We've seen several news items the last week that related directly to the problem of terrorism directed at Americans, starting with the terror alert announced last weekend and debated for the rest of the week. As I've indicated in my previous posts on that, I think the current five-level color-coded general "terror alert" system is fatally flawed.
What is really the point of having vague and general terror warnings? Other than to promote a climate of fear? Unless people have something specific they can and should do differently in a particular situation, what good do these color-coded terror alerts really serve?
We did have a couple of busts. In Albany NY, two leaders of a local mosque were caught in an FBI sting operation offering their help in raising money to buy a shoulder-fired missile to use in assassinating the Pakistani ambassador to the US. Mohammed Mosharref Hossain runs a pizzeria and Yassin Muhiddin Aref is the mosque's imam. An unnamed senior Bush administration official claimed that Aref has ties to Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group operating in Iraq whose exact ties to al-Qaeda are unknown. Both suspects have long beards and exotic names and fit the popular image of "Muslim terrorists."
In another sting operation, the FBI busted a 66 former counterfeiter named Gale Nettles. FBI aids suspect in catching himself Chicago Tribune 08/06/04. Nettles had blabbed to a cell-mate when he was in prison in Mississippi that he planned to blow up the federal courthouse in Chicago. Federal agents followed up on the threat and caught him making arrangements to do just that. Nettles is an aging white guy nicknamed "Pops" who law enforcement had once regarded as affiliated with the Aryan Nations gang. I haven't seen Nettles described yet as a "Christian terrorist" or a "white-supremacist terrorist."
In fact, neither of these two cases involved catching anyone in actual plots with actual terrorists, at least based on the initial information. We just have a vague claim by an anonymous Bush official that one of the Albany suspects was "connected" to a group that may be connnected to al-Qaeda.
Sting operations are legitimate law-enforcement tools. But they are what they are. They involve government agents persuading suspects to participate in a scheme that would be criminal if it were real. The suspects may or may not have committed a crime had the agents not been involved. At least in Gale Nettles case, there was a claim from a jailhouse informant that he actually intended to commit a specific crime before the sting operation began.
Neither case meant any kind of breaking up of operating terrorist networks. And how solid the cases are remains to be seen. Bob Dreyfuss raised a very legitimate point a few days ago (9/11 Commission: Failure No. 5 07/30/04):
After 9/11, Attorney General Ashcroft warned that there were 5,000 Al Qaeda sleepers in the United States, but nary one has been found—and none have committed any acts of terrorism. Yet the FBI has reinvented itself, beefing up its Joint Terrorism Task Forces, creating an Office of Intelligence, and reorienting many of its crime-fighting agents to intelligence, not law enforcement.
After three years, Ashcroft's "war on terror" busts largely consists of a few cases against doofuses in Oregon and New York who made some clumsy attempts to link up with al-Qaeda types and imprisoning thousand of immigrants who were not even suspected of terrorist ties for months on end without benefit of counsel. He had to let John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" who was caught fighting in the opposing army in a war against US forces. Because he couldn't afford the publicity a full trial would have involved, focusing worldwide press attention on the already- estblished practice of torturing prisoners and on the highly-questionable actions of US and British forces in relation to our Northern Alliance allies' practice of murdering prisoners of war.
Now, I'm sure we can all be relieved that a potentially subversive pizza place owner is off the street for now. But if there are thousands of jihadist sleeper agents prowling around the United States, why is the FBI having to cook up its own phony terrorist plots to bust people nearly three years after the 9/11 attacks?
At firstglance, the bust in Britain of 12 people in Britain, one of whom is said to be a senior al-Qaeda leader and the head of al-Qaeda in Britain, seems far more substantial in terms of its real effect in combatting terrorist networks than the cases Ashcroft has delivered so far. But it remains to be seen how solid those are: The sting and the spin: will a small house in Willesden unlock the secrets of al-Qa'ida? Independent (UK) 08/07/04.
The chief prize in London is a man now being described as Bin Laden's "UK general", Abu al-Hindi. Seized at a house in north-west London, Mr al-Hindi is said to have been traced from Mr Khan's computer. He is thought to have been under surveillance for a number of weeks and was the main target of Tuesday's operation. A slew of reports paint a picture of the man as a linchpin in the terror network. If they are all true, the man with the codename Bilal is one of three men who cased potential targets in the US, is the author of a guerrilla training manual and was a worshipper at Abu Hamza's Finsbury Park mosque. ...
There has been considerable scepticism over the timing of these arrests in London and Pakistan. Just as the White House has been accused of timing its new orange alerts to undermine presidential challenger John Kerry, so the timing of the new arrests is suspiciously convenient for Pakistan. After all, they come just as President Pervez Musharraf was under renewed pressure, particularly after the many unflattering mentions Pakistan received in last month's 9/11 Commission report. Well-informed sources say Mr Musharraf was being pressured by the White House to help President Bush on one of two fronts: either to deliver new al-Qa'ida arrests, or provide troops for Iraq. And sure enough, just as the arrests were announced this week, Pakistan said it would not send troops to Iraq. The suspicion persists that Pakistan moves against al-Qa'ida only when the timing suits President Musharraf. ...
The fact is that the "war on terror" has become so politicised and the popular portrayal of al-Qa'ida so warped (the phrase "linked to al-Qa'ida" has become a kind of journalistic knee-jerk) that very little - certainly in the short term - can be taken at face value. The politicisation is bound to be at its height in a US election year.
... The problem is determining where the facts stop and the spin begins.
Once again, we're reminded that credibility counts. And both the Bush and Blair governments had given the world, and their own citizens, many reasons to doubt their credibility on terrorism claims.
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