Honor Killings and the Struggle of Moderate Islam

by M. Zuhdi Jasser

Recently on Pajamas Media, Supna Zaidi of Islamist Watch addresses the Atlanta murder and July 2008 “honor killing” of Sandela Kanwal. She asked the question concerning the July murder, “Does Islam Justify Honor Killings?” Her outrage over the murder and the increasing prevalence of ‘honor killings” in the Muslim world is not only understandable but an issue that deserves a much more resounding response from Muslims. As Ms. Zaidi astutely points out, “What kind of an ideology causes a man to show no remorse for murdering his own daughter, but rants and raves at being served ham sandwiches while in prison? The media picked up the story quickly and asked, "Is Islam to blame?" The facts she discusses about honor killings and their linkage to the practice of Islam by some and the corrupt legal protections in countries like Jordan and Pakistan are certainly true.

But Ms. Zaidi criticizes my comments on the issue in my brief CNN interview on the subject stating,

“Leaving honor killings at the doorstep of illiterate villagers, as Jasser does, ignores the problem on a humane level in favor of intellectual debate”

then she ends with this overriding conclusion:

“Neither Jasser nor Manji addresses the issue of accountability. Chaudhry Rashad was not raised in a vacuum. If moderates reinforce the line that honor killings are "dripping" with Allah or are part of Eastern culture, those prone to such violent acts will continue on the same path. No Muslim will claim theological authority to enforce change from the mosque. Nor will Muslims be forced to act now if the implication from Manji is that culture takes centuries to evolve. But if everyone starts pointing the finger at Muslim society collectively and asks, "why do you let this happen?" maybe change will finally come.

But the facts she uses to impugn my stance on the subject as articulated in the CNN interview in question of July 8, 2008 are mischaracterized. Her premise is clearly that even these “moderate Muslims” are apologists for an Islam which supports honor killings. As a dedicated anti-Islamist Muslim, it should be obvious to anyone who reviews my work that I share many of the goals against Islamists which Ms. Zaidi has in her work at Islamist Watch. But if the individuals she is watching include front line anti-Islamist Muslims like me, I am concerned that we are missing the real enemy while employing a self-defeating strategy. And that makes it even more important to correct the public record about my comments, moderate Islam, and honor killings.

First of all, a fair review of all of my comments in that interview, beyond the first few seconds, makes it clear that a very common mantra of mine about accountability in the Muslim community is again obvious despite Ms. Zaidi’s mischaracterization. I did point a finger directly at the Pakistani Muslim community in Atlanta for their apologetics. I did, contrary to her suggestions, call upon Muslims to act:

“Muslims need to stand up. I’m not going to say he’s not a Muslim. We don’t have a church that communicates or excommunicates people. What I am going to do is start a movement of Muslims that will stand up and say this is not only wrong; he should get the capital punishment. And we should start to have formal processes to protect daughters and children like his, so that when Muslims stand up and speak up – I don’t know if you heard the Pakistani community that stood up in Atlanta recently, in Georgia, and basically said that well, the family is depressed. Well, you know, they should stand up and say this is completely wrong, and immoral, and not Islam.”

If this isn’t demanding that Muslims become accountable against this barbarism, I don’t know what is. And I do take some umbrage with the implication from that I somehow care more about the victimization of Islam than about the real victim – Sandela Kenwal, a 25-year-old woman. Honor killings and the environment which feeds it is despicable and needs the full attention of Muslims across the globe. As I stated, clerics and medieval Islamism which fuels it needs reform and only Muslims can do that. But to dismiss Islam from being part of the solution, and to entirely dismiss endemic corruption, illiteracy, and the culture of misogyny as part of the problem is folly in my opinion. Over centuries Islam has become intertwined with all of these maladies, but moderates cannot be expected to modernize Islam while saying that “Islam is the problem” and especially we cannot submit that our own “reformed or post-modern” Islam is the problem.

Moreover, thus even more important than her mischaracterization of my comments, is the underlying implication about the standard to which anti-Islamist Muslims are going to be held in order to demonstrate our intellectual honesty or realism about whether the major problems in the Muslim community are also problems in “Islam.”

Ms. Zaidi stated “…with this, Muslims make honor killings a part of Islam.”

So the debate really comes down to this: what is Islam, what is not Islam, and who actually defines “Islam” as a faith?

As a genuine anti-Islamist Muslim I am working against the very same groups and ideologies Ms. Zaidi is in order to defeat the greatest ideological threat of the 21st century – political Islam. Make no mistake: we will never win this war of ideas by handing over the mantle of “Islam” to the radicals. Anti-Islamist Muslims calling what we practice “Islam” and calling out radical Islamists as “un-Islamic” is the best and in fact the only strategy from where I sit as a devout Muslim.

Ms. Zaidi’s rationale creates an untenable scenario for the very moderate Muslims she impugns. If moderate Muslims are going to be chastised for apologizing for Islam by stating that acts such as honor killings are “not Islam” (“our Islam,” that is), how does she expect us to be effective agents of change within “Islam”? We need to be credible, confident practitioners of our interpretation of our own faith of Islam in order to be perceived as what we really are – people who love our faith and don’t want to see it controlled and destroyed by the political agenda and corruption of Islamists. It is my belief, at least regarding our work as devout Muslims, that the most effective method of stimulating reform is to do so positively from a modernized Islamic position rather than negatively and critically as outsiders to “Islam” as Zaidi’s strategy implies.

I would suggest that Ms. Zaidi revisit this strategy where moderate Muslims are supposed to acknowledge that murderers like Chaudry Rashad are practicing Islam. And in fact, I do acknowledge in the interview that they believe they are practicing Islam and that there are many Muslims who empower what they do through a medieval interpretation of Islam which needs reform. But I certainly can say all of that without “giving up the farm” on what is Islam. This is an untenable proposition for anyone focused on internal reform and runs against the life experience of truly moderate Muslims who live a coherent moral Islam and are anti-Islamist.

She extends her critique further, stating,

“Leaving honor killings at the doorstep of illiterate villagers, as Jasser does, ignores the problem on a humane level in favor of intellectual debate. The more secular, educated elites o f Muslim countries may not be so backward as to commit such crimes themselves, but they know it is happening and prefer to look the other way…”

Without a doubt, the masters of apologia are Islamists who Ms. Zaidi so aptly monitors including various American Islamist organizations like CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Council), ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), and MAS (Muslim American Society). Few Muslims have been as critical as I have of their apologia and inability to be forthright with the public about the problems which arise from political Islam and the need for reform. Their apologia is obvious in their dissimulation and refusal to identify the ideologies and permutations of Islamism which feed Islamist-inspired terror. These organizations soak up the bandwidth of American media and governmental attention to Islam with victimology and obfuscation. They squander their resources and avoid needed areas of reform while they promote their agenda of “lawful Islamism” as Islamist Watch founder Daniel Pipes has astutely remarked. I hope those remain the types of groups Ms. Zaidi spends most of her time watching.

As President Abdurrahman Wahid mentioned in his 2005 Wall Street Journal piece “Right Islam vs.Wrong Islam,” anti-Islamist and anti-Wahhabi Muslims along with non-Muslims need to work to counter the Islamists in all of their permutations. We might as well pack up and go home and surrender to the Islamists if we are going to submit the realm of our own definition of Islam to the radical and politically motivated ideologies, behaviors, and corruptions of Islamists.

I am certainly realistic enough to fully understand if Zaidi felt that the “Islam,” which I was taught by my parents and grandparents and surrounding community, is not palpable in the public square and should work to assert itself in a more effective manner to change the dogmas which lead to the likes of Chaudry Rashad. I can also fully understand if Zaidi felt that the Islam which I practice, live, and teach my own children, seems to be very different from the radical Islam of Chaudry Rashad, HAMAS, Hezbullah, al Qaeda, or the political Islam (Islamism) of ISNA, CAIR, MPAC, ICNA, and MAS.

But, for the life of me, I cannot understand the wisdom of pushing forth the argument that Muslim realists like me or Irshad Manji, who are able to muster the courage to call a spade a spade should also give up the only fuel for our work which is the premise that we have a vision of Islam which is in harmony with the 21st century? I have previously repeatedly discussed the need for all Muslims to begin to more vociferously challenge the imams and clerics about the very reigns of our faith which they exploit to justify their own medieval pronouncements and backward Sharia which they do in the name of Islam. But just because these clerics call it “Islam” doesn’t make their Islam, my Islam or “our” Islam.

Strategically, once I, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and all other anti-Islamist Muslims give up the mantle of faith to those who are Islamist and are corrupt, we truly become useless. I cannot in good conscience say anything publicly which I do not tell my own children at home. If my children were to ask me about the association of Islam with honor killings, I would as powerfully as possible tell them exactly what I said in that July CNN interview – that not only is that not Islam, it is un-Islamic and violates every tenet of the Islam we teach them at home. This is the same truth that millions upon millions of Muslims would tell their own children if asked the same question. This is, yet, in no way to deny the truths which Zaidi does rightly note as far as the linkage of Islam to the justification of honor killings in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan and many other Muslim communities.

