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THis is for a JDAM attack in InDIA
Thursday July 29, 5:33 PM
India, US sponsor multinational disaster exerciseBy Indo-Asian News Service
http://in.news.yahoo.com/040729/43/2f7um.html
New Delhi, July 29 (IANS) <b>A multinational exercise in dealing with
disasters, co-hosted by India and the US, got under way here
Thursday to help military and civilian officials develop the
capability of immediate response to a crisis.</b>
Representatives from 26 countries are attending Tempest Express-7,
which will continue till Aug 6 and has been organised by India's
Integrated Defence Staff and the US Pacific Command.
This is the first time such a multinational exercise is being held
in India.
A defence ministry spokesman said India would take on the mantle of
a lead nation in the exercise and react to a "<b>disaster situation in
an environment previously affected by internal problems</b>".
"Military planners will look into areas of interoperability and
decision loops in emerging exercise situations," he said.
The exercise is part of growing interaction between the armed forces
of India and the US in the field of UN peacekeeping operations and
will focus on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
Addressing participants at the start of the exercise Thursday, US
Charge d' Affaires Robert Blake said increasing global
interdependence requires greater cooperation between nations on
trans-national matters and all nations must learn from one another's
experiences in humanitarian and disaster-related issues.
The exercise will help develop a capability to rapidly augment and
build upon a core group of multinational planners capable of
conducting immediate planning in the event of a crisis.
<b>
This group will facilitate detailed planning and force commitment
and execution of UN-mandated peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance
or disaster relief missions.</b>
Nations participating in the exercise include Australia, Brunei,
Canada, East Timor, France, Fiji, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan,
South Korea, Madagascar, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mauritius,
Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka,
Thailand, Tuvalu, Britain and Vietnam.
Representatives from India's Centre for UN Peacekeeping, NGOs,
humanitarian assistance experts and other UN organisations have also
been invited.
WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF INTERNATIONAL FORCE FORCING THEIR WAY INSIDE INDIA AFTER AN ATTACK.
THEY MAY ALSO THRAWT A SECOND STRIKE FROM INDIA
Preparing for a nuclear 9/11 commission unless Paki is denuked
The ironic situation is that USA continues to depend on the only terror state in the world to tackle terror. This terror state is a failed state with an intelligence apparatus called ISI which has close ties with terror operatives. Musharraf is playing a clever game of hide-and-seek with commanders of US Central command and with Pres. Bush.
US electoral politics seems to be playing out on terror alerts hoping that such alerts and change of colours from yellow to orange or red will help focus on Bush as the only salvation to fight against terror.
The next Nuclear 9/11 commission may have a different story to tell, despite all the geiger counters in use at strategic locations, that the policy of dancing with the devil may get some headlines but is counter-productive as a strategy to rid the world of islamist terror. There is every guarantee that are more Khan's operating and that the islamic nukes are already in the hands of terror with little that Uncle Sam can do to denuke them. USA continuing to prop up a failed state is a Munich betrayal being played out all over again.
The class action suit by the victims and families of victms of 9/11 should be not against the Government of Pakistan but against the Government of USA for not denuking Pakistan and for allowing the 9/11 terror to operate from the epicenter of terror, which is Pakistan -- assuming that USA has full control over events taking place for an October election surprise, through military-subcontractors called military rulers in Pakistan. 9/11 commission has erred in supporting the ongoing policy of the state department to continue to ride the tiger of the failed state of Pakistan which is cocking-a-snook at the ineptitude of US geopolitical thinking.
Kalyanaraman
Asia Times On line, 4 August 2004
Pakistan produces the goods, again
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - When US Central Command commander General John Abizaid visited Islamabad last week, his first priority was not Pakistan sending troops to Iraq, but the arrest of high-value al-Qaeda targets.
Almost magically, just days later, a Tanzanian al-Qaeda operative, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was arrested in the Punjab provincial city of Gujrat. He is wanted in the United States in connection with the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He was one of the United States' 22 most-wanted terrorists, and had a US$5 million bounty on his head.
Security experts close to the corridors of power in Pakistan tell Asia Times Online that as the November presidential elections in the US draw closer, more such dramatic - and timely - arrests can be expected. The announcement of Ghailani's arrest coincided with the Democratic Party's convention in Boston during which John Kerry was confirmed as challenger to President George W Bush.
According to the experts, Abizaid met with all top Pakistani officials and discussed plans to broaden the net for the arrest of foreigners in Pakistan from South Waziristan to all of the other six tribal agencies, as well as to the southwestern province of Balochistan.
The Pakistan army has launched two major offensives in South Waziristan this year in an attempt to capture foreign militants, managing only to stir resentment from the local tribespeople.
Already, though, under intense pressure from the US, Pakistan has handed over as many as 350 suspected al-Qaeda operators into US custody. Most have been low-ranking, but some important names are, according to Asia Times Online contacts, being held in Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) safe houses to be presented at the right moment.
The contacts say that Pakistan's strategic circles see the high-value al-Qaeda operators as "bargaining chips" to ensure continued US support for President General Pervez Musharraf's de facto military rule in Pakistan. Had Pakistan handed over top targets such as Osama bin Laden, his deputy Dr Aiman al-Zawahir, Tahir Yuldash (leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) and others - assuming it was in a position to do so - the military rulers would have lost their usefulness to the US in its "war on terror".
Information accessed by Asia Times Online traces the arrest of Ghailani to the earlier apprehension of one Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, alias Abu Talha. Khan, a computer engineer in his mid-20s, was arrested in Lahore. He had been wanted for some time and was thought to have been hiding in South Waziristan.
Documents, computers and reports allegedly uncovered in Khan's arrest led US officials this week to warn against a possible al-Qaeda attack against financial institutions in the US. However, subsequently some analysts in the US have claimed that much of the information that resulted from the arrest was compiled before the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said Monday in an interview on PBS that surveillance reports apparently collected by al-Qaeda operatives had been "gathered in 2000 and 2001". But she added that information may have been updated as recently as January.
As one observer in Karachi commented, "Every second jihadi I know has a computer and is always busy checking information on buildings in the US - their height and width and their possible vulnerable areas - and it is their routine practice to make plans with computer graphics to bring down US buildings to the ground."
Nevertheless, in response to the perceived threat, US authorities have launched a huge search for terrorist operatives who might have helped conduct surveillance of the five main financial institutions in New York City, Newark, and Washington - Citigroup, the New York Stock Exchange, Prudential, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
According to news reports, tens of thousands of delivery records to the buildings in question will be scrutinized. Investigators also will question those who have had access to the architectural plans of the institutions' largest buildings, and former employees.
Khan, from Karachi, initially belonged to the banned Jaish-i-Mohammed, a militant outfit fighting in Kashmir. As a Jaish member, he went to Afghanistan during the Taliban period (1996-2001), where he acquired extensive military training in Arab camps and became acquainted with several prominent Arab fighters. He also met Amjad Hussain Farooqui, a member of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a banned group of sectarian assassins who target Shi'ite Muslims. At this point Khan entered the underworld.
After the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, many foreign al-Qaeda members such as Ghailani fled to Pakistan's tribal areas, where they either made their way on to their home countries or decided to stay.
Ghailani ended up in South Waziristan, where he remained, but in the face of the two Pakistan army operations there, he was forced to flee, and with the help of Khan and others ended up in Gujrat. Khan's attempts to contact a travel agent in Lahore to smuggle Ghailani and his family out of the country apparently led to his arrest - his satellite telephone calls were intercepted by intelligence agencies. After two weeks of interrogation, Khan pointed the way to Ghailani's hideout.
The next 'target'?
Dr Aafia Siddiqui, in her mid-30s, has a PhD in neurological sciences from the US. She is believed to have Pakistani and US nationality. She is wanted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as an "al-Qaeda operative and facilitator" and in connection with "possible terrorist threats" in the US. September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (caught in Pakistan) is believed to have told authorities about Aafia.
She disappeared, with her three children, a few months ago in Pakistan. Asia Times Online sources claim that she is in the custody of the ISI. All calls by her family and humanitarian groups for her to be produced in court have been ignored.
Acquaintances of Aafia say she was an ISI contact and played an active role as a "relief worker" in Chechnya and Bosnia - a role the government now does not want to reveal. She has also been connected with different Arab non-governmental organizations in the US, through which she also helped to supply aid and funds to Chechens.
However Aafia's case turns out, doubtless a number of al-Qaeda operators are already in detention in Pakistan to be produced when and as necessary.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FH04Df03.html
Aug 2, 2004
Arrests in Pakistan Show Progress, but Also That the Country Remains a Refuge for Terrorists By Paul Haven Associated Press Writer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Vital information gleaned from the arrests of a senior al-Qaida terrorist and a militant computer expert highlights the progress Pakistan is making in the fight against terrorism. But it also illustrates that this Islamic nation remains a refuge for Osama bin Laden's group, where the most wanted men in the world can hide out for years.
"We know that al-Qaida is here. They have their sleeper cells in Pakistan, and we are trying to eliminate them," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat told The Associated Press.
Intelligence agents found plans for new attacks in e-mails on the computer of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian arrested July 25 after a 12-hour gunbattle in the eastern city of Gujrat, said Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed.
"We got a few e-mails from Ghailani's computer about (plans for) attacks in the U.S. and U.K.," he told the AP, adding that the information has been shared with Pakistan's allies - a reference to the United States.
Officials also are getting a wealth of information from a militant computer and communications expert arrested in an earlier raid in July. The man would send messages using code words to al-Qaida suspects, a Pakistani intelligence official told the AP on condition of anonymity.
Ahmed confirmed the arrest but refused to give details.
"He is a very wanted man, but I cannot say his name now," the information minister said. He said the man was a militant, but refused to say if he was part of al-Qaida.
Pakistani officials would not speculate on whether the information from Ghailani and the computer expert is what prompted Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to issue a warning Sunday about a possible al-Qaida attack on financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J.
However, a U.S. counterterrorism official said Sunday's warning stems in large part from Pakistan's capture several weeks ago of an al-Qaida operative.
The operative was privately identified as Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, also known as Abu Talha, said to be a communications expert. The Pakistani intelligence official said, however, that the name was an alias; he would not say what the man's real name was.
At his news conference, Ridge specifically thanked Pakistan for its help in the war on terror.
The arrests of both men have raised hopes that more top suspects might soon fall. Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed hiding in the mountainous no-man's land between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But a second Pakistani intelligence official who was involved in the arrest of Ghailani cautioned against unrealistic expectations.
"Naturally, these interrogations help to gain an understanding of their network ... but that doesn't mean that we are closing in on bin Laden," he said.
Bin Laden and his deputy have spent nearly three years avoiding a dragnet by the 20,000-strong U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan and a 70,000-member Pakistani force on this side of the border.
Pakistan has arrested more than 550 al-Qaida suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks, turning most of them over to the United States. Among the higher-profile arrests are Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - all senior aides to bin Laden.
But that success is the silver lining to a dark cloud - this nation of 150 million remains a favorite hiding place for terrorists - from the teeming metropolis of Karachi, to the tribal regions along the Western border with Afghanistan, to towns like Gujrat in eastern Punjab.
Al-Qaida is believed behind the Friday attempt to assassinate prime minister-designate Shaukat Aziz, as well as two bids to take out Musharraf in March. Both men survived, but more than two dozen Pakistanis died.
