Here we Go...........

[LoungeMachine]

Al-Qaida finds safe haven in Iran
But former leaders reportedly under house arrest
Suleiman Abu Ghaith, once a spokesman for bin Laden, is believed to be living Iran. Gaith and other former al-Qaida leaders, fled to Iran after the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001.
Al-jazeera / AFP

By Robert Windrem
Investigative producer
NBC News
Updated: 8:13 p.m. ET June 24, 2005


Somewhere north of Tehran, living perhaps in villas near the town of Chalous on the Caspian Sea coast, are between 20 and 25 of al-Qaida’s former leaders, along with two of Osama bin Laden’s sons.

Men such as Saif al-Adel, the former military commander of al-Qaida, and Suleiman Abu Ghaith, the bespectacled bin Laden spokesman, are not in hiding but rather in the care — or custody — of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

“They are under virtual house arrest,” not able to do much of anything, said one senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

How they got there and what will happen to them is one of the more intriguing stories of the war on terror, one that is filled with secret movements, stolen communications and a failed attempt at a prisoner exchange involving Iranian dissidents.

“We believe that they're holding members of al-Qaida's management council,” Fran Townsend, President Bush’s counterterrorism czar, said of Iran.

In an interview with Tom Brokaw two weeks ago, she added: “And we have encouraged and suggested that they ought to try them, they ought to admit freely that they're there — which they have not done — that they're holding them. Or they ought to return them to their countries of origin, which they've also been unwilling to do.”

How’d they get there?

The road to Iran
NBC News has learned that in the chaotic last days before Kabul, Afghanistan, fell to U.S. troops in November 2001, bin Laden and his lieutenants made a strategic decision. Al-Qaida’s then military commander, Mohammed Atef, has just been blown up in a U.S. air attack in the city, one in which a CIA Predator had pinpointed the very house he was staying in. It was time to move out.

Al-Qaida’s leadership had been divided into consultative and management councils, both of which reported to bin Laden.

The consultative council, the “al shura,” was viewed as the more critical to the terror network's continued operations. Its members, including bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would flee east to cities in Pakistan. There, over the next few years, many key players would be picked up and bundled off to interrogation centers with great regularity. Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaida’s recruitment and training leader — known as the “dean of students” — was arrested in Faisalabad. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, its operations commander, was grabbed in Rawalpindi; two of his deputies, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Faraj al Libbi, were taken in Karachi and Multan, and other lesser figures were regularly rousted by Pakistani forces.

The management council went west, to northern Iran, where the United States had little sway and the Iranians had little interest in pushing for their arrests. The group included al-Adel and abu Ghaith; Shaik Said, al-Qaida's chief financial officer; Abu Hafs, al-Qaida’s personnel director; the two top aides to Zawahiri; and a mysterious Yemeni, Abu Dahak, who served as al-Qaida’s ambassador to the rebels in Chechnya. On a personal level, two of bin Laden’s teenage sons, Sa’ad and Hamza, also were taken to Iran.


Setting up base
That’s not to say the Iranians, with their Shiite leadership, held any love for the Wahhabis and Salafists. Iranian intelligence had tried to kill Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, at a palace built for him by bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

“They missed, but it wasn’t for lack of trying,” said a Pentagon counter terrorism official at the time of the 2000 attempt. “It was one big truck bomb. I know. I saw pictures of the crater.”

But Iran was either unable or uninterested in taking the al-Qaida members into custody. Al-Qaida operatives, it was soon determined, were in communications, both personally and electronically, with the management and consultative councils. Orders were being given, commands were being carried out.

In April 2002, only five months after leaving Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence officials believed they saw a link between al-Qaida in Iran and the first post-9/11 terrorist attack ordered by bin Laden. A propane truck, used a truck bomb, breached the gates of one of Africa’s oldest synagogues in Djerba, Tunisia, killing 14 tourists. Although the suicide bomber was Tunisian, Western intelligence believed that the attack has been organized by Sa’ad bin Laden.


Feeling pressure
There was also evidence that critical meetings regarding the future of al-Qaida were being held in the relative safety of Iran. But al-Qaida decided at a meeting in Iran in November 2002 that the pressure on it was so great that it could no longer exist as a hierarchy. Two top leaders had just been arrested in Pakistan and in the pre-Iraq war environment, Western governments were putting up a united front.

