Fears Grow That Libya Is Incubator of Turmoil

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the former Al-Qaeda commander whose LIFG terrorist organization had killed U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Πηγή: abcNews
By MAGGIE MICHAEL, AP
Jan 26 2013

Libya's upheaval the past two years helped lead to the ongoing conflict in Mali, and now Mali's war threatens to wash back and further hike Libya's instability. Fears are growing that post-Moammar Gadhafi Libya is becoming an incubator of turmoil, with an overflow of weapons and Islamic jihadi militants operating freely, ready for battlefields at home or abroad.

The possibility of a Mali backlash was underlined the past week when several European governments evacuated their citizens from Libya's second largest city, Benghazi, fearing attacks in retaliation for the French-led military assault against al-Qaida-linked extremists in northern Mali.

More worrisome is the possibility that Islamic militants inspired by — or linked to — al-Qaida can establish a strong enough foothold in Libya to spread instability across a swath of North Africa where long, porous desert borders have little meaning, governments are weak, and tribal and ethnic networks stretch from country to country. The Associated Press examined the dangers in recent interviews with officials, tribal leaders and jihadis in various parts of Libya.

Already, Libya's turmoil echoes around the region and in the Middle East. The large numbers of weapons brought into Libya or seized from government caches during the 2011 civil war against Gadhafi are now smuggled freely to Mali, Egypt and its Sinai Peninsula, the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad. Jihadis in Libya are believed to have operational links with fellow militant groups in the same swath, Libyan fighters have joined rebels in Syria and are believed to operate in other countries as well.

Libyan officials, activists and experts are increasingly raising alarm over how Islamic militants have taken advantage of the oil-rich country's weakness to grow in strength. During his more than four-decade rule Gadhafi stripped the country of national institutions, and after his fall the central government has little authority beyond the capital, Tripoli. Militias established to fight Gadhafi remain dominant, and tribes and regions are sharply divided.

In the eastern city of Benghazi, birthplace of the revolt that led to the ouster and killing of Gadhafi, militias espousing an al-Qaida ideology and including veteran fighters are prevalent, even ostensibly serving as security forces on behalf of the government since the police and military are so weak and poorly armed. One such militia, Ansar al-Shariah, is believed to have been behind the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in the city that killed four Americans, including the ambassador. Since then, militants have been blamed for a wave of assassinations of security officers and government officials.

Earlier this month, former Libyan leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil warned the militant threat extends to efforts to establish a state that can enforce rule of law.

"Libya will not see stability except by facing them," he told a gathering videotaped by activists and aired on Libyan TV. "It is time to either hold dialogue or confront them." He listed 30 officials and police officers assassinated in Benghazi the past year.

The Mali drama illustrates how the threat bounces back and forth across the borders drawn in the Sahel, the region stretching across the Sahara Desert. Libya and Mali are separated by Algeria, but the two countries had deep ties under Gadhafi. Thousands of Tuaregs moved from Mali to Libya beginning in the 1970s, and many joined special divisions of Gadhafi's military where they earned higher salaries than they would have at home.

As Gadhafi was falling in 2011, thousands of heavily armed Tuareg fighters in southern Libya fled to northern Mali. The Tuareg are an indigenous ethnic group living throughout the Sahel, from Mali to Chad and into Libya and Algeria.

The fighters, led by commander Mohammed Ag Najem, broke the Mali government's hold over the north and declared their long-held dream of a Tuareg homeland, Azawad. But they in turn were defeated by Islamic militants, some linked to al-Qaida's branch in North Africa, who took over the territory and imposed rule under an extreme version of Shariah, or Islamic law. This month, as militants moved south, France launched its military intervention to rescue the Mali government, conducting airstrikes against militants.

In retaliation, militants seized an oil complex in eastern Algeria, prompting a siege by Algerian forces that killed dozens of Western hostages and militants.

The militant group that carried out the Algeria hostage taking, in turn, had help from Libyan extremists in the form of smuggled weapons and "organizational ties," the group's leader, Moktar Belmoktar said.

"Their ideological and organizational connection to us is not an accusation against a Muslim but a source of pride and honor to us and to them," Belmoktar, the one-eyed Algerian founder of the Masked Brigade, said of the Libyans in an interview with The Mauritanian newspaper in mid-December. "Jihadists in al-Qaida and in general were the biggest beneficiaries of the Arab world uprisings, because these uprisings have broken the chains of fear ... that the agent regimes of the West imposed."

He urged Libyan militants not to submit to calls by the Tripoli government to hand over their weapons, saying their arms are "the source of their dignity and their guarantee of security."

With pressure building on Mali's Islamists, Libya provides a possible alternative haven for jihadis, said Scott Stewart of the global intelligence group Stratfor.

"It is a very good place to operate if you are an extremist," he said. "There are fault lines and divisions ... The central government has very little authority outside Tripoli. This is very conducive environment for Jihad to thrive."

They already have a free rein in Benghazi.

"Libya became a heaven for them," Col. Salah Bouhalqa, a leading military commander in Benghazi, said of al-Qaida. "The Westerners are fearful that what happened in Algeria will take place in Libya. And here, just like Mali and Egypt and Iraq, these groups have extensions."

Some extremists say they are determined to shape the new Libya. Youssef Jihani, a member of Ansar Shariah in Benghazi, vowed that he and other jihadis would not accept a return to the days when they were jailed and executed under Gadhafi's rule. He told the AP in Benghazi late last year that the toppling of Gadhafi would not have been possible without the strength of jihadi fighters who he said joined the uprising to ensure an "Islamic state of Libya, where Shariah rule is implemented."

The bearded young man said he lay down his weapons last year. But he said he would take arms up again if Libya's next constitution doesn't make a clear reference to rule by Islamic law or if secular politicians hold power and try to rein in jihadis.

Jihani proudly said he believes in al-Qaida and supports its slain leader Osama bin Laden and Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar. He said that during Libya's civil war in 2011, he killed a captured soldier from Gadhafi's army after discovering 11 video clips on his mobile phone showing soldiers raping women and men. Jihani said he ordered the soldier to dig his own grave, then severed his head with a knife.

"I wish I could behead him 11 times," he said. His story could not be independently confirmed.

Stewart, of Stratfor, also pointed to a concern that al-Qaida could make inroads among Libya's impoverished and alienated Tuareg.

Living in mud-brick slums or camps in the deserts of southwestern Libya, most Tuaregs were never given citizenship under Gadhafi's rule, though he used their fighters as mercenaries, and now they suffer not only from poverty but from the disdain of Libyans who see them as Gadhafi loyalists.

For centuries, Tuareg ran caravan routes across the Sahara, carrying gold and other valuables. Now they're known for smuggling weapons and drugs. In slums around the towns of Sabha and Owbari, they sleep next to livestock in shacks with corrugated metal roofs, with webs of electric cables dangling from poles overhead and garbage-filled streets.

Libya's new leadership has largely shunned them. The Tuareg's four members in parliament were removed because of ties to Gadhafi's regime, leaving them without a political voice. The Tuareg contend they were exploited by Gadhafi, along with all other Libyans.

"Gadhafi's rule left behind a breeding ground for terrorism by depriving people of their rights and education .... After all the promises, we thought we will live in heaven, but kids here die from scorpion bites," said Suleiman Naaim, a Tuareg rights activist, told the AP in Owbari.

Death toll in Yemen anti-US protests rises

Πηγή: Asian Times
By AP
Sept 14 2012

Clashes between police and demonstrators protesting against a film mocking Islam near the US embassy in Sanaa on Thursday killed four people, a security official said.

'Four people were killed and 34 others were wounded in the clashes that lasted from morning until late in the evening' in the area around the US embassy in Sanaa, the official said.

Earlier on Thursday, a security official said that Yemeni police shot dead a protester in confrontations outside the embassy, shortly after ejecting crowds that stormed the mission's compound.

The White House said that it was doing everything it could to protect its diplomats in Yemen, after a mob breached the embassy wall as fury spread over a US-produced film mocking Islam.

"We are doing everything we can to protect safety and security of personnel," White House spokesman Jay Carney said, adding that President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi had pledged his government would not tolerate violence.

The State Department said all of the US staff at the embassy in Yemen, a hot front on the US campaign against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, were safe.

"We are obviously doing what we can with the Yemenis to restore security there. All of our personnel are safe and accounted for," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told journalists.

Hadi earlier publicly apologized to US President Barack Obama and the American people for the acts of a 'mob' and ordered a probe.

California ex-convict confirms role in anti-Islam film

A Libyan man holds a placard during a demonstration against the attack on the US consulate that killed four Americans, including the ambassador, in Benghazi, Libya.

Πηγή: Arab News
By GILLIAN FLACCUS (AP)
Sept 13 2012

LOS ANGELES: The provocative anti-Muslim film implicated in mob protests in Egypt and Libya received logistical help from a man once convicted of financial crimes and featured actors who complained that their inflammatory dialogue was dubbed in after filming.

