Salon.com > Duncan Campbell

Hunting for the mastermind

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:22:00 +0000

Four homegrown suicide bombers, three of them from West Yorkshire, U.K., and none of them previously known to the police, carried out last week's bomb attacks on London, police believe. The hunt is now on for the person who police suspect may have masterminded the bombings and who may have already left the country.

"Normality now will not be the same as normality was before," a senior security source said Tuesday night, reflecting on what looks certain to have been Britain's first experience of suicide bombers. The discovery of a bomb factory in Leeds indicates to the police that there were plans for future attacks.

Four men, between 18 and 30, three of them with West Yorkshire addresses and all of them British, met up at Luton station before boarding a Thameslink train to King's Cross the morning of July 7.

It appears that the four, described by security sources as "cleanskins" -- with no convictions or known terrorist involvement -- reached their rendezvous via two or three hired cars, one of which was located Tuesday at Luton station. Explosives were found in the car, police revealed Tuesday night.

Police were also examining a second car found at the station. It was taken to a storage facility at Leighton Buzzard.

Grilling Negroponte

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 13:56:00 +0000

The man chosen by President Bush to be the new U.S. director of national intelligence Tuesday denied that he had covered up human rights abuses when he was Washington's ambassador to Honduras. John Negroponte came under fierce questioning from the Senate intelligence committee as his nomination for the role was considered.

The questioning coincided with the publication of diplomatic cables sent by Negroponte in the 1980s which indicate that he secretly sought to undermine the peace process in Central America and entertained the head of a group trying to violently overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The documents show that he sought to cover up clandestine U.S. involvement in the war in Nicaragua.

Nearly 400 cables and memos sent or received by Negroponte, who was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the U.N. before being nominated for his new intelligence position, indicate that he tried to undermine peace efforts, promoted the war against the Sandinistas -- which he referred to as "our special project" -- and gave tips to the State Department on how to cover up the U.S. role.

Reconstructing justice

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 14:35:00 +0000

After tea and biscuits, the shackled defendant is brought in by a guard bearing a Kalashnikov. The senior judge, one of three, sits at a desk at one end of the room, flanked by sofas. The evidence is read out by the prosecution, people wander in and out and, after a brief discussion, the judges make up their minds and deliver their verdict and sentence. It's a typical day in a criminal court in Afghanistan.

"The whole trial for something like murder can be over in 45 minutes," says British barrister Noel Casey, who has just returned from Kabul, the capital. "What was most noticeable was how informal it was. People would drift in and out of the room, and it didn't have any of the gravity that you normally associate with a trial. It was like sitting in a lounge."

The football stadium in Kabul may no longer be used for public executions, but someone accused of murder can still be tried and sentenced in less than an hour, with no legal representation. Now a group of Western lawyers are hoping to change the nature of Afghan justice with a pioneering system of legal aid for defendants.

“Nothing like this should ever happen”

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 16:10:00 +0000

A pair of spectacles, a set of keys, a student card, a watch, a few euros, a single gray trainer. Rita Betancourt removes the objects delicately from a small green box and places them on the table of the immaculate suburban home where she and her husband, Luis Tenesaca, now live alone. These are the remains of what their only child, 17-year-old Jose Luis, had with him when he set off cheerfully for college in Madrid on the morning of March 11 last year.

Like many other mothers, fathers, lovers, sisters, brothers, friends, Rita Betancourt will be finding the next few days especially painful. The anniversary of the bombing of the four rush-hour trains in Madrid that took 191 lives and left more than 1,500 injured and countless bereaved comes at a time when rival politicians have been bickering over who was to blame and amid angry calls from the victims' relatives for a new commission to take over the inquiry into "11-M."

"We came to Spain from Ecuador because my son was a very bright student and we wanted him to have a better education," said Rita, who remembers the day she arrived in the country with Jose Luis -- April 4, 2000 -- to join her engineer husband, Luis, who had come a year earlier.

