Sheikh Jarrah evictions based on forgeries
Ma’an – 07/04/2010
Jerusalem – The court-ordered eviction warrants handed down by the settler organization Nahalat Shimon International to two Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah on Tuesday were based on forged documents, Fatah official in charge of Jerusalem Affairs Hatem Abdul Qader said.
“The Israeli High Court of Justice previously accredited forged documents issued by this [Nahalat Shimon International] society and approved its ownership of the lands the homes are built on,” Abdul Qader told Ma’an.
“The society’s lawyer is sending out circular warrants to residents, ordering them to evacuate their homes,” he added, alleging that all the land ownership documents previously used by the organizations to evict other families in the neighborhood are counterfeit.
The Fatah official said the latest families faced with eviction, the Dajani and Daoudi families, will file a petition at the High Court of Justice to overturn the eviction warrants on the basis that they were approved on forged documents.
“The Nahalat Shimon society is supported by the Israeli government in its work toward building a settlement neighborhood in the area,” Abdul Qader said.
Israeli NGO Ir Amin said in a 2009 report that the settler-related real estate organization “plan[s] to demolish the existing residential structures [in Sheikh Jarrah] and evict hundreds of Palestinian residents in order to clear the way for a new Israeli settlement: Shimon HaTzadik [Simon the Just].”
The structures in question are 28 Palestinian homes, currently housing descendants of 27 Palestinian families, who were offered housing by UNWRA and the Jordanian Ministry of Development in 1956, in exchange for their refugee baskets. The Jordanian government had told the families that within three years, the deeds would be transferred into their names if the owners did not reclaim the land, pursuant to Jordan’s Enemy Property Law. Despite no claims within the stipulated period, the deeds were not passed on to the current tenants.
Nahalat Shimon, in conjunction with a number of other organizations, began filing lawsuits in the 1970s to evict the families in question, based on land sale deeds allegedly acquired during the Ottoman rule and the British Mandate. Many of these owners had fled the neighborhood before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
“The struggle for the area highlights an additional issue: the ongoing attempt of Israeli settlers, backed by the Israel Lands Administration (ILA), to ‘reclaim’ plots of land in East Jerusalem that were owned by Jews under British or Ottoman rule. These efforts continue throughout East Jerusalem, despite Israeli courts’ ongoing refusal to recognize similar claims by Palestinian owners in West Jerusalem,” Ir Amin wrote.
Rounded Up: Artificial Terrorists and Muslim Entrapment after 9/11 :: Book Review ::
(Image: The Troy Book Makers)
By Mirza A. Beg | December 16, 2009
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush Justice Department arrested almost 1,200 Muslims throughout the United States. They were ordinary American immigrants, mostly of Arab origin. The evidence at best was flimsy based on someone’s vendetta or in some cases neighbor’s paranoia.
Within a week the Justice Department unveiled the infamous “USA Patriot Act”. Congress passed it in early October 2001 over the objection of many thoughtful Americans. The word USA PATRIOT is an acronym designed to pull at American heart strings. It stands for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism’
None of the arrested were ever brought to trial; although a few were summarily deported at the slightest irregularity in their immigration documents. Many were tortured. Exactly how many were tortured and how badly is a secret under the aegis of the “Patriot act”. Perhaps some day it will come out.
Overnight Muslim organizations became suspect. FBI undercover operations were taken in stride by most Muslims as a part of the job of the FBI to protect the citizens. But what unfolded in many cases was incitement and entrapment by implanted agent Muslim provocateurs with shady pasts, in trouble with the law.
On August 5, 2004, the lead national news was that two Muslims associated with the Albany Mosque were arrested in a terrorist plot. There names were Yassin Muhiddin Aref and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain.
The book, Rounded Up: Artificial Terrorists and Muslim Entrapment after 9/11, is written by Dr. Shamshad Ahmed, a professor of Physics, who established the Masjid As-Salam in 1980 and serves as its president. He knew the two victims of entrapment to be honest decent people. It is essentially a short account of Yassin Muhiddin Aref, an immigrant from the Kurdish part of Iraq and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain from Pakistan, their background and how were they entrapped by the FBI.
Why they were entrapped is best known to the government or perhaps it is not even known to them. It is just possible that because they could not convict any of the 1,200 arrested, they tried random entrapment under the “one percent Cheney doctrine”, that is if the law enforcement authorities suspected someone of having a 1% chance of supporting terrorism, America would treat him as if he were 100% a terrorist. Once the process was in motion, the Justice Department did not back down because the conviction was under the Kafkaesque “Patriot Act”.
The chapters are generally arranged chronologically from the day of the FBI raid on the Mosque (Masjid) on the 5th of April 2004, with a few flash back chapters describing the establishment of the mosque and how the author met the two victims of the FBI sting.
