Video: Trailer for film on Tanja Nijmeijer, a Dutch woman who joined the FARC

War Inquiry Met Second-Tier Bush Officials

By Mark Hosenball, Newsweek

The British official inquiry team examining the origins and conduct of the Iraq War met with some relatively senior former officials of the George W. Bush administration on a weeklong visit to the U.S. earlier in May. But neither Bush, Dick Cheney, nor any other very senior Bush-era policymaker, military, or intelligence official appears to have been willing to speak to the inquiry team, which is led by Sir John Chilcot, a former senior civil servant.
In an official statement issued on Friday, the inquiry committee said that it had held a series of "private discussions" between May 17 and May 21 with "people from the current and former administrations," as well as the current ambassadors. Although the committee has held public hearings in London in which most of the top U.K. officials involved in war-relateddecisions—including former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and many of their top advisers—gave testimony in public, the inquiry commission said that while the Americans they met had agreed to have their names released to the public, because the meetings "were not formal evidence sessions, records of the conversations are not being published." (See the complete list of former Bush administration officials who spoke to the inquiry whose names were released today, but whose contributions are not spelled out in any detail, here.)... (more)

How Immigrants Actually Reduce Crime - Newsweek

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/05/27/reading-ranting-and-arithmetic.html

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Police chiefs voice concerns to AG about Ariz. law http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_15895/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=1ypo6kqH

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Gay Days in Morocco

Elton John performance in Morocco raises outcry http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_15884/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=eDlyMmIq

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Spy v Espion: NYT on Blair resignation and France

May 21, 2010
Dispute Over France a Factor in Intelligence Rift

By MARK MAZZETTI


WASHINGTON — An already strained relationship between the White House and the departing spymaster Dennis C. Blair erupted earlier this year over Mr. Blair’s efforts to cement close intelligence ties to France and broker a pledge between the nations not to spy on each other, American government officials said Friday.

The White House scuttled the plan, officials said, but not before President Nicolas Sarkozy of France had come to believe that a deal was in place. Officials said that Mr. Sarkozy was angered about the miscommunication, and that the episode had hurt ties between the United States and France at a time when the two nations are trying to present a united front to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.

Officials said the dust-up was not the proximate cause of President Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Blair, who announced his resignation on Thursday, from the job as director of national intelligence, but was a contributing factor in the mutual distrust between the White House and members of Mr. Blair’s staff. The episode also illuminates the extent to which communications between the president’s aides and Mr. Blair had deteriorated during a period of particular alarm about terrorist threats to the United States. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/politics/22intel.html

BBC News - Chile charges Pakistani man over US embassy alert

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/mobile/americas/8684987.stm

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Show Me Your Papers! Or, Hey, Don't.

Passport please — but license will do

The law says U.S. citizens have to have a passport or other approved document to cross the border, and most comply, but Customs agents let them slide if they don't.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/state/passport_please__but_drivers_license_will_do_93833059.html

This makes an interesting companion piece to my column on Thursday:


Shadowland: Immigration and IDs: A Modest Proposal, 13 May 2010
All Americans—whether brown, white, or black—should be required to carry a passport showing they are red, white, and blue. http://www.newsweek.com/id/237950

Shahzad: The Rube Goldberg of Terrorism

 
This little video of Rube Goldberg made in 1940 digresses into a seriously silly demonstration of the power of gasoline. It's a plug for the petroleum business -- but it also suggests a critical failing of the Time Square bomb, of which gasoline cans were a part: liquid gasoline burns, as the video says, "like a candle." It's vaporized and compressed gasoline that explodes.



Faisal Shahzad may have returned from Pakistan to Connecticut on a mission of mayhem earlier this year, but the more we know about the way he planned and executed the attempted bombing of Times Square, the more hapless and incompetent he appears.

Test Runs

As we read in the U.S. attorney’s complaint against Shahzad, he bought the Pathfinder for $1,300 cash in the parking lot of a supermarket out in Connecticut on Saturday, April 24. According to one of my best law enforcement sources, who does not want to be identified more specifically than that, there was no paperwork and there were no records of the transaction in the hands of the seller. Shahzad might have gotten away for quite a while without being traced as the buyer if he had not made the fatal mistake of calling the seller back to check the last time the car had had its oil changed. But more about that later.

On Wednesday, April 28, according to my source, Shahzad drives the rusty Pathfinder into Manhattan to recon the route he would take later and the traffic situation around Times Square. He then drives back out to Connecticut.

On the evening of Friday, April 30, Shahzad drives his Isuzu Trooper, registered to him, into the city and parks it just a few blocks from Times Square, on West 38th between 8th and 9th Avenues. His plan was to use it as his getaway car the following night. He locked it up tight, then went to Grand Central and took the train back out to Connecticut.

The Night of the Would-be Bombing

On Saturday, May 1, Shahzad drove the Pathfinder to Manhattan and headed up the FDR Drive, turned off on 49th, drove a block or so and stopped. As it happens, he was near the United Nations, which is probably not the smartest place to pull over, not least because he was on candid camera. He checked the cargo in the back of the Pathfinder, and may have set the timer going. He then drove to 2nd Ave. and turned left, went four blocks and turned right onto 45th. He took that straight across town, crossed Broadway and pulled over, leaving the emergency lights flashing and the keys in the ignition, as if he were just running an errand. He had tinted the windows after he bought the car and he may have hoped that anyone passing by would think there was still someone inside it. Of course, the tinting also hid the cobbled-together bomb from public view.

In fact, Shahzad headed straight for his Isuzu on 38th Street. (He may have gone through Shubert Alley between 45th and 44th, but the cops say he was not the man caught on CCTV who stripped off a black shirt to reveal a red one and seemed to be looking furtively behind him. ) Then, a surprise. As my source put it, “When he gets to 38th Street, I don’t know what he says to himself, but probably it was ‘Oh, shit!’ He realizes that he left the keys to the Isuzu on the ring of keys that he left in the Pathfinder.” So the “getaway car”  remains parked just where it was and, once again, takes a train back to Connecticut. He may also have been wondering by that point why he hadn’t heard an explosion.

On Sunday, apparently still secure in the idea he’d covered his tracks, Shahzad came back into town to pick up his Trooper. It is not clear to me whether he had a second set of keys – he may have called AAA or a similar group to help him. Anyway, a minor point. He got into the car, got it going and drove back out of town.

By then, however, the NYPD and FBI were exploring the wealth of evidence Shahzad had left behind in the unexploded Pathfinder. After several hours in which the bomb squad took apart the device, apparently modeled on plans by Rube Goldberg, the Pathfinder was loaded onto a flatbed truck and carted out the NYPD forensic lab in Queens.

What my guy calls “the Eureka moment” came when a detective who specializes in “auto crime” was called in to try to I.D. the vehicle. The dashboard VIN, or vehicle identification number, had been removed, but the detective crawled underneath and identified one on the bottom of the engine block. Because of his experience with stolen cars and chop shops, he was able to say right away that the engine belonged to the car (a 1993 model – the engine might have been changed), and once that I.D. was made, law enforcement computers kicked into high gear.

The Follow-Up

The VIN quickly led to the registered owner in Connecticut, who told police he’d asked his daughter to handle the sale, and she’d put it on Craigslist. She had been the person who met with Shahzad in the parking lot to make the cash transaction. She said she didn’t really know his name and she didn’t think she had any contacts for him.