Instead, following the advice of a key Iran-based al-Qaida strategist, Mustapha Nasar Setmariam, the terror network decided to move its operatives out into the wider world, to the rest of the Middle East, Europe and North America.

As time wore on, the al-Qaida operatives became bolder. In May 2003, operatives in Saudi Arabia carried out the first attack in Riyadh, targeting Westerners’ compounds. Thirty-five people, including eight Americans, were killed.

TO BE CONTINUED

[LoungeMachine]

PT. 2



Let's make a deal
As a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official told NBC News: “The U.S. government believed that the Saudis made a deal with the Iranians in 1996 after the Khobar Towers bombing. The deal was structured this way: The Saudis would not cooperate with the U.S. on the investigation, knowing that if they did cooperate, the U.S. would have the justification for bombing Iran.”

In return, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Iranians agreed not to support any terrorist attacks in the kingdom. (Ultimately, the United States charged Saudi Hezbollah members with the Khobar Towers attack and named as unindicted co-conspirators two officers of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence.)

“Then, in 2003, we are told, the Saudis — with U.S. and British help — discovered that al-Qaida's management council in Iran was communicating with the al-Qaida cell in Saudi that had carried out the attacks on Western compounds in Riyadh," the official said.

House arrest
“The Saudis let the Iranians know and, citing the earlier agreement, demanded that the Iranians put a halt to the operations of the management council, leading to the Iranians putting the 20 to 25 al-Qaida officials in Iran under virtual house arrest,” the official said.

And that’s just what happened, say current U.S. officials. According to reports in the Arab media, they were rounded up and taken to two locations guarded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards: one in villas in the Namak Abrud region, near the town of Chalous on the Caspian coast, 60 miles north of Tehran, and the other in Lavizan, a region northwest of the capital that also houses a large military complex.



Publicly, all CIA Director Porter Goss will say is that Iran has “detained” al-Qaida elements.

“I don't have all of the information I would like to have,” he told Tom Brokaw. “But I think your understanding is that there is a group of leadership of al-Qaida under some type of detention — I don't know exactly what type, necessarily — in Iran is probably accurate. But I don't think I want to go too far into that — if you don't mind.”

Whether it was a quid pro quo with the Saudis is uncertain to this day, say U.S. officials, but it’s better that they are under some sort of control and not operating freely.

U.S. presses for information
The Iranians admit privately they have the al-Qaida officials and say they are “investigating” their activities. That does not impress Townsend.

“But the Iranians are not telling us who they have," she said. "They may be telling you and there may be things in their newspapers, but they're not telling us, and they were not talking about what, if anything, what progress, if any, has been made in terms of their investigation.”

Does the White House counterterrorism czar think there will be a trial of the al-Qaida officials anytime soon?

“No. I do not,” she said.

And does the United States have any kind of communication with Iran about the situation?

“I would refer you to the State Department,” Townsend said.

Isn’t that a matter that might go outside of channels?

“It could,” she said.

CONTINUED

[LoungeMachine]

Al-Qaida finds safe haven in Iran

PT. 3

Talk of terrorist trade
In fact, says one former senior U.S. intelligence official, back-channel discussions have been a lot more concrete.

“The Iranians will not give you specific names, or at least they would never give us specific names. They would always duck the question,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In fact, he said, Iran first proposed the exchange of al-Qaida operatives for leaders of the group Mujahedeen E. Khalk who are under U.S. control in Iraq. The MEK has been on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations since 1998, when the Clinton administration was trying to open up lines of communications with Iran. The State Department blames the group for the killings of five Americans in the run-up to the Iranian revolution in 1979 and various murders and attacks on Iranian diplomats and civilians both inside and outside Iran.

In addition, Saddam Hussein had financed, trained and armed the MEK, even building the group a 5,000-man training facility in Fallujah (now being used by the U.S. Marines) and used them in the Iran-Iraq War and in cross-border attacks after the war.

“The exchange was never formally proposed, but several general offers were made through third parties, not all of them diplomatic,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“One reason nothing came of it was because we knew that there were parts of the U.S. government who didn't want to give them the MEK because they had other plans for them … like overthrowing the Iranian government.”

