Al-Qaida's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, broadcasts his outfit's colossal insecurities by trying to insult Barack Obama. First, the insult:
Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.
In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect _ along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice _ "house Negroes."
Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term "abeed al-beit," which literally translates as "house slaves." But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as "house Negroes."
The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.
Two racist twits in a cave: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri
Except that Malcom X ultimately became a regular old Sunni Muslim who even when he was in the Nation would have been disgusted by al-Qaida, for reasons that will be explained later in the post. First, some analysis, from the National Security Network:
Experts agree that the release of a new tape by Al Qaeda’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahri indicates that Al Qaeda feels threatened and is on its heels after Obama’s resounding victory. President-elect Obama’s diverse background, along with his pledge to reverse many of the policies and approaches of the Bush administration on issues such as detentions at Guantanamo, torture and the war in Iraq has served to dramatically improve America’s image, especially in the Muslim world. Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke explained, “Most of all, by returning to American values the world admires, Obama sets al Qaeda back enormously in the battle of ideas, the ideological struggle which determines whether al Qaeda will continue to have significant support in the Islamic world.” Having thrived on the decline in America’s world image, the impact of Obama’s victory provides a direct challenge to Al Qaeda’s negative depiction of the United States. Additionally, Obama’s emphasis on shifting US attention from Iraq to Afghanistan represents a direct physical threat to Al Qaeda’s leadership. America’s improved global image and the new administration’s focus on Afghanistan threatens Al Qaeda and has led to what experts see as a confused, racist, and off-kilter response reflective of an organization on the defensive.
Now to the main reason Malcolm X would have despised al-Qaida (in addition to the fact that Malcolm was an American,) and more importantly, the reasons these booboos are doing themselves more harm than good in the parts of the world they hope to build in: turns out al-Qaida and its leaders, including Osama bin Laden, have a history of racial bigotry, specifically directed at black people...
... by indulging in divisive labels such as "House Slave" or "House Negro", Dr. al-Zawahiri has strayed from being merely disrespectful into being entirely disreputable and dishonorable. By playing the race card so quickly and so brazenly, al-Zawahiri may end up causing backlash against Al-Qaida in the very constituencies he is seeking to woo. It also invites the question, how is this a legitimate criticism coming from the senior leadership of Al-Qaida, which is dominated almost solely by Arab Egyptians and Saudis? Moreover, what would Malcolm X have thought of an organization, Al-Qaida, that at one time offered a higher salary to its Arab membership than its Black African adherents? One might imagine that the financial guru responsible for overseeing this inequitable arrangement -- Egyptian national Mustafa Abu al-Yazid -- would have been punished for his bigoted actions. In fact, al-Yazid has since been promoted to the number 3 position in Al-Qaida, right behind Dr. al-Zawahiri. This is hardly the type of image that Al-Qaida would like to see proliferate in critical regions adjacent to jihadi conflict zones in Somalia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania.
Maybe someone should get Adam Gadahn, the American yahoo who hangs out with the Qaida and apparently thinks he can channel Malcolm X for them (and who I'm praying is a double agent for his sake, otherwise he's a complete horse's ass...) an unabridged history of al-Qaida. And then there are Osama bin Laden's own attitudes on race (plus Whitney Houston and "color mixing,") as related by his former Sudanese mistress:
Kola Boof, 37, the Sudanese poet and novelist who claims to have once been bin Laden's sex slave, writes in her autobiography, "Diary of a Lost Girl," which is excerpted in the September Harper's: "He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen."
...Boof says bin Laden couldn't stop talking about his favorite singer and had lofty plans for her. "He said he wanted to give [her] a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives."
... But as much as bin Laden adored Houston, he was also dismissive of black women. "African women are only good for a man's lower pleasures," bin Laden supposedly said. "What need do you have for a womb?"
And Boof writes that the 9/11 terror mastermind detested her hairstyle. "Why do you wear your hair braided?" he fumed, telling her that "only monkeys" did that.
Do you know what the translation for the term "the base" is in Arabic? It's "al-Qaeda."