Dr. Shamshad in this book exposes the “Catch 22” nature of the infamous “Patriot Act”. One would expect that by planting an informer, the FBI had a clear case. No, the case lasted three years, and all the delays were by the FBI asking extensions to prepare their case. The defense was kept in the dark even about the exact charges. Every piece of information had to be pried out after lengthy court petitions. Occasionally when they succeeded, the information was so redacted to be almost useless. Even the judges ruling, why the information was classified, was classified and the defendant was denied access. In essence the “Patriot Act” renders the justice of a Kangaroo Court, so well described by Franz Kafka in his dark novel “The Trial”.
Parts of the transcribed taped evidence by the Pakistani informer that were procured after long court battles are in the Appendixes of the book. They clearly show, it was the informer who kept on badgering the victims to say and do things that could be construed as illegal. At times the victims objected to his proposals as immoral and un-Islamic. He persisted, and on occasions the victims appear to be humoring the informer. The case rested on Musharraf Hossain being induced to take a loan from the informant at very favorable terms. The fact that the informer could launder his money and perhaps buy Chinese made rockets Hussain did not condone. Though the informant wanted the loan to be unrecorded, Hossain insisted on the propriety of it being recorded .The only crime for which Yassin Aref was roped in at the time was that as a friend he acted as witness to that loan.
Aref’s command of English was not very good. It often appears that he was not quite clear about the tenor of the conversation. The conversations with Hossain were often in Urdu and the FBI’s paid translator intentionally mistranslated taxes to terrorist. In 2005, a raid on a Kurdish camps in Iraq yielded a tape recording where someone seems to refer to Aref almost ten years earlier by a word in Kurdish that translates as elder brother. But if one wanted to stretch the meaning, it could be commander. Only this nebulous translation was presented to the jury to prove that he was a militant.
Dr. Shamshad Ahmad presents a very cogent account of the atmosphere in Albany during the publicity and the trial of the two defendants. On the one side the right-wing talk radio was in overdrive demonizing the Muslim and Arab community as has become very familiar nationwide. The politicians such a Governor Pataki also took advantage of the situation. But the author also very lucidly portrays the support they got from thoughtful Americans, including some in the clergy in the best of American traditions. They not only joined the vigils in support of the defendants but gave material help and wrote petitions.
The balanced and thoughtful reporting of the Albany Times Union was exemplary. The author has included many of the incisive cartoons by John deRosier castigating the bizarre nature of the case. Those cartoons are indeed worth the proverbial thousand words.
The lawyers worked assiduously towards an impossible task of defending the accused where parts of the charges, the evidence and even the rationale judge’s rulings are reminiscent of a Kangaroo court without the clowns. Stephen Downs who voluntarily joined the case pro bono and has written the forward to this book worked especially hard in the best tradition of the American legal system.
In the introduction of the book Dr. Ahmad has described his own conservative education in a Madarsa where he learned his basic values of Islamic decency and caring. From his short narration of his background, it becomes clear that one can be conservative in the best sense of the words as well as a progressive with liberal values as well. He has dedicated this book to the peace and justice loving humanitarians, and the proceeds from this book go to help the victims of the justice system gone awry in the shadow of the unpatriotic, “Patriot Act”.
Iran rejects US claim of arms aid to Afghan militants
Press TV – April 5, 2010
Iran has rejected accusations by the top US military commander that it is providing weapons to the militants in Afghanistan.
The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen claimed in a Kabul news conference that Iran has shipped arms to Taliban militants in Kandahar.
In a statement released on Monday, the Iranian Embassy in Kabul rejected the charges as “recurring allegations” and a sort of “fabrication” by the US in order to justify its defeat in Afghanistan.
The statement added that Washington is attempting to “deceive the public opinion” by accusing other countries of sending weapons to militants in the war-torn country.
It urged the US to “find more logical ways to fight terrorism rather than accusing others” of providing arms to the militants.
“Iran always supports the nation and the government of Afghanistan,” the embassy statement added.
The United States has frequently accused Iran of supplying aid to the Taliban militants in Afghanistan. Such claims come in face of the fact that the Taliban, which follow the radical Wahhabi sect, have opposed Iran since long ago and have murdered eight Iranian diplomats when they took over most of Afghanistan in the 1990’s.
“Iran is working to increase its influence in the area. On the one hand, that’s not surprising; she is a neighbor state, a neighbor country. On the other hand, the influence I see is all too often negative,” Mullen told a news conference during a visit to Kabul on Wednesday.
“I was advised last night about a significant shipment of weapons from Iran into Kandahar, for example,” Reuters quoted Mullen as saying.
How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan
By Glenn Greenwald | April 5, 2010
On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.
Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.
One NATO official said that there had likely been an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim). The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, “US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”
What is clear — yet again — is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly “reports” on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact. Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was “reported” by CNN on February 12:
Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an “honor killing.” The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an “unnamed senior military official said” about the incident, and it even helpfully explained:
An honor killing is a murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them.
The U.S. official said it isn’t clear whether the dishonor in this case stemmed from accusations of acts such as adultery or even cooperating with NATO forces.
“It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing,” said the official, who added the Taliban could be responsible. . .
The operation unfolded when Afghan and international forces went to the compound, which was thought to be a site of militant activity. A firefight ensued and several insurgents died, several people left the compound, and eight others were detained.
