Breaking news, American born AQ member Adam Gadahn caught:

KARACHI, Pakistan – The American-born spokesman for al-Qaida has been arrested by Pakistani intelligence officers in the southern city of Karachi, two officers and a government official said Sunday as video emerged of him urging U.S. Muslims to attack their own country.

The arrest of Adam Gadahn is a major victory in the U.S.-led battle against al-Qaida and will be taken as a sign that Pakistan, criticized in the past for being an untrustworthy ally, is cooperating more fully with Washington. It follows the recent detentions of several Afghan Taliban commanders in Karachi, including the movement’s No. 2 commander.

This is a major victory on top of the string of successful strikes and arrests of AQ and Taliban leaders in Pakistan. The real question we’ll start asking is, since he at least was an American citizen, how he will be treated? POW, enemy combatant, criminal? This debate is going to be started all over again. Considering we’ve intentionally targeted him with UAV strikes in the past, my assumption is he will not be treated as an American citizen, especially since he has publicly renounced his citizenship which makes him legally stateless.

Apparently not. Seems nobody is sure at the moment.

Front page of the Gulf News yesterday in Dubai.

Mahmud al-Mabhuh, a senior Hamas military commander and a founder of the Al-Qassam Brigades, was assassinated in the luxurious Al Bustan Rotana Hotel in Dubai on 19 January (or 20th January, accounts differ). On the day of the incident, the Al-Qassam Brigades announced that he died of terminal cancer in a hospital in the United Arab Emirates, but nothing more was said publicly. The news of his murder was only made public ten days after the assasination occurred. The account of his murder is unclear—he was either suffocated, electrocuted, poisoned, or injected with a drug that induced a heart attack.

The Dubai police have asserted that the assassination team consisted of eleven suspects holding various European nationalities. Also, two Palestinians were arrested in Jordan and handed over to Dubai, suspected of giving logistical assistance. One has been reported to be a security official in the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority, which begs the question from Hamas and others: is Fatah teaming up with Mossad to target Hamas? (Rumors are rampant, however, and some think that this was a Hamas inside job, while others suspect Mossad.)

Of course, all of this is reminiscent of the film Munich, which narrates the allegedly true story about Israel’s covert assasination of people involved in the attack on Israel Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. Seeing the newspaper, however, one of my (Muslim) colleagues said it reminded him more like the hooligans from Oceans Eleven.

Fun gossip and rumors:

• This could be evidence of expansion of Israel’s assasination policy.
• Police chief Dahi Khalfan has said he will issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if investigators show Mossad was behind the killing.
• Meanwhile, there was no comment from Dubai-based diplomats from the countries linked to passports carried by the alleged assassin cell: six with British, three Irish and one each from France and Germany.
• A former high-ranking Mossad official, Rami Igra, told Israel Army Radio that the assassination, despite looking like a professional job, was far too amateurish to be Isaraeli, noting that the assailants were seen on a security camera.
• Poor Jerusalem-based British citizen Melvyn Mildiner was shocked to see his name and passport number listed as one of the suspects. He told Reuters news agency that he has never been to Dubai and had no connection with the Mossad or the assassination.

A brief clip from the film “The Four Lions,” which presents four bumbling would be home grown jihadists in the UK.

Via Political Warfare

There has been yet another IED attack in Russia on the rail system. After Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia is one of the ‘hottest’ place for IED attacks and yet many go unreported in the mainstream news. Most target critical infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines or transportation.

My immediate thought is whether the future of Russia may one day look like Nigeria. With dozens of ethnic groups, religions and a history of separatism and Islamic extremism it’s not unthinkable. Combine that with the country’s increasing reliance on its oil and gas industries for both economic and political power, and key elements are there for such a campaign.

Via Bruce Schneier. Watch and wait for it.

Yemen is probably the most misunderstood international story in the Western mass media since… well, Uganda in September 2009. As was the case during the Uganda uprising, I believe the problem originates in the ignorance of regionalism in Yemen, or as Professor Harm J. De Blij has written time and time again: geography matters.