But because Shahzad had called her a few days later to ask about the last oil change, the cops found his number in her mobile. Even though he’d used a prepaid throwaway phone, they reportedly pulled up the records of the numbers called from the throwaway and linked one to Shahzad. All this would have been on Sunday, so essentially within the first 24 hours. “We closed in on him,” said the source.

Now, there’s been some confusion in the press about when or whether the case was moved somehow from the NYPD to the FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Force. My guy says this is misleading, that the FBI and JTTF were involved all along, from the first briefings on the scene on Saturday night.

As the focus of the investigation and surveillance of Shahzad moved to Connecticut, the NYPD was not directly involved and my source said he did not have much to add to accounts that the Feds may have lost track of him for a while.

The latest Newsweek story on the case, based on reporting by Mark Hosenball, myself and Ron Moreau and Sami Yousufzai in Pakistan, gives this account of what happened:

By Monday, Shahzad was under surveillance by the feds at his Bridgeport apartment. But maybe a little too much surveillance. FBI agents no longer wear regulation white shirts and snap-brim hats as they did in J. Edgar Hoover's day, but Shahzad's neighborhood was soon crawling with burly men in SUVs. Equally noticeable, reporters—tipped off by law-enforcement sources to expect a big bust—began showing up in the area. Something may have spooked Shahzad, because he apparently slipped out the back and—undetected despite all the surveillance—got into his car and drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport.

According to my source, the Feds had the number of the cell phone Shahzad still used after ditching his throwaway, and they were monitoring it on Monday as he headed for JFK, which may be one reason Attorney General Eric Holder claimed he wasn’t worried about losing him. It is also worth noting that the longer they could monitor that phone, if indeed they were doing so, the more likely they could trace Shahzad’s connections. Conceivably, they wanted to see who he would call when he thought he was safe on board the plane – but that’s just guesswork, and it may be far too kind to the Feds, who just screwed up. A last-minute check of the flight manifest by the Customs and Border Protection guys at JFK turned up Shahzad. They stopped the plane and made the collar.

Shahzad did not seem surprised. “Are you the NYPD or the FBI?” he asked. Actually, it was the CPB.

NYTimes: Al Qaeda’s Nuclear Plant

From The New York Times:

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: Al Qaeda's Nuclear Plant

Did an American nuclear-plant maintenance worker arrested in Yemen
give Al Qaeda vital information?

http://nyti.ms/cDvkxY

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CNN Video: Attorney General Eric Holder on Arrest in Times Square Bomb Case

New York (CNN) -- A U.S. citizen has been arrested in the Times Square bombing probe, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced early Tuesday.

Faisal Shahzad was arrested at JFK airport in New York as he prepared to board a flight to Dubai, Holder said.

"It is clear the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans," Holder said. "We will not rest until we bring everyone responsible to justice."... http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/04/new.york.car.bomb/index.html?hpt=T1&iref=BN1

WNYC Brian Lehrer Show: See Something, Say Something

Reports indicate that a street vendor was the first to act in this weekend's thwarted Times Square bomb attempt.  Karen Greenberg, Executive Director of The Center on Law and Security at NYU Law School, andChristopher Dickey--blogger, Newsweek's Middle East Regional Editor, and author of Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force--The NYPD--look at the balance between professional security and the “see-something-say-something” approach.

CNN Video: Bloomberg and Kelly on Times Square Bomb

How do you protect New Yorkers from this kind of attack?

If you look at the last chapter of Securing the City, which you can browse on Amazon, I go into considerable detail about the measures taken at Times Square on New Year's Eve. They give an idea of the extreme means used when the risk is highest. But at normal times you have to depend on the vigilance of the public, the quick response of cops on the scene, and on aggressive, proactive intelligence work that tries to stop this kind of thing long before it gets to the stage of fireworks popping in the backs of cars. Two examples would be the Herald Square case in '04 and the Zazi case last year. 

We are all helped by the fact that most terrorists are idiots and they're inept. But unless you have multiple layers of defense you really are vulnerable. Fortunately that is what the NYPD, working with the Feds (and occasionally in spite of them) set out to achieve - and so far, it has to be said, the cops have been pretty effective.

Most analysis of this incident so far focuses on some threat related to Al Qaeda. The design of the bomb -- and the incompetence of the bomb maker(s) -- are reminiscent of attempted attacks in London and Glasgow in 2007. Those were inspired by Osama bin Laden's war of terror, but none of the people involved ever trained with AQ or took orders from its leadership. 


We should not discount the possibility that this attempted mass murder was the work of an individual or small group with no Muslim ties and no sympathy for AQ whatsoever. Anarchists out to mark May 1, right-wing crazies looking to send some demented message of their own against taxes (like Joe Stack, who flew his little plane into some Texas IRS offices), or someone who hated "Lion King" ticket holders, or had a vendetta against the Bank of America ... Never underestimate the range of people who look to make their point by making mayhem in New York City. The potential list of perpetrators is long and will remain so until more evidence has been analyzed.


-- C.D.

Noriega's Last Laugh

Shadowland: Noriega’s Last Laugh, 27 April 2010After the United States overthrew Panama's dictator in 1989, it thought such operations would be easy. Then came Afghanistan and Iraq. http://www.newsweek.com/id/237043

Audio: BBC/NPR The World: Noriega Appears Before French Judge

Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega appeared before a French judge today after being extradited from the United States on money laundering charges. Noriega had been in a US jail since 1989 when American troops ousted him from power. Marco Werman gets details from Christopher Dickey, Paris Bureau Chief for Newsweek. http://www.theworld.org/2010/04/27/former-panamanian-dictator-appears-before-french-judge/
 Photo of Noriega taken at his home in 1982. (c) Christopher Dickey

 

Playing the Identity Card

Jordan and its Palestinians

By Chris Phillips

Published: Tuesday 06 April 2010 Updated: Tuesday 06 April 2010

Jordan has been the subject of criticism for its decision to withdraw citizenship from several thousand of its citizens of Palestinian origin. Although the decision has been defended by Jordan as a means to counter Israeli plans to transfer the Palestinian population of the West Bank to Jordan, there is more at play in the situation. Palestinians in Jordan are predisposed to economic and political disenfranchisement, and the decision to withdraw their citizenship is an unrealistic solution to this problem.

For a country that takes great care to promote a positive image abroad, Jordan has recently been subjected to unusually harsh criticism from Western NGOs. In February, Human Rights Watch accused Amman of arbitrarily withdrawing citizenship from several thousand of its citizens of Palestinian origin, “denying them basic citizenship rights such as access to education and health care.” Similarly, the previous month Freedom House, the Washington-based democracy watchdog, relegated the Hashemite Kingdom from the tiny list of ‘partly free’ Arab governments to the ever-increasing collection of ‘not free’ states in the Middle East.
The two complaints are not unrelated. The failure of Jordanian democratizing initiatives has much to do with government fears that genuine freedom will allow its Palestinian-originating majority to dominate over the East Bank elite who have ruled in Amman since independence. The practice of withdrawing citizenship from a select few stems from the same concerns. Though over half of Jordan’s population are of Palestinian origin, many are economically and politically disenfranchised and social divisions remain acute. Despite sixty years of attempted integration, the Hashemite monarchy has still not come to terms with its ‘Palestinian problem’.... http://www.majalla.com/en/ideas/article37894.ece

Israel: From Targeted Assassinations to Targeting Journalists and Their Sources

Anat Kam photographed by AFP/Chen Galili

In November 2008  Uri Blau wrote an investigative piece for  Haaretz magazine about continuing summary executions -- called "preventive action" or "targeted assassinations" -- by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. These were supposed to have been stopped in 2006, and the deaths of the targets were being reported as the result of arrest operations that went wrong. Anat Kam, who formerly served at the Israeli military's headquarters, was later arrested and accused of hurting state security by passing Blau about 2000 documents, hundreds of which were classified, that enabled him to write the story. Blau learned of the arrest while traveling in the Far East, and also found out someone had broken into his home and tossed it. Blau is now in London, concerned that if he goes back to Israel he will be jailed, too.

