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Thursday, August 26, 2010
Administration halts prosecution of alleged USS Cole bomber
By Peter Finn The Washington Post Thursday, August 26, 2010; 8:47 PM
The Obama administration has shelved the planned prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged coordinator of the Oct. 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, according to a court filing.
The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attack, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.
In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that "no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future."
The statement, tucked into a motion to dismiss a petition by Nashiri's attorneys, suggests that the prospect of further military trials for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has all but ground to a halt, much as the administration's plan to try the accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in federal court has stalled.
Only two cases are moving forward at Guantanamo Bay, and both were sworn and referred for trial by the time Obama took office. In January 2009, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directed the Convening Authority for Military Commissions to stop referring cases for trial, an order that 20 months later has not been rescinded.
Military officials said a team of prosecutors in the Nashiri case has been ready go to trial for some time. And several months ago, military officials seemed confident that Nashiri would be arraigned this summer.
"It's politics at this point," said one military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy. He said he thinks the administration does not want to proceed against a high-value detainee without some prospect of civilian trials for other major figures at Guantanamo Bay.
A White House official disputed that.
"We are confident that the reformed military commissions are a lawful, fair and effective prosecutorial forum and that the Department of Defense will handle the referrals in an appropriate manner consistent with the interests of justice," said the official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Defense Department issued a statement Thursday saying the case is not stalled. "Prosecutors in the Office of Military Commissions are actively investigating the case against Mr. al-Nashiri and are developing charges against him," the statement said.
With the 10th anniversary of the Cole bombing approaching on Oct. 12, relatives of those killed in the attack expressed deep frustration with the delay.
"After 10 years, it seems like nobody really cares," said Gloria Clodfelter, whose 21-year-old son, Kenneth, was killed on the Cole.
Military prosecutors allege that Nashiri, a Saudi national, was a senior al-Qaeda operative and close associate of Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated the suicide attack on the Cole. Nashiri was scheduled to be arraigned in February 2009 but the new administration instructed military prosecutors to suspend legal proceedings at Guantanamo Bay. The charges against Nashiri were withdrawn.
In November 2009, however, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appeared to revive the case when he announced that the military would prosecute Nashiri, one of at least 36 detainees who could be tired in federal court or a military commission.
"With regard to the Cole bombing, that was an attack on a United States warship, and that, I think, is appropriately placed into the military commission setting," Holder said.
But critics of military commissions say the Nashiri case exemplifies the system's flaws, particularly the ability to introduce certain evidence such as hearsay statements that probably would not be admitted in federal court. The prosecution is expected to rely heavily on statements made to the FBI by two Yemenis who allegedly implicated Nashiri. Neither witness is expected at trial, but the FBI agents who interviewed them will testify, said Nashiri's military attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Stephen C. Reyes. "Unlike in federal court, you don't have the right to confront the witnesses against you," he said.
Such indirect testimony could be critical to a conviction because any incriminating statements Nashiri might have made are probably inadmissible under the 2009 Military Commissions Act, which bars the use of evidence obtained through torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Nashiri, 45, was captured in the United Arab Emirates in November 2002, and immediately placed in CIA custody. He was among three detainees held by the agency who was water-boarded, and a report by the CIA's inspector general found that Nashiri was threatened with a gun and a power drill.
"I am very confident, based upon what I have heard, that there is more than sufficient evidence linking him to the attack on Cole directly, and that they do not need any of the information that may have come from black site interviews and interrogations," said Kirk S. Lippold, who was commander of the Cole when it was attacked.
Reyes said Nashiri's treatment at the hands of the CIA will be part of any proceeding and will be relevant to any sentence he receives if he is found guilty. The government is expected to seek the death penalty.
"I'm not admitting to guilty, but his treatment is absolutely relevant in a death case and can be used in mitigation to lessen the sentence," Reyes said.
Nashiri, who has been held at Camp 7 at Guantanamo Bay since September 2006, has never appeared in court. But according to the transcript of a 2007 Combatant Status Review Tribunal, he said that he had nothing to do with the Cole bombing and that his connections to those involved in the explosion, including the purchase of the suicide boat, were unwitting. "We were planning to be involved in a fishing project," he said.
Mumbai terror suspect David Headley was ‘rogue US secret agent’
Rhys Blakely in Mumbai From Times (London) Online December 17, 2009
A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.
David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.
He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.
Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT. Related Links
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“India is looking into whether Headley worked as a double agent,” an Indian Home Ministry official said yesterday.
Mr Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was in Mumbai until two weeks before the attacks on the city, which claimed 166 lives last November. It is alleged that he spent months checking targets in India’s commercial capital, using his Western looks and anglicised name to move in elite social circles, hobnob with Bollywood actors and even to pass himself off as Jewish.
Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.
“The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.
“That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”
According to Mr Raman, it is probable that Mr Headley, who was arrested when the US authorities learned that he was about to fly to Pakistan, was listed on the main database of the US National Counterterrorism Centre, a facility used by the CIA and several other American agencies to track terror suspects.
Indian officials suspect that US agencies declined to share intelligence to avoid compromising other secret operations and to to be able to deny any link with Mr Headley.
Analysts believe that the US may also have been anxious to avoid sharing information that could further raise tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbours who have fought three wars.
According to documents put before a court in Chicago, Mr Headley had links with the Pakistan Army and, through it, with al-Qaeda.
As well as helping to co-ordinate the Mumbai atrocity, Mr Headley is accused of planning attacks on Mumbai’s Bollywood film industry, the Shiv Sena, a Hindu extremist group also based in Mumbai, a major Hindu temple, and a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
The US authorities allege that he was close to Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a former Pakistani schoolmate and businessman who is also being charged with planning to attack the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Mr Rana is accused of having known about the attack on Mumbai in advance.
The CIA denied that Headley had worked for the organisation.
“Any suggestion that Headley was working for the CIA is complete and utter nonsense. It’s flat-out false,” Paul Gimigliano, from the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, said.
The Indian Home Secretary, Gopal Krishna Pillai, has said that his Government would seek the extradition of Mr Headley — a request that has so far been stonewalled by US officials.
CIA Red Cell - A Red Cell Special Memorandum - 5 February 2010
This memo was prepared by the CIA Red Cell, which has been charged by the Director of Intelligence with taking a pronounced "out-of-the-box" approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues. Comments and queries are welcome and may be directed to the CIA Red Cell at (703) 482-6918 / 482-0169 or 44462/50127, secure. (C)
What If Foreigners See the United States as an “Exporter of Terrorism”? (S//NF)
Much attention has been paid recently to the increasing occurrence of American-grown Islamic terrorists conducting attacks against US targets, primarily in the homeland. Less attention has been paid to homegrown terrorism, not exclusively Muslim terrorists, exported overseas to target non- US persons. This report examines the implications of what it would mean for the US to be seen increasingly as an incubator and “exporter of terrorism.” (S//NF)
Contrary to common belief, the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon, nor has it been associated only with Islamic radicals or people of Middle Eastern, African or South Asian ethnic origin. This dynamic belies the American belief that our free, open and integrated multicultural society lessens the allure of radicalism and terrorism for US citizens.
• Late last year five young Muslim American men traveled from northern Virginia to Pakistan allegedly to join the Pakistani Taliban and to engage in jihad. Their relatives contacted the FBI after they disappeared without telling anyone, and then Pakistani authorities arrested them as they allegedly attempted to gain access to al-Qa’ida training facilities.
