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Garnaoui's trial is reminiscent of the mafia trials of the early Sixties, what with the witness amnesia, missing evidence, etc. The European bungling reported here reminds me of the Yee, Al-Arian, and Mayfield cases stateside. From the Washington Post, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
BERLIN -- The defendant, a Tunisian man with a bushy beard, sits inside a bulletproof glass box in the courtroom. Since his arrest more than a year ago, German authorities have declared the suspect, Ihsan Garnaoui, to be a terrorist and a threat to national security, a man who plotted attacks against U.S. and Jewish targets here.But since his trial began earlier this month, prosecutors have struggled to make their accusations stick. Witnesses for the state have displayed shaky memories. Security officials have refused to allow two confidential informants to take the stand. And a key police report is missing.
At the same time, European authorities have been less aggressive than American investigators in the pursuit of some well-known radicals.
U.S. officials unsealed a federal grand jury indictment last week against Abu Hamza Masri, a radical London cleric, accusing him of orchestrating a hostage-taking plot in Yemen, among other crimes. The case involved the 1998 kidnapping of 16 Western tourists, a dozen of whom were British.
British officials have long considered Hamza a public menace because of his outspoken support for al Qaeda and have sought to strip him of his citizenship, possibly so he could be deported. But they have never been able to develop a criminal case against him, or to take him into custody until last week. And that was only in response to a U.S. request for his extradition.
On Friday, British Home Secretary David Blunkett said U.S. officials had simply been able to assemble more evidence against Hamza. "If we had that evidence and it related to our country," Blunkett told BBC radio, "we would have been able to take action through our courts."
In Germany, where the government estimates that more than 30,000 people belong to radical Islamic groups, the biggest targets have similarly remained beyond the reach of the law.
A German court last year did convict a Moroccan man, Mounir Motassadeq, of more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder for aiding the Hamburg al Qaeda cell that carried out the Sept. 11 hijackings. But that verdict was overturned in March by federal appellate judges, who ruled that he was denied a fair trial and deserved a new one. Another alleged 9/11 accomplice, Abdelghani Mzoudi, was acquitted outright in February.
In the Motassadeq case, the appellate court threw out the verdict in part because U.S. officials would not allow testimony or interrogation transcripts from Ramzi Binalshibh, an al Qaeda leader and accused ringleader of the Sept. 11 plot. The defendant's lawyers had argued that Binalshibh could have verified that their client was unaware of the hijackers' plans.
As a result, some Germans have blamed the United States for the outcome of the case and the fact that Motassadeq remains a free man.
"We have a huge problem with the behavior of the U.S. authorities," said Ulrich von Jeinsen, an attorney representing Americans who lost family members in the Sept. 11 attacks. "It is a question to the American side: What are they willing to give us? It is simple and easy. We will have a reluctance [to pursue other cases in court] unless we have an exchange of cooperation among intelligence services."
Some legal experts, however, said German prosecutors and intelligence agencies should be held at least equally accountable. Christoph Safferling, a criminal law professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, said the appellate judges wanted to send a signal that the German judiciary should be more skeptical of evidence in future terrorism cases.
"When you read the decision handed down, it is in some passages quite angry," Safferling said, referring to the overturning of the Motassadeq verdict. "It is quite angry that this person was convicted on such weak evidence, and also very angry with the intelligence services' [lack of] cooperation." ...
Public sentiment is building to change laws in an attempt to bolster security. An April poll by the Allensbach Institute found that 57 percent of Germans surveyed feared that there would be terrorist attacks in the country in the near future, the highest level recorded by the firm since shortly after the Sept. 11 hijackings.
Last week, after years of debate, German political leaders reached a compromise on a new immigration policy that among other things will make it easier for the government to deport terrorism suspects and keep them under closer surveillance.
"It needs to be possible to remove these people from Germany," said Reinhard Grindel, a member of the German Parliament from the opposition Christian Democrats. "There were holes in the laws here, and [the new immigration law] will now close them. The political consequence is that these people will no longer be able to stay in Germany."
Despite the assumptions of some Western analysts, Islamic radicalism never was remotely close to being a personality cult centered around Osama. But just in case someone didn't get the point, here is some information about some lesser-known but powerful terrorist leaders. From AP, with thanks to Peter Rockas and Jeffrey Imm:
From the dusty Sahara to the jungles of Indonesia and in the cauldron of unrest that is US-occupied Iraq, a new generation of Osama bin Ladens is emerging to take the place of elders who have been killed, captured or forced underground. The new class has already written a new history of terror in blood - from Istanbul to Madrid to Yanbu, Saudi Arabia.'These are the men that are the new 21st-century terrorists,' said Mr Evan Kohlmann, a US-based terror expert.
At the fore of this group is 38-year-old Abu Musab Zarqawi, a former Osama commander who has links to terror groups from North Africa to the Caucasus.
If you thought being a terrorist might be a cushy career choice, you're wrong.
Increased risk means the life expectancy of today's generation of terrorists will probably be short.'But these guys don't care,' said Mr Evans, of Jane's. 'They consider themselves to be the first members of the new Islamic vanguard. There will be plenty more Zarqawis bubbling up to the surface.'
Why? Not just because of American policy. There were Zarqawis long before there was a United States of America.
He lived by the sword, he died by the sword. From Reuters, with thanks to Nicolei:
KARACHI, Pakistan (Reuters) - A senior pro-Taliban cleric in Pakistan was gunned down Sunday outside his mosque in the southern city of Karachi, and his death unleashed violent protests in which at least 17 people were hurt.Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, who had called for a "jihad," or holy war, against the United States after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was fatally wounded, police said.
The mob seems to have heard that fast food can kill.
In the middle-class neighborhood of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, an enraged mob threw stones at an outlet of American fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken, and broke its windows, police said. A government-run National Saving Center was also attacked.
More on Siddiqi, from WND. (Thanks to FreedomNowNews and Jeffrey Imm.)
WASHINGTON – The California imam who helped convert an al-Qaida suspect to Islam headed a Muslim activist group under investigation here for possible financial ties to terrorist front groups.Adam Gadahn allegedly traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to train at al-Qaida camps following his conversion while attending the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove, Calif., in the late 1990s. Siddiqi is head of the mosque there.
Congress is reviewing the financial records of the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, as part of a post-9-11 investigation into alleged ties between tax-exempt Muslim organizations and terrorist groups.
Siddiqi served as president of ISNA from 1996 to 2000. He still serves on its board. ISNA did not return phone calls to its Indianapolis headquarters.
From Reuters, with thanks to Nicolei:
KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - "Are you Muslim or Christian? We don't want to kill Muslims. Show us where the Americans and Westerners live," Islamic militants told an Arab after launching a shooting spree on Westerners in Saudi Arabia.The four gunmen, aged 18 to 25 and wearing military vests, grabbed Abu Hashem, an Iraqi with a U.S. passport, in front of his home in the Oasis compound in Khobar but let him go when he told them he was a Muslim.
"Don't be afraid. We won't kill Muslims even if you are an American," he quoted them as saying.
That's odd. I keep hearing terrorism is caused by American foreign policy.
Abu Hashem, the director of a Saudi firm who has been in Khobar for six months, said he wanted to move to Bahrain.He said the four gunmen had been polite and calm.
"They gave me a lecture on Islam and said they were defending their country and ridding it of infidels," he told Reuters at Qusaibi hotel.
"The gunmen were so polite. I cannot comprehend this politeness they showed me because I am a Muslim and this cruelty to others," said Abu Hashem, who declined to give his first name.
In response to the above, an urgent press release from the World Lebanese Cultural Union (thanks to Walid Phares):
WORLD LEBANESE CULTURAL UNION (INGO) Office of the Secretary General www.wlcu.orgCONCERNS ABOUT LEBANESE VICTIMS OF TERROR IN SAUDI ARABIA
The World Lebanese Cultural Union (WLCU), the legitimate representative of the Lebanese Diaspora expresses its utmost concerns as a result of the Terrorist attacks in Khubar in Saudi Arabia. From media reports and sources within the community, the WLCU has learned that the armed Terrorists have targeted Lebanese nationals among other nationals and are holding a number of them as hostage, till this hour.
The WLCU was particularly concerned by the fact that the Terrorists have once again targeted a particular religious community among the Lebanese nationals, as reported by survivors and the media. The attacks of last October were a warning. Today's attack confirms our concerns about the security of the Lebanese community, in Saudi Arabia.
The WLCU condemns these attacks, and calls on
1) The Saudi Government to do all it can to protect Lebanese lives.
2) The UN to intervene and help rescuing thousands of Lebanese workers and business people in Saudi Arabia.
3) The Lebanese Government to take all measures needed to face the terrorist threat against its own citizens and nationals abroad. The Lebanese Government is responsible for the security of these citizens. It must condemn the perpetrators firmly and crack down on their support organizations based in Lebanon. Failing to do so, will engage the responsibility of the Lebanese Government as well.
As developments are taking place, the WLCU will monitor the situation of the community in Saudi Arabia and remain in contact with its branches in the Arabian Peninsula as well as with concerned Governments around the world.
The Office of the Secretary General.
For media contacts, please contact the Commission on Information of the WLCU at wlcuuscanada@aol.com
From AP, with thanks to DC Watson:
JERUSALEM — A senior Hamas commander, his assistant and a bystander died in a fiery Israeli airstrike in Gaza City early Sunday, hours before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was to confront his Cabinet over his plan to pull soldiers and settlers out of Gaza. Hamas called the attack a "cowardly assassination crime" and said it killed Wael Nassar, 38, a top Hamas commander; his assistant, Mohammed Sarsour, 31; and an unidentified bystander. The two Hamas leaders were on the motorcycle when it exploded, witnesses said.The Israeli military said its air force carried out the strike, aimed at "two senior Hamas commanders who were responsible for many attacks against Israelis, including suicide bombings, and were planning further attacks."
Witnesses said they saw a flash in the sky before the motorcycle exploded. Outside the hospital morgue, angry Palestinians, most of them Hamas supporters, chanted "God is great." Amplified statements from local mosques mourned Nassar, one of the founders of the Hamas military wing, called Izzedine al-Qassam. Nassar planned many Hamas attacks against Israelis, Palestinians said.
Notice that the Palestinians confirm what Israel said: this man planned many attacks against Israelis.
Why is it so easy to get people to sign up? Why won't American Muslim spokesmen move beyond "the Qur'an forbids suicide" and answer that question? From AFP, with thanks to Twostellas:
TEHRAN: Hundreds of Iranian men and women, even children, declared their willingness to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq and Israel following Friday prayers in Tehran.The "volunteers" signed their names and gave their telephone numbers to an obscure group calling itself the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the World Islamic Movement.
A spokesman, Mohammad Yasser Samadi, said the action was to "show our friends in Iraq and all other Muslims that we are ready to give our lives to defend our honor.
"Suicide operations are the best way to fight the oppressors and they have already shown their worth in Lebanon and during the war between Iran and Iraq," he said, referring to the neighbours' bloody 1980-88 conflict.
However, there was no evidence the action was anything more than symbolic, and Samadi said they would renounce suicide operations if asked to by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
As far as I know, there is no sign that he has asked them to yet.
Doesn't he know that the Qur'an forbids suicide?
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan police have arrested a man suspected of trying to recruit students to carry out suicide attacks on international peacekeepers in Kabul, a spokesman for the multinational force said on Saturday.
Pakistan sends a message to India.
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan successfully test-fired on Saturday a ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads, as part of efforts to boost defenses in its rivalry with India.
If they murder people how can they be "innocent"?
BANGKOK, May 29 (AFP) - Assailants decapitated an elderly Buddhist in Thailand's Muslim south Saturday and vowed more such killings if Muslims continued to be arrested for the months-long unrest in the region, police said.It was the first decapitation in the violence, which has claimed some 190 lives since January, police said.
Sieng Patkaoe, 63, was attacked by men with machetes early Saturday as he tapped rubber trees on his plantation in the southern province of Narathiwat, district police said.
Sieng's severed head was left along a village road. His body, found some 60 metres (yards) away, had a note pinned to it threatening more killings, police said.
"If innocent Malayu (the predominant ethnic group in the Muslim south) continue to be arrested, we will murder more Buddhists," police quoted the note as saying. It was written in Thai and printed by computer, they said.
The U.S. Embassy said one American was confirmed dead
More trouble in Saudi Arabia:
DAMMAM, Saudi Arabia (AP) - Saudi security forces stormed an expatriate residential complex Saturday seeking gunmen who had taken hostages after a shooting rampage on two compounds housing oil company offices, killing at least six people - including a 10-year-old boy.At least one American and two other Westerners were among those killed in the second deadly attack on oil industry targets in the Saudi kingdom this month. There were reports the death toll could be as high as 15.
Saudi forces fired shots inside the residential complex in the eastern city of Khobar, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity. They gave no further details.
Earlier, a police officer inside the housing compound told The Associated Press that all hostages had been released and negotiations were under way.
And here's an Update from AP: Saudi Forces Hunt Militants After Attack. Islamic militants, no less. Who'd have guessed?
And also a list of recent attacks in Saudi Arabia.
"While many of us will be blessed to live a longer life, few of us will ever live a better one," — John McCain
FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) - Former pro football player Pat Tillman was "probably" killed by friendly fire as he led his team of Army Rangers up a hill during a firefight in Afghanistan last month, the U.S. Army said Saturday.
Just as the army that investigated Abu Ghraib way back in January, now they have investigated Tillman's death and issued a public report.
Such transparency conflicts with the fevered imaginings of those who think Bushitler and Ashcroft are rounding up dissenters and dragging them to the Ministry of Love, while shadowy neo-cons fling truth down the memory hole.
I just flew back to the US from another country last Tuesday, and security still seemed lax at the departure point. Of course, the US has no direct control over that, but surely some sort of efforts could be made. Meanwhile, security is, at least according to this report, stepping up efforts stateside. From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal official in charge of the nation's airports said Friday security has been "stepped up a notch" in the face of renewed terror warnings this holiday weekend and said authorities are asking the public to be vigilant."If they see anything unusual, report it - an unattended package, something that just doesn't look right, even odd behavior in the terminal or on the aircraft," FAA Administrator Marion Blakey said on NBC's "Today" show.
She said photographs of seven suspected terrorists released Wednesday by the FBI "are everywhere" and that screeners have been redeployed to some of the busiest airports in anticipation of heavy Memorial Day holiday travel.
From MEMRI, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
The London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that "an Iranian intelligence unit has established a center called The Brigades of the Shahids of the Global Islamic Awakening to replace the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Department of Liberation and Revolutionary Movements, which had been in charge of helping and training revolutionary forces across the world." [1] The article went on to report a speech given by an official of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, threatening the U.S. with suicide and missile attacks at already-selected sensitive targets, and threatening to "take over" Britain. The following is the report: [2]Iran Stands Ready to Attack the West
"A source close to [Revolutionary Guards] intelligence confirmed that P.R. has been appointed secretary-general of a new office that has begun registering the names of suicide volunteers to be sent to Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon.
"[The newspaper reported that it had obtained] a tape with a speech by H.A., a [Revolutionary] Guards intelligence theoretician, who teaches at the Revolutionary Guards' Al-Hussein University. [In the tape, H.A.] spoke of Tehran's secret strategy aimed at taking over the Arab and Muslim countries by means of helping revolutionary forces and organizations. H.A. is regarded as one of the advisors of a branch in the organization, and has published a number of works on exporting the [Islamic] revolution and the method of the struggle against the world arrogance [i.e., the U.S.].
"In his speech at a secret conference attended by students who are members of the Ansar Hizbullah movement at Al-Hussein University, [H.A. said]: 'Iraqi oil constitutes 11% of the world oil reserves, and it has fallen into the hands of the U.S. and Britain. The value of the intelligence documents that the U.S. obtained because of its takeover of Iraqi intelligence is greater than $1000 billion. Whereas our [Iran's] Foreign Ministry was expressing willingness to reconstruct the statue of the Buddha [destroyed by the Taliban in 2001] in Afghanistan – that is, to build an idol, which is an act that is against the principles of Islam – the U.S. managed to force its rule on Afghanistan.
"'(President Muhammad) Khatami speaks of the dialogue between civilizations, and I have grave doubts about this. It is a dubious idea. We do not want to take over the British Embassy, since they (the British) have already cleared the embassy of documents; we must take over Britain [itself].'
"After [H.A.] harshly attacked Khatami and the reformists, he said in his speech: 'The West sees us as terrorists, and depicts our strategy as terrorism and repression. Had our youth agreed to Khatami's teachings and interpretations, it would never have fought the arrogance, and would never have defended the holy places – because Khatami speaks always of being conciliatory, of patience, and of rejecting terrorism, while we defend [the line of] toughness and war against the enemies of revolutionary Islam. I take pride in my actions that cause anxiety and fear to the Americans.
"'Haven't the Jews and the Christians achieved their progress by means of toughness and repression? We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilizationand for the uprooting of the Americans and the English.
"'Our missiles are now ready to strike at their civilization, and as soon as the instructions arrive from Leader ['Ali Khamenei], we will launch our missiles at their cities and installations. Our motto during the war (in Iraq) was: Karbala, we are coming, Jerusalem, we are coming. And because of Khatami's policies and dialogue between the civilizations, we have been compelled to freeze our plan to liberate the Islamic cities. And now we are [again] about to carry out the program.'
"In his speech, he added: 'The global infidel front is a front against Allah and the Muslims, and we must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front, by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them.'
"In another part of his speech, he emphasized, 'If Israel dares attack the [nuclear] installations at Bushehr, our losses will be very low, because [only] one structure will be destroyed – while we [i.e., Iran] have means of attacking Israel's nuclear facilities and arsenals such that no trace of Israel will remain.'"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), May 28, 2004.
[2] Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), May 28, 2004.
From Reuters, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- A bomb blast derailed a passenger train in a Russian region bordering Chechnya on Saturday, but no one was seriously injured, a railways spokesman said. blockquote>Posted at 6:31 AM | Comments (1)
From Thailand's Nation:
In a stall recently set up near the historic Krue Se Mosque, a young man is busy selling VCDs, CDs and books that mostly cover various aspects of Islam. One of the VCDs is entitled "Global Jihad Movements".The stall owner, a native of Pattani who spoke on condition of anonymity, tells me while I glance at his extensive range of products that VCDs on jihad have sold out quickly after the April 28 incident at the mosque which left 32 suspected insurgents dead.
In all, 108 suspected insurgents died on April 28, while five security personnel also perished.
The Islamic word jihad has often been associated with international terrorism since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
"The VCDs on jihad have been selling like hotcakes," he says.
The young businessman tells me that he usually sells his goods at major mosques in Pattani and Yala, including the Central Mosque of Pattani. He set up a stall at Krue Se Mosque after April 28.
"There are a series of VCDs on jihad movements in Afghanistan, Chechnya and also about [Osama] bin Laden," he says, adding that his merchandise comes from Malaysia.
It is hard to know what the buyers of these VCDs have in mind. Perhaps they want to know more about how fellow Muslims pursue jihad - the struggle against any act of aggression in defence of Islam - in other countries.
Jihadwatch is occasionally discovered by those hoping to learn more about how to wage violent jihad and who are subsequently disappointed to learn that the site is against it.
The illustrious and deservedly beloved Hugh Fitzgerald has sent me this precise,
perceptive, and courageous address by Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. Notes Hugh: "Goh Chok Tong has given no indication of being a devout follower of Pat Robertson. Nor is there any record of his changing his name from something reminiscent of Perle or Wolfowitz... He does, however, live between Malaysia and Singapore, and has a lifetime of experience with Islam."
Chris Patten would do well to read this speech carefully. What follows here are some good excerpts, but it is all excellent. Read it all.
The war against terrorism could shape the 21st century in the same way as the Cold War defined the world before the fall of the Berlin Wall. To win, we must first clearly understand what we are up against. Terrorism is a generic term. Terrorist organizations such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or ETA in Spain are only of local concern. The virulent strain of Islamic terrorism is another matter altogether. It is driven by religion. Its ideological vision is global. It is most dangerous. The communists fought to live whereas the jihadi terrorists fight to die, and live in the next world. My perspective is formed by our own experiences in Southeast Asia which post Sept. 11 has emerged as a major theater for terrorist operations. In December 2001, Singapore arrested 15 people belonging to a radical Islamic group called the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). They were plotting even before Sept. 11 to attack American and other Western interests in Singapore. In August 2002, we arrested another 21 members of this group. Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand have also made many arrests of terrorists. The JI regional leadership spanned Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Southern Philippines. Its tentacles even probed into Australia. JI's objective was to create a Daulah Islamiyah, an Islamic state in Southeast Asia. This was to be centered in Indonesia but would include Malaysia, Southern Thailand, Southern Philippines, and, inevitably, Singapore and Brunei. But the most crucial conclusion our investigations revealed was this: the existence of a transregional terrorist brotherhood of disparate Southeast Asian groups linked by a militant Islamic ideology to each other and to Al Qaeda. Whatever their specific goals, these groups were committed to mutual help in the pursuit of their common ideology: they helped each other with funds and support services, in training and in joint operations.In 1999, JI formed a secret caucus called the Rabitatul Mujahidin, meaning Mujahidin Coalition, to bring together various militant Southeast Asian Islamic groups. It was responsible for the bombing attack against the Philippine Ambassador to Indonesia in Jakarta in August 2000. The brain behind the attack was Hambali, the link man between Southeast Asian terrorism and Al Qaeda. Fortunately, he is now under arrest.
But the threat remains. It stems from a religious ideology that is infused with an implacable hostility to all secular governments, especially the West, and in particular the U.S. Their ultimate goal is to bring about a Caliphate linking all Muslim communities. Their means is jihad which they narrowly define as a holy war against all non-Muslims whom they call "infidels."
Likewise, JI's ultimate goal is a Caliphate, by definition not confined to Southeast Asia. The dream of a Caliphate may seem absurd to the secular mind. But it will be a serious mistake to dismiss its appeal to many in the Islamic world, though the majority do not believe in killing and dying for it.
But there are radicals and militants who do. The terrorist brotherhood in Southeast Asia and its links to al Qaeda were first forged through the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Ibrahim Maidin, the leader of the Singapore JI cell, underwent military training in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. His encounters with the Mujahidden deeply impressed him. Maidin wrote several letters to the Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and to Osama bin Laden. He asked whether Mullah Omar was to be regarded as the Caliph of the Islamic World. After returning to Singapore, Maidin arranged for JI members to visit Afghanistan and to undergo training there.
Islamic militancy is not new to Southeast Asia. But what is new is this type of fanatical global ideology (including the phenomenon of suicide bombers) that has been able to unite different groups and lead Southeast Asian groups to subordinate local interests to the broader struggle.
Ibrahim Maidin has confessed to a senior Singapore intelligence officer that
in retrospect he had made the mistake of moving too quickly and should have
waited for Malaysia, Indonesia, the Southern Philippines and Singapore to
become an Islamic state before acting against U.S. interests. But he still believes that his side would ultimately win.
From our experience in Southeast Asia, I draw three principal conclusions that I believe have a wider relevance.
First, the goals of these terrorists make the struggle a zero-sum game for them. There is no room for compromise except as a tactical expedient. America may be the main enemy but it is not the only one. What Osama bin Laden offered Europe in April was only a "truce" [if it stopped "attacking Muslims or interfering in their affairs including [participating] in the American conspiracy"], not a lasting peace. The war against terrorism today is a war against a specific strain of militant Islamic terrorism that wants, in effect, a "clash of civilizations."
The JI has tried to create the conditions for Christians and Muslims in Southeast Asia to set against one another. In December 2000, it attacked churches in Indonesia, including one church in an Indonesian island off Singapore. It has sent its members to fight and stir up trouble in Ambon against Christians.
One of those we detained in Singapore was a service engineer with an American company. He confessed that he actually liked his American friends
and bosses. He was nevertheless involved in targeting American interests. We
have a sense that he had struggled with this. He eventually decided to testify against the spiritual leader of JI, Abu Bakar Bashir, but only because he felt betrayed by Bashir's denial of the very existence of the JI organisation which Bashir headed and to whom he and other members had sworn allegiance.
And just as Osama bin Laden is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and America, in Southeast Asia, JI was plotting to do the same thing by blowing up the pipelines that supply water from Malaysia to Singapore. The JI knew that water from Malaysia is a matter of life and death for Singapore. They knew that race and religion have historically been the major fault lines within and between both countries. The JI's intention was to provoke a conflict between Singapore and Malaysia and portray a "Chinese Singapore" as threatening a "Muslim Malaysia," and use the ensuing confusion to try and overthrow the Malaysian government and establish an Islamic state in Malaysia.
That particular plot failed. The governments of Singapore and Malaysia could not have allowed it to succeed. We know only too well what is at stake.My second conclusion is that it is only through absolute and unsentimental clarity about the threat we face that we can define, differentiate and therefore, isolate militant Islamic terrorism from mainstream Islam. It is not sufficient to repeat, mantra like, that the majority of Muslims are peaceful and do not believe in violence. Unfortunately, we too often sacrifice clarity to be politically correct.
This brings me to my third and perhaps most important conclusion. Just as the Cold War was an ideological as well as a geopolitical struggle, the war against terrorism must be fought with ideas as well as with armies; with religious and community leaders as well as police forces and intelligence services. This ideological struggle is already upon us. Unless we win the battle of ideas, there will be no dearth of willing foot soldiers ready to martyr themselves for their cause.
We know that we should work with the moderates and isolate the extremists. But as we seek to separate the wheat from the chaff, we need to recognise that both come from the same plant. How we seek to engage and encourage the Muslim world to fight the ideological battle against the extremists must reflect this sensitivity and awareness.
This is complicated but not impossible. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi fought the Islamic party, PAS, on the issue of the kind of Islamic state that Malaysia should be. He won a resounding victory in the general elections. He checked PAS' advance towards an austere Muslim state with Sharia laws with his vision of an Islamic state that is Islam Hadahri or "Progressive Islam." He has joined issue not on whether Malaysia should be an Islamic state but on the nature of such a state; and the struggle to define Malaysia's Islamic state will continue for a long time. In Indonesia, Islamic based parties generally did not do as well as parties that do not campaign under the banner of Islam in the recent parliamentary elections. But the Islamic parties will remain a crucial swing factor in the presidential elections later this year.
Let me conclude with a few words about the role of the U.S. Only the U.S. has the capacity to lead the geopolitical battle against the Islamic terrorists. Iraq has become the key battleground. Before he was killed in Saudi Arabia, Yousef Al Aiyyeri, author of the al Qaeda Blueprint for fighting in Iraq, said: if democracy succeeds in Iraq, that would be the death of Islam. That is why Osama bin Laden and others have put so much effort to try and break the coalition and America's resolve to stay the course to build a modern Iraq that Muslims will be proud of. Those who do not understand this, play into their hands. The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail. If that is destroyed, Islamic extremists everywhere will be emboldened. We will all be at greater risk.
If we are to win the war against terrorism, we must, as Sun Tze in "The Art of War" says, understand the enemy. And we must, all of us, Muslims and non-Muslims, Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Asians, unite against it. But we must create the conditions that will make this essential unity possible.
Malfunctioning anti-terror mechanism update: Denny's manager in Denver calls FBI to report the presence of two of the Seven Wanted in his restaurant last Wednesday. Agent is bored, indifferent, bureaucratic.
The Al-Qaeda types, meanwhile, were, "demanding, rude, and obnoxious." Hey -- don't they know it's a religion of peace?
Anyway, I don't know if these guys were really in Denny's. I don't see any a priori reason why not, and why a follow-up effort couldn't be made. From the Denver Post, with thanks to Diana West:
Samuel Mac, manager of the Denny's in Avon, isn't happy with the response he got from the FBI when he reported that two of them ate at his restaurant Wednesday.When he called the FBI in Washington, D.C., Mac said the man who answered the telephone said he had to call the Denver office and declined to take down any of the information.
When he called the Denver office, he was shuttled to voice mail because the agents were busy, Mac said. It was five hours before a seemingly uninterested agent called back.
Mac said two men - he subsequently identified them from their photographs as Adnan G. El Shukrijumah and Abderraouf Jdey - came into Denny's, which is just off Interstate 70, about 8 p.m.
One ordered a chicken sandwich and a salad, the other just a salad, Mac said. They were demanding, rude and obnoxious, he said.
For some time now the comments here have been almost entirely unmoderated. My staff and I are quite overtaxed as it is, and I have entered an extraordinarily busy period involving much travel and several hot deadlines. Also the site has grown so much lately that there are many more comments than there used to be.
Thus while I read most of them when the site was new, now I only read the occasional thread. But when I do, occasionally I see questions addressed to me. These, of course, may occur in other threads that I don't see, so please note that if you really want to ask me something, the best way is through the email feature here ("Contact us" at left), and not in a comments thread. Thus if you have asked me something and I haven't answered, most likely it's because I didn't see your question.
Also, this means that if someone says something that is ban-worthy, I most likely haven't seen it. Please email me if you are concerned about something specific.
The resistance against global jihad is a struggle to defend of the equality of rights and dignity of all people — male, female, of all races, Muslim, non-Muslim, etc. Thank you for your support and assistance.
Fawaz Damra case from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. How could Damra's statements about terrorism be irrelevant and prejudicial to a case about his past links to terrorism?
The government's chief witness in Fawaz Damra's case says the indicted imam is a "classic case study of a radical Islamic militant" with ties to associates of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.In a report filed in federal court, Matthew Levitt says Damra actively aided "in the persecution of Israelis and Jewish people in general." The report, interpreting Damra's Arabic speech, quotes him as saying in 1989, "The first principle is that terrorism, and terrorism alone, is the path to liberation. . . . If what they mean by jihad is terrorism, then we are terrorists."
"There was some people out there that wore long clothes, but the only time we ever saw them was at the post office"
What they're thinking in the town where the Feds say Abu Hamza was hoping to set up a terrorist training camp. This article and this one at Dhimmi Watch show how important it is for Americans to have a full and working knowledge of Islam and the goals of Islamic radicals like Osama bin Laden and Abu Hamza. From AP:
Dean Lawrence used to think it was a joke when he heard all the talk about terrorists thinking about training on a sheep ranch outside his tiny hometown of Bly, Ore.He was rethinking things Thursday after the arrest of a Muslim cleric in London on charges of trying to establish a terrorist training camp near Bly, a logging and ranching town in the sagebrush-dotted high desert of southern Oregon.
"A small town like this - I read in the paper one time there was 15 people came down to look" at the ranch, Lawrence said Thursday in a telephone interview from the gas station he owns in Bly.
The townspeople have been slow to believe terrorists were really targeting their town.
Two people connected to a mosque in Seattle, Semi Osman and James Ujaama, were charged in 2002 with trying to start a training camp for Al-Masri, but the charges were dropped in exchange for guilty pleas on lesser charges.Authorities have said Ujaama sent al-Masri a fax proposing a camp outside Bly, and al-Masri sent two representatives to evaluate the site. The two were reportedly disappointed that the property had no barracks for trainees, and the camp was never developed.
The Klamath County Sheriff's Department got a tip from Interpol about the ranch in 1999 and sent some deputies to keep an eye on it, but they did not notice much beyond a dozen people taking target practice, said Sheriff Tim Evinger.The shooting was not enough to catch the notice of neighbor Don Wessel, a retired logger who himself is used to taking shots at gophers on his ranch. He saw the news about Al-Masri's arrest on television.
"There was some people out there that wore long clothes, but the only time we ever saw them was at the post office," said Wessel.
Finally one wonders, "Why Oregon?"
Oregon had a brush with terrorism in 2002, when seven Portland-area Muslims, most of them American-born, were charged with plotting to join the Taliban to fight in Afghanistan.Only one, accused ringleader Habis Abdu al Saoub, made it to the battlefield, where he was killed by U.S. forces last year. The others met with visa and money troubles and returned without firing a shot. They pleaded guilty to various charges and are serving three to 18 years in prison.
Posted at 6:11 AM | Comments (14)
From the San Diego Channel, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
SAN DIEGO -- A 34-year-old Saudi national believed to have ties with two of the deceased Sept. 11 hijackers was arrested Thursday in San Diego by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Hasan Saddiq Faseh Alddin, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody on immigration charges, resulting from two prior domestic violence convictions, according to Mike Unzueta, deputy special agent-in-charge for ICE investigations in San Diego.
Perhaps his connection to the hijackers was coincidental.
Memo to all permanent residents: you will attract less law enforecement attention if you don't beat your wives.
Imam arrested in a Pennsylvania mosque. From Philadelphia's WPVI.com, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Members of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force descended on a house and mosque this morning and arrested the Imam in front of his wife and children.Meriem Moumen says she and her husband were dropping their daughter off at school when they were surrounded by Philadelphia police, FBI and other federal agents.
They detained Mohamed Ghorub, the Imam of the Ansaar Allaah mosque in Bridesburg.
Many complain about the "use" of "immigration issues" to harass "law-abiding" Muslims. I thought they were immigration laws, not suggestions.
He was arrested a year ago, and released on bond which has now been revoked. The FBI says Immigration was the lead agency on today's raid.Immigration says the raid was initiated by the FBI. In the past, the FBI has used immigration issues to detain and question people indefinitely. Moumen says they asked her where they were hiding the guns and where do they get their money. She says they have nothing to hide.
Adam Yahiye Gadahn was apparently expelled from Muzammil Siddiqi's Islamic Society of Orange County, but what I want to know is this: what did he learn from Siddiqi before that? In this AP story, Siddiqi says: "He was becoming very extreme in his ideas and views. He must have disliked something."
And then there was the mysterious arrest:
Gadahn, who was named Wednesday as one of seven suspected Al Qaeda operatives sought by the FBI, was later expelled from the mosque after attacking an employee. Records show he pleaded guilty to assault and battery charges in June 1997 and was sentenced to two days in jail and 40 hours of community service."He was becoming very extreme in his ideas and views," said Muzammil Siddiqi, the society's religious director. "He must have disliked something."
But what did he learn from Siddiqi before that? After all, Kenneth Timmerman has noted that:
During an anti-Israel rally outside the White House on Oct. 28, 2000, Siddiqi openly threatened the United States with violence if it continued its support of Israel. "America has to learn ... if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come. Please, all Americans. Do you remember that? ... If you continue doing injustice, and tolerate injustice, the wrath of God will come." By "injustice," he meant U.S. support for Israel.Siddiqi also has called for a wider application of sharia law in the United States, and in a 1995 speech praised suicide bombers. "Those who die on the part of justice are alive, and their place is with the Lord, and they receive the highest position, because this is the highest honor," he was quoted as saying by the Kansas City Star on Jan. 28, 1995.
So said Adnan El'Shukri-Jumah, one of the Seven Wanted Ones. And what was he willing to do to bring that law here? From an otherwise annoyingly irrelevant and unrevealing puff piece about this man's family in the Sun Sentinel, with thanks to Wendy and Mentat:
For El'Shukri-Jumah's family, Ashcroft's announcement served only to renew the despair they have endured since a similar FBI announcement brought the world's attention to their doorstep in March 2003. The family last saw the eldest son in 2001, before the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. His mother said he has called once since then. He said he was teaching English in Morocco, had married and had a son; she warned him to stay away, telling him that the U.S. government was imprisoning Arab and Muslim men without letting them see a lawyer, Ahmed said.
His mother explains further:
He may have been uncomfortable with the open expression of sexuality in the American public, but her son never expressed hatred or the desire to harm anybody.He appreciated this country, its cultural diversity and the kindness of its people, she said.
"You know something," she said, "he and I used to say, `If this country had Islamic law it would be the best country on the Earth.'"
From AP, some information about six of the seven Islamic radicals wanted in possible connection with planning for a major attack in America this summer. Strange thing -- nary a Buddhist among them:
AAFIA SIDDIQUI: A Pakistani woman who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a biology degree in 1995 and wrote a doctoral thesis on neurological sciences in 2001 at Brandeis University. Authorities have not charged that Siddiqui, 32, is a member of al-Qaida but believe she could be a "fixer," someone with knowledge of the United States who can get things done for other operatives. FBI officials believe Siddiqui also spent time in the Maryland suburbs of Washington.The FBI issued a global alert for her arrest in March 2003 and requested that Pakistan locate Siddiqui. A month later, Siddiqui's mother, Ismat, claimed she saw her daughter get into a minicab with her three children for a journey from Karachi to Islamabad. But a senior Pakistani security official said Wednesday that she could not be found. Her husband, Dr. Amjad Mohammed Khan, also is wanted by the FBI for questioning.
FAZUL ABDULLAH MOHAMMED: A native of the Comoros Republic in the Indian Ocean, he is believed to be al-Qaida's ringleader in eastern Africa. He has been indicted in the United States in the 1998 al-Qaida bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people. Since the indictment, Fazul's face could be seen on the walls of Kenyan police stations, and he has a $25-million bounty on his head. He is thought to be hiding in Kenya or Somalia.
AHMED KHALFAN GHAILANI: A Tanzanian who also goes by the names "Foopie," "Fupi" and "Ahmed the Tanzanian." He is under indictment in the United States for the embassy attacks.
AMER EL-MAATI: Born in Kuwait, he is wanted by the FBI for questioning about possible al-Qaida links.
ABDERRAOUF JDEY: A Tunisian who obtained Canadian citizenship in 1995. He was among five men who left suicide messages on videotapes recovered in Afghanistan at the home of Mohammed Atef - reportedly Osama bin Laden's military chief who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2001.
Also recovered from the home was a suicide letter by Jdey from August 1999. In the letter, he pledged to die in battle against infidels, according to information released by U.S. authorities in 2002. Jdey also goes by the names Farouq Al-Tunisi and Al Rauf bin Al Habib bin Yousef Al-Jiddi. He might have a Canadian passport. His last known address was an apartment building in Montreal.
ADAM YAHIYE GADAHN: A 25-year-old U.S. citizen who also goes by the names Adam Pearlman and Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki. FBI Director Robert Mueller says he attended al-Qaida training camps and has served as an al-Qaida translator. Gadahn says on an Islamic Internet site that he grew up on a goat ranch in Riverside County, Calif., and converted to Islam in his later teenage years after moving to Garden Grove, Calif.
