Hardball: US Wants Names of Pakistani Operatives

Pakistani officials tell The New York Times that the Obama
administration has demanded the names of top-level intelligence
operatives in order to find out whether or not they aided Osama bin
Laden. It's the latest sign of growing tensions between Pakistan and
Washington. Pakistan has always rejected demands to name operatives in
its Inter-services Intelligence Directorate, which aided the fight
against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s and is believed to
have maintained close ties with bin Laden since.

Human Rights Watch Condemns bin Laden Killing

You will recall that 'Human Rights Watch' was conflicted on Monday about how to respond to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Now, they've had a chance to think about it. And they've decided to condemn Bin Laden's killing. Really.

On May 3 HRW executive director Ken Roth tweeted: Ban Ki-moon wrong on #Osama bin Laden: It’s not “justice” for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction http://reut.rs/kKQfuu

In contrast to elected officials, such as President Obama, who must choose between real options, Roth presents a fictitious alternative in which arch-terrorists in countries like Pakistan can be arrested, tried, and punished by functioning international judicial systems.

Of course.

Labels: Human Rights Watch, Osama Bin Laden

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:11 PM

Obama's Greatest Accomplishment

[I]f a significant part of the Democratic health care plan survives, that will “probably” easily outrank yesterday’s bin Laden success. Obama will have done something a series of popular Democratic presidents had failed to accomplish in more than half a century. … And it’s easy to overestimate the significance of Osama’s demise: Remember when we thought finding Saddam would turn the tide in Iraq?

C'mon. Does Mickey think bin Laden is the same as Saddam in the American psyche? OBL attacked ths country; Saddam didn't. Osama began this hideously divisive bait of a war. Saddam just couldn't cop to not having any WMDs. (By the way, Mickey had similar prescience (ahem) after 9/11, when he predicted we would have moved on by Thanksgiving.)

In my view, the president who found and killed Osama bin Laden will be very hard not to re-elect. Now the association between his name and his enemy's will be an asset: Obama killed Osama. A few tea-party fanatics will have their heads explode. And the Big Lie that Obama is somehow not a strong president is debunked - because strength doesn't actually mean being inflammatory on Fox News, it means exercizing patience, quiet and resolve to get what you want. That Obama also helped prevent a Great Depression - with zero Republican votes - and brought universal health insurance to America? All we need now is a debt deal. And the only way that's possible before the election is if Obama looks highly likely to win it. That likelihood just increased today.

So it's good potential news all round. And since this incident reveals that we are really at war with Pakistan, not Afghanistan, I suspect Obama will have the leverage to shift strategy drastically in the coming year. Without bin Laden and with Pakistan working against us, the logic for withdrawal just got a lot stronger. Which is why, I suspect, the hegemonists are busy reminding us this war is not over. Because for them, it's never over.

But your average American? We did what we went there to do after 9/11. And after ten years, it is time to leave. With our heads high. And justice done.

(Photo by Tina Fallon via Mackey)

Pakistan's Deadly Games - Rushdie

Are we really supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know Osama bin Laden was living there for five years? Salman Rushdie on why it’s time to declare the country a terrorist state.

Osama bin Laden died on Walpurgisnacht, the night of black sabbaths and bonfires. Not an inappropriate night for the Chief Witch to fall off his broomstick and perish in a fierce firefight. One of the most common status updates on Facebook after the news broke was “Ding, Dong, the witch is dead,” and that spirit of Munchkin celebration was apparent in the faces of the crowds chanting “U-S-A!” last night outside the White House and at ground zero and elsewhere. Almost a decade after the horror of 9/11, the long manhunt had found its quarry, and Americans will be feeling less helpless this morning, and pleased at the message that his death sends: “Attack us and we will hunt you down, and you will not escape.”

