was compromised, Townley said in his FBI interrogation.

To allay any U.S. suspicions, DINA did dispatch two other Chilean operatives using the phony names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral. After they arrived in the United States on Aug. 22, 1976, they made a point of having the Chilean Embassy notify Walters’s office, but the CIA again demonstrated little curiosity about the mission.

‘Beyond Belief’

“It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by a foreign intelligence service in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere in the United States,” wrote John Dinges and Saul Landau in their 1980 book, Assassination on Embassy Row.

“It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations that had been attributed to DINA.”

As for the Letelier assassination, DINA was soon plotting another way to carry out the killing. In late August 1976, DINA dispatched a preliminary team, consisting of Larios Fernandez and a female agent, to do surveillance on Letelier as he moved around Washington.

Then, on Sept. 8, 1976, Townley followed, using an official Chilean passport under the fictitious name of Hans Petersen Silva.

After arriving at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, Townley said he contacted Virgilio Paz by telephone and then rented a car to drive to Union City, New Jersey, to meet Paz at a restaurant named “Bottom of the Barrel,” according to the FBI report.

The next night, Paz brought members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement to Townley’s motel room, including Guillermo Novo Sampol and Jose Dionisio Suarez Esquivel, Townley said.

“Cuban exiles present at the meeting agreed that the CNM would assist DINA in assassinating Letelier,” the FBI report said. “Shortly thereafter he [Townley] traveled to Washington, D.C. in the automobile of Virgilio Paz in order to conduct additional surveillance on Letelier and to purchase additional materials necessary to make the bomb which would be utilized to kill Letelier.

“Basically, the bomb was made up of TNT and a substance which he [Townley] believed to be C-3 plastic. Several months previously he modified a CB Fanon Courier … receiver in Chile at the request of the CNM to be utilized at a future date. …

“The crystal on the receiver was set at 31.040 megahurts [sic]. A major modification made by Townley was to remove the speaker from the receiver and put in a transformer. A standard blasting cap was used in the construction of the bomb. The bomb was contained in an aluminum baking tin.”

Townley’s remark about DINA’s preparation of the explosive device for the U.S.-based Cuban extremists further indicates that the DINA-CNM relationship represented an active penetration of the United States by an international terrorist cabal operating under the nose of U.S. intelligence.

Final Plans

After arriving in Washington and checking into a downtown Holiday Inn, Townley and Paz spent several days conducting surveillance of Letelier. After another CNM operative Suarez Equivel arrived, the assassination team took the next step, heading to Letelier’s house in suburban Maryland.

Late that Saturday night, Sept. 18, or early Sunday morning, Sept. 19, Paz drove Townley to Letelier’s neighborhood. Townley “was dropped off at the top of a hill in a cul-de-sac street, immediately adjacent to the Letelier home. [After crawling under Letelier’s Chevelle] he affixed the bomb to the cross-member and recalled he had some trepidation as to whether the bomb would remain attached since he ran out of tape," the FBI report said.

“The bomb contained a safety switch which he placed in the ‘on’ position after covering the switch with tape. … While he was placing the bomb he recalled that a police cruiser passed by … however, he was undetected. After placing the bomb he walked down the hill and joined Virgilio Paz in the latter’s automobile and they left the area and returned to their hotel.”

On Sunday morning, Townley flew from Washington National Airport to Newark where he met CNM leader Novo Sampol for breakfast. Then they drove to New York City where Novo had a meeting with an “attorney apparently connected with the local New York City government,” the FBI report said.

After a family visit in Westchester County, Townley flew to Miami where he saw his parents at their Boca Raton home before meeting with Miami CNM member Felipe Rivero Diaz, who pressed Townley for more assistance from DINA, the FBI report said.

By Monday evening, Townley had become “troubled that no news had been received concerning Letelier and he suspected that something had gone wrong with the plan to assassinate him.”

Early Tuesday morning, Sept. 21, Townley called Virgilio Paz to find out what had happened. “Paz was extremely angry at the early hour of the call and the use of the telephone from a security standpoint. Paz furnished no information concerning the Letelier bomb,” the report said.

“Later on during the morning he [Townley] contacted Ignacio Novo Sampol in Miami and they arranged to have lunch at a Miami restaurant. During the telephone conversation, Novo informed him that something had happened in Washington, D.C. Subsequent news broadcast the death of Letelier as a result of a bomb which detonated in the latter’s automobile.”

Next, Townley said he “eliminated the identity of Hans Petersen Silva and returned to Chile utilizing a United States passport under the name of Kenneth Enyart.”

Slowly into Focus

Back in Washington, the facts of the assassination slowly came into focus. The explosion that ripped apart Letelier’s Chevelle had shattered a quiet morning in the stately section of the capital where embassies line Massachusetts Avenue, what is called Embassy Row.

The blast ripped off Letelier’s legs and punctured a hole in Ronni Moffitt’s jugular vein. She drowned in her own blood at the scene; Letelier died after being taken to George Washington University Hospital. Ronni’s husband, Michael Moffitt, survived.

At the time, the attack represented the worst act of international terrorism on U.S. soil and remains the most notorious terror attack sponsored by a foreign government inside the United States.

Adding to the potential for scandal, the terrorism had been carried out by a regime that was an ostensible ally of the United States, one that had gained power in 1973 with the help of the Nixon administration and the CIA.

The scandal also jeopardized the reputation of CIA Director George H.W. Bush and the political future of his boss, President Gerald Ford, who was in the midst of a heated presidential campaign against Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Within hours of the bombing, Letelier’s associates accused the Pinochet regime, citing its hatred of Letelier and its record for brutality. The Chilean government, however, heatedly denied any responsibility.

That night, at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Sen. James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat, spotted Bush and approached the CIA director. Abourezk said he was a friend of Letelier’s and beseeched Bush to use the CIA “to find the bastards who killed him.”

Abourezk said Bush responded: “I’ll see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile.” [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege (http://www.neckdeepbook.com/).]

A problem, however, was that one of the CIA’s best-placed assets – DINA chief Manuel Contreras – would turn out to be a mastermind of the assassination.

Wiley Gilstrap, the CIA’s Santiago station chief, did approach Contreras with questions about the Letelier bombing and wired back to Langley Contreras’s assurance that the Chilean government wasn’t involved.

Following the strategy of public misdirection that DINA already had used in hundreds of “disappearances” of dissidents, Contreras pointed the finger at the Chilean Left. Contreras suggested that leftists had killed Letelier to turn him into a martyr.

Evidence of Lying

The Ford administration had plenty of reasons to disbelieve Contreras.

“The CIA had substantive evidence to show that Contreras was lying,” researcher Peter Kornbluh wrote in his 2004 book, The Pinochet File. “The Agency had concrete knowledge that DINA had murdered other political opponents abroad, using the same modus operandi as the Letelier case. The Agency had substantive intelligence on Condor, and Chile’s involvement in planning murders of political opponents in Europe.”

Rather than fulfilling his promise to Abourezk to “see what I can do,” Bush ignored leads that would have taken him into a confrontation with Pinochet.
As the Ford administration dawdled and Bush’s CIA kept its head down, right-wing Cuban terrorists stepped up their war against leftists in general and Fidel Castro’s communist government in particular.

On Oct. 6, 1976, a Cubana airliner, flying the Cuban Olympic fencing team and other passengers to Cuba, exploded after taking off in Barbados, killing everyone onboard. At the time, this sort of mid-air bombing was unprecedented, and the evidence quickly pointed to Cuban extremists linked to CORU and the CIA.

But the U.S. government either resisted putting the pieces together or chose to avoid the obvious conclusions.

On Oct. 6, the day of the Cubana Airline bombing, a CIA informant in Chile went to the CIA station in Santiago and relayed an account of Pinochet denouncing Letelier, with the dictator calling Letelier’s criticism of the government “unacceptable.”

The source “believes that the Chilean Government is directly involved in Letelier’s death and feels that investigation into the incident will so indicate,” the CIA field report said.

But Bush’s CIA chose to accept Contreras’s denials and even began leaking information that pointed away from the real killers.

Newsweek reported in the magazine’s Oct. 11, 1976, issue that “the Chilean secret police were not involved. …. The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime.”

Similar stories ran in other newspapers. On Nov. 1, 1976, the day before the presidential election, the Washington Post became another vehicle for trumpeting Pinochet’s innocence.

“Operatives of the present Chilean military Junta did not take part in Letelier’s killing,” the Post wrote, citing CIA officials. “CIA Director Bush expressed this view in a conversation late last week with Secretary of State [Henry] Kissinger.”

Despite Bush’s success in keeping the truth about the Letelier assassination under wraps, Democrat Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated Ford on Nov. 2, 1976.

Cracking the Case

Over the next two years, federal investigators would crack the case, successfully bringing charges against Townley and several Cuban-American conspirators. But prosecutor Eugene Propper told me that the CIA didn’t volunteer the crucial information about the Paraguayan gambit or hand over the photo of the chief assassin, Townley.

“Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case,” Propper said.

According to the recently obtained prosecutor’s notes, one of the breaks in the Letelier case came from Rolando Otero, a Cuban exile who was believed to be the youngest member of the CIA-trained Bay of Pigs invasion force in 1961 and who was implicated in a string of 1975-76 bombings in Miami (though ultimately acquitted).

Otero had worked with Chile’s DINA, but – according to John Dinges’s 2005 book, The Condor Years – was a double agent for Venezuela’s intelligence service, DISIP, causing his Chilean controllers to jail and torture him before expelling him to the United States.

According to the prosecutor’s notes, “Otero became the witness who gave a Washington, D.C. AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney] the key to the car-bombing of Orlando Letelier. … The AUSA cut a deal with Otero that if Otero talked about the Letelier case, he would not have to give any information about [terrorism] cases … in Miami.”

The prosecutor’s notes also complained of a wider lack of cooperation from Washington in the many cases of Cuban-exile terrorism in Miami.

Regarding the information generated by the Letelier prosecution, the Miami prosecutor asked, “why wasn’t that information ever communicated to Miami, the Cuban exile stronghold, where the most devious and clandestine plots were discussed on a regular basis? The links to Miami were so thick, the exchange of communication so thin.”

As for the CIA's initial Letelier cover-up, neither Bush nor Walters was ever pressed to provide a full explanation.

When I submitted questions to Bush in 1988 – while he was running for president and I was a Newsweek correspondent preparing a story on his year as CIA director – Bush’s chief of staff Craig Fuller responded, saying “the Vice President generally does not comment on issues related to the time he was at the Central Intelligence Agency and he will have no comment on the specific issues raised in your letter.”

Newsweek editors subsequently killed my critical story about Bush’s CIA tenure, even though he was citing that experience as an important element of his résumé for the presidency. Walters also rebuffed interview requests on the Letelier topic prior to his death on Feb. 10, 2002, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

New Cover-up

In 1995, after the Pinochet dictatorship had ended, DINA chief Contreras and his assistant Espinoza were convicted in Chile for the Letelier assassination and sentenced to seven and six years, respectively. Contreras began implicating Pinochet in the Letelier case and other acts of terrorism, saying Pinochet knew and approved all of these actions.

As for Pinochet, former President Bush didn’t hold a grudge against this foreign leader who allegedly had sponsored a terrorist attack under the nose of the U.S. government at a time when Bush was chief of U.S. intelligence.

In 1998, when Pinochet was detained in Great Britain on an extradition request from Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who was pursuing Pinochet for killing Spanish citizens, George H.W. Bush was one of the world leaders who rallied to Pinochet’s defense.

Bush called the case against Pinochet “a travesty of justice” and demanded that Pinochet be sent home to Chile “as soon as possible,” which the British courts did.

However, Garzon’s initiative prompted the Clinton administration to take a second look at the Letelier case in 2000. An FBI team reviewed new evidence that had become available and recommended the indictment of Pinochet.

But the final decision was left to the incoming administration of George W. Bush. In effect, the baton of the Letelier-Moffitt-murder cover-up was passed to a new Bush generation. Besides failing to act on the FBI’s recommendation, the Bush II administration continued to withhold relevant documents from Chilean investigators.

The younger George Bush – and his brother Florida Gov. Jeb Bush – also helped out in protecting the old Cuban terrorists who were implicated in the Cubana Airline bombing, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both have been allowed to live out their golden years in the relative safety and comfort of the United States.

As for Pinochet, the aging general never had to face justice for his acts of international terrorism or for his domestic human rights crimes. Pinochet died of a heart attack on Dec. 10, 2006, at the age of 91.

‘Blood Boil’

When I tracked down former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry Sanford, who was assigned to the Cuban terrorism cases in the mid-1970s, he still sounded frustrated at the lack of support he got from Washington to pursue these killers who inflicted death both inside and outside the United States.

“My blood starts to boil when I think of how much we could have done but how badly we were kept in the dark,” said Sanford, now 66, living in northern Florida. “I asked for stuff and never got it.”

Sanford recalled that when CIA Director Bush visited Miami at the end of the bloody year 1976, FBI agents “asked him for information from the CIA on where explosives [for the Cuban exiles] were stashed.” The response from Bush, according to Sanford, was “forget about it.”

Referring to the umbrella organization CORU, Sanford said, “it was the only terrorist group that ever exported terrorism from the United States.”

Ironically, the CIA’s analytical division reached a similar, troubling conclusion in an annual report entitled “International Terrorism in 1976” that was published in July 1977, after CIA Director Bush had left office.

“Cuban exile groups operating under the aegis of a new alliance called the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations [CORU] were particularly active during the second half of the year,” the CIA reported. “They were responsible for no less than 17 acts of international terrorism (at least three of which took place in the US).

“Statistically, this matches the record compiled by the various Palestinian terrorist groups during the same period. But largely because the Cuban exile operations included the October bombing of a Cubana Airlines passenger aircraft, their consequences were far more bloody.”

In other words, Cuban exiles based in the United States – during George H.W. Bush’s year in charge of the CIA – outpaced Palestinian terrorists in terms of a total body count.

After the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, the U.S. government presented itself as the innocent victim of international terrorism with a moral right not only to pursue the “bad guys” across the globe but to subject some captives to torture, to lock others up indefinitely without trial, and to launch attacks that have killed many thousands of innocents.

In the years that have followed, there were few recollections of the days under the current president’s father when the bloodiest terrorists were “our guys.”