The self-proclaimed director of “Innocence of Muslims” initially claimed a Jewish and Israeli background and said he had gone into hiding because of the international controversy set off by the movie. But by day’s end Wednesday, others involved in the film said his statements about his background were contrived, and evidence mounted that the film’s key player was a southern Californian Coptic Christian with a checkered past.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he managed logistics for the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and Prophet Muhammad (praise be upon him) and may have inflamed mobs that attacked US missions in Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

Nakoula denied he had directed the film, though he said he knew the self-described filmmaker, Sam Bacile. But the cellphone number that the AP contacted Tuesday to reach the filmmaker who identified himself as Bacile traced to the same address near Los Angeles where Nakoula was located.

Nakoula told the AP he is a Coptic Christian and supported the concerns of Christian Copts about their treatment by Muslims.

The film was implicated in protests that resulted in the burning of the US consulate Tuesday in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Libyan officials said Wednesday that Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other embassy employees were killed during the mob violence, but US officials now say they are investigating whether the assault was a planned terrorist strike linked to Tuesday’s 11-year anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Nakoula denied he had posed as Sam Bacile. Federal court papers filed in a 2010 criminal prosecution against him said Nakoula had used numerous aliases in the past. Among the fake names, the documents said, were Nicola Bacily and Erwin Salameh.

During a conversation outside his home, Nakoula offered his driver’s license to show his identity but kept his thumb over his middle name, Basseley. Records checks by the AP subsequently found that middle name as well as other connections to the Bacile persona.

The AP located Bacile after obtaining his cell phone number from Morris Sadek, a conservative Coptic Christian in the US who had promoted the anti-Muslim film in recent days on his website. Egypt’s Christian Coptic populace has long decried what they describe as a history of discrimination and occasional violence from the country’s Arab majority.

Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, who sparked outrage in the Arab world when he burned Qur’ans on the ninth anniversary of 9/11, said he spoke with the movie’s director on the phone Wednesday and prayed for him. Jones said he has not met the filmmaker in person, but added that the man contacted him a few weeks ago about promoting the movie. Jones and others who have dealt with the filmmaker said Wednesday that Bacile was hiding his real identity.

“I have not met him. Sam Bacile, that is not his real name,” Jones said. “I just talked to him on the phone. He is definitely in hiding and does not reveal his identity. He was quite honestly fairly shook up concerning the events and what is happening. A lot of people are not supporting him. He was generally a little shook up concerning this situation.”

The Youtube account, “Sam Bacile,” which was used to publish excerpts of the provocative movie in July, was used to post comments online as recently as Tuesday, including this defense of the film written in Arabic: “It is a 100 percent American movie, you cows.”

Nakoula, who talked guardedly about his role, pleaded no contest in 2010 to federal bank fraud charges in California and was ordered to pay more than $790,000 in restitution. He was also sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and ordered not to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer.

Assistant US Attorney Jennifer Leigh Williams said Nakoula set up fraudulent bank accounts using stolen identities and Social Security numbers; then, checks from those accounts would be deposited into other bogus accounts from which Nakoula would withdraw money at ATM machines.

It was “basically a check-kiting scheme,” the prosecutor told the AP. “You try to get the money out of the bank before the bank realizes they are drawn from a fraudulent account. There basically is no money.”
American actors and actresses who appeared in “Innocence of Muslims” issued a joint statement Wednesday saying they were misled about the project and alleged that some of their dialogue was crudely dubbed during post-production.

In the English-language version of the trailer, direct references to Prophet Muhammad appear to be the result of post-production changes to the movie. Either actors aren’t seen when the name “Muhammad” is spoken in the overdubbed sound, or they appear to be mouthing something else as the name of the prophet is spoken.

“The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer,” said the statement, obtained by the Los Angeles Times. “We are 100 percent not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose. We are shocked by the drastic rewrites of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred.”

One of the actresses, Cindy Lee Garcia, told the Gawker.com website that the film was originally titled “Desert Warriors” and said the script did not contain offensive references to Islam. She said the director, who identified himself as Bacile, told her then that he was Egyptian.

The person who identified himself as Bacile and described himself as the film’s writer and director told the AP on Tuesday that he had gone into hiding. But doubts rose about the man’s identity amid a flurry of false claims about his background and role in the purported film.

Bacile told the AP he was an Israeli-born, 56-year-old, Jewish writer and director. But a Christian activist involved in the film project, Steve Klein, told the AP on Wednesday that Bacile was a pseudonym and that he was Christian.

Klein had told the AP on Tuesday that the filmmaker was an Israeli Jew who was concerned for family members who live in Egypt.

Officials in Israel said there was no record of Bacile as an Israeli citizen.

When the AP initially left a message for Bacile, Klein contacted the AP from another number to confirm the interview request was legitimate; then Bacile called back from his own cell phone.

Klein said he didn’t know the real name of the man he called “Sam,” who came to him for advice on First Amendment issues.

About 15 key players from the Middle East — people from Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, and a couple of Coptic Christians from Egypt — worked on the film, Klein said.

“Most of them won’t tell me their real names because they’re terrified,” Klein said. “He was really scared and now he’s so nervous. He’s turned off his phone.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, said Klein is a former Marine and longtime religious-right activist who has helped train paramilitary militias at a California church. It described Klein as founder of Courageous Christians United, which conducts protests outside abortion clinics, Mormon temples and mosques.

It quoted Klein as saying he believes that California is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells “who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can.”

In his brief interview with the AP, Bacile called Islam a cancer and said he intended the film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion.

But several key facts Bacile provided proved false or questionable. Bacile told the AP he was 56 but identified himself on his YouTube profile as 74. Bacile said he is a real estate developer, but Bacile does not appear in searches of California state licenses, including the Department of Real Estate.

Hollywood and California film industry groups and permit agencies said they had no records of the project under the name “Innocence of Muslims,” but a Los Angeles film permit agency later found a record of a movie filmed in Los Angeles last year under the working title “Desert Warriors.”

A man who answered a phone listed for the Vine Theater, a faded Hollywood movie house, confirmed that the film had run for a least a day, and possibly longer, several months ago, arranged by a customer known as “Sam.”

Google Inc., which owns YouTube, pulled down the video Wednesday in Egypt, citing a legal complaint. It was still accessible in the US and other countries.

Klein told the AP he vowed to help make the movie but warned the filmmaker that “you’re going to be the next Theo van Gogh.” Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker killed by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after making a film that was perceived as insulting to Islam.

“We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” Klein said.

Turmoil Spreads to U.S. Embassy in Yemen

Protesters sought to storm the United States embassy during a protest against an anti-Islamic film in Sana on Thursday.

Πηγή: New York Times
By NASSER ARRABYEE and ALAN COWELL
Sept 13 2012

SANA, Yemen — Turmoil in the Arab world linked to a contentious video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad spread on Thursday to Yemen, where hundreds of protesters stormed the United States Embassy, two days after assailants killed the American ambassador in Libya and crowds tried to overrun the embassy compound in Cairo.

News reports also spoke of a separate protest in Tehran, where around 500 Iranians chanting “Death to America” tried to converge on the Swiss Embassy, which handles United States interests in the absence of formal diplomatic relations with Washington. Hundreds of police officers held the crowds back from the diplomatic compound, which Swiss officials had evacuated as a precaution, Agence France-Presse said.

For a third straight day, protesters scuffled with police in Cairo, news reports said, while in Iraq, a militant Shiite group, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, once known for its violent attacks on Americans and other Westerners, said the video “will put all American interests in danger.”

In Sana, witnesses said Yemeni security forces had tried to disperse a crowd at the fortified embassy compound in the east of Sana, the capital. But protesters broke through an outer perimeter protecting the embassy, clambering over a high wall and setting fire to a building.

They were forced to retreat after trying to plunder furniture and computers, the witnesses said.

Security forces guarding the embassy fired into the air as protesters set fire to two vehicles and burned tires. Protesters tore down and burned an American flag, replacing it with their own banner proclaiming the Islamic faith, witnesses said.

There were no immediate reports of American casualties or that the protesters had managed to breach the main diplomatic buildings within the compound. Yemeni officials said an unspecified number of protesters were wounded and some were arrested. Hours after the attack started, smoke still rose from the area.

By early afternoon, one witness, Yahya Yousef, who lives opposite the embassy, said: “Now almost everyone is out, and firing has ceased. We saw protesters getting out with some stuff from inside.”

The protests came hours after a Muslim cleric, Abdul Majid al- Zandani, urged followers to emulate the protests in Libya and Egypt, Sana residents said. Mr. Zandani, a onetime mentor to Osama bin Laden, was named a ”specially designated global terrorist” by the United States Treasury Department in 2004.

The crowd gathered a day after the embassy warned Americans in a posting on its Web site that “in the wake of recent events in Libya and Egypt, there is the possibility of protests in Yemen, and specifically in the vicinity of the U.S. Embassy, in the coming days.”