There are two major yet unrelated conflicts taking place in Yemen—the Sunni and Al Qaeda-linked separatist threat in the central south of the country (a major concern of the United States) and a Shia uprising in the north (alarming to the Yemenis and Saudis, possibly supported by Iran, but of little relevance to the rest of the world). And carefully distinguishing between the two is critical to keep the US out of a real quagmire.

Let’s start from the beginning. A century ago, Yemen was divided into two spheres of influence, with the Ottomans controlling the Red Sea coastal area (North Yemen), while the Aden coast was a protectorate of the British (South Yemen). After World War I, a Shia spiritual leader established himself as King in North Yemen and titled his country the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. Although he initially fought with the growing Saudi state, the Saudis backed the king during the 1960s civil war, whereas the Soviets and Egyptians backed a republican insurgency, which came to an end in 1970. Meanwhile, the former British Protectorate became the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in 1967, also enjoying backing from the Soviets. Perhaps due to the dual Red sympathies, perhaps due to Arab nationalism, the two states agreed to unify in the early 1970s, and ultimately merged in 1990. (A group in South Yemen declared and fought for independence during several months in 1994.)

The Cold War conflicts are essentially unrelated to today’s violence. Back then, the differences were primarily political. Today, the roots of the conflict are religious and tribal. The northern uprising in the mountains along the Saudi border is a Shia rebellion based on anger and frustration with the persecution and neglect of the mountainous region by the (Sunni) government. The Yemeni and Saudi governments are fighting this rebellion, and the Saudis have blockaded the coast, on the pretext of stopping Iranian arms from reaching the rebels. The violence has caused widespread displacement of people in the areas, as the Shia rebels and government troops treat civilian casualties as a secondary concern.

The border with Saudi Arabia and Yemen was definitively demarcated in 2000.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2001 Anthrax attacks have yet to be solved and the case is still open.

I think this is something some of us know but the details of the article will interest you. For the sake of conjecture, I’d posit there are several possible scenarios here:

1) The FBI simply can’t solve the case. Either the crime was committed too well or the FBI and other government agencies screwed up. No big mystery or conspiracy. Just incompetence. (an all too frequent explanation of government behavior)

2) Someone in the USG knows or has a very good idea who the perpetrator(s) was/were but is unwilling to acknowledge it and is perhaps impeding the investigation due to the ramifications. E.g. it could be another state such as Russia or North Korea in which case the US would have to declare war, or perhaps an alleged ally like Saudi, or rogue elements from within an allied state?

3) The USG wants the public to believe the case is closed while it continues to investigate quietly to avoid embarassment.

Readers, any further theories?

Farhat Taj has a very interesting article in the Daily Times (Pakistan) that vigorously justifies drone attacks. Taj’s credentials are curious—she is a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research at the University of Oslo, and a member of Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy—yet it is with that background that she writes from first hand experience praising US drone attacks and saying that Waziristan locals agree with her. For what the article lacks in sophistication and structure it makes up for with its unique perspective.

There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the people of Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani society on the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US drone attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty. Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons express sensational clamour over the supposed ‘civilian casualties’ in the drone attacks. I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks with hundreds of people of Waziristan. They see the US drone attacks as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say, their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s column is, one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about the civilian casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the view of the people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the Taliban and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met these people in the Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

I would challenge both the US and Pakistani media to provide verifiable evidence of civilian ‘casualties’ because of drone attacks on Waziristan, i.e. names of the people killed, names of their villages, dates and locations of the strikes and, above all, the methodology of the information that they collected. If they can’t meet the challenge, I would request them to stop throwing around fabricated figures of ‘civilian casualties’ that confuse people around the world and provide propaganda material to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the politics and media of Pakistan.

I pose that challenge because no one is in a position to give a correct estimate of how many individuals have been killed so far in drone attacks. On the basis of American media estimates, 600 to 700 ‘civilian population’ have been killed. The Pakistani government, pro-Taliban political parties like Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, Tehrik-e-Insaf, and the media are quoting the same figure. Neither the government of Pakistan nor the media have any access to the area and no system is in place to arrive at precise estimates. The Pakistani government and media take the figure appearing in the American media as an admission by the American government. The US media too do not have access to the area. Moreover, the area is simply not accessible for any kind of independent journalistic or scholarly work on drone attacks. The Taliban simply kill anyone doing so.