-----

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com (http://www.neckdeepbook.com/). His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.

[Jasonik]

Our Own Strength Against Us: The War on Terror as a Self-Inflicted Disaster

April 4, 2008
by Ian S. Lustick (http://www.independent.org/publications/policy_reports/detail.asp?type=full&id=28)

Download PDF File (28 pages) (http://www.independent.org/pdf/policy_reports/2008-04-04-lustick.pdf)

The War on Terror is much more than a colossal waste. It is the most potent threat Americans face to their liberties and security. With one spectacular blow al-Qaeda managed to exploit the fantasies of a “New American Century” cabal inside the Bush administration and sucker the American people and its leaders into a response that serves its interests. The overstated, but publicly honored, “War on Terror” and the catastrophic invasion of Iraq associated with it rescued the jihadi movement from oblivion by convincing most of the Muslim world that jihadi propaganda about the “infidel Christians and Jews” was actually correct.

At home, Americans have been so bamboozled by the hysterical imagery of the War on Terror that the absence of evidence of a truly serious terrorist threat cannot even be a topic of public discussion. Politicians, the news media, rival government agencies, defense contractors, lobbyists of all kinds, universities, and the entertainment industry battle ferociously to increase revenues and pump up reputations by posing as more committed to winning the War on Terror than their competitors. Frustrated by their inability to find any evidence of serious terrorist activities in the U.S., law enforcement and related agencies escalate techniques of pre-emptive prosecution and entrapment to justify their enormous budgets.

Terror is a problem, but the War on Terror, because it turns U.S. power against America, is a catastrophe.

Ian S. Lustick is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair.

*****

I cannot recommend too strongly taking the time to read this report.

[Jasonik]

Bin Laden's driver is in the dock, but America's war on terror is on trial

The first military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay begins tomorrow. Its outcome will determine far more than the fate of a minor al-Qa'ida figure

By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Sunday, 20 July 2008 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bin-ladens-driver-is-in-the-dock-but-americas-war-on-terror-is-on-trial-872413.html)

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's personal driver, will enter a specially built courtroom in Guantanamo Bay tomorrow for the first full trial of any of the hundreds of detainees to have been sent to America's infamous prison camp since the 9/11 attacks nearly seven years ago.

Instead of one of al-Qa'ida's top leaders in captivity – such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – the accused in the first US military tribunal since the Second World War is a 39-year-old Yemeni, whose lawyers say he belongs on a psychiatric ward rather than in jail. Heightening the irony, a military judge has overruled prosecutors and decided that Mr Hamdan's lawyers can question the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks and other possible witnesses about the driver. The judge threatened to delay the trial if prosecutors did not arrange this over the weekend.

Even the US does not claim that the driver and sometime mechanic, who earned a mere $200 (£100) a month, was a major terror figure. But prosecutors allege that he carried weapons used by al-Qai'da and helped to spirit Bin Laden out of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. If convicted, he could find himself in prison for life.

For many, however, it is the erosion of America's historic liberties that will be on trial tomorrow. The Bush administration created a system of detention without due process when it set up the Guantanamo prison camp in 2002, a legal limbo in which hundreds of detainees – including Mr Hamdan, according to his lawyers – have suffered psychological and possibly physical torture. The driver is alleged to have gone mad as a direct result of being kept in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day in a tiny cell; he is hardly the ideal subject for the first major test of President George Bush's much-criticised system of military commissions to bring terrorism suspects to justice.

Mr Hamdan left his home in Yemen in 1996 and tried to sign on as an Islamist fighter in Tajikistan, but could not get into the country. The US says he went to Afghanistan instead, and ended up working for Bin Laden. After the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Mr Hamdan drove al-Qa'ida's supreme leader between safe houses to avoid US missiles, according to prosecutors, who say he broke away a month later and evacuated his daughter and pregnant wife from Kandahar in the midst of the invasion.

It is not only Mr Hamdan's future that will be determined by the trial. There is great concern among members of the Bush administration that they too could find themselves before foreign or international courts for the role they played in facilitating and encouraging the torture of detainees.

The infamous "torture memos" circulated by Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Charles Addington, and two former administration figures, Douglas Feith and Alberto Gonzales, covertly approved the abuse of prisoners by the CIA. These men were publicly warned recently by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when Mr Powell was Secretary of State, to "never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia or Israel".

One of the most explosive parts of the trial could be the efforts by the defence to show in coming weeks that Pentagon officials interfered with military prosecutors and pressed cases for strictly political reasons. Hearings on that issue are expected to reveal how White House officials and aides of Mr Cheney were on the phone to Guantanamo – in a way, some claim, that made a mockery of American military justice. The former chief Guantanamo prosecutor, Colonel Morris Davis, a harsh critic of the way the war crimes tribunal system is run, could even testify for Mr Hamdan.

Since the US designated* its naval base at the tip of Cuba as a place to imprison some of its greatest enemies, about 800 people have been held at Guantanamo, and some 420 have been released back to their countries without charge. The oldest known suspect imprisoned there was 95-year-old Mohammed Sadiq from Afghanistan, who has been released. The youngest is Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was just 16 years old when he was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2002.

A grainy video of a weeping Mr Khadr, who is still being held, emerged last week, providing an unprecedented glimpse into the harsh conditions at Guantanamo. Now 21, he was shown being interrogated for three days by Canadian intelligence agents after he had been tortured by sleep deprivation for three weeks. The longest portion of the video, an eight-minute segment, shows a sobbing Mr Khadr, burying his head in his hands and moaning "Help me, help me" as the agents look on.

The footage, from a camera hidden behind a ventilation shaft, is the first video of a Guantanamo interrogation to become public. It was obtained under court order by Mr Khadr's Canadian lawyers, who want to bring him home. But neither the US nor the Canadian government wants to see him released. The US military accuses him of killing a soldier with a grenade and injuring another. However, efforts to persuade military courts that he is an "enemy combatant" were thrown out last year.

As for Mr Hamdan, he is "small fry, a grunt, and Bush knows it", said Marc Falkoff, a lawyer representing several other Yemeni detainees. "But the administration was never going to bring one of its high-profile detainees out first when nobody quite knows what's going to happen in this brand-new legal process."

The military commissions were created to try people designated "unlawful enemy combatants" after the Supreme Court issued a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration in June 2006 for tearing up the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war and denying the most basic right of habeas corpus to prisoners. Despite the international clamour against Guantanamo, the US has charged only 20 of its prisoners, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was tortured by "waterboarding" before arriving at the camp. One detainee, David Hicks, accepted a plea bargain in 2007, served nine months and is now free in his native Australia.

Mr Hamdan is suicidal and hears voices. He talks incessantly to himself and says that living alone inside a metal cell and never being allowed to see the sun "boils his mind". The isolation in which prisoners are held is blamed for driving them out of their minds with despair.

"He will shout at us; he will bang his fists on the table," said his military-appointed defence lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer. His attempts to stop the case until his client is granted more humane conditions, enabling him to prepare his defence, were rejected last week. The authorities complain that Mr Hamdan was far from a model inmate and that he routinely spat at guards and threw urine.

Guantanamo inmates face more time in isolation than many on Death Row in the US, say experts on American prison conditions. But the camp's spokeswoman, Commander Pauline Storum, claims that detainees are more psychologically robust than the ordinary US prison population, with fewer than 10 per cent mentally ill, compared with 50 per cent of the inmates in US jails. Nor is there is solitary confinement in Guantanamo, she adds, only "single-occupancy cells", and in any event prisoners communicate with each other by banging on their walls.

Lawyers handling some 80 war crimes cases are closely watching Mr Hamdan's trial. "The issue of mistreatment of prisoners, the miserable lives they live in these cells, will come up in every case," says Clive Stafford Smith, the British lawyer who is representing 35 detainees. In April, when Mr Hamdan appeared before the navy captain acting as his military judge, he announced that he would boycott his trial, crying out: "There is no such thing as justice here!" The judge told him to have faith in US law, declaring: "You have already been to the Supreme Court ."

But the prisoner corrected him. While his lawyers had won a famous victory over the Bush administration in a case known as Hamdan vs Rumsfeld, he had not left Guantanamo. Instead, in more than six years of incarceration, he has made exactly two phone calls to his family back in Yemen, and received no visits. He has been punished for having a Snickers bar in his cell that his lawyers gave him and for stockpiling too many pairs of socks.

"Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse," he wrote to his lawyers. "Why, why, why?"

The echoes of Hamdan vs Rumsfeld are still rumbling through the legal system. While Mr Cheney's adviser called efforts to apply the protections of the Geneva Conventions to prisoners "an abomination", the Supreme Court ruled emphatically that the administration had to abide by these laws in its war on terror. Even in wartime, the court said, the President was bound by laws and treaties, including the Geneva Conventions. The administration had no right to impose military commissions unilaterally, with rules made up in the White House.

So under pressure from President Bush, the 2006 Military Commissions Act was passed by Congress. This is what will finally be tested tomorrow. The Supreme Court has given Mr Hamdan the opportunity to challenge his status as an "enemy combatant" by presenting "reasonably available" evidence and witnesses to a panel of three commissioned officers, while being represented by a military officer.

-----

* [I]The Guantanamo Prison Camp is a violation of the treaty with Cuba, forced on that country by the US. The treaty says that the foreign US base at Guantanamo will be used only for refueling and repairing Navy ships. Only. According (http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/021915.html) to to Gary North.

[Ninjahedge]

Even the US does not claim that the driver and sometime mechanic, who earned a mere $200 (£100) a month, was a major terror figure. But prosecutors allege that he carried weapons used by al-Qai'da and helped to spirit Bin Laden out of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. If convicted, he could find himself in prison for life.

Um, what????

Great, so we arrest a guy that got paid $200 a month to do nothing more than drive a guy around, and we have to spend thousands a month to keep him imprisoned for life for fear he might drive again?


GJ!

[Jasonik]

Fatal flaws found in terrorism database

Posted by Stephanie Condon
August 22, 2008 2:11 PM PDT (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10023848-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5)

One of the country's most important terrorism databases is on the verge of failure after suffering from gross mismanagement and technical design flaws that went ignored for months, a congressional investigation found.

A congressional committee on Thursday called for an investigation into a program called "Railhead," which was supposed to upgrade the National Counterterrorism Center's integrated terrorist intelligence database, called Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). The database serves the United States' 16 separate intelligence agencies, and as of January, contained more than 500,000 names (PDF) (http://www.nctc.gov/docs/Tide_Fact_Sheet.pdf), according to the NCTC. The program has cost an estimated $500 million.

Railhead was also meant to improve TIDE Online, an unclassified version of the TIDE database, and NCTC Online, a classified database of terrorist information and intelligence reports available to counterterrorism analysts.

However, officials at the NCTC began making drastic changes to the Railhead program in recent weeks, according to the House Science and Technology Committee, including laying off hundreds of private contractors working on the program. The number of contractors has shrunk from more than 800 to just a few dozen. The state of the program is now in jeopardy.

Representative Brad Miller, chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee's Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, sent a letter (PDF) (http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/AdminLetters/bm_InspectorGeneralMaquire_terrorwatchlist_8.21.08 .pdf) Thursday to the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence requesting an investigation into Railhead's near-collapse.

"Potentially hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted, delivery schedules have slipped, contractor employees have been laid off," he wrote. "The end result is a current IT system used to identify terrorist threats that has been crippled by technical flaws and a new system that if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today."

Miller noted the problems with TIDE and Railhead stem from "fundamental design flaws," namely their reliance on Structured Query Language (SQL) to search the database. SQL is a computer code that uses sentence structures to conduct queries, as opposed to using text-based searches, like search engines such as Google do.

Due to faulty searches, tens of thousands of CIA messages to the NCTC have not been properly processed or reviewed, or may not have even reached the TIDE database.

On top of that, the TIDE database has reportedly crashed several times in recent months, delaying the delivery of updated terrorist intelligence data to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center.

While TIDE already has problems, Railhead appears to just exacerbate them: The Railhead initiative would significantly downgrade the NCTC Online's capabilities by preventing access to any intelligence community Web sites or data resources, such as sites for the CIA, DIA, or FBI.

The project is not only flawed but also behind schedule. Thirty-four of Railhead's 72 "action items" are past due, and two are behind schedule. Ten more tasks--five of them costing more than $92 million--are "significantly off-task."

Unnamed sources involved with the Railhead project also told Congress that some of the project's deals with private contractors were inappropriate. A memo (PDF) (http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/Staff_Memo_toBM_terror_watch_8.21.08.pdf) produced by congressional staff cites sources who allege that SRI International's involvement in the project created a conflict of interest because SRI program director Earl Lyberger has close ties to Railhead's program manager Dirk Rankin.

Additionally, the staff's sources allege that the government misused funds by spending nearly $200 million to retrofit a building in Herndon, Va., belonging to one of the project's main contractors, Boeing.

Representatives from Boeing and SRI did not respond to requests for comments.

Miller noted in his request for an investigation into the program that there may be efforts under way to close down Railhead completely.

*****

Anti-terror agency defends computer system

From Jeanne Meserve
CNN Homeland Security Correspondent
updated 8:17 p.m. EDT, Fri August 22, 2008
WASHINGTON (CNN) (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/22/terror.watch.list/index.html?eref=rss_topstories) -- The National Counterterrorism Center is disputing charges that the computer system that compiles information on terrorists and suspected terrorists from government agencies is ineffective and hindering its ability to track terrorists.

"There has been no degradation in the capability to access, manage and share terrorist information," the center said in a statement on Friday.

Rep. Brad Miller, D-North Carolina, is asking for an investigation into the center's computer systems. Miller says that half a billion dollars has been spent on a computer upgrade that is riddled with flaws.

"It's been seven years since 9/11, and we appear to be no better prepared, no better able to connect the dots than we were seven years ago," Miller said.

The computer system is used to create government watch lists and provides information to federal, state and local officials.

According to a congressional staff report prepared by Miller's House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, the system put in place after the September 11 attacks has limitations that make it difficult to search or locate key data.

For instance, the report says, information about "pocket litter" -- the scraps of paper in a suspect's pocket that can yield important clues like phone numbers, credit cards and addresses -- is contained in 23 tables rather than just one.

The report says the system upgrade, called Railhead, does not have the ability to search e-mails and discussion threads, images or attachments.