Similarly, The New York Times, while noting that there were “varying accounts of what happened” among U.S. forces and their allies in the Afghan police, also passed along the Pentagon’s false version of events with no questioning. Here’s the NYT‘s February 12 article in its entirety:
Several civilians were killed in Paktia Province on Friday when a joint Afghan-NATO force went to investigate a report of militant activity, but NATO and the Afghan police gave varying accounts of what happened. A NATO statement said the joint force went to a compound in the village of Khatabeh, in the Gardez district, where insurgents opened fire on them from a residential compound. Several insurgents were killed and a large number of men, women and children fled and were detained by the NATO force. Inside the compound, soldiers “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed,” the NATO statement said. The Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, confirmed the episode but said the dead in the house were two men and three women, who he said were killed by Taliban militants. He said the killings took place while the residents were celebrating the birth of a baby.
CNN conveyed its version of events without the slightest contradiction or doubt, and the NYT simply ignored entirely the claims of the residents of the village — notwithstanding the fact that serious conflicts about what actually took place were known from the very beginning. Consider, for instance, this February 12 article by Amir Shah of the Associated Press, who actually bothered to pick up a phone to determine if the Pentagon’s claims were true before “reporting” them as fact; this is what Shah found:
However, relatives of the dead accused American forces of being responsible for the deaths of all five people when contacted by The Associated Press by phone.
A man who identified himself as Hamidullah said he had been in the home as some 20 people gathered to celebrate the birth of a son when a group of men he described as “U.S. special forces” surrounded the compound.
When one man came out into the courtyard to ask why, Hamidullah said he watched U.S. forces gun him down.
“Daoud was coming out of the house to ask what was going on. And then they shot him,” he said.
Then they killed a second man, Hamidullah said. The rest of the group were forced out into the yard, made to kneel and had their hands bound behind their back, he said, breaking off crying without giving any further details.
A deputy provincial council member in Gardez, Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, said news of the operation has inflamed the local community that believes the Americans were responsible for the deaths.
“Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women. The people are so angry,” he said.
The Pentagon’s version of events was vehemently disputed from the start. But there was not a hint of any of that in the CNN or NYT “reporting,” which simply adopted the press release claims of NATO forces. That Press Release, false from start to finish, claimed that “a combined force of Afghan and international troops last night found the bound and gagged bodies of two women and the bodies of two men during an operation in the province’s Gardez district,” and “members of the combined force found the bodies inside.” Ironically, the Pentagon Press Release ended this way: “‘ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,’ ISAF spokesman Canadian army Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay said.” On March 16 — more than a month later, and only after a major investigative report about this incident was published by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London — the NYT ran a story detailing the gruesome claims of residents about what really happened; click that link for the horrific details and to get a sense for how false were the Pentagon and U.S. media’s original claims about what took place.
Contrast the pure propaganda dissemination of the American media with the immediate reporting of the Pajhwok Afghan News, an independent news agency created in Afghanistan to enable war reporting by Afghans. Here is how they reported the Pakita incident from the beginning, on Febraury 12 (via NEXIS):
US Special Forces have shot dead a district intelligence chief along with four family members in the volatile southeastern province of Paktia, a senior police officer claimed on Friday. Brig. Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar explained that Daud and his family were celebrating the birth of his son. But acting on a misleading tip-off, foreign troops raided the intelligence official’s residence. . . . He said the dead included Daud, his brother Zahir, an employee of the attorney’s office, and three women. . . .
But the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed Afghan and international forces found the bound and gagged bodies of three women during the operation in Gardez late Thursday night. “The joint force went to a compound near the village of Khatabeh, after intelligence confirmed militant activity. Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed,” the ISAF press office in Kabul said. . . .
When the troops entered the compound, according to the press release, they conducted a thorough search and found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed. “The bodies had been hidden in an adjacent room.”
Note the crucial difference: the Afghan news service shaped its report based on the statements of actual witnesses on the ground and local investigators, while also including the Pentagon’s version of events. Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.
* * * * *
All of this is a chronic problem, not an isolated one, with war reporting generally and events in Afghanistan specifically. Just consider what happened when the U.S. military was forced in 2008 to retract its claims about a brutal air raid in Azizabad. The Pentagon had vehemently denied the villagers’ claim that close to 100 civilians had been killed and that no Taliban were in the vicinity: until a video emerged proving the villagers’ claims were true and the Pentagon’s false. Last week, TPM highlighted a recent, largely overlooked statement from Gen. McChrystal, where he admitted, regarding U.S. killings of Afghans at check points: “to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.” And as I documented before, the U.S. media constantly repeats false Pentagon claims about American air attacks around the world in order to create the false impression that Key Terrorists were killed while no civilians were.
