‘AL QAEDA’: A FIGMENT OF THE FEAR- AND WAR-MONGERING PROPAGANDISTS IMAGINATION

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Yesterday the Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his band of fearmongering lunatics warned Australians gathering at Gallipoli for ANZAC Day to be aware of a ‘terrorist threat’. In the UK Guardian today it is reported that the ‘head of Scotland Yard's counterterrorism command said yesterday that al-Qaida had survived the six-year long "war on terror" launched by President George Bush and Tony Blair, and its central leadership had retained the ability to order devastating attacks on Britain.’ As well as Gallipoli that is. And in Iraq, where it seems the Iraqi franchise of ‘al Qaeda’ has claimed responsibility for the deaths yesterday of nine US troops.

So good is the ‘al Qaeda’ franchise business that even the Israelis have tried to set up an ‘al Qaeda’ shop in Palestine. Unfortunately the locals soon discovered that the business wasn’t genuine (apparently Mossad hadn’t paid bin Laden the franchise fee) so the business was quickly shut down.

Of course al Qaeda exists, or at least existed, (indeed, it was set up with the assistance of the CIA as part of their covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan before the Taliban took over there) but it doesn’t exist in the way that the western neocon-dominated press would have us believe. Despite the continued references to ‘al Qaeda’ everyday as we are told that they are responsible for every conceivable atrocity that occurs on our planet, there has not been any evidence whatsoever that ‘al Qaeda’ per se has ever been responsible for anything beyond the borders of Afghanistan and the remoter parts of Pakistan.

The western propagandists have presented to the world a picture of an ‘al Qaeda’ as being a massive and extremely well disciplined international organisation that has branches everywhere. Yet nowhere is there any prima facie evidence to suggest that they even exist, let alone in such an organised and disciplined way. As the piece in today’s UK Guardian demonstrates, we are expected to simply believe what we are told with the total lack of evidence being conveniently explained away as; ‘for security reasons we can’t divulge the source’.

In Iraq the US and their allies are currently busy trying to wedge the Sunni and Shi’ite factions by blaming ‘al Qaeda’ for the friction between the two groupings. This is nothing new; they’ve tried it before, but now they are putting more effort into their blame game because they see it as away of polarising the rest of Islam in the Middle East and beyond thus diverting attention away from the Israelis and their efforts to subdue Palestine, Hamas and Hizbollah but, at the same time, demonising further an Iran that has a predominately Shiite population (as against the rest of the Islamic world which is around 80% Sunni).

The problem for the US, Israel, and their western allies, is that all this propaganda is for consumption in the west only. The Middle Eastern peoples, Sunni or Shia, are very much aware that their relationships with each other are quite secure and have been for decades. For them the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ remains just that – a myth, and that the struggles that exist between various Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq are mainly a combination of political and criminal secular differences in a post-Saddam lawless era and that such violence, as bloody as it often is, is contained within Iraq and has nothing to do with the battles that Islamic peoples and Arabs generally are fighting against Israeli right-wing Zionism in Palestine and US hegemonic colonialism in the Middle East and Central Asia.

‘Al Qaeda’ remains, as it has since the US decided that they were to blame for the events of 9/11, a myth that exists solely to perpetuate fear and the illusion that there is always an enemy to justify the continued ‘Global War on Terrorism’.

posted by Damian Lataan at 12:50 PM

U.S. Watch Lists Sow Frustration and Fear

Ryan Singe 04.16.07 | 12:00 AM

Elizabeth Kushigian spent time in an isolation room at Miami International Airport every time she returned from an international trip -- until a senator got her taken off a DHS watchlist.

For years, Elizabeth Kushigian never had a problem flying back-and-forth to Costa Rica, where she runs a local micro-lending nonprofit. But in 2004, she suddenly found it impossible to re-enter the United States without being ordered into a special isolation room at Miami International Airport. There, she'd wait for extra scrutiny.

"I was in the line where you come in and stamp your passport, and each time they would scan the passport and look at (the) screen and stiffen," Kushigian says. "I was on some sort of list. I don't know why; it could have been because of something I did in the '60s and in the early 1980s, I did some civil disobedience on behalf of El Salvador."

Kushigian is just a member of a growing club of American citizens whose lives have been touched by a slew of government watch lists proliferating with little oversight or redress mechanisms since the 9/11 attacks. Containing, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of names submitted by dozens of agencies, the lists have not only snagged people like Kushigian -- who wind up on them for mysterious reasons -- they've also stigmatized and inconvenienced thousands of others whose names happen to be similar to an entry on the list.