And now for the post. Christopher Buckley has resigned from the National Review, and his resignation was accepted in what might be called a "New York minute" (except that the right hates New York, except that they mostly live there ... so, maybe a "Wasila minute???) His crime: he endorsed Barack Obama, and in doing so, enraged the base. ... And so now, the son of NR's founder, the really, very delightful William F. Buckley Jr., is on the outs. He writes at The Daily Beast (Tina Brown's new blog home):
Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed”—the b-word has been much used in all this—my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.
Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.
My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1969, Pup wrote a widely-remarked upon column saying that it was time America had a black president. (I hasten to aver here that I did not endorse Senator Obama because he is black. Surely voting for someone on that basis is as racist as not voting for him for the same reason.)
My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.
So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.
Buckley goes on to say that it's really no biggie, since conservatism doesn't mean much in the wake of eight years of gigantic government, Terri Schiavo intervention and an ill-conceived war in Iraq. Besides, as many conservatives (including George Will, David Brooks, and when he's not being a peevish, duplicitous little prick, even David Frum have admitted, the Republican Party is becoming increasingly a hostile place for intellectuals (except for neocons. They're always welcome.) And so, welcome to the winning team, Chris. We're glad to have you.
Seven years into the so-called "war on terror," it's becoming increasingly clear that the best defense America may have against the Bush administration, and its authoritarian, almost congenital abuses of government power, is the very military it has pressed onto the front lines of the global battlefield. Case in point, the apparent ending to the saga of Salim Hamdan, convicted, not of being a terrorist, but of being the wrong guy's driver. His sentence was passed down by a military panel late this afternoon:
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A military jury sentenced Osama bin Laden's former driver to 5 1/2 years in prison for aiding terrorism Thursday, making him eligible for release in just six months, despite prosecutors' pleas to give him no less than 30 years.
Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had faced a maximum sentence of life behind bars, gets credit for five years already served at Guantanamo Bay. He thanked the jurors for the sentence and repeated an apology for having served bin Laden.
"I would like to apologize one more time to all the members and I would like to thank you for what you have done for me," Hamdan told the panel of six U.S. military officers, hand-picked by the Pentagon for the first U.S. war crimes trial in a half century.
The military tribunal, which Hamdan and his attorneys helped to bring about for himself and others, by successfully arguing to the Supreme Court that so-called "enemy combatants," a term simply made up by the Bush administration, were not beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions, or of the Constitution.
The military jury and judge had already decided that Hamdan should receive credit for the five years he has already been locked away in the Bush administration's special brand of limbo, and the judge had urged the panel to consider Hamdan's low level status in the Bin Laden organization, and the fact that he is the sole supporter of his family. The military panel resisted the Pentagon prosecutor's demand that they "make an example of him."
Hamdan, who was likely tortured while in American custody at Gitmo, can still appeal to a U.S. court. Which begs the question: what's the point of these "military tribunals" if the same kind of justice meted out to domestic terror suspects like Jose Padilla -- who got a longer sentence than Hamdan: 17 years from an old fashioned American jury, despite having no contact whatsoever with Bin Laden -- winds up being dished out there?
The difference? In a real courtroom, Hamdan would have walked on the heresay, the secret testimony, and the torture alone. Driver or no driver.
The Pentagon is seeking a 30 year to life sentence for Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, after he was convicted on one of five terrorism counts in the Bush administration's kangaroo court (which thankfully was tempered by the general good sense of the U.S. military officers on the "jury.")
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A Pentagon prosecutor Thursday cast Osama bin Laden's driver as ''a hardened al Qaeda member'' and asked the six-member U.S. military jury who convicted him of terrorism to lock him up for 30 years, if not for life.
''Once you see your boss killing people, you leave. You get another job. Period,'' prosecutor John Murphy told jurors assigned to start deliberating his punishment later in the day.
Defense attorneys countered that the appropriate penalty was 45 months imprisonment, effectively seeking time served.
The same jury on Wednesday convicted Salim Hamdan, 40, of Yemen on five counts of providing material support for terrorism, which the trial judge consolidated into one.
It rejected more serious charges of conspiracy.
