Washington News Review

The coming debate over American ‘strength’ abroad

2012-01-25T21:36:00.000-05:00

By David Ignatius, Wednesday, January 25, 7:36 PM
The Washington Post

The foreign-policy theme that should dominate this year’s presidential campaign is “American renewal.” Each candidate claims to have a strategy for halting the nation’s decline, but their versions often amount to “more of the same” — which ain’t gonna work.

For a bracing discussion of what a revival of U.S. power would actually require over the next few decades, I recommend a new book, “Strategic Vision” by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Though he worked for a president who came to symbolize U.S. “malaise” in the late 1970s, Brzezinski has always been on the hawkish, “realist” side of his party, and in this book, he is especially critical of status-quo policies.

A wake-up line in Brzezinski’s book is that there are “alarming similarities” between America today and the Soviet Union just prior to its fall, including a “gridlocked governmental system incapable of enacting serious policy revisions,” a back-breaking military budget and a failing “decade-long attempt to conquer Afghanistan.”

The gist of Brzezinski’s strategy is that America must become strong enough to act as “a responsible partner to the rising and increasingly assertive East.” He sees a future U.S. role as a “balancer” and “conciliator” among Asian nations that, left to themselves, will get into messy fights.

To achieve this revival, Brzezinski argues that the United States needs to work closely with a democratizing Russia and Turkey (assuming they continue on that path) to build what he calls a “larger West.” If the United States tries too boldly to go it alone or too meekly to accommodate the rising powers, it’s headed for trouble.

Here we come to the heart of the political debate in this presidential campaign: What does American “strength” mean in the 21st century? Is it a recovery of the kind of power and prerogative the United States had, say, in the Ronald Reagan years? Or is it something more aligned with changes in the global balance? Brzezinski would favor the latter, but let’s look at what the candidates are saying.

In every GOP debate, you hear insistent calls for a restoration of U.S. power from the front-runners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. They evoke a lost Arcadia and suggest that the United States can reclaim its exceptional status as a “city on a hill,” towering above other nations.

The specific GOP prescriptions mostly involve muscle-flexing: more military pressure on Iran; more CIA covert action against Iran, Syria and other rivals; tougher trade policies toward China. The implicit theme is that President Obama’s efforts to mend fences with allies and work through the United Nations are signs of weakness — and that a strong America must lead from the front.

The problem with the GOP version is that America is already muscle-bound to a fault. To exercise power effectively, it needs good allies. If Brzezinski is right and a “larger West” requires cooperation with Russia and Turkey, then some of the GOP rhetoric about exceptionalism is counterproductive — little more than vain boasting. Obama has actually begun the job of cultivating these new partners, with his 2009 “Russia reset” and his patient diplomacy with Turkey.

The GOP candidates sometimes seem disdainful of global realpolitik, and they voice the romantic, go-it-alone ethos of the neoconservative wing of the party. Romney, for example, dismissed the idea of negotiating peace with the Taliban — a position even some of his own advisers reject. On the Middle East, Gingrich disdains the two-state solution that every other major nation (including Israel) favors — calling the Palestinians an “invented” people who, presumably, don’t deserve a state. That kind of rhetoric is so far outside the mainstream that it’s the strategic equivalent of walking off the plank.

As for Obama’s strategic vision, he talks a better game than he plays. He understands that the U.S. economy needs rebuilding, but despite the ringing agenda he laid out once more in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, he hasn’t enacted the strong policies that would deal with debt, decaying infrastructure and bad public education.

Blaming congressional deadlock isn’t a strategy, it’s an excuse. Obama was elected to make government work again. If he can’t do it, someone else should try.

A similar criticism applies to Obama’s foreign policy. He raised hopes at home and abroad because he proposed to resolve festering problems, such as the Palestinian issue. In reality, he flopped. His Afghanistan policy is a muddle, and that’s being charitable. In this campaign, Obama needs to explain how he will lead America past the old slogans and status-quo policies into an era of genuine national revival.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Economic Potholes Add Dangers on Egypt’s New Political Path

2012-01-25T21:26:00.000-05:00

January 24, 2012
NYT
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL SHEIKH

CAIRO — After a year of unending turmoil and military rule, Egypt faces an acute financial crisis that could undermine its political transition and pose a defining challenge to Islamists now coming to power.

With mounting debts, negligible economic growth and dwindling foreign reserves, the military rulers and the new Islamist-led Parliament now confront some difficult choices, beginning with an all but inevitable further devaluation of Egypt’s currency that could send the prices of food and other goods soaring.

The government may also soon be forced to overhaul the vast system of energy subsidies that now account for a fifth of government spending. Increases in food prices and reductions of subsidies have provoked riots here in the past.

“The situation is dire,” said Magda Kandil, executive director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, who called some of the recent indicators “alarming.”

In a sign of the situation’s severity, the ruling military council last week reversed itself and reopened talks with the International Monetary Fund over the terms of a $3.2 billion loan. The generals previously rejected the same deal as an affront to national sovereignty, but officials of the military-led government now say they may seek an even larger loan.

Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood, the long-outlawed Islamist group that controls half the seats in the new Parliament, also indicated its openness to the financial lifeline in its separate meeting with the I.M.F. representatives — an even more stunning reversal after eight decades of denouncing Western colonialism and Arab dependency.

Leaders of the Brotherhood readily acknowledge that steering Egypt through the crisis will be a formative test of their ability to govern. Activists focused on forcing Egypt’s military rulers to give up power, meanwhile, say the economic malaise has become a major obstacle to their cause because so many Egyptians have come to crave a return to stability.

Others note with dismay that the bread-and-butter frustrations that helped fuel the protests that ousted President Hosni Mubarak one year ago have grown only more acute since then, especially for the legions of jobless or underemployed young people.

Nowhere is the economic distress more evident than in the business of Egyptian weddings, which are a costly rite of passage here that marks the graduation into adult life and which generate revenue that rivals the annual American aid budget for Egypt.

In one hard-pressed Cairo neighborhood, wedding planners say couples have cut back on events that may have cost $300 before the revolution because they can now pay only about $100. Jewelry stores say the average amount that grooms spend on the traditional gifts of gold for their brides has fallen sharply, and disc jockeys say they now perform at just 2 or 3 weddings a month, down from an average of 10 before the revolution.

“Nobody is getting married after the revolution,” said Amr el-Khodary, 37, who was forced to close his shop that rents cars for wedding parades.

Ibrahim Mohamed, a 26-year-old cab driver with a college degree, is a case in point. A steep decline in fares, he said, has prevented him from saving up the roughly $7,000 for an apartment, furniture, a small wedding and the customary gift of jewelry that he says he needs to marry.

“If it weren’t for the revolution,” he said, “I would have been able to get married.”

The reasons for his plight have been piling up all year: a virtual cutoff of foreign investment, a 30 percent decline in tourist visits and the stagnation of economic growth. The official unemployment rate is 12 percent, but among young people the real rate of unemployment is at least double that figure.

The military rulers have also presided over a period of financial turmoil. Inflation has surged into double digits, and the exchange rate for the currency, the Egyptian pound, is under heavy pressure. Foreign exchange reserves have plunged, as the government is spending about $2 billion a month in a losing battle to prop up the pound. Foreign currency reserves have fallen to about $10 billion, after certain obligations, from about $36 billion before the revolt.

Economists say Egypt’s military rulers contributed to the strain by shunning the planned loan from the I.M.F. last June, when it could have provided badly needed hard currency and a financial seal of approval that might have helped reassure foreign investors and aid donors.

Instead, the ruling military council has tried to sustain the government’s growing deficits by borrowing internally, while businesses struggle to get the loans they need to expand and revive the economy.

Now the military government appears to have used up its domestic sources as well. On Monday, the government managed to sell Egyptian banks only about a third of a planned bond offering valued at $580 million, even at yields that reached a new peak of nearly 16 percent.

“Continued borrowing from the domestic markets is a bankrupt policy, literally,” said Ragui Assaad, an Egyptian economist at the University of Minnesota who is now in Cairo.

Even with new sources of foreign currency from the I.M.F., he said, Egypt would soon be forced to capitulate to a further decline in the exchange rate — gradually, if the government is lucky.

“Of course it is going to hurt,” Mr. Assaad said. “But there is going to be no choice but to devalue the currency.”

Fears of runaway inflation are already acute. “Nobody puts their money in the bank because they are afraid it won’t be worth anything later,” said Hamdy Shaaban, 40, a mechanic. “Why would I put money in a bank? I don’t know what is going to happen next.”

But the other solution that many economists favor — overhauling the policies that have Egypt spending more than $15 billion a year on energy subsidies — appears for now to be politically impossible. It is a regressive system that most benefits those who drive sport utility vehicles and live in air-conditioned villas, and other countries with similar systems have successfully replaced them with more targeted subsidies for the needy.

But most Egyptians cherish the subsidy as a birthright, and few believe that the transitional government has the credibility or legitimacy to push through a major change. “Someone has to be able to convince people that they are going to get compensated,” Mr. Assaad said.

Still, many economists contend that Egypt can navigate around a potential collapse. They note that the military-led government has recently announced plans to trim nearly $4 billion from the yawning deficit of over $30 billion, or more than 10 percent of gross domestic product. Among other things, it has begun to trim the energy subsidies to heavy industry, perhaps in preparation for changes the monetary fund might require.

In addition, Ahmed Galal, managing director of the Economic Research Forum, based in Cairo, said economists were increasingly optimistic about the policies of the Muslim Brotherhood. The group has made it clear that it supports free markets, and it has already begun talking about the urgency of subsidy reform. Its lawmakers began drawing up proposals to tackle the issue when they were members of the opposition minority under Mr. Mubarak.

“These guys want to succeed,” Mr. Galal said of the Brotherhood’s lawmakers. “They are really singing songs that are quite moderate, quite civic, quite inclusive, and they are looking at countries like Turkey rather than Iran or Afghanistan.”

Five myths about the Arab Spring

2012-01-15T06:25:00.000-05:00

By Fouad Ajami, Published: January 12 2012

1. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech helped inspire the Arab Spring.

Nothing could be further from the truth. By the time of these rebellions, the Arab and Muslim romance with President Obama had long vanished. He had gone to Cairo in June 2009 promising a new American approach to the Arab-Muslim world. But embattled liberals in the Arab world (and in Iran) had already begun to see through him. While Obama pledged “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” Arabs saw the new American leader’s ease with the status quo.

Obama set out to repair America’s relations with Syria and Iran, and gave George W. Bush’s “diplomacy of freedom” a quick burial. “Ideology . . . is so yesterday,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bluntly proclaimed in April 2009, identifying Bush’s assertive foreign policy as a thing of the past. But as upheaval swept through Iran in the first summer of the Obama presidency, the self-styled bearer of a new American diplomacy ducked for cover.

The Arabs nearby were quick to see that Obama’s cosmopolitanism — the Kenyan father, the years in Indonesia — masked a political man focused on problems at home. The rebels in Tunisia and Egypt did not expect the U.S. cavalry to ride to the rescue. Even when the rescue mission for the Libyans came, it was late, and the push was from Paris and London, not Washington.

2. These are Facebook and Twitter revolutions.

Facebook and Twitter enabled young dissidents to get around entrenched autocracies and communicate with one another. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who was the face of the revolt in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, what was next after Hosni Mubarak fell, Ghonim replied: “Ask Facebook.” But it was ordinary men and women who sacked the pharaoh.

These rebellions have been fueled by traditional sparks: crowds coming out of mosques after Friday prayers in the embattled cities of Syria; the test of wills between brutal regimes and those brave enough to challenge them; and young people in Daraa, Homs and Hama conquering the culture of fear and taking on despotism.

Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian street vendorwho set himself ablaze in December 2010, didn’t have a Facebook page. He had a sense of righteous anger and despair. We should rein in the technophilia: Internet penetration in the Arab world is still modest.

3. The Obama administration threw Hosni Mubarak under the bus.

The Egyptian president was the author of his own demise. Washington had assumed that Mubarak would ride out the storm. As Egyptians came together to topple the dictatorship, the Obama administration was hobbled by confusion, expressing a presumptuous intimacy with the man while most Egyptians had nothing but contempt for him. Mubarak had long been the pillar of America’s relations with the Arab world. Remember that just a few weeks before he fell, Clinton said that the Egyptian regime was “stable.”

America should not write itself into every story: There are forces in distant nations that we can neither ride nor extinguish. Egypt, a patient land, had given Mubarak three decades. In return, the ruler toyed with his people and belittled them. He sat at the apex of a lawless regime and never designated a legitimate successor. (Even the most obtuse could see that he intended to bequeath power to his pampered son.) He had risen out of the armed forces, and the officer corps came to see that dynastic ambition as a brazen affront. In this Egyptian drama, those at the White House and in Foggy Bottom were mere spectators.

4. Saddam Hussein’s fall in Iraq inspired the Arab Spring.

Having supported the Iraq war, I would love to make this connection. But Iraq, contrary to the hopes and assertions of conservative proponents of the war, is not relevant to the Arab Spring.

When the protests began in late 2010, Iraq no longer held the Arab world’s attention. There was bloodshed in Iraq’s streets, there was sectarianism, and few Arabs could consider Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki a standard-bearer of a new political culture. The Iraqi story was burdened with two handicaps: The despotism had been decapitated by American power, so it was not a homegrown liberation. And the new Iraqi order had empowered the Shiite majority. The Sunni “Arab street” was not enamored of the political change in Iraq; it had passionately opposed the American war and had no use for Baghdad’s new Shiite leaders.

Tahrir Square inspired other uprisings because Egypt is the trendsetter in Arab political and cultural life. Iraq is a place all its own; very few, if any, Arabs elsewhere can relate to the upheaval in that country.

5. The rebellions will further damage prospects for the Arab-Israeli peace process.

It’s true that hooligans overran the Israeli Embassy in Cairo after Mubarak’s fall. But Arab-Israeli accommodation hardly flourished in the time of the dictators. Despite a peace treaty that was the precondition of American patronage of his regime, Mubarak kept Israel at arm’s length. During his three decades in power, he went to Israel once — to attend the funeral of the slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Mubarak’s reign was an incendiary mix of anti-modernism, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. The 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt was kept, but it was a cold peace with no intimacy between the two countries.

And no praise ought to be showered on the kind of “peace” that Damascus has observed with Israel since the 1973 October War. The Syrian-Israeli border has been quiet, but Syria has had the Lebanon-Israel border from which to harass the Jewish state. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s recent statement that the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime would be “a blessing for the Middle East” is on the mark.

The leaders of the Arab rebellions may not be fervent, public advocates of peace with Israel, but they have emerged out of the recognition that the dictatorships used the conflict with Israel as a convenient alibi for their own political and economic failures. Does anyone truly believe that the people of Homs dread Israel more than Assad’s tyranny?

outlook@washpost.com

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and co-chair of Hoover’s Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free

2012-01-14T11:53:00.000-05:00

By Jonathan Turley, Published: January 13 2012
The Washington Post

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens

President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)

Indefinite detention

Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. While the administration claims that this provision only codified existing law, experts widely contest this view, and the administration has opposed efforts to challenge such authority in federal courts. The government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)

Arbitrary justice

The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)

Warrantless searches

The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)

Secret evidence

The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. In addition, some cases never make it to court at all. The federal courts routinely deny constitutional challenges to policies and programs under a narrow definition of standing to bring a case.

War crimes

The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. When courts in countries such as Spain moved to investigate Bush officials for war crimes, the Obama administration reportedly urged foreign officials not to allow such cases to proceed, despite the fact that the United States has long claimed the same authority with regard to alleged war criminals in other countries. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)

Secret court

The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)

Immunity from judicial review

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)

Continual monitoring of citizens

The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)

Extraordinary renditions

The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens.

These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy.

Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, terrorism will never “surrender” and end this particular “war.”

Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: “That is a decision which we leave where it belongs — in the executive branch.”

And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he does not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat.

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.

Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

Muslim Brotherhood offered assurances on treaty, State Dept. says

2012-01-07T11:03:00.002-05:00

January 6, 2012

(JTA) -- The Muslim Brotherhood assured the United States it would not break Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, according to the U.S. State Department.

A State Department spokesperson said Thursday that the Islamist political party had offered assurances it would not break Egypt's 1979 accord with Israel, despite statements to the contrary by a party leader.

"We have had other assurances from the party with regard to their commitment not only to universal human rights, but to the international obligations that the government of Egypt has understaken," Victoria Nuland told reporters in Washington.

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's departure from power has raised concerns that political reform in the Arab world's most populous country could lead to the emergence of a hostile regime that would depart from its historic peace accord with the Jewish state.

In an interview published Sunday, Rashad Bayoumi, the party's deputy leader, said the group will not recognize Israel "under any circumstance."

Asked about Bayoumi's comment, Nuland said he was but one member of the Muslim Brotherhood and that the party would be judged by what it does.

When China will overtake America

2012-01-03T08:12:00.000-05:00

Dec 27th 2011, 14:00 by The Economist online

‘US violating human rights at home and abroad’ – Russian report

2011-12-29T00:45:00.002-05:00

Robert Bridge, RT
Published: 28 December, 2011, 19:21
Edited: 28 December, 2011, 19:45

In a report released by the Foreign Ministry detailing human rights abuses around the world, the United States comes up short, cited for violations on both the domestic and foreign fronts.

The report says that the United States, on the pretext of fighting terrorism, is actually crushing the liberties and freedoms of the very individuals the security measures were intended to protect – the American people.

"The situation in the United States…is far from the ideals proclaimed in Washington," the report says. “The incumbent administration continues to apply most of the methods of controlling society and interfering in the private lives of the American people that were adopted by the special services under George Bush on the pretext of combating terror.”

On October 26, 2001, a little over one month after the terror attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration rammed through the so-called Patriot Act, which many Congressmen admitted they did not have the time to read. Since the ratification of this draconian piece of legislation, the US government has been empowered to sift through emails, telephone calls – even the library books an individual may check out – all in the name of fighting against terrorism.

The Foreign Ministry also noted that the White House and the Department of Justice "shelter from liability CIS operatives and high-ranking officials" connected with serious violations of human rights.

In 2007, the International Red Cross released a shocking report, based on numerous interviews with detainees of Guantanamo Bay detention center, which revealed the existence of “black site” prisons at various locations in Eastern Europe.

In December 2005, Dick Marty, the Swiss politician responsible for investigating the allegations on behalf of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, reported evidence that "individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal standards." Marty’s investigation has found no concrete evidence establishing the existence of secret prisons in Europe, but added that it was "highly unlikely" that European governments were unaware of the American program of renditions.

In June 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe supported the conclusions of the report by Dick Marty (Resolution 1562 and Recommendation 1801).

The Russian Foreign Ministry report went on to condemn “the exterritorial application of US legislation by the US administration,” which “seriously harms Russian-US relations,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in its report.

"It leads to violations of the basic rights and freedoms of Russians, including arbitrary arrests and abductions from third countries, cruel treatment, criminal prosecution on the basis of evidence given by false agents and doubtful evidence," the document reads, citing as examples the cases involving Russian citizens Viktor Bout and Konstantin Yaroshenko.

Viktor Bout was arrested in Thailand in 2008 by US and Thai police and extradited in 2010 to the United States to stand trial on charges of arms smuggling. Bout, who is currently incarcerated in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York City, says he has no hope for receiving a fair trial in the United States.

In 2005, Hollywood released the film Lord of War starring Nicolas Cage, which portrays a character based on the 'life' of Viktor Bout.

Bout continues to maintain his innocence.
NATO – force for good?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which the United States is the primary sponsor, also fared poorly in the Foreign Ministry report.

According to the document, NATO forces repeatedly violated humanitarian law in Libya by killing civilians and failing to prevent numerous crimes by the Libyan opposition. The statistics presented on civilian casualties provide a portrait of a military operation that was reckless at best.

"According to various information, intensive bombardment in the first days of the campaign (and even before the operation was headed by NATO) led to the deaths of civilians: from 64 to 90 civilians, including up to 40 people in Tripoli, and 150 were wounded. On May 13, 13 imams were killed and 50 imams were wounded during a collective prayer in the city of Brega. Nine people were killed during the bombing of Tripoli on June 19. Fifteen people, including three children, were killed as a result of NATO bombing on June 20," the report says.

Meanwhile, NATO officials ignored crimes committed by the Libyan opposition, the report says.

"NATO did not take any effective measures on the numerous crimes committed by the former Libyan armed opposition registered by international human rights NGOs, including killings, violence, ethnic crimes, etc., which essentially promoted such actions taken by the rebels," the report by the Russian Foreign Ministry says.

The document emphasizes that NATO denies that the death of civilians was a result of the bombing carried out by the coalition forces at the official level.

"They are saying that the targets for the bombing were thoroughly selected to rule out civilian casualties. They said, referring to NATO’s support of the Interim National Council, that there would have been much more casualties if it had not been for NATO," the report says.

NATO defended reports on civilian casualties due to NATO actions solely as propaganda put out by the Gaddafi regime, the report adds. Eyewitness testimony, however, as well as media reports, contradicts these statements.

"Various evidence provided by eyewitnesses and media (and in some cases even pro-NATO media publications) indicates that a considerable part of this information is true," the report says.

The report also states that members of the previous Libyan government and its supporters were killed without due process of a court hearing; all the opposition required was the tacit consent of NATO.

Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was captured alive on October 20, 2011 in his hometown of Sirte by members of the Libyan National Liberation Army after his convoy was attacked by NATO warplanes. Despite being taken alive, Gaddafi was beaten and killed by his captors.
US democracy – not so perfect

The report went on to criticize the United States for what it sees as a faulty democratic system of elections, which increasingly lacks representation from third party candidates.

"Human rights activists are concerned by the fact that independent candidates are barred from elections and electoral offices,” the report said, while going on to mention the “practice of appointing senators by governors in case of offices becoming vacant early,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in its first annual report on human rights.

The report mentioned the case of Rod Blagojevich, the former Governor of Illinois, who was found guilty of trying to sell the vacated senatorial seat of Barack Obama.

"Curious in this context is the case of former Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich, who in fact attempted to sell the seat of a senator from that state, which became vacant after Barack Obama was elected president of the US," the report says.

The ministry document also aired concerns about the condition of freedom of speech in the United States.

"The US Congress has been unable…to pass legislation entitling journalists to keep their sources secret (except for certain situations when a court acknowledges disclosure of information necessary).”

The Russian report on human rights also mentioned the increasing frequency of US journalists losing their jobs due to uttering what is determined to be “politically incorrect” remarks, which the authors of the report suggest is just another form of media censorship.

Recently, two American journalists – 44-year-old senior CNN Middle East editor Octavia Nasr and 89-year-old White House correspondent Helen Thomas – lost their jobs due to “slips of the tongue,” which seems to be a one-way ticket to an early retirement in the world of US journalism these days.

Thomas, who had been part of the White House Press Corps since the Eisenhower administration, was forced to retire for telling a rabbi in May 2010 that Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine."

Octavia, who had worked at CNN for 20 years, was fired immediately after she posted a Twitter message expressing admiration for Lebanon's Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Faldlallah, who passed away last July.

A Reform Agenda for Arab Economies

2011-12-27T08:34:00.002-05:00

Interviewee:
Manuela V. Ferro, Director, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management for the Middle East and North Africa, World Bank
Interviewer:
Jonathan Masters, Associate Staff Writer, CFR.org

December 22, 2011

ManuelaEconomic challenges are central to the political transformations sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Arab governments--some of them fragile democracies--need to tackle corruption, slow growth, inequity, and unemployment that helped arouse protest movements. Manuela V. Ferro, a World Bank expert on Arab economies, says the region faces significant difficulties in the near term, including reductions in trade, tourism, and foreign investment. Governments intent on reform, she adds, must strive for an economic recovery with "visible benefits to all citizens," and focus on fiscal sustainability, job creation, and protecting the poor.

We're just over a year out from the start of the Arab Spring. What are the economic prospects for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)?

Political events in 2011--revolutions and evolutions--in several countries have created opportunities for more open societies and inclusive growth. However, there are also short-term consequences on economic performance; we saw tourism, trade, investment, and in some countries, remittances have also slowed down. Tourism, which comprises 4 and 6 percent of Egypt and Tunisia's GDP, respectively, contracted significantly following revolutions. Yet this labor-intensive sector is a major source of foreign exchange for several countries; in Egypt tourism revenues were the second-largest source of foreign exchange earnings in FY2010. The region has witnessed foreign direct investment (FDI) declines in a number of countries.

In several countries (in particular non-oil exporters - Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen), while the medium-term economic and social outlook remains promising, near-term growth prospects are weaker than a year ago. This is especially the case in countries where there is significant uncertainty about the length, nature, and direction of transition.

It is against this backdrop of economic vulnerability in several MENA countries that the eurozone crisis is hitting. So far, domestic and regional events are still dominating the economic outlook for most countries in the MENA region. Economic and social challenges in MENA are unrelated to the Eurozone crisis, but could be exacerbated by it.

What are the biggest challenges these countries face, from an economic standpoint, during these transitions? And what are some of the basic reforms that are necessary?

Governments need to ensure that economic and social policies support a strong economic recovery with visible benefits to all citizens, not just those politically connected. This means that economic governance policies that ensure a level-playing field will need to play a much greater role than they have in the past.

Many (non-oil exporting) countries in the region had an acceptable--though not stellar--economic performance during the last decade: about 3-4 percent growth per year. Creating the fifty to seventy million jobs needed to reduce unemployment will require three things:

First, ensuring economic stability and fiscal sustainability in the context of increased social pressures and rising borrowing costs.

Second, supporting job creation through a more vibrant private sector, in particular by integrating MENA countries more fully in the world economy. Until now, MENA has been one of the least integrated regions in the world. Looking forward, economic integration through greater trade and investment is an overarching development strategy that can do for the MENA region what it did before for Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and other emerging trading partners that are now sustainable growth paths.

Governments need to ensure that economic and social policies support a strong economic recovery with visible benefits to all citizens, not just those politically connected.

Third, protect the poor through more effective, much better targeted social protection. MENA countries have long had redistributive policies through subsidies and public employment programs. MENA countries have operated extensive subsidy systems--for energy, water and food--for the past forty years, which have totaled more than $50 billion for the region as a whole. These systems are inefficient and do not provide an effective mechanism to help households cope with temporary shocks or move out of poverty.

The concerns are very different as you move from the short term, to medium term, and then to the long-term structural problems. Could you talk a bit about the various challenges along this timeline?

Policies that make sense in the short run should also make sense in the long run. There is a question of sequencing, yes, but thinking exclusively of the short run is likely to be detrimental.

For instance, the Tunisian transition government introduced a set of measures to signal a clear break from the past and set the country on a new path. This included enhancing access to information to promote transparency; opening up access to the Internet; improving public procurement procedures; streamlining the regulatory burden faced by firms; introducing new rules for good governance in the banking sector; reforming the National Employment Fund and introducing new programs to better assist the unemployed. Because these reforms helped lay the foundations of a stronger, more open Tunisia, and set the country on a faster, more inclusive, development path, (the World Bank) supported the reforms introduced by the government with a development policy Loan, alongside other development partners.

Are there success stories from other parts of the world that can serve as a model for some of these transitioning Arab countries?

Eastern Europe benefited from a popular rejection of an economic model driven by central planning, by a supportive global economic environment, and by openings towards EU membership. In many Eastern European countries, there was an organized political leadership that adopted market-friendly policies. In Latin America there were many fits and starts, as might be the case in the Middle East and North Africa.

In East Asia, Indonesia offers an interesting example, as governance and economic reforms led to a vibrant, dynamic economy. Each of these experiences offers lessons for MENA. But there is no clear-cut model that applies directly. Each transition happens in a particular context, with particular initial conditions. The path is rarely straight, and we must be prepared for potentially long transitions.

What is the best policy for these countries as they navigate the financial straits of transition?

Different countries in transition face different economic stresses, and will find their own way to address financing needs. Egypt, like other countries in the region undergoing a political transition, is managing a fast-evolving situation, now made more difficult by a global economy that is itself in a dangerous phase. Egyptian authorities have taken some steps recently to address foreign exchange needs. For instance, they auctioned dollar-denominated treasury bills, perhaps part of a strategy to diversify funding away from local sources.

[E]conomic integration through greater trade and investment is an overarching development strategy that can do for the region what it did before for Central and Eastern Europe, and East Asia.

Perhaps for historical reasons, there is a perception in some quarters in Egypt that external debt is at dangerously high levels. In fact, much of Egypt's debt is domestic; the composition and small size of Egypt's external debt makes it relatively resilient to external shocks.

Given that domestic borrowing costs are running at double digits and that public sector borrowing needs are high and could be crowding out the Egyptian private sector, the authorities have remained engaged with potential sources of external finance.

High unemployment, particularly among the youth, is a persistent problem in the region. What steps need to be taken to address this?

What we have heard from young people is that they want jobs, social justice, and dignity. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the social contract--and the economic model that underpinned it--became increasingly strained, in particular in non-oil producing countries. Governments became gradually unable to continue employing people.

The private sector was unable to absorb labor because of the rapidly growing youth population and government policies that limited entry of new firms but protected those that were politically connected. In some countries, education was increasingly unable to provide the skills for a modern private sector, and labor productivity was low. For non-oil producers, the subsidy bill became difficult to uphold because of unprecedented high prices of fuel and food.

With relatively high rates of unemployment around 10 percent and youth unemployment at 24 percent for the MENA region, approximately forty-eight million jobs will have to be created in the coming decade. Women face even higher rates of unemployment.

Only a dynamic and growing private sector can create jobs at a rate that keeps pace with this growing and increasingly young population. The public sector can help in the short run, but short-term jobs programs cannot solve a structural unemployment challenge. Managing expectations of how fast the deficit of jobs can be addressed is critical.

*Editor's Note: This interview was conducted in writing.

Oil interests push China into Sudanese mire

2011-12-25T18:09:00.002-05:00

By Andrew Higgins, Published: December 24
The Washington Post

JUBA, South Sudan — At a restaurant along the River Nile offering crocodile and ostrich meat, officials of the world’s newest — and desperately destitute — nation hosted a lunch this month for Liu Guijin, China’s visiting envoy for African affairs.

Liu’s visit to Juba, the dirt-track capital of South Sudan, which split from Sudan in July, came at a tense time: Sudan had just bombed a refugee camp, armed militias were mining roads, and troops were clashing in disputed border areas.

The Chinese envoy, however, came here mainly to talk about oil.

The Chinese “are very worried,” said Stephen Dhieu Dau, South Sudan’s minister of petroleum and mining, who attended the lunch with Liu. “Their wish is to see the continuation of production and the flow of the crude. This is their concern.”

China, which gets nearly a third of its imported crude oil from Africa, has invested billions of dollars in the past 15 years to pump crude from this war-scarred land. But the division of what until five months ago was a united country has pushed Beijing into a political minefield in defense of its assets, straining China’s “just business” insistence that it doesn’t get involved in the internal affairs of foreign lands.

China’s involvement revolves largely around the interests of a single company, the China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, a state-owned giant that, in its quest to match the global reach of Western oil majors and to feed China’s appetite for fuel, has dragged usually risk-averse Chinese diplomats into one of Africa’s most poisonous feuds.

Across Africa, China is getting tugged into local affairs. In Zambia, China’s involvement in mining — and its close ties to the incumbent president — dominated a September presidential election. China’s man lost. A multibillion-dollar, energy-linked Chinese loan to Ghana caused political ructions there. Leaders in Chad, meanwhile, have been struggling in recent weeks to tamp down public anger over a sudden boost in the price of gasoline produced by a new CNPC refinery near the Chadian capital.

China’s entanglement in foreign nations’ quarrels, however, is perhaps deepest in the desert and bush that flank the Nile. Here, CNPC straddles both sides of a murderously volatile fault line: between Muslim Arabs in the north and black, often Christian Africans who inhabit the south.

Most of the oil lies in the landlocked south, but the only way to get it to market is through Chinese-built pipelines that pass through the north to a Chinese-built terminal on the Red Sea.

When CNPC first took a stake in oil fields here in 1996, China placed all its chips on a brutal regime in Khartoum, selling arms and providing diplomatic cover as President Omar Hassan al-Bashir battled to crush southern rebels. With these same rebels now running ministries in Juba, China is rushing to hedge its bets, offering Khartoum’s foes in the south a package of development aid and low-interest credit that hasn’t been announced but that officials here say could be worth as much as $10 billion.

“During the struggle of the people of South Sudan, China took the side of the government in Khartoum,” said Pagan Amum, the secretary-general of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, or SPLM, a rebel outfit during the civil war that is now South Sudan’s ruling party. “But that is history, a troubled history, and we will not allow ourselves to be hostages of the past.”

Amum, who got invited to China last month, said that he raised this “difficult past” during a banquet in Beijing at the corporate headquarters of CNPC and that he was assured that the company wants to “sort things out, to heal” and work closely with Juba.

Pursuit of energy

In the vanguard of China’s pursuit of energy and profit overseas, CNPC began looking abroad nearly two decades ago, just as Chinese industry’s appetite for oil started to overtake domestic production. Since then the company has invested in ventures from Peru and Venezuela to Iraq and Kazakhstan.

But nowhere has CNPC poured in so much money and caused itself — and the Chinese government — so many headaches as in Sudan.

China imported more than half the oil it consumed last year, with Africa its biggest source after the Middle East. The country’s largest African supplier by far was Angola, but most of that oil was simply purchased, not produced, by Chinese companies. In the Sudan region, by contrast, CNPC — the dominant partner in foreign consortiums operating there — actually pumped the oil from the ground.