In tests, it couldn't match different spellings of suspected terrorists' names, a common problem associated with translating Arabic names into English. And it will not connect to intelligence community Web sites like the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency.

"It's like having a dictionary without it being in alphabetical order," Miller said. "The information may be there; you just can't find it."

In its statement, the center said regular reviews have identified program shortcomings that have been quickly addressed. It noted that the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed multiple times and that the program has received congressional support.

"Representative Miller's Subcommittee has had no interaction with the NCTC or the Intelligence Community on the Railhead Program," the statement said.

[Jasonik]

Controversy Snarls Upgrade Of Terrorist Data Repository

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 3, 2008; D01 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/02/AR2008090202709_pf.html)

A major effort to upgrade intelligence computers that hold the government's master list of terrorist identities is embroiled in controversy about the project's management and the work of contractors hired for the job, documents and interviews show.

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, serves as the central repository of information about more than 400,000 suspected terrorists around the world. Operating at the National Counterterrorism Center, TIDE and other systems each day deliver files of information to watch-list programs that screen people traveling into the United States, or they make data available online to intelligence analysts across the government.

Authorities said TIDE has revolutionized many national security tasks. But because it was built quickly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, it is limited and lacks many features needed by the intelligence community, documents show. Those limitations in TIDE and related systems hamper the ability of intelligence analysts to discover patterns and make connections among the growing pools of data they amass from around the world. TIDE also has suffered periodic outages of up to two hours, according to interviews with government officials and contractors involved with the project.

In 2006, authorities quietly launched Railhead, a project worth as much as $500 million over five years, to improve TIDE and eventually replace it and some related systems with technology that would significantly expand their capabilities.

After more than a year and about $100 million, the Railhead project has become the focus of criticism from some counterterrorism analysts and contractors, who have said it does not provide the search capabilities they expected and appears to be behind schedule. One lawmaker has taken up those questions and publicly asked for an investigation by the inspector general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, saying his congressional staff has information from a contractor whistle-blower that shows the project is on the "brink of collapse," possibly threatening national security.

Officials at the counterterrorism center said in interviews that the allegations are untrue and irresponsible. They acknowledged that Railhead has suffered from some "speed bumps" common to large technology projects, including inadequate communication about what features analysts and other users need. They said that dozens of contract employees had been let go this summer, but that it was done to spend funds more wisely and on more important tasks.

The officials said the project is on track. A pilot project offering improved access and a wider array of features for TIDE Online -- the system that allows analysts to draw information from TIDE -- will be launched in coming weeks. "Have we had some hurdles? Of course we have," said Vicki Jo McBee, who took over as chief of the project in July.

"We are making progress," she said. "The users are going to be more than satisfied."

The questions about Railhead underscore growing apprehension about contract management in the intelligence community, which has spent tens of billions of dollars in the war on terror in recent years with an insufficient procurement workforce and little public oversight, according to documents and interviews.

Several unclassified reviews of intelligence spending in the past few years have said the shortage of contracting expertise in the classified world is acute.

The allegations of problems also highlight the government's persistent difficulties in conceiving and building giant computer systems, even for national security projects.

The Railhead project relies on a controversial approach to contracting that gives great authority to a "lead systems integrator" -- in this case, Boeing -- that serves in essence as a management proxy for the government. Other projects relying on lead systems integrators, such as the Coast Guard's Deepwater project, have repeatedly overshot deadlines and costs. The Department of Defense appropriations bill for 2008 sharply restricted the use of lead systems integrators because of such problems.

TIDE and related systems have become crucial tools in the war on terror. TIDE is the central "base for all-source information on international terrorist identities for the U.S. Government," according to documents from a congressional briefing in April. One system linked to TIDE, NCTC Online, has more than 5,500 users in more than 40 federal organizations and agencies.

But counterterrorism officials have made clear that TIDE and related systems need to be upgraded. Documents used in an April briefing of staff members on Capitol Hill show that the systems are poorly integrated, and difficult and costly to upgrade. "Those Information Technology capabilities, as good as they are, were not designed for the scale, robustness or integrated performance required by the NCTC mission," the briefing documents said.

The Railhead project is set up so that the government can hire contractors to upgrade the system in increments, leading to an "integrated and accessible" system that would improve the discovery of information for analysts and make access far easier.

Dozens of documents obtained by The Washington Post show that Boeing and SRI International, one of the primary contractors, and dozens of other subcontractors have sometimes struggled to fulfill a mission that from the outset was not clearly defined.

Officials at Boeing and SRI declined to answer questions.

Boeing and SRI have sometimes not cooperated, the documents show. Last summer, during the transition to Railhead from a previous contracting program, the TIDE system was operated by a sharply diminished support staff and occasionally shut down, according to interviews with people involved in the project.

Counterterrorism officials said those issues were a natural result of the transition from one contract to another and added that it did not impede the systems' effectiveness.

A recent review by SRI and subcontractors, done at the behest of government officials, turned up more than 500 instances where the system did not function as planned or as analysts expected. The systems under development, for instance, did not enable analysts examining terrorist data to see classified cables, to easily sort and filter search results or to search for non-exact matches, the June 18 document said.

One contract executive involved in Railhead, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the work, asserted that the project was not properly planned and that some tasks may have to start over. The executive said Boeing and SRI did not work well together in the public's interest. Contractors assessing the project complained about the lack of cooperation from Boeing in the June 18 document.

"A request for data listed below to complete the gap analysis was requested from Boeing. The information requested below has not been provided by the LSI [lead system integrator]," the document said.

In an interview, Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), chairman of the House Science and Technology subcommittee on investigations and oversight, said those documents, provided by a whistle-blower who worked for a contractor, show the Railhead program is in trouble.

In an Aug. 21 letter, Miller asked the inspector general to investigate "the technical failure and mismanagement of one of the government's most important counterterrorism programs."

"This is a critical national security program that has been plagued by technical design and development errors, basic management blunders and poor government oversight," Miller said in a news release issued that same day.

Officials at the counterterrorism center said the staff material Miller provided in support of his request contains factual errors, including a claim that thousands of CIA cables had not been properly entered into TIDE and that the program has cost $500 million so far.

The officials acknowledged the "gap analysis" reports issued in June. But they said most of those shortcomings have been addressed in recent months and that information in those reports was taken out of context.

Despite occasional outages, the TIDE system has been available for counterterrorism work more than 99 percent of the time, and it has not missed any deadlines for supplying terrorist information to watch-list systems, one senior government official said.

Miller defended going public with his preliminary probe, saying "we conduct our business in the open."

[lofter1]

Let's get a burka for Mrs. Palin and her blind faith (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/Story?id=5782924&page=4) -- send her over to Pakistan to clean things up ...

GIBSON: Do we have a right to anticipatory self-defense? Do we have a right to make a preemptive strike again another country if we feel that country might strike us?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

GIBSON: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?

PALIN: Now, as for our right to invade, we're going to work with these countries, building new relationships, working with existing allies, but forging new, also, in order to, Charlie, get to a point in this world where war is not going to be a first option. In fact, war has got to be, a military strike, a last option.

GIBSON: But, Governor, I'm asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

GIBSON: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?

PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.

[joe25]

^ She should stick to writing sports article on Alaskan papers if she is incapable of saying yes or no.

[lofter1]

Mrs. Palin does have that bad impulse to try and talk herself out of an awkward moment. It's a bit bullying. And reveals clearly what she does and does not understand. Then there is the snarky quotient. And the occasional wink and head bob.

Very poor traits for a diplomat or negotiator.

Probably works great at the hockey rink when yelling at the coach or the kids.

[KenNYC]

The fact that this woman could be president scares the crap out of me.

[lofter1]

Well, she seems to thrive on intimidation. So at least she'd be happy.

[Ninjahedge]

Let's get a burka for Mrs. Palin and her blind faith (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/Story?id=5782924&page=4)

Sometimes I feel so uninspired........

[NYC4Life]

CNN

U.S. takes North Korea off terror list

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States on Saturday removed North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terrorism, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/11/us.north.korea/art.korea.mccormack.ap.jpg
U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack announces the agreement Saturday.

"Based upon the cooperation agreement North Korea has recently provided ... the secretary of state this morning rescinded the designation of the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] as a state sponsor of terrorism, and that was effective as of her signature," McCormack said.
McCormack said the United States and North Korea had reached agreement "on an number of important verification measures" of North Korea's nuclear program.

These include participation by all members of the Six Party Talks, the role of the U.N. nuclear (http://topics.cnn.com/topics/Nuclear_Proliferation) watchdog agency, access to all of North Korea's nuclear facilities and what procedures would be used in the verification process.

"Every element of verification that we sought is included in this package," McCormack said at a news conference.

A senior State Department official said earlier that President Bush made the decision Friday night to remove North Korea from the terrorism list. http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/2.0/mosaic/tabs/video.gif Watch how North Korea escaped the terror list » (http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/11/us.north.korea/index.html#cnnSTCVideo)

The official said verification of North Korea's statements about its nuclear program will start right away, and the North Koreans will immediately reverse actions they have taken in recent weeks to restart their reactor and reprocessing facilities that produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The North Koreans are expected to make a separate announcement Saturday, McCormack said.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/11/us.north.korea/art.nkorea.nuclear.program..jpg
A satellite image of the Yongbyon Nuclear Center north of Pyongyang, North Korea.

McCormack said Japan had agreed to formalizing the agreement at the Six-Party level, although the issue of North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s has not yet been addressed.

President Bush spoke Saturday morning with Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, telling him that the United States "will never forget the abduction of Japanese citizens by the North Koreans," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

"We will continue to strongly support Japan's position on the abduction issue and will urge North Korea to take immediate steps to implement the commitments it made this summer as part the agreement reached with Japan," he said.

North Korea was added to the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1988, the fourth country to be added. Cuba, Syria, Sudan and Iran remain on the list.

Countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism are subject to limitations on foreign aid, a ban on defense exports and sales, restrictions on exports of "dual use" items -- those that could be used for defense or non-defense purposes -- and a variety of financial and other restrictions.

In recent weeks, North Korea (http://topics.cnn.com/topics/North_Korea) objected to the way the United States and its allies were proposing to verify that North Korea was revealing all its nuclear secrets.

The question of removing North Korea from the terror list had been under intense deliberations in the Bush administration over the past several days, since the U.S. point man in the negotiations, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, had returned from talks in North Korea.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had talked by phone to her counterparts in China, Japan and South Korea, and according to a spokesman on Friday, she expected to talk to Russia's foreign minister in coming days.

Speculation had been rising in Washington that the Bush administration would decide to "de-list" North Korea, despite fierce opposition from some of Bush's fellow Republicans.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a strongly critical statement after Saturday's announcement.

"While I am not surprised by today's decision, I am profoundly disappointed," she said.

"Given the regime's decision to restart its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon and actions barring access to the site by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, it is clear that North Korea has no intention of meeting its commitment to end its nuclear program."

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain put out a statement Friday opposing taking North Korea off the terrorism list.

"I have previously said that I would not support the easing of sanctions [against] North Korea unless the United States is able to fully verify the nuclear declaration Pyongyang submitted on June 26," McCain said. "It is not clear that the latest verification arrangement will enable us to do so."

McCain's Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, had a more positive view, calling North Korea's agreement to the verification measures "a modest step forward." But, he said, any failure on Pyongyang's part to follow through with its side of the agreement must be met with swift action.

"President Bush's decision to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism is an appropriate response, as long as there is a clear understanding that if North Korea fails to follow through there will be immediate consequences," Obama said.

"If North Korea refuses to permit robust verification, we should lead all members of the Six-Party Talks in suspending energy assistance, re-imposing sanctions that have recently been waived, and considering new restrictions."

Participants in the Six-Party Talks, besides the United States and North Korea, are South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.


© 2008 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (http://www.cnn.com/tbs/index.html) All Rights Reserved.

[Zephyr]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/images/branding/masthead_subpages_hover.gif


Obama puts Osama off his game

http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/thumbnails/columnist/2007-10/295609.jpg
Clarence Page
November 23, 2008


Having a last name that sounds like Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's first name has never been a political plus for Barack Obama. Could it now be a burden for Al Qaeda too?

It was a lot easier for the Islamist terror organization to frame the U.S. as a racist, anti-Muslim "crusader" nation before we elected a biracial American named Barack Hussein Obama to be our president.

That would help to explain why Al Qaeda's first official response to Obama's election features Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group's No.2, denouncing Obama in a Web video as a "house slave" or "abeed al-beit" in Arabic. An English subtitle provided by Al Qaeda's propaganda arm translates the term as "house Negro." Actually, the Arabic phrase literally translates as "house slaves."

Zawahiri compares Obama to Malcolm X, the assassinated black American Muslim leader who made the plantation reference to house slaves and house Negroes famous in the early 1960s to describe blacks who played along with white supremacy.

"You represent the direct opposite of honorable black Americans like Malik al-Shabazz, or Malcolm X," Zawahiri said, citing Malcolm's Arabic and English names.

Zawahiri said Obama, Colin Powell and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "confirmed" Malcolm X's definition of a house Negro, a term the militant black leader used to describe blacks who were subservient to whites. "You were born to a Muslim father but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America," Zawahiri said.

To which I as an African-American respond—in a cleaned-up version of an old black community phrase—"Negro, please!"

It's a little too glib for Al Qaeda's No. 2 to honor Malcolm, an American, 43 years after his assassination when he is unable to speak for himself.

As a longtime student of his speeches and ghost-written autobiography, I don't think he would appreciate being exploited by fugitive jihadi terrorists any more than he'd want his face on Ku Klux Klan bedsheets.

Such irony. Just as Obama has made it cool to play by the rules and challenge the system at its own game—and win!—along comes Zawahiri to challenge his negritude.

I might be a tad bit more impressed with Zawahiri's indignation had I heard him similarly denounce the traffic in black African slaves that Arabs continue to conduct in Sudan and Persian Gulf states.

With most of the world, including much of the Arab and Islamic world, enthralled with Obama's election victory, it's no surprise that Al Qaeda feels compelled to assert itself back into world headlines. But their show is getting old, lame and increasingly irrelevant, even in the highly competitive Islamist terrorist world.