“The U.S. Embassy continues to recommend that U.S. citizens avoid large gatherings. Even demonstrations or events intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate into violence. U.S. citizens in Yemen are urged to monitor local news reports and to plan their activities accordingly,” the Web posting said.

An American official contacted by telephone declined to describe what had happened at the embassy.

With American Marines and naval vessels heading for Libya, where the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three of his staff were killed on Tuesday in an attack on the United States consulate, and new crowds reported gathering in Tunis and Cairo overnight, the reports from Yemen added to the already volatile mix of passions that have commingled with the initial exuberance of the so-called Arab Spring.

In an attempt to defuse the passions in his own country, President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, was quoted on Thursday as saying the attacks on American personnel were unacceptable. Speaking in a television address while visiting Brussels, the Egyptian leader said he supported peaceful demonstrations but rejected attacks on personnel and diplomatic missions.

“What happened is unacceptable, rejected. The Prophet Muhammad taught us to respect human life," Bloomberg News quoted Mr. Morsi as saying. But he also warned against maligning Islam’s founding prophet. “The Prophet Muhammad and Islamic sanctities are red lines for all of us.”

Little is known about the origin of the video that provoked the protests. It was made in obscurity somewhere in Southern California, and promoted by a network of right-wing Christians with a history of animosity directed toward Muslims. When a 14-minute trailer of it was posted on YouTube in June, it was barely noticed.

But when the amateurish video was translated into Arabic and reposted twice on YouTube in the days before Sept. 11, and promoted by leaders of the Coptic diaspora in the United States, it drew nearly one million views and set off bloody demonstrations.

The initial eruption of protests in Egypt and Libya came on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

Referring to the killings in Benghazi, American and European officials said on Wednesday that while many details about the attack remained unclear, the assailants seemed organized, well trained and heavily armed and they appeared to have at least some level of advance planning. But the officials cautioned that it was too soon to tell whether the attack was related to the Sept. 11 commemoration.

On that same day in Yemen this week, a car bomb exploded on Tuesday alongside a convoy of vehicles used by Yemen’s defense minister, killing seven bodyguards and five civilians in the heart of the capital, while the minister escaped unharmed, government and hospital officials said. The attack came one day after a top operative of Al Qaeda in Yemen was killed in what Yemeni officials called an American drone strike.

Those episodes and the violence on Thursday spoke to the continued volatility in poverty-stricken Yemen, where the United States is seeking to eradicate militant cells held responsible for a number of conspiracies, including an attempt by an operative of Al Qaeda to detonate a bomb hidden in his clothes on a flight bound for Detroit in December 2009.

The blast on Tuesday in downtown Sana tore through a thoroughfare between the cabinet office and the state radio building, shattering buildings and wrecking a vehicle carrying the seven bodyguards, seconds after the minister himself, Maj. Gen. Mohammed Nasser Ahmed, had passed by in another vehicle after a weekly cabinet meeting.

Documents provide rare insight into FBI’s terrorism stings

A wire-wearing FBI informant named Shaheed Hussain was used in a sting operation against four Muslim men charged with trying to blow up New York synagogues and shoot down military planes.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Peter Finn
April 14 2012

Days before his arrest in Pittsburgh last month, Khalifa Ali al-Akili posted a remarkable message on his Facebook page: A mysterious man who spoke often of jihad had tried to interest Akili in buying a gun, then later introduced him to a second man, whom Akili was assured was “all about the struggle.”

It smelled, Akili wrote on Facebook, like a setup.

“I had a feeling that I had just played out a part in some Hollywood movie where I had just been introduced to the leader of a ‘terrorist’ sleeper cell,” Akili wrote.

When he googled a phone number provided by the second man, it turned out to be to Shahed Hussain, one of the FBI’s most prolific and controversial informants for terrorism cases. Soon the sting was off; Akili was subsequently arrested on gun — not terrorism — charges, which he has denied.

It was a rare miss for Hussain, 55, who has played a wealthy, dapper member of a Pakistani terrorist group in several FBI operations over nearly a decade.

This role has inflamed Muslim and civil rights activists, who describe Hussain as an “agent provocateur,” and prompted harsh comments from the presiding judge in a 2010 case, who questioned his honesty and the aggressiveness of the FBI’s tactics.

“I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it and brought it to fruition,” said U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon at the sentencing of four men from Newburgh, N.Y., convicted on terrorism charges. She added, “That does not mean there was no crime.”

Hussain declined to speak about his work for the FBI, saying in a brief phone interview, “I can’t say anything for security reasons.” The FBI declined to discuss Hussain or McMahon’s comments.

But the blown Pittsburgh sting and the voluminous court records from the 2010 case have provided rare insight into a tactic used increasingly by the FBI since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in which suspects are monitored almost from the beginning of plots and provided with means to help them carry them out. The targets in such stings have included Washington’s Metro subway system, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.

There have been 138 terrorism or national security cases involving informants since 2001, and 51 of those have come over the past three years, according to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York. The center said the government secured convictions in 91 percent of those cases.

Law enforcement officials say stings are a vital tactic for heading off terrorism. But civil rights activists and others say the FBI has been identifying individuals with radical views who, despite brash talk, might have little ability to launch attacks without the government’s help.

“It almost seems like the government is creating a theatrical event that produces more fear in the community,” said Michael German, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union and a former FBI agent who worked undercover.

Yet in these terrorism stings, every attempted defense that has alleged entrapment by the government has failed, according to Fordham’s Center on National Security. The FBI said that record speaks volumes and rejected any suggestion that it has invented terrorist plots. “They present the idea,” FBI spokesman Kathleen Wright said of the targets of investigations. “It is not us coming up with these ideas.”

Officials said the subjects of these stings are the ones who first generate suspicion — by contacting terrorists overseas, attempting to secure weapons or speaking of a desire to commit violence.

One of the prosecutors in the 2010 case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Halperin, said in court that confidential informants such as Hussain are an “important tool” for the FBI. “Mr. Hussain is Pakistani. He speaks Urdu. He speaks Pashto. He’s Muslim. He can read Arabic,” Halperin said. “All of these things make Mr. Hussain a very valuable asset for the FBI.”

The birth of an asset

In testimony for the 2010 terrorism case, for which Hussain appeared as a witness for the prosecution, he described himself as a member of a politically connected family in Pakistan who fled to the United States with his wife and children after he was falsely accused of murder during a government crackdown against the secular MQM party. He arrived on a fake British passport in 1994, Hussain testified.

In the years since, his relatives in Pakistan have transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to him, allowing him and his family to acquire gas stations, a beverage center and a motel in Upstate New York, according to financial records produced in court. He also testified that former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, during a trip to New York, gave his son $40,000 to buy a new car, but the judge, McMahon, questioned the veracity of the claim.

It was not the only time McMahon expressed doubts about Hussain’s honesty.

“By the end of the trial, the jury knew that Hussain had lied about his finances to at least two courts (the Northern District of New York and the Northern District Bankruptcy Court), lied to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, lied to the Town of Colonie and its school district about his residence, lied to potential customers of his motel, and lied to the IRS about his income at tax time,” wrote McMahon.

In late 2001, Hussain was arrested on federal fraud charges of helping immigrants illegally secure driver’s licenses. Hussain, who had been working as a translator for the Department of Motor Vehicles, faced a possible prison term and deportation to Pakistan. He pleaded guilty and, as part of his agreement with the government, cooperated with the FBI by going undercover to secure evidence against several former associates in the scheme, including his mistress.

Hussain excelled in this new role — a fact grudgingly accepted even by his detractors.

“Both his physical and emotional presence seemed impervious to chastisement, to exposure, to anything — nothing seemed to throw his casual defiance off course,” said Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham’s Center on National Security, who has observed Hussain in court.

The bureau also has sent Hussain to London and Pakistan, where he infiltrated a terrorist training camp, according to court testimony.

In the summer of 2003, Hussain first adopted the persona of the suave, moneyed terrorist at the direction of the FBI. The object of the sting was Yassin Aref, an Iraqi Kurd and the spiritual leader of an Albany mosque.

Aref was convicted of participating in a plot to launder funds from the sale of a shoulder-fired missile. Aref’s attorneys said he simply saw what he thought was a loan between Hussain and the owner of a struggling pizza parlor who was also convicted. Aref and the owner of the pizza parlor were sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The informant at work

On another assignment for the FBI, Hussain went to Newburgh’s Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque 12 times before he met James Cromitie, a convert to Islam and a stocker at a Wal-Mart, in June 2008.

In a poor community, Hussain struck an odd figure, driving Hummers and BMWs and wearing designer clothes.

Salahuddin Muhammad, imam of the mosque, said in an interview that some people suspected that Hussain was an FBI informant. He was too eager to engage people in conversation about jihad, Muhammad said.

Cromitie, who attended the mosque infrequently, either didn’t hear of the suspicions of others or didn’t care.

