Kings Abdullah of Jordan and Saudi Arabia showered $316,000-worth of precious jewelry on Condoleezza Rice
23 Dec.: They included an emerald and diamond necklace, ring, bracelet and earrings set from Abdullah II and Queen Rania and a ruby and diamond necklace with matching earrings, bracelet and ring from Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
Afghanistan has over 1600 miles of border, most of it unpatrollable. This has led to our use of indiscriminate air attacks, search and sweep operations that annoy everyone and some huge errors that unless corrected, throwing soldiers at the problem can not fix.
Oddly, the war with Afghanistan is the war even protesters like. When Obama said we need to send troops to Afghanistan he was cheered in city after city. Yet there is little strategy, no one left or right can tell you what we hope to accomplish. There is no goal, which is an odd way to run a war.
The tribe that crosses over from Pakistan into Afghanistan living in both areas is the Pashtun tribe. Crippled with the destruction of their mullah system and tribal elders by first the Russians and now us, we are convinced by bombing and attacking them we are fighting the terrorists and we are accomplishing something.
It is not a stretch to think that way, as not only do I believe Osama is in that region but so is the fully intact Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda. It is quite clear they are welcome among the Pashtun.
1 child in 3 dies before they are five in the tribe. We spend less that $20 a person on the tribe to upgrade their lives. By contrast, we give Pakistan 2 billion a year- just for their military. What do we get for the money?
Whenever one of our government representatives visits Pakistan the military does a program they call, "catch and release". They jail the terrorist leaders during the visit, then they are all released as soon as the visiting government agent leaves.
Let me ask you a qustion no one seems to want to ask. If they know where they are, and can pull them in and then release them, doesn't that also mean they can kill them anytime they want? They get, 2 billion in our money for this circus.
The Pashtun tribe has the heads of terrorism among them. Instead of simply bombing the area, rushing in troops with no understanding of
the tribe or its customs, we need a new approach.
Only by reconstructing the Mullah system can we change the region. They must do it themselves, but we can help by working with moderates and improving people's lives.
The Pashtun people are proud and hate being told what to do. Yet no change can occur without the country preachers being won over.
The average Pashtun doesn't want a bomb killing his kid going off, doesn't want their nation to be thought of as a base for suicide bombers.
Find the moderates, improve people's lives, stop treating the people all like criminals.
OBAMA SENATE SEAT CRISIS GROWS, NYC DECLARES TAX WAR ON POOR, SHOE THROWER EXPOSES LACK OF SECURITY AROUND BUSH, GROWING UP IN A NORTH KOREAN PRISON, GREECE HEADED FOR REVOLUTION, THE UNREPORTED TERROR WAR INSIDE PAKISTAN
Sneed hears rumbles President-elect Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is reportedly on 21 different taped conversations by the feds -- dealing with his boss' vacant Senate seat!
Masked youths attacked the riot police headquarters in Athens Dec. 16, throwing petrol bombs and stones, damaging police vehicles parked outside. Elsewhere in the city, schoolchildren blocked streets, and scores of teenagers halted traffic outside the main court complex. (AP, Dec. 16) Protesters also stormed a studio of the state NET TV network, breaking into a newscast and unfurling a black banner reading: "Stop watching television, take to the streets." The newscast had been broadcasting statements by Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis on the riots that have rattled Greece since the Dec. 6 police shooting of a teenage boy. NET president Christos Panagopoulos called the incident "a premeditated act that went beyond all measures of social tolerance and protest." http://www.ww4report.com/node/6535
Gov. Paterson's proposed $121 billion budget hits New Yorkers in their iPods - and nickels-and-dimes them in lots of other places, too.
Trying to close a $15.4 billion budget gap, Paterson called for 88 new fees and a host of other taxes, including an "iPod tax" that taxes the sale of downloaded music and other "digitally delivered entertainment services."
"We're going to have to take some extreme measures," Paterson said Tuesday after unveiling the slash-and-burn budget.
The proposal, which needs legislative approval, did not include broad-based income tax increases, but relied on smaller ones to raise $4.1 billion from cash-strapped New Yorkers.
Movie tickets, taxi rides, soda, beer, wine, cigars and massages would be taxed under Paterson's proposal. It also extends sales taxes to cable and satellite TV services and removes the tax exemption for clothes costing less than $110.
Although the Secret Service put everyone who attended President George W. Bush's Baghdad news conference through several layers of security Sunday, the agency appeared to be caught off guard when an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the president.
"We'll be our own harshest critic regarding this incident" Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said Monday, "and we'll make any appropriate changes to security."
Donovan said, however, that agents on the scene knew that everyone in attendance had been screened for weapons and that they appeared to have taken the "appropriate level of action." No shots were fired as Bush's Secret Service detail joined Iraqi police in taking the shoe thrower into custody. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/57882.html
In the North Korean prison where Shin Dong-hyuk was born and where he watched his mother hanged, inmates never saw a picture of Kim Jong Il
In 2008, Pakistan wobbled in its fight against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, who have grown into an enormous threat to the stability of the country and the entire South Asian region. Less than a dozen gunmen, believed to have come from Pakistan, slaughtered more than 170 people in the Indian city of Mumbai on November 26, heightening tensions between the two nuclear-armed countries. But in Pakistan, terrorists have been equally brutal towards their own countrymen.
Roadside bombs, suicide attacks and other tactics killed more than 2,000 people in 2008 - including civilians, security officials, politicians and foreigners - as Islamist insurgents strengthened control over almost all the mountainous tribal region along the Afghan border and parts of North Western Frontier Province (NWFP). http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/246607,pakistan-teetering-in-fight-against-terrorism.html
This is a fascinating article, but it might help you wrap your mind around a concept I first wrote about 7 years ago. This article has loads of anti- Bush comments at the start, and then admits there really is a threat of a nuclear terrorist attack. I spoke at the College two years ago on Al Qaeda where I made the then bold statement that Al Qaeda existed, it wasn't a Bush "fear card", and a nuclear attack is what they are aiming for. Now we have an article from the left that begins by attacking Bush, and admits the threat is very real. Perhaps by phrasing it this way, you'll pay attention.
By the way, over the course of the years I have written of many arenas we are sitting ducks for attacks, this is not the same as predicting a date it will happen. So occasionally I get emails from people saying, "you warned about the dirty bombs, and that was 3 months ago, it didn't happen". Of course we caught a guy here in Chicago who was trying to pull an attack off. I certainly hope we catch anyone trying to attack or can even disrupt plans by advising people of threats. There is no Nostradamus here, in fact, it turns out Nostradamus wasn't either. His followers have changed his writings over the years.
If psychologically the only way you can consider these issues is if they are cloaked in leftist rhetoric or anti- Bush comments I can live with that. The threat is that real. While I still think we are targeted for attack before the inauguration, I certainly hope people are arrested, stopped or diverted from doing it. One thing is for sure, if we don't figure out how to deal with issues like nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and the like, we will get bit on the ass.
"Megaterror Attack Likely By 2013, Say Experts." It's a good bet this headline caused thousands of Americans to stop in the tracks of their morning routines.
Even by the tough post-9/11 standards of a.m. bummers, it was a gulper. On Dec. 4, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism convened a press conference to declare that our margin of safety against an act of megaterror is shrinking at a disturbing clip. The commission also issued a book-length study, World at Risk, which concluded, "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013."
Depending on whom you ask, this is the good news. The WMD commission's conclusion is actually a little sunnier than some previous warnings of the same ilk. In 2004, one of the commission's ranking members, Harvard's Graham Allison, published a book called Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, in which he estimated that there was an even chance that a nuclear weapon -- not a "dirty bomb," but an actual Hiroshima-style fission bomb -- would destroy an American city within a decade unless swift action was taken to lock down the world's sprawling stocks of fissile material, concentrated in, but not limited to, Russia.
Too dark a forecast? Maybe. The truth is nobody knows. But if people are skeptical of, or inured to, this kind of warning after eight years of Bush/Cheney, it's understandable. Bogus mushroom-cloud visions, after all, were used to sell the Iraq war. Later, nuclear terror fears were stoked with gusto by a Bush administration fighting dirty in defense of every aspect of its war on terror. In the run-up to the 2004 election, Vice President Dick Cheney took a one-man, nuke-terror traveling roadshow through Midwestern swing states, at one point famously suggesting that the Democrats simply did not grasp the dangers of nuclear terrorism. "You have to get your mind around [the] concept," said the vice president, seething with condescension.
What made Cheney's fearmongering especially infuriating is that Democrats have always had their minds more firmly around the concept than Republicans. In 2004, it was Sen. John Kerry, not President Bush, who pledged to create a cabinet-level position to coordinate the battle against loose nukes and the black market in nuclear materials. And it was Kerry, not Bush, who proposed boosting funding for nuclear-threat-reduction programs. Kerry had even discussed nuclear terrorism in his 1998 book The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security, written when Cheney was busy saddling Halliburton with asbestos class-action suits.
