We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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This news has been around bits of the blogosphere but it is still shocking enough to write about a week later.
When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.
She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:
“It’s about time they got a taste of what they’ve been giving the Middle East.”
It gets worse.
When Edmonds reported the incident and other breaches in security, mistranslations and potential espionage by Middle Eastern colleagues she was fired “without specified cause”. Edmonds’s supervisor, “a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut” reportedly told his employees to take long breaks, to slow down translations, and to simply say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations so that they could go on with their investigations and interrogations of those they had detained.
The FBI, which like the army suffers from a severe shortage of Arabic translators, instated a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program after 9-11. Edmonds is said to have detailed these allegations further in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Edmonds wrote Justice’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a Jan. 5 letter.
I have alleged, and the FBI has confirmed (to Senate investigators), that there are in fact such persons in the language department.
I do not know whether these allegations are true, but I have no reason to doubt their validity. I have no problem believing that a government agency swamped with bureaucracy and with departmental biases can foster such shocking behaviour within its ranks. An allegded shortage of arabic translators seems to have opened floodgates to greedy and hostile behaviour of the Middle Eastern linguists in residence whose allegiances cannot be doubted.
Any chance of a more appropriate ‘sensitivity training’? Once more, without feeling…
It seems to me that the latest suicide bombings in Iraq, targeted at Iraqis nascent army, should be met with a blizzard of public relations aimed not at minimizing the horror of what happen but rather making it clear that the perpetrators are trying to play the Iraqi people for fools.
Certainly seeking to play one section of Iraqi society off against another is potential a highly effective strategy for the bag guys. However by making the revelations such as the one Dale wrote about yesterday as widely known as possible within Iraq, this could be turned around in a most interesting fashion and perhaps used to promote a sense of solidarity within Iraq againt the Al-Qaeda/Ba’athist hardcore.
Perhaps the propaganda war will be the decisive battle in this struggle and paradoxically publicizing the enemy’s views as widely as possible might be the Allies trump card. By their own words they are revealed. Now let them be reviled for them.
Sections of a seventeen page letter likely written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants, have been published in the New York Times. Terrorist leader al-Zarqawi bemoans the lack of support in Iraq:
“Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother,” according to the document. “However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house.”
Other quotes show how he sees more difficulty in the future:
“The problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance,” the document says. “When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region.”
“We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases.”
“America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes.”
“By God, this is suffocation!”
More ominously, he talks of his desire to incite sectarian warfare. He would see tens of thousands of Iraqi’s die for his macabre politico-religious goals:
“So the solution, and only God knows, is that we need to bring the Shia into the battle,” the writer of the document said. “It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands” of Shiites.
“You noble brothers, leaders of the jihad, we do not consider ourselves people who compete against you, nor would we ever aim to achieve glory for ourselves like you did,” the writer says. “So if you agree with it, and are convinced of the idea of killing the perverse sects, we stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command.”
There is just too much of value in this story to convey without redoing the entire article. It is well worth the time to read the entire thing.
I have also intentionally left out a few very interesting admissions…
Amidst the voluminous analysis and comment about the Middle East, the part it played in the Cold War seems seldom mentioned of late. But, from the 1950’s right through to the end of the 1980’s, the Israeli-Arab conflict was, at least in part, an important Cold War battlefront, fought out between two proxy antagonists.
But, everything old is new again:
The primary goal of the EU is the internationalisation of the conflict in order to underline the need for its own mediating role. Here is the prevailing European view: The longer the conflict continues and the deeper it gets, the more evident is the incapability of the US to moderate a peace process. The EU thus concludes that both sides are in need of – ironically speaking – the good uncle from Europe to resolve this conflict with European democratic and ecological values, its welfare state and civil society. How good for both sides that there is Europe and how bad for the world that one side, and this is Israel, is affording a wild west type of policy in the style of the US.
The need for a solution only exists as long as the war continues. This is why the EU does not want the conflict to end before it gains a major role. And this is why the EU does not wish the PA to give up too early and why the EU is strengthening the PA. The EU is getting up to the cynicism of stirring up a conflict that it supposedly wants to see resolved by financing one side. This is the inherently inhuman purpose of EU humanitarian aid in the region. The Palestinians are playing the ugly role of being the cannon fodder for Europe’s hidden war against the US. It can be noted on the sidethat this is not considered an anti-Arab policy by those who otherwise easily use this word.
This is an excerpt from a longish but thoroughly fascinating article written by German Green MEP, Ilke Schroder. If she is correct (and I must say that the facts on the ground do somewhat bear her out) then it appears as if the European Union has stepped into the role once played by the old Soviet Union.
MommaBear links to several recent articles on the increasingly revolutionary situation in Iran.
