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Homeland Security Focus
Areas NYTimes.com June 19, 2008 Abu Sayyaf Militants Free Kidnapped News Crew in PhilippinesMANILA — Abu Sayyaf militants have released members of a news team they abducted last week in the southern Philippines, among them one of the country’s best-known television journalists, officials said Wednesday. The journalist, Ces Drilon, and a cameraman and a guide were abducted June 8 on their way to interview members of Abu Sayyaf. A driver was released more than a week ago, and the others late Tuesday. “There was betrayal involved, which was why we were kidnapped,” Ms. Drilon said Wednesday during a news briefing. She did not elaborate. The militants had demanded a ransom of about $340,000 by noon Tuesday, but Ms. Drilon’s employer, ABS-CBN, the country’s largest network, had repeatedly said it would not pay. The driver was released last Thursday after local officials paid the kidnappers about $45,000, which was not characterized as a ransom. Officials said the kidnappers had relented on Ms. Drilon and her companions when offered, in lieu of a ransom, “a livelihood package.” They did not explain what that might entail, but officials had said that the lagging economy in the Muslim areas of the south was a factor in the rise in kidnappings there. Alvarez Ishaji, the mayor of Indanan, a city in Sulu Province, said the package might involve promoting jobs in the region. Avelino Razon Jr., the chief of the Philippine National Police, said Wednesday that the release of Ms. Drilon and her crew was mainly the result of negotiations between the kidnappers and Sulu officials. The police also credited a senator, Loren Legarda, a former colleague of Ms. Drilon’s at ABS-CBN. Ms. Drilon, whose face bore mosquito bites after nine days in the jungles on the island of Jolo, said, “We were treated well, in a perverse kind of way.” But she said the kidnappers had threatened at one point to cut off her driver’s head. Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist extremist group mainly known for its banditry in the south, has been blamed for several of the more serious terrorist attacks in the Philippines in recent years, including the bombing of a ferry in 2004 that caused a fire that killed 116 people. The group’s members have kidnapped, and sometimes decapitated, their victims, including several foreigners. Abu Sayyaf has been the target of a sustained military campaign supported by the United States. Although American and Philippine officials say the campaign has weakened the group considerably during the past five years, analysts say the militants remain a high security threat.
NYTimes.com
June 6, 2008 Qaeda Group Says It Bombed EmbassyBy SOUAD MEKHENNET and ALAN COWELL FRANKFURT — A Qaeda operative based in Afghanistan claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing outside the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, according to a posting on jihadist Web sites, saying the attack was in revenge for the publication of cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers. There was no immediate independent authentication of the claim, a statement posted late Wednesday with an attribution at its end to Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, Al Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan. At least six people were killed in Monday’s bombing, all Pakistanis. Denmark has sent an intelligence team to help Pakistan investigate, Reuters reported. The posting said that Denmark had never apologized for the publication of the cartoons and that the bombing was a warning to others who might contemplate similar publications. It called the embassy attack “revenge against the infidel government” of Denmark for the “degrading drawings of the prophet.” Islam prohibits any representation of Muhammad. The caricatures were commissioned by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten and first published in 2005, setting off sometimes violent protests throughout the Muslim world. In February, after the Danish police arrested two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent on charges of plotting to kill one of the cartoonists, 17 Danish newspapers republished the cartoons as a statement of solidarity and press freedom. That ignited a new round of global protests, and prompted a threatening audio message from Osama bin Laden on March 20. The statement claiming responsibility for the embassy attack included a quote from that audio message: “If there is no check on your freedom of words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.” The posting said more acts would follow unless Denmark apologized for the cartoons. It also said that the will of the Islamabad suicide bomber would be published soon. A Danish Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic constraints, said Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller were emphatic that Denmark would not be cowed by terrorists. While the government has acknowledged that the Muhammad cartoons offended many Muslims, it has repeatedly insisted that it will not tamper with Danish norms of free speech. The attack on the embassy has spurred Denmark to debate its foreign policy. A vocal minority has criticized the country’s early support of the war in Iraq and its handling of the cartoon crisis, arguing it has made the country vulnerable to terrorists. The government withdrew Danish troops last year from Iraq ahead of parliamentary elections and a simmering domestic backlash against the war; it still has soldiers in Afghanistan. Souad Mekhennet reported from Frankfurt and Alan Cowell from London. Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Paris and Michael Slackman from Cairo.