Based upon Zaidi’s premise, I cannot see how there could ever be a truly anti-islamist Muslim. If true reformers are going to submit the realm of Islam to the barbarians of Islamism what are we to call the faith that we practice and the faith in which we believe?

Zaidi asks if Mr. Rashad “grew up in a vacuum.” Other anti-Islamist Muslims and I can also fairly ask if she believes we grew up in a vacuum. I am not ready, now or ever, to hand over the mantle of Islam to any radical, cleric, or Islamist regardless of how much work we have to do to correct the dogma of today which is “their Islam.”

Yes, we Muslims have a lot of work to do. But I cannot see the wisdom of activists with whom I clearly have so much in common intimating that we are somehow ignoring the real victim. I never made such a connection and in fact felt that the best way to advocate for this victim and the prevention of such heinous crimes again is to clearly separate Islam from these actions and call upon the Muslim community to do so.

From where I sit, somewhere within the house of Islam, if we are to diffuse the Islamist threat which Zaidi is also focused on defeating, it can only be done through a civil war over what is and what is not Islam. By attacking both sides, Zaidi leaves nothing but scorched earth with no starting point for a modern Islam.

I am not ready to relegate my children and my children’s children to a lifetime of having our faith dictated by the actions and beliefs of Islamists, their clerics and their enablers. I am fully aware of the reality of what is done in the name of Islam by Islamists and their enablers. I am also fully aware that this journey will be a long one towards modernity and enlightenment from within our faith of Islam whose legal tradition is still often guided by medieval pronouncements which have yet to be reformed. AIFD and I may be only a few steps down a path which is miles long. But Zaidi’s critique, if heeded by strategists, is dangerous, since it leaves reformers no answer today within the faith. The prevention of any future murders in the name of Islam demands that Muslims teach one another that such actions are not Islam and the legal pronouncements which say so need to be changed and defeated.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a physician in private practice, and a community activist.

Federal Suit: Obama Not A “Natural Born Citizen,” Obama & DNC Try To Delay Production of Obama’s Birth Certificate ‘Till After Election

On August, 21, 2008, prominent lawyer, Hillary supporter, former Pennsylvania Democratic Party official and former Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General Philip J. Berg, filed a suit in Federal court in Philadelphia alleging that, because of several factual situations, Obama is not a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires all candidates for President to be (see http://obamacrimes.com/) and he uses as proof, among other things, the testimony of Obama’s paternal grandmother, a half-brother and half sister who say they witnessed that Obama was born, not in Hawaii as Obama claims, but in Kenya.

Most of these allegations could instantly be proven false if Obama were to produce the original, long form copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate for examination. Obama has consistently refused to do this and, instead, Obama’s campaign website and his online supporters have offered images of a shorter Hawaiian “certificate of live birth,” that many questioned documents experts say is a forgery and, doesn’t definitively answer the question anyway.

Now, in legal motions filed in Federal court by attorneys for Obama and the DNC this past Monday, October 6th, Obama and the DNC request that any “discovery” in this case, i.e. the actual production and examination of Obama’s original Hawaiian birth certificate, which Berg alleges does not exist because Obama was born in Kenya, be deferred until other legal issues are settled, in effect, postponing production of the birth certificate in question until after the November 4th Election.

This is truly a “Constitutional Crisis” and a Crisis for our Legal System and one that the MSM—deep, deep in the tank for Obama--wants no part in telling us exists, much less covering; you would think that the MSM would at least cover this story to debunk it and for a few laughs but, had I not gone to Berg’s website, I would not have known of this latest legal move, which was invisible because not reported by the MSM. The fact that Obama will not just produce this document—a thing easily done and likely to win him many political points, while at the same time, damaging his political enemies--to settle the issue, and the fact that Obama and the DNC are willing to spend money on delaying production of this original birth certificate, tells me that Obama doesn’t have one, because it doesn’t exist and if it doesn’t exist, Obama is disqualified from running for the Presidency, his campaign collapses and Obama, Democrats in general and the Democratic Party are thoroughly discredited and forever indelibly stained by this monumental fraud on the American people and our country’s democracy; thus, the stakes for Obama, for Democrats, for the Democratic Party and, most importantly, for our democratic form of government, could not be higher. I am sure there is much frantic activity behind the scenes and that the pressure on the Federal judge hearing this case is enormous.

Can you think of any sane reason why Obama would not pull out his original birth certificate for examination and immediately settle this bothersome, costly and “distracting” suit and this controversy? I can’t.

Obama and the DNC, aided by the silence of the MSM, want to keep this Federal suit, these developments, as unknown and quiet as possible, wants the action to be over before we even know that it happened; I suppose the likes of Greta Van Susteren wants to cover the monumentally important story of OJ’s new trial and tribulations, instead.

Obama and the DNC are hoping that if Obama wins in November, Obama’s Presidency will be a faite accompli, no one will have the guts or will want to go through the monumental Constitutional Crisis and Crisis in our Legal System that would ensue if attempts were made to remove a Constitutionally disqualified President-designate Obama from his position. The potential for riots in the streets by Obama’s outraged black supporters (always a threat of implied violence useful to Democrats) is only one of the many dire scenarios one can easily conjure up. Democrats control Congress and all the chairmen of key committees that would be involved in such a Constitutional Crisis are hard-core Democrats. The Democrats probably figure that once they win, they can try every trick in the book, they will fix this problem somehow and evade blame, play dumb, throw up a confusing barrage of conflicting information, say that the citizenship requirement is just an archaic “technicality,” unfair and unimportant, point fingers and say they didn’t realize there was a “Crisis,” and can count on most people to not want to “make waves,” “rock the boat,” or to want to be part of such a potentially cataclysmic upheaval endangering the peace and tranquility and the very fabric of our democracy--so, one way or the other--the Democrats will smooth things over and make this suit go away, to enter the Bermuda Triangle of unsolved and endlessly disputed controversies like the disappearance of Judge Crater, Chappaquiddick and the Kennedy Assassination.

So, the time to act is now, before the Election and the necessary awareness leading to calls for such action is what Obama and the DNC are trying to prevent, with their legal maneuvering and the MSM is also trying to prevent by their silence on this suit and this issue.

Opec members seek emergency meeting

By Carola Hoyos in London

Almost half the members of the Opec oil cartel are considering an emergency meeting in Vienna next month as oil prices dropped to their lowest level in nearly a year.

Almost half the members of cartel have in the past few days called on the group to act to halt the slide before their next official meeting scheduled to take place in Algeria in late December.

Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Iraq, Venezuela and Ecuador, whose economies tend to be most dependent on high oil prices and whose ministers are among the most hawkish of the 13-member group, have all lobbied for the cartel to drop output.

Their calls came as oil consuming nations moved to bolster their economies in a co-ordinated interest rate cut.

Oil prices on Wednesday resumed their slide towards $85 a barrel, a level last reached in December last year.

Nymex November West Texas Intermediate fell $3.06 to $87 a barrel, while ICE November Brent slid $2.96 to $81.

Opec’s next meeting was scheduled for December 18 in Algeria, but ministers are now saying they could meet on November 18 in Vienna, site of the group’s headquarters.

Opec controls nearly 40 per cent of the world’s oil supply, and at its meeting last month pledged to reduce its production by about 500,000 barrels a day in an attempt to boost prices. So far the group’s reduction has fallen far from that mark, but slowing production often takes more than a few weeks.

The world consumes about 87m barrels a day of oil.

A Positive Sign for the Grid

Although it’s somewhat unusual to see the words “good idea” and “Dept of Homeland Security” in the same sentence, it actually appears to have happened last week. ...

What Hackers Know about Control Systems that You Don't

Computers and electronics run our infrastructure and our world. Electronic signals support generation, transmission, and distribution of power that keeps our lights on and the water coming out of our taps. They also support the entire global industrial manufacturing infrastructure. They are so ubiquitous that at a recent industry conference, a top cyber agent at the FBI was quoted as saying, "Computers are everywhere. Most of you drove here in one."

Consider then the importance of availability and reliability of those electronic, or "cyber," systems that connect and, in some cases help to operate, critical infrastructure. Computers manage such important infrastructure as:

• Water distribution and wastewater collection systems
• Oil and gas pipelines
• Electrical utility transmission and distribution
• Rail and other public transportation

These systems are often interconnected and interdependent. Remember the power blackout in 2003 that started with one power station in Ohio, and eventually spread to darken seven US states and half of eastern Canada? It was caused by a cascading failure that impacted more than 508 generating units at 265 power plants, including 22 nuclear power plants. Power blackouts don't just affect the electricity to homes and retail businesses. Outages also impact:

• Oil and gas production
• Refinery operations
• Water treatment systems
• Wastewater collection
• Pipeline transportation systems
• Rail and most public transportation systems

Many of the companies who operate these critical infrastructure systems are now connecting them to their internal corporate networks, but without the customary security procedures that we are used to deploying in the typical IT environment. The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of cyber security currently lacking in control system environments today and the reasons behind these vulnerabilities. This document describes some actual events that demonstrate current control system vulnerabilities. This paper also discusses how an Internet Reputation Intelligence (a trusted Internet reputation system that augments the protection of all cyber systems) creates a proactive security model for control systems where other, traditional and reactionary, technologies fall short.
(PDF, 16 pages)

Carney: Department of Homeland Security needs to be reformed

by Daily Review

US Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa.) said the Department of Homeland Security needs to be need reformed, adding that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be removed from the department’s domain. FEMA should be given “cabinet level status,” with direct access to the president, Carney said, as was the case under former President Bill Clinton, before FEMA became part of the Department of Homeland Security. “An organization as important as important as FEMA gets a guy like Michael Brown running it,” Carney said referring to the former director who resigned following Hurricane Katrina. “We need someone qualified running that organization and we need to fund (Homeland Security) adequately and staff it adequately.” Carney made his comments during an editorial board meeting with the Scranton Times-Tribune, owned by the same parent company as The Citizens’ Voice. Carney, who faces Republican Chris Hackett in the 10th Congressional District, is seeking his first re-election. He focused his comments on what he called his “bi-partisan” approach as a congressman, and the need to “reach across the aisle.” Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats in Carney’s district by about 32,000, making up 48.5 percent of the registered voters in the district, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State. ...

