Posted on 12/14/2004 10:13:13 PM PST by DoctorZIn
Top News Story
Congressman Warns of Iranian Attack on U.S.
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 14, 2004
WASHINGTON - A senior Republican congressman has been warning America's intelligence community for more than a year of an alleged Iranian plot to crash commercial airliners into a New Hampshire nuclear reactor.
Since February 2003, Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania has held a series of secret meetings in Paris with a former high-ranking official in the Shah's government who has correctly predicted, according to Mr. Weldon, a number of internal developments in Iran ranging from the regime's atomic weapons programs to its support for international terrorism, including Al Qaeda.
Based on two informants inside the mullahs' inner circle, Mr. Weldon's source, whom he code-named "Ali," relayed allegations to the Pennsylvania lawmaker that an Iranian-backed terrorist cell is seeking to hijack Canadian airliners and crash them into an American reactor. The target of the operation was only identified by Ali as SEA, leading Mr. Weldon to predict it was the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire, about 40 miles north of Boston. Ali told the congressman that the attack was first planned for between November 23 and December 3, 2003, but was postponed to take place after this year's presidential election.
For nearly two years, Mr. Weldon tried to quietly press the CIA and a Senate panel that oversees Langley to follow up on the intelligence his Iranian source in Paris was providing. But these efforts came to nothing, according to Mr. Weldon. So now Mr. Weldon is going public. The congressman said in an interview last week that he intended to publish a book early next year outlining the intelligence he has collected from various sources that he said will detail an Iranian plot to conduct a more lethal attack on America than September 11, 2001.
"I get a lot of wackos who come to see me, who claim to have information," he said. "In this case, this source came to me from a former member of Congress, a Democrat. I followed up a lead. That lead developed an ongoing process of information-sharing for two years that I took to the highest levels of the intelligence community."
In Washington, the new book from Mr. Weldon, based in part on his meetings with Ali, will provide fresh ammunition for the Republicans against an intelligence community perceived by the White House as hostile to the president's policies.
Last month, the new director of the CIA, Porter Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent many of the most senior analysts and operations officers into early retirement. In a speech he gave to the staff at Langley, Mr. Goss had to remind the employees that the president sets national security policy.
But if Mr. Weldon's source turns out to be right, America could also be losing a valuable intelligence asset on Iran, a country where most intelligence analysts in America concede the CIA has too few human sources.
The congressman's experience with America's spy service in the last year echoes frustrations from other American officials and analysts who have cultivated Iranians willing to provide America with intelligence, but who have been ignored. After a December 2001 meeting in Rome between Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar, the State Department and CIA went out of their way to shut down the channel. Mr. Franklin is now the target of a grand jury investigation into alleged espionage activities for passing information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
A summary of Ali's predictions were outlined in a November 2003 letter to the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Roberts from Kansas. In its opening lines, Mr. Weldon wrote, "This letter is to warn you of an intelligence failure in the process of happening."
Later in the letter, Mr. Weldon, who is the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote, "I am not asserting that such an attack shall occur. But given [Ali's] record of accurate predictions, shouldn't the Intelligence Community at least be investigating his story?"
The letter and an accompanying memo titled, "Ali: a Credible Source," goes into detail about information Mr. Weldon's source provided that was later confirmed in the press. For example, Ali first passed on the Iranian threat to the reactor at a Paris meeting on May 17, 2003.
On August 22, 2003, the Toronto Star reported the arrest of 19 people in Canada for immigration violations who were suspected of being connected in a terrorist conspiracy. One of the men in the cell was taking flight lessons and had flown an airplane directly over an Ontario nuclear power plant, according to the newspaper.
So, impressed with the quality of his source's information, Mr. Weldon met in 2003 with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, to plead his case to get funding for Ali. But the CIA, according to the Pennsylvania lawmaker, demanded to know the identities of Ali's sources inside Iran, a condition Mr. Weldon said was unreasonable given the high-risk espionage.
"I took this straight to the top," Mr. Weldon said in an interview. "I wanted to work through the channels but I did not get anywhere."
Frustrated with the CIA's response, Mr. Weldon took his case to the Senate panel that oversees the agency.
He pressed them in the 2003 letter to hold a hearing on the matter and urge the CIA to get Ali the money to continue to pay off his sources inside the Islamic republic. According to Mr. Weldon, the committee did not respond in any meaningful way. "One or two senior people called the chief of staff. Not the kind of response I wanted. I had to get this off my shoulders," he said in an interview.
Mr. Weldon said more of Ali's intelligence will be shared in his forthcoming book, which he promised would "shake Washington."
He said that the manuscript, which he has just completed, details how Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, "has set up a separate entity in the government the president does not know about, which includes all the terrorist groups connected to bin Laden and others. They are avowed to consummate a major attack inside the United States. In the book I name this plot."
