Pakistan Promises to Arrest Three “Very Bad Boys” Tied to Times Square Bombing

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Last week, the US put the Tehrek-i-Taliban Pakistan on its official terrorist lists and charged its leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, with something that was almost certainly not a crime. Oddly, though, DOJ did not charge Mehsud which actions they verbally alleged he committed that actually are a crime: conspiring with Faisal Shahzad in his attempted bombing of Times Square. I took from that that either DOJ knows Mehsud was not directly involved in the bombing (contrary to what they said publicly and Shahzad testified in court), or that they simply have no evidence of his involvement in spite of the reported cooperation of Faisal Shahzad.

Which is why I find it interesting that Pakistan has said it will charge (but apparently has not yet done so) three men in connection with the Times Square bombing.

Officials say the three men helped Shahzad to travel to northwestern Pakistan and meet militant leaders there, and sent him $13,000 in the U.S. when he ran short of money. The Pakistani official also said the charges won’t merely cover the plot by Shahzad – who was trained by terror goons in the northwest tribal hotbed of Mir Ali, near Afghanistan.

“They gave refuge to two suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Kashmir,” said the security official, referring to the swath of mountains India and Pakistan have fought over for decades. The businessmen who helped Shahzad were identified as Shoaib Mughal, Shahid Hussain and Humbal Akhtar.

“Those are very bad boys,” the Pakistani official said.

So what has the hold up been given that the Pakistanis presumably have testimony from Shahzad, wire transfer evidence, and documents they mention elsewhere in the article?

Last week, I wondered whether the whole campaign roll-out against the TTP was designed to help Pakistan overcome its reluctance to target the TTP, which has been very useful for Pakistan. And particularly since Shahzad has ties to the military through his retired Air Force father, whether Pakistan was trying to shield powerful people tied to the plot.

Suffice it to say this is feeling a lot like Pakistan’s “crack down” on AQ Khan.

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Who We Are: Zeitoun and Camp Greyhound Five Years On

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In a country founded on “self evident truths” such as life, liberty, equality, and due process of law, the timeless quote from Ben Franklin speaks to the peril imposed when the founding principles are discarded or compromised:

Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.

Yet, of course, since 9/11 that is exactly what the United States has done and what has resulted in return. Fareed Zakaria has a piece up at Newsweek speaking to the senseless and destructive madness that has consumed the US since the 9/11 attacks:

The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted.

….

Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers.

Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism.

…..

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?

Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germs of every other … In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended?.?.?.?and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war,” Madison concluded.

Indeed it is a chilling picture we have allowed our political “leaders” to paint us into, and Zakaria does not even hit some of the most disturbing impingements on due process and the rule of law such as the government arrogating itself the right to summarily execute American citizens with no judicial trial or due process whatsoever and the legal black hole that is Guantanamo and the Obama Military Commission and indefinite detention program. That is, as a nation, who and what we are today and it has bought us nothing except world scorn, geometrically more enemies, a plundered treasury, ignored and dilapidated domestic infrastructure, swelling joblessness and exploding income inequality.

But, hey, at least we have increased security and all those oppressive terrorist modalities are only for al-Qaida and the bad foreigners, right? No. The rot is now who we are, towards ourselves in addition to “them”. And that is where we finally get to the subject of the title of this post. Nothing demonstrates the deadly rot virus that has been injected into the blood of the American ethos than the story of Zeitoun. (more after jump) Read more →

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On Tuesday, General Petraeus Achieved Victory in Oceania; On Wednesday, He Led Us to War against Eastasia

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The day after Obama declared victory (sort of) in Iraq, the Administration announced a whole package of sanctions against the Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e Taliban. The sanctions:

  • Designate TTP as a Foreign Terrorist Organization
  • Designate TTP as a Special Designated Global Terrorist Organization
  • Designate TTP’s two leaders, Hakimullah Mehsud and Wali Ur Rehman, as Special Designated Global Terrorists
  • Offer of $5 million reward leading to Mehsud or Rehman’s arrest
  • Charge Mehsud in connection with the Khost killings

Forgive me if I dismiss what are real measures against a genuinely dangerous organization. But I can’t help but suspect this lays the ground work to ensure we have a war against terror to fight (and with it, expanded executive powers) beyond July 2011.

