NEFA Foundation: A Look Inside a Secret Taliban Training Camp By Evan Kohlmann The NEFA Foundation has obtained exclusive video footage of a secret Taliban training camp located just north of the Afghan capital Kabul,
excerpts of which were aired today by NBC News. The recording was made by NEFA consultant Claudio Franco, who watched firsthand as Taliban fighters demonstrated the detailed construction of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which their commander endorsed as his preferred method of attacking enemy forces. Asked if they would be ready to strike as "martyrdom volunteers" on targets in Western countries, the men responded, "Allah willing, we will, once we have defeated the infidels…. if we are still alive, we will go to other countries and push the infidels out from other Islamic countries." They also acknowledged that "there are mujahideen coming to us from various countries to carry out martyrdom missions... They are coming from Islamic countries, even from Europe, America, (Australia) and from all over the world, to train and, yes, also for suicide attacks."
Click to view video excerpts from NBC News 
September 11, 2007 09:29 PM
Link TrackBack (0) Print "Intense Hospitality"- Islam in American Courts and Why It Matters By Jeffrey Breinholt During the week we recognize the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and Congress considers the future of U.S. involvement in Iraq, I want to offer some general observations about an issue I have been writing about - Islam in the American courts - and why awareness of this history is so important to counterterrorism challenges we face today.
Here’s a little-known historical fact that comes from an American court case: the reason Western countries chose to place military and diplomatic assets in foreign locations was the threat of Muslims to their nationals residing those countries. We know this because of a 1957 Supreme Court opinion, in which the wife of a U.S. Air Force sergeant who killed him and was thereafter convicted in court martial proceedings successfully challenged the application of the military tribunals to her overseas conduct. The concurring opinion by Justice Felix Frankfurter contains a history lesson, and a hilarious typographical error:
The practice of European governments to send officers to reside in foreign countries, authorized to exercise a limited jurisdiction over vessels and seamen of their country, to watch the interests of their countrymen and to assist in adjusting their disputes and protecting their commerce, goes back to a very early period, even preceding what are termed the Middle Ages. * * * In other than Christian countries they were, by treaty stipulations, usually clothed with authority to hear complaints against their countrymen and to sit in judgment upon them when charged with public offenses. After the rise of Islamism, and the spread of its followers over eastern Asia and other countries bordering on the Mediterranean, the exercise of this judicial authority became a matter of great concern. The intense hospitality of the people of Moslem faith to all other sects, and particularly to Christians, affected all their intercourse, and all proceedings had in their tribunals. Even the rules of evidence adopted by them placed those of different faith on unequal grounds in any controversy with them. For this cause, and by reason of the barbarous and cruel punishments inflicted in those countries, and the frequent use of torture to enforce confession from parties accused, it was a matter of deep interest to Christian governments to withdraw the trial of their subjects, when charged with the commission of a public offense, from the arbitrary and despotic action of the local officials. Treaties conferring such jurisdiction upon these consuls were essential to the peaceful residence of Christians within those countries and the successful prosecution of commerce with their people.
Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 77 S.Ct. 1222 (1957).
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Justice Frankfurter was quoting from the Court’s 1891 opinion in
Ross v. McIntyre, 140 U.S. 453, 11 S.Ct. 897 (1891) and, if you look at that older opinion, you will realize the word “hospitality” should instead read “hostility.” Without this edit, the quote seems odd, as it suggests “intense hospitality” (a strange term in English) yielding barbaric punishment and torture, as if these things were party favors. When you consider the original language, the meaning of the Frankfurter’s language is clear: the reason we project an official presence in foreign countries is because we cannot trust how foreign countries governed by Islamic law will treat our citizens there.
Fortunately, we do not have to deal with the threat of Islamic law to American citizens who live in the U.S. This is why, prior to the 1960s,
Ross v. McIntyre and
Reid v. Covert were two of only a handful of cases in which an American judicial opinion mentioned Islam.
Alas, that is no longer true. We now face Muslims who want to kill us on our homeland. When caught, they sometimes try to justify what they are doing by Islamic law. Doubt that? Look at the cases.
Since this article contains general observations, I am going to avoid the temptation to drive home this point through case examples, and save it for another article. Here, I will stick with the numbers. Has the frequency of references to Islam in American court cases gone up with the rise of Islamic terrorism?
Part of the beauty of computerized legal research is the ability to search cases for particular words. I did this to determine the number of state and federal opinions that mention Islam. For this, I constructed a search for the words “Islam,” “Muslim” or “Moslem,” or some variation of these words (which, for example, would capture “Islamic” and “Muslims”). The following graph illustrates the results by decade, starting in the 1960s.
