Michelle Nichols
NEW YORK
Wed Jan 20, 2010 2:42pm EST
RELATED NEWS

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States has won convictions in 89 percent of cases involving terrorism charges brought since the September 11, 2001 attacks, a study by New York University’s Center on Law and Security found on Wednesday.
U.S.

With the self-professed September 11 mastermind and four accused accomplices due to be tried in New York, the report found the federal courts provided a “a strong and effective system of justice for alleged crimes of terrorism.”

The Center on Law and Security reviewed 828 prosecutions that made up 337 cases against 804 people for its “Terrorist Trial Report Card: September 11, 2001 - September 11, 2009.”

“While we can only assess the cases that have been brought, federal prosecution has demonstrably become a powerful tool in many hundreds of cases, not only for incapacitating terrorists but also for intelligence gathering,” wrote the Center’s Executive Director Karen Greenberg.

The report found the Department of Justice had moved away from an initial practice of making high-profile arrests, but prosecuting few terrorism charges, to focusing more on building a case to pursue terrorism and other serious charges.

In the first year following the September 11, 2001 attacks, fewer than one in 10 announced terrorism arrests were tested in court, with prosecutors seeking lesser or unrelated charges. This rose the following year to fewer than two in five.

“The emphasis has shifted to trying accused terrorists as terrorists,” Greenberg said. “More and more, the allegations made in public have eventually been charged and proven in court.”

COURTROOM DELIVERS GREATER KNOWLEDGE

In 2001/02, just 8 percent of defendants labeled as “terrorists” in the media faced terrorism charges with 38 percent of those convicted, the center’s report found, while in 2006/07 47 percent of those called “terrorists” faced terrorism charges and 84 percent were convicted.

“The Justice Department has adopted a more disciplined approach, promising less in its public pronouncements and delivering more in the courtroom,” Greenberg said.

The study found the number of terrorism cases has fallen to an annual average of less than 30 from 127 cases indicted in the year following September 11, 2001.

Of the defendants whose citizenship could be identified, the report found the largest group was from the United States.
It said an accused affiliation with an extremist group was identified for less than half of the defendants, with the most common affiliation being with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), while links to al Qaeda came in second, accounting for 11 percent of defendants.

In nearly two thirds of cases, no specific target for an attack was identified, the study said, while in cases that did involve a specific target, two thirds were aimed overseas and 16 percent focused on military bases, equipment or personnel.

The Center on Law and Security found the Justice Department had also developed a successful strategy for convincing defendants to cooperate, leading to more arrests and greater intelligence.

“Much of the government’s knowledge of terrorist groups has come from testimony and evidence produced in grand jury investigations, including information provided by cooperators, and in the resulting trials,” Greenberg said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60J58A20100120

Code of conduct bans burning schools, cutting off ears, lips, tongues
By Alissa J. Rubin
The New York Times
updated 5:34 a.m. ET, Thurs., Jan. 21, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan - The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image and win favor with local Afghans as they try to counter the Americans’ new campaign to win Afghan hearts and minds.

The Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, issued a lengthy directive late last spring outlining a new code of conduct for the Taliban. The dictates include bans on suicide bombings against civilians, burning down schools, or cutting off ears, lips and tongues.

The code, which has been spottily enforced, does not necessarily mean a gentler insurgency. Although the Taliban warned some civilians away before the assault on the heart of Kabul on Monday, they were still responsible for three-quarters of civilian casualties last year, according to the United Nations.

Now, as the Taliban deepen their presence in more of Afghanistan, they are in greater need of popular support and are recasting themselves increasingly as a local liberation movement, independent of Al Qaeda, capitalizing on the mounting frustration of Afghans with their own government and the presence of foreign troops. The effect has been to make them a more potent insurgency, some NATO officials said.

Afghan villagers and some NATO officials added that the code had begun to change the way some midlevel Taliban commanders and their followers behaved on the ground. A couple of the most brutal commanders have even been removed by Mullah Omar.

Broad initiative

The Taliban’s public relations operation is also increasingly efficient at putting out its message and often works faster than NATO’s. “The Afghan adaptation to counterinsurgency makes them much more dangerous,” said a senior NATO intelligence official here. “Their overarching goals probably haven’t changed much since 2001, but when we arrived with a new counterinsurgency strategy, they responded with one of their own.”

The American strategy includes limiting airstrikes that killed Afghan civilians and concentrating troops closer to population centers so that Afghans will feel protected from the Taliban.

American and Afghan analysts see the Taliban’s effort as part of a broad initiative that employs every tool they can muster, including the Internet technology they once denounced as un-Islamic. Now they use word of mouth, messages to cellphones and Internet videos to get their message out.

“The Taliban are trying to win the favor of the people,” said Wahid Mujda, a former Taliban official who now tracks the insurgency on the Internet and frequently comments on Afghan television. “The reason they changed their tactics is that they want to prepare for a long-term fight, and for that they need support from the people; they need local sources of income,” he said. “So, they learned not to repeat their previous mistakes.”

Propaganda war

The Taliban can shape the narrative about attacks sometimes before NATO public affairs even puts out a statement. Unlike the NATO press machine, the Taliban are willing to give details, and while some are patently exaggerated or wrong, others have just enough elements of truth that they cannot be entirely ignored.