Study of Data Mining for Terrorists Is Urged

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — A federal panel of policy makers and scientific experts urged a government-wide evaluation Tuesday of programs that sift through databases looking for clues on terrorism, to determine whether the programs are effective and legal.

The federal government has made aggressive use of so-called data-mining tools since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as counterterrorism officials in many intelligence agencies have sought to analyze records on travel habits, calling patterns, e-mail use, financial transactions and other data to pinpoint possible terrorist activity.

The National Security Agency’s program for wiretapping terror suspects without warrants, the screening of suspicious airline passengers and the Pentagon’s ill-fated Total Information Awareness program, shut down by Congress in 2003 because of privacy concerns, have all relied on aspects of data mining.

But in a 352-page government study released on Tuesday, a committee of the National Research Council warned that successfully using these tools to deter terrorism “will be extremely difficult to achieve” because of legal, technological and logistical problems. It said a haphazard approach to using such tools threatened both Americans’ privacy rights and the country’s legitimate national security needs.

Mining through data patterns has been shown to work in commercial settings to predict what kind of toothpaste people may buy and what kind of movie they are likely to rent, or to detect casino card-counters or those engaged in credit card fraud.

But there is little evidence to confirm that the techniques work to actually find terrorists, despite the growing use in the last seven years, committee members said. Part of the problem, they said, is that the sample of known terrorists and actual attacks is so small that it is difficult to establish patterns of suspicious behavior.

The push to accumulate enormous amounts of information has also produced the risk of “a huge number of false leads” that could implicate people with no actual connections to terrorism, the committee said.

“More data does not mean better data,” said William J. Perry, the former defense secretary who was co-chairman of the panel, with Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering.

The National Research Council, a government-chartered nonprofit group, set up the panel in 2005 to study data mining at the request of the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation.

Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania computer science professor who has studied data mining but was not involved in the study, said one of the most important points made in the report — little understood by the public — was to underscore the “fundamental problems” in adapting commercial data-mining to the hunt for terrorists. The committee, Mr. Blaze said, “has performed a real public service.”

Timothy Edgar, the deputy for civil liberties in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the White House, said his office had begun reviewing data-mining programs “on an ad hoc basis,” partly at the direction of Congress. But he said the committee’s recommendations laying out a framework for legal and operational concerns in a data-mining program could help to guide that effort.

“This is something the government could do in a more systematic way,” Mr. Edgar said.

Judge Orders 17 Detainees at Guantánamo Freed

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration’s detention policies.

The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area.

“I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina said.

Saying the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims that he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and government requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal. ....

More than 300 arrested in immigration sweep

More than 300 suspected illegal immigrants were arrested Tuesday morning at a chicken processing plant near Greenville, S.C. -- the latest in a stepped-up federal enforcement effort that has resulted in the deportation of thousands of illegal workers in recent months.

Tuesday's raid was led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and involved hundreds of agents from numerous agencies. The target was Columbia Farms, a processing plant that had been the subject of a 10-month criminal investigation. ....

Intel Chief Praises Fusion Centers

by Mickey McCarter

Charlie Allen outlines DHS plans for remainder of 2008 Information-sharing between federal, state and local governments at national fusion centers has proven vital to alerting authorities to possible terrorist threats, such as those that might damage supply chain security, Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence Charles Allen told the Maritime Security Council in Washington, DC, Tuesday. "Our ability to move, analyze and act on information is our greatest strength. We must use the network and the information in that network, to push our defensive perimeter outward," Allen declared. The network in question--the National Fusion Center network--is staffed with intelligence officers who must pass threat information along to where it is needed, whether at the national level or in a city. To overcome old barriers to communication between federal, state and local analysts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has worked to strengthen the National Fusion Center Network, deploying 25 officers to fusion centers nationally with 10 more to be assigned by the end of the year. DHS has further expanded secret clearance sites of the Homeland Security Data Network (HSDN) to 23 to facilitate access to secret information around the nation. The department plans to double the number of secret HSDN sites by the end of the year, Allen announced. Each fusion center with HSDN has Web pages to assist with information sharing. Meanwhile, agents in 45 states, the District of Columbia and seven federal agencies have access to the unclassified Homeland Security State and Local Community of Interest. DHS also will provide mobile intelligence training to fusion center personnel, starting next month. The DHS Offices of Privacy and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties also will provide mobile training to the centers to protect individual rights and privacies. The increase in fusion center activity has resulted in more intelligence products, Allen remarked. Nine intelligence assessments have been produced in collaboration with the fusion centers, DHS and others so far this year. State and local fusion centers also have served as an important source of intelligence for federal agencies. The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis has passed along more than 140 homeland security intelligence reports from state and local sources to the national intelligence community, Allen reported. Last year, such reports accounted for 1.5 percent of intelligence reporting nationally, but it has accounted for 8 percent so far this year. "In two cases, [intelligence community] analysts used local information to write articles for the President's Daily Brief," Allen remarked. "Without the presence of a DHS officer in the state fusion center, this information would not have been available. This is the essence of the effort to share intelligence and information vertically and horizontally." The application of intelligence from federal, state and local stakeholders along with private businesses will continue to help secure unprecedented levels of containerized cargo--estimated to reach 492 million units in 2015, up from 192 million in 2005,according to the United Nations.

