Monthly Archives: February 2010

al Qaeda, Barack Obama, guest authors, Yemen

Undermining al Qaeda in Yemen; Should the US outsource its security to a war criminal?

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The global reach of al Qaeda in Yemen became clear when a Nigerian disciple of the murder cult nearly blew up an airliner over Detroit. In response, the Obama administration is strengthening its support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, one of the regions longest serving dictators and one of the most corrupt.

President Obama said he hopes to communicate to “Muslims around the world that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death, including the murder of fellow Muslims, while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress.” The hypocrisy is stunning.

The US administration is well aware that Saleh’s government is committing atrocities against civilians that rise to the level of war crimes. In a Darfur-like conflict in Sa’ada, northern Yemen, collective punishment of Shiite civilians includes indiscriminate bombing and intentional starvation. A former recruiter for Usama bin Laden leads the military with the help of tribal militias, former Iraqi army officers and foreign jihaddists. Over 200,000 are homeless from the war and largely deprived of aid. When Oxfam warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe of terrifying proportions,” the Yemeni Health Minister threatened to expel the organization.

Journalists who report on the carnage are tried as terrorists, like Abdulkarim al Khaiwani, or disappear like Mohammed al Maqaleh, who reported an air strike that killed 87 war refugees in September and hasn’t been seen since.

In south Yemen, police shot and killed dozens of anti-government protesters since 2007. Thousands were arrested. (Torture in Yemeni jails is brutal.) At a recent demonstration, southerners raised the US flag like a distress signal for rescue from tyranny. Funeral marches snake for miles along dusty roads.

If bombed starving children, disappeared journalists and bloody protesters aren’t enough for those who ascribe to the strongman theory of Middle Eastern politics, there’s also Yemen’s consistent duplicity on the terror issue.

President Saleh is a long time al Qaeda appeaser who relies on militants as an essential base of support and deploys terrorists as mercenaries. It’s no surprise Yemen’s al Qaeda morphed into a transnational threat or that its leadership survived a recent spate of Yemeni air strikes. The surprise is that the US is staking its security on President Saleh, the King of Spin. Saleh promised to reform after the 2000 USS Cole bombing, the 2002 Limburgh bombing and after qualifying for the Millennium Challenge Account in 2005. He said things were going to be different after the 2006 donor’s conference and the 2008 US Embassy attack that killed 13. In Yemen, al Qaeda is dubbed “the other face of the regime” in reference to the multi-tiered enmeshment between the two. Officials covertly provide training, transport and passports to jihaddists. When Yemen needs fighters, it releases terrorists from jail and puts them on the payroll.

If Obama’s goal is to push back on the terror threat from Yemen for a few years, then Saleh’s messy air strikes, botched raids and half hearted hunting may achieve some limited disruption. But at the root of Yemen’s growing terror threat is elite, not popular, support for al Qaeda. In 1994’s civil war between north and south Yemen, Saleh used veterans of bin Laden’s Afghan jihad to defeat the “Godless communists” in the south. Some of these bin Laden loyalists are now military commanders, governors and ambassadors.

Conventional wisdom holds that al Qaeda fanatics could raise a small army in such a poverty stricken, rowdy and largely illiterate country. Saudi money funds the spread of hard core Salafism while most rural areas have no clean water, electricity or medical services. Jobs go to government loyalists. But instead of lining up as suicide bombers, Yemenis all over the country are protesting for civil rights.

Yemen is not, as Maureen Dowd said, a place “that breeds people who want to kill us.” Yemenis are a kind hearted and courageous people. Last week, Women Journalists Without Chains led the 31th weekly demonstration to support banned newspapers. When ten Sana’a University professors, Academics against Corruption, were fired for exposing massive theft, protesters took to the streets in solidarity. In Aden, security forces strafed a peaceful sit-in at al Ayyam Newspaper, an award winning independent banned in May. Police set the offices on fire and arrested its editors, claiming they were hunting al Qaeda.

The Yemeni people have their own narrative that delegitimizes al Qaeda’s bloody imperialism. In Yemen, democracy is not a dirty American word but a constitutional right denied by a thuggish regime.

Despite the smiling assurances of Yemen’s legion of Baghdad Bobs, Yemen’s government is a brutal mafia. The idea that has broad resonance in Yemen is not the coming of the global caliphate, but the coming of the democratic state.

What Yemen needs, if not a war crimes tribunal, is a major crimes tribunal to purge corrupt officials and foster governmental legitimacy. Yemen’s public funds and lands, foreign aid and oil revenue were stolen by President Saleh and his relatives for decades, while millions of children wither from malnutrition and never attend school. Stability will be achieved when the Yemeni oligarchy accounts for its crimes against the nation. Maybe with amnesty, they’ll leave quietly and a caretaker government of Yemeni technocrats can take the reins with little bloodshed.

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Jane Novak is a long-time analyst and expert on Yemeni internal affairs. The author of over 60 articles on Yemen, Jane was dubbed by the Swiss daily NZZ “the best known foreigner in Yemen.” In 2007, her Armies of Liberation web site was banned by the Yemeni government. Jane can be reached via email here.