Chinese customs figures show that China imported 92 million barrels of crude from Sudan last year — or 70 percent of Sudan’s total oil exports as reported by the then united country’s Central Bank.

CNPC, thanks in part to its expansion overseas, now ranks as one of the world’s biggest energy companies. Its listed subsidiary, PetroChina, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, has a market capitalization just behind that of ExxonMobil, America’s biggest oil company.

Though largely motivated by profit, CNPC won strong state support for its push into Sudan by presenting this and other investments abroad as a boost to China’s energy security: They reduce China’s dependence on Western oil majors that dominate production in Angola, Nigeria and elsewhere. But they’ve also left Beijing struggling to juggle often-irreconcilable interests.

“They want to be close to us and close to Khartoum. But Jesus said you cannot serve two masters,” said Dau, South Sudan’s petroleum minister. “They have to make a choice. They have to be honest and say who is right. That is what the Bible says.”

China has tried to stay neutral but gets sniped at by both sides. “It’s a dilemma for China,” said Cui Shoujun, director of the International Energy Research Center at Renmin University in Beijing. China “tries to balance the south and the north but hasn’t come up with an effective way to do this.”

Amid escalating tension across a new international border, Amum, the head of South Sudan’s ruling party, traveled to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, last month for talks with officials from Khartoum on pipeline tariffs and other issues. The African Union mediated the negotiations, but China played an active role behind the scenes trying to calm tempers.

When discussions broke down and Sudan threatened to disrupt pipeline deliveries, Amum got a call on his cellphone from China’s ambassador in Juba. The ambassador, Amum said, “is very powerful” and wanted to ensure that oil keeps flowing.

“We talked about threats to our national interest and their national interests,” Amum said.

The Chinese Embassy declined to comment. The Foreign Ministry in Beijing then issued a stern public warning that “China thinks it is crucially important . . . to keep normal oil production.”

Sudan, though a close friend of Beijing for years, still held up China-destined oil shipments for several days. Liu, China’s Africa envoy, rushed to Juba and then Khartoum, warning that oil has to keep flowing “because the consequences of stopping . . . will be disastrous to everyone.” Oil tankers are now being loaded normally again, but the underlying dispute is far from solved.

As the talks with Khartoum collapsed, South Sudan’s Petroleum Ministry summoned CNPC and its partners from Malaysia and India to a shabby hotel conference room in Juba to confront another nettlesome issue: the rewriting of oil contracts.

The ministry says it doesn’t want the companies to suffer financially but does want them to pay attention to matters that the old, Khartoum-drafted contracts largely ignored: protection of the environment, respect for human rights and social responsibility. CNPC officials in Juba, citing the sensitivity of the talks, declined to comment.

Western firms retreat

The deals South Sudan wants reworked date to when CNPC first plunged into Sudan, taking over fields originally developed by the U.S. company Chevron, which, alarmed by mounting violence, had pulled out. Shortly after this, Washington in 1997 imposed economic sanctions on Sudan, which it declared as a “sponsor of terrorism and a relentless oppressor of its minority Christian population.”

As Western companies retreated, CNPC advanced, boosting production and investing in a pipeline to the Red Sea that, in 1999, allowed the first oil exports from Sudan.

Stories spread of atrocities linked to CNPC’s oil wells, including accounts of Chinese-supplied helicopters gunning down villagers as the Sudanese military moved in to clear and secure oil-producing areas. Not all of the accounts were true, but CNPC, steeped in the secretive ways of China’s ruling Communist Party, which appoints the company’s boss, mostly ignored pleas from outsiders for information and access.

By the time Sudan and southern rebels signed a peace accord in 2005 to end Africa’s longest civil war, “China was the devil in the minds of many people here,” said Alfred Sebit Lokuji, an expert in local development at Juba University.

China also came under withering fire from Western human rights activists, who accused it of complicity in Khartoum’s depredations in the western Darfur region and in the south. They called on investors to boycott PetroChina, CNPC’s listed subsidiary, and dubbed the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing “the genocide games.”

When the International Criminal Court in The Hague indicted Bashir on war-crimes charges in Darfur in 2009, Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee and a former CNPC boss who had led the company’s 1990s expansion into Sudan, visited Khartoum to attend the opening of a Chinese-built refinery. He declared himself an “old friend of the Sudanese president.”

Amum, the SPLM secretary-general, said he was assured by CNPC’s boss, Jiang Jiemin, during his trip to Beijing that “if anything bad happened, it was not from them but from the government of Sudan. They said they were not involved in human rights violations.” CNPC in Beijing declined to comment.

China shifts gears

As independence for South Sudan became increasingly likely, China shifted gears, opening a diplomatic mission in Juba and reaching out to the SPLM. CNPC also set about mending fences, funding a computer center at Juba University. When Sudan split in July, the oil company began moving staff members from Khartoum to Juba, setting up offices, a dormitory and a canteen in a cluster of prefabricated huts at a Chinese-run hotel. China’s embassy is in the same compound.

Newly relocated CNPC staff members are shocked by Juba’s primitive conditions. A poster on their office wall warns of “Five Major Hazards” — a list of diseases endemic in South Sudan. But, one staffer noted, at “least they sell beer,” unlike in Khartoum, where alcohol is banned.

South Sudan, which gets 98 percent of its revenue from oil pumped by CNPC-led foreign operators, has tried to woo Chevron, Halliburton and other U.S. oil companies but found no takers, leaving China as its only real economic partner.

“Reality makes us work with people who are not our friends,” said Lual Deng, a southerner who served in Khartoum as petroleum minister before the country split. “We would prefer Western companies, but they are not coming.”

China’s money hasn’t opened all doors. Nihal Bor, the chief editor of the Citizen, a local newspaper, recalled how a Chinese diplomat stopped by ahead of an August visit to Juba by Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and offered to pay for the publication of “an interview” with Yang trumpeting Beijing’s friendship. But there was a snag: The paper would not get to see the minister, only to publish an embassy-scripted “interview” in return for cash. “We are not that desperate,” said the editor, who declined the offer.

Amum, the ruling party’s head, though, thinks China’s deep pockets offer the best hope for development in a country bigger than France but with only a few dozen miles of paved roads. China, he says, can help not just the oil industry, but also mining, agriculture and infrastructure. “There are no hard feelings,” Amum said. He has learned how to use chopsticks.

Protesters ‘Deserve to Be Thrown Into Hitler’s Ovens,’ Egyptian Military Adviser Says

2011-12-23T09:56:00.000-05:00

By ROBERT MACKEY
NYT
december 19, 2011

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, a general from Egypt’s ruling military council insisted on Monday that soldiers had not used force against peaceful protesters after a weekend of such attacks that were “witnessed by journalists, captured on video and broadcast across the Internet and on satellite television.”

But a still more baffling statement was made by a retired general who now serves as an adviser to the military government’s public relations department. In comments published by the Egyptian newspaper Al Shorouk on Monday, the adviser, Gen. Abdel Moneim Kato, said that the protesters who came under attack by soldiers were delinquents “who deserve to be thrown into Hitler’s ovens.”

Strangely, the retired general’s invocation of Nazi Germany came just hours before Egypt’s military rulers claimed to have disrupted a plot to burn down the country’s Parliament building.

Responding to the comments, Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading liberal voice, wrote on Twitter that the retired general had “a deranged and criminal state of mind!” In a second message written in Arabic on the social network, Mr. ElBaradei said, “The likes of Kato belong in jail, not in power.”

An adviser to the military addressing media: “Delinquents should be put in Hitler’s gas chambers”, a deranged and criminal state of mind!

— Mohamed ElBaradei (@ElBaradei) December 19, 2011

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo also denounced General Kato, calling him an “official who does not hesitate to declare Nazi opinions that incite hatred and justify violence against citizens he disagrees with.”

Five months ago, a private television channel fired the host of a popular program hours after she sparred with General Kato on the air. During that interview, the general claimed that some of the journalists whose views were aired on the program were “saboteurs,” and said two Egyptian presidential candidates were American agents. When the host asked General Kato if he had any proof to support his assertions, he said that he did not.

Egyptian Military Adviser Calls Attack on Woman Justified

2011-12-23T09:39:00.000-05:00

December 22, 2011
NYT
By ROBERT MACKEY

An adviser to Egypt’s military rulers said in a newspaper interview published on Thursday that a brutal attack on a female protester by Egyptian soldiers on Saturday was justified because the woman had insulted the army.

Thousands of Egyptian women took to the streets of Cairo this week to protest the beating of the woman, whose black abaya was stripped back to reveal her underwear during the attack.

Asked about video and photographs of soldiers hitting and kicking the woman, Gen. Abdel Moneim Kato, a retired officer who advises the ruling military council in Cairo, told the Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that the female activist “had been insulting the army through a megaphone” before she was stripped and beaten.

That justification for the brutal beating comes eight months after the generals put in power by President Hosni Mubarak sentenced another activist, Maikel Nabil, to three years in prison for “insulting the armed forces” on Facebook.

According to an English-language summary of the general’s comments published by The Egypt Independent, a Cairo daily, the adviser also defended the use of live ammunition against protesters, which he claimed was permitted by the terms of the Geneva Conventions. But, as another retired general told The Independent, the conventions that govern the rules of war between states or militias contain no such provision permitting attacks on civilian protesters.

In fact, one protocol, adopted in 1977 to govern the conduct of armies during civil wars, states clearly that even then, “the civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack.” The same protocol also bars soldiers from engaging in “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, rape, enforced prostitution and any form or indecent assault.”

General Kato — who called protesters delinquents “who deserve to be thrown into Hitler’s ovens” in another interview this week — also claimed that activists calling for an end to military rule were agents of foreign governments who had paid children to attack soldiers.

While the woman whose beating sparked such outrage has yet to speak publicly, a woman who attempted to come to her aid, and was then pummeled by soldiers herself, spoke to CNN from her hospital bed on Thursday.

The second woman, Azza Hilal Suleiman, told CNN: “There’s no justice. I don’t know how long we’ll go without justice. We didn’t ask for anything but to be free in our own country. We’ve been oppressed by the military, by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and by the police. I don’t know how much longer they will continue to kill us.”

Ms. Suleiman, who said her father was an army general, added: “My family isn’t like the men in the military now. My family was very decent and pure. What’s happening in the military now is dirty. Humans without conscience or mercy or humanity, what right do they have to do this to people?”

Another female activist gave this account of the beating and sexual assault she endured on Saturday after she was captured by soldiers to Mosireen, a Cairo film collective.

Since Egyptians without access to the Internet or satellite television might not have seen the video of the attack on the women, and on other protesters, activists took to the streets of Cairo with portable projectors to screen the footage on Thursday. The activist and blogger Lilian Wagdy reported that supporters of the army had tried to stop one such screening by destroying the projector, which sparked an impromptu protest march in the Cairo district of Heliopolis.

Some of the activists also painted graffiti images of the attack on the pavement and asked Egyptians to consider whether they would accept such an assault if the victim was their mother.

Egyptian military escalates force against protesters

2011-12-18T20:07:00.000-05:00

Supporters of the military rulers of Egypt shout slogans against opponents demonstrating against the army rule from the roof of the building housing the ministry of transport and communications in central Cairo on Saturday.

By Leila Fadel, Published: December 17 | Updated: Sunday, December 18, 8:40 AM
The Washington Post

CAIRO — The Egyptian military and protesters clashed for a third straight day Sunday, pelting each other with rocks in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the Egyptian revolution.

The skirmishes came a day after soldiers used brutal force to disperse protesters in central Cairo on Saturday as deadly clashes exacerbated tensions in the midst of an electoral season. Wielding batons and firing live ammunition, military police officers escalated a crackdown that has left at least 10 people dead and more than 400 wounded since Friday. Video of military police beating female protesters, dragging them by their hair and in one case stripping a woman and stomping on her chest have gone viral, enraging activists.

So far Islamists, who made huge gains during the first two stages of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, have largely stayed away from Tahrir Square. The preeminent Islamic religious institution, al-Azhar, had yet to comment on the death of one of its own, Sheikh Emad Effat, who was killed by gunfire. Thousands mourned him at his funeral Saturday.

The April 6 Democratic Front, a breakaway group of the April 6 youth movement, one of the main orchestrators of the 18-day uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, called for Egypt’s military chiefs to be prosecuted for the protesters’ deaths.

“They are killing the revolutionaries as Mubarak did, and they deserve to be in the cage like him,” a statement from the group said.

The unrest marked a peak in a fluctuating cycle of violence in recent months between security forces and protesters who are demanding that the country’s interim military rulers make good on their promise to oversee a transition to democratic rule.

Few of the demands from the dizzying days of the winter revolt that ousted Mubarak have been fulfilled. Egypt’s security agencies have not been reformed. The despised emergency law that authorized the indefinite detention of civilians has been expanded, rather than voided. Accusations of grave human rights abuses at the hands of the military rulers rival those that came to light during Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Meanwhile, many observers say, the country’s economy is imploding.

“There is no resolution in sight. It’s just a vacuum that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is not able to fill,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egypt expert at the New York-based Century Foundation. “They’ve shown they cannot calm the waters. There is a political crisis.”

On Saturday, a growing number of political leaders condemned the military rulers for allowing and in some cases encouraging the violence to spiral out of control. The latest clashes represent the worst unrest in Cairo since more than 42 people were killed in six days of fighting between security forces and protesters last month. An investigation was promised then, but no one from the security forces has been held accountable.

As protests spread to the port city of Alexandria, some political parties called for united action against the military council.

“The armed forces’ continuing crimes in killing protesters . . . [prove], beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the military council is no longer to be trusted to manage the transitional phase,” the leftist Social Democratic Party said in a statement.

The country’s best-organized political group, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, condemned the crackdown, accusing the military council of betraying Egyptians’ trust and implying that it was using force for political ends. The party has so far won the most votes in two rounds of multi-phase parliamentary elections set to end in March, and it demanded that elections continue.

“Whenever the situation calms down and the country turns to its historical elections in order to achieve its real democratic transformation, someone tries to spark sedition, ignite the situation and instigate unrest, with clear and wanton desire to prevent stability, and disrupt the democratic process and the handover of power,” the party said in a statement.

By late Saturday afternoon, the military had erected a wall of concrete blocks to cut Tahrir Square off from Qasr el-Aini Street, where the parliament and cabinet buildings are. Protesters pulled themselves to the top of the wall to pelt soldiers with stones, angered by the mounting casualties. Tents smoldered in the square after soldiers raided the area earlier in the day, beating unarmed demonstrators, brandishing pistols and torching field hospitals. Although evening brought a respite from the violence, protesters described the day’s events as war.

“The military has one solution: to kill this revolution, to crush this revolution so they can continue,” said Omar Hani, 18, a mass communications student wearing a yellow hard hat to protect himself from stones. “I don’t know day from night. We’ve been living in a state of war, gunfire and rocks.”

The country’s newly appointed prime minister, Kamal el-Ganzouri, addressed the country for the first time Saturday in a televised news conference, calling the latest events an “attack on the revolution” and denying that the military had engaged in violence, including the use of live bullets.

Activists were incensed by the remarks from a man they see as a puppet of the country’s military rulers. He spoke just before soldiers entered the square with force.

Nadia Sayed, 42, said, weeping, that she had watched the soldiers beat women and men to unconsciousness, pull people out of a mosque and set fire to tents.

“We need a miracle from God,” she said. “Enough plundering, enough theft, enough killing.”

On Saturday night, the military council released a statement in which it expressed “sorrow” but did not acknowledge the military’s involvement in the violence. The statement said the wounded would be treated in military hospitals and that detainees were being investigated as part of an effort to “get to the bottom of the clashes and find the facts.”

It did not say that any military personnel were under investigation.

At least nine members of a newly formed advisory council, expected to be an influential sounding board for the military rulers during the writing of a constitution, have resigned in protest at the crackdown.

“When I entered this council, I thought it was an opportunity to change their ways. They proved they haven’t changed,” said Ahmed Khairy, 24, who resigned Friday. “I’m against killing people.”

Special correspondent Ingy Hassieb contributed to this report.

The Promise: Two wealthy men set out to transform the lives of 59 fifth-graders

2011-12-18T20:01:00.000-05:00

The fifth-graders in a Prince George’s County elementary school who were offered free college tuition in 1988 have followed varied paths: One became a cop; another a drug dealer. One killed herself; another killed his father. The group also includes a doctor, cellist, politician and UPS driver.

By Paul Schwartzman, Published: December 17 2011
The Washington Post

Darone Robinson and Rudolph Norris were driving home after playing basketball one afternoon, reminiscing about their school years together, about that kid who made them laugh, the kid with the colorful shirts and infectious cackle.

What happened to William Smith, the prankster standing at the center of their class picture?

Back in the spring of 1988, they’d all been friends at Seat Pleasant Elementary, part of a class of fifth-graders from some of Prince George’s County’s poorest neighborhoods.

Then, on a May afternoon, they received an unexpected gift that would alter their lives: the promise of a college education, paid for by two wealthy businessmen. Suddenly, the 11-year-olds were part of an ambitious social experiment being tried across the country, one that brought together rich benefactors and needy kids in a largely untested but intimate style of philanthropy aimed at lifting entire families out of poverty.

At Seat Pleasant, the promise generated a wave of publicity and excitement, transforming the fifth-graders into symbols of hope in their own neighborhoods and well beyond. The scholarships gave them a chance to achieve a kind of success that had eluded most of their parents. Yet their good fortune also became a burden that would endure long after they reached adulthood. The questions followed them: What would become of William Smith, Darone Robinson and the rest of the Seat Pleasant 59?

Would they graduate from high school?

Would they make it to college?

What would they make of their gift?

More than 20 years later, the answers are sometimes surprising, sometimes satisfying and sometimes heart-rending. One would become a doctor. One would become a cellist. One would become a UPS driver. One would kill herself. One would kill his father. One would become a politician. One would become a cop. One would become a drug dealer.

On that afternoon in 2010 when they shot hoops, Darone Robinson and Rudolph Norris were long past their school days. Long past the time when they were skinny, restless fifth-graders who counted the minutes to recess and hurled themselves around the Seat Pleasant playground with ferocious glee.

They were grown men now, 33-year-old fathers with all kinds of responsibilities. Darone was working as a Pepco customer service rep, Rudolph as an electrician. Yet they loved sifting through their memories: the girls they admired, the teachers who scared them, the fights they won and lost.

William Smith had been there through all of it. Darone hadn’t seen him in years, but Rudolph had. He knew how to find William, who came to be defined not by his big smile and exuberant laugh, but by a devastating burst of violence.

A few weeks later, Rudolph and Darone drove downtown, to a housing project on a hill near Howard University. They knocked on a glass sliding door overlooking a vacant lot. Moments later, William Smith swept aside a dark blanket that covered the glass and unlocked the door, reaching up from his wheelchair to hug his two old classmates.

******

The fifth-graders at Seat Pleasant Elementary buzzed with excitement. Just before 1:30 p.m. May 26, 1988, they had been summoned by their principal, Julia Wright, to the multipurpose room, a tiled, high-ceiling hall in which the kids ate lunch and attended assemblies. Their parents were already there, along with the school’s teachers and staff. A new banner stretched across the stage, reading, “I Have a Dream,” above “Seat Pleasant Elementary.”

Wright had not revealed the purpose of the gathering, not even to most of the staff.

Sliding into metal folding chairs, Rudolph and Jeffery Norris, cousins and classmates, gaped at the cluster of TV news cameras and photographers. Jeffery’s only previous experience with reporters had occurred when they were 8, after they had seen a man grab a bat and beat Rudolph’s stepfather to death on a baseball field. Now, as they waited for the assembly to start, Jeffery wondered whether the presence of the cameras meant he was about to hear something awful.

Tiffany Alston didn’t know what to expect. At 11, she’d already decided what she wanted to do with her life. She would become a lawyer, something she had told her teacher only a week earlier.

“That’s going to cost a lot of money,” the teacher replied, an answer that Tiffany replayed that night to her mother.

Shirley Alston was a single parent who worked several part-time jobs to raise two children. No one was going to tell her what was possible for her daughter. She would decide that. And she had decided that Tiffany would go farther than anyone else in their family. She would get a degree.

“You will go to college even if I have to scrub floors on my hands and knees,” Tiffany remembers her mother declaring.

Darone Robinson’s mother arrived at the school that afternoon irritated because she’d had plans to spend her day off eating lunch with a friend. But then someone from the school had called and summoned her to a meeting, refusing to disclose the purpose.

Always showing off and getting himself in trouble, Rose Johnson said of her youngest child. What had Darone done this time?

Like Rose Johnson and Shirley Alston, many of the Seat Pleasant parents were raising children alone. They worked as secretaries and grocery clerks, as janitors and security guards, earning so little money that their kids qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. The overwhelming majority of the fifth-graders — nearly 80 percent — were African American. The rest were white, Asian or Hispanic.

There were kids who had migrated from distant places. One boy came from Cambodia after his parents were pushed into a refugee camp by the Khmer Rouge. Another had escaped the civil war tearing up Nicaragua. Another came from Nigeria, only to have her father killed in a car crash on New Hampshire Avenue.

At 1:30 p.m., the chairman of the Prince George’s school board introduced Abe Pollin, then 64, who wore a “Hello My Name Is . . .” name tag on his pin-striped lapel even though all the adults in the room knew he was the owner of the Washington Bullets and the Washington Capitals. Standing next to Pollin was Melvin Cohen, also 64, who owned District Photo, a successful film processing company.

Before a bouquet of microphones, Pollin explained that he and Cohen had established a $325,000 fund intended to help the children get the kind of education required for success.

“When you go to college,” Pollin told them, “when you’re ready to go to college, there will be funds to pay for your tuition.”

Silence.

Some of the parents were unsure that they had heard him right. Did he just say he was paying for college?

What is tuition? Jeffery Norris asked himself. What exactly is college?

The principal asked Pollin to repeat his offer.

“This is a partnership between your parents, your teachers and us,” he said. “College may seem like a long way away, but we’re going to help you achieve your dreams.”

There was more silence. And then someone started to clap, and people started to cheer and cry, and someone shouted, “Thank God!” Someone else shouted, “Thank you, Jesus!”

Tiffany Alston’s mother wiped her wet cheeks and nose with tissues, making her daughter cringe. Stop, Mom, Tiffany thought. Please stop embarrassing me.

For months after the announcement, Pollin and Cohen would try to avoid giving the impression that they were handing out free college educations. In fact, they were agreeing to grant the equivalent of in-state tuition at the University of Maryland. But in the frenzy of the moment, many of the parents felt as if they had just won the lottery.

After Pollin and Cohen sat down, the principal stood and wiped her own tears away. “You have invested wisely in the lives of these children,” she told the businessmen.

She asked the students how many of them planned to attend college. Every single hand shot up.

Then Monica McIntyre, a fifth-grader who excelled at the cello, rose to thank the men on behalf of her classmates. Pollin bent over and hugged her with both arms, planting a wet kiss high on her right cheek.

From his seat, her father, Paris McIntyre, a teletype operator at the Goddard Space Flight Center, could not believe what he was seeing. Years before, his wife, Lorna, had worked as a cook for Abe and Irene Pollin, and now Abe, without even realizing the connection, was up there, in front of all those people, hugging his daughter.

The TV crews crowded around.

Darone Robinson, a short boy with bright eyes, was asked whether he understood his good fortune. He shrugged. Darone’s only experience with college was when his adored older cousin, a basketball star at George Mason University, had taken him to visit the campus. The university’s emerald green lawns and palatial buildings were so different from Capitol Heights, where he and his mom and sister lived in his aunt’s modest brick house to save money.

Rose Johnson wanted Darone to go to college, too, but she had no idea how she’d pay his tuition on her $13,000-a-year receptionist’s salary. Now, after listening to Pollin and Cohen, she no longer had to worry, and the joyous relief brought tears that she brushed aside with her thumb as she followed her boy through the crowd.

The cameras and commotion made some of the kids shy. William Smith, the gangly and square-shouldered class funnyman, reveled in the attention and was among those clapping the hardest at the announcement. “I wanted to scream,” he told a reporter.

His mother, Theresa Smith, was equally elated. Her education had been interrupted just after she’d given birth to William at 17. A few months later, her own mother was murdered, forcing her to care for her three younger brothers and her new baby.

Theresa Smith worked as a secretary at the Defense Department to support her family. At 28, she maintained a tight grip at home, barring her son from wandering the neighborhood after school or playing outside. William referred to his home life as lockdown, but Theresa Smith believed that it was the only way to ensure William’s survival.

With college within reach for her son, Theresa said she felt like the beneficiary of divine intervention.

“I was praying,” she said, “asking the Lord to send me a way to get him to college.”

******

As he watched the families rejoicing and lining up to shake hands with Pollin and Cohen, Tracy Proctor felt a great sense of optimism and excitement.

“Every last one of them will go to college,” he promised himself. Proctor’s job was to make that happen.

The idea of adopting a class of impoverished children had originated seven years earlier in New York, when Eugene Lang, a multimillionaire industrialist, promised 61 sixth-graders at PS 21 in East Harlem that he would send them to college if they stayed in school.

Lang’s offer triggered newspaper headlines, laudatory calls from the White House, and a gaggle of wealthy imitators who sponsored their own classes. They were eager to try this new form of philanthropy, one that allowed them to form close ties with the children they were helping and maintain that bond over a long period of time. Or, as Pollin explained to his newly adopted students: “We’re going to be part of you. You might get tired of looking at us.”

By 1988, the concept behind Lang’s “I Have a Dream” Foundation had been replicated in 15 cities, serving 4,000 Dreamers, as the students were called.

Pollin and Cohen, who were well known in Washington for their philanthropic largesse, decided to adopt a class in Prince George’s because it was the home of Pollin’s Capital Centre and Cohen’s company. They left the choice of the elementary school to the county’s school superintendent, who recommended Seat Pleasant because it was in a community in dire need of help.

Although they planned to be as deeply involved as possible, the businessmen needed someone to keep the kids on track, someone to be their eyes and ears in the lives of the students at school and at home. They needed someone who understood the kids’ experiences and spoke their language, someone the kids would respect.

Proctor was just 24 and had no experience working with children when Pollin and Cohen interviewed him for the job. He told them about how he’d grown up as one of eight siblings raised by a single mother in a series of housing complexes in Southeast Washington. By the time he was 12, Proctor had attended six elementary schools.

He made it to Howard University on a baseball scholarship and graduated in 1987, an achievement that convinced Pollin and Cohen that they had found the right mentor for their Dreamers.

A month after Proctor was offered the job, he stood with Pollin and Cohen as they introduced him to the students. In the audience, Tiffany Alston and some of the girls and mothers giggled. Proctor was cute, they told each other, with his tall, athletic frame, mustache and deep voice.

Jeffery Norris was less enthusiastic. “Someone else to call my mom and complain about me,” he told himself.

******

On television that night, the fifth-graders and their parents were featured on the local news. The next day, a photograph of Pollin hugging Monica McIntyre appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. Her father, Paris, was quoted in the New York Times.

In their neighborhoods, the Dreamers became celebrities and almost immediately grew accustomed to star treatment. Special buses took them to school. They got tickets to Bullets games and concerts, and free film from Cohen’s District Photo business. On some days, small groups were escorted to lunch with Cohen and Pollin at their offices, and there were special dinners. At the Capital Centre, the kids gawked at Pollin’s beige Mercedes-Benz in his reserved parking spot and walked down hallways lined with photographs of Wes Unseld, Elvin Hayes and other stars.

There were thick turkey sandwiches and potato chips delivered in white boxes at the lunches, and filet mignon was served at the dinners. Before the gatherings, Proctor provided Pollin with a photograph of each guest and a one-sentence description so Pollin could greet them by their first names — “Hi, Tiffany” or “Hi, Darone” or “Hi, Jeffery” — and ask about school and their ambitions.

Jeffery Norris was amazed that a virtual stranger — a white man, no less — would show interest in their lives and embrace them.

Tiffany Alston enjoyed listening to Pollin tell stories about his life, how his parents immigrated to the United States from Russia, how they built a construction company and then he bought a basketball team.

“You can do it,” he told them.

The kids loved inspecting the big gold ring Pollin wore on his right finger, the one he got when the Bullets won the NBA championship in 1978. Pollin, who died in 2009, seemed to pay extra attention to the tallest kid in the class, Terrell Jackson, who already stood at 6 feet by sixth grade. Terrell told Pollin that he wanted to play for the Bullets when he grew up and earn enough money to take care of his Dreamer buddies.

Pollin’s response, one that remained with Terrell into adulthood, was that he should stay in school and go to college, and then he could get a tryout with the team. First, though, he and his classmates had to survive sixth grade.

At William Smith’s house, his mother was terrified that her son failed to understand what was at stake. William was not exactly a conscientious student. With so many restrictions imposed on him at home, the last thing he wanted to do at school was sit in class and pay attention. He dreaded homework. When he didn’t know the answer to something, he says, his mother would smack him on the side of his head.

“This is not a joke!” Theresa Smith yelled at him. “This is serious!”

His mother told him that he would be the first in their family to go to college and that his success would uplift them all. “You’re going to get this right,” he remembers her saying, “and if you don’t, I’ll be knocking your head off.”

Jeffery Norris’s mother also wanted her son to be the first in the family to go to college. But she remained concerned about Jeffery’s emotional well-being. For months after he saw his uncle murdered, Jeffery had been unable to sleep in his own bed, awaking to nightmares of the baseball bat crushing his uncle’s skull. Sometimes, when his mother would go to the bathroom, he would wait outside the door.

She sent him to a psychiatrist, who advised her to talk about the incident only if Jeffery brought it up. When he did, he often asked, “Why didn’t Uncle Terry fight back?” School became the place where Jeffery fought back. The promise of a college scholarship did nothing to change that.

At Darone Robinson’s house, his mother told stories about his three uncles going to college. She had the same expectations for Darone, and she did not hide her fury when he acted up or didn’t do his homework.

“I’m going to push you,” Rose Johnson liked to say. “You will go to school, if I have to quit my job and go with you.”

The pushing and prodding didn’t have much impact. The Seat Pleasant 59 were an unruly bunch.

Their teacher, John Scott Lucas, a onetime amateur hockey player, established a classroom “penalty box” to punish those who were disorderly. Once, Lucas became so frustrated that he slammed locker doors and retreated to the restroom to escape the racket. Several Dreamers recall him bursting into tears.

“My dogs are better trained than you people,” one student remembers Lucas shouting.

The Dreamers were so out of control that Tracy Proctor felt compelled to sit in Lucas’s class to ensure calm. Once, after Proctor had ordered Terrell Jackson to settle down, the boy confronted him in the stairwell outside the classroom and threatened to beat him up.

Proctor grabbed him by the shirt and with one hand lifted him up against the wall.

Tiffany Alston, who was sitting inside the classroom, heard Terrell shout, “You better get off me!”

“You’re going to stay here and listen,” Proctor replied, “and you’re going to do what I say!”

******

All year, Proctor had gone to the children’s homes, one by one, to meet their parents and see where they lived. He had seen the filthy walls and trash in one boy’s house. He knew that, at the age of 11, another boy could not write a sentence. He knew that Rudolph Norris’s stepfather had been murdered, and that Rudolph and Jeffery had witnessed it. He knew that William Smith’s mother was a stickler for propriety, correcting her son if he said, “Uh-huh” when answering a question. “That’s ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ” she’d say. He knew that some of the parents had grown suspicious of Pollin and Cohen.

“What do they want with our children?” he remembers one mother demanding. “I’m sure they’re getting a tax write-off.”

Others didn’t understand that the scholarship offer was not a blank check. Pollin and Cohen were agreeing to meet the cost of in-state tuition at the University of Maryland, but the money needed for books or room and board would have to come from grants or other sources.

After his altercation with Terrell, Proctor summoned the Dreamers to a meeting, during which he reminded them that they had accomplished nothing. All they’d done was be lucky. “You were at the right place at the right time,” Proctor told them. “You aren’t that special.”

As sixth grade ended and they graduated from Seat Pleasant Elementary, the Dreamers created a yearbook, in which Tiffany Alston was chosen “Best All Around” and William Smith was listed as an “Outstanding Orator.”

The students were asked to declare their career ambition, favorite subject and motto.

“Reach for the stars,” wrote one. “Never say, ‘I can’t,’ ” wrote another.

“Keep on dreaming until you reach that special place,” wrote Tiffany.

Darone Robinson’s motto was less lofty: “Try to make it through life.”

Coming tomorrow: In day two of The Seat Pleasant 59, a giddy sense of promise is replaced by a sobering reality.

The West should bet on freedom in Egypt

2011-12-16T20:02:00.000-05:00

By Natan Sharansky, Published: December 16
The Washington Post

The results of the recent parliamentary elections in Egypt and the harsh scenes of soldiers beating protesters this weekend have fueled a new round of anxiety in the West over the direction of the Arab Spring. Hopes raised to a fever pitch by the events of January and February have suffered a crushing blow. Observing the victory of the Islamist parties last month, liberals’ miserable showing and the military’s determination to maintain an iron grip, some ask whether the end of Egyptian democracy is already in sight. Others are asking whether democracy, “our” Western heritage, is really for “them.”

These are the wrong questions, and the attitude behind them, if encapsulated in policy, will ensure the return of dictatorship or worse.

This same reflexive attitude long undergirded Western support for Egypt’s dictatorial rulers as the guarantors of “stability.” That support, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, suffocating other, better political options. Are we now bent on repeating the same dreary cycle, lending our consent to repression in the name of a false stability?

