'If the US attacks were an assault on "civilisation", why shouldn't Muslims regard the Afganistan attack as a war on Islam?'
08 November 2001
"Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go on enduring these lies? There is no "campaign" -- merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MiGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943.
Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar, or the Italian air force or the French air force over Herat. Or even the Pakistani air force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.
Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya -- which we have already left in Vladimir Putin's bloody hands? I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb that exploded in Beirut in 1985 -- targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to the Hezbollah, who now appears to be back on Washington's hit list -- and which missed Nasrallah but slaughtered 85 innocent Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book, Veil, that the CIA was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund the operation. So will the US President George Bush be hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.
So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on about the "air campaign", "coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?
Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to spend long in Pakistan to realise that the Pakistani press gives an infinitely more truthful and balanced account of the "war" -- publishing work by local intellectuals, historians and opposition writers along with Taliban comments and pro-government statements as well as syndicated Western analyses -- than The New York Times; and all this, remember, in a military dictatorship.
You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the subcontinent to realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans. The Beirut daily As-Safir ran a widely-praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs was forced to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. The implication, of course, was that this -- rather than the crimes against humanity on 11 September -- was the reason for America's determination to liquidate Osama bin Laden. Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the United States in the aftermath of the September atrocities.
One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary", in The News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who was arrested in Alabama on 19 September with an expired visa. In prison in Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth. Then, long after he had sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat him against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first round. There are going to be 10 rounds like this." There are dozens of other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of them appear to be true.
Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy of the West's supposed "respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed the world, going to suspend military operations in Afghanistan during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. After all, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq conflict continued during Ramadan. So have Arab-Israeli conflicts. True enough. But why, then, did we make such a show of suspending bombing on the first Friday of the bombardment last month out of our "respect" for Islam? Because we were more respectful then than now? Or because -- the Taliban remaining unbroken -- we've decided to forget about all that "respect"?
"I can see why you want to separate bin Laden from our religion," a Peshawar journalist said to me a few days ago. "Of course you want to tell us that this isn't a religious war, but Mr Robert, please, please stop telling us how much you respect Islam."
There is another disturbing argument I hear in Pakistan. If, as Mr Bush claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on "civilisation", why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a war on Islam?
The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the Australians. While itching to get into the fight against Mr bin Laden, the Australians have sent armed troops to force destitute Afghan refugees out of their territorial waters. The Aussies want to bomb Afghanistan -- but they don't want to save the Afghans. Pakistan, it should be added, hosts 2.5 million Afghan refugees. Needless to say, this discrepancy doesn't get much of an airing on our satellite channels. Indeed, I have never heard so much fury directed at journalists as I have in Pakistan these past few weeks. Nor am I surprised.
What, after all, are we supposed to make of the so-called "liberal" American television journalist Geraldo Rivera who is just moving to Fox TV, a Murdoch channel? "I'm feeling more patriotic than at any time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge," he announced this week. "And this catharsis I've gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living." This is truly chilling stuff. Here is an American journalist actually revealing that he's possibly "itching for revenge".
Infinitely more shameful -- and unethical -- were the disgraceful words of Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said. "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ... we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people."
Mr Isaacson was an unimaginative boss of Time magazine but these latest words will do more to damage the supposed impartiality of CNN than anything on the air in recent years. Perverse? Why perverse? Why are Afghan casualties so far down Mr Isaacson's compassion? Or is Mr Isaacson just following the lead set down for him a few days earlier by the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do".
Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the US government's demand not to broadcast Mr bin Laden's words in toto lest they contain "coded messages". But the coded messages go out on television every hour. They are "air campaign", "coalition forces" and "war on terror".
Robert Fisk: As the refugees crowd the borders, we'll be blaming someone else
'It is palpably evident that they are not fleeing the Taliban but our bombs and missiles'
23 October 2001
Mullah Mohammed Omar's 10-year-old son is dead. He was, according to Afghan refugees fleeing Kandahar, taken to one of the city's broken hospitals by his father, the Taliban leader and "Emir of the Faithful", but the boy -- apparently travelling in Omar's car when it was attacked by US aircraft -- died of his wounds.
