Updates from AIJAC

The Phony War is Over

October 8, 2001
Number 10/01 #04

The first military action of the US war against terror, begun by the Sept. 11 terror attacks, have begin in Afghanistan. Below are US President Bush's speech to the nation upon the opening of hostilities, and a pre-recorded message from chief suspect Osama in Laden broadcast on Qatar's Al-Jazeera network.

Following this are two articles about the larger task the US must now pursue as part of the war, one from Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, and another by David Ignatius of the International Herald Tribune on why this is the first "netwar." Finally, there is an interesting article on past failure of the West to cut off terrorist funding, and the importance of this non-military side of the war.

Presidential Address to the Nation

George W. Bush

October 7, 2001

 Good afternoon.  On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.  These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.

Bin Laden statement broadcast on al-Jazeera TV

DUBAI, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Following is the text of a videotaped statement made by Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and broadcast on Qatar-based al-Jazeera television on Sunday:

"Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God. America has been filled with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God that what America is tasting now is only a copy of we have tasted.

Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated. God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme place in heaven, for He is the only one capable and entitled to do so. When those have stood in defence of their weak children, their brothers and sisters in Palestine and other Muslim nations, the whole world went into an uproar, the infidels followed by the hypocrites.

A million innocent children are dying at this time as we speak, killed in Iraq without any guilt. We hear no denunciation, we hear no edict from the hereditary rulers. In these days, Israeli tanks rampage across Palestine, in Ramallah, Rafah and Beit Jala and many other parts of the land of Islam, and we do not hear anyone raising his voice or reacting. But when the sword fell upon America after 80 years, hypocrisy raised its head up high bemoaning those killers who toyed with the blood, honour and sanctities of Muslims.

The least that can be said about those hypocrites is that they are apostates who followed the wrong path. They backed the butcher against the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child. I seek refuge in God against them and ask Him to let us see them in what they deserve. I say that the matter is very clear. Every Muslim after this event (should fight for their religion), after the senior officials in the United States of America starting with the head of international infidels, (U.S. President George W.) Bush and his staff who went on a display of vanity with their men and horses, those who turned even the countries that believe in Islam against us -- the group that resorted to God, the Almighty, the group that refuses to be subdued in its religion.

They (America) have been telling the world falsehoods that they are fighting terrorism. In a nation at the far end of the world, Japan, hundreds of thousands, young and old, were killed and (they say) this is not a world crime. To them it is not a clear issue. A million children (were killed) in Iraq, to them this is not a clear issue. But when a few more than 10 were killed in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Afghanistan and Iraq were bombed and hypocrisy stood behind the head of international infidels, the modern world's symbol of paganism, America, and its allies.

I tell them that these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. May God shield us and you from them.

Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion. The wind of faith is blowing and the wind of change is blowing to remove evil from the Peninsula of Mohammad, peace be upon him.

As to America, I say to it and its people a few words: I swear to God that America will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the army of infidels depart the land of Mohammad, peace be upon him. God is the Greatest and glory be to Islam.

(c) Copyright Reuters Limited 2000. All rights reserved.

A War on Many Fronts . . .

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, October 5, 2001

There is a serious debate raging in Washington about war aims. And then there is the caricature debate in which, on the one hand, you have the reasoned, moderate, restrained doves who want very limited war aims. And on the other hand, you have the unreconstructed hawks -- those daring to suggest that the war on terrorism does not stop with Afghanistan -- aching for blood and continents to conquer.

Let's begin at the beginning. No one, hawk or dove, sought this war. This war was declared on us. The only question is how to prosecute it.

The question is whether after Pearl Harbour our strategic objective should have been (a) destroying the Japanese First Air Fleet that did the deed, or (b) destroying the regime in Tokyo to put Japanese imperialism permanently out of business.

The previous generation had no difficulty making that choice. Nor did the president of this generation in his national address on Sept. 20. "Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them," he said. "And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism." Government. Nations. Not just going cave-to-cave in Afghanistan looking for Osama.