Consider how unprepared Western governments were for the events of the Arab Spring. They shouldn’t have been. At a 2007 democracy conference in Prague, Egyptians such as Saad Ibrahim, Iraqis such as Mithal al-Alusi and other Arab democratic dissidents assured the participants, including President George W. Bush and other Western statesmen, that their region was ripe for popular revolt. What had happened in the Soviet Union, they said, was already happening in the Middle East: Ordinary people were losing their fear, daring to exercise their long-suppressed faculty to not only speak but also think freely. It was merely a matter of time before the actions of a few would multiply and become, in the end, irrepressible.

The Western officials gathered in Prague loved what they heard from these dissidents. But after they went home, nothing changed in their governments’ policies. The stability model continued to reign and, with it, the rationale that in Egypt there was no alternative but the Muslim Brotherhood or chaos.

The Arab Spring gave the lie to the stability model, which — as the Prague dissidents knew and as millions went on to demonstrate this year — was in fact a recipe for instability. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square the people spoke, and what did they demand? Not the destruction of Israel. Not the damnation of America. They demanded the right to live in a society where minds would no longer be controlled. Their demand was local, but their message was universal.

One Western response to the Egyptian revolution was to back elections. These are far from a bad thing, but they are not the main thing. Thus far, post-Mubarak elections in Egypt have sparked further turmoil, alarm, disillusionment and fatalism among Western observers beguiled by the dream of a democratic triumph. “It’s not the French Revolution,” moaned an Israeli columnist.

This is, inadvertently, an instructive point. For if the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution proves anything, it is that a gap exists between the moment people decide they will no longer live in a society ruled by fear and the moment a democratic society forms — a society that will protect not only “correct” thinking but also the thoughts one hates.

Nothing is instantaneous in politics. To think of elections as a panacea, let alone a sure road to real democracy, is to evince a failure of historical imagination. The proper role of the free world is not to encourage or to stop elections. Its role should be to formulate, and to stick by, a policy of incremental change based on creating the institutions that will lead ineluctably to pressure for more and more representative forms of government. The free world should place its bet on freedom — the hope and demand of Tahrir Square — and work toward a civil society defined by that value.

In executing such a policy, Western governments and nongovernmental organizations would donate funds only to individuals and groups working for the same goal; foster joint business ventures able to contribute to a liberal economy, which are desperately needed in a country on the verge of bankruptcy; encourage bottom-up enterprises in education, media and social reform; and collaborate with students, women’s groups, trade unions, liberal democrats and others pressing the cause of a free press, freedom of religion, the freedom to organize and the rule of law.

Whether, in Egypt’s case, the process will be lengthy or relatively brief depends on the Egyptian people. But it depends no less on the West’s determination to get on the side of those desirous of change, to influence the direction of change and to help shape the emergence of a new generation of leaders. Our choice does not lie between a corrupt military dictatorship and a totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood. If, between Western and Egyptian leaders, at least one of the two parties is wholeheartedly insistent on forging a free civil society, a democratic outcome is a strong possibility; if both parties are against it, all will truly be lost.

Keeping the Arab Spring alive

2011-12-16T19:49:00.000-05:00

By Editorial Board, Published: December 16 2011
The Washington Post

IT WAS a year ago Saturday that fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself aflame in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, improbably providing the spark for what has become a regional revolution. The Arab Spring acquired its name in part because early commentators likened it to the upheavals that brought an end to dictatorship in other parts of the world — including the former Soviet bloc, East Asia and Latin America. It seemed logical that Middle Eastern states would, at last, follow the same path that led in other places from dictatorship and economic stagnation to free elections, free markets and integration into a global economy.

A year later, it’s clear that the Arab revolutions are different in some fundamental ways — and may not deserve the label of “spring.” Democratic transformations in other parts of the world since 1980 were largely peaceful, as autocrats from the Philippines to Chile yielded to “people power.” But while that paradigm mostly worked in Tunisia and in Egypt early this year, the subsequent months have been dominated by scenes of slaughter, as Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh have chosen to fight — even to the death — rather than give up. Mr. Gaddafi is gone, and the Assad and Saleh regimes may soon follow. But the thousands of deaths they caused have cast a pall over their countries; no one yet knows when and how the killing will end or whether there will be reconciliation.

A second difference in the Arab transformation is the worrying economic prospects of newly liberated countries. Eastern European and Asian countries adopted liberal market policies that led to booming growth; so, after a few years of drift, did most of Latin America. But Egypt and other Arab states so far are leaning toward a populism that could inhibit foreign investment and trade. They are also unlikely to receive as much Western aid as helped the new democracies of the 1980s and ’90s. Libya will prosper with oil. But many young Arabs may find that their aspirations for jobs remain unmet.

A final distinction is the nature of the political movements coming to power in the revolution’s aftermath. Though the Islamists of Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere say that they are democrats, they are not liberal — and their relations with the West are uneasy at best. The true liberals of the Arab world — those who plotted the uprisings on Facebook and brought the secular middle classes to the street — risk being marginalized. They lack the organization of mosque-based movements or the foreign funding supplied by conservative states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In Egypt, they also remain the prime target of a military establishment that hopes to preserve an outsize measure of power.

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that the Middle East’s modernization is proving bumpier than elsewhere: The troubles reflect some of the reasons that the 20th-century model of autocracy lasted decades longer there than in Latin America or Asia. But the messiness should not be a reason to regret the revolution, or worse, support the attempts of the Egyptian or Syrian armies to check the Islamists or “restore order” by force.

The best cure for what ails the Middle East is what it has lacked: free debate and democracy. In the short term, that may lead to mistaken policies or greater friction with the West. But over time extremists and fundamentalists are more likely to be discredited. The Arab world’s huge and rising young generation wants the freedom and prosperity it sees spreading in much of the rest of the world — and the rest of the world should be betting on that.

Congress moves to restrict money for Egypt, Pakistan in foreign aid bill that avoids deep cuts

2011-12-16T19:46:00.000-05:00

By Associated Press, Published: December 16, 2011

WASHINGTON — Congress would impose restrictions on aid to Egypt, Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority in a $53.3 billion bill that avoids the deep cuts in foreign assistance and State Department funding that Republicans had pursued this year.

The legislation is part of a sweeping, $1 trillion-plus year-end spending package that provides money for 10 Cabinet agencies through September. The House passed the measure on Friday and the Senate is expected to vote sometime this weekend.

Foreign aid amounts to just 1 percent of the federal budget, but lawmakers intent on cutting the deficit, especially conservative tea party Republicans, have clamored for significant reductions in spending overseas. Democrats and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pressed to spare the accounts.

The legislation would provide $53.3 billion for foreign assistance and the State Department — $42.1 billion for the base budget and $11.2 billion for the Overseas Contingency Operations account. That account pays for the State Department’s role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other expenses. Lawmakers shifted costs for security and economic assistance, funds for the State Department and for the U.S. Agency for International Development into the account, increasing the amount from $7.6 billion to $11.2 billion.

Still, the base budget is some $6 billion less than the current level and $8.7 billion below what President Barack Obama sought for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The bill does provide $3.1 billion in security assistance for ally Israel.

“In a difficult economic and political climate, this bill meets our national security needs and global responsibilities while implementing tough restrictions and requirements on recipients of U.S. assistance,” said Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid.

Reflecting concerns about uncertainty within the Egyptian government, the bill would block release of $1.3 billion in security assistance to Cairo and $250 million in economic assistance until the secretary of state makes several assurances to Congress. She must certify that Egypt is abiding by a 1979 peace treaty with Israel and that military rulers are supporting the transition to civilian government with free and fair elections and “implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association and religion and due process of law.”

The military took over in Egypt after longtime President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular revolt in February. On Friday, Egypt held its second round of parliamentary elections.

The legislation freezes aid to Pakistan until the secretary can certify that Islamabad is cooperating on counterterrorism, including taking steps to prevent terrorist groups such as the Haqqani network from operating in the country. The aid amount was unspecified in the legislation as Congress gave the Obama administration flexibility to figure out the funds.

A separate defense bill would hold back $700 million for Pakistan until the defense secretary provides Congress a report on how Islamabad is countering the threat of improvised explosive devices.

The bill continues the existing restrictions on aid to the Palestinian Authority, requiring the secretary to certify that it is committed to a peaceful co-existence with Israel and is taking appropriate steps to combat terrorism. Economic assistance for the Palestinians is in jeopardy if they pursue statehood recognition in the United Nations over the objections of the United States and Israel, which wants to resume talks.

The amount was not spelled out, again leaving it to the administration to sort out.

The restrictions carry a waiver for national security.

In a victory for congressional Democrats and the Obama administration, the bill dropped a House-backed ban on federal money for international family planning groups that either offer abortions or provide abortion information, counseling or referrals.

The policy has bounced in and out of law for the past quarter century since Republican President Ronald Reagan first adopted it 1984. Democrat Bill Clinton ended the ban in 1993, but Republican George W. Bush re-instituted it in 2001 as one of his first acts in office. Within days of his inauguration, Obama reversed the policy.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Former child slave brought to Calif. from Egypt to work for family becomes US citizen

2011-12-15T19:54:00.000-05:00

By Associated Press, Published: December 15 2011

MONTEBELLO, Calif. — More than a decade ago, 10-year-old Shyima Hall was brought to Southern California by an affluent Egyptian couple who forced her to sleep in a cold garage at night and spend her days working as a maid.

For nearly two years, Hall ironed clothes, washed dishes and handled other domestic chores until authorities freed her.

On Thursday, she met with officials again but this time to proudly take the oath of allegiance to America as a newly minted U.S. citizen — a key step on her path to becoming a police officer or immigration agent to help other victims of human trafficking.

“Now I can move on with my career and start my life the way I want it,” the 22-year-old said, her eyes sparkling after the ceremony on Thursday in Montebello. “It’s just something I’ve waited for for a long time.”

Hall was sent to work for an Egyptian couple as a domestic servant in Cairo when she was 9. The following year, Abdel Nasser Youssef Ibrahim and his then-wife Amal Ahmed Ewis-abd El Motelib arranged for someone to apply for a tourist visa on her behalf and brought her to the United States, U.S. court records show.

In 2000, Hall set foot in California — but only inside the spacious home where Ibrahim and Motelib lived with their five children in Irvine. She was not allowed to play outside the house or with the other children, but rather slept in the garage without electricity and manually washed her clothes in a bucket, the documents show.

Both Ibrahim and Motelib slapped Hall and told her police would arrest her if they saw her outside the home, the documents show, adding they knew her visa had expired and did nothing to extend it.

For nearly two years, she lived in the garage, worked full time and was not allowed to attend school. A neighbor became suspicious and called police.

After her rescue, Hall wound up in foster care and bounced around from home to home. She was adopted by a family in Beaumont and was able to obtain legal status to remain in the country and eventually got her green card.

Hall — who took her adoptive family’s surname — said she felt like the family was more enamored of her case than of her and weren’t supportive of her efforts to start her career, which prompted her to move out and start a life of her own.

She took classes at college and got a job. She is now a sales supervisor at an upscale watch store and volunteers for her local police department in the hopes of becoming an officer. Now, with her naturalization certificate in hand, she can pursue her dream.

“No one really can tell you you can’t do that or you can’t be that person,” she said after the naturalization ceremony for 900 new citizens. “I can be who I want to be and that’s the most important part for me.”

Hall said she doesn’t dwell on the past and tries to look forward. She would also like to get her U.S. passport and visit Egypt to see her 10 brothers and sisters.

Mark Abend, a supervisory special agent at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said he met Hall when she was a frightened child rescued by police.

Over time, she began to confide in investigators about her experience, learned English, graduated from high school and has become an impassioned advocate for trafficking victims, speaking about her experience at training sessions held by law enforcement.

“For her to be able to go through all that and still keep her head up and not be suffering from severe depression... for her to actually pull it all together and become very successful is really amazing to me,” said Abend, who attended the ceremony along with Hall’s friends and attorneys.

In 2006, Ibrahim and Motelib pleaded guilty to holding Hall in involuntary servitude, forced labor, conspiracy and harboring an illegal immigrant. Ibrahim was sentenced to 36 months in prison and Motelib was sentenced to 22 months. Both were ordered to pay $76,000 to Hall for her work for the family.

The Associated Press reported on the case in a series in 2008 on the exploitation of children in Africa.

Moteilb was deported to Egypt in 2008. Ibrahim was determined to be subject to deportation, but an immigration judge ruled he could remain in the country.

Ibrahim is under an order of supervision and regularly reports to immigration authorities, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Gingrich remarks on Palestinians ‘divisive and destructive,’ Levin says

2011-12-11T12:27:00.000-05:00

Posted at 01:46 PM ET, 12/10/2011
The Washington Post
By Felicia Sonmez

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Saturday sharply criticized Newt Gingrich’s remark this week that the Palestinians are an “invented” people, calling the statement by the former House speaker and GOP presidential contender “divisive and destructive.”

“Next Gingrich is wrong to think his attempt to turn the Palestinians into a non-people with no claim to a state will appeal to his audience on the Jewish Channel, on which they are apparently to be aired on Monday,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said in a statement.

“The vast majority of American Jews (including this one) and the Israeli Government itself are committed to a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side as neighbors and in peace,” he added.

Gingrich, whom polls show surging in several early primary states less than a month before the nominating process starts, made the remark Wednesday in an interview expected to broadcast Monday on The Jewish Channel. News of the comments was first reported by Politico’s Ben Smith on Friday afternoon.

“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state,” Gingrich says in the interview. “It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places. And for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and I think it’s tragic.”

The remarks represent a shift by Gingrich away from the long-standing U.S. policy goal of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, a position that has been advocated by both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Most Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill have declined to weigh in on the GOP presidential primary, although House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi last month mocked Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) request for a “public debate” with the California Democrat, and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) claimed Perry was “pandering to the tea party” by proposing that lawmakers’ salaries and time spent in Washington be slashed.

That Gingrich’s comments drew such a strong rebuke from Levin suggests that while the former speaker may have made them in an attempt to appeal to social conservatives in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa, the remarks could wind up backfiring, particularly within the foreign policy community.

In his statement, Levin argued that Gingrich’s “cynical efforts to attract attention to himself with divisive and destructive statements will not help his presidential ambitions since they are aimed at putting the peace between Israel and the Palestinians that Americans yearn for even further out of reach than it is today.”

“Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match,” he added.

Beyond Guantánamo, a Web of prisons across US for terrorism inmates

2011-12-11T12:25:00.000-05:00

Aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people

By SCOTT SHANE
12/11/2011
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.

An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.

Among them is Ismail Royer, serving 20 years for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In a letter from the highest-security prison in the United States, Mr. Royer describes his remarkable neighbors at twice-a-week outdoor exercise sessions, each prisoner alone in his own wire cage under the Colorado sky. “That’s really the only interaction I have with other inmates,” he wrote from the federal Supermax, 100 miles south of Denver.

There is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Mr. Royer wrote. Terry Nichols, who conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Ahmed Ressam, the would-be “millennium bomber,” who plotted to attack Los Angeles International Airport. And Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
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In recent weeks, Congress has reignited an old debate, with some arguing that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. But military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantánamo hugely costly — $800,000 per inmate a year, compared with $25,000 in federal prison.

The criminal justice system, meanwhile, has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity, and without the international criticism that Guantánamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial. A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, an examination of how the prisons have handled the challenge of extremist violence reveals some striking facts:

Big numbers. Today, 171 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. As of Oct. 1, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported that it was holding 362 people convicted in terrorism-related cases, 269 with what the bureau calls a connection to international terrorism — up from just 50 in 2000. An additional 93 inmates have a connection to domestic terrorism.
Lengthy sentences. Terrorists who plotted to massacre Americans are likely to die in prison. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in 2010, is serving a sentence of life without parole at the Supermax, as are Zacarias Moussaoui, a Qaeda operative arrested in 2001, and Mr. Reid, the shoe bomber, among others. But many inmates whose conduct fell far short of outright terrorism are serving sentences of a decade or more, the result of a calculated prevention strategy to sideline radicals well before they could initiate deadly plots.
Special units. Since 2006, the Bureau of Prisons has moved many of those convicted in terrorism cases to two special units that severely restrict visits and phone calls. But in creating what are Muslim-dominated units, prison officials have inadvertently fostered a sense of solidarity and defiance, and set off a long-running legal dispute over limits on group prayer. Officials have warned in court filings about the danger of radicalization, but the Bureau of Prisons has nothing comparable to the deradicalization programs instituted in many countries.
Quiet releases. More than 300 prisoners have completed their sentences and been freed since 2001. Their convictions involved not outright violence but “material support” for a terrorist group; financial or document fraud; weapons violations; and a range of other crimes. About half are foreign citizens and were deported; the Americans have blended into communities around the country, refusing news media interviews and avoiding attention.
Rare recidivism. By contrast with the record at Guantánamo, where the Defense Department says that about 25 percent of those released are known or suspected of subsequently joining militant groups, it appears extraordinarily rare for the federal prison inmates with past terrorist ties to plot violence after their release. The government keeps a close eye on them: prison intelligence officers report regularly to the Justice Department on visitors, letters and phone calls of inmates linked to terrorism. Before the prisoners are freed, F.B.I. agents typically interview them, and probation officers track them for years.

Both the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress often cite the threat of homegrown terrorism. But the Bureau of Prisons has proven remarkably resistant to outside scrutiny of the inmates it houses, who might offer a unique window on the problem.

In 2009, a group of scholars proposed interviewing people imprisoned in terrorism cases about how they took that path. The Department of Homeland Security approved the proposal and offered financing. But the Bureau of Prisons refused to grant access, saying the project would require too much staff time.
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“There’s a huge national debate about how dangerous these people are,” said Gary LaFree, director of a national terrorism study center at the University of Maryland, who was lead author of the proposal. “I just think, as a citizen, somebody ought to be studying this.”

The Bureau of Prisons would not make any officials available for an interview with The New York Times, and wardens at three prisons refused to permit a reporter to visit inmates. But e-mails and letters from inmates give a rare, if narrow, look at their hidden world.

Paying the Price
Consider the case of Randall Todd Royer, 38, a Missouri-born Muslim convert who goes by Ismail. Before 9/11, he was a young Islamic activist with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, meeting with members of Congress and visiting the Clinton White House.

Today he is nearly eight years into a 20-year prison sentence. He pleaded guilty in 2004 to helping several American friends go to a training camp for Lashkar-e-Taiba, an extremist group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. The organization was later designated a terrorist group by the United States — and is blamed for the Mumbai massacre in 2008 — but prosecutors maintained in 2004 that the friends intended to go on to Afghanistan and fight American troops alongside the Taliban.

Mr. Royer had fought briefly with the Bosnian Muslims against their Serbian neighbors in the mid-1990s, when NATO, too, backed the Bosnians. He trained at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp himself. And in 2001, he was stopped by Virginia police with an AK-47 and ammunition in his car.

But he adamantly denies that he would ever scheme to kill Americans, and there is no evidence that he did so. Before sentencing, he wrote the judge a 30-page letter admitting, “I crossed the line and, in my ignorance and phenomenally poor judgment, broke the law.” In grand jury testimony, he expressed regret about not objecting during a meeting, just after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which his friends discussed joining the Taliban.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t come out and clearly say that’s not what any of us should be about,” he said.

Prosecutors call Mr. Royer “an inveterate liar“ in court papers in another case, asserting that he has given contradictory accounts of the meeting after Sept. 11. Mr. Royer says he has been truthful.
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Whatever the facts, he is paying the price. His 20-year sentence was the statutory minimum under a 2004 plea deal he reluctantly took, fearing that a trial might end in a life term. His wife divorced him and remarried; he has seen his four young children only through glass since 2006, when the Bureau of Prisons moved him to a restrictive new unit in Indiana for inmates with the terrorism label. After an altercation with another inmate who he said was bullying others, he was moved in 2010 to the Supermax in Colorado.

He is barred from using e-mail and permitted only three 15-minute phone calls a month — recently increased from two, a move that Mr. Royer hopes may portend his being moved to a prison closer to his children. His letters are reflective, sometimes self-critical, frequently dropping allusions to his omnivorous reading. His flirtation with violent Islam and his incarceration, he says, have not poisoned him against his own country.

“You asked what I think of the U.S.; that is an extraordinarily complex question,” Mr. Royer wrote in one letter consisting of 27 pages of neat handwriting. “I can say I was born in Missouri, I love that land and its people, I love the Mississippi, I love my family and my cousins, I love my Germanic ethnic heritage and people, I love the English language, I love the American people — my people.

“He said he believed some American foreign policy positions had been “needlessly antagonistic” but added, “Nothing the U.S. did justified the 9/11 attacks.”

Mr. Royer rejected the notion that the United States was at war with Islam. “Conflict between the U.S. and Muslims is neither inevitable nor beneficial or in anyone’s interest,” he wrote. “Actually, I suppose it is in the interest of fanatics on both sides, but their interests run counter to everyone else’s.” He added an erudite footnote: “ ‘Les extrémités se touchent’ (the extremes meet) — Blaise Pascal.”
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He expressed frustration that the Bureau of Prisons appears to view him as an extremist, despite what he describes as his campaign against extremism in discussions with other inmates and prison sermons at Friday Prayer, “which they surely have recordings of.”

“I have gotten into vehement debates, not to mention civil conversations, with other inmates from the day I was arrested until today, about the dangers and evils of extremism and terrorism,” Mr. Royer wrote in a yearlong correspondence with a reporter. “Can they not figure out who I am?”

A scorched-earth approach
In 2004, prosecutors believed they knew who Mr. Royer was: one of a group of young Virginians under the influence of a radical cleric, Ali al-Timimi, whose members played paintball to practice for jihad and were on a path toward extremist violence. After Sept. 11, federal prosecutors took a scorched-earth approach to any crime with even a hint of a terrorism connection, and judges and juries went along.

In the Virginia jihad case, for instance, prosecutors used the Neutrality Act, a little-used law dating to 1794 that prohibits Americans from fighting against a nation at peace with the United States. Prosecutors combined that law with weapons statutes that impose a mandatory minimum sentence in a strategy to get the longest prison terms, with breaks for some defendants who cooperated, said Paul J. McNulty, then the United States attorney overseeing the case.

“We were doing all we could to prevent the next attack,” Mr. McNulty said.

“It was a deterrence strategy and a show of strength,” said Karen J. Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University who has overseen the most thorough independent analysis of terrorism prosecutions. “The attitude of the government was: Every step you take toward terrorism, no matter how small, will be punished severely.”

About 40 percent of terrorism cases since the Sept. 11 attacks have relied on informants, by the count of the Center on Law and Security at New York University, which Ms. Greenberg headed until earlier this year. In such cases, the F.B.I. has trolled for radicals and then tested whether they were willing to plot mayhem — again, a pre-emptive strategy intended to ferret out potential terrorists. But in some cases prosecutors have been accused of overreaching.

Yassin M. Aref, for instance, was a Kurdish immigrant from Iraq and the imam of an Albany mosque when he agreed to serve as witness to a loan between an acquaintance and another man, actually an informant posing as a supporter of a Pakistani terrorist group, Jaish-e-Muhammad. The ostensible purpose of the loan was to buy a missile to kill the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Aref’s involvement was peripheral — but he was convicted of conspiring to aid a terrorist group and got a 15-year sentence.

That was a typical punishment, according to the Center on Law and Security, which has studied the issue. Of 204 people charged with what it calls serious jihadist crimes since the Sept. 11 attacks, 87 percent were convicted and got an average sentence of 14 years, according to a September report from the center.

Federal officials say the government’s zero-tolerance approach to any conduct touching on terrorism is an important reason there has been no repeat of Sept. 11. Lengthy sentences for marginal offenders have been criticized by some rights advocates as deeply unfair — but they have sent an unmistakable message to young men drawn to the rhetoric of violent jihad.

The strategy has also sent scores of Muslim men to federal prisons.

Special units
After news reports in 2006 that three men imprisoned in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had sent letters to a Spanish terrorist cell, the Bureau of Prisons created two special wards, called Communication Management Units, or C.M.U.’s. The units, which opened at federal prisons in Terre Haute, Ind., in 2006 and Marion, Ill., in 2008, have set off litigation and controversy, chiefly because critics say they impose especially restrictive rules on Muslim inmates, who are in the majority.

“The C.M.U.’s? You mean the Muslim Management Units?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The units currently hold about 80 inmates. The rules for visitors — who are allowed no physical contact with inmates — and the strict monitoring of mail, e-mail and phone calls are intended both to prevent inmates from radicalizing others and to rule out plotting from behind bars.

A Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman, Traci L. Billingsley, said in an e-mail that the units were not created for any religious group but were “necessary to ensure the safety, security and orderly operation of correctional facilities, and protection of the public.”

An unintended consequence of creating the C.M.U.’s is a continuing conflict between Muslim inmates and guards, mainly over the inmates’ demand for collective prayer beyond the authorized hourlong group prayer on Fridays. The clash is described in hundreds of pages of court filings in a lawsuit. In one affidavit, a prison official in Terre Haute describes “signs of radicalization” in the unit, saying one inmate’s language showed “defiance to authority, and a sense of being incarcerated because of Islam.”

One 2010 written protest obtained by The New York Times, listing grievances ranging from the no-contact visiting rules to guards “mocking, disrespecting and disrupting” Friday Prayer, was signed by 17 Muslim prisoners in the Terre Haute Communication Management Unit. They included members of the so-called Virginia jihad case of which Mr. Royer was part; the Lackawanna Six, Buffalo-area Yemeni Americans who traveled to a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan; Kevin James, who formed a radical Muslim group in prison and plotted to attack military facilities in Los Angeles; and John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

An affidavit signed by Mr. Lindh, who is serving 20 years after admitting to fighting for the Taliban, complained that a correctional officer greeted male Muslim inmates with “Good morning, ladies.” (“No ladies were in the area,” Mr. Lindh writes.) Prison officials say in court papers that Mr. Lindh has repeatedly challenged guards and violated rules.

Unlike those at the Supermax, inmates in the segregated units have access to e-mail, and some were willing to answer questions. Mr. Lindh, whose father, Frank Lindh, said his son believed the news media falsely labeled him a terrorist, was not. In reply to a reporter’s letter requesting an interview, he sent only a photocopy of the sole of a tennis shoe. Since shoe bottoms are considered offensive in many cultures, his answer appeared to be an emphatic no.

There is some evidence that the Bureau of Prisons has assigned Muslims with no clear terrorist connection to the C.M.U.’s. Avon Twitty, a Muslim who spent 27 years in prison for a 1982 street murder, was sent to the Terre Haute unit in 2007. When he challenged the assignment, he was told in writing that he was a “member of an international terrorist organization,” though no organization was named and there appears to be no public evidence for the assertion.

Mr. Twitty, working for a home improvement company and teaching at a Washington mosque since his release in January, said he believed the real reason was to quash his complaints about what he believed were miscalculations of time off for good behavior for numerous inmates. “They had to shut me up,” he said.

Another former inmate at the Marion C.M.U., Andy Stepanian, an animal rights activist, said a guard once told him he was “a balancer” — a non-Muslim placed in the unit to rebut claims of religious bias. Mr. Stepanian said the creation of the predominantly Muslim units could backfire, adding to the feeling that Islam is under attack.

“I think it’s a fair assessment that these men will leave with a more intensified belief that the U.S. is at war with Islam,” said Mr. Stepanian, 33, who now works for a Princeton publisher. “The place reeked of it,” he said, describing clashes over restrictions on prayer and some guards’ hostility to Islam.

Yet Mr. Stepanian also said he found the “family atmosphere” and camaraderie of inmates at the unit a welcome change from the threatening tone of his previous medium-security prison, where he said prisoners without a gang to protect them were “food for the sharks.” When he arrived at the C.M.U., he said, he found on his bed a pair of shower slippers and a bag of non-animal-based food that Muslim inmates had collected after hearing a vegan was joining the unit.

He was wary. “I thought they were trying to indoctrinate me,” he said. “They never tried.” The consensus of the inmates, he said, “was that 9/11 was not Islam.” “These guys were not lunatics,” he said. “They wanted to be back with their families.”

Reflection
It may be too early to judge recidivism for those imprisoned in terrorism cases after Sept. 11; those who are already out are mostly defendants whose crimes were less serious or who cooperated with the authorities. Justice Department officials and outside experts could identify only a handful of cases in which released inmates had been rearrested, a rate of relapse far below that for most federal inmates or for Guantánamo releases.

For example, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a Kuwaiti Canadian who plotted with Al Qaeda to attack American embassies in Singapore and Manila, pleaded guilty in 2002 and began to work as an F.B.I. informant. But F.B.I. agents soon discovered he was secretly plotting to kill them — and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Nearly all of these ex-convicts, however, lie low and steer clear of militancy, often under the watchful eye of family, mosque and community, lawyers and advocates say. A dozen former inmates declined to be interviewed, saying that to be associated publicly with a terrorism case could derail new jobs and lives. As for Mr. Royer, he is approaching only the midpoint of his 20-year sentence.

Did he get what he deserved? Chris Heffelfinger, a terrorism analyst and author of “Radical Islam in America,” did a detailed study of the Virginia jihad case, and concluded that Mr. Royer’s sentence was perhaps double what his crime merited. But he said the prosecution was warranted and probably prevented at least some of the men Mr. Royer assisted from joining the Taliban.

“I think a strong law enforcement response to cases like this is appropriate nine times out of 10,” Mr. Heffelfinger said. Mr. Royer himself, in his long presentencing letter to Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, said he understood why he had been arrested. “I realize that the government has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from terrorism,” he wrote, “and that in this post-9/11 environment, it must take all reasonable precautions.”

Today, Mr. Royer’s only battle is to serve out his sentence in a less restrictive prison nearer his children. In what he called in a letter “a heroic sacrifice,” his parents, Ray and Nancy Royer, moved from Missouri to Virginia to be close to their son’s children, now aged 8 to 12.

“I found it necessary to be a surrogate father,” said Ray Royer, 70, a commercial photographer by trade, in an interview at the retirement community outside Washington where he and his wife now live. When his son, who still goes by Randy in the family, converted to Islam at the age of 18, his parents did not object. Later, when he headed to Bosnia, they chalked it up to his active social conscience. “Religion is a personal thing,” the elder Mr. Royer said. “He’d never been in trouble.”

Ray Royer was at his son’s Virginia apartment in 2003 when the F.B.I. knocked at 5 a.m., put him in handcuffs and took him away. Now, years later, he alternates between defending his son and expressing dismay at what Randy got himself into.

“He did help his buddies get to L.E.T.,” or Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group later designated as a terrorist organization. “He admitted to it. He should pay the price.” Still, he added, “maybe he deserved five years or so. Not 20.”

Ray Royer sat at his home computer one recent evening, looking through a folder called “Randy Pics” — photographs tracing his son’s life from childhood, to fatherhood, to prison.

“He loved his family,” the father said of his son. “Why would he put this cause ahead of his family? I still don’t really know what happened. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

Saudi report: Women driving spurs premarital sex

2011-12-04T16:58:00.000-05:00

AP – 12/3/2011

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — A report given to a high-level advisory group in Saudi Arabia claims that allowing women in the kingdom to drive could encourage premarital sex, a rights activist said Saturday.

The ultraconservative stance suggests increasing pressure on King Abdullah to retain the kingdom's male-only driving rules despite international criticism.

Rights activist Waleed Abu Alkhair said the document by a well-known academic was sent to the all-male Shura Council, which advises the monarchy. The report by Kamal Subhi claims that allowing women to drive will threaten the country's traditions of virgin brides, he said. The suggestion is that driving will allow greater mixing of genders and could promote sex.

Saudi women have staged several protests defying the driving ban. The king has already promised some reforms, including allowing women to vote in municipal elections in 2015.

There was no official criticism or commentary on the scholar's views, and it was unclear whether they were solicited by the Shura Council or submitted independently. But social media sites were flooded with speculation that Saudi's traditional-minded clerics and others will fight hard against social changes suggested by the 87-year-old Abdullah.

Saudi's ruling family, which oversees Islam's holiest sites, draws its legitimacy from the backing of the kingdom's religious establishment, which follows a strict brand of Islam known as Wahhabism. While Abdullah has pushed for some changes on women's rights, he is cautious not to push too hard against the clerics.

In October, Saudi Arabia named a new heir to the throne, Prince Nayef, who is a former interior minister and considered to hold traditionalist views, although he had led crackdowns against suspected Islamic extremists. His selection appeared to embolden the ultraconservative clerics to challenge any sweeping social reforms.

Prince Nayef was picked following the death of Crown Prince Sultan.

Panetta chides Israel over stalled peace process

2011-12-04T16:57:00.000-05:00

By Joby Warrick, Published: December 2 2011
The Washington Post

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta prodded Israel on Friday to do more to reverse its deepening isolation in the Middle East, and suggested that Israeli leaders bear significant blame for a stalled peace process that he said “has been effectively put on hold.”

Panetta’s admonishment came in a speech in which he also pledged an “unshakable” commitment to the security of the Jewish state and reiterated a promise to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons — including by military force, if needed. He said the Defense Department had contingency plans for a “wide range of military options, should they become necessary.”

“When it comes to the threat posed by Iran, the president has made clear that we have not taken any options off the table,” Panetta said.

Panetta’s remarks on Israel were the latest in a series of statements by Obama administration officials chiding Israeli leaders over the nearly moribund state of the peace process. Former defense secretary Robert M. Gates was quoted in September as complaining about Israeli inaction on peace talks despite substantial U.S. assistance on weapon systems and intelligence.

