Sunday, September 03, 2006
Demagoguery Won't Keep Us Safe
Huffington Post
Demagoguery Won't Keep Us Safe
Coleen Rowley
In the past week, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld have both made impassioned appeals to continue the U.S. occupation of Iraq, insisting that any other option means defeat or, worse yet, is an effort to "appease" the terrorists. Cheney insisted that opponents of the occupation are not "serious" about fighting terror, while Rumsfeld accused critics of wanting to "Blame America First".
It didn't take long for Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post to expose the fact that the only thing Rumsfeld and Cheney are serious about is using the terrorist threat --- again --- to vilify their opponents for political gain:
Bush suggested last week that Democrats are promising voters to block additional money for continuing the war. Vice President Cheney this week said critics "claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, citing passivity toward Nazi Germany before World War II, said that "many have still not learned history's lessons" and "believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased."
Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone.
The fact that senior members of the administration are relying so heavily on straw men in their efforts to bolster support for the occupation of Iraq demonstrates just how weak their case is. But Donald Rumsfeld made a particular appeal to "history's lessons" in his speech, and it is worth pointing out a number of historical lessons which the current administration would do well to learn.
1. Bravado is no substitute for policy. As Keith Olbermann so eloquently explained, the real parallel between today's situation and Neville Chamberlain's attempts to appease Hitler is that, like the Bush administration, Chamberlain willfully ignored important facts which contradicted his chosen course. In the absence of a detailed plan for success in Iraq --- and it's abundantly clear more than three years in that there is none --- the Bush position essentially boils down to Chamberlain's: trust that the government knows what it's doing.
For some administrations, this might be a tenable position. However the Bush administration has been consistently proven wrong about every aspect of the 'war on terror', from supposed links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to the magnitude of Iraq's weapons stockpiles to the number of troops required for a successful mission to the overall cost of the war. Given their track record alone, their 'stay the course' policy is almost certainly the wrong one. As I've often said on the campaign trail these last 14 months, quoting from the great Albert Einstein, "We cannot solve a problem with the same level of mentality that created it."
2. Military force is ineffective against insurgencies. The U.S., U.S.S.R. and Great Britain were able to defeat the Nazis on the battlefield because the Nazis were on the battlefield. Yet despite the administration's acknowledgement that the terrorist threat is "a different kind of enemy," they still believe terrorism can be defeated militarily.
From the American withdrawal from Vietnam to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to the 18-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, history teaches us that military force is an inefficient tool for combating insurgencies. It is even less effective when focused on a single country in an effort to defeat a global enemy like al Qaeda.
3. Our choices are not limited to all-out war or 'appeasement'. The Cold War was 'cold' because we never directly engaged the Soviets in combat. There were proxy wars, to be sure, but there was also a great deal of negotiation, economic pressure, and carrot-and-stick applied to bring about the demise of the Soviet Union. It took nearly fifty years, but in the end we won, and democracy flowered in Eastern Europe in spectacular fashion. This came about not as the result of armed conflict or 'appeasement', but by tough-minded negotiation based on rock-solid intelligence, all backed by a credible threat of force.
4. Violating civil liberties in the name of security is a mistake. Japanese-Americans were forced into internment camps during WWII. Joe McCarthy conducted a witch hunt investigating 'un-American activities'. And Cold War surveillance abuses under Presidents Johnson and Nixon led to near-unanimous approval of the FISA act. All of these efforts purporting to increase security by violating the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of Americans have been rightly regarded by posterity as 'un-American'. There is no question history will render the same verdict on President Bush's illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of innocent Americans.
There is one final lesson of history, not for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, but for the American people. The two U.S. presidents who have come closest to 'appeasement' in Iraq are Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, each of whom turned a blind eye to massacres Saddam Hussein committed against his own people. Bush Senior even failed to lift a finger as Hussein massacred hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites who attempted to depose him at Bush's behest. Rumsfeld was the Reagan administration envoy who negotiated with Hussein, and Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush.
If Cheney and Rumsfeld had admitted error in their previous dealings with Hussein, they might have more credibility now. But for them, as for George Bush, the top priority is never to admit fault, and never to appear weak. Ironically, the desire to appear strong has dangerously weakened our military and significantly increased the terrorist threat.
Bravado is not a defense against terrorism, and neither is demagoguery. It's time America had leaders who understand that.
Co-written by Coleen Rowley, Candidate for Congress in Minnesota's 2nd District and David Bailey, researcher and writer for the campaign.
Hizbullah's Worrisome Weapon: Imagine if terrorists got hold of car bombs with wings. Now they can.
Hizbullah's Worrisome Weapon
Imagine if terrorists got hold of car bombs with wings. Now they can.
By Dan Ephron
Newsweek
Sept. 11, 2006 issue - Hizbullah's chief, Hassan Nasrallah, spent the past two years bragging about a remote-control aircraft that could carry an explosive device to strike a target anywhere inside Israel. He finally put that threat into action a few weeks ago, during the Lebanon war, launching three of the pilotless planes toward Israeli targets—including two on the war's last day. They were Iranian-built Ababil unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), capable of carrying an 88-pound warhead for up to 150 miles. The Israelis say Hizbullah received at least 12 UAVs from Iran before the war—meaning that Nasrallah may still have a small arsenal of them hidden away for future use.
How dangerous could terrorist UAVs be? Some analysts doubt that the pilotless planes are a real threat. Ephraim Sneh, a retired Israeli general and a Labor Party member of Parliament, says a UAV's relatively small payload gives only "limited" capacity to inflict damage—although it still packs significantly more explosive power than any of the unguided Katyusha rockets that pounded northern Israel until the fighting stopped. All three UAVs launched by Hizbullah during the 33-day war were shot down by Israeli jets before they could do any harm. It's easy if you know how, says Israel's outgoing chief of military intelligence, Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser.
Still, many U.S. and Israeli defense experts are worried. What if terrorists crashed a UAV into a petrochemical facility? Or detonated it inside a packed sports stadium? "I suspect they would have loved to hit one of our national symbols," says another Israeli source, asking not to be named discussing sensitive military matters. The vehicles, especially models with sophisticated guidance systems like the Ababil's, can fly close to the ground, making them tough to detect by radar.
The Pentagon saw the risk even before Lebanon erupted. This past January, NEWSWEEK has learned, the U.S. Air Force ordered a classified study of the UAV threat. The Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board is still working on its report, which is expected to suggest ways to disable the planes—possibly by jamming their remote signals—without affecting America's own communications. In laying out the study's "terms of reference," Air Force officials warned that the "total number of UAVs, including those that have the potential to be used against U.S. interests, is proliferating exponentially."
U.S. analysts have particular qualms about the Tehran regime. "If the Iranians supplied UAVs to Hizbullah, there's no reason they couldn't supply similar capability to elements of the insurgency in Iraq," says Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official on the National Security Council. A senior Pentagon official, asking not to be named discussing strategic issues, says U.S. troops are equipped to track most tactical objects that become airborne, including at least some of the smaller pilot-less planes. But the terrorists and their weapons keep growing more sophisticated. Tim Owings, the deputy project manager for the U.S. Army's own Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems, says his team is giving close attention to the threat. "We're certainly spending more time exploring counter-type activities," he tells NEWSWEEK. Now Nasrallah has made the task more urgent than ever.
With Kevin Peraino in Jerusalem
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14640261/site/newsweek/
The 'Islamofascists'
The 'Islamofascists'
Bush's new national-security offensive has been plagued by debate over what to call the bad guys.
By Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
Newsweek
Sept. 11, 2006 issue - Last fall White House aides were grappling with a seemingly simple question that had eluded them for years: what should the president, in his many speeches on the war on terror, call the enemy? They were searching for a single clean phrase that could both define the foe and reassure Americans who were confused by a conflict that had grown much bigger than Osama bin Laden. But the answer was anything but simple. Some academics preferred the term "Islamism," but the aides thought that sounded too much as if America were fighting the entire religion. Another option: jihadism. But to many Muslims, it's a positive word that doesn't necessarily evoke bloodshed. Some preferred the conservative buzzword "Islamofascism," which was catchy and tied neatly into Bush's historical view of the struggle.
But when national-security adviser Steve Hadley called the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department, the experts nixed the idea of a single phrase for a war that was so complex. "There was a conscious desire not to use just one definitive word, because there wasn't a perfect word," recalls Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter at the time (and now a NEWSWEEK contributor). The result was a rhetorical mishmash. "Some call this evil Islamic radicalism," Bush explained, "others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamofascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam."
Five years after 9/11, and more than three years after invading Iraq, President Bush is still searching for the perfect phrase to define the enemy in the war on terror—and reassure Americans who will soon head to the polls. Other Republicans—including Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who is in a tough re-election race—have adopted "Islamofascism" as shorthand for terrorists. The term gained currency in the early '90s in reference to radical Muslim clerics, and was popularized after 9/11 by neocons.
Bush has used the term "Islamic fascists" sporadically, most recently to describe the alleged London bomb plotters last month. But the phrase was noticeably absent from his latest major speech on the war last week—which was part of a procession of campaign-style addresses by the administration's biggest names. This time he called the bad guys "a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology." It was hardly the kind of pithy slogan GOP activists could slap on a bumper sticker.
With the elections just two months away, the White House is turning once again to a strategy that has worked so well in the past: evoke 9/11, raise the specter of Al Qaeda and accuse the Democrats of fatal weakness in the face of the enemy. But 2006 is not 2004, when the administration found it easier to tie bin Laden's loyalists in with the insurgents in Iraq. One of Bush's strengths has been his ability to make the complex seem simple. But the war on terror's many fronts—British airline plots, Lebanese militias, Iranian nukes, brewing civil war in Iraq—defy any simple political packaging. (Some foreign-policy analysts question whether Bush may be unwittingly helping the jihadists by lumping together disparate groups, instead of exploiting the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and non-Arabs.)
Voters—including many Republicans—are openly doubting the president's ability to make the country more secure.
