I MERCATI E IL DEBITO
Borse in rosso, premier in Parlamento Il Colle: «Subito misure per la crescita»
Piazza Affari perde il 2,53%. Intervento di Napolitano
Domani Tremonti da Juncker, Berlusconi alla Camera e al Senato
ECONOMIA I listini europei bruciano 100 miliardi. Il Comitato di stabilità: il sistema Italia è solido Pica 
Guarda i listini di Borsa
Guarda i listini di BorsaBorse in rosso, si muove Tremonti
E Napolitano riceve Draghi al Colle
Piazza Affari perde il 2%.
Il ministro convoca
il comitato di stabilità
Indici in diretta 
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ECONOMIA Tensione sempre
più alta sui titoli di Stato.
La Commissione Ue: fiducia nelle misure dell'Italia di Paola PicaUsa, il piano ottiene il via libera della Camera. Ora il Senato
più alta sui titoli di Stato.
La Commissione Ue: fiducia nelle misure dell'Italia di Paola Pica
Usa, il piano ottiene il via libera della Camera. Ora il Senato
Svolta, ultima occasione Giavazzi 
Scrivi 
Blog Fregonara-Meli - Berlusconi mercoledì in aula
- Stati Uniti, in Aula anche la democratica Gabrielle Giffords dopo l'attentato di Tucson
Foto
ALBERONI, MA CHE STAI A DI’? - STATE A SENTIRE: “TUTTA LA MUSICA ITALIANA, DA MODUGNO A ENDRIGO A MINA A BATTISTI, ESPRIME I SENTIMENTI ABITUALI, L’AMORE. IL ROCK NO. È AMERICANO, NASCE DALL’ESPANSIONE DI SÉ, DAL SUPERAMENTO DELLE EMOZIONI NORMALI. È ESPRESSIONE DI ESPERIENZE PAROSSISTICHE POSSIBILI SOLO CON LA DROGA. E ANCHE CHI ASCOLTA QUESTA MUSICA IN CONCERTO O IN DISCOTECA, SPESSO, PER VIVERLA, DEVE FARE LO STESSO”. PER FORTUNA CHE SCRIVE “SPESSO”…
| No se detiene la fuga hacia el dólar y marcaría un nuevo récord |
| Es más intensa que en períodos preelectorales anteriores y está liderada por ahorristas minoristas |
Enviá tu comentario de la nota
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| Con el frío, vuelven los cortes de gas |
| El Gobierno ordenó restringir al mínimo técnico el consumo de unas 300 industrias en todo el país |
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| Malestar por el nuevo cupo de trigo para las cooperativas |
| El campo criticó la asignación de 450.000 toneladas a ACA, AFA y productores entrerrianos |
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| Se moderó la suba de la recaudación |
| Por un alza menor en el comercio exterior, el monto se ubicó por debajo de las expectativas |
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| Se reúnen hoy Mujica y Cristina Kirchner |
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| Globant se expande en EE.UU. con la compra de otra tecnológica |
| La firma argentina busca hacerse fuerte en entretenimiento para móviles y redes sociales |
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| Concursos y quiebras |
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| Murió Jorge Juan Ramos Mejía |
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| Acuerdo en Washington, pero poco para festejar |
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| Trigo: lenta cosecha en Alemania |
| La lluvia interrumpe el avance de las labores y pone en riesgo los cultivos |
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| Mejora parcial del valor de la soja |
| El mayor repunte fue para la oleaginosa de la próxima cosecha, que pasó de US$ 315 a 320 |
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| Negocios ágiles y precios sostenidos |
| El interés firme de la demanda por los novillos y los novillitos; el índice general fue $ 8,165 |
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| Los laboratorios miran al exterior |
| Richmond abrió una planta que exportará 50% de su producción y Chemo negocia para instalarse en Brasil |
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| Qué pasa |
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CORRIERE DEL VENETO
Dà del «negro schifoso» al compagno Ciclista cacciato dal Giro di Rio
CRONACHE L'italiano Marco Coledan è stato espulso dalla corsa brasiliana: Renato Santos si era rifiutato di dargli il cambio nel tirare il gruppo. Il direttore sportivo: «In Italia non è un insulto razzista»
Russia to Purchase Iskander Tactical Missile Systems
The Russian Defence Ministry is planning to purchase Iskander-M tactical missile systems, deputy defence minister general Dmitry Bulgakov said.
Allen-Vanguard to Deliver Integrated Counter-Explosives Solution to Canadian Forces
Allen-Vanguard has been awarded a contract to provide Canadian Forces with a complete integrated solution for personal protection against explosives.
US Army to Produce JLTV
The US Army joint light tactical vehicle (JLTV), is all set to enter into formal production after refining its requirements during a two-year technology development (TD) phase.
Raytheon Develops Mini Antenna to Prevent Friendly Fire
Raytheon has developed a mini interrogation antenna capability to help soldiers and unmanned aircraft to prevent friendly fire as part of the light vehicle demonstration contract.
CORPORATE NEWSHESCO Launches New Website
HESCO Bastion
Revision Demonstrates Soldier Systems Capability Through $2m US Army Helmet Development Contract Award
Revision Eyewear
TECOM Industries Selected by Raytheon Missile Systems for Antennas for Small Diameter Bomb II Program
TECOM Industries
Colibrys Targets Denationalised Russian Aerospace and Energy Industries
Colibrys
em.tronic to Attend DSEi 2011
em.tronic
The US-Al Qaeda Alliance:
Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya. Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists
By Prof. Peter Dale Scott
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25829
Global Research, July 29, 2011
Twice
in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military
spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and
then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military
spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the
increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the
1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the
extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions,
rather than its foe.
U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.
U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.
In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and
Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the
heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries –
Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been
straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse
for intervention.