Note that Iqbal Sacranie, the voice of moderate Islam in Britain, is suggesting that Hamza is being treated unfairly. Search this site for Abu Hamza, read some articles, and tell me there isn't a reasonable case for arresting this man. From the BBC, with thanks to EPG:
Controversial cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has been arrested on an extradition warrant issued by the US government, which is said to relate to terrorism.Scotland Yard has confirmed a 47-year-old man was seized at his home in west London at 0300 BST on Thursday.
The cleric, who preaches outside the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, will appear before magistrates at Belmarsh on Thursday.
Hamza and his mosque have been conncected with terrorists in the past.
But Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said it was still important that the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" be observed."He has certainly made provocative statements... but we need to be very clear [about the difference] between those remarks, that are perhaps deeply offensive to us, and whether there has been a breach of law," he told BBC News.
"I think for any British citizen, irrespective of where you come from, what your feelings are, what your thoughts are, the law should be applied equally."
From AP, with thanks to DC Watson:
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) -- Two car bombs exploded minutes apart by a language school close to the U.S. Consul's residence in Pakistan's biggest city Wednesday, killing a police officer and wounding 25 other people.The attack came days after police in Karachi said they smashed an Islamic militant ring accused in a deadly bombing outside the U.S. Consulate two years ago and a failed assassination plot against Pakistan's pro-American president.
The fact that one of the seven wanted Al-Qaeda members is an American citizen, a convert to Islam, speaks volumes. Of course, several converts have already won headlines in the war on terror: John Walker Lindh, Juan Padilla, Richard Reid, Jack Roche, etc. It is obvious why Islamic terrorist groups would want to recruit such people. Less often noted is the significance of the fact that they can be recruited at all. For they approach the Qur'an and other Islamic texts without the culturally ingrained ways of understanding them that Muslims pick up in Islamic societies. In other words, they come to Islam more or less in a pure, abstract form. The force of any given passage of Qur'an or Hadith is not blunted by cultural habit and familiarity. This is extremely revealing of the nature of the Qur'an and Sunnah.
[Last night I posted the above graphic with a similar story. I was surprised to see that it quickly disappeared, but it was while the site was being worked on by the technicians. So I posted it again, made sure it was up, and turned to other work. Now this morning I find it gone again. I am no computer expert and don't know why this is happening, but I suspect it is also why some of you have found you can't post occasionally, or encounter other difficulties. Apologies for any inconvenience, and I will try to figure out what's going on. I thought the problems had been taken care of, so this is really puzzling.]
From the Washington Post:
The nation's top law enforcement officials, saying they are convinced al Qaeda is planning an attack on the United States in the coming months, issued an urgent plea yesterday for information about seven people who they said could be involved in such an effort.FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III asked for the public's help in tracking down six men and one woman associated with al Qaeda who either are familiar with the United States or have a history of involvement in attacks on U.S. interests.
All but one -- Adam Yahiye Gadahn, 25, a Southern California convert to Islam linked to top al Qaeda captive Abu Zubaida -- have been sought for many months by the FBI. Officials said they do not know whether any of the seven is in the United States. ...
"Credible intelligence, from multiple sources, indicates that al Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months," Ashcroft said. "This disturbing intelligence indicates al Qaeda's specific intention is to hit the U.S. hard." He said the information has been "corroborated on a variety of levels."
The problems you may be having getting to Jihad Watch today stem from efforts to resolve continuing space problems. The readership is growing very quickly, and we are doing our best to accomodate. All problems should be resolved soon, and thanks for your patience.
Step back for a minute and imagine an army led by a Buddhist monk or Christian priest, who was only one of many such clerics who preached violence from the pulpit and led armed forces. Then tell yourself that the Islamic identity of people like Al-Sadr and his lieutenant is incidental to what they are doing. Yet this politically correct myopia continues to afflict most Western policymakers, to our detriment.
From AP:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. troops captured a key lieutenant of radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr during overnight clashes in Najaf that killed 24 people and wounded nearly 50, hospital and militia officials said.
Here is a Fox story (thanks to Jeffrey Imm) about the latest threats.
Counterterrorism and law enforcement officials told Fox News Tuesday that they are extremely concerned that terrorist groups like Al Qaeda may be planning an attack during one of the major events scheduled for this summer. The comments came after a think tank study revealed that despite the elimination of several key figures, Al Qaeda still has a functioning leadership, over 18,000 potential terrorists in its global network and a swelling membership thanks to the war in Iraq.
I wrote about Sgt. Hasan Akbar's attack on his fellow American troops in Onward Muslim Soldiers. Now comes confirmation of my contention there that he attacked them solely out of loyalty to Islam, not because of racism or anything else (contrary to widely published reports). From AP, with thanks to LGF:
FORT BRAGG, N.C. - A prosecution witness testified Monday that a soldier charged with killing two officers in a grenade attack during the Iraq war confessed to the crimes after his arrest, saying he feared the wartime deaths of Muslims.
The SITE Institute has published excerpts of a training manual for Muslim kidnappers. The entire article is well worth reading at that site. One illuminating point is that the manual clearly sees kidnapping as an Islamic religious act, and even — astonishingly enough — as an opportunity to call people to Islam:
• Abide by Muslim laws as your actions may become a Da’wa [call to join Islam].
You may be annoyed when proselytizers knock on your door, but one thing you can say about the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others: they aren't under any illusions that kidnapping and murder will make their faiths any more attractive to nonbelievers.
Another convert to Islam ends up mixed up with terrorists. Where, o where, is this grand religion of peace we keep hearing about? From the New York Times, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
ARIS, May 25 — A Paris court today sentenced a Frenchman with ties to a suspect in the Madrid train bombings to four years in prison for helping Islamic terrorists in Europe.The man, David Courtallier, was convicted of conspiring with criminals engaged in a terrorist enterprise and was not implicated in the Madrid bombings, which killed 191 people on March 11. But Mr. Courtallier, a cheese vendor from France's Savoy region who converted to Islam in 1997, had been in contact with Jamal Zougam, one of the first suspects arrested in the Madrid attacks.
In both Onward Muslim Soldiers and Islam Unveiled I discuss the British Sheikh Omar Bakri, who has long boasted about using Britain's freedom of speech to advocate the establishment of a Sharia state in Britain. Here is more about him, from the Dallas Morning News:
LONDON – The puzzle of Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad is the puzzle of growing ranks of militant Muslims across Europe today. Some are talkers, others are doers, and often it isn't easy to distinguish between the two.Sheik Bakri, a controversial London-based cleric, counsels the hundreds of young men and women who attend his weekly sermons to exercise restraint and nonviolence. Yet, he says martyrdom is a key to paradise. Under some circumstances in the defense of Islam, he says, violence and killing may be necessary.
Europe may be the scene of martyrdom attacks soon, Sheik Bakri warned in an interview, although he placed numerous caveats on how that could unfold.
He regards the West as the enemy, confers upon Osama bin Laden the honorific of "sheik," and praises as "magnificent" the 19 al-Qaeda members who killed themselves in the Sept. 11 attacks. But he also preaches kindness and respect for non-Muslims and condemns indiscriminate attacks as "forbidden" in Islam.
Taqiyya alert: Bakri taught two young British Muslims who journeyed to Israel to become suicide bombers.
A commentary last year in the Guardian newspaper mistakenly described Sheik Bakri, who walks with a cane but is otherwise able-bodied, as "one-eyed, hook-handed."
That would be Abu Hamza, Bakri's partner in crime.
An April 26 New York Times story listed Sheik Bakri foremost among European clerics allegedly expressing sympathy toward terrorist attacks against Europe. He was so angered, he banned members of al-Muhajiroun from speaking to the non-Muslim news media and accused the New York Times of attempting "to stir up hatred towards Muslims and to whip the masses into a frenzy of fear and animosity."Rankling officials
Nevertheless, Sheik Bakri acknowledged in the April 22 interview that he has deliberately tried to rankle the British and U.S. governments with his fiery sermons, which he delivers several times a week at mosques and community centers around England.
By praising al-Qaeda as "magnificent," the cleric said, he is able to draw media attention and spread his message to a wider audience. But because he stops short of calling for his own followers to stage attacks, he explained, he has been able to avoid arrest for inciting terrorism.
Key to his rhetorical strategy is a carefully worded explanation of Islam's "covenant of security," which obliges Muslims to behave themselves when they have been invited into their enemy's domain. It is forbidden, the cleric explained, for Muslim immigrants to launch attacks in the Western countries where they reside because, as guests, they must abide by a covenant of nonaggression.
He said there currently is no one who can be described as the undisputed leader of all Muslims. However, he describes Mr. bin Laden as, hands down, the most popular and widely respected person in the Muslim world today.
"If you want to make free elections in the Muslim world, I doubt if anyone could compete with him. Even moderate Muslims, if they are given the free hand to vote and are given the power, they would vote for Osama bin Laden," he said. ...
Muslims who regard Mr. Bin Laden as their supreme leader might regard themselves as free to rise up against their European hosts, Sheikh Bakri said.
"What we do is all part of the same struggle," said Anjem Choudary, the chief deputy of Sheik Bakri, who described the jihad being waged by al-Muhajiroun in the United Kingdom as the same as those being waged by Muslim guerrillas in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya.
"It's right that we're fighting against it [oppression by the West]. We just don't do so militarily," he said.
Sheikh Bakri says he makes a point of sending advance copies of his sermons to British police so they can judge for themselves whether he is the terrorist demon portrayed by the media. So far, police have not intervened. In spite of calls by members of Parliament for his arrest and deportation, British authorities say Sheikh Bakri has the right of free speech as long as he doesn't incite violence.
Kids love him, too — a tiny minority of kids, of course
This story is an AP version (thanks to Jake) of the Reuters piece below. This one is far more concerned than the Reuters piece with portraying these findings as showing that the war on terror has failed.
However:
1. Doesn't the fact that half of Al-Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured indicate that the war on terror thus far may not have been as dismal a failure as the lead paragraph suggests?
2. Estimates of the number of people who went through Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan have ranged as high as 120,000. Low-end estimates are still in the 70,000-80,000 range. If only 18,000 of them are still active, doesn't that indicate some success? Of course, these 18,000 could inflict tremendous damage, but I'd still rather have 18,000 to deal with than 100,000.
3. The idea that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have boosted Al-Qaeda is dear to the hearts of people like Ted Kennedy, but where would we be now if there had been no response to 9/11, or if that response had amounted to just a few cruise missiles lobbed into Waziristan? Would the Al-Qaeda members who already existed before 9/11 have folded up shop and stopped attacking Westerners?
4. Also, if Muslims joined Al-Qaeda because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, doesn't that indicate that they didn't have any serious objection to Al-Qaeda's activity even before joining? After all, if they considered Osama and Co. to be heretics who were defaming Islam by using it to justify terrorism, that wouldn't change because the Americans invaded, would it? Surely in that event it would have been possible to create a non-terrorist force that was not allied with Al-Qaeda, that would have really constituted the indigenous militiamen that Ted Rall and his ilk imagine the terrorists to be? But doesn't the fact that this didn't happen indicate that the ideological divide between Al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamic world wasn't as large as most analysts continue to believe?
LONDON - Far from being crippled by the U.S.-led war on terror, al-Qaida has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks, a report said Tuesday.
Well, if this report is true, we now have a count of the tiny minority of extremists: evidently, there are 18,000 of them. But of course Reuters — and few analysts — seem to care how these 18,000 were recruited, and whether such recruitment efforts are still effective among Muslims worldwide.
From Reuters, with thanks to nevermindlv:
LONDON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden's network, a leading London think-tank says.
In all the excitement around the Jihad Watch offices lately here in sunny Secure Undisclosed Locationville, we once again neglected to post links to two new articles by Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer: "The Jihad in America and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic Way," which appeared in Human Events; and "The Enemy is Not Just Al-Qaeda," from FrontPage. Both appeared last Thursday, although I assure you they were not written simultaneously.
U.S. News and World Report has this. In the days after the Madrid bombing everyone asked what would happen if the American election was targeted. Would Americans go the way of Spain or be roused to greater action?
Al-Qaeda would like to find out.
The chatter was persistent--and alarming. In the weeks after the deadly March bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid by al Qaeda operatives, the supersecret U.S. surveillance network, Echelon, intercepted a number of messages from suspected terrorists suggesting planning for a massive, multipronged assault on the United States. When? Between this summer's political conventions and October, one month before the presidential election. The intelligence appeared to confirm information obtained from some seized al Qaeda computers and from several human sources, government officials say. Officials at the CIA and the National Security Agency, which runs the Echelon program, believe the information is credible but worry that the human sources were on the periphery of the now widely dispersed al Qaeda network. Nevertheless, the information pointed to two, perhaps three, targets, the sources say: New York, Washington, and Las Vegas. The objective of the suspected attack, the officials continued, would be not only to cause mass casualties and devastation of U.S. infrastructure but to roil the presidential race. The Madrid bombings, which killed 191 people and wounded 1,800, also toppled the Spanish government and triggered the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. "Since Spain," says a Bush administration official, "al Qaeda has had the feeling of 'We can do this. We can affect an election.' "
More holy fighting in the holy city of Najaf where a holy shrine was damaged— but not it seems wholly destroyed.
NAJAF, Iraq (AP) - One of the most sacred shrines of Shia Islam suffered minor damage during clashes Tuesday between U.S. forces and radical Shiite militiamen that killed at least 13 Iraqis, some of them civilians. It was unclear who was responsible for the shrine damage.
A wonderful hi-tech dream that will fall apart if differing agencies do not share information.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Department of Homeland Security is on the verge of awarding a 15-billion-dollar contract for creating an elaborate system of databases that would track visitors to the United States long before they arrive.On Sunday, The New York Times said the contract, which will probably be awarded in coming days to one of three final bidders, is already generating considerable interest as federal officials try to improve their ability to monitor those who enter the United States at more than 300 border checkpoints.
No one wonder he thinks bin Laden seemed like a "nice man". More in The Age on the trial of Australian terror suspect Jack Roche.
Al-Qaeda leaders talked about destroying American and Israeli airlines flying to Australia a year before the September 11 attacks in the United States, a court heard yesterday.The strikes were part of a plot outlined in early 2000 in the Pakistan city of Karachi by al-Qaeda's second in command, Mukhtar, in talks with alleged al-Qaeda conspirator Jack Roche.
Roche, 50, a British-born Islamic convert, has denied plotting with senior al-Qaeda officials to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra, with intent do endanger lives.
On day six of his trial in the Perth District Court, the jury was played part of a nine-hour videotape of an interview with Roche conducted by two Australian Federal Police agents in November 2002.
Roche says in the interview that he and Mukhtar also talked about the assassination of Americans and Israelis in Australia and how Melbourne Jewish leader Joe Gutnick would be a possible target.
"Mukhtar was thinking about any airlines that regularly came to Australia from either the US or Israel," Roche says in the recording. "But he mainly was interested in the American airlines that flew into Australia and people who could be targeted."
There is no way for cases like this not to be highly politicized from the beginning, and the FBI should have known that.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - A federal court threw out the case Monday against an American lawyer arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings, lifting a a cloud of suspicion that has surrounded the attorney since his arrest earlier this month.Robert Jordan, the FBI agent in charge of Oregon, said the agency "regretted" any hardship caused by the arrest, and said the agency would be reviewing its practices on fingerprint analyses.
ADDENDUM: If this case had really been a witch hunt, of course, Mayfield would never have been released. But greater care is needed, as I called for in this article about the case: "No Margin for Error in Terror War." It appeared in Human Events on May 13:
An American lawyer named Brandon Mayfield was arrested last Thursday. Reports indicated that his fingerprints were found on one of the bags holding the explosives that blew up in Madrid on March 11. Adding to the suspicion was that he was a convert to Islam — and therefore possibly, like John Walker Lindh, a convert to jihad ideology. Among Mayfield’s clients had been another Muslim convert, Jeffrey Battle, who was convicted some time ago of participating in a conspiracy to aid Al-Qaeda. (Mayfield didn’t represent him on that case, but on an earlier one involving child custody.)But a significant question arose almost immediately. Not long after the FBI took Mayfield into custody, Spanish officials expressed grave reservations about the incriminating fingerprint (it turned out to be just one). It was, they contended, not similar enough to fingerprints known to be Mayfield’s.
Now, I’m not saying that Mayfield is innocent. Nor am I saying he’s guilty. What I am saying is the FBI better have more than a single fingerprint on which to base their case, and that they need to make their case as convincing in the court of public opinion as in a court of law. They need to assure Americans that they do have other evidence — even if they’re not able to say what it is at this point. This is because there is no way for cases like this not to be highly politicized from the beginning. The doubts about the fingerprint just feed suspicions such as those expressed by Mayfield’s brother: “I think the reason they are holding him is because he is of the Muslim faith and because he is not super happy with the Bush administration.”
The idea that the FBI is now rounding up random Muslims and critics of the Bush Administration is a cherished fantasy of the loony Left, but cases like this only feed the paranoia. If the fingerprint turns out definitively to be not Mayfield’s, his case will form a nice companion, in the hysterical annals of Bushitler’s reign of terror, to that of Muslim Army Chaplain James Yee. Yee was arrested last September and suspected of mishandling classified documents at Guantanamo; officials intimated that a treason charge could be in the offing. But then it all got curiouser and curiouser: prosecutors asked for more time so that they could determine whether the documents Yee had were really classified at all. The charges were reduced, revised, and finally dropped altogether.
American Muslim advocacy groups and their allies have tried to make Yee’s case into a cause celebre, clamoring for an official apology and comparing Yee to Alfred Dreyfus, the Army Captain who was convicted of treason on charges trumped-up by anti-Semites in France a hundred years ago. Just last Saturday the Chicago Tribune huffed: “No apologies by the military would fully restore Yee’s reputation or compensate his family for the suffering they endured. Yet a formal apology would be a good place to start. The military ought to consider, too, how this witch hunt has damaged its image, its plans to recruit Muslims and Arabs into its intelligence services — an urgent task — and its reputation among Muslims at home and abroad.”
Maybe Yee hasn’t received an apology because of the unanswered questions that linger about his case. When the charges were dropped, Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo spoke cryptically of “national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence” if the government continued to prosecute Yee.
What on earth did Miller mean? That the documents Yee was carrying were so sensitive that a trial would bring to light information that must not come out? If that was so, then why was he sent back to work? But if he didn’t have classified documents, why not dispel all remaining suspicions and allow this innocent man to get on with his life without any clouds hanging over him?The stakes are too high in the war on terror to allow for the kind of bungling that marked, or seemed to mark, the Yee case, and which now threatens to turn another high-profile terror prosecution into a fiasco. The problem is not that all this makes Bush look bad. It is that there are plenty of real terrorists still at large. Whether Justice is trumping up charges against innocent people or mishandling the prosecution of real jihadists is equally damaging. Abu Ghraib is just one example: there is today simply no margin for error.
Saudi Arabia's plentiful chickens come home to roost again.
RIYADH: (AFP) A German national was shot dead in Riyadh on Saturday, becoming the seventh Westerner to be killed in Saudi Arabia this month, hours after authorities reported seizing bomb-making material in a terror "den"."An expatriate holding German citizenship was shot and killed by unknown elements in eastern Riyadh. Security authorities are still (investigating) the incident," the capital's police chief said.
From The Telegraph:
Note also:
Common wisdom in the Iraqi capital is that nearly all the Mahdi army fighters in the holy cities are poor and ignorant Shias from the sprawling Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.But most of those fighting the Americans this weekend were local. Some were educated and from well-off families.
And it's 1 2 3 What are we fightin' for? Don't ask the major TV networks. (AP)
A speech in which Bush is expected to lay out details of the transfer of power to Iraq, and reassure Americans about that war, will not be covered by the major networks.
According to Hollywood Reporter:
The broadcast networks are not expected to carry President Bush's primetime speech tonight, in which he will lay out a "clear strategy" for the future of Iraq. The Bush administration has not requested the Big Four to air live the president's address to an audience at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., scheduled for 8 p.m. EDT on the last Monday of the crucial for the network's ad rates May sweep period.NBC, Fox and ABC will proceed with their scheduled programming for the 8-9 p.m. hour -- an episode of "Fear Factor," the finale of "The Swan" and the broadcast premiere of Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind," respectively. NBC and Fox's sibling cable channels, MSNBC and Fox News, will carry the speech.
Everybody loves Raymond, but nobody loves W.
CAIR responded to the murder of Nicholas Berg by circulating a petition against terrorism called “Not in the Name of Islam.”
The “Not in the Name of Islam” petition states: “We, the undersigned Muslims, wish to state clearly that those who commit acts of terror, murder and cruelty in the name of Islam are not only destroying innocent lives, but are also betraying the values of the faith they claim to represent. No injustice done to Muslims can ever justify the massacre of innocent people, and no act of terror will ever serve the cause of Islam. We repudiate and dissociate ourselves from any Muslim group or individual who commits such brutal and un-Islamic acts. We refuse to allow our faith to be held hostage by the criminal actions of a tiny minority acting outside the teachings of both the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Islam Online says the petition is “Not in the Name of Islam”
On the other hand, it promotes a message of pacifism to Muslims in the US and around the world, disregarding Islam’s instructions to fight oppression and invasion. This is suggested when the term reject violence is used.Violence and all its forms are subjectively interpreted. To non-Muslims, the desired interpretation would be “Drop all of your beliefs in fighting against our oppression.” Another possible connotation would be that Muslims should not support the death penalty or corporal punishment. The death penalty, whether by stoning, hanging or beheading, is considered a violent act by many.
Desperate to curry favor with non-Muslims, CAIR has successfully been trapped in a catch-22. Now that we’ve suggested that Muslims do not believe in violence, non-Muslims will tear us up in their writings by accusing us of hypocrisy for daring to take up arms against an occupying force.
UPDATE: Read the comments. In haste I missed the crucial point that the Islam Online article was written by an American Islamic chaplain. Thanks to Charles and all the others who provided the info.
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) U.S. forces battled fighters loyal to radical Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in his stronghold of Kufa overnight Sunday, and at least 18 people died. Many militiamen returned to their homes after abandoning the center of another holy Shiite city, Karbala, witnesses said.The clashes broke out when American tanks and troops moved into the city for the first time as part of an effort to weaken the militia of al-Sadr, a fierce opponent of the U.S.-led occupation who launched an uprising against the coalition in early April. He routinely delivers a sermon at Friday prayers in Kufa.
It seems as if even AP is getting tired of "the holy city of ..." designation. It calls to mind a recent Scrappleface headline: "New York, Washington Declared Muslim Holy Cities." Now that's thinking outside the box, and an interesting tactic to boot.
Back to AP:
The U.S. military has said al-Sadr's forces are using mosques and shrines to store weapons and organize attacks, while the radical cleric's supporters have accused the military of desecrating holy places.
Meaning: if al-Sadr's forces attack from the mosque it is not a desecration, but if U.S. forces follow them back to their lair, it is.
Thanks to Jeffrey Imm, this story from The Telegraph:
...there is no disguising the fact that hundreds of angry young Shias - some poor and ill-educated, others from relatively well-off families - are flocking to the Mahdi army.
The article concludes:
"I am no fan of Moqtada al-Sadr but it is the Americans who are causing our suffering. Every day they kill innocent people. They should just leave our country. They promised democracy and freedom but all they have delivered is torture and abuse."
Jihad Watch was temporarily off-line, ironically because the site was just upgraded to handle more data and bandwidth.
Apologies for any inconvenience.
In today's Dallas Morning News, by Andrew McCarthy:
For Islamic militants like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, Osama bin Laden and those who follow them, jihad means killing the enemies of the militants – which is pretty much anyone who is not a militant. That sounds crazy to us – we're from a diverse, tolerant, live-and-let-live culture. But if we are going to appreciate the risk – the threat – we face, the reality is: It matters much less what we think about the militants than what they think about themselves.
Mort Kondracke mentions that
The decapitation of Nicholas Berg - which, it merits reminding, required several cuts of the knife to stop his screaming - was a front-page story for just one day. Only one newspaper that I know of, the Dallas Morning News, plus the Weekly Standard magazine, made the point that Berg's murder is "why we fight."
Don't mess with Texas.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. officials believe they have "rock solid" evidence that Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi (search), once a darling of the American government, passed secrets to Iran, Fox News has learned."There is no need for an investigation because we're quite certain he did it," one senior Bush administration official said.
The official first described the evidence against Chalabi as "pretty solid" and then characterized it as "rock solid."
U.S. officials won't describe the information Chalabi's alleged to have passed to Iran or how he's supposed to have obtained it, but they said he does not have the clearance to possess American classified information.
According to Reuters, however, this is not what yesterday's raid was all about.
An Iraqi judge, Hassan Muathin, said the raid was carried out under an arrest warrant for several men wanted for stealing state-owned vehicles, but Chalabi accused U.S.-led authorities running Iraq of a "targeted attack" against him.Squads of soldiers and police sealed off the neighborhood around the headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and a nearby house used by Chalabi, removing computers, files, a copy of the Koran and other personal items, Chalabi said.
UPDATE: Michael Rubin of the American Enterpise Institute sees it this way:
On May 20, U.S. forces raided the home and office of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi. At a press conference following the operation, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) spokesman Dan Senor told assembled journalists that U.S. forces did not participate. To be kind, Senor appeared to misspeak. There was a non-Iraqi American citizen in Chalabi's house at the time of the raid. As armed men pointed guns at Chalabi's head, the U.S. citizen demanded to know who was in charge. A number of heavily armed Americans (judging by language and accent) in civilian clothes, upon learning of the presence of a non-Iraqi witness, scurried outside and waited in U.S. military humvees while Iraqis searched Chalabi's house.Those conducting the raid stole a Chalabi family Koran, smashed a portrait of Chalabi's father, and destroyed computers and family heirlooms. Chalabi's name did not appear on the warrant they presented. Iraqi police conducting the raid under American supervision sheepishly apologized in Arabic; they did not know they were to target Chalabi.
Iraqis--fans and foes of Chalabi alike--saw the raid as another sign of the contempt the CPA shows for ordinary Iraqis. By sending forces to break into Chalabi's house and then by holding a Governing Council member at gunpoint, Bremer sought to humiliate Chalabi. Bremer has not learned from the Abu Ghraib scandal. Humiliation backfires.
Simultaneously, the inside-the-beltway rumor mongering made clear both the irrational contempt and ignorance that many professional pundits feel for any proponent of Arab democracy. Those academics, pundits, and commentators who have never met Chalabi reserve for him the greatest vitriol.
And, via LGF, Michael Ledeen, also of the American Enterprise Institute, spells it out further:
Yet the State Department's and the CIA's Middle East gangs have hated him and fought him for more than a decade, because he is independent and while he is happy to work with them, he will not work for them.
If we can't take a picture of Aunt Mabel on the D train ("ummm, how did we wind up at Coney Island?"), the terrorists win.
The New York Daily News on proposed new regulations to help deter terrorism in the subways:
Smiling will still be allowed on the subways, but - sorry, tourists - taking pictures may soon be banned.Transit officials, at the request of police, yesterday proposed prohibiting photography and videotaping in the subway system and on buses - hoping to thwart terrorists from gathering information for an attack.
There are various other rules proposed, such as no walking between cars (I committed that particular crime quite often back when I lived in Gotham City); no shoes on the seats, and no jumping the turnstile even if you have a valid fare card that malfunctions.
NYPD Transportation Police Chief Michael Scagnelli said police would use discretion in issuing summonses to shutterbugs. But violators could be questioned and subjected to background checks, he said, and have their film confiscated.
New York officials were recently planning for possible subway terrorism in a four-hour drill, coordinated by the Office of Emergency Management and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
NEW YORK (AP) _ City officials staged a mock explosion in a lower Manhattan subway station early Sunday May 16, simulating an incident with 200 injured and 40 killed to test protocols and communications among emergency personnel from multiple agencies.
More info on the arrests on Tuesday.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S.-led forces in Iraq are holding two people suspected of possible involvement in the kidnap and beheading of American Nicholas Berg earlier this month, the U.S. military said on Friday. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the forces, told a news conference four people had been detained in a raid in Baghdad two days ago and two had subsequently been released. Of the other two, he said: "We may find out that they have no association with the murder."
AP spoke to an anonymous Iraqi official who said the group that killed Berg was led by a relative of Saddam Hussein.
The group that was involved in the killing of Berg was led by Yasser al-Sabawi, a nephew of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi security official said. He said American intelligence had asked Iraqi authorities to hand over the suspects, but they were still in Iraqi hands.Al-Sabawi was not among those arrested, the Iraqi official said.
Scotsman.com reports on claims by terror suspect Jack Roche to have had lunch with Bin Laden in March 2000. (Thanks to Jean-Luc.)
“Yeah a very nice man ... I would rather meet him than George Bush I can tell you,” he told the reporter. “He is a very nice man, but I only met him for a short time ... just outside Kandahar.”Roche told the reporter he sat down to start eating, “and I looked across and I said ‘whoah – that’s like the bloke on the telly.”’
Prosecutors say Roche was in Afghanistan to undergo explosives training with al-Qaida.
Roche, a convert to Islam said,
“If someone punches you, you are allowed to punch them back. I am very concerned about my brothers and sisters of Islam who are being punched by these people,” Roche said during the interview.
Time reports that the FBI has sent a bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that individual suicide bombers may attempt to strike inside the United States.
Law enforcement professionals should be on the alert for "people wearing heavy, bulky jackets on warm days, smelling of chemicals, trailing wires from their jackets" and should know that "suicide bombers may disguise themselves in stolen military, police or firefighter's garb, or even as pregnant women."
Note the last paragraph:
In fact, U.S. analysts are at a loss to explain why the homeland has thus far escaped such attacks, since a number of extremist groups, particularly Hamas, have a sizeable presence here. One factor, officials say, is that terror leaders still regard America as a cash cow, and don't want to antagonize moderate Muslim donors. Another reason, says one specialist, may simply be that while there seems to be an endless supply of fanatical youths willing to die for the cause in the Middle East, most of them simply can't get visas to the U.S.
As I have recently pointed out, there is No Margin For Error In the Terror War.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - A lawyer who had been arrested two weeks ago in connection with the terror attacks in Spain was set free Thursday after evidence pointed to another suspect in the deadly bombings.
A debate by Intelligence Squared, the London Forum for live debate.
Speakers for the motion:
Some of Taheri's remarks:
This debate is not easy.For Islam has become an issue of political controversy in the West.
On the one hand we have Islamophobia, a particular affliction of those who blame Islam for all the ills of our world.
The more thin skinned Muslims have ended up on regarding every criticism of Islam as Islamophobia.
On the other hand we have Islamoflattery that claims that everything good under the sun came from Islam. ( According to a recent PBS serial on Islam, even cinema was invented by a lens-maker in Baghdad, named Abu-Hufus!)
This is often practised by a new generation of the Turques de profession, Westerners who are prepared to apply the rules of critical analysis to everything under the sun except Islam.
They think they are doing Islam a favour.
The opposite is true.
Depriving Islam of critical scrutiny is bad for Islam and Muslims, and ultimately dangerous for the whole world.
The whole thing is well worth reading. He concludes:
Muslims can build democratic society provided they treat Islam as a matter of personal, private belief and not as a political ideology that seeks to monopolise the pubic space and regulate every aspect of individual and community life.Ladies and gentlemen: Islam is incompatible with democracy.
The motion was carried by 403 votes for, 267 against. 28 were undecided.
Other spins: "Bush Seeks to Rally GOP Around Iraq Plan" (later headline from AP); "Bush Rallies Worried Republicans on Capitol Hill" (Reuters).
This rare meeting seems to be becoming an annual event.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan Thursday, saying Iraqis are ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming some political power, but warning that violence is likely to worsen as that transfer approaches.The president made a rare visit to Capitol Hill as lawmakers prepare to head to their home states for the Memorial Day recess.
"This has been a rough couple of months for the president, particularly on the issues of Iraq, and I think he was here to remind folks that we do have a policy and this policy is going to be tough," said Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. "Things, as I think he commented, are very likely to get worse before they get better."
But later
It was the second year in a row that Bush met behind closed doors exclusively with his fellow Republicans just ahead of the congressional Memorial Day break. The stakes were especially high this year: Bush and most lawmakers face re-election, and Iraq is still plagued by chaos and violence six weeks before the United States cedes some power to Iraqis.
Ach so! Intelligent intelligence from Deutschland:
Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BFV), one of three national intelligence services in Germany that is charged with gathering information on domestic as well as foreign extremist and terror groups active on home soil, stressed on Monday that Islamic terrorism posed the biggest security threat in Germany.Presenting the annual domestic security report 2003 in Berlin, German Interior Minister Otto Schily said, "Unfortunately we still face diverse dangers in Germany of which Islamic terrorism and Islamic extremism form the focal point."
Schily added that recent terrorist attacks such as the ones in Madrid in March this year that killed almost 200 people targeted so-called soft targets worldwide."We can't assume that Germany lies outside the reach of such targets," Schily warned, saying that in the eyes of Islamic terrorists Germany counted as an ally of the United States and Israel and was also actively involved in the war against terrorism through its peacekeeping deployment in Afghanistan.
Many thanks to all who sent variations on this story. Although Dumont used a forged passport, the 90 day visa reiterates the importance of Daniel Pipes' observations, Europe's Threat to the West.
TOKYO (Kyodo News) — A senior member of the al-Qaida terrorist network repeatedly entered Japan on 90-day visas with a forged French passport in 2002 and 2003 to hide out in the city of Niigata for about a year, and had telephone conversations with a senior British member of the network during his stay, investigative sources said Wednesday.Lionel Dumont, 33, who was arrested in Germany last December, entered Japan from Singapore on July 17, 2002. He left Oct 5 that year just before his visa was to expire but then reentered Japan 11 days later with a new visa. He repeated this two more times until his final departure last September.
AP reports also that he attempted to organize a terrorist cell (Report: al-Qaida Member Had Japan Base ) and UPI provides further details:
Dumont was arrested in Germany last December. He had been sought by Interpol in connection with an attempted terrorist bombing related to the Group of Seven economic summit in Lyon, France in June 1996.Japanese authorities apparently are shocked by the fact that Dumont, 33, repeatedly shuttled between Japan and abroad, and remained in contact with foreign nationals in Japan after leaving the country in September, 2003.
Police found records of phone calls from Dumont to Pakistanis and Iranians resident in Japan, Yomiuri Shimbun reported. They are concerned he may have been raising money and forming a terrorist network in Japan.
I have had little to say about the 9/11 commission's road show in New York. The idea of investigating what we could have done better in the past to know what we must do better in the future is a good one in theory, but I don't see it happening here.
Giuliani puts it well:
NEW YORK (AP) - Giuliani said the briefings he received from federal officials indicated that New York's bridges, tunnels and subways were more likely targets."I do think the interpretation would have been more in the direction of suicide bombings than aerial attacks," Giuliani said one day after his top commissioners were grilled over their Sept. 11 response.
Above all,
"Our enemy is not each other, but the terrorists who attacked us," Giuliani said. The mayor acknowledged there were "terrible mistakes" made on Sept. 11, but attributed that to the unprecedented circumstances."The blame should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones," Giuliani said as family members broke into applause.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The top intelligence official at the Homeland Security Department, worried about an increased risk of attack in coming months, says al-Qaida wants to strike on U.S. soil with something other than a conventional explosive - perhaps with a chemical or biological weapon.
Hughes is able to see the big picture— and that is why he worries.
Hughes ticks off a list of terrorist attacks that began in the 1990s - Khobar Towers, the African embassy bombings, the USS Cole, bombings in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and 9/11 - and worries that terrorists are able to show much patience."If the past is indeed prologue, then we are going to screw up, or they are going to get lucky," Hughes said. "I can't sleep."
Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin, Defense Department officials told Fox News Tuesday. The artillery shell was being used as an improvised roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. The 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent.
James Taranto has more on the spin at the New York Times and elsewhere.
So far, only Sky News has this. Assiduous searches elsewhere turned up only a BREAKING NEWS alert about actor Tony Randall's death.
More details when available.
UPDATE: According to AFP, none of the four included Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who US authorities believe carried out the killing.
Four people have been arrested over the beheading of American Nicholas Berg, Iraq sources say.The 26-year-old businessman's decapitated body was found 10 days ago in Baghdad.
UPDATE: AFP has more.
So often the response to calls to take the jihadist threat seriously consists of three epithets: "Hatemonger! Islamophobe! Racist!"
That last one always gets me. What race are Muslims?
Read Daniel Pipes on the Europe's Threat to the West.
Looks as if somebody has found Saddam's WMD's. From AP, with thanks to JJP Mackie:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A roadside bomb containing deadly sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. It was believed to be the first confirmed finding of any of the banned weapons upon which the United States based its case for the Iraq war.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The head of the Iraqi Governing Council was killed in a suicide car bombing near a checkpoint outside the coalition headquarters in central Baghdad on Monday, dealing a blow to U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq ahead of a handover of sovereignty on June 30.Abdel-Zahraa Othman, also known as Izzadine Saleem, was the second and highest-ranking member of the U.S.-appointed council to be assassinated. He was among nine Iraqis, including the bomber, who were killed, Iraqi officials said.
"Days like today convince us even more so that the transfer must stay on track," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, speaking on CNN.
More than 200 Islamic students threw stones and tried to storm the British embassy compound in Teheran yesterday in protest over Iraq. Iranian students burn the Union Flag outside the British embassy in Teheran The crowd, which chanted "Death to America, death to Britain and death to Israel", was quickly dispersed by riot police but its leaders vowed to be back.
The grandfather of all modern Islamic terrorist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, is in hot water yet again in Egypt. From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Police arrested 54 members of Egypt's outlawed Muslim Brotherhood early Sunday in an ongoing crackdown against the organization, officials said.The Brotherhood said "about 55" people had been arrested. A leading member of the group said police told the men they were being detained for belonging to an illegal group, said Ali Abdel-Fattah.
