The Myths And Realities Of Iraq

Extracted from the Boston Globe
By Nikolas Gvosdev and Ray Takeyh, September 29, 2006

As the midterm elections approach, Iraq dominates the headlines. In a remarkable misappropriation of history, President Bush is conjuring the ghost of Hitler and outlandish World War II analogies to justify his policies. In the Bush administration's distorted lexicon, calls for withdrawal are appeasement, and dissent is yet another form of disloyalty.

But if the United States wants to achieve its strategic objectives in the Middle East - after three and half years of inconclusive warfare - it is time to transcend the prevailing myths and consider the ramifications of an American departure from Iraq.

The first argument is that the American presence is the only way to avoid civil war. The reality is that Iraq is engulfed by a low-level civil war. Much of the violence now dominating television screens is sectarian strife. As Shi'ite militias and Sunni militants confront one another - and as Iraq's democratically elected politicians increasingly demonstrate their impotence to lead their constituencies - the notion that American troops are defending a democratic Iraq against Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign fighters is at best anachronistic. The longer US forces attempt to impose coercive stability, the more America will become entangled in Iraq's sectarian conflicts. Whether Iraq can hold itself together is a question that Americans can no longer answer on behalf of Iraqis.

The second argument is that even if Americans can't hold Iraq together, the US presence at least prevents a larger regional conflict. This myth holds that, in the vacuum created by an American withdrawal, all of Iraq's neighbors will find themselves sucked into the conflict. But for decades, conflicts in the Middle East have been successfully compartmentalized; civil wars and strife in countries as different as Algeria, Yemen, and Lebanon did not provoke larger regional conflicts.

Should America leave Iraq, the involvement of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and perhaps even Israel in Iraq's civil war certainly will be more intense. However, all these countries have experience in pursuing their interests through proxies as opposed to direct involvement. Iraq may become a battlefield where Iraqi factions are supported by outside patrons eager to advance their geopolitical interests. But such conflict is likely to be waged within well-delineated lines, preventing a regional war.

What about the argument that Iraq will turn into a haven for terrorists? To a large extent, this has already happened. Under our watch, Iraq has become a magnet for jihadists eager to hone their skills in battle against US forces. The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi this year has done little to stem the growth of terrorist cells in the country. The US invasion has achieved one thing: the transformation of a tyrannical state into one that will attract a large number of transnational terrorists. And that reality is unlikely to be disturbed by the size and strength of American forces.

``Staying the course" isn't working. A US departure can't make things much worse. If direct confrontation is not succeeding, then a more realistic solution is to quarantine the country to minimize negative consequences.

The final argument marshaled in defense of an open-ended American commitment is the notion that a withdrawal would damage America's credibility. But the damage has been done. By defining victory not as the removal of Hussein but the creation of a Jeffersonian democracy on the banks of the Tigris, at any point the United States leaves, global opinion will conclude that America ``was defeated." Simply punching time on the clock won't change that perception.

Israel stayed in South Lebanon for 18 years; when it withdrew in 2000, Hezbollah claimed victory.

Whenever America withdraws, it will have empowered a Sunni narrative that brave warriors of the faith brought low the mighty power of the West. The challenge facing Washington is how to secure America's interests in the Middle East in light of such perceptions.

Nearly four years after the American invasion, it is time to acknowledge that the mission will likely remain unaccomplished. The problems that the American invasion was to avert have only grown worse. Instead of embracing distorted myths that only perpetuate an errant war, it is time to appreciate that the consequences of failure may not be calamitous.

Nikolas Gvosdev is the editor of the National Interest. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of ``Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic."

Iraq Situation Is 'Dire,' Says Straw

Taken from Yahoo News
September 29, 2006

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The current situation in Iraq is "dire" according to former British foreign secretary Jack Straw.

Straw now the leader of Britain's House of Commons blamed "mistakes" made by the U.S. administration in the aftermath of the invasion for the current problems.

"The current situation is dire," he said during an appearance on BBC1's Question Time.

"I think many mistakes were made after the military action -there is no question about it - by the United States administration.

"Why? Because they failed to follow the lead of Secretary (of State, Colin) Powell.

"The State Department had put in a huge amount of effort to ensure there was a proper civilian administration."

Although ministers and officials, both in London and Washington, have accepted that mistakes were made, Straw's acknowledgement of the current difficulties was unusually frank.

His comments carry particular significance as he was the member of the government, after Tony Blair, most closely associated with the decision to go to war.

Straw was appointed foreign secretary in 2001, and was demoted earlier this year in a Cabinet shuffle.

Straw's comments came after Blair defended Britain's relationship with the U.S., including over the war in Iraq, at the governing Labour Party's annual conference Tuesday.

Blair warned against backing down in the face of mounting casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, both on the frontline of the US-led "war on terrorism."

Zawahri Calls Bush A Failure Over War On Terror

Taken from Yahoo News
29.09.06

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri called President Bush a "lying failure" for saying progress had been made in the war on terror, according to a video posted on the Internet on Friday. "Bush you are a lying failure and a charlatan. It has been three and-a-half years (since the arrests) ... What happened to us? We have gained more strength and we are more insistent on martyrdom," the Egyptian militant leader said.

Zawahri was referring to the arrest of al Qaeda figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

"Bush, oh failure and liar, why don't you be courageous for once and confront your people and tell them the truth about your losses in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.

He also called Pope Benedict a "charlatan" because of his remarks on Islam.

"This charlatan accused Islam of being incompatible with rationality while forgetting that his own Christianity is unacceptable to a sensible mind," Zawahri said.

In a speech to a university in his native Germany on Sept 12, Pope Benedict quoted criticism of Islam and the Prophet Mohammad by 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who wrote that everything Mohammad brought was evil and inhuman.

He said there was no room for violence in a religion based on reason.

The 'War On Terror': The Last Stand Of Al-Qa'ida's Houdini

Taken from Independent, UK
Justin Huggler reports
Published: 27 September 2006

Omar al-Faruq, who was killed by British troops in Iraq on Monday, was the man who had achieved what appeared to be impossible - escape from the US detention centre at Bagram, in Afghanistan. So how did he come to be shot dead in a Basra suburb?

In the early hours of Monday, about 250 British soldiers surrounded a house in a suburb of the Iraqi city of Basra. It's not a safe place, even in broad daylight. At night nobody ventures out, and the street would have been dark and silent. The troops had come for one man: 250 highly trained, heavily armed soldiers, sent after a single fugitive. But then this was no ordinary fugitive. This was al-Qa'ida's answer to the Count of Monte Cristo: a man who had escaped from one of the most heavily guarded prisons on earth, the special detention centre at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. To this day, nobody is sure how he pulled it off.

Omar al-Faruq's story is remarkable. Born in Kuwait to Iraqi parents, he trained at an al-Qa'ida camp in Afghanistan, was captured in Indonesia, and flown secretly back to Afghanistan by the Americans to be held at Bagram. After his escape last year, he taunted the Americans and accused them of torturing him in a propaganda video released to Arab television channels. On Monday morning, his extraordinary life on the run finally came to an end in a hail of British bullets in his homeland, Iraq.

This was a man who managed to escape from a prison where he was kept in a wire cage that was supposed to be watched both night and day, in an orange jumpsuit that was supposed to make it impossible for him to escape without being spotted. Who broke out through three layers of razor wire and concrete, and managed to cross a minefield that the Americans deliberately did not clear in order to make escape a lethal option.

It wasn't supposed to end the way it did - at least, not according to the Army. Major Charlie Burbridge told reporters: "As we moved into the house there was an exchange of fire and the individual we're talking about, Omar al-Faruq, was killed, which is regrettable, frankly, as the operation was intended to arrest him." But a neighbour in Basra told The New York Times that Faruq was alone in the house, which is bound to raise the question of why 250 heavily armed soldiers were unable to take a single man alive.

Whatever the truth over his death, the US and Britain will be delighted they finally have a body that links the insurgency raging in Iraq with al-Qa'ida.

Except, quite possibly, they don't. The same neighbour said Faruq arrived in Iraq only 20 days ago, to visit his seriously ill mother, who lives in Basra, not to take part in the insurgency. That would explain why he was in Basra, deep in the Shia heartlands in the south, where al-Qa'ida is not exactly popular. It is the Sunni militants who claim they are allied to Osama bin Laden, and who massacre Shia Iraqis and bomb their holiest shrines.