But there have been other interventions in which
Americans have used al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their influence,
for example Azerbaijan in 1993. There a pro-Moscow president was ousted
after large numbers of Arab and other foreign mujahedin veterans were
secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized by
three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air America. (The three, all
once detailed from the Pentagon to the CIA, were Richard Secord, Harry
Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn.)2 This was an ad hoc marriage of convenience:
the mujahedin got to defend Muslims against Russian influence in the
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, while the Americans got a new president who
opened up the oilfields of Baku to western oil companies.
The pattern of U.S. collaboration with Muslim
fundamentalists against more secular enemies is not new. It dates back
to at least 1953, when the CIA recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow
Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and also began to cooperate with the
Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in 2011 we see a more complex
marriage of convenience between US and al-Qaeda elements: one which
repeats a pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo in 1997-98. In
those countries America responded to a local conflict in the name of a
humanitarian intervention to restrain the side committing atrocities.
But in all three cases both sides committed atrocities, and American
intervention in fact favored the side allied with al-Qaeda.
The cause of intervention was fostered in all three
cases by blatant manipulation and falsification of the facts. What a
historian has noted of the Bosnian conflict was true also of Kosovo and
is being echoed today in Libya: though attacks were “perpetrated by
Serbs and Muslims alike,” the pattern in western media was “that
killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of non-Muslims
were not.”4 Reports of mass rapes in the thousands proved to be wildly
exaggerated: a French journalist “uncovered only four women willing to
back up the story.”5 Meanwhile in 1994 the French intellectual
Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) traveled to Bosnia and fervently endorsed the
case for intervention in Bosnia; in 2011 February BHL traveled to
Benghazi and reprised his interventionist role for Libya.6
In all of the countries mentioned above, furthermore,
there are signs that some American and/or western intelligence groups
were collaborating with al-Qaeda elements from the outset of conflict,
before the atrocities cited as a reason for intervention.. This suggests
that there were deeper reasons for America’s interventions including
the desire of western oil companies to exploit the petroleum reserves of
Libya (as in Iraq) without having to deal with a troublesome and
powerful strong man, or their desire to create a strategic oil pipeline
across the Balkans (in Kosovo).7
That the U.S. would support al-Qaeda in terrorist
atrocities runs wholly counter to impressions created by the U.S. media.
Yet this on-going unholy alliance resurrects and builds on the alliance
underlying Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1978-79 strategy of provocation in
Afghanistan, at a time when he was President Carter’s National Security
Adviser.
In those years Brzezinski did not hesitate to play
the terrorist card against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts
of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s intelligence service) to work with the
Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to destabilize Afghanistan, in a way
which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At the time, as he
later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, “We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”9
CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of
using terrorists against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA
channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence
Service) to their client Afghan extremists like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar
(today one of America’s enemies in Afghanistan). But in 1986, “Casey
committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit
radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with
the Afghan Mujaheddin.”10 CIA aid now reached their support Office of
Services in Peshawar, headed by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, and by
Osama bin Laden. The al-Kifah Center, a U.S. recruitment office for
their so-called Arab-Afghan foreign legion (the future al Qaeda), was
set up in the al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn.11
It is important to recall Brzezinski’s and Casey’s
use of terrorists today. For in Libya, as earlier in Kosovo and Bosnia,
there are alarming signs that America has continued to underwrite
Islamist terrorism as a means to dismantle socialist or quasi-socialist
nations not previously in its orbit: first the USSR, then Yugoslavia,
today Libya. As I have written elsewhere, Gaddafi was using the wealth
of Libya, the only Mediterranean nation still armed by Russia and
independent of the NATO orbit, to impose more and more difficult terms
for western oil companies, and to make the whole of Africa more
independent of Europe and America.12
Support for the mujahedin included collusion in
law-breaking, at a heavy cost. In the second part of this essay, I will
show how government protection of key figures in the Brooklyn al-Kifah
Center left some of them free, even after they were known to have
committed crimes, to engage in further terrorist acts in the United
States -- such as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Libya
The NATO intervention in Libya has been presented as a
humanitarian campaign. But it is not: both factions have been
committing atrocities. Thanks in part to the efforts of the
well-connected p.r. firm the Harbour Group, working on behalf of the
Benghazi opposition’s National Transitional Council [NTC], Americans
have heard many more press accounts of atrocities by pro-Gaddafi forces
in Libya than by the Benghazi opposition.13 But in fact, as the London
Daily Telegraph reported,
Under rebel control, Benghazi residents are
terrorized, many "too frightened to drive through the dark streets at
night, fearing a shakedown or worse at the proliferating checkpoints."
Moreover, about 1.5 million black African migrant
workers feel trapped under suspicion of supporting the wrong side.
Numbers of them have been attacked, some hunted down, dragged from
apartments, beaten and killed. So-called "revolutionaries" and "freedom
fighters" are, in fact, rampaging gunmen committing atrocities
airbrushed from mainstream reports, unwilling to reveal the new Libya if
Gaddafi is deposed.14
Thomas Mountain concurs that “Since the rebellion in
Benghazi broke out several hundred Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian and
Eritrean guest workers have been robbed and murdered by racist rebel
militias, a fact well hidden by the international media.”15 Such reports
have continued. Recently, Human Rights Watch accused the rebels of
killing Gaddafi supporters who were just civilians and looting, burning
and ransacking pro-Gaddafi supporters' houses and areas.16
Americans and Europeans are still less likely to
learn from their media that among the groups in the Benghazi
transitional coalition, certainly the most battle-seasoned, are veterans
of the Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya (Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group, or LIFG). The importance of the LIFG contingent in the
TNC has been downplayed in a recent issue of the International Business
Times:
The LIFG is a radical Islamic group which has been fighting small scale guerrilla warfare against Gaddafi for almost a decade. Much of the LIFG leadership came from soldiers who fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, as part of the Mujahedeen. Since the beginning of the uprising reports said that some of the LIFG has joined the TNC rebel movement on the ground, and many accused the fighters of having links to Al-Qaeda, which the LIFG has since denied.Previously however, the LIFG had stated that its ultimate goal is to install an Islamic state inside Libya, which given the fact that many of its fighters are now on the side of the TNC is quite worrying. However as the LIFG is reported to have a fighting force of no more than a few thousand men, it is believed it will not be able to cause much trouble within the opposition.17
It remains to be seen whether a victorious TNC would
be able to contain the Islamist aspirations of the ruthless jihadist
veterans in their ranks.