Homeland Security and Economic Recovery

by Phil Leggiere

Homeland security, resiliency linked to economic revitalization. As the depth and magnitude of the global financial crisis becomes apparent, calls to retrench public spending can be expected to accelerate, regardless of which party controls Congress and the White House. Understandable as this reflex may be, there are also costs of not spending. Perhaps nowhere are the long-term costs of not spending so potentially momentous as in the area of infrastructure. Last year, after the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, author and homeland security analyst Stephen Flynn outlined 5 Disasters Coming Soon If We Don’t Rebuild U.S. Infrastructure in an article in Popular Mechanics. Click here to see full story Flynn envisioned the impact a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Valley could cause the 30 outdated, inadequate levees in the area. “Sixteen Delta islands would drown under 300 billion gallons of salt water from San Francisco Bay,” he wrote. “It would not only spell disaster for the residents, but also cause problems farther afield, contaminating the fresh water supply for two-thirds of California. Some 10 million people would face severe shortages over the many months the water supply took to recover.” Another Flynn scenario involved seepage through the numerous holes that have been discovered in the foundation of Kentucky’s 55-year-old Wolf Creek Dam. In a worst-case scenario, Flynn said, the mile-long structure, which holds back the largest manmade reservoir east of the Mississippi, would release a wall of water, inundating towns and cities downstream along the Cumberland River, including Nashville. Flynn further imagined a major earthquake in Los Angles or a terrorist attack at its harbor, which he calculated could lead to an extended closure of America’s largest port complex. If that occurred, Flynn said, Southern California’s inventory of refined fuels would be exhausted in two to three weeks, and 18 million people literally run out of gas. A shutdown also would disrupt the flow of 40 percent of the nation’s maritime containers, idling factories everywhere and leaving retailers with bare shelves within days. Truly renovating infrastructure would go beyond protecting existing infrastructure from attack. As Jena Baker McNeill, a homeland security policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, wrote in a recent paper entitled Building Infrastructure Resiliency: Private Sector Investment in Homeland Security: “As Americans have become increasingly obsessed with protecting infrastructure from terror¬ist attacks, they have focused less and less on keep¬ing that same infrastructure in good condition. The idea persists that installing ever more guns, gates, and guards is critical, and will prevent all threats. When everything is critical, however, nothing is critical. As a result, any security gains garnered by threat prevention are jeopardized, while adequate upkeep, the less glamorous of the two, is largely abandoned.” Click here to see report. “What we need instead is resiliency,” McNeill declared. “Resiliency,” she added, “does not mean that we need to forget the prevention-of-terrorism aspect of infrastructure. It simply means that prevention is not the end of the equation. We must change the infrastructure mis¬sion to one that aims to improve infrastructure ade¬quacy across the board while protecting high-risk targets. If we lack the ability to accommodate the infrastructure needs of the population, a cata¬strophic event would stymie the transportation and delivery of essential aid—whether goods or people. Well-maintained infrastructure can lessen or largely eliminate damage from an attack—minimizing loss of lives and property.” While McNeill’s points are compelling and increasingly acknowledged, positive economic arguments for infrastructure resilience have been sparse. In an essay in the current New York Review of Books entitled A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure, investment banker Felix Rohatyn and Everitt Erlich, Senior Vice President and Director of Research for the Committee for Economic Development assay such an argument, outlining the case for a National Infrastructure Bank. They suggest that homeland security needs and economic recovery may be far more closely linked than is commonly acknowledged. Click here to see full article. “These are rare times of ferment in one of the most neglected fields of public policy—the nation's infrastructure, or what used to be known as public works, including roads, mass transit, bridges, ports and airports, flood control systems, and much else. We have been confronted with spectacular and tragic evidence of the inadequacy of these facilities in the failure of the levees in New Orleans and in the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis,” they write. Putting the problem of aging, increasingly vulnerable infrastructure in historical context the authors recall that “Throughout US history, competent public investment decisions have been an essential complement to private investment, from the Louisiana Purchase and the Land Grant Colleges to the Interstate Highway System and the Internet. And the functions of infrastructure are still as essential as they have ever been, if not more so.” Contrasting that record with the present they note that China will spend $200 billion on its railways between 2006 and 2010—the largest investment in railroad capacity made by any country since the nineteenth century—while the US rail system continues to become more and more degraded at a time of great potential renewal. The Chinese also plan over the next twelve years to construct 300,000 kilometers of roads in rural China, as well as ninety-seven new airports. “The Chinese understand that economic power depends on these investments,” they conclude. A key problem in developing a coherent national plan for infrastructure renewal, Rohatyn and Ehrlich believe, is that responsibility for the nation's infrastructure is currently spread across federal, state, and local governments. For example, they say, “the federal government is responsible for maintaining wastewater systems, while states and municipalities handle drinking water. The federal government helps states, cities, and towns build and operate mass transit systems; and it builds bridges that are part of the Interstate system, while local governments build local roads and the picturesque covered bridges that appear on tourist postcards.” One key lesson of Hurricane Katrina, according to the authors, was the devastating consequences of these failures of coordination. “The state of Louisiana and its municipalities built flood control systems around levees while ignoring the deterioration of fragile wetlands in the Mississippi Delta,”, while “ Louisiana's congressional delegation steered federal funds toward navigation projects instead of flood control.” To begin to address the growing infrastructure crisis the authors argue in favor of “a new and different approach to selecting, financing, and managing infrastructure” conceptually laid out last year in a report by Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, a commission co-chaired by Rohaytn, along with former Senator Warren Rudman. The core idea of the CSIS commission proposal is to establish a National Infrastructure Bank, an institution that the authors describe as being similar to the World Bank, “an entity that evaluates project proposals and assembles a portfolio of investments to pay for them.” The bank, as they conceive it, “ would replace the various "modal" programs for highways, airports, mass transit, water projects, and other infrastructure, streamlining them and folding them together into a new entity with a new culture and purpose. Any project seeking federal participation over a set dollar threshold would have to be submitted to this bank. (Smaller projects would be left to states, cities, and towns, perhaps with an accompanying federal grant to be used at the discretion of the state or local government.) Rather than receiving grants through pre-set federal formulas or privileged congressional payments, states, cities, or other levels of government would come to the bank with proposals they wished to pursue.” The bank, they say, would have no preconceived, overarching plan for the nation's infrastructure. “Proposals for infrastructure investment would still predominantly come from state and local governments. Our plan would preserve almost entirely the existing balance of power between federal, state, and local government, but would change dramatically the way priorities are set and projects funded. That is because it would proceed project-by-project, and dollar-by-dollar, to find the best use of federal resources.” Doubtless with the recent travails of the mortgage scandals in mind, Rohatyn and Ehrlich emphasize that, “the bank's securities, whatever they may be, should not benefit from a promise of the government's full faith and credit (as has been enjoyed and abused by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Only close scrutiny by investors can provide the kinds of discipline needed to ensure the bank's long-term success. If the bank wishes to support a proposed project—whether by writing a check, insuring a local bond, providing other credit guarantees, or lending its own money—its securities should each be carefully exposed and specifically targeted, allowing participating investors to evaluate the assets they buy.” “Regardless of the government's fiscal position,” they conclude, “ vital investments in transportation, water supply, education, and clean energy are necessary to maintain our future standard of living. Our political system pours money into war and tax breaks while relying on deficit finance. Those in charge then announce that there are no resources left to secure our economic future. The new bank we propose offers one alternative to such a dangerous set of policies.” The proposals may, or may not, be politically practical. At least two bills, one the National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007, submitted by Senators Chris Dodd (D., Connecticut) and Chuck Hagel (R., Nebraska), both of whom served as members of the CSIS commission, the other offered in the House of Representatives by Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D., Massachusetts) and Representative Keith Ellison (D., Minnesota) outline an approach broadly similar to Rohatyn and Ehrlich. At the very least, however, they usefully sketch out the intersection between homeland security and sustainable development which is likely to be key to public policy going forward.

Feds fork over $37.8 billion more to AIG

Vote Fraud 2008: The Coming Disaster?

Brits launch shoot-to-kill ops

LONDON -- Specialist agents for Britain's MI6 intelligence service, trained to pose as Muslim extremists, are leading two hand-picked SAS units to seek and destroy a secret bomb-making factory in Baghdad, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Their first major success came last weekend when sharpshooters shot and killed Mahir Ahmad Mahmud Judu al-Zubaydi near his hideout in Baghdad's Adhamiya suburb.

The MI6 agents had identified him as the deputy commander of al-Qaida in the city and the mastermind behind a series of recent bombings. He died as he was on his way to a local mosque for Friday prayers.

"His removal will send shock waves through Baghdad's terrorist networks," said coalition spokesman Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll.

Al-Zubaydi had been hunted for two years since he appeared on a video recording showing him shooting dead a Russian diplomat in the city. He was at the top of the SAS target list for having been credited with killing over 300 men, women and children with his bombs.

The MI6 agents are fluent in the local languages and live outside the highly protected Green Zone, moving from one hideout to another in the hostile Sunni Muslim areas of the city.

Their work is described as "the most dangerous of all the undercover operations in Iraq. Their prime targets are to not only destroy the factory, but to discover the terrorist cells where the bombers wait to strike," confirmed a senior intelligence officer in London.

Days before they had tracked down al-Zubaydi, the MI6 agents had established he was responsible for last month's killing of 35 civilians and injuring more than 100 others through roadside bombs created in the secret factory.

Bomb and casing fragments showed the explosives originally came from Iran -- and may possibly have been smuggled into the country with the knowledge of Iranian diplomats.

US ‘Still Looking’ at Establishing an Interests Section in Iran

By Patrick Goodenough

(CNSNews.com) – The United States has not shelved a proposal to establish an interests section in Iran, although there are no public signs that the Iranian government is ready to embrace the idea.

An interests section facilitates relations between people of two countries that do not have diplomatic relations, typically dealing with legal issues such as birth and death registrations, and cultural and educational affairs.

Another, unrelated non-governmental initiative aimed at improving ties between the U.S. and Iran also has drawn skeptical responses in Iran.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the weekend that the Bush administration continues to consider the idea of an interests section.

“I think it’s an interesting idea,” she told reporters en route to Astana, Kazakhstan. “But, you know, we are going to take a look at it in the light of what it could do for our relationship with the Iranian people.”

Asked whether the step remained a possibility before the end of the Bush administration in January, Rice said, “We are still looking at the idea.” ....

A State Department spokesman referred queries about the AIC license to OFAC, saying only “our policy has not changed. We encourage efforts to increase people-to-people contacts between the people of Iran and the people of the United States in order to expand mutual understanding, as long as parties involved work in accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.”

IMF: It's Worse Than It Looks

The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday increased its estimate of global losses from the financial meltdown to $1.4 trillion and warned that the world's economic downturn was deepening.

"Declared losses on U.S. loans and securitized assets are likely to increase further to about $1.4 trillion," the IMF said, increasing the loss estimate from $945 billion in April and slightly up from $1.3 trillion it cited last month.

In its quarterly assessment of global capital markets, the IMF said global economic activity is slowing down as growth in advanced economies decelerates and emerging economies start to lose momentum.

"Despite better-than-expected performance early this year, rising financial turmoil has led to a downgrade in the IMF's baseline forecast for global economic growth in 2008-09," it said.

The IMF called for "internationally coherent and decisive policy measures" to restore confidence and to avert a more protracted economic slowdown, but warned that central banks would need to continue injecting cash to calm the unprecedented turmoil.

"The risk of a more severe adverse feedback loop between the financial system and the broader economy represents a critical threat," the IMF said.

"The combination of mounting losses, falling asset prices, and a deepening economic downturn has caused serious doubts about the viability of a widening swath of the financial system," it added.

It estimated that major global banks will need about $675 billion in capital over the next several years.

The IMF warned of further losses, with significant gaps between reported and estimated write-downs, as the crisis increasingly becomes disorderly.

