West should close gaps against nuclear terrorism By John Hughes
Wed Apr 5, 4:00 AM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20060405/cm_cs...HE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

Two events last week underline the reason for continuing concern about Iran's nuclear intentions.

One was the Iranian claim that it had successfully test-fired a missile not detectable by radar, which can use multiple warheads to hit several targets simultaneously. The Fajr-3 (which means "victory" in Farsi) is claimed by Iranian sources to have a range capable of reaching Israel and therefore American bases in the Middle East.

The second event, disclosed at a US congressional hearing, was that in a test by government investigators, they were able to smuggle into the country enough radioactive material to make two "dirty" bombs. In the test last December, the investigators managed to sneak small amounts of such material across US border crossing points in Washington State and Texas. Radiation alarms went off, but security inspectors were fooled by phony documents and allowed the material through. If the investigators could do it, terrorists might be able to.

The Iranian position is that it will pursue a nuclear energy program for peaceful purposes, but that it is not making nuclear weapons. Western nations do not believe that, especially as Iran has a long record of duplicity about its nuclear intentions.

The possibility that Iran, under an erratic regime, could build and possess a nuclear bomb is itself cause for concern. However, the possibility that such a weapon could fall into the hands of terrorists who have been supported by Iran is of much greater concern.

If rogue nations like Iran and North Korea should even think of using such a weapon themselves against the United States, its military forces, or allies such as Israel, they would have to confront the certainty of devastating US retaliation. The retaliation would likely be as awesome if it were clear that they had given the bomb to terrorists.

We know that terrorists like Al Qaeda have expressed interest in acquiring a nuclear bomb. To do so, their options are to steal it, to buy it, or to build it, perhaps with the know-how and cooperation of a nation like Iran, friendly to their ambitions.

In a new study of the threat of catastrophic nuclear terrorism and steps to prevent it, Charles Ferguson says that some 27,000 nuclear weapons presently exist in the arsenals of eight nations - Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, and the US. All but about 1,000 of these are in Russia and the US.

Mr. Ferguson, a scientist expert on nuclear safety issues and a former nuclear engineering officer on a ballistic-missile submarine, carried out the study for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he is presently a fellow.

His report says the existing nuclear weapons are generally securely guarded, hard to steal, and would be difficult to activate without access to sophisticated codes for arming and firing them. But there are concerns about the security of nuclear weapons in Pakistan, whose former leading nuclear weapons expert, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, sold nuclear weapons programs to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. And a coup in Pakistan might install officials sympathetic to terrorist causes. Also of concern are Russian tactical nuclear weapons, especially some that are relatively portable, that may not possess internal security mechanisms, and are not in secure central storage. Clearly, the development of nuclear weapons in Iran, with its longtime sponsorship of terrorism, would raise a host of similar questions.

If nuclear weapons are hard to steal or buy, the other alternative for terrorists is to build one. This requires the acquisition of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Ferguson's report says at least one terrorist group has tried to enrich uranium, but the process is extremely challenging and it failed. Enriching uranium or making plutonium is currently beyond the capability of terrorists without state sponsorship.

That militant Islamic terrorists remain interested in making at least a radium dirty bomb, for which they do not need uranium, is evident from instructions carried recently on one of their websites. It gave instructions to distill radium from certain industrial products and to construct a detonation device to disperse the radioactive material. Whether this is feasible, or whether they have developed the capability to target US facilities with it, remains unclear.

The CFR report charges that major gaps remain in existing US and international programs to secure nuclear weapons. It suggests various measures to plug those gaps.

They should be heeded as Western nations continue their tortuous negotiations to limit danger from a new emerging nuclear power like Iran.

• John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, is editor and chief operating officer of the Deseret Morning News.

US blames al Qaeda leader for 90% of Iraqi suicide attacks

Baghdad April 11 2006

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/59836-print.shtml

More than 90% of suicide attacks in Iraq are carried out by terrorists and foreign fighters recruited, trained and equipped by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, according to a US military spokesman.

Zarqawi and his group "are real threats to the citizens, security and stability of Iraq and we continue to conduct aggressive operations to eliminate the threat they pose not only to Iraq, but also to the rest of the region", said Major General Rick Lynch.

The Washington Post reported the US military was conducting a propaganda campaign to "magnify the role" of Zarqawi to turn Iraqis against him and to link the war in Iraq to the September 11 attacks.

It claimed some intelligence officials believed the campaign had overstated Zarqawi's importance in the uprising.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," Lynch said. "The terrorists and foreign fighters that he recruits, trains and equips carry out more than 90% of the insidious suicide attacks against the men, women and children of Iraq, attacks that have killed or injured thousands of Iraqis in the last year alone."
He added that al Qaeda in Iraq's impact had been "ruthlessly devastating" despite its relatively small presence.

George W Bush, meanwhile, pressed Iraqi leaders again to form a government as it looked increasingly likely that the main Shi'ite Alliance would drop Ibrahim al Jaafari as its candidate for premier to break a four-month deadlock.

The alliance delayed a meeting on a final decision even after intense pressure from Kurdish and Sunni leaders left it with no other options. The alliance fears removing Jaafari, who won his nomination by only one vote, would split the bloc at a time when Iraq needs strong leadership.–AP

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

U.S.: Author Says Al-Qaeda Still A Force

By Julie A. Corwin
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/...196d4f8ab3.html


WASHINGTON, April 11, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Britain's "The Observer" reported on April 9 that a soon-to-be-released report by the British government has concluded that the July 2005 bombings in London were carried out by four men who had no links to Al-Qaeda.

But author Peter Bergen contends that one of the men alleged to have been involved in the attacks, Mohammed Siddique Khan, likely made contact with the "outer fringes" of Al-Qaeda during one of his trips to Pakistan.

"If you look at the [videotaped] suicide will of Mohammed Khan, who was after all a Pakistani, second-generation, it was shot by Al-Sahab, which means the clouds in Arabic," Bergen said. "Now that's Al-Qaeda's video-production arm. Al-Qaeda's video-production arm doesn't exist in Leeds [England], where Mohammed Khan is from."

Bergen links the London attack with the first anniversary of the expiration of a "truce" offered by bin Laden in April 2004. The Al-Qaeda leader offered European countries the chance to withdraw from the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and stop "attacking Muslims." The offer expired on July 15, 2004.

'Broad Strategic Guidance'

Bergen, who produced the first televised interview with bin Laden in 1997, challenges the popular impression that Al-Qaeda has ceased to function as a formal organization.

"Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri are out there and actually influencing what is happening," he said. "Of course, they're not in command and control of their organization. Bin Laden hasn't been picking up a sat [satellite] phone or cell phone to order people to do things for a very long time. But through the medium of videotapes and audiotapes bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri provide broad strategic guidance to the network, and they also give specific instructions."

Since September 11, 2001, 35 video- and audiotapes from bin Laden and al-Zawahri have surfaced. According to Bergen, these tapes do more than just attempt to foment righteous anger toward the infidels. They provide specific suggestions for targets. For example, in late 2004, bin Laden called for attacks on Saudi oil facilities.

"I think there is some relationship between that call and the attack we just saw on the Saudi oil facility, the very major oil facility," Bergen says. "And we've seen a lot of attacks on oil workers in Saudi [Arabia], and bin Laden has also called for attacks on Iraqi oil facilities.

To buttress his argument, Bergen cites an interview on Al-Jazeera television in February 2006 with former senior Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah. Dadullah said that bin Laden and al-Zawahri "are in operational control" and are "giving us orders."

Dadullah and Bergen are not the only people convinced that bin Laden continues to pick targets for his terrorist network around the world. According to "The Daily Mail" on 9 April, following the release of the British government report, the Conservative Party is going to demand further investigation into the London bombings. The paper quoted Conservative homeland-security spokesman Patrick Mercer as saying that the lack of a link with Al-Qaeda was difficult to believe.

Bergen, for his part, suggests that pinpointing ultimate culpability for any particular bombing may not always be possible or necessarily what's most important. "In the end does it really matter?" he asks. "When a bomb goes off and it kills your mom, does it matter if it was Al-Qaeda itself or Al-Qaeda inspired?"

Bergen says he is particularly worried about the possibility of a rocket-propelled-grenade attack bringing down a passenger jet. That, he predicts, would have a devastating impact on the aviation and tourism businesses.

Military denies it hyped Zarqawi threat

Reuters
Monday, April 10, 2006; 11:35 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1000491_pf.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military denied on Monday a newspaper report that it had waged a propaganda campaign to overstate the threat posed by al Qaeda's leader in Iraq.

The Washington Post had reported that some senior military intelligence officers believe the importance of Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may have been exaggerated, citing military documents and officers familiar with the alleged campaign.

According to the article, Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq, told a U.S. Army meeting: "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will, made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

Major General Rick Lynch, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, issued a statement denying the Washington Post report and saying that Zarqawi remained a grave threat.

"A recent article citing a military briefing from 2004 has called into question the threat that Abu Musab Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq pose to Iraq, dismissing it as propaganda' -- nothing could be further from the truth," he said.

"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq have openly declared war on the democratic process in Iraq and are responsible for the overwhelming majority of suicide attacks against the people of Iraq -- a tactic developed and honed by him."

Harvey said at the meeting that while Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq had carried out deadly bombing attacks, they remained "a very small part of the actual numbers," according to the newspaper.

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former (Saddam Hussein) regime types and their friends," Harvey said, according to a transcript of the meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Post reported.

Largely aimed at Iraqis, the Zarqawi campaign began two years ago and was believed to be continuing, the Post said. It has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts and at least one leak to an American journalist, the newspaper said.

Another military officer familiar with the program told the newspaper that the material was all in Arabic. But the officer said the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his profile in the American press's view," the report said.

Zarqawi has a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Officers familiar with the propaganda program were cited as saying that one goal was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin.

"Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," a U.S. military briefing document from 2004 stated, the Post reported.

(Additional reporting by Joanne Allen in Washington)

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0900890_pf.html

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.

The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.

Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."

Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."

U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it.

"When we provided stuff, it was all in Arabic," and aimed at the Iraqi and Arab media, said another military officer familiar with the program, who spoke on background because he is not supposed to speak to reporters.

