New Taylor Follow-the-Money Report, and Nigerian Reaction

The Coalition for International Justice just released a report in which I was the lead author, outlining the current financial structure of Charles Taylor's enterprises, his past weapons purchases and the threat he poses to the region. The entire report can be found here, and be sure to read the appendeces. We have a lot of original documents, weapons purchases, end user certificates, internal letters to Taylor etc., that are interesting for those who follow these issues.

In the report, we estimate Taylor took in about $105 million a year in extra-budgetary income, but was forced to spend about 80 percent of that on weapons, mercenaries, the RUF etc. Even more interesting is mapping the webs of criminal associations and terrorist ties he maintained.

At the press conference at the UN Correspondents seat in New York yesterday, a senior Nigerian diplomat made the most unequivocal statement to date that Taylor will be turned over if he is found to have violated his terms of assylum. He said it much more clearly than president Obasanjo has to this point: "The Nigerian federal government has been very very consistent. Nigeria intervened at a very critical moment within the conflict in Liberia. With the consent of AU leaders and other international leaders, Nigeria granted Mr Taylor political asylum for the purpose and only purpose of enhancing peace in Liberia. However... if the government is convinced that Taylor has violated his terms of asylum, then you can be sure-the world community can be sure-that Mr. Taylor cannot take cover in Nigeria having violated in a very proven wayhis terms of asylum."

So, there it is. However, it appears that a near-deal among Obasanjo, the Bush administration and the British has run into difficulties. The UN Security Council is scheduled to debate action on Taylor this week, most likely a resolution calling for Obasanjo to turn him over. This report lays out some of the compelling reasons it should pass and be acted on.

http://www.douglasfarah.com/ thursday, may 19th 2005

HOW CAN BRITAIN STILL USE THE MERCHANT OF DEATH?

Today the UK will promise to curb arms traffickers. But the MoD is hiring planes from a dealer linked to Bin Laden.
By Andrew Gilligan. Evening Standard, Monday, 9th May 2005.

Victor Bout [sic] is the most notorious arms trafficker in the world. Linked to Osama bin Laden by the British government, linked to the Taliban by the US government, he was described by a New Labour minister as a "merchant of death" who must be shut down.
Yet an Evening Standard investigation has found that, just two months ago, a Victor Bout company was hired by that very same British government to operate military flights from a key RAF base.

Bout, a 38-year old Russian, owns or controls a constellation of airlines that have smuggled illegal weapons to conflict zones for the past 15 years. He has been named in countless official investigations and reports - the most recent only last month. The authorities in Belgium, where he used to work, have issued a warrant for his arrest. In 2004, the US froze his assets and put him on a terrorist watch list [not that they stopped him flying to and from Baghdad, TYR].

But between 6 and 9 March this year, according to official Civil Aviation Authority records, two Victor Bout charter flights took off from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. The cargo was armoured vehicles and a few British troops. The client was the Ministry of Defence.

The charters were operated by an airline called Trans Avia. It was named as one of Mr. Bout's front companies by the Government itself - in a Commons written answer on 2 May 2002. The Government cannot claim ignorance of Bout's dubious links. The Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane reassured MPs: "The UK has played a leading role in drawing international attention to Bout's activities, initially in Angola and Liberia and more recently relating to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda".

A specialist aviation journal reported that the "al Qaeda link" was Bout's role in supplying bin Laden with a personal aeroplane - in the days before September 11, when he had a little more freedom of movement. Could Trans Avia have gone legit since then? Not according to the United States Treasury Department. Only two weeks ago, on 26 April, the Treasury "designated" Trans Avia as one of 30 companies linked to Bout, "an international arms dealer and war profiteer". Bout "controls what is reputed to be the largest private fleet of Soviet-era cargo aircraft in the world", says the Treasury press release. "The arms he has sold or brokered have helped fuel conflicts and support UN-sanctioned regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan. Notably, information available to the US government shows that Bout profited by $50 million by supplying the Taliban with military equipment when they ruled Afghanistan."

The story doesn't end there. Another two flights were made in the same three days of March by an airline called Jet Line International, also from RAF Brize Norton. A further three flights were made at the same time from another base, RAF Lyneham. The destination was Kosovo. The client, once again, was the Ministry of Defence.

Yet Jet Line, too, is a company that has been accused of close connections to Bout. According to the authoritative US newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, it appeared on a list of Bout companies circulated by the State Department to US diplomatic posts around the world.

