Leaked Documents Show Pakistani Spy Agency Aids Taliban

Tens of thousands of classified military documents made public Sunday give a first-hand account of the grim realities of the war in Afghanistan, including challenges faced by U.S. troops in battling an increasingly sophisticated Taliban force and collusion of Pakistan's military intelligence agency with Afghan insurgents. The more than 90,000 secret military and diplomatic reports, covering the period from January 2004 through December 2009, were obtained by an organization called WikiLeaks and released to the New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks ago on the condition they not be published before Sunday night. The documents were subsequently posted on the WikiLeaks website.

The New York Times reports on documents that detail a nexus between Pakistan's intelligence agency and Taliban insurgents, including Pakistani intelligence agents meeting with Taliban leaders to plan attacks against U.S. forces and assassinate Afghan leaders. The reports also describe cooperation between Pakistani intelligence and al Qaida fighters to wage attacks against American troops, including arming the Taliban with motorbikes for suicide attacks. The documents also detail several instances of collaboration between former ISI chief retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul and Afghan mujahideen, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who have been responsible for some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. troops in recent years. Gul has denied the reports as "fiction." Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Hassan Haqqani, has also denied reports of ties between Taliban and al Qaida fighters and Pakistani intelligence agency : "These reports reflect nothing more than single-source comments and rumors, which abound on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and are often proved wrong after deeper examination."

The Times also reports that the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is much worse than officially portrayed by the U.S. government. It chronicles a story on the Combat Outpost Keating, a U.S. military outpost created in 2006 in eastern Afghanistan to fight the insurgency and connect local allies to the central government in Kabul. The military outpost is reported to be representative of the challenges facing U.S. troops in battling the insurgency including "low troop levels, unreliable Afghan partners and an insurgency that has grown in skill, determination and its ability to menace." Taliban fighters have been reported to use heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles to shoot down U.S. helicopters.

According to Der Spiegel, the war logs shed new light on targeted killings of top al Qaida and Taliban leadership by the elite U.S. Task Force 373. The unit consists of members of the Navy Seals and the Delta Force and reports directly to the Pentagon instead of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The fact that the task force has a unit stationed on a German base in Mazar-e-Sharif could prove potentially embarrassing for the German government, Der Spiegel says.

The reports also highlight how growing civilian casualties have alienated the local Afghan population from the U.S.-led allied war effort against the al Qaeda and other terrorists. National Security Adviser James Jones has criticized WikiLeaks for releasing the documents in a statement: "WikiLeaks made no effort to contact us about these documents - the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people."

Scotland Yard's Radical Advisor

An advisory group that London's Metropolitan Police is required to consult with on safety and security issues is being headed by a radical Islamist who leads a group openly trying to bring sharia law to Europe, Andrew Gilligan reports in Monday's Telegraph.

Azad Ali previously had to resign as the founding chairman of the Muslim Safety Forum due to his radical views, Gilligan reports, but he has quietly returned to the post. Ali is part of the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), which wants an Islamic state in Europe. Success infiltrating Labour Party politics was among the findings of Gilligan's investigation into the IFE. As for Ali:

"He has previously praised a key mentor of Osama bin Laden. Earlier this year, he was filmed by an undercover reporter from Channel 4's Dispatches stating: 'Democracy, if it means not implementing the sharia, of course nobody agrees with that.'

When the documentary was aired, Mr Ali attacked the reporter on the IFE's official radio station, saying: 'We've got a picture of you and a lot more than you thought we had. We've tracked you down to different places. And if people are gonna turn what I've just said into a threat, that's their fault, innit?'"

The Muslim Safety Forum has a signed agreement with the Metropolitan Police to be consulted on formulating policy.

One Member of Parliament questioned the wisdom of the police relationship with the Forum, saying police "should have nothing to do with [Ali]. I know for a fact that there are just as knowledgeable members of the Muslim community who do not share his subversive views."

When Arab States Mistreat Palestinians

Though the United Nations has declared them counter-productive and needlessly provocative and Israel has dramatically reduced its blockade, international groups continue to organize waves of flotillas to Gaza carrying various aid supplies.

One is set to sail from Lebanon at any time.

Journalist Khaled Abu Toameh wonders why the Lebanese don't do more for Palestinians living in Lebanon. In a column published by the Hudson Institute, Abu Toameh laments the lack of scrutiny on Arab states that mistreat Palestinians. Jordan has revoked the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians.

In Lebanon, "Not only are Palestinians living in Lebanon denied the right to own property, but they also do not qualify for health care, and are banned by law from working in a large number of jobs" including as journalists, doctors and lawyers.