But this officer said that the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his profile in the American press's view."

With satellite television, e-mail and the Internet, it is impossible to prevent some carryover from propaganda campaigns overseas into the U.S. media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the U.S. Special Operations Command that focuses on "trans-regional" media issues. Such carryover is "not blowback, it's bleed-over," he said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment."

The Zarqawi program was not related to another effort, led by the Lincoln Group, a U.S. consulting firm, to place pro-U.S. articles in Iraq newspapers, according to the officer familiar with the program who spoke on background.

It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.

The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.

One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

In 2003 and 2004, he coordinated public affairs, information operations and psychological operations in Iraq -- though he said in an interview the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run the psychological operations and could not speak for them.

Kimmitt said, "There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience."

A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers familiar with the program.

"Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts.

Officials said one indication that the campaign worked is that over the past several months, there have been reports that Iraqi tribal insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists, especially in the culturally conservative province of Anbar. "What we're finding is indeed the people of al-Anbar -- Fallujah and Ramadi, specifically -- have decided to turn against terrorists and foreign fighters," Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said in February.

Al Qaeda poses a threat to Pakistan, says US official
[ Friday, April 14, 2006 09:23:22 amIANS ]
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1489895.cms

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WASHINGTON: The United States has refused to confirm reports of a senior Al Qaeda operative being killed in Pakistan.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack deferred questions on the subject to Islamabad saying that it was in a "best position" to offer any comment on the matter. The Al Qaeda operative suspected to be killed was wanted in the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya.

"I am not in a position to confirm the reports for you one way or the other. I know there is a high-ranking Pakistani official who spoke to the matter. I think that they are probably in the best position to offer any comment on the matter", McCormack said yesterday.

"Certainly, fighting Al Qaeda is an important priority for President Musharraf. We believe that in President Musharraf, we have a good partner in fighting the war on terrorism, fighting Al Qaeda. It's not only important in the global fight against terrorism, but Al-Qaeda presents a threat to Pakistan itself, so they devote quite a few resources to that fight", he added.

"In terms of an individual wanted in connection with the embassy bombing, we want to see justice be done. We want to see individuals held to account for what they have done." McCormack said.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...5-23109,00.html

Al-Qaeda to 'move fight' to Saudi Arabia
From correspondents in Paris
April 22, 2006
A SUSPECTED senior Al-Qaeda operative who escaped from a US airbase in Afghanistan last July called on members overnight in a video statement to move to fight in Saudi Arabia, predicting they would soon overcome US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"You must have a precise programme in mind: we will soon conquer America (the United States) in Afghanistan and Iraq. We must then head directly towards the peninsula of Mahomet (Saudi Arabia)," Saudi Mohammad al-Qahtani, said in the video statement released on the internet.

"We will have acquired great military experience...We call on our brothers who are fighting at the moment in the peninsula of Mahomet to continue their fight. We will soon be there," he said.

Al-Qahtani was one of four Al-Qaeda members who escaped from the US Bagram airbase last July.

The escape of the four men, described by the US army as "dangerous combatants", is a source of embarrassment at the main US base in Afghanistan.

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews....TY-BINLADEN.xml


Bin Laden says West waging war on Islam
Sun Apr 23, 2006 9:34 AM ET



By Yara Bayoumy

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said the West's shunning of the Hamas-led Palestinian government showed it was waging a "Crusader-Zionist war" on Muslims, according to an audiotape attributed to him and aired on Sunday.

People in the West share responsibility for their countries' "war against Islam", said the speaker, who sounded like bin Laden, on the tape broadcast on Al Jazeera television.

The Saudi-born militant said the Darfur crisis in western Sudan and Western efforts to isolate the Palestinian government since Hamas won January elections were part of this campaign.

"Their rejection of Hamas affirms that it is a Crusader-Zionist war against Muslims," bin Laden said.

In the brief excerpts of the tape that Al Jazeera aired, he did not repeat his assertion in an audiotape issued in January that al Qaeda was preparing attacks in the United States but was open to a conditional truce with Americans.

But his remarks about the complicity of Westerners in the policies of their governments appeared to be an argument that they were fair game for revenge attacks by militants.

"The war is a responsibility shared between the people and the governments. The war goes on and the people are renewing their allegiance to its rulers and masters," bin Laden said.

"They send their sons to armies to fight us and they continue their financial and moral support while our countries are burned and our houses are bombed and our people are killed."

The Qaeda leader, on the run since the U.S. campaign to oust Afghanistan's Taliban government in 2001 after the September 11 attacks, said Western leaders had ignored his truce offers.

"They do not want a truce unless it is from our side only ... they insist on continuing their Crusader campaign against our nation and to loot our wealth," bin Laden said.

He urged militants to prepare for a long struggle in Darfur. The United States is pressing for U.N. sanctions against the Sudanese government for its part in the conflict.

"I call on mujahideen and their supporters in Sudan ... and the (Arabian) Peninsula to prepare all that is necessary to wage a long-term war against the Crusaders in western Sudan," bin Laden said, accusing the West of seeking to divide Sudan.

An Islamist government in Khartoum hosted bin Laden for several years in the 1990s.

The Darfur conflict erupted in 2003 when mostly non-Arab tribes revolted, accusing the Arab-led government of neglect.

Khartoum retaliated by arming mainly Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, who began a campaign of murder, rape and plunder that drove more than 2 million villagers into squalid camps in Darfur and in neighboring Chad. Khartoum denies responsibility.

Bin Laden also called for boycotting the United States and European countries over the controversial cartoons lampooning Islam's Prophet Mohammad first published by a Danish newspaper.

"Bin Laden urged in his tape that solidarity for the Prophet ... should continue by widening the boycott to include the United States and European nations that supported Denmark," Al Jazeera said.

"He also demanded that those who offended the Prophet ... be hand over for trial to al Qaeda," it said.

Bin Laden voice recording: West waging crusade against Islam Monsters and Critics.com
Cairo - In a new voice recording aired Sunday by pan-Arab channel al-Jazeera, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said that the West was waging a crusade against Islam, which their boycott of Hamas and their intervention in Sudan proved. 'Their [the West's] boycott of Hamas confirmed that it is a crusade Zionist war against Muslims,' bin Laden said. The United States and European Union recently halted aid to the radical Hamas movement, which won a resounding victory in Palestinian elections, demanding the group renounce violence and recognize Israel. In reference to Sudan, bin Laden criticized US support for the autonomy of the south of the country and the Sudanese government's signing of a peace treaty. '(Sudanese President Omar) Beshir and (US President George W) Bush should know that this treaty is not worth the value of the ink in which it was written and for us, the treaty is not at all binding,' bin Laden said. He accused the US of exploiting the disputes between the tribes in Sudan's western province of Darfur to fuel the conflict as a pretext for sending what he called a 'crusade army' to seize oil there. 'I call on the mujahedin in Sudan and its neighbours especially the Arab peninsula to prepare all they need to engage in a long-term war against the crusade thieves in Western Sudan,' bin Laden added. This was the first appearance of bin Laden in the Arab media since al-Jazeera aired a voice recording on January 19 in which the al- Qaeda leader offered the West an armistice. In Sunday's recording, bin Laden said that the rejection by the West of his armistice was proof that the West opposed dialogue. The West was insisting on continuing a crusade war against 'our nation.' 'The politicians of the West do not want dialogue except for the sake of dialogue to drag us on, for them to gain more time. They want an armistice that is observed only by us,' bin Laden said.
Bin Laden says West waging war on Islam Reuters.uk
Purported bin Laden tape describes 'war on Islam' International Herald Tribune
Ha'aretz - Olberlin - The Age - Aljazeera.net - all 329 related »

Bin Laden says West waging war on Islam Yahoo! New
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said the West's shunning of the Hamas-led Palestinian government showed it was waging a "Crusader-Zionist war" on Muslims, according to an audiotape attributed to him and aired on Sunday. People in the West share responsibility for their countries' "war against Islam," said the speaker, who sounded like bin Laden, on the tape broadcast on Al Jazeera television. The Saudi-born militant said the Darfur crisis in western Sudan and Western efforts to isolate the Palestinian government since Hamas won January elections were part of this campaign. "Their rejection of Hamas affirms that it is a Crusader-Zionist war against Muslims," bin Laden said. In the brief excerpts of the tape that Al Jazeera aired, he did not repeat his assertion in an audiotape issued in January that al Qaeda was preparing attacks in the United States but was open to a conditional truce with Americans. But his remarks about the complicity of Westerners in the policies of their governments appeared to be an argument that they were fair game for revenge attacks by militants. "The war is a responsibility shared between the people and the governments. The war goes on and the people are renewing their allegiance to its rulers and masters," bin Laden said. "They send their sons to armies to fight us and they continue their financial and moral support while our countries are burned and our houses are bombed and our people are killed." The Qaeda leader, on the run since the U.S. campaign to oust Afghanistan's Taliban government in 2001 after the September 11 attacks, said Western leaders had ignored his truce offers. "They do not want a truce unless it is from our side only ... they insist on continuing their Crusader campaign against our nation and to loot our wealth," bin Laden said. He urged militants to prepare for a long struggle in Darfur. The United States is pressing for U.N. sanctions against the Sudanese government for its part in the conflict. "I call on mujahideen and their supporters in Sudan ... and the (Arabian) Peninsula to prepare all that is necessary to wage a long-term war against the Crusaders in western Sudan," bin Laden said, accusing the West of seeking to divide Sudan. An Islamist government in Khartoum hosted bin Laden for several years in the 1990s. The Darfur conflict erupted in 2003 when mostly non-Arab tribes revolted, accusing the Arab-led government of neglect. Khartoum retaliated by arming mainly Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, who began a campaign of murder, rape and plunder that drove more than 2 million villagers into squalid camps in Darfur and in neighboring Chad. Khartoum denies responsibility. Bin Laden also called for boycotting the United States and European countries over the controversial cartoons lampooning Islam's Prophet Mohammad first published by a Danish newspaper. "Bin Laden urged in his tape that solidarity for the Prophet ... should continue by widening the boycott to include the United States and European nations that supported Denmark," Al Jazeera said. "He also demanded that those who offended the Prophet ... be hand over for trial to al Qaeda," it said.
By Yara Bayoumy

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/04/23/...tape/index.html

Purported bin Laden tape denounces West's response to Hamas
Message calls for supporters to fight peacekeepers in Sudan

Sunday, April 23, 2006; Posted: 11:52 p.m. EDT (03:52 GMT)


The speaker, believed to be Osama bin Laden, called on Muslims to "prepare for a long war" in Sudan.