"There is no doubt at all about the links between Jet Line and Bout," says Johan Peleman, the researcher who wrote the UN report. "It's one of his most important assets." Intelligence agencies say the same thing. Jet Line's office address in its base at Chisinau, Moldova, is the same as that of Aerocom, a company exposed by the United Nations as involved in sanctions-busting and arms-smuggling to the brutal rebels of Liberia. According to the UN, Aerocom was involved in the illegal smuggling or attempted smuggling of more than 6,000 automatic rifles and machine guns, 4,500 grenades, 350 missile launchers, 7,500 landmines, and millions of rounds of ammunition in breach of a UN arms embargo.

Tracking down the registration numbers of the sanctions-busting aircraft, it turns out that the Jet Line aircraft that flew the MoD flights in March were previously registered to Aerocom. They are in fact the same planes.

Bout's activities have helped cause quite literally thousands of deaths in many of the worst places in the world. Born in 1967, he served in the Soviet air force and then military intelligence, where he developed a gift for languages. When the USSR broke up, he "acquired" a large fleet of surplus or obsolete aircraft, which he used to deliver arms and ammunition also "acquired" from old Soviet stockpiles. That weaponry fuelled some of the most savage wars in Africa. Charles Taylor's insurgent guerrillas used Bout weapons to destroy Liberia. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) used Bout weapons to terrorise the country, seize the diamond mines, and chop off their opponents' hands.

None of our business? Well, the RUF's Bout-supplied weapons were almost certainly used to attack British troops engaged on the Sierra Leone peacekeeping mission in 2000.

Bout's planes would arrive at obscure African airstrips, loaded with weapons, then leave heaped with diamonds, coltan - vital for making mobile phones - and other precious minerals in return. "He was apolitical," said one UN official. "He would fly for anyone that paid." Bout's willingness to go places that no-one else would go made him the market leader in the arms-trafficking business. Little wonder, therefore, that the then Foreign Office minister Peter Hain said "The murder and mayhem of Unita in Angola, the RUF in Sierra Leone, and groups in Congo would not have been as terrible without Bout's operations." He was truly "a merchant of death", Hain said [and for a long time I respected Hain for it, too - TYR].

Bout used to operate from Ostend, in Belgium, where a shabby hotel in the city centre acted as his informal marketplace. There was a flight departures screen in the hotel bar, so he could keep track of his planes' movements. Then he was forced to retreat to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates - and after September 11, to Moscow, where he controls his empire through front companies such as Trans Avia. "You are not putting facts. You are putting allegations," he tells journalists on the rare occasions they manage to get through on his Russian phone number. [Actually, the quote comes from his surprise appearance on Ekho Moskhy radio in 2002 - TYR]

Britain has been embarrassed by dodgy airlines before. Last year, the Department for International Development promised a full investigation after the Standard exposed its use of Aerocom on an aid flight to Africa. The problem is that few reputable carriers want to fly to Kosovo, Iraq, Darfur or some of the places where the government needs transport. And the airline brokers used by Whitehall seem to have learned surprisingly few lessons from past embarrassments.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defence said the fact that its broker "seems to have used an aircraft in Jet Line International livery" was not the same as saying that the MoD itself had contracted Jet Line. But, whatever hairs the MoD may choose to split, the payout - for Mr. Bout - is the same.
Today and tomorrow, at the MoD's vast procurement headquarters in Bristol, defence officials are holding a special conference with human rights groups and arms trade campaigners. The purpose is to persuade them that the government is serious about cracking down on the scourge of arms trafficking.
One good way to start might, perhaps, be to stop putting British taxpayers' money into the pockets of the worst arms trafficker in the world."

http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/ 13/05/2005

A precedent for justice?

Jess Bravin had a remarkable article in last Thurday's Wall Street Journal (available for free to the public) on a set of war crimes decisions issued shortly after World War II which contain striking resemblances to the cases pending today — both cases involving alleged Al Qaeda members, and cases involving U.S. servicemembers accused of abuse. According to Mr. Bravin:
For decades, records of the Kikuchi case and hundreds of other postwar tribunals lay forgotten in archives and government offices around the world. But now they could assume new significance for one of the most contentious aspects of the war on terrorism: the U.S.'s treatment of prisoners.
Hundreds of suspected terrorists and enemy fighters have been captured since the fall of 2001 and housed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. The Bush administration has determined these captives aren't protected by the Geneva Conventions. But the administration has faced a wave of legal challenges to that view, and suffered several defeats so far. Today, government lawyers will ask a federal appeals court in Washington to reverse a November ruling that found the Geneva Convention protects prisoners held at Guantanamo and ordered an immediate halt to military commission proceedings against detainees because they didn't comply with the treaty.The legal battle is likely to end up at the Supreme Court, and, depending on its outcome, could compel the U.S. to devise a new road map for prisoner treatment.

