Patrons of Sharia militants release 73 captured Yemeni soldiers

A provincial official said:"Al-Qaeda has released 73 soldiers they seized in the south in early March," The official was speaking in the city of Jaar which is held by the militant group Ansar Al-Sharia (Partisans of Sharia). The group is often said to be Al Qaeda linked or by this official simply Al Qaeda. This blurring of distinctions between groups is probably a deliberate tactic of Yemeni officials since the U.S. is bound to help them as long as they are fighting Al Qaeda.

The official claimed that two busloads of soldiers were driven from Jaar to Aden the main port city in the south. The official said that religious and tribal mediators had secured their release. There were rumors that they were to be executed. There is no account of what the militants were given in exchange. Perhaps there are promises that local tribes will not take part in government attempts to drive out the militants from areas they occupy.On March 4 the militants had successfully attacked an army base near Zinjibar killing 185 soldiers and capturing the 73 who are now released.

The president of Yemen Hadi recently held talks with the FBI director Robert Mueller. No doubt there will be renewed attempts to dislodge militants from areas they occupy. This will stir up more unrest in the south that already has a separatist movement as well as militant groups. For more see this article.

Obama Team divided on limits of presidential power.

This is all a bit bizarre. It is important to pay attention to framing in reading material such as this. The frame parameters always remain uncriticized and virtually unnoticed. In this article part of the frame involves the concept of the War on Terror. This is taken to be a war like any other war so that one can start applying the rules of war--and usually spinning them to fit the strangeness of the enemy who lacks real armed forces, uniforms, etc. or association with any particular nation. If the war on terror were like the war on drugs or crime in general most of the discussion would be irrelevant. One would not be discussing drone attacks for example if this were a war on crime or who could be targeted for killing.

Obama Team Is Divided on Tactics Against Terrorism
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON — Senior lawyers in the Obama administration are deeply divided over some of the counterterrorism powers they inherited from former President George W. Bush, according to interviews and a review of legal briefs.

The rift has been most pronounced between top lawyers in the State Department and the Pentagon, though it has also involved conflicts among career Justice Department lawyers and political appointees throughout the national security agencies.

The discussions, which shaped classified court briefs filed this month, have centered on how broadly to define the types of terrorism suspects who may be detained without trials as wartime prisoners. The outcome of the yearlong debate could reverberate through national security policies, ranging from the number of people the United States ultimately detains to decisions about who may be lawfully selected for killing using drones.

“Beyond the technical legal issues, this debate is about the fundamental question of whom we are at war with,” said Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who specializes in war-power issues. “The two problems most plaguing Obama in the war on terrorism are trials for terrorists and taking the fight beyond Afghanistan to places like Pakistan and Yemen. This issue of whom we are at war with defines both of them.”

In the years after the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Bush claimed virtually unlimited power as commander in chief to detain those he deemed a threat — a view so boundless that his Justice Department once told a court that it was within the president’s lawful discretion to imprison as an enemy combatant even a “little old lady in Switzerland” who had unwittingly donated to Al Qaeda.

But President Obama and his team, which criticized such claims as an overreach, have sought to demonstrate that the executive branch can wage war while also respecting limits imposed on presidential power by what they see as the rule of law.

In March 2009, the Obama legal team adopted a new position about who was detainable in the war on terrorism — one that showed greater deference to the international laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, than Mr. Bush had. But what has not been known is that while the administration has stuck to that broad principle, it has been arguing over how to apply the body of law, which was developed for conventional armies, to a war against a terrorist organization.

An examination of that conflict offers rich insight into how the team of former law professors and campaign lawyers, nearly all veterans of the Clinton administration, is shaping important policies under Mr. Obama.

In February 2009, just weeks after the inauguration, John D. Bates, a federal judge overseeing several cases involving detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, asked a provocative question: Did the new administration want to modify Mr. Bush’s position that the president could wield sweeping powers to imprison people without trial as wartime detainees?

