President Bush declared in 2002 that there were numerous "terrorist sleeper cells" to be tracked down in the US, the FBI director Mueller, in 2005, said that the lack of discovery of "sleeper cells" in the US was the thing that concerned him most.
New DCI "Czar". John Negroponte testified to a senate committee in Feb., 2006 about only one "sleeper cell"...in Lodi, CA....reported months later by PBS Frontline to be a harmless Pakistani immigrant ice cream truck driver, Mr. Hayat, and his equally harmless, but unwitting, son.....
A recent NIE disclosed an assessment that the US war in Iraq was actually strengthening the terroist threat, instead of weakening it.
Mr. Bush appointed John Negroponte, with this as Negroponte's background:
[url]http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB151/index.htm[/url]THE NEGROPONTE FILE
NEGROPONTE'S CHRON FILE FROM TENURE IN HONDURAS POSTED
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 151 - Part 1
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
April 12 , 2005
Close Relations with Honduran Military,
Contra "Special Project" Against Nicaraguan Sandinistas
Dominated Cable Traffic
Reporting on Human Rights Violations Nonexistent between 1982 and 1984
(President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte as the first Director of National Intelligence on February 17, 2005.) (Source: White House)
Washington D.C., April 12, 2005 - As the Senate Intelligence Committee convenes to consider the nomination of John Negroponte to be Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Archive today posted hundreds of his cables written from the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa between late 1981 and 1984. The majority of his "chron file"- cables and memos written during his tenure as Ambassador- was obtained by the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents were actually declassified at Negroponte's request in June 1998, after he had temporarily retired from the Foreign Service.
The 392 cables and memos record Negroponte's daily, and even hourly, activities as the powerful Ambassador to Honduras during the contra war in the early 1980s. They include dozens of cables in which the Ambassador sought to undermine regional peace efforts such as the Contadora initiative that ultimately won Costa Rican president Oscar Arias a Nobel Prize, as well as multiple reports of meetings and conversations with Honduran military officers who were instrumental in providing logistical support and infrastructure for CIA covert operations in support of the contras against Nicaragua -"our special project" as Negroponte refers to the contra war in the cable traffic. Among the records are special back channel communications with then CIA director William Casey, including a recommendation to increase the number of arms being supplied to the leading contra force, the FDN in mid 1983, and advice on how to rewrite a Presidential finding on covert operations to overthrow the Sandinistas to make it more politically palatable to an increasingly uneasy U.S. Congress.
Conspicuously absent from the cable traffic, however, is reporting on human rights atrocities that were committed by the Honduran military and its secret police unit known as Battalion 316, between 1982 and 1984, under the military leadership of General Gustavo Alvarez, Negroponte's main liaison with the Honduran government. The Honduran human rights ombudsman later found that more than 50 people disappeared at the hands of the military during those years. But Negroponte's cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place.
Today's posting by the National Security Archive includes the complete series of cables released under the Freedom of Information Act. The State Department released another several dozen cables from the series yesterday, and these are available in Part 2 of this posting.
[url]http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?pid=2386[/url]| Posted 05/06/2005 @ 11:50am
From Iran-contra to Iraq
......James Steele was recently featured in a New York Times Magazine story as a top adviser to Iraq's "most fearsome counterinsurgency force,"
[url]http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0503/dailyUpdate.html[/url]posted May 3, 2005, updated 12:56 p.m.
Adapting to shifting sands of battle in Iraq
US and Iraqi forces adjust to combat changing insurgent tactics.
....The New York Times reports that Iraqi forces are adapting new ways to deal with insurgents. As the Times reports, former members of Saddam Hussein's security forces, originally dismissed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority shortly after Hussein's Baathist regime was toppled, are now being relied on more heavily than before. The Times profiles General Adnan, the Sunni leader of "Iraq's most fearsome counterinsurgency force," the 5,000-strong Special Police Commandos.
In a country of tough guys, Adnan Thabit may be the toughest of all. He was both a general and a death-row prisoner under Saddam Hussein. He favors leather jackets no matter the weather, his left index finger extends only to the knuckle (the rest was sliced off in combat) and he responds to requests from supplicants with grunts that mean 'yes' or 'no.' Occasionally, a humble aide approaches to spray perfume on his hands, which he wipes over his rugged face.
As part of his no-nonsense approach to combating the insurgency, Mr. Thabit played a key role in launching the popular Iraqi reality TV show 'Terrorism in the Grip of Justice,' which has "proved to be one of the most effective psychological operations of the war," according to the Times.
The insurgents, or suspected insurgents, on 'Terrorism in the Grip of Justice' come off as cowardly lowlifes who kill for money rather than patriotism or Allah. They tremble on camera, stumble over their words and look at the ground as they confess to everything from contract murders to sodomy......
an outfit called the Special Police Commandos that numbers about 5000 troops. The article, by Peter Maass, noted that Steele "honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980s." And, as Maass reminded his readers, that civil war resulted in the deaths of 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and "[m]ost of the killing and torturing was done by the army and right-wing death squads affiliated with it." The army that did all that killing in El Salvador was supported by the United States and US military officials such as Steele, who was head of the US military assistance group in El Salvador for two years in the mid-1980s. (A 1993 UN truth commission, which examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the US-backed El Salvador military and its death-squad allies.)
Maass reported that the Special Forces advisers in El Salvador led by Steele "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses." But he neglected to mention that Steele ran afoul of the Iran-contra investigators for not being honest about his role in the covert and illegal contra-support operation.
After the Iran-contra story broke in 1986, Steele was questioned by Iran-contra investigators, who had good reason to seek information from him. The secret contra-supply network managed by Oliver North had flown weapons and supplies to the contras out of Illopongo Air Base in El Salvador. Steele claimed that he had observed the North network in action but that he had never assisted it. The evidence didn't support this assertion. For one, North had given Steele a special coding device that allowed encrypted communications to be sent securely over telephone lines. Why did Steele need this device if he had nothing to do with the operation? And for a time Steele passed this device to Felix Rodriguez, one of North's key operatives in El Salvador. Furthermore, Congressional investigators discovered evidence indicating that aviation fuel given to El Salvador under a US military aid program that Steele supervised was illegally sold to the North network. (The Reagan administration refused to respond to congressional inquiries about this oil deal.) And according to the accounts of others, Steele had made sure that the North network's planes, used to ferry weapons to the contras, could come and go from Illopongo.......
....and of course, there is this:
[url]http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2006/10/23/opinion/letters/120246.txt[/url]]]>Iraqi fundamentalists not our only enemy
Individuals determined by the federal government to be involved in terrorist activities may be detained indefinitely without the right to know the charges against them, have legal representation or have a speedy trial. This means if the government suspects you or me of being involved with terrorist activities, we have no legal rights to prove we are innocent.
The government can eavesdrop on our calls without warrants and randomly open mail - that recently happened to a relative of mine. The government recently acquired from several phone companies' mass files on their customers' phone usage.
The government has determined that it does not need to follow the Geneva Conventions if it chooses to torture prisoners outside of U.S. soil. It has determined that certain torture, determined by them as appropriate, may be used.
These human rights to representation, privacy and freedom from torture have been taken away in the name of the ``War on Terrorism.''
The enemy to be feared is not just the Iraqi fundamentalists, but our own right-wing, Republican-controlled government, put in place in part by a strong Christian fundamentalist movement.
The three branches of government put into place as checks and balances are controlled by the same far right-wing Republican government.....
I'll start with this:
Paul Reynolds of the BBC reports on the money flow to the Rand Corp., and then the Rand Corp. report, "Civil Democratic Islam: partners, resources and strategies" by Cheryl Bernard is examined.... following that is a Wapo report that tells us that Ms. Bernard is married to Zalmay Khalilzad, protege of Bush admin. insider, Thomas E. Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha......
http://web.archive.org/web/20040706152212/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3578429.stm or [url]http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3578429.stm[/url]
Last Updated: Monday, 29 March, 2004, 10:51 GMT 11:51 UK
Preventing a 'clash of civilisations'
By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent
A strategy for the West to counter Islamic extremism by supporting Islamic moderates has been put forward in a report funded in part by a conservative American foundation.
It says that the West should help religious "modernists" in the Islamic world in order to prevent a "clash of civilisations."
It states: "It seems judicious to encourage the elements within the Islamic mix that are most compatible with global peace and the international community and that are friendly to democracy and modernity."
The report, called "Civil Democratic Islam: partners, resources and strategies", was drawn up by the Rand Corporation with financial help from the Smith Richardson Foundation, a conservative trust fund which hands out more than $120 million a year to universities and other research organisations.
It is a sign perhaps that some American conservatives, many of whom want to press democratic reform in Muslim countries, realize that a focused approach is needed.
Suspicions
It is a contribution to a debate well under way in the West. The latest manifestation of this debate was a recent speech by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey, who wondered why Islam was "associated with violence throughout the world." His conclusion is not dissimilar to that of this report.
"Is extremism so ineluctably bound up with its faith that we are at last seeing its true character? Or could it be that a fight for the soul of Islam is going on that requires another great faith, Christianity, to support and encourage the vast majority of Muslims who resist this identification of their faith with terrorism?" he asked.
"The United States and its allies need to be more discriminating in the way they perceive and interact with groups who call themselves Islamic" - Cheryl Benard, Rand Corp
The recommendations have also come as the Bush administration is proposing to use the G8 summit in the American state of Georgia in June to push the issue of democratic and social reform in the Middle East. The summit will coincide with the handover of power in Iraq to an interim Iraqi government.
The Bush initiative has raised suspicions in Arab countries and among some of America's European allies who do not want anything imposed from the outside.
Islam's crisis
The report's writer, Cheryl Benard, said: "The United States and its allies need to be more discriminating in the way they perceive and interact with groups who call themselves Islamic.
"The term is too vague, and it doesn't really help us when we are looking to encourage progress and democratic principles, while being supportive of religious beliefs."
The report states: "Islam's current crisis has two main components: a failure to thrive and a loss of connection to the global mainstream. The Islamic world has been marked by a long period of backwardness and comparative powerlessness."
It says that Muslims disagree on what to do about this and identifies four essential positions in Muslim societies:
# Fundamentalists who "reject democratic values and contemporary Western culture."
# Traditionalists who "are suspicious of modernity, innovation and change."
# Modernists who "want the Islamic world to become part of global modernity."
# Secularists who "want the Islamic world to accept a division of religion and state."
The report says that the modernists and secularists are closest to the West but are general in a weaker position than the other groups, lacking money, infrastructure and a public platform.
Education
It suggests a strategy of supporting the modernists first. This would be done by, for example, publishing and distributing their works at subsidised cost, encouraging them to write for mass audiences and for youth, getting their views into the Islamic curriculum and helping them in the new media world which is dominated by fundamentalist and traditionalists.
It goes onto the say that traditionalists should be supported against the fundamentalists by publicising the traditionalist criticism of extremism and by" encouraging disagreements" between the two positions. It says that "in such places as Central Asia, they (traditionalists) may need to be educated and trained in orthodox Islam to be able to stand their ground."
A third strategy would be "to confront and oppose the fundamentalists" by, among other things, challenging their interpretation of Islam and revealing their links with illegal groups and activities.
Support for the secularists would be cautious and very selective, for example by encouraging "recognition of fundamentalism as a shared enemy."