• In November 2008, Pakistani-American David Headley conducted surveillance in support of the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba (LT) attack in Mumbai, India that killed more than 160 people. LT induced him to change his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley to facilitate his movement between the US, Pakistan, and India.
• Some American Jews have supported and even engaged in violent acts against perceived enemies of Israel. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an American Jewish doctor from New York, emigrated to Israel, joined the extremist group Kach, and killed 29 Palestinians during their prayers in the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron which helped to trigger a wave of bus bombings by HAMAS in early 1995.
• Some Irish-Americans have long provided financial and material support for violent efforts to compel the United Kingdom to relinquish control of Northern Ireland. In the 1880s, Irish-American members of Clan na Gael dynamited Britain’s Scotland Yard, Parliament, and the Tower of London, and detonated bombs at several stations in the London underground.In the twentieth century, Irish-Americans provided most of the financial support sent to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The US-based Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), founded in the late 1960s, provided the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) with money that was frequently used for arms purchases. Only after repeated high-level British requests and then London’s support for our bombing of Libya in the 1980s did the US Government crack down on Irish-American support for the IRA. (S//NF)
American Freedoms Facilitate Terrorist Recruitment and Operations (S//NF)
Primarily we have been concerned about Al-Qa’ida infiltrating operatives into the United States to conduct terrorist attacks, but AQ may be increasingly looking for Americans to operate overseas. Undoubtedly Al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups recognize that Americans can be great assets in terrorist operations overseas because they carry US passports, don’t fit the typical Arab-Muslim profile, and can easily communicate with radical leaders through their unfettered access to the internet and other modes of communication.
• Terrorist groups such as Al-Qa’ida have surely noticed the ease with which Headley was able to travel multiple times on a US visa between the US, Pakistan, and India without arousing suspicion from officials.
• Al-Qa’ida and other extremist groups have also probably noticed that the US Government has been more concerned with preventing attacks on the US by homegrown terrorists or foreigners than with Americans going overseas to carry out attacks in other countries. Most foreign governments do not suspect that American citizens would plot or perpetrate attacks against their citizens within their borders. Foreign terrorists have recruited homegrown US extremists for attacks abroad and are likely to increase the use of this method because so far it has slipped below the radar of the governments of the US and other countries.
• The ubiquity of internet services around the world and the widespread use of English on popular websites such as Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and various blogs enable radical clerics and terrorist recruiters to bypass America’s physical borders and influence US citizens. For example, a self-proclaimed recruiter for the Pakistani Taliban reportedly contacted the five men in northern Virginian via YouTube and then exchanged coded emails with the group. Terrorists apparently know that detection is especially difficult in cases where the potential US recruit is not affiliated with any known terrorist group. (S//NF)
Impact on Foreign Relations if US Seen as “Exporter of Terrorism” (S//NF)
If the US were seen as an exporter of terrorism, foreign partners may be less willing to cooperate with the United States on extrajudicial activities, including detention, transfer, and interrogation of suspects in third party countries. As a recent victim of high-profile terrorism originating from abroad, the US Government has had significant leverage to press foreign regimes to acquiesce to requests for extraditing terrorist suspects from their soil. However, if the US were seen as an “exporter of terrorism,” foreign governments could request a reciprocal arrangement that would impact US sovereignty.
• Foreign regimes could request information on US citizens they deem to be terrorists or terrorist supporters, or even request the rendition of US citizens. US failure to cooperate could result in those governments refusing to allow the US to extract terrorist suspects from their soil, straining alliances and bilateral relations.
• In extreme cases, US refusal to cooperate with foreign government requests for extradition might lead some governments to consider secretly extracting US citizens suspected of foreign terrorism from US soil. Foreign intelligence operations on US soil to neutralize or even assassinate individuals in the US deemed to be a threat are not without precedent. Before the US entered World War II, British intelligence carried out information operations against prominent US citizens deemed to be isolationists or sympathetic to the Nazis. Some historians who have examined relevant archives even suspect that British intelligence officers assassinated Nazi agents on US soil. (S//NF)
Foreign perception of the US as an “exporter of terrorism” also raises difficult legal issues for the US, its foreign allies, and international institutions. To date, the US is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and instead, has pursued Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs) with other countries to ensure immunity for US nationals from ICC prosecution. The US has threatened to terminate economic aid and withdraw military assistance with countries that do not accede to BIAs.
• If foreign regimes believe the US position on rendition is too one-sided, favoring the US, but not them, they could obstruct US efforts to detain terrorism suspects. For example, in 2005 Italy issued criminal arrest warrants for US agents involved in the abduction of an Egyptian cleric and his rendition to Egypt. The proliferation of such cases would not only challenge US bilateral relations with other countries but also damage global counterterrorism efforts.
• If foreign leaders see the US refusing to provide intelligence on American terrorism suspects or to allow witnesses to testify in their courts, they might respond by denying the same to the US. In 2005 9/11 suspect Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquitted by a German court because the US refused to allow Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspected ringleader of the 9/11 plot who was in US custody, to testify. More such instances could impede actions to lock up terrorists, whether in the US or abroad, or result in the release of suspects. (S//NF)
The CIA feels that nations across the globe would start co-operating with it less in the wake of the Headley case and growing instances of home grown terrorists and start believing that the U.S. is an exporter of terrorism, according to a secret document posted by WikiLeaks.
The CIA concluded that foreign governments would be less likely to cooperate with the U.S. on detention, intelligence-sharing, and other issues, the whistleblower site said.
“Primarily we have been concerned about Al-Qaeda infiltrating operatives into the United States to conduct terrorist attacks, but AQ may be increasingly looking for Americans to operate overseas,” said the document.
The CIA termed it as a thought provoking document. “These sorts of analytic products — clearly identified as coming from the Agency’s ‘Red Cell’ — are designed simply termed it to provoke thought and present different points of view,” CIA spokesperson, Marie Harf, told PTI.
The leaked document notes that Pakistani-American David Headley conducted surveillance in support of the LeT for the Mumbai attacks that killed 167 people.
“LeT induced him to change his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley to facilitate his movement between the US, Pakistan and India,” the CIA document said.
Headley had confessed to plotting the Mumbai attacks and LeT’s role in it.
“If the US were seen as an exporter of terrorism, foreign partners may be less willing to cooperate with the United States on extrajudicial activities, including detention, transfer, and interrogation of suspects in third party countries,” the document said.
“As a recent victim of high-profile terrorism originating from abroad, the US Government has had significant leverage to press foreign regimes to acquiesce to requests for extraditing terrorist suspects from their soil.
However, if the U.S. were seen as an “exporter of terrorism,” foreign governments could request a reciprocal arrangement that would impact US sovereignty,” the CIA said.
The CIA documents running into a few pages said contrary to common belief, the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon, nor has it been associated only with Islamic radicals or people of Middle Eastern, African or South Asian ethnic origin.
“This dynamic belies the American belief that our free, open and integrated multicultural society lessens the allure of radicalism and terrorism for US citizens. Late last year five young Muslim American men travelled from northern Virginia to Pakistan allegedly to join the Pakistani Taliban and to engage in jihad.”
The document said: “Their relatives contacted the FBI after they disappeared without telling anyone, and then Pakistani authorities arrested them as they allegedly attempted to gain access to al-Qaeda training facilities.”
It said if foreign regimes believe the U.S. position on rendition is too one-sided, favouring the U.S., but not them, they could obstruct U.S. efforts to detain terrorism suspects.
For example, in 2005 Italy issued criminal arrest warrants for U.S. agents involved in the abduction of an Egyptian cleric and his rendition to Egypt.
