Appeals Court Rejects Lawsuit on Surveillance
By ADAM LIPTAK | Published: July 6, 2007
A divided federal appeals court today dismissed a case challenging the National Security Agency’s program to wiretap without warrants the international communications of some Americans, reversing a trial judge’s order that the program be shut down.
The majority in a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled on a narrow ground, saying the plaintiffs, including lawyers and journalists, could not show injury direct and concrete enough to allow them to have standing to sue.
Because it is extremely difficult to show concrete injury from the highly classified program, the effect of the ruling was to insulate the program from judicial scrutiny in ordinary federal courts.
The majority did not rule on the merits of the case, though the appeals judge who wrote the lead opinion, Alice M. Batchelder, said the case provoked “a cascade of serious questions.” Those questions included whether the program violated a 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, along with Constitution’s First and Fourth Amendments.
But Judge Batchelder was implicitly critical of the decision last year by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the Federal District Court in Detroit, whose ruling striking down the program was stayed during the appeals. “The district court answered all of these questions in the affirmative,” Judge Batchelder wrote, “and imposed an injunction of the broadest possible scope.”
A second appeals court judge, Julia Smith Gibbons, concurred in the judgment dismissing the case but did not join in Judge Batchelder’s extensive and technical discussion of whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue. Judge Gibbons agreed, however, that the case turned “upon the single fact that the plaintiffs have failed to provide evidence that they are personally subject to the program.”
She added that “plaintiffs are ultimately prevented from establishing standing because of the state secrets privilege,” a legal doctrine that requires courts to limit or dismiss cases when allowing them to proceed would disclose information harmful to national security. Judge Batchelder did not discuss the privilege.
A number of other challenges to the program have been consolidated before a federal judge in San Francisco, and the federal appeals court in California, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, will hear an appeal from one of the judge’s preliminary rulings next month.
Some plaintiffs in that case contend that they can prove standing even under the Sixth Circuit majority’s analysis. Those plaintiffs, an Islamic charity and two of its lawyers, say they have seen a classified document confirming that their communications were actually intercepted.
In dissent on the Detroit case yesterday, Judge Ronald Lee Gilman wrote that the issue of the plaintiffs’ standing presented “the closest question in this case.” But he wrote that at least the plaintiffs who are lawyers did have standing.
Those lawyers said they have had to change the way they communicate with clients in the Middle East because they feared that their discussions would not be confidential.
“To my mind,” Judge Gilman wrote, “the attorney-plaintiffs have articulated an actual or imminent harm” because the program “puts them in the position of abrogating their duties under applicable professional-responsibility rules if they communicate with clients and contacts via telephone and e-mail.”
Standing, Judge Gilman wrote, is the hard part. “Once part that hurdle,” he said, “the rest gets progressively easier.”
Judge Gilman also put some distance between his views and those of Judge Taylor. “Without expressing an opinion concerning the analysis of the district court,” he wrote, “I would affirm its judgment.”
In January, not long before the appeal was argued, the White House announced that it would submit the N.S.A. program for supervision by a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Judge Gilman, the only judge to address the significance of that move, discounted it. He said the administration has reserved the right to resume warrantless surveillance and that the appeal was therefore not moot.
Judge Batchelder was appointed by President George Bush, Judge Gibbons by President George W. Bush and Judge Gilman by President Bill Clinton. Judge Taylor, the district court judge, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.
The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We are deeply disappointed,” the group’s legal director, Steven R. Shapiro, said in a statement, “by today’s decision that insulates the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance activities from judicial review and deprives Americans of any ability to challenge the illegal surveillance of their telephone calls and e-mails.”
Mr. Shapiro said the group is weighing its options, including the possibility of appealing to the United States Supreme Court.
NYT : Hints of Surrender at Mosque in Pakistan
Friday, July 06, 2007
Hints of Surrender at Mosque in Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD | Published: July 6, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 5 — The death toll in the government’s three-day siege of a radical mosque in the center of Islamabad has risen to 19, the interior minister said Thursday. Reports also emerged Thursday evening that the hold-out cleric leading the rebellion was offering to surrender.
The government kept up its pressure on the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, demanding the unconditional surrender of the estimated 400 to 500 people still inside, as many as half of them female students and teachers. Army and police commandos have surrounded the complex and barred access since heavy clashes with armed followers on Tuesday.
Several times during the day and evening helicopters circled overhead, and the security forces exchanged fire with the militants inside the mosque in half-hour bursts of heavy gunfire and explosions. Then, each time the guns fell silent, the troops used loudspeakers to call on those inside to surrender, assuring them safe passage.
Yet government officials conceded that despite some success on Wednesday — when more than 1,100 students surrendered and one leader of the uprising was arrested while trying to escape dressed in a burqa — security forces were now locked in a standoff with the militants, who are intent on imposing Islamic law throughout the country.
More students emerged from the mosque on Thursday, but the interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, said there were still up to 60 armed militants inside who were preventing others from leaving.
“There are 50 to 60 hard-core militants with automatic weapons, grenades and petrol bombs, which they have used,” he said at a news briefing here in the capital. “They are the ones who have stopped the women and children from coming out. The majority want to leave.”
“The government is exercising maximum restraint because there are women and children inside, and we don’t want any harm to them,” he added. “The restraint is on the special orders of the president. We have to be patient and wait.”
Six men from inside had been caught jumping over the wall in a bid to escape, he said, adding: “Naturally they cannot sustain it for long. Despondency, panic and confusion would prevail and that would, I am sure, give us the desired result, and they will surrender.”
About 40 people, including some women, escaped from the mosque in the afternoon and were fleeing against the wishes of those in charge inside the compound, Javed Iqbal Cheema, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said late Thursday.
He called on Abdur Rashid Ghazi, the younger of two brothers leading the mosque and its religious schools, to allow all children and students to leave safely.
In telephone interviews with Pakistani television news channels, Mr. Ghazi said he was offering to surrender on the condition he not be prosecuted and be allowed to stay in the compound with his sick mother for a few days.
“We are not criminals,” he told Aaj TV. “They are treating us like criminals. Even with criminals, negotiations take place. It is quite clear that they want killing.”
Government officials were adamant that Mr. Ghazi had to surrender without negotiation. The arrest of Maulana Abdul Aziz, his elder brother, on Wednesday evening has damaged the clerics’ cause, said Tasnim Aslam, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.
State television, Pakistan TV, showed a heavily edited interview with the maulana after his arrest in which he was made to don his burqa again and lift the veil for the camera.
Bearded and wearing a white skull cap, the maulana, or teacher, said he had left the mosque to prevent further loss of life.
“I was thinking that if I stay there, then my students will lay down their lives for me, and we were left with no other way,” he said. “I would not use the word ‘escape.’ Shariah” — the Islamic legal code — “allows if a person wants to leave quietly, in hiding, to save one’s life. It was not the question of just my life.”
He made light of the students’ militant activities, saying that no orders had been given to fire on the Pakistani soldiers or to burn down government buildings, and that they had acted on their own. He denied that there were militants inside the compound and said that they had only about 15 Kalashnikovs in the compound, some of which were licensed.
Maulana Aziz denied that women were being used as human shields, but he admitted that the female teachers, among them his wife, who runs the girls’ seminary, were trying to keep the women inside. “The female students were never used as shields,” he said. “We have just given them an inspiration for jihad.”
Two brothers whose 19-year-old sister was in the mosque said they had talked with her by telephone but she was refusing to come out. “She is totally happy, she is not afraid,” said one brother, who identified himself as Abdullah, 34. “I tried my very best to tell her to come out but she wants to be with her teachers.”
The atmosphere inside the mosque seemed a strange mixture of militancy, innocence and religious fervor. Armed men carried automatic rifles and pistols and many wore ammunition vests.
One apparently experienced fighter, tall and heavily built, held a loudspeaker and directed students in the street. “Don’t fall in the trap of the enemy,” he barked. “Guard the mosque and madrasa. Don’t go too far.”
Inside the prayer hall, students sat in groups. Some recited the Koran or offered prayers, seemingly oblivious to the firing of bullets and tear gas. A dozen or so students stood around those who made speeches through the loudspeakers and chanted, “Jihad! Jihad!”
One student shouted into the loudspeaker: “Brothers, don’t fear, victory is near. Our companions across the country have stood up in our support.”
By CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD | Published: July 6, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 5 — The death toll in the government’s three-day siege of a radical mosque in the center of Islamabad has risen to 19, the interior minister said Thursday. Reports also emerged Thursday evening that the hold-out cleric leading the rebellion was offering to surrender.
The government kept up its pressure on the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, demanding the unconditional surrender of the estimated 400 to 500 people still inside, as many as half of them female students and teachers. Army and police commandos have surrounded the complex and barred access since heavy clashes with armed followers on Tuesday.
Several times during the day and evening helicopters circled overhead, and the security forces exchanged fire with the militants inside the mosque in half-hour bursts of heavy gunfire and explosions. Then, each time the guns fell silent, the troops used loudspeakers to call on those inside to surrender, assuring them safe passage.
Yet government officials conceded that despite some success on Wednesday — when more than 1,100 students surrendered and one leader of the uprising was arrested while trying to escape dressed in a burqa — security forces were now locked in a standoff with the militants, who are intent on imposing Islamic law throughout the country.
More students emerged from the mosque on Thursday, but the interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, said there were still up to 60 armed militants inside who were preventing others from leaving.
“There are 50 to 60 hard-core militants with automatic weapons, grenades and petrol bombs, which they have used,” he said at a news briefing here in the capital. “They are the ones who have stopped the women and children from coming out. The majority want to leave.”
“The government is exercising maximum restraint because there are women and children inside, and we don’t want any harm to them,” he added. “The restraint is on the special orders of the president. We have to be patient and wait.”
Six men from inside had been caught jumping over the wall in a bid to escape, he said, adding: “Naturally they cannot sustain it for long. Despondency, panic and confusion would prevail and that would, I am sure, give us the desired result, and they will surrender.”
About 40 people, including some women, escaped from the mosque in the afternoon and were fleeing against the wishes of those in charge inside the compound, Javed Iqbal Cheema, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said late Thursday.
He called on Abdur Rashid Ghazi, the younger of two brothers leading the mosque and its religious schools, to allow all children and students to leave safely.
In telephone interviews with Pakistani television news channels, Mr. Ghazi said he was offering to surrender on the condition he not be prosecuted and be allowed to stay in the compound with his sick mother for a few days.
“We are not criminals,” he told Aaj TV. “They are treating us like criminals. Even with criminals, negotiations take place. It is quite clear that they want killing.”
Government officials were adamant that Mr. Ghazi had to surrender without negotiation. The arrest of Maulana Abdul Aziz, his elder brother, on Wednesday evening has damaged the clerics’ cause, said Tasnim Aslam, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.
State television, Pakistan TV, showed a heavily edited interview with the maulana after his arrest in which he was made to don his burqa again and lift the veil for the camera.
Bearded and wearing a white skull cap, the maulana, or teacher, said he had left the mosque to prevent further loss of life.
“I was thinking that if I stay there, then my students will lay down their lives for me, and we were left with no other way,” he said. “I would not use the word ‘escape.’ Shariah” — the Islamic legal code — “allows if a person wants to leave quietly, in hiding, to save one’s life. It was not the question of just my life.”
He made light of the students’ militant activities, saying that no orders had been given to fire on the Pakistani soldiers or to burn down government buildings, and that they had acted on their own. He denied that there were militants inside the compound and said that they had only about 15 Kalashnikovs in the compound, some of which were licensed.
Maulana Aziz denied that women were being used as human shields, but he admitted that the female teachers, among them his wife, who runs the girls’ seminary, were trying to keep the women inside. “The female students were never used as shields,” he said. “We have just given them an inspiration for jihad.”
Two brothers whose 19-year-old sister was in the mosque said they had talked with her by telephone but she was refusing to come out. “She is totally happy, she is not afraid,” said one brother, who identified himself as Abdullah, 34. “I tried my very best to tell her to come out but she wants to be with her teachers.”
The atmosphere inside the mosque seemed a strange mixture of militancy, innocence and religious fervor. Armed men carried automatic rifles and pistols and many wore ammunition vests.
One apparently experienced fighter, tall and heavily built, held a loudspeaker and directed students in the street. “Don’t fall in the trap of the enemy,” he barked. “Guard the mosque and madrasa. Don’t go too far.”
Inside the prayer hall, students sat in groups. Some recited the Koran or offered prayers, seemingly oblivious to the firing of bullets and tear gas. A dozen or so students stood around those who made speeches through the loudspeakers and chanted, “Jihad! Jihad!”
One student shouted into the loudspeaker: “Brothers, don’t fear, victory is near. Our companions across the country have stood up in our support.”
Filed under
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BBC : Pakistan head orders mosque pause
Friday, July 06, 2007
Pakistan head orders mosque pause
BBC News | Friday, 6 July 2007
Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has told security forces to be patient to allow women to leave the Red Mosque complex (Lal Masjid) in Islamabad.
He ordered a temporary halt to the security operation in the stand-off between radicals and the authorities.
On Thursday, the deputy leader of the mosque he and hundreds of his militant followers were ready to surrender.
Ghazi Abdul Rashid said they would lay down their arms if the security forces ceased firing and did not arrest them.
But the conditions were dismissed by Pakistani government ministers.
The offer to end the confrontation, in which 19 people have died, came after troops pounded the Red Mosque complex, breaching its wall in three places.
On Thursday evening much of the city was plunged into darkness, after storms caused failures in the power supply.
'Sick mother'
Speaking in a telephone interview broadcast on Pakistani television, Abdul Rashid said he had told government mediator Chaudry Shujaat Hussain that his followers were ready to surrender.
"I am making this offer to save the lives of the students," he said.
But Abdul Rashid said he had insisted the authorities promise not to detain anyone who they could not prove belonged to any banned militant groups, or were not wanted for any crime.
"If they are linked to any banned organisation, it can be verified," he said
"It can be looked into... those who are not should be let go."
The cleric also demanded a guarantee of safety for himself and his family, saying he wanted to remain on the premises with his sick mother until they were able to move elsewhere.
'Human shields'
The Pakistani government rejected Abdul Rashid's conditional offer and Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim Khan said he and the remaining students would have to lay down their arms unconditionally like all those who left the mosque over the past two days.
"He should allow everybody, women, children to come out. He can come out with them... nobody is going to fire on them," he told Reuters.
"He should surrender himself... If there are cases against him, let the court decide."
The minister said Abdul Rashid was involved in a number of criminal cases.
Earlier, Mr Khan accused the Red Mosque Islamists of using women and children as human shields.
"A large number of women and children are being held hostage by armed men in room," he told a press conference.
The Interior Minister, Aftab Sherpao, said 740 men and 400 women had so far left the mosque.
Mr Sherpao said he believed 300-400 students were still inside, of whom around 50-60 were hardcore militants.
The clerics and their followers have been campaigning for Islamic Sharia law in Islamabad.
The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad says the radicals do not have much support in the capital and people are quite glad to see the government taking them on.
But the authorities' action is likely to upset people in the more conservative North-West Frontier province, where most of the students come from.
BBC News | Friday, 6 July 2007
Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has told security forces to be patient to allow women to leave the Red Mosque complex (Lal Masjid) in Islamabad.
He ordered a temporary halt to the security operation in the stand-off between radicals and the authorities.
On Thursday, the deputy leader of the mosque he and hundreds of his militant followers were ready to surrender.
Ghazi Abdul Rashid said they would lay down their arms if the security forces ceased firing and did not arrest them.
But the conditions were dismissed by Pakistani government ministers.
The offer to end the confrontation, in which 19 people have died, came after troops pounded the Red Mosque complex, breaching its wall in three places.
On Thursday evening much of the city was plunged into darkness, after storms caused failures in the power supply.
'Sick mother'
Speaking in a telephone interview broadcast on Pakistani television, Abdul Rashid said he had told government mediator Chaudry Shujaat Hussain that his followers were ready to surrender.
"I am making this offer to save the lives of the students," he said.
But Abdul Rashid said he had insisted the authorities promise not to detain anyone who they could not prove belonged to any banned militant groups, or were not wanted for any crime.
"If they are linked to any banned organisation, it can be verified," he said
"It can be looked into... those who are not should be let go."
The cleric also demanded a guarantee of safety for himself and his family, saying he wanted to remain on the premises with his sick mother until they were able to move elsewhere.
'Human shields'
The Pakistani government rejected Abdul Rashid's conditional offer and Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim Khan said he and the remaining students would have to lay down their arms unconditionally like all those who left the mosque over the past two days.
"He should allow everybody, women, children to come out. He can come out with them... nobody is going to fire on them," he told Reuters.
"He should surrender himself... If there are cases against him, let the court decide."
The minister said Abdul Rashid was involved in a number of criminal cases.
Earlier, Mr Khan accused the Red Mosque Islamists of using women and children as human shields.
"A large number of women and children are being held hostage by armed men in room," he told a press conference.
The Interior Minister, Aftab Sherpao, said 740 men and 400 women had so far left the mosque.
Mr Sherpao said he believed 300-400 students were still inside, of whom around 50-60 were hardcore militants.
The clerics and their followers have been campaigning for Islamic Sharia law in Islamabad.
The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad says the radicals do not have much support in the capital and people are quite glad to see the government taking them on.
But the authorities' action is likely to upset people in the more conservative North-West Frontier province, where most of the students come from.