Hussain later told the FBI that Cromitie said: “Look, brother, I might have done a lot of sin, but to die like a shaded (martyr), I will go to paradise . . . I want to do something to America.”

By July, Hussain had told Cromitie he was part of a Pakistani terrorist group. Cromitie, who had multiple drug convictions but no history of violence, said he wanted to join, according to the FBI’s debriefing of the informant.

During a November 2008 trip to Philadelphia with Hussain, which coincided with the terrorist attacks on several locations in Mumbai, India, Cromitie made some of his most incendiary statements.

Cromitie hadn’t heard of the attacks, but Hussain pointed out that one of the targets in Mumbai was a Jewish center, according to transcripts of conversations that were secretly recorded and later played in court.

“I’d like to get a synagogue,” Cromitie said.

The judge later noted in a finding of fact that “whenever Hussain asked Cromitie to act on those sentiments — make a plan, pick a target, find recruits, introduce the [confidential informant] to like-minded brothers, procure guns and conduct surveillance — Cromitie did none of the above.”

McMahon said that at this point Hussain began to add “more worldly inducements” to the “offer of paradise” beginning with a BMW “but only after Cromitie had completed a mission.”

Closing the net

Hussain left for Pakistan on Dec. 18, 2008, and didn’t return to the United States for two months. While he was away, the FBI briefed officials at Stewart International Airport in New York on the investigation but assured them that “Cromitie was unlikely to commit an act without the support of the FBI source.”

Indeed, Cromitie said, “I just dropped everything,” according to the transcript of the conversation. But when Hussain returned, Cromitie’s enthusiasm was rekindled.

McMahon later wrote that “the court believes and specifically finds that it was about this time when Hussain offered Cromitie as much as a quarter million dollars to participate in a mission.”

Such an offer was not authorized by the FBI, the prosecutor told the court. Hussain denied making it, saying the reference to a specific amount of money was not intended to be literal. McMahon, in her sentencing, said she did not believe him.

After a surveillance drive around Stewart Air National Guard Base on Feb. 24, 2009, Cromitie cut off communication with Hussain for six weeks, he later testified. Cromitie pretended to have left town, although he was still in Newburgh.

On April 5, Cromitie called Hussain. “I have to try to make some money, brother,” Cromitie said.

“I told you. I can make you $250,000, but you don’t want it, brother. What can I tell you,” Hussain said.

Cromitie soon was back in.

On May 20, 2009, Hussain, Cromitie and three associates drove south from Newburgh carrying three duffel bags, each stuffed with nearly 40 pounds of explosives and 500 steel ball bearings to maximize casualties at a synagogue and a Jewish community center in the Bronx. After bombing them, the men planned to double back north to Stewart Air National Guard base near Newburgh to launch a stinger missile at parked military planes.

But the FBI had provided the bombs and the missile and had rendered them harmless.

All four Newburgh men were later convicted on terrorism charges in a jury trial and sentenced to 25 years in prison. They have appealed.

On the final drive to the Bronx, Hussain tried to get Cromitie to prime the bombs by following his instructions on which wires to connect, Hussain testified. But Cromitie and the others couldn’t figure it out, and Hussain had to stop the car and do it himself.

When they got to the Bronx, Hussain had to explain how to operate a car key fob so Cromitie could open the first of the pre-parked cars and plant the bomb.

Afterward, Hussain asked him if he had turned the bomb on. “I forgot,” Cromitie replied.

Hussain told him not to worry, it could still be detonated.

Cromitie then set off to plant the other two bombs, but he couldn’t open the trunk of the next car. Hussain told Cromitie by walkie-talkie to just put them in the back seat.

Hussain then signaled for the FBI to move in.

Egyptian court ruling keeps Salafist candidate in race for president

Πηγή: FP
By Mary Casey
April 12 2012

An Egyptian court ruled on Wednesday that it would not disqualify the ultraconservative Islamist Hazem Abu Ismail from running in presidential elections at this time. 

Concerns that the popular Salafist sheikh, one of the race's frontrunners, would be barred from the contest rose upon evidence that Abu Ismail's mother had become a U.S. citizen and applied to vote in Los Angeles toward the end of her life. 

According to Egyptian electoral law, applicants cannot stand for presidential elections if at least one parent or spouse holds foreign nationality. 

Abu Ismail filed a lawsuit calling for the interior ministry to prove his mother's U.S. citizenship, which it was unable to do. 

Thousands of Egyptians rallying outside the courtroom celebrated the verdict. However, the decision is not final and a list of eligible candidates will be released by the national election commission on April 26 ahead of the first round of voting on May 23 and 24.

If Abu Ismail is still banned from candidacy, it will likely boost support for his more moderate Islamist competitors Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and Khairat el-Shater, who also faces possible disqualification over a controversial pardon of a conviction under former President Hosni Mubarak.

In Hard-Liner’s Surge, New Worries for Brotherhood

Supporters of Hazem Salah Abu Ismail displayed his image on posters on Friday in Cairo, where they delivered his formal application for candidacy.

Πηγή: New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
April 2 2012

CAIRO — Hazem Salah Abu Ismail is an old-school Islamist.

He wants to move toward abolishing Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and cites Iran as a successful model of independence from Washington. He worries about the mixing of the genders in the workplace and women’s work outside the home. And he promises to bring extraordinary prosperity to Egypt, if it turns its back on trade with the West.

He has also surged to become a front-runner in the race to become Egypt’s next president, reconfiguring political battle lines here. His success may help explain why the United States offered signs of tacit approval over the weekend when the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamic group, broke its pledge not to field its own candidate.

With a first round of voting set for late May and a runoff in mid-June, the first presidential race here since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year is shaping up as a battle among Islamists.

The Brotherhood, which leads Parliament, had pledged not to seek the presidency for fear of provoking a backlash from the Egyptian military and the West. But Mr. Abu Ismail’s surge raises the prospect that the winner might not be a more secular or liberal figure, but a strident Islamist who opposes the Brotherhood’s pragmatic focus on stable relations with the United States and Israel and free-market economics.

Mr. Abu Ismail poses a subtler threat, too, challenging the Brotherhood’s status as the main voice of Islamist politics in Egypt and threatening to undermine its campaign to set aside Western fears of political Islam. The Brotherhood is taking a considerable risk in running its own candidate against him, since its victory is by no means assured.

And so, in a remarkable inversion, American policy makers who once feared a Brotherhood takeover now appear to see the group as an indispensable ally against Egypt’s ultraconservatives, exemplified by Mr. Abu Ismail.

American diplomats — surprised by the success of ultraconservative, populist Islamists known as Salafis in parliamentary elections — have watched Mr. Abu Ismail with growing alarm.

On Sunday, speaking on condition of standard diplomatic anonymity, State Department officials said they were untroubled and even optimistic about the Brotherhood’s reversal of its pledge not to seek the presidency. The Brotherhood’s candidate, Khairat el-Shater, a millionaire businessman considered the most formative influence on the group’s policies, is well known to both American diplomats and their contacts in the Egyptian military. Though in and out of prison, he was the Brotherhood’s main point of contact with Mr. Mubarak’s security services and is now its main conduit for talks with the council of generals who took power at his ouster.

Mr. Shater has met with almost all the senior State Department officials and American lawmakers visiting Cairo. He is in regular contact with the American ambassador, Anne Patterson, as well as the executives of many American companies here, and United States officials have praised his moderation as well as his intelligence and effectiveness.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Istanbul on Sunday for a meeting on Syria, declined to comment on the Brotherhood’s reversal on fielding a candidate or on Mr. Shater. Instead, she said that the United States was watching all the candidates for their commitments to uphold basic rights. “We want to see Egypt move forward in a democratic transition, and what that means is you do not and cannot discriminate against religious minorities, women, political opponents,” she said. “There has to be a process — starting in an election — that lays down certain principles that will be followed by whoever wins the election. That is what we want for the Egyptian people.”

A new poll set for release on Monday by the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a state-financed research group, offered the first measure of Mr. Abu Ismail’s growing popularity. In a randomized survey of 1,200 Egyptians in recent weeks, Mr. Abu Ismail had jumped to second place from fourth or fifth place in polls taken last year, said Diaa Rashwan, a researcher at the Center.

The poll did not include Mr. Shater or any Brotherhood candidate. Amr Moussa, a former diplomat under Mr. Mubarak and political celebrity with high name recognition, remained the front-runner, with the support of about 33 percent of the respondents. But Mr. Abu Ismail was gaining on him, with about 22 percent. A liberal Islamist, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, won the support of about 8 percent, and another Islamist moderate, Mohammad Salim al-Awa, had about 4 percent.

The plan for a runoff increases the Islamists’ chances. If no one wins a majority in the first vote in May, the top two vote-getters will enter a June runoff. And any relatively secular candidate such as Mr. Moussa will have a hard time beating any of the Islamists then, given that the Brotherhood and other Islamists won about three-quarters of the seats in Parliament.