No regrets, of course. Back in 1985, when American aircraft bombed Libya, they also destroyed the life of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's six-year-old adopted daughter. No regrets, of course. In 1992, when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made Apache helicopter fired an American-made missile into the car of Said Abbas Moussawi, head of the Hizbollah guerrilla army in Lebanon, the Israeli pilot also killed Moussawi's 10-year-old. No regrets, of course.
Whether these children deserved their deaths, be sure that their fathers -- in our eyes -- were to blame. Live by the sword, die by the sword -- and that goes for the kids too. Back in 1991, The Independent revealed that American Gulf War military targets included "secure" bunkers in which members of Saddam Hussein's family -- or the families of his henchmen -- were believed to be hiding. That's how the Americans managed to slaughter well over 300 people in an air raid shelter at Amariya in Baghdad. No Saddam kids, just civilians. Too bad. I wonder -- now that President George Bush has given permission to the CIA to murder Osama bin Laden -- if the same policy applies today?
And so the casualties begin to mount. From Kandahar come ever more frightful stories of civilians buried under ruins, of children torn to pieces by American bombs. The Taliban -- and here the Americans must breathe a collective sigh of relief -- refuse to allow Western journalists to enter the country to verify these reports. So when a few television crews were able to find 18 fresh graves in the devastated village of Khorum outside Jalalabad just over a week ago, the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could ridicule the deaths as "ridiculous". But not, I suspect, for much longer.
For if each of our wars for infinite justice and eternal freedom have a familiar trade mark -- the military claptrap about air superiority, suppression of "command and control centres", radar capabilities -- each has an awkward, highly exclusive little twist to it. In 1999, Nato claimed it was waging war to put Kosovo Albanian refugees back in their homes -- even though most of the refugees were still in their homes when the war began. Our bombing of Serbia led directly to their dispossession. We bear a heavy burden of responsibility for their suffering -- since the Serbs had told us what they would do if Nato opened hostilities -- although the ultimate blame for their "ethnic cleansing'' clearly belonged to Slobodan Milosevic.
But Nato's escape clause won't work this time round. For as the Afghan refugees turn up in their thousands at the border, it is palpably evident that they are fleeing not the Taliban but our bombs and missiles. The Taliban is not ethnically cleansing its own Pashtun population. The refugees speak vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fall on their cities. These people are terrified of our "war on terror'', victims as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Centre on 11 September. So where do we stop?
It's an important question because, once the winter storms breeze down the mountain gorges of Afghanistan, a tragedy is likely to commence, one which no spin doctor or propaganda expert will be able to divert. We'll say that the thousands about to die or who are dying of starvation and cold are victims of the Taliban's intransigence or the Taliban's support for "terrorism" or the Taliban's propensity to steal humanitarian supplies.
I have to admit -- having been weaned on Israel's promiscuous use of the word "terror" every time a Palestinian throws a stone at his occupiers -- that I find the very word "terrorism" increasingly mendacious as well as racist. Of course -- despite the slavish use of the phrase "war on terrorism" on the BBC and CNN -- it is nothing of the kind. We are not planning to attack Tamil Tiger suicide bombers or Eta killers or Real IRA murderers or Kurdish KDP guerrillas. Indeed, the US has spent a lot of time supporting terrorists in Latin America – the Contras spring to mind -- not to mention the rabble we are now bombing in Afghanistan. This is, as I've said before, a war on America's enemies. Increasingly, as the date of 11 September acquires iconic status, we are retaliating for the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington. But we're not setting up any tribunals to try those responsible.
The figure of 6,000 remains as awesome as it did in the days that followed. But what happens when the deaths for which we are responsible begin to approach the same figure? Refugees have been telling me on the Pakistan border that the death toll from our bombings in Afghanistan is in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds. Once the UN agencies give us details of the starving and the destitute who are dying in their flight from our bombs, it won't take long to reach 6,000. Will that be enough? Will 12,000 dead Afghans appease us, albeit that they have nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden? Or 24,000? If we think we know what our aims are in this fraudulent "war against terror", have we any idea of proportion?