The rulings from the years immediately after World War II lay out the most complete picture available of the way the U.S. viewed treatment of prisoners of war back then, when modern international humanitarian law was laid down. The question is, do these cases apply today?
Critics of the Bush administration's policy on terror-related prisoners argue they do. "These are the foundational cases," the first to apply international law to questions of prisoner treatment during armed conflict, says David Cohen, a 56-year-old professor of classics and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, who also teaches classes on war crimes. He has spent the last 10 years collecting the documents from archives and government offices, adding millions of pages to existing records and unearthing the case of Mr. Kikuchi.
The records make it clear that after World War II, U.S. military prosecutors and judges set out to establish a precedent barring any prisoner mistreatment, by aggressively pursuing and punishing even comparatively small offenses. What the records make clear are some unbelievable similarities between the policy positions and defenses of the Japanese during World War II, and the U.S. government today. Then, the U.S. prosecuted such abuses, aggressively using the "command responsibility" doctrine to go after senior officers who knew or should have known about their subordinates' misconduct.
Now, a year after Abu Ghraib, we have yet to see a single court-martial for a soldier over the rank of staff sergeant. Instead, today's generals remain free to hold panel discussions where they blame everyone else but themselves. According to BG Janis Karpinski at a recent talk in San Francisco:
"I find it hard to believe that I did not know," she said. "If I had known, I would've raised the issue. I would've shouted about it." Wrong! That's not the standard. A general officer is not just responsible for what she knew, but what she should have known.
The same goes for the colonels and captains under her. As a nation, we have sent enemy generals to the gallows for the actions of their subordinates. See Application of Yamashita, 327 US 1 (1946).
There is some irony in the fact that we now let our own generals off for similar misconduct. But wait — there's more irony where that came from. Mr. Bravin's article (and its online supplement -- also available for free from the Wall Street Journal) draws an even more interesting parallel between the kind of legal process afforded U.S. personnel by the Japanese during WWII, and the kind of legal process we are now giving alleged Al Qaeda members at Gitmo and elsewhere. After WWII, we prosecuted the Japanese for war crimes stemming from their deprivation of due process in violation of international law, so the point is a very important one. According ot Mr. Bravin and the records from the WWII archives:
Japan saw the bombing of its cities as the deliberate targeting of civilians--and employed summary proceedings to punish captured American flyers as war criminals. Following the war, American military authorities concluded that treating Americans as war criminals was itself a war crime, because the Japanese procedures didn't meet the due-process standards of international law. At U.S. military commissions convened at Yokohama, Japan, in the late 1940s, U.S. Army officers carefully reviewed the level of due process the enemy had afforded American prisoners, and harshly punished them for falling short of what the U.S. decided was required.
That history may now come back to haunt the Bush administration, as advocates for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, argue that, like Japan in World War II, the U.S. today is punishing prisoners without affording them sufficient due process.

The current military commission is unlawful, [Georgetown law professor Neal] Katyal argues, because it affords defendants fewer rights than American soldiers receive before courts-martial, in particular by denying defendants the right to confront all witnesses or see all evidence against them.
The government's primary claim is that courts have no authority to second-guess the treatment of enemy prisoners. But the administration also contends its military commission will offer a fair trial. President Bush's November 2001 order authorizing the commission called for "full and fair" trials, and officials say they have been reviewing the procedures with an eye to making them resemble courts-martial more closely. Nonetheless, the administration maintains that special courts are needed to try international terrorism suspects because of the grave threat they pose to the U.S. Under current rules, commissions can sentence convicts to any term or, on vote of a unanimous seven-member panel, death.

