person:osama bin laden

  • Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking. Take a ride along the Punjabi American highway - Los Angeles Times
    https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-col1-sikh-truckers-20190627-htmlstory.html

    By Jaweed Kaleem, Jun 27, 2019 -
    It’s 7:20 p.m. when he rolls into Spicy Bite, one of the newest restaurants here in rural northwest New Mexico. Locals in Milan, a town of 3,321, have barely heard of it.

    https://www.trbimg.com/img-5d12f8d2/turbine/la-1561524431-z6kcx6gnzm-snap-image
    Punjabi-operated truck stops

    The building is small, single-story, built of corrugated metal sheets. There are seats for 20. The only advertising is spray-painted on concrete roadblocks in English and Punjabi. Next door is a diner and gas station; the county jail is across the road.

    Palwinder Singh orders creamy black lentils, chicken curry and roti, finishing it off with chai and cardamom rice pudding. After 13 hours on and off the road in his semi truck, he leans back in a booth as a Bollywood music video plays on TV.

    “This is like home,” says Pal, the name he uses on the road (said like “Paul”).

    There are 3.5 million truckers in the United States. California has 138,000, the second-most after Texas. Nearly half of those in California are immigrants, most from Mexico or Central America. But as drivers age toward retirement — the average American trucker is 55 — and a shortage grows, Sikh immigrants and their kids are increasingly taking up the job.

    Estimates of the number of Sikh truckers vary. In California alone, tens of thousands of truckers trace their heritage to India. The state is home to half of the Sikhs in the U.S. — members of a monotheistic faith with origins in 15th century India whose followers are best recognized by the uncut hair and turbans many men wear. At Sikh temples in Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Riverside, the majority of worshipers are truck drivers and their families.

    Over the last decade, Indian Americans have launched trucking schools, truck companies, truck washes, trucker temples and no-frills Indian restaurants modeled after truck stops back home, where Sikhs from the state of Punjab dominate the industry.

    “You used to see a guy with a turban and you would get excited,” says Pal, who is in his 15th year of trucking. “Today, you go to some stops and can convince yourself you are in India.”

    Three interstates — the I-5, I-80 and I-10 — are dotted with Indian-American-owned businesses catering to truckers. They start to appear as you drive east from Los Angeles, Reno and Phoenix, and often have the words “Bombay,” “Indian” or “Punjabi” on their storefront signs. But many, with names like Jay Bros (in Overton, Neb.) and Antelope Truck Stop Pronghorn (in Burns, Wyo.) are anonymous dots on a map unless you’re one of the many Sikhs who have memorized them as a road map to America.

    The best-known are along Interstate 40, which stretches from Barstow to North Carolina. The road, much of it alongside Historic Route 66, forms the backbone of the Sikh trucking world.

    It’s a route that Pal, 38, knows well. Three times a month, he makes the seven-day round trip between his Fontana home and Indiana, where he drops off loads and picks up new ones. Over his career, he’s driven 2 million miles and transported items as varied as frozen chickens and paper plates. These days, he mostly hauls chocolate, rice and fruits and vegetables from California farms. Today, it’s 103 containers of mixed produce, with mangoes, bell peppers, watermelons, yellow onions and peeled garlic among them. All are bound for a Kroger warehouse outside Indianapolis.

    Across the street from Spicy Bite, dozens of arriving drivers form a temporary village of 18-wheelers in a vast parking lot by the interstate. Most are white. Nearly all are men. More are older than younger.

    But every now and then there are Sikhs like Pal, with long salt-and-pepper beards, colorful turbans and thick Indian accents. They head straight toward Spicy Bite.

    Lines can form out the door at the restaurant, which opened two years ago outside the Petro Stopping Center, a longtime mainstay for truckers headed east.

    Pal makes a point to stop by the restaurant — even just for a “hello” — when he sleeps next door. The Sikh greeting is “Sat sri akaal.” It means “God is truth.” In trucking, where turnover is high, business uncertain and risk of accidents ever present, each day can feel like a leap of faith and an opportunity to give thanks.

    Punjabi Americans first appeared on the U.S. trucking scene in the 1980s after an anti-Sikh massacre in India left thousands dead around New Delhi, prompting many Sikhs to flee. More recently, Sikhs have migrated to Central America and applied for asylum at the Mexico border, citing persecution for their religion in India; some have also become truckers. Estimates of the overall U.S. Sikh population vary, placing the community’s size between 200,000 and 500,000.

    In recent years, corporations have pleaded for new truckers. Walmart kicked up salaries to attract drivers. Last year, the government announced a pilot program to lower the age for driving trucks from 21 to 18 for those with truck-driving training in the military. According to the American Trucking Assn., the trucker shortage could reach 100,000 within years.

    “Punjabis are filling the gap,” says Raman Dhillon, a former driver who last year founded the North American Punjabi Trucking Assn. The Fresno-based group advises drivers on regulations, offers insurance and tire discounts, and runs a magazine: Punjabi Trucking.

    Like trucking itself, where the threat of automation and the long hours away from home have made it hard to recruit drivers, the Punjabi trucking life isn’t always an easy sell. Three years ago, a group of Sikh truckers in California won a settlement from a national shipping company after saying it discriminated against their faith. The drivers, who followed Sikh traditions by wrapping their uncut hair in turbans, said bosses asked them to remove the turbans before providing hair and urine samples for pre-employment drug tests despite being told of the religious observance. The same year, police charged a man with vandalizing a semi truck at a Sikh temple in Buena Park. He’d scribbled the word “ISIS.”

    Still, Hindi- and Punjabi-language newspapers in the Eastern U.S. regularly run ads promising better wages, a more relaxed lifestyle and warm weather as a trucker out West. Talk to any group of Sikh drivers and you’ll find former cabbies, liquor store workers or convenience store cashiers who made the switch.

    How a rural Oklahoma truck stop became a destination for Sikh Punjabis crossing America »

    “Thirty years ago, it was hard to get into trucking because there were so few people like us in the business who could help you,” says Rashpal Dhindsa, a former trucker who runs Fontana-based Dhindsa Group of Companies, one of the oldest Sikh-owned U.S. trucking companies. When Pal first started, Dhindsa — now a close friend but then an acquaintance — gave him a $1,000 loan to cover training classes.

    It’s 6:36 a.m. the next day when the Petro Stopping Center switches from quiet darkness to rumbling engines. Pal flips on the headlights of his truck, a silver ’16 Volvo with a 500-horsepower engine. Inside the rig, he heats aloo gobi — spiced potatoes and cauliflower — that his wife prepared back home. He checks the thermostat to make sure his trailer isn’t too warm. He takes out a book wrapped in a blue cotton cloth that’s tucked by his driver’s seat, sits on a bed-turned-couch and reads a prayer in Punjabi for safety on the journey: There is only one God. Truth is His name…. You always protect us.

    He pulls east onto the highway as the sun rises.

    Truckers either drive in pairs or solo like Pal. Either way, it’s a quiet, lonely world.

    Still, Pal sees more of America in a week than some people will in their lives. Rolling California hills, spiky desert rock formations, the snow-dusted evergreens of northern Arizona, the fuzzy cacti in New Mexico and, in Albuquerque, hot air balloons rising over an orange sky. There’s also the seemingly endless fast food and Tex-Mex of Amarillo and the 19-story cross of Groom, Texas. There’s the traffic in Missouri. After hours of solitude on the road, it excites him.

    Pal’s not strict on dogma or doctrine, and he’s more spiritual than religious. Trucking has shown him that people are more similar than different no matter where you go. The best of all religions, he says, tend to teach the same thing — kindness to others, accepting whatever comes your way and appreciation for what’s in front of you on the road.

    “When I’m driving,” Pal says, “I see God through his creation.”

    His favorite sights are the farms. You spot them in Central California while picking up pallets of potatoes and berries, or in Illinois and Indiana while driving through the corn and soybean fields.

    They remind him of home, the rural outskirts of Patiala, India.

    Nobody in his family drove trucks. Still, to Pal, he’s continuing tradition. His father farmed potatoes, cauliflower, rice and tomatoes. As a child, Pal would ride tractors for fun with Dad. Today, instead of growing food, Pal transports it.

    He wasn’t always a trucker. After immigrating in 2001 with his younger brother, he settled in Canoga Park and worked nights at 7-Eleven. After he was robbed at gunpoint, a friend suggested trucking. Better pay, flexible hours — and less dangerous.

    Three years later, he started driving a rig he didn’t own while getting paid per mile. Today, he has his own company, two trucks between himself and his brother — also a driver — and bids on shipments directly with suppliers. Nationally, the average pay for a trucker is just above $43,000. Pal makes more than twice that.

    He uses the money to pay for the house he shares with his wife, Harjeet Kaur, 4-year-old son, brother and sister-in-law, nieces and parents. Kaur threads eyebrows at a salon and video chats with him during lunch breaks. Every week before he leaves, she packs a duffel bag of his ironed clothes and stacked containers of food for the road.

    “I love it,” Pal says about driving. “But there are always two sides of the coin, head and tail. If you love it, then you have to sacrifice everything. I have to stay away from home. But the thing is, this job pays me good.”

    The truck is fully equipped. From the road, you can see only driver and passenger seats. But behind them is a sleeper cab with a bed that’s 6-foot-7 by 3-foot-2.

    Pal likes to connect the TV sitting atop a mini-fridge to his phone to stream music videos when he’s alone. His favorite songs are by Sharry Maan, an Indian singer who topped charts two years ago with “Transportiye.” It tells the story of a Sikh American trucker who longs for his wife while on the road. At night, the table folds down to become a bed. Pal is just missing a bathroom and his family.

    The life of a Sikh trucker is one of contrasts. On one hand, you see the diversity of America. You encounter new immigrants from around the world working the same job as people who have been truckers for decades. All transport the food, paper and plastic that make the country run. But you also see the relics of the past and the reminders of how you, as a Sikh in 2019, still don’t entirely fit in.

    It’s 9:40 a.m. on Saturday when Pal pulls into Bowlin’s Flying C Ranch rest center in Encino, N.M., an hour past Albuquerque and two from Texas. Here, you can buy a $19,999 stuffed buffalo, Baja jackets and fake Native American moccasins made in China in a vast tourist stop attached to a Dairy Queen and an Exxon. “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood plays in the background.

    It reminds Pal of the time he was paying his bill at another gas station. A man suddenly shouted at customers to “get out, he’s going to blow up this place!” “I will not fight you,” Pal calmly replied. The man left. Those kinds of instances are rare, but Pal always senses their danger. Some of the most violent attacks on Sikhs this century have been at the hands of people who mistook them for Muslims or Arabs, including the case of a turban-wearing Sikh man in Arizona who was shot dead by a gunman four days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

    For Pal, suspicious glances are more common. So are the truckers who think he’s new to the business or doesn’t speak English. None of it fazes him.

    “Everybody relates to us through Osama bin Laden because we look the same,” he says, driving across the plains toward the Texas Panhandle. “Or they think because my English sounds different that I am not smart. I know who I am.”

    Every day, he wears a silver bracelet that symbolizes a handcuff. “Remember, you are handcuffed to God. Remind yourself to not do bad things,” Pal says. It reminds him to be kind in the face of ignorance and hatred.

    At a Subway in Amarillo a few hours later, he grabs his go-to lunch when he’s taking a break from Indian food: a chicken sandwich on white bread with pepper jack, lettuce, tomato and onion. At home, the family is vegetarian. Pal relishes chances on the road to indulge in meat. He used to depend solely on his wife’s cooking. Today, he has other options. It’s a luxury to switch from homemade meals to Punjabi restaurants to fast food.

    Trucking has helped Pal find his faith. When he moved to the U.S., he used to shave, drink beer and not care much about religion. But as he got bored on the road, he started listening to religious sermons. Twelve years ago, he began to again grow his hair and quit alcohol; drinking it is against the faith’s traditions. Today, he schedules shipments around the temple calendar so he can attend Sikh celebrations with his family.