Weldon needs to get back to what he was elected to do. Playing James Bond isn't it.
What is the nearest AFB to NH? And how long would it take for fighters to be scrambled to shoot the damn things down? Inquiring minds want to know.
Oh, I think they know we have the means, they just rightly believe we dont have the will, at least nationally, until another attack.
Pease AFB, NH
Loring AFB ME
Westover Ma AFB
Plattsburgh AFB New York
Otis AFB Ma
Westfield Ma ANG
Does anyone remember the guy who warned about 9/11 (he died in the World Trade Center). No one listened to him either. After he kept pounding his head against the wall with the CIA, he ended up taking a security position in the WTC. Just maybe this Congressman knows what he is talking about and feels he has no choice but to go public with a book to get others to start listening. There were plenty of naysayers before 9/11 too.
Is Mr. Weldon legit? I don't know anything about the man so I was wondering if he is a RINO? Personally, I don't know what to make of that article. Yeah, I guess one could say that he's just promoting his new book, but the fact that Dubya has been trying to "clean house" in our Intelligence Community says something to me. Without knowing more about Weldon, I'm inclined to believe this, and I hope it DOES shake Washington. Anyone who thinks the Mullah's aren't going to try to bring down the "great satan" needs to wake up.
I'd appreciate hearing other views on this article, and on Mr. Weldon.
Who cares what kinda info one might offer...
Actually, from what I can tell, Weldon has always been a good guy. While I'm not sure about a congressman holding secret meetings like this, Weldon is someone with enough credibility that he should be listened to IMHO.
Weldon is a lib and an opportunist. However, if he says he has Iranian sources and info, I'd believe him.
I just hope the "new CIA" is going to investigate his report...
No comments on the Iranian leaders I posted?
Minister Says Iran Is Open to U.S. Talks
By NAZILA FATHI
Published: December 15, 2004
EHRAN, Dec. 14 - Iran is willing to talk with the United States about its nuclear program if Washington treats it as an equal partner, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Tuesday.
"If negotiations are on the basis of equality and mutual respect in the same way we are talking to Europeans now, there is no reason not to talk to others," Mr. Kharrazi said in response to a question at a joint news conference with South Africa's visiting foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
Mr. Kharrazi's conciliatory comments came a day after Iran opened talks in Brussels with Germany, France and Britain on nuclear, economic and security cooperation.
He said Iran was following the talks "very seriously" and hoped Europe would keep its promises.
Iran agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment program in return for European assistance in peaceful nuclear technology.
Washington, which does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran, suspects Iran of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.
"The talks are very serious and both parities know the talks should continue," Mr. Kharrazi said of the meetings in Brussels.
"If we see the talks are waste of time and have no results," he said, "we will definitely make our own decisions. We can tell three months from now whether the talks are useful and can provide Iran's rights to have access to peaceful nuclear technology."
In Washington, a State Department official, responding to Mr. Kharrazi's comments, said the United States "has never been opposed to discussing things with Iran when something useful can be accomplished."
But he said that on the nuclear issue, Iran had "not done anything to lead one to believe that would serve a useful purpose."
American policy is to support the European negotiations with Iran, but the Bush administration remains skeptical that talks can achieve any results.
Keeping Faith in Reform, and Islam, in Iran
As Secular Movement Crumbles, Defiant Cleric Spreads Blame With a Smile[Excerpt]
By Robin WrightWashington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page A20
TEHRAN -- Mohsen Kadivar is a lonely voice in Iran these days.
A charismatic cleric with a salt-and-pepper beard and a spirited smile, Kadivar became a hero to Iranian youth during his 1999 trial for challenging Iran's rigid theocracy.
But the once-robust reform movement he symbolized virtually evaporated this year. Its political groups are in disarray. The last of 110 dissident newspapers or magazines have been shut down. Democracy advocates in parliament were barred from running again in elections last February, and student activists have been jailed or harassed.
These days, Kadivar, 45, is increasingly on his own -- and he is criticizing both conservatives and reformers.
He still stirs controversy with his scathing criticism of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the symbol of Iran's political system. Kadivar warns that Khamenei's position is growing even more powerful as reformers are marginalized.
"The supreme leader is increasing his powers . . . but not his authority. Authority you can see in the street from the people. Power you get from soldiers and security forces," said Kadivar, still defiant after spending 18 months in solitary confinement in Tehran's Evin prison for "disseminating lies" and "defaming Islam."
Interviewed in his modest, book-lined office, Kadivar said ordinary Iranians were "not satisfied" with Khamenei. "If they see him on TV, they change the channel," he said.
