Last month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans that Iraq “continues to calm down.” But the bitter reality is that America is losing the war in Iraq. And it’s not just because the interim Iraqi government can’t stop the suicide bombers or prevail over the soldiers loyal to Shiite rebel leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr. It’s also because neither the U.S. nor the interim Iraqi government can control the flow of Iraq’s oil.
The bad news from the oil fields continued last week when men loyal to Sadr surrounded several Iraqi government buildings and threatened to attack pipelines and other oil facilities unless the government stopped pumping oil through the pipes that feed Iraq’s oil export terminals in the Persian Gulf, Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya. (Mina al-Bakr was built by Halliburton for the new Baathist government in the mid-1970s, when the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Iraq.) The Iraqi government reportedly stopped pumping oil in an effort to stem unrest in Basra, a city that for months has been viewed as more pro-Western than other areas.
Saboteurs also bombed one of the two main pipelines that feed the terminals. Repair crews had the 48-inch line fixed by Aug. 11, but it was unclear when — or if — the pipeline would be put back into service. Every day that the Persian Gulf terminals are shut, it costs the Iraqi government at least $50 million in lost oil revenue.
The situation in the northern oil fields is even worse. The easiest way to move oil from the oil-rich fields near Kirkuk to market is through a pipeline that runs to the Turkish port at Ceyhan. But ever since U.S. forces invaded Iraq, that pipeline has suffered more hits than Mike Tyson. The pipeline has been bombed so frequently that Iraqi officials are openly talking about shutting it down.
Indeed, most of the news from Iraq’s oil sector, despite some $2.3 billion in investment by the United States in the months since Saddam Hussein was deposed, has been bad. Recent figures show that oil production now approaches 2.3 million barrels of oil per day. Exports have reached about 1.9 million barrels per day — a fraction of the amount Iraq was exporting in the days before the first Iraq war in 1991. Although the exports are far less than the Pentagon had hoped for, they are helping Iraq’s nascent government stay afloat. And the new regime has been bolstered by record-high oil prices, which show no sign of abating anytime soon. On Aug. 13, prices for September delivery of light sweet crude hit a record high of $45.93 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
But along with the rising prices and an increase in production has come a dramatic increase in the number of insurgents. According to the New York Times, the number of insurgents in Iraq has grown from 2,500 in April 2003 to some 20,000 today. And those men understand that America’s Achilles’ heel in Iraq is oil.
“Whoever controls Iraqi oil controls Iraq’s destiny,” says A.F. Alhajji, an oil industry analyst at Ohio Northern University who closely follows the Persian Gulf. And now, says Alhajji, the insurgents are ensuring that Iraq’s destiny is to continue in chaos. By strangling the country’s oil exports, they are cutting off the lifeblood of Iraq’s new government. Without reliable flows of cash from its oil industry, Iraq will not be able to rebuild. And the U.S. Congress is unlikely to fund the Iraqi rebuilding effort unless it shows some results quickly.
Since last June, insurgents have attacked various parts of Iraq’s oil infrastructure at least 90 times. That figure is probably a fraction of the real number. Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington think tank that tracks energy issues, says the real figure may be twice as high. But the Pentagon is reluctant to talk about the attacks on oil targets. “Nobody really wants to provide information because it’s a political hot potato,” says Luft. According to IAGS’s pipeline watch Web site, there were 90 attacks on oil targets between June 2003 and early August of this year. On Aug. 5 alone, there were three attacks, including an additional bombing of the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line. That same day, a bomb hit a gas pipeline that feeds an electricity plant in Bayji, north of Tikrit.
For the insurgents, pipelines are attractive targets. Some 4,400 miles of pipelines crisscross Iraq. The Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line — which, according to IAGS, has been bombed 11 times in the past 15 months — has become the insurgents’ favorite target. (Other sources say that pipeline is being bombed much more frequently — at least once a week, sometimes more.) The ongoing cost of repairing the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line and the nearly impossible task of protecting it from further attacks are two reasons Iraqi officials have considered shutting it down, a move that makes sense to Alhajji. “It’s not worth it anymore,” he says, adding that the expense of patrolling the line, combined with the lost oil and repair costs, has made the pipeline expendable.