    “I don’t mind questions about my religion. But when people say to me, ‘Why do you not cut your hair?’ they are asking the wrong question,” Pal says. “The real question is, why do they cut their hair? God made us this way.”

    It’s 4:59 p.m. when he arrives in Sayre, Okla., at Truck Stop 40. A yellow Punjabi-language billboard advertises it as the I-40 starts to bend north in a rural region two hours from Oklahoma City.

    Among the oldest Sikh truck stops, it has a 24-hour vegetarian restaurant, convenience store, gas station and a housing trailer that functions as a temple — all spread over several acres.

    Pal has been coming here for more than decade, since it was a mechanic shop run by a Sikh former trucker who settled on the plot for its cheap land. When he has time, Pal lingers for a meal. But he’s in a rush to get to Joplin, Mo., for the night so he can make his drop-off the next day.

    He grabs a chai and heads to the temple. Resting on a small pillow upon the altar is the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. An audiotape plays prayers on a loop. A print of Guru Nanak, the faith’s founder, hangs on the wall.

    Pal prostrates and leaves a few dollar bills on the floor as a donation for upkeep. He prays for God to protect the temple, his family and himself on the 891 miles that remain until he hits the Indianapolis suburbs.

    “This feels like a long drive,” Pal says. “But it’s just a small part of the journey of life.”

    #USA #LKW #Transport #Immigration #Zuwanderung

  • Pour Nicolás Maduro, El Español annonce une « extraction à la Oussama Ben Laden », courte et propre organisée depuis Washington…

    El Español: La extracción de Maduro se estaría organizando desde Washington
    http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/politica/espanol-extraccion-maduro-estaria-organizando-desde-washington_282042


    Cortesía

    El Departamento de Estado de EE UU, la OEA y parte de la oposición en el exilio estarían negociando la salida del poder de Nicolás Maduro, reseñó El Español

    «La operación de extracción, si es necesaria, será como la de Osama bin Laden, limpia y corta. Son sólo tres o cuatro personas a las que hay que apresar», explicó una fuente directamente implicada en la negociación del oficialista. 

    De acuerdo con el documento que ya estaría finalizado pero aún sigue en discusión, plantea “la intervención de tropas extranjeras para sacar de sus posiciones de poder a los líderes chavistas”.

  • Sudan. A desperate Bashir | MadaMasr
    https://madamasr.com/en/2019/02/10/opinion/u/a-desperate-bashir

    It has been eight weeks since anti-government protests began in Sudan, and the government is running out of money. And so Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is not spending his time addressing rallies and strategizing with his inner circle on how to quell or placate the most serious protests in his government’s 30 year history. He is on a plane, criss-crossing the Middle East and North Africa, visiting heads of states in the hope that he can extract some support to bridge his regime for another few months, to fill petrol pumps with fuel and ATMs with cash. These financial boosts have, in the past, come in many forms, ranging from vanilla aid to development schemes, where land or strategic ports are sold off to foreign sovereign leaders and billionaires. During Osama bin Laden’s years in Sudan, it was rumored that, at one point, the government had sold him over half of the agricultural land under its control. When he was expelled from Sudan, his losses were estimated to have reached US$300 million.

  • The Real Reasons Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Wanted Khashoggi ‘Dead or Alive’
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reasons-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-wanted-khasho

    Christopher Dickey 10.21.18
    His death is key to understanding the political forces that helped turn the Middle East from a region of hope seven years ago to one of brutal repression and slaughter today.

    The mind plays strange tricks sometimes, especially after a tragedy. When I sat down to write this story about the Saudi regime’s homicidal obsession with the Muslim Brotherhood, the first person I thought I’d call was Jamal Khashoggi. For more than 20 years I phoned him or met with him, even smoked the occasional water pipe with him, as I looked for a better understanding of his country, its people, its leaders, and the Middle East. We often disagreed, but he almost always gave me fresh insights into the major figures of the region, starting with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, and the political trends, especially the explosion of hope that was called the Arab Spring in 2011. He would be just the man to talk to about the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, because he knew both sides of that bitter relationship so well.

    And then, of course, I realized that Jamal is dead, murdered precisely because he knew too much.

    Although the stories keep changing, there is now no doubt that 33-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the power in front of his decrepit father’s throne, had put out word to his minions that he wanted Khashoggi silenced, and the hit-team allegedly understood that as “wanted dead or alive.” But the [petro]buck stops with MBS, as bin Salman’s called. He’s responsible for a gruesome murder just as Henry II was responsible for the murder of Thomas Becket when he said, “Who will rid me of that meddlesome priest?” In this case, a meddlesome journalist.

    We now know that a few minor players will pay. Some of them might even be executed by Saudi headsmen (one already was reported killed in a car crash). But experience also tells us the spotlight of world attention will shift. Arms sales will go ahead. And the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi risks becoming just one more entry in the annals of intensifying, murderous repression of journalists who are branded the “enemy of the people” by Donald Trump and various two-bit tyrants around the world.

    There is more to Khashoggi’s murder than the question of press freedom, however. His death holds the key to understanding the political forces that have helped turn the Middle East from a region of hope seven years ago to one of brutal repression and ongoing slaughter today. Which brings us back to the question of the Saudis’ fear and hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, the regional rivalries of those who support it and those who oppose it, and the game of thrones in the House of Saud itself. Khashoggi was not central to any of those conflicts, but his career implicated him, fatally, in all of them.

    The Muslim Brotherhood is not a benign political organization, but neither is it Terror Incorporated. It was created in the 1920s and developed in the 1930s and ‘40s as an Islamic alternative to the secular fascist and communist ideologies that dominated revolutionary anti-colonial movements at the time. From those other political organizations the Brotherhood learned the values of a tight structure, party discipline, and secrecy, with a public face devoted to conventional political activity—when possible—and a clandestine branch that resorted to violence if that appeared useful.

    In the novel Sugar Street, Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz sketched a vivid portrait of a Brotherhood activist spouting the group’s political credo in Egypt during World War II. “Islam is a creed, a way of worship, a nation and a nationality, a religion, a state, a form of spirituality, a Holy Book, and a sword,” says the Brotherhood preacher. “Let us prepare for a prolonged struggle. Our mission is not to Egypt alone but to all Muslims worldwide. It will not be successful until Egypt and all other Islamic nations have accepted these Quranic principles in common. We shall not put our weapons away until the Quran has become a constitution for all Believers.”

    For several decades after World War II, the Brotherhood’s movement was eclipsed by Arab nationalism, which became the dominant political current in the region, and secular dictators moved to crush the organization. But the movement found support among the increasingly embattled monarchies of the Gulf, including and especially Saudi Arabia, where the rule of the king is based on his custodianship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam. At the height of the Cold War, monarchies saw the Brotherhood as a helpful antidote to the threat of communist-led or Soviet-allied movements and ideologies.

    By the 1980s, several of the region’s rulers were using the Brotherhood as a tool to weaken or destroy secular opposition. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat courted them, then moved against them, and paid with his life in 1981, murdered by members of a group originally tied to the Brotherhood. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, then spent three decades in power manipulating the Brotherhood as an opposition force, outlawing the party as such, but allowing its known members to run for office in the toothless legislature, where they formed a significant bloc and did a lot of talking.

    Jordan’s King Hussein played a similar game, but went further, giving clandestine support to members of the Brotherhood waging a covert war against Syrian tyrant Hafez al-Assad—a rebellion largely destroyed in 1982 when Assad’s brother killed tens of thousands of people in the Brotherhood stronghold of Hama.

    Even Israel got in on the action, initially giving Hamas, the Brotherhood branch among the Palestinians, tacit support as opposition to the left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization (although PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat once identified with the Brotherhood himself).

    The Saudi royals, too, thought the Brotherhood could be bought off and manipulated for their own ends. “Over the years the relationship between the Saudis and the Brotherhood ebbed and flowed,” says Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on extremism at George Washington University and one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. studying the Brotherhood’s history and activities.

    Over the decades factions of the Brotherhood, like communists and fascists before them, “adapted to individual environments,” says Vidino. In different countries it took on different characteristics. Thus Hamas, or its military wing, is easily labeled as terrorist by most definitions, while Ennahda in Tunisia, which used to be called terrorist by the ousted Ben Ali regime, has behaved as a responsible political party in a complex democratic environment. To the extent that Jamal Khashoggi identified with the Brotherhood, that was the current he espoused. But democracy, precisely, is what Mohammed bin Salman fears.

    Vidino traces the Saudis’ intense hostility toward the Brotherhood to the uprisings that swept through much of the Arab world in 2011. “The Saudis together with the Emiratis saw it as a threat to their own power,” says Vidino.

    Other regimes in the region thought they could use the Brotherhood to extend their influence. First among these was the powerful government in Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has such longstanding ties to the Islamist movement that some scholars refer to his elected government as “Brotherhood 2.0.” Also hoping to ride the Brotherhood wave was tiny, ultra-rich Qatar, whose leaders had used their vast natural gas wealth and their popular satellite television channel, Al Jazeera, to project themselves on the world stage and, they hoped, buy some protection from their aggressive Saudi neighbors. As one senior Qatari official told me back in 2013, “The future of Qatar is soft power.” After 2011, Jazeera’s Arabic channel frequently appeared to propagandize in the Brotherhood’s favor as much as, say, Fox News does in Trump’s.

    Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, and the birthplace of the Brotherhood, became a test case. Although Jamal Khashoggi often identified the organization with the idealistic hopes of the peaceful popular uprising that brought down the Mubarak dynasty, in fact the Egyptian Brotherhood had not taken part. Its leaders had a modus vivendi they understood with Mubarak, and it was unclear what the idealists in Tahrir Square, or the military tolerating them, might do.

    After the dictator fell and elections were called, however, the Brotherhood made its move, using its party organization and discipline, as well as its perennial slogan, “Islam is the solution,” to put its man Mohamed Morsi in the presidential palace and its people in complete control of the government. Or so it thought.

    In Syria, meanwhile, the Brotherhood believed it could and should lead the popular uprising against the Assad dynasty. That had been its role 30 years earlier, and it had paid mightily.

    For more than a year, it looked like the Brotherhood’s various branches might sweep to power across the unsettled Arab world, and the Obama administration, for want of serious alternatives, was inclined to go with the flow.

    But then the Saudis struck back.

    In the summer of 2013, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the commander of the Egyptian armed forces, led a military coup with substantial popular support against the conspicuously inept Brotherhood government, which had proved quickly that Islam was not really the “solution” for much of anything.

    Al-Sissi had once been the Egyptian military attaché in Riyadh, where he had many connections, and the Saudis quickly poured money into Egypt to shore up his new regime. At the same time, he declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and launched a campaign of ruthless repression. Within weeks of the coup, the Egyptian military attacked two camps of Brotherhood protesters and slaughtered hundreds.

    In Syria, the efforts to organize a credible political opposition to President Bashar al-Assad proved virtually impossible as the Qataris and Turks backed the Brotherhood while the Saudis continued their vehement opposition. But that does not mean that Riyadh supported moderate secular forces. Far from it. The Saudis still wanted to play a major role bringing down the Syrian regime allied to another arch enemy, the government of Iran. So the Saudis put their weight behind ultra-conservative Salafis, thinking they might be easier to control than the Muslim Brothers.

    Riyadh is “okay with quietist Salafism,” says Vidino. But the Salafis’ religious extremism quickly shaded over into the thinking of groups like the al Qaeda spinoff called the Nusra Front. Amid all the infighting, little progress was made against Assad, and there to exploit the chaos was the so-called Islamic State (which Assad partially supported in its early days).

    Then, in January 2015, at the height of all this regional turmoil, the aged and infirm Salman bin Abdelaziz ascended to the throne of Saudi Arabia. His son, Mohammed bin Salman, began taking into his own hands virtually all the reins of power, making bold decisions about reforming the Saudi economy, taking small measures to give the impression he might liberalize society—and moving to intimidate or otherwise neutralize anyone who might challenge his power.