The latest draft of the US government's own proposals are reported to include the promotion of parliamentary exchanges, the offering of advice on legislation, support for literacy campaigns, and the promotion of more access to personal and development finance.
The Rand approach is more overtly political and has definite diplomatic gains in mind.
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A3401-2001Nov22[/url]Afghan Roots Keep Adviser Firmly in the Inner Circle
Consultant's Policy Influence Goes Back to the Reagan Era
By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 23, 2001; Page A41
Four years ago at a luxury Houston hotel, oil company adviser Zalmay Khalilzad was chatting pleasantly over dinner with leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban regime about their shared enthusiasm for a proposed multibillion-dollar pipeline deal.
Today, Khalilzad works steps from the White House, helping President Bush and his closest advisers in attempts to annihilate those same Afghan officials.
From his perch as a member of the National Security Council and special assistant to the president, the Afghanistan native is one of the most influential voices on Afghan policy.
He is the only White House official to have lived in Afghanistan, and he has a visceral feel for the region's tensions and history. His long-term influence on matters pertaining to Central Asia is made apparent by a photo in his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Snapped next door at the White House, it shows President Ronald Reagan and Khalilzad huddled in discussion with an Afghan leader, who at the time was battling to oust the Soviets.
"Zalmay is the ideal man for Afghanistan, because he is an Afghan himself and he's grown up there and knows the country," said Richard Dekmejian, a specialist in Islamic fundamentalism at the University of Southern California and an acquaintance for more than a decade. "He brings firsthand knowledge of the country together with the perspective of a policy expert. He's at the right place."
Since the 1980s -- as a Reagan administration policy planner, a consultant, a Pentagon strategist and a Rand Corp. scholar -- Khalilzad, a U.S. citizen, has been in contact with myriad squabbling Afghan warlords and political leaders.
Over the decades, he has evolved from a Cold War activist, celebrating the retreat of Soviet forces from his homeland, to a more moderate voice, calling for friendly persuasion with the Taliban. Now, he is a hawk urging the Taliban's destruction.
His evolving views are evident in a long string of journal articles, position papers and newspaper columns.
"The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran," Khalilzad wrote four years ago in The Washington Post. "We should . . . be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction. . . . It is time for the United States to reengage" the Taliban.
More recently, though, he began stressing that action against the Taliban "now is essential."
"The danger is growing," he wrote late last year with Daniel Byman of the Rand Corp. in Washington Quarterly, a policy magazine. "Soon the movement will be too strong to turn away from rogue behavior. It will gain more influence with insurgents, terrorists and narcotics traffickers and spread its abusive ideology throughout the region. . . . Alternatives to confrontation have little promise."
Khalilzad was born 50 years ago in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, 70 miles south of the Soviet border. While still young, his family moved to the regional capital of Kabul, where his Pashtun father worked in the government, which was then a monarchy.
"They certainly would have been people among the intellectual elite of the time," said Thomas E. Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "They became Kabuli, the Parisians of Afghanistan: urbane, urbanized people."
Khalilzad's first glimpse of the United States came as a teenager, when he visited this country in a student exchange program run by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker charitable organization, Gouttierre recalled. Khalilzad went home with a passion for American culture, including basketball.
"He saw and played basketball while in the U.S.," said Gouttierre, who coached Khalilzad on a student team. "As it turned out, he was not a great player. I knew then he would be a better intellectual than a basketball player."
After completing high school in Kabul, Khalilzad earned an undergraduate degree from the American University in Beirut, followed by a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1979 -- the same year the Soviets invaded his homeland.
For the next decade, Khalilzad was an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, also serving as executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a support group for the Afghan mujaheddin then battling the Soviets.
From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad worked at the State Department as a special adviser to the undersecretary of state, consulting on the Iran-Iraq War and on the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He belonged to a small group of policymakers who successfully pressed the Reagan administration to provide arms -- including shoulder-fired Stinger missiles -- to anti-Soviet resistance fighters in Afghanistan.
He then served as undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration while it waged war against Iraq. Later, he worked as a senior political scientist at Rand, a consulting company that performs policy studies for the U.S. military. He directed strategy for Rand's Project Air Force and founded the corporation's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
He also joined the board of the Washington-based Afghanistan Foundation, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to raising interest in the country. He became the primary author of a foundation position paper that urged U.S. officials to prod the Taliban and its opposition toward joining forces in a new, broad-based government.
During the mid 1990s, while at the for-profit Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal Corp., a U.S. oil company that hoped to construct gas and oil pipelines across Afghanistan. At the time, Unocal held signed business agreements with the Taliban.
In December 1997, Unocal brought top Taliban leaders to the United States to view its operations in Houston. Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for the visiting Taliban delegation. Over dinner, Khalilzad challenged the leaders on their treatment of women, whom the Taliban jailed for failing to cover their faces with veils. His debate with Amir Khan Muttaqi, Taliban minister of culture and information, escalated into a spirited dissection of the precise language of the Koran.
Khalilzad's wife, Cheryl Bernard, is an Austrian writer and feminist whose novels champion women's rights.
Over the years, Khalilzad has written and edited books with such titles as "Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare," "United States and Asia: Toward a New U.S. Strategy and Force Structure" and "Aerospace Power in the 21st Century." He also co-wrote, with his wife, "The Government of God: Iran's Islamic Republic."
After Bush's victory last November, Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department. He also counseled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In his current role, he answers directly to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
"He is scholarly, cool. Always a smile. Outgoing," Dekmejian said. "He's not a preacher type, one who goes out there and moves the masses. But he is very good at addressing small groups of people. He is not an arrogant government person. He has an open mind."
Gouttierre said the White House is lucky to have an expert in diplomacy and military affairs who also has a gut-level feel for the politics of Afghanistan.
"He's the right kind of a guy at the right place right now," he said.
background:
[url]http://www.slate.com/?id=2069119[/url]The PowerPoint That Rocked the PentagonThe LaRouchie defector who's advising the defense establishment on Saudi Arabia.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2002, at 7:49 PM ET
......According to Newsday, Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard N. Perle, a former Pentagon official and full-time invade-Iraq hawk, invited Murawiec to brief the group, so Perle can't exactly distance himself from the presentation. But he can do the next best thing—duck reporters' questions. Murawiec also declined reporters' inquiries, including one from Slate.....
.....When he spoke on panel with Richard Perle at the American Enterprise Institute on Dec. 1, 1999, Murawiec was introduced as having just moved to the United States after "a dozen years" of working as managing director of GeoPol in Geneva, "a service that supplies advice to European clients, similar to what Kissinger Associates offers from New York, except without the accent." That is a bit of an overstatement. A Google search of "Murawiec and GeoPol" produces 12 hits. Compare that to the 10,300 hits on Google for "Kissinger Associates."
Murawiec's résumé would predict many Nexis hits, but a search of his name reveals just five bylines: Twice already this year, Murawiec has contributed to the neocon publication the National Interest, on the subject of Russia. [Correction: Murawiec wrote for the National Interest once in 2000 and once in 2002. The topic both times was Russia.] In 1999 he wrote for the Post's "Outlook" section on "internationalism," and in 1996 he contributed a piece to the Journal of Commerce on Russia. His only other Nexis-able byline is a dusty one from the Jan. 23, 1985, edition of the Financial Times, which describes Murawiec as "the European Economics Editor of the New York-based Executive Intelligence Review weekly magazine."
Executive Intelligence Review, as scholars of parapolitics know, is a publication of the political fantasist, convicted felon, and perpetual presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. It's not clear exactly when Murawiec left the LaRouche orbit. An article by LaRouche that appeared last year in Executive Intelligence Review calls Murawiec "a real-life 'Beetlebaum' of the legendary mythical horse-race, and a hand-me-down political carcass, currently in the possession of institutions of a peculiar odor." In 1997, LaRouche's wife Helga Zupp LaRouche wrote in Executive Intelligence Review (republished in the LaRouche-affiliated AboutSudan.com Web site) that Murawiec "was once part of our organization and is now on the side of organized crime." The truth value of that statement surely ranks up there with LaRouche's claim that the Queen of England controls the crack trade. To say, zero.
When Murawiec departed LaRouche's company is unclear, but Dennis King, author of 1989's Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, thinks it came when many followers split as LaRouche's legal problems grew and climaxed with a 1988 conviction for conspiracy and mail fraud. "[Murawiec] was not a political leader," says King, "but a follower who did intelligence-gathering."
Now that Murawiec has assumed such a vocal place in the policy debate, the man who gave him the lectern owes us the complete back-story. Over to you, Richard Perle.
The 2002 "presentaion" by Murawiec is of interest, in addition to it's warped content, because of the slate.com article that follows this WaPo piece, and links Murawiec to Richard Perle, "top ten" neocon !
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47913-2002Aug5?language=printer[/url]Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies
Ultimatum Urged To Pentagon Board
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 6, 2002; Page A01
A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States.
"The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader," stated the explosive briefing. It was presented on July 10 to the Defense Policy Board, a group of prominent intellectuals and former senior officials that advises the Pentagon on defense policy.
"Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies," said the briefing prepared by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand Corp. analyst. A talking point attached to the last of 24 briefing slides went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East.
The briefing did not represent the views of the board or official government policy, and in fact runs counter to the present stance of the U.S. government that Saudi Arabia is a major ally in the region. Yet it also represents a point of view that has growing currency within the Bush administration -- especially on the staff of Vice President Cheney and in the Pentagon's civilian leadership -- and among neoconservative writers and thinkers closely allied with administration policymakers.
One administration official said opinion about Saudi Arabia is changing rapidly within the U.S. government. "People used to rationalize Saudi behavior," he said. "You don't hear that anymore. There's no doubt that people are recognizing reality and recognizing that Saudi Arabia is a problem."
The decision to bring the anti-Saudi analysis before the Defense Policy Board also appears tied to the growing debate over whether to launch a U.S. military attack to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. The chairman of the board is former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, one of the most prominent advocates in Washington of just such an invasion. The briefing argued that removing Hussein would spur change in Saudi Arabia -- which, it maintained, is the larger problem because of its role in financing and supporting radical Islamic movements.
Perle did not return calls to comment. A Rand spokesman said Murawiec, a former adviser to the French Ministry of Defense who now analyzes international security affairs for Rand, would not be available to comment.
"Neither the presentations nor the Defense Policy Board members' comments reflect the official views of the Department of Defense," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said in a written statement issued last night. "Saudi Arabia is a long-standing friend and ally of the United States. The Saudis cooperate fully in the global war on terrorism and have the Department's and the Administration's deep appreciation."
Murawiec said in his briefing that the United States should demand that Riyadh stop funding fundamentalist Islamic outlets around the world, stop all anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli statements in the country, and "prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including in the Saudi intelligence services."
If the Saudis refused to comply, the briefing continued, Saudi oil fields and overseas financial assets should be "targeted," although exactly how was not specified.
The report concludes by linking regime change in Iraq to altering Saudi behavior. This view, popular among some neoconservative thinkers, is that once a U.S. invasion has removed Hussein from power, a friendly successor regime would become a major exporter of oil to the West. That oil would diminish U.S. dependence on Saudi energy exports, and so -- in this view -- permit the U.S. government finally to confront the House of Saud for supporting terrorism.
"The road to the entire Middle East goes through Baghdad," said the administration official, who is hawkish on Iraq. "Once you have a democratic regime in Iraq, like the ones we helped establish in Germany and Japan after World War II, there are a lot of possibilities."