There are those who fear that, from their years of
combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the battle-hardened LIFG, although
probably not dominant in the Benghazi coalition today, will come to
enjoy more influence if Benghazi ever gets to distribute the spoils of
victory. In February 2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence George
Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that "one of
the most immediate threats [to U.S. security in Iraq] is from smaller
international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida
links. They include ... the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group."18 In 2007 a
West Point study reported on “the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG)
increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda, which culminated
in the LIFG officially joining al-Qaeda on November 3, 2007."19
Although Britain and the US were well aware of the
West Point assessment of the hard-core LIFG in the Benghazi TNC
coalition, their special forces nevertheless secretly backed the
Benghazi TNC, even before the launch of NATO air support:
The bombing of the country came as it was revealed
that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep
inside Libya targeting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces – and more are on
standby....
In total it is understood that just under 250 UK
special forces soldiers and their support have been in Libya since
before the launch of air strikes to enforce the no-fly zone against
Gaddafi’s forces.20
There are also reports that U.S. Special Forces were
also sent into Libya on February 23 and 24, 2011, almost a month before
the commencement of NATO bombing.21
UK support for the fundamentalist LIFG was in fact at least a decade old:
Fierce clashes between [Qadhafi's] security forces and Islamist guerrillas erupted in Benghazi in September 1995, leaving dozens killed on both sides. After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally declared its existence in a communiqué calling Qadhafi's government "an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty" and declaring its overthrow to be "the foremost duty after faith in God." This and future LIFG communiqués were issued by Libyan Afghans who had been granted political asylum in Britain.... The involvement of the British government in the LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the subject of immense controversy. LIFG's next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-MI5 officer David Shayler.22
David Shayler’s detailed account has been challenged,
but many other sources reveal that UK support for Libyan jihadists long
antedates the present conflict.23
Even more ominous for the future than the
nationalistic LIFG may be the fighters from the more internationalist Al
Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) who have seized the opportunity presented
by the war to enter the conflict, and equip themselves from Gaddafi’s
looted armories.24 AQIM presents a special concern because of recent
reports that, like other al Qaeda associates from Afghanistan to Kosovo,
it is increasingly financed by payoffs from regional drug
traffickers.25
In short, the NATO campaign in Libya is in support of
a coalition in which the future status of present and former al-Qaeda
allies is likely to be strengthened.26 And western forces have been
secretly supporting them from the outset.
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Bosnia
Similarly, Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and
Kosovo were presented as humanitarian. But both sides had committed
atrocities in those conflicts; Like the western media, Washington
downplayed the Muslim atrocities because of its other interests.
Most Americans are aware that Clinton dispatched U.S.
forces to Bosnia to enforce the Dayton peace accords after a
well-publicized Serbian atrocity: the massacre of thousands of Muslims
at Srebrenica. Thanks to a vigorous campaign by the p.r. firm Ruder
Finn, Americans heard a great deal about the Srebrenica massacre, but
far less about the beheadings and other atrocities by Muslims that
preceded and helped account for it.
A major reason for the Serb attack on Srebrenica was
to deal with the armed attacks mounted from that base on nearby
villages: “intelligence sources said it was that harassment which
precipitated the Serb attack on the 1,500 Muslim defenders inside the
enclave.”27 General Philippe Morillon, commander of the UN troops in
Bosnia from 1992 to 1993, testified to the ICTY (International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) that Muslim forces based in
Srebrenica had “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and
destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a
degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region”28 According
to Prof. John Schindler,
Between May and December 1992, Muslim forces repeatedly attacked Serb villages around Srebrenica, killing and torturing civilians; some were mutilated and burned alive. Even pro-Sarajevo accounts concede that Muslim forces in Srebrenica...murdered over 1,300 Serbs...and had “ethnically cleansed a vast area.29
Former U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith
later admitted in an interview that the U.S. administration was aware of
“small numbers of atrocities” being committed by the foreign mujahedin
in Bosnia, but dismissed the atrocities as “in the scheme of things not a
big issue.”30
Other sources reveal that Washington gave a tacit
green light to Croatia’s arming and augmentation of the Muslim presence
in Srebrenica.31 Soon C-130 Hercules planes. some but not all of them
Iranian, were dropping arms to the Muslims, in violation of the
international arms embargo which the U.S. officially respected. More
Arab-Afghan mujahedin arrived as well. Many of the airdrops and some of
the mujahedin were at Tuzla, 70 kilometers from Srebrenica.32
According to The Spectator (London), the Pentagon was
using other countries such as Turkey and Iran in this flow of arms and
warriors:
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of Mujahideen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. .... As part of the Dutch government’s inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University compiled a report entitled ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’, published in April 2002. In it he details the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to assist Bosnia’s Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine agencies’ of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups that included Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia — airlifts with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.33
Cees Wiebes’ detailed account, based on years of
research, documents both the case for American responsibility and the
vigorous American denials of it:
At 17.45 on 10 February 1995, the Norwegian Captain Ivan Moldestad, a Norwegian helicopter detachment (NorAir) pilot, stood in the doorway of his temporary accommodation just outside Tuzla. It was dark, and suddenly he heard the sound of the propellers of an approaching transport aircraft; it was unmistakably a four engine Hercules C-130. Moldestad noticed that the Hercules was being escorted by two jet fighters, but could not tell their precise type in the darkness. There were other sightings of this secretive night-time flight to Tuzla Air Base (TAB). A sentry who was on guard duty outside the Norwegian medical UN unit in Tuzla also heard and saw the lights of the Hercules and the accompanying jet fighters. Other UN observers, making use of night vision equipment, also saw the cargo aircraft and the fighter planes concerned. The reports were immediately forwarded to the NATO Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Vicenza and the UNPF Deny Flight Cell in Naples. When Moldestad phoned Vicenza, he was told that there was nothing in the air that night, and that he must be mistaken. When Moldestad persisted, the connection was broken.The secretive C-130 cargo aircraft flights and night-time arms drops on Tuzla caused great agitation within UNPROFOR and the international community in February and March 1995. When asked, a British general responded with great certainty to the question of the origin of the secret supplies via TAB: ‘They were American arms deliveries. No doubt about that. And American private companies were involved in these deliveries.’ This was no surprising answer, because this general had access to intelligence gathered by a unit of the British Special Air Services (SAS) in Tuzla. The aircraft had come within range of this unit’s special night vision equipment, and the British saw them land. It was a confirmation that a clandestine American operation had taken place in which arms, ammunition and military communication equipment were supplied to the ABiH. These night-time operations led to much consternation within the UN and NATO, and were the subject of countless speculations.34
Wiebes reports the possibility that the C-130s, some
of which were said to have taken off from a US Air Force base in
Germany, were actually controlled by Turkish authorities.35 But U.S.
