Eric Umansky

Flagging, a Problem

From the NYT:

George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a hard-line Marxist group that shocked the world with a campaign of airline hijackings and bombings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died Saturday of a heart attack in Amman, Jordan.

From the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969 to the simultaneous hijacking of three Western airliners to Amman, Jordan, in September 1970, the Front stayed in the news with high-profile attacks that other Palestinian groups never seemed able to match.

“When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we kill a hundred Israelis in battle,” he told the German magazine Der Stern in 1970 ...

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered three days of mourning and flags lowered to half-staff in the Palestinian territories.

More (on) Cameras

Neither  friends nor readers are taking kindly to my plea for thousands of surveillance cameras in the NY subway system  "watching every move of mine and everybody elses."

So maybe I wasn't right to predict that after London most people will feel similarly and that privacy concerns will fade away.  (Then again, cameras do suddenly seem to be  all the rage  now.) But whatever the public sentiment about cameras, let me just reiterate my call for plenty of them. 

Yes, there should be safeguards. For instance, crude racial profiling = not good. So create the appropriate policies and procedures banning such faux paus. That could ammeliorate some of the concerns.  Of course there always could be abuses--it's only reasonable to expect that there will be. But that doesn't mean we should just skip cameras  altogther. The risk of abuse can be  minimized  while the potential benefit of the things could be huge. Consider that not only did the cameras in London ID the four bombers--after the fact, of course--they also picked up a big lead, the kind that could save lives:

British police and intelligence officials have launched a nationwide manhunt for a man identified as a likely bomb maker in last week's London attacks, who was seen on a security tape with the four suspected bombers, according to a U.S. official ...

"They know who No. 5 is," said the official, who has access to substantial intelligence flowing from the bomb investigation but asked to not be identified ...

A video camera in King's Cross Station in North London captured the five men huddling together at about 8:30 on the morning of the bombings. Then, said the official, "The four goons [suicide bombers] went their way, and No. 5 went his."

And it's not like London has a few  unobstrusive  cams.  The  Underground is a  privacy absolutist's nightmare:   

Large Underground stations, such as those close to the attacks, have around 100 surveillance cameras each. And hundreds more cameras line the streets surrounding each station, providing literally thousands of hours of footage for police to comb through.

Londonistan

The Jamestown Foundation, which does some of the best analyses of  jihadism,  put out a report last year about how Britain's lax asylum laws have helped make it a  home-away-from-home for many Islamic militants.

This kind of argument can  easily morph into racism or xenophobia. But the Jamestown folks. are serious analysts not 'immigration reformers' looking to  score cheap points.  And despite the queasiness connected to the conclusions they might also be accurate.  They're at least worth a read: 

You could say that London has become, for the exponents of radical Islam, the most important city in the Middle East. A framework of lenient asylum laws has allowed the development of the largest and most overt concentration of Islamist political activists since Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Just ask the French, whose exasperation with the indulgent toleration afforded to Algerian Islamic activists led them to dub the city dismissively as “l’antechambre de l’Afghanistan.”

They certainly have a point. Many of Bin Laden’s fatwas were actually first publicized in London. In fact, the United Kingdom in general seems to differ from other European states in the degree to which it became a spiritual and communications hub for the jihad movement. As such, it can furnish the indefatigable researcher a wealth of primary source material on Islamic terrorism.

The refuge the United Kingdom offers Islamist opposition is little short of bizarre. What appears to have happened is that the country’s asylum laws were designed to protect only dissidents and refugees from foreign governments. Victims of other persecutions, such as sectarian or ethnic struggles, fall through the net. The result of this is that, for the Middle Eastern refugee population, a proportion of them can claim asylum specifically on the basis of their Islamist political opinion and activity.

[...]

The latitude granted by British law to activities other countries would find impermissible has bred a stock of legally savvy Islamists who know how to express themselves as provocatively as possible but just staying a whisker within the law. Anjam Choudry, the chairman of al-Muhajiroun is a lawyer himself, and another master of the art is the Syrian born radical Islamist and veteran of the 1982 Muslim Brotherhood uprising, Sheikh Omar bin Bakri Muhammad, a founder of Hizb al-Tahrir and co-founder of al-Muhajiroun. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, Bakri had long presented himself as the spokesman of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, and funder of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But he came to notoriety as far back as 1991 and the first Gulf War when he claimed that the then UK Prime Minister, John Major, was “a legitimate target; if anyone gets the opportunity to assassinate him, I don’t think they should save it. It is our Islamic duty and we will celebrate his death,” [3] a point which he later clarified as “a legitimate target if he were to set foot in a Muslim country.”

The contradiction with reality is somewhat startling, as Sheikh Bakri acknowledged to the press that he had been living on social benefits from the British government of “nearly £300 a week in state handouts for himself, his wife, and their five (as of 1996) children.” He explained it thus: “Islam allows me to take the benefit the system offers. I’m fully eligible. It is very difficult for me to get a job. Anyway, most of the leadership of the Islamic movement is on [state] benefit.”

I don't know that the analysis is right--maybe it has the facts all screwed up. But it's worth finding out more about...

London

Awful. Here's London's mayor, Red Ken:

"This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful; it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers; it was aimed at ordinary working class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christians, Hindu and Jew, young and old, indiscriminate attempt at slaughter irrespective of any considerations, of age, of class, of religion, whatever, that isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it's just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder, and we know what the objective is, they seek to divide London. They seek to turn Londoners against each other and Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack... I wish to speak through you directly, to those who came to London to claim lives, nothing you do, how many of us you kill will stop that flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another, whatever you do, how many you kill, you will fail."