Charging a formerly dead guy

Perhaps my favorite comment on the criminal charges came from reporter James Gordon Meek:

DOJ charges Pak #Taliban emir Hakimullah Mehsud in absentia for killing 7 CIA officers in #Afghanistan 12/09. Anybody tell CIA’s drone unit?

Presumably, Meek is referring to claims a US drone strike killed Mehsud in January, a claim the CIA once judged to have a 90% likelihood of being correct. There’s not much point in arresting Mehsud if he’s been dead nine months.

But the mention of CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan raises a bunch more problems with DOJ’s charges. For starters, Mehsud’s wife–a civilian–was reportedly killed in that January drone strike too. Both the uncertainty the CIA has about its purportedly scalpel-like use of drones and the civilian deaths they’ve caused illustrate the problem with drones in the first place. Civilians–CIA officers–are using them in circumstances with significant collateral damage. It would be generous to call the use of drones in such situations an act of war; some legal experts have said the CIA officers targeting the drones are as much illegal combatants as al Qaeda fighters themselves.

The affidavit describing the evidence to charge Mehsud doesn’t say it, but underlying his alleged crime is the potential US crime of having civilians target non-combatants in situations that cannot be described as imminently defensive.

Charging someone for revenge on CIA’s illegal killing

Which leads us to the crimes for which they’re charging Mehsud: conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to use a WMD (bombs) against a US national while outside of the United States. Basically, DOJ is charging Mehsud with conspiring with Humam Khalil Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian doctor who committed the suicide bombing at Khost that killed 7 CIA officers and contractors.

Now, there’s not much doubt that Mehsud did conspire with al-Balawi. I just doubt whether it could be fairly called a crime. The affidavit describes two videos in which Mehsud stands side by side with al-Bawali. In one, both al-Balawi and Mehsud describe the upcoming attack as revenge for killings in the drone program–most importantly, of Mehsud’s brother Baitullah Mehsud from a CIA drone strike in August 2009.

Al-Balawi then continues alone: “This itishhadi [martyrdom-seeking attack] will be the first of the revenge against the Americans.” After additional declarations of revenge by al-Balawi, MEHSUD resumes speaking in Pashtu, explaining the motive for the upcoming suicide attack by al-Balawi, that is the death of the former emir of the TTP, Baitullah Meshud [sic] which MESHUD [sic] attributes to the Americans.

Remember, too, that al-Balawi was a double agent. The Americans believed he was helping them target people, people just like Mehsud. That means al-Balawi (and presumably through him, Mehsud) knew he was specifically targeting those behind the earlier killings in Pakistan when he killed them.

So al-Balawi successfully killed people who were either civilians, in which case their own strikes at Baitullah Mehsud and others may be illegal, or people who were acting as soldiers, in which case the attack on their base was presumably legal under the law of war. And for helping al-Balawi, DOJ is now charging Mehsud with conspiracy.

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ACLU and CCR Sue to Stop Targeted Killings

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From a joint press release:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) today filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s asserted authority to carry out “targeted killings” of U.S. citizens located far from any armed conflict zone.

The authority contemplated by the Obama administration is far broader than what the Constitution and international law allow, the groups charge. Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. An extrajudicial killing policy under which names are added to CIA and military “kill lists” through a secret executive process and stay there for months at a time is plainly not limited to imminent threats.

“The United States cannot simply execute people, including its own citizens, anywhere in the world based on its own say-so,” said Vince Warren, Executive Director of CCR. “The law prohibits the government from killing without trial or conviction other than in the face of an imminent threat that leaves no time for deliberation or due process. That the government adds people to kill lists after a bureaucratic process and leaves them on the lists for months at a time flies in the face of the Constitution and international law.”

The groups charge that targeting individuals for execution who are suspected of terrorism but have not been convicted or even charged – without oversight, judicial process or disclosed standards for placement on kill lists – also poses the risk that the government will erroneously target the wrong people. In recent years, the U.S. government has detained many men as terrorists, only for courts or the government itself to discover later that the evidence was wrong or unreliable.

According to today’s legal complaint, the government has not disclosed the standards it uses for authorizing the premeditated and deliberate killing of U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield. The groups argue that the American people are entitled to know the standards being used for these life and death decisions.

