*A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has remanded `Aqil Ahmad Abdul Quddus, the harborer of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, to jail. A warrant is out for his father, Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, who had been at a wedding in Lahore and appears to have gone into hiding. Pakistani intellectuals like Najam Sethi have been demanding that the fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami clarify why the al-Qaeda leader was in one of their safe houses, but so far no answers are forthcoming. The Jamaat appears to be sidestepping such questions by focusing on protests of the looming Iraq war. In the meantime, plans for imposing shariah or a medieval interpretation of Islamic law on the Northwest Frontier Province are proceeding apace. The provincial government, in the hands of Islamists, has relatively little power over such matters, but the MMA intends to push as far as it can.



*An Asharq al-Awsat reporter based in Dubai is reporting that al-Qaeda plans to unleash female terrorists against the US. Usama Bin Laden's mother is quoted as saying that it is permitted to women to fight alongside men in jihad if the number of men is too few to win otherwise. Since current FBI profiling is based on a conviction that the main terrorist threat comes from young men, this new tactic could be effective.



*Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the rector of Cairo's al-Azhar Seminary (the most important center of religious learning in the Sunni world) has said he agrees that if the US attacks Iraq, it would be legitimate for Muslims to declare jihad against the US troops doing the invading. This view was issued by an al-Azhar research center two days ago. Its report suggested that Iraq was only the first of a number of Arab centers to be targetted by the US. Al-Azhar is usually pretty timid about politics, and its scholars condemned al-Qaeda for 9/11. If its clerics are out front on this issue of using jihad to fight US troops in Iraq, it shows that they are confident everyone already agrees with them. Likewise, they wouldn't be saying these things unless Hosni Mubarak's police state was permitting them to. Mubarak has refused to have anything to do with a Western invasion of a brother Arab country, and has been sullen about the powerlessness of Arab countries to stop it. Permitting the normally staid al-Azhar to engage in wild talk must be his minor revenge on W.



*A truly horrifying report of Israeli atrocities around Hebron has just come out. See: http://www.palestinemonitor.org/updates/update_cover.htm. It says in part: "Abdel Hadi Hantash, an expert in settler activities in Hebron and a member

of the Committee for Land Defense said, “These activities – performed in the

name of ‘security’ -- are part of an Israeli plan to evacuate the area of

Palestinians, pushing them into isolated cantons, so that they can gain full

control of the area. The problem is that the world is not paying sufficient

attention to what is happening here.” “People keep warning of the ‘threat’ of transfer –

especially in the context of a possible war against Iraq,” said Renad Qubaj, Coordinator

of PNGO (Palestinian Network of NGOs). “But transfer is not a threat; it is a

reality – and currently taking place in pockets all over the West Bank.” "



Let's leave aside human rights violations and war crimes contravening the Geneva Accords for a moment. What I'd like to know is whether Israeli targetted assassinations and other Draconian measures couldn't wait until after the Iraq war? Wouldn't you expect an ally of the US that gets billions of dollars a year from you and me to respect our needs just a little bit and cool it so as to avoid unnecessarily inflaming Arab public opinion at a tense time for us? As far as I am concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is among the biggest dangers to US foreign policy goals in the Middle East. And people say France is ungrateful to the US.

*The Pakistani parliament has been sent home by Gen. Pervez Musharraf after having been paralyzed for several days by the chanting and filibustering of opposition politicians. They object to the sweeping powers he has arrogated to himself, including the "Legal Framework Order" of 19 unilateral amendments to the 1973 Constitution inserted by the general last summer. The Prime Minister, Zafarullah Jamali, presides over a small and shakey coalition majority. He managed to make a speech pledging his government to stay uninvolved with any attack on Iraq. This promise was aimed at defusing the sharp criticisms made of his government as a lackey of America, and the large rallies successfully organized by the United Action Council of fundamentalist parties. The pledge failed to accomplish its goal, however, and the parliamentarians decamped. It is still not clear how Pakistan will vote on the UN Security Council with regard to the Anglo-American resolution now on the table. One would have thought that Jamali's speech foreclosed a "yes" vote, but some observers remain convinced that Pakistan will back the US when push comes to shove. A Pakistani cabinet meeting on the Iraq issue was reported to favor an abstention at the UNSC vote, and to hope that France or Russia would make the vote moot by exercising its veto. It is interesting that democratic sentiments have proved at least something of a road block for US policy with regard to both Turkey and Pakistan. This result brings into question the apparent conviction of the Bush administration hawks that a democratic Iraq will support the US, either.



*Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov insists that Russia will vote against the current UNSC Anglo-American resolution authorizing war against Iraq, saying he has seen no convincing justfication for such a move. He is reported to be saying that Russia will exercise its veto on the Security Council.



*Kurdish Peshmerga forces say they have fanned out along the Iraqi border with Turkey and are prepared to repel by force any Turkish incursion into Iraqi territory in conjunction with a US war on Iraq.

*An al-Qaeda leader reports on a militant web site that there were only 1900 "Arab Afghan" fighters in Afghanistan during the US war against the Taliban, and that 350 were killed. This is a lower number than most estimates I've seen.



*A major rally of tens of thousands of protesters took place Sunday in Rawalpindi (near Islamabad), denouncing the US war on Iraq. They accused Pervez Musharraf of turning Pakistan into an American colony and urged Pakistan not to vote for the American resolution at the UN security council (where Pakistan is one of ten elected members currently). The rally was organized by a newly powerful coalition of fundamentalist religious parties.



*Between 100,000 and 500,000 Muslims also rallied in East Java, Indonesia, against an Iraq war, calling for a non-violent solution and questioning whether Bush's path to power really made him the legitimate president of the US.



*Thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians went first to the presidential palace in Baabda and then to that of in Damascus, supporting Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, giving them support in their stance against an Iraq war. Lahoud warned against divisions in Arab ranks.



*A representative of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq will attend a meeting of Iraqi dissidents on Tuesday or Wednesday in free Iraqi Kurdistan, after consultations with Ahmad Chalabi in Tehran recently. SCIRI has been unhappy with announced plans for a period of US occupation of Iraq after the war, and has even spoken of shooting at occupation troops. But the crisis seems to have died down a bit, since a member of the Hakim family is willing to attend the Kurdistan conference.

*Dawn is reporting that the computer files and CDs confiscated from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on his arrest in Rawalpindi demonstrate the breadth of his networking in the Philippines, Europe and the US. (He had lived in the Philippines in the mid-1990s and plotted terrorism there against US targets like airliners. Like many al-Qaida goons, he led a dissolute lifestyle, hanging out in strip clubs and living large. His photograph shows that he still carries the weight and the alcohol damage. The al-Qaida terrorists believe it is all right to live immorally if your life is dedicated to destroying the enemies of Islam).



The materials confiscated also show recent contacts with Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of them now apparently in northern Pakistan. Attempts are being made to track them down. The whereabouts of Bin Laden's four wives and his children in Iran is also now apparently known. We may be near an endgame against the top al-Qaida leadership, which will make us all much safer (as long as the Bush administration does not provoke so much new anger that a new generation of expert engineer/terrorists arise).



*The war in Iraq is scary for many reasons, not least my concerns about a US mandate trying to administer a contemporary Arab society. But what is really scary is that many of the hawks in the Bush administration say, "after Baghdad, Beijing." Iraq is a small country with a much degraded army and even its weapons of mass destruction have been 95% wiped out. The war may or may not be harder fought than the Pentagon expects, but it is a task that the US can almost certainly accomplish. Besieging communist China and trying to overthrow the government there, however, is a fool's errand and a recipe for world war. See Jonathan Freedland's insightful article in the Guardian:



http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,903076,00.html



*About 500,000 demonstrators marched in Cairo Wednesday, in a rally authorized by the National Democratic Party. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is well aware of the need to allow an enraged population to blow off steam. In fact, however, the event was a staged affair with few grass roots supporters. It was the sort of thing you would go to if you were an NDP supporter; and, Egyptian governments have been known to spread some money around to produce a crowd. The demonstration last week this time, which was 100,000-strong, was more of a grass roots affair and probably more important, though smaller in size.



*The horrific attack on a bus in Haifa, apparently an operation of the fundamentalist Hamas party, was denounced by the mainstream PLO because they said it would obscure the wrongs that have been being done to innocent Palestinians by the Israeli army of occupation.