The issue returned to national debate last week after one of the nation's most respected constitutional law professors was told by an airline official that he'd been placed on a watch list for his criticism of the president, a claim that U.S. officials deny.

Kushigian's hassles at the airport ranged from minor delays to full-blown interrogations. The second time she was pulled aside at the border, officials with the Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement demanded to know how she could afford to travel on her salary. When she explained that she'd inherited money from her father, they peppered her with questions about what his factory used to make, and what charities he donated to.

"It was unnerving sitting in that little room even for a short period of time, Kushigian says. "You get a sense of what people who are not senators and not citizens go through."

Kushigian tried to figure out why she'd been targeted by filing a Freedom of Information Act request, but learned nothing. Then she turned to her elected representatives in Massachusetts, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, who himself was famously fingered by a watch list in 2004. Eventually Kennedy's office sent along a letter signed by the head of Immigration and Customs, which said in part: "With respect to Mrs. Kushigian's specific situation, we are pleased to report that action has been taken in order that she not be subjected to automatic special attention when arriving at U.S. Ports-of-Entry."

Kushigian was one of the lucky ones: Winning even a tacit acknowledgement that she was on a list is a rare victory over the federal homeland security bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of travelers have applied to get help from the Transportation Security Administration, which now has three lists: a no-fly list of persons considered too dangerous to be allowed on a plane or cruise ship; a selectee list of people who must undergo extra screening to fly; and a white list of persons who have names similar to those on the other lists, but who are not threats.

The last publicly reported tally of the no-fly and selectee lists in October 2006 put the combined number of names at 119,000. The current number is a closely guarded secret, but Homeland Security officials announced earlier this year that it cut the no-fly list in half after hand-reviewing the names, which are submitted by a hodgepodge of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite that, last month constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Princeton University, found himself unable to check in curbside at a New Mexico airport. A check-in clerk with American Airlines told him it was because he was on a "terrorist watch list," Murphy says.

"One of them, I don't remember which one, asked me, 'Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying for that,'" recalls Murphy. "I said, 'No, but I did give a speech criticizing George Bush,' and he said, 'That will do it.'"

Incensed at the thought that the administration was using an anti-terrorism measure for political purposes, Murphy publicized his run-in through a prominent law blog, Balkinization. His accusations lit up the comment boards on several influential websites.

The evidence remains thin that Murphy was actually on a watch list -- he was able to get a boarding pass on his return trip -- but the incident shows how the watch list programs have put their imprint on America's consciousness. It's in the very nature of secret watch lists to induce paranoia, says Lee Tien, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer and longtime critic of government watch lists.

"If (the lists) weren't secret, you would know if you were on one and you would be able to scream about it," Tien says. "Without accountability, they will be stupid or evil; and without transparency, there's no way to tell the difference."

Following a string of high profile cases of watch lists snaring innocent travelers -- ranging from U.S. armed forces personnel, to prominent politicians and nuns -- the Department of Homeland Security launched a website in February to help out people who are wrongly matched with names on the list. Travelers can fill out a complaint form online, and so far, 3,700 people have applied for help.

That's a big change for the government, which didn't even admit that it had a no-fly list until fall of 2002. The existence of a second list, known as the "selectee list", was also kept secret until it surfaced in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and first reported by Wired News.

Those lists also largely derived from the "unified terrorist watch list," a blend of information from intelligence agencies and the FBI that's also shared with the FBI's National Crime Information Center. The NCIC database is queried nearly any time a cop or county sheriff makes an arrest or pulls someone over for speeding.

The Treasury Department runs a separate list known as the OFAC list (short for Office of Foreign Assets Control), which is the only published government anti-terrorism watch list. The 250-page long list includes organizations and individuals with which American companies are prohibited from doing business.

While there are almost no American citizens on the OFAC list, it is routinely used during home purchases, credit checks and even apartment rentals, and has caused people with common Latino and Muslim names to be denied mortgages for having a name that only vaguely resembles a name on the list, according to a recent report (.pdf) from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.

The transparency of the public OFAC list is a double-edged sword: Unlike the other watch lists, people can easily determine if a name similar to theirs is on the OFAC list. At the same time, because it's unclassified and published, the OFAC is widely used by companies that run background checks. The potential for of civil liberties abuse is high, says Shirin Shinnar, who wrote the LCCR report.