A spokesman for Mr. Abu Ismail’s campaign said Sunday that Mr. Shater’s entry into the race would help Mr. Abu Ismail by taking votes from Mr. Aboul Fotouh, a former Brotherhood leader still popular with its rank and file.

But Mr. Rashwan of Al Ahram predicted a hard-to-handicap face-off between Mr. Shater and Mr. Abu Ismail. While Mr. Shater has the backing of the Brotherhood’s formidable political machine, Mr. Rashwan said, Mr. Abu Ismail is more charismatic. And in addition to his support from those who favor his conservative religious ideas, Mr. Abu Ismail also benefits from populist appeals to Egypt’s poor and marginalized. Mr. Shater, in contrast, is a wealthy businessman and politician. “He is part of the elite,” Mr. Rashwan said.

He also noted that the Brotherhood’s members have benefited from sympathy and admiration as victims of the Mubarak government’s repression when they were its main opposition. But the Egyptian media usually refers to Mr. Shater as the Brotherhood’s “strongman,” and Mr. Rashwan said he inspired “fear,” not “sympathy.”

Mr. Abu Ismail’s campaign posters already blanket the walls and car windows of Cairo. Last Tuesday, he was mobbed like a rock star at Cairo University. On Friday, busloads of his supporters staged a parade to deliver his formal application for candidacy, stopping traffic across the city.

“American and Israel pay enormous sums of money to control the whole society,” he declared at a rally last week. “We can’t be preoccupied by the issues of daily life rather than stand up to them.”

With Libya's Ascendant Islamists: 'Don't Get the Wrong Idea'

Abdel Hakim al-Hassadi, once an Islamist exile from Gaddafi's Libya who spent years fighting on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan, greets guests in his living room in the eastern Libyan city of Darna

Πηγή: Time
By ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER
March 30 2012

Abdel Hakim al-Hassadi seems unperturbed by the fact that someone blew up his car last night. "I was at evening prayer in the mosque when it happened," he says. An unknown assailant threw a grenade under the car, sending it into flames. "I believe it was a message," he adds. "If they wanted to kill me — they would do it in an open place." Then he offers his guests tea.

In post-Gaddafi Libya, where a weak, fledgling government means little security and a lot of uncertainty, life is still a little dicey. But to al-Hassadi, perhaps the most powerful man in the eastern Libyan city of Darnah, it's all part and parcel of moving forward, past the era of dictatorship and into something freer, and hopefully better. "After decades of destruction, it's impossible to change in a few hours or even a few years," he says. "But now we are free. Even the land has changed — it's growing new grass again."

Al-Hassadi, 46, was the commander of the Abu Slim Martyrs Brigade, which fought on the eastern front line against forces loyal to the late Muammar Gaddafi during Libya's war last year. It was Darnah's biggest brigade, and al-Hassadi says that most of the local fighters still view him as their leader.

But al-Hassadi also gets a significant chunk of his street credit from the fact that he fought in Afghanistan, on the side of the Taliban, from 1997 to 2002. "I was fighting against the Northern Alliance and Karzai," he says, before adding quickly: "I didn't fight the Americans."

In the new Libya, new types of characters are emerging from the ashes of Gaddafi's decades-long repression to take the reins in a new, yet-to-be-determined kind of society. And in some cases, old stereotypes and predictions seem to be holding true. Liberal elites from the country's larger cities of Tripoli and Benghazi have long cracked jokes about Darnah's repute as a hotbed of extremism. And Salem el-Naas, a manager at the town's only luxury hotel, the Darna Pearl Hotel, laughs heartily when asked whether any tourists ever come to the sun-drenched city on the sea. "Tourists or terrorists?" he chuckles before regaining his composure. "Not yet," he adds more seriously. "But we hope."

Suffice it to say that despite its rolling hillsides of tamarind trees and sleepy, whitewashed apartments, Darnah has a bad rep — one that al-Hassadi embodies perfectly. When Gaddafi's heir apparent, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, warned at the start of the uprising last year that the east wanted to break off and form an Islamic emirate, most people assumed he was talking about Darnah. The town's residents boast that they sent more men to fight in the insurgency during the Iraq war than any other city in Libya. (Recently, several dozen people held a protest to demand that their captured relatives in Iraq be returned.) And a wall along the azure Mediterranean coast has been graffitied with warm and tolerant slogans like "Yes to Pluralism. No to Extremism" and "No to Qaeda" — but the words "No to" have been crossed out.

The fact that Darnah's most powerful man in the post-Gaddafi era happens to be a former associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the assassinated leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, doesn't do a whole lot to void the stereotype. And it makes some of the country's liberals downright nervous. "I met Zawahiri and Zarqawi. But Sheik Osama [bin Laden] — well, I was in the same house, but I never met him," al-Hassadi recalls as one of his young sons plays nearby in an Afghan-style pakul hat.

Indeed, al-Hassadi is the kind of community leader and fighter who, in unluckier circumstances 10 years ago, might have wound up at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. But these are different times. The Islamists whom Gaddafi worked hard to keep under lock or underground are among the key architects of a new Libya — another, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, whom al-Hassadi says he admires and whom the CIA and MI6 allegedly helped extradite to Libya for torture by Gaddafi's regime, is one of the most powerful military leaders in Tripoli. And al-Hassadi will tell you that's not as bad as it might sound. "The West thinks that everyone who has gone to Afghanistan is a terrorist," he says, looking sharply at me: "Have you ever been to Afghanistan?"

What matters now, he says, is that he and the other prominent religious and revolutionary leaders of Darnah are trying to restore stability. "We're trying to build a police service here," he says. And indeed, the residents there say their town is one of the safest in eastern Libya. And after decades of neglect under Gaddafi, they're seeing a revolving procession of top government figures. "In the last two weeks, all the government ministers were here — even [head of the NTC] Mustafa Abdel-Jalil," says el-Naas at the Darna Pearl Hotel. "They have to visit Darnah because Gaddafi and his family didn't like it, so the new government has to come here to have a better view of the city. They have to correct the old governmental view."

In streets lined by palms, school is back in session and uniformed boys and girls flock from sidewalks into courtyards. Teachers say they're following a new curriculum. But for all of Darnah's religiosity, the religious-studies portion hasn't changed, only the subject of history, which used to include Gaddafi's propaganda-rich study of the Jamahiriya (his contortion of the Arabic word for republic), says Ruqaya al-Azraiq, an administrator at a girls' secondary school in the town.

To some extent, al-Hassadi concedes, it's true what the outsiders say, that Darnah is a religious place. "People here are very concerned with religion and the Arab world," he says — that's what drove many of its young men to join the insurgency in Iraq to fight the "injustice" wrought by the Americans, he says. Those who have returned home do want a Libya that is governed by Islamic law, he says. But he argues that some people misunderstand what that means. "Islam is built on values like public service, mercy, freedom of expression and human rights. There is no law in the world that can protect the rights of women and human beings like Islam," he says. "But there have been some mistakes that have given the West the wrong idea."

Darnah marked the heartland of Libya's first armed uprising against Gaddafi in the 1980s and '90s, says Mansour Kikhia, a population geographer at Benghazi University. And Gaddafi's neglect of the area had only served to feed the flames of extremism and revolt, he adds, which in turn spurred a harsher crackdown. "That's what made some of Darnah's youth grow sympathetic towards [the Islamists]," he says. In the end, fear of Darnah's reputation for extremism became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Al-Hassadi says he went to Afghanistan initially because he, like many other Islamists living under North Africa's dictatorships at the time, was fleeing state repression. "We went to Sudan, to Syria, to Egypt. But they followed us everywhere. Europe was impossible to get into. So you had to go to Afghanistan. It was controlled by the Taliban, so it was the safest place for us."

Al-Hassadi won't say whether he wants to see a Taliban-styled regime in Libya — exactly what liberals in Tripoli and Benghazi say they fear as they watch the rise of figures like him. But he also says it's too soon to know what Libya's future government will look like. "I'm not for or against the Taliban. Our religion is one of forgiveness and one that gives people their rights. Anyone who steals is punished, and he who kills gets killed — this is what Islam teaches, and even that [value] is something they teach in America." He smiles.

It's almost time for the noon prayer, and as we are to leave a living room adorned with vases of fake flowers and silver tea trays, al-Hassadi apologizes for not shaking my hand (it's not appropriate). Then he jokes: if we lose his phone number and need to contact him in the future, we can always get it from the CIA. "Italian intelligence, the CIA — everyone is still watching us," he says with a grin and then shrugs indifferently. They probably are.

US lacks a champion in the new Egypt

Πηγή: Goupstate
By BRADLEY KLAPPER (AP)
Feb 17 2012

The U.S. is losing old friends and can't win new friends in the new Egypt.

Trying to secure a way home for seven American democracy experts trapped in the country, the Obama administration is facing a wrathful campaign of retribution from Hosni Mubarak's old allies of the dictatorship, which the U.S. long supported but then turned away from last year.