But shutting down the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan line would have negative repercussions for both the Turks and the Kurds. The Kurds, who have been the most reliable supporters of the American invasion, are very concerned about losing the revenue that comes from the oil fields in northern Iraq. If that revenue stops flowing, the Kurds will lose a powerful voice at the bargaining table. The Turkish government, which is nominally pro-American, will be angered if the pipeline is shut down because the Turks are paid transit fees on oil shipped through the line. And there’s another danger: Closing the northern export route would enable insurgents to concentrate all their disruptive efforts on the pipelines and pumping stations in the central and southern parts of the country, which feed the Persian Gulf oil terminals.
Furthermore, if the line is shut down, there is a real possibility that it could be looted, just as other parts of the Iraqi oil industry were looted in the weeks after American troops got to Baghdad. If pumps and other parts are stolen, the Iraqi government will be limited to exporting its oil through the Persian Gulf for months, if not years, after order returns to the country.
President Bush and his administration don’t like to talk about Iraq’s oil — at least not in the context of a justification for the war. In November 2002, in an interview with Steve Croft on “60 Minutes,” Rumsfeld asserted that the then-looming Iraq war had “nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.”
Despite Rumsfeld’s pronouncement, it’s clear that oil has always been the key factor in America’s relationship with Iraq. During the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush kept to his script that the war was “not about oil.” Yet his own secretary of state, James Baker, a Texan with deep ties to the oil industry, didn’t get the memo advising him to stick with the script. On Nov. 13, 1990, Baker held a press conference during which he said that the “economic lifeline of the industrial world runs from the [Persian] Gulf, and we cannot permit a dictator such as this to sit astride that economic lifeline. And to bring it down to the level of the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs. If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s jobs. Because an economic recession worldwide, caused by the control of one nation, one dictator if you will, of the West’s economic lifeline will result in the loss of jobs on the part of American citizens.”
On Jan. 15, 1991, just before the United States began attacking Saddam’s forces in Kuwait, Bush signed a national security directive.
The very first line of the recently declassified directive declared, “Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security.” It goes on to say that America “remains committed to defending its vital interest in the region, if necessary through the use of military force, against any power with interests inimical to our own.”
Oil was a key factor in the second Iraq war from the get-go. The first combat took place on March 20, 2003, when several groups of Navy SEALs stormed the Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya oil terminals. By controlling the oil terminals, the Pentagon was able to ensure that it would eventually control Iraq’s oil exports.
A week later, on March 27, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the war wouldn’t be overly expensive. “We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” He continued, saying “the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years.”
A few weeks later, Wolfowitz compared America’s reaction to the threat of nuclear weapons being developed by North Korea with the situation in Iraq. “Let’s look at it simply,” he said. “The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”
Leaders of al-Qaida have been talking about the oil issue for years. In interviews with Western reporters a few years ago, Osama bin Laden repeatedly referred to what he called the “rape” and “plunder” of Saudi Arabia’s oil by the United States. In 2002, after al-Qaida operatives bombed the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen, the terror group released a statement that said, “The Mujahadeen hit the secret line — the provision line — and the feeding to the artery of the life of the crusader nation.”
On April 24 of this year, three bomb-laden boats piloted by suicide bombers attacked both of Iraq’s oil terminals in the Persian Gulf. None of the boats hit their targets, but the attacks killed two U.S. Navy sailors and injured four others. Two days after the attacks, al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued a statement that said, “We tell you enemies of God, robbers of oil and riches and drug traders … O snakes of evil, we will exterminate and debilitate you by land, sea and air until God makes us victorious or until we die.”
The attempted bombings of the oil terminals were the first waterborne suicide attacks on American forces since 2000, when al-Qaida engineered the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 American sailors. Al-Zarqawi reminded the world of the attack on the USS Cole, saying that his loyalists “have repeated this attack in a new garb and with stubborn determination by striking vital economic links of the infidel and atheist states.”
One week after the attack on the terminals, Saudi gunmen killed two Americans, two Brits and an Australian who were working for ABB Lummus in the oil town of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia’s most important port on the Red Sea. On May 29, al-Qaida assassins attacked an oil industry complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. That attack left 22 people dead. After the Khobar attack, al-Qaida leader Abdul Aziz al-Moqrin (now believed to be dead) said the attack was carried out because Saudi leaders have been providing “America with oil at the cheapest prices according to their masters’ wish, so that their economy does not collapse.”