"When they tried to flush the terrorists out of Afghanistan they came to Pakistan. When they flushed them from the tribal regions, they spread all over the country," said Talat Masood, a security analyst and former Pakistani general. "What we are facing now is very complex. It is one of the greatest terrorist challenges and it is not going to end soon."
Despite the government's strong support of the United States, the nation is home to dozens of homegrown militant groups - some with roots in the Kashmir conflict, others that sprung up during the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
They and their sympathizers have helped al-Qaida fugitives hide, sometimes for years.
Ghailani arrived in Pakistan on a Kenyan Airlines flight to Karachi on Aug. 6, 1998, a day before the bombs went off in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. He was a ghost until his arrest nearly six years later, apparently as he was planning to flee the country.
----
AP reporter Munir Ahmad in Islamabad and Zarar Khan in Karachi contributed to this report.
AP-ES-08-02-04 1338EDT
This story can be found at: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBQM3ZVEXD.html
See also: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/s...sp?story=547431
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/internat...print&position=
August 4, 2004 Pakistan Allows Taliban to Train, a Detained Fighter Says By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 - For months Afghan and American officials have complained that even while Pakistan cooperates in the fight against Al Qaeda, militant Islamic groups there are training fighters and sending them into Afghanistan to attack American and Afghan forces.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5594697/site/newsweek/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/internat...sia/03laho.html The failure of Pakistan to act in the tribal areas until recently has led some Pakistani and American analysts to question the seriousness of General Musharraf's efforts, but Pakistani officials insisted Monday that the two recent arrests were evidence of their commitment and success in fighting terrorism.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1091397...2779893,00.html Take a Hard Look at Terror Allies By KATHY GANNON August 2, 2004 While its Pakistani partners keep the U.S.-led coalition busy hundreds of miles to the south, Taliban and al Qaeda move with relative freedom further north, and in some of Pakistan's most congested cities, including Quetta and Karachi.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/s...sp?story=547641 Then there are those who argue that Bin Laden may be being protected by rogue elements within Pakistan's own security forces. Recent press reports in Pakistan pointed out the disturbingly high number of militant attacks in which members of the security forces have been involved. The Pakistani military and intelligence establishment worked for years alongside Bin Laden's organisation in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and if the current leadership is thought to be sincere in the hunt for Bin Laden, some of the lower ranking are believed to remain highly sympathetic to his cause.
Bin Laden is still a popular figure in Pakistan. T-shirts bearing his picture are still on sale. Karachi's second-highest-selling Urdu language newspaper, the Daily Ummat, prints his picture on its masthead every day, together with an extract from one of his speeches. "If Bin Laden is caught or killed in Pakistan, he will be taken to Afghanistan and they will say it was done by the American forces," says Yusufzai, adding that President Musharraf could face serious unrest if Bin Laden were known to have been caught in Pakistan.
But there are those in Pakistan who suggest it is not even in Musharraf's interest to capture Bin Laden, if he is in the country. "There is a view among some that they don't really want to pick OBL up, because if they do, then Musharraf would lose his utility to the US," says Sherry Rehman, an opposition member of parliament.
American funds are flowing to Pakistan. The country has even been named as a major non-Nato ally. Find Bin Laden, the argument goes, and all that could dry up. But Pakistan is facing problems. The pressure from the US is increasing. Pakistan got some 200 mentions in the September 11 commission's report - more than Iran and Iraq combined. Congress is putting Pakistan's efforts in the "war on terror" under scrutiny.
And now it seems that al-Qa'ida is declaring war on Pakistan, with last week's attempted assassination of the prime minister-designate, Shaukat Aziz, in a suicide bombing that a group claiming to be affiliated to al-Qa'ida said it carried out. Are the hunted becoming the hunter? Shortly before his death, Nek Mohammed threatened attacks inside Pakistani cities. President Musharraf has accused al-Qa'ida of being behind two of the recent assassination attempts against him, and Dr Zawahiri called for his killing in his own recent tape recording.
And all the while the world's most wanted man remains silent, hidden. The only thing for sure is that if he has been killed or captured, we'll hear of it well in time for November's elections. But don't bet on it yet.
The Atlantic Monthly | September 2004
Inside Al-Qaedaâs Hard Drive
Budget squabbles, baby pictures, office rivalriesâand the path to 9/11
by Alan Cullison
Sidebar:
"Tips for the Traveling Terrorist"
"Underwear should be the normal type that people wear, not anything that shows you're a fundamentalist." Suggestions lifted from the laptop on how to pass unnoticed in the West.
In the autumn of 2001 I was one of scores of journalists who ventured into northern Afghanistan to write about the U.S.-assisted war against the Taliban. As I crossed the Hindu Kush to cover the fighting for The Wall Street Journal, my journey took what looked like a fatal turn: the battered black pickup truck I had rentedâwhich in its better years had been a war wagon for Afghan gunmenâlost its brakes as it headed down a steep mountain path, careened along the edge of a gorge, slammed headlong into the back of a Northern Alliance fuel truck that was creeping down the mountain, and slid to rest on its side in the middle of the road. My bags spilled down the mountainside or were crushed beneath the pickup.
Fortunately, none of the pickup's occupantsâa Japanese journalist, two Afghan interpreters, the driver, and a shoeless boy who had been riding on the roof and wiping dust from the windshieldâwas seriously injured. Only my interpreter, a Russian-speaking Afghan, seemed to be hurt; he clutched his side and said that something had hit him in the ribs. We nursed some cuts and bruises, and climbed aboard a Northern Alliance truck carrying wooden crates of Kalashnikov ammunition.
Sidebar:
"Letters From a Young Martyr"
Farewell letters and poems found on the laptop from a young man selected for a suicide mission.
The wreck might have been just a minor bump in my travels through a land where inhabitants display a whoopsy-daisy attitude toward fatal accidents and killings. But a day later, after bedding down forty miles north of Kabul, I asked my interpreter what had hit him in the ribs. He said it was my computer, which he'd always held in his lap for safekeeping. I got up and removed the computer from its black bag, opened its lid, and saw that the screen was smashed. In the coming weeks, living in a fly-infested hut, I scrawled stories by candlelight with a ballpoint pen and read dispatches to my editors over a satellite phone.
That crash became memorable for reasons I never expected. When the Taliban's defenses crumbled, in November of 2001, I joined a handful of malnourished correspondents who rushed into Kabul and filed stories about the city's liberation. We pounced like so many famished crows on the first Western staples we had seen since leaving home: peanut butter, pasteurized milk, and canned vegetables, all of which we found on Chicken Street, Kabul's version of a shopping district. We raided the houses where Arab members of al-Qaeda had been holed up during their stay in Afghanistan, grabbing whatever documents were left in their file cabinets. But unlike most correspondents, I needed to spend some time getting to know Kabul's computer dealers, because I wanted to replace my laptop. It took about an hour to shake hands with all of them.
The regime that had forbidden television and kite-flying as un-Islamic had also taken a dim view of computers. I searched through the bazaars and found Soviet-era radios and television sets, but the electronics dealers had never even seen a computer, and certainly didn't know how to wire one to a satellite phone.
I found my first computer dealer in a drafty storefront office in downtown Kabul, near the city's central park. He worked alone and didn't have a computer in his office, because, he said, he couldn't afford one. He bragged that he was the sole computer consultant for the Afghan national airline, Ariana. This impressed me deeplyâuntil I learned that Ariana had only one computer and only one working airplane.
He told me about another dealer, who ran a computer training school on the second floor of a building overlooking the park. I fumbled my way up a decrepit, unlit stairwell and along a dusty hallway to an office: a long room with a threadbare couch and a desk with a computer on it.
The second dealer told me that he had serviced computers belonging to the Taliban and to Arabs in al-Qaeda. I forgot about my own computer problems and hired him to search for these computers. Eventually he led me to a semiliterate jewelry salesman with wide-set eyes and a penchant for gold chains. This was the man who that December would take $1,100 from me in exchange for two of al-Qaeda's most valuable computersâa 40-gigabyte IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop. He had stolen them from al-Qaeda's central office in Kabul on November 12, the night before the city fell to the Northern Alliance. He wanted the money, he said, so that he could travel to the United States and meet some American girls.
y acquisition of the al-Qaeda computers was unique in the experience of journalists covering radical Islam. In the 1990s the police had seized computers used by al-Qaeda members in Kenya and the Philippines, but journalists and historians learned very little about the contents of those computers; only some information from them was released in U.S. legal proceedings. A much fuller picture would emerge from the computers I obtained in Kabul (especially the IBM desktop), which had been used by al-Qaeda's leadership.
On the night before Kabul fell, Taliban officials were fleeing the city in trucks teetering with their personal effects. The looter who sold me the computers figured that al-Qaeda had fled as well, so he crawled over a brick wall surrounding the house that served as the group's office. Finding nobody inside, he took the two computers, which he had discovered in a room on the building's second floor. On the door of the room, he said, was the name of Muhammad Atefâal-Qaeda's military commander and a key planner of 9/11. Each day, he said, Atef would walk into the office carrying the laptop in its black case. The looter knew he had something good.
So did the U.S. military when it heard what I had bought. The offices of The Wall Street Journal, just across from the World Trade Center, had been destroyed on 9/11. Our New York staff, which was working out of a former warehouse in Lower Manhattan, was acutely aware of potential threats; it was carefully screening mail for anthrax. Thinking that the computers might hold information about future attacks, my editors called the U.S. Central Command, which sent three CIA agents to my hotel room in Kabul. They said they needed the computers immediately; I had time to copy only the desktop computer before handing them both over. Atef's laptop was returned to me two months later, by an agent named Bert, at a curbside in Washington, D.C. The CIA said that the drive had been almost empty, but I've always wondered if this was true.
The desktop computer, it turned out, had been used mostly by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy. It contained nearly a thousand text documents, dating back to 1997. Many were locked with passwords or encrypted. Most were in Arabic, but some were in French, Farsi, English, or Malay, written in an elliptical and evolving system of code words. I worked intensively for more than a year with several translators and with a colleague at The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Higgins, interviewing dozens of former jihadis to decipher the context, codes, and intentions of the messages for a series of articles that Higgins and I wrote for the Journal in 2002.
What emerged was an astonishing inside look at the day-to-day world of al-Qaeda, as managed by its top strategic plannersâamong them bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Atef, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, all of whom were intimately involved in the planning of 9/11, and some of whom (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri) are still at large. The documents included budgets, training manuals for recruits, and scouting reports for international attacks, and they shed light on everything from personnel matters and petty bureaucratic sniping to theological discussions and debates about the merits of suicide operations. There were also video files, photographs, scanned documents, and Web pages, many of which, it became clear, were part of the group's increasingly sophisticated efforts to conduct a global Internet-based publicity and recruitment effort.
The jihadis' Kabul office employed a zealous managerâAyman al-Zawahiri's brother Muhammad, who maintained the computer's files in a meticulous network of folders and subfolders that neatly laid out the group's organizational structure and strategic concerns. (Muhammad's system fell apart after he was arrested in 2000 in Dubai and extradited to Egypt.) The files not only provided critical active intelligence about the group's plans and methods at the time (including the first leads about the shoe bomber Richard Reid, who had yet to attempt his attack) but also, in a fragmentary way, revealed a road map of al-Qaeda's progress toward 9/11. Considered as a whole, the trove of material on the computer represents what is surely the fullest sociological profile of al-Qaeda ever to be made public.
Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda's strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government; amid the group's penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries, which are manifest in vitriolic memos between Kabul and cells abroad. Al-Qaeda's leaders worried about a military response from the United States, but in such a response they spied opportunity: they had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and they fondly remembered that war as a galvanizing experience, an event that roused the indifferent of the Arab world to fight and win against a technologically superior Western infidel. The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent. Afghanistan would again become a slowly filling graveyard for the imperial ambitions of a superpower.
Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.
LIFE IN AFGHANISTAN
l-Qaeda's leaders began decamping to Afghanistan in 1996, after the group was expelled from Sudan. Ayman al-Zawahiri, at the time also the leader of the militant Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, issued a call for other Islamists to follow, and in one letter found on the computer described Afghanistan as a "den of garrisoned lions." But not all Arabs were happy with the move. Afghanistan, racked by more than a decade of civil war and Soviet occupation, struck many as unfit to be the capital of global jihad. Jihadis complained about the food, the bad roads, and the Afghans themselves, who, they said, were uneducated, venal, and not to be trusted.
In April of 1998 a jihadi named Tariq Anwar visited Afghanistan for a meeting of Islamists and wrote back to his colleagues in Yemen about his impressions.
To: Al-Qaeda Members in Yemen
From: Tariq Anwar
Folder: Outgoing MailâTo Yemen
Date: April 1998
I send you my greetings from beyond the swamps to your country, where there is progress and civilization ⦠You should excuse us for not calling. There are many reasons, the most important of which is the difficulty of calling from this country. We have to go to the city, which involves a number of stages. The first stage involves arranging for a car (as we don't have a car). Of course, we are bound by the time the car is leaving, regardless of the time we want to leave. The second stage involves waiting for the car (we wait for the car, and it may be hours late or arrive before the agreed time). The next stage is the trip itself, when we sit like sardines in a can. Most of the time I have 1/8 of a chair, and the road is very bad. After all this suffering, the last stage is reaching a humble government communication office. Most of the time there is some kind of failureâeither the power is off, the lines out of order, or the neighboring country [through which the connection is made] does not reply. Only in rare cases can we make problem-free calls â¦
The Arabs' general contempt for the backwardness of Afghanistan was not lost on the Taliban, whose leaders grew annoyed with Osama bin Laden's focus on public relations and the media. Letters found on the computer reveal that relations between the Arabs and the Taliban had grown so tense that many feared the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, would expel the Arabs from the country. A dialogue to resolve the two sides' differences was carried on at the highest levels, as the memo below, from two Syrian operatives, demonstrates. ("Abu Abdullah" is a code name for bin Laden; "Leader of the Faithful" refers to Mullah Omar, in his hoped-for capacity as the head of a new Islamic emirate, based in Afghanistan.)
To: Osama bin Laden
From: Abu Mosab al-Suri and Abu Khalid al-Suri
Via: Ayman al-Zawahiri
Folder: Incoming MailâFrom Afghanistan
Date: July 19, 1999
Noble brother Abu Abdullah,
Peace upon you, and God's mercy and blessings.
This message [concerns] the problem between you
and the Leader of the Faithful â¦
The results of this crisis can be felt even here in Kabul and other places. Talk about closing down the camps has spread. Discontent with the Arabs has become clear. Whispers between the Taliban with some of our non-Arab brothers has become customary. In short, our brother Abu Abdullah's latest troublemaking with the Taliban and the Leader of the Faithful jeopardizes the Arabs, and the Arab presence, today in all of Afghanistan, for no good reason. It provides a ripe opportunity for all adversaries, including America, the West, the Jews, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Mas'ud-Dostum alliance, etc., to serve the Arabs a blow that could end up causing their most faithful allies to kick them out ⦠Our brother [bin Laden] will help our enemies reach their goal free of charge! â¦
The strangest thing I have heard so far is Abu Abdullah's saying that he wouldn't listen to the Leader of the Faithful when he asked him to stop giving interviews ⦠I think our brother [bin Laden] has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause â¦
The only solution out of this dilemma is what a number of knowledgeable and experienced people have agreed upon â¦
Abu Abdullah should go to the Leader of the Faithful with some of his brothers and tell them that ⦠the Leader of the Faithful was right when he asked you to refrain from interviews, announcements, and media encounters, and that you will help the Taliban as much as you can in their battle, until they achieve control over Afghanistan. ⦠You should apologize for any inconvenience or pressure you have caused ⦠and commit to the wishes and orders of the Leader of the Faithful on matters that concern his circumstances here â¦
The Leader of the Faithful, who should be obeyed where he reigns, is Muhammad Omar, not Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden and his companions are only guests seeking refuge and have to adhere to the terms laid out by the person who provided it for them. This is legitimate and logical.
The troubled relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban hadn't interfered with global plans. Al-Qaeda had developed a growing interest in suicide operations as an offensive weapon against Americans and other enemies around the world. On August 7, 1998, the group simultaneously struck the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with car bombs, killing more than 220 people and wounding more than 4,000. Concerned that inflicting such heavy casualties on civilians would tarnish its image even among its supporters, al-Qaeda actively sought religious and legal opinions from Islamic scholars around the world who could help to justify the killing of innocents. The following letter is presumably a typical request for theological guidance.
To: Unknown
From: Unknown
Folder: Outgoing Mail
Date: September 26, 1998
Dear highly respected _______
â¦I present this to you as your humble brother ⦠concerning the preparation of the lawful study that I am doing on the killing of civilians. This is a very sensitive caseâas you knowâespecially these days â¦
It is very important that you provide your opinion of this matter, which has been forced upon us as an essential issue in the course and ideology of the Muslim movement â¦
[Our] questions are:
1- Since you are the representative of the Islamic Jihad group, what is your lawful stand on the killing of civilians, specifically when women and children are included? And please explain the legitimate law concerning those who are deliberately killed.
2- According to your law, how can you justify the killing of innocent victims because of a claim of oppression?
3- What is your stand concerning a group that supports the killing of civilians, including women and children?
With our prayers, wishing you success and stability.
SECRET OPERATIONS
s al-Qaeda established itself in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and began managing international operations of ever increasing complexity and audacity, the group focused on ensuring the secrecy of its communications. It discouraged the use of e-mail and the telephone, and recommended faxes and couriers. The electronic files reflect the global nature of the work being done; much of the correspondence was neatly filed by country name. Messages were usually encrypted and often couched in language mimicking that of a multinational corporation; thus Osama bin Laden was sometimes "the contractor," acts of terrorism became "trade," Mullah Omar and the Taliban became "the Omar Brothers Company," the security services of the United States and Great Britain became "foreign competitors," and so on. Especially sensitive messages were encoded with a simple but reliable cryptographic system that had been used by both Allied and Axis powers during World War IIâa "one-time pad" system that paired individual letters with randomly assigned numbers and letters and produced messages readable only by those who knew the pairings. The computer's files reveal that in 1998 and 1999, when a number of Islamists connected to al-Qaeda were arrested or compromised abroad, the jihadis in Afghanistan relied heavily on the one-time-pad system. They also devised new code names for people and places.
Letters sent from and to Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1999 contain coded language typical of many files on the computer; they also show the degree to which al-Qaeda operatives abroad were being exposed and detained because of their efforts. In the first of the following two letters much of the code remains mysterious.
To: Yemen Cell Members
From: Ayman al-Zawahiri
Folder: Outgoing MailâTo Yemen
Date: February 1, 1999
⦠I would like to clarify the following with relation to the birthday [probably an unspecified attack]:
a) Don't think of showering as it may harm your health.
b) We can't make a hotel reservation for you, but they usually don't mind making reservations for guests. Those who wish to make a reservation should go to Quwedar [a famous pastry shop in Cairo].
c) I suggest that each of you takes a recipient to Quwedar to buy sweets, then make the hotel reservation. It is easy. After you check in, walk to Nur. After you attend the birthday go from Quwedar to Bushra St., where you should buy movie tickets to the Za'bolla movie theater.
d) The birthday will be in the third month. How do you want to celebrate it in the seventh? Do you want us to change the boy's birth date? There are guests awaiting the real date to get back to their work.
e) I don't have any gravel [probably ammunition or bomb-making material].
To: Ayman al-Zawahiri
From: Unknown
Folder: Incoming MailâFrom Yemen
Date: May 13, 1999
Dear brother Salah al-Din:
⦠Forty of the contractor's [bin Laden's] friends here were taken by surprise by malaria [arrested] a few days ago, following the telegram they sent, which was similar to Salah al-Din's telegrams [that is, it used the same code]. The majority of them are from here [Yemen], and two are from the contractor's country [Saudi Arabia] â¦
We heard that al-Asmar had a sudden illness and went to the hospital [prison]. He will have a session with the doctors [lawyers] early next month to see if he can be treated there, or if he should be sent for treatment in his country [probably Egypt, where jihadis were routinely tortured and hanged] â¦
Osman called some days ago. He is fine but in intensive care [being monitored by the police]. When his situation improves he will call. He is considering looking for work with Salah al-Din [in Afghanistan], as opportunities are scarce where he is, but his health condition is the obstacle.
Though troubled by arrests abroad, the jihadis had time and safety for contemplation in Afghanistan. In 1999 al-Zawahiri undertook a top-secret program to develop chemical and biological weapons, a program he and others referred to on the computer as the "Yogurt" project. Though fearsome in its intent, the program had a proposed start-up budget of only $2,000 to $4,000. Fluent in English and French, al-Zawahiri began by studying foreign medical journals and provided summaries in Arabic for Muhammad Atef, including the one that follows.
To: Muhammad Atef
From: Ayman al-Zawahiri
Folder: Outgoing Mailâ To Muhammad Atef
Date: April 15, 1999
I have read the majority of the book [an unnamed volume, probably on biological and chemical weapons] ⦠[It] is undoubtedly useful. It emphasizes a number of important facts, such as:
a) The enemy started thinking about these weapons before WWI. Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials â¦
b) The destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons.
c) A germ attack is often detected days after it occurs, which raises the number of victims.
d) Defense against such weapons is very difficult, particularly if large quantities are used â¦
I would like to emphasize what we previously discussedâthat looking for a specialist is the fastest, safest, and cheapest way [to embark on a biological- and chemical-weapons program]. Simultaneously, we should conduct a search on our own ⦠Along these lines, the book guided me to a number of references that I am attaching. Perhaps you can find someone to obtain them â¦
The letter goes on to cite mid-twentieth-century articles from, among other sources, Science, The Journal of Immunology, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and lists the names of such books as Tomorrow's Weapons (1964), Peace or Pestilence (1949), and Chemical Warfare (1921).
Al-Zawahiri and Atef appear to have settled on the development of a chemical weapon as the most feasible option available to them. Their exchanges on the computer show that they hired Medhat Mursi al-Sayed, an expert to whom they refer as Abu Khabab, to assist them. They also drew up rudimentary architectural plans for their laboratory and devised a scheme to create a charitable foundation to serve as a front for the operation. According to other sources, Abu Khabab gassed some stray dogs at a testing field in eastern Afghanistan, but there is no indication that al-Qaeda ever developed a chemical weapon it could deploy.