It was an enigmatic end to the life of one of al-Qa'ida's most resourceful fugitives. Was the ruthless killer finally tracked down because he couldn't keep away from his ailing mother's side? The wife he left behind in Indonesia, Mira Agustina, who appeared before the cameras briefly yesterday with only her eyes visible behind a black veil, was left to say in dazed wonderment: "It feels as if something in my heart tells me that he's dead, but the other half of my heart says that I am not convinced." She says she did not even know her husband was being held in Afghanistan for three years, so secretive were the Americans about where they had taken him.

There can be few men whose lives have so completely encapsulated the strange wandering life of the modern Islamic militant, born at one end of the world, captured at the other, and finally killed back where he started. It was a life that took in the now notorious practice of "rendition", the American method of secretly flying captured suspects to places such as Bagram where they can be interrogated using methods that would be illegal in the US. And it also took in a starring appearance in one of the equally notorious al-Qa'ida propaganda videos.

When Omar al-Faruq, if that is his real name - he also went under several aliases - first came to the world's attention in 2002, he was living a quiet and outwardly unremarkable life with Mira in Cijeruk, a small Indonesian village nestled among paddy fields and banana trees an hour from Jakarta.

US investigators happened upon him quite by accident, according to a report in Time magazine that quoted a "CIA document". They were intrigued to find the same Indonesian mobile phone number - 081-2957-6852 - stored in mobile phones belonging to Abu Zubeida, a senior al-Qa'ida operative captured in Pakistan, Agus Dwikarna, an Indonesian militant, and a third, unnamed al-Qa'ida prisoner in Guantanamo Bay.

The number was traced to Faruq. Indonesian security forces captured him, and three days later the US whisked him off to Bagram to be interrogated. At first he refused to cooperate. But eventually, after nearly three months, he began to talk. And the story he told was rather more dramatic than his interrogators were expecting. He told them he was al-Qa'ida's senior representative in south-east Asia, and he was involved in planned attacks in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia.

He said a plan was under way to bomb US embassies across the region on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The US put out an alert and the attacks, of course, never happened. But Faruq gave the Americans a wealth of information on al-Qa'ida's efforts in south-east Asia.

That, at least, is what happened according to the CIA report quoted by Time back in 2002. Indonesian officials, meanwhile, have claimed they would have found it easier to pin a lot of attacks on the cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, who was arrested and jailed after the 2002 Bali bomb attacks, if the Americans had allowed Faruq to testify.

Reports at the time did not say what made Faruq cave in and talk. But in his al-Qa'ida propaganda video appearance after his escape he described being tortured. He said he was taken from Bagram to a place called the "Prison of Darkness", where it was so dark he could not see his own hand in front of his face. He said his wrists were tied with rope so tight the blood supply was cut off. And he said interrogators forced him to watch video footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre in the 9/11 attacks, with the sound of the explosion turned up very loud, followed by the sounds of people screaming.

The reports of his interrogation were the last that the outside world heard of Faruq until last year. Then he surfaced again, in the most dramatic fashion, with his escape from Bagram.

Except, at the time, only senior American officials knew Faruq was one of the four prisoners who had escaped. When they named the escapees, they identified Mr Faruq by an old and little used alias, presumably to cover up the fact they had not only lost four inmates, but had mislaid one of their most prized al-Qa'ida captives. That Faruq was one of the four who escaped that day only emerged months later, when a lawyer tried to call him to give evidence in the military trial of a sergeant who had been accused of mistreating him - and was told he could not because Faruq had escaped.

It was a spectacular escape. The detention facility at Bagram has been described as resembling the conditions in which Hannibal Lecter was held in The Silence of the Lambs. Prisoners were kept in wire cages where they could be seen at all times by guards. When they were allowed out, they were shackled hand and foot.

But in the early hours of 11 June last year, Faruq and three fellow prisoners managed to pick the lock of the wire cage where they were being held with implements they had made themselves, according to reports in US newspapers which quoted military sources extensively. They managed to slip out of their distinctive orange jumpsuits, and instead put on less recognisable blue prisonwear they had somehow acquired.

They then managed to get through an exercise yard and to a small section of the perimeter fence that was damaged, without attracting the sentries on two watchtowers. They crawled, Houdini-like, through a small gap between the razor wire and the concrete blocks, and dropped to the other side, where they then managed to get across a minefield.

"It was bizarre to me," Maj-Gen Peter Gilchrist, Britain's senior officer in Afghanistan at the time, said. "I don't understand how it could happen."

The escape was so remarkable that serious doubts have been raised over whether it can possibly have happened the way it is described. At the very least, analysts have suggested, the four escapees must have had help on the inside, in order to know about the gap in the fence, and to find their way there so easily through a maze of buildings. Newsweek magazine quoted a fugitive Taliban commander as claiming the four men were secretly exchanged for captured US special operations troops, and the escape story was invented to cover the swap. The US vehemently denies this, and it does seem unlikely it would invent a story which seemed a major humiliation at the time.

It seems Faruq had pulled off one of the great escapes of modern times. He turned up again earlier this year, in an al-Qa'ida propaganda video, to gloat about it. Identified as "the hero Faruq al-Iraqi" (Faruq the Iraqi), he was shown in a lengthy interview talking about his capture in Indonesia, his interrogation at Bagram, and his escape. Wearing an ammunition belt across his chest, he described several close calls during the escape, saying the fugitives were exposed to view when they were breaking out of the cell, but no one noticed. After they broke out of the compound, searchlights came within metres of them several times, but never quite picked them out.

He was an elusive man. After his capture, his wife told reporters: "When we got married, he made me promise that if he disappeared one day, I would not go looking for him. So I kept my commitment and didn't search."

At the time of the video, most observers thought he was probably still in Afghanistan, or just across the border in Pakistan. But six months later his body has turned up in his homeland, Iraq - run to ground at last on a visit to his sick mother.

Weekly Round Up: "Is He Alive Or Isn't He?" & "We Worked Hard To Kill Him!"

It’s been another hectic week in the world of politics. The major news story was whether Ossama Bin Laden was dead or alive? It really doesn’t matter because the world faces thousands of Bin Ladens. We also had Europes victory against the Americans in the Ryder Cup. Well done to Ian Woosnam's boys and also credit to Tom Lehman for being very sporting towards the European win. Also in the news was the Venezuelan official that was was kept in detention in JFK, we expect more from Venezuela in the near future! Here are all the other stories…

North America
US Senate backs terror trial bill
The US Senate has passed controversial legislation endorsing President George W Bush's proposals to interrogate and prosecute foreign terror suspects. The 65-34 vote followed Thursday's backing by the House of Representatives for almost identical legislation.

Under the new legislation, special tribunals will be set up to question and try suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"As our troops risk their lives to fight terrorism, this bill will ensure they are prepared to defeat today's enemies and address tomorrow's threats," President Bush said in a statement on Thursday.

Senate approves $70B for war spending
The Senate unanimously approved $70 billion more for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan Friday as part of a record Pentagon budget.

The bill, now on its way to the White House for President Bush's signature, totals $448 billion. It was passed by a 100-0 vote after minimal debate.

Approval by a comfortable margin came despite intense partisan divisions over the course of the Iraq war, which is costing about $8 billion a month. Another infusion of money will be needed next spring.

Congress has now approved $507 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan and heightened security at overseas military bases since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to the Congressional Research Service. The war in Iraq has cost $379 billion and the conflict in Afghanistan now totals $97 billion.

US diplomat denies threat to bomb Pakistan
The US did not threaten to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age", the man who allegedly made the remark said. The former US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, said he thought it likely that his message had been misunderstood by the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf.

He said Mr Armitage told the intelligence chief to "be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age" . However, speaking at a security conference in South Korea, the former deputy secretary of state insisted that version of events was wrong.

"This conversation never happened," Reuters quoted him as saying. "I had a very strong conversation with the intelligence chief. I told him that for Americans this was a black or white issue. Pakistan was either with us or against us. "I have no doubt that the intelligence chief was quite inflammatory in the language he used with President Musharraf." Mr Armitage suggested an alternative reason for the Pakistani leader's allegations, made while he was in the US to promote his memoirs.

Bill Clinton defends bin Laden handling
In a combative interview on "Fox News," former President Clinton defended his handling of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden, saying he tried to have bin Laden killed and was attacked for his efforts by the same people who now criticize him for not doing enough.

"That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," Clinton said in the interview. "They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try." Clinton said he "worked hard" to try to kill bin Laden. "We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since," he said.

Pakistan to Canada: Stop griping about troop deaths
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf bluntly told Canadians to stop complaining about the number of soldiers they were losing in Afghanistan, saying Canada's death toll was far less than Pakistan's.

