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/

(BN) Dubai Helping Iran Evade Sanctions as Smugglers Fail to Bow to U.S. Laws

Bloomberg News, sent from my iPhone.

Dubai Helps Iran Evade Sanctions as Smugglers Ignore U.S. Laws

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- On a sweltering mid-October evening, horns blare as pickup trucks at Dubai Creek wharf jockey to deliver cargo bound for Iran. Televisions, cartons of toothpaste, car parts, refrigerators and DVD players stretch for about a mile on the dock along the murky waterway that snakes to the Persian Gulf.

"We'll take anything as long as you pay us," says Ali, a 24-year-old Iranian deck hand in an oil-stained T-shirt, as he pulls down a blue tarpaulin covering air conditioners, tires and tea bags headed for the port of Bandar Abbas, 100 miles (160 kilometers) across the Gulf. "We've taken American stuff -- printers, computers, everything."

Years before the world turned its attention to Dubai's financial crisis, the second largest of the seven states in the United Arab Emirates was amassing clout -- and money -- as Iran's back door to the West, Bloomberg Markets magazine reported in its March issue.

Iran's biggest non-oil trading partner provides a stream of household items -- from diapers and mobile phones to laptops and washing machines -- as well as illicit items such as aircraft parts and computer chips that the U.S. says have nuclear and military uses.

The U.S. forbids American companies from sending anything to Iran, with limited exceptions, such as medical supplies, and has pressed other nations to stop doing business with the country. The Justice Department has prosecuted foreign companies that sell American goods with military uses to Iran.

'Offshore Business Center'

The U.A.E. was the biggest importer of U.S. products in the Middle East and North Africa, the Government Accountability Office said in December 2007. It ships out as much as 80 percent of the material -- and as much as a quarter of that heads to Iran, says Jean-Francois Seznec, a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in Washington. From 2005 to 2009, trade between Dubai and Iran tripled to $12 billion, according to the Dubai Chamber of Commerce. Iran's main exports to Dubai are nuts, carpets and petrochemicals.

"Dubai is Iran's offshore business center," says Afshin Molavi, a fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation, which analyzes public policy. "Dubai plays a huge role in Iran's economy."

Dubai's porous borders enable Iran to snub the West. The Islamic Republic has disregarded United Nations Security Council demands that it cease work on its nuclear program, which the U.S. and its allies suspect is geared to giving Iran nuclear weapons. The U.S. State Department charges that Iran's regime backs terrorist groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

Close Economic Ties

Imports from Dubai are helping to grease the economy at a time when the Iranian government is struggling to keep a lid on a growing demand for democracy.

Iran's footprints are everywhere in Dubai. About 8,000 Iranian businesses, and at least 1,200 trading companies, operate in the emirate, according to the Iranian Business Council, a Dubai-based group that promotes economic ties.

The sprawling Iranian Club offers outdoor sports facilities, a stadium, a hotel, a theater and a restaurant with some of the best Persian food in town. Dubai doesn't enforce the wearing of Islamic hijab for women. Inside the club, women wear the covering clothing and headgear to conform to rules in Iran. Clocks for Tehran and Dubai, a half hour apart, hang next to pictures of Iran's former and current supreme leaders, ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei.

'Absolute Sieve'

"You can get anything you want, and you can ship anything you want to Iran," says Morteza Masoumzadeh, an IBC director and owner of a shipping company that transports goods between Iran and Dubai. "Every company in Iran is either here or has representatives here."

Lisa Prager, a partner in the Washington office of law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati and a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce, agrees.

"Dubai is an absolute sieve," says Prager, who has investigated smuggling in the emirate.

Sultan Bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, governor of the U.A.E.'s central bank, and Saeed Abdullah Al-Hamiz, head of banking supervision, didn't return e-mails or phone calls seeking comment. Hamad Buamim, director general of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, declined interview requests. Yousef Al Otaiba, the U.A.E.'s ambassador to the U.S., declined to comment through a spokesman.