Graph: cases by Decade Note that we still have over two years left in the current decade, yet the total number of American judicial opinions mentioning Islam is more than double what we saw in the 1990s.
This next graph, which carves the data more finely to deal with the number of cases published each year since 1990, provides more insight:
Graph: cases by Year In this graph, I did not include the cases from 2007, since one-quarter of the year remains. However, the number of federal and state opinions issued so far in 2007 (530 and 68, respectively) suggests that the final 2007 tally will slightly exceed those figures from 2006.
To get at why there has been such a dramatic increase, one has to review the cases, something I have been doing over the last few months. While my research is continuing, I can offer this explanation: in general, Islam is increasingly being asserted by Muslims as relevant to American legal controversies. The exponential growth in federal opinions in comparison to the state court opinions (the frequency which have gone up, but remained fairly stable) is the frequent issuance of federal opinions in three types of cases: (1) prison cases, where Muslim prisoners housed at federal and state correctional facilities argue that they are being deprived of religious freedom, (2) employment cases, where Muslims claim they are being unfairly discriminated against in the workplace, and (3) asylum cases, where Muslims and non-Muslim aliens argue they should not be sent back to their home countries because of what Muslims on non-Muslims will do to them. These three types of controversies are generally decided by federal courts, and are the most recurring type of opinion mentioning Islam, along with criminal prosecutions involving Muslim defendants, which can be either federal or state.
It is the actual court opinions, beyond the numbers, that are so fascinating. Why is this legal history relevant? In counterterrorism, the law library is an undervalued source of strategic intelligence. Legal controversies involving Muslim parties are a rich source of insight, since real things are at stake and the results (and reasoning) are published for all the world to see. That means American counterterrorism analysts can get a good idea of the plans of Muslims within the U.S. - including those who might not choose to be so forthcoming about their goals and motivations if not for the litigation - by seeing how they behave in court.
Here is a great example, something to use next time someone argues that Iraq and 9/11 are completely unconnected. This is a claim we have heard since 2003, including this week as Congress questions General Petreaus. Like many others, I believe the claim is snake oil being sold for political profit.
During the prosecution of those Al Qaeda operatives responsible for the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassies in East Africa, one of the defendants, Mohammed Sadeek Odeh, tried to elicit from an expert witness named Imam Seraj W’ahhaj the religious justification for Al Qaeda’s actions in planning and attacking the two American embassies in August 1998: that it was an appropriate response for all religious Muslims to the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq.
U.S. v. Bin Laden, 2001 WL 1160604 (S.D.N.Y. 2001).
This courtroom strategy was two full years before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and prior to 9/11, and this was a fleeting reference in an opinion available on Westlaw. The implications are clear: Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda’s plans, at least in terms of being a motivating factor for Al Qaeda's conduct. Usama Bin Laden and his operatives were outraged by the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, which is to say the
status quo that the advocates of soft power were arguing we should have pursued in lieu of the invasion. Al Qaeda was willing to attack us in part because of these sanctions, which means that we would not be buying fewer angry Al Qaeda operatives if we had let the sanctions continue, judging from what one of its operatives said in an American courtroom. Whatever one thinks about whether the sanctions were sufficient, keeping them in place as a more moderate alternative to boots on the ground would not have led Al Qaeda to view us any more kindly. The Caravan of Martyrs would have continued, somewhere. We know that because of an American court opinion. What else is out there, that we might be missing?
This prospect illustrates a sermon I have been preaching for some time: American legal opinions, for those who choose to scrutinize them, are an underrated source of strategic intelligence about the goals and capabilities of our foreign enemies. In previous articles, I employed this idea to examine the implications of
Muslim employment discrimination claims (which are increasing after 9/11 without any corresponding increase in their rate of success) and the Muslim tactic of pursuing
frivolous libel actions. Though I have not yet written anything about the Muslim tendency to cloak alleged criminal conduct in Islamic religious principles - what I refer to as the defense of “I am a Muslim,” similar to what Mohammed Sadeek Odeh tried in 2001 - it is also a growing strategy which offers insight into a society Muslims would like to instill here. The growth of Muslim-related litigation means more court opinions, and more data. One does not have to credit the idea that the U.S. court system is becoming Islamicized to see the value of assessing how Muslim litigants behave. In fact, the results (a little secret: the Muslims generally lose) are often less instructive than their arguments and their legal tactics.
