headland

Ukrainians return for a third time to vote in their Presidential elections tomorrow, December 26. Yossef Bodansky, Senior Editor, Global Information System, reports in Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily (December 24, 2004) on his observations as part of a team of election monitors in the first two rounds. Bodansky contends that the elections were free, fair, and legal (though, significantly, he does not mention the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko). He sees the unprecedented move of repeating a Presidential election to be caused by the pressure of Western Europe and the United States, along with a pre-planned post-election propaganda war by the Yushchenko campaign. He notes that no one on his team saw anyone conducting exit polls in the second round, undermining the claims of the Yushchenko campaign that the results of these polls are evidence of fraud. On the subject of exit polls, see Which Side Attempted a Fraud in the Ukraine? for a discussion of an earlier story in Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily: "Extent of Soros-Linked Involvement Becoming Clear in Attempting to Seize Ukraine Elections for Yuschenko (December 3, 2004).

Bodansky is perplexed that the United States would side with the Western European support for Yuschenko's "coup attempt." He notes that Yuschenko, on the eve of the elections, gave assurances to the leaders of Germany, France and Spain that once elected he would immediately withdraw Ukrainian troops from Iraq. On the other hand, Viktor Yanukovich told Washington and Moscow that the Ukrainian contingent would not leave Iraq until the last U.S. troops left.

My guess is that U.S. statements of support for the "Orange Revolution" were initiated unilaterally by factions within the State Department that are dubious of, if not opposed to, the Bush Administration's Iraq policies. Continuing speculations about the source of the dioxin poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko prevent the Administration from any action other than awaiting the results of Sunday's third round of elections.

Labels: Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, Global Information System, Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, Yossef Bodansky

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the reported "mastermind" of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, was integrally linked into the Bosnia al-Qaida terrorist hub. Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily reports today that extremely reliable Global Information System (GIS) sources have produced definitive evidence of the link ("Al-Qaida Leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Bosnian Links Emerging," November 24, 2004).

Specifically, GIS sources reveal that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, born in Kuwait on October 22, 1966, was in Bosnia as a first member of the El-Mudzahid unit, and then, since 1996, he was a member of the Egyptian Islamist radical operations. He obtained a Bosnian citizenship certificate in 1994 (Sarajevo Police No. 09/2-204-108 dated April 30, 1994) and a Bosnian passport soon thereafter.

In 2003, Defense & Foreign Affairs/GIS reported several additional links between Bosnian officials and the Islamist terrorist network ("Bosnian Official Links With Terrorism, Including 9/11, Become Increasingly Apparent as Clinton, Clark Attempt to Justify Support of Bosnian Militants," Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS, September 17, 2003).

A key link between radical Islamists in the government of Bosnia-Herzogovina (B-H) and Islamist terrorists was Huso (later Hussein) Zivalj, B-H Ambassador to the U.N. during the September 11, 2001 attacks. Zivalj arrived in New York just before the attacks and left the U.N. post shortly thereafter. During his stay as B-H Ambassador to Vienna between 1992 and 1995, Zivalj approved a significant number of visas and passports to radical islamists of non-Bosnian origin. In 1995, a B-H passport was issued to Safet Catovic [Passport No. BH-46600], who has had many links to Islamist "charity" front groups funding terrorist organizations. Earlier, Zivalj had issued a Bosnia-Herzogovina passport to Osama bin Laden himself.

Additionally, five of the known 9/11 hijackers had direct links through and with Bosnia, and all were supported by Bosnian-linked Islamist "charities".

Why have these links between Bosnian Islamists and 9/11 not become prominent news? Defense & Foreign Affairs concludes on a troubling note:

It is also significant that, despite the fact that the US Government has had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in custody for more than a year, there has been no mention of Bosnia's role in the September 11, 2001, attacks, despite the growing volume of evidence linking Bosnia to the attacks. There has been some suggestion that the linkage was an embarrassment to the US Government -- and particularly to the US Dept. of State -- which had been a significant source of support for the Bosnian Islamists during and after the Bosnian civil war.

Now that Condoleezza Rice is to be Secretary of State and Porter Goss is at the Central Intelligence Agency, one should be able to hope that any residual support within the U.S. Government for Bosnian Islamists can finally cease.