Of course everyone would prefer narrow war aims. They carry less immediate risk and better prospects for success. But that "success" is illusory. It would leave us mortally at risk.

Start with the narrowest objective: finding those responsible for Sept. 11 and "bringing them to justice." Imagine if Osama were delivered to us alive. His trial would become a media circus that would make Camp OJ look like local TV coverage of a bingo fraud. It would become the greatest platform for the dissemination of a murderous ideology since Hitler's beer hall putsch trial in 1924.

The trial would be surreal, probably presided over by more Scottish judges in full wig at The Hague, like those who found one Libyan sub-peon responsible for Pan Am 103. Osama, of course, would not get the death penalty. Which would mean that every week there would be a school bus hijacked and children's throats slit to win his release. He would be out in weeks.

Nor would killing Osama solve the problem. Kill him and another will arise. In fact, we already know who the successor is: Osama's second in command, Ayman Zawahiri.

Moreover, even if the al Qaeda network is taken down, other networks will form -- as long as there are states in the region ready to nurture, protect and use terrorists in their war against America and the West.

Which is why the war on terrorism cannot be just about individuals. It must be about governments. Why, even the State Department, after wobbling, has come around to the idea that getting Osama is not enough. The Taliban regime must fall too.

What happens then? That will depend on whether we succeed against the Taliban. If we do not, then we have lost the war and we will live the rest of our lives in the gas-mask-buying dread we feel today.

But what if we do topple the Taliban? Do we stop there? We cannot. We have entered a new era with a new threat. They're called weapons of mass destruction, but that is a euphemism. These are weapons of genocide. What is at stake is not a repetition of the World Trade Centre but a massacre unseen in human history, possibly millions of Americans dead from biological or chemical warfare.

You do not make weaponized anthrax in Afghan caves. For that you need serious scientists and serious laboratories, like the ones in Baghdad. Richard Butler, the former chief arms inspector in Iraq, tells us that Iraq has weaponized anthrax and VX gas. Syria has chemical weapons. Iran is developing nukes. They all sponsor terrorists.

The threat is unique, but so is the moment. The provocation is clear. The American people are committed. The entire West and even India and Russia are behind us. Now is the time to go after state-sponsored terrorism.

This does not mean invading every country. It means getting some regimes to change policies and others to fall -- whether by economic and diplomatic pressure, internal revolt or, as a last resort, military action.

At a time like this, the imprudent ones are those who simply want to lop off one tentacle of the terrorist threat, the one that perpetrated Sept. 11. Doing that will give us satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, and an entirely false sense of security.

The next attack, catastrophic beyond our imagination, is waiting to happen. If we do not have the will to go after that threat now, these sophisticated weapons will fall into the hands of al Qaeda's comrades and successors. We will be living the 13 days of the Cuban missile crisis -- our last encounter with the real possibility of genocidal attack on America -- for the rest of our lives.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

The Adversary Is Fundamentalist Networks, Not Islam Itself...

David Ignatius

International Herald Tribune, Monday, October 8, 2001

Many thoughtful people worry, even if they don't say so out loud, that the savage suicide attacks of Sept. 11 marked the beginning of a "clash of civilizations," in Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington's phrase - a world war between Islam and the West.

What the world confronts now, however, is not a religious war but something far more diffuse - a "netwar," to use a term coined by two innovative scholars from the Rand Corp.

The "clash of civilizations" analysis is misleading because it treats the Islamic world as a monolith, a modern version of the implacable Ottoman armies marching toward the gates of Vienna. The Islamic world is far more cacophonous and disorganized than that. It is riven by sects and tribes, secularists and fundamentalists, mullahs and military officers.