Car Bomb Hits Danish Mission In Islamabad
By Candace Rondeaux ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 2 -- As many as eight people were killed and 24 injured Monday in Pakistan's capital when a powerful car bomb ripped through the Danish Embassy. The explosion occurred in the heart of one of the most closely guarded areas of the city, and could be heard from nearly a mile away. A six-foot-wide crater was left in the road about 12 feet from the embassy gates, where a car packed with an estimated 44 pounds of explosives stopped before the blast occurred, officials said. The bombing was the first in Islamabad in a little more than two months, and the second this year to target foreigners living and working in the Pakistani capital. Pakistan has been racked by political unrest and violence since early last year, but attacks have intensified considerably since the country's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated Dec. 27. More than 150 people have been killed in violence since parliamentary elections Feb. 18. Most of the embassy's foreign workers had moved out of the building following a decision by Danish newspapers in February to republish a controversial cartoon showing the Islamic prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb as a turban. The incident unleashed a furor throughout the Islamic world, and Danish diplomatic missions have been on high alert ever since. The Danish newspapers reprinted the cartoon after police arrested three men linked to a plot to assassinate Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who authored the work. The cartoon, which was first published in September 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten along with 11 other cartoons, provoked waves of violent protests worldwide that resulted in at least 100 deaths. Crowds of demonstrators set fire to Danish Embassy buildings in Syria, Iran and Lebanon. There were conflicting reports on the number of casualties in Monday's attack. Pakistani authorities said six people were killed, including two police officers. But paramedics who arrived at the scene minutes after the blast said eight people had been killed. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller told the Associated Press that Monday's explosion killed a Pakistani custodian, seriously injured a handyman and hurt two other workers. "It is terrible that terrorists do this. The embassy is there to have a cooperation between the Pakistani population and Denmark, and that means they are destroying that," Moeller said in comments on Danish television reported by the wire service. Dozens of cars parked in front of a U.N. mission building across from the embassy were charred and overturned in a gnarled heap. Several other neighboring buildings were also damaged. Debris from the bombing was scattered around the site for several hundred yards. The engine of the car apparently used in the attack was tossed about 50 yards before landing next to the body of a passerby who was killed in the blast. Anwar Butt, a manager with a branch of the U.N. Development Program, said he was in his office on the second floor of the U.N. building with more than 20 of his colleagues when he heard the deafening blast. Windows shattered, forcing shards of glass into his head and back. "I was sitting in my office at my desk. Suddenly we heard a blast," Butt said. "Thank God my desk is safe with my back to the windows, otherwise I might have been killed." The bombing, in the heart of a residential section of Islamabad heavily populated by diplomats and foreigners, sent shock waves through the city's tightly knit expatriate community. Several embassies had already put their staffs on high alert in March after a Turkish woman was killed and several other people were injured in a bombing at an Italian restaurant here that was popular with foreigners. Salman Bashir, Pakistan's foreign secretary, arrived at the embassy about two hours after the blast. Glass and charred debris crunching underfoot as he walked to the site, Bashir vehemently condemned the bombing and promised that the Pakistani government would protect foreign missions in the country. "I think that the Pakistani nation feels very ashamed today of incidents like this," Bashir said. "They have damaged the image of our country." Kamal Shah, Pakistan's interior secretary, said all foreign embassies will be moved to the heavily guarded diplomatic enclave. He said a multi-agency task force that includes the Islamabad police is investigating whether the blast was caused by a suicide attack, remote-controlled bomb or timed explosive device. "It is not possible to say who was involved at this stage or whether there was one or two or more attackers," Shah said. A Pakistani official familiar with details of the investigation said a white Toyota Corolla was used to execute the bombing. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the car bore fake diplomatic license plates. Ashghar Gardezi, chief of police in Islamabad, said that "all indications suggest a suicide bombing," but the body of the attacker had not yet been recovered. Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.
NYTimes.com May 28, 2008 Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally WomenBy ELAINE SCIOLINO and SOUAD MEKHENNET BRUSSELS — On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes. In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair. The only adornment is a pair of powder-blue slippers monogrammed in gold with the letters SEXY. But it is on the Internet where Ms. El Aroud has distinguished herself. Writing in French under the name “Oum Obeyda,” she has transformed herself into one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe. She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, she bullies Muslim men to go and fight and rallies women to join the cause. “It’s not my role to set off bombs — that’s ridiculous,” she said in a rare interview. “I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.” Ms. El Aroud has not only made a name for herself among devotees of radical forums where she broadcasts her message of hatred toward the West. She also is well known to intelligence officials throughout Europe as simply “Malika” — an Islamist who is at the forefront of the movement by women to take a larger role in the male-dominated global jihad. The authorities have noted an increase in suicide bombings carried out by women — the American military reports that 18 women have conducted suicide missions in Iraq so far this year, compared with 8 all of last year — but they say there is also a less violent yet potentially more insidious army of women organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators and fund-raisers, who either join their husbands in the fight or step into the breach as men are jailed or killed. “Women are coming of age in jihad and are entering a world once reserved for men,” said Claude Moniquet, president of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. “Malika is a role model, an icon who is bold enough to identify herself. She plays a very important strategic role as a source of inspiration. She’s very clever — and extremely dangerous.” Ms. El Aroud began her rise to prominence because of a man in her life. Two days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, her husband carried out a bombing in Afghanistan that killed the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud at the behest of Osama bin Laden. Her husband was killed, and she took to the Internet as the widow of a martyr. She remarried, and in 2007 she and her new husband were convicted in Switzerland for operating pro-Qaeda Web sites. Now, according to the Belgium authorities, she is a suspect in what the authorities say they believe is a plot to carry out attacks in Belgium. “Vietnam is nothing compared to what awaits you on our