A statement from the group said the dawn raids were "a surprise escalation, against all expectations and (in line) with the fierce American and Israeli campaign against the Arab region, which requires solidarity between the regimes and all political forces," with the Brotherhood at the forefront
From CNN, with thanks to JJP Mackie:
(CNN) -- The Arabic language news network Al Jazeera aired pictures Sunday of what it said were two Russian electrical workers taken hostage last week by an Islamic group in Dura, south of Baghdad.A statement from a group referring to itself as Jaish al-Tifa al-Mansoura -- the Army of the Victorious Sect -- said it was holding the men and called on countries participating in "this criminal act," presumably the war in Iraq, to withdraw their citizens "before it's too late." ...
"We are showing the whole world our prisoners' pictures and how the Muslim mujahedeen are treating them," the previously unknown group said in the statement, which accompanied the tape.
"We have decided to punish America and its followers, and we'll destroy the crusaders' imperial dream," the statement continued.
The men were working for the electric power consortium Inter Energo Servis when their vehicle was ambushed south of Baghdad. Another IES worker was killed in the attack, a company spokesman said.
Khamenei's man
Also, rumblings from Tehran. From AP, with thanks to JJP Mackie:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr drove Italian forces from a base in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Sunday and attacked coalition headquarters there with grenade and mortar fire as tensions in the Shiite region escalated.Two U.S. soldiers died elsewhere, and gunmen killed three Iraqi women working for the U.S. led-coalition. Amid the ongoing violence, the United States is looking to move some of its 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to bolster forces in Iraq, South Korean and U.S. officials said.
Two Iraqi fighters were killed and 20 were wounded in battles in Nasiriyah, mostly at two bridges across the Euphrates, residents said.
The Italian troops evacuated their base as it came under repeated attack. Portuguese police were called out to support the Italians, their first action since the force of 128 deployed to Nasiriyah in November, a Portuguese duty officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
At least 10 Italians were wounded, one critically, contingent spokesman Lt. Col. Giuseppe Perrone told The Associated Press by phone. He said the Italians relocated to the nearby Tallil air base.
Also in Nasiriyah, a convoy transporting the Italian official in charge of the city, Barbara Contini, came under attack as it neared the headquarters of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, Perrone said. Two Italian paramilitary police were wounded. ...
Apparent gunfire slightly damaged one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines in Najaf on Friday, prompting calls for revenge against the Americans and even suicide attacks against the coalition.
The U.S. military has said al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army was probably responsible, but Iran's supreme leader on Sunday accused the United States of damaging the shrine through "shameless" and "foolish" actions.
"Muslims can't tolerate the shameless incursion of American forces into sacred places," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
Two U.S. tanks were stationed Sunday in a main square in Najaf, while militiamen held positions in the cemetery and other areas.
Several mosque imams from Fallujah, a Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad that was the site of heavy fighting last month, visited al-Sadr in Najaf to show solidarity. The siege of Fallujah by U.S. Marines ended when the coalition allowed an Iraqi force led by former officers in Saddam Hussein's army to take over security in the city.
Jeffrey Imm has called my attention to this notice from London Indymedia, and he notes that the mainstream media generally doesn't cover joint activities by anarchist and jihadist groups. But the Far Left's links with radical Islam are increasingly obvious. Comments Imm: "The London Anarchists protested Mark and Spencer's Department Store, because one of the founders was Jewish, and because the department store is willing to do business with Israel. One of the protestors repeatedly shouted 'Heil Hitler'. The original report of the M&S Anarchist protest was edited to remove the text celebrating the killing of Israeli soldiers by Anarchists: 'heroic killing of 6 Zionist soldiers', where it is discussed at: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/05/291508.html.
The antisemitic nature of the Anarchist organizations continues to become evident as it is increasingly difficult to discern the difference between Anarchist and Nazi organizations."
Victory to the Intifada picket of Marks and Spencer Oxford Street St Loski, 06.05.2004 22:57The history of Britain's biggest clothing retailer Marks and Spencer demonstrates how consumer habits in Britain are tied to the oppression of other peoples. Marks and Spencer has championed the state of Israel and thus connived in the dispossession and suppression of the Palestinians. Our comforts and pleasures, which Marks and Spencer so eagerly service, have been bought at an unacceptable price. ...
The occupation of Iraq by imperialist troops and the occupation of Palestine by Israel supported by the imperialists is coming up against resistance. It is our duty to defend the resistance both in Palestine and Iraq and demand the end to the occupation. Peace and justice in the Middle East cannot be achieved while there is no justice for Palestinians.
So join our weekly picket – come and speak, chant, sing, discuss, petition – be part of telling the passing public the truth about the situation in Palestine and help them to understand the urgency of the situation.
Boycott Marks and Spencer – shop with a conscience! Victory to the Intifada!
See you next week.
Mohammed Al-Hindi
From Haaretz, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Israel Air Force missiles struck targets in Gaza City early Sunday, hitting a building housing the offices of the political branch of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah group and another belonging to a pro-Hamas newspaper, witnesses reported.Nobody was inside either office at the time of the air strikes, although several bystanders, including two children, were wounded in the attack on Fatah's office.
Fatah's secretary-general in the Gaza Strip, Ahmed Halless, said the site was a cultural center that offered social and educational programs to local families.
"Israel should understand that aggression will not bring peace. Violence will bring more violence," he said.
Sure, Halless. But that cuts both ways, doesn't it?
The second strike hit the office of al-Resala, a weekly newspaper that supports Hamas.The IDF described the targets as "focal points of terrorist activity," saying that the Fatah building was used by its military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The military also claimed that the Hamas newspaper was used for incitement purposes and to pass messages between the group's leadership.
On Saturday, the IAF launched two missile strikes in the Gaza Strip, hitting Islamic Jihad targets and wounding 12 people. The IDF denied Palestinian claims that the attacks were an abortive attempt to assassinate Jihad leader Mohammed al-Hindi.
Jack Roche (ABC Television News)
Another convert who somehow missed the Qur'an's counsels of peace and tolerance. From Breakingnews.ie, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
A British-born Muslim convert was recruited by al-Qaida for a plan to blow up the Israeli embassy in Canberra with a lorry bomb, prosecutors said today on the opening day of the man’s trial.Jack Roche (aged 50) was told by senior officials in Osama bin Laden’s terror network to form a terror cell in Australia to carry out the plot, prosecutor Ron Davies told Perth District Court. The bombing was never carried out.
Roche has pleaded not guilty to one charge of conspiring to damage the Israeli embassy by means of explosives, and as a consequence harm diplomatic staff. He faces a maximum sentence of 25 years if convicted.
Prosecutors told the jury Roche travelled to Afghanistan to meet with senior figures from the terrorist organisation – including bin Laden – in March 2000.
A Buddhist Temple in Thailand
Maybe it was homework. From Reuters, with thanks to DC Watson:
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Bomb blasts rocked three Buddhist temples in Thailand's troubled Muslim south Sunday, wounding at least one person in the latest violence to hit the restive region, police said.The temples, located in three separate districts of Narathiwat province, were hit by bombs within minutes of each other. One temple suffered damage to its roof and pillars.
"Three temples were attacked with explosives," said Police Major General Kathane Kochapalayuk. A bystander was slightly wounded outside one temple.
Authorities declined to speculate on the motive for the attacks, the first major incident in the region since security forces killed 108 Muslim militants who attacked police outposts across three southern provinces on April 28.
Some in Turkey evidently oppose the "moderate, secular values" Blair has come to praise. From Reuters, with thanks to Nicolei:
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Four small bombs exploded outside branches of British bank HSBC in the Turkish cities of Ankara and Istanbul on Sunday night, hours before British Prime Minister Tony Blair was set to visit Turkey.Police and local media said the blasts caused minor damage and no casualties.
The bank has been targeted before. Its main Istanbul office was one of four British and Jewish targets bombed in Istanbul in November, attacks which killed 61 people.
A police official said one percussion bomb, believed to have been placed under a car, smashed windows of a bank branch in the capital Ankara when it exploded around 10:30 pm (3:30 p.m. EDT).
There was also an explosion in front of another branch in the city, he said.
State-run Anatolian news agency said there were two similar blasts outside two HSBC branches on the Asian side of the country's commercial hub Istanbul around 10 pm, which were also caused by percussion bombs and caused some damage.
Percussion bombs, often used by militant groups in attacks in Turkey, generally produce a loud bang but little damage.
Television pictures showed slight damage to the wall of one of the banks, which had been cordoned off as police officers inspected the area for evidence.
November's devastating bombs, whose victims included British consul Roger Short, have been blamed on a Turkish Islamist group linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Far-leftist and Kurdish militant groups have also carried out bombings in Turkey in the past. Istanbul is scheduled to host a NATO summit in late June.
Blair was expected to pledge his support for Turkey's bid to join the European Union and to discuss turmoil in neighboring Iraq during his six-hour visit to the capital Ankara.
He will be the first British leader to visit Ankara since Margaret Thatcher 16 years ago and is expected to praise Turkey's political reforms and stress its importance as a moderate Muslim country espousing democratic, secular values.
Thamarak Isarangura
Just as Pakistan's schools are laboratories of jihad, so also in Thailand. From the Independent, with thanks to Nicolei:
Hidden a few kilometres down a remote country lane in the heart of Thailand's troubled deep south - where a Muslim separatist uprising has left more than 200 dead this year - is the multi-million-dollar new campus of the Yala Islamic College.With more than a dozen Arab teachers from across the Middle East and a seemingly endless flow of funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, Yala has become the most obvious manifestation of what critics here say is an "Arab threat" to the traditionally moderate and tolerant local Islamic tradition. It was first brought home in 2002 when two dozen Middle Eastern suspects were arrested in the south for forging travel documents, visas and passports for al-Qa'ida operatives.
How did the teachers at Yala make inroads into the "moderate and tolerant local Islamic tradition"? Well, it's a school, after all. They taught a "purer form of Islam" (see below) from the Qur'an and Sunnah, showing through them that moderation and tolerance were not as Islamic as Thai Muslims may have assumed.
The south's largely unregistered Islamic schools - which offer religious education, a regular curriculum and training in Arabic and the local Yawi dialect - are accused by the government of being breeding grounds for radical separatists. The Islamic faith in Thailand, like Buddhism, has always been seen as being integrated with many other beliefs and practices, but the foreign-returned Muslims are insisting on a "purer" form of Islam.
After all, it was the teachers themselves leading the jihad:
A number of the Muslim separatists killed on 28 April, when more than 100 Islamists were gunned down on their motorbikes by soldiers acting on a tip off about a planned series of raids on army posts across the south, taught at local Islamic schools. Radical Thai Muslims have also targeted government-run secular schools, with nearly 100 this year alone being burned to the ground.Last week a Bangkok court issued an arrest warrant for a Muslim teacher accused of organising the worst separatist attacks - proof, say critics, that many Muslim Thai teachers who went overseas to Islamic schools must have come under the influence of hardliners.
The Buddhist minority in the south are circulating pamphlets detailing alleged local Muslim extremism, saying it poses an unprecedented threat both to their religion and the state. One senior Thai government official in Pattani said that he was aware of the first signs of "ethnic cleansing" in Narathiwat, one of the south's Muslim-majority provinces. "Some Thai Buddhist families have been told to leave under the threat of violence," he said on condition he not be further identified.
The Deputy Prime Minister, General Thamarak Isarangura, has said the Thai government believes there are military training sites in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt where Thai Muslim separatists are trained to execute terror attacks. More than 160 Thai Muslims students are enrolled in Islamic institutions in Saudi Arabia, and 1,500 in Egypt.
Yala Islamic College is run by Dr Ismail Lutfi, a Thai graduate of the hardline Wahhabi Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He has an estimated 8,000 followers in key Islamic posts throughout the south, and the 1,500 students at the college are taught a hardcore Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law in the Arabic language.
Lutfi knows how to tell Western journalists what they want to hear; however, it is left unclear whether he considers jihad in Thailand to be violence and extremism at all:
"I am against violence and I am against extremism," Dr Lutfi said in flawless Arabic in an interview at the college this week. "However, I do not consider telling the local Muslims that they should go to the mosque and pray five times a day extremism," he added.
Hamidou Laanigri
New signs of increased activity from an emerging jihadist base in Morocco — leading to frustration with Europe's lax anti-terror laws. From the New York Times, with thanks to Nicolei:
Morocco has been among the West's closest Arab allies and has long been instrumental in pursuing Arab-Israeli reconciliation. Although Moroccan and European officials now agree that there is a new Moroccan threat, they disagree over its nature and origin — and how to contain it.One problem is simply identifying major Moroccan terrorists. Two months after the Madrid train bombings, Spanish investigators believe that its mastermind may still be at large.
The French and Belgian police successfully dismantled Moroccan cells in their countries after the Madrid attacks, but they are convinced that other cells may have burrowed further underground.
Moroccan terrorists, intelligence and police experts say, know how to blend in.
"There are cells in which the Moroccans are well integrated into the population," Pierre de Bousquet, the head of the Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, France's counterintelligence service, said in an interview. "So they do not seem suspicious. They work. They have kids. They have fixed addresses. They pay the rent. The networks are dispersed throughout Europe and are very autonomous."
In addition to uneven cooperation among law enforcement and intelligence agencies within Europe, there is the problem of tensions that have surfaced between European and Moroccan officials.
Although the two sides are working together to investigate the Madrid bombings, the Moroccans have complained that their pleas for help after the Casablanca attacks were largely ignored until terrorists struck the heart of Europe.
They also have expressed frustration that laws in many European countries are not tough enough.
In April a court in Hamburg, Germany, allowed a Moroccan who was the only person convicted in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States to leave prison pending a new trial.
Three weeks later a court in Rome acquitted 12 people, including 9 Moroccans, who were arrested in 2002 and accused of being associated with a terrorist organization.
"The Madrid bombings finally have forced the Europeans to make their investigations more serious and their cooperation quicker and more operational," Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, Morocco's chief of security, said in an interview. "But we are victims of laws and guarantees that protect the rights of individuals at the expense of cracking down against organized crime."
Intelligence and law-enforcement officials in Spain, France and Belgium say that their Moroccan colleagues have refused to face the fact that Moroccans have banded into autonomous terror cells that can carry out attacks without outside organization, logistical support or money.
A real-life Third Man mystery from the Washington Post, with thanks to Mrs. Obelix:
The FBI has never found the individual who allegedly asked two Yemenis to take photos of federal buildings in downtown New York in May 2001, an episode that was mentioned in an intelligence report given President Bush little more than a month before the attacks on the World Trade Center, according to government officials. The two Yemenis were questioned on May 30, 2001, by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents, and their camera was confiscated after guards saw them taking photos of 26 Federal Plaza and surrounding buildings, including one that housed the FBI's counterterrorism unit in New York.Federal officials developed the film and found the images showed the plaza and surrounding buildings, plus the street. When FBI agents subsequently questioned the two men, they said they took the photos for a friend in Indianapolis who had never visited New York. The FBI has never located the Yemeni friend, who was in the United States under an assumed name with false documents.
Federal officials at the time were on alert because one day earlier, in one of the courthouses photographed, six men had been found guilty on a number of counts in connection with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, an attack linked to al Qaeda. A terrorist alert had been put out that day by the State Department, although the government said at the time it was not aware of any specific threat in response to the verdicts.
The President's Daily Brief (PDB) for Aug. 6, 2001, the highly classified intelligence report prepared by CIA for President Bush and top officials, contained a short section titled, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." Along with some past material about previous threats by the al Qaeda leader, the report referred to the FBI investigating "suspicious activity in this country consistent with the preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
At the time of the public release of the briefing document last month, a White House fact sheet said the FBI had "interviewed the men and determined that their conduct was consistent with tourist activity and the FBI's investigation identified no link to terrorism."
Neither the fact sheet nor two White House officials who briefed reporters April 9 mentioned that a third Yemeni was involved.
Within a few weeks of the May 30, 2001, incident, the FBI concluded that the two Yemeni men had no connection to terrorists and appeared to be taking tourist photos, according to a senior FBI official, who declined to be identified because he was discussing an ongoing investigation.
But the official also acknowledged that the third man, who had been working in the Indianapolis area under the assumed name Mohammed Hassan Abadi, has never been located or interviewed. The FBI does not know the man's real name, but it does have a photograph of him and has found no links between his assumed name or photograph and terrorist groups or individuals, the official said.
Kim Jong Il: Stalinist jihad?
What were "Syrian technicians" doing on the train? Could they provide a hint as to why it exploded? Is Kim Jong Il making common cause with the global jihad? From The World Tribune, with thanks to Mrs. Obelix:
Syrian technicians accompanying unknown equipment were killed in the train explosion in North Korea on April 22, according to a report in a Japanese newspaper.A military specialist on Korean affairs revealed that the Syrian technicians were killed in the explosion in Ryongchon in the northwestern part of the country, according to the Sankei Shimbun. The specialist said the Syrians were accompanying "large equipment" and that the damage from the explosion was greatest in the portion of the train they occupied.
The source said North Korean military personnel with protective suits responded to the scene soon after the explosion and removed material only from the Syrians' section of the train.
The technicians were from the Syrian technical research center called Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche Scientific (CERS). Although CERS was established to promote science and technology development, it has been viewed as a major player in Syria's weapons of mass destruction development program. ...
As many as 10 Syrians and accompanying North Koreans were killed, according to the report. The bodies of the Syrians were taken home on May 1 by a Syrian aircraft, which had come to Pyongyang to deliver aid supplies.
The Syrians and North Koreans who transported the victims were also reportedly wearing protective suits similar to those worn by the North Korean military figures who arrived on the scene immediately after the accident, the source said.
The United States and other countries have expressed concern that Syrian and North Korea are developoing Scud-D missiles, as well as chemical and biological weapons.
Concerning the cause of the explosion incident, the DPRK has explained that a train carrying fertilizer containing ammonium nitrate and a railroad tank carrying petroleum were being shunted, and, in the process, came into contact with electrical wires, due to carelessness.
Mickey (Disney Corp.)
From WOFL.com, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Walt Disney has a new security measure in place. Hydraulically powered, steel barricades block the service entrances of the resort's four theme parks. They were apparently designed to stop a 20-thousand-pound truck bomb traveling 70 miles per hour. The dozen or more yellow-and-black barricades are state-of-the-art. The manufacturer recently shipped the same model to Baghdad, Iraq, to guard the new U-S Embassy there. A Disney spokeswoman yesterday says the company did NOT install the barricades in response to a specific terrorist threat against the parks.
Prince Nayef
From the Independent, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Al-Qa'ida terrorists whose suicide bombs killed 35 people and injured 200 at a housing compound in Riyadh last May were secretly assisted by certain members of the Saudi National Guard which protects the royal family, military trainers employed by a US firm have claimed.In exclusive interviews with The Independent on Sunday, the former trainers for the Vinnell Corporation, which has an $800m (£460m) contract to advise the Saudi National Guard, allege:
* Some members of the Saudi National Guard knew about the bombing in advance and gave inside help to al-Qa'ida, including possibly a detailed map of the target.
* An "exercise" organised by the national guard removed 50 of 70 security staff for the day of the bombing, thus leaving the compound "defenceless".
* Security was generally lax, with machine guns unloaded and guards unarmed.
* Vinnell and the Saudis were given detailed, repeated warnings that Islamic militants were planning an attack, but did nothing to upgrade security.
These claims will renew the controversy over the failure of the Saudi royal family to deal with Islamic insurgents. In recent weeks al-Qa'ida has renewed its attacks on Western targets in Saudi Arabia which have killed several British workers. ...
The bombing on 12 May 2003 was implemented with precision based on meticulous intelligence. Lt-Col Raphael Maldonado, then a Vinnell instructor, claims al-Qa'ida received inside assistance from National Guard members. "This compound was too big and complex to be bombed without inside help", he said. He points to the discovery of a detailed map in the car left behind by the assailants and an improvised ladder consisting of concrete blocks and the trace of shoe markings made by people rushing to escape just before the explosion.
On the morning of the atrocity, Lt-Col Maldonado noticed that none of his Saudi co-workers was present. A fellow Vinnell adviser angrily told him that a Saudi National Guard commander had suddenly notified him that they were leaving the compound to per- form night manouevres with 50 trainers. "I don't understand why they are suddenly going into the field for just one night," he told Lt-Col Maldonado, who was even more concerned when he drove past the local mosque at noon and noticed far fewer shoes outside the door than usual.
Lt-Col Maldonado believes that removing 50 of the 70 Vinnell trainers on what he claims was a "pointless" and unscheduled expedition 40 miles away just before the bombing, was deliberate, leaving the compound defenceless. "There is no doubt we were set up," he said. "Someone in the upper echelons of the Saudi National Guard knew the bombing was imminent." ...
The Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef, condemned the bombing and called for public assistance in capturing 19 suspects. But the reaction showed how al-Qa'ida has retained support. Three prominent clerics declared the terrorists were "devout" men and called on people to disobey the regime's request. They said any help to the police would constitute aid to the US in its "war against Islam". Ten of the suspects remain at large.
Bazian
Jonathan Calt Harris of Campus Watch (via FrontPage, with thanks to DC Watson) exposes how Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian explained, or tried to explain, to Bill O'Reilly his call for Intifada in America:
Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer at Berkeley in Islamic Studies, recently went on television and was put on the defensive by Bill O’Reilly. The subject was comments Bazian had made at a left-wing rally in San Francisco on April 10, 2004, calling for an “intifada” in the United States.As reported by LittleGreenFootballs.com, and Frontpagemagazine.com (and viewable here) Bazian ungrammatically declared to a crowd of protestors, “we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change fundamentally the political dynamics in here.”
Bazian concluded with a promise of more violence to come: “They’re gonna say, ‘some Palestinian being too radical’ — well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet!”[i]
Bazian appeared on Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor on April 19 to explain what he meant by the word intifada. Bazian defined it as “shaking off,” willfully ignoring that these days, both in Arabic and in English, it means “violent rebellion.”
“It was a reference point,” Bazian backtracked. “I was calling for a grassroot political change at this time to make changes in the country considering what has been taken place.” O’Reilly pressed him:
O’REILLY: But no violence. You don’t want anybody to use violence?
BAZIAN: No. I’ve been activist for the past 20 years or so. And I have never engaged in any violence. And non-violence is the method that I choose for political change.
O’REILLY: OK. Therefore, I assume then you condemn Hamas and Hezbollah?
BAZIAN: Well, I condemn the targeting of civilians in any situation. I think relations to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; you have the Hatfields and McCoys getting at each other. And I think it will behoove us here in the United States not to aid or encourage either side to engage in violence.
O’Reilly was ready for Bazian’s efforts to dodge his accusations.
O’REILLY: We did a very exhaustive search on you, professor. And we’ve never seen you say that you condemn the violent methods of Hamas and Hezbollah ever.
BAZIAN: Well, yes, if you want me to speak about the violence that has taken place, I just spoke to you, telling you that violence is unacceptable.
O’REILLY: OK, but you yourself have not come out and condemned it.
Bazian here was relying a common two-step tactic of those who sympathize with the militant Islamic and Palestinian causes: condemn the violence or terrorism in general, without naming names; then deflect blame to the victim, especially the United States or Israel; or dismiss the danger that terrorism poses.
Here are a few examples of the “I condemn … but” line of reasoning, all concerning the Palestinians and Israel:
• Eric Vickers, [former] head of the American Muslim Council: “We condemn any sort of terrorist activities,” but “We can’t be simplistic in our views. We have to recognize exactly what is occurring in the Middle East. We have to recognize that what is occurring there is an uprising by the Palestinian people.”[ii]
• Rashid Khalidi, former PLO press flack, now a “professor” at Columbia University: “Killing civilians is a war crime,” but “Resistance to occupation is [accepted] in international law.”[iii]
• Joel Beinin, professor of Middle Eastern History at Stanford: “there is absolutely no justification for the Palestinians’targeting of unarmed civilians in their struggle to end the occupation,” but “no Palestinian armed actions of any sort have ever posed an existential threat to Israel.”[iv]
Bazian fit this pattern precisely:
• “I condemn terrorism throughout. But at the same time, I would like people here in the U.S. to begin condemning the Israeli assassinations.”
O’Reilly repeatedly offered Bazian the chance to condemn terrorist groups, but he as many times declined it. Thus is another academic equating the targeting of terrorist leaders with the targeting of civilians and children. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Bazian would also call for a campaign of violence in the United States.
Jonathan Calt Harris, a former reporter for Time magazine and managing editor with the Middle East Forum, is a writer in Illinois.
Notes:
[i] “An Intifada in This Country,” April 11, 2004, LittleGreenFootballs at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=10615
[ii] http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=brithume619
[iii] Khalidi, Rashid, Arab Tells Arabs: 'Stop Whining' NewsMax.com, Wires, Saturday, June 8, 2002.
[iv] Beinin, Joel. Another Bloody Passover, AlterNet, March 27, 2002 at http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12711
Curioser and curiouser. From NewsMax, with thanks to Joel:
Nick Berg had a bit of a strange run the last few years, starting with the "coincidental" usage of his e-mail account by the alleged 20th 9/11 hijacker and ending with his beheading at the hands of terrorists in Iraq.He is described by various news agencies as a techno genius, a dreamer, a wanderer, a funnyman and the ultimate Curious George.
Today, Philly.com revealed another item about Berg: "Berg's stubborn wanderlust made him a target of suspicion - a religious Jew riding around Mosul in a taxi with a copy of the Koran. ... Some U.S. soldiers even wondered if the patriotic Berg was 'a wannabe freedom fighter.'"
So, what was he doing in Iraq? A friend told Fox News he thought Berg was "sailing in Turkey." (Sure ... if we were to go sailing, that's the place we'd choose as well.)
When Berg was arrested in Mosul, he had two items with him that made authorities nervous: a copy of the Koran and another book reportedly entitled either "The Jewish Problem" or "The Jewish Solution." Why a Jew would be carrying these items is unclear, but Berg supporters say it was like him to be curious about such things.
Berg also refused to leave Iraq when asked to do so by the State Department.
He not only apparently felt the need to help rebuild Iraq, but he also wanted to go into business doing so. He told jailers that he was losing thousands of dollars while being detained.
He had worked in Africa (Uganda) and had a relative living in Mosul, so that's where he went in Iraq. He was arrested only because he was an unaccompanied American in a place where that was highly unusual.
A military source in Iraq told the Philadelphia Daily News, "He was jailed because unescorted Americans aren't usually seen downtown and 'they didn't know what to do with him.'
"Police were suspicious because of 'his demeanor'" and the two books he carried.
Berg was, according to the paper, "under Iraqi control ... the FBI also questioned Berg three times and visited his parents back in West Chester."
Authorities tried to tell Berg to go home and offered to pay for everything, but he told them: "You don't understand these people like I do. You're here for a reason - and so am I."
On April 6, Berg was released from jail, and three days later he disappeared.
O, selfish Canada
"Selfish"? That's what Canada gets for all its accomodations to terrorists?
From the National Post, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
ISLAMABAD - The Al-Qaeda terror network views Canada as a legitimate target because it is a "selfish" nation committing "terrorism" against Muslims around the world, an unofficial spokesman for jihadists waging holy war against the West said yesterday.
Arafat quotes the book of peace. From AP, with thanks to DC Watson:
In a televised speech from the West Bank town of Ramallah, Arafat urged his people to remain steadfast."Find what strength you have to terrorize your enemy and the enemy of God," he said, quoting the Quran. "And if they want peace, then let's have peace."
Having gotten himself or herself into the position of suggesting that the Qur'an says to terrorize people, the AP writer is ready to explain Islam to us:
Arafat, whom Israel accuses of supporting militant groups, did not appear to be calling for new attacks on Israel. The Quranic passage refers to the early Muslims' wars against pagans and is frequently invoked by Islamic leaders today to encourage strength in times of conflict.
"Martyr Al-Sadr"
From AsiaNews:
Nassiriyah (AsiaNews) – Today, a spokesman from "Martyr Al-Sadr’s Office" declared Jihad, saying the holy city of Nassiriyah must not be occupied by foreign troops.This was the first time in 20 years that Shiite religious leaders have declared holy war against any foreign power. Meanwhile, a spokesman from the same office in Baghdad, has asked Al-Mahdi militia forces to start heading for Najaf.
On several occasions Shiite imams have warned about the danger of militarily trespassing on the two holy Shiite towns, which Ayatollah Al-Sistani himself said were “off-limits” to foreign troops.
Moreover, for the first time in many years Friday prayer was cancelled at Imam Hussein’s mosque in Karbala “due to the bad situation” and by way a decree issued by Ayatollah Al-Sistani. Meanwhile, 4 people have died and 13 were wounded in violent conflict that broke out in Karabala late yesterday.
This morning heavy fighting erupted in Najaf, where prayer services were also cancelled. Battling were American soldiers and Moqtada Al-Sadr Al-Mahdi militants. Around 7.00 a.m. (Iraqi time) a series of explosions ripped through downtown Najaf while gunfire was heard criss-crossing city streets. ...
Al-Mahdi militia units have taken control of buildings around Najaf's holy sites and hotels where Shiite pilgrims are staying, most of whom are from Iran.
Many witnesses have said that Imam Moqtada Al-Sadr has not set out for Kufa (a town 20 km from Najaf) to attend Friday prayer services, like he has done every week since taking refuge in Najaf.
From Iran's IRIB News, with thanks to Twostellas:
Dubai, May 14 - A statement purported to be from the Al-Qaeda chief in Saudi Arabia said on Friday that one of the terror network's cells had carried out a recent attack at a petrochemical plant which killed five westerners."The Yanbu cell which carried out the heroic, successful operation this month is one of the most eloquent and best examples" of what militants should seek to achieve, said the statement attributed to Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin and posted on an Islamist website.
The authenticity of the statement could not be independently confirmed.
Four gunmen went on a shooting rampage at the plant in the industrial Red Sea port of Yanbu on May 1, killing two Americans, two Britons and an Australian.
A Saudi national guardsman was also shot dead in gunbattles before the carnage ended with the death of the assailants.
"Our brother Abu Ammar Mustafa Al-Ansari, God rest his soul, was from the cream of the Mujahedeen, having waged Jihad (holy war) in Afghanistan and Somalia," said the message allegedly penned by Muqrin, who tops a list of most-wanted presumed Al-Qaeda militants in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi authorities have identified the leader of the Yanbu assailants, all from the same family, as Mustafa Abdul Kader Abed Al-Ansari.
Bali, October 2002
From the Herald Sun, with thanks to Nicolei:
SUSPECTED links between Jemaah Islamiah, the terror group responsible for the Bali bombings, and the Madrid train bombers are being investigated by British police.If confirmed, the news would add credence to claims by terror experts that the Madrid bombers may have trained in JI-linked terrorist camps in central Indonesia.
The British investigation was launched after Spanish news agency Efe reported that seven Islamic terrorists involved in the Madrid train bombings telephoned a JI operative and a jailed radical Muslim cleric in London's Belmarsh prison shortly before they blew themselves up last month.
Surrounded by police in a flat in Leganes, south Madrid, on April 3, the terrorists reportedly placed three calls to the phone of Britain's suspected al-Qa'ida chief Abu Qatada, and also made calls to Indonesia to "someone in the milieu" of JI spiritual leader Abu Bakar Bashir.
The men, mostly from Morocco, who soon afterwards blew themselves up, were reportedly seeking authorisation to commit suicide, the report said. ...
The alleged leader of Spain's al-Qa'ida cell, Abu Dahdah, visited Poso in central Indonesia in May 2001 according to a recent report by JI expert Sydney Jones, director of the Jakarta office of the International Crisis Group.
In an interview in March, Ms Jones told The Australian there was "clearly close contact" between al-Qa'ida and JI and that Spanish al-Qa'ida operatives were trained in terrorist camps in Indonesia.
"It goes back to at least late 2000, maybe before," she said. "The whole reason that Poso came to international attention was because Spanish authorities arrested al-Qa'ida operatives who said they had been trained in Poso."
Indonesian police found two copies of the Koran in Spanish, another Spanish book and 26 Spanish business cards in raids on JI's bomb factory in Semarang in central Java last year.
Mansur Escudero
"Will there be a policeman standing at the back of every mosque?" asks a Muslim spokesman, amazed that the Socialist government recently elected in a wave of Spanish dhimmitude after 3/11 may not be as compliant as he had hoped. But anyway, why not? Can Mansur Escudero guarantee that any mosque in Spain will never be used by terror recruiters?
From The Telegraph, with thanks to Fanabba:
The Spanish government is drawing up plans to triple the size of its anti-terrorist force and take control of the funding of mosques among other emergency measures to fight Islamic terrorism. According to reports published yesterday, the interior minister, Jose Antonio Alonso, has outlined the plans to the centre-Right opposition party. They include finding ways of monitoring the content of preaching in mosques."The state must be able to know and to ensure that religious freedom is not used for other purposes," Mr Alonso was quoted as saying.
The Moroccan Immigrant Workers' Association complained that up to now funding had been left in the hands of Saudi-backed imams who preached a radical form of Wahhabi Islam.
Other Muslim groups and the opposition People's Party have criticised the possible reforms as encroaching on religious freedom. ...
In addition, the government wants to boost financing for mosques and develop relations between the authorities and the country's 600,000-strong Muslim community.
It is estimated that there are 400 mosques or Muslim religious centres nationwide. The justice ministry has a register of 235 Muslim communities but has no idea of the number of mosques in Spain or of who is preaching in them.
Any reform in Spain must respect "religious freedom and the safety of citizens", said Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, the first deputy prime minister. ...
"We really need to improve the laws to control Islamic radicals. We need to get to a legal situation in which we can control the imams in small mosques," said Mr Alonso. "That is where the Islamic fundamentalism that lead to certain actions is disseminated."
Mansur Escudero, the president of the Islamic Council, said: "I never thought that a socialist minister with a progressive attitude and respect for the constitution would launch such an attack on religious freedom. Will there be a policeman standing at the back of every mosque?"
They're driven to it by their desperate poverty, we're told. They're uneducated and easily led, and manipulated into doing it by cunning leaders, we're told. Give them an economic fair shake and a college degree, and the problem will melt away.
I explain in Onward Muslim Soldiers why this isn't so, and now confirmation comes from a study reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, with thanks to Teri:
Suicide bombers are not all poor, uneducated, religious fanatics or madmen, as many people believe.Research on the social and psychological background of terrorists show they tend to be more prosperous and better educated than most in their societies, and no more religious or irrational than the average person.
A study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003 found only 13 per cent were from a poor background, compared with 32 per cent of the Palestinian population in general, according to a New Scientist report.
Suicide bombers were also three times more likely to have gone on to higher education than the general population, Claude Berrebi, an economist at Princeton University in the US, found.
Ariel Merare, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, said he had changed his view that most suicide bombers were mentally ill after studying the background of every suicide bomber in the Middle East since 1983.
"In the majority you find none of the risk factors normally associated with suicide, such as mood disorders or schizophrenia, substance abuse or a history of attempted suicide," he said. ...
Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said the findings had overturned popular ideas about terrorists. "They are like you and me," he said.
The experts said resistance groups tended to adopt suicide tactics when they were losing political ground to rival groups, and used psychological techniques to ensure recruits went through with the act.
A sense of duty to a brotherhood was the most important way rational people could be persuaded to kill themselves, said Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan.
Damage to the mosque has prompted calls for revenge and suicide attacks.
NAJAF, Iraq (AP) - American tanks firing shells and heavy machine guns made their deepest incursion yet Friday into this stronghold of a cleric who launched an uprising last month against the U.S.-led coalition. One of Shia Islam's holiest shrines was slightly damaged by apparent gunfire, prompting calls for revenge and even suicide attacks.Top aides of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened to unleash more attacks across the once-calm Shiite south and in the fetid Shiite slums of slums of Baghdad. One even urged citizens to register for suicide squads, starting Saturday. Gunmen attacked the coalition headquarters in Nasiriyah, trapping international staff inside.
In Baghdad, Hamid al-Bayati, spokesman for a mainstream Shiite group represented on the Iraqi Governing Council, called the fighting in Najaf, the world's greatest center of Shiite theology and scholarship, a "big mistake" that could inflame sectarian passions.
Christians fleeing Kano
From The Barnabas Fund:
Many hundreds of innocent Christians have died in Kano since a Muslim protest turned into carnage in retaliation for Muslim deaths hundreds of miles away in Yelwe. Members of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) say some 600 Christians have been killed so far this week in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city. Andrew Ubah, the general secretary of the association in Kano, told Reuters on Thursday 13 May that he was keeping a tally based on reports from church leaders throughout the city. “Almost 600 people have been killed and 12 churches burned,” he said.David Emmanuel, a factory worker told Reuters he saw two truckloads of corpses on Wednesday night, and he counted at least 30 bodies in the street. Elsewhere, correspondents have seen 35 mostly burned and mutilated bodies.
The official police tally of 30 that remains more or less static from Wednesday night is belied by the overflowing morgue and the constant stream of eye-witness reports from all quarters of the city. Bodies were being discovered on Thursday and because the main hospital mortuary was full were taken to undisclosed locations, according to the Red Cross. “Not all cases are reported, especially cases in which relatives have already buried their dead,” said Aminu Inua, a Red Cross official in Kano.
“Hundreds of people were killed,” said Christian leader Mark Amani. “Some corpses were burned in wells. Even little children were killed. The bodies of pregnant women were ripped open and their bodies burned,” he said.
Sources report the killing of several hundred people when defiant mobs of Muslim youths armed with clubs and machetes and cutlasses rampaged at about 1 a.m. on Thursday despite a police imposed curfew. Mobs went from house to house looking for Christian victims and in some cases trapped the occupants inside and torched the houses. Police have been issued orders to shoot armed rioters on sight. While Muslims have complained that the police have killed innocent civilians as a result, they do not mean the scores of hacked bodies that lie in the streets and in charred buildings and vehicles according to residents.
There are fears that the number of deaths may continue to grow since an order was circulated by Umar Ibrahim Kabo, the most senior Mulim cleric in Kano, for all Christians to leave the area by today, Friday 14 May. More than 30,000 residents, mostly Christians, have been driven from their homes in Kano officials said on Thursday, a figure confirmed by Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon in a telephone conversation with Barnabas Fund.