It is getting no help from the most legitimate force now in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and a sympathetic ear but little concrete support from an unpopular military leadership that has long benefited from U.S. largesse.

One year after the revolution that chased Mubarak from power, no one wants to be seen as too close to the United States.

After watching the U.S. deliver billions of dollars in aid to prop up Mubarak over three decades of authoritarian rule, the political parties that have risen from the ashes of his dictatorship see no value in doing Washington's bidding. The calculation holds even when it comes to defending U.S. groups that long championed democracy for Egyptians, or even when more than $1.5 billion may be at stake.

The dispute began in December when security forces raided the offices of nonprofit groups that receive foreign funding, seizing documents and computers. Among those affected were the National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists. Several Americans, including Sam LaHood, son of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, have sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy while their status remains unclear.

"Trial with the possibility of prison time for our staff appears the most likely outcome at present," Lorne Craner, the IRI president, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

To resolve the crisis, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have personally engaged top officials in Egypt's military-led government to end the investigations of democracy workers and allow U.S. citizens on a no-travel list to leave Egypt.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey visited Cairo last week in another unsuccessful bid for a solution, and the logjam has led to increasing threats to withhold the United States' annual aid to Egypt. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will lead a congressional delegation on yet another such effort in the coming days.

But administration officials are hesitant to push the issue too far. Despite Mubarak's ouster, the U.S. is eager to salvage an alliance with Egypt that has been a foundation of stability in the Middle East since the late 1970s, ensuring peace between the Arab world's most populous country and Israel. Ending U.S. assistance programs only a year after Egyptians braved the repression in Cairo's Tahrir Square would hardly be a vote of confidence in Arab democracy.

"I am always reluctant to come to the stark conclusion about cutting aid," Dempsey told a congressional panel Thursday. "Cutting off aid and therefore cutting ourselves off from them means that the next generation won't have that benefit, and I don't know where that takes us, to tell you the truth."

Still, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland insisted that a failure to resolve the situation with the Americans "may have an impact on all kinds of other aspects of our relationship with Egypt, including our ability to support them economically." For the military assistance to go through, she noted, Clinton must certify to Congress sometime in spring that Egypt is promoting freedom of speech and religion and the rule of law. "She has not made those decisions yet," Nuland said.

Congress is impatient. At a congressional hearing Thursday, congressmen took turns lambasting the Egyptian military, judiciary and new Islamist force for failing to advance the case of the trapped Americans.

And in testimony by the presidents of the four nongovernmental organizations under investigation in Egypt, congressmen were urged to cut off any relations with Egypt's International Cooperation Minister Faiza Aboul Naga, a Mubarak-era holdover described as the "ringleader" of the crackdown, or cut off military aid to the country entirely. Aboul Naga is in charge of handling U.S. assistance funds, an irony not lost on those who spoke at the hearing.

"One dimension of this issue cannot be brushed aside: foreign assistance," said Rep. Howard Berman, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

He said the U.S.-Egypt relationship has been a boon for U.S. interests and stability in the Middle East, after decades of hostility when Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser led his country down a "stridently anti-Western and anti-U.S." path. Berman warned, however, that "this NGO crisis raises the specter that there are perhaps some in Egypt who would like to see the pendulum swing back again to the bad old days."

In a move that has increased tension, state media this week published testimony by Aboul Naga to two judges investigating allegations the groups tried to foment unrest in Egypt. Aboul Naga claimed the United States and Israel did not want Egypt to prosper following Mubarak's ouster, so they resorted to the creation of chaos. She also accused some of the groups of being "Jewish" fronts.

But if Aboul Naga spearheaded the crackdown, support for it has spiraled far wider since. The military, besieged by complaints from disenchanted liberals and empowered Islamists, appears unable to muster enough strength to intervene in what it calls an independent judicial process, despite what U.S. officials say is a shared wish to see the problem resolved. In a very disappointing action for Washington, the Muslim Brotherhood broke its silence Wednesday by praising the officials carrying out the crackdown and supporting their "nationalist position."

Nuland stressed that some Egyptian advocacy groups, facing similar pressures, were speaking out for the U.S. But she regretted that parties that participated actively in U.S. democracy-building programs and then succeeding in recent parliamentary elections have held back. The Brotherhood was the biggest winner of Egypt's recent votes.

"You can't have it both ways, although some will try to in this highly political season in Egypt," Nuland told reporters. She blamed Egypt's media, which has gone as far as accusing the U.S. of trying to carve up Egypt into smaller countries, and politicians she refused to identify for drumming up anti-American sentiment "for narrow self-promotion and nationalist purposes," poisoning the public debate.

"We don't pick candidates; we don't put our thumb on the scale of elections," she said. "We support Egyptian political parties, election observers, etc., who want to learn how to do campaigning. And we are open for business for anybody who wants to participate in these programs."

In Libya, a Fundamentalist War against Moderate Islam Takes Shape

Libyans perform ritual prayers at a mosque in Tripoli October 24, 2011.

Πηγή: Time
By STEVEN SOTLOFF
Jan 18 2012

The Libyan revolution has not been kind to Mahmud al-Arabi. Last March, forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ransacked his grocery store in Zuwara after he fled to Tunisia, stealing about $6,000 worth of supplies. When he returned in September, facing mounting debts, al-Arabi turned to selling beer and liquor — an illegal enterprise in a country where alcohol has been banned for four decades. His new business drew the attention of Islamist rebels who helped to overthrow Gaddafi. After they threatened the store's landlord, they blew up Arabi's shop. Out of money and out of work, Arabi spends his days in his trailer home lamenting the turn his country has taken. Says he, "I got nothing but suffering from this revolution."

Throughout this country, Libyans are discovering that their hard fought battle to win freedoms is at risk. Puritanical Muslims known as Salafis are applying a rigid form of Islam in more and more communities. They have clamped down on the sale of alcohol and demolished the tombs of saints where many local people worship. The small town of Zuwara near the Tunisian border, dominated by a heterodox Muslim sect despised by the Salafis, is quickly becoming the battlefield for competing visions of Libya's future.

Arabi's trailer sits on the outskirts of the town, surrounded by crushed Heineken beer cans. Inside, bowls strewn around the floor capture the rain drops that leak through the porous ceiling. "I prefer selling alcohol to begging," he says, explaining how he lost his entire savings during the revolution. After Gaddafi loyalists took the town, he was a wanted man for supporting the anti-regime fighters and had to be smuggled to Tunisia at a cost of 3,500 dinars. "I lost everything in my store and had no money. So I decided to sell alcohol."

He shows off a room with 3,000 small cans of Heineken beer and a dozen liquor bottles. "Business was very good," he boasts. "I had more than a hundred customers a day who bought Absolut [Vodka], J&B and [Johnny Walker] Red Label." But when the Salafis came knocking, Arabi knew his days as an alcohol vendor were numbered. "They said this was a Muslim village where alcohol is forbidden," he relates. "I didn't want any trouble with them and agreed to stop selling alcohol at the store. But the Salafis weren't satisfied with that and destroyed it."

It is not only Arabi who has faced the Salafis' wrath. The estimated 200-to-400 members of the local Salafi movement have demolished shrines belonging to adherents of the Ibadi sect, long considered heretics by orthodox Sunni Muslims. In the town's cemetery, large blocks of stone surround what was once a mausoleum. The large conical shaped structure that once adorned it now lies collapsed in the debris. Salafists are intolerant of other strands of Islam and have physically attacked Muslim minorities in other parts of the Arab world such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Many Muslims frequent the shrines of saints, believing they have powers of intercession with the divine. Salafis, however, believe these are pagan rites that must be obliterated from Islam. "The situation has gotten much worse lately," says Ibadi Sheikh Walid Darder. "We may have not had political rights under Gaddafi, but we did not live in fear of going to the mosque."

Throughout Libya, Gaddafi's fall has emboldened Salafis, who were persecuted and imprisoned under the now deceased leader. They have increased their public presence, taken over mosques, and even hoisted the flag of al-Qaeda over the courthouse in Benghazi where the revolution began eleven months ago. In the capital of Tripoli, Salafis have destroyed more than six shrines. In one incident, dozens swarmed mausoleums belonging to two Muslim mystics and dug up their bodies so that worshippers could no longer visit their tombs. They also burned the relics around the shrines.

Arabi however is not concerned with the destruction of obscure tombs he does not frequent. "I just want my life back," he pleads. "I fought in the mountains here against Gaddafi. My payback is blowing up my shop," he says, turning to dump a bowl full of rainwater on the soggy field outside his trailer.

Challenge for Political Islam in Syria

Riad Shafka, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, said he would welcome Turkey stepping in to stop the violence, but not the West.

Πηγή: Middle East Online
By Sami Moubayed

Dec 11 2011

Arab nationalism has been tested, and milked, for nearly 50 years. It failed drastically at answering people's political, economic, and social worries. So has Baathism, which has already started its long march into history, stresses Sami Moubayed.