HP Main - Rushdie Pakistan Anjum Naveed / AP Photo

Many of us didn’t believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. An extremely big man, 6-foot 4-inches tall in a country where the average male height is around 5-foot 8, wandering around unnoticed for ten years while half the satellites above the earth were looking for him? It didn’t make sense. Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man’s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications. The U.S. administration confesses it was “shocked” by the elaborate nature of the compound.

We had heard—I certainly had, from more than one Pakistani journalist—that Mullah Omar was (is) being protected in a safe house run by the powerful and feared Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) somewhere in the vicinity of the city of Quetta in Baluchistan, and it seemed likely that bin Laden, too, would acquire a home of his own.

In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, the old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”) just isn’t going to wash.

In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, all the big questions need to be answered by Pakistan. The old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”) just isn’t going to wash, must not be allowed to wash by countries such as the United States that have persisted in treating Pakistan as an ally even though they have long known about the Pakistani double game—its support, for example, for the Haqqani network that has killed hundreds of Americans in Afghanistan.

This time the facts speak too loudly to be hushed up. Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800 yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for five years?

Pakistan’s neighbor India, badly wounded by the November 26, 2008, terrorist attacks on Mumbai, is already demanding answers. As far as the anti-Indian jihadist groups are concerned—Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad—Pakistan’s support for such groups, its willingness to provide them with safe havens, its encouragement of such groups as a means of waging a proxy war in Kashmir and, of course, in Mumbai—is established beyond all argument. In recent years these groups have been reaching out to the so-called Pakistani Taliban to form new networks of violence, and it is worth noting that the first threats of retaliation for bin Laden’s death have been made by the Pakistani Taliban, not by any al Qaeda spokesman.

India, as always Pakistan’s unhealthy obsession, is the reason for the double game. Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India’s supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

For a long time now America has been tolerating the Pakistani double game in the knowledge that it needs Pakistani support in its Afghan enterprise, and in the hope that Pakistan’s leaders will understand that they are miscalculating badly, that the jihadists want their jobs. Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons, is a far greater prize than poor Afghanistan, and the generals and spymasters who are playing al Qaeda’s game today may, if the worst were to happen, become the extremists’ victims tomorrow.

There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Laden’s compound provides further proof of Pakistan’s dangerous folly.

As the world braces for the terrorists’ response to the death of their leader, it should also demand that Pakistan give satisfactory answers to the very tough questions it must now be asked. If it does not provide those answers, perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations.

Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and, recently, the Booker of all Bookers), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Life—and one collection of short stories, East, West. He has also published three works of nonfiction—The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, and Step Across This Line—and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a former president of American PEN.
The Daily Beast

Bin Laden's Death: Triumph or Tragedy

May 1, 2011 |

Photo Credit: AFP/File


On September 11, 2001, I stood on the perimeter of Lafayette Park, gazing across the lawn to the White House for a good long while, on my walk home from a temp job in the National Press Building. The subways were shut down in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The workers of Washington filled the streets, tuned out of their office buildings, many with no way home, moving dazedly along the pavement on a brilliant fall day against a sonal backdrop of screaming sirens.

As I write in the wee hours of Monday morning, the screaming outside the White House comes from a gathering of hundreds of young people waving American flags, hooting and hollering gleefully, in celebration of the death of Osama bin Laden, whose demise at the hands of U.S. troops was announced very late Sunday night by President Obama.

It's hard to overstate the symbolic victory, both for the Obama administration, and for the American people, of the news of Bin Laden's death. And for the family members and friends of those whose lives were taken by the al Qaeda attacks, a sense of justice is no doubt felt by most. All the same, one thing that is easy to overstate is whatever negative impact the Bin Laden killing will have on the daily operations of the terrorist organization he founded, which, according to national security experts, he wasn't really running himself anymore, anyway. Meanwhile, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawarhiri, remains at large.