Of the two dozen people who attended the Defense Policy Board meeting, only one, former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, spoke up to object to the anti-Saudi conclusions of the briefing, according to sources who were there. Some members of the board clearly agreed with Kissinger's dismissal of the briefing and others did not.
One source summarized Kissinger's remarks as, "The Saudis are pro-American, they have to operate in a difficult region, and ultimately we can manage them."
Kissinger declined to comment on the meeting. He said his consulting business does not advise the Saudi government and has no clients that do large amounts of business in Saudi Arabia.
"I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be a strategic adversary of the United States," Kissinger said. "They are doing some things I don't approve of, but I don't consider them a strategic adversary."
Other members of the board include former vice president Dan Quayle; former defense secretaries James Schlesinger and Harold Brown; former House speakers Newt Gingrich and Thomas Foley; and several retired senior military officers, including two former vice chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired admirals David Jeremiah and William Owens.
Asked for reaction, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said he did not take the briefing seriously. "I think that it is a misguided effort that is shallow, and not honest about the facts," he said. "Repeating lies will never make them facts."
"I think this view defies reality," added Adel al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser to Saudi leader Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz. "The two countries have been friends and allies for over 60 years. Their relationship has seen the coming and breaking of many storms in the region, and if anything it goes from strength to strength."
In the 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia played major roles in supporting the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, pouring billions of dollars into procuring weapons and other logistical support for the mujaheddin.
At the end of the decade, the relationship became even closer when the U.S. military stationed a half-million troops on Saudi territory to repel Hussein's invasions of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Several thousand U.S. troops have remained on Saudi soil, mainly to run air operations in the region. Their presence has been cited by Osama bin Laden as a major reason for his attacks on the United States.
The anti-Saudi views expressed in the briefing appear especially popular among neoconservative foreign policy thinkers, which is a relatively small but influential group within the Bush administration.
"I think it is a mistake to consider Saudi Arabia a friendly country," said Kenneth Adelman, a former aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is a member of the Defense Policy Board but didn't attend the July 10 meeting. He said the view that Saudi Arabia is an adversary of the United States "is certainly a more prevalent view that it was a year ago."
In recent weeks, two neoconservative magazines have run articles similar in tone to the Pentagon briefing. The July 15 issue of the Weekly Standard, which is edited by William Kristol, a former chief of staff to Quayle, predicted "The Coming Saudi Showdown." The current issue of Commentary, which is published by the American Jewish Committee, contains an article titled, "Our Enemies, the Saudis."
"More and more people are making parts of this argument, and a few all of it," said Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins University expert on military strategy. "Saudi Arabia used to have lots of apologists in this country. . . . Now there are very few, and most of those with substantial economic interests or long-standing ties there."
Cohen, a member of the Defense Policy Board, declined to discuss its deliberations. But he did say that he views Saudi Arabia more as a problem than an enemy. "The deal that they cut with fundamentalism is most definitely a threat, [so] I would say that Saudi Arabia is a huge problem for us," he said.
But that view is far from dominant in the U.S. government, others said. "The drums are beginning to beat on Saudi Arabia," said Robert Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan who consults frequently with the U.S. military.
He said the best approach isn't to confront Saudi Arabia but to support its reform efforts. "Our best hope is change through reform, and that can only come from within," he said.
Has the thought crossed any of your minds that it is "odd" that one man, neocon trained, PNAC member, Zalmay Khalilzad, "picked" Karzai to rule Afghanistan, served as US ambassador in Afghanistan, and then moved on to pick the Iraqi government coalition, and now serves as US ambassador to Iraq, after a track record of defining the US strategy for that region of the world, under the influence of "Jihad" book publisher, Thomas E. Gouttierre...obscure Nebraska professor, the only man from academia who apparently advises the US government on Afghan affairs?
If there really is an emerging "caliphate" that Bush is committed to stop, why are the ranks of diplomatic and DOD personnel, so "thin"? Why does Zalmay Khalilzad appear to be the "entire show"?
Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War; $2 Billion Program Reversed Tide for Rebels Series: CIA IN AFGHANISTAN Series Number: 1/2; [FINAL Edition]Steve Coll. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Jul 19, 1992. pg. a.01
.... During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory - into the Soviet Union itself.
Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans
, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials."We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union," Casey said, according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the meeting.
Casey's visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to strike at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire.
Eight years after Casey's visit to Pakistan, the Soviet Union is no more. Afghanistan has fallen to the heavily armed, fraticidal mujaheddin rebels. The Afghans themselves did the fighting and dying - and ultimately won their war against the Soviets - and not all of them laud the CIA's role in their victory. But even some sharp critics of the CIA agree that in military terms, its secret 1985 escalation of covert support to the mujaheddin made a major difference in Afghanistan, the last battlefield of the long Cold War.
How the Reagan administration decided to go for victory in the Afghan war between 1984 and 1988 has been shrouded in secrecy and clouded by the sharply divergent political agendas of those involved. But with the triumph of the mujaheddin rebels over Afghanistan's leftist government in April and the demise of the Soviet Union, some intelligence officials involved have decided to reveal how the covert escalation was carried out.
The most prominent of these former intelligence officers is Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war between 1983 and 1987 and who last month published in Europe and Pakistan a detailed account of his role and that of the CIA, titled "The Bear Trap."
This article and another to follow are based on extensive interviews with Yousaf as well as with more than a dozen senior Western officials who confirmed Yousaf's disclosures and elaborated on them.
U.S. officials worried about what might happen if aspects of their stepped-up covert action were exposed - or if the program succeeded too well and provoked the Soviets to react in hot anger. The escalation that began in 1985 "was directed at killing Russian military officers," one Western official said. "That caused a lot of nervousness."
One source of jitters was that Pakistani intelligence officers - partly inspired by Casey - began independently to train Afghans and funnel CIA supplies for scattered strikes against military installations, factories and storage depots within Soviet territory.
The attacks later alarmed U.S. officials in Washington, who saw military raids on Soviet territory as "an incredible escalation," according to Graham Fuller, then a senior U.S. intelligence official who counseled against any such raids. Fearing a large-scale Soviet response and the fallout of such attacks on U.S.-Soviet diplomacy, the Reagan administration blocked the transfer to Pakistan of detailed satellite photographs of military targets inside the Soviet Union, other U.S. officials said.
To Yousaf, who managed the Koran-smuggling program and the guerrilla raids inside Soviet territory, the United States ultimately "chickened out" on the question of taking the secret Afghan war onto Soviet soil. Nonetheless, Yousaf recalled, Casey was "ruthless in his approach, and he had a built-in hatred for the Soviets."
An intelligence coup in 1984 and 1985 triggered the Reagan administration's decision to escalate the covert progam in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. The United States received highly specific, sensitive information about Kremlin politics and new Soviet war plans in Afghanistan. Already under pressure from Congress and conservative activists to expand its support to the mujaheddin, the Reagan administration moved in response to this intelligence to open up its high-technology arsenal to aid the Afghan rebels.
Beginning in 1985, the CIA supplied mujaheddin rebels with extensive satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet targets on the Afghan battlefield, plans for military operations based on the satellite intelligence, intercepts of Soviet communications, secret communications networks for the rebels, delayed timing devices for tons of C-4 plastic explosives for urban sabotage and sophisticated guerrilla attacks, long-range sniper rifles, a targeting device for mortars that was linked to a U.S. Navy satellite, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, and other equipment.
The move to upgrade aid to the mujaheddin roughly coincided with the well-known decision in 1986 to provide the mujaheddin with sophisticated, U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Before the missiles arrived, however, those involved in the covert war wrestled with a wide-ranging and at times divisive debate over how far they should go in challenging the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Roots of the Rebellion
In 1980, not long after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to prop up a sympathetic leftist government, President Jimmy Carter signed the first - and for many years the only - presidential "finding" on Afghanistan, the classified directive required by U.S. law to begin covert operations, according to several Western sources familiar with the Carter document.
The Carter finding sought to aid Afghan rebels in "harassment" of Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan through secret supplies of light weapons and other assistance. The finding did not talk of driving Soviet forces out of Afghanistan or defeating them militarily, goals few considered possible at the time, these sources said.
The cornerstone of the program was that the United States, through the CIA, would provide funds, some weapons and general supervision of support for the mujaheddin rebels, but day-to-day operations and direct contact with the mujaheddin would be left to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. The hands-off U.S. role contrasted with CIA operations in Nicaragua and Angola.
Saudi Arabia agreed to match U.S. financial contributions to the mujaheddin and distributed funds directly to ISI. China sold weapons to the CIA and donated a smaller number directly to Pakistan, but the extent of China's role has been one of the secret war's most closely guarded secrets.
In all, the United States funneled more than $2 billion in guns and money to the mujaheddin during the 1980s, according to U.S. officials. It was the largest covert action program since World War II.
In the first years after the Reagan administration inherited the Carter program, the covert Afghan war "tended to be handled out of Casey's back pocket," recalled Ronald Spiers, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, the base of the Afghan rebels. Mainly from China's government, the CIA purchased assault rifles, grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light antiaircraft weapons, and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan. Most of the weapons dated to the Korean War or earlier. The amounts were significant - 10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983, according to Yousaf - but a fraction of what they would be in just a few years.
Beginning in 1984, Soviet forces in Afghanistan began to experiment with new and more aggressive tactics against the mujaheddin, based on the use of Soviet special forces, called the Spetsnaz, in helicopter-borne assaults on Afghan rebel supply lines. As these tactics succeeded, Soviet commanders pursued them increasingly, to the point where some U.S. congressmen who traveled with the mujaheddin - including Rep. Charles Wilson (D-Tex.) and Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.) - believed that the war might turn against the rebels.
The new Soviet tactics reflected a perception in the Kremlin that the Red Army was in danger of becoming bogged down in Afghanistan and needed to take decisive steps to win the war, according to sensitive intelligence that reached the Reagan administration in 1984 and 1985, Western officials said. The intelligence came from the upper reaches of the Soviet Defense Ministry and indicated that Soviet hard-liners were pushing a plan to attempt to win the Afghan war within two years, sources said.
The new war plan was to be implemented by Gen. Mikhail Zaitsev, who was transferred from the prestigious command of Soviet forces in Germany to run the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the spring of 1985, just as Mikhail Gorbachev was battling hard-line rivals to take power in a Kremlin succession struggle.
Cracking the Kremlin's Strategy
The intelligence about Soviet war plans in Afghanistan was highly specific, according to Western sources. The Soviets intended to deploy one-third of their total Spetsnaz forces in Afghanistan - nearly 2,000 "highly trained and motivated" paratroops, according to Yousaf. In addition, the Soviets intended to dispatch a stronger KGB presence to assist the special forces and regular troops, and they intended to deploy some of the Soviet Union's most sophisticated battlefield communications equipment, referred to by some as the "Omsk vans" - mobile, integrated communications centers that would permit interception of mujaheddin battlefield communications and rapid, coordinated aerial attacks on rebel targets, such as the kind that were demoralizing the rebels by 1984.
At the Pentagon, U.S. military officers pored over the intelligence, considering plans to thwart the Soviet escalation, officials said. The answers they came up with, said a Western official, were to provide "secure communications {for the Afghan rebels}, kill the gunships and the fighter cover, better routes for {mujaheddin} infiltration, and get to work on {Soviet} targets" in Afghanistan, including the Omsk vans, through the use of satellite reconnaissance and increased, specialized guerrilla training.