It said a further decline in the U.S. housing market and a wider economic slowdown is leading to new loan deterioration. Delinquencies on prime mortgages and commercial real estate are increasing, as well as those for corporate and consumer loans, it noted.

With the economic slowdown spreading, financial institutions will increasingly face losses on non-U.S. assets as well, the IMF said.

The fund said pressures were now emerging in Europe, as house prices in some countries decline, economic growth falters and lending conditions tighten.

The IMF warned that overall risks to emerging markets, which earlier appeared resilient to the credit turmoil, have risen sharply as appetite for emerging assets has declined and capital outflows have intensified, leading to tighter liquidity conditions.

DHS warns of potential terror attacks on public buildings

By Jim Popkin

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today issued an analytical "note" to U.S. law-enforcement officials cautioning that al-Qaida terrorists have in the past expressed interest in attacking public buildings using a dozen suicide bombers each carrying 20 kilograms of explosives.

Authors with the U.S. Office of Intelligence and Analysis added that they have "no credible or specific information that terrorists are planning operations against public buildings in the United States." The DHS analysts--after coordinating with the FBI Threat Analysis Unit--said they were releasing the note because "it is important for local authorities and building owners and operators to be aware of potential attack tactics."

According to the note obtained by NBC News, a "recently discovered audio recording of al-Qa‘ida training sessions conducted several years ago provides instruction to potential suicide terrorists on seizing a publicly accessible building and damaging or destroying it with explosive charges."

Among the materials on a CD–ROM seized earlier this year by Belgian authorities and provided to Interpol, the note said, "is a detailed audio explanation by now-deceased senior al-Qa‘ida operative Yousef al-Ayeeri of a method taught in an al-Qa‘ida training camp for attacking a publicly accessible building. Interpol believes the Arabic-language recording was made shortly before al-Ayeeri’s death in 2003."

Saudi security forces killed al-Ayeeri in 2003.

The Audiotape:
The DHS said al-Ayeeri's five-year-old audiotape walks potential suicide bombers through the following scenario:

"Once a target is selected, al-Ayeeri recommends assembling a team of 12 individuals, each armed with an assault rife and grenade and carrying approximately 20 kilograms of explosives. The attackers are to storm the building, seal off escape and access points, and occupy it long enough to set and detonate their explosive packages. Al-Ayeeri stressed the importance of carrying out these steps before law enforcement can respond, even if notified early in the attack. He assumes the attackers will be killed during the operation," the DHS note said.

The instructional audiotape continued:

"Al-Ayeeri believed attackers would be able to enter many publicly accessible buildings easily with little or no resistance from often poorly trained and lightly armed or unarmed security guards, and that an explosion from inside the building would be particularly effective."

In the unclassified report, the analysts added that, "if each of the 12 attackers’ 20 kg charge is combined into a single large bomb, it would have more explosive power than the truck bomb used in the 1983 Beirut Embassy attack. Terrorists to date have not conducted attacks on public buildings using the full range of tactics covered in al-Ayeeri’s training."

Since 9-11, the FBI and DHS have issued hundreds of similar warnings and bulletins to law-enforcement officials, cautioning them about potential terrorist attacks. Critics have said that some of the scenarios seem implausible, including warnings about teams of scuba-diving bombers and terrorists' use of prosthetic devices that would allow women to hide explosives in devices “that mimic the look of a pregnant woman.” Law enforcement officials have responded that there's a need for aggressive intellience sharing--one of the lessons learned the hard way after the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Update: I have edited this post to make it clear that the Department of Homeland Security authored this document, after consulting with the FBI. As the document states, it was "Prepared by the DHS/Critical Infrastructure Threat Analysis Division. Coordinated with the FBI/Threat Analysis Unit."

Syrian tanks advance to Lebanese Beqaa Valley border. Israel forces on high alert

Russian military experts calculate that the window for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will shrink to 3-6 months if Moscow sells Iran (and Syria) the sophisticated S-300 system for guarding those sites against air, missile or cruise missile attack. DEBKAfile’s Moscow sources report that Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert failed in the key missions of his Moscow trip to persuade Russian leaders to discuss Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and to refrain from selling this advanced weapon to Iran and Syria. ...

Syrian tanks advance to Lebanese Beqaa Valley border. Israel forces on high alert

Syria moved tank units up to the Lebanese Beqaa Valley border Tuesday, Oct. 7. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that this is Damascus’ second troop movement on the Lebanese border. For three weeks, commando units have been poised on the North Lebanese border. Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak on an announced visit to the border troops cautioned officers to exercise maximum vigilance. ...

Al-Qaeda Plots New Terror Attacks In Britain

al Qaeda is planning a new wave of terror attacks on Britain, security chiefs have warned.

Intelligence agencies are tracking four plots to unleash carnage on our cities.

And they fear there could be up to a dozen more in the early planning stages. The terror operations are thought to centre on London and Birmingham.

Two are understood to be plans to launch devastating explosions in the city centres.

The intelligence services have less information on the others but fear there could be an attack on a power station, an attempt to poison water supplies or a bid to ASSASSINATE a top politician.

An intelligence source said one reason they were taking the plots so seriously was because there was foreign involvement from Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Former Tory security spokesman Patrick Mercer, who has also advised Gordon Brown, said: “Because we have not been attacked since the handover of Prime Ministers last year does not mean to say that the threat has gone away. Not by a long chalk.

Click here for additional information

Socialism Is Draining America of Capital

By Dick McDonald

A free market capitalist system runs on its capability to devote a reasonable portion of the income it earns each year to investments in its future. For years, no country in the world has done a better job of that than America. Unfortunately for the last few years, Americans are spending more than they earn. That has created a serious shortage of capital in our financial markets and has forced Wall Street to solicit investment funds from foreigners and sovereign wealth funds.

A fear exists that if we continue to allow foreigners to buy up large segments of our economic engine we will lose control of our own destiny. Tom Friedman of the New York Times hopes to ignite that fear in a recent op-ed.

Another friend of mine in the ship-supply business in Baltimore, Alan Kotz, told me about a German customer who recently put in double his normal order. When Alan asked him if he was aware of how much he had ordered, the German brushed his question away and laughed: "Alan, never mind, everything for us is half price."

And a good thing it is. Even though the dollar has strengthened a bit lately, we are going to need foreigners and sovereign wealth funds from China, Asia, Europe and the Middle East more than ever to survive this crisis - and they are going to need us to be healthy as well. In the process, we are going to become even more intertwined and dependent on the rest of the world.

This election season sees capitalism under severe attack from American socialists. Under the guise that 95% of the taxpayers will receive a tax cut, the socialists are playing the Pied Piper leading Americans into believing the same lie that Bill Clinton swept into office with in 1992 and the Democrats took back the Congress in 2006 - middle class tax cuts. Tax cuts were never delivered in 1992 or 1993; rather taxes were raised. In 2006 - 2007, there were no tax cuts either. The question then remains: will Obama deliver a tax cut or will he tax the vibrant American economy unmercifully to establish a socialist state - a state that so many believe to be "fairer" than a free-market economy?

The capital markets, now starved for new sources of capital, appear destined for even more desperate times. A combination of higher prices, inflation and the possible increased taxation on the productive elements of the society will leave little room for investment by ordinary Americans. Combine that with the fact that socialists will flood into Washington in January and you will discover why the stock market has fallen from over 14,000 on the Dow to under 10,000. The people are not stupid. Government governed by those who favor their own concept of fairness over that of freedom signals a massive downturn in economic fortunes of all Americans.

It doesn't have to be so. We have a massive new source of capital to drive the American economy way past the 14,000 level. If we only divert the payroll taxes of $1.4 trillion collected each year by the Federal government into the personal investment accounts of taxpayers and then invest those sums into the capital markets we could put the economy into hyper-drive.

Americans are tired of being told there is no way capitalism can be "fair." They are tired of being robbed of 15.3% of the lifetime income in return for no nest egg whatsoever. It is time to liquidate the $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities for entitlements that the Social Security Administration warns taxpayers may never be funded and therefore cause the total failure of the system.

It is time for capitalism to prove it is the "fair" system ready to vault all Americans into an era of prosperity. As the economy is driven by infusions of new capital every year - we have that new source of that capital that America presently wastes on consumption. See www.riseupamerica.us for the blueprint that will revitalize our economy and enable every American to achieve the American Dream.

U.S. intelligence warns Iraq war could explode again

(Compiler's note: A "must read" rca)

By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and Nancy A. Youssef,

WASHINGTON — A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year. ....

Welcoming Terror on Campus

By Jacob Laksin

As the fountainhead of global Islamic terrorism, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has long had a public-relations problem. For years the Brotherhood has struggled to veil its reputation as a violent and reactionary religious movement without moderating the substance of its politics, which continue to include support for terror attacks and the institution of hard-line Sharia law. At the University of California at Irvine (UCI), the Brotherhood has now found an audience receptive to its efforts.

This Wednesday, four separate UCI programs – including the department of history; the Center for Research on International and Global Studies at UCI’s School of Social Sciences; the school’s Middle East Studies Student Initiative and its Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies – will host Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, a young member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the leader of its new generation of self-styled “moderate Islamist” activists. Still in his twenties, the Cairo-based Houdaiby has a long lineage in the Brotherhood: His grandfather was Hassan el-Houdaiby, a prominent Brotherhood ideologist. Houdaiby has carried on the family tradition, writing a column for the Brotherhood’s official English-language website, IkhwaWeb.com, and generally trying to arouse foreign sympathy for a movement still regarded as dangerous in the West.