involvement was detected in the elaborate cover-up, from the fact that
US AWACS aircraft, which should have provided a record of the secret
flights, were either withdrawn from duty at the relevant times, or
manned with US crews.36
A summary of Wiebes’ exhaustive report was published in the Guardian:
The Dutch report reveals how the Pentagon formed a secret alliance with Islamist groups in an Iran-Contra-style operation.US, Turkish and Iranian intelligence groups worked with the Islamists in what the Dutch report calls the "Croatian pipeline". Arms bought by Iran and Turkey and financed by Saudi Arabia were flown into Croatia initially by the official Iranian airline, Iran Air, and later in a fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.The report says that mojahedin fighters were also flown in, and that the US was "very closely involved" in the operation which was in flagrant breach of the embargo. British secret services obtained documents proving that Iran also arranged deliveries of arms directly to Bosnia, it says.The operation was promoted by the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, which was cautious about using Islamist groups as a conduit for arms, and about breaching the embargo. When the CIA tried to place its own people on the ground in Bosnia, the agents were threatened by the mojahedin fighters and the Iranians who were training them.The UN relied on American intelligence to monitor the embargo, a dependency which allowed Washington to manipulate it at will.37
Meanwhile the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which in
the 1980s had supported the “Arab-Afghans” fighting in Afghanistan,
turned its attentions to Bosnia.
Al-Kifah’s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The
Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in
Bosnia....Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman,
the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the
jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves....The Al-Kifah Bosnian
branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story
building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational
headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office,
Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from
the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled
by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.38
One of the trainers at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El,
assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army
bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New
Jersey.39 In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along
with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up
New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was
personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Crown
Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.40
About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, today the leader
of al Qaeda, came to America to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he
was hosted by Ali Mohamed, a U.S. double agent and veteran of U.S. Army
Special Forces who had been the top trainer at the Al-Kifah mosque.41
Almost certainly al-Zawahiri’s fund-raising was in support of the
mujahedin in Bosnia, reportedly his chief concern at the time. (“The
Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 1993, Mr. bin
Laden had appointed Sheik Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda's
second-in-command, to direct his operations in the Balkans.”)42
Wiebes’ detailed report and the news stories based on
it corroborated earlier charges made in 1997 by Sir Alfred Sherman, top
adviser to Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the influential
rightwing nationalist Centre for Policy Studies, that “The U.S.
encouraged and facilitated the dispatch of arms to the Moslems via Iran
and Eastern Europe -- a fact which was denied in Washington at the time
in face of overwhelming evidence.”43 This was part of his case that
The war in Bosnia was America's war in every sense of
the word. The US administration helped start it, kept it going, and
prevented its early end. Indeed all the indications are that it intends
to continue the war in the near future, as soon as its Moslem proteges
are fully armed and trained.
Specifically, Sherman charged that in 1992 Acting
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had instructed Warren Zimmerman,
U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, to persuade Bosnian President Izetbegovic
to renege on his agreement to preserve Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian unity,
and instead accept American aid for an independent Bosnian state.44
The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Kosovo
This raises the disturbing question: were some
Americans willing to ignore the atrocities of the al-Kifah mujahideen in
Bosnia in exchange for mujahideen assistance in NATO’s successive wars
dismantling Yugoslavia, the last surviving socialist republic in Europe?
One thing is clear: Sir Alfred Sherman’s prediction in 1997 that
America “intends to continue the war in the near future” soon proved
accurate, when in 1999 American support for al-Qaeda’s allies in Kosovo,
the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led to a controversial NATO bombing
campaign.