The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation under the Taliban and al Qaeda. It is in this context that they would welcome anyone, Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil, to rid them of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone attacks. Secondly, the people feel comfortable with the drones because of their precision and targeted strikes. People usually appreciate drone attacks when they compare it with the Pakistan Army’s attacks, which always result in collateral damage. Especially the people of Waziristan have been terrified by the use of long-range artillery and air strikes of the Pakistan Army and Air Force. People complain that not a single TTP or al Qaeda member has been killed so far by the Pakistan Army, whereas a lot of collateral damage has taken place. Thousands of houses have been destroyed and hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed by the Pakistan Army. On the other hand, drone attacks have never targeted the civilian population except, they informed, in one case when the funeral procession of Khwazh Wali, a TTP commander, was hit… I have heard people particularly appreciating the precision of drone strikes. People say that when a drone would hover over the skies, they wouldn’t be disturbed and would carry on their usual business because they would be sure that it does not target the civilians, but the same people would run for shelter when a Pakistani jet would appear in the skies because of its indiscriminate firing.

The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel.

The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his detention, he boasted that 20 more young Muslim men were being prepared for similar murderous missions in the Yemen.

The lawyer for the 23-year-old Nigerian entered a formal not guilty plea on Friday to charges that he tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25 – even though he reportedly admitted earlier that he was trained and supplied with the explosives sewn into his underwear by al-Qaeda in the Arab state.

“He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up,” Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.

“I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal.”

Abdulmutallab could have been held and interrogated in military custody under existing US legislation before a decision was taken whether to charge him before a military tribunal or a civilian court, according to Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General under President George W Bush.

The Minister mentioned one of the [Sierra Leone] coup’s leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, “in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him.” …

Forget Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for “extortion by law-enforcement and immigration officials.” This is one of the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime.

- Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, February 1994

A portrait is emerging of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the “Christmas Bomber” who was thwarted as he tried to detonate a bomb as he flew from Nigeria to Detroit—that should chill liberal policymakers to the bone. Despite what we might like to think, he was not some rough kid from a broken home radicalized by Islamists in the ghettos of Nigeria. He was in fact a member of the uppercrust of Nigerian society and had studied at elite private schools in Togo and Britain, where he lived a very comfortable lifestyle. His father was a former Minister of Finance for the Nigerian government, a prominent banker and a respected businessman, who was so concerned about his son’s religious fanaticism, praise of terrorists, and study of Arabic and Islam in Yemen, that he alerted US authorities of his son’s radicalism six months before the attack (unfortunately, it didn’t do much good).

Some in the UK think it has to do with extreme leftist educational institutions that espouse anti-Americanism and protect extremist Islamist thinkers under the guise of free speach. But this may have less to do with it than the effect of education on a mind not tempered by other social and personal safeguards. Indeed, this type of education and family background is not the exception among terrorists—it’s practically the rule. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attacks, was an Egyptian national, son of a lawyer, who attended graduate school in Germany. That’s a similar background to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a founder of Al Qaeda and reported to be it’s “brain”, the son of a university chemistry professor who trained to become a physician. And of course, Osama Bin Laden is a member of the Bin Laden family, one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families.

I believe the lesson from this is that education will not save us in the long-term battle against terror. Nigeria has millions of destitute young men living in absolute poverty. So do dozens more Muslim countries. Yet most militants are radicalized not by homegrown religous institutions, which tend to be very conservative and preserving the status quo (indeed, religious leaders in Nigeria were quick to condemn the recent attempted plane bombing). The danger as always is radical thinkers that want to violently destroy the status quo and existing institutions.

Whether it be 19th century France, 20th century Russia and China, or 21st century Islamic World, education is never a cure for extremists driven to violence, and pursuing education of the masses as a countermeasure to the spread of extremism is nonsense. Indeed, that may provide the venues and networks for the thinking that justifies terrorism and militancy.

SIDENOTE: There’s a second topic to follow here, also addressed by Kaplan’s 1994 article, that Nigeria is crime-ridden and corrupt, with notoriously dangerous airports, that should be a major warning sign to US authorities.