This week Israel's censors lifted the gag order that had blocked coverage of the case in the Israeli press, and the papers are now filled with editorials about the conflict between state security and freedom of the press, some of which are quite passionate.


But in the midst of the debate about press freedom, the original story seems to be getting lost -- literally. The links to it on the Haaretz site that I came across were broken, and it took some considerable browsing on the Web to find it. Lest it go missing again, I am posting the full text here:


License to kill
By Uri Blau
Tags: assassinations

The announcement made by the Israel Defense Forces' spokesman on June 20, 2007 was standard: "Two armed terrorists belonging to the Islamic Jihad terror organization were killed last night during the course of a joint activity of the IDF and a special force of the Border Police in Kafr Dan, northwest of Jenin. The two terrorists, Ziad Subahi Mahmad Malaisha and Ibrahim Ahmed Abd al-Latif Abed, opened fire at the force during its activity. In response the force fired at them, killing the terrorists. On their bodies two M-16 rifles, a pistol and ammunition were found. It was also discovered that the terrorists were involved in planning suicide attacks against the Israeli home front, including the attempt in Rishon Letzion last February."

The laconic announcement ignores one important detail: Malaisha was a target for assassination. His fate had been decided several months earlier, in the office of then head of Central Command, Yair Naveh. As far as the public was concerned, on the other hand, the last declared assassination carried out by the IDF in the West Bank took place in August 2006; at the end of that year the High Court of Justice set strict criteria regarding the policy of assassinations in the territories.

A Haaretz Magazine investigation reveals for the first time operational discussions in which the fate of wanted men and innocent people was decided, in apparent disregard of the High Court decision. Thus it was revealed that the IDF approved assassination plans in the West Bank even when it would probably have been possible to arrest the wanted men - in contradiction to the State's statement to the High Court - and that in cold military terminology the most senior IDF echelons approve, in advance and in writing, the harming of innocent Palestinians during the course of assassination operations. Moreover, it turns out that the assassination of a target the defense establishment called part of a "ticking infrastructure" was postponed, because it had been scheduled to take place during the visit of a senior U.S. official.
 
Leading legal experts who were asked to react to the documents say that the IDF is operating in contradiction to a High Court ruling. "Morality is a very difficult issue," Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer of Hebrew Univeristy said. "The thought that there are people who sit behind a desk and determine that someone is fated to die is a frightening thought."

Another two killings

(at most)

The IDF spokesman refuses to provide precise figures about the number of targeted assassinations carried out since the start of the intifada in 2000: "The subject of preventive strikes is concentrated in the hands of the Shin Bet [security service]." A spokesman for the Shin Bet stated that the organization "does not publish data of this kind." According to the human-rights organization B'Tselem, the IDF assassinated 232 Palestinians between the start of the intifada and the end of October 2008, in operations that also killed 154 non-targeted civilians.

The most common code names for assassination operations are the acronyms Pa'amon (peula mona'at - preventive action) and Sakum (sikul mimukad - targeted assassination). During the past two and a half years the IDF has not announced the carrying out of assassinations in the West Bank, and when wanted men were killed there, the official reports stated that these were "arrest operations" or "exchanges of fire." This was also reported in regard to the killing of Abed and Malaisha - who has now been revealed as a previous target for assassination.

On March 28, 2007 a representative of the Shin Bet, a representative of the Special Police Unit Yamam and several officers from Central Command convened in Naveh's office. On the agenda was the Two Towers operation (the strike at Malaisha). "The mission" said the head of the command, "is arrest," but "in case identification is made of one of the leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Walid Obeidi, Ziad Malaisha, Adham Yunis, there is permission for the force to intercept them, and that is according to the situation assessment in the course of carrying out the mission." Naveh did not allow an assassination if there were women or children near the wanted man, and explained that, "in the event that there are women and children in the vehicle, the method is arrest."

On April 12 Naveh convened another meeting about Malaisha. This time he decided that permission would be granted to carry out the assassination of the target and "another two people at most." On the day of the meeting in Naveh's office another discussion took place, chaired by the head of the Operations Directorate, Brig. Gen. Sami Turjeman. At the meeting, the plans for a preventive operation against Malaisha were presented, and the head of the Operations Directorate explained that "a preventive strike in Ayush [Judea and Samaria] is an exceptional sight ... It could be seen as an attempt to damage the attempts to stabilize, which means that it requires sensitivity to causing a minimum of collateral damage. Everything possible must be done to prevent harm to those who are uninvolved." The target of the operation, he added "leads a 'ticking' infrastructure and meets the required criteria for a preventive strike."

At this point Turjeman spelled out the conditions of Malaisha's incrimination, and ruled that only if they existed would the targeted assassination get a green light. He added that no more than five people (including the driver) should be assassinated in the operation. Turjeman approved the operation even if there should be one unidentified person in the car. Regarding the matter of timing, he said that "in light of the anticipated diplomatic events, the prime minister's meeting with Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] and the visit of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, I recommend ... implementation afterward." In the discussion Turjeman also referred to the High Court ruling about appointing a committee whose job would be to examine targeted assassinations after the fact, and said that in light of the High Court instructions on the matter, the operation should be documented.

The next day the operation was brought up for the approval of Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi. A limited number of senior officers convened in his office, including his deputy, the head of the Operations Directorate, the head of the Operations Brigade, the chief military prosecutor, a representative of Central Command and a representative of the Shin Bet. The paper summing up the meeting says that Ashkenazi "emphasized that due to the High Court orders regarding the establishment of a professional committee on targeted assassinations, the composition of the committee should be agreed on with the Shin Bet as soon as possible."

Although Malaisha was defined as part of a "ticking infrastructure," Ashkenazi too was disturbed by the timing of the action and said that "in light of the diplomatic meetings anticipated during the course of the week, the date of implementation should be reconsidered." Ashkenazi prohibited attacking the vehicle in which Malaisha was traveling if it was discovered that there was "more than one unidentified passenger" in it.

Two months after the Two Towers plan was approved, and long after the diplomatic visits and meetings that took place in the second week of April 2007, came the operation in which Malaisha was killed in the Jenin area.

Legal approval

At the beginning of 2002, attorneys Avigdor Feldman and Michael Sfard petitioned the High Court of Justice against the policy of targeted assassinations on behalf of the Public Committee against Torture in Israel and the Al-Haq organization. Almost five years later, on December 14, 2006, the president of the Supreme Court at the time, Justice Aharon Barak, issued his decision. Barak, with the concurrence of Justices Dorit Beinisch (now the president of the Supreme Court) and Eliezer Rivlin, rejected the petition and did not rule out the legality of targeted assassinations in the territories.