As was widely reported at the time, the KLA was
supported both by the networks of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and also by
the traffic in Afghan heroin:
Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden -- who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.45
According to former DEA agent Michael Levine, the
decision of Clinton to back the KLA dismayed his DEA contacts who knew
it to be a major drug-trafficking organization.46 As Ralf Mutschke of
Interpol testified to Congress,
In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a
terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations
with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic
countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden. Another
link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an
Egyptian Djihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin
Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict. [This
is almost certainly Zaiman or Mohammed al-Zawahiri, one of the brothers
of Ayman al-Zawahiri.] In 1998, the KLA was described as a key player in
the drugs for arms business in 1998, "helping to transport 2 billion
USD worth of drugs annually into Western Europe". The KLA and other
Albanian groups seem to utilize a sophisticated network of accounts and
companies to process funds. In 1998, Germany froze two bank accounts
belonging to the "United Kosova" organization after it had been
discovered that several hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into
those accounts by a convicted Kosovar Albanian drug trafficker.47
According to the London Sunday Times, the KLA’s background did not deter the US from training and strengthening it:
American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.48
According to former U.S. Army Captain David
Hackworth, later Newsweek's contributing editor for defense, former US
military officers in the private U.S. military contractor MPRI (Military
Professional Resources Incorporated) not only trained KLA personnel,
but even fought alongside them.49 This reinforced earlier reports that
MPRI personnel had also been involved in training Croatians at the time
of the illicit Croatian arms pipeline to Bosnia.50
After Kosovo,
Sherman repeated his warnings against “expanding American hegemony”,
exercised through NATO with varying degrees of partnership and
subordination of other players. .... The process commenced with the
deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia, led by Germany and acquiesced in by
the other European Union members and the United States (1991). It
progressed with sanctions against Serbia for attempting to help the
western Serbs (1992). In Bosnia America's early involvement sparked off
civil war (the Zimmerman Visit to Izetbegovic, in the aftermath of the
Lisbon Agreement), and it eventually matured into the bombing campaign
of 1999 and the occupation of Kosovo.51
Others suspected that America’s involvement was
motivated by its desire to see a new Trans-Balkan pipeline and a new
U.S. military base in the Balkans to defend it. Although such critics
were initially ridiculed, both predictions soon proved true. The
U.S.-registered AMBO corporation, headed by former BP executive Ted
Ferguson, began construction of a pipeline from Albania to Macedonia in
2007.52 And nearby is a semi-permanent U.S. Army base, Camp Bondsteel,
that can hold up to 7000 soldiers.
In 2007, President George W. Bush created a new
United States Africa Command, U.S. AFRICOM. But its HQ at present is in
Stuttgart, Germany. This has led to speculation on the Internet that
America has its eyes on Libya’s international airport, which the U.S.
Air Force had operated as Wheelus Air Force Base until its ouster in
1970.
II. From the First WTC Bombing to 9/11: The Domestic U.S. Fallout from Collusion with Terrorists
The fact that Americans have had repeated recourse to
al-Qaeda Islamists as assets in their expansive projects does not
constitute proof that there is any long-term systematic strategy to do
so, still less that there is a secret alliance.
I believe rather that America is suffering from a
malignant condition of military power run amok – power which, like a
malignant cancer, tends to reproduce itself at times in ways
counterproductive to larger goals. Those who are appointed to manage
this vast power become inured to using any available assets, in order to
sustain a sociodynamic of global intervention that they are,
ironically, powerless to challenge or turn around. The few dissenters
who try to do so are predictably sidelined or even ejected from the
heights of power, as not being “on the team.”
Those in Washington who decided to assist terrorists
and drug traffickers seem not to have considered such “externalities” as
the domestic consequences from official dealings with criminal
terrorist networks that are global in scope. Yet the consequences were
and are real, for the Islamist terrorists that were protected by the US
in their subversion of order in Kosovo and other countries were soon
being protected inside the US as well. As former DEA agent Michael
Levine reported of the KLA-linked drug networks, “These guys have a
network that's active on the streets of this country.... They're the
worst elements of society that you can imagine, and now, according to my
sources in drug enforcement, they're politically protected.”53
In other words, Kosovars were now enjoying the de
facto protection in their U.S. drug trafficking that had earlier been
enjoyed by the CIA’s Chinese, Cuban, Italian, Thai, and other ethnic
assets dating from the 1940s.54
Mother Jones reported in 2000, after the NATO bombing
in support of the KLA that Afghan heroin, much of it distributed by
Kosovar Albanians, now accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin
seized in America -- nearly double the percentage taken four years
earlier.55 Meanwhile in Europe, it was estimated that “Kosovo Albanians
control 40% of Europe's heroin.”56 In addition there is a near universal
consensus that the outcome of the war in Bosnia left al-Qaeda’s
jihadists much more strongly entrenched in the Balkans than they had
been earlier. In the words of Professor John Schindler, Bosnia, “the
most pro-Western society in the umma [Muslim world],” was “converted
into a Jihadistan through domestic deceit, violent conflict, and
misguided international intervention.”57
It is too soon to predict with confidence what will
be the domestic fallout or “blowback” from NATO’s empowerment of
Islamists by creating chaos in Libya. But the domestic consequences of
similar U.S. interventions in the past are indisputable, and have
contributed to major acts of terrorism in this country.
American protection for the Al-Kifah mujahedin
support base in Brooklyn led to interference in domestic U.S. law
enforcement. This enabled mujahedin recruits at al-Kifah to plot and/or
engage in a number of domestic and foreign terrorist attacks on America.
These attacks include the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the
so-called “New York landmarks plot” of 1995, and the Embassy attacks of
1998 in Kenya and Tanzania. Involved in all of these events were
terrorists who should have been rounded up earlier because of crimes
already committed, but were allowed to stay free.