But it's also hard to estimate the amount of blowback (or lack thereof) the U.S. and its allies will encounter as a result of the killing. Already there are calls for photos of the body, of which Obama said the U.S. has custody, to be released, an act that would likely serve as an incitement to extremists. Those who think the killing of Bin Laden signals an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan may want to think again, for it's quite possible that Pakistan will be further destabilized by Bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. forces on a compound so close to the capital. At this point, the Afghan war is no longer about Afghanistan, which many believe to be a lost cause; it's about the nuclear-armed Pakistan, and maintaining a U.S. presence in a tinderbox region that could blow up a good part of the world.

It's difficult to believe that U.S. could have gone in to the compound in Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was found, without the acquiescence of Pakistan's President Zardari, already a weak figure whose reputation is unlikely to be enhanced by any role he may have had in allowing the U.S. to conduct a military operation on his nation's soil.* The U.S. was unpopular in Pakistan long before it began launching drone attacks on villages in the hinterlands of Waziristan, but repeated operations that yielded civilian deaths have soured even moderate Pakistanis on their government's rather tortured alliance with the Western superpower.

Yet while U.S. intelligence operatives likely located Bin Laden's location via government insiders, the location of Bin Laden's hideout suggests that the late al Qaeda leader had more than a little help from inside the Pakistani intelligence community, where he had always found a significant measure of support. On a reporting assignment in 1998, I arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Bin Laden had set up headquarters. Already in the sights of he Clinton administration for bombings in Saudi Arabia and threats against the U.S., the al Qaeda leader had just issued a de facto fatwa against all Americans and their property. The local paper, the Frontier Post, was rife with breathless stories of CIA operatives darting through the local bazaar. The operatives, it was said, knew where Bin Laden was, but he was untouchable because of the support he had in the Pakistani intelligence community.

There was a time, of course, when Bin Laden also had the support of the American intelligence community -- back when the U.S. was arming Afghan warlords and jihadis to take on the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan. Bin Laden used his fortune as the scion of a Saudi construction magnate to gather a force of foreign, mostly Arab, fighters to fight alongside the Afghans, and the CIA was only too happy to help Bin Laden's fighters get the arms they needed.

Pakistan was the conduit for the supply chain of rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs supplied by the U.S., and through its madrassahs, sustained by both the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence operation, young men were turned into fighters. However noble the cause of Afghans reclaiming their nation from the Soviet invaders, the U.S. was not in it for the nobility of the cause; America was fighting its own proxy war against the Soviets, and the devastation America's Cold War foe endured at the hands of the Afghans surely facilitated the Soviet Union's demise as a nation.

But after the Afghans all but won the Cold War for America, the U.S. turned tail and left, leaving stockpiles of arms in the hands of unscrupulous warlords. The Taliban was initially born as an antidote to rapaciousness of the warlords, only to become its own brand of oppression, aided and abetted by Osama Bin Laden, who, until yesterday, was more than a living, breathing symbol of extremism; he was a living, breathing creature of the blowback to America's first intervention in the region.

Now that he is gone, the question of blowback re-opens. While Bin Laden's death by U.S. bullets may not operationally change the function of al Qaeda, it changes dynamics around the world. Barack Obama will forever be the guy who got Bin Laden, surely a triumph for him at home. But in a part of the world where U.S. arms have killed children, and where U.S. history is too often the story of alliances with dictators, the outcome is far less certain.

*This sentence was updated. U.S. officials say that Pakistan was not notified before the raid on Bin Laden's compound.

Bin Laden/Al Qaeda Fund Ground Zero Mosque

Bin Laden/Al Qaeda Funding Ground Zero Mosque Imam Rauf

*** Join SIOA and FDI on Sepember 11, 2010 at 2pm, on Park Place (between Church and West Broadway) as we pay our respects to the murdered and demonstrate against the Ground Zero mega mosque opening on September 11, 2011. ***

Think about this. The duplicitous Imam erecting a triumphal mosque in the shadow of what were the world's tallest buildings for a time, is funded by the very same Islamic supremacists who attacked and brought down those two buildings that housed a small city. 50,000 people worked in the buildings, while another 200,000 visited or passed through each day. The complex had its own zip code, 10048.