Voters—including many Republicans—are openly doubting the president's ability to make the country more secure. Polls show that voters narrowly side with Republicans on terrorism, but they now prefer Democrats on Iraq. The White House believes the numbers are driven by the continuing bloodshed (the latest Pentagon report shows a 50 percent increase in Iraqi casualties this summer, citing a rise in sectarian violence and a still-powerful Sunni insurgency). For an administration that has built its entire political strategy around simplifying the complexities of national security, the widening war—and the softening ground at home—are sources of great frustration. "It can be hard to really explain who we are fighting and what we are up against in a way that isn't confusing," said one senior Bush aide, who declined to be named while speaking about strategy.
The uncertainty over how best to sell the war may help explain last week's speeches by the administration's biggest guns—Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice. The media played them as a concerted effort to put Democrats on the defensive and win back the trust of disillusioned Republicans. But the speeches also underscored something else: how disjointed the once disciplined administration has become when talking about the war. Cheney, usually the most aggressive member of Team Bush, was notably less strident about the war's critics; his assertion that they suffer from "self-defeating pessimism" was a step back from earlier complaints that they had lost "their memory, or their backbone." Bush described the doubters as "sincere" and "patriotic"—but wrong. But Rumsfeld apparently didn't get the memo. In one of his more extreme rhetorical forays, the Defense secretary likened critics of the war to the appeasers of Nazi Germany in prewar Europe. Rice, meanwhile, chose an altogether different historical analogy. The fight against terrorists, she suggested, was akin to the long struggle of the cold war.
GOP strategists are working to get their own message under control, and to unify a disparate party. According to one internal party memo, Bush's position on national security is the best way to motivate Republicans to go to the polls in November. Longtime pollster Fred Steeper, a former adviser to Bush 41, wrote that "large majorities" supported Bush's commitment to defeating terrorists in Iraq and around the world.
Any sign of disarray was out of sight as Bush landed in Utah, one of the reddest states in the Union, last week. A hastily arranged crowd of more than 3,000 supporters gathered late on Wednesday to greet him at Salt Lake City airport. Bush bounded off his plane to the soundtrack of the movie "Air Force One" as rock-concert lights spun and twirled in the night sky. "You're the man, George!" screamed one fan. The president might not know what to call the enemy, but he knows where to find his friends.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14640535/site/newsweek/
Iraq, US at odds over military handover
Reuters
Iraq, US at odds over military handover
By Ross Colvin
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The United States and Iraq were at odds on Saturday over the transfer of operational control of Iraq's military to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government, forcing a delay of a handover ceremony.
Saturday's ceremony to transfer control of Iraq's army from U.S. commander General George Casey to the Iraqi Defense Ministry had been hailed by U.S. officials as a big step toward Iraq taking responsibility for security.
"There is a disagreement on the wording of the document that outlines the new relationship between Coalition Forces and Iraqis," U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson told Reuters late on Saturday evening.
"It is embarrassing, but it was decided it was better not to sign the document," he said, adding that objections to the wording had been raised by Maliki's government.
The U.S. military, suffering almost daily casualties, has been training Iraq's fledgling military so that it can gradually extract itself from Iraq's increasingly sectarian violence more than three years after the 2003 invasion.
"They are not going to go ahead with the document until the language is agreed upon. It's not a matter of major substance, but they're not happy with the wording of the document," Johnson said, adding that it would be signed "in a matter of days".
Maliki, keen to be seen as ending his government's dependency on U.S. military power, said this week his forces would take control of most of Iraq from foreign troops by the end of the year. But some analysts have questioned this timetable given the surge in sectarian bloodletting.
Fourteen Pakistani and Indian Shi'ite pilgrims were abducted and killed in Iraq's western desert, police said on Saturday, victims of sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shi'ites that threatens civil war.
In his weekly radio address, U.S. President George. W Bush told Americans that Iraq was not in civil war, despite a bloody week in which hundreds more died and a grim Pentagon report said spreading violence may turn into just such an all-out conflict.
"Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war," Bush said. "They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, while the overwhelming majority want peace and a normal life in a unified country."
PM MEETS SISTANI
The top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a new call for restraint after meeting Shi'ite Islamist Maliki in the holy city of Najaf and warned the government to act quickly to avoid disaster.
The slain pilgrims, 11 Pakistanis and three Indians, had been traveling to holy Shi'ite sites in Iraq on Thursday when they were attacked in Anbar province, the desert heartland of the Sunni insurgency, Iraqi and Indian officials said.
An official at the al-Hussein hospital in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala, where the bodies were taken on Friday, said the 14 men had their hands bound and had been shot in the head. Some had been tortured and one was partially decapitated.
An attack on a revered Shi'ite shrine in February has unleashed bloodletting between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Muslims who were politically dominant under Saddam Hussein and now form the backbone of the three-year-old insurgency.
"If the state is unable to ensure security for the people then this will open the way for some groups to do this and this would be very risky," Sistani said in a statement, referring to militias blamed for violence and which Maliki vows to disband.
But the reclusive Sistani's restraining hand on Shi'ites has been weakened since the February attack as Shi'ite death squads have become prime movers in what the Pentagon called the "core conflict" -- no longer the insurgency but sectarian bloodshed.
Indian junior Foreign Minister E. Ahamed told Reuters the 14 pilgrims killed on Thursday were among 40 people who had entered Iraq after touring holy sites in Jordan and Syria.
Ahamed said gunmen had stopped the convoy and separated the men from the women in the party, which comprised 14 Indians and 26 Pakistanis. Police found the bodies of the men in neighboring Kerbala province the following day, he said.
Assessing the situation in Iraq over the past three months, a 63-page Pentagon report said on Friday attacks rose by 24 percent, Iraqi casualties soared by 51 percent and the violence was extending north beyond Baghdad. Partial Iraqi data indicated a dip of about a quarter in civilian deaths in August, however.
(Additional reporting by Robert Birsel in Islamabad, Patricia Wilson in Washington, N. Ananthanarayanan in New Delhi and Alastair Macdonald, Ibon Villelabeitia, and Mussab Al-Khairalla in Baghdad)
Agency wants FAA execs disciplined over 9/11
Reuters
Agency wants FAA execs disciplined over 9/11: NYT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Transportation Department's inspector general has urged the FAA to consider disciplining two executives who failed to correct false information provided to the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
Citing the report by the acting inspector general, Todd Zinser, whose office acts as the department's internal watchdog, the Times said the Federal Aviation Administration executives, as well as a third, now-retired official, learned after the fact that false information was given to the commission in May 2003 about the FAA's contacts with the Air Force on the morning of the attacks.
That information suggested that the FAA had made contact with its Air Force liaison immediately after the first of the four hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center in New York, the Times said.
But the commission's investigators found that the liaison did not join a conference call with the FAA until after the third plane crashed nearly an hour later.
The time gap is considered significant because it helps undermine an initial claim by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is responsible for domestic air defense, that it moved quickly and had a chance to shoot down the last of the hijacked planes still in the air, United Airlines Flight 93, the Times said.
Now the inspector general's report, compiled to address complaints from the independent September 11 commission, has found that the three FAA executives failed to act on an "obligation" to correct the false information given to the commission.
The FAA declined to identify the executives and their names and titles were not disclosed in the inspector general's report, the Times said. The agency also did not say whether it was considering disciplinary action. There was no evidence that the executives provided false information knowingly, the inspector general's office found.
The FAA said the "inspector general's investigation has clarified the record and found no evidence that FAA officials knowingly made false statements," the Times said.
The Pentagon's inspector general said in a similar finding last month concerning military officers who provided inaccurate testimony to the commission that their inaccuracies could be mainly attributed to poor record-keeping.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Al-Qaeda's Saudi Origins
meforum.org
Al-Qaeda's Saudi Origins
Islamist Ideology
by Uriya Shavit
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2006
From where did Al-Qaeda come? While its actions are well known, its intellectual origins are not. Many scholars and analysts depict the group as a new phenomenon. They cite its international recruitment, its message of global jihad, its lack of a clear chain-of-command, and its use of the Internet as both an operational and informative tool. While the group's amorphousness makes it threatening and unpredictable, neither Osama bin Laden's operative modes nor his ideology are cloaked in mystery. Rather, they are a synthesis of two interlinked and equally important sources of influence: first, the teachings of ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam, the leader of the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s; and second, the Saudi opposition movement which arose in the early 1990s and sought to Islamize Saudi society in response to a perceived Western "cultural attack" on the Muslim world.
The Saudi Debate on the Western Cultural Attack
Both influences arose out of a struggle within Saudi Arabian society. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the House of Saud managed to unite much of the Arabian Peninsula under its leadership. The Saudi kingdom preserved a temporal-religious balance of power: Saudi kings and princes took charge of political and financial decisions, while the ulema, the Muslim clergy, governed religious and judicial affairs including the issuance of fatwas, religious edicts that judged the compatibility of temporal decisions with Islamic law.
However, this balance of power was superficial. While the House of Saud derived legitimacy from the ulema, it also appointed or dismissed them and set the boundaries of their authority. Whenever the ulema disagreed with a Saudi king, the last word was almost always his. The clergy could debate political decisions, but they could not impose amendments.
The king and clergy often disagreed over the compatibility of modernization with Wahhabi puritanism. During the 1920s, for example, the ulema protested King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Saud's decision to use wireless communication, claiming it was devilish.[1] During the 1960s, the ulema contested King Faisal Ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz's decision to introduce television broadcasting because, they claimed, it contradicted the Qur'an and could corrupt society.[2] In both cases, clerical objections did not prevent implementation of the king's decision.
The 1970s oil boom changed Saudi society. Two distinct social groups emerged. The first, composed of young, often Western-educated technocrats sought to develop Saudi infrastructure and adapt Saudi administrative, educational, and financial systems to Western standards. The second were ulema, who graduated from newly-established religious schools and universities. They, too, enjoyed the economic boom but feared that rapid modernization could endanger Saudi Arabia's Muslim identity.[3] These young clerics did not oppose modernization per se like their predecessors but demanded that new technologies be harnessed to promote Islam. They did not oppose television broadcasts, for example, but demanded that any programming be Islamic in nature and free of Western influence. Their approach to modernization was, in fact, more Salafi in nature than Wahhabi. While these two strains of Islamism are often conflated, there are subtle differences. Salafism refers to a school of thought developed in Egypt in the late nineteenth century that called for a return to the origins of Islam yet aimed to harmonize Islam with the scientific and technological aspects of modernity. Wahhabism is a Saudi puritan school which, in its idealization of the time of Muhammad, also rejects scientific and technical aspects of modernity.