The Iraqi government and the Pentagon are doing all they can to protect Iraq’s oil infrastructure. More than 14,000 security personnel are now working for Erinys, a South African private security firm that has a $39 million contract to guard Iraq’s pipelines, pumping stations, refineries and oil wells. But given the results so far, Erinys may need an additional estimated 14,000 guards.
Mike Ameen, a Houston-based oil executive, is not optimistic about the future of Iraq’s oil economy. Ameen has spent decades working in the Middle East. He speaks, reads and writes Arabic and has recently worked as a consultant for the U.S. government on the Iraqi oil business. Ameen says that by targeting the oil infrastructure, the insurgents are making it far more expensive for oil field contractors to do business in Iraq. They are also preventing any major oil companies from even considering new investments in Iraq. “It’s a gloomy picture — it really is,” says Ameen.
Unfortunately, that gloomy picture shows no sign of improving anytime soon.
A military guard will be on each arm of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as he is led into a courtroom on Saturday to be arraigned for a second time before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay. He went through the same process in the same courtroom on nearly the same charges almost four years ago in the closing months of the Bush administration. The fact that President Obama chooses now, six months before voters choose between him and Mitt Romney, to restart what some have dubbed “the trial of the century,” using a second-rate system of justice he had ordered stopped at a facility he had ordered closed, makes an unflattering statement about the timidity of his leadership and the malleability of his principles.
Apologists for the tarnished military commissions, like Attorney General Eric Holder and the sixth and current chief prosecutor Brigadier General Mark Martins, acknowledge that our regular federal courts are best suited for terrorism trials. Holder told an audience at Northwestern University in March:
Simply put, since 9/11, hundreds of individuals have been convicted of terrorism or terrorism-related offenses in Article III courts and are now serving long sentences in federal prison. Not one has ever escaped custody. No judicial district has suffered any kind of retaliatory attack. These are facts, not opinions. There are not two sides to this story. Those who claim that our federal courts are incapable of handling terrorism cases are not registering a dissenting opinion – they are simply wrong.
After singing the praises of the federal courts – which really have been swift, severe and successful in comparison to the six and-a-half dubious trials completed over the past decade at Guantanamo – Martins and Holder pivot to polishing the image of the tarnished military commissions they argue are well-suited for a small category of cases. Martins told an audience at Harvard in April:
It is perfectly reasonable to ask why – with concurrent jurisdiction over offenses that can be characterized as both federal civilian crimes and violations of the law of war and with comparable procedural protections – we should invest great energy and resources in military trials. The answer is that there is a narrow but important category of cases in which the pragmatic and principled choice among the lawful tools available to protect our people and serve the interests of justice is a reformed military commission.
Beltway bureaucrats are prone to using buzzwords to shade the truth. For example, rather than saying “yes, it makes us look bad when we lock people away in prison for a decade without a trial,” some might soften it up by using more subtle Beltway language: “The optics are not optimal.” The word “pragmatic” has become a favorite of the spinmeisters. In truth, being pragmatic has become a synonym for being a wuss. When a bureaucrat capitulates instead of confronting barriers standing in the way of doing the right thing, and then cites the barriers as an excuse for choosing the easier path, he is lauded for making the “pragmatic choice.” Others might say he simply wussed out. President Obama has been “pragmatic” far too often on national security choices in his first three years in office.
There is nothing pragmatic or principled about undermining America’s reputation as a champion of the rule of law and a supposed model for the world to follow. The apologists for Obama’s decision to embrace military commissions call attention to similarities between the commission rules and the rules in federal courts, and they claim those rules are essentially the same. They argue that the two systems are virtually identical and that trial observers will find trials in the two forums nearly indistinguishable. In some things, however, close is just not good enough. An O’Doul’s looks like a beer and has a beer-like flavor, but a real beer drinker would never argue that an O’Doul’s is virtually indistinguishable from a Sam Adams. Just as a near-beer is not practically the same as a real beer, neither is near-justice the equivalent of real justice. The apologists may think they are fooling the rest of the world when they say at long last military commissions do real justice, but they are wrong.