    Saudi Arabia is a country named after one family, the al Saud, and while there is nothing remotely democratic about the government, within the family itself with its thousands of princes there traditionally has been an effort to find consensus. Every king up to now has been a son of the nation’s founder, Abdelaziz ibn Saud, and thus a brother or half brother of the other kings.

    When Salman took over, he finally named successors from the next generation. His nephew Mohammed bin Nayef, then 57 and well known for his role fighting terrorism, became crown prince. His son, Mohammed bin Salman, became deputy crown prince. But bin Nayef’s position between the king and his favorite son clearly was untenable. As one Saudi close to the royals put it: “Between the onion and the skin there is only the stink.”

    Bin Nayef was pushed out in 2017. The New York Times reported that during an end-of-Ramadan gathering at the palace he “was told he was going to meet the king and was led into another room, where royal court officials took away his phones and pressured him to give up his posts as crown prince and interior minister. … At first, he refused. But as the night wore on, the prince, a diabetic who suffers from the effects of a 2009 assassination attempt by a suicide bomber, grew tired.” Royal court officials meanwhile called around to other princes saying bin Nayef had a drug problem and was unfit to be king.

    Similar pressure was brought to bear on many of the richest and most powerful princes in the kingdom, locked up in the Ritz Carlton hotel in 2017, ostensibly as part of an extra-legal fight against corruption. They were forced to give allegiance to MBS at the same time they were giving up a lot of their money.

    That pattern of coerced allegiance is what the Saudis now admit they wanted from Jamal Khashoggi. He was no prince, but he had been closely associated in the past with the sons of the late King Faisal, particularly Turki al-Faisal, who was for many years the head of the Saudi intelligence apparatus and subsequently served as ambassador to the United Kingdom, then the United States.

    Although Turki always denied he had ambitions to be king, his name often was mentioned in the past as a contender. Thus far he seems to have weathered the rule of MBS, but given the record of the crown prince anyone close to the Al Faisal branch of the family, like Khashoggi, would be in a potentially perilous position.

    Barbara Bodine is a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, which has suffered mightily since MBS launched a brutal proxy war there against Iran. Both MBS and Trump have declared the regime in Tehran enemy number one in the region. But MBS botched the Yemen operation from the start. It was dubbed “Decisive Storm” when it began in 2015, and was supposed to last only a few weeks, but the war continues to this day. Starvation and disease have spread through Yemen, creating one of the world’s greatest humanitarian disasters. And for the moment, in one of those developments that makes the Middle East so rich in ironies, in Yemen the Saudis are allied with a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

    “What drives MBS is a ruthless effort toward total control domestically and regionally; he is Putin of the Desert,” says Bodine. “He has basically broken the back of the princelings, the religious establishment and the business elite, brought all ministries and agencies of power under his sole control (’I alone can fix it’), and jailed, killed or put under house arrest activists and any and all potential as well as real opposition (including his mother).”

    In 2017, MBS and his backers in the Emirates accused Qatar of supporting “terrorism,” issuing a set of demands that included shutting down Al Jazeera. The Saudis closed off the border and looked for other ways, including military options, to put pressure on the poor little rich country that plays so many angles it has managed to be supportive of the Brotherhood and cozy with Iran while hosting an enormous U.S. military base.

    “It was Qatar’s independent streak—not just who they supported but that they had a foreign policy divorced from the dictates of Riyadh,” says Bodine. “The basic problem is that both the Brotherhood and Iran offer competing Islam-based governing structures that challenge the Saudi model.”

    “Jamal’s basic sin,” says Bodine,“was he was a credible insider, not a fire-breathing radical. He wrote and spoke in English for an American audience via credible mainstream media and was well regarded and highly visible within the Washington chattering classes. He was accessible, moderate and operated within the West. He challenged not the core structure of the Kingdom but the legitimacy of the current rulers, especially MBS.”

    “I do think the game plan was to make him disappear and I suspect the end game was always to make him dead,” said Bodine in a long and thoughtful email. “If he was simply jailed within Saudi there would have been a drumbeat of pressure for his release. Dead—there is certainly a short term cost, whether more than anticipated or longer than anticipated we don’t know yet, but the world will move on. Jamal will become a footnote, a talking point perhaps, but not a crusade. The dismembered body? No funeral. Taking out Jamal also sends a powerful signal to any dissident that there is no place safe.”

    #Arabie_Saoudite #Turquie #politique #terrorisme #putsch

  • The Islamic fundamentalist Jeremy Corbyn should be ashamed of himself – if only he’d behaved more like Margaret Thatcher | The Independent
    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-islam-jewish-antisemitism-israel-labour-party-margaret-

    Un peu d’humour (anglais) ne fait jamais de mal en politique.

    It gets worse and worse for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. There’s a rumour that photos have emerged of a courgette grown on his allotment which is a similar shape to a rocket propeller used by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

    This comes on top of revelations that he has a beard, much like Palestinian terrorists, and his constituency is Islington, which starts with IS, or Islamic State. As a vegetarian he doesn’t eat pork, his friend John McDonnell’s initials are JM – that stands for Jihadist Muslim – and he travels on underground trains, that are under the ground, just like the basements in which Isis make their little films.

    The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and various others have also published a photo of him folding his thumb while holding up his fingers, in a way they describe as a salute to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. That settles it. If you don’t constantly check the shape of your thumb to make sure it’s not folded in a way similar to the way it’s folded by Muslim groups in Egypt, you might as well strap Semtex to your chest and get a bus to Syria.

    Thankfully there are some brave journalists who discovered the truth: that Corbyn laid a wreath in Tunisia at a memorial for civilians who were bombed, but also buried in that cemetery are the “Munich terrorists”. It turned out that the terrorists are not buried there at all, as they’re buried in Libya, but you can’t expect those journalists to get bogged down in insignificant details like that.

    We’ve all turned up for a funeral to be told we’re in the wrong country. “I’m afraid the service for your Uncle Derek is in Eltham Crematorium,” we’re told, “and you’ve come to Argentina.” It doesn’t make any difference to the overall story.

    Because there are Palestinian leaders who may have been terrorists in that cemetery. And when you attend a memorial service, you are clearly commemorating everyone in the cemetery, and the fact that you’ve probably never heard of most of them is no excuse.
    Corbyn takes on Margaret Thatcher over homelessness in Parliament in 1990

    If it’s possible to bring comfort to all those shocked by this outrage, it may be worth recalling that one of the first scandals about Corbyn after he became leader was that he wasn’t dressed smartly enough when he laid a wreath at the Cenotaph, which was an insult to our war dead. He’s just as scruffy in the pictures from Tunisia, so perhaps what he’s actually doing is insulting the terrorists, by laying a wreath near them while his coat is rumpled.

    I suppose it may just be possible that the wreath he laid at an event organised to mark the bombing of civilians in 1985 was actually put there to mark the bombing of civilians in 1985.

    But it’s much more likely that secretly, Jeremy Corbyn supports Palestinian terrorists who murder athletes. You may think that if you hold such an unusual point of view, it might have slipped out in conversation here and there. But the fact he’s never said or done anything to suggest he backs the brutal murder of civilians only shows how clever he is at hiding his true thoughts.

    This must be why he’s always been a keen supporter of causes beloved by Islamic jihadists, such as gay rights. For example, Jeremy Corbyn was a passionate opponent of Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 law that banned the mention of homosexuality in schools. He supported every gay rights campaign at a time when it was considered extremist to do so. And the way he managed to be an extremist Islamic fundamentalist and an extremist gay rights fanatic at the same time only shows how dangerous he is.

    One person who appears especially upset by all this is Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it’s always distressing when someone that sensitive gets dragged into an issue.

    Sadly he’s going to be even more aghast when he reads about another event in which wreaths were laid for terrorists. Because a plaque was unveiled to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel, in which 91 people died, mostly civilians and 28 of them British. This was carried out by the Irgun, an Israeli terror gang, and one man, who by coincidence was also called Benjamin Netanyahu, declared the bombing was “a legitimate act with a military target”.
    The most ridiculous claims made about Jeremy Corbyn
    He called Hezbollah and Hamas ‘friends’
    ‘Jeremy Corbyn thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a tragedy’
    He is ‘haunted’ by the legacy of his ‘evil’ great-great-grandfather
    Jeremy Corbyn raised a motion about ‘pigeon bombs’ in Parliament

    When Benjamin Netanyahu hears about this other Benjamin Netanyahu he’ll be furious.

    The Labour MPs who pine for Tony Blair are even more enraged, and you have to sympathise. Because when Blair supported murderers, such as Gaddafi and Asad, he did it while they were still alive, which is much more acceptable.

    So you can see why Conservative politicians and newspapers are so disgusted. If you subjected the Conservative Party to a similar level of scrutiny, you’d find nothing comparable. There might be the odd link to torturers, such as their ex-leader Margaret Thatcher describing General Pinochet, who herded opponents into a football stadium and had them shot, as a close and dear friend. Or supporting apartheid because “Nelson Mandela is a terrorist”. But she was only being polite.

    We can only guess what the next revelation will be. My guess is “Corbyn supported snakes against iguanas in Attenborough’s film. Footage has emerged of the Labour leader speaking alongside a snake, and praising his efforts to catch the iguana and poison and swallow him. One iguana said he was ‘shocked and horrified’ at the story, told in this 340-page special edition, and one anti-Corbyn Labour MP said, ‘I don’t know anything about this whatsoever, which is why I call on Mr Corbyn to do the decent thing and kill himself.’”

    #Jeremy_Corbin #Fake_news #Calomnies #Violence

  • The Islamic fundamentalist Jeremy Corbyn should be ashamed of himself – if only he’d behaved more like Margaret Thatcher | The Independent
    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-islam-jewish-antisemitism-israel-labour-party-margaret-

    It gets worse and worse for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. There’s a rumour that photos have emerged of a courgette grown on his allotment which is a similar shape to a rocket propeller used by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

    This comes on top of revelations that he has a beard, much like Palestinian terrorists, and his constituency is Islington, which starts with IS, or Islamic State. As a vegetarian he doesn’t eat pork, his friend John McDonnell’s initials are JM – that stands for Jihadist Muslim – and he travels on underground trains, that are under the ground, just like the basements in which Isis make their little films.

    The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and various others have also published a photo of him folding his thumb while holding up his fingers, in a way they describe as a salute to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. That settles it. If you don’t constantly check the shape of your thumb to make sure it’s not folded in a way similar to the way it’s folded by Muslim groups in Egypt, you might as well strap Semtex to your chest and get a bus to Syria.

    Thankfully there are some brave journalists who discovered the truth: that Corbyn laid a wreath in Tunisia at a memorial for civilians who were bombed, but also buried in that cemetery are the “Munich terrorists”. It turned out that the terrorists are not buried there at all, as they’re buried in Libya, but you can’t expect those journalists to get bogged down in insignificant details like that.

    We’ve all turned up for a funeral to be told we’re in the wrong country. “I’m afraid the service for your Uncle Derek is in Eltham Crematorium,” we’re told, “and you’ve come to Argentina.” It doesn’t make any difference to the overall story.

    Because there are Palestinian leaders who may have been terrorists in that cemetery. And when you attend a memorial service, you are clearly commemorating everyone in the cemetery, and the fact that you’ve probably never heard of most of them is no excuse.
    Corbyn takes on Margaret Thatcher over homelessness in Parliament in 1990

    If it’s possible to bring comfort to all those shocked by this outrage, it may be worth recalling that one of the first scandals about Corbyn after he became leader was that he wasn’t dressed smartly enough when he laid a wreath at the Cenotaph, which was an insult to our war dead. He’s just as scruffy in the pictures from Tunisia, so perhaps what he’s actually doing is insulting the terrorists, by laying a wreath near them while his coat is rumpled.
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    I suppose it may just be possible that the wreath he laid at an event organised to mark the bombing of civilians in 1985 was actually put there to mark the bombing of civilians in 1985.

    But it’s much more likely that secretly, Jeremy Corbyn supports Palestinian terrorists who murder athletes. You may think that if you hold such an unusual point of view, it might have slipped out in conversation here and there. But the fact he’s never said or done anything to suggest he backs the brutal murder of civilians only shows how clever he is at hiding his true thoughts.

