The Intelligence Mess: How It Happened, What to Do About It

Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11704013_1

Intelligence-gathering is something of a square peg in the round hole of contemporary political morality. It is about unearthing that which is willfully concealed, an enterprise that necessarily calls for invading privacy and inducing betrayal--discomfiting acts in an age that exalts the individual and his liberties above community and country. It is about assuming and preparing for the worst in an era that sees "bad" as an outmoded adjective for "different," another dash of enlivening spice in a rich social stew. Intelligence is gimlet eyes in a world of rose-colored glasses.

Now, however, that foreign pathologies long denied have visited their excesses upon us, many among the benignly tolerant have turned overnight into the equivalent of ambulance-chasers. In particular, they have confidently laid at the door of America's intelligence apparatus the success of America's enemies on September 11, 2001. Even as investigators in the CIA and FBI were unable to "connect the dots," it is said, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers cavorted for months in this country before carrying out the atrocities of that day. Nor was this catastrophe--"by definition, the worst intelligence failure in our country's history," in the words of the Reagan-era intelligence expert Herbert Meyer--a singular phenomenon. Less than a year earlier, a billion-dollar battle ship, the U.S.S. Cole, had been bombed and nearly sunk, causing the deaths of seventeen servicemen, because we unwittingly berthed it in the al-Qaeda-infested port of Aden, Yemen. This, after our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were turned to rubble in August 1998 by the very same al Qaeda, which had already attacked numerous times previously, and which no less often had expressly declared war on the United States.

Nor is that all. Thanks to our failed intelligence services (the indictment continues), the Bush administration grossly overestimated the stockpiles and production capacity of chemical, bacteriological, radiological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. In the meantime, in North Korea, construction of nuclear weapons seems to have ensued for years right under our noses. And Pyongyang's mischief marked only a single strand in a web of proliferation woven by our ally Pakistan, a web that may have spread into as many as seven nations, including Iran, where the mullahs now harbor the remnants of al Qaeda's leadership.

How did this wide wreckage in our intelligence capacities come about? One incisive answer has been given by Mark Riebling in his gripping history, Wedge: How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security (1994, re-issued in 2002 with a new epilogue). Riebling's thesis is that the problem is longstanding, that it has a single "root cause," and that this root cause is institutional. In his telling, a full half-century's worth of national disasters--from Pearl Harbor through the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11--can be traced directly to intelligence failures, and those failures were proximately caused by turf-battling between our two great rival agencies.

This has now become conventional wisdom, accepted on all sides. And one can see the apparent sense in it. A ramified system of multiple agencies having similar missions and chasing the same budget dollars will inevitably produce rivalry; rivalry begets pettiness, and pettiness begets failure. Such, indeed, is the reasoning behind virtually all of the proposals now under consideration by no fewer than seven assorted congressional committees, internal evaluators, and blue-ribbon panels charged with remedying the situation.

One proposed fix, supported by, among others, Senator John Edwards and James B. Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration, would create a new entity, analogous to Britain's MI-5, to assume the FBI's domestic-intelligence mission. Decoupling that agency's information-gathering from its law-enforcement duties would allegedly result in a specialist agency that would more resemble, and be less likely to rumble with, its foreign-intelligence counterpart, the CIA. These hoped-for efficiencies would, it is (naively) supposed, compensate for the loss of the FBI's critical power to leverage intelligence-gathering with the ready hammer of prosecution.

Steinberg and Senator Dianne Feinstein are also among those who would solve the pitfalls of conflicting bureaucracies by . . . adding another bureaucracy. This new National Intelligence Directorate would oversee the full spectrum of relevant entities, compelling the likes of the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the State Department's intelligence branch to play nice with each other. Presumably it would also render obsolete the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, another new entity (under CIA direction) created by President Bush a year ago to promote harmony.



II

But is it true that inter-agency rivalry is the problem everyone claims it is?

That rivalry exists is indisputable; likewise, that its effects can be pernicious. One of my first encounters with the CIA a decade ago occurred when I and other prosecutors preparing the conspiracy case against the organization responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing asked the agency for a much-needed briefing. The CIA was perfectly willing to come to New York for that purpose--but not if our FBI case agents were going to be in the same room.

Nevertheless, like many facts that appall at first blush, internecine warfare is only, at best, half the story. For one thing, intelligence professionals are correct (if occasionally disingenuous) when they complain that the public has a skewed perception of their operations: while catastrophic lapses are always notorious, intelligence successes are more numerous. These, however, must typically be kept secret in order to preserve sources of information and methods of gathering it. The unfortunate result is a portrait of ceaseless "failure" that, aside from giving intelligence-gathering an undeserved bad name, also obscures other verities.

First, day-to-day cooperation among agencies, and particularly between the FBI and CIA, is actually far better than people have been led to believe. In terrorism cases, in the decade after the 1993 WTC bombing, teamwork improved in leaps and bounds. To be sure, there are occasional breakdowns, usually due to personality conflicts. But this is an unavoidable function of the human condition--which no legislation on earth can repeal--and it is just as frequently a factor in intra-agency disputes as in those between agencies. Today, agents who fail to compare notes are generally acting in violation of information-sharing protocols; it is hard to imagine additional directives improving the situation.

Second, intelligence-gathering is not monolithic. Domestic intelligence is radically different from the foreign variety, and both differ critically from the needs of the military. So polysemous an imperative requires a variety of skills to meet widely divergent situations and assumptions. As both a practical and a political matter, it is inconceivable that the task could be accomplished by a single agency, and proposals that suggest otherwise are certain only to reshuffle, rather than eradicate, natural rivalries while damaging the quality and quantity of information collection.

Third, and most misunderstood, rivalry--overall--is a virtue. In the government's vast monopoly, it is essential. Naturally, the seamy side of competition being a perennial best-seller, the public record is replete with hair-raising anecdotes of sharp-elbowed investigators pursuing the same quarry to the benefit of criminals, enemies, and traitors. On a macro level, however, the throat-cutting is statistically insignificant. As a rule, competition impels agents to test their premises and press for better information; it results in the generation of more leads and the collection and refinement of more intelligence. In a world where the Supreme Court cannot decide a case without amicus briefs from innumerable interested observers, where Congress declines to pass legislation without the input of scores of experts, do we really want the President, in matters of national security, reduced to a single stream of intelligence-collection and analysis?

If turf-battling is not an enormous obstacle, does that mean there are no obstacles? Hardly. The real problems, though, are not bureaucratic but structural and philosophical. They have taken over 40 years to metastasize, and they would take a lot more than cosmetic surgery to reverse, even assuming the national will to do it.



III


As with much else in our national life, the bacillus now grown to plague America's intelligence apparatus took root in the unrest of Vietnam and the upheaval of Watergate. The perception of national security became intertwined in those years with an increasingly unpopular war that ended badly. For a generation of activists soon to take up positions of influence in politics, academia, and the media, the antiwar movement inculcated a lasting aversion not only to the exercise of American military power but to the agencies tasked with assessing threats to our national security, not to mention the real-world grunt work of intelligence.

Watergate deepened the aversion. For one thing, the burglars included former intelligence officers. For another, President Richard Nixon enlisted the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation of the break-in. For a third, his White House "enemies" operation featured spying against domestic political adversaries. Hot on the heels of these misdeeds, the CIA became enmeshed in other domestic spying scandals that were subjected to high-profile probes, first by a commission appointed by President Ford and, in 1976, by the celebrated Senate Select Committee chaired by Frank Church.

Perhaps the first consequence of this chain of events was a long-term decline in the authority of the executive branch of government. The decline stemmed from an illogic that often bedevils the aftermath of scandal: the tendency to confound the sins of a corrupt actor (in this case, Nixon) with a structural weakness in the system itself. In the mid-1970, the new operating premise was that, since robust presidential power was likely to be corrupted, it must therefore be scrutinized and shackled in every respect.

From this there followed a second consequence: a shift of national-security functions, prominently including intelligence-gathering, from the ambit of broad executive discretion to the area where executive action is regulated by Congress and the federal courts. Compared with the "intelligence failures" decried by journalists and politicians today, this shift engendered a continuing calamity.

In the constitutional license given to executive action, a gaping chasm exists between the realms of law enforcement and national security. In law enforcement, as former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr explained in congressional testimony last October, government seeks to discipline an errant member of the body politic who has allegedly violated its rules. That member, who may be a citizen, an immigrant with lawful status, or even, in certain situations, an illegal alien, is vested with rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution. Courts are imposed as a bulwark against suspect executive action; presumptions exist in favor of privacy and innocence; and defendants and other subjects of investigation enjoy the assistance of counsel, whose basic job is to thwart government efforts to obtain information. The line drawn here is that it is preferable for the government to fail than for an innocent person to be wrongly convicted or otherwise deprived of his rights.

Not so the realm of national security, where government confronts a host of sovereign states and sub-national entities (particularly terrorist organizations) claiming the right to use force. Here the executive is not enforcing American law against a suspected criminal but exercising national-defense powers to protect against external threats. Foreign hostile operatives acting from without and within are not vested with rights under the American Constitution. The galvanizing national concern in this realm is to defeat the enemy, and as Barr puts it, "preserve the very foundation of all our civil liberties." The line drawn here is that government cannot be permitted to fail.

For these reasons, prior to the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate revolution, executive-branch authority in matters of national security had been almost plenary. The constitutional checks held by Congress were largely trifles. The power to declare war was already nearly an anachronism--during the Civil War, the Supreme Court had ruled that, regardless of whether Congress acts, Article II of the Constitution actually obliges the President to respond with all necessary force to put down attacks against the United States. Even Congress's power of the purse lacked much practical muscle, given the inherent political risk for a legislator who dared to withhold funds the President said were vital to national security.

In line with this, the executive branch had wide latitude to gather intelligence against potential threats. True, the CIA's charter did not permit it to conduct domestic intelligence-gathering--that task being left to the FBI--but this affected only which arms of the executive branch could spy on our enemies in which venues. It did not, at least in theory, affect the substance of the information to be gathered.



IV


But cataclysmic changes were ahead, and their harbinger was President Jimmy Carter's acquiescence in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Here, for the first time, Congress and the courts undertook to regulate the gathering of national intelligence, particularly by electronic eavesdropping, against agents of hostile foreign powers. In the Nixonian afterclap, it was adjudged that the executive could not be trusted unilaterally to wield this power, which might secretly be used against political opponents.

Of course, such wiretapping was already illegal, and the Nixon experience had amply demonstrated the political price to be paid for engaging in it. No matter. Henceforth, the executive branch would not be allowed to use whatever tactics it, as the branch with the most expertise and information, determined were necessary to protect the nation. Rather, it would be compelled to go to a federal FISA court newly created for the purpose, and, as with the procedure for criminal wiretaps, it would need to establish probable cause that the target was an agent of a foreign power. Electronic surveillance would be permitted only if the judges approved.

The impact on intelligence collection was serious. Previously, it would have been laughable to suggest that foreign enemy operatives had a right to conduct their perfidies in privacy--the Fourth Amendment prohibits only "unreasonable" searches, and there is nothing unreasonable about searching or recording people who threaten national security. (The federal courts have often recognized that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.) Now, such operatives became the beneficiaries of precisely such protection. Placing so severe a roadblock in the way of a crucial investigative technique necessarily meant both that the technique would be used less frequently (thereby reducing the quantity and quality of valuable intelligence) and that investigative resources would have to be diverted from intelligence-collection to the rigors of compliance with judicial procedures (which are cumbersome).

This was only the start of the debacle. Courts and the organized defense bar soon began to ply the FISA statute with hypothetical governmental abuses. What if, they worried, a national-security wiretap yielded evidence of an ordinary crime--not an unlikely event, given that terrorists tend to commit lots of ordinary crimes, including money laundering, identity fraud, etc. This was no problem under FISA as written: intelligence agents could simply pass the information to agents of the criminal law, who could then use the damning conversations in court. But what if such law-enforcement agents, for their part, were to try to use FISA as a pretext to investigate crimes for which they themselves lacked probable cause to secure a regular criminal wiretap?

In one sense, the suggestion was not out of line--wiretap conversations are devastating evidence, and defense lawyers routinely strain to have them suppressed. But the notion was logically absurd. If a criminal investigator was going to act corruptly, it would be far easier for him to fabricate evidence showing probable cause for a regular wiretap (by pretending, for example, to have an anonymous source who had bought illegal drugs from the target) than to trump up a national-security angle necessitating an additional set of internal approvals. Nor was there any indication that such chicanery was actually afoot. But reality is rarely an obstacle for those who see life as an ongoing law-school seminar. Gradually, courts rewrote FISA, grafting onto it a so-called "primary purpose" test requiring the government to establish not only probable cause that it was targeting operatives of a foreign power but also that its real reason for seeking surveillance was counterintelligence, not criminal prosecution.