In short, killing thousands of Arabs and Muslims has not endeared Al Qaeda to Arabs and Muslims. In Iraq, for example, Al Qaeda's attempts to take control of the Sunni insurgency backfired. Most of the rank-and-file insurgents actually have turned to make common cause with the American occupiers rather than put up with Al Qaeda's intruders.

And the appearance of Al Qaeda's No. 2 raises a compelling question: Where's No. 1? We have hardly heard from bin Laden since he popped up like a Cheshire cat four years ago in a videotaped address to the American people a few days before the presidential election.

Why no bin Laden this time? Maybe the old fox is growing cautious—or more cowardly. American forces have stepped up their missile strikes in the tribal regions along the porous Afghan-Pakistan border. Discretion can be the better part of bin Laden's survival.

Or maybe he's dead. Many intelligence experts think his notoriously bad kidneys may have done him in while hiding out in some cave in the wilds of western Pakistan. The Grim Reaper may have done the work of America's covert intelligence community without firing a shot.

While that mystery simmers, the bookish Zawahari does not inspire the same charismatic zing in the Islamic world, especially among the Muslims Al Qaeda has been trying to woo in East Africa. Many potential recruits there have been too happily joining Americans in celebrating Obama's new house—the White House!

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board.


Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1123pagenov23,0,7494340.column)

[Zephyr]

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/article/pieces/postcom_logo.gif

http://www.dglobe.com/ap/gfx/ap_logo.gif







The violence came as Iraqi lawmakers prepared for a vote Wednesday on a security pact with the United States that would enable American forces to stay in Iraq for up to three more years under strict Iraqi oversight.


Separate bombings in Baghdad kill at least 20


By BUSHRA JUHI
The Associated Press
Monday, November 24, 2008


BAGHDAD – A female suicide bomber blew herself up near an entrance to the U.S.-protected Green Zone and a bomb tore through a minibus carrying Iraqi government employees in separate attacks on Monday, killing at least 20 people, Iraqi officials said.

A third attack on an Iraqi police patrol in Baghdad killed two civilians, police said.

The violence came as Iraqi lawmakers prepared for a vote Wednesday on a security pact with the United States that would enable American forces to stay in Iraq for up to three more years under strict Iraqi oversight.



http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2008/11/24/PH2008112400383.jpg
(AP Photo/Pool)

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, second
from left, takes part in a meeting with Iraqi
political leaders to discuss the Iraqi-U.S.
security pact in Baghdad, Iraq, on Sunday,
Nov. 23, 2008. (AP)


In the first attack, a bomb attached to a bus used by the Trade Ministry to ferry employees to work exploded shortly before 8 a.m. in eastern Baghdad, police and hospital officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Thirteen ministry employees were killed and three wounded, according to an official with the state-owned Iraqi shopping centers company who also spoke on condition of anonymity. The company is part of the Trade Ministry.

The rush-hour attack happened in a Shiite area and the injured were taken to Kindi hospital in Baghdad.



http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2008/11/24/PH2008112400518.jpg
(AP Photo/Adil al-Khazali)

An Iraqi woman cries out in pain as she is
treated for burns after a bus bombing in
Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, Nov. 24, 2008.
A female suicide bomber blew herself up near
an entrance to the U.S.-protected Green Zone
and a bomb tore through a bus carrying Iraqi
government employees in separate attacks
on Monday, killing at least 18 people,
Iraqi officials said.
(Adil Al-khazali - AP)

The U.S. military said 14 people were killed and four were injured in the 7:20 a.m. blast on the minibus. It said American soldiers assisted Iraqi police in securing the area and treating casualties.

About 45 minutes later, a female suicide bomber blew herself up as she stood in line to be searched at a checkpoint near the Green Zone in central Baghdad, killing seven people and wounding 13, according to an Interior Ministry official who declined to give his name.

The U.S. military said the bombing near the Green Zone occurred between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. and killed two Iraqi army members and three civilians. One civilian was injured, it said.

The Green Zone houses the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi government headquarters.

In a third attack, a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol around 10:30 a.m. near Technology University in eastern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four other people, an Iraqi police officer and an official at Ibin al-Nafis hospital said on condition of anonymity. Two police officers were among the injured.


© Copyright 1996-2008 The Washington Post Company (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/24/AR2008112400143.html?hpid=topnews)

[Jasonik]

Feds warn of terror plotting against NYC subways

By EILEEN SULLIVAN and DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writers – 18 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Federal authorities are warning law enforcement personnel of a possible terror plot against the New York City subway and train systems during the holiday season, and police are beefing up security in preparation.

An internal memo obtained by The Associated Press says the FBI has received a "plausible but unsubstantiated" report that al-Qaida terrorists in late September may have discussed attacking the subway system.

A person briefed on the matter, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the intelligence-gathering work, said the threat may also be directed at the passenger rail lines running through New York, such as Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road, which are particularly busy with Thanksgiving holiday travelers.

A U.S. counterterror official, also speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to do so publicly, said senior government officials have been briefed because the FBI very recently received credible information about possible attacks over the holiday season, and authorities are particularly concerned about this long holiday weekend.

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko confirmed only that his agency and the Homeland Security Department issued a bulletin Tuesday night to state and local authorities, and the information is being reviewed.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the warning was issued as a routine matter, but added that there may be an increased police presence in New York and other large cities.

The internal bulletin says al-Qaida terrorists "in late September may have discussed targeting transit systems in and around New York City. These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives placed on subway/passenger rail systems," according to the document.

"We have no specific details to confirm that this plot has developed beyond aspirational planning, but we are issuing this warning out of concern that such an attack could possibly be conducted during the forthcoming holiday season," according to the warning dated Tuesday.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said they have received an unsubstantiated report and as a result have "deployed additional resources in the mass transit system."

While federal agencies regularly issue all sorts of advisory warnings, the language of this one is particularly blunt.

Intelligence and homeland security officials are working with local authorities to try to corroborate the information "and will continue to investigate every possible lead," the memo says.

Rep. Peter King, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said authorities "have very real specifics as to who it is and where the conversation took place and who conducted it."

"It certainly involves suicide bombing attacks on the mass transit system in and around New York and it's plausible, but there's no evidence yet that it's in the process of being carried out," King said.

Knocke, the DHS spokesman, said the warning was issued "out of an abundance of caution going into this holiday season."

No changes are being made to the nation's threat level, or for transit systems at this time, he said.

"However, transit passengers in larger metropolitan areas like New York may see an increased security presence in the coming days," Knocke said.

The increased personnel could include uniformed and plainclothes "behavior detection" officers, federal air marshals, canine teams, and security inspectors, Knocke said.
___
Associated Press Writers Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington and Colleen Long in New York contributed to this report.

[Ninjahedge]

You know, with such a small force at your command, it would make sense to "talk about" many MANY different possibilities and plans of attack, so long as you commit to one of them.

I think that is the key to terror, feint a lot, but make sure you throw a real punch every now and again to get you "opponent" to duck every time, whether you swing or not.

I HOPE this is another feint, but, unfortunately, we can't be sure. So bring in the sniffer doggies!

[Zephyr]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif


Week in Review


Ahead for Obama: How to Define Terror



http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/30/weekinreview/30mahlar.xlarge1.jpg
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

VERDICT PENDING The future is unclear for the Guantánamo Bay site
where Salim Hamdan was tried.


By JONATHAN MAHLER
Published: November 29, 2008

A version of this article appeared in print on November 30, 2008 ... of the New York edition.


WASHINGTON — Early last Tuesday morning, a military charter plane left the airstrip at Guantánamo Bay for Sana, Yemen, carrying Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Hamdan. Once the Bush administration’s poster boy for the war on terror — the first defendant in America’s first military tribunals since World War II — Mr. Hamdan will spend less than a month in a Yemeni prison before returning to his family in Sana, having been acquitted by a jury of United States military officers of the most serious charge brought against him, conspiracy to support terrorism.

The turn of events underscores the central challenge President Obama will face as he begins to define his own approach to fighting terrorism — and the imperative for him to adopt a new, hybrid plan, one that blends elements of both traditional military conflict and criminal justice.

Until now, much of the debate over how best to battle terrorism has centered on the two prevailing — and conflicting — paradigms: Is it a war or a criminal action? The Hamdan case highlights the limitations of such binary thinking. As the verdict in his tribunal this summer made clear, Mr. Hamdan was not a criminal conspirator in the classic sense. Yet, as an aide to the world’s most dangerous terrorist, neither was he a conventional prisoner of war who had simply been captured in the act of defending his nation and was therefore essentially free of guilt.

So how should Americans think about Mr. Hamdan? More broadly, how should they think about the fight against terrorism?

The problems with the war paradigm are by now familiar. Because the war on terror is unlike any other the United States has waged, traditional wartime policies and mechanisms have made for an awkward fit, in some instances undermining efforts to defeat terrorism. The traditional approach to dealing with captured combatants — holding them until the end of hostilities to prevent them from returning to the battlefield — is untenable in a war that could last for generations.

If you treat the fight against terrorism as a war, it’s hard to get around the argument that it’s a war without boundaries; a terrorist could be hiding anywhere. Yet by asserting the right to scoop up suspected terrorists in other sovereign nations and indefinitely detain and interrogate them without hearings or trials, the administration complicated its efforts to build an international coalition against terrorism.

“The war-against-Al-Qaeda paradigm put us in a position where our legal authorities to detain and interrogate didn’t match up with those of our allies, so we ended up building a system that’s often rejected as strategically unsound and legally suspect by even our closest allies,” says Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia who worked on detainee issues in the Bush administration.

Perhaps the most problematic consequence of the war paradigm, though, is that it gave the president enormous powers — as commander in chief — to determine how to detain and interrogate captured combatants. It was the use, or abuse, of those powers that produced the Bush administration’s string of historic rebukes at the Supreme Court, starting in 2004 when the justices ruled in Rasul v. Bush that the president had to afford the Guantánamo detainees some due process.

Some critics of President Bush are now urging President-elect Obama to abandon the war paradigm in favor of a pure criminal-justice approach, which is to say, either subject captured combatants to criminal trials or let them go. This will almost certainly not happen.

Mr. Obama may be more inclined to prosecute suspected terrorists in the federal courts than Mr. Bush has been, and he may even avoid referring to the battle against terrorism as a “war.” But ceding the military paradigm altogether would severely limit his ability to fight terrorism. On a practical level, it would prevent him from operating in a zone like the tribal areas of Pakistan, where American law does not reach.

“If you seriously dialed it back to the criminal-justice apparatus you will paralyze the executive branch’s ability to go where they believe the bad guys are,” says Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “When people talk about a return to the criminal-justice system, they’re ignoring the geographical limits of that system.”

In fact, the military approach to fighting terrorism predates the Bush administration. After Al Qaeda attacked two American embassies in Africa in 1998, President Clinton launched cruise missiles against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan thought to be making chemical weapons. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama said he would not hesitate to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan — an act of war — if that country’s government was unwilling to do so itself.

Going forward, the fight against terrorism will have to be something of a hybrid. This is a novel idea, as the Constitution lays out only two distinct options: the country is at war, or it is not. Such a strategy may require building new legal systems and institutions for detaining, interrogating and trying detainees.

There has already been talk of creating a national security court within the federal judiciary that would presumably give more flexibility on matters like, say, the standard of proof for evidence collected on an Afghan battlefield. Similarly, it may be necessary to set clear legal guidelines for when the government can detain enemy combatants, and how far C.I.A. agents can go when interrogating terror suspects.

This won’t be easy. It will require striking a balance between the need to preserve and promote America’s rule-of-law values, protect its intelligence gathering and ensure that no one who poses a serious threat is set free.

Such an infrastructure is not likely to survive unchallenged, let alone win popular support, if the executive branch builds it alone. Its chances would be far better with input from Congress, acting as the elected representatives of the people to ensure that any new systems protect both the public and America’s values. And direct advice from the courts could ensure that they are found to be constitutional.

Paradoxically, such an approach might ultimately enhance a president’s power. “We need a strong president to fight this war,” says Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard who worked in the Bush Justice Department, “and the way to ensure that there’s a strong president is to have the other institutions on board for the actions he feels he needs to take.”

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/weekinreview/30mahler.html?_r=1&ref=politics)

[Jasonik]

...the need to preserve and promote America’s rule-of-law values...

How quaint. These are values you see -- neither principles nor ideals -- and therefore much more mutable (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=%22america%27s+changing+values%22&btnG=Search).



"Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the
English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we
cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is
decadent, and our language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share
in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse
of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to
electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the
half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an
instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have
political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence
of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause,
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because
he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely
because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the
English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to
have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which
spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take
the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more
clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political
regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and
is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."

-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

[Zephyr]

http://www.latimes.com/images/standard/lat_logo_inner.gif


Excerpt from an excellent piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled "Bush has successfully defended anti-terrorism policies," by David G. Savage (30 December 2008). Don't be fooled by the title into thinking that Bush is being mostly praised. This is a good example of the manner in which it was written:





... Guantanamo may be the exception, albeit a partial one. The Supreme Court on three occasions struck down Bush's policies regarding the holding and trying of prisoners there. But the administration resisted making changes.

In June, the court ruled -- for the second time -- that prisoners had a right to plead for their freedom before a judge. A few hearings got underway in the fall. Last month, a judge ruled that five Bosnian men had been wrongly held as "enemy combatants," and on Dec. 16 three of them were flown home to Bosnia. They were the first prisoners set free from Guantanamo as a result of judge's order.

But the Guantanamo litigation has overshadowed the fact that Bush administration lawyers prevailed in blocking most other challenges.

When the government is sued, its lawyers can throw up an array of barriers. They can say the officials who carried out the policy have immunity from being sued. They can say the plaintiffs do not have standing to sue or lack enough evidence to show the policy is unconstitutional.

"This is a Catch-22," said Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale Law School. "They can say, 'You don't know we did it, so you can't sue.' Or, 'If you know we did it, you can't sue because it's a state secret.' The government makes these procedural arguments in every case, and it means you essentially never get a ruling on the merits."

If the people involved are foreigners, administration lawyers have said they have no rights under the Constitution.

Four British Muslims who had been shipped to Guantanamo and were freed years later sued former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials. They alleged they had been tortured at Guantanamo and subjected to religious harassment. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington threw out the lawsuit on the grounds that the men had no rights. ...


Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-bush-terror-law30-2008dec30,0,4941731.story)

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/article/pieces/postcom_logo.gif (http://www.washingtonpost.com/?nav=globaltop)



9 Muslim Passengers Removed From Jet

Others on Flight Say a Remark Was 'Suspicious'

By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2009; B01

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI.

Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother's wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window.' I think they were remarking about safety."

Irfan said he and the others think they were profiled because of their appearance. He said five of the six adults in the party are of South Asian descent, and all six are traditionally Muslim in appearance, with the men wearing beards and the women in headscarves. Irfan, 34, is an anesthesiologist. His brother, 29, is a lawyer. Both live in Alexandria with their families, and both were born in Detroit. They were traveling with their wives, Kashif Irfan's sister-in-law, a friend and Kashif Irfan's three sons, ages 7, 4 and 2.

AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson agreed that the incident amounted to a misunderstanding. But he defended AirTran's handling of the incident, which he said strictly followed federal rules. And he denied any wrongdoing on the airline's part.

"At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn't have made on the airplane, and other people heard them," Hutcheson said. "Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions."

Hutcheson confirmed that it was ultimately the pilot's decision to postpone the flight. But he said the pilot was influenced not only by the complaints from passengers but by the actions of two federal air marshals on board, who had learned of the incident and reported it to airport police.

As a result of that report, federal officials made the decision to order all 104 passengers from the plane and re-screen them and their luggage before allowing the flight to take off for Orlando -- two hours late and without the nine passengers.

Ellen Howe, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, said the pilot acted appropriately.

"For us, it just highlights that security is everybody's responsibility," Howe said. "Someone heard something that was inappropriate, and then the airline decided to act on it. We certainly support [the pilot's] call to do that."

Howe added that the TSA's involvement was limited to conducting a security sweep of the plane after the passengers were removed. Airport police officers' only involvement was to hold the passengers in custody until the FBI arrived, said Tara Hamilton, a spokeswoman for the agency that runs the airport.

Hutcheson said AirTran is not likely to reimburse the passengers for the additional cost of their replacement tickets on USAirways. He said they were given a full refund for their AirTran fares and may fly on the carrier now that the investigation is complete.

The detained passengers said that is not likely.

"It was an ordeal," said Abdur Razack Aziz, the family friend who was also detained. "Nothing came out of it. It was paranoid people. It was very sad."


© 2009 The Washington Post Company



There's a term called Security Theater - counter-threat security measures that convey to the public the sense that the response is adequate to the threat, but in reality, provide little or no added security.

An example I saw recently on TV involved the ban of liquid bottles on airlines. The scene showed an airport security checkpoint, with an agent confiscating various bottles and tossing them in a giant bin behind him.

The point was that there was no deterrent to a terrorist attempting to bring a liquid device onto a plane; all that would happen would be for the item to be confiscated. He could try it again and again.

[lofter1]

Imagine the nasty explosive soup that one of those TSA types may have created (inadvertantly?) by tossing hundreds of containers of various liquids into one big vat. After all, the security personnel weren't checking the contents individually to see if any of the supposed shampoos, saline solutions, fruit drinks and pomades were actually dreaded, dangerous and potentially explosive materials. Throwing them all together like that would seem to go against the TSA's stated purpose of keeping the chemical components away from each other (thereby robbing them of their explosive potential).

But apparently it was not the TSA's practice to take precautionary action once items were separated from passengers. Instead the bins of banned items were kept ringside at the Security Circus. And by the Government's way of thinking, the people paid to keep things Safe & Secure were very possibly building time bombs and leaving them ticking away in Terminals all across the land.

Yet there were no explosions. Was anything of danger EVER discovered in all those months we watched that episode of Security Theater?

So ... where was that particular Terror which we were told was hidden within all those sequestered liquids / gels / solutions?

[Jasonik]

"A new series about the HEROES (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GQ0xP-an6U) who keep us safe at home."

[eddhead]

Security Theater[/B] - counter-threat security measures that convey to the public the sense that the response is adequate to the threat, but in reality, provide little or no added security.

An example I saw recently on TV involved the ban of liquid bottles on airlines. The scene showed an airport security checkpoint, with an agent confiscating various bottles and tossing them in a giant bin behind him.

The point was that there was no deterrent to a terrorist attempting to bring a liquid device onto a plane; all that would happen would be for the item to be confiscated. He could try it again and again.

Saw that as well on 60 minutes. The point is that Security protocals do little to protect from a passenger sneaking behind the agent and grabbing a bottle. Incredible.

[Zephyr]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif

Washington







“ The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy combatants held at Navy facilities on the American mainland or at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”


Early Test of Obama View on Power Over Detainees


By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: January 2, 2008


WASHINGTON — Just a month after President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he must tell the Supreme Court where he stands on one of the most aggressive legal claims made by the Bush administration — that the president may order the military to seize legal residents of the United States and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime.









http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/03/us/detainee190.jpg
Peoria Journal Star, via Associated Press

Ali al-Marri is being
held in a Navy brig in
South Carolina.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/18/us/gitmopromo190.jpg (http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo) http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/multimedia/icons/interactive_icon.gif [Click Here - Z] Interactive Feature

The Detainees

By reviewing government documents,
court records and media reports,
The Times was able to compile an
approximate list of detainees cur-
rently at Guantánamo..


The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy combatants held at Navy facilities on the American mainland or at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama made broad statements criticizing the Bush administration’s assertions of executive power. But now he must address a specific case, that of Ali al-Marri, a Qatari student who was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001. The Bush administration says Mr. Marri is a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda, and it is holding him without charges at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. He is the only person currently held as an enemy combatant on the mainland, but the legal principles established in his case are likely to affect the roughly 250 prisoners at Guantánamo.

Many legal experts say that all of the new administration’s options in Mr. Marri’s case are perilous. Intelligence officials say he is exceptionally dangerous, making deportation problematic.

Trying him on criminal charges could be difficult, too, in part because some of the evidence against him may have been obtained through torture and would not be admissible.

And staying the course in the Marri case would outrage civil libertarians.

“If they adopt the Bush administration position, or some version of it,” said Brandt Goldstein, a professor at New York Law School, “it is going to be a moment of profound disappointment for everyone in the legal community and Americans generally who believe that the Bush administration has tried to turn the presidency into a monarchy.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama, Brooke Anderson, said he “will make decisions about how to handle detainees as president when his full national security and legal teams are in place.”

There are other significant cases on the Supreme Court’s docket — including ones concerning indecency on the airwaves, religious displays, voting rights and the possible pre-emption of state injury suits by federal law — but specialists say a midcourse correction is most likely in the enemy combatant case, Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, No. 08-368.

Charles Fried, who was solicitor general in the Reagan administration, said such changes should be undertaken “reluctantly and rarely” and only “for sufficient reason in a sufficiently urgent case.”

From the new administration’s perspective, Mr. Marri’s case may meet that standard.

A year ago, Mr. Obama answered a detailed questionnaire concerning his views on presidential power from The Boston Globe. “I reject the Bush administration’s claim,” Mr. Obama said, “that the president has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.”

That sounds vigorous and categorical. But applying this view to Mr. Marri’s case is not that simple. Although he was in the United States legally, he was not an American citizen. In addition, a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force arguably gave the president the authority that Mr. Obama has said is not conferred by the Constitution alone.

Still, Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has generally supported the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terrorism, said Mr. Obama’s hands are tied. He cannot, Mr. McCarthy said, continue to maintain that Mr. Marri’s detention is lawful.

“I don’t think politically for him that’s a viable option,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Legally, it’s perfectly viable.”

There is precedent for reversing course between campaign and courthouse. When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, he was vehement in his opposition to the first Bush administration’s policy of intercepting Haitian refugees at sea and returning them without asylum hearings.

By the time he took office, though, Mr. Clinton had changed his mind, instructing the Justice Department to defend the policy in the Supreme Court, which upheld it in 1993.

Mr. Obama’s supporters are hoping for a different approach, one that will ensure that the precedents set during the Bush administration do not take root.

“The agenda for the Obama administration in dealing with the Bush administration’s assault on the rule of law,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and a member of the Marri legal team, “should be to plow the site with both intellectual and political salt.”

In 1993, Mr. Clinton said that practical reality trumped legal theory. In the Marri case, too, the practical alternatives to military detention may strike the Obama administration as unpalatable.

One possibility is to deport Mr. Marri to Qatar, but Bush administration officials say that would be an enormous mistake.

“Al-Marri must be detained,” Jeffrey N. Rapp, a defense intelligence official wrote in a court filing in 2004, “to prevent him from aiding Al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States, its armed forces, other governmental personnel, or citizens.”

Mr. Marri’s lawyers would be delighted to see their client freed, but they are also eager to vacate a decision of the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., in July upholding the president’s authority to detain Mr. Marri subject to a court hearing on whether he was properly designated an enemy combatant.

Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Mr. Marri, emphasized both points.

“If, as President-elect Obama has pledged, the rule of law in America is to be restored,” Mr. Hafetz said, “then Mr. al-Marri’s military detention must cease and the lower court’s ruling upholding the president’s power to order the military to seize legal residents and American citizens from their homes and imprison them without charge, must be overturned.”

Another alternative for the new administration is to prosecute Mr. Marri as a criminal. But it is not clear that there is admissible evidence against him.

When Mr. Marri was arrested, in December 2001, he was charged with garden-variety crimes: credit card fraud and, later, lying to federal agents and financial institutions, and identity theft. But when Mr. Bush moved Mr. Marri from the criminal system to military detention in June 2003, the government agreed to dismiss those charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled.

The more serious accusations recounted in Mr. Rapp’s statement are attributed partly to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the chief architect of the Sept. 11 attacks and who was captured in early 2003. The Central Intelligence Agency has said Mr. Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, and information obtained from him may therefore not be admissible in court. Mr. McCarthy, the former prosecutor, said he hoped the new administration is sifting through its options with exceptional care.

“If they can’t try him in federal court and assuming he poses the severe risk the Bush administration suggests he poses, is there some room to detain him under the immigration system?” Mr. McCarthy asked. “If there is not a Plan B, we have a disaster that transcends al-Marri,” he added, referring to the larger question of what to do with the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

A second case concerning detainees is moving even faster than Mr. Marri’s. Last month, the Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court to take a fresh look at a case brought by four former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay who say they were tortured. Acting fast, the appeals court initially ordered briefing to be completed by the Friday before Inauguration Day.

Depending on how you look at it, the appeals court was being exceptionally efficient, uninterested in the new administration’s views or doing it a favor by not forcing it to take an immediate position on whether provisions of the Bill of Rights and a federal law guaranteeing religious freedom apply to detainees held at Guantánamo Bay.

Eric L. Lewis, a lawyer for the former prisoners, asked the court to slow things down, a request the Bush Justice Department opposed. But the appeals court granted Mr. Lewis’s request on Friday, and the first filings are now due on Jan. 26 — the Monday after Inauguration Day.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/washington/03scotus.html?ref=politics)

[ZippyTheChimp]

Silent Butt Deadly
Weapons of Ass Destruction


LONDON, Sept. 28, 2009


Al Qaeda Bombers Learn from Drug Smugglers


New Technique of Storing Bomb Materials
Inside Body Cavity Nearly Kills a Saudi Prince

By Sheila MacVicar

(CBS) Al Qaeda has developed a new tactic that allows suicide bombers to breach even the tightest security, as CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports.

Inside a Saudi palace, the scene was the bloody aftermath of an al Qaeda attack in August aimed at killing Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, head of Saudi Arabia's counter terrorism operations.

To get his bomb into this room, Abdullah Asieri, one of Saudi Arabia's most wanted men, avoided detection by two sets of airport security including metal detectors and palace security. He spent 30 hours in the close company of the prince's own secret service agents - all without anyone suspecting a thing.

How did he do it?

Taking a trick from the narcotics trade - which has long smuggled drugs in body cavities - Asieri had a pound of high explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum.

This was a meticulously planned operation with al Qaeda once again producing something new: this time, the Trojan bomber.

The blast left the prince lightly wounded - a failure as an assassination, but as an exercise in defeating security, it was perfect.

The bomber persuaded the prince he wanted to leave al Qaeda, setting a trap.

Al Qaeda has an animated movie showing the meeting between the bomber and the prince. Asieri says more senior al Qaeda figures want to surrender and convinces the prince to talk to them on a cell phone.

In the conversation recorded by al Qaeda, you hear a beep in the middle of two identical phrases that are repeated by the bomber and his handler.

Explosives experts tell CBS News that beep was likely a text message activating the bomb concealed inside Asieri.

The Trojan bomber hands the phone to Prince Mohammed. He's standing next to him, and 14 seconds later, he detonates.

"This is the nightmare scenario," said Chris Yates, an aviation security consultant.

On a plane at altitude, the effects of such a bomb could be catastrophic. And there is no current security system that could stop it.

"Absolutely nothing other than to require people to strip naked at the airport," said Yates.

And al Qaeda says it will share its new technique via the Internet very soon. There is nothing that can stop that either.

©MMIX, CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.


Still more indignities at the airport?

[lofter1]

... Asieri had a pound of high explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum.



These guys are way kinky.

Trying not to imagine the bomb-prep scene ...

[Ninjahedge]

Um, how can we test methods of anal detection?

Any volunteers for test subjects? :eek:

Am I wrong here, but wouldn't a dog be able to tell? Also, with the time you spend on Airport check-ins, it is amazing these guys can stay....retentive for that long.... I guess it depends on what you have to eat before.....

Time for standard colon cleansing before boarding!!!! (Or development of more advanced MRI machines that could detect a pound of anythnig in someone's digestive track, or cut open and placed under the skin (Remember Batman?).

[Daquan13]

An AA Boeing 757 was ordered to be quarantined, emptied of its cargo and held out of service at Logan Int'l Airport yeasterday after it was learned that a bomb scare note was posted in one of the craft's rear bathrooms.

Seems the officials think that this flight was tied in with the one that left Miami 2 weeks ago and had a similar note in one of the rear lavs. That plane was also a 757. Two of the flight attendants might have something to do with it.

Another reason not to fly! :(

[ZippyTheChimp]

Rare bathrooms?

[Ninjahedge]

They just don't cook them long enough.....

[Alonzo-ny]

If you can only lightly wound someone standing right next to them I doubt this method would bring down a plane.