Time Interviews 'Future Suicide Bomber'

He talks, not surprisingly, of being at peace:

"It doesn't matter whether people know what I did," he says. "The only person who matters is Allah—and the only question he will ask me is 'How many infidels did you kill?'"

And talks about not wanting to kill civilians although not so much that he would abandon the mission:

"I pray no innocent people are killed in my mission," he says. "But if some are, I know when they arrive in heaven, Allah will ask them to forgive me."

Not much surprising there, but here are two things that caught my eye:

He would like to understand Americans better, he says. He was arrested by U.S. patrols twice and detained for short spells, but because he speaks no English, he was unable to communicate with his captors. But this is a small regret, he says, of the kind he is determined to put out of his mind. "When you get ready for the final mission," he says almost to himself, "you can't think about the past.

I've written often about how the U.S.'s lack of cultural knowledge in Iraq (including speaking the damn language)  has resulted in the detention of thousands of innocent Iraqis--thereby getting more people pissed off at us. But there's another  side of operating blind: Sometimes it means you'll miss the guilty guy. 

Finally, the Time piece has this bit of myth-busting: Iraqi gov't officials have recently been claiming that many suicide bombers are forced to do the job. "In a majority of cases, you find hands chained to the steering column, so these were not volunteers," said an  Interior Ministry spokesman. Here's Time:

  U.S. investigators who have looked into scores of cases believe coercion is rare. Navy Commander Fred Gaghan, head of the Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell, which has investigated more than 60 bombings in the past five months, has not found any evidence of fetters. "They don't need them, because they have plenty of volunteers who will do it willingly," he says.

Backstory to attacks in Egypt?

From Al-Jazeera:

Egyptian security officials have said the bombing and shootings in downtown Cairo on Saturday were acts of revenge connected to a 7 April bomb blast investigation.

[The two women and one man involved in yesterday’s attacks] are reported to have been related to Ashraf Said, a suspect in the 7 April bombing who died in police custody a few days ago.

General Fuad Allam, former head of Egyptian security, believes the attacks were poorly coordinated and executed and not the work of a terror organisation.

"I believe that this is an individual act. What happened today is the aftermath of the al-Azhar bombing. The bomber in the Abd al-Munaim Riyad district was one of the most wanted men in connection with the al-Azhar bombing," he told Aljazeera.net.

Muhammad Sayid Said, political expert at the Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies, believes government torture of suspects might have been the motive for the revenge attacks. "If the Interior Ministry's account is true, then these women were harmed some way or another very severely, and this bombing and shooting came as revenge. The family for sure suffered torture besides the disrespect that occurs in such circumstances [detention]," he told Aljazeera.net.

Obviously, a relative being tortured does not give anyone a greenlight to kill innocent people (or anybody else for that matter). If the attackers had survived they should have been punished to full extent of the law. But if you're looking to understand what fueled the attacks--not to excuse them but to   think about how society can work to avoid them on the future--well, here's  potential factor. 

It’s worth recalling Lawrence Wright’s fascinating New Yorker profile of Osama’s right hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. As an Islamic militant, Zawahiri was considered a co-conspirator in the assassination of Sadat. He was tortured (after which, he named names):

His allegations of torture were substantiated by forensic medical reports, which noted evidence of six injuries from assaults with "a solid instrument." He was also supported by the testimony of one of the intelligence officers, who said that he had seen Zawahiri, "his head shaved, his dignity completely humiliated, undergoing all sorts of torture."

The officer went on to say that he had been in the interrogation room when another prisoner was brought in. The officers demanded that Zawahiri confess to complicity in the assassination plot in front of his fellow-conspirator. When the prisoner said, "How can you expect him to confess when he knows that the penalty is death?" Zawahiri reportedly replied, "The death penalty is more merciful than torture."

Zawahiri was released in 1984, a hardened radical.

As Wright wrote, torture’s connection to jihadism traces all the way back to godfather of modern jihadism, Sayyid Qutb:

The theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the Islamists' rage against the West. Egypt's prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution—they called it "justice"—was all-consuming.

Stories about Sayyid Qutb's suffering in prison have formed a kind of Passion play for Islamic fundamentalists. Qutb had a high fever when he was arrested, but the state-security officers handcuffed him and took him to prison. He fainted several times on the way. For several hours, he was kept in a cell with vicious dogs, and then, during long periods of interrogation, he was beaten.

[...]

The hardening of Qutb's views can be traced in his prison writings. Through friends, he managed to smuggle out, bit by bit, a manifesto entitled "Ma'alim fi al-Tariq" ("Milestones"). The manuscript circulated underground for years. It was finally published in Cairo in 1964, and was quickly banned; anyone caught with a copy could be charged with sedition.

The upshot: Torture doesn’t just have a moral cost, it has a practical one. We might have just seen that in Egypt yesterday.

UPDATE. Let me pre-empt a potential objection: In the 1990s, Egypt did seem to  squash the jihadist. But let's remember, in the process Zawahiri, perhaps deciding conditions weren't too suitable in Egypt, took off to hang with Bin Laden, first in Sudan and later in Afghanistan. They first started hanging in 1993 and announced their marriage in  February1998. The first large scale attacks ascribed to al-Qaida--the bombings of the U.S. embassies in West Africa--happened six months later. Zawahiri has been indicted in those attacks.   

And then there's  Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the 'Blind Sheik'). You might remember him as the man who inspired the 1993 bombing of the WTC. As Newsweek once put it, "Throughout the 1980s, Rahman called for replacing the Egyptian government with a theocratic state. Under pressure at home, he moved to the United States in 1990."

So, yes, Egypt quelled the terrorism at home. But...is there an Arabic word for blowback? (Or for when your blows hits your allies instead?)