Kadivar said the supreme leader's absolute veto power over legislation, presidential decisions, judicial verdicts and candidates for public office has made Iran a "religious dictatorship" as unjust and illegitimate as the monarchy ousted in 1979.
"No one should be above the constitution. Most Iranians believe this but are afraid to say it," he added. "The supreme leader doesn't come from God."
By contemporary Middle Eastern standards, Iran has an unusual variety of activists and thinkers. Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her human rights campaign. Abdul Karim Soroush, a philosopher who now teaches abroad, is often called the Martin Luther of Islam for his ideas on reforming the faith.
Kadivar's younger sister, Jamileh, was a leading reform member of parliament until the Council of Guardians barred her from running again this year. Her husband, Ataollah Mohajerani, was a cabinet minister and a leading advocate of a freer press until he was squeezed out.
But as the leverage of secular reformers ebbs, Kadivar is among the few who remain a serious threat to the religious leadership because he, too, wears a white clerical turban.
"As a cleric, he speaks with more authority to the community of believers. He also reflects the split within the clerical community that is the repository of power in Iran," said Shaul Bakhash, author of "The Reign of the Ayatollahs," who teaches at George Mason University.
Other U.S.-based analysts said prospects for reform in Iran will depend heavily on younger dissident clerics challenging the original revolutionaries, who are now in their sixties and seventies.
"The clergy has been talking about these issues among themselves, but Kadivar has taken the discourse into the public domain, so he's more threatening," said Hadi Semati, a political scientist at Tehran University who is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Semati said Kadivar's greatest success has been in raising such ideas as "a redefinition of Islam compatible with democracy, and a more appropriate relationship between mosque and state."
Even within the Shiite clergy, he said, there is an appetite for alternative visions. "At least 95 percent of the clergy have not been beneficiaries of the revolution," Semati said. "Some got money and prestige, but the overwhelming majority are poor and have not been part of the power structure."
Kadivar quotes liberally from both the Koran and the 19th-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as other Western thinkers, as he builds the case for blending Islam and democracy.
"Without respecting individuality and freedom of choice, human dignity cannot be respected," he wrote in a paper presented in Brussels last month. "Any exercise of force and compulsion on people in the name of religion is forbidden."
Kadivar asserts that the conservatives' agenda is destructive for both Iran and Islam. "Our job as religious people is not politics," he said. "They are taking Iran backward, not toward the future."
But he is also hard on reformers, saying they have failed to promote their ideas aggressively. "They don't have a practical map. They were not strong. . . . They have only the appearance of parties," he said.
Kadivar said President Mohammad Khatami, a lame-duck reformist whose final term ends in mid-2005, "thought when he made a good speech, that was enough." But he added, "If you want to change society, it requires resisting. . . . Khatami didn't do this."
Kadivar's family is from Shiraz, a former Iranian capital noted for its roses, poets and good humor. A broad smile often breaks across Kadivar's face, even as he lambastes his fellow clerics -- and muses about his own vulnerability. ...
Officials have threatened to send him back to prison several times, Kadivar said, adding that for him, "It almost doesn't matter. I came out of a small prison to a big prison, because when I can't say my thoughts, I still live in a prison."
Iraqi minister says Iran is source of 'terrorism'
12-15-2004, 08h23
- (AFP/USMC)BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq's Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan accused Iran of orchestrating terrorist attacks in Iraq, saying its neighbor country was the "most dangerous enemy of Iraq".
"Iran is the most dangerous enemy of Iraq and all Arabs," Shaalan said. "The source of terrorism in Iraq is Iran."
The two countries fought a brutal eight-year war from 1980 under then leader Saddam Hussein, and lingering tensions remain, with many Iraqis still convinced that Iran is trying to undermine their country.
"Terrorism is Iraq is orchestrated by Iranian intelligence, Syrian intelligence and Saddam loyalists. The financing and training of the terrorists comes from Syria and Iran," he said.
His comments came as campaigning opened for Iraq's landmark national elections, and a day after Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Saddam Hussein's top henchmen would go to trial next week for crimes against humanity.
Wednesday also marks the end of voter registration across the violence-wracked country, and the deadline for parties to present their lists of candidates for the January 30 vote.
Allawi is widely expected to be among the candidates running from his Iraqi National Accord party, and his announcement of trials for former regime members has been seen as a bid to give him a political boost ahead of the polls.
"The trial will begin next week of the symbols of the former regime who will appear in succession to ensure that justice is done in Iraq," Allawi said Tuesday.
Saddam, seized by US forces along with 11 of his top Baathist lieutenants, is being held at Camp Cropper, a vast US base near Baghdad's international airport, Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin confirmed.
All 12 appeared in court in July for the first time since their capture to hear preliminary charges of crimes against humanity leveled against them.