Canada has 2,300 troops based in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. In the last three months, 20 soldiers have been killed in clashes with Taliban militants, prompting calls for the mission to be brought back home. Musharraf told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that if Canada was worried about soldier fatalities, it should not be in the war-torn country.

Mexican leader knocks U.S. crime rates
Mexican President Vicente Fox said that violence was a problem on both sides of the border and that U.S. officials need to work on their own rising crime rates.

U.S. officials have criticized the high murder and kidnapping rates in Mexican border cities and the danger they pose to Americans.

"I saw that crime rates in the United States increased 3.5 percent so far this year. So they have their own problems," Fox said. "And with numbers of homicides, it's better we don't speak about them, because, even though they show up on the front pages every day, there are many fewer here than there."

Mexico's Calderon rips border wall plan
Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon slammed U.S. plans to build more fences on its southern border, saying it would not solve illegal immigration.

"We are worried ... about the actions that the United States is discussing concerning building a border wall and tightening restrictions on migrants," Calderon said after meeting with Mexico's foreign secretary.

The U.S. Senate is debating legislation to build 700 miles of fence on the U.S.-Mexico border along with other security measures, which the House has already passed.

President Vicente Fox, of Calderon's conservative National Action Party, has called the plans "shameful" and said the fence would be like the Berlin Wall. Calderon succeeds Fox on Dec. 1. There are an estimated 11 million Mexicans in the United States, about half of whom are illegal. Last year, Mexican migrants sent home more than $20 billion in remittances.

South America
Chavez: "Bush Has Called Me Worse Things"
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez who denounced President Bush as "the devil" in a speech at the U.N. General Assembly, and during a visit to Harlem the following day, calling him an "alcoholic." Said that Bush has called him worse things: “tyrant, populist dictator, drug trafficker, to name a few," Chavez said. "I'm not attacking Bush; I'm simply counterattacking. Bush has been attacking the world, and not just with words, with bombs. I think the bombs he's unleashed on Baghdad or Lebanon do a lot more harm than any words spoken in the United Nations."

He also referred to his past threats that he could cut off oil exports to the U.S. if it tries to oust him. "Believe me, if I were to decide tomorrow to stop sending oil to the United States ... the price would go up to $150, $200 a barrel. But we don't want to do it, and we aren't going to do it," Chavez said. "We ask only for respect."

Chavez lambasted the U.S. government for trying to block Venezuela's campaign for a seat in the U.N. Security Council. U.S. officials regularly call the Venezuelan leader a destabilizing force, and Bush has said he sees Chavez as a threat to democracy. The United States has backed Guatemala's bid for one of the seats reserved for a Latin American nation. Chavez has called Bush a "devil" in the past.

Ecuador candidate defends Chavez ties
A tough-talking leftist economist and presidential front-runner who rattles foreign investors said he is proud to call Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez his friend.

Rafael Correa also said he would not extend the U.S. military's use of the Pacific coast Manta air base as an operational site for drug surveillance flights when the treaty runs out in 2009.

But Correa denied accusations from conservative political rivals that Chavez is financing his presidential run in a field of 13 candidates ahead of the Oct. 15 election.

He also said "Calling Bush the devil is offending the devil". He said "the devil is evil, but intelligent. I believe Bush is a tremendously dimwitted president who has done great damage to his country and to the world,"

Europe
Blair 'turned blind eye to Iraq intelligence' in Bush meeting
Tony Blair turned "a blind eye to intelligence" and failed to challenge George Bush over claims that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, according to new claims published this week.

A note of a private meeting between Mr Blair and President Bush in January 2003 shows that Tony Blair failed to confront Mr Bush when he claimed Saddam Hussein had tried to buy aluminium tubes for nuclear weapons production.

Mr Blair did not contradict the President despite having received "private briefings" which indicated that the aluminium tubes were more likely to be for conventional weapons, according to the new edition of a book by the international lawyer Philippe Sands. The claims in a new US edition of the book, Lawless World, will raise fresh questions about whether Mr Blair played a secondary role to President Bush.

'One-sided' Middle East policy attacked by Labour Arab group
Tony Blair's "shoulder-to-shoulder" support for the Bush administration has been attacked by a Labour-affiliated body.

The 300-strong Arab Labour Group has accused the Prime Minister of adopting a one-sided approach to the Middle East crisis because of Washington's strong support for Israel. It has launched a campaign to persuade Mr Blair's successor to adopt a more balanced policy.

The group says it feels "let down" by the Government in the wake of the conflict in Lebanon."Unfortunately, Mr Blair has failed to treat both sides equally. Instead he has bowed to pressure put on him by Israel backed by George Bush," it says. The group, most of whom are Labour members, includes Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Its chairman, said: "We have been overlooked and neglected, treated as second-class citizens. It seems to me there is a very big Zionist lobby in the party. In Lebanon, our government took the same stand as America. If we had had an immediate ceasefire, fewer people would have been killed."

New Trident system may cost £76bn, figures show
The true cost of replacing and operating the Trident nuclear missile system would be at least £76bn, according to estimates. The figure is based on calculations made by the Liberal Democrats from parliamentary answers and is backed up by independent Commons researchers.

The £76bn figure is based on the value the government has put on the cost of the existing Trident system - £14.9bn - plus the percentage of the £30bn defence budget now devoted to Trident for 30 years.

In his presidential address to the governing body of the Church in Wales yesterday, the Archbishop of Wales, Barry Morgan, said money spent on Trident could be better used fighting child disease, the Press Association reported. Referring to a possible replacement cost of £25bn, he said: "With that money we could prevent 16,000 children dying every day from diseases caused by impure water and malnutrition."

EU chief: Bulgaria, Romania and no more
The European Union's chief called for a halt to further expansion of the bloc after Romania and Bulgaria join, saying the EU had to resolve the stalemate over its proposed constitution before it could accept new members.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the 25-nation bloc was limited in its capacity to absorb more members without new rules to make an expanded EU work more effectively. He said the draft constitution answered those problems and needed to be salvaged.

Croatia and Turkey started entry talks last year, and Croatia was expected to finish its membership negotiations by 2009. Turkey's talks were expected to last decades.

Del Ponte says Serbs not doing enough on Mladic
U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte said on Friday she was "not satisfied" that Serbia was carrying out its own action plan to arrest and extradite Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic.

In an assessment sinking Serbia's dwindling hopes of resuming suspended membership talks with the European Union this year, she said Belgrade was still "far away from full cooperation" with the war crimes tribunal.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said after hearing an informal briefing from Del Ponte in Finland that he had heard nothing to prompt him to revive the frozen talks on closer ties. "There are no new elements that we are aware of, and there is no sign of progress from the Serbian side," Rehn told Reuters.

Negotiations were frozen in May because of Serbia's lack of progress in trying to catch Mladic, who is charged with genocide for atrocities by his army in the 1992-95 Bosnia war.

Pope doesn't dwell on remarks in meeting
Pope Benedict XVI told Muslim diplomats that Christians and Muslims must work together to guard against intolerance and violence as he sought to soothe anger over his recent remarks about Islam.

The pontiff also quoted from his predecessor, John Paul II, who had close relations with the Muslim world, calling for "reciprocity in all fields," including religious freedom. Benedict spoke in French to diplomats from 21 countries and the Arab League in his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo near Rome.

Georgia charges 4 Russians with spying
Georgia has charged four Russian military officers with spying, while Russian planes evacuated dozens of diplomats and their relatives as the diplomatic dispute worsened between Moscow and the former Soviet republic.

Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said Russia had redeployed troops closer to its border and that the Russia Black Sea fleet was expected to start maneuvers in the next few days.

Georgian police maintained their positions around the Russian military headquarters in Tbilisi, hoping to detain another officer accused of spying. Russian Ambassador Vyacheslav Kovalenko said Moscow would not hand him over. The Tbilisi City Court ruled that two of the four detained officers can be held for another two months, a spokesman said. It was to consider the cases of the other two later in the day, Ilya Gergedava told The Associated Press.

Berlin opera pulled over Muhammad scene
A leading opera house canceled a 3-year-old production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" that included a scene showing the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), unleashing a furious debate over free speech.

After its premiere in 2003, the production by Hans Neuenfels drew widespread criticism over the scene in which King Idomeneo presents the severed heads not only of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, but also of Muhammad (PBUH), Jesus (PBUH) and Buddha. The disputed scene is not part of Mozart's original staging of the 225-year-old opera, but was an addition of Neuenfels' production, which was last performed by the company in March 2004.