“A program that authorizes killing U.S. citizens, without judicial oversight, due process or disclosed standards is unconstitutional, unlawful and un-American,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “We don’t sentence people to prison on the basis of secret criteria, and we certainly shouldn’t sentence them to death that way. It is not enough for the executive branch to say ‘trust us’ – we have seen that backfire in the past and we should learn from those mistakes.”

CCR and the ACLU were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorize the targeted killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi, whom the CIA and Defense Department have targeted for death. The complaint asks a court to rule that using lethal force far from any battlefield and without judicial process is illegal in all but the narrowest circumstances and to prohibit the government from carrying out targeted killings except in compliance with these standards. It also asks the court to order the government to disclose the standards it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists. [my emphasis]

For the backup documentation, go here or here.

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CIA: Money Is Fungible, Except When It Is Our Money

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Keep in mind as you read these four paragraphs from WaPo’s follow-up on NYT’s story on Mohammed Zia Salehi that the person quoted is almost certainly from the same CIA that profiles terrorist organizations that, regardless of the charitable work they do, may not legally receive money.

U.S. officials did not dispute that Salehi was on the CIA payroll, which was first reported by The New York Times. But officials sought to draw a distinction between agency payments and corruption probes.

“The United States government had nothing to do with the activities for which this individual is being investigated,” the second U.S. official said. “It’s not news that we sometimes pay people overseas who help the United States do what it needs to get done. . . . Nor should it be surprising, in a place like Afghanistan, that some influential figures can be both helpful and – on their own, separate and apart – corrupt to some degree.”

The flow of CIA money into the region dates to the agency’s support for mujaheddin fighters who ousted Soviet forces three decades ago.

The spigot was tightened during the 1990s but reopened after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much of the money went to support warlords whose militias helped to overthrow the Taliban regime, which had provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda training camps. Salehi had served as an interpreter for one of the most prominent of those warlords, Abdurrashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose forces played a critical role in the campaign against the Taliban.

The unnamed “second US official” almost certainly is at the CIA or it’s close vicinity. And this person wants to claim that the money CIA pays to Salehi has absolutely nothing to do with the corruption of which he stands accused. The story elsewhere details the alleged corruption to include sheltering New Ansari (a money transfer firm used to drain aid money out of Afghanistan), doling out cash and cars to Hamid Karzai supporters, and negotiating with the Taliban. So the CIA actually wants to claim that the money it pays to Salehi is not then laundered into payments to Karzai supporters or cooperative Taliban members.

You know, the Taliban? The guys we claim to be fighting, since there are no more al Qaeda members in Afghanistan?

And you have to love the understated irony of the passage, the way Greg Miller and Joshua Partlow remind readers that the CIA has funded a lot of Islamic extremists, including some who loosely cooperated with other mujahadeen groups like those that would become al Qaeda. It’d be nice, mind you, if they also reminded readers that Rashid Dostum is the creep behind the Convoy of Death massacre, but that might just be too much irony for this short passage.

It’s bad enough that the CIA openly admits funding this guy, yet claims their payments could have nothing to do with the deep corruption of which he is accused.

But on top of that there’s this blind belief that these kind of payments never, ever, have blowback.

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Dexter Filkins’ Busy Week

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Dexter Filkins’ story reporting that a top, corrupt, Hamid Karzai aide is on the CIA payroll is not, by itself, all that interesting.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

But read it in conjunction with Filkins’ other two stories this week. His week started, after all, with the equally unsurprising story that Abdul Ghani Baradar’s capture some months ago may have been orchestrated by Pakistan’s ISI to prevent peace negotiations between Karzai’s government and the Taliban. That story relies on both Pakistani officials boasting of their ploy, Afghan officials explaining how they attempted to negotiate peace, and a Pakistani spiritual leader talking about his role in the attempted negotiations. It includes the allegation–made by a former Afghan official and a NATO official–that Ahmed Wali Karzai had met with Baradar. But perhaps most interesting for our purposes is this passage:

Some American officials still insist that Pakistan-American cooperation is improving, and deny a central Pakistani role in Mr. Baradar’s arrest. They say the Pakistanis may now be trying to rewrite history to make themselves appear more influential. It was American intellgence that led to Mr. Baradar’s capture, an American official said.

“These are self-serving fairy tales,” the official said. “The people involved in the operation on the ground didn’t know exactly who would be there when they themselves arrived. But it certainly became clear, to Pakistanis and Americans alike, who we’d gotten.”