As modernization progressed, these young ulema became increasingly discontented with the path of the Saudi kingdom. They opposed the growing number of girls attending school, the mushrooming number of television sets, temporal courts, and a banking system that did not adhere to the Islamic legal prohibition against charging interest. The personal extravagance of some young Saudi princes added insult to injury. The authoritarian nature of the Saudi system allowed little outlet for their discontent. When, on November 20, 1979, a young Saudi former national guardsman named Juhaiman al-‘Utaibi and a small band of followers took control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca to demand the overthrow of the House of Saud and the severing of all relations with the West, most ulema stood alongside the king.[4]
However, their unease did not dissipate, but rather than coalesce into a formal opposition movement, they preached the dangers of poorly supervised modernization. They cautioned that the kingdom and the broader Muslim world were subject to a sophisticated Western "cultural attack" (al-ghazw ath-thaqafi) or "intellectual attack" (al-ghazw al-fikri), which sought first to weaken Muslim faith and morals and then conquer again Muslim territories and convert Muslims to Christianity. Its tools were Western textbooks, Western television programs, Western sports, Western cafés, and Western banking systems.[5] Influenced by the teachings of Egyptian Islamists who found refuge in Saudi Arabia, the proponents of such a conspiracy theory did not differentiate between the capitalist West and the communist bloc; both were variations of the same enemy.
The ulema had a two-pronged plan to thwart this Western conspiracy: first they sought to purge Saudi Arabia of any Western influences and Islamize all aspects of Saudi life, including its judiciary, media, financial institutions, and educational systems. They would then launch a counterattack in which they would attempt to influence the Western world, mainly via Muslims living in Europe and the United States.
The Means of Combating the Intellectual Attack on the Muslim World, a book published in Mecca by the Saudi-controlled, pan-Islamist Muslim World League, is a typical manifestation of this conception. The author, Hassan Muhammad Hassan, describes the Western intellectual attack as a tumor whose timely detection is critical to the body's recovery. He argued that the West planned a three-stage offensive: first, the West would seek to convince Muslims that Islam is not a complete way of life but merely folklore; then Muslims would doubt their faith, before lastly, abandoning it.[6] According to Hassan, the Western plot had already borne fruit because of Muslims' ignorance of the ideological underpinnings of Western society. For example, many Muslims failed to understand the destructive implications of teenagers imitating the West by directing their admiration toward soccer teams instead of ulema.[7] He concluded that the only way to counter the Western onslaught would be to restore the hegemony of Islam in all aspects of life: Muslim states should annul any laws which contradict Shari‘a (Islamic law); Muslims should harness the press to further the Islamic cause; Muslims residing in the West must be recruited for the Muslim cause; and all Muslims must understand that any foreign presence on Muslim soil, even when disguised as academic or scientific, is part of a plot to shatter Islamic identity.[8]
The ulema who cautioned against the "cultural attack" regarded the House of Saud, at least rhetorically, as a potential leader, not an enemy, of the struggle against Western penetration. The House of Saud did not oppose this conception. The Saudis were even ready to accept some of the ulema's minor demands, such as increased allocations for proselytizing overseas, so long as the ulema did not violate certain red lines, such as challenging the Saudi kingdom's military alliance with the United States. The war against the "cultural attack" was fine, so long as its prosecution did not threaten regime stability.
The War in Afghanistan and the Legacy of the Armed Jihad
The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, in the eyes of those cautioning against a Western cultural attack, affirmation of their assumptions. The struggle for Afghanistan gave young, religious Saudis—graduates of the kingdom's new religious universities—an opportunity to defend Islam. A few hundred traveled to Afghanistan to join Muslim guerilla fighters, the mujahideen. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan assisted them financially and logistically.[9] For the Saudi regime, their activity was a blessing: not only did it portray Saudi Arabia as a leading force in the liberation of Afghanistan without the kingdom having to directly intervene in the conflict, but it also kept the most radical and adventurous young Saudis far from Saudi Arabia. Instead of fighting the U.S. presence on Saudi soil, the kingdom's young radicals fought Soviet penetration of Afghan soil.
There, many Saudis—including Osama bin Laden—became followers of ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam. A Palestinian who fled to Jordan after the Six-Day war, ‘Azzam joined the Muslim Brotherhood and obtained a doctorate in Islamic law from Cairo's Al-Azhar University in 1973 before settling down to teach Islamic law at the University of Jordan. He was fired for involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood and moved to Saudi Arabia where, in 1981, he joined the faculty of King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz University in Jeddah. He did not stay long and traveled to Islamabad and then to the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier to organize the anti-Soviet jihad. Bin Laden became ‘Azzam's close ally, assisting him with finance and logistics.
‘Azzam argued that it was the personal obligation (fard al-‘ayn) of every Muslim to defend Islamic lands against the penetration of the infidels. This duty was no different than the responsibility to fast or pray. A son neither would need his father's approval nor a wife her husband's approval to fulfill it.[10] Primary responsibility for the fight against occupation of the infidels rested upon the victimized residents but, if they did not possess force enough to resist, every Muslim should join them in battle.[11] Waging war against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and Israel were the highest priorities because these two states represented beachheads from which the infidels would expand. However, ‘Azzam argued Afghanistan was more urgent because the battles at the time were at their peak and because in Afghanistan the resistance was purely Muslim; there were no Christian populations, as there are on the West Bank.[12]
Several Saudi ulema endorsed ‘Azzam's ideas. He also claimed to have the endorsement of Sheikh ‘Abd al-Aziz bin Baz, head of the Council for Senior Ulema, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia, though he offered no proof for this claim.[13] However, he went beyond the concerns articulated by the Saudi ulema: he made the struggle an individual one, giving up on the idea that Muslim states are able to defend Muslim soil. He also shifted the struggle from the sociocultural to military dimension. While his colleagues in Saudi Arabia preached about the dangers of Western penetration into the Muslim world, ‘Azzam transformed his ideas into a successful armed struggle for which he eventually sacrificed his life, dying with two of his sons in a November 1989 explosion in Peshawar, apparently the work of Soviet agents. It was this legacy of an active, armed, and nongovernmental struggle against Western penetration that he bequeathed to bin Laden when the war in Afghanistan ended in a Soviet defeat.
Radicalizing the Defense against Cultural Attack
On August 2, 1990, shortly after bin Laden's return from Afghanistan, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Riyadh's subsequent decision to invite the U.S. military to protect the kingdom radically transformed the Saudi debate about the Western "cultural attack." Deployment of Western troops to Saudi soil fit the narrative of those ulema who said that Western cultural penetration of the kingdom was just a precursor to a Western military reconquest of the Middle East. To these young Saudis, the House of Saud was at best duped by the West and, at worst, complicit.
Aware of the risk, King Fahd urged the Council of Senior Ulema to issue an edict legitimizing the presence of U.S. troops.[14] But rather than appease many of the young ulema, their edict convinced them that the clerics of the senior religious establishment were pawns in the hands of the Sauds and had eschewed their sacred obligation to defend Islam. A movement against U.S. military presence grew rapidly at mosques and in religious universities. Its leaders were Salman al-‘Awda, a professor of Islamic law at Imam Muhammad bin Saud University in Riyadh,[15] and Safar al-Hawali, a charismatic lecturer who headed the department of theology at Umm al-Qurra University in Mecca.[16] Hawali's sermons were widely distributed on audiotape and became popular during the buildup to Operation Desert Storm.[17]
Hawali described the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait as part of a Western conspiracy to conquer the Muslim world. This conspiracy was, in Hawali's opinion, the result of a Western understanding that in the post-Soviet era, only the Muslim world could challenge Western hegemony, and therefore, the West must subordinate all Muslims to its rule. According to Hawali, Washington encouraged Kuwait to increase its oil exports to harm Iraq's economy. The U.S. government then not only gave the Iraqi leader the green light to invade Kuwait but later discouraged Saddam from compromise. Finally, Washington pressured the Persian Gulf states to agree to war against Iraq. His sermons reflected frustration with the Saudi blindness to U.S. plots and Washington's alleged goal to reshape the Middle East in accordance with U.S. strategic interests and ideals. They were imbued with a belief that given the opportunity, the average Saudi subject would fight the Western danger.[18]
Other developments in the run-up to Operation Desert Storm deepened the suspicions of young ulema that the conflict was part of a cultural attack. On November 6, 1990, a few dozen Saudi women in Riyadh sent their drivers away and, stating that nothing in Islam prohibits women from driving, drove their cars in a protest-rally against the social ban against women driving.[19] Riyadh ulema were certain that Kuwaiti and Western women had inspired their Saudi counterparts. In response to ulema demands, the government issued a ban on women driving.[20]
A month later, forty-three businessmen and intellectuals signed a petition to the king, demanding diminished authority for the ulema in Saudi society. This "Liberal Petition," argued that Qur'anic interpretations are, unlike the Qur'an itself, human and amendable. In addition, they demanded a new press law to parallel progressive legislation in other countries and called for women to have a greater role in Saudi society.[21] Then, as the war began, Saudi Channel 2 offered its viewers live CNN feed. To the ulema, this was an insult: not only was their country part of a Western-led coalition against another Muslim country, but Saudi television was also helping broadcast images demonstrating Western military and technological superiority to the Saudi public through Western eyes.[22]
When the war ended, many younger ulema sought a complete U.S. withdrawal from Saudi soil. When the king turned down this demand, they concluded that if the House of Saud could no longer protect Saudi Arabia from the Western cultural attack, then the ulema, not the House of Saud, should run the country.
In March 1991, a group of ulema secretly drafted a "letter of demands" (khitab al-matalib) to demand the establishment of an independent consultative (shura) council to consist of ulema that would rule in all internal and external matters. They also demanded that special committees adapt all laws and regulations to Islamic law, that state organs be purged of corruption, that the collection of interest by financial institutions be banned, that the state build a strong and sophisticated military, and that Saudi Arabia relinquish any alliance—such as the Riyadh-Washington partnership—which in their view contradicted the Shari‘a.[23]
Signed first in Riyadh, the letter of demands circulated throughout the kingdom and gained approximately 400 signatures of preachers, heads of Islamic organizations, judges, and scholars, who represented the relatively younger religious establishment. Even bin Baz supported the petition.[24] Encouraged by this dramatic step, four of the petitioners traveled to Jeddah and submitted the petition to the king's chief of staff. Sympathizers distributed thousands of underground copies around the country.[25]
The letter of demands represented a clear, albeit rhetorical, rebellion against the House of Saud. But the king's hands were tied. Nothing in the petition contradicted Saudi law or official Saudi statements; in fact, King Fahd and his predecessors had often promised creation of a consultative council, albeit one without any structure or powers specified.