The sentence would seem in some ways to be a moot point, since the Bush administration intended to hold Hamdan indefinitely as an "enemy combatant" even if he had been acquitted of all charges. In addition, his conviction was obtained using heresay evidence, secret testimony, and possibly even statements derived from torture.
Hamdan, a Yemeni, was convicted by the six Pentagon-appointed jurors at the Guantanamo Bay trial of aiding terrorism by chauffeuring bin Laden around Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks. But Hamdan said he merely had a "relationship of respect" with bin Laden, as would any other employee.
"It's true there are work opportunities in Yemen, but not at the level I needed after I got married and not to the level of ambitions that I had in my future," he said, reading in Arabic from a prepared statement.
The five-man, one-woman jury found Hamdan guilty of aiding terrorism but acquitted him of conspiracy Wednesday at the first US war crimes trial since World War II.
Under tribunal rules, the jury imposes the sentence, not the judge. Their verdict does not have to be unanimous, and a review by a Pentagon legal official can reduce the sentence but not increase it.
The military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, told jurors they could impose any sentence from life in prison to no punishment. He instructed jurors to take into account the nearly seven years Hamdan has spent in confinement and that he is the sole supporter of his wife and two children.
Allred, who has described Hamdan as a "small player," previously ruled he should receive five years of credit for time served at Guantanamo Bay since the Pentagon decided to charge him.
The tribunals' chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, had said prosecutors would take the acquittal into account when recommending a sentence. But prosecutor John Murphy on Thursday urged the jury to make an example of Hamdan with a penalty of 30 years to life.
"You have found him guilty of offenses that have made our world extremely unsafe and dangerous," Murphy said. "The government asks you to deliver a sentence that will absolutely keep our society safe from him."
Defence attorneys urged leniency, reminding jurors that Hamdan was not convicted of any role al-Qaida's attacks. A psychiatrist hired by the defense told jurors that Hamdan has the potential to be rehabilitated.
"It is important the world recognize that this is justice and not revenge," said Charles Swift, one of Hamdan's civilian attorneys.
The verdict will be appealed automatically to a special military court in Washington. Hamdan can then appeal to U.S. civilian courts as well.
Defence lawyers say Hamdan's rights were denied by an unfair process, hastily patched together after Supreme Court rulings that previous tribunal systems violated U.S. and international law.
"The problem is the law was specifically written after the fact to target Mr. Hamdan," Swift said.
On the 7th anniversary of that notorious August 6th Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States," (which Dubya ignored cuz he was busy clearin' brush...) the Bush administration's Constitution skirting military tribunals claim their first victim. So what victory have the Bushies won for the Global War on Terror? They've convicted Bin Laden's driver ... of being Bin Laden's driver:
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's former driver was convicted of supporting terrorism in the first U.S. military war-crimes trial of a terror suspect captured after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Salim Hamdan was found guilty of providing material support to al-Qaeda by serving as bin Laden's driver and body guard, Army Colonel Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, said in Washington after the verdict was announced at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The jury of six military officers cleared Hamdan of conspiring with bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda operatives to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, Keck said.
And despite the failure to convict him of anything more serious than driving, the U.S. can now incarcerate Hamdan (whose name was made famous in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld cast that established a basic right to a trial for detainees ... fancy that ...) for the rest of his life.
A conviction means ``now we will have an appeal'' to test the validity of the crime of providing material support to terrorists, which is ``a new made-up offense that didn't exist when he committed it,'' said John Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general and dean of the Franklin Pierce Law School in Concord, New Hampshire.
A decision on that issue ``will be important because lots of people will be charged with it,'' Hutson said.
The jury cleared Hamdan of specific accusations that he transported SA-7 surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan to be used by al-Qaeda to attack U.S. forces, according to verdict details described in a telephone interview by Air Force Major Gail Crawford, a spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay.
Life Term
The charges carry a possible term of life imprisonment.
The charge of providing material support to terrorism accused Hamdan of serving as bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan, ``knowing that by providing said service or transportation he was directly facilitating communication and planning used for acts of terrorism.''
