By anyone’s standard, Anne-Marie Murphy didn’t look like a terrorist threat. In 1986, Murphy was a 32-year-old hotel chambermaid from Dublin, Ireland, who was six months pregnant and on her way to marry her fiancé in Israel. Authorities discovered a bomb in her carry-on bag as she boarded a plane in London on her way to Tel Aviv.
Kozo Okamoto didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist, either. In 1972, he and two other Japanese passengers had just arrived in Tel Aviv on a flight from Puerto Rico when they retrieved guns from their checked bags and opened fire in the arrival terminal at Ben Gurion International Airport, killing more than two dozen people and injuring nearly 80.
Nor did Patrick Arguello seem like a state enemy in 1970 before he tried to hijack an Israeli El Al plane flying from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to New York. Arguello, who was killed by Israeli sky marshals as he tried to carry out his attempt, was a Nicaraguan who had attended high school in Los Angeles.
Enemies, Israel has learned, don’t always look like the known enemy. Terrorists, both willing and unwilling (such as Murphy, who was unwittingly used by her Palestinian fiancé as a carrier for his bomb), come in many guises, including color, ethnicity and gender.
Which is why racial profiling (in which authorities target people of certain races or ethnicities) has never worked very well in any environment, including Israel.
That racial profiling can be a tricky tactic is something Americans should understand by observing the diversity of some of the terrorists who have operated on domestic soil or against Americans — Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City bomber), Eric Rudolph (the abortion clinic bomber), Richard Reid (the ponytailed British-Jamaican who tried to bring down an American Airlines jet with his shoe) and the Arab hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers.
Yet last month, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a program to randomly search New York subway passengers after the London tube bombings, two city politicians called for racial profiling instead. They insisted that the enemy’s face is an easy one to spot and that authorities shouldn’t waste time randomly searching, say, Norwegian grandmothers when the real threat comes from Middle Eastern and Asian men.
New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Democrat, plans to introduce a bill that would roll back anti-racial-profiling legislation and allow police to stop whomever they want to stop in their efforts to prevent terrorism. Councilman James Oddo, a Staten Island Republican, promises to introduce a similar resolution in the City Council.
“I thought [Hikind] was courageous to say publicly what many New Yorkers felt privately,” Oddo tells Salon.
Although Bloomberg denounced the proposals immediately, Oddo says he got e-mails from more than 80 people outside New York who expressed overwhelming support for his proposal. They included a military major serving in Iraq and the relative of a victim killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. But many Manhattanites called him un-American and racist. And Oddo’s fellow council members vowed to introduce their own resolution to express support for current laws that prohibit profiling based on race, ethnicity or religion.
Oddo, who voted for the anti-racial-profiling laws, says that he and Hikind aren’t calling for racial profiling, a loaded term that conjures up disturbing images. They simply don’t want police to fear that if they stop “an inordinate number of people who look a particular way,” someone will accuse them of violating the individuals’ rights.
“Racial profiling is when you stop people because they look a certain way, without cause, and you’re trolling to find trouble,” Oddo says. “We never said, ‘Stop only Arab [or] Muslim men, and don’t stop whites.’ We just said, ‘If you’re going to engage in these searches, do it in a manner that’s more efficient and more effective.”
Being more effective, he explains, means recognizing that the bombings of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the USS Cole in Yemen, and the World Trade Center in New York all had something in common. “The common denominator is that every jihadi who is engaged in international terrorism has been a young fundamentalist,” Oddo says. “We shouldn’t try to couch that reality in some politically correct terms.”
Some people do consider racial profiling unethical, but there are plenty of other reasons to reject racial profiling, even aside from its violation of equal protection rights.
David Harris, professor of law and values at the University of Toledo College of Law in Ohio, says that focusing on specific ethnic groups alienates the very people authorities need to help them catch terrorists. “By the time the threat is at the subway or airport, we’re down to the last line of defense,” Harris says. “You really want to catch these people before they go to the subway.”
That can be accomplished only by gathering information from people who live in the communities where sleeper cells reside and can tell authorities who’s new in a neighborhood and who seems to have income without holding a job.
But the most important reason to oppose racial profiling, says Harris, the author of “Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work,” is that, as the title of his book suggests, it simply doesn’t work.
Harris says that when police use race or ethnic appearance as a factor in law enforcement, their accuracy in catching criminals decreases. Even worse, it can lead to accidental deaths, such as the fatal shooting by London police of an innocent Brazilian man after the bombings there.
Harris points to a study of New York’s “stop and frisk” campaign in the late 1990s, when police were stopping people in the streets on a regular basis in an effort to confiscate illegal weapons and reduce crime. The campaign created tension between the police and minority communities, who thought they were being unfairly targeted for frisks. It turned out they were right.
After Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was killed during a stop, New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer ordered a study of 175,000 “stop and frisk” records and found that although African-Americans composed only 25 percent of New York City’s population at the time, they made up 50 percent of the people who were stopped. Latinos were roughly 23 percent of the population and 33 percent of those stopped, while whites were 43 percent of the population and 13 percent of those stopped.
Those findings interested Harris less than what the statistics indicated about the results: Police were going to a lot of trouble for little reward, especially when the people they stopped were African-Americans.
Harris looked at what he called “hit rates” — the percentage of stops in which the police found drugs, a gun or something else that led to an arrest — and noted that the number of hits in general was very low for the number of stops that police made. But more interesting was that the rate for African-Americans was much lower than the rate for Caucasians. Police had a hit rate of 12.6 percent when they stopped Caucasians and only 10.5 percent when they stopped African-Americans. The hit rate for Latinos was 11.5 percent.
“You might say that we have a difference of 2.1 percent between blacks and whites. But it’s actually a difference of 20 percent when you do the math right,” Harris says. And “the difference between whites and Latinos is about 10 percent.”
Essentially, police were stopping more African-Americans than Caucasians but finding fewer criminals among the former. Why? Not because blacks commit proportionately fewer crimes than whites do (the data vary according to the type of crime and other factors) but because police were looking at the wrong factors when they stopped people, Harris says.
“They’re focusing on appearance when they should be focusing on behavior,” he says. “When they’re not distracted by race, they’re actually doing a more accurate job” of picking out the right people.
Focusing on appearance produces a lot of false positives. And “every time you introduce a false positive, you take resources away from your ability to focus on people who are really of interest — those who are behaving suspiciously,” Harris says. “If it’s a question of finding a needle in a haystack … don’t put more hay on the top.”
What does work in preventing terrorism, Harris says, is behavior profiling. “If you’re going to catch people who mean to put bombs on your subway trains or in airplanes, you don’t actually care [if they're] young Muslim men … You care about [keeping] anyone from boarding the airplane who is going to behave like a terrorist.”
Yuval Bezherano agrees. Bezherano is the executive vice president of New Age Security Solutions, a company that teaches people how to identify behaviors that indicate a person is concealing something and could be a security risk. The technique is called behavior pattern recognition and is modeled after methods used in Israel. NASS’s president, Rafi Ron, is a former security chief at Ben Gurion Airport. The company has trained authorities at Boston’s Logan International Airport as well as personnel at the Statue of Liberty. Recently the company trained about 100 employees of New York’s subway and bus system.
The signs to watch for can be as obvious as someone acting nervous and sweating profusely on a cold day or as subtle as someone walking awkwardly in a way that indicates the person could be wearing a belt of explosives.
“It’s always the unusual, the thing that doesn’t fit,” Bezherano says. “If you know your environment and what is usual for the environment, you know what to look for.”
Depending on the situation, the next step might be to engage the person in a targeted conversation to determine whether he or she should be elevated to a higher level of risk or cleared from consideration.
It was this kind of screening that caught Anne-Marie Murphy, who initially raised interest among El Al’s security staff because she was a pregnant woman traveling a long distance alone, something that Bezherano says is unusual behavior. She’d already cleared three security checkpoints at London’s Heathrow Airport before an El Al “profiler” asked her where she’d be staying in Israel. Murphy’s fiancé had warned her not to tell authorities about him because they would interrogate her if they knew she had an Arab boyfriend, so she told the profiler she’d be staying at the Hilton Hotel in Bethlehem. The profiler knew there were only two Hiltons and that neither was in Bethlehem. When authorities searched Murphy’s bag, they discovered several pounds of plastic explosives concealed in a false bottom and a microchip detonator hidden in a pocket calculator.
Behavior profiling is much more effective than racial profiling, Bezherano says, because it’s not unusual for terrorist groups to outsource their operations to individuals or groups who don’t fit the expected racial or ethnic profile.
Patrick Arguello was a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front when he posed as the husband of a woman who was an operative for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to help her hijack the El Al plane.
Kozo Okamoto was a member of the Japanese Red Army, which attacked Ben Gurion Airport; the group shared the Marxist ideologies of the PFLP.
Bezherano says there’s no reason to believe that al-Qaida won’t, or doesn’t, farm out some of its tasks to other groups. “The philosophy of terrorist organizations is that the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” Bezherano says. “Even though al-Qaida is very extreme, [its members] will collaborate with others as long it as it serves their cause.”
If those working to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil engage in racial or ethnic profiling, they’re merely playing into terrorists’ hands — and are likely to miss some of the enemies right in front of their eyes.
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) 