Holder and Martins justify the need for a second-rate military commission system by talking up the alleged realities of the battlefield that they say make it impracticable for troops to worry about doing rights advisements and establishing a chain of custody for evidence while in the midst of a war. Their general principle is entirely valid … but also totally irrelevant in the cases they intend to prosecute before military commissions. Few of the 779 men ever held at Guantanamo were captured by members of the U.S. armed forces and even fewer still were apprehended on the battlefield as that term is commonly understood by ordinary human beings. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, was rousted from a sound sleep and arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate based on information developed by our civilian Central Intelligence Agency. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged USS Cole bomber, was apprehended in Dubai, a bustling global business center in the United Arab Emirates that no one considers a battlefield. Hambali was arrested near Bangkok, Thailand, by Thai authorities and later turned over to the CIA. The truth is that not a single one of the 14 so-called high-value detainees was captured by members of the U.S. armed forces on a battlefield; in fact, none were even apprehended in Afghanistan. The perception of some inexperienced 19-year-old Army private trying to read Miranda rights to a captured al Qaeda fighter while hunkered down in a foxhole with bombs exploding nearby and bullets whizzing past overhead is a canard.
Military commission apologists should have the integrity to stand up and tell the public the truth about the small category of cases they believe are best-suited for the second-rate procedures of the tarnished military commissions. The truth is the reason the apologists want a second-rate military commission option is because of what we did to the detainees, not because of what the detainees did to us. This is not about the exigencies of the battlefield and the problems our soldiers face trying to fight a war; this is about torture, coercion, rendition and a decade or more in confinement without an opportunity to confront the evidence – abuses that would have us up in arms if done to an American citizen by some other country – that make the tarnished military commissions uniquely suited to try and accommodate the small category of cases where we crossed over to the dark side. A military commission may be a justice-themed theatrical production – complete with a script, actors, a sound stage and costumes that create a passable courtroom-like atmosphere – but beneath that facade is a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ charade where, as the government admits, even if a KSM or a Nashiri is found not guilty he returns to a cell to continue serving what is likely a life sentence. That should not inspire anyone to wave the flag and shout USA! USA! in celebration of our vaunted exceptionalism.
Lloyd Cutler was the youngest member of the prosecution team in the trial of eight Nazi saboteurs captured, convicted by a military commission and executed in a span of six weeks in the summer of 1942. He wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on December 31, 2001, nearly 60 years after his military commission experience ended and 10 days before the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay. Mr. Cutler said that how we prosecute alleged al Qaeda terrorists will say as much about us as it does about al Qaeda. He warned that success will be judged by our ability to show the world that justice is in fact being done.
Had we heeded Mr. Cutler’s advice back in 2001 we would not be where we are now in 2012, fumbling along more than a decade later still trying to mold a second-rate process to fit around sets of bad facts we created when we turned our backs on the law and our values. In normal practice, cases are developed to conform to the court. Here, because of how we mistreated some of the detainees, we are trying to develop a court to conform to the cases. We are setting an example for the world, but not a good one.
In the wake of the extrajudicial killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and several other people in Yemen this week, we’re faced (once again) with the realization that the United States Constitution has become a largely meaningless totem. It gets waved around enthusiastically by people on all sides of the political spectrum whenever it seems to serve their interests, but nobody pays much attention to what it actually says. Presumably President Obama, the military-intelligence establishment and the mainstream media are declaring Awlaki a special case. Thanks to the secret provisions of secret laws, he was deprived of all the rights of citizenship and not subject to the ordinary rule of law that extends back not merely to the Constitution but to the Magna Carta (at least).
Some similar exemption must also be made for the Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was found, badly injured and barely alive, after a 2002 firefight between U.S. troops and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. (Khadr’s father, an al-Qaida supporter and fundraiser, had apparently dropped him off at a Taliban compound a few weeks earlier.) Based on what we see in the painful, revealing documentary “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo” — the first film to show actual interrogation footage from inside the secret American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Khadr became a sort of ritual sacrifice by the Canadian government, an offering to its American allies and/or overlords. His case became a hot political issue north of the border, where Canadians pride themselves on a society that is more egalitarian, and more civilized, than that of their American neighbors.
Following a Canadian Supreme Court decision, most of Khadr’s seven-hour interrogation at Gitmo by CSIS officers — the approximate Canadian equivalent of the CIA — has been declassified, and veteran lefty documentarians Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez use that claustrophobic, low-resolution 2003 footage as the basis for “You Don’t Like the Truth.” That sounds like something the interrogators might have said to Khadr, but it isn’t. It’s what he tells them after realizing they don’t want to hear his allegations that he was tortured by American forces, and that all his supposed confessions about knowing Osama bin Laden and attending al-Qaida barbecues were made up on the spot, to stop the pain.