Sure, we'll blame the Taliban for future tragedies. Just as we've been blaming them for drug exports from Afghanistan. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the Taliban-drug linkage. And all we have to do to believe this is to forget the UN Drug Control Programme's announcement last week that opium production in Afghanistan has fallen by 94 per cent, chiefly due to Mullah Omar's prohibition in Taliban-controlled areas. Most of Afghanistan's current opium production comes -- you've guessed it -- from our friends in the Northern Alliance.
This particular war is, as Mr Bush said, going to be "unlike any other" -- but not in quite the way he thinks. It's not going to lead to justice. Or freedom. It's likely to culminate in deaths that will diminish in magnitude even the crime against humanity on 11 September. Do we have any plans for this? Can we turn the falsity of a "war against terror" into a war against famine and starvation and death, even at the cost of postponing our day of reckoning with Osama bin Laden? (The Independent Argument)
Saudi pilot named as US hijacker alive in Tunis
Saied Hussein Gharamallah Al Ghamdi has been in Tunis for nine months training with colleagues from state carrier Saudi Arabian Airlines, the London-based Asharq Al Awsat paper said
- A Saudi pilot named by Washington as one of the suspects in September 11's suicide plane bombings is alive and well and living in Tunisia, an Arabic newspaper reported.
Saied Hussein Gharamallah Al Ghamdi has been in Tunis for nine months training with colleagues from state carrier Saudi Arabian Airlines, the London-based Asharq Al Awsat paper said.
It said he had seen his own photo on CNN after being fingered by the United States as a suspect in the September 11 attacks and contacted the embassy in Tunis.
US officials said he was believed to have hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania apparently before reaching its intended terror target in Washington.
The FBI said it had gotten his photo from a flight school where he supposedly trained in Florida.
Asharq Al Awsat said Al Ghamdi has twice visited the United States -- studying there for a year beginning in October 1998, and for around six weeks after August 2000.
The paper published an interview Monday with another alleged Saudi suspect, Abdelaziz Al Omari, who said he too was alive and well, and that he was an engineer who had no idea how to fly a plane.
He said his passport was stolen in the United States in 1995.
Muslim opinion sees conspiracy
US moves to sway views in the Muslim world with polished PR and quicker responses to bin Laden videos.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
AMMAN, JORDAN - America's effort to enlist street-level support among Arabs and Muslims in the fight against international terrorism is running into a brick wall.
Although most people in the United States consider Osama bin Laden the prime suspect behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks, public opinion throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds is moving in a completely different direction. Most Muslims are entertaining alternative theories, and many are embracing one theory above all - that the attacks were carried out by Israel's clandestine intelligence service, the Mossad.
Such widespread skepticism about Mr. bin Laden's alleged involvement is the clearest proof yet that the US is badly losing the so-called PR war. Aware of the problem, the US and its Western allies are using more sophisticated methods to counteract bin Laden's exploitation of Muslim sentiment.
After bin Laden's latest statement was aired on Al Jazeera satellite news station Saturday, accusing the US of waging war against Islam and calling Arab leaders "infidels" for supporting the United Nations, a former US diplomat took to the same airwaves, watched by 35 million viewers, and provided a US government rebuttal in flawless Arabic.
While applauding the effort, Middle East experts say Muslims are looking for a substantive change in US policies (dealing with Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan), rather than a more vigorous intellectual debate.
In the meantime, conspiracy theories proliferate, even among senior government officials of the Arab coalition partners.
"The level of conspiracy theories just makes you want to scream," says a Western diplomat based in Amman, who had just been lectured by a senior Jordanian official about the Mossad's "obvious" role.
The Syrian Defense Minister, Mustafa Tlass, shared the same view with a group of visiting academics from Britain last month.