In his speech at a meeting of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Panetta said Israel could count on “three enduring pillars of U.S. policy” to preserve its safety and prosperity during a period of extraordinary turmoil in the Middle East. The pillars included the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security, a broader commitment to stability in the region, and a determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he said.

“These are not merely rhetorical reassurances,” Panetta said. “These are firm principles that are backed up by tangible action, the commitment of resources and demonstrable resolve.”

But he also said Israel must do more to ensure its own security by seeking to repair strained relations with Egypt, Turkey and Jordan, and by seizing the opportunity to negotiate a permanent peace settlement with the Palestinians.

“Unfortunately, over the past year, we’ve seen Israel’s isolation from its traditional security partners in the region grow, and the pursuit of a comprehensive Middle East peace has effectively been put on hold,” Panetta said.

Panetta acknowledged that Israel is not solely responsible for its isolation, but he said it needed to make a greater effort to mend fences, particularly with Turkey. “If the gestures are rebuked, the world will see those rebukes for what they are,” he said.

Parents of 'Adolf Hitler' Lose Custody of Newborn

2011-11-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

By Alyssa Newcomb | ABC News Blogs – 11/19/2011

Heath and Deborah Campbell, the New Jersey parents of three children with Nazi-inspired names, lost custody of their fourth child 17 hours after he was born, the Express-Times of Lehigh Valley, Pa., reported.

Hons Campbell was taken into custody by the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services late Thursday night after the doctor who delivered the baby called the agency, the paper reported.

“There’s no legal binding court order. It’s basically a kidnapping, but they use different terms,” Heath Campbell told the Express-Times.

The Campbell family stepped into the spotlight in December 2008 when a ShopRite grovery store declined to decorate a birthday cake for their son Adolf Hitler Campbell’s third birthday.

The state took custody of Adolf, along with his sisters JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Himler Jeannie Campbell, in January of 2009. The three children have remained in foster care ever since.

A DYFS spokesperson told ABCNews.com in 2009 that she could not comment on a specific case, but said children are only taken into custody if there is a suspicion of abuse or neglect.

“We would never remove a child simply based on their name,” the spokeswoman said.

Neighbor Lori Dilts told ABCNews.com at the time the children were taken that it was certainly not because of their names.

“Those children look outwardly healthy, but they didn’t have much freedom,” Dilts said. “Occasionally, the little boy would come over here and would hate having to go back to his house.”

The couple’s attorney, Pasquale Giannetta, told The Associated Press that a court a hearing has been scheduled for Monday to determine the custody status of the newborn.

ABC News’ Russell Goldman contributed to this report.

Saudi Arabia expands its power as U.S. influence diminishes

2011-11-19T14:42:00.002-05:00

By David Ignatius, Published: November 18 2011
The Washington Post

RIYADH

Over this year of Arab Spring revolt, Saudi Arabia has increasingly replaced the United States as the key status-quo power in the Middle East — a role that seems likely to expand even more in coming years as the Saudis boost their military and economic spending.

Saudis describe the kingdom’s growing role as a reaction, in part, to the diminished clout of the United States. They still regard the U.S.- Saudi relationship as valuable, but it’s no longer seen as a guarantor of their security. For that, the Saudis have decided they must rely more on themselves — and, down the road, on a wider set of friends that includes their military partner, Pakistan, and their largest oil customer, China.

For Saudi watchers, this change is striking. The kingdom’s old practice was to keep its head down, spread money to radical groups to try to buy peace, and rely on a U.S. military umbrella. Now, Riyadh is more open and vocal in pressing its interests — especially in challenging Iran.

The more-assertive Saudi role has been clear in its open support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is Iran’s crucial Arab ally. The Saudis were decisive backers of last weekend’s Arab League decision to suspend Syria’s membership (though they also supported the organization’s waffling decision Wednesday to send another mediation team to Damascus).

Money is always the Saudis’ biggest resource, and they are planning to spend it more aggressively as a regional power broker — by roughly doubling their armed forces over the next 10 years and spending at least $15 billion annually to support countries weakened economically by this year’s turmoil.

The enormous military expansion was signaled this past week by Gen. Hussein al-Qubail, the chief of staff. Because of “surrounding circumstances,” he said, the Saudis would spend more to achieve “the highest degree of combat readiness.”

Overseeing the arms buildup will be a new defense minister, Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, described by Saudis as a strong manager during his many years as governor of Riyadh. This contrasts with what foreign analysts say was the loose discipline (and occasional corruption scandals) under his predecessor, Prince Sultan, who died in October after 48 years as defense minister.

Saudi sources provided an unofficial summary of the defense buildup. The army will add 125,000 to its estimated current force of 150,000; the national guard will grow by 125,000 from an estimated 100,000; the navy will spend more than $30 billion buying new ships and sea-skimming missiles; the air force will add 450 to 500 planes; and the Ministry of Interior is boosting its police and special forces by about 60,000. The Saudis are also developing their own version of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command.

The doubling of ground forces is partly a domestic employment project, but it’s also a signal of Saudi confidence.

The Saudi shopping list is a bonanza for U.S. and European arms merchants. That’s especially true of the air force procurement, with the Saudis planning to buy 72 “Eurofighters” from EADS and 84 new F-15s from Boeing. The rationale is containing Iran, whose nuclear ambitions the Saudis strongly oppose. But Riyadh has an instant deterrent ready, too, in the form of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal that the Saudis are widely believed to have helped finance.

Big weapons purchases have been a Saudi penchant for decades. More interesting, in some ways, is their quiet effort to provide support to friendly regimes to keep the region from blowing itself up in this period of instability. The Saudis have budgeted $4 billion this year to help Egypt, $1.4 billion for Jordan, and $500 million annually over the next decade for Bahrain and Oman. They will doubtless pump money, as well, to Syria, Yemen and Lebanon once the smoke clears in those volatile countries.

“In outlays, we’ve budgeted $15 billion a year just to keep the peace,” says one Saudi source, adding up the economic assistance to Arab neighbors. But that’s hardly a stretch for a country that, by year-end, will have about $650 billion in foreign reserves.

The Saudis speak more charitably of the United States than they did a few months ago, after reassuring visits by Vice President Biden and national security adviser Tom Donilon, and close military and intelligence cooperation continues. But President Obama is seen as a relatively weak leader who abandoned his own call for a Palestinian state under Israeli pressure. The United States isn’t exactly the god that failed, but its divine powers are certainly suspect in Riyadh.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Angry over spying, Muslims say: 'Don't call NYPD'

2011-11-15T18:56:00.000-05:00

By CHRIS HAWLEY and EILEEN SULLIVAN - Associated Press | AP – Mon, Nov 14, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Fed up with a decade of police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to the police with their concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups.

Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to a lawyer before speaking with the authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. Some members of the community have planned a demonstration for next week.

Some government officials point to this type of outreach as proof that Muslims aren't cooperating in the fight against terrorism, justifying the aggressive spy tactics, while many in the Muslim community view it as a way to protect themselves from getting snared in a secret police effort to catch terrorists.

As a result, one of America's largest Muslim communities — in a city that's been attacked twice and targeted more than a dozen times — is caught in a downward spiral of distrust with the nation's largest police department: The New York City Police Department spies on Muslims, which makes them less likely to trust police. That reinforces the belief that the community is secretive and insular, a key reason that current and former NYPD officials cite for spying in the first place.

The outreach campaign follows an Associated Press investigation that revealed the NYPD had dispatched plainclothes officers to eavesdrop in Muslim communities, often without any evidence of wrongdoing. Restaurants serving Muslims were identified and photographed. Hundreds of mosques were investigated, and dozens were infiltrated. Police used the information to build ethnic databases on daily life inside Muslim neighborhoods.

Many of these programs were developed with the help of the CIA.

At a recent "Know Your Rights" session for Brooklyn College students, someone asked why Muslims who don't have anything to hide should avoid talking to police.

"Most of the time it's a fishing expedition," answered Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York, who supervises an advocacy organization that does such community presentations. "So the safest thing you can do for yourself, your family, and for your community is not to answer."

New York Republican Rep. Peter King said this kind of reaction from the Muslim community is "disgraceful."

Muslim groups have previously organized educational programs around the country describing a person's legal rights, such as when they must present identification to a police officer and when they can refuse to answer police questions. A California chapter of a national Muslim organization posted a poster on its website that warned Muslims not to talk to the FBI. The national organization ultimately asked the California branch to remove the poster from the website.

In New York, the AP stories about the NYPD and internal police documents have outraged some Muslims and provided evidence of tactics that they suspected were being used to watch them all along. These disclosures have intensified the outreach campaigns in New York.

A recently distributed brochure from an advocacy organization at the City University of New York Law School warns people to be wary when confronted by someone who advocates violence against the U.S., discusses terror organizations, is overly generous or is aggressive in their interactions. The brochure said that person could be a police informant.

"Be very careful about involving the police," the brochure said. "If the individual is an informant, the police may not do anything ... If the individual is not an informant and you report them, the unintended consequences could be devastating."

Sweeping skepticism of police affects community relations at all levels of law enforcement on a wide range of issues, not just the NYPD's counterterrorism programs. Interactions with a real terror operative could go unreported to law enforcement out of an assumption that the operative is actually working for the NYPD. A victim of domestic abuse or street violence may not trust the police enough to call for help.

Retired New York FBI agent Don Borelli said intelligence gathering is key to police work, not just in terrorism cases. But he said it can backfire when people feel their rights are being violated.

"When they do, these kinds of programs are actually counterproductive, because they undermine trust and drive a wedge between the community and police," said Borelli, now a security consultant with the Soufan Group.

Kassem said the activists' presentations are intended to "inform citizens about their legal rights when law enforcement comes to their doorstep." He said the goal is not to dissuade citizens from contacting authorities when they have concerns about a crime.

Since the 2001 terror attacks, the NYPD, city government officials and federal law enforcement have spent years building relationships with the New York Muslim community, assuring many Muslims that they are considered partners in the city's fight against terrorism. But in some cases, community members who have been hailed as partners and even dined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg were secretly followed by the NYPD or worked in mosques that the department had infiltrated, according to secret NYPD documents obtained by the AP.

"There's not a reference here to the fact that New York is the No. 1 target of Islamic terrorists, that the NYPD and the FBI have protected New York," King said, referring to one of the recent brochures about detecting police informants.

King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has held a series of hearings about the threat of radicalization within American Muslim communities and the level of cooperation members of the community provide to law enforcement. Muslim and civil rights advocacy groups have decried the hearings and pointed to terror cases around the country in which members of the Muslim community helped law enforcement foil plots.

New York Muslim community groups say they've held dozens of meetings for people who are worried about police surveillance and the NYPD's counterterrorism programs. In one instance, an audience of college students watched as a law student played out the role of a police informant and another played the role of the person the informant was targeting. The goal was to teach people to spot informants.

"Stay away from these people. That's one of the most powerful things you can do," said Robin Gordon-Leavitt, a member of an advocacy organization Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility.

At another meeting, organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, students watched a film of two actors portraying FBI agents talking their way into a young Muslim's home and interrogating him. At the meeting, students were warned not to speak with police even if their parents, imams or Muslim clerics urge them to cooperate.

"You'll even hear imams saying, 'As long as I obey the law, I have nothing to worry about.' But that's not how it plays out on the ground," said Cyrus McGoldrick, CAIR New York's civil rights manager.

CAIR has had a strained relationship with law enforcement and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case.

The Muslim community wants an independent commission to investigate all NYPD and CIA operations in the Muslim community.

Israel is a strategic asset for U.S. national interests, according to new report

2011-11-13T19:10:00.000-05:00

Published 02.11.11
Latest update 02.11.11
HAARETZ

Report issued by Washington Institute for Near East Policy describes how the benefit of the U.S.-Israel relationship far exceeds the cost.
By Natasha Mozgovaya Tags: Israel US

These days, when reporters are mercilessly grilling State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland over the United States' funding cut to UNESCO following its approval of Palestine as member, the argument that Israel is a strategic asset to the U.S. might sound slightly presumptuous.

But according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy – as expressed in their latest report, "Israel: A Strategic Asset for the United States" – the U.S.-Israel relationship is not a one-way street at all.
Obama with Netanyahu - Reuters - May 20, 2011

U.S. President Barack Obama with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office in Washington, May 20, 2011.
Photo by: Reuters

Its authors argue that Americans – starting with top administrative officials – should start acknowledging that Israel is a strategic asset for the U.S. They say the U.S.-Israeli relationship "stands equally on an underappreciated third leg: common national interests and collaborative action to advance those interests."

One of the authors, Robert Blackwill, is the former deputy national security adviser for strategic planning and presidential envoy to Iraq, and currently serves as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Blackwill said Tuesday that contrary to popular opinion, the U.S.-Israel relationship in no way weakens United States' standing in the Arab world.

"Since 1973, we haven't identified any instances in the Arab world in which the U.S. paid a price for its relationship with Israel," said Blackwill.

"American diplomats, of course, hear much condemnation of U.S.-Israel relations, but when Arab governments act, they act on the basis of their national interests and we can't find examples of concrete tangible actions of the Arab governments against the U.S. because of its relations with Israel."

"Would Saudi Arabia's relationship with Washington be different if relations between Washington and Israel went into decline? Would they lower the price of oil? Would it view American democracy promotion in the Middle East more favorably? Would it regard U.S. Afghanistan policy more positively? Our criterion in this report was to check how the Arab government act; not what they say," said Blackwill.

When asked by Haaretz whether they see the recent vote approving Palestinian membership at UNESCO as an unfavorable result of the U.S.-Israel relationship, both Blackman and co-author Walter Slocombe exclaimed, "No!"

"The optic that we look though is the U.S. national interest, and this vote did not have a substantial influence on [that]," Blackwill said. "We are trying to make a very long-term argument. We want the debate to be on the long-term proposition, not what happened last week or last month," he added.
netanyahu obama - GPO - May 20 2011

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House, May 20, 2011.
Photo by: GPO

They admitted their argument is not widely accepted in the U.S. government, not to mention in academic circles.

Blackwill said Tuesday that the topic of the U.S.-Israel relationship is "very emotional" for a lot of people. So far U.S. administrations have not been willing to make the strategic advantage part of the argument in support of U.S.-Israeli relations, he said, adding that "It's hard to change the embedded views of the bureaucracy."

"The kinds of changes that are proposed in this report are never bottom up. They have to be top-down."

Blackwill and Slocombe's report reflects on U.S. cooperation with Israel with regards to various security concerns, from Israel's undertakings of tasks the U.S. might not be willing to do, to sharing intelligence and missile defense cooperation, to the Israeli expertise in cyber security that has already benefitted U.S. banking, communications, transportation and utilities.

This relationship is even more critical now, as both countries share an interest to prevent nuclear proliferation and oppose the spread of Iranian influence and the influence of Iran's proxies.
Still, Slocombe, who is a former Pentagon official and currently senior counsel at Caplin & Drysdale law firm, admitted "there is no magical military solution for Iran". So long as it's the case, he said, the argument in favor of military force is weak. He added, however, that the option of a surgical military strike should not be ruled out.

Blackwill added that, today, Israeli and U.S. intelligence estimates of Iran's nuclear program are "pretty close". "This was not the case five years ago," said Blackwill, who described Iran's nuclear program as "the most consequential danger for American national interest in the Middle East."

Regarding the Arab Spring, Blackwill and Slocombe were skeptical as to whether the U.S. would benefit from impending changes to the political structures of Israel's neighboring countries. "[The Arab Spring] is good in itself, but we're not sure it furthers our national interest." In contrast, they said, Israel is already a stable democracy and there is no other country in the Middle East whose national interests are "so closely aligned with those of the U.S."

Egypt’s military guards its own power

2011-11-13T19:08:00.000-05:00

By Leila Fadel, Published: November 12 2012
The Washington Post

CAIRO — Two weeks before parliamentary elections billed as a first big step toward democracy, there are new signs that the generals ruling Egypt are trying to steer the transition to preserve their vast political and economic power.

A widening circle of critics say that new proposals from Egypt’s ruling military council suggest that the generals are backing away from a pledge to quickly hand over authority to elected leaders. They note that guidelines put in place by the generals have prolonged the transition to democracy, allowing them to stay in place as de facto rulers until after presidential elections that could be held as late as 2013.

The deceleration could allow the generals time to protect their vast commercial holdings, which extend from large tracts of prime real estate to water-bottling plants to factories that manufacture air-conditioning units. In recent proposals, the generals have pressed for rules that would forbid civilian oversight of the military budget and grant the military council, rather than a new parliament, the most influence in the writing of a new constitution.

Egyptians welcomed the military rulers as heroes nine months ago, when the army helped demonstrators bring to an end to the almost 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, then pledged to yield to elected leaders as soon as possible.

But pro-democracy activists and prominent members of Egypt’s political elite are accusing the generals of trying to maintain a dominant hand in the country’s future, a role that the military has played here since Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers overthrew King Farouk in 1952.

“They want to protect their own power and privileges. They have no notion of what democracy is about,” said Hani Shukrallah, editor of the English-language al-Ahram Online Web site. “They want a stable political system where they can keep their privileges, where they can exercise some power over the future of Egyptian policy as a whole.”

Used to the shadows

Even now, the extent of the military’s holdings in factories and other businesses remains so shrouded in secrecy that estimates vary widely, from 5 to 45 percent of Egypt’s economy. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which acts as the head of state under Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the Mubarak-era defense minister, operates almost entirely in the shadows, announcing most decisions by Facebook.

U.S. officials have said they remain confident that the generals will eventually surrender power to a new Egyptian president. But Western diplomats and most experts here say it appears that the criticism of their actions has only prompted the military leaders to slow the pace of change and to act indecisively, sometimes reversing decisions after they are announced.

Their current role at the top of Egypt’s power structure has clearly been jarring for the historically reclusive generals, who, until the toppling of Mubarak, had always wielded influence behind the scenes. Beginning with Nasser, and continuing through Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, each of Egypt’s modern leaders has emerged from the officer corps and ruled as an autocrat backed by a powerful army.

With voting set to begin Nov. 28 and lasting through March, the coming parliamentary elections could be the first test of whether the military’s powers will be rolled back or will remain untouchable.

It remains unclear how much power an elected parliament will wield. For now, the military has made clear that it intends to retain the right to appoint the prime minister and cabinet and to control the budget, even after the new parliament is in place.

But those proposals have been condemned across Egypt’s activist political spectrum, most strongly by Islamist leaders. If adopted, they would allow the military to veto any portion of the constitution that it opposes and to disband a constitutional assembly chosen by parliament and appoint a new one if the assembly does not meet a six-month deadline. The proposals would also allow the military to exclude its budget from civilian oversight.

“The military has put its cards on the table and shown that it intends to maintain a lot of control, but to do so even more openly than it did in the past,” said Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There was never anything in writing that the military had total control of their own budget. Now they have put it in writing. It goes further than anything that happened before. They also made it very clear that they are going to control the process of writing the constitution.”

Broad public support

The Egyptian military is a notoriously change-averse institution, as U.S. diplomats noted in a 2008 cable from the embassy in Cairo that was made public by the group WikiLeaks. Tantawi, the military chief, was called “aged and change-resistant.” The same dispatch said he was opposed to economic and political reforms that would contribute to decentralization of power.

A desire to maintain a strong central government, presumably propped up by the military, is partly what drives the generals’ grasp for power in these uncertain times, analysts say. Advocates of that approach say that without generals at the helm, Egypt would plunge into lawlessness and economic collapse, a scenario that the military council appears to truly fear.

Even now, the army and its top commanders enjoy broad public support, regularly polling at the top in surveys on whom Egyptians trust most since Mubarak’s ouster. That has left critics in a delicate situation — trying to raise concern about military rule when most Egyptians are highly supportive of Egypt’s army and the generals seem reluctant to leave.

Though they are visibly uncomfortable in the spotlight, disentangling them from power could take years.

In addition to their quest for stability, the generals also seem determined to safeguard the economic perks they have amassed through decades of authoritarian rule, analysts say. The military’s expansive holdings have never been subject to domestic or international scrutiny, and the generals are loath to put them before the public now, according to the analysts. They want to lay the groundwork to protect their financial interests and become the guardians of Egypt’s political system before they pass the reins, said Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

“In a fully functioning democracy, they would be subjected to government control,” he said. “They do not want the development of oversight capacity that would impinge upon them. They don’t want democratization.’’

Sides of faith collide at Ford Field prayer rally

2011-11-12T13:12:00.000-05:00

BY NIRAJ WARIKOO
11/12/2011
DETROIT FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Speaking to thousands inside Ford Field, the controversial leader of a 24-hour prayer rally in Detroit called Friday evening for Jesus to rule over Detroit, Dearborn and America. Otherwise, he warned, the U.S. will fall into ruin.

"We need Jesus' face to appear all across America," Lou Engle thundered to a cheering crowd at TheCall, a movement that has drawn criticism.

Before the rally began, about 150 people protested against Engle, who is with a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. Its leaders often rail against Muslims, gays, abortion, Catholics, African Americans and politicians who support abortion rights.

They say Dearborn is under demonic control because of its Muslim population. And they say they believe African Americans have been cursed by Satan in recent decades because they vote Democratic.

Organizers for Engle's prayer event were expecting 50,000 to 70,000 people to show up, but the crowd size was markedly smaller than that, with much of the stadium unfilled. They also were heavily targeting African Americans in Detroit, but most of the crowd was white.

"Their message is not one of inclusion; it's of hate," said Jennifer Teed of Detroit, who opposed Engle's prayer event. "I don't see how that's religious."

She held up a sign that read, "All are people" and "Standing on the Side of Love."

The protest against Engle featured Catholic, Baptist and Methodist pastors from Detroit, as well as gay rights and women's activists. Chanting "Stop the hate" and "Spread the love," the protesters said the prayer rally inside the stadium promotes division and intolerance.

"God did not call us to hate," said the Rev. Charles Williams of Historic Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit.

In the past year, Engle and his supporters have said their message is the key to reviving the world. Engle says black gospel music can defeat pop culture and then lead a generation to convert Muslims.

"We believe that God wants to raise up a new worship sound out of Detroit," said Engle, who is based in Kansas City, Mo., at the International House of Prayer.

But several Detroit clergymen said they were being patronizing and racist toward minorities. Some Muslims were concerned about their mosques because Engle and others made references to targeting local Islamic centers.

During his talks Friday night, Engle often referred to Dearborn, calling for Jesus to appear "all over Dearborn, all over Michigan."

From 3-6 a.m. today, the rally will focus specifically on defeating Islam in Dearborn and eventually around the world. Engle said Muslims will dream of Jesus while the group is praying at Ford Field.

Critics said Engle is part of a movement that promotes intolerance.

Cheryl Voglesong of Royal Oak held up a sign outside Ford Field that read: "Take Thy Fearmongering back to Kansas. We don't want it."

Contact Niraj Warikoo: 313-223-4792 or nwarikoo@freepress.com

Detroit prayer event puts Muslim community on edge

2011-11-12T13:07:00.002-05:00

By JEFF KAROUB - Associated Press
11/11/2011

DETROIT (AP) — An area with one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States is bracing itself for a 24-hour prayer rally by a group that counts Islam among the ills facing the nation.

The gathering in Detroit at Ford Field, the stadium where the Detroit Lions play, starts Friday evening and is designed to tackle issues such as the economy, racial strife, same-sex relationships and abortion. But the decade-old organization known as TheCall has said Detroit is a "microcosm of our national crisis" in all areas, including "the rising tide of the Islamic movement."

Leaders of TheCall believe a satanic spirit is shaping all parts of U.S. society, and it must be challenged through intensive Christian prayer and fasting. Such a demonic spirit has taken hold of specific areas, Detroit among them, organizers say. In the months ahead of their rallies, teams of local organizers often travel their communities performing a ritual called "divorcing Baal," the name of a demon spirit, to drive out the devil from each location.

"Our concern is that we are literally being demonized by the organizers of this group," said Dawud Walid, executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations' Michigan chapter, which last week urged local mosques and Islamic schools to increase security. "And given the recent history of other groups that have come into Michigan ... we're concerned about this prayer vigil stoking up the flames of divisiveness in the community."

TheCall is the latest and largest of several groups or individuals to come to the Detroit area with a message that stirred up many of its estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Muslims. Recent visitors have included Florida pastor Terry Jones; members of the Westboro Baptist Church; and the Acts 17 Apologetics, missionaries who were arrested for disorderly conduct last year at Dearborn's Arab International Festival but were later acquitted.

As with many other Christian groups, TheCall and its adherents believe Jesus is the only path to salvation. While they consider all other religions false, they have a specific focus on Islam, largely in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, terrorism overseas and fear that Islam, which is also a proselytizing faith, will spread faster than Christianity.

TheCall is modeled partly on the Promise Keepers, the men's stadium prayer movement that was led in the 1990s by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney. TheCall's first major rally was in September 2000 on the national Mall in Washington, drawing tens of thousands of young people to pray for a Christian revival in America. Co-founder Lou Engle has organized similar rallies in several cities, including a 2008 event at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium two days before Election Day to generate support for Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California.

Theologically, Engle is part of a stream of Pentecostalism that is independent of any denomination and is intensely focused on the end times. Within these churches, some leaders are elevated to the position of apostle, or hearing directly from God.

Muslims aren't the only ones concerned about Friday's event. A coalition of Detroit clergy plans to march to the football stadium Friday and hold their own rally.

"We do not agree with the spread of a message of hate, but a message of peace and a message of love," the Rev. Charles Williams II, pastor of Historic King Solomon Church in Detroit, said Wednesday. "We love our Muslim brothers. We love those who are homosexual and we are not scared ... to stand up when the time calls for us to."

Engle declined interview requests from The Associated Press, and one of his representatives referred calls to Apostle Ellis Smith of Detroit's Jubilee City Church. Smith, who appeared with Engle and other Detroit-area clergy in promotional videos filmed at Ford Field, considers himself a point-person for TheCall in Detroit.

Smith told the AP that fears of the event taking on an anti-Muslim tone are overblown. He said attendees won't be "praying against Muslims," but rather "against terrorism that has its roots in Islam."

"We're dealing with extremism," he said. "We're against extremism when it comes to Christians."

Still, in a pre-event sermon he delivered Oct. 9 at a suburban church, Smith called Islam a "false," ''lame" and "perverse" religion. He said it was allowed to take root in Detroit because of the city's strong religious base. That's why TheCall event is "pivotal," he said.

"That's why I believe it's by divine appointment: Detroit is the most religious city in America," Smith said in the sermon, adding later, "What I'm saying to you is Detroit had to happen because we have to break these barriers that have hindered in so many ways."

The sermon was archived on the online sermon library Sermon.net.

Smith on Thursday said he was offering his personal perspective that Islam is "a false religion, as many others are."

He said the main focus of Friday's gathering is "loving God, loving God's people."

Dawn Bethany, 43, said she is attending with about 70 others from Lansing's Epicenter of Worship, where she is the church's administrator. Bethany said she believes the event will be a "monumental spiritual experience," and "the negativity is a distraction from seeing who God is." God, she said, "is love."

NY jury convicts Russian arms dealer of trying to sell heavy weapons to Colombian terror group

2011-11-02T23:07:00.002-04:00

By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, November 2, 2011

NEW YORK — A notorious Russian arms dealer accused of evading authorities for years while fueling violence in war zones around the globe was convicted Wednesday in swift fashion in a U.S. courtroom on charges he conspired to sell weaponry to South American terrorists.

Viktor Bout, known as the Merchant of Death, looked straight ahead and showed no emotion as a jury forewoman read guilty verdicts on each of four conspiracy counts — a conviction that could result in a life sentence. Jurors had deliberated only six hours over two days in federal court in Manhattan.

The outcome was immediately applauded by those who labored to bring Bout to justice before he was finally snared in an elaborate Drug Enforcement Administration sting in Thailand in 2008 and — over the objections of Russia — extradited last year to the United States.

“The guy was without a doubt one of the most dangerous of his kind on the face of the earth, and it’s reassuring to know he’ll be locked up behind bars where he belongs,” said Michael Braun a former DEA official involved in the investigation. “If he had been allowed to carry on, he would have gone right back doing his dirty business.”

The evidence proved that Bout, 44, was someone “ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

Before Bout left court, he hugged one of his attorneys. The defense team said there would be an appeal.

“He’s resolute,” defense lawyer Kenneth Kaplan said of his client. “He’s a strong man. He accepts the verdict and is hopeful.”

For nearly two decades, the former Soviet military officer built a worldwide air cargo operation, amassing a fleet of more than 60 transport planes, hundreds of companies and a fortune reportedly in excess of $6 billion — exploits that were the main inspiration for the Nicholas Cage film “Lord of War.”

His aircraft flew from Afghanistan to Angola, carrying everything from raw minerals to gladiolas, drilling equipment to frozen fish. But the network’s specialty, according to authorities, was black market arms — assault rifles, ammunition, anti-aircraft missiles, helicopter gunships and a full range of sophisticated weapons systems, almost always sourced from Russian stocks or from Eastern European factories.

In the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S., British and United Nations authorities heard growing reports that Bout’s planes and maintenance operations, then headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, were aiding the Taliban while it sheltered al-Qaida militants in Afghanistan. Bout later denied that he worked with the Taliban or al-Qaida — and denied ever participating in black market arms deals.

In 2008, while under economic sanctions and a U.N. travel ban, Bout was approached in Moscow by a close associate about supplying weapons on the black market to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Bout was told that the group wanted to use drug-trafficking proceeds to pay for surface-to-air missiles and other weapons, making it clear it wanted to attack helicopter pilots and other Americans in Colombia, prosecutors said.

Neither man knew at the time that the two FARC officials they were dealing with were undercover informants working for the DEA, said the associate, South African businessman Andrew Smulian, who took the witness stand for the government as part of a plea deal.

At first, Bout dismissed the idea of a deal, Smulian testified.

“He said he didn’t deal with drug dealers,” Smulian said.

Smulian testified that Bout overcame his doubts and agreed that for a down payment of $20 million he would arrange for cargo planes to air-drop 100 tons of weapons into Colombia. Bout finalized the phony deal with the two DEA informants in a bugged hotel room in Bangkok in March 2008.

Jurors heard an informant on one tape saying: “We want to knock down those American sons of bitches.”

“Kill them, and kick them out of my country,” the informant says. “They don’t care where they go anymore. They go here, they go there. They go wherever they want. Why?”

Bout is quoted as saying on the tapes: “Yes, yes, yes. They act as if ... as if it was their home.”

One of the informants, Guatemala-born Carlos Sagastume, testified at trial that during the conversation Bout was writing on a sheet of paper a list of weapons he could provide and remarked, “And we have the same enemy.”

Asked on the witness stand what that meant, the informant responded, “He was referring to the Americans.”

Lawyers for Bout had offered what the government dismissively referred to as the “planes defense,” claiming their client had no intention of selling any weapons but acted as though he would so he could unload two old cargo planes for $5 million.

In closing arguments, the defense sought to convince the jury the DEA had framed a legitimate businessman by building its case on recorded conversations that were open to interpretation and never resulted in the exchange of any arms or money.

U.S. authorities “don’t have anything,” defense attorney Albert Dayan said. “All they have is speculation, innuendo and conjecture.”

Prosecutor Brendan McGuire countered there was ample proof that Bout “did everything he could to show he could be the one-stop shop for FARC.”

Sentencing was set for Feb. 8.

Alleged ricin plot in Georgia was a long shot

2011-11-02T23:06:00.002-04:00

Posted at 02:24 PM ET, 11/02/2011
WP
By Joby Warrick

From al-Qaeda to neo-Nazis, numerous hate groups have fantasized of pulling off a deadly terrorist attack using the highly lethal extract of the castor bean known as ricin. None has ever succeeded in carrying out such plans.

The four Georgians arrested this week in connection with an alleged terrorist plot may have been capable of advancing further than most amateur weaponeers, given their access to professional labs. (One had previously worked at the Centers for Disease Control, another for the Department of Agriculture.) But their chances for truly creating a weapon of mass destruction were tiny at best, biodefense experts say.

“Absolutely zero,” said Raymond Zilinskas, a microbiologist and expert on chemical and biological weapons.

The castor beans that are the source of ricin are relatively easy to obtain, and recipes for extracting the toxin are easily found on the Internet. But while a would-be terrorist could manufacture small batches of the poison in a basement or garage, the challenges involved in delivering lethal doses of ricin to large numbers of people are insurmountable for amateurs, said Zilinskas, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.

“No one has done it, as far as we know,” he said. “It is beyond the capabilities of anyone except professional weapons scientists.”

Ricin is regarded as one of the world’s most toxic natural substances, so poisonous that a dose the size of a few grains of salt can kill. It has been effectively used in the past as an assassination weapon, most famously during the slaying of Bulgarian novelist and defector Georgi Markov, who was killed in 1978 by a suspected Bulgarian agent using a specially modified umbrella to inject the pellet of ricin into his victim.

But even governments with dedicated weapons laboratories have struggled to create a ricin weapon that can kill on a large scale. Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein tried to do so during the late 1980s, but his scientists abandoned the effort after finding it was too difficult to convert ricin into a fine power or mist, according to records unearthed by U.N. weapons inspectors.

Justice Department officials say one of the men involved in the latest case got so far as obtaining castor beans, and the four -- all 65 or older, all alleged members of a far-right militia movement — had talked about using ricin in attacks on several U.S. cities.

Frederick Thomas, 73, one of the alleged co-conspirators, was quoted by court records as having boasted of his plans to kill, telling an undercover agent, “I’ve been to war, and I’ve taken life before, and I can do it again.”