lands,” she wrote to a supposed Western audience in March about wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Ask your mothers, your wives to order your coffins.” To her followers she added: “Victory is appearing on the horizon, my brothers and sisters. Let’s intensify our prayers.” Her prolific writing and presence in chat rooms, coupled with her background, makes her a magnet for praise and sympathy. “Sister Oum Obeyda is virtuous among the virtuous; her life is dedicated to the good on this earth,” a man named Juba wrote late last year. Changing Role of Women The rise of women comes against a backdrop of discrimination that has permeated radical Islam. Mohamed Atta, the Sept. 11 hijacker, wrote in his will that “women must not be present at my funeral or go to my grave at any later date.” Last month, Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, said in an online question-and-answer session that women could not join Al Qaeda. In response, a woman wrote on a password-protected radical Web site that “the answer that we heard was not what we had hoped,” according to the SITE monitoring group, adding, “I swear to God I will never leave the path and will not give up this course.” The changing role of women in the movement is particularly apparent in Western countries, where Muslim women have been educated to demand their rights and Muslim men are more accustomed to treating them as equals. Ms. El Aroud reflects that trend. “Normally in Islam the men are stronger than the women, but I prove that it is important to fear God — and no one else,” she said. “It is important that I am a woman. There are men who don’t want to speak out because they are afraid of getting into trouble. Even when I get into trouble, I speak out.” After all, she said, she knows the rules. “I write in a legal way,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. I’m Belgian. I know the system.” That system often has been lenient toward her. She was detained last December with 13 others in what the authorities suspected was a plot to free a convicted terrorist from prison and to launch an attack in Brussels. But Belgian law required that they be released within 24 hours, because no charges were brought and searches failed to turn up weapons, explosives or incriminating documents. Now, even as Ms. El Aroud remains under constant surveillance, she is back home rallying militants on her main Internet forum and collecting more than $1,100 a month in government unemployment benefits. “Her jihad is not to lead an operation but to inspire other people to wage jihad,” said Glenn Audenaert, the director of Belgium’s federal police force, in an interview. “She enjoys the protection that Belgium offers. At the same time, she is a potential threat.” Embracing a Strict Islam Born in Morocco, reared from a young age in Belgium, Ms. El Aroud did not seem destined for the jihad. Growing up, she rebelled against her Muslim upbringing, she wrote in a memoir. Her first marriage, at 18, was unhappy and brief; she later bore a daughter out of wedlock. Unable to read Arabic, it was her discovery of the Koran in French that led her to embrace a strict version of Islam and eventually to marry Abdessater Dahmane, a Tunisian loyal to Mr. bin Laden. Eager to be a battlefield warrior, she said she hoped to fight alongside her husband in Chechnya. But the Chechens “wanted experienced men, super-well trained,” she said. “They wanted women even less.” In 2001, she followed her husband to Afghanistan. As he trained at a Qaeda camp, she was installed in a camp for foreign women in Jalalabad. For her, the Taliban was a model Islamic government and reports of its mistreatment of women were untrue. “Women didn’t have problems under the Taliban,” she insisted. “They had security.” Her only rebellion was against the burqa, the restrictive garment the Taliban forced on women, which she called “a plastic bag.” As a foreigner, she was allowed to wear a long black veil instead. After her husband’s mission, Ms. El Aroud was briefly detained by Mr. Massoud’s followers. Frightened, she was put in contact with Belgian authorities, who arranged for her safe passage home. “We got her out and thought she’d cooperate with us,” said one senior Belgian intelligence official. “We were deceived.” Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who was France’s senior counterterrorism magistrate at the time, said he had interviewed Ms. El Aroud because investigators suspected that she had shipped electronic equipment to her husband that was used in the killing. “She is very radical, very sly and very dangerous,” he said. Ms. El Aroud was tried with 22 others in Belgium for complicity in the Massoud killing. As a grieving widow in a black veil, she persuaded the court that she had been doing humanitarian work and knew nothing of her husband’s plans. She was acquitted for lack of evidence. Her husband’s death, though, propelled her into a new life. “The widow of a martyr is very important for Muslims,” she said. She used her enhanced status to meet her new “brothers and sisters” on the Web. One of them was Moez Garsalloui, a Tunisian several years her junior who had political refugee status in Switzerland. They married and moved to a small Swiss village. There, they ran several pro-Qaeda Web sites and Internet forums that were monitored by Swiss authorities as part of the country’ first Internet-related criminal case. After the police raided their home and arrested them at dawn in April 2005, Ms. El Aroud extensively described what she called their abuse. “See what this country that calls us neutral made us suffer,” she wrote, claiming that the Swiss police beat and blindfolded her husband and manhandled her while she was sleeping unveiled. Convicted last June of promoting violence and supporting a criminal organization, she received a six-month suspended sentence; Mr. Garsalloui, who was convicted of more serious charges, was released after 23 days. Despite Ms. El Aroud’s prominence, it is once again her husband whom the authorities view as a bigger threat. They suspect he was recruiting to carry out attacks last December and that he has connections to terrorist groups operating in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The authorities say that they lost track of him after he was released from jail last year in Switzerland. “He is on a trip,” Ms. El Aroud said cryptically when asked about her husband’s whereabouts. “On a trip.” A ‘Holy Warrior’ Meanwhile, her stature has risen higher with her claims of victimization by the Swiss. The Voice of the Oppressed Web site described her as “our female holy warrior of the 21st century.” Her latest tangle with the law hints at a deeper involvement of women in terrorist activities. When she was detained last December in connection with the suspected plot to free Nizar Trabelsi, a convicted terrorist and a onetime professional soccer player, and to attack a target in Brussels, Ms. El Aroud was one of three women taken in for questioning. Although the identities of those detained were not released, the Belgian authorities and others familiar with the case said that among those detained were Mr. Trabelsi’s wife and Fatima Aberkan, 47, a friend of Ms. El Aroud and a mother of seven. “Malika is a source of inspiration for women because she is telling women to stop sleeping and open their eyes,” Ms. Aberkan said. Ms. El Aroud operates from her three-room apartment that sits above a clothing shop in a working-class Brussels neighborhood where she spends her time communicating with supporters, mainly on her own forum, Minbar-SOS. Although Ms. El Aroud insists that she is not breaking the law, she knows that the police are watching. And if the authorities find way to put her in prison, she said: “That would be great. They would make me a living martyr.” Basil Katz contributed research from Paris.