    This must be why he’s always been a keen supporter of causes beloved by Islamic jihadists, such as gay rights. For example, Jeremy Corbyn was a passionate opponent of Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 law that banned the mention of homosexuality in schools. He supported every gay rights campaign at a time when it was considered extremist to do so. And the way he managed to be an extremist Islamic fundamentalist and an extremist gay rights fanatic at the same time only shows how dangerous he is.

    One person who appears especially upset by all this is Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it’s always distressing when someone that sensitive gets dragged into an issue.

    Sadly he’s going to be even more aghast when he reads about another event in which wreaths were laid for terrorists. Because a plaque was unveiled to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel, in which 91 people died, mostly civilians and 28 of them British. This was carried out by the Irgun, an Israeli terror gang, and one man, who by coincidence was also called Benjamin Netanyahu, declared the bombing was “a legitimate act with a military target”.
    The most ridiculous claims made about Jeremy Corbyn
    He called Hezbollah and Hamas ‘friends’
    ‘Jeremy Corbyn thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a tragedy’
    He is ‘haunted’ by the legacy of his ‘evil’ great-great-grandfather
    Jeremy Corbyn raised a motion about ‘pigeon bombs’ in Parliament

    When Benjamin Netanyahu hears about this other Benjamin Netanyahu he’ll be furious.

    The Labour MPs who pine for Tony Blair are even more enraged, and you have to sympathise. Because when Blair supported murderers, such as Gaddafi and Asad, he did it while they were still alive, which is much more acceptable.

    So you can see why Conservative politicians and newspapers are so disgusted. If you subjected the Conservative Party to a similar level of scrutiny, you’d find nothing comparable. There might be the odd link to torturers, such as their ex-leader Margaret Thatcher describing General Pinochet, who herded opponents into a football stadium and had them shot, as a close and dear friend. Or supporting apartheid because “Nelson Mandela is a terrorist”. But she was only being polite.

    We can only guess what the next revelation will be. My guess is “Corbyn supported snakes against iguanas in Attenborough’s film. Footage has emerged of the Labour leader speaking alongside a snake, and praising his efforts to catch the iguana and poison and swallow him. One iguana said he was ‘shocked and horrified’ at the story, told in this 340-page special edition, and one anti-Corbyn Labour MP said, ‘I don’t know anything about this whatsoever, which is why I call on Mr Corbyn to do the decent thing and kill himself.’”

  • L’interview de la mère d’Oussama Ben Laden, Alia Ghanem, par Martin Chulov dans le Guardian est l’évènement médiatique du moment :
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/03/osama-bin-laden-mother-speaks-out-family-interview
    L’article a été largement signalé et commenté (positivement) dans les grands médias français.

    Or, en dehors d’Angry Arab, personne ne semble vouloir remarquer que l’interview reprend tous les talking points de la propagande séoudienne de l’ère Mohamed Bin Salman.

    D’entrée de jeu, Chulov admet qu’il interviewe la famille Ben Laden sous le contrôle du régime séoudien :

    Now, Saudi Arabia’s new leadership – spearheaded by the ambitious 32-year-old heir to the throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – has agreed to my request to speak to the family. (As one of the country’s most influential families, their movements and engagements remain closely monitored.)

    Voilà l’une des dictatures les plus violentes de la planète, où le déplaisir du prince vous vaudra la ruine, ou la prison, ou la réclusion à vie dans une résidence privée, ou quelques centaines de coups de fouets, voire la décapitation. Un pays où des milliardaires parmi les plus puissants ont été retenus dans un hôtel, possiblement torturés, avant d’être proprement ruinés. Où un Premier ministre étranger a été retenu et démissionné d’office.

    Mais si la famille accepte enfin de parler – avec l’accord de la nouvelle direction du régime – c’est, selon Chulov, pour éviter de « réouvrir d’anciennes plaies » :

    Unsurprisingly, Osama bin Laden’s family are cautious in our initial negotiations; they are not sure whether opening old wounds will prove cathartic or harmful. But after several days of discussion, they are willing to talk.

    L’idée qu’il n’est pas bien sain, d’un point de vue journalistique, de présenter dans de telles conditions la parole de ces gens comme un authentique entretien, est soulevée dans la fin de l’article par une demi-sœur de Ben Laden installée (réfugiée ?) à Paris. Objection balayée d’une phrase et l’euphémisme « complicated status in the kingdom » :

    From her home in Paris, she later emailed to say she strongly objected to her mother being interviewed, asking that it be rearranged through her. Despite the blessing of her brothers and father, she felt her mother had been pressured into talking. Ghanem, however, insisted she was happy to talk and could have talked longer. It is, perhaps, a sign of the extended family’s complicated status in the kingdom that such tensions exist.

    D’ailleurs la conversation se fait ouvertement en présence d’un commissaire politique du régime mais, précise notre grand reporter : qui ne fait aucune tentative pour influencer la conversation…

    When we meet on a hot day in early June, a minder from the Saudi government sits in the room, though she makes no attempt to influence the conversation.

    On est heureux de constater que les méthodes séoudienness se sont affinées depuis l’interview grotesque de Saad Hariri.

    Bref, l’entretien commence.

    D’entrée de jeu, premier élément de langage tiré de la propagande officielle saoudienne : Oussame Ben Laden s’est radicalisé sous l’influence d’un membre des Frères musulmans. Subtile…

    “The people at university changed him,” Ghanem says. “He became a different man.” One of the men he met there was Abdullah Azzam, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was later exiled from Saudi Arabia and became Osama’s spiritual adviser.

    Un autre élément de langage, central, reviendra plusieurs fois dans l’interview : en Afghanistan, Ben Laden est un type très bien : il n’est pas encore un jihadiste (jusqu’en 1999…).

    “[…] He spent all his money on Afghanistan – he would sneak off under the guise of family business.” Did she ever suspect he might become a jihadist? “It never crossed my mind.”

    Tant qu’à faire, le petit détail sectaire qui ne trompe pas : la maman de Ben Laden est alaouite :

    Ghanem begins to relax, and talks about her childhood in the coastal Syrian city of Latakia, where she grew up in a family of Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

    Évidemment, le bon fan-boy de la rébellitude syrienne ne tarde pas à en faire la bonne lecture : la mère de Ben Laden est alaouite « comme les Assad ». Par exemple Sam Dagher te conseille l’article en commençant par cette remarque (subtile) :
    https://twitter.com/samdagher/status/1025343757229678597

    Must read by ⁦@martinchulov⁩ on Bin Laden’s mother. She’s Syrian Alawite like the Assads. […]

    Un autre talking point typique de MBS : l’Arabie séoudite était un pays relativement libéral dans les années 70 (ah ah… comment traduire « freewheeling » ici sans paraître totalement ridicule), mais a adopté une interprétation rigoriste du wahhabisme en réaction à la révolution iranienne (dont le but, écrit-il, était d’exporter le chiisme dans le monde arabe sunnite).

    Osama bin Laden’s formative years in Jeddah came in the relatively freewheeling 1970s, before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which aimed to export Shia zeal into the Sunni Arab world. From then on, Saudi’s rulers enforced a rigid interpretation of Sunni Islam – one that had been widely practised across the Arabian peninsula since the 18th century, the era of cleric Muhammed ibn Abdul Wahhab.

    Ah, il faut te dire qu’à ce moment de ce long article, l’interview proprement dite de la mère de Ben Laden est terminée depuis longtemps, et n’a dû occuper que deux gros paragraphes…

    À la place, on part dans des considérations enthousiastes sur cette nouvelle direction saoudienne, sous l’influence de Bin Salman, qui voudrait instaurer un « islam modéré » en Arabie (Chulov est d’ailleurs sans surprise coupable, dans le Guardian, de plusieurs articles enthousiastes sur les femmes séoudiennes autorisées à conduire) :

    In 2018, Saudi’s new leadership wants to draw a line under this era and introduce what bin Salman calls “moderate Islam”. This he sees as essential to the survival of a state where a large, restless and often disaffected young population has, for nearly four decades, had little access to entertainment, a social life or individual freedoms. Saudi’s new rulers believe such rigid societal norms, enforced by clerics, could prove fodder for extremists who tap into such feelings of frustration.

    Reform is beginning to creep through many aspects of Saudi society; among the most visible was June’s lifting of the ban on women drivers. There have been changes to the labour markets and a bloated public sector; cinemas have opened, and an anti-corruption drive launched across the private sector and some quarters of government. The government also claims to have stopped all funding to Wahhabi institutions outside the kingdom, which had been supported with missionary zeal for nearly four decades.

    Such radical shock therapy is slowly being absorbed across the country, where communities conditioned to decades of uncompromising doctrine don’t always know what to make of it. Contradictions abound: some officials and institutions eschew conservatism, while others wholeheartedly embrace it. Meanwhile, political freedoms remain off-limits; power has become more centralised and dissent is routinely crushed.

    Toujours plus éloigné du sujet initial (la maman d’Oussama), le prince Turki al-Faisal, l’« érudit » ancien chef des services secrets saoudiens :

    I meet Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was the head of Saudi intelligence for 24 years, between 1977 and 1 September 2001 (10 days before the 9/11 attacks), at his villa in Jeddah. An erudite man now in his mid-70s, Turki wears green cufflinks bearing the Saudi flag on the sleeves of his thobe.

    Lequel te synthétise l’élément de langage central de l’article : en Afghanistan c’est un combattant de la liberté, et c’est après que ça se gâte :

    “There are two Osama bin Ladens,” he tells me. “One before the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and one after it. Before, he was very much an idealistic mujahid. He was not a fighter. By his own admission, he fainted during a battle, and when he woke up, the Soviet assault on his position had been defeated.”

    As Bin Laden moved from Afghanistan to Sudan, and as his links to Saudi Arabia soured, it was Turki who spoke with him on behalf of the kingdom. In the wake of 9/11, these direct dealings came under intense scrutiny.

    Et une autre explication totalement tirée par les cheveux : si la plupart des terroristes du 11 Septembre étaient séoudiens, ce n’était pas parce que les Séoudiens vivent dans un environnement toxique depuis l’enfance, mais parce que Ben Laden voulait tourner le monde occidental contre l’Arabie… Oui, c’est une très jolie théorie du complot dans laquelle on présente le royaume comme une victime du 11 Septembre :

    “There is no doubt that he deliberately chose Saudi citizens for the 9/11 plot,” a British intelligence officer tells me. “He was convinced that was going to turn the west against his ... home country. He did indeed succeed in inciting a war, but not the one he expected.”

    Et pour terminer, enfonçons le clou sur l’authentique conviction réformatrice (« mais pourra-t-il réussir ? ») de ce brave Mohammed Bin Salman :

    While change has been attempted in Saudi Arabia before, it has been nowhere near as extensive as the current reforms. How hard Mohammed bin Salman can push against a society indoctrinated in such an uncompromising worldview remains an open question.

    Saudia Arabia’s allies are optimistic, but offer a note of caution. The British intelligence officer I spoke to told me, “If Salman doesn’t break through, there will be many more Osamas. And I’m not sure they’ll be able to shake the curse.”

  • Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam – Mark Curtis
    http://markcurtis.info/2015/12/17/britains-collusion-with-radical-islam

    Britain’s contribution to the rise of the terrorist threat goes well beyond the impacts its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had on some individuals. The more important story is that British governments, both Labour and Conservative, have, in pursuing the so-called ‘national interest’ abroad, colluded for decades with radical Islamic forces, including terrorist organisations. They have connived with them, worked alongside them and sometimes trained and financed them, in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives. Governments have done so in often desperate attempts to maintain Britain’s global power in the face of increasing weakness in key regions of the world, being unable to unilaterally impose their will and lacking other local allies. Thus the story is intimately related to that of Britain’s imperial decline and the attempt to maintain influence in the world.