According to the U.S. military's World War II records, Japanese officials also devised special procedures to deal with what they considered an extraordinary threat. American flyers "who do not violate international law will be treated as prisoners of war," but those "suspected of being felonious war criminals" would face Japanese military tribunals. Offenses "subject to military punishment" included "bombing, strafing and other acts of attack aimed at threatening and inflicting casualties on civilians," "damaging and destroying private property which has no military significance" and "any atrocious brutal acts that disregard humanity." The maximum penalty was death by firing squad. Like the Bush administration's military commissions, the Japanese courts could consider evidence extracted through coercive interrogations. But laws passed by the Japanese Diet and regulations issued by the Imperial Army spelled out procedures intended to ensure that prisoners weren't punished arbitrarily.
As the war wore on, however, the Japanese deviated from their regulations, using samurai swords to behead convicted flyers because ammunition was too scarce to waste on firing squads. Dozens of Americans were executed after summary hearings with no right of appeal.
Prosecuted by the U.S. after the war, Japanese officials said their harsh acts were dictated by military necessity.Col. Hajime Onishi, charged with presiding over the execution of U.S. flyers in June, 1945, argued that "the indiscriminate bombings had killed 20,000 people and wounded 30,000 in his territory, most of whom were noncombatants, and, therefore, the thought of the disposition of 27 airmen was a small incident compared with these facts," records say. "The criminal code and international law were secondary matters when compared with military operations of the supreme command."
Defense lawyers argued that offering full-blown trials for American flyers was impossible in the war's waning months, as Japan suffered under relentless U.S. attacks. Besides, such procedures "would not have given the crew members any greater rights or protections than they received under the abridged procedure, and that it constituted a trial under international law." In any event, defense lawyers argued, the "crew members had no rights as they were not prisoners of war."
Perhaps surprisingly, U.S. Army reviewers concluded in 1949 that "a Japanese tribunal could have reasonably found there was indiscriminate bombing " and that " in the course of a legal trial might well have found the [American] crew members guilty." Moreover, they acknowledged that Japanese legal procedures, although based on inquisitorial judges rather than the adversarial system used in the U.S., cannot be considered "automatically illegal. "But the abridged procedures employed as the war wore down violated the flyers rights, the U.S. found.
" These men were not informed they were being charged with indiscriminate bombing and, except in the intelligence investigation, where they might reasonably be expected to give as little information as possible, they were not given a chance to make a statement." The flyers weren't permitted to attend the hearings where they were convicted and sentenced, the Army reviewers found. Then, as now, the argument was the same for the departure from legal process: necessity.
In a nutshell, the argument was made then by the Japanese and now by the U.S. that a full and fair trial for the defendants might somehow damage national security, and therefore it was necessary to convene some kind of summary proceeding (usually in secret) which would safeguard the state. The similarities between the Japanese military commissions and today's U.S. military commissions are striking. Indeed, the procedure to hold such commissions without the accused in the room is at the heart of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the current case pending before the DC Circuit challenging the lawfulness of the commissions. (Full disclosure: I drafted a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the government in that case.) Depriving today's military commission defendants of the right to be present for all important phases of their trial, such as voir dire, runs against both U.S. statute (10 U.S.C. 839, 849, 850) and international law. The president's order and other supporting statements make it clear that we are implementing these commission rules because we deem it necessary to do so — that it would be "impracticable" to try such individuals in federal court or a conventional military court.
However, in devising these commissions, the administration has developed a set of rules which are fatally inconsistent with both U.S. law and international law. Sixty years ago, the Japanese deployed similar arguments in support of their own military commissions — and soon found themselves in the defendant's chair for war crimes based on those unlawful legal proceedings. We should be wary of following the example set by the Japanese. If the administration wants to try enemy combatants by military commission, there is ample precedent for doing so. However, such commissions must be legislatively authorized, and constituted in accordance with U.S. law and international law. It may well be easier to simply try such defendants in a general court-martial, since the UCMJ grants military courts jurisdiction over enemy combatants for war crimes, and the military justice system is a far more mature and respected institution. Or, the current commission system can be legislatively authorized, and then amended to conform more closely to the UCMJ and past commissions procedures. The New York Times reported two weeks ago that the Pentagon was considering a proposal to do just that, but my sources agree that the proposal was dead-on-arrival when it got to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President's office.
I suppose there is a final irony in all of this, which I alluded two in last week's Slate column on lawfare. As a nation, we have now committed ourselves to the spread of freedom and democracy throughout the world. Establishing the rule of law, and building democratic institutions, come part and parcel with this charter to spread freedom. We cannot embrace such things on the one hand, as we are in Iraq, while flouting the rule of law on the other, as we are in Gitmo. The world sees our inconsistency, and criticizes our policies as a naked, unprincipled grab for power. It's not enough to talk the freedom talk; you must also walk the freedom walk. And that means adhering to the rule of law in all contexts, such as treating captured enemy fighters according to established U.S. and international law. There is no evidence that giving these men a proper trial would somehow hurt national security; all the evidence suggests our political and moral standing would be enhanced if we treated these men according to the law. So why haven't we done so?
[Phillip Carter,Monday 11th April 2005

http://www.intel-dump.com/

"The Coalition of the Billing"

The United States depends on private firms (PMFs) to conduct military operations in Iraq to an unprecedented degree. In this month's Foreign Affairs, Peter Singer identifies five unresolved, and largely undiscussed, dilemmas that arise from the military's new relationship with the private sector. I've paraphrased them here:
1. The incentives of a private industry hinge on profitability. Thus, they may not always be in sync with the security interests of the United States.
2. The global industry of PMFs is largely unregulated. Companies may hire individuals with poor credentials or accept a contract with unseemly clientele. After hiring, training may be insufficient.
3. PMFs pursue public goals using private means, severing the relationship between the public and its foreign policy.
4. US law sharply distinguishes between soldier and civilian; the expanding grey area of hired fighters remains uncharted.
5. PMFs may rob the military of its unique identity by taking over jobs which were once the exclusive duty of the military.
After reading this article, I searched for examples of these dilemmas. I found that one of the more notorious contractors, Custer Battles, nicely demonstrates (or have been accused of demonstrating) 4 of the 5 of them.