Ah, American jurisprudence! Fort it's next trick, maybe the Bush administration could put the late Bruce Ivins on trial posthumously for material support to the FBI in closing the anthrax case which they haven't got the goods to prove...
WE know what a criminal White House looks like from “The Final Days,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.
“The Final Days” was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book “The Dark Side” connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.
Some of “The Dark Side” seems right out of “The Final Days,” minus Nixon’s operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become “so paranoid” that “they actually thought they might be in physical danger.” The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.
The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to stop the “torture memos” and are long gone from the White House. But Vice President Cheney and Mr. Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney general (Michael Mukasey) and C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won’t shut the door firmly on torture even now.
Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.
Meanwhile, members of the administration appear not to be completely oblivious to the perils they find themselves in. Former U.N. ambassadorial temp John Bolton got a nice scare in Europe this spring, when a citizen attempted to arrest him for war crimes. Baron von Rumsfeld has had to be fleet footed in France after narrowly escaping a war crimes indictment (Bush has even sought to immunize his defense team from indictment in the International Criminal Court. No consciousness of guilt there... and failing to get blanket immunity, has forced bilateral agreements on about 100 countries to ensure that U.S. officials won't be handed over.) And no less an insider than retired Gen. Antonio Taguba, who probed the infamous abuses at abu-Ghraib, has definitively stated that key members of the Bush administration committed war crimes by ordering and devising the torture of detainees
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
(The Red Cross, the lead organization in such matters, concurs.) And ccording to Rich:
Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.
No wonder the former Rumsfeld capo, Douglas Feith, is trying to discredit a damaging interview he gave to the British lawyer Philippe Sands for another recent and essential book on what happened, “Torture Team.” After Mr. Sands previewed his findings in the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protested he had been misquoted — apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the interview. Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House hearing this Tuesday.
So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to “never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.” But while we wait for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.
Worse, the Mayer book makes it clear that for all the descent into Communist Chinese military tactics, the Cheney-led torture mania hasn't helped U.S. national security. Instead, the lies that torture has elicited have been principle causes leading us into the Iraq quagmire:
In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.” By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”
After 9/11, our government emphasized “interrogation over due process,” Ms. Mayer writes, “to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized.” But in reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced “confession” to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.
The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”
That “something” was crucial in sending us into the quagmire that, five years later, has empowered Iran and compromised our ability to counter the very terrorists that torture was supposed to thwart. As The Times reported two weeks ago, Iraq has monopolized our military and intelligence resources to the point where we don’t have enough predator drones or expert C.I.A. field agents to survey the tribal areas where terrorists are amassing in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the threat to America from Al Qaeda is “comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,” said Seth Jones, a RAND Corporation terrorism expert and Pentagon consultant. The difference between now and then is simply that the base of operations has moved, “roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia.”
Meanwhile, in Rich's telling, we're back where we were in the summer before 9/11. Hell, even Chandra Levy is making a comeback, courtesy of a 12-part "investigative" series by the Washington Post... (BTW that summer, Chandra consumed about 90 percent of my time as editor of an NBC News website. Here we go again...)
Bin Laden's deputy says Iran trying to undermine al-Qaida
By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader issued a new audiotape Tuesday accusing Shiite Iran of spreading a conspiracy theory about who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks to discredit the power of the Sunni terrorist network.
Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, has stepped up his denunciations of Iran in recent messages in part to depict al-Qaida as the Arabs' top defense against the Persian nation's rising power in the Middle East.
The increasing enmity toward Iran is a notable change of rhetoric from al-Zawahri, who in the past rarely mentioned the country — apparently in a hopes he would be able to forge some sort of understanding with Tehran based on their common rivalry with the United States. Iran has long sought to distance itself from al-Qaida.
Doh!!! How could they do it to ya, John???
"Al-Zawahri wanted to work with Iran, but he's deeply disappointed that Iran has not cooperated with al-Qaida," said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert and author of "Inside al-Qaida: The Global Network of Terror."
So now, al-Zawahri "wants to appeal to the anti-Shiite, anti-Iran sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world," said Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore.