“The proliferation of such cases would not only challenge U.S. bilateral relations with other countries but also damage global counterterrorism efforts,” it said.
“If foreign leaders see the U.S. refusing to provide intelligence on American terrorism suspects or to allow witnesses to testify in their courts, they might respond by denying the same to the U.S.
In 2005 9/11 suspect Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquitted by a German court because the U.S. refused to allow Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspected ringleader of the 9/11 plot who was in U.S. custody, to testify.
“More such instances could impede actions to lock up terrorists, whether in the U.S. or abroad, or result in the release of suspects,” said the CIA document posted by WikiLeaks.
The Dead Sea, a storied feature of the landscape since at least biblical times, is drying up. (Naftali Hilger)
Fathi Huweimel leans carefully over the edge of a jagged slab of broken asphalt, peering down into a 60-foot-deep crater that was level ground just yesterday. All around him sprawl the ruins of Ghawr al Hadithah, once a farming village in central Jordan but now a jigsaw of broken houses, shattered roads and abandoned tomato fields growing wild amid the massive holes pocking the earth. To the east, the village gives way to desert fringed by stark, sere mountains. To the west, a few hundred yards away, lie the glimmering waters of the Dead Sea.
“We’ve had about 75 holes open up in the last two years,” says Huweimel, a thickset man with a broad mouth and deep brown eyes who has lived all of his 45 years in the area. He works as a field researcher with Friends of the Earth-Middle East, an environmental organization. “Everyone is leaving,” he continues. “Those who stay are staying because they have no choice.”
The holes first started appearing in the 1980s, but the pace at which new ones open up has increased dramatically in recent years. Miraculously, no one has been killed by a cave-in yet, though there have been some close calls. A group of seven women — including Huweimel’s aunt — were harvesting tomatoes together one day when the ground collapsed with a roar just 2 meters in front of them. A small salt factory that employed about 100 people was evacuated before it collapsed.
The cause of all this destruction is water — or, rather, the lack of it. The ground is collapsing into sinkholes because the water beneath it is retreating. And the water is retreating because the Dead Sea, a storied feature of the landscape since at least biblical times, is drying up.
The sea — actually a huge lake straddling the Israeli-Jordanian border at the lowest point on Earth, 420 meters below sea level — has been fed for millennia by the Jordan River. But today, so much water is siphoned out of the Jordan to feed farms and cities that practically nothing is left to replenish the Dead Sea.
Over the past three decades, the sea’s level has fallen by some 25 meters and continues to drop by an average of another meter every year. Its surface area is dwindling apace; the sea’s shore has retreated as much as a mile. That is dealing a severe blow to the hotels and spas dotting what used to be the sea’s beaches. Moreover, as the water retreats, it destabilizes the ground around it, spawning the sinkholes that have devoured Ghawr al Hadithah. Underground freshwater springs that feed nearby oases rich in wildlife are also being dragged down.
“It’s a time bomb,” Huweimel says. “It will only get worse if nothing is done.”
It’s an extraordinary problem that has generated an extraordinary response. The governments of the three peoples that live along the Jordan River and the Dead Sea — the Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians — are working together to promote a potential solution: a conduit to bring ocean water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. It’s being touted as a triple win: The water would replenish the Dead Sea, and in the process generate hydroelectric power, which would in turn run desalination plants to make potable water for the region. As a not-inconsiderable political bonus, it would constitute the first major project ever undertaken by all three nations.
There’s just one problem. The conduit might make things even worse.
One morning in late spring, Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth-Middle East, takes me to the Lido Café at the northern end of the sea on the Israel side. For decades, the Lido was an elegant open-air restaurant where well-heeled residents of Jericho and Jerusalem would come to have a leisurely lunch, smoke nargileh water pipes and step right off the patio for a dip in the Dead Sea. Today, weeds push through the patio’s broken tiles, and paint is peeling off the parts of the walls that are still standing. A hunched, leafless tree sulks by steps that once led to the water but now stop abruptly 3 feet above trash-strewn desert. The Dead Sea is barely visible in the distance, across a half-mile of bare, dun-colored earth.
The Lido Cafe, where visitors used to step off the patio for a dip in the Dead Sea. (Naftali Hilger)
“This place died because the Dead Sea ran away,” says Bromberg, an athletically built Israeli lawyer who still speaks with a trace of an accent betraying his boyhood in Australia. He’s looking slightly disheveled today in a rumpled polo shirt, his short hair uncombed. Bromberg knows this area like he knows the neighborhood in Tel Aviv where he lives. He’s been bringing legislators, activists, journalists and pretty much anyone he can get interested out here for more than a decade now to witness the crisis facing the Dead Sea.
Bromberg, 46, founded Friends of the Earth-Middle East in 1994, in the heady days after Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo accords, when it seemed that peace might finally be within reach. As thrilling as that prospect was, Bromberg also saw a potential downside, one which he investigated in his master’s thesis at the American University in Washington, D.C. “I concluded that the peace process would contribute to the demise of the environment,” Bromberg says. “It was all about building hotels, industrial estates and highways. There was no discussion on improving or even protecting the environment.”
That finding inspired him to seek out like-minded Jordanian and Palestinian activists to help create FoEME, the first civil organization to bring representatives from all three peoples together in common cause. The idea was to address environmental issues that cross borders, water chief among them.
Of course, the region’s bitter politics haven’t made things easy. Within a few years of the group’s founding, the peace process collapsed into the bloody second Intifada. With the body count of both Palestinians and Israelis rising daily, anyone working with the other side risked being seen as a traitor. Bromberg’s car tires have been slashed, his Jordanian counterpart has been shot at, and Palestinian FoEME workers have been kidnapped by hard-line militias — but the group has not only survived, it has grown and now boasts 50 paid staff and offices in Tel Aviv, Bethlehem and Amman. Funding comes from the U.S. and European governments as well as private foundations. Time magazine declared the group “environmental heroes” in 2008, and last year the Skoll Foundation gave it an award for social entrepreneurship. “I don’t accept everything the Israeli government does, but there has to be a dialogue between the people,” says Baha Afaneh, a Palestinian who works in FoEME’s Amman branch. “We’re trying to work together on issues that affect us all.”
Saving the Dead Sea was the very first project the group took on. “We did an inventory back in 1995,” Bromberg says, “and we saw that the Dead Sea faced the gravest threat.”
Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of Frines of the Earth-Middle East (Naftali Hilger)
The Dead Sea earns its name from the composition of its waters, which are so dense with minerals and salt — 10 times as much as ordinary seawater — that nothing but microbes survives in them. The sea has no channel out. Water comes in mainly from the Jordan River and leaves by evaporating under the sweltering desert sun, which routinely drives temperatures up to 120 degrees.
For thousands of years, that input/output equation remained more or less in balance. But in recent decades, the region’s booming population has thrown it completely out of whack. Jordanians, Palestinians and especially Israelis pull so much water from the Jordan that only a heavily polluted trickle now reaches the Dead Sea from the north. Meanwhile, at the sea’s southern end, enormous factories pump out water to extract minerals. What’s left behind in the sea is evaporating as fast as ever, but almost no new water is coming in to replenish it.
The Dead Sea has shrunk before. Throughout its long history, there have been low-rainfall years that reduced the Jordan River to a dribble. “The sea has been even lower than it is today in previous centuries, but it would always come back when precipitation picked up,” Bromberg says. “The difference today is that the Dead Sea is on a one-way ride. It can’t come back as it has before.”