Depending on who one talks to in Syria, the Egyptian elections have sparked off either fear, or great inspiration -- given that they have played out nicely in favour of the Muslim Brotherhood. The seculars are panicking, to say the least, watching the victory of Islamic parties in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and the emergence of politically-driven politicians in Libya. Regardless if the regime stays or not, political Islam is on the rise, they claim, and the Islamists will eventually overtake the Syrian parliament in democratic elections. A closer look, however, might prove otherwise.

The Brotherhood has matured over the past 60 years, and so have its splinter groups, for example, like Hamas. They once were focused on an Islamic theocracy and resorted to violence at times, to make that happen, notably Syria in 1979-1982. They rarely accepted others and often said that their way was the only way forward for Arab society. That too has changed, and the Brotherhood-inspired Al Nahda Party for example, cannot rule in the same manner that Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali did in Tunisia, and nor can the Egyptian Brotherhood be another Hosni Mubarak. They are now marketing themselves as moderate Muslims, closer to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan than Osama bin Laden. People want to believe them, and have given them a chance, simply because they have not yet been tested in government.

Having said that, it is no secret that the Muslim Brotherhood, inactive and mute within Syrian society for over 30 years, has started to re-emerge, rather strongly, in different Syrian cities. In Jebel Al Zaweh in the vicinity of Idlib, for example, they are at their strongest influence in decades. The same cannot be said for the historically conservative city of Hama, where their influence recently has been strongly challenged by secular opposition activists like Fidaa Al Hawrani, the daughter of Syria's socialist "godfather" Akram Al Hawrani. Fidaa Hawrani, a doctor, is operating around the clock with ordinary Syrians, offering them free-of-charge medical services, thereby outdoing the Brotherhood when it comes to hands-on popularity and community service.

In other cities like Damascus and Aleppo, one cannot really measure how popular the Brotherhood would be, until Syrians go to the polls. What is clear, however, is that in recent years, political Islam, once attractive only to poor people, has now infiltrated high society and is becoming a magnet for the urban rich. In posh neighborhoods of Damascus, for example, wearing the hijab is astronomically high, so is mosque-going and closed Islamic lessons, given by followers of the prominent Islamic teacher, Munira Al Qubaisi.

The Qubaisis, as they are known in society, operate a very powerful network among the wives, daughters, and mothers of affluent businessmen in Damascus. They single-handedly re-invented the Islamic hijab, for example, a hallmark of their society. Previously in the 1950s and 1960s, the Damascus norm was an Audrey Hepburn-like scarf, adorned more for modesty, rather than religiousness. Now, thanks to the Qubaisis, it comes with dark stockings and a long coat in dark blue, navy blue, or black -- depending on how senior a woman is in the Qubaisi society. The Qubaisis control schools, mosques, and entire neighbourhoods, where alcohol, for example, is not served at restaurants, and where hijab-wearing young women drive around in brand new BMWs and Audis. They are rich, socially prominent, and influenced by Islam.

Will affiliates of Islamic groups like the Qubaisis vote for an Islamic party in upcoming parliamentary elections, if they were truly transparent and democratic? Chances are that they would, and so would prominent regime-friendly clerics like the ex-dean of the Faculty of Theology, Said Ramadan Al Bouti, a heavyweight in conservative Damascene society, or even the Grand Mufti himself, Ahmad Hassoun, who commands strong popularity in his native Aleppo. All talk about them being "secular clerics" is pure nonsense, marketed by them during the heyday of the secular era, in order to cuddle up to officials. That is only natural, given that although many would think twice before admitting, all Muslim conservatives are inspired by Brotherhood founder Hassan Al Banna's slogan, "Islam is the solution."

Arab nationalism has been tested, and milked, for nearly 50 years. It failed drastically at answering people's political, economic, and social worries. So has Baathism, which has already started its long march into history. In fact, it is precisely because Baathism failed that people began searching elsewhere for answers -- at mosques, for example, in online Islamic forums, and at the theology lessons of people like Saeed Ramadan Al Bouti and Al Qubaisi. And it is precisely because moderate Islamic parties were denied a platform for decades that Al Qaida-inspired fundamentalists hijacked Islam throughout the Arab World.

That argument is logically being challenged by those who believe that although popular, political Islam will never come to power in Syria, for one main reason: demographics.

In Syria, 10 per cent of the population is Christian, and they would never vote for the Brotherhood. Neither would the 15 per cent Alawite and Shiite communities, or the 3 per cent Druze, or 2 per cent "others" (Circassians, Jews, Ismailis). Then come 15 per cent Syrian Kurds and 10 per cent tribes and Bedouins, who although Sunni Muslims, would also never support an Islamic party. That adds up to 55 per cent, topped with no less than 25 per cent of Syria's 75 per cent Sunni majority, who are seculars or ordinary Syrians simply un-attracted to political Islam.

That sums up to a majority of voters in any parliamentary elections, meaning that the Muslim Brotherhood or its sister groups would not take more than 20-25 per cent of any incoming Chamber. Meaning, in true internationally-monitored parliamentary elections, Islamic-driven parties like the Brotherhood would be unable to rule on their own with no coalition parties, as the case with the Al Nahda Party in Tunisia.

In a democracy, it is their constitutional right, regardless of what the seculars think or say about them. When democracy prevails, the ballots decide who rules. If they fail, they will get ejected, perhaps in another Arab Spring, also through the ballot. No quantum physics here, just pure and plain democracy.

Sami Moubayed is a university professor, historian, and editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria. This article appeared in Gulf News on December 6, 2011.

WH: ‘Democratic Process’ More Important Than Islamists Winning in Arab Nations

Veiled Egyptian women walk past a poster in Arabic that reads, “The Freedom and Justice Party” – the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm – on the first day of parliamentary elections in Alexandria on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011.

Πηγή: cnsnews
By Patrick Goodenough

Nov 29 2011

The Obama administration is again playing down concerns about the rise of Islamist movements in Arab countries in transition, even as developments in Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Egypt indicate that the so-called “Arab spring” may leave Islamists in charge clear across North Africa.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is widely expected to dominate parliamentary elections that began without incident on Monday and will be held in three stages over the next six weeks.

“We regard these elections as a blessed portal through which Egypt shall cross safely to democracy and the transfer of power to the Egyptian people,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, said in a statement as the polls opened.

Asked during a briefing about the election and the possibility of Islamists winning, White House press secretary Jay Carney replied, “The fact of the matter is, the democratic process is what’s important.”

“Principles matter to this president, not parties,” he continued. “And we hold whatever party prevails or is represented in the outcome of an election like this – whether it’s in Egypt or elsewhere – our standards have to do with respect for human rights, respect for the democratic process, renunciation of violence, and inclusion of and respect for minorities in the process.”

Carney said it was “unfair to assume that any party that has a religious affiliation cannot adhere to democratic principles. It is simply not the case and has not been borne out by the facts.”

“So, before we judge the disposition of a government or a parliament that is only just beginning to take shape through elections that have started today, I think we need to let the process run its course, continue to espouse our firm support for democratic principles and for civilian control of the government, and then judge the outcome by the actions of those who prevail,” he said.

At the State Department, spokesman Mark Toner adopted a similar stance.

“We’ve been very clear about how we view the Muslim Brotherhood, which is that if they’re committed to the democratic process, we welcome them as a part of the political process,” he said.

Asked about organization’s support for Hamas and its views on the Arab-Israel peace process, Toner said only that “we would call on any Egyptian government to adhere to its previous commitments and agreements.”

‘Saying many of the right things’

In Morocco, the Islamist Justice and Development Party won the most seats in parliamentary elections at the weekend, and will likely produce the country’s next prime minister. Morocco largely sidestepped the wave of protests across the region this year. King Mohammed VI offered political concessions to defuse popular sentiment, although he retains overall power.

A month ago another Islamist party, Ennahda, won elections in Tunisia for a constituent assembly, which will be tasked with drafting a new constitution.

Meanwhile in Libya, a transitional leader’s remark last month about the primacy of Islamic law (shari’a) prompted concern, little allayed by his subsequent assurances that Libyans were “moderate Muslims.”

On Monday, scores of Libyan religious leaders meeting in Tripoli called for the government to ensure that the new constitution would be based on shari’a and that violations of Islam, such as the availability of alcohol, should be prohibited.

(The situation in the remaining North African country, Algeria, is in flux. Protests early this year prompted the government to announce some reforms including constitutional amendments aimed at preventing an uprising. Emboldened, Islamists are flexing their muscles. In October two senior Islamists called on Algerians to demand the closure of all bars and stores selling alcohol. Some 200,000 Algerians were killed in an Islamist insurgency launched in the early 1990s after the army banned the Islamic Salvation Front and canceled elections it was expected to win.)

Asked about the elections in Tunisia and Morocco, Toner said Monday that Ennahda has “been saying many of the right things and it’s been encouraging.”

With regard to the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, he replied, “I think we’ll wait and see how this party actually operates and the things it says publicly, as well as its governance.”