"There was a demand from my friends {in the CIA} to capture a vehicle intact with this sort of communications," recalled Yousaf, referring to the newly introduced mobile Soviet facilities. Unfortunately, despite much effort, Yousaf said, "we never succeeded in that."
"Spetsnaz was key," said Vincent Cannistraro, a CIA operations officer who was posted at the time as director of intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Not only did communications improve, but the Spetsnaz forces were willing to fight aggressively and at night. The problem, Cannistraro said, was that as the Soviets moved to escalate, the U.S. aid was "just enough to get a very brave people killed" because it encouraged the mujaheddin to fight but did not provide them with the means to win.
Conservatives in the Reagan administration and especially in Congress saw the CIA as part of the problem. Humphrey, the former senator and a leading conservative supporter of the mujaheddin, found the CIA "really, really reluctant" to increase the quality of support for the Afghan rebels to meet Soviet escalation. For their part, CIA officers felt the war was not going as badly as some skeptics thought, and they worried that it might not be possible to preserve secrecy in the midst of a major escalation. A sympathetic U.S. official said the agency's key decision-makers "did not question the wisdom" of the escalation, but were "simply careful."
In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, and national security adviser Robert D. McFarlane signed an extensive annex, augmenting the original Carter intelligence finding that focused on "harassment" of Soviet occupying forces, according to several sources. Although it covered diplomatic and humanitarian objectives as well, the new, detailed Reagan directive used bold language to authorize stepped-up covert military aid to the mujaheddin, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.
New Covert U.S. Aid
The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies - a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, according to Yousaf - as well as what he called a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels. At any one time during the Afghan fighting season, as many as 11 ISI teams trained and supplied by the CIA accompanied the mujaheddin across the border to supervise attacks, according to Yousaf and Western sources. The teams attacked airports, railroads, fuel depots, electricity pylons, bridges and roads, the sources said.
CIA and Pentagon specialists offered detailed satellite photographs and ink maps of Soviet targets around Afghanistan. The CIA station chief in Islamabad ferried U.S. intercepts of Soviet battlefield communications.
Other CIA specialists and military officers supplied secure communications gear and trained Pakistani instructors on how to use it. Experts on psychological warfare brought propaganda and books. Demolitions experts gave instructions on the explosives needed to destroy key targets such as bridges, tunnels and fuel depots. They also supplied chemical and electronic timing devices and remote control switches for delayed bombs and rockets that could be shot without a mujaheddin rebel present at the firing site.......
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22?language=printer[/url]From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad
Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts
By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 23, 2002; Page A01
In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code......
Many of the 4 million texts being trucked into Afghanistan, and millions more on the way, still feature Koranic verses and teach Muslim tenets.
The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture
and that the books "are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy." Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.Organizations accepting funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development must certify that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. The certification states that AID "will finance only programs that have a secular purpose. . . . AID-financed activities cannot result in religious indoctrination of the ultimate beneficiaries."
The issue of textbook content reflects growing concern among U.S. policymakers about school teachings in some Muslim countries in which Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism are on the rise. A number of government agencies are discussing what can be done to counter these trends.
President Bush and first lady Laura Bush have repeatedly spotlighted the Afghan textbooks in recent weeks. Last Saturday, Bush announced during his weekly radio address that the 10 million U.S.-supplied books being trucked to Afghan schools would teach "respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry."
"The first lady stood alongside Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai on Jan. 29 to announce that AID would give the University of Nebraska at Omaha $6.5 million to provide textbooks and teacher training kits.
AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.....
.... Some legal experts disagreed. A 1991 federal appeals court ruling against AID's former director established that taxpayers' funds may not pay for religious instruction overseas, said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law expert at American University, who litigated the case for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Ayesha Khan, legal director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the White House has "not a legal leg to stand on" in distributing the books.
"Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to supply materials that are religious," she said.
Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. .....
.... AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.
Officials said private humanitarian groups paid for continued reprintings during the Taliban years. Today, the books remain widely available in schools and shops, to the chagrin of international aid workers. ....
..... Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.
"We were quite shocked," said Doug Pritchard, who reviewed the primers in December while visiting Pakistan on behalf of a Canada-based Christian nonprofit group. "The constant image of Afghans being natural warriors is wrong. Warriors are created. If you want a different kind of society, you have to create it."
....In early January, UNICEF began printing new texts for many subjects but arranged to supply copies of the old, unrevised U.S. books for other subjects, including Islamic instruction.
Within days, the Afghan interim government announced that it would use the old AID-produced texts for its core school curriculum. UNICEF's new texts could be used only as supplements.
Earlier this year, the United States tapped into its $296 million aid package for rebuilding Afghanistan to reprint the old books, but decided to purge the violent references.
About 18 of the 200 titles the United States is republishing are primarily Islamic instructional books, which agency officials refer to as "civics" courses. Some books teach how to live according to the Koran, Brown said, and "how to be a good Muslim."
UNICEF is left with 500,000 copies of the old "militarized" books, a $200,000 investment that it has decided to destroy, according to U.N. officials.
On Feb. 4, Brown arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.
"We turned it from a wartime curriculum to a peacetime curriculum," he said.
[url]http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/schools.html[/url]Getting children back to school is a number one priority in Afghanistan's post war government. But the big question is: what will they learn?
Back to school in Afghanistan
CBC News Online | January 27, 2004
The National | Airdate: May 6, 2002
Reporter: Carol Off | Producer: Heather Abbott | Editor: Catherine McIsaac
....A student learns to add and subtract bullets
Math teachers use bullets as props to teach lessons in subtraction. This isn't their idea. During decades of war, the classroom has been the best place to indoctrinate young people with their duty to fight. Government-sponsored textbooks in Afghanistan are filled with violence. For years, war was the only lesson that counted.
The Mujahideen, Afghanistan's freedom fighters, used the classroom to prepare children to fight the Soviet empire. The Russians are long gone but the textbooks are not. The Mujahideen had wanted to prepare the next generation of Afghans to fight the enemy, so pupils learned the proper clips for a Kalashnikov rifle, the weight of bombs needed to flatten a house, and how to calculate the speed of bullets. Even the girls learn it.
"We were providing education behind the enemy lines."
But the Mujahideen had a lot of help to create this warrior culture in the school system from the United States, which paid for the Mujahideen propaganda in the textbooks. It was all part of American Cold War policy in the 1980s, helping the Mujahideen defeat the Soviet army on Afghan soil.
University of Nebraska
The University of Nebraska was front and center in that effort. The university did the publishing and had an Afghan study center and a director who was ready to help defeat the "Red Menace."
"I think Ronald Reagan himself felt that this was a violation of the rights of the Afghans," says Tom Goutier, who was behind the Mujahideen textbook project. "I think a lot of those working for him thought this was an opportunity for us to do the Soviet Union some damage."
Goutier's personal involvement in Afghanistan began in 1964 as a young U.S. peace corps volunteer. Over the years, he rubbed shoulders with Mujahideen leaders and he learned Afghan languages. During the 1980s, his love of America and his love of Afghanistan merged.
"We were living in an era in which the Afghans were trying to learn to survive," he says. "They were fighting for their survival in which a million of them were killed, a million and a half wounded. So, at that time, there was a lot of militaristic thinking."
The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in 1979. Its fighting forces were well armed and ruthless. The Mujahideen fought the Soviets throughout the 1980s with a lot of covert aid from the U.S.
In 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. put a rush order on its proxy war in Afghanistan. The CIA gave Mujahideen an overwhelming arsenal of guns and missiles. But a lesser-known fact is that the U.S. also gave the Mujahideen hundreds of millions of dollars in non-lethal aid; $43 million just for the school textbooks. The U.S. Agency for International Development, AID, coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program.
"We were providing education behind the enemy lines," says Goutier. "We were providing military support against the enemy lines. So this was a kind of coordinated effort indeed.
"I eventually was involved in some of the discussions, negotiations for removing the Soviets from Afghanistan. I was an American specialist in these discussions and many people in those discussions said just as important as (the) introduction of stinger missiles was the introduction of the humanitarian assistance because the Soviets never believed the U.S. would go to that extent."
"The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks," says CBC'S Carol Off. "What discussions did you have with the Mujahideen leaders? Was it any effort to say maybe this isn't the best for an eight-year-old's mind?"
"No, because we were told that that was not for negotiations and that the content was to be that which they decided," says Goutier.
There were those who opposed the text book project, such as Sima Samar who ran a school in those days, but opposition did little good.
Sima Samar
"I was opposing but we had no choice," says Samar, who served as minister of women's affairs for the interim government that ran Afghanistan after the Taliban were driven out. "It was already done and… nobody had the freedom to speak against all those things."
"I was interested in being of any type of assistance that I could to help the Afghans get out of their mess and to be frank also anything that would help the United States in order to advance its interests," says Goutier.
American interests were well served. But after the defeat of the Soviet empire, the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan. The country descended into civil war. The U.S. gave almost no money to help rebuild after the war against the Soviets and no money to rewrite the school textbooks.
.....The latest war in Afghanistan is now over but there's a constant threat of a new one. In the markets, tailors make uniforms for the stream of young men who want to be mercenaries. Only hunting guns are sold now since the heavy weapons are banned. But they still exist, woven into the very fabric of the country.
The Afghan children who returned to school in 2002 got new textbooks with new ideas but from the same old publisher. The University of Nebraska secured the contract again for $6.5 million from the United States government.
However this time there was a promise that they will not contain war propaganda.
[url]http://web.archive.org/web/20011126021357/http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/329/learning/CIA_scholar_links_to_Asia_Mideast_reexamined+.shtml[/url]CIA, scholar links to Asia, Mideast reexamined
By Chris Mooney, Globe Correspondent, 11/25/2001
Andrew Hess, who teaches a course on Afghanistan at Tufts University, is one of the nation's top specialists on a suddenly crucial part of the world. Since the United States started its Afghan campaign - and began getting criticism for its lack of expertise in Central Asia - Hess has waited for the government to tap his knowledge.
He's still waiting.
This fall Hess has taken calls from newspaper reporters and television stations - but hasn't received one call from US intelligence. He says he's baffled.
''I'm the only person with a program at the graduate level in the United States that deals with southwest Asia,'' he said.
Since Sept. 11, the CIA has made clear that it is eager for recruits familiar with the Middle East and Central Asia, especially those who can speak Arabic, Dari, or Pashto. And applications have shot through the stratosphere, many from recent college graduates.
But the deeper knowledge of the area and language lies not with students but with professors like Hess. And when it comes to academics, many intelligence watchers say that contact with the CIA largely remains limited to those scholars who have well-established credentials as insiders.
....The Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha has longstanding ties with Washington policymakers and collaborates regularly with intelligence. ''We're at war,'' said center director Thomas Gouttierre. ''I'm an American, and the American government is leading this war. If we have some knowledge or analysis that could be of advantage, we should be forthcoming.''....
[url]http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_nebraska/index.html?query=AFGHANISTAN&field=geo&match=exact[/url]In Nebraska, an Oasis of Insight Into Afghanistan's Heart; [Biography]
Jodi Wilgoren. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 6, 2001. pg. A.8
WHEN Thomas E. Gouttierre, a baker's son from Maumee, Ohio, applied for the Peace Corps in 1964, he had never even flown on an airplane, never mind traveled beyond the United States. He wanted to go somewhere that ''wasn't hot'' and ''wasn't in the Western Hemisphere,'' so he listed Iran, Turkey and ''anyplace but Latin America'' as his three choices.