The sea is unlikely to ever disappear completely. Small underground springs and rain provide enough water that even if the Jordan were to dry up altogether, the sea would eventually stabilize — but as an ultra-briny puddle of about one-third its original size. If that were to happen, it would mean the loss of a world historic site and incalculable damage to the region’s economy and ecology.
Tourists flock to the area from all over the world for the spectacular desert scenery and history. Masada, the mountaintop fortress where Jewish zealots held out for years against conquering Romans, is nearby, as is the cave where the Dead Sea scrolls were found. But the main attraction is the sea itself, with its mineral-rich, ultra-salty waters, which are reputed to have therapeutic powers and offer the giddy experience of effortless floating.
But it gets harder every year for visitors to actually reach the water. When Israel’s Ein Gedi Spa, a health-tourism complex offering massages and sulphur pools, was built in the 1980s, the Dead Sea came right up to the wall around its outdoor swimming pool. Now, guests have to ride a tractor-pulled tram through a mile of mud flats to reach the constantly receding shore.
A sinkhole in the Ein Gedi area. (Naftali Hilger)
And as the water retreats, more and more sinkholes open up. Kibbutz Ein Gedi, which runs the spa, has had to close a nearby campground because half of it has been swallowed up by the earth. Sinkholes have also made it too dangerous to work a date plantation across the road, where the palms have been left to dry up and double over on themselves, as though they’ve abandoned hope. The sinkholes have also forced the Israeli government to scrub plans for 5,000 new hotel rooms in the area. All told, the Dead Sea’s shrinkage is costing Israel some $60 million per year in lost tourism revenues, according to an estimate by the Samuel Neaman Institute, an Israeli public policy research outfit.
Eli Raz knows more about the sinkholes than anyone. Raz is a sinewy, silver-haired Ben-Gurion University geologist who lives at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, where he works out of a windowless office surrounded by glossy photos of desert rocks, flowers and salt formations. He has been studying the holes since they first started appearing in the late 1980s. A few years ago, on one of his regular research expeditions, he fell into a 30-foot sinkhole and was trapped for 14 hours until rescue workers pulled him out. “Now I have documented sinkholes from the inside as well as out,” Raz deadpans.
Raz estimates there are more than 3,000 sinkholes just on the Israeli side. They are the result of a shift in underground currents caused by the sea’s drop. Subterranean Dead Sea water has built up a layer of salt rock under the soil in many areas. As that water withdraws, new water takes its place, slowly dissolving the salt layer — until the ground above gives way.
Sinkholes are just one side effect of the shift in the underground water flow. As the groundwater chases the receding seawater, it is changing the course of the underground springs that feed nearby oases. Sizeable swathes of vegetation are dying as a result. That threatens the ibex, leopards and other rare animal and plant species that live in the oases, as well as the hundreds of millions of birds that stop to rest in them on their migration routes.
“If you disturb this ecosystem, it could have a big chain reaction,” Raz says. “That’s my biggest concern.”
But concerned as he is about the damage being done by the Dead Sea’s shrinkage, Raz is deeply skeptical of the plan to save it by bringing in water from the Red Sea.
The idea of digging a waterway from the ocean to the Dead Sea has been bandied about for centuries. Athanasius Kircher, a renowned German-Jesuit scholar, proposed it in 1664 as a transportation route; an English admiral named William Allen seconded the notion in 1855. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, imagined a canal from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea in his seminal 1902 book Altneuland (The Old New Land).
The Israeli government took a serious look at digging a canal in the 1970s and 1980s, hoping it could yield hydroelectric power that would leave the country less dependent on foreign oil. But the Red-to-Dead project really began gathering steam in the 1990s, amid the exuberance of peacemaking between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians. Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres is the idea’s foremost champion. In his book, The New Middle East, Peres writes:
“Politically, this earthshaking enterprise can help maintain peace and establish mutual long-term interests. … The water will flow along the Arava (the desert valley in which the sea sits), the power stations will give light, and the wasteland will bloom with life. The region will experience peace, serenity and progress. People from other countries will use the seaport and airport, visit the spas and vacation centers and enjoy the products of our flourishing desert.”
Video: The Disappearing of the Dead Sea
The second Intifada bumped the Red-Dead project to the back burner, but finally, in 2006, the governments of Israel, Palestine and Jordan jointly convinced the World Bank to get on board. Everyone involved agrees saving the sea is a priority, but each side gives different weight to the project’s other expected benefits. For Jordan, which faces a chronic and deepening shortage of water, developing new, potable supplies is paramount. For Israel, a major engineering project in partnership with an Arab country would constitute a long-sought political milestone. The mere fact that it and its Arab neighbors are talking about such an undertaking earned the participants a pat on the head from the U.S. Senate, which passed a resolution in 2007 applauding “the cooperative manner” in which all three sides were working to save the Dead Sea. For the Palestinians, who were originally excluded from the planning for the conduit, it’s crucial just to be given a role in the project, to bolster their political standing in general and their claims to the region’s water resources in particular. “Though we are occupied by Israel, the Jordan River runs along our land,” as does part of the Dead Sea, says Shaddad Attili, head of the Palestinian Water Authority. “It’s important that we be brought in as partners.”
The World Bank has rounded up $16.7 million from the U.S., France, Sweden and other countries for a series of studies on the feasibility and environmental and social impacts of what is now formally known as the Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Study Program. The project could ultimately take any of several forms — a canal, a tunnel, a pipeline or some combination. In any case, the engineering is fairly straightforward. Red Sea water would have to be pumped over or piped under the hills around Aqaba, Jordan’s sole port, which offers the most promising access point to the Red Sea. But after that, it would simply flow downhill to its sub-sea-level destination. Hydroelectric stations along the way would harness the flow to generate power for desalination plants. Estimated cost: anywhere from $5 billion to $15 billion.
And that’s the just the basic version. Peres and Israeli industrial magnate Yitzhak Tshuva want to take things even further by building a Vegas-style strip of desert resorts along the waterway. At a recent conference in Jerusalem, Tshuva presented a plan to line the conduit with parks, lagoons, entertainment centers and 200,000 hotel rooms.
It sounds great: Save the Dead Sea, get freshwater, promote regional cooperation, maybe even generate thousands of jobs. But Friends of the Earth-Middle East and other environmental groups are deeply concerned that the conduit might do more harm than good.
There are potential problems all along the route the water would travel. The conduit would suck as much as 2 billion cubic meters — or a little more than half a trillion gallons — of water every year out of the Gulf of Aqaba, a narrow finger of the Red Sea. Pulling out that much water could alter the currents and temperatures in the Gulf, warns the Samuel Neaman Institute, potentially harming the highly sensitive coral reefs and the 1,000-plus species of fish that live there. Those reefs are a world-class diving destination; losing them would certainly cost Jordan some of the nearly half-million visitors that come to Aqaba every year. The massive, noisy machinery required to pump the water out certainly won’t help the tourist trade, either.
The waterway is planned to run through the Arava Valley, which sits on the border between two tectonic plates. That makes the area prone to earthquakes that could damage the conduit and send salt water spilling into the surrounding desert, which is home to rare palm trees, gazelles, hyrax and other species. “It’s a totally unique ecosystem,” Bromberg says. “We’re not so worried about a rupture — that would be a one-time thing. It’s a consistent leak that is the biggest worry. They’re going to be moving nearly 2 billion cubic meters of water through here every year. A leak would mean a constant slow seep of a lot of water.”