9/11, Abdulmutallab, Barack Obama, DOJ, Eric Holder, Flight 253, Ghailani, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, War on Terror

David Rivkin and Marc Thiessen: A Tale of Two Terrorists (AG Holder sends a WOT canary in to destroy the Bush doctrine)

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Fn 12 on page 59 of the DOJ’s December 18, 2009 rebuttal to Ghailani’s Speedy Trial Motion to dismiss his case in federal court. Click to enlarge

In their Wall Street Journal op-ed today, David B. Rivkin and Marc Thiessen understated the significance of the Bush doctrine arguments filed on December 18, 2009 by the Department of Justice and used to rebut the Speedy Trial Motion to dismiss the federal case against Ahmed Ghailani. Surely U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara did not file contrary to the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder.

Mr. Bharara is no doubt a dedicated public servant. I have great personal faith in his abilities, loyalty to our Nation, and willingness to do all that he can to successfully prosecute Ahmed Ghailani to the fullest extent of the law. That said, Ghailani is President Barack Obama’s canary for the federal prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his 9/11 co-conspirators, and perhaps 40 more detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay. For the criminalization of the war against terror to succeed, Ghailani’s motion must fail. It is ironic and insidious that Obama and Holder must first defend what they seek to destroy:

On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

Mr. Bharara, on behalf of the Justice Department, filed a memorandum with the court stating that Ghailani’s claims are dangerous and off the mark. Interrogating terrorists must come before criminal prosecution, he wrote in language so strong that even a redacted version of his filing (which we have obtained) serves as a searing indictment of the administration’s mishandling of Abdulmutallab.

“The United States was, and still is, at war with al Qaeda,” Mr. Bharara argued. “And because the group does not control territory as a sovereign nation does, the war effort relies less on deterrence than on disruption—on preventing attacks before they can occur. At the core of such disruption efforts is obtaining accurate intelligence about al Qaeda’s plans, leaders and capabilities.” … READ THE REST

Review again the image above and think about Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab. Then read this fuller excerpt from the DOJ’s rebuttal. It begins with the last paragraph on page 46 (B. Discussion) and runs through the partially transcribed paragraph on page 50. (Except where clarification was needed, citations and footnote numbering were omitted from this transcription):

First, the Government’s interest in protecting national security justified the delay in this case. The Supreme Court has stated that is “‘obvious and unarguable’ that no governmental interest is more compelling than the security of the Nation.” If vindicating the Government’s interest in, for example, presenting a more effective case by seeking to persuade a co-defendant to testify against the defendant is a “valid” reason for delay, it follows that this most compelling of interests is “valid” as well.

Indeed, delay is more justifiable in this case than when the Government delays a trial to persuade a co-defendant to testify against the defendant (an in Vassell). In both cases, the defendant’s trial is intentionally delayed by the Government. But it is only in the Vassell-type situation that the Government delays the proceedings in order to put the defendant himself in a worse position at trial. The possibility that the delay will harm an individual’s defense at trial is the core concern of the Speedy Trial Clause, and the Vassell-type situation skirts close to this concern in that situation, then surely it may be put off in a case such as this — when the purpose for the delay was not to enhance the chances of convicting the defendant, but rather to obtain information that could be used to prevent future terrorist attacks against the nation by incapacitating others…

The defendant attempts to discredit the importance and relevance of national security in this case by calling it “an intentionally amorphous concept that can fluctuate depending on the specific aims that the Government seeks to protect.” But, however vague or overstated the invocation of national security could conceivably be in other contexts, there is nothing “amorphous” about the concept as applied here, and no question that the strength of the Government’s interest was at its zenith in this case. The defendant was a longstanding al Qaeda terrorist, and al Qaeda is the group responsible for the brutal murder of thousands of American citizens here and abroad. The United States was, and still is, at war with al Qaeda. And because the group does not control territory as a sovereign nation does, the war effort relies less on deterrence than on disruption — on preventing attacks before they occur. At the core of such disruption efforts is obtaining accurate intelligence about al Qaeda’s plans, leaders, and capabilities. [emphasis added mine]

In these circumstances, the Executive Branch’s decision initially to treat the defendant, a foreign national captured abroad in an al Qaeda safe house after a 14-hour gun battle, as an intelligence asset — to detain him abroad in order to detain vital, real-time intelligence about al Qaeda — warrants considerable deference. As the Supreme Court explained only last year:

In considering both the procedural and substantive standards used to impose detention to prevent acts of terrorism, proper deference must be accorded to the political branches. Unlike the President and some designated Members of Congress, neither the Members of the Court nor most federal judges begin the day with briefings that may describe new and serious threats to our Nation and its people. The law must accord the Executive substantial authority to apprehend and detain those who pose a real danger to our security.

Boumediene; see also e.g. United States v. Moussaoui … cf. Central Intelligence Agency v. Sims.

The pdf of the DOJ’s rebuttal is in two parts, here and here, if you wish to download it.