    With some of these radical Islamic forces, Britain has been in a permanent, strategic alliance to secure fundamental, long-term foreign policy goals; with others, it has been a temporary marriage of convenience to achieve specific short-term outcomes. The US has been shown by some analysts to have nurtured Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida, but Britain’s part in fostering Islamist terrorism is invariably left out of these accounts, and the history has never been told. Yet this collusion has had more impact on the rise of the terrorist threat than either Britain’s liberal culture or the inspiration for jihadism provided by the occupation of Iraq.

  • The Manchester Bombing as Blowback: The latest evidence
    https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-manchester-bombing-as-blowback-the-latest-evidence-83ec2127801d

    In summary, the evidence so far shows that there are six inter-related aspects of blowback:

    1. Salman Abedi and his father were members of a Libyan dissident group — the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) — covertly supported by the UK to assassinate Qadafi in 1996. At this time, the LIFG was an affiliate of Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and LIFG leaders had various connections to this terror network.

    2. Members of the LIFG were facilitated by the British ‘security services’ to travel to Libya to fight Qadafi in 2011. Both Salman Abedi and his father, Ramadan, were among those who travelled to fight at this time (although there is no evidence that their travel was personally facilitated or encouraged by the security services).

  • U.S. and Russia Agree on Steps to Combat ISIS in Syria - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/world/middleeast/us-and-russia-agree-on-steps-to-combat-isis-in-syria.html

    MOSCOW — The United States and Russia announced a tentative deal on Friday to coordinate airstrikes against the Islamic State and the Nusra Front , Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.

    [...]

    Mr. Kerry made clear that defeating the Nusra Front was a major American priority.

    “So if some critic is criticizing the United States or Russia for going after Al Nusra, which is a terrorist organization, because they’re good fighters against Assad, they have their priorities completely screwed up,” Mr. Kerry said. “The fact is that Nusra is plotting against countries in the world. What happened in Nice last night could just as well come from Nusra or wherever it came from as any other entity. Because that’s what they do.”

    [...]

    The United States has carried out occasional strikes against what have been described as senior Qaeda figures in Syria. But it has refrained from systematic attacks against the Nusra Front, whose ranks are heavily Syrian, including many who left less extreme rebel groups because Nusra was better armed and financed.

    • Dans un article écrit quelques heures auparavant, le « think tank » financé par les dictateurs du Golfe arabo-persique disait ceci :
      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/world/middleeast/john-kerry-vladimir-putin-syria-plan.html

      Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the #Atlantic_Council, was also critical of the proposed military coordination with the Russians. He said that combined attacks against Nusra would effectively end the Syrian opposition, cementing Mr. Assad’s grip on power and enraging most Syrians.

    • Rapport au Sénat étasunien de l’envoyé spécial d’Obama, Brett H. McGurk (fin juin 2016)
      http://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/062816_McGurk_Testimony.pdf

      In Syria, as ISIL is losing territory in the east, its terrorist rival – Jabhat al-Nusra – is gaining ground in the west, putting down roots in Idlib province along the Turkish border. Nusra is establishing schools and training camps, recruiting from abroad, launching major military operations, and enjoying a sophisticated on-line presence, all the while providing safe haven for some of al Qaida’s most experienced terrorists. With direct ties to Ayman al Zawahiri,
      Osama Bin Laden’s successor, Nusra is now al Qaida largest formal affiliate in history.

      Traduit ici, http://www.slate.fr/story/121139/victoire-irak-syrie-terrorisme-europe

      « [Le Front] #al-Nosra implante des écoles et des camps d’entraînements, recrute depuis l’étranger, mène des opérations militaires d’envergure et jouit d’une présence sophistiquée sur le Web, tout en offrant un refuge à certains terroristes d’#al-Qaida parmi les plus expérimentés. [Il entretient aussi] des liens directs avec Ayman al-Zawahiri, l’héritier de Ben Laden. » Ce qui en fait, pour reprendre la formule de M. McGurk, « la plus grande filiale officielle d’al-Qaida de l’histoire. »

    • Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn’t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that’s my best guess), because he would’ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don’t know anything really about 9/11. We just don’t know. We don’t know what role was played by whom.

      KK: So you don’t know if the hush money was from the Saudi government or private individuals?

      SH: The money was from the government … what the Saudis were doing, so I’ve been told, by reasonable people (I haven’t written this) is that they were also passing along tankers of oil for the Pakistanis to resell. That’s really a lot of money.

  • Are the U.S. and Allies Getting Too Cozy With Al Qaeda’s Affiliate in Syria?
    http://blog.peaceactionwest.org/2015/07/24/are-the-u-s-and-allies-getting-too-cozy-with-al-qaedas-affilia

    Reporting on al Nusra’s recent victories in Idlib, Charles Lister at Brookings reported:

    “Several commanders involved in leading recent Idlib operations confirmed to this author that the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey, which coordinates the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to vetted opposition groups, was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation from early April onwards. That operations room — along with another in Jordan, which covers Syria’s south — also appears to have dramatically increased its level of assistance and provision of intelligence to vetted groups in recent weeks.

    Whereas these multinational operations rooms have previously demanded that recipients of military assistance cease direct coordination with groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, recent dynamics in Idlib appear to have demonstrated something different. Not only were weapons shipments increased to the so-called “vetted groups,” but the operations room specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.” [emphasis added]

    As news of the coalition victories spread, the Wall Street Journal published a piece entitled “To US Allies, Al Qaeda Affiliate in Syria Becomes the Lesser Evil” that reinforces the possibility some U.S. military leaders also see such collaboration with al Qaeda as a legitimate option. The author of the article spoke with retired US Admiral James Stavridis , a recent Supreme Allied Commander of NATO who oversaw the 2011 Libya campaign. Discussing the new role of key US allies backing a coalition that includes the al Qaeda affiliate, the Admiral compared the relationship to partnering with Stalin in World War II:

    “It is unlikely we are going to operate side by side with cadres from Nusra, but if our allies are working with them, that is acceptable. If you look back to World War II, we had coalitions with people that we had extreme disagreements with, including Stalin’s Russia,” said Mr. Stavridis, now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston.

    “I don’t think that is a showstopper for the U.S. in terms of engaging with that coalition.” [emphasis added]

    It is important to note that the head of al Nusra though indicating an unwillingness to attack the West for now, still pledges allegiance to Ayman Zawahiri, the long time deputy to Osama Bin Laden, and currently the official head of Al Qaeda. In addition, human rights groups have pointed to al Nusra’s “systematic and widespread violations including targeting civilians, kidnappings, and executions.” Al Nusra has engaged in lethal car bombing attacks targeting civilians and they have actively recruited child soldiers. Like ISIS, al Nusra has treated women and girls in areas they control particularly harshly. In addition to strict and discriminatory rules on dress, employment and freedom of movement there have been abductions of women and even executions of at least one woman accused of adultery.

    Despite all this, retired Adm. Stavridis isn’t the only commentator who finds our allies’ involvement with al Nusra ‘acceptable’. The prominent foreign policy journal, Foreign Affairs published a piece this year entitled “Accepting Al Qaeda: The Enemy of the United States’ Enemy.” The author, Barak Mendelsohn, makes the case that al Qaeda staying “afloat” is better for US interests, citing threats to US allies from Iran and the Islamic State. A couple weeks later Lina Khatib , the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, wrote in a piece that “Nusra’s pragmatism and ongoing evolution mean that it could become an ally in the fight against the Islamic State”.

    #blanchiment_de_Qaïda

  • Pakistan expels aid agency Save the Children - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pakistan-expels-aid-agency-save-the-children/2015/06/11/5ff94be0-1079-11e5-a0dc-2b6f404ff5cf_story.html

    The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, declined to discuss the specific reason for the action. But the move appeared to be related to long-standing allegations of Save the Children’s ties to the Pakistani physician recruited to help the CIA gain information about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts prior to the 2011 U.S. military mission that killed him in northwestern Pakistan.

    #ONG

  • Al Jazeera accentue sa propagande grossière pour Al Qaeda, cette fois avec un texte en anglais. Comme c’est le même gugusses que précédemment, et que c’est parfaitement ridicule, c’est certain : ça va convaincre les Américains.

    Nusra Front’s quest for a united Syria
    http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/06/nusra-front-quest-united-syria-150602050740867.html

    “We used to cover al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden, and their hosts, Mullah Omar’s Taliban in Afghanistan. They would never go beyond offering simple tea and bread for breakfast. Things now seem entirely different,” I replied, gesturing towards the dozen dishes placed in front of me.

    With humility, my host insisted that I should start my breakfast.

    I think of this little anecdote to illustrate the change that has undertaken al-Qaeda in Syria. In this ancient melting pot of religions and civilisations, it is the kitchen which is key to comprehending sociology.

    […]

    Unexpectedly, he did not abandon al-Qaeda or withdraw his allegiance from its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri - who, like the British monarch, has symbolic resonance without much in the way of practical authority.

    […]

    By now, the time for forgiveness for the Assads or Hezbollah has surely passed. They can continue to swear allegiance to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, if this offers some lease of life. In Ramadi and Anbar, the US-supported Shia groups fighting ISIL shout sectarian slogans “Ya Hussain!” and “Ya Khamenei!” as they battle through Sunni heartlands.

    The Obama administration may be at ease with the idea of armed groups alien to the Iraqi population fighting on behalf of Baghdad - but continues to have a problem with Syrian fighters - such as those who make up Nusra’s ranks - fighting in Syria. This dichotomy will not serve the West’s interests.

  • The Rise of the Digital Caliphate (extract) | رأي اليوم
    http://www.raialyoum.com/?p=263610

    Islamic State is the latest, most deadly, incarnation of the global jihad movement established by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998. Yet the ‘digital caliphate’ is no mere virtual reality. It has a very real geographical, territorial presence. In traditional terms of politics and boundaries, can a ‘state’ be established in just a few months? German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, who spent ten days in the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria, is categoric in his assessment that, ‘We have to understand that Isis is a country now.’

    This extract is from ‘Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate’ by Abdel Bari Atwan; published by Saqi books in May 2015.

    #isis #ei #daesh #tic_arabes

  • #Terror_Files: What’s on #Osama_Bin_Laden’s Private Bookshelf

    The U.S. government today released dozens of documents recovered from the special operations raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, including now declassified correspondences from bin Laden and 39-English language books in which the terror leader apparently took interest.

    http://abcnews.go.com/International/terror-files-whats-osama-bin-ladens-bookshelf/story?id=31173365
    #terrorisme #livre #correspondance

  • Seymour M. Hersh : The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

    It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

    The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

    This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

    ‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

    (pas encore lu)

    • Pakistanis Knew Where Bin Laden Was, Say U.S. Sources
      http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistanis-knew-where-bin-laden-was-say-us-sources-n357306

      Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a “walk in” asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding - and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.

      The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

      The new revelations do not necessarily cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission. The official story focused on a long hunt for bin Laden’s presumed courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

      While NBC News has long been pursuing leads about a “walk in” and about what Pakistani intelligence knew, both assertions were made public in a London Review of Books article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

    • Author Reported Essentials of Hersh’s bin Laden Story in 2011 — With Seemingly Different Sources
      https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/former-professor-reported-basics-hershs-bin-laden-story-2011-seemingly-di

      R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh.

      Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about bin Laden’s location from tracking an al Qaeda courier, but from a member of the Pakistani intelligence service who wanted to collect the $25 million reward the U.S. had offered for bin Laden; (2) Saudi Arabia was paying Pakistan to keep bin Laden under the equivalent of house arrest; (3) Pakistan was pressured by the U.S. to stand down its military to allow the U.S. raid to proceed unhindered; and (4) the U.S. had planned to claim that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but was forced to abandon this when one of the Navy SEAL helicopters crashed.

      The Spy Who Billed Me: Hersh Did Not Break Bin Laden Cover Up Story
      http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/05/hersh-did-not-break-bin-laden-cover-up-story.html

      Seymour Hersh’s story, “The Killing of Bin Laden,” in the London Review of Books has a fundamental problem: it’s either plagiarism or unoriginal.