On September 11, 2001, that all came to a crashing, horrible end, when Islamic jihad brought the war to our shores and murdered 2,998 American citizens here at home. 10 years later, Islamic supremacists will open a 15-story victory mosque on September 11, 2011.

From a conference call with Berntsen and Rep. Peter King, R-L.I.:

“I am concerned about the fact that Al Qaeda and other militant organizations will target that mosque. They will infiltrate people into the mosque,” Berntsen said. “Once they have done that they will petition to bring their own mullahs in, or imams, and have them emigrate into the United States using our immigration law against us. I think it will be foolish to not recognize the fact that this mosque at Ground Zero will be a magnet for militants, that they will attempt to do this to establish themselves literally feet away from what is hallowed ground in New York City.”

“Militants are using these mosques. They are using front organizations against us. They Wtc_vert1 are using the west’s respect and tolerance for all religions against us,” Berntsen said. “We have to continue to respect everyone’s religious beliefs and allow them to have the ability to practice religions. We also at the same time have to be thoughtful about security, where we allow these facilities to be. We would not have allowed a Shinto shrine to be placed at the front gate of Pearl Harbor.”

I wonder if Berntsen knows how right he is. Righter than he knows. Al Qaeda doesn't have to infiltrate the mosque, they are already in. The Attorney General must examine and investigate the alleged ties and funding by Xenel Corporation and Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan. Who is Xenel? They fund the Imam and .....

The website lists Xenel Industries Ltd. as a primary donor to the Al-Falah Program. Xenel, a Saudi owned conglomerate, "provides development, manufacturing, investment, trading and services throughout a wide range of areas of interest" ranging from healthcare and infrastructure to oil and real estate, according to the company's website (www.xenel.com).

On December 10, 2002, the Orlando Sentinel published an article describing the research of a local trade union regarding Xenel, who had just been awarded a $100 million contract to build the city of Orlando a new state-of the-art convention center. The article reveals that Xenel CEO Abdullah Alireza sits on the executive board of Dar al-Maal al-Islami (DMI), a bank based in Switzerland. Haydar Mohamed bin Laden, half brother of Osama bin Laden, also sits on the twelve member executive board.

According to State Department records and the August 2002 brief filed by the families of 9/11 victims, DMI is involved in "al Qaeda financing through several of its subsidiaries, including […] Faisal Islamic Bank and Al Shamal Islamic Bank." During the 2001 trial of those suspected in the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, Faisal Islamic Bank was implicated directly in terrorist activities by former al Qaeda operatives: Ahmed al-Fadl, a finance manager for al Qaeda, testified that al Qaeda accounts in Khartoum were held at Faisal Islamic Bank.

Xenel also funds The Cordoba Initiative and Faisal and Khan's ASMA supremacist group as well. This, according to the World Economic Forum:

The Xenel Corporation, and others... endorsed projects: (hat tip to Lawrence)

1. ASMA Society: Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow
American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA)’s Cordoba Initiative proposed to convene young Muslim leaders from the US and the broader Muslim world to expand its network of Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT). The mission of the MLT is to foster a unified, uniquely American voice of Islam capable of accelerating the development of a healthy Islamic identity that is both western and closely connected to Muslim communities worldwide. MLT will act as a platform and network of emerging young Muslim leaders who are committed to this mission and have the capacity to act as change agents.

911 Imam Faisal's "Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow" fundamentalist jihadis like Yasir Qadhi —

a favorite speaker at conferences of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), among others (more here.)

This connection between Xenel and al Qaeda, according to the Orlando Sentinel, was persuasive enough that the city of Orlando decided to cancel the contract it had previously awarded to Xenel. The involvement Bin Laden-tied Xenel led to the cancellation of a different 100 million dollar project in Florida. If such ties would cancel a convention center, why not a 100 million dollar Islamic supremacist mega mosque at the site of largest attack on American soil by these same players?