As one would expect, this created among many prosecutors a grave apprehension about "the appearance of impropriety"--a hidebound concept governing lawyer ethics that is perfectly nonsensical in the life-and-death context of national security. Even as militant Islam began its terrorist war against the United States with the 1993 WTC bombing and the 1994-95 "Bojenka" plot to blow a dozen American airliners out of the sky over the Pacific, the Justice Department was worrying that agents and prosecutors might be perceived to be using intelligence-gathering authority to build criminal prosecutions. Often, the result was weeks or more of delay, during which identified terrorists who happened also to be committing quotidian crimes went unmonitored while the government dithered over whether to employ FISA or the criminal wiretap law. The insanity reached its apex in 1995 with the "primary purpose" guidelines drafted by the Clinton administration: henceforth, a firewall would be placed between criminal and national-security agents, generally barring them even from communicating with one another.

The damage from the firewall and the impediments to FISA has been incalculable. It took ten years to make the racketeering case against Sami al-Arian, the professor accused of helping run the murderous Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the campus of South Florida University, because the wealth of information collected by intelligence agents was withheld from their criminal counterparts. And that was a pittance compared with what happened in the waning weeks before the September 11 attacks. Zacarias Moussaoui, who had paid cash for pilot training (and was reported to authorities when his bizarre behavior--including intense interest in how cabin and cockpit doors worked--could no longer be ignored), was detained by the immigration service. Worried FBI intelligence agents were desperate to search his computer, but were turned down by supervisors who decided there was insufficient evidence to go to the FISA court. His al-Qaeda membership and numerous connections to the hijackers were not uncovered until after the attacks.

And the Moussaoui travesty itself pales in comparison to the story of Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, excruciatingly recounted in Slate by Stewart Baker, general counsel of the National Security Agency during the early Clinton administration. The pair, who had trained to pilot planes, lived in California. In August 2001, an astute FBI intelligence agent was trying to find them, and asked the criminal division for help. But FBI headquarters stepped in and insisted that the firewall not be breached: criminal agents were to stay out of the intelligence effort. A few weeks later, al-Midhar and al-Hazmi plunged Flight 77 into the Pentagon, their manifold ties to Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers kept safely under wraps.



V

In attempting to "connect the dots" on how branches of our government erected barricades against efficient information-sharing, one cannot avoid addressing the most basic blunder of all. In the years after World War II, the designers of the CIA conceived of it as, in one sense, an analogue to the American military. Just as the armed forces are generally precluded by law from domestic policing (which is left to the FBI and other federal, state, and local agencies), so the CIA could not conduct its operations within U.S. territory.

The CIA, then, is confined to foreign intelligence and counterintelligence activities. When leads cross into U.S. territory, the FBI takes over--mainly through its foreign-counterintelligence division, which is separate from its law-enforcement side. This division of labor, and not simple rivalry, is the salient reason for the inter-agency warfare of the last half-century.

Turf aside, however, the structure is not analogous to the military doctrine of posse comitatus, which bars the armed forces from domestic policing. For if the United States were invaded by a foreign army, our military would respond; that would be a national-defense function, not policing. Similarly, hostile foreign operatives within the U.S.--plotting, recruiting, providing funding and material support to their principals--fit the mold of an invading foreign army far better than that of a criminal collaborator.

Yet U.S. law and tradition (strenuously supported by many of the same politicians who today bluster about the CIA's lack of dot-connecting skills) rig intelligence as if it were Russian roulette: the agency whose raison d'?tre is to counter foreign threats to our national security is precluded from participating in investigations once they cross into our nation, while the agency that is expected to pick up the ball and run with it from there does so without the CIA's depth of knowledge and expertise.

The ill-conception of this arrangement has become increasingly patent. With the info-tech revolution, al-Qaeda operatives seamlessly share information across borders with the click of a mouse, enabling them instantly to construct a complete picture of their prey. By contrast, the forces charged with keeping us safe from them are expected to complete awkward hand-offs as persons and information roam in and out of the country. The windfall beneficiary is, ironically, the terrorist operative who happens also to be an American citizen. Such an operative is not only protected by the full panoply of constitutional rights wherever in the world he travels but is radioactive to the CIA, which is no less fearful of the perception that it is spying on Americans than the Justice Department was about the appearance of misusing FISA.



VI

It is bad enough that, prior to 9/11, terrorists could easily survive in the lacunae of our domestic intelligence apparatus. Worse, they positively thrived on the way it operated.

Throughout the eight years of the Clinton administration, as militant Islam's jihad against America escalated, the federal courts became the linchpin of counterterror strategy. This began understandably enough. The 1993 WTC bombing was viewed as a domestic crime. Although, years later, investigators and journalists would link the bombing to al Qaeda, and al Qaeda in turn to prior terrorist acts against the U.S., at the time not much was known about Osama bin Laden, his network, and his national support systems in Afghanistan and Sudan. No one credibly could fault President Clinton for handling the matter as a court case or for not responding militarily. As the murder and mayhem grew, however, and as it became clearer that indictments were a pusillanimous response to suicide bombers geared to obliterate American embassies and naval destroyers, Clinton stayed the self-defeating course.

As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has observed, weakness is provocative. The fecklessness of meeting terrorist attacks with court proceedings--trials that take years to prepare and months to present, and that, even when successful, neutralize only an infinitesimal percentage of the actual terrorist population--emboldened bin Laden. But just as hurtful was the government's promotion of terrorism trials in the first place. They were a useful vehicle if the strategic object was to orchestrate an appearance of justice being done. As a national-security strategy, they were suicidal, providing terrorists with a banquet of information they could never have dreamed of acquiring on their own.

Under discovery rules that apply to American criminal proceedings, the government is required to provide to accused persons any information in its possession that can be deemed "material to the preparation of the defense" or that is even arguably exculpatory. The more broadly indictments are drawn (and terrorism indictments tend to be among the broadest), the greater the trove of revelation. In addition, the government must disclose all prior statements made by witnesses it calls (and, often, witnesses it does not call).

This is a staggering quantum of information, certain to illuminate not only what the government knows about terrorist organizations but the intelligence agencies' methods and sources for obtaining that information. When, moreover, there is any dispute about whether a sensitive piece of information needs to be disclosed, the decision ends up being made by a judge on the basis of what a fair trial dictates, rather than by the executive branch on the basis of what public safety demands.

It is true that this mountain of intelligence is routinely surrendered along with appropriate judicial warnings: defendants may use it only in preparing for trial, and may not disseminate it for other purposes. Unfortunately, people who commit mass murder tend not to be terribly concerned about violating court orders (or, for that matter, about being hauled into court at all).

In 1995, just before trying the blind sheik (Omar Abdel Rahman) and eleven others, I duly complied with discovery law by writing a letter to the defense counsel listing 200 names of people who might be alleged as unindicted co-conspirators--i.e., people who were on the government's radar screen but whom there was insufficient evidence to charge. Six years later, my letter turned up as evidence in the trial of those who bombed our embassies in Africa. It seems that, within days of my having sent it, the letter had found its way to Sudan and was in the hands of bin Laden (who was on the list), having been fetched for him by an al-Qaeda operative who had gotten it from one of his associates.

Intelligence is dynamic. Over time, foreign terrorists and spies inevitably learn our tactics and adapt: consequently, we must refine and change those tactics. When we purposely tell them what we know--for what is blithely assumed to be the greater good of ensuring they get the same kind of fair trials as insider traders and tax cheats--we enable them not only to close the knowledge gap but to gain immense insight into our technological capacities, how our agencies think, and what our future moves are likely to be.

In considering the asserted "intelligence failures" of September 11 and beyond, it is worth bearing in mind this information bounty, which our government consciously decided to provide from 1993 through 2001 even as it was increasingly manifest that the enemy was growing more proficient, its attacks more deadly.



VII

Although I have thus far been concentrating on the collection and analysis of intelligence here at home, a similar and complementary history can be constructed for what happened to our capabilities overseas. There, too, our intelligence apparatus was thoroughly compromised.

In particular, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's dovetailed with a severe economic recession that ultimately cost George H. W. Bush his presidency. For the CIA, this constellation of circumstances had two major, detrimental consequences.

First, desperate to cut spending wherever politically palatable, the federal government declared a "peace dividend." This was a fantasy. Although the fall of Soviet tyranny was an enormous blessing, it also presaged a more challenging international environment, filled with threats diffuse, unconventional, and less predictable. Nevertheless, at the urging of many of the same elected officials now complaining about failure, including Senator John F. Kerry, intelligence spending was repeatedly slashed.

The second nightmare for the CIA was President Clinton. For the first President Bush, himself a former CIA director, intelligence had been a priority. For Clinton, it was a nettlesome chore--and one he largely avoided. Clinton had no time even for James Woolsey, his own chosen director of Central Intelligence, declining to hold a single one-on-one meeting during Woolsey's maddening two-year tenure. This freeze-out had the predictable effects: agency morale plummeted, officers abandoned ship, and Congress's funding door slammed shut.

Human intelligence also fell into disrepair, having already fallen into disrepute. It is worth considering that almost all the terrorism prosecutions of the 1990's took place after successful attacks. We managed to stop exactly two such attacks: the 1994 Bojenka plot against the airliners, and a 1993 conspiracy to bomb New York City landmarks. The former success was due to sheer luck (a fire, started by inept chemical mixing on the part of two terrorists, was detected by an alert Manila police officer), combined with a Pakistani informant who was induced to turn in the ringleader. The latter happened because an informant penetrated the blind sheik's terror organization, recorded scores of conspiratorial conversations, and permitted agents to catch the plotters in flagrante delicto, stirring explosives. Sadly, that informant had actually infiltrated the group in 1991 but had been deactivated seven months before the 1993 WTC bombing (after which he was reinstated).

One cannot develop the necessary global network of intelligence informants without CIA case officers. As George Tenet, the current director, attested in a recent speech, by the time he took the helm in the fifth year of the Clinton administration the graduating class of case officers was at a historic nadir. As for the agency's clandestine-services program, Tenet elaborated, that was in such a shambles that it will take until 2009 before it is functioning at an acceptable level.

Meanwhile, abjuring clandestine operatives, Clinton-era intelligence went hi-tech, making extensive use of satellite surveillance and other advances in remote eavesdropping. But with fewer agents to translate and analyze what was gathered, or to follow leads, the effort was ineffectual. Consider: the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, carried out by an organization we had been focusing on for five years, took several months to plan; ditto the 2000 strike on the U.S.S. Cole (which would have happened eight months earlier, to the U.S.S. The Sullivans, had not the terrorists' attack boat sunk from the heft of explosives). The attacks of September 11, 2001 were plotted on four continents for well over a year. We did not sniff out any of them.

As the CIA stumbled, the FBI was ascendant, opening a host of new legal-attach? offices around the world. Generally speaking, this was a positive development: just as the terrorist threat was exploding, so too was the spread and sophistication of criminal syndicates, making it imperative for law-enforcement agencies to cooperate internationally. But timing is everything. The FBI was spreading its wings just as its most significant cases involved not ordinary crimes but national security.

Some of our best information is obtained from foreign intelligence services. Naturally, those services are much less forthcoming if they think that what they tell us will have to be revealed in court because of U.S. legal rules. Historically, that was not much of a problem when dealing with the CIA; it is, however, always a concern for a country weighing whether to share some sensitive or potentially embarrassing information with the FBI. The Saudis' infamous obstruction of the FBI's efforts to investigate the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing is an exquisite example.

In the Clinton years, no matter how many times we were attacked, all the world knew that our approach was to have the FBI build criminal cases. Indeed, Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 39, issued in June 1995, announced that prosecuting terrorists and extraditing indicted terrorists held overseas were signature priorities of the administration. Nearly three years later, after several other attacks and public declarations of war by bin Laden, Clinton issued a press release that both trumpeted as a ringing success his strategy of having terrorists "apprehended, tried, and given severe prison sentences" and announced a new directive, PDD 62. This purported to "reinforce the mission of the many U.S. agencies charged with roles in defeating terrorism,"including by means of the "apprehension and prosecution of terrorists." The embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed less than three months later.




VIII

The mantra that "9/11 changed everything" is omnipresent. But is it true? It is certainly true in one crucial sense: our national anti-terrorism strategy is no longer to fight bombs and militias with indictments and press releases. The military has reemerged as the spearhead, with law enforcement in an important but subordinate role. The ramifications have already been positive: simply by responding with force to our enemies, we have not just eliminated thousands of terrorists but accumulated volumes of vital intelligence.

But much still needs to change, and the prognosis is not hopeful. For one thing, we speak of intelligence "failures" as if they were current lapses, to be laid at the feet of the poor saps left without a chair just as the music stopped. And we speak about "fixes" without coming to terms with the nature of the problem; until we do, any such fixes will at best be palliatives, and will more likely make things worse.