THE BANALITY OF OFFICE LIFE
lthough al-Qaeda has been mythologized as a disciplined and sophisticated foe, united by a deadly commonality of purpose and by the wealth of its leader, internal correspondence on the computer reveals a somewhat different picture. In the years leading up to 9/11 the group was a loose confluence of organizations whose goals did not meld easily, as was seen in both tactical discussions (for example, should they attack Arab governments, America, or Israel?) and day-to-day office operations. At the most basicâthat is to say, humanâlevel the work relationships of al-Qaeda's key players were characterized by the same sort of bickering and gossiping and griping about money that one finds in offices everywhere. The following exchange is similar in tone and substance to much of what was found on the computer.
To: Ezzat (real name unknown)
From: Ayman al-Zawahiri
Folder: Outgoing MailâTo Yemen
Date: February 11, 1999
Noble brother Ezzat â¦
Following are my comments on the summary accounting I received:
⦠With all due respect, this is not an accounting. It's a summary accounting. For example, you didn't write any dates, and many of the items are vague.
The analysis of the summary shows the following:
1- You received a total of $22,301. Of course, you didn't mention the period over which this sum was received. Our activities only benefited from a negligible portion of the money. This means that you received and distributed the money as you please â¦
2- Salaries amounted to $10,085â45 percent of the money. I had told you in my fax ⦠that we've been receiving only half salaries for five months. What is your reaction or response to this?
3- Loans amounted to $2,190. Why did you give out loans? Didn't I give clear orders to Muhammad Saleh to ⦠refer any loan requests to me? We have already had long discussions on this topic â¦
4- Why have guesthouse expenses amounted to $1,573 when only Yunis is there, and he can be accommodated without the need for a guesthouse?
5- Why did you buy a new fax for $470? Where are the two old faxes? Did you get permission before buying a new fax under such circumstances?
6- Please explain the cell-phone invoice amounting to $756 (2,800 riyals) when you have mentioned communication expenses of $300.
7- Why are you renovating the computer? Have I been informed of this?
8- General expenses you mentioned amounted to $235. Can you explain what you mean? â¦
To: Ayman al-Zawahiri
From: Ezzat
Folder: Incoming MailâFrom Yemen
Date: February 17, 1999
Kind brother Nur al-Din [al-Zawahiri]:
⦠We don't have any guesthouses. We have bachelor houses, and the offices are there too. We called it a guesthouse hypothetically, and we don't have any bachelors except Basil and Youssef. And Abd al-Kareem lives at his work place.
If I buy a fax and we have two old ones, that would be wanton or mad.
Communication expenses were $300 before we started using the mobile phoneâand all these calls were to discuss the crises of Ashraf and Dawoud and Kareem and Ali and Ali Misarra and Abu Basel and others, in compliance with the orders.
Renovating our computer doesn't mean buying a new one but making sure that adjustments are made to suit Abdullah's [bin Laden's] work. There were many technical problems with the computer. These matters do not need approval.
There are articles for purchase that are difficult to keep track of, so we have put them under the title of general expenses â¦
The first step for me to implement in taking your advice is to resign from ⦠any relationship whatsoever between me and your Emirate. Consider me a political refugee â¦
THE MERGER
l-Qaeda's relationship with the Taliban, though strained at times, grew cozier as the attacks on New York and Washington approached. Mullah Omar was enraged at the U.S. missile strikes on Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998âstrikes that were made in retaliation for bin Laden's African-embassy bombings that year. Bin Laden, meanwhile, kept after the Taliban leader with a campaign of flattery. He hailed Mullah Omar as Islam's new caliph (a lofty title not used since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire) and talked of Afghanistan as the kernel of what would become a sprawling and pure Islamic state that would embrace Central Asia and beyond. By 2001, some said, bin Laden had become a confidant of Mullah Omar, helping him to understand the outside world. He encouraged the Taliban leader to destroy the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas and sent him a congratulatory note afterward.
To: Mullah Omar
From: Osama bin Laden
Folder: Publications
Date: April 11, 2001
⦠I pray to Godâafter having granted you success in destroying the dead, deaf, and mute false godsâthat He will grant you success in destroying the living false gods, the ones that talk and listen. God knows that those [gods] pose more danger to Islam and monotheism than the dead false gods. Among the most important such false gods in our time is the United Nations, which has become a new religion that is worshipped to the exclusion of God. The prophets of this religion are present in the UN General Assembly ⦠The UN imposes all sorts of penalties on all those who contradict its religion. It issues documents and statements that openly contradict Islamic belief, such as the International Declaration for Human Rights, considering all religions are equal, and considering that the destruction of the statues constitutes a crime â¦
Meanwhile, Ayman al-Zawahiri rallied the support of other jihadis, especially in his militant group Islamic Jihad, which eventually became the largest component of al-Qaeda. Those jihadis from Egypt had been suspicious of him because of his close ties to bin Laden, whom they considered a publicity hound. In the summer of 1999 they ousted al-Zawahiri as the leader of Islamic Jihad and replaced him with a veteran, Tharwat Shehata, who wanted to limit the relationship with bin Laden and concentrate the group's fight against Egypt, not America. But with money scarce and morale low, Shehata soon resigned, and by the spring of 2001 al-Zawahiri had assumed control again. He sent a note to his colleagues in Islamic Jihad proposing a formal merger with bin Laden and al-Qaeda as "a way out of the bottleneck." Borrowing terms from global commerce, he warned of increased market share for "international monopolies"âthe CIA and probably also Egyptian intelligence. The merger, he said, could "increase profits"âthe publicity and support that terrorism could produce.
To: Unknown
From: Ayman al-Zawahiri
Folder: Letters
Date: May 3, 2001
The following is a summary of our situation: We are trying to return to our previous main activity [probably the merger]. The most important step was starting the school [training camps], the programs of which have been started. We also provided the teachers with means of conducting profitable trade as much as we could. Matters are all promising, except for the unfriendliness of two teachers, despite what we have provided for them. We are patient.
As you know, the situation below in the village [probably Egypt] has become bad for traders [jihadis]. Our Upper Egyptian relatives have left the market, and we are suffering from international monopolies. Conflicts take place between us for trivial reasons, due to the scarcity of resources. We are also dispersed over various cities. However, God had mercy on us when the Omar Brothers Company [the Taliban] here opened the market for traders and provided them with an opportunity to reorganize, may God reward them. Among the benefits of residence here is that traders from all over gather in one place under one company, which increases familiarity and cooperation among them, particularly between us and the Abdullah Contracting Company [bin Laden and his associates]. The latest result of this cooperation is ⦠the offer they gave. Following is a summary of the offer:
Encourage commercial activities [jihad] in the village to face foreign investors; stimulate publicity; then agree on joint work to unify trade in our area. Close relations allowed for an open dialogue to solve our problems. Colleagues here believe that this is an excellent opportunity to encourage sales in general, and in the village in particular. They are keen on the success of the project. They are also hopeful that this may be a way out of the bottleneck to transfer our activities to the stage of multinationals and joint profit. We are negotiating the details with both sides â¦
Al-Zawahiri's proposal set off a storm of protest from some members of Islamic Jihad, whoâagainâfavored focusing on the struggle against the Egyptian government. They accused al-Zawahiri of leading their group in dangerous directions.
To: Ayman al-Zawahiri
From: Unknown
Folder: Letters
Date: Summer, 2001
Dear brother Abdullah al-Dayem:
[another name for al-Zawahiri]
⦠I disagree completely with the issue of sales and profits. These are not profits. They are rather a farce of compound losses. I believe that going on in this is a dead end, as if we were fighting ghosts or windmills. Enough of pouring musk on barren land.
I don't believe that we need to give indications of how this unplanned path will fail. All we need to do is to estimate the company's assets since the beginning of this last phase, then take inventory of what remains. Count the number of laborers in your farms [probably cells] at the mother's area [probably Egypt], then see if anyone has stayed. Consider any of the many projects where you enthusiastically participated. Did any of them succeed, other than the Badr external greenhouses, which enjoyed limited success?
All indicators point out that the place and time are not suitable for this type of agriculture. Cotton may not be planted in Siberia, just as apples cannot be planted in hot areas. I'm sure you are aware that wheat is planted in winter and cotton in summer. After all our efforts we haven't seen any crops in winter or summer.
This type of agriculture is ridiculous. It's as if we were throwing good seeds onto barren land.
In previous experiments where the circumstances and seeds were better we made major losses. Now everything has deteriorated. Ask those with experience in agriculture and history.
Despite the protests of certain Islamic Jihad members, a merger with al-Qaeda had been cemented in the spring of 2001, and in June the new group issued "Statement No. 1"âa press release of sorts, found on the computer, that warned the "Zionist and Christian coalition" that "they will soon roast in the same flame they now play with." The following month someone sat down at the computer and composed a short message, titled "The Solution," which trumpeted "martyrdom operations" as the key to the battle against the West. On August 23 another operative tapped out a report on a target-spotting mission in Egypt and Israel that had been carried out by Richard Reidâthe British national who would later try to blow up a Paris-to-Miami airline flight with a bomb packed in one of his high-top sneakers. And on that same day in August the following plan for sending an agent on a target-spotting mission to the U.S.-Canadian border region was typed into the computer.
To: Real name unknown
From: Unknown
Folder: Hamza
Date: August 23, 2001
Special file for our brother Abu Bakr al-Albani ["the Albanian"] on the nature of his mission.
First, the mission: Gather information on:
1. Information on American soldiers who frequent nightclubs in the America-Canada border areas
2. The Israeli embassy, consulate, and cultural center in Canada
3. If it is possible to enter America and gather information on American soldier checkpoints, or on the American army in the border areas inside America
4. Information on the possibility of obtaining explosive devices inside Canada â¦
I have given to our brother $1,500 for travel expenses in Canada and America, and also the cost of the ticket for the trip back to us after four months, God willing.
AFTER 9/11
he first evidence of work on the computer following 9/11 comes just days after the attacks, in the form of a promotional video called "The Big Job"âa montage of television footage of the attacks and their chaotic aftermath, all set to rousing victory music. The office was surely busier than it had ever been before, and soon many members of al-Qaeda's inner circle were competing for time on the computer. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the senior Yemeni operative who coordinated with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in masterminding the attacks, used the computer to work on a hasty and unfinished ideological justification for the operation, which he titled "The Truth About the New Crusade: A Ruling on the Killing of Women and Children of the Non-Believers," excerpts of which follow:
Concerning the operations of the blessed Tuesday [9/11] ⦠they are legally legitimate, because they are committed against a country at war with us, and the people in that country are combatants. Someone might say that it is the innocent, the elderly, the women, and the children who are victims, so how can these operations be legitimate according to sharia? And we say that the sanctity of women, children, and the elderly is not absolute. There are special cases ⦠Muslims may respond in kind if infidels have targeted women and children and elderly Muslims, [or if] they are being invaded, [or if] the non-combatants are helping with the fight, whether in action, word, or any other type of assistance, [or if they] need to attack with heavy weapons, which do not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants â¦Now that we know that the operations were permissible from the Islamic point of view, we must answer or respond to those who prohibit the operations from the point of view of benefits or harms â¦
There are benefits ⦠The operations have brought about the largest economic crisis that America has ever known. Material losses amount to one trillion dollars. America has lost about two thousand economic brains as a result of the operations. The stock exchange dropped drastically, and American consumer spending deteriorated. The dollar has dropped, the airlines have been crippled, the American globalization system, which was going to spoil the world, is gone â¦
Because of Saddam and the Baath Party, America punished a whole population. Thus its bombs and its embargo killed millions of Iraqi Muslims. And because of Osama bin Laden, America surrounded Afghans and bombed them, causing the death of tens of thousands of Muslims ⦠God said to assault whoever assaults you, in a like manner ⦠In killing Americans who are ordinarily off limits, Muslims should not exceed four million non-combatants, or render more than ten million of them homeless. We should avoid this, to make sure the penalty [that we are inflicting] is no more than reciprocal. God knows what is best.
