Read this review of David Frum and Richard Perle's book An End to Evil. Find it on the New York Review of Books
Tomorrow the World
By Thomas Powers
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror
by David Frum and Richard Perle
Random House, 284 pp, $25.95
1.
The invasion of Iraq and the planting of an American army in the heart of the Middle East have encouraged one of the war's intellectual architects, Richard Perle, to think that the United States may be pulling up its socks at last. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, following the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the fruit, in Perle's view, of a bracing new clear-eyed toughness in dealing with the enemies of democracy. But the job is far from over and Perle, in the new book he has written with David Frum, worries that "many in the American political and media elite are losing their nerve for the fight." The enemies are many, friends are few, and summertime soldiers on the left, as Perle sees it, want to call a truce in the war on terror in "the hope that...somehow the threat will disappear on its own."
About the source of the threat Perle expresses no doubt. It comes from "a radical strain within Islam" driven by "murderous hatred of the United States" to carry out terrorist attacks against America and its friends. Despite a vigorous worldwide counter-terror campaign, "Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder"; and the willingness of state sponsors to arm them with weapons of mass destruction threatens "even our survival as a nation." But where might the terrorists get these weapons, now that Iraq has been occupied? "North Korea claims already to possess some bombs," Perle argues. "Iran is very close—perhaps three years away, in the optimistic view of US intelligence, maybe twelve to eighteen months, by the less sanguine Israeli estimate."
We have heard such alarms before, most recently about Iraq, but Perle brushes aside the failure to find the weapons which were cited to justify the American invasion. "The critics' emphasis on stockpiles," he writes, "seems to us seriously misplaced." Iraq fortunately was stopped in time, but other outlaws remain: "Why let an enemy grow stronger?" At the top of the enemies list are Iran and North Korea, which not only engage in terror but support terror. "Both regimes present intolerable threats to American security," he insists. "We must move boldly against them both and against all the other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. And we don't have much time."
That's quite a list of target countries —seven nations in all, including the two already defeated and occupied. Does "moving boldly" mean invasion to remove the regimes in all of them? Maybe yes, maybe no. Only a month after the terror attacks of September 11 Perle told an interviewer for Frontline that the resolute action he recommended in Afghanistan and Iraq might be enough to caution others:
Because having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam's regime, the message to the others is, "You're next." Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. "You're next, and if you don't shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we'll take you down, too."
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Few thought Perle's plan to invade Iraq reasonable or likely when he first began to defend the idea in public. It seemed over-bold even after President Bush, in his second State of the Union speech in January 2002, included Iraq in the "axis of evil"—a phrase partly invented by Perle's coauthor, David Frum, who put the words "axis of hatred" in an early draft of the President's speech. But Perle was not speaking lightly. As a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, he was a figure of significance in Washington, close to officials close to the President, and last year's relentless march to war is ample evidence that Perle's views were taken seriously in the Bush White House.
Of course Perle was not alone in beating the drum, but he is the first of the Washington hard-liners to have written at length about the strategy behind the war on terror, a fact which makes An End to Evil important and timely. The unraveling of the official case for war, based on intelligence claims, now exploded, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons and vigorous programs to build more, makes it all the more urgent to understand why President Bush was so determined to go to war, what he hoped to achieve by it, and what we ought to expect if the war policy is confirmed by the President's reelection in November.
Richard Perle and David Frum share the title page and the copyright notice in An End to Evil, but to this reader, at least, it seems that the book belongs in some sense to Perle alone. I do not mean to suggest that Perle did all the work of writing, or that he and Frum did not reach agreement on the text before it went to the printer, or that Frum did not bring experience of his own to the project. But it is Perle who is the one with the public persona, who has held policy-level jobs in two administrations, who is often in the news, and whose pugnacious, bravura intellectual style gives the book its flavor. And above all, it is Perle who has a long history of promoting the hard-line, or "realist," approach to American foreign policy.
Perle has been a fixture on the Washington scene since 1969, when he joined the staff of Senator Henry Jackson, a hard-line Democrat deeply opposed to the whole idea of détente with the Soviet Union. Jackson was a man of the anti-Communist, working-class left, the son of a union man, and he was a combative advocate of keeping ahead in the nuclear arms race, fighting the Communists in Vietnam, and pushing the Soviets hard to open their borders to Russian Jews trying to emigrate—an effort in which he was ultimately successful. Perhaps a quarter of Israel consists now of former Russian Jews and there are those who think Jackson's hard line also deserves a significant share of the credit for the eventual collapse of communism, the freeing of Eastern Europe, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is not quite clear from An End to Evil, or from things Perle has written and said elsewhere, whether he brought a fierce approach to foreign affairs with him to Washington or learned it during the eleven years he spent at Jackson's side. But hard-line is what Perle is.
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"Hard-line" is a word defined by thirty years of examples. At various times hard-liners, Perle often among them, pushed for more and better nuclear weapons, ridiculed the notion of "arms control," argued for victory in Vietnam, were ready to spread the war into Laos, Cambodia, and even North Vietnam itself, supported Israel's invasion of Lebanon, wanted to kick the Sandinistas out of Nicaragua, argued that an all-out arms race would spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, pushed for American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, backed the scrapping of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, supported a clear commitment to defend Tai-wan, and expressed contempt for the United Nations. To be hard-line involves the willingness to use force, realism about using money and power to get one's way, impatience with feel-good idealism, all-out backing for friends, and contempt for efforts to placate enemies. "Hard-liners" share an Old Testament view of the world, promise an eye for an eye, know what they want, and never forget an injury.
But perhaps most important of all, hard-liners are comfortable with the fact of overwhelming American military and economic power, and argue that it ought to be used without apology to chastise enemies, support friends, and get what America wants. In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal Perle and Frum argue that most definitions of hard- and soft-line get things exactly backward. "It is the soft-liners who are driven by ideology, who ignore or deny inconvenient facts and advocate unworkable solutions," they write. "It is the hard-liners who are the realists, the pragmatists." In their view the confusion is nowhere more evident than in the discussion of Israel and the Palestinians, where East–West friction brings almost daily bloodshed. Hard-liners face facts, Perle and Frum argue: Arafat will never make peace with Israel. Period. But the soft-liners, including many in the US State Department, "cling to this belief" that dialogue, negotiation, compromise will bring a settlement at last.
Perle's devotion to Israel runs deep. Decades of war and near-war with hostile neighbors have made the country tough and self-reliant, in many ways the ideal archetype of hard-line realism as state policy. Perle has been a director of the Jerusalem Post, a consultant for Israeli weapons manufacturers, a member of the board of advisers of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and one of the coauthors of "A New Strategy for Defending the Realm," an influential paper recommending a hard-line policy to Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's predecessor as Israeli prime minister. In an interview with Ben Wattenberg on PBS in November 2002, Perle was asked why "these neoconservative hawks" were mainly Jewish, and how he answered charges that there was a "hidden agenda" in his call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein—that, as Perle restated the question in his reply: "We are somehow motivated not by the best interest of the United States but by Israel's best interest." Behind the first, Perle replied "there's clearly an undertone of anti-Semitism," and the second claim, in his view, gave off the same aroma. "It's a nasty line of argument," he said, "to suggest that somehow we're confused about where our loyalties are."
Perle strikes me as a little nervous and defensive on this point. Why not admit openly that of course the fate of Israel is much on his mind? Anglophiles of yesteryear did not apologize for arguing that it was in America's best interest to come to the aid of Britain in 1940, and Polish Americans did not worry in silence about the fate of Lech Walesa. Complex loyalties are part of the American style. But the decision to attack Iraq was made by President Bush, whose loyalties are not complex. Bush has no history as a hard-liner himself but he seems to have adopted a hard-line position as a governing style, telling enemies abroad what he will not tolerate, pushing for his agenda without compromise at home, taking the support of allies like Britain's Tony Blair as if it were his by right, dismissing the hesitations of other longtime friends as somehow meanly motivated. Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill reports in his quasi memoir of two frustrating years in the Bush administration, The Price of Loyalty,[1] that Bush was rigid on questions of policy. "I won't negotiate with myself," he often said, meaning, in O'Neill's view, that once the President had taken a position it was set in concrete, and no one should expect to revisit its rationale. The President's frequent use of the word "evil," echoed by Perle and Frum, is a sign that he is not about to negotiate with himself when the question on the table is how to deal with enemies.
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This firmness is about all Bush shares with Perle. Intellectually they are poles apart; Bush sticks to the official line with numbing tenacity while Perle has a lively comment about everything. There is a dazzling, at moments disorienting extravagance to An End to Evil, like the grand climax to an evening of fireworks. No hyperbolist could exaggerate the range or confidence of Perle's opinions. It seems that success in defeating terror is going to require changing pretty much the whole of the rest of the world as well—from the culture of bureaucracy in the CIA to the position of Britain in Europe, from the timidity of the State Department to the irresolution of the United Nations, from the foot-dragging of Pentagon generals to the ingratitude of old allies like France and Germany. Among the obstructionists scolded by Perle are not only Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, but former President Clinton, the State Department's Richard Armitage (for his "incredible statement that he considered Iran to be a 'democracy'"), Brent Scowcroft and Richard Haass (for "almost certainly" instructing US Ambassador April Glaspie to shrug off Saddam Hussein's plans to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990), CIA director George Tenet ("He has failed. He should go"), and even the first President Bush, because he "tried to prevent the Soviet Union from disintegrating"—a failure of nerve so egregious that Perle puts the words in italics.
An End to Evil makes so many charges against enemies abroad, accuses so many people of cant and confusion, issues so many warnings of imminent peril, and proposes so many bold undertakings that it is difficult to find the idea at the core of the book— identification of the danger that America faces, and the strategy Perle believes will bring victory. When the reader gets a grip on the danger at last it turns out to be a kind of mirror-image of the President's claim that terrorists hate America for what it is—Western, tolerant, democratic, pluralist, materialist, and so on. In Perle's view the source of Islamic terror is to be found in who they are—blocked at every turn in societies where hatred and violence are the only means of self-expression:
Take a vast area of the earth's surface, inhabited by people who remember a great history. Enrich them enough that they can afford satellite television and Internet connections, so that they can see what life is like across the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic. Then sentence them to live in choking, miserable, polluted cities ruled by corrupt, incompetent officials. Entangle them in regulations and controls so that nobody can ever make much of a living except by paying off some crook-ed official. Subordinate them to elites who have suddenly become incalculably wealthy from shady dealings involving petroleum resources that supposedly belong to all.... Deny them any forum or institution—not a parliament, not even a city council—where they may freely discuss their grievances. Kill, jail, corrupt, or drive into exile every political figure, artist, or intellectual who could articulate a modern alternative to bureaucratic tyranny.... [Ensure] that the minds of the next generation are formed entirely by clerics whose own minds contain nothing but medieval theology and a smattering of third world nationalist self-pity. Combine all this, and what else would one expect to create but an enraged populace....
Perle's argument for an aggressive assault on "terror," by which he means "all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not," begins with the assumption that no strategy can succeed which does not fundamentally alter the world that breeds terror. The most important change—the one that must precede and open the door to all others—would be to replace closed, authoritarian governments with open ones—in a word, bring democracy to the Islamic world. This bold idea has also been embraced by President Bush, who told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington a year ago that "the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life." The invasion of Iraq did not merely end the possibility that Saddam Hussein would give nuclear weapons to Osama bin Laden; it created an opportunity to build a freer, fairer, more open society to serve as a beacon of hope in the Islamic world, "and it is vital," Perle writes, "that we succeed."
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Of this bold scheme, after a day's reflection, one might say what Jake Barnes told a wistful Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises—"Isn't it pretty to think so." Perle's plan to transform the Islamic world beginning with Iraq, an idea shared by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and others in Washington, represents what is possibly the single most ambitious program to change the world in American history. Not even the fabled Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after World War II matches it for imagination, generosity, sweep—and difficulty. As I write, success in the democracy-building effort in Iraq seems far from certain. Rather than one free state with a newborn democracy, it seems that Iraq is breaking into three super-nationalist, mutually hostile mini-states comprising the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shiites in the south. In Afghanistan the military victory of late 2001 seems to be slipping away as the Taliban proves to have life in it yet.
I have no quarrel with Perle's vision of what Iraq might become. "If Iraq's new legislature is freely chosen," he writes,
...if its bureaucracy is generally honest and competent and its courts are fair, if Iraqis can engage in private business without harassment and favoritism, if Iraq's different communities can live without fear—then that is an achievement as impressive as anything the democratizers could hope for.
This is nobly said. Who would fault the dream? Where my credulity fails is with the implicit claim that the scope of this grand intervention is the brainchild of "realists" and "pragmatists." What makes Perle think that the United States can do for the warring factions of Iraq, burning with the grievances of centuries and still raw from thirty years of oppression under the police state of Saddam Hussein, something it has conspicuously failed to do over half a century for the Israelis and the Palestinians?
2.
Richard Perle has been living with the dilemmas at the heart of An End to Evil for many years—at least since the first Persian Gulf War of 1991, when the United States, in his view, made a ghastly mistake in failing to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, an error he credits (gently here) to Colin Powell and the first President Bush. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11 he has argued his position with renewed fervor "to journalists from around the world, almost all of whom eventually work their way up to the one big question: Is the war on terror a Zionist plot?"
Are those really the words used? I doubt it. I'm guessing that the posing of the question sounds more like this: Is one of the goals of the war on terror to make the Middle East safe for Israel? With the question put that way Perle's answer would surely be yes, and a careful search through his blizzard of obiter dicta discovers a theory about how this might come to pass. It is based on two axioms—that Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other military opponents of Israel are dependent on state sponsors like Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia for support; and that these groups, by their resort to attacks on civilians, are on the roster of terrorist organizations and thereby pose a threat to the United States, a threat that cannot be distinguished from that of al-Qaeda. This is presumably what Perle means when he says "Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder" and why he presses for war on "all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not." It's a tricky point. According to Dilip Hiro's The Essential Middle East,[2] Hezbollah and Hamas consider themselves to be at war with Israel, not the United States. Treating them as synonymous with al-Qaeda adds to the number of America's enemies and widens the war on terror without making it easier to fight.
But President Bush seems to have adopted Perle's inclusive definition of terror, possibly without understand-ing quite how clearly it commits the United States to support for Israel's continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. By declaring Israel's enemies as our own, the inclusive definition of terror as a strategy to make the Middle East safe for Israel certainly seems more "pragmatic and realistic" than the more grandiose effort to replace the regimes in Perle's target countries. "Moving boldly" against Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia may not actually bring democracy, but it will certainly impede the flow of money and arms to Hezbollah and Hamas, bring a period of relative peace, and thereby allow Israel to put off again the difficult moment when it must give up the West Bank. Delay of the inevitable, cutting off money and arms, making life hard for opponents —those are goals realists and pragmatists can get behind.
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In the world according to Richard Perle everything is clear and all choices are stark—except when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza. There he grows vague. "The Arab–Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism," he writes. "The unwillingness of the Arabs to end the quarrel is a manifestation of the underlying cultural malaise from which Islamic extremism emerges." So the suicide bombers are driven by "the under-lying cultural malaise"? It has nothing to do with thirty-five years of Israeli occupation?
On this subject alone Perle is unable to say what he thinks must be done, offering instead a bleak outline of everything that won't work, starting with the one thing Palestinians have agreed they want—a state in the West Bank and Gaza. Perle concedes that this might be achieved, "if the United States were to denounce Israel as an illegal occupier of Muslim land, attack it, deport the Jewish population, and turn over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians...." Alas, "carving out a twenty-third Arab state in the Judaean Hills" won't solve anything. The mini-state will be weak and small; extremists will demand more; "every great-niece or third cousin whose family once lived on what is now Israeli territory must be allowed to return." America will have to take on the job of defending the mini-state from Hezbollah and Hamas. "In the end, we will be fighting its people on its behalf. We will have created a Palestinian South Vietnam." Yes, yes—"a peaceful, open, and democratic Palestinian state would be a good thing," he concedes, but "the likeliest result...will be another abject failure of the so-called peace process." It will all end badly.