Four years later, the Democrats are finally in a position to show the country, and the world, what real leadership on the threat of nuclear terrorism looks like. The bipartisan WMD commission, created by Congress in 2007, has written a report that's both useful resource and timely reality check. Nuclear terrorism is not just the stuff of manipulative neoconservative fantasy. A consensus is hardening around the world that the threat is real and growing. While America's actions on the world stage can mitigate this threat, a more benign foreign policy alone will not eliminate it. The United States is not the only potential target, and U.S. foreign policy is not the only inspiration for groups seeking these weapons.
Luckily, the incoming president grasps the issue in all of its complexity. Barack Obama has produced a layered and ambitious agenda to confront the interlocking threats of nuclear terrorism, proliferation and the lingering arsenals of the world's two biggest nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, which maintain thousands of missiles on hair-triggers. Everything is in place to begin to put the hydra-headed nuclear genie into an internationally controlled bottle. As with other planks on the incoming administration's agenda, the question is whether Democrats will be able to force its arms control program past the opposition of conservative critics and entrenched interests in Washington, which will be at least as hard as persuading the world's other nuclear powers to meet us half way.
When it comes to public opinion, the nuclear question is trickier than most. The mere discussion of nuclear dangers, some studies suggest, appears to drive the public away from the very policies that would reduce them. It's a catch-22 for peace and security advocates who would rally public support behind arms control in the coming years, which may present a precious final window of opportunity. Ignore or downplay the threat, and people will not feel they are pressing enough to radically alter the status quo. Be honest about the nature of these threats, and people may instinctively retreat into support for militaristic policies that increases the danger.
The dilemma is especially acute when it comes to nuclear terrorism. A recent study conducted by the research firm American Environics found that even mentioning the words "nuclear" and "terrorism" together is counterproductive in trying to engage the public. First, it scares people -- "increases mortality salience," in social psychology jargon -- and second, it's cognitively jarring, as people are accustomed to using different mental frames when considering terrorist threats (pre-emption) and nuclear threats (deterrence). This is a serious bind for those advocating bold new nuclear policies. How can you raise awareness and deepen understanding of an issue that dares not speak its name?
"Fear provokes support for strong defense policies, not mutual disarmament and arms control," says Rob Willer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the American Environics study. "Support for those kinds of cooperative and disarmament policies are a more difficult outcome, requiring a basis for trust, a sense of security."
Unlike the arms control negotiations of the 1980s and '90s, there isn't much basis for trust when it comes to Islamist terrorist groups or doomsday cults. Nor is a sense of security likely to be established until new policies are put in place -- policies whose political success requires first confronting the reality of the situation head-on.
"The incoming administration has a robust 12-point plan on nuclear policy," says Naila Bolus, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, which supplies grants for peace and security initiatives. "Understanding the role of fear and how to use or counter it will be an important element in our ability to accomplish the[se] goals. Fear can be both a motivator and an inhibitor, and recent research has shown that, post-9/11, certain phrases such as 'nuclear terrorism' can trigger a reflexive conservative response that leads the public to oppose further reductions in nuclear weapons."
"Nonproliferation and disarmament advocates see an opportunity with the election of Obama to increase public fears of nuclear terrorism as a way to advance their agendas," says Michael Shellenberger, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that strategizes effective messaging for progressive causes. "[But] raising fears of nuclear terrorism, increases support for military action -- including pre-emptive nuclear bombing -- by the U.S."
Wary of this conservative reflex, some Democratic advocates for arms control have criticized the "scariness" of last week's WMD commission report. "[Post-Iraq], a fear-based strategy of reducing nuclear dangers is not politically sustainable," Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, told a Washington audience shortly after the commission report was made public. "We [don't need] to terrify the American people with alarming details about possible threats to the homeland," Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, told Global Security Newswire. "It's time to retire the fear card." But is it really possible to "retire the fear card" in an age of mounting nuclear threats? And is it desirable?
Among the lessons of the global disarmament movement of the 1980s is that fear has the potential to generate and sustain energy and focus in confronting nuclear threats. It was mass-audience nightmare-inducing films like The Day After and Threads that fueled the U.S. and European anti-nuclear movements, not anemic statistics about strategic redundancy. One million people did not fill Central Park demanding a nuclear freeze because they were dreaming of kittens in the summer of 1982. It was gut-fear that motivated President Ronald Reagan, his secretary of state, and their Soviet counterparts to abandon arms racing and begin seriously contemplating total nuclear disarmament in the mid-'80s. (Their conversion experiences are recounted in Richard Rhode's important history of the nuclear arms race, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.)
As during the first nuclear age, the bald facts of the second are terrifying. It is not "hyping" them -- as Shellenberger and others suggest -- to describe them accurately and argue for an urgent response. Along with the lingering threat of global thermonuclear apocalypse, groups of different stripes and levels of technological sophistication continue to seek the stuff of nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed 18 incidents of theft or loss of weapons grade uranium or separated plutonium in the last year alone; there are hundreds of known cases since the end of the Cold War. (Fortunately, almost all of these cases have involved material of poor quality and small quantity.) It's anyone's guess how many incidents have gone unreported. As Harvard's Mathew Bunn reminds us in his annual report, Securing the Bomb, it takes relatively little of this material to set off a chain reaction. "Fat Boy," the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, was made with 6 kilograms of plutonium. That fits in a can of soda.
The challenge of the next four years is to find a way to convey the force of this reality, while at the same time explaining that the answer, however counterintuitive it may seem, is the exact opposite of the right-wing prescription of missile defenses, 20th century-style deterrence and the occasional pre-emptive war. Fully justified nuclear fears, harnessed by intelligent leadership, leads in one direction only: down a path of international cooperation and arms control, terminating in nuclear disarmament before 2050. The WMD commission is just the latest group to add its voice to a growing chorus calling for a strengthening of international treaty regimes and the dawning of a new day in arms control. This half of the equation gets less attention than the bleak percentages of an American Hiroshima, but it is to this part of the equation that requires better and more regular explanation and advocacy.
Barack Obama is the right president to lead this effort. Not only can he correctly pronounce the word "nuclear," he moves to the White House from the same Southside Chicago neighborhood where the Doomsday Clock is maintained by the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He fully understands the interrelationships between proliferation, arms control and nuclear terrorism.
"As president, I will lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons materials at vulnerable sites within four years," Obama told Arms Control Today before the election. "[I will also] convene a summit on preventing nuclear terrorism [and] make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear policy."
The incoming administration will find ever-widening support for a bold arms control agenda in the policy community in Washington. The sea change first gained attention in 2006, when Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In so doing, the statesmen were following in the footsteps of other doyens of Cold War foreign policy, such as Robert McNamara and Paul Nitze, who also came to realize the balance of terror could not maintain its balance in the new century. In the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institute and Jan Lodal, former president of the Atlantic Council, set out the challenges and imperatives of fulfilling the "logic of zero." The basic vision, they write, "has been endorsed by no less than two-thirds of all living former secretaries of state, former secretaries of defense and former national security advisers. Both Barack Obama and John McCain have expressed support for it, as well. Given this remarkable bipartisan consensus, the next president will have an opportunity to make the elimination of all nuclear weapons the organizing principle of U.S. nuclear policy."
It isn't just in Washington that a new anti-nuclear wind is beginning to blow. Last Wednesday in Paris, an international group of high-level ex-officials from nuclear and non-nuclear states launched the Global Zero project (with funding by Richard Branson) to free the world of nuclear weapons within 25 years. As with the WMD commission and the IAEA, the group urges the public to understand the link between arms control and nuclear terrorism: "In recent months, the threat of proliferation and nuclear terrorism has led to a growing chorus of world leaders calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons," the group said in a release. "It is urgent that we begin now."
No one who looks honestly at 21st century nuclear threats could disagree. Confronting the dangers of the second nuclear age will be scary, and it will be difficult. But facing our nuclear fears is necessary if we are to move beyond them and accomplish the historic task sitting between now and any future worth having.
FEDERAL RESERVE PASSES OUT 2 TRILLION DOLLARS, REFUSES TO SAY TO WHOM!
The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.
“If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that’s what they don’t want us to know,” said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.
The Fed stepped into a rescue role that was the original purpose of the Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The central bank loans don’t have the oversight safeguards that Congress imposed upon the TARP.
Total Fed lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time Nov. 6. It rose by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since Sept. 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren’t rated AAA.
‘Been Bamboozled’
Congress is demanding more transparency from the Fed and Treasury on bailout, most recently during Dec. 10 hearings by the House Financial Services committee when Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat, said Americans had “been bamboozled.”
BANGLADESHI JIHAD MOVEMENT SENDS THREATS OF A NEW BOMBING CAMPAIGN BY REGISTERED MAIL
The Media Department of the Jamiat-ul-Mojahedin Bangladesh (JMB) has sent a package of threats and propaganda materials to Dhaka newspapers and Bangladeshi politicians by fax and registered mail. Together with threats of a bombing campaign during the December 29 parliamentary elections (the first since the military enforced emergency rule in 2007), the JMB sent CDs containing video footage of JMB leaders, including footage of their arrests and court appearances following the nearly simultaneous explosion of roughly 400 bombs nationwide on August 17, 2005. JMB leaders also urge jihad against the Bangladeshi secular judicial system, condemn the media and describe democracy as “a system of evil.” Bangladesh’s judicial system is a frequent target of the JMB, which regards it as a colonial holdover in need of being replaced by Islamic law. The CDs featured a statement by the movement’s late leader, Shaykh Abdur Rahman, who was executed for his role in the murder of two judges, and a Bengali translation of a statement by Osama bin Laden (Prothom Alo [Dhaka], December 3; New Nation [Dhaka], December 5). The movement is expected to seek revenge for the execution of Shaykh Abdur Rahman and five other top JMB leaders in March 2007. During emergency rule the JMB is believed to have regrouped and actually expanded its membership.