Osama bin Laden himself was composing letters on the computer just weeks before the fall of Kabul. In them he defiantly addressed the American people with a statement of al-Qaeda's goals, which he then went on to spell out at much greater length for Mullah Omar, in the spirit of a powerful, high-level political adviser offering advice to a head of state.
To: The American People
From: Osama bin Laden
Folder: Publications
Date: October 3, 2001
What takes place in America today was caused by the flagrant interference on the part of successive American governments into others' business. These governments imposed regimes that contradict the faith, values, and lifestyles of the people. This is the truth that the American government is trying to conceal from the American people.
Our current battle is against the Jews. Our faith tells us we shall defeat them, God willing. However, Muslims find that the Americans stand as a protective shield and strong supporter, both financially and morally. The desert storm that blew over New York and Washington should, in our view, have blown over Tel Aviv. The American position obliged Muslims to force the Americans out of the arena first to enable them to focus on their Jewish enemy. Why are the Americans fighting a battle on behalf of the Jews? Why do they sacrifice their sons and interests for them?
To: Mullah Omar
From: Osama bin Laden
Folder: Deleted File (Recovered)
Date: October 3, 2001
Highly esteemed Leader of the Faithful,
Mullah Muhammad Omar, Mujahid,
May God preserve him â¦
1- We treasure your message, which confirms your generous, heroic position in defending Islam and in standing up to the symbols of infidelity of this time.
2- I would like to emphasize the major impact of your statements on the Islamic world. Nothing harms America more than receiving your strong response to its positions and statements. Thus it is very important that the Emirate respond to every threat or demand from America ⦠with demands that America put an end to its support of Israel, and that U.S. forces withdraw from Saudi Arabia. Such responses nullify the effect of the American media on people's morale.
Newspapers mentioned that a recent survey showed that seven out of every ten Americans suffer psychological problems following the attacks on New York and Washington.
Although you have already made strong declarations, we ask you to increase them to equal the opponent's media campaign in quantity and force.
Their threat to invade Afghanistan should be countered by a threat on your part that America will not be able to dream of security until Muslims experience it as reality in Palestine and Afghanistan.
3- Keep in mind that America is currently facing two contradictory problems:
a) If it refrains from responding to jihad operations, its prestige will collapse, thus forcing it to withdraw its troops abroad and restrict itself to U.S. internal affairs. This will transform it from a major power to a third-rate power, similar to Russia.
b) On the other hand, a campaign against Afghanistan will impose great long-term economic burdens, leading to further economic collapse, which will force America, God willing, to resort to the former Soviet Union's only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction.
Thus our plan in the face of this campaign should focus on the following:
âServing a blow to the American economy, which will lead to:
a) Further weakening of the American economy
b) Shaking the confidence in the American economy. This will lead investors to refrain from investing in America or participating in American companies, thus accelerating the fall of the American economy â¦
âConduct a media campaign to fight the enemy's publicity. The campaign should focus on the following important points:
a) Attempt to cause a rift between the American people and their government, by demonstrating the following to the Americans:
âThat the U.S. government will lead them into further losses of money and lives.
âThat the government is sacrificing the people to serve the interests of the rich, particularly the Jews.
âThat the government is leading them to the war front to protect Israel and its security.
âAmerica should withdraw from the current battle between Muslims and Jews.
This plan aims to create pressure from the American people on their government to stop its campaign against Afghanistan, on the grounds that the campaign will cause major losses to the American people.
âImply that the campaign against Afghanistan will be responded to with revenge blows against America.
I believe that we can issue, with your permission, a number of speeches that we expect will have the greatest impact, God willing, on the American, Pakistani, Arab, and Muslim people.
Finally, I would like to emphasize how much we appreciate the fact that you are our Emir. I would like to express our great appreciation of your historical stands in the service of Islam and in the defense of the Prophet's tradition. We ask God to accept and reward such stands.
We ask God to grant the Muslim Afghani nation, under your leadership, victory over the American infidels, just as He singled this nation out with the honor of defeating the Communist infidels.
We ask God to lead you to the good of both this life and the afterlife.
Peace upon you and God's mercy and blessings.
Your brother,
Osama Bin Muhammad Bin Laden
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200409/cullison.
Tick, Tick, Tick
The Atlantic Monthly | October 2004
Pakistan is a nuclear time bombâperhaps the greatest threat to
American security today. Here's how to defuse it
by Graham Allison
.....
Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 have I been as
frightened by a single news story as I was by the revelation late
last year that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear-
weapons program, had been selling nuclear technology and services on
the black market. The story began to break last summer, after U.S.
and British intelligence operatives intercepted a shipment of parts
for centrifuges (which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs
as well as fuel) on its way from Dubai to Libya. The centrifuges
turned out to have been designed by Khan, and before long
investigators had uncovered what the head of the International Atomic
Energy Agency has called a "Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation"â
a decades-old illicit market in nuclear materials, designs,
technologies, and consulting services, all run out of Pakistan.
The Pakistani government's response to the scandal was not
reassuring. Khan made a four-minute televised speech on February 4
asserting that "there was never any kind of authorization for these
activities by the government." He took full responsibility for his
actions and asked for a pardon, which was immediately granted by
President Pervez Musharraf, who essentially buried the affair. Today
Pakistan's official position remains that no member of Mu-sharraf's
government had any concrete knowledge of the illicit transferâan
assertion that U.S. intelligence officials in Pakistan and elsewhere
dismiss as absurd. Meanwhile, Pakistani investigators have reportedly
questioned a grand total of eleven people from among the country's
6,000 nuclear scientists and 45,000 nuclear workers, and have refused
to allow either the United States or the IAEA access to Khan for
questioning.
Pakistan's nuclear complex poses two main threats. The firstâ
highlighted by Khan's black-market networkâis that nuclear weapons,
know-how, or materials will find their way into the hands of
terrorists. For instance, we have learned that in August of 2001,
even as the final planning for 9/11 was under way, Osama bin Laden
received two former officials of Pakistan's atomic-energy programâ
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majidâat a secret compound near
Kabul. Over the course of three days of intense conversation bin
Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, grilled Mahmood
and Majid about how to make weapons of mass destruction. After
Mahmood and Majid were arrested, on October 23, 2001, Mahmood told
Pakistani interrogation teams, working in concert with the CIA, that
Osama bin Laden had expressed a keen interest in nuclear weapons and
had sought the scientists' help in recruiting other Pakistani nuclear
experts who could provide expertise in the mechanics of bomb-making.
CIA Director George Tenet found the report of Mahmood and Majid's
meeting with bin Laden so disturbing that he flew directly to
Islamabad to confront President Musharraf.
This was not the first time that Pakistani agents had rendered
nuclear assistance to dangerous actors: in 1997 Pakistani nuclear
scientists made secret trips to North Korea, providing technical
support for that country's nuclear-weapons program in exchange for
Pyongyang's help in developing long-range missiles. And not long ago,
according to American intelligence, another Pakistani nuclear
scientist negotiated with Libyan agents over the price of nuclear-
bomb designs. Pakistan's nuclear program has long been a leaky
vessel; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has deemed the
country "the world's No. 1 nuclear proliferator."
learly, there is a significant danger that the black market will put
Pakistani nukes (or nuclear material and technical knowledge) in
terrorist handsâif it hasn't already. But there is a second, equally
significant danger: that a coup might topple Musharraf and leave all
or some of Pakistan's nuclear weapons under the control of al-Qaeda,
the Taliban, or some other militant Islamic group (or, indeed, under
the control of more than one). Part of the problem is that in order
to keep its focal enemy, India, from destroying its arsenal in a pre-
emptive strike, Pakistan has hidden its nuclear weapons throughout
the country; some of them may be in regions that are effectively
under fundamentalist Muslim control. Moreover, Pakistan's official
alliance with the United States in the war on terror has only
increased the danger posed by al-Qaeda sympathizers within its
nuclear establishment. Although Musharraf has pledged his "unstinting
cooperation in the fight against terrorism," not all the thousands of
officers in Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies have signed
on. After all, until 9/11 some of them were working closely with
members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Nor, for that matter, does
Pakistan's general population support Musharraf's alliance with the
United States. A poll this past March asked Pakistani citizens which
leaders in international affairs they viewed favorably. Only seven
percent said George W. Bushâand 65 percent said Osama bin Laden.
The uneasy contradiction between Musharraf's pro-American foreign
policy and the widespread anti-Americanism within Pakistan has forced
Pakistani policymakers to walk a razor's edge. Musharraf faces the
clear and present threat of assassination: twice in the past year he
has narrowly escaped attempts on his life. When I spoke to him not
long after the second of those attempts, he said he thought he had
used up many of his nine lives.
It may not take a bullet to wrest control over Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal from Musharraf. In local elections held in October of 2002 a
coalition of fundamentalist parties won command of the government in
the North West Frontier Province. The group, known as Muttahida
Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), offered a simple platform: pro-Taliban, anti-
American, and against all Pakistani involvement in the war on terror.
MMA is now the third largest party in Pakistan's parliament; from its
new position of strength it has spoken vigorously about the need to
regain the honor Pakistan has lost through its subservience to the
United States and its struggle with India, with which it has been
engaged in a harrowing game of nuclear brinkmanship. To win a vote of
confidence that would allow him to serve out his presidential term
(which ends in 2007), Musharraf was recently compelled to make a deal
with the Islamist parties to step down as head of the military by the
end of this year. If all that weren't disconcerting enough, the
region the MMA controls happens to be the very one where Osama bin
Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are currently believed to be hiding.
Under these conditions the emergence of a nuclear-equipped splinter
group from within the Pakistani establishment looks disturbingly
plausible. Provoked by anger that Musharraf has made Pakistan a
puppet of the United States, such a group would have not only a
motive and the domestic political support for a nuclear terrorist act
against America but also the organizational competence, the
expertise, and the raw material to carry it out.
hat to do about this combustible mixture of extreme political
instability and nuclear capability is perhaps the most difficult
challenge facing U.S. policymakers today. (Consider, for instance,
how much simpler it is to deal with North Korea's nuclear program,
which is controlled by a monolithic regime and not by layers of
governmental subagencies that may have conflicting loyalties and
ideologies.) Up to now the Bush Administration's response to this
challenge has consisted of essentially three ingredients: trying to
keep the Pakistani government on America's side in the war on terror
(and the Administration deserves credit for carefully nurturing its
relationship with Musharraf); examining the possibility of having
American forces seize or neutralize Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in an
emergency; and blindly hoping that the worst does not occur. But
hope, as the well-known saying at the Pentagon goes, is not a plan.