Central to all of these attacks was the role of Ali
Mohamed, the former U.S. Special Forces double agent at al-Kifah, and
his trainees. Ali Mohamed, despite being on a State Department Watch
List, had come to America around 1984, on what an FBI consultant has
called “a visa program controlled by the CIA.”58 So did the “blind
Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of al-Kifah; Rahman was issued two
visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular
section of the American embassy in Sudan.”59
Ali Mohamed trained al-Kifah recruits in guerrilla
tactics near Brooklyn. This operation was considered so sensitive that
the New York police and the FBI later protected two of the recruits from
arrest, when they murdered the Jewish extremist Meir Kahane. Instead,
the New York Police called the third assassin (El Sayyid Nosair) a “lone
deranged gunman,” and released the other two (Mahmoud Abouhalima and
Mohammed Salameh) from detention. This enabled Abouhalima and Salameh,
along with another Ali Mohamed trainee (Nidal Ayyad) to take part three
years later in the first (1993) bombing of the World Trade Center.60
Prosecutors protected Ali Mohamed again in the
1994-95 “Landmarks” trial, when Omar Abdul Rahman and some of Mohamed’s
trainees were convicted of conspiring to blow up New York buildings. In
that case the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, named Ali Mohamed as an
unindicted co-conspirator, yet allowed him to remain free. When the
defense issued a subpoena for Mohamed to appear in court, the prosecutor
intervened to avoid Mohamed’s having to testify.61
Ali Mohamed was well aware of his protected status,
and used it in early 1993 to obtain his release when detained by the
RCMP at Vancouver Airport. As this episode has so ignored in the US
press, I will quote the account of it in Canada’s premier newspaper, the
Toronto Globe and Mail:
The RCMP had their hands on one of the key insiders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, but he was released after he had Mounties call his handler at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.Ali Mohamed, a Californian of Egyptian origin who is believed to be the highest ranking al-Qaeda member to have landed in Canada, was working with U.S. counterterrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993. Mr. Mohamed now is in a U.S. prison."The people of the RCMP told me by midnight that I can go now," Mr. Mohamed — who confessed in the United States to being a close bin Laden associate — wrote at the time in an affidavit shown Wednesday to The Globe and Mail.The incident happened after customs agents at Vancouver International Airport detained Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus via Frankfurt, after they found him carrying two forged Saudi passports.Mr. Mohamed, who was waiting to pick him up at the airport, inquired of the police about his friend's detention. That made the RCMP curious about Mr. Mohamed, but he dispelled their suspicions by telling them he was a collaborator with the FBI.62
The Globe and Mail story makes it clear that in 1993
Mohamed already had a handler at the FBI, to whom the RCMP deferred.
Patrick Fitzgerald, in his statement to the 9/11 Commission, gave a
quite different story: that Mohamed, after returning from Nairobi in
1994, applied for a job “as an FBI translator.”63 The difference is
vital: because the FBI told the RCMP to release Mohamed, he was then
able to travel to Nairobi and plan for bombing the U.S. Embassy there.
According to author Peter Lance, by 2007 Fitzgerald
had enough evidence to arrest and indict Mohamed, but did not. Instead
he interviewed Mohamed in California, along with an FBI agent, Jack
Cloonan. After the interview Fitzgerald chose not to arrest Mohamed, but
instead to tap his phone and bug his computer. Lance asks a very
relevant question: did Fitzgerald fear that ”any indictment of al
Qaeda’s chief spy would rip the lid off years of gross negligence by
three of America’s top intelligence agencies”?64
One month after the Embassy bombings, Ali Mohamed was
finally arrested, on September 10, 1998. Yet when Fitzgerald handed
down thirteen indictments two months later, Mohamed’s name was not among
them. Instead Fitzgerald again allowed him to avoid cross-examination
in court by accepting a plea bargain, the terms of which are still
partly unknown. Specifically we do not know the term of Mohamed’s
sentence: that page of his court appearance transcript (p. 17) is filed
under seal.65
As part of the plea bargain, Mohamed told the court
that at the personal request of bin Laden, he did surveillance on the
U.S. Embassy in Kenya, “took pictures, drew diagrams, and wrote a
report” which he personally delivered to bin Laden in the Sudan.66
Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who negotiated the plea bargain,
testified at length about Mohamed to the 9/11 Commission, who concluded
in their Report (p. 68) that Mohamed “led” the embassy bombing
operation. Ironically, the Embassy bombing is the official reason today
why Zawahiri (like bin Laden before him) is wanted by the FBI, with a
$25 million bounty on his head.
But the American public has been denied the right to
learn about Ali Mohamed’s involvement in other terrorist events.
Particularly relevant would be his involvement in 9/11. As his FBI
handler Cloonan later reported, Mohamed explained to him that he
personally trained the accused hijackers in how to seize planes:
He [had] conducted training for al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane. He ran practical exercises in Pakistan and he said, “This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [word blacked out] and put it in your carry-on luggage.” They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. “This is how you position yourself,” he said. “I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.” He wrote the whole thing out.67
Conclusion
At present America is in the midst of an
unprecedented budget crisis, brought on in large part by its multiple
wars. Nevertheless it is also on the point of several further
interventions: in Yemen, Somalia, possibly Syria or Iran (where the CIA
is said to be in contact with the drug-trafficking al-Qaeda offshoot
Jundallah),68 and most assuredly in Libya.
Only the American public can stop them. But in order
for the people to rise up and cry Stop! there must first be a better
understanding of the dark alliances underlying America’s alleged
humanitarian interventions.
This awareness may increase when Americans finally
realize that there is domestic blowback from assisting terrorists as
well. The long elaborate dance between Mohamed and his Justice
Department overseers makes it clear that the handling of terrorists for
corrupt purposes corrupts the handlers as well as the terrorists.
Eventually both the handlers and the handled become in effect
co-conspirators, with secrets about their collusion both parties need to
conceal.
Until the public takes notice, that concealment of
collusion will continue. And as long as it continues, we will continue
to be denied the truth about what collusions underlay 9/11.
Worse, we are likely to see more terrorist attacks,
at home as well as abroad, along with more illegal, costly, and
unnecessary wars.
|
This is FREE intelligence for distribution. Forward this to your colleagues.
Geopolitical Journey: Indonesia's Global Significance
I am writing this from Indonesia. Actually, that is not altogether a
fair statement. I am at the moment in Bali and just came from Jakarta.
The two together do not come close to being Indonesia. Jakarta, the
capital, is a vast city that is striking to me for its traffic. It takes
an enormous amount of time to get anywhere in Jakarta. Like most
cities, it was not built to accommodate cars, and the mix of cars with
motor scooters results in perpetual gridlock. It is also a city of
extraordinary dynamism. There is something happening on almost every
street. And in the traffic jams, you have time to contemplate those
streets in detail.