"We know the consequences of the conflict over the (Muhammad) caricatures," Deutsche Oper said its statement announcing the decision. "We believe that needs to be taken very seriously and hope for your support."

Middle East
Israel Releases Hamas Official
An Israeli military court on Wednesday released the Palestinian deputy prime minister, Nasser al-Shaer, one of more than 30 Hamas lawmakers and cabinet ministers who have been detained by the Israelis over the past three months.

Mr. Shaer, who was the highest-ranking official held, was arrested on Aug. 19 but was not charged with any crime, and the court cited a “lack of evidence” in ordering his release.

However, the court said that for the next two weeks, Mr. Shaer would not be allowed to go to Ramallah, where his office is located and which serves as the Palestinian political headquarters in the West Bank.

Israel began rounding up the Hamas legislators in the West Bank after Palestinian militants, including the armed wing of Hamas, seized an Israeli soldier on June 25 and took him into the Gaza Strip. The soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, is still being held, despite an Israeli military incursion in Gaza and the crackdown on Hamas lawmakers.

4,000 fighters killed, 'al-Qaida in Iraq' tape claims
The new leader of al-Qaida in Iraq has admitted that more than 4,000 foreign fighters have been killed in the country since the US-led invasion in 2003, according to an internet recording.

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir - also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri - said: "We have spilled the blood in Iraq of more than 4,000 foreigners who came to fight."

The Arabic word he uses indicates he is speaking about foreigners who joined the insurgency in Iraq, not coalition troops. It is believed to be the first major statement from insurgents in Iraq about their losses.

In the recording, which has not been verified as authentic, the voice thought to be Masri's urges Muslims to make the holy month of Ramadan a "month of holy war". Ramadan began last weekend.

Israel Sentences Jewish Settler
In another development, an Israeli court sentenced a Jewish settler to four life sentences for a shooting spree that killed four Palestinians in the West Bank.

The settler, Asher Weissgan, killed the four Palestinians in an industrial zone in Shiloh on Aug. 17, 2005, the day that the Israeli military began forcibly removing all Jewish settlers from Gaza.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Weissgan carried out the killings in an attempt to prevent the Gaza withdrawal from taking place. Mr. Weissgan was convicted of the killings earlier this month.

Israel backs off plan to kill Nasrallah
Israel has quietly backed off its plan to assassinate Hezbollah's leader because of the international condemnation that his killing would create, the Israeli daily Maariv reported.

During the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah that ended Aug. 14, Israel had targeted Hassan Nasrallah for assassination, security officials said, according to Maariv. Nasrallah went underground, though he repeatedly recorded videos from his hiding place that were broadcast on Lebanese television.

When the war ended, the army recommended that the efforts to kill Nasrallah be called off because his assassination would lead to international criticism of Israel and would ignite an even more violent war, Maariv reported. However, the government declined to call off the hunt, the newspaper reported.

Nasrallah emerged from hiding on Sept. 22 to address a massive rally in Lebanon celebrating Hezbollah's fight against Israel. Israel army officials determined they could assassinate him with an airstrike during the rally, but dozens of bystanders also would be killed, Maariv reported.

The government decided an airstrike was not worth the risk, and accepted the army's recommendation that it should abandon efforts to kill Nasrallah for the time being, the newspaper reported. However, the government did not make a formal decision regarding Nasrallah.

Jewish Group Snatches Girl in West Bank Raid
Members of a Jewish group this week snatched a 6-year-old girl who was born to a Jewish mother but lived with her Palestinian father in the West Bank.

The members of Yad L'achim, an organization that describes its aim as rescuing ``Jewish souls,'' snatched the girl during a night-time raid on a house in Tulkarm, in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv said.

``We turned to the police and other services, but none of them was able to help us. So we used one of our undercover units,'' Mati Dushenski, a spokesman for Yad L'achim, told Reuters, confirming Wednesday's operation.``We have done many similar operations in the past,'' he said.

A Palestinian newspaper reported that the Jewish gunmen had long beards and had worn Arab headdresses in an apparent effort to disguise themselves as locals.

The girl's father was quoted in Ma'ariv as saying that he and the girl's mother met seven years ago, fell in love and married. The mother converted to Islam and moved to Tulkarm where he had another wife and five children. The mother was said to be preparing a legal suit to maintain custody of the child.

Bullish Iran calls for a fresh start with Britain
Iran's leaders are calling for a new relationship with Britain, at a time when Tehran's international clout has been strengthened by events in Lebanon and Iraq.

"We are now at a new beginning," said Iran's new ambassador to London, Rasoul Movahedian. "The world has been changed, the region has been changed, and it is time for us to think of a new modality of our relationship. There are grounds of common interest for both Iran and Great Britain to work together."

Iran is "concerned about the role played by the British Government in the Lebanon war," Mr Movahedian says. "It has damaged [the] reputation of Britain in the Middle East in general." As for Mr Bush: "We know that Americans are a great nation and they deserve a wiser president.

U.N. expert: Iraq torture may be worse
Torture in Iraq may be worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein, with militias, terrorist groups and government forces disregarding rules on the humane treatment of prisoners, the U.N. anti-torture chief said Thursday.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator on torture, made the remarks as he was presenting a report on detainee conditions at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay as well as to brief the U.N. Human Rights Council, the global body's top rights watchdog, on torture worldwide.

Reports from Iraq indicate that torture "is totally out of hand," he said. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

Saudis plan long fence for Iraq border
Saudi Arabia is pushing ahead with plans to build a fence to block terrorists from crossing its 560-mile border with Iraq - another sign of growing alarm that Sunni-Shiite strife could spill over and drag Iraq's neighbors into its civil conflict.

The barrier, which hasn't been started, is part of a $12 billion package of measures including electronic sensors, security bases and physical barriers to protect the oil-rich kingdom from external threats, said Nawaf Obaid, head of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an independent research institute that advises the Saudi government.

All of Iraq's neighbors, including the Saudis, fear the violence could spill over the borders and threaten their own security. Saudi leaders worry about Sunni extremists returning home to wage war on the U.S.-allied monarchy or Shiite militants trying to stir up trouble among the Shiite minority.

Contracts for building the fence (expected to cost about $500 million and take five to six years to finish) have not been awarded and work is not expected to begin before next year.

Family disputes U.S. raid on Iraqi house
American troops killed eight people, four of them women, after taking heavy fire during a raid Wednesday on a suspected terrorist's house northeast of Baghdad, the U.S. command said. But relatives of the dead disputed the U.S. account, saying their family had nothing to do with any terrorist group.

In all, 23 people died violently around Iraq, including at least 10 killed in a shootout Wednesday night near a Sunni mosque in Hurriyah, a northern neighborhood of Baghdad, police said. The U.S. command also announced the deaths of a Marine and a U.S. soldier, both killed in action Monday in Anbar province.

"This is an ugly criminal act by the U.S. soldiers against Iraqi citizens," Manal Jassim, who lost her parents and other relatives in the attack, told Associated Press Television News.

Brother-in-law of new Saddam judge slain
The brother-in-law of the new judge presiding over Saddam Hussein's genocide trial was killed and his nephew was wounded in a shooting Friday in Baghdad, the latest deadly violence linked to proceedings against the former Iraqi leader.

Kadhim Abdul-Hussein was fatally shot, and his son, Karrar, was wounded in the capital's western Ghazaliyah neighborhood by unidentified assailants, police 1st Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.

It was not immediately clear whether they were targeted because they were related to Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa, a Shiite Muslim who took over the Saddam trial last week, or if it was another of the sectarian attacks that have been plaguing Baghdad.

Al-Khalifa had been deputy to the original chief judge in the trial, Abdullah al-Amiri, who was removed on accusations he was too soft on Saddam. Among other things, al-Amiri had angered Kurdish politicians by declaring in court that Saddam was "not a dictator."

Africa
The African Union
The African Union said it will extend the mandate of a peacekeeping force in Sudan's Darfur region through Dec. 31, avoiding a showdown for now over Sudan's refusal to permit the United Nations to take over the mission.

Sudan's government vehemently opposes the introduction of U.N. forces in Darfur, where fighting between rebels and government-backed militias has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced 2.5 million since 2003. The U.N. has called it the world's worst humanitarian disaster.

Carlyle poised to bid for Libyan oil giant, says son of Gaddafi
Al-Saadi Gaddafi, the son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the country's long-time leader, said Carlyle was one of four or five groups involved in an international tender to buy 100 per cent of Tamoil. It is thought the business will fetch close to $3bn (£2bn).