What does this mean? Perle's answers are elliptical. "The greatest... obstacle to peace is the feeling among many people in the Arab and Muslim world that anything that was once theirs can never legitimately be anybody else's." Many peoples have suffered the loss of a homeland in the last hundred years, he writes. They got used to it. Jews had to leave their homes in Arab land. "They...let go of the past. The exiled Palestinians should likewise be accepted as citizens of Arab countries in which they now live." Is Perle saying that the Palestinians ought to give up their hope of a state on the West Bank...and move away?
The hard-liner seems to have run out of ideas. China, Russia, the CIA, the State Department, "the underlying cultural malaise" in the Middle East— all these he can fix. But when it comes to the longest-running open sore in the clash of civilizations, his advice to the Palestinians is what Lucy in her role as psychiatrist used to tell the troubled Charlie Brown—"Get over it!"
That's what decades of bloody struggle over the West Bank get by way of helpful advice in An End to Evil. After it come eighty pages on "Organizing for Victory" and how to deal with "Friends and Foes." Firmly is the basic idea. It's all rousing stuff in its way but hard to take seriously if not for one fact—the American army now planted in the heart of the Middle East. Anybody wondering when that army will return home should follow closely something never mentioned by Perle—the status of forces agreement soon to be negotiated between the United States and the new sovereign government of Iraq, once it is established. A status of forces agreement regulates the presence of military forces in an alien country. It's my guess that the United States will insist on the right to maintain bases in Iraq, to supply, expand, or contract them at will, and to conduct military operations inside Iraq, or against third countries from Iraq, without requiring the permission of the host government. Anything less would be lacking in realism. The hard-liners have insisted all along that Iraq is not the only regime in the Middle East that needs changing, and the United States will need plenty of latitude if a reelected President Bush is to carry on with the hardline strategy for winning the war on terror.
Notes
[1] Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (Simon and Schuster, 2004); see Paul R. Krugman's review in these pages, February 26, 2004.
[2] Carroll and Graf, 2003.
The Christian Science Monitor:
WASHINGTON - Sure Al Qaeda has been weakened, but it has transformed itself into a collection of regional terror groups that operate more autonomously and may be even more dangerous. And although Saddam Hussein has been removed, Iraq is increasingly becoming a rallying point for terrorists.
"As we continue the battle against Al Qaeda, we must overcome a movement - a global movement infected by Al Qaeda's radical agenda," said George Tenet, director of the CIA.
Mr. Tenet, along with the directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the FBI, laid out their world threat assessments before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee this week, and Tenet will give a similar appraisal Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The system created by the United States for trials by military tribunal of foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay is fundamentally unfair and hopelessly antiquated, military lawyers assigned to represent these prisoners said on Wednesday.
"We are concerned with virtually every aspect of the military commission process and the impact that will have on our client's chances to get a fair trial," Navy Lt. Cdr. Philip Sundel told Reuters.
Sundel and Army Maj. Mark Bridges were assigned by the Pentagon on Feb. 6 to represent Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen.
[Ed: This is a great pair of articles from this weekend from The Washington Post on the CIA's role in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, leading up to Sept. 11, 2001.]
The seeds of the CIA's first formal plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden were contained in another urgent manhunt -- for Mir Aimal Kasi, the Pakistani migrant who murdered two CIA employees while spraying rounds from an assault rifle at cars idling before the entrance to the CIA's Langley headquarters in 1993.
For several years after the shooting, Kasi remained a fugitive in the border areas straddling Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. From its Langley offices, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center asked the Islamabad station for help recruiting agents who might be able to track Kasi down. Case officers signed up a group of Afghan tribal fighters who had worked for the CIA during the 1980s guerrilla war against Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan.
A team of CIA operators from the agency's Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in October 1999. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the group was led by the chief of the center's Osama bin Laden unit, known to his colleagues as Rich, a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world.
They went to a secluded airfield, boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter, and swooped toward the jagged, snow-draped peaks of northern Afghanistan.
Their aim was to revive secret intelligence and combat operations against bin Laden in partnership with guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, a ragged coalition of Afghan fighters, many of them veterans of the war against the Soviets. Massoud's hardened militiamen clung to their positions in the stark Panjshir Valley.
WASHINGTON -- Libya today reversed its prime minister and confirmed that it was responsible for blowing up Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 and killing 270 people.
The statement by the Jamahiriya news agency could put back on track a plan by the Bush administration to let Americans travel to Libya.
The statement, which appeared on Libya's Web site, said Libya had helped bring two suspects to justice "and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials."
ISLAMABAD : Pakistani security forces on the trail of Osama bin Laden were Wednesday questioning nearly two dozen Al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects captured in a dramatic operation near the Afghan border.
The suspects were arrested on Tuesday after hundreds of Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships swooped on a town in the semi-autonomous South Waziristan tribal region.
But officials refused to comment on a report in a leading Pakistani newspaper that a son of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a top lieutenant to Al-Qaeda kingpin bin Laden, was among the detainees.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States turned over a Danish national who was imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the government of Denmark, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, and the Danes planned to set him free.
"He's going to Denmark as a free man," said Lene Balleby, a spokeswoman at the Danish Embassy in Washington.
The Pentagon did not give his name, but Danish media have identified him as Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, imprisoned in February 2001 after being captured in Afghanistan.
The U.S. assault on al Qaeda has "transformed the organization into a loose collection of regional networks working autonomously," Tenet said. The smaller groups "pick their own targets, they plan their own attacks," but they share an anti-American goal. Tenet Warns of Al Qaeda Threat By Dana Priest Despite U.S. success in attacking al Qaeda's hierarchy, the network is still capable of "catastrophic attacks" against the United States, and acquiring chemical, biological and radiological weapons remains a "religious obligation" in Osama bin Laden's eyes, CIA Director George J. Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee yesterday. The U.S. assault on al Qaeda has "transformed the organization into a loose collection of regional networks working autonomously," Tenet said. The smaller groups "pick their own targets, they plan their own attacks," but they share an anti-American goal. The most immediate threats include the possibility of "poison attacks" and al Qaeda's ongoing effort to produce anthrax material, Tenet said. He added: "Extremists have widely disseminated assembly instructions for an improvised chemical weapon using common materials that could cause a large number of casualties in a crowded, enclosed area." "We are still at war against a movement," said Tenet, appearing with other administration officials to discuss global security threats. "People who say it's exaggerated don't look at the same world I look at. It's not going away anytime soon." In Iraq, most attacks by insurgents have been committed by loyalists of the former government, said Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He added that "it appears much of the Sunni population has not decided whether to back the coalition or support the insurgents. The key factors in this decision are stability and a future that presents viable alternatives to the Baathists and Islamists." At the same time, he said, foreign fighters have carried out "some of the most significant attacks," including suicide bombings. "Left unchecked," Jacoby said, "Iraq has the potential to serve as a training ground for the next generation of terrorists." The testimony came in the administration's annual worldwide threat assessment, which aims to give Congress a broad view of national security threats and the status of U.S. responses to them. It was the first time Tenet appeared on Capitol Hill since controversy intensified over his agency's prewar assessments of Iraq, and he was peppered with questions by Republicans and Democrats about CIA assertions that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and had an advanced nuclear program, none of which have been found. "People voted to authorize the use of force based on what we read in these reports," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). Finding no weapons of mass destruction is "a pretty bitter pill to swallow with respect to the value of intelligence, particularly in a preemptive war." Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) pressed Tenet even harder, saying the decision to go to war in Iraq was based on "either bad intelligence or misleading the people." Tenet shot back: "We are not perfect, but we are pretty damn good at what we do, and we care as much as you do about Iraq and whether we were right or wrong." For the past eight months, the House and Senate intelligence committees have been examining the intelligence community's prewar analysis of the Iraq threat. The Senate committee plans to issue the first of its two reports next month and, according to Senate officials, it will be highly critical of Tenet and the CIA. President Bush recently appointed a commission to probe the same matter, with a mandate to look at the broader question of the CIA's ability to track weapons proliferation. Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) questioned Tenet about his Feb. 5 speech at Georgetown University, which included his declaration that CIA analysts "never said there was an imminent threat." Tenet's speech was a response to criticism of prewar intelligence and to those who say the Bush administration portrayed as imminent the threat posed by Iraq's weapons and links to terrorists. "If it wasn't an imminent threat, in your mind, how would you have characterized or assessed the threat at that point in time?" Snowe asked yesterday. "I would have characterized it as something that was grave and gathering, something that we were quite worried about, quite worried about the nature of surprise," Tenet answered. ". . . And so you would agree with the characterizations that were made by the president, the vice president, Secretary Powell, in that respect," Snowe asked. "I just characterized what I think, how I was thinking about this at the time. . . . I haven't parsed everybody's words, and I don't want to do that." ". . . But, I'm just wondering then, do you think that we made a -- we then took this action in Iraq on a lesser standard than 'imminent'?" Snowe asked. "Well, I don't want to go back," Tenet said. " . . . See, now we're -- we're now into a realm of what all the policymakers were thinking about this, and I don't want to go back and parse their words." Jacoby, Tenet and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III all answered "yes" when asked if the United States is safer now than right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But they each went on to describe an interlocking web of terrorist organizations that have found common cause against the United States since then. Mueller said subways and bridges in major cities and airlines continue to be al Qaeda targets. "There are strong indications that al Qaeda will revisit missed targets until they succeed," Mueller said, "such as they did the World Trade Center. And the list of missed targets now includes both the White House as well as the Capitol." He said that while the bulk of al Qaeda supporters in the United States help with fundraising, logistics and recruitment, some have been involved "in operational planning." Jacoby said hijackings and attacks with portable, shoulder-fired missiles against civilian aircraft remain prominent concerns. "A number of factors virtually assure a terrorist threat for years to come," Jacoby said. "Despite recent reforms, terrorist organizations draw from societies with poor or failing economies, ineffective governments and inadequate education systems." "Demographic bubbles" of young people "further burden governments and economies," he said, mentioning a number of countries where a high proportion of the population is under 15: Saudi Arabia, with 43 percent; Iraq, 41 percent; Pakistan, 39 percent; Egypt, 34 percent; Algeria, 33 percent; and Iran, 29 percent. © 2004 The Washington Post Company
CIA Chief Says Group Is Fragmented but Still Dangerous
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 25, 2004; Page A01
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Relatives of a Sudanese man accused by the U.S. military of being an al-Qaida accountant and bodyguard to Osama bin Laden said they had not heard from the suspect since 1996 and were shocked to learn he was detained at Guantanamo Bay, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The younger brother of Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi told the independent Al-Sahafa daily newspaper that al Qosi's family learned he would face a U.S. military tribunal through a report on the Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera.
The only one who recognized al Qosi on television was his father, who said he would know him "even if his eyes were closed," the paper reported.
"When his father heard about his news on TV, he hugged the TV and cried. We all cried," the suspect's younger brother, Abdallah, was quoted as saying.
Arrest Shocks Guantanamo Prisoner's Family
By Associated Press
February 25, 2004, 10:27 AM EST
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Relatives of a Sudanese man accused by the U.S. military of being an al-Qaida accountant and bodyguard to Osama bin Laden said they had not heard from the suspect since 1996 and were shocked to learn he was detained at Guantanamo Bay, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The younger brother of Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi told the independent Al-Sahafa daily newspaper that al Qosi's family learned he would face a U.S. military tribunal through a report on the Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera.
The only one who recognized al Qosi on television was his father, who said he would know him "even if his eyes were closed," the paper reported.
"When his father heard about his news on TV, he hugged the TV and cried. We all cried," the suspect's younger brother, Abdallah, was quoted as saying.
On Wednesday, family and friends refused to talk to reporters, fearing their comments could harm al Qosi before the tribunal.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon charged al Qosi and Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul, of Yemen -- who are among more than 600 terror suspects held at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- with war crimes conspiracy.
The Pentagon said al Bahlul was a propagandist for bin Laden.
The men allegedly trained at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon's list of charges does not mention either man carrying out or planning any terrorist attack.
The two suspects will face the first U.S. military tribunal since World War II and could face maximum sentences of life in prison if convicted.
Al Qosi, born in 1960 in Atbara, 215 miles north of Khartoum, was "calm and aloof," his family told Al-Sahafa.
Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press
Pat Buchanan's take on the Neo-Cons:
No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict
http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington Post depiction of himself as the “intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.”
The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are losing their grip on reality.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” “What is new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained” now menaces “our survival as a nation.”
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
“[A] radical strain within Islam,” says Perle, “ ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws.”
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to “overthrow our civilization” and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this same scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more battles.
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never “the clear and present danger” the authors insist she was.
Calling their book a “manual for victory,” they declaim:
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.
But no nation can “end evil.” Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every human heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle propose to “end” it? Nor can any nation “win the war on terror.” Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA, Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela. Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin, Mao, Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can “end” it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and “immortality,” will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors: “We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they kill our people or others .... We must deter all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not” [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending everyone, everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to Cuba, from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have used torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations that need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli Defense Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a short list of priority targets: “The war on terror is not over, it has barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder.”
Now al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn, “present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time.”
“Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?” the authors demand. They call for a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a “Western orientation”—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus? Invade? Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to guerrilla war?
Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad’s regime be destroyed—by us?
“We don’t have much time,” say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to provide us “with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror,” or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how would that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a “state sponsor of terror” 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. “The regime must go,” say our authors, because Ayatollah Khamenei has
… no more right to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker.
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to “toss dictators aside”? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves. “We have no doubt how such a war would end,” say the authors. They also had no doubt how the Iraqi war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom and democracy? Not exactly:
It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome.
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the desperate for action this day: “We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial.”
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends.
They promised him a “cakewalk,” that we would be hailed as “liberators,” that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass.”
What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003.
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s protégé passed over? Because the “INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis.” The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle asserted that Saddam “is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.”
Naming Khidir Hamza, “one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam,” as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of 400 uranium enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. “Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them.” Only “preemptive action” can save us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam was imminent:
With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even?
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had access to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his links to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s “collaboration with terrorism is well documented,” wrote Perle, “Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11 ringleader, is convincing.”
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. “We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not.”
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. “No war in ‘04” is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about “unipolar” moments and “American empire” aside, there are limits to American power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000 are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his “axis-of-evil” rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of the Union, “We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.”
The long retreat of American empire has begun.
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the imminent departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, “One squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.”
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars, seems, given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in unreality. Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this authority. Nor does it appear he intends to try. And were the United States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate every ally in the Islamic world and Europe—including Tony Blair’s Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed our armed forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our demise as a nation.
If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to isolate it from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father to help us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather than another enemy of the United States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of enemies. They do not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked us. They want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies. They want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls “the Firemen’s War” into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit 9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their desperation knows no bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy as appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and isolating your enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia and China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an American victory—call it imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of operations, multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of our country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an Arab and Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their war for hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not America’s agenda, and their fight is not America’s fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum and Perle concede, this is “our generation’s great cause.”
“Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men who would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and retribution across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David invented the “axis-of-evil” phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum ratted out his old colleagues in a “hot” book and got himself hired by National Review, where he produced a cover story about a dirty dozen “Unpatriotic Conservatives” who hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and “wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror.”
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must, in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle co-authored “A Clean Break,” a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus secretly urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by his own government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of Defense while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate themselves with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon once bore the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings. The toxic charge of “Anti-Semite!” has become the last argument of the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People are less intimidated now. They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He opposed war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we would unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know where the neocons came from—that was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.