When reporters become the story

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 14:05:00 +0000

More than 20 years ago, a young video cameraman called Ed Caraballo got his first heady experience of the wild side of filming when he worked with John Lydon's PiL band in New York. Now Caraballo, a New Yorker, is experiencing a much wilder time having been jailed for eight years in Afghanistan for allegedly being part of a freelance bounty-hunting team that was trying to track down Osama bin Laden by carrying out violent interrogations.

Last week, Caraballo, who said he was merely filming events as a professional journalist, was moved from his cell in Kabul after an al-Qaida suspect threatened to burn him to death. Caraballo's incarceration came at the same time as that of a young Polish-British journalist, Ewa Jasiewicz, who was arrested in Israel and detained at Ben Gurion airport for three weeks after the Israeli authorities decided that she was not a journalist but an activist. Back in London, Jasiewicz writes in the Journalist this month a defense of "activist journalism" that does not adopt any pretense of objectivity.

The profitable business of war

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 14:50:00 +0000

George W. Bush's grandfather, the late U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the U.S. National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz and to a hum of preelection controversy. The evidence has also prompted one former U.S. Nazi-war-crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Afghanistan’s rocky road to freedom

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:03:00 +0000

Earlier this month, it was announced that the elections in Afghanistan were to be delayed for a second time, with the country now supposedly choosing a president in October and a new parliament next spring. The announcement made few waves. Afghanistan is the day before yesterday's story. Nearly three years after Operation Enduring Freedom was launched to remove the Taliban regime and bring liberty and prosperity to one of the world's most impoverished countries, not much of the operation endures and many basic freedoms -- from insecurity, from fear, from poverty -- remain elusive.

The timing of the election, one month before George Bush goes to the polls himself, has as much to do with American as Afghan politics. With Iraq in turmoil, a newly elected Afghan president will be offered as proof that at least some of the administration's foreign policy objectives have been met.

Many Afghans, particularly in Kabul, clearly welcomed the removal of the Taliban. But the one thing that the Taliban did provide was security, so that people could travel in the countryside without fear of ambush and so that the plunder, rape and corruption of the warlord era that preceded them became largely contained.

Will women change Afghanistan?

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 14:19:00 +0000

Last week , in the eastern province of Nangarhar, an Afghan woman was killed when the car she was travelling in hit a landmine. She had been working to register voters for Afghanistan's presidential elections, scheduled for October 9. Two weeks earlier, just south of Jalalabad, a bomb exploded on a bus carrying Afghan women working as voter registration officials, killing three of them. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility, saying it was a warning not to take part in the elections.

There is still cultural unease in some areas of Afghanistan about the enfranchisement of women. Men and women register separately to vote, and women are registered by other women. Following the explosion near Jalalabad, the work of all women registration officials in the eastern and southern provinces was suspended, effectively halting, albeit temporarily, the electoral process for women. But in spite of repeated warnings from the Taliban that women should neither register nor stand for office, 2.1 million women have now registered to vote, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the body overseeing the process. This means that 38% of the current electorate are women, overturning predictions that few would register.

The George Clooney of Kabul

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 14:26:00 +0000

When Afghan police burst into the large suburban house in Kabul, they were not expecting to see three men strapped to the ceiling and hanging by their feet.

This was supposedly an import business, after all.

But as they released the men, and five other captives who were also in the house, officers realised they had stumbled upon a private jail where Afghan prisoners were being locked up and tortured.

Yesterday, Afghan security forces and the US military admitted they appeared to have uncovered a freelance counterterrorism mission by bounty hunters, who may have been lured to the country by the prospect of earning multimillion-dollar rewards.

At the heart of their investigation is a former American special forces soldier, Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema, who is alleged to have run the private jail and was being questioned last night.

Mr Idema, who is said to be always heavily armed, is far from the only ex-military man to be making a living in Kabul, which has an atmosphere redolent of The Third Man, Graham Greene's thriller about postwar Vienna.