Tag: Terrorism

Ignatieff on terrorism

Michael Ignatieff (that philosophical vagabond: he went from Oxford to the London School of Economics to Harvard in just a few years, and from Isaiah Berlin to war, peace and terrorism in even less time) offers an essay on the terrorist as an auteur, and draws the lesson that he is tempting us to join him in infamy:

An accomplished terrorist — al-Zarqawi is undoubtedly one — understands us better than we seem to understand him. He knows that the only chance of forcing an American withdrawal lies in swaying the political will of an electorate that, already divided and unwilling, has sent its sons and daughters there. This is where his images become a weapon of war, a way to test and possibly shatter American will. He is counting on our moral disgust and on the sense of futility that follows disgust. Moral disgust is the first crucial step toward cracking the will to continue the fight.

Now let’s not be sentimental about American virtue or scruple. Democracies can be just as ruthless as authoritarian societies, and Americans haven’t been angels in the war on terror, as the images from Abu Ghraib so plainly show. But the willingness of American democracy to commit atrocity in its defense is limited by moral repugnance, rooted in two centuries of free institutions. This capacity for repugnance sustained the popular protest that eventually took us out of Vietnam. Al-Zarqawi is a cynic about these matters: the truths we hold to be self-evident are the ones he hopes to turn against us. He thinks that we would rather come home than fight evil. Are we truly willing to descend into the vortex to beat him? He has bet that we are not.

But his calculation is that either way, he cannot lose. If we remain, he has also bet — and Abu Ghraib confirms how perceptive he was — that we will help him drive us into ignominious defeat by becoming as barbarous as he is. He is trailing the videos as an ultimate kind of moral temptation, an ethical trap into which he is hoping we will fall. Everything is permitted, he is saying. If you wish to beat me, you will have to join me. Every terrorist hopes, ultimately, that his opponent will become his brother in infamy. If we succumb to this temptation, he will have won. He has, however, forgotten that the choice always remains ours, not his.

(Thanks, Negar!)

Another look at the Taba bombers

It’s amazing how quickly the Taba bombings have faded from memory and gone from an event that was meant to shake up Egypt to an almost non-event. Still, the latest update is that the Egyptian ministry of interior has issued a statement saying that Al Qaeda had no links with the bombers who were arrested about a week ago.

That seems probable. There hasn’t been extensive coverage of this in English to my knowledge, but the profile of the bombers really does not make them out to be mastermind terrorists of Muhammad Atta caliber. I did a story for The Times reporting the basic facts, but it got cut down a fair amount. I’m reproducing the relevant excerpts below:

The [interior ministry] statement identified Ayad Said Saleh, a Palestinian living in the northern Sinai town of Al Arish, as the mastermind behind the operation. Saleh and one of his accomplices, Suleiman Ahmed Saleh Flayfil, were killed as they tried to escape the bombing scene but were caught by the explosion, suggesting that the bomb timers had malfunctioned and that the attacks were not intended to be suicide bombings.

“This confirmed that the incident was not a suicide bombing operation as the Palestinian and Egyptian were killed as they escape from their vehicles after they had failed to set the timers properly,” the statement said.

The two men were identified through DNA samples taken from body parts found on the scene of the bombing, it added.

Two other men who participated in the operation – Flayfil’s brother Muhammad and Hamid Jumaan Jumaa Jumaan – are still at large.

Investigations have also led to the arrest of five men – most of them Sinai Bedouins from Al Arish – who, while not directly involved in the bombings, participated in their preparation.

The ministry of interior said that several of the men who were arrested owned or worked in small workshops were the put the bombs together with unexploded ammunition from wars fought between Egypt and Israel in Sinai. These were rigged to timers recuperated from washing machines and placed in vehicles that were stolen for the operation by a one of the men, who was a known stolen car dealer.

Another one of the men arrested, a Bedouin from the area where the bombings occurred who owned a holiday camp, provided information to the bombers on the resorts that were targeted.

Saleh, the alleged mastermind, worked as a driver, had a long criminal record, and was most recently involved in the rape of a young woman in his car. The statement said he had “recently become a religious extremist.”

“[The attacks] were a response to the breakdown in the situation in the Occupied Territories and was targeted at Israelis staying in the hotel and the two holiday camps,” the statement said.

The statement however did not mention whether the nine men were part of any organisation. Three groups have claimed responsibility for the bombings, including Al Jamaa Islamiya Al Alamiya (the International Islamic Group), Kataib Al Tawhid Al Islamiya (the Islamic Brigades of Belief in the Unity of God), and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades. The last of these groups, named after a leading Islamist activist, was previously unknown but has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attacks in the Arabic-language press and may be affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Overall, the bombers — if this is them, which some people doubt considering the extent of the damage caused by the bombings in heavily policed area — don’t really seem like Al Qaeda types. Petty criminals turned radical, perhaps. And the fact that they used old unexploded ordnance and washing machine timers doesn’t inspire much confidence, either.