In Amman, Saddam's defense team immediately disputed the planned trials, which Amin said would start by end-March rather than next week.
"The interrogation (of detainees) in the absence of their lawyers is invalid and the accusations made against them are also invalid according to legal rules," said the spokesman for the Jordan-based team, Ziad Khassawhen.
A justice ministry spokesman said Wednesday he only heard of the upcoming trials from media reports.
"I had no idea this was going to happen," he said.
Government officials had said Saddam, who could face the death penalty, would go on trial after the January 30 elections, billed as the first free Iraqi vote in half a century but threatened by the ongoing violence in Iraq.
Saddam's capture on December 13, 2003, has done nothing to stop the deadly insurgency in which thousands of people have been killed.
Four Iraqi policemen were killed and another 13 are missing after an attack on their convoy in a notoriously dangerous area south of Baghdad on Tuesday, police said Wednesday.
Twenty policemen were also injured in the attack.
A 10-vehicle police convoy with 85 recruits on board was travelling from the southern city of Basra to take over from a police unit in Baghdad when it came under attack close to an area known as the "triangle of death," a police source said.
"When the convoy arrived in Basmaya, about 15 kilometres (nine miles) south of Baghdad, it came under attack by unknown gunmen using an assortment of weapons," the source said.
Also Tuesday as a deadly car bomb exploded near the Green Zone in Baghdad, visiting US military chief General Richard Myers insisted the elections would not be derailed by attacks, despite acknowledging a probable spike in violence.
"We said all along that violence will increase as we move towards the elections... They (insurgents) will stop at nothing to try to keep Iraq from becoming a free country," Myers said.
But Allawi said unrest was only likely to increase after the polls.
"Terrorist strikes and attacks will not stop after the elections. On the contrary they will increase because this is a fight between good and evil," he told parliament.
Allawi, however, announced that the insurgency had been dealt a blow by the killing of an aide to Iraq's most wanted man, Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for a string of deadly attacks and the killing of hostages.
"I have been told that an individual by the name of Hassan Ibrahim Farhan Zyda from Zarqawi's group has been killed and that two of his deputies have been arrested," he said.
In the latest violence, at least eight Iraqis were killed in two suicide car bomb attacks in as many days near the fortress-like Green Zone, which houses the interim Iraqi government and foreign embassies.
A national guard was killed and 12 other people wounded in Tuesday's bombing, which occurred at an Iraqi national guard recruiting center outside a Green Zone entrance where seven people were killed the previous day.
Another US marine was killed Tuesday, the military said, bringing to 12 the number of US troops to die in fighting since Friday in Baghdad and the restive Al-Anbar province, which hosts the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah.
Myers said "there was still work to be done, still pockets of people that have to be dealt with" in Fallujah.
But Allawi insisted that last month's massive US-led assault against the Sunni Muslim stronghold had "cleared the town of terrorists" and that the authorities were working to allow residents to return within days.
Iran Can't Be Bought Off
December 15, 2004
UPI
Bennett Ramberg
LOS ANGELES -- Can economics trump values? The European Community has placed a bet that they can. In a new round of negotiations France and Germany believe they can buy off Iran's ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons. If history is the judge, the tack is a chimera. Failure should prompt another course: challenge the values and their foundation.
Europe's quixotic aspirations go back to the fall of 2003. At the time, Iran's nuclear perfidy was evident to all. Multiple reports from the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency demonstrated conclusively that Tehran had spent years secretly acquiring the means to manufacture nuclear weapons ingredients in violation of its nonproliferation obligations. Washington took a hard line. It called upon the IAEA Board of Governors to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council for the application of sanctions.
Britain, France and Germany balked. The Europeans saw a chance not only to resolve the stalemate but -- in the case of Bonn and Paris -- to upstage Washington while generating economic benefits for themselves. The result: In October 2003, the three European powers sent their foreign ministers to Iran to offer economic, nuclear and political incentives. They believed that Iran could be bought.
At first blush, the EU-3 scored a coup. On Oct. 21, 2003, Iran agreed "to suspend all uranium enrichment and processing activities as defined by the IAEA." Headlines declared, "Iranian Deal a Victory for European Diplomacy." The adulation proved short-lived. Although it would not be until June 2004 when Tehran bolted from the agreement, the signs already were present on Oct. 22, 2003 when President Mohammad Khatami declared, "Iran will never give up this (enrichment) program."
When Iran's enrichment activities resumed in the summer of 2004, European pride would not allow failure. The EU-3 offered the mullahs the promise of more bountiful economic and nuclear carrots. Negotiations proved difficult. Iran was unwilling to cede uranium enrichment. By early November, the parties struck a new deal -- or so it appeared. Iran would "suspend" - again -- its enrichment activities. Europe would have additional time to put an effective economic incentive package together.