"If you are denied an apartment or a job, you often aren't told at all why -- let alone that it was because you were identified as a possible terrorist," Shinnar says.

Just as murky is the question of how useful the lists actually are. The Transportation Security Administration refuses to provide any statistics on whether the lists have ever prevented any known terrorist from boarding a plane.

For its part, the Terrorist Screening Center, which compiles the unified terrorist watch list created by a 2003 presidential directive, did not respond with a request for comment. But a 2005 Inspector General report (.pdf) found the center's database of hundreds of thousand of records was plagued with technical difficulties and inaccurate entries.

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Feds May Move On Local Mosques

A new FBI case against terror suspects could be set to rock the Bay Area

By Najeeb Hasan

After 23-year-old Lodi resident Hamid Hayat was convicted last year of training at a terrorist camp in Pakistan, government officials warned that terror investigations in Northern California were ongoing.

Now, members of the Bay Area's Muslim community believe that the FBI is close to making additional high-profile arrests of one or more terror suspects who frequent mosques in Silicon Valley and the East Bay. According to a source informed about the investigation, one of the organizations targeted in the Bay Area terror probe is the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative-leaning Muslim organization, founded in India during the 1920s, that boasts world-wide membership and whose primary focus is to persuade Muslims to recommit to their faith.

Last October, a South African Muslim scholar associated with the Tablighi Jamaat, Fazlur Rahman Azmi, was denied entry to the United States and detained at San Francisco International Airport by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Azmi, who had successfully entered the United States to preach in both 1999 and earlier in 2006, was planning on teaching at various American mosques during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Nawaz Khan, a resident of Newark, Calif., and one of Azmi's students, had arranged for Azmi to lecture at the Islamic Society of the East Bay in Fremont, one of the Bay Area's largest and most diverse mosques.

Muslims are concerned that the ongoing terror probe in the East Bay is related to Azmi's planned visit to the Fremont mosque.

A spokesperson said the FBI could neither confirm or deny the existence of such an investigation.

"There is of course not a lot I can say," says FBI public information officer Joseph Schadler. "I did want to make clear that we don't target mosques for investigation. We begin and end an investigation if they pose a threat based on credible information."

Muslims connected to the Fremont mosque are also concerned that the planned arrests may be supported by flimsy evidence. One critic with ties to law enforcement agrees that current terror investigations can be motivated not by strong evidence, but by pressure on America's counter-terrorism agencies to produce results.

"It's something, in my opinion, that is happening," says James Wedick, who retired from the FBI in 2004 after 35 years of service, when asked if the FBI could be pressured to move on weak terror cases. During the Lodi case, Wedick had been skeptical of the evidence marshaled against the terror suspects and worked with defense attorneys on the case; a judge did not permit him to testify in the trial as an expert witness.

"In the last couple of years throughout the Bureau, they know there is a pot of gold out there called terrorism dollars," he says. "[It's] resource allocation—who gets what money, including plain dollars and agent bodies. You are allocated these resources depending upon if you got something going. What I've seen is the Bureau and the department is quick to call something terrorism when it's not—because you got an obvious interest in getting those resources, and they are not going to get them, unless they could say to folks back in Washington that there is a legitimate case. So there is motivation, unfortunately. I've talked to people in the position to know; I've got guys coming to me all day long, telling me they [the FBI] are mischaracterizing things. I don't know if it's going on with respect to this specific case."

"I think that's a completely mistaken assumption," counters the FBI's Schadler. "We work our cases at our end with the Department of Justice, nobody is pressuring us to do anything."

Members of the Bay Area Muslim community, meanwhile, have become somewhat accustomed to FBI activity within their community since 2001.

"It's disheartening," says Mohamad Rajabally, a Fremont dentist who recently completed his term as the president of the Islamic Society of the East Bay. "But, unfortunately, this is the climate Muslims are facing. I always say that we have nothing to hide, and we welcome anybody to our mosques."

During the controversial Lodi case last year, Hayat was convicted based on a confession in which he contradicted himself several times. He was also secretly taped by a government informant posing as a friend; the informant, however, was not able capture a Hayat confession on tape, which weakened the case further. At the time, Muslim leaders in groups such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) believed that the Hayat case was pursued by the FBI to bolster the arguments for the renewal of the Patriotic Act.

