Monday, August 07, 2006
Monday: Al-Qaida's Egyptian merger unpacked; Change afoot at CIS public affairs; FAMS latest
Lauren Verdery, the head of public affairs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is to step down, United Press International has learned. Here's my brief for the UPI wire.
Al-Qaida's Egyptian merger -- all talk and no jihadis?
There's continuing uncertainty about what the Ayman al-Zawahiri videotape released over the weekend actually means.
The tape, released by al-Qaida's media arm, al-Sahab, and available here to SITE Institute subscribers is, according to their translation, an interview with Mohammed Khalil al-Hakayma, AKA Abu Jihad al-Misri, with an introduction by Zawahiri.
Al-Misri says in the interview that a group of hardliners from the al-Jamaa al-Islamiya group in Egypt had joined al-Qaida, "to help our great scholar, His Eminence the unshakeable Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, languishing in the dungeons of the American prisons, and to repel the attacking enemy which is occupying the countries of the Muslims."
Rahman, known as the blind sheikh, has been in U.S. federal prison since his 1995 conviction in a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks.
Al-Misri says the foremost mujahed from the Egyptian group merging with al-Qaida is Mohammed al-Islambouli, and Zawahiri's introduction promises a message from him soon.
According to al-Jazeera, Islambouli is the younger brother of Khalid al-Islambouli, who was executed for his part in the 1979 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, the then Egyptian president. The younger Islambouli left Egypt in the mid-1980s and is believed to have been in Afghanistan working with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
But now, it seems, al-Jamaa al-Islamiya -- whose leaders declared from jail in 1998 that they had abandoned armed struggle -- have posted a message on their Web site (Arabic only, alas) denying any link with al-Qaida.
According to this CNN piece, the message stresses that the Zawahiri statement "is not true, and… contradicts reality." The group "absolutely rejects the claims in (their) entirety," CNN reports.
One translation of the full message sent to your humble correspondent by an anonymous donor specifically denies that Rahman is with the breakaway group. "It is well known (he) was and still is one of the staunchest supporters" of the decision to abandon armed jihad, says the message.
One of the other militants named in the original al-Sahab tape, Sheikh Abedel-Akhar Hamad, has already given an interview to al-Jazeera TV denying that he is joining al-Qaida, the message says.
The bottom line question is: How much of a presence does the breakaway faction have on the ground in Egypt? And that still seems unclear.
Sheikh Abdel Akher Hammad, a former al-Jamaa al-Islamiya leader, told Aljazeera from Germany that support for the merger was limited. "If (some) brothers... have joined, then this is their personal view and I don't think that most… members share that same opinion."
FAMS latest -- Knowlton speaks out
One other piece worthy of note: the Las Vegas Review-Journal has tracked down David Knowlton, the special agent who was in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service field office there, and who is said to have imposed a controversial quota on marshals' reporting of suspicious incidents.
The piece is pretty detailed and it gives Knowlton a lot of room to defend himself.
Bottom line? After being advised there was an "interpretation issue," Knowlton told the paper, "I made it very clear: There's no quotas, but I do expect participation" in the program of "intelligence gathering" by marshals keeping alert for suspicious activity of all kinds, and reporting back to a database at headquarters via special two-way pager-type devices.
The problem is, as several have told your humble correspondent, some marshals basically refused to participate in the program having decided it was, in the words of one them, "bullshit."
"It was just a quota by another name," said the marshal about the insistence on participation. And more than a year after the service's headquarters says the quota issue was resolved, a whistleblower complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel alleged that a minimum number of Surveillance Detection Reports was still expected every month.
The Review-Journal says Knowlton was "disappointed by the air marshals who have taken their concerns to the news media. He said the negative publicity overshadows the good work done every day by thousands of air marshals throughout the country."
There are clearly some tough questions to be asked about why so many air marshals -- and so many from Las Vegas specifically -- have, generally after exhausting internal channels, felt so strongly about the issues they were raising that they went to outside agencies like the Office of Special Counsel or the media.
The piece quotes Knowlton as sourcing it back to the quota issue. "It all started with the Surveillance Detection Reports," he said. "I've tried to fix it, and that was two years ago."
And finally...
...something that religious extremists of every stripe can agree on. They are all -- Christian, Jewish and Islamic -- unshakably opposed to a huge international gay pride event in Jerusalem this week.