All that remained was the blessing of the IAEA Board of Governors. Back in Tehran, conservative factions rebelled. They called for the exclusion of 20 centrifuges. The European venture teetered. To overcome the mullah's bargaining ploy, the Board of Governors caved. It modified the standards applied to verification and agreed that the suspension was not legally binding. It also rebuffed Washington¹s demands that Iranian violations serve as the tripwire for Security Council action.
Now resolution of Iran's nuclear challenge resides entirely in Europe's court. Unfortunately, a fundamental flaw infects the EU-3 strategy: Iran cannot be bought. Economic currencies do not buy political values.
For the mullahs, one value dominates: preservation of the theocratic regime. Iran's leadership appears to believe that a nuclear weapons capacity promotes supporting values --security, international influence, self-confidence, prestige, scientific infrastructure, economic modernization and energy diversity while buttressing popular support.
Iran's values, however, can become the West¹s sword. Consider a potpourri of alternatives:
-- Co-opt Iran's nuclear enrichment ambition. Tehran repeatedly declares that nuclear enrichment will promote energy security. The West should test the contention. Propose an international partnership providing technology, expertise along with co-managers, serving, most important, as expert resident watchdogs with full authority to prevent suspect activities.
-- Sow nuclear fear. Iran, obviously, resides in a dangerous neighborhood. Use public diplomacy to cultivate popular fear that nuclear plants are radiological hostages to terrorist malevolence, military attacks and accidents. Reiterate this question: Do nuclear values outweigh multiple nuclear risks and economic costs for a country with abundant oil, natural gas and solar energy resources?
-- Promote national security foreboding. The mullahs appear to believe that nuclear weapons will promote national security. Impress upon them that the tack will make them less secure. Iran will become an American nuclear weapons target in an era of preemption.
-- Squeeze Iran's economy. The Iranian revolution promised a prosperity that never matured. Economic isolation should follow the failed European negotiation to press home the costs of nuclear perfidy.
-- Support Iran's democratic opposition. Provide convert assistance to such groups as the Tahkimeh Vahdat, a domestic Iranian coalition that seeks to contest the power of the clerics.
-- Use Baghdad to challenge Iran. Should Iraq stabilize and democratize, use what will likely be a Shiite-dominated state to challenge Iran's model of political development to promote regime change.
-- Offer a carrot. Remind Iranians about Libya. Libya's decision to halt its WMD ambitions ended its political and economic isolation. Tehran would likewise benefit.
Each measure tests values that sustain the Islamic regime. Collectively, they provide a largely untried template that avoids the most draconian step that lurks in the background -- namely, military action by Washington or Jerusalem against Tehran's evident nuclear weapons program.
Bennett Ramberg served in the Department of State's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the administration of George H.W Bush.
They took over our embassy and held our diplomats and staff for 444 days.
They are totally unpredictable and irrational.
2004 Wednesday 15 December
Iraqi Official : Iran Is 'Number One Enemy'
BAGHDAD, - AP- Iraq's defense minister on Wednesday accused neighboring Iran and Syria of supporting terrorists in his war-ravaged country.
Hazem Shaalan also accused Iran of backing the al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group headed by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and said his country's opponents want "turbaned clerics to rule in Iraq."
Shaalan said Iraqi authorities obtained information about Iran's role in Iraqi's insurgency after last month's arrest of the leader of the Jaish Mohammed (Mohammed's Army) terrorist group during U.S.-led operations in Fallujah.
"When we arrested the commander of Jaish Mohammed we discovered that key to terrorism is in Iran, which this the number one enemy for Iraq," Shaalan told reporters in Baghdad.
On Nov. 15, Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said American forces detained Jaish Mohammed members, including the organization's leader, Moayad Ahmed Yasseen, also known as Abu Ahmed, during the military operation to uproot insurgents based in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.
Allawi has said the group was known to have cooperated with Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al-Qaida and Saddam loyalists and has claimed responsibility for killing and beheading a number of Iraqis, Arabs and foreigners in Iraq.
The U.S. military has said in the past that Jaish Mohammed appears to be an umbrella group for former intelligence agents, army, security officials, and Baath Party members.
Shaalan accused Iranian and Syrian intelligence agents, plus operatives of deposed leader Saddam Hussein's security forces, of "cooperating with the al-Zarqawi group to run criminal operations in Iraq," adding that Syria and Iran was providing funds and training.
Both countries have previously rejected U.S. and Iraqi claims that they are supporting insurgents in Iraq. Damascus, however, has said it is unable to fully close its long, porous border with Iraq.
"They are fighting us because we want to build freedom and democracy and they want to build an Islamic dictatorship and have turbaned clerics to rule in Iraq," he said, providing no further details.