Tamoil refines, markets and sells the country's oil, and has around 3,000 petrol stations in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain, with a further 150 in Africa.

Carlyle has been known in the past for its links to prominent right-wing US politicians. These include the former US secretary of state James Baker and the former US defense secretary Frank Carlucci, as well as the former British prime minister John Major. None of the men retains positions with the company.

Asia
North Korea rejects talks, blames U.S.
North Korea rejected further talks on its nuclear program and blamed the breakdown in negotiations directly on the United States, claiming Washington wants to rule the world.

In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon said U.S. financial sanctions, imposed shortly after a joint statement was issued at six-nation talks on the North's nuclear program on Sept. 19, 2005, had convinced Pyongyang that the negotiations were not worth pursuing.

"It is quite preposterous that the DPRK, under the groundless U.S. sanctions, takes part in the talks on discussing its own nuclear abandonment," Choe said.

She drinks. She dances. She's a DJ. And she's Japan's new First Lady
She drinks, is passionate about soap operas, dances flamenco and once worked as a radio DJ. Meet Akie Abe, the new First Lady of Japan.

In Junichiro Koizumi, Japan had almost everything it could wish for in a prime minister: big, iconic hairstyles, recognition on the world stage and colourful hobbies, such as his extreme Elvis fandom. But through it all something was missing — the Prime Minister was single and Japan had no first lady to adore or abhor.

But now a nation obsessed with the clothes, jewellery and antics of its women celebrities can breathe a sigh of relief. In Mrs Abe, the vivacious 44-year-old wife of Shinzo Abe, who was confirmed as Prime Minister this week, Japan finally has a rich source of interest and glamour for those times when politics become too dull.

All 24 aboard WWF helicopter killed in Nepal
All 24 people on board a helicopter chartered by conservation group WWF in Nepal were killed after the aircraft crashed in bad weather two days ago, officials said on Monday.

The wreckage of the Russian-made helicopter was found earlier on Monday by a Nepali army team after incessant rains and fog had hampered rescue efforts.

The army helicopter found the crashed aircraft about 2 km southwest of Ghunsa, a village in Taplejung district, about 300 km (190 miles) east of the capital, Kathmandu.

Of the 20 passengers and four crew, 17 were Nepalis. Others included a Finnish diplomat, two Americans, a Canadian and a Swiss-Australian, as well as two Russians.

Thai coup leaders choose interim premier
Thailand's auditor general, Jaruvan Maintaka, told reporters late Thursday that Gen. Surayud Chulanont, 62, a highly regarded retired officer, would lead the country until promised elections next year.

But the government had not made its official announcement yet, and when telephoned Friday Jaruvan denied her comments, telling The Associated Press: "I didn't say so."

Over a 40-year career in the military, Surayud garnered a reputation for effectiveness, tact and incorruptibility. Upon his retirement in 2003, he was appointed to the Privy Council, the top advisory body to the king.

Large demonstrations early this year demanding his ouster reflected a polarized Thai society, and many Thais have greeted the coup as a resolution of a national crisis. The United States, which has decried the coup as a setback to democracy, on Thursday suspended $24 million in assistance to Thailand.

Australasia
Australian PM rejects report that Iraq war raised terror threat
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has dismissed a leaked US intelligence report that found the US-led Iraq war increased the global threat of terrorism, rather than diminishing it.

The Australian leader said terrorism was a global threat long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which some 2,000 Australian troops participated, pointing to the first Bali bombing in 2002, where scores of Australians died.

"I remind you that the 88 Australians who were killed in Bali were murdered before the invasion of Iraq. "And I remind you that the first attack on the World Trade Centre took place in 1993, ten years before the military operation in Iraq."

Saddam wanted foreign cash to bury Kurds
Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq wanted foreign cash to build thousands of concrete bunkers to bury dead Kurds, an Australian inquiry into abuses of the UN oil-for-food programme has heard.

The claims emerged in the sensational finale of a nine-month probe into whether Australian wheat exporter AWB illegally channelled 220 million US dollars to the regime of Saddam, who is on trial in Iraq for the genocide of 182,000 people in a 1987-88 campaign against the Kurds.

In a last-minute twist, a lawyer for the probe revealed that the wheat exporting monopoly could face terrorism-related charges if it knowingly supplied cash that could have funded human rights atrocities.

An internal document appeared to suggest that executives of AWB, which has taken a severe battering at the inquiry, knew the Iraqis wanted foreign currency in 2001 to build 2,000 concrete burial bunkers.

The White House Ignored Urgent Iraq Warning In September 2003

Extracted from The Washington Post
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: September 29, 2006

The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.

Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice.

The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.

Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.

Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.

The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”

The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.

After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.

The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.

In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.

Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.

Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior F.B.I. official.

In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

Olmert Says Israel Will Not Accept A Nuclear Iran

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in comments published Tuesday (http://www.iht.com) that Israel would not allow Iran, which it considers its top enemy, to produce nuclear weapons.

"Israel can't accept the possibility of Iranians having nuclear weapons and we will act together with the international forces, starting with the Americans, in order to prevent it," Olmert told The Jerusalem Post daily in an interview.

Olmert said he thought U.S. President George W. Bush was "absolutely determined" to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Israel, he added, won't accept a situation in which Iran possesses such arms.

"I don't think Israel can be reconciled (to this)," Olmert said. "I don't intend to. This is a danger that is just one thing that we can't afford."

-------------------------------------------------------------------

This isn’t the first time Israel planned to use Nuclear Weapons against its enemies.

In October 1973, with its forces battling to repel invasions by Egypt and Syria, Israel did what had previously been unthinkable: It briefly wheeled its nuclear-capable Jericho-1 missiles out of their secret silos.

That, historians believe, was picked up by U.S. spy satellites and stirred up fears in Washington of a catastrophic flare-up between the Jewish state and the Soviet-backed Arabs. Message received, an urgent American shipment of conventional arms to Israel was quick to follow, and helped turn the war.

So when did the Israelis become a proper nuclear power – why did not the international community stop it from happening? Only one man can answer that question. A brave Israeli who exposed to the world of Israel’s capabilities, he today remains a prisoners within Israel.

Here is an extract of an interview conducted by the Metro Newspaper on Mordechai Vanunu

60 Seconds, London Metro
By James Ellis - Monday, September 19, 2005

Mordechai Vanunu is the technician who blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear weapons programme in 1986. He was lured to Rome by a Mossad honeytrap, kidnapped and sent back to Israel. Released last year after 18 years in prison but placed under state arrest, he cannot leave the country nor speak to foreigners and risked arrest by giving this interview to Metro.

Some people would call you a traitor.
I did what I did for peace, not against Israel. I was punished unjustly and beyond reasonable means. I am still being punished. That is the Jewish state for you. I was born a Moroccan Jew but I soon realised that I could not follow the religion, especially in Israel with its Zionist policies. So, I became a Christian before I was captured.

What kind of reaction do you now get on the streets?
I went to the Old City of East Jerusalem last week and one woman started to call me a bastard and a traitor. I ignore them but I also find myself quite lucky not to have faced that much aggression since my release. My way is not to be afraid and to behave like normal. Those are tricks I learnt while in prison.

Tell us about the tricks.
The way to survive is not to be paranoid. The Israelis tried to make me paranoid for 18 years but did not succeed. I was very stubborn. The guards are stupid, they just follow orders, so I tried to understand what they were trying to achieve and made sure I did the opposite. I was not tortured physically but there was a lot of psychological torture. They can only do physical torture if you are aggressive, so I never gave them the chance.

What were the conditions like?
I had 11 years in solitary and was only able to see the guards and, occasionally, some of my family. They did let me have books, TV and a computer, though. I was also allowed out to exercise for a couple of hours a day.

What was going back to a normal prison population like?
I didn't really. The guards wanted to put me with Jewish prisoners; there were about 40 of them and 600 Palestinians. All the Jews were prison informers who sucked up to the guards. I told them so and told them that they had damaged their pride. That's the kind of thing prison does to people as it's easy to become demoralised. It made me not want to spend time with the Jewish prisoners though, so I mainly stayed in my cell.

Did you suspect the woman in the honeytrap?
No. I really liked her and trusted her.

Are you now more wary of women?
No, that experience did not, and cannot, change my human nature to love and enjoy the friendship of women and their company. In fact, it's the opposite, I want to prove that 18 years in prison has not changed me.

What's the root cause of problems in Israel/Palestine?
Everything is based on religion. The Israelis take Arab places and change their names. They are baptising Palestine into Israel. It makes the Israeli people believe this really is the promised land and that Jews are the chosen people. It's very powerful propaganda, as the younger generation in Israel know nothing of the Arab names for towns and places.