Asked whether the administration was comfortable with “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism gaining the reins of power” in the region, Toner said, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the premise of your question.”

“I think what we’ve seen is sweeping change across the region; one that we believe is resulting in real democratic reform – the kind of reform we’ve long believed is necessary for many of these countries. And this process continues to play out.”

After meeting with senior European Union officials at the White House on Monday, President Obama told reporters they had “spent a lot of time discussing how we can be supportive of the best elements of what’s taking place in North Africa and the Middle East, continuing to encourage democracy, continuing to encourage transparency, continuing to encourage economic development – because we’ve both agreed that the aspirations that were expressed in Egypt and Tunisia and in Libya are not simply political issues but they’re also economic issues, and that we have to do everything we can to support increased opportunity for young people.”

Monday’s remarks build on earlier ones by administration officials, emphasizing the view that – in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s words – “what parties call themselves is less important than what they do.”

“The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous and wrong,” Clinton told a National Democratic Institute awards dinner earlier this month.

What was important, she said, was an adherence to democratic principles.

During a press briefing on Oct. 25, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also disputed a reporter’s premise that there was a “rise of fundamentalism in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.”

“I think what we are seeing is we are seeing newly democratic, newly free people and populations feeling their way forward,” she said.

A day earlier, she responded to a question about shari’a forming the basis of countries’ legal systems by saying that the term shari’a “has a broad application and is understood differently in different places and by different commentators.”

“We’ve seen various Islamic-based democracies wrestle with the issue of establishing rule of law within an appropriate cultural context,” Nuland said. “But the number one thing is that universal human rights, rights for women, rights for minorities, right to due process, right to transparency be fully respected.”

America's troubling support for oil-rich Islamist regimes

Πηγή: The Japan Times
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Nov 8 2011

NEW DELHI — When Libya's interim government announced the "liberation" of the country Oct. 23, it declared that a system based on the Islamic Sharia, including polygamy, will replace the secular dictatorship that Moammar Gadhafi ran for 42 years.

"We, as a Muslim nation, have taken Islamic Sharia as the source of legislation; therefore, any law that contradicts the principles of Islam is legally nullified," declared interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil.

Swapping one evil for another may seem a cruel political comedown after seven months of relentless NATO airstrikes in the name of promoting democracy in Libya — an air war, with special-forces support, that enabled the ragtag rebel militias to triumph but left a vast trail of death and destruction.

The Western powers that militarily effected the regime change in Libya have made little effort to stop its new rulers from establishing a theocratic system founded on Islamic jurisprudence.

For the United States, Britain and France, such a political turn is an unavoidable price to pay to have their own men in power. The Islamist embrace indeed helps protect the credibility of men who otherwise may be seen as foreign puppets in their society.

This is the same reason why these powers have condoned the rulers of the oil sheikdoms for their long-standing alliance with radical clerics.

For example, the U.S.-backed House of Saud not only practices the century-old political tradition of Wahhabi Islam — the source of modern Islamic fundamentalism — but also exports this fringe form of Islam, with the result that the more liberal Islamic traditions elsewhere are being gradually snuffed out.

Yet when the Saudi crown prince died recently, Washington did not seek to encourage a more reform-oriented replacement. Now named as next in line to the king is Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, seen in Washington as a dependable ally despite his close ties with jihad-extolling clerics and his role as the head of the kingdom's well-oiled security apparatus, which routinely carries out beheadings, floggings, and eye-gougings. Nayef has been dubbed the new "crown prince of darkness."

So critical have the Arab monarchs become to U.S. interests that Washington has failed to stop these cloistered kings from continuing to fund Muslim extremist groups and madrasas in other countries. From Africa to South and Southeast Asia, Arab petrodollars have played a key role in fomenting militant Islamic fundamentalism that targets the West, Israel, and India as its enemies.

In fact, U.S. policy winked at this year's Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to help crush the prodemocracy movement of the majority Shiite community. The Saudi intervention actually paralleled the 1979 Soviet intervention to bolster a besieged regime in Kabul — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-led arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaida.

The plain fact is that the U.S.-led regional strategy, far from being forward-looking, is driven by narrowly defined geopolitical interests. The imperative to have pliant regimes in oil-rich countries trumps other considerations and concerns, including political repression and the costs that women pay in Islamist-oriented states.

As a result, the U.S. still props up the Wahhabist monarchs in the Arab world, even as the relatively secular Arab states — Syria, Libya and Iraq — have fallen victim to U.S.-sponsored regime change or sanctions. The absence of oil resources in another more-secular Arab state — Egypt — made its long-standing ruler, Hosni Mubarak, dispensable for U.S. policy when he came under a popular siege domestically.

With the U.S. support they enjoy, the most-tyrannical regimes — the oil monarchies — have been able to ride out the Arab Spring, emerging virtually unscathed. For the U.S., the six monarchical states that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman — are also critical for strategic interests.

After withdrawing its forces from Iraq, Washington plans to use Kuwait as a new military hub to expand its military presence in the Persian Gulf region and foster a U.S.-led "security architecture," under which its air and naval patrols would be regionally integrated.

NATO's regime change in Libya — which has the world's largest reserves of light sweet crude, the top-notch oil that American and European refineries prefer — was clearly not about ushering in an era of liberal democracy.

Having been born in blood, the new Libya faces uncertain times. The only certain element is that its new rulers will remain beholden to those that helped install them.

U.S. Sen. John McCain has already announced after meeting the new Libyan rulers that they are "willing to reimburse us and our allies" for the costs of effecting the regime change. Given that the U.S. Treasury Department alone holds $37 billion worth of frozen Libyan assets, paying the estimated $1.2-billion bill for the NATO military mission may seem a small price for Libya.

More fundamentally, America's troubling ties with Islamist rulers and groups were cemented in the 1980s when the Reagan administration openly employed Islam as an ideological tool to spur the spirit of jihad against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The blatant use of Islam for geopolitical aims fostered a series of developments that have come to haunt the security of the free world, including the rise of the mujahideen, or "holy warriors," the inculcation of a jihad culture in Pakistan by a U.S.-backed military ruler, Zia ul-Haq, and the birth of the Pakistan-fathered Afghan Taliban in which the CIA served as the midwife.

It was at a White House ceremony attended by some "holy warriors" from the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt in the mid-1980s that President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the mujahideen as the "moral equivalent of America's Founding Fathers."

Two such moral equivalents, Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, later became America's nemesis.

Whereas the U.S. finally killed bin Laden in a daring raid deep inside Pakistan this year, it is still seeking to cut a deal with Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura to help secure a face-saving exit from the decade-long war in Afghanistan.

Make no mistake: International terrorism and the modern-day Frankenstein monsters are the haunting by-products of the war against atheism and communism that the U.S. was supposed to have won.

Yet the lessons from that war have already been forgotten, including the need to keep the focus on long-term goals and not be carried away by political expediency and narrow geopolitical objectives.

The current attempt to strike a Faustian bargain with the Taliban, for example, ignores the very lesson from the creation of this evil force.

Another lesson that has fallen by the wayside is the need for caution in training Islamic insurgents and funneling lethal arms to them to help overthrow a regime. In Libya, bringing the myriad rebel militias under government control is likely to prove difficult, potentially creating a jihadist citadel at the southern doorsteps of Europe. Yet the regime-change success in Libya is likely to encourage greater Western indirect military support to Sunni rebels seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad's authoritarian but secular regime, which has banned face veils in universities.

It has been argued by exponents of the U.S. policy approach that because a war runs on expediency, with strange bedfellows involved as partners, unsavory allies are unavoidable — ranging from Islamist militias to regimes that bankroll militant Islamic fundamentalism overseas. After all, to get rid of Nazism, the allies needed Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

However, these advocates overlook the fact that Stalin did not create Hitler or foster Nazism; nor was Stalin's removal necessary to eradicate Nazism.

Paradoxically, the U.S. practice of propping up malleable but Islamist rulers in the Middle East creates a street-level situation not only laden with strong anti-U.S. sentiment but also support for more authentically Islamist and independent forces. So, if elections are held, it is such autonomous Islamists that often emerge as winners, as the diverse cases of Gaza and Tunisia attest.

This trend, in turn, encourages U.S. policy to back rulers that espouse Islamist beliefs as the legitimating credo of their hold on power.

Let's be clear: The global fight against terrorism can succeed only by ensuring that states do not contribute in any way to the rise of virulent Islamic fundamentalism extolling violence as a sanctified religious tool. Yet today, history is in danger of repeating itself.

The brutal killing of Gadhafi by his NATO-backed captors and the macabre public display of his body for several days in another city populated by a rival tribe were redolent of the manner in which former Afghan President Najibullah was dragged out of the United Nations compound in Kabul by the Taliban in 1996, beaten, shot dead, and hung from a traffic barricade.

What followed was unending bloodletting that has turned Afghanistan into an open sore for regional and international security.

In this light, will Libya become another jihadist haven?