Recent history offers something of a model for how to proceed. In
August of 1991 a group of conservatives in the Soviet security
establishment attempted to overthrow President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Tanks commanded by the coup plotters ringed the Kremlin; Gorbachev,
on vacation in the southern part of the country, was placed under
house arrest. In the weeks that followed, President George H.W. Bush
announced that the United States would unilaterally remove all
battlefield nuclear weapons and challenged the Soviet Union to do
likewise. The coup was aborted, and Gorbachev responded to Bush's
initiative by launching a process that eventually withdrew thousands
of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from the outer reaches of the
empire, helping to ensure that the looming dissolution of the Soviet
Union would not create more than a dozen new nuclear states. When
President Bill Clinton took office, he focused on eliminating the
strategic nuclear arsenals that remained in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and
Belarus. By the end of 1996 every one of the nuclear weapons in those
states had been deactivated and returned to Russia. Pakistan's
situation today is not identical to Russia's in the early 1990s,
though the problem of diffused control of nuclear weapons is
analogous. But the same lesson applies: it's that alertness in this
arena can yield positive results.
Most of what has to be done to secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons and
materials will have to be done by the Pakistanis themselvesâwith
American encouragement. One of the more enduring legacies of the
Musharraf administration may be the Nuclear Command Authority,
completed in December of 2003. Designed to impose greater centralized
control over the Khan Research Laboratories and the Pakistani Atomic
Energy Commission, the NCA is headed by Musharraf and vice-chaired by
Pakistan's Prime Minister, and is divided into two unitsâfor nuclear
weapons and for nuclear scientific personnelâeach led by a three-star
general.
One option would be for the United States to supply Pakistan with a
technology called "permissive action links," which would require
Musharraf himself to enter an electronic code before any of the
country's nuclear weapons could be deployed. Judging from my
conversations with Musharraf last winter, however, the delicacy and
sensitivityâand, given the constraints of the nuclear non-
proliferation treaty, the legal difficultyâof such a project can
hardly be exaggerated. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is designed first
and foremost to deter India. As noted, Pakistan fears that India
might locate its nuclear arsenal and destroy its nuclear weapons in a
first strike. (Every nuclear power has had similar fears in the early
stages of its program.) No reasonable country would divulge
information that would leave its arsenal vulnerable to a pre-emptive
strike. And even though Pakistan is now an ally of the United States
in the war against al-Qaeda, can Musharraf be confident that if the
United States provides him with permissive action links, it will not
retain some undisclosed ability to disable Pakistan's weapons? An
offer of U.S. technical and financial assistanceâalong with
diplomatic assistance in the dispute over Kashmirâmight incline
Musharraf to let us help him secure electronic control over his
arsenal. But we must remember that pushing for too much too soon
could destabilize Musharrafâor even lead to his overthrow by someone
who is more sympathetic to bin Laden than to the United States.
Our unlikely savior here might be, of all countries, China. For many
years China has acted as an ally, mentor, and supplier of arms to
Pakistan, and the two countries are united by their antagonism toward
India. If China were to embrace comprehensive security and control of
its own arsenal, and be certified by the United States as having done
so, then perhaps Musharraf would permit China and the United States
each to review the security procedures for half of Pakistan's nuclear
weapons and materials, so that neither country could have full
knowledge of all of Pakistan's arsenal.
he actions required to neutralize the threat of Pakistani
proliferation are ambitious; a measure of realism is necessary. But
realism need not mean defeatism. In the early 1960s John F. Kennedy
predicted that "by 1970 there may be ten nuclear powers instead of
four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty." If those nations with the
technical capacity to build nuclear weapons had gone ahead and done
so, Kennedy's prediction would have come true. But his warning helped
awaken the world to the dangers of unconstrained proliferation. The
United States and other nations negotiated international constraints,
provided security guarantees, offered inducements, and threatened
punishment. Today 187 nationsâincluding scores that have the
technical capacity to build nuclear arsenalsâhave renounced nuclear
weapons and committed themselves to the nuclear nonproliferation
treaty; only eight states (not the "fifteen or twenty" of Kennedy's
prediction) have nuclear weapons. The challenge now is to achieve
similar success in blocking the seemingly inexorable path to a
nuclear 9/11.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200410/allison
Pre-empting nuclear 9/11 or nuclear Beslan; priority number one in strategic security initiatives
9/11 and now, Beslan. It is no time to pause. Any number of commissions may be appointed to provide recommendations for public policy. Unless there is clarity in perceiving the disaster that a nuclear 9/11 will be for the entire world, there will not be a credible policy to counteract terror.
The following observations of Prof. Amy Zegart are scary and should alert every citizen of the world: "One recent study showed the odds of detecting a nuclear bomb inside a heavy machinery container were close to zero. As the 9/11 Commission concluded, such a lopsided transportation strategy makes sense only if you intend to fight the last war."
When will the US awaken to the dangers of the Islamic nuke in Pakistan? Wisdom lies in pre-empting a nuclear 9/11 or a nuclear Beslan. This should be priority number one for a sane world order.
Kalyanaraman
washingtonpost.comPreventing a Nuclear 9/11
By Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier
Sunday, September 12, 2004; Page B07
This month's hostage tragedy in Russia is a stark reminder of the potent terrorist threat that country still faces -- a threat that could result in a nuclear Sept. 11 if terrorists manage to gain access to Russia's nuclear stockpiles.
Unfortunately, the recent claim by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov that inadequately secured nuclear stockpiles in Russia are only a "myth" is far from the truth. There has been a decade of improvements in Russia, but the work remains dangerously incomplete and the threat to nuclear facilities is terrifyingly high. While many of the best-known thefts of nuclear material occurred a decade ago, it was only last year that the chief of Russia's nuclear agency testified that nuclear security was underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars. At nearly every site U.S. experts visit, they reach quick agreement with Russian experts on the need for substantial security upgrades. Russia's decision to send additional troops to guard nuclear facilities in the wake of the most recent terrorist attacks belies the notion that these facilities were adequately secured before. Moreover, that heightened troop presence is not likely to last and will do little to reduce the danger of theft by insiders.
Meanwhile, terrorists are zeroing in on these nuclear stockpiles. Top Russian officials have confirmed at least two cases in 2001 of terrorists carrying out reconnaissance at Russian nuclear warhead storage sites. The 41 heavily armed, suicidal terrorists who seized hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater in 2002 reportedly considered seizing the Kurchatov Institute instead -- a site with enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for dozens of nuclear weapons. In 2003 proceedings in a Russian criminal case revealed that a Russian businessman had been offering $750,000 for stolen weapon-grade plutonium for sale to a foreign client. Al Qaeda has been actively seeking nuclear material for a bomb and has strong connections to Chechen terrorist groups.
Comprehensive U.S.-funded security upgrades have been completed for only 22 percent of Russia's potential nuclear bomb material; upgrades for tens of thousands of bombs' worth of material are still incomplete. Disputes over access to sensitive sites, liability, and other bureaucratic and political obstacles have been allowed to stymie progress for years.
This is a global problem. More than 130 research reactors in dozens of countries still operate with HEU fuel, and many have no more security than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. Pakistan's heavily guarded nuclear stockpiles face huge threats, from both insiders and outsiders, including large remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban in the country.
The good news is that this is a solvable problem. Plutonium and HEU -- the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons -- are too difficult for terrorists to make. If the world's stockpiles can be locked down and kept out of terrorist hands, nuclear terrorism can be prevented.
Many of the needed programs are in place. In addition to continuing efforts to secure Russia's stockpiles, the administration has been exploring similar cooperation with Pakistan and others -- and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has just launched a Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) designed to remove potential bomb material entirely from the world's most vulnerable sites rapidly.
Three steps are urgently needed if the world is to win the race to lock down these stockpiles before the terrorists get to them.
First, it will be crucial to implement GTRI as quickly, flexibly and comprehensively as possible -- with a target of removing potential bomb material from the world's highest-risk facilities within four years. Congress should give Abraham both the explicit and flexible authority and the additional funds he needs.
Second, the United States and Russia must drastically accelerate their efforts to secure Russia's stockpiles. The next U.S-Russian summit should focus on agreements to sweep aside bureaucratic and political obstacles and set an agreed deadline for getting the job done. President Bush needs to make clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin that locking down these stockpiles quickly and permanently is central to U.S.-Russian relations and to Russia's own security.
Third, the United States must expand the security upgrade effort to the rest of the world, forming a fast-paced global partnership to quickly lock down all the vulnerable nuclear caches that cannot simply be removed or eliminated.
Making all this happen will require a sea change in the level of sustained White House leadership, no matter who is president. A full-time senior official is needed -- one who has the president's ear -- to lead the myriad efforts in many agencies meant to block the terrorist pathway to the bomb. This official must also keep the issue on the front burner at the White House day in and day out. Only then will we have done all we should to reduce the risk of a nuclear Sept. 11.
Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, are co-authors of "Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action." Bunn worked on programs to secure nuclear materials in the Clinton administration, and Wier helped to develop budgets for some of these programs in the Clinton and current Bush administrations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Sep10.html
THE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORHow safe are we?
Bush says he's made an attack less likely, but homeland security funds go to all the wrong places and intelligence is still a mess
BY AMY B. ZEGART
Amy Zegart is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of "Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC."
September 12, 2004
When John Kerry starts dusting off his salute and George W. Bush starts listening to the 9/11 Commission, you know that this election is about national security. The president has made the campaign primarily a referendum on how safe from terrorism the country has become under his leadership. But can we really tell?
Thankfully, al-Qaida has not struck inside the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. But this does not prove that the president's policies are working. The Bush administration could be doing something right. Or we could be days away from al-Qaida's next strike.
Henry Kissinger once asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution. The Chinese leader said it was too soon to tell. Terrorism is no different. In a war that will last for decades, judging success mid-stream cannot be done by examining outcomes; only a rear-view mirror in a distant future will reveal how many plots al-Qaida hatched, how many were stopped and what American actions made a difference.
If we ask how far we have come since 9/11 in terms of safety planning the evidence is not encouraging.
Homeland security funds are flowing, but not to the right places. Since 9/11, Congress has distributed $13 billion to state governments with a formula only Washington could concoct: 40 percent was split evenly, regardless of a state's population, targets or vulnerability to terrorist attack. The result: Safe places got safer. Rural states with fewer potential targets and low populations, such as Alaska and Wyoming, received more than $55 per resident. Target-rich and densely populated states like New York and California received $25 and $14 per person respectively. Osama bin Laden, beware: Wyoming is well fortified.
It gets worse. Over the past three years, the federal government has spent 20 times more on aviation security than on protecting America's seaports, even though more than 90 percent of U.S. foreign trade moves by ship, but less than 5 percent of all shipping containers entering the country are inspected. One recent study showed the odds of detecting a nuclear bomb inside a heavy machinery container were close to zero. As the 9/11 Commission concluded, such a lopsided transportation strategy makes sense only if you intend to fight the last war.
Then there is our intelligence system, a dysfunctional family of agencies that have proven uniquely adept at resisting reform, getting the wrong information into the right hands and the right information into the wrong hands. The past three years have witnessed the two greatest intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor. Yet Bush has held no one accountable for these results, and has avoided leading the charge for reform.