Thomas’s wife, Charlotte, reached by phone by an Associated Press reporter, dismissed the alleged plot as “baloney.”

Worker suing intelligence agency claims anti-Muslim bias

2011-11-01T19:09:00.002-04:00

Posted at 06:00 AM ET, 11/01/2011
WP
By Ed O'Keefe

A Northern Virginia man is filing a discrimination lawsuit against one of the nation’s most secretive intelligence agencies, claiming it revoked his security clearance because his wife attended an Islamic school and works for a Muslim nonprofit group.
Eye Opener

Mahmoud M. Hegab, hired in 2010 as a budget analyst for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, sued in U.S. District Court in Alexandria last month and asked the agency to reverse its decision to revoke his clearance and place him on unpaid leave.

In court papers, Hegab, who lives in Alexandria, said he joined the agency in January 2010 and informed officials during his orientation that he had married his wife, Bushra Nusairat, between the time of his security clearance investigation and the date he reported to work.

The NGA supplies satellite imagery to the military and requires its 16,000 workers to obtain a top secret security clearance as a condition of employment. But the agency revoked Hegab’s clearance last November, citing concerns with Nusairat’s background; he was placed on unpaid leave in January.

Nusairat is a program associate with Islamic Relief USA, a nonprofit that partners with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and other global aid groups to provide food aid and public health and educational programs in poor or disaster-prone regions of the world.

Hegab’s attorney, Sheldon Cohen, argued in court papers that the decision to revoke his clearance “was based solely” on Nusairat’s “religion, Islam, her constitutionally protected speech, and her association with, and employment by, an Islamic faith-based organization.”

The couple declined to comment. But Cohen, an Arlington attorney who has represented hundreds of federal employees in security clearance disputes, said NGA officials closely probed Nusairat’s background once they learned of Hegab’s marriage.

Cohen described Islamic Relief USA as a “noncontroversial organization,” and said he did not know of other cases where someone lost his clearance because his wife or a close relative worked for such a group.

A Fairfax native, Nusairat graduated in 2005 from the Islamic Saudi Academy, a Saudi-backed school that came under close scrutiny for using textbooks that promoted violence and religious intolerance. The school’s 1999 valedictorian also was convicted of plotting with al-Qaeda to kill George W. Bush.

Nusairat then attended George Mason University, where she studied international diplomacy and Islamic studies and led the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine.

Court papers also said that during the course of its investigation, the NGA discovered a photo believed to be of Nusairat attending a 2003 anti-Iraq war protest in Washington — when she was 16 years old.

As Hegab appealed the NGA’s decision in a series of written responses, court documents said he told the agency that his wife had been born and raised in Virginia, attended the Islamic Saudi Academy because her parents believed the school provided an education on par with other ethnic and religious-affiliated schools in the Washington area, and attended the anti-war rally along with thousands of other Americans, including military veterans and lawmakers.

In March, the NGA told Hegab that he had mitigated the agency’s concerns regarding his wife’s educational background, but the agency maintained its concerns with Nusairat’s “current affiliation with one or more organizations which consist of groups who are organized largely around their non-United States origin.”

When Cohen asked the agency for further details, officials did not deny they were expressing concerns with Islamic Relief USA, he said.

Founded in 1993, Islamic Relief USA maintains offices in four states and has earned top accreditations and awards from charity auditors. Most recently, it worked with the Agriculture Department on a summer feeding program for underprivileged children and provided aid to victims of spring tornadoes in Alabama.

Hebah Reed, a charity spokeswoman, confirmed Nusairat’s employment but could not comment further on the case.

“We have not received any complaints from any of our organization’s employees about discrimination when it comes to obtaining security clearances,” Reed said in an e-mail. “In fact, because of the nature of our work, we do work closely with many federal and local agencies on a regular basis and anti-Muslim discrimination has not been a concern.”

Lawyers said the Hebag case was the first they knew of where clearance was revoked because of a spouse’s ties to Islamic organizations. But federal agencies have a well-documented history of revoking clearances because of an employee’s family or marital ties.

During the Cold War, intelligence agencies regularly denied clearances to individuals whose spouses were involved with communist or so-called fellow traveler organizations. People with relatives in or from Russia or other Warsaw Pact countries also were denied clearances.

More recently, agencies have rejected applicants and employees because they have family living in the Middle East or Afghanistan, said Mark F. Riley, an Annapolis attorney who also handles security clearance cases. Riley recalled a client who dropped legal challenges against his federal employer because he needed to travel to a Middle Eastern country to bail out an imprisoned brother.

An NGA spokesman referred questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, which also declined to comment. The Justice Department must respond to the suit by Dec. 6.

Cohen expects the government to seek a dismissal of the case. If that happens, “we’ll go on from there,” he said, “but we intend to fight.”

Abdullah: Jordan ‘last man standing’ for Israel

2011-10-30T11:24:00.000-04:00

October 27, 2011

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Jordan's King Abdullah II said he would stand by his country's peace treaty with Israel, although he expressed doubts about the Egypt-Israel peace.

"You have seen what has happened in Egypt [and] Turkey," Abdullah told The Washington Post in an interview this week, referring to Israel's deteriorating relations with both countries, particularly since the overthrow earlier this year of the Mubarak regime in Egypt. "We are actually the last man standing with our relationship with Israel."

The king expressed doubts about the viability of Israel-Egypt peace in the wake of President Hosni Mubarak's removal, describing the prospect of an Egyptian abrogation of the peace treaty as a "very, very strong possibility."

Abdullah said he would stand by the peace with Israel, and might even take a more active role in the peace process.

"Because of the loss of Egypt’s political leadership, the rest of us are having to step up," he said. "On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Jordan’s relationship with the Palestinians has had to take a step forward."

U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit From Iraq

2011-10-30T09:38:00.002-04:00

October 29, 2011
NYT
By THOM SHANKER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.

The plans, under discussion for months, gained new urgency after President Obama’s announcement this month that the last American soldiers would be brought home from Iraq by the end of December. Ending the eight-year war was a central pledge of his presidential campaign, but American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.

After unsuccessfully pressing both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government to permit as many as 20,000 American troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2011, the Pentagon is now drawing up an alternative.

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

With an eye on the threat of a belligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.

The size of the standby American combat force to be based in Kuwait remains the subject of negotiations, with an answer expected in coming days. Officers at the Central Command headquarters here declined to discuss specifics of the proposals, but it was clear that successful deployment plans from past decades could be incorporated into plans for a post-Iraq footprint in the region.

For example, in the time between the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States Army kept at least a combat battalion — and sometimes a full combat brigade — in Kuwait year-round, along with an enormous arsenal ready to be unpacked should even more troops have been called to the region.

“Back to the future” is how Maj. Gen. Karl R. Horst, Central Command’s chief of staff, described planning for a new posture in the Gulf. He said the command was focusing on smaller but highly capable deployments and training partnerships with regional militaries. “We are kind of thinking of going back to the way it was before we had a big ‘boots on the ground’ presence,” General Horst said. “I think it is healthy. I think it is efficient. I think it is practical.”

Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

“We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Tajikistan after the president’s announcement.

During town-hall-style meetings with military personnel in Asia last week, the secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, noted that the United States had 40,000 troops in the region, including 23,000 in Kuwait, though the bulk of those serve as logistical support for the forces in Iraq.

As they undertake this effort, the Pentagon and its Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, have begun a significant rearrangement of American forces, acutely aware of the political and budgetary constraints facing the United States, including at least $450 billion of cuts in military spending over the next decade as part of the agreement to reduce the budget deficit.

Officers at Central Command said that the post-Iraq era required them to seek more efficient ways to deploy forces and maximize cooperation with regional partners. One significant outcome of the coming cuts, officials said, could be a steep decrease in the number of intelligence analysts assigned to the region. At the same time, officers hope to expand security relationships in the region. General Horst said that training exercises were “a sign of commitment to presence, a sign of commitment of resources, and a sign of commitment in building partner capability and partner capacity.”

Col. John G. Worman, Central Command’s chief for exercises, noted a Persian Gulf milestone: For the first time, he said, the military of Iraq had been invited to participate in a regional exercise in Jordan next year, called Eager Lion 12, built around the threat of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

Another part of the administration’s post-Iraq planning involves the Gulf Cooperation Council, dominated by Saudi Arabia. It has increasingly sought to exert its diplomatic and military influence in the region and beyond. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, for example, sent combat aircraft to the Mediterranean as part of the NATO-led intervention in Libya, while Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates each have forces in Afghanistan.

At the same time, however, the council sent a mostly Saudi ground force into Bahrain to support that government’s suppression of demonstrations this year, despite international criticism.

Despite such concerns, the administration has proposed establishing a stronger, multilateral security alliance with the six nations and the United States. Mr. Panetta and Mrs. Clinton outlined the proposal in an unusual joint meeting with the council on the sidelines of the United Nations in New York last month.

The proposal still requires the approval of the council, whose leaders will meet again in December in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and the kind of multilateral collaboration that the administration envisions must overcome rivalries among the six nations.

“It’s not going to be a NATO tomorrow,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic negotiations still under way, “but the idea is to move to a more integrated effort.”

Iran, as it has been for more than three decades, remains the most worrisome threat to many of those nations, as well as to Iraq itself, where it has re-established political, cultural and economic ties, even as it provided covert support for Shiite insurgents who have battled American forces.

“They’re worried that the American withdrawal will leave a vacuum, that their being close by will always make anyone think twice before taking any action,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, said in an interview, referring to officials in the Persian Gulf region.

Sheik Khalid was in Washington last week for meetings with the administration and Congress. “There’s no doubt it will create a vacuum,” he said, “and it may invite regional powers to exert more overt action in Iraq.”

He added that the administration’s proposal to expand its security relationship with the Persian Gulf nations would not “replace what’s going on in Iraq” but was required in the wake of the withdrawal to demonstrate a unified defense in a dangerous region. “Now the game is different,” he said. “We’ll have to be partners in operations, in issues and in many ways that we should work together.”

At home, Iraq has long been a matter of intense dispute. Some foreign policy analysts and Democrats — and a few Republicans — say the United States has remained in Iraq for too long. Others, including many Republicans and military analysts, have criticized Mr. Obama’s announcement of a final withdrawal, expressing fear that Iraq remained too weak and unstable.

“The U.S. will have to come to terms with an Iraq that is unable to defend itself for at least a decade,” Adam Mausner and Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote after the withdrawal announcement.

Twelve Republican Senators demanded hearings on the administration’s ending of negotiations with the Iraqis — for now at least — on the continuation of American training and on counterterrorism efforts in Iraq.

“As you know, the complete withdrawal of our forces from Iraq is likely to be viewed as a strategic victory by our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime,” the senators wrote Wednesday in a letter to the chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee.

Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border

2011-10-29T20:10:00.000-04:00

No Suspicion Required Under DHS Policies

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 1, 2008

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"The policies . . . are truly alarming," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government's border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.

DHS officials said the newly disclosed policies -- which apply to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens -- are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism. Officials said such procedures have long been in place but were disclosed last month because of public interest in the matter.

Civil liberties and business travel groups have pressed the government to disclose its procedures as an increasing number of international travelers have reported that their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices had been taken -- for months, in at least one case -- and their contents examined.

The policies state that officers may "detain" laptops "for a reasonable period of time" to "review and analyze information." This may take place "absent individualized suspicion."

The policies cover "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form," including hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover "all papers and other written documentation," including books, pamphlets and "written materials commonly referred to as 'pocket trash' or 'pocket litter.' "

Reasonable measures must be taken to protect business information and attorney-client privileged material, the policies say, but there is no specific mention of the handling of personal data such as medical and financial records.

When a review is completed and no probable cause exists to keep the information, any copies of the data must be destroyed. Copies sent to non-federal entities must be returned to DHS. But the documents specify that there is no limitation on authorities keeping written notes or reports about the materials.

"They're saying they can rifle through all the information in a traveler's laptop without having a smidgen of evidence that the traveler is breaking the law," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Notably, he said, the policies "don't establish any criteria for whose computer can be searched."

Customs Deputy Commissioner Jayson P. Ahern said the efforts "do not infringe on Americans' privacy." In a statement submitted to Feingold for a June hearing on the issue, he noted that the executive branch has long had "plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border without probable cause or a warrant" to prevent drugs and other contraband from entering the country.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wrote in an opinion piece published last month in USA Today that "the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices." Searches have uncovered "violent jihadist materials" as well as images of child pornography, he wrote.

With about 400 million travelers entering the country each year, "as a practical matter, travelers only go to secondary [for a more thorough examination] when there is some level of suspicion," Chertoff wrote. "Yet legislation locking in a particular standard for searches would have a dangerous, chilling effect as officers' often split-second assessments are second-guessed."

In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco upheld the government's power to conduct searches of an international traveler's laptop without suspicion of wrongdoing. The Customs policy can be viewed at: http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/travel/admissability/search_authority.ctt/search_authority.pdf.

West Sees Libya as Opportunity for Businesses

2011-10-29T12:25:00.000-04:00

October 28, 2011
NYT
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The guns in Libya have barely quieted, and NATO’s military assistance to the rebellion that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi will not end officially until Monday. But a new invasion force is already plotting its own landing on the shores of Tripoli.

Western security, construction and infrastructure companies that see profit-making opportunities receding in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned their sights on Libya, now free of four decades of dictatorship. Entrepreneurs are abuzz about the business potential of a country with huge needs and the oil to pay for them, plus the competitive advantage of Libyan gratitude toward the United States and its NATO partners.

A week before Colonel Qaddafi’s death on Oct. 20, a delegation from 80 French companies arrived in Tripoli to meet officials of the Transitional National Council, the interim government. Last week, the new British defense minister, Philip Hammond, urged British companies to “pack their suitcases” and head to Tripoli.

When Colonel Qaddafi’s body was still on public display, a British venture, Trango Special Projects, pitched its support services to companies looking to cash in. “Whilst speculation continues regarding Qaddafi’s killing,” Trango said on its Web site, “are you and your business ready to return to Libya?”

The company offered rooms at its Tripoli villa and transport “by our discreet mixed British and Libyan security team.” Its discretion does not come cheaply. The price for a 10-minute ride from the airport, for which the ordinary cab fare is about $5, is listed at 500 British pounds, or about $800.

“There is a gold rush of sorts taking place right now,” said David Hamod, president and chief executive officer of the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce. “And the Europeans and Asians are way ahead of us. I’m getting calls daily from members of the business community in Libya. They say, ‘Come back, we don’t want the Americans to lose out.’ ”

Yet there is hesitancy on both sides, and so far the talk greatly exceeds the action. The Transitional National Council, hoping to avoid any echo of the rank corruption of the Qaddafi era, has said no long-term contracts will be signed until an elected government is in place. And with cities still bristling with arms and jobless young men, Libya does not offer anything like a safe business environment — hence the pitches from security providers.

Like France and Britain, the United States may benefit from the Libyan authorities’ appreciation of NATO’s critical air support for the revolution. Whatever the rigor of new rules governing contracts, Western companies hope to have some advantage over, say, China, which was offering to sell arms to Colonel Qaddafi as recently as July.

“Revenge may be too strong a word,” said Phil Dwyer, director of SCN Resources Group, a Virginia contracting company that opened an office in Tripoli two weeks ago to offer “risk management” advice and services to a company he would not name. “But my feeling is those who are in favor” with the transitional council “are going to get the nod from a business point of view.”

The Security Contracting Network, a job service run by Mr. Dwyer’s company, posted on its blog two days after Colonel Qaddafi’s death that there would be plenty of work opening up in Libya.

“There will be an uptick of activity as foreign oil companies scramble to get back to Libya,” the company said, along with a need for logistics and security personnel as the State Department and nonprofit organizations expand operations. “Keep an eye on who wins related contracts, follow the money, and find your next job,” the post advised.

In Tripoli, there is a wait-and-see atmosphere. At breakfast on Friday in a downtown hotel, a British security contractor pointed out the tables of burly men — hired guns like himself. “Look at it,” he said. “Full of ’em.”

Many are still protecting foreign journalists, but others are hoping to get training contracts with a fledgling government trying to tame its unruly armed forces. Security industry officials say the work here may never match the colossal scale of spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, but with a squeeze coming on European and American government spending, it is a prize nonetheless.

Business opportunities for Western companies began opening in Libya in 2004, when Colonel Qaddafi’s decision to give up his nuclear weapons program ended his country’s pariah status. Mr. Hamod led four American business delegations to Libya between 2004 and 2010 and watched “a gradual thawing of commercial relations,” he said.

Total foreign direct investment in Libya had grown to $3.8 billion in 2010, from an estimated at $145 million in 2002, according to the World Bank. But many deals were skewed by brazen demands from Colonel Qaddafi’s children for a share of the proceeds, and the state of the country was grim after many years of economic sanctions and neglect.

Libya “needed everything,” Mr. Hamod said: banking and financial services, hospitals and medical clinics, roads and bridges, and infrastructure for energy and for the oil industry.

Now, after months of fighting, and with the security situation still fragile, there are huge new requirements, like rebuilding apartment complexes reduced to rubble by shelling, guarding oil installations as they restore or expand production, and training and equipping new armed forces.

Mr. Hamod said American companies are often more hesitant than Chinese or some European companies about operating in a tumultuous environment like that of post-Qaddafi Libya. “There’s reluctance to charge headlong back into Libya,” he said. “Historically, U.S. companies are interested in the rule of law on the ground and what it might mean for a multimillion-dollar investment.”

At a Group of 8 meeting in Marseille, France, in September, finance ministers pledged $38 billion in new financing, largely loans, to Arab countries between 2011 and 2013. Though Libya is now pumping less than one-third of its prewar oil production of 1.7 million barrels a day, it has Africa’s largest oil reserves, which eventually should mean a steady supply of cash.

The simultaneous excitement and confusion for people exploring opportunities in Libya are evident in proliferating Libya-themed groups on LinkedIn, the online business-oriented social network.

“Can anyone in the group tell me if there are flights into Tripoli,” wrote Peter Murphy, an Irish surveyor now working on an offshore wind project, on a LinkedIn discussion page called Anglo Libya Business Group. “Also, what is the situation for business visas for business travelers?”

One answer came from Mabruk Swayah, who identified himself on LinkedIn as a Libyan working in business development. “Hi friends you are all welcome to Libya,” Mr. Swayah wrote. “Just make sure you go through the proper channels for your work contracts and don’t get involved in bribes, inducements or sweeteners to officials.”

He added, “Remember we have free media now.”

Wall Street Protests

2011-10-19T08:48:00.002-04:00

U.S. troubled by Israeli release of some Palestinians

2011-10-18T21:51:00.000-04:00

Reuters By Arshad Mohammed | Reuters – 10/18/2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has concerns about some of the 477 Palestinians Israel freed on Tuesday in exchange for an abducted Israeli soldier because they killed or injured U.S. citizens, a U.S. official said.

The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration had conveyed its concerns to the Israeli government, suggesting it did so at the 11th hour as Israel engineered the swap to free Sergeant Gilad Shalit.

In one of the biggest such exchanges between Israel and the Palestinians, Shalit was freed after being held incommunicado for five years by Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian faction that rules the Gaza Strip and that vies for primacy with Fatah, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank.

In the deal with Hamas, which the United States regards as a foreign terrorist organization, Israel plans to free more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, the first 477 of whom left Israeli jails on Tuesday for Gaza, the West Bank and abroad.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters that the United States had concerns about some of the Palestinians whose release was envisaged in the deal but he would not specify whether any of these were among the 477 already freed.

"As a matter of principle, the United States opposes the release of individuals who have been convicted of crimes against Americans," he said in an email.

"We communicated our position to the government of Israel after we became aware of specific individuals who were identified as part of this release," he added.

The White House said President Barack Obama is pleased that Shalit has been freed and he wants Israelis and Palestinians to take steps toward resuming peace negotiations.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters during the president's bus tour in North Carolina that it was not yet clear how Shalit's release would impact the Middle East peace process but said Obama was "personally pleased" by the development.

"Each side needs to take steps that make it easier to return to negotiations rather than harder," Carney said.

While leaders of Islamist Hamas and their secular rivals in President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement made conciliatory comments about each other's role in achieving the deal, it appeared likely to accentuate the divide between the factions.

Abbas is shunned by Hamas as a pawn of Israel and its Western allies but has angered Israel and the United States by refusing to revive long-stalled peace talks with the Israelis and by seeking full Palestinian membership in the United Nations.

Family condemns death of Awlaki’s son

2011-10-18T21:49:00.000-04:00

Grandfather says teen, killed in U.S. airstrike, wasn’t in al-Qaeda
By Peter Finn , Tuesday, October 18, 2011
WP

In the days before a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki last month, his 16-year-old son ran away from the family home in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa to try to find him, relatives say. When he, too, was killed in a U.S. airstrike Friday, the Awlaki family decided to speak out for the first time since the attacks.

“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”

The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.

The young Awlaki was the third American killed in Yemen in as many weeks. Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, died alongside Anwar al-Awlaki.

Yemeni officials said the dead from the strike included Ibrahim al-Banna, the Egyptian media chief for al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, and also a brother of Fahd al-Quso, a senior al-Qaeda operative who was indicted in New York in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden.

The strike occurred near the town of Azzan, an Islamist stronghold. The Defense Ministry in Yemen described Banna as one of the “most dangerous operatives” in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, often referred to by the acronym AQAP.

U.S. assessment

U.S. officials said they were still assessing the results of the strike Monday evening to determine who was killed. The officials would not discuss the attack in any detail, including who the target was, but typically the CIA and the Pentagon focus on senior figures in al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

“We have seen press reports that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al-Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al-Banna at the time,” said Thomas F. Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged U.S. citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”

A senior congressional official who is familiar with U.S. operations in Yemen and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy issues said, “If they knew a 16-year-old was there, I think that would be cause for them to say: ‘Gee, we ought not to hit this guy. That would be considered collateral damage.’ ”

The official said that the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command are expected to ensure that women and children are not killed in airstrikes in Pakistan and Yemen but that sometimes it might not be possible to distinguish a teenager from militants.

Nasser al-Awlaki said he was told by people in the area where the airstrike occurred that the two teenagers were about to have a meal with a small group of men when they were hit. He said he did not know who else was in the group but was told that they were mostly young people.

“The others I just don’t know. Maybe they were being targeted,” Awlaki said.

‘A typical kid’

In a separate statement Monday, the Awlaki family said that Abdulrahman “along with some of his tribe’s youth have gone barbecuing under the moonlight. A drone missile hit their congregation killing Abdulrahman and several other teenagers.”

Nasser al-Awlaki said the family decided to issue a statement after reading some U.S. news reports that described Abdulrahman as a militant in his twenties.

The family urged journalists and others to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman.

“Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies,” the statement said. “His Facebook page shows a typical kid. A teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.”

The pictures on the Facebook page show a smiling kid out and about in the countryside and occasionally hamming it up for the camera. Abdulrahman left the United States with his father in 2002.

Nasser al-Awlaki said Abdulrahman was in the first year of secondary school when he left Sanaa to find his father. He wrote a note to his mother, saying he missed his father and wanted to see him. The teenager traveled to the family’s tribal home in southern Yemen, but Anwar al-Awlaki was killed Sep. 30 in Yemen’s northern Jawf province, about 90 miles east of the capital.

“He went from here without my knowledge,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. “We would not allow him to go if we know because he is a small boy.” He said his grandson, after hearing about his father’s death, had decided to return to Sanaa.

The family also condemned the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, 40, as an “unlawful assassination,” saying that he was an American citizen who had never been formally charged with any crime.

Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, was one of al-Qaeda’s most prominent and effective propagandists, but U.S. officials said he had also become directly involved in terrorist plots against the United States. After his killing, President Obama described him as chief of “external operations” for AQAP.

U.S. officials had tied him to the attempted bombing of a commercial aircraft on approach to Detroit and the attempted downing of two cargo planes over the United States. They said he inspired an Army officer who is charged with killing 13 people in a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., and a Pakistani-American man who tried to set off a car bomb in New York City in May 2010.

The family, in its statement, said, “Anwar was never a ‘militant’ ” nor was he “the head of Al Qaeda external operations.”

The United States has stepped up drone operations in Yemen to counter AQAP, which it fears is exploiting the country’s chaos to plot further attacks. Violent clashes continued Monday in Sanaa between government forces and troops loyal to an army general who broke with President Ali Abdullah Saleh to protect protesters calling for his ouster.

Obama Sends 100 Troops to Fight Ugandan Rebels

2011-10-16T23:02:00.002-04:00

By BNO

October 15, 2011 BNO" -- WASHINGTON, D.C. : U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday announced the deployment of around 100 U.S. special operations troops to Uganda to fight the rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

In a letter to Congress, Obama informed that in the next months further U.S. troops will be shipped out to other African countries as well, including South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, the President noted that although the deployed U.S. forces are combat-equipped, "they will only be providing information, advice and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense."

In May 2010, President Obama signed into law the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act which reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to support regional partners' efforts to end the 'atrocities' committed by LRA in central Africa.

The United States' decision to send a group of military advisers to assist the forces that are countering the LRA, the U.S. State Department said, is part of the comprehensive, multi-year strategy that seeks to help mitigate and end the threat posed to civilians and regional stability by the LRA

The strategy outlined four strategic objectives for U.S. support, including the increased protection of civilians, the apprehension or removal of Joseph Kony and senior LRA commanders from the battlefield, the promotion of defections and support of disarmament, demobilization, reintegration of remaining LRA fighters and the provision of continued humanitarian relief to affected communities.
The LRA, formed in the late 1980s, has operated for over 20 years and is known for having murdered, raped, and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children.

Since 2008 alone, the LRA has killed more than 2,400 people and abducted more than 3,400 others. The United Nations estimates that over 380,000 people are displaced across the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan as a result of LRA activity.

Since 2008, the United States has provided over USD 40 million in critical logistical support, equipment and training to enhance counter-LRA operations by regional militaries.

--BNO News

Fresh Uganda Oil Find ‘Africa’s Biggest’

2011-10-16T23:01:00.002-04:00

By The Times

14 Jan 2009 "The Times" - -Heritage Oil announced details of a large oil discovery in Uganda yesterday, which the company claimed could be the largest onshore discovery in sub-Saharan Africa.

Heritage said that its latest discovery – Giraffe1 – in the Lake Albert region, could total at least 400 million barrels of oil.

However, Paul Atherton, chief financial officer, told The Times that the wider field it was developing, dubbed Buffalo-Giraffe, had several “billions of barrels of oil in place”, although it was unclear how much of this would be recoverable.

He said that the field, which is 9,000 square kilometers in size – or six times the size of Greater London – was unquestionably the largest onshore discovery made in sub-Saharan Africa in at least 20 years, possibly ever.

Mr Atherton said that of the 18 wells the company had drilled in the basin so far, all had produced oil. “Clearly the entire basin is full of oil,” he said. “It’s a world-class discovery, the most exciting new basin in Africa in decades.”

Previously, the largest onshore fields discovered in sub-Saharan Africa were at Rabi-Kounga in Gabon, where 900 million barrels were found in 1985, and at Kome in Chad, where 485 million barrels were found in 1977.

Mr Atherton said that it would take at least another three years to start commercial production. The crude could be exported by road or rail, he said, but analysts believe that the most practical solution would be to build an 806-mile pipeline to take it to Kampala, Uganda’s capital, and then the Kenyan coast. The pipeline would need to be heated and designed to traverse swampy and mountainous land. It would cost an estimated $1.5 billion (£1 billion) to complete.

Heritage and its partner Tullow Oil, which also has a 50 per cent equity stake in the project, would need to demonstrate that the field could produce at least 400 million barrels of oil to justify the cost of building such a pipeline. Richard Griffith, an Evolution Securities analyst, said the latest discovery “thrashed” this commerciality threshold.

See Also - Uganda : Pressure Mounts To Make Public Oil Agreements:Uganda's oil discovery is already attracting major players like Italian oil giant Eni Spa, U.S. Exxon Mobil, France's Total and of recent the China National Offshore Oil Company. The country does not have the funds to finance the production of oil and instead signed agreements with oil giants spelling out how the revenue will be shared with investors willing to fund the production phase. The companies will build an oil refinery in Uganda and an oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. This will enable the landlocked country to sell its estimated two billion barrels of crude oil internationally

Uganda's oil contracts leaked - a bad deal made worse: The repeated claims by the Ugandan government and the oil companies that Uganda has received a very good deal and the best in the region are not only a fiction, but were reliant on the real terms of the contracts being kept secret. While the contracts will deliver vast profits to Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil, the contracts will prevent the Ugandan people from receiving their due benefits.

Oil extraction and the potential for domestic instability in Uganda: The paper identifies and discusses in detail three sources of domestic volatility that may arise as a result of oil development.

Uganda: Oil could cause war : The attacks are by armed gangs suspected to be rebels of the FDLR, LRA, and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). In the ongoing campaign in DR Congo, President Joseph Kabila is being criticised for failing to restore peace in this vital area.

Egypt’s Military Expands Power, Raising Alarms

2011-10-15T11:23:00.000-04:00

October 14, 2011
NYT
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Egypt’s military rulers are moving to assert and extend their own power so broadly that a growing number of lawyers and activists are questioning their willingness to ultimately submit to civilian authority.

Two members of the military council that took power after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak said for the first time in interviews this week that they planned to retain full control of the Egyptian government even after the election of a new Parliament begins in November. The legislature will remain in a subordinate role similar to Mr. Mubarak’s former Parliament, they said, with the military council appointing the prime minister and cabinet.

“We will keep the power until we have a president,” Maj. Gen. Mahmoud Hegazy said. The military had pledged in formal communiqués last March to hold the presidential election by September. But the generals now say that will come only after the election of a Parliament, the formation of a constitutional assembly and the ratification of a new constitution — a process that could stretch into 2013 or longer.

A transition to civilian rule before and not after the drafting of a new constitution was also a core component of a national referendum on a “constitutional declaration” that passed in March as well. The declaration required that the military put in place democratic institutions and suspend a 30-year-old emergency law allowing arrests without trial before the drafting of the constitution to ensure a free debate. But by extending its mandate, the military will now preside over the constitutional process.

The military’s new plan “is a violation of the constitutional declaration,” Tarek el-Bishry, the jurist who led the writing of that declaration, wrote this week in the newspaper Al Sharouk, arguing that the now-defunct referendum had been the military’s only source of legitimacy.

The United States, where concerns run high that early elections could bring unfriendly Islamists to power and further strain relations with Israel, has so far signaled approval of the military’s slower approach to handing over authority. In an appearance this week with the Egyptian foreign minister, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged an early end to the emergency law but called the plan for elections “an appropriate timetable.”

Within Egypt, however, the schedule is a fresh source of tension between the military council and civilian political leaders from liberals to Islamists. Political leaders say they were shocked last week when two dozen Coptic Christian demonstrators died in clashes with soldiers guarding a government building. Some protesters were run over by military vehicles and others were shot.

Confidence in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces — known as SCAF — reached a breaking point, many political leaders say, three days later when the military council placed blame for the deaths on the aggression of the demonstrators and denied that the soldiers used live ammunition. The military has blocked any civilian investigation into the clash.

“No political party can trust the SCAF now,” said Emad Gad, an analyst at the state-financed Al Ahram research group and now an active member of the Social Democratic Party. “We are seeing the real face of the SCAF, after the lifting of the mask.”

Citing a series of public hints as well as pattern of actions, activists and analysts now say they believe that the military is seeking to slow down a democratic transition until it feels certain that its position and privileges will remain unassailable even under civilian rule. Some here have advocated offering the military special rights including immunity from prosecution in civilian courts, protection from oversight of their operations and budget, and a writ to intervene in political affairs in the name of protecting the secular character of the government. “It is an open secret” that carving out special powers is the main goal of the military, said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

The postponement of the handing over of power until after the presidential election, he said, was “a clear sign that the SCAF did not want a civilian president who under the current constitutional declaration would have power over the army for the first time since the 1952 revolution.”

Last spring, the military was viewed by some liberals as moving too quickly toward new elections. They feared that the military’s original timetable for transition to democratic rule, with elections of Parliament, a new president and the drafting of a new constitution all taking place within a few months, could effectively hand power to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that was Egypt’s main political opposition under Mr. Mubarak. That was when some liberals began arguing publicly that the military should define for itself its own powers and role under the new constitution, including the broad autonomy and authority to intervene to protect the secular character of the state.

Some now call the military’s deadly violence against the Coptic protesters a wake-up call for such liberals. “The liberal elite was so blinded by the fear of Islamists’ taking over that they were willing to accept the security blanket of the army,” said Mr. Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Individual Rights. “But Sunday’s massacre was a turning point because they saw what the army was capable of — brutality that came as a very early reminder of what things were like under Mubarak.”

After the military’s clash with the Coptic Christian protesters, the Muslim Brotherhood took a more sympathetic view of the military’s role than the liberal parties. “All the Egyptian people have grievances and legitimate demands, not only our Christian brothers. Certainly, this is not the right time to claim them,” the Brotherhood said in a statement.

But the Brotherhood, too, objected to the new election schedule. Its Freedom and Justice Party urged the military council “to come back to the first vision it laid out, and which it changed without any known reasons, of holding the presidential elections without delay.”

Selecting a committee to draft a constitution will be the most important function of the new Parliament. The military has said it will impose certain diversity requirements on the membership. Parties and candidates running for Parliament acknowledge that they do not know what powers it may have while the military controls the government. But several politicians said they planned to compete for seats, in part to have a platform for potentially challenging the military. “What else can we do?” asked Mr. Gad, of the Social Democratic Party.

Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo.

Who's behind the Wall Street protests?

2011-10-14T15:38:00.000-04:00

Reuters By Mark Egan and Michelle Nichols | Reuters 10/13/2011

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men.

There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

"I can understand their sentiment," Soros told reporters last week at the United Nations about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which are expected to spur solidarity marches globally on Saturday.

Pressed further for his views on the movement and the protesters, Soros refused to be drawn in. But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, "George Soros money is behind this."

Soros, 81, is No. 7 on the Forbes 400 list with a fortune of $22 billion, which has ballooned in recent years as he deftly responded to financial market turmoil. He has pledged to give away all his wealth, half of it while he earns it and the rest when he dies.

Like the protesters, Soros is no fan of the 2008 bank bailouts and subsequent government purchase of the toxic sub-prime mortgage assets they amassed in the property bubble.

The protesters say the Wall Street bank bailouts in 2008 left banks enjoying huge profits while average Americans suffered under high unemployment and job insecurity with little help from Washington. They contend that the richest 1 percent of Americans have amassed vast fortunes while being taxed at a lower rate than most people.

BANKING LIFE SUPPORT

Soros in 2009 wrote in an editorial that the purchase of toxic bank assets would, "provide artificial life support for the banks at considerable expense to the taxpayer."

He urged the Obama administration to take bolder action, either by recapitalizing or nationalizing the banks and forcing them to lend at attractive rates. His advice went unheeded.

The Hungarian-American was an early supporter of the 2008 election campaign of Barack Obama, who will seek a second term as president in the November, 2012, election. He has long backed liberal causes - the Open Society Institute, the foreign policy think tank Council on Foreign Relations and Human Rights Watch.

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros' Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.

Aides to Soros say any connection is tenuous and that Soros has never heard of Adbusters. Soros himself declined comment.

The Vancouver-based group, which publishes a magazine and runs such campaigns as "Digital Detox Week" and "Buy Nothing Day," says it wants to "change the way corporations wield power" and its goal is "to topple existing power structures."

SLOW START

Adbusters, whose magazine has a circulation of 120,000 and which is known for its spoofs of popular advertisements, came up with the Occupy Wall Street idea after Arab Spring protests toppled governments in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, said Kalle Lasn, 69, Adbusters co-founder.

"It came out of these brainstorming sessions we have at Adbusters," Lasn told Reuters, adding they began promoting it online on July 13. "We were inspired by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt and we had this feeling that America was ripe for a Tahrir moment."

"We felt there was a real rage building up in America, and we thought that we would like to create a spark which would give expression for this rage."

Lasn said Adbusters is 95 percent funded by subscribers paying for the magazine. "George Soros's ideas are quite good, many of them. I wish he would give Adbusters some money, we sorely need it," he said. "He's never given us a penny."

Other support for Occupy Wall Street has come from online funding website Kickstarter, where more than $75,000 has been pledged, deliveries of food and from cash dropped in a bucket at the park. Liberal film maker Michael Moore has also pledged to donate money.

The protests began in earnest on September 17, triggered by an Adbusters campaign featuring a provocative poster showing a ballerina dancing atop the famous bronze bull in New York's financial district as a crowd of protesters wearing gas masks approach behind her.

Dressed in anarchist black, the battle-ready mob is shrouded in a fog suggestive of tear gas or fires burning. Some are wearing gas masks, others wielding sticks. The poster's message seems to be a heady combination of sexuality, violence, excitement and adventure.

Former carpenter Robert Daros, 23, saw that poster in a cafe in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Having lost his work as a carpenter after Florida's speculative construction boom collapsed in a heap of sub-prime mortgage foreclosures, he quit his job as a bartender and traveled to New York City with just a sleeping bag and the hope of joining the protest movement.

Daros was one of the first people to arrive on Wall Street for the so-called occupation on September 17, when protesters marched and tried to camp on Wall Street only to be driven off by police to Zuccotti Park - two acres of concrete without a blade of grass near the rising One World Trade Center.

"When I was a carpenter, I lost my job because the financier of my project was arrested for corporate fraud," said Daros, who was wearing a red arm band to show he was helping out in the medic section of the Occupy Wall Street camp.

Since its obscure beginnings, the campaign has drawn global media attention in places as far-flung as Iran and China. The Times of London, however, was not alone when it called the protests "Passionate but Pointless."

Adbusters' co-founder Lasn dismisses that, reeling off specific demands: a tax on the richest 1 percent, a tax on currency trades and a tax on all financial transactions.

"Down the road, there will be crystal clear demands coming out of this movement," he said. "But this first phase of the movement is messy and leaderless and demandless."

"I think it was perfect the way it happened."

Senate Armed Services chairman: Alleged Iranian assassination plot may be act of war

2011-10-12T21:23:00.002-04:00

By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, October 12, 2011

WASHINGTON — The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States may be an act of war against the U.S., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Wednesday.

“It may be,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters when asked whether he considers the alleged scheme to be an act of war. “But I’d want to see what the implications of that characterization are before I use it.”

At the least, Levin said, the alleged plan was “a damn serious threat to the United States.” He said that either way, there should be a serious response by the U.S., but he declined to say what that response might be.

“It’s in the United States, an alleged effort to assassinate somebody on our territory who, by the way, is an ambassador to the United States. So whether or not that constitutes an act of war against the United States” is a valid question, he said.

Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who heads a Homeland Security subcommittee, said the alleged plan would be an act of war if it was sponsored by the Iranian government.

Federal prosecutors have accused Iran of planning to pay a Mexican drug cartel figure to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb in Washington. President Barack Obama says the purported scheme is “a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law.”

Iran has denied the accusations.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Investigators initially doubted plot had Iran ties

2011-10-12T21:13:00.000-04:00

WP
By Joby Warrick | 02:38 PM ET, 10/12/2011

The plot by alleged Iranian operatives to kill a Saudi diplomat in Washington was so crudely constructed that U.S. investigators initially had trouble believing that Iran was truly behind it, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Although the Justice Department eventually linked the plan to Iran’s elite Quds Force, almost nothing in the case bore the hallmarks of the notorious military unit that has trained and equipped terrorists and assassins around the world, the officials said.
Mansour Arbabsiar (CBS News)

A wire transfer two months into the uncover probe--$100,000 in cash, moved in tell-tale fashion from Iranian bank accounts to an undercover agent in Mexico--finally persuaded American investigators that the assassination plan had high-level backing. And still, questions remained about who in Iran knew of the plot and at what level it was approved.

“What we’re seeing would be inconsistent with the high standards we’ve seen in the past,” said one U.S. official, one of four who briefed journalists about the four-month investigation. The officials agreed to speak on the condition that neither their names nor affiliations be disclosed.

Justice Department officials disrupted the plot in September with the arrest of an Iranian-American, Mansour Arbabsiar, 56, who is accused of working with Quds Force members in Iran to carry out a hit against Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

According to court documents, Arbabsiar was tasked by an Iranian cousin with recruiting Mexican hit-men for a $1.5 million plan to kill Jubeir as he dined in a Washington restaurant. The alleged plan was foiled when Arbabsiar made contact with a man he believed was a drug-cartel member. Instead, it was an undercover informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The U.S. officials acknowledged that initial details of the alleged plot engendered great skepticism among law-enforcement and intelligence analysts who worked on the case. The Iranians involved exercised uncharacteristically sloppy tradecraft in trying to recruit unknown gunmen—from a drug cartel with no known ties to Iran—to carry out such a politically explosive act as the assassination of a powerful Saudi envoy in the heart the U.S. capital.

Over time, however, intelligence agencies gathered what they considered corroborating evidence connecting the plot firmly to Quds Force officers, including Gholam Shakuri, a member of the elite unit with whom Arbabsiar met in Iran. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the evidence but acknowledged that the money transfer provided important clues.

While acknowledging they did not have conclusive proof, the U.S. officials said they were convinced that Quds Force chief Qassem Suleimani and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameinei were at least aware of the plot’s general outlines.

“We do not think it was a rogue operation, in any way,” a second official said. But he added: “We don’t have specific knowledge that Suleimani knew about specific” details of the plot.

The officials said American investigators theorized that the operatives’ sloppiness reflected Iran’s inexperience in working in North America, where even the globally networked Quds Force lacks connections and contacts. But they said the oddly brazen nature of the plot may also may have reflected the naivete of the clique of hard-line clerics that has come to dominate Iran’s leadership in recent years.

“These leaders have no Western experience, and they have a great misunderstanding of the United States,” the second official said. “They don’t understand where the red lines are.”

Officials: Iran’s amateur-hour plot shows inexperience in hitting US, but also deadly intent

2011-10-12T21:11:00.002-04:00

By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, October 12, 2011

WASHINGTON — The alleged Iranian plot against the Saudi ambassador to Washington was “amateur hour,” an unusually clumsy operation for Iran’s elite foreign action unit, the Quds Force, U.S. officials said Wednesday as further stranger-than-fiction details emerged of the assassination gone wrong.

The Iranians’ would-be covert operative turned to a woman he met while working as a used car dealer, hoping to find a Mexican drug dealer-assassin, and wound up with an American informant instead, according to two U.S. law enforcement officials.

Other U.S. officials said Manssor Arbabsiar made further mistakes, including arranging a pay-off for the attack in an easily traceable way.

They attributed the missteps to Iran’s relative inexperience carrying out covert operations in the United States and Mexico.

They said the U.S. believes the planned attack on the Saudi ambassador was conceived in part as proof that such an operation could be carried off. Then, perhaps, Iran would have followed up with a series of attacks against other embassies in the U.S. and in Argentina, officials said.

All of the officials requested anonymity in order to provide details from classified analyses and an active criminal case.

In public remarks, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke Wednesday of a “dangerous escalation” of what the U.S. claims is an Iranian pattern of franchising terror abroad.

“We will work closely with our international partners to increase Iran’s isolation and the pressure on its government and we call upon other nations to join us in condemning this threat to international peace and security,” Clinton said at a Washington conference.

Her words strongly suggested that the U.S. wants some new action against Iran from the U.N. Security Council, which has already approved several rounds of mild to moderate sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear program.

Two men, including a member of Iran’s Quds Force special foreign actions unit, were charged in New York federal court Tuesday with conspiring to kill the Saudi diplomat, Adel Al-Jubeir. Justice Department officials say the men tried to hire a purported member of a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the assassination with a bomb attack while Al-Jubeir dined at his favorite restaurant.

U.S. officials believe Iran hoped that an attack of that design would be blamed on al-Qaida. That, in turn, would strike at two of Iran’s chief enemies: the U.S., constantly at odds with Iran over its nuclear aspirations, and Saudi Arabia, battling Iran in a diplomatic Cold War for influence across the Persian Gulf and Middle East.

Saudi Arabia most recently helped thwart Shiite-majority demonstrators in Bahrain, whom Iran backed, and clashed again with Iran in Syria. Iran advised Syrian leaders on how to crack down on demonstrators, while Saudi Arabia has encouraged further protests and called for the Syrian government’s ouster.

The Quds Force is tasked with extending Iranian influence through fear and violence, intimidating other countries with assassinations, terror attacks and kidnapping, the officials said.

Such plots are managed by the Quds Force’s Special External Operations Unit, and carried out by sometimes unexpected proxies, like anti-Shiite Sunni extremists, the officials said.

The unit answers directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who U.S. officials believe is briefed on high-profile operations. While the U.S. has no direct proof, and did not charge in court, that the top Iranian leaders approved this attack, any such operation would be vetted at the highest levels, one of the officials said.

U.S. law enforcement officials said the criminal charges were limited to those actions they could prove in court, and did not cover all the information they had gathered about possible Quds Force goals or intentions. Even the roles of three of four Quds officers connected to this plot were not detailed in the criminal case but instead were laid out in economic sanctions imposed on them administratively by the Treasury.

During an interview with The Associated Press, Clinton said the Obama administration is stepping cautiously and won’t overstate its case.

The alleged plot “does give a lot of credibility to the concerns” about other Iranian activity, Clinton said in the interview Tuesday. “But we have to be careful, and we’ve tried to be very careful in this instance. What you’ll see in the complaint is what we know, what we can prove.”

The U.S. blames the Quds Force for some of the worst terrorist acts against U.S. troops overseas, including the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia.

More recently, the group has smuggled long-range rockets into Iraq for use by Shiite militant groups, including in an attack on Camp Victory outside Baghdad on June 6, that killed six U.S. servicemen, U.S. officials said.

The Iranian group also plays a double game in Afghanistan, providing overt cash and economic aid to the Afghan president while funneling weapons such as long-range rockets to the Taliban, the officials said.

Arbabsiar is a 56-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who also had an Iranian passport. In May 2011, the criminal complaint says, he approached someone he believed to be a member of the vicious Mexican narco-terror group, Los Zetas, for help with an attack on a Saudi embassy.

The man he approached turned out to be an informant for U.S. drug agents, who in return for leniency on drug charges against him had become a paid informant and had led U.S. agents to several drug seizures, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal court in New York.

Arbabsiar was introduced to the informant by a woman he had met when he previously worked as a used car salesman in Corpus Christi, Texas, two law enforcement officials said. She was the informant’s aunt.

The informant was not actually a member of Los Zetas but had worked with drug traffickers and was able to present himself as a Zeta to Arbabsiar.

A more savvy operative might have been suspicious when the informant set up meetings in Reynosa, Mexico, the territory of a rival gang where a Zeta would not be welcome.

The government charged that Arbabsiar had been told by his cousin Abdul Reza Shahlai, a high-ranking member of the Quds Force, to recruit a drug trafficker because drug gangs have a reputation for assassinations. The Zetas are known for the brutality of the beheadings, mass killings and grotesque mutilation of their victims.

As the covertly recorded meetings between Arbabsiar and the informant continued, the plot eventually centered on targeting Al-Jubeir in his favorite restaurant, though the informant didn’t name any specific restaurant, officials said.

There was also discussion between the two of possibly bombing other targets later, possibly including the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Argentina and the Israeli Embassy in Washington, two law enforcement officials said. But they emphasized that no plans were devised for such attacks, one reason this was not included in the criminal charge.

When the Iranian agent transferred more than $100,000 in two batches to the informant, U.S. authorities decided to act, senior U.S. officials said.

In addition to Arbabsiar, the criminal complaint named Gholam Shakuri, described as Shahlai’s deputy in the Quds Force who helped provide funding. Shahlai was identified by the Treasury Department in 2008, during George W. Bush’s administration, as a Quds deputy commander who planned a Jan. 20, 2007, attack in Karbala, Iraq, that killed five American soldiers and wounded three others.

Arbabsiar, Shakuri and Shahlai and two others — Qasem Soleimani, a Quds commander who allegedly oversaw the plot, and Hamed Abdollahi, a senior Quds officer who helped coordinate — were put under economic sanctions Tuesday by the Treasury for their alleged involvement. The department described all except Arbabsiar as Quds officers.

___

Associated Press writers Alicia Caldwell, Matthew Lee, Pete Yost and Nedra Pickler contributed to this report.

___

AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier can be followed on Twitter via (at)kimberlydozier

Iranians see Ahmadinejad as disconnected from alleged plot

2011-10-12T21:10:00.002-04:00

By Thomas Erdbrink, Wednesday, October 12, 2011
The Washington Post

TEHRAN — As Iranians struggled Wednesday to comprehend an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, analysts here agreed that even if U.S. charges of official Iranian involvement were true, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government likely had nothing to do with the scheme.

The security organizations that the United States says were behind the alleged plot — the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite special operations branch, the Quds Force — are well beyond Ahmadinejad’s influence. And leaders associated with them have played key roles in attacking Ahmadinejad during his recent rift with powerful Shiite Muslim clerics and commanders who helped bring him to power.

Amid new levels of infighting within Iran’s opaque leadership, Ahmadinejad at present wields no influence over the country’s two main intelligence and security organizations: the Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They are firmly under the control of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Even against the backdrop of this power struggle, Iranian dissidents and analysts are hard-pressed to come up with reasons for any of Iran’s leaders to undertake such a risky plot. Even if carried out successfully, it probably would have been quickly blamed on Iran, the analysts noted.

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday accused “elements of the Iranian government” of conspiring to kill the Saudi ambassador. In addition to an Iranian American who was arrested in New York, officials named two alleged Iranian conspirators as Quds Force officials: Gholam Shakuri and Abdul Reza Shahlai. Shakuri, who was identified as a deputy to Shahlai, was charged in the case. Both remain at large. U.S. officials declined to say how high in the Iranian leadership they think the conspiracy goes.

Iranians interviewed Wednesday suggested various possible culprits in the alleged plot, ranging from the CIA to Revolutionary Guard elements to a rogue faction within Iran’s power structure.

“There are those within the Guards with some degree of independence,” said Sadegh Zibakalam, a political scientist critical of the government. “But I cannot point any fingers in this bizarre plot that only hurts Iran.”

What is clear, analysts said, is that the Islamic Republic’s security organizations are currently a black hole for the Ahmadinejad government, which is increasingly under fire from Intelligence Ministry officials as well as Revolutionary Guard commanders and hard-line Shiite clerics.

These critics recently called Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff and main adviser, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a “tumor” that needs to be cut out of the government. They have also threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Ahmadinejad if he refuses to cut ties with advisers they describe as a “deviant current” bent on undermining the influence of the country’s ruling clerics.

Ahmadinejad publicly fell from grace in April when he tried to fire Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi, a Shiite cleric, but was forced to back down when Khamenei, the supreme leader, reinstated him.

Replacing Moslehi with someone from Ahmadinejad’s inner circle would have strengthened the president’s hand in the ministry. Now Ahmadinejad is facing public attacks from his former hard-line backers, who accuse him, among other things, of planning to restore relations with the United States.

Some analysts speculate that the bizarre alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was engineered by the Revolutionary Guards — but was meant to be discovered by U.S. intelligence — in order to sabotage any possible back-channel talks between Ahmadinejad’s representatives and the United States.

Others dismiss that theory, saying that the Iranian hierarchy’s control of foreign policy is clear. Khamenei makes the important foreign policy decisions, and extensive surveillance by political commissars leaves little room for rogue elements.

With Iran’s regional role in flux, some Iranians wonder whether the alleged plot could be related to developments closer to home.

Iranian officials admit privately to genuine worries over losing Syria as a strategic partner and say popular uprisings in the Middle East pose challenges, as well as opportunities. The ouster of entrenched rulers in the region is seen as reducing Iran’s role as a leader of oppressed movements.

“In the current status quo, Iran might lose, with now even Hamas trading prisoners with the Israelis,” one analyst said, referring to the Palestinian militant group. “Maybe they felt the need to make a great impact on their enemies.”

Others strongly disagreed, arguing that none of Iran’s security organizations would stake so much now on such an ill-conceived plot. “Iran’s leadership would never risk being involved in hitting someone on U.S. soil,” Zibakalam said. “Why would they endanger Iran in this way? This is really not logical.”

Yet, there is some precedent for such an act. In 1980, an American Muslim acting on behalf of the new revolutionary government in Tehran assassinated Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a monarchist living in exile in the Washington area, before fleeing to Iran.

As Iranians puzzle over the latest alleged plot, a realization appears to be setting in that, true or not, the allegations herald a dangerous period of increased tensions between Iran and the United States.

“Whoever is behind it — inside or outside the country — is determined to create an international front against Iran,” said Saeed Laylaz, a political analyst who was imprisoned in a crackdown on anti-government protests following Ahmadinejad’s disputed 2009 reelection. “The U.S. is gradually paving the way for a confrontation with Iran,” he said.

The Surreal Moments of the Underwear Bomber's Trial

2011-10-12T20:07:00.000-04:00

The Atlantic Wire By Adam Martin | The Atlantic Wire – 10/12/2011

It's hard to imagine anything more serious than a trial on charges of international terrorism. The suspect faces life in prison and his would-be victims, who prosecutors say closely escaped a fiery death, offered testimony that sealed his fate. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009, pleaded guilty on Wednesday morning after just one day of testimony as federal prosecutors laid out their case against him. Abdulmutallab, you'll remember, tried to detonate a chemical bomb he had hidden in his underwear as the plane flew over Detroit, but after it flared up it failed to explode. Witnesses for the government on Tuesday described a chaotic scene in which passengers rushed to subdue a man bent on killing them over a major city. But for all its gravity, the short-lived Abdulmutallab trial has grabbed imaginations because of its abundance of surreal, and at times even funny, descriptions of his thwarted attack attempt. One thing about Abdulmutallab's guilty plea: It will save him further embarrassment at trial.
Related: Underwear Bomber Pleads to Guilty

"Dude, your pants are on fire": The quote that led the Detroit Free Press's coverage got wide play on Twitter. Los Angeles news anchor Pam Cook declared it the "quote of the week." Scott Cassel, a Twitter user following the story, encapsulated people's feeling about the line: "I know this is serious, but read it and see if u smile." The quote came from Michael Zantow, a passenger from Wisconsin, who sat behind Abdulmutallab and testified on Tuesday. From the Free Press's testimony blog:

Zantow noticed Abdulmuttalab put a blanket over his head, prompting a flight attendant to ask him if he was okay.

“I saw movement… as he was pulling an airline blanket over his head and shoulders,” said Zantow. After that, maybe 4-5 minutes later, Zantow heard a loud pop that sounded like a firecracker. He couldn’t tell exactly where it came from.

After the pop, “everyone kinda looked around,” Zantow said. About 30 seconds later, a passenger yelled: “Hey dude, your pants are on fire.”

Adult diapers: Reporters seemed to struggle to describe Abdulmutallab's "bulky" underwear in more serious terms. Zantow testified that "they were bulky and they were burning," and reportedly got a laugh from the jury when he compared them to child's pull-up diapers. The comparison made it into The New York Times, where reporter Monica Davey wrote that "his underwear looked peculiar, almost like a child’s pull-up or an adult diaper."
Related: Mystery Witnesses Revealed for Muslim Radicalization Hearings

Burned genitals: Shortly before the start of the trial, Abdulmutallab's standby defense lawyer, Anthony Chambers, moved to block a hospital photo showing Abdulmutallab's burned genitals from evidence. U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds denied the request, but prosecutors had not yet presented the photo when Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty. Now that he has conceded his guilt, he'll escape the embarrassment of having the picture shown in court.
Related: Two Iraqis Living in Kentucky Indicted on WMD Charges

Naked and defeated: Abdulmutallab wanted to go out in an explosion that would rock the United States on behalf of Al Qaeda, prosecutors allege. But when his chemical bomb failed to work, his situation turned into the exact opposite of that. Like a bad dream, Abdulmutallab had to sit out the rest of his flight to Detroit pantsless, burned, and restrained. The Free Press's testimony blog from Tuesday has more:

Tukel said the defendant pulled down his pants to push the plunger on the bomb. After a passenger put out the fire, he essentially sat naked from the waist down for the rest of the flight.

A man who sat with Abdulmutallab in the business section said the defendant admitted trying to ignite a bomb, Tukel said. A flight attendant seated across from Abdulmutallab talked with him. She asked him if he was in pain from burns. He nodded his head yes. She asked him what he had in his pocket. He didn’t answer. She asked again. He told her he had an explosive device, Tukel said.

Had enough: The giggles at his failed attempt seem to have gotten to Abdulmutallab. According to Wednesday's testimony blog, after he acknowledged his guilt, "he warned the U.S. that, if it continued to murder innocent Muslims, a calamity would befall the U.S. 'If you laugh at us now, we will laugh at you later,' he said."

Officials concede gaps in U.S. knowledge of Iran plot

2011-10-12T20:03:00.000-04:00

Reuters By Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria | Reuters – 10/12/2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iran's supreme leader and the shadowy Quds Force covert operations unit were likely aware of an alleged plot to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, but hard evidence of that is scant, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

The United States does not have solid information about "exactly how high it goes," one official said.

The Obama administration has publicly and directly blamed Iran's government for seeking to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, and has warned Tehran it will face consequences. The accusation has heightened tensions in the volatile, oil-rich Gulf.

Tehran has called the accusation a fabrication designed to sow discord in the region.

The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said their confidence that at least some Iranian leaders were aware of the alleged plot was based largely on analyses and their understanding of how the Quds Force operates.

They said it was "more than likely" that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Quds Force commander Qasem Suleimani had prior knowledge or approved of the suspected plot. They insisted it was "not a rogue operation in any way," and was sanctioned and directed by Quds Force operatives in Iran.

But other parts of Iran's factionalized government may not have known, they said. That included President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who "didn't necessarily know about this," one said.

New details emerged about Manssor Arbabsiar, the Iranian-American and former Texas resident who is alleged to have tried to hire a Mexican drug cartel figure to assassinate al-Jubeir. That figure turned out to be a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant.

Arbabsiar, the only suspect known to be arrested in connection with the alleged plot, went by "Jack" and moved to Iran about a year ago, according to news reports.

Arbabsiar's wife, Martha Guerrero, told KVUE TV station in Austin, Texas, he was innocent. "I may not be living with him, being separated, but I cannot for the life of me think that he would be capable of doing that," she was quoted as saying.

'VERY OUTSIDE THE PATTERN'

Several senior U.S. government officials acknowledged the alleged plot was unusual in its poor tradecraft -- spy jargon for espionage skills and finesse.

"We would expect to see the Quds Force cover their tracks more effectively," said one official. Another said a plot to launch a violent attack inside the United States was "very outside the pattern" of recent Quds Force activities.

Kenneth Katzman, an Iran specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said there were elements of the alleged plot that did not make sense.

"The idea of using a Texas car salesman who is not really a Quds Force person himself, who has been in residence in the United States many years, that doesn't add up," Katzman said.

"There could have been some contact on this with the Quds Force, but the idea that this was some sort of directed, vetted, fully thought-through plot, approved at high levels in Tehran leadership I think defies credulity," he said.

The U.S. officials said Quds Force operations until now had principally involved providing covert Iranian support to anti-American and anti-Israeli militants and insurgents in the Middle East and South Asia.

But the officials also noted a history of antagonism between Iran's theocratic Shi'ite government and Saudi Arabia's Sunni monarchy. That hostility manifested itself in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, a Saudi residential complex housing U.S. servicemen, in which U.S. officials say the Quds Force played a significant role.

Officials said the poor tradecraft and loose talk by Arbabsiar left open a strong possibility that officials in Tehran believed the U.S. government would not necessarily view an attack on Saudi Arabia's ambassador as an attack on the United States itself.

ACTIVE AGAINST U.S. OVERSEAS INTERESTS

Historically, Quds Force operatives have been active against U.S. interests overseas, including providing arms and other support to both Shi'ite and Sunni insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

Iranian government operatives or militant groups supported by Iran, such as the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hizbollah, have been implicated in attacks on U.S. and other Western targets, including bombings in the 1980s of the U.S. Embassy and a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in which 85 people died.

After his arrest, Arbabsiar confessed that a cousin in Iran, whom U.S. officials identified as Abdul Reza Shahlai, was a senior Quds Force official, the indictment against him said. Federal authorities say that under their supervision after his arrest, Arbabsiar discussed the alleged assassination plot on the phone with Gholam Shakuri, whom one U.S. official identified as a Quds Force "case officer," or agent handler.

A U.S. official said Shahlai in the past had come to the attention of U.S. security officials responsible for monitoring Quds Force activities. Another official said that after his arrest, Arbabsiar identified photographs of two Quds Force operatives that had been provided by U.S. intelligence.

U.S. officials said apart from their historical knowledge about how the Iranian leadership and Quds Force interact, they believed high-level Iranian government support for the plot was corroborated by the fact that Arbabsiar allegedly managed to arrange a $100,000 wire transfer to fund the plot.

The money passed through at least one Asian financial haven, one official said, adding the Iranians were relatively sloppy in concealing the funds' origin.

Fed up with Washington, wealthy boycott campaign fundraising

2011-10-12T20:02:00.000-04:00

ReutersBy Jessica Toonkel | Reuters – 10/12/2011

(Reuters) - They might not be among the jobless protesting against Wall Street, but the rich are angry, too. Furious over U.S. government gridlock, the wealthy have their own form of protest: Refusing to make political contributions.

A number of financial advisers say their wealthy clients have told them they will not make political contributions this year, many for the first time ever.

Bessemer Trust CEO John Hilton says in his 42 years advising ultra high-net worth investors, he has never seen clients so frustrated with the state of affairs in Washington.

He said a number of the firm's clients - who have an average of $30 million in investable assets - say they believe a lack of leadership and political wrangling are the primary cause of recent market problems - and the declines in their portfolios. Because of that, they say they're saying no to requests to make political contributions.

"People are pissed," said Alan Ungar, an adviser with Critical Capital Management Inc. in Calabasas, California. His clients have an average $1.6 million or more in assets invested with the firm. "This isn't about taxes," he said. "It's about the partisan dynamic."

Political contributions from wealthy donors are crucial for presidential campaigns, said Michael Beckel, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, a research group that tracks donations and their impact on elections and policy in the U.S.

Thirty-one percent of all individual donations came from people who donated $2,000 or more during the 2008 presidential elections, according to the Federal Election Commission. "We are definitely seeing a slower start in donors giving money than we did four years ago," Beckel said.

In the second quarter of 2007, Republican candidates raised about $115 million from individual donors. In the second quarter of this year, the latest crop of candidates raised about a third of that, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.

ON THE SIDELINES

The frustration among wealthy donors has been building throughout the year.

For months, Congress fought about raising the federal government's borrowing limit. An agreement to raise the debt ceiling and cut spending in August came just in time to avert a possible debt default but concerns about the gridlock and the nation's budget deficits led credit rating agency Standard & Poor's to remove the United States' triple-A rating.

In the weeks that followed, stock indexes have seen wild swings, including a record number of days of 400-plus point swings in the Dow Jones industrial average.

Markets have remained volatile since and the gridlock continues. On Tuesday, the Senate blocked President Barack Obama's $447 billion jobs bill.

One client told Hilton that he was recently contacted by the political party he is affiliated with to make a contribution. He told Hilton that he declined, telling the caller that considering the situation in Washington and with his retirement account down 25 percent partly because of it, he didn't want to contribute.

In the Washington, D.C. area, wealthy donors are often active in fund-raising for presidential campaigns. This year, many are sitting on the sidelines, said Ted Halpern, a Rockville, Maryland-based financial adviser whose average client has more than $2 million in assets.

"My clients are the ones who are usually hosting fund-raisers at their homes," he said. Many have historically been staunch Democrats, but Halpern said this year some say they might vote for a Republican because they hope a change will lead to action of some kind in Washington, Halpern said.

"There is just a lot of resentment out there," he said.

Jim Heitman, an adviser with Compass Financial Planning in Alta Loma, California, whose average account size is $1.3 million, said several of his clients are usually active in their parties. But this year, they're doing less and some are using the money they earmark for political contributions to pay off mortgages on vacation homes or to invest in alternative assets like gold, he said.

"The attitude is increasingly 'a pox on both their houses,'" Heitman said.

How an alleged plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador was discovered along the Mexican border

2011-10-11T21:24:00.000-04:00

10/11/2011
By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, October 12, 2:45 AM

WASHINGTON — The unraveling of an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States came from a surprising place — the front lines of the drug war along the Mexican border.

And like a Hollywood thriller, the murder-for-hire tale cuts back and forth across international lines. “This case illustrates we live in a world where borders and boundaries are increasingly irrelevant,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller.

According to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in New York, the plot was revealed by an informant inside the world of the Mexican drug trade, a man paid by U.S. drug agents to rat out traffickers.

The complaint describes the informant as someone who was previously charged for violating drug laws in the United States but got the charges dismissed by agreeing to cooperate with U.S. drug investigations. U.S. officials trusted the informant because he had proved reliable in the past and led to several drug seizures — and the informant was paid for those tips.

In May 2011, the informant allegedly met with a Texas man named Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who also had an Iranian passport. The complaint doesn’t say how the two were introduced, but Arbabsiar reportedly approached the informant, who he thought was an associate of a drug cartel well known for its violent tactics, to ask about his knowledge of explosives for an attack on a Saudi embassy.

The informant reached out to his contacts in the United States to tell them all about it. Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was told the informant was “somebody who was in one of the drug cartels, credible, long history, was fully capable of conducting the kind of operation the Iranian was asking for.”

“This guy brought it to us, and from there it was laid out in front of us as they went forward,” the Michigan Republican said.

The complaint said Arbabsiar and the informant met several more times in Mexico over the next few months, with the informant secretly recording their conversations for U.S. authorities. The two spoke English and their discussions became more focused on a specific target for violence — the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, a U.S.-educated commoner sent to the United States to repair relations after the Sept. 11 attacks who has been ambassador since 2007.

The complaint said Arbabsiar has fully confessed to his role in the operation and said he was recruited, funded and directed by Iran’s special foreign actions unit known as the Quds Force. Arbabsiar said his cousin Abdul Reza Shahlai was a high-ranking member of the Quds Force who approached him this past spring to ask for his cooperation. Arbabsiar said he frequently traveled between the U.S. and Mexico for work and knew people he believed were in the drug trade, and his cousin asked him if he could recruit someone in the narcotics business for criminal activity.

U.S. officials say Shahlai has a violent past — the Bush administration accused him of planning a Jan. 20, 2007, attack in Karbala, Iraq, that killed five American soldiers and wounded three others. This time, according to U.S. officials, Shahlai and other Quds agents approved a plot to pay their Mexican drug contact $1.5 million for the death of the ambassador — making a $100,000 down payment to an account the informant provided.