This fragmented world of Islam has produced some strange alliances. During the Cold War years the United States helped support Islamist forces as a bulwark against radical, secular regimes such as Iraq, Syria and Nasser's Egypt, which were allied with the Soviet Union. The culmination of that strategy was America's support for Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, a move that helped win the Cold War but also created America's new enemies, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

Israel played similar games in Lebanon during the late 1970s and early '80s, attempting to ally with Shiite and Druze Muslims against the secular leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. To say that this strategy backfired is to put it mildly.

It is a noteworthy fact, in this regard, that the first modern war to contain revolutionary Islam was fought not by the United States or Israel but by Iraq in the 1980s against Iran.

The lesson is that nothing in this part of the world turns out quite the way you planned. That is why a clash of civilizations won't happen - the world of Islam is too complicated and shifting a landscape, with too many internal battles. What does seem likely is that we are seeing the first "netwar." That phrase is drawn from a fascinating paper that was posted on the Internet last week by David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla of Rand. (It can be found at www.firstmonday.org.)

The authors coined the term back in 1993 to describe what they saw as the future of warfare. The West's opponents would not be traditional armies or hierarchical political movements, or even organized guerrilla forces, but groups that operated like the discrete but interconnected nodes of an electronic network.

"These protagonists are likely to consist of dispersed organizations, small groups and individuals who communicate, coordinate and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, often without a central command," Mr. Ronfeldt and Mr. Arquilla write in their new paper. Their cells would be everywhere and nowhere - like those of Osama bin Laden's Qaida network. The netwar authors make points that are highly relevant to the new war against terrorism. "Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks," they note. That is a telling point for war planners at the Pentagon, surely one of the most hierarchical organizations ever devised.

"A particular challenge for the cumbersome American bureaucracy will be to encourage deep, all-channel networking among the military, law enforcement and intelligence elements whose collaboration is essential for achieving success," the authors warn.

"It takes networks to fight networks," they insist. In other words, if America and its allies march off in formation into Afghanistan against a dispersed and devious enemy (one that will fly airplanes into buildings and spray biological weapons from crop dusters) they will lose.

Here there is some reason to believe that U.S. planners realize they are fighting a netwar. According to a story by Joseph Fitchett in the International Herald Tribune last week, the battle plan in Afghanistan involves small special-operations units that will use 21st century sensors and communications technology. They will be as pervasive and invisible as their enemy, and presumably as lethal. "Simply put," write the netwar theorists, "the West must start to build its own networks and must learn to swarm the enemy, in order to keep it on the run or pinned down until it can be destroyed."

By focusing so heavily on Mr. bin Laden, the United States may be misunderstanding a key aspect of netwar. The new enemy may prove to be "leaderless." Even if Mr. bin Laden is captured or killed, the network will remain. As soon as one cell is destroyed, another will become active.

The war against terror promises to be long and deadly. That is why defence - the ability to maintain secure perimeters within which people can go about their ordinary lives - will be as important as offence.

Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune

September 30, 2001 The Detroit News.

U.S. ignored money trail

Bush is doomed to fail if he doesn't cut off financing of terrorists

By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Moving the money

In the welter of events following the bombing of the World Trade Center in Feb. 26, 1993, few noticed that the first man arrested, Mohammed Salameh -- the poor, unemployed illegal immigrant -- offered $5 million for bail. Where could he get this kind of money?

The judge refused bail. But was the source of Salameh's offer the same as the one that funded the eight men -- arrested shortly afterward -- who planned to blow up Manhattan's tunnels and bridges and to assassinate public officials? Were the same money sources behind the final attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11?

Now, a frantic search to identify funds belonging to radical Muslim terrorist organizations is on. Osama bin Laden has been accused of being the source for both attacks on the World Trade Center, as well as the Pentagon. President George W. Bush has declared that "Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to organized crime." But it is more than that. Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, is an elaborate international criminal organization and a much bigger threat than the Mafia.

"We have tougher laws against organized crime and drug trafficking than terrorism," Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft told the House Judiciary Committee, on Sept. 24th. And he went on to outline the Bush administration's proposals for changes in U.S. laws dealing with terrorism, incorporating some of the same legislation that has been used against organized crime and drug trafficking organizations for decades.