What's your opinion on Israel's security wall around the West Bank?
When I was first released, I'd heard about it but I'd not seen it. When I saw it I was shocked. People should come and see for themselves and see how it violates the human rights of Palestinians on the West Bank. Then they should write to their MPs and ask them to intervene.

Israel cannot speak of peace when it comes to the Wall - it is such an obstacle to the peace process. It does not stop terror and does not even follow the Green Line. It is designed to grab land and make people's lives more difficult. It's putting people in prison without imprisonment.

It's modern, sophisticated psychological warfare and will stop the Palestinians from building their own state. The Israelis ignored the International Court of Justice, which has called it illegal. Perhaps if Tony Blair said something they would respect his views.

The threat of going to prison still hangs over you. Did you achieve anything?
That is another subject to challenge Tony Blair about. It's OK for him to speak about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Iran but not about the ones Israel has. He should especially say something about the programme now it has been revealed that Britain actually helped Israel develop nuclear weapons when it sold 20 tonnes of heavy water to the country in 1958. Previously, Norway and France had been blamed.

What's the solution to the Israel/Palestine problem?
One state, two people. Two states will just make for a permanent conflict as neither side can trust each other. It will also keep a Jewish state and one of apartheid against Palestinians who live in Israel as Israeli Arabs. I want democracy for everyone. The Israelis say they are proud of democracy but we do not have it. Maybe we could start with two states and reunify at a later date. If there was one democratic state, with equal rights for everyone, the Arab world would have no choice but to accept Israel.

Will there ever be peace?
Maybe in 50 years. In about 30 years the Israelis will realise they should destroy the Wall. The suicide bombers and those who promote them will have to realise that their actions have only served the Israeli cause. But the Israeli policies are the ones that have created the suicide bombers. They kill people's families, they take their land and they destroy their houses.

What's next for you?
I have a court appearance coming up for the last time I spoke to a journalist. If I am not sent back to prison I will try and make it to Bethlehem for Christmas. I tried last year but, as it's in a Palestinian-controlled area, I was arrested by the police. Maybe I'll make it this time.

Iran Seen Borrowing Nuclear Strategy From Israel

Taken from Yahoo News
By Bernd Debusmann, Special Correspondent, Wed Sep 27 2006

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In developing its nuclear program Iran is using strategies that allowed its enemy Israel to assemble the Middle East's only atomic arsenal without admitting it had one, according to a leading expert on the Israeli program.

"Whether deliberately or inadvertently, there are elements of resemblance between the way Iran is pursuing its nuclear program today and the way Israel was pursuing its own program in the 1960s," Avner Cohen, author of a landmark study entitled "Israel and the Bomb," in a telephone interview.

"This is a great irony of history but Iranian policymakers and nuclear technocrats may be strategically mimicking the Israeli model," said Cohen, senior research scholar at the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies.

As Cohen sees it, the elements the Israeli and Iranian nuclear programs have in common are secrecy, concealment, ambiguity, double talk and denial.

Iran's probable strategy, he says, is to create the perception of having a secret weapons program, or being close to it, without actually testing a bomb or declaring its possession or impending possession.

That echoes the Israeli program, which began in the late 1950s at the Dimona nuclear complex in the Negev Desert. Since then, Israel has declined to confirm or deny it has nuclear weapons, saying only it would not be the first to "introduce" them into the Middle East.

Over the decades, Israel's attitude has been "let the world guess" or as former Prime Minister Shimon Peres called it, "deterrence by uncertainty."

INTELLIGENCE GAPS
Intelligence agencies are guessing again. The current Washington debate on Iran features widely varying estimates of how close the Islamic state might be to a nuclear weapon.

Iran has consistently denied it is working on a weapons program and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, has found no evidence of one. Last month, the IAEA disputed a U.S. congressional report saying Iran was already producing weapons-grade uranium.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies use equipment from spy satellites and supercomputers to subterranean listening devices. But there are few spies on the ground in Iran, where Washington has had no official presence for more than a quarter of a century.

"The ... nature of the Iranian target poses unique HUMINT (human intelligence) challenges; since American officials have so little physical access to Iran, it is difficult to collect information there," a congressional intelligence report said last month.

"There is a great deal about Iran that we do not know."

That includes, intelligence officials acknowledge, insight into the small circle of religious figures in Iran with the authority to decide whether to pursue building a nuclear bomb and how many resources to devote to the project.

U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte said in February that Iran was 10 years away from a bomb but later talked about "the beginning of the next decade perhaps to the middle of the next decade" - four to ten years.

He added: "Iran is ... a hard (intelligence) target. They engage in denial and deception. They don't want us necessarily to know everything that they are doing. So we don't, for example, know whether there is a secret military program and to what extent that program has made progress."

While there are parallels between Iran now and Israel then, the political context is vastly different. Beginning with Richard Nixon, a succession of U.S. presidents looked the other way as Israel built up its arsenal, historians says. Published estimates of the number of Israel nuclear devices range from 75 to 200.

In contrast, the administration of George W. Bush has said it would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran, a country the president has termed part of an "axis of evil."

Israeli Group Calls Power Plant Attack A 'War Crime'

Extracted from the Independent
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Published: 28 September 2006

The air strike on Gaza's only power station that has left most residents with half their normal electricity supply three months later was a war crime, according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem.

A 34-page report says the cuts in power are: harming health care; drastically limiting water supplies to three hours a day; plunging sew-age treatment to near crisis levels; limiting the mobility of high-rise dwellers by halting lifts; and threatening residents with food poisoning because of interruptions to refrigeration.

The report, entitled Act of Vengeance, says the cuts in power have also seriously disrupted small businesses in Gaza, deepening an economic crisis already far worse than that faced by Gaza's 1.3 million residents at the peak of the Palestinian uprising three years ago.

B'tselem says the Israeli missile strike, which disabled the US-insured power station by destroying six transformers three days after the abduction of the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit by Gaza militants, is in breach of international law because it deliberately targeted a "civilian object".

The agency says Article 54(2) of the Geneva Protocol states that: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population." Article 52 of the protocol says lawful attacks are limited to, "military objects", defined as those, "whose total or partial destruction... offers a definite military advantage".

Arguing that no such advantage resulted from the strike, B'tselem says the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) supported the strike on the power station and three bridges in the Gaza Strip on 28 June by saying that, "the actions are intended to make it difficult and to disrupt the activity of the terror infrastructure related directly and indirectly to the abduction of Cpl Gilad Shalit".

After B'tselem wrote to Israel's Defence Minister about the strikes an official wrote back on behalfof the Judge Advocate General's office saying that "the infrastructure targets... assist the illegal activity of the terror organisations in the Gaza Strip".

The B'tselem report says: "The fact that both the IDF spokesperson and the Judge Advocate General took special care not to mention how the attack on the power plant, or power stoppages resulting from it, would 'disrupt the activity of the terror infrastructure' or the 'launching of Qassam rockets at Israeli communities' speaks for itself."

B'tselem adds that it is still waiting for a reply to a request of the Judge Advocate General to explain the connection. The agency says even if the "doubtful" claim that the attack provided a military advantage, the attack breached international law by being disproportionate.

B'taselem wants Israel to prosecute those responsible for ordering the strike, to fund rehabilitation of the plant, to upgrade electricity supplies from Israel and allow compensatory claims by Gaza's residents.

The IDF said last night said it had no comment to make on the report.

* The Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister, Naser al-Shaer, a senior Hamas official, was freed from detention yesterday by an IDF court. His lawyer said there was no evidence against him.

Amnesty Accuses Pakistan Of Abusing Rights

Taken from Yahoo News on 29.09.06
By MUNIR AHMAD, Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Amnesty International accused Pakistan on Friday of taking hundreds of people into custody on suspicion of terrorism and holding them in secret locations or handing them to U.S. authorities for money.

Pakistan's practice of offering rewards running to thousands of dollars for unidentified terror suspects has led to illegal detentions of innocent people, said Claudio Cordone, senior director of research at Amnesty International.

"Bounty hunters — including police officers and local people — have captured individuals of different nationalities, often apparently at random, and sold them into U.S. custody," he said.
Pakistani government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

The human rights group made its claims in a new report titled "Human Rights Ignored in the War on Terror," which charges Pakistan, a key U.S. ally, with systematic human rights abuses against Pakistani and foreign suspects.