According to transcripts of their recorded conversations cited in the complaint, the informant told Arbabsiar he would kill the ambassador however he wanted — “blow him up or shoot him” — and Arbabsiar responded he should use whatever method was easiest. The plot eventually centered on targeting Al-Jubeir in his favorite restaurant and Arbabsiar was quoted as saying killing him alone would be better, “but sometime, you know, you have no choice.” Arbabsiar dismisses the possibility that 100-150 others in the restaurant could be killed along with the ambassador as “no problem” and “no big deal.”

Eventually, according to the complaint, the informant told Arbabsiar he must come to Mexico to offer himself as “collateral” for the final payment of the $1.5 million fee for the assassination. Arbabsiar said his cousin’s deputy at the Quds Force — Gholam Shakuri, also charged in the complaint but at large in Iran — warned him against offering himself as a guarantee of payment. But Arbabsiar went anyway, boarding a flight to Mexico on Sept. 28 with plans to fly to Iran after the plot was finished.

Mexican authorities, who say they had been cooperating with U.S. officials in the investigation, denied Arbabsiar entry into the country and he boarded a flight to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Law enforcement officials secretly boarded with him to keep him under surveillance, and he was arrested when he got off the plane in New York.

Arbabsiar agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities and made several recorded phone calls to Shakuri in which they discussed the purchase of a “Chevrolet,” their agreed-upon code-word for the plot. Shakuri urged Arbabsiar to make sure they “just do it quickly.”

___

AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier contributed to this report.

Iran behind alleged terrorist plot, U.S. says

2011-10-11T21:19:00.001-04:00

By Jerry Markon and Karen DeYoung,
Published: October 11
Updated: Wednesday, October 12, 2011
The Washington Post

U.S. officials on Tuesday accused elements of the Iranian government of plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, allegations that aggravated the tense relationship between the United States and the Islamic Republic.

The Justice Department unsealed charges against two Iranians — one of them a U.S. citizen — accusing them of orchestrating an elaborate murder-for-hire plot that targeted Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi envoy to Washington and a key adviser to King Abdullah. The Iranians planned to employ Mexican drug traffickers to kill Jubeir with a bomb as he ate at a restaurant, U.S. officials said.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that “the United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions,” but other officials indicated that it was not yet clear who in the Iranian government was behind the alleged plot.

“There’s a question of how high up did it go,” said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House thinking. “The Iranian government has a responsibility to explain that.”

Federal authorities said they foiled the plan because the Iranian American, Mansour Arbabsiar, happened to hire a paid informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration to carry it out. Arbabsiar, 56, was arrested Sept. 29 in New York and later implicated Iranian officials in Tehran in directing the plot, U.S. officials said.

In addition to Jubeir, officials said, the plot envisioned later striking other targets in the United States and abroad, including a Saudi embassy, though those plans appeared preliminary at best. Arbabsiar has acknowledged that he was recruited and funded by men he understood to be senior officers in the Quds Force, an elite division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for foreign operations, court documents say.

An Iran-based member of that force, Gholam Shakuri, is also charged in federal court in New York with conspiracy to murder a foreign official and to commit an act of international terrorism, along with other counts.

The Iranian government denied the accusations, calling them a new round of “American propaganda” and saying they were fabricated to divert attention from U.S. economic troubles and the Occupy Wall Street protests.

“The U.S. government and the CIA have very good experience in making up film scripts,” Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said in Tehran. “It appears that this new scenario is for diverting the U.S. public opinion from internal crises.”

Ali Larijani, Iran’s former top nuclear negotiator and current head of parliament, described the U.S. allegations Wednesday as “silly and mischievous.” He told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency: “They made noises that they arrested those who wanted to bomb the Saudi Embassy. Foolish words that, by using expanded media coverage, were clearly meant to cover up their internal problems.” He added: “We have normal relations with the Saudis. There is no reason that Iran wants to do these childish things they accuse us of.”

Quick U.S. reaction

The Treasury Department also announced financial sanctions against Shakuri, three other Quds Force officials and Arbabsiar, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration would work with allies to devise more actions to isolate the Islamic Republic.

The State Department also issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens over the suspected Iranian plot.

“The U.S. government assesses that this Iranian-backed plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador may indicate a more aggressive focus by the Iranian government on terrorist activity against diplomats from certain countries, to include possible attacks in the United States,” the department said in a statement on its Web site. The travel alert expires Jan. 11, 2012.

Arbabsiar appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and was ordered held without bail in a proceeding that did not require him to enter a plea. His court-appointed attorney, Sabrina Shroff, said outside the court that he would plead not guilty, Bloomberg News reported. Shakuri remains at large in Iran.

Shiite-dominated Iran and Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia are longtime rivals for regional dominance, a contest that moved into high gear with the U.S. elimination of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as a powerful buffer between them and began to play out in proxy battles in Lebanon, Bahrain and elsewhere.

But some specialists on Iran expressed skepticism that the Islamic Republic would resort to killing a prominent Saudi official — a virtual act of war against that country — in the U.S. capital.

“Why would Iran want to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington?” said Alireza Nader, an Iran expert at the Rand Corp. “I’m not discounting the evidence necessarily, and Iran has a long history of supporting terrorism. But plots against the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., would be outside that norm.”

Other experts said the seemingly unusual method of carrying out the assassination — recruiting what the plotters thought was a Mexican drug trafficker — made sense. “Let’s face it: The level of scrutiny in Mexico is less,” said Fred Burton, a former State Department security specialist who monitors threats in Mexico for the Stratfor group.

Mexican drug cartels are now multifaceted, transnational criminal organizations that have developed increasingly sophisticated car bombs. U.S. federal agents have said the Mexican mafia’s learning curve — from crude pipe bombs to radio-triggered plastic explosives — has been rapid.

U.S. officials declined to comment on Iran’s motive for the alleged plot, saying that the information is classified and that they are continuing to investigate. They also would not specify the other possible targets, declining to confirm other media reports that they included the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington.

‘A deadly plot’

Officials described the details of the plan as chilling, with FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III saying that “though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real, and many lives would have been lost.’’

The plot dates to early spring, when a cousin of Arbabsiar’s, a senior member of the Quds Force, approached him while he was in Iran about a plan to kidnap Jubeir, according to court documents. The criminal complaint does not identify the cousin, but a Treasury Department release issued Tuesday said a cousin of Arbabsiar named Abdul Reza Shahlai, a Quds Force official, “coordinated the plot” and approved financial payments.

Arbabsiar allegedly told the cousin that he did business on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border and knew a number of drug traffickers. The cousin told Arbabsiar that he should hire a trafficker to carry out the plot “because people in that business are willing to undertake criminal activity in exchange for money,” according to the complaint.

It remains unclear what led Arbabsiar to the person identified only as CS-1. The confidential DEA source, referred to by Arbabsiar as “the Mexican” in meetings tape-recorded by the source, was described in court papers only as a paid informant who was once charged in the United States with a drug offense.

The charges were dropped because the informant has provided valuable information in a number of cases, and in this instance, he quickly notified federal agents that Arbabsiar had contacted him, according to court documents and federal officials.

The two began a series of meetings in Mexico in May that quickly turned to discussing the killing of Jubeir, the documents say. Jubeir, the son of a Saudi diplomat, is one of the most powerful foreign policymakers outside the royal family.

The informant told Arbabsiar that he would need four men to carry out the assassination. His alleged price: $1.5 million.

Shakuri, identified by Treasury as a deputy to Shahlai, gave Arbabsiar thousands of dollars to fund the plot, court documents say. As a down payment, Arbabsiar allegedly arranged for nearly $100,000 to be wired to an account that was secretly overseen by the FBI.

For the site of the bombing, the informant suggested a Washington restaurant where Jubeir “goes out and eat[s] like two times a week,” according to the recordings. When the informant noted that bystanders could be killed in the attack, including U.S. senators, Arbabsiar dismissed these concerns as “no big deal,” court documents say.

“They want that guy [the ambassador] done [killed],” Arbabsiar reportedly said. Federal authorities said the informant was never referring to an actual restaurant.

According to the Justice Department, Arbabsiar was arrested by federal agents while on a layover at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport after being denied entry in Mexico. Arbabsiar waived his Miranda rights against self-incrimination and has provided “extremely valuable intelligence,” according to a letter prosecutors sent last week to a federal judge in New York updating her on the status of his detention.

A team of law enforcement agents has been working “virtually around the clock since the defendant’s arrest,’’ it said.

Staff writers Jason Ukman, Scott Wilson and Greg Miller, correspondents Thomas Erdbrink in Tehran and William Booth in Mexico City, and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Secret U.S. memo sanctioned killing of Aulaqi

2011-10-01T22:05:00.000-04:00

By Peter Finn, Published: September 30 2011
The Washington Post

The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials.

The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said.

“What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war,” said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closely held deliberations within the administration.

The administration has faced a legal challenge and public criticism for targeting Aulaqi, who was born in New Mexico, because of constitutional protections afforded U.S. citizens. The memorandum may represent an attempt to resolve, at least internally, a legal debate over whether a president can order the killing of U.S. citizens overseas as a counterterrorism measure.

The operation to kill Aulaqi involved CIA and military assets under CIA control. A former senior intelligence official said that the CIA would not have killed an American without such a written opinion.

A second American killed in Friday’s attack was Samir Khan, a driving force behind Inspire, the English-language magazine produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. An administration official said the CIA did not know Khan was with Aulaqi, but they also considered Khan a belligerent whose presence near the target would not have stopped the attack.

The circumstances of Khan’s death were reminiscent of a 2002 U.S. drone strike in Yemen that targeted Abu Ali al-Harithi, a Yemeni al-Qaeda operative accused of planning the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. That strike also killed a U.S. citizen who the CIA knew was in Harithi’s vehicle but who was a target of the attack.

The Obama administration has spoken in broad terms about its authority to use military and paramilitary force against al-Qaeda and associated forces beyond “hot,” or traditional, battlefields such as Iraq or Afghanistan. Officials said that certain belligerents aren’t shielded because of their citizenship.

“As a general matter, it would be entirely lawful for the United States to target high-level leaders of enemy forces, regardless of their nationality, who are plotting to kill Americans both under the authority provided by Congress in its use of military force in the armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces as well as established international law that recognizes our right of self-defense,” an administration official said in a statement Friday.

President Obama and various administration officials referred to Aulaqi publicly for the first time Friday as the “external operations” chief for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a label that may be intended to underscore his status as an operational leader who posed an imminent threat.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.

Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in national security law, said the government likely reviewed Aulaqi’s constitutional rights, but concluded that he was an imminent threat and was deliberately hiding in a place where neither the United States nor Yemen could realistically capture him.

Last year, the Obama administration invoked the state secrets privilege to argue successfully for the dismissal of a lawsuit brought in U.S. District Court in Washington by Aulaqi’s father, Nasser, seeking to block the targeting of his son. Judge John Bates found that in Aulaqi’s case, targeting was a “political question” to be decided by the executive branch.

The decision to place Aulaqi on a capture or kill list was made in early 2010, after intelligence officials concluded that he played a direct role in the plot to blow up a jet over Detroit and had become an operational figure within al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

“If you are a dual national high in the Japanese operational group responsible for Pearl Harbor, you’re not exempt, and neither was” Aulaqi, the administration official said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights argued on behalf of Aulaqi’s father last year that there is no “battlefield” in Yemen and that the administration should be forced to articulate publicly its legal standards for killing any citizen outside the United States who is suspected of terrorism.

Otherwise, the groups argued, such a killing would amount to an extrajudicial execution and would violate U.S. and international law.

“International human rights law dictates that you can’t unilaterally target someone and kill someone without that person posing an imminent threat to security interests,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The information that we have, from the government’s own press releases, is that he is somehow loosely connected, but there is no specific evidence of things he actualized that would meet the legal threshold for making this killing justifiable as a matter of human rights law.”

ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner said that Aulaqi had been targeted for nearly two years and that the government would appear to have a very elastic definition of imminent threat.

The former senior intelligence official said the CIA did reviews every six months to ensure that those targeted for possible killing remained threats as defined by law and presidential findings.

The administration describes al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as an associated force of the original terrorist group that was led by Osama bin Laden until he was killed, making AQAP subject to congressionally authorized military force. Officials said Aulaqi was part of an enemy force and posed an ongoing, immediate danger.

Staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Anwar al-Aulaqi’s death reopens wounds for Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church

2011-10-01T22:04:00.000-04:00

By Michelle Boorstein and Kafia A. Hosh, Published: September 30 2011
The Washington Post

At the Northern Virginia mosque where Anwar al-Aulaqi once preached, the news of his killing ripped open a wound that congregants wish would heal.

For a decade, Dar al-Hijrah has been haunted by its association with Aulaqi, who was the imam at the Falls Church mosque on Sept. 11, 2001, but had yet to publicly embrace the anti-American extremism that would make him a target of U.S. drones.

Tariq Nelson, an active member of the mosque, expressed weariness Friday at trying to explain Aulaqi’s apparent shift from moderate interfaith activist to violent jihadist.

“When you feel like you’ve been continuously embarrassed,” Nelson said, “it’s painful and humiliating.”

Imam Shaker Elsayed acknowledged Aulaqi’s death at a crowded Friday afternoon prayer service. “May Allah give him mercy,” the imam told dozens of worshipers, noting that “when anyone leaves this life . . . their judgment is reserved by Allah.”

Those who killed Aulaqi, Elsayed added, “need to equally prepare for that moment” when they also will be judged by Allah.

Aulaqi is an uncomfortable subject at Dar al-Hijrah, where people emphatically reject his advocacy of violence but agree with his criticism of U.S. foreign policy and heavy military presence in the Middle East.

Many complain that they have endured suspicion because of Aulaqi’s past ties to the mosque.

“I know for a fact that my attendance has been documented” by the government, said Sandra Amen-Bryan, a psychologist from Arlington County. “I’m not breaking the law. I’m coming here to worship. What I resent is the mindset that because this individual is guilty then the rest of us are guilty by association.”

Jennifer Rogers, 32, said she was uncomfortable with the government-sanctioned killing of an American citizen — a sentiment echoed by mosque leaders and a number of Muslim organizations.

“They should have at least brought him back here and put him through this judicial system,” said Rogers, an Alexandria resident who converted to Islam in 2000. “It’s his right as a citizen.”

In a statement, mosque officials called the killing of an American “an assassination.”

They stressed that when Aulaqi preached at Dar al-Hijrah 10 years ago, he “was known for his interfaith outreach, civic engagement and tolerance in the Northern Virginia community.” It wasn’t until he left the United States and was allegedly tortured by Yemeni authorities, the statement said, that he began preaching violence and encouraging “impressionable American Muslims to attack their own country. With his death, Al-Awlaki will no longer be able to spread his hate speech over the internet to our youth.”

Aulaqi was hired in 2001 to be the imam at Dar al-Hijrah, where more than 3,000 worshipers from more than 35 countries pack into the prayer hall every Friday.

Bassam Estwani, one of the mosque’s early founders, said he “never saw any sign of extremist thinking. He was a scholar, spoke both languages, Arabic and English, very well. I wondered to myself afterward, is he the same person who spoke here?”

Right after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Aulaqi was in demand as an articulate spokesman for American Islam and interfaith understanding. He did a chat about Ramadan on washingtonpost.com and allowed a Post videographer to chronicle a day in the life of an American imam.

Eventually, however, federal investigators learned that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers had briefly worshiped at Dar al-Hijrah when Aulaqi was the imam. Their appearance at the mosque “may not have been coincidental,” the federal 9/11 Commission concluded.

In 2002, Aulaqi declined an offer from two Dar al-Hijrah leaders to return to the mosque. He was seriously considering running for parliament in Yemen, he told Hossein Goal, a former member of Dar al-Hijrah’s executive committee, and Imam Johari Abdul-Malik. He also was mulling hosting a TV show in the gulf or landing a teaching job at an Islamic university.

Staff writer William Wan contributed to this report.

al-Aulaqi killed in Yemen

2011-10-01T21:37:00.001-04:00

SOURCE: AP

The American-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was killed in Yemen Friday, became a top target for U.S. counterterrorism operations through his reported role in a range of attacks and attempted attacks. Learn more about those attacks and his life:
2011
Yemen drone strike

Sept. 30
Successful strike

Aulaqi perished in an attack on his convoy by a U.S. drone and jet, 75 miles east of Sanaa between Al Jawf and Marib.

May
Unsuccessful strike

As Yemen is gripped by an uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh's regime, a U.S. drone targets Aulaqi but the mission fails.
2010

Oct.
Linked to mail bombs

Aulaqi is believed to have had a hand in mail bombs addressed to Chicago-area synagogues, packages intercepted in Dubai and Europe.

May
British cabinet member stabbed

British cabinet minister Stephen Timms is stabbed by a woman who said she was influenced by al-Aulaqi's sermons.
Times Square bomber

Attempted bombing of Times Square

Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to detonate a bomb in Times Square bomber on May 1, 2010, was inspired by Aulaqi's sermons and videos. He does not appear to have been in touch with him directly.

April

President Obama makes Aulaqi the first American placed on the CIA target list.

March

An Aulaqi tape is released in which he urges American Muslims to mount attacks in the U.S.
2009
Underwear bomber

Dec. 25
Christmas underwear bomber

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian "underwear bomber" who tried to blow up a plane headed for Detroit, Mich., on Dec. 25, 2009, was inspired by Aulaqi. In addition, Aulaqi put Abdulmutallab "in touch with plotters and trainers of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

Dec. 24
Unsuccessful drone strike

Aulaqi was believed to be at a gathering of al-Qaeda figures in Yemen's Shabwa mountains, a day before Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airliner near Detroit. Yemeni warplanes, using U.S. intelligence help, struck the tents but Aulaqi and others were believed to have driven off hours earlier.
Fort Hood attack

Nov. 5
Fort Hood attack

Nidal Hasan's attack on Fort Hood was also inspired by the Yemeni cleric. Hasan exchanged emails with Aulaqi before the attack, but it is unclear if Aulaqi was giving him instructions or was just his religious mentor.
2007

After release from prison, Aulaqi moves to the Awalik tribal heartland in eastern province of Shabwa, an al-Qaeda stronghold, living in his family home in the mountain hamlet of Saeed and occasionally preaching in a local mosque.
2006
Aulaqi arrested

Yemeni authorities arrest Aulaqi with a group of five Yemenis suspected of kidnapping a Shiite Muslim teenager for ransom. He is released without trial after a year in prison following the intercession of his tribe.
Falls Church mosque
2001
9/11 investigation

After Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Aulaqi was interviewed at least four times in two weeks about his dealings with three of the hijackers aboard the flight that slammed into the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 Commission report said Aulaqi was also investigated by the FBI in 1999 and 2000. None of the investigations led to criminal charges against him.

Aulaqi becomes preacher at Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, outside Washington.
2000

Aulaqi starts preaching in San Diego mosque where he met two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
1991
Studies in the U.S.

Aulaqi returns to the United States to study civil engineering at Colorado State University, then education at San Diego State University. He later does doctoral work at George Washington University.
1978

His family returns to Yemen, where his father serves as agriculture minister and is a professor at Sanaa University.
1971

April 22

Aulaqi was born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents.

As incomes drop, Americans dip into savings

2011-10-01T21:02:00.000-04:00

By Jia Lynn Yang and and Erica W. Morrison, Published: September 30 2011
The Washington Post

The personal income of Americans dropped for the first time in two years in August, according to government figures released Friday, forcing people to dip into their savings to cover their spending.

The drop in earnings is just one more sign that the country’s stalling economy is straining families — and it’s consistent with a generally bleak picture for American workers whose wages have remained stagnant since 2001.

Personal income fell 0.1 percent in August compared with the month before, the first decline since October 2009, the government said. As a result, Americans tapped their reserves, dropping the personal savings rate to its lowest point since December 2009, or 4.5 percent. Meanwhile, spending remained flat, when adjusting for inflation.

The trend is rooted in the country’s nagging unemployment problem, analysts said. N o new jobs were created in August, keeping the unemployment rate stuck at 9.1 percent.

“You have a massive number of families, and not just the unemployed, who feel like their financial position is not where they want it to be,” said David Neumark, professor of economics and director of the Center for Economics & Public Policy at University of California, Irvine. “And the only way to get there is to save more.”

Meanwhile, prices for food and gas are creeping up, rising 0.2 percent in August compared with July. Energy prices rose 1.2 percent while food prices ticked up 0.6 percent.

“In order to cope with higher prices for most goods and services — especially food and gasoline — many households had no choice but to save less, spend more and get less,” wrote Chris G. Christopher Jr., senior principal economist at IHS Global Insight in a note. “All of this is happening in an economic environment with volatile equity markets, falling household assets, diminishing 401(k)s, high unemployment and depressed consumer confidence.”

Michael Marshall, 54, a District resident, said he left his full-time job at Staples in 2008 to help care for his mother. On Friday afternoon, he was applying for jobs at a city unemployment center on Minnesota Avenue in Northeast.

“My savings account is gone as of this moment that we’re speaking,” Marshall said. “It’s a full-time job looking for a job.”

He posted his résuméon the government unemployment Web site and has set up three interviews already.

Some local shoppers have noticed the rising prices.

“Prices have gone up,” said Vanesssa Jordan of Fredicksburg, Va., who was shopping at the Costco store at Pentagon City in Arlington. “You have to start holding on to what you have.”

The recent recession laid bare broader economic trends that have been squeezing the middle class for years.

According to Census data released in September, the typical American family actually saw its earnings decline in the past 10 years, the first time that has happened in this country for at least five decades. Meanwhile, executive pay has exploded and corporate profits have hit record levels.

Government data show that real median household income hit a peak of $53,252 in 1999. Wages began stalling years before the financial crisis, but persistent joblessness has exacerbated the issue.

Consumers appear to be holding back on their spending with the jobs crisis so persistent and wages flat.

Reflecting the grim mood about the economy, stocks fell Friday with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging 2.2 percent, or 241 points, to close at 10,913.38. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, a broader measure, dropped 2.5 percent and has fallen more than 14 percent in the past three months. The quarterly drop is the worst since the financial crisis of 2008.

Business activity, however, appears to be on the rise. The Institute for Supply Management-Chicago’s business barometer increased to 60.4 in September, up from 56.5 in August.

morrisone@washpost.com

Was the BBC victim of a hoax? No, say the Yes Men

2011-09-27T23:48:00.000-04:00

By Dylan Stableford | The Cutline
9/27/2011

"Governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world."

That's what a purported London-based independent trader named Alessio Rastani told the BBC on Monday in a jaw-dropping interview that quickly went viral.

But just as quickly, rumors swirled that Rastani was actually a member of the Yes Men, a loose-knit group of merry pranksters and imposters that attempt to manipulate the media with the goal of exposing the dubious conduct of big corporations.

The Yes Men publicly denied that Rastani is a member. And the BBC said in a statement that it doesn't think he is, either: "We've carried out detailed investigations and can't find any evidence to suggest that the interview with Alessio Rastani was a hoax. He is an independent market trader and one of a range of voices we've had on air to talk about the recession."

"We've never heard of Rastani," the group said in a statement of its own. "He isn't a Yes Man. He's a real trader who is, for one reason or another, being more honest than usual."

Rastani has an active Twitter feed, Facebook account and blog--all consistently updated. And Rastani gave an extensive interview to Forbes insisting he is who he says he is--an independent trader who works from his South London home.

Felix Salmon of Reuters has another theory: that Rastani, who bears a striking resemblance to a member of the Yes Men, is both a trader and member of the troupe.

"Independent traders are, well, independent," Salmon noted. "You don't need to spend very much time hanging around the comments section at Zero Hedge to discern a strong nihilistic and even anti-capitalist strain to much of the thinking in that community. Independent traders are often men in their 20s and 30s who inherited a substantial sum of money and who for whatever reason don't have a more attractive opportunity in the regular workforce. They work from home, they tend to have a strong contrarian streak, and they have a lot of time on their hands.

"All of which is entirely consistent with the profile of the kind of people who might join or become the Yes Men," Salmon added.

For his part, Rastani says he was simply misunderstood.

"I have no idea why I'm getting this attention," Rastani told Forbes. "I don't think it was news. For someone to say what I said, I thought everybody already knew this kind of stuff. The big players of funds rule the world, I don't think that was news. And what I said about making money from a crash, obviously not everybody knows about that, you can make money from a downward market."

Rastani added: "A lot of people just got the wrong end of the foot, misunderstood what I was saying. They thought I was joyful or licking my lips about the idea of making money from people's miseries. That's probably the way it looked on the video. But if they watch the whole video, what I was really trying to say is people need to educate themselves about how to do that ... what I was trying to say was, look, everyone should basically prepare. I was trying to be the good guy. If this market's going to crash, then you've got to prepare yourself."

Israel building plan for East Jerusalem draws fresh rebuke from U.S., others

2011-09-27T12:11:00.000-04:00

By Joel Greenberg and Joby Warrick, Published: September 27 2011
WP

JERUSALEM — Israel advanced plans Tuesday to build 1,100 homes in a Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem, drawing condemnations from Palestinian officials and a sharp rebuke from the Obama administration, which warned that the move could undercut efforts to restart negotiations.

The Israeli decision— a procedural step in a permitting process that was already underway — comes at a particularly sensitive moment, after a controversial Palestinian application last week for membership in the United Nations and amid parallel efforts by global powers to prod the two sides to sit down together for the first time in more than a year.

The “Quartet” of Middle East mediators — the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia — proposed new talks to begin next month with the aim of reaching a comprehensive settlement by the end of 2012. But the Palestinians have said they will not return to negotiations unless Israel halts construction of settlements on land they seek for a future state. They claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli Interior Ministry said the Jerusalem District Planning Committee had advanced the housing plan in the neighborhood of Gilo, which is built on West Bank land annexed to Jerusalem, making the project available for public objections for a mandatory 60-day period before a decision on final approval.

Roei Lachmanovich, a spokesman for Interior Minister Eli Yishai, said the move was purely technical and “by no means a signal” to the Palestinians. Other Israeli officials agreed, saying the timing of the decision was a local matter outside the direct control of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu--who, in fact, has intervened in the past to delay such plans.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the Israeli decision amounted to “1,100 nos to the resumption of peace talks.”

“Israel wants to ensure that there will be no land left for a two-state solution,” he said.

The Quartet proposal calls on the Israelis and Palestinians “to refrain from provocative actions if negotiations are to be effective” and reiterates their obligations under the 2003 blueprint for peace known as the “road map,” which calls for an Israeli settlement freeze and a cessation of violence by the Palestinians.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the Israeli move “counterproductive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties.”

“As you know, we have long urged both sides to avoid any kind of action which could undermine trust, including, and perhaps most particularly, in Jerusalem, any action that could be viewed as provocative by either side,” Clinton said at a news conference.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said the administration was “deeply disappointed” by Israel’s announcement.

“We have maintained all along that each side in the dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis should take steps that bring them closer to direct negotiations to resolve the issues that stand in the way of Palestinian statehood and a secure Jewish state of Israel,” Carney told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One. “When either side takes unilateral action, it makes it harder to achieve that. We make our views known, just as we did, obviously, with regard to the Palestinian action at the United Nations.”

The E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said the Israeli decision “should be reversed.”

The United Nations also criticized the move. “This sends the wrong signal at this sensitive time,” said Richard Miron, spokesman for the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry. “Settlement activity is contrary to the Roadmap and to international law and undermines the prospect of resuming negotiations and reaching a two-state solution to the conflict.”

Israeli officials sought to play down the decision, noting that the proposed Gilo construction project had long been in the works and undergoing normal bureaucratic review. Netanyahu, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, said the Gilo building plan was being handled “the same way Israeli governments have been doing for years.”

“We plan in Jerusalem. We build in Jerusalem, period,” Netanyahu said.

He ruled out another Israeli settlement freeze after a 10-month moratorium on new building expired last September, leading the Palestinians to break off negotiations. “We already gave at the office,” Netanyahu said.

greenbergj@washpost.com

Senator: Consider military action against Pakistan

2011-09-25T19:26:00.002-04:00

9/25/1011

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunday that the U.S. should consider military action against Pakistan if it continues to support terrorist attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.

"The sovereign nation of Pakistan is engaging in hostile acts against the United States and our ally Afghanistan that must cease, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told "Fox News Sunday."

He said if experts decided that the U.S. needs to "elevate its response," he was confident there would be strong bipartisan support in Congress for such action.

Graham did not call for military action but said "all options" should be considered. He said assistance to Pakistan should be reconfigured and that the U.S. should no longer designate an amount of aid for Pakistan but have a more "transactional relationship" with the country.

"They're killing American soldiers," he said. "If they continue to embrace terrorism as a part of their national strategy, we're going to have to put all options on the table, including defending our troops."

In testimony last week to Graham's committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, said Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency had backed extremists in planning and executing the assault on the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan and a truck bomb attack that wounded 77 American soldiers. Both occurred this month.

Mullen contended that the Haqqani insurgent network "acts as a veritable arm" of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency as it undermined U.S.-Pakistan relations, already tenuous because of the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan exports violence, Mullen said, and threatens any success in the 10-year-old war.

Graham said Pakistan does cooperate with the U.S. in actions against al-Qaida. But he said the Pakistani military feels threatened by a democracy in Afghanistan and is betting that the Taliban will come back there.

"The best solution is for Pakistan to fight all forms of terrorism, embrace working with us so that we can deal with terrorism along their border, because it is the biggest threat to stability," he said. "But Pakistan is terrorism itself. They have made a tremendous miscalculation."

Netanyahu declines to reject GOP critique of Obama on Israel

2011-09-25T16:05:00.002-04:00

By Rosalind S. Helderman, Sunday, September 25, 2011
WP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Sunday that his nation’s bond with the United States and President Obama remains strong, but he declined to counter harsh criticism of Obama’s Middle East policy by Republican presidential candidates.

Speaking as the United Nation’s Security Council prepares to debate an application to create a Palestinian state—a move Obama has pledged the United States will block—Netanyahu said he stands ready to sit down and negotiate a peace deal. But he said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ request for UN intervention was undermining peace efforts.

“I think the Palestinians are trying to get away without negotiating,” Netanyahu said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They’re trying to basically detour around peace negotiations by going to the United Nations and having the automatic majority in the United Nations General Assembly give them a state.”

Netanyahu’s comments followed Abbas’s return to the West Bank over the weekend, where he was greeted with a hero’s welcome after making the statehood application to the UN in the face of tremendous pressure from the United States to drop the bid.

Abbas suggested to reporters that he would likely reject a new blueprint for talks advanced by international mediators because he believed it did not adequately address Palestinian conditions for talks.

Netanyahu said he stood ready to meet Abbas at any time, insisting he would have met at the UN building in New York City, which both men visited last week to address the statehood issue.

But he said he would not end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank without a negotiated deal that offered Israel security guarantees. He rejected suggestions that Israel’s position has caused the country to become more isolated as Muslim nations have rebelled against dictators who had been less hostile to the Jewish state during the so-called Arab Spring.

“I’m not going to head recklessly to feed more territory to the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam, as I call it,” Netanyahu said during the “Meet the Press” interview. “I want to first erect a wall against this military that takes over every territory that we vacate. I want to make sure that it doesn’t snap its gaping jaws, as I said, and devour us for dinner. That’s peace.”

Israel’s position remains viable, Netanyahu said, because of its strong friendship with the United States, which he said crosses party lines and has been represented by each occupant of the White House, including President Obama.

But asked if he disagreed with comments from Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who last week referred to Obama’s policy toward Israel as “naive, arrogant, misguided and dangerous,” Netanyahu demurred.

“David,” he replied to “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, “you’re trying to throw me under the bus of America politics. Well, guess what. I’m not going to be thrown.

“I think the important thing to understand is this, and this is the truth about American politics. Israel enjoys tremendous bipartisan support,” Netanyahu said.

Caution fills Obama’s playbook

2011-09-24T07:17:00.002-04:00

By David Ignatius, Published: September 23 2011
The Washington Post

It was painful to watch President Obama last week at the United Nations, backing away from the goal of Palestinian statehood he had championed when he took office. The best that could be said was that it was a bit of foreign-policy realism, acknowledging the political and strategic fact that the United States will never abandon Israel in the U.N. Security Council.

Obama is playing defense in foreign policy these days, trying not to make costly mistakes. Like a football team protecting a slim lead, he wants to avoid fumbles that would cost him the game. The idea of daring offensive moves — the risky touchdown pass — is a distant memory from 2009. This is a team that chants to itself: “Dee-fense!”

There are worse things than playing cautiously. The big gamble may be tempting, but it can lead to disaster, as Menachem Begin found with his invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and George W. Bush learned after his occupation of Iraq in 2003. Though commentators may be howling for a big, bold move, the correct choice is often the one that hedges against really bad outcomes. Papa Bush (“41”) was teased on “Saturday Night Live” with the mocking phrase “wouldn’t be prudent,” but he politely backed his way right into the dismantlement of the Soviet Union.

It should be said that Obama is playing defense reasonably well. There are big, long-lasting mistakes lurking in the Arab Spring — chief among them a chaotic implosion of Syria that could trigger a wave of sectarian massacres on the order of Iraq in 2006. Obama has understood the need to be cautious about the Syrian transition, even if he gets hammered sometimes in the editorial pages.