Career Justice Department lawyers handling Guantánamo lawsuits feared that rolling back the Bush position might make it harder to win. And the new acting head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel — David Barron, a Harvard law professor and co-author of a lengthy law review critique of Bush administration claims that the commander in chief can override statutes — worried that Judge Bates had given them too little time to devise the answer.

But the White House counsel, Greg Craig, a campaign adviser to Mr. Obama who had been a foreign policy official in the Clinton administration, saw this as an important opportunity to demonstrate a break with Mr. Bush. And at a White House meeting, Mr. Obama weighed in, declaring that he did not want to invoke unrestrained commander-in-chief powers in detention matters.

With the president’s directions in hand, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department came back on March 13, 2009, with a more modest position than Mr. Bush had advanced. It told Judge Bates that the president could detain without trial only people who were part of Al Qaeda or its affiliates, or their “substantial” supporters. The department rooted that power in the authorization granted by Congress to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. And it acknowledged that the scope and limits of that power were defined by the laws of war, as translated to a conflict against terrorists.

But behind closed doors, the debate flared again that summer, when the Obama administration confronted the case of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian man who had been arrested in Bosnia — far from the active combat zone — and was being held without trial by the United States at Guantánamo. Mr. Bensayah was accused of facilitating the travel of people who wanted to go to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda. A judge found that such “direct support” was enough to hold him as a wartime prisoner, and the Justice Department asked an appeals court to uphold that ruling.

The arguments over the case forced onto the table discussion of lingering discontent at the State Department over one aspect of the Obama position on detention. There was broad agreement that the law of armed conflict allowed the United States to detain as wartime prisoners anyone who was actually a part of Al Qaeda, as well as nonmembers who took positions alongside the enemy force and helped it. But some criticized the notion that the United States could also consider mere supporters, arrested far away, to be just as detainable without trial as enemy fighters.

That view was amplified after Harold Koh, a former human-rights official and Yale Law School dean who had been a leading critic of the Bush administration’s detainee policies, became the State Department’s top lawyer in late June. Mr. Koh produced a lengthy, secret memo contending that there was no support in the laws of war for the United States’ position in the Bensayah case.

Mr. Koh found himself in immediate conflict with the Pentagon’s top lawyer, Jeh C. Johnson, a former Air Force general counsel and trial lawyer who had been an adviser to Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign. Mr. Johnson produced his own secret memorandum arguing for a more flexible interpretation of who could be detained under the laws of war — now or in the future.

In September 2009, national-security officials from across the government packed into the Office of Legal Counsel’s conference room on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, lining the walls, to watch Mr. Koh and Mr. Johnson debate around a long table. It was up to Mr. Barron, who sat at the head of the table, to decide who was right.

But he did not. Instead, days later, he circulated a preliminary draft memorandum stating that while the Office of Legal Counsel had found no precedents justifying the detention of mere supporters of Al Qaeda who were picked up far away from enemy forces, it was not prepared to state any definitive conclusion.

So with no consensus, the legal team decided on a tactical approach. For as long as possible they would try to avoid that hard question. They changed the subject by instead asking courts to agree that people like Mr. Bensayah, looked at from another angle, had performed functions that made them effectively part of the terrorist organization — and so were clearly detainable.

The appeals court has not yet ruled on Mr. Bensayah’s case. But the hours and effort that high-level officials expended on wrestling over adjustments to the reasoning in his case — only to reach the same outcome, that he was detainable without trial — dovetailed with a pattern identified by critics as varied as civil libertarians and former Bush lawyers.

“I think the change in tone has been important and has helped internationally,” said John B. Bellinger III, a top Bush era National Security Council and State Department lawyer. “But the change in law has been largely cosmetic. And of course there has been no change in outcome.”

But at a recent American Bar Association event, Mr. Koh argued that the administration’s changes — including requiring strict adherence to anti-torture rules and ensuring that all detainees are being held pursuant to recognizable legal authorities — have been meaningful. The United States, he said, can now defend its national-security policies as fully compliant with domestic and international law under “common and universal standards, not double standards.”