You won’t see Khadr suffer physical torture on these surveillance tapes, although the interrogators rely on time-honored tactics of psychological abuse, alternately berating him and plying him with Big Macs. You will see a teenager who speaks idiomatic North American English, and who is obviously relieved to see fellow Canadians, whom he naively assumes have come to help him. And you’ll see him go through a near-total breakdown, sitting alone in the room weeping for his mother, after he realizes that no one cares about what happens to him and that he’s only interesting to his interrogators as long as he keeps making up stories about Osama and al-Qaida.
I have no idea whether Khadr actually threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Delta Force soldier, as was alleged after his capture. (Khadr has consistently denied it, and photographic evidence suggests that he had been shot through the back and was out cold before the soldier’s death.) But the Canadian interrogators barely mention it, and it feels suspiciously like an inflammatory distraction, thrown in mostly to alienate all possible North American sympathy. At best it’s an ancillary question. If Khadr was a genuine military combatant, then he can’t be prosecuted for killing an enemy soldier in battle. Furthermore, he would have to be considered a child soldier under international law, which theoretically immunizes him even for war crimes. Convicting him on such charges, as the government eventually did in a secret court on secret evidence, required the finding that he wasn’t a soldier but a civilian terrorist (even though he was supposedly linked to two organizations, al-Qaida and the Taliban, with whom the U.S. government has repeatedly said it’s at war).
Côté and Henríquez intersperse brief and highly effective interview segments between snippets of the interrogation tape, with subjects ranging from former U.S. military officers (including Khadr’s lawyer and psychiatrist) to former Guantánamo inmates (including Moazzam Begg, now a leading British activist for other detainees) to Khadr’s mother and sister (wearing full-face Islamic veils) to Damien Corsetti, the much-demonized former soldier who knew Khadr as a guard at Bagram. What comes through repeatedly is that questions of law and reason, or guilt and innocence, played no role in the case of Omar Khadr. He was a vulnerable and confused kid whose own government turned its back on him, which made him a perfect candidate to become one of the few Gitmo detainees convicted of something. He was 15 when he was captured, and will be 31 when he (supposedly) gets out.
“You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo” is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with more cities and dates to follow.
A top al-Qaida operative was killed earlier this week in Pakistan’s tribal areas, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Thursday. The death landed another blow against the besieged terrorist network.
The man killed was Abu Hafs al-Shahri, whom two U.S. officials describe as al-Qaida’s chief of operations in Pakistan.
Though his name is little known beyond intelligence circles, Al-Shahri is described as dangerous by both the Pakistani and U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe classified counterterrorist operations.
He was apparently killed by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, though officials would not describe the method since the program is classified. A drone strike was reported by locals on Sunday night.
The officials say al-Shahri worked closely with the Pakistani Taliban to carry out attacks inside Pakistan, and was also a contender to assume some duties of al-Qaida’s second in command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. Al-Rahman was killed by a CIA drone strike in late August.
U.S. officials believe they can cripple the core al-Qaida organization if they take out the top four or five figures, following the killing in May of al-Qaida chief Osama by Laden by Navy SEALs. Eight of the network’s top 20 leaders were killed this year alone, according to the Pentagon’s undersecretary for defense intelligence, Michael Vickers, in remarks this week. Vickers predicted that with sustained counterterrorist operations, “within 18-24 months, core al-Qaida’s cohesion and operational capabilities could be degraded to the point that the group could fragment and exist mostly as a propaganda arm.”
But Vickers and CIA director David Petraeus said al-Qaida’s offshoots will remain a serious threat to the U.S.
A Pakistani intelligence official says Pakistani operations chief al-Shahri was a Saudi national, who had lived in the tribal regions of Pakistan, bordering eastern Afghanistan, since 2002.
One of the U.S. officials said the same individual is No. 11 on Saudi Arabia’s top-85 most wanted terror suspects, where his full name is listed as Osama Hamoud Gharman Al-Shihri. The official said the same person is No. 68 on Interpol’s most wanted list, where his name was spelled “Al-Shehri” and his birthdate was listed as Sept. 17, 1981.