The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were another wake-up call to the West about terrorism and its elaborate financing. For a long time, there has been evidence that terrorist, international drug trafficking and criminal organizations use the same fund-raising methods to enrich themselves.

Yet no one seemed to connect the dots. And no one seriously tried to crack down on their financing.

Bin Laden's is only one among many hostile international criminal organizations, often state-sponsored, that will do whatever they can to diminish the status of the United States as the only superpower.

According to a State Department report, the Taliban, who are at bin Laden's service, has the advantage of controlling the world's largest heroin production and distribution in the world.

Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the heroin production soared to hundreds of tons each year. In 1999 alone, the world production of heroin was estimated at 500 metric tons; 400 were produced by the Taliban and available to fund bin Laden and his associates worldwide.

First warning

The writing was on the wall on July 5, 1991, when the Bank of England shut down what was the most important Islamic bank in the world, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). This criminal entity was created by the Pakistani Aaga Hassan Abedi "to fight the evil influence of the West"; to help with the creation of the "Islamic Bomb"; to finance all Muslim terrorist organizations; and to launder the money that was generated mostly by illicit drug trafficking and other illegal activities, including arms trafficking.

When BCCI went belly up, we learned from thousands of documents that Abu Nidal -- the notorious Palestinian terrorist organization that now enjoys the hospitality of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah and bin Laden -- had accounts in the bank. By the end of the 1980s, the "special services" provided by BCCI included access to Western humanitarian and international development funds, as well as drug money laundering, secret transfers of cash and bribes.

A "Black Network," a special enforcement unit supported by Abu Nidal and other terrorist organizations, operated from Pakistan. The same Pakistan that harbored bin Laden for many years while its officials told the United States that they didn't know his whereabouts. And the same Pakistan that for decades, even according to the State Department's annual report, had been a major drug trafficking and money laundering center.

Western blindness

Yet, now more importantly, we also discovered that the American and British governments knew and kept the bank open for a long time. The bank "that would bribe God" was able to get away with its criminal activities for decades due to Abedi's clever portrayal of the Muslim nations as victims of Western -- and particularly U.S. -- "imperialism." And when the bank was shuttered, the accusation in the Muslim/Arab and Third World countries was that the U.S. and the United Kingdom governments closed the bank to curtail the growing fiscal power of Muslim countries.

Like Abedi, anti-American, anti-Western terrorist and radical Muslim states and organizations, such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iraq and Iran, use Western democratic rhetoric to their advantage. But it is the wilful blindness, mainly toward the growing volume of drug money laundering, exercised by Western bankers on the one hand and Western politicians on the other, that makes money laundering possible, despite the many laws and international conventions to control this phenomenon.

The BCCI was the first warning to the West. The second warning about the abuse of European and American financial markets by terrorist organizations, as well as their involvement in the illicit arms and drug trade, was made in February 1994 by the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS).

The Organized Crime Unit of the NCIS warned that Middle East terrorist groups and states were targeting the financial centers of London, Frankfurt and other Western countries, and that they favour illegal drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud.

America reacts

The reaction in the United States and other Western countries was a barrage of anti-money-laundering regulations and allegedly better banking supervision. A new anti-money laundering industry sprung up, and billions were spent on the development of new technologies and many instruments to monitor these illegal activities.

But the ease with which bin Laden Inc. was able to prosper and bilk the markets just before their attack on America is strong evidence that the anti-money-laundering measures and insider trading laws are largely ineffective. It also proves that technology alone is not the answer, that human intelligence is necessary to fight this, like other wars.

It also brought home the realization that laws and regulations are not worth the paper they are written on without the political will to implement them.

Testifying on money laundering and terrorism before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs on Sept. 26, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., warned that "the evidence is clear that terrorists are using our own financial institutions against us."