National Review’s response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a separate column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of having “blamed the Jews,” he insisted that the term neocon, in common usage for 25 years, is now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews. They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives.’
Mowbray and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant soldier who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but only add to their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their tactics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics of the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word “neocon,” he writes, the “con” stands for conservative and the “neo” stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so few are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a book with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil, declared: “This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth.”
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from “American empire” to “benevolent global hegemony” to “a Pax Americana” to “world democratic revolution” have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the Palestinians a home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a Munich sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has been opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined by what is best for America. And what is best for America is what our forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of foreign wars, avoid “permanent alliances,” beware of “passionate attachments” to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory was won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic into Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of Israel only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of a foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to rationalize their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. “The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism,” Frum and Perle protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey says it is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an “ideological” nation, “like the Soviet Union of yesteryear.” We and Israel are democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to it.
That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
(article is too long too paste)
An investigative piece by Lamis Andoni & Sandy Tolan, with reporting by Berkeley students.
Held up to the light, the X ray of Fouad Mahed's right femur resembles a piece of the sky on a clear desert night: countless specks of white scattered against an ink-black backdrop.
But this milky way is actually hundreds of fragments of lead and bone, the result of a bullet from an Israeli rifle that shattered Mahed's leg. The image itself is of something that no longer exists. After massive blood loss, doctors were forced to amputate the limb two weeks after the shooting.
"Surgery is easy when you know the anatomy," says Dr. Nasri Khoury, tracing the outline of Mahed's femur with a pen. "But when the anatomy is destroyed, the surgeon is at a loss."
Thousands of Palestinian young men and boys may become permanently crippled from bullet wounds suffered during the last five months of stone-throwing protests against Israeli rule. As with Fouad Mahed, a carpenter from Gaza, many of the 11,000 injuries came when unarmed people were shot.
Published February 21, 2001
Israel's Favored Ammo is Crippling a Generation of Young Palestinians
Shoot to Maim
by Lamis Andoni & Sandy Tolan
Held up to the light, the X ray of Fouad Mahed's right femur resembles a piece of the sky on a clear desert night: countless specks of white scattered against an ink-black backdrop.
But this milky way is actually hundreds of fragments of lead and bone, the result of a bullet from an Israeli rifle that shattered Mahed's leg. The image itself is of something that no longer exists. After massive blood loss, doctors were forced to amputate the limb two weeks after the shooting.
"Surgery is easy when you know the anatomy," says Dr. Nasri Khoury, tracing the outline of Mahed's femur with a pen. "But when the anatomy is destroyed, the surgeon is at a loss."
Thousands of Palestinian young men and boys may become permanently crippled from bullet wounds suffered during the last five months of stone-throwing protests against Israeli rule. As with Fouad Mahed, a carpenter from Gaza, many of the 11,000 injuries came when unarmed people were shot.
This investigation was conducted under the auspices of the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, with reporting by Sara Dunn, Chris Smith, and Gavin Tachibana in Amman; and Aryn Baker, Jessie Deeter, and Robin Shulman in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The high rates of crippling injuries are in large part due to the fragmenting bullets fired by M16s. The American-made Colt weapons, introduced during the Vietnam War as lightweight field rifles capable of inflicting maximum damage on the enemy, are being used increasingly by the Israel Defense Forces against civilian demonstrators. The M16 ammunition often breaks into tiny pieces after penetration, ripping up muscle and nerve and causing multiple internal injuries, much like those of the internationally banned dumdum bullets.
Forensics experts in the United States and Europe, who agreed for this article to examine the X rays of Fouad Mahed and other wounded Palestinians, confirm repeated casualties from M16s, shotguns, and other live ammunition. These images, together with other X rays seen in West Bank and Jordanian hospitals, show a pattern some forensics specialists call a "lead snowstorm," the fragmentation of high-velocity military ammunition, fired at civilians. Many of the wounded were hit at short range—less than 100 meters—compounding internal damage.
The reliance on these rounds is part of what human rights groups have denounced as excessive use of Israeli force against mostly unarmed Palestinians. "Shooting people with high-velocity bullets to wound them is a form of summary punishment being inflicted in the field," says Dr. Robert Kirschner of the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights.
It's not yet clear how newly elected prime minister Ariel Sharon, a lifelong hard-liner, will handle the spiraling conflict. Last week the IDF sent helicopter gunships to assassinate a senior Palestinian security officer. The next day, a Palestinian bus driver plowed into a bus stop, killing seven Israeli soldiers and one civilian. Charges continued that Israeli troops were firing live ammunition into unarmed crowds before trying to scatter them with tear gas or water cannons, as the military code requires—the same charges the IDF denied under Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak.
"Every new victim wounded or killed is not a goal for us," says Major Olivier Rafowicz, a spokesperson. "The violence is initiated by the other side. If they can show victims, wounded, blood, children—it is only serving the Palestinian interest: 'See, we are only doing popular activities, and the bad Israeli guy is killing us for nothing.' We are not interested in that on the Israeli side."
Major Rafowicz argues that Israel has exercised considerable restraint in the face of life-threatening demonstrations, with gunfire from Palestinians. In addition, he says, Israel has tried unsuccessfully to acquire nonlethal riot control from several European countries. Nevertheless, Rafowicz insists, IDF soldiers operate under strict rules of engagement. "We open fire only on people who are endangering our lives," he says. "You can kill someone with a rock. A stone is a weapon."
Adds another IDF spokesperson: "We don't shoot live bullets when nobody's shooting at us."
Yet in more than 100 interviews for this article, patients, doctors, and medical personnel in 14 hospitals and clinics in Jordan and the West Bank paint a far different picture. With no shooting from the Palestinian side, and often little or no use of tear gas to disperse the protests, Israeli soldiers have repeatedly fired live ammunition into unarmed crowds.
Fadi Mohammed, 18, (left) is paralyzed in both legs.
photo: Heidi Zeiger
Ibrahim Mustafa Darwish, 17, was shot in the abdomen on November 15, during protests at the Erez checkpoint that divides Gaza from Israel. Six weeks later, he lies in bed at Jordan Hospital in Amman. The bandages on his abdomen are bloody and sticky, signs of multiple surgeries to remove a meter of intestines. Israeli soldiers fired at the 18 stone-throwers from a distance of 15 meters.
Fadi Mohammed, 18, was also shot in the abdomen in late November while throwing rocks at a protest. The single bullet exploded two vertebrae, injuring his kidney and paralyzing both legs. He arrived November 30 at Palestine Hospital in Amman, where surgeons removed his spleen and parts of his vertebrae.
Mahmoud Al Medhoun, 15, was hit three times—in the leg, back, and abdomen—by soldiers firing from the hatch of a tank. One bullet lodged in his spine, smashing three vertebrae and pinching a nerve. His right leg is paralyzed. Doctors have removed part of his colon and repaired his liver; he is unable to eat. "God willing, I will walk again," declares Mahmoud. But when his father cites the doctors' opinion that the paralysis is probably permanent, the boy rolls himself into a ball, burying his face in the crook of his arm and crying.
Crippling injuries among Palestinians are estimated at 1500—a figure likely to rise as more of the wounded seek rehabilitation. Palestinian officials say the rate of disabling injuries during this Al Aqsa Intifada, which began in the shadow of East Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque on September 29, is higher than during the first intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993. "The Israeli response to this intifada has been more ferocious, swifter, and more intensive," says Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.
Lethal fire has come from M16, M3, and M24 snipers' rifles, and from higher-caliber munitions, including concrete-busting machine-gun bullets, grenade launchers, 120-millimeter tank shells, and Hellfire rockets fired from American-made Apache attack helicopters. The heavier fire, say Israeli analysts, has come in response to Palestinian sniping. But even the more benign ammunition designed for riot control, like so-called rubber bullets—steel balls coated with a thin layer of rubber—can be fatal if fired at short range. "They are the nightmare of the neurosurgeon," says Dr. Jihad Mashal. "Every time the patient moves his head, it's like a marble moving in jelly. There's nothing you can do about it."
In the first weeks of the Intifada, head and upper-body injuries accounted for a great portion of Palestinian casualties. "A large part of those wounded by live bullets are those we indeed wanted to not only injure but kill," wrote General Giora Eiland in a letter to Israeli human rights lawyer Neta Amar. "These are the same people that shoot at us with live ammunition. The fact that most of them are wounded in the upper body or head is a positive thing."
After a flurry of international condemnation, the rate of head and chest injuries dropped, replaced by devastating leg and abdomen wounds. "I consider it a form of torture," says Kirschner of Physicians for Human Rights. "There's no question in my mind that this was a very conscious military decision to use this weapon to wound people as a form of intimidation of the population. And as a result, probably several thousand young Palestinian men will end up with permanent disabilities."
The M16 ammunition was at first mistaken by Palestinian doctors for the dumdum bullet, banned by the Hague Convention in 1899. "Many people think that it's a dumdum bullet, because if it does penetrate deep enough, it will break," says Martin Fackler, a former army surgeon who now runs ballistics tests for the U.S. Department of Defense. "Fragmentation does cause more wounds."
The weapon was introduced in 1963, as an experiment with the South Vietnamese army during the Kennedy administration. Soon reports came back from the field, recounted in a 1995 article in the International Review of the Red Cross, of a bullet that "does cartwheels as it penetrates living flesh, causing a highly lethal wound that looks like anything but a caliber .22 hole." By 1966, army doctors reported "gaping, devastated area[s] of soft tissue and even bone, often with loss of large amounts of tissue" and a disintegrating bullet. Seven years later, reports were circulating about wounds that looked like those caused by the expanding dumdum bullets, banned for causing "superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering."
Years of experiments revealed that the lightweight M16 bullet was prone to "yaw" and "tumble" more quickly after penetration—giving it greater potential to rip apart tissue by flying through the body sideways. The higher velocity—a trait now shared with other military rifles—also meant the bullet created a larger "temporary cavity," destroying solid, less flexible tissues like the spleen and liver—a pattern of injury borne out in Palestinian medical records. And the bullet fragmented more, causing multiple injuries from tiny pieces of lead, each on its own haywire path.
The old dumdum had been banned from the battlefield, but now some worried that a new bullet, with similar consequences, was taking its place. For years, disputes over what actually caused the wounds—the bullet's velocity, its tumbling, its fragmentation—slowed efforts to ban the ammunition. In 1995, the Swiss introduced an initiative to bring the M16 ammunition, along with others, under the umbrella of the Hague Convention. In his analysis of the Swiss effort in the International Review of the Red Cross, the humanitarian scholar Eric Prokosch urged states to "seize the opportunity" for the "adoption of the strongest possible ban on the modern dumdum bullets."
Some ballistics experts in Europe agree. Dr. Peter J.T. Knudsen, a Danish forensic pathologist who has written extensively on bullets and humanitarian law, argues that all M16 ammunition currently used by military forces should be banned, because they all tend to shatter. "Fragmentation adds unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury," he says.
Others caution that the M16 should not be singled out in what amounts to a political struggle rooted in the Cold War.
"The concept of 'inhumane' rifle bullets is a product of minds who know nothing of real war, and usually have ulterior—usually political—motives," says Fackler, who points out that heavier military bullets, with greater mass, also produce large wounds. "I have seen many soldiers who have had both legs and an arm blown off by explosive devices: land mines, artillery, etc. That is inhumane. There are no rifles on the battlefield that can disrupt anywhere near that much tissue. So does it make good sense to declare a rifle bullet inhumane and ignore the weapons that cause far more tissue disruption?"
Defenders of the M16 say attempts to ban the rifle's 5.56mm ammunition were started by the Soviet Union, envious of the U.S. and NATO's lightweight, efficient military rifle. That claim is disputed, but the issue remains politically charged. After years of testing and repeated international meetings, some humanitarian and ballistics experts would like to raise the issue of high-velocity, fragmenting bullets at an international conference in Europe later this year. They say it's time that weapons causing the same degree of unnecessary harm as the old dumdum bullets be placed under the same kind of ban.
Chances for that appear slim. After floating a proposal that might have put restrictions on the M16 ammunition, potentially forcing NATO countries to develop entirely new, nonfragmenting ammunition, the Swiss government now appears ready to offer a more modest plan.
"Can you imagine if there were an attempt to ban 5.56[mm] bullets?" asks Denmark's Dr. Knudsen. "Think about all the countries that would have to discard all their M16 ammunition." Even if they replaced it with the nonfragmenting bullets being tested, there's still a stark political reality: None of the "safer" bullets are manufactured in America. "Imagine if you told the U.S. Army they would have to buy all their bullets from a foreign country," Knudsen says. "Or how about the senator in whose state the bullets are made? There's too much money involved."
As humanitarians debate whether to consider a ban on ammunition they believe excessively harmful to soldiers, the IDF continues to use the weapons on unarmed Palestinian civilians. Live ammunition has been used "routinely in an illegal and indiscriminate manner," a Human Rights Watch report said of the IDF, "resulting in deaths and injuries to civilians."
Mohammad Nada, 17, will need a nerve graft to regain full mobility in his left leg.
photo: Heidi Zeiger
Nasri Showkat lies in his bed in Jordan Hospital, waiting for doctors to extract the last bullet fragments, lodged near his left eye socket. The graying edges of his short black hair and his thin silver-frame glasses give a learned look to Showkat, a history major who was due to graduate this year. On October 25, he joined hundreds of demonstrators in Ramallah. They marched to the Israeli-guarded checkpoint and threw their stones. When Showkat saw his friend shot in the head, he rushed out and was himself shot, he says, by a sniper. The bullet hit Showkat in the upper lip, exploding into seven fragments inside his head. He lost the teeth on one side of his mouth, which he covers with one hand when he tries to speak.
Amjad, 22, was hit in the head in the West Bank town of Jenin. X rays show a bullet lodged in the back of his skull. His arms are listless and floppy like a rag doll's, and the room smells like excrement.
Mohammad Nada, 17 years old, was shot twice by an Israeli sniper on December 1 while clearing debris in front of his sister's house, close to the site of daily clashes in Ramallah. The second shot went into his left buttock and hit his sciatic nerve, which controls the up-and-down movement of the foot. X rays show evidence of a high-velocity bullet, which fragmented into hundreds of pieces. Doctors say he needs a graft to repair the nerve.
Isa Abu Abdullah, 19, was confronted by Israeli tanks in Gaza on the third morning of Ramadan, November 29. He threw stones, then was hit by a bullet in the left calf. While down, he was hit by six more bullets: three in his left thigh, two in his right thigh, and one in his right arm. Doctors at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza moved part of an artery from his right leg to his left, then sent him to Amman for further surgery.
Mahmoud Odeili, 23, lives in Gaza, near the Israeli settlement of Gush Katif, a constant flashpoint. Now he fills a bed in Amman's Shmesani Hospital. The unemployed father of two barely opens his mouth when he speaks, because of the high-velocity bullet that smashed his jaw before exiting through the back of his neck. He says he and his friends ran out to throw stones at an Israeli demolition crew sent to destroy their houses. He was shot by a soldier in a tank 100 meters away. "They shot us and kept going," he says.
"How many patients do you want to see?" asks Dr. Ghazi Hanania of the Abu Raya Rehabilitation Centre in Ramallah. The doctor, in a gray charcoal suit with a red scarf, looks across his desk with deeply tired eyes. "You can talk to 2000 patients if you want to."
Outside the center, four young men in wheelchairs gather at the curb, soaking up the December sun. Nasser Bilali, his leg in a heavy cast, says he was just walking home when clashes broke out. In the confusion he was hit by a high-velocity bullet that shredded several bones in his left foot. He's not sure if he'll walk again without crutches; it will be months before he can even think about going back to work. "I can't consider myself a hero," says Bilali. "Because I didn't even throw stones. I was just walking and I got shot."