Take Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction. It may yet turn out that these will be found in Iraq itself, or that they were moved or hidden outside the country in the many months between when we first told Saddam Hussein we were coming and when at last we arrived to depose him. Still, for the moment the stubborn fact remains that the government said the WMD were there and they have not been located. Whose intelligence failure is that? Did our intelligence agencies "fail" in 2003, when, according to David Kay, even Saddam's Republican Guard believed Iraq possessed the weapons? Or did they "fail" in the 1990's when the government of the United States regarded the CIA, and spying, and human intelligence, and Iraq as one big pain that should just go away?

Hizballah killed well over 200 servicemen in the two Lebanon attacks of 1983. The blind sheik, and bin Laden after him, promised their adherents that a reprise or two of such "operations" would surely induce the Americans to cut and run from the Persian Gulf. Although we did not cut and run, we did stand by as Saddam Hussein put down a revolt we had incited with the materiel we let him keep. When Saddam tried to assassinate the first President Bush and when he expelled the UN inspectors, we lobbed a few missiles at useless targets--just as we did when bin Laden obliterated our embassies in Africa. In response to the Cole bombing, we did nothing.

Bin Laden struck us repeatedly in the eight years leading up to September 11. From the thousands in al Qaeda's swelling international ranks, we plucked about 40 and indicted them, bathing them in all the rights of American defendants, and arming them with information from our intelligence files to prepare their defenses. One of these, Mohammed Daoud al-`Owhali, had killed nearly 250 people by helping to drive a car bomb to the entrance of our embassy in Nairobi, and later confessed. Al-`Owhali was a soldier in a war on America, probably among the most effective ever. He was held not as a prisoner of war but as a criminal defendant, questioned not by the CIA but by FBI agents, who actually tried to give him Miranda warnings. When he was given a civilian trial, a U.S. judge initially ordered his confession suppressed--which would nearly have guaranteed his acquittal--because he had not been advised of his right to have an American defense lawyer present: a right that, since he was in the custody of Kenya, he did not have. The judge later relented, but only after issuing an opinion holding that foreign terrorists who attack America overseas should be accorded the benefits of the constitutional system it is their mission to destroy.

Was September 11 the worst intelligence failure in our country's history? Or was it, rather, a national failure, the failure of a country that allowed its sense of decency to overwhelm its instinct for survival and that effectively convinced its enemies that they could strike with impunity?

The problem with our intelligence apparatus, to repeat, is that we went on a national nap for over two decades. If an entity is systematically warped and mismanaged for 20 or 30 years--not by a single agency director or American President, but by a philosophy--it cannot be fixed overnight. You cannot wake up on Monday and say, "We need more informants," and expect to have them embedded and reporting by the close of the business day. If those lobbying for quick fixes to the intelligence mess do not appear to understand this, might it be because they do not want anyone to start probing whose mess it actually is?



IX

This is not to say that the U.S. intelligence apparatus needs fundamental restructuring. In my opinion, it does not. Instead, its primary needs are, first, time to reverse a quarter-century of sloth, and, second, adequate resources to build a new human-intelligence network. Beyond that, a few other things need to happen, but it is here especially that pessimism sets in.

Although there is no need to restructure the CIA and FBI, the division of labor between them must take account of new realities. Without losing the benefits of rivalry, it is imperative to eliminate the structural barriers that, assuming they ever made sense, make none now. In particular, in a national-security investigation, the overriding assumption must be that we are dealing not with potential criminals presumed innocent but with foreign enemies who must be brought to heel. This means that the CIA must be able to follow the trail of its intelligence into the U.S.

In short, I am proposing that the CIA be permitted to work in the United States against those who have been colorably associated with foreign powers, including terrorist groups. A number of safeguards can be put in place to assure Americans that we have not authorized Big Brother to run amok. In addition to requiring that the FBI be given notice and periodic updates, we could mandate that the CIA obtain authorization within 72 hours of the start of domestic surveillance.

My own preference is that this approval come from a responsible executive-branch official rather than from the courts. The FISA model, in my view, violates the principle of separation of powers, gets courts (which have no institutional expertise in, or ready access to, intelligence) into the business of micro-managing national security, discourages agents from pursuing investigations essential to public welfare, and confers upon enemy operatives benefits they should not have. Still, given that FISA is not going away, I would rather have a requirement to obtain FISA court authorization than a continuation of the outdated system in which, while al Qaeda can freely cruise from Peshawar to Peoria, the CIA gets turned away at the border.

Complementing this change, the FBI and the CIA should continue their increasingly effective cooperation outside the United States, with two caveats. The first is that the CIA (and the Defense Department) should be in the lead, the FBI in a secondary role except when the executive branch determines it is in our national interest to extradite to our criminal-justice system a terrorist held by a foreign sovereign. The second is that, the targets in this war being enemy combatants and not criminal suspects, they should not get Miranda warnings, American constitutional protections (except minimal due process, which our government must always accord), or lavish access to our sensitive files. Instead, they should be captured, held for however long active hostilities last, squeezed (humanely) for information, and, if they have violated the laws of war, given military tribunals.

Other commonsense steps to promote competent intelligence-collection were incorporated in the Patriot Act, enacted six weeks after the September 11 attacks. This act, however, has come under blistering assault; so vicious has the campaign been that sensible Democrats like Senator Feinstein and Senator Joseph Biden have been moved to join their voices to those of President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft in the act's defense. But it may be too little, too late: there are now more than a half-dozen proposals making their way through Congress seeking rollbacks or repeal.

The Patriot Act's intelligence improvements were vital, and nowhere more so than in the area of information-sharing. It dismantled the pernicious FISA firewall that prevented agents from pooling information. It authorized intelligence agents who were conducting FISA surveillance to "consult with federal law-enforcement officers to coordinate efforts to investigate or protect against" terrorism and other hostile acts. In addition, the act made it easier to obtain surveillance authorization, scotching the requirement that agents show that foreign counterintelligence was the "primary purpose" for their application in favor of the less burdensome certification that it was a "significant purpose."

But it is these crucial improvements that have come under greatest fire. First, in 2002, the FISA court itself took umbrage at Congress's demolition of the firewall and the (judicially invented) "primary purpose" test. Fortunately, the court's attempt to reestablish the suicidal status quo ante was blocked. Next, however, an amalgam of libertarian Republicans and anti-Bush Democrats has promised to limit the term of the bill's crucial provisions to December 31, 2005, when they are currently scheduled to "sunset" unless extended or made permanent by new legislation.

This bipartisan Senate cabal (led by Democrats Patrick Leahy, Richard Durbin, and Harry Reid and Republicans Larry Craig and John Sununu) wants not only to terminate the FISA sharing provisions but to end the sharing of grand-jury information; to restrict the information that intelligence agencies may obtain from communications-service providers (the same kind of information long available to criminal investigators probing health-care fraud and gambling); and effectively to destroy the valuable "sneak-and-peak" search warrant (another longstanding tool in ordinary criminal investigations) that allows agents, with court approval, to search a location for intelligence purposes but not to seize anything, thus keeping the targets unaware. No doubt, the next time something goes boom, these Senators and their myriad sympathizers will be among the first to wail about unconnected dots.

A political class that appreciated the stakes involved would not indulge in this sort of recklessness. It would not hasten to dub every episodic setback an intelligence failure without asking searchingly whether we have set our agencies up to fail. It would have the necessary perseverance, through the inevitable torrent of catcalling, to retrace a quarter-century of missteps. And it would construct its remedies on the basis of a correct diagnosis of the disease. Right now, when we need it most, this is not the political class we have.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York, led the 1995 terrorism prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in connection with the first World Trade Center bombing. His reviews and essays have appeared in COMMENTARY, National Review Online, and other publications.


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Reform Overdue for Central Intelligence
Posted April 5, 2004
By Jamie Dettmer


George Tenet remains a stout defender of his CIA, but there is a growing consensus in Washington that far-reaching reforms are necessary.


George Tenet has been on the offensive all winter, defending the CIA's recent record as more details emerge of his agency's failures from overstating Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs to not fully appreciating the extent of the work undertaken by Libya and Iran to develop nuclear weapons. In speeches and in congressional testimony, the U.S. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) has sought cautiously to shift blame elsewhere, suggesting that high administration officials may have ignored equivocations in intelligence reports concerning Iraq and elected to highlight worst-case scenarios. The New York Times' interpretation of Tenet's testimony, quickly denied in official circles, is that at least three times he had to advise Vice President Dick Cheney to restrain himself when making the public case for war against Saddam and urged him to soften his claims about the immediacy of an Iraqi threat.

Tenet hardly has shifted his ground since the terror attacks struck New York City and Washington on 9/11. In the wake of the attacks he insisted, "Failure means no focus, no attention, no discipline - and those were not present in what either we or the FBI did here and around the world." Subsequently, he has admitted to a mistake here or there, and he has acknowledged that CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., needs to improve its skills when "connecting the dots." But he still won't concede that Sept. 11 represented a massive failure on the part of the agency he heads.

Despite Tenet's spirited defense, grave questions remain about the CIA, its recent performance and what is to be done to improve it. A report due soon by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on 9/11 intelligence failures, currently undergoing a final edit, reportedly delivers a devastating verdict on the CIA performance. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said of the report: "It's shocking," and added, "There has to be accountability."

The report is bound to fuel calls for reform and to intensify the Washington debate about reform. For critics outside Langley it is difficult to get a full picture of the CIA, as intelligence successes have to remain cloaked, whereas dramatic failures stumble into the public light, often as a result of efforts by the stumblers to avoid blame. Even so, while Tenet remains a stout defender of his agency, there is a growing consensus in Washington that reform is necessary, although there is often little agreement about what reforms are needed or the scale of the change that may be required.

Most lawmakers and intelligence insiders accept that the CIA has to do a better job of collecting intelligence and analyzing the information that is gathered. But many larger institutional questions remain unresolved, such as how to achieve greater coordination between U.S. intelligence agencies and whether there should be a unification of national-level collection and analytic agencies under the CIA director to give him maximum control of the whole intelligence apparatus - a move that would be fought tooth-and-nail by the Pentagon, which commands the lion's share of the intelligence budget.

And it isn't clear that Congress is capable of biting the reform bullet. Though there have been angry exchanges in recent months between the congressional panels - most notably last September over a report by the chief investigator for the House and Senate Joint Inquiry Committee on the Sept. 11 attacks accusing agency officials of withholding vital information from committee staff - the panels are reluctant to take on the intelligence community. Former and current CIA officials say that, on the whole, the panels traditionally are supine, don't ask enough questions about ongoing everyday matters and give the agency the benefit of the doubt.

And the panels are fearful of rocking the boat when it comes to major reform. Many lawmakers who serve on the oversight panels enjoy a cozy relationship with the community and are loath to risk endangering their good ties. "That has become more obvious with the current intelligence committees," says an intelligence source with experience on Capitol Hill. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence saw Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas replace Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida as chairman, and congressional insiders say that has helped Tenet mount his arguments for the status quo. Roberts is a strong defender of Tenet, unlike Graham, who was critical.

The panel also lost the CIA director's most uncompromising critic, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who had to leave because of an eight-year time limit for service on the committee. Shelby placed many of the problems at the CIA firmly at Tenet's door, claiming that the DCI's leadership was weak. On the House side, the intelligence chairman, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), is a former CIA officer. As an intelligence insider, Capitol Hill aides claim, he tends to pull his punches.

Reform has been held back in the past and congressional oversight blunted because of the CIA's tendency to co-opt lawmakers and Hill aides and to turn them in effect into agents of influence in Congress for the agency. In the mid-1990s, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania rebuked the CIA for doing this, saying, "The CIA's Directorate of Operations would be better advised to improve its reputation and standing by real performance, instead of attempting to rely on factors like personal, school or family ties."

But if there were real impetus behind reform, what changes should be made? Former and current intelligence agents say that Tenet has made one post-9/11 change that will pay dividends. Recently, the Directorate of Operations (DO) was instructed to inform analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence of the identities and track records of sources for raw reports, thereby allowing analysts a better chance of evaluating the information being provided. Previously, analysts were not told about DO sources and assets and therefore often were unable to distinguish the value of the information they received in DO reports. Some of the inaccuracies in the agency's assessments of the weapons programs in Iraq were the result of analysts' lack of knowledge about sources, say CIA insiders.

That reform doesn't satisfy Tenet critics such as Shelby; he believes change requires a much bigger shake-up. He sees Sept. 11 as "part of a pattern of intelligence failures" that resulted in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa and the successful attack on the USS Cole. Shelby also questions whether Tenet has the determination or ability to reform the CIA and to bring order to the Byzantine organization of America's $30 billion intelligence community.