Barnabas Fund wishes to announce an urgent appeal to support the survivors, those displaced from their homes and the families of Christian victims in Kano. You can make a donation to help the pastors, their families and their churches through a Barnabas Fund office or via our website donation page. Remember to specify Project 39-500.
Bashar Assad
More on Syria's attempts to placate their restive and growing radical Muslim population. From AP, with thanks to Miriam:
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - Syrian President Bashar Assad on Thursday challenged the basis of U.S. sanctions on his country and said he would not expel Palestinian militant groups as demanded by the United States. Assad disputed the case the Bush administration had made to impose the embargo, saying Syria does not have weapons of mass destruction and there is no evidence of foreign fighters crossing the border from Syria to Iraq."We have always asked the administration to give us one passport or one name or evidence of that (border infiltration) happening. So far, we have not had that happen," Assad told a group of American editors. ...
President Bush imposed the sanctions Tuesday. They ban all U.S. exports to Syria except food and medicine and they forbid direct flights between Syria and the United States. The penalties came as a response to allegations that Syria was supporting terrorism and undermining U.S. efforts in neighboring Iraq. Bush signed the order under a law that Congress passed by an overwhelming vote late last year.
Tel Aviv bomber Hanif studied Islam in Damascus
This BBC article (thanks to Miriam) tells us that while Syria has a strong tradition of moderate Islam, radical Wahhabism is now spreading there. It doesn't, of course, explain why. But the radical appeal is always the same: they present themselves as representing "pure Islam," and they have the texts to back up their claims. Moderates worldwide are usually moderate because they ignore those texts — not because they have a response to the radicals that is coherent and convincing on Islamic grounds. Sheikh Kuftaro, despite all his talk of moderation here, called for jihad against the US last winter. Early in the Iraq war he issued a statement saying: "I call on Muslims everywhere to use all means possible to thwart the aggression, including martyr operations [that is, suicide attacks] against the belligerent American, British and Zionist invaders. . . . Resistance to the belligerent invaders is an obligation for all Muslims, starting with (those in) Iraq."
More and more people are finding comfort and inspiration in religion and, even in secular Syria, religion is becoming more important.More Syrians are going to the mosque, more women are wearing the hijab and underground women's religious discussion groups are mushrooming even though they are banned.
The austere Wahhabi brand of Islam practised by Osama bin Laden is also growing more popular and clerics are calling for jihad in Iraq and Palestine.
But Syria remains one of the countries in the region where moderate Islam is still thought to be the dominant trend as Christians, Sunnis, Shias and Alawites continue to co-exist.
'Great role'
At the Abu Nour mosque in Damascus, every Friday the faithful gather around Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the grand mufti of the republic and great advocate of inter-faith dialogue.
The message there is one of moderation, and prayers are said for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Sheikh Salaf Kuftaro, the son of the grand mufti, says there is no room for political Islam on the agenda of the foundation.
"We try through our teachings to inculcate in the minds of our students of the Sharia the notion of moderation, tolerance and dialogue with non-Muslims and respect," he said.
"We believe this is one of the pillars of our religion, Islamic schools such as ours have a great role at a national and Muslim level, at a time when Islam is being accused of being a religion of extremism and terrorism."
Of the 5,000 students who attend classes at the foundation, around 1,000 are foreigners from all over the world. Americans, Japanese and Norwegians all come to study Arabic and Islam.
For those whose Arabic is not advanced enough yet, the Friday sermon is simultaneously translated into several languages, including English and Turkish."I've chosen this particular place, Abu Nour, from its reputation of being a balanced teaching school of the religion," said Mansour, a 22-year-old American from Atlanta, Georgia.
"This school is not about debating, it's not about having dialogues on current events. This school is about teaching the language and the fundamentals of religion and that's what I mean with balance.
"It doesn't try to have a mental influence on your political views because we do hear about other schools which want their students to be more indoctrinated with their philosophies."
Authorities worried
Certainly, some people seem to be coming away from Syria with a less tolerant message.
In April last year, Asif Muhammad Hanif, a British Muslim who had studied Islam and Arabic in Damascus, blew himself up in an Israeli pub in Tel Aviv.
After the bombings in Turkey last year against British and Jewish targets, Syria expelled 22 Turks, three of whom had been studying at the Abu Nour foundation.
Sheikh Kuftaro said the foundation and other Islamic institutes could not be held responsible for the actions of every person that once attended the school.
Although this has also been the official line, in March Syria announced it would no longer allow new foreign students to register at the Islamic schools, a sign that that the authorities are worried.
"You can never be sure whether the energy of fundamentalists is going to be invested in anti-Americanism or domestically," said Syrian analyst Samir Taqi.
"As long as the Americans are behaving this way and Muslims feel humiliated by the US, I think it is difficult to imagine that these fundamentalist currents are going to be used against the regime but it depends on developments."
For now, the regime is still tolerating the growing Islamist trend in Syria as it diverts people's frustrations towards the outside world - specifically the Israelis and the Americans.
Columnist Hamid Golpira has written a compact little column in the Tehran Times (thanks to MEMRI) explaining what jihad is all about. Interestingly enough, his explanation is exactly the same as the one I outline in Onward Muslim Soldiers: it involves an inner, spiritual struggle, but also a physical battle to spread the hegemony of Islam, "inviting" non-Muslims to accept Islam and subjugating those who refuse as second-class dhimmis.
This is another demonstration of the fact that the tenets of violent Islam that are usually ascribed by Western analysts to the Wahhabis alone are held by all sects of Islam, including the Shi'ites of Islam. Remember also that when he speaks about not attacking civilians, that the definition of civilians in this context has proven to be extremely elastic — cf. Israel and the World Trade Center.
(I had a bit of trouble getting the direct link to the original Tehran Times piece to work. If you have trouble, go to their main page and search for "jihad." The article is entitled "True Jihad.")
Once I was the student of a very great shaikh. He taught me and the other students many things. May Allah bless him for teaching us so many things and accept his jihad of teaching.Once our teacher taught us about the rules of jihad. He said that every Muslim must first do jihad-i-nafs, the struggle against the desires of the lower self, for self-purification. Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him and his family) said that jihad-i-nafs is the great jihad. We should reflect upon this deep hadith.
After performing jihad-i-nafs to a satisfactory level and committing oneself to lifelong performance of jihad-i-nafs, a Muslim can do the other jihad, the lesser jihad.
This jihad determines the three types of people in the world: (1) the true Muslims; (2) the non-Muslims who are not enemies of Islam actively fighting against Islam; and (3) the enemies of Islam, which includes all munafiqin (hypocrites who claim to be Muslims).
The true Muslims are our brothers and sisters and we must never fight against them. Also, we must never fight against the non-Muslims who are not enemies of Islam, since some of them live in Islamic countries and have paid the jeziya tax, making them dhimmis (people protected by Islam), and others are citizens of non-Muslim countries who are not personally fighting against Islam or assisting a war against Islam.
As far as the enemies of Islam, we are only permitted to fight against them if we have done everything in our power to avoid war and to encourage them to stop being enemies of Islam and to join one of the other two groups.
Our wise teacher explained it to us like this. First we must invite them to Islam. Even if they declare war against us, we should invite them to Islam by calling a one-day truce for them to think over our invitation. If after one day they embrace Islam, we should accept them as Muslim brothers and sisters and war has been averted.
If they do not embrace Islam, we should invite them to pay the jeziya tax and become dhimmis or to make a peace treaty with the Muslims, and we should again call a one-day truce for them to think over our proposal. If after one day they decide to pay the jeziya tax and become dhimmis or to make a peace treaty with the Muslims, we should accept their decision, and again war has been averted.
However, if they do not embrace Islam and do not decide to become non-Muslims who are not enemies of Islam but decide to make war against the Muslims, then, under such circumstances, we are allowed to wage war against them, as long as we observe all the other rules of jihad, such as treating prisoners fairly and not attacking civilians. And Islam teaches that genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and terrorism are always haram (forbidden).
Once, before a battle, Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him and his family) gave Imam Ali (peace be upon him) a flag on which was inscribed la ilaha illa ‘llah (there is no God but Allah) and told him to go out to the battlefield to invite the enemies to Islam while carrying the banner. And Imam Ali (peace be upon him) went out to the battlefield carrying the banner of Islam and inviting the enemies to Islam. This is the best example of true jihad.
Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker"
Some interesting revelations: the CIA says that Zarqawi himself, the notorious Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq, killed Nick Berg. Also, the FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after his computer password was found in the possession of Zacarias Moussaoui. It's strange, and stranger still with Berg's father saying of the murderers, "They did not know what they were doing. They killed their best friend."
A CIA official said Thursday that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was, in "high probability," the person shown on a video beheading American Nicholas Berg, based on an analysis of the voice on the video.The speaker on the video, now believed to be al-Zarqawi, reads a lengthy statement criticizing Islamic scholars and taunting the crusaders. Standing alongside four other militants wearing headscarves and masks to disguise themselves, al-Zarqawi then kills Berg.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters Thursday in Baghdad that it appears al-Zarqawi was responsible. The U.S. military has already posted a $10 million reward for Zarqawi for having orchestrated some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Iraq.
Initially, Berg's murder seemed to be a case of an eccentric young American who was in the wrong place at the worst possible time -- just as the revelations of American mistreatment of iraqi prisoners were coming to light.
But CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports on what is turning into a bizarre mystery with a connection to 9/11.
U.S. officials say the FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after a computer password Berg used in college turned up in the possession of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative arrested shortly before 9/11 for his suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota.
The bureau had already dismissed the connection between Berg and Moussaoui as nothing more than a college student who had been careless about protecting his password.
But in the wake of Berg's gruesome murder, it becomes a stranger than fiction coincidence -- an American who inadvertently gave away his computer password to one notorious al Qaeda operative is later murdered by another notorious al Qaeda operative.
Iraqi police arrested him because of his name and an Israeli stamp on his passport. From The Age:
Hugo Infante, 31, a Chilean photographer said he re-met Mr Berg around April 6 when the American returned to Baghdad, two weeks after he said he was going to Mosul for two days on business. "He said: 'They arrested me because I had a Jewish last name and an Israeli stamp in my passport.' Then the Iraqi police put him with the US military because they thought he was a spy."Nick told me all this. He wasn't mad. It was just an adventure for him. He said: 'This shit happens. It was bad luck.' "
In the Arab world, any indication that someone is a Jew or has links with Israel can be potentially fatal, as Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded on video in Pakistan two years ago, found out to his cost.
Mr Berg, 26, an independent businessman, came to Iraq to repair communications towers and had no affiliation with the US Government, officials said. In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Philadelphia, Mr Berg's parents contend that his incarceration, which began with his arrest on March 24, prevented him from returning to the US on a flight that was to have arrived in New York on March 30.
As arrangements were made instead to fly Mr Berg's remains to Kuwait and then to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, important questions about his death remained unanswered, including why he was detained for nearly two weeks and how and when he was abducted and killed.
"He knew who he was and he was not unaware of the risks here," said Andrew Duke, 49, a Colorado businessman who drank beer with Mr Berg at the hotel the night before he was abducted, apparently on the way to Baghdad International Airport. Mr Duke said Mr Berg had given him a similar account of what happened in Mosul. "His attitude was it was all a bit of fun (being arrested). Inconvenient, but in the bigger picture, not a big deal," Mr Duke said.
"How did it happen? All you have to do is be at a checkpoint and not take it seriously."
Dan Senor, spokesman for the US-led coalition in Iraq, insisted on Wednesday that Mr Berg was arrested and held by Iraqi police and was never in American custody, although the FBI visited him three times and US military police checked that he was being treated properly.
"My understanding is that they suspected that he was involved/engaged in suspicious activities," Mr Senor said, referring to the Iraqi police.
The FBI released a statement indicating that coalition authorities had warned Mr Berg that the environment was dangerous but that he had refused offers to help get him out of Iraq safely.
Back in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the Berg family lashed out at US military officials for failing to do more to protect Mr Berg and disputed repeated US military statements that he was in the custody of Iraqi police.
Mr Berg's older brother, David, emerged from the family's home in suburban Philadelphia with a four-page email that he said was sent by Mr Berg just hours after he was freed from jail. He was freed on April 6, the day after the Berg family filed a lawsuit in the US that Nicholas was being held illegally by American forces. In the email, addressed to his parents, brother and sister, Mr Berg described the 13 days he spent in the Shirdta Iraqiyah station near Mosul, an Iraqi detention facility where he said the US military police supervised and trained Iraqi officers.
"The MPs were a little surprised to see an American in civilian clothing and I think out of formality and boredom they decided to do a background check, which involved CID," Mr Berg wrote, referring to the US Army's Criminal Investigation Division.
The next morning, Mr Berg described the questioning by the FBI agents as amicable but pointed. Among the questions he wrote that he was asked were: "Why was I in Iraq? Did I ever make a pipe bomb? Why was I in Iran?" He believed that their questions arose from some Farsi literature and a book about Iran that he carried.
Mr Berg wrote that after four days, he was transferred to a cell block that included prisoners charged with petty offences and suspected war criminals.
"Word had spread, due to the presence of certain items among my stuff, that I was Israeli," Mr Berg wrote, later noting that his passport contained an Israel stamp. "So I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie walking into a jail full of mother-rapers and father-stabbers as an accused litterbug."
When he left the Baghdad hotel for the last time on April 10, he told Mr Infante he was heading for the airport but would return. He phoned his family on April 9. A month later, his body was discovered on a Baghdad roadside. On Tuesday, militants posted a grisly video showing his decapitation on a website linked to al-Qaeda.
Hizballah (Party of Allah)
It was un-Islamic, they say. Unfortunately, that is not an open-and-shut case. But it seems more likely anyway, from the looks of this story, that Hizballah has decided that this particular terrorist act, as opposed to all the terrorist acts that they themselves have perpetrated, is un-Islamic because it has diverted attention from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which was the best thing to happen to the terrorists since the 3/11 Madrid bombings and the Spanish election thereafter.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group condemned Wednesday the beheading of an American hostage by Iraqi militants as an ugly crime that flouted the tenets of Islam."Hizbollah condemns this horrible act that has done very great harm to Islam and Muslims by this group that claims affiliation to the religion of mercy, compassion and humane principles," the Shi'ite Muslim group said in a statement.
An Islamist Web site Tuesday carried a video clip of the execution of the man who identified himself as Nick Berg, with a statement saying a group linked to al Qaeda did it in revenge for the abuse of Iraqis by U.S. troops.
Hizbollah said Berg's killing had diverted the world's gaze from an escalating furor over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by occupation soldiers.
"The timing of this act that overshadowed the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in occupation forces prisons is suspect timing that aims to serve the American administration and occupation forces in Iraq and present excuses and pretexts for their inhumane practices against Iraqi detainees."
The Syrian-backed group which the United States deems "terrorist" said the executors' behavior was closer to "the Pentagon school -- the school of killing and occupation and crimes and torture and immoral practices that were exposed by the great scandal in occupation prisons."
Washington blames Hizbollah, whose attacks forced Israeli troops to withdraw from south Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year occupation, for 1980s suicide bombings against its embassy and Marines barracks and the abduction of Westerners in Beirut.
Sifton
Brooklyn ice cream shop owner Abad Elfgeeh pled guilty to funding jihad terrorism. But that wasn't good enough for the judge. From AP, with thanks to Miriam:
Judge Charles P. Sifton said the Yemeni proprietor, Abad Elfgeeh, had not understood the consequences of his guilty plea to illegally transferring money to bank accounts in Yemen, Switzerland, Thailand and China.FBI agents arrested Elfgeeh last year after learning that $20 million had passed through the bank accounts of his Brooklyn-based business from 1997 and 2003. He pleaded guilty in October.
Elfgeeh, a naturalized U.S. citizen, remained under house arrest.
“Nobody, but most importantly not Mr. Elfgeeh, was clearly advised (about) ... his rights to a jury trial with the prospect of facing the sentences that he now faces,” Sifton said.
Court filings portray Elfgeeh, 49, as a vital link in a system that moved millions of dollars to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and Hamas. Prosecutors also believe Elfgeeh was an associate of Sheik Mohammed Hasa Al-Moayad, a prominent Yemeni cleric charged with funneling millions to al-Qaida before the Sept. 11 attacks.
A pre-sentencing report by the U.S. Probation Department plays down any link to terrorism, saying federal agents assigned to the case had said “there appears to be little, if any, evidence to suggest that Elfgeeh had any role in financing terrorism or any knowledge that money he was transmitting was used to finance terrorism.”
Frank Hancock, Elfgeeh’s lawyer, added: “The only thing they have credible evidence for is the fact that he was operating a legal business that they say he needed a license for.”
Prosecutors said they would try to strike another plea bargain. But, Elfgeeh, who faced the possibility of more than 10 years in prison, said he refused to accept a deal that included jail time.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Elfgeeh said as he left a federal court in Brooklyn. “America is still good.... It’s still the best country in the world.”
In a letter requesting a 10-year sentence, prosecutors say Elfgeeh told a confidential informant that he had sent money to al-Moayad, who has pleaded innocent to charges and is being held without bail.
Records show al-Moayad had called Elfgeeh’s ice cream shop and kept its number in his phone book, prosecutors said. Before his extradition, Al-Moayad also told an FBI agent that Elfgeeh had helped him raise money in the United States.
Imam Fawaz Damra (PBS)
Imam Fawaz Damra, the Cleveland cleric and erstwhile media darling as a famous "moderate" Muslim, now stands accused of lying about his ties to terrorist groups. And today he is in more hot water. From AP:
CLEVELAND - A Muslim cleric accused of hiding terrorist ties is now the subject of a federal investigation into his finances, according to court documents.Fawaz Mohammed Damra, who already is charged with lying about his ties to terror on immigration forms, could be charged with tax evasion, money laundering, mail and wire fraud, according to documents filed Tuesday by federal prosecutors.
Damra, 41, leader of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, has pleaded innocent to a charge of obtaining U.S. citizenship by providing false information. He is accused of having ties to several terrorist groups, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and concealing those affiliations when he applied for citizenship.
If convicted in the trial scheduled to begin June 15, Damra could lose his citizenship and be sentenced to up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Prosecutors revealed the financial investigation of Damra while explaining in a memo to U.S. District Judge James Gwin how they plan to use evidence seized in a search of Damra's home in suburban Strongsville in January.
Authorities seized a computer, copies of sermons and political speeches, the manifesto of the terrorist Palestinian Islamic Jihad and stacks of financial records in the search.
The "speeches, sermons, notes and articles are in many respects critical, inflammatory, and inciting toward the U.S., U.S. policy, the state of Israel and to Israelis and Jewish people in general," federal prosecutor James V. Moroney wrote in the memo.
Damra's lawyers want Gwin to exclude the evidence seized from the cleric's home. They said Damra's wife, Nasreen, consented to the FBI search at the time but was so upset by her husband's arrest that her judgment was clouded. The lawyers also say the search was illegal because it went beyond the scope of an arrest warrant.
Yesterday there was a hearing in the Ryan Anderson case. Anderson, you may recall, is the Muslim National Guardsman who is accused of trying to join Al-Qaeda. Interestingly and without explanation, Muslim Army Chaplain James Yee, who was famously arrested and held on suspicion of espionage and then released with all charges dropped, attended the hearing. From the Seattle Times:
FORT LEWIS — In a covered parking garage near Seattle Center, National Guard Spc. Ryan Anderson sat in an SUV with two men who spoke with Arabic accents."What organization do you think we are?" said one of the men, an undercover agent calling himself Mohammed.
"I believe you are what Americans call al-Qaida," Anderson replied.
Before the hourlong conversation was over, all of it captured by a hidden camera in early February, Anderson spoke of the possibility of defecting to join the terrorist group. He also offered to help train al-Qaida fighters to take out U.S. convoys in Iraq and shared ways of destroying U.S. tanks and killing their crews, according to the video.
When the other agent asked about Humvees equipped with added armor, Anderson replied that the vehicles were still vulnerable, particularly the windshield.
"It would be very easy to kill a driver, or the crew inside," he said.
The damaging video was shown yesterday in day one of a two-day preliminary hearing at Fort Lewis to determine if Anderson should face trial by court-martial on charges of attempting to aid the enemy. The hearing, known as an Article 32, continues today.
If convicted, he could face the death penalty, though no one has been put to death in the military in more than 40 years.
Anderson, a 26-year-old Muslim convert from Lynnwood, was arrested Feb. 12, just weeks before he was to deploy to Iraq with the Washington state National Guard's 81st Armored Brigade, where he served as a tank crewman.
Anderson, wearing desert fatigues, glasses and a crew cut, sat quietly throughout the hearing taking notes and conferring with his military attorney. Family members sat in the gallery behind him.
According to testimony, Anderson first came to the attention of investigators through a Montana judge who spent her off-hours hunting for terrorists on the Internet.
Shannen Rossmiller from Conrad, Mont., testified that she was monitoring a Web site that catered to Muslim extremists when she came across a posting by an "Amid Abdul Rashid."After a series of searches, she traced the name to Anderson and, posing as a Muslim extremist, exchanged e-mails with him. Learning that he was a member of the military, and believing that he might be a threat, she contacted authorities.
Anderson told her "he was curious if a brother fighting for the wrong side could defect," Rossmiller testified.
Once alerted by Rossmiller, the FBI contacted military-intelligence officers, who set up a sting operation and traded dozens of text messages with Anderson. "Are you with us brother?" they asked in one. "Every step of the way, Inshallah (if God wills)," he replied, according to transcripts of the messages shown in court.
On Feb. 8, as his unit was undergoing pre-deployment training at Fort Lewis, Anderson met with undercover Officer Ricardo Romero at a bookstore in nearby Lakewood, Romero testified.
Romero said he asked if Anderson could provide a passport photo and a military manual. Anderson agreed, Romero said.
The next day, Anderson met with Romero and another agent near Seattle Center.
The prosecutors, Maj. Chris Jenks and Maj. Timothy MacDonnell, showed a videotape of the encounter.
On the tape, Anderson told the men that his mother was Jordanian and that he had converted to Islam because he "found no faith in Christian teachings and looked for a way to feel the emptiness."
He showed them schematics of M1A1 Abrams tanks pulled from an unclassified Defense Department Web site and pointed out vulnerabilities in the tanks.
After being asked why he would want to help al-Qaida, Anderson replies on the video: "While I love my country, I think the leaders have taken this horrible road. I have no belief in what the American Army has asked me to do. They have sent me to die."
The prosecutors also called two civilian witnesses who work for the military. They testified that Anderson's statements about the Abrams tank were accurate.
Under cross-examination by Anderson's lawyer, Maj. Joseph Morse, Romero acknowledged that some of the things Anderson told him, such as his mother being from Jordan, were untrue.
Romero also acknowledged that Anderson said things that were exaggerated or untrue, such as his claim of being a qualified pilot and holding a concealed-weapons permit.
Morse did not call any witnesses yesterday. Anderson and his attorney have declined interviews.
Among those at Anderson's hearing was Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Fort Lewis who until recently was embroiled in an investigation of suspected espionage at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The Army has since dismissed all charges against Yee. Yee refused to say, and Army officials refused to disclose, why he attended the hearing.
Kadyrov with his grandsons
Kadyrov, the Chechen leader who was just assassinated by jihadists, just didn't want it as fast as his killers did. He also takes issue with the radical Islam brought to Chechnya by mujahedin from other countries, which he contends was at variance with the Islam that was rooted in Chechen culture. But there again, such people were doubtless able to gain recruits by appealing to the Islamic texts and showing that their vision of the faith was the one taught in those texts. From Pravda, with thanks to Peter Rockas:
From Interview with Akhmad Kadyrov by PRAVDA.Ru correspondents, 2003, 25 July, Moscow- Akhmad-Haji, Do you see the Republic of Chechnya as a Muslim, an Islamic one?
- I was strongly against the introduction of a Sharia government in the republic - but not because I did not want such a thing. I am working hard for it, actually. But I know that we are not ready. One has to nurture a new generation, to raise children in the spirit of Islam.
The Sharia regulations that they gave us were simply an interpretation of the Sudanese ones. They were approved by Yandarbiyev, and he did not ask anyone. When Aslan Maskhadov and I visited Saudi Arabia and met with the government of Sudan, Sudanese officials told us that it had taken them 11 years to institute a Sharia government. Did we want to have everything done in one day? Things do not work like that.
Furthermore, who dictated Islam to us? Movladi Udugov, who does not have any idea what Islam is? Or Maskhadov and Yandarbiyev? Who are they? They do not know the bases of Islam, they do not understand it.
All these people ran a separatist policy deliberately. ...
Military troops were withdrawn from Chechnya on Dec. 31, 1996. But what did "free Chechnya" do? It opened the door to criminals from the entire territory of Russia, the former USSR and its outskirts. Criminals were coming to Chechnya from all over the world - they did not have a place in their own countries. But they could live perfectly well in Chechnya.
Non-Muslims were allegedly converting to Islam. It is ridiculous to talk about such a thing. Becoming a Muslim for them implied growing a beard and learning how to pronounce "salam aleykum." What kind of a Muslim is that?
I grew up in a very religious family. I could read the Qu'ran easily at the age of five. Do you think I can stay calm when such people try to teach me what Islam is, how to pronounce it and what to do with it?!If Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a peace treaty between Russia and Chechnya, why did the incursion into Dagestan take place? If we, as a separate state that had concluded a peace treaty with Russia, attack a neighboring republic, a unit of the Russian Federation, is it called Jihad? No, it is not. It is a provocation to unleash a war in Chechnya.
- But you declared Jihad on Russia in 1995. You were waging war on Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov's side.
- Yes, I was on that side, and I am proud that I was able to choose the right way to go. There are specific reasons for why I declared Jihad and why I changed my position. That was a time when people were gripped with the idea of liberation. They thought that people like Dudayev or Yandarbiyev wanted freedom and an Islamic state for Chechnya.
And what happened next?
There is a rule of Sharia: If the enemy wants to suppress you, you are supposed to put up a strong resistance. But the enemy did not come on its own: We brought it to us. We went to Dagestan, arranged a massacre there and then returned. This means, as they say, that Russia is the enemy that came to the borders and demanded that the bandits should be delivered - Basayev, Khattab, everyone who had been in Dagestan. But instead of delivering the bandits, Aslan Maskhadov appointed them commanders. He accepted the war, and that was when I stood up against them.
I appeared on television and called upon people to bring their sons, their brothers back - everyone who was going to Dagestan. I said that it was a war between neighbors, between Muslims. But it didn't work. I personally told Maskhadov not to let Basayev go. Aslan assured me that Basayev was not coming back to Chechnya, because he had a plan: To first conquer Dagestan and then attack Azerbaijan and spread the ideas of Islam.
Nigerian Christians fleeing Kano
The jihad in Nigeria continues. It is still portrayed as ethnic violence, and still blamed on Christians whenever they respond, but the attacks all originated in jihad initiatives. Note that this story does contain information about how the Muslims were incited by a preacher who told them that Nigerian Christians are acting as part of a Western conspiracy against Islam. From AP, with thanks to FreedomNowNews:
KANO, Nigeria - Muslim mobs brandishing machetes and clubs attacked Christians in the streets of Kano on Wednesday as security forces struggled to quell a two-day rampage to avenge a massacre of hundreds of Nigerian Muslims.Police confirmed at least 30 killed in strife engulfing this northern city, where thousands — mostly minority Christians — cowered in army barracks and police stations as mobs attacked victims outside. Witnesses spoke of scores more slaughtered.
"I saw them put an old tire on his neck and set him ablaze," said a 30-year old Christian, Barry Owoyemi, of a dead Christian neighbor. Owoyemi was whisked to safety by police who fired guns in the air to scare away the attackers.
Authorities ordered police to shoot rioters on sight.
The rampage exploded Tuesday following a demonstration by thousands of Muslims protesting the slaying of up to 600 Muslims by a predominantly Christian ethnic group last week in the central Nigeria town Yelwa.
The latest rioting threatened to send violence spiraling further. In an apparent response to Muslim attacks, a group of young Christians in one Kano neighborhood fired shotguns Wednesday at groups of Muslim men accused of torching houses.
"The Kano situation is an unfortunate development and just a reverberation of what happened in Yelwa," said Remi Oyo, spokeswoman for President Olusegun Obasanjo. ...
A leader of minority Christian Ibo-speakers in Kano, Boniface Ibekwe, asked police in the presence of journalists to "stop this killing today or give us six months to leave Kano peacefully."
By Wednesday evening, security forces fired tear gas and shot into in the air to disperse crowds ahead of a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
On Tuesday, Kano's most influential cleric launched the Muslim protest from the main mosque, telling protesters that the Yelwa killings were part of a supposed Western conspiracy against followers of Islam.
The May 2 and May 4 attacks on Yelwa by ethnic Tarok Christians left 500 to 600 dead in the largely Muslim Hausa-speaking town, according to a Red Cross official who traveled there. Nigerian officials — who routinely play down violence to avoid inciting revenge attacks — put the death toll at half those figures.
In February, Muslim militants were blamed for the slaughter of almost 50 people in Yelwa — including Christians who took refuge in a church.
"Were blamed"? Is there any question that they didn't do it? There is not.
A photo of Berg taped on his mailbox at home
US officials are denying the Berg family's claims. From AP:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - An American civilian who was beheaded in a grisly video posted on an al-Qaeda-linked Web site was never in U.S. custody despite claims from his family, a coalition spokesman said Wednesday. ...But unanswered questions remained about Berg in the days before he vanished, as well as where and when he was abducted.
Berg spoke to his parents March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30, according to his family in suburban Philadelphia.
But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days, the family said.
His father, Michael, said his son was not allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.
Coalition spokesman Dan Senor told reporters that Berg was detained by Iraqi police in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The Iraqis informed the Americans, and the FBI questioned him three times about what he was doing in Iraq.
Senor said that to his knowledge Berg "was at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces."
However, calls by The Associated Press to police in Mosul failed to find anyone who could confirm Berg was held there. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority runs Iraq, controlling not only the police, but the military and all government ministries.
FBI agents visited Berg's parents March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son's identity.
On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day, Berg was released. He told his parents he had not been mistreated.
Berg's father blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son's death, saying if his son had not been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave Iraq before the violence worsened.
"I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused," Michael Berg said. "I don't think this administration is committed to democracy."
Asked for details about Berg's last weeks in Iraq, Senor replied: "We are obviously trying to piece all this together, and there's a thorough investigation." He said he was reluctant to release details but did not say why.
"The U.S. government is committed to a very thorough and robust investigation to get to the bottom of this," Senor said, adding that "multiple" U.S. agencies would be involved and that the FBI would probably have overall direction.
Senor said that in Iraq, Berg had no affiliation with the U.S. government, the coalition or "to my knowledge" any coalition-affiliated contractor. But Senor would not specify why Iraqi police, who generally take direction from coalition authorities, had arrested him and held him.
Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt said the only role the U.S. military played in Berg's confinement was to liaise with the Iraqi police to make sure he was being fed and properly treated because "he was still an American citizen."
It was unclear whether al-Zarqawi was shown in the Web site video or simply ordered the killing. Al-Zarqawi also is sought in the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan in 2002, and Washington has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture or killing.
Berg's father, brother and sister wept in their front yard Tuesday when told of the video.
"I knew he was decapitated before," said his father, Michael. "That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public."
The father said "there's a better chance than not" that his son's captors knew he was Jewish. "If there was any doubt that they were going to kill him, that probably clinched it, I'm guessing," he said.
Amnesty International condemned the killing as "a serious crime under international law," and said those responsible should be brought to justice.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said there was "no justification for the deliberate and brutal killing of an innocent civilian."
U.S. officials fear the savage killing might prompt more foreigners working on international reconstruction projects to flee the country. ...
Last month, Iraqi militants also videotaped the killing of Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi.
This story is, predictably enough, getting none of the loving coverage lavished on Abu Ghraib. From AP:
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Arab media reacted cautiously Wednesday to the videotaped beheading of an American civilian by Islamic militants in Iraq, with some newspapers conspicuously playing it down or even ignoring it.The biggest pan-Arab satellite television channels broadcast an edited version of the gruesome video, not showing the actual killing of Nick Berg, 26, of West Chester, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. The businessman was abducted in April.
In one of the most explicit displays, Kuwait's Al-Siyassah daily ran a photo of a masked militant holding up Berg's severed head.
The video of the execution was released on the Internet too late for some Middle East newspaper columnists to react to it. The killing, attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, appalled many Arabs. ...
Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the big two satellite networks, aired carefully edited versions of the video. In Al-Arabiya's edit, a militant is seen drawing a knife and jerking Berg's body to one side. The rest is not shown.
"The news story itself is strong enough," said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera. "To show the actual beheading is out of the realm of decency."
Lebanon's private Al Hayat-LBC station led its bulletins Wednesday with the video. Its news presenter said: "We apologize to our viewers for not showing the entire tape because of the ugliness of the scene."
Kuwait state television broadcast the news of the execution late Tuesday but not the video.
Iraqi newspapers reported nothing about the killing, although it may have broken to late for them.
Egypt's leading daily, Al-Ahram, ignored the beheading Wednesday. Two other major pro-government newspapers ran news agency reports on their inside pages, without photos.
An Al-Ahram editor, Ahmed Reda, said the news came too late Tuesday night for the paper to confirm the video's authenticity with the U.S. government.
Newspapers in Syria, where the government controls the press tightly, did not report it at all.
A professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo, Hussein Amin, said the handling of the story by Egypt's pro-government papers was political and appropriate.
"I think that the government does not want to show this on the front page as a main item because it shows a very poor — poor is not the proper word; disgusting maybe is the better word — example of revenge," Amin said. "There is also the threat that it could be happening to other Americans. If they put it on the front page, (it could be seen as) they are favoring this kind of action."
Jordanian newspapers, state television and radio reported Berg's killing, but without commentary.
Most Lebanese newspapers, such as the left-wing As-Safir, published the report and a photograph of Berg sitting in front of the militants. As-Safir ran the headline: "Al-Zarqawi slaughters an American to avenge Iraqi prisoners."
In many Arab newspapers, the beheading received less display than the news of America's imposing sanctions on Syria and the killing of six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City.
Nick Berg just before the murder
Walid Phares explains the significance of the Berg murder at FrontPage.
The slaughtering of Nick Berg is one small step for terrorists and a major leap for the West’s encounter with Jihadism. The videotape, posted on the Ansar website, is one of many horrifying acts perpetrated by the followers of Osama bin Laden. It has also become a shameful benchmark in the West’s liberal media reporting.The Abu Ghraib disaster, the behavior of few bad apples within the U.S. armed forces, triggered this major development that will influence the way citizens look at al-Qaeda's war on Americans. September 11 brought Mohammad Atta into the collective memory of this country and the international community, but May 11 will keep Abu Musab al Zarqawi in that same memory as one of the most cruel enemies of innocent civilians anywhere. The terrorist fugitive’s name is the title of the horrendous video showing Berg’s beheading.
Nick Berg's life was simple. Out of Philadelphia, he sought a job in a liberated Iraq, or so he thought. He trusted his government, and trusted the politicians of his country. He traveled to help Iraqis and establish a personal link with Iraq's civil society. But he was obstructing the spread of Jihad. He became a lonely Kafir (infidel), and found himself on the wrong side of dar el Harb (the war zone as conceived by the Islamists). And as such, he was slaughtered by the long sword of al Zarqawi. The pictures of his murder will circle the world – and they deserve to overshadow the Abu Ghraib photos.
In the American detention center that grabbed world attention and ignited a self-whipping crusade in the U.S., men were shown naked, piled up and humiliated. But because American is a free and democratic society, such acts of humiliation and abuse are abhorrent to American people everywhere and come to be quickly judged and condemned. This is because Americans value life and live in an open society which exposes its own injustices. The rights of detainees are sacred in America, even if these detainees are terrorists and have taken innocent lives.
At the Abu Ghraib of jihad, however, innocents are slaughtered at will at the discretion of unholy warriors. In the al Zarqawi "detention centers," there are no laws, there are no codes, and there is no humanity; only a cult of death exists that demands the slaughter of innocents and perpetuates itself without justice or reflection.
Unfortunately, some among us may have fuelled the blood fiesta that was shown on the website. While Abu Ghraib has now become another way in which terrorists can legitimize killing innocent people, liberal and anti-American voices from this end of the world re-perpetrate this horrid logic, excessively assessing the so-called impact of the Iraqi soldiers abuse by their guards and declaring that the "reactions will be violent and bloody." In other words, they morally legitimized these bloody acts by seeing them as mere responses, not actions that are in line with a culture of death and hatred. So when the slaughter of Berg took place and was posted online, these same voices rushed to establish a moral equality between Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of an innocent young man. But no such equality exists.
To start with, the assessment that all people in the Middle East misunderstood America and despised its image as result of the photos was wrong. At a media summit at the State Department last Friday, and while Secretary Rumsfeld was under heavy shelling in Congress, U.S. officials learned from two dozen Arab and Mideast media people that "many opinions in many segments had different concerns in the region."
Those who are anti-American - including al-Qaeda sympathizers - will take the pictures to the zenith of exploiting hatred. One Mideast participant told the Foreign policy officers "if you tell those radicals that the Arab world will react violently, the Jihadists will react on behalf of Arabs and Muslims, but without their consent." Many participants, from different religious and ethnic background, warned U.S. officials not to give the terrorists meat for their diet.
In reality, many people in the Middle East understand that American values vanished in the Abu Ghraib detention center, but that this does not reflect the U.S. initiative in the greater Middle East. Apart from al Jazeera and the Jihadi web sites, the people of Iraq generally felt embarrassed for the US.
For Kurds, mainstream Shiites and democratic Sunnis, it remained clear: the weakening of the U.S. role would be a catalyst for the return of Baathism and the surge of Wahhabism. For them, Abu Ghraib is a passage in a much wider chapter: the transition to sovereignty. Iraqis understood that, but the carriers of petite politics on these shores did not and refuse to. By developing a crisis of so-called immorality in the American military, leftists try to make the American public believe in a widespread systemic problem that is being responded to by Jihadists.