“We are not saying that we don’t have to fight battles,” he said. “We’re just saying that we should fight those battles within the framework of law.”

Last week, in another speech, Mr. Koh also for the first time outlined portions of the administration’s legal rationale for targeted killings using drone strikes, which some scholars have criticized. His remarks, however, focused on issues like whether it was lawful to single out specific enemy figures for killing — not defining the limits of who may be deemed an enemy.

But Mr. Feldman, the Harvard professor, said the detention debate also had “serious consequences” for the targeted killings policy because, “If we’re at war with you, then we can detain you — but we can also try to kill you.”

That said, he cautioned, additional factors complicate the analysis of selecting lawful targets. Among them, it is not clear whether Mr. Obama is more willing in classified settings to assert that, as commander in chief, he can use drone strikes to defend the country against perceived threats that cannot be linked to the Congressionally authorized war against Al Qaeda.

And even in detention matters, Bush-era theories have remained attractive to some. This January, two appeals court judges appointed by Mr. Bush — Janice Rogers Brown and Brett M. Kavanaugh, both of whom had been singled out by Democrats after their nominations as too ideological — reopened the debate by unexpectedly declaring, in another Guantánamo case, that the laws of armed conflict did not limit the president’s war powers.

In the Justice Department, career litigators who defend against Guantánamo lawsuits wanted to embrace that reasoning, arguing it would help them win. Judges have sided with detainees seeking release in some 34 of 46 cases to date — though the decisions largely turned on skepticism about specific evidence, not the general legal theory about who was detainable.

But political appointees — including Mr. Barron, Mr. Koh and even Mr. Johnson — criticized the reasoning of the appeals court ruling as vulnerable to reversal and argued that the administration should not abandon its respect for the laws of war.

In classified briefs filed in several detainee cases this month, officials said, the Justice Department adopted an ambivalent stance. It cited the ruling as a precedent while also reasserting its own contradictory argument that the laws of war matter. The debate would go on.

“We’ll see how the cases develop,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview in February, in the midst of that latest round. But, he added, “I don’t think we are going to deviate from our argument.”

The Thirty Billion Dollar Pair of Underpants.

For the most part the costs associated with increased security will over time simply be accepted as consumers pay for this in increased costs of air fares. However the cost of the extension of the war on terror to c0untries such as Yemen, Somalia, and Nigeria are almost incalculable. Of course the US had already been conducting a virtually unreported low level military operations in Yemen but it would seem from the flurry of news articles that preparations are being made for further intervention. As military costs increase and the US debt increases by leaps and bounds there will necessarily be cuts to the social safety net in the US. This is from aljazeera.


The $30bn pair of underpants

By Mark LeVine



Guarding against similar attacks could cost tens of billions of dollars [GALLO/GETTY]

Almost immediately after it was learned that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a US airliner using explosives concealed in his underpants, received training in Yemen, US politicians called for Barack Obama, the US president, to expand the 'war on terror' - which remains very much a war despite the administration's official ban of such vocabulary - to that country.

The president obliged, declaring that the US would strike anywhere to prevent another attack.

Such calls were in fact unnecessary, as the US is already involved in Yemen, supervising attacks on militants that have been credited by analysts with helping to further inflame anti-Americanism and support for al-Qaeda in the country.

Indeed, far from heralding a more successful US effort to stamp out Islamist terrorism, the soon to be deepening footprint in Yemen is a sure sign of America's defeat in the war against violent extremism in the Muslim world.

'Boots on the ground'

Think about it. One angry young man with about three ounces (around 80 grams) of explosive material, $2,000, and a pair of specially tailored underwear has completely disrupted the US aviation system.

It does not even matter that he failed to blow up the plane.

The costs associated with preventing the next attack from succeeding will measure in the tens of billions of dollars - new technologies, added law enforcement and security personnel on and off planes, lost revenues for airline companies and more expensive plane tickets, and of course, the expansion of the 'war on terror' full on to yet another country, Yemen.