The Left and the Islamists
Joshua Kurlantzick
The Manhattan attorney Lynne Stewart has been wedded to activist causes since the 1960’s, defending a long train of leftists who have had run-ins with the law. A grandmotherly woman with a wide, jowly pink face and graying hair in a bowl cut, she has represented antiwar demonstrators, aging yippies, and Black Panthers. In one well known display of her skills, she convinced a jury in the late 1980’s that Larry Davis, a drug dealer who had wounded six policemen in a shootout, was himself the victim of corruption and racism, and won his acquittal.
When Stewart arrived at a federal prison hospital in Minnesota in May 2000, however, she met a client from a very different milieu. In the visiting room, Stewart sat down across from Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the infamous blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for life in 1995 for inciting the 1993 World Trade Center attack and plotting to blow up the FBI’s office in Manhattan as well as the United Nations and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.
Though roughly the same age as Stewart, Abdel Rahman seems to have missed out on many of the famously tolerant ideals associated with her generation of activists. He has called for the slaughter of Jews, and for women to have little public role in society. Yet, with Sheik Omar, Stewart allegedly took a step beyond mere legal advice. Videotapes reportedly show that Stewart loudly spoke nonsense words while her client, under the din, instructed a man traveling with Stewart and posing as a translator to execute a new terrorist plot. For this, Stewart has been charged with providing material support for terrorism, since the dangerous sheik is forbidden from contacting his followers.
At Stewart’s trial this fall, an FBI agent told the court that Sheik Omar later issued a proclamation, found in Stewart’s office, announcing that “Any statement that comes from her . . . should be taken as if I said it.” Also at the trial, an Egyptian reporter for Reuters testified that, at roughly the same time as this proclamation, he had received a call from Stewart relaying a message from Omar to his followers that they should break their cease-fire with another Islamist group.
Revelations of her complicity with known terrorists left Stewart nonplussed. “We hit if off,” she gushed to the Washington Post about her interactions with the sheik. “He’s really an incredible person.”
The seemingly improbable partnership that has emerged in recent years between figures like Lynne Stewart and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman is the subject of David Horowitz’s new book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.* According to Horowitz, links that began to form between Islamists and American leftists at the end of the cold war have been cemented by 9/11 and the Iraq war. Calling this alliance the “Hitler-Stalin pact of our times,” he warns of its potential impact, especially in undermining the war on terror.
Horowitz, the founder of the online magazine FrontPage and a former radical leftist, is at his best in documenting the intellectual connections between these strange bedfellows. He shows, for instance, how the anti-American pronouncements of Noam Chomsky have become increasingly indistinguishable from those of the fire-breathing clerics who appear on Arab satellite TV stations. Horowitz dredges up reams of similarly incendiary quotations from a range of American and Arab radicals. At the organizational level, he documents occasions on which leftist Western lawyers like Stewart have defended Muslim groups accused of abetting terrorism, and he points to the participation of militant Muslims in some of the most publicized antiwar rallies.
Horowitz also provides useful historical context for this unlikely romance. Over the past century, he argues, the radical Left in Europe and the U.S. has come to define itself as a “movement against, rather than a movement for.” Primarily, of course, its target has been the United States, no matter what the United States has stood for. For Horowitz, the historical roots of today’s “red-green” alliance (green being the color of Islam) are to be found in the American Left’s long-standing obsession with the treatment of blacks and Native Americans and especially in its loudly proclaimed solidarity over the years with Fidel Castro, the North Vietnamese, and Communist rebels in El Salvador and Nicaragua. When the U.S. declared war on terror, it was time, once again, for the Left to lionize whomever America opposed.
The fact that radical Islamists hold social and cultural values diametrically opposed to those of American leftists is not, Horowitz maintains, as big a problem for either party as it might appear. As in a previous era, when the hard Left dealt with Stalin’s widely acknowledged crimes by turning its attention to more attractive proxies of the cause like Vietnam and Cuba, today’s radicals tend to pay tribute not to al Qaeda but to groups like Hamas, whose extensive social-service network can be invoked to soften the horrors perpetrated by its terror cells. (Interestingly, though, few if any of today’s leftists have decamped for Teheran or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, as some once did for the workers’ “paradises” of Cuba and North Vietnam.)
For their part, the prophets of radical Islam have not only borrowed from the Left in recent decades—citing Bernard Lewis, Horowitz notes that anti-Americanism seems to form the one exception to their categorical hatred of Western ideas—they have learned to appeal to leftist sympathies. The Arab media now constantly condemn the U.S. for victimizing the third world and supporting tyrants. Many Islamists have even mastered the rhetoric of class struggle and anti-colonial resistance. As Horowitz observes, the Ayatollah Khomeini sought to portray his revolution in Iran as a movement of the oppressed, thus gaining the support of elements of the global political Left.
Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance is among the first serious examinations of this troubling and relatively new relationship, and for that he certainly deserves credit. But there is a good deal more to be said about the origins of this ideological convergence and the concrete ways in which it has already found expression.
Useful as it is to be reminded of the long history of the radical Left’s shifting allegiances, Horowitz scants what is decidedly new in the developments he describes. A decade ago, a red-green alliance would have seemed astounding. On campuses in Europe and America, women’s groups usually avoided Islamist organizations, which often held highly misogynistic beliefs. The primary concerns of hard-leftist groups tended to be local issues, like labor rights and poverty. Few had ties to any Muslim organizations.
One powerful catalyst that changed all this was the birth of the anti-globalization movement. The real and imagined evils of globalization have breathed new life into the international Left, especially among the young. The social dislocation brought about by trade, outsourcing, and economic integration has proved to be a potent issue. But radicals have not rested content with protesting the policies they dislike. They have also sought villains, and they have found familiar ones: America and the Jews.
As Mark Strauss of the Carnegie Endowment has argued in “Antiglobalism’s Jewish Problem” (Foreign Policy, December 2003), this is no accident. Despite the youth of many anti-globalization activists, they have drawn upon and updated venerable tropes of traditional anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The Rockefellers and Rothschilds have disappeared as international bogeymen, only to be replaced by theories of Jewish and American intrigue at the World Trade Organization and other supranational economic agencies. In the demonology of the Left, the top-hatted banker in striped pants has given way to the greedy, globe-trotting American consultant and the conspiring Zionist warmonger.
That such images should have found a ready audience in the Muslim world is no surprise. But their dissemination depended on yet another recent development: the Internet. Before the advent of today’s computer technology, the hard Left in Europe and the U.S. would have had no idea how to seek out Islamist sympathizers. A generation ago, it would have been necessary for the two groups to occupy the same physical space—an unlikely prospect, given that traditional Muslims living in Arab-French suburbs, for example, rarely mingle with the college students who frequent Left Bank cafes. The Internet has opened a door between these disparate environments. Since the 1990’s, Europe and America have seen a dramatic increase in the number of homepages on the Web created by both radical Muslims and anti-globalization activists. Creating links among these groups has become, literally, a matter of pushing the right buttons.
Horowitz provides few details about the actual political and financial connections, as opposed to the ideological affinities, between Islamists and radical leftists in the U.S. More disappointingly, he does not turn his attention to Europe, where such connections abound, thanks to the large and growing presence of Muslim immigrants and the interest groups that cater to them.
In early 2003, several British left-wing parties—Marxists, socialists, Labor radicals—came together with Islamist groups, including the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, to create a joint steering committee. Its co-chairmen (to give something of its flavor) were Andrew Murray of the British Communist party and Muhammad Asalm Ijaz of the London Council of Mosques. On the Continent, at roughly the same time, similar alliances were cemented between Islamist organizations and leftist parties like France’s Trotskyist Workers’ Struggle.
These links were quickly put to use. Throughout 2003 and 2004, Islamists and anti-globalization activists in Europe have held a number of joint protests, marches, and conferences. A February 2003 demonstration in London, co-sponsored by the Muslim Association of Britain and the Stop the War Coalition, drew some one million people. In France, several anti-globalization groups helped to lead marches protesting the government’s order that headscarves could not be worn in public schools. At all of these rallies, Islamist and anti-Semitic ideas have become commonplace (a precedent set, as Horowitz correctly notes, by the notorious UN World Conference against Racism held in South Africa in 2001). Islamists and anti-globalization activists have other pan-European activities planned for 2005.
Still more worrisome is the fact that the leftist-Islamist partnership has been able to convert its cooperation into votes. In 2004 elections for local offices throughout Europe and for seats in the European Parliament, Islamic groups either worked together with leftists on joint lists or helped promote Left candidates in Belgium, Great Britain, and France, where the hard Left won 5 percent of the vote, a substantial figure for any small group. The electoral advantages of this united front can only grow as immigration and high birthrates add to Europe’s already sizable Muslim population.
In their outreach to Muslim radicals, hard-Left groups in the U.S. lag only slightly behind their European peers. Horowitz singles out one of the best-known of these organizations, International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a New York-based group founded by former U.S. attorney general and long-time radical agitator Ramsey Clark (who has also represented the blind sheik). ANSWER, Horowitz shows, traffics in precisely the same kind of anti-American and anti-Semitic vitriol as the most hateful Islamists.