On the UCI faculty, at least, Houdaiby has made a favorable impression. In particular, he has impressed history professor Mark LeVine, who helped organize this week’s event. In an interview, LeVine said that he met Houdaiby in Cairo while conducting research for his recent book, Heavy Metal Islam: Religion, Popular Culture and Resistance in the Middle East, and came away convinced that the young activist truly represents a new breed of Muslim Brother – a clear break with the rigid fundamentalists who dominated the movement throughout its 80-year history.

As an example, LeVine says that Houdaiby is “more interested in working with the secular forces in Egypt, which is something that the Muslim Brotherhood has not traditionally done. And he has a willingness to be critical of the leadership, something that you would not have seen a generation ago.” Inviting Houdaiby to UCI, according to LeVine, is a way for students to engage with a Muslim activist who is not only close in age but also represents a new model of Islamic leadership.

That is a flattering description. Yet, there is reason to doubt whether Houdaiby really represents a trend toward moderation, and whether it is fitting for an American university to provide him with a platform. On the evidence of his published writings, Houdaiby is not the democratic reformer he affects to be.

Houdaiby certainly sounds convincing. Even as he describes himself as a moderate Islamist, he takes care to stipulate that “moderate Islamists fully endorse democracy, and their discourse illustrates a clear respect of civil liberties and human rights.” As for Islamic politicians, he explains, they “fully endorse democracy, support freedom of the press, and believe in equality as the basis of citizenship.”

So it is with the Brotherhood, which, as Houdaiby tells it, should not be considered a fundamentalist group. Rather, it is a “reformist organization that upholds the principles of tolerance [and] peaceful reform.” Instead of imposing its views on society, the Brotherhood champions “constructive dialogue that is based on mutual respect and appreciation of diversity.” It’s no coincidence that the topic of Houdaiby’s appearance at UCI will be “religion and democracy in the Middle East.” If Houdaiby is to be believed, the Brotherhood is now the Middle East’s foremost advocate of democracy and democratic values.

That is not whole story, however. A closer look at Houdaiby’s writings suggests that while he has shrewdly adopted the rhetoric of Western democrats, his political goals, like those of the Brotherhood, could hardly be more opposite. Where Houdaybi departs from his predecessors is largely in his success in putting a fresh and tolerant face on an old and intolerant agenda.

For instance, there are his countless contradictions. While Houdaybi says that the “state should not interfere in the individual’s personal choice to violate Islamic teachings and drink alcohol,” he insists that this is only true “as long as he does not violate the societal rights by threatening its security.” Of course, the notion that deviating from Islamic teachings constitutes a societal “threat” would convince only those who, like the Brotherhood, argue that society should be governed exclusively by Sharia law. Brotherhood founder Hassan el-Banna similarly proclaimed that Islam must be “given hegemony over all matters of life.” Houdaiby’s references to personal choice may sound more congenial to Western ears but it is noteworthy that his underlying assumption about the supremacy of Sharia is exactly the same as el-Banna’s.

Given his explicit support for Sharia law, it’s hard to give credence to Houdaiby’s professed belief in equality. And indeed Houdaiby’s writings point in a very different direction. For example, Houdaiby has criticized Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mahdi Akef for denouncing as “naked” those women who do not wear the hijab, or headscarf. However, Houdaiby isn’t prepared to say that women should be given a choice on the matter. On the contrary, he has written that “I support Akef’s stance on wearing the hijab, and like him view it as a religious obligation.” One need only consider the Taliban’s promises to assault with disfiguring acid all women who do not wear the hijab to see how tolerant Islamists tend to be of women who do not abide by such “religious obligations.”

Lest one take him for a radical, Houdaiby insists that his ideal of an Islamic society would look nothing like Taliban-era Afghanistan. But his support for criminalizing adultery in accordance with Sharia law belies such assurances. Although he has written that it is a “couple’s personal choice to adhere to Islamic teachings, prohibiting sexual relations outside marriage,” he insists that “the choice should not violate their society’s right to have a decent environment. Therefore, extramarital sexual relations are only a punishable crime if there are four eyewitnesses to the relation.” As with the hijab, the Islamic world provides revealing examples of what such a standard for punishing adultery might look like in practice. In November 2007, a Saudi appeals court sentenced a married woman to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she was gang-raped for the crime of “being in the car with an unrelated male.” In that case, her rapists were also her accusers. In Afghanistan, similarly, women are often sentenced to prison terms of up to twenty years after being raped. Houdaiby’s praise for “Western political systems” may have convinced some Western liberals that he is one of them, but his support for a Sharia-ruled state, with all the gender inequities it implies, indicates otherwise.

Indeed, in his ideology, Houdaiby is an Islamist of the old school. As his spiritual inspiration, he invokes the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sheikh Youssef el-Qaradawi. Of Qaradawi, Houdaiby claims that he has “shown a high level of respect for human rights and civil liberties.” In fact, Qaradawi is an anti-Semite who rejects all dialogue with Jews – “There is no dialogue between them and us other than… the language of the sword and force,” he has declared – and a supporter of terrorism. In 2007, Khaled Mashal, the Damascus-based leader of Brotherhood offshoot Hamas, praised Qaradawi for his “support of martyrdom operations.” According to Mashal, the good sheikh “never hesitated to issue rulings in support of these operations, and there were times when we were in dire need of these rulings.” That Houdaiby regards Qaradawi as a model religious guide is a telling commentary on what it means to be a “moderate Islamist.”

If UCI faculty and administrators are troubled by Houdaiby’s agenda, they show no evidence of it. Professor LeVine, while conceding that he has not read all of Houdaiby’s writing, defended him as someone who “absolutely” does not represent the Brotherhood’s more extreme positions. And yet, LeVine added that he would support inviting him to the school even if that were the case. “In the end I don’t really care,” Levine said. “I think he represents a rising generation of Islamic activists that we need to talk with, and I don’t think I need to read everything he’s written to see that he’s worth engaging.”

Still, LeVine says that he would be happy to invite critics of Islam and Islamism to UCI, including Ayan Hirsi Ali and Dutch politician Geert Wilders, provided that the school can afford their fees. (LeVine said that the Houdaiby will not be receiving an honorarium for his appearance and that the school has paid only for his trip from Egypt.) For now, though, that sentiment does not appear widely shared at UCI. The school does not plan to have a speaker to challenge Houdaiby's presentation of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The only clear winner in that scenario would seem to be the Muslim Brotherhood. The forerunner of al-Qaeda has long tried to present itself as a force for tolerance, human-rights and democracy in the Muslim world. Even in the Middle East that self-description has not gone unchallenged. How ironic that it should meet with so little skepticism at an institution devoted, at least in theory, to promoting critical thinking.

Fed to lend to companies in emergency move

By JEANNINE AVERSA

WASHINGTON (AP) - Frantically trying to stop the bleeding on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve took a first-time step Tuesday to get cash directly to businesses and hinted that interest rates could come down soon. Stocks continued their free fall anyway and hit new five-year lows.

The central bank invoked emergency powers to lend money to companies outside the financial sector and buy up mounds of commercial paper, the short-term debt that firms use to pay for everyday expenses like salaries and supplies.

The Fed, which has only loaned money to banks before, made the move as the gravest financial crisis in decades wore on and concern spread around the world.

In a speech to the National Association for Business Economics, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered a strong signal interest rates may need to be cut. And he warned the country could be stuck in the economic doldrums for some time.

"The outlook for economic growth has worsened," Bernanke said. "The heightened financial turmoil that we have experienced of late may well lengthen the period of weak economic performance."

The gloomy assessment appeared to open the door wider to an interest rate cut on or before the Fed convenes again Oct. 28. The Fed's key interest rate now stands at 2 percent.

Wall Street turned its back. The Dow Jones industrials lost 508 points, more than 5 percent, to close at 9,447, the lowest since Sept. 30, 2003. The Standard & Poor's 500, a broader stock index, closed below 1,000 for the first time since that same day.

President Bush again sought to strike a reassuring tone and said the nation would make it through an economy blighted by job losses, record foreclosures and shriveled retirement savings. Congress' top budget analyst estimated Tuesday that Americans' retirement plans have lost as much as $2 trillion in 15 months.

"Have faith, this economy is going to recover over time," the president said in a speech in Virginia. "I wish I could snap my fingers and make what happened stop. But that's not the way it works."

Bush reached out to European leaders earlier Tuesday to urge coordination on efforts to solve the crisis. The White House said Bush was open to the idea of a summit.

The contagion has spread overseas. Britain's chief financial regulator was readying a statement to make before markets opened Wednesday, and the BBC reported that the British government was poised to announce a rescue package for the banking system there.

Concerns are mounting that a global recession is developing, and pressure is growing on the U.S. government to do something beyond the $700 billion financial bailout package that Bush signed into law Friday.