      If it’s fiction—as some have implied, it’s plagiarism. If it’s true, it’s not original. The story was broken here on The Spy Who Billed Me four years ago, in August 2011

      […]

      I have had great respect for Seymour Hersh, arguably one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time. I do not believe his story is fiction. I trust my sources—which were clearly different than his. I am, however, profoundly disappointed that he has not given credit to the one who originally broke the story.

    • La presse semble vouloir régler son compte à ce grand journaliste.

      Etats-Unis. Mort de Ben Laden : une enquête très polémique
      Publié le 12/05/2015

      (...) D’aucuns, à l’instar du site internet Vox [ http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden ] , n’hésitent cependant pas à parler du penchant du journaliste pour la théorie du complot. Pour le journaliste Max Fisher, “l’enquête de Seymour Hersh est certes impressionnante à lire, mais elle ne résiste pas à un examen minutieux des faits et est bourrée de contradictions et d’incohérences”. Elle serait une bonne illustration de la dérive de Seymour Hersh “qui s’est éloigné, ces dernières années, du journalisme d’investigation pour s’engager sur le terrain glissant des conspirations.” (...)

      cet article a été repris et cité ce matin sur France-Culture Par Thomas CLUZEL

      Que s’est-il passé la nuit où Ben Laden a été tué ? x
      12.05.2015
      http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-revue-de-presse-internationale-que-s-est-il-passe-la-nuit-ou-

    • Oui, l’article de Vox a beaucoup circulé. Cet article de The Nation (assez marrant) répond à l’article de Vox : It’s a Conspiracy ! How to Discredit Seymour Hersh | The Nation
      http://www.thenation.com/blog/207001/its-conspiracy-how-discredit-seymour-hersh

      Max Fisher, now at Vox, learned well during his apprenticeship under Marty Peretz at The New Republic. This week, he was among the first to try to smear Seymour Hersh’s piece in the London Review of Books, which argued that pretty much everything we were told about the killing of Osama bin Laden was a lie. Most importantly, Hersh’s report questions the claim that Washington learned of OBL’s whereabouts thanks to torture—a claim popularized in the film Zero Dark Thirty.

      There’s a standard boiler plate now when it comes to going after Hersh, and all Fisher, in “The Many Problems with Seymour Hersh’s Osama bin Laden Conspiracy Theory,” did was fill out the form: establish Hersh’s “legendary” status (which Fisher does in the first sentence); invoke his reporting in My Lai and Abu Ghraib; then say that a number of Hersh’s recent stories—such as his 2012 New Yorker piece that the United States was training Iranian terrorists in Nevada—have been “unsubstantiated” (of course, other reporters never “substantiated” Hersh’s claim that Henry Kissinger was directly involved in organizing the cover-up of the fire-bombing of Cambodia for years—but that claim was true); question Hersh’s sources; and then, finally, suggest that Hersh has gone “off the rails” to embrace “conspiracy theories.”

      […]

      To accuse Hersh of falling under the thrall of “conspiracy theory” is to repudiate the whole enterprise of investigative journalism that Hersh helped pioneer. What has he written that wasn’t a conspiracy? But Fisher, and others, believe Hersh went too far when in a 2011 speech he made mention of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, tagging him as a Dan Brown fantasist. Here’s Fisher, in his debunking of Hersh’s recent essay: “The moment when a lot of journalists started to question whether Hersh had veered from investigative reporting into something else came in January 2011. That month, he spoke at Georgetown University’s branch campus in Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address alleging that top military and special forces leaders ‘are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.… many of them are members of Opus Dei.’”

      But here’s Steve Coll, a reporter who remains within the acceptable margins, writing in Ghost Wars about Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey: “He was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion.… He attended Mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice…. He believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.” Oliver North, Casey’s Iran/Contra co-conspirator, worshiped at a “’charismatic’ Episcopalian church in Virginia called Church of the Apostles, which is organized into cell groups.”

      Not too long ago, no less an establishment figure than Ben Bradlee, the editor of The Washington Post, could draw the connections between the shadowy national security state and right-wing Christianity: Iran/Contra was about many things, among them a right-wing Christian reaction against the growing influence of left-wing Liberation Theology in Latin America. Likewise, the US’s post-9/11 militarism was about many things, among them the reorganization of those right-wing Christians against what they identified as a greater existential threat than Liberation Theology: political Islam. Fisher should know this, as it was reported here, here, and here, among many other places.

      Eager to debunk Hersh, it’s Fisher who has fallen down the rabbit hole of imperial amnesia.

    • Seymour Hersh Article Alleges Cover-Up in Bin Laden Hunt - NYTimes.com
      http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/seymour-hersh-article-alleges-cover-up-in-bin-laden-hunt.html?ref=todayspap

      In one conceivable episode, Mr. Hersh writes that American intelligence officials were alerted to Bin Laden’s whereabouts by a Pakistani military officer who walked into the United States Embassy in Islamabad and was subsequently paid a reward and moved by the C.I.A. to the United States. The account told by the Obama administration after the raid — that the C.I.A. tracked down Bin Laden through the work of dogged analysts — was a ruse intended to protect the real informant, according to Mr. Hersh.

      It is a deception that the C.I.A. has employed before, claiming for years that it discovered that one of its own, Aldrich H. Ames, was passing intelligence to the Soviet Union through the work of a team of analysts. The truth that eventually emerged was that crucial evidence against Mr. Ames came from a Soviet spy working for the C.I.A.

      Yet other claims by Mr. Hersh would have required a cover-up extending from top American, Pakistani and Saudi officials down to midlevel bureaucrats.

      [...]

      Mr. Hersh is standing by his article. In a brief telephone interview on Monday, he said, “You can have your skepticism.”

      His manner was cheerful and breezy, and he seemed unfazed about the controversy his reporting has stirred up. It is not the first time that Mr. Hersh’s work has been met with hostility from the authorities, and he laughed loudly at the mention of the denials from the White House and others.

      “Those are classic nondenial denials,” he said, before rushing off to take a call from another reporter.

      [...]

      [...] Mr. Hersh’s story would probably have gained much less traction had it not been for the often contradictory details presented by the Obama administration after the raid, and the questions about it that remain unanswered.

    • Les révélations de Seymour Hersh sur l’assassinat de Ben Laden sont à prendre au sérieux
      12 mai 2015 | Par Thomas Cantaloube
      http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/120515/les-revelations-de-seymour-hersh-sur-lassassinat-de-ben-laden-sont-prendre

      Le vétéran américain du journalisme d’investigation livre dans un long article une version différente de ce qui s’est passé en mai 2011 à Abbottabad, quand le leader d’Al-Qaïda a été tué par un commando américain. Son récit est crédible et informé, autant en tout cas que celui fourni jusqu’ici par la Maison Blanche.

    • « L’Assassinat d’Oussama ben Laden » par Seymour Hersh (3/4)
      Par Seymour Hersh pour la London Review of Books, le 10 mai 2015
      http://www.reopen911.info/News/2015/05/14/lassassinat-doussama-ben-laden-par-seymour-hersh-34
      Suite de la deuxième partie de l’article.

      ““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““
      L’Assassinat d’Oussama ben Laden (London Review of Books) - (4/4)
      http://www.legrandsoir.info/l-assassinat-d-oussama-ben-laden-london-review-of-books-4-4.html
      ou
      http://www.reopen911.info/News/2015/05/15/lassassinat-doussama-ben-laden-par-seymour-hersh-44

    • The Detail in Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Story That Rings True - Carlotta Gall
      http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/magazine/the-detail-in-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-that-rings-true.html

      On this count, my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s. Beginning in 2001, I spent nearly 12 years covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Times. (In his article, Hersh cites an article I wrote for The Times Magazine last year, an excerpt from a book drawn from this reporting.) The story of the Pakistani informer was circulating in the rumor mill within days of the Abbottabad raid, but at the time, no one could or would corroborate the claim. Such is the difficulty of reporting on covert operations and intelligence matters; there are no official documents to draw on, few officials who will talk and few ways to check the details they give you when they do.

      Two years later, when I was researching my book, I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset. After the book came out, I learned more: that it was indeed a Pakistani Army brigadier — all the senior officers of the ISI are in the military — who told the C.I.A. where Bin Laden was hiding, and that Bin Laden was living there with the knowledge and protection of the ISI.

      […]

      I do not recall ever corresponding with Hersh, but he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of. The former C.I.A. officer Larry Johnson aired the theory of the informant — credited to “friends who are still active” — on his blog within days of the raid. And Hersh appears to have succeeded in getting both American and Pakistani sources to corroborate it. His sources remain anonymous, but other outlets such as NBC News have since come forward with similar accounts. Finally, the Pakistani daily newspaper The News reported Tuesday that Pakistani intelligence officials have conceded that it was indeed a walk-in who provided the information on Bin Laden. The newspaper names the officer as Brigadier Usman Khalid; the reporter is sufficiently well connected that he should be taken seriously.

  • Sudan maintains balancing act with Saudi, Iran

    Reuters http://af.reuters.com/article/sudanNews

    By Shadi Bushra KHARTOUM, April 30 (Reuters) -

    The war in Yemen has given Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a skilled political operator who has ruled Sudan for a quarter-century, an opportunity to show wealthy Sunni powers that he can be an asset against Iranian influence - if the price is right.

    Bashir has maintained power amid region wide unrest in part by navigating a shifting patchwork of alliances that has seen Khartoum at different times draw close to Osama bin Laden, the United States, and Iran.

    Now it appears that Bashir and many of his countrymen hope that supporting a month-old Saudi-led bombing campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen will encourage Gulf powers to pour aid and investment into Sudan’s struggling economy.

    If Bashir, who this week won another five-year term, pulls off yet another juggling act by winning Arab cash without completely alienating Iran, it will strengthen his argument at home and abroad that only he can steer his fractious country through an increasingly complicated region.

    Since the military operation in Yemen began, Saudi Arabia has pledged fresh investments in Sudan’s key agricultural sector, and bankers say there is more willingness for Gulf banks to do business with their Sudanese counterparts.

    But if Sudan is to see major economic support from Saudi Arabia and its allies, Bashir will have to overcome a deep distrust of his government, which analysts and diplomats say has a checkered history of switching partners at its convenience.

    “There is no trust in the Gulf for Omar al-Bashir...The leaders in the Gulf think that Bashir can betray them at any time, so they won’t give him aid until he shows he is serious about joining them and leaving Iran,” a Gulf diplomat said.

    If Khartoum commits to standing up to what Saudi Arabia sees as expanding Iranian influence, Riyadh could claim victory in prying one of Tehran’s few Arab allies out of its arch-rival’s orbit, the diplomat said.

    Analysts, however, expect Sudan to keep up its regional balancing act by voicing support to the Yemen campaign but keeping a line of communication to Tehran open.

    That would give the intervention a veneer of Arab unity, but would not satisfy Saudi and its allies enough to guarantee the flood of aid that many Sudanese have begun to expect.

    INVESTMENT MORE IMPORTANT THAN ARMS

    Sudan and Iran, both listed as state sponsors of terrorism and under sanctions by the United States, have benefited from cooperation in the face of Western attempts to isolate them.

    Sudan, which is separated from Saudi Arabia by a few hundred kilometers across the Red Sea, has helped Iran project its influence into Africa by serving as the key entry point for Iranian weapons exports to the continent, arms monitors say.

    It is also widely believed to allow covert weapons shipments destined for Iran-backed groups, such as Hamas in Palestine, to pass through its territory, at times prompting Israeli bombing of those convoys.

    In exchange, Sudan has benefited from Iranian weapons technology that has helped Sudan become one of the major arms producers in Africa, arms monitors say.

    Khartoum denies taking part in these activities.

    Sudan’s growing role as an arms exporter has helped to bolster its economy since it lost much of its oil revenue when South Sudan seceded in 2011, and Khartoum also appears to supply some allies in the region for ideological purposes, said Jonah Leff of Conflict Armaments Research.

    But with double digit inflation and high unemployment, Sudan needs Gulf investments more than it needs Iranian weapons.