Iraqi troops free British journalist Two Americans among dozens killed in attacks Tuesday, April 15, 2008 3:11 AM By Hannah Allam McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
BAGHDAD -- Iraqi forces who were conducting raids on militants yesterday in the southern port city of Basra freed a British journalist who had been held hostage for two months, the Iraqi military announced. Richard Butler, a photographer who was on assignment for CBS, appeared to be in good condition in Iraqi television footage that showed him smiling broadly as jubilant Iraqi officials embraced him. The rescue is seen as a sorely needed morale boost for the country's beleaguered security forces. In Baghdad and to the north, however, violence continued as car bombs, mortars, assassinations and other attacks left more than 30 people dead and dozens wounded. The U.S. military announced the deaths yesterday of two American soldiers in separate homemade-bomb attacks, one in Baghdad and the other north of the capital in the Salahuddin province. A suicide car bombing killed at least 14 members of the Kurdish peshmerga militia and injured 15 others in the northern town of Sinjar. Kurdish authorities said the group had traveled to Sinjar for a vacation after weeks of duty in nearby Mosul. Authorities in Diyala province discovered a mass grave containing the remains of 20 to 30 people. The bodies appeared to have been at the site nearly eight months. Butler had been kidnapped from his hotel in central Basra in February. The Iraqi military said he was freed during an operation in Basra's Jubaila district. In the past month, Shiite Muslim militias fought fierce gunbattles with U.S. and Iraqi troops until an agreement, brokered largely by neighboring Iran, ended the worst of the fighting. U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched a crackdown on Basra's militias and gangs, many of which are allied with his Shiite political rivals. In recent days, the Iraqi government began house-to-house raids for arms, weapons, drugs and other contraband in some of Basra's most dangerous neighborhoods. Butler told Iraqi state television that he'd been sitting in a room, unable to see what was happening because of a hood over his head that he was required to wear at all times. He said he heard the Iraqi forces arrive and their struggle with his captors before his hood was removed and he realized he'd been rescued. The Iraqi troops delivered Butler to British forces stationed in the area.
NYTimes.com March 24, 2008 The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet. Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The drop in coverage parallels — and may be explained by — a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of Americans said they followed events in Iraq “very closely” in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall. Experts offer many other explanations for the declining media focus, like the danger and expense in covering Iraq, and shrinking newsroom budgets. In the last year, a flagging economy and the most competitive presidential campaign in memory have diverted attention and resources. “Vietnam held the media’s attention a lot better because it was a war with a draft that touched a lot more people; people were sent against their will, and many more Americans were killed,” said Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. “In a conventional war, like World War II, there’s dramatic change, a moving front line, a compelling narrative,” he said. But after the triumphal first months, Iraq became a war of insurgents vs. counterinsurgents, harder to make sense of, “with more of the same grim news, day after day.” The three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year. Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year. The policy debate in Washington that dominated last year’s Iraq coverage has almost disappeared from the news. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago. The drop accelerated with a sharp decline in violence in Iraq that began at the end of last summer. The last six months have been safer for American troops than any comparable period since the war began, with about 33 killed each month, compared with about 91 a month over the previous year. “The available news hole got so much smaller because election and economic news took up so much of the space,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center. There are no authoritative figures for most media coverage before 2007. But a check of several large and midsize newspapers’ archives shows a year-by-year decline in articles about Iraq, and an increase in the proportion supplied by wire services. Experts who follow the coverage say there is no doubt about the trend. “I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.” He argued that Americans who support the war might not have wanted to follow the news when it was bad, and that Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better. And the presidential candidates, he said, have shown “surprisingly little interest in discussing it in detail.” Many news organizations have fewer people in Iraq than they once did, though no definitive numbers are available. Coalition officials have said that although there were several hundred reporters embedded with military units early in the war, the number has been measured in tens in recent months. Violence against journalists makes reporting on Iraq costly and difficult; executives of The New York Times have said that the newspaper is spending more than $3 million a year to cover Iraq. The risks have forced news organizations to hire private security forces and Iraqi employees who can go places that Westerners cannot safely explore. From the start of the war through 2005, journalists and their support workers were killed in Iraq at a rate of one every 12 days, according to tallies kept by the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2006 and 2007, the rate was one every eight days. Most of those killed have been Iraqis. “Danger and the expense are gigantic factors,” Mr. Jones said. “The news media have to constantly revisit how much money and risk to expend.”