Former senior Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, now president of the Center for Security Policy, agrees with the Shelby line, arguing that "A man who does not understand what is wrong with his organization is unlikely to be able to fix it." As he wrote recently: "Tenet has insisted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that there was no failure of intelligence. Such a stance has become increasingly untenable, as more and more evidence emerges that neither the CIA nor the FBI properly handled information about threats of deadly aircraft-delivered attacks by Islamist operatives against U.S. government facilities and/or other prominent sites."

Failure in leadership has been a common complaint of assorted intelligence aides covering their own failures stretching back decades. In the early 1990s, former veteran analyst John Gentry argued in a long and detailed reform paper that the culture of the agency needed to be altered, with the agency ridding itself of deadwood and bringing in agents of change. "The president [Bill Clinton] and Congress must understand the culture - the disease - before they can prescribe remedial medicine," he wrote. "Reorganizational Band-Aids will only briefly ameliorate symptoms. They must also understand the disease-causing agents - the senior responsible executives - and remove them from the organs of intelligence agencies to prevent reinfection." Several former CIA directors when taking up their posts at Langley noted the need for a cultural change but failed to bring it about. John Deutch noted the importance of changing the culture in his confirmation hearing but failed to unleash the bloodletting that was needed to do that.

Aside from cultural problems, Gaffney believes a root cause for recent intelligence mishaps rests with the agency's "failure to invest adequately in the traditional espionage techniques known as human intelligence, or 'HUMINT.'" He says this "problem has its roots in the deliberate emasculation of the agency's HUMINT assets and capabilities when Jimmy Carter turned the CIA over to Adm. Stansfield Turner. But it has persisted and metastasized during the years since - especially during the Clinton presidency." The CIA needs to stop being overreliant on electronic means of intelligence collection, he argues.

Former and current CIA officials concur with Gaffney. They add that the agency also needs to widen the type of operatives and assets it hires, and former State Department and CIA counterterrorism official Larry Johnson cites the lack of ability of the agency to hire foreign nationalities. "We need to be like Russia - hire the nationalities that can blend in and don't worry about getting soiled by hiring thugs if that's what it takes," he told United Press International, Insight's sister wire service. "Either you are willing to soil your hands a bit for the sake of the information, or you're going to think well of yourself and get blindsided the way we did on Sept. 11."

The CIA's analytical setup is the focus of many of the reform calls. Former and current intelligence officials argue that the system is cumbersome and is top heavy with managers. Reports, they say, are overedited and there is little communication between analysts and the higher reaches of the agency. Further, analysts often are inexperienced and assignment transfers are frequent, preventing analysts from developing real expertise. The average assignment is about two years. Veterans say transfers should be kept to a minimum and the average length of assignment should be at least five years and maybe longer.

Analysts' morale is low. Many feel they are at the bottom of the pile and that their promotion opportunities to management levels are few. Fast-track promotion opportunities should be instituted and those with analyst backgrounds should be welcome in the higher echelons of the agency, say some intelligence insiders.

Critics also worry that the DI welcomes and rewards those who subscribe to prevailing orthodoxies and punishes analysts who buck conventional wisdom and think out of the box. "Loyalty to individual bosses has assumed a great role within the directorate," complains a current CIA analyst. "Your career can be ruined if you take on the prevailing opinion of senior managers." Again, this is an old problem, and Gentry in the 1990s was lamenting it, claiming analysis was "tailored to gain personal and institutional kudos - one that DCIs [William] Casey, [William] Webster, [Robert] Gates and [James] Woolsey showed no inclination to alter."

Gentry also urged major bloodletting in the DI, arguing that "The CIA's problem managers have prospered for so long that they are ubiquitous in senior executive suites and common throughout middle management as well." He called for widespread sackings. "The upheaval would be considerable, but it would be relatively short-lived. Some temporary disruption is far preferable to the ongoing malaise that has plagued the DI for a decade." That malaise could continue if Congress doesn't insist something be done.

Away from change at the CIA, many reformers maintain that the role and power of the DCI need to be strengthened. Writing several years ago, Victor Marchetti noted that Richard Helms frequently would rage at his limited powers when it came to trying to coordinate the intelligence community as a whole, observing "to his staff that while he, the DCI, was theoretically responsible for 100 percent of the nation's intelligence activities, he in fact controlled less than 15 percent of the community's assets - and most of the other 85 percent belonged to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Without a central figure knocking the heads of the myriad agencies that go to make up the U.S. intelligence community, interagency rivalry has been allowed to thrive. There is tremendous duplication, and confusion is sown among consumers of the intelligence product. Some reformers maintain that larger chunks of the intelligence community should come directly under the sway of the DCI and that he should have control of more of the budget. Such a move, though, would trigger a major turf war between Langley and the Pentagon, and any efforts to bring the National Security Agency under the CIA's control likely would bring the reform process to a shuddering halt with a lobbying fight being waged on Capitol Hill, insiders say.

Still, to overcome the ravages of poor leadership in the past and the dysfunction among the different parts of the intelligence community today will require tough remedial action and upheaval, but without boldness there can be no major improvement. The question is whether Congress and the White House are ready to grasp the nettle.

Jamie Dettmer is a senior editor for Insight.


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Hamas invested in U.S. real estate with Gulf money
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, April 5, 2004
Hamas has invested up to $25 million in housing projects throughout the United States.
U.S. officials said the investment was believed to have stemmed from Saudi and other Gulf Arab sources as part of an effort to finance Hamas insurgency operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They said the funding pointed to the close links between Hamas and Gulf Arab supporters.
[In Nablus, Israeli special operations forces arrested 26 senior Hamas insurgents, Middle East Newsline reported. Israeli officials said this comprised the Hamas military command in the northern West Bank city.]
Hamas investments in the United States began in the early 1990s through Mussa Abu Marzouk, a member of Hamas's political bureau, officials said. The investments were handled mostly through a firm founded by an Egyptian national sentenced in January 2004 to one year in prison for relaying millions of dollars to Al Qaida as well as other Islamic insurgency groups.
In February, a U.S. federal court in Rhode Island ruled that Hamas must pay $116 million to the parents and children of an Israeli couple killed in a Palestinian attack in 1996. On Thursday, the same court ruled that the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority must also each pay similar damages to the plaintiffs.
FBI officials have provided evidence of Hamas investments during the investigation of Soliman Biheiri, alleged to have been a key conduit of Saudi and Gulf funding to Al Qaida and Hamas. The investigation of Biheiri, sentenced to one year in jail, was conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and included numerous Saudi-sponsored groups in the Washington D.C. area.
Hamas invested in the construction of hundreds of apartment units, many of them in the suburban Washington area, officials said. In Prince George County, Md., Hamas was said to have financed the construction of 57 homes in a project called Oxon Hill, which contains numerous Muslim immigrants.
Abu Marzouk, expelled by the United States in the late 1990s, was a principal investor in Oxon Hill. He was also cited as a principal of a Biheiri company, BMI, a subsidiary of which financed a development called Barnaby Knolls in Maryland.
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The investigation into Hamas investments stemmed from a federal raid of 14 Saudi-aligned businesses in Virginia in 2002 meant to uncover the ties between BMI and a Herndon, Va. corporation, Sana-Bell Inc. Sana-Bell was alleged to have laundered millions of dollars for the Saudi-sponsored International Islamic Relief Organization, believed connected to Hamas and the Egyptian Gamiat Islamiya.
A declaration of sentencing of Biheiri released by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] detailed the Hamas investments. In the declaration, ICE senior agent David Kane said BMI employed investment schemes to launder large amounts of money to and from Hamas organizations and businesses. Kane said these organizations included 100 bogus charities, most of which operated in Virginia.
The declaration also traced the flow of money to Hamas for investment in the United States. It said money was flowing from Hamas charities through banks in Virginia and New Jersey to the port of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The ICE said a significant amount of revenues that stemmed from Hamas investments were employed "in furtherance of Hamas terrorist operations."
The key investor in BMI was identified as a Saudi national, Yasin Qadi. Qadi has been placed on a U.S. Treasury Department list of financiers of Al Qaida.
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.

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Saudis agree to detain transferred Guantanamo inmates
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, April 5, 2004
Saudi Arabia has agreed to detain several Al Qaida insurgents transferred by the United States.
U.S. officials said the Saudi detention was a condition for the release of several Saudi nationals in U.S. custody since early 2002. The nationals had been held for nearly two years at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Officials said many of the Guantanamo detainees managed to conceal their activities in Taliban and Al Qaida camps in Afghanistan. They said that in the past, at least one instance a freed Guantanamo detainee rejoined Al Qaida and its war against the West.
The Saudi nationals were identified as low-level operatives of Al Qaida, Middle East Newsline reported. Officials said four Saudis had been transferred to Riyad for continued detention.
The Defense Department has begun releasing or transferring detainees from Guantanamo. So far, 146 detainees left the facility, most of them for freedom. About 30 others were transferred for continued detention in their native countries.
Currently, there are 595 detainees at Guantanamo. On Friday, the Pentagon said it transferred for release 15 detainees, including those from Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Yemen.
"The decision to transfer or release a detainee is based on many factors, including whether the detainee is of further intelligence value to the United States and whether he is believed to pose a threat to the United States," a Pentagon statement said.
The Al Qaida detainees transferred to Jordan arrived as the kingdom seized a truck filled with explosives and searched for two other vehicles believed sent by Al Qaida. The official A-Rai daily reported on Friday that authorities have been questioning suspects under the command of Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi, regarded as the most lethal Islamic insurgent in Iraq.
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc
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>> HIGHER ED WATCH...

The Saudi Fifth Column On Our Nation's Campuses

By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 5, 2004

From Riyadh to Ramallah to the Ivy League, the Saudi Wahhabi lobby and money machine is funding the goals of radical Islam and undermining America's efforts to prosecute the War On Terror.

The press recently reported new closures by the Department of Justice of Saudi "charitable" fronts like the Muslim World League, the Al-Haramain Foundation, the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), and others which raised money for Al Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.[1] But the government has so far ignored an even larger network of Saudi front groups working toward parallel ends.



This network is embedded deep within our system of higher education, including many of our most prestigious universities. The Saudis have steadily infiltrated American educational institutions, using vast infusions of money to turn the American educational system against US support for Israel and in favor of the Saudi vision of a global Muslim state in which not only Jews but Christians and all infidels will have subordinate status to the followers of the "true faith." At the same time they look to affect American policy in the Middle East and public opinion in the US in a way to aid their Wahhabist goals.[3]


Saudi Wahhabism fuels a particular hatred for the West and its liberalism regarding religious tolerance and human rights. It views attempts by the West to promote democratic reforms in the medieval Arab monarchy of the Saudi royal family as an affront to Islam. In other words, it shares the religious and political views of its wayward-but not forgotten- son, Osama Bin Laden.


Accordingly, the Saudi royal family has been waging its own quiet jihad of ideas and disinformation to advance its goals. It has also financed terrorist activities of Al Qaeda and Palestinian radicals. The US Senate Judiciary Committee recently heard testimony from fellow senators and terrorism experts that the Bush administration has failed to recognize the dangers of Saudi influence, having left the Kingdom in control of most of the Muslim organizations in the United States. For instance, 80% of the mortgages on mosques in the US are paid for by the Wahhabist Saudis.


Over the last 30 years the Saudi Royal Family has contributed upwards of 70 billion US dollars to infiltrate worldwide institutions with propaganda against the West and Israel. This sum, it has been observed, makes the one billion dollars per annum spent by the Soviet Union during the Cold War for Communist propaganda pale by comparison. [4] The Saudis see donations to our universities as a way of promoting their political and religious propaganda. To quote their English language daily, Ain Al Yaqueen: "The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under the custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz has positively shouldered responsibility and played a promising role in order to raise the banner of Islam all over the globe and raise the Islamic call either inside or outside the kingdom."[5]


The new head of Middle East Studies at UC Santa Barbara, Stephen Humphreys, holds a chair named after Aziz himself. The head of the Muslim American Society , W. Deen Muhammed, has stated that Saudi gifts require the receiver to prefer the Saudi "school of thought." While Humphreys denies there are strings attached, one wonders how likely a thesis on Saudi misogyny or their educational system teaching hatred of Americans, Jews and Christians would go over in Saudi funded departments if someone hoped to advance or be tenured.[6]


One wonders why a theocratic totalitarian regime where 30% of the population is illiterate and where PhDs teach that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make matzoh[8] would take such interest in the American educational system instead of their own.[9]Yet the money the Saudis are pouring into our universities and colleges as gifts and endowments is alarming: King Fahd donated $20 million dollars to set up a Middle East Studies Center at the University of Arkansas; $5 million was donated to UC Berkeley's Center For Mideast Studies from two Saudi sheiks linked to funding Al Qaeda; [10] $2.5 million dollars to Harvard; $8.1 million dollars to Georgetown including a $500,000 scholarship in the name of President Bush; $11 million dollars to Cornell; $1.5 million dollars to Texas A&M; $5 million dollars to MIT; $1 million dollars to Princeton; Rutgers received $5 million dollars to endow a chair as did Columbia which tried to hide where the money came from.[11] Saudi largesse included UC Santa Barbara; Johns Hopkins; Rice University; American University in Washington, D.C.; University of Chicago; Syracuse University; USC; UCLA; Duke University; and Howard University among many others.[12]


Saudi infiltration works on several levels. By creating new Middle East Studies Centers and such endowed chairs on campuses across the US, the Saudis are able to influence the curriculum taught to the next generation of American students about the Middle East situation as taught at Saudi-funded madrassas both here and abroad. That curriculum is decidedly anti-Western and full of incitement against Christians and Jews.[13] Based not on truth as much as the agenda of the totalitarian regime in power, it "molds" the next generation to hate Israel and to hate America as an "imperialist" or "racist" nation.[14]


For example, according to Middle East historian Martin Kramer, Columbia University has become the "Bir Zeit (University) on -the- Hudson"[15]. Bir Zeit is a university built for the Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank. Instead of its being a source for educational prosperity and peace, it is a breeding ground for totalitarian terrorist ideologues and their ilk. Faculty write scholarly works about Middle East history against the US and Israel as a matter of course. At Columbia, Palestinians dominate the teaching of the modern Middle East and do not encourage a diversity of approaches in doing so. [16] When a chair is endowed by Saudi money it is filled by academics known for their Palestinian or Saudi activism less than for their scholarship.