    After his surprise announcement that Sudan would join the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Bashir said that Gulf states would lift banking restrictions put in place last year.

    A spokesman for Sudan’s central bank said more Saudi and Emirati banks were dealing with Sudanese financial institutions now than they had recently. A banking source confirmed that there was more activity from the Gulf in past weeks.

    Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Sudan also said his government would encourage investors to pump money into Sudan’s agriculture sector, which makes up most of Sudan’s exports.

    “There will be new investments in the agriculture sector, and they will be huge investments. We hope Sudan will be ready for this,” Ambassador Faisal bin Hamed al-Mualla told journalists this month, weeks after the Yemen campaign began.

    Sudan has balked at the suggestion that it traded its support for the Yemen campaign for the promise of economic aid.

    The foreign ministry said Sudan joined the campaign to ensure the safety of Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia, though it remains unclear if Sudanese forces have actually participated in the fighting.

    “We do not sell our positions,” Hamid Mumtaz, the ruling party’s political secretary, told Reuters during the elections, when campaign posters showed Bashir pictured with Saudi’s King Salman and foreign policy seemed to play an outsized role.

    VOTER SUPPORT

    Many voters said they supported Bashir because of the expected rapprochement with the Gulf.

    “Bashir has put us on the right side of things. The Saudis have the money to rebuild Egypt, imagine what they can do here,” said Abdulrahman Hassan, a 52-year-old voter.

    While Gulf investment could increase, it is unlikely that Saudi or its allies will move to prop up Bashir as they did President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in neighbouring Egypt.

    Saudi Arabia worries that Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Riyadh opposes, drive policy in Bashir’s government, analysts say, and there is growing anxiety in Sudan’s ruling party that Bashir will sideline Islamists.

    “The National Congress Party has always been split, and Bashir has done a good job of balancing that split. But he has less reason to keep the Islamists in government now,” a government source said.

    But he can’t move against Brotherhood-linked politicians without jeopardizing the coalition of security commanders and Islamists that have guaranteed his rule so far, the source said.

    Despite the economic pull of Saudi Arabia, influential elements in government will resist cutting Iran ties completely.

    The military and other security services have benefited from the Iran relationship and will likely keep their own lines of communication to Tehran open, analysts said, allowing Sudan to reshuffle its ties to the regional powers in the future.

    “This game in which you try to deal with multiple suitors is a function of the weakness of the regime. The reason they have to do this, almost cap in hand, is because of failed economic policies and the need to access patronage,” said Harry Vanderhoeven at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. “It’s very pragmatic. And given Sudan’s past it’s very reversible if the regional constellation makes it necessary.” (Additional reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz)

  • Want to shoot machine guns with the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden? That’ll be $50,000, please. - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/04/24/want-to-shoot-machine-guns-with-the-navy-seal-who-killed-osama-bin-l


    Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill is shown here during a deployment to Liberia. (Photo courtesy Robert J. O’Neill)

    Key contributors to a conservative group have received a special invitation: For $50,000, they can shoot guns and hang out this June with Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL credited with killing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

    The offer was recently made by the ForAmerica organization. Those invited have until May 10 to RSVP for an event at the Amangani Resort Hotel in Jackson Hole, Wyo. The facility offers picturesque views of the Snake River, and is on the southern tip of Grand Teton National Park. A room there can cost more than $1,000 per night.

    Le premier inscrit, très motivé malgré son grand âge, a consenti à révéler son nom. Il s’agit de Hassan ibn el Sabbah.

  • ISIS turns on its creator, a marginalized, drained al-Qaida - Middle East - Israel News | Haaretz
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/.premium-1.651107

    Ideology is far from the best to tool to use when attempting to decipher the constantly shifting kaleidoscope of Jihadist alliances, from Syria to Afghanistan.
    By Zvi Bar’el

    A special event is rocking jihadist groups these days. This week, for the first time in twenty years, The Afghani Taliban published the life story of their leader Mullah Omar. Omar, who hosted and protected Osama Bin Laden before the attacks on September 11, took great care for many years to remain undercover, fostering a secretive, mysterious image. He was known to very few people, his photo was never published and his lifestyle and whereabouts were unknown.

    Thus the publication of his history, education and numerous feats against the “American enemy” is an exceptional occurrence evoking much interest, particularly due to its timing. According to Afghani and Pakistani pundits who follow Islamic organizations in the two countries, the reason for shedding the layer of mystery around Omar is the increasing defection of senior Taliban leaders towards the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) organization, based on their sense that the Taliban leader can no longer fulfill the prime mission of the group, that he is disconnected from his followers and mainly because Taliban funding sources are drying up.

    Other sections of the Taliban oppose the attempts at reconciliation with the Afghani government, concerned that this reconciliation – the success of which is doubtful – will isolate the Taliban from their power bases. This requires that Mullah Omar appear in public, presenting himself as the only leader in the eyes of the Taliban, thus trying to stanch the flow of deserters going to the “ISIS caliphate of Khorasan,” which is portraying itself as the sole representative of Islamist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and India.

    At the other end of the Middle East there have been recent reports that Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is considering stepping down as the group’s leader. These reports claim that he has transmitted messages to various branches of the group, releasing them from their vows of allegiance to the group, calling on them to join other Islamist groups, including Islamic State, and continue operating within them. The most detailed such report comes from Ayman Din, a former Al-Qaida operative, who left the organization in the 1990s but still maintains close ties to Islamic groups.

    In an interview to the London daily Al-Khayat, he related that al-Zawahiri feels he can no longer compete with Islamic State. Even though he’s succeeded in setting up three new branches - in Somalia (the al- Shabab organization), in Egypt’s Sinai and in India - the internal conflicts within these branches, including the most important one in Yemen, where some of his operatives crossed the lines and joined Islamic State, have transformed Al-Qaida into a secondary and even marginal group.

    In Syria too, in which Al-Qaida operates through its proxy Jabhat al-Nusra, headed by Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, al-Qaida’s situation is not great. Jabhat al-Nusra linked up with al-Qaida at a late stage of the civil war in Syria, following a bitter clash between al-Joulani and Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Al-Baghdadi, who headed Al-Qaida in Iraq before arriving in Syria, was told by al-Zawahiri to return to Iraq and conduct operations from there, leaving Jabhat al-Nusra to conduct the war in Syria. Al- Baghdadi, who was already in control of many areas of Syria, rejected this demand and in effect announced the severing of his links with al-Qaida, heaping abuse at al-Zawahiri in the process.

    However, it seems that the leadership of Jabhat al-Nusra is also facing a serious dilemma. Qatar, which has financed and fed the group for years, wants the group to dissociate itself from al-Qaida and join what are mistakenly labeled the “moderate” groups. The objective of this is to remove Jabhat al-Nusra from the U.S. Administration’s list of terrorist groups, thus allowing Qatar to support it directly without causing itself any embarrassment. It would thus join the common struggle against Islamic State and Syrian president Bashar Assad.

    However, Jabhat al-Nusra, which controls several strategic areas such as parts of the Syrian city of Idlib, parts of the Golan Heights and the Daraa area, has yet to make a choice. The group can’t see any advantage in dissociating from al-Qaida, which would force it to join the fighting alongside groups that differ from it ideologically, and possibly even having to share control over areas it already holds and from which it currently reaps financial profits.

    On the other hand, rejecting Qatar’s demands risks losing the financial support it enjoys. If Qatar convinces Turkey to join the attempts to budge Jabhat al-Nusra, its refusal may also block the vital free passage to and from Turkey, now available to its fighters. These calculations illustrate the fact that loyalty to al-Qaida or its absence is not dependent on ideological grounds but on pragmatic considerations that relate to the group’s very survival. The faction is therefore considering setting up a new group with a different name, which will allow its removal from the list of terrorist groups and secure its funding. However, such a move may lead to further splitting of the group, which will weaken it militarily and thus debilitate its bargaining power vis-à-vis Qatar.

    Jabhat al-Nusra was dealt another severe blow this week when it lost the battle for the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus. The most significant armed group within the camp is the Hamas-affiliated Aknaf Bayt al-Maqdis. As such, it is supported by the Muslim Brothers in Syria, the rivals of Jabhat al-Nusra. This rivalry played well into the hands of Islamic State - and according to some reports, al-Nusra activists even assisted Islamic State fighters in their battles with the Hamas-linked group.

    It’s doubtful whether these moves by Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, were coordinated with or reported to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is ideologically far removed from both Islamic State and the Muslim Brothers. The constantly shifting kaleidoscope that presents new patterns of alliances - often illogical - between different groups, makes the exact pigeonholing of each group irrelevant. It no longer makes any difference if Jabhat al-Nusra is linked to al-Qaida or is even financed by it, if in some local arenas it cooperates with Islamic State while in others it fights it. This is also how one should relate to the “pledge of allegiance” to Islamic State, taken by more than 30 Islamic groups across the world, or to the abandonment of al-Qaida by some of these groups. Islamic State needs these allegiances in order to portray itself as the largest and strongest organization, and in order to depose - if not to eradicate - al-Qaida as a competing organization. This is the same manner in which al-Qaida operated before a competitor that now threatens its existence grew within its own ranks.

    At the outset, Osama Bin Laden distinguished between two kinds of enemies. The nearby ones; those Arab or Muslim regimes who are not implementing Islam correctly - and the distant enemy, mainly the West, intent on disseminating its culture and controlling Islamic states while endangering their religious values. The fight against the two enemies must be waged in parallel, determined Bin Laden. Following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the distant enemy became much more accessible due to its presence in these occupied countries. This fact helped al-Qaida recruit supporters based not only on religious grounds but on national ones, thus mobilizing thousands of volunteers across Muslim nations for a war against the occupying Western armies.

    Subsequently, Bin Laden set up branches in most Muslim nations, basing them on local radical and terrorist groups whose main aim was to fight local regimes - but who also provided activists for international operations. On this al-Qaida infrastructure, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is basing his widespread control network. With such a structure, Islamic State can afford to suffer defeat in one country or region, but its infrastructure will continue to exist, continuing to absorb local al-Qaida branches.

  • 3 times U.S. foreign policy helped to create the Islamic State - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/09/3-times-u-s-foreign-policy-helped-to-create-the-islamic-state

    In a new paper for the Brookings Institution, Cole Bunzel, an expert on the Islamic State at Princeton University, (...) finds that three actions of recent United State foreign policy inadvertently helped create the conditions that would allow a self-proclaimed “caliphate” in the Middle East to come into existence. Here’s how the Islamic State’s caliphate went from a dim idea to a grim reality in a little over a decade.

    1. The war in Afghanistan

    Bunzel’s paper, titled “From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State,” shows that as far back as late 2001 or early 2002, members of al-Qaeda were discussing the idea of an Iraq-based “caliphate” with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who founded al-Qaeda in Iraq – a key precursor to the Islamic State.

    Al-Qaeda military strategist Sayf-al’Adl claims to have discussed the idea while both he and Zarqawi were in Iran, where they had fled following the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan. “This [would be] our historic opportunity by the means of which perhaps we would be able to establish the Islamic State, which would have the main role in eradicating oppression and helping establish the Truth in the world, god willing,” Adl wrote of Zarqawi’s plan to relocate to Iraq.

    As the paper notes, at this point Zarqawi had not yet pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda (his notable hatred for Shiite Muslims was a source of disagreement with the group), and it isn’t clear whether the plan for an Iraq-based caliphate came from Zarqawi or al-Qaeda itself. What is important, Bunzel explains in an e-mail, is that the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan shaped this plan: Until 2001, al-Qaeda had viewed Afghanistan and Taliban leader Mullah Omar as the future of an Islamic caliphate. “With the loss of Afghanistan in 2001, [Adl] and others were looking for a new host for the caliphate project,” Bunzel says.

    Al-Qaeda members would later admit that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan would force them to change their plans. "Had this emirate [the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan] persisted, it would have been the beginning of the desired caliphal Islamic state for all the world’s Muslims," Adl later wrote in a 2005 letter to Zarqawi.