'Aggressive Measures'

In an e-mail, the U.A.E. Embassy in Washington said, "The U.A.E. fully supports and enforces United Nations Security Council resolutions barring shipment of sensitive materials and technologies to Iran and is taking aggressive measures to enforce export-control laws that prevent the transshipment of illicit materials." In 2007, Dubai imposed export-control laws designed to combat smuggling of military goods to Iran.

The U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Iran in 1979 after followers of the late Ayatollah Khomeini held 52 Americans captive in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. In its latest annual report on terrorism, published in April 2009, the State Department said Iran remained the world's most-active state sponsor of terrorism. The department charged that Iran has funneled money and weapons to groups that have planted roadside bombs in Iraq.

Since the summer, millions of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the validity of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's June 12 re-election. At least 50 have been killed and thousands detained.

"The Iranian people have sought nothing more than to exercise their universal rights," U.S. President Barack Obama said on Dec. 28. "They have been met with the iron fist of brutality."

Profitable Trade

Iran has frustrated Obama, the U.S. and the United Nations by pressing ahead with its nuclear enrichment program, in which uranium is converted into fuel that can be used for power plants as well as weapons. Obama has warned that Iran would face consequences if it failed to show its efforts were peaceful and transparent. Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful, spurned a deal offered by China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. to reduce its nuclear stockpile.

Iran says countries see the value in maintaining their ties with the Islamic Republic, despite U.S. and UN sanctions.

"Many countries have been under pressure, but they've made decisions according to their interests," Shamseddin Hosseini, Iran's economy and finance minister, said during an International Monetary Fund meeting in Istanbul in October. "The fact is that having a trade relationship with Iran is very profitable."

Abu Dhabi's Role

Abu Dhabi, the most powerful of the emirates by virtue of about $45 billion in oil exports in 2009, may flex its muscles to try to break up the Iran-Dubai connection, says Nader Habibi, an economics professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Abu Dhabi, which has always been suspicious of Iran's political and nuclear ambitions, enjoys considerable leverage. In 2009, the emirate, which is about 16 times the size of Dubai, stepped in with a $20 billion bailout.

The money included $10 billion for Dubai World, the state- run holding company that spent billions to carve out of the desert a financial hub and tourist destination. In a nod to the growing influence of Abu Dhabi leader Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Dubai renamed its 200-story Burj Dubai skyscraper the Burj Khalifa in January.

The three Persian Gulf neighbors exist in an uneasy triad. Abu Dhabi follows a conservative Sunni religious doctrine that's at odds with Iran's Shia Islam.

Political Tensions

The government of Sheikh Khalifa, who's also president of the U.A.E., disputes Tehran's claim to three islands near key shipping lanes in the Gulf. Dubai tries to maintain a middle ground. It has cozied up to Abu Dhabi to ride out its debt crisis. Yet, with what the IBC says are 400,000 Iranians living within its borders -- the largest concentration of the emigres outside Greater Los Angeles -- Dubai can't ignore its giant neighbor to the north.

Thousands of Iranians travel to Dubai annually for a break from the Islamic Republic's ban on alcohol and laws that require women to cover their hair and the shape of their bodies. Abu Dhabi, despite the bailout, is leery of Dubai's freewheeling ways.

"A likely price for Abu Dhabi's help will be a greater centralization of the U.A.E. and less independence for Dubai," says Eckart Woertz, economics program manager at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, which analyzes Middle Eastern policy.

'Firmer Grip'

Abu Dhabi may push for U.A.E.-wide control of air and sea shipping, he says. Today, each emirate creates and administers many of its own laws, much as U.S. states do.

"Abu Dhabi could end up with a firmer grip on implementation of sanctions policies against Iran, which would benefit the U.S.," Woertz says.

The U.S. has struggled for decades to make sanctions against Iran work. It has brought more than 20 cases against companies that it believes broke U.S. rules on exporting military or sensitive nuclear-processing material to the Islamic Republic. Kesh Air International in Novato, California; Limmt Economic & Trade Co. in Dalian, China; and Aviation Services International BV in the Netherlands have all used Dubai as a shipment destination for goods going into Iran, according to court documents.

