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01/18/2006:

"“War on Terror” Continues to Create Terrorists"

The CIA’s recent botched attempt to kill al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman Zawahiri, in Pakistan illustrates why the Bush administration’s overly aggressive “war on terror” actually motivates terrorists to attack the United States. Certainly, capturing or killing the brains behind al Qaeda is an important goal. Unfortunately, in the U.S. method of warfare—which unduly emphasizes attrition, heavy firepower and sophisticated weaponry, even against guerrillas and terrorists—the technology of killing has outstripped the quality of human intelligence needed to hit the correct targets. The CIA’s unmanned Predator drone fired missiles that killed many Pakistani civilians, including women and children, but apparently not Zawahiri.

Making things even worse, the killing of women and children continues to spark public outrage all across Pakistan, leading to mass protests in all of Pakistan’s major cities and the trashing and burning of a U.S.-supported aid organization. Such public ire will make it even less likely that the United States will receive accurate future intelligence about where Zawahiri and his boss, Osama bin Laden, are hiding, even though the prices on their heads are substantial.

And to shore up the popularity of his war on terror at home, which has been dragged down by an incongruous, unnecessary, now unpopular war in Iraq, President Bush has combined these reckless military actions with cowboy rhetoric, which only further stoke the flames of anti-U.S. hatred among radical Islamists. Bringing back the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric used during the Cold War against the “godless Communists,” the administration is now implying that those with “too much god of an alien kind” are trying to build a worldwide empire that could again threaten the United States. The president has cast the war on Islamic terrorism as a contest between the men in white hats who advocate freedom and those with black headgear who want to create “a totalitarian Islamic empire reaching from Spain to Indonesia.”

Yet bringing back the caliphate—the political and spiritual leader of Sunni Islam who ruled a united Islamic world—is a long-term objective of even moderate Muslims. As a result, to the Muslim world, the president’s war on terror looks much like a war on Islam that threatens to make the clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy.
informationclearinghouse.info

L.A. Times: The Pakistan predicament
A quarter of a century ago, the U.S. funded and armed Islamic extremists in Pakistan to cross the border and fight the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan; when the Soviets left, the U.S. lost interest in the region. Pakistan supported the Taliban after it took over Afghanistan and gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda. After 9/11, Musharraf claimed to have reversed course and threw in his lot with the U.S.

Washington has rewarded Pakistan with a five-year, $3-billion aid package. Musharraf promised to close the madrasas — fundamentalist schools that foment anti-Americanism — but progress has been slow. And the problem doesn't just lie with the private madrasas. The nation's public schools use textbooks promoting violent battles against infidels. The province where Friday's apparently botched attempt to kill Zawahiri occurred now has a pro-Taliban government, making it harder for Islamabad to search for Al Qaeda. But difficulty is not impossibility.

Iraq Interior Minister Okayed Torture: Ex-General
BAGHDAD, January 16, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Iraq's Interior Minister Bayan Jabr Solagh and senior officials at his ministry have condoned torture and abuses of detainees, a ministry's whistle-blower who was in charge of the special forces unit said in new statements.

Muntazar Al-Samarrai, who fled Iraq for Jordan last year, said an interior ministry squad has been set up at Solagh's orders, which intimidated Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, and arrested scores without court warrants, Reuters reported Sunday, January 15.

"The squad was receiving orders from Solagh directly and were interrogating people without court approval," Samarrai, a Sunni Arab with a long career in the military, told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel.

He noted that the random arrests and crackdowns were also carried out under the watchful eyes of the ministry's senior officials.