Soon Mr. Gouttierre was teaching English and coaching basketball in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Instead of the Peace Corps' standard two years, he stayed nearly 10. Then he came here to the University of Nebraska's Omaha campus, home to the nation's only Center for Afghanistan Studies and its largest library of works on Afghanistan. As dean of international studies, he visited 70-some nations before losing count, and has studied the Taliban and Osama bin Laden for the United Nations....
...THE Center for Afghanistan Studies was started in 1973 as the Omaha campus's attempt to break into international academics by focusing on an area few others considered. From 1986 to 1994, the university spent more than $50 million in grants training teachers and funneling textbooks to more than 130,000 students in Afghanistan and Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. The library has 8,000 manuscripts and documents on the region, from an 1860 handwritten volume of poetry known as the Haft Aurang to the Afghan Communist Party's first newspaper a century later.
Mr. Gouttierre, who graduated from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, never finished his Ph.D., though he has three honorary doctorates....
Los Angeles Times
June 14, 2002 Friday Home Edition
Section: Part A Main News; Part 1; Page 1; Foreign Desk
Headline: The World; Karzai Chosen As Leader, Vows To Rebuild Nation;
"Although challenged by two other candidates, his victory was preordained by the controversial influence of U.S. and other foreign advisors, which could taint the credibility of his tenure. Mohammad Zaher Shah, the nation's former king,
withdrew from the political stage on the advice of President Bush's envoy [Zalmay Khalilzad].
Former President Burhanuddin Rabbani's departure from the race is believed to have been arranged in return for a prestigious title to be bestowed later. Still, Karzai's selection--he received 1,295 of the 1,575 votes cast--clearly reflected majority sentiment among those gathered for the weeklong convocation. Even his rivals joined in the spirit of celebration over what they see as the beginning of a new age in their homeland."
[url]http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0E15F83E580C778DDDAF0894DA404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fK%2fKarzai%2c%20Hamid[/url]Traditional Council Elects Karzai as Afghan President
June 14, 2002, Friday
By CARLOTTA GALL (NYT); Foreign Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 14, Column 1, 1201 words
....The United States, which helped put him in power as part of its war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, openly backed his candidacy. The American envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was on stage offering his congratulations this evening as the results were read inside the vast tent where the loya jirga has been meeting for several days.
''He became a consensus candidate,'' said Mr. Khalilzad in an interview after the election. ''It looked like he was going to win, and it happens often in Afghan loya jirgas when a victory looks inevitable, then they move towards a consensus.''
Mr. Karzai had won over the strongest challengers to his side earlier in the week, securing important endorsements from the former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, who ruled out any post for himself, as well as a former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and the strong Tajik faction in his own cabinet, including Defense Minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim. Mr. Karzai is an ethnic Pashtun.
A final challenge came when royalists put forward their own candidate for chairman of the loya jirga on Wednesday. But when the chairmanship was won this morning by Ismail Qasimyar, a supporter of Mr. Karzai, it became clear that there was broad support for him.......
[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2589341.stm[/url]Thursday, 19 December, 2002, 11:18 GMT
Afghan legal system under spotlight
...Mr Karzai has made it clear that Afghanistan, a predominantly Muslim society, intends to maintain sharia law, while at the same time establishing pluralistic democracy and an independent judiciary....
[url]http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/iraq/postwar/player_khalizad.html[/url]U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad
In September 2001, Zalmay Khalilzad, now the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a key player in the country's democratic process, was working as an obscure staffer in the National Security Council.
But as the Bush administration's war on terror unfolded after 9/11, Khalilzad, an Afghan-born Muslim with a background in Middle East policy, rose to a prominent role as an adviser, Zalmay Khalilzad intermediary and policymaker. He was appointed as a special presidential envoy to Afghanistan following the U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban, and in 2003, Khalilzad became U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.
He helped acting Afghan President Hamid Karzai set up a transitional government in the country of his birth and oversaw its first democratic elections in late 2004.
President Bush appointed Khalilzad to replace John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to Iraq in June 2005 where his first task was negotiating a compromise between the Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis and secular groups over the constitution. He paid special attention to bringing Sunnis into the political process, especially after a coalition of Shiite parties won the most in parliamentary elections held in December 2005.
"The fundamental problem of Iraq is that the various communities are polarized along ethic and sectarian lines," Khalilzad told the NewsHour in February 2006. "And to deal with this problem, they need to form a national unity government, and that's what we are encouraging."
Khalilzad earned a reputation as a strategic thinker and one who can balance the complexity of politics in the Middle East with U.S. policy.
"He brings a lot more to bear than his predecessors, who knew nothing about Iraq. I wonder how many of our top decision-makers knew, a few years ago, the difference between Sunni and Shia," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, in an interview with The New Yorker. "He is a broad-minded pragmatist and an insightful strategist. He has a unique advantage in a part of the world in which the United States has become massively engaged and does not have many people at the top equipped to deal with it."
In Iraq, Khalilzad lives in the Baghdad's Green Zone and travels in a security convoy often backed up with armed helicopters for air support. He works from his office in Saddam Hussein's former marble presidential palace supervising a staff of 5,000, the largest U.S. Embassy in the world.
Khalilzad was born in 1951 in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. His father worked in the local office of the ministry of finance. His mother, though illiterate, kept informed by having her children read the newspapers out loud to her.
His family moved to Kabul when he was in eighth grade. In high school he spent a year as an exchange student in California that he credits with giving him a different approach to his home country.
Khalilzad went on to attend Kabul University but transferred to the American University of Beirut after winning a scholarship. He studied political science and history of the Middle East in Beirut from 1970 to 1974. During this time, he met his wife Cheryl Bernard who was researching a dissertation on Arab nationalism. The couple has two sons.
In 1975, Khalilzad came to American to pursue his doctorate at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Albert Wohlstetter, an expert in military strategy who helped him make contacts in Washington. Wohlstetter exposed Khalilzad to the so-called neoconservative approach to foreign policy that places an emphasis on using America's military power.
Khalilzad accepted a teaching position in the political science department at Columbia in 1979 and wrote articles about the Soviet Union's invasion into Afghanistan that received considerable attention from experts. In 1984 he became an American citizen and accepted a fellowship with the Council on Foreign Relations.
From 1985-89, Khalilzad served as an adviser on Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war at the State Department where he wrote a policy paper that called for the U.S. to shift its focus from Iraq to Iran. He left the government for the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization where he founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
During the first Persian Gulf war, Khalilzad worked for the Defense Department as the assistant deputy undersecretary for policy where he received the Department of Defense medal for outstanding public service.
Convince
]]>
Authorities trying to track money back to bin Laden But crucial financial trail could lead to dead end, anti-terror experts say TERRORISM STRIKES AMERICA THE RESPONSE Sun, The (Baltimore, MD) September 21, 2001......Funding on that scale would not necessarily have required large international bank transfers of the kind often seen in cases involving drug cartels or corrupt regimes. That could limit the ability of the National Security Agency to follow the money through its electronic intercepts of such transactions, which are carried out by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), headquartered in Belgium.............and from a December, 2002, UN Report:
From .pdf page 11:30. New emphasis is also being placed by several major banking countries on Financial Action Task Force (FATF) special recommendation VII (see annex IV), which relates to wire transfers. FATF has issued a new proposal for an interpretive note to ensure that basic information identifying the originator of fund transfers is obtained and preserved by banks and intermediaries, and that such information is made rapidly available to law enforcement and other appropriate authorities for the purpose of investigating, prosecuting and tracing the assets of terrorists or other criminals. The Group would like to see the FATF proposal for an interpretive note quickly adopted and implemented by all countries and banking jurisdictions.
31. The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.
Obviously, everyone, (including the Baltimore Sun's loyal, al Qaeda readership) but the right wing chorus, knows and has known to avoid conducting financial transactions that are processed via SWIFT, Fedwire, or CHIPS systems.
The NY Times reporting that is substantive is that the Bush administration continued to broadly mine the data on the SWIFT computers, in spite of the fact that the U.S. administration must have been aware that al Qaeda knew to avoid conducting financial transactions that passed through those clearing systems for the last five years.
The right wing "blowback" is intended to distract from the obvious question, who are the actual intended targets of five years of warrantless, or of vaguely documented warrented data mining of international financial transactions by the U.S. government?
When will the "feelings" based, politcal support for the administration not only become aware that it is being used, but grow to resent it?
]]>Remember that what I'm going to outline here is just one facet of the much larger picture of Abramoff financed, republican organized crime. Consider my earlier blog about the MSM failure to even report on Abramoff's family background; his uncle was coincidentally doing business with a Toronto mobster in the late 1970's and Abramoff's father, Frank was closely involved with his brother Bernard's business dealings in New Jersey. The coincidence is that Abramoff may have been induced to plead guilty because of his connection to the murder of another mysterious Toronto native with reported mob ties, Gus Boulis.
A legitimate prosecution of what has happened here should not be blunted by concerns of "upsetting" the political status quo. It is obvious that the current balance of power owes it's existance to a successful series of organized conspiracies and the resulting crimes that financed it into supremacy through the selling out of the peoples' trust and government to the highest and best connected bidders, or the threat of the use of the republican legislative apparatus against those who did not pay amountst Abramoff, Scanlon, or Markham suggested.[2]
We can only expect a limited, sham prosecution. The republican controlled executive branch controls the DOJ.
We must make use of what we have. Repeated emphasis on Susan Ralston's connections to Abramoff and her subsequent close proximity to Rove and Bush is an example of a tactic that make it harder for the white house to distance itself from Abramoff. [12]
It may be helpful to maintain a steady message that the briber of Randy Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, paid large fees to Ed Markham's ASG, [7] and the common thread of ASG.... Alexander Strategy Group,[2] with Brian Darling,[1] the author of the Schiavo memo that was intially blamed on democrats, that ASG paid $115,000 to Delay's wife Christine[5], the reports that Abramoff's connection to Delay was via Edwin Markham, that Markham is Delay's pastor,[4] and that Markham's ASG was connected with Enron's strategy to corner the energy market,[3] and shared office quarters with a "dummy" money laundering, Delay controlled non-profit.[5] Of course, Delay's ties to his former staffer, and Abramoff lobbying partner, prosecution witness Michael Scanlon, is icing on the cake.
.......[1] l
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32554-2005Apr6.htm
Counsel to GOP Senator Wrote Memo On Schiavo
Martinez Aide Who Cited Upside For Party Resigns
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 7, 2005; Page A01
The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.
Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.
.......[2]
http://www.hillnews.com/news/10052004/agenda.aspx
October 5, 2004
Quietly, the right shapes its agenda
.....The Conservative Working Group (CWG), as the group calls itself, is one of several invitation-only conservative gatherings making its influence felt in the Senate, a body known more for compromise and moderation than for advancing conservative ideals.
As the conservative movement has gained strength in recent years, its champions in the Senate have sought to organize and hold regular strategy meetings, taking cues from more established gatherings on the House side and on K Street. Older groups such as the CWG, which was set up in 1974, have been rejuvenated, while a bevy of new groups has sprung up. These include the Values Action Team (VAT), which emphasizes social issues; the Fiscal Action Team (FAT), which focuses on economic and tax issues; and a gun-rights group.