The president grudgingly embraced one of the 9/11 Commission's key recommendations - creating a national intelligence director with "full budgetary authority" - only under strong pressure and finally, last Wednesday, after opposing the idea for weeks. There is urgency and boldness for you.
Not only has Bush shown tepid support for the 9/11 Commission's ideas, he seems to have none of his own. For instance: How can we fix the cultural pathologies that cripple our intelligence system? Bush has said nothing about this and the Commission identified the problem but left it to the national intelligence director to solve.
Building new organizational arrangements with more people and more power will not make us safer if intelligence officials still view the world through the same old lenses and hoard information in the same old stovepipes.
The FBI, for example, faces a daunting cultural challenge: transforming a crime-fighting culture that prizes slow and careful evidence gathering after-the-fact into an intelligence culture that takes fast action to prevent future tragedies. Training programs are crucial to this effort. Today, however, counter-terrorism training constitutes only two weeks out of the 17-week required course for all new agents. That's less time than agents get for vacation.
Then there is the unspoken 11th Commandment operating inside the CIA, FBI and the other 13 intelligence agencies: Thou Shalt Not Share. Here, too, the core problem is cultural - the reluctance to pass information across agency lines is deeply engrained, based more on habit and values than policy or organization charts. And here, too, training is key.
Creating a "one-team" approach to intelligence requires developing trust and building informal networks between officials in different agencies. This is best done by requiring cross-agency training programs early in officials' careers. By current policies, however, most intelligence professionals can spend 20 years or more without a single community-wide training experience. Dots will always be hard to connect when intelligence agencies do not trust or understand each other.
While Bush has placed the biggest burden on his own record in the campaign, it's important to note that Kerry has offered only a lackluster alternative that can be summed up as, "I'm for whatever the 9/11 Commission says." This is like a diner who orders the entire menu because there's nothing he really wants except to avoid making a choice. The commission's recommendations are good, but far from perfect.
No one knows when or where al-Qaida will strike next. But this much we do know: All Americans will lose in November if we don't start demanding better homeland security policies and stronger leadership from the White House and a more thoughtful plan from Kerry too.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpz...oints-headlines
Self-surfing USA: Subrahmanyam
Personal memoirs do not a history make. The historic testing of thermo-nuclear devices at Pokharan on 11 May 1998 is a decisive, defining moment in the history of Bharat.
The dangerous game that USA is playing by cuddling the Paki bomb with Chinese connivance will come home to haunt US policy for a long time to come, when strategists like Graham Allison start counting tick, tick, tick for a nuclear 9/11 using the Islamic bomb.
US strategic thinking is still conditioned by the pre-cold war era of fight against the Soviet Union. In the post-9/11 world, the true allies for peace are likely to be Russia and Bharat who have to chalk out an effective strategy to contain and defeat the nation of Islam -- the caliphate. There are islamists who are prepared to achieve this with inhuman techniques such as the gruesome tragedy of Beslan.
9/11 and now, Beslan. What more will it take the policy-makers in USA to realise that the fight against terror in Fergana valley, cannot be won without Russia and Bharat as Uncle Sam's allies?
Kalyanaraman
Self-surfing USA
K. Subrahmanyam
September 17, 2004, Hindustan Times
In 1998-99, when Jaswant Singh and US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott engaged in a dialogue of a number of rounds on the nuclear issue in the aftermath of Shakti tests, there were strident demands from sections of the BJP as well as opposition parties that there should be greater transparency about the ongoing discussions. There were even charges against the Indian side that it was yielding to US pressure. Now Talbott, in his very readable book Engaging India, has come out with a full account of the dialogue. It turns out that the Indian side did not yield to US pressure but firmly defended the countryâs security interests as defined by Delhi.
Jaswant Singh emerges from the account as a kind of hero for the sophisticated manner in which he softly stonewalled the American demands and yet developed and maintained a very warm friendship with Talbott. The book also reveals that in 1994, when the US proposed a conference of five nuclear powers, Japan and Germany, Pakistan and India to discuss the proliferation issue India demanded that the list should include North Korea, Iran and Libya. While Talbott admits that this demand was justified, he has no comment to offer on why and how the Indians were able to focus attention on the three countries with which Pakistan was at that time engaged in clandestine proliferation activity and what the US intelligence was informed at that time on that proliferation. The conference was never held.
While he mentions China as one of the helpers of Pakistanâs nuclear weapons programme, the continuing Chinese help to Islamabadâs weaponisation, Beijingâs association with A.Q. Khanâs activities (illustrated by the Chinese weapon drawings in Libya) and the supply of ring magnets to Pakistani centrifuges â all of which indicated that Pakistani arsenal was only an extension of the Chinese arsenal â do not find mention.
He recommends India should adopt the international standard of export controls. But the international standards as practised by Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland were to permit Khan and the Pakistani military establishment to indulge in black-market sale of West European nuclear equipment and technology and for the West to look the other way. Is that what he wants India to do?
Talbott mentions his being involved in efforts to persuade Russia to permit changes in the anti-ballistic missile treaty to allow the US to construct a missile defence against a future North Korean missile threat. But the transfer of North Korean missiles to Pakistan, and Islamabad firing Ghauri missile in April 1998, did not appear to amount in Washingtonâs view a sufficient challenge to Indian security to warrant Delhi carrying out nuclear tests.
In other words, there is one standard for US security and a different one for the Indian security. He has hinted at his scepticism about US authorities accepting the Pakistani claim that their military was not involved in Khanâs proliferation activities. But he has no comment to offer on how India should safeguard its security, placed between proliferating China and Pakistan in an axis with a totally permissive non-proliferation regime which looked away as China, Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland combined with Khan in establishing an international nuclear Walmart.
Talbott pressed for an Indian nuclear doctrine when it was well- known that no other nuclear power has published a doctrine. When the National Security Advisory Board came up with its doctrine of no-first use, minimum credible deterrence, absolute civilian
control on the weapons and commitment to disarmament, in a leap of imagination Talbott and his
advisors concluded that India was about to build an arsenal, a replica of the US deterrent which at its height exceeded 30,000 warheads because the document mentioned strategic triad.
Sea-based and mobile delivery systems are less vulnerable to an adversaryâs strike in a no-first use situation and the size of a survivable arsenal is directly proportional to its vulnerability. A submarine fitted with a cruise missile is not beyond Indiaâs capability in the next decade. The doctrine, meant as a long-term guideline, took into account this possibility and included the sea-based systems to keep the size of the deterrent to the lowest minimum possible.
Only a highly prejudiced perspective could have interpreted this as an attempt to build an arsenal equalling that of Britain, France and China. Unfortunately, Jaswant Singh did not explain the logic of the Indian doctrine to the Americans. That is not surprising since no Indian politician had anything to do with its formulation, nor did they attempt to understand it.
Talbott continues to maintain that India should not be allowed to get into the nuclear club as a legitimate member since that would wreck the present NPT. At the same time, he cannot imagine a solution to the challenge posed by Indian and Pakistani tests beyond asking these two countries to exercise restraint and sign the CTBT. There is a logical solution â to declare the first use of nuclear weapon, a crime against humanity punishable by all nuclear weapon powers under UN authority. It is because the US and other western nuclear weapon powers want to retain their right to use of nuclear weapons first that other nations find them a currency power.
US permissiveness in respect of Pakistani proliferation with Chinese help in the Eighties and the West European and Chinese blackmarketing in nuclear weapon technology with the help of A.Q. Khan and Pakistani military compelled India to have a minimum credible deterrent with the pledge of no-first use.
Bill Clinton is quoted asserting that India did not need nuclear weapons as it did not face any threat. If India, placed between a hostile China and a Pakistan sworn to bleed India through a thousand cuts, did not face a security problem, what security problem justifies US waging war thousands of miles away maintaining the largest nuclear arsenal and seeking withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty?
Talbott, in spite of his empathetic approach to India, continues to be a prisoner of the traditional nuclear cult of the Cold War era.
It is no surprise that he could not make any headway against Jaswant Singh and his team.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1...120001.htm
I am kinda sick and tired of KS articles. A man of his stature should write something more informative than, rehashing what is public knowledge.
nothing new.
(karra viraga koodahu pamu chavkudahu)
Dont wanna kill the snake nor wanna break the stick.
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If you read Bharat Karnad's book, KS musings, the NPT being brought into force, the Chinese aggression, the Ayub adventure, rupee devaluation, Shastri's death etc. there was something wierd going on in the sixties. Something spooked all these folks to try to muzzle India.
The first trigger event was the takeover of Goa by India from then on it was reaction mode to stave of bigtime disruption.
At this stage, US especially Bush credibility is at nadir in world arena. Well, he can only push some nations to pressurize Iran, rest of the world donât buy what he is saying. Yesterdayâs reception to Bush UN speech is a good indicator.
US policy is biased, on one side they are protecting Pakistan, infact US is their greatest cheer leader and on other hand they have objection with Iran. Pakistan is Nuclear Wal-mart. Iran objective is Israel or poke finger in US. But Pakistan is providing blue prints to Iran. On one side US is providing political asylum to Chechen leaders and on other side expect from Russia to not to supply vital nuke parts to Iran.
Somewhere they have to change strategy, so that nukes should not go into Islamic jingoes.
The "busting" of A.Q. Khan and other tall tales
When President Bush patted himself on the back last night for "busting" the "A.Q. Khan network," many of the 55 million Americans watching -- most of whom probably never heard of Mr. Khan -- probably thought that sounded pretty darn good. But who is this A. Q. Khan, and has his network been "brought to justice," as Bush claimed? Hardly.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, also known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, was pardoned by Pervez Musharraf after admitting he gave nuclear technology to other countries, including North Korea and Iran. Bush, who said last night that nuclear proliferation "in the hands of a terrorist" enemy was the greatest threat to our national security supported the pardon of A.Q. Khan, even though he admittedly proliferated nuclear technology right into the hands of the last two nations standing in Bush's Axis of Evil.
Not only has Khan been pardoned, the Washington Post reports that "not a single person involved in his network has been prosecuted anywhere." <b>And just today, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency complained to the BBC that Pakistan won't even let the UN watchdog agency interview Khan</b>.
The misrepresentation of A.Q. Khan's status wasn't the only factual-fudging we saw last night.
What is nemesis? When USA gets socked by Paki nuke. Because, USA has nurtured the Paki nuke in a skullduggery deal with China, little realising that what was being nurtured was an islamic nuke. 9/11? What 9/11?
Waiting for Godot is like waiting for nuke 9/11.
How dumb can Uncle Sam get? How diabolical can the inheritors of Mao Tse Tung's power-from-gun-barrel get?
Kalyanaraman
'Pak may leak nukes to terrorists'
IANS[ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2004 09:44:53 PM ]
WASHINGTON: Pakistan and Russia are two nations that could be potential sources of leaking nuclear weapons technology or fissile materials to terrorists, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on nuclear terrorism.
"The fear regarding Pakistan is that some members of the armed forces might covertly give a weapon to terrorists or that, if President Musharraf were overthrown, an Islamic fundamentalist government or a state of chaos in Pakistan might enable terrorists to obtain a weapon," the report said.