Thus Columbia's new chair was given to Rashid Khalidi, a University of Chicago historian and Palestinian activist. Khalidi took over the "Edward Said Chair Of Arab Studies." Said, who died recently, and who was raised in Egypt, was a member of the Palestine National Council and anti-Israel activitist thought the Oslo peace process was a "sellout." [17] He was an English literature professor, whose expertise was Jane Austen, yet his anti-American and anti-Israel writings dominate the perspectives of Middle East Studies departments across the nation.


Khalidi is on record defending the killing of Israeli soldiers: "Killing civilians is a war crime, whoever does it, but resistance to occupation is legitimate in international law". [18] Khalidi is an obsessive Israel basher and has stated Americans are "brainwashed" by the Middle East's only democracy. He also considered US popular support for overthrowing Saddam Hussein an "idiots' consensus". [19]


Another Palestinian professor in Columbia's Middle East Studies program is Joseph Massad, who also rails against the US and Israel. Massad likes to denigrate American democracy by alluding to early 19th century history when slavery was a worldwide institution, and accuses America of nuclear genocide for using the atomic bomb to end World WarII. He has also characterized Israel as an "imperialist" and "colonial" concoction of the Europeans. [20]


With Khalidi's appointment as chair and Massad as the main teacher of politics and history of the Middle East at Columbia, what students will be exposed to with no alternative views isn't hard to imagine. Even Lisa Anderson, head of International Studies at Columbia has conceded publicly that Middle East Studies at Columbia are not balanced, nor are they at other Middle East Studies centers nationwide.[21] What is more telling is that Columbia tried to conceal where the money came from to fund Khalidi's chair until pressure from outside academics and even the state of New York required it.[22] Daniel Pipes has remarked that choosing Khalidi for the Columbia chair is "particularly egregious because he is one of a team of Palestinian falsifiers who are all giving us this propagandist, non-scholarly interpretation of the Middle East" and that Columbia's cover-up of the donors "doesn't smell right". Steve Emerson, who reports to Congress frequently on terrorism issues, has stated publicly that "Khalidi's statements raise serious questions about his attitudes on violence" [23]


But Columbia is not alone. Such departments and professors are now found in Middle East Studies programs nationwide.



UC Berkeley's Center For Middle East Studies website boasts of receiving a $5 million dollar grant courtesy of Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and Sheikh Salahudin Yusef Hamza Abdeljawad, another major donor. Both are linked to Islamic charities which the US government says are front groups for funding Al Qaeda and both are now part of a $1 trillion dollar lawsuit by the families of the victims of 9/11.


Their contributions link through a labyrinth of front banks and charitable institutions which ultimately finance terrorism against the West. Al-Saud gives generously to the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the Muslim League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth--all established fronts for terrorist funding named by the US State Department. And Abdeljawad is linked to the Saudi Dar-Al_Maal-Islami Bank founded by Osama Bin Laden and managed by Osama Bin Laden's brother that is known by the State Department to also fund terrorism as well. Did the Sultan Al-Saud give money knowingly to charity that made its way to Bin Laden? [24]


A visit to the Sultan's foundation website in Saudi Arabia tells much more. It lists a "Higher Council" or board of directors which includes one Abdulrahman bin Ali Jeraisy who has been openly funding Al Qaeda according to a report to Congress.[25] UC Berkeley's Saudi funded academics have more than satisfied Saudi goals of using US campuses to teach hate for America and Israel. The Israel divestment petition was begun at UC Berkeley and has been promoted by faculty there. [26] A Jewish student who complained to her Arabic instructor about the anti-semitic Protocols Of the Elders Zion was told that the ficitious "protocols" were indeed written by Jews. She was then attacked by the instructor's supervisor, who openly called her a liar and threatened her with a libel suit. He even lied to the press claiming an investigation had been conducted of the student's claims when the student was never interviewed. The instructor held so firm to his comment about Jews being authors of the forgeries that the campus newspaper believed afterward that the "protocols: were actually written by Jews. [27]


Saudi endowed chairs and departments have produced faculty at the college level in America who spout the propaganda provided to 8th graders in Saudi Arabian schools, where textbooks claim that Jews "are people of treachery and betrayal." At Connecticut State University, Norton Mezvinsky, has declared Judaism a religion of "racism" whose followers believe that "the blood of non-Jews has no intrinsic value" and that the killing of non-Jews does "not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion" and that Judaism teaches "the killing of innocent Arabs for revenge is a Jewish virtue." While textbooks in Saudi Arabia claim "the Zionist Jews are the enemies of Islam and supporters of the modern Crusaders" Joel Beinin, Middle East Studies professor at Stanford and former head of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), rails against America's "Zionist lobby" that controls the US government by blocking democracy and economic development in the Arab world" and uses power "to make and unmake regimes". [29]


The University of Arkansas Middle East Studies department, set up under King Fahd, offers an Arabic language program. A sample newsletter published by the department contains a full-page poem translated by some of the studnet body's Arabic language students entitled "A Letter To A Faraway Friend (from inside the occupied territory)". The poem subtly demeans Israel and praises martyrdom and death. [30] The sole guest lecturer to the department mentioned on its site is Joel Beinin.[31]


Examples abound on campuses all over the country. Harvard received a $2 million dollar grant from Sheik Khalid Al Turki. For its graduation ceremony it chose a student, Zayed Yasin, for commencement speaker. His speech? "My American Jihad." Yasin has voiced his support for Hamas and says suicide bombers should be paid. He also has raised money for the Holy Land Foundation, one of the Islamic charities shut down by the Bush administration as a front for Al-Qaeda.[32] Prince Alaweed Bin Talal recently donated $500,000 to Georgetown University for a scholarship program in President Bush's name. Alaweed also recently donated $27 million dollars to Hamas. Martin Kramer's book "Ivory Towers On Sand: The Failure Of Middle East Studies" illustrates many other similar situations on US campuses to show how pervasive this has become. [33]


Saudi money sets up these academic departments with anti-American and anti-Israel agendas, but U.S. taxpayers underwrite the programs themselves. This is done through Title VI funding mandated by Congress. Originated in the late 1950's during the Cold War, Title VI received an additional $86 million dollars after 9/11 as part of the Education Act. This allowed the creation of 118 Middle East Resource Centers at US colleges and universities where Arabic would be taught and security analysis developed in the War On Terror. Yet the program has been seriously abused. The idea was that the universities would provide an understanding of the Middle East and Arab language experts for the military and intelligence services. But most Middle East Studies departments let their students slide by with minimal Arabic instruction. The focus is on research articles which serve the worldwide cause of jihad when they have any contemporary relevance.[34] It goes also for "outreach" programs to secondary schools which are little more than propaganda efforts against Israel and the United States.


At Georgetown University such an outreach program is provided for teachers from kindergarten level through the 12th grade. Seminars are packed with Arab anti-war activists opposed to the removal of Saddam Hussein by the US military. One of these "academics" was in fact once a public relations consultant for Saddam Hussein and blamed the oppression of Iraq's people by Saddam Hussein on the United States. No opposing views were presented.[35]


Once the Saudi endowments are complete, matching funds are then provided by the US taxpayer, who refreshes the Saudi investment with matching funds through Title VI. One "scholar" who lobbied for the continuation of such funding to the State Department recently was Hussein Ibish, a non-academic and leader of the radical American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. [36]


Besides paying the salaries of academics who advance the Saudi "point of view", Title VI money goes to what could be considered the Saudis' "foot soldiers" on campus, activists who will spread the word beyond the scholarly community. Co-mingled funding for Middle East centers goes into stipends, scholarships and fellowships for Arab students to support them in their work as activists spearheading Muslim and Palestinian groups on campus. While handpicked Arab professors and sympathizers "reeducate" the student body to the proper "point of view," these student activist groups carry it forward, creating an atmosphere that permeates campuses with anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda. A tour of any major campus will reveal the prevalance of professionally produced flyers posted against Israel and "Zionists" (the new euphemism for Jews) or against American policy in Iraq, and "film festivals" and lectures devoted to crude attacks on alleged Israeli "massacres" and other alleged atrocities.

All this is made possible by the Title VI funding of stipends to Middle East Studies students. Arab students may train overseas during the summer in "activism" then return to campus to ply their skills. As a result, anti-Semitic attacks are on the increase on our college campuses. Not long ago Jewish students at San Francisco State needed to be escorted to safety by off-campus city police during a pro-Israel rally, causing one professor to remark it was like Germany in the 1930's. At Concordia University, 1,500 "students" showed up to create a riot and prevent former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from speaking about terrorism on that campus and ticket holders needed a police escort off campus as well.

This tide of abuse needs to be addressed. Academic departments with political agendas is a new phenomenon on American campuses and directly violates the principles of Academic Freedom established by the American Association of University Professors and long recognized by accrediting institutions. Congress has recently taken a needed step to oversee the way it provides Title VI needs to take a hard look at the way it provides money to underwrite these programs. University trustees and administrators need to do likewise.

ENDNOTES


[1] www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/mowbray/mowbray122002.asp

[2] www.ropma.net/saudi-education.htm#edn1

[3] http://216.26.163.62./2003/ss_terror_06_27.html

[4] http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=alexievtestimony


[5] http://216.26.163.62/2003/ss_terror_06_27.html

[6] http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=alexievtestimony

[8] http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP35402

[9] http://biz.bahrainedb.com/NewsIn.asp?Article=1605&Sn=6

[10] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/675

[11] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/794

[12] Source: US Dept. of Education (figures may be higher due to more current donations).

[13] http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-stalinsky020703.asp

[14] http://www.meforum.org/article/538

[15] http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/2003_09_08.htm

[16] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/663

[17] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1157

[18] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/756

[19] http://www.campus-watch.org/about.php

[20] http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1825.shtml

[21] http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&PageID=57

[22] http://www.senatorlavalle.com/press_archive_story.asp?id=199

[23] www.campus-watch.org/article/id/756

[24] www.campus-watch.org/article/id/627 also: http://www.sultanfoundation.org/english/advisory.htm

[25] http://financialservices.house.gov/media/pdf/031103me.pdf

[26] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3804

[27] http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=7785

[28] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=2783

[29] http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/comment/comment-harris061903.asp

[30] http://www.uark.edu/depts/mesp/newsletter/fall03.pdf

[31] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/398

[32] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/22 also: http://www.academia.org/news/struggle.html

[33] http://www.ivorytowers.org/pages/832317/index.htm

[34] http://www.meforum.org/article/208/

[35] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/740

[36] www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5101 also: www.wrmea.com/backissues/1188/8811050.htm (note discussion of American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee touring Saudi information minister) also: http://kyl.senate.gov/legis_center/subdocs/091003_epstein.pdf also: www.us-israel.org/jsource/US-Israel/lobby.html

[37] http://www.sultanfoundation.org/english/studies.htm

[38] http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz061603.asp

[39] http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz061603.asp

[40] http://www.ropma.net/saudi-education.htm#-edn1


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Lee Kaplan is a contributing editor to Frontpagemag.com.
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>> NYU WATCH...

Boycotting Israel at NYU?