- Plans for a $100 million, 250,000-square-foot convention center in the Kissimmee-St. Cloud area near Orlando have been scrapped over claims that the developer has links to terrorism.

The Osceola county commission voted to abandon a proposed partnership with Xentury City Development Co. Officials of Local 362 of the Employees Union alleged that the CEO of Xentury's Saudi-owned parent firm may have ties to a bank that reportedly funds terrorist activities.

Current CEO Kahlid Alireza of Xenel is mentioned in the "Golden Chain" list.

The "Golden Chain" or a list purported sponsors of al Qaeda that was seized in March 2002 raid by Bosnian police authorities of the premises of the Benevolence International Foundation in Sarajevo. The list includes at least 20 top Saudi and Gulf State financial sponsors including bankers, businessmen, and former ministers. Part of the list included computer file titles "Tarekh Osama" or "Osama History", but the appellation "Golden Chain" itself is due to al Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl, who vouched for its authenticity; the FBI later also pronounced the document as genuine

Looking for a bin Laden link? Orlando Business Journal

Union questions come as talks over 'labor peace' appear to stall

KISSIMMEE — Osceola County's attorney will examine union claims of alleged ties between the owners of Xentury City Development Co. and the family of Osama Bin Laden.

"We aren't alleging anything," says Neal Kwatra, a Washington-based senior research analyst for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International. "We don't want to characterize this. We are just providing reproductions of publicly available facts."
[....]

Xentury City is the company selected to build the $100 million Osceola County Convention Center. Its parent corporation is Saudi Arabia-based Xenel Industries.
[...]

Shipley describes a 90-page packet of information that appears to indirectly tie Xentury's parent company [Xenel] to "less than desirable individuals, businesses and organizations."

Shipley says the union officials would not leave their information packet with him, "on the advice of their attorney."

The commissioner says he invited the union leaders to present the information at the commission meeting.

Morty Miller, president of Local 362, and Kwatra declined. Both men say they feel the information needs to be presented in its entirety in a calm, dispassionate way. "We wanted to sit with the county attorney and walk her through all the information," says Kwatra. "We didn't want a 'he said, she said,' circus-like atmosphere. We were discreet; we didn't take this to the media."

The union research in question reportedly describes a "close working relationship" in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, between two wealthy families: the Alireza family and the bin Laden family.

Although the bin Laden family name is now forever tied to Osama bin Laden, it is also known in Saudi Arabia as a $5 billion global construction enterprise launched by Mohammed bin Laden, an illiterate masonry worker and the father of 54 children, including Osama.

The bin Laden family link to Xentury City [Xenel] as reportedly outlined by the union goes through several connections:

• One major shareholder in the Al Shamal bank founded by Osama bin Laden and others is the Faisal Bank.

• A trust holds an ownership interest in the Faisal bank.

• One member of the board of supervisors of the trust is Abdullah Alireza.

• Alireza is also the managing partner and a major shareholder of Xenel Industries, the parent company of Xentury City.

Pamela Geller

Obama and Osama on Fox Assassination Menu

Obama and Osama on FOX Assassination Menu

Jeffrey Feldman, HuffPost

During a live interview, FOX Contributor Liz Trotta jokingly wished for the assassination of Sen. Barack Obama.

This latest incident from FOX News continues the trend in violent rhetoric about Sen. Obama from pundits, politicians, and entertainers.

Grinning While Joking About Killing A Candidate
The incident happen in an exchange with the FOX News anchor. When asked her opinion of the recent scandal surrounding some comments made by Sen. Hillary Clinton, which Trotta described by saying that, "some are reading [it] as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama." Hemmer quickly corrected Trotta, having noticed that she had said "Osama" when she meant "Obama." At this point, Trotta said, "Obama. Well...both if we could!" Trotta then laughed gleefully.