Al-Zawahri appeared intent on exploiting widespread worry in the Arab world over Iran's influence, particularly in Iraq, to garner support for al-Qaida. At the same time, he sought to denigrate Iran's ally Hezbollah, which has gained some popularity even among Sunnis in the region for its fight against Israel.
Al-Zawahri's comments came in a two-hour audio posted on an Islamic militant Web site, the second message in weeks in which he answered hundreds of questions sent to the site by al-Qaida sympathizers and others. ...
("Psst!... John ... can we start bombing Iran yet?" "Patience Joe ... Patience...)
Oh wait, there's more...
... in many of his answers, al-Zawahri went out of his way to criticize Iran. He said the Iraqi insurgent umbrella group led by al-Qaida, called the Islamic State of Iraq, is "the primary force opposing the Crusaders (the United States) and challenging Iranian ambitions" in Iraq.
One questioner asked about the theory that has circulated in the Middle East and elsewhere that Israel was behind the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah's Al-Manar television of starting the rumor. "The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said.
"Iran's aim here is also clear — to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq," he added. Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled al-Qaida's allies, the Taliban.
And now for the big finish:
... the change in tone could be because of al-Qaida's failure to win the release of al-Qaida figures detained by Iran since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, including al-Qaida security chief Saif al-Adel and two of bin Laden's sons.
Gunaratna said that up to 200 al-Qaida figures and their families are under house arrest in Iran and that Tehran has rejected al-Qaida attempts to negotiate their release.
Al-Qaida doesn't have the strength to launch attacks in Iran, but it intends to do so "in the future," he said. "If al-Qaida becomes strong in Iraq ... Iran believes al-Qaida in Iraq could become a major threat."
Al-Qaida has previously claimed responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks.
In an audiotape last week, al-Zawahri denounced what he called Iran's expansionist plans, saying Tehran aims to annex southern Iraq and Shiite areas of the eastern Arabian Peninsula as well as strengthen ties to its followers in southern Lebanon. He warned that if Iran achieves its goals, it will "explode the situation in an already exploding region."
So al-Qaida is not only NOT cooperating with Iran, it intends to "strike it in the near future..." and Iran is not only NOT arming, training or helping al-Qaida (a ridiculous notion repeatedly put forward ... accidentally...??? ... by John McCain and his neocon friends) ... they are detaining al-Qaida prisoners?
Recall that in his testimony, General Petraeus declared that the biggest threat to the U.S. inside Iraq is Iran. But John McCain and the neocons claim the biggest threat to the U.S. inside Iraq is al-Qaida (all 1,000 of them...) so which is it, and if they're not working together, as John McCain would have the American people believe, is one of them more or less working in line with our interests? And if al-Qaida, wherever they are, including the franchises like al-Qaida in Iraq, constitute our single worst enemy, then isn't the enemy of our enemy ... Iran ... kind of on our side?
The case is closed, the clowns have left the big-top, and an exhaustive review of 600,000 documents has proven, once and for all, that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaida. Can we stop debating this now?
Rather silent out there in Red Blogland, although this poor dear seems to have gotten confused about the second-tier Al Qaida in Mesopotamia, thinking gosh, they must be the same crew run by Osama bin Laden ... and missing the very salient point that, um, THEY WEREN'T THERE BEFORE THE WAR WE STARTED in 2003...
One shudders to think what Stephen Hayes is thinking tonight...
What a strange thing it is to have a day off in the middle of the week ... it's enough to make Thursday feel like a Monday. Oh well ... here's what-a-gwan:
Conversations:
Al Gore to Tipper: "Well, at least the boy was in a Prius..." (after his son gets pinched for possession of marijuana, Xanax, Adderol, Soma and more. And just days before daddy's 7-7-07 global warming concert? Duuuude...
A man is arrested outside Barack Obama's hotel in Iowa holding an eight-inch knife. Scary, with shades of Bobby Kennedy, or a security detail overacting? I hope for the latter but fear the former is more on the money.
Untruths?