By Martin Kramer
MartinKramer.org | April 5, 2004

The habitual academic petition-signers against Israel are out in force, in a letter to Hebrew University president Menachem Magidor. They charge that Israel "makes it difficult or impossible for Palestinian teachers and students to reach their universities," and that Israeli troops are responsible for "harassment, arrests, random shootings and assaults" on Palestinian campuses. The occupation itself, they write, "disrupts the necessary framework for any successful educational structure." The signatories of the letter call themselves "defenders of Palestinian academic freedom and supporters of the academic boycott against Israel." And they ask "the Israeli academic leadership where it stands on the issue of current Israeli policy, and to share with us what Israeli academic institutions are doing to challenge the behavior of your government." (For more, see this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Now I don't speak for anyone else, but I know where I would lay the blame for the plight of Palestinian academic institutions. (By the way, there wasn't even one such institution in the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and every one of them was established under the Israeli occupation.) I would lay the blame on the Palestinian Authority for choosing war, and on the violent militias that use campuses as recruitment stations for terrorists.

Nevertheless, Israeli academics have never boycotted Palestinian professors, even in the worst days of terror. To the contrary: if you're organizing a conference in Israel, it's almost obligatory to have a Palestinian professor on the podium. Free exchange is what academic freedom means, and Israeli universities have done an admirable job of upholding it in trying times. In contrast, the academic boycott against Israel is itself a gross violation of academic freedom, because it explicitly imposes a political litmus test on Israeli scholars. It's radical-style McCarthyism.

Among the American signatories, there are a handful of Middle East academics. Only one stands out: Professor Zachary Lockman, who identifies himself as director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He stands out because he's the only signatory with any academic clout. In fact, not only did he become director of NYU's Middle East center last fall. His center simultaneously became a self-standing Title VI National Resource Center for the Middle East. Its activities enjoy a federal subsidy of around $400,000 a year.

Now that Lockman has announced himself as a "supporter of the academic boycott against Israel," the question for New York University and the U.S. Department of Education is a simple one. Is it Lockman's intention to implement the boycott that he supports, in the National Resource Center that he administers? If the answer is yes, then New York University's provost should insist he step down. It's unthinkable that a comprehensive center for Middle Eastern studies would boycott Israeli academics. (Tell the provost yourself if you agree.) And it's unthinkable that the U.S. government would subsidize such a center. If Lockman is going to walk the boycott walk at the Kevorkian Center, its federal subsidy should be revoked immediately.

Now it may be that Lockman supports the boycott only in principle, and has no intention of acting on his principle. But having signed the petition as the director of the Kevorkian Center, and not simply as an NYU professor (which would have sufficed for identification purposes), he has to clarify that point. Specifically, he must reassure New York University and the U.S. Department of Education that no boycott, in any form whatsoever, open or tacit, will be implemented at the Kevorkian Center. Anything less than an explicit reassurance will leave a cloud of suspicion hanging over the place.

When I was a center director, in the 1990s, I was careful to stay clear of political controversy, so as not to drag my colleagues down my own alley. Professor Lockman seems to feel no comparable obligation. His colleagues might ask themselves whether they can afford this sort of academic "leadership." They should affirm that Lockman doesn't speak for them or the Kevorkian Center, whose name he has deliberately put on a political statement. If they feel otherwise, they should announce that as well. (Professor Timothy Mitchell, previous director, also signed the boycott letter.) So Lockman wants to know where every academic in Israel stands? Let's first find out where every member and affiliate of the Kevorkian Center stands.

Update: I'm pleased to report that Professor Lockman has clarified his position to the provost of NYU, repudiating the boycott. "Neither I nor NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, which I direct, advocate or implement such a boycott," Lockman writes in a letter dated April 2. And he adds:

I signed the letter as a supporter of academic freedom for Palestinian scholars and academic institutions, not as a supporter of a boycott against Israel. However, the wording of the letter was such that it could have led people to construe my support for the defense of the academic freedom of Palestinians as an endorsement of a boycott of Israeli scholars and academic institutions, which is not the case. In reality, neither the Kevorkian Center, nor I as an individual, advocates or practices a boycott of Israeli scholars or academic institutions. In fact, the Center regularly hosts visiting scholars and professors from Israel and maintains ongoing relations with Israeli academic institutions, and issues related to Israel are part of the Center's program.
NYU provost David McLaughlin has accepted Lockman's assurances. The boycott letter that Lockman signed, McLaughlin adds, "was poorly constructed, its wording inadequately precise, and so his signing of it unclear as to his intentions." Actually, I thought it was pretty straightforward. And as Lockman says he signed the letter via the Internet, I wonder how he failed to notice that the web address of the letter is www.academicboycott.org, and the title of the webpage is "Boycott Israeli Academic and Research Institutions: Open Letter." That's not exactly subtle. Even so, I will not dispute the assurances he's now given.

The main thing, however, is that the provost has added his own assurances:

The University's position on calls for a boycott is clear. It stands firm against any such boycott, which by its very nature runs counter to the essence of the University, and to the values to which New York University in particular is committed. Our view is that the University is a space that encourages open, free and continuous dialogue free from fear of recrimination.
That's an important statement by the university's leading academic official, it binds the entire university, and I'm delighted to have elicited it.

If there is a lesson here, it is that academics, who make their livelihood by the crafting of written and spoken words, should be discriminating in what they sign. I'll continue to keep a sharp eye on the doings of the Kevorkian Center and its director. But from my point of view, Lockman has done the right thing. I hope the other signatories will follow suit.


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George Galloway: It's not easy being Gorgeous
George Galloway is embroiled in the mother of all libel battles. But the cigar-chomping rebel MP laughs in the face of disaster. Deborah Ross takes a ride in his Mercedes to hear why
05 April 2004


I meet George Galloway - also known as Gorgeous George, of course, as well as Britain's biggest champion of the Arab world - at his office in the House of Commons. I'm not sure why, but by the time I arrive, which is mid-afternoon-ish, George and the photographer are engaged in a conversation about beards not being fashionable any more. "A hundred years ago every MP had one," George is saying. David Blunkett still has one, I say. "Yes, but he probably doesn't know he has one," George says.

George does not have a beard, but he does have a little silver moustache. "Emma Nicholson once told me," he says, "that kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt." Everyone else in the room - myself, the photographer, two of Galloway's staff, Yasmin and Rima - freezes in horror, largely because, I think, we had always hoped to get though life without ever having to hear "egg" and "moustache" in the same sentence. Who hasn't?

George isn't fazed, though. I don't think much ever fazes George. "I thought it might have been a come-on," he continues, "so I beat a hasty retreat." He'd quite like to be thought of as a bit of a sexy beast, I think. His favourite actor, it turns out, is Jack Nicholson, and there is this sense that he might model himself on Jack, a little.

Certainly, he chomps on his fat cigars in a very Hollywood sort of way. He is chomping on one now, but while this cigar, he says, is all very well, it's not as juicily fat as his favourite, "the Montecristo No 2; they're like torpedoes". But he's suspended his Montecristo habit for the time being. They're expensive, he says, and what with his upcoming libel battle against The Daily Telegraph, "I have to put money into my legal pot. My bill is already a quarter of a million pounds. Luckily, my lawyers have faith in me. They're not asking for it up front."

We're off to Walsall, where George is due to speak at 7.30pm at a meeting of Respect, the new lefty anti-war party he founded to contest the European elections. Rima - thirty-ish, Manchester-born, of Lebanese/ Syrian descent - is coming too. She's a rubbish map-reader, it turns out, but is very beautiful with glossy black corkscrew curls. "You should meet her mother," says George later. "Wow, what a looker!"

We walk down the corridor. Mike Gapes, the pro-Israel MP, is a near neighbour. Do they pass the time of day? "No," George replies. I try to work out who his mates are in the anti-war lot. Glenda Jackson? "A cold fish," he says, shiveringly. "To me, her finest role was in A Touch of Class. She was very loveable in that." So if she can act loveable, she should be able to act warm? "Exactly. I do admire her Joan of Arc-like integrity, though." Ken Livingstone? "I admire and respect him, but he's not an easy person to like." Robin Cook? "Of course, while we must welcome any sinner that repents, he prepared the ground for all that happened."

His best friends include Alan Milburn, Barbara Roche, John Reid and Margaret Hodge. OK, maybe not. "I used to regard them as Trots! Margaret was always known as Enver Hoxha, after the Albanian dictator: now she's like a member of the Royal Family, lecturing patronisingly all over the place." I suppose that, whatever you might think about George, you do have to admire him for not shifting when the wind did. However, he did once have ministerial ambitions: "I would have loved to have been Foreign Secretary." So maybe there is some frustration and bitterness here. Perhaps, even, it's not so much that he loves Iraq, or found good in Saddam - more that he hates New Labour so much that any enemy of theirs has to be a friend of his.

Out to his car, now, which is parked in the forecourt. It's a big navy Mercedes. But it's not new, he stresses, and "I've done 108,000 miles in it since September 11". So many speaking engagements, he's had time for little else. Not even Sex and the City. "My staff encouraged me to watch and I did begin to feel I knew the characters." Who did he fancy most? "Well, you'd want to marry Charlotte and you'd want to sleep with Samantha, wouldn't you?"

In your dreams, pal, I want to say, but of course I'm much too polite. "Nice car," I do say. "I always pay for my own petrol," he says. His combined salary as an MP and columnist for the Scottish edition of The Mail on Sunday amounts to ?150,000 a year. He once, famously, interviewed Saddam for The Mail on Sunday. Saddam offered him a Quality Street, which he did not accept. "I'm not really a chocolate man. I'm more cakes and puddings. I like banoffee pie."

His other cars, by the way, include a Range Rover in Portugal, where he has a second home, and "a soft-top vintage Mercedes, which I bought with my libel winnings from Robert Maxwell. All my cars are third-hand. The only new car I've ever owned was a Lada. It was good. Never broke down once. Soviet engineering!"

Rima offers to drive, but George won't hear of it. "I don't feel as manly, somehow, being driven." George, 50, is not a big man. He's surprisingly small, in fact, but stockily powerful with stockily powerful thighs, now splayed on the driving seat. (That's another image you didn't want, I bet.) His jeans strain at the seams. They used to be black but are so old they're that strange green that old black things go. His jacket is positively shiny with age. I'm shocked. What happened to Gorgeous George of the chi-chi Kenzo suits? "I used to be much better dressed because I used to have more time to shop," he says. "I like Selfridges. I used to go there a couple of times a year, but for the last couple of years, with the war and the run-up to the war, I really haven't had time." Rima offers George a small white pillow. "Piles?" I ask, sympathetically. "My back," he replies, firmly.

The car comes to life with a soft purr. We move off, past the Houses of Parliament. "I like the House of Commons. I like it late at night. It's got a certain majesty about it. But at the same time I could turn my back on it easily enough." George was expelled from the Labour Party (he is now the independent MP for Glasgow Kelvin) last October for his extreme anti-war rhetoric.

Would he return, if invited? No, he says. "If the Labour Party were to undergo some convulsive change, then obviously I'd have to think about that. But just swapping Blair for Brown wouldn't be a convulsive change." How did it feel, I ask, to be expelled? "I wasn't surprised, but I was shocked. When they said the words, I did feel a stab. But I'm over it." Does anything ever faze him? "Calamity has hardened me and turned my mind to steel," he says. Poetic, I say. "Ho Chi Minh," he says.

George and calamity. Everywhere George goes, trouble follows, as sure as eggs are eggs (which is fine; just don't bring moustaches into it). The classic case was at War on Want, which he raised from an unknown outfit to a major charity. At the same time, he was accused of fiddling his expenses and philandering. While an independent auditor cleared him of dishonesty, he admitted to coming away from a business trip to Greece with "carnal knowledge" of another woman, despite being married at the time. Not a happy marriage, then? "I wouldn't have been having an affair if it had been a happy marriage." Pause. "Rima, are we taking the M6?"

He is always being libelled, too. "I've won - if that's the word - a quarter of a million pounds in libel damages over the years, but I can honestly tell you I'd rather the libels hadn't happened. I hate being hated, lashed, traduced." Why are you libelled so often? "That's what my lawyers would like to know." Most recently, he won ?30,000 from The Times (for a Julie Burchill column that confused him with another MP altogether) and substantial undisclosed damages from the The Christian Science Monitor over a claim, based on what turned out to be forged documents, that he was paid ?10m by Saddam to oppose the conflict in Iraq.

The forgeries, he says, are evidence of a dirty-tricks campaign. "If you'd been at any of the anti-war demonstrations you'd know that I'm the main speaker, am always the final speaker and always get the best response." That's modest of you, George. "Those are facts." His libel case against the Telegraph involving another set of documents - this time purporting to show that he had been receiving ?375,000 a year from the Iraqi government - is due in court in November. He is impenetrably confident - but what, I ask, if it does go against him? He'll be finished, politically and financially. "If the worst comes to the worst," he says, "I'll go up a hill and read a book. I know I've done nothing to be ashamed of."