Mixing regular seawater with that of the Dead Sea, which has a different chemical composition, could also be bad news. Research by the Geological Survey of Israel suggests that the Dead Sea’s calcium-rich brine could react with sulphates in the seawater to form gypsum, which would turn the Dead Sea white. The influx of less-salty water could also stimulate the Dead Sea’s microorganisms, causing an algae bloom that would turn the water red. And diluting the sea’s salinity would likely also reduce its famous buoyancy.
“We think the solution is dealing with the root causes of the sea’s demise,” Bromberg says, “not some technological fix that will give rise to a new set of problems.”
The main cause shrinking the Dead Sea is the emaciated, immiserated Jordan River. In 1847, the Jordan was so big and wild that U.S. Navy Lt. W.F. Lynch had to battle rushing rapids and waterfalls on an exploratory expedition down the river to the Dead Sea. Today, the storied waterway, featured in the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — the river “deep and wide” in which John baptized Jesus — creeps into the Dead Sea as a trickle composed mostly of sewage. According to a FoEME study released in May, the river’s annual inflow to the sea has been squeezed from 1.3 billion cubic meters to an estimated 20 to 30 million cubic meters — a 98 percent drop.
People are to blame. Since 1970, the combined population of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories has more than tripled from 5.3 million to some 17 million. Over the last several decades, they, along with their neighbor to the north, Syria, have tapped, dammed and diverted almost all of the water in the Jordan and the springs and tributaries that once fed it.
Originating in the mountains between Israel and Syria, the river runs down into the Sea of Galilee and from there through the Jordan Valley to the Dead Sea. But Israel and Jordan now take so much water out of the Sea of Galilee that almost none flows out into the riverbed.
Pilgrims south of the Sea of Galilee, where the Bible says Jesus was baptized. (Naftali Hilger)
About a half-mile south of the Sea of Galilee, what little river water does escape comes up against an earthen berm, forming a large pool rimed with scum and trash. Five fat green pipes angle down into the pool, sucking out water for nearby banana and avocado fields. A little water slips out through a submerged conduit, emerging as a trickle on the other side of the berm. Into that trickle from another pipe gushes a feculent, gray-green stream of sewage. Signs in English, Hebrew and Arabic warn: “Danger! Don’t enter or drink the water!” It flows away downstream, where it is augmented by more sewage, agricultural runoff and fish pond refuse — the whole mess reconstituted as the sacred waters of the Jordan River.
About 120 kilometers to the south is the spot where Jesus was purportedly baptized. Thousands of devout tourists come to this tranquil patch of reed-lined riverbank every year to follow his example. On a hot day in spring, a black-cassocked Greek Orthodox priest holds the hand of Kristin Londal, a 40-year-old Bible studies teacher from Bronxville, N.Y., as she steps down from a wooden platform into the sluggish green-brown water. She’s dressed in a plain white robe. Holding her nose shut, Londal submerges herself three times.
“Yes, I know the river is polluted. Jesus will keep me clean!” she tells me afterward, standing on the platform dripping and radiant. “But,” she adds, “I will take a shower tonight.” As we talk, a water-rat the size of a small dog pops its head up and swims calmly past.
Israel and Jordan are taking steps to clean the river — but they may strangle it in the process. Wastewater treatment plants are being built on both sides to capture and recycle the sewage before it hits the Jordan. That’s certainly progress. But the FoEME study warns that if that sewage water isn’t replaced with anything, “the Lower Jordan River is expected to run dry at the end of 2011.”
The most obvious way to get more water is desalination, a technology in which Israel leads the world. But desalinating enough water from the Mediterranean to take care of the towns and farms that rely on the Jordan would be tremendously expensive, and would also require large amounts of greenhouse-gas producing energy. There has also been talk of somehow bringing in water from Turkey, another major undertaking.
Bromberg, however, maintains that at least a third of the Jordan’s flow can be restored by using existing water resources more wisely. For starters, if both Jordan and Israel reduced their subsidies to agriculture, they could wean themselves off the unsustainable habit of farming water-intensive export crops in the desert, he says. That’s already starting to happen, but only to an extent. “We’ve had to destroy a lot of trees in the last few years because of the lack of water,” says Yuval Malka, a spokesperson for Kibbutz Kinneret, an agricultural settlement near the Sea of Galilee. “We plant fewer bananas, avocados and mangos.” But he balks at the notion of getting rid of them altogether. “Bananas pay good,” Malka says. “We made nearly a million dollars from them last year.”
Other decidedly unsexy proposals for reducing the amount of water drawn from the Jordan and Sea of Galilee include replacing water toilets with composting ones. “It’s a lot of tiny fixes,” Bromberg says. “That’s the problem; no one’s going to get rich from restoring the Jordan. Politicians are more attracted to grand projects that will leave a mark on history — and make their friends a lot of money.”
Beyond the Jordan, FoEME is pressing to reduce the water used by the massive mineral-extraction works at the southern end of the Dead Sea. On both sides of the border, these companies channel Dead Sea water through a system of broad, winding canals into a 150-square-kilometer expanse of shallow evaporating pools. There, potash, bromides, magnesium and salt are extracted by floating harvesting machines.
The minerals are then taken to a vast industrial park just south of where the story of Sodom and Gomorrah supposedly took place. There’s nothing biblical about the landscape now, though. The desert is buried under a massive sprawl of multistory steel scaffolds, conveyor belts, chutes, pipes and power lines. Gray smoke billows skyward from towering chimneys while roaring trucks and toploaders shuffle between mountainous heaps of raw white potash.
This industry is responsible for some 40 percent of the Dead Sea’s water losses, according to the World Bank. Bromberg says they could cut that substantially if they extracted minerals by pushing the sea’s water through membranes, rather than by evaporating it. That would save water — but would be more expensive.
In any case, even if the river were restored and the mineral industry reined in, Jordan would still need more water. The conduit offers the best fix for that and the Dead Sea, its supporters argue. “The environmentalists want to let the Jordan water all flow back, but this is utopian. In my opinion, the conduit is the only valid solution,” says Elias Salameh, a University of Jordan hydrologist who has studied the Dead Sea problem extensively. “Of course, it will have bad environmental impacts. We should study and try to minimize them. But the benefits will be far greater.”
If the conduit could also significantly improve relations between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians, as supporters like Salameh argue, it might even be worth a certain amount of environmental damage. Israel’s peace with Jordan is reasonably sturdy but could use reinforcing. Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, on the other hand, fluctuate between bad and appalling. Resolving their conflict would be a boon to the whole world. Israeli and Palestinian politicians and even French President Nicolas Sarkozy claim the conduit will help.
“This project brings hope to the region,” Attili says. “Despite all the crisis and conflict, we are talking to each other and working together.”
But the World Bank’s most recent assessment of the project’s potential political implications, released in May, is only guardedly optimistic on this score.
“The magnitude of the [conduit project] is such that regular and close coordination will be necessary. … This will bind the parties together in mutual dependency, which can only promote better understanding and ties,” the report says. However, it continues, “the relationships between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are dominated by political realities. … Implementation of the [project]… will not, of itself, affect these issues.” The report projects only “minor to moderate positive impacts” on the political front.
With all this in mind, the World Bank recently launched another study, this one examining alternatives to a Red-to-Dead canal or pipeline, including a restoration of some flow to the Jordan River and a water conveyance from the Mediterranean. The whole suite of World Bank studies is scheduled to be completed in June 2011.
In the meantime, however, Jordan plans to start its own, separate project, which would pump Red Sea water to desalination plants near Aqaba and channel the leftover brine to the Dead Sea.