"We cannot determine that every targeted preemption strike is forbidden under international law, just as we cannot determine that every targeted preemption is permissible under international law," Barak wrote in the last judgment he published in his 28 years on the Supreme Court.

According to the High Court ruling, well-founded and convincing information is necessary in order to classify a civilian as being part of a group of civilians who are carrying out hostile acts; a person should not be assassinated if it is possible to use less damaging methods against him; and he should not be harmed more than necessary for security needs. In other words, a person should not be assassinated if it is possible to arrest him, interrogate him and indict him. However, if the arrest involves serious danger to the lives of the soldiers, there is no need to use this means; after every assassination a thorough and independent examination must be conducted regarding the degree of precision, the identity of the man as a terror activist, and in the case of mistaken identity, the payment of compensation should be considered; harm to innocent civilians should be avoided as much as possible during an assassination, and "harm to innocent civilians will be legal only if it meets the demands of proportionality," ruled Barak.

In this context, Barak gave an example according to which "it is possible to fire at a terrorist who is firing from the balcony of his home at soldiers or civilians, even if as a result an innocent bystander is liable to be hit. Such a strike at an innocent civilian will meet the demands of proportionality. That is not the case if the house is bombed from the air and dozens of its residents and bystanders are hit."

Barak stated that, "The struggle against terror has turned our democracy into a 'defensive democracy' or a 'fighting democracy.' However, this struggle must not overturn the democratic nature of our regime."

According to B'Tselem, since the ruling regarding targeted assassinations was handed down, 19 Palestinians who were targets of assassination have been killed in the territories, and 36 Palestinians who were close to the targets were hit in the course of IDF operations, all of them in the Gaza Strip.

"It turns out that in total contradiction to the High Court ruling, there are cases in which there is an order to assassinate someone when it is possible to arrest him," says David Kretchmer, a professor of international law. "Advance approval to kill civilians who do not take part in hostile activities makes things even worse. The principle of proportionality, to the effect that if one strikes at a military target an accompanying strike against civilians will not be illegal, does not apply in a case when the attack itself is illegal - for example, in a case where there is an obligation, according to the High Court ruling, to arrest the suspect."

Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer: "According to the High Court ruling it is clear that where it is possible to carry out an arrest, we must carry out an arrest and avoid what is called a 'targeted assassination' and which I call 'preventive killing.' A substantial part of Judea and Samaria is under the effective rule of the IDF, and in my opinion, in such an area preventive killing must be ruled out. The limited interpretation that I am suggesting for the international law is that an attack must take place in the course of that person's participation in a dangerous action, because then you are in effect acting in self-defense based on the situation taking place."

Legal commentator Moshe Negbi: "'Unidentified people' can also be totally innocent and you are ostensibly giving a license to kill here. The problem is previous knowledge, because usually when we refer to collateral damage we are referring to 'after the fact,' but here this is almost certain foreknowledge. It is very problematic that permission is given to execute an innocent man deliberately. The question is whether it is proportional. I think that the High Court was referring to a situation where perhaps among a mass of people there is one who is innocent, but here it is one on one. It is very grave to grant permission when you know ahead of time that 50 percent of those you are hitting are innocent. Such a thing must certainly be discussed at the level of the attorney general and it certainly must be known to the public and undergo public criticism, if only so that anyone who thinks it is patently illegal can turn to the High Court."

Regarding the fact that assassinations can wait until the conclusion of diplomatic meetings, Kretchmer says: "Postponing an operation for diplomatic reasons is unequivocal proof of the fact that this is not a 'ticking bomb' situation." Kremnitzer adds: "According to my legal understanding, these cases [targeted assassinations] must be cases in which you must act immediately, and if it is not a matter of an immediate need, in my opinion it is against the law."

Although almost two years have passed since the High Court ruling, a committee to examine the assassinations after the fact has yet to be appointed. Last week Aviad Glickman published on Ynet (the website of the mass circulation paper Yedioth Ahronoth) that Attorney General Menachem Mazuz had turned to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demanding the establishment of such a committee as soon as possible. "This step must be completed without further delay," wrote Mazuz, "for fear that a continued delay is liable to constitute contempt of court."

The bad guys

Yair Naveh, who served as head of Central Command from 2005 to 2007, confirms that occasionally, there is no genuine attempt to arrest wanted men. "If the guy doesn't put his hands up we don't get into stories, we immediately establish contact. I don't want to have people hurt for no reason. If I know that the guy is armed and is a ticking bomb, then I want him to be hit immediately without fooling around. It's not the preventive action procedure, it's an entirely different story.

"In my time there were no targeted assassinations. Not a single one, as far as I recall. In principle, there were no targeted assassinations in Central Command and none were approved. What I did have was an ability to reach all of [the wanted men]; therefore there is no reason for a targeted assassination. It is relevant only when you can't reach someone, but if you can reach him and arrest him at night or have an exchange of fire with him, then it is not a targeted assassination."

Is it possible that programs were approved and in the end were not carried out?

"No. In principle there was no such thing during my time, because in every operation there were special forces that had to arrive and arrest the guy. To tell the truth, in some places we knew a priori that there would be firing. If you know that you are operating against Islamic Jihad or against Hamasniks or even against some of the jokers who were in the Casbah, then it was clear to me that there would be engagement."

In the approval of the March 2007 plan regarding Ziad Malaisha you said the mission was arrest, but if one of the leaders of Islamic Jihad was identified, the force had permission to carry out interception. What is that if not targeted assassination?

"Those are guys for whom we received basic confirmation that they are ticking bombs. Those are guys that if we had contact with them, because we knew in advance that they were armed, the default choice was not to start calling on them to halt and then to see whether or not they fled, but right from the start, if they didn't put up their hands and throw away their weapons, then we engaged with them. That's not because they had to be killed. It's also because they are both ticking bombs and armed. That's the assumption."

That is semantics. You gave permission to fire at them from the moment they were identified.

"If they don't put up their hands right at the start. You arrive, shout 'IDF, hands up!' You surround them. If the guys don't put up their hands, then you don't wait to close in on them, to make a declaration. If you receive confirmation that the guys have received all the relevant approvals, then we say, 'Friends, I don't want you to get into a pressure cooker here' [methods used by the IDF to make someone give himself up]. If they don't surrender immediately then you immediately engage them, so that you won't be hurt. That's the story. It's not a targeted assassination, where you are approving their execution even if they put up their hands."

The approval you gave the forces states that if there are women and children, there is to be an arrest. In other words, it would have been possible to arrest them.

"That means that if there are women and children we assume another risk and tell the guys that if they fire at you and begin to flee you don't begin to exchange fire, but you try to stop the vehicle by shooting at the tires."

The Operations Directorate approval in the case of Malaisha states that this is a preventive action operation.

"If it was approved as preventive action, that is, as a target for assassination, it's a different story."

But then it contradicts the High Court orders to the effect that Israel controls the area and approval of the plan includes the option of arrest.

"Don't bother me with the High Court orders, I don't know when there were High Court orders and when there weren't. I know that a targeted assassination is approved and there is a preventive action procedure and I receive instructions from the Operations Directorate."

What is the difference between the preventive action procedure and people that you give permission to fire at if they are identified?

"The difference is language. You say 'Hands up. If not, I'm opening fire,' and here I don't say anything and drop a bomb from a plane."

In the instructions there is no mention of the arrest option, and permission is given to fire if there is identification of a wanted man.