The JMB has the capability of following up on its threats. Recent seizures of JMB arms caches have revealed the group has developed the ability to manufacture sophisticated explosive devices made entirely from locally available materials (Indo-Asian News Service, November 18; Daily Star [Dhaka], November 18). The JMB’s explosives expert, “Boma” Mizan, was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison (bdnews24.com, November 25; Daily Star, November 26).
Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite counterterrorist unit, is currently engaged in operations against the JMB in northern Bangladesh designed to capture the group’s current Amir, Saidur Rahman (New Nation, December 5). Human rights organizations have accused RAB of torture, the death of innocent civilians and arbitrary violence. RAB is drawn from members of the nation’s army, air force, navy and police.
PAKISTAN’S “ANTI-TERRORIST” TALIBAN VOW TO FIGHT INDIA IF NECESSARY
Recent statements from Pakistani Taliban leaders suggest an Indian attack on Pakistan in response to alleged Pakistani responsibility for the Mumbai terrorist assault could do what the Pakistani military and politicians have been unable to do so far – bring the Pashtun militants of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) onside with the Pakistani government in a common cause.
Taliban spokesman Saifullah Akhtar announced the Taliban was ready to “annihilate” the 8,500 Indian troops it claims are operating in Afghanistan. Akhtar pledged the Taliban would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the Pakistani army if India “committed aggression” against Pakistan; “We’ll put all the differences aside at this juncture and unite… We’ll stand by the army against external powers… The Taliban are like lions before whom all the powerful have to bow down.” The Taliban spokesman added that Indians rather than the Taliban were responsible for the Mumbai attacks. According to Akhtar, the Taliban condemn the killing of innocent civilians and are “opposed to terrorism across the world” (Nawa-i-Waqt [Rawalpindi], December 3).
Though India is not part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Pakistan has recently complained about an un-mandated Indian military presence in Afghanistan (ANI, November 25). In 2006, India announced it would send 3,000 members of the paramilitary Indo-Tibetan Border Police to Afghanistan to guard Indians working on a new road between Kandahar and the Iranian port of Chabahar (Daily Times [Karachi], February 8, 2006). Great Britain has asked India in the past to commit troops to the ISAF mission (The Tribune [Chandigarh], May 2, 2006).
Maulvi Omar, another Taliban spokesman, was also quoted as saying the Taliban would defend the Line of Control (the unofficial military border between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir) in the same way they defend the Durand Line (the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan). Since the Taliban basically ignore the Durand Line, the meaning of Omar’s statement is somewhat elusive. Maulvi Omar added, “in the event of an Indian attack, we'll make it clear to the Pakistani people whether we are defenders of this country or militants” (Nawa-i-Waqt [Rawalpindi], December 3).
The Taliban’s newfound nationalism and opposition to terrorist attacks will come as a revelation to many. Pakistan’s regular forces are unlikely to accept Taliban assistance in any but the most extreme circumstances, though the option may be preferable to leaving the NWFP in Taliban hands in order to move Pakistani military assets currently deployed there up to the border with India. A major military withdrawal from the NWFP and tribal agencies would effectively leave Taliban and al-Qaeda elements free to operate in the area just as Pakistani forces have taken the initiative in a large regional offensive. It would also disturb the United States, which is encouraging Pakistan to intensify its campaign against the militants. The Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, was in Pakistan earlier this month to urge Pakistan to take “more concerted action against militant extremists elsewhere in the country,” according to a U.S. embassy statement (Reuters, December 3).
Jihadis React to Mumbai Attacks
Jihadi forum members have been eager to learn anything about the Mumbai terror attacks, hoping for clues that al-Qaeda has perpetrated, in a jihadi perspective, these “great and admirable attacks.” In response to this interest, the jihadi forums have circulated an analytical article about the Mumbai attacks by the Kuwaiti Salafi cleric Hamid al-Ali (h-alali.org, December 1). Al-Ali is on the U.S. list of terrorism supporters and financiers and is best known for his early 2001 fatwa (religious ruling) approving the use of suicide attacks, including flying an aircraft into a building (see Terrorism Monitor, April 26, 2007). Al-Ali’s article received over fifteen hundred hits in on day and was reposted in major jihadi forums and websites (muslm.net, December 2; alboraq.info, December 2; hanein.info, December 2).
In an article entitled, “The Secret Behind India’s Joy over the Mumbai Incident,” Hamid al-Ali alleges that the attacks came right after a training exercise for U.S. officials in which a map of Pakistan was included in the training scenario showing Pakistan dismantled into smaller states. The Mumbai attacks followed this conspiracy by the United States and India, says al-Ali, claiming that the end objective is to dismantle the only Islamic country armed with nuclear weapons.
The map in question was first published to accompany an article by retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters in the June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal, but copies are only now being circulated in Pakistan as proof of America’s intention to dismember Pakistan by joining the North-West Frontier Province to Afghanistan and severing Baluchistan as part of a new “Free Baluchistan,” leaving the remainder of “natural” Pakistan as a much reduced nation lying almost entirely east of the Indus River. Al-Ali’s “training exercise for U.S. officials” is just part of the mythology that has grown around this document as it circulates in Pakistan.
An Islamabad daily mocked the importance ascribed to this map by Pakistan’s elites:
The debacle of 1971 taught us that it is dangerous for a country to be cocooned in an artificial sense of immortality. But it is also disempowering and futile for a nation to live with the paranoia of imminent death. Not a day goes by without our prophets of doom (who incidentally are often proponents of non-representative power elites in Pakistan) bellowing that a US-led global plot to divide Pakistan into pieces is close to fruition. Their smoking gun is a redrawn map of Pakistan (now widely redistributed over the Internet) that was published by the Armed Forces Journal in 2006. There are thousands of such journals in the US that publish all kinds of crazy ideas produced by analysts and think tanks. But our conspiracy-mongers are convinced that this lone article is irrefutable proof that "America" wishes Pakistan's dismemberment (The News [Islamabad], November 29).
According to al-Ali, India sides with the Zionists, occupies Pakistani Kashmir against the well of its Muslim majority and commits heinous crimes against Kashmiris. Al-Ali reminds his readers that India also backed Bangladesh against Pakistan in the 1971 war of Bengali secession. India’s Hindus were alarmed when the Taliban began to exert power and influence in nuclear-armed Pakistan and began supporting Kashmiri Muslims’ aspirations for independence. Therefore, the hidden agenda of India aims to penetrate Afghanistan under the U.S. umbrella, with Israeli cooperation, to eliminate jihad and the Islamic movements.
Secondly, India is endeavoring to dismantle Pakistan under the pretext that Pakistan is the springboard for all global jihadi movements. Al-Ali reiterates India’s role in instigating the West against Pakistan. India’s argument, says al-Ali, is that the “Taliban movement sprung from Pakistan, where the most dangerous terrorists reside in Pakistan’s Waziristan. Pakistan is overloaded with religious schools filling Muslims’ minds with Takfiri ideology. Pakistan is the only Islamic nuclear state vehemently interacting with Islamic issues.” Al-Ali goes on to elucidate the many services and favors India rendered to Israel to win the support of the West against Pakistan. Finally, al-Ali predicts Indian escalation and possible all out war, backed by the United States, against the mujahideen in Kashmir with the collusion of the corrupt president of Pakistan, Asif Zardari.
Al-Ali’s analysis received many comments from jihadi forum members. Although corroborating al-Ali’s conspiracy theory in general, some jihadi forum chatters raised three main arguments on the Mumbai attacks. One forum member disagreed with al-Ali’s insinuation that the Indian intelligence services were behind the attacks with the intent of undermining Pakistan, saying “It’s insane to think that such young men would pay with their lives for India’s possible political conspiracy against Pakistan.” Other critics, working on the assumption that the Pakistani Taliban was responsible, rebuffed the premise that the group had made a strategic mistake by attacking India. On the contrary, the Taliban would force Pakistan to redeploy its military from the border with Afghanistan to the border with India, consequently relieving pressure on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Another forum member posted a summary of what he claimed was a Rand Corporation study predicting the partition of Pakistan into small emirates as a result of religious, ethnic and sectarian rivalry. Small political entities would emerge from the dismantling of Pakistan in Baluchistan, Sindh, and Punjab.
Some forum members believe that the Mumbai perpetrators are Muslims from Pakistani- controlled Kashmir. Without consideration to the repercussions on Pakistani-Indian political affairs, the attackers struck Mumbai to seek revenge Hindu violations of Muslim honor. A link to a free file-hosting website was posted in muslm.net showing instances of Hindu aggression against Indian Muslims; thereafter even moderate Islamic forum members were convinced the Mumbai attacks were justified.