Such suspicious attitudes and conspiracy theories are nothing new in the Middle East, where the Mossad is often seen as an evil force lurking behind otherwise inexplicable events. In the case of bin Laden, these attitudes have substantially undermined President Bush's attempt to translate worldwide sympathy for the 5,000 innocent victims of the attacks into a concerted international campaign against terrorism. "We are just not even in the ballpark here, and the Bush administration is aware of this," says Michael Hudson, director of the Arab studies program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The lack of direct evidence proving a bin Laden connection - combined with what many Arab and Muslim analysts see as a US rush to judgement - is spawning a flood of elaborate theories.
Among theories advanced by Arab newspaper columnists in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, London, the West Bank, and elsewhere:
-- The attacks were the work of "the great Jewish Zionist mastermind that controls the world's economy, media, and politics."
-- Bush ordered the hijackings and attacks as a means to solidify his hold on power in Washington and erase any memory of the election controversy in Florida.
-- Japanese extremists carried out the terrorism in retribution for US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
-- Members of the American militia movement were behind the attacks in answer to the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
-- China or Russia launched the attacks to undermine efforts by the US to develop a missile defense shield system.
Conspiracy theories are an inevitable consequence in countries where the flow of news and information is controlled by the government. To compensate, analysts attempt to discern the truth by reading between the lines. Frequently, the resulting speculation is based on the question: Who benefits?
"It is a lack of information and candor that feeds conspiracy theories, as people attempt to use their own wit in trying to figure out what is being hidden from them," says Jon W. Anderson, an anthropologist at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. "There is a serious failure of public diplomacy [by the US], which is feeding the generation of conspiracy theories."
To counter this information disconnect, the Bush administration is hiring private public relations experts to wage media campaigns in the Middle East.
Middle East experts are skeptical. "To think of this in terms of advertising is missing a really big point," says Mr. Hudson of Georgetown University. "It is not really 'the medium is the message,' it isn't," he says. "You have to have something to say."
Rather than viewing the US as a force working for a just and lasting peace, many Muslims question whether America's real agenda is to wage a war against Islam in order to render the region safe for Israel. Bush's use of the word "crusade" in an early speech is still cited by Muslims as proof of this.
At the street level, there is a near total distrust of US government policies and aims.
The most prominent theory in circulation is the false suggestion that Jewish Americans were given advance warning not to report to work at the World Trade Center the morning of the attacks. This is the so-called "proof" that Israel's Mossad was behind the attacks.
"Why hasn't the media stressed the 4,000 Jews who did not turn up for work on Sept. 11," asks Lina, a Palestinian college student here in Amman. Her two friends, both wearing head scarves, nod in agreement.
"The Israelis are the ones who have the most to gain," says Samer, a dress-shop clerk.
Under this analysis, the Mossad conducted the Sept. 11 attacks to goad the US into what would become a joint US-Israeli military operation against Islam - with the US targeting bin Laden in Afghanistan and Israel targeting Islamic militants in Palestine.
Another line of analysis among some Muslims is that bin Laden lacked the ability from his cave hideout in Afghanistan to carry out such a complex terror attack.
"Bin Laden is being framed for these attacks," adds Mahmood, a Saudi attending college in Jordan. "There is no evidence of his involvement."
In fact, there is substantial and growing circumstantial evidence pointing to involvement by those associated with Al Qaeda. But it remains unclear whether US investigators have uncovered any direct links to bin Laden.
Some Arabs say it is already too late, that they have no confidence in the US to reveal the truth. "We believe Osama bin Laden didn't do this, even if the evidence shows that he did," says Ahmad, a restaurant worker.
Nida, an eye doctor in Amman, agrees. "If there is no [direct] proof, it means it was not bin Laden, but the Americans will not accept it," she says.
Pakistanis Buy Into the Conspiracy Theories
Asia: Many in the country see no reason to go after Bin Laden--they believe the attacks were the work of Jews, Hindus or even America itself.
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan -- In this city's Saddr Bazaar, a place of uneven sidewalks, cheap hotels and chockablock shops, the restaurants offer skewers of spicy chicken finished off with sweet, milky tea and served with talk about the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks.
But the recounting of the events is altogether different from the facts that Americans know.