The British government says the idea that the eight doctors and others who were arrested in the recent attempts at creating 'splosions at Glasgow and London airports were al-Qaida isn't quite accurate... now THIS is al-Qaida, if you still believe they are the boogeyman the administration wants you to believe they are...
Not so smart?
Some Iraq war protesters are pulling a thoreau and withholding federal taxes. Good luck with that one...
The Siniora government unleashes its military on a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. And of coure, the U.S. media immediately claims that the group they're fighting is al-Qaida.
Fatah al-Islam, a group accused of links to al-Qaeda and Syria, has threatened to widen its campaign if troops do not stop the shelling.
A spokesman for the group, Abu Salim, told French news agency AFP: "The army is not only opening fire on us, it is shelling blindly.
"If this continues, we will carry the battle outside the city of Tripoli."
So who is Fatah al-Islam? According to Reuters:
- The faction emerged in November when it split from Fatah al-Intifada (Fatah Uprising), a Syrian-backed Palestinian group. Fatah al-Islam had some 200 fighters at the time, based in Nahr al-Bared camp. Security sources have said militants from other Palestinian camps have joined the group since then and have been trained at the camp.
- The Lebanese government links Fatah al-Islam to Syrian intelligence. Syria and Fatah al-Islam deny any links to each other. The government says four Syrian members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to bombing two buses in February in a Christian area near Beirut. Three people were killed in the attacks.
- Fatah al-Islam's leader, Shaker al-Abssi, is a veteran Palestinian guerrilla. He was sentenced to death in Jordan for killing a U.S. diplomat in 2002. The slain leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, received a similar sentence for the same crime.
- Abssi says his group has no organisational links to al Qaeda but agrees with its aim of fighting infidels. Fatah al-Islam statements have appeared on Islamist Web sites known to publish al Qaeda statements.
- Abssi told Reuters in March that his group's main mission was to reform the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon according to Islamic sharia law before confronting Israel.
So they're linked to al-Qaida in goals, and they traffic in the same websites. Does that make them an "al-Qaida linked organization"? In a sense, it doesn't matter, except that it does. The Bush administration's tactic of labeling every militant group as al-Qaida (and every arrested potential domestic terrorist or person with brown skin and criminal intent in the U.S., including American citizens) as well as the media complicity in same, is a dangerous oversimplification of reality. How can you develop good intelligence in the so-called 'war on terror' when you really don't understand who, or how many groups, you're fighting?
Let's go for a pretty trustworthy source: Janes Defence Weekly:
Fatah al-Islam, Lebanon's new jihadists
A new radical Sunni group has emerged in Lebanon. Led by the Palestinian Shakir al-Absi, Fatah al-Islam is based in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli.
Shakir Absi has expressed a militant jihadist ideology with a focus on Israel. He has said his group's objective is to bring religion to the Palestinian cause and that hundreds of potential suicide bombers had prepared themselves to strike Israel.
In an interview with the New York Times on 16 March, Absi confirmed that he once worked as a pilot for Fatah leader Yasser Arafat, then staged attacks on Israel from his own base in Syria. He also admitted working with Zarqawi. He said that after his imprisonment in Syria he broadened his targets to include US citizens. He told the paper: "We have the right to do such acts, for is it not America that comes to our region and kills innocents and children?"
Fatah al-Islam's ambition to attack Israel will remain limited by the Shia group Hizbullah's pervasive control of southern Lebanon. A Sunni jihadist group would stand little chance of launching a cross-border attack into Israel without being spotted by Hizbullah's informers. They would also have little chance of staging a successful attack: after years of confrontation between Hizbullah and the Israeli military, the border zone is probably the toughest insurgent theatre in the world.
So now we see a group whose focus is not jihad against the United States, but rather, war against Israel. In other words, a much more traditional anti-Israeli militant group, comprised, surprise, surprise, of Palestinians.
For a more complex, textured, but very thorough reading of the relationship between Palestinian militants in Lebanon (and Syria) and al-Qaida, you'll want to read this. The start:
Al Jazeera ran on Sept 18 the second part of a documentary by Yusri Fouda on Al Qaeda in "Bilad al Sham". The thesis is that inherently Al-Qaeda has a forward looking plan that was to attack the US, draw America to the Middle East and then fight it (i.e. in Iraq) and then exploit that conflict to get to the Palestinian front using Damascus and Lebanon.