Incidentally, a friend of mine who works at a local human rights organization has told me that there were massive arrests in Sinai during the investigation — and a lot of torture and brutality against innocent civilians. His research will probably make it out as a report soon, but it’s a reminder that these attacks only tend to worsen the already rather dire impunity with which police and security services operate in Egypt.

Osama’s latest

I did a piece on the latest Bin Laden video yesterday (I’ll add the link later, right now it’s not working, but you can find it on th VOA website). The Al Jazeera transcript of the video is here . People I talked to in the Arab world mentioned that the fact Osama clearly took responsiblity for the attack would be a blow to the conspiracy thoeories about the Mossad or the CIA having staged 9/11.

They also stressed a few points about the video:
1. The tone: how Bin Laden avoids military symbols and violent threats and takes a calm, persuasive tone.
2. The suggestion that the battle between Al Qaeda and the West, rather than an inherent and eternal conflict, is a policy-driven one, and can be eneded, resolved, if certain conditions are met.
3. The specific references to US political developments (he references the Florida recount,the Patriot Act), and his critique of President Bush to the American people.

The LA Times has an interesting piece (via www.talkingpointsmemo.com) that ties these observations together and suggests that bin Laden is trying to transform himself from international terrorist to Muslim statesman.

This kind of analysis is worth pursuing; there are a lot of questions about what bin Laden was hoping to accomplish with this message… Personally, I find it fascinating and surreal that he is basically debating President Bush across the world this way, even incorporating some of Bush’s favorite terms (“freedom”) into his own statement.

The Secret in the CIA’s Back Pocket

I’ve always thought that one of the most astonishing about the way the Bush administration handled 9/11 is that no one was held to account. Not the people who didn’t get the warnings to the president, not the White House for ignoring that warning if it did get to it, not the Air Force personnel that failed to scramble in time to intercept the third plane, not the CIA for having lousy intelligence — nothing. And even the 9/11 Commission eschews assigning blame to specific institutions or people.

Apparently, the CIA has been working on its own report on 9/11 which does assign blame and treats some people pretty harshly. But, as Robert Scheer reports on Alternet, we’re not about to see it before the elections:

According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17- month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been “stalled.” First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.

The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.

“What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that,” said the intelligence official. “The report found very senior-level officials responsible.”

Let’s hope those senior-level officials will lose their jobs on November 2.

Sinai terror attacks

After a seven-year hiatus, terrorism is back in Egypt. After you read below the fold, do check out this radio transcript from ABC. A Jihadist group has claimed responsibilitz, but the Egyptian government is saying it could be related to the current fighting in Gaza.More later.

Blasts kill 30 on Egypt-Israeli border
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By Sarah el Deeb

Oct. 7, 2004 | Three explosions shook popular resorts on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Thursday night as many Israelis vacationed at the close of a Jewish holiday. Officials said at least 30 people were killed and 114 wounded, and witnesses gave unconfirmed reports that all three explosions were caused by car bombs.

Continue reading Sinai terror attacks

Whodunnit?

Hamas: Arab State May Have Helped in Syria Killing:

“We were not convinced initially, this would be treason for an Arab security apparatus to be involved in this,” Hamas Lebanon head Osama Hamdan said of a report in the Al-Hayat daily.

The Arabic daily said an Arab country had given the Israeli spy agency Mossad information about the movements and habits of Hamas leaders abroad.

“Now, because of what happened yesterday or through other information, there are indications that this may be case,” he said.”

I would bet on Jordan, or perhaps even the Syrians themselves. Who else would have that kind of information? And why would they share it with Israel — what would they get in return? Hell, you can’t even dismiss the possibility that it could be Egypt considering the difficulty it is having in negotiating with Hamas these days, and the fact that it will sooner or later have to confront it in Gaza if the pullout takes place. If we’re lucky, we’ll known in ten years. If we’re not, we’ll either never know at all or find out soon enough after someone gets assassinated.

Update: It looks like they think it’s Jordan. And some people do think they will hit back:

Hamas may retaliate by striking outside Israel, ex-ambassador says:

Retaliation against Israelis outside their country could follow last weekend’s assassination in Damascus of a Hamas official, a respected Canadian analyst on the Middle East said yesterday.

“There will be a tendency to explore overseas operations,” said Michael Bell, former Canadian ambassador to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Egypt”

Where in Pakistan is OBL?