While the government rejected the ulema's specific demands, it sought to diminish their challenge and popularity with incorporation of notions of cultural attack in some of its actions and rhetoric. The king sharply increased allocations for religious activities. Even during the economic crisis of 1992, the government increased the number of religious establishment employees from 54,000 to 60,300.[26] The Saudi government also launched a number of initiatives to strengthen the Islamic identity of Muslim diasporas. The king himself described the establishment of the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) as outreach to Muslims living in Europe.[27]
Rhetorically, too, the regime co-opted some ideas of Hawali and other dissidents. Since the end of 1991, the king's speeches have promoted the idea of a clash of civilizations between an aggressive, materialistic, hegemony-seeking Western civilization and a spiritual Muslim civilization led by Saudi Arabia.[28] Many Saudi newspaper opinion columns—all subject to state censorship if not representing endorsed views—suggested that Saudi Arabia must launch a counterattack against the Western civilization. For example, one column in the Al-Riyadh daily contended that, because taking the struggle into the enemy's territory is the key to victory, the Saudi regime should exploit ties to Muslim diasporas in the West to transform the Christian crusade against Muslims into a crusade to Islamize the Christian world.[29]
Still, the Saudi royal family did not adhere to demands to abandon its U.S. military alliance or expel foreign troops, nor were the kingdom's laws purged of all non-Muslim influences. The king's March 1992 decision to decree a Basic Law of government and a Law of the Consultative Council ridiculed the ulemas' most radical demand by creating a council devoid of any real power for religious authorities.[30] In so doing, King Fahd drew a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate dissent. The petitioners of the letter of demands could no longer call for the establishment of a meaningful consultative council and still claim to operate within the boundaries of state legitimacy.
Faced with the dilemma of further challenging the king or retreating, most oppositionists retreated. The number of declared supporters of the ulemas' demands diminished after 1992, and even many of those who remained relinquished the demand for the establishment of a powerful consultative council although they did continue to advocate for greater Islamization of Saudi society and foreign policy. While some scholars argue that a further petition, the Mudhakarat an-Nasiha (the memorandum of advice), circulated in March 1992,[31] represents radicalization of the Saudi opposition,[32] this view misinterprets the evolution of the movement and its relations with the House of Saud. While the memorandum of advice was more elaborate in its demands for Islamization of the Saudi society, it relinquished the more radical demand to transfer political power from the House of Saud to the ulema and so reflected the regime's success in marking the boundaries of legitimacy for the opposition. It was signed by far fewer than had signed the letter of demands. Not only was bin Baz not among them, but the memorandum of advice drew condemnation from the Council for Senior Ulema.[33]
The regime's attitude toward those who persisted in criticism became harsher. In the summer of 1993, the police searched Hawali's offices and froze ‘Awda's bank accounts. Teachers at King Saud university in Riyadh, who in May established a human rights committee (Lajnat ad-Dif‘a ‘an al-Huquq ash-Shar'iya, often translated as the Committee for the Defense of the Legitimate Rights, CDLR, but may also be translated as "Committee for the Defense of the Shari‘a Rights") were fired; a few fled to exile in London where they launched a campaign to overthrow the House of Saud.[34] The regime reestablished control of the debate and over its religious opposition without either serious concession or a shot being fired.
Bin Laden and ‘Azzam: Synthesizing Ideology and Practice
What role Osama bin Laden had in those stormy events is not known; yet, he must have played some role because in the fall of 1991, he fled to exile in Sudan. Bin Laden likely identified with Hawali and ‘Awda's ideas objecting to the deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
During his first years of exile in Sudan, bin Laden was a prominent Saudi opposition figure, known mostly for his antipathy to the Saudi alliance with the United States. In April 1994, after he identified with the CDLR, the Saudi Interior Ministry stripped him of his citizenship. In May 1996, the Sudanese government at Riyadh's urging expelled him. He found shelter in Afghanistan, protected by the Taliban.
From his Afghan exile, he issued "a declaration of war" and, in several press interviews, called for an armed struggle against U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. He also claimed responsibility for the June 1996 explosions in Dhahran, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen, saying they were a warning and a response to the collusion between the Saudi regime and the "Zionist-Crusade" alliance.[35] While he drifted apart from the mainstream Saudi opposition of the early 1990s, his emphasis on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia and his consistent criticism of the House of Saud reflected the concerns of Hawali and ‘Awda and made him merely a Saudi opposition figure.
In the late 1990s, bin Laden altered his political profile and embarked on an effort to become the leader of a global jihad against the United States and its allies. Using his fortune and his operational skills, he recruited radical Islamists willing to attack Western targets and trained several hundred in camps in Afghanistan. On February 23, 1998, bin Laden announced the establishment of "The World Islamic Front for the Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders" (Al-Jabha al-Islamiya al-‘Alamiya li-Jihad al-Yahud w'as-Salabiyin) in the Arabic daily Al-Quds al-‘Arabi and positioned himself to head its supreme council. Joining him were jihadist leaders from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but their alliance was weak, and they did not agree upon the front's hierarchy and goals.[36] Six months later, bin Laden proved his organization's lethality when it simultaneously attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, killing more than 220, injuring five thousand,[37] and gaining publicity for his organization and ideas.
Both the declaration of the World Islamic Front for the Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders and bin Laden's audiotape aired on Al-Jazeera on December 26, 2001, explaining his reasons for the 9-11 attacks, demonstrate the synthesizing origins of his thought and operation. While the first signifies his claim to leadership of the global jihad, the second signifies the manifestation of this claim. Unlike a few other well-known documents attributed to bin Laden, there is no doubt as to the authenticity of either of these two documents. Still, bin Laden's ideology and modes of operation remain rooted in the legacies of ‘Azzam and the Saudi opposition and reflect a dynamic synthesis of the two.
The founding declaration of the World Islamic Front offered an analysis of the crisis the Muslim world faced. While the front claimed to speak for all Muslims, its analysis concentrated on the concerns of the Saudi opposition, resembling arguments articulated by Hawali less than a decade earlier. It suggested "three truths" to be evident: the first was that "for more than seven years [since 1991], America has been conquering the most sacred of all Muslim soil, that of the Arab peninsula, plundering its resources, dictating to its rulers how to act, humiliating its inhabitants, threatening its neighbors, and turning military bases on its soil into the spearhead of its war against the neighboring Muslim peoples." The second was that a "Crusading-Jewish alliance" would not settle for the immense devastation it brought down on millions of Iraqis (with U.N. sanctions) but now sought to kill the surviving Iraqi people and their Muslim neighbors. The third truth was that while U.S. goals were religious and financial, Washington's goal was also to serve the Jewish state and divert attention from Israel's occupation of the Al-Aqsa mosque and its killing of the Muslims residing in its territories.[38]
The declaration leaned heavily on the Saudi debate on the "cultural attack": the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia was the original sin and the primary reason for the hardships faced by the Muslim world. The Palestinian problem, which ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam also emphasized, is of lesser importance and is addressed only in relation to U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf.
However, bin Laden's suggested remedy is a far cry from that suggested by Hawali and other dissidents. It relinquishes all hopes that the Saudi regime or any other Muslim regime would challenge Western plots and also neglects the intellectual and cultural aspects of the struggle. According to the declaration, the struggle against the West is not to be a struggle of words, nor is it to be a struggle of state-armies; rather, it is to be a struggle of devoted Muslim individuals fighting against sporadic Western targets. Here the influence of ‘Azzam is clear: following in his footsteps, bin Laden's declaration ended with an edict, ruling that it is the personal duty (fard al-‘ayn) of any Muslim to kill Americans and their allies, citizens and servicemen, whenever and wherever possible.[39]
In his audio statement three years later, bin Laden reversed the list of grievances, yet a synthesis remained. In the audio declaration, bin Laden explained the logic of the attacks and called for a continuation of the struggle. While the geographical context of the armed struggle against the West resembled that of ‘Azzam, the modes of operation designed by bin Laden echoed many of the ideas articulated in the Saudi-oriented debate on the Western "cultural attack." He described the United States as engaged in a crusade against Muslims around the world. While he concentrated on the post-9-11 war to oust the Taliban, he also commented on what he regarded as U.S. complicity in what he perceived as atrocities committed against children in the West Bank and Gaza. He then contended that 9-11 was retaliation against the continuing deprivation (zulm) of the sons of Palestinians, Iraqis, Somalis, Sudanese, and Kashmiris and called on the Muslim nation to awaken and end Washington's global campaign, not only against Muslims but also the whole of humanity.[40]
The military presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil was no longer the focus of bin Laden's counterattack; indeed, it was not mentioned in the declaration. Having been in exile for a decade and claiming the helm of a global jihad against the West, the geographical context he addressed went beyond his origins and concentrated, like that which ‘Azzam presented, on Afghanistan and Palestine.
Nevertheless, the modes of operation bin Laden recommended remained rooted in the Saudi opposition. He viewed the counterattack against U.S. influence as a combined effort, not narrowly restricted to an armed dimension. He showed pride at the immense economic damage inflicted on the United States by 9-11 and emphasized that damaging the U.S. economy was as important as damaging its military, explaining that should the U.S. economy collapse, then the U.S. government could not subordinate other peoples.[41] Bin Laden's roots also showed in his pride that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis. He reminded his audience that he had warned previously that should the United States be involved in a conflict with the sons of the two holy places (Saudi Arabia), it would long for its days in Vietnam. He also contended that the reason for the Saudi dominance in the attack was that its citizens were the most devoted in belief.[42] Like Hawali and other Saudi dissenters, bin Laden clearly envisioned a Saudi leadership in the struggle against the West.
