Is this how we win friends?
William Fisher

HIGH officials in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and other US Government departments and agencies, love to talk about how good they are in “reaching out” to American Muslim communities. They should be reaching out. It is just possible that folks in these communities might be valuable sources of intelligence. Or credible teachers of the customs and practices of Arabs and other Muslims. Too bad the Bush Administration didn’t learn more about this before it decided to invade and occupy a Muslim country.
The amazing thing about American Muslims is how well they have been assimilated into US culture. This is in sharp contrast to the attitudes of European governments about their growing Muslim communities — and vice versa. There is certainly no shortage of examples of the Americanization of the Muslims among us. Many have been here for generations. Thousands serve in the armed forces, many of them in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even more have applied for jobs at the FBI, the CIA, the DHS, and other agencies involved in national security. But they are often turned down because their family ties to people in dangerous parts of the world — say, the Middle East — precludes them from receiving security clearances.
But where else would their family ties be? Being turned away by agencies that spend a small fortune in tax dollars courting this constituency is not exactly a prescription for making the applicants feel all warm and fuzzy toward our government. And then there’s the “material support” for terrorists rap. For American Muslims, this presents a real dilemma. One of the most fundamental tenets of Islam is charitable giving. But giving to whom? The President and Congress have given the Treasury Department the authority to designate any charitable organization as a supporter of terrorism. With that authority, Treasury has investigated thousands of not-for-profits that support Muslim causes.
And it has effectively closed down many of these by seizing its records and freezing its assets — with virtually no due process at all.
The outfits so designated have included the organization that was the largest and most prominent Muslim charity in the US, the Holy Land Foundation. The government seized HLF’s assets in 2001 and didn’t put them on trial until mid-2007. Meanwhile, donations from supporters languished in frozen bank accounts. Small wonder then that the government’s record of using Muslim charities for target practice is adding new impetus to the efforts of prominent constitutional lawyers to seek substantial changes in the “material support” law. The latest failure in a terrorism-financing prosecution came late in 2007, when a Texas jury failed to render any guilty verdicts in the trial of HLF. Several HLF officials were charged with giving money to Hamas, the Palestinian organization designated a terrorist group by the US in 1995.
The trial ended with a mix of acquittals and deadlocks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation started looking into HLF in 1993.
In December 2001, the US Treasury Department (DOT) seized and confiscated the charity’s assets and records, effectively putting the organization out of business. Given that outcome, some legal scholars have questioned why the government pursued a criminal prosecution at all. The trial did not begin until mid-2007. William Neal, a juror in the HLF case, told the media that the government’s evidence “was pieced together over the course of a decade — a phone call this year, a message another year.”
Instead of trying to prove that the defendants knew they were supporting terrorists, Neal said, prosecutors “danced around the wire transfers by showing us videos of little kids in bomb belts and people singing about Hamas, things that didn’t directly relate to the case.” Civil liberties groups say the HLF case was just the latest in a line of misguided prosecutions. One such group, OMB Watch, charges that the USA Patriot Act gives the government “largely unchecked power to designate any group as a terrorist organization.”
It says that “once a charitable organization is so designated, all of its materials and property may be seized and its assets frozen. The charity is unable to see the government’s evidence and thus understand the basis for the charges. Since its assets are frozen, it lacks resources to mount a defense. And it has only limited right of appeal to the courts. So the government can target a charity, seize its assets, shut it down, obtain indictments against its leaders, but then delay a trial almost indefinitely.” One result, say critics of the government’s policy, is that Muslim charities have experienced a precipitous decline in contributions.
Contributions that do arrive often come in cash from anonymous givers. And donors who happen to be Muslim are increasingly turning to the large household names like Oxfam and Save the Children, which may conduct programs in predominantly Muslim areas abroad. One of America’s foremost constitutional scholars, Prof. David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center, argues that the “material support principle is ‘guilt by association’ in 21st-century garb, and presents all of the same problems that criminalizing membership and association did during the Cold War.” He told us that the problem requires fundamental changes in the terrorism-financing law. Included in Cole’s recommendations for major changes: 1. The Treasury Department should be required to permit closed charities to direct their collected funds to charities mutually approved by the frozen charity and the government. 2. Congress should enact a statutory definition of a “specially designated terrorist.” “Right now the Treasury Department makes such designations entirely on the basis of an Executive Order, and accordingly Congress has given the president essentially a blank check,” Cole told us. 3. Treasury should allow designated entities to use their own funds to pay for their own defense. “Treasury not only shuts down charities in a secretive one-sided process, but then bars the charities from using any of their own money to defend themselves against the designation,” according to Cole.
4. The criminal material support statutes should be amended to require proof that an individual supported a proscribed group with the intent to further its illegal activities. “Today,” according to the government, “even aid intended to discourage terrorist activities is a crime under the material support laws,” Cole says.
He adds, “There is no requirement that the aid have any connection to terrorism,” and cites a case he is handling with the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP) at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). He told us, “My clients had been providing human rights advocacy training to the PKK in Turkey, as a way of encouraging them to use peaceful lawful means to resolve their disputes with the Turkish government over its treatment of the Kurdish minority. By encouraging lawful outlets for dispute resolution, such aid would presumably discourage terrorism. Yet under the material support statute it is a crime even if HLP could prove that both the purpose and the effect of their support was to decrease the PKK’s resort to violence.”
OMB Watch says the “material support” effort has resulted in the government shutting down charities that were not on any government watch list before their assets were frozen. The organization says the result is that Muslims have no way of knowing which groups the government suspects of ties to terrorism. “Organizations and individuals suspected of supporting terrorism are guilty until proven innocent,” it says.
OMB Watch told us, “A group could comply 100% and still be shut down ‘pending an investigation’.” Material-support cases are just a small fraction of the Justice Department’s terrorism prosecutions, but some observers believe they represent a shift in government strategy from punishment to prevention. Earlier prosecutions were for acts of violence that actually took place. Examples include the first World Trade Center attack, the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Africa, and conspiracies that were relatively close to fruition.
Nonetheless, government terror-financing prosecutions have been reasonably successful. From the Sept. 11 attacks to last July, the government started 108 material-support prosecutions and completed 62. Juries convicted nine defendants, 30 defendants pleaded guilty, and 11 pleaded guilty to other charges. There were eight acquittals and four dismissals. In terrorism prosecutions involving a violent act actually committed or near fruition, the government’s record is spottier.
According to the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, the government has a 29 percent conviction rate in terrorism prosecutions overall, compared with 92 percent for felonies generally.
The latest government setback involves the so-called Liberty City Seven — seven men named for the blighted Miami district where they allegedly operated. Charged with plotting to join forces with Al-Qaeda to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower, one was acquitted last month and a mistrial was declared for the six others after the federal jury deadlocked.
Prosecutors acknowledged that no attack was imminent, and then-Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales said after the arrests in mid-2006 that the alleged terror cell was “more aspirational than operational.”
In some cases, defendants are arguably convicted of terror-related offenses in the court of public opinion rather than in the courts. One example often cited by lawyers is the case of Dr. Rafil Dhafir, an Iraqi-born American citizen, who organized and raised money for a charity providing humanitarian relief to children in Iraq.
He was never charged in court with a terrorist-related offense; in fact, the word “terrorism” was not allowed to be used in his trial, although prominent politicians such as then-New York Governor George Pataki publicly hailed his arrest as a victory in the war on terror.