"I'm not familiar with such a document."

Why in the approvals for targeted assassination is permission given in advance to harm unidentified people?

"Weren't there people in the Shahadeh case? [Fatah leader Mohammed Shahadeh was assassinated by Hamas in October 2006]. But those aren't questions that you should ask me. What is approved as preventive action goes through approvals all the way to the prime minister, and what is decided is decided. Usually these guys hung around with bad guys, not good guys."

Linguistic innovations

In the State's reply to the High Court, prior to its ruling, it was claimed that carrying out a targeted assassination is "an exceptional step" that is taken "only when there is no other, less severe way of implementing it ... In the context of these strict instructions it was decided that when there are realistic alternatives to the action, such as arrest, these alternatives should be used."

But the most noticeable thing the High Court ruling changed regarding the assassinations is the language used by the IDF in planning them. On December 13, 2006, a day before the High Court ruling was handed down, wanted man Muhammed Ramaha was killed in the Ein Beit Ilma refugee camp in the Nablus area. According to the IDF spokesman's report to the media at the time, Ramaha was killed in the course of a joint "arrest operation" of the IDF, the Shin Bet and the Yamam police unit.

Now it turns out that Ramaha's fate had been sealed a month earlier, when the Central Command conducted a discussion on an operation planned by the IDF's Maglan special operations unit in the Nablus area. Those in attendance were presented with orders from Maj. Gen. Naveh, who ruled that the armed men walking around the area were connected to Mohammed Ramaha's unit and "should be attacked." There was no option offered of trying to arrest the members of the squad, and conditions for opening fire were the identification of two armed men, "conspiratorial" activity involving at least one armed man, or "when an indication is given" of the presence of Ramaha in the squad. As mentioned, a month after the discussion Ramaha was killed.

The Maglan soldiers were also the ones who carried out an operation on November 8, 2006 that ended in the killing of five Palestinians, two of them unarmed. The IDF, as usual, did not present it as an assassination mission, but it turns out that the force's assignment was "to sneak into the center of the village, up to the observation point overlooking the killing area that had been designated in advance, to lie in ambush for armed terrorists and to hit them at short range."

Another example: At the end of September 2006 the then head of the Operations Directorate, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot (today GOC Northern Command), conducted a discussion in which approval was given to assassinate a Fatah member - an expert on the production of explosives belts - in the Nablus area. "The Time For Chaos Has Arrived" was the name of this operation, in which the major general approved attacking the man "in the context of the procedure of targeted assassination of important figures in light of the fact that he is a 'ticking bomb.'" As opposed to operations planned after the High Court ruling, where there are specific instructions regarding conditions in which the action should not be carried out, in this case the only instructions were "to try to refrain insofar as possible from harming innocent people."

"Apparently what happened in the wake of the High Court ruling is mainly 'word laundering,'" says Kretchmer. "In other words, the use of words referring to arrest when in fact there is no real intention of carrying out an arrest, but the reference is to assassination." Sfard says that, "whoever gave the IDF a permit to execute civilians without trial should not be surprised when the death squads it has created do not adhere to the few restrictions imposed on this policy. It's a natural, logical and inevitable process of moral deterioration involved in assassinations."

A military source said that the first years of the intifada were "a period lacking order. They fired at just about anything that moved." He says that in recent years, especially after the High Court ruling, the procedure in Central Command and the Operations Directorate is somewhat different, one reason being that representatives of the Military Prosecutor's Office "are breathing down their necks." As for the importance attributed by the army to the country's image and to the timing of its activity, the source said, not without a degree of cynicism, that "the criteria for a 'ticking bomb' change if Condoleezza Rice is in the country."

An investigation by Haaretz indicates that IDF operations that are defined in advance as arrest operations rather than assassination operations do for the most part end in arrest. However, there is something disturbing about the fact that when it comes to the plan to arrest a Palestinian, the commander in charge of the operation sometimes feels a need to explain that this is not an assassination assignment and that the wanted man should be brought back alive. For example, in an operation planned last May for the arrest of a Fatah activist in Bethlehem, the GOC Central Command explained to the commander of the Duvdevan undercover commando unit that "the mission is arrest rather than killing." And in fact, that activist was arrested alive. In the same operation, incidentally, it was explained to the forces that "there is no permission to behave aggressively toward foreign media crews."

When Naveh was asked why he occasionally told the forces that the wanted men be brought back alive, which should ostensibly be obvious, he explained: "That means that I am exposing our forces to additional risk, and even if he opens fire, they do not kill him immediately but try nevertheless to arrest him." It also turns out that the presence of children is not always an excuse to cancel military operations. At the end of March 2007, the chief of staff allowed Duvdevan to carry out the arrest of a wanted man during the birthday party of one of his children. The name chosen by the IDF for this action was Kindergarten Party.

(c) Haaretz 2008

What was that Qatari diplomat up to on the flight to Denver?

SHARYL ATTKISSON, CBS CORRESPONDENT: Tonight, officials confirm to CBS News that 27-year-old Mohammed Al-Madadi of Qatar was on his way to visit an al-Qaeda operative serving time in a Colorado prison. That operative is Ali Al-Marri, arrested after 9/11. U.S. officials say the planned visit between the diplomat Al-Madadi, and the imprisoned al Qaeda member was just a routine case of a diplomat checking on a countryman. The visit never happened because Al-Madadi sparked a terrorism scare on his flight to Denver last night. Officials say he lit a cigarette in the first-class lavatory. When the flight attendant smelled smoke and asked what he was doing, he replied, I was just lighting my shoe on fire, apparently referring to the 2001 shoe bomber, and went back to his seat, refusing to turn over his lighter. Federal Air Marshals on the flight got involved and the pilot declared an emergency.
-- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/08/national/main6375465.shtml

Also from CBS:

...Last February, 2009, as the Supreme Court neared hear oral arguments about al-Marri's case, the Obama Administration reversed the executive branch's course - ending the policy of indefinite detention without charges of "enemy combatants" on U.S. soil, and transferred al-Marri back to the civilian system.

Last April, 2009, al-Marri pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism. He admitted to credit card fraud, plus:

- Training in al Qaeda military camps in Afghanistan between 1998-2001.

- Meeting chief Sept. 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and agreeing to be deployed to the U.S. by Sept. 10, 2001 (the day he entered the country with his family).

-Meeting in Dubai, UAE, with Sept. 11 financier Mustafa al-Hawsawi and receiving $10,000 from him.

-Researching, while in America in the fall of 2001, the use of chemical weapons, where to get chemicals such as sulfuric acid and precursors for cyanide gas, and potential targets such as dams and tunnels.

-Establishing a fictitious business using a false name using stolen Social Security number (ostensibly to purchase the chemicals, which never occurred).

-Communicating in code with five different e-mail accounts, referring to himself as "Abdo" and to KSM as "Muk." (FBI investigators learned from their pre-CIA torturing interviews of Abu Zubaydah in 2002 that KSM was known to all as "Muktar," and that he/KSM/Muktar had been the primary planner of 9/11).

-Adopting the nomme de guerre "Abdul-Rahman al-Qatari" and providing al-Qaeda with his family contact information in case he was killed or "martyred" during an al-Qaeda mission.

Al-Marri's wife and five children now live in Saudi Arabia, as do a number of his siblings....