The majority of forum members are convinced that al-Qaeda was involved in the attacks one way or another, pointing to a video by al-Qaeda delivered to news agencies in the Indian city of Sringar last year. In the alleged al-Qaeda video a man calling himself Abu Abdulrahman al-Ansari claimed to be a high ranking member of al-Qaeda and threatened to wage holy war against India (abrar.org June 8, 2007). Whether the Pakistani army decides to track down Islamic movements in Kashmir or is forced into a confrontation with the Indian army, it will ease Pakistani pressure on the tribal areas where the Pakistani Taliban operates.
Abdul Hameed Bakier is an intelligence expert on counter-terrorism, crisis management and terrorist-hostage negotiations. He is based in Jordan.
Mumbai Terror Investigation Leads to Pakistan’s “Epicenter of Terrorism”
Two weeks after the deadly Mumbai terrorist incidents which claimed 164 lives, including security forces personnel and foreign nationals, Indian investigating agencies have been struggling to unearth a terror trail that appears to point directly towards neighboring Pakistan.
In one of the most prolonged and deadly terrorist attacks the country has ever seen, at least ten Muslim terrorists entered Mumbai on November 26 using sea routes to perpetrate mindless carnage at several places, including the main railway station, a hospital and two luxury hotels. The terrorists holed up in three South Mumbai buildings – the Taj Mahal hotel, the Oberoi-Trident hotel and the Nariman House (a Jewish center), taking guests and inmates as hostage. After a fierce 60 hour long operation, India’s elite security forces rescued most of the hostages while killing nine terrorists and capturing one. The sole prisoner was identified as Muhammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, a resident of Okara, Pakistan and presently in the custody of the Mumbai Police.
An unknown militant group, the Deccan Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the Mumbai attacks. The same group also issued a threat to blow up major airports across the country a week after the Mumbai events (Financial Express [Mumbai], December 4). However, for some time now this name-game has been a part of an attempt by Pakistan-based terror groups to give a homegrown Indian flavor to the ongoing jihadi terrorism in the region. In the last few years, names like Lashkar-e-Qahar, Indian Mujahideen, Tehriq-e-Qasas and Inquilabi Mahaz have been floated, perhaps to divert attention from the Pakistan-based terror groups.
Interrogations and circumstantial evidence suggest the complicity of a Pakistan-based and Kashmir-centric Islamist group, the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Meanwhile, Mumbai police have released photos of the terrorists and traced their place of origin to Pakistan’s Punjab province, based on the evidence gathered and the confession of Kasab, the sole surviving terrorist (Times of India, December 9). Three of the ten terrorists were from Okara, three were from Multan, two were from Faisalabad, and one each from Sialkot and Dera Ismail Khan.
The probe so far has pointed to four LeT operatives. The “masterminds” are identified as Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, who was seized by Pakistani police after a raid on a LeT camp in Kashmir, and Yusuf Muzammil, whose current whereabouts are unknown. Based on the results of police interrogations, two individuals identified as Abu Hamza and Khafa have been named as trainers who provided maritime lessons and training in the handling of explosives and weapons (Times of India, December 6; Daily Times [Lahore], December 12). According to Rakesh Maria, the Joint Commissioner of Police and a lead investigator in the Mumbai attacks, Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD, a charity and front organization for LeT) chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed was also involved with Lakhvi, Hamza and Kahfa in the Mumbai plot, from planning to execution (Press Trust of India, December 10). Earlier, government sources claimed that the investigators had “incontrovertible proof” of the names of the ISI handlers and trainers and the locations in Pakistan where the terrorist training was carried out. Police also claimed to have recovered some of terrorists’ communications through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (The Hindu, December 5). With the help of foreign investigating agencies, especially the FBI, Mumbai police tracked the VoIP number brought from Orlando, Florida, which was used by the terrorists to talk to Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, who is currently under detention in Pakistan along with 20 other LeT and Jaysh-e-Mohammed operatives (Indian Express, December 10).
The fishing trawler in which the terrorists reached the Mumbai coast, the MV Kuber, had an inventory of items that established a Pakistani hand in the attacks, including wheat flour, dental gel and shaving cream all bearing “Made in Pakistan” tags. The Thuraya satellite phone recovered from the abandoned trawler contained records of a conversation between LeT chief Yusuf Muzammil, based in the Kashmiri city of Muzafarabad, and an individual known as Yahya, believed to be a point man for the LeT and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) in Bangladesh. Yahya reportedly arranged SIM (subscriber identity module) cards and fake ID cards, primarily from countries like Mauritius, the UK, the United States and Australia. The satellite phone also has records of calls traced to Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi in Jalalabad in Afghanistan (Times of India, November 30).
Interrogation of the lone surviving terrorist has revealed details of LeT training camps in Danna, Abdul-Bin-Masud, Mangla Dam, Akas, Um-Al-Qura, Badli and Muzafarabad in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir. Mumbai’s Crime Branch denied the involvement of more than ten terrorists in these multiple attacks, adding that the terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks were trained at four places inside Pakistan: Manshera, Muridke, Muzafarabad and Karachi (Daily News and Analysis [Mumbai], December 7).
Tausif Rehman and Mukhtar Ahmed (the latter a constable and former police informant) were two suspects apprehended in Kolkata and New Delhi, respectively, for their alleged role in supplying mobile SIM cards to the terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks (The Hindu, December 6). Investigating agencies have also tied two Indian men, Fahim Ansari and his close associate Sabahuddin Ahmed, to the Mumbai attacks. Ansari allegedly carried out reconnaissance missions in Mumbai and was arrested last February with a number of maps highlighting Mumbai landmarks in his possession. Both Ansari and Sabahuddin Ahmed have been in detention in Uttar Pradesh since their arrest in February in connection with a LeT attack on a police post in the Rampur district (Times of India, December 12).
There was certainly a massive intelligence failure that allowed terrorists to hit Mumbai while evading all security points. Officials at India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), claim to have sent relevant intelligence inputs to other security agencies, including the Mumbai Police, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Coast Guard prior to the attack. In return, Indian Coast Guard sources pointed fingers at the spy agency while describing how terrorists spread false information and managed to divert Coast Guard and Naval ships in the wrong direction to enter Indian territory by sea. Mumbai police and the IB also have refuted RAW’s claims of prior warning (CNN-IBN, December 3; Press Trust of India, December 3; for the Indian intelligence agencies, see Terrorism Monitor, March 24).
However, the ensuing blame game among security and intelligence agencies over “actionable inputs” notwithstanding, the newly appointed Home Minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, has admitted that there were intelligence and security lapses and has vowed to bring in a stringent anti-terror law, establish a federal investigating agency, and provide modernization packages for police and intelligence agencies to prevent future attacks by terrorists. He also vowed to introduce bills to strengthen the legal provisions relating to the prevention, investigation, prosecution and punishment of terrorist acts (Sify.com. December 11).
Meanwhile the United Nations Security Council’s Al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee imposed sanctions on Jamaat-ud-Dawa as well as Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and three others individuals, including Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, Haji Muhammad Ashraf (the Jamaat’s chief of finance) and Mahmoud Ahmed Bahaziq (Times of India, December 11). Under international pressure, Pakistan has initiated a crackdown against JuD’s establishments in Punjab province and its central office in Lahore (Geo TV News, December 12).
With the wealth of evidence available, the federal government and the investigating agencies, including the Anti-Terrorist Squad and the Crime Branch of the Mumbai Police, are confident in making a strong case against the Pakistan-based terrorist groups and their patrons in order to expose to the international community what Indian politicians have taken to describing as Pakistan’s “epicenter of terror.”
Animesh Roul is the Executive Director of Research at the New Delhi-based Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict (SSPC).
This is from MOTHER JONES MAGAZINE, a far left wing publication.
MotherJones.com / News / Feature In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing Federal officials insist that the Oklahoma City bombing case was solved a decade ago. But a Salt Lake City lawyer in search of his brother's killers has dug up some remarkable clues—on cross-dressing bank robbers, the FBI, and the mysterious third man." /> James Ridgeway" />
kenney trentadue was driving a 1986 Chevy pickup when he was pulled over at the Mexican border on his way home to San Diego on June 10, 1995. He was dark-haired, 5 feet 8 inches, and well muscled, a former athlete who had picked up construction work after he quit robbing banks. His left forearm bore a dragon tattoo. Highway patrol officers ran his license and found that it had been suspended, and that he was wanted for parole violations. After two months in jail in San Diego, Trentadue was shipped, on August 18, to a prison in Oklahoma City for a hearing on the parole violations. The move placed Kenney in close proximity to the most famous federal prisoner in America. In one way or another, it also sealed his fate. Four months earlier, another car had been stopped by a state trooper, some 80 miles north of Oklahoma City. It was 10:20 a.m. on April 19, 1995, and much of the country was still waking up to the enormity of what had happened earlier that morning, when an explosives-laden Ryder truck gutted the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The driver of the 1977 Mercury Marquis was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and driving without tags. He gave his name as Timothy McVeigh. Two days later McVeigh was identified as the John Doe No. 1 wanted in the bombing, and fellow antigovernment extremist Terry Nichols turned himself in to police. They were indicted on August 10, and federal authorities said they had their men. But there were many who didn't buy the tidy closure.