To that end, the Fed announced it would begin buying companies' short-term debt. The powers were bestowed during the Depression as part of the Federal Reserve Act.

The government's bailout package is aimed at thawing lending by buying bad mortgage-related debt off the books of troubled financial institutions. The idea is that the banks would then be in a better position to lend and get the economy moving.

Commercial paper borrowing usually ranges from overnight to less than a week. But in the current climate of mistrust, the market has dried up considerably.

The action makes the Fed a crucial source of credit for nonfinancial businesses in addition to commercial banks and investment firms—and also exposes it to risk because so much of the debt would not be backed by collateral.

Credit markets, clenched up for weeks now, relaxed somewhat after the Fed's move.

The Fed said it was creating a new entity to buy two types of short-term debt, known as three-month unsecured and asset-backed commercial paper, directly from eligible companies. It hopes to have the program up and running soon, Fed officials said.

Fed officials said they would buy as much of the debt as necessary to get the market functioning again but refused to say how much that might be. They noted that around $1.3 trillion worth of commercial paper would qualify.

The Treasury Department, which worked with the Fed on the program, said the action was "necessary to prevent substantial disruptions to the financial markets and the economy."

The Treasury will provide money to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to support the new program, the Fed said. The money would be separate from the $700 billion financial bailout package.

The Fed said it planned to stop buying the short-term debt on April 30 but may extend the program.

There was $1.6 trillion in outstanding commercial paper, seasonally adjusted, on the market as of last week, the most recent data from the Fed. The market has shrunk from $2.2 trillion last summer.

ACORN office in Vegas raided in voter-fraud probe

By OSKAR GARCIA

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state's office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.

Secretary of State spokesman Bob Walsh says ACORN is accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with false and duplicate names.

The raid comes two months after state and federal authorities formed a task force to pursue election-fraud allegations in Nevada.

25 Years Later: We Came in Peace

(Compiler's note: A "must read" article. rca) jihad

By Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)

In a Proceedings exclusive, the commanding officer of the Marine unit devastated by the suicide bombing of its barracks in Beirut recounts the horror of that October day 25 years ago and calls it a seminal event in the war against Islamist extremists.

On Sunday morning, 23 October 1983, I awoke as usual at dawn, dressed, and went below to the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit's Combat Operations Center to check the overnight communications traffic. I roamed outside my headquarters at Beirut International Airport to view the dawn, struck by the quiet of the morning. I saw Marines going about their duties and greeted others preparing for a workout. Being Sunday, we were on a modified routine that pushed reveille back an hour to 0630, with Sunday brunch served between 0800 and 1000.

I returned to my office, which I shared with my executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Slacum, to review the daily schedule. Little did we know that this morning would be anything but quiet and routine.

At 0622, a massive explosion rocked our headquarters, followed by enormous shock waves. Shards of glass from the blown out windows, equipment, manuals, and papers flew across the room. The office entry door, located on the far side away from the explosion, was blown off its hinges, the frame bent and the reinforced concrete foundation of the building cracked.

I ran outside to find myself engulfed in a dense, gray fog of ash, with debris still raining down. I felt sickened as I stumbled around to the rear of my headquarters, thinking we had taken a direct hit from a Scud missile or heavy artillery. As the acrid fog began lifting, my logistics officer, Major Bob Melton, gasped, "My God, the BLT building is gone!" A knot tightened in my gut.

After an instant of disbelief, I quickly realized we had suffered heavy casualties. I later learned that a suicide driver penetrated our southern perimeter and rammed a 19-ton truck bomb into the lobby of the Marine Battalion Landing Team (BLT) building and detonated it. Forensics and intelligence later estimated the compressed-gas-enhanced device to have an explosive equivalent in excess of 20,000 pounds of TNT. Minutes later, a similar truck bomb struck the French paratrooper headquarters at Ramlet-El-Baida, bringing down a nine-story building and killing 58 French peacekeepers.

This started the longest and most miserable day of my life. The death toll eventually reached 241 Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers, the highest loss of life in a single day since D-Day on Iwo Jima in 1945. The coordinated dual suicide attacks, supported, planned, organized, and financed by Iran and Syria using Shiite proxies, achieved their strategic goal: the withdrawal of the multinational force from Lebanon and a dramatic change in U.S. national policy. The synchronized attacks that morning killed 299 U.S. and French peacekeepers and wounded scores more. The cost to the Iranian/Syrian-supported operation was two suicide bombers dead.

Remembrance and Justice

At dawn this 23 October, a solemn candlelight vigil will begin the day at the foot of the Beirut Memorial, nestled in the pines of North Carolina. Families, veterans, and friends will gather to pay tribute to those who "Came in Peace" on this, the 25th anniversary. Each name etched on the marble wall of the memorial will be read aloud by a family member or friend. Later, a more formal ceremony will include military music, pageantry, and speeches commemorating the legacy of the peacekeepers who paid the ultimate sacrifice. A wreath will be laid at the foot of the statue of the lone Marine standing perpetual guard at the memorial.

The quiet strength and dignity displayed by the families of those lost is a continual source of inspiration to me. There are numerous stories about how they picked up the pieces of shattered lives, helped one another, and carried on to raise their families. There is no finer tribute to honor the memories of these fallen.

In the Iranian Behesht-E-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran, there will also be a ceremony at a monument erected in 2004 to commemorate the Beirut suicide bombers. In attendance will likely be some dressed as suicide bombers, chanting the standard "death to America" and "death to Israel."

One individual who will be absent this year is Imad Fayez Mugniyah, one of the world's most wanted and notorious terrorists. He was a key operative in the suicide bombings that Sunday morning in Beirut and has been linked with many major operations including the 1984 kidnapping and murder of the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley. Mugniyah was also directly in charge of the 1988 kidnapping and execution of Marine Corps Colonel Rich Higgins, who was serving with the United Nations peacekeeping mission. And he was indicted in absentia by the U.S. government for his role in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, which led to the savage beating and execution of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stetham.

Long overdue justice was finally served on 12 February 2008. In an ironic twist, Mugniyah was assassinated in a quiet, upscale neighborhood of Damascus-by a car bomb, one of his weapons of choice. His greatest notoriety was pioneering the widespread use of suicide bombers, which has evolved to become the favored tactic of Islamic extremists.

Osama bin Laden took inspiration from Mugniyah's 1983 bombings and used that model for al Qaeda's first successful dual suicide bombings against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, on 7 August 1998. Before a meeting between bin Laden and Mugniyah in Sudan in 1996, al Qaeda did not have this expertise. But it later expanded the simultaneous, coordinated suicide bombing model for the four commercial airline hijackings and attacks on 11 September 2001.

The events that Sunday morning in Beirut exposed a deep-seated fanaticism fanned by Islamic jihadists without sectarian divisions. Recent history has made us more familiar with this phenomenon. The 18 April bombing of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks' bombings in Beirut are considered to be seminal events in the war against terrorism. It was the first time Islamic suicide bombers had attacked significant American targets. This Iranian- and Syrian-instigated act of war was pure terrorism. Our timidity to respond created an aura of impunity that the Islamic extremists sensed and pursued all the way to the 9/11 attacks, which finally awakened America.

Suicide Attacks

The introduction of suicide truck bombs as a tactic in Beirut in 1983 proved to be an effective if heinous tool. The bottom line is that they worked, and recent history has confirmed their cruel efficiency and huge cost in innocent lives. These attacks were cynically planned to ensure success for the terrorists and cause massive casualties.

The post-bombing investigation conducted by FBI Special Agent Danny Deffenbaugh revealed computations and technical assessment of the device (bomb) and the high explosive used-pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN). Deffenbaugh also identified canisters of compressed butane gas contained in the bed of the truck with the PETN. This enhancement of the explosive, also found at the earlier U.S. embassy attack, indicated the Iranians were trying to create a fuel-air explosive. This creates a shocking effect with a propagation wave that produces additional heat and takes away the oxygen twice as fast. An explosives expert stated that this effect verified the anti-personnel purpose of the attack. It also explained the reason why so many dead and wounded suffered severe burns.

In describing the destructive strength of the bomb, Deffenbaugh verified publicly what was briefed to us privately by the FBI and others-that the immensity of the bomb precluded the necessity of the truck bomb reaching the building. I was informed that the truck did not even have to leave the airport access road adjacent to the western side of the BLT building to have comparable devastation and casualties. The suicide bomb that killed the French paratroopers did not reach their headquarters before it detonated but still caused the collapse of the nine-story structure.

More telling was the successful suicide attack on Israeli headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, on 4 November 1983, just ten days after the attack on U.S. and French peacekeepers. Even though the Israelis had none of the restrictions of a presence mission and nothing that would hinder their extensive intelligence capabilities, they were struck with a carbon-copy attack ten days after our attack. It should be noted that the Israelis had many of the defenses the Marines were criticized for not having at Beirut International Airport. Still, the terrorist attack was successfully carried out-killing 60 and injuring 30 more-even though the suicide truck was halted well short of the target.

Members of the intelligence community compiled an all-sources damage assessment after the Marine barracks bombing. In it, they studied signals, overhead, and human intelligence and concluded the evidence was overpowering that Iran had been behind it. An intelligence expert close to the final assessment stated he did not know anyone who studied the information and drew any other conclusion.