Bruce Riedel, who led President Obama’s review of the administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, described the information war as critical. “You have to respond in the propaganda war in a very quick time cycle; you can’t put out a statement saying, ‘We’re looking for all the facts before we comment,’ ”Mr. Riedel said.

The new public relations campaign combined with relatively less cruel behavior may have stemmed some of the anger at the insurgency, which tribal leaders in the south said had begun to rally people against the Taliban.

But the most important factor in their growing reach is the ineffectiveness of the central government and Afghans’ resentment of foreign troops. Military intelligence analysts now estimate that there are 25,000 to 30,000 committed Taliban fighters and perhaps as many as 500,000 others who would fight either for pay or if they felt attacked by theWestern coalition.

The effort to change the Taliban’s image began in earnest last May when Mullah Omar disseminated his new code of conduct. The New York Times obtained a copy of the document through a Taliban spokesman. A version of the new code was authenticated last summer by NATO intelligence after a copy was seized during a raid and its contents corroborated using human intelligence, according to a senior NATO intelligence official.

The version sent to The Times is a 69-point document ranging from how to treat local people, how to treat prisoners, what to do with captured enemy equipment and when to execute captives. Much of the document deals with the Taliban chain of command and limits the decisions that field commanders can make on their own. The document exhorts insurgents to live and work in harmony with local people.

In an eerie echo of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the photographing of prisoners, one edict states: “If someone is sentenced to death, he must be killed with a gun, and photographing the execution is forbidden.”

Creating a code of behavior is one thing, enforcing it another. The Taliban have survived in part because they are an atomized movement and it is difficult to persuade local commanders, who operate in mountain or desert redoubts, to follow directives from leaders living hundreds of miles away in Pakistan.

There are doubts as well about the Taliban’s recent assertions that they are independent from Al Qaeda. Leaders of both groups live in the same areas of Pakistan, and Al Qaeda remains a source of financing and training for the Afghan movement.

“If you compare the document to actual behavior, Mullah Omar only has marginal control over his forces,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, the director of communications for NATO.

“A portion of it may stick in some parts of the country, but not in other places,” he said. Despite an edict that says in suicide attacks “to try your best to avoid killing local people,” a suicide bombing in Oruzgan Province last Thursday killed 16 civilians. But in most places, the civilian casualties from suicide bombers have been in the single digits. The Kabul attack on Monday killed five people, two of them civilians, and wounded 32.

That contrasts sharply with Pakistan, where the insurgency routinely fields suicide bombers who kill scores of civilians.
Intimidation and assassinations

Admiral Smith and others say that according to a recent Defense Intelligence Agency survey, the Taliban’s new strategy has failed to win over Afghans and that even though the insurgency may be carrying out fewer mutilations and beheadings, it still relies on intimidation through night letters, threatening conversations and even assassinations.

Interviews with tribal elders in areas where the Taliban are active suggest a complex picture. Several interviewed in rural Kandahar Province praised the Taliban’s new, less threatening approach, but said that did not translate into enthusiasm for the Taliban movement. At the same time, there is not much liking for either the Afghan government or NATO troops.
“There is a tremendous change in the Taliban’s behavior,” said Haji-Khan Muhammad Khan, a tribal elder from Shawalikot, a rural district of Kandahar Province. “They don’t behead people or detain those they suspect of spying without an investigation. But sometimes they still make mistakes, people still fear them, but now generally they behave well with people. They had to change because the leadership of the Taliban did not want to lose the support of the grass roots.”

The latest refrain of Taliban commanders, their Internet magazine and from surrogates is that the insurgency represents Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, who are portrayed as persecuted by the Afghan government. “Pashtuns are suffering everywhere; if you go and check the prisons, you won’t find any prisoners except Pashtuns; when you hear about bombings, it is Pashtuns’ homes that have been bombed,” said a Taliban commander from Kandahar Province who goes by the name Sangar Yar.

While Pashtuns have been disproportionately affected by the Western military offensive, the insurgency is active predominantly in Pashtun areas where it is difficult to separate civilians and fighters.

At the moment, the dueling propaganda wars seem to have reached a stalemate.

“People have no choices; they are in a dilemma,” said Abdul Rahman, a tribal elder and businessman in Kandahar. “In places where the Taliban are active, the people are compelled to support them, they are afraid of the Taliban. And, in those places where government has a presence, the people are supporting the government,” he said.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar.

This story, “Taliban Overhaul Image in Bid to Win Allies,” originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34969819/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times

Sun, Jan 10 2010
By William Maclean, Security Correspondent - Analysis

LONDON (Reuters) - The killing of CIA employees in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber lauded online as a militant James Bond suggests al Qaeda’s south Asian allies have developed an unprecedented capacity to disrupt the West’s spy efforts.
The attack by a Jordanian double agent also shows militants are keener on killing Western spies than infiltrating them, underlining the daunting challenge for Western services seeking to plant an informant among al Qaeda’s senior ranks.

The agent, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, blew himself up on December 30 inside Forward Operating Base Chapman, a well-fortified U.S. compound in Khost province in southeast Afghanistan, killing seven CIA officers and a Jordanian officer.

The attack, the second-most deadly in CIA history, pleased a global community of al Qaeda propagandists thrilled to discover Balawi was the author under a pen name of some of the most celebrated anti-Western commentaries on the Internet.