Other American officials suspect the C.I.A. may have been unwittingly used by the Pakistanis for the larger aims of slowing the pace of any peace talks.

That is, among Filkins’ American sources, one side denies Pakistan would be so tricky with the US (read, the CIA). That person calls the entire story “self-serving fairy tales.” And the other side “suspect[s] the CIA may have been unwittingly used by the Pakistanis.”

That is, among Filkins’ American sources, this story is a debate over whether the CIA is incompetent or not.

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Our Paramilitaries and Their Militia Play Doctor

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Jim White has an important observation about the increasing militarization of our aid operations in Afghanistan.

When the medical teams come from the very same organization that disappears innocent people in the middle of the night, the US effort in Afghanistan has become completely detached from sanity.

The medical team described above is affiliated with the provincial reconstruction team and both come from Special Operations. By militarizing these vital functions which could be part of helping the Afghan population, the military is pushing aside neutral groups such as the UN and other non-governmental organizations.

When I read it, I thought it important to place this story about the Pakistani floods alongside it.

As public anger rises over the government’s slow and chaotic response to Pakistan’s worst flooding in 80 years, hard-line Islamic charities have stepped into the breach with a grass-roots efficiency that is earning them new support among Pakistan’s beleaguered masses.

Victims of the floods and political observers say the disaster has provided yet another deeply painful reminder of the anemic health of the civilian government as it teeters between the ineffectual and neglectful.

The floods have opened a fresh opportunity for the Islamic charities to demonstrate that they can provide what the government cannot, much as the Islamists did during the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, which helped them lure new recruits to banned militant groups through the charity wings that front for them.

In just two districts in this part of the northwest, three Islamic charities have provided shelter to thousands, collected tens of thousands in donations and served about 25,000 hot meals a day a since last Saturday — six full days before the government delivered cooked food.

20% of Pakistan is underwater right now and experts forecast more monsoons and outbreaks of cholera. In response, thus far, we’ve sent two (Marine) helicopters, though we’re planning to send more, along with tens of millions in aid. Yet as has happened in other countries (most notably Lebanon), groups with ties to Islamic extremists have stepped up to provide the most credible emergency assistance.

We really are in a position–and seem willingly trying to push ourselves further into that position–where we’re placing our paramilitaries into a competition with indigenous militias to see who can most credibly provide functions that ought to be governmental. I really don’t see how this ends well.

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Is the Government Using OFAC to Prevent Due Process?

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The ACLU and CCR just had a conference call to talk about their suit challenging the licensing scheme the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control uses to prevent lawyers from representing those on OFAC’s designated terrorist list. Much of the discussion pertained to whether Anwar al-Awlaki could be legitimately considered an enemy combatant given his alleged incitement of attacks on the US.

But I was most interested in the timing. As the CCR summary notes, Awlaki’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki, first retained the ACLU and CCR in “early July” to challenge the assassination order on his son on due process grounds. Within weeks, on July 16, 2010, the government designated Anwar al-Awlaki a specially designated global terrorist. At that point, ACLU and CCR had to stop their work on suing the government and apply for a license allowing them to represent the Awlakis. As ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero noted, listing Awlaki put lawyers in neutral, “while we were in 3rd or 4th gear a few weeks ago” as they wait for the bureaucratic process of getting a license play out.

I asked whether they thought this was intentional–that is, whether they thought the government had designated Awlaki a terrorist so as to make it harder for the ACLU and CCR to represent him. Romero admitted the timing of the listing “did raise our eyebrows.” He said the timing raises the question of “whether OFA is being used to impede lawyers’ ability to challenge” programs like the kill list. And ACLU Attorney Ben Wizner noted how long after the government put Awlaki on the kill list it was before they started to designate him a terrorist and freeze his assets.

Implicit in my question was how the government knew the ACLU and CCR were representing the Awlakis. I will work to clarify that, though Romero did say that the lawyers on the case had traveled to Yemen and started meeting with the family.

In any case, add the timing of the government’s designation of Anwar al-Awlaki as a terrorist to the list of other things that already stink about the government’s efforts to kill him with no due process.

Note: The quotes in this are my transcriptions of the call itself. Since I’m mid-move, I didn’t manage to record the call, but will check the quotes for attribution and accuracy later this PM.