To most people here, there's no reason to implicate Saudi militant Osama bin Laden or other Muslims in the crime. To the best of their knowledge, the circumstantial evidence points elsewhere: toward Israel first of all, or the Americans themselves, or even the Hindus.
Asshad Malik, 21, of the Malik Sports shop, does not hesitate when asked about his understanding of the attacks Sept. 11. "The Jews did it," he explains, his face all open credulity as he stands in front of rows of cricket bats and board games.
Mohammed Aamir, a 26-year-old student, chimes in: "We have heard it from the international media. Especially the BBC. . . . They say it not directly but indirectly."
Aamir and Malik are not alone. Many, if not most, people one encounters on the streets here seem to genuinely believe that the assault on the U.S. was some sort of Jewish, American or Indian conspiracy.
In a country of 141 million, it would suggest that millions subscribe to the most widely heard canard that also has spread across the Arab world and beyond: that 4,000 Jews, forewarned, stayed away from the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks and were spared.
In Pakistan, the account has been published in one or another form in most Urdu-language papers, with no serious disclaimers.
Other widely circulated rumors abound. A quick list would have to include:
* No passengers were in the four jetliners that crashed Sept. 11, and the aircraft were operated by remote control; therefore the passenger lists and the allegation of hijackings are a fiction.
* Australian Prime Minister John Howard canceled a trip to New York just before Sept. 11 because he had been informed of the plot.
* Cameras were prepositioned around the World Trade Center to capture the crashes, proving that the attacks were part of a well-coordinated plot.
* Only Americans could have turned off the aircraft's radar and accomplished the other technical feats to avoid detection. Therefore, the conspiracy was an internal affair, perhaps triggered by Al Gore's presidential defeat last year.
* The attack is part of a vast Jewish and/or Hindu plot to pit Muslims and Christians against each other so that Jews or Hindus will emerge on top. Hinduism is the dominant religion of Pakistan's archrival, India.
Rumors that would be dismissed out of hand in a better-informed society have been wholeheartedly embraced by Pakistan's tabloid press and even by some semi-respectable newspapers. The stories then have been amplified by word of mouth until they have become in some cases accepted "truths."
"When a news item is published in the paper about the disappearance of 4,000 Jews from their jobs that day, America should not ignore that," argued shopkeeper Mohammed Iqbal, 53, when told that the stories he had heard were not true. "I trust the newspaper. The newspeople are very intelligent, and if they are giving the story, it must be true."
"Most of the people believe these stories because our major problem is illiteracy," said Mohammed Omar, 27, a finance manager for a Dutch consulting business here. "If anyone told them that fact, they believe it."
Of course, the fact that such ideas have been sown and have taken root so quickly is due to some extent to political and religious prejudice and hatred. But it is also a reflection of the relative susceptibility of many people to information that is handed to them from a trusted source.
Some of the stories seem to be deliberate plants with a political agenda. For instance, one of the first sightings of a news story directly blaming Israel for the World Trade Center bombing was in the Nation, a leading daily published in the major cities of Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi.
On the Sunday after the tragedy, a front-page story was slipped into the Karachi edition: "Mossad Behind Attacks--From Our Correspondent."
Ayesha Haroon, an editor at the Islamabad edition of the paper, said she was not sure where the item about the Israeli intelligence service came from, but her first impression was that it was a credible news service.
"It's quite possible" that there was deliberate malice in printing it, she said. "But I also think it has to do with the Internet. Somebody in Canada, the U.S. or U.K. is sitting there and makes up something and sends it to us. And when you see something on the computer, you tend to believe it's true."
No matter how it happens, the result is a house-of-mirrors distortion of information that helps explain the hostility on the streets of Pakistan toward the U.S. demand for the capture or death of Bin Laden, whom many people regard as a man who has been wronged by the West.
"It is possible that people in America did it themselves," said Ahshed Mahmood, 33, a columnist from the Mussafat, a daily Urdu-language newspaper. But on reflection, Mahmood said he had to admit that many stories printed in Pakistan are simply false.
"The media is much involved--they are giving their own opinions without any research. Most of the stories are not based on facts most of the time," he said, adding that his own paper is an exception.