NYTimes.com March 17, 2008 With Order to Name Sources, Judge Is Casting a Wide NetEvery day, newspapers publish articles like the ones that have gotten Toni Locy in trouble: she quoted law enforcement officials, their names kept secret, about a person under investigation in an unsolved crime. But there was nothing ordinary about the crime — the anthrax attacks in 2001 — or the fallout for Ms. Locy, a reporter who wrote about the case for USA Today. She has become one of the rare reporters who risk serious punishment for refusing to reveal confidential sources, and even in that exclusive company, her story is extraordinary. A federal judge in Washington, Reggie B. Walton, wants her to name sources who might have had nothing to do with her articles. He has ordered her to pay fines up to $5,000 a day if she continues to withhold the names. And he has ordered that she pay the fines herself, prohibiting the newspaper from paying for her. The actions against Ms. Locy, 48, are unlike any taken by an American court, according to First Amendment lawyers, media associations and companies that have petitioned the court on her behalf. They say that Judge Walton’s decision last month to hold her in contempt of court sets a precedent that would chill the routine workings of the press. The contempt order has been stayed pending an appeal to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which will hear arguments on May 9. “This is an unprecedented fishing expedition to expose people without any reason to think they have any relevant information,” said Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Never has a court specified that the sanctioned person has to pay the fines herself, and fines of this magnitude are almost unheard of.” Judge Walton has described the issue as straightforward. The plaintiff in a lawsuit needs the information, he has said on the bench and in court papers, and a contempt finding is meaningless without some coercive power. He set her fine to increase over time, up to $5,000 a day after the second week in contempt. The plaintiff is Steven J. Hatfill, a scientist who was considered a suspect in the anthrax attacks, though no one has been charged. He sued the federal government, claiming that in talking about him to reporters, officials violated the federal Privacy Act. Judge Walton ordered Ms. Locy to reveal her unnamed sources for two articles she wrote in 2003. Ms. Locy, now an assistant professor of journalism at West Virginia University, says she cannot recall which government officials gave the information. So the judge ordered her to name all sources with whom she might have discussed the case. She says she had 10 to 12 such sources, people with whom she also discussed subjects like the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Under Judge Walton’s order, she said, “folks who helped me on far more sensitive stories than the two at issue in this case could be exposed.” But Judge Walton said that “the identity of those who did not provide information about Dr. Hatfill will remain confidential to all other than Dr. Hatfill and his attorneys.” Many states have laws shielding reporters from having to divulge sources in most circumstances, but there is no similar federal law. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a shield bill, 398 to 21, but a weaker version stalled in the Senate. Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana and the author of the House bill, lately has cited Ms. Locy’s plight as proof that a shield law is needed. Her case “is the biggest bullet in the gun,” said Matt Lloyd, a spokesman for the congressman. Ms. Locy contends that much of the information in her articles first came to her from one of Dr. Hatfill’s own lawyers and that law enforcement figures only confirmed it. More than many of her competitors, she wrote skeptically about the government’s focus on him. She compared the treatment of Dr. Hatfill to that of Richard Jewell, a suspect in the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta, and pointed out that “Jewell was cleared, marking one of the most humbling chapters in F.B.I. history.”
NYTimes.com February 13, 2008 Sadrists Say Journalists to Be FreedBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 6:08 a.m. ET BAGHDAD (AP) -- A deal has been reached with kidnappers for the release of two CBS News journalists, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's office in Basra said Wednesday. Harith al-Ethari, a director of al-Sadr's office in the southern Iraqi city, said negotiations had persuaded the kidnappers to release the British journalist and his Iraqi interpreter later Wednesday. ''We reached an agreement with kidnappers to hand over the Iraqi interpreter to the police command in Basra and the British journalist will be handed over to al-Sadr's office in Basra this afternoon,'' al-Ethari told The Associated Press. He did not give a specific time. Iraqi police and witnesses said the two were seized Sunday from a hotel in Basra, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad. CBS News said Monday that two journalists working for it were missing in Basra, but it did not identify them and has requested their names not be released if obtained. Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, has seen fierce fighting between rival Shiite militias as part of a power struggle in the oil-rich south. Al-Ethari did not identify the kidnappers but said Sadrist mediators had persuaded the kidnappers to drop their demands and release the hostages. He refused to list the original demands ahead of the release. Earlier, an Iraqi police official in Basra familiar with the negotiations said talks had started at 3 p.m. Tuesday and continued until midnight, then resumed three hours later. Kidnappings of Westerners and Iraqis -- for political motives or ransom -- were common in the past but have become infrequent recently with a decline in violence. Since 2004, three journalists -- Fakher Haider of The New York Times, as well as James Brandon of Britain and New York freelancer Steven Vincent -- have been abducted in Basra, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Brandon was released, but Vincent and Haider were murdered, it said. According to CPJ, at least 51 journalists have been abducted in Iraq since 2004. The New York-based group said the majority was released, but 12 were killed. CPJ, which has recorded at least 126 journalists killed since the U.S.-led war started in March 2003, also condemned the murder of a 27-year-old Iraqi journalist this week in Baghdad. The bullet-riddled body of Hisham Michwit Hamdan was found Tuesday, two days after he disappeared after leaving the offices of the Young Journalists League to buy notebooks and pens at a market in the central Baghdad district of Bab al-Mudham. League chief Haider Hasoun al-Moussawi said Hamdan had joined the independent organization when it was established in 2003 as a media watchdog and had not reported any threats. Iraqi legislators, meanwhile, were engaged in urgent discussions a day after the speaker of the fragmented parliament threatened to disband the legislature, saying it is so riddled with distrust it appeared unable to adopt the budget or agree on a law setting a date for provincial elections. Disbanding parliament would prompt new elections within 60 days and further undermine Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's shaky government, which is limping along with nearly half of the 40 Cabinet posts vacant. The disarray undermines the purpose of last year's influx of U.S. troop -- to bring down violence enough to allow the Iraqi government and parliament to focus on measures to reconcile differences among minority Sunnis and Kurds and the majority Shiites. Violence is down dramatically, but political progress languishes. Iraq's constitution allows Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the hot-tempered speaker and a member of the minority Sunni faction, to dissolve parliament if one-third of its members request the move and a majority of lawmakers approve. Al-Mashhadani said Tuesday he already had sufficient backing for the move from five political blocs, but he refused to name them. Al-Mashhadani said the Iraqi treasury had already lost $3 billion by failing to pass a budget before the end of 2007. He did not explain how the money was lost. He blamed the lack of a budget on Kurdish politicians who have refused to back down from a demand that their regional and semiautonomous government be guaranteed 17 percent of national income. The 17 percent formula for Kurds was applied to past budgets, but some Sunni and Shiite lawmakers sought to lower it to about 14 percent. The argument is that the Kurdish population is closer to 14 percent of Iraq's total than 17 percent as Kurds insist. There has been no census in decades.