Dilemma 1: The company is embroiled in a financial scandal. Two whistle-blowers filed a $50 million dollars lawsuit, accusing the company of fraud and using a billing scheme to overcharge the US government. A small instance of "fraud" in this case: Custer Battles is accused of billing the US for Iraqi Airways forklifts even though they were found on site.

Dilemma 2: Rumors of abuse is surfacing as well. MSNBC recently interviewed four former hires of Custer Battles. All of them tell stories of fellow employees terrorizing civilians and shooting indiscriminately. In short, some of these guys have been playing Rambo, especially when dealing with what must be ferociously frustrating traffic jams: "[He] sighted down his AK-47 and started firing. It went through the window. As far as I could see, it hit a passenger. And they didn't even know we were there." says Colling of one of these traffic jam incidents. He quit the job immediately. Bill Craun, another employee interviewed, did the same, writing a letter to a friend at the Pentagon which states: "I didn't want any part of an organization that deliberately murders children and innocent civilians."

Dilemma 3: As serious as they sound, it is difficult to investigate all of these allegations . Private companies fall outside of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA is perhaps the only reason we are aware of widespread abuses perpetrated by military personnel. Without this type of oversight, it is difficult to evaluate the behavior of the soldiers. But Bill Craun unequivocally assures us: "What we saw, I know the American population wouldn't stand for."

Dilemma 4: Perhaps because of the lack of transparency, as of yet "not one private military contractor has been prosecuted or punished for a crime in Iraq." says Singer in his article.

As for dilemma 5, well that one is somewhat abstract and thus hard to prove. But if it is indeed a problem, Custor Battles is part of it, as are the rest of the contracted firms.I am not writing this to indict all of the contractors working in Iraq, or to project them as an evil and malicious bunch. The seeds of thes alleged misconduct are planted in the structure the businesses' roles in Iraq and their relationship to the government. Left on their own, companies will be companies. It is up to the US government to make sure that this incentive driven behavior does not hinder national security goals or cause needless harm to the very people they are supposed to help.

http://www.usamnesia.com

Tariq Ramadan: The Case of the Grand Deception

No case illustrates the murderous deception of Western society by Islamic militants more than the recent episode involving Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss professor who was denied a visa to teach at the University of Notre Dame. His supporters in the U.S. rallied vigorously around Mr. Ramadan, protesting with total moral certitude the politically outrageous move by the US government to muzzle a Muslim "moderate". The coalition to defend Ramadan included The New York Times, The Washington Post, academic boards around the country, Islamic advocacy groups and human rights groups. Their near unanimous message was that Mr. Ramadan was a genuine "moderate" and "Islamic pluralist", but that even if one disagreed with some of his statements, Mr. Ramadan surely should have been entitled to have his ideas debated in the great free marketplace of ideas of the American campus

Miraculously, the coalition of high priests of political correctness, Wahabi groups masquerading as pluralists, and the elite censors of fair and balanced journalism did not prevail. Mr. Ramadan was not given a visa and soon, in an act of righteous indignation, refused to reapply for another visa.

Even after the murderous actions by Islamic militants on 9-11 in the US, and in fact in carrying out or planning terrorist operations in more than 90 countries between 1990 and 2003, the American intelligentsia in a devilish collusion with radical Islamic groups hiding under false veneer, have managed to perpetrate the grand deception of militant Islam: pretending to be moderate, democrats with a small d, pluralists and victims of hate, radical Islamic groups have continued to invert reality, turning facts on their head, in a stunning ability to anoint themselves as the victims of hate as opposed to the murderous reality that they are the progenitors of hate. Where else could radical Islamic leaders like Yousef Al Qardawi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who calls for killing Jews (not just Israelis but Jews) and Americans (not just occupiers) be described as "moderate" or a pro-western "reformer" or variations of this theme (Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, La Times)? Where else could one hear that Jihad was a "beautiful" concept, as was broadcast on NPR recently, devoid of any violent or militant meaning? NPR's commentator was the daughter of an Islamic American leader who justified the killing of Robert Kennedy-a fact NPR withheld from its listeners but paled in comparison to its brazen willingness to air a de facto commercial for al Qaeda with the commentator ending her Islamist (tax-payer subsidized) infomercial with the following line: "Someday, I hope 'jihad' will find its way back into our lexicon, when it can be used properly, in sentences like 'She's on a jihad to achieve the American Dream.'"