The Amnesty allegations, largely based on interviews with former detainees, come days after the country's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, revealed in his memoir, "In The Line of Fire," that Pakistan had captured 689 al-Qaida terror suspects, and turned over 369 to Washington.

"We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars," Musharraf said, without specifying how much was paid.

During his trip to the United States this week, Musharraf told CNN that CIA agents were working in this South Asian country, particularly in the southwestern city of Quetta, searching for militants with their Pakistani counterparts.

Cordone said many detainees ended up in secret locations or at U.S. prisons including those at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Bagram, Afghanistan.

"Hundreds of people have been picked up in mass arrests, many have been sold to the U.S.A as 'terrorists' simply on the word of their captor, and hundreds have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air base or secret detention centers run by the USA." he said. "The road to Guantanamo very literally starts in Pakistan," Cordone said.

Amnesty said numerous detainees claimed that U.S. agents were present during interrogations that took place in Pakistan. The report also details the alleged "unlawful transfer" of detainees into U.S. custody, including a Pakistani chicken farmer who was accused of being a deputy foreign minister for the Taliban and sent to Guantanamo Bay.

In a statement, Amnesty said such detainees also are at "risk of torture and unlawful transfer to third countries."

Many innocents, including children, have also been rounded up in Pakistan under the pretext of the war on terror, the Amnesty report said.

"Some (children) were arrested alongside their adult relatives, some were themselves alleged to be terror suspects and some were held as hostages to make relatives give themselves up or confess," Amnesty said in the executive summary of the report, which is to be released in Islamabad later Friday.

The report said three women and five children were detained during the July 2004 arrest of al-Qaida suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian, who was allegedly involved in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that killed more than 200 people.

Ghailani was arrested after a gunbattle in Gujrat in eastern Pakistan. Among those reportedly taken into custody with him were a baby and a 13-year-old Saudi boy identified only as Talha.
"Nothing is known about the fate and whereabouts of the women and children," Amnesty said.

The report also detailed the detentions and killings of reporters and activists allegedly targeted by Pakistani authorities. These include Hayatullah Khan, a journalist whose bullet-riddled body was found in the North Waziristan tribal region in June, more than six months after being detained.

Khan disappeared Dec. 5, 2005, days after he photographed shrapnel from a Hellfire missile allegedly fired by an unmanned American aerial drone that killed a wanted Egyptian al-Qaida figure, Hamza Rabia, in the North Waziristan town of Mir Ali.

The photos sparked mass protests across Pakistan and spurred criticism of Islamabad's ties with Washington.

Members of Khan's family accused Pakistan's intelligence service of involvement, but authorities denied that. No one has claimed responsibility.

Amnesty report: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa330352006

Schwarzenegger Signs Global Warming Bill

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday signed into law a sweeping global warming initiative that imposes the nation's first cap on greenhouse gas emissions, saying the effort kicks off ''a bold new era of environmental protection.''

Schwarzenegger called the fight against global warming one of the most important issues of modern times.

''We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late,'' Schwarzenegger said during an address before signing the bill.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and New York Gov. George Pataki, as well as Democratic legislators, joined Schwarzenegger for the high-profile ceremony. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who struck a deal with Schwarzenegger over the summer to develop clean technologies, joined the ceremony via video link.

Blair called the bill-signing ''a proud day for political leadership'' and ''a historic day for the rest of the world, as well.''

California's efforts on global warming have been in the spotlight since Schwarzenegger and the state's legislative Democrats reached an accord last month on the Democrat-authored bill to cut greenhouse gases.

Schwarzenegger called the bill signing a historic occasion. He expected other states, the federal government and even other nations to follow.

Schwarzenegger said it is possible to protect the environment as well as the state's economy. He expects the law will lead to a new business sector in California devoted to developing the technologies industries can use to meet the tougher emission requirements.

''We can save our planet and boost our economy at the same time,'' the governor said.

One man that has been in the news for the last few weeks is Al Gore. The former vice president has been championing the need to reduce pollution and make people aware of Global Warming and its consequences.

Here is a nice interview conducted by the London Metro....

60 SECONDS: Al Gore
Graeme Greene - Thursday, September 14, 2006

Al Gore was the 45th vice president of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001 in the Clinton administration. He ran as the Democratic candidate for president, losing to George W Bush in the contested 2000 election, which many believe Gore won. He is currently starring in global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, out in cinemas now.

How are you enjoying being a film star rather than a politician?
[Laughs] I take that label with a big grain of salt. I’m old enough to know a red carpet is just a rug.

The film’s called An Inconvenient Truth. Inconvenient for who?
The wealthy and powerful polluters - oil companies - and their allies, particularly in American politics, such as George W Bush and Dick Cheney. If they accepted the truth, then they would have a moral obligation to make big changes and they don’t want to. Their strategy is to pretend that the truth is not yet established. It’s a strategy based on dishonesty.

How bad is the situation?
We’re putting 70million tons of pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the Sun inside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop.

Will saving the environment require a radical change in Western lifestyles?
The biggest changes will be in government policies but there’s no doubt that some changes will have to be made by all of us. Many welcome the changes as, in many cases, ‘green’ technology is better. For example, hybrid cars perform better and last longer, so the fact that they pollute less is only one of their benefits. When you switch to the new energy-saving light bulbs, they only need to be changed one tenth as often. As we get deeper into the solving of this crisis, we’ll be confronted with new designs, new architectural solutions and so on.

How fast do we need to act?
Respected scientists are saying we may have as little as ten years to start making significant changes. I think we’ll do it in less time. In fact, I predict Bush will change his position within two years.

It was a mistake to invade Iraq when it had nothing to do with 9/11. I’d have concentrated on finding Bin Laden

Do you think it will become a priority voter issue, above crime, education, healthcare, tax...?
Yes. In America, 85 conservative evangelical ministers supportive of Bush and Cheney just announced they’re changing their position and are calling on their congregations to make this a priority. We have a long way to go but the movement is heading in the right direction.

How much is environmental progress hindered by the main players in the Bush administration having connections with the oil industry?
That’s a big part of the problem in America but I think they’re going to have to change. Their ties to the oil industry help to explain their inaction but the weight of the evidence for global warming is piling up, putting enormous pressure on them to face up to the truth.

Is there still resistance to the argument that we’re damaging the environment?
Fifteen per cent of the population believe the Moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party.

How disappointed were you by the 2000 election result?
I was strongly in disagreement with the Supreme Court’s decision that Bush won. In the American system, there’s no step between a definitive Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. I didn’t choose the latter.

Did you consider it?
[Laughs] I can’t even joke about it. I had to either respect the law, or not. When people say I did the right thing, I quote Winston Churchill: ‘American people generally do the right thing after first exhausting every available alternative.’

Did it take long for you to bounce back
There are millions of people who have been through experiences that were so much worse than mine. Was it difficult? Of course but you move on and make the best of it. One of the truths of the human condition is that we often learn the most from the most difficult experiences.

Many say you won the election.
Oh, there’s no question about that.

You and George Bush in a room, alone for five minutes. What would you do?
We would have a civil conversation.

Not even a few jabs?
No.

Will you run again in 2008?
I haven’t ruled it out 100 per cent but I don’t expect to. I really don’t. I’m not trying to be coy.

Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?
I’m not going to get drawn into a premature discussion of the presidential possibilities.

Are Americans open to the idea of a female president?
Of course. Britain had a female prime minister.

The presidency comes with a few perks. If you had got in, which would have been your favourite abuse of the position?
Air Force One is very nice. I thought about that when I took off my shoes and belt and gave up my toothpaste at Heathrow this morning [laughs].

As president, would you have handled 9/11 differently?
I’d like to think I’d have handled the immediate aftermath as well as Bush did - he rallied the country and invaded Afghanistan to go after Osama bin Laden but he started to make serious mistakes soon after. It was a mistake to invade Iraq when it had nothing to do with 9/11. I’d have concentrated on finding Bin Laden and the people who attacked us and I’d have rallied the American people to become independent of Middle Eastern oil so we could be more in control of our own destiny.

Do you see oil as the main cause of global conflict?
As long as we’re dependent on the most unstable region in the world for the lifeblood of our economy, we’re going to face these repeated dangers. Right now, we’re borrowing enormous amounts of money from China to buy enormous amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia to convert it into enormous amounts of pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s not a good pattern. We need to change every part of it.

Bosnian Serb Leader Jailed For War Crimes

Taken from The Guardian, UK on Wednesday September 27, 2006
By Ian Traynor

A former Bosnian Serb political leader was found guilty today of the extermination, murder and forced expulsion of Bosnia's Muslims in 1992, in the most important war crimes trial to reach a conclusion at the UN tribunal in The Hague dealing with former Yugoslavia.