A sprawling Great Plains town known for its tornadoes, Oklahoma City was already the center of a swirl of theories about the crime, all of them insisting that the two men could not have acted alone. Some refused to give up on the idea of Middle Eastern terrorists, speculating about a plot headed by Saddam Hussein; others suspected an inside job by the feds. Some simply stuck to the far more plausible conviction that there were coconspirators not yet apprehended. After all, immediately following the bombing, law enforcement had been searching furiously for a man whom numerous sources said they saw with McVeigh, and who by some accounts was seen walking away from the Ryder truck—the character whose police composite sketch became known around the world as John Doe No. 2. According to the police description, this man was about 5 feet 9, muscular, and dark-haired. By some accounts, he drove an older model pickup truck and had a dragon tattooed on his left forearm.
Kenney's brother, Jesse Trentadue, knew nothing about the resemblance between his brother and the nation's most wanted man. But he now believes it sparked the events that would launch him on a 12-year investigation of a prison mystery and a massive government stonewalling effort. In the process, he would discover documents showing that even as the Justice Department was working to convict what it insisted were only two conspirators, its agents were actively investigating a wider plot—a plot whose possible ramifications they concealed from defense lawyers and from a public that, at a delicate moment in an election year, they were anxious to reassure. The government's refusal to disclose what it knew—and what it did not know—may also have forestalled the nation's best opportunity to address the problems in federal law enforcement and intelligence that would become tragically apparent on September 11, 2001.
Jesse Carl Trentadue is no liberal crusader, nor is he an antigovernment conspiracy theorist. He grew up poor in an Appalachian coal camp, called Number 7, halfway between Cucumber, West Virginia, and Horsepen, Virginia. Earlier generations of Trentadue men had all gone into the mines: One grandfather had first descended at age six, another at age 12, and both had died of black lung, as would Jesse's father. But coal prices fell during the Korean War, and in 1961 the Trentadues followed a neighboring family to Orange County, California. They traveled, Jesse says, "like the Okies," heading west on Route 66, sleeping beside the car at night.
Jesse's ticket to a different life was a track and field scholarship to the University of Southern California where, like his teammate O.J. Simpson, he made all-American. After a stint in the Marines and law school at the University of Idaho, he landed in Salt Lake City, where he built a reputation as a tough, tenacious lawyer working everything from sports law to contract disputes. He met me on a warm Saturday, on a bench in front of the Judge Building, the handsome, century-old structure where he practices law. Stocky, with a graying mustache and a neat beard, a cigar between his lips, he looked like the 21st-century version of an Old West sheriff—weather-beaten, self-contained, and shrewd. His office upstairs was dominated by an enormous portrait of his brother. It depicted Kenney in a dark shirt, looking calm and earnest, bathed in a glow that evoked the portraits of saints.
As youngsters in West Virginia, Jesse says, the brothers "shared a bed and an outhouse." Three years his junior, Kenney was a track star in high school, but dropped out after an injury and joined the Army, where he developed a heroin habit. Then he tried carpentry and factory work before discovering that he had a knack for robbing banks. "This isn't just robbing a teller," Jesse notes with a flush of pride. "It's taking the whole bank down." On Kenney's jobs, he adds, "the weapons were empty or the firing pins had been removed. He said, 'Robbery is one thing. Murdering is something else, and it's not worth that.'" When Kenney got caught, "he didn't contest it. He just went in, pled guilty, and served his time." Released on parole in 1988, Kenney cleaned up, started working in construction again, and got married. His first child, a boy named Vito, was born nine days after Kenney was arrested at the border.
On August 19, 1995, Kenney called Jesse's house to report that he had just arrived at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center. Jesse's wife, Rita, an attorney and law professor, was surprised he'd been shipped from San Diego all the way to Oklahoma for a probation hearing. Kenney told her—in a conversation that was, like all inmates' calls,"It's that jet age stuff."
Kenney called again that night, sounding chipper, and the brothers strategized about the parole hearing; Kenney promised to call again the next day. But no call came until early the morning of August 21, when the phone rang at Kenney and Jesse's mother's house. It was the prison warden. Kenney, she said, had committed suicide that night. She offered to have the body cremated at government expense—a move without precedent in federal prison policies—but Wilma Trentadue turned her down.
Five days later, Kenney's body arrived at a mortuary in California. There were bruises all over it, clumsily disguised with heavy makeup; slashes on his throat; ligature marks; and ruptures on his scalp. Photos of the injuries were included in a letter that Jesse drew up on August 30 and hand-delivered to the Bureau of Prisons (bop), which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice (doj) . "I have enclosed as Exhibit 'A' a photograph of Kenneth's body at the funeral," it read. "This is how you returned my brother to us.... My brother had been so badly beaten that I personally saw several mourners leave the viewing to vomit in the parking lot! Anyone seeing my brother's battered body with his bruised and lacerated forehead, throat cut, and blue-black knuckles would not have concluded that his death was either easy or a 'suicide'! " After describing Kenney's injuries in detail, and speculating how they might have come about (bruises to his arms from being gripped, others to his legs from being knocked to the ground with batons, slashes to his throat from someone "possibly left-handed," which Kenney was not), Jesse concluded: "Had my brother been less of a man, you[r] guards would have been able to kill him without inflicting so much injury to his body. Had that occurred, Kenney's family would forever have been guilt-ridden... with the pain of thinking that Kenneth took his own life and that we had somehow failed him. By making the fight he did for his life, Ken has saved us that pain and God bless him for having done so!"
Two days later, on September 1, the Bureau of Prisons issued a press release stating that Kenney's death had been "ruled a suicide by asphyxiation" and that the injuries on the body "would indicate persistent attempts...to cause himself serious injury or death." (Officials would later put forth an elaborate scenario in which Kenney tried to hang himself but fell, bruising his head and body, and then tried to slit his throat with a toothpaste tube before succeeding in his second hanging attempt.)
In fact, as the bop would have known, no official ruling as to the manner of death had been made; rather, every communication from the state medical examiner's office indicated it was being treated as a suspicious death. On August 22, the day after the body was delivered to the ME's office, Chief Investigator Kevin Rowland called the local fbi office to file a complaint. On a form documenting the call, the fbi agent wrote "murder" and noted that Rowland "believes that foul play is suspect[ed] in this matter." The state's chief medical examiner, Fred Jordan, refused to classify the case a suicide, listing the manner of death as "unknown" pending investigation. As was customary with suspicious deaths, within days the Bureau of Prisons formed a board of inquiry. In an unusual move, the staff attorney heading the probe was told to treat his team's findings as "attorney work product," which would protect it from discovery in any future lawsuit as well as from Freedom of Information Act requests. In October the bop's general counsel issued a memo noting that "there is a great likelihood of a lawsuit by the family of the inmate." To this day, the bop, fbi, and Department of Justice refuse to discuss the case; spokespeople for each agency referred questions for this story to an fbi official in Oklahoma City, who declined to comment citing ongoing litigation.
Not long after Kenney died, Jesse got an anonymous phone call. "Look," the caller said, "your brother was murdered by the fbi. There was an interrogation that went wrong.... He fit a profile." The caller mentioned bank robbers but didn't give many details. Jesse didn't know what to make of the tip; he put the call out of his mind. Exactly what happened the night Kenney died is impossible to reconstruct, in large part because a great deal of evidence went missing or was destroyed by prison officials. According to bop documents, a guard discovered Kenney hanging from a bedsheet noose in his cell at 3:02 on the morning of August 21, 1995. Stuart A. Lee, the official in charge at the prison that night, refused to unlock the cell while he waited for a video camera to film the body. According to a bop memo, he would later tell investigators that he knew Kenney was dead and he thus "was not concerned with taking any immediate emergency action." The prison medic on several occasions said he performed cpr on Kenney, but later admitted he made no effort at resuscitation. The video of the body was never made, or it was erased, depending on whose account you believe.
Prison officials did take photos of Kenney's body, though when the family asked for copies, they said they couldn't find them; the photos reappeared in the fbi's files years later. Kenney's clothes vanished between the time he was found hanging in his cell and the time his body was turned over to the medical examiner. Other evidence, including his bedsheets, boxers, and fingernail clippings, disappeared for several weeks; investigator Rowland would later suggest they had been in the trunk of an agent's car. Kenney's cell was cleaned by 2 p.m. the day of his death, before legally required examinations of the site had been made. And even though the medical examiner's office had given orders to preserve the cell, the walls—including a pencil scrawl that prison officials called Kenney's "suicide note"—were painted over, leaving only photos whose "lack of detail," according to the fbi crime lab, rendered it "doubtful if this hand printing will ever be identified with hand printing of a known individual."