Abu Toameh quotes Lebanese journalist Rami Khouri, who writes of the mistreatment in Arab states of "foreign guest workers, who often are treated little better than chattel or indentured laborers…The mistreatment, abysmal living conditions and limited work, social security and property rights of the Palestinians [in Lebanon] are a lingering moral black mark."

It's a black mark ignored by human rights activists and Western media, Abu Toameh argues. Lebanon's parliament just postponed action on a bill to grant Palestinians civil rights, but there's been little or no coverage of the debate. It's a double standard when compared to the intense coverage given to any Israeli policy toward Palestinians.

His column can be read here.

And that "Rock the Casbah" Cover is Out

Appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, the cameras wouldn't show Elvis Presley from the waist down. His swaying hips were a little much for the sensitivities of the era. Eleven years later, the Rolling Stones had to tone down "Let's Spend the Night Together," making it "Let's Spend Some Time Together."

Such hypersensitivity toward musicians is alive and well in the West Bank, where Maizie Williams and her 1970s group Boney M recently performed. Palestinian organizers asked Williams not to sing one of her hits, "Rivers of Babylon." Why?

It is based on Psalm 137, which is part of Jewish services on holidays including Rosh Hashanah and references Jewish roots in the Holy Land:

"By the rivers of Babylon
Where he sat down
And there he wept when he remembered Zion."

Williams complied, but didn't understand the logic.

"I don't know if it is a political thing or what, but they asked us not to do it and we were a bit disappointed that we could not do it because we know that everybody loves this song no matter what," she said.

At least there was a music festival in the West Bank. There's little chance the Hamas theocrats in Gaza would consider such a decadent event. There, authorities are cracking down on smoking water pipes in public. Like many Hamas policies, it only applies to women. Men are free to smoke where they want.

One young Palestinian woman expressed her frustration over the law:

"I think it's a silly decision. It's a ridiculous, seriously. This is personal freedom...Why is it that a man is allowed to smoke shisha while it's not allowed for a woman?"

An Audacious Play by a Presidential Pal

Among the ever-expanding list of planned flotillas aimed at breaking the Israeli blockade on Gaza comes a new U.S.-based effort to send a boat named for President Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. Further complicating the matter for the White House is the role played by Rashid Khalidi, a friend of Obama's.

Organizers are trying to raise $370,000 to finance the trip, which could have about 50 passengers. No details have been offered about what items the boat would carry.

Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, notes American law prohibits "fitting, furnishing or arming vessels with the intent of committing hostile acts against a country with which the U.S. is at peace. (Challenging a blockade is a hostile act.)" He wonders whether the Justice Department would investigate the President's friend.

A State Department spokesman has confirmed that the U.S. is investigating IHH – the Turkish group behind the last flotilla – for possible designation as a terrorist group.

Winfield Myers comments "The real audacity this round is for Khalidi, who served as a spokesman for the PLO while it was listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, to engage in this kind of agitprop. Audacious, but hardly surprising for a man with a long history of substituting anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda for scholarship and teaching, as CW has demonstrated conclusively."

Khalidi ,the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, told the Washington Post he didn't know that the boat was named after Obama's book when he signed on to the effort. Not that it would have mattered:

"But if the name is a problem for the administration, it can simply insist publicly that Israel lift the siege: end of problem, end of embarrassment," he wrote, "That of course would require it to respond to the systematic mendacity of those in Congress and elsewhere who support the siege, and indeed whatever else the Israeli government does."

Like everyone else in the flotilla movement, Khalidi is silent about actions by the Hamas government that prompted the blockade in the first place. He also ignores the ongoing kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held four years without contact with any international relief organization.

Israel dramatically reduced the items banned from entry into Gaza last month, easing what already was a questionable humanitarian crisis for 1.5 million Palestinians living there. Factories are re-opening, formerly lucrative smuggling tunnels are closing and a new mall even opened.

As Lorne Gunter writes in Canada's National Post, what's left of the Israeli blockade is to prevent Hamas from arming, "not so it could pile on the misery of Gazans; Israel lets scores of aid shipments in every day."

Islamist Scholar's Books Banned in Bangladesh

As part of its efforts to stem rising Islamic extremism, the Bangladesh government has banned Islamist ideologue Maulana Syed Abdul Ala Maududi's books from libraries across the country. Shamim Mohammad Afjal, who heads the government-funded Islamic Foundation, reportedly told the BBC that Maududi's publications promoted "militancy and terrorism."