In the decade and a half before 9-11, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda and virtually every other radical Islamic group and leader successfully perpetrated the most brilliant strategic enemy deception in US history by planting themselves in the heart of enemy territory under false cover as non-profit (and or course tax deductible) humanitarian groups, civil rights groups, and apolitical religious institutions. Until 9-11, the deceit had continued with staggering success as radical Islamic groups and leaders were routinely invited to the White House, provided with federal funding, praised by politicians, and lionized by the media.

But before this charade was exposed, nearly 3000 Americans were forced to pay with their lives as the price for the belated realization that we had been had. Suddenly, charities that had been secretly operating as conduits for terrorists and established American Muslim leaders leading double lives as terrorist masterminds were finally being recognized for who they were: Terrorists. And instead of being toasted at the State Department, they were now more appropriately being prosecuted, shut down and deported.

And yet, more than 3 years after 9-11, it would seem that this same homicidal self-delusion is alive and well in the United States. This is where Mr. Ramadan comes to play such a pivotal role in highlighting the danger of this continued self-deception.

First, Mr. Ramadan is not any more a moderate than David Duke would be considered a moderate on race relations. The only difference is that David Duke is not smart enough to speak in two languages, cloak his racism under the mantle of pluralism or enjoy the witting collaboration of the media.

In several interviews given to various European publications over the last few years, Mr. Ramadan has repeatedly provided a justification for terrorist acts against US allies such as Israel and Russia and, more recently, against the US itself. Asked by the Italian magazine Panorama if the killing of civilians is right, Mr. Ramadan unambiguously responded that "In Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, there is a situation of oppression, repression and dictatorship. It is legitimate for Muslims to resist fascism that kills the innocent." When asked if car bombing against US forces in Iraq were legitimate, Professor Ramadan responded that "Iraq was colonized by the Americans. The resistance against the army is just."

Mastering the art of taqiyya (double speaking to fool the unbelievers), Tariq Ramadan has enchanted many with his apparent moderation. But a careful examination of his words reveals that Professor Ramadan is not what he seems and claims to be. Yes, he says that he "agrees with integration" of Muslims in the West, but he is careful to say that "we [Muslims] are the ones who are going to decide the content." He makes us happy by saying that he accepts Western secular law, but, here's the catch, "only if this law doesn't force me to do things against my religion." And when he is cornered with questions on the brutality of some punishments of Islamic law, such as stoning, he tells us that he is against them, but (there is always a "but".) they are in Quranic texts and so he cannot fully condemn them and we have to settle for "an absolute moratorium on all physical punishments."

The telegenic, soft-spoken and charming professor is just the modern, westernized face of the same enemy that wears a different mask on other battlefields. As the distinguished expert of Middle East affairs Fouad Ajami recently wrote, Tariq Ramadan is, "in the world of the new Islamism, pure nobility." His moderate façade hides his radical heart and just a careful read of his words would reveal it. France, the country that knows him best, has made up its mind on him. A court in Lyon recently said that preachers like Tariq Ramadan "can exert an influence on young Islamists and therefore constitute an incitement that can lead them to join violent groups."

In France at least, some leftist intellectuals have recognized Mr. Ramadan for what he is. The self-censorious NY Times was even forced to report that Bernard-Henri Levy, who wrote the best-seller "Who Killed Daniel Pearl" accused Ramadan of being the "intellectual champion of all kinds of double-talk" with a "racist vision of the world" and having promoted anti-Semitism. The Times further reported that Bernard Kouchner, the foreign aid advocate and former health minister of France, called Mr. Ramadan "absolutely a kook with no historical memory" and "a dangerous man." He added, "The way he denounced some Jewish intellectuals is close to anti-Semitism."

Still, the Ramadan fan club in the US continued to portray the exclusion of Mr. Ramadan as part of an anti-Muslim campaign; the charge of anti-Muslim racism, part of the larger orchestration by radical Muslims to portray themselves as the victims of hate, has been mastered perfectly, requiring only the collaboration of the American media. At the height of the controversy last year, The New York Times opined that "American Muslim groups questioned the government's ability or willingness to distinguish between what they see as Muslim moderates like Mr. Ramadan and extremists." But who were these American Muslim groups, portrayed by the Times as intellectually honest arbiters of who really is a moderate? None other than off-shoots and branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic radical movement that gave birth to al Qaeda and Hamas, and whose founder was none other than Hassan Al-Banna, the grandfather of Mr. Ramadan.