A mouthpiece for the ruling Mullahs has stated resigning members of government will be treated as criminals under Islamic law. With large numbers of popular leaders now out of government the next election looks to be a very weak and sad affair of limited public credibility. After the election? The deluge perhaps.
They have tied the steam relief valve shut. There is nowhere for dissent in Iran to go now. Pressure can only build until it explodes onto the streets of Tehran. The question is whether the Mullahs will begin ‘the Terror’ before or after the explosion.
The nuclear disarmament of Libya is moving more quickly than I would have imagined. According to Jane’s Defence Weekly on 30 January 2004:
Libya ships nuclear weapon material to US
The process of removing weapons of mass distruction (WMD) from Libya has begun, with 55,000 lbs (25,000kg) of “critical materials related to Libya’s nuclear weapons programme and ballistic missile capabilities” now held on US soil, according to White House spokesperson Scott McClellan.
Adding this to today’s revelations by Dr. Kahn in Pakistan makes three down and three to go of the potential sources of weapons grade fissionables. Well… plus an extra half to account for the thriving Russian black market.
Salam Pax, who I have always rather enjoyed reading, has some quite interesting observations on how listening to American Armed Forces radio in Iraq strikes him. Having listened to American Armed Forces radio when I was in the Balkans, it does make me smirk in that kind of “I hear you, Bro…” sort of way.
For me this sort of thing is what makes blogs so compelling… insights on how things effect people that no amount of watching CNN will give you.
Yes, you read it correctly. Congressional leaders have met and shaken the hands of the very people who imprisoned American Embassy staff in 1979-80. I am sure you remember the evening news from that time: Day 120: America Held Hostage or the like, each day for the better part of a year.
According to SMCCDI, an Iranian student group, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi met with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) and Mr. Mohammed Javad Zarif met with Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-OH) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and others. SMCCDI claims these two men were among the students who took the entire US Embassy staff hostage.
I hope you find it as appalling as I do. The only reason we should want to meet with these people is to hear a public apology. Afterwards we might consider talking to them… about a transition from Mullahcracy to Democracy.
I have not run across this elsewhere, but I have not been looking either. If the mad mullahs of Iran are executing officers who are war heroes, it is a worrisome sign of what they are planning for the population. If it was just a matter of tightening control over the Army, they could just ‘retire’ the offending officers. Executions mean they want to remove any possibility forthcoming orders are not followed or troops switch sides in a showdown. I am worried they are preparing for a major pogrom with an end result of yet another set of unrecorded mass graves in the deserts of Central Asia.
I have been getting conflicting information on what might happen if it comes to a confrontation ala Eastern Europe. An Arab friend feels that the majority of the country is not of the urban middle class and the country folk are absolutely loyal to their tribal leaders and very fundamentalist. A physicist friend with urban contacts tells me the balance is not so clear cut and during the previous Iranian Revolution the liberals simply got double-crossed by the fanatical mullahs with whom they had a temporary common cause.
Perhaps members of our commentariat or some Arab friends could lend insight into what might happen if push really does come to shove in Tehran.
While reading some DOD press briefing transcripts tonight I was struck by the total dehumanization inherent in a person choosing to be a suicide bomber. At the instant they strap on the explosive belt or seat themselves in a car bomb they cease being a person. They become nothing but an expendable munition, bombs in a deceptively human form.
I suggest a new name for them: SPM’s.
Self Portable Munitions.
Almost everyone has heard about the list of persons and organizations purportedly bribed with oil by Saddam Hussein. You can find the partial list here at MEMRI.
Enjoy!
This looks interesting, from today’s Independent:
Claims that dozens of politicians, including some from prominent anti-war countries such as France, had taken bribes to support Saddam Hussein are to be investigated by the Iraqi authorities. The US-backed Iraqi Governing Council decided to check after an independent Baghdad newspaper, al-Mada, published a list which it said was based on oil ministry documents.
The 46 individuals, companies and organisations inside and outside Iraq were given millions of barrels of oil, the documents show. Thousands of papers were looted from the State Oil Marketing Organisation after Baghdad fell to US forces on 9 April.
“I think the list is true,” Naseer Chaderji, a Governing Council member, said. “I will demand an investigation. These people must be prosecuted.” Rumours had circulated for months that documents implicating senior French individuals were about to surface. Such evidence would undermine the French position before the war when President Jacques Chirac staked out the moral high ground in opposing the invasion.
I don’t remember Chirac staking out any moral high ground, just that some people thought he had, perhaps including him. But I do recall learning, although I forget how, that Saddam had a bribery network that covered the whole Middle East, and I recall thinking that it probably did not stop there. Of course, it is hardly news that France is riddled with corruption. The news is that a semi-major newspaper is saying it, today, again.
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