But the beheading of Nick Berg cannot be understood as something that America caused. Abu Musab al Zarqawi ordered the kidnappings of Americans and others months ago. Before and after Fallujah’s last episode, the terrorists resorted to "collect" the victims. On one of their audio websites, they called them "assembled sheep" (Tajmeeh al khawareef) who were to be "sacrificed" at will.
Thus, whether Abu Ghraib happened or not, al-Qaeda was building its human ammunition depot. Berg's ordeal was not a direct result of Abu Ghraib. Al-Qaeda does not care when prisoners are mistreated. For them, the big picture is to weaken and humiliate the U.S. and to prevent the rise of an Arab democracy. This is why al Zarqawi stops at nothing to create chaos and fear in the region so as to undermine American efforts. But the Western Left ignores this dynamic and, as a result, steps into al-Qaeda's trap - and helps to cause additional bloodshed in Iraq.
Murder, and mutilation of corpses in Nigeria — out of "revenge," although the conflict has its roots in jihad ideology. From AP, with thanks to Twostellas:
KANO, Nigeria - Angry young Muslim men attacked "nonbelievers" with machetes Tuesday, while others burned cars, stores and apartments in apparent revenge for last week's killings of hundreds of Muslims by a Christian group.Three corpses - one charred and another badly mutilated - lay in the streets; it was unclear who killed them. There were unconfirmed reports of several others killed by young men who barricaded streets with burning tires and garbage.
The violence came hours after thousands of Muslim protesters - some carrying daggers, sickles and clubs - marched from the main mosque in the northern city of Kano, traditionally a hotbed of religious tensions.
Amina Usman, a 19-year-old university student, recounted seeing two mutilated bodies next to a makeshift checkpoint where young Muslim Hausa-speaking men armed with sticks, knives and clubs were searching cars for Christians and animists and asking passengers to recite Muslim prayers.
"It was hell," said Mohammed Aliyu, another university student, who said he saw five bodies in another part of Kano, Nigeria's largest Muslim city, one with a burning tire around its neck. ...
Demonstrators were protesting attacks on Hausa-speaking Muslims by fighters from the Tarok-speaking tribe in the central Nigerian town of Yelwa. A Red Cross official has said between 500 and 600 people died in the Yelwa attacks, while the Nigerian government's emergency response agency estimates less than half that number.
In the capital, Abuja, President Olusegun Obasanjo met with a delegation of Muslim leaders calling for the capture of the Yelwa attackers.
Obasanjo asked the clerics to "tell your followers to be patient and give me time to resolve the matter."
"It's time now to put a permanent stop to this whole thing," Obasanjo said as reporters looked on. "The situation in Yelwa is condemnable and I condemn it in very strong terms."
In Kano, soldiers and police in armored vehicles were deployed in an attempt to quell what began as an angry demonstration but quickly turned into a riot.
An Associated Press reporter saw youths at a makeshift checkpoint of burning tires strike three young women with machetes after accusing them of being "nonbelievers" for wearing Western-style skirts and blouses.
The women escaped with bleeding head wounds after several motorcycle taxi drivers intervened.
"Everywhere, people have taken the laws into their own hands. We are trying to control the situation," said police commissioner Abdul Damini Daudu. ...
Muslim leaders in Kano earlier linked the Yelwa attacks to the U.S.-led war against terror.
"This violence is a calculated global Western war against Muslims, just like in Afghanistan and Iraq," Umar Ibrahim Kabo, the most senior Muslim cleric in Kano, told protesters, some of whom burned U.S. and Israeli flags. "Muslims are in grief."
Kabo issued a seven-day ultimatum to Obasanjo to apprehend the Yelwa killers "or be blamed for whatever happens" afterward.
Kano Governor Ibrahim Shekarau told protests that "killings of Muslims throughout the world ... will only embolden us."
Muslims should be "ready to lay down our lives," Shekarau said, while urging protesters not to attack "innocent people."
The Yelwa attacks follow a deadly succession of communal violence. In February, Muslim militants were blamed for the slaughter of almost 50 people there - many of them Christians who took refuge in a church.
New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Nigeria's government Tuesday of failing to take steps to stop the "endless cycle of revenge."
Another radical imam arrested in France. From AFP, with thanks to Twostellas:
PARIS - An Iraqi imam with political refugee status who preached at a mosque outside Paris was arrested and placed under investigation for violating a house arrest order, court sources said on Tuesday.Yashar Ali, who French intelligence services believe to be a key figure in the Salafist movement, which preaches a strict interpretation of the Koran, was taken into custody on Monday in Argenteuil, northwest of the French capital.
In March, an administrative court had confirmed an order to expel Ali, placing him under house arrest until he could be deported, but the imam never respected the ruling to remain in his Argenteuil home, police said.
Ali’s arrest came amid the center-right government’s campaign to deport radical imams, which has sparked concern among the five million Muslims in France, who fear that Paris is leading a witch-hunt against their clerics.
Israel has vowed to stay in Gaza City until the remains are recovered
Palestinian Arabs have taken the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza. Israel wants them back — in accord with every norm of human civilization.
From the BBC, with thanks to Nicolei:
The Palestinian Authority has called on militant groups and any residents of Gaza who are holding the remains of the soldiers to return them "in conformity with human rights and the Muslim religion". The troops' armoured personnel carrier was blown to pieces, scattering debris and body parts over a wide area, when it ran over an improvised bomb in the road.The vehicle was loaded with explosives intended to destroy workshops suspected of producing rockets.
There was a furious Israeli reaction after militants were seen displaying pieces of the dead.
At an emergency meeting of his inner cabinet on Tuesday night, Mr Sharon said Israel was fighting a "cruel, inhuman enemy".
From the Savannah Morning News, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Freighter hijackings and terrorist swimmers are among key concerns of the U.S. Coast Guard as it prepares to secure area waterways for the upcoming G-8 Sea Island Summit, according to agency briefing papers prepared late last week.The documents provide a list of potential threats after warning: "Terrorist scenarios are receiving attention at all levels."
Feared actions include:
* Executing a USS Cole-type incident, which took place in 2000, when terrorists blew a hole in the hull of a Navy ship in the Middle East;
* Grounding vessels;
* Taking control of a vessel and steering it into a protected zone;
* Swimming across the Savannah River to gain access to the press center and dignitary area;
* Blocking a deep-draft vessel;
* Using divers to plant explosives on a dock or a pier;
* Boarding vessels and draping banners;
* Creating anarchy on the waterfront.
Grounding a vessel or steering it to the security zones would be a classic move by terrorists, according to Steven C. Bronson, a retired Navy boatswain mate chief.
He is an internationally renowned maritime counter-terrorist expert whose company – Tactical Waterborne Operations of Virginia Beach, Va., – has trained Coast Guard and other law enforcement teams around the country in tactics and techniques.
"They use all of this as a diversion," Bronson said. "They'll drive a boat on the beach and disappear into the woods and draw all the attention and fire to one spot, while the real attack will be at another location."
Swimmers could prove to be especially problematic, Bronson said. They could get right up to one of the tied-up excursion boats or a nearby dock and plant an explosive. This could prove particularly useful if a terrorist could conduct an operation on the river in front of the Savannah International Trade & Convention Center, where most of the media will be located throughout the June 8-10 summit.
The Coast Guard briefing papers warn against taking the threats too lightly – as was the case, the agency argues, with the World Trade Organization about five years ago: "One of the major issues with the WTO at Seattle is that they ignored early, consistent intelligence."
Al-Sadr's gunmen
From CNN, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Coalition forces have killed 20 to 25 Iraqi militia members loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr during an ongoing operation to disarm insurgents in Karbala, according to senior coalition military official.Meanwhile, four Filipino contractors have died in a mortar attack on a U.S. air base in northern Iraq. ...
The coalition forces, supported by the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and Iraqi security forces, also seized weapons and ammunition, including pipe bombs and rocket launchers.
A U.S. commander in Iraq has urged religious and political leaders to seek a "political outcome" to the standoff between U.S. troops and al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia in two other Iraqi cities -- Najaf and Kufa.
Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey said he has "opened a window" for negotiations.
From Reuters, with thanks to Miriam:
GAZA, May 10 (Reuters) - Palestinians with axes and shovels desecrated 33 graves in a Commonwealth war cemetery in the Gaza Strip to protest against reported abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. and British soldiers, witnesses said on Monday.Reprinted photographs of soldiers apparently mistreating and humiliating Iraqi detainees were affixed to dozens of untouched gravestones in the British-administered cemetery in Gaza City for 3,661 soldiers who died in two world wars.
Palestinian militant factions said they had nothing to do with the assault in the well-maintained cemetery dotted with flower beds, saying Islam forbade attacks on sites of the deceased regardless of religion or politics.
Essam Jeradeh, head gardener at the cemetery, said he and relatives who have tended the site for decades as a family business noticed about eight people standing by some graves some distance away on Sunday evening.
"At first we thought they were visitors paying respects. But as we approached we realised they were sabotaging the graves. We ran at them, screaming, and they fled," he told Reuters on Monday amid tombstones broken into pieces or toppled intact.
"They (the dead) had been sleeping here for 90 years and no one disturbed them," said Jeradeh, whose father was awarded a British MBE for his care of the cemetery established in 1917.
Photographs pasted on other tombstones showed a U.S. soldier dragging an Iraqi prisoner along a floor with a leash and a British soldier apparently urinating on a detainee.
"The curse will chase you forever" and "we shall avenge" were scrawled in Arabic on some of the photographs.
"These posters show it was an act of anger over the images coming from Iraqi prisons," said Jeradeh's son Ibrahim.
"We have been informed that several graves were desecrated last night at the Imperial War Graves Commission Cemetery in Gaza. We are investigating," a British embassy spokesman in nearby Israel said.
Some of the rage over the Abu Ghraib abuse photos comes not from the real thing, but from faked photos that come from a pornographic movie — and were published in the Egyptian press. From AP, with thanks to Miriam:
CAIRO, Egypt -- The U.S. Embassy demanded a retraction Wednesday for photographs published in the Egyptian press that it said were faked pictures of American soldiers sexually abusing female prisoners in Iraq.But editors of two of the three publications involved said Wednesday they saw no grounds for a retraction. The editor-in-chief of the third publication, Al-Wafd, was not available.
"We have done a thorough investigation of the origin of these photos and have conclusive evidence that they originated on a pornographic Web site," the embassy said in a statement. "They are clearly staged photos, done by actors, as the site itself states."
"Their publication needlessly inflames an already heated atmosphere," the statement added, referring to Arab outrage over the revelation last weekend that U.S. soldiers had sexually humiliated male prisoners in Iraq. The U.S. television network CBS broadcast photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, just west of Baghdad.
U.S. authorities have condemned the soldiers' actions and promised to bring them to justice.
The editor of the Egyptian weekly Al-Osboa, Mustafa Bakri, dismissed the U.S. Embassy's complaint. His newspaper published at least one photograph of a man, purportedly an American soldier, taking sexual advantage of a woman as one of a series run across three pages on May 3.
"We have published, maybe, one picture from the Internet, which was one of several pictures published by the media," Bakri told The Associated Press. "The kind of pictures on CBS made us believe that any other picture is authentic.
"Now the U.S. Embassy is speaking about pictures that were published only on the Internet. OK, let us agree on what CBS published, aren't they enough?"
The editor of Al-Mussawar, Makram Mohammed Ahmed, said he was not aware of the U.S. Embassy complaint. This week, his magazine published a picture of a partially naked woman with parts of her body blacked out.
Ahmed said he would not rule out that fake pictures were circulating.
And why are the Egyptians so reluctant to acknowledge this and do anything about it?
Samir Kuntar
The PA routinely praises terrorists, and yet US officials continue to treat it as if it were a respectable government organization. From Arutz Sheva, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is urging National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice to suspend her planned meeting with the head of the Palestinian Authority until he publicly refutes an article in the official PA newspaper praising a terrorist who murdered an Israel father and his two young daughters."Those who incite murder by praising murderers do not deserve the honor of meeting with senior U.S. government officials," said ZOA National President Morton A. Klein. "At this crucial moment in the international war against terrorism, the Bush administration must have a policy of zero tolerance for those who incite terrorism and praise terrorists."
As reported by Palestinian Media Watch, a May 6th article in the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida heaped praise on Samir Kuntar, who is serving multiple sentences of life imprisonment in Israel for murdering an Israeli father, Danny Haran, and his two young daughters in Nahariya in 1979. The PA newspaper praised Kuntar as "a name of pride in the history of the prisoners of the national movement" and "a beacon of light for us and for the generations to come and an authentic role model. Every day that passes Samir's pride grows, and our pride in him grows greater and greater."
In this connection, journalist David Bedein ("www.israelbehindthenews.com") reports that official PA radio, known as Voice of Palestine, regularly praises Arab terror attacks. Calling the station the "most influential media tool in the hands of the Palestinian government," Bedein writes that it is "the official voice of the Palestinian people... You hear [it] everywhere in the Arab street. It sets the public tone... [Its] radio airwaves were provided for the PA from Israel's Ministry of Communications with the idea that the Palestinians would be able to broadcast messages of 'peace' on their own radio and in their own language" - and yet "during the past ten years, The Voice Of Palestine has consistently praised Arab terror attacks."
Last week's slaughter of a pregnant woman and her four little daughters, for instance, was described on Voice of Palestine as "an act of heroic martyrdom." As reported by Arabic media expert Dr. Michael Widlanski, the station repeatedly used the terms for "heroic martyrdom" to describe the terrorist act, and called the murders "heroic martyrs."
Osama Haroon Satti
Jihad in Tyler, Texas? From Dallas/Fort Worth's CBS-11, with thanks to El Colombiano:
TYLER, TX. -- A virtually unnoticed federal arrest here this Spring of a well-educated Pakistani man caught trying to buy illegal silencers, firearms and C-4 explosives has set off a nationwide FBI counterterrorism investigation, CBS-11 has learned.The investigation centers on whether Osama Haroon Satti, 35, came to Tyler on behalf of a terrorist cell hoping to arm for a plot to rob and murder wealthy Jews and other non-Muslims on the West Coast, sources familiar with the FBI investigation tell CBS-11. Satti is currently in federal custody on charges of buying an illegal silencer and handgun.
Federal prosecutors connected to the case have declined to comment.
Satti has remained tight-lipped so far with investigators who, sources tell CBS-11, are urgently seeking answers about his stated plans to buy explosives along with up to 20 more silencers capable of firing 100 bullets each before wearing out.
Satti, who currently lives in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Falls Church, Va., did not respond to a CBS-11 request for comment as he was being led away in chains after a recent court appearance in Tyler.
His public defender, Greg Waldron, declined interview requests, in deference to the continuing FBI investigation. He noted only that his client has pleaded not guilty.
The FBI's investigation searching for any possible ties between Satti and foreign terror groups has expanded nationwide since a federal sting ensnared him March 8 inside a Tyler Hampton Inn Hotel room for buying an illegal handgun and silencer, CBS-11 News has learned.
Current and former FBI agents tell CBS-11 that the arrest of Satti justifies the aggressive national investigation based, at least in part, on the fact that Satti is so well-educated and from a country on the State Department’s terrorist watch list.
“You’re not dealing with some deadhead. You’re dealing with an educated individual who’s on the same playing field as the investigators,” said Tino Perez, who recently retired as a supervisor of the Dallas FBI’s International Terrorism squad. Perez has no direct knowledge about the investigation.
“I’d treat it as a serous thing. I would want to know foremost if he was part of a network, or if he was acting alone.”
Investigators, at least initially, were particularly interested in whether Satti might be connected to the Al-Quaeda-supported terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan. This summer, the government charged eleven reputed members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, two of them Pakistani nationals, with a variety of terrorist activities in the same suburb where Satti lives. ...
According to an affidavit unsealed in connection to the firearms charge, Satti returned in March demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of weapons and carrying thousands of dollars in cash.
During a joint undercover ATF and FBI operation, Satti bought one silencer and one handgun and spoke of plans by unnamed but similar-minded Muslims to kill and rob Jews and non-Muslims, including gays, CBS-11 has learned. Experts say many Islamic extremists are as obsessed with gays as they are Jews.
Nick Berg of Philadelphia moments before he was murdered (Reuters)
Reuters, in their caption to the photo up above, says Berg was "executed." So does the AP story below. But this man had committed no crime for which execution was warranted by any frame of reference. He was murdered. Will the world that is recoiling in ever-greater paroxysms of horror over the prisoner abuse note how disproportionate is this response?
CAIRO, Egypt - A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site showed the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq, and said the execution was carried out by an al-Qaida affiliated group to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.The video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American." It was unclear whether al-Zarqawi — an associate of Osama bin Laden — was shown in the video, or was claiming responsibility for ordering the execution.
Al-Zarqawi also is said to have ties to terrorist groups ranging from Ansar al Islam in Iraq to Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He's believed to be behind many attacks in Iraq, including numerous high-profile operations.
The video pictures of the execution showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit — similar to a prisoner's uniform — who identified himself as Nick Berg, a U.S. civilian whose body was found on a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday.
"My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael, my mother's name is Suzanne," the man said on the video. "I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah. I live in ... Philadelphia."
There was no way to be certain the tape was authentic.
After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and putting a large knife to his neck. A scream sounded as the men cut his head off, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" — "God is great." They then held the head out before the camera. ...
On the Web site, one of the executioners read a statement:
"For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused."
"So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way."
The Web site on which the video was posted is known as a clearing house for al-Qaida and Islamic extremist groups' statements and tapes. An audiotape purportedly from bin Laden — which the CIA said was probably authentic — appeared on the same Web site last week.
Western officials say al-Zarqawi, whose real name is Ahmad Fadhil al-Khalayleh, is a lieutenant of bin Laden. The United States has offered $10 million for information leading to the capture or killing of al-Zarqawi, saying he is trying to build a network of foreign militants in Iraq to work for al-Qaida.
In the video, the speaker threatened both President Bush and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
"As for you Bush ... expect severe days. You and your soldiers will regret the day you stepped into the land of Iraq," he said. He described Musharraf as "a traitor agent."
Dodd
From the New Haven Register, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
NEW HAVEN — Hoping it’s not too late to stave off a terrorist attack on the nation’s rail system, three Washington officials came to Union Station Monday to support a bill that would dedicate billions to train security.The federal government has allocated $4.4 billion for aviation safety and $10 million for rail and other transit security, said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-New Haven.
"When you consider that five times as many people travel by trains and other vehicles of mass transit than do our airlines, you get some sense of the imbalance that is occurring," said U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who accompanied DeLauro and U.S. Sen.A bill approved by the Senate Banking Housing and Urban Affairs Committee would allocate $5.2 billion for public transit security, with $3.5 billion of it for physical improvements and the rest for training.
"We’re painfully aware of how fragile these systems are as the result of the attacks on March 11 in Madrid," said Dodd. "It was a wake up call to people. I hope these dollars are not too late."
Malian soldiers training
From the New York Times (thanks to Jeffrey Imm) comes news of an expanding front in the defense against global jihad.
STUTTGART, Germany — The American campaign against terrorism is opening a new front in a region that military officials fear could become the next base for Al Qaeda — the largely ungoverned swath of territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Western Sahara's Atlantic coast.Generals here at the United States European Command, which oversees the area, say the vast, arid region is a new Afghanistan, with well-financed bands of Islamic militants recruiting, training and arming themselves. Terrorist attacks like the one on March 11 in Madrid that killed 191 people seem to have a North African link, investigators say, and may presage others in Europe. ...
American military officials say that Qaeda-linked militants, pushed out of Afghanistan and blocked by increased surveillance of traditional points of entry along the Mediterranean coast, are turning to overland travel in order to make contact with North African Islamic terror groups.
The officials cite the case of Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, also known as Abu Mohamed, a Qaeda militant who traveled across Africa in 2002 to help plan attacks.
Mr. Alwan, a Yemeni and a close associate of Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was linked to the October 2000 attack on the American warship Cole. He is believed to have been helping to plan an attack on the United States Embassy in Mali's capital, Bamako, before he was killed in late 2002 during a raid by Algerian forces in Algeria's northeastern Batna Province.
Mr. Alwan's appearance in the region rattled the American military and added impetus to a strategy that had been taking shape since the Sept. 11 attacks. The United States is working with the countries of the so-called Sahel, the impoverished southern fringe of the Sahara, to shore up border controls and deny sanctuary to suspected terrorists.
The program, called the Pan-Sahel Initiative, was begun with $7 million and focused on Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad. It is being expanded to include Senegal and possibly other countries. The European Command has asked for $125 million for the region over five years.
An added catalyst to the program was the kidnapping of Western tourists in the desert of southeastern Algerian early last year. A terrorist leader named Ammari Saifi, also known as Abderrezak al-Para because he was trained as an Algerian Special Forces paratrooper, took 32 European tourists hostage near the Libyan border and transported some of them to northern Mali.
To free the hostages, United States military officials say, Germany paid him a ransom of nearly $6 million — equivalent to a quarter of Niger's defense budget — making him instantly one of the most powerful Islamic militants in North Africa.
He is a leader of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or G.S.P.C., which was formed in 1998 and has many links with Al Qaeda.
Earlier this year, Mr. Saifi went on a shopping spree in northern Mali, gathering weapons, vehicles and recruits while American and Algerian intelligence monitored him with growing alarm. In February, Algerian forces intercepted a convoy carrying weapons north from Mali. Algerian officials say the cargo contained mortar launchers, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and surface-to-air missiles.
The United States European Command sent a Navy P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft to sweep the area, relaying Mr. Saifi's position to forces in the region. Mali pushed him out of the country to Niger, which in turn chased him into Chad, where, with United States Special Forces support of an airlift of fuel and other supplies, 43 of his men were killed or captured. Mr. Saifi himself got away, American officials say. With his money and experience and broader network, G.S.P.C. remains the most dangerous group in North Africa, they say.
In the wake of the G.S.P.C. hunt, military chiefs from nine African nations were brought to European Command headquarters in Stuttgart last month. Several of the generals, like the military chiefs of neighboring Mali and Niger, had never met one another before. Others, like the military chiefs of Morocco and Algeria, were more accustomed to competing than cooperating.
All the countries expressed anxiety about the growing threat of Islamic militancy within their borders.
Government officials in Burkina Faso have complained to American officials about "bearded ones" showing up in remote areas preaching the salafist, or fundamentalist, strain of Islam that inspires the world's Islamic militants. The foreign imams distribute cassette tapes and have greater wealth than the local imams with whom they are competing.
"These are not local extremists," one American official said. "These are people from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, who are essentially Islamic missionaries preaching a form of Islam that is very, very different from what these countries want or grew up with."
But can the defenders of the local form of Islam refute the Salafis' arguments from the Qur'an and Islamic tradition?
The Italian terror cell was broken through wiretaps obtained under Italy's new anti-terror laws. From UPI, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Washington, DC, May. 10 (UPI) -- It's September 29, 2003 and Adel is frustrated. "I've just spoken to Sheikh Rashid and he said there's no decision on my going to Iraq. What are they waiting for?" The person at the other end of the phone line murmurs words of encouragement.Months later, Adel still waits. "Sheikh, don't think that I haven't considered alternatives to this path," he tells Mahamri Rashid, the imam of Florence in another phone conversation. "But I wouldn't change my mind even if they covered me with gold. I wouldn't change it for anything. I lie awake at night thinking about it. It's a huge universal project."
In another phone conversation in early March of this year Adel tells a friend, "In a month we will be martyrs at last."
But others were also listening to these conversations, and early Sunday morning Italian intelligence agents arrested Adel and three other Tunisians along with Mahamri Rashid, the imam of Florence. All have been charged under Italy's anti-terrorism laws.
Italian authorities said Rashid recruited young Arabs to become suicide bombers and fighters linked to al-Qaida the terrorist group, and sent them to Iraq. The other four arrested were his most recent would-be martyrs. According to press accounts, investigators had stepped in to make the arrests days before the Tunisians were due to depart for Yemen and Syria where they would have been given weapons and explosives before being smuggled into Iraq.
The arrest was the result of a long investigation involving numerous wiretaps, some of which were published in newspapers Sunday and Monday. The Italian government intensified its anti-terrorist campaign following the March 11 bombings in Madrid. This particular investigation was already underway at the time, but after Madrid the authorities feared that the terrorists were planning to attack targets in Italy.
This fear intensified when, in a discussion about the Madrid attack, one of the Tunisians said, "If we were to stage an attack in Italy we could hit the Giglio commercial center (in Florence) or the movie complex across from it and we would kill thousands of people."
But from the start their destination was Iraq. As quoted in La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera the recorded phone exchanges provide a chilling insight into the gradual process of bending their minds towards "martyrdom" in the cause of Islam.
John Lehman
Yesterday in our nation's chief target, New York City, I picked up this incisive assessment by former Navy Secretary John Lehman in the New York Post:
PART of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared.We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national-security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam, it must have been Saddam.
We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism.
None of our government institutions was set up with receptors, or even vocabulary, to deal with this. So we left ourselves completely vulnerable to a concerted attack.
Where are we today? I'd like to say we have fixed these problems, but we haven't. We have not diminished in any way the fervor and ideology of our enemy. We are fighting them in many areas of the world, and I must say with much better awareness of the issues and their nature. We're fighting with better tools.
But I cannot say we are now safe from the kind of attack we saw on 9/11. I think we are much safer than we were on 9/11: The ability of our enemies to launch a concerted, sophisticated attack is much less than it was then. Still, we're totally vulnerable to the kinds of attacks we've seen in Madrid, for instance.
We face a very sophisticated and intelligent enemy who has been trained, in many cases, in our universities and gone to school on our methods, learned from their mistakes, and continued to use the very nature of our free society and its aversion to intrusion in privacy and discrimination to their benefit.
For example, today it is still a prohibited offense for an airline to have two people of the same ethnic background interviewed at one time, because that is discrimination. Our ability to carry out covert operations abroad is only marginally better than it was at the time of 9/11.
It's very important that people understand the complexity of this threat. We have had to institute new approaches to protecting our civil liberties - the way we authorize surveillance, the way we conduct our immigration and naturalization policies, and the way we issue passports. That's only the beginning.
The beginning of wisdom is to recognize the problem, to recognize that for every jihadist we kill or capture - as we carry out an aggressive and positive policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere - another 50 are being trained in schools and mosques around the world.
This problem goes back a long way. We have been asleep. Presidents in four administrations put their arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi jihadism, and said these are our eternal friends.
We have seen throughout the last 20 years a kind of head-in-the-sand approach to national security in the Pentagon. We paid no attention to the real nature of this emerging threat, even though there were warning signs.
Many will recall with pain what we went through in the Reagan administration in 1983, when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut - 241 Marines and Navy corpsmen were killed. We immediately got an intercept from NSA [National Security Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign ministry of Iran, ordering the murder of our Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate. Instead, we did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do, which was to withdraw.
Osama bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments. The vaunted United States is a paper tiger; Americans are afraid of casualties; they run like cowards when attacked; and they don't even bother to take their dead with them.
We fueled and made these people aware of the tremendous effectiveness of terrorism as a tool of jihad. They chased us out of one place after another, because we would not retaliate.
The secretary of Defense at the time has said he never received those intercepts. That's an example of one of the huge problems our commission has uncovered. We have allowed the intelligence community to evolve into a bureaucratic archipelago of baronies in the Defense Department, the CIA, and 95 other different intelligence units in our government. None of them talked to one another in the same computerized system. There was no systemic sharing.
We had watch lists with 65,000 terrorists' names on them, created by a very sophisticated system in the State Department called Tip-Off. That existed before 9/11, but nobody in the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] bothered to look at it. The FAA had 12 names on its no-fly list.
The State Department had a guy on its list named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was already under indictment for his role in planning the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. State issued him a visa.
Two big lessons glare out from what our investigations have discovered so far. Number one: In our government bureaucracy today, there is no accountability.
Since 9/11 - the greatest failure of American defenses in the history of our country, at least since the burning of Washington in 1814 - only one person has been fired. He is a hero, in my judgment: [retired Vice] Adm. John Poindexter.
He got fired because of an excessive zeal to catch these bastards. But he was the only one fired. Not any of the 19 officers lost their jobs at Immigration for allowing the 19 terrorists - nine who presented grossly falsified passports - to enter the country.
Customs officer Jose Melendez-Perez stopped the 20th terrorist, who was supposed to be on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. Probably because of the shorthanded muscle on that team, the passengers were able to overcome the terrorists.
Melendez-Perez did this at great personal risk, because his colleagues and his supervisors told him, "You can't do this. This guy is an Arab ethnic. You're racially profiling. You're going to get in real trouble, because it's against Department of Transportation policy to racially profile."
He said, "I don't care. This guy's a bad guy. I can see it in his eyes."
As he sent this guy back out of the United States, the guy turned around to him and said, "I'll be back." You know, he is back. He's in Guantanamo. We captured him in Afghanistan.
Do you think Melendez-Perez got a promotion? Do you think he got any recognition? Do you think he is doing any better than the 19 of his time-serving, unaccountable colleagues? Don't think any bit of it. We have no accountability - but we're going to restore it.
NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army Monday to launch a broad new offensive against U.S.-led occupying forces following a U.S. crackdown on his strongholds in Baghdad and across the south.The U.S. military claimed new successes in campaigns against Sadr's forces and minority Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Sadr's chief aide told Reuters at his main base in the holy city of Najaf that a new phase had begun in a month-long insurgency across Shi'ite southern Iraq.
"We have now entered a second phase of resistance," he said. But U.S. commanders, helped by rival Shi'ite leaders, sound increasingly confident of containing the Mehdi Army.
Tanks flattened Sadr's office in Baghdad's Sadr City district overnight and U.S. spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt made a hard-to-verify claim that troops killed 35 fighters in the sprawling Shi'ite slum.
U.S. forces, spurred on by mounting irritation with Sadr among Shi'ite elders, have also squeezed the outskirts of Najaf.
With British forces around Basra, they have been taking back key positions such as police stations in a string of towns across Shi'ite southern Iraq. An armored U.S. column rolled again into the center of the holy city of Kerbala Monday.
Hoon said the situation remained tense around Basra and Amara and further violence was likely in the coming days.
"Our policy now is to extend the state of resistance and to move it to all of Iraq because of the occupiers' military escalation and crossing of all red lines in the holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf," Sadr lieutenant Qais al-Khazali said.
The U.S. commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, said his troops were doing their best to avoid inflaming religious passions by intruding on sacred ground.
But he said: "We will be patient, but our patience won't last forever. There is a limit to our patience with Sadr."
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush plans this week to impose economic sanctions on Syria for supporting terrorism and failing to stop guerrillas from entering Iraq, people involved in the deliberations said on Monday. Congressional sources said Bush was expected to curb future investments by American energy firms in Syria and prohibit Syrian aircraft from flying into the United States.Bush was also expected either to block transactions involving the Syrian government or to ban exports to Syria of U.S. products other than food and medicine, the sources said.
A White House announcement on the sanctions is planned as early as Tuesday.
Note: Many bags look alike; be sure the one you take is yours
A few days ago I posted an article about radioactive material in Ukraine. Now the LA Times has pulled more information together.
VIENNA — Concerns are growing that Al Qaeda or a related group could detonate a "dirty bomb" that would spew radioactive fallout across an American or European city, according to intelligence analysts, diplomats and independent nuclear experts.Although safeguards protecting nuclear weapons and their components have improved, experts said the radioactive materials that wrap around conventional explosives to create a contaminating bomb remained available worldwide — and were often stored in non-secure locations.
Detonating a dirty bomb would not cause the death and devastation wrought by a nuclear weapon, but officials and counter-terrorism experts predicted that it would result in some fatalities, radiation sickness, mass panic and enormous economic damage.Intelligence agencies have reported no reliable, specific threats involving dirty bombs or nuclear weapons, but senior U.S. and European officials and outside experts said several factors had heightened fears in recent weeks.
They said concerns were focused on three Al Qaeda operatives who led experiments involving dirty bombs and chemical weapons and on widely held suspicions that a special wing of the terrorist network was planning a spectacular attack.
They also said that chatter justifying the use of nuclear weapons against the U.S. had increased on radical Islamic websites as the occupation of Iraq stretches into its second year.
Abu Ghraib Prison (AP)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The prisoner abuse scandal has so tarnished the Army's 800th Military Police Brigade that soldiers slated to receive an Army Bronze Star medal have been dropped from the list, the brigade's commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, said Sunday."The vast majority of fine, outstanding soldiers in the brigade are paying dearly," Karpinski told The Associated Press in an e-mail.
After the Army started its investigation into abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib penitentiary, "many, many" of the soldiers' recommendations for the Army medal were downgraded, said Karpinski, whose 2,800-member brigade operated 12 U.S. prisons and detention camps across Iraq, including the sprawling Abu Ghraib facility west of Baghdad.
The Bronze Star denotes heroism, outstanding achievement or meritorious service.
An Army report into the abuses at the prison, written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, faulted Karpinski and other commanders in the brigade and its subordinate battalions, saying leaders paid too little attention to the prison's day-to-day operations. Previous abuses of prisoners or lapses at the prison went unpunished or unheeded, the report found.
Note the difference between the above story
The report commends two individual soldiers and a sailor for either halting abuse at Abu Ghraib or refusing to participate.
"My principle torturer was a man named Ibrahim Al Dali who was promoted from captain to major as a result of his torturing me and getting me to confess,” says Sampson.
The difference?
"I know the members of (the Saudi) government are hypocrites. I know the members of their government are liars, and therefore I do not expect anything better from them than that. I do not expect anything other than them to continue playing their hypocritical games.”
No one expects it of the United States.
UPDATE: Drudge reports that a furious President Bush has demanded to see all prisoner abuse photos and videos
A furious President Bush has demanded to see all photos and videos showing abuse of Iraq detainees, a senior White House source said late Sunday."The president was blindsided by the first TV images, he will not be blindsided again," the source, who demanded anonymity, explained to the DRUDGE REPORT.
The president has instructed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to present him with him all known images that could further deepen the crises.
This all reminds me of some of the initial controversy surrounding Islam Unveiled. When I argued that Western values and the values of Islamic Extremists are fundamentally different, the most common answer was not a refutation of that point but rather an irrelevant game of "gotcha" proving Western Civilization does not always live up to its professed values. As Senator Lieberman pointed out "I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized," and that four Americans in Fallujah who were "murdered and burned and humiliated ... never received an apology from anybody."
Dr. Sayed al-Faghi says Saudi Arabia framed the British government for the Riyadh bombings, in an effort to stop his group from criticizing the Saudi regime (CBS)
CBS' 60 Minutes sparked worldwide outrage over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American troops. Now it seems they are going after Our Friends the Saudis. They report on the case of innocent Britons who were tortured into confessing they had set off bombs around Riyadh. In the halcyon days before 9/11 it was easier for the Saudis to round up the usual suspects — foreigners — that to admit they had a problem with fundamentalist jihadis.
Six years ago, Sampson had taken a job as a business consultant in Saudi Arabia. But in November 2000, two cars bombs went off in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, killing a British engineer and injuring several other westerners.Three weeks later, as Sampson was leaving his home in Riyadh for work, a grey sedan pulled up beside him. “Three Saudis in traditional dress came out of the sedan. One of them waved a warrant card and pistol in my face,” recalls Sampson. “The others pinned my arms behind my back, stripped me of my belongings, handcuffed me, began punching and beating me, and pushed me into the vehicle.”
Sampson was blindfolded and driven to a closely guarded building on the outskirts of Riyadh, which is the detention center of the Mabahith - the Saudi security police. There, he was tortured into confessing that he had carried out those bombings.
“It initially started with punchings and kickings, and that progressed from beating me on the soles of my feet to being hung upside down in a position known as the chicken -- with your feet uppermost and your feet and backside exposed, readily available for beating,” says Sampson. “And between interrogation sessions, I was returned to the same cell and handcuffed to the door, so I couldn't sit down and I couldn't sleep.”
He said that after being beating on the soles of his feet and chained to the door, he stood in agony: “There’s no way you can, I could even kneel down in that position, and so I'd be standing on my feet which were swollen, so badly swollen that they were actually exuding plasma through the skin.”
I imagine world opinion is going to turn on the Saudis. We are going to start hearing protests from around the globe any minute now. Anyone...? Anyone...? Bueller...?
Masked Palestinian militants, members of the Popular Resistance Committees, pray with their Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers in the southern Gaza Strip refugee camp of Rafah, during a rally supporting the attack in which a 34-year-old Israeli settler and her four children were killed(AFP)
While the U.S. wrings it hands over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, Palestinian jihadis go for extra points in a recent terror attack. From the Jersusalem Post:
Early Sunday evening at least three Palestinian terrorists opened fire shooting at several hundred mourners gathered at the site where Tali Hatuel and her four daughters were gunned down and murdered on the Kissufim crossing a week ago.No one was wounded in the attack. Several residents were treated for shock. IDF forces spotted three terrorists, a tank fired a shell hitting two and the third was hit by light weapons.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.
Eran Shterenberg spokesman for the Gaza Coast Regional Council said several terrorists approached the road and opened fire. Soldiers and armed residents returned fire as women, babies and children lay on the ground and crouched near parked cars seeking cover from the gunfire. A bulletproof bus drove up to the site and women and children boarded it as residents armed with weapons stood watch.
U.S. army Spc. Jeremy Sivits (AP)
It won't satisfy anyone, of course.
In related news,Reuters quotes defense officials as reporting that already this week the U.S. military punished two Army Reserve soldiers who assaulted prisoners while working as guards at Guantanamo.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A 24-year-old military policeman will face a public court martial in Baghdad next week, the first of seven American soldiers to be tried on charges of abusing Iraqi prisoners, a U.S. military spokesman said Sunday.Stung by photographs of humiliation that have hardened Arab anger at the United States, the army promised full media access when Specialist Jeremy Sivits goes on trial on May 19, but it was unclear if the court hearings would be televised.