And there are those who fall back on the free market response: Is the most powerful nation in the world afraid of allowing Mr. Ramadan access to the intellectual pluralism of the US, where free speech is honored as the most sacred privilege that we have?

Well, Mr. Ramadan does not need to be in the United States to convey his message and thoughts. Through the internet, media and instant telecommunications, the American public is not being denied one iota of Mr. Ramadan's propaganda.

After the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the same defenders of Mr. Ramadan-the New York Times and other elite media-were the first to ask probing and indignant questions about how the blind Sheik, with his radical views, was able to get visas to the United States in the early 1990's. But that was before he was indicted or convicted of any US crime. So apparently, the high priests at the time decided that the premium of free speech for non-US guests was not sacred; that in fact, the right to visit the US was not a constitutional right afforded to any citizen of the world, a view unfortunately increasingly espoused by editorial boards.

Title 8 United States Code Section 1182 requires the exclusion from the US of any alien who has "used his position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity, or to persuade others to support terrorist activity or a terrorist organization." The provision seems written to fit Ramadan's case. The entry into the United States of any foreign national is, by law, a privilege and not a right. It is preposterous to ask the US government to disregard its own laws and to grant this privilege to a person who openly condones attacks against U.S. forces and interests.

Aside from the legal justification for barring Mr. Ramadan, the moral reason for keeping Mr. Ramadan out is the same reason why the US has for years denied visas to neo-Nazi proponents from Western Europe. It is not only the access to the United States that both neo-Nazis and Mr. Ramadan have sought. Rather it is the official imprimatur of the US government, an effective declaration of political legitimacy attending to the granting of the visa. And that is precisely same legitimacy that allowed militant Islamic groups to operate for so long in the United States. Do we really want to repeat history?

http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/04/tariq_ramadan_t.html#more

Guus Kouwenhoven's Arrest and Taylor's Unraveling Empire

Well, the good news is that Dutch authorities last week arrested Guus Kouwenhoven, one of former President Charles Taylor's main money men. They got him in Rotterdam, although he was supposed to be banned from travel. He was the head of the Oriental Timber Corporation, the Chinese/Malaysian firm responsible for clear-cutting some of the last of West Africa's forests for the benefit of Taylor and themselve, as well as trafficking weapons for Taylor. After fleeing Liberia and his Africa Hotel, he settled, with some of OTC's equipment, in Congo-Brazzaville, where his forestry activities continued. He conveniently found a house next to the president's there.
Now he is charged charged with violating the U.N. weapons embargo and war crimes. Police searched an apartment in Rotterdam and one in Paris in relation to his arrest. So he may be in for a long haul. His arrest should lead to an unraveling of at least part of Taylor's financial empire, which seemingly continues to thrive. Kouwenhoven, like Emmanuel Shaw and other of Taylor's bagmen, started out on the other side, working for the Doe government. Of course, so did Taylor, before "liberating" Liberia.
Guus knows a lot. The question is what will he say to protect his paymaster? And, unfortunately, that paymaster may still be making money.There are disturbing reports of ongoing, illicit diamond mining activities in Liberia, which could have links to Taylor. The most recent U.N. Panel of Experts report (dated March 17 but not yet available on the net) found that there are several questionable diamond operations now underway, showing how little Liberia has changed. Among the companies whose activities were questioned were the American Mining Associates, run by Gene Byrge, and U.S. citizen. AMA has improved roads, brought in trucks and fully-mechanized washing plant and alot more, but says it is only carrying out "exploration" activities. The Panel believes the "scale of operation was excessive to exploration activity."
Perhaps more worrisome is the widespread buying of diamonds by foreign dealers, who operate out of hotels and guest houses. Coupled with that is the activity of the West Africa Mining Corporation (WAMCO), a company "financed by the privately-owned London International Bank Limited," the situation seems bad and getting worse. The fantastically-favorable terms WAMCO negotiated in a secret deal with the interim government of Liberia "would create a de facto monopoly over much of Liberia's diamond-producing regions," the report found. "The conditions under which this agreement was negotiated remain extremely opaque. There was no formal bidding process and...it transpired that the company had had no previous experience in the mining sector whatsoever." Best of all, WAMCO was granted permission to set up its own private security force. Sound like Taylor's type of operation? As the panel concluded, "The people of Liberia are not likely to benefit from such an arrangement in the long term." Nor the short term, for that matter.

