Palestinian-Lebanese Flap Revives Old Hostility
Wed Mar 27, 1:44 PM ET
By Samia Nakhoul
BEIRUT (Reuters) - A dispute at an Arab summit in Beirut Wednesday revived long-standing Lebanese-Palestinian tensions and overshadowed a Saudi Middle East peace plan.
The Palestinians quit the morning session in fury over what they said was Lebanese President Emile Lahoud's refusal to let their leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) address the summit by satellite from his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Israel has kept Arafat bottled up in Ramallah for more than three months, demanding that he arrest militants and enforce a cease-fire to halt 18 months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.
Lahoud later said he had feared Israel might interfere with a live broadcast, but Arab officials and analysts saw it as a deliberate snub, which they attributed to the bitter enmity Syrian and some Lebanese leaders feel toward Arafat.
The atmosphere was sour even before the summit began. The Palestinian delegation arrived in Beirut to find that their hosts had given them just six hotel rooms. Some Gulf delegations occupied up to 300 rooms. Most others got more than 30.
More significantly, Lebanon insisted that the Arab leaders ensure that any terms they agree for a peace deal with Israel should explicitly reject any move to let the 360,000 Palestinian refugees it now hosts settle permanently on its territory.
Lebanon fears the impact on its delicate sectarian balance of any such solution. Many Lebanese blame Palestinians for triggering the 1975-90 civil war that devastated their country.
Syria intervened in the civil war to prevent Palestinian guerrillas getting the upper hand and has long sought to curb Arafat's political independence. It has not forgiven him for cutting a separate peace deal with Israel at Oslo in 1993.
Damascus, which still has about 20,000 troops stationed in Lebanon, dominates politics in its weaker neighbor.
VIDEO LINK
Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath told Reuters Lahoud had shown contempt for the whole summit by preventing Arafat from addressing the assembled leaders from afar.
"Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites), with all his mean and impertinent ways, prevented President Arafat from attending the summit physically," Shaath said. "The head of the summit prevented his image and voice from being present."
Palestinian and Arab delegates said foreign ministers had agreed the order of summit speeches in advance.
Jordan, which hosted the last Arab summit, was to go first, then Lahoud, followed by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah and Arafat. But the Palestinian leader never got his turn.
Live television coverage showed Arafat preparing to speak over the video link as he waited for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to finish a protracted address to the summit.
Instead Lahoud gave the floor to the president of tiny Djibouti.
"Every Arab delegation, including the Saudis, tried their best to persuade President Lahoud to allow Arafat to speak," Shaath said.
"I don't want to judge the intentions of the Lebanese president but what he did was a grave political mistake...The whole summit has failed," the Palestinian minister said.
When the summit reconvened after a lengthy break, Lahoud said there had been a "misunderstanding" over Arafat's speech.
"I say we are all determined that his speech reach the summit and through it the world," he told dismayed Arab leaders.
"We agreed with the Palestinians that it should be recorded and then broadcast to the summit because direct transmission would have given Israel the chance to interfere with the speech," the Lebanese leader explained.
But by the end of the summit's first day, the Arab leaders had yet to hear Arafat's message to them.
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Thursday, March 21, 2002
"Those interviews created deep strains between law enforcement and recent immigrants who are Arab and-or Muslim," said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.
Mr Ashcroft denied the allegations, saying investigators "fostered new trust" with Arab and Muslim communities.
Feds to Question 3,000 Foreigners on Terrorism
Wed Mar 20, 4:11 PM ET
By James Vicini
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States wants to question 3,000 more foreign nationals who recently came to this country, Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) said on Wednesday, even though a report on the first round of interviews found few had any information about the Sept. 11 attacks.
At the U.S. Attorney's office in Alexandria, Virginia, Ashcroft defended the initial questioning of several thousand foreign men, a program which critics denounced as racial profiling because it targeted young Arab and Muslim immigrant men.
Ashcroft said the interviewing ensured that "potential terrorists hiding in our communities knew that law enforcement was on the job in their neighborhoods.
"Such a climate could cause would-be terrorists to scale back, delay or abandon their plans altogether," he said, adding that the U.S. strategy "may well have contributed to the fact that we have not suffered a substantial terrorist attack since Sept. 11th."
Under the program, the Justice Department (news - web sites) came up with an initial list in November of about 5,000 men, aged 18 to 33, who entered the United States on non-immigrant visas after Jan. 1, 2000, and have passports from countries where Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network has been present or active.
Ashcroft said only about half of the foreign nationals on the list had been located and interviewed. He admitted "serious flaws" in the ability to locate visitors to the United States.
Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan who is a House Judiciary Committee (news - web sites) member, said, "The suggestion that Arab and Muslim Americans appreciate being singled out and interrogated is a prime example of the attorney general's wartime propaganda machine in full swing."
James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, said he was "stunned" by the announcement.
"It was a mistake the first time around and it compounds the mistake doing it yet another time," Zogby said in a telephone interview. "The attorney general I think has misled the public by presenting the first round as a success ... in fact, law enforcement have told us it was not."
Zogby said law enforcement personnel, from local police to FBI (news - web sites) agents, have told the institute they are reluctant to undertake this program, as it diverts them from pursuing actual leads in the Sept. 11 attacks and erodes trust in communities that police have worked hard to build.
"FBI (agents) made it clear that they did not want to be involved in this, but they simply had to do it because it was coming from the political people at Justice," Zogby said.
JUSTICE REPORT
A Justice Department report on the initial round of questioning concluded that most of those interviewed had no information about the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people.
It said some provided leads that may assist in the investigation into the hijacked plane attacks or other planned violence.
For example, one person interviewed recalled seeing one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, the report said. Two other individuals identified acquaintances who had taken flight training. Examples in the publicly released report were heavily redacted.
Fewer than 20 individuals were taken into custody, most for immigration violations, the report said. Three were arrested on criminal charges, but none of the cases appeared to have any connection to terrorism, the report said.
Ashcroft said only a "very small number" refused to be interviewed in the initial round of questioning. "Many of those interviewed volunteered to provide information on an ongoing basis in the future," he said.
Ashcroft said 3,000 individuals who entered the United States more recently will be sought for voluntary questioning over the next 60 days.
"These visitors to our country have been selected for interviews because they fit the criteria of persons who might have knowledge of foreign-based terrorists," he said.
"We believe that these individuals might, either wittingly or unwittingly, be in the same circles, communities or social groups as those engaged in terrorist activities," he said, emphasizing that the 3,000 are not suspected of any criminal activity.
"We are merely seeking to solicit their assistance to obtain any information they may have regarding possible terrorists or potential terrorist acts," he told the federal prosecutors.
Monday, March 11, 2002
Facts About the US Military Budget
http://www.clw.org/milspend/fy03facts.html
President Bush has proposed a $45 billion increase in military spending for fiscal year 2003. The proposed military budget will rise to $396.1 billion including $16 billion for Department of Energy nuclear weapons activities and other defense related programs outside the Pentagon.
========================
Facts About the Military Budget
========================
=Military spending accounts for 17.8 percent of the entire federal budget.
=According to the Senate Budget Committee minority staff, since President Clinton's initial fiscal 2001 budget request for the Department of Defense of $291.1 billion, spending for that agency will have increased in 2003 by $88.2 billion, or 30.3 percent in nominal terms and 24.7 percent in real terms.
=Military spending comprises over half (53 percent) of total discretionary spending ($755 billion). This is an increase from 48% in fiscal 2001. Discretionary spending is money that Congress and Administration have direct control over.
=Our military budget is greater than the entire economies (Gross Domestic Product) of each of the following countries Austria, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Norway, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Pakistan, Vietnam and Venezuela.
=The proposed military budget of $396.1 billion is 15 percent higher than the average Cold War budget even in today's dollars. From 1946 to 1989 the United States budget authority for defense was an average of $343 billion a year (fiscal 2003 dollars).
=In terms of outlays, according to the Senate Budget Committee minority staff, the proposed spending in fiscal 2003 exceeds the Cold War average by $44 billion.
===========================
How much is the $45 billion increase?
===========================
It's more than THREE times the defense budgets of all the states of concern - Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Syria COMBINED ($12.8 billion)!
It's greater than the budgets of the Departments Commerce, Interior, Labor, State and the Environmental Protection Agency COMBINED ($44.1 billion)!
It tops the defense budget of any other nation in the world except Japan ($45 billion)!
It's more than the budgets of every other federal agency except for the Dept. of Education and the Dept. of Health and Human Services.
Dept. of Housing and Urban Development ($31.5 billion);
Dept. of Energy ($21.9 billion);
Dept. of Agriculture ($19.8);
Dept. of Justice ($21.8 billion);
Dept. of Transportation ($19.8 billion);
Dept. of Treasury ($16.6 billion);
and the Dept. of Veterans Affairs ($26.4 billion)!
It's more than the federal government spends on Natural Resources and Environment ($30 billion) and the Administration of Justice ($38.2.4 billion)!
It's nearly twice as much as the entire international affairs budget, including foreign military aid ($23.9 billion)!
It's greater than the Gross Domestic Products of over two-thirds of the individual nations in world including Lebanon, Kuwait, North Korea, Bolivia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cuba, Uganda and Costa Rica!
America's Morality Has Been Distorted By September 11th
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
March 07, 2002
In Afghan fields, the poppies blow. Yes, even as the Americans are moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords and gangsters running much of the western-supported Afghan government are ensuring a bumper new crop of heroin for the world's markets.
The UN have warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The "war against terror" comes first. The broken roads and highways of Afghanistan are now ribbons of anarchy and brigandage and murder across the country. The pathetic little force of peace-keepers in Kabul cannot control all of the capital, let alone the rest of the country. The Interim President, Hamid Karzai, can scarcely control the street outside his office. But the "war against terror" comes first.
Locked into their "war against terror" – and now discovering that their enemies want to fight them – the Americans remain equally indolent when confronted by the infinitely more dangerous conflict 2,000 miles to the west of Kabul, in the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Nablus, Jenin and Gaza. When the Israeli army goes on a shooting spree in the refugee camps and kills 16 Palestinians, among them two children, the US calls for "restraint". When a Palestinian suicide bomber murders a crowd of Israelis in Jerusalem, including two babies and a 10-year old, the US boldly blames Yasser Arafat for not "stopping terrorism" by locking up the bad guys. And Ariel Sharon? Why, he's busy destroying the police stations and prisons to make sure Mr Arafat can't do what he's been ordered to do.
And when Mr Sharon actually announces that Israel must "inflict greater losses" – in other words, kill more Palestinians – Washington is silent. Maybe it's not indolence. Maybe the Bush administration actually believes that the man held "personally responsible" by an Israeli commission of inquiry for the murder of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in Beirut in 1982 really is fighting America's "war on terror". Maybe America's moral compass has become so skewed by the crimes against humanity on 11 September that President Bush simply no longer cares what Mr Sharon does.
It's as if all the lessons of history – in Afghanistan as well as the Middle East – have been tossed into a bin. Take ex-President Clinton. He arrives in Israel and what does he do? He blames Mr Arafat. And what does his preposterous wife say when she does the same thing? "Yasser Arafat bears the responsibility for the violence that has occurred; it rests on his shoulders ..." She says that her role as a US Senator is "to support the Israeli people". Really? What's wrong with supporting innocent Palestinians as well? Wrong religion? Back-to-front writing? Wrong eye colour?
So a war against colonial occupation has been transformed into an offshoot of the "war on terror", the language of this war ever more infantile. We now have to learn by rote the following words: tit-for-tat, cycle-of-violence, axis of evil, bunker-buster, daisy-cutter ... Is there no end to this childishness? No, there is not. For the latest little killer is the word "transfer" or "resettlement". As in "the simple answer... would be to create a vast separation from Israel, resettling the Palestinians in Jordan, where 80 per cent of the population is Palestinian." This comes from an article published in USA Today. In Israel itself, an opinion poll asks Israelis how many of them would support "transfer" – of Arabs out of their homes, of course, not Jewish settlers off Arab land – as a solution to the war.
This is incredible. "Transfer" is ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansing is a war crime. If American newspapers are prepared to print such an option and if Israelis are asked to give their opinion on it, what is Mr Milosevic doing in The Hague? The moral collapse is already underway. Take the watering down of the US government's latest report on human rights. In 2000, it said that Egypt's hopelessly unfair military courts "do not ensure civilian defendants due process before an independent tribunal". In the 2001 report, however, that sentence has been censored out. It has to be, of course, because Mr Bush is now setting up his own military courts to try his prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without due process.
And while the Americans are distorting the nature of the war between Israel and the Palestinians, they are lying about Afghanistan. General Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central Command, refers in the following words to the mistaken killing of 16 innocent Afghans at Hazar Qadam: "I will not characterise it as a failure of any type." Sorry? Either General Franks – who on Tuesday managed to refer to his newly killed soldiers as dying "in Vietnam" – didn't read the facts or he is a very disreputable man.
His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, refuses to use the word "mistake" or even "investigation" after thousands of innocent Afghans died under US bombs because the word "sometimes has the implication of more formality or a disciplinary action". When Washington's top military men are so dishonest, is it any surprise that Israeli tanks can open fire on refugee camps without any serious response from the US or blast cars carrying children because they want to kill their father?
It is surely time that Europe became involved. It is surely time that the EU held a summit about these terrible conflicts and involved itself directly. We should be expanding the peace force in Kabul to remove the weapons of Afghanistan and let America move into the swamp of semi- occupation and guerrilla warfare if that is what it wishes. We should be asking Israel to repay the €17.29m (£10.5m) of European taxpayers' money that has been destroyed by the Israeli army in its vandalisation of EU-funded Palestinian infrastructure.
Since the Americans won't talk to Yasser Arafat, we should take over from them. If Washington is too slovenly to halt this terrible war between Arab and Israeli, we must try to do so. We're asked to fund America's bankrupt policies with our euros. So now it's time to demand that we have a say in them. Instead of that, Downing Street, which over Christmas castigated those journalists who predicted chaos and blood in Afghanistan – myself included, I'm glad to say – feeds Mr Bush's fantasies by supporting yet another war with Iraq.
I'm beginning to suspect that 11 September is turning into a curse far greater than the original bloodbath of that day, that America's absorption with that terrible event is in danger of distorting our morality. Is the anarchy of Afghanistan and the continuing slaughter in the Middle East really to be the memorial for the thousands who died on 11 September?
Tuesday, March 05, 2002
US Deports Israeli Spy Suspects
Tue Mar 5, 6:37 PM ET
By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Authorities have arrested and deported dozens of young Israelis since early last year who represented themselves as art students in efforts to gain access to sensitive federal office buildings and the homes of government employees, U.S. officials said.
A draft report from the Drug Enforcement Administration — which first characterized the activities as suspicious — said the youths' actions "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity."
Immigration officials deported them for visa violations; no criminal espionage charges were filed.
The arrests, made in an unspecified number of major U.S. cities from California to Florida, came amid public warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about suspicious behavior by people posing as Israeli art students and "attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings."
The Israelis were arrested and deported on charges of working in the United States without authorization or overstaying visits on tourist visas, said Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington. He described dozens of arrests since early 2001 but gave no exact figures.
The DEA report said a majority of the young people questioned by U.S. investigators acknowledged having served in military intelligence, electronic signals interception or explosive ordnance units in the Israeli military. The DEA said one person questioned was the son of a two-star Israeli general, one had served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army and another served in a Patriot missile unit.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Yaffa Ben-Ari said it was "nonsense" that the students were spying on the United States.
Another Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Irit Stopper, confirmed that a few Israelis posing as art students were expelled from the United States for working without permits. However they were not accused of espionage, she said. She did not say how many Israelis were expelled and did not give any additional details.
The DEA report was first obtained by a French Web site that specializes in intelligence news, Intelligenceonline.com. DEA spokeswoman Rogene Waite in Washington confirmed that the agency had written a report on this subject and forwarded it to other law enforcement agencies.
"That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background," the report said.
An FBI (news - web sites) official, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted there were no espionage charges filed against any of the individuals and that they had been deported. Asked whether any spying activity occurred, the official repeated that no charges had been filed.
A Justice Department (news - web sites) official, also asking not to be publicly identified, said investigators have been aware of some "alleged linkage" between the students and alleged espionage activities in the United States since early 2001, and said authorities have made arrests in Dallas, Chicago, San Diego and in south Florida. INS spokesman Rodney Germain in Miami said five or six people were arrested in that area at least six months ago on immigration counts.
Although security experts at the DEA first characterized the youths' behavior as suspicious, and INS authorities later arrested them, the FBI typically investigates espionage cases in the United States.
The DEA report said that among U.S. sites apparently targeted was Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, home to the military's AWACS surveillance planes and the place where many of the nation's B-1 bombers are repaired. Investigators also said that one female art student went to the home of a worker for the Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) in Denver to sell paintings and returned later to photograph the house, according to the report.
"At this time, the Department of Justice (news - web sites) does not have information to support these accounts of Israeli students possibly committing espionage," said Susan Dryden, a department spokeswoman. The deputy U.S. attorney general, Larry Thompson, declined to discuss the arrests when asked about them during a news conference Tuesday.
The U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, a federal agency, circulated a public warning in March 2001 urging employees to report contact with people describing themselves as Israeli art students.
"These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning said. "They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch."
Cooperation with Israel, a longtime key ally, is increasingly important in the U.S. war on terrorism.
French Reports: U.S. Busts Big Israeli Spy Ring
Tue Mar 5, 1:32 PM ET
PARIS (Reuters) - The French daily Le Monde reported on Tuesday that the United States had broken up a huge Israeli spy ring that may have trailed suspected al Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities.
The newspaper cited a secret U.S. government report outlining spying activities by Israelis that it said contained "elements (that) support the theory that Israel did not give the U.S. all the information it had about the planning for the September 11 attacks."
In Washington, however, U.S. law enforcement officials discounted the report, with one calling the assertion of a spy ring "a bogus story."
Le Monde said the secret study said the Israelis posed as graphic arts students and tried to enter buildings belonging to the Drug Enforcement Administration and other U.S. agencies.
Intelligence Online, a Paris-based newsletter that reported on the study Monday, said some 120 Israeli spies had been arrested or expelled and inquiries were continuing.
Asked by Reuters Monday about the Intelligence Online report, an FBI (news - web sites) spokesman flatly called it a "bogus story." The spokesman said: "There wasn't a spy ring."
In Washington on Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department (news - web sites) spokeswoman Susan Dryden said of the Le Monde report, "At this time, we have no information to support this."
U.S. officials said some Israeli students had been sent out of the country for immigration violations, not for spying.
In Israel on Monday, a spokesman said the prime minister had no comment on the matter.
Le Monde reported Intelligence Online's findings and added elements it said its reporters had uncovered.
"A vast Israeli espionage network operating on American territory has been broken up," it wrote.
The French newspaper described it as the biggest Israeli spy case in the United States to be made public since 1986, a reference to the life sentence given Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who passed U.S. military secrets to Israel.
The Pollard affair strained relations between the United States and Israel, two traditionally close allies.
Guillaume Dasquie, editor of Intelligence Online, told Reuters Monday the report did not specify exactly what information the alleged agents were seeking.
"The report shows the clandestine network was engaged in several intelligence operations. It was a long-term project," he said.
Le Monde said it published excerpts from the introduction of the June 2001 report, including a comment that the women in the spy ring were "usually very attractive."
AL QAEDA LINK?
Le Monde said more than one third of the suspected Israeli spies had lived in Florida, where at least 10 of the 19 Arabs involved in the Sept. 11 airplane attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon (news - web sites) also lived.
At least five of the spies resided in Hollywood, Florida, where alleged hijacker Mohammad Atta and four accomplices in the attacks also lived, the paper said.
The United States holds Saudi-born Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network responsible for the September attacks.
Two Israelis lived in Fort Lauderdale, near Delray Beach, where hijackers in the planes that crashed into the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania resided temporarily, the report added.
"This concordance could be the source of the American view that one of the missions of the Israeli 'students' could have been to track al Qaeda terrorists on (U.S) territory without informing federal authorities," Le Monde said.
The newspaper said it had seen a copy of the secret report, and that it had learned that six suspected spies had used portable telephones bought by a former Israeli vice consul in the United States.
Both Le Monde and Intelligence Online said the DEA had confirmed the existence of the report drawn up for the Justice Department by the drug agency together with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI and the U.S. Air Force. A spokesman for the U.S. anti-drug agency was not immediately available for comment.
Intelligence Online said the suspects, all between 22 and 30, had recently completed their Israeli military service and one was related to a two-star Israeli general. It named several of the Israelis it said had been arrested.
The inquiry began in February 2001 and is still continuing, it quoted the report as saying.