A newly broadcast audiotape believed to be from Osama bin Laden slams the West for cutting off funds to the Palestinian Hamas-led government and calls on al Qaeda followers to fight a proposed international force in Sudan.

In the tape, aired Sunday in part on Arabic-language TV network Al-Jazeera, the speaker repeatedly blasts a "crusader-Zionist war" against Islam, citing other activities in Chechnya and Somalia.

Al-Jazeera, which is based in Qatar, said the new tape is from bin Laden. And White House spokesman Scott McClellan said U.S. officials believe it is bin Laden's voice. (Watch new anger at U.S. citizens from the taped speaker -- 2:50)

"The intelligence community has informed the president that they believe this is authentic," he said.

"The al Qaeda leadership is on the run and under a lot of pressure," he said. "We are advancing, they are on the run, and we won't let up. We will prevail and it's important to use all tools at our disposal." (CNN analyst Peter Bergen: Bin Laden wants to show he's still influential -- 5:21)

On the tape, bin Laden says "the opposition to the Hamas government is proof of the crusade against Muslims."

Bin Laden and other al Qaeda figures use the term "crusaders" to refer to Christians.

He also says on the new tape that any such war "is the joint responsibility of the people and the government."

Responding to the tape, Hamas spokesman Sam Abu Zuhri said Hamas has "a different ideology" than that of al Qaeda.

The remarks about the halting of funds suggest the tape is relatively recent. The United States and some other Western nations have officially stopped contributions to the Palestinian government since Hamas assumed power March 30. Humanitarian aid is instead donated through nongovernmental organizations.

The militant wing of Hamas has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in recent years, killing many civilians. Israel and the U.S. State Department consider Hamas a terrorist organization, though it also operates an extensive social services network in the territories.

The United States and European Union have called on the Hamas-led government to end terrorist attacks and recognize Israel's right to exist.

Tape calls for Sudan war
On the tape, bin Laden slammed U.S. and British efforts and their past actions in Sudan, where bin Laden lived in the mid-1990s before being expelled by the Sudanese government.

"I call on the mujahedeen [Islamic fighters] and their supporters, especially in Sudan and the Arabian peninsula, to prepare for a long war against the crusaders and plunderers in western Sudan. Our goal is not defending the Khartoum government but [to] defend Islam, its land and its people," the speaker said.

A civil war has destroyed much of western Sudan and left hundreds of thousands dead. Arab militias have carried out torture, widespread killings and rapes, particularly in the nation's Darfur region.

The United States and many human rights groups have declared a "genocide" in the region, although the United Nations stopped short of that term. Sudan denies a genocide and widespread accusations that the militias have government backing.

A U.N. peacekeeping force is set to take over efforts from the African Union in September.

Al-Jazeera reported that on the tape, bin Laden also refers to the controversy over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, saying, "I am urging Muslims to boycott the products of Western countries, including the United States, which backed Denmark" after the cartoons were published by a Danish newspaper.

This section of the tape was not played on Al-Jazeera, however.

No recent appearances on video
Unlike recent messages, the tape attributed to bin Laden says he holds American and Western citizens -- not just their governments -- responsible for conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Any war is the joint responsibility of the people and the government," the tape says.

The most recent previous audiotape attributed to bin Laden was heard in January. In it, the speaker says plans for terror attacks are under way -- and also offers a "long-term truce."

"The war against America and its allies will not be confined to Iraq," the voice on the January tape says, adding that "Iraq has become a magnet for attracting and training talented fighters." (Full story)

"It's only a matter of time," the voice says, referring to attacks. "They are in the planning stages, and you will see them in the heart of your land as soon as the planning is complete."

The last videotaped message from bin Laden was seen just before the U.S. presidential election in 2004. That was his first known videotaped message in three years.

Analysts have speculated on the reasons that only audiotapes have been released since then. Bin Laden has been rumored to have faced health troubles or to have been wounded in an attack, although nothing conclusive has been found.

He is believed to be hiding somewhere in the mountainous region of the Pakistani-Afghan border. The United States has posted a $25 million reward for his capture.

Several Democratic U.S. lawmakers on Sunday pointed to the tape as a sign that the Bush administration has wasted efforts in Iraq instead of adequately cracking down on al Qaeda. (Full story)

CNN's Caroline Faraj, Octavia Nasr, Nic Robertson and Henry Schuster contributed to this report.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-04...ladentape_x.htm

Bin Laden accuses West of waging war on Islam
Updated 4/24/2006 2:00 AM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this

The message from Osama bin Laden called for a global Muslim boycott of American goods.

The Associated Press
CAIRO — Osama bin Laden accused the United States and Europe in an audiotape broadcast Sunday of supporting a "Zionist" war on Islam by cutting off funds to the Hamas-led Palestinian government.
The al-Qaeda leader's message, broadcast on Al-Jazeera television, was his first in three months.

Bin Laden cited the West's decision to cut off aid to the Hamas-led government because it refuses to renounce violence or recognize Israel. The U.S. government and the European Union say Hamas is a terrorist group.

"The blockade which the West is imposing on the government of Hamas proves that there is a Zionist, crusaders' war on Islam," bin Laden said.

President Bush was told about the tape Sunday morning. The intelligence community has informed the White House it believes the tape is authentic, said Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan.

"The al-Qaeda leadership is on the run and under a lot of pressure," McClellan said at a Marine base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., where Bush was having lunch with military families. "We are on the advance. They are on the run."

Al-Qaeda has no known direct links to Hamas. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri distanced the group from bin Laden, declaring that "the ideology of Hamas is totally different from the ideology of Sheik bin Laden."

Both groups, however, call for the destruction of the Jewish state. In addition, Israel has indicted two West Bank terrorists for alleged al-Qaeda membership.

Israeli government spokesman Raanan Gissin said it appeared bin Laden decided to issue the verbal assault to deflect growing Arab animosity toward al-Qaeda.

In December, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the bombings of Jordan hotels that killed many Arabs.

Bin Laden "has been criticized for the destruction and carnage he's causing the Muslim nation. He's looking for another justification," Gissin said. "Criticizing Israel sounds more politically correct."

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said the tape was another attempt by bin Laden to gain attention for his cause. "He wants ... to get attention that he still is a player," Khalilzad said on CNN's Late Edition.

Bin Laden may be hiding in the mountains on Pakistan's side of its long border with Afghanistan, the Pentagon has said.

In the broadcast Sunday, bin Laden also called for a global Muslim boycott of U.S. goods similar to the recent ban on Danish products after the publication of caricatures of Islam's prophet Mohammed condemned by Muslim clerics.

Also Sunday, Pakistani Information Minister Rashid Ahmed said a Syrian terrorist killed near the Afghan border was a close aide of al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri. Marwan Hadid al-Suri, 38, was killed Thursday in a shootout.

Posted 4/23/2006 8:34 AM ET
Updated 4/24/2006 2:00 AM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=710...id=ahNaSDJmX7VE

Bin Laden Accuses West of Aiming to Steal Oil in Sudan's Darfur
April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden accused the West of seeking to steal oil in Sudan's Darfur region in an audiotape attributed to him that was broadcast on the satellite television station al-Jazeera.

Bin Laden said Muslim fighters should be prepared to fight ``crusaders'' in the west of Sudan and accused the U.S. of pressuring the Sudanese government to sign an ``unjust'' accord last year that ended a 21-year civil war.

Sudan is sub-Saharan Africa's third-biggest oil exporter. The United Nations has 9,000 troops in Sudan to monitor a January 2005 peace accord that ended a 21-year civil war between the Islamic north and the Christian and animist south.

``They are waging a war between the sons of the tribes in Darfur in preparation for sending troops and stealing the oil of western Sudan. I urge the mujahadeen and their followers to do all they must to fight against the thieves,'' bin Laden said.

Bin Laden also called for a boycott of goods from western countries, including the U.S., which he said supported Denmark in the row about cartoons depicting Islam's prophet Muhammad, and said the international isolation of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government proves there is a crusade against Islam.

He also warned citizens of Western countries that ``war is a joint responsibility between the people and their government,'' saying, ``Nobody is showing any concern for the fact that our countries are being burned, our houses shelled, and our people killed.''

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is analyzing the recording to determine its authenticity, a U.S. intelligence official told Bloomberg News.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HD22Ak03.html
Al-Qaeda finds its missing link in Iran
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The US-led "war on terror" is entering a critical phase, with the al-Qaeda leadership being given a chance to revitalize its cause now that Iran is in the US crosshairs over its nuclear program.

"Tehran has taken over the central stage by challenging American hegemony," Hamid Gul told Asia Times Online. "Tehran is today's inspiration force. It charms the Arab youths on the streets. The Arab rulers are terrified of this development, and this is the reason they are coming to Pakistan one after another."

Gul is a former corps commander of the Pakistani army and ex-director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence. Persian-speaking Gul is reckoned as one of the architects of the jihadi
movements that finally turned global and made Afghanistan their base in the mid- and late 1990s when the Taliban ruled.

Gul was referring to visits to Pakistan by Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salah. Islamabad is a US outpost in the "war on terror" that the two prominent Arab leaders visited, while at least one more is scheduled in coming weeks.

Contacts close to the echelons of power in Pakistan's military headquarters, Rawalpindi, tell Asia Times Online that judging from the pattern of talks, all of the Muslim countries that side with the United States anticipate a US attack on Iran around October.

And, according to these contacts, their strategy is to consolidate opinion in the Organization of Islamic Conferences to be prepared. This does not mean stopping the attack, but being ready for the fallout in the Middle East and beyond.

"Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's anti-American calls have become the voice of today's Arab youths. They see in him a hero, and it has shaken the foundations of pro-American dictators and monarchs," Gul explained.