At the Nieman Watchdog Foundation, Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan war reporter for The Times of London who published the March 13 investigative report, has a crucial, must-read piece on all of this. Amazingly, his Nieman piece was written three weeks ago, and recounted in detail: (a) how clearly the U.S.-led forces had lied about what happened in Paktia; and (b) the reasons why the U.S. media continuously spews false government propaganda about the war. Starkey wrote under this headline:
In this mid-March piece, Starkey explained how he had discovered that NATO’s claims about the Paktia incident were false (he recounted that evidence in gruesome detail in the Times on March 13, three days before the NYT finally returned to the story to correct its original reporting), and more importantly, highlighted why the U.S. media so frequently disseminates false NATO claims with no questioning:
The only way I found out NATO had lied — deliberately or otherwise — was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.
NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged. . . .
It’s not the first time I’ve found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.
There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military’s monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are “cowards,” NATO attacks on civilians are “tragic accidents,” intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.
Starkey describes some of the understandable reasons so many reporters do nothing more than regurgitate officials claims: resource constraints, organizations limits, dangers of traveling around, and the “embed culture.” But he also recounts how NATO tries to intimidate, censor and punish any reporters like him who report adversely on official claims. Illustratively, in response to Starkey’s March 13 article detailing what really happened at Paktia and the cover-up that ensued, NATO issued a formal statement singling him out and accusing him of publishing an article that was “categorically false.” As recently as that mid-March statement, NATO was still claiming — falsely — that the women in Paktia were killed prior to the arrival of American troops, and they were impugning the integrity of the reporter (Starkey) who was proving otherwise.
There are some very courageous and intrepid reporters in Afghanistan, including some who work for American media outlets. It was, for instance, a superb and brave investigative report by the NYT‘s Carlotta Gall in Afghanistan that uncovered what really happened in that air attack on Azizabad and who documented the Pentagon’s false claims. But far more often, Americans are completely misled about events in Afghanistan by the combination of false official claims and mindless stenographic American “journalism.” And no matter how many times this process is exposed — from Jessica Lynch’s heroic firefight to Pat Tillman’s death by Al Qeada — this relentless propaganda machine never seems to diminish.
NATO Admits Killing Civilians in February Afghan Raid
By Jason Ditz | April 04, 2010
Nearly two months after the high profile night raid in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province and after several official denials, NATO has finally admitted to killing all five civilians, including two Afghan government employees.
NATO’s first official acknowledgement of the raid claimed they engaged in a “fire fight” with insurgents known to be hiding at the house and made a “gruesome” discovery of three slain women bound and gagged in an adjacent room of the house. Two of the women were later revealed to be pregnant at the time.
Though the family initially disputed the claims, the real holes in the official story began to develop a month later, when Rear Admiral Greg Smith admitted they had no evidence the “firefight” involved a single shot fired by anyone but the NATO forces, and all the arrested “insurgents” were released. NATO also attempted to pay them “compensation” for the slain civilians, but were rebuffed.
But all of this still leaves an enormous loose string to tie up. If there was no “gruesome discovery” as claimed, then the US special forces responsible for the raid not only killed those pregnant women, but bound and gagged their corpses to try to cover it up (which is what the family claimed the day after it happened, to the dismissal of everyone).
Incredibly, however, NATO is still insisting that they have no evidence that the soldiers acted “inappropriately” in the slaughter, and even though Afghan government officials confirmed that the troops were removing evidence from the scene for seven hours before letting the Afghan security forces in to inspect it they maintain that nothing resembling a cover-up has occurred.
The Manufactured Menace from Michigan — Take Two
William N. Grigg | April 01, 2010
“That’s it, baby — strut! The camera loves you!” In a familiar bit of Homeland Security Theater, a law enforcement officer, his arms decorated with gangbanger-style tattoos, swaggers through a search of alleged Hutaree militia member Thomas Piatek’s home in Hammond, Indiana.
When the stranger materialized a few years ago, nobody really knew much about him. He seemed like a suitably sympathetic figure and quickly ingratiated himself by offering whatever help he could. No task was too menial for him, and he had a way of finding just what the group needed right when it was required.
Most importantly, he seemed to share the group’s antipathy toward the government. If anything, he was just a bit more emphatic than the rest in denouncing official corruption and endorsing violent “direct action” against the state. He seemed eager to shepherd the group in a more militant direction, eagerly out-bidding every expression of outrage and hostility. One of his favorite recurring themes was the idea that a criminal state could only be fought through the use of criminal means.
When the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) staged an armed raid to arrest several members of the group, the helpful stranger was nowhere to be found. He did leave a parting gift, however, in the form of detailed allegations recorded in a federal indictment alleging that the group he had infiltrated on behalf of the JTTF was involved in extensive criminal activity — most of which was either suggested or directly facilitated by him — and an ambitious plot to wage war against the United States Government.
In broad outline, this is what most likely happened within Michigan’s Hutaree militia during the past couple of years, a period during which — as federal authorities now admit — the group was infiltrated by both an undercover FBI agent and a “cooperating witness.”
One of the FBI’s plants, significantly, “posed as someone who could provide the group with custom-made explosives,” observes the Detroit News.
That revelation is critical, since it means that the alleged plot to manufacture of improvised explosive devices — referred to, with hysterical hyperbole typical of the Regime’s pronouncements, as “weapons of mass destruction” — was quite possibly instigated by the FBI’s informant/provocateur.