"In a country where there is a void of information, newspapers resort to rumors partly in order to fill space," said Syed Talat Hussan, a prominent Pakistani journalist. "In addition, there is an abiding tradition in the Pakistani print media deliberately to prove that whatever goes wrong is the work of Jews and Hindus."
Yet the stories could easily have been debunked, he said. "Why don't they counter-check? Because they don't want to, because it goes against the grain of their beliefs."
This bias has a bearing on the demands heard frequently here that the United Stated needs to make public its proof if it wants Pakistani public support for an assault to capture or kill Bin Laden, who is believed to be in Afghanistan. Hussan said he doubts that any proof would be sufficient.
"If they embrace rumors like these," he said, "they are not going to believe facts."
Haroon, of the Nation, said another aspect of the problem is that Pakistanis believe that Western publications are against them.
"Generally, the people here are very, very upset with the international media, and they have the feeling that the international media will never take their side," she said. "They think it is either pro-U.S.A., pro-Israel or pro-India."
Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI
Ex-Silicon Valley resident plotted embassy attacks
A former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden's bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was a U.S. government informant during much of his terrorist career, according to sources familiar with his case.
Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen and longtime Silicon Valley resident who pleaded guilty last year to terrorism charges, approached the Central Intelligence Agency more than 15 years ago and offered to inform on Middle Eastern terrorist groups, a U.S. government official said.
Later, according to the sources, Mohamed spent years as an FBI informant while concealing his own deep involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist band: training bin Laden's bodyguards and Islamic guerrillas in camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan; bringing Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden's chief deputy, to the Bay Area on a covert fund-raising mission; and planning the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, in which more than 200 people died.
The story of Mohamed's dual roles as FBI informant and bin Laden terrorist - - and the freedom he had to operate unchecked in the United States -- illustrates the problems facing U.S. intelligence services as they attempt to penetrate the shadowy, close-knit world of al Qaeda, experts said.
Mohamed "clearly was a double agent," Larry C. Johnson, a former deputy director in the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism and a onetime CIA employee, said in an interview.
Johnson said the CIA had found Mohamed unreliable and severed its relationship with him shortly after Mohamed approached the agency in 1984. Johnson faulted the FBI for later using Mohamed as an informant, saying the bureau should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist, deeply involved in plotting violence against the United States and its allies.
"It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that they did not have control," Johnson said. "The FBI assumed he was their source, but his loyalties lay elsewhere."
The affair was "a study in incompetence, in how not to run an agent," Johnson said.
FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette declined to comment on Mohamed, as did a spokesman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose office prosecuted the case of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
A law enforcement source familiar with the case said the FBI had followed appropriate procedures in attempting to obtain crucial information from Mohamed, whom he conceded was "double-dealing" and difficult.
"When you operate assets and informants, they're holding the cards," this source said. "They can choose to be 100 percent honest or 10 percent honest. You don't have much control over them.
"Maybe (the informant) gives you a great kernel of information, and then you can't find him for eight weeks. Is that a management problem? Hindsight is 20/20."
Mohamed, 49, is a former Egyptian Army major, fluent in Arabic and English, who after his arrest became known as bin Laden's "California connection." Last year, when he pleaded guilty in the embassy bombing case, he told a federal judge that he first was drawn to terrorism in 1981, when he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group implicated in that year's assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
For almost as long as he was a terrorist, Mohamed also was in contact with U.S. intelligence, according to court records and sources.
In 1984, he quit the Egyptian Army to work as a counterterrorism security expert for EgyptAir. After that, he offered to become a CIA informant, said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The agency tried him out, but because he told other possible terrorists or people possibly associated with terrorist groups that he was working for the CIA, clearly he was not suitable," the official said.
The CIA cut off contact with Mohamed and put his name on a "watch list" aimed at blocking his entrance to the United States, according to the official.
Nevertheless, Mohamed got a visa one year later. He ultimately became a U.S.
citizen after marrying a Santa Clara woman. In 1986, he joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. He was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces.
There he worked as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, then as an instructor on Middle Eastern affairs in the John F. Kennedy special warfare school.