The Children from the WikiLeaks Video

An AlJazeera report on what happened to Salah and Duaa Salah, the two little children in the video of the shooting incident in Baghdad in July 2007 when two Reuters journalists and ten other men were killed, including the father of these two kids. Both children were seriously wounded -- they show their scars here -- but both survived.

WikiLeaks video of 2007 Baghdad Massacre

This is grim, but this kind of incident is going to happen in war time. If you watch the full video as presented here, you clearly see in the first minutes (3:40 to 4:25) two men carrying AK-47s and one carrying something that looks very much like an RPG. These are distinct from the cameras slung over the shoulders of the two Reuters newsmen, who were unarmed. What is not clear is who the men with the weapons were -- possibly security guards -- or if the men with the weapons were hit, since they disappear behind buildings as the chopper circles. They may or may not be waiting for an approaching American Bradley accompanied by Hum-Vs. What is clear is that when the Apache opened fire, none of those in its sights had actual weapons in their hands, only cameras, and the decisions to hit the van trying to take the wounded away, and the treatment of the two children wounded inside the van looks truly shabby. The callousness of the dialogue in the air is typical of war as well. It would have been good to hear and see the reaction of the troops on the ground -- the ones trying to rescue the children -- when they heard they were supposed to turn them over to Iraqi forces, if those forces ever arrived. I do not think we would hear that same cynical tone.
-CD

Fierce debate on Israel underway inside Obama administration (UPDATED) - Laura Rozen - POLITICO.com

http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/Fierce_debate_on_Israel_underway_inside_Obama_administration.html

Sent from my iPhone

War or no war?” asks the Lebanese, adding in a digression that seems to buy some fleeting reassurance, “before or after the summer?”
-- That's the question Raghida Dergham asks in her latest column. The answer is complicated, and not very encouraging.
http://www.raghidadergham.com/4rdcolumn.html

"Gallup and Pew surveys indicate that perhaps 7 percent of the world's Muslim population — nearly 100 million people — sympathize with jihadi aspirations. But of those many millions, only a few thousands actually commit to violence. Our data show that a reliable predictor of whether or not someone joins the Jihad is being a member of an action-oriented group of friends. It's surprising how many soccer buddies join together."...


As one Air Force General said to me: “I was trained for Ds ─ defeat, destroy, devastate ─ now I’m told we have responsibility for the Rs ─ rebuild, reform, renew . Well, I was never trained for that, so what the Hell am I supposed to do? Destroy in just the right way to rebuild?”

Anthropologist Scott Atran's statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 10 is one of the most consistently surprising -- and smartest -- rundowns on the nature of terrorist organizations and the best ways to fight them that I have seen anywhere. It should be read carefully by anyone concerned with these issues.

FRANCE24: Iran Hostage Update

09 March 2010 - 10H48

- Clotilde Reiss trial - France - Iran - Iranian elections - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Court to rule on parole for Iranian PM killer

Ali Vakili Rad (pictured), an Iranian man convicted of killing a former Iranian prime minister outside Paris in 1991, is set for a parole hearing in France on Tuesday.

By FRANCE 24 (with wires) (text)

A Paris court is set to rule on Tuesday whether to free an Iranian agent sentenced to life in prison for the 1991 assassination of a former Iranian prime minister outside Paris.

Ali Vakili Rad was convicted in 1994 for killing Shahpour Bakhtiar, the last Iranian premier under Shah Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Bakhtiar and an aide were strangled and stabbed at Bakhtiar’s home in the western Paris suburb of Suresnes. Prosecutors said the killing was a plot by Iran’s clerical regime.

Vakili Rad is serving a life sentence with no possibly of parole until July 2009.

Iran hints at a possible exchange

His parole request comes at a time when France is seeking the release of Clotilde Reiss, a 24-year-old French academic who was detained in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential election. Iranian prosecutors have accused Reiss of spying during a mass trial against post-election protesters and supporters, charges Reiss has denied.

In an interview with a French TV station in September, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hinted at a prisoner exchange. “Do you know that there are some Iranians who have been in prison in France for years?" he asked. “These are prisoners too, they also have families.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has dismissed reports of a prisoner exchange, describing any talk of such an exchange as "blackmail."

The Oil Curse
Iraqis may at last be on their way to the petro-prosperity they've waited so long to enjoy. They should be careful what they wish for.

By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek Web Exclusive Mar 8, 2010

Like one of those perverse twists in the tales of "The Arabian Nights" (many of which, you will recall, took place in Baghdad and Basra), modern Iraq's greatest source of prosperity—its vast reserves of oil and natural gas—could also be the biggest long-term threat to hopes for democracy.

Yes, on Sunday the Iraqis once again proved bravely, stubbornly, even astoundingly that they won't be kept away from the polls by mere car bombs and mortar shells. But by and large they were voting for the same coterie of politicians who've made Iraq among the five most corrupt nations in the world. The country's near-term future is just about waiting, after the election, for a new government to take shape over the next many weeks. But its long-term future could be haunted by what Stanford professor Larry Diamond calls "the oil curse."...(more: http://www.newsweek.com/id/234634 )

NYT's Paperback Row - 7 March 2010

SECURING THE CITY: Inside America’s Best Counter­terror Force — the NYPD, by Christopher Dickey (Simon & Schuster, $16.)

When Raymond Kelly returned for his second tour of duty as New York’s police commissioner in 2002, there weren’t even 25 cops on the terrorism beat. Today there are more than 1,000. Drawing on the city’s deep pool of fluent Arabic speakers and hiring a C.I.A. man as his deputy commissioner for intelligence, Kelly has built a hybrid that combines crime-fighting and intelligence gathering. Intelligence-led policing, as this approach has come to be known, has had some successes in keeping the city safe, although it has critics as well. In the Book Review, Jonathan Mahler praised the “solid” reporting in this “timely” and “informative” book.

Murder Ink--The Dubai Op and Psy-Ops

Mike Isikoff's piece on the Dubai incident: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/03/05/israel-will-benefit-from-the-hamas-assassination.aspx


My backgrounder:

In the Middle East, assassination is a form of communication. The “hit team” killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai is the latest case– but will it be the last?

By Christopher Dickey

Let’s not, for a moment, talk about the pseudo-mystery surrounding the murder of Hamas operative Mahmoud Mabhou in a luxury hotel room in Dubai last January 20. The police chief there doesn’t have much doubt that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, carried out the attack. And, frankly, I don’t think Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu wants there to be much doubt, either. His government’s not confirming, but not denying, and it’s smiling.

The whole Israeli establishment clearly is happy this arms trafficker is dead. “The fact that a terrorist was killed -- and it doesn’t matter if it was in Dubai or Gaza -- is good news to those fighting terrorism,” said opposition leader Tzipi Livni. who served with an elite Mossad unit herself in the 1980s. (“To kill and assassinate, though it’s not strictly legal, if you do it for your country, it’s legitimate,” she once said, looking back.)

But getting rid of a bad guy is only one part of the murder game as it’s played in the Middle East. The other part is to make sure your enemies know it was you who did it, without their quite being able to prove it. They need to wonder if they’re next. They need to wonder who might finger them. “It will make those people more distrustful of each other,” says Martin van Creveld, the widely respected Israeli analyst of modern warfare. “They will assume that they have traitors in their midst.” In short, they become as nervous as Hamas and indeed Hizbullah leaders have been in the weeks since the Mabhou killing.