An old woman in a white headscarf and a black Palestinian dress has been listening to Bilali's story. She begins to yell and wave her arms. "Look at him! He's young, and he's already in a wheelchair. Haram! Haram! This is a crime! This is a crime! We're using stones. They're using bombs and rockets and tanks!" She points to the rehab center's second floor. "My son is upstairs. A woman pours out the blood of her heart to raise a son through poverty and hardship, and now he gets shot."
Dr. Hanania says he is not so worried about the hundreds of patients his staff is contending with now. "The problem is what will be coming to the center in the coming days," he says. Because the Israelis are limiting freedom of movement between West Bank towns and villages, the doctor says, it's impossible to estimate how many young men will need rehabilitative care. But when the roads open, Dr. Hanania expects a flood. "There are reports that there are 25 to 30 percent of the injured in need of rehabilitative care"—several thousand people, given the current casualty figures. "If that's true, it's a national disaster."
Across the Jordan River in Amman, Dr. Khoury pulls back Fouad Mahed's bedcovers to reveal a bandaged stump—the remnants of his right leg. After he was hit, doctors in Gaza pumped 17 pints of blood into Mahed, to replace that which was pouring from the wound. Complications from a skin graft forced doctors to send him to Amman, where he could get treatment unavailable in the Gaza hospitals.
Khoury has operated on hundreds of injured Palestinians dating back to the first intifada. But never has he seen so many severely wounded. He puts his hand on Mahed's shoulder. "This guy is amazing," says Dr. Khoury. "After all he's been through"—the shooting, the amputation, the formation of ulcers that almost killed him—"the smile never leaves his face."
Mahed was shot in Gaza just after returning home from an afternoon of prayer. Israeli shells began to fall in his Khan Yunis neighborhood, 100 meters from an Israeli military installation. When parts of his ceiling caved in, Mahed, who says he has never taken part in the protests, decided to bring his wife and daughter to his brother's house. Just outside his door, he was hit.
Mohammed Mahmoud Abu Fodeh, 22, was shot in the arm, chest, and lung.
photo: Heidi Zeiger
The question of whether lethal force is justified rests in determining whether police or security forces are acting to defend themselves or others against the threat of imminent death or serious injury. Israeli officials say they are shooting in response to shooting. "The Palestinians are not only throwing stones like 10 years ago," says Major Rafowicz of the IDF, "but also using rifles, Kalashnikovs, within the demonstration."
Even in such cases, Israeli forces, supported by tanks and high-caliber fire from helicopter gunships, have often overwhelmed the Palestinian side. "Usually the Palestinian fire is pathetic," an anonymous IDF sniper told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. "The shooting is totally pathetic. . . . You know that most of it will be into the air."
Despite headlines describing a conflict between two armies—and despite repeated calls from Israeli and U.S. officials that it is the Palestinians who must stop the violence—approximately 90 percent of the dead and wounded have been Palestinians or Israeli Arabs. The IDF's own figures indicate that in three-quarters of the clashes, there was no Palestinian gunfire. "Israel's policy is directed in large part against the Palestinian civilian population, which is not firing at Israeli civilians or IDF soldiers and is the primary victim of Israel's human rights violations," says a recent report by B'tselem, the respected Israeli human rights group.
Of the dozens of patients interviewed in the 14 hospitals, all but four said they were throwing stones, coming to the aid of another wounded person, or simply walking past a flashpoint when they were shot. One patient admitted to firing a gun when hit; three others said they were throwing Molotov cocktails.
"Molotov cocktails can kill," says Major Rafowicz.
According to human rights groups, even the gasoline bombs pose little threat to soldiers equipped for riot control. "The Israeli security services were almost invariably well-defended, located at a distance from demonstrators in good cover, in blockhouses, behind wire or well-protected by riot shields," Amnesty International concluded in its October report. "Certainly, stones—or even petrol bombs—cannot be said to have endangered the lives of Israeli security services in any of the instances examined by Amnesty International."
The Palestinians, by comparison, have been easy targets.
Shadi Masri, 24, was shot three times in the abdomen on November 16, after throwing Molotov cocktails at a tank. Beside his bed at Amman Surgical Hospital stands a Palestinian flag. On the wall hangs a poster of Yasir Arafat, superimposed over a crowd of protesters. Masri doesn't know how long it took him to get to Jordan, but says he does remember Israeli soldiers taking his picture and punching him in the ambulance. It was the third time he was injured during this intifada.
Mohammed Bassam, 15, was shot while protesting on November 26 in Birzeit, near Ramallah. A high-velocity bullet went through his shin, crushing the bone. Surgeons inserted steel rods through his leg and an "external fixator" resembling perforated file-cabinet rods. He uses a walker to get around his hospital room.
Adil, 31, was shot during what he says was a peaceful protest following a funeral of a man killed in the clashes. A bullet splintered a bone in his left leg. Adil says he saw fragments of the limb in the street before he passed out.
Morad, 15, breathes slowly, with the aid of a respirator. The machine clicks, his chest fills with air, it clicks again, his chest falls. His eyelids are purple and swollen, his head wrapped in a bandage. A heart monitor is connected to his chest. A bullet is lodged in his brain.
Sharif Darwish, 34, sits sideways on his bed at Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. A heavy cast holds in place the shattered bones of his foot. "The guy who carried me to the ambulance was killed," he says. Darwish stares ahead at nothing. A few weeks before, a rocket hit his Beit Jala house, landing next to his bedroom. "I had just woken up to get some breakfast," he says.
Palestinians, almost without exception, trace the beginnings of the Al Aqsa Intifada to the September 28 arrival of Ariel Sharon at Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary, or Temple Mount to the Israelis), backed by a thousand Israeli troops and riot police. The high casualties, they say, began as part of a brute-force strategy by then prime minister Ehud Barak to try to achieve a swift end to the conflict.
"These are good tactics if one wants to wipe out an enemy," said Dr. Stephen Males, a former senior police officer in the U.K. who accompanied an Amnesty International fact-finding team to the region. "They are not policing."
Israelis say Sharon's visit was merely an excuse to adopt a carefully orchestrated intifada planned and backed by the Palestinian Authority. "We are talking about a very organized and very planned violent strategy chosen by the P.A. to try to achieve political goals from the very beginning," says Major Rafowicz. "To try more quickly to achieve political objectives, mainly, we believe, to improve the Palestinian position abroad by reinforcing the image of the underdog of the big, bad Israeli.
"We have been dragged into this situation not by our own policy. We look very bad on TV because we are a regular army facing a so-called popular demonstration. But on the other side it is a strategy."
Publicly, IDF officials keep to their explanations of restraint in the face of violence. General Eiland, in his letter to the Israeli human rights lawyer, wrote: "[W]ithin a rioting crowd of unarmed residents, there are also those . . . who are armed. You cannot demand of a soldier to shoot only when he is convinced there is no danger for whoever stands next to a Palestinian opening fire at him."
Privately, some IDF soldiers and generals have been telling Israeli journalists something else. "I don't know if the IDF takes revenge," an IDF sniper told the newspaper Ha'aretz. "But every time, after there's a serious incident, it's political, you can feel it. You as a soldier know that if in the papers today they have written about a lot of things that happened to the IDF, then they will allow you to shoot more."
The sniper told Ha'aretz that soldiers are allowed to shoot at Palestinians who pose a potential threat, as long as they appear to be over the age of 12. "Twelve and up is allowed," said the sniper. A senior IDF officer told another Ha'aretz reporter: "Nobody can convince me we didn't needlessly kill dozens of children."
The high casualties sustained by Palestinians during the first two months of clashes, and the international condemnation of Israel that followed, have prompted a shift in tactics on both sides. Casualties began to decline in December, says Ghassan Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center. He calls that decrease "a sign of fewer massive demonstrations at Israeli army checkpoints."
This is not an indication of renewed faith in the prospects for peace. Palestinians, says Khatib, have lost faith in an Oslo process that they no longer believe can deliver on basic issues of sovereignty, Jerusalem, and the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland. Increasingly, says Khatib, Palestinians are equating discussions of peace and security with the continuation of the Israeli occupation. A recent poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center shows two-thirds of Palestinians support the most extreme measures, including suicide bombings, "under the current political conditions." The poll also indicates 70 percent of Palestinians support continuing the Al Aqsa Intifada.
In the hospital interviews in Jordan and the West Bank, young men appeared eager to again pick up the stone.
Mohammed Mahmoud Abu Fodeh, at 22, is already a veteran of the Palestinian struggle. Now, he lies in a bed in Amman's Specialty Physiotherapy Hospital, after being shot twice while protesting at the checkpoint between Jericho and the Allenby Bridge into Jordan. One high-velocity bullet lodged in his left shoulder. Another pierced a lung. His friends thought he was dead, until they saw him crawling toward the ambulance. The bullet from his chest rests in a jar beside his bed, "for memory and for evidence," he says.
"We're not afraid of their bullets, but they fear our stones," he says. "God gave us the stone—it has God's will in it. It's all we have.
"The stone has awakened the Arab world, from the leaders to the laymen," he says. "This is only the beginning."
To follow up on our class discussions please read this BBC series on the question of how America projects its power. Try to post your comments.
The U.S. government announced today that it is mounting its first prosecution of enemy prisoners since the aftermath of World War II, charging two detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison who were alleged bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, before a military tribunal with conspiracy to commit war crimes.
Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan was an al Qaeda propagandist who produced videos glorifying the terrorist network's attack on the destroyer U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, and who on Sept. 11, 2001, was given the job of arranging a satellite hookup to Afghanistan so bin Laden could watch news coverage of the event, according to a U.S. military charging document released today.
Al Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen was a key al Qaeda accountant and weapons smuggler dating back to the late 1990s, and as a bin Laden bodyguard wore an explosives-laden suicide belt to thwart assassination attempts on the Saudi millionaire, according to a charging document filed against Bahlul.
BAGHDAD (AFP) — University students and teachers staged a sit-in at the University of Baghdad on Monday to protest the detention of Iraqi scientists by US forces on suspicion of involvement in weapons of mass destruction programmes under Saddam Hussein.
"My husband has been detained for 28 days in an unknown location," said Galshin, the wife of 49-year-old Ali Abdelraa Al Zaaq, who heads the university's faculty of genetics.
"The Americans had already detained him from May to August and then released him, saying that he was not on the list of wanted scientists," she told AFP.
"A month ago, he went to one of their bases to obtain a weapons permit and they arrested him again, arguing they had new evidence against him," Galshin said.
"My husband has been detained in Abu Ghraib (prison) for six months without charges," said Sobhi aid Al Rawi, 59, who heads the computer science department at the women's faculty of science.
"Some of the professors currently being held had already been interrogated once and had been very cooperative with the Americans," said Hoda Al Nuaimi, who heads the Centre for Palestinian Studies and was one of the sit-in's organisers.
The 20-odd protesters waved banners which read: "Science is not a crime," "Release the scientists immediately."
Asked about the arrests, US coalition spokesman Michael Pierson said: "Some scientists who were in the former regimes military are being held as prisoners of war."
"Civilians who we detain whether they're scientists or not — pose an imperative threat to security, either because of what they've done or what they know," he added.
A large number of scientists who worked in the armament industry under Saddam's regime and are suspected of having taken part in a weapons of mass destruction programmes have since found jobs as university teachers.
One scientist was murdered and another seriously wounded in shooting attacks in Baghdad shortly after they met with a team of US investigators last autumn.
Many others have sought refuge in the United States since the end of the war.
Saddam's alleged chemical and biological weapons caches were the main justification for the US-led military intervention in Iraq, but ten months after the end of major fighting, the coalition still has not found any weapons of mass destruction.
No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington Post depiction of himself as the “intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.”
The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are losing their grip on reality.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” “What is new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained” now menaces “our survival as a nation.”
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
“[A] radical strain within Islam,” says Perle, “ ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws.”
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to “overthrow our civilization” and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this same scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more battles.
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never “the clear and present danger” the authors insist she was.
Calling their book a “manual for victory,” they declaim:
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.
But no nation can “end evil.” Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every human heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle propose to “end” it? Nor can any nation “win the war on terror.” Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA, Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela. Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin, Mao, Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can “end” it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and “immortality,” will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors: “We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they kill our people or others .... We must deter all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not” [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending everyone, everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to Cuba, from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have used torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations that need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli Defense Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a short list of priority targets: “The war on terror is not over, it has barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder.”
Now al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn, “present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time.”
“Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?” the authors demand. They call for a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a “Western orientation”—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus? Invade? Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to guerrilla war?
Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad’s regime be destroyed—by us?
“We don’t have much time,” say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to provide us “with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror,” or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how would that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a “state sponsor of terror” 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. “The regime must go,” say our authors, because Ayatollah Khamenei has
… no more right to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker.
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to “toss dictators aside”? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves. “We have no doubt how such a war would end,” say the authors. They also had no doubt how the Iraqi war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom and democracy? Not exactly:
It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome.
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the desperate for action this day: “We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial.”
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends.
They promised him a “cakewalk,” that we would be hailed as “liberators,” that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass.”
What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003.
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s protégé passed over? Because the “INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis.” The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle asserted that Saddam “is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.”
Naming Khidir Hamza, “one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam,” as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of 400 uranium enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. “Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them.” Only “preemptive action” can save us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam was imminent:
With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even?
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had access to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his links to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s “collaboration with terrorism is well documented,” wrote Perle, “Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11 ringleader, is convincing.”
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. “We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not.”
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. “No war in ‘04” is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about “unipolar” moments and “American empire” aside, there are limits to American power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000 are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his “axis-of-evil” rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of the Union, “We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.”
The long retreat of American empire has begun.
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the imminent departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, “One squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.”
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars, seems, given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in unreality. Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this authority. Nor does it appear he intends to try. And were the United States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate every ally in the Islamic world and Europe—including Tony Blair’s Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed our armed forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our demise as a nation.
If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to isolate it from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father to help us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather than another enemy of the United States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of enemies. They do not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked us. They want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies. They want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls “the Firemen’s War” into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit 9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their desperation knows no bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy as appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and isolating your enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia and China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an American victory—call it imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of operations, multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of our country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an Arab and Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their war for hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not America’s agenda, and their fight is not America’s fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum and Perle concede, this is “our generation’s great cause.”
“Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men who would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and retribution across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David invented the “axis-of-evil” phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum ratted out his old colleagues in a “hot” book and got himself hired by National Review, where he produced a cover story about a dirty dozen “Unpatriotic Conservatives” who hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and “wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror.”
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must, in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle co-authored “A Clean Break,” a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus secretly urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by his own government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of Defense while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate themselves with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon once bore the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings. The toxic charge of “Anti-Semite!” has become the last argument of the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People are less intimidated now. They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He opposed war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we would unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know where the neocons came from—that was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.
National Review’s response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a separate column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of having “blamed the Jews,” he insisted that the term neocon, in common usage for 25 years, is now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews. They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives.’
Mowbray and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant soldier who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but only add to their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their tactics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics of the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word “neocon,” he writes, the “con” stands for conservative and the “neo” stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so few are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a book with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil, declared: “This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth.”
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from “American empire” to “benevolent global hegemony” to “a Pax Americana” to “world democratic revolution” have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the Palestinians a home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a Munich sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has been opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined by what is best for America. And what is best for America is what our forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of foreign wars, avoid “permanent alliances,” beware of “passionate attachments” to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory was won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic into Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of Israel only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of a foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to rationalize their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. “The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism,” Frum and Perle protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey says it is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an “ideological” nation, “like the Soviet Union of yesteryear.” We and Israel are democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to it.