"It is not our intention to hide anything," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference, though he has insisted there would be no "show trial."
Sivits, who faces three charges, including one of maltreating detainees, is one of seven military police to be charged with abusing prisoners in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, where Saddam Hussein's torturers tormented thousands of Iraqis.
Afghan police officers look the bloodstrain Sunday, May 9, 2004 in Kabul, Afghanistan where joggers found the two bodies of the two white men, aged about 30 and in Afghan dress, in a public garden in west Kabul, early Sunday, police said. (AP)
Let's hope there is some follow-up to this curious story.
KABUL (Reuters) - Two foreign men, one Swiss, were stabbed and stoned to death in the Afghan capital, government officials said Sunday."There were various injuries you could see on the head caused by stones and bricks," said Ihsanullah Alimi, a doctor involved in the post-mortem.
"And there are also stab injuries on the head. And on one body, a rope seemed to have been tightened on the neck."
The bodies, clothed in local shalwar (baggy trousers), long shirts and woolen hats when found, were being examined by forensic experts.
Local residents informed police and led them to the bodies in Baghe Chilstone, an ancient garden not far from the city's center, Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal, told Reuters.
An investigation was under way to determine "who stoned these to death, and why," Mashal said. "One of them holds a Swiss passport and the nationality of the other is not known."
Both had come from neighboring Pakistan nine days ago, said Khalil Aminzada, deputy chief of Kabul police. He said they were pelted with bricks and stones last night.
A local official at the Swiss embassy in Kabul said Swiss diplomats were informed about the deaths and were seeking more details from the authorities.
Stoning to death is a punishment proposed by Islam for adulterers. The practice was publicly administered by the ousted Taliban who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 when a U.S.-led military campaign overthrew the radical regime.
Italy is often used as a logistical base
Another Islamic religious leader implicated in terrorist activity. "The Qur'an forbids suicide." What Qur'an was this Algerian imam reading? "Islam condemns terrorism." How did this imam miss the boat? From the BBC, with thanks to LGF:
Italian police say they have arrested an Algerian imam and four Tunisians suspected of planning suicide attacks against Western targets in Iraq. The men were seized in a series of raids in Florence and the province of Liguria - which were still ongoing.The raids were part of an investigation into the Islamic militant group, Ansar al-Islam, police said. ...
In the latest raids, police searched a mosque in Florence and a number of homes.
"We have dismantled a cell of Ansar al-Islam," police chief Oscar Fiorolli was quoted as saying. The group is suspected of being behind attacks on coalition targets in Iraq.
A local imam was the alleged ringleader, Italian police said.
In recent years police investigations in Italy have found evidence that Islamic terrorist groups have used the country to get false documents and provide hiding places for members, our Rome correspondent says.
Mosques in various cities have been searched in connection with these inquiries, she says.
People running for cover after the blast
The "separatists" and "rebels" in this report are, of course, mujahedin.
GROZNY, Chechnya (CNN) -- Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov and at least three others died in an explosion Sunday during celebrations at a stadium in the Chechen capital, officials said.Russia's presidential press service confirmed Kadyrov's death, and a spokesman for the Russian Interior Ministry said that another 44 people were wounded in the blast at Grozny's Dynamo stadium.
The stadium was crowded with people celebrating Victory Day, which marks the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.
Among the wounded was the top commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, Gen. Valery Baranov.
The blast happened beneath the VIP stand where political and military leaders were reviewing a military parade commemorating Victory Day.
A spokesman for the Chechen Interior Ministry said that the bomb may have been buried in concrete as many as three months ago while the stadium was undergoing a renovation. ...
The blast comes a few weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his annual state of the nation address, proclaimed the "military phase of the conflict may be considered closed" in Chechnya.
Chechen separatists have been fighting for independence from Russia since the mid-90s and are being credited in the Russian media for having carried out the attack.
Victory Day is a major national celebration in Russia.
The Grozny ceremonies were mirrored by festivities throughout the country, including a march in Moscow's Red Square.
Chechen rebels have in the past targeted official events and public gatherings for attacks.
(Thanks to Jeffrey Imm for the link.)
Magnus Ranstorp (Aftonbladet)
An overview from Knight Ridder:
ROME - A series of recent developments in the war on terrorism, barely noticed in the United States, suggests that global Islamic extremism is spreading.On Monday, Turkish authorities charged nine people, believed to be part of an al-Qaeda-linked group, in connection with planning to bomb next month's NATO summit in Istanbul, which President Bush is scheduled to attend. That followed the April 26 televised confessions of suspects allegedly caught trying to build a chemical bomb, which authorities said could have killed tens of thousands in Jordan's capital, Amman.
In Saudi Arabia, authorities weren't so successful. On May 1, militants shot dead two Americans, two Britons and an Australian at an oil company's offices. On May 3, a car bomb exploded in southwestern Pakistan, killing three Chinese engineers who had been building a multimillion-dollar seaport.
In Syria on April 27, a gym teacher died in a cross fire between extremists and police. In Thailand the next day, police killed 108 Muslim militants who had allegedly attacked police stations trying to seize guns, though that incident has overtones of longstanding ethnic strife. In Spain, an indictment issued April 29 alleges that one of the Moroccans accused in connection with the Madrid train bombings is also linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In Indonesia on April 30, protesters rioted after a radical cleric was arrested again on charges linking him to the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people.
On Thursday, the FBI took into custody Oregon lawyer Brandan Mayfield, in connection with the Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people and injured 2,000.
Many of these events, all within the past two weeks, received scant attention in the United States, where the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal has dominated news headlines. But they are the most recent indications that the threat of Islamic terrorism -- and the transnational battles against it -- are intensifying.
The recent episodes show that law enforcement and intelligence agencies across Europe and the Middle East have been able to prevent terrorist attacks and have vigorously pursued those accused of planning them. Yet the military and police actions haven't stopped extremists from hatching chilling plots.
Islamic militants "are trying to expand the battlefield and exhaust the United States, creating widespread fear," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism specialist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. ...
U.S. officials say that more than two-thirds of al-Qaeda's leaders have been killed or captured, and as many as 4,000 people have been arrested on terrorism-related charges worldwide.
But some experts believe the war on terrorism -- and the U.S.-led war in Iraq -- have inspired recruits who are operating in loosely affiliated, independent cells.
"The U.S. invasion of Iraq increased the worldwide threat of terrorism many times over," said Rohan Gunaratna, author of the book "Inside al-Qaeda, the Global Network of Terror."
Richard Evans, a terrorism expert and editor of Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London said, "These days, al-Qaeda really is just a merchant banker of global Islamic militancy.
"The modern face of global Islamic militancy is very disjointed and extremely diffuse. There are all kinds of different groups and different networks operating around the world now."
In Turkey, where four suicide truck bombings killed 63 people in November, officials said they'd been watching and listening to the NATO summit plotters for up to a year. When they finally moved in, they said, they seized handguns, rifles, explosives, timers, mobile telephones, bomb-making pamphlets and compact discs containing instructions from Osama bin Laden.
They said the suspects were members of Ansar al-Islam, a radical group that operates in northern Iraq.
Turkish newspapers reported Tuesday that authorities believed three of the suspects intended to carry out suicide attacks against Bush at the June summit. One of the men had lived in Pakistan for six years, where he received flight training, a newspaper said.
Details are still sketchy about the plot in Amman. On April 26, Jordanian authorities broadcast taped confessions from suspects who said they planned to set off a chemical bomb -- what kind of chemical wasn't disclosed -- near Jordanian intelligence headquarters in Amman. Authorities said the attack could have killed as many as 80,000 people.
A statement attributed to Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who U.S. officials believe is responsible for several suicide attacks against civilians in Iraq, later confirmed the bomb plot but denied that chemicals would have been used.
The plot also called for attacks on the prime minister's office and the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordanian officials said on state television. Six suspects were arrested and four others were killed in a series of recent raids, security officials said.
The Amman and Istanbul operations came after a series of other arrests in Europe since the Madrid rail car bombings. On April 6, U.S. and British agents reportedly uncovered a possible plot to use the lethal chemical osmium tetroxide to kill people in the United Kingdom.
Europe may face an even larger indigenous terror threat than the United States because it is home to larger numbers of Islamic extremists and closer to North Africa and the Middle East.
Extremists also have targeted certain Islamic countries allied with the United States, particularly Saudi Arabia, which faces a homegrown threat, and Turkey, which is seen as a crucial battleground.
European and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies' counterterrorism efforts "have been very successful, relatively speaking. We know what they think about, we know how they operate," said Ranstorp, the terrorism expert. "But of course... you can't watch all individuals all the time."
Evans said: "In Western Europe, another successful terrorist attack is a case of 'when,' not 'if.' "
Nigerian soldiers (BBC)
The violence in Nigeria has been widely reported as Christians attacking Muslims. Most reports ignored the fact that those attacks were in response to many earlier attacks by jihadists. By early April, 1,500 Christians had been killed, and 173 churches destroyed.
This is not to say that anything the Christians might have done, or might do, is justified. But it exposes the hypocrisy of the media establishment. First, jihad violence against Christians is ignored. Then, retaliation by Christians is reported as if it were unprovoked violence against Muslims.
A flash from Compass Direct, with thanks to FreedomNowNews:
JOS, Nigeria, May 7 (Compass) -- Fresh religious violence has erupted in Yelwa town in the central state of Plateau, Nigeria, two months after Muslim militants killed a pastor and 48 members of his church there on February 23. The latest Muslim-Christian clash has resulted in the deaths of 350 people and the disappearance of 250 women and children, according to police reports.Meanwhile, more than 120 people were reportedly killed and thousands more displaced by inter-religious violence in the northern state of Taraba in late April.
The latest crisis in Yelwa erupted in the early hours of Sunday, May 2. Victims who fled to the state capital of Jos said that more than 1,000 houses and religious buildings had been destroyed by fire. ...
According to news reports yesterday from the Associated Press and Agence France Press (AFP), land disputes between members of the predominantly Christian Tarok tribe and Muslim Hausa-Fulani farmers sparked the violence in Yelwa. A Muslim city councilman told AFP reporters that at least 630 persons, most of them Muslims, had died in the fighting.
Local Christian sources said the crisis is linked to recent attacks on Christian villages in the area by Muslim extremists. They believe because only Muslims remained in Yelwa following the February 23 murders, aggrieved Christians carried out last Sunday's attack in reprisal for the earlier assault.
Muslim-Christian violence broke out in the northern state of Taraba in late April, causing the death of over 120 people and leaving thousands more displaced.
The crisis reportedly erupted on April 27 in Sarkin Kudu and Dampar villages in Ibi local government area of the state. Local sources said an Easter Sunday attack by Muslim militants on Christian villages in the nearby state of Plateau provoked the Taraba violence.
"Christians in Plateau state believe that these two villages, Sarkin Kudu and Dampar, are operational bases for Muslim militants who use them to attack Christian villages in that state," Alhaji Lawal Mohammed, a Muslim and the chairman of Ibi local government council, told Compass. "And because of this, the religious crisis has now spread into our state."
The Muslim political leader confirmed the 120 casualties, adding that he is shaken by the crisis. Mohammed then called on the Nigerian government, as a matter of urgency, to deploy soldiers to the area in order to check the spread of anarchy.
In response to the tensions, Plateau state officials have created a peace committee to network with Taraba, Benue, and Nasarawa state governments. The peace committee is seeking a viable solution to the religious conflict that has engulfed the three states in recent months.
"We have contacted Taraba, Benue and Nasarawa states to check their borders to prevent unnecessary encroachment," Michael Botmang, deputy governor of Plateau state, told Compass yesterday. "On our part, we have sent enough security personnel to the borders to prevent an influx of the Muslim militants."
Over the Easter weekend, Muslim militants launched attacks against predominantly Christian villages in Plateau. Government sources reported only three Christian victims from those attacks, as opposed to the 20 deaths reported by eyewitnesses. About 20,000 refugees fled the area as a result of the violence."
(KATU photo)
Could the Mayfield case be another long bungle, a la Yee? With Yee, we heard first that he had classified documents. Then we heard that the prosecution wasn't sure whether or not they were classified. Then all charges were dropped, although an official was quoted saying something cryptic about how national security concerns prevented further pursuit of the charges.
In Mayfield's case, we heard that his fingerprints were on material linked to the Madrid bombings. Now it's just one fingerprint, and it may not be his.
The threat of terror is real, and that's why every one of these arrests is a high-stakes proposition. The Justice Department's credibility and honesty are at stake. Not much of it is left after Yee. Will they squander the remainder on Mayfield? From AP:
The newspaper El Pais reported Saturday that Spanish investigators have serious doubts as to whether the fingerprint found on a plastic bag tied to March 11 explosions on commuter trains is that of Portland-area lawyer Brandon Mayfield.The report said Spanish forensics experts found only eight points of similarity between the print and the one of Mayfield held in U.S. files because of his status as a former member of the Army.
The FBI said it found 15 such points, El Pais said.
The Interior Ministry declined to comment on the report.
Mayfield, 37, was arrested at his law office on Thursday as a material witness in the March 11 bombings, which killed 191 people and wounded 2,000.
He has not been charged with a crime.
Spanish officials say at least one fingerprint thought to be Mayfield's was found on a plastic bag containing detonators of the kind used in the attacks. The bag was found in a van left near the station from which three of the four trains bombed departed.
U.S. officials also said a single print of Mayfield's was found on the bag.
The number of points of coincidence required to submit prints as evidence had changed over the years.
The Weekly Detail, an Internet newspaper for fingerprint experts, says a certain number of coinciding so-called Galton points used to be required by various countries before an identification was legally accepted.
However it said that now investigators evaluate prints on a number of levels, thus "there is no statistical foundation for a minimum point requirement" because modern tests are both qualitative and quantitative and too complex to be quantified.
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
How do they convince these converts that they should join up? By appealing to the Qur'an and Sunnah. But of course, the group involved claims it is being unfairly targeted by the government.
From AP:
"When they use converts, it means they are using people who are familiar with Manila, with Cebu, with the Christian-dominated centers," National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales warned at a recent forum.Muslim converts landed in the spotlight when at least seven were arrested in March in and around Manila with caches of explosives. Police said one, Redendo Cain Dellosa, confessed that he planted a bomb on a ferry that caught fire two months ago, killing more than 100 people. Dellosa's lawyer called it a false confession extracted under torture.
Government officials estimate the Philippines has about 200,000 Muslim converts, many who worked as migrant laborers in the Middle East before returning to join the nation's 8 million-strong Islamic community.
Philippine Muslims are dwarfed by the sheer numbers of Christians in this nation of 84 million, but convert groups get by on funds from Arab benefactors and tithing from Muslims in the Middle East.
The government intelligence report identified the Fi Sabilillah Da'wah and Media Foundation as the main local advocate of a radical Muslim convert movement in Christian-dominated Manila and Luzon island.
The group has been headed since 1998 by a man authorities suspect is a terrorist, Ahmad Santos, who is now in hiding. Police and soldiers recently raided the foundation's mosque and office in suburban Quezon City, seizing firearms, explosives and videotapes of jihad activities.
Police arrested Santos' two wives, but they were released on bail.
The March report links Fi Sabilillah officers to bin Laden's al-Qaida. Fi Sabilillah also has been tied to the Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, other fundamentalist groups and a network of foundations set up by bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa.
Santos refused to meet with AP. But a Fi Sabilillah officer, Yusuf Ledesma, denied charges of terrorism and said the Muslim group is being unfairly targeted by a government attempt to whip up anti-Islam hysteria.
"They really have no proof that Fi Sabilillah has ever been involved in any terrorist act," Ledesma told AP. "They seem to be using us as props in a propaganda war."
Ledesma accused police of planting guns and explosives in the Fi Sabilillah office and torturing converts into admitting terror activities.
The intelligence report claims that two Islamic schools, or madrassas, in the northern provinces of Pangasinan and Tarlac, were run by Santos and provided paramilitary training for Muslim converts.
Eight converts -- including the alleged ferry bomber, Dellosa -- were arrested in a 2002 raid on the madrassa in Pangasinan, but were released.
Dellosa was among six alleged terrorist cell members from the brutal Abu Sayyaf group arrested last month when President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said officials had foiled major terror attacks in Manila.
The intelligence report said the men arrested in 2002 admitted membership in a group known as the Rajah Sulaiman Movement, whose primary objective is to establish Islamic cities on Luzon island in the Christian-dominated north. A secondary goal is to carry out terror attacks in the north, taking attention away from predominantly Muslim areas of the south.The report cites meetings and contacts between Santos, his two brothers and Muslim groups in the south, including with Salamat Hashim, the late chairman of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
The report says Santos and four Fi Sabilillah converts received special military training from the Liberation Front, including the use of explosives, in December 2001 and January 2002.
When government forces attacked a Liberation Front complex last year, Santos purportedly received instructions from Salamat to carry out bombings, kidnappings and assassinations of high-ranking officials in Manila, the report said, though the plot was never carried out.
Liberation Front spokesman Eid Kabalu acknowledges Santos visited the group's training camp and interviewed Salamat for a TV-radio program, "Discover Islam," which Santos used to run. But Kabalu denied any contacts with Santos were related to bombings or other terror activities.
Santos is linked to Abu Sayyaf through Omar Lavilla, a classmate of Abu Sayyaf chief Khadaffy Janjalani at a school allegedly established and funded by bin Laden's brother-in-law, Khalifa, the report says. Khalifa, a Saudi businessman, has a Filipina wife and used to visit the Philippines often.
Three sisters provide another connection: one married to Lavilla, one to Janjalani and another to Abu Sayyaf senior officer Abu Solaiman.
Before raids on the madrassas in Pangasinan and Tarlac, Santos sent Lavilla to Mindanao in the south to get $180,000 from Janjalani, according to arrested members of the Rajah Sulaiman Movement. The cash was intended for development of bases in Luzon, buying weapons and carrying out bombings, kidnappings and assassinations, the report said, but preparations were suspended because the money did not arrive in time.
The report outlines Fi Sabilillah links with Jemaah Islamiyah through Santos; a slain Jemaah Islamiyah officer, Fathur Roman Al Ghozi of Indonesia; and Jaybe Ofrasio, a Filipino Muslim convert arrested early this year in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Some contacts may have been involved in providing bank accounts used in transferring suspected Jemaah Islamiyah funds from domestic and foreign bank accounts to Ofrasio's local account, where substantial deposits and withdrawals continued after he left in July 2003 and even after his arrest, the report said. The report gave no figures but called the transfers "huge."
A Fi Sabilillah officer was also allegedly one of the contacts of suspected Jemaah Islamiyah finance officer Taufic Rifqi, an Indonesian arrested in Mindanao last October, and Abdulmukim Edris, an Abu Sayyaf member slain after escaping from jail last July with terror suspect Al Ghozi.
Al Ghozi, accused of supervising a bloody Dec. 30, 2000, train bombing in Manila that killed 20 people, later was killed in a shootout with soldiers.
Ledesma denied any knowledge of the Rajah Sulaiman Movement or its military arm. Ledesma also denied any links between Fi Sabilillah and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Abu Sayyaf or Jemaah Islamiyah.
But he said Fi Sabilillah members sometimes encounter Liberation Front members in forums and Abu Sayyaf detainees during jail visits as part of charity work. And he acknowledged that as Muslims, Fi Sabilillah members are interested in making Luzon island a fertile ground for Islamic conversions.
"For us to want a return to our Islamic roots through da'wah, or missionary work, or peaceful means is not out of the question," Ledesma said.
The report said Santos recently arranged explosives procurement through Muslim convert Mohammad Barrientos, who was arrested in April north of Manila with a cache of explosives and a utility vehicle with a false bottom. Although authorities have alleged Barrientos dealt with Santos' group, he has not been identified as a member of any terror networks.
Ataturk
Ever since it was established by Kemal Ataturk in an atmosphere of war against Islam, Turkish democracy has survived by alternating oppression of radical Muslims with concessions to them. From the Financial Times, with thanks to Nicolei:
Universities in Turkey are locked in a dispute with the government over a proposed change to admissions policy that has led to claims of a "hidden Islamic agenda" and has echoes of a previous clash between the secular state and an Islamic-oriented government. Some university rectors threatened to resign yesterday and opposition MPs walked out of a parliamentary commission in protest at a government proposal to give students from Islamic high schools the same access to secular third-level institutions as those from secular high schools.The general staff of the armed forces said anyone "devoted to the principles of the republic" could not accept the measure, which the government intends to put to a vote in parliament next week. It was approved by parliament's education committee yesterday despite the walk-out by members of the opposition Republican People's party.
The dispute goes to the heart of an increasingly fractious debate in Turkey over the rise to power of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). Its power base is among an emerging middle class of devout, socially conservative Muslims in the country's Anatolian heartland, whose children would be the chief beneficiaries of the proposed change.
The government's measure would overturn a 1999 law banning students from imam hatip high schools, where they get a solid Islamic schooling, from receiving third-level education in secular universities and pursuing careers other than as imams and preachers. That law was introduced after Turkey's first, unhappy experience with an Islamic-oriented government, and it drastically reduced the number of students at these schools.
Some opponents of the new measure said it would lead to a revival of imam hatip schools and greatly expand religious education, violating the republic's official secular ideology.
Many university-educated Turks remain convinced that the AKP has a "hidden agenda" to force all women to wear headscarves and to shift the country, whose population of 70m is 99 per cent Muslim, gradually towards a stricter interpretation of Islamic law. Any suggestion of a move in that direction would almost certainly end Turkey's chances of joining the European Union.
Ural Akbulut, rector of Middle East Technical University, said he would resign if the measure became law. In an interview, he said the higher education system would be "swamped" by religious students who would gradually take over state institutions. "The hidden agenda is for every government appointee to be a practising Muslim," he said.
Erdogan Tezic, head of the Higher Education Board, accused the government of pursuing a "political initiative" that would "irreparably damage" Turkey's secular education system. If the measure and other education reforms are approved by parliament, the leadership of the HEB will be replaced.
From WND, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
New evidence about a meeting in Prague between September 11 plot leader Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani has been uncovered, reports Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news service.Investigative journalist Edward J. Epstein has uncovered Czech government visa records indicating al-Ani was posted to the Iraqi embassy in Prague between March 1999 and April 21, 2001, and was involved in handling Iraqi agents.
A search of the Iraq Embassy in Prague after the fall of Baghdad to coalition forces revealed al-Ani had scheduled a meeting for April 8, 2001, with a Hamburg student, according to an appointment calendar obtained by Czech intelligence.
Al-Ani then was placed under surveillance as he met with a young Arab-speaking man in Prague April 8.
After seeing Atta's photograph after Sept. 11, the Czech counterintelligence watcher identified the man he had seen meeting al-Ani as Atta. Al-Ani was expelled from Prague within two weeks.
According to Epstein, al-Ani denied he met Atta and repeated the denial after being detained by U.S. forces in July.
The CIA has been unable to confirm the Prague meeting between al-Ani and Atta. If confirmed, the meeting would indicate a role by Saddam Hussein's intelligence service in some level of support for the Sept.11 plot.
The current official U.S. intelligence conclusion is that Saddam's regime was not involved in supporting the Sept. 11 attacks.
According to Epstein, Spanish intelligence has uncovered information indicating Algerians Khaled Madani and Moussa Laouar supplied Atta and another al-Qaida member, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, with false passports.
From CNN, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
KARACHI, Pakistan -- At least 15 people have been killed and 90 injured by a suspected suicide bomber at a Shiite mosque in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, police said.Hundreds rioted across the city after the bombing, throwing stones and torching buildings.
According to an officer at the scene, the bombing appeared to be a suicide attack.
President Pervez Musharraf condemned Friday's blast as a "heinous act of terrorism" and ordered police to trace the culprits, according to The Associated Press. ...
Video showed the blood-spattered and shattered interior of the mosque with body parts littering the floor along with discarded worship caps and prayer rugs. ...
The mosque is housed in a religious school for students aged between 4 and 18. The school is run by the government and has separate mosques for Sunni and Shiite Muslim worshippers.
Witnesses told AP though that most of the victims were adults who were praying at the mosque.
There have been frequent terrorist attacks and sectarian violence in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and its business hub. Police there have been on high alert since April when they raided a building and found weapons and explosives.
About 80 percent of Pakistan's 150 million people are Sunni, and the rest Shiite. They live mainly in peace, but radical groups on both sides frequently carry out deadly attacks.
From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukrainian security forces seized nearly 375 pounds of a radioactive material seen as a likely ingredient for a "dirty bomb", authorities said Thursday. In a joint action, Ukraine's police and state security agents seized two containers of cesium-137 and arrested three men from the southern city of Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, police spokesman Yuriy Kondratyev told The Associated Press. An unspecified number of people also were detained throughout Ukraine.Cesium-137 is considered a likely ingredient for a so-called "dirty bomb," in which conventional explosives are combined with radioactive material.
Another terror/charity story, from Dallas's CBS11, with thanks to Todd and Dick:
All through his protracted fight to gain legal residency in America, 16-year Dallas resident Ayman Sabri Ismail has held to the story that his work for the Holy Land Foundation was as a lowly computer graphics technician who knew nothing about the charity’s business.Claiming a tenuous low-profile connection to the Richardson-based organization could only help the Jordanian stay in North Texas with his naturalized American wife and five children. Especially, since President Bush two years ago declared the charity a clandestine fundraising arm for the terrorist group Hamas, shut it down and moved to deport or charge other employees with various crimes.
But in an unusual turn of courtroom events, the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday allowed a rare public accusation to surface: that Ismail is a terrorist.
Government records obtained by CBS-11 cite evidence that Ismail was a high-ranking fundraiser for the Holy Land Foundation, not the lowly computer technician he has repeatedly claimed he was. Working as a fundraiser for the banned organization makes Ismail a terrorist under provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the government has asserted in immigration records obtained by CBS-11.
A Dallas immigration judge’s ruling on a request for bond, detailing evidence gathered by the Department of Homeland Security, says Ismail accepted checks from donors, actively solicited money and was given the title “Director of Resource Development, Pledges Division.”
“Notwithstanding (Ismail’s) self-serving statements, the evidence demonstrates that respondent did solicit and receive funds for HLF within the meaning of (the Patriot Act),” according to a Dallas immigration judge’s ruling, called a bond memorandum, denying a bond hearing. “Respondent engaged in terrorist activity…
Ismail was detained earlier this month and sent to a federal holding facility in Haskell, Texas, where he could not be reached for comment. According to government records, he denied being a fundraiser for HLF even when presented with checks made out to him and donor solicitations sporting his signature and title.
“In general, the respondent argues that he did not solicit funds on behalf of HLF and that HLF did not solicit funds that were provided to Hamas,” the bond memorandum stated.
From his defense comes the usual allegations of racist persecution. Evidently all these guys are reading out of the same playbook.
Ismail’s Dallas attorney, John Wheat Gibson, dismissed the government allegations as government persecution tantamount to German government persecution of Jews during the 1930s.“What this young man is going through is pretty much what a lot of Jewish Germans had to suffer in 1936,” Gibson said. “It had nothing to do with the merits of the case; it has to do purely with the ethnicity of the defendant.”
Gibson also said that even if his client did wear several hats while working for HLF, raising money for an organization that Ismail believed was a legitimate charity is not a crime.
“He was doing the same job that the secretary for the Baptist church does,” Gibson said. “They have no evidence that he was any more than a graphic artist. He was working for a nonprofit corporation.”
The Bush administration in December 2001 cited FBI and foreign intelligence in claiming that HLF and some of its employees worked as clandestine U.S.-based support for Hamas, a group that has repeatedly deployed suicide bombers in a often-stated quest to eliminate the state of Israel.
Supporters have steadfastly maintained that HLF was a legitimate charity that helped only needy Muslims across the globe but they have lost legal appeals to reopen all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
One former FBI counter-terrorism official who worked on the HLF investigation said the charity funneled large sums of money as incentives for suicide bombers to strike.
“It was to help support those families, telling the terrorists that we will take care of your family if you do this for Allah,” said Tino Perez, recently retired head of the Dallas FBI’s International Terrorism squad. ...
But a spokesperson for the DFW Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, defended Ismail as nothing more or less than a devoted father and husband. Court records show that Ismail came to the U.S. on a student visa in 1990 to attend the University of Texas at Tyler.
“They need to focus on the real terrorists, not innocent people that happen to be Muslims or Arabs … and being targeted because of that,” she said.
Maybe this man really is innocent. But when has a Muslim ever been arrested when such spokesmen didn't say "They need to focus on the real terrorists"? Just who would this spokesperson identify as a "real" terrorist? George W. Bush? Ariel Sharon?
There is no jihad in the Balkans, they say. Orthodox Serbs and others are trying to frame a purely ethnic conflict as a jihad, they say.
From a Treasury Department press release, with thanks to the SITE Institute and Jeffrey Imm:
In another step today to halt the flow of terrorist dollars that have tainted the charitable community, the U.S. Department of the Treasury Department designated three Bosnian charities under Executive Order 13224. The U.S. is asking the United Nations’ 1267 Sanctions Committee to add these entities to its consolidated list of terrorists tied to al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden and the Taliban.“Today’s action continues the international drumbeat to expose the terrorist nodes used to support the infrastructure of hate," said Juan Zarate, the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Executive Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. “Unfortunately, we have seen the vulnerabilities of charities in countries like Bosnia, where there is not only a need for charitable giving but also a susceptibility that such institutions will be co-opted by terrorist sympathizers.”
The United States previously designated Bosnian-operated charities that were funneling dollars for terrorist-related activities, including the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), the Global Relief Foundation (GRF) and the Bosnian branch of Al-Haramain Foundation (AHF), including its director and Vazir, an alias for the organization.
Yasser Arafat attends Friday prayers at a mosque adjacent to his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Friday, May 7, 2004 (AP)
Oh, one is tempted to joke about this: at last, something on which Israelis and Palestinians can agree, etc. etc. and so forth. But is there anyone who doubts that this man is alive only at the sufferance of Israel? It is only the fear of someone worse than Arafat that makes them rather bear the ills they have than fly to others they know not of.
Palestinian Media Watch has the goods on last Friday's sermon.
Ever since Israeli PM Ariel Sharon's statement that Yasser Arafat as a terrorist leader is not immune from Israeli retribution, Palestinian Authority TV has repeatedly stated that Arafat actually wants to be killed by Israel, which would grant him the status of Shahid (Holy Martyr). In last week's sermon, the Imam restated the Palestinian Islamic belief that death as a Shahid is preferable to life, going so far as to pray for Arafat's death as a Shahid.The following is text of the sermon:
“Regarding the threats of this Nazi mass murderer [Ariel Sharon] against President Arafat, we hereby tell him: We are not like you, because we do not desire life. If you threaten to kill President Arafat, we will pray to Allah: “Grant the President Shahada (Martyrdom) for you." Yes, we do not pray - like other preachers pray - for longevity for the rulers; here in Palestine we pray: “Lord, grant the President Shahada for you”.” [PA TV Sermon by Ibrahim Madiras, April 30, 2004]
Tycoon Al-Fayed: Who would have thought a school "considered a model of religious moderation" could be involved in such a bloodbath?
More on the situation in Thailand. Some are no doubt truly shocked while others are "shocked, shocked" ala Casablanca. (Thanks to Nicolei)
Harrods tycoon Mohammed al Fayed donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to an Islamic school where 11 pupils died in a bloody confrontation between machete-wielding militants and Thai security forces, its headmaster said today.The school is considered a model of religious moderation, and students and staff say they are shocked at the involvement of former and current students in the April 28 attacks on police and army posts in southern Thailand.
Chares Krauthammer has interesting observations on the Iraqi prisoner abuse story.
...there is one fundamental issue at stake that dares not speak its name. This war is also about -- deeply about -- sex.For the jihadists, at stake in the war against the infidels is the control of women. Western freedom means the end of women's mastery by men, and the end of dictatorial clerical control over all aspects of sexuality -- in dress, behavior, education, the arts.
Taliban rule in Afghanistan was the model of what the jihadists want to impose upon the world. The case the jihadists make against freedom is that wherever it goes, especially America and Europe, it brings sexual license and corruption, decadence and depravity.
The appeal of this fear can be seen in the Arab world's closest encounter with modernity: Israel. Israeli women are by far the most liberated of any in that part of the world. For decades, the Arab press has responded with lurid stories of Israeli sexual corruption.The most famous example occurred in the late 1990s when Egyptian newspapers claimed that chewing gum Israel was selling in Egypt was laced with sexual hormones that aroused insatiable lust in young Arab women. Palestinian officials later followed with charges that Israeli chewing gum was a Zionist plot for turning Palestinian women into prostitutes, and "completely destroying the genetic system of young boys" to boot.
Which is why the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.
Photos proclaim "I told you so"
That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe -- and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations.
Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an "I told you so" played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.
Terrorists are using the Net to threaten nations' electronic systems and infrastructures (Ofer Zemach, Jerusalem Post)
The Jerusalem Post with a round up of how jihadis use cyberspace:
Islamic terrorists are winning the on-line war against Western interests because of their virtually unchecked ability to use the Internet to plan, promote, and propagate both physical and cyber attacks.Efforts to monitor, predict, and counter such attacks are only in the earliest stages. Technical, legal, privacy, and even political challenges are slowing down what could be called cyber counterterrorism in Israel and the US. Private groups have done much of what little successful monitoring has been done so far, as government efforts, particularly in the US, have been hampered by civil liberties concerns.
While no major terror attacks have yet been carried out on or through the Internet, the sophistication of attacks is increasing and test runs for major disruptions have occurred.
These efforts go far beyond spamming people mercilessly and trying to recruit over the web.
The Washington Post reported in 2002 that US intelligence services had monitored al-Qaida terrorists snooping around in the computer systems of dams, power plants, and other facilities.Three recent power outages within a week at Los Angeles International Airport have raised some concerns. One of the power outages affected 100 flights and caused two planes to fly within six kilometers of each other, closer than US regulations allow. Two of the outages were attributed to birds landing on power lines, and a malfunctioning transformer apparently caused the third.
I hope al-Qaida isn't training birds.
(KATU photos)
This story from Houston's ABC affiliate has Brandon Mayfield's wife praying for his release, but doesn't mention to whom she is praying: Mayfield, an American lawyer who represented jihadist Jeffrey Battle and has now been arrested on suspicion of a connection to the Madrid bombing, is a convert to Islam.
Is it possible that he, like John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, and so many other Western converts, somehow missed the Qur'an's teachings of peace we keep hearing so much about?
"My husband is a good man. He is a good father and he is a good husband," said Mayfield's wife, Mona Mayfield. "I am upset that this has leaked out. There have been no charges against my husband, and we pray for his early release."Mayfield also worked as an assistant to the defense of Jeffrey Battle back in 2002. Battle was convicted of helping al Qaida, and sentenced to 18 months in prison. It's not clear yet if that has any connection to Mayfield's arrest.
And in a story from Portland's KATU, we learn that Mayfield could not have done anything so heinous as to help the Madrid bombers. Why? Well, because he is a devout Muslim and goes to mosque. He would never have had anything to do with those Madrid bombers, who were ... devout Muslims who went to mosque.
And of course there are the standard protestations of innocence, discrimination, and official mishandling of the case, which appear whenever a Muslim is arrested on suspicion of terrorist activity.
"His wife was in tears because of the way the search was conducted. The FBI apparently hurt things in the house, left things in disarray," Nelson told reporters outside Mayfield's home. "He is a regular run-of-the-mill guy."Nelson also said Mayfield had never traveled to Spain.
Mayfield's mother, AvNell Mayfield, told a Kansas newspaper said her son had not traveled outside of the U.S. since he visited his wife's family 10 years ago.
"He is not a militant person," she said. "He is very law-abiding, very quiet. He is a devout Muslim and goes to mosque. This is an outrage."
Neighbors tell KATU News that Brandon Mayfield and his wife have lived in the home for about a year and a half and are a friendly family.
Najaf: A terrified family strolls by a wicked American and his tank
From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
NAJAF, Iraq — U.S. soldiers seized the governor's office Thursday in the holy city of Najaf, wresting control from Shiite militiamen loyal to a radical cleric in battles that left an estimated 40 insurgents dead. ...Amid concerns that U.S. troops were about to move directly against anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, his militiamen dug in in Najaf, taking positions behind earthen mounds leading into the city center and firing a barrage of mortar shells and small arms fire at the U.S. base late Thursday. American soldiers responded with 120mm mortar fire.
Gunmen took cover behind buildings as American helicopters flew overhead. An increased number of fighters were seen in the city center.
"We will fight until the last drop of our blood," said Dhia Shami, as he stood behind a dirt barricade.
"We expect the Americans to retreat," said fellow militiaman Malek Holeicha. "We are fighting for our faith. They don't have any faith."
At the city's Imam Ali shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, a coffin wrapped in an Iraqi flag was brought in — apparently one of the dead from the fighting.
"This is a martyr for Muqtada," mourners chanted. ...
Elsewhere, coalition troops exchanged gunfire with dozens of al-Sadr militiamen in Karbala, 50 miles north of Najaf. Militiamen took ambush positions behind cars and a discarded desk a few hundred yards from the city's main Shiite shrines.
A witness told Associated Press Television News that troops fired on the insurgents and ended up destroying four buses of Pakistani pilgrims, which were seen burning. The witness said "three or four" Pakistanis had been killed.
"We're going to demolish them — and even Bush," shouted one masked man, waving a Kalashnikov. "We're going to win, by God's will."
Militiamen also fired on Italian troops farther south near Nasiriyah, wounding one, the Italian military said.
In the past two days U.S. soldiers estimate they have killed about 80 militiamen. One U.S. soldier was killed Wednesday.
"I think we are going to gain momentum from now on," said Lt. Michael Watson, a platoon leader with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Najaf.
The Baghdad bomb exploded outside a 3-foot-high concrete blast wall that protects a U.S. checkpoint.
The U.S. soldier slain by the bomb was the 21st U.S. serviceman killed in Iraq in May. The homicide bomber also died.
An Internet statement signed by a group linked to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.