Stay tuned. In the meantime, I hope more of my fellow lawyers will start to join me in the intelligence analysis business, where the raw intelligence is within court files, even if they cannot bill their work to a paying client.
(As always, the views in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Department if Justice.)
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September 11, 2007 07:15 PM
Link TrackBack (0) Print On the Sixth anniversary of 9/11: Ten questions for the future By Walid Phares At this sixth anniversary of the Jihadist attacks on America, a better understanding of the past can lead us to a clearer analysis of future trends. Such analysis opens up the way for a series of critically important questions.
1. Do the Jihadists wish to destroy the enemy (the free world) or absorb it?
2. Do they want to attack the West and the United States before they accomplish their goals in the Muslim world first? A crucial question, leading to many others.
3. Will it be possible to conclude peace with the Jihadists? What would doing so entail?
4. What are al Qaeda’s priorities in the struggle against the United States?
5. What weaknesses and holes do the Jihadists see in America and the West, and how would they use them?
6. Are the governments in the United States and other western nations ready for these future wars?
7. What would the next generations of Americans, today’s children and youths, have to face in these wars?
8. What should the United States and the West do to avoid future jihads?
9. Why wasn’t it already done in the past?
10. Are the Jihadists alone, or do they have the backing of other powers and states?
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A first objective is to show that future is very much about the past. The future of America depends on our understanding of the historical roots of Jihadism. This is not a war with an enemy with whom governments can sign peace treaties or establish new frontiers. The free world is facing forces that link directly to ancient and modern history. Their ideology was born decades ago, but was inspired by doctrines from the Middle Ages. America has never engaged in a conflict with deeper roots in the past. Today’s terrorists see the world with different eyes and minds from all Americans – and from most communities worldwide. To fully understand their mindset, we must learn about the terrorists’ history and their reading of history. The future of U.S. national security, international relations, and world stability lies in the hands of those who are first to learn about the terrorists’ relevant history. That is the key to their code, but it is not a secret one; it was simply hidden for too long by our own elite, which denied the public this fundamental knowledge. By severing the historical roots from contemporary conflicts waged by the terrorists, and by camouflaging their real long term intents (which are also linked to their version of history), our elite blurred or even blinded our vision.
In my research I make the case that a central obligation in the war on terror, waged since the fall of 2001, is education of the public: the American public first, but international public opinion as well. The outcome of the conflict will be decided by how well citizens understand the threat. The Islamic Fundamentalists’ jihadist strategies are not fully centered on classical state warfare. The resources of regimes have been merged with the capabilities of networks. The jihadists’ presence is fluid and their actions are stealthy until the final stages of an operation. But ironically, jihadists emerge, grow and develop almost entirely in the open. If we look at their public manifestation and thinking, whether in chat room conversations or media like al Jazeera, we can begin to understand their objectives. And if we learn about their past and deeper history, we can understand their current and future strategies.
Many among us wonder about the global strategy of the jihadists. Not only there is a global jihadist strategy, but also several different components. Not only are the terror plans frightening; they are already underway on a global level. The terrorist and jihadist strategies against the United States and the West started earlier than most of us generally think, that terrorists have been more successful in infiltrating than we expect, and that they are readying themselves for far larger strikes than they have mounted in the past.
There should be a global effort to educate the West about past mistakes in judgment that led to the terrorist advances. But perhaps more importantly, from what we know has really happened, and what we know could have happened, comes a terrifying picture of what could happen around the world if the appropriate policies and measures are not taken.
PS: This article was adapted from Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America Dr Walid Phares is the director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the author of The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Dem
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September 11, 2007 07:03 PM
Link TrackBack (0) Print Bin Laden Video Calls For More Jihadists, Testament of 9/11 Hijacker By Jeffrey Imm A new message from Osama Bin Laden has been received, in which he praises the 19 9/11 Jihadists and calls for additional Muslims to become Jihadists.
Reuters reports that a "U.S. intelligence official said the voice appeared genuinely to be that of bin Laden."
Laura Mansfield reports that the video is entitled "The Wills of the Heroes of the Raids on New York and Washington. The Will of the Martyr (as we see him) Abu Mus'ab al Shehri With a forward by Sheikh Osama bin Laden, may Allah protect him". Laura Mansfield's web site provides a
excerpt of the video.
SITE Institute reports that the video/audio message is 47 minutes, and opens with a still image of Osama Bin Laden from the
September 7, 2007 video "The Solution".