That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
But this is nonsense, and Kristol knows it. When Britain and France declared war on Hitler on September 3, 1939, FDR did not “come to the defense of France and Britain.” He delivered a fireside chat that night promising the nation America would stay out. There will be “no blackout of peace” here, FDR promised us.When France fell in May-June of 1940, pleading for planes, FDR sent words of encouragement. Not until 18 months after the fall of France did we declare war on Hitler and not until after Hitler declared war on us. Thus, we did not go to war to defend democracy in Britain or France. We went to war to smash the Japanese Empire that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Kristol is parroting liberal myths.
In the Cold War the United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek, Salazar, Franco, Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and the Korean generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey, Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats proved far more reliable than democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, and Pierre Trudeau. When it comes to wars that threaten us, hot or cold, we Americans are at one with Nietzsche, “A state, it is the coldest of all cold monsters.”
India is democratic and 200 times the size of Israel. Yet in India’s wars with Pakistan, we tilted toward Pakistan. Why? Because the Pakistanis were allies, and India sided with Moscow. That India was democratic and Pakistan autocratic made no difference to us.
As for Israel, has America really given her $100 billion and taken her side in every Arab quarrel because she is a democracy?
Tell it to Tony Judt. When this British historian proposed—given the impossibility of separating Arabs from Jews on the West Bank—that Israel annex the West Bank, become a bi-national state, and give Palestinians equal rights, neocons went berserk.
Frum called Judt’s idea “genocidal liberalism” that would leave Jews exposed to slaughter. John Podhoretz declared it “unthinkable” and “the definition of intellectual corruption.” “[H]aughty and ugly,” said the New Republic, which hurled Judt from its masthead.
But if the just solution to the South African problem was to abolish bantustans and create a one-man, one-vote democracy, why is that not even a debatable solution to the Palestinian problem?
In temperament, too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the antithesis of conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn, they are the “neo-Jacobins” of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.
Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint.
The Perle-Frum book is marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons’ fatal flaw. In the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing their plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to deny it. They reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where they came from, what they believed, how they were different, and how they had become the new elite. With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush marching to their war drums, one of them bellowed, “We are all neoconservatives now!”
But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country ensnared in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will be made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
And this one they’ve got right.
March 1, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative
The United States Justice Department grossly mismanaged the war on terror and exaggerated its success in fighting terrorism, a federal prosecutor alleges in a lawsuit against attorney-general John Ashcroft.
The allegations come from Richard Convertino, the lead prosecutor in the first major post-September 11, 2001 prosecution which resulted in the conviction of three members of an alleged terrorism sleeper cell in Detroit.
The suit charges that a senior official in the Justice Department's terrorism and violent crimes section told Convertino that positive news reports concerning the department's success against terrorism efforts were overblown.
"The press gives us more credit than we deserve," the lawsuit quotes the official as telling Convertino.
From correspondents in Washington
19feb04
The United States Justice Department grossly mismanaged the war on terror and exaggerated its success in fighting terrorism, a federal prosecutor alleges in a lawsuit against attorney-general John Ashcroft.
The allegations come from Richard Convertino, the lead prosecutor in the first major post-September 11, 2001 prosecution which resulted in the conviction of three members of an alleged terrorism sleeper cell in Detroit.
The suit charges that a senior official in the Justice Department's terrorism and violent crimes section told Convertino that positive news reports concerning the department's success against terrorism efforts were overblown.
"The press gives us more credit than we deserve," the lawsuit quotes the official as telling Convertino.
Covertino also accuses his employers of "gross mismanagement", in the war on terror, with heavy-handed officials at Justice Department headquarters in Washington hindering prosecutors in the field.
The 42-year-old prosecutor says his repeated pleas for assistance were ignored and alleges there was a "lack of support and cooperation, lack of effective assistance, lack of resources and intradepartmental infighting" in terrorism cases.
"These concerns directly related to the ability of the United States to effectively utilise the criminal justice system as a component in the 'war on terrorism'," the lawsuit said.
Attorney-general John Ashcroft frequently praised the Detroit case as a success in the war on terror, but the case has recently begun to unravel.
Convertino is facing an internal Justice Department investigation for failing to disclose relevant information to the defence, including an allegation that the government's key witness was lying, until long after the trial ended in June 2002.
Convertino claims the Justice Department is retaliating against him because he has attacked its efforts in the war on terror, and is seeking damages under the Privacy Act in the suit.
The Australian government appears to have given up on efforts to bring the country's two detainees at a US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back to Australia to stand trial.
John Howard, prime minister, rejected opposition calls to make local anti-terrorism laws retrospective to enable Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks to be brought to Australia for trial.
Australia trial for Guantanamo suspects ruled out
By Virginia Marsh in Sydney
Published: February 22 2004 21:09 | Last Updated: February 22 2004 21:09
The Australian government appears to have given up on efforts to bring the country's two detainees at a US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back to Australia to stand trial.
John Howard, prime minister, rejected opposition calls to make local anti-terrorism laws retrospective to enable Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks to be brought to Australia for trial.
Mr Howard, who was a lawyer before entering politics, said it was sometimes fair to use retrospective laws to close tax loopholes but not for criminal cases.
"It is fundamentally wrong to make a criminal law retrospective," the prime minister said.
"Those people will not be brought back to Australia unless, of course, they are acquitted."
Mark Latham, the Labor leader, on Friday said that Australia should consider making retrospective legal changes if that would help ensure the two men could be brought home for trial.
However, he appeared to back down on Saturday after his shadow justice minister raised some concerns.
Mr Latham's remarks were prompted by Britain's success in securing the release of detainees at Guantanamo.
Mr Hicks, who has been held in solitary confinement for much of his internment, has been selected as one of the first Guantanamo prisoners to face the military commission.
He was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and has yet to be charged.
The US military lawyer selected by the Pentagon to represent the 28-year-old from Adelaide urged Canberra to reconsider.
"I hope it is not too late for the government to re-evaluate the military commission process in light of the position the British government has taken," Michael Mori told ABC. "Hicks should only be tried in the commission process for international crimes and they should be just as applicable back in Australia."
The US and its allies, which included Australia, captured several hundred alleged terrorists and former Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
About 700 were taken to the US base at Cuba by the Americans but Washington also sanctioned the release of some prisoners to countries such as Turkey.
Human rights groups say this has allowed them to be tortured and forced to reveal information about al-Qaeda.
Amantha Perera COLOMBO, Jul 16 (IPS) - Talk about the Tamil Tigers' suicide cadres and many in both the majority Sinhala community and minority Tamils here in Sri Lanka react with fear.
Since the start of the peace talks in Sri Lanka, the Tigers have allowed, just once, a rare public display of the much-feared Black Tiger suicide cadres. Credit: Buddhika Weerasinghe.
''Their commitment is scary," says Lakshman Wickremasinghe, a Sinhalese. His thoughts are echoed by Nadaraja Sivaganashan, a Tamil. ''They don't care who, when or what, they will kill themselves."
Both of them think suicide bombings by the Tigers have not ended for good, despite the cessation of hostilities that has been in place since February 2002 in the Tigers' campaign for their own homeland.
The use and effect of suicide bombings in Sri Lanka's two-decade-old ethnic conflict was underscored this month, which marks the 16th anniversary of the Tigers' first official use of this weapon on Jul. 5, 1987.
On that day, Captain Miller, a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the Tigers are formally known, drove an explosives-laden truck into an army camp housed at a school in Nelliady in the northern Jaffna peninsula.
Since then, the Black Tigers, as the suicide cadres are known, have been emulated by the likes of Hamas in the Palestinians' campaign against Israeli occupation, and by the al-Qaeda network of terrorists.
Lasantha Dahanaike, a human rights investigator based in the United States, says that poverty, repression -- and the anger and desperation stemming from these -- are responsible for the evolution of the suicide cadre culture.
"I don't condone it, but it is the most effective weapon against an army that has modern weapons at its disposal. They (suicide cadres) are using their best weapon,'' said Dahanaike, a Sri Lankan who has also done research on the suicide attacks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In other words, the use of suicide bombers depends heavily on the particular situation in a conflict. If the situation on the ground continues to be a breeding ground for such desperate moves, suicide attacks will continue, he adds.
On Jul. 5, Miller and other LTTE cadres who followed him were commemorated by the LTTE all over Tamil-dominated areas in the North and East. At least 243 Tigers have since followed in Miller's footsteps, including 53 women.
Estimates of the number of suicide cadres at present are hard to make, but media quoted one LTTE speaker at the Jul. 5 ceremony as saying there are some 500 of them.
Female suicide cadres were responsible for two of the most spectacular Tiger attacks -- the one that killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and the assassination attempt on Sri Lankan President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in 1999. Kumaratunga survived the attack, but lost an eye.
The background of Black Tiger Kandasmy Lingeswaran is typical. Born to a poor fishing family in Jaffna, he witnessed his family and community harassed by government forces. He joined the LTTE and like most cadres, was willing to give up his life for the Tigers' elusive leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, and what he believes is the Tamil cause.
"If war breaks out, I will fight. And in war you make sacrifices," Lingeswaran said during an interview soon after he was released by the government during a prisoners-of-war swap in September.
''For some, particularly for those who have lost a loved one during an ethnic riot or killed by a soldier, Prabhakaran is a demigod," said author Rohan Gunaratna in his book, 'International and Regional Security, Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil Insurgency'.
Media reports that emerged during the investigation into the Gandhi assassination revealed that Dhanu's motivation for becoming a suicide bomber stemmed from her rape by Indian soldiers stationed in Sri Lanka during the late 1980s.
From the time a cadre is singled out to be a Black Tiger, he or she courts mythical admiration. The Black Tiger is separated from ordinary cadres and severs all contact with family and friends. Before embarking on a suicide mission, he or she will partake in a special meal with Prabhakaran.
In death, Black Tigers are venerated. In LTTE cemeteries, suicide cadres have pride of place with granite tombstones over graves that hold no bodies.
Shrines built in memory of them dot Sri Lanka's north-east. At the location of the attack in Nelliady, which is now under government control, the Tigers erected a statue of Miller last year. It was here that the main commemoration ceremony in Jaffna took place earlier this month.
The Tiger rebels also look after suicide cadres' families after their demise. For the likes of Lingeswaran, in death he may be able to give his poor family something that he never could in life, a comfortable life and respect. Miller's mother too was among the chief guests at the Jul. 5 ceremony.
The newest addition to the suicide wing is the Sea Tigers. Footage of such attacks has shown them speeding toward Sri Lankan Navy crafts in explosive-ridden crafts, waving and acknowledging the cheers of cadres on other boats.
Some suicide attacks have caused massive casualties, among them the 1996 bombing through an explosives-ridden lorry of the Central Bank building in which 86 were killed and 1,338 injured. In the June 1995 attack on the Joint Operation Command, 21 people were killed and 120 injured.
A suicide cadre is a potent weapon that cannot be detected very easily, says government military spokesman Brig Gen Sanath Karunaratne. "It is a one-way soldier and there is very little stopping. Once you get someone into that mentality, there can be no limit," he told IPS.
For instance, Babu, the LTTE cadre who killed President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993, had infiltrated the President's staff through a household staffer and remained inactive for almost two years before carrying out the suicide attack.
The LTTE realises that the Black Tigers give them an unmatched edge. "The Black Tigers are the strongest force of a much weakened people,'' said Amithaab, an LTTE official at the Nelliady ceremony.
The Tamil daily 'Sudar Oli' recently quoted Prabhakran as paying tribute to suicide cadres. ''No weapon and no technology on earth, can stop the determination of the LTTE's suicide bombers. The suicide squad came into being at a critical juncture in the history of the Tamil liberation movement and has taken it to the next stage."
In many ways, this month's ceremony in Nelliady was a means for the Tigers to tell the Sri Lankan government and other parties in the peace process that it is still a force to reckon with militarily.
For the time being, the Black Tigers are hibernating. They have only been put on public display once, during the Heroes Day celebrations in November, when they marched
A lawyer for three Britons held at Guantanamo Bay has accused the British and US governments of releasing only those whose cases threatened to create bad publicity.
Gareth Peirce represents two detainees who are to be freed from the army base in Cuba, as well as Moazzam Begg, 36, one of the four who must stay.
Ms Peirce told BBC Radio 4's Today programme politicians had chosen to send home detainees whose cases had reached the US Supreme Court, where a defeat could be damaging for President George Bush.
Lawyer angry at Cuba releases
A lawyer for three Britons held at Guantanamo Bay has accused the British and US governments of releasing only those whose cases threatened to create bad publicity.
Gareth Peirce represents two detainees who are to be freed from the army base in Cuba, as well as Moazzam Begg, 36, one of the four who must stay.
Ms Peirce told BBC Radio 4's Today programme politicians had chosen to send home detainees whose cases had reached the US Supreme Court, where a defeat could be damaging for President George Bush.
She said: "We have a real concern that a deal has been struck.
"The return of a number, of whom I represent two, is very convenient in order to leave others behind who are creating less pressure.
DETAINEES BEING RELEASED
Shafiq Rasul, 24, of Tipton, West Midlands
Asif Iqbal, 20, of Tipton
Ruhal Ahmed, 21, of Tipton
Jamal Udeen, 35, from Manchester
Tarek Dergoul, 24, from east London
BRITISH MEN STILL BEING HELD
Moazzam Begg, 36, from Birmingham
Feroz Abbasi, 23, from south London
Martin Mubanga, 29, from north London
Richard Belmar, 23, from London
The officer said they were now seen as "low risk", and the UK government had said it did not regard them as a threat to national security.
Nine Britons have been among about 650 terror suspects held at the United States base on Cuba for two years without trial.
Most are believed to have been arrested in Pakistan or Afghanistan as suspected al-Qaeda or Taleban fighters.
Peter Clarke, head of anti-terrorism at Scotland Yard, said the police had a responsibility to investigate circumstances that had led to the suspects' detention.
'Case for treason'
The five men being released are: Shafiq Rasul, of Tipton, West Midlands; Asif Iqbal, of Tipton; Ruhal Ahmed, of Tipton; Jamal Udeen, from Manchester, and Tarek Dergoul, from east London.
They do not include Feroz Abbasi or Mr Begg, who face potential trials before a military tribunal in the US, according to the authorities there.
Shadow home secretary David Davis said: "If they fought against coalition troops on the battlefield, they should also be charged and tried in the UK.
"In addition, I think there may be a case for treason."
WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 — The United States will soon release five of the nine British citizens detained at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, British and American officials said today.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the five would be released "in the next few weeks." He said the five would face questioning under Britain's Terrorism Act 2000 upon their return but would be "treated fairly and properly."
Discussions on the four others were continuing, Mr. Straw said, but he insisted that they be tried "in accordance with international standards or returned to the U.K.," The Associated Press reported from London.
ALONG THE ISRAEL-WEST BANK FRONTIER (AP) - For the Israelis of Kfar Saba, the high concrete wall dividing them from the West Bank is a salvation: It has halted the suicide bombings that cloaked their town in fear.
For the Palestinians of Qalqiliya, less than a mile away, it is a noose suffocating their once vibrant town.
Meir Toledano, a 52-year-old from Kfar Saba, nods approvingly at the barrier: "I live in peace now." Mohammed Hanini, 40, glares at it from the other side: "If I could pull it out with my teeth, I would.''