In Lebanon, Hizbullah took special note of the fact that two dozen or more alleged members of the hit team entered Dubai on what looked very much like American, British, European and Australian passports. Some Israeli journalists did the same thing in order to get close to Hizbullah during its war along the border in 2006. “We must tighten foreign passport control at the airport ,” declared Nawaf Moussawi, a Hizbullah member of parliament in Beirut. “Every Lebanese and Arab must deal with holders of foreign passports as foreign spies.”

“I’m sure the Israelis did not try very hard to hide their operations,” says Timur Goksel, formerly the United Nations’ man in south Lebanon, and now an analyst in Beirut. “Half their goal was deterrent. They want to show that they can catch these guys whenever they want. They’re not going to deny it completely. They want to give the impression that they can reach anyone, anywhere.”

Such murders and such messages go back at least to the cult of the assassins mythologized by terrified Crusaders almost a thousand years ago. Iran has worked hard to master the craft, and systematically murdered its opponents exiled in Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s. After Israel had carried out a long series of hits on Palestinian leaders and Hizbullah about the same time, an intelligence advisor to then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told me the Israelis, the Arabs and Iranians all understood perfectly well – at least at his level – that they were playing by an eye-for-an-eye code as old as the Bible.

This morning I called up France’s famous counter-terror investigator and magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière to talk about all this. Now retired from the tribunal, he recently published a book with a title that would translate roughly as “What I Couldn’t Say Before.” In it, among many other cases, he talks about the murder of Palestinian Liberation Organization operative Atef Bseiso in Paris in 1992. Bseiso was unknown to the public but well known to many secret services, and often talked to them. Indeed, he’d been meeting with French intelligence officers the day he was killed.

As Bseiso got out of a car in front of the luxurious Méridien Montparnasse Hotel, two men in jogging suits opened fire on him from close range, shooting him first in the body, then finishing him off with a bullet to the head. In a nice little bit of tradecraft, their pistols were inside sacks that contained the cartridges as they were ejected rather than leaving them behind on the ground as evidence. At first the French accepted claims of responsibility that appeared to come from a rival Palestinian faction. But investigators eventually discovered a Mossad mole in PLO leader Yassir Arafat’s inner circle who had fingered Bseiso.

In Bruguière’s judgement there’s no question that Israelis were behind Bseiso’s killing, although he could never prove it in court. And there’s no question in his mind, either, that “this crime, committed in cold blood, was clearly a message addressed to the authorities of our country” that they should distance themselves from Palestinians like Bseiso.

When I asked Bruguière about the Dubai case and whether it was meant to send a similar message, however, he drew a distinction. Murders like Bseiso’s were like coded memos sent “between services,” he said, and “meant to remain in the milieu of those who understood them.” The Dubai hit, revealed step by step through the lenses of closed circuit television and covered in such exhaustive detail by the global press – and even on YouTube -- could be more publicity than the Israelis bargained for, he said. Yossi Melman, author of the classic study of the Mossad, “Every Spy A Prince” (Houghton Mifflin, 1990) wrote in the Israeli daily Haaretz that this might be the last assassination of its kind. “The conclusion could be that the era of heroic operations in the style of James Bond movies is close to its end.”

Me, I don’t think so. If the Dubai operation had come off as perfectly as planned the message that “you can check into a luxury hotel but you can’t hide” still probably would have been clear to Hamas leaders, and if not, subtle little hints could have come their way through the rumor mill of informants and collaborators. But the risk that the Dubai hit would make big headlines almost certainly was taken into account, too. Jonna Mendez, who spent more than a quarter century with the CIA’s clandestine services, told the Associated Press “you can be sure [the members of the assassination team] knew they were being surveilled. Likewise, they would assume that the documents they were using would be made available after the fact. What does this mean? It means it didn’t matter. The faces and the documents that were captured by the cameras will never be seen again.”

Mendez’s recommendation for tradecraft going forward: “Steal the identity, disguise the participants, be ready on the other side with another set of identities and documents, and embrace and conceal the protagonists on their return,” she said. “With that goal in mind this may, in fact, be the operation of the future.”

Whether you regard them as sordid murderers or secret heroes, after all, such assassins are likely to remain the Middle East’s great communicators.

Related stories :

Newsweek December 1, 1986, UNITED STATES EDITION
Cutting Arafat's Sea Link
BYLINE: CHRISTOPHER DICKEY in Cyprus with MILAN J. KUBIC in Jerusalem and THEODORE STANGER in Rome
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 46 LENGTH: 977 words
HIGHLIGHT: A widening secret war

The bomb went off shortly after 2 a.m. as the rented car turned off Syngrou Avenue, a cruising strip for prostitutes and transvestites in Athens. It sprayed more than 100 ball bearings through the vehicles interior, piercing the driver's lungs and enveloping the car in flames. The corpse was so badly burned it took laboratory tests even to determine its gender. But the identity of the victim was well known to officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization: Brigadier Monzer Abu Ghazala, chief of the PLO seaborne commando operations that have threatened coastal Israel for years.

As far as the Athens police are concerned, the Oct. 21 death remains unsolved. Abu Ghazala may have been a victim of inter-Arab rivalry. He may have blown himself up by accident. As if by reflex, the PLO blamed the killing on Israel's secret service, the Mossad -- but in this case there is circumstantial evidence the Palestinians may be right.

In recent months Israel has waged a relentless war against Palestinian guerrillas, particularly those aligned with PLO leader Yasir Arafat. The war, overt and covert, has spread throughout the Mediterranean region. Only last week Israeli jets bombed and destroyed the PLO's main naval base just outside the Lebanese port of Sidon.

Mistaken identity

Israeli sources deny they've revived the "hit teams" that once hunted down suspected terrorists. The results, they say, are not worth the risk. It took more than six years for Israeli agents to hunt down the alleged mastermind of the 1972 massacre in Munich -- and then only after they killed an innocent Arab waiter in Norway in a case of mistaken identity. But the combination of severe retaliation and selective assassination has long been a cornerstone of Israeli counterterrorist policy. Hard-line Commerce Minister Ariel Sharon, though not responsible for counterterrorist action, reflected a widespread view when he declared, the day after Abu Ghazala's death. "We have to hit their leaders . . . anywhere in the world."

The Israeli war against seaborne guerrillas began in earnest in March 1978, when 13 PLO terrorists landed in boats south of Haifa, seized a civilian-filled bus and killed 35 Israelis, injuring 80 more. That incident led to a buildup of Israel's coastal defenses. But Palestinian guerrillas still had land access to Israel through Lebanon. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon -- and the subsequent expulsion from the area of Arafat's Al Fatah organization -- left the sea as the only route available to Arafat forces.

In the spring of 1985, as moderate Arab leaders were attempting to promote the joint peace initiative of Arafat and Jordan's King Hussein, Abu Ghazala's forces were preparing a dramatic naval attack on Israel, according to an indictment issued earlier this month by an Israeli military court. The indictment alleges that the commandos were to be lowered form a mother ship in rubber speedboats that would land at the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam. There they would seize vehicles and penetrate the Defense Ministry compound, taking hostages against the release of 150 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. But the Israeli Navy intervened, sinking Al Fatah's 1,000-ton ship Atavarious 100 miles out to sea in April 1986. Twenty of the alleged commandos went down with the ship; another eight were captured.