Other key evidence was simply omitted from or buried in the official reports: fbi and state Bureau of Investigations officials later testified, in a lawsuit brought by the Trentadue family, that a second person's blood had been found in Kenney's cell, and that there were no cut marks on the noose from which he was, according to prison officials, "cut down." According to an internal fbi memo, a prison guard told his neighbor that Kenney had been killed, and then hung in his cell as a cover-up; an inmate who reported hearing similar statements from a second guard said he was warned to keep silent and then sent to isolation. Another inmate, Alden Gillis Baker, would later give Jesse's lawyer a note describing an incident during which, he said, Kenney got into an altercation with a guard. Eventually, he wrote, additional officers entered the cell, there was "a lot of physical violence going on," he heard "faint moaning," and later the sound of bedsheets being torn. (He would repeat this account in a deposition in connection with a lawsuit brought by Jesse, but a judge ruled that Baker, a convicted robber and sex offender, was not a reliable witness. In 2000, Baker was found hanging in his cell in a California federal prison.)
Government accounts of the incident relied heavily on reports from a different set of inmates. One claimed that during his two days at the prison, Kenney had seemed angry and agitated. Another claimed he was acting "upset, paranoid, and weird in general," and thought everyone was talking about him having aids. (The Bureau of Prisons transcript of Kenney's conversation with Jesse's wife reads, "It's that aids stuff," not, as Rita insists he said, "that jet age stuff." According to medical records, Kenney was hiv negative.) And then there were the words scrawled in pencil on the wall—"My Minds No Longer It's Friend" and "Love Ya Familia!" Oddly, the bop investigator who took the pictures shortly after Kenney's death wrote in a caption that the scrawl read, "Love Paul."
The fbi agent who investigated the case immediately following Kenney's death did not even look at the cell. He did visit the prison, but spoke only with officials, interviewing no inmates and collecting no evidence except for the photos of the cell. The case languished for months, until complaints from the medical examiner's office reached the Department of Justice in Washington. In early 1996, the department's Civil Rights Division took over supervising the investigation and decided that the case should be presented to a federal grand jury, which would determine whether to issue an indictment.
On July 6, 1996, more than 10 months after Kenney's death, the grand jury was convened. Justice officials from Washington went to the trouble of commuting to Oklahoma City to oversee the proceedings. It was an election year, and President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno—still under a cloud for her handling of the Waco siege three years earlier—was preparing to try McVeigh and Nichols. The last thing the doj needed was a trial, in Oklahoma City, accusing its employees of murder and obstruction of justice.
But to put the case to rest, federal officials would have to find a way around Fred Jordan, the Oklahoma chief medical examiner who had refused to classify the death a suicide. Within a few months, the local fbi office was calling Jordan—a man with a long and distinguished career, who had achieved near-heroic status in Oklahoma City for his effective and sensitive handling of the bombing victims' remains—a "loose cannon."
In December 1995, Jordan told an fbi official that the bureau had urged him to hold off on releasing an autopsy report until the fbi could complete its investigation. He also told the U.S. attorney's office in Oklahoma City, according to correspondence from that office, that Kenney had been "abused and tortured"; later he would tell them, according to a bop lawyer, that "the federal Grand Jury is part of a cover-up." In a memo to his own files, Jordan wrote that it was "very likely this man was killed." In search of a second opinion, doj officials asked Bill Gormley, a forensic pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, to review the case. In May 1997, Gormley called Kevin Rowland, the chief investigator in the Oklahoma medical examiner's office, who wrote a memo to his files noting that Gormley "was troubled that [the doj] only seemed interested in him saying it might be possible these injuries were self inflicted." In fact, Rowland wrote, Gormley had grown convinced that "this man was murdered."
As late as July 1997, Fred Jordan told a local TV station, "I think it's very likely [Kenney] was murdered. I'm not able to prove it....You see a body covered with blood, removed from the room as Mr. Trentadue was, soaked in blood, covered with bruises, and you try to gain access to the scene, and the government of the United States says no, you can't.... At that point we have no crime scene, so there are still questions about the death of Kenneth Trentadue that will never be answered because of the actions of the U.S. government. Whether those actions were intentional—whether they were incompetence, I don't know.... It was botched. Or, worse, it was planned."
After more than a year of proceedings, in August 1997, the grand jury (which, like all such panels, had heard only evidence selected by the government) concluded its investigation without issuing any criminal indictments. The doj held back the news for two months while staff in Washington met to devise a roll-out plan that a doj aide compared to "coordinating the invasion of Normandy." The plan targeted the media as well as Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who, thanks to Jesse Trentadue's efforts, had taken an interest in the case. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing a few months earlier, Hatch had quizzed then-Attorney General Janet Reno about Kenney and told her that "it looks like someone in the Bureau of Prisons, or having relations with the Bureau of Prisons, murdered the man."
But Hatch never followed through on his stated intent to hold hearings on the case. Neither did Oklahoma Republican Senator Don Nickles, then the majority whip. In December 1997, Nickles held a press conference lambasting the feds' handling of the case; he said prison officials in Oklahoma had told him they'd been ordered not to talk about it. The next day Nickles got a visit from Thomas Kuker, head of the fbi's Oklahoma City office. According to an internal fbi memo, Kuker assured the senator that he, too, had once been concerned about the case, but had become convinced that there was no foul play. After a second meeting with the fbi two months later, Nickles backed off.
The doj also continued to pressure Medical Examiner Fred Jordan, to the point where Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General Patrick Crawley wrote to a Justice Department attorney that the bop and fbi had "prevented the medical examiner from conducting a thorough and complete investigation into the death, destroyed evidence, and otherwise harassed and harangued Dr. Jordan and his staff. The absurdity of this situation is that your clients outwardly represent law enforcement or at least some arm of licit government.... It appears that your clients, and perhaps others within the Department of Justice, have been abusing the powers of their respective offices. If this is true, all Americans should be very frightened of your clients and the doj."
Four months later, in July 1998, Jordan suddenly changed his conclusion on Kenney's manner of death from "unknown" to "suicide," saying he had been convinced in large part by the identification of the supposed suicide note by a handwriting expert—even though the expert had not been able to see the actual note, and had received what the doj itself considered inadequate samples of Kenney's handwriting. Although he never fully retreated from this determination, Jordan would later say, in a deposition, that he still believed Kenney was beaten, and that he himself had been "harassed by the Department of Justice from the very beginning" of the case.
The last government investigation into the death of Kenney Trentadue, conducted by the doj's Office of the Inspector General (oig), was concluded in November 1999. The report was sealed, and only a brief summary made public. The full report, a copy of which was obtained by Mother Jones, ran to 372 pages and included names and many other crucial details. It also contained material taken from the secret grand jury proceeding, according to its cover page.
The oig report supported the government's position that Kenney's injuries had been self-inflicted. But it did find fault with the prison's response and with the fbi's investigations, concluding that bop and fbi employees had lied about their actions to supervisors, investigators, and the oig itself. (In 2003, Jesse filed a complaint about what he considered shoddy investigative work in the report with the President's Council on Efficiency and Integrity, a White House agency; the council dismissed the complaint, and when Jesse asked why, it sent him 55 pages of evidence the oig had submitted. All but 350 words had been blacked out.)
In late 2000, the civil lawsuit brought by the Trentadue family commenced in federal district court in Oklahoma City. The jury found that Stuart A. Lee, the prison official in charge the night Kenney died, had violated Kenney's civil rights by being "deliberately indifferent to his medical needs." Four months later, the court awarded the family $1.1 million for emotional distress (based not on Kenney's death itself, but on the bop's conduct afterward). The court denounced prison employees for trying to cover up their own misconduct, declaring that, "From the time of Trentadue's death up to and including the trial, these witnesses seemed unable to comprehend the importance of a truthful answer." The government appealed, and the matter remains bogged down in the courts to this day.
For Jesse, the ruling was bittersweet. For more than four years, he had been investigating the case—interviewing witnesses, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, lobbying lawmakers. But he was no closer to understanding why Kenney might have been, as the medical examiner had put it, "tortured," or why the prison and the doj would have gone to such lengths to cover up whatever occurred. By the spring of 2003, Jesse Trentadue had all but given up on solving the mystery. Then he got a call from a small-town newspaper reporter in Oklahoma. His name was J.D. Cash, and he wanted to talk about Kenney, whose story and photo had been widely circulated on the Internet. What kind of vehicle had he been driving when he was stopped at the border? Did he have tattoos? Then Cash explained what had gotten him interested. Kenney's particulars fit the police description of John Doe No. 2, and some photos of Kenney bore a clear resemblance to the police sketch of the alleged bomber. And both Kenney and John Doe No. 2 looked quite a bit like another man, a bank robber named Richard Lee Guthrie.
Guthrie's name meant nothing to Jesse Trentadue, but in the far-right radical scene, he had some notoriety. In 1994 and 1995, Guthrie and his gang, the Aryan Republican Army, carried out an impressive series of 22 bank robberies across the Midwest, netting some $250,000 that they used to support the white-supremacist movement.