Labels: al Qaeda, Al-Qa'idah, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Bosnia, Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, Global Information System, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Kuwait

Arafat died of AIDS-related failures,

"When the subject of Arafat's AIDS condition was raised with a number of Palestinian, French and other sources, the response invariably was that it was an 'open secret', but one now increasingly spoken of in loud whispers..."

and, in the immediate aftermath of his death, the PLO will be dominated by the jihad-oriented faction of Fatah, strongly supported by the Iranian and Syrian governments. These are the reports of sources for Global Information System Stations, in Paris, Cairo, Beirut and Gaza, and related in Friday's Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily.
Here are the details of that report:
• The new Fatah Chairman is Faruq Qaddumi, who has the support of mobilized elements of Palestinean society.
• Qaddumi was in Beirut on November 11, for talks with Syrian and Iranian officials and leaders of HizbAllah and other terrorist and radical groups. He is strongly supported by Legislative Council Speaker and Interim Chairman Rawhi Fatouh.
• Fatah's strongly-active terrorist unit, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, changed its name on Thursday to Arafat Martyrs' Brigade.
• Extensive planning has been underway for some time before Arafat's death was announced to ensure that his funeral would occur on al-Quds (Jerusalem) day, November 12, 2004. This was a holiday created as a "gift" by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran after Arafat became the first Arab official to visit him after the 1979 revolution. Al-Quds Day is the last Friday in the month of Ramadan.
• Several Arab diplomats were told -- while officially Arafat was claimed to be alive -- to be ready and available on al-Quds Day, raising the suspicion that Arafat had been dead for some time before the announcement so that his body could be held for the symbolic day.
• Four separate diplomatic sources, three of them Arab, told GIS/Defense&Foreign Affairs that Arafat died of AIDS-related failures.

Labels: Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, Al-Fatah, Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, Global Information System, Hezbollah, HIV/AIDS, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yassir Arafat

Yossef Bodansky, Senior Editor of Global Information Service, argues in Monday's Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily that Osama bin Laden's main audience in his recent speech was the Arab world, not Americans, and that his main message was the heralding and defense of a mass-killing spectacular strike against the United States.

Bodansky takes bin Laden's message to be an anticipatory moral defense:

He emphasized that the key to the security of all Americans was in their own hands: "Your security does not lie in the hands of Kerry, Bush, or al-Qaida . Your security is in your own hands." This can be done if Americans, through the electoral process, profoundly changed the policy of the US and ended the war on terrorism. "Each and every state that does not tamper with our security will have automatically assured its own security," bin Laden noted. Left unstated was the most important point: namely, that if US voters chose to support the continuation of the war on terrorism in one form or another they would be held responsible for the inevitable retaliation. This was the logic behind the spectacular strikes of September 11, 2001, and this logic remains valid.

In a November 2001 interview by Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, Bin Laden made the argument that given their participation in the democratic process, no US citizen was actually an innocent civilian.

"This is a major point in jurisprudence," bin Laden explained. "In my view, if an enemy occupies a Muslim territory and uses common people as human shield, then it is permitted to attack that enemy. ... The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president, their government manufactures arms and gives them to Israel and Israel uses them to massacre Palestinians. The American Congress endorses all government measures and this proves that the entire America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims: the entire America, because they elect the Congress."

Bodansky reports that in the summer 2004 there began a crescendo of threatening messages, referring to the forthcoming use of weapons of mass destruction against the West, with a strong hint of the use of a nuclear weapon. He also notes that the threats delivered in American English by Azzam al-Amriki in late October of spectacular strikes against American cities have been echoed in numerous messages delivered in Arabic, Dari and a host of other languages.

A note from the Editor reports that GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs sources within the Islamist movements in the Balkans all report, on October 31, 2004, an upsurge in the rumors of a planned nuclear strike by Islamists on one or more U.S. targets. The note adds that Bosnian groups linked to the radical Islamist party SDA were active in supporting the terrorists who carried out the attacks on September 11 in the United States and in March 2004 in Madrid.

Bodansky concludes that taken together, these warnings have created great expectations among those faithful to the Islamic jihadist movement and that the leadership is not likely to ignore or fail to fulfill these expectations.

[Ed. In the full text of the speech posted on Aljazeera.Net, there is a grisly attempt by bin Laden to lay the blame for 9/11 on the victims. He claims to discern in their gestures before the collapse of the towers this message: "How mistaken we were to have allowed the White House to implement its aggressive foreign policies against the week..." Bin Laden then sees the victims imploring living Americans to hold their leaders to account, thereby implying that if we do not, we too will be guilty and thus deserving of the attacks of the Islamists.]