And what happens when the next attacker turns out to have received ideological or logistical training in yet another country? Perhaps in Nigeria, which is home to a strong and violent Salafi movement, or anyone of a dozen other African, Gulf, Middle Eastern or South East Asian countries where al-Qaeda has set up shop?

Will the US ramp up its efforts in a new country each time there is an attempted attack, putting US "boots on the ground" against an enemy that is impossible to defeat?

Such a policy would fulfill al-Qaeda's wildest dreams, as the US suffers death by a thousand cuts, bleeding out in an ever wider web of interconnected and unsustainable global conflicts.

The European connection

As with the 9/11 attacks, Europe figures prominently in the current attacks. Then it was Germany, this time it was London, where Abdulmutallab studied and apparently began his descent into extremism.

Europe's role is not surprising, and in the case of London, particularly apt.




After centuries as a primary purchaser and transporter of slaves to the Americas from west equatorial Africa, the British used the abolishment of the slave trade to interfere ever more into the economy of the Niger Delta until it assumed increasing colonial control in the mid third of the 19th century, creating the modern state of Nigeria as part of the process (the British gained control of Aden and surrounding areas of Yemen around the same time).

The rampant poverty, corruption and violence that today plague Nigeria are an inheritance of British rule, which itself was built up on centuries of slave raiding and trading - among the most corrupt and violent of activities - by the indigenous elites of the region with Europe, a devil's bargain that haunts this part of the world to the present day.

Should the US be invading London for providing material support to terrorism?

It took decades after the end of the British empire for the impact of British colonialism in South Asia and Africa to blow back onto British soil. The US has not even finished her imperial moment and it has already arrived.

The US will now become ever more deeply involved across the arc of instability beginning in Nigeria and stretching across Africa, the Middle East and into Central Asia.

In the process, it will deepen the mistakes that have made attacks such as the one attempted by Abdulmutallab inevitable.

Poverty and oppression

This is clear from the New York Times' New Year's eve editorial about Yemen, which warned of the importance of "heading off full chaos" in the country.

"Yemen's government is corrupt and repressive," the paper intoned. "But President Ali Abdullah Saleh seems to want to cooperate."

The world's paper of record is utterly clueless as to the intimate link between the corruption and oppression of the Yemeni government and its willingness to "cooperate" with the US, and the roots of radicalism in Yemen.

The New York Times, along with the rest of the mainstream media, have also ignored the role growing up so privileged in a country such as Nigeria had on Abdulmutallab, who likely saw the "moderation" (in Western eyes) of his wealthy banker father as a sign of his participation in a system that violated the most basic ethical premises of his religion and helped support poverty and oppression at home and across the Muslim world.

If the mainstream press, and with it no doubt the Obama administration, are unwilling to recognise the inextricable ties between oppression, poverty, corruption and violence by governments like Nigeria and Yemen, and the rise of religiously grounded extremism and violence there, then its increasing foot- or boot-print there will strengthen rather than weaken al-Qaeda and similar movements.

Strategy of shame

As I stood in the security line at JFK airport waiting to be frisked before boarding a New Year's day flight home, another goal, or at least consequence, of the most recent attack became apparent, one deeply tied to the obsession with physical and sexual honour in radical Islamist ideology: With this one failed action, the movement will succeed in routinising the systematic physical violation of airline travellers by our own security personnel as a part of the price of air travel.

Invasive frisking of the most intimate areas of the human body and revealing full body scans represent from a hardcore Salafi perspective an almost unbearable indignity -one they will surely relish seeing millions of the enemy routinely suffer, especially when such violations mirror the daily indignities and sexual humiliation infamously suffered by inmates in Guantanamo and other US-run prisons.

Call it a politics or strategy of shame - another weapon in the al-Qaeda arsenal that the West will have a hard time finding an answer for and which will erode support for the 'war on terror' from within even as Western governments strengthen their ties to oppressive front line states.

Osama bin Laden could not have planned it better if he tried.