David Frum, a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A journalist and speechwriter for President George W. Bush, he is the author of The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House and An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, written with Richard Perle.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Frum/frum-con0.html
John L. Esposito, University Professor of Religion and International Affairs, and Founding Director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A past president of the Middle East Studies Association, he is editor-in-chief of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, editor of the Oxford History of Islam, and the author of numerous books, including Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality, and most recently, the Oxford Dictionary of Islam.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Esposito/esposito-con0.html
Ira Lapidus, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founding Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies on the Berkeley campus. Professor Lapidus has traveled extensively across the Muslim world and written many articles and books on Islam and related subjects. His publications include Islam, Politics, and Social Movements, edited with Edmund Burke, and Contemporary Islamic Movements in Historical Perspective. He is also the author of A History of Islamic Societies, which was published in 1988 and has recently been issued in a second edition.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Lapidus/lapidus-con0.html
Michael Nacht, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Professor Nacht teaches and writes in the fields of U.S. national security and foreign policy, and on management strategies for public organizations. He was a founding coeditor of the journal International Security, and he served in the Clinton administration as Assistant Director for Strategic and Eurasian Affairs of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Dean Nacht presently serves as Chairman of the Secretary of Defense's Advisory Committee on Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Nacht/nacht-con0.html
Wealthy Arab-Americans and foreign-born Muslims who strongly back President Bush's decision to invade Iraq are adding their names to the ranks of Pioneers and Rangers, the elite Bush supporters who have raised $100,000 or more for his re-election.
This new crop of fund-raisers comes as some opinion polls suggest support for the president among Arab-Americans is sinking and at a time when strategists from both parties say Mr. Bush is losing ground with this group. Mr. Bush has been criticized by Arab-Americans who feel they are being singled out in the fight against terrorism and who are uneasy over the administration's Palestinian-Israeli policies.
Yet the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq have been a catalyst for some wealthy Arab-Americans to become more involved in politics. And there are still others who have a more practical reason for opening their checkbooks: access to a business-friendly White House. Already, their efforts have brought them visits with the president at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., as well as White House dinners and meetings with top administration officials.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday announced the creation of an administrative panel that will annually review the cases of detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to ensure that none is held "any longer than is absolutely necessary."
But Rumsfeld, in a speech to the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, defended the government's practice of holding detainees indefinitely without charges, saying they "are enemy combatants and terrorists who are being detained for acts of war against our country. And that is why different rules have to apply."
An American soldier has been detained on suspicion of trying to pass information about military weapons to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The suspect, identified as Ryan Anderson, a National Guardsman based at Fort Lewis in Washington state, was held after a surveillance operation.
His unit is preparing to be deployed in Iraq as part of a rotation of forces.
It is thought he did not pass on any information, but may have tried to contact al-Qaeda through the internet.
Officials said Mr Anderson, 26, converted to Islam within the past few years.
US guardsman 'in al-Qaeda plot'
An American soldier has been detained on suspicion of trying to pass information about military weapons to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The suspect, identified as Ryan Anderson, a National Guardsman based at Fort Lewis in Washington state, was held after a surveillance operation.
His unit is preparing to be deployed in Iraq as part of a rotation of forces.
It is thought he did not pass on any information, but may have tried to contact al-Qaeda through the internet.
Officials said Mr Anderson, 26, converted to Islam within the past few years.
'Aiding the enemy'
Lt Col Stephen Barger said Mr Anderson was suspected of "aiding the enemy by wrongfully attempting to communicate and give intelligence to the al-Qaeda terrorist network".
He said Mr Anderson was arrested following a joint investigation involving the army, the FBI and the Justice Department.
The BBC's Nick Childs, in Washington, says the soldier is a member of a tank crew but not of a senior rank and is not thought to have had access to highly sensitive information.
Pentagon officials said he had been signing on to extremist internet chatrooms and was trying to contact al-Qaeda operatives to offer services and information.
Mr Anderson, who serves in the 81st Armored Brigade, is being held in custody at Fort Lewis.
Fresh public alarm
Our correspondent says details of this case remain murky and precisely why Mr Anderson might initially have come under suspicion is not immediately clear.
This apparent security scare could raise new alarms in the minds of the American public, at least about the reliability of some Muslim military personnel, he adds.
But US military officials aren't drawing any wider conclusions right now. They are anxious to attract more Muslim recruits to help with operations in Iraq.
Mr Anderson is the second Muslim soldier from Fort Lewis to be suspected of wrongdoing in the US-led war on terror.
Former Fort Lewis chaplain, Capt James Yee, is accused of mishandling classified material at Guantanamo Bay prison camp, where hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects are being held.
Three other men working for the Americans have been charged with security violations at Guantanamo Bay.
SEATTLE - A Seattle-raised Muslim convert who aided the Taliban was sentenced to two years in prison Friday, getting a break for helping authorities with other investigations in the war on terrorism.
James Ujaama, 38, pleaded guilty last year, admitting he delivered computer equipment and a recruit to Taliban officials in Afghanistan.
With time already served behind bars, he could be free this summer.
"In the future, I will act more responsibly and make the right choices," the American-born Ujaama told U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein.
GENE JOHNSON
Associated Press
SEATTLE - A Seattle-raised Muslim convert who aided the Taliban was sentenced to two years in prison Friday, getting a break for helping authorities with other investigations in the war on terrorism.
James Ujaama, 38, pleaded guilty last year, admitting he delivered computer equipment and a recruit to Taliban officials in Afghanistan.
With time already served behind bars, he could be free this summer.
"In the future, I will act more responsibly and make the right choices," the American-born Ujaama told U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein.
Ujaama was arrested in 2002 following an investigation into a Seattle mosque and was indicted on charges he conspired to set up a terrorist training camp in Bly, Ore. Those charges were later dropped.
He instead pleaded guilty to the aiding-terrorism charges and was offered a two-year sentence in exchange for his cooperation in terrorism investigations.
Specifically, authorities were looking for information about London cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, a suspected terrorist. Ujaama befriended him in London in the 1990s and ran al-Masri's Web site, which advocated holy war against the United States. Ujaama also admitted that at al-Masri's bidding, he escorted a man to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.
Al-Masri is wanted in Yemen for his alleged role in the 1998 kidnappings of 16 Western tourists, four of whom died in a shootout.
The judge said she was initially surprised by the light term called for in Ujaama's plea agreement. But she said she also had never seen a case where a defendant had agreed to provide such extensive cooperation.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday: "Our highest priority is to disrupt the networks of terror, and the information gained from individuals like Ujaama helps us protect innocent Americans from terrorist attacks."
Ujaama was born James Earnest Thompson in Denver. He converted to Islam in the early 1990s and became involved in the Dar-us-Salaam mosque in Seattle, whose members preached an extreme version of Islam.
He tried to travel to Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks but was unable to cross the border from Pakistan.
WASHINGTON — A Spanish national being held by the U.S. government at the prison for terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay (search), Cuba, has been transferred into the custody of the Spanish government, the Department of Defense (search) said today.
Senior leadership at the DOD and other senior government officials determined that the detainee no longer required detention in the U.S.
The detainee, whose identity was not released, is the fourth transfer or release from the prison, which has held hundreds of suspected Al Qaeda (search) and Taliban (search) fighters since the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Last month, three teenage boys were released from Guantanamo and sent back to their home countries. The Pentagon said it was determined they no longer posed a threat to the United States.
Transfer or release of detainees can be based on many factors, including whether an individual would pose a threat to the United States, if an individual is of further intelligence value and whether an individual is going to be tried by the U.S. government for any crimes.
DOD officials said they expected there will likely be further transfers or releases of detainees.
TEHRAN, Feb. 11 -- On Revolution Day, the Iranian equivalent of the Fourth of July, Azadi Street was again transformed from east-west artery to carnival midway. Men lined up for free yogurt. Hawkers coaxed women to finger the material of baby clothes. Children clamored for a turn throwing darts at George W. Bush.
Hossein Asadi put three darts right between the eyes of the caricature, sketched on a pair of boards mounted in a sideshow tent. He walked away with a new yellow tennis ball but no change in his feelings, which were nothing if not admiring.
"They like me to hit George Bush, so I hit George Bush," said Hossein, 15. "They say it's the Great Satan, but I say it's a great country.
"I've seen nothing bad from the Americans."
Agha and his dorm mates were separated from the adult detainees and given special treatment as youngsters.
The most difficult aspect of his confinement, Agha said, was being out of contact with his family and worrying about them, partly because he was the oldest son and his father depended on him to help support the family.
When he first reached Guantanamo, he said, he asked a literate prisoner to write home on his behalf. After he learned to write in Pashto a little bit, he said, he wrote several letters and gave them to Red Cross delegates, who he said visited every one or two months.
"I always asked them when I would be released, and they always told me soon, God willing," Agha said.
But last week, after Agha was reunited with his father, he learned that most of the letters, addressed to relatives in Naw Zad, never reached his family in their village. For nearly one year, they knew nothing of his whereabouts.
An Afghan Boy's Life in U.S. Custody
Cuban Camp Was Welcome Change After Harsh Regime at Bagram
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 12, 2004; Page A01
NAW ZAD, Afghanistan, Feb. 11 -- Ismail Agha was a slight, illiterate village boy of 13 when his family last saw him 14 months ago. When he reappeared last week, he was three inches taller, his voice had deepened, his chin had sprouted a black beard and he had learned to read, write and do basic math.
Agha's transformation occurred mostly in a place called Camp Iguana, a seaside compound within the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he and two other Afghan teenagers suspected of belonging to the Taliban militia were confined for more than 12 months, until their release Jan. 29.
The long-term detention of minors at Guantanamo, where about 650 people suspected of having links to Islamic terrorists are held, has drawn criticism from human rights groups. But Agha, who spoke with a foreign journalist Wednesday in this remote town in the southern province of Helmand, described his experience as closer to a tropical boarding school than a prison.
"Me go to Cuba, speak English now," he said with a proud grin as he sat in the police station in Naw Zad, a muddy three-block market center surrounded by bright green poppy fields and almond orchards in pink spring bloom. Agha's native village, Durabin, is a poor farming community in the mountains that is a five hours' walk from the nearest road leading into Naw Zad.
Transplanted to a modern U.S. military base half a world away, the shy village youth said he saw the ocean for the first time, played soccer, slept in an air-conditioned room and showered twice a day after growing up in a village without plumbing or electricity. "We could even turn the lights on and off when we wanted," he said, lapsing quickly into his native Pashto.
Agha's time in Guantanamo was in sharp contrast to the harrowing month and a half he spent at Bagram air base, near the capital, Kabul, where he was held and interrogated by U.S. soldiers. Agha said he was never beaten but was subjected to pressures that coincide with what the U.S. military refers to as "extreme duress."
"It was a very bad place. Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick on my door and yell at me to wake up," he said. "When they were trying to get me to confess, they made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours. Sometimes I couldn't bear it any more and I fell down, but they made me stand that way some more."
Agha said he was repeatedly asked whether he was with the Taliban or other Islamic groups, and repeatedly answered no. He said he was arrested by mistake while looking for construction work with a friend at an Afghan military camp in the town of Greshk, in central Helmand province. He said Afghan soldiers beat him and then turned him over to U.S. troops, who flew him by helicopter to Bagram.
"They say you truth tell me, you are Talib. I say me no Talib. They not believe me," he said, speaking in English, then switching back into Pashto.
"I was a boy in my village when the Taliban were the government, and I didn't know anything about them," he added. "The Americans said my friend confessed to being a Talib. I don't know if he was, but we met when we were looking for work. I had nothing to tell them, and I don't think they ever got any benefit from me."
U.S. military officials in Afghanistan have refused to disclose the names or numbers of Afghan detainees held at Bagram at any time, and they have never allowed public access to the detention facilities there, except for visits by delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
After more than a month at Bagram, Agha said, he was warned that if he did not confess he would be sent to a terrible and distant place called Guantanamo. Shortly after that, he said, he was put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood placed over his head.
"It was hard to breathe, but I didn't complain because I didn't hear any of the others complaining," he said. "I don't know how long the flight was, but when they flew me back home the other day, I did not have a hood on and I counted the time. It was 23 hours."
Once he arrived at Guantanamo, Agha said, he was astonished by the change.
There were no more questions and no more threats, only school and exercise and Muslim prayers and dorm life with two other young Afghans he had never met before. He said both were from Paktia province, one his age and one a little younger, and that he knew them only as Asadullah and Naqibullah.
The boys lived in a house with several rooms: a shared sleeping room and an adjoining room for eating and studying. On one side they could see the ocean, but the other three sides were blocked by high walls and barbed wire, and they never saw or spoke with the adult prisoners.
Each day, Agha said, they were taught English, Pashto and basic math by Afghan American teachers. They were also given copies of the Koran. Each night, four U.S. soldiers took turns sleeping in the second room. On Wednesday, he asked to send greetings to all of them, but said he never learned their names.
In response to criticism about the detention of minors at Guantanamo, U.S. military officials have said age makes no difference in their decisions to confine suspects who may have links to terrorist groups or be able to provide information about them. However, Agha and his dorm mates were separated from the adult detainees and given special treatment as youngsters.
The most difficult aspect of his confinement, Agha said, was being out of contact with his family and worrying about them, partly because he was the oldest son and his father depended on him to help support the family.
When he first reached Guantanamo, he said, he asked a literate prisoner to write home on his behalf. After he learned to write in Pashto a little bit, he said, he wrote several letters and gave them to Red Cross delegates, who he said visited every one or two months.
"I always asked them when I would be released, and they always told me soon, God willing," Agha said.
But last week, after Agha was reunited with his father, he learned that most of the letters, addressed to relatives in Naw Zad, never reached his family in their village. For nearly one year, they knew nothing of his whereabouts.
"I sent my son out to look for construction work, and he just vanished," said Agha's father, Hayatullah, an illiterate farmer of about 60, who was in Naw Zad on business this week and waited for two days with a journalist while a messenger went to fetch Agha from Durabin. "I went to all the work sites in the towns, but no one had seen him. Finally I thought he must be dead."
Then sometime last November, Hayatullah said, he received a letter through the Red Cross in which Agha said he was in good health and staying in a place called Guantanamo. Hayatullah had no idea what that meant, so he made his way to Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, and asked the authorities.
"They told me it was a jail in the United States. I was amazed," said the short, white-bearded man Wednesday as he and his son sat in the Naw Zad police chief's office. "I could not imagine what the Americans wanted with him, but I was glad to know he was alive."
That was the only word the family received until about 10 days ago, when someone from the Red Cross found Hayatullah in Naw Zad and told him Agha would soon arrive at the airport in Kandahar, a large southern city.
Meanwhile, back in Camp Iguana, Agha was informed that he would be leaving shortly for home.
"They gave me a party and said I could have anything I wanted to eat, so I asked for Pepsi and chicken kebob," he said. "They also gave me a letter that said if I was ever arrested again, I would be sent to prison and never let out." Then he and the other two boys were put on a plane, again in shackles but this time without being hooded.
Last week they arrived at Bagram, and Agha was then flown on a Red Cross plane to Kandahar. Red Cross officials in Kabul have declined to discuss the release of Agha or the other two boys, citing a policy of confidentiality and the special issue of their being minors.
"I didn't recognize my son even when he came up and kissed my hand," Hayatullah said. "He was much taller and a little fatter, and he had a beard. Also, he told me he had learned to read." The old man sat up and smiled. "My son got an education in America."
Agha was also proud of his academic progress, but said he planned to go back to farming his family's land and did not expect to continue studying. He said that although he had enjoyed the modern comforts of Guantanamo, "it was still a jail. And when you are home beside your father and mother, it doesn't matter whether your life is hard."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
DES MOINES, Feb. 10 — Facing growing public pressure from civil liberties advocates, federal prosecutors on Tuesday dropped subpoenas that they issued last week ordering antiwar protesters to appear before a grand jury and ordering a university to turn over information about the protesters.
The protesters, who had said they feared that the unusual federal inquiry was intended to silence and scare people who disagreed with government positions, declared victory.