[Ninjahedge]

Depends on how close you put your arse to the window I guess......

[User Name]

If you can only lightly wound someone standing right next to them I doubt this method would bring down a plane.
Beg to differ...

http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2006_08_12.html#005892

to detect pooched goods, employ the squat-n-cough.

[ZippyTheChimp]

"Ladies and gentlemen, please observe the
No buttocks pressed against the windows signs."

[Ninjahedge]

Kinda redefines the definition of "shaped charge" doesn't it?

[kakonsteraro]

how do I know this? We have been fighting terrorism since 1492 and Still going. I hope none of you think your war on terrorism is going to be over in your lifetime.

[lofter1]

What is revealed in this story is fairly amazing ...

D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08terror.html?)
By GINGER THOMPSON, ERIC SCHMITT and SOUAD MEKHENNET
November 7, 2010

WASHINGTON — American authorities sent David C. Headley (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/david_c_headley/index.html?inline=nyt-per), a small-time drug dealer and sometime informant, to work for them in Pakistan months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups, according to court records and interviews. Not long after Mr. Headley arrived there, he began training with terrorists, eventually playing a key role in the 2008 attacks that left 164 people dead in Mumbai.

The October 2001 warning was dismissed, the authorities said, as the ire of a jilted girlfriend and for lack of proof. Less than a month later, those concerns did not come up when a federal court in New York granted Mr. Headley an early release from probation so that he could be sent to work for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in Pakistan. It is unclear what Mr. Headley was supposed to do in Pakistan for the Americans.

“All I knew was the D.E.A. wanted him in Pakistan as fast as possible because they said they were close to making some big cases,” said Luis Caso, Mr. Headley’s former probation officer.

On Sunday, while President Obama was visiting India, he briefed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the status of his administration’s investigation of Mr. Headley, including the failure to act on repeated warnings that he might be a terrorist. A senior United States official said the inquiry has concluded that while the government received warnings, it did not have strong enough evidence at the time to act on them. “Had the United States government sufficiently established he was engaged in plotting a terrorist attack in India, the information would have most assuredly been transferred promptly to the Indian government,” the official said in a statement to The New York Times. The statement did not make clear whether any American agencies would be held accountable.

In recent weeks, United States government officials have begun to acknowledge that Mr. Headley’s path from American informant to transnational terrorist illustrates the breakdowns and miscommunications that have bedeviled them since the Sept. 11 attacks. Warnings about his radicalism were apparently not shared with the drug agency that made use of his ties in Pakistan ...

FULL ARTICLE (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08terror.html?)

[Ninjahedge]

That is seriously something that should send some heads rolling.

Unfortunately, they will not be the ones responsible.

Maybe the ones behind the scenes did not reveal this because they were waiting for other events to expose themselves so that the ones truly responsible would no longer have their fall-guys/Firewall in place......


Why knows. Too much like a John Grisham novel there. This is either a grand plot or an even grander screw-up... :P

[lofter1]

The guy was a heroin dealer before he became a government agent.

What would lead anyone to think the Feds should have a few extra eyes watching over him?

[Ninjahedge]

Maybe we never learned about the microphone and GPS unit permanently "installed" up his colon.

[lofter1]

Now on Taxi TV: Salvo in Terror-Trial Debate

NY TIMES (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/now-showing-on-taxi-tv-salvo-in-a-debate-over-terror-trials/?ref=nyregion)
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
November 9, 2010

The television in a New York City taxicab is a good place to get an update on the weather or learn about a new tourist attraction. It is also, starting Tuesday, a medium for one of city’s most contentious political debates.

Human Rights Watch, the international advocacy group, is sponsoring a 30-second commercial in the city’s taxicabs to promote a petition urging the Justice Department to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other suspects in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in a New York City federal court, rather than at a military tribunal.

The “man-on-the-street”-style video, filmed around parts of Lower Manhattan, features more than a dozen anonymous city residents, from formally dressed bankers to street vendors, who speak directly to the camera, declaring, “I’m a New Yorker.” The speakers proclaim their support for the trials to be held in the city; “here, here, because the crime was committed here,” one says. The advertisement ends by urging viewers to “stand up for 9/11 trials in New York” and suggesting a visit to the group’s Facebook page.

The 30-second ad, titled “It Happened Here,” will run through Sunday in 11,800 yellow cabs — nearly the entire city fleet ...

FULL ARTICLE (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/now-showing-on-taxi-tv-salvo-in-a-debate-over-terror-trials/?ref=nyregion)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m31oBDwzJW0

[Merry]

Review (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2932&p=348903&viewfull=1#post348903) of new book by Blair Kamin, Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age

[mariab]

Where would they get the jurors? Who would they be?

[lofter1]

Dubious Deal, Cloaked by National Security Claim


" ... a review of documents show that Mr. Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States. But the technology appears to have been a hoax ... "
NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?hp)
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
February 19, 2011

WASHINGTON — For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.

The Justice Department, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Mr. Montgomery bamboozled federal officials.

A onetime biomedical technician with a penchant for gambling, Mr. Montgomery is at the center of a tale that features terrorism scares, secret White House briefings, backing from prominent Republicans, backdoor deal-making and fantastic-sounding computer technology.

Interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials and business associates and a review of documents show that Mr. Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States. But the technology appears to have been a hoax, and a series of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, repeatedly missed the warning signs, the records and interviews show.

Mr. Montgomery’s former lawyer, Michael Flynn — who now describes Mr. Montgomery as a “con man” — says he believes that the administration has been shutting off scrutiny of Mr. Montgomery’s business for fear of revealing that the government has been duped.

“The Justice Department is trying to cover this up,” Mr. Flynn said. “If this unravels, all of the evidence, all of the phony terror alerts and all the embarrassment comes up publicly, too. The government knew this technology was bogus, but these guys got paid millions for it.”

Justice Department officials declined to discuss the government’s dealings with Mr. Montgomery, 57, who is in bankruptcy and living outside Palm Springs, Calif. Mr. Montgomery is about to go on trial in Las Vegas on unrelated charges of trying to pass $1.8 million in bad checks at casinos, but he has not been charged with wrongdoing in the federal contracts, nor has the government tried to get back any of the money it paid. He and his current lawyer declined to comment.

The computer codes he patented — codes that he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.

The codes led to dead ends in connection with a 2006 terrorism plot in Britain. And they were used by counterterrorism officials to respond to a bogus Somali terrorism plot on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, according to previously undisclosed documents.

“Dennis would always say, ‘My technology is real, and it’s worth a fortune,’ ” recounted Steve Crisman, a filmmaker who oversaw business operations for Mr. Montgomery and a partner until a few years ago. “In the end, I’m convinced it wasn’t real.”

Government officials, with billions of dollars in new counterterrorism financing after Sept. 11, eagerly embraced the promise of new tools against militants.

C.I.A. officials, though, came to believe that Mr. Montgomery’s technology was fake in 2003, but their conclusions apparently were not relayed to the military’s Special Operations Command, which had contracted with his firm. In 2006, F.B.I. investigators were told by co-workers of Mr. Montgomery that he had repeatedly doctored test results at presentations for government officials. But Mr. Montgomery still landed more business.

In 2009, the Air Force approved a $3 million deal for his technology, even though a contracting officer acknowledged that other agencies were skeptical about the software, according to e-mails obtained by The New York Times.

Hints of fraud by Mr. Montgomery, previously raised by Bloomberg Markets and Playboy, provide a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of government contracting. A Pentagon study in January found that it had paid $285 billion in three years to more than 120 contractors accused of fraud or wrongdoing ...

Software and Secrets

... The Bush administration declared that some classified details about the use of Mr. Montgomery’s software were a “state secret” that could cause grave harm if disclosed in court. In 2008, the government spent three days “scrubbing” the home computers of Mr. Montgomery’s lawyer of all references to the technology ...

The secrecy was so great that at a deposition Mr. Montgomery gave in November, two government officials showed up to monitor the questioning but refused to give their full names or the agencies they worked for.

Years of legal wrangling did not deter Mr. Montgomery from passing supposed intelligence to the government, according to intelligence officials, including an assertion in 2006 that his software was able to identify some of the men suspected of trying to plant liquid bombs on planes in Britain — a claim immediately disputed by United States intelligence officials. And he soon found a new backer: Edra Blixseth, a onetime billionaire who with her former husband had run the exclusive Yellowstone Club in Montana.

Hoping to win more government money, Ms. Blixseth turned to some influential friends, like Jack Kemp, the former New York congressman and Republican vice-presidential nominee, and Conrad Burns, then a Republican senator from Montana. They became minority stakeholders in the venture, called Blxware.

‘We Are All Toast’

In an interview, Mr. Burns recalled how impressed he was by a video presentation that Mr. Montgomery gave to a cable company. “He talked a hell of a game,” the former senator said.

Mr. Kemp, meanwhile, used his friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney to set up a meeting in 2006 at which Mr. Kemp, Mr. Montgomery and Ms. Blixseth met with a top Cheney adviser, Samantha Ravich, to talk about expanding the government’s use of the Blxware software, officials said. She was noncommittal.

Mr. Flynn, who was still Mr. Montgomery’s lawyer at the time, sent an angry letter to Mr. Cheney in May 2007. He accused the White House of abandoning a tool shown to “save lives,” and warned that if the administration failed to block a Montana judge from making confidential details public, Mr. Montgomery would have to “reveal the names of the individuals he worked with at the C.I.A.” (After a falling out with Mr. Montgomery, Mr. Flynn now represents another party in one of the lawsuits.)

But Mr. Montgomery’s company still had an ally at the Air Force, which in late 2008 began negotiating a $3 million contract with Blxware.

In e-mails to Mr. Montgomery and other company officials, an Air Force contracting officer, Joseph Liberatore, described himself as one of the “believers” in the technology, despite skepticism from the C.I.A. and problems with the no-bid contract.

If other agencies examined the deal, he said in a December 2008 e-mail, “we are all toast.” ...

FULL ARTICLE (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?hp)

© 2011 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Dubious Deal, Cloaked by National Security Claim

... he soon found a new backer: Edra Blixseth, a onetime billionaire who with her former husband had run the exclusive Yellowstone Club in Montana.

Hoping to win more government money, Ms. Blixseth turned to some influential friends, like Jack Kemp, the former New York congressman and Republican vice-presidential nominee, and Conrad Burns, then a Republican senator from Montana. They became minority stakeholders in the venture, called Blxware.


Club founder blasts ex-wife, says judge is biased

BLOOMBERG NEWS (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-19/club-founder-blasts-ex-wife-says-judge-is-biased.html)
JANUARY 19, 2011

"BUTTE, Mont. (AP) — The founder of Montana's ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club, Tim Blixseth, on Tuesday alleged that his ex-wife pursued fraudulent dealings with the U.S. government as he attempted to discredit testimony she offered in support of a $40 million judgment against him last year.

Appearing in federal court in Butte, attorneys for Tim Blixseth laid out a complex scheme in which they said Edra Blixseth used her political connections to seek a $100 million intelligence contract for bogus computer software.

Allegations related to the alleged software scheme with Montgomery date back several years ...

©2011 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

[lofter1]

Dubious Deal, Cloaked by National Security Claim

“The Justice Department is trying to cover this up,” Mr. Flynn said. “If this unravels, all of the evidence, all of the phony terror alerts and all the embarrassment comes up publicly, too. The government knew this technology was bogus, but these guys got paid millions for it.”


The ORDER (http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/nevada/nvdce/3:2006cv00056/46642/1172/0.pdf) of the UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF NEVADA

On October 28, 2010, this Court received from the Honorable Ralph B. Kirscher, United States Bankruptcy Court Judge for the District of Montana, documents filed in a case pending before Judge Kirscher, In re Edra Blixseth, Case No. 09-60452-7, which may violate the Protective Order (Doc. #253) entered by the undersigned in this case. The subject documents have been stricken from the record in the bankruptcy proceedings in Montana ...

DATED: October 28, 2010
PHILIP M. PRO
United States District Judge

[Ninjahedge]

“Dennis would always say, ‘My technology is real, and it’s worth a fortune,’ ” recounted Steve Crisman, a filmmaker who oversaw business operations for Mr. Montgomery and a partner until a few years ago. “In the end, I’m convinced it wasn’t real.”


....but it was still worth a fortune.... ;)

[lofter1]

How would America do that?

[mariab]

31 US troops, mostly elite Navy SEALs, killed in Afghanistan

7 Afghan commandos also die in attack; SEALs were from same unit but not same team that killed Osama bin Laden[/h]msnbc.com staff and news service reports

updated 54 minutes ago
2011-08-06T19:10:50

KABUL, Afghanistan (http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&where1=KABUL, Afghanistan&sty=h&form=msdate) — A military helicopter was shot down in eastern Afghanistan, killing 31 U.S. special operation troops, most of them from the elite Navy SEALs unit that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, along with seven Afghan commandos. It was the deadliest single incident for American forces in the decade-long war.
The Taliban claimed they downed the helicopter with rocket fire while it was taking part in a raid on a house where insurgents were gathered in the province of Wardak late Friday. It said wreckage of the craft was strewn at the scene.
U.S. officials confirmed to NBC News that the U.S. believes the helicopter was shot down. One senior defense official, speakng on condition of anonymity, said the military does "not have any indication that it was anything other than" hostile fire.
NATO confirmed the overnight crash took place and that there "was enemy activity in the area." But it said it was still investigating the cause and conducting a recovery operation at the site. It did not release details or casualty figures. "We are in the process of accessing the facts," said U.S. Air Force Capt. Justin Brockhoff, a NATO spokesman.
One current and one former U.S. official said that the dead included more than 20 Navy SEALs from SEAL Team Six, the unit that carried out the raid in Pakistan in May that killed bin Laden. They were being flown by a crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because families are still being notified.
None of those killed in the crash is believed to have been part of the SEALs mission that killed bin Laden, but they were from the same unit as the bin Laden team.
The SEALs were not all from the same location in the U.S., officials told NBC. Some were East-Coast based, others West-Coast based.