18 al-Qaida leaders reportedly in Iran
Even if there is no movement in U.S.-Iranian discussions, there have been indications over the past year of discussions between Arab states and Iran about the disposition of al-Qaida members in Iran.

There was a particularly intense and public flurry last summer, according to Sharq al-Awsat, the London-based Arab newspaper, which also reported that the total number of al-Qaida operatives in Iran was 348 and leaders 18.

In June, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said his country had in the past given Saudi Arabia some useful information concerning members of bin Laden's network that it was detaining. He did not elaborate.

Sharq al Awsat also reported that Tehran handed over wanted Saudi militant Khaled bin Odeh bin Mohammed al-Harbi to Saudi authorities.

Syria weighs in
Riyadh believed the disabled militant, suspected of being an al-Qaida figure close to bin Laden, surrendered in mid-July under an amnesty after contacting the Saudi Embassy in Iran.

That reportedly followed a meeting at which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad convinced Tehran during a visit early this month of the "seriousness" of using al-Qaida elements in Iran as a card in its policy with the United States.

Most recently, there are reports in Iranian newspapers of the investigation proceeding and a comment by Saif a-Adel, the former military commander, in al-Quds, a radical London-based newspaper. Accompanying an article in which he praises Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was a note saying that al-Adel had “a lot of free time” to write.

That, say U.S. officials, is a good thing.

[Nickdfresh]

We're also holding a lot of people the IRANIANS consider to be 'terrorists.' Anti-government Iranian resistance fighters along the IRAQI border were disarmed after SADDAM fell.

[LoungeMachine]

The US War With Iran Has Already Begun



By Scott Ritter
Monday 20 June 2005


First Published english.aljazeera.netAmericans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.

On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary."

We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the 'execute' orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.

These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.

President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.

This timeline of events has ramifications that go beyond historical trivia or political investigation into the events of the past.


It represents a record of precedent on the part of the Bush administration which must be acknowledged when considering the ongoing events regarding US-Iran relations. As was the case with Iraq pre-March 2003, the Bush administration today speaks of "diplomacy" and a desire for a "peaceful" resolution to the Iranian question.

But the facts speak of another agenda, that of war and the forceful removal of the theocratic regime, currently wielding the reigns of power in Tehran.

As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah's to an "axis of evil" (together with the newly "liberated" Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of "democracy" to the Iranian people.

"Liberation" and the spread of "democracy" have become none-too-subtle code words within the neo-conservative cabal that formulates and executes American foreign policy today for militarism and war.

By the intensity of the "liberation/democracy" rhetoric alone, Americans should be put on notice that Iran is well-fixed in the cross-hairs as the next target for the illegal policy of regime change being implemented by the Bush administration.

But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream.

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

Perhaps the adage of "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror.

But the CIA-backed campaign of MEK terror bombings in Iran are not the only action ongoing against Iran.

To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's interest in Azerbaijan may have escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan's role in the upcoming war with Iran.

The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.

But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.

In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.

No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Arab Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.

A much shorter route to Tehran now exists - the coastal highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.

US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.

Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and ground power in Azerbaijan.

Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003.

America and the Western nations continue to be fixated on the ongoing tragedy and debacle that is Iraq. Much needed debate on the reasoning behind the war with Iraq and the failed post-war occupation of Iraq is finally starting to spring up in the United States and elsewhere.

Normally, this would represent a good turn of events. But with everyone's heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran - an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.

Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.

We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.


*************
Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998, and author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy, to be published by I B Tauris in October 2005.

[ODShowtime]

so if Russia says "enoughs enough" then it's the end of the world, right?

[FORD]

Originally posted by ODShowtime
so if Russia says "enoughs enough" then it's the end of the world, right?

Depends on how they handle it. They could just gather a coalition of Muslim nations together and march on Israel (the originators of the PNAC plan). That would be what's known as the "Ezekiel 38-39 scenario" and that would only be the beginning of the End Of The World.

I actually think that's a little more likely than going for the nukes and everybody taking everybody else out.

[BigBadBrian]

I'll read this all later. I have more important things to do right now...like take a mean crap. :)

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
I'll read this all later. I have more important things to do right now...like take a mean crap. :)

I was thinking of having a shelf installed in there for my laptop:D