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Apparently, Reporting on Right Wing Death Squads Is Now Material Support for Terrorism

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We’ve discussed the recent SCOTUS decision that ruled the government can charge people engaging in First Amendment activities with material support for terrorism. Even groups trying to teach terrorist organizations to engage peacefully might be judged to be materially supporting terrorists.

And while I don’t think that’s precisely what is going on here, the logical next step after treating counseling on conflict negotiations as material support for terrorism is to treat reporting on conflict negotiations as material support for terrorism.

Hollman Morris Rincón, an independent journalist in Colombia, won a Nieman Fellowship this spring to study conflict negotiation strategies, international criminal court procedures, and the Rome Statute. I’ll just quote the AP:

BOGOTA, Colombia — The U.S. government has denied a visa to a prominent Colombian journalist who specializes in conflict and human rights reporting to attend a prestigious fellowship at Harvard University.

Hollman Morris, who produces an independent TV news program called “Contravia,” has been highly critical of ties between illegal far-right militias and allies of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, Washington’s closest ally in Latin America.

The curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, which has offered the mid-career fellowships since 1938, said Thursday that a consular official at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota told him Morris was ruled permanently ineligible for a visa under the “Terrorist activities” section of the USA Patriot Act.

Of course, given that the Attorney General has, himself, helped a bunch of white Republicans get away with their material support for Colombia’s death squads, you might think our country simply thinks some terrorists are more equal than others. But keep in mind: both Colombia’s left wing and right wing terrorists are on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list.

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Obama Administration Grants Europeans Rights Americans Don’t Have

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You know what happens when your elected representatives fight for your privacy? Counterterrorism investigators actually grant you some!

At issue is SWIFT–the database that tracked most international money transfers which the Bush Administration mined in its counterterrorism fight. When SWIFT’s server moved to the EU, the US tried to demand the same access as it had had previously. But the EU Parliament–strengthened by the Lisbon treaty–rejected the terms the US initially demanded. And as negotiations went on, the EU insisted on safeguards for its citizens.

Well, the EU finally signed an agreement with the US, and here are the protections the EU won for its citizens (h/t LES):

Elimination of bulk data transfers

The key to the deal for Parliament was the eventual elimination of “bulk” data transfers. In exchange for backing the agreement, MEPs won an undertaking that work on setting up an EU equivalent to the US “Terrorism Finance Tracking Program” (TFTP), which would preclude the need for bulk data transfers, will start within 12 months. Once Europe has a system enabling it to analyse data on its own territory, it need only transfer data relating to a specific terrorist track.

A new role for Europol

Another innovation of the new agreement is that it empowers “Europol”, the EU’s criminal intelligence agency based in The Hague, to block data transfers to the USA. Europol will have to check that every data transfer request by the US Treasury is justified by counter-terrorism needs and that the volume of data requested is as small as possible.

An EU representative in the USA to monitor data processing

The new version of the agreement also provides that the use of data by the Americans, which must be exclusively for counter-terrorism purposes, is to be supervised by a group of independent inspectors, including someone appointed by the European Commission and the European Parliament. This person will be entitled to request justification before any data is used and to block any searches he or she considers illegitimate.

The agreement prohibits the US TFTP from engaging in “data mining” or any other type of algorithmic or automated profiling or computer filtering. Any searches of SWIFT data will have to be based on existing information showing that the object of the search relates to terrorism or terrorism finance.

Right of redress for European citizens

In February 2010, MEPs demanded that under any new version of the agreement European citizens should be guaranteed the same judicial redress procedures as those applied to data held on the territory of the European Union. The new proposal says this time that US law must provide a right of redress, regardless of nationality.

Data retention and deletion

Extracted data may be retained only for the duration of the specific procedures and investigations for which they are used. Each year, the US Treasury must take stock of any data that have not been extracted, and hence individualised, which will no longer be of use for counter-terrorism purposes, and delete them.  Such data must be deleted after five years at the latest.

There will be two checks–at the Europol level and via an EU representative working in the US–to make sure the data is being accessed appropriately. Within a year, Europe will assume the role the US is now playing. And the agreement at least grants redress in court and limits on data retention (though like those in Europe who opposed this deal, I’m skeptical of the efficacy of these requirements).

That’s more than we American citizens get under some of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

Then again, some of our representatives tried to win greater protections for US persons last year. But short of doing what the EU did–withdrawing US access to the data–Congress was unable to win concessions from the Administration.

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