Alex McPhail, the World Bank’s study program manager for the Red-Dead conduit, claims the bank is not concerned about Jordan going ahead with this project before the bank’s studies have been completed. “We’re talking about 2 billion cubic meters of water in our project,” McPhail says. “They’re talking about a fraction of that amount. And the Jordanians have assured us our studies will be done long before they turn the first shovel on their project.”
Whether it will save the Dead Sea or damage it further, however, neither project will have any impact at all for a long time. Each will take an estimated 20 years to complete. In the meantime, the sinkholes devouring the fields of Ghawr al Hadithah and Kibbutz Ein Gedi will keep multiplying. The mud flats in front of the tourist hotels will keep growing. And the Dead Sea will keep slipping further and further away from us all.
WikiLeaks founder points at Pentagon over rape claims
by Igor Gedilaghine Sun Aug 22, 2010 2:08 pm ET
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview published Sunday he believed the Pentagon could be behind a rape allegation against him that was swiftly dropped by Swedish authorities.
His comments came as prosecutors justified their treatment of the 39-year-old Australian, whose whistleblowing website is embroiled in a row with Washington over the publication of secret Afghan war documents.
The Aftonbladet newspaper quoted Assange as saying he did not know who was "hiding behind" the rape claim, which prompted prosecutors to issue a warrant for his arrest on Friday but which was cancelled the following day.
"But we have been warned that for instance the Pentagon will use dirty tricks to destroy us. I have furthermore been warned about set-up sex traps," he said, in a translation of comments published in Swedish.
The former computer hacker described the allegations as "shocking" and said he had "never, neither in Sweden nor in any other country, had sex with someone in a way which wasn't completely voluntary on both sides."
Assange told Aftonbladet -- for which he last week agreed to write a regular column -- that his enemies would still use the claims to damage WikiLeaks despite the lifting of the warrant.
The website is set to publish 15,000 more secret papers about the war in Afghanistan in coming weeks, having recently released nearly 77,000 papers and sparking charges that it had endangered the lives of informants and others.
"I know from experience that WikiLeaks' enemies continue to trumpet things even after they have been denied," Assange said.
He refused to give more details about the two women whose claims sparked the furore, saying that it would impinge on their privacy.
Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said any allegation of dirty tricks was "absurd".
Sweden's prosecution service said Saturday that Assange was now "not suspected of rape" and was no longer wanted for questioning on the allegation, but added that an investigation into a separate molestation charge remained open.
He had been in Stockholm earlier this month giving a press conference on the upcoming release of the last batch of Afghanistan documents, but he generally remains on the move around the world staying with supporters.
He told Aftonbladet he was currently at a friend's summerhouse in northern Sweden.
As the furore over the arrest warrant grew, the Swedish prosecutor's office issued a statement on Sunday defending its actions.
It said that chief prosecutor Eva Finne, who was responsible for withdrawing the arrest warrant, had "more information available to decide on Saturday than the duty prosecutor on Friday evening".
"A decision regarding restrictive measures, such as this, must always be reevaluated in a preliminary inquiry," the statement added.
Prosecutor's office spokeswoman Karin Rosander told AFP late Saturday that the procedure followed was normal and would have been launched automatically by the duty prosecutor in serious cases such as rape.
Separately the duty prosecutor, Maria Haljebo Kjellstrand, said that she "did not regret her decision".
The two women who originally made the allegations did not make an official complaint and it was the police who took the decision to inform the prosecutor's office, she told Expressen newspaper, which broke the story of the charges.
"I received a report from the police which seemed to me to be sufficient to arrest him. On Friday evening I got a call from the police describing what the women said. The information I received was convincing enough for me to take my decision," Hljebo Kjellstrand was quoted as saying.
WikiLeaks and the Pentagon are locked in a bitter dispute over the Afghan papers, with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates calling the website "guilty" on moral grounds and Assange saying that the site would not be threatened.
The Pentagon has said it would not negotiate a "sanitised" release of the documents, as WikiLeaks had suggested it might in order that US officials could help analyse the documents and avoid publishing the names of people whose lives could be threatened.
Facing Afghan mistrust, al-Qaeda fighters take limited role in insurgency
By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 23, 2010; A01
On Aug. 14, a U.S. airstrike in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz killed a Taliban commander known as Abu Baqir. In a country where insurgents are killed daily, this attack was notable for one unusual detail:
Abu Baqir, the military said afterward, was also a member of al-Qaeda.
Although U.S. officials have often said that al-Qaeda is a marginal player on the Afghan battlefield, an analysis of 76,000 classified U.S. military reports posted by the Web site WikiLeaks underscores the extent to which Osama bin Laden and his network have become an afterthought in the war.
The reports, which cover the escalation of the insurgency between 2004 and the end of 2009, mention al-Qaeda only a few dozen times and even then just in passing. Most are vague references to people with unspecified al-Qaeda contacts or sympathies, or as shorthand for an amorphous ideological enemy.
Bin Laden, thought to be hiding across the border in Pakistan, is scarcely mentioned in the reports. One recounts how his picture was found on the walls of a couple of houses near Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, in 2004.
A year later, U.S. forces also saw his likeness on a jihadist propaganda poster near the Pakistan border. In 2007, a district subgovernor in Nangarhar province informed U.S. officials that a local newspaper would print "names of personnel working for bin Laden."
Other al-Qaeda leaders are similarly invisible figures. One report describes a botched June 2007 attempt to capture or kill Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda military commander. U.S. Special Forces missed their target, instead accidentally killing seven children in a religious school in Paktika province.
There are also fleeting references to Abu Ikhlas al-Misri, the nom de guerre of an Egyptian who serves as an al-Qaeda commander in Kunar province. In 2008, an Afghan district official confirmed to U.S. officers that he had heard a rumor that Abu Ikhlas was suffering from a "sprained ankle." But otherwise, at least in the WikiLeaks reports, the Egyptian remains in the shadows. Change in strategy
In June, CIA Director Leon Panetta estimated that, "at most," only 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives were present in Afghanistan. His assessment echoed those given by other senior U.S. officials. In October, national security adviser James L. Jones said the U.S. government's "maximum estimate" was that al-Qaeda had fewer than 100 members in Afghanistan, with no bases and "no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies."
Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, al-Qaeda's leadership and fighters have largely sought refuge across the border in Pakistan. There they have been targeted by U.S. drone attacks from the skies as they try to remain beyond the reach of U.S. forces.
The evasion marks a departure from al-Qaeda's approach in previous conflicts. Bin Laden and other jihadist leaders recruited thousands of Arabs and other foreign fighters to combat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Al-Qaeda also persuaded hundreds, if not thousands, of followers to travel to Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, where they played a significant role in fueling the insurgency and sectarian violence.
This time, U.S. military officials and analysts say, al-Qaeda has changed its strategy, mostly limiting its role in the Taliban-led insurgency to assisting with training, intelligence and propaganda. Although the terrorist network still considers the "liberation" of Afghanistan its primary strategic objective, it is biding its time until the infidels lose patience and leave.
"The numbers aren't large, but their ability to help local forces punch above their weight acts as a multiplier," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and Georgetown University professor. "They've learned from their previous experiences, when their foreign fighters were front and center."
In Iraq, he noted, al-Qaeda figures from elsewhere alienated the locals by trying to hijack that insurgency.
U.S. military officials say al-Qaeda recognizes the same risk in Afghanistan. Taliban leaders often see al-Qaeda, their erstwhile ally, as "a handicap," according to an unclassified briefing presented in December by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
Although Taliban commanders want support from al-Qaeda and jihadists around the world, according to Flynn, they are sensitive to the idea that ordinary Afghans might view it as foreign interference.