We're purring up the Edgware Road now... Born and brought up in Dundee, his father worked in an engineering factory. I ask if he still feels working-class, with his Merc and his salary and his houses - which he now shares with his second wife, a Palestinian scientist. "I'm absolutely working-class. It's how you relate to other people, how awkward you feel when you kiss them... do you kiss them on one cheek or two? Are you absolutely confident about what to do with all that cutlery? Do you switch over when the opera comes on? Have you ever been to ballet?"

I say that a good test is having a cleaner. Middle-class people are good at underpaying and bossing them, but working-class people aren't, no matter how wealthy they might have become. He agrees: "I can't bear the thought of somebody being given orders to clean things in my house." Yes, he does have a cleaner, but he also has a solution. "I try to be out when she comes."

I ask George to describe his politics in one word. "Socialist. Although I'm not as left wing as you think." Surprise me, George. "I'm strongly against abortion. I believe life begins at conception, and therefore unborn babies have rights. I think abortion is immoral." You can't be pro-choice? "Who is choosing for the child?"

Well, I say, better the unborn unwanted child than the born unwanted one. "I can't accept that, because I believe in God. I have to believe that the collection of cells has a soul." No, he says, his faith in God cannot be shaken, and, yes, he hopes to go to Heaven. "I believe the souls of the departed will be there, and that I will see the good people I have known again." What would Hell be? A two-up, two-down shared with Tony Blair, Charles Moore, Julie Burchill and a cleaner who demands a lot of direction? "That would be hell," he confirms.

We stop at a motorway services. Cheese toasties all round. George's treat. I have to say, if he did ever earn ?375,000 a year from the Hussein regime, he's not spending it on snacks. Then it's back on the road, arriving in Walsall at seven-ish, but then, alas, Rima's map-reading skills being what they are, we drive round and round the same one-way system 78 times. George tries not to lose it. "The air in this car would be very blue if you weren't in it," he tells me.

Eventually, we do make the venue. "Anywhere to park, brother?" George asks the chap outside. "No, brother, but if you drive up to the roundabout and take the first left..." George passes the keys to Rima. "She'll do it," he says. He does not add: "Would you mind, sister?" He might be quite good at bossing staff about, after all.

George is the last speaker and, yes, the best. Then it's home on the last train to London. The day hasn't been so bad. I've quite enjoyed it, actually. I like George. I've no idea if the Telegraph's allegations against him are true or not. But I do hope not. Then, maybe I'm just assuming that any enemy of New Labour has to be a friend of mine. It may take me a while to forgive the egg-and-moustache thing, though. Obviously.
5 April 2004 22:46

? 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd



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U.S. sanctions Gulf firm for helping Iran's missile program

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, April 5, 2004
The United States has sanctioned a firm from the United Arab Emirates for providing help to Iran's cruise missile program.

It was the first time the United States has sanctioned a company from the UAE, regarded as an ally of Washington. Previously, U.S. sanctions regarding missile assistance to Iran included China, North Korea, Russia and former East Bloc states.

Officials did not immediately identify the UAE firm, Middle East Newsline reported. But they said the Bush administration has discussed with the UAE the need to tighten export controls to prevent the transfer of components and technology for missile and weapons of mass destruction programs.

On Friday, the State Department announced sanctions on 13 companies that provided missile components to Iran. The companies included five Chinese firms, two from Macedonia, two from Russia, one from Belarus, North Korea, Taiwan and the UAE.
State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the sanctions were in accordance to the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000. Ereli said sanctions were not imposed on any of the countries where the companies were based.
"The penalties were imposed pursuant to the Act," Ereli said, "because there was credible information indicating that these companies had transferred to Iran, since Jan. 1, 1999, either equipment and technology on the export -- multilateral export control lists or items such as those on the list but falling below control list parameters or other items with the potential of making a material contribution to proscribed programs."
So far, 23 entities have come under U.S. sanctions since the legislation, which bans any dealings by the U.S. government with these companies. In 2003, four entities were sanctioned.
On March 23, the State Department lifted sanctions from six Russian entities. Officials said the six were found to have no longer supplied missile assistance to Iran.
On Sunday, UAE officials disclosed that the Central Bank has frozen $3.1 million in funds linked to what they termed terrorist groups as well as SMB Computers, the Dubai-based company employed by the Pakistani nuclear network of scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Officials said Dubai authorities were briefed by U.S. officials on SMB's role in processing and shipping nuclear weapons components to Iran and Libya. In mid-March, they said, SMB was shut down.
"The UAE Central Bank has frozen all accounts related to SMB Computer Co. as part of the investigation," Central Bank governor Sultan Bin Nasser Al Suwaidi said. "The investigating committee has made significant progress.
The Dubai public prosecutor will soon announce the results of the probe."
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc
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Kharrazi to visit Moscow Monday
Friday, April 02, 2004 - ?2004 IranMania.com
Tehran, April 2 (IranMania) -- According to Iran's State News Agency (IRNA) Iran's Foreign Minister Dr Kamal Kharrazi is to arrive in Moscow on Monday to take part in a meeting of foreign ministers of the Caspian Sea littoral states.
The meeting, to open Tuesday, will be attended by Foreign Ministers of the sea`s five littoral states--Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.
According to the Russian president`s special envoy for Caspian Sea affairs, Viktor Kalyuzni, the foreign ministers will tackle issues such as the military activities of states in the sea, an equitable manner of dividing the sea and determination of fishing areas.
The meeting will also make preliminary arrangements for a meeting of heads of the sea`s littoral countries to be held in Tehran this year.

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>> BUSINESS OF WAR...

BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, April 5, 2004 1:53 p.m. EDT

Soldiers as Victims

Our item Friday on blogger Markos Zuniga's post about the four Blackwater Security Consulting contractors murdered in Fallujah, Iraq, last week--"They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them," Zuniga said--brought this response from reader Josh Waxman:
It would be "fair and balanced" if you also mentioned that Markos explained that the reason he was angry was because the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq got second billing to the deaths of these individuals.
But that might not please your master, would it? It's really nice when facts are things you can use as you wish, and discard when they're inconvenient.
We don't want to get into any trouble, so if you see our master, please don't tell him we published Waxman's letter. Anyway, we're not sure how Zuniga's professed sympathy for soldiers is a mitigating factor. "Screw them," he said of four men who had been lynched. Is such an attitude less despicable because there are other people whose lynching Zuniga would object to?
The distinction between soldiers and civilian contractors seems like mere hairsplitting when you consider that all four of the Fallujah dead were retired U.S. military special forces officers. Reader Ray Gardner puts things in perspective:
Blackwater and security firms like them are a place where former Marines, special forces soldiers and other high-speed types from the U.S. military go upon leaving active duty.
Going back in the Marines myself is just not feasible at my age but I have considered going to work for such a security firm since 9/11. Such employment for me would be the next best thing to going back to active duty.
Others go into such work for a variety of reasons, but one thing is common among them; they are hardworking Americans, mostly military veterans, who have given their lives to defending this country.
To speak out against Blackwater's employees is to speak against veterans one and all. When they were active duty, these guys were the 5% that did all of the dirty work.
Zuniga's rationalization is interesting, though, for what it tells us about the way the left views the U.S. military. Back in the Vietnam era, the antiwar movement vilified American servicemen; as we noted in February, when John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, he charged his fellow veterans with all manner of war crimes.
Somewhere along the line, it became politically incorrect on the liberal left (as distinct from the radical left) to disparage members of the military. The operative principle became: We support the troops, though we oppose their mission. Members of the military thereby achieved the status of accredited victims, entitled to liberal "compassion." And in a February interview with CNN's Judy Woodruff, Kerry reinterpreted his 1971 views to absolve soldiers of any guilt: "I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. . . . It's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers. . . . I've always fought for the soldiers."
The San Francisco Chronicle has a revealing profile of Susan Galleymore, a 48-year-old Alameda, Calif., antiwar activist whose son, Nick, is an Army Ranger serving in Iraq. Galleymore doesn't approve of Nick's chosen career, and she's written about it:
In one essay, Galleymore asked for others to appreciate that the soldiers are in a dilemma, "caught in a military culture that encourages the numbing of most emotions but anger. Whip up enough anger in young men emotionally isolated, denied friends, family, lovers, even civilians [sic] clothes, physically exhaust them, nourish them inadequately, expose them to extreme temperatures and violent behavior, confine them to base and portray everyone else as murderous and you create impossible stress."
Nick told his mother that wasn't his experience.
Indeed. The idea of soldier-as-victim might have made some sense in 1971, when the draft was on and some soldiers were in Vietnam against their will. But today's military has not a single conscript; everyone fighting in Iraq and elsewhere is a professional who has voluntarily chosen a hazardous line of work. They deserve our gratitude and respect, not our pity.
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Very Awkward Facts
Richard Clarke's denials of Iraq's terror ties don't ring true.

BY LAURIE MYLROIE
Saturday, April 3, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

The credibility of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has come under withering fire. He has been caught in error after error, omission after omission. I can attest to one error more: a highly revealing error that tells us a great deal about who Richard Clarke really is.
Mr. Clarke singles me out for special criticism in his book, "Against All Enemies." This is not surprising. He believes that Islamic terrorism is the work of a few individual criminals, many of them relatives. I have for years gathered the evidence that shows that terrorism is something more than a mom-and-pop operation: that it is supported by powerful states, very much including Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of "Ramzi Yousef." But who was "Ramzi Yousef"?
The evidence suggests that "Ramzi Yousef" had close connections to the Iraqi security services. This evidence has impressed, among others, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board. Mr. Clarke calls the Yousef-Saddam connection an "utterly discredited" theory, unworthy of serious debate. He likes the phrase so much, he even uses it on the dust jacket of his book. But let's review the facts:
* Fact No. 1: "Ramzi Yousef" entered the U.S. in September 1992 on an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing a journey beginning in Baghdad. This fact is attested by the inspector who admitted Yousef into the U.S. Yet Mr. Clarke contends that Yousef entered the U.S. without a passport.

* Fact No. 2: The sole remaining fugitive from the 1993 bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is an Iraqi. After the attack, Yasin fled to Iraq. The Iraqi regime rewarded Yasin with a house and monthly stipend. Yet Mr. Clarke claims, incredibly, that the Iraqis jailed Yasin.

* Fact No. 3: Seven men were indicted in the 1993 attack. Two of the seven, Yousef and Yasin, have Iraqi connections. Yet Mr. Clarke inflates the number of participants to 12, so as to create the impression that the presence of one or two men with Iraqi connections was no big deal.

* Fact No. 4: The truth is, we don't really know much about the prisoner bearing the name "Ramzi Yousef." Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over Yousef's two trials, observed at sentencing: "We don't even know what your real name is." Yet Mr. Clarke claims to know what the judge did not: Yousef, he writes, "was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait where his father worked."
To reach this conclusion, Mr. Clarke has to ignore a forest of awkward facts. In late 1992, according to court documents, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of the 1984 and 1988 passports of Abdul Basit Karim (those documents have Karim born in Kuwait). Yousef claimed to be Karim, saying he had lost his passport and needed a new one to return home. He received a temporary passport, in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, which he used to flee New York the night of the Trade Center bombing.
Karim was, indeed, a real person, a Pakistani reared in Kuwait. After completing high school in Kuwait, Karim studied for three years in Britain. He graduated from the Swansea Institute in June 1989 and returned home, where he got a job in Kuwait's Planning Ministry. He was there a year later, when Iraq invaded.
Kuwait maintained an alien resident file on Karim. That file appears to have been altered to create a false identity or "legend" for the terrorist Yousef. Above all, the file contains a fingerprint card bearing Yousef's prints. But Yousef is not Karim--as Judge Duffy implied--for many reasons, including the fact that Yousef is 6 feet tall, while Karim was significantly shorter, according to his teachers at Swansea. They do not believe their student is the terrorist mastermind. Indeed, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, latent fingerprints lifted from material Mr. Karim left at Swansea bear "no resemblance" to Yousef's prints. They are two different people.
The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim's file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef's. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its terrorist agents.
The debate over Yousef's identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed's identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef's "uncle," and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef's "brothers."
A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that "it's obvious" that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given "legends," on the basis of Kuwait's files, while Iraq occupied the country.
When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us "against all enemies." Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.
Ms. Mylroie, an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign, is author of "The War Against America" (HarperCollins, 2001).

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>> HOLY? HOTHEAD...