Attendees claim that the behind-the-scenes strategy sessions have already swayed the Senate agenda, even though few people realize it, because, as one Senate aide put it, “We derive our power from being underground.”.....
.... The CWG is led by Ed Corrigan, executive director of the conservative Senate Republican Steering Committee. It serves as a staff-led counterpart to the weekly meeting held by senators on the Steering Committee. Corrigan also runs the Fiscal Action Team.
Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and his chief of staff, Rob Wasinger, lead the VAT meetings, which like the other groups, attracts staff, lobbyists and activists.
For lobbyists, the sessions are a chance to bring their message to dozens of staffers at once, while collecting valuable information to bring back to their clients.
“People make sure they get there because [the CWG] is an important group,” said Chris Myers, a lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a regular attendee.
“It’s active. They get things done. Folks want to get there and get some face time.”
He added, “We can learn about issues that are out there that Senate staff are working on. … They can find out what the business community is thinking on some of these issues.”
A lobbyist who attends the meetings agreed. “It a good place to organize conservatives. It’s an opportunity for a staffer to bend other senators’ ears,” the lobbyist said. “For lobbyists, we get an update on what’s going on. That’s good for clients.”......
“Every group would love to sit down with these staff — outside groups, K Street, trade associations. It is definitely staff willing to listen and understand, but it also has a conservative viewpoint already,” he said. When not speaking to the group, he added, “I get to be a fly on the wall. … People come and vent about things that are going on.
If a member [of the Senate] were there, people would not be as open as they are.”
Baird credits the CWG with helping force the resignation two weeks ago of a spokeswoman for the commission conducting an inquiry into the United Nations’ oil-for-food program. The Heritage Foundation had complained that she wrote an op-ed two years ago that was critical of President Bush.
For leadership aides, the meetings can be an early-warning system, indicating what the conservative base is thinking and planning. Bill Wichterman, policy adviser to Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), regularly attends.
Yet, in many cases, Senate leaders and conservatives find themselves on the same page. Frist is one of the most conservative members of the Senate, as are Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and GOP Conference Chairman Rick Santorum (Pa.).
Some observers argue that as the Senate leadership moves farther to the right, organized meetings such as the CWG have had more say in leadership decisions.
“When we first started [in 1974], we didn’t really have anyone in leadership favorable to our point of view,” said Paul Weyrich, who led the CWG in its early years and now heads the Free Congress Foundation. “We had to figure out ways to get around them. … Today, it’s entirely different. Today, we have the most conservative leadership group in the modern history of Senate. … The Steering Committee under these circumstances is taken very seriously.”
Myers agreed. “They aren’t outsiders anymore. It used to be that to get attention, they had to throw bombs. Now they are in the room. They are leadership,” he said.
The CWG often coordinates with House-side groups and gatherings off the Hill. The House Republican Steering Committee organizes a large group of staffers who meet on Mondays.
Weyrich runs a weekly conservative meeting, the Coalitions Lunch, at the Free Congress Foundation. It routinely attracts House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.), Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.) and Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.).
Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform also hosts a well-known conservative strategy session. Corrigan and Weyrich run the Stanton Group, which focuses on foreign policy, while Brian Darling, a lobbyist at the Alexander Strategy Group, organizes a meeting on gun rights.
Aside from the Heritage Foundation and the Chamber, the “off-campus” contingent at CWG meetings includes White House staffers Matthew Kirk and Virginia Loper, Bob Thompson from the Free Congress Foundation, Ben Dupuy from the National Rifle Association and Stacie Rumenap from the American Conservative Union.
Various contract lobbyists also attend.
.....[3]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alexander_Strategy_Gro
up
Enron was ASG's biggest client; they received at least $411,000 from Enron between 1999 and 2001. [7] (http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/2835510.htm?1c)
"Ed Buckham and ASG were involved with a "secret 'grassroots' campaign -- spearheaded by Enron -- to deregulate energy markets... An outline for the plan was faxed to Tom DeLay's Washington office. It was printed on Alexander Strategy letterhead complete with Ed Buckham's name in print. The only problem was that Alexander Strategy's CEO was still in the employ of the federal government at the time... Alexander Strategy Group was, as Enron promised, awarded the $750,000 contract to drum up support for electric power deregulation -- a goal that Enron believed would open the $300 billion a year electric markets to Enron. The stealth campaign would operate out of an energy consortium dubbed, 'Americans for Affordable Electricity' -- a name that Californians would find bitterly ironic just three years later."
.....[4]
http://www.time.com/time/press_releases/article/0,8599,1037633,00
.html
Posted Sunday, Mar. 13, 2005
.....Buckham, DeLay’s former chief of staff, has become one of the most powerful people in Washington, report TIME’s national political correspondent Karen Tumulty,
Buckham helped DeLay build a political machine known as DeLay Inc., for the seamless coordination between his office and the lobbying corridor of K Street. Now that machinery threatens to derail DeLay, according to Tumulty. ......
.....“What even fewer people outside that office knew was that the two shared a bond that transcended power and politics: Buckham, a licensed nondenominational minister, was also DeLay’s pastor,” reports Tumulty. “For a while, in DeLay’s early days as whip, they organized daily voluntary prayer sessions for the staff—until it began making some aides uncomfortable. After that, according to two sources who worked in the office at the time, the two of them frequently prayed together privately, joining hands in DeLay’s office.”.......
....TIME reports that Buckham’s lobbying business shares the same Georgetown waterfront office suite as the registered foreign agent that gave DeLay and others paid trips to South Korea in violation of House rules. Edward Stewart, who not only manages international business for Buckham’s Alexander Strategy Group but is also Washington representative for the agent, The Korea–U.S. Exchange Council, declined to comment on the controversy. Buckham, 46, did not return telephone calls and e-mails seeking an interview......
....Buckham’s client list, according to his firm’s website, includes the American Bankers Association, Bell South, Eli Lilly, Fannie Mae, R.J. Reynolds and Time Warner (parent of this magazine).
Buckham also appears to have played a key role in the spreading scandal around lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a former producer of low-budget movies whose most marketable asset was access to DeLay, writes Tumulty. “How did Jack Abramoff get into Tom DeLay’s office?” asks a source close to the majority leader. “Ed Buckham.”........
.....[5]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/A
R2005123001480_pf.html
The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail
Nonprofit Group Linked to Lawmaker Was Funded Mostly by Clients of Lobbyist
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 31, 2005; A01
The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.
Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).
The former president of the U.S. Family Network said Buckham told him that Russians contributed $1 million to the group in 1998 specifically to influence DeLay's vote on legislation the International Monetary Fund needed to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.
A spokesman for DeLay, who is fighting in a Texas state court unrelated charges of illegal fundraising, denied that the contributions influenced the former House majority leader's political activities. The Russian energy executives who worked with Abramoff denied yesterday knowing anything about the million-dollar London transaction described in tax documents........
In addition to the million-dollar payment involving the London law firm, for example, half a million dollars was donated to the U.S. Family Network by the owners of textile companies in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, according to the tax records. The textile owners -- with Abramoff's help -- solicited and received DeLay's public commitment to block legislation that would boost their labor costs, according to Abramoff associates, one of the owners and a DeLay speech in 1997......
But the records show that the tiny U.S. Family Network, which never had more than one full-time staff member, spent comparatively little money on public advocacy or education projects. Although established as a nonprofit organization, it paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to Buckham and his lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group.
There is no evidence DeLay received a direct financial benefit, but Buckham's firm employed DeLay's wife, Christine, and paid her a salary of at least $3,200 each month for three of the years the group existed. Richard Cullen, DeLay's attorney, has said that the pay was compensation for lists Christine DeLay supplied to Buckham of lawmakers' favorite charities, and that it was appropriate under House rules and election law.
Some of the U.S. Family Network's revenue was used to pay for radio ads attacking vulnerable Democratic lawmakers in 1999; other funds were used to finance the cash purchase of a townhouse three blocks from DeLay's congressional office. DeLay's associates at the time called it "the Safe House."
DeLay made his own fundraising telephone pitches from the townhouse's second-floor master suite every few weeks, according to two former associates. Other rooms in the townhouse were used by Alexander Strategy Group, Buckham's newly formed lobbying firm, and Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), DeLay's leadership committee.
They paid modest rent to the U.S. Family Network, which occupied a single small room in the back.
.....[6]
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20051214-9999-1n14del
ay.html
......Even before PerfectWave's patent disputes were resolved, it was donating money to key politicians in Washington.
On Sept. 20, 2002, three months after the company was founded, it donated $15,000 to Delay's Texas PAC. By the end of 2003, Max and Ellen Gelwix made more than $50,000 in political contributions, mostly to key Republican officials in the House leadership or the House Appropriations Committee.
Among other contributions, the Gelwixes donated $10,000 to DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority PAC; $11,000 to Future Leaders PAC, headed by Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee; $10,000 to Rely on Your Beliefs PAC, headed by acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt of Missouri; and $10,000 to Superior California Federal Leadership Fund, headed by Rep. John Doolittle, R-Granite Bay, who is on the Appropriations Committee.
The same month that Wilkes launched PerfectWave, he hired Alexander Strategy Group – composed of DeLay insiders – as his lobbying group on Capitol Hill.
The group, which is headed by DeLay's former chief of staff Ed Buckham, staffed with former DeLay employees and included DeLay's wife as a consultant, has a reputation in Washington as a conduit to DeLay's office.
Over the next three years, Wilkes paid about $630,000 in lobbying fees to the group. Although Wilkes' own two-man lobbying group – Group W Advisors – officially represented PerfectWave in Washington, Group W Advisors was represented by the Alexander Strategy Group.
During 2003 and 2004, as Wilkes pushed for contracts for PerfectWave and his other companies, DeLay was a frequent flier on a corporate jet partly owned by Wilkes and was often seen in his company at Southern California golf courses.
.....[7]
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051204/news_1n4adcs.htm
l
THE CUNNINGHAM SCANDAL
Contractor 'knew how to grease the wheels'
ADCS founder spent years cultivating political contacts
By Dean Calbreath
and Jerry Kammer
STAFF WRITER / COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
December 4, 2005
Born in San Diego County in 1954, Wilkes graduated from Hilltop High School in 1972, along with his football teammate and best friend Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, currently third-in-command at the Central Intelligence Agency. Wilkes and Foggo were roommates at San Diego State University, were best men at each other's weddings and named their sons after each other.
Wilkes' career in political relations dates to the early 1980s, shortly after Foggo joined the CIA. Foggo was sent to Honduras to work with the Contra rebels who were trying to topple the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, according to sources within the CIA.
.....[12]
Bush won't want you to know this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/09/20/BL20
05092000753_pf.html
.......Abramoff's White House Connections
In addition to Safavian, Abramoff is known to have close ties to at least one other key White House official: Susan B.
Ralston, Karl Rove's omnipresent assistant and gatekeeper.
Here's Peter H. Stone writing in the National Journal last year: "As presidential adviser Karl Rove set up shop in the West
Wing in 2001, he was looking for an assistant to serve as the trusted gatekeeper of his new fiefdom. Superlobbyist and
Republican fundraiser Jack Abramoff was happy to lend a hand. <b>Abramoff knew just the right person for the job: his own
assistant, Susan Ralston. She interviewed with Rove and got the position."</b>
Ralston told Filipinas magazine last year: "Working for Karl Rove is like being at the center of the Bush universe -- I am
fortunate to be where I am, and be involved in much of what goes on at the White House.".....
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Susan_B._Ralston
Susan Bonzon Ralston, Special Assistant to the President & Assistant to the Senior Advisor Karl Rove, was Jack Abramoff's
executive assistant at Preston Gates and Ellis and later at the Greenberg Traurig law and lobbying firm, where "she served as
the assistant director of governmental affairs.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/politics/27aide.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102705A.shtml
Ms. Ralston's portfolio expanded at the White House this year, accompanied by an elevated job title and a significant raise.
In 2003, she held the position of executive assistant to the senior adviser and <b>earned $64,700, which was bumped to
$67,600 in 2004. This year, as Mr. Rove took on new duties as the deputy chief of staff, Ms. Ralston was promoted to special
assistant to the president and assistant to the senior adviser, earning $92,100.</b>
Now, people familiar with Ms. Ralston's work said, she functions as Mr. Rove's own chief of staff, coordinating the five
groups within the West Wing that he oversees.
or this:
http://www.philippinenews.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=5
45c047910d8be922c67368a1a27ee84
Ralston still 'at her desk working:' White House
Cristina DC Pastor, Dec 07, 2005
SUSAN RALSTON, according to the White House, remains a deputy assistant to President George W. Bush and a deputy of top presidential adviser Karl Rove..........
Jack also held a note on parking lots used by the Atlantis Hotel Casino, which went bankrupt in Atlantic City in 1989. Another 1979 article reports on an Atlantic City police dept. investigation of Det. Edward Rush, who admitted that he had "introduced Angelo Pucci to a local realtor."
This is signifigant, because Kadin is suspected of recruiting and paying the three mob connected men accused of murdering Bouris.
On Jan. 2, 2004, the man who pleaded guilty in connection with Kadim's mother's 1993 murder, was reported by Knight Ridder news service, to be in witness protection:
"......Gus Boulis, the flamboyant, combative self-made Greek multimillionaire, was murdered in February 2001 in an orchestrated shooting with all the trappings of a messy mob-style hit. Boulis was driving from his Fort Lauderdale office when one car stopped short, cutting him off. Another car pulled alongside, and the driver emptied a semiautomatic into the founder of Miami Subs and SunCruz Casinos.
Boulis supporters immediately started pointing fingers at Adam Kidan, the disbarred New York lawyer who had bought the floating casinos four months earlier for $147.5 million. Kidan's financing was shaky, and the deal had quickly imploded into lawsuits and fisticuffs.
After the murder, Boulis estate lawyers discovered that Kidan had paid $145,000 to Anthony Moscatiello, a childhood friend of the John Gotti family, as a food and beverage consultant to SunCruz. In an odd footnote, Kidan's mother, Judith Shemtov, had been murdered in 1993 in Staten Island in a mob-connected home invasion gone awry. The getaway driver: former South Beach club impresario-turned-informant Chris Paciello......
......The highest-ranking mobster to set up permanent residence in South Florida in recent years is Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico, son of legendary Colombo family boss Carmine "The Snake" Persico. "The Snake," now 70, was sent to prison for 130 years in 1991.
Mob turncoats have testified that "The Snake" handpicked his son to succeed him, sparking a war that left 12 dead in the Colombo ranks. Allie Boy lived in Lighthouse Point, Fla., in the late 1990s after his 1994 acquittal on charges that he ordered some of the murders.
His South Florida freedom was short-lived.
In September 1998, he was arrested in the Florida Keys after a routine Coast Guard inspection on his 50-foot yacht, "Lookin' Good," found a 12-gauge shotgun, 20 shells, a .380-caliber pistol and 14 rounds of ammunition.
Persico, who had been convicted in 1986 on a heroin-trafficking-related racketeering charge, was not allowed to carry weapons. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
On the eve of his release, the feds unsealed a new indictment calling him the acting boss of the Colombos. One of the key witnesses: Chris Paciello, now in witness protection."
More background on Chris Paciello:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/9950,owen,11025,1.html
Chris Paciello’s Double Life
Dr. Jekyll in Miami, Mr. Hyde in Manhattan
by Frank Owen
December 15 - 21, 1999
"The innocent Staten Island housewife whom friend-to-the-stars Chris Paciello was charged two weeks ago with slaying in 1993 is not the only dead body floating around in the Miami club owner's murky and violent past, according to a former business partner and government snitch.....
.........Paciello's powerful lawyer, Roy Black, believes the government is picking on his client because of his high-profile lifestyle. "He really helped put South Beach on the map," says Black, who has defended the likes of Marv Albert and William Kennedy Smith. "Unfortunately, anybody who becomes a success in this country is an easy target."
"That's ridiculous," scoffs federal prosecutor Jim Walden. "This case is not about celebrity. It's about serious violent crime."
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/Issues/1999-12-23/news/feature_print.h
tml
From newtimesbpb.com
Originally published by Broward-Palm Beach New Times 1999-12-23
Fight Club
Chris Paciello, the dangerous darling of the South Florida nightlife set, has a reputation for fisticuffs. And Mob ties.
By Tristram Korten.....
And....
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/9814,bastone,11037,1.html
Thug Life
Wild Man Chris Paciello Has the Juice at Liquid
by William Bastone
April 1 - 7, 1998.........
Finally, this Feb. 22, 2001 New Times Broward-Palm Beach background article on the new Suncruz Casino Ship partnership seems remarkably prescient with it's examination of Abramoff's and Ben Waldman's ties to the christian right. Waldman's relationship with Pat Robertson is another ring in what may turn out to be a circus that fills the "big tent" of republican politics to overflowing.
Ralph Reed, a chrisitan right political leader whose ties to Abramoff and to Indian casino lobbying have been extensively covered by Atlanta's AJC, is also mentioned:
"SunCruz executives Jack Abramoff and Ben Waldman are walking examples of the strange and sometimes uneasy alliance between the family-values party and the gambling industry. Both men have strong ties to the Christian Coalition, which is adamantly opposed to gambling. And both were affiliated with the Reagan administration before leaving government service for careers with conservative causes.
Abramoff, SunCruz's vice president, has been connected to the Christian right since he was a student at Brandeis University, where he served as the head of a conservative group called the College Republicans. In that position he enlisted a young Ralph Reed as his top deputy; the two have remained close friends ever since. After graduating from Georgetown University law school in 1986, Abramoff later went to work in the Reagan White House and played an integral role in starting the Christian Coalition with Reed.
Waldman, the company president, served as associate director of Reagan's White House Office of Public Liaison and in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1988 he began work as press secretary and top aide to Pat Robertson during the televangelist's run for the presidency. (Robertson now directs the Christian Coalition.) Waldman then staged two failed bids for a West Virginia congressional seat in the 1990s.
There's an easy answer to the question of how the pair reconciles affiliation with both the Christian Coalition and the gambling industry, says company spokesman Mike Scanlon, also a GOP lobbyist. (Abramoff and Waldman declined to comment.) Both Abramoff and Waldman are Jewish, and the basic tenets of that faith don't preclude gambling, he says. "Jack is a deeply religious man himself; he's a conservative, Orthodox Jew," Scanlon says. "But there is no conflict in his religion with representing or owning gaming interests. Gambling is permissible by their religion."
That explanation doesn't wash with the Rev. Tom Grey, executive director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. "Bullshit," says Grey, who belongs to the United Methodist Church. He accuses the Republican Party of selling out to the big money of the gambling industry, a view shared by Christian Right stalwarts like former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family president James Dobson. "It's hypocritical for the Republican Party to talk about family values when it's promoting a business that destroys families," Grey adds. "What politicians want to do is say the right things about gambling and then take the money it gives them."
There is no question that Abramoff and Waldman, who are both in their early forties, give SunCruz considerable governmental clout in an industry that relies heavily on the kindness of politicians.
Abramoff is a lobbying powerhouse who has been paid millions of dollars by the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi to keep Congress from taxing revenues made at their casinos. He also represents E-lottery.com, which provides Internet services to state lotteries. In December he joined the Miami-based law firm of Greenberg Traurig, bringing $8 million worth of annual lobbying business with him, according to Scanlon. Last July he was featured in a Wall Street Journal article that called him a "GOP strongman" in Washington because of his pull with Republican leaders such as Tom DeLay, the majority whip in the House of Representatives, and Texas Rep. Dick Armey. Gaming interests have filled the campaign chests of some Republicans, including DeLay and Armey, say antigambling activists. "Tom DeLay blocks all antigambling legislation," says Mark Harrison, a Capitol Hill lobbyist who works for antigambling forces. "The industry runs all the money through him, so he blocks the bills." (DeLay's office in Texas didn't return messages from New Times.)
At present SunCruz faces little threat on the national level; a bill that would have banned gambling cruises to international waters was killed last year. But the industry has voiced concern about new attorney general John Ashcroft, another Abramoff friend, who has professed his opposition to gambling in all forms. And President George W. Bush, while he has made no promise, has said he doesn't support the gambling business. "Jack has a relationship with the President," Scanlon says. "He doesn't have a bat phone or anything, but if he wanted an appointment, he would have one."
On the state level, Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat, has been trying (and failing) to shut down SunCruz for years, but Scanlon says he doesn't expect that kind of combative relationship to continue. "Bob Butterworth had issues not only with the day-cruise industry but also with Gus as an individual," Scanlon says. "We've reached out to the [Florida] attorney general's office, and we intend to follow not only the letter but also the spirit of the law. We are far different people than Gus Boulis and prior management."
The most powerful man in the state, Gov. Jeb Bush, hasn't embraced the gambling industry. But he has taken little action to curtail it. "As far as I can tell, he's not in favor of gambling expansion, but we have no reason to believe he is antigaming," Scanlon says.
SunCruz has high hopes. The company, which owns 11 cruise ships and employs about 1000 people, plans to double the size of its business in three years. And Abramoff is currently touring countries where SunCruz wants to introduce cruise-ship gambling, including Israel and Hong Kong. At the time Boulis was murdered, company chairman Adam Kidan, also an active Republican and campaign contributor, was in Israel trying to drum up business, Scanlon says.
Such expansion may engender controversy, but Abramoff and Waldman are no strangers to that. Abramoff spent the late 1980s and early 1990s in Hollywood as a movie producer. The United Nations placed one of his films, Red Scorpion, about a Soviet spy who ultimately joins U.S.-backed forces, on a boycott list in 1993 when it was discovered that South Africa, still under apartheid at the time, supplied the set with military equipment. And in 1994, the year Republicans took over Congress, Abramoff joined a Seattle law firm and began his lobbying career with the help of close ties to Newt Gingrich and DeLay. A year later he represented Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who was widely considered a corrupt despot and was labeled an "obstacle to democracy" by the U.S. State Department. Abramoff also made a bundle lobbying for the Northern Marianas Islands, an American commonwealth that human-rights advocates say is little more than a legal sweatshop. The islands are exempt from immigration and minimum-wage laws; for the past several years, Abramoff has been successful in persuading Congress to keep them that way.
Waldman, for his part, worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Reagan-era scandals, and then left for a job with Joseph A. Strauss, who had started a company designed to garner federal funds for developers and landlords. Another of Strauss' employees was thenInterior Secretary James Watt. Allegations of kickbacks surfaced, and in the early 1990s both Strauss and Watt were investigated and convicted of various felonies. Waldman was never charged.
Kidan, Abramoff, and Waldman formed an ownership group that bought SunCruz for $147 million from Boulis this past summer. After the murder, the media turned to the company in part because Boulis and Kidan had been carrying on a public feud. Newspapers quoted Kidan complaining Boulis had attacked him during a business meeting and was out to kill him. Kidan and Boulis accused each other of cheating on the deal, and Boulis filed a lawsuit claiming SunCruz had bounced millions of dollars in checks for the sale and was delinquent in paying him millions more.
At press time Fort Lauderdale police hadn't yet interviewed SunCruz executives, but they are researching the company, says police spokesman Mike Reed. No one at SunCruz, though, seems particularly concerned. The company wants only to show Boulis' family respect and get on with business, says Scanlon. The marriage between Republican leaders and the gambling industry is perfectly natural, he adds. "I don't think gambling is antifamily at all," Scanlon says. "Gambling doesn't destroy people -- people destroy people. The gentleman or gentlewoman who decides to gamble makes that decision of his own free will.... It's a free-market industry, and that appeals to conservatives."
At Abramoff and Waldman's urging, politicians are likely to help the company succeed, says Grey, the antigambling crusader. "They could stop this industry, but they won't," he explains. "Florida seems to be against gambling, but they let it continue. Both parties -- it's not just Republicans -- have used gambling as a feeding trough. Used to be the Mob went to Las Vegas to fill its pockets, now it's [to] Congress.""
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Excerpts from June 19, 2004 NY Times Editorial:
"When the commission studying the 9/11 terrorist attacks refuted the Bush administration's claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, we suggested that President Bush apologize for using these claims to help win Americans' support for the invasion of Iraq. We did not really expect that to happen. But we were surprised by the depth and ferocity of the administration's capacity for denial. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have not only brushed aside the panel's findings and questioned its expertise, but they are also trying to rewrite history.
Mr. Bush said the 9/11 panel had actually confirmed his contention that there were "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said his administration had never connected Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Both statements are wrong......
........Mr. Bush has also used a terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush used to refer to Mr. Zarqawi as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner" who was in Baghdad working with the Iraqi government. But the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime, nor under the direction of Al Qaeda........"
The first published Zarqawi reference that I can find from the NY Times in that site's archive search was dated March 24, 2002,
presumably about the Oct., 2001 murder
of US diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan.
Zarqawi was supposedly implicated in Foley's
murder, according to the Jordanians, by
two captured "assasins"........
A Feb. 2, 2003 report in the Guardian is the next oldest Zarqawi reference:
"But the question that remains unresolved is whether there is any evidence that Saddam is in bed with al-Qaeda. The answer is likely to devolve to two lines of investigation - both of which, Bush administration officials will say, lead directly from Saddam to al-Qaeda.
The first connection, Powell is certain to allege, is a one-legged Jordanian wounded in the allied bombing of Afghanistan, who the Bush administration will argue is that missing link. He is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Stories about al-Zarqawi have been carefully fed to the media, suggesting his key role as the connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam. Most of them have been unsourced. And all have been dismissed by those who have followed the career of this veteran of the global jihad, who was fighting for Islam long before the world had heard of Osama bin Laden and whose al-Qaeda credentials have, in part, been created to fulfil the agendas of those who want him for other reasons.
So it is al-Zarqawi who is credited with being al-Qaeda's chemist-in-chief - an expert in weapons of mass destruction. It is al-Zarqawi, too, who is credited with being the mastermind behind a plot to use ricin to poison food at a British military base and other Allied military sites across Europe.
What is known about the career of this master terrorist? According to Jordanian intelligence, al-Zarqawi fled Afghanistan in late 2001, first to Iran, from where he was expelled, and then to Baghdad, where he received treatment for his wounds and had his leg amputated. It was while he was in Baghdad that the old campaigner's phone calls home were intercepted by the Jordanians and passed to colleagues in US.
Jordan's interest in al-Zarqawi is twofold. The country has named him as being behind the killing of US aid official Lawrence Foley, 60, in Jordan last October, on the basis of the confessions of two involved in the killing who say al-Zarqawi supplied them with weapons and money for attacks.
There is a second version of the al-Zarqawi story, supplied by German intelligence. Here his real name is Ahmed al-Kalaylah. They say he is al-Qaeda's combat commander, appointed to orchestrate attacks on Europe, and place him among the top 25 in the al-Qaeda hierarchy.
Each version could have elements of truth but both are are at odds with the facts known about his career in terrorism. According to jihadists who knew him in Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi's CV - though vicious - is less interesting than some make out.
They say that, despite fighting in the CIA-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he does not adhere to the ideology of al-Qaeda, a view shared by the CIA. Indeed, his name does not figure on its list of the 22 most wanted Islamic terrorists and he has never been mentioned in the list of senior al-Qaeda men in bin Laden's entourage in Afghanistan.
So why has al-Zarqawi suddenly been elevated to the position of a senior bin Laden lieutenant? The answer, say some, is that the Jordanians need a figure like al-Zarqawi to clamp down on their own Islamist extremists. One London-based Islamist said: 'If you want the key to the al-Zarqawi story, then look at the source of the information. The Jordanians have wanted their own bin Laden figure for some time and he fits the profile.'
'He's just an ordinary man,' said a former Arab mujahid who fought in the Afghan war against the Russians. 'He arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 and fought against Russia in Khosht in 1991.' He said that when the Taliban stormed to power, he chose to stay and in 1999 formed a close-knit group of Jordanians linked to the traditional Islamic-resistance group, the Muslim Brotherhood.
There, al-Zarqawi ran a guesthouse in Logo, a one-hour drive west of Kabul in an area ruled by the anti-Taliban warlord Gulbedin Hekmatyar. 'He lived with a group of 30-40 Jordanians of the Muslim Brotherhood,' said the source. 'There wasn't even a training camp.'
If the link to al-Zarqawi is at best circumstantial, the second connection that the Bush administration apparently plans to develop is equally tendentious. That connection is to the al-Ansar group, which, like al-Zarqawi, is also sheltering in Kurdish northern Iraq. The leader of this group, also expected to be name checked by Powell this week, is Mullah Krekar.
His group certainly is nasty, but what baffles many is that, despite the allegations about his group, he remains at large, living unmolested by the authorities in Norway.
Unlike al-Zarqawi, Krekar can speak for himself. 'I can say to you that this is not true that I am a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,' Krekar, 47, said in an interview in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. 'I will wait until Wednesday, and if Powell says anything against me, I can use documents to prove it is not true. Everything: that we have chemical bombs, [ties to] Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, all of those things.'
Despite claims by US officials that he is a terrorist specifically linked to al-Qaeda, they also admit they do not have the evidence to charge him, despite two interviews with the FBI.
'I told the FBI, "I can come to America and prove it's not true in your court",' said Krekar, who studied Islamic theology with a founder of al-Qaeda and has praised bin Laden. 'I am not an enemy of America.' "
And....
With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.
But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.....
And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today."
BBC News Article
Confessions 6 April, 2004 - The shooting of Mr Foley outside his home was the first killing of a Western diplomat in the city.
He was shot several times in the chest and head as he walked towards his car.
Among those sentenced to death by the military court were Libyan Salem Saad bin Suweid and Jordanian Yasser Freihat, who were arrested in December 2002 and accused of carrying out the actual shooting.
They had told the court they were innocent and had been forced to confess to the crime.
The other six were sentenced to death in absentia, including Zarqawi.
Two other defendants, Mohammed Damas and Mohammed Amin, who had also pleaded not guilty, were sentenced to 15 years and six years in jail respectively. ....... "
This June 16, 2004 ABC News report places Zarqawi on the FBI's Most Wanted List, but I cannot find him there. ABC also reported:
"Attention on al-Zarqawi has increased in recent months as he became a more vocal terror figure, due in part to three recordings released on the Internet, including that of the beheading of American businessman Nicholas Berg.
Even this winter, such a profile was uncharacteristic of the 36-year-old al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian previously not known for claiming responsibility for the numerous attacks in which he's believed to have had a hand."
And..
"Intelligence officials believe al-Zarqawi has cells or links to Muslim extremists around the world, including countries he has been known to have spent time in: Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Spain, Saudi Arabia , Sudan, Syria, Pakistan and Kuwait.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has also said that al-Zarqawi and his network have plotted against countries including France, Britain, Italy, Germany and Russia.
Al-Zarqawi, whose real name is Ahmad Fadhil al-Khalayleh, joined the jihadist cause in his teens, traveling to Afghanistan to fight alongside the mujahadeen, or holy warriors, trying to prevent a Soviet occupation. The street-smart plotter is thought to have become a student of Islamic literature.
He was known as the "one-legged terrorist" because U.S. intelligence indicated he received medical treatment and was fitted with an artificial leg in Baghdad in 2002, after fleeing Afghanistan.
However, the view now is that al-Zarqawi has both legs, even though he is still believed to have traveled to Iraq for treatment for his leg or another injury, a U.S. intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Associated Press Writer Curt Anderson contributed to this report "
Bush Administration Claims That Zarqawi Sought Safe Haven in Iraq Put in Doubt - ABC News page (1) (2)
NEW YORK, Oct. 5, 2004
..."This is a murky story," said Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser. "I'm sure we'll find out more but what we do know about Zarqawi is that he knew Iraq well."
Since then, the president has subtly altered his language when discussing Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad before the war. Bush no longer maintains Zarqawi was harbored by Saddam, just that he was there."
So.... one leg or two? Terrorist killer of more than 700, or.....just a shady character in a "murky story".
The folks that carefully fed us the "Al-Zarqawi is a bogeyman" story, have not been very credible about much else that they have officially stated about Iraq. They can't seem to keep the Zarqawi story straight.
in 2002 at his "chemical weapons and terrorist training camp" in Kurdish controlled Kirmal (Khurmal).
The story had already been reported on Feb. 7, 2003. If it is true, it is another indication that Zarqawi is more of a terrorist "prop" than an actual threat:
By GREG MILLER Los Angeles Times
Friday, February 7, 2003
Washington -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent a significant part of his presentation to the United Nations this week describing a terrorist camp in northern Iraq where al-Qaida affiliates are said to be training to carry out attacks with explosives and poisons.
But neither Powell nor other administration officials answered the question: What is the United States doing about it?
Lawmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say that they have been stymied for months in their efforts to get an explanation for why the U.S. has not launched a military strike on the compound near the village of Khurmal. Powell cited its ongoing operation as one of the key reasons for suspecting ties between Baghdad and the al-Qaida terror network.
The lawmakers put new pressure on the Bush administration on Thursday to explain its decision to leave the facility unharmed.
"Why have we not taken it out?" Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) asked Powell during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. "Why have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"
Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.....
......Absent an explanation from the White House, some officials suggested the administration had refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.
"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. "If you take it out, you can't use it as justification for war."..................
......A White House spokesman said Thursday he had no immediate comment on the matter.
The administration's handling of the issue has emerged as one of the more curious recent elements of the war on terrorism. Failing to intervene appears to be at odds with President Bush's stated policy of pre-empting terrorist threats, and the facility is in an area where the U.S. already has a considerable presence.
U.S. intelligence agents are said to be operating among the Kurdish population nearby, and U.S. and British warplanes already patrol much of northern Iraq as part of their enforcement of a "no- fly" zone. "
The record of "news" reports indicates that there is no way to confirm that Al-Zarqawi is the terrorist nemesis that the Bush administration some of the time.....purports him to be.