WaPo : Pakistan Launches Operation Against Radicals in Mosque
Friday, July 06, 2007
Pakistan Launches Operation Against Radicals in Mosque
Talks on Peaceful Ending Apparently Stall
By Griff Witte | Washington Post Foreign Service | Friday, July 6, 2007; Page A08
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 6 -- Pakistani security forces launched a major operation Thursday against radical students holed up in an Islamabad mosque, seeking to end a months-long standoff that has turned bloody in recent days.
Fighting raged in the darkness and continued early Friday, with the pops and cracks of small-arms fire echoing through the silence of a residential neighborhood. Just after 3 a.m., there was a major explosion, followed by an intense round of shooting that lasted nearly half an hour.
The government had earlier been hoping to pressure the students to leave the mosque peacefully, but those negotiations appeared to have broken down.
It was not immediately clear how many people had been killed in the clash, but leaders of the pro-Taliban Red Mosque have said they are prepared to fight to the death. The government, meanwhile, vowed Thursday to settle for nothing less than surrender.
"We want absolute, total and unconditional surrender," Tariq Azim Khan, state information minister, told reporters. He added, though, that the government believed some in the mosque were being held against their will and that "the parents of students who are still inside requested us to give more time. It will be wrong to go in with full force when women and children are still inside."
Pakistani officials have repeatedly said they wanted to give students, especially the many young girls believed to be in the compound, enough time to leave before commencing an all-out assault. But it appeared Friday that time was fast running out.
Mosque leaders have tried in recent months to impose a rigid interpretation of Islamic law on this cosmopolitan capital, part of their efforts to turn Pakistan into a theocratic state. From their base in the heart of the city, students with an affiliated madrassa, or religious school, have taken alleged prostitutes hostage and have threatened music store owners with attacks.
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has struggled with how to combat the challenge. He has been criticized by moderate forces within Pakistan for not cracking down earlier and for allowing extremism to spread within the country. But Musharraf has said he was concerned that a raid could lead to civilian casualties and that it could provoke a backlash.
Musharraf's hand was forced Tuesday when a firefight broke out between radical students and army rangers that claimed at least 19 lives. More than 1,000 students heeded government calls Wednesday to surrender, and by Thursday night it seemed as though those remaining in the mosque would soon follow.
But as the sun set, a plume of thick black smoke could be seen rising above the mosque following a series of powerful explosions. Witnesses reported that the concrete wall surrounding the mosque had been at least partially destroyed, and heavily armed commandos dressed in black seemed to be moving into position for a possible raid.
Stone-faced soldiers manning sandbagged guard posts stood watch at virtually every intersection within half a mile of the mosque. Helicopter gunships circled overhead, and armored personnel carriers with machine guns mounted on the backs rumbled through otherwise deserted streets.
"It's been a little terrifying," said Faisal Imtiaz, who lives near the mosque with his mother, brother and three sisters. Like other residents, Imtiaz had been restricted to his home for days because soldiers were ordered to shoot on sight anyone not authorized to be in the streets.
The mosque's leader, Maulana Abdul Aziz, was arrested Wednesday night as he attempted to flee disguised in a burqa. His detention briefly sparked hopes that the standoff would be settled without further bloodshed, especially after Aziz, in an interview with Pakistani state television, called for the 600 girls and 250 boys who he said remained in the mosque to escape or surrender. Aziz said the holdouts had only 15 Kalashnikov rifles -- a far cry from the extensive arsenal that was reported earlier.
"I saw after coming out that the siege is very intense," Aziz said. "Our companions will not be able to stay for long."
Following Aziz's arrest, his younger brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, took over leadership of the mosque. In a series of television interviews Thursday night, the normally combative Ghazi seemed worn down, saying he wanted only to ensure that his students were given safe passage out of the mosque and that he be treated "with dignity." Ghazi also said that any militants in the mosque with ties to known terrorist organizations could be arrested and charged.
But after finally indicating he was ready to surrender, Ghazi abruptly shifted course late Thursday and said he would continue to fight until the government promised to let him escape.
A trickle of students continued to emerge from the mosque Thursday after the exodus Wednesday. Some of those who left reported that others were being held in the mosque against their will.
"They want to come out, but they are not allowed to do so," a young student who had surrendered said in an interview with the private station GEO News. "I think it's just to keep the pressure on the government."
While the brothers had earlier elicited support from other hard-line religious leaders nationwide, sentiment seemed to shift against them Thursday following news of Aziz's arrest. In fiery sermons, Aziz had advocated a strict division between men and women. His decision to try to escape under a burqa with a group of women struck many as cowardly.
"It's such a shameful act, and that's why all the ulema [religious scholars] and sympathizers of Red Mosque administrators are feeling so down today and ashamed," said Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, leader of a coalition of far-right religious parties.
At a funeral in a poor village in western Pakistan, people were cursing Aziz. The funeral was held for Zakir Ullah, 18, a former student at the Red Mosque's madrassa who was killed in the violence this week.
"He was an innocent and peaceful boy who succumbed to the stupid policies of Red Mosque administrators," said his uncle, Murad Khan. "Those who were killed are innocent students who were there for getting Islamic education."
Special correspondents Shahzad Khurram in Islamabad and Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
Talks on Peaceful Ending Apparently Stall
By Griff Witte | Washington Post Foreign Service | Friday, July 6, 2007; Page A08
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 6 -- Pakistani security forces launched a major operation Thursday against radical students holed up in an Islamabad mosque, seeking to end a months-long standoff that has turned bloody in recent days.
Fighting raged in the darkness and continued early Friday, with the pops and cracks of small-arms fire echoing through the silence of a residential neighborhood. Just after 3 a.m., there was a major explosion, followed by an intense round of shooting that lasted nearly half an hour.
The government had earlier been hoping to pressure the students to leave the mosque peacefully, but those negotiations appeared to have broken down.
It was not immediately clear how many people had been killed in the clash, but leaders of the pro-Taliban Red Mosque have said they are prepared to fight to the death. The government, meanwhile, vowed Thursday to settle for nothing less than surrender.
"We want absolute, total and unconditional surrender," Tariq Azim Khan, state information minister, told reporters. He added, though, that the government believed some in the mosque were being held against their will and that "the parents of students who are still inside requested us to give more time. It will be wrong to go in with full force when women and children are still inside."
Pakistani officials have repeatedly said they wanted to give students, especially the many young girls believed to be in the compound, enough time to leave before commencing an all-out assault. But it appeared Friday that time was fast running out.
Mosque leaders have tried in recent months to impose a rigid interpretation of Islamic law on this cosmopolitan capital, part of their efforts to turn Pakistan into a theocratic state. From their base in the heart of the city, students with an affiliated madrassa, or religious school, have taken alleged prostitutes hostage and have threatened music store owners with attacks.
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has struggled with how to combat the challenge. He has been criticized by moderate forces within Pakistan for not cracking down earlier and for allowing extremism to spread within the country. But Musharraf has said he was concerned that a raid could lead to civilian casualties and that it could provoke a backlash.
Musharraf's hand was forced Tuesday when a firefight broke out between radical students and army rangers that claimed at least 19 lives. More than 1,000 students heeded government calls Wednesday to surrender, and by Thursday night it seemed as though those remaining in the mosque would soon follow.
But as the sun set, a plume of thick black smoke could be seen rising above the mosque following a series of powerful explosions. Witnesses reported that the concrete wall surrounding the mosque had been at least partially destroyed, and heavily armed commandos dressed in black seemed to be moving into position for a possible raid.
Stone-faced soldiers manning sandbagged guard posts stood watch at virtually every intersection within half a mile of the mosque. Helicopter gunships circled overhead, and armored personnel carriers with machine guns mounted on the backs rumbled through otherwise deserted streets.
"It's been a little terrifying," said Faisal Imtiaz, who lives near the mosque with his mother, brother and three sisters. Like other residents, Imtiaz had been restricted to his home for days because soldiers were ordered to shoot on sight anyone not authorized to be in the streets.
The mosque's leader, Maulana Abdul Aziz, was arrested Wednesday night as he attempted to flee disguised in a burqa. His detention briefly sparked hopes that the standoff would be settled without further bloodshed, especially after Aziz, in an interview with Pakistani state television, called for the 600 girls and 250 boys who he said remained in the mosque to escape or surrender. Aziz said the holdouts had only 15 Kalashnikov rifles -- a far cry from the extensive arsenal that was reported earlier.
"I saw after coming out that the siege is very intense," Aziz said. "Our companions will not be able to stay for long."
Following Aziz's arrest, his younger brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, took over leadership of the mosque. In a series of television interviews Thursday night, the normally combative Ghazi seemed worn down, saying he wanted only to ensure that his students were given safe passage out of the mosque and that he be treated "with dignity." Ghazi also said that any militants in the mosque with ties to known terrorist organizations could be arrested and charged.
But after finally indicating he was ready to surrender, Ghazi abruptly shifted course late Thursday and said he would continue to fight until the government promised to let him escape.
A trickle of students continued to emerge from the mosque Thursday after the exodus Wednesday. Some of those who left reported that others were being held in the mosque against their will.
"They want to come out, but they are not allowed to do so," a young student who had surrendered said in an interview with the private station GEO News. "I think it's just to keep the pressure on the government."
While the brothers had earlier elicited support from other hard-line religious leaders nationwide, sentiment seemed to shift against them Thursday following news of Aziz's arrest. In fiery sermons, Aziz had advocated a strict division between men and women. His decision to try to escape under a burqa with a group of women struck many as cowardly.
"It's such a shameful act, and that's why all the ulema [religious scholars] and sympathizers of Red Mosque administrators are feeling so down today and ashamed," said Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, leader of a coalition of far-right religious parties.
At a funeral in a poor village in western Pakistan, people were cursing Aziz. The funeral was held for Zakir Ullah, 18, a former student at the Red Mosque's madrassa who was killed in the violence this week.
"He was an innocent and peaceful boy who succumbed to the stupid policies of Red Mosque administrators," said his uncle, Murad Khan. "Those who were killed are innocent students who were there for getting Islamic education."
Special correspondents Shahzad Khurram in Islamabad and Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
WaPo : Construction Woes Add to Fears at Embassy in Iraq
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Construction Woes Add to Fears at Embassy in Iraq
By Glenn Kessler | Washington Post Staff Writer | Thursday, July 5, 2007; Page A01
U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead.
A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards' base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., a Middle Eastern firm that is already under Justice Department scrutiny over alleged labor abuses. First Kuwaiti also erected the guard base, prompting some State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad to worry that the problems exposed in the camp suggest trouble lurking ahead for the rest of the embassy complex.
The first signs of trouble, according to the cable, emerged when the kitchen staff tried to cook the inaugural meal in the new guard base on May 15. Some appliances did not work. Workers began to get electric shocks. Then a burning smell enveloped the kitchen as the wiring began to melt.
All the food from the old guard camp -- a collection of tents -- had been carted to the new facility, in the expectation that the 1,200 guards would begin moving in the next day. But according to the cable, the electrical meltdown was just the first problem in a series of construction mistakes that soon left the base uninhabitable, including wiring problems, fuel leaks and noxious fumes in the sleeping trailers.
"Poor quality construction . . . life safety issues . . . left [the embassy] with no recourse but to shut the camp down, in spite of the blistering heat in Baghdad," the May 29 cable informed Washington.
Such challenges with construction contracts inside the fortified enclave known as the Green Zone reflect the broader problems that have thwarted reconstruction efforts throughout war-torn Iraq.
The "fairly serious problems" noted in the cable indicate that First Kuwaiti's work fails to meet basic safety standards, said an administration official who was not authorized to speak to the news media. But the State Department's Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), which oversees construction of the new embassy, has kept a "close hold" on the project, making it difficult for anyone else in the government to gauge progress. "We are suspecting we will find the same issues in the new embassy," resulting in months of delays, the official said.
The embassy cable prompted a stinging response from James L. Golden, OBO's managing director for the embassy project. In a cable dated June 8, he berated personnel in Baghdad for sending their message over an open embassy system, rather than keeping the complaints in-house. He defended First Kuwaiti and accused the embassy and KBR -- a Texas-based company that runs many facilities in Iraq and discovered the wiring problems -- of making false claims to deflect attention from their own errors.
The guard base "has been constructed to the approved design specifications," Golden wrote, adding that "none of the issues raised in the cable has merit" and that "it appears [the embassy] and KBR simply do not want to operate the camp for other reasons."
KBR said its concerns were justified. "Safety remains KBR's top priority," said Heather L. Browne, the firm's director of corporate communications. "Our initial assessments determined that the issues identified were not linked to KBR's work and in fact inspection reports from the [State Department] confirm that KBR was not responsible for the safety issues identified."
Tensions Over Deadline
The tough exchanges between Baghdad and Washington reflect some of the tensions as the State Department rushes to complete the embassy this year. Originally, the new guard base -- estimated to cost about $22 million -- was due for completion in January, but deadlines were missed. OBO certified that the camp "meets and exceeds" its contract requirements in a letter signed April 14 and provided by First Kuwaiti. The new delay in moving the guards may affect plans to build temporary housing for maintenance workers and contractors hired to help run the new embassy, which is scheduled to be completed in the fall.
An embassy spokesman declined to comment, referring calls to Washington. Pat Kennedy, director of the State Department's Office of Management Policy, said that the embassy cable was a "frank discussion" of its concerns but that the embassy now "is satisfied with the process we have put in place to address these issues." He said he was "not prepared to make the large leap" that concerns about the guard base might also apply to the larger embassy project.
Retired Maj. Gen. Charles E. Williams, the director of OBO, who was formerly with the Army Corps of Engineers, declined to be interviewed. "It is internal business," said his special assistant, Phyllis A. Patten-Breeding.
First Kuwaiti's labor practices are already under investigation by the Justice Department amid allegations that foreign employees were brought into Iraq under false pretenses -- such as being told that they were to work in Dubai -- and then forbidden to leave because the company had confiscated their passports. First Kuwaiti has called those accusations "ludicrous."
Samir Ida, the company's construction director, said that the guard base was completed to "all specifications." He provided an e-mail from an OBO official who described it as "one of the better built camps" in Iraq. "The U.S. Embassy is still in the process of being constructed, and while some work remains, First Kuwaiti has not been informed of any issues relating to substandard work," he added.
After the electrical problem was discovered and no quick fix seemed available, the embassy was forced to serve the guards MREs (meals-ready-to-eat) for several days until all the food could be moved back to the old housing, known as Camp Jackson, according to the embassy cable's detailed account. The original plan was for the guards to wait only one or two weeks before the electrical issues were fixed.
But the problems mounted. The 252 prefabricated residential trailers, with either two or three rooms each, filled with formaldehyde fumes. The trailer manufacturer, a Saudi company called Red Sea Housing Services Co., confirmed to the embassy it had used the toxic chemical in preparing the housing. Red Sea told the embassy to keep the windows open and use charcoal in the rooms to absorb the odor, but "the fumes are still prevalent," the cable said.
The embassy cable noted that five people had been identified at various times as the project manager, and that it was all but impossible for embassy officials to obtain information from them, with no one seeming to be in charge. "Two of the project managers have had extremely limited previous project management experience," the cable said. A $500,000 project to install a fire-suppression system appeared to be proceeding without proper supervision, it added.
The saga did not end there, as recounted by the cable in 23 lengthy paragraphs that mixed outrage with dense bureaucratic language.
First, KBR and First Kuwaiti quickly began finger-pointing. KBR electricians determined that the electrical wiring was too small for the load required, but First Kuwaiti electricians -- after initially concurring -- began to balk at the assessment, the cable said.
Then KBR raised new concerns about the grounding and electrical feeds into the facility.
Fire Hazards
The embassy cable noted that there had been at least four fires in dining facilities in Iraq blamed on similar problems. At a May 16 meeting, officials showed photos indicating fire hazards in the dining hall's wiring that were so serious that the few guards who had moved into the base's new residential housing were sent back to Camp Jackson.
"It was unknown as to whether similar wiring was present in the residential trailers," the cable said.
At the meeting, KBR representatives began to express unease about their responsibility and liability in operating and maintaining the base's electrical system. On May 24, OBO declared that the wiring problem had been fixed, but KBR conducted an inspection a day later and said the problems remained. KBR found that the reworked wiring "is still substandard," the cable said. The embassy also said that it believes it has discovered counterfeit wiring, labeled as 10mm when it was actually 6mm.
Meanwhile, on May 18, OBO unexpectedly informed the embassy that it would soon stop maintaining the power stations and water-treatment facilities at the new guard base. The embassy protested that it had limited staff to operate the equipment, which needs to be in operation constantly to avoid costly repairs. First Kuwaiti provided only "minimal spare parts" for the power generators and "less than minimal spare parts" for the water-treatment plant, the cable said.
Finally, on May 25, a KBR hazardous-materials expert discovered that all 10 generators had developed leaks. The fuel tanks were installed without corrosion protection or leak detectors, and fuel had begun to saturate the soil around the tanks. The cable said that Teflon tape designed for water pipes had been used on the fuel tanks, and that such tape "will dissolve on contact with diesel fuel." KBR refused to operate the power generators unless its liability was waived.
The result, the cable concluded, is that the guards will continue to stay in "tents and deplorable living conditions." Officials now say that the guard base will not be ready until Aug. 1.
By Glenn Kessler | Washington Post Staff Writer | Thursday, July 5, 2007; Page A01
U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead.
A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards' base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., a Middle Eastern firm that is already under Justice Department scrutiny over alleged labor abuses. First Kuwaiti also erected the guard base, prompting some State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad to worry that the problems exposed in the camp suggest trouble lurking ahead for the rest of the embassy complex.