Perhaps most remarkably, the influence that the debate on the "cultural attack" had on bin Laden's mode of operation was evident in his attempt to launch the counterattack from the enemy's soil, using the enemy's technology and members of the enemy's Muslim diaspora. In the Saudi debate on the "cultural attack," it was often argued that the Muslim world should harm the West in the same way the West harms the Muslim world—that is, by penetrating its cultural and social identity and forcing its inhabitants to question their values and beliefs to the point that they would collapse. Bin Laden adopted this conception and extended it, recruiting Muslims residing for months in the United States to execute a grand terror operation. In the audio declaration, he boasted that the young men involved in the attacks "used the enemy's planes and studied at the enemy's schools."[43]
Indeed, bin Laden's success in terrorizing the United States is largely the result of the materialization of the conception of the "counterattack": while the 9-11 attacks had little direct strategic importance for the U.S. economy and society, the emerging threat of a few Muslim Americans or Muslim Europeans becoming a fifth column and of sophisticated technologies becoming self-destructive weapons not only struck fear and suspicion in many Western societies but also forced them to rethink long-held convictions on such issues as freedom of speech, immigration, due process, and multiculturalism.
Bin Laden's synthesis of ‘Azzam's and the Saudi dissidents' ideas as well as the manifestation of this synthesis were unique. No other leader of the Saudi opposition followed in his footsteps. By claiming the helm of the leadership of a global, violent jihad against the West, bin Laden distanced himself from the mainstream Saudi opposition. Shortly after 9-11, Hawali and ‘Awda denounced bin Laden and urged Saudi youngsters not to follow in his footsteps. Hawali was even involved in the voluntary extradition of a young Saudi, whom the Saudi authorities sought to arrest in connection with his ties to Al-Qaeda, raising speculation about both his co-option by the religious establishment and whether he had the resolve to practice what he preached. [44]
Uriya Shavit teaches Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University and is author of A Dawn of an Old Era: The Imaginary Revolution in the Middle East (Keter, 2003). He thanks Joseph Kostiner and Eyal Zisser for their assistance.
[1] Douglas A. Boyd, "Saudi Arabia Broadcasting: Radio and Television in a Wealthy Islamic State," Middle East Review, Summer and Fall 1980, p. 20.
[2] Ibid, pp. 22-3; Robert Lacey, The Kingdom (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1979), pp. 369-70.
[3] On Saudi Arabia's quick path to modernization, see Helen Lackner, A House Built on Sand: A Political Economy of Saudi Arabia (London: Ithaca Press, 1978), pp. 172-212.
[4] On ‘Utaibi's movement, see Joseph A. Kechician, "Islamic Revivalism and Change in Saudi Arabia," The Muslim World, Jan. 1990, p. 12; Lacey, The Kingdom, pp. 478-89.
[5] Muhammad ‘Abd al-‘Alim Marsi, Ath-Thakafa …Wal-Ghazu ath-Thakafi fi Duwal al-Khalij al-‘Arabia (Riyadh: Maktabat al-‘Abikan, 1995), pp. 129-72; "Min Sayhkim as-Saudiya: Al-Mal am as-Salafiya," Al-Bilad (Beirut), June 15, 1991.
[6] Hassan Muhammad Hassan, Wassa'il Muqawamat al-Ghazu al-Fikri lil-‘Alam al-Islami (Mecca: Rabitat al-‘Alam al-Islami, 1981), pp. 7-63, 149.
[7] Ibid., pp. 56-5.
[8] Ibid., pp. 79-176.
[9] Mariam Abu Zahab and Olivier Roy, Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (London: Hurst & Company, 2004), pp. 12-8; ‘Atef S‘adawa, "Mustaqbal al-Afghan al-Arab," Al-Dimuqratiya (Cairo), Jan. 2002, pp. 203-13.
[10]‘Abdallah ‘Azzam, ‘Ad-Dif'a ‘an Aradi al-Muslimin Ahamu Furudh al-‘Ayn (Amman: Maktabat ar-Risala al-Haditha, 1987), pp. 19-32, 42-9.
[11] Ibid., p. 33.
[12] Ibid., pp. 34-8.
[13] Ibid., p. 5.
[14] Jacob Goldberg, "Saudi Arabia," Middle East Contemporary Survey, XIV (1990): 607.
[15] Mamun Fandi, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), p. 90; Mahmud al-Rif‘ai, Al-Mashru al-Islakhi fi as-Saudia: Kissat al-Hawali wal-‘Awda (Washington: n.p., 1995), p. 18.
[16] Fandi, Saudi Arabia, pp. 62-3; Rif‘ai, Al-Mashru al-Islakhi fi as-Saudia al-Islahi fi as-Saudiya, pp. 16-7, 30-1.
[17] S‘ad Rashid al-Fakih, Zalzal as-Saud (London: Al-Haraka al-Islamiya lil-Islah, n.d), pp. 31-2.
[18] See also, Safar al-Hawali, Haqa'iq hawl Azmat al-Khalij (Cairo: Dar Mecca al-Mukarama, 1991), pp. 110-5, 126-35.
[19] Fandi, Saudi Arabia, pp. 49-50; Goldberg, "Saudi Arabia," pp. 21-622.
[20] Rif‘ai, Al-Mashru al-Islakhi fi as-Saudia al-Islahi fi as-Saudiya, pp. 20-1; Fakih, Zalzal as-Saud, pp. 38-44.
[21] Al-Bilad, June 15, 1991.
[22] Fakih, Zalzal as-Saud, p. 49.
[23] Ash-Sh'ab (Cairo), May 21, 1991; Rif‘ai, Al-Mashru al-Islakhi fi as-Saudia al-Islahi fi as-Saudiya, pp 107-8.
[24] Rif‘ai, Al-Mashru al-Islakhi fi as-Saudia al-Islahi fi as-Saudiya, pp. 110-1.
[25] Fakih, Zalzal as-Saud, pp. 63-70.
[26]Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier than Thou: Saudi Arabia's Islamic Opposition (Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000), p. 101.
[27] King Fahd, interview on MBC, Foreign Broadcasting Information Service (FBIS), NES-223-91, Nov. 19, 1991; ‘Adnan Kamil, "At-Telefision al-Fadaa'i Keif wa Limadha," ‘Ukaz (Jedda), July 9, 1992.
[28] King Fahd, speech to the Muslim World League, ‘Ukaz, Jan. 26, 1992.
[29] Salih Muhammad al-Namla, "Hata la Yakun A'adaa'," Al-Riyadh, May 28, 1992.
[30] For the text of the Basic Law and the Law of the Consultative Council, see ‘Ukaz, Mar. 2, 1992.
[31] For a description of the events leading to the drafting of the memorandum and a summary of its contents, see Fakih, Zalzal as-Saud, pp. 88-106.
[32] R. Hrair Dekmejian, "The Rise of Political Islamism in Saudi Arabia," Middle East Journal, Autumn 1994, p. 636.
[33] For the text of the Council for Senior Ulema's condemnation, see Al-Riyadh, Sept. 18, 1992.
[34] Fakih, Zalzal as-Saud, pp. 106-35; Ann Elizabeth Mayer, "The Human Rights Debate," in Martin Kramer, ed., The Islamism Debate (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1997), pp. 123-4; Teitelbaum, Holier than Thou, pp. 49-51.
[35] Teitelbaum, Holier than Thou, pp. 77-9.
[36] Esther Webman, "The Polarization and Radicalization of Political Islam," Middle East Contemporary Survey, XXII (1998): 129-30.
[37] The Washington Post, Jan. 8, 1999.
[38] "Nas Bayan al-Jabha al-Islamia al-‘Alamia lil-Jihad al-Yahud wal-Salbiyin," Al-Quds al-Arabi (London), Feb. 23, 1998.
[39] Ibid.
[40] "An-Nas al-Kamil li-Kalimat bin Ladin," Al-Quds al-Arabi, Dec. 28, 2001.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Joshua Teitelbaum, "Ha-dor ha-Hadash Shel ha-Ulama: Mish‘enet Hadasha la-Mishtar," in Esther Webman, ed., Ha-Mizrah ha-Tichon 2005: Be'siman Khilofei Be-siman Hilofei Dorot (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African studies, 2005), pp. 113-5.
This item is available on the Middle East Forum website, at http://www.meforum.org/article/999
Airline security needs to be based on common sense, not policies that will turn citizens into inmates of their own countries
Flying Blind
Airline security needs to be based on common sense, not policies that will turn citizens into inmates of their own countries
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Aug. 29, 2006 - Flying used to be about freedom. No matter where you intended to land, there was something magical about escaping to the heavens. Now, as we know, flying is more like going to prison, if not, indeed, to hell.
As it happens, I once spent a week interviewing inmates and staff at what was then the main “super-max” federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. It was the successor to Alcatraz, and the predecessor of the facility that opened in Florence, Colorado, in 1994. “Security” was its aim, its ethos, its excuse for everything. Life in Marion had so many grim limitations and restrictions that the worst of the worst criminals convicted in federal courts—spies, drug lords, racist murderers, gang leaders—actually would try to behave themselves in hopes they might someday get out of its peculiar purgatory, even though the greatest escape they could achieve was transfer to another federal pen.
The operative principle for prison security was that anything one inmate managed to make into a weapon would be taken away from everyone. Saran Wrap was a case in point. Sandwiches had come in it. But one of the inmates discovered a way to burn an aspirin tablet, generating enough heat to melt the wrap, harden it, and make a dagger, so no more cellophane on the sandwiches. Ditto bed springs. They could be cut, twisted and sharpened into weapons, so the beds were concrete slabs.
The cardboard backing on every legal pad at Marion was torn off because one prisoner managed to fashion it into a crude bomb filled with match heads, using bits of metal zipper as shrapnel. The most benign objects were, in the imagination of the inmates and the guards, potential deadly weapons. One by one, they were taken away until each convict’s life was made as barren as it could possibly be made.
"Big Brother is always watching," the warden at Marion told me. The basic goal was to keep prisoners safe from each other and alive: “pure security,” he called it. "Every day that goes by and no inmate or staff member is seriously hurt, we've accomplished our mission."