Mohamed's behavior and his background were so unusual that his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, became convinced that he was both a "dangerous fanatic" and an operative of U.S. intelligence.
Anderson, now a businessman in North Carolina, said that on their first meeting in 1988, Mohamed told him, "Anwar Sadat was a traitor and he had to die."
Later that year, Anderson said, Mohamed announced that -- contrary to all Army regulations -- he intended to go on vacation to Afghanistan to join the Islamic guerrillas in their civil war against the Soviets. A month later, he returned, boasting that he had killed two Soviet soldiers and giving away as souvenirs what he claimed were their uniform belts.
Anderson said he wrote detailed reports aimed at getting Army intelligence to investigate Mohamed -- and have him court-martialed and deported -- but the reports were ignored.
"I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California . . . getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit," he said. "That just doesn't happen. "
It was equally unthinkable that an ordinary American GI would go unpunished after fighting in a foreign war, he said.
Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed was "sponsored" by a U.S. intelligence service. "I assumed the CIA," he said.
In 1989, Mohamed left the Army and returned to Santa Clara, where he worked as a security guard and at a home computer business.
Between then and his 1998 arrest, he said in court last year, Mohamed was deeply involved in bin Laden's al Qaeda. He spent months abroad, training bin Laden's fighters in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. While in Africa, he scouted the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, target of the 1998 bombing. In this country,
he helped al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top aide, enter the country with a fake passport and tour U.S. mosques, raising money later funneled to al Qaeda.
According to Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert and author who has written about the case, Mohamed by the early 1990s had also established himself as an FBI informant.
"He agreed to serve (the FBI) and provide information, but in fact he was working for the bad guys and insulating himself from scrutiny from other law enforcement agencies," Emerson said in an interview.
One particularly troubling aspect of the case, Emerson says, was that Mohamed's role as an FBI informant gave bin Laden important insights into U.S. efforts to penetrate al Qaeda.
The case shows "the sophistication of the bin Laden network, and how they were toying with us," he said.
Some information about the nature of Mohamed's contacts with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies is contained in an FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in New York at the time of his 1998 arrest. The document describes contacts between Mohamed and the FBI and Defense Department officials.
At times, Mohamed made alarming admissions about his links to the al Qaeda terrorists, seemingly without fear of being arrested. Mohamed willfully deceived the agents about his activities, according to the affidavit.
In 1993, the affidavit says, Mohamed was questioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after a bin Laden aide was caught trying to enter the United States with Mohamed's driver's license and a false passport.
Mohamed acknowledged traveling to Vancouver to help the terrorist sneak into the United States and admitted working closely with bin Laden's group. Yet he was so unconcerned about being arrested that he told the Mounties he hoped the interview wouldn't hurt his chances of getting a job as an FBI interpreter.
(According to the affidavit, he had indeed applied for the FBI position but never got it.)
Later that year, Mohamed -- again seemingly without concern for consequences -- told the FBI that he had trained bin Laden followers in intelligence and anti-hijacking techniques in Afghanistan, the affidavit says.
In January 1995, Mohamed applied for a U.S. security clearance, in hopes of becoming a security guard with a Santa Clara defense contractor. His application failed to mention ever traveling to Pakistan or Afghanistan, trips he had told the FBI about earlier. In three interviews with Defense Department officials, who conducted a background check on him, he claimed he had never been a terrorist.
"I have never belonged to a terrorist organization, but I have been approached by organizations that could be called terrorist," he told the interviewers.
According to the affidavit, he told FBI agents in 1997 that he had trained bin Laden's bodyguards, saying he loved bin Laden and believed in him. Mohamed also said it was "obvious" that the United States was the enemy of Muslim people.
In August 1998, after the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, he told the FBI that he knew who did it, but refused to provide the names.
Two weeks later, after lying to a U.S. grand jury investigating the embassy bombings, he was arrested. He pleaded guilty last year, but he has never been sentenced and is once again believed to be providing information to the government -- this time from a prison cell.