In fact, ANSWER’s transgressions extend well beyond the dangerous rhetoric cited by Horowitz. In December 2003, the group helped to convene the second annual Cairo Conference, an anti-U.S. hate fest attended by a variety of Islamists, including Osama Hamdan, a top leader of Hamas. ANSWER has also given a seat on its steering committee to the Muslim Students Association (MSA). This American group presents itself as a benign advocate for Muslim college students. But as Jonathan Dowd-Gailey has recently documented in the Middle East Quarterly, the MSA has funneled money to the Holy Land Foundation and other charities accused of funding Hamas and Hizballah. MSA leaders have called for the death of all Jews and have spread pro-Taliban propaganda. The group advises its members that their “long-term goal” should be “to Islamicize the politics of their respective universities.”
Indeed, for radicals in the U.S. and Europe, any taboo that may once have kept them from openly collaborating with known Islamic terrorists has largely disappeared. As Lynne Stewart’s trial was proceeding in Manhattan in September, an “international strategy meeting” was being held in Beirut under the title, “Where Next for the Global Anti-War and Anti-Globalization Movements?” Among the hundreds of groups in attendance, from over fifty nations, were such pillars of the anti-globalization hard Left as Focus on the Global South, a think tank devoted to issues of international trade; ATTAC, a socialist network with branches across Europe and Latin America and links to European political parties; and CorpWatch, an American group that monitors corporate influence on politics.
And who was on hand as a conference host to welcome the delegates to Beirut—to make sure hotel rooms were acceptable, meals met everyone’s tastes, and delegates could call their loved ones back home? None other than the Shiite terrorist group Hizballah, along with local Islamists and secular leftists. Though the conference did include radical advocates for the rights of women and other minorities, attendees seemed to have no problem taking directions from a group whose clerical overlords believe in a version of Islam that sentences homosexuals and adulterers to death by stoning.
Immediately after this conference adjourned, another left-wing group, this one of a religious cast, descended on Lebanon. A delegation of the American Presbyterian Church met with Hizballah officials in Beirut and praised the terrorist organization. As one of its members helpfully explained on Hizballah television, “Relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”
The partnership between Islamists and the international Left poses its most immediate threat to Jews. As Horowitz rightly worries, the anti-Semitic propaganda spread by the red-green alliance stokes violence against Jewish communities and makes Israel an ever more vilified object of rage. Ultimately, too, Islamists may turn some part of the anti-globalization movement toward violence, just as groups in the 1960’s like the Weather Underground took up guns and bombs as they became more radical. Indeed, many older members of the hard Left have never forsworn such tools. As Lynne Stewart told the New York Times (in an interview cited by Horowitz), there is nothing wrong with using “directed violence” against “the institutions which perpetuate capitalism.”
In the longer term, the ideas propagated by the hard Left-Islamist alliance could also seep into the wider political culture, poisoning the mainstream Left and otherwise sane liberals. Praise for suicide bombers, Horowitz notes, can already be heard at times from members of Europe’s socialist establishment. In France, Belgium, Great Britain, and other European states, some parties of the moderate Left have tried to co-opt Muslim groups while sidestepping their extreme rhetoric, hoping thereby to bolster the parties’ own credibility with dissatisfied radical voters. The French Communists, traditionally one of the larger and more mainstream leftist parties, have been leaders in this regard.
On the American side, too, pressure seems to be building for Washington to engage Islamic extremists more directly, in an effort to blunt some of their sting. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, American diplomats around the world have begun to make contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood despite serious concerns about the organization, which has fomented revolution across the Middle East and “is dedicated,” in the Post’s words, “to creating an Islamic civilization that harks back to the caliphates of the 7th and 8th centuries.” Edward P. Djerejian, a former top State Department official, insists that the U.S. must “know where they [Islamists] are coming from, to influence them.” To demonize the Muslim Brotherhood, warns a former CIA official, “would be foolhardy to the extreme.” As if to confirm this new strategy, the government-funded National Democratic Institute recently hosted a delegation from a Yemeni party linked to the Muslim Brotherhood at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
As we and our allies try to develop more sophisticated political and diplomatic strategies for dealing with the Muslim world, the temptation will be great to reach out to those Islamist groups that express some willingness to work with us. Signs of apparent reasonableness are difficult to resist, especially for well-meaning internationalist bureaucrats. In its item on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Washington Post reported that some State Department officials believe the group could be persuaded to temper its anti-U.S. stance and even to battle the jihadists.
Such hopes defy reality. They also ignore the long history of Islamist groups in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that have worn a moderate face in their formative years but, once in power, have moved quickly to implement shari’a law, eliminate all opposition, and give aid to terrorists. As Islamists become more visible participants in the politics of the Western democracies, and as their new friends on the hard Left strive to obliterate or gloss over their record of mendacity and violence, the rest of us cannot afford to turn a blind eye to who they are and what they stand for.
JOSHUA KURLANTZICK is the foreign editor of the New Republic.
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