"They [Arab rulers] are anxious and restive. They are seeing their doomsday started. Since Pakistan and Arab rulers operate under the US umbrella, they are basically joining their heads together to contain the Iranian threat.

"The way Iran has spun its web in the region, all strategic levers are coming into Tehran's hands. The Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan led by [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar is part of the Islamic movement and already close to Iran, but it is only a matter of time when Taliban-related movements will resolve all differences with Iran and join hands with Tehran," Gul said.

Historically, Arabs have viewed Iran with hostility, and there are some who are skeptical whether Iran will continue in its current role as anti-US champion should back-channel diplomacy, especially involving Russia and China, lead to a resolution of the crisis over its nuclear program.

Within two weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency will give a final report to the United Nations Security Council, the results of which could determine whether or not sanctions are imposed on Iran.

Critics argue that should the crisis be defused, Iran will back down from its present rhetoric and leave all radicals in the lurch. After all, they argue, Tehran has indirectly facilitated US interests in the region, be they in Afghanistan or Iraq.

"I don't agree with this notion," Gul said dismissively. "Iran raised funds for Hamas at a time when the whole Muslim world was sympathetic with Hamas but did not dare to openly support them. Iran [this week] pledged [US]$50 million.

"At the same time, it is untrue that Iran supported US designs in the region. Instead, it cleverly played its cards and now it is evident that it has trapped the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Gul.

Al-Qaeda's grand design
Iran's becoming a rallying point for anti-US sentiment in the Muslim world fits well with al-Qaeda. Asia Times Online has already outlined a pivotal debate in al-Qaeda on two major issues - the question of a base and that of a unified command structure (see Al-Qaeda goes back to base, November 4, 2005).

Integral to the first issue was whether al-Qaeda should get rid of its shadowy image and fight in the open. This would involve the establishment of an Islamic state (base) from which calls for jihad could be issued and jihadi forces prepared.

Al-Qaeda has achieved this target in the Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan on the Afghan border by setting up a virtual independent state, which is being expanded into South Waziristan and many towns in Afghanistan, in Kunar, Paktia, Khost, Helmand and Zabul provinces (see Revolution in the Pakistani mountains, March 23).

But although the Afghan resistance is linked with the Iraqi resistance and they have started open battles against US-led forces in Afghanistan, the question of a unified command that would control resistance movements whether they be in Iraq, Palestine or Afghanistan is still unanswered.

This is where Iran could now fit in, by evolving from an inspirational anti-US model to taking a lead role in orchestrating resistance movements, in collaboration with al-Qaeda.

For radical Islamists, the situation is a major turnaround for their cause of pan-Islamicism and one that could even resolve 1,400 years of historical, ideological and political differences in the Muslim world.

"The Islamic Revolution of Iran [1979] was in fact a victory of all Islamic movements which were striving to establish one Islamic role model in the world so that it would be an inspirational force and would convince the masses that the Islamic system of life was still workable after 1,400 years," Muslim intellectual Shahnawaz Farooqui explained to Asia Times Online.

Shahnawaz is a young Pakistan-based Muslim intellectual, a teacher, writer and a poet. His main work is in the field of the interpretation of Muslim history and Muslim ideologies. His views are often aired in the Iranian media.

"The Iranian revolution was in fact a complete revolution under the leadership of imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini. It was above any sectarian bounds. After the revolution, Khomeini announced that the base of Shi'ite-Sunni differences was historical rather than theological.

"Shi'ites believe that Ali deserved to be the first Muslim caliph, and they rejected all three before Ali and believe Ali is the first caliph. Sunnis believe that the first three caliphs, Bakr, Omar and Osman, are all [the] righteous [ones] and that Ali was the fourth caliph. Imam Khomeini addressed this issue and called it historical differences which had no connection with basic Islamic theology, and if Shi'ites gave up their historical point of view on the issue of the caliphate, it would make no difference, but on the other hand it would wipe out Shi'ite-Sunni differences once and for all," Shahnawaz maintained.

"Unfortunately, imam Khomeini could not convince anybody - neither his internal circles of clerics nor Al-Howza [the supreme Shi'ite religious council in Iraq] as no one among the Shi'ites was ready to give up their historical position on the question of the caliphate.

"However, the situation turned bad after the demise of Khomeini and it was felt that during the period of [ex-president Hashemi] Rafsanjani and [former president Mohammed] Khatami the Iranian revolution was somewhere lost.

"However, the victory of President Ahmadinejad has once again revived the very spirit of the Iranian revolution, and once again all Islamic movements, whether it is the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-i-Islami, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other, are joining hands with Tehran," said Shahnawaz.

"To me, President Ahmadinejad has redeemed the Iranian Islamic revolution with all its ideological legacies," Shahnawaz added.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1145794301...e_whats_news_us
In Tape Shown on Arab Network,
Bin Laden Makes New Statement

A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
April 23, 2006 10:58 a.m.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Osama bin Laden issued ominous new threats in an audiotape broadcast Sunday, purportedly saying the West was at war with Islam and calling on his followers to go to Sudan to fight a proposed United Nations force in Darfur.

In his first new message in three months, Mr. bin Laden said the West's decision to cut off funds to the Palestinians because their Hamas leaders refuse to recognize Israel proved that the U.S. and Europe were conducting "a Zionist crusader war on Islam."


"The blockade which the West is imposing on the government of Hamas proves that there is a Zionist crusader war on Islam," said the speaker on the tape broadcast by the al Jazeera network.

"I say that this war is the joint responsibility of the people and the governments. While the war continues, the people renew their allegiance to their rulers and politicians and continue to send their sons to our countries to fight us."

In response, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said "the ideology of Hamas is totally different from the ideology of Sheik bin Laden." But he also added that the "international siege on the Palestinian people" would create tension in the Arab and Islamic world. "It's natural that this tension is going to create an impression that there is a Western-Israeli alliance working against the Palestinians," Mr. Abu Zuhri said, adding that Hamas is interested in having good relations with the West.

In the tape Mr. bin Laden also addressed the conflict in Sudan, where he was based before being expelled under threats from the U.S. He then moved to Afghanistan and is believed to be hiding out in the rugged mountains on the Pakistani side of their common border.

Negotiators are trying to broker a peace deal between warring factions in Darfur by an April 30 deadline. "I call on mujahedeen and their supporters, especially in Sudan and the Arab peninsula, to prepare for long war again the crusader plunderers in Western Sudan. Our goal is not defending the Khartoum government but to defend Islam, its land and its people," Mr. bin Laden purportedly said. The authenticity of the tape couldn't immediately be verified.

The voice on the tape sounded strong and resembled that on previous recordings attributed to Mr. bin Laden. There was no way to independently verify the authenticity of the tape. "We are aware of the tape and a technical analysis of the recording is being conducted," said a U.S. intelligence official speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) said the emergence of a new tape reflects the fundamental problems that the Bush administration faces in the fight against terrorism, including an insufficient effort to commit U.S. troops.

"It underscores the failure of this administration to capture him," Mr. Kerry said on ABC's "This Week."

In Washington, U.S. intelligence officials said Mr. bin Laden is separated from his top deputy and, in a sign he has to be careful about whom he trusts, surrounded by fellow Arabs. His No. 2, Ayman al Zawahri, is hiding in a more settled area along the border, also surrounded by al Qaeda operatives from Egypt, the officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

If verified, the new tape would be the first message from Mr. bin Laden since Jan. 19, which had followed a year of public silence. That tape was also released to al Jazeera, which aired it, marking the first time the al Qaeda leader addressed the world since December 2004, when he called for the boycott of Iraqi elections and endorsed the commander of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

In the January message, Mr. bin Laden also offered to forge a truce with the U.S. if it agrees to end its military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and withdraw support for Israel's foreign policy.

Write to the Online Journal's editors at newseditors@wsj.com

Prophet cartoon offenders must be killed: bin Laden Yahoo! News
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called for people who ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad to be killed, weighing into the furor that erupted after a Danish newspaper ran cartoons lampooning Islam's holy messenger. "Heretics and atheists, who denigrate religion and transgress against God and His Prophet, will not stop their enmity toward Islam except by being killed," the Saudi-born militant said. Bin Laden's remarks were part of an audio tape which Al Jazeera television aired excerpts from on Sunday. The television station later published a full transcript on its Web site. The Doha-based satellite television channel had aired excerpts of the tape in which bin Laden accused the West of waging a "Crusader-Zionist" war against Islam, citing the isolation of the Hamas-led Palestinian government and the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region as examples. Anger over the cartoons, which a Danish newspaper first published last year, outraged Muslims who consider drawings of the Prophet to be blasphemous. The caricatures, which were reprinted in several Arab and European newspapers, sparked violent protests in which more than 50 people were killed. Consumers in Muslim countries have also boycotted Danish goods. Denmark's government has refused to apologize for the cartoons, saying it cannot say sorry on behalf of a free and independent media and that freedom of speech is sacred. "The insistence of the Danish government to refrain from apologizing and its refusal to punish the criminals and take action to prevent this crime from being repeated... shows that the notions of freedom of speech have no roots, especially when it comes to Muslims," bin Laden said in the tape.

He's Still Been Laying Low
OSAMA SUSPECTED OF HIDING ON AFGHAN BORDER
Associated Press

Osama bin Laden is hiding in a remote tribal area along Afghanistan's 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, separated from his top deputy and, in a sign he has to be careful about whom he trusts, surrounded by fellow Arabs. His No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, is hiding in a more settled area along the border, surrounded by al-Qaida operatives of his Egyptian nationality, according to U.S. intelligence officials familiar with his pursuit.

http://public.findlaw.com/pnews/news/ap/o/...701f5654a4.html

Marc Lynch. "Al-Qaeda's Media Strategies," The National Interest, Spring 2006, pp. 50-56. Lynch examines Al-Qaeda's relationship with Arab media, Bin Laden and Zawarhiri's media strategies, the migration of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other jihadists from satellite TV to the Internet, and Arab media coverage of Bin Laden's videos and the Iraqi insurgency. He finds that U.S. public diplomacy has improved under Karen Hughes, but the USG's Al-Hurra satellite television station, "a costly white elephant with few viewers is disappearing with hardly a trace in the Arab media environment." Overall, the U.S. needs a better understanding of "real arguments Arabs are having among themselves." Lynch, a professor of political science at Williams College, is the author of Voices of the New Arab Public (2006).