http://www.douglasfarah.com/

You bet your life

The epidemic of bird flu among poultry in North Korea is taking on a decidedly desperate cast. UN Food and Agriculture experts are flying there from Bangkok, China and Australia (Reuters).The context is grim. A great deal of money, effort and hope was invested in poultry production by the North Korean government. Struggling to feed its undernourished population of 23 million, a special state agency was established for breeding chickens and ducks in December of 2001 (UPI via World Peace Herald). While poultry was one of the few growing sectors of the economy, the country produced only about 25 million birds in 2004, just over one per person/year, far short of Kim Jong Il's promised one kilogram of chicken meat and 60 eggs a month for every household in Pyongyang. The number of chickens estimated in North Korea is about 19 million. Now mass culling is reducing this already inadequate source of protein.Pyongyang's public admission of the previously denied bird flu outbreak is seen by many as a sure sign the problem has spiraled out of control and foreign help is needed. The epidemic has probably already hit the poor rural area and is spreading. North Korea has mobilized its military to cull and disinfect poultry farms around Pyongyang, according to the South Korean Unification Ministry:
"Thousands of soldiers from the Pyongyang Defense Command and 3d Army Corps are involved in the slaughter and burial of diseased fowl," a Unification Ministry official told the Joong Ang Ilbo.[ . . . ]According to the Unification Ministry, the North's mobilization of the military is evidence of the seriousness of the situation. North Korean troops, after finishing winter drills this month, were scheduled to assist farmers during spring planting, the ministry said. The North shifted the assignment of the soldiers to cope with the spread of bird flu, officials said.So while the Bush Administration and our European allies were dithering over North Korea's nuclear shenanigans, another kind of bomb was ticking in the Korean peninsula, where the current Asian bird flu outbreak began in 2003 in the South and spread to Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Indonesia.Reuters reports that the FAO experts are hoping to contain the virus before it mutates to a form easily transmissible between humans. This view is incomprehensible. The virus is already solidly entrenched in poultry in Asia, animals in close proximity to human beings. By common consent the virus cannot be eradicated at this point. If there is no intrinsic biological barrier to its making the feared genetic change, it will happen and containing the poultry epidemic (a worthwhile enterprise on its own) will not prevent it.It is time to stop talking this way and plan seriously for a pandemic in the near future. With good luck it won't happen, although no one at the moment can give a convincing argument why it shouldn't and there are plenty of plausible arguments why it should. If I were a betting person, I wouldn't bet my money against a pandemic. Why should I bet my life on it?


http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com

YAWNING HEIGHTS

Sexy yawns
Donald MacLeod reports on the research that suggests sex is the reason for yawning
Wednesday March 16, 2005


Don't drop off at the back there - yawning is really interesting. Proving this has become the mission in life of Dutch academic Wolter Seuntjens, whose thesis - The Hidden Sexuality of the Human Yawn - has earned him a well-deserved place on this week's Improbable Research tour.
"The yawn has not received its due attention," argues Seuntjens, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who set out to provide an encyclopaedic overview of all available knowledge about yawning, drawing on linguistics (semantics, etymology), sociology, psychology, the medical sciences (anatomy, physiology, pathology, and pharmacology), and the arts (literature, film, visual arts).
He then explores whether yawning has an erotic side.
Not all readers will agree he has really proved his point about the erotic yawn , despite citing a passage from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as an example, but it is a good try.
Seuntjens believes there is no good explanation for yawning. He says the common explanation of hypoxia - that yawning is a way for the body to take in more oxygen - is untested.
Psychologically, too, it remains a riddle, Seuntjens has found after trawling through all sorts of literature. "In fact, we have really no idea what causes yawning and what purpose yawning serves or what mechanisms are responsible for yawning and even what the essential anatomical constituents of yawning are. In the age in which the human genome has been deciphered and space travel has become almost trite this verdict may sound like an affront," he writes.
But the yawn and the associated stretch of the 'stretch-yawn syndrome' have been linked to desire and even of being in love, figuring in the courtship process both in the West and in passages in ancient Indian literature. Seuntjens has even found one pair of authors who described the feeling that accompanies the acme of yawning as a "mini-orgasm".
He adds: "In discussing pathology I discovered that yawning and spontaneous ejaculation were mentioned concomitantly in terminal rabies.
"In discussing pharmacology I found a link between yawning and spontaneous orgasm in withdrawal from heroin addiction. Likewise, yawning and sexual response were associated as clinical side effects of several antidepressant drugs. In one publication an undeniable causal relation was reported: both spontaneous and intentional yawning provoked instantaneous ejaculation orgasm."
But there times, concedes Dr Yawn, when a yawn is simple a yawn - "even if a 'simple' yawn is not simple at all" - and we have to interpret every individual yawn as the occasion arises.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/improbable/story/0,11109,1438356,00.html