“Our James Bond — who is he? He is Abu Dujana! His motto: Let me die or live free!” Qaeda supporter Asadullah Alshishani wrote in one posting, referring to Balawi’s online pen name.

The attack followed the failed December 25 downing of a U.S. airliner over Detroit, the November 5 killing of 13 at a U.S. army base by a gunman linked to a Yemen-based preacher and a string of arrests of suspected militants in the United States in 2009.

Counter-terrorism experts say the incidents show the resilience of the globally-scattered hubs of sympathizers, financiers and supporters that Osama bin Laden has fostered as he has come under increasing pressure from U.S. drone attacks in South Asia, where he is believed to be hiding.

ALLIES ARE AT AL QAEDA’S CORE

Investigators are studying possible links between the December 30 attack and at least two local al Qaeda allies — Pakistan’s own Taliban insurgents and the Haqqani network associated with the Afghan Taliban group fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

A spate of militant propaganda about the attack has only intensified this focus.

Al-Jazeera television reported that shortly before his suicide attack Balawi had made a video urging revenge for the death of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, killed by a pilotless U.S. aircraft last year.

Pakistan television station AAJ showed what it said was a video of Balawi sitting with Baitullah’s successor, Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, and reported he shared U.S. and Jordanian state secrets with militants.

“The attack and the statements being made about it show that links to local partners are at the very core of al Qaeda’s mission,” said Brynjar Lia, a research professor at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.

“If al Qaeda had not ingratiated itself with local groups it would have exposed itself to grave dangers,” he said, in a reference to the dependence of al Qaeda’s mostly Arab leaders on their more militarily powerful south Asian hosts for security.

Former intelligence officials have said Balawi was recruited by Jordanian intelligence to infiltrate al Qaeda and the Taliban and give Washington an intelligence advantage it has sought with special urgency since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Balawi had associated with Islamists in the past, but U.S. and Jordanian spy agencies believed he had been successfully “de-radicalized.”

Analysts said it appeared the CIA understandably hoped he might be someone with the credibility, savvy and boldness to infiltrate senior al Qaeda ranks and operate undetected.

But the agency’s desire for a well-placed agent may have led it to cut corners on security, some commentators have said.

QAEDA SEEKS A “DEATH BLOW”

A Western counter-terrorism official said the attack had shown that al Qaeda “is not playing an intelligence game, which would have meant keeping its man alive in our system. It’s at war, and it wants to deal a death blow.

“We are the ones playing the intel game. Were we so desperate for a major breakthrough with that effort that we got carried away?”

CIA Director Leon Panetta denied there had been complacency.

“This was not a question of trusting a potential intelligence asset, even one who had provided information that we could verify independently. It is never that simple, and no one ignored the hazards,” he wrote in the Washington Post.

“The individual was about to be searched by our security officers - a distance away from other intelligence personnel - when he set off his explosives.”

The West’s need for sources is likely to ensure that Western intelligence maintains its ties to Jordan, analysts said.
“If the Jordanians are as good as we think they are, the U.S. would be mad to sever the relationship,” former U.S, intelligence officer Robert Ayers told Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6090TE20100110

January 12, 2010
The Washington Times
Nicholas Kralev

A senior Republican senator urged Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday to drastically increase the number of specialized units at U.S. embassies around the world that screen visa applicants for security concerns, including ties to terrorists or other criminal groups.

In a letter to Mrs. Clinton, Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa decried the slow pace of setting up visa-security units — only at 14 of more than 220 U.S. missions abroad so far - and blamed the State Department for putting “roadblocks” to efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to boost its presence at several consulates.

“At this rate, it would take over 20 years to establish [visa-security units] in the approximately 40 posts that DHS has identified as high-risk,” Mr. Grassley wrote.

“This is completely unacceptable, especially in light of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day,” he said. “Implementation of the [visa-security units] has hardly progressed at all. There isn’t one in London, where Abdulmutallab was issued his visa, or in Nigeria, where his father went to warn U.S. officials” about his ties to al Qaeda in Yemen.

Congress directed DHS when it was established in 2002 to create the units in question to help State Department consular officers abroad in screening visa applicants. Mr. Grassley called them vital for “shoring up one of America’s first lines of defense against foreign terrorist attacks.”

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., there were calls in Congress for the State Department to be stripped of its visa-issuing responsibilities, but the secretary of state at the time, Colin L. Powell, managed to keep that function in his agency. The visa-security units were created as a compromise.

Mr. Grassley, who is ranking member on the Finance Committee, had previously written on the same matter to Mrs. Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, but had “not received a substantive response.”

“It has been reported to my office that the slow pace of implementation has been due to objections and roadblocks from the State Department,” his letter to Mrs. Clinton said. “Specifically, over the last few years DHS encountered resistance from ambassadors in attempting to establish [units] in Kuala Lumpur, London, Nairobi, Istanbul and Kuwait City. It is extremely troubling that an ambassador can inhibit the ability of DHS in carrying out its mission.”

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley confirmed Monday that there are 14 visa-security units in 12 countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Egypt and Venezuela, but he rejected Mr. Grassley’s accusations.