The ara had a flair for the dramatic. They rented getaway cars in the names of major fbi officials. At some robberies they wore Clinton and Nixon masks; at others, they tried to look like Arabs. At a December 1994 robbery they wore Santa and elf suits; the following April, they left behind an Easter basket holding a bronzed pipe bomb. In a home movie, Guthrie's partner Peter Langan donned a black balaclava and talked about the coming white revolution. The ara's philosophy was old-fashioned nativism, but their style was a takeoff on the ira, with Latin American revolution and rock and roll thrown in. (Members of the Philadelphia skinhead music scene were part of the group.) Langan liked to call himself "Commander Pedro"; outside the gang, he cross-dressed and later, when sentenced to prison for the robberies, requested that a judge authorize a sex-change operation.
Cash told Jesse that some people—including some in federal law enforcement—thought the ara might have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, and that Guthrie could have been John Doe No. 2. (Guthrie, along with other key ara members, was finally arrested in January 1996 and was reported to be cooperating with federal prosecutors tracking the far right. That July, shortly before he was due to testify in court against Langan, Guthrie was found hanging in his cell.)
J.D. Cash, who died in May, at age 55, was an unsettling figure—a genuine crusader for truth as well as an instinctive self-promoter. A lanky man with a warm face that could turn hard in a hurry, he'd been a lawyer, mortgage banker, and entrepreneur before taking a job as the hunting and fishing reporter for the McCurtain Daily Gazette in eastern Oklahoma. Having lost friends and family in the attack, he had grown consumed with the bombing and become a central figure in the Oklahoma City "truth movement," a loose collection of individuals and groups dedicated to identifying holes in the official story, advancing alternate theories, and gathering evidence to support them.
Cash became an acknowledged clearinghouse for information on the bombing and its endless complications, uncovering a store of vital information while putting forth some highly questionable theories. He despised the fbi and loved writing stories about the bureau's stupidity and perfidy. His belief in a cover-up—and even government foreknowledge of the bombing—had made him a favorite among some militia types. Yet he also insisted that the bombing was part of a conspiracy by the organized far right, and wanted to see all the perpetrators brought to justice. From Cash, Jesse Trentadue would get a crash course on the questions that still lingered, years later, around the bombing.
For the federal government, a great deal was riding on public perceptions of the attack. Bill Clinton's speech at a memorial service for the victims, and his emotional meetings with their families, drove up his popularity ratings, which had bottomed out after the 1994 midterm elections; the spotlight on violent antigovernment extremists was also credited with eroding sympathy for the antigovernment rhetoric in Newt Gingrich's Contract With America.
But the destruction of the Murrah Building—just like, years later, the fall of the Twin Towers—also pointed to a series of deep shortcomings in federal law enforcement and intelligence. Agencies such as the fbi had plenty of agents doing first-rate crime-solving work, but their record in "domestic intelligence" was another matter. Not unlike the patriot groups obsessed with black helicopters, the fbi was consumed by conspiracy theories that reflected the fears and fantasies of its leadership. The same agency that harassed pinko screenwriters in the 1950s, bugged civil rights leaders in the 1960s, and today monitors peace activists and librarians sought to infiltrate the far right through similar means—with dubious informants and questionable surveillance. And when it did move against far-right groups, it often ended up boosting the movement it sought to thwart; the 1992 raid at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the botched 1993 attack on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco fueled a growing fury on the far right. (The Oklahoma City bombing came on the second anniversary of the Waco disaster.) Increasingly, that anger was targeted at the federal government and its symbols.
The Murrah Building itself had been the target of a white-supremacist plot as far back as 1983. Among those involved in that failed endeavor was Richard Wayne Snell, who was later convicted of murdering a black Arkansas state trooper and a pawn-shop owner who he thought was Jewish. Snell was executed on April 19, 1995—the very day of the Murrah bombing. The final resting place of Snell's body would be a remote religious compound called Elohim City. For those seeking evidence of a wider conspiracy in the bombing—and the federal government's missed opportunities to crack it—all roads led to Elohim City.
the place was not much to look at—a clutch of small buildings in the Ozark Mountains in eastern Oklahoma. Elohim City's inhabitants were followers of the late Robert Millar, who taught a doctrine known as Christian Identity, which holds that black and brown people and other "non-whites" (including Jews) are "mud people." The community was patriarchal and polygamous, with all residents, including children, trained in the use of weapons by a visitor they called "Andy the German"—Andreas Strassmeir, a former German military officer.
For many years, Elohim City served as a sort of extremist sanctuary. Members of the Aryan Nations came through, skinhead bands made visits, young recruits showed up at the gates. Dennis Mahon, a former Klansman who had become a leader of the White Aryan Resistance, had a trailer there and participated in Andy the German's guerrilla warfare training. In the early 1990s, the burgeoning militia movement, which helped inspire McVeigh and Nichols, became part of the mix. Also drifting in and out of Elohim City were various informants. Internal fbi memos suggest that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the far right, had a source there whose tips were passed to law enforcement. (Mark Potok, the director of splc's intelligence project, told me that his organization had not placed an informant inside the compound, but received only second- or thirdhand reports from the compound.) Millar himself shared some information with the fbi, according to his former attorney, Kirk Lyons, in hopes of avoiding a Waco-style raid. And the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was getting information from inside Elohim City for nearly a year before the Murrah bombing, via an ex-debutante named Carol Howe. The daughter of a wealthy Oklahoma businessman, Howe with her fiancé had formed a two-person neo-Nazi group that urged "white warriors" to take up arms against the government. In 1994 she called a racist hot line and got involved with the White Aryan Resistance and Mahon. Soon thereafter the batf, possibly wielding the threat of a weapons charge, convinced Howe to inform on Mahon, and for most of the next two years it employed her as an informant. In that capacity she made numerous trips to Elohim City.
Howe's reports provided the batf—which, records show, shared some of the information with the fbi—with details about the weapons being stockpiled at Elohim City, Strassmeir's combat training, and Millar's sermons against the mud people and the U.S. government. Howe reported that Strassmeir had talked about blowing up federal buildings, and that he and Mahon had made several trips to Oklahoma City. In February 1995, Howe joined a group of Elohim City residents on such a trip; she told her batf handler that she'd stayed at the home of a former military person who demonstrated an explosive device.
Two years after the bombing, in 1997, Howe and her fiancé were indicted on charges related to their two-person "National Socialist Alliance" that included making bomb threats and possession of an illegal explosive device. She would be acquitted on all charges. There was a pretrial hearing in the case, which involved testimony from Howe's batf handler, on the same day that Timothy McVeigh's trial opened in Denver. At one point, the judge had the following conversation with Howe's attorney, Clark Brewster: The Court: Well, let me ask you this, Mr. Brewster. A lot of this makes for good conversation, like the trip to Oklahoma City, you know, before the bombing and so forth and it makes for sensationalism, and I don't know that it really has anything to do with the Oklahoma City bombing, but I saw where you were coming from. With that McVeigh trial going on, I don't want anything getting out of here that would compromise that trial in any way. Brewster: What do you mean by compromise? Do you mean shared with the McVeigh lawyers?
The Court: Yes, or something that would come up—you know, we have got evidence that the [batf] took a trip with somebody that said buildings were going to be blown up in Oklahoma City before it was blown up or something of that nature, and try to connect it to McVeigh in some way or something. Brewster did not return calls for this story; McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen Jones, says the prosecution never gave him any information about Howe or Elohim City, but that Brewster filled him in and he attempted to have Howe testify at trial. The judge rebuffed him on this and every other attempt to show that McVeigh and Nichols hadn't acted alone.
one day in 2004, Jesse had a kind of breakthrough—one that would put him at the center of the Oklahoma City truth movement, though it would ultimately get him no closer to proving who was to blame for Kenney's death. A source at the fbi, who had at one point taken an interest in Kenney's case, passed him two heavily redacted memos indicating that, more than a year after Oklahoma City, the bureau had been investigating a link between the bombers and bank robber Richard Guthrie's ara—a connection that ran through Elohim City.
Jesse filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and then a lawsuit, for documents containing information on these connections, and the bureau—after first claiming it had none—finally produced 25 documents comprising 150 pages, many of them heavily redacted.
The documents connect two investigations under way at the bureau in 1995 and 1996, both of them linked to Elohim City via informants: OKBOMB, run out of Oklahoma City, and BOMBROB, an investigation of the bank-robbing Aryan Republican Army. One of the memos, dated August 23, 1996—some 16 months after the bombing—was sent from fbi headquarters in Washington to the BOMBROB investigation. It read, "Information has been developed that [names redacted] were at the home of [redacted] Elohim City, Oklahoma on 4/5/95 when OKBOMB subject, Timothy McVeigh, placed a telephone call to [redacted] residence. On 4/15/95, a telephone call was placed from [redacted] residence to [redacted] residence in Philadelphia division. BOMBROB subjects [redacted] left [redacted] residence on 4/16/95 en route to Pittsburgh [sic], Kansas where they joined [redacted] and Guthrie." At that time, some ara suspects lived around Philadelphia, and Pittsburg, Kansas, was the site of an ara safe house. The document makes clear that the bureau was interested in communication between McVeigh and the ara immediately before the bombing, and that Guthrie himself was in Pittsburg—some 200 miles from Oklahoma City—three days before the attack.