Beyond carnage, suicide bombings provide grand theater by way of international press coverage. Since their genesis in Beirut, such attacks have grown to becoming a weapon of choice for Shia and Sunni alike. This tactic carries a profound psychological message of fear and intimidation. I believe reasonable observers agree that such attacks are very difficult to deter, and their increased usage and success reflect the terrorists' desire for the spectacular hysteria and chaos created by such attacks.

Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah

The Multinational Peacekeeping Force presence in Lebanon in 1982-83 undoubtedly contributed to the stability of the government of Lebanon and saved lives. Our successes, albeit limited, were obviously worrisome enough to the primary powerbrokers in Tehran and Damascus to compel them to launch the suicide truck bombing operations against us. The timing, locations, and targets of the bombings were no more coincidental than were the sophisticated planning, magnitude, and execution of the attacks.

The choice of 23 October was significant because National Reconciliation Talks among all key factions within the government of Lebanon were scheduled to be held in Geneva, beginning on the 31st. Preliminary talks were set to begin on the 24th at Beirut International Airport, where the U.S. Multi-National Peacekeeping Force had been located for more than a year.

The airport site was supposed to be one of the most secure areas in Lebanon. The Marine and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of who we were and what we represented. The passive nature of the peacekeeping mission provided attractive targets that Iran and Syria were not about to pass up. It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support-which I strongly opposed for a week-to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on 19 September and that the French conducted an air strike on 23 September in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.

Unknown to us at the time, the National Security Agency had made a diplomatic communications intercept on 26 September (the same date as the cease-fire ending the September War) in which the Iranian Intelligence Service provided explicit instructions to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (a known terrorist) to attack the Marines at Beirut International Airport. The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later, with word of the intercept stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack.

Iran's Motivation

Looking back today, it is easier to comprehend why Iran moved a contingent of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps into the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley during the height of the Iraq-Iran War in 1982-83. Following the 1982 Israeli invasion, and with Syrian complicity, Iran established a base of operations to carry out its strategic goals. This corps founded, financed, trained, and equipped Hezbollah to operate as a proxy army, a force expanded today to challenge the freely elected government of Lebanon, which cannot control, much less disarm, Hezbollah.

Using Lebanon as a base, the force conducted border raids and rained rocket and missile attacks on Israel. Iranian persistence and determination has paid off handsomely in terms of regional influence, political power, and military prowess, and they have suffered no consequences. It is clear that their brashness and the carnage they inflict continue to expand.

The recent revelations that Iranian weapons are killing U.S. Marines and Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan should surprise no one. Conclusive evidence has disclosed that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force has transported roadside bombs and armor-piercing "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs) from Iran into Iraq. Other advanced Iranian weapons found in Iraq include the RPG-29 rocket-propelled grenade, 240-mm rockets, and perhaps the most ominous, the Misagh 1, a portable surface-to-air missile that uses an infrared guidance system.

This influx of sophisticated weaponry has been accompanied by intelligence revealing Iranian facilitation of travel and training inside Iran for Iraqi insurgents. U.S. intelligence officials have stated that Iranian complicity could not take place without approval at the highest levels of the Iranian government.

Among the terrorist groups that Iran supports are al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Three of them are Sunni groups and are supported, among other reasons, to undercut the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Shiite Iran's support and its strategic relationship with the Sunni Wahhabi al Qaeda are especially telling.

The relationship between Iran and al Qaeda was confirmed by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission. Its report highlighted Iranian involvement in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, training for al Qaeda operations against Israel and the United States, and safe-transport and safe-haven for those operations.

War Against the United States

What continues to unfold is the debunking of the theory that an ideological separation between the Sunnis and Shiites would prevent any mutual cooperation in operations against a common enemy, i.e., the United States and its allies. Evidence confirms the old adage that my enemy's enemy is my friend.

In reality, Iran has been waging war against the United States for more than a quarter-century, from the 1979 hostage crisis and the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 to providing sophisticated weaponry to Sunni and Shia insurgents in Iraq. Iranian mullahs have chosen to wage a radically aggressive campaign to create and accelerate instability throughout the region by using their proxies, many of whom are non-Shia. Some examples include:

Support for Hamas to launch rockets and attacks into Israeli villages across the Gaza Strip borders

Continued building of heavily armed Hezbollah in Lebanon to not only challenge the legitimacy of the duly-elected government of Lebanon, but also to prepare for the inevitable next war with Israel

Supporting Syria, their lone Arab client, in their incessant efforts to further destabilize Lebanon and Iraq. (At last count, eight anti-Syrian Lebanese leaders, journalists, and members of parliament have been assassinated by Syrian operatives.)

Supporting Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan against NATO forces

Using the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force to facilitate training, equipping, and financing Shiite and Sunni extremist militias in Iraq against U.S., Iraqi Army, and coalition forces.

A recent development revealed that Hezbollah instructors trained Shiite militiamen in remote camps inside southern Iraq and planned some of the most brazen attacks against U.S.-led forces.

Iran has evolved as a major player in the Middle East with growing influence. Its proxy war with Israel, which many fail to see as only one front in a larger war, increases Iranian popularity throughout the Arab world. The Iranian capability to cause trouble on three fronts, on their schedule, does not augur well for the peace process. Add to this Quds Force links to the Taliban and Iranian weapons and sophisticated munitions being smuggled into Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iran has positioned itself to wreak havoc and cause diversions through proxies while avoiding retribution for their continuing bloodshed.

Connecting the Dots

In August 2005, Mustafa Mohammad-Najjar was named the new defense minister of Iran. This position takes on new importance considering the brazen, complex campaign Iran is waging to destabilize the region. Keep in mind that these diversions draw attention from their primary objective of attaining a nuclear capability.

Najjar's previous assignment as senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps earned him a reputation of ruthlessness and ideological loyalty. In 1983, he commanded the 1,500-man expeditionary force sent to Lebanon's Baaka Valley.

This Iranian unit provided security, planning, training, and operational support for the dual suicide truck bombings on 23 October 1983. Najjar's successes in these attacks, which are still celebrated in Tehran today, led to the withdrawal of the Multinational Peacekeeping Force. The withdrawal after the bombings, with no retribution from the United States, became a turning point in the unbounded use of terrorism by radical Islamic fanatics worldwide. Under his command, Najjar's corps played a key role in the formation of the Party of God (Hezbollah) and the education and training of Mugniyah, who reportedly lived and operated out of Iran.

I often wonder whether Najjar was among those troops involved in the fighting at Suq-al-Garb during the September War in 1983. The 24th Marine Amphibious Unit's 2d Radio Detachment was intercepting, among others, significant Farsi communications during the multi-Muslim militia's assault on the Lebanese armed forces. The multi-confessional Lebanese army held together and successfully defended its position which, in my opinion, led the decision makers in Tehran and Damascus to change their tactics from conventional attacks to the shadows of terrorism. Whether or not he was present at Suq-al-Garb, Najjar's position as commander of the Revolutionary Guard detachment supports the notion that he would have wanted to be there. My guess is that he was.

As the Iranian defense minister, he is most certainly involved in global terrorist attacks and the acquisition of nuclear weaponry. It is more probable than possible that Iran will use its favorite proxy, Hezbollah, to carry out future attacks against the West, including the United States. Najjar's long association with the now-deceased terrorist mastermind Mugniyah lends credence to this. We could well find ourselves, in our own country, the recipient of a weapon of mass destruction in an attack planned and executed by some of the same players who carried out the 1983 suicide attacks in Beirut. Some of these dots could very well connect.

Another dot emerged shortly after the announcement of Najjar's ascendency to defense minister. A close confidant and fellow alumnus of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Lebanon contingent was appointed by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to lead the corps' ground forces. Brigadier General Ahmad Kazemi, whose previous assignment was commander of the Republican Guard's air force, was responsible for the development of solid-fuel technology. He was also responsible for research and production of Shahab missiles, including the Shahab-4, with a projected range of 3,000 kilometers and capable of carrying a nuclear warhead that could reach the heart of Europe.

The Story Continues

Today, Lebanon is again being used as a battlefield for foreign forces to settle their disagreements. The state-within-a-state that the Palestine Liberation Organization created in the late 1970s has been replaced. The Iranian model, establishing Hezbollah as a proxy, has proved to be more successful. Hezbollah's development and growth suggest that in 1983, Iran and Syria had a long-range strategy to increase their influence in the region and the world. The operational and training base established by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that year remains an active hub of activity a quarter-century later.

This 23 October, when families and friends gather for this year's remembrance, will again remind us of those dedicated peacekeepers who never came home. They were denied the joy of raising a family, pursuing their dreams, and enjoying the blessings of America. Amid the renewals of friendship, hugs, and tears, there always lingers an undercurrent of deep sorrow and anguish that hasn't lessened 25 years later. The peacekeepers' valor and sacrifice will never be forgotten.

Colonel Geraghty served over 25 years in the Marine Corps and seven years in the Special Operations Group of the Central Intelligence Agency. He commanded the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut, Lebanon, during the suicide truck bombings on 23 October 1983. He currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona.