The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London. Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. But others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. But early signs of an exodus are clear, and officials in the United States and the Middle East say the potential for veterans of the insurgency to spread far beyond Iraq is significant.
In a report written for the United States government, Dennis Pluchinsky, a former senior intelligence analyst at the State Department, said battle-hardened militants from Iraq posed a greater threat to the West than extremists who trained in Afghanistan. Iraq has become a laboratory for urban guerrilla tactics, he explained, citing the use of safe houses, surveillance, bomb making and mortars. Militants in Iraq are turning out instructional videos and electronic newsletters on the Internet that lay out their playbook for a startling array of techniques, from encryption to booby-trapped bombs to surface-to-air missiles, and those manuals are circulating freely in cyberspace.
Tactics common in Iraq are showing up in other parts of the world. In Somalia and Algeria, for example, recent suicide bombings have been accompanied by the release of taped testimonials by the bombers, a longtime terrorist practice embraced by insurgents in Iraq.
When Muhammad al-Darsi, 24, got out of prison in Libya last year after serving six years for militant activities there, he had one goal: killing Americans in Iraq. A recruiter he found on the Internet arranged to meet him in Damascus, Syria. But when he got there, Mr. Darsi said, he was drafted into the war that is seeping out of Iraq. The recruiter told him a team of militants from Iraq had traveled to Jordan, where they were preparing attacks on Americans and Jews. He asked Mr. Darsi to join them and blow himself up in a crowd of tourists at the airport in Amman. “I agreed,” Mr. Darsi said in a nine-page confession to Jordanian authorities after the plot was broken up. The authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for Mr. Darsi.
U.S. officials have accused Syria of being indifferent to the way militants use their country as a gateway to Iraq. In Damascus, Mounir Ali, a Ministry of Information spokesman, conceded that controlling Syria’s long border with Iraq was difficult. But he blamed the United States for not supplying border-control technology and said that Syria, too, was apprehensive about militant attacks. “We are very afraid of this problem created in Iraq,” he said. “The religious problem. The sectarian one. It is going to affect everybody and primarily Syria.”
Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident in Britain who runs the jihadist Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, said in an interview, “The flow of fighters is already going back and forth, and the fight will be everywhere until the United States is willing to cease and desist.”
In Lebanon, the Lebanese Army recently found itself in a furious battle against a militant group, Fatah al Islam, whose ranks included as many as 50 veterans of the war in Iraq, according to Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, general director of the Internal Security Forces in Lebanon. More than 30 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting the group at a refugee camp near Tripoli. General Rifi said that “if any country says it is safe from this, they are putting their heads in the sand.”
– edited from The New York Times
PeaceMeal, July/August 2007
The report recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network. "[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."
Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999, while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.
His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government. But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.
Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College's commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, "He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom."
Many of Record's arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made by critics of the administration. But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the Army's premier academic institution. Iraq, Record concludes, "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda."
In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism. Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's overreach in World War II. "A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means."
He also scoffs at the administration's policy, laid out by President Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future, he writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated."
The essay concludes with several recommendations, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps — a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress. But Record also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in Iraq, and be prepared to settle for a "friendly autocracy" there rather than a genuine democracy.
– edited from The Washington Post,
January 12, 2004
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2004
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Did the United States government send an innocent man out of the country to be tortured? That’s the disturbing question at the heart of a case that may reveal a secret side of the war on terrorism — one that the administration does not want to talk about.
In September 2002, Maher Arar,
a Syrian-born Canadian citizen (photo), took his wife and two children on a beach vacation
in Tunisia. But he flew home alone early on Sept. 26 for his job as a software engineer.
On a stopover at JFK Airport in New York en route to Montreal, Mr. Arar, 32, was detained
and interrogated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
When INS agents began questioning him, Arar wasn’t concerned at first, he said in an interview on 60 Minutes II aired Jan. 21."The interrogation lasted about seven or eight hours, and then they came and shackled me and chained me," Arar recalled. "I said, ‘What's happening here?’ And they would not tell me." What he didn’t know is that he’d been placed on the U.S. immigration watch list.
After spending the night in a holding cell, Arar was shackled, driven to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and locked in solitary confinement. Agents told him they had evidence that he’d been seen in the company of terrorist suspects in Canada and accused him of being a member of al Qaeda. Arar denies any involvement with the organization.
Arar was held incommunicado. When his wife, Monia Mazigh, who has a PhD in finance, didn’t hear from him for six days, she called the Canadian embassy. Then American officials acknowledged they were holding Arar. A Canadian consular official visited Arar in Brooklyn and assured him he’d be deported home to Canada.
But the U.S. Justice Department had a different plan. After two weeks in custody, Arar was taken from his cell by federal agents in the middle of the night. "They read me the document. They say, ‘The INS director decided to deport you to Syria,’" Arar related. "And of course, the first thing I did was I started crying, because everyone knows that Syria practices torture."
Torture in Syrian prisons is well-documented. The state department’s own report cites an array of gruesome tortures routinely used in Syrian jails. And in a speech last fall, President Bush condemned Syria, alongside Iraq, for what he called the country’s "legacy of torture and oppression."
Deportation agents flew Arar on a specially chartered jet to Jordan, and the Jordanians drove him to Syria. It would be a year before Maher Arar would see his family again.
The morning after his arrival, Arar said a Syrian intelligence officer arrived carrying a thick, black electrical cable. "He said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ I said — I was crying, you know — ‘Yes, I know what it is. It’s a cable.’ And … he beat me very strongly" on the palms of the hands, then stopped and asked questions.
Arar says the physical torture took place during the first two weeks, but he says he also went through psychological and mental torture: "They would take me back to a room, they call it the waiting room. And I hear people screaming. And they, I mean, people, they’re being tortured. And I felt my heart was going to go out of my chest."
Arar says he was held in an underground cell 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, and 7 feet high. "It’s a grave. It’s the same size of a grave. It’s a dark place. It’s underground," says Arar. It was his home for a full 10 months.
He says the Syrians were pressing him to confess he’d been to an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan: "They just wanted to find something that the Americans did not find — and that’s when they asked me about Afghanistan. They said, ‘You’ve been to Afghanistan,’ so they would hit me three, four times. And, if I hesitate, they would hit me again."
Arar says he signed a confession because he was "ready to do anything to stop the torture." But he claims that he had never been to Afghanistan, or trained at a terrorist camp. "Just one hit of this cable, it’s like you just forget everything in your life. Everything!" he says.
Back in Canada, Monia was fighting for her husband’s life. Eventually, she got the ear of then-Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and Canadian diplomats subsequently demanded answers from the United States. It turned out, however, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had been passing the information about Arar’s alleged terrorist associations to U.S. intelligence. And U.S. government officials spoken to by 60 Minutes II say they told Canadian intelligence that they were sending Arar to Syria — and the Canadians signed off on the decision.
It took a year from the time Arar was detained in New York for him to be released. Syria’s highest-ranking diplomat in Washington, Imad Moustapha, said, "We could not substantiate any of the allegations against him."
60 Minutes II alleges that the decision to deport Arar was made at the highest levels of the U.S. Justice Department, with a special removal order signed by John Ashcroft’s former deputy, Larry Thompson. Ashcroft made his only public statement about the case in November. He said the U.S. deported Arar to protect Americans — and had every right to do so.
"I consider that really an utter fabrication and a lie," says Michael Ratner, one of Arar’s attorneys and head of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York. "They knew, when they were sending him to Syria, that Syria would use certain kinds of information-gathering techniques, including torture, on him. They knew it," says Ratner. "That’s why he wasn’t sent to Canada."
On January 22, 2003, CCR filed suit in federal court against Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, FBI director Robert Mueller, and other U.S. officials. The suit states that the decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria was done with full knowledge of the existence of state-sponsored torture in that country, and in direct violation of the Convention Against Torture, a treaty signed and ratified by the United States in 1994. Federal officials deported Mr. Arar to Syria under the Government’s "extraordinary renditions" program precisely because that country can and does use methods of interrogation that would not be legal or morally acceptable in this country or any other democratic country.
Mr. Arar has already filed a multimillion-dollar damage suit against Syria and Jordan. He says he was also beaten by Jordanian officials before being handed over to Syria.
In Canada on January 21, the RCMP raided the home and offices of an Ottawa Citizen journalist as part of a criminal investigation into leaks in the case of Maher Arar. Police say they are investigating an alleged breach of the Security of Information Act by reporter Juliet O’Neill, who wrote a story on the Arar case in November. The act makes it illegal to communicate leaked secret documents. Ottawa Citizen editor-in-chief Scott Anderson said, "I think this is a black, black day for freedom in this country. I am outraged."
– compiled from CBS News, CBC News
(Canada), CCR-NY and Amnesty International
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2004
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
The International Committee for the Red Cross reiterated its criticism of the Bush administration on October 10 for ignoring repeated appeals to give legal rights to prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After a visit to the base, ICRC officials said many prisoners were suffering "a worrying deterioration" in mental health because they are held without charges and without legal counsel."They have no idea about their fate and they have no means of recourse at their disposal through any legal mechanism," said ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal.
Westphal said the ICRC, the only independent body with access to the detainees, had yet to see "any significant movement" from administration officials to its long-standing request that the United States give the prisoners legal rights in accordance with international conventions governing prisoners of war. The Bush administration has refused to grant them prisoner of war status but says the detainees are treated humanely.
However, human rights groups have criticized the conditions under which the prisoners are held, adding that interrogation techniques used there might include torture. Whatever the prisoners’ status, the ICRC said: "People held as a result of conflict or armed violence are protected by international humanitarian law, and should be treated humanely."
Those held at Guantanamo come from more than 40 countries and speak around 17 languages, the ICRC said. Suspected of links to the fallen Afghan Taliban regime or al-Qaida terrorist network, some prisoners have been confined for more than 18 months. The Pentagon has refused to identify them, has not brought charges against any, and has barred them from contacting lawyers. The Pentagon is in the final stages of planning for military trials of at least some of the prisoners.
"We have observed what we consider to be a worrying deterioration in the psychological health of a large number of the internees" because of the uncertainty of their situation, Westphal said. The indefinite detentions without charge have led to 32 suicide attempts by 27 prisoners, mostly by hanging.
At a May 28 White House press briefing — two days after the Pentagon reported two new suicide attempts — President Bush's former press secretary Ari Fleischer asserted, "The prisoners in Guantanamo are … receiving far better treatment than they received in the life that they were living previously."
On November 30, an anonymous military official announced that more than 100 men and boys will be released from Guantanamo in the next two months.
– compiled from The Associated Press
and Reuters
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2003
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
The actions taken by President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft in authorizing military tribunals for suspected terrorists and secretly detaining more than a thousand persons in the United States for questioning have been condemned as "a constitutional coup d'etat" by experts on constitutional and international law.
An executive order signed by President Bush gives him the exclusive right to identify, try, and even execute foreign terrorists without the constitutional or evidentiary protections ordinarily granted defendants in the U.S. criminal justice system. Under the executive order, the president himself is to determine who is an accused terrorist or has "knowingly harbored" a terrorist and is, therefore, subject to trial by tribunal.
Those accused do not need to be tried in the United States. They may be tried in other countries — like "liberated" Afghanistan — and on ships at sea. The tribunals will be held in secret without a jury. Panels of military officers will be the judges, empowered to impose the death penalty if two-thirds of them agree. There will be no appeals to any of their sentences.
The tribunals will not be conducted in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice. "The accused in such a court would have dramatically fewer rights than a person would in a court-martial," according to Eugene R. Fidell, the president of the National Institute of Military Justice. Mr. Fidell said he expected the executive order to be challenged in court.
Georgetown University law professor David Cole emphasized, "The only times that military tribunals have been permitted in the past have been in a declared war with respect to enemy aliens — people who are involved in fighting against us in a declared war on behalf of a nation with which were at war."
President Bush asked for an official declaration of war, but Congress refused.
White House officials said the tribunals are necessary to protect potential American jurors from the danger of passing judgment on accused terrorists. They also said the tribunals would prevent the disclosure of government intelligence methods, which normally would be public in civilian courts.
"[T]he conventional way of bringing people to justice doesn't apply to these times," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett.
Harvard Law School professor Phillip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general, pointed out that terrorists — notably those convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — have been successfully prosecuted in civilian court under the Classified Information Procedures Act, which allows classified information to be used at trial without being disclosed to the public. He added, "The tribunal idea looks to me like a way of dealing with a fear that we lack the evidence to convict these people."
Conservative columnist William Safire lambasted the president's order in no uncertain terms: "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens. . . . We are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts. . . . In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.' "
In the criminal investigation following the September 11 terrorist attacks, some 1,200 persons in the United States have been held incommunicado. Numerous legal protections under the Constitution and international treaties appear to have been ignored or violated in their detention.
"We are becoming a banana republic here in the United States, with 'disappeared' [persons]," said Francis A. Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois. "We don't know where they are or the conditions under which they are being held. We have no idea whether they have access to attorneys. We do know one of them died, under highly suspicious circumstances, while in custody."
Resident aliens "are entitled to the protections of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment," Boyle said. The foreign detainees are also protected by international law under treaties to which the United States government is a party, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Covenant affords basic due process protections to everyone in the United States, irrespective of their citizenship, according to Boyle.
After two months, federal authorities said they had found no evidence indicating that any of the people detained played a role in the suicide hijacking plot.
In an earlier century, the Supreme Court ruled that a President of the United States — no less than Abraham Lincoln — had violated the Constitution by subjecting Confederate sympathizers to military tribunals. The Supreme Court asserted: ". . . [Our constitution] foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers and people would become restive under restraint and seek by sharp and decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper; and that the principles of constitutional liberty would be in peril, unless established by irrepealable law. . ."
The Bush administration is not only shredding America 's most sacred document — the United States Constitution — it is also putting in harms way American citizens — journalists and others — who may be charged by foreign governments with threatening their national security. If the United States can prosecute and even execute vaguely identified "supporters of terrorism" swiftly and secretly, why can't other countries also follow our lawless example?
- compiled from The New York Times, The
Village Voice and American Free Press
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2001
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)