Obama is hedging, too, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The danger there is the perception that America is leaving and the ensuing scramble to fill the power vacuum. Recognizing that problem, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is already talking about the likelihood that the United States will keep some troops in Afghanistan after 2014. Obama could have avoided a lot of his current Af-Pak problems if he hadn’t coupled his December 2009 troop surge with a pledge to start withdrawing those troops in July 2011. The wiser course would have been deliberate ambiguity.

The retreat on the Palestinian issue must be a bitter pill for Obama. Regaining America’s role as an evenhanded mediator seemed his top priority when he took office. His first interview as president was with the Arabic news channel al-Arabiya; his June 2009 speech in Cairo was a masterful signal that America was ready to engage its Muslim adversaries and make peace. Obama knew that America’s security, and Israel’s, required creation of a Palestinian state.

What happened to that promise? It’s a long and depressing story, but the simple answer is that Obama got outfoxed. He decided not to immediately enunciate core principles for an agreement, which would have built on the remarkable progress made in 2008 by Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, a story that awaits Condoleezza Rice’s memoirs. Instead, he picked a fight over Israeli settlements that landed him in the morass of Israeli coalition politics.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waited Obama out. Every month that the diplomatic wrangling went on, Obama grew weaker politically and Netanyahu stronger. The denouement was Obama’s speech Wednesday, in which he spoke almost ruefully of “peace in an imperfect world.” His best hope now is that he won’t actually have to veto a statehood resolution. Talk about playing defense.

While crediting Obama’s caution, I wish he would study the example of Henry Kissinger, who was playing a weak hand in 1971 when the Vietnam War was unraveling. Kissinger dealt a new set of cards by traveling secretly to China. He recalls in his memoirs that in his first meeting with Zhou Enlai, he cautiously opted for a broad, philosophical discussion of “our perceptions of global and especially Asian affairs.”

“The statesman finds opportunity,” even in adversity, notes Robert Blackwill, a Republican foreign policy expert who worked for Kissinger and both Bushes. That’s a good prescription for Obama. He’s in damage-limitation mode — sensible enough in a time of uncertainty but not really a strategy. What’s the opportunity — in Pakistan, in India, in Turkey, in Syria — and yes, in the Palestinian state that inevitably will be declared?

Playing defense works if you’ve got a lead to protect. But it’s not enough when that lead is slipping away.

davidignatius@washpost.com

In tropical paradise, U.S. drones meant revenue

2011-09-22T19:25:00.002-04:00

Posted at 08:09 AM ET, 09/22/2011

By Craig Whitlock

U.S. Navy Commander Greg Hand speaks to participants during a media day event in Victoria, Seychelles, in 2009. An MQ-9 Reaper can be seen in background. (Maj. Eric Hillard — U.S. Africa Command)

Drones can clearly track down terrorists. But they can apparently boost an economy, too.
The U.S. military’s deployment of MQ-9 Reaper drones to the Seychelles, a tropical paradise in the Indian Ocean, generated $3.1 million in revenue for local businesses during their first four months of operations, according to an unclassified U.S. diplomatic cable buried in the database of State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
As the subject line of the 2010 cable touted: “U.S. Military Presence Benefits Seychelles Economy.”
The Reapers – known as “hunter-killer” drones for their tracking ability – may be unmanned. But it takes a whole village of military personnel and contractors to operate the aircraft from the ground. In this case, that meant 82 people deploying to Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, the island chain known for its Sports Illustrated swimsuit model shoots and royal honeymoons.
When they weren’t flying the Reapers, the drone crew spent $937,260 on “Food/Liberty,” or about $11,400 per person over a four-month period ending in December 2009 (the Reapers arrived in late September).
Expenses also included $51,760 for vehicle rentals, $70,777 for aircraft fuel and $598,363 for the catchall category of “facilities/services.”
All told, “a significant sum in a country as small as Seychelles,” the cable noted.
“The Seychellois have already taken notice of the economic benefits,” the cable continued. “Local shop owners and restaurateurs have commented that the U.S. military is bringing a steady income into hotels, restaurants, and shops: a direct influence of the American presence.”
Accommodations accounted for a particularly large chunk of change. The drone crew accumulated a tab of $1,457,784, which comes to roughly $150 per night per person over four months.
Not bad for a tropical dreamland. The Four Seasons Resort nearby charges more than $500 a day.

From Pakistan’s ISI, an act of folly

2011-09-22T19:22:00.000-04:00

Posted at 05:35 PM ET, 09/22/2011
By David Ignatius
WP

In the annals of global folly, I’d give high marks to the continuing refusal of Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, to break decisively with the terrorist Haqqani network.

A devastating new portrait of the ISI’s madness was provided Thursday by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his farewell testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mullen said he had “credible intelligence” that a Sept. 11 bombing that wounded 70 U.S. and NATO troops and a Sept. 13 assault on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were done “with ISI support.”

This is a bombshell, especially coming from Mullen, who has been the best American friend of ISI and the Pakistani military. When an intelligence agency is involved with (or condones) the bombing of another country’s embassy, that is perilously close to a covert act of war.

What does the ISI imagine lies ahead? More of its games with the Haqqanis, which fit the British description of fatuous actions that are “too clever by half”? More double- and triple-gaming of the sort into which it has entangled itself and the CIA for several decades? No, I don’t think so. When a Mullen goes before Congress and says our nominal ally is responsible for killing Americans and trying to take down our embassy, that’s a break from business as usual.

ISI officials tend to throw up their hands in a gesture of wounded innocence when the Haqqani network is mentioned. Of course we have contacts with them, they will say; that’s what intelligence services do. Sometimes they will go further and say they are willing to help contain the Haqqanis, but only as part of a broader deal in Afghanistan. Sorry, but the clock just ran out on those arguments.

The tragedy of what’s happening now is that the ISI and Pakistan were moving in the right direction just two years ago, when they summoned up their courage and attacked the Taliban in the Swat Valley and then assaulted the Mehsud tribal militants in South Waziristan.

There were signs then of the resolve and strategic clarity that might make Pakistan one nation at last, with the tribal areas under the writ of Islamabad, more than 60 years after the nation was founded.

But they blew it. Sad to say, especially for someone like me who likes Pakistan and admires many officials there, even in the ISI. But they blew it. Now they have to figure out a way to dig themselves out of the hole that they have created in their half-clever folly.

U.S.: Pakistanis supported Afghan attacks

2011-09-22T19:21:00.002-04:00

Posted at 12:12 PM ET, 09/22/2011
By Karen DeYoung
(Associated Press)

Pakistan-based insurgents planned and conducted some of the major attacks in Afghanistan recently, including the one on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week, with the support of Pakistan’s intelligence service, senior U.S. defense officials told Congress on Thursday.

“The Haqqani network ... acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. “With ISI support, Haqqani operatives plan and conducted” a truck bomb attack that wounded more than 70 U.S. and NATO troops on Sept. 11, “as well as the assault on our embassy” two days later.

“We also have credible intelligence that they were behind the June 28th attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul and a host of smaller but effective operations,” he added.

Mullen’s statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, together with remarks by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to the panel, were the most specific in a week of strong administration criticism of Pakistan.

“In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy,” Mullen said in a prepared opening statement, “the government of Pakistan, and most especially the Pakistani army and ISI, jeopardizes not only the prospect of our strategic partnership but Pakistan’s opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional influence.

“They may believe that by using these proxies, they are hedging their bets or redressing what they feel is an imbalance in regional power,” he said. “But in reality, they have already lost that bet. ... They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being.”

Both Mullen and Panetta resisted lawmakers’ attempts to describe what Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, called “the kind of options available to us to stop” Pakistani support for the insurgents and the “actions the administration is prepared to take” to ensure it.

“We’ve made clear that we are going to do everything we have to do to defend our forces,” Panetta said. “I don’t think it would be helpful to describe what those options would look like and what operational steps we might or might not face.”

The administration has insisted that Pakistan sever its ties with the insurgents, in particular the Haqqani forces based in the tribal region of North Waziristan, and supply all available intelligence on the group. Although senior administration officials have said they would prefer to work together with Pakistan against the group, they have indicated they are prepared to consider an expansion of drone strikes in the region, as well as surgical ground strikes, according to senior administration officials.

“The first order now,” Panetta told lawmakers, “is to put as much pressure on Pakistan as we can to deal with this issue.”

Levin noted that similar public pressure has continued for several years, and asked whether “Pakistan’s leaders are aware of what options are open to us, so they’re not caught by any surprise.”

“I don’t think they would be surprised by the actions that we might or might not take,” Panetta said.

Ahmadinejad’s U.N. speech sparks walkout

2011-09-22T19:19:00.002-04:00

By Joby Warrick, Thursday, September 22, 2:07 PM 2011
The Washington Post

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad triggered a mass exodus from the U.N. General Assembly’s chamber Thursday with a combative speech that blasted the United States and other Western powers and questioned whether Islamist terrorists were behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Iranian leader, known for his bomb-throwing rhetoric, used his allotted 15 minutes before the world body to blame the West for a list of ills throughout history, from slavery to the two world wars and the global economic crisis.

He also criticized the Obama administration for killing Osama bin Laden, suggesting that the al-Qaeda leader could have been the star witness at a trial that would reveal the true culprits behind the attacks on New York and Washington.

“Instead of assigning a fact-finding team, they killed the main perpetrator and threw his body into the sea,” Ahmadinejad said. Meanwhile, those who raised questions about Sept. 11 or the Nazi Holocaust were “threatened with sanctions and military action,” he said.

His words sent diplomats streaming for the exits, starting with the U.S. delegation and followed by dozens of Europeans and others. More than a third of the General Assembly seats were empty by the time Ahmadinejad finished speaking, to polite applause.

The Iranian president had recently made conciliatory gestures to the West, including his support for a decision to free Americans Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, who were arrested in 2009 after straying into Iranian territory during a hike along the Iraqi border. But there were no olive branches in evidence during his sharply worded speech, which was accompanied by finger-wagging and dramatic hand gestures.

“Do these arrogant powers really have the competence and ability to run or govern the world?” he asked, referring to the United States and the former colonial powers of Europe. In an apparent reference to the Western-led military intervention in Libya, he added: “Can the flower of democracy blossom from NATO’s missiles, bombs and guns?”

Positioning himself as spokesman for developing and non-aligned countries, Ahmadinejad called for scrapping the “prevailing world order” — including the U.N. Security Council as currently structured — in favor of a more evenly balanced system.

“There is no other way than the shared and collective management of the world to put an end to the present disorders, tyranny and discriminations worldwide,” he said.

Obama tells U.N. he sees ‘no shortcut’ to Israeli-Palestinian peace

2011-09-21T19:09:00.000-04:00

By Scott Wilson and William Branigin, Published: September 21 2011
The Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS — President Obama on Wednesday hailed the popular revolutions that have transformed the political landscape of the Middle East and urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to revive talks toward a difficult peace.

In the third address of his presidency to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama acknowledged that he is frustrated by lack of progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace, but he stressed that there is “no shortcut” to ending the conflict, and he called for understanding of each side’s “legitimate aspirations.”

Obama spoke ahead of a likely effort by the Palestinian Authority to seek U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state, an effort that the United States has vowed to veto in the U.N. Security Council, which must endorse the statehood bid before it goes to the General Assembly.

But Obama made no direct reference to a U.S. veto, instead maintaining that a resolution of the conflict can come only through negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas plans to give the Security Council on Friday a letter seeking statehood but will allow “some time” for the council to consider the request before taking the case to the General Assembly, a senior Palestinian official told reporters Wednesday afternoon. This would avert an immediate showdown at the United Nations over the statehood bid.

In his speech, Obama also called on the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on the Syrian government, which he accused of murdering, detaining and torturing thousands of opposition protesters.

He spoke poetically about the anti-government revolutions that have ousted long-standing autocrats in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia since he last appeared before the General Assembly a year ago.

“Something is happening in our world,” Obama told the gathered heads of state, diplomats and others. “The way things have been is not the way they will be. The humiliating grip of corruption and tyranny is being pried open.”

But Obama noted that in places such as Syria, Iran and other nations facing citizen revolts, there is more work to be done to achieve the rights and freedoms he said were spreading in much of the world.

And he acknowledged that for much of his audience the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “stands as a test of these principles — and for American foreign policy.”

When he spoke last year here, Obama had only weeks before inaugurated a new round of direct negotiations between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But those talks collapsed soon after when Netanyahu declined to renew a politically difficult moratorium on Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank that he had imposed to meet a Palestinian condition for talks. The two sides have not negotiated since, and Abbas, frustrated by the lack of movement, has decided to seek U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state this month.

Recalling that he called for an independent Palestine when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly from the same podium a year ago, Obama said: “I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress. I assure you, so am I. But the question isn’t the goal we seek. The question is how to reach it. And I am convinced that there is no shortcut to the end of a conflict that has endured for decades.”

He added: “Peace is hard work. Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N. If it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now. Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians — not us — who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and on security; on refugees and Jerusalem.”

Obama called for “compromise,” but stressed that “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable.” Noting that Israel “is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it,” he said, “friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth, just as friends of Israel must recognize the need to pursue a two-state solution with a secure Israel next to an independent Palestine.”

Obama described in detail Israel’s tenuous security situation in a part of the world where it is largely isolated and often under attack — diplomatically and, at times, militarily. And he reaffirmed the right of Palestinians to have an independent state and live in dignity.

“That truth — that each side has legitimate aspirations — is what makes peace so hard,” Obama said. “And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in each other’s shoes. That’s what we should be encouraging.”

U.S. diplomats are working to round up enough votes against the Palestinian statehood resolution to make a U.S. veto unnecessary, although it remains unclear whether a majority of the 15-member council will oppose a bid that is backed by most U.N. members.

Abbas appears determined to submit the Palestinian membership application to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday. But diplomats note that ensuing diplomatic maneuvering within the Security Council could delay a vote on the proposal for days, weeks or longer.

White House advisers acknowledge the toll that the administration’s lack of progress in brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace has taken on its regional standing.

Soon after taking office, Obama chose to deliver his appeal for “a new beginning” with the Muslim world in Cairo, emphasizing that the Arab Middle East was among his most important audiences.

Asked recently how the president’s Muslim outreach was faring, Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that while there has been progress in some Islamic countries, there remains a “continued challenge around public opinion in the Arab world.”

“I think the principal challenge has been the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” said Rhodes, adding that it is “not surprising given how important that issue is to people.”

Obama also used his address Wednesday to trace the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the beginning of a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, telling the audience that he has reduced by half the 180,000 U.S. soldiers deployed in those countries when he took office.

“So let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding,” Obama said. “This is critical to the sovereignty of Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the strength of the United States as we build our nation at home.”

But his theme — that “peace is hard,” a phrase he repeated several times — gave his remarks a sharper edge than in the past, when he used his address to the General Assembly lay out the loftier aspirations of his foreign policy for the year ahead.

Touching on other topics in his speech Wednesday, Obama castigated Iran as a “government that refuses to recognize the rights of its own people” and blasted Syria for killing thousands of opposition demonstrators, while detaining and torturing many others. He praised the demonstrators and called on the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“The Syrian people have shown dignity and courage in their pursuit of justice — protesting peacefully, standing silently in the streets, dying for the same values that this institution is supposed to stand for,” Obama said. “The question for us is clear: Will we stand with the Syrian people, or with their oppressors?”

He said the United States already has imposed “strong sanctions” on Syria’s leaders and that many U.S. allies have joined in supporting a transfer of power in the country.

“But for the sake of Syria — and the peace and security of the world — we must speak with one voice,” he said. “There is no excuse for inaction. Now is the time for the United Nations Security Council to sanction the Syrian regime, and to stand with the Syrian people.”

After his address, Obama met with Netanyahu, who thanked the U.S. president “for standing with Israel and supporting peace.”

“I think this is a badge of honor, and I want to thank you for wearing that badge of honor,” Netanyahu said, referring to Obama’s vow to veto a Palestinian statehood bid.

Netanyahu, who has had a rocky relationship with Obama, said “you’ve also made it clear that the Palestinians deserve a peace, but it’s a state that has to make that peace with Israel.”

“I think the Palestinians want to achieve a state, but they’re not prepared yet to make peace with Israel,” Netanyahu said.

Meanwhile, at the General Assembly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said leaders have “a moral and political obligation” to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He devoted his entire address to the issue, saying that “60 years without moving one inch forward — doesn’t it seem like time to do something new?”

Sarkozy warned that a Security Council rejection of a Palestinian state could provoke violence in the Middle East. Instead, he said, the General Assembly should grant “observer status” to the Palestinians, a step that a majority of the body appears to support, and set a one-year timeline for negotiations to achieve a peace agreement.

Obama has not endorsed that “intermediate step,” as Sarkozy characterized it. Obama was meeting with both Sarkozy and Abbas later Wednesday.

Branigin reported from Washington.

House Republicans Discover a Growing Bond With Netanyahu

2011-09-21T07:14:00.000-04:00

9/21/2011
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
NYT

WASHINGTON — When the Obama administration wanted to be certain that Congress would not block $50 million in new aid to the Palestinian Authority last month, it turned to a singularly influential lobbyist: Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the request of the American Embassy and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Netanyahu urged dozens of members of Congress visiting Israel last month not to object to the aid, according to Congressional and diplomatic officials. Mr. Netanyahu’s intervention with Congress underscored an extraordinary intersection of American diplomacy and domestic politics, the result of an ever-tightening relationship between the Israeli government and the Republican Party that now controls the House.

On Tuesday, one of President Obama’s potential rivals in 2012, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, delivered a speech in New York criticizing Mr. Obama’s stance toward Israel as “naïve, arrogant, misguided and dangerous.” Mr. Perry said that he would be a guest soon of Danny Danon, the hard-right deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament.

The relationship between the Israeli government and the Republican Party has significantly complicated the administration’s diplomatic efforts to avert a confrontation at the United Nations this week over the Palestinian bid for full membership as a state, limiting President Obama’s ability to exert pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to make concessions that could restart negotiations with the Palestinians.

One of the members of Congress who attended the meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in August, Representative Michael G. Grimm of New York, a Republican, said that it was carefully explained to the delegation that the money would be used for training Palestinian police officers who work closely with the Israeli government.

Mr. Grimm said he felt more comfortable receiving the explanation from the prime minister than from Obama administration officials.

“I think the credibility is different,” he said, “in the sense that this is his country and he certainly would not support something that would have negative effects within his country.”

For the Republicans, the relationship with the Israeli government has created what many see as an opportunity. Mindful of Mr. Obama’s strained relationship with Mr. Netanyahu and emboldened by a special election victory last week in a heavily Jewish Congressional district in New York, Republicans hope the tensions between Mr. Obama and Israel — underscored by the latest developments at the United Nations — will help propel future political victories for their party.

Even as Mrs. Clinton continued this week to pursue what she called “extremely intensive ongoing diplomacy” to find a compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Republicans sought to leverage support among Jewish voters here at home who traditionally have favored Democrats.

The National Republican Congressional Committee has drawn up a list of several Democrat-rich Congressional districts — including one on Long Island now held by Representative Steve Israel, who leads a rival Democratic group — where it believes Republicans have a fighting chance by appealing to Jewish voters.

The House speaker, John A. Boehner, addressed a Jewish group in his home state, Ohio, last weekend, contrasting his invitation to Mr. Netanyahu to address Congress in May with the Israeli leader’s more frosty relationship with the administration; Mr. Boehner plans another speech this week to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington.

Unbending support for Israel has long been a bipartisan fact of American politics, but Mr. Netanyahu’s popularity in Congress now runs deeper than ever. When he appeared before Congress in the spring, his speech rebutting Mr. Obama’s ambitious peace proposals was interrupted by nearly three dozen standing ovations.

Mr. Netanyahu’s standing has complicated American diplomatic and financial support for the Palestinians as Mr. Obama tries to reach a peace between the two sides that would establish a Palestinian state, the stated goal of the last two presidential administrations.

As the Palestinian bid for recognition at the United Nations gained momentum this summer, both Republicans and Democrats warned that Congress would sever the American financial assistance that began under President George W. Bush if the Palestinians proceeded in that effort.

“The U.S. Congress has generously supported Palestinian efforts to build infrastructure and build the capacity of institutions in the past,” Representative Kay Granger of Texas, the Republican chairwoman of the House subcommittee overseeing foreign aid, and her Democratic counterpart, Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York, wrote in a letter to the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas.

“However, American assistance has always been predicated upon Palestinian leaders’ commitment to resolve all outstanding issues through direct negotiations.”

Since 2007, the United States has spent $600 million a year supporting the Palestinians, training its security forces, providing direct budget assistance to the Palestinian coffers for essential services and delivering humanitarian assistance through nongovernmental organizations working in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel views the money as helping to foster stability by supporting Palestinian government services and professionalizing security forces. American aid, however, has come with restrictions and requires White House waivers and notifications to Congress.

One provision forbids aid to any terrorist group, raising questions about the future of financing after the announcement in April of a unity government between the Palestinians in the West Bank and Hamas, which controls Gaza and remains a designated terrorist organization. That reconciliation has not been taken place, however, averting at least for now a cutoff in aid.

The notifications required to Congress before releasing the aid give committee leaders the power to put holds on delivery of the aid — something the administration sought to avoid by urging Mr. Netanyahu to intervene to keep the money flowing last month. The $50 million was the last of $200 million this year in direct budget assistance to the Palestinians.

While the American aid to the Palestinians has been viewed with suspicion by some of Israel’s supporters, the Israeli government, especially through its security officials, has expressed support for it.

“Netanyahu made the pitch to members at the request of the secretary and embassy,” a Congressional official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic discussions. That the financing request first had to pass muster with House Republicans — many of them backbenchers who were among the 81 members of Congress to visit Israel — demonstrates the power of that relationship.

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the most powerful Jewish member of Congress, said the importance of the Israeli-American security connections was driven home during their August visit, during which a bus was bombed. “We saw U.S. taxpayer dollars in cooperation between American interest and Israeli interests toward the same end,” Mr. Cantor said.

“We’re in it together.”

“What you have on the Hill is a bipartisan demonstration for the U.S./Israeli relationship, and frankly I think it’s in contrast to the signals being sent from the White House,” he said. Mr. Cantor has written an op-ed article, which has yet to be published, with Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the minority whip, expressing their support for the nation.

Mr. Cantor also recalled the conversation concerning the $50 million, and the prime minister’s support for it, and said that further monies from Congress would be “colored greatly by the Palestinians’ actions at the U.N.”

Obama aims to salvage Mideast crisis aversion plan

2011-09-20T23:20:00.000-04:00

By BRADLEY KLAPPER and MATTHEW LEE - Associated Press 9/20/2011

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. and its allies changed tactics Tuesday on how to avert a crisis over a Palestinian statehood bid, as the White House announced that President Barack Obama would meet Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. At the same time, U.S. officials conceded they could not stop Abbas from officially launching his case for the Security Council's approval of the statehood effort.

But they hoped to contain the fallout by urging Abbas not to push for an actual vote in the Council, where the U.S. has promised a veto, to give international peacemakers time to produce a statement that would be the basis for resumed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Obama is expected to make a pro forma request to Abbas when they meet Wednesday not to proceed with his initial plan, but also make the case for the Palestinian leader to essentially drop the move for statehood recognition after delivering his letter of intent to the U.N., expected Friday.

"The president will be able to say very directly why we believe that action at the United Nations is not the way to achieve a Palestinian state," said Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser. He noted that Abbas has indicated his intent to go the Security Council, but said Obama "has made it clear that we do not believe that that will lead to a Palestinian state, that we oppose such efforts."

Obama will also meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday.

The new approach would see the "quartet" of Mideast peace mediators — the U.S., European Union, United Nations and Russia — issue a statement addressing both Palestinian and Israeli concerns and setting a timetable for a return to the long-stalled peace talks, officials said.

Israel would have to accept its pre-1967 borders with land exchanges as the basis for a two-state solution, and the Palestinians would have to recognize Israel's Jewish character if they were to reach a deal quickly, officials close to the talks said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing diplomacy.

European officials, supported by the United States, were presenting the contours of a compromise agreement to the Israeli and Palestinian governments, and asking for tough concessions from each. Officials said several extremely challenging hurdles were leading to some pessimism as to whether mediators would be able to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, with both sides being pressed to accept positions they've long deemed anathema to their visions of a two-state peace pact.

The difficult diplomacy reflected in some ways the intractability of a dispute that has foiled would-be peacemakers for decades, even though none of the actual elements of a final agreement was being discussed.

Quartet envoys met for a third straight day in New York to come up with a formula that would lead to direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The goal is to reach a comprehensive agreement that would address this week's three major issues, officials said.

The Palestinians would be allowed to deliver their letter of request Friday to the United Nations, but the Palestinians would not act on it for a year or would withdraw it at a later point. That would allow Abbas to save face and prevent an embarrassing defeat that might empower his party's rival faction, Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by Israel and the United States.

The Palestinians could also go to the U.N. General Assembly, where they have overwhelming support, but would have to seek instead some form of intermediate upgrade that would stop short of a full recognition of statehood.

And the quartet, with Israel and the Palestinians' advance approval, would give the two sides a year to reach a framework agreement, based on Obama's vision of borders fashioned from Israel's pre-1967 boundary, with agreed land swaps. The statement would also endorse the idea of "two states for two peoples, Jewish and Palestinian," which would be a slightly amended version of Israel's demand for recognition specifically as a "Jewish state."

So far, neither side seemed willing to make such a dramatic concession, officials said. There was also some disagreement among the quartet with Russia expressing its displeasure with a number of EU and U.S. supported ideas, they said. And they cautioned that the agreement could cause the same conundrum at next year's U.N. General Assembly meeting if talks fail to advance by then.

Obama met on Tuesday with Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan of Turkey, once a close regional partner of Israel but lately an increasingly vociferous critic, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton discussed the Palestinian plan with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister.

In addition to international pressure, Obama was coming under fire from leading Republican hopefuls over his handling of the Mideast peace process.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Obama was part of the problem, criticizing him for demanding concessions from Israel and claiming that the president had emboldened the Palestinians to take their case to the United Nations.

"We would not be here today at this very precipice of such a dangerous move if the Obama policy in the Middle East wasn't naive and arrogant, misguided and dangerous," Perry said in a speech in New York. "The Obama policy of moral equivalency, which gives equal standing to the grievances of Israelis and Palestinians, including the orchestrators of terrorism, is a very dangerous insult."

In a statement before Perry spoke, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney also waded into the dispute and called the jockeying at the United Nations this week "an unmitigated disaster." He accused Obama's administration of "repeated efforts over three years to throw Israel under the bus and undermine its negotiating position."

In Congress, Republicans and Democrats expressed their opposition to the Palestinian effort and implored world leaders to vote against any U.N. resolution. Leading Senate voices on foreign policy have written to Latin American and African governments asking that they oppose the Palestinian action, and warning the Palestinians that they could lose millions of dollars in U.S. aid.

"U.S. foreign assistance is not an entitlement," Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said. "Assistance is not automatic."

Embracing Israel, GOP candidates assail Obama

2011-09-20T23:12:00.000-04:00

By BETH FOUHY and KASIE HUNT - Associated Press 9/20/2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and their GOP presidential rivals slammed President Barack Obama's Middle East policies Tuesday while emphatically declaring their ownsupport for Israel as the United Nations considered a bid for Palestinian statehood.

Republican front-runner Perry, the Texas governor, denounced the president's Israel policy as "misguided and dangerous," speaking to supporters in New York as the Obama administration worked a few miles away to thwart a U.N. vote to grant formal recognition to the Palestinian Authority.

Perry also accused Obama of appeasement, as did Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who assailed the president from the Midwest.

Perry's chief rival for the nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, issued a statement accusing Obama of "throwing Israel under the bus."

The Republican campaigns have similar goals: establish contrasts with Obama on an issue where he's struggled; chip away at American Jews' support for Democrats and prove their conservative, pro-Israel bona fides with the evangelical voters who will play a significant role in the GOP presidential primaries.

During the 2008 election campaign, Obama worked hard to reassure nervous Jewish voters that he would defend Israel as president. But he's faced doubts and criticism since then.

Perry criticized Obama's stated goal that any negotiations should be based on Israel's borders prior to the 1967 Mideast war, with mutually agreed adjustments and land swaps to accommodate population shifts and some homebuilding since 1967. Perry called that stance "insulting and naïve."

Obama angered Israel earlier this year by endorsing a Palestinian demand that negotiations over future borders begin with the lines Israel held before capturing the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in 1967.

In regard to potential official recognition, the administration has been working intensively behind the scenes to restart direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians and to persuade Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to drop his push and avoid an explosive confrontation at the U.N. later in the week.

But Perry had strong criticism nonetheless, speaking to a group of ultraconservative Jewish and Israeli leaders at a New York hotel.

"Simply put, we would not be here today at the precipice of such a dangerous move if the Obama policy in the Middle East wasn't naïve, arrogant, misguided and dangerous," Perry said, flanked by U.S. and Israeli flags. "The Obama administration has appeased the Arab Street at the expense of our own national security interests. They have sowed instability that threatens the prospect of peace."

Romney said, "What we are watching unfold at the United Nations is an unmitigated diplomatic disaster. It is the culmination of President Obama's repeated efforts over three years to undermine its negotiating position." He called for an end to U.S. foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority if the U.N. vote went the Palestinians' way.

The candidates' remarks represented their efforts to win over the conservative and evangelical voters who care deeply about GOP support for Israel. They back Israel as a U.S. ally in the fight against terror and as a rare democracy in the volatile Mideast. Some also support Israel for theological reasons.

Perry told reporters his support for Israel was in part driven by his religious faith.

"I also as a Christian have a clear directive to support Israel, so from my perspective it's pretty easy," Perry said when a reporter asked if Perry's faith was driving his views. "Both as an American and as a Christian, I am going to stand with Israel."

Republicans who describe themselves as evangelical prefer Perry over Romney — 33 percent really like Perry while just 17 percent really like Romney, according to an August AP-GfK poll. Republicans who aren't evangelical like both men about the same.

A third Republican candidate, Minnesota Rep. Bachmann, also weighed in Tuesday — but Bachmann, also an evangelical, left religion out of it and instead issued a statement calling on Obama to prevent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from coming to the U.N.

"Ahmadinejad has shown himself to be an enemy not only of Israel, but also of the United States," the Minnesota congresswoman said. "This administration tried and failed to do outreach to Iran, reminding us once again that appeasement of deadly dictators is never a wise or effective strategy."

Perry also accused the Obama administration of appeasing bad actors in the Middle East in connection with the Palestinian statehood effort.

"We're equally indignant of the Obama administration and their Middle East policy of appeasement that has encouraged such an ominous act of bad faith." In a political context, "appeasement" is language used sometimes used to describe how European governments tried to accommodate Adolf Hitler without sparking war.

Obama's re-election campaign was prepared to deal with the political fallout and assembled a team of prominent Jews ready to defend the president's record on Israel.

"It appears to be a coordinated Republican effort to distort and misrepresent Obama's strong record and support for Israel, by these presidential candidates and others, for partisan advantage," said former Democratic Rep. Mel Levine of California, who spoke to The Associated Press after Obama's campaign asked him to.

In 2008, Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote against Republican John McCain. While few strategists expect Jewish voters to swing heavily toward the GOP next year, even a small erosion of support for Obama could make a difference in Florida, a major swing state, and in several House districts across the country.

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes strongly defended the president's record on Israel Tuesday. "This administration could not have been a stronger friend and supporter here," Rhodes told reporters at the U.N. "What we're here to do is strongly support Israel and help work toward a two-state solution" in the best interest of both Israel and the Palestinians, Rhodes said.

Tensions are likely to escalate as the week goes on. Abbas, the Palestinian leader, said he will continue to seek full U.N. membership even though he says he is under "tremendous pressure" to drop the effort. The U.S. has indicated it would veto the proposal in the U.N. Security Council.

U.S. officials are insisting there is still time to avoid a divisive showdown, and have been working with Western allies in hopes of a last-minute compromise. Obama is to address the U.N. Wednesday.

Perry blasts Obama’s policies on Israel, Palestinians

2011-09-20T23:01:00.000-04:00

By Philip Rucker, Tuesday, September 20, 11:28 AM 2011
The Washington Post

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry castigated President Obama for his handling of Israeli-Palestinian relations on Tuesday, accusing Obama of a “policy of appeasement” toward the Palestinians that he said was undermining U.S. security interests in the Middle East.

The Texas governor charged that the Obama administration — which has been trying to head off a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood this week and relaunch peace talks — was encouraging the Palestinians to shun direct negotiations with the Israelis.

Perry, a leading contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, said the United States should reconsider its aid to the Palestinians and close the Palestinian Authority’s offices in Washington if Mahmoud Abbas, president of the authority, succeeds in his quest for formal recognition of statehood at the annual session of the U.N. General Assembly this week.

“We would not be here today at the very precipice of such a dangerous move if the Obama policy in the Middle East wasn’t naive, arrogant, misguided and dangerous,” Perry said in a speech in New York.

He blasted Obama for saying last spring that the 1967 borders should be the starting point for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Perry said Obama’s statement isolated Israel “in a manner that is both insulting and naive.”

Obama’s statement was denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the time. But Netanyahu had embraced the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations before that, and he said last month that he would do so again if the Palestinians dropped their statehood bid.

Perry’s top GOP rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, also assailed Obama’s Middle East policies in a statement issued Tuesday morning.

“What we are watching unfold at the United Nations is an unmitigated diplomatic disaster,” Romney said. “It is the culmination of President Obama’s repeated efforts over three years to throw Israel under the bus and undermine its negotiating position.”