Doubtless those responsible for airline safety have a similarly fatalist, minimalist view, and not without cause. It’s been five years since September 11, 2001, when 19 men using box cutters on commercial flights changed the world forever. No one would ever want to see that again. But the draconian security measures taken after an alleged airline terror plot was revealed in Britain earlier this month have exposed the reductio ad absurdum of current thinking about what makes us safe, or not.
The last few days have seen a stunning series of exaggerated reactions to minor incidents. On Friday alone, half a dozen little security breaches or anonymous threats suddenly escalated into significant aircraft diversions or delays around the United States. Earlier last week, a United Airlines flight from London to Washington D.C. landed in Boston—accompanied by fighter jets—when a 59-year-old American woman named Catherine Mayo acted like a nut. She reportedly urinated outside the plane’s galley and allegedly mumbled something about Al Qaeda.
(Afterwards, it turned out Mayo has spent a lot of time traveling in Pakistan, ostensibly as a journalist. She wrote an article in 2003 for the English-language Daily Times there that blamed American psychiatrists for what she called the “manic depression” of the United States after 9/11. “This is a woman with very serious mental health issues,” Mayo’s public defender told the court in Boston during her initial hearing on Friday.)
And then there was Northwest Flight 042. When a dozen young Indian businessmen returning from a wedding boarded it in Amsterdam for the last leg of their flight home to Mumbai last week, they were in a decidedly rambunctious mood. (Although all were Muslim, it’s not clear how observant or abstemious they were.) They were trading seats, playing with their cell phones, allegedly refusing to turn them off, and some reportedly taunted the cabin crew by tossing the phones to each other.
American sky marshals on board got involved. About 10 minutes out from Amsterdam, the pilot wheeled around, escorted back to the ground by fighter jets (which seems to be standard operating procedure). The alleged troublemakers were hauled off, but Dutch officials then cleared them to fly home the next day.
The Indian press quickly declared the real “crime” of the businessmen was the color of their skin. "If brown equals terrorist, doesn't white equal racist?" suggested an editorial in the Hindustan Times. And knee-jerk prejudice might have played a role, but the essence of the problem lies in the fact that so much has come to seem sinister that overwhelmed security staff and paranoid passengers see threats everywhere they look: in a beard or a prayer, a cell phone or a soft drink.
By coincidence, a NEWSWEEK reporter was on the previous leg of Northwest Flight 042, which went from Minneapolis to Amsterdam that same day. Barbie Nadeau was returning home to Rome from vacation in the States with her husband and two little boys, ages 6 and 4. In Minnesota, the security obsession was less with skin tones and Motorolas than with run-of-the-mill liquids. Parents of little kids were watched especially closely, it seemed, because the screeners suspected they might be smuggling boxes of juice on board.
As Nadeau points out in an e-mail, her family’s two carry-on bags had enough electronics in them to wire a missile: “a laptop, a portable DVD player, a sound-blaster adapter and headphones, two cell phones, four MP3 players with headphones, a BlackBerry, a brick of AA batteries and two hand-held video games.” The security woman paid them no attention. “She dug around the electronics, searching for juice. About three other moms nearby were going through the same harassment…”
Nadeau concedes that the screeners and airline staff were just doing their job, “but it struck me that the security was so focused on finding and confiscating any liquid item, they were actually not focusing on any other potentially suspicious things anyone might be carrying. Case in point: nail clippers. I didn't realize they were in my bag, but they got by in Minneapolis, only to be confiscated in Amsterdam.”
Ah, yes, nail clippers. I have searched in vain for the example of nail clippers being used to hijack an airplane—on the face of it a pretty ludicrous proposition—but I guess someone could imagine they might be. Just as Saran Wrap can become a dagger. Or the cardboard back of a legal pad can be made into a bomb with zipper shrapnel.
We are walking in our socks through security checks, you realize, not because anybody ever succeeded in blowing up a plane with explosive shoes, but because one man tried and failed. Moms are surreptitiously smuggling juice boxes for their kids because the alleged plotters in Britain reportedly wanted to mix up explosives on board planes using different liquid components. But recent reporting on that case suggests they may not have known what they were doing, or how to do it.
Should we be concerned and careful? Yes. And we shouldn’t think there are easy answers. The much-vaunted Israeli model for airline security works at one single airport, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion, and with one small airline overseas, El Al, using highly educated screeners, many of whom are performing their national military service. Can the U.S. use the same psychological profiling techniques at hundreds of airports with screeners paid a little over the minimum wage and, perhaps, a high school diploma? Doubtful. Is better physical screening the answer? Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor at the University of Chicago who has written extensively on these issues suggested in an International Herald Tribune op-ed last week that the best approach would be “to eliminate most carry-ons and emulate high-security prisons…”
In fact, security systems will continue evolving, as will terrorist efforts to get around them. But the policies that develop in that process have to be based on a cool, common sense assessment of the real threats, not sensationalism and cover-your-ass bureaucracy. The failed dreams of would-be terrorists cannot be the measure of the threat against us. To achieve “pure security,” in the end, Americans would have to become inmates of their own country.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14569998/site/newsweek/?rf=nwnewsletter
Friday, September 01, 2006
Republicans Admit bin Laden Controls Our Wartime Strategy
Huffington Post
Steven G. Brant
Republicans Admit bin Laden Controls Our Wartime Strategy
Like it or not, George W. Bush is our Commander in Chief. And Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, et al love to argue that Republicans must maintain control of our government so that our Commander in Chief can continue to do the masterful job he is doing fighting the War on Terrorism.
Right? No arguement so far?
Well, what if George Bush really isn't our Commander in Chief?
What if Osama bin Laden really is?
What? Sounds crazy? Well, I've got proof...straight from a Republican's mouth on a major national news show.
But first, let's get our definitions straight. If you are the "commander", that means you direct the strategic planning that determins what those you are commanding do. Right?
You obviously have help from the strategy development team that "serves at your pleasure" (as Don Rumsfeld says whenever he's asked why he is still Secretary of Defense). But ultimately it's you who are giving directions to your troops. Right?
Well, tonight we have conclusive proof that our Commander in Chief, President George W. Bush, is taking his direction from someone other that hand-picked team.
Tonight we have proof that President Bush is actually taking his direction from Osama bin Laden. And not just bin Laden alone, but from his lieutenants too. In other words, Osama bin Laden is effectively the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.
This fascinating admission comes from Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the Republican chosen by her party to debate the issue of the global war on terrorism on the PBS Newshour. According to Rep. Blackburn, the reason we are in Iraq now is because Osama bin Laden has told us we must be there.
When you watch the video below, at about the 50 second mark you will hear her say, "When you have Osama bin Laden and his lieutenents saying the centerpiece of the War on Terror is in Iraq...then we know it would be foolish of us to leave and to let them take that battlefront. It would be a foolish move for us to do that."
Here's the video...
Before making this astounding admission - which I think you'll agree she says with a kind of directness that lets you know this is a clear policy position she and her party have thought about, not just some off-the-cuff remark - Rep. Blackburn gives a new twist to the Republcan's "Nazi sympathizers" talking point by saying "There are people who are always going to be against fighting for freedom." But what really blew me away was her claim that we must continue to see the war in Iraq as the battlefront of the war on terrorism because bin Laden says we should...and that it would be "foolish" to do otherwise.
Well, the word "fool" is what came to my mind, not "foolish".
Since the Republicans are using World War II analogies these days, can anyone imagine what would have happened during that war if an American politician had said "We're going to keep fighting in such and such a place because that's where Hitler and his lieutenants say the battlefront of the war is."???
Congressman Marty Meehan (D-MA) was debating Rep. Blackburn and failed to pick up on her statement. I think he did a great job of putting forward the Democrat's talking points, but for some reason he didn't recognize the gift Rep. Blackburn was handing to him when it happened.
But that's okay. We still can.
On a major national news program, the Republicans have admitted that George W. Bush is reacting to what and where our enemies tell him the global war on terror is. Our enemies say "It's in Iraq." and he says "Okay. Well then, we'll fight you there." He is the Responder in Chief, not the Commander in Chief.
I wish I knew enough to tell if George W. Bush...and Rep. Blackburn...and the whole team controlling our wartime strategy...can now be declared "Enemy Combatants". I'm guessing they can't. That would just be too weird...like "Twilight Zone" weird.
But then what can we declare them to be?
How about this?...
"Incompetent"..."Toast."..."Done"..."You're out of here."...or an old expression from my college days that just popped into my mind" "Sh*t for brains".
Or my two favorite declarations of the moment: "Soon to be checked by a Democrat-controlled Congress" and "Completely out of power after the 2008 elections."
-------------------------------------
Three footnotes:
1. When you're trained in the science of organizational strategy as I am, you learn that reactive strategic thinking of the kind the Bush Administration constantly uses (always fighting "yesterday's battles") is the least effective strategic planning methodology there is. Sure, you need to put out fires when they happen. But the optimal approach to creating a safe and prosperous future is to be proactive, not reactive. And proactive thinking does NOT mean "reacting really fast to something you see is happening." Proactive means "preventing fires from happening in the first place by steering future events into healthier, non-lethal behavioral dynamics patterns." And this requres the ability to think creatively and systemically, the way designers and inventors think. I regret that the Bush Administration does not appear to have a creative bone in its entire body. They are pretty much all-reactive, all-the-time. They really aren't working to design the better world we are capable of having. They do get creative when it comes to their use of language to justify their actions. I'll give them that. Although some might just call what they are doing then "lying". But just watch. If we wind up going to war with Iran in 2007 or 2008, the Bush Administration will have said "We had no choice but to respond with the use of force to what Iran did." They will be in complete "reactive mode", having failed to use one iota of creative thinking in what they claim today is an effort designed to "make war the choice of last resort" when dealing with Iran. Just watch.
2. Truth be told, I don't know how Rep. Blackburn was chosen to appear on the Newshour. But given the well-coordinated nature of the Republican Party, I'm sure she didn't just volunteer to do so all by herself. So I think it's safe to say she was her party's choice to be on the Newshour.
3. Also, when I think about Bush taking direction from bin Laden, I can't help but think about the financial connection through the Carlyle Group between the Bush and bin Laden families. I'm just not sure what to make of it, but there it is all the same.
Thousands of anti-war protesters demand: "Give us the truth"
Thousands of anti-war protesters demand: "Give us the truth"
By Christopher Smart and Jeremiah Stettler
Salt Lake Tribune
They came bearing banners, singing ballads and barking demands from the U.S. commander in chief.