This is not surprising, since the terrorists have been using our democratic system to undermine it and destroy our way of life all along. The naive U.S. attitude that our successful capitalistic democracy, combined with financial and technical aid negotiations, would bring around the radical Muslims failed miserably.

Clinton appeasement

Despite its stated policy of not negotiating with terrorists, the Clinton administration went out of its way to appease a few of the 20th century's most notorious terror groups: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the PLO and the Irish Republican Army. All are heavily involved in the drug trade.

On the eve of the 1993 handshake on the White House lawn between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service estimated the PLO's ill-gotten gains to total between $8 billion to $10 billion, with an annual income of about $1.5 billion to $2 billion from "donations, extortion, payoffs, illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, etc."

Since then, Washington has only aided and abetted the PLO. Since the start of the Oslo process, Arafat has received at least $3 billion more from the United States and the international community, without any serious demand for accountability, according to a report this year to Congress. Arafat, in well-documented instances, has been systematically skimming off portions of these funds, as he has with monies given to him on behalf of the refugees in the camps.

The PLO was in the drug trafficking business almost from the beginning. Operating from Lebanon, under Habash's able leadership and assisted by a PLO-owned shipping company SUMUD, the organization exported hashish, opium, heroin and cocaine, first to Europe and later even to the United States and Australia. In return, it obtained weapons for their war against Israel and the West, and amassed a massive treasure trove. In addition, the PLO and Arafat, who enjoy the financial and strategic support of Hussein and bin Laden, have the distinction of being the organization that promoted "suicide bombers" as a weapon.

Yet the Clinton administration subsidized a multitude of radical Palestinian groups, ranging from Arafat's Fatah branch of the PLO and its military wing, the Tanzim, to the socialist-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by George Habash, all with close ties to bin Laden, Iraq and Iran.

Will Bush repeat errors?

The Bush administration seems destined to repeat the same mistake as its predecessor, dismissing verbal Palestinian leadership attacks on the United States as a need for internal "propaganda." It fails to understand, even after the terrible attacks, that all terrorist organizations are the same.

Thus, it is difficult to comprehend that the administration has just offered to remove Damascus from the State Department's list of terrorist sponsors if Syria joins the U.S.-led coalition against bin Laden. It was the Clinton White House that, despite evidence to the contrary, removed Syria from its list of the drug trafficking countries, to entice Syria to join the "peace process" in the Middle East.

The failure of that process and the compromises the United States has made to maintain an illusion of peaceful prospects had no doubt added to the Muslim radical terrorists' resolve to attack what they see as a naive and vulnerable America.

In another example of self-delusion, in 1999, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suggested a U.S.-led coalition to negotiate with the FARC and supported Colombia President Pastrana's "land for peace" initiative, despite a report from the General Accounting Office that the FARC is running a major international criminal enterprise that, among other things, supplies hundreds of tons of cocaine and heroin to the U.S. black market.

This second Clinton "land for peace" initiative gave half of Colombia to the narco-terrorist FARC, while doing nothing to diminish its violence or appetite to control the rest of the country.

Instead of re-evaluating this misguided policy, the Bush administration, even after declaring war on terrorism, appears to be drifting toward embracing it -- by giving some regimes that sponsor terrorism a pass for their cooperation in a U.S. coalition.

More difficult to comprehend is the omission of two of the most vocal radical Muslim, anti-American terrorist organizations -- Hamas and Hezbollah -- from the presidential order to freeze their assets.

Even if America receives help, it will remain important to follow and cut off the money supply to terrorist groups and their state sponsors. The United States may achieve a short-term goal of finding bin Laden and perhaps unseating the Taliban, but there will remain plenty of anti-U.S. terrorists prepared to take their place.

The West has already had several warnings. If it doesn't try to choke the financing of terrorism now, it invites another tragedy like the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- probably with even deadlier weapons.

Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the New York-based Center for the Study of Corruption and the author of "Evil Money" (Harper Business) and "Narco-Terrorism" (Basic Books).