In April 2009, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Limmt on charges it had covertly used New York banks to finance large quantities of restricted materials for Iran. In May, Hassan Keshari, a naturalized U.S. citizen who owns Kesh Air, was sentenced to 17 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to export military aircraft parts to Iran.

Banking Ties

In September, Robert Kraaipoel, the director of Aviation Services, and his son, Robert Neils Kraaipoel, pleaded guilty to federal charges related to a conspiracy to illegally export aircraft parts to Iran. Both are citizens of the Netherlands.

The U.S. has also tried to cut Iran's access to the American banking system. The U.K.'s Lloyds TSB Bank Plc paid a $350 million fine to the Justice Department and the Manhattan District Attorney's office in January 2009. According to the department, employees in Dubai and the U.K. had stripped identification tags from money transfers, allowing Iran, Libya and Sudan to send funds through the U.S. financial system. In December, Credit Suisse Group AG agreed to pay $536 million for violating U.S. sanctions and funneling millions of dollars secretly to Iran and other countries.

Front Companies

Some of the companies the U.S. is targeting set up shop in plain view of Dubai's bustling docks. Less than 200 meters (650 feet) from Dubai Creek wharf, the grimy, five-story Bani Yas Center office complex served as headquarters for Iranian front companies, according to Alexander Acosta, a former U.S. attorney for the southern district of Florida and now dean of the Florida International University College of Law in Miami.

On the ground floor, clothing stores with signs in English and Russian sell off-brand shirts, ties and shoes. In the lobby, the names of 30 trading and transport companies are written in white plastic letters on a black board.

A single office here housed four Iranian firms that ordered microchips, computer parts and global-positioning-system devices from U.S. providers, according to court documents. The companies, with names such as Majidco Micro Electronics and Mayrow General Trading, had the electronics shipped to Dubai.

From there, it was easy to forward the gear to Iran aboard an Iran Air flight, according to court documents. The Justice Department alleges in an indictment unsealed in September 2008 in Miami that the microchips found their way into roadside bombs in Iraq that were used against U.S. troops.

Silent Partners

While traces of the four firms had vanished during a visit to the center in October, hundreds of such front companies operate in Dubai, Wilson Sonsini's Prager says.

"We've figured it out and we made some cases, but it's still a sieve," she says.

Iranians also gain a foothold in Dubai by setting up a business with a local resident acting as a silent partner. A U.A.E.-based company can better access lines of credit and import goods than one based in Iran. It's a simple matter from there to ship the goods across the Gulf, IBC's Masoumzadeh says.

Residents can benefit from such deals. Under Dubai law, businesses must have an Emirati sponsor who takes a 51 percent stake. In return for acting as a silent partner, locals can earn a steady income, ranging from a few thousand dollars to more than $100,000 a year, the New America Foundation's Molavi says.

Deep Roots

For more than a century, Persian-speaking Iranians have lived and worked in Dubai, which today has about 1.7 million people. The first Iranian merchants to settle arrived about 150 years ago. Another group emigrated in the 1930s to flee the modernizing edicts of Reza Shah, whose son, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in 1979. Others moved to avoid the religious extremism of the Islamic Republic that followed his rule.

On this steamy October evening, people are enjoying kebabs marinated in yogurt and stews with pomegranate and walnuts at Iranian restaurants called Abshar and Ostadi. On Fridays, some Iranians attend the Shiite mosque with its green-and-blue glazed-tile facade, which is steps away from the Iranian Consulate.

Amities Etemadi, an Iranian architect, came to Dubai in 1999 after graduating from the Islamic Azad University of Tehran. She visits Iran once a year for family reasons but considers Dubai her home, she says, sipping a Diet Coke at an outdoor cafe. In her short-sleeved T-shirt with her hair uncovered, she would be breaking rules in Iran that would earn her a jail sentence or a public lashing.

'Don't Take You Seriously'

"It's difficult to work in construction projects in Iran because they don't take you seriously as a woman," she says.

It was a different story in the 1960s and 1970s. While the shah encouraged Iranians to be cosmopolitan and Western, Dubai was no more than a village on the edge of the Arabian Desert. Its main industry was exporting pearls.