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HD25Df01.html
Fighting talk from Osama and the Taliban
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The latest Osama bin Laden message on Sunday coincides with the deadliest phase of the spring offensive in Afghanistan, which began on Friday when the Taliban-led insurgency launched fighters in various provinces under a unified strategy.

In an audio tape allegedly of bin Laden broadcast on Sunday by Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite television network based in Qatar, the al-Qaeda leader accused average Westerners "of supporting a war on Islam" and urged his followers to go to Sudan - his former base - to fight a proposed United Nations peacekeeping force. Some 300,000 African villagers have been killed in Darfur in attacks by Arab fighters backed by Khartoum.

The Taliban offensive involved a number of groups ranging from 100-200 fighters each launched simultaneously in about two dozen places along the porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the main focus on the Nooristan, Ghazni, Khost, Paktia and Paktika regions.

Contacts of Asia Times Online claim that the attacks will continue on a daily basis involving many hundreds of Taliban entering Afghanistan. The fighters are primed to carry out not only hit-and-run operations, as in the past, but also to engage in sustained battles from bases they will establish with the consent of the local population.

In their most successful attack, a roadside bomb on Saturday killed four Canadian soldiers traveling in an armored vehicle in a convoy in Gomboth, a village about 40 kilometers north of Kandahar, a former Taliban stronghold. US firms as well as pro-government clerics were also targeted. On Monday, three Taliban fighters and one policeman died in a gun battle between Taliban fighters and security forces in the province of Ghazni.

Over the past year, the Taliban have steadily cemented their support among the general population, capitalizing on inflammatory issues such as the alleged desecration of the Holy Koran by US interrogators, brothels in Kabul, the burning of a Taliban body, and cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. This has brought unanimity among different tribes to support the anti-US movement and paved the way for the Taliban to pitch sustained battles in open areas against US-led forces.

The overall objective of the Taliban is that by winter they will have taken control of most of rural Afghanistan.

The strategy
The latest Taliban strategy could be defined as a "netwar", as in the operations of networks, but the leadership sitting in the mountains would outline the strategy as being identical to that of the mujahideen against the Soviets in 1988, when, for the first time, the mujahideen gained complete control over the areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and over villages around the major cities.

At this point, almost 10 years after the Soviet invasion, the mujahideen were able to wage pitched and sustained battles from their bunkers, and crucially they had a stream of fresh recruits to tap, as well as money and arms.

In terms of personnel, it is estimated that in the North and South Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan the Taliban have enough supporters to draw on to fight for a year - about 40,000 men. In North Waziristan alone there are about 27,000.

There are indications of an equally strong presence of Taliban fighters in the other five tribal agencies, beside various other districts in Pakistan.

In a figure often quoted by Pakistani intelligence, as many as 500,000 men visited Afghanistan during the Taliban rule from 1996-2001. Most of them received military training, while all of them had ideological inspiration. About 50,000 of these people are believed to be still active as members of jihadi organizations. Obviously, this is a large pool from which the Taliban could draw.

In the early to mid-1990s, Pakistan's madrassas (seminaries) were the major source of foot soldiers in the Taliban-led movement, which triumphed over bickering mujahideen factions and seized power. This was done with the tacit approval of the Pakistani establishment.

Under US pressure, as Pakistan sides with the United States in the "war on terror", a number of checks and balances have been placed on the madrassas. However, there remains a zeal among religiously motivated youths, especially from Punjab's rural areas, to join hands with the Taliban-led resistance. They know very well where to go and whom to contact to get into Afghanistan.

The five years of Taliban rule was a major inspirational force for these youths, and now there is no need, as in the past, for the Pakistani establishment to encourage them to strengthen the Taliban - the Taliban's ideology itself is a strong motivating force.

At the same time, al-Qaeda and the Taliban have focused on sharpening the divide between the West and Islam - as in bin Laden's latest tape, where he reminds the Muslim world that by withdrawing funds from the Hamas-led government in Palestine, the West is showing its grudge against Islam in general. In this way, al-Qaeda attracts both human and material resources for its war against the West.

In terms of the Taliban-led insurgency, its financial sources remain highly secretive. It is believed to be supported by various dubious sources, including the opium trade, yet observers point out that to finance an operation of the present scale for several months could only be done by states.

This is a universal law of resistance movements: once they gain a certain critical mass, they generate more support from regional players. The Taliban are fast approaching that position.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

US seeks death penalty for Moussaoui Yahoo! News
A U.S. jury began deliberating Zacarias Moussaoui's fate on Monday after prosecutors requested the death penalty for the September 11 conspirator and the defense implored jurors to send him to prison for life so he would not become a martyr. The only U.S. case related to the deadly hijacked airliner attacks went to the jury after District Judge Leonie Brinkema gave them roughly an hour of instructions. In closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin asked the jury to decide to execute Moussaoui, who said he would have participated in the September 11 attacks if he had not been arrested the previous month on immigration charges. "Let me be blunt, ladies and gentlemen," said Raskin. "There is no place on this good Earth for Zacarias Moussaoui." But one of the court-appointed defense lawyers, Gerald Zerkin, urged the jury to instead make a decision that "requires some courage" and sentence Moussaoui to life in prison. "He wants you to sentence him to death. He came to America to die in jihad and you are his last chance," Zerkin said. "He clearly sees that as his last way to martyrdom." The jury will just decide the sentence since Moussaoui has pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts relating the September 11 plot. Moussaoui, 37, sat in the courtroom staring at the 12-member jury during most of closing proceedings. But as he left for a morning break, Moussaoui said, "You'll never get me, America. Never ever." After the jury left to begin deliberating in the midafternoon, Brinkema lauded the attorneys and noted that the defense lawyers -- with whom Moussaoui will not speak -- had an "impossible client." "There never has been a defendant as difficult as this one," said Brinkema.

'SACRIFICIAL LAMB'
Prosecutors earlier dismissed defense claims that Moussaoui was mentally ill and that he sought martyrdom. Raskin said Moussaoui was "elated that al Qaeda murdered 2,972 innocent people on September 11." "Enough is enough," Raskin said. "It is time to put an end to his hatred and venom. It is time to sentence Zacarias Moussaoui to death." The panel of nine men and three women must be unanimous in order to sentence Moussaoui to death. The same jury already decided Moussaoui was eligible for the death penalty. Zerkin said the U.S. government was offering up Moussaoui as a "sacrificial lamb." "The government opts for retribution against the only person it has brought to trial in relation to 9/11," the lawyer said in describing Moussaoui as an inept al Qaeda operative. The jury is considering evidence presented during two weeks of testimony by survivors and family members of victims of the deadly hijackings that killed about 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon outside Washington not far from the federal courthouse. Prosecutors showed gruesome pictures of charred bodies and a video clip of people jumping from New York's World Trade Center during their closing arguments. Zerkin said the government was trying to assuage the families' pain with Moussaoui. "If the people who testified ... need the death of Mr. Moussaoui to recover, it can only be because the government has held that out for them," he said. "The government has held out the prospect of Mr. Moussaoui's execution as being the cure." Moussaoui testified twice in the trial. He contradicted previous statements by saying he was meant to pilot a fifth plane into the White House as part of the hijacking plot, though the FBI testified it had no information to support that claim. The 37-year-old French citizen also said he wished more Americans could have suffered in the attacks.
By Deborah Charles

Jury Takes Up Moussaoui's Fate Yahoo! News
Zacarias Moussaoui's fate was placed Monday afternoon in the hands of a jury that will decide whether he is executed for his part in the deaths of Sept. 11, 2001. Jurors opened deliberations at 2:26 p.m. EDT, after final pleadings from the prosecution to "put an end to his hatred and venom" by opting for execution, and from the defense to spare him the martyr's death he seeks and send him to prison for life instead. The jury decided in 15 hours of deliberations over four days earlier this month that Moussaoui, 37, the only man charged in this country in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was responsible for deaths that day even though he was in jail. That qualified him for the death penalty. The question now before jurors is whether he deserves it. Moussaoui had been unrepentant throughout a legal drama that included a virtually unprecedented Internet-era multimedia presentation that recreated for the jury the last half-hour on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11 as passengers overwhelmed hijackers, and gripping first-person accounts of suffering. Moussaoui has publicly relished the results of the attacks, mocked victims and their families, insulted his lawyers and yet insisted he did not want to die. During a recess in closing arguments, Moussaoui said: "Our children will carry on the fight." As he left the courtroom, he raised his hands in the air, smiling, and clapped as if he'd finished watching a performance. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema commended both sides for their handling of the difficult case and singled out the burden of the defense lawyers in having to represent someone who rejected them at every turn. "There never has been a defendant as difficult as this one," she said, "who did everything he could to undermine your efforts." After the jury left, defense lawyers tried once more to have the death penalty stricken from the case, based on their inability to put direct questions to witnesses held elsewhere as enemy combatants. But Brinkema dismissed that motion, agreeing with the prosecution that the issue had already been decided by an appeals court. Prosecutor David Raskin urged the jurors to reject defense arguments that Moussaoui is mentally ill and to brush off any hesitation that they would be giving him what he wants by deciding on execution. "He wants you to think
Osama bin Laden will be mad at us," Raskin said. "Do you think Osama bin Laden gives a damn about what happens here? ... That is a joke." Raskin said: "It is time to put an end to his hatred and venom." The prosecutor pointed out how Moussaoui rejoiced in the deadly outcome of the attacks. "The defendant rejoices in all that pain," he said. "He loved it because he was responsible for it. He loved it because it meant to him, mission accomplished." Defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin countered that Moussaoui's contempt for the victims and the trial "is proof that he wants you to sentence him to death. He is baiting you into it. He came to America to die in jihad and you are his last chance." Zerkin said the jury can instead "confine him to a miserable existence until he dies and give him not the death of a jihadist ... but the long slow death of a common criminal." Zerkin also asked jurors to keep an eye on history, noting that even in the Nuremberg trials after World War II, only 11 death sentences were handed out for "the worst atrocities in the history of man." He said Moussaoui is "a veritable caricature of an al-Qaida terrorist" and "the only al-Qaida operative inept enough to be captured before 9/11." "This is about history, it is about how our justice system responded to the worst terrorist attack on our soil," Zerkin said. During his presentation, prosecutor David Novak replayed some of the horrific photos and videos that jurors had seen during witness testimony, including a burned body in a wrecked Pentagon office and body parts at the base of the World Trade Center. "If not this case, then when is a death sentence appropriate?" he asked. "How many people have to die?" Moussaoui's wishes are irrelevant, Novak told the jury. "Nothing in the jury instructions will tell you to try to figure out what the defendant wants and give him the opposite." The defense had presented evidence of Moussaoui's shattering treatment as a child born in France of Moroccan descent, of his father's and uncle's violence in his home and of mental illness rampant in his family. Raskin said none of that excused his conduct and he rejected the defense argument that Moussaoui is a schizophrenic. "Just because we can't comprehend this kind of evil, doesn't mean he suffers a mental illness," he said. "We will never understand evil like this." Although Moussaoui was in jail on Sept. 11, the jury ruled that lies he told federal agents when he was arrested in August 2001 on immigration violations allowed the plot to go forward. Prosecutors presented testimony from dozens of victim-impact witnesses whose accounts often left jurors in tears. Emotions switched from sorrow to rage when prosecutors cross-examined Moussaoui, who mocked the victims' testimony and took glee in the Sept. 11 aftermath. Moussaoui had previously taken the stand and stunned the courtroom by claiming he was to have piloted a fifth plane on Sept. 11, after years of denying a role in the attacks. Defense lawyers sought to blunt the victim-impact testimony by putting a dozen Sept. 11 family members on the stand in support of their case. The witnesses were barred from explicitly saying they favored life in prison, but got their point across by saying that they do not seek vengeance. Much of the testimony also revolved around Moussaoui's mental health. Experts hired by the defense diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic who suffers delusions, including his firmly held belief that
President Bush will free him from prison. Government-appointed experts say Moussaoui is not mentally ill and attribute his beliefs about Bush to religious zealotry.
By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer

April 25, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Osama's Crusade in Darfur
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NEW YORK TIMES

Those of us who want a more forceful response to genocide in Darfur should be sobered by Osama bin Laden's latest tape.

In that tape, released on Sunday, Osama rails against the agreement that ended Sudan's civil war with its Christian and animist south and accuses the U.S. of plotting to dispatch "Crusader troops" to occupy Darfur "and steal its oil wealth under the pretext of peacekeeping." Osama calls on good Muslims to go to Sudan and stockpile land mines and rocket-propelled grenades in preparation for "a long-term war" against U.N. peacekeepers and other infidels.

Osama's tape underscores the fact that a tougher approach carries real risks. It's easy for us in the peanut gallery to call for a U.N. force, but what happens when jihadis start shooting down the U.N. helicopters?

So with a major rally planned for Sunday to call for action to stop the slaughter in Darfur, let's look at what specific actions the U.S. should take. One reader, William in Scottsdale, Ariz., wrote to me to say that he had called Senator John McCain's office to demand more action on Darfur. "The lady on the phone asked me for suggestions," he said — and William was short on suggestions.

The first step to stop the killing is to dispatch a robust U.N. peacekeeping force of at least 20,000 well-equipped and mobile troops. But because of precisely the nationalistic sensitivities that Osama is trying to stir, it shouldn't have U.S. ground troops. Instead, it should be made up mostly of Turks, Jordanians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and other Muslims, and smaller numbers of European and Asian troops. The U.S. can supply airlifts, and NATO can provide a short-term bridging force if necessary.

Second, the U.S. and France should enforce a no-fly zone from the French air base in Abéché, Chad. American military planners say this is practicable, particularly if it simply involves destroying Sudanese aircraft on the ground after they have attacked civilians.

Granted, these approaches carry real risks. After we shoot up a Sudanese military plane, Sudan may orchestrate a "spontaneous" popular riot that will involve lynching a few U.S. aid workers — or journalists.

But remember that the Sudanese government is hanging on by its fingernails. It is deeply unpopular, and when it tried to organize demonstrations against the Danish cartoons, they were a flop.

The coming issue of Foreign Policy magazine publishes a Failed States Index in which Sudan is ranked the single most unstable country in the entire world. If we apply enough pressure, Sudan's leaders will back down in Darfur — just as they did when they signed a peace deal to end the war with southern Sudan.

A no-fly zone and a U.N. force are among the ways we can apply pressure, but another essential element is public diplomacy. We should respond to Osama by shining a spotlight on the Muslim victims of Darfur (many Arabs have instinctively sided with Sudan's rulers and have no idea that nearly all of the victims of the genocide are Muslim).

The White House can invite survivors for a photo-op so they themselves can recount, in Arabic, how their children were beheaded and their mosques destroyed. We can release atrocity photos, like one I have from an African Union archive of the body of a 2-year-old boy whose face was beaten into mush. President Bush can make a major speech about Darfur, while sending Condi Rice and a planeload of television journalists to a refugee camp in Chad to meet orphans.

Madeleine Albright helped end the horrors of Sierra Leone simply by going there and being photographed with maimed children. Those searing photos put Sierra Leone on the global agenda, and policy makers hammered out solutions. Granted, it's the fault of the "CBS Evening News" that it gave Darfur's genocide only 2 minutes of coverage in all of last year (compared with the 36 minutes that it gave the Michael Jackson trial), but the administration can help when we in the media world drop the ball.

The U.S. could organize a summit meeting in Europe or the Arab world to call attention to Darfur, we could appoint a presidential envoy like Colin Powell, and we could make the issue much more prominent in our relations with countries like Egypt, Qatar, Jordan and China.

Americans often ask what they can do about Darfur. These are the kinds of ideas they can urge on the White House and their members of Congress — or on embassies like Egypt's. Many other ideas are at savedarfur.org and at genocideintervention.net.

When Darfur first came to public attention, there were 70,000 dead. Now there are perhaps 300,000, maybe 400,000. Soon there may be 1 million. If we don't act now, when will we?

Osama’s operating area shrinking: US spy chief

http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=66435

Agencies
Posted online: Friday, April 21, 2006 at 1027 hours IST


Washington, April 21: Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden operates in an increasingly narrow area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, US spy chief John Negroponte said in an interview aired on Thursday.



"I think he's operating from a narrower and narrower corner of space in that Pakistan-Afghanistan border area," Negroponte told NBC television's "Today Show".

Asked what worried him most, he replied, "It's the international terrorists. It's al-Qaeda. What is it we don't know?"

The former ambassador to Iraq oversees 16 spy agencies - including the CIA - as the first director of national intelligence, a post set up as part of an effort to reform counter-terrorism efforts after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Negroponte has come under criticism recently from lawmakers in Congress over his performance, but he told the US television network that progress had been made since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

"We're really on this case 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And in that sense, I think we are certainly safer than we were before 9/11," he said.

In 2001, US and Afghan forces tracked bin Laden in Tora Bora in Afghanistan but failed to capture him.

The Bin Laden Tape

OSAMA BIN Laden is not merely intent on killing Westerners. He is also happy to exploit mass civilian casualties in Muslim countries. His latest audiotape message rails against the prospect of a Western-backed peacekeeping force in the Sudanese territory of Darfur, where tens of thousands of Muslim...

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/2...o_bin_laden.php
Listening To Bin Laden
Tom Porteous
April 25, 2006


Tom Porteous is a syndicated columnist and author who was formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office.

Osama bin Laden's latest anti-Western rant shows that his grasp of history is as flawed as his grasp of morality.

But it also indicates that that he is still an adept master of exploiting the flaws of U.S. counter-terrorism policies as well as the prejudices, fears and resentments of millions of Arab Muslims in an increasingly polarized post-9/11 world.

The focus of bin Laden's latest tape recording, broadcast on Al-Jazeera on April 23, was Sudan. His self-serving analysis takes mendacity to extraordinary levels: the West is blamed for the disaster in Darfur; the United States is accused of seeking to divide Sudan between North and South; and Britain is accused of having divided the Sudan from Egypt back in colonial times.

In fact, responsibility for the holocaust taking place in Western Sudan, in which the victims (hundreds of thousands of them) are all Muslims, lies not with "Zionist Crusaders" but lies squarely on the shoulders of bin Laden's own erstwhile protectors, the Islamists in the Khartoum regime who provided al-Qaida with sanctuary in the 1990s.

The 2005 Sudanese peace agreement, a rare recent success of U.S. foreign policy, which has brought to an end fifty years of bloodshed in southern Sudan, provides for self determination for the South: The mostly non-Muslim population of southern Sudan will decide for themselves in a referendum in 2011 whether they want to remain part of a united Sudan or to secede.

As for the claim that Britain divided Sudan from Egypt, the opposite is in fact the truth: The British colonial authorities aided and abetted the Egyptian re-colonization of Sudan in 1899 when the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was established—and the Sudanese were glad to be rid of both the Egyptians and the British when they achieved independence half a century ago.

However, bin Laden is not about to let the truth spoil his message on Sudan or anywhere else. He portrays the West's humanitarian intervention in Darfur as yet another example of the West's long military domination of the Muslim world, another front in his own "Long War" against the "Crusader" enemy.

This interpretation is as absurd as it is ironic. In fact, the United States and its allies have failed to put together a military coalition strong enough to stop the desperate tragedy in Darfur. This is partly because they have no vital strategic interests in Western Sudan, but also because since the invasion of Iraq the United States' prestige is so low that it can ill afford to undertake another military intervention that would be perceived in the Arab world as a further infringement of Arab sovereignty.

For those inhabitants of the Arab and Muslim "street" who are minded to take bin Laden's comments about Sudan seriously, it matters little that his judgmental, black-and-white vision of the world does not tally either with the awkward facts of Sudanese history or with the complexities of local politics.