The “Hutaree Conspiracy” was the second installment in the FBI’s ongoing Homeland Security Theater in Michigan. The Bureau’s campaign against the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Dearborn followed almost exactly the same script. The final act of that earlier melodrama was an October 28, 2009 FBI raid against several of the mosque’s adherents that ended with the death of its imam, Luqman Ameen Abdullah.
Initial reports claimed that Abdullah was killed in a “shootout” or “exchange of gunfire” with the Feds in a warehouse allegedly containing stolen goods. The word “execution” might be a more appropriate description in light of the fact that Abdullah was shot at least twenty times, including an entry wound in his back and an oddly specific grouping in and around the genital region.
The imam allegedly provoked the federal fusillade by shooting one of the FBI’s “K9 agents.” Significantly, the official autopsy report — a document actively suppressed by the Dearborn Police Department for more than three months — describes a series of “lacerations” (also described by Wayne County Chief Medical Examiner Carl Schmitt as “puncture wounds”) that are consistent with being mauled by a dog.
It’s possible Abdullah shot the dog to protect himself. It’s also possible that he never fired a shot, and the dog stepped in front of one or more round intended for Abdullah. The official FBI narrative is that “Freddy,” the Belgian Malinois killed during the raid, “gave his life in the line of duty” on behalf of “his team.” The dog was buried in a solemn ritual and his name was added to the FBI’s “memorial wall.”
We’ll never know the exact circumstances of “Freddy” death. This much has been clearly established, however: Abdullah bled to death with his hands cuffed behind his back while the FBI took the time to arrange an emergency medical airlift for their attack dog.
The most favorable construction one can put on this set of facts is that the feds handcuffed a helpless man who had been perforated by at least twenty gunshots. A grimmer possibility is that he was handcuffed before he was shot. In either case, this juxtaposition — a handcuffed man bleeds to death while his assailants arrange emergency medical treatment for their dog — reeks of some malodorous combination of depraved indifference and concentrated malice.
Despite the fact that both the investigation of the mosque and the raid were conducted by the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, no terrorism-related charges were filed against any of the ten men listed in the criminal complaint. The charges include “conspiracy” counts arising from an alleged plot to receive and sell “goods that defendants believed were stolen from interstate shipments”; one count of mail fraud; three counts related to possession of firearms or body armor by a felon; and tampering with automobile VIN numbers.
Attendees of Abdullah’s mosque included many men who had served time behind bars. As a younger man, Abdullah was convicted of assault. Like many of this followers and countless thousands of others scattered across the country, Abdullah was converted to radical Islam within the world’s largest and most lavishly funded madrassa — the federal prison system. His friends and supporters insist that Abdullah, despite his criminal history, was a caring, pious, and generous man. The mosque ran a soup kitchen and was involved in other forms of charitable outreach to the economically blighted neighborhood.
Omar Regan at the funeral of Luqman Abdullah.
Abdullah was expansively hostile toward the government and deeply suspicious of the police — what rational person isn’t?– but those who knew him well insist he consistently rejected aggressive violence of any kind.
“My father was a sharp-tongued individual,” recalls Omar Reagan, a Los Angeles-based comedian and motivational speaker. “He would talk about his dislike of government — about how law enforcement wasn’t protecting and serving the people. But speaking his emotions and acting on his emotions are two different things.”
The “evidence” presented in the criminal complaint unsealed after Abdullah was killed shows that he encouraged his followers to acquire the skills to employ defensive violence to protect themselves from both private and government-employed criminals. He also explicitly and repeatedly refused to condone aggressive action against anyone.
FBI Counter-Terrorism Agent Gary Leone, the author of the affidavit, hurls speculative allegations with the exuberant glee of a caged monkey flinging feces at spectators.
In substantive terms, his criminal complaint deals with a small fencing operation. However, where “anti-government” groups are concerned, the FBI appears to suffer from an institution-wide case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome; this may be why the bureaucratic incentives under which Leone operates dictate that every molehill be described as if it were of Himalayan proportions. Accordingly, Abdullah and his followers are portrayed as nothing less than hardened, battle-ready shock troops of the global jihad:
“The investigation has shown that Luqman Ameen Adbullah, Imam of the Masjid Al-Haqq … is a highly placed leader of a nationwide fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily of African-Americans…. Their primary mission is to establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state (`The Ummah’) within the borders of the United States, governed by Shariah law….. [Abdullah] regularly preaches anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric. Abdullah and his followers have trained regularly in the use of firearms, and continue to train in martial arts and sword fighting…. Abdullah preaches that every Muslim should have a weapon, and should not be sacred to use their weapon when needed.”
Aftermath: An FBI agent near the warehouse in which Abdullah was gunned down.
Even if every word of that summation were accurate, none of what is described above constitutes a crime — a fact Leone tacitly acknowledged by declining to file terrorism or sedition charges.