—Arab News



A blow to the US
Dr Moeed Pirzada


BENAZIR Bhutto was a gifted progeny of a remarkable mind. Confronted by a three-decade long adversity and tragedy, she displayed an uncanny ability to redefine and remerge. There is no doubt that she stood head and shoulder above all her political contemporaries. And she was not merely brave; she was a woman of extraordinary courage that pressed ahead despite the ‘clear & present danger’ to her life. But let there be no doubt that this gifted Pakistani leader died, not for the Pakistani people but, fighting her way to power through the maze of contradictions that is: American foreign policy.
Few events inspire such copious comment, as her death did. Many were taken by the sheer tragedy and most took issues with the official explanations that Al Qaeda was behind her assassination. Fingers have been pointed at the elements inside the Pakistani security establishment and some like Robert Fisk, the veteran British journalist, have fired the shot at Musharraf himself. What remained missing is a sobre analysis of the conflict of interest that took her life.
Perhaps Michael Portillo, the former Tory politician, was an exception. He struck at the bull’s eye with his aptly titled article in Sunday Times: “That assassin’s strike killed the West’s foreign policy too.” Portillo, a former Tory politician and an old admirer of Bhutto from the days of Oxford was on spot with his candid admission that Americans have no candidate left in the Pakistani elections. Yet that may have been the problem.
An autopsy could have revealed what specifically lead to the 5-cm oval hole in her ‘Temporoparietal region’ and a political post-mortem may be needed to understand the wedge between the US foreign policy interests and those ‘interests’ that ultimately pulled the trigger. Unless the two are reconciled, or this widening crevice somehow narrowed, more on the so-called list of shadowy Al Qaeda may fall to the great peril of the state of Pakistan; this may also seriously escalate the later costs of ‘salvaging’ for the US policy making.
But the wedge is part of the complex relationship Pakistani establishment found itself in after 9/11. Changed global circumstances compelled them to accept, against their better judgment, a purely US construct of ‘war against terrorism’. Many, if not all, in the Pakistani security establishment, suspected the US of furthering long term objectives in Central and South Asia, in other words all around Pakistan under the panoply of the war against terrorism. The power sharing arrangements of the post-Taleban Afghanistan only confirmed these fears.
Combination of needs and insecurities lead both sides to a dangerous tango. If US foreign policy had to advance their interests, Pakistani establishment had to preserve theirs. The mushrooming of non-state actors, jihadists being the principal examples, inside Pakistan became the inevitable costs of this complex, asymmetrical and thus unstable relationship. This soon turned into a relationship without which one side could not achieve its objectives; but without which unfortunately the other could not even survive.
Before her death Bhutto was working with Mark Seigel, her lobbyist, on a new book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West. But their relationship dated to early 80s when she was struggling, after her father’s hanging, against Gen Zia’s regime, and was active inside the US. From those days, she had grasped one clear lesson: political power in Pakistan is neither possible nor sustainable without the American blessing.
As a politician desperate to get back to power, Bhutto could spot the ever widening fault lines between the Americans and the Pakistani establishment. And she successfully managed to parachute herself in the flanks: between the Musharraf regime and the Bush administration.
Many publishers in the world may be thinking of hiring Javed Iqbal Cheema to continue Harry Potter sequels; but when this colourful spokesman for Pakistan’s Ministry of Information was charging Al Qaeda for Bhutto’s murder, he was not saying anything new. The received wisdom right from the moment or even before she landed in Pakistan was that she will be under attack from extremists and Al Qaeda. Her bravado statements which she routinely issued to burnish her credentials in Washington and to put Pakistani establishment on defensive, combined with the unconfirmed pronouncements from Baitullah Mehsud were cited to establish the universally accepted belief that Al Qaeda will eliminate her.
But was she a threat to the extremists? Musharraf government is already busy in a war, employing gun-ship helicopters and F-16s against the jihadists; whatever she could do more was to come through the same state apparatus. Isn’t it true that to argue that she represented any greater threat to the jihadists is to say that the war against terrorism under the Musharraf regime is not real? And while they decide, we may need to store water, milk and petrol.