“We have cooperated fully with DHS in terms of the development of the Visa Security Program and the establishment of visa-security units,” he told reporters. “I know of no obstacles that the State Department has put forward to prevent DHS from adding security units to various locations.”

Asked if the department had a problem adding units in other countries, he said: “Conceptually, no.”

A 2008 report on the units by the DHS inspector-general cited some budget restraints to expanding the program, but it also said that “chiefs of mission at some posts have resisted” the creation of new units.

As part of the reason for their resistance, the report said the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs “had seen few examples of [visa-security units] personnel providing expert advice and training on specific security threats.” In addition, it “questioned the extent to which” special agents assigned to units “have expertise or training in counterterrorism.”

It was not clear Monday whether that disagreement between the Departments of State and Homeland Security continues in the Obama administration — nor whether Mrs. Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had done anything to resolve the differences.

The Washington Times reported Monday that U.S. visa-revocation procedures broke down in a welter of interagency uncertainty in the Abdulmutallab case, which led to letting the Nigerian Islamist known to U.S. intelligence board a flight from Amsterdam on Dec. 25.

While some critics blame the State Department, which has full authority to cancel visas without permission from other agencies, others say the intelligence community should have recommended revocation based on information it had — but the State Department did not.

Administration officials said the embassy in Nigeria, where Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father reported his links to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in November, failed to check whether he had a valid U.S. visa, and to include that information in the message it sent to Washington.

Mr. Abdulmutallab’s latest visa was issued by the embassy in London, where he studied in 2008, but he had a previous visa issued in Nigeria in 2006.

At the time he applied for his visas, he was subjected to the strict rules and requirements implemented after the Sept. 11 attacks, but there was no information linking him to terrorist groups, so his applications were approved, officials said.
They also said the National Counterterrorism Center, which did not recommend that the State Department revoke Mr. Abdulmutallab’s visa, classified him as a “possible terrorist.”

“Please explain why classification as a ‘possible terrorist’ should not disqualify a foreign national from traveling to the United States,” Mr. Grassley wrote to Mrs. Clinton.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/12/increase-sought-in-units-to-screen-visa-applicants/?feat=home_cube_position3

D.C.-based Islamic group trying to quash book exposing terror ties
________________________________________
Posted: January 09, 2010
12:00 am Eastern
By Art Moore
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

A federal judge ruled against the Council on American-Islamic Relations today in its lawsuit against a father and son who carried out a six-month undercover investigation of the D.C.-based Muslim group, denying a request to conduct discovery – an examination of its opponent’s witnesses, facts and documents – prior to hearing a motion to dismiss the case.

CAIR is suing P. David Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, for allegedly stealing sensitive internal documents and making recordings of officials without consent. Chris Gaubatz, who posed as a Muslim in an internship with CAIR’s national office in Washington, took some 12,000 pages of documents destined for a shredder in an attempt, he said, to expose the group’s ties to Islamic jihad and terrorism. His father is a former Air Force special agent with extensive Middle East experience who researches the spread of radical Islam in the U.S. and its threat to national security.

In her ruling today, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., canceled a court hearing scheduled for Tuesday and gave CAIR until Jan. 15 to reply to the Gaubatz’s motion to dismiss the case.

The motion filed last month by Gaubatz lawyer Daniel Horowitz asserts CAIR has no claim because it does not legally exist.
Horowitz explains that just two weeks after CAIR was named by the Justice Department in May 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist finance case in U.S. history, the organization changed its name to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network.

“CAIR is not a valid entity and even if it were, the exposure of its inner workings is part of the price it pays for being a controversial group in a hotly contested arena,” Horowitz declares in his reply to CAIR’s lawsuit.

The FBI produced evidence at the trial of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation in 2008 that CAIR was established as a front for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

The material obtained by the Gaubatzes is featured in the book “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” published by WND Books, an affiliate of WorldNetDaily.com. The book asserts CAIR is acting as a front for a conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood – the parent of al-Qaida and Hamas – to infiltrate the U.S. and help pave the way for Saudi-style Islamic law to rule the nation.

Horowitz said CAIR had hoped to draw WND Books into the legal battle so it could pull the book off the shelves. But the federal judge’s ruling today prevents the group from any legal investigation of the Gabautzes or WND Books under the court’s authority before the motion to dismiss the case is heard.

In its lawsuit, CAIR sought to stop the Gaubatzes and their associates from “posting, publishing, disclosing, or in any way using any documents, recordings, or other information obtained from CAIR, either directly or indirectly.”

“That means pull the book,” Horowitz explained. “Since CAIR doesn’t even exist, what right do they have to question the publisher of the book or anyone else?”
Horowitz asked further, if Kollar-Kotelly throws out the case “because CAIR filed under a false name, what is the ‘real’ name that they can use if they refile?”

“In my opinion, the only real name that they can use, that is not a fraud on the court, is Hamas,” he said.

Horowitz says if CAIR responds to his brief by filing an amendment to change its registered name back to Council on American Islamic-Relations, he will seek an evidentiary hearing “to establish whether there is a genuine corporate entity that is ‘CAIR’ or whether ‘CAIR’ is a moniker used to represent the activities of a ruling group that oversees (in some way) the operations of other CAIR related groups.”