In addition, the memos indicate that the fbi received reports of McVeigh calling and possibly visiting Elohim City before the bombing, at one point seeking "to recruit a second conspirator." The documents also have one source reporting that McVeigh had a "lengthy relationship" with someone at Elohim City, and that he called that person just two days before the bombing. (These documents were never shown to McVeigh's lawyer.) The Justice Department and the fbi would not comment on the documents; an fbi spokesman in Oklahoma City told me that the bureau is confident it has caught and convicted those responsible for the bombing.
Jesse believes that McVeigh's contact was Strassmeir, a fixture in many Oklahoma City theories. There has been much speculation, aired most recently on the bbc show Conspiracy Files this year, that Strassmeir had ties to U.S. and German intelligence and might (along with his government contacts) have had advance knowledge of the plot. In February 2007, Jesse filed a declaration in court signed by Nichols stating, "McVeigh said that Strassmeir would provide a 'safe house' if necessary. McVeigh...said that Strassmeir was 'head of security at some backwoods place in Oklahoma.'" Strassmeir left the country in early 1996; he was later questioned on the phone by the fbi.
Kirk Lyons, Strassmeir's U.S. attorney, who has defended a number of far-right figures over the years, says the reality is far simpler; Strassmeir came to the United States to take part in Civil War reenactments, liked it here, and, hoping to find a bride, ended up at Elohim City. Lyons insists that Strassmeir was never a spy, except in the minds of conspiracy theorists. ("These silly right-wingers think I am Mossad," he says. "I've given up arguing with these nutsy cuckoos.") Reached at his home in Berlin, Strassmeir told me that he met McVeigh once, at a gun show in 1993, but that they never spoke again. He said he had no intelligence affiliations and had no clues to the Oklahoma City attack before it happened; but there were definitely informants at Elohim City, he added, and sometimes surveillance planes flew overhead—probably, he thought, to check out the marijuana fields that "some of the rednecks" had planted. He confirmed that two ara members were part-time residents of Elohim City, but said that "nobody knew much about them."
the oklahoma City bombing prefigured 9/11 in many ways. There were the missed clues; the federal informant who actually had contact with the conspirators; the turf-conscious agencies failing to share and act on vital information; and in general, a domestic-intelligence program incapable of translating surveillance into action. Just as they would misunderstand the nature of Al Qaeda, the fbi and other agencies never viewed the far right as a political movement with the strategic and tactical ability to deliver a major attack. Intelligence on these groups suffered from the broader inadequacies of domestic intelligence, especially in the use of untested freelance informants recruited under threat of prosecution. But with federal police forces and the Justice Department responsible for policing themselves, and the details of their work often shrouded in secrecy, the system remained unaccountable. The bombing "grew out of a definable social movement the authorities didn't understand," says Leonard Zeskind, a researcher who has tracked the far right for more than 30 years. "It went unsolved because of the character and gross mismanagement of the investigation. It was an outrageous crime, and the size of the crime magnifies the level of incompetence."
In fact, after the bombing law enforcement's failures were not corrected but rewarded. Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which severely restricted federal courts' ability to grant habeas corpus relief, paving the way for speedier executions (like that of Timothy McVeigh), and ultimately for Guantanamo. It also restricted the rights of immigrants, extended surveillance capabilities, and provided $1 billion in authorization for antiterrorism work, half of it for the fbi. The act raised only muted protest, perhaps in part because it was signed into law by a Democratic president. Yet there can be no doubt that the roots of the Patriot Act were planted not in the chasm of Ground Zero but in the dusty soil of Oklahoma.
For Jesse Trentadue, the ara-Oklahoma City connection has suggested what he believes is the missing motive in his brother's killing: Just as J.D. Cash posited in his first phone call, he now believes that whoever interrogated Kenney took him to be John Doe No. 2—and that Kenney died during an interrogation gone bad. He has no proof for that theory, though he continues to pursue all leads—interviewing McVeigh's death-row neighbor, David Paul Hammer; preparing to formally depose Terry Nichols; seeking to obtain a surveillance video he believes exists of the Murrah Building area shortly before the blast. But by now, Jesse is after more than his brother's killers. He has become an American archetype, the citizen-investigator—still propelled by the sense of justice that first drew him into the law, but no longer convinced of the government's ability to see that justice is done. Jennifer Wedekind, Caroline Dobuzinskis, and Jessica Savage contributed research to this article. For more Oklahoma City (and John Doe No. 2) mysteries, see motherjones.com/oklahomacity.
The top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan says that 2009 will be a "tough fight" in Afghanistan, and the United States will need nearly twice as many troops for up to four years to stabilize the country.
Gen. David McKiernan told USA Today on Sunday that increasing U.S. troop levels from about 32,000 to 55,000 or 60,000 is "needed until we get to this tipping point where the Afghan army and the Afghan police have both the capacity and capability to provide security for their people. That is at least three or four more years away."
A report issued Monday by a Europe-based think tank said that the Taliban have expanded their presence in Afghanistan to cover more than 70 percent of the country.
The report, issued by the International Council on Security and Development, said that the Taliban presence this year was up from 54 percent of the country last year.
"While the international community’s prospects in Afghanistan have never been bleaker, the Taliban has been experiencing a renaissance that has gained momentum since 2005. The West is in genuine danger of losing Afghanistan," its authors wrote.
Jesse Trentadue discusses the the events surrounding the 1995 murder of his brother while in federal custody in Oklahoma City and the connection to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the Elohim City paramilitary camp sting operation run by the FBI and Southern Poverty Law Center, foreknowledge of FBI agents and complicity of FBI informants in the bombing, the ongoing court battles with the U.S. government over FOIA requests and civil lawsuits and the involvement of Obama’s appointed attorney general Eric Holder in the coverup of Kenny’s murder.
HOAX PHONE CALL ALMOST TRIGGERED INDIA- PAKISTAN WAR, MORE INFO ON MASSACRED SOUTH KOREANS EMERGES, ALL ROADS LEAD TO PAKISTANI INTEL, RICE SAYS RUMSFELD NOT TO BLAME FOR IRAQ, CHAVEZ TRANSFORMS MILITARY
A hoax telephone call almost sparked another war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan at the height of last month's terror attacks on Mumbai, officials and Western diplomats on both sides of the border said on Sunday.
Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani President, took a telephone call from a man pretending to be Pranab Mukherjee, India's Foreign Minister, on Friday, November 28, apparently without following the usual verification procedures, they said.
The hoax caller threatened to take military action against Pakistan in response to the then ongoing Mumbai attacks, which India has since blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), they said.
Mr Zardari responded by placing Pakistan's air force on high alert and telephoning Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, to ask her to intervene.
An official but secret United States government document, marked as releasable to the government in Islamabad, has linked Pakistan’s former top spymaster, Inter-Services Intelligence Director General Lt Gen (retd) Hamid Gul, to the Taliban and Al Qaeda networks.
The two-page unsigned document has already been provided to the government, and published in the Pakistani media yesterday.
Official sources say that Gul has been charged in the paper with providing financial assistance to Kabul-based criminal groups and involvement in spotting, assessing, recruiting and training young men from seminaries.
Condoleezza Rice is taking responsibility for the troubled U.S. occupation in Iraq right after Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
Rice was President George W. Bush's national security adviser when the war began in 2003. She says it wasn't former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's fault that things went badly when the U.S. began to occupy Iraq after driving out Saddam.
Government investigators digging into the grim hidden history of mass political executions in South Korea have confirmed that dozens of children were among many thousands shot by their own government early in the Korean War.
The investigative Truth and Reconciliation Commission has thus far verified more than two dozen mass killings of leftists and supposed sympathizers, among at least 100,000 people estimated to have been hastily shot and dumped into makeshift trenches, abandoned mines or the sea after communist North Korea invaded the south in June 1950.
The killings, details of which were buried in classified U.S. files for a half-century, were intended to keep southern leftists from aiding the invaders at a time when the rightist, U.S.-allied government was in danger of being overrun by communist forces.
Congo's government has invited about 20 armed groups to participate in talks with Tutsi rebels to end fighting in war-ravaged North Kivu province, the information minister said Sunday.
Tutsi insurgent leader General Laurent Nkunda demanded direct negotiations with President Joseph Kabila's government after launching a renewed offensive in late August that forced a quarter of a million people to flee violence in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo.
Repeatedly routed by Nkunda's battle-hardened fighters, the government appeared to agree to that demand Friday, announcing it would send a delegation to Kenya to meet with the rebels on December 8. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081207/wl_nm/us_congo_democratic
As President Hugo Chavez launches another campaign to abolish term limits and rule Venezuela until at least 2019, he counts on a loyal and powerful partner: the armed forces.
His military made headlines this month conducting a three-day exercise with Russian warships in the Caribbean Sea. But on the mainland, a more lasting transformation is under way: Chavez is converting the armed forces into a revolutionary corps at the service of the president. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/6150191.html
It has remained one of World War II's most enduring mysteries, one that resonated decades later after Sept. 11: Who in Washington knew what and when before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941?
Specifically, who heard or saw a transcript of a Tokyo shortwave radio news broadcast that was interrupted by a prearranged coded weather report? The weather bulletin signaled Japanese diplomats around the world to destroy confidential documents and codes because war with the United States, the Soviet Union or Britain was beginning.