"Terrorists or rogue states might acquire a nuclear weapon in several ways. The nations of greatest concern as potential sources of weapons or fissile materials are widely thought to be Russia and Pakistan," it added.
Pakistan, a close ally of the US in the war against terrorism, has often been described by South Asia experts as a "potential source" of radicalism, proliferation, terrorism and even nuclear war.
The report said that although it would be difficult for the terrorists to launch a nuclear attack on any American city, such an attack is plausible and would have catastrophic consequences - in one scenario killing over a half a million people and causing damage of over $1 trillion.
Russia, the report noted, has many tactical nuclear weapons as well as much highly enriched uranium (HEU) and weapons grade plutonium, which do not have adequate safeguards.
Many experts believe that technically-savvy terrorists could fabricate a nuclear bomb from HEU. Terrorists could also obtain HEU from the more than 130 research reactors worldwide, most of which remain unprotected.
"If terrorists acquired a nuclear weapon, they could use many means in an attempt to bring it into the United States. This nation has many thousands of miles of land and sea borders, as well as several hundred ports of entry.â
âTerrorists might smuggle a weapon across lightly guarded stretches of borders, ship it in using a cargo container, place it in a hold of a crude oil tanker, or bring it in using a truck, a boat, or a small airplane," says the report.
The US would have to take up a "layered defence" to try to block terrorists at various stages in their attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon and smuggle it into the US.
These layers include threat reduction programmes in the former USSR and Pakistan, long-term engagement with the unsecured nuclear nations, efforts to secure HEU worldwide, control of former Soviet and other borders, the Container Security Initiative and Proliferation Security Initiative and US border security.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/article...096,curpg-3.cms
The reasons are not far to seek. The monster of an islamic nuke created in Pakistan by USA in collusion with China will come to an American city, Uncle Sam. Don't be deluded into believing that dancing with Gen. Musharraf will help prevent the inevitable.
For a good chance of making it evitable, denuke Paki.
Listen to Graham Allison on Oct. 20, 2004.
Kalyanaraman
Nuclear 9/11 inevitable: Graham Allison
DLC | Blueprint Magazine | October 7, 2004
Nuclear Terrorism
Book Excerpt
By Graham Allison
NUCLEAR TERRORISM: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe
by Graham Allison
Times Books, 272 pp, $24.00
On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning's Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.
The CIA had no independent confirmation of this report, but neither did it have any basis on which to dismiss it. Did Russia's arsenal include a large number of ten-kiloton weapons? Yes. Could the Russian government account for all the nuclear weapons the Soviet Union had built during the Cold War? No. Could Al Qaeda have acquired one or more of these weapons? Yes. Could it have smuggled a nuclear weapon through American border controls into New York City without anyone's knowledge? Yes. In a moment of gallows humor, someone quipped that the terrorists could have wrapped the bomb in one of the bales of marijuana that are routinely smuggled into cities like New York.
In the hours that followed, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice analyzed what strategists call the "problem from hell." Unlike the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union knew that an attack against the other would elicit a retaliatory strike or greater measure, Al Qaeda -- with no return address -- had no such fear of reprisal. Even if the president were prepared to negotiate, Al Qaeda had no phone number to call.
Clearly no decision could be taken without much more information about the threat and those behind it. But how could Rice engage a wider circle of experts and analysts without the White House's suspicions leaking to the press? A CNN flash that the White House had information about an Al Qaeda nuclear weapon in Manhattan would create chaos. New Yorkers would flee the city in terror, and residents of other metropolitan areas would panic. The stock market, which was just then stabilizing from the shock of 9/11, could collapse.
American Hiroshima. Concerned that Al Qaeda could have smuggled a nuclear weapon into Washington as well, the president ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to leave the capital for an "undisclosed location," where he would remain for many weeks to follow. This was standard procedure to ensure "continuity of government" in case of a decapitation strike against the U.S. political leadership. Several hundred federal employees from more than a dozen government agencies joined the vice president at this secret site, the core of an alternative government that would seek to cope in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion that destroyed Washington. The president also immediately dispatched NEST specialists (Nuclear Emergency Support Teams of scientists and engineers) to New York to search for the weapon. But no one in the city was informed of the threat, not even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Six months earlier the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had picked up chatter in Al Qaeda channels about an "American Hiroshima." The CIA knew that Osama bin Laden's fascination with nuclear weapons went back at least to 1992, when he attempted to buy highly enriched uranium from South Africa. Al Qaeda operatives were alleged to have negotiated with Chechen separatists in Russia to buy a nuclear warhead, which the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed to have acquired from Russian arsenals. The CIA's special task force on Al Qaeda had noted the terrorist group's emphasis on thorough planning, intensive training, and repetition of successful tactics. The task force also highlighted Al Qaeda's strong preference for symbolic targets and spectacular attacks.
Staggering the imagination. As the CIA's analysts examined Dragonfire's report and compared it with other bits of information, they noted that the attack on the World Trade Center in September had set the bar higher for future terrorist spectaculars. Psychologically, a nuclear attack would stagger the world's imagination as dramatically as 9/11 did. Considering where Al Qaeda might detonate such a bomb, they noted that New York was, in the jargon of national security experts, "target rich." Among hundreds of potential targets, what could be more compelling than Times Square, the most famous address in the self-proclaimed capital of the world?
Amid this sea of unknowns, analysts could definitively answer at least one question. They knew what kind of devastation a nuclear explosion would cause. If Al Qaeda was to rent a van to carry the ten-kiloton Russian weapon into the heart of Times Square and detonate it adjacent to the Morgan Stanley headquarters at 1585 Broadway, Times Square would vanish in the twinkling of an eye. The blast would generate temperatures reaching into the tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. The resulting fireball and blast wave would destroy instantaneously the theater district, the New York Times building, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within a third of a mile of the point of detonation. The ensuing firestorm would engulf Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden, leaving a landscape resembling the World Trade Center site. From the United Nations headquarters on the East River and the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, to the Metropolitan Museum in the eighties and the Flatiron Building in the twenties, structures would remind one of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building following the Oklahoma City bombing.
On a normal workday, more than half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of Times Square. A noon detonation in midtown Manhattan could kill them all. Hundreds of thousands of others would die from collapsing buildings, fire, and fallout in the ensuing hours. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast would fry cell phones, radios, and other electronic communications. Hospitals, doctors, and emergency services would be overwhelmed by the wounded. Firefighters would be battling an uncontrolled ring of fires for many days thereafter.
The threat of nuclear terrorism, moreover, is not limited to New York City. While New York is widely seen as the most likely target, it is clear that Al Qaeda is not only capable of, but also interested in, mounting attacks on other American cities, where people may be less prepared. Imagine the consequences of a ten-kiloton weapon exploding in San Francisco, Houston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other city Americans call home. From the epicenter of the blast to a distance of approximately a third of a mile, every structure and individual would vanish in a vaporous haze. A second circle of destruction, extending three-quarters of a mile from ground zero, would leave buildings looking like the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. A third circle, reaching out one and one-half miles, would be ravaged by fires and radiation.
Uncontrollable blaze. In Washington, a bomb going off at the Smithsonian Institution would destroy everything from the White House to the lawn of the Capitol building; everything from the Supreme Court to the FDR Memorial would be left in rubble; uncontrollable fires would reach all the way out to the Pentagon.
In a cover story in the New York Times Magazine in May 2002, Bill Keller interviewed Eugene Habiger, the retired four-star general who had overseen strategic nuclear weapons until 1998 and had run nuclear antiterror programs for the Department of Energy until 2001. Summarizing his decade of daily experience dealing with threats, Habiger offered a categorical conclusion about nuclear terrorism: "it is not a matter of if; it's a matter of when." "That," Keller noted drily, "may explain why he now lives in San Antonio."
In the end, the Dragonfire report turned out to be a false alarm.
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?cp=2&kaid=...ontentid=252927
Contact: Karin K. Freedman/Kyra Jennings
(202)546-0007/(800)546-0027
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) BLUEPRINT Magazine will host a luncheon speech with Dr. Graham Allison, founding dean of Harvard's Kennedy School and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, to discuss what the government can do to prevent nuclear terrorism. The address will be held on Wednesday, October 20, 2004 at 1:00 p.m. in the Dirksen Senate Office Building....
At the forum, Dr. Allison will lay out two provocative arguments. First, a nuclear terrorist attack on an American city is currently inevitable, given the serious intentions of our enemies, the increasing availability of weapons, and the countless ways terrorists could smuggle a weapon across American borders. Second, nuclear terrorism is preventable if we focus strategically on securing loose nuclear materials and dealing with potential nuclear states.
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=85&su...ontentid=252961
AQ Khan's aide arrested in Germany
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A Swiss engineer suspected of helping Libya obtain nuclear weapons technology has been arrested in Germany, prosecutors said Monday.
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Warren Buffett - one of the richest man in the world who has huge stakes in insurance industry has commented that nuclear 9/11 is a matter of when and not if.
About 3 years Syemour Hersh had an article in in New Yorker on this subject and some people weren't exactly comfortable discussing this subject since it didn't fit in with their existing 'models'. Of course, people/opinions and models change with time.
'Accidental Indo-Pak nuke war possible'
ANI[ FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2004 11:14:08 PM ]
WASHINGTON: A former Pakistani army major general has said that the possibility of an "accidental" nuclear war breaking out between India and Pakistan could not be ruled out because of a lack of "robustness in the decision-making systems in both countries".
In a study presented at South Asia roundtable organised by the Brookings Institution this week, Major General Mahmud Ali Durrani claimed that possessing nuclear weapons systems placed serious demands on a nation and its government, the foremost of them being, the need for internal political stability and strong institutions.
Simultaneously, the Daily Times quoted him as saying that efforts were needed to address issues like proliferation, safety, security and stability and the avoidance of a nuclear war by miscalculation.
Basing his conclusions after a series of extensive interviews with US and Pakistani officials, besides scholars, former civil and military officers and those now responsible for the security and safety of nuclear programmes, Major General Durrani said that there was a "consistent perception of concern" for the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, apprehensions about the robustness of the decision-making system, the lack of conflict reduction mechanisms in the region."
According to Gen Durrani, although Pakistan had not declared a formal nuclear doctrine, he was able to determine four national nuclear policy objectives in his meetings with Pakistani officials.
They are: deterrence of all forms of external aggression that endanger national security, achievement of deterrence through the development and maintenance of an effective combination of conventional and strategic forces within the country's resource constraints, deterrence of Pakistan's adversaries from attempting a counter-force strategy against its strategic assets and finally, stabilisation of strategic deterrence in the South Asian region.
He, however, suggested that while the present situation might not be all that bad on the ground, the training of military and non-military security forces should be brought up to international standards, based on a realistic threat assessment of the threat of terrorism.
Major General Durrani also recommended that political pressures should be controlled by reducing the radical religious influence in both Pakistan and India and resolving lingering disputes through dialogue.
"Crisis management should be implemented through a series of political and military confidence-building measures, including special emissaries, a crisis management agreement, media management, additional hotlines, notification of alert status, separation of nuclear weapons from delivery systems, flag meetings and cooperative border monitoring," the paper quoted him as saying.
He further said that nuclear proliferation should be avoided through legislative changes, stronger fiscal and technical control of weapons programmes and improving operating procedures of weapons security.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/artic...887211.cms
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