As late as 1960, Dubai had no electricity, no roads, no bridges, no running water and no telephones, according to Jim Krane, author of "City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism" (St. Martin's Press, 2009).

Yet Dubai always had an underbelly that lured hustlers and smugglers, Krane says. Its waterfront offered easy access to the Gulf and to countries in the Mideast, Asia and Africa, and its laissez-faire attitude attracted people with subversive ambitions, he says.

"Smuggling became an art form," Krane says.

Links to 9/11

Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan organized a smuggling operation of nuclear material in Dubai, says David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. Khan, who developed Pakistan's nuclear program, confessed in 2004 to shipping nuclear technology to Iran and Libya.

Al-Qaeda used the emirate's banking system to transfer funds, according to the 9/11 Commission report, which investigated the attacks on New York and Washington. About half of the $250,000 spent on the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to al- Qaeda terrorists in the U.S. from Dubai banks, the commission found.

The U.S. government says getting Dubai to cooperate is crucial to its effort to rein in Iran. Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey, the U.S. point man on financial sanctions against the Islamic Republic, has shuttled to Dubai more than a dozen times.

"I'm aware that Dubai has deep historical ties to Iran," says Levey, seated in his fourth-floor office in Washington. "They want to be part of the global trading and be a financial center. They see the potential reputational risk that these ties with Iran pose."

Treasury Blacklist

The Treasury Department has designated 119 Iranian companies, banks and officials as supporters of Iran's nuclear or terrorist activities. It has placed them on a list that bans them from having any dealing with U.S. companies and that allows the U.S. to seize their assets.

In 2006, the department announced sanctions against Bank Saderat, one of Iran's biggest lenders, for transferring funds to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia paramilitary group. The Treasury listed Bank Melli, Iran's biggest bank, the following year for funding Iran's nuclear program.

The State Department took aim at the U.A.E. in 2007. It threatened to designate the emirates as a "destination of diversion concern," a label applied to countries that send sensitive nuclear technology to Iran. The classification would have meant that U.S. customs officials would start giving more scrutiny to exports to the U.A.E. Dubai agreed to enact its own stringent laws, which among other things, ban the export or re- export of strategic goods like military hardware without a special license.

Dubai Gets Tough

Since then, Dubai customs agents have shut down at least 30 local companies, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Last August, U.A.E. customs investigators intercepted and seized a North Korean ship carrying weapons to Iran.

Levey has repeatedly warned banks in Dubai against dealing with Iran. In November 2008, the Treasury further tightened restrictions by revoking a special financial arrangement referred to as a "U-turn license." This measure in effect prevents U.S. banks from making dollar transfers to Iranian banks or other financial institutions even if the transfers are on behalf of European or Asian companies.

"Levey is trying to paralyze Iran, but Dubai is Iran's biggest trading partner and it won't be easy," says Abbas Bolurfrushan, a former president of the IBC who runs an insurance company specializing in shipping. "Iran has experience in getting around sanctions."

Clean Companies

From his 19th-floor office in the Radisson Hotel, Bolurfrushan can see Dubai Creek and the dhows brimming with appliances, food and clothing. He left Iran in 1982 after the government nationalized the insurance industry. He set up his own company in Dubai. He says Emirati customs officials are becoming stricter with businesses they think belong to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the branch of Iran's military that controls its borders.

"The majority of Iranian companies here are clean and have nothing to do with smuggling weapons or material for the nuclear program," Bolurfrushan says. "Dubai's security forces have put Iranians under the microscope."

Esfandiar Rashidzadeh says he has felt Dubai's tighter regulations. In 2004, Rashidzadeh, the former vice governor of Iran's central bank, set up an affiliate of Iran's Bank Melli in Dubai. He wanted to attract foreign investors to a fund called First Persia Equity Fund that invested in Iran's stock market. Americans can't invest in the fund. In March 2009, the Treasury added Rashidzadeh to its blacklist.

'Better Intel'

Trouble is, Rashidzadeh says, he'd left the Bank Melli affiliate 18 months before the Treasury's move.

"They need better intel," he quips, saying the worst consequence of the American action was missing a relative's wedding in the U.S.