That balancing act has resulted in a limited, if steady, flow of foreign fighters. Most are Uzbeks and Chechens who join networks affiliated with, but not formally part of, al-Qaeda, U.S. military officials said. Less common are Arabs and European Muslims who answer al-Qaeda's direct call to join the jihad in Afghanistan.
One indicator of the presence of foreign fighters can be found at the U.S. military's new Parwan prison at Bagram air base.
Vice Admiral Robert S. Harward, commander of U.S. detention operations in Afghanistan, said fewer than 50 of the 950 prisoners come from outside the country. Of those, about three-quarters are Pakistanis. He said fighters from outside Central Asia are rare: "This is a very local fight." Concentrated in the east
A review of the leaked U.S. military reports suggests that Arab fighters -- those most likely to be affiliated with al-Qaeda -- generally confine their activities to a handful of Afghan provinces along the Pakistan border. When they cross the line, the Arabs usually do so in small numbers and as part of larger Taliban units.
In June 2007, for example, a U.S. Army brigade combat team reported receiving information about a band of 60 Taliban insurgents, including six Arabs and two Iranians, massing on a mountaintop in Khost province. Also that month, in Paktika province, one Arab and two Pakistan fighters were killed after a larger Taliban group attacked a U.S. outpost in the Bermal district.
In November 2009, a patrol of Afghan soldiers and police led by U.S. forces reported an early evening ambush in Kunar province. A small group of insurgents planted a roadside bomb and attacked the patrol with small-arms fire. The patrol did not suffer casualties in the firefight, but they killed one of the enemy and recovered his cellphone. The patrol's report highlighted how their interpreter turned on the phone and found that "everything was in Arabic."
Analysts said other evidence confirms that al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan is concentrated in the east, just across the border from where the network's leadership is based in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Between 2005 and 2009, al-Qaeda's online propaganda arm produced a series called "Pyre for the Americans in the Land of Khurasan." (Khurasan is an ancient term referring to Afghanistan and other territory in Central Asia.) Of the 90 videos in the series, which contained purported scenes of Afghan battles and ambushes, 56 were filmed in three eastern provinces -- Kunar, Paktika and Khost -- that border the Pakistani tribal areas, according to Anne Stenersen, a researcher on Islamic radicalism for the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.
The database of 76,000 reports posted by WikiLeaks covers the period from January 2004 to December 2009. Although extensive in number, they consist mostly of low-level military field reports, many of them unconfirmable, and are not a complete account of U.S. efforts to combat al-Qaeda. For example, the reports do not shed light on longstanding efforts to track or kill al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.
Some reports, however, provide secondary glimpses of the secretive campaign by U.S. Special Operations forces and the CIA to hunt insurgent leaders in Afghanistan. The records reveal the existence of one such unit, Task Force 373, which searches for targets on the U.S. military's "kill or capture" list, known as the Joint Prioritized Effects List.
Based on its numbering system, more than 2,000 targets have been added to the list, the reports suggest. There are many accounts of attempts to capture Taliban commanders on the list, but only one is clearly identified as a leader of al-Qaeda: Abu Laith al-Libi, who evaded the botched June 2007 raid in Paktika province.
The Libyan al-Qaeda military commander did meet his end in another U.S. operation seven months later -- in next-door Pakistan.
Far from Ground Zero, other plans for mosques run into vehement opposition
By Annie Gowen Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 23, 2010; A01
MURFREESBORO, TENN. -- For more than 30 years, the Muslim community in this Nashville suburb has worshipped quietly in a variety of makeshift spaces -- a one-bedroom apartment, an office behind a Lube Express -- attracting little notice even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But when the community's leaders proposed a 52,900-square-foot Islamic center with a school and a swimming pool this year, the vehement backlash from their neighbors caught them by surprise. Opponents crowded county meetings and held a noisy protest in the town square that drew hundreds, some carrying signs such as "Keep Tennessee Terror Free."
"We haven't experienced this level of hostility before ever, so it's new to us," said Saleh M. Sbenaty, an engineering professor who is overseeing the mosque's planned expansion.
The Murfreesboro mosque is hundreds of miles from New York City and the national furor about whether an Islamic community center should be built near Ground Zero. But the intense feelings driving that debate have surfaced in communities from California to Florida in recent months, raising questions about whether public attitudes toward Muslims have shifted.
In Tennessee, three plans for new Islamic centers in the Nashville area -- one of which was ultimately withdrawn -- have provoked controversy and outbursts of ugliness. Members of one mosque discovered a delicately rendered Jerusalem cross spray-painted on the side of their building with the words "Muslims go home."
The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro became a hot-button political issue during this month's primary election, prompting failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey to ask whether Islam was a "cult."
Another candidate paid for a billboard high above Interstate 24 near Nashville that read: "Defeat Universal Jihad Now."
Evangelist Pat Robertson weighed in Thursday, wondering on his television program whether a Muslim takeover of America was imminent and whether local officials could be bribed. (The mayor of the county where the Islamic Center is proposed called that idea "ridiculous.")
The members of the Murfreesboro mosque, who say they have always rejected extremism, have been bewildered by the vitriol.
Sbenaty, 52, who came to the United States from Syria for his doctoral studies three decades ago, gets misty-eyed describing the kindness his neighbors showed his family after Sept. 11. At one point, he recalled, he was in a shopping mall parking lot with his wife, who wears a hijab, and a group of locals made a point to stop and assure them they had nothing to fear.
The other day, however, as he was standing on the mosque's 15-acre parcel of land just outside town, drivers honked and flipped their middle fingers in the air as they rode past.
"It's tough to see that change," Sbenaty said. Change in tone
A Time magazine poll released Thursday found that 43 percent of Americans hold unfavorable views of Muslims, far outpacing the numbers for Mormons (29 percent), Catholics (17 percent), Jews (13 percent) and Protestants (13 percent). Twenty-five percent of those polled said most Muslims in the United States are not patriotic Americans.
Although the overall level of anti-Muslim sentiment hasn't shifted much since the uproar over the mosque near Ground Zero, the change in tone has been striking, religious scholars and other experts say.
The reasons are myriad: rising fears of homegrown terrorism after the Fort Hood shootings and the attempted Times Square bombing, the rhetoric of the burgeoning "tea party" political movement and increasing unhappiness with President Obama. A growing number of Americans -- one in five -- believe the president is a Muslim, according to a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"It shouldn't be surprising that there's a negative reaction to this mosque," said Richard Lloyd, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University. "Because you can connect it to this global media event in New York, it just reinforces this siege mentality local residents have."
Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University, said a Florida church's plan to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of Sept. 11 is emblematic of the country's new mood.
"Something more is happening," Ahmed said. "We are becoming aware that the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims is wider than it was after 9/11, and that's a frightening prospect."
In the Nashville area, the Muslim population has grown to 20,000 to 25,000, fueled by the arrival of Somalis fleeing strife and the federal government's decision to resettle Iraqi refugees there after the Persian Gulf War. Central Tennessee is now home to the country's largest population of Iraqi Kurds.
The community has outgrown its four mosques, where men often have to pray in the parking lots because of the crowds, leaders say. 'A certain amount of fear'
Murfreesboro, about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, is a quiet town of 100,000 people, largely white conservative Christians. Residents take pride in the historic town square skirting an antebellum courthouse, the site of a famous Confederate raid during the Civil War. Patriotic banners line the lampposts. On the highway, there's a Sonic drive-in every few miles. Gospel music radio stations are as numerous as those playing country music.