President Barack Obama mourned the deaths of the American troops, saying in a statement that the crash serves as a reminder of the "extraordinary sacrifices" being made by the U.S. military and its families. He said he also mourned "the Afghans who died alongside our troops."
The death toll would surpass the worst single day loss of life for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001 — the June 28, 2005 downing of a military helicopter in eastern Kunar province. In that incident, 16 Navy SEALs and Army special operations troops were killed when their craft was shot down while on a mission to rescue four SEALs under attack by the Taliban. Three of the SEALs being rescued were also killed and the fourth wounded. It was the highest one-day death toll for the Navy Special Warfare personnel since World War II.
With its steep mountain ranges, providing shelter for militants armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, eastern Afghanistan is hazardous terrain for military aircraft. Large, slow-moving air transport carriers like the CH-47 Chinook are particularly vulnerable, often forced to ease their way through sheer valleys where insurgents can achieve more level lines of fire from mountainsides.Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday gave the first public word of the new crash, saying in a statement that "a NATO helicopter crashed last night in Wardak province" and that 31 American special operations troops were killed. He expressed his condolences to President Barack Obama.

The helicopter was a twin-rotor Chinook, said an official at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was receiving his information from an Afghan officer in Kabul.
The crash took place in the Sayd Abad district of Wardak province, said a provincial government spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid. The volatile region borders the province of Kabul where the Afghan capital is located and is known for its strong Taliban presence.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement that Taliban fighters downed the helicopter during a "heavy raid" in Sayd Abad. He said NATO attacked a house in Sayd Abad where insurgent fighters were gathering Friday night. During the battle, the fighters shot down the helicopter, killing 31 Americans and seven Afghans, he said, adding that eight insurgents were killed in the fight.
There have been at least 17 coalition and Afghan aircraft crashes in Afghanistan this year.
Most of the crashes were attributed to pilot errors, weather conditions or mechanical failures. However, the coalition has confirmed that at least one CH-47F Chinook helicopter was hit by a rocket propelled grenade on July 25. Two coalition crew members were injured in that attack.
Elsewhere, an accidental NATO attack
Meanwhile, in the southern Helmand province, an Afghan government official said Saturday that NATO troops attacked a house and inadvertently killed eight members of a family, including women and children.
NATO said that Taliban fighters fired rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire at coalition troops during a patrol Friday in the Nad Ali district.

"Coalition forces responded with small arms fire and as the incident continued, an air strike was employed against the insurgent position," said Brockhoff. He added that NATO sent a delegation to meet with local leaders and investigate the incident.
Nad Ali district police chief Shadi Khan said civilians died in the bombardment but that it was unknown how many insurgents were killed.
Helmand, a Taliban stronghold, is the deadliest province in Afghanistan for international troops.
NATO has come under harsh criticism in the past for accidentally killing civilians during operations against suspected insurgents. However, civilian death tallies by the United Nations show the insurgency is responsible for most war casualties involving noncombatants.
In south Afghanistan, NATO said two coalition service member were killed, one on Friday and another on Saturday. The international alliance did not release further details.
With the casualties from the helicopter crash, the deaths bring to 365 the number of coalition troops killed this year in Afghanistan and 42 this month.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44043847/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/?gt1=43001

[mariab]

'True heroes' mourned after Taliban fighters down chopper, killing 30 US troops

Slain SEALs were from same unit that killed Osama bin Laden; NATO launches operation to retrieve aircraft's remains

NBC, msnbc.com and news services
updated 8/7/2011 8:34:04 AM ET 2011-08-07T12:34:04

KABUL, Afghanistan (http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&where1=KABUL, Afghanistan&sty=h&form=msdate) — Insurgents shot down a helicopter in Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite Navy SEALs unit that killed Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials said. It was the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war. The downing Saturday was a stinging blow to the lauded, tight-knit SEAL Team 6, months after its crowning achievement. It was also a heavy setback for the U.S.-led coalition as it begins to draw down thousands of combat troops fighting what has become an increasingly costly and unpopular war. Seven Afghan commandos also died during the incident.
The Associated Press quoted an Afghan official as saying there was renewed fighting in the area Sunday. NATO confirmed it has begun an operation to recover the remains of the helicopter.
None of the 22 SEAL personnel killed in the crash were part of the team that killed bin Laden in a May raid in Pakistan, but they belonged to the same unit. Their deployment in the raid in which the helicopter crashed would suggest that the target was a high-ranking insurgent figure.
Video: SEALs community in mourning (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/#slice-1)(on this page) Special operations forces, including the SEALs and others, have been at the forefront in the stepped up strategy of taking out key insurgent leaders in targeted raids, and they will be relied on even more as regular troops pull out.
"No words describe the sorrow we feel in the wake of this tragic loss," General John Allen, who took over from General David Petraeus three weeks ago as commander of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said in a statement released overnight. "All of those killed in this operation were true heroes who had already given so much in the defense of freedom."
A current U.S. official and a former U.S. official said the Americans included 22 SEALs, three Air Force combat controllers and a dog handler and his dog. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because military officials were still notifying the families of the dead.


The SEALs were not all from the same location in the U.S., officials told NBC News. Some were East-Coast based, others West-Coast based.
'Brave warrior'
Geneva Vaughn of Union City, Tennessee, told The Associated Press on Saturday that her grandson Aaron Carson Vaughn, a Tennessee native, was one of the SEALs who was killed.
Speaking to CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/07/afghanistan.fatality/index.html), Vaughn described her grandson — a father of two young children — as a "brave warrior" but also a "gentle man."
She added: "He loved his country and he was willing to give his life to protect his family and protect his country. He was a great American."
Jon Tumilson of Rockford, Iowa, was also among the SEALs killed in the attack, his father George Tumilson told The Des Moines Register (http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110806/NEWS/110806026/Navy-SEAL-from-Iowa-among-30-U-S-troops-killed-Afghan-helicopter-crash).
The strike is likely to boost the morale of the Taliban in a key province that controls a strategic approach to the capital Kabul. The overnight raid took place in the Tangi Joy Zarin area of Wardak province's Sayd Abad district, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul. Forested peaks in the region give the insurgency good cover and the Taliban have continued to use it as a base despite repeated NATO assaults.

Read the rest:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44049685/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/?gt1=43001

[Ninjahedge]

This is the strange thing.

Watching this, I felt sad that some of our guys were killed in this, but one thing popped up in the back of my head. This is still a war.

We glorify our own soldiers and praise their accomplishments, but forget that most of what they "accomplish" is the killing of other people.

I am NOT saying that I sympathize with those they killed, or the political positions of the combatants, or anything of that nature, but I am just numb from the reality that THIS is what war is. We dress it in all sorts of special colors, names, ceremonies and such, but it was, is and shall always be, death.

[ZippyTheChimp]

War is hell.

[eddhead]

There is no justification for us involvment in iraq or afghanistan. none. this war has bankrupted us in terms of blood and treasure. it's an outrage.

[Ninjahedge]

I am 50% on that.

Afghanistan is the only place we had a place being, as well as our sortie into Pakistan to get that guy they had no idea was renting a summer house right down the road from one of their military bases.

"Hey Jaquir, doesn't that guy look a lot like Osama?"

"Don't be silly, he isn't black!" >wark<

Anyway, although I do believe we had a place in Afghanistan, the resources we devoted were never enough, and we focused on another that has been a money pit since day 1. Iraq.

Now that we have destabilized a country we could have easily kept paying of for YEARS as compared to the $$ we have spent "stabilizing" it, we are stuck up poop canal. If we pull completely out, someone will be more than happy to take our place in a rather fragile socio-economic system that was previously only held together by a vindictive dominating tyrant.

I do not think it is our best interest to remove all presence there for a long time, and I am pissed at them making the move in the first place.

That said, there are plenty of places we are spending that we do not need to. We are NOT the world's police force (as Barney was going off on this morning on the news), and once we remove ourselves from that position, maybe we can focus more on actual needs rather than self-paid mercenary outfit.

[lofter1]

We got off track in Afghanistan almost as soon as we went in. Empires for the past 2,000 years have failed to achieve "Nation Building" there and it was pure hubris to think we could do otherwise.

Knock out the main bad guys and get out would have been a much better plan. But 10 years on we're still slogging through, and possibly have created more enemies there than we had before (not to mention all along we've been feeding the wolves next door).

[Ninjahedge]

I am not disagreeing on the money pit of Afghanistan.

The only point I hold is that it was the only place that we really had a reason to do something about. The other, ironically, was taken by Hubris and a few manipulative individuals that stood to gain a lot over the manipulation of a former "co-workers" son.

[mariab]

Doomed soldiers were racing to save Army Rangers when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan

BY Lukas I. Alpert (http://wirednewyork.com/authors/Lukas I. Alpert)
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, August 8th 2011, 4:00 AM

http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2011/08/08/alg_three_military.jpg AP
Lt. Cmdr. Jonas Kelsall (left) Chief Petty Officer James Reeves (center) and Sgt. Patrick Hamburger were among those killed when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan.

The elite soldiers killed when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Afghanistan) were rushing to help others stuck in a firefight while hunting a top Taliban (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/The+Taliban) commander.
The 30 U.S. (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/United+States) service members - including 22 Navy SEALs (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/U.S.+Navy+SEALs) - and eight Afghan soldiers killed, were racing to save a group of Army Rangers (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/U.S.+Army+Special+Operations+Command) pinned down by enemy fire, officials said.
The Army unit had been tracking a Taliban commander responsible for attacking U.S. forces when they met heavy resistance in restive Wardak Province (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Wardak+Province), CNN (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Cable+News+Network) reported.
As the Chinook helicopter (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/CH-47+Chinook+Helicopter) carrying the elite SEAL Team Six commandos closed in, it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed, officials said.
NATO (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/NATO) was recovering the remains of the twin rotor helicopter. The Americans included 22 SEALs, three Air Force combat controllers and a dog handler and his dog, according to a current and a former U.S. official.
It was the deadliest single incident for NATO forces since the Afghan war began.
The SEALs were part of the same unit responsible for killing terror boss Osama Bin Laden (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Osama+bin+Laden), although none of the dead participated in that raid.
While the Department of Defense (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/U.S.+Department+of+Defense) has not yet released the identities of those killed, some names emerged Sunday as family members contacted local media. They included:
- Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Strange (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Michael+Strange), 25, of Philadelphia (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Philadelphia), had been in the military for six years.
"He wasn't supposed to die this young. He was supposed to be safe," said his mother, Elizabeth Strange (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Elizabeth+Strange), outside the family's home, where a dozen American flags fluttered in the wind. "He told me that and I believed him. I shouldn't have believed him because I know better."
- Chief Petty Officer James Reeves (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/James+Reeves) and Lt. Cmdr. Jonas Kelsall (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Jonas+Kelsall), both of Shreveport (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Shreveport), La., went to the same high school where they played soccer together.
Reeves became a SEAL in 1999, his father told The Shreveport Times (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/The+Shreveport+Times), and had earned four Bronze Stars.
Kelsall was an expert in underwater demolition, the paper reported.
- Air Force Tech Sgt. John W. Brown (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/John+Brown), of Siloam Springs (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Siloam+Springs), Ark., was a paramedic attached to the Navy SEALs. He had been in the military for nine years.
"It's something that the state of Arkansas (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Arkansas) can be proud of to know that one of our finest, and he was one of our finest, has died for our country," Brown's friend, Arkansas state Rep. Justin Harris (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Justin+Harris), told KATV.
- National Guard (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/The+Army+National+Guard) member Sgt. Patrick Hamburger (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Patrick+Hamburger), 30, of Lincoln, Neb. (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Lincoln+(Nebraska)), had just been deployed into combat for the first time two weeks ago, relatives said.
"He didn't have to go, and he wanted to go because his group was getting deployed. He wanted to be there for them. That's him for you," his brother Chris Hamburger (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Chris+Hamburger) said.
- Aaron Carson Vaughan (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Aaron+Carson+Vaughan), 30, of Tennessee (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Tennessee) and Jon Tumlinson (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Jon+Tumlinson) of Rockford (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Rockford), Iowa (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Iowa) - both SEALs - had previously been identified as among the dead.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2011/08/08/2011-08-08_lost_on_way_to_to_save_buddies_seals_doomed_in_ hunt_for_taliban_big.html

[mariab]

This was a tearjerker, especially if you're a dog lover.

Dog mourns at casket of fallen Navy SEAL

Labrador retriever Hawkeye lies down with a sigh at funeral of his ownerhttp://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/110825-seal-vmed-5a.grid-5x2.jpg

By Scott Stump TODAY.com contributor

updated 8/25/2011 9:54:58 AM ET 2011-08-25T13:54:58 Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson lay in a coffin, draped in an American flag, in front of a tearful audience mourning his death in Afghanistan. Soon an old friend appeared, and like a fellow soldier on a battlefield, his loyal dog refused to leave him behind.
Tumilson’s Labrador retriever, Hawkeye, was photographed lying by Tumilson’s casket in a heart-wrenching image taken at the funeral service in Tumilson’s hometown of Rockford, Iowa, earlier this week. Hawkeye walked up to the casket at the beginning of the service and then dropped down with a heaving sigh as about 1,500 mourners witnessed a dog accompanying his master until the end, reported CBS.
http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/tdy-110811-at-sgt-tumilson.grid-3x2.jpg
AP
The photo was snapped by Tumilson’s cousin, Lisa Pembleton, and posted on her Facebook page in memory of the San Diego resident. Tumilson, 35, was one of 30 American troops, including 22 Navy SEALs, who were killed when a Taliban insurgent shot down a Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade on Aug. 6.
“I felt compelled to take one photo to share with family members that couldn't make it or couldn't see what I could from the aisle,” Pembleton wrote on her Facebook page. “To say that he was an amazing man doesn't do him justice. The loss of Jon to his family, military family and friends is immeasurable.’’

Read the rest:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44271018/ns/today-today_pets_and_animals/?GT1=43001

[mariab]

Wonder how many blackout marks there will be.


Newseum in DC first to show FBI evidence from 9/11

3:56 PM, Sep. 1, 2011

WASHINGTON — Washington’s Newseum on Friday will put on public view for the first time artifacts from the Sept. 11 attacks and the FBI’s investigation of terrorism.
The journalism museum is expanding its current FBI exhibit with a new section, “War on Terror: The FBI’s New Focus.” The Newseum will offer free admission on the weekend of Sept. 10-11 to mark the 9/11 anniversary.
The exhibit will include clues about Osama bin Laden’s activities that have been stored in the FBI’s evidence lockers.
Among the 60 new artifacts on view are engines and landing gear from passenger planes that crashed into New York’s World Trade Center and hiking boots that would-be bomber Richard Reid rigged to explode aboard an airliner in December 2001.
———
Online:
http://newseum.org/


http://www.mycentraljersey.com/article/B3/20110901/NJNEWS18/309010062/Newseum-in-DC-first-to-show-FBI-evidence-from-9-11?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s

[/h]

[Ninjahedge]

Daq, could you re-edit and get rid of all those format commands?