Rashidzadeh says U.S. sanctions are unlikely to sway Iran's policies -- but they may make it more expensive to conduct business there.

"Their pressure will not change regime behavior but add to the cost of doing business," he says. "We've survived sanctions before."

Stephen Austen, a former managing director of the same investment fund, counters that sanctions are hurting. Austen, who had worked at Lloyds Bank Plc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., was one of the fund's managers in the Cayman Islands and later in Dubai.

'Sanctions Are Biting'

Austen says U.S. efforts against Iran are frightening potential investors the nation needs to fix its aging oil fields and improve its natural gas production. A lack of machinery and spare parts is hurting Iran's car industry, he says.

Iran is also having trouble getting financing, Austen says.

"The U.S. has successfully barricaded Iran from the international capital markets," he says. "The Iranian government does not want to admit that the sanctions are biting, but they are biting very hard."

That assessment is good news for Levey, who's unlikely to ease his scrutiny of Iran -- or his prodding of Dubai.

"Abu Dhabi is going to apply pressure on Dubai to limit its dealings with Iran," Brandeis University's Habibi predicts. "Abu Dhabi is no friend of Iran."

With Abu Dhabi in the mix, the U.S. may have finally found a regional ally in its struggle to persuade Dubai to firmly shut Iran's back door to the West. For Related News and Information:

To contact the reporter on this story: Kambiz Foroohar in New York at kforoohar@bloomberg.net

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AJE: Complete Bin Laden Audio and Text

A few obvious points about the new Bin Laden tape:

First of all, presuming that this really is from him, it's striking that nothing is said about the Dec. 30 attack on the CIA base in Afghanistan that killed seven of the Agency's employees, including a top AQ tracker. The bomb also took out a cousin of Jordan's King Abdullah working with the GID. Why wouldn't Bin Laden claim credit for that operation, too? Presumably because it had not happened when this was recorded. So it's fair to surmise this was taped between the failed Umar Farouk attack on the Christmas Day flight to Detroit and the Al-Balawi suicide bombing at FOB Chapman, Afghanistan, on December 30. That would mean it is almost a month old.

Secondly, the reference to Palestine generally and Gaza specifically is incongruous at this particular moment. Partly that's for reasons pointed out by the various analysts Al Jazeera cites below. Al Qaeda has never been embraced by Hamas, specifically, or the Palestinians, generally. Their fight is against Israel, not the whole Western world, and that's quite enough. They don't need to broaden their range of enemies. However, December 27 was the one year anniversary of the beginning of the Israeli siege of Gaza, which provoked intense anger throughout the Arab and Muslim world. One would have to presume that is also the likely occasion for this tape.

Conclusion, it takes a long time for an audio recording of OBL to make its way from wherever he is to the offices of AJE, whether in Qatar or elsewhere. That suggests he is still in a hole somewhere and gives us yet another reason to believe he does not have any sort of operational control over attacks against the United States or other targets. What he can do -- about all he can do -- is sit back and take credit for helping to inspire the mayhem to begin with.

Bin Laden warns US of more attacks

Osama bin Laden has warned Barack Obama, the US president, that there will be further attacks on the United States unless he takes steps to resolve the Palestinian situation. In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera on Sunday, the al-Qaeda chief, praised the Nigerian accused of a failed attempt to blow up an airliner heading for Detroit on Christmas Day. "The message I want to convey to you through the plane of the hero Umar Farouk [Abdulmutallab], reaffirms a previous message that the heroes of 9/11 conveyed to you," Bin Laden said. "America will never dream of living in peace unless we live it in Palestine. It is unfair that you enjoy a safe life while our brothers in Gaza suffer greatly. "Therefore, with God's will, our attacks on you will continue as long as you continue to support Israel," bin Laden said. "If it was possible to carry our messages to you by words we wouldn't have carried them to you by planes."... http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/01/201012415287209336.html

Londonistan Update: England's Jihadi Subculture

Very interesting piece from NPR. Note the part in bold face:

Bomb Plot Suspect Tied To Alleged U.K. Terrorists

by Dina Temple-Raston

British and U.S. intelligence authorities have linked the young Nigerian at the center of the alleged attack on Northwest Flight 253, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to two men accused of ties to major terrorist plots in the United Kingdom, NPR has learned.