"In these times of intolerance and suspicion," write the organizers of WorldPride, "from the home of three of the world's great religions, we will proclaim that love knows no borders." To which your humble correspondent can only add, Amen.
Al-Qaida's Egyptian merger -- all talk and no jihadis?
There's continuing uncertainty about what the Ayman al-Zawahiri videotape released over the weekend actually means.
The tape, released by al-Qaida's media arm, al-Sahab, and available here to SITE Institute subscribers is, according to their translation, an interview with Mohammed Khalil al-Hakayma, AKA Abu Jihad al-Misri, with an introduction by Zawahiri.
Al-Misri says in the interview that a group of hardliners from the al-Jamaa al-Islamiya group in Egypt had joined al-Qaida, "to help our great scholar, His Eminence the unshakeable Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, languishing in the dungeons of the American prisons, and to repel the attacking enemy which is occupying the countries of the Muslims."
Rahman, known as the blind sheikh, has been in U.S. federal prison since his 1995 conviction in a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks.
Al-Misri says the foremost mujahed from the Egyptian group merging with al-Qaida is Mohammed al-Islambouli, and Zawahiri's introduction promises a message from him soon.
According to al-Jazeera, Islambouli is the younger brother of Khalid al-Islambouli, who was executed for his part in the 1979 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, the then Egyptian president. The younger Islambouli left Egypt in the mid-1980s and is believed to have been in Afghanistan working with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
But now, it seems, al-Jamaa al-Islamiya -- whose leaders declared from jail in 1998 that they had abandoned armed struggle -- have posted a message on their Web site (Arabic only, alas) denying any link with al-Qaida.
According to this CNN piece, the message stresses that the Zawahiri statement "is not true, and… contradicts reality." The group "absolutely rejects the claims in (their) entirety," CNN reports.
One translation of the full message sent to your humble correspondent by an anonymous donor specifically denies that Rahman is with the breakaway group. "It is well known (he) was and still is one of the staunchest supporters" of the decision to abandon armed jihad, says the message.
One of the other militants named in the original al-Sahab tape, Sheikh Abedel-Akhar Hamad, has already given an interview to al-Jazeera TV denying that he is joining al-Qaida, the message says.
The bottom line question is: How much of a presence does the breakaway faction have on the ground in Egypt? And that still seems unclear.
Sheikh Abdel Akher Hammad, a former al-Jamaa al-Islamiya leader, told Aljazeera from Germany that support for the merger was limited. "If (some) brothers... have joined, then this is their personal view and I don't think that most… members share that same opinion."
FAMS latest -- Knowlton speaks out
One other piece worthy of note: the Las Vegas Review-Journal has tracked down David Knowlton, the special agent who was in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service field office there, and who is said to have imposed a controversial quota on marshals' reporting of suspicious incidents.
The piece is pretty detailed and it gives Knowlton a lot of room to defend himself.
Bottom line? After being advised there was an "interpretation issue," Knowlton told the paper, "I made it very clear: There's no quotas, but I do expect participation" in the program of "intelligence gathering" by marshals keeping alert for suspicious activity of all kinds, and reporting back to a database at headquarters via special two-way pager-type devices.
The problem is, as several have told your humble correspondent, some marshals basically refused to participate in the program having decided it was, in the words of one them, "bullshit."
"It was just a quota by another name," said the marshal about the insistence on participation. And more than a year after the service's headquarters says the quota issue was resolved, a whistleblower complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel alleged that a minimum number of Surveillance Detection Reports was still expected every month.
The Review-Journal says Knowlton was "disappointed by the air marshals who have taken their concerns to the news media. He said the negative publicity overshadows the good work done every day by thousands of air marshals throughout the country."
There are clearly some tough questions to be asked about why so many air marshals -- and so many from Las Vegas specifically -- have, generally after exhausting internal channels, felt so strongly about the issues they were raising that they went to outside agencies like the Office of Special Counsel or the media.
The piece quotes Knowlton as sourcing it back to the quota issue. "It all started with the Surveillance Detection Reports," he said. "I've tried to fix it, and that was two years ago."
And finally...
...something that religious extremists of every stripe can agree on. They are all -- Christian, Jewish and Islamic -- unshakably opposed to a huge international gay pride event in Jerusalem this week.
"In these times of intolerance and suspicion," write the organizers of WorldPride, "from the home of three of the world's great religions, we will proclaim that love knows no borders." To which your humble correspondent can only add, Amen.