The first signs of trouble, according to the cable, emerged when the kitchen staff tried to cook the inaugural meal in the new guard base on May 15. Some appliances did not work. Workers began to get electric shocks. Then a burning smell enveloped the kitchen as the wiring began to melt.
All the food from the old guard camp -- a collection of tents -- had been carted to the new facility, in the expectation that the 1,200 guards would begin moving in the next day. But according to the cable, the electrical meltdown was just the first problem in a series of construction mistakes that soon left the base uninhabitable, including wiring problems, fuel leaks and noxious fumes in the sleeping trailers.
"Poor quality construction . . . life safety issues . . . left [the embassy] with no recourse but to shut the camp down, in spite of the blistering heat in Baghdad," the May 29 cable informed Washington.
Such challenges with construction contracts inside the fortified enclave known as the Green Zone reflect the broader problems that have thwarted reconstruction efforts throughout war-torn Iraq.
The "fairly serious problems" noted in the cable indicate that First Kuwaiti's work fails to meet basic safety standards, said an administration official who was not authorized to speak to the news media. But the State Department's Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), which oversees construction of the new embassy, has kept a "close hold" on the project, making it difficult for anyone else in the government to gauge progress. "We are suspecting we will find the same issues in the new embassy," resulting in months of delays, the official said.
The embassy cable prompted a stinging response from James L. Golden, OBO's managing director for the embassy project. In a cable dated June 8, he berated personnel in Baghdad for sending their message over an open embassy system, rather than keeping the complaints in-house. He defended First Kuwaiti and accused the embassy and KBR -- a Texas-based company that runs many facilities in Iraq and discovered the wiring problems -- of making false claims to deflect attention from their own errors.
The guard base "has been constructed to the approved design specifications," Golden wrote, adding that "none of the issues raised in the cable has merit" and that "it appears [the embassy] and KBR simply do not want to operate the camp for other reasons."
KBR said its concerns were justified. "Safety remains KBR's top priority," said Heather L. Browne, the firm's director of corporate communications. "Our initial assessments determined that the issues identified were not linked to KBR's work and in fact inspection reports from the [State Department] confirm that KBR was not responsible for the safety issues identified."
Tensions Over Deadline
The tough exchanges between Baghdad and Washington reflect some of the tensions as the State Department rushes to complete the embassy this year. Originally, the new guard base -- estimated to cost about $22 million -- was due for completion in January, but deadlines were missed. OBO certified that the camp "meets and exceeds" its contract requirements in a letter signed April 14 and provided by First Kuwaiti. The new delay in moving the guards may affect plans to build temporary housing for maintenance workers and contractors hired to help run the new embassy, which is scheduled to be completed in the fall.
An embassy spokesman declined to comment, referring calls to Washington. Pat Kennedy, director of the State Department's Office of Management Policy, said that the embassy cable was a "frank discussion" of its concerns but that the embassy now "is satisfied with the process we have put in place to address these issues." He said he was "not prepared to make the large leap" that concerns about the guard base might also apply to the larger embassy project.
Retired Maj. Gen. Charles E. Williams, the director of OBO, who was formerly with the Army Corps of Engineers, declined to be interviewed. "It is internal business," said his special assistant, Phyllis A. Patten-Breeding.
First Kuwaiti's labor practices are already under investigation by the Justice Department amid allegations that foreign employees were brought into Iraq under false pretenses -- such as being told that they were to work in Dubai -- and then forbidden to leave because the company had confiscated their passports. First Kuwaiti has called those accusations "ludicrous."
Samir Ida, the company's construction director, said that the guard base was completed to "all specifications." He provided an e-mail from an OBO official who described it as "one of the better built camps" in Iraq. "The U.S. Embassy is still in the process of being constructed, and while some work remains, First Kuwaiti has not been informed of any issues relating to substandard work," he added.
After the electrical problem was discovered and no quick fix seemed available, the embassy was forced to serve the guards MREs (meals-ready-to-eat) for several days until all the food could be moved back to the old housing, known as Camp Jackson, according to the embassy cable's detailed account. The original plan was for the guards to wait only one or two weeks before the electrical issues were fixed.
But the problems mounted. The 252 prefabricated residential trailers, with either two or three rooms each, filled with formaldehyde fumes. The trailer manufacturer, a Saudi company called Red Sea Housing Services Co., confirmed to the embassy it had used the toxic chemical in preparing the housing. Red Sea told the embassy to keep the windows open and use charcoal in the rooms to absorb the odor, but "the fumes are still prevalent," the cable said.
The embassy cable noted that five people had been identified at various times as the project manager, and that it was all but impossible for embassy officials to obtain information from them, with no one seeming to be in charge. "Two of the project managers have had extremely limited previous project management experience," the cable said. A $500,000 project to install a fire-suppression system appeared to be proceeding without proper supervision, it added.
The saga did not end there, as recounted by the cable in 23 lengthy paragraphs that mixed outrage with dense bureaucratic language.
First, KBR and First Kuwaiti quickly began finger-pointing. KBR electricians determined that the electrical wiring was too small for the load required, but First Kuwaiti electricians -- after initially concurring -- began to balk at the assessment, the cable said.
Then KBR raised new concerns about the grounding and electrical feeds into the facility.
Fire Hazards
The embassy cable noted that there had been at least four fires in dining facilities in Iraq blamed on similar problems. At a May 16 meeting, officials showed photos indicating fire hazards in the dining hall's wiring that were so serious that the few guards who had moved into the base's new residential housing were sent back to Camp Jackson.
"It was unknown as to whether similar wiring was present in the residential trailers," the cable said.
At the meeting, KBR representatives began to express unease about their responsibility and liability in operating and maintaining the base's electrical system. On May 24, OBO declared that the wiring problem had been fixed, but KBR conducted an inspection a day later and said the problems remained. KBR found that the reworked wiring "is still substandard," the cable said. The embassy also said that it believes it has discovered counterfeit wiring, labeled as 10mm when it was actually 6mm.
Meanwhile, on May 18, OBO unexpectedly informed the embassy that it would soon stop maintaining the power stations and water-treatment facilities at the new guard base. The embassy protested that it had limited staff to operate the equipment, which needs to be in operation constantly to avoid costly repairs. First Kuwaiti provided only "minimal spare parts" for the power generators and "less than minimal spare parts" for the water-treatment plant, the cable said.
Finally, on May 25, a KBR hazardous-materials expert discovered that all 10 generators had developed leaks. The fuel tanks were installed without corrosion protection or leak detectors, and fuel had begun to saturate the soil around the tanks. The cable said that Teflon tape designed for water pipes had been used on the fuel tanks, and that such tape "will dissolve on contact with diesel fuel." KBR refused to operate the power generators unless its liability was waived.
The result, the cable concluded, is that the guards will continue to stay in "tents and deplorable living conditions." Officials now say that the guard base will not be ready until Aug. 1.
WaPo : Homemade, Cheap and Dangerous
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Homemade, Cheap and Dangerous
Terror Cells Favor Simple Ingredients In Building Bombs
By Craig Whitlock | Washington Post Foreign Service | Thursday, July 5, 2007; Page A01
LONDON, July 4 -- The 39-page memo recovered from an al-Qaeda laptop computer in Pakistan three years ago read like an Idiot's Guide to Bombmaking. Forget military explosives or fancy detonators, it lectured. Instead, the manual advised a shopping trip to a hardware store or pharmacy, where all the necessary ingredients for a terrorist attack are stocked on the shelves.
"Make use of that which is available at your disposal and . . . bend it to suit your needs, (improvise) rather than waste valuable time becoming despondent over that which is not within your reach," counseled the author of the memo, Dhiren Barot, a British citizen who said he developed his keep-it-simple philosophy by "observing senior planners" at al-Qaeda training camps.
Barot, who was later captured near London and is serving a 30-year sentence, had envisioned an attack with multiple car bombs that would detonate liquid-gas cylinders encased in rusty nails -- a strategy with striking similarities to an attempt last week by a suspected terrorist cell to blow up three vehicles in London and Glasgow, Scotland.
Counterterrorism officials have warned for years that Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants have tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction, such as a nuclear device or chemical or biological weapons. In response, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have invested vast amounts of money to block their acquisition.
So far, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have relied almost solely on simple, homemade bombs crafted from everyday ingredients -- such as nail-polish remover and fertilizer -- when plotting attacks in Europe and the United States.
The makeshift bombs lack the destructive potential of the conventional explosives that rake Iraq on a daily basis. They are also less reliable, as demonstrated by the car bombs that failed to go off in London last week after the culprits tried to ignite them with detonators wired to cellphones.
But other attempts have generated plenty of mayhem and damage, including the kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London public transit system on July 7, 2005.
"It makes no difference to your average person if somebody puts a car bomb out there that is crude or one that is sophisticated," said Chris Driver-Williams, a retired British major and military intelligence officer who studies explosive devices used by terrorist groups. "If it detonates, all of a sudden you've got a very serious device and one that has achieved exactly what the terrorists wanted."
The advantages of homemade explosives are that they are easy and cheap to manufacture, as well as difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect. According to one expert, the peroxide-based liquid explosives that an al-Qaeda cell allegedly intended to use to blow up nine transatlantic airliners last summer would have cost as little as $15 a bomb.
It is technically simple to make such explosives. Instructions are widely available on the Internet. Experts added, however, that it takes skill and sophistication to construct a viable bomb by adding timing devices, detonators or secondary charges.
Investigations have found evidence that most al-Qaeda cells involved in bombing plots in Europe have received training in camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or were tutored by graduates of those camps.
Among them: cell members involved in the July 7, 2005, bombings in Britain and a separate plot two weeks later that also targeted the London subway. The suspected ringleaders of the May 16, 2003, bombings in Casablanca were also al-Qaeda camp veterans who had experimented in explosives. Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, was taught how to build his shoe bomb in Afghanistan.
Stephen Swain, former head of the international counterterrorism unit at Scotland Yard in London, said the culprits in each case had been trained by seasoned al-Qaeda operatives "without a shadow of a doubt."
"It's a common thread throughout the entire theater of al-Qaeda-style operations," said Swain, who retired last year and is a senior consultant for Control Risks Group, an international security firm. "There's quite a lot of training going on in this regard."
Terrorist groups have been using homemade explosives for years. In February 1993, Islamic radicals drove a truck loaded with about 1,500 pounds of urea nitrate -- a fertilizer-based explosive -- and hydrogen-gas cylinders into a garage underneath the World Trade Center.
The bomb killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Investigators determined that the cell built the bomb in New Jersey by consulting manuals brought from Pakistan. Two years later, the ringleader of the plot, Ramzi Yousef, tried but failed to use homemade liquid explosives to down 11 airliners crossing the Pacific Ocean.
The same year, Timothy J. McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb consisting of 5,000 pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer, killing 168 people.
Since then, it has become more difficult to purchase large quantities of fertilizer without attracting attention; sellers in the United States and many European countries are supposed to notify authorities of suspicious customers.
The last known attempt by al-Qaeda to construct a fertilizer-based bomb in Europe came in 2003, when a cell operative bought 1,200 pounds of bagged Kemira GrowHow fertilizer for about $200 from an agricultural supply store in Britain. The salesman, John Stone, later testified that he thought the transaction was strange because it was the wrong time of year to apply the substance and the buyer claimed to have only a small garden plot.
"I hope you're not going around bombing anything," Stone said he told the buyer half-jokingly, although the salesclerk did not notify police.
British authorities were tipped off soon after, however, by an employee at a rental-storage center where the cell was keeping the fertilizer. In April, five members of the group were convicted in the plot, known as Operation Crevice. Many European fertilizer manufacturers have since reduced the amount of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in their products.
Partly as a result, European and U.S. counterterrorism officials said terrorist cells are increasingly turning to peroxide-based explosives, which can be made in much smaller quantities from materials available at drugstores.
The most commonly used compound is triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. Primary ingredients for a homemade batch typically include acetone, which can be found in nail-polish remover, and hydrogen peroxide, a chemical used in hair-bleaching products.
TATP wields about 85 percent of the explosive power of TNT and can be made in a kitchen or bathroom. A dime-size amount of the explosive can ignite a fireball the size of a basketball.
The risky side of TATP is that it is highly unstable. A spark or light friction can detonate the explosive, making it extraordinarily difficult to handle. Experts and police said there have been numerous cases in which suspected terrorists -- as well as foolhardy amateur chemists -- have set off accidental explosions, resulting in death or severe injuries.
"You need to concentrate the chemicals," said Hans J. Michels, a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College in London. "It's a filthy job and it's dangerous, but it can be done."
Despite the dangers, al-Qaeda cells have used peroxide-based explosives in more than a dozen plots in the past decade, including the July 7 and 21, 2005, London incidents, as well as attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul and the Indonesian island of Bali, according to counterterrorism officials. Danish police also discovered TATP in September during the arrest of seven terrorism suspects in Odense.
In crystalline form, TATP looks like powdered sugar and is difficult to detect in airports; security officials need to examine an exposed surface with a swab kit or other tester to determine its presence.
"TATP and peroxide-based explosives are concern number one for the aviation industry," said Ehud Keinan, a chemistry professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and a leading researcher on the substance. "It will take some time before we are protected. Right now, we are not."
Reached by telephone in Paris, where he was scheduled to give a lecture about TATP on Wednesday at an international conference, Keinan said he often carries a small sample of the volatile compound in his carry-on luggage when he flies -- just to test airport security. "Nobody ever stops me," he said.
When asked if it might be dangerous to sit next to him on a plane, he said, "If you know how to take care of it, it's okay. If you don't know what you're doing, you're in trouble."
U.S. Homeland Security officials have said terrorism suspects arrested last August in Britain on charges that they were plotting to blow up several transatlantic airliners might have been planning to smuggle on board TATP or a related compound, HMTD, hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. Experts said it would take as little as one or two quarts of those explosives to down a large plane.
TATP was discovered in the late 19th century but was deemed to have no industrial or commercial applications because it was so unstable. Researchers generally ignored the substance until 1980, when Palestinian fighters used it for the first time in a bomb in Israel.
Palestinian bombers have used it ever since. TATP was used for the first time in an attack in Europe in July 1994, when Palestinians exploded a car bomb outside the Israeli Embassy in London.
U.S. and European counterterrorism investigators paid limited attention to the explosive until the July 2005 bombings in London. Afterward, the New York City Police Department built an exact replica of the apartment in Leeds, England, that the July 7 conspirators allegedly used to manufacture their backpack bombs.
Hugh O'Rourke, deputy inspector of the NYPD counterterrorism division, said the police department wanted to show beat officers what a kitchen-counter TATP production line would look like. He said it is easy to mistake the white powder and its cooking tools -- such as pool cleaners, large tubs or commercial-size fans -- for a common drug lab.
"Patrol cops see a lot of white powder, think it's crack, and want to touch it and package it," which could easily result in an explosion, he said. "We don't want them doing that."
Terror Cells Favor Simple Ingredients In Building Bombs
By Craig Whitlock | Washington Post Foreign Service | Thursday, July 5, 2007; Page A01
LONDON, July 4 -- The 39-page memo recovered from an al-Qaeda laptop computer in Pakistan three years ago read like an Idiot's Guide to Bombmaking. Forget military explosives or fancy detonators, it lectured. Instead, the manual advised a shopping trip to a hardware store or pharmacy, where all the necessary ingredients for a terrorist attack are stocked on the shelves.
"Make use of that which is available at your disposal and . . . bend it to suit your needs, (improvise) rather than waste valuable time becoming despondent over that which is not within your reach," counseled the author of the memo, Dhiren Barot, a British citizen who said he developed his keep-it-simple philosophy by "observing senior planners" at al-Qaeda training camps.
Barot, who was later captured near London and is serving a 30-year sentence, had envisioned an attack with multiple car bombs that would detonate liquid-gas cylinders encased in rusty nails -- a strategy with striking similarities to an attempt last week by a suspected terrorist cell to blow up three vehicles in London and Glasgow, Scotland.
Counterterrorism officials have warned for years that Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants have tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction, such as a nuclear device or chemical or biological weapons. In response, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have invested vast amounts of money to block their acquisition.
So far, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have relied almost solely on simple, homemade bombs crafted from everyday ingredients -- such as nail-polish remover and fertilizer -- when plotting attacks in Europe and the United States.
The makeshift bombs lack the destructive potential of the conventional explosives that rake Iraq on a daily basis. They are also less reliable, as demonstrated by the car bombs that failed to go off in London last week after the culprits tried to ignite them with detonators wired to cellphones.
But other attempts have generated plenty of mayhem and damage, including the kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London public transit system on July 7, 2005.
"It makes no difference to your average person if somebody puts a car bomb out there that is crude or one that is sophisticated," said Chris Driver-Williams, a retired British major and military intelligence officer who studies explosive devices used by terrorist groups. "If it detonates, all of a sudden you've got a very serious device and one that has achieved exactly what the terrorists wanted."
The advantages of homemade explosives are that they are easy and cheap to manufacture, as well as difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect. According to one expert, the peroxide-based liquid explosives that an al-Qaeda cell allegedly intended to use to blow up nine transatlantic airliners last summer would have cost as little as $15 a bomb.
It is technically simple to make such explosives. Instructions are widely available on the Internet. Experts added, however, that it takes skill and sophistication to construct a viable bomb by adding timing devices, detonators or secondary charges.
Investigations have found evidence that most al-Qaeda cells involved in bombing plots in Europe have received training in camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or were tutored by graduates of those camps.