British and U.S. officials have been feverishly tracking down leads on anyone who had contact with Abdulmutallab during the three years he was a student in London. His father sent him to study mechanical engineering at University College London in 2005. It was Abdulmutallab's first experience in the West, and those who knew him in London said he was quiet and somewhat lonely.

That has meant that leads about his contacts with other potential terrorists have been few and far between. One official told NPR that Abdulmutallab had few friends, and though he attended several local mosques, he made no impression on the elders who worshipped there.

'Jihadi Subculture'

Scotland Yard had opened what it called a tracer file on Abdulmutallab. Essentially, it was a file that indicated that he had contacts with extremists in the U.K., but that there was no reason to think those contacts would lead to violence. One official in London said there was a "jihadi subculture in the U.K. that numbers in the thousands." This subculture apparently included people like Abdulmutallab, who either dabbled in extremist ideas or ran in circles that sometimes included potential terrorism suspects. Security services in London decided long ago that they didn't have the resources to follow those tracer leads. Instead, they focused on several hundred people they thought were more likely to launch attacks. Abdulmutallab, by their accounts, fell into the broader category of young Muslims who were just dabbling in radical ideas.

Contacts With Suspected Terrorists

But when they returned to Abdulmutallab's file after the alleged Christmas Day airliner attack, officials started to see the signs of a possible switch in Abdulmutallab's mindset. The first worrisome contact they flagged after the incident was with a man linked to a 2006 plot. In that case, a group allegedly planned to detonate liquid bombs onboard at least seven passenger planes en route to the U.S. and Canada. That plot is the reason passengers are no longer permitted to carry more than 3 ounces of liquid onboard a plane....http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122868637&ft=1&f=1001

New York Post: Cops Abroad, "Securing the City"

Updated: Sat., Jan. 23, 2010, 3:55 PM

NYPD's long arm of the law

By JAMES FANELLI

Last Updated: 3:55 PM, January 23, 2010

Posted: 3:55 PM, January 23, 2010

Between 2002 and 2003, the NYPD and FBI arrested and deported six Iranian diplomats in New York for photographing infrastructure and rail lines. The busts set off an alarming scenario for the NYPD’s intelligence division — that Iran could aid terrorist groups like Hizbollah in an attack on the Big Apple.

To investigate, detectives had to go beyond the five boroughs. They flew to Buenos Aires to meet with Argentine authorities and learn from the 1992 and 1994 Hizbollah attacks on Jewish and Israeli facilities there.

Here's a look at where New York's Finest can be found.

Those deadly bombings were retaliation for the death of Hizbollah leaders in the Middle East. The quickly executed strikes led intelligence officials to believe plans had been in the bag for a while and that reconnaissance on the targets and materials were provided by Iranian officials stationed in South America.

NYPD detectives walked away from the trip with key intelligence on how terror operations can be disrupted.

But the south of the border flight was just one of many overseas trips made by New York’s Finest in the past decade.

In the years since 9/11, the nearly 38,000-strong police force has recalibrated its mission, thinking globally to act locally. In an ambitious plan, it has set up permanent posts in 11 international cities and dispatched intelligence detectives to every continent except Antarctica in order to network with local law enforcement, gather intelligence and learn terrorist techniques after attacks.

The NYPD has swooped into India after the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai to learn the terrorists’ weapons and explosives of choice, reviewed Saudi Arabia’s de-radicalization program and profiled rising Islamic extremist elements in the Balkans.

The purpose of the assignments is simple: Use that knowledge to prevent another Big Apple tragedy.