I read the reports out of the West Bank and Gaza every day, and it seems to me that almost every day the Israeli army kills innocent civilians--babies, kids, grandmothers, what have you. Here is how the Christian Science Monitor reported Monday's operation:



"On a raid Monday to arrest Hamas political leader Sheikh Mohammed Taha, Israeli troops killed eight people, including Noha Maqadme, a pregnant mother of 11. Hours after that raid in the densely packed Bureij refugee camp, shock fused with calls for revenge in an example of the way IDF incursions into Gaza may be hardening resistance instead of undermining it.In the crumbling streets, endurance seemed to be the order of the day as youths hoisted mattresses on their shoulders for those made homeless by the damaging or complete destruction of 14 houses. Four of those structures housed families of Palestinians involved in attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers, the army says. Though human rights groups condemn the practice as collective punishment and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the army says the demolitions deter others considering violence against Israeli targets. Neighboring houses were blown apart by the force of the blasts, which toppled the wall of a room where the Maqadme family took shelter after soldiers announced a curfew. Jamil Maqadme, his face bruised and sweater torn in the explosion, remembers his mother leaving to make tea for his brother - and then an explosion. "Everyone was under the ruins," he says. "It was deep darkness. I heard my mother scream 'help.' "Something was on my chest, and it was difficult to breathe," he says. His father and a neighbor extricated him, but four of his siblings were injured, and his mother, Noha, was dead."



A man named Mohammad Hasan Ali Issa of Nablus was apparently shot to death by Israeli soldiers after he was already in captivity and in handcuffs. The Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza are either extremely unprofessional and incompetent, or they have secret orders to carry out their operations against terrorists regardless of the loss of innocent Palestinian life. Since this latter would be a war crime, it is of course denied, but that is certainly what it looks like to me.



The Hamas fanatics and the Likud fanatics feed off one another and each gains internal power from the brutality and murders committed by the other. The Haifa bombing killed 15 people and wounded 40, many of them college students (one was an American). It was not only vicious but stupid. It just provides further pretext to the Likud to press for the liquidation of any Palestinian state and some form of ethnic cleansing against the population of the Occupied Territories. Most Americans just shrug and say it is the problem of the people who live over there.



But 9/11 should have been a wake up call. Its real lesson was not that the US needs to go around fighting perpetual war. The lesson was that it is extremely dangerous to let hate fester. And yet, the Bush administration has done nothing to lessen hate. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli PM, even embarrassed Bush by rejecting any Palestinian state in the future. That will really improve things--just announce to the Arabs that they will be screwed over yet again in Palestine just as the US is going to war against Iraq. Ariel Sharon should be ashamed of himself for taking American money hand over fist and then pissing all over US policy needs in the region.

Although the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, an al-Qaeda mastermind, has raised hopes that the war on terror is bearing fruit, the question of his patron inside Pakistan remains murky and troubling. He was arrested in a house owned by a Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, a 78-year-old microbiologist characterized in Pakistani news reports as a leader of the Jamaat-i Islami, a fundamentalist group in Pakistan. The doctor's son, Ahmad Abdul Quddus, 41, was taken into custody. He is also said to be a member of the Jamaat-i Islami, . His sister, Qudsia Bibi, argued that her brother was "slow" (i.e. of very low intelligence) and was not Khalid Shaikh Muhammad's host. (But then why was the latter in the house with Ahmad?) Pakistani police have now questioned the elder Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, who lived in the Sudan and may have a connection to Usama Bin Laden dating from the latter's own Sudan period (early to mid 1990s). Now it turns out that another member of the family is a Pakistani officer, Major Adil Quddus, who is being questioned by Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, in Kohat, near Peshawar. An officer of the Signal Corps, he is brother of Dr. Abdul Quddus and uncle of the man who was arrested. An al-Qaeda-linked major in the Pakistani army in that region might be an extremely important asset to the organization, since some of those who escaped from Afghanistan are probably there. Does his being in the Signal Corps help him in this regard?



So here are the questions: Is Ahmad Abdul Quddus actually a person of low intelligence? Was his father the real host of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad? Is his father actually a leader of, the Jamaat-i Islami? (This question is important because the Jamaat is part of the United Action Council, the coalition of fundamentalist religious groups that controls the provincial government of the Northwest Frontier Province and about 20% of the seats in the Federal parliament. The Jamaat has repeatedly called for an end to the manhunt for al-Qaeda and the expulsion of US personnel from Pakistan. Do they take this stance because of the danger that further arrests may demonstrate the complicity of some members of the Jamaat and of the Jami`at Ulama-i Islam in the sheltering of al-Qaeda?) Is Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, the father, involved in al-Qaeda as a result of his Sudan experience? Was his expertise in microbiology of interest to al-Qaeda terrorist planners? Is Major Adil Quddus involved with al-Qaida? Are there al-Qaeda cells *within* the Jamaat-i Islami, perhaps unknown to the organization's leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmad? Or is there an even more central and sinister link? Are there in turn radical Jamaat cells inside the Pakistani officer corps?

*Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was planning further terrorist attacks on the US. These would include, according to Newsweek, hijacking petroleum fuel trucks and smashing them into buildings, and destroying bridges in Washington, DC. He was trained in the US as an engineer. I was wrong yesterday about his being a Palestinian--his family is from Baluchistan in Pakistan. It is heartening to see al-Qaeda lose one of its most imaginative strategists. He is now likely to spill the beans on everything--safe houses, sources of funding, whereabouts of major leaders--everything. This is a major victory for our side.



*The Arab League is falling apart. The meeting a couple of days ago in Sharm al-Sheikh featured a shouting match between Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qadhafi and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, each implying that the other was a lackey of the Americans. The proceedings are usually full of pleasantries and saying it like it is has not been a strong tradition. Meanwhile, Kuwaiti relations with Lebanon and Syria are in the dumpster because of the actions of the former at another recent meeting. The disunity and lack of decorum at the Arab League deprive it of the little dignity it had left as an organization.



*Ariel Sharon has announced that his new government has turned its back on previous promises and now opposes the creation of a Palestinian state. Since it has been clear for some time that Sharon intended to annex much of the West Bank for Zionist settlers the only surprising thing about his statement is that he finally just came out and said it. Since Bush has promised the Arabs a viable Palestinian state, Sharon has more or less cut his legs off from underneath him. There will be trouble about all this. Sharon's plans imply further displacement of the Palestinian population. Meanwhile, Israeli troops killed a 9 year old child yesterday in Gaza. Innocent civilians seem to be being shot on a daily basis. This is what the Arab world can expect from the Bush administration? The sense of betrayal is palpable.

*Pakistani security forces, including the Inter-Services Intelligence, conducted a raid in Rawalpindi that netted one of the biggest al-Qaeda fish yet caught. CIA men were also present. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, one of Bin Laden's right hand men and among the masterminds of the two World Trade Center bombings, is now in US custody in some country other than Pakistan (possibly they took him to Bagram). He may well know where Bin Laden is or has been recently, and I imagine they are pumping him now before his information goes stale. This is a very major success in the War on Terror. Pop open the champagne, guys and gals.



The clear involvement in the capture by the Inter-Services Intelligence is a further sign that that organization has been being purged of its Islamist officers who supported the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Pakistani government now gets major aid from the US and is expecting the $3 bn. debt it owes the US to be wiped off the books, so the military has good reason to cooperate.



Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, born 1964 or 1965 and now in his late '30s, is an uncle of Ramzi Yusuf, the chemist who was central in carrying out the first World Trade Center bombing of 1993. They were later together in the Philippines, where Ramzi's captured notes show he was planning the crashing of a plane into the CIA headquarters. They also wanted to bomb US commercial airliners on Southeast Asia routes. He had attended Chowan College in North Carolina (in the early 80s?), then went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. After the war wound down, he, like many other of Reagan's "freedom fighters," gradually turned against the US. He was born in Kuwait. HIs actual ethnicity, though, seems to be in dispute. The NYT today says he is of Pakistani origins. Earlier press reporting had identified him and Ramzi Yusuf as of Palestinian heritage. Either way, their identification with the Palestinian cause is clearly one motive for their immense hatred of the US. Apart from the question of these two, there is a substantial Palestinian element in al-Qaeda, even if most of its operations have concerned the Arabian Sea, South Asia or the US rather than Israel. That bloody and dangerous conflict needs to be resolved if we are to win the war on terror.



*The leader of Israel's conservative religious Shas party is furious at Ariel Sharon for his alliance with the new secular party. He has pledged to bring down the new government, even if it means cooperating with the Labor Party and even the Arab parties. Well, imagine. I agree with Shas about something. From their lips to God's ear.



* An Israeli military official has threatened to take out Hizbullah's military capabilities in Lebanon. The party has a paramilitary militia of about 5,000 who have been harassing the Israelis in the occupied Shebaa Farms. Question: If Israel could not take out Hizbullah during so many years of occupying southern Lebanon, how would it do so now?