—Khaleej Times




Flying the busy skies
Tan Wei

CHINA’S civil aviation administration was initially established by the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee as a subordinate organ to the People’s Military Commission on November 2, 1949, one month after the People’s Republic of China was founded. This started a new era in China’s civil aviation industry.
On August 1, 1950, China formally launched its first two domestic air routes: one from Tianjin to Chongqing and the other from Tianjin to Guangzhou. The Sino-Soviet Civil Aviation Co. (SKOGA) was founded on July 1, 1950, as a joint airline and launched the country’s first three international routes from Beijing to Chitta, Irkutsk and Alma-Ata in the former Soviet Union. The joint airline agreement was annulled on January 1, 1951, when the Soviet partner turned over its shares to China. In 1950, China had only 12 domestic and international air routes, with total traffic turnover and passenger transport volume standing at 1.57 million ton-km and 10,000 people respectively. By 1957, China had had 27 domestic and international air routes, with the total traffic turnover reaching 15.34 million ton-km and the passenger transport volume hitting 68,500 people.
Statistics from the General Administra-tion of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) show that after a half century of development, China’s civil aviation industry boasted 1,336 routes covering a total mileage of 2.11 million km by the end of last year. Of these, 1,068 were domestic routes (including 43 routes to Hong Kong and Macao), leading to 140 cities nationwide, with the total mileage standing at 1.15 million km. The other 268 were international routes to 91 cities in 42 countries, with the mileage totaling 966,200 km.
In recent years, some private investors have taken interest in the civil aviation business and helped to enrich the air routes. There are a dozen private or joint-venture airlines with 39 aircraft and total registered capital of 2.6 billion yuan ($347 million) on the Chinese mainland currently. China’s first private airline, Okay Airways Co. Ltd., made its maiden flight in March 2005. Yet, Li Xiaojin, a professor with the Civil Aviation University of China, thought there was more room for private airlines to expand. “A minimum of 20 aircraft are needed to guarantee profit for an aviation company, and the company should focus first on its size in order to bring about mass effect,” said Li. “A majority of private airlines in China now use only one to three planes to fly one or two domestic routes and it’s very difficult for them to make money.”
Smooth flying ahead
On November 6, Wuhan-based private airline, East Star Airlines, launched its Wuhan-Hong Kong and Wuhan-Macao air shuttles. This was the first time for a domestic private airline to launch international routes.
The number of cities that need the CAAC’s nod for launching new routes has decreased from 20 to 10, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Kunming, Xi’an, Dalian and Hangzhou. They are cities playing host to the country’s top 10 airports in terms of traffic. Other cities are looking for the green light from regional administrations and then have to register at the CAAC. It’s the goal for the CAAC to free any city and any new route from going through the ratification process by 2010. After that, the only stipulation is registration.
It’s stipulated in the Provisional Measures for the Administration of Flight Schedules of the Civil Aviation, which went into effect as of September 1, 2007, that flight schedules for newly launched routes enjoy priority during flight adjustment.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)