"I mean, if you can imagine, nobody joins the Bureau to work some BS case," says Wedick. "Let's go back to the Hayat case. People stepped into the case, said this is going to be great, only to find out there is no case. There was nothing corroborated to terror except to say in recorded conversation, you had a series of statements ... [but] if you look at them, they made no sense. They [the FBI] made no effort to mitigate them or make sense of them, except to say he said in some fashion [that he attended a camp], and even if he contradicted himself, we'll make an indictment. The older guys are saying, 'What am I doing, this isn't a case—do we follow this guy, does he have something connected with explosives?' Did we follow them? That's what you have to do to prove the case. If you look at all the [nation-wide terror] cases, most of the cases involved the Bureau paying somebody huge amounts of money to go into a network, leaving it up to them, and saying we got a terrorism case."

Rajabally, however, would rather wait and see what unfolds than panic.

"They are arousing suspicion," he says of the rumors that have been swirling through the community. "For what? People will ask you what proof you have. You are raising doubts and panic in the community for no reason."

'Anti-Palestinian' song faces ban from Eurovision

'Anti-Palestinian' song faces ban from Eurovision

Doesn't Israel take the cake? Entering a hate Palestinians, Iranians, etc., song in this Europe wide competition.

BTW, last time I checked a map of Europe, I could not find the "NUKE EM!" state.
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Song of terror picked by Israel for Eurovision
Israel settles for a number called Push the Button about the threat of terrorism and Armageddon.

Israel gripped by Syria war fears

by Jacques PintoThu Feb 22, 9:55 AM ET

A reported Syrian troop build-up near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights has fuelled speculation in Israel about a future conflict, more than three decades after the two enemies last went to war.

Syrian armed forces appear to be moving closer to the armistice line as Damascus spearheads an unprecendented armaments drive, shrieked Israel's Haaretz newspaper from its front page Thursday.

"The Syrian armed forces are being strengthened in a way unprecedented in recent memory with the help of generous funding from Iran," wrote military affairs correspondent Zeev Schiff.

Brigadier General Yossi Beidatz, the head of military intelligence research, has also warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is preparing for conflict with Israel, possibly through Hezbollah, which fought a 34-day war with Israel last year.

Haaretz said the main thrust of Syria's armaments drive was missiles and long-range rockets, with its navy being bolstered by an Iranian missile similar to one fired by Hezbollah, killing four Israeli sailors last summer.

Syria is also close to concluding a deal with Russia to procure thousands of advanced anti-tank missiles, of the sort Hezbollah used to such lethal effect against Israeli armour last year, Haaretz reported.

"It appears that the Syrians have moved forces closer to the border (armistice line) with Israel on the Golan Heights," wrote Schiff, noting similar movements prior to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Three decades ago, a coordinated Egyptian and Syrian assault caught Israel totally off guard on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, triggering its deadliest conflict since independence in 1948.

Syria has test-fired ballistic missiles, such as a Scud-D surface-to-surface missile, which would put most of Israel within range, Haaretz reported.

Israel is still smarting from its deadly pounding by more than 4,000 Hezbollah rockets that killed some 40 civilians last summer.

But Defence Minister Amir Peretz was quoted by journalists as telling military officials to "avoid making unnecessary comments" on Syria and asking officers to steer clear of a "war of words" with Damascus.

"The situation in the field will be examined according to facts and the Israel Defence Force will prepare itself accordingly," he was quoted as saying.

One aide, Amos Gilad, said he saw no immediate danger of war but that Syrian weapons purchases highlighted the need for Israel to remain combat-ready.

"The fact that Syria is strengthening its military capabilities does not mean we're going to be attacked tomorrow but certainly we need to be prepared," Gilad told public radio.

"There is no danger of war. There is no deployment of forces indicating that Israel would be threatened by an offensive tomorrow."

A northern command source agreed that Syria had beefed up its troops along the armistice line as Israel did following the outbreak of war in Lebanon.

"Since the end of the war, tension has remained high on both sides and at a much higher level than it was before the war. There is much more Israeli and Syrian daily military presence along the border today," the official said.

But a source in the UN force in the Golan Heights charged with monitoring the armistice denied any Syrian troop build-up and lashed out an "alarmist Israeli media that repeatedly brings up the topic".

On Wednesday, Israel launched war games on the Golan Heights that Peretz flatly denied were connected to fears of a new conflict with Syria.

Damascus has repeatedly demanded the return of the Golan, a strategic plateau which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and unilaterally annexed in 1981. It is now home to more than 15,000 settlers.

Peace talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 2000, in part because of disputes over the return of the territory.