It is kinda irritating to see that stuff on every quoted article you bring in...


Thanks!

[Daquan13]

Ok, you're welcome, but......,

Format commands? Could you please help me by explaining a little bit better on what they are?

Are you speaking of the stuff at the top of the post just under the picture? Let me know, please.

[Ninjahedge]

Al Quaeda rejects Iran's 09-11 conspiracy theories.
[ h=2]Al-Qaida rejects Iran's 9/11 conspiracy theories[/h ]http://por-img.cimcontent.net/api/assets/bin-201109/2354-Iran-Ahmadinejad.jpg Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, listens during a press con...

[ h=3]By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF, AP
Thu Sep 29, 3:17 PM EDT[/h ]
http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/misc/progress.gifhttp://wirednewyork.com/forum/clear.gif

This is what I am seeing.

[ZippyTheChimp]

The h things in brackets.

[lofter1]

That pesky crud that shows up everywhere in the latest version of Vbulletin :cool:

But it's the http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/misc/progress.gifhttp://wirednewyork.com/forum/clear.gif that's really making me crazy :eek:

[eddhead]

How did you do that??

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/misc/progress.gifhttp://wirednewyork.com/forum/clear.gif

[Ninjahedge]

< img src="http://wirednewyork.com/forum/images/misc/progress.gif" border="0" alt="" >

Spaces included for illustration.....

[Daquan13]

It happened when I transfered the post from the 09-11 thread to here. I think I'll delete and repost it from the Web. Thanx.

[Daquan13]

Ok, here it is again, this time, with no annoying stuff; I deleted the other one.


Al-Qaida rejects Iran's 9/11 conspiracy theoriesBy MAAMOUN YOUSSEF
Associated Press

Published: Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 5:03 p.m.


Al-Qaida has sharply criticized Iran's president over his suggestions that the United States government was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and not al-Qaida, dismissing the comments as "ridiculous."

During his trip to New York last week for the U.N. General Assembly, Ahmadinejad claimed in an interview with The Associated Press that explosive material and not planes brought down the World Trade Center. He stopped short of saying the United States staged the disaster, but said that as an engineer, he's sure New York's twin towers were not brought down by jetliners.

"A few airplanes without previous coordination known to the security forces and the intelligence community in the United States cannot become missiles and target the heart of the United States," Ahmadinejad said.

In an article posted online Wednesday in the terror network's English-language Internet magazine "Inspire," al-Qaida rejected the Iranian leader's suggestions.
"Why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?" asked the article's author, Abu Suhail. He said Iran wanted to portray itself as a country that stands up to the U.S.

"For Iran, anti-Americanism is merely a game of politics. It is anti-American when its suits it and it is a collaborator with the U.S. when it suits it," Abu Suhail said.
He cited a number of examples of when Iran allegedly cooperated with the U.S., including in the invasion of Afghanistan. He also said the Shiites in Iraq, who are supported by Iran, "brought the American forces to the country and welcome them with open arms."

Abu Suhail said Iran is jealous of al-Qaida's "success" in the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that because Tehran couldn't strike at the U.S. itself, the Iranians want to "to discredit Sept. 11 and what better way to do so than conspiracy theories."

He said Iran and the Shiites opposed giving al-Qaida credit for the 9/11 attacks "because this would expose their lip-service to jihad (holy war) against the Great Satan," a term Iranian officials have used to describe the U.S.

Al-Qaida mainly embraces Sunni militants, and is bitterly hostile toward Shiites, who make up the vast majority of Iran.
Late al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in his many audio and video messages praised the attacks several times and in 2004 he publicly acknowledged al-Qaida's involvement and two years later asserted his responsibility for the attacks in an audio message defending Zacarias Moussaoui, who was undergoing a trial for his participation in the attacks.

In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a probe that took six years to complete of the tower collapses; the last report found that fire caused the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, a skyscraper north of the twin towers.

In the collapses of the twin towers, the agency found that extreme heat from the jetliner crashes caused some steel beams to lose strength, causing further failures in the building until the entire structure succumbed.

[Daquan13]

Underwear-bomb maker believed dead in Yemen strikehttp://por-img.cimcontent.net/api/assets/bin-201110/fb63-Mideast-Yemen-Al-Qaida-Bombmaker.jpg FILE - This undated file photo released by Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Interior on Sunday, ...

By LEE KEATH, AP
Sat Oct 1, 2:05 PM EDT

A Saudi militant believed killed in the U.S. drone strike in Yemen constructed the bombs for the al-Qaida branch's most notorious attempted attacks — including the underwear-borne explosives intended to a down a U.S. aircraft, and a bomb carried by his own brother intended to assassinate a Saudi prince.

The death of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri would make the Friday drone strikes on a convoy in the central deserts of Yemen one of the most effective single blows in the U.S. campaign to take out al-Qaida's top figures.

The strike also killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric who had been key to recruiting for the militant group and a Pakistani-American, Samir Khan, who was a top English-language propagandist.

But Christopher Boucek, a scholar who studies Yemen and al-Qaida, said al-Asiri's death would "overshadow" that of the two Americans due to his operational importance to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group that is considered the most active branch of the terror network.

Late Friday, two U.S. officials said intelligence indicated al-Asiri was among those killed in the strike. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because al-Asiri's death has not officially been confirmed.

The 29-year-old al-Asiri was one of the first Saudis to join the Yemen-based al-Qaida branch and became its key bombmaker, designing the explosives in two attempted attacks against the United States.

His fingerprint was found on the bomb hidden in the underwear of a Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials. The attack failed because the would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab botched detonating the explosives, ending up only burning himself before being wrestled away by passengers.

The explosives used in that bomb were chemically identical to those hidden inside two printers that were shipped from Yemen last year, bound for Chicago and Philadelphia in a plot claimed by al-Qaida. The bombs were intercepted in England and Dubai.

In perhaps his most ruthless operation, al-Asiri turned his younger brother, Abdullah, into a human bomb in a 2009 attempt to kill Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the kingdom's top counterterrorism official and son of its interior minister.

Abdullah volunteered for the suicide mission, asking to replace another militant named to carry it out, according to an acccount in Sada al-Malahem, an Arabic-language Web magazine issued by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Abdullah pretended he was surrendering to Saudi authorities, and Prince Mohammed agreed to receive him in his home in Jiddah during a gathering to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
While talking to the prince, Abdullah blew himself up. The prince, however, escaped with only injuries.

Saudi officials have said the bomb was "inside" Abdullah's body, but explosives experts believe that al-Asiri strapped the bomb between his brother's legs.

"Come see my brother Abdullah's body parts. May he enjoy it, he was killed the way he had hoped for and his body was torn for the love of God," al-Asiri said afterward, according to Sada al-Malahem.

All three bombs contained a high explosive known as PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which was also used by convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid when he tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is led by a Yemeni militant named Nasser al-Wahishi, a former aide of Osama bin Laden, and combines Yemeni fighters with the remnants of the terror network's branch in Saudi Arabia, which was largely crushed by the kingdom's security forces in the mid 2000's. The group is believed to number several hundred fighters, hiding in the mountains of Yemen where the central government has little control.

According to Sada al-Malahem, al-Asiri and his brother Abdullah were the first of the Saudi branch to pledge allegiance to al-Wahishi, after fleeing Saudi Arabia following a month chase by Saudi authorities. After their allegiance, the magazine issued the call for other Saudi members to come to Yemen.

Al-Asiri and his brother abruptly left their Mecca home three years ago, said their father, a four-decade veteran of the Saudi military. Aside from a brief phone call to say they had left the country, he never heard from them again.

According to Sada al-Malahem, al-Asiri and his friends originally planned to go fight the Americans in Iraq, but Saudi police raided the apartment where they were hiding and arrested them.

"They put me in prison and I began to see the depths of (the Saudis) servitude to the Crusaders and their hatred for the true worshippers of God, from the way they interrogated me," the magazine quotes him as saying.

Upon his release, al-Asiri tried to create a new militant cell in Saudi Arabia but was once again discovered. Six of his colleagues were killed and he and his brother fled south to the Asir mountains where they holed up for weeks.

They entered Yemen on Aug. 1, 2006, and met with al-Wahishi, who had escaped from prison just months earlier, and became the nucleus of the new al-Qaida affiliate, said the account, which could not be independently confirmed.
____
AP correspondent Sarah El Deeb contributed to this report.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Daquan13]

Airline attack suspect starts trial with outbursthttp://por-img.cimcontent.net/api/assets/bin-201110/ebc4-Airline-Attack.jpg In this courtroom drawing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab appears in U.S. District Judge Nancy ...

By ED WHITE, AP

Tue Oct 4, 7:08 PM EDT

A Nigerian man accused of trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear made a defiant political outburst Tuesday, demonstrating again why his courtroom behavior will be closely watched throughout the trial where he's representing himself.

"The mujahadeen will wipe out the U.S. — the cancer U.S.," said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, scowling as he referred to Muslim guerrilla fighters.
When marshals removed his handcuffs, he also claimed that a radical Muslim cleric killed last week by the American military is still alive.

In nearly two years of legal proceedings, Abdulmutallab has normally been polite and studious in front of the judge and prospective jurors. But in the moments before court, he's shown a tendency to make comments reflecting loyalty to al-Qaida and contempt for the United States.

The 24-year-old is charged in federal court with trying to destroy the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas 2009. He has pleaded not guilty, and his trial is expected to last three or four weeks.

Prospective jurors were questioned one by one, and most were told to return Thursday for inclusion in the final pool of 37 to 45 people.
Abdulmutallab, who is acting as his own lawyer, briefly questioned a potential juror, who expressed concern about people possibly "waiting in the wings outside the courthouse," no matter the verdict.

"There could be people who would be angry and want to retaliate?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied.
There was no good indication how active Abdulmutallab will be when witnesses begin testifying next week. On Tuesday, he rarely looked up from the defense table and deferred most questions to Anthony Chambers, his court-appointed standby attorney. He wrote or read and quietly talked to Chambers about whether to request that a jury candidate be excused.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds reminded him that appearances are important. She firmly recommended that he not wear jail clothes and instead put on something that would make a "better impression on jurors," at least a shirt with buttons to replace an oversized white T-shirt.
Abdulmutallab asked whether he could wear a traditional Yemeni belt with a dagger — a request the judge swiftly denied.
He returned with a dark pinstriped suit coat over a full-length tunic, with a black skull cap.

Abdulmutallab, a well-educated man from a wealthy African family, has spent two years in custody and rarely causes a ripple in court. But Tuesday's outburst was his second in two weeks.

"Anwar is alive," Abdulmutallab said, referring to American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in an air strike in Yemen just days ago.
The government alleges Abdulmutallab's attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 was directed by al-Awlaki. In September, he made a reference in court to slain al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who has called him a "hero," and complained about his prison clothes.

But Abdulmutallab has never showed defiance in front of Edmunds, a judge who has spent nearly 20 years on the bench.

"I don't know if he's trying to make a show. It's totally out of character" compared to past court appearances, said Kurt Haskell, a Detroit-area attorney who was a passenger on Flight 253. "Even when he lit the bomb, he didn't make a peep."

Abdulmutallab has pleaded not guilty to eight charges, including conspiracy to commit terrorism and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. The government says he intended to blow up the plane by detonating chemicals in his underwear just seven minutes before the jet carrying 279 passengers and a crew of 11 was to land at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

The bomb failed, and passengers assisted by crew members saw flames and pounced on Abdulmutallab. It was the first terrorist act in the U.S. during the Obama administration.

The government says Abdulmutallab willingly explained the plot twice, first to U.S. border officers who took him off the plane and then in more detail to FBI agents who interviewed him at a hospital for 50 minutes, following treatment for serious burns to his groin.

As the judge and lawyers combed through prospective jurors, exposure to news reports about the case was a major topic. The first two people were quickly excused when they doubted they could be fair.

Some of the most intense questioning involved Chambers and a woman who works on computer networks for a major retailer. Names and other personal details were not revealed in court.

On her questionnaire, she said the alleged attack was not an "accident" or the "act of an innocent man." But in court, she said she could put that view aside.

"I may have a lot of opinions but there is a right to a fair trial based on facts, not opinions," she said.
Chambers wanted her removed but the judge kept her in the pool.
___
Associated Press Writer Jeff Karoub contributed to this report.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Daquan13]

This is strange, and I never ever said this to anyone. I've kept it to myself all this time.

But ten years ago, when I was planning my vacation from work, there was a toss-up as to where I wanted to go - either Las Vegas or Cape Cod. I chose to go to Cape Cod, having not been there for a year at that time.

The trip to Las Vegas would have more than likely had me on Flight 175 (since I flew on it earlier that year to Los Angeles with a connecting flight to Las Vegas).

I could have been amongst the many thousands who died so needlessly that day!! And since Flight 175 was the prefered one for 5 of the terrorists to hijack, I shutter to think and wonder if those madmen were on it, doing a dry run! I thought back and said; What if they were planning to hijack the plane on THAT particular day?

But thank God that I chose other plan instead! Even though I've flown several times since that tragic event, I wonder if it would ever happen again, even trhough the gov't is now tougher with airport screening now than they were back then.

I sometimes have nightmares about being on that ill-faited flight and seeing that horror unfold! I've been in several situations before where I was about to die or thought that I would. Imagine having nightmares like that, seeing a big ball of flames hurtling toward you on a hijacked plane, knowing that you're about to die! Two of my co-workers were on that flight. Losing them was almost like losing a relative.

We were all like family at United Airlines, and when one co-worker had a problem, we ALL chipped in to help. Too bad that those two co-workers didn't know ahead of time about the horror that would end their lives so abruptly. We're often told that when it is our time, it is our time. I guess that I was spared from dying that day, as was Silverstein when his wife had successfully talked him into keeping his doc's appointment that morning, instead of going over to WOTW, as he usually did for breakfast every morning.