Bali is an island of great beauty, complete with mountains, white
beaches, blue waters and throngs of tourists. Since I am one of those
tourists, I will not trouble you with the usual tourist nonsense of
wanting to be in a place where there are no tourists. The hypocrisy of
tourists decrying commercialization is tedious. I am here for the
beaches, and they are expensive. The locals with whom tourists claim to
want to mingle can’t come into the resort, and tourists leaving the
resort will have trouble finding locals who are not making a living off
the tourists. As always, the chance of meeting “locals” as tourists
usually define them — people making little money in picturesque ways —
is not easy. Read more »
Dispatch: Russian Privatization and Modernization
Analyst Lauren Goodrich examines the reasons behind Moscow’s plan to privatize strategic Russian firms. Watch the Video »
Еженедельный журнал Ru.chabad.org
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| August 2, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Two-Faced Washington Lowering America’s War Ceiling? Imperial Psychosis on Display By Tom Engelhardt By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline. And yet, among the dramatis personae we’ve been watching, there are clearly missing actors. They happen to be out of town, part of a traveling roadshow. When it comes to their production, however, there has, of late, been little publicity, few reviewers, and only the most modest media attention. Moreover, unlike the scenery-chewing divas in Washington, these actors have simply been going about their business as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America’s new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul. According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech “warning” that “Western powers needed to ‘proceed carefully’” and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would “be no rush for the exits.” If, in Washington, people were rushing for those exits, no chance of that in Kabul almost a decade into America’s second Afghan War. There, the air strikes, night raids, assassinations, roadside bombs, and soldier and civilian deaths, we are assured, will continue to 2014 and beyond. In a war in which every gallon of gas used by a fuel-guzzling U.S. military costs $400 to $800 to import, time is no object and -- despite the panic in Washington over debt payments -- neither evidently is cost. In Iraq, meanwhile, in year eight of America’s armed involvement, U.S. officials are still wangling to keep significant numbers of American troops stationed there beyond an agreed end-of-2011 withdrawal date. And the State Department is preparing to hire a small army of 5,000-odd armed mercenaries (with their own mini-air force) to keep the American “mission” in that country humming along to the tune of billions of dollars. In Libya, the American/NATO war effort, once imagined as a brief spasm of shock-‘n’-awe firepower that would oust autocrat Muammar Gaddafi in a nanosecond, is now in its fifth month with neither an end nor a serious reassessment in sight, and no mention of costs there either. In Yemen and Somalia, the drones, CIA and military, are being sent in, and special operations forces built up, while in the region a new base is being constructed and older ones expanded in the never-ending war against al-Qaeda, its affiliates, wannabes, and any other nasties around. (At the same time, the Obama administration is leaking information that the original al-Qaeda teeters at the edge of defeat, even as it intensifies the CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.) And further expansion of the war on terror -- watch out, al-Qaeda in North Africa! -- seems to be a given. Meanwhile back in Washington -- not, mind you, the Washington of the debt-ceiling crisis, but the war capital on the banks of the Potomac -- national security spending still seems to be on an upward trajectory. At $526 billion (without the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars added in), the 2011 Pentagon budget is, as Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, has written, “in real or inflation adjusted dollars… higher than at any time since World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the height of the Reagan buildup.” The 2012 Pentagon budget is presently slated to go even higher. Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
Prepared for the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs View this page at www.dailyalert.org
Subscribe
| Via Smartphone |
August 2, 2011
In-Depth Issues:
Palestinians Call for Mass Marches on Sept. 20 - Mohammed Daraghmeh (AP-Forbes)
Palestinian officials said Monday they plan to begin mass marches against Israel's occupation of the West Bank on Sept. 20, the eve of a largely symbolic UN vote to recognize their independence.
The U.S. opposes the Palestinian initiative and has signaled it will use its veto power to defeat the measure in the Security Council.
Why Damascus, Aleppo Are Silent for Now - Sami Moubayed (Gulf News-Dubai)
Sympathy with the Syrian uprising is high in the Syrian capital, but close to non-existent in Aleppo because of the city's distance, its relative immunity from the economic crisis (thanks to flourishing business relations with Turkey), and the unique relationship the city has had with President Bashar Al-Assad, who has paid it plenty of attention since coming to power in 2000.
Within the new districts of Damascus and Aleppo, the business elite has been staunchly pro-regime.
That will likely remain the case due to the weight of their clerics (who are allied to the state), along with the political, social and economic interests of their nobility and business community.
In many cases, that nobility is "new money" and rose to power and fame only after the Baathists took over in 1963.
The silence of both cities, however, won't last for too long.
Palestinian Rocket Wounds Israeli Bedouin Woman - Shmulik Hadad (Ynet News)
A rocket fired from Gaza on Monday exploded near a Bedouin tent encampment in southern Israel and its shrapnel wounded Fatma Sariaa, 55, in the legs.
4,000 Ethiopians on Their Way to Israel (Jerusalem Post)
Four thousand Ethiopian Falash Mura received Israeli immigration authorization in the past six months and more than half already arrived, Israel Radio reported.
Jordan Jails Former Al-Qaeda Aide for Terrorism (AFP-Al-Ahram-Egypt)
A Jordanian military court on Thursday sentenced Issam Barqawi, known as Abu Mohammed Al-Maqdessi, a former advisor to top Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, to five years in prison for recruiting people in Jordan to join the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Following the verdict, Maqdessi shouted: "We are mujahedeen (holy warriors)...and we will continue to fight the Americans."
Daily Alert Blog
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
- Israel Ready to Discuss Border "Package": No Return to the 1967 Lines - Allyn Fisher-Ilan
Israel has told Middle East power brokers it was ready to discuss a proposed package on borders with Palestinians to help Western powers revive stalled peace talks, an Israeli official said Monday. The official denied reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu had agreed to President Obama's proposal to negotiate a pullback to the 1967 lines.