Among them: cell members involved in the July 7, 2005, bombings in Britain and a separate plot two weeks later that also targeted the London subway. The suspected ringleaders of the May 16, 2003, bombings in Casablanca were also al-Qaeda camp veterans who had experimented in explosives. Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, was taught how to build his shoe bomb in Afghanistan.
Stephen Swain, former head of the international counterterrorism unit at Scotland Yard in London, said the culprits in each case had been trained by seasoned al-Qaeda operatives "without a shadow of a doubt."
"It's a common thread throughout the entire theater of al-Qaeda-style operations," said Swain, who retired last year and is a senior consultant for Control Risks Group, an international security firm. "There's quite a lot of training going on in this regard."
Terrorist groups have been using homemade explosives for years. In February 1993, Islamic radicals drove a truck loaded with about 1,500 pounds of urea nitrate -- a fertilizer-based explosive -- and hydrogen-gas cylinders into a garage underneath the World Trade Center.
The bomb killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Investigators determined that the cell built the bomb in New Jersey by consulting manuals brought from Pakistan. Two years later, the ringleader of the plot, Ramzi Yousef, tried but failed to use homemade liquid explosives to down 11 airliners crossing the Pacific Ocean.
The same year, Timothy J. McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb consisting of 5,000 pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer, killing 168 people.
Since then, it has become more difficult to purchase large quantities of fertilizer without attracting attention; sellers in the United States and many European countries are supposed to notify authorities of suspicious customers.
The last known attempt by al-Qaeda to construct a fertilizer-based bomb in Europe came in 2003, when a cell operative bought 1,200 pounds of bagged Kemira GrowHow fertilizer for about $200 from an agricultural supply store in Britain. The salesman, John Stone, later testified that he thought the transaction was strange because it was the wrong time of year to apply the substance and the buyer claimed to have only a small garden plot.
"I hope you're not going around bombing anything," Stone said he told the buyer half-jokingly, although the salesclerk did not notify police.
British authorities were tipped off soon after, however, by an employee at a rental-storage center where the cell was keeping the fertilizer. In April, five members of the group were convicted in the plot, known as Operation Crevice. Many European fertilizer manufacturers have since reduced the amount of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in their products.
Partly as a result, European and U.S. counterterrorism officials said terrorist cells are increasingly turning to peroxide-based explosives, which can be made in much smaller quantities from materials available at drugstores.
The most commonly used compound is triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. Primary ingredients for a homemade batch typically include acetone, which can be found in nail-polish remover, and hydrogen peroxide, a chemical used in hair-bleaching products.
TATP wields about 85 percent of the explosive power of TNT and can be made in a kitchen or bathroom. A dime-size amount of the explosive can ignite a fireball the size of a basketball.
The risky side of TATP is that it is highly unstable. A spark or light friction can detonate the explosive, making it extraordinarily difficult to handle. Experts and police said there have been numerous cases in which suspected terrorists -- as well as foolhardy amateur chemists -- have set off accidental explosions, resulting in death or severe injuries.
"You need to concentrate the chemicals," said Hans J. Michels, a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College in London. "It's a filthy job and it's dangerous, but it can be done."
Despite the dangers, al-Qaeda cells have used peroxide-based explosives in more than a dozen plots in the past decade, including the July 7 and 21, 2005, London incidents, as well as attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul and the Indonesian island of Bali, according to counterterrorism officials. Danish police also discovered TATP in September during the arrest of seven terrorism suspects in Odense.
In crystalline form, TATP looks like powdered sugar and is difficult to detect in airports; security officials need to examine an exposed surface with a swab kit or other tester to determine its presence.
"TATP and peroxide-based explosives are concern number one for the aviation industry," said Ehud Keinan, a chemistry professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and a leading researcher on the substance. "It will take some time before we are protected. Right now, we are not."
Reached by telephone in Paris, where he was scheduled to give a lecture about TATP on Wednesday at an international conference, Keinan said he often carries a small sample of the volatile compound in his carry-on luggage when he flies -- just to test airport security. "Nobody ever stops me," he said.
When asked if it might be dangerous to sit next to him on a plane, he said, "If you know how to take care of it, it's okay. If you don't know what you're doing, you're in trouble."
U.S. Homeland Security officials have said terrorism suspects arrested last August in Britain on charges that they were plotting to blow up several transatlantic airliners might have been planning to smuggle on board TATP or a related compound, HMTD, hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. Experts said it would take as little as one or two quarts of those explosives to down a large plane.
TATP was discovered in the late 19th century but was deemed to have no industrial or commercial applications because it was so unstable. Researchers generally ignored the substance until 1980, when Palestinian fighters used it for the first time in a bomb in Israel.
Palestinian bombers have used it ever since. TATP was used for the first time in an attack in Europe in July 1994, when Palestinians exploded a car bomb outside the Israeli Embassy in London.
U.S. and European counterterrorism investigators paid limited attention to the explosive until the July 2005 bombings in London. Afterward, the New York City Police Department built an exact replica of the apartment in Leeds, England, that the July 7 conspirators allegedly used to manufacture their backpack bombs.
Hugh O'Rourke, deputy inspector of the NYPD counterterrorism division, said the police department wanted to show beat officers what a kitchen-counter TATP production line would look like. He said it is easy to mistake the white powder and its cooking tools -- such as pool cleaners, large tubs or commercial-size fans -- for a common drug lab.
"Patrol cops see a lot of white powder, think it's crack, and want to touch it and package it," which could easily result in an explosion, he said. "We don't want them doing that."
Filed under
HMTD,
hydrogen peroxide,
Pakistan,
Ramzi Yousef,
TATP
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, July 05, 2007
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Philly dot Com : Bush salutes military, warns of 'more sacrifice'
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Bush salutes military, warns of 'more sacrifice'
By Deb Riechmann | Associated Press
MARTINSBURG, W. Va. - President Bush defended his Iraq war policy in a patriotic Fourth of July talk, saying that while he honors the sacrifice of U.S. troops, now is not the time to bring them home.
The president said victory in Iraq would require "more patience, more courage and more sacrifice."
"If we were to quit Iraq before the job is done, the terrorists we are fighting would not declare victory and lay down their arms. They would follow us here," Bush told a crowd of about 1,000 people gathered at a West Virginia Air National Guard maintenance hangar.
"It's a tough fight, but I wouldn't have asked those troops to go into harm's way if the fight was not essential to the security of the United States of America," he said.
It was the fourth Independence Day that Bush has spent in West Virginia.
He thanked the service members serving abroad and their families, including children at the event who recited the Pledge of Allegiance with him.
He also read from a 1777 newspaper article about an Independence Day celebration in Philadelphia, where people fired artillery, toasted democracy, and watched fireworks that illuminated the sky.
Bush compared the citizen-soldiers of the Continental Army who traded pitchforks for muskets to the guardsmen and other military personnel fighting today.
"We're still celebrating, and rightly so," Bush said.
After the speech, the president returned to the White House, where he will celebrate his 61st birthday tomorrow.
By Deb Riechmann | Associated Press
MARTINSBURG, W. Va. - President Bush defended his Iraq war policy in a patriotic Fourth of July talk, saying that while he honors the sacrifice of U.S. troops, now is not the time to bring them home.
The president said victory in Iraq would require "more patience, more courage and more sacrifice."
"If we were to quit Iraq before the job is done, the terrorists we are fighting would not declare victory and lay down their arms. They would follow us here," Bush told a crowd of about 1,000 people gathered at a West Virginia Air National Guard maintenance hangar.
"It's a tough fight, but I wouldn't have asked those troops to go into harm's way if the fight was not essential to the security of the United States of America," he said.
It was the fourth Independence Day that Bush has spent in West Virginia.
He thanked the service members serving abroad and their families, including children at the event who recited the Pledge of Allegiance with him.
He also read from a 1777 newspaper article about an Independence Day celebration in Philadelphia, where people fired artillery, toasted democracy, and watched fireworks that illuminated the sky.
Bush compared the citizen-soldiers of the Continental Army who traded pitchforks for muskets to the guardsmen and other military personnel fighting today.
"We're still celebrating, and rightly so," Bush said.
After the speech, the president returned to the White House, where he will celebrate his 61st birthday tomorrow.
Philly Dot Com : Political infighting blocks action on oil bill in Iraq
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Political infighting blocks action on oil bill in Iraq
It is seen as a setback for a Sept. progress report in U.S.
By Tina Susman | Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD - Political infighting blocked lawmakers from opening debate yesterday on legislation to oversee the oil industry as Iraqi and U.S. leaders called for reconciliation among Iraq's feuding factions.
An influential group of Sunni Muslim clerics, the Association of Muslim Scholars, joined the fray surrounding the oil bill yesterday by issuing a religious edict, forbidding legislators from voting for it.
"Whoever does so will be exposed to God's wrath and will have committed the crime of collaboration with the enemy," said a statement from the group, a fierce opponent of the U.S. occupation.
The developments were an ominous sign for U.S. and Iraqi leaders, who have counted on passage of the legislation to show evidence of political progress before parliament starts a monthlong break July 31. U.S. officials must give Congress a progress report on Iraq in September, leaving little time for the measure to win approval.
Also yesterday, two U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq. One died in Nineveh province in northwestern Iraq when his helicopter was shot down. A second soldier was injured. In southern Baghdad, another soldier was killed, the military announced, bringing to at least 3,588 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the invasion of March 2003.
At a gathering yesterday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged lawmakers to trade the "language of confrontation" for the "language of cooperation," a message to legislators whose boycotts of parliament and squabbling have hobbled the government.
Maliki joined Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and Army Gen. David H. Petraeus in addressing hundreds of guests for a U.S. Independence Day celebration.
"It's not easy to stand united," Petraeus said. "We learned that lesson during our own nation's history, and we are seeing that in Iraq today."
The parliament has proved incapable of overcoming its sectarian rivalries, and none of the legislation considered essential to national reconciliation has been passed into law.
The oil legislation is considered the most important, because of the potential wealth to be derived from the oil industry. The legislation is made up of two bills, one of which is a framework to oversee management of the industry. The other, known as the revenue-sharing law, would lay out the mechanisms for distributing oil revenues.
Wrangling over the bill is so tough because it hits on the most contentious question over the future shape of Iraq: how to balance power between the central government and the country's regions, divided on sectarian and ethnic lines. The demands of each side - Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish - for the bill are far apart, and often mutually exclusive.
Sunnis, centered in parts of the country with few proven reserves, fear that Shiites and Kurds in the oil-rich south and north will monopolize profits from the industry - and so want a stronger federal role to ensure a Sunni say in how the fields are run.
The bill's framework was passed by the cabinet on Tuesday, but various political blocs immediately began objecting to it. Kurdish lawmakers, who just days ago had expressed support for the measure, said they had not seen the draft that was passed Tuesday and could not guarantee their support for it. Sunni legislators have said the bill would open the industry to foreign investors, mainly U.S. oil companies, and deprive Iraqis of their due wealth.
The 44-member main Sunni bloc is boycotting parliament over an unrelated issue. That would make it difficult to give legitimacy to the oil bill even if it passed. Without their presence, Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman said, it was not possible to debate the measure.
The revenue-sharing bill has not been passed by the cabinet.
It is seen as a setback for a Sept. progress report in U.S.
By Tina Susman | Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD - Political infighting blocked lawmakers from opening debate yesterday on legislation to oversee the oil industry as Iraqi and U.S. leaders called for reconciliation among Iraq's feuding factions.
An influential group of Sunni Muslim clerics, the Association of Muslim Scholars, joined the fray surrounding the oil bill yesterday by issuing a religious edict, forbidding legislators from voting for it.
"Whoever does so will be exposed to God's wrath and will have committed the crime of collaboration with the enemy," said a statement from the group, a fierce opponent of the U.S. occupation.
The developments were an ominous sign for U.S. and Iraqi leaders, who have counted on passage of the legislation to show evidence of political progress before parliament starts a monthlong break July 31. U.S. officials must give Congress a progress report on Iraq in September, leaving little time for the measure to win approval.
Also yesterday, two U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq. One died in Nineveh province in northwestern Iraq when his helicopter was shot down. A second soldier was injured. In southern Baghdad, another soldier was killed, the military announced, bringing to at least 3,588 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the invasion of March 2003.
At a gathering yesterday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged lawmakers to trade the "language of confrontation" for the "language of cooperation," a message to legislators whose boycotts of parliament and squabbling have hobbled the government.
Maliki joined Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and Army Gen. David H. Petraeus in addressing hundreds of guests for a U.S. Independence Day celebration.
"It's not easy to stand united," Petraeus said. "We learned that lesson during our own nation's history, and we are seeing that in Iraq today."
The parliament has proved incapable of overcoming its sectarian rivalries, and none of the legislation considered essential to national reconciliation has been passed into law.
The oil legislation is considered the most important, because of the potential wealth to be derived from the oil industry. The legislation is made up of two bills, one of which is a framework to oversee management of the industry. The other, known as the revenue-sharing law, would lay out the mechanisms for distributing oil revenues.
Wrangling over the bill is so tough because it hits on the most contentious question over the future shape of Iraq: how to balance power between the central government and the country's regions, divided on sectarian and ethnic lines. The demands of each side - Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish - for the bill are far apart, and often mutually exclusive.
Sunnis, centered in parts of the country with few proven reserves, fear that Shiites and Kurds in the oil-rich south and north will monopolize profits from the industry - and so want a stronger federal role to ensure a Sunni say in how the fields are run.
The bill's framework was passed by the cabinet on Tuesday, but various political blocs immediately began objecting to it. Kurdish lawmakers, who just days ago had expressed support for the measure, said they had not seen the draft that was passed Tuesday and could not guarantee their support for it. Sunni legislators have said the bill would open the industry to foreign investors, mainly U.S. oil companies, and deprive Iraqis of their due wealth.
The 44-member main Sunni bloc is boycotting parliament over an unrelated issue. That would make it difficult to give legitimacy to the oil bill even if it passed. Without their presence, Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman said, it was not possible to debate the measure.
The revenue-sharing bill has not been passed by the cabinet.
NYT : Bush Evokes Revolutionary War to Bolster the U.S. Cause in Iraq
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Bush Evokes Revolutionary War to Bolster the U.S. Cause in Iraq
By JIM RUTENBERG | Published: July 5, 2007
MARTINSBURG, W.Va., July 4 — Facing renewed wrangling with Democrats — and possibly some Republicans — over continuing the Iraq war, President Bush on Wednesday took Independence Day as an opportunity to hark back to another bloody war with no apparent end in sight.
Reading aloud from an article about the first Fourth of July celebration, in Philadelphia in 1777, and its “grand exhibition of fireworks,” Mr. Bush told the audience of Air National Guard members and their families at the base here, “Our first Independence Day celebration took place in a midst of a war — a bloody and difficult struggle that would not end for six more years before America finally secured her freedom.”
Addressing National Guard members with the 167th Airlift Wing who were gathered in a cavernous airplane hangar here, he said, “Like those early patriots, you’re fighting a new and unprecedented war — pledging your lives and honor to defend our freedom and way of life.”
After nearly six years of war, beginning with the war in Afghanistan, such Fourth of July speeches have become routine for Mr. Bush. On Independence Day last year, Mr. Bush went to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, to argue against Democratic calls to withdraw from Iraq.
Then, with Congress in Republican hands and no real attempts by it to force a withdrawal legislatively, his argument seemed tailored for that year’s Congressional elections above anything else. Now, with Congress under the control of Democrats, many of whom won with promises to force an end to the war, the threat to his plans from Congress is real.
Democratic leaders have said they will use votes on the defense authorization bill after the July 4 recess to push new proposals calling for withdrawal timetables and possibly even a reassessment of the authorization to use force in Iraq.
A Congressionally mandated preliminary progress report on the results of the troop increase that Mr. Bush ordered in Iraq is due on July 15 and its results — which are expected to be mixed — could add to the pressure to end the war or change strategies. It comes as a growing number of moderate Republicans, including Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, voice concerns.
Mr. Bush said if the United States were to leave Iraq now, Al Qaeda “would be able to establish their safe haven from which to do two things: to further spread their ideology and to plan and plot attacks against the United States.”
Victory, he said, “will require more patience, more courage, and more sacrifice.”
Several Democrats have made the case that the president’s strategy is failing and that a full or partial withdrawal would press the Iraqis to settle their problems on their own. The lawmakers are facing dissatisfaction in polls that party strategists attribute to disquiet among Democratic voters with the party’s failure to force change in the president’s Iraq strategy.
Mr. Bush spent 20 minutes in the hangar, which dwarfed the crowd, shaking hands and talking with a long line of Guard members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families. He then lifted off for what his spokesman, Scott Stanzel, said would be a Fourth of July celebration at the White House that would double as a celebration of his 61st birthday this Friday.
Mr. Stanzel said Mr. Bush’s daughters and parents and his wife, Laura, would attend.
As Mr. Bush said of Mrs. Bush, “Laura sends her love — she would be with me, but I told her to fire up the grill.”
By JIM RUTENBERG | Published: July 5, 2007
MARTINSBURG, W.Va., July 4 — Facing renewed wrangling with Democrats — and possibly some Republicans — over continuing the Iraq war, President Bush on Wednesday took Independence Day as an opportunity to hark back to another bloody war with no apparent end in sight.