Bomb kills Iraqi TV cameraman Nation is deadliest place for journalists Thursday, January 31, 2008 3:10 AM By Kimi Yoshino LOS ANGELES TIMES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An Iraqi television cameraman for a Shiite-backed satellite news station was killed when a roadside bomb detonated near a security checkpoint in Balad, about 50 miles north of the capital, station officials said yesterday. The blast also killed a driver and seriously injured a female reporter, who remains hospitalized, the station said. Alaa Abdulkareem Fartusi, 29, is the first journalist to die this year in Iraq, which has become the world's deadliest place to cover a story, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Fartusi, who had worked for two years at al-Furat, a station funded by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, is survived by a wife and two daughters, ages 1 and 3. "Apart from being a colleague, he was a very good friend," al-Furat reporter Ahmed Mehdi said. "He was always optimistic, always happy. If there was sadness, he would be the one smiling, trying to console everyone. We miss him as a friend more than anything else." Fartusi was part of a crew traveling to Samarra for a story on the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque, one of the holiest Shiite shrines in Iraq. The three left Baghdad on Monday and spent the night in Balad. They were headed to Samarra on Tuesday morning when the bomb exploded, striking their van, Mehdi said. The station does not think the crew was targeted, Mehdi said. At least 126 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. In Hamiya, south of Baghdad, a dispute broke out Tuesday night between local police and members of the U.S.-backed Awakening Council, a volunteer security force. The disagreement centered on at least five -- but as many as 25 -- council members who were allegedly wrongly detained and jailed. Accounts of the incident varied, with police and local officials saying that members of the council attacked the police station and tried to steal weapons. Iraqi army and Awakening Council officials said the matter was resolved after a brief dispute that did not result in deaths or serious injuries. The detained members of the security force were released.
NYTimesw.com November 21, 2007
U.S. Accuses Iraqi Photographer of Aiding RebelsThe American military is sending an Iraqi photographer for The Associated Press it accuses of aiding the insurgency into Iraq’s criminal justice system, according to the American authorities and The A.P. The photographer, Bilal Hussein, was part of an 11-member team that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography in 2005. He has been detained without charge since April 2006. A spokesman for the American military in Iraq, Maj. Brad Leighton, said Mr. Hussein was held after soldiers found explosive devices, insurgency propaganda and surveillance photographs of an installation for American-led forces during a routine patrol when they entered his apartment in 2006. His lawyer, Paul Gardephe, said that the allegations were unfounded and that the American authorities had not disclosed any specific charges to be brought against Mr. Hussein. Mr. Gardephe said that in e-mail messages and other correspondence, military officials had alluded to further allegations, including that Mr. Hussein had made offers to provide false identity papers to an Iraqi sniper seeking to elude American custody, and that he had taken photographs so synchronous with bomb attacks that it seemed that he had prior knowledge of the attacks. The Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, was quoted by The A.P. on Monday as saying that the military had “convincing and irrefutable evidence that Bilal Hussein is a threat to stability and security in Iraq as a link to insurgent activity.” He called Mr. Hussein “a terrorist operative who infiltrated The A.P.” Mr. Gardephe said that the news agency had investigated Mr. Hussein’s work, which included interviews with Mr. Hussein, 36, and an examination of the 400 photographs he produced for The A.P., and that it had found no evidence supporting the military’s allegations. Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of The A.P., said in an interview: “We believe that Bilal Hussein has been singled out because of his work as a journalist. While we are glad that there is finally some development that may lead to the end of his imprisonment without charges, we are concerned still about the lack of specificity against him. We have long said that Bilal Hussein was nothing more than a reputable A.P. journalist doing his job, and our position about that has not changed.” Mr. Hussein owned a small electrical shop in Falluja, where he lived, when he was recommended to The A.P. and started working as a local fixer and guide before becoming a photojournalist. He covered the American invasion of Falluja in 2004 before being reassigned to Ramadi. The A.P. employs 200 people in Iraq, including reporters, photographers and television reporters, and the majority are Iraqis. Mr. Hussein’s work focused on the effects of the war on Iraqi civilians, said Mr. Gardephe. He was arrested in April 2006, when soldiers sought entry to his apartment in Ramadi during what they described as a routine search after an explosion on a nearby street. Military officials said they had found photographs of insurgents, which might be construed as propaganda, inside the apartment, Mr. Gardephe said. Mr. Gardephe said that many part-time journalists working for foreign news agencies were arrested at that time in Anbar Province, but that while the others were released after four to five months Mr. Hussein had remained in detention. He has been kept at Camp Crocker near the Baghdad airport. “They will not tell me what allegations they are planning to allege,” Mr. Gardephe said. “Nor do I know what evidence they have.” The American authorities said they intended to file the charges this month. Mr. Hussein’s case would be heard before an investigative judge who would determine what evidence to consider and what witnesses to call, and whether the case should then pass to trial before three judges. The only other journalist to be transferred to the Iraqi central criminal court, Mr. Gardephe said, was a CBS cameraman, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, who was arrested by the American military in March 2005 and held for a year. He was transferred to the Iraqi court in March 2006 and was acquitted that month, Mr. Gardephe said.