The statement, on a Web site known for militant Islamic messages, was signed by the military wing of the "Monotheism and Jihad Group," which is believed led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Jordanian is wanted by the United States for allegedly organizing militants to fight U.S. troops in Iraq on behalf of Al Qaeda. The statement's authenticity could not be confirmed. ...
Meanwhile, a blindfolded man described as an Iraqi-American being held hostage in Iraq was shown pleading for help on an Arab TV station.
The man, speaking English, gave his name as Aban Elias and said he was from Denver.
"I am a civil engineer working here in Baghdad," he said, adding that he worked for the Pentagon.
Elias, shown on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV, appealed to Islamic associations to work for his release.
With the tape came a statement from a previously unknown group calling itself "The Islamic Rage Brigade." The group said Elias was kidnapped on May 3. It made no demands.
Megawati with Muzadi (Reuters)
Lagging in the polls, Indonesia's Megawati is playing the religious card. From Reuters, with thanks to Andy:
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri on Thursday chose the leader of the country's largest Muslim group as vice presidential candidate on her ticket for the July 5 election.The choice of Hasyim Muzadi, chairman of the moderate, 40-million-strong Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), is seen as an effort to boost Megawati's waning popularity after her party, the secular Indonesia Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P), lost significant ground in April 5 parliamentary elections. ...
Megawati faces a tough battle in the July 5 presidential election against former security minister and ex-general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has been topping opinion polls, and former military chief Wiranto who is the nominee of the Golkar party that did best in the parliamentary elections.
Cleric Muzadi was upbeat during his turn at the lectern.
"Nahdlatul Ulama has no plan to set up a religious state but it wants to see religious values shine across this country," he said, adding that Megawati first courted him six months ago.
"The combination of me and Megawati will unite 'freedom' and 'God is Greatest'. The two should not be on different sides," said Muzadi, referring to the respective rallying cries of the nationalist and Islamic camps.
Before the announcement, PDI-P deputy chairman Roy Janis said the choice of Muzadi was aimed at bringing solid Muslim credentials to Megawati's re-election bid. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country.
Brandon Mayfield (KGW Photo)
Breaking news from Fox
FBI agents arrested a Portland, Ore., man Thursday as part of the investigation into the deadly train bombings in Spain, federal officials said.Brandon Bieri Mayfield, a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody on a material witness warrant, said a senior law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The arrest is the first known in the United States with connections to the March 11 bombings in Madrid.
The FBI also searched his home, which he shares with his wife, the official said.
Beth Anne Steele, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Portland, confirmed two search warrants had been served Thursday in Washington County, which includes parts of Portland. She would not release further details.
Sue Rutledge, of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Portland, said the warrants were served in the cities of Portland and Beaverton. She could not comment about whether the warrants were connected to the train bombings in Madrid, or whether there had been any arrests.
Material witness warrants, usually kept confidential by a federal judge, are used by the government to hold people suspected of having direct knowledge about a crime or to allow time for further investigation into the witness.
Officials would not provide any further details about Mayfield or his alleged connection with the Madrid bombings, which killed 191 people and injured 2,000 others. Spanish authorities blame the attack on Islamic extremists, possibly linked to Al Qaeda.
Eighteen people have been charged to date in Spain -- six charged with mass murder and the others with collaboration or with belonging to a terrorist organization. The FBI and other U.S. agencies have warned that Al Qaeda or its sympathizers might attempt to attack mass transit systems in major U.S. cities this summer.
Earlier this year, in Portland, the last of six men and a woman were sentenced on charges of conspiring to wage war against the United States by helping Al Qaeda and the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.
UPDATE: Prepare yourselves. Reuters, of all places, has identified the lawyer as a Muslim. No doubt they see it as more evidence of prejudice: as Mayfield's brother said, "I think the reason they are holding him is because he is of the Muslim faith and because he is not super happy with the Bush administration."
Or could his arrest have something to do with this fact reported by Newsweek? Brandon Mayfield's fingerprints allegedly were found on bomb-related evidence associated with the Madrid attacks.
A Muslim lawyer from Portland, Oregon, was detained by the FBI on Thursday without explanation, his family said, but Newsweek magazine said he was being held in connection with the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in March.
The bounty hunter
Osama, or someone, is offering gold for American and UN officials. From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
CAIRO, Egypt - A statement attributed to Osama bin Laden offered rewards in gold valued at nearly $136,000 Thursday for the killing of top U.S. and U.N. officials in Iraq. ..."You know that America promised big rewards for those who kill mujahedeen (holy warriors)," the transcript read. "We in al-Qaida organization will guarantee, God willing, 10,000 grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier Bremer, or the American chief commander or his deputy in Iraq."
It was referring to L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, and top military officials.
"For security reasons, the rewards will be given as soon as conditions permit, God willing," the transcript read. "As for those who die while killing an occupying soldier, the great prize will be for us and for him when God grants him martyrdom, and the smaller prize (the gold) will be for his family."
The statement also promised the same reward for the deaths of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi.
"The United Nations is nothing but a Zionists' tool, even if it worked under the cover of providing humanitarian aid," the statement said. "... Whoever kills Kofi Annan or the head of his commission in Iraq or a representative like Lakhdar Brahimi, he will be awarded the same prize of 10,000 grams of gold."
The statement promised a lesser prize — 1,000 grams of gold — to anyone killing a citizen of countries it called "the masters of the veto like Americans and Britons" — a reference to nations with veto power on the U.N. Security Council.
And it offered 500 grams of gold to anyone killing citizens of countries it called "slaves of the Security Council who are in Iraq, like Japan and Italy."
With gold selling Thursday on London exchanges for $387.60 an ounce, 10,000 grams of gold was valued at $135,660, 1,000 grams at $13,566, and 500 grams at $6,783.
The statement appeared on two Web sites, the Ansar Islam Forum and the Islamic Research Center. Both are clearing-houses for statements by al-Qaida and other Islamic militant groups.
The transcript also denounced U.S. plans to hand sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30, calling them a trick to end the resistance that has killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers.
"The so-called handing sovereignty over to Iraqis is an overt trick, to anesthetize the people and abort the militant resistance, and (such a trick) will not deceive the true mujahedeen of the sons of Iraq," the statement said.
"There is no sovereignty for Iraq as long as a crusader soldier remains in its land, and no sovereignty for Iraq as long as it is not ruled by Islam."
It urged Iraqis to fight a holy war against their U.S.-appointed Governing Council, which it called a "puppet" of the U.S.-led coalition and "a tool to pass their plans to the people and a way to show their hatred of religion."
"Therefore, jihad (holy war) is obligatory for all Muslims in Iraq," the statement read.
The statement was titled: "A Word from the emir of the Islamic armies, Osama, to the nation and especially to brotherly Muslims in Iraq." It used language similar to previous bin Laden statements, laden with Quranic verse.
Those Qur'anic verses are not just window dressing. They are Osama's effort to potray his mission as simply a manifestation of the responsibility of all Muslims. These verses are recruitment tools for the terrorists. And they work.
As June 30 draws ever closer, the mujahedin continue their efforts to destablize Iraq. Democracy is not something they long for, but something they view as a foreign import that offends Allah. From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb Thursday outside the so-called Green Zone that houses the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad, killing five Iraqi civilians and a U.S. soldier.Twenty-five people, including two American soldiers, were injured in the blast. The bomb, hidden inside an orange-and-white Baghdad taxi, exploded outside of a three-foot-high concrete blast wall which protects a U.S. checkpoint.
"There was a long line of cars. Fortunately, the blast barriers worked in this case," said Col. John Murray of the U.S. Army's Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division.
A suicide bomber also died in the attack, the military said.
Hours later, a roadside bomb exploded on Saadoun Street, a busy commercial avenue on the east side of the Tigris River near the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. Two Iraqis were injured.
Also Thursday, the U.S. command said that two U.S. soldiers were killed and two were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded in Baghdad. A statement said the explosion occurred just before midnight Wednesday but gave no further details.
The suicide attack came one day after U.S.-led forces launched their biggest assault yet against militiamen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, raiding hideouts in several cities and clashing with gunmen. At least 15 Iraqis and a U.S. soldier were killed in Thursday fighting. In later overnight clashes, another 11 militiamen were killed, the U.S. military said.
Abu Hamza and his masked bodyguard. The Finsbury Park Mosque which was once his headquarters was raided in January 2003 after police found castor beans, traces of ricin and equipment for making the toxin in an apartment (AP)
Where is the ricin this man produced? From the Washington Post, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
LYON, France -- Menad Benchellali, thin and bearded, was known among his Arab friends as "the chemist" because of the special skills he learned at al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. When he returned to his native France in 2001, according to investigators, he set up a laboratory in his parents' spare bedroom and began to manufacture ricin, one of the deadliest known substances.Working at night with windows open to dissipate fumes from the process, he blended ingredients in a coffee decanter and spooned the doughy mixture onto newspapers to dry. The final product was a white power that Benchellali stored in small glass flasks and old jars of Nivea skin cream -- to be used, as he later told police, "in the event I became involved in the jihad."
Today, exactly how many jars of ricin the 29-year-old Benchellali may have produced -- and their whereabouts -- is an urgent question for European governments facing a wave of terrorist attacks and threats. Last year, investigators say, similar containers turned up in Britain, in the possession of North Africans who were allegedly planning an attack. At least one other jar is known to be missing, and French investigators suspect that still others exist.
The story of Benchellali's laboratory offers a glimpse into a secret world of suspected terrorists and their quest for biological and chemical weapons. According to European investigators, a string of incidents in recent months points to a particular interest in ricin, the highly lethal toxin that comes from castor beans. Other powerful poisons that also are relatively easy to obtain and use -- botulinum toxin and industrial chemicals such as potassium cyanide and osmium tetroxide -- have also been sought by suspected terrorists. In April, police in Jordan foiled what government officials said was a plot to use chemical bombs and poison gas in a series of attacks on embassies and government buildings in Amman, the capital. ...
Al Qaeda's interest in biological and chemical arms is well documented, although the group's ability to produce such weapons is believed to have been crippled by the loss of its sanctuary in Afghanistan. Invading U.S. forces in 2001 discovered and destroyed two production centers that were preparing to manufacture cyanide and the botulinum and salmonella toxins, and possibly anthrax.
Since then, investigators believe al Qaeda has become more diffuse, transforming itself into a loose-knit collection of underground cells. They say that Benchellali, who has been in prison in France since December 2002, may be one of hundreds of specially trained graduates of al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan who have shared their skills with a new generation of recruits. ...
In the past 21/2 years, ricin-making equipment or traces of the toxin have been discovered during police raids on al Qaeda-affiliated cells in Britain, France, Spain, Russia, Georgia and Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. In each case, police also found manuals or papers containing detailed instructions for making and using ricin. ...
Deadlier by far than cobra venom, a speck of pure ricin the size of a pinhead will kill an adult if injected into the bloodstream. A slightly larger dose -- roughly a pinch -- is fatal if swallowed or inhaled. Ricin is water-soluble and virtually odorless, so it can be used to contaminate water or food supplies on a small scale. Victims may be unaware of their exposure until hours afterward, when the toxin begins to attack living cells and disrupts their ability to make essential proteins. The result is respiratory distress, internal bleeding and organ failure. Death can occur in as little as 36 hours, and there is no antidote or cure. ...
The raw materials for ricin are cheap. The toxin naturally exists in castor beans, which grow wild in many parts of the world, including the United States, where the plants are prized by gardeners and landscapers as an ornamental shrub. Brazil, China and India grow industrial quantities of the colorful, plump beans to make castor oil, which is used in products ranging from laxatives and shampoos to lubricating oils. A single castor bean, if chewed, contains enough ricin to kill a child. Al Qaeda's interest in ricin dates to at least the late 1990s. Two terrorism manuals seized from al Qaeda operatives in several locations contain detailed instructions on making and using the toxin. One was found by British journalists in November 2001 at a deserted al Qaeda safe house in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Another was titled, "The Encyclopedia of Jihad," and commends ricin as one of the "poisons that the holy warrior can prepare and use without endangering his health." ...
The son of an Algerian-born Muslim cleric, Benchellali grew up in a gritty Lyon suburb, Les Minguettes, notable for its thickets of towering public housing complexes and 30-percent unemployment rate. As a boy, he witnessed his father's confrontations with the French government over laws banning Islamic head coverings for school girls. Although he developed a fondness for nice cars and clothes, he saw few opportunities for obtaining them, or for gaining full acceptance as a Muslim and Arab in France, according to family acquaintances."As an Arab living here, the only area of society where you are truly accepted is religion," said Mustapha Kessous, a Lyon journalist and radio talk-show host who has written extensively about the Benchellali family and Lyon's immigrant community. "To anyone meeting you on the street, you are a Muslim and an Arab first, not a Frenchman."
Police are uncertain how Benchellali first connected with al Qaeda. In the late 1990s, according to U.S. and French intelligence officials, he traveled to Afghanistan to train in one of several camps that the group established for foreign recruits. On one of his later trips he was accompanied by his younger brother Mourad, who eventually was captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and is now being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
U.S. officials believe Menad Benchellali may have received advanced training at al Qaeda's Derunta camp, near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. The camp housed one of al Qaeda's labs and a school for a select group of recruits who studied the use of toxic chemicals and biological toxins, including ricin, U.S. intelligence sources say.
The instructors included at least two scientists: Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist who is now in custody in Malaysia, and a Pakistani microbiologist who U.S. officials have declined to name. At Derunta, U.S. forces discovered castor oil and equipment for making ricin. "There is a lot of evidence of crude attempts to produce ricin," at Derunta, said a U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition he not be identified by name.
After al Qaeda lost Afghan camps to invading U.S. forces in late 2001, Benchellali's chemical training shifted to the Pankisi Gorge, a lawless area in Georgia that borders Chechnya, the separatist republic in southern Russia, French authorities say. The existence of makeshift laboratories and training camps in the mountainous region has been documented by the Georgian government, which moved to close the camps early last year. Benchellali told police he had planned to join the Chechen rebels but was thwarted in his attempts to cross into Russia. He decided instead to return to France, taking with him new skills and a network of contacts spanning most of Western Europe. ...
Cue the standard protestations of innocence:
Relatives and neighbors contend that the government's claims about Benchellali are wildly exaggerated. Jacques Debray, a lawyer representing the Benchellali family, said he believed that France's arrest of the parents was partly a pressure tactic to extract confessions -- including possible new leads to assist the U.S. government in its prosecution of Mourad Benchellali, the son held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. "Such information could clearly improve relations with the United States," Debray said.French terrorism officials, however, are convinced that the arrests halted a terrorist attack and likely saved lives -- and not just in France. But the details of such plans for an attack are not known.
"Members of this group had training in chemical and biological weapons," said a senior French terrorism investigator who spoke on the condition he not be identified by name. "We know they wanted to develop poisons and use them to create panic. It was to be one tool among many."
Plots Across Europe
Menad Benchellali's arrest gave police a breakthrough that led to the unmasking of other plots and terror cells in Europe.
In January 2003, prompted by French discoveries in the Benchellali case, British police raided apartments in London, Bournemouth and Manchester and apprehended 13 North African men suspected of ties to al Qaeda and an affiliated terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam. In one of the London apartments authorities found castor beans, traces of ricin and equipment for making the toxin. Later that month, Spanish police arrested 16 North Africans and seized additional equipment, chemicals and false passports.
French officials believe the Spanish, British and French cells were communicating with one another and coordinating their activities, especially those related to obtaining toxins and poisons. Members of all three groups had spent time at the same Pankisi Gorge camp. Yet, more than a year after Benchellali's arrest, European and U.S. counterterrorism officials are not convinced that all members of the network have been identified.
The Bush administration has said it believes more than 100 militants were part of the same cluster of terrorist cells that allegedly included Benchellali. It also contends that members of the network took orders from Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Palestinian terrorist believed to have organized recent suicide bombings in Iraq. While other governments are less certain about the command structure, there is wide agreement among counterterrorism officials that additional sleeper cells continue to operate in Europe, Asia and possibly North America.
"They are honing their skills and awaiting instructions," said Jacquard, the French terrorism expert. "They make what they want and they raise their own money. Some may not be sophisticated. But they communicate with more professional and trained individuals who are operating under the last orders they received from leaders of al Qaeda."
Ryan Parry (Mirror)
From the Times Online, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Vetting procedures at the royal palaces must be tightened up and a new security director appointed after a reporter managed to get a job with the royal household, an inquiry has concluded. In the two months that Ryan Parry, an undercover Daily Mirror reporter, spent working as a footman at Buckingham Palace last year, he laid out the Queen's breakfast and visited the bedroom where President Bush and his wife were to sleep.After the breach, the independent Security Commission set up an inquiry under Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, a senior judge, to investigate what had gone wrong.
Today she reported that the Palace's existing security procedures were inadequate. Terrorists could have exploited the loopholes discovered by the press, she warned.
"The most likely sources of insider threat to the Royal Family are from the Press and individuals seeking to 'test' security measures or to cause embarrassment," said the report.
"However any weaknesses which can be exploited by these groups can also be exploited by terrorists."
The commission's report also said that the background, criminal record and job references of possible workers at the Palace, including visiting contractors, should be rigorously checked.
More help from an "ally." From UPI, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Sanaa, , May. 6 (UPI) -- Yemen said Thursday it will not extradite a Yemeni citizen accused by the United States of terrorism and loyalty to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.Prime Minister Abdel Kader Bajamal was quoted by the weekly "September 26" saying Sheik Abdel Majid al-Zandani, who figures on a U.S. list of wanted terrorists worldwide, should be tried in Yemen if accusations against him proved to be correct.
"The Yemeni Republic cannot extradite any of its citizens to a foreign country, be it Sheik al-Zandani or anyone else," Bajamal said, stressing the United States' request to extradite him is "totally rejected."
U.S. authorities accuse al-Zandani, a Sunni Muslim cleric, of being a fervent follower of bin Laden and having a long history of backing al-Qaida and mobilizing terrorists.
Zafarullah Khan Jamali
From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistani intelligence has uncovered a plot by a small band of terrorists to hijack and possibly blow up a plane bound for the United Arab Emirates, the prime minister said Wednesday, prompting the nation to put its airports on "red alert."Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali told The Associated Press that authorities believe there was a group of about four to six people who wanted to hijack a plane. Intelligence indicated they wanted to blow it up, he said.
There was no indication when the plot was due to be carried out or if it involved al-Qaida. Jamali would not speculate on whether the hijackers were Pakistanis or foreigners.
"Hijackers have no nationality," he said.
A senior official at Pakistan's intelligence agency said authorities are not sure who the men are.
"If we had their names and nationalities or other information about their whereabouts, they would have been arrested already," he said on condition of anonymity. ...
"We got the information from our intelligence network, not from a threatening phone call or letter," Riaz said. "We don't know what group it is. We can't say whether it is al-Qaida."
No flights have been canceled because of the alert, Jamali said.
"Naturally when one gets some hint about (a plot) or one gets a feeler or is informed directly or indirectly, I think this high alert is a must," Jamali said.
The United Arab Emirates is the main financial hub of the Arab world. Dubai is also a regional transit hub and there are about 20 flights a day from the Pakistani cities of Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. Pakistan International Airlines, Emirates airlines, Gulf Air, Malaysian Air and Aeroasia fly to the Emirates from Pakistan.
In March, the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi and the consulate in Dubai briefly shut their doors after receiving a "specific threat," though there was no indication it was connected to the recent Pakistani alert.
Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Rauf Chaudhry told AP that a Pakistani intelligence agency issued the recent warning. He also would not say whether the men were believed to be al-Qaida.
Chaudhry said no arrests have been made and airports nationwide continue to be "on red alert."
Pakistan has been beset by a string of terror attacks since President Gen. Pervez Musharraf threw his support behind the United States' war on terror following the September 11 attacks.
Musharraf himself survived two suicide attacks in December, and dozens have been killed in attacks on foreigners and minority Christians. The president blamed the assassination attempts on al-Qaida.
Several homegrown Islamic militant groups -- including Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and the al-Qaida-linked Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi -- also have launched frequent attacks.
U.S. soldiers guard the voter registration office in Kabul
Some people don't want the elections in Afghanistan to go forward. From CNN, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
(CNN) -- Two Western election workers have been killed in a suspected militant attack in a remote eastern region of Afghanistan, an Afghan official has said.One private security source told CNN on Wednesday the pair were working for Global Risks, a British company helping the United Nations to register Afghans for the elections scheduled to take place in September.
Some reports said an Afghan translator was also killed in the attack, which took place near Nurestan.
"I confirm that there was an attack by a number of people and two foreigners and one Afghan were killed," Deputy Interior Minister Hilalludin Hilal told The Associated Press. The attack occurred Tuesday, Hilal said.
It was unclear where the foreign nationals were from or whether they were U.N. employees.
Afghanistan, which is grappling with a growing drug trade and sporadic violence, is a key security concern for the West two years after a U.S.-led coalition toppled the Taliban for harboring al Qaeda terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
International security officials are particularly concerned about the September elections. In late March, Afghan President Hamid Karzai postponed the poll -- originally scheduled for June -- citing low voter registration.
But the U.N. is pressing ahead with plans to register 10 million Afghan voters across the country, despite mounting violence by Taliban-led militants.
The world body has so far registered almost 2 million Afghans in eight major cities for the election, but has only just started to sign up voters in lawless remote regions.
Abu Usama may know this man; then again he may not
In the Arabic-language Al-Wasat magazine, a revealing interview with a jihadist. From the SITE Institute, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Abu Usama, who gave himself this nickname in honor of bin Laden, affirmed his association with al-Qaeda and also assured that he “speaks for Abu Musab Zarqawi”. He denied Zarqawi’s involvement in the latest bloody attacks that targeted Shi’ite religious centers, assuring that “the Americans’ losses in Fallujah exceeded by far what had been announced. He said that, during the latest battles, 15 US helicopters were taken down, and more than 90 armored cars and tanks were destroyed with weapons developed by the combatants themselves”.Abu Usama, who calls himself the “Prince” of combatants, added that the “al-Qaeda organization is spiritual not military”, and that “every Mujahid truthful to God is a Qaeda member”. He assured that “they are fighting the Americans because they invaded Iraq, and because they are blasphemers, as God’s word should come before everything”.
Pursuant to a question on the lack of technical and military balance between their traditional weapons and the advanced US munitions, Abu Usama led his interviewer to a room full of US weapons, equipment, and clothing confiscated by “the heroic Mujahideen after having killed the blasphemers who had them in their possession”. He explained that they are getting weapons from everywhere, that “they are capable of fighting the Blasphemers as long as it is God’s wish”, and that “the Believers are bound to triumph”.
To a question if the Salafists viewed Shi’ites and Sufis as their enemies, based on the fact that the Salafist’s ideology considers Shiites and Sufis blasphemers, Abu Usama said: “If they collaborate with the occupation, then they are our enemies. And if they take no action, they are silent devils that must be killed when necessary. That is when they become a danger to Islam and Muslims… Such is the case in Iraq because they are not fighting the Blasphemers and are helping them get established in Muslim territories”.
Repeatedly avoiding to admit if he was a Zarqawi follower, Abu Usama fervently denied any involvement of Zarqawi in the assassination of Assayyed Al Hakim, the Ashoura events, and the explosions that targeted Iraqis, saying: “Those accusations are lies made up by the American-Zionists to portray a bad image of the Jihad. I swear by the Great God that, every targeting in Iraq of the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds was arranged for by the CIA and the Zionist Mossad”.
He acknowledged that, even though Shi’ites and Sufis are considered Blasphemers, and their killing is recommended in their ideology, they took no part in those operations and were not aware of them. In a reference to Muqtada Al Sadr’s last “khutba” [speech] in which he swore to defend their sanctities, he said: “I would like to tell him [Al Sadr]: ‘your sanctities are Muslim sanctities that we respect. We, in the “Salaf Saleh”, have not taken any military action against them up until this moment’”.
Abu Usama explained that, holding blasphemers as prisoners is an old means used to make the enemy fail politically, and to exchange the hostages with the Mujahideen detained inside and outside Iraq. He disagreed with his interviewer that citizens of countries that did not participate in the war on Iraq should not be held hostages, “for all blaspheming countries are openly or secretly allies of the US”. He considered that “America is in deep trouble in Fallujah. With all its power, it was not capable of defeating this small city. It would if it could”.
When asked about the number of Mujahideen, their nationalities [if they were only Iraqis, or Arabs and foreigners], and who supplies them with weapons ready to use in their confrontations with the Americans, he said: “Thanks to God, we have Brothers bearers of the highest scientific diplomas. They are capable, with the help of God, to manufacture the weapons, not only finance their supply”.
The "highest scientific diplomas"? But I thought this was a movement that only appealed to the ignorant. Hmmm.
Johanna Boogerd-Quaak
It is crucial that civil liberties be protected; otherwise we risk becoming indistinguishable from the jihadists, who would subjugate non-Muslims and women under Sharia. But unfortunately many use calls to protect civil liberties simply as political cover for quite different motives (often involving craven dhimmitude and an unwillingness to confront the realities of jihadist irredentism and expansionism), and it has all become very difficult to sort out. From BreakingNews.ie, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
The European Parliament overruled member governments today and refused to reconsider its opposition to a contentious transatlantic anti-terrorist deal on sharing airline passenger data.The parliament in Strasbourg voted 343 to 301 against the request to offer an opinion on the deal.
Eighteen MEPs abstained.
The decision not to vote on the deal, negotiated last December between the commission and the United States, is a setback for EU governments keen to boost anti-terrorist cooperation with Washington.
But in practical terms it may have little effect, since interim measures are already in place that provide Washington with even more passenger information than the proposed permanent agreement.
The proposed final accord – intended to provide legal certainty for European airlines caught in the middle – will stay on hold until the court rules on the issue, which could take several months.
Many in the Parliament fear the deal violates civil liberties.
“We still have no guarantees that European passenger data transferred to the US is not passed on to third parties,” said Dutch liberal Johanna Boogerd-Quaak, the leading opponent of the deal.
Conservatives, who supported the deal in last month’s vote, argued it was urgently needed to prevent terrorist attacks on transatlantic flights.
14-year-old Husam Abdu, losing his chance to cavort with the virgins last March
It seems that the teenage suicide bombers had teenage recruiters. From Reuters, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm and Nicolei:
JERUSALEM: A 15-year-old Palestinian boy was charged by the Israeli military on Tuesday with recruiting teenagers to become suicide bombers.Nasser Awartani is accused of enlisting a 16-year-old who blew himself up at a military checkpoint and a 14-year-old who was caught with an explosives belt.
The 12 charges on the indictment submitted to the military court include attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The older boy blew himself up last October after telling Awartani that he “wishes to carry out an attack in the name of God,” the charge sheet said.
Awartani, of the West Bank city of Nablus, was photographed with him before the attack.
The 14-year-old was caught at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank in March.
Soldiers defused his explosives belt by remote control. The incident was broadcast around the world.
The case sparked a big outcry by Palestinians against militants' efforts to recruit teenagers who might more easily evade Israeli security checks.
Awartani, one of the youngest Palestinians to be charged with involvement in suicide bombings, recruited for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah Movement and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Musse Sheikh
The radical Muslim group is recruiting energetically in Denmark. Note that this report blandly assumes that moderate Muslims will be less devout than radicals. This highlights a key problem: that while there are many moderate Muslims, they lack a theoretical, theological foundation within Islam to justify their point of view. From the Copenhagen Post, with thanks to Ali Dashti and Nicolei:
Muslim fundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir has pulled out all the stops in a recruitment campaign to lure young immigrants to a meeting on Sunday at Copenhagen's Nørrebrohallen.On Tuesday, Hizb ut-Tahrir members loitered outside the locker room of Fremad Amager football club, which consists primarily of first and second-generation immigrant youth. According to the team's head coach--who is himself an immigrant, and asked Jyllands-Posten not to print his name--four Hizb uh-Tahrir members passed out flyers to the young players and told them about the meeting.
"They talked about Western domination around the world, and said it was high time that Muslims stood together to retaliate against attacks, and so on. There was a lot of talk about the US-Iraq conflict," said the coach.
The young football players were reportedly uninterested in Hizb ut-Tahrir's recruitment spiel, and left after 10 minutes.
Copenhagen's Amager neighbourhood has also been a hotspot for Hizb uh-Tahrir recruitment efforts in recent days. The group has passed out flyers in housing complexes with a high concentration of immigrants. On Wednesday, four young men handed out invitations to Sunday's meeting in front of the Amagerbro metro station. The young men declined Jyllands-Posten's requests for comment, referring all inquiries to Hizb ut-Tahrir's spokesman, Fadi Abdullatif. The newspaper was unable to reach Mr. Abdullatif on Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir ventured all the way to Tåstrup to pass out flyers and hang posters on the Nørrebrohallen meeting in the Taastrupgaard and Gadehavdegaard housing projects.
"We're not surprised that Hizb ut-Tahrir is operating out here now. I am not aware if they have been active in our council before. They're apparently moving further and further out from Copenhagen, and today they were out at Høje-Taastrup Station," said Mette Stribolt, a bilingual consultant at Høje Taastrup Council.
Stribolt said officials would be particularly vigilant of the organisation's activities in the coming months.
"We know that they're appealing in large part to young people under 18. And at that age, people are especially impressionable, and may be conflicted about their identity, opinions, and values. It is important that we encourage an open discussion on how to tackle this problem," said Stribold.
On Wednesday, Jyllands-Posten reported that Hizb uh-Tahrir was recruiting young people at Brøndby Station Center and surrounding S-train stations in Copenhagen's western suburbs. Teachers, social workers, and consultants from Brøndby Council told the newspaper that moderate young Muslims often felt pressured by their more devout, fundamentalist counterparts. In some cases, young, integrated Muslims have been physically threatened.
See also this from DR Nyheder (thanks again to Ali Dashti): Hizb-ut-Tahrir should be banned
The Danish People’s Party has suggested that a temporary ban be placed on the extreme Muslim organisation Hizb-ut-Tahrir, following the revelation yesterday that they are aggressively recruiting children at Danish schools. However, it is the first time the Radical-Left Party and the Social Democrats have also agreed to call on the Justice Minister to ban, temporarily, the organisation, until the case can be tried in the high courts.The suggested ban is also supported by several immigrant organisations. The spokesperson for the 17,000 Somalis living in Denmark, Musse Sheik, agrees that Hizb-ut-Tahrir should be banned if they are indeed acting as reported.
A new article by Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, "Why They Hate Us," is available today at FrontPage. It explores the rage caused by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers, explaining that such incidents are not the causes of the Muslim world's animus against the United States, and that that animus will not be pacified by any hearts-and-minds campaign or any amount of socioeconomic blandishments.
What Hugh sees when he looks in the mirror
Jihad Watch has from its inception been intended as much more than a website. We're pleased with how rapidly our traffic is growing — we just started in October, and the site received six million hits in April. But efforts are ongoing to establish Jihad Watch as an organization that will offer resistance to jihadist activity in the public and academic spheres. One of the most important aspects of this resistance at this point is simply raising public awareness of the nature and magnitude of the problem we are facing in jihad terrorism. In that connection, I am pleased to announce the formation of the Jihad Watch speakers bureau.
It's a small bureau, more like a file cabinet, at this point: two available speakers. But it is a beginning. As funding and circumstances permit, we will add others.
One speaker is, of course, I myself: Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer. I am, if you are unaware, the author of two books on Islam and coauthor of a third. I've also written seven monographs on Islam for the Free Congress Foundation, and innumerable articles. I have spoken about Islam at the University of North Carolina, the Florida Society for Middle East Studies at Florida Atlantic University, and many other schools, institutions, and organizations — as well as on hundreds of radio shows all over the country.
But the really exciting part of this announcement is our other available speaker: none other than Hugh Fitzgerald. Hugh is well known to regular readers of Jihad Watch as the gentleman who, with apparently miraculous ease, graces post after post with witty, erudite comments that manifest an astonishing breadth of knowledge about Islam and today's jihad terrorism. I am delighted to announce that he is now available through Jihad Watch to speak to your group — and that he is just as witty and erudite in person as he is on the printed page, or more so. Besides his comments here, you can read his review of my book Onward Muslim Soldiers here, which is much more elegantly written than the book itself, and his article "Islam for Infidels" here.
For information about booking either Hugh or me to speak to your group, use the "CONTACT US" feature to the left and send us an email.
From AP, with thanks to J.P. Mackie, who asks, "Can we expect the same from any Islamic leaders — to come on TV and express their dismay about the murderous mutilation of innocent workers passing through Fallujah, or the senseless killing of a pregnant mother and her 4 children?"
WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday in an interview with Arab TV that the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by some members of the U.S. military was "abhorrent" and does not represent "the America that I know."Bush's appearance on Arab television was set for the day after the Army disclosed that it is conducting criminal investigations of 10 prisoner deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus another 10 abuse cases.
In addition, the deaths of two Iraqi prisoners already have been ruled homicides. In one case, a soldier was court-martialed, reduced in rank and discharged from the Army. In the other homicide, a CIA contract interrogator's conduct has been referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
"There will be investigations, people will be brought to justice," Bush said of the alleged humiliation and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, a notorious prison during Saddam Hussein's regime that was taken over by U.S. troops.
He also said that the U.S. inquiry would look into whether such instances of abuse also took place in other prisons. "We want to know the truth," Bush said.
Hassan Butt (BBC)
Hassan Butt wants to be a martyr. From Asian News, with thanks to Nicolei:
A MUSLIM who publicly declared his support for the Madrid terrorists and claims he wants to be a `martyr' is being investigated by police.Hassan Butt, aged 24, from Manchester, featured in a TV programme which alleged that British Muslims are preparing to take up arms despite the efforts of the police and security forces.
Butt, who has previously been arrested twice under the Terrorism Act, said he "envies" the Madrid bombers and that he too would like to become a martyr.
He said: "It is my hope that by the age of 40 I am a martyr - and if I hadn't I would probably be a bit dejected in not being among the martyrs of Islam."
Asked if he was prepared to follow other British Muslims to a terror training camp, he says he would be "honoured" and that he would have his mother's support.
A dhimmi police official was standing by to correct the negative image Butt had left of Islam:
But Chief Superintendent Tony Kane said: "Greater Manchester Police will be viewing the programme to determine what, if any, offences have been committed."The experience of Greater Manchester Police staff in dealing with our Muslim communities is that the vast majority of British Muslim are appaled by terrorist atrocities.
"Furthermore, they believe that Islam categorically forbids any such violence which causes death and mayhem. This view was clearly expressed in a letter to all British mosques by the Muslim Council of Britain."
The Real Story with Fiona Bruce programme claimed many young men, like Butt, are influenced by London-based Omar Bakri, leader of the controversial al Muhajiroun group.
It said he has recently defended the Madrid bombers and told young British Muslims, some as young as 10, that they must "kill and be killed" for Islam, that "suicide bombers would be guaranteed a place in paradise", and even that they should consider "flying a plane into 10 Downing Street".
And, referring to the continued presence of British, Spanish and US forces in Iraq, it said he told an east London audience: "What happened in Madrid is all revenge. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. Anybody (that) commits a crime he should be punished - that's exactly what happened in relation to Spain.
"Objective number one - break the psychology of the occupier by hitting back in their homeland. To be worried about their own wives and loved ones."
"Prepare as much as you can from strength and from force to terrorise - because terrorism it is part of Islam."
Glenn A. Fine
It amazes me, but it doesn't surprise me. From AP, with thanks to Nicolei:
WASHINGTON - Federal prison officials are failing to adequately screen Muslim chaplains and others who provide Islamic religious services to inmates to determine whether they hold extremist views, Justice Department investigators say. A report by Justice Department inspector general Glenn A. Fine also found Muslim contractors and volunteers have ample opportunity "to deliver inappropriate and extremist messages," which could lead to terrorist recruitment, inside federal prisons because they lack proper supervision.Muslim inmates themselves sometimes lead Islamic services in prisons, another potential source of terror recruitment and dissemination of extremist doctrine, according to the report obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press. Formal release was set for Wednesday.
"Religious providers are in a unique position to influence the beliefs and conduct of inmates," the report said. "The presence of extremist chaplains, contractors or volunteers ... can pose a threat to institutional security and could implicate national security if inmates are encouraged to commit terrorist acts."
About 9,000 of the estimated 150,000 federal prison inmates identify themselves as Muslim. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI has been concerned that al-Qaida and other terror groups might use prisons to radicalize inmates and recruit operatives in the United States.
The 10 full-time Muslim chaplains at federal prisons told Justice Department investigators they had not witnessed any such attempts. Besides these chaplains, there are dozens of Islamic contractors and volunteers who provide religious services to inmates.
The Muslim chaplains, according to the review, "stated that some inmates are radicalized in prison by other inmates."
Richard Reid, convicted of attempting to blow up an airliner with a shoe bomb, converted to Islam while in a British prison. Jose Padilla, being held as an enemy combatant on allegations he was plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, is believed to have turned to radical Islam while jailed in Broward County, Fla., the report says. ...
The Muslim chaplains, contractors and volunteers in federal prisons all undergo criminal background checks. The chaplains and contractors also must pass a drug-screening urinalysis.
But prison officials told investigators they did not ask these providers any questions about their Islamic doctrine because to do so might violate the Constitution.
The Justice Department review, however, said prison officials should be able to determine if a Muslim religious official subscribes to a doctrine espousing violence, anti-American activities or discrimination.
The report makes a number of other recommendations, including tighter supervision by prison officials of chapel services and control of religious materials, more staff training about Islam and increased hiring of chaplains and other religious providers based on referrals by local or regional Muslim organizations.
The Bureau of Prisons has made "significant improvements" in many of these areas since the review began in March 2003, the report says. Bureau officials did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.
The review was prompted by concerns raised by several senators, including Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., that prison officials brought in Muslim religious providers from organizations that may have ties to extreme forms of Islam.
The Bureau of Prisons until recently accepted endorsements for chaplains and other providers from the Islamic Society of North America. Now it has no national group to use for endorsements, which has effectively frozen hiring of Muslim service providers.