Mark LeVine is currently visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden. His books include Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Supposed Security

Interesting that the author gives good evidence that with all the new surveillance it likely it would not have prevented 9/11. I can think of other reasons why that might be the case!

Supposed Security
All that high-tech gadgetry and security that's meant to keep us safe is really just an illusion, says Ottawa author Maureen Webb

Chris Cobb
The Ottawa Citizen


Sunday, April 08, 2007


Security, or the illusion of it, has become an increasingly intrusive part of our everyday lives since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

We tolerate the inconsistent security dance at airports, the lineups at international borders, inflated airport security fees attached to airfares and the inconveniences and restrictions on freedom of movement. We tolerate without necessarily being convinced that any of it makes a whit of difference to our communal safety.

That's what we know because it's in our faces every day.

In Illusions of Security, Ottawa human rights lawyer Maureen Webb focuses on what we don't know and makes the overriding point that, in the name of security, electronic surveillance of ordinary citizens has become pervasive and intrusive. And while it is largely ineffective against perceived terrorist threats, she adds, electronic surveillance is proving a boon to private industry -- both those producing the technology and those starting to use it for reasons unrelated to terrorism.

Webb, co-chair of the Ottawa-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, cautions against governments out of control and other institutions, including colleges and universities and the unlikely Professional Association of Driving Instructors, willingly handing over students' private information to government agencies.

Webb's book is nothing if not well documented and although it contains familiar passages -- the sad tale of Maher Arar and a tirade against the administration of George W. Bush, for example -- it is an important and valuable counter to the government-stoked prevailing wisdom that what we have forfeited in terms of freedom and privacy is a small price to pay for collective safety.

Global security measures, writes Webb, don't make us more secure: "They only create illusions of security. Illusions that do little to catch or stop terrorists and that ensnare the innocent, divert resources away from better initiatives, obscure our public policy debates and betray our real personal and collective security."

With that, Webb captures the essence of the civil libertarian position. But what makes her work thought-provoking even for the skeptic is the evidence that although the 9/11 attacks may have been avoidable, mass surveillance of the type now in place would not have helped stop them.

Traditional gumshoe intelligence work, she points out, had already targeted several of the 9/11 perpetrators as potential threats long before the event and there was evidence that they were planning some atrocity with an airplane. The U.S. intelligence community did not see the significance of the information they had and the Bush administration did nothing to heighten security when they were told.

She writes: "If U.S. agencies could not see the wood for the trees when they had specific information about a specific kind of threat and specific individuals, would it have helped them to sift through information on the lives of millions of people?"

Webb was inspired to write this book by the plight of Maher Arar and his wife Monia after attending a small Parliament Hill vigil in February 2003, before his disappearance, became a cause celebre.

"I couldn't quite explain why I had come," she writes. "Dragging my kids out to political rallies just wasn't something that I usually did. Perhaps I was attuned to Monia's story because at the time I was working on border issues at my job. But more than anything else, I was there as a mother -- one who had listened to another mother's story unfold on the radio over the previous five months and tried to answer my own kids' curious questions."

The mass of white middle-class Canadians who rest easy because they feel mass electronic surveillance, and increasingly sophisticated surveillance equipment, is about targeting minorities, should think again, cautions Webb.

"In the wired world of the 21st century," she writes, "most people in the developed world, and many in the developing world, have their 'wires' permanently plugged in. The information we leave behind creates an ever-accumulating, virtual picture of us, which state agents can call up to scrutinize again and again."

By which she means most transactions we perform with credit cards and debit cards and when we travel or make loan applications. To name but a few.

"These systems are indiscriminate and aren't interested in accuracy. The technologies, like biometrics and data mining, are highly flawed technologies -- they don't work. But more than that they undermine our democratic rights and institutions and as we know from the Maher Arar case, these are what protect us collectively and individually. They are thereal bulwarks against threats from irresponsible governments."

The Book

Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World.

By Maureen Webb

City Lights, $19.76.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007