Al-Shahri engaged in liaison mainly with Pakistan’s Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan to conduct coordinated attacks against targets inside Pakistan, one of the U.S. officials said. But al-Qaida also inspired the Pakistani Taliban to undertake its first known overseas attack, when a U.S. based operative tried and failed to detonate a car bomb in Times Square last year.
Al-Shahri’s killing was first reported by NBC News.
Al-Qaida’s senior planner of global terror operations, Adnan Shukrijumah, remains at large.
AP writer Matt Apuzzo contributed from Washington, and AP writer Riaz Khan contributed to this story from Peshawar.
The Obama administration accused Iran on Thursday of entering into a “secret deal” with an al-Qaida offshoot that provides money and recruits for attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Treasury Department designated six members of the unit as terrorists subject to U.S. sanctions.
The U.S. intelligence community has in the past disagreed about the extent of direct links between the Iranian government and al-Qaida. Thursday’s allegations went further than what most analysts had previously said was a murky relationship with limited cooperation.
David S. Cohen, Treasury’s point man for terrorism and financial intelligence, said Iran entered a “secret deal with al-Qaida allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” He didn’t provide any details of that agreement, but said the sanctions seek to disrupt al-Qaida’s work in Iraq and deny the terrorist group’s leadership much-needed support.
“Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today,” Cohen said in a statement. “We are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”
Treasury said the exposure of the clandestine agreement would disrupt al-Qaida operations by shedding light on Iran’s role as a “critical transit point” for money and extremists reaching Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“This network serves as the core pipeline through which al-Qaida moves money, facilitators and operatives from across the Middle East to South Asia,” it said..
Treasury said a branch headed by Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil was operating in Iran with the Tehran government’s blessing, funneling funds collected from across the Arab world to al-Qaida’s senior leaders in Pakistan. Khalil, the department said, has operated within Iran’s borders for six years.
Also targeted by the sanctions is Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, appointed by Osama bin Laden as al-Qaida’s envoy in Iran after serving as a commander in Pakistan’s tribal areas. As an emissary, al-Rahman is allowed to travel in and out of Iran with the permission of government officials, the statement claimed.
The sanctions block any assets the individuals might have held in the United States, and bans Americans from doing any business with them.
No Iranian officials were cited for complicity in terrorism. The others targeted were Umid Muhammadi, described as a key planner for al-Qaida in Iraq’s attacks; Salim Hasan Khalifa Rashid al-Kuwari and Abdallah Ghanim Mafuz Muslim al-Khawar, Qatar-based financial supporters who’ve allegedly helped extremists travel across the region; and Ali Hassan Ali al-Ajmi, a Kuwait-based fundraiser for al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The action comes a day after the top U.S. commander for special operations forces said al-Qaida is bloodied and “nearing its end,” even as he warned that the next generation of militants could keep special operations fighting for a decade to come.
Navy SEAL Adm. Eric T. Olson said bin Laden’s killing on May 2 was a near-fatal blow for the organization created by bin Laden and led from his Pakistan hide out. He said the group already had lost steam because of the revolts of the Arab Spring, which proved the Muslim world did not need terrorism to bring down governments, from Tunisia to Egypt.
Treasury’s public allegations against Iran may reflect part of a strategy to expand the pressure on smaller, less well-established offshoots of al-Qaida as the weakening of the group’s leadership threatens to make its activities more disparate. Washington already has re-focused much attention on al-Qaida’s Yemen-based branch, which has attempted to bomb a U.S.-bound jetliner and cargo planes in recent years.
But the exact nature of Iran’s relationship with al-Qaida remains disputed in Washington, with different branches of the intelligence community disagreeing about whether Iran is supporting al-Qaida as a matter of policy, according to one U.S. official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
Some hardline militants backing al-Qaida, members of Islam’s majority Sunnis, see the Shiite Islam dominant in Iran as heretical, and they view Tehran’s regional ambitions as a greater threat than the West. Sunni insurgents in Iraq have used car bombs and suicide attacks against Shiite targets, killing thousands since 2003, as well as targeting Shiite militias allied to Iran.
Since 2001, Iran has appeared a somewhat reluctant host for senior al-Qaida operatives who fled there after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, keeping them under tight restrictions. After an initial period of cooperation with the West, Iran now seems to be a more comfortable haven even if it remains on the edge of al-Qaida’s orbit.
Western officials point to the release earlier this year of an Iranian diplomat who was held for 15 months after being kidnapped by gunmen in Pakistan.