The report drew no conclusions about allegations of terrorism-related connections by ISNA or other groups. But a classified version of the review includes an FBI assessment about individuals and groups with such links.
Darfur refugees (AFP)
Charles Jacobs of the American Anti-Slavery Group has sent around an urgent message with the news that at 10:00 AM (EST) this morning, NPR will be airing a program on Christian persecution under Islam in Sudan.
Jacobs asks that as many people as possible call in at that time and talk about Christians as dhimmis. The phone number for the station is 1 800-423-TALK.
Here is the link for the show.
And click here to protest against rampant human rights abuses by jihad warriors in Sudan.
Thailand's Thaksin
How did Ismaae Yusof Rayalong miss the Qur'an's teachings of peace? From Thailand's The Nation, with thanks to Nicolei:
Police yesterday issued an arrest warrant for Ismaae Yusof Rayalong, a religious teacher in Yala’s Lamyai tambon, in connection with last week’s attacks against more than 10 police installations, which ended in the deaths of 108 suspected Muslim insurgents and five security officers.As police started searching for Ismaae, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra moved to ease Muslim anger over the security forces’ alleged use of excessive force and for violating the sanctity of Krue Se Mosque in Pattani by setting up an independent committee to investigate last week’s bloodshed.
Thaksin said he would visit the historic mosque, the scene of a shootout between Muslim insurgents and security forces, that left the 32 men holed up in the mosque dead. The army fired rockets and grenades at the mosque, action which has stirred up anger among local Muslims.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a police officer said Ismaae is the headmaster of the Tohyeeming Islamic boarding school in Yala’s Muang district.
Poliec believe Ismaae is one of the top operatives who helped plan last week’s attacks.
Information incriminating Ismaae came from interrogations of 17 insurgents who were arrested during last Wednesday’s bloody shootouts, the source said.
In other news from Thailand (thanks again to Nicolei), "Security at Government House was raised to high alert yesterday following a report that it was targeted for a suicide bombing attack in retaliation for the killing of 108 Islamic militants last week."
Those "militants," of course, mounted the first attack.
Imam Ramee with his wife and children
More on the Ramee Muhammad case from the UK's Asian News:
After two articles in tabloid newspapers claiming Imam Ramee once preached sermons of hate to suicide bombers, immigration officials visited his home in Cheetham Hill, Manchester.He was asked to report to a local court where he was suddenly seized, refused bail, and taken to the Harmsworth detention centre near London ready for deportation.
Said Mrs Muhammad: "I am desperately worried. My husband was not aware they were about to deport him when he went to the court. He was just seized. He has not been able to appeal. They are fast tracking him out of the country all over these articles which were untrue.
"I am facing the same deportation procedure but it has been delayed because I have a medical condition."
Before he was detained Imam Ramee spoke to Asian News and denounced the tabloid stories that claimed he enjoyed £1,400 a month in benefits while making a 'mad' asylum claim.
He also denied press accusations that he used to spout words of hate to impressionable young British Muslims including Asif Hanif, who killed three Jewish people in Israel when he blew himself up outside a Tel Aviv bar, and shoe bomber Richard Reid.
He said: "These stories are garbage. They have really damaged me and all Muslims. People who know me in Manchester say they cannot believe what was written."
Former US marine Ramee says he is seeking asylum in Britain from America because he would be in great danger if he is deported back to the States where he was born.
"Even before 9/11 Muslim converts were being persecuted there. In the Chicago mosque where I was Imam, some were jailed, some were even killed by the authorities.
"Two of my closest religious colleagues have been told they cannot leave the United States. If I was sent back I would fear for my life and the lives of my wife and children."
Imam Ramee's characterizations of the United States, where Muslims enjoy more civil rights and careful treatment by authorities than they do in many Muslim countries, casts everything he says into doubt — particularly his claims to teach peace.
Imam Ramee was born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother. He converted to Islam when he came across a Muslim cleric while he was working in the prison service.He admits he may once have swallowed the "false" version of Islam that approves of terror bombing but insists that well before he lectured to students, including Hanif and Reid, at the Finsbury Park Mosque, he changed his to one of peace.
Evidently his preaching of peace there was ineffective, since they went on to blow people up in the name of Islam (or try to do so, in Reid's case). Another question: wasn't Abu Hamza imam of the Finsbury Park mosque at the time Ramee Muhammad lectured there? If so, why did Hamza, who so openly and indefatigably continues to preach violent jihad against the West, allow his teachings to be contradicted by another speaker on the staff?
He also denies he wants to live off benefits.He said: "I have been in Britain since 2001 and had been taking care of my family with the proceeds of my teaching work.
"I am only on benefits now because under British law an asylum seeker is barred from having paying employment.
"I teach peace. Once I began to read deeper into Islam I realised that the youth were not being told the full story, that jihad is speaking the truth, not blowing yourself up.
"I am no more responsible for the attitudes and actions of youths like Reid than are their British teachers at school.
Then where did Reid, a convert to Islam, get the idea that blowing himself up on an airplane would please Allah — if not from his Islamic teachers?
"Recently Mohammed Bakri of the Finsbury Park Mosque said a bomb attack in Britain is inevitable. This just does not have to be the case if youth are taught properly. It is clearly stated, for example, that Muslims cannot bomb their homeland.
Another questionable statement. It is clearly stated where, and by whom, that Muslims cannot bomb their homeland? There are no bombs in the Qur'an — they hadn't been invented when it was written. But more importantly, do British Muslims even consider Britain to be their homeland? The actions of some of Ramee's old Finsbury Park associates suggest that they do not.
"I think it's appaling what some of the Mujahadeen are doing, they have shown no care for the youth by pushing them into violent acts."Imam Ramee says he wants to go on spreading the peace message in Manchester mosques.
An Immigration Service spokesman said: "The Home Secretary set up this fast track procedure to deal with cases that are totally unfounded. The US does not constitute a threat."
Indeed.
Because of the nature of Western societies, mujahedin can move about freely in the West. I am not in favor of any measure that would curtail the civil rights that are the hallmark of Western free societies. But sometimes Western authorities even know about their activities but can't or won't apprehend them. We need a greater will to combat these people, who after all want to destroy us, and the courage to track them where they recruit and operate, in the mosques. From The Scotsman:
The man who masterminded a deadly gun attack on an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia was a former member of an opposition group based in the UK, the organisation said today.Mustafa Abdel-Qader Abed al-Ansari is said to have led a shooting rampage on the offices of engineering company ABB in the city of Yanbu, which killed six people including two Britons.
The Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights confirmed that al-Ansari – a Saudi Citizen – lived in London between 1994 and 1996.
Muhammad al-Massari, secretary general of the London-based group which opposes the Saudi royal family, said al-Ansari studied English in the capital and married a woman in Cambridge before disappearing in late 1996.
“This young man was involved in many Jihad activities in the whole of Africa, Bosnia and Afghanistan,” Dr al-Massari told PA News.
Al-Ansari joined the CDLR in 1994, but disappeared after a leadership split in the group in 1996, the Saudi dissident said.
“He stayed with us. A few months later he disappeared. We thought he might have left the country and gone to Afghanistan.
“Since then he has never touched foot in Europe. He never contacted.”
Dr al-Massari said he believed al-Ansari, who was around 22 when he lived in the UK, may have joined the Taliban but that he was unlikely to be a member of al Qaida. ...
Dr al-Massari said of al-Ansari: “He was a very good young man. He was a very staunch believer in Jihad.”.
He continued: “I thought he was more rational than (to use) desperado action.
“He wasn’t extremely simple minded. He didn’t have a wide education but he had quite an extensive background.”
This is good. We wouldn't want anyone to think that the Spanish are going to tolerate acts of terror in their backyard. But — correct me if I'm wrong — didn't they already have a policy of dealing with acts of terror? Called "appeasement"? (Thanks to Rosh for the link.)
Madrid, May 04, 2004 (EFE via COMTEX) --The Spanish government on Tuesday announced the formation of a team of six special prosecutors who will focus on the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.News of the decision came after a Tuesday meeting between Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido and Eduardo Fungairio, chief prosecutor of the high court known as the Audiencia Nacional.
The group is to include the prosecutor investigating the March 11 bombings in Madrid, Olga Sanchez.
The measure is designed to step up the fight against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, which Conde-Pumpido identified as one of his top priorities soon after taking office.
Judicial officials said the team of prosecutors plans to meet regularly with Eurojust, a body comprising judges, prosecutors and investigative police units from each European Union country, with an eye toward strengthening judicial cooperation against organized crime.
From Reuters, with thanks to Cathy J. Palmer, an example of the other part of the double game the Saudis are playing.
RIYADH (Reuters) - A Saudi prince said Monday the killing of five Westerners in a weekend shooting spree was an act of madness and urged citizens to protect foreigners helping to develop the oil-rich kingdom's economy.His comments came as Swiss-based ABB Lummus said it was evacuating all 90 foreign staff from Yanbu, where the shooting occurred, and that an expansion project it was carrying out for Saudi petrochemical firm YANPET would have to be put on hold.
"This is an act of madness which no sane person would carry out," Prince Saud bin Abdullah, chairman of the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu, said of Saturday's shooting, the first assault on an energy facility and the most brazen attack yet on Westerners.
"We must treat our guests well, especially since they came to help develop this country and participated in many of our achievements," he told Okaz daily. "Islam forbids such acts."
Is that so? Well, the terrorists can be forgiven for misunderstanding Islam on that point, given that they have probably imbibed Saudi-produced material teaching the virtues of violent jihad, or listened to sermons on Saudi government TV urging Allah to destroy the Crusaders and Zionists.
The caption to this AP photo reads:
Demonstrators chant 'Bomb London, bomb New York' and 'We are terrorists' outside Downing Street, London, Tuesday May 4, 2004, on the day that the British government announced that it will make a statement concerning the photographs which allegedly show British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. (AP Photo/John D McHugh)
Is this your freedom? In a word, no. Our freedom is more accurately illustrated by the fact that those responsible for the abuse of prisoners will be prosecuted. They are, in other words, not protected by an ideology that is immune to self-criticism and justifies abuses by theological or legal tenets, or by reference to other abuses.
Look at the signs the demonstrators are carrying. They are from Al-Muhajiroun, the notorious pro-Osama radical Muslim group in Britain that has been wanting to "bomb London, bomb New York" long before these prisoners were abused — and long before there were even any American troops in Iraq. Their "Remember September 11" is not a memorial, it's a threat. You can read about them in Onward Muslim Soldiers, where, among other things, I record the group's leader Omar Bakri's statement that he is working for the day when the "black flag of Islam" — the jihad flag — will fly over #10 Downing Street. The Iraqi prisoners are just the latest pretext.
It's not just for the fields anymore. From the New York Times, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
PARIS, May 4 — French police are scrambling to locate 1,100 pounds of fertilizer that could be used to make a powerful bomb after the material was discovered missing on Monday in northern France.The fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, is believed to have been stolen over the Easter weekend from the port of Honfleur near the mouth of the Seine river, according to officials quoted by local media. The officials said large quantities of the fertilizer were stored at the port without any particular security measures.
Ammonium nitrate is highly explosive when mixed with diesel or fuel oil and has been used for some of the most destructive terrorist bombs in recent history, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the bombings that killed 62 in Istanbul last year.
Sales of ammonium nitrate are strictly regulated in the European Union, where rules require that the fertilizer be produced with large, dense granules to prevent it from absorbing oil and being transformed into bomb material. But the granules can easily be broken up with commercial grinders.
The theft comes at a time when European security forces are on alert for terrorist attacks following the deadly March 11 training bombings that killed 191 in Madrid. ...
In late March, British police seized more than half a ton of the fertilizer in West London in a raid on suspected Islamic terrorists. Earlier this month, Turkey joined the European Union in regulating sales of the fertilizer because of fears that it could be used again for bombings there.
Sichan Siv
This just in from Reuters:
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudan won an uncontested election Tuesday to the United Nations' main human rights watchdog, prompting the United States to walk out because of alleged ethnic cleansing in the country's Darfur region.
Alleged, eh?
Sudan's envoy immediately shot back that the U.S. delegation was "shedding crocodile tears," and he accused the United States of turning a blind eye as Iraqi prisoners were mistreated and civilians were harmed in battle. ...Sichan Siv, the U.S. delegate to the council, accused Sudan of having no right to sit on the rights commission because of ethnic cleansing in Darfur where the government is accused of backing Arab militia in pillaging black Africa villages, raping and killing.
"The United States will not participate in this absurdity," Siv said. "Our delegation will absent itself from the meeting rather than lend support to Sudan's candidacy," he said before briefly walking out of council chambers.
He had done the same a year ago when Cuba won a seat on the commission.
Sudan's deputy U.N. ambassador, Omar Bashir Mohamed Manis, said the United States had no right to accuse anyone of human rights violations, after allegations of abuses in Iraq including mistreatment of Iraqis held in U.S.-run prisons
Images of the Iraqi prisoners "are fresh in the minds of all justice-loving people around the world," he said.
The U.S. military is conducting an investigation into the prisoner abuse scandal after news reports and photos broadcast by CBS last week showed Iraqis stripped naked and tormented by U.S. captors.
Manis also referred to Iraqi civilian casualties during a recent siege in Falluja. "This (U.S.) delegation is turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the American forces against the innocent civilian population in Iraq, including women and children," he said,
The world is in a bad state when abuses by American soldiers in Iraq, which will be thoroughly investigated and punished, are seriously offered as worse than jihad genocide and slavery in Sudan, which was never a concern of the Khartoum government. Here is just one of thousands of examples.
Weapons, explosives and other evidence from the jihadists' lair (EPA)
The New York Post has more today on the plot to kill Bush and bomb NATO that we posted about here yesterday. (Thanks to Mrs. Obelix.)
May 4, 2004 -- A terrorist bomb plot to kill President Bush was thwarted yesterday when Turkish police nabbed 25 members of an al Qaeda-linked cell who planned to assassinate world leaders in Istanbul next month - then flee to Iraq.Investigators yesterday announced that they seized 16 of the men in the Turkish town of Bursa last Thursday, along with guns, explosives, forged ID documents, bomb-making booklets - and 4,000 CDs featuring training instructions from Osama bin Laden.
Turkish TV said three of the suspects had been planning for as long as a year to blow themselves up with a bomb that would also kill Bush and other Western leaders.
The plot had reached a very advanced stage and terrorists had begun testing explosives, The Times of London reported.
Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and dozens of other world leaders are scheduled to attend a NATO summit in Istanbul on June 27-28.
The historic meeting will be the first since NATO expanded to 26 member states.
The 16 suspects, all Turkish nationals, are members of Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group based in northern Iraq, said Bursa province Governor Oguz Kagan Koksal.
Remember, Ansar al-Islam is the cuddly Mullah Krekar's group.
The group, tied to al Qaeda, is believed responsible for twin homicide bombings in Irbil, Iraq, that killed 109 people in February. ...Yesterday, nine of the 16 were brought before a special Turkish court that handles terrorism cases and were charged with "membership in an illegal organization."
They face up to 10 years in jail on that charge. It's not clear if the other seven who were detained will face charges.
Nine additional suspects, seized in separate raid in Istanbul last week, were released after it was determined they were not members of Ansar al-Islam.
Koksal said the suspects were "in the middle of an attack plan." He gave no details of their capture.
Equipment and bombmaking instructions were seized from suspects' homes, as were forged identity documents and CDs that served as training manuals, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Guns and videotapes showing bin Laden training militants at a camp in Afghanistan were also found.
Turkish TV aired videotape of the group's leader, Alpaslan Toprak, grinning as he was being led away by police.
Turkish police have been on high alert because the summit would be an ideal terrorist target - and because 69 suspects charged in al Qaeda bomb attacks that killed 60 people at a bank, two synagogues and the British Consulate go on trial this month.
Yeah, the Saudis are really cracking down on the elements that give rise to terrorism. From IMRA, with thanks to Alyssa Lappen:
Riyadh Kingdom of Saudi Arabia TV1 in Arabic, official television station of the Saudi Government, at 0930 GMT carries a 30-minute live sermon from the holy mosque in Mecca. Shaykh Abd-al-Rahman al-Sudays delivers the sermon. ...The imam also says any attempt "to destabilize the society is considered a major crime against the nation," warning Muslims that "sedition is growing with the killing of innocent people." He condemns the recent "act of terrorism in the city of Riyadh" as "cowardly and a crime." The imam says that "what has taken place is considered an ugly crime against Islam, reason, logic, and human values" and denounces it as "a crime, exposed terrorism, and a serious precedent and evil." He also warns that "any act of terrorism against peaceful and innocent Muslims "amounts to a violation of the Islamic laws," adding that such actions are forbidden by [Islam], particularly in the country of the two holy mosques, "the cradle of Islam, and the heart of the Islamic nation." "These criminals," he also says, "kill innocent Muslims, terrorize peaceful people, and destroy property" without considering God's warnings against such "crimes, which are tantamount to unbelief." ...
Note that he is only exercised about crimes against Muslims. But he does go on to sound some notes that sound positively reformist:
The imam warns against "tainting the image of jihad through such acts of terrorism and crime," adding that such "reckless actions have harmed Muslims, the Islamic call, and charity work." He also calls for "foiling such actions, strengthening Islam and Muslims, and carrying out reform in all walks of life." He warns against "extremism and the policy of charging others of unbelief."
Sounding good, eh? Well, read on.
Turning to the Palestine question, the imam says that "our Palestinian brethren in Palestine are suffering from state terrorism by the Zionist entity, which carries out assassinations of Palestinian leaders." He urges the Arab nation "to protect our brothers and our sanctities in Palestine," despite international defeatism and "the Zionist enemy's flagrant defiance of international charters and norms."Turning to Iraq, the imam says that "our Muslim brothers in the Iraq of history and civilization are facing another bloody chapter, particularly in the brave, steadfast city of Al-Fallujah." He urges fair people all over the world "to condemn this unjust aggression and occupation and to use all ways to stop it." He also calls on the Iraqi people "to remain patient and to close their ranks."
In conclusion, the imam asks God to strengthen Islam and Muslims, to
destroy the enemies of the nation and religion, to protect the Islamic
countries, to support "our mujahidin brothers in Palestine," to disperse
"the unjust Zionists," and to stop bloodshed in Iraq.
Evidently he thinks the mother and her children were terrorists
This is a lesson that many people seem to be finding difficult to grasp. That's all right, I'll keep repeating it: the difference between the two civilizations that are clashing now is not that one will commit heinous acts and the other will not. Human nature being what it is, evil will never be wholly absent from any group.
But one civilization will condemn and punish those who commit such crimes; the other will not. While the Americans who abused the Iraqi prisoners are under arrest and will be prosecuted, Yasir Arafat's government has done nothing to condemn the brutal murder of a pregnant mother and her four children. I doubt that any such condemnation would be forthcoming even if the murderer had made them pose in humiliating pictures.
From IMRA, with thanks to Alyssa Lappen:
The Monday morning broadcast of Yasser Arafat's Voice of Palestine (VOP) said that the settlers from Neveh Dekalim, five of whom were murdered yesterday, were "mukharibun" - terrorists. The reference to the settlers as terrorists was in a VOP report that the settlers were preparing to build a new neighborhood in the settlement.Once again today, VOP did not condemn the attack yesterday that killed a pregnant mother and her four children but did vigorously condemn the "cowardly act" by Israel in attacking a Hamas radio station which had exhorted Palestinians to carry out further attacks against Israel. There were no reported casualties in this Israeli attack.
His club is for Muslims only
William Webb follows up on my Washington Times article from last week.
Robert Spencer wrote an important editorial for the Washington Times last week that we have reprinted in the articles section of williamwebb.org. He joins a growing number of concerned citizens who warn of near-term attacks within the United States.While I think nothing short of a miraculous effort by our outstanding men and women at FBI or Department of Homeland Security can prevent the upcoming series of attacks—I do not think it is time for fear or hysteria.
Rather, it is time for vigilance from all our citizens—particularly from that elusive and supposedly dominate group of “moderate Muslims” that our politicians and diversity-preaching media and academics assure us represent the real face of Islam.
It is time for people of all religions, political persuasions and heritages to become vigilant and observant. The next series of mass murders by the Islamists will respect neither Muslim, Christian nor Jew, nor Republican, Democrat nor Independent.
Right now, there are Islamist terror cells operating within the United States. And just like the 9/11 hijackers, the majority of the terrorists making up these cells are not on the various terrorist watch lists. So it is up to ordinary citizens to be alert for suspicious behaviors and to alert proper authorities. The terrorists in these cells are not Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons, Catholics, Hindus, Moonies or Agnostics. They are as the Al-Qaida manual says, “The member of the Organization must be Moslem. How can an unbeliever, someone from a revealed religion (Christian, Jew), a secular person, a communist, etc, protect Islam and Moslems and defend their goals and secrets when he does not believe in that religion [Islam]?"
It is time for the moderate Moslems to step up to the plate and maintain vigilance with us infidels as we go into a very dangerous summer.
Now I know the civil libertarians on both sides of the political spectrum gnash their teeth over any suggestion of “spying” on fellow citizens and if we weren’t involved in a worldwide religious insurgency I would wholeheartedly agree with those on both the right and left.
But it is my contention that we are involved in a religious war that is ultimately going to result in the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans unless we wake up very soon. Many of these well-meaning libertarians will have the blood of these thousands on their hands.
These libertarians don’t want the government creating databases like TIA or the Matrix to conduct homeland intelligence gathering. They don’t want the Patriot Act extended. They don’t want an MI-5-type organization created to focus only on homeland intelligence and counter-terrorism. They don’t want to profile the only group of people who have declared war on us and openly calls for our destruction. They don’t want to allow the FBI or DHS to do surveillance of known radical mosques. They don’t want to have any semblance of a sane immigration policy. They don’t want foreign students tracked. They don’t want to treat combatants like war criminals but rather like common criminals.What methods are left other than blind chance or a vigilant citizenry?
Bin Laden has said that Americans never understand “until they are hit in the head.”
Those who have seen the classified information are now beginning to understand the true danger behind bin Laden and the growing Islamist legions.
Does he have a nuke? The evidence strongly suggests he does. This is the nightmare scenario. Unfortunately, many Americans, including many politicians and media elites can’t comprehend that radical Islamists have already received religious justification from radical Islamic religious leaders to use WMDs against us.
Will it take a massive “strike against the head” with hundreds of thousands killed and the severe economic consequences to follow to get our politicians to finally get it?
But just as bad would be a strike against a nuclear reactor (which was the original plan for 9/11), a large chemical plant, refinery, or a strike involving a combination of three. You can read in many major metropolitan newspapers during the immediate post 9/11-era the predicted death toll for any one of these strikes.
We are entering a very dangerous time here in the United States. With all the victories in the war on terror, and all the hard work of dedicated FBI, DHS and police officers across the country, we still are very vulnerable.
Many of these vulnerabilities remain because of the sheer impossibility of making an enormous country like the United States 100 percent safe.
But many of the vulnerabilities remain because libertarians and politicians on both the right and left put civil liberties and votes ahead of homeland security and effective counter-intelligence. Hopefully, we won’t have to lose a 100,000 people to learn we tilted the balance too much in favor of terrorists.
It is the summer for all citizens to be vigilant.
Flying the unfriendly skies
From the Washington Times, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Federal officials have pinpointed an airline flight from Los Angeles to Washington as a potential terrorist target in the past two weeks and have begun scrutinizing the flight crew's luggage and using security agents to follow pilots preparing for the flight.Bomb-sniffing dogs are also being stationed in the gate area as passengers of United Airlines Flight 200 from Los Angeles International Airport to Dulles International Airport undergo more intense security checks.
The flight, which departs Los Angeles at 6:55 p.m. Eastern (3:55 local time) and arrives in Dulles at 11:46 p.m. Eastern, has been "sanitized" before takeoff, said one flight crew member who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"They absolutely tear everything apart inside the flight bag, every piece of professional literature, flight manuals, head sets, they empty the overnight bag. It's being scrutinized at a level I have never seen in over 25 years of flying," the crew member said.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has designated it as a "flight of interest," according to a memo from the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) obtained by The Washington Times.
Pilots and flight attendants "are receiving a thorough second security screening by the TSA, which includes flight bags and all personal belongings. In addition, the pilot conducting the preflight is being shadowed," the memo said.
"Shadowed," refers to a policy of preventing pilots from entering the aircraft for preflight inspections until a security escort arrives to follow their movements, said the crew member. A TSA official then observes the pilots from the terminal window.
Neither pilots nor air marshals are receiving an explanation for the intense searches, and neither is the airline nor the pilot unions, according to the memo and the crew member.
The TSA and United Airlines did not return calls seeking comment.
Omer Hassan Ahmed Albashir, President of the Sudan, addresses the UN's Millennium Summit (UN Photo)
Yes, it's true. Click here to read the Reuters article about Sudan taking a place on the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Click here to protest against rampant human rights abuses by jihad warriors in Sudan.
But does Moratinos (right) condemn all jihadist violence?
An acknowledgement of where jihad terrorists are recruited and formed from an unlikely source: Spain.
MADRID, Spain (AP) - The Spanish government is considering monitoring mosques and imams to curb Islamic extremism blamed for the March 11 terror bombings in Madrid, the foreign minister said Monday."I think it is important to know what is being preached on Fridays in the various religious forums that have been growing in Spain in a totally uncontrolled fashion," Miguel Angel Moratinos told the Telecinco television network, referring to prayers on the Muslim holy day.
He said that, as Spain's North African immigrant community has expanded in recent years, mosques have arisen in everything from workshops to offices.
Spain has a Muslim community of about 500,000 people out of a total population of 42 million. Moroccans make up the second largest immigrant group, with about 380,000 members.
Fourteen of the 18 people charged in the Madrid bombing are Moroccans.
The judge leading the investigation into the bombings, which killed 191 people, has said the alleged instigator of the attack, a Tunisian named Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, preached holy war among Muslims in Madrid.
Moratinos spoke a day after Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said in a newspaper interview that he is considering drafting a bill to monitor imams, or Muslim clerics, as well as clergy of other faiths.
Oberwetter (right)
No protection from our friends and allies in the House of Saud. From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
YANBU, Saudi Arabia — The U.S. ambassador traveled to this Saudi oil-industry city Monday with a simple message for the gathered Americans: Go home. We cannot protect you. Huddled in a meeting room in a Holiday Inn still pocked with bullet holes after the latest in a string of attacks on Westerners killed two Americans and four others, many said they would heed his words.The first to go were among the 90 foreign employees of ABB Lummus Global Inc., a Houston-based oil contractor whose offices were attacked Saturday by four gunmen trying to encourage Saudis to join the resistance against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
The Saudi interior minister said early Tuesday that the attack appeared to have been carried out by Al Qaeda. Arriving in Kuwait City for a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Prince Nayef was asked whether Usama bin Laden's terrorist network was responsible.
"Yes, but we need time to confirm this," he said. ...
Journalists were barred from the meeting between Ambassador James C. Oberwetter and Yanbu's American community. But Oberwetter later told a news conference that he had encouraged the families to leave the country.
"While we are doing this urging, the U.S. government is not in a position to cause that to happen," he said. "Those are individual decisions by private Americans and by those companies."
People who attended the meeting said the ambassador spoke bluntly. His message was, "It is time for us to pack our bags and go home. ... We cannot protect you here," said a teacher at a local American school. A colleague nodded in agreement.
Reflecting the tense climate in Yanbu, the two women -- like many foreigners -- refused to give their names.
"I'm very, very frightened," the teacher said. "We still don't know whether we are going to stay or not, but I think it's really time for us to leave."
Zarqawi: doing it all for Allah
From the SITE Institute, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm, a message purportedly from Al-Qaeda's Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, posted on a jihadist website. It is noteworthy not only for the responsibility it claims for two suicide bombings in Iraq, but also for the heavy religious tone. Clearly Zarqawi not only understands his struggle as a religious one, but he assumes that this language will appeal to others of like mind, who will find no incongruity in thanking Allah for blowing people to bits.
“On Thursday dated 10 Rabih Al Awwal 1425 [April 29, 2004], the heroic Mujahid – May he be accepted by God - Abu Hussayn Al- Suri [the Syrian] took off in a car filled with explosives targeting a large convoy of troop transports, armored tanks and vehicles (Hummers), that were resting after having escaped from an attack on their camp in the region of Al Radwaniyyah, southwest of Baghdad. He plunged into them with his car – God rest his soul – and was awarded the killing of over seventy soldiers – thanks and gratitude to God.“And thanks to the Almighty God, the blessed operations against the powers of blasphemy and atheism continue,
“For, on Friday dated 11 Rabih Al Awwal 1425 [April 30, 2004], the heroic Mujahid – May he be accepted by God – Abul Walid Al Tunisi [the Tunisian] took off in a car filled with explosives targeting five troop transports, each transporting around fifteen soldiers in the region of Al Yussufiyyah south of Baghdad. Thanks to God above, he was able to achieve a complete destruction of four of them. Pieces of fifty-one soldiers were blown up and scattered in the air from the intensity of the explosion. Thanks and gratitude to God.
The communiqué added that “no matter how powerful America and its parties are, their strength is nothing compared to that of the Almighty”…
Signed
The Military Department
Attawhid and Jihad Group
13 Rabih Al Awwal 1425
May 2, 2004
Salim
A follow-up to the previous post. (Thanks to Basil.)
NEW YORK (CNN) -- More than three years after he stabbed a jail guard in the eye, a top aide to Osama bin Laden who was in U.S. custody before the September 11 terrorist attacks was sentenced Monday to 32 years in prison.U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts in Manhattan federal court sentenced Mamdouh Mahmud Salim for attempted murder. Salim pleaded guilty two years ago to the November 1, 2000, stabbing of corrections officer Louis Pepe with a comb sharpened into a shank.
Batts previously decided that Salim, 46, would face 17 to 22 years behind bars based on federal sentencing guidelines.
Last year she ruled against the government's contention that Salim's sentence should be considered terrorism-related because it was related to an effort to influence the outcome of a trial where he was one of the original defendants -- the trial of al Qaeda soldiers for the 1998 truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Prosecutors also pointed to threatening notes in Salim's cell as evidence of a hostage-taking plan.
The notes said, "We are the Muslims who were falsly (sic) accused of bombing the embassy in Africa. ... If the government worrys (sic) about the safty (sic) of its citizines (sic) it has to comply with all our demands."
Salim denied the Pepe assault was a plot to take hostages but said he had considered escaping to the United Nations and declaring refugee status.
Ah. So it seems that even Salim has learned to play the game, at least to some degree.
Pepe (AP)
Why did they scrawl the cross on his chest? Because from their point of view this was all part of their jihad against the "Crusaders." From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
NEW YORK — A former federal prison guard said he will tell a judge on Monday that he was stabbed in the eye and left for dead by a top aide to Usama bin Laden as the aide tried to escape prison in 2000. "Now I'm going to kill him," are the last words Louis Pepe says he heard before he was stabbed with a sharpened comb in an attack by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the alleged bin Laden associate, and an accomplice, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed.Pepe, 46, said Sunday he plans to speak at Salim's sentencing because he is outraged that Salim could face as little as 18 to 21 years in prison for an attack he says was more brutal than the government revealed.
"I hate to go, but I got to go," said Pepe, who was left with limited vision and brain damage. "I thought that you wouldn't have to see him no more."
Salim still faces trial and a possible life sentence on conspiracy charges in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. The attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. Mohamed is serving life after his conviction in the embassy bombings case, which included charges related to the stabbing.
In the interview Sunday with The Associated Press, Pepe sat in his wheelchair in a small room in the Queens house where he lives with his parents. A white cowboy hat signed by corrections officers he trained rested on a shelf above him.
Pepe said the government and Salim have combined to sanitize what happened on Nov. 1, 2000, portraying the assault as quick and almost entirely Salim's doing after the guard failed to handcuff the inmates.
Pepe said he will tell the judge how he properly handcuffed the inmates before they slipped free, blinded him with hot sauce, beat him repeatedly and even tried to rape him before stabbing him to get his keys in a bid to free other suspected terrorists.
"Both of them did it, not just one," Pepe said excitedly, his right eye wide open and a piece of gauze resting in the socket where the left eye used to be.
"They started, 'Bam, bam, bam, bam!'" he said, shouting as he thrust his fist and arm down repeatedly in a re-enactment.
Pepe said the attack lasted an hour, rather than the 20 minutes that prison authorities maintain it took for help to arrive from less-isolated parts of Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Prison authorities say a videotaping system didn't function properly that day so it was impossible to verify how much time passed.
Pepe's memory seems intact, though the brain damage he suffered leaves him with speech difficulties and an inability to read.
Pepe described how he resisted throughout the attack, even giving the inmates his house keys when they demanded his prison keys. He said the inmates scrawled the sign of the cross in his blood on his chest before they left him for dead.
Barno
From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
KABUL, Afghanistan — A top U.S. commander expressed concern Monday about Pakistan's counterterrorism strategy near the Afghan border and said a "significant" number of foreign militants holed up there must be eliminated."There are foreign fighters in those tribal areas who will have to be killed or captured," said Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani government has offered an amnesty to foreign militants in South Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border where Al Qaeda and Taliban rebels are believed to be living.
On Saturday, the government pushed back by one week an April 30 deadline for foreigners to surrender. Despite a threat of renewed military action, no foreign militants have yet taken up the amnesty offer.
"It's very important that the Pakistani military continue with their operations to go after the foreign fighters in particular, who in my view will not be reconciled," Barno said at a news conference.
"We have some concerns that could go in the wrong directions," he said of the Pakistani operations.
Pakistan Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan insisted there was no rift with the United States.
"Pakistan is saying nothing different from what the U.S. commander is saying. We also say that the foreign elements in our tribal areas must surrender, otherwise they will be killed," Sultan said.
Thailand's Thaksin
From the Washington Times, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Thai security forces engaged in fierce gun battles Wednesday with Islamic militants, killing about 100 suspected youths in a series of fire fights in southern Thailand.Worried that news of the clashes could negatively affect the country's tourism industry, Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was careful to blame local youth gangs, and not connect the clashes to al Qaeda or its affiliates. This contradicts what "many officials fear," say M.J. Gohel and Sajjan M. Gohel, terrorism analysts at Asia Pacific Foundation.
In a report last Wednesday, the London international policy assessment group said "international militant groups may be behind the attacks and are contributing to increasing tensions" in the area. If confirmed, this comport more with the belief al Qaeda and groups tied to Osama bin Laden's terror operations are increasingly active in Southeast Asia.
Reports from the region have been foggy at best, with police saying groups of youths on motorcycles launched a series of attacks on police stations. But it is clear the fighting, which the Gohel report says is "a serious escalation of the violence that began in early January," seems to indicate the groups involved are seeking automatic weapons.
Last January's attack was on a military arsenal. Tuesday's attempted raids were on police stations. The insurgents were armed only with small guns, machetes and knives, indicating they meant to obtain automatic arms from the police.
Last Tuesday's attacks were in three separate provinces, heavily dominated by Muslims — Yala, Pattani and Songkhla. However, since the attacks were coordinated, it is very unlikely these were simply the work of errant "youths."
Analysts believe the attacks could be the work of Thai separatists. But security officials, the Gohels say, "have theorized that Jemaah Islamiyah also might have lent support to the local militant groups." ...
Southern Thailand is predominantly Muslim. The area borders on Malaysia, itself a Muslim country. Following the recent clashes, Malaysia closed its border with Thailand.
This move, and a warning from Muslim groups that foreign tourists should avoid Thailand, will further depress tourism-generated revenues. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome — or SARS — scare in Asia, as well as a series of terrorist attacks, in the last few years have contributed to keeping vacationing foreigners and their dollars away. ...
The Gohel reports states: "The Thai military is monitoring an al Qaeda-linked group that operates in the southern part of the country. The Guragan Mujaheedin Islam Pattani, a 40-member Muslim militant group, was responsible for a spate of attacks in Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces in the last 1½ years.
"It has been said that a key member, Wae Ka Raeh, had trained and fought with al Qaeda in Afghanistan and was now in hiding in Malaysia's Terenganu State."
Having suffered setbacks in Europe, al Qaeda could well be concentrating its efforts in Southeast Asia where support of local Muslim populations offers a more solid base.
"The recent unraveling of involvement of Jemaah Islamiyah and its local allies, point to the growing threat of terrorism in the Southeast Asian Region," claims
the Gohel report. "There is a substantial threat in all parts of Thailand," it adds.As an example, the Gohels cite an event last June 13. Acting on information from U.S. investigators, the Gohel report says Thai authorities "seized a large amount of radioactive material" that originated from Russian stockpiles and was smuggled into Thailand through Laos. The material, Cesium-137, a radioactive derivative of nuclear power plants, was said to be meant for making a "dirty bomb."
Some analysts believe Thailand and Southeast Asia, including parts of northern Australia, have been designated by al Qaeda as a "second front" in the war on terror.
An Al-Qaeda/China/Australian stock market link? From WND, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
Al-Qaida is financing its worldwide terror operations by investing in blue-chip Australian stocks with the assistance of Beijing's powerful Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).Citing information from Britain's MI6 and European intelligence services, Gordon Thomas, security correspondent for the London Sunday Express, writes that the bin Laden organization's investment strategy includes "leading technology and defense corporations in Australia, Singapore and other Pacific Rim countries." Billions, earned through illegal drug dealings with China's SIS, are being laundered into the stock market through banks in Australia, Japan, Germany and Ireland.
The article appears in today's Melbourne Sunday Herald.
Thomas cites Brian McAdam, a former Canadian Foreign Service officer who worked closely with the FBI to identify some 3,000 U.S. companies that are fronts for CSIS or have financial links to al-Qaida. "Only now are Western intelligence agencies becoming aware of the links that CSIS has with drugs, money laundering and the support it provides for terrorists. We are talking of billions of dollars," said McAdam.
Bin Laden speeches on video, bomb-making equipment, and more, as displayed by Turkish police
From CNN, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
(CNN) -- Turkish officials say police have foiled a bomb plot targeting a NATO summit in Istanbul that will be attended by world leaders including U.S. President George W. Bush.Police detained at lea