Maududi founded the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) party in 1941 in Lahore, Pakistan, which was then a part of British India. The JI is the oldest Islamic religious party and radical Islamist movement in South Asia. The Bangladesh branch of the JI, the largest Islamic party in Bangladesh, seeks to build an Islamist state based on Shariah law and has close ties to the banned terrorist group Jamaat ul Mujahedin Bangladesh (JMB) and al Qaeda. Two members of the JMB were convicted July 14 of attacking Bangladeshi security forces in 2005 and were each sentenced to 50 years in jail. The banned terrorist group has also been implicated in the August 2005 serial bomb blasts that killed at least 26 people and wounded several others. Senior leaders of the JI were recently arrested for collaborating with the Pakistani army and engaging in mass killings and other war crimes during the 1971 war of independence that culminated in Bangladesh ceding from Pakistan and forming a separate independent state.

Maududi is regarded as a leading pioneer of Islamic revivalism in South Asia and Bangladeshi authorities maintain his "writings promote radicalism and his ideological goal was to capture power in the name of Islam." Maududi has been reported to be influenced by the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen or the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamic revivalist movement founded in Egypt in 1928 that seeks to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate based on Islamic law. He is also reported to have been a close associate of Brotherhood luminary Sayyed Qutb.

Maududi's books are often promoted by American Islamist groups, including the Islamic Circle of North America.

UK Court Accepts Vandals' "Israeli War Crimes" Defense

British judicial officials may investigate the actions of a presiding judge who directed a jury to acquit defendants accused of causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to an arms factory after the defense argued it was to stop Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza.

Judge George Bathurst-Norman told jurors that Gaza's Palestinians suffered "hell on earth" as a result of Israel's actions. The lead defendant's actions might even merit the George Cross, England's highest civilian honor.

The jury followed the judge's advice, accepting the defendants' insistence that although they committed a crime, they did so in order to stop Israel from committing more serious ones against the Palestinians.

The Crown Prosecution Service's Board of Deputies wants the Office of Judicial Complaints to investigation Bathurst-Norman's remarks from the bench. "The press reports of Judge George Bathurst-Norman's comments… give rise to profound concerns about the appropriateness of his directions to the jury," said Board President Vivian Wineman.

The seven defendants objected to the role of EDO MBM, a British company supplying military equipment used in Operation Cast Lead – the military campaign launched by Israel in December 2008 to destroy Hamas terror cells firing rockets into Israel. On January 16, 2009, the defendants broke into a manufacturing facility owned by the company and spent close to an hour damaging equipment with hammers, throwing cabinets and computers out of a top-floor window, and sabotaging machinery.

The seven were backed by a group calling itself smash EDO, which bragged openly about activists' success in destroying property and getting away with it.

The local Member of Parliament, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, praised the court decision and said she was "absolutely delighted" the activists had been cleared.

Judge Bathurst-Norman's decision "takes the delegitimisation of Israel in the U.K. to new levels," a British blogger observed. "Not only can you freely trash Israeli goods in a supermarket, practice antisemitism at a British university and get an arrest warrant for an Israeli official visiting the UK" but "you can now break into a factory making exports to Israel and lay waste to the production machinery."

Read more about the case here, here and here.

Sources and Methods of Islamic Radicalization are Global

A recent report in Malaysia's The Star illuminates the universality of today's fight against Islamic radicalism.

Entitled "Young Men the Easy Target for Recruitment," the report outlines how moderately-minded youth in Southeast Asia have been drawn to violent jihad—primarily with the al-Qaida-linked terror organization, Jemaah Islamiyya (JI). The methods for this recruitment are strikingly similar to those witnessed in the U.S. during the past few years. Among the pathways Islamist militants have taken to extremism are radical mosques, the Internet, and prison.

According to the The Star, mainstream "Levis Bermuda short"-wearing young men who come from moderate Muslim roots, "where religion is a way of life to live out good values," are experiencing a "dramatic twist" to extremism after being exposed to "radical preachers who typically are charismatic and persuasive."

As authorities crack down on mosques and madrassas, and imprison radical clerics and teachers, "the militants have…turned to cyber space to recruit new members via Facebook or their own websites." This has proven quite effective, and is propagated to a much larger audience than more conventional "in-person" recruitment and "education."

Additionally, police efforts to quell the growth of jihadist groups in Southeast Asia by imprisoning known militants and radical clerics, has had the unintended consequence of radicalizing a new generation in prison.

As The Star report explains:

"Senior militants jailed for their involvement in terrorism are believed to wield tremendous influence in jail. They draw fellow inmates to their cause by teaching them how to read the Quran and eventually end up radicalising [sic.] and recruiting them."