“The NYPD has a very clear focus when it comes to fighting terrorism,” said Christopher Dickey, the author of “Securing The City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force — The NYPD.” “It’s not fighting ideologically. It’s fighting in very practical and narrow terms based on the belief that New York City is the number one terror target in the world. Its entire mission is to stop terrorist attacks from taking place there.” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly returned to New York as the top cop in January 2002, to a city still reeling from the horrific events a few months earlier. And in the time since 1994, when he left the commissioner’s office, he had worked in Haiti, for Interpol and for the federal government, gaining international experience....http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/nypd_long_arm_of_the_law_Zs9SkOimTmrCYbfNCrLNzM

NYTimes.com: C.I.A. Deaths Prompt Surge in U.S. Drone Strikes

FRONT PAGE | January 23, 2010 C.I.A. Deaths Prompt Surge in U.S. Drone Strikes BY SCOTT SHANE AND ERIC SCHMITT Since a suicide bombing that killed seven Americans in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency has employed an intensive series of strikes against militants in Pakistan. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy

(BN) U.K. Raises Terror-Threat Level to `Severe'; U.S. Level Remains Unchanged

Bloomberg News, sent from my iPhone.

U.K. Raises Its Terrorism Threat Level to Severe

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The U.K. raised its international terrorism threat level to "severe" from "substantial," indicating authorities consider an attack "highly likely."

"I should stress that there is no intelligence to suggest that an attack is imminent," Home Secretary Alan Johnson said in the statement today announcing the change.

The heightened alert comes two days after the government suspended direct flights between Yemen and the U.K. as British officials prepare to host conferences next week in London on Yemen and on the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. government said it doesn't plan to follow the U.K. action with its own raised alert.

The highest level of alert in the U.K.'s five-tier scale is "critical," meaning an attack is "expected imminently." "Severe" comes next, followed by "substantial," indicating an attack is a "strong possibility." The last two threat levels are moderate and low.

Earlier today India alerted its airports and national airline after intelligence reports said hijackers may attempt to seize a plane flying in South Asia. The Indian Civil Aviation Ministry ordered extra searches of passengers before they board and the use of sky marshals on some flights, according to a government statement.

Dec. 25 Incident

The Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda said it was behind a Dec. 25 plot in which Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on its approach to Detroit.

Several hundred al-Qaeda members in remote tribal areas of Yemen may be preparing for attacks similar to last month's plane plot in the U.S. and elsewhere, President Barack Obama's assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, John Brennan, said on Jan. 3.

The U.S. has no plans now to raise its terror threat level, an Obama administration official said after the U.K. posted the increased alert. The official asked not to be identified. The overall threat level of the U.S. is elevated, or yellow, meaning there is a "significant risk" of attack. Yellow is the third of five tiers in the threat alert.

The country's threat level for domestic and international flights is high, or orange, which is the second-most severe on the scale.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Jan. 20 announced stepped-up security following the attempted Christmas Day attack including the creation a "no-fly list" of terrorist suspects and a second list of those who will be subject to increased security screening prior to boarding flights heading to Britain.

The nation's three intelligence agencies will focus on investigating individuals "long before" they reach the country, he said.

To contact the reporters on this story: James Hertling in Paris at jhertling@bloomberg.net Kitty Donaldson in London at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.net

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CNN intvu with Defne Bayrak, CIA Bomber's Wife

This CNN interview with Defne Bayrak is interesting because it's video, and it completely supports what was reported last week in my column, and the week before by Newsweek Turkiye:





Shadowland: Divorce, Jihadi Style 13 January 2010
What role do women play in Al Qaeda? A few are suicide bombers; others may encourage their men to become one. http://www.newsweek.com/id/230607/page/1

Newsweek Online: The Bomber's Wife 7 January 2010
In an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK Türkiye, the wife of the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan talks about her husband's life and beliefs. (Reported by Newsweek Turkiye's Adem Demir, written by Christopher Dickey) http://www.newsweek.com/id/229792

English transcript of the Newsweek Turkiye interview: http://www.newsweekturkiye.com/haberler/detay/35416/My-Husband-Fought-for-Islam

Al-Jazeera in English: Obama's First Year

Christopher Dickey, Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School, and Philip Bobbitt, author of "Terror and Consent" on Riz Khan's program, 20 January 2009:

BBC News - Straw says Iraq 'most difficult decision' in his life

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/mobile/uk_news/politics/8471511.stm

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Nicaragua: Back to the Future

http://www.nicatimes.net/nicaarchive/2010_01/0115101.htm

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