The 250 or so families -- about 1,000 people -- who worship at the existing Islamic Center come from around the globe and include doctors, car salesmen and students from nearby Middle Tennessee State University. Members of the mosque have raised about $600,000 to buy land and prepare the site for a 10,000-square-foot gathering place. Plans for a school, pool and cemetery are expected to take years to complete.
But the vision of a large-scale complex has caused consternation among locals.
"What I sense is a certain amount of fear fueling the animosity," said Jim Daniel, a former county commissioner and former county Republican Party chairman, sitting down for lunch one day last week at City Cafe. Residents worry that "the Muslims coming in here will keep growing in numbers and override our system of law and impose sharia law," the strict code of conduct based on the Koran.
Daniel and his dining partner -- the local Democratic Party chairman, Jonathon Fagan, 32 -- say they're uneasy about the proposal but agree that Rutherford County followed the law when it approved the plans for the Islamic Center in May.
"We have to allow them freedom of religion," Fagan said with a tight smile. "It takes courage to live in a free country. We have to have the courage to do that, even if we don't agree with it."
The man leading the fight against the mosque is a stocky 44-year-old correctional officer named Kevin Fisher. After he heard about the proposal, he voiced his opposition with an op-ed in the town's alternative weekly.
Fisher spent his formative years in Buffalo, where a homegrown terrorist cell of Yemeni Americans was uncovered in 2002. Its presence in a place so familiar haunts Fisher to this day, he said. He is well aware that clerics at U.S. mosques have been accused of espousing radical views in the years before and after Sept. 11.
And he pointed out that one of the Murfreesboro mosque's board members was suspended after the discovery of a MySpace page where he had posted Arabic poetry and a photo of the founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas. Leaders of the mosque said their internal investigation showed no wrongdoing, and they are cooperating with federal authorities looking into the matter.
"So many things about Islam are disconcerting," Fisher said. "As they get bigger, there will be concerns about the ideology, what they preach and what they believe."
Fisher, who is African American, chafes when the mosque's supporters "dial up the rhetoric from the '60s" to attack opponents by accusing them of bigotry against Muslims.
"It's offensive to me," he said. His stepmother "was dragged off restaurant stools in the 1960s and has cigarette burns in her arm. That's discrimination." Town square showdown
One recent hot day, the two sides met at a protest rally in the Murfreesboro town square. Opponents of the mosque marched, prayed and sang "God Bless America." They were greeted by a line of counter-protesters with peace signs. Fingers pointed. Words flew.
About 1,000 people were there, and afterward, one of them, Sherry McLain, told a local radio station that she was worried about plans that had surfaced this spring for new Islamic centers in her town and two nearby communities.
"That frightens me," she said. "Something's going on, and I don't like it. We're at war with these people."
Fisher said the protest was a "a beautiful example of our democracy at work." But Lema Sbenaty, Saleh's 19-year-old daughter and an MTSU student, didn't see it that way.
"I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that," she said later. "You could see the hatred in their eyes."
On Friday night, Lema and her mother, Fetoun, 47, a preschool teacher, gathered with about 200 others at the existing Islamic Center for iftar, the feasts held during the holy month of Ramadan to break the daily sunrise-to-sunset fasting.
The mosque, housed in a low-slung office building, is divided into two suites, one for men and one for women. In the women's room, about 35 women listened to prayers via closed-circuit TV streaming from the men's side and then sat cross-legged on the floor for a dinner of rice and lamb with yogurt sauce. One of the men had pulled his Dodge Ram truck up to the door of the mosque and cooked the lamb -- butchered according to halal guidelines -- in a huge pot just outside.
As dozens of children played, Lema, Fetoun and the others said they were dismayed that their hopes for a larger worship space had garnered such negative attention nationally. They said they hoped it would be resolved peacefully and soon.
"God will decide," Fetoun Sbenaty said. "It's his house."
Many possible Israeli concessions would be suicidal
By George F. Will The Washington Post Sunday, August 22, 2010; A15
JERUSALEM 'Twas a famous victory for diplomacy when, in 1991 in Madrid, Israelis and Palestinians, orchestrated by the United States, at last engaged in direct negotiations. Almost a generation later, U.S. policy has succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their recent insistence on "proximity talks" -- in which they have talked to the Israelis through American intermediaries -- and to direct negotiations. But negotiations about what?
Idle talk about a "binational state" has long since died. Even disregarding the recent fates of multinational states -- e.g., the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia -- binationalism is impossible if Israel is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. No significant Israeli constituency disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: "The Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders."
Rhetoric about a "two-state solution" is de rigueur. It also is delusional, given two recent, searing experiences.
The only place for a Palestinian state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied -- legally under international law -- since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. Michael Oren, now Israel's ambassador to the United States, said several years before becoming ambassador:
"There is no Israeli leadership that appears either willing or capable of removing 100,000 Israelis from their West Bank homes. . . . The evacuation of a mere 8,100 Israelis from Gaza in 2005 required 55,000 IDF [Israel Defense Forces] troops -- the largest Israeli military operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War -- and was profoundly traumatic."
Twenty-one Israeli settlements were dismantled; even the bodies of Israelis buried in Gaza were removed. After a deeply flawed 2006 election encouraged by the United States, there was in 2007 essentially a coup in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. So now Israel has on its western border, 44 miles from Tel Aviv, an entity dedicated to Israel's destruction, collaborative with Iran and possessing a huge arsenal of rockets.
Rocket attacks from Gaza increased dramatically after Israel withdrew. The number of U.N. resolutions deploring this? Zero.
The closest precedent for that bombardment was the Nazi rocket attacks on London, which were answered by the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other German cities. When Israel struck back at Hamas, the "international community" was theatrically appalled.
A senior cabinet member -- Moshe Yaalon, strategic affairs minister and possible future prime minister -- says "our withdrawals strengthened jihadist Islam," adding, "We have the second Islamic republic in the Middle East -- the first in Iran, the second in Gaza: Hamastan."
Israel's withdrawals include the one that strengthened the Iranian client on Israel's northern border, in southern Lebanon. Since the 2006 war provoked by Hezbollah's incessant rocketing of northern Israel, Hezbollah has rearmed and possesses as many as 60,000 rockets. Today, Netanyahu says, Israel's problem is less the Israel-Lebanon border than it is the Lebanon-Syria border: Hezbollah has received from Syria -- which gets them from Iran -- Scud missiles capable of striking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. A leader of Hezbollah says, "If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."
Because upward of a million immigrants have come from the former Soviet Union, today one-sixth of Israelis speak Russian. Israel has Russian-language newspapers and television. Russian Israelis are largely responsible for Avigdor Lieberman being foreign minister. Yoram Peri, professor of Israel studies at the University of Maryland, says these immigrants "don't understand how a state that can be crossed in half an hour by car would be willing to even talk about relinquishing territories to its seemingly perpetual enemies." These immigrants know that Russia's strategic depth -- space -- defeated Napoleon and Hitler.
Netanyahu, who is not the most conservative member of the coalition government he heads, endorses a two-state solution but says that any West Bank Palestinian state must be demilitarized and prevented from making agreements with the likes of Hezbollah and Iran. To prevent the importation of missiles and other arms, Israel would need, Netanyahu says, a military presence on the West Bank's eastern border with Jordan. Otherwise, there will be a third Islamic republic, and a second one contiguous to Israel.