    2. The war in Iraq

    While the Afghanistan war sparked a new search for a potential caliphate, it was another war that made that candidate actually look realistic. “In 2001/2, the Iraq-based caliphate was just an ambition,” Bunzel explains, “but after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it appeared to al-Qaeda to be a serious possibility now.”

    After the Iraq war in March 2003, Zarqawi began to focus his attention on the country. In 2004, he pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden, renaming his group from Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad to Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn ("al-Qaeda in Iraq"). In 2005, Bunzel’s paper shows how three separate al-Qaeda leaders wrote to Zarqawi in 2005, urging him to set up an Islamic state in Iraq. Notably, Ayman al-Zawahiri, then the al-Qaeda’s second in command, told Zarqawi that he hoped such a state would “reach the status of the caliphate.”

    Despite the shared aim, from the start the relationship between al-Qaeda’s core and al-Qaeda in Iraq had its problems. In one noteworthy exchange, after a series of beheadings were carried out by Zarqawi’s group and released on videotape, Zawahiri wrote to him to urge him to stop the practice because other Muslims "will never find [the images] palatable."

    However, the rising power of the Shiite majority in post-war Iraq seems to have been a boon for Zarqawi’s extreme sectarian viewpoint, and by 2006 al-Qaeda in Iraq looked close to establishing its own Sunni state.

    Then, on June 7, a U.S. airstrike killed Zarqawi. Al-Qaeda in Iraq soon stopped existing in any official strategy.

    Instead, a group of Sunni jihadist groups rebranded themselves under a new title: “The Islamic State of Iraq.” Here, the idea of a Middle East-based caliphate proposed in 2001/2002 became a core idea. Abu ’Umar al-Baghdadi, a former Iraqi policeman whose real name was Hamid Dawud Khalil al-Zawi, was announced as its “Commander of the Faithful” – the title officially given to leaders of the caliphate in Islamic history and traced him to the lineage of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (this man in turn was killed in 2010, though the U.S. government had tried to cast doubt on whether he actually existed).

    Bunzel’s report notes that while the founding of “The Islamic State of Iraq” was greeted as big news on jihadi online forums, it struggled to unite Sunni Islamist groups in Iraq, and had a fraught relationship with al-Qaeda. For years after its founding in 2006, this "Islamic State" failed to materialize in any practical terms, instead turning into what Bunzel describes as a “paper state.” But the foundations for the next stage of caliphate were being created at this point, often in American-run prisons like Camp Bucca, where extremist Islamists mixed with ex-members of Iraq’s Baath party, combing their religious fervor with military know-how.

    3. The death of Osama bin Laden

    One of the men held at Camp Bucca was Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri, who was held there in 2004 but later released as he was not seen as a high level threat. After Abu ’Umar al-Baghdadi was killed in 2010, Badri was named the new leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, given the title of “commander of the faithful” and tied to Muhammad’s bloodline. His new name was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.

    For a while, this new Baghdadi didn’t really do much. It took him two years to publish an audio address, and official statements didn’t appear from the Islamic State of Iraq’s new leaders until mid-2011. This wasn’t because they were inept (in fact, Bunzel argues that they were clearly far more talented than the previous leaders). Instead, it looks a lot like they were waiting for a perfect opportunity.

    It was only in 2012 the group suddenly announce their return. And the next year, on April 9, 2013, Baghdadi announced the expansion of the Islamic State to Sham — the Arabic word for greater Syria. Baghdadi went so far as to say that Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda branch in Syria’s brutal civil war, was now part of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Sham,” what soon become known as “ISIS.”

    The leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, issued his own statement denying this and saying that his group remained under the authority of al-Qaeda, while al-Qaeda called on the Islamic State of Iraq to remain in Iraq. Regardless, thousands of Jabhat al-Nusra fighters joined ISIS and the two groups became rivals. Relations between ISIS and al-Qaeda became poor until finally, on Feb. 2, 2014, al-Qaeda issued a statement that officially disavowed any ties with ISIS.

    • #inadvertently !

      Heureusement qu’il y a encore des doctorants (pardon, experts) pour imaginer que, peut-être (attention, hein, je dis bien peut-être) ce n’était pas forcément une bonne idée :
      1. d’envahir l’Afghanistan,
      2. d’envahir l’Irak,
      3. assassiner Ben Laden.

      Cole Bunzel | Foreign Policy Research Institute
      http://www.fpri.org/taxonomy/term/2851/0

      Cole Bunzel is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, where his research focuses on the history of Wahhabism, the puritan Islamic reform movement in Saudi Arabia. A former fellow with the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Damascus, Syria, he has also studied and researched in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Additionally, his works deals in depth with the jihadi movement identified with such groups as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS). He writes for the blog www.jihadica.com and is the author of, most recently, From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State (Brookings Institution, March 2015).

  • L’Ukraine est sauvée: McCain a un plan qu’il est bon! Citing Bin Laden-backed Mujahideen, McCain Makes Worst Argument Ever to Arm Ukrainian Military
    https://www.districtsentinel.com/citing-bin-laden-backed-mujahideen-mccain-makes-worst-argument-eve

    Incensed by the lieutenant general’s analysis, McCain pointed to the 1980’s Soviet war in Afghanistan as a success story of what happens when the US commits weapons in a proxy war against the Russians.

    “I’m sure that the Russians had a significant advantage when they invaded Afghanistan. I’m sure that throughout history when we’ve helped people who’ve been invaded and oppressed and when we haven’t, [we’ve seen] what the consequences have been.”

    In the case of Afghanistan, the consequences, which have been widely and exhaustively reported, were the rise of the Taliban and decades of war, and over 13 years of a US military campaign against the very same people that the Pentagon covertly armed in the 1980’s—militants who included Osama Bin Laden himself.

    (via Angry Arab)

  • Abu Qatada/Ben Laden : Arab Daily News présente ses excuses pour avoir mal retranscrit les propos d’Abu Qatada sur Ben Laden et clarifie les propos

    http://thearabdailynews.com/2014/11/05/clarification-abu-qatadas-interview

    The Arab Daily News published an interview with Shaikh Abu Qatada on November 3, 2014 which was a collection of discussions that took place on several occasions at his house and elsewhere. The published material contained one crucial error regarding Shaikh Abu Qatada’s position on Osama Bin Laden.

    By Ali Younes

    The Arab Daily News published an interview with Shaikh Abu Qatada on November 3, 2014 which was a collection of discussions that took place on several occasions at his house and elsewhere. The published material contained one crucial error regarding Shaikh Abu Qatada’s position on Osama Bin Laden.

    Originally I wrote, that Shaikh Abu Qatada “had never pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden and that he advised others to do the same and that Bin Laden was not qualified religiously to lead the Muslims.”

    Several readers drew my attention to this point that it was “inaccurate” and “not true”.

    While I am grateful to those who pointed that error to me, I should point out that many based their collective judgments on the whole piece on a bad Google-translation from English into Arabic and that translation contained many mistakes and many wrong words that changed many of the meanings in the article. That’s why we included an accurate Arabic translation here to prevent any possible misunderstanding.

    The honorable Shaikh Abu Qatada also protested that quote as a line that does not reflect accurately what he said in Arabic.

    After checking with my notes on that line regarding Bin Laden, I found that we made a mistake. Shaikh Abu Qatada is right. That line has since been removed from the story.
    What the Shaikh actually said on this issue in Arabic and in full was that he “never pledged allegiance to Bin Laden, and that before September 11, no one including many Islamic Jihadist groups pledged allegiance to him. But After September 11, things changed, and many groups and individuals, pledged allegiance to Bin Laden and Al Qaida and considered Bin Laden as the leader of Muslims.”

    I don’t want to make excuses for that error and there is no excuse for it. It was my mistake alone and I apologize first to Shaikh Abu Qatada who graciously allowed me into his house and trusted me with his thoughts and views and second to the readers of the Arab Daily News.

    توضيح : حول مقابلة الشيخ أبو قتادة

    .بقلم : علي يونس

    نشرت عرب ديلي نيوز مقابلة مع الشيخ أبو قتادة في 3 نوفمبر 2014 والذي كان عبارة عن مجموعة من المناقشات التي جرت في عدة مناسبات في منزله وأماكن أخرى . المادة المنشورة في المقال احتوت على خطأ واحد مهم بشأن موقف الشيخ أبو قتادة من أسامة بن لادن .فقد كنت قد كتبت أن الشيخ أبو قتادة ” لم يسبق له أن بايع أسامة بن لادن وأنه نصح الآخرين بفعل الشيء نفسه ، وأن بن لادن لم يكن مؤهلا دينيا وعلمياً لقيادة المسلمين”. بعد نشر المقال لفت العديد من القراء انتباهي إلى هذه النقطة بأنها كانت ” غير دقيقة” و ” غير صحيحه ” . هذا و أنا ممتن جداً للذين أشارو إلى هذا الخطأ . أود أن أذكر هنا ، بالاضافة، إلى أن العديد من القراء بنى حكمه على المقال بمجمله بناء على ترجمة جوجل من الإنجليزية إلى العربية و هي ترجمة غير دقيقه وتحتوي الكثير من الاخطاء و الكثير من الكلمات الخاطئة والتي غيرت الكثير من المعاني في المقال. هذا وقد إحتج واعترض الشيخ الجليل أبو قتادة على الاقتباس الخاطى الذي لا يعكس بدقة ما قاله. وعليه، و بعد التحقق من ملاحظاتي المكتوبة حول هذا السطر، المتعلق ببن لادن ، وجدت أنني قد ارتكبت خطاً . إعتراض الشيخ أبو قتادة هو الصحيح. وعليه فقد تم إزالة هذا السطر من المقال. ما قاله الشيخ في الحقيقة هو أنه “لم يبايع بالولاء ل أسامة بن لادن ، و قبل 11 سبتمبر لا أحد بما في ذلك العديد من المجموعات الجهادية الإسلامية بايع بالولاء لبن لادن . ولكن بعد أحداث 11 سبتمبر تغيرت الامور ، وبايع العديد من الجماعات والأفراد، أسامة بن لادن و- القاعدة و اعتبرو بن لادن كزعيم للمسلمين ” . بالرغم من أن هذا الخطأ كان غير مقصود و انه لم يكن أبداً هناك نوايا سيئه من قبلي ، فلا أريد هنا تقديم الأعذار لهذا الخطأ وليس هناك عذرا لذلك . كان خطأي وحدي وأنا أعتذر أولا إلى الشيخ أبو قتادة الذي استقبلني مشكورا في منزله ووثق بي من خلال مشاركته لي أفكاره ووجهات نظره و ثانيا الى قراء عرب ديلي نيوز الذين نرجو أن نبقى عند حسن ظنهم وثقتهم دوماً.

  • Jihad for Dummies. Les « chemins de la radicalisation » sont impénétrables : L’Islam pour les Nuls, Le Coran pour les Nuls et L’Arabe pour les Nuls :
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/two-british-men-admit-linking-extremist-group-syria

    Their path to radicalisation involved inspiration from material from Osama bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, online material, and using the internet to chat with extremists overseas. As part of their preparations they ordered books online from Amazon, including titles such as Islam For Dummies, the Koran For Dummies and Arabic For Dummies.

  • Iraq crisis: Sunni caliphate has been bankrolled by Saudi Arabia - Voices - The Independent
    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iraq-crisis-sunni-caliphate-has-been-bankrolled-by-saudi-arabia-95333

    So after the grotesquerie of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 suicide killers of 9/11, meet Saudi Arabia’s latest monstrous contribution to world history: the Islamist Sunni caliphate of Iraq and the Levant, conquerors of Mosul and Tikrit – and Raqqa in Syria – and possibly Baghdad, and the ultimate humiliators of Bush and Obama.

    Fisk ne fait pas dans la dentelle ! J’aime assez la conclusion :

    Finally, we will be invited to regard the future as a sectarian war when it will be a war between Muslim sectarians and Muslim non-sectarians. The “terror” bit will be provided by the arms we send to all sides.