NYTimes.com October 15, 2007 An Internet Jihad Sells Extremism to Viewers in the U.S.By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET When Osama bin Laden issued his videotaped message to the American people last month, a young jihad enthusiast went online to help spread the word. “America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness,” he wrote on his blog. “America is known to be a people of arrogance.” Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups. In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq. His neatly organized site also includes a file called “United States of Losers,” which showcased a recent news broadcast about a firefight in Afghanistan with this added commentary from Mr. Khan: “You can even see an American soldier hiding during the ambush like a baby!! AllahuAkbar! AllahuAkbar!” Mr. Khan, who was born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Queens, is an unlikely foot soldier in what Al Qaeda calls the “Islamic jihadi media.” He has grown up in middle-class America and wrestles with his worried parents about his religious fervor. Yet he is stubborn. “I will do my best to speak the truth, and even if it annoys the disbelievers, the truth must be preached,” Mr. Khan said in an interview. While there is nothing to suggest that Mr. Khan is operating in concert with militant leaders, or breaking any laws, he is part of a growing constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of Al Qaeda and other groups, a message that is increasingly devised, translated and aimed for a Western audience. Terrorism experts at West Point say there are as many as 100 English language sites offering militant Islamic views, with Mr. Khan’s — which claims 500 regular readers — among the more active. While their reach is difficult to assess, it is clear from a review of extremist material and interviews that militants are seeking to appeal to young American and European Muslims by playing on their anger over the war in Iraq and the image of Islam under attack. Tedious Arabic screeds are reworked into flashy English productions. Recruitment tracts are issued in multiple languages, like a 39-page, electronic, English version of a booklet urging women to join the fight against the West. There are even online novellas like “Rakan bin Williams,” about a band of Christian European converts who embraced Al Qaeda and “promised God that they will carry the flag of their distant brothers and seek vengeance on the evil doers.” Militant Islamists are turning grainy car-bombing tapes into slick hip-hop videos and montage movies, all readily available on Western sites like YouTube, the online video smorgasbord. “It is as if you would watch a Hollywood movie,” said Abu Saleh, a 21-year-old German devotee of Al Qaeda videos who visits Internet cafes in Berlin twice a week to get the latest releases. “The Internet has totally changed my view on things.” An Internet Strategy Al Qaeda and its followers have used the Internet to communicate and rally support for years, but in the past several months the Western tilt of the message and the sophistication of the media have accelerated. So has the output. Since the beginning of the year, Al Qaeda’s media operation, Al Sahab, has issued new videotapes as often as every three days. Even more come from Iraq, where insurgents are pumping them out daily. That production line is the legacy of one man: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed in June 2006 by American bombs. Mr. Zarqawi learned the power of the Internet in prison, according to a former associate who was imprisoned with him in Jordan a decade ago. Mr. Zarqawi’s jailhouse group of 32 Islamists sought to recruit other prisoners by handwriting a newsletter, Al Tawheed, when it discovered a larger audience. “We sent them outside, to brothers in Europe and England,” who posted the newsletters on militant Web sites, the associate said, asking not be identified because he said he is involved with Islamist activities. In Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi embraced the video camera as a weapon of war. “He made the decision that every group should have a video camera with them, and every operation should be taped,” said a Palestinian militant who went to Iraq in 2005 to teach foreign fighters from Morocco and parts of Europe how to build bombs and stage roadside attacks. Two Lebanese intelligence officials confirmed that the Palestinian, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Omar, had worked with Mr. Zarqawi in Iraq, and he played a video of foreign fighters in Iraq for reporters of The New York Times. Abu Omar, 37, a muscular man who carried a Glock 21 pistol tucked into the belt of his camouflage pants during an interview at his home in Lebanon, said Mr. Zarqawi also had him tape his bombmaking classes so his expertise would not be lost if he were killed. “We had two cameramen, people who learned how to do this before they came to Iraq,” Abu Omar said. “And after filming, we had different houses in the area where we made the videos.” Dahia al-Maqdassi, 26, a Palestinian who said he produced insurgent videos in Iraq two years ago, said, “In every city in Iraq they had a little office where someone did film operations.” He described his “media section” as a house near Falluja where 6 to 10 people worked. “We finished the film and then sent it to jihadi Web sites,” Mr. Maqdassi said. Propaganda Rap Video One of the most influential sites is Tajdeed, which is based in London and run by Dr. Muhammad Massari, a Saudi physicist and dissident. Over lunch at a McDonald’s near his home, Dr. Massari said Mr. Zarqawi’s insurgent videos from Iraq inspired local productions like “Dirty Kuffar,” the Arabic word for nonbeliever. The 2004 rap music video mixed images of Western leaders with others purporting to show American troops cheer as they shot injured Iraqi civilians. Dr. Massari, who helped promote the video, said similar crossover productions soon followed and made their way to his Web site. “I never touch the videos that are on my forums,” said Dr. Massari, who wears a long white Arabic robe. “Someone with Al Qaeda uploads them, probably at Internet cafes, to password-protected sites. Then they call a friend, say, in Australia or Brasília, and say, ‘Hi Johnny, your mom is traveling today.’ That is the code to download the video. It goes up and down like that a few times, with no trace, until someone posts a link on my site.” Last spring, Al Qaeda made what analysts say was a bold attempt to tap potential supporters in the United States. In a videotaped interview, Ayman al-Zawahri, a bin Laden lieutenant, praised Malcolm X and urged American blacks and other minorities to see that “we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all of mankind.” The tape quickly found an audience. Mr. Zawahri “cares about black people,” wrote a blogger with Vibe, the American hip-hop and urban culture magazine, which claims 1.6 million visits a month. “At least, I think that’s why he’s quoting Malcolm X in his latest mix tape, which dropped last weekend.” Umar Lee, a 32-year-old Muslim convert from St. Louis, offered a stinging critique of Mr. Zawahri on his blog for Muslim Americans, criticizing “the second-class status many blacks live in right in the Arab World.” Soon, Mr. Lee’s blog churned with commentary on the parallels between Arab and black American radicals. A four-minute version of the hourlong Qaeda video, entitled “To Black Americans,” has logged more than 1,800 views on YouTube in the four months since it was posted. Among those who posted a link to the YouTube version was Mr. Khan, the North Carolina blogger who said he was struck by the simplicity in the messages of both Al Qaeda and Malcolm X. “They are geniuses for having the ability to mold their ideology into simple yet influential messages that can reach the grass-roots level,” he said. Mr. Khan produces his blog anonymously, but was identified by The Times through the e-mail account he used in previous online discussions. (Pictures he had posted online helped The Times distinguish him from another, unrelated North Carolina resident, about 10 years older, who has the same name.) In an interview at a local mosque, where he sat on a prayer rug wearing a traditional Arabic robe, Mr. Khan traced his increasing militancy. His blog has attracted enough notoriety that vigilante groups opposed to jihadi sites have gotten him shut down a few times in recent months. He said he was somewhat surprised he had not been confronted by government authorities, although, he said, “I’ve never told anybody to build bombs.” His early postings, beginning in 2003, promoted strengthening Islam in North America through nonviolent confrontations. But with the escalating war in Iraq, bloodshed became a recurrent theme. He described his favorite video from Iraq: a fiery suicide-bomber attack on an American outpost. “It was something that brought great happiness to me,” he said. “Because this is something America would never want to admit, that they are being crushed.” Asked how he felt living among people who had sent soldiers to Iraq, Mr. Khan said: “Whatever happens to their sons and daughters is none of my concern. They are people of hellfire and I have no concern for them.” A Teenage Transformation Born in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Khan was 7 when his family moved to New York City and settled into the Queens neighborhood of Maspeth. He mirrored his teenage peers, from their slang to their baggy pants, until August 2001 when, at age 15, he said, he attended a weeklong summer camp at a mosque in Queens, which was sponsored by a fundamentalist but nonviolent group now known as the Islamic Organization of North America (IONA). “They were teaching things about religion and brotherhood that captivated me,” Mr. Khan said. He said he went back to school knowing “what I wanted to do with my life: be a firm Muslim, a strong Muslim, a practicing Muslim.” He prayed more regularly. He dressed more modestly. He stopped listening to music except for Soldiers of Allah, a Los Angeles hip-hop group, now defunct, whose tunes like “Bring Islam Back” continue to have worldwide appeal among militant youths. He also befriended members of the Islamic Thinkers Society, a tiny group that promotes radical, nonviolent Islam by leafleting in Times Square and Jackson Heights, Queens. After moving with his family to North Carolina in 2004, Mr. Khan said, he attended a community college for three years and earned money selling various products, including kitchen knives. But he began spending chunks of his days on the blog he created in late 2005, “Inshallahshaheed,” which translates as “a martyr soon if God wills.” The Internet traffic counter Alexa.com, which rarely is able to measure the popularity of blogs because they do not have enough readers, ranked his among the top one percent of one hundred million Internet sites in the world. If Mr. Khan’s extreme rhetoric has won him a wider audience, it has caused him problems at home. Last year, his father tried to pull him back to the family’s more moderate views by asking an imam to intervene. “I tried to bring arguments from the Koran and scholars, and said, ‘Whatever you are thinking it is not true,’” said Mustapha Elturk, a family friend and the leader of IONA, the Islamic organization that first inspired Mr. Khan. But Mr. Khan did not budge, he said. Mr. Khan said he separated from IONA over one matter: the organization would not support violent jihad without the endorsement of a Muslim nation’s leader, which Mr. Khan argues is unnecessary. Mr. Elturk said, “His father and family are really scared that he might do something.” Attempts to Shut Down Blog |