February 11, 2004
By MONICA DAVEY
DES MOINES, Feb. 10 — Facing growing public pressure from civil liberties advocates, federal prosecutors on Tuesday dropped subpoenas that they issued last week ordering antiwar protesters to appear before a grand jury and ordering a university to turn over information about the protesters.
The protesters, who had said they feared that the unusual federal inquiry was intended to silence and scare people who disagreed with government positions, declared victory.
"We made them want to stop," Brian Terrell, executive director of the Catholic Peace Ministry here and one of four protesters who received subpoenas, told a crowd at the federal courthouse. "We're here to make them want to never let it happen again."
Representatives of the United States attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, Stephen Patrick O'Meara, declined to comment on what prompted the reversal. Mr. O'Meara's spokesman, Al Overbaugh, said he could not comment on information related to grand jury subpoenas.
On Monday, prosecutors defended their inquiry, saying it was limited to the narrow issue of whether a protester trespassed on Iowa National Guard property on Nov. 16.
A subpoena compelling Drake University to provide information about an antiwar forum on its campus on Nov. 15 was also withdrawn, as was an earlier court order that barred Drake officials from speaking publicly about the case.
David E. Maxwell, president of the private university of 5,100 students, said he was deeply relieved.
"It has been a remarkable several days," Dr. Maxwell said. "I'm still processing this."
The school received a subpoena last week that demanded a broad range of information about the sponsor of the forum on Nov. 15, the Drake chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. The subpoena included its leadership lists, annual reports and location. That subpoena was later narrowed somewhat, university officials said on Tuesday, to include the names of people at the forum and records from campus security that might describe "the content of what was discussed at the meeting."
Dr. Maxwell said the subpoenas concerned him because they threatened essential values of the university like the right to free assembly and the sense of the university as a "safe haven" for ideas, even unpopular ones.
"It raised very troubling issues for us," he said.
In the end, the president said, events played out as they should.
"From that perspective," Dr. Maxwell said, "this has shown that the system works. We felt something inappropriate was being asked of us, and in the end it was resolved the way we wanted."
Civil liberties advocates here and nationally said they had questions about the intent of the investigation and whether it might signal a broader worry for antiwar protesters here and others elsewhere. The Iowa Civil Liberties Union intends to investigate the investigation, said its executive director, R. Ben Stone.
"Despite any retreat by the Iowa U.S. Attorney," Mr. Stone said, "there remain serious questions about the scope of this particular investigation. If it was just a trespassing investigation, why seek the membership records of the National Lawyers Guild? If this was an attempt to chill protests through the aggressive policing of a run-of-the-mill crime, we've got a serious problem in America."
Twenty-one people attended a training session on nonviolent protest at the Nov. 15 antiwar forum, organizers said. On Tuesday, a far larger group, more than 100, stood outside the federal courthouse beside Mr. Terrell in bitter cold, holding a new set of protest signs that said, "Say no to political grand juries," "You can subpoena us, but you will not silence us" and "Investigate Halliburton not Iowans."
The Islamic headscarf has become one of the most hotly disputed items of clothing in Europe. The French parliament has approved legislation to ban it from state schools, and politicians in Germany and Belgium want similar laws.
BBC News Online asked eight commentators for their views on imposing a ban on the headscarf. Click on the quotes below to read more and use the form to tell us what you think.
Alain Destexhe, Belgian politician
Fareena Alam, UK magazine editor
Amir Taheri, Paris-based Iranian writer
Rachida Ziouche, Algerian exile in France
Fanny Dethloff, Lutheran clergywoman
Alice Schwarzer, German feminist
Binnaz Toprak, Turkish academic
Tariq Ramadan, Islamic affairs analyst
Alain Destexhe is a Belgian senator who, inspired by developments in France, has proposed a bill that would see headscarves banned from state schools.
We are certainly not trying to stamp out multi-culturalism. But we are very anxious that the conflicts of the world are not brought into the classrooms, and that is why we support the French legislation and are trying to introduce a similar law in Belgium.
For one, public spaces should be neutral spaces, not places to spread a particular view of the world. Secondly we have a duty of care to children who enter the public school system, and there is certainly an issue that young Muslim women are often forced into wearing the headscarf by those around them.
Therefore while some allege that we are taking away their individual freedoms, in some cases we will actually be restoring it. We want individuals to be integrated, and we want Muslim women to be viewed and treated as equals.
I am not wholly confident that the legislation will pass in Belgium, as it has proved very controversial. What people seem to forget is that nobody is seeking to regulate what people do in their private spheres, merely to stipulate that in the public sphere, certain rules must apply. And it is better that these decisions are taken by a democratically elected government, than leaving the matter to individual schools to decide upon.
Fareena Alam is the editor of Q-News, Europe's leading Muslim magazine.
Modesty is only one of many reasons why a woman wears a scarf. It can be a very political choice too. I began wearing it at the age of 21, against the wishes of my family, while serving as president of the United Nations Students' Association at university. I wanted to assert my identity and counter common stereotypes about Muslim women. A woman who wears a hijab can be active and engaged, educated and professional.
Isn't it the fundamental secular standard - that one cannot demand that any individual surrender an unobtrusive religious observance?
Fareena Alam
There are many women, from Iran and Saudi Arabia for example, who have had very negative experiences with gender oppression in their home countries. They bring this vitriol to the debate about the hijab. This is not only unacceptable to me, it goes against their own secular principles of freedom and choice. Does this democratic society have any room for a British-Muslim woman like me who chooses to wear the hijab on my own terms? Isn't it the fundamental secular standard - that one cannot demand that any individual surrender an unobtrusive religious observance?
The terms of reference that define secularism can and must shift to remain relevant in a world that is constantly changing and diversifying. Isn't the idea of what it means to be French or British constantly evolving?
Amir Taheri is an Iranian author and journalist based partly in Paris.
The headscarf ban is a political move and I don't think the government is right. It has nothing to do with the broader issue concerning the six million Muslims in France.
At least three-quarters of the French Muslim population are North African Arab, who are experiencing the same problems as the Black-Americans in the US.
The proposed law is making a mountain out of a molehill
Amir Taheri
They lack opportunity and are mostly parked in huge Stalinist suburbs around large cities - it is almost like living in hell.
Rather than focusing on the issue of the scarf, the government should be focusing on these problems. You can't solve them by passing such a law - by standing outside a school gate and tearing the scarf off the heads of girls.
The proposed law is making a mountain out of a molehill. Not that many Muslims wear it in France, or anywhere else for that matter. There are 1.8 million French Muslim school girls and, according to 2002 government statistics, only around 2,000 of those wore the scarf. Out of those, only 157 girls refused to remove when told to do so.
Rachida Ziouche, a journalist, is the daughter of an Algerian imam who has been living in exile in France since fleeing her homeland.
Where I live, in a small town in France, girls and young women are intimidated by Muslim men who oblige them to wear the scarf. These Muslim women are often isolated, and need some protection. The law to outlaw the veil goes some way towards addressing this need.
France wants its people to live together, celebrating their diversity, but it also has a secular tradition to protect
Rachida Ziouche
Of course there has been criticism - some people say that France is discriminating against its Muslim community, trying to stop them from being themselves. I simply do not believe this to be the case. France wants its people to live together, celebrating their diversity, but it also has a secular tradition to protect - one which seeks to keep religion from the public sphere. And anybody who says that it is removing their religious freedoms, I say this: do you really believe a four-year-old is wearing the headscarf by choice?
I strongly believe that people coming from the Middle East to live in Europe must adhere to the law of the land and respect the traditions of the country they have come to live in. Many of the people who come seem to think that the only person they have to obey is God.
Others say that the veil is the wrong target - that the real issue is the alienation of the Muslim community in France, poverty and unemployment. The two are not mutually exclusive. The government must certainly act on the economic issues, but it must also try to alleviate the oppression of young Muslim women.
Alice Schwarzer is a prominent German feminist.
This issue is about the constitution, and the division between state and religion - a hard fought for achievement of the enlightenment. The weakening of this division is utterly incomprehensible, particularly as it comes at a time when the worldwide offensive of the theocrats is not just making countries with Muslim majorities subservient to their inhumane "holy laws", but is also threatening democracies worldwide. Countries like France have long grasped the consequences of this.
The passiveneness of politicians leaves the majority of Muslim women in Germany powerless against the militant minority of fundamentalists
Alice Schwarzer
The Green politician in charge of immigrant affairs, Marieluise Beck has the cheek to warn of a "demonisation" of the headscarf, that a ban on headscarves in schools will "push Muslim women into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists". In fact the opposite is the case: the passiveness of politicians leaves the majority of Muslim women in Germany powerless against the militant minority of fundamentalists.
Fanny Dethloff is a pastor at a Hamburg church and is responsible for refugee issues in the community
It makes absolutely no sense at all to bar Muslim women from public places because they wear the scarf. This kind of exclusion prevents these women gaining access to jobs, stops them from being integrated. It does nothing for emancipation - indeed, by shutting out those women who are trying to better themselves, it has quite the opposite effect.
Cracking down in this way is only likely to lead to a sense of victimisation, which will fuel extremism, not reduce it
Fanny Dethloff
Of course we want to condemn fundamentalism, but we don't do that by punishing the women - it is not the women who are involved with pushing this kind of intolerant, politicised Islam, it's the men. At a time like this we need more understanding, more tolerance, not less. And indeed, cracking down in this way is only likely to lead to a sense of victimisation, which will fuel extremism, not reduce it.
It is also problematic to assume, as some people do, that women are forced into wearing the scarf by overbearing men. While it is certainly the case that some are pressured into putting it on, many Muslim who wear it do it quite self-consciously. We need to respect their wishes, not ourselves oppress them by trying to make them take it off.
Binnaz Toprak is a political science professor at Bosphorous University in Istanbul, Turkey, a secular country with a Muslim majority.
I think they have got it right in France. Civil servants and schoolgirls should not wear the veil. Personally, I am against it, it is a symbol of the inferior status of women in Muslim countries. In many situations, males have great authority over under-age girls and we cannot be certain that the girls are wearing the hijab because they want to or because their fathers and brothers are forcing them to. They should, therefore, be protected.
Personally, I am against it, it is a symbol of the inferior status of women in Muslim countries
Binnaz Toprak
In the case of civil servants, I think that when people refer to someone in government office, they should be able to feel that they will not be discriminated against because they do not share the same beliefs as that civil servant. A headscarf could be seen as a symbol of those beliefs.
The issue in Turkey at the moment is whether university students should be allowed to wear the hijab. Many students wear it for political reasons but others wear it for religious reasons and I think that choice should be respected.
Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Islamic Studies and Philosophy at Switzerland's Ecole de Geneve and University of Freibourg.
Muslims in France believe they are being targeted. They fear the law banning scarves in schools will open the door to all kinds of discrimination. The French debate about the issue is so passionate that Muslims fear a new type of Islamaphobia.
Many Europeans are afraid of losing their identity
Tariq Ramadan
The real issue should not be a question of law but of how to build a pluralistic society. This involves facing up to shared responsibilities. Muslims have to understand that the argument about protecting the secular nature of the state is something very specific to the French psychology.
They need to be more explicit in the way they present themselves and their religion and be fully involved in their society. At the same time, fellow citizens, need to understand that to build a pluralistic society they need to know more about others, to be ready to be out-centred from their values and principles.
It needs good will and education. This is not the feeling we have in France, or even Europe as a whole, at the moment. The reality in Europe is of a growing Muslim population, and many Europeans are afraid of losing their identity. The debate in France and other countries over the headscarf appears to be a manifestation of this, and it doesn't help.
Muslims should see the ban in France as a sign that the road ahead is not going to be easy but it is not the end of the road. It is just the beginning of the dialogue.
What are your views on the opinions expressed here? If you would like to comment please use the form at the bottom of the page or on the right-hand side.
The veil in itself is just a piece of tissue, what counts is what is behind it. These women who so insist upon it should be ashamed of not respecting and throwing away with their stupidity and narrow-mindedness all the hard efforts other women of their own culture, their own religion have made, very often sacrificing their lives to get a better life for ALL women.
Elize, Arlon Belgium
I really cannot understand what the fuss is about. Why is it always considered ok to wear less, but if someone likes to cover everyone becomes alarmed? After all this upheaval, one really starts to suspect that Western culture is indeed exploiting women as sex symbols, and not being allowed to do so by a small minority is perceived as a major threat?
Anna, Tehran, Iran
I cannot see any sense in the prohibition or ban on the Muslim headscarves. Is secularism the NORM, ideology and the "religion" of modern France or EU? Any one who does NOT conform to its "religion" of "laicite" or is it "laicism" has to be proscribed! Why? Is this not another form of fanatical intolerance in the guise of the so called secularism!
Eliseo Mercado,OMI, Rome, Italy
It is a symbol and a human right that is being banned. Remember the public labelling of Mentally & Physical Disabled, Communists, Homosexuals, and others in Nazi Germany? In a rights based culture that is the Free West, there is no place for persecution based on beliefs. Greater problems than merely clothing need to be addressed. Ridiculous.
Christopher Donovan, Perth, Australia
Does anyone really believe that this will stop women being forced to wear the hijab by their families and peers? If the law prevents them wearing headscarves in public, they will only be forced to cover up the moment they get home. This law will offend those who want to wear headscarves, crucifixes or other symbols of their religion, and only benefit those who are somehow offended by seeing the symbols of other people's beliefs in public.
Maria, Aldershot, UK
I'm afraid the ban will be seen to be discriminatory. After all, if the objection is to religious symbols, why don't the authorities ban Christians from wearing crosses on a chain around their neck? They say they will do so if the cross is too conspicuous, but that is unfair on Muslims and other religions; they suffer just because their religious symbols happen to be more visible.
Saurabh, Delhi, India
We live in a secular West. No headscarves in schools! The veil is to silence, to make invisible and to subjugate women. It is the mark of oppression.
Lili Ann Motta, E. Marion, NY/ United States
Yes, I strongly believe that the scarf should be banned. It is a symbol of female oppression and has no place in a modern society. Those who insist on wearing scarves should return to their native country.
R. Johns, Singapore
It is a shame that many ignorant people seem to feel that Muslim girls should have forced upon them the 'freedom' to be leered at like a piece of meat as many of our own daughters are before unromantic encounters in an alley on their way home from the club they just got wasted in.
Adam Ward, Bristol, UK
The idea that people should be forced to wear, or not to wear, any particular style of clothing by the state or by their religion is preposterous. This is a clear breach of the rights of the individual which I hope we will never accept in this country. To justify forcing people not to wear a garment on the basis that they are being forced to wear it, and therefore need to be forcibly freed from that, is just stupid and goes nowhere in addressing the real problems of this world.
Gabriel Lee, Hertford, England
What bothers me is how an "enlightened" "democratic" and secular society can dictate what women wear. Ironically, France is taking such a Patriarchal approach to the situation in the guise of Secularism.
Ahmad, Boston
The headscarf poses no threat to any social order but in fact encourages moderate behaviour.
Asim Mirza, Stoke - England
This entire debate is starting to border very close to the absurd. Legislating what can and cannot be worn within France's "secular" society and schools is at the polar end of the absurdity of compulsory veiling. What do about term holidays then? If France is so adamantly a secular nation, then perhaps they should centre their term holidays around random periods of the year, go to school on Christmas Day and Eid al-Adha, etc. How far can it possibly go? The headscarf does not threaten the achievements of the Enlightenment or national identity: what threatens the achievements of the enlightenment are governments who micromanage their citizens and feminists who are "allergic" to Islam.
Alexandra, London
If Muslim women and girls are forced to wear the scarf by male relatives and a law is passed banning it in public places, won't those same male relatives refuse to allow the women to leave the house if they can't wear the scarf? This law may have the effect of making their lives more restricted, not more open.