Authorities have witnessed similar patterns in the U.S., in which "flag-waving and apple pie-eating" American-Muslims are drawn to jihad against the West after being indoctrinated by radical jihadist forums, extremist Muslim inmates, and persuasive preachers; the last of which the NYPD's Radicalization in the West report classified as "Spiritual Sanctioners."

In one prominent example, Northern Virginia-based imam, Ali al-Timimi, provided the religious justification to a group known as the "Virginia Paintball Jihad Network" to take up arms against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Al-Timimi is now serving a life sentence for his role with the network.

More recently, yet another group of Northern Virginia youth—dubbed the "Zamzam 5"—attempted to wage jihad against American troops in Af-Pak after supposedly being recruited online by a senior regional leader of al-Qaida living half a world away. Evidence also suggests that the group's frequent exposure to the radical ideology being taught at the ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America) Center in Alexandria, VA may have played a role in their decision to fly to Pakistan in an attempt to fight Americans. In June, the young men were convicted in a Pakistani court of terror-related offenses and sentenced to 10-year terms.

As we have seen here in the States, even prison cells cannot inhibit the spread of radical, violent Islamic teaching. A number of prominent terror plots and "sanctioners" can trace their histories to American prisons, including:

• Jose Padilla—suspected of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb and convicted of conspiracy to murder people overseas and of providing material support to terrorists;

• Kevin James—creator of the Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS) cell, which recruited other inmates to plot attacks against military and Jewish targets in and around Los Angeles;

• The Bronx Synagogue/Stewart Air National Guard Base(Newburgh, NY) Plot—four black Muslim men, some of whom are said to have converted to Islam while in prison, arrested for attempting to blow up 2 Riverdale synagogues, and to shoot down military airplanes taking off from the upstate-NY Air Guard Base.

In 2009, the Islam in Europe blog brought to light the extent to which radical Islamic indoctrination is taking place in French prisons as well—further driving home the point that the jihadist ideology is spreading rapidly, and globally.

U.S. Designates Awlaki a Terrorist

He has become a recruiter of terrorists against America, and on Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department designated American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The move freezes any assets he may have here and makes it illegal for anyone in the United States to engage in any transactions with Awlaki or to provide him with material support. It has been reported that President Obama already had authorized killing Awlaki, who is connected to a series of recent attacks, including Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan and failed Detroit airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He also called for direct attacks on American civilians.

Awlaki "has proven that he is extraordinarily dangerous, committed to carrying out deadly attacks on Americans and others worldwide," Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey said in a statement. "He has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism -- fundraising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents."

Awlaki was born in New Mexico and preached in Colorado, San Diego and Virginia. The 9/11 Commission report tied him to at least two of the hijackers in that attack and recent reports indicate AQAP has recruited dozens of Westerners for terrorist training in Yemen.

Read the Treasury announcement here.

Lynn Stewart re-Sentenced to 10 years in Federal Prison

A federal judge in New York re-sentenced Lynn Stewart to 10 years and one month in prison Thursday. The decision comes after five years of legal proceedings for the woman who crossed the line from defense attorney to terrorist intermediary.

Stewart was initially convicted in 2005 for helping her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, relay messages from his prison cell to other terrorists. At the time, Rahman, also known as the Blind Sheikh, was serving a prison sentence for his role in numerous terrorist plots. According to the government's evidence at trial:

"Abdel Rahman, a blind Islamic scholar and cleric, was the leader of [a] seditious conspiracy, the purpose of which was "jihad," in the sense of a struggle against the enemies of Islam. Indicative of this purpose, in a speech to his followers Abdel Rahman instructed that they were to "do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, with the missile…. against God's enemies." Abdel Rahman's role in the conspiracy was generally limited to overall supervision and direction of the membership, as he made efforts to remain a level about the details of individual operations. However, as a cleric and the group's leader, Abdel Rahman was entitled to dispense fatwas, religious opinions on the holiness of an act, to members of the group sanctioning proposed courses of conduct and advising them whether the acts would be in furtherance of jihad."

As we previously reported, she appealed the conviction and her two-year sentence to a federal court. That court denied the appeal, noting that the trial court's "breathtakingly low sentence of 2 1/3 years…trivializes Stewart's extremely serious conduct."

Stewart was facing up to 30 years in prison and prosecutors had asked that she get at least 15. While the 10 year sentence is a far cry from the maximum, it should send a message that, while zealous advocacy on behalf of a criminal defendant is integral to the criminal justice system, attorneys must be wary not to cross the line when defending those accused of terrorism.

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