Reading aloud from an article about the first Fourth of July celebration, in Philadelphia in 1777, and its “grand exhibition of fireworks,” Mr. Bush told the audience of Air National Guard members and their families at the base here, “Our first Independence Day celebration took place in a midst of a war — a bloody and difficult struggle that would not end for six more years before America finally secured her freedom.”
Addressing National Guard members with the 167th Airlift Wing who were gathered in a cavernous airplane hangar here, he said, “Like those early patriots, you’re fighting a new and unprecedented war — pledging your lives and honor to defend our freedom and way of life.”
After nearly six years of war, beginning with the war in Afghanistan, such Fourth of July speeches have become routine for Mr. Bush. On Independence Day last year, Mr. Bush went to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, to argue against Democratic calls to withdraw from Iraq.
Then, with Congress in Republican hands and no real attempts by it to force a withdrawal legislatively, his argument seemed tailored for that year’s Congressional elections above anything else. Now, with Congress under the control of Democrats, many of whom won with promises to force an end to the war, the threat to his plans from Congress is real.
Democratic leaders have said they will use votes on the defense authorization bill after the July 4 recess to push new proposals calling for withdrawal timetables and possibly even a reassessment of the authorization to use force in Iraq.
A Congressionally mandated preliminary progress report on the results of the troop increase that Mr. Bush ordered in Iraq is due on July 15 and its results — which are expected to be mixed — could add to the pressure to end the war or change strategies. It comes as a growing number of moderate Republicans, including Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, voice concerns.
Mr. Bush said if the United States were to leave Iraq now, Al Qaeda “would be able to establish their safe haven from which to do two things: to further spread their ideology and to plan and plot attacks against the United States.”
Victory, he said, “will require more patience, more courage, and more sacrifice.”
Several Democrats have made the case that the president’s strategy is failing and that a full or partial withdrawal would press the Iraqis to settle their problems on their own. The lawmakers are facing dissatisfaction in polls that party strategists attribute to disquiet among Democratic voters with the party’s failure to force change in the president’s Iraq strategy.
Mr. Bush spent 20 minutes in the hangar, which dwarfed the crowd, shaking hands and talking with a long line of Guard members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families. He then lifted off for what his spokesman, Scott Stanzel, said would be a Fourth of July celebration at the White House that would double as a celebration of his 61st birthday this Friday.
Mr. Stanzel said Mr. Bush’s daughters and parents and his wife, Laura, would attend.
As Mr. Bush said of Mrs. Bush, “Laura sends her love — she would be with me, but I told her to fire up the grill.”
LAT : Mike Gravel's ripple effect
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Mike Gravel's ripple effect
The Democratic presidential candidate is the avant garde of the new artpolitical era.
by Crispin Sartwell | July 5, 2007
IN MANY ARTS, such as painting, poetry, woodworking and arrogance, Americans have made significant contributions. We have few rivals when it comes to growing marijuana or blowing stuff up. But in one art we are as inventive as small appliances or perhaps cucumbers.
I speak of the art of political advertising. American politicians expend untold billions of dollars on campaign commercials. Not only do these ads all appear to have been produced by the same vicious idiot, it appears that this vicious idiot has been lobotomized and then repeatedly, thoroughly concussed.
That is why as Americans we all owe a debt of aesthetic gratitude to the genius of former senator and current Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, who has taken the pabulum and kitsch that is our political art and transcended it — swept it up, summarized it and broken through it into a new range of possibilities. Mike Gravel is to political advertising what Ralph Waldo Emerson is to the essay, Walt Whitman to poetry, Jackson Pollock to painting, 50 Cent to bullet wounds. He is the avant garde of the new artpolitical era.
The medium of Gravel's genius is YouTube, but he ought to be on every cable network and broadcast channel in the country. In one ad, he appears in front of a pond. He stares at the camera for about a minute, just squints at us all, confronting us with the very essence of human existence. His silence, it emerges on a careful listening, is infinitely more expressive than the words of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, and is a bolder and more precise formulation of policy initiatives. Then Gravel picks up a rock and throws it into the pond. Then he walks slowly away.
In another ad, Gravel gathers firewood. Then for about seven minutes we simply watch a fire burning.
These are Dadaist campaign ads, as revolutionary in their context as Duchamp's urinal, Warhol's Marilyns, Washington crossing the Delaware, Bugs Bunny's attack on Elmer Fudd. But how are they to be interpreted?
Chucking a rock into a pond and lighting a fire are acts with extreme symbolic resonance. As Gravel's act ripples over the world's waters, growing ever less sizable until a single molecule washes up in New Zealand, his message or his messagelessness permeates the entire environment, undetectably changing everything. Perhaps Billy Joel — who should be writing music for the Edwards' campaign — didn't start the fire. But Gravel did.
These "symbolist" readings are, however, impoverished. I prefer to think of it like this: In American politics, language has been so emptied of meaning that silence is the only remaining medium of expression. Spend the next 20 years debating whether the immigration bill = amnesty; meanwhile, people, as Gravel shows us with unremitting clarity, are still crossing borders. Gravel's works bring us out of the yapyap — the blah, blah, blah, yackety, smackety, if I may — and back to the things themselves, the reality that exists before and outside our words, the reality that eventually shuts us up or kills us.
The ads are both a commentary on the emptiness of our political discourse — a parody if you like — and a refutation of that emptiness, or a triumph over it, a reinsertion of brute content, a silent explosion of truth into a world of mere and moronic fiction.
Our politicians are voids or spreading zones of emptiness, a set of focus-grouped phrases and nice outfits, a congeries of cliches, representations of which there is no reality. In the terms of the late theoretician Jean Baudrillard, our politics is a precession of simulacra.
But Gravel's politics reminds us that if someone were to drop an anvil or a piano on you from a tall building, you would amount to a puddle. Gravel's works confront us with our own existences and our deaths, the brute thereness of truth, the skull beneath the $400 haircut, the cellulite under the pants suit. His is neo-existentialist, post-apocalyptic, post-post modern art, a silence that screams and cajoles.
Gravel's politics are a politics of the body and of the physical world, of what is underneath our language and above it, what is broken and beautiful, the real world of human beings.
I suggest to you that a Gravel presidency would lead to an entirely new America, doing to us what cubism did to post-impressionism: dragging us moaning in glorious epiphanic pain into a new world.
It may be that Gravel, like Vincent van Gogh, Friedrich Nietzsche or indeed, Crispin Sartwell, is a premature birth of an astonishing future. He may toil in obscurity, misunderstood or ignored in his own time. And yet, whether we can fully theorize him or not, Mike Gravel, though he may never be president, has brought us all to the very brink of political ecstasy.
CRISPIN SARTWELL teaches art and art history at Dickinson College. His latest book is "Six Names of Beauty."
The Democratic presidential candidate is the avant garde of the new artpolitical era.
by Crispin Sartwell | July 5, 2007
IN MANY ARTS, such as painting, poetry, woodworking and arrogance, Americans have made significant contributions. We have few rivals when it comes to growing marijuana or blowing stuff up. But in one art we are as inventive as small appliances or perhaps cucumbers.
I speak of the art of political advertising. American politicians expend untold billions of dollars on campaign commercials. Not only do these ads all appear to have been produced by the same vicious idiot, it appears that this vicious idiot has been lobotomized and then repeatedly, thoroughly concussed.
That is why as Americans we all owe a debt of aesthetic gratitude to the genius of former senator and current Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, who has taken the pabulum and kitsch that is our political art and transcended it — swept it up, summarized it and broken through it into a new range of possibilities. Mike Gravel is to political advertising what Ralph Waldo Emerson is to the essay, Walt Whitman to poetry, Jackson Pollock to painting, 50 Cent to bullet wounds. He is the avant garde of the new artpolitical era.
The medium of Gravel's genius is YouTube, but he ought to be on every cable network and broadcast channel in the country. In one ad, he appears in front of a pond. He stares at the camera for about a minute, just squints at us all, confronting us with the very essence of human existence. His silence, it emerges on a careful listening, is infinitely more expressive than the words of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, and is a bolder and more precise formulation of policy initiatives. Then Gravel picks up a rock and throws it into the pond. Then he walks slowly away.
In another ad, Gravel gathers firewood. Then for about seven minutes we simply watch a fire burning.
These are Dadaist campaign ads, as revolutionary in their context as Duchamp's urinal, Warhol's Marilyns, Washington crossing the Delaware, Bugs Bunny's attack on Elmer Fudd. But how are they to be interpreted?
Chucking a rock into a pond and lighting a fire are acts with extreme symbolic resonance. As Gravel's act ripples over the world's waters, growing ever less sizable until a single molecule washes up in New Zealand, his message or his messagelessness permeates the entire environment, undetectably changing everything. Perhaps Billy Joel — who should be writing music for the Edwards' campaign — didn't start the fire. But Gravel did.
These "symbolist" readings are, however, impoverished. I prefer to think of it like this: In American politics, language has been so emptied of meaning that silence is the only remaining medium of expression. Spend the next 20 years debating whether the immigration bill = amnesty; meanwhile, people, as Gravel shows us with unremitting clarity, are still crossing borders. Gravel's works bring us out of the yapyap — the blah, blah, blah, yackety, smackety, if I may — and back to the things themselves, the reality that exists before and outside our words, the reality that eventually shuts us up or kills us.
The ads are both a commentary on the emptiness of our political discourse — a parody if you like — and a refutation of that emptiness, or a triumph over it, a reinsertion of brute content, a silent explosion of truth into a world of mere and moronic fiction.
Our politicians are voids or spreading zones of emptiness, a set of focus-grouped phrases and nice outfits, a congeries of cliches, representations of which there is no reality. In the terms of the late theoretician Jean Baudrillard, our politics is a precession of simulacra.
But Gravel's politics reminds us that if someone were to drop an anvil or a piano on you from a tall building, you would amount to a puddle. Gravel's works confront us with our own existences and our deaths, the brute thereness of truth, the skull beneath the $400 haircut, the cellulite under the pants suit. His is neo-existentialist, post-apocalyptic, post-post modern art, a silence that screams and cajoles.
Gravel's politics are a politics of the body and of the physical world, of what is underneath our language and above it, what is broken and beautiful, the real world of human beings.
I suggest to you that a Gravel presidency would lead to an entirely new America, doing to us what cubism did to post-impressionism: dragging us moaning in glorious epiphanic pain into a new world.
It may be that Gravel, like Vincent van Gogh, Friedrich Nietzsche or indeed, Crispin Sartwell, is a premature birth of an astonishing future. He may toil in obscurity, misunderstood or ignored in his own time. And yet, whether we can fully theorize him or not, Mike Gravel, though he may never be president, has brought us all to the very brink of political ecstasy.
CRISPIN SARTWELL teaches art and art history at Dickinson College. His latest book is "Six Names of Beauty."
NYT : Pakistanis Capture Cleric in Mosque Rebellion
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Pakistanis Capture Cleric in Mosque Rebellion
By CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD | July 5, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Thursday, July 5 — Pakistani security forces arrested one of the leaders of the rebellion at a radical mosque here in the capital on Wednesday as he tried to escape disguised in a burqa among more than 1,000 students who surrendered at the complex.
Women who left the mosque Wednesday gave their names to a security officer. A cleric who was arrested wore a burqa to disguise himself.
Government officials said they did not know how many people remained inside the mosque, where 10 people were killed Tuesday in clashes with security forces, who locked down the area. The commander of a Pakistani Army Ranger unit at the scene estimated that 70 percent of the complex had emptied, suggesting that 300 people might still be inside.
He predicted that the security forces would have to fight those who refused to give up. “It is the end of the game for them,” he said.
By early Thursday morning, about 3 a.m., several large explosions, mortar fire and a heavy exchange of gunfire could be heard coming from the area of the mosque, indicating that some kind of operation was under way.
The tough measures showed new resolve by the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to end a standoff that has proved an embarrassment since January, when the students began a series of challenges to push for the imposition of Islamic law throughout Pakistan.
Western diplomats and General Musharraf’s political opponents here say that the general has failed to stand up to the Islamic extremists and that their widening influence threatens the security of the country, which sits on the front line of American efforts to battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
After a bloody and chaotic day on Tuesday, the government moved in heavy armor and more Pakistani Army Rangers overnight, imposing a curfew around the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, which lies just a few blocks from the main government offices.
Those remaining inside the mosque after Tuesday’s violence were given a deadline of 11 a.m. Wednesday to surrender themselves and their weapons. There was to be no negotiation with the clerics, government officials said.
The authorities cut off the power in the area and demanded that residents stay in their houses. Three attack helicopters circled over the mosque several times just before dusk, raising fears that the security forces were preparing to storm the complex.
Last week, General Musharraf cited the bloodshed that would result from storming the compound as a reason for his hesitation, suggesting that he was wary of the popular reaction as well as possible retaliation by extremists.
Officials said bombers struck twice in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing 13 people. At least one of the attacks, they said, may have been a response to events at the Red Mosque.
In one attack, a suicide car bomber hit a Pakistani military convoy in the border region of Bannu, in the North-West Frontier Province, killing six soldiers and four children playing cricket nearby. That attack was probably retaliation for a missile strike on militants in the area that killed 34 people on June 19.
The second attack on Wednesday, a roadside bomb aimed at a local police official, killed three civilians in the district of Swat, said the provincial police chief, Muhammad Sharif Virk. He blamed a local cleric who has been trying to rally support for the clerics under siege in Islamabad.
One of those clerics, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the elder of two brothers running the uprising at the Red Mosque, was arrested as he tried to escape among a crowd of women, dressed like them in a black, all-enveloping burqa, government officials said.
He was spotted by the police because he was taller and larger than the women, Javed Iqbal Cheema, a government spokesman, said at a news briefing late Wednesday.
The younger brother, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the more vocal of the two, is thought to be still inside the mosque complex, along with some of his armed followers. The religious complex was founded by the brothers’ father, a famous jihadi leader who was assassinated in 1998.
By Wednesday, the tide of popular feeling seemed to be turning against the clerics. Relatives of students who attended separate male and female schools inside the mosque compound said they had not been aware of the presence of weapons in the complex.
But most said both the clerics and the government shared blame for the bloodshed on Tuesday. “We sent our daughters for education, not terrorism,” said Kastabar Ali, 48, a taxi driver whose two nieces were still inside the seminary.
For most of the day, the clerics refused to surrender and were sending mixed signals by asking for more time, officials said. “The two clerics remain defiant so far, and we haven’t received any flexibility from their side,” Mr. Cheema, the government spokesman, said Wednesday evening, minutes before news of Maulana Abdul Aziz’s arrest. “Having said that, I would only say they have no option but to surrender.”
He and other officials said the government was determined to avoid further violence. By midmorning, after another man was shot dead near the mosque overnight, Pakistani Army Rangers in combat gear cordoned off the area with barbed wire.
Security forces then announced over a loudspeaker that the government was offering students 5,000 rupees, about $82, and alternative education in government madrasas if they left the complex.
“We ensure no action against women and children and those who were not involved in any unlawful activity and promise them a safe passage and 5,000 rupees each by President Pervez Musharraf as expenses for traveling to their homes,” the minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan, said at a news conference in the morning.
“We do not want bloodshed,” he said. “We have repeatedly supported a peaceful resolution to the problem.”
Families were bused in to a meeting place, and steadily during the day female students filtered out with their relatives. Male students were not allowed to go free but were shown on a local television channel walking out in single file, hands aloft and being searched by the police.
They were then taken away for screening, and 170 were being detained on suspicion of involvement in previous offenses, the information minister, Muhammad Ali Durrani, said in the second of four news briefings officials gave during the day.
The government extended the deadline several times because so many students took up the offer to leave the mosque, and by late Wednesday up to 1,200 had come out. “Our strategy is that we vacate the mosque with minimum losses,” Mr. Durrani said.
But the mosque’s leaders were pressing the students to stay, some students and their relatives said. Fez Muhammad from Kashmir, who was leading his two teenage daughters from the complex, said the administrators of the mosque had not wanted them to leave.
“They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” he said.
One of his daughters, Taiba, 16, confirmed that the leaders of the mosque had tried to persuade them to stay, and she said that she and her sister left only because their father had insisted. “They said, ‘If you give your life, it will be in the way of God,’ ” she said.
Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.
By CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD | July 5, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Thursday, July 5 — Pakistani security forces arrested one of the leaders of the rebellion at a radical mosque here in the capital on Wednesday as he tried to escape disguised in a burqa among more than 1,000 students who surrendered at the complex.
Women who left the mosque Wednesday gave their names to a security officer. A cleric who was arrested wore a burqa to disguise himself.
Government officials said they did not know how many people remained inside the mosque, where 10 people were killed Tuesday in clashes with security forces, who locked down the area. The commander of a Pakistani Army Ranger unit at the scene estimated that 70 percent of the complex had emptied, suggesting that 300 people might still be inside.
He predicted that the security forces would have to fight those who refused to give up. “It is the end of the game for them,” he said.
By early Thursday morning, about 3 a.m., several large explosions, mortar fire and a heavy exchange of gunfire could be heard coming from the area of the mosque, indicating that some kind of operation was under way.
The tough measures showed new resolve by the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to end a standoff that has proved an embarrassment since January, when the students began a series of challenges to push for the imposition of Islamic law throughout Pakistan.
Western diplomats and General Musharraf’s political opponents here say that the general has failed to stand up to the Islamic extremists and that their widening influence threatens the security of the country, which sits on the front line of American efforts to battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
After a bloody and chaotic day on Tuesday, the government moved in heavy armor and more Pakistani Army Rangers overnight, imposing a curfew around the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, which lies just a few blocks from the main government offices.
Those remaining inside the mosque after Tuesday’s violence were given a deadline of 11 a.m. Wednesday to surrender themselves and their weapons. There was to be no negotiation with the clerics, government officials said.
The authorities cut off the power in the area and demanded that residents stay in their houses. Three attack helicopters circled over the mosque several times just before dusk, raising fears that the security forces were preparing to storm the complex.
Last week, General Musharraf cited the bloodshed that would result from storming the compound as a reason for his hesitation, suggesting that he was wary of the popular reaction as well as possible retaliation by extremists.
Officials said bombers struck twice in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing 13 people. At least one of the attacks, they said, may have been a response to events at the Red Mosque.
In one attack, a suicide car bomber hit a Pakistani military convoy in the border region of Bannu, in the North-West Frontier Province, killing six soldiers and four children playing cricket nearby. That attack was probably retaliation for a missile strike on militants in the area that killed 34 people on June 19.
The second attack on Wednesday, a roadside bomb aimed at a local police official, killed three civilians in the district of Swat, said the provincial police chief, Muhammad Sharif Virk. He blamed a local cleric who has been trying to rally support for the clerics under siege in Islamabad.
One of those clerics, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the elder of two brothers running the uprising at the Red Mosque, was arrested as he tried to escape among a crowd of women, dressed like them in a black, all-enveloping burqa, government officials said.
He was spotted by the police because he was taller and larger than the women, Javed Iqbal Cheema, a government spokesman, said at a news briefing late Wednesday.
The younger brother, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the more vocal of the two, is thought to be still inside the mosque complex, along with some of his armed followers. The religious complex was founded by the brothers’ father, a famous jihadi leader who was assassinated in 1998.
By Wednesday, the tide of popular feeling seemed to be turning against the clerics. Relatives of students who attended separate male and female schools inside the mosque compound said they had not been aware of the presence of weapons in the complex.
But most said both the clerics and the government shared blame for the bloodshed on Tuesday. “We sent our daughters for education, not terrorism,” said Kastabar Ali, 48, a taxi driver whose two nieces were still inside the seminary.
For most of the day, the clerics refused to surrender and were sending mixed signals by asking for more time, officials said. “The two clerics remain defiant so far, and we haven’t received any flexibility from their side,” Mr. Cheema, the government spokesman, said Wednesday evening, minutes before news of Maulana Abdul Aziz’s arrest. “Having said that, I would only say they have no option but to surrender.”
He and other officials said the government was determined to avoid further violence. By midmorning, after another man was shot dead near the mosque overnight, Pakistani Army Rangers in combat gear cordoned off the area with barbed wire.
Security forces then announced over a loudspeaker that the government was offering students 5,000 rupees, about $82, and alternative education in government madrasas if they left the complex.
“We ensure no action against women and children and those who were not involved in any unlawful activity and promise them a safe passage and 5,000 rupees each by President Pervez Musharraf as expenses for traveling to their homes,” the minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan, said at a news conference in the morning.
“We do not want bloodshed,” he said. “We have repeatedly supported a peaceful resolution to the problem.”
Families were bused in to a meeting place, and steadily during the day female students filtered out with their relatives. Male students were not allowed to go free but were shown on a local television channel walking out in single file, hands aloft and being searched by the police.
They were then taken away for screening, and 170 were being detained on suspicion of involvement in previous offenses, the information minister, Muhammad Ali Durrani, said in the second of four news briefings officials gave during the day.
The government extended the deadline several times because so many students took up the offer to leave the mosque, and by late Wednesday up to 1,200 had come out. “Our strategy is that we vacate the mosque with minimum losses,” Mr. Durrani said.
But the mosque’s leaders were pressing the students to stay, some students and their relatives said. Fez Muhammad from Kashmir, who was leading his two teenage daughters from the complex, said the administrators of the mosque had not wanted them to leave.
“They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” he said.
One of his daughters, Taiba, 16, confirmed that the leaders of the mosque had tried to persuade them to stay, and she said that she and her sister left only because their father had insisted. “They said, ‘If you give your life, it will be in the way of God,’ ” she said.
Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.
Filed under
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Salman Masood,
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Taliban
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Dawn : Militants vow to avenge Lal Masjid deaths
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Militants vow to avenge Lal Masjid deaths
By Our Correspondent | KHAAR, July 5
Suspected militants have threatened to carry out suicide attacks across the country in revenge for the killing Lal Masjid students. Pamphlets purportedly distributed by the Mujahideen-i-Bajaur in villages and towns of the agency on Thursday warned of attacking public places across the country and paramilitary forces in tribal areas.
The pamphlet said: “Mujahideen strongly denounce operation and killing of students in Lal Masjid and they will take revenge by carrying out suicide attacks.”
Following the distribution of the pamphlets, the political authorities tightened security and increased the number of paramilitary forces at checkposts in the agency. Security has also been beefed up along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Meanwhile, a medicine shop was blown up in the Mamond tehsil of the agency on Wednesday night. The explosion did not cause any casualty, residents said.
They said that the explosion completely damaged the shop owned by Noorul Haq.
By Our Correspondent | KHAAR, July 5
Suspected militants have threatened to carry out suicide attacks across the country in revenge for the killing Lal Masjid students. Pamphlets purportedly distributed by the Mujahideen-i-Bajaur in villages and towns of the agency on Thursday warned of attacking public places across the country and paramilitary forces in tribal areas.
The pamphlet said: “Mujahideen strongly denounce operation and killing of students in Lal Masjid and they will take revenge by carrying out suicide attacks.”
Following the distribution of the pamphlets, the political authorities tightened security and increased the number of paramilitary forces at checkposts in the agency. Security has also been beefed up along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Meanwhile, a medicine shop was blown up in the Mamond tehsil of the agency on Wednesday night. The explosion did not cause any casualty, residents said.
They said that the explosion completely damaged the shop owned by Noorul Haq.
Dawn : Late-night round
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Late-night round
By Mohammad Asghar and Munawer Azeem | ISLAMABAD, July 5
There was another round of intense firing around midnight outside the besieged Lal Masjid as the security forces captured five more militants trying to escape by scaling the mosque’s wall.
The firing continued for several minutes, triggering speculations that the final assault had begun. But till the filing of this report at around 2:10am the government held off.
Earlier, the law-enforcement agencies had captured 60 fleeing students and, according to sources, a number of them later confessed that they belonged to the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
Among those captured on Thursday were students from three seminaries of Islamabad — Jamia Fareedia, Jamia Mohammadia and Dar-ul-Uloom, Barakahu.
Besides, the sources said, 67 other students surrendered during the day. However, no weapon was recovered from them.
By Mohammad Asghar and Munawer Azeem | ISLAMABAD, July 5
There was another round of intense firing around midnight outside the besieged Lal Masjid as the security forces captured five more militants trying to escape by scaling the mosque’s wall.
The firing continued for several minutes, triggering speculations that the final assault had begun. But till the filing of this report at around 2:10am the government held off.
Earlier, the law-enforcement agencies had captured 60 fleeing students and, according to sources, a number of them later confessed that they belonged to the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
Among those captured on Thursday were students from three seminaries of Islamabad — Jamia Fareedia, Jamia Mohammadia and Dar-ul-Uloom, Barakahu.
Besides, the sources said, 67 other students surrendered during the day. However, no weapon was recovered from them.
Dawn : Restraint in dealing with Lal Masjid crisis lauded
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Restraint in dealing with Lal Masjid crisis lauded
By Anwar Iqbal | WASHINGTON, July 5
The United States said on Thursday that the government of Pakistan had displayed ‘exceptional restraint’ in dealing with the Lal Masjid crisis. In its second statement on the situation in three days, the US State Department said the government’s action against militants hiding inside the Lal Masjid complex was “domestic security issue” of Pakistan and hoped for a peaceful resolution.
“We are following the situation closely and hope for a peaceful resolution to this affair,” the statement said.
“The government of Pakistan has demonstrated exceptional restraint in dealing with this situation to date,” the State Department said.
“We hope that those who continue to resist will choose to cooperate with the government, and express themselves peacefully, so that further violence can be avoided.”
Reuters adds from New Delhi: India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that Pakistan’s confrontation with militants at Lal Masjid had brought home the dangers of terrorism to that country and India wished it success in fighting the menace.
Mr Singh told a group of women journalists he wished Pakistan “Godspeed in tackling the dangerous situation” arising out of the fighting at the mosque, NDTV quoted him as saying.
“Pakistan is seeing terrorism for the first time. What is happening in Pakistan, thinking people have realised fundamentalism is perverse and dangerous to society,” the Press Trust of India news agency quoted him as saying.
India last year said Pakistan was also a victim of terrorism and formed a joint counter-terrorism panel as part of a peace process.
But that process had slowed down because Pakistan was “preoccupied”, Mr Singh was quoted as saying.
“The dialogue has slowed down, not because of us, but because of the situation in Pakistan,” he said.
AFP adds from Islamabad: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown telephoned President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday to praise his efforts to curb militancy and terrorism, a senior Pakistani official said.
It was Mr Brown’s first contact with the military ruler since taking over from Tony Blair on June 27.
“The British Prime Minister appreciated President Musharraf’s key role in the fight against militancy and terrorism and promised to maintain close ties between the two countries,” the official told AFP.
The two leaders also discussed “longstanding bilateral ties between the two allies and agreed to further strengthen them,” he said.
Sources said the mosque crisis also came up in the discussion between the two leaders, though the official would not confirm or deny it.
By Anwar Iqbal | WASHINGTON, July 5
The United States said on Thursday that the government of Pakistan had displayed ‘exceptional restraint’ in dealing with the Lal Masjid crisis. In its second statement on the situation in three days, the US State Department said the government’s action against militants hiding inside the Lal Masjid complex was “domestic security issue” of Pakistan and hoped for a peaceful resolution.
“We are following the situation closely and hope for a peaceful resolution to this affair,” the statement said.
“The government of Pakistan has demonstrated exceptional restraint in dealing with this situation to date,” the State Department said.
“We hope that those who continue to resist will choose to cooperate with the government, and express themselves peacefully, so that further violence can be avoided.”
Reuters adds from New Delhi: India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that Pakistan’s confrontation with militants at Lal Masjid had brought home the dangers of terrorism to that country and India wished it success in fighting the menace.
Mr Singh told a group of women journalists he wished Pakistan “Godspeed in tackling the dangerous situation” arising out of the fighting at the mosque, NDTV quoted him as saying.
“Pakistan is seeing terrorism for the first time. What is happening in Pakistan, thinking people have realised fundamentalism is perverse and dangerous to society,” the Press Trust of India news agency quoted him as saying.
India last year said Pakistan was also a victim of terrorism and formed a joint counter-terrorism panel as part of a peace process.
But that process had slowed down because Pakistan was “preoccupied”, Mr Singh was quoted as saying.
“The dialogue has slowed down, not because of us, but because of the situation in Pakistan,” he said.
AFP adds from Islamabad: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown telephoned President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday to praise his efforts to curb militancy and terrorism, a senior Pakistani official said.
It was Mr Brown’s first contact with the military ruler since taking over from Tony Blair on June 27.
“The British Prime Minister appreciated President Musharraf’s key role in the fight against militancy and terrorism and promised to maintain close ties between the two countries,” the official told AFP.
The two leaders also discussed “longstanding bilateral ties between the two allies and agreed to further strengthen them,” he said.
Sources said the mosque crisis also came up in the discussion between the two leaders, though the official would not confirm or deny it.
Dawn : Besieged cleric seeks safe passage
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Besieged cleric seeks safe passage | Nerves as standoff continues | Govt sticks to its guns
By Syed Irfan Raza | ISLAMABAD, July 5
As a battle of nerves between heavily-armed security forces and militants holed up in the Lal-Masjid-Jamia Hafsa complex lingered for the third day, desertions by the Madressah students continued. However, late-night statements by cleric Maulana Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, seeking safe passage, indicated that the six-month-old saga was nearing end.
It was yet another day of high tension and drama in and around Lal Masjid, with repeated exchanges of fire, terrorising the militants with the deafening fire by dummy motors and almost continuous hovering of cobra helicopters to create an impression that a full-fledged operation was about to be launched. While bouts of intense tear-gassing continued in phases throughout the day, at one stage the security troops carried out controlled explosions to create a number of breaches in the outer wall of the mosque-madressah complex, including one 14-foot breach, which was the first clear indication that the option of storming the building was being seriously contemplated.
Senior officials of Pakistan Rangers and interior ministry said that even though they had flatly rejected Maulana Ghazi’s terms for surrender, including his request for safe passage, they were still delaying the storming of the complex in order to allow parents of some of the trapped students to use their influence to get their loved ones out. Some of them did succeed in the attempt and several women and men came out voluntarily.
However, the real action during the day was an attempt by several hardcore militants to escape. All of them were captured. Later in the evening a highly dejected Maulana Ghazi told reporters on phone that he and his men were prepared to give up their arms, provided they were not arrested and allowed to leave the area unharmed.
In one TV interview Maulana Ghazi refuted the government’s claim that some activists of banned outfits were present inside the mosque. “The government can photograph and collect the data of all those present with him inside the mosque and it can arrest those involved in some heinous crime,” he said.
He said he was not ready to surrender but he feared the post-arrest humiliation. He claimed that his arrested brother Maulana Abdul Aziz was coerced to record a TV interview. He said he and his companions should not be treated like criminals.
But apparently demoralised by the arrest of his elder brother on Wednesday night while trying to escape wearing a burqa, the otherwise belligerent Maulana Ghazi was not in his element. In television interviews he even offered to lay down arms, return the mosque and madressah to the institution that runs and manages seminaries, and denied having any suicide bombers among his hardcore loyalists. But he wanted safe passage for all his armed men.
“No such conditions are acceptable to us,” interior ministry’s spokesman Brigadier Cheema told reporters. And later Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said there was absolutely no question of holding any further talks with the militants holed up in the mosque. Another minister, Tariq Azeem was even more categorical. “Ghazi and others will have to give up and offer an absolute, total and unconditional surrender,” he told a group of foreign journalists.The life in the sector G-6, where the mosque is located, and in the nearby areas remained crippled as curfew continued. However, a two-hour relaxation provided some relief to residents, who came out in large numbers to buy essential items.
The authorities had made special arrangements through mobile vans to sell basic goods in different parts of the area.
The number of militants who surrendered on Thursday was thin as compared to those who had came out of the compound on Tuesday and Wednesday, and only 40 to 50 male and female students surrendered during the whole day. It was observed that security personnel started firing whenever they saw nobody coming out of the mosque to surrender.
Throughout the day some sort of tension prevailed between security personnel and parents of those madressah students who had been taken away for questioning after they had come out of the mosque voluntarily. There were arguments and bouts of shouting in an area close to the place where the Rangers have set up their camp office. Some of the parents accused security personnel of deceiving them saying their children had left the mosque on their persuasion but when they came out they were held and treated like ‘terrorists’. The security personnel covered faces of the arrested students with their shirts, tied their hand behind their back and sent them to the Central Adiyala Jail in Rawalpindi.
The parents of the arrested students were not allowed to meet them and were asked to visit the jail.
All kinds of speculations about the exact number of casualties did the rounds as journalists were neither allowed inside hospitals nor permitted to go near the conflict zone. At one point Maulana Rasheed Ghazi told a private TV channel that some 35 to 40 people had been killed in the mosque but it was not confirmed by the authorities.
Hospital sources said that five bodies had been brought on Thursday from inside the mosque, and Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said the death toll had reached 19. He said the security forces had made a 14-foot breach in the outer wall of the mosque so that children inside the mosque could come out.
Briefing the media, a senior official said five girls who had managed to escape from the mosque told the authorities that all the women and children in the mosque had been held hostage and kept in a locked room by armed militants.
He also claimed that earlier in the day, the militants had hurled hand-grenades on the security forces damaging an APC of the army.
Since the start of the security operation and deployment of army troops, several officials and ministers hold briefing for the media, after issuing conflicting statements. While one of the ministers said that 50 armed militants were among about 400 men and women in the mosque-madressah complex, a senior Rangers official said their assessment was that about 100 armed men were among those still in the building.
While different government officials gave different accounts of the events of the day, they all appeared to agree on one point -- not permitting the media to cover the developments.
Mr Sherpao said that President General Pervez Musharraf was constantly following the events and was fully behind all the actions being taken by the troops on the ground.
With additional reporting by Khaleeq Kiani, Amir Wasim, Munawer Azim and Muhammad Asghar
By Syed Irfan Raza | ISLAMABAD, July 5
As a battle of nerves between heavily-armed security forces and militants holed up in the Lal-Masjid-Jamia Hafsa complex lingered for the third day, desertions by the Madressah students continued. However, late-night statements by cleric Maulana Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, seeking safe passage, indicated that the six-month-old saga was nearing end.
It was yet another day of high tension and drama in and around Lal Masjid, with repeated exchanges of fire, terrorising the militants with the deafening fire by dummy motors and almost continuous hovering of cobra helicopters to create an impression that a full-fledged operation was about to be launched. While bouts of intense tear-gassing continued in phases throughout the day, at one stage the security troops carried out controlled explosions to create a number of breaches in the outer wall of the mosque-madressah complex, including one 14-foot breach, which was the first clear indication that the option of storming the building was being seriously contemplated.
Senior officials of Pakistan Rangers and interior ministry said that even though they had flatly rejected Maulana Ghazi’s terms for surrender, including his request for safe passage, they were still delaying the storming of the complex in order to allow parents of some of the trapped students to use their influence to get their loved ones out. Some of them did succeed in the attempt and several women and men came out voluntarily.
However, the real action during the day was an attempt by several hardcore militants to escape. All of them were captured. Later in the evening a highly dejected Maulana Ghazi told reporters on phone that he and his men were prepared to give up their arms, provided they were not arrested and allowed to leave the area unharmed.
In one TV interview Maulana Ghazi refuted the government’s claim that some activists of banned outfits were present inside the mosque. “The government can photograph and collect the data of all those present with him inside the mosque and it can arrest those involved in some heinous crime,” he said.
He said he was not ready to surrender but he feared the post-arrest humiliation. He claimed that his arrested brother Maulana Abdul Aziz was coerced to record a TV interview. He said he and his companions should not be treated like criminals.
But apparently demoralised by the arrest of his elder brother on Wednesday night while trying to escape wearing a burqa, the otherwise belligerent Maulana Ghazi was not in his element. In television interviews he even offered to lay down arms, return the mosque and madressah to the institution that runs and manages seminaries, and denied having any suicide bombers among his hardcore loyalists. But he wanted safe passage for all his armed men.
“No such conditions are acceptable to us,” interior ministry’s spokesman Brigadier Cheema told reporters. And later Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said there was absolutely no question of holding any further talks with the militants holed up in the mosque. Another minister, Tariq Azeem was even more categorical. “Ghazi and others will have to give up and offer an absolute, total and unconditional surrender,” he told a group of foreign journalists.The life in the sector G-6, where the mosque is located, and in the nearby areas remained crippled as curfew continued. However, a two-hour relaxation provided some relief to residents, who came out in large numbers to buy essential items.
The authorities had made special arrangements through mobile vans to sell basic goods in different parts of the area.
The number of militants who surrendered on Thursday was thin as compared to those who had came out of the compound on Tuesday and Wednesday, and only 40 to 50 male and female students surrendered during the whole day. It was observed that security personnel started firing whenever they saw nobody coming out of the mosque to surrender.
Throughout the day some sort of tension prevailed between security personnel and parents of those madressah students who had been taken away for questioning after they had come out of the mosque voluntarily. There were arguments and bouts of shouting in an area close to the place where the Rangers have set up their camp office. Some of the parents accused security personnel of deceiving them saying their children had left the mosque on their persuasion but when they came out they were held and treated like ‘terrorists’. The security personnel covered faces of the arrested students with their shirts, tied their hand behind their back and sent them to the Central Adiyala Jail in Rawalpindi.
The parents of the arrested students were not allowed to meet them and were asked to visit the jail.
All kinds of speculations about the exact number of casualties did the rounds as journalists were neither allowed inside hospitals nor permitted to go near the conflict zone. At one point Maulana Rasheed Ghazi told a private TV channel that some 35 to 40 people had been killed in the mosque but it was not confirmed by the authorities.
Hospital sources said that five bodies had been brought on Thursday from inside the mosque, and Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said the death toll had reached 19. He said the security forces had made a 14-foot breach in the outer wall of the mosque so that children inside the mosque could come out.
Briefing the media, a senior official said five girls who had managed to escape from the mosque told the authorities that all the women and children in the mosque had been held hostage and kept in a locked room by armed militants.
He also claimed that earlier in the day, the militants had hurled hand-grenades on the security forces damaging an APC of the army.
Since the start of the security operation and deployment of army troops, several officials and ministers hold briefing for the media, after issuing conflicting statements. While one of the ministers said that 50 armed militants were among about 400 men and women in the mosque-madressah complex, a senior Rangers official said their assessment was that about 100 armed men were among those still in the building.
While different government officials gave different accounts of the events of the day, they all appeared to agree on one point -- not permitting the media to cover the developments.
Mr Sherpao said that President General Pervez Musharraf was constantly following the events and was fully behind all the actions being taken by the troops on the ground.
With additional reporting by Khaleeq Kiani, Amir Wasim, Munawer Azim and Muhammad Asghar
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Reuters : Pakistan rejects radical cleric's surrender terms
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Pakistan rejects radical cleric's surrender terms
By Kamran Haider | Thu Jul 5, 2007 10:18PM EDT
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A cleric holed up in a Pakistani mosque said on Friday he and hundreds of followers were willing to surrender, but set conditions authorities rejected after three days of violence in which 19 people have died.
The government said the attempt to attach demands, including safe passage, was unacceptable and insisted cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi release women and children being held as human shields.
Violence erupted outside the Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, in the capital on Tuesday after months of rising tension between the authorities and the mosque's Taliban-supporting clerics and their thousands of religious student followers.
Hundreds of troops and police are surrounding the fortified mosque in a leafy central Islamabad neighborhood.
There was intermittent gunfire and explosions on Thursday and early on Friday. Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said troops had blasted some holes in the compound walls.
The government has ordered the students to surrender and about 1,200 of them have come out. But resistance from those inside, who authorities say include militants from banned groups armed with rifles and grenades, was stiff.
Ghazi, speaking in telephone interviews from the mosque, said he wanted safe passage for himself and his followers.
"There are no militants from banned organizations among the students," Ghazi told Aaj Television.
He later told Geo TV students coming out could be screened so authorities could see none was a militant: "They should announce a ceasefire and come here and discuss a screening process."
He also asked that he and his sick mother be allowed to live in the mosque "until I make some alternative arrangements".
But the government rejected any conditions and said the only option was surrender.
"If he is sincere in his offer then first of all he should immediately release the women, girls and innocent children who are being kept there forcefully," Cheema told a news conference.
"They should leave their weapons in the mosque and come out."
Many Pakistanis welcomed the action against the clerics and their hardline students, whose behavior had been reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Moderate politicians and the media have for months urged President Pervez Musharraf to tackle them, but he cited concern about bloodshed and authorities tried to appease them.
Musharraf, who has been under pressure from Western allies to do more to tackle militancy, faces an election this year and while a peaceful and successful end to the stand-off would win him credit, heavy casualties in an assault would be damaging.
"HONOURABLE EXIT"
Ghazi's elder brother and chief cleric of the mosque, Abdul Aziz, was captured on Wednesday trying to escape in a woman's all-enveloping burqa.
Authorities don't know how many people are in the mosque but Aziz, in an interview broadcast on Thursday, said 850 students were there, 600 of them female. He urged them to give up.
The government said many of those inside were being kept against their will as human shields.
The clerics and their followers, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, launched an increasingly provocative campaign from January to press various demands, including action against vice. They threatened suicide attacks if suppressed.
But it was last month's kidnapping of six women and a man from China -- Pakistan's most steadfast ally -- whom the students said were involved in prostitution, that was a key factor forcing government action.
The Lal Masjid has been a centre of radical Islam for years but its supporters' increasing assertiveness is seen as part of a phenomenon known as "Talibanization" -- the spread of militant influence from remote Afghan border regions to central areas.
A friend of Ghazi's, former security official and Islamist Khalid Khuwaja, said the cleric wanted a just way out: "He simply wants an honorable exit, otherwise he'd prefer death."
(Additional reporting by Faisal Aziz)
By Kamran Haider | Thu Jul 5, 2007 10:18PM EDT
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A cleric holed up in a Pakistani mosque said on Friday he and hundreds of followers were willing to surrender, but set conditions authorities rejected after three days of violence in which 19 people have died.
The government said the attempt to attach demands, including safe passage, was unacceptable and insisted cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi release women and children being held as human shields.
Violence erupted outside the Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid, in the capital on Tuesday after months of rising tension between the authorities and the mosque's Taliban-supporting clerics and their thousands of religious student followers.
Hundreds of troops and police are surrounding the fortified mosque in a leafy central Islamabad neighborhood.
There was intermittent gunfire and explosions on Thursday and early on Friday. Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said troops had blasted some holes in the compound walls.
The government has ordered the students to surrender and about 1,200 of them have come out. But resistance from those inside, who authorities say include militants from banned groups armed with rifles and grenades, was stiff.
Ghazi, speaking in telephone interviews from the mosque, said he wanted safe passage for himself and his followers.
"There are no militants from banned organizations among the students," Ghazi told Aaj Television.
He later told Geo TV students coming out could be screened so authorities could see none was a militant: "They should announce a ceasefire and come here and discuss a screening process."
He also asked that he and his sick mother be allowed to live in the mosque "until I make some alternative arrangements".
But the government rejected any conditions and said the only option was surrender.
"If he is sincere in his offer then first of all he should immediately release the women, girls and innocent children who are being kept there forcefully," Cheema told a news conference.
"They should leave their weapons in the mosque and come out."
Many Pakistanis welcomed the action against the clerics and their hardline students, whose behavior had been reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Moderate politicians and the media have for months urged President Pervez Musharraf to tackle them, but he cited concern about bloodshed and authorities tried to appease them.
Musharraf, who has been under pressure from Western allies to do more to tackle militancy, faces an election this year and while a peaceful and successful end to the stand-off would win him credit, heavy casualties in an assault would be damaging.
"HONOURABLE EXIT"
Ghazi's elder brother and chief cleric of the mosque, Abdul Aziz, was captured on Wednesday trying to escape in a woman's all-enveloping burqa.
Authorities don't know how many people are in the mosque but Aziz, in an interview broadcast on Thursday, said 850 students were there, 600 of them female. He urged them to give up.
The government said many of those inside were being kept against their will as human shields.
The clerics and their followers, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, launched an increasingly provocative campaign from January to press various demands, including action against vice. They threatened suicide attacks if suppressed.
But it was last month's kidnapping of six women and a man from China -- Pakistan's most steadfast ally -- whom the students said were involved in prostitution, that was a key factor forcing government action.
The Lal Masjid has been a centre of radical Islam for years but its supporters' increasing assertiveness is seen as part of a phenomenon known as "Talibanization" -- the spread of militant influence from remote Afghan border regions to central areas.
A friend of Ghazi's, former security official and Islamist Khalid Khuwaja, said the cleric wanted a just way out: "He simply wants an honorable exit, otherwise he'd prefer death."
(Additional reporting by Faisal Aziz)
NYT : Pakistan’s Battles Against Islamic Militants Reach the Capital
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Pakistan’s Battles Against Islamic Militants Reach the Capital
By JANE PERLEZ and CARLOTTA GALL | July 4, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 3 — A months-long standoff between the Pakistani government and Islamic militants holed up in a mosque in the heart of the capital erupted in violence on Tuesday. The fierce clashes between security forces and students left at least nine people dead and scores wounded.
The fighting exposed the normally placid capital to the wider divisions between moderates and militants in Pakistan, shattering the notion that the seat of government was immune from extremism.
The crackle of gunfire and the arc of tear gas could be heard and seen from blocks away soon after the confrontation began in the afternoon around Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, a prominent place of worship in the capital. Students attacked a nearby government building where security forces had taken up positions, setting fires and sending black smoke billowing into the sky.
Each side blamed the other for causing the violence. Among those killed were a Pakistani Army ranger and two students from a pair of religious schools, or madrasas, that accommodate male and burka-clad female students in separate buildings.
The leader of the madrasa for young men, Abdur Rashid Ghazi, has used the students over the last six months to challenge the leadership of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Mr. Ghazi, who apparently has the backing of a number of militant groups, insists that Pakistan follow Islamic law and keep good relations with the Taliban, whose influence the United States has consistently asked General Musharraf to confront more aggressively.
Since January, the students have staged a sit-in at a children’s library. In March, they seized three Pakistani women accused of running a brothel. Last month, the male students barricaded three police officers inside the school. Ten days ago, the students kidnapped six masseuses from mainland China working in Islamabad.
At each provocation, moderate Pakistanis have expressed frustration with General Musharraf’s reluctance to take on the madrasa leaders. His caution, they say, has only encouraged further challenges and demonstrated the folly of not drawing a harder line with the extremists.
Western diplomats, too, say they have been surprised at the unwillingness of the Musharraf government to confront the school, which says it has thousands of students enrolled, many from poor families.
General Musharraf was asked directly why he had not yet acted when he addressed a media workshop in Islamabad last week. He replied that the government might storm the building, but added that he would not want the news media to show the dead that could result from an attack, apparently fearing the popular reaction and response by militants.
The clashes Tuesday, bloody as they were, did not appear to be definitive, since the leaders of the madrasa and many students remained in the buildings through nightfall.
Government officials blamed clerics and armed students for starting the battle. They said the students, including some young women, rushed toward one of the police positions set up near the complex over the last few days. The police then apparently fired, according to witnesses.
Soon after the shooting began, the loudspeakers at the mosque announced that the mosque had been attacked and that now was the time for bravery.
On the street alongside the two madrasas, hundreds of students chanted jihad slogans; some threw stones at a government school where security forces had taken positions. On the roof of the madrasa for young women, Jamia Hafsa, students threw buckets of water on tear gas shells. Inside, many of the students clutched long sticks and some recited verses from the Koran.
By late afternoon, many of the female students had left the school building from a back door, often walking out in twos and threes.
One mother, Saifa Bibi, who said she had picked up her daughter, Kusar Shaheen, 15, at the school, described the tear gas there as so strong that she kept her veil wet in order to breathe.
One young student, when asked whether she was afraid of the police, replied: “I’m not afraid of the police, I’m afraid of God.” After evening prayers, one man rushed out of the back entrance waving his arms in the air, shouting “jihad, jihad.”
The minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan, said that the government’s security forces, including the police and Army Rangers — paramilitaries often used to quell urban violence in Pakistan — had been deployed around the mosque complex over the last four or five days to prevent students from conducting further vigilante raids and abductions.
Mr. Khan insisted there had been no plan to raid the mosque complex, but said the situation had changed once those inside seized weapons from the police and shot and killed a ranger and wounded five others.
“The government wants those people who shot the ranger and injured people and those who are carrying heavy weapons,” he said in a telephone interview. “We want them to surrender those people and give them up to the police. If they don’t do that, then they leave us no option.”
He described the casualties as regrettable but said the students were responsible for much of the firing. He said the government had demanded that Mr. Ghazi end the occupation of the children’s library, hand over the students responsible for the shootings and surrender all weapons inside the schools. Those demands, he said, were not open to negotiation.
As the shooting continued Tuesday afternoon, the emergency staff at two city hospitals scrambled to treat the wounded. Dr. Fazle Hadi, director of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Science, said 25 wounded people were being treated there. A passer-by and a student of the madrasa had died, Dr. Hadi said. More than 60 female students were being treated for exposure to tear gas, he said.
At the Federal Government Services Hospital, Dr. S. M. A. Pasha, the surgeon in charge of the emergency unit, said 12 people were treated for gunshot wounds.
Among those wounded were a television journalist, Absar Alam, who was hit in the head by a rock that apparently was thrown at him. He described the scene as a “war in the heart of the capital.”
“There was no one in control,” he said from his hospital bed, his head bandaged, his shirt soaked in blood. “It doesn’t look like a capital city of the country.”
Another journalist, Israr Ahmed, 45, a CNBC Pakistan cameraman was critically wounded when gunfire from government forces sprayed photographers and cameramen, a photographer at the scene said.
The Army ranger, 45, a male student from the madrasa, 22, and a laborer were killed by the gunfire, Dr. Pasha said.
The minister of information, Muhammad Ali Durrani, said nine people were killed.
Salman Masood contributed reporting.
By JANE PERLEZ and CARLOTTA GALL | July 4, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 3 — A months-long standoff between the Pakistani government and Islamic militants holed up in a mosque in the heart of the capital erupted in violence on Tuesday. The fierce clashes between security forces and students left at least nine people dead and scores wounded.
The fighting exposed the normally placid capital to the wider divisions between moderates and militants in Pakistan, shattering the notion that the seat of government was immune from extremism.
The crackle of gunfire and the arc of tear gas could be heard and seen from blocks away soon after the confrontation began in the afternoon around Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, a prominent place of worship in the capital. Students attacked a nearby government building where security forces had taken up positions, setting fires and sending black smoke billowing into the sky.
Each side blamed the other for causing the violence. Among those killed were a Pakistani Army ranger and two students from a pair of religious schools, or madrasas, that accommodate male and burka-clad female students in separate buildings.
The leader of the madrasa for young men, Abdur Rashid Ghazi, has used the students over the last six months to challenge the leadership of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Mr. Ghazi, who apparently has the backing of a number of militant groups, insists that Pakistan follow Islamic law and keep good relations with the Taliban, whose influence the United States has consistently asked General Musharraf to confront more aggressively.
Since January, the students have staged a sit-in at a children’s library. In March, they seized three Pakistani women accused of running a brothel. Last month, the male students barricaded three police officers inside the school. Ten days ago, the students kidnapped six masseuses from mainland China working in Islamabad.
At each provocation, moderate Pakistanis have expressed frustration with General Musharraf’s reluctance to take on the madrasa leaders. His caution, they say, has only encouraged further challenges and demonstrated the folly of not drawing a harder line with the extremists.
Western diplomats, too, say they have been surprised at the unwillingness of the Musharraf government to confront the school, which says it has thousands of students enrolled, many from poor families.
General Musharraf was asked directly why he had not yet acted when he addressed a media workshop in Islamabad last week. He replied that the government might storm the building, but added that he would not want the news media to show the dead that could result from an attack, apparently fearing the popular reaction and response by militants.
The clashes Tuesday, bloody as they were, did not appear to be definitive, since the leaders of the madrasa and many students remained in the buildings through nightfall.
Government officials blamed clerics and armed students for starting the battle. They said the students, including some young women, rushed toward one of the police positions set up near the complex over the last few days. The police then apparently fired, according to witnesses.