The reply to CAIR also contends the Gaubatzes’ actions to expose the group are protected by the First Amendment.
Kollar-Kotelly issued a restraining order Nov. 3 barring the Gaubtazes from further use or publication of the material and demanding that they return it to the Muslim group’s lawyers. But the FBI also has shown interest in the material, stepping in with a warrant Nov. 23 to examine the papers and recordings, apparently as part of its concern about CAIR and its terrorist links to Hamas.

The FBI cut off ties to CAIR one year ago in response to the group’s terrorist ties. Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York and other senators have called for a government-wide ban on CAIR.

Horowitz, a frequent TV legal analyst based in the San Francisco Bay area, represented talk-radio host Michael Savage in his lawsuit against CAIR. Renowned First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus, who represented Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case during the Vietnam War, also is defending the Gaubatzes. A third high-profile advocate, Bernard Grimm of Washington, D.C., also is a member of the legal team.

CAIR claims the Gaubatzes used CAIR property and personal information of CAIR’s employees and donors to cast the group in a “negative, inaccurate light.” The group claims it had an expectation of confidentiality that was breached, causing injury to the organization and causing it and its officials and employees “to suffer unwarranted harassment up to and including threats of violence.”

But Horowitz says CAIR’s pleading does not make it clear that the documents taken from CAIR were consigned to the shredder. “Muslim Mafia,” he points out, describes Chris Gaubatz’s internship at CAIR as “a six-month counterintelligence operation” during which he “routinely load[ed] the trunk of his car with boxes of sensitive documents and deliver[ed] them into the custody of investigative project leader P. David Gaubatz who in turn stockpiled them at his office in Richmond, Virginia.”

Chris Gaubatz says CAIR’s office manager had asked interns to destroy whole boxes of documents in the basement with a commercial shredder. The other interns didn’t want to take on the mundane task, leaving Gaubatz virtually alone in the basement, where he “would sometimes spend hours going through boxes and putting together one box that was good stuff and shredding the rest.

“And then at the end of the day I would just walk down there (to the basement), pick the good box up, and walk out of the building with it,” he said.

The Gaubatzes’ legal reply to CAIR argues the damages claimed are not specific and, in any case, are related to conduct protected by the First Amendment.

The reply says CAIR, which contends it is simply a civil rights group, is trying to bring a debate into the courtroom that actually belongs in the public arena. In contrast to CAIR’s description of itself, Horowitz notes, the authors of “Muslim Mafia” describe CAIR as “a full-service terror support group.”

“CAIR’s lawsuit tries to bring the debate into the courtroom by confusing its version of how the material was obtained with a claim for damages due to the effects of publication,” the brief states.

Horowitz calls CAIR’s action “an impermissible end run around First Amendment protections.” He notes that ironically, in CAIR’s case against Savage, the group “decried this same tactic, alleging that ‘fair use’ protected CAIR’s right to use six minutes of a radio talk show and post it on CAIR’s website to illustrate a point.”

“The fact that ‘CAIR’ is upset or that members may have been threatened does not weaken the First Amendment protections,” Horowitz argues.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=121440

Associated Press, 01.09.10, 01:27 PM EST

NEW YORK — A New York City man under investigation for his links to a terror suspect has been indicted on charges that he flew to Pakistan to get military training from al-Qaida.

Adis Medunjanin was scheduled to be arraigned Saturday on charges of receiving military training from a foreign terrorist organization and conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country.

His lawyer says he is innocent.

The 25-year-old was one of two Queens men arrested early Friday in connection with the investigation of Najibullah Zazi, a Colorado airport driver who pleaded not guilty last year to supporting terrorism.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/01/09/general-us-nyc-terror_7262175.html

Associated Press
By VIJAY JOSHI, Associated Press Writer
1/8/2010

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – Three churches in Malaysia were attacked with firebombs, causing extensive damage to one, as Muslims pledged Friday to prevent Christians from using the word “Allah,” escalating religious tensions in the multiracial country.

Many Malay Muslims, who make up 60 percent of the population, are incensed by a recent High Court decision to overturn a ban on Roman Catholics using “Allah” as a translation for God in the Malay-language edition of their main newspaper, the Herald.

The government says Allah, an Arabic word that predates Islam, is exclusive to the faith and by extension to Malays. It refuses to make an exception, even though the Herald’s Malay edition is read only by Christian indigenous tribes in the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak.

At Friday prayers at two main mosques in downtown Kuala Lumpur, young worshippers carried banners and gave fiery speeches, vowing to defend Islam.

“We will not allow the word Allah to be inscribed in your churches,” one speaker shouted into a loudspeaker at the Kampung Bahru mosque. About 50 other people carried posters reading “Heresy arises from words wrongly used” and “Allah is only for us.”

“Islam is above all. Every citizen must respect that,” said Ahmad Johari, who attended prayers at the National Mosque. “I hope the court will understand the feeling of the majority Muslims of Malaysia. We can fight to the death over this issue.”

The demonstrations were held inside the mosque compounds to follow a police order against protests on the streets. Participants dispersed peacefully afterward.

Malaysia is often held up as a model for other Islamic countries because of its economic development, progressive society and generally peaceful coexistence between the Malay majority and the ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities who are mostly Christians, Buddhists and Hindus.

The Allah controversy, however, has the potential to shatter that carefully nurtured harmony, drive a deep racial wedge and scare away sorely needed foreign investment as the country struggles to emerge from the global financial crisis.