Furthermore, the inflammatory dicta in Leone’s complaint (which consumes 29 of the document’s 45 pages) artfully misrepresents Abdullah’s views regarding the legitimate use of violence, as those views were summarized by Leone’s snitches within the mosque. The most striking example of Leone’s dishonesty deals with an attempt by one of his assets to entrap Abdullah into endorsing terrorist violence.
“Confidential Source S-2,” a JTTF plant who allegedly recorded conversations with Abdullah, admits that he offered $5,000 to instigate some kind of criminal violence during the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit. According to Leone’s own summary of the incident, “Abdullah said he would not be involved in injuring innocent people for no reason.”
“Confidential Source S-3” alleges that Abdullah described how Abdul Samoor, one of his followers, “printed out several things from the internet including Al-Qaeda training camp materials. Abdullah said he told Saboor to throw them away and cautioned him not to look at things on the internet.” This — like most of the “evidence” assembled by Leone — was hearsay, but it actually works against the FBI’s interest by underscoring Abdullah’s refusal to endorse Islamic terrorism.
“S-3” also describes a conversation during a trip to Alabama in which Abdullah commented that he “didn’t agree with bombing civilian targets such as buses, which occur in Israel and the West Bank, but said it is fine to bomb police stations.
The awkward diction here suggests that Abdullah was referring specifically to actions taken by Palestinians and drawing a distinction — for whatever it might be worth — between terrorist attacks on helpless civilians and what he perceived as defensive insurgent warfare against armed personnel carrying out a military occupation.
One of the most critical disclosures offered by “S-3” deals with a reported conversation on June 19, 2009, in which the imam told an associate that he knew someone in his mosque was “working for the FBI…. Abdullah said that he is hopeful that anyone who is working for the Feds will come to the mosque often to pray, will see the error of his ways, and admit he has been working with the Feds.”
Abdullah’s conciliatory remarks came on the same day he supposedly said that he would kill anybody “trying to gather information on him.” Leone accounts for this contradiction by claiming that the wily imam knew he was being “listened to and targeted by law enforcement so he intentionally [made] conflicting statements in order to protect himself.”
How can we tell which reported statements are sincere? Ah, this is easy, Leone would insist: We should dismiss anything that appears moderate and responsible as posturing, and assume that anything incendiary and self-incriminating represented Abdullah’s genuine intentions.
The problem here is that all of the “consensually recorded” comments that are directly quoted in the criminal complaint are entirely innocuous. It is only when one of the confidential informants is paraphrasing Abdullah that we are barraged with shockingly detailed references to alleged criminal acts and criminal plots.
Furthermore, the “direct” quotes are not complete: Nearly all of them contain strategically placed ellipses indicating the removal of potentially critical details. Presenting them as direct evidence would be tantamount to perjury through selective editing. And as we’ve seen, even the accounts provided by Leone’s pet provocateurs contain compelling evidence that Abdullah — whatever he may have planned or done — was not an aspiring terrorist.
Abdullah was infuriated by the wars of aggression being waged by the Regime in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was also convinced that the FBI was an enemy of American Muslims. Notwithstanding his passionate outrage, and despite Leone’s efforts to depict him as an exponent of aggressive jihad, Abdullah — as described in the complaint — endorsed violence only for defensive purposes.
“They [are] smashing the Muslims all over the world and then we sit here like everything is all right,” stated Abdullah in an October 10, 2008 conversation surreptitiously recorded by “S-3.” “`Just leave us alone.’ I mean, no. Everything isn’t all right. Matter of fact, you better get up from over there and leave them people alone, man. You [are] wrong. It’s no threat from the Muslims here. The Muslims here are saying, you know, `Hey, just let us live here and [unintelligible], that’s the only thing they [are] worried about…. That’s no good, man.”
For Leone, the take-away here is that Abdullah maintained “it is not all right to simply get along with kuffars,” or non-Muslims — the insinuation being that Abdullah endorsed militancy and revenge. But Abdullah’s discursive remarks actually read like a plea for Washington to desist from its aggression against Muslims abroad, and respect the wishes of American Muslims to be left alone. Those are the sentiments of someone weary of armed violence, rather than someone eagerly courting confrontation.
Abdullah’s desire to be left in peace was captured in recorded comments recorded by “S-3” on November 30, 2008. The conversation dealt with the activities of federal agents, who — according to Abdullah — were “just terrorizing the people.”
“It’s a whole organized effort,” he asserted. “Organized effort to betray you. But not just you, other people too. It’s not just, just Muslims”; it’s also people like “McVeigh and them” — meaning, apparently, non-Muslim “anti-government extremists” targeted for infiltration and manipulation by the FBI.
“It’s no question about, he [McVeigh] was involved in getting that stuff done,” Abdullah continued. “Even though they [McVeigh and “others unknown”] did what they did, they probably was irked on, and supported in everything, by the FBI.” After all, he pointed out, the “first World Trade Center bombing was the FBI.”
Bear in mind that Abdullah was describing the FBI’s documented history of orchestrating terrorist plots to an FBI informant-provocateur. I’m sufficiently cynical to suspect that this could be what got him killed.