Momcilo Krajisnik, the former head of the wartime Bosnian Serb parliament and the political right hand of the fugitive genocide suspect Radovan Karadzic, was sentenced to 27 years on five counts of crimes against humanity.

Today's judgment will have a strong impact on the cases against Karadzic and his military commander, General Ratko Mladic, if they are put in the dock. They have been on the run for 11 years.

The judges found that the crimes in which Krajisnik was involved bore features of "genocide", but he was acquitted on two counts of genocide and complicity in genocide.

That finding indicates that the only prospect of obtaining a genocide verdict in the trials of Karadzic and Mladic, if they are captured, relates to the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995.

The verdict concluding the 30-month trial was seen as a watershed because the judges found that an ethnic cleansing campaign that killed tens of thousands and uprooted millions was definitively political, masterminded and implemented by a political clique of Serb leaders.

Krajisnik is the most senior Bosnian Serb political figure to face trial. "Krajisnik wanted the Muslim and Croat populations moved out of Bosnian Serb territories in large numbers, and accepted that a heavy price of suffering, death, and destruction was necessary to achieve Serb domination," said presiding Judge Alphons Orie reading the verdict.

"Immense suffering was inflicted upon the victims. The crimes were committed over a long period, often through brutal methods, with hatred or appalling lack of concern. Krajisnik's role in the commission of the crimes was crucial."

The court has already ruled that the Srebrenica massacre of almost 8,000 Muslim males was an act of genocide, although no one from former Yugoslavia has yet been found guilty of the gravest crime of all.

The most important trial yet held in The Hague - that of the former Serbian and president, Slobodan Milosevic - was inconclusive because the defendant died in March.

The Krajisnik trial was being closely watched because of the defendant's political prominence. He was a founder member of the Serbian Democratic party in Bosnia, the party led by Karadzic that was the key instrument of the mass programme of pogroms and ethnic cleansing in the 1992-95 war. Krajisnik was also speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament during the war and, the judges found, a de facto member of a five-strong Bosnian Serb presidency that devised the programme for the systematic purges of non-Serbs from the territory it controlled.

"The common objective was to ethnically recompose the territories targeted by the Bosnian Serb leadership by drastically reducing the proportion of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats through expulsion," the judges found. "Krajisnik gave the go-ahead for the expulsion programme to commence."

The Bosnian Serb political leadership, the judges found, was guilty of "exterminating" Muslims in 14 municipalities in Bosnia, murdering them in 28, forcibly expelling them from 27, and persecuting them in all 35 municipalities which featured in the indictment.

But the judges found that there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide in the period up to the end of 1992, nine months into the war. Today's verdict was the fourth time that the tribunal in The Hague has thrown out genocide charges, all relating to different parts of Bosnia, suggesting it would have been difficult to obtain a genocide verdict against Milosevic had he lived.

But today's judgment proves that a political clique masterminded and ordered a vast and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in which, according to the most detailed forensic study in Sarajevo, around 70,000 Muslims, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed, and up to two million were uprooted.

Krajisnik, the judges said, was empowered to supervise the police, military, and paramilitary forces carrying out orders from him and his political peers.

"In the early stages the common objective may have been limited to the crimes of deportation and forced transfer, [but] the criminal means very soon grew to include other crimes of persecution, as well as murder, and extermination."

Musharraf Angry at British Report That Pakistan Supported Al-Qaeda & Taleban

Extracted from The Times, UK
By Jenny Booth and agencies, on 28.09.06

General Pervez Musharraf will hold talks with Tony Blair today amid controversy over a British government-commissioned report that claims Pakistan's spy network is too close to Muslim terrorists.

The report by the Defence Academy - a Ministry of Defence thinktank - which was leaked to the BBC's Newsnight programme, is said to claim that, indirectly, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had supported al-Qaeda and the Taleban and aided the Madrid and London bombers.

The policy paper is also reported to propose using military links between British and Pakistani armed forces to persuade Mr Musharraf to step down as leader of the country, accept free elections, withdraw the army from civilian life and dismantle ISI.

The Pakistan President reacted angrily to the findings, particularly the suggestion that his intelligence service had in any way colluded with terrorism.

He told the BBC: "These aspersions against ISI are by vested interests and by those who don’t understand ground realities. I don’t accept them at all and I reject them fully... Absolutely, 200 per cent, I reject it...

"We don’t like anybody advising us to dismantle ISI, least of all the [British] Ministry of Defence."

President Musharraf said that he would raise the issues with Mr Blair when he meets him at Chequers tonight. Mr Blair for his part is expected to try to allay the President's anger.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said that the study in no way represented the views of the ministry or of the Government. "To represent it as such is deeply irresponsible and the author is furious that his notes have been wilfully misrepresented in this manner, "the spokesman said. "Indeed, he suspects that they have been released to the BBC precisely in the hope that they would cause damage to our relations with Pakistan.

"Pakistan is a key ally in our efforts to combat international terrorism and her security forces have made considerable sacrifices in tackling al Qaeda and the Taleban. We are working closely with Pakistan to tackle the root causes of terrorism and extremism."

The leaked British report also "paints a stark picture of failure" on the War on Terror, according to Newsnight, suggesting that the West's fight against extremism was going nowhere with no end in sight.

Echoing a American intelligence report leaked to The New York Times this week, the British document says that the war in Iraq has radicalised Muslims and acted as a "recruiting sergeant" for extremists. President Bush was obliged partially to declassify the report, titled Global Trends in Terrorism, yesterday to quell gloomy rumours about its contents.

The British report’s author, who has a military background and links to MI6, travelled to Pakistan in June with a delegation on a factfinding visit, the BBC programme stated.
He is to have held interviews with the Pakistan army and academics to prepare a report about the Islamic country and the global war on terror. The BBC said it would not name him for security reasons.

The study said: "The wars in Afghanistan and particularly Iraq have not gone well and are progressing slowly towards an as yet specified and uncertain result. The war in Iraq ... has acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists from across the Muslim world." It added: "Iraq has served to radicalise an already disillusioned youth and al-Qaeda has given them the will, intent, purpose and ideology to act."

The document went on to state: "British armed forces are effectively held hostage in Iraq following the failure of the deal being attempted by the Chief of Staff to extricate UK armed forces from Iraq on the basis of doing Afghanistan, and are now fighting and are arguably losing, or potentially losing, on two fronts."

The report states that ISI is supporting terrorism by secretly backing the coalition of religious parties in Pakistan known as the MNA. It said: "The Army’s dual role in combating terrorism and at the same time promoting the MNA, and so indirectly supporting the Taleban through the ISI, is coming under closer and closer international scrutiny."

The British policy of supporting President Musharraf because he provides greater stability is flawed because Pakistan is "on the edge of chaos", the document claimed. It added: "Indirectly Pakistan, through the ISI, has been supporting terrorism and extremism whether in London on 7/7 or in Afghanistan or Iraq."

The report proposed using the military links between the British and Pakistan armies at a senior level to persuade President Musharraf to step down, accept free elections and persuade the army to dismantle the ISI.

General Musharraf was arriving in Britain today after a stay in America which has been marked by controversy. During interviews to publicise his memoirs, serialised by The Times, he claimed that America threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it did not cooperate against the Taleban after the 9/11 attacks.

He has also criticised British intelligence for delays in informing the Pakistan authorities that two of the bombers who carried out the July 7 attacks in London had visited his country just months earlier.

The President said: "I reject it from anybody - MoD or anyone who tells me to dismantle ISI. ISI is a disciplined force, for 27 years they have been doing what the government has been telling them, they won the Cold War for the world.

"Breaking the back of al-Qaeda would not have been possible if ISI was not doing an excellent job."

The President rejected criticism that Pakistan was at the centre of a terrorist network. He told Newsnight that the terrorists’ base was "mainly" Afghanistan "but it has its fallout in Pakistan", he repeated his criticisms of the UK for not doing enough to stop its own homegrown extremists.
The President said: "There’s no doubt that the London [bombers] ... have some way or other come to Pakistan. But let us not absolve the United Kingdom from their responsibilities.

Youngsters who are 25, 30-years-old and who happen to come to Pakistan for a month or two month and you put the entire blame on these two months of visit to Pakistan and don’t talk about the 27 years or whatever they are suffering in your country."

The leaked document was due to form the basis of further meetings to discuss policy towards Pakistan, Newsnight claimed.