Prime Minister Najib Razak condemned the attacks on the churches by unidentified assailants, who struck before dawn in different suburbs of Kuala Lumpur. He said the government would “take whatever steps it can to prevent such acts.”

Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the country’s leaders were very concerned about the situation.

“We don’t want this to spread out into something else. … I am not only assuring the minorities, I am assuring all Malaysians — anybody who is in Malaysia — that they are safe,” he told reporters.

In the first attack, the ground-level office of the three-story Metro Tabernacle Church was destroyed in a blaze set off by a firebomb thrown by attackers on motorcycles soon after midnight, police said. The worship areas on the upper two floors were undamaged and there were no injuries.

Two other churches were attacked hours later, with one sustaining minor damage while the other was not damaged. Church officials had earlier said a fourth church was attacked but they later retracted the report saying they were misinformed. National police chief Musa Hassan said the report of the fourth attack was a rumor.

No arrests have been made.

The tribespeople of Sabah and Sarawak, who speak only Malay, have always referred to God as “Allah,” an Arabic word used not only by Muslims but also by Christians in Muslim-majority countries such as Egypt, Syria and Indonesia.

Many Malaysian Muslims say its use by others would mislead people, tempting them to convert to Christianity.

Since the verdict, hateful comments and threats against Christians have been posted widely on the Internet, but this was the first time the controversy turned destructive.

Kuala Lumpur police Chief Mohamad Sabtu Osman told The Associated Press that a witness saw four people on two motorcycles breaking the glass front of the Metro Tabernacle church and throwing an incendiary object inside before fleeing.

He said police found a wrench, an empty gasoline can and two scorched motorcycle helmets at the scene.

The backlash against the court verdict has reinforced complaints by minorities that they face institutional discrimination. They say it is almost impossible to get permission to build new churches and temples. Some Hindu temples have been demolished in the past. Court verdicts in religious disputes usually favor Muslims.

___

Associated Press writers Julia Zappei, Sean Yoong and Eileen Ng contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100108/ap_on_re_as/as_malaysia_allah_ban

Human Events
by Robert Spencer
Posted 01/07/2010

Despite the mainstream media’s best efforts to cover up the jihadist elements in both attacks, informed Americans know that Major Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen Americans in a jihad attack at Fort Hood in November, and that another Muslim, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to explode Northwest Flight 253 as it landed in Detroit in another jihad attack on Christmas Day. But another major recent jihad assault has not been understood as such – although it was a manifestation of exactly the same deadly belief system that motivated Hasan and Abdulmutallab.

Both Hasan and Abdulmutallab were linked to the New Mexico-born, Yemen-based Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who boasted in October 2009 that Yemen would soon become a center of the global jihad – and has been doing his best to bring that about by preaching violence and hatred against Jews and Christians for years.

Al-Awlaki has also recently decried the cartoons of Muhammad that caused worldwide riots after being published in a Danish newspaper in late 2005. He characterized the cartoons as “one of the worst events or incidents of cursing Muhammad. In fact it might be the worst in our history.” He warned that the cartoonists, “by committing blasphemy against our beloved Muhammad have actually walked straight into a hornet’s nest, and that the dust of this will never settle down.”

Indeed, it hasn’t settled down. In Denmark last Friday, as if taking his cue from al-Awlaki’s words, a Muslim man used an axe to smash through the bullet-proof glass front door of the home of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. Entering the house, he began to smash at the steel door of Westergaard’s safe room until finally police arrived and subdued him.

While few Western analysts realized it, in fact the attack on Westergaard was part of the same jihad as that of Hasan and Abdulmutallab. The latter two hoped to gain a place in the Paradise of heavenly virgins that the Koran guarantees to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111). But insofar as they saw themselves as mujahedin in the classic Islamic mold, they hoped also to weaken and demoralize the Infidel enemy, with an eye toward the ultimate goal of compelling the Infidels to accept the hegemony of Islamic law.

The attack on Westergaard was in service of the same goal. Westergaard’s attacker was outraged that the cartoonist had transgressed the bounds of Islamic law by (as he saw it) mocking Muhammad. Islamic law stipulates that non-Muslims forfeit their lives when they dare to criticize Islam, Allah, or Muhammad. When he swung his axe at Westergaard’s door, this jihadist was doing his part to compel Europe and the West to accept Islamic norms for speech — or else.

The cartoon controversy thus illustrates the gulf between the Islamic world and the post-Christian West in matters of freedom of speech and expression. Yet as Obama’s America and an equally politically correct Europe continue to pay homage to the idols of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism, they may give up those hard-won freedoms voluntarily. The Flight 253 incident has led to attempts (of widely varying effectiveness) to stiffen airport security and shore up our national defense against violent jihad attacks. In the same way, the axe in Westergaard’s front door ought to lead to robust affirmations of the importance of the freedom of speech as a safeguard against tyranny, and concrete steps to defend and protect that freedom.

Freedom of speech encompasses precisely the freedom to annoy, to ridicule, to offend. If it doesn’t, it is hollow. The instant that any person or ideology is considered off-limits for critical examination and even ridicule, freedom of speech has been replaced by an ideological straitjacket. Westerners seem to grasp this easily when it comes to affronts to Christianity, but the same clarity of thought doesn’t seem to carry over to an Islamic context.