"There's a hell of a lot (U.S. officials) didn't know about Ali Mohamed," said Harvey Kushner, a terrorism expert and criminology professor at the University of Long Island. "He infiltrated our armed services and duped them."
Yet, Kushner said, such duplicitous interactions may be a necessary component of intelligence work.
"I hate to say it, but these relationships are something we should be involved in more of. That's the nasty (part) of covert operations. We're not dealing with people we can trust." (San Francisco Chronicle)
Tribal land is Talibanland
By Pepe Escobar
BARA, Khyber Agency, Pakistan - The grand tribal jirga (council) was in full swing on Sunday. Between 500 and 600 prominent elders from three agencies on the Pakistan border with Afghanistan - Mohmand, Bajar and Khyber - attended, fully turbaned and fully armed. Almost 50 of the leaders spoke in the session lasting for more than five hours.
And everyone basically said the same thing: they urged Pakistan's leader President General Pervez Musharraf to step down, and they called for a jihad against the United States. Abdul Wadoud Afridi, from the powerful Afridi clan, had called the jirga, and he was in charge of the microphone when it came time to announce the decision of the meeting - all of the religious groups in the three agencies will adopt a single platform and wage a jihad against the US.
The groups claimed that they would defend their 1,400 kilometer border with Afghanistan "until the last drop of blood" and that as soon as American troops landed in Afghanistan they would depart for their jihad.
This crucial decision in Bara - 25 kilometers from the Afghan border - should be taken seriously by the US. The tribal areas are practically untouched by Pakistani law, and they are ruled by elders according to Pashtunwali - the strict, ancient Pashtun honor code. This is the hotbed of the Taliban's rearguard troops - they are well armed, well motivated and profoundly knowledgeable of the treacherous terrain in the mountains of Afghanistan. In these three agencies - and also in the other five - women are donating their jewelry, affluent men are donating their gold, and even kids are asking their parents when they get to go on the jihad. Just in Mohmand Agency, the donations top more than US$1.4 million - mostly from wealthy tribal businessmen involved in arms and drug smuggling.
The speakers in Bara said that their ethnic Pashtun Taliban brothers were being punished "because they refused to bow to the US, and this could not be tolerated by world-known terrorist America". They said that the real aim of America was "to destroy the Pakistani nuclear program, curb the Islamic movement and eliminate Islamic thought from the Pakistani Army". This interpretation bears a striking resemblance to what many intellectuals and political analysts are saying in Peshawar, the restive Pakistani city on the Khyber Pass close to the border with Afghanistan.
The tribal leaders also accused Musharraf of "high treason" - "and for that he is punishable". The speakers said that America was claiming supremacy of the world, "but the only supreme power was Almighty Allah".
In two declarations - echoing Taliban leader Mullah Omar's latest statement from somewhere near Kandahar - the jirga members said that "the fate of the US will not be different from that of Britain and the USSR", in reference to two previous occupying powers which were unable to conquer Afghanistan. The leaders blamed the Pakistani government for the fact that the whole tribal area has been declared a no-go area for foreigners: not only does the Pakistani government "restrain tribals from taking part in any political activity, but it keeps the world unaware of such activity". A violent protest campaign is expected not only around Peshawar, but also in the capital Islamabad.
Fresh from his release from house arrest - due to the provincial government bowing to vociferous street protests in Peshawar - Maulana Fazlur Abdul Rahman, leader of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), is back on the scene with guns blazing. He is openly calling for a war of Muslims against infidels. According to JUI sources, more than 60,000 JUI "martyrs" are ready to leave to defend Afghanistan. This would be in addition to the reported 100,000 from Mohmand Agency alone who are ready to go. The JUI is also calling for all people in Pakistan to boycott American products.
Rahman insists that the army is now against the nation. He seems to be fully in tune with the mood of the nation: In a recent poll, 86 percent of the people interviewed said that they were against the American strikes. Rahman also said that those who abandoned the Taliban and Afghanistan would also "compromise on Kashmir tomorrow". Musharraf - a staunch supporter of Kashmir's freedom struggle - is now being vilified for something that even he would never dream of doing. Or could he? (Asia Times Online)