SITE reports that Bin Laden introduces Waleed al-Shehri, describing his motivations for being among those who "penetrated the most extreme degrees of danger" of the "19 champions".
In the new video,
AP reports that Osama Bin Laden praised al-Shehri, saying he "recognized the truth" that Arab rulers were "vassals" of the West and had "abandoned the balance of (Islamic) revelation."
AP also reports that the Bin Laden audio message states:
"It is true that this young man was little in years, but the faith in his heart was big. So there is a huge difference between the path of the kings, presidents and hypocritical Ulama (Islamic scholars) and the path of these noble young men," like al-Shehri, bin Laden said. "The formers' lot is to spoil and enjoy themselves whereas the latters' lot is to destroy themselves for Allah's Word to be Supreme. It remains for us to do our part. So I tell every young man among the youth of Islam: It is your duty to join the caravan (of martyrs) until the sufficiency is complete and the march to aid the High and Omnipotent continues."
Reuters reports that the video includes the "will" of the 9/11 Jihadist Waleed al-Shehri: "Hijacker al-Shehri was shown wearing white robes in the video by the network's production arm as-Sahab, which superimposed him on a backdrop featuring a model airplane and an image of New York's burning Twin Towers. In his testament, he quoted part of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, which he believes commands Muslims to fight infidels."
AP reports that the video shows 9/11 Jihadist Waleed al-Shehri, addressing the camera and warning the U.S.: "We shall come at you from your front and back, your right and left."
Reuters also reports al-Sheri as stating: "The difference between us and you -- O cowards -- is that you fear death and are frightened by it, whereas we hope for it and seek it in God's path."
SITE Institute also reports that on the video: "Shehri speaks on the condition of Islam during his time, arguing it one of depravity and able to bring one to tears 'in view of the weakness, humiliation, scorn and enslavement it is suffering because it neglected the obligations of Allah and His orders, and permitted His forbidden things and abandoned Jihad in Allah’s path.' Legitimacy of jihad and suicide bombings in particular for the Cause of Allah are at the focus of his will, Shehri describing the American presence in Saudi Arabia as among the 'chief causes' of Islam’s misfortune and the jihad against them as the 'most obligatory of obligations'. To America, Shehri speaks of its being in Saudi Arabia: 'you shall expelled from it, humiliated and subdued and dragging behind you the tails of defeat and remains of those killed. And how could we desire anything other than your killing, when our lord ordered us thus'."
Sources: SITE Intelligence Group: The Will of Walid al-Shehri AKA Abu Musab al-Shehri, One of the Nineteen 9/11 Hijackers, Introduced by Usama bin Laden – 9/2007 Laura Mansfield web site Laura Mansfield - Except of Video: September 11, 2007 - AP: New Osama Bin Laden Video Shows 9/11 Hijacker's Last Testament September 11, 2007 - Reuters: Bin Laden praises 9/11 "champions" September 11, 2007 - UPI: No live image of bin Laden in 9/11 video September 7, 2007 - SITE Transcript and Video Link to Bin Laden Video (Updated) September 11, 2007 10:30 AM
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Al-Qaeda Resurgent Six Years On?
I’ve just finished two books written by promising young scholars, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution" by Kevin A. C. Gutzman and "33 Questions about American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask" by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Refreshingly, neither of the authors seems interested in sounding like the staff of the Republican National Committee. 
America had made history but until now not experienced history, at least not since the War Between the States, and most of us are from families who immigrated since then. The day of the attacks it was said that this would be America's second bloodiest day, second to that of Antietam, when twenty three thousand died in a couple of hours. But -- thank God -- the casualties are much less than was first expected, and even at the worst there could have been no comparison with Hamburg or Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Warsaw or Nanking. 
It’s easy, in the wake of the Iraq invasion, to forget what else was going on at the time—for instance, the bloodiest period of the Palestinian Intifada, in the spring of 2002. For a time, it should be recalled, Bush actually appeared to promote negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians—but by the summer of that year, he dramatically reversed course and essentially declared himself a Likud partisan. That helped set the stage for his aggression against Iraq. It is significant that in several interviews John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have stated that their interest in the Israel Lobby originated not with the beginnings of the war in Iraq but with the dramatic reversal by the Bush regime that occurred in summer 2002—which proved the turning point in his presidency. 
Major Ebola outbreak in DR Congo An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been confirmed by the World Health Organization in Kasai province. At least 166 people have died and WHO says it is aware of 372 other cases. 