Just how many Arabs and Muslims actually take seriously bin Laden's analysis of Sudan, Palestine, Iraq or any other Middle Eastern issue is of course an important—a crucial—question. We know from polls that U.S. prestige has plummeted throughout the Middle East (and indeed in much of the rest of the world) since the invasion of Iraq. But what is not clear is how far there has been a corresponding increase in support for “bin Ladenism.” In spite of President Bush's post 9/11 "with-us-or-against-us" rhetoric, the fact that a majority of Arabs and Muslims are now deeply opposed Mr. Bush's policies does not necessarily mean they are "with the terrorists."

Two important points stand out quite clearly, however. First, Arab and Muslim publics are currently acutely vulnerable to the extremist ideology of prophets like bin Laden. It is essential that policymakers seeking to undercut bin Laden's message should understand the reasons for this vulnerability: widespread illiteracy (especially among Arabs) and ignorance; the deliberate promotion of Islamist propaganda by regimes in the Muslim world (including the West's closest allies) in pursuit of narrow survivalist agendas; authoritarianism and suppression of free speech; and a string of all-too-real political and social defeats, failures and humiliations.

The second point is that current U.S. and British policies in the Middle East could hardly be better designed to encourage the political resentments, frustrations and the pervasive sense of helplessness and lack of control that undercut the efforts of political moderates and fuel political extremism and terrorism. These policies include: military and political interventions in Iraq and elsewhere; the threat of further intervention in Iran; the justification of human rights abuses in the name of a war on terror; the refusal to engage with Islamists of any color, even those with democratic mandates, on the grounds that they are terrorists; and, the recent U-turn on democratization.

Whether seen from the perspective of bin Laden's Long War against the Crusaders or through the prism of the United States' Long War against terrorism, the battle for hearts and minds is what will decide the outcome of this escalating conflict. At the moment it is a battle in which the United States and its allies seem bent on handing victory to the most reactionary and violent forces in the Muslim world.


Copyright © 2006 Tom Porteous / Agence Global

9/11 film opens Tribeca festival BBC News
The Tribeca film festival, founded by Robert De Niro, opens on Tuesday with the world premiere of a movie about the 11 September terrorist attacks. United 93 is set on the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought with hijackers. De Niro, who created the festival to help revitalise lower Manhattan after the events of 2001, said "it would seem strange" not to show the movie. Several of the festival's 275 films also tackle the impact of that day. Festival creator Robert De Niro said it was right to show United 93 and also The Heart of Steel, about volunteers who helped victims of the attacks. Writer-director Paul Greengrass, who made United 93, said Tribeca was "the most appropriate place for the film to play first". He added it was "an honour and a privilege to bring this film there. It's daunting and it's humbling, but I know in my heart we all did our best to honour this subject".

'Right thing'
De Niro acknowledged that "some will be ready, and some will not be ready" for United 93. "Not everyone is going to feel good, of course. But after four and a half years, it feels like the right thing to do," he said. Some cinemas in the US have already pulled trailers for United 93 after audiences became upset. Among the 90 premieres at the festival is the first US screening of Mission: Impossible 3, which sees Tom Cruise travelling across Manhattan by helicopter, speedboat, sports car and underground train. Other major movies include the disaster remake Poseidon, with Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas, and Lonely Hearts, which stars John Travolta and James Gandolfini as detectives tracking down two killers. More than 4,000 productions were submitted for consideration by the organisers of the two-week festival.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...la-story-footer

Zarqawi Video: Holy Warriors Standing Firm
From Associated Press
11:01 AM PDT, April 25, 2006


CAIRO, Egypt -- In a rare video posted on the Internet, Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi accused the West and the United States of waging a "crusader" war against Islam, but said Muslim holy warriors were standing firm.

He also said the formation of a new government in Iraq was an attempt to help the United States get out of what he called the dilemma it faces in Iraq.

In the past, al-Zarqawi has made statements only through audiotapes posted on the Web, although photos of him obtained by the U.S. government have been widely circulated.

In the video, al-Zarqawi, who wears a beard and mustache, sat dressed in black, with ammunition cases hung from his neck and an automatic rifle propped against the wall to his right.

He wore a black scarf wrapped on his head and around his neck, while the flag of his group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, was superimposed on the screen. In another scene, he was shown sitting on the floor with three other men, all wearing black masks.

The video came just two days after a highly publicized call to arms by Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden -- on an audiotape played on Arab television -- that encouraged Muslims to support his group in its war with the West.

It also came a day after a triple bombing at a resort in Egypt that killed at least 24 people, including 21 Egyptians and three foreigners.

It was not possible to confirm the authenticity of the video, but it was posted on a Web site that al-Zarqawi's group often uses to post Internet messages.

Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has claimed responsibility for some of the most high-profile suicide bombings in Iraq, and also for a score of other attacks including hotel bombings last November in Jordan.

But in recent months, al-Zarqawi had sharply lowered his profile, halting his group's Internet claims and joining a bloc of other radical groups. Some other radical leaders had said he had been shunted aside and told to lower his profile.

In January, al-Zarqawi's group said in a Web statement that it had joined five other Iraqi insurgent groups to form the Mujahedeen Shura Council, or Consultative Council of Holy Warriors. Since then, al-Zarqawi's group had stopped issuing its own statements, a sharp contrast to its previous frequent postings, and al-Zarqawi has not issued a Web audiotape since January.

In the video posted today, the logo of the Shura Council appeared on the screen as al-Zarqawi spoke, even as the flag of his specific group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, appeared in one corner.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/57C...BCD2D285CAB.htm

Zarqawi video vows defeat for US
Tuesday 25 April 2006, 21:17 Makka Time, 18:17 GMT

Al-Zarqawi has a $25 million bounty on his head

A man identifying himself as al-Qaeda's Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has appeared in an internet video, vowing to defeat the United States in Iraq.


"By God, America will be defeated in Iraq," said the man identified as al-Zarqawi in what would be the first public appearance of one world's most-wanted militants in at least three years.

In the past, al-Zarqawi has made statements only through audiotapes posted on the web.

"When the enemy entered into Iraq, their aim was to control Iraq and the area," the man said in the video. "But here we have been fighting them for the last three years."

The man, sporting a beard, is shown meeting with fighters briefing him on events in the western Iraqi town of Ramadi.

"Your brethren in the information committee of the Mujahedeen's Consultative Council are happy to present the first video of the emir of the al-Qaeda Organisation in the Land of Two Rivers, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," footage on the website said.


In the past, al-Zarqawi has only
made statement on audiotape

The man also announced the formation of an umbrella group for anti-US fighters.

He also was shown firing an automatic rifle. The message on the video was dated April 21.

The Jordanian-born Zarqawi is blamed for deadly attacks in Iraq and the kidnapping and beheading of hostages and has a $25 million US bounty on his head.


AFP

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/230...9BC37F3C16B.htm


Analyst says bin Laden 'desperate'
By Adla Massoud in New York

Monday 24 April 2006, 9:25 Makka Time, 6:25 GMT

Fawaz Gerges: The war in Iraq has played into al-Qaeda's hands

In The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, his latest book on al-Qaeda, Middle East analyst Fawaz Gerges says that by the mid-1990s, the jihadi movement was nearly a spent force, having been ruthlessly repressed by "the near enemy" - Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

To revive their flagging movement, al-Qaeda decided to take its fight to the West, "the far enemy", but this caused a rift with other militant movements who feared US military power would ultimately destroy them.

On Sunday, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden released an audio tape accusing the West of mounting a "Crusader war" on Muslim nations.

Gerges, who holds the Christian Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at New York's Sarah Lawrence University, believes bin Laden may be growing desperate.

Aljazeera.net: What are we to understand from Osama bin Laden's message about a crusader war against Muslims?

Fawaz Gerges: Bin Laden is desperately trying to capitalise on America's and the West's woes in Iraq and elsewhere to convince young Muslims that the West is waging a "crusader war on Islam", and that they should resist the new imperial crusade militarily.

For bin Laden, the current struggle is more than political or economic; it is existential and civilisational. His mission, as he clearly states, is to incite young Muslims and remind them of the stakes involved in this global conflict.

He sounds deeply disappointed that his messages have fallen on deaf ears. The caravan of jihad has left him behind, and it is moving in a dramatically different direction than he had expected. He feels an urgent need to remind his followers and the Muslim community that he is still alive, that he exists.

But the truth is that there are few takers for his civilisational war. Neither Iraqis nor Palestinians are willing to wage a war on bin Laden's behalf; nor do they subscribe to his vision. They have much more limited goals than bin Laden's ambitious and convoluted rhetoric.

In your book you state that the 9/11 attacks were bin Laden's idea but that other jihadi leaders disagreed with him. Why did they remain silent?

9/11 was carried out by a tiny faction - al-Qaeda - which represents a minority within the jihadi movement and its strategies have been vehemently criticised and opposed by religious nationalists. They preferred to concentrate on changing the Muslim world rather than taking the fight global.

The majority of lieutenants decided to go their own ways because they disagreed with the merger between the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri's organisation, and al-Qaeda.

Some of them in internal correspondence wrote to al-Zawahiri and said "listen we'll go on our own way but we will never air our dirty laundry in public, we will never try to discredit you".

I think this is a kind of a secret universe, a universe that does not function according to rational means. They have a deep sense of loyalty and brotherhood towards each other.

Why did bin Laden and al-Qaeda decide to focus on the West?

The catalyst that turned bin laden against the far enemy (The Christian West) was the American military intervention in the Gulf war in 1991 and the permanent stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia.

You begin your book by critiquing the 9/11 Commission report and stating that the United States sees the jihadi movement as monolithic.

I think the 9/11 Commission report focused on the criminal investigation. It presented a partial portrait of how the 9/11 conspiracy unfolded: Trying to piece together the various threads of the plot such as when the orders were given, who gave them, who were the leading conspirators behind the plot. I think the Americans wanted to know who did what.

So the 9/11 report started with the micro details and made very sweeping generalisations not about the conspiracy itself but about the nature of the threat that the United States faced.

In other words, the report stopped short of illuminating the big historical and sociological questions of how and why jihadi movements decided to attack the United States. It lumped indirectly the jihadi movement with the Islamist movement as a whole.

I think it was highly dangerous to make sweeping generalisations and to lump all jihadis together with al-Qaeda as well as the Islamist movement.