Sure, he’s an FBI bureaucrat, but what he really wants to do is direct: Special Agent Andrew Arena, the choreographer of at least two ersatz “terrorism” plots in the Detroit area.
Within a few weeks of that conversation, FBI undercover operatives began a series of ten clandestine operations intended to entice members of Abdullah’s congregation into a plot to steal and fence stolen property.
All of those staged pseudo-crimes were instigated by the FBI’s assets, who also arranged for the “stolen” goods to be stored at a Dearborn warehouse that was rented by the FBI.
It was in that warehouse that Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a man once known as Christopher Thomas, an ex-con who understood how the FBI’s infiltration and provocation racket worked, was shot at least twenty times before bleeding to death with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Although nobody was killed when the FBI rolled up the Hutaree militia, the Bureau’s campaign against that “Christian militia” was struck from the same template used against Abdullah’s followers. Several of the Hutaree militiamen were seized at an FBI-controlled warehouse
where they had gathered — unarmed — to attend what they had been told was a “memorial service.”
The FBI’s investigative accomplishments are criminally overrated, but in arranging
ersatz terrorist plots it displays choreography skills that put the late Bob Fosse to shame. Recent events in Michigan suggest that the Bureau is staging a revival of its Hoover-era production, COINTELPRO. Don’t feel left out; the chances are pretty good that the Bureau’s touring troupe of provocateurs will visit your hometown sometime soon.
No Drawdown for US Special Forces in Iraq
By Jason Ditz | April 02, 2010
Despite much being made of the so-called August timetable that would spell an end to “combat” missions in Iraq and cut the US forces to about 50,000, SOCOM head Admiral Eric Olson today announced that this would not affect his troops, which are involved in some of the heaviest combat.
“The special operations forces are not experiencing a drawdown in Iraq,” Olson insisted, adding that the 50,000 troops scheduled to stay behind would have a “continuing mission” to support their operations.
The admiral gave no indication that there was a separate drawdown timetable at all for the 4,500 SOCOM forces in Iraq, saying that his conversations with Gens. Petraeus and Odierno suggested that they were planning to sustain that level going forward.
There have been discussions for months that the August drawdown would be slowed or even stopped altogether amid rising violence in the nation, but the comments by Admiral Olson today suggest that the speculative drawdown strategy had never included his forces, and that the administration never had any intention of stopping combat operations in August.
US ‘fabricated documents’ in pursuit of Iranian engineer
Press TV – April 2, 2010
The US authorities have been accused of presenting fabricated documents to French courts to support their demand for extradition of an Iranian engineer, as his court postpones deciding his fate for the sixth time.
Majid Kakavand, 37, was arrested in France in March 2009, at the request of US authorities, as he was returning to Iran after a short holiday in France.
The United States requested his extradition to stand trial for allegedly breaching US embargo against Iran.
He is alleged to have purchased a number of items that may have been of US origin through a Malaysian company, while residing in Iran.
In order for an extradition request to be approved, French courts must decide whether the alleged acts of Kakavand would have violated French law, had they occurred in France. This prerequisite is known as “dual criminality.”
Having detained Kakavand, the French courts have repeatedly requested further information from the US Department of Justice regarding the allegations against the Iranian.
However, since the US failed to provide sufficient evidence to prove the existence of dual criminality, the judge asked for expert advice from France’s “General Delegation for Ordnance” (DGA), which is the body responsible for weapons development and evaluations, and the country’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). After evaluating the electronic components that Kakavand is alleged to have imported into Iran, both agencies declared that the goods could not be used for military purposes as dual-use technology. DGSE further advised that the case against the Iranian was weak and that he should be released.
Tehran has also highlighted Kakavand’s plight and has demanded his immediate release. On March 16, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said: “The innocence of (Majid) Kakavand is evident and we urge France not to be trapped in American propaganda and release him.”
Now, according to Kakavand’s French lawyers, it appears that, in their enthusiasm for his extradition, the US authorities have stepped over the legal line and have used forged documents to try to sway the French court to hand him over.
Advocate Diane Francois says that some of the documents included “email copies with attachments that did not have corresponding dates,” concluding that the documents were falsified, reported Expatica.com on March 31.
“We will ask San Francisco prosecutors to open a federal investigation of the documents provided by the US authorities,” she said.
Kakavand too denies that he did anything illegal. Additionally, legal experts believe that, as the US embargos against Iran are unilateral, they have no legal force outside the territory of the US, especially when applied extraterritorially, such as has been applied to Kakavand, who is alleged to have traded in US-origin goods outside of the US.
The European Union has repeatedly rejected extraterritorial enforcement of US embargos on its territory.
Nevertheless, this is not the only time that the US has pursued Iranians across the world on similar spurious charges. In 2006, they had Jamshid Ghassemi arrested in Thailand and in 2007 Yousef Boushvash was detained in Hong Kong; both for alleged breaches of extraterritorial US embargo.
Both were released by respective authorities, once it became clear that the US demand for their extradition had no legal basis.