Some 4,000 protesters streamed into Washington Square surrounding The Salt Lake City/County Building downtown to protest the war in Iraq and President George W. Bush, who was scheduled to arrive this evening for an appearance before the national convention of the American Legion.
A few blocks south, uniformed military veterans and civilians spoke in support of the U.S. troops at a 300-strong Freedom Rally in Liberty Park.
They clasped hands and sang out ''God Bless the U.S.A.'' Yellow ribbons printed with the phrase ''Support our Troops,'' hung from shirt pockets, baseball caps and American flags.
''We must continue to support our troops,'' said Paul Holton, president of Operation Give, which organized the rally. ''We want them to be victorious. We want them to accomplish their mission safely.''
Apparently referring to Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, he said: ''The world needs to know we will not sit idly by and let someone speak for us who we disagree with.''
Anderson -- who has taken heat from Republicans for his support of the anti-war demonstration -- was greeted with a huge cheer and the crowd at Washington Square began chanting, ''Rocky, Rocky, Rocky.''
Placards waved with slogans like: ''Impeach Bush,'' ''Regime change begins at home'' and ''Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.''
Big-headed papier mache likenesses of Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added to the carnival atmosphere.
But the gathering turned serious when Anderson called the Bush administration to task for inserting the United States in what he called ''an unnecessary war based on false justifications.''
''Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism,'' he said. ''We are here today to insist that those who were elected to be our leaders tell us the truth. If we had the truth, we wouldn't be in Iraq today.''
The crowd chanted: ''Give us the truth. Give us the truth.''
The mayor said it was ''chilling'' that Bush and his administration could continue to lie to the American people with impunity.
''These imperious, arrogant, dishonest people think we should just fall in line with them and continue to take them at their word.''
Anderson said coming generations will pay the price for the Bush administration's ''lies, violence, cruelty, incompetence and inhumanity.''
The mayor called for ''a new day,'' saying citizens ''must be cognizant of our moral responsibility to speak up in the face of wrongdoing.''
''We must pursue peace as vigorously as the Bush administration has pursued war,'' he said.
A former member of the Green Berets, Gil Iker, also addressed the lively gathering, saying that the president misrepresented himself when he said he was a ''uniter, not a divider.'' ''Tragically, the president has squandered our biggest asset, our country's unity.'' After the invasion of Afghanistan, Iker said, the Bush administration lost track of the original mission: to hunt down al Qaeda.
''Iraq is not Afghanistan, any more than Vietnam was World War II,'' he said. ''Bush and Cheney have done enough to our beloved country; they should cut and run.''
Between protest songs and banner waving, the Rev. Tom Goldsmith told the crowd that the president is in denial of the growing civil war in Iraq.
''Bush leads this nation with eyes wide shut,'' he said. ''The war in Iraq is a fiasco.''
Goldsmith invited protestors to sign a petition to indict Bush and his administration, as well as Congress for abuse of power and failure to uphold the Constitution.
As the rally ended, a group of veterans led a march from City Hall to the federal building.
Back at the Freedom Rally, Virginia Foster Eisler, a member of the American Legion Auxiliary from Butler County, Pa., stood amid the crowd, her father's World War II dog tags around her neck and a Japanese flag stained with his blood at her side. She said she supports the soldiers and the country her father gave his life for.
''The troops need to know that we are behind them, like the Rosies in World War II, to show them that they are appreciated and that freedom isn't free,'' Foster Eisler said.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff addressed the crowd.
''I have to support the right of Rocky to be stupid,'' he said. ''But I will not support his right to hurt people. What he is doing is hurting those people whose loved ones gave the ultimate sacrifice.''
A sign nearby echoed his sentiments, in less political terms: ''The fruits, flakes and peacenik nuts don't speak for heartland America.''
A senior vice commander for the American Legion from Douglasville, Ga., Dale Barnett said the veterans organization must stand up against the anti-war crowd that turned public sentiment against the troops during the Vietnam era.
''People look at America. Our enemies look at us. The American people look at us. We as the American Legion believe we should be setting an example about what's positive in America,'' he said.
Some Soldiers Opting Out Of The War; Conscientous Objectors Accept Consequences
Some Soldiers Opting Out Of The War
Conscientous Objectors Accept Consequences
By Willie Monroe
KGO-TV
Protests against the war within the ranks are gaining attention. Soldiers are being asked to return to the war in Iraq. Some are saying they won't go.
Twenty-four-year-old Pablo Paredes spent several years in the Navy before he decided he could not support the war in Iraq.
Pablo Paredes, conscientious objector: "I said, 'This war is illegal. This is immoral more so.' And I'm not going to provide any assistance to that."
In November 2004, he refused to work on a ship sending marines to Iraq. The result was a court martial, and three months of confinement and hard labor.
Now he counsels others at the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors where more than a third of the calls this year are from soldiers considering going AWOL.
Steve Morse, Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors: "There's increasing numbers of people who have been to Iraq more than once. They're coming back with post traumatic stress disorder. Some of them refuse to go back, will not go back. Many of them are AWOL."
The Pentagon says desertions are down from about 5,000 in 2001 to 2,500 last year. The military doesn't make it easy to obtain conscientious objector status.
Steve Morse: "Many people just give up and go AWOL."
Today, Army Specialist Mark Wilkerson turned himself in at Fort Hood in Texas after going AWOL a year-and-a-half ago.
Spec. Mark Wilkerson, conscientious objector: "I am not willing to kill or be killed or do anything else I consider morally wrong for reasons I don't believe in."
Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, possibly the only commisioned officer who refused to go to Iraq, saids he'd fight in Afghanistan, but would choose prison over Iraq.
Lt. Ehren Watada, conscientious objector: "There was a deception and a manipulation of intelligence by the highest levels of my chain of command in order to orchestrate and undertake this war."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the fight will continue.
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense: "Today we will not tell 50 million Afghans and Iraqis that because the going is tough, and it is tough, let there be no doubt, that we will abandon them to the beheaders, the terrorists."
These conscientious objectors say they're prepared to accept the consequences of their decision.
The Netherlands is expert at keeping itself dry. So why aren't U.S. bureaucrats seeking more of its help rebuilding the levees?
It's Cheaper to Go Dutch
The Netherlands is expert at keeping itself dry. So why aren't U.S. bureaucrats seeking more of its help rebuilding the levees?
By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Sept. 4, 2006 issue - The Dutch know a thing or two about staying dry. Most people in the Netherlands live below sea level, and the country's major cities are in continual danger of being washed away. Or they would be, if Dutch engineers weren't so good at designing levees and floodgates to keep storms at bay. The Netherlands hasn't suffered a catastrophic storm-driven flood since the 1950s, when it began building the current system. Over the decades, North Sea storms have battered the country, and the dikes have held. The Dutch are, no argument, the world's experts. Which raises a question as U.S. politicians and bureaucrats dicker over whether and how to fortify New Orleans against future storms: why not hire the Dutch?
They may yet do just that. U.S. engineers are impressed by the Dutch system, but so far, bureaucratic sluggishness has slowed reconstruction. Much of the contentious debate over rebuilding the city has centered on what to do about the lowest-lying areas, including the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward. Early cost estimates made it seem that whole sections of the city would have to be abandoned. But Hans Vrijling, a renowned authority on flood control who designed part of the Dutch system, says it should be possible to protect New Orleans—even low-lying sections—from storm surges more than 10 times Katrina's. The price tag: less than $10 billion.
Instead, Congress has so far allocated $5.7 billion to repair and rebuild the existing levees to pre-Katrina standards. Those levees, if they had worked, were supposed to have protected the city from a 100-year storm. In other words, the walls would guard against a storm surge so severe it is likely to happen only once every century. If that sounds impressive, consider this: critical flood barriers in the Netherlands are designed to withstand a 10,000-year surge. That may seem like overkill. But storm scientists estimate a Katrina-strength hurricane is likely to wallop the Gulf Coast again at least once in the next 70 years.
Congress has given the Army Corps of Engineers $20 million to come up with a comprehensive design to protect the city permanently. American engineers have been in consultation with Dutch designers, and in the meantime the Corps has asked a Dutch firm to design a 100- to 200-year floodgate system for the western end of Lake Borgne. Dan Hitchings, the Army Corps official in charge of Gulf Coast protection, says it may ultimately bring in more Dutch help. But it likely won't know for sure for more than a year. The Corps has until the end of 2007 to complete its study, and it shows no signs of speeding things along. Hitchings says the Corps has to give Congress a range of options and price tags, to "make sure the nation wants to do what the Netherlands did."
Vrijling, for one, can't understand what the Corps is going to study for so long. The technology already exists and has been tested over decades in the Netherlands. He says Dutch and American engineers, working together, would need only "a couple of months" to draw up a detailed plan. "If we had the will and one month's money from Iraq, we could do all the levees and restore the coast," says Ivor Van Heerden, a Louisiana State University hurricane scientist who warned for years about a Katrina-like disaster. "We can save Louisiana. It is very doable."
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14535074/site/newsweek/
Going For Broke
Going For Broke
Elizabeth Warren discusses how ordinary families wind up bankrupt and why new legislation could be hurting those at risk.
By Karen Springen
Newsweek
Aug. 31, 2006 - Last year, the number of personal bankruptcies ballooned to two million as people rushed to beat last deadline for a new law that made it harder and more expensive for consumers to declare themselves broke. The increase was followed by a slump, with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reporting this week that personal bankruptcies for the year ending June 30 fell to 1.45 million—the lowest level in five years.
Does that mean Americans are in better financial shape? Not quite, according to bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren, a professor of law at Harvard University and co-author (with her daughter) of "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke" (Basic Books; September 2003) and "All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan" (Free Press; March 2005.) NEWSWEEK's Karen Springen spoke with Warren about why she thinks the current legislation helps lenders at the expense of ordinary Americans and how the nation can get out of a debilitating cycle of debt. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: In 2005, you testified in Congress against the new bankruptcy law. Why do you think it passed anyway?
Elizabeth Warren: This is one of those times when the imbalance in lobbying [power] could not have been more grotesque. I had people in Congress tell me that they had two and three and four [credit industry] lobbyists come by to see them every single day for months on end. There was no one to lobby for families in financial trouble ... It's just not fair.
Many indebted Americans get stuck in a bottomless pit of late fees and increased interest rates. What happens now that their bankruptcy options are reduced and it costs so much more [about $299, plus a $50 mandatory financial counseling fee as well as legal fees] to file?
Many will go bankrupt anyway. This bill was about driving up the costs of filing for bankruptcy and delaying that filing, so that people would make payments for another three to six months before they went to see a lawyer. Many of them will still apply for bankruptcy. The only people who will be denied access to bankruptcy will be the very poorest, who can't pay the increased filing fees or hire a lawyer. For the overwhelming majority of families who file for bankruptcy, there is no other option. They owe on average more than two years' income. They can't make interest payments on what they owe. The only options other than bankruptcy are going into the underground economy or knocking over [a] 7-11 [store].
How does the new bill change the filing process?
No one can file for bankruptcy without seeing a credit counselor, which delays the process. The paperwork has been increased, which drives up the attorneys' fees. Attorneys are required to make certain certifications, which increase the likelihood of litigation, and further push up the costs. More debt survives bankruptcy. And the list goes on. The bottom line is that the bankruptcy courthouse is still open, but the steps to the front door are steeper.
Some in the credit industry have blamed bankruptcies on overconsumption.
I wish they were right. If that were the problem, then the solution would be obvious: don't buy so many Game Boys and $200 sneakers. The problem is that's not what's wrong with families. Ninety percent of the families who file for bankruptcy do so following a job loss, a medical problem or a family torn apart by death or divorce.
So is the stereotype of debtors with too many big-screen TVs false?
It's right up there with the welfare mom who drives a Cadillac. A great story but not true.
It's commonly thought that people simply don't pay most medical debt, that they default and the hospital covers it.
The data show that more than half of the families who file for bankruptcy do so in the aftermath of a serious medical problem. And three quarters of those people have health insurance at the onset of the illness or accident that ultimately landed them in bankruptcy. Sometimes it's hospital bills, but more often, it's about co-pay, deductibles, uncovered treatments, drugs, rehab, supplies, all the things that aren't covered by insurance. So part of the answer is that the financial impact of a serious medical problem goes beyond hospital bills. Lost jobs, drugs, physicians, rehab, health supplies. It's expensive to get sick in America today—too expensive for the average family.
Health insurance companies say your figure—that medical bankruptcies contribute to more than half of all bankruptcies—is too high.
The insurance companies want us to believe that the private health insurance industry works and that everyone who is paying huge premiums monthly is safe. Our data shows that it's simply not true.
According to your research, three quarters of the people whose medical debt contributed to their bankruptcies had health insurance. What are the implications of that finding?
If our finding had been that every person in bankruptcy following a medical problem had no health insurance, then the industry would have had a very different response—we need to help more people get health insurance. Let's get the state to subsidize health insurance. Let's use this study to frighten families into paying even more for insurance. When the study showed that even those with health insurance were at terrible risk for financial collapse, the health insurance industry went crazy.
Medical bankruptcies are a modern phenomenon, right? Why didn't we see them at the turn of the century, let alone very often a generation ago?
At the turn of the century, people didn't live as long. And when they got sick, medicine couldn't do much for them. The bad news was that they died. The good financial news was that they didn't go broke. Today we've just reversed it. A person may recover physically from a serious illness, but her family may never recover financially. I have a friend whose child was hit on the head in a soccer game and lost consciousness for a few seconds. They took the little boy to the emergency room, where he spent the day and released him at the end of the day with the diagnosis that he had a bump on his head. The bill was $20,000 ... What would they have done if they hadn't had health insurance? It's not simply people with leukemia and heart transplants who run up large medical bills. It's appendectomies and blown-out knees that can leave a family financially devastated.
What's the solution to the medical bankruptcy problem?
The problem of medical bankruptcies is a symptom of a much larger problem in how we pay for healthcare in America. The solution is to reform healthcare financing. We must reform our healthcare payment system. If we don't, millions more families, hardworking, play-by-the-rules people, will end up in complete financial collapse.
Bankruptcy is meant to give people a fresh start. Is that possible for people such as the elderly with huge, ongoing medical debts and little opportunity to get a good job?
No. Bankruptcy only deals with the past. So it works particularly well for people who have bright job prospects in the future and whose problems are far behind them. For the elderly, who face ongoing difficulties paying for medical treatment, bankruptcy is some help to deal with past debts, but it won't give any future services. And they'll be limited in how often they can file. Many are living in such an economically fragile state that it takes very little to tip the financial boat over. One of the women in our study explained that she had to quit her job in a fast-food restaurant because her high blood pressure was making her feet swell, and her doctor said she couldn't stand up for the two-hour stretches required at the register. Once she quit her job, she couldn't afford her blood pressure medicine. She was caught in the classic Catch 22.
Today most college students take out loans. What will be the long-term effects of so much student debt?
Today's young people are graduating from college with debts that they will work for 10 to 20 years to pay off. Dead-flat broke looks like a real step up that they may never accomplish because they already owe so much. They have forfeited any financial security before they have even begun their financial lives.
What about mortgage debt?
Tapping into your home equity or taking risky variable-rate mortgages is borrowing more money and telling your lender they can come and get your house. When these creative lending [deals] come due, more than a million Americans will lose their homes, and millions more will be stretched to the breaking point. Never before in America have we had so many homes built so near the financial cliff. The home used to be a financial steadying point. When all else [failed], at least you had the security that your mortgage payment didn't go up and you built up financial equity in your house.
What can Americans do to stay out of debt?
It's about learning about the new rules of money. Debt is something that happens when the rest of your spending is not in balance. Any debt other than mortgage debt is a symptom that something's wrong with a family's budget. People don't realize how heavy debt is, how much it weighs. It is 50 pounds on your back.
Do you have any credit cards?
I'm what the credit industry refers to as a "deadbeat." I use my credit card and pay it off each month. They hate folks like me. I smile every time I use that credit card.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14604090/site/newsweek/
Lawmakers to Seek a Vote of No Confidence in Defense Secretary
washingtonpost.com
Democrats Target Rumsfeld
Lawmakers to Seek a Vote of No Confidence in Defense Secretary
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Under assault from Republicans on issues of national security, congressional Democrats are planning to push for a vote of no confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this month as part of a broad effort to stay on the offensive ahead of the November midterm elections.
In Rumsfeld, Democrats believe they have found both a useful antagonist and a stand-in for President Bush and what they see as his blunders in Iraq. This week, Democrats interpreted a speech of his as equating critics of the war in Iraq to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, an interpretation that Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff disputed. But Democrats said the hyperbolic attack would backfire.
But even before that, Democrats and some Republicans had maintained that Bush has never held anyone in his administration accountable for decisions in the Iraq war that many military analysts say went disastrously wrong. The decisions include not mobilizing enough troops to keep the peace, disbanding the entire Iraqi army and purging all members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party -- including teachers and low-level technocrats -- from the Iraqi government.
"Secretary Rumsfeld's stewardship of this effort is a failure, and he has let down our armed forces," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who is pushing for the no-confidence move.
By demanding accountability, Democrats hope to blunt what has been an all-out assault on their positions on national security. The Republican National Committee yesterday blasted Democrats again as "Defeatocrats," and the attacks will continue when Congress returns next week from its month-long recess. Republican leaders plan to consider a full slate of security-related legislation before leaving on Sept. 29 for the campaigns.
The legislative calendars in the House and Senate include defense spending bills, the annual defense policy bill, legislation to authorize the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program and a measure to bring Bush's military tribunals into compliance with a Supreme Court ruling that declared the initial tribunals unconstitutional.
"Now is not the time for a weak and indecisive approach that has been offered by Capitol Hill Democrats, and that's why Republicans are working to keep America safe through policies based on strength and purpose, rather than confusion and defeat," House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said yesterday, as he laid out the final legislative push before the campaigns.
Rather than change the subject to domestic issues, as they have tried in past years, Democrats are hoping to confront Republicans head-on.
"We will not be Swift-boated on this issue," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in an interview, alluding to the assault by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the Vietnam war record of Democratic candidate John F. Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign. "We will fight them on national security."
Front and center of that campaign may be the attack on Rumsfeld. Some Democratic House candidates, such as Diane Farrell in Connecticut's 4th District, have been encouraging Democratic leaders to move formally for a vote of no confidence. And party leadership aides said they are canvassing Democratic members of Congress and exploring the parliamentary mechanism to do so. Before the move is set, the aides said, they want to hear from Democrats in tough races who may feel that the move would leave them vulnerable to Republican attacks.
But Emanuel said the move is set. And he hopes to stage the resolution with as many as 12 retired generals and other military officers who have called for Rumsfeld's resignation.
"We're going to go for a no-confidence vote on Rumsfeld," Emanuel said.
Senate Democrats are considering a similar move. Next week, Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) will offer a sense-of-the-Senate resolution demanding Rumsfeld's resignation.
Bush has stood strongly behind his defense secretary, and Republicans appear to relish the debate. Just 68 days before the election, many of their incumbent candidates continue to trail Democratic challengers, but GOP leadership aides say they feel more confident they can close the gap by Nov. 7 as long as terrorism and defense stay front and center.
To mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, House leaders plan a resolution both commemorating the event and putting Democrats on the spot, possibly by praising legislative efforts in the aftermath of the attacks, such as the USA Patriot Act.
A bill to clarify the legality of the NSA's wiretapping without court warrants will also force Democrats to choose between a liberal base that believes the program is an unconstitutional breach of civil rights and a majority of Americans who back the effort.
As for the resolution on Rumsfeld, Republicans will charge that Democrats are playing politics while they are trying to legislate.
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) said such a resolution will signal to swing voters and conservative Democrats that the party has become captive to a liberal wing they would not want to entrust with control of Congress.
But Democrats -- and some Republicans -- say a debate on Rumsfeld's tenure at the Pentagon will present a quandary to embattled GOP incumbents in districts that have turned solidly against the war.
"We are approaching 2,700 dead Americans, 20,000 wounded, many of them missing eyes, missing limbs, facing paralysis," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.). "They want to debate that; we're happy to debate that."
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