Why do you consider that to be dangerous?

The US is no longer facing a tiny dangerous faction within the Islamist movement that is al-Qaeda. The US faces now an ideological enemy which encompasses all jihadis, local jihadis and trans-national jihadis and even radical Islamists.

In many ways this basically sets the US on a highly dangerous track because it's one thing to say that the US faces al-Qaeda which is a highly dangerous enemy and it's another to say that the US faces an ideological threat which encompasses all jihadis and even all Islam.

It changes the nature of confrontation and basically convinces Americans who know very little about the nuances and differences between jihadis and the Islamists that somehow we're facing what I call an existential threat, a strategic threat. And this is not true.

You speak of other militant groups. Are Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas part of the jihadis movement?

Yes, however, Hezbollah and Hamas are the radical Islamists who basically focus their energy and militancy on the [Israeli] occupation. They do not believe in the expansion of jihad outside the Arab-Israeli conflict.

How central an issue is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to these jihadi movements?

In the book, I show that the overwhelming majority of clerics, Islamists and civil society leaders were opposed to the 9/11 attacks.

But when it comes to the question of Palestine the opposite is true. The overwhelming majority of clerics, opinion makers, and religious leaders look at what Hamas and Islamic Jihad are doing against the Israeli occupation as legitimate forces of resistance.

The Israeli six day war in 1967 was really one of the pivotal factors in the rise of the Islamist and jihadi movement. No doubt about it. Palestine has inspired generations of Arab and Muslim activists and radicals and jihadis and militants ... even secular militants.

Has the war in Iraq strengthened al-Qaeda?

Well, I don't think the war in Iraq has strengthened al-Qaeda. I think what the war in Iraq has done is to create a new generation of jihadis who basically subscribe to a similar ideology to that of al-Qaeda.

I think the American war in Iraq has played into the hands of al-Qaeda's trans-national ideology on global jihad. In many respects, Iraq is slowly and gradually replacing Afghanistan as a recruiting tool and ground for jihadi action.

Let's remember though that the overwhelming majority of fighters in Iraq are Iraqi nationalists or Islamists who are trying to end the US occupation in Iraq.

But powerful factions of jihadis who are lead by [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi have basically received a great deal of public and popular support as a result of the war that has raged in Iraq for the past three years.

So in many ways, yes it has supplied ammunition to the ideology of global jihad.

And of course it has deepened and widened anti-Americanism throughout Arab and Muslim lands. It silenced moderates who basically went on the offensive against the ideology of global jihad after 9/11.

What is the best way to defeat al-Qaeda?

The American war against al-Qaeda cannot and will not be won on the battlefield. The US is not facing a conventional army. This is an unconventional war and I think in many ways al-Qaeda is totally highly adaptable and dynamic.

The only way for the US and the international community to win this war is by creating coalitions and alliances with Arab and Muslim societies, not just counter-insurgency tactics.

The US must really endeavour to address the legitimate grievances of the floating middle and Arab and Muslim public opinion and create alliances by addressing regional conflicts like the Palestinian predicament.

It does this by keeping a healthy distance from Arab and Muslim dictators and by building bridges with the largest constituency in the Arab Muslim world - Arab and Muslim youth.


Aljazeera

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in rare videotape threatens: “We will liberate Jerusalem by jihad!”

April 25, 2006, 8:39 PM (GMT+02:00)

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources: Zarqawi showed his face for the first time in more than a decade on an Internet tape released Tuesday, the day after three explosions killed 24 people, injured 70, at Dahab in Egyptian Sinai and 48 hours after Osama bin Laden’s audiotaped threat to the Crusader-Zionist enemy was aired by Arabic Al Jazeera TV. The combination may herald a fresh al Qaeda cycle of terrorist attacks.

Our sources reported Monday that the Egyptian authorities are investigating whether a 10-man cell reportedly held ready by Zarqawi in N. Sinai or Gaza for a large-scale attack was responsible for the third Sinai bombing attack in two years.

In the new tape, Zarqawi declared: The crusader enemy entered Iraq to extend Zionist rule from the Euphrates to the Nile. He said “the Americans led by Bush, the Jews, the Crusaders and the ‘Muslim traitors’ will not know a moment’s peace as long as our eyes are open.”

DEBKAfile adds: Zarqawi is held responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq and masterminding the latest al Qaeda terror attacks in Jordan, Aqaba, Eilat, Egypt, Sinai and, most probably, Tuesday’s coordinated triple bombing in the Red Sea resort of Dahab. Egypt now says two suicide bombers and a time bomb caused the three explosions that wrecked two cafes and a supermarket on the breach front.

The casualties appear to be European tourists on their Easter break and Egyptians. There are no immediate reports of Israeli casualties.

A year ago, 88 people, many of them tourists, were killed in a triple blast at Sharm el-Sheikh 100km south of Dahab. Two years ago, many Israelis died in multiple al Qaeda attacks in Sinai.

This year, Israelis joined the stream of foreign tourists to Sinai after an Egyptian assurance that thousands of its security forces had finally cleared out the Qaeda strongholds in the central Sinai Hilal mountain range. A special operation had been conducted among their Bedouin collaborators and the peninsula resorts must now be considered safe.


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Zarqawi warns fight to go on Yahoo! News
Al Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi appeared in a rare video on Tuesday to denounce the new government as an American puppet designed to help Washington pull out of its woes in the country. In the well-produced 35-minute video posted on the Internet, America's most wanted man in Iraq, dressed in black with a green ammunition belt, warned of more attacks: "What is coming is more painful." The video, which an accompanying statement says is his first after he previously used audio tapes, comes two days after an audio message from Osama bin Laden was aired and a day after a bombing in Egypt killed 18 people. The Zarqawi video first came on air in Iraq at about the same time Prime Minister-designate Jawad al-Maliki appeared on state television in a taped interview to say he was talking with all political parties to form a government of national unity. Washington and many others see a coalition grouping majority Shi'ite Muslims, Sunni Arabs and Kurds as the only way to end the insurgency and stem sectarian bloodshed. "This democratic play which you brought to Iraq after you promised people freedom and ... economic stability has gone with the wind," Zarqawi said. "Today, you are trying with all means to assemble people who differ among themselves ... and apostates to form a government to save you from your critical situation," he said, at times depicted firing an assault rifle, training soldiers in the desert or consulting masked aides over a map. Some political leaders have publicly written Jordanian-born Zarqawi off as a spent force, and he has kept a low profile recently. But Western intelligence sources and most analysts say he remains powerful and has simply switched his sights from the U.S. military to Iraqi soldiers and police. As Zarqawi's video appeared on television, Maliki, a tough-speaking Shi'ite with four weeks to name a cabinet acceptable to parliament, gave one of the most comprehensive outlines of his vision since President Jalal Talabani asked him to become premier on Saturday.

NO MILITARY SOLUTION
He urged Shi'ites, Kurds and Sunnis to unite against suicide bombings, shootings and assassinations that have killed many thousands of security force personnel and civilians since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, but warned there was no military solution. "Force alone will not wipe out terrorism. If it ends in one place it pops up in another. If we are to succeed with all Iraqi people there must be solutions to unemployment and start a process of investment," he said. Sectarian violence has rocketed since the bombing of an important Shi'ite shrine in February, and Maliki warned failure to disband militias -- linked to major political parties -- threatened to push Iraq into civil war. "The weapons must be in the hands of the state. Their presence in the hands of others (militias) will be the start of problems that will trigger a civil war," he said. Late on Monday, Maliki said he planned to deliver his new cabinet and government well ahead of the 30-day deadline: "God willing, I am setting myself a timetable of 15 days to finish forming the cabinet and deliver it to the parliament." In Washington, President George W. Bush, whose poll ratings have hit the lowest of his rule amid public disenchantment with the war, has welcomed Maliki's appointment as a historic moment. U.S. forces are "engaged in heroic efforts" to help Iraq succeed, he said. "We're on our way to victory." There are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. "We've got more work to do. But the people -- our troops need to know and those working in the field need to know -- that there is a bipartisan desire for us to be successful in this very important theater in the war on terror." Washington has said a government of national unity will strengthen Iraq and improve its ability to maintain its own security, paving the way for some U.S. troops to go home. But U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, who led very public U.S. efforts to push politicians into agreement, also warned Americans to prepare for a long engagement in Iraq and the region. "We must perhaps reluctantly accept that we have to help this region become a normal region, the way we helped Europe and Asia in another era," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Now it's this area from Pakistan to Morocco that we should focus on.
By Terry Friel

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HD27Ak02.html
Loud and clear: No respite in the 'long war'
By Ehsan Ahrari

The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has issued a videotaped message of himself only two days after his emir (leader), Osama bin Laden, urged his followers to be ready to wage a "long war" against the Westerners who are getting ready to occupy the Darfur region of Sudan.

Zarqawi's videotape came only one day after a major terrorist attack in Egypt. The bracketing of these incidents and videotapes carries an intricate message of it own - that the "long war" is being waged on a number of fronts. These incidents happened just a few weeks after the United States issued its Quadrennial
Defense Review 2006, which also contains a discussion of "long war".

These are trying times for President George W Bush. The Iraq war is not getting better. Nor are his approval ratings. A new poll showed that only 32% of Americans approve of the way he is conducting his job. Considering how closely the Islamists study their "enemies", one can rest assured that they are not going to let up.

Bin Laden widened the scope of the "long war" this week by declaring, "I call on the mujahideen and their supporters in Sudan ... and the Arabian Peninsula to prepare all that is necessary to wage a long-term war against the Crusaders in western Sudan."

As if to prove that they were paying attention to bin Laden's call, there was a major terrorist incident in Dahab, Egypt.

Zarqawi then made his own contribution to this "long war" by signaling a major shift in his strategy. The timing was not coincidental. The tape was issued when hopes are rising that Jawad al-Maliki, the premier-designate of the Shi'ite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, will be successful in putting together a national-unity government.

Mindful of what is developing in Iraq, Zarqawi declared, "Any government which is formed in Iraq now, whether by Shi'ites or Zionist Kurds or those who are dubbed Sunnis, would only be a stooge. They are a poisoned dagger in the heart of