Soon after the shooting began, the loudspeakers at the mosque announced that the mosque had been attacked and that now was the time for bravery.
On the street alongside the two madrasas, hundreds of students chanted jihad slogans; some threw stones at a government school where security forces had taken positions. On the roof of the madrasa for young women, Jamia Hafsa, students threw buckets of water on tear gas shells. Inside, many of the students clutched long sticks and some recited verses from the Koran.
By late afternoon, many of the female students had left the school building from a back door, often walking out in twos and threes.
One mother, Saifa Bibi, who said she had picked up her daughter, Kusar Shaheen, 15, at the school, described the tear gas there as so strong that she kept her veil wet in order to breathe.
One young student, when asked whether she was afraid of the police, replied: “I’m not afraid of the police, I’m afraid of God.” After evening prayers, one man rushed out of the back entrance waving his arms in the air, shouting “jihad, jihad.”
The minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan, said that the government’s security forces, including the police and Army Rangers — paramilitaries often used to quell urban violence in Pakistan — had been deployed around the mosque complex over the last four or five days to prevent students from conducting further vigilante raids and abductions.
Mr. Khan insisted there had been no plan to raid the mosque complex, but said the situation had changed once those inside seized weapons from the police and shot and killed a ranger and wounded five others.
“The government wants those people who shot the ranger and injured people and those who are carrying heavy weapons,” he said in a telephone interview. “We want them to surrender those people and give them up to the police. If they don’t do that, then they leave us no option.”
He described the casualties as regrettable but said the students were responsible for much of the firing. He said the government had demanded that Mr. Ghazi end the occupation of the children’s library, hand over the students responsible for the shootings and surrender all weapons inside the schools. Those demands, he said, were not open to negotiation.
As the shooting continued Tuesday afternoon, the emergency staff at two city hospitals scrambled to treat the wounded. Dr. Fazle Hadi, director of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Science, said 25 wounded people were being treated there. A passer-by and a student of the madrasa had died, Dr. Hadi said. More than 60 female students were being treated for exposure to tear gas, he said.
At the Federal Government Services Hospital, Dr. S. M. A. Pasha, the surgeon in charge of the emergency unit, said 12 people were treated for gunshot wounds.
Among those wounded were a television journalist, Absar Alam, who was hit in the head by a rock that apparently was thrown at him. He described the scene as a “war in the heart of the capital.”
“There was no one in control,” he said from his hospital bed, his head bandaged, his shirt soaked in blood. “It doesn’t look like a capital city of the country.”
Another journalist, Israr Ahmed, 45, a CNBC Pakistan cameraman was critically wounded when gunfire from government forces sprayed photographers and cameramen, a photographer at the scene said.
The Army ranger, 45, a male student from the madrasa, 22, and a laborer were killed by the gunfire, Dr. Pasha said.
The minister of information, Muhammad Ali Durrani, said nine people were killed.
Salman Masood contributed reporting.
Filed under
Carlotta Gall,
Jane Perlez,
Pakistan,
Salman Masood,
science,
Taliban
by Winter Patriot
on Wednesday, July 04, 2007
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Reuters : Iraq takes step closer to landmark oil law
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Iraq takes step closer to landmark oil law
By Alister Bull and Dean Yates | July 3, 2007
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's cabinet approved changes to a draft hydrocarbon law on Tuesday and sent it to parliament for immediate debate, taking a big step towards meeting a key political target set by the United States.
In fresh violence, a car bomb killed 21 people and wounded 36 near an outdoor market in Baghdad's Shi'ite neighborhood of Shaab, police said. They said a parked car exploded just before nightfall, when residents were shopping.
Washington has pushed Iraq for months to speed up passage of the law and other pieces of legislation, which are seen as vital to curbing sectarian violence and healing deep divisions between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.
The law is intended to ensure a fair distribution of the world's third largest oil reserves, which are located mainly in the Shi'ite south and the Kurdish north of the country.
Sunni Arabs, the backbone of the insurgency, live mainly in central provinces that have little proven oil wealth and have long feared they would miss out on any windfall should violence ease enough to revive the struggling industry.
"The law was approved unanimously (by the cabinet) ... it was referred to the parliament which will discuss it tomorrow," Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a news conference, calling it the "most important" law in Iraq.
OIL RESERVES
The draft oil law was originally approved by the cabinet in February but faced opposition from the government in autonomous Kurdistan, which felt it was getting a raw deal.
Besides deciding who controls the country's oil reserves and setting up a new oil firm to oversee the industry, the law aims to provide a legal framework for attracting foreign investment.
Other major laws also need to be passed that set provincial elections by the end of the year and that allow some members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to return to government and the military. Maliki said these would be discussed next week.
But parliament is running out of time to debate and approve the series of laws. It has already extended its current session to the end of July, before legislators take a month off.
That leaves little time before the U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have to present a report to Washington in the middle of September on Iraq's security and political progress.
The report is being viewed as a political watershed, with U.S. President George W. Bush under mounting pressure to show his Iraq strategy is working and with campaigning in the 2008 U.S. presidential race already well under way.
Bush spoke separately by telephone to Iraq's top leaders on Tuesday including Maliki, the country's president and the two vice presidents, the White House said.
Spokesman Tony Snow said Bush encouraged all of them to move "not only aggressively forward" on political reforms but to "work well with one another".
The main Sunni bloc is boycotting both cabinet and parliament meetings in protest at what it says is unfair treatment against its members, although the move also reflects the deep divisions between Iraq's politicians.
(Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny, Ahmed Rasheed, Mussab Al-Khairalla and Waleed Ibrahim)
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
By Alister Bull and Dean Yates | July 3, 2007
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's cabinet approved changes to a draft hydrocarbon law on Tuesday and sent it to parliament for immediate debate, taking a big step towards meeting a key political target set by the United States.
In fresh violence, a car bomb killed 21 people and wounded 36 near an outdoor market in Baghdad's Shi'ite neighborhood of Shaab, police said. They said a parked car exploded just before nightfall, when residents were shopping.
Washington has pushed Iraq for months to speed up passage of the law and other pieces of legislation, which are seen as vital to curbing sectarian violence and healing deep divisions between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.
The law is intended to ensure a fair distribution of the world's third largest oil reserves, which are located mainly in the Shi'ite south and the Kurdish north of the country.
Sunni Arabs, the backbone of the insurgency, live mainly in central provinces that have little proven oil wealth and have long feared they would miss out on any windfall should violence ease enough to revive the struggling industry.
"The law was approved unanimously (by the cabinet) ... it was referred to the parliament which will discuss it tomorrow," Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a news conference, calling it the "most important" law in Iraq.
OIL RESERVES
The draft oil law was originally approved by the cabinet in February but faced opposition from the government in autonomous Kurdistan, which felt it was getting a raw deal.
Besides deciding who controls the country's oil reserves and setting up a new oil firm to oversee the industry, the law aims to provide a legal framework for attracting foreign investment.
Other major laws also need to be passed that set provincial elections by the end of the year and that allow some members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to return to government and the military. Maliki said these would be discussed next week.
But parliament is running out of time to debate and approve the series of laws. It has already extended its current session to the end of July, before legislators take a month off.
That leaves little time before the U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have to present a report to Washington in the middle of September on Iraq's security and political progress.
The report is being viewed as a political watershed, with U.S. President George W. Bush under mounting pressure to show his Iraq strategy is working and with campaigning in the 2008 U.S. presidential race already well under way.
Bush spoke separately by telephone to Iraq's top leaders on Tuesday including Maliki, the country's president and the two vice presidents, the White House said.
Spokesman Tony Snow said Bush encouraged all of them to move "not only aggressively forward" on political reforms but to "work well with one another".
The main Sunni bloc is boycotting both cabinet and parliament meetings in protest at what it says is unfair treatment against its members, although the move also reflects the deep divisions between Iraq's politicians.
(Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny, Ahmed Rasheed, Mussab Al-Khairalla and Waleed Ibrahim)
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
NYT : As Pakistan’s Chief Looks Ahead, Army Holds the Cards
Thursday, June 28, 2007
As Pakistan’s Chief Looks Ahead, Army Holds the Cards
Memo From Islamabad
By CARLOTTA GALL | June 28, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Speculation has been rife in political circles recently that Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, may not survive his wrangle with the chief justice and hold on to power, but a great silence emanates from the one place that may count the most: the barracks and the mess halls of the armed forces, the other great part of Pakistan’s ruling equation.
What the army thinks about the political logjam, and what it decides to do in the event of continuing stalemate, instability or violence, will be the defining factor in General Musharraf’s future, most commentators agree.
If and when the army feels it is being damaged by its association with General Musharraf, and his insistence on retaining the dual posts of president and chief of army staff, they will act to safeguard the reputation of the army, they say.
Historians and columnists have been outlining the precedents, recalling how Pakistan’s three previous military rulers exited from power. None of the departures came in happy circumstances, and none bode well for General Musharraf, who took power in a bloodless coup in 1999.
The longest ruling general, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who seized power in 1977, died in 1988 in a plane crash, the cause of which still remains a mystery.
The strongest possibility is that the plane was brought down using a bomb. But according to one theory, the plane crashed after the crew was disabled by knockout gas hidden inside crates of mangoes — a gift that was put on board the presidential plane at the last minute. This being the mango season, the old story has gained a lot of currency lately. “He either goes the mango-crate way or he goes gracefully,” one military officer said.
Pakistan’s other two military dictators in its turbulent 60 years since independence were forced out by fellow officers. Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, who ruled from 1958 to 1969, was isolated, unpopular and sick by the end, and after months of popular unrest was replaced by another military man, Gen. Yahya Khan.
General Yahya Khan promised a return to democracy and held probably the fairest elections Pakistan has ever seen. But after war and the breakup of Pakistan in 1971, when Bangladesh gained independence, his fellow officers forced him to resign and hand over rule of what remained of Pakistan to the civilian political leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
General Musharraf, the fourth military ruler of Pakistan, has already survived several attempts on his life, and with suicide bombing on the rise, and Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the hills, the possibility of assassination remains — even if he should step down.
But the general is showing no readiness to give up either of his posts, president or chief of army staff, though the terms for both jobs expire toward the end of the year. In a recent interview, he said that after a life in the army, his uniform was like a second skin to him.
But if his stubbornness is met with more demonstrations, challenges in the courts and possibly civil unrest, the army command will grow increasingly concerned.
Well aware of the importance of backing within the army, General Musharraf called a meeting of his corps commanders and principal military staff recently, apparently to ensure their support. The military public relations service issued an unusually long news release in that vein.
“The Corps Commanders and Principal Staff Officers of the Pakistan Army affirmed to stand committed for the security of their country under the leadership and guidance of the President and the COAS,” it read, referring to the chief of army staff.
Issuing such a statement is unusual and brings to mind the vote of confidence that often presages the end for a cabinet officer or, in sports, a manager or coach. In effect, several former members of the army said, such assurances only underscore the general’s insecurity.
The military officer said he had not seen a commander calling for such a statement of support in more than 30 years in the army. “The statement was a mistake,” he said.
“The army is not a political party,” he said. “People do not have to swear support for their leader.” An army officer takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, not his commander, he added.
A veteran opposition politician, Enver Baig, was more definitive. “The military backing he had, has definitely eroded,” he said, speaking of General Musharraf. The discontent with General Musharraf is seeping into the lower ranks as well. “The midlevel officers are becoming restless,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, a military analyst and author of a recent book on the military’s enormous economic clout that has angered the military leadership.
In the North-West Frontier Province there is growing frustration among military and intelligence officials over the rising lawlessness of Taliban militants, and the president’s apparent lack of concern and direction, senior officials say.
The National Security Council, which considered the problem in early June, promised more police officers and resources. Meanwhile, military officers no longer feel comfortable going around Peshawar in uniform, said one former officer from the province.
Even in the capital, army officers say they can feel the changing mood. The military officer described driving in Islamabad and seeing someone holding up a placard showing a big army boot stamping on a map of Pakistan. “That is a very poor reflection,” he said. “It is hatred that is building in the civilian level against the army.”
Faced with such discontent, the mood in the military is not for another general to take over, but for the country to restore civilian rule, he and several former members of the military said.
But who will tell the general to go? After nearly eight years in power, General Musharraf has personally picked all the top military and intelligence leaders. He will remain secure as long as he retains the support of four or five of the nine corps commanders, Ms. Siddiqa said.
Military officers, especially senior ones coming up for promotion or retirement and eager to keep the privileges they have earned, will not speak out of line to the chief of army staff, the officer said.
The officer said he could sense growing dissatisfaction among fellow officers, but discipline was such that no one was voicing it. “They don’t say it,” he said. “From their eyes you can see it.”
Asked if the corps commanders might tell the general he had to go, he answered, “We may be coming to that stage.”
Memo From Islamabad
By CARLOTTA GALL | June 28, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Speculation has been rife in political circles recently that Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, may not survive his wrangle with the chief justice and hold on to power, but a great silence emanates from the one place that may count the most: the barracks and the mess halls of the armed forces, the other great part of Pakistan’s ruling equation.
What the army thinks about the political logjam, and what it decides to do in the event of continuing stalemate, instability or violence, will be the defining factor in General Musharraf’s future, most commentators agree.
If and when the army feels it is being damaged by its association with General Musharraf, and his insistence on retaining the dual posts of president and chief of army staff, they will act to safeguard the reputation of the army, they say.
Historians and columnists have been outlining the precedents, recalling how Pakistan’s three previous military rulers exited from power. None of the departures came in happy circumstances, and none bode well for General Musharraf, who took power in a bloodless coup in 1999.
The longest ruling general, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who seized power in 1977, died in 1988 in a plane crash, the cause of which still remains a mystery.
The strongest possibility is that the plane was brought down using a bomb. But according to one theory, the plane crashed after the crew was disabled by knockout gas hidden inside crates of mangoes — a gift that was put on board the presidential plane at the last minute. This being the mango season, the old story has gained a lot of currency lately. “He either goes the mango-crate way or he goes gracefully,” one military officer said.
Pakistan’s other two military dictators in its turbulent 60 years since independence were forced out by fellow officers. Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, who ruled from 1958 to 1969, was isolated, unpopular and sick by the end, and after months of popular unrest was replaced by another military man, Gen. Yahya Khan.
General Yahya Khan promised a return to democracy and held probably the fairest elections Pakistan has ever seen. But after war and the breakup of Pakistan in 1971, when Bangladesh gained independence, his fellow officers forced him to resign and hand over rule of what remained of Pakistan to the civilian political leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
General Musharraf, the fourth military ruler of Pakistan, has already survived several attempts on his life, and with suicide bombing on the rise, and Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the hills, the possibility of assassination remains — even if he should step down.
But the general is showing no readiness to give up either of his posts, president or chief of army staff, though the terms for both jobs expire toward the end of the year. In a recent interview, he said that after a life in the army, his uniform was like a second skin to him.
But if his stubbornness is met with more demonstrations, challenges in the courts and possibly civil unrest, the army command will grow increasingly concerned.
Well aware of the importance of backing within the army, General Musharraf called a meeting of his corps commanders and principal military staff recently, apparently to ensure their support. The military public relations service issued an unusually long news release in that vein.
“The Corps Commanders and Principal Staff Officers of the Pakistan Army affirmed to stand committed for the security of their country under the leadership and guidance of the President and the COAS,” it read, referring to the chief of army staff.
Issuing such a statement is unusual and brings to mind the vote of confidence that often presages the end for a cabinet officer or, in sports, a manager or coach. In effect, several former members of the army said, such assurances only underscore the general’s insecurity.
The military officer said he had not seen a commander calling for such a statement of support in more than 30 years in the army. “The statement was a mistake,” he said.
“The army is not a political party,” he said. “People do not have to swear support for their leader.” An army officer takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, not his commander, he added.
A veteran opposition politician, Enver Baig, was more definitive. “The military backing he had, has definitely eroded,” he said, speaking of General Musharraf. The discontent with General Musharraf is seeping into the lower ranks as well. “The midlevel officers are becoming restless,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, a military analyst and author of a recent book on the military’s enormous economic clout that has angered the military leadership.
In the North-West Frontier Province there is growing frustration among military and intelligence officials over the rising lawlessness of Taliban militants, and the president’s apparent lack of concern and direction, senior officials say.
The National Security Council, which considered the problem in early June, promised more police officers and resources. Meanwhile, military officers no longer feel comfortable going around Peshawar in uniform, said one former officer from the province.
Even in the capital, army officers say they can feel the changing mood. The military officer described driving in Islamabad and seeing someone holding up a placard showing a big army boot stamping on a map of Pakistan. “That is a very poor reflection,” he said. “It is hatred that is building in the civilian level against the army.”
Faced with such discontent, the mood in the military is not for another general to take over, but for the country to restore civilian rule, he and several former members of the military said.
But who will tell the general to go? After nearly eight years in power, General Musharraf has personally picked all the top military and intelligence leaders. He will remain secure as long as he retains the support of four or five of the nine corps commanders, Ms. Siddiqa said.
Military officers, especially senior ones coming up for promotion or retirement and eager to keep the privileges they have earned, will not speak out of line to the chief of army staff, the officer said.
The officer said he could sense growing dissatisfaction among fellow officers, but discipline was such that no one was voicing it. “They don’t say it,” he said. “From their eyes you can see it.”
Asked if the corps commanders might tell the general he had to go, he answered, “We may be coming to that stage.”
Filed under
Carlotta Gall,
Pakistan,
suicide,
Taliban
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, June 28, 2007
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