Yet such clarity is needed more than ever. Jihad attacks of all kinds have sharply increased since Barack Obama became President. Obviously his outreach to the Islamic world is taken as weakness and responded to accordingly. It is long past time for him to reverse course – and above all, to see the jihad threat in its totality.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35095

Washington Times
OPINION/ANALYSIS
01/07/2010
By Kim R. Holmes

Rarely is the absurdity of a policy completely unmasked in a single statement. But it happened last Sunday when John O. Brennan, President Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, announced that Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been “talking to people who detained him,” but now “doesn’t have to” because he has a public defender and will be tried in a civilian court.

Say what? Imagine if Mohammed Atta, who piloted one of the 9/11 planes into the World Trade Center, had somehow survived. Now suppose the authorities treated him as though he had merely broken into a liquor store … no interrogation, just charged him with a crime, given him a public defender and taken him to the county courthouse. Odds are the case would have ended with a plea bargain, Atta giving up information in return for a light jail sentence.

The public would have been outraged. They would have demanded that Atta be treated as what he was — an enemy combatant. Authorities would have been expected to do everything possible to learn what he knew, so as to prevent another attack.

So what’s changed? Despite what the president has said, this administration acts as though terrorist attacks on U.S. soil are criminal matters, not acts of war. That policy means that a terrorist planning to attack Americans is best off trying to kill as many people as possible on U.S. soil. That way he can not only get a civilian trial and public defenders paid for by American taxpayers. He can keep his secrets safe. And he won’t have to face U.S. soldiers trying to kill him in firefights in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Talk about perverse incentives. The law is supposed to protect Americans, not make them easy targets for terrorists.
You have to wonder what a terrorist attacking inside the U.S. would have to do to warrant interrogation. Would he have to kill hundreds or thousands of Americans? If so, what legal difference does it make for where he’s tried? The jurisdiction question doesn’t hinge on whether people die, but on the nature of the action and the type of person perpetrating it. A terrorist who succeeds in killing hundreds of Americans is just as much an enemy combatant as one who tries but fails.
You also have to wonder why the administration went to all the trouble of establishing a “high value interrogation group,” or HIG, in the national security staff. Is an al Qaeda operation trying to kill 300 Americans not “high value” enough? What about all those other terrorists-in-training who reportedly want to follow in Abdulmutallab’s footsteps? Don’t the lives they threaten make the Nigerian terrorist a valuable enough person to interrogate?

Yes, President George W. Bush put British-born terrorist Richard Reid in a civilian court. For whatever reason, that set an unfortunate political precedent; but it did not establish any binding precedents in law. There is no legal requirement to try foreign nationals like Reid or Abdulmutallab in a U.S. civilian court. The most definitive Supreme Court case on the matter, Ex parte Quirin, ruled that enemy combatants (in that case German saboteurs) caught in the U.S. can be tried by a military tribunal.

Mr. Obama is fond of distinguishing himself from Mr. Bush. So he is perfectly free to set himself apart from Mr. Bush by being “really” tough on terrorism.

But he didn’t. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, it appears that he does not believe people like Abdulmutallab are engaging in acts of war against the United States. The president’s positions on detainees and Guantanamo Bay have so tied him up in legal knots that he can’t see something that is otherwise so obvious — namely, that there is a huge legal difference between a U.S. citizen trying to commit murder for private reasons and a foreign-born (i.e. non-U.S. citizen) terrorist doing so for political reasons on behalf of an organization engaged in war against the United States.

Abdulmutallab should have been handed over to military intelligence experts for interrogation and detention. After that he should have been sent to a military commission for trial. In addition to doing justice properly, and adhering to the Constitution, this would have sent would-be terrorists the message that they won’t be treated with kid gloves if they are caught inside the U.S. trying to kill Americans.

Unfortunately, other terrorists must be shaking their heads in wonder. They can scarcely believe their good fortune that attacking civilians in the U.S. rather than soldiers on a foreign battlefield can get them a better deal if they are caught.
Nothing in the Constitution or the law requires us to expose Americans to this kind of legal nonsense. The law is intended to protect Americans. We do our constitutional rights no favor by pretending that enemy combatants have the same rights as ordinary criminals.

• Kim R. Holmes, a former assistant secretary of state, is a vice president at the Heritage Foundation (Heritage.org) and author of “Liberty’s Best Hope: American Leadership for the 21st Century.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/07/holmes-response-airliner-attack-theater-absurd/

Children in the news give glimpse of 9/11 mastermind’s cruel ways
The Associated Press
updated 6:00 p.m. ET, Tues., Jan. 5, 2010

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - With a book written by one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, and with news of a daughter sheltering in the Saudi Embassy in Iran, some of the blanks are being filled in on the life of the 9/11 mastermind’s large family, including lurid details of his parenting style.

Two weeks ago, the son, Omar bin Laden, revealed that many of the children who had been with their father in Afghanistan escaped to Iran following the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, and were still together in a walled compound under Iranian guard.
Confirmation came with the news that a daughter, Eman bin Laden, had taken refuge in the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Saudi officials are negotiating with the Iranians to allow Eman to return to Saudi Arabia, where she was born. On Tuesday Omar bin Laden told The Associated Press that he, as well as his wife and mother, had applied for visas to go to Tehran and help speed Eman’s case.