Peter Bergen, the only Western journalist to have met Osama Bin Laden, wrote an important article on the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader in The Atlantic (via The Agonist), where he wonders if OBL (and presumably top aides like Ayman Al Zawahri) might not be hiding near Kashmir rather than the northern Pakistan-Afghanistan order as has been presumed:

“A further possibility, which to date has received scant attention, is that bin Laden is somewhere in the mountains of Pakistani Kashmir–an area that is off limits to outsiders and home to numerous Kashmiri militant groups, some of which are deeply intertwined with al-Qaeda. Harakat ul-Mujahideen (HUM), for instance, shared training camps in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda in the late 1990s. An offshoot of HUM, Jaish-e-Muhammad, orchestrated the kidnapping-murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, an operation run in conjunction with al-Qaeda. U.S. officials believe that Jaish-e-Muhammad received funding from bin Laden. The multiple relationships between those groups and al-Qaeda–what one U.S. official in the region described to me as “overlapping networks of nasty people”–make the groups obvious potential allies in the effort to hide bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. According to Pakistani terrorism analysts, several of the most militant Pakistani groups have recently gathered under an umbrella organization called Brigade 313, named for the number of men who stood with the Prophet Muhammad at the key battle of Badr, in the seventh century. Also, the Kashmiri militant groups are genuinely popular in Pakistan. Until January of 2002, when it was officially banned, Lashkar-e-Taiba maintained 2,200 offices around the country and attracted hundreds of thousands of followers to its annual gatherings. Technically Lashkar no longer exists, but it continues to operate, under a different name and with a lower profile, and its leader, Hafiz Saeed, continues to address rallies in Pakistan.

Further complicating the picture, the Pakistani government has long had a close relationship with the Kashmiri groups because they share the goal of expelling Indian forces from the Kashmir region. Bin Laden understands that Kashmir is Pakistan’s “blind spot,” a senior U.S. military-intelligence official told me. Musharraf’s government has cracked down on Kashmiri militants since 9/11, but the intensity of the crackdown has ebbed and flowed. For instance, Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish terror group, is not under house arrest and, according to a U.S. official, has “good relations with [Pakistan’s] spooks.” An official in Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry concurs: “The leadership and brains of al-Qaeda are not in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The question is, Who is in Kashmir?”

He also asks, what happens if OBL is killed? Would it really make things worse? I don’t share his pessimism, but the parallel with Sayyid Qutb is troubling.

Sayyid Qutb, generally regarded as the Lenin of the jihadist movement, was a relatively obscure writer before the Egyptian government executed him, in 1966. After his death his writings, which called for offensive holy wars against the enemies of Islam, became enormously influential. The same thing would happen after bin Laden’s death, but to an infinitely greater degree.

Hersh and the Egyptian abductees

The Guardian is running excerpts from Seymour Hersh’s new book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. The one linked to below is particularly interesting for those of us who have been following this from Egypt, explaining how US intelligence kidnapped two Egyptian Islamists (at least one of whom was a member of Islamic Jihad, Ayman Al Zawahri’s organization before he joined Al Qaeda) from Sweden and handed them over to the Egyptian security services, who used their favorite information-gathering methods — electrodes attached to genitals — to make them more cooperative.

Rumsfeld’s dirty war on terror:

On December 18 2001, American operatives participated in what amounted to the kidnapping of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had sought asylum in Sweden. The Egyptians, believed by American intelligence to be linked to Islamic militant groups, were abruptly seized in the late afternoon and flown out of Sweden a few hours later on a US government-leased Gulfstream private jet to Cairo, where they underwent extensive and brutal interrogation. “Both were dirty,” a former senior intelligence official, who has extensive knowledge of special-access programmes, told me, “but it was pretty blatant.”

The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little attention outside of Sweden, despite repeated complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when a Swedish television news magazine revealed that the Swedish government had cooperated after being assured that the exiles would not be tortured or otherwise harmed once they were sent to Egypt. Instead, according to a television report, entitled The Broken Promise, Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs and shackles, were driven to the airport by Swedish and, according to one witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side to a group of Americans wearing plain clothes whose faces were concealed. Once in Egypt, Agiza and Zery have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members and attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated torture by electrical shocks distributed by electrodes that were attached to the most sensitive parts of their bodies. Egyptian authorities eventually concluded, according to the documentary, that Zery had few ties to ongoing terrorism, and he was released from jail in October 2003, although he is still under surveillance. Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is outranked in al-Qaida only by Osama bin Laden. In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years in an Egyptian prison.

There are a number of other alleged Egyptian Islamists that are thought to have been kidnapped from whatever country they were in and flown to Cairo for torture and interrogation, including one who was apprehended in Syria and is thought to have died while in custody. We’re not likely to find much more about them, though, at least not if we don’t have the kind of contacts Hersh has in the US intelligence community.

“Blaming Saddam for everything”

Jimmy Breslin’s editorial in Newsday is mind-boggling for two reasons: one, that such a great number of Americans seem to think that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks despite all the media attention that he is getting since his arrest, and secondly that the role of the Bush administration in spreading that notion is still not seriously attacked. Here’s what one person told Breslin, who was interviewing people near the World Trade Center:

“For me Hussein did it, the other guy, too. These people both is together in Iraq and in the trade center,” Garcia said. “If Saddam don’t do nothing, why he go into a hole? Because he is afraid we catch him for the World Trade Center that he did with bin Laden? The both of them together.”

Saddam has plenty to blamed for in his own country. Perhaps the misguided notion that he was involved in 9/11 will dissipate when he is put on trial and not charged with conspiring in that attack.