China Denies Backing Iran Sanctions
US Claims of Consensus Denied by Russia, China
By Jason Ditz | April 01, 2010
Yesterday’s claims that the Chinese government had, after months of US cajoling, finally agreed to support sanctions against Iran appear to be premature, and China has reiterated its past position that diplomacy, not sanctions, should resolve the issue.
“We will strengthen communication with other parties and engage all parties to promote a proper resolution by diplomatic means,” insisted Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang.
Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi insisted that China’s position had not changed at all, and he met today with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili about the issue.
Russian officials also issued a statement saying that they supported “focused and selective” sanctions, which is largely in keeping with their previous statements in opposition to the broader package of “crippling” economic sanctions sought by the US.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed earlier this week that there was a “consensus” on the need for sanctions and claimed specifically that China had a “growing awareness” of the importance of the move.
“Reporting” on Iran should seem familiar
By Glenn Greenwald | March 31, 2010
Fox News currently has an article at the top of its website that is headlined: “CIA: Iran Moving Closer to Nuclear Weapon.” The report, by DOD and State Department correspondent Justin Fishel, begins with this alarming claim:
A recently published report by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iran is still working on building a nuclear weapon despite some technical setbacks and international resistance — and the Pentagon say it’s still concerned about Iran’s ambitions.
But, as blogger George Maschke notes, that statement is categorically false. The actual report, to which the Fox article links and which the DNI was required by Congress to submit, says no such thing. Rather, this is its core finding:
The report says the opposite of Fox’s statement that “Iran is still working on building a nuclear weapon.” And, of course, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate which concluded that Iran ceased development of its weapons program has never been rescinded, and even the most hawkish anonymous leaks from inside the intelligence community, when bashing the 2007 NIE, merely claim that analysts “now believe that Iran may well have resumed ‘research’ on nuclear weapons — theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb — but that Tehran is not engaged in ‘development’ — actually trying to build a weapon.”
This misleading “reporting” is hardly confined to Fox News. Reporting on Obama’s efforts to secure international sanctions, Reuters today makes this claim:
[E]evidence has mounted raising doubts about whether Tehran is telling the truth when it says its nuclear program is only to produce peaceful atomic energy.
Particularly damning was a report in February from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that said Iran may be working to develop a nuclear-armed missile.
… Meanwhile, The New York Times’ David Sanger — who is the Judy Miller of Iran when it comes to hyping the “threat” based overwhelmingly, often exclusively, on anonymous sources — continues his drum beat this week. In an article co-written with William Broad, Sanger warns — “based on interviews with officials of several governments and international agencies” (“all” of whom “insisted on anonymity”) — that “international inspectors and Western intelligence agencies say they suspect that Tehran is preparing to build more sites in defiance of United Nations demands.” But rather than the secret, nefarious scheme which the NYT depicts this as being, these plans for additional sites were publicly announced — by the Iranian government itself — many weeks ago.As I’ve noted before, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Iran wanted a nuclear weapons capability. If anything, it would be irrational for them not to want one. What else would a rational Iranian leader conclude as they look at the U.S. military’s having destructively invaded and continuing to occupy two of its neighboring, non-nuclear countries (i.e., being surrounded by an invading American army on both its Eastern and Western borders)? Add to that the fact that barely a day goes by without Western media outlets and various Western elites threatening them with a bombing attack by the U.S. or the Israel (which itself has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and categorically refuses any inspections or other monitoring). If our goal were to create a world where Iran was incentivized to obtain nuclear weapons, we couldn’t do a better job than we’re doing now.
But regardless of one’s views on that question, or on the question of what the U.S. should do (if anything) about Iranian proliferation, the first order of business ought to be ensuring that the reporting on which we base our views is accurate. A CNN poll from February found that 59% of Americans favor military action against Iran if negotiations over their nuclear program fail (see questions 31-32) — and that’s without the White House even advocating such a step. As the invasion of Iraq demonstrated, the kind of fear-mongering, reckless, and outright false “reporting” we’re seeing already — and have been seeing for awhile — over Iran’s nuclear program poses a far greater danger to the U.S. than anything Iran could do.
Featured Video
Iran FM Araghchi: “Hormuz Will No Longer Be the Same”
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Sam Husseini: The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq war
By Slava Zilber | American Herald Tribune | October 14, 2019
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- The Mecca Pact Courts Iran: Containment Comes Full Circle
- Oman FM: Persian Gulf states, Iran, Iraq should form security pact excluding US
- Trump peddles fresh falsehoods, claims Iran ‘started the war’ as US aggression drags on
- Ukraine quagmire? Yes, but it’s for NATO, not Russia
- US intelligence hypes Chinese, Russian space threats while accelerating its own military buildup in orbit
- Iran FM Araghchi: “Hormuz Will No Longer Be the Same”
- EU facing trillion-euro debt hole while seeking more cash for Kiev
- How US, Europe, Persian Gulf states exhausted missile stockpiles, splurged billions to defend Israel
- Up in arms… Koreans reject U.S. empire’s plan to make South Korea the next Ukraine
- Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia could advance region-led security framework in Tehran: FM spox
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