Media-savvy saviour of Iraqis or a defiant, dangerous hothead
By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
06 April 2004
For Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Iraq, and for many Shia, the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is a dangerous hothead.
But to his young, radical followers, the 30-year old Shia firebrand is an inspired leader who has dared to challenge the American occupation.
Mr Sadr is the only surviving son of the Muslim cleric, Ayatollah Mohamed Sadeq al-Sadr, who was assassinated by Saddam's agents in 1999 along with two sons for his defiant stand against the regime.
Baghdad's Shia district, Saddam City, was renamed Sadr City after the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator. The slum in northeastern Baghdad has become Mr Sadr's power base, patrolled by his militia, the Mehdi army.
Sadr junior, who was last night under threat of arrest by the US military and branded an outlaw, took up a bellicose position from the moment the American occupation began.
In his Friday sermons in Kufa, he dons a white shroud as a symbol of mourning. In every sermon, participants repeat after him: "No, No to Israel, No, No to America, No, No to terrorism."
The media-savvy leader is aware of the benefits of his father's image, which is brandished at every protest rally. His positions were given wider currency through his ownership of the weekly newspaper al-Hawza al-Natiqa, which recently accused Mr Bremer of following Saddam by persecuting the Shia majority.
But Mr Sadr's views in his paper were not representative of the Shia community. The most influential cleric is the elderly Grand Ayatollah Sistani, a cautious leader of the conservative mainstream, and whose low political profile has angered radicals.
Mr Sadr's supporters were accused of mounting a siege of Ayatollah Sistani's home in Najaf, only days after the killing of a moderate Shia leader, Ayatollah Abdel-Majid al-Khoei, who had just returned from exile in Britain in April last year. The cleric was hacked to death at a meeting with Sistani on whether to co-operate with the invaders.
Mr Bremer may have unwittingly played into Mr Sadr's hands last week, by ordering his newspaper to be temporarily closed, on the grounds that it was inciting violence against coalition forces.
The protests by Mr Sadr's supporters turned violent at the weekend, and left 52 people dead.
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>> HOLY? HOTHEAD 2...DEATH CULT WATCH...

Face to face with mastermind of Jerusalem suicide bombs
Abdul Rahman Makdad planned attacks this year on two Israeli buses. Nineteen were killed. He tells Donald Macintyre why he prefers civilian targets - and why he did not carry out the operations himself
06 April 2004


He sat in the middle of the room, a few feet away from the Shin Bet interrogator he had got to know so well since he was arrested just under a month ago. With his well-kept beard, and dressed in a beige zip-up jacket over a white T-shirt, dark trousers, his feet sockless under brown lace-up shoes without laces, Abdul Rahman Makdad looked relaxed, perhaps even a little truculent.

As he began to speak, in a clear, unhesitant voice, it required effort, here in the heart of the Russian Compound prison, to conjure the full enormity of the mission Makdad was describing in such calm, matter-of-fact terms. On Saturday 21 February, just six weeks ago, he had sent his wife and infant son away to his parents-in-law, leaving him free to concentrate on the work ahead.

At 4pm Mohammed Za'ul, at 23 five years younger than Makdad, arrived at Makdad's home in Bethlehem so that the older man could give the younger one final instructions and spend the night meticulously preparing the explosives before packing them into the blue rucksack Za'ul would be wearing when he boarded the number 14 bus in Jewish West Jerusalem the following morning.

Neither man had slept that night; Makdad took the customary video of Za'ul's last testament as a man who had volunteered for martydom. Makdad saw to it that Za'ul was wearing clothes suitable for the Jerusalem weather that morning - jeans, jacket and a nondescript hat. The object, he explained, was to make Za'ul as unobtrusive - and as Jewish looking - as possible. "In general he wasn't frightened," said Makdad. "But I told him not to look at any police and security people and not to be frightened." Za'ul did not speak any Hebrew; so he had been under a standing instruction to detonate the bomb if he was spoken to by the bus driver. "But this is a rare situation."

Although only religious, by his own account, "in a general way, not an extreme one", Makdad had joined Za'ul in his last prayers. The two men ate breakfast together before Za'ul left at 6pm, to be guided by a construction worker carefully chosen for his local knowledge through the security cordon dividing Bethlehem from Jerusalem and on to the centre of the city. It was after 8.30am that Makdad got the news that the bomb had detonated as a bus headed north along Kind David Street in rush hour, killing eight Israeli civilians and wounding more than 60. "I heard it on the radio," he said. "And I was happy."

If Makdad had somehow been broken by his interrogation he showed no sign of it. Asked early on in this rare hour-long interview whether he accepted the principal Israeli accusation that he had organised the February bomb on the number 14 bus and the one just a month earlier which had killed 11 people on a number 19 Jerusalem bus, he answered coolly: "I was responsible for the last two operations. I don't recall the numbers of the buses."

He showed impatience - turning to his unnamed Shin Bet interrogator, an Arabic speaker in his 30s dressed in jeans and a check shirt, to enjoy a joke with him at the expense of the sheer "Westernness" of our questions - when he was asked repeatedly exactly how the two men had spent the last 14 hours before Za'ul left on his mission. What had they eaten for breakfast? Did it matter? Maybe a little humus; he couldn't really remember. Why were we so obsessed with food? Were we hungry?

What had they spoken about when Makdad wasn't working on the explosives? "Ordinary conversation. There was no need at all to convince this man to carry out the operation. He himself chose to be a martyr." Indeed "the easiest thing [about such operations] is to find a martyr. In our nation we have thousands of people who want to be martyrs."

Makdad's journey to the leadership of a cell of four men, according to Makdad - which was part of a larger, interlocking, 20-strong Bethlehem-based cell according to the Israelis - had been a relatively long one. He was born in Egypt. His family had fled there as refugees after 1948 from near Ashkelon. Makdad lived there until he was 14, moving on to Libya, where he joined Fatah's Palestinian Liberation Army and took a commando course.

But with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the wake of the Oslo accords he came to Gaza and then to Jenin, where he served in the Palestinian Security Services. At this point, he said: "I believed in peace. I served with the police force." But then, as he put it: "I noticed that Israel didn't want peace."

The manifestations of the occupation remained in place - including what Makdad described as "Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people." He was transferred to Bethlehem, where he became a bodyguard to the PA governor, Mohammed Madami, and then to the man who took over the governate from Madami five months ago, Zuhair Manasra. He was in that job until he was arrested; indeed, as Makdad confirmed, his family continue to receive his salary now he is in detention. To Makdad this is entirely natural, despite the Authority's stated opposition to suicide bombings. "They treat me as a political prisoner not as a criminal. If I had been found out as a collaborator, they would have stopped my salary."

The Israeli charge sheet against Makdad is lengthy, going back to shooting attacks in 2001. In 2003, the Israelis say, he took instructions from Ahmed Mugrabi, whom Makdad had first met in Libya. Makdad managed to stay in contact with Mugrabi after his detention for his part in a 2002 suicide bombing in Beit Yisrael.

As late as last month, just a week after dispatching the second bus bomber to Jerusalem, Makdad is accused of planning a spectacular but foiled hijacking of an Israeli bus. Two suicide bombers would have driven the bus to Bethlehem, forcing it and its passengers into the Church of the Nativity to negotiate the release of Palestinian prisoners in return for the passengers' lives. If anything had gone wrong, the bombers would have blown up the bus.

So why had he agreed to talk to us, five reporters from European and American newspapers, invited to the Russian Compound by his Israeli enemies? "The main purpose of this meeting is to give a clear picture of our strategy, which is reacting to killing by killing." He used this last phrase several times, justifying the killing of innocent civilians as a response to the deaths caused by Israeli targeted assassinations and incursions into the occupied territories. Makdad told us: "We prefer to do the explosions in a bus. Sometimes it has to be in Jerusalem in a crowded area. But the main thing is to create more casualties."

What had the tactic, internationally reviled as it was, achieved for the Palestinian cause? If the Israelis continued to kill Palestinians, this would eventually help to achieve the Palestinian goals "in the long term and in the future".

If we had asked about his interrogation, the Israeli officials supervising the interview would have ended it immediately. Although officials admit privately that prisoners like Makdad sometimes give information because they are allowed to believe falsely that their wife and children are under threat of detention, this prohibition was not, they insisted, because he might reveal maltreatment at the hands of his captors. Five years ago, after repeated and well-documented accusations that the Israelis had regularly tortured prisoners, the Supreme Court ruled against any physical abuse of prisoners.

But in any case, what had been the gain in this, at times surreal, meeting for the Israeli authorities themselves? Occasionally, perhaps, a prisoner may give information in such circumstances that he will withhold from his interrogators. Explaining that his cell was a freelance one, beholden to none of the well-known armed factions, Makdad disclosed, apparently for the first time, that the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade had been allowed to claim responsibility for the bombing in return for providing 3,000 shekels (?400) through Makdad's brother, Maher. The "credit" for the operation had, in effect, been sold.

But the other, more potent factor may well have been Makdad's role as an employee of the PA, particularly in Bethlehem where from 2002 until two months ago the Authority was in theory left in charge of security. According to the Israelis, this allowed the militant factions to establish themselves in the town.

Makdad himself insisted that if the PA - or the Bethlehem Governor - had known about his activities he would have been arrested. Seven miles away in his office in Bethlehem, Governor Manasra indeed said he had been "astonished" at Makdad's arrest and subsequent confession. "All I ask of my bodyguards is that they are polite to people and balanced in their behaviour. He was both these things." But while adamant that he opposed attacks on innocent civilians he warned that incursions, checkpoints and seizure of land to accommodate the route of the security barrier which were stopping "patients getting to their doctors, children to their schools, students to their universities" and devastating the local economy created a feeling of hopelessness among Palestinian youth. "Give me one day in 2003 or 2004 in which the Israelis did not kill a Palestinian," he added. "What the Israelis do is going to make more and more Palestinians radical and violent. They leave no way for a reasonable or pragmatic way of doing things."

He claimed that even though the Israelis had not backed a security plan to transfer known militants to Jericho, the PA was "every day stopping actions [by militants] because we think that to kill civilians is to escalate the conflict". He had been obliged in January to release a dozen prisoners held in Bethlehem only when the Israeli Army had raided the city and demanded they be handed over to them.

Back in Jerusalem, awaiting what is likely to be life sentence, an unrepentant Makdad insisted he "had no regrets. I have done nothing wrong" Two more questions. Why, if he was strong believer in martyrdom, had he not carried out of the bombings himself? If he went on such a mission, he would no longer be able to organise others to do so. But he had been ready to do the February bombing himself if it had been necessary because no martyr could be found. And was his career of organising attacks on Israelis over? Well, prisoner swaps are a feature of the conflict. "No I don't think it is over."
5 April 2004 22:50


? 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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U.S. may move vs. Pakistan terror areas
By SIOBHAN MCDONOUGH
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Pakistani tribal elders leave Governor House after their meeting with officials, Monday, April 5, 2004 in Peshawar, Pakistan. Senior government official warned more than 100 elders from two tribal regions that have been the focus of a recent hunt for al-Qaida suspects that they face punitive action if they fail to evict or hand over foreign terrorist in their areas. (AP Photo/M. Sajjad)
WASHINGTON -- Pakistan must eliminate terrorist sanctuaries or this country will step in and do its part in obliterating them, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad said Monday.
Unless the issue of sanctuaries is solved, it will be difficult to fully abolish security problems in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, he said.
"We cannot allow this problem to fester indefinitely," Khalilzad told about 100 people at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
"We have told the Pakistani leadership that either they must solve this problem or we will have to do it for ourselves."
About 2 1/2 years after the Taliban-led government was toppled in a U.S.-led bombing campaign, Khalilzad gave a status report. He said "Afghanistan is succeeding."
However, he cautioned, "to consolidate the victory over extremism and terrorism in Afghanistan will take a sustained commitment of at least five years by the United States and its partners."
One of the greatest worries remains over the Taliban and other hostile groups that continue to be able to base, train and operate from Pakistani territory, he said.
The U.S. military has stepped up patrols along the rugged Pakistani border in an attempt to crush militants linked to the Taliban, al-Qaida or Afghan anti-government guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Khalilzad said the United States prefers that Pakistan take responsibility and the Pakistani government agrees.
"We are prepared to help President (Gen. Pervez) Musharraf. However, one way or the other, this problem will have to be dealt with."
Progress is evident in rebuffing the Taliban and other terrorists who aim to destabilize Afghanistan, the ambassador said.
The number of security incidents has remained roughly constant during the past year; the attacks consist of terrorist actions or small, uncoordinated military activities.
"They are too weak to threaten the new government and the coalition," Khalilzad said.
He said the most immediate challenge are presidential and parliamentary elections, scheduled for September. The challenge is logistical and operational, not security-related, he said.
The United Nations, which has lead responsibility for the elections, has registered 1.5 million of the estimated 10 million Afghans eligible to vote, Khalilzad said.
The Afghan National Army consists of about 8,000 troops. It will reach about 20,000 by the end of the year, he said, and roughly 30,000 police officers will have been trained and equipped by then.
Khalilzad is a U.S.-educated member of Afghanistan's ethnic Pashtun group, now representing America in the country of his birth.