Israel Radio and Channel 2 television reported that Netanyahu had agreed to negotiate a possible withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. The Israeli official responded that Netanyahu "has been clear that Israel will not return to the 4th of June 1967 borders." "In order to...facilitate the restarting of direct talks, Israel has been willing to accept a package that includes a formula on borders," the official said, adding that "a part of the package would mean being recognized as a Jewish state." (Reuters) - Syrian Forces Intensify Assault on Hama - Liz Sly and Joby Warrick
Syrian forces launched a renewed assault on the city of Hama on Monday. At least four people were killed, but the toll was expected to rise because residents reported a sudden and intense increase in bombardments Monday night, with shells crashing into residential neighborhoods, a hospital and the courthouse. "The bombing is very big, and they are using some bombs that are bigger than tanks," said activist Saleh Hamawi. Syrian troops did not, however, penetrate the center of the city, which has effectively been under the control of protesters since June. (Washington Post) - U.S. Military Claims Success Curbing Attacks in Iraq with Iranian Weapons - Thom Shanker
Attacks by insurgents using advanced Iranian weapons have dropped significantly over the last few weeks, senior American military officials said Monday, citing a two-track campaign of allied raids on Iranian-backed militants and official Iraqi protests to Tehran. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a visit to Iraq: "You've seen in the last two or three weeks a dramatic reduction." (New York Times)
- UNIFIL: IDF Troops Didn't Cross Border - Hanan Greenberg
UNIFIL said Monday that Lebanese fire on IDF troops earlier in the day was uncalled for, and that the IDF had not crossed into Lebanese territory, as the Lebanese army had claimed. Lebanese soldiers had opened fire on Israeli soldiers patrolling the border, who returned fire. (Ynet News) - Egypt Recruits Sinai Bedouin to Protect Natural Gas Pipeline - Oren Kessler
The companies managing the pipeline that transports Egyptian natural gas to Israel have contracted Bedouin tribes to protect the facilities - sabotaged five times since the start of this year- Egypt's state-run MENA news agency reported Monday. (Jerusalem Post) - Israeli Prime Minister Sends Ramadan Message to Muslims - Herb Keinon
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broadcast a Ramadan message to Israeli Arabs and Muslims around the world on Sunday. Ramadan began on Monday. Netanyahu said: "We are witnessing now a very dramatic moment in human history, and the history of the Middle East. We are witnessing the Arab Spring and we all want it to flourish and succeed. I know it is true for the people of Israel, who know the taste and meaning of democracy."
He said that Israeli democracy can serve as "a beacon for their brothers in this vast area." If Arab democracy will take root, Netanyahu said, "there will be true peace. But we don't have to wait for that to happen. I would like to use this opportunity and call upon my neighbor, President Abbas, to sit down and negotiate with me without preconditions, right here and now." (Jerusalem Post)
- Syria's Ramadan Massacre - Editorial
On Sunday, Syrian army troops led by tanks launched an assault on the city of Hama from four directions, firing cannon and machine guns indiscriminately at the unarmed residents manning street barricades. Video clips posted on YouTube showed the tanks blasting at the minarets of mosques, while snipers picked off people on the streets.
Assad clearly is calculating that those who suppose that dictators can no longer get away with massacres are wrong. On June 17, administration officials talked about sanctions against Syria's oil and gas sector and the referral of Mr. Assad and his collaborators to the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. Nothing has happened since then. Is it any wonder that Mr. Assad thinks he can slaughter the people of Hama with impunity? (Washington Post)
See also U.S. Weighs New Sanctions Against Syria - Joby Warrick
The Obama administration said Monday that it was studying possible new sanctions and other unilateral measures against Syria. (Washington Post) - Syria's Brutal Crackdown Must End Now - Editorial
The savage crackdown comes as the government-sponsored National Dialogue was supposed to start. Many opposition leaders have decided that the only purpose of the supposed dialogue is to legitimize the government. The Syrian army's timing was deliberate. Across the Islamic world, Muslims were preparing for the start of Ramadan. But the Syrian army grabbed this opportunity to seek a military solution to the continuing civil unrest in the country. (Gulf News-Dubai)
See also Losing Patience - Editorial
The Syrian authorities might believe themselves to be smarter than their domestic opposition and the international community, but their latest moves have exhibited an embarrassing amount of shortsightedness. In 2011, the battle is not between the government and the Muslim Brotherhood. It's between the government and the people. It's between the government and a number of cities. And suburbs. And villages. The Syrian people are quickly losing their patience. (Daily Star-Lebanon) - UN Vote on Palestine Leads Only to Pain - Joel Brinkley
In September the UN is likely to vote on whether to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state. Right now, Israeli and Palestinian officials are traveling to European and other capitals, furiously soliciting votes. But no one doubts that a majority will vote with the Palestinians. "We have no chance of winning," said Ron Dermer, a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "We have maybe 30-40 countries on our side."
Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, has publicly criticized Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, for raising public expectations. "That's not my thinking about September at all - assert absolute sovereignty unilaterally." The truth is, he added, the day after the vote will the same as the day before. (Tribune Media Services)
- Unlike in Egypt or Tunisia, sectarian rivalries are central to Syrian politics. The Assad regime is Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that comprises only 10-15% of Syrians. However, the best-armed and best-trained divisions of the Syrian army are Alawite.
- To avoid civil war, our goal should be to separate the Assad family and its closest cronies from the rest of the Alawite community. The Alawite generals in the Syrian Army should be key targets for a campaign of psychological warfare urging them to salvage their community's post-Assad future by refusing now to kill their fellow citizens.
- The U.S. should stop speaking about "the regime" and speak instead about "the Assads." We should say clearly that Assad must and will go. The Alawites, and the generals in particular, won't think hard about their place in Syria's future until they are convinced Assad is finished. For the same reason the U.S. should be far more active in turning Assad and his closest supporters into international pariahs, using whatever multilateral bodies are available.
- Much
can be done to avoid a sectarian war in Syria if the Assad mafia can be
separated from much of its own sectarian support. We can use our voice
and influence to persuade Syria's minorities that they have a secure
future after Assad is gone - and help all of Syria's communities agree
on the rules for the post-Assad era that is coming.
The writer, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, handled Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2009.