The following August the Israelis captured two more boats, this time headed from Cyprus to Sidon. Among those captured was Faisal Abu Shar, deputy commander of force 17, Arafat's elite security unit. Suspecting a major leak in security, Force 17 began searching for "spies" who may have been watching its operations out of the Cypriot port of Larnaca.

On Sept. 25 two Arabs and a Briton coldly murdered three Israelis they believed were spying from a yacht docked in the harbor. There is no evidence, however, that the Israelis were anything other than tourists, and the Israeli government used their killing as justification for its spectacular bombing of the PLO headquarters in Tunisia six days later.

Less noted at the time was the murder, in Limassol, Cyprus, of Moustafa Sabra, a 26-year old Syrian merchant seaman who, according to American intelligence sources, was also fingered as a spy for the Israelis.

By early this year, the naval war seemed to be widening. In January two Palestinian-owned hydrofoils mysteriously blew up and sank in a shipyard at Messina, Italy. The ships ostensibly were to ferry passengers between Cyprus and Juniye, Lebanon. But several published accounts indicate Israeli agents were behind the sinkings because they feared the large, speedy ships would be armed and used to transport Arafat's guerrillas to Lebanese refugee camps. According to Italian police sources, an unexploded charge found on one of the hydrofoils has been linked to bombs that killed two PLO officials in Rome in 1981 and 1982. Moreover, the bombs in those assassinations bore a strong resemblance to the type of bomb used in Athens last month.

Motley navy

Then, last July, four Palestinian and Lebanese commandos from a Syrian-backed faction in Lebanon landed on a beach just north of the Israeli border. All four guerrillas were killed in the ensuing fight, but two Israeli soldiers also died. Later that month Israel intercepted yet another Cypriot ship with an undisclosed number of Palestinians aboard. Despite its lack of success against Israeli targets, Arafat's motley navy may be vital to his efforts to re-establish himself and his supporters among Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon. If he succeeds, it could well negate Israel's states purpose in invading Lebanon in the first place. If he fails, some Mideast analysts suggest, his influence could be damaged beyond repair. Those stakes give the naval war a special intensity on both sides.

(c) Newsweek 1986

Newsweek April 25, 1988, UNITED STATES EDITION
The Death of a PLO Leader
BYLINE: CHRISTOPHER DICKEY in Cairo
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 32 LENGTH: 540 words
HIGHLIGHT: A murder in Tunis, a new round of bloody protests

His alias meant Father of Holy War, and that is what he became to the Palestinian uprising in the Israel-occupied West Bank and Gaza. Abu Jihad, whose real name was Khalil al Wazir, stood second only to Yasir Arafat in the military hierarchy of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the dark early hours of Saturday morning at his home in Tunis, a team of gunmen caught up with the 53-year-old guerrilla leader, riddling him with bullets from silenced submachine guns.

After dawn, as the news spread, the occupied territories erupted in the bloodiest violence since the beginning of the four-month-long uprising. Black flags of mourning went up over refugee camps; Palestinians chanted calls for revenge and poured into the streets. At least 14 were killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers. Some Israeli officials denied they were involved in Wazir's murder; others refused to comment altogether on the killing. Israeli terrorism experts blamed internal struggles in the PLO leadership. But the killing fits a familiar pattern in the underground war between Palestinian and Israeli operatives.

In the 1970s the Israeli tracked down and killed some of the Black September terrorists who plotted the Munich Olympics massacre. In 1986 a senior PLO commander was blown up mysteriously in his car in Athens. And over the years PLO killers have murdered agents of Israel's Mossad, both real and imagined.

Since the violence in the occupied territories began, the stakes have escalated. Two months ago a car bomb in Limassol, Cyprus, killed three of Wazir's top aides. Two of them were responsible for coordinating PLO operations in the West Bank.

Whatever their motives, Wazir's murderers struck closer to the top of the PLO than any killers before them. In the 1960s, along with Arafat, Wazir was a founder of Fatah, the most powerful PLO faction. Although Arafat is the recognized leader of the organization, Wazir and intelligence chief Salah Khalaf shared in most major decisions.

When the Palestinian uprising began last December it took much of the PLO leadership by surprise, but Wazir moved quickly to involve himself with the action, helping to coordinate and sustain it. To build international sympathy for the uprising, he and other PLO leaders focused the violence on the territories, eschewed outside acts of terrorism and forbade the use of firearms in the street fighting. But the Limassol killings in February led to calls inside the organization for retaliation.

The Israelis "want to draw us into open war in Europe," a senior PLO official said at the time. Instead, Wazir sanctioned an operation near Israel's Dimona nuclear facility -- a bus hijacking that ended in a shoot-out and left six people, including three Israelis, dead. Several reports suggested the killing of Wazir might have been Israel's revenge for the Dimona attack. Whoever killed Abu Jihad, whether an Israel hit team or even other Palestinians, the focus of PLO anger -- the brunt of the violence that has already been provoked in the territories -- will have to be borne by Israel. Given a 30-year history of action, reaction and carnage, the one certainty is that Wazir's death portends more killing to come.

(c) Newsweek 1988

“The text message was cryptic and sent through an intermediary, but its spookiness has become legendary among the Americans tasked with trying to stabilize Iraq. The moment was May 2008, and once again all hell was breaking loose. Shiite militias had gone to battle against each other. The fighting threatened to spread to Baghdad. Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were scrambling to find somebody to broker a truce. Then the text message was passed to the American commander. “General Petraeus,” it began, “you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.” Within days it was Suleimani who brokered the truce.”

—	The Sandman Cometh Tehran’s master of clandestine operations, Qassem Suleimani, could hold the key to Iraq’s future—if he were not so busy back in Iran. By Christopher Dickey http://www.newsweek.com/id/234493/page/1

Newsweek Cover: "Victory at Last" in Iraq

Newsweek Cover: Rebirth of a Nation, 27 February 2010 (issue Date 8 March 2010)
Something that looks an awful lot like democracy is beginning to take hold in Iraq. It may not be 'mission accomplished'—but it's a start. http://www.newsweek.com/id/234281
(written with Babak Dehghanpisheh and John Berry, with additional reporting by Maziar Bahari)

"Iraqi democracy will succeed," President George W. Bush declared in November 2003, "and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation." The audience at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington answered with hearty applause. Bush went on: "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."

In Iraq, meanwhile, an insurgency was growing, terrorism was spreading, and American forces were in a state of near panic. They had begun rounding up thousands of the Iraqis they had come to "liberate," dragging them from their homes in the middle of the night and throwing them into Abu Ghraib Prison. At the time of Bush's speech, some of those detainees were being tortured and humiliated. Iraq had entered a spiral of gruesome violence that would kill scores of thousands of its people and cost more than 4,000 U.S. military personnel their lives. American taxpayers month after month, year after year—and to this day—would spend more than $1.5 billion per week just to keep hundreds of thousands of beleaguered troops on the ground, fearful that if they withdrew too quickly, or at all, the carnage would grow worse and war, not democracy, would spread throughout the region.

Bush's rhetoric about democracy came to sound as bitterly ironic as his pumped-up appearance on an aircraft carrier a few months earlier, in front of an enormous banner that declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. And yet it has to be said and it should be understood—now, almost seven hellish years later—that something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East. ... http://www.newsweek.com/id/234281

The Takeaway: The Terror Threat in Perspective

http://www.thetakeaway.org/2010/feb/04/warnings-terror-threat-should-we-worry/