Sandra S., New York, USA
By Tom Heneghan
PARIS (Reuters) - France's National Assembly voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to banish religious emblems from state schools, a measure meant to keep tensions between Muslim and Jewish minorities out of public classrooms.
Deputies voted 494 to 36 to ban Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses and to expel pupils who insisted on wearing them. It will not apply to private schools.
The government says the ban does not single out any religion, but cabinet ministers acknowledge its main targets are the Islamic headscarves and anti-Semitic remarks from Muslim pupils that teachers say have become more frequent.
"After this debate and the magnitude of this vote, both the republic and its secularism have been reinforced," Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin told deputies.
"What is at issue here is the clear affirmation that public school is a place for learning and not for militant activity or proselytism," Assembly Speaker Jean-Louis Debre said.
It was the first reading of the bill, which must go to the Senate and then back to the National Assembly for final approval in mid-March, which now should be just a formality.
The key passage of the law, which schools would apply from September, reads: "In primary and secondary state schools, wearing signs and clothes that conspicuously display the pupil's religious affiliation is forbidden."
"This will not solve the problem," said Lhaj Thami Breze, president of the large Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF). "Who will decide what's conspicuous and what's not?"
He said the UOIF would urge schoolgirls to opt for discrete head coverings such as bandannas or caps and hoped these would be accepted at school. "It's unfortunate that the whole nation is so preoccupied with a simple piece of cloth," he remarked.
Nicholas Perruchot, a centrist UDF deputy who voted against the bill, said: "The law will not be applicable and the disputes will not diminish."
RISING RACISM, ANTI-SEMITISM
The ban has wide public support in France, which has the largest Muslim and Jewish minorities in western Europe.
Leaders of France's 5 million Muslims denounce it as discriminatory and likely to stigmatize veiled schoolgirls. It has provoked criticism from Muslim and Christian leaders abroad, including Pope John Paul II.
Jewish leaders have been split over the ban, with those in favor seeing it as a bulwark against the militant Islam they see spreading in poor neighborhoods with mixed populations.
Lord Greville Janner, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, said in London it was a sad decision which "disgracefully punished the entire Muslim population and other religious communities."
Before the vote, Education Minister Luc Ferry said France had witnessed a "spectacular rise in racism and anti-Semitism in the last three years" and the ban would help to keep classes from dividing into "militant religious communities."
He said the law would also make clear pupils could not object to or skip classes for religious reasons.
Teachers have complained in recent years of problems with Muslim pupils who interrupt history classes to deny the Nazis slaughtered Jews, boycott classes on human reproduction because they are "immodest," or refuse to attend physical education.
It was not clear if France would also ban Sikh turbans, which the country's 5,000 Sikhs say are not religious symbols.
In Kuala Lumpur, about 40 supporters of the fundamentalist Islamic PAS, the biggest opposition party in mainly Muslim Malaysia, protested against the law outside the French embassy chanting "Long live Islam" and "Crush the infidels."
Associated Press
DES MOINES, Iowa — In what may be the first subpoena of its kind since the Communist-hunting days of the 1950s, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
University, Four Anti-War Activists Subpoenaed
Saturday, February 07, 2004
DES MOINES, Iowa — In what may be the first subpoena of its kind since the Communist-hunting days of the 1950s, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
Federal prosecutors refuse to comment on the subpoenas, served by a local sheriff's deputy who works on the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
In addition to records about who attended the forum, the subpoena orders the university to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum.
The group, once targeted for alleged ties to communism in the 1950s, announced Friday it will ask a federal court to quash the subpoena on Monday.
"The law is clear that the use of the grand jury to investigate protected political activities or to intimidate protesters exceeds its authority," guild President Michael Ayers said in a statement.
Representatives of the Lawyer's Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union said they had not heard of such a subpoena being served on any U.S. university in decades.
Those served subpoenas include the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House, and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq in 2002.
They say the subpoenas are intended to stifle dissent.
"This is exactly what people feared would happen," said Brian Terrell of the peace ministry, one of those subpoenaed. "The civil liberties of everyone in this country are in danger. How we handle that here in Iowa is very important on how things are going to happen in this country from now on."
The forum, titled "Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" came the day before 12 protesters were arrested at an anti-war rally at Iowa National Guard headquarters in Johnston. Organizers say the forum included nonviolence training for people planning to demonstrate.
The targets of the subpoenas believe investigators are trying to link them to an incident that occurred during the rally. A Grinnell College librarian was charged with misdemeanor assault on a peace officer; she has pleaded innocent, saying she simply went limp and resisted arrest.
"The best approach is not to speculate and see what we learn on Tuesday" when the four testify, said Ben Stone, executive director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, which is representing one of the protesters. Supporters plan to demonstrate outside the courthouse.
Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based American Association of University Professors, said he had not heard of any similar case of a U.S. university being subpoenaed for such records.
He said the case brings back fears of the "red squads" of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam War protesters.
According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the Drake subpoena asks for records of the request for a meeting room, "all documents indicating the purpose and intended participants in the meeting, and all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting."
It also asks for campus security records "reflecting any observations made of the Nov. 15, 2003, meeting, including any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting."
Several officials of Drake, a private university with about 5,000 students, refused to comment. A source with knowledge of the investigation said a judge had issued a gag order forbidding them from discussing the subpoena.
Israeli Vice Premier Ehud Olmert sought U.S. approval Thursday of his government's plan to abandon Jewish settlements in Gaza. But he said firmly that, no matter what, "Israel will not remain in Gaza."
The Bush administration is wary of what Olmert acknowledged was a unilateral step by Israel. But the vice premier said dismantling settlements, beginning in the second half of the year, was consistent with President Bush's vision of a final agreement with the Palestinians that would establish a Palestinian state next year on the West Bank and in Gaza.
A Pakistani nuclear scientist whose involvement in international WMD proliferation was described by the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog as "the tip of an iceberg" was today pardoned for his part in the trade.
Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, said that he had accepted a written apology from Abdul Qadeer Khan - known as the father of the country's nuclear bomb - for selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
"What is the motive of people? Money, obviously. That's the reality," Mr Musharraf said after issuing the pardon.
Writes one of my favorites, Thomas Friedman of the NYT:
Attention Republicans: You may think the results of the Democratic primaries indicate that Americans aren't interested in foreign policy. All they care about are domestic issues, like health care and taxes, and that's what the president should focus on. Maybe. But be careful. You could wake up in November and find that while Mr. Bush focused on the home front, his foreign policy created the "Islamic Republic of Iraq" and the "Islamic Republic of Palestine." Imagine defending those on the campaign trail? Have I got your attention? As they say in the phone commercial, "Can you hear me now?"
I hope we can avoid this worst-case scenario. But it's a real possibility, given the Bush team's failure so far to create a political process that can forge, empower and legitimize a moderate center in Iraq or in Palestine — a center that can counter the rising power of Hamas and Hezbollah among Palestinians and that of the Shiite and Sunni clergy in Iraq.
PARIS, Feb 4 (AFP) - FBI director Robert Mueller met with French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris Wednesday to discuss their two countries' efforts to cooperate in fighting terrorism.
Mueller, who was on a 24-hour visit, also met the heads of France's foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.
Interior ministry officials declined to give AFP any details of the talks, saying only that terrorism-related topics were covered.
A Hamburg court today acquitted a Moroccan man of helping the September 11 hijackers after rejecting a dramatic last-minute motion for new evidence by a lawyer for relatives of American victims of the attacks.
Abdelghani Mzoudi was cleared of more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and charges of belonging to a terrorist organisation.
Presiding Judge Klaus Ruehle said the five-judge court – which freed Mzoudi in December on evidence that suggested he had no knowledge of the plot to attack the United States – had to give him the benefit of the doubt.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) - A U.S. citizen captured during the U.S. war in Afghanistan and detained for more than two years without charges saw a lawyer for the first time on Tuesday in a meeting closely monitored by his military guards.
Frank Dunham, a federal public defender, said he spent about an hour with Yaser Esam Hamdi inside a South Carolina navy base, but could not disclose what his client said since everything Hamdi says is classified.
"I'm not allowed to discuss anything that he said to me. That's one of the rules and conditions for seeing him," Dunham told reporters outside the gate of the Charleston Naval Weapons Station.
U.S. Citizen Caught in Afghanistan Gets Lawyer Visit
CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) - A U.S. citizen captured during the U.S. war in Afghanistan and detained for more than two years without charges saw a lawyer for the first time on Tuesday in a meeting closely monitored by his military guards.
Frank Dunham, a federal public defender, said he spent about an hour with Yaser Esam Hamdi inside a South Carolina navy base, but could not disclose what his client said since everything Hamdi says is classified.
"I'm not allowed to discuss anything that he said to me. That's one of the rules and conditions for seeing him," Dunham told reporters outside the gate of the Charleston Naval Weapons Station.
Hamdi, who was born in the United States to Saudi parents and raised in Saudi Arabia, has been designated an "enemy combatant" and held without charge.
The United States has faced heavy criticism from civil rights and legal groups at home and abroad over the detention of hundreds of prisoners, most of them foreigners, without charge and without access to lawyers in its war on terrorism.
Dunham said the meeting with Hamdi, 23, was not a normal client-attorney visit.
"I don't really believe that we saw him today in the way that an attorney sees a client," he said. "There was a Navy commander in the room. There was a television camera on us being monitored by a person outside the room."
"The essence of seeing an attorney I believe is seeing an attorney under circumstances where you know what you say to him is not going to be repeated to anybody. That didn't exist today."
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed last month to hear an appeal by Hamdi challenging whether U.S. officials have the power to detain him indefinitely as an enemy combatant.
CAPTURED COMBATANTS
The U.S. government has defended the detention, saying it recognized the "time-honored military practice" of detaining captured combatants in wartime.
Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 in the war to hunt down members of al Qaeda and oust their Taliban protectors following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
He was initially taken to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, where the United States is holding Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners, and moved to the United States when officials discovered he was born in Louisiana.
The Pentagon gave permission for the lawyer's visit two months ago, arranging a date for it last week.
Dunham said he had told Hamdi about his legal case and given him articles and legal briefs on it and his client "now knows that he has a case. He now knows that his case is before the United States Supreme Court."
Dunham said his client showed no signs of abuse, but his situation -- not knowing how long he would be held -- was "pretty tough."
Hamdi seemed a "nice young man, very appreciative of the fact that we had come to visit him," he said.
Dunham said his argument to the Supreme Court would be based on the basic right of a U.S. citizen to due process.
"They can't just take a U.S. citizen and lock them up and keep them there forever, no matter what we suspect the U.S. citizen is involved in, no matter how dangerous we feel that U.S. citizen is."
Hamdi's family has said Hamdi, a college student, was spending the summer in Pakistan helping refugees when he crossed into Afghanistan, was swept up by Taliban fighters and forced to fight in the war.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the Hamdi case in April, with a decision due by the end of June.
[J298 watched Steve Emerson's Jihad in America today.]
From FAIR, on Steve Emerson:
Yet Emerson seems irrepressible. In 1997, for example, an Associated Press editor became convinced that Emerson was the "mother lode of terrorism information," according to a reporter who worked on a series that looked at American Muslim groups.
As a consultant on the series, Emerson presented AP reporters with what were "supposed to be FBI documents" describing mainstream American Muslim groups with alleged terrorist sympathies, according to the project's lead writer, Richard Cole. One of the reporters uncovered an earlier, almost identical document authored by Emerson. The purported FBI dossier "was really his," Cole says. "He had edited out all phrases, taken out anything that made it look like his."
Another AP reporter, Fred Bayles, recalls that Emerson "could never back up what he said. We couldn't believe that document was from the FBI files."
JEDDAH, 3 February 2004 — Saudi Arabia yesterday called for a global fight against terrorism led by the United Nations and said no country should provide shelter to terrorists. “Terrorists should never be allowed to practice their subversive activities from any territory,” Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd said.
In their joint message to an estimated two million pilgrims assembled in Makkah and other holy sites in the Kingdom, King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, reiterated Saudi Arabia’s total opposition to terrorism and reaffirmed its efforts to promote world peace.
FORMER British Prime Minister John Major says the war on terror is not only impossible to win but set to worsen if the West fails to drag developing nations out of poverty and make peace with Muslims.
Speaking in Melbourne yesterday to financial advisers, Mr Major, who helped secure peace in Northern Ireland, said the war was well intended but ultimately hopeless.
BALI, Indonesia (AP) - Damaged but still dangerous, an al-Qaida linked Southeast Asian terror network is regrouping with the help of porous borders, rising fanaticism and new recruits, officials told The Associated Press ahead of an anti-terror conference here.
Forced further underground by a police crackdown, dependent on couriers and broken into isolated cells willing to lash out on their own, Jemaah Islamiyah is becoming less predictable, officials said.
This is a great op-ed in today's Washington Post about how ordinary Iranians don't want nuclear stuff in their country. (Suprise!)
Oh, and this was written by my cousin, Karim Sadjadpour, who is an analyst with the International Crisis Group, and is a visiting fellow at the American University of Beirut.
Do the people of Iran want the bomb? Iran's recent decision to allow for tighter inspection of its nuclear facilities -- which Iran says are for civilian purposes -- was hailed by Iranian and European officials as a diplomatic victory, while analysts and officials in Washington and Tel Aviv continue to be wary of Tehran's intentions. But despite the attention given to Iran's nuclear aspirations in recent months, one important question has scarcely been touched on: How do the Iranian people feel about having nuclear weapons?
Iranian officials have suggested that the country's nuclear program is an issue that resonates on the Iranian street and is a great source of national pride. But months of interviews I have done in Iran reveal a somewhat different picture. Whereas few Iranians are opposed to the development of a nuclear energy facility, most do not see it as a solution to their primary concerns: economic malaise and political and social repression. What's more, most of the Iranians surveyed said they oppose the pursuit of a nuclear weapons program because it runs counter to their desire for "peace and tranquility."
244 Die in Saudi Stampede During Muslim Pilgrimage:
MINA, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 1 (Reuters) — At least 244 Muslim pilgrims were crushed to death and a similar number were injured Sunday in a stampede during a Devil-stoning ritual at the climax of the annual hajj season in Saudi Arabia.
Panic spread rapidly after some people in the crowd collapsed just as many of the two million white-robed pilgrims, chanting "God is greatest," surged toward the Jamarat Bridge in Mina to throw stones at pillars representing the Devil.
Pakistan scientist sold nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran, Libya:
Dr AQ Khan, a Pakistan national hero for having led the country into the elite club of the nuclear-armed, has confessed to selling nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
The confession is contained in a 12 page document signed by Dr Khan on Sunday, Dawn reports. It came after a series of intense, two hour "debriefing" sessions and ended several months of denials by the scientist that he was the principal culprit in the illegal technology transfers.
Nine killed in bomb attack on Iraq police:
Twelve people died and at least 50 were injured yesterday in two attacks by Iraqi insurgents in northern Iraq.
A car bomb killed nine and injured 45 at a police station in the northwestern city of Mosul in the latest of a series of suicide strikes on coalition forces or their local allies. Near the restive oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the northeast of the country, three US soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division died when a roadside bomb ripped through their convoy. A total of 522 US soldiers have so far been killed in the Iraq conflict, 364 in combat.
Bomb attack on Afghan mayor kills eight:
Suspected Taliban or al-Qaida rebels detonated a remote-controlled bomb that exploded near a vehicle carrying the mayor of a southern Afghan district, killing him and seven relatives, a senior official said Sunday.
Three children, sons of Mayor Khalif Sadaht, were among the casualties of the roadside blast at 5 pm Saturday in Deh Rawood, southern Uruzgan province.