In negotiations for the diplomat’s freedom, they say Iran promised better conditions for dozens of people close to Osama bin Laden who were being held under tight security. These included some of the terror chief’s children and the network’s most senior military strategist, Saif al-Adel.
Still, the life of the al-Qaida-linked exiles in Iran continues to be very much a blind spot for Western intelligence agencies. Few firm details have emerged, such as how much Iran limits their movements and contacts.
Almost everything we learn about Al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden these days is coming from anonymous U.S. officials.
Wednesday, for instance, U.S. officials told us via The Washington Post that Al-Qaida was on the verge of being totally wiped out. The comments echoed earlier ones from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the former C.I.A. director, who earlier said that only a couple dozen more Al-Qaida militants needed to be killed before the war was over.
Last week the officials were talking to the Wall Street Journal. They told the paper that Al-Qaida would likely be shifting the focus of its attacks to Western targets outside of the United States. They said this was because it had become too difficult for them to strike inside the United States.
The Wall Street Journal said the U.S. officials had come to this conclusion based on evidence gleaned from flash drives found in the compound where bin Laden was killed. Much of the information we are learning about bin Laden and Al-Qaida, in fact, is said (by U.S. officials) to be coming from those flash disks, as well as a computer.
It was from the computer, for instance, that U.S. officials learned that bin Laden liked porn. Everyone ran with that story. It was great story. Not only was it sure to drive traffic, combining two of the most searched items on the internet these days (porn and bin Laden), but it also tweaks the legacy of a man who claimed that a strict adherence to Islam is what guided him in his global campaign of terror.
It is reminiscent of the news, also released by U.S. officials, immediately following the raid that led to bin Laden’s death that, in a vain attempt to protect himself, bin Laden used his wife as a human shield. Not so heroic. That detail turned out to be false. As was news that bin Laden was armed.
The news that bin Laden liked porn also came from U.S. officials. They leaked it anonymously to Reuters and then everyone else reported the Reuters report (including GlobalPost). In fact, all the details about the raid, what transpired and what was found after, has come from U.S. officials.
The New York Times reported on May 6 that the details surrounding the raid and the discoveries that followed have been fluid in their accuracy. It partly blamed a ravenous media, itself included. But it also blamed a desire by the United States to spin facts in order to diminish bin Laden’s legacy.
Was the revelation that bin Laden liked porn part of that spin? What about everything else we are learning from U.S. officials? Is that spin too?
If it’s not spin, all the reports surely play into the hands of the U.S. government. Not only did the Wall Street Journal story infer that our defense measures are working but it justified our continued pursuit of Al-Qaida militants all over the world, both through the war in Afghanistan and the ramping up of drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia.
The Washington Post story, meanwhile, suggests that we have been successful in Pakistan, where drone strikes have been plentiful, but Al-Qaida remained strong in Yemen, where the U.S. plans to increase its use of unmanned drones.
Other things we learned recently about bin Laden: He was planning an attack on the 10-year anniversary of Sept. 11, he had a “direct” role in the planning of the July 7 bombings in London, a belief that runs counter to previous reports, and he was actively planning any number of other attacks as well — all according to “U.S. officials.”
If you say so.
Detainees at Guantanamo Bay (Credit: Reuters) 
A still from "You Don't Like the Truth" 
FILE - This Monday, Aug. 3, 2009 file photo released by the official website of the Iranian Supreme Leader's office, shows Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right, delivering a speech after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seated at left, formally endorsed him for a second term as President during an official ceremony in Tehran, Iran. As Iran's capacity to build nuclear weapons grows, intelligence assessments from nations that follow Tehran's atomic progress discern increasing indecision and squabbling by its leadership on whether to make such arms - and if so, how overtly. Most suggest Ahmadinejad is more circumspect. But an intelligence summary shared recently with The Associated Press sees Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the more cautious of the two and says the Revolutionary Guard is benefiting from the dispute, with some of the authority normally exercised by the president devolving to it. (AP Photo/Office of the Supreme Leader, File) ** EDITORIAL USE ONLY, NO SALES ** EDITORS NOTE AS A RESULT OF AN OFFICIAL IRANIAN GOVERNMENT BAN ON FOREIGN MEDIA COVERING SOME EVENTS IN IRAN, THE AP WAS PREVENTED FROM INDEPENDENT ACCESS TO THIS EVENT(Credit: AP) 