Hm ... part one of mission ... accomplished???
The seminal point the documentary makes is that "the youth are jaded with the corruption in the Arab world and an impotent leadership" so much so, that bright, educated people like Mohammad Atta (this is the documentary's assessment not mine) turn to religion as a means to an end.
In fact the founder of Junood Al Sham is on record saying the only way to fight Israel is to turn to religion and that when you do so as a fighter, you are fearless.
This zealous fervor invariably is the panacea to the "Zionist-American-Western" axis, several of the interviewees hold.
An interesting and worrying dimension to all this was the existing and growing Salafist movement in Lebanon, namely in mountainous areas and even places like Baalbak where one of the 19 hijackers that carried out the Sept.. 11 attacks was from.
The documentary goes on to narrate how Al Qaeda's man in Lebanon was arrested and then 'died' in detention. His supporters claim he was tortured and killed.
Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. "Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn't have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis," he said. "It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can't storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step far greater than this government can take."
And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.
And yes, it is difficult not to feel Syria's hands these days. Fouad Siniora's government, surrounded in its little "green zone" in central Beirut, is being drained of power. The army is more and more running Lebanon, ever more tested because it, too, of course, contains Lebanon's Sunnis and Shia and Maronites and Druze. What fractures, what greater strains can be put on this little country as Siniora still pleads for a UN tribunal to try those who murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005?
Three U.S. troops are missing in Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi troops are now scouring Mahmoudiya, in the area known as the "triangle of death" searching for them. This just goes to show why we shouldn't be placing our troops in small units embedded with the Iraqi military. Anyway... the apparent kidnapping, which came during an ambush which also cost the lives of four other troops and their Iraqi translator, is a reminder of the danger, not just of death in Iraq, but also of disappearance. Remember Specialist Matt Maupin? It's been three years and he's still missing.
Meanwhile, there's breaking news that two American troops were shot, and at least one of them killed, by "militants" who opened fire at U.S. and Pakistani troops on the Pakistani-Afghan border.
...then why is he set to serve just nine months in prison back in his home country of Australia? Perhaps this is a clue:
As part of the plea bargain, Hicks also withdrew claims he was abused in US detention.
The Australian had previously alleged he was beaten by US forces after his capture in Afghanistan and that he had been sedated before learning of the charges against him.
Addressing the tribunal, he affirmed he had "never been illegally treated by any persons in the control or custody of the United States" before or after his transfer to Guantanamo in 2002.
But wait, there's more:
As part of his plea deal, Hicks has agreed not to speak to the media for a year, not to receive any money for his story and not to sue the US government.
At Friday's hearing, he had to convince the military judge that his guilty plea was genuine and not just a tactic to return home to Adelaide.
However his father, Terry, said that was the only reason he had agreed to make the plea.
And this:
The Australian government will be relieved that the David Hicks saga is coming to an end, says the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney.
While the conservative government is a supporter of the US military justice system, it has come under a great deal of pressure from Australians disturbed by Hicks' treatment, and will be glad to put the issue behind it with elections due later in the year, our correspondent says.
Two governments, one giant cover-up, but at the end of the day, at least David Hicks is out of Gitmo. Who can blame him for pleading out?
Chris Wallace ... wait a minute ... you mean THAT Chris Wallace ?????? actually pauses for a moment from his normal role as Fox News' most skilled pretend neutral journalist, to actually behave like a neutral journalist... debunking the claims of innocence of one Douglas Feith, who insisted on an earlier program that, but of course he never claimed Iraq's Saddam Hussein had an operational link with al-Qaida! When a Fox News host is calling out the neocons, you KNOW the world is slowly coming to an end.
Meanwhile, the Dems are still muddling over how to stop the president, or whether to stop him at all...
Speaking of the speech, it appears it was crafted, along with the strategy that goes with it is your resident nut-job, who once wanted to go to war with North Korea.
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%>
Tell a friend
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%>