Labels: al Qaeda, Al-Qa'idah, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, George W. Bush, Global Information System, John Kerry, Osama bin Laden, Yossef Bodansky

Syrian President Bashar al-Asad speaking in Damascus at the Conference of Syrian Expatriates on October 8 said: "Do they [the Western countries] want to fling the entire region into the volcano? Haven't they learned from 9/11? Haven't we learned from the Iraq war? Hasn't the world learned? We learned many years ago that when a volcano erupts, its core strikes countries near and far, great and small, powerful and weak. The time has come for us to learn this lesson." ("Syrian president Asad Issues Stark Warning, Supported by Possible Terrorist Action and IRBM Capability," Jason Fuchs and Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, October 15, 2004.)

Asad's threat of an Islamist "core" capable of striking targets anywhere is particularly ominous in the light of the GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily report that government officials in Damascus and Tehran were involved in intense debates with the high command of the Islamist-jihadist movement over whether to launch "spectacular" strikes against Western and specifically United States targets. GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs reports intelligence of at least two large missile launch sites that have a strong Iranian involvement. Rumors that these sites may have been prepared to launch the Iranian Shahab-3D IRBM are particularly disturbing. Edward Jay Epstein reports that the imprecision of the Shahab-3 missile, announced by Iran on September 26 to be deployed on mobile launchers, makes it impractical for any payload other than WMDs. In July 2003, Syria tested air-dropped chemical and biological weapons in Darfur, Sudan.

Labels: Bashar al-Asad, biological weapons, chemical weapons, Damascus, Darfur, Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, Global Information System, Shahab-3D IRBM, Sudan, Syria

In today's Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily it is claimed that Global Information System sources report that supporters of Sen. John Kerry have "prepared a series of television ads to take advantage of a possible major terrorist attack against the US before the [November 2, 2004] election" ["Campaign Supporting US Presidential Hopeful Kerry Readies Ads to Capitalize on Terrorist Attack on US"].

The ads reportedly say of President George W. Bush: "He said he'd keep us safe. He didn't."

The report does not identify the tax-exempt 527 group that has prepared the ads.

Labels: 527 groups, Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, George W. Bush, Global Information System, John Kerry

Jason Fuchs reports in Tuesday's Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily ¹ that "spectacular" attacks against targets in the West and particularly the United States, prior to the U.S. elections on November 2, are the subject of "intense strategic discussions" involving Islamist-jihadist groups along with their chief state sponsors, Iran and Syria. Global Information System (GIS) sources report that, on the question of a major Islamist offensive, "[Government officials in] Damascus and Tehran, and Islamist leaders in Islamabad are engaged in the debate and having "major input."

"Damascus and Tehran, and [Islamist leaders in] Islamabad are in on the debate and are having major input."

Though the debate is formulated in theological language, the GIS sources describe it as "extremely pragmatic." The utilitarian calculation involves an estimation of the probable reaction of the US electorate to pre-election attacks, described as a new mass-casualty "spectacular," and the danger of retaliation directed toward the sponsoring states. There is also some discussion of how the Muslim world will respond to the extreme violence and bloodshed being proposed.

Sources have stressed that the sponsoring states have the power to prevent the attacks on their own, "in more than one way," should they choose to do so.

This is not the first report of plans for a major attack against the West. A leaked Iraqi intelligence report, published in the Iraqi daily al-Watan on September 22, 2004 (and discussed by headland on September 24 in Al-Zarqawi planning major attack in Europe or US." ²), alleged that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was preparing cells for a big attack, "along the lines of 11 September," in Western Europe or the United States.

GIS sources characterized these reports as somewhat misleading, inasmuch as Zarqawi has no direct control over significant assets in Western Europe. Nonetheless, some of the non-Iraqi Islamist fighters who have fought in Iraq under Zarqawi's command and in association with his Jamaat al-Tawhid wa'l-Jihad (Unity and Jihad Group) have returned to Islamist units in their home countries. These operatives are under commanders in Western Europe and await the directions of the high strategic operational command led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and his associated state sponsors.

TO BE CONTINUED.

NOTES
¹ Jason Fuchs (Global Information System UN Correspondent), "Intense Debate by Islamist movements and Sponsoring States on New Terrorist Attacks on the West," Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, October 12, 2004.
² The headland report, Al-Zarqawi planning major attack in Europe or US.", was based on a BBC Worldwide Monitoring translation of the al-Watan report, published on www.al-watan.com in Arabic.

Labels: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ayman al-Zawahri, Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, Global Information System, Iran, Iraq, Jamaat al-Tawhid wa'l-Jihad, Jason Fuchs, Syria