Omar and his wife, Zaina Alsabah, later e-mailed the AP to report that another bin Laden son, 16-year-old Bakr, had been allowed to leave on Dec. 25. It said, “He arrived with great joy at the destination of his choice” and was with relatives. The e-mail did not disclose where Bakr was, but said he was not in Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden’s family was already under the spotlight in “Growing Up Bin Laden,” written by Omar and his mother, Najwa bin Laden, and published in late October.

The book describes a brood of children — up to 20 from different wives — who were raised from an early age by an authoritarian father who shunned the luxury his inherited wealth could buy.

No laughter, or toys

The mother and son write that the kids grew up in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Afghanistan without laughter or toys, were routinely beaten, and lost their pets to painful death from poison gas experiments by their father’s fighters.

When they became young adults, their father asked them to volunteer for suicide missions. When Omar protested, bin Laden was quoted as replying: “You hold no more a place in my heart than any man or boy in the entire country. This is true for all my sons.”

It was then, Omar recounted, that he “finally knew exactly where I stood. My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

Speaking to AP, Omar recalled visiting his father’s training camps in Afghanistan and being sent to the front lines of the civil war that tore Afghanistan in the 1990s.

“I nearly lost my life so many times,” he said. “People may ask why I left my father. I left because I did not want anyone to choose my destiny. … And I believe I chose correctly, for I chose life. I chose peace.”

Osama bin Laden was 17 when he married his Syrian first cousin, Najwa, then 15. The couple lived in the western port city of Jiddah, where bin Laden took three more wives.

In Jiddah’s suffocating heat, the family was denied the use of refrigerators and air conditioners. When Omar’s asthma got bad, his father ordered him to treat it with honeycombs and onions.

In the early 1990s, bin Laden fell out with the Saudi royal family over the presence of U.S.-led troops on Saudi soil and moved his wives and children to Sudan. There he owned farms, grew sunflowers and set up several businesses.

‘Challenging trials’

On a nighttime camping trip outside Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, bin Laden told his oldest sons to dig ditches in the desert and then ordered his wives and children to each lie in one of them, according to the book. When someone complained of the desert cold, bin Laden said they should cover themselves with dirt or grass.

“Do not think about foxes or snakes,” the book quoted him as saying. “Challenging trials are coming to us.”

In 1994, the Saudi government stripped bin Laden of his citizenship.

The next year five Americans were killed by a car bomb outside a U.S. military training center in Riyadh. It was the first attack on Saudi soil that the government blamed on bin Laden followers.

Bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan in 1996. He moved his family — minus his second wife and her children, who had left him — to stone huts without electricity or running water high on a mountain in Tora Bora in Afghanistan.

There he took a fifth wife, believed to be a Yemeni. He sent his children to the front lines of the Afghan civil war and made them attend hours of jihadist indoctrination.

In the book, Omar described how one day, while sitting with his father on the mountain, bin Laden told him about his plan is to destroy the U.S. from within.

“I sat mute, feeling not one jolt of passion for my father’s life,” Omar wrote. “I only wanted him to be like other fathers, concerned with his work and his family.”

On Sept. 9, 2001, Najwa left her husband and returned to her native Syria, taking with her a son and her two youngest daughters. Eman, Omar’s sister, was left behind with her father and siblings. Omar, who by then was 20, had left the family and Afghanistan earlier that year.

Fled to Iran

In a Dec. 23 interview with Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, Omar said the bin Laden children were told to flee after the U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan began, and they ended up in neighboring Iran.

He told the paper that the family had been unsure of their fate until Eman’s escape.

It has long been believed that Iran has in custody a number of bin Laden’s children who fled Afghanistan, most notably Saad and Hamza, who are thought to have held positions in al-Qaida.

But Iran never confirmed it and claimed to have been surprised to discover Eman was in the Saudi embassy.
Besides 17-year-old Eman, the siblings in Iran include Othman, 25, Fatima, 22, Hamza, 20, and Bakr, 15 along with 25 other relatives, among them bin Laden’s daughters-in-law and 11 grandchildren, according to Omar.

Five other children are in Saudi Arabia and three in Syria, he said.

Son Saad left the compound less than a year ago and his whereabouts are unknown, Omar told the AP in an e-mail last month. This year, U.S. officials said Saad, who would have been 30, may have died in a U.S. drone airstrike in Pakistan.

Refuge in Saudi Embassy

Omar told the paper that after eluding her Iranian guards, Eman managed to contact her brother Abdullah, bin Laden’s first-born. He had left the bin Laden household in the 1990s when they all lived in Sudan, and is now in Saudi Arabia.
He advised her to seek immediate refuge in the Saudi Embassy, the paper said.

Omar and his wife, Alsabah, both spoke to the AP. Alsabah said the compound occupied by bin Laden’s family is on the outskirts of Tehran and has several houses, gardens and a swimming pool.

“They are well-treated,” she said.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are strategic rivals in the Middle East, and the sensitivities surrounding the bin Laden family’s case are such that she asked that her and her husband’s present whereabouts not be revealed.

Omar said getting his sister out of Tehran was “a family issue” and “It has nothing to do with politics.”

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34713251/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/