ProPublica on Chicago Terrorism Trial & Pakistan Lessons?-

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Chicago Terrorism Trial: What We Learned, and Didn’t, About Pakistan’s Terror Connections

by Sebastian Rotella
ProPublica, June 9, 2011, 9:36 p.m

The terrorism trial of Tahawwur Rana, a minor accomplice whose trial ended Thursday in a guilty verdict on two of three counts, offered an extraordinary look into the underworld of terrorism and espionage in South Asia and had repercussions much closer to home.

The five days of testimony of confessed American terrorist and Pakistani spy David Coleman Headley were unprecedented in a U.S. courtroom. Headley delivered explosive revelations about how officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) funded, supported and directed the 2008 Mumbai attacks along with the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group.

Because of his mix of front-line experience and high-level contacts, Headley's testimony was like a seminar in how terrorists communicate in code, do surveillance on targets and assemble plots while spies oversee the operations from the shadows like puppeteers.

The case also showed how a growing number of serving and former Pakistani military officers have put their lethal talents at the service of Lashkar, al-Qaida and other groups. It revealed the impunity with which ISI officers and terrorists alike operate in Pakistan even when they target Americans and other Westerners. (See our readers' guide to the trial.)

The evidence combined with the indictment of Headley's ISI handler in the murders of six American victims of the Mumbai attacks has worsened the already troubled U.S. Pakistani-relationship.

"The trial has been yet another bump in the road for U.S.-Pakistan relations," said Stephen Tankel, author of a forthcoming book titled Storming the World Stage: the Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

At the same time, the trial left enduring mysteries.

It did not answer questions about whether Sajid Mir, a Lashkar mastermind caught on tape directing the slaughter in Mumbai by phone, was once a Pakistani military officer. It did not explore the extent to which ISI chiefs beyond Headley's handler, known only as Major Iqbal, were aware of the Mumbai plot, which ultimately killed 166 people. Headley testified that he believed top ISI leadership was not aware, but he also said he thought Iqbal's commanding officer and his unit of the spy agency knew about the operation.

Finally, prosecutors managed to skirt two delicate and interconnected issues that the U.S. government refuses to discuss: Headley's role as a U.S. informant and the failure of the FBI to stop his terrorist activity despite at least six warnings during seven years. Headley revealed that he was simultaneously an extremist and an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration for at least two years and that he gathered counterterror intelligence as well as doing anti-drug work.

Headley testified that he stopped working for the DEA in September 2002, but that did not change contradictions and gaps in the U.S. government's official version. The DEA has stated that he was deactivated in early 2002, while other agencies have said he remained an informant until as late as 2005.

The lack of clarity reinforces suspicions that the U.S. government knew more about Headley than it has revealed and that his role as an informant shielded him from more aggressive scrutiny in the years before his arrest in October 2009.

"I don't feel we got the whole story about Headley as an informant from the Americans," said a European counterterror official involved in the investigation. "I believe he was a drug informant and also some other kind of informant."

The jury did not get the whole story either. Headley had already pleaded guilty to doing reconnaissance in Mumbai and for a plot in Denmark. The official focus of the trial was the narrower issue of charges of material support of terrorism against Rana, who owns an immigration consulting firm in Chicago. He was accused of supporting Headley's reconnaissance for the Mumbai and Denmark attacks and of overall support for Lashkar. Prosecutors charged that Rana let Headley open an office of the firm in Mumbai and use the business as cover for his surveillance in India and Denmark.

The verdict suggested a common-sense analysis by the jury. Headley testified that the Mumbai plot was a joint operation in which he was directed by Major Iqbal of the ISI and the Lashkar handler named Mir. The defense established that Rana communicated with Major Iqbal, but not any Lashkar masterminds. Rana's lawyers argued that Headley, Rana's boyhood friend, was a skilled manipulator who convinced Rana that he was doing intelligence for the ISI against India, Pakistan's arch-enemy, and kept him in the dark about the Mumbai plot.

The acquittal on the charge of supporting the Mumbai plot indicates that the jury accepted that argument. But they apparently rejected the idea that Rana remained a dupe once the carnage in India had happened. Headley soon enlisted Rana to assist his reconnaissance on a newspaper in Denmark that has become an internationally known target of terrorists after publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005. Because Rana was a devout Muslim, it seems hard to believe he did not suspect anything at that point.

Rana's conviction is a small victory. Washington has been pressing Pakistan for more than a year to arrest Major Iqbal as well as Mir and a half-a-dozen other Lashkar chiefs who have been implicated as masterminds. Despite abundant evidence and the U.S. federal indictment, the Pakistani government has not pursued those fugitives. They are not in hiding and continue to be involved in terrorist plotting, U.S. investigators say.

Lashkar is simply too powerful and too close to the Pakistani security forces, according to Western and Indian counterterror officials. Pakistani officials fear that arresting major figures in Lashkar, which has not attacked the Pakistani state, could result in violent backlash and further instability.

"They think they have to leave these Lashkar cadres free to control the organization," an Indian anti-terror official said. "They are worried that if they move against them, it could be a civil-war situation."

http://www.propublica.org/article/chicago-terrorism-trial-what-we-learned-and-didnt

JUDITH MILLER: Bin Laden Got the Death He Deserved

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[ed.note: Enough said…]

End of Discussion

by Judith Miller
Fox News

May 9, 2011

http://www.judithmiller.com/9567/bin-laden-death-deserved

Enough already. The blood of Usama Bin Laden's corpse had barely dried on the Abbottabad compound floor when the complaints about the raid began. By Sunday May 8, the whining had become a veritable Greek chorus.

First came the unseemly dispute between some veterans of the Bush administration and supporters of the White House over who deserves credit for the raid. Bush proponents argued that there would have been no mission without their reform and restructuring of the nation's intelligence and homeland security capabilities. A senior Obama official claimed that President Bush had deliberately downgraded the importance of getting Bin Laden after the U.S. botched the attempt to catch him at Tora Bora and shifted vital intelligence and special forces assets to the war in Iraq, a catastrophic diversion, he called it, from the manhunt.

On his show Sunday, Fareed Zakaria blasted both sides of the debate, calling the argument "silly." "Lots of people deserve credit," he said, sensibly, a view echoed on his program by former Bush national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. She called the stunning raid "a victory across presidencies." (Yes, that includes President Clinton, the first commander-in-chief to sense that Bin Laden was more than a nuisance – a militant Islamist creep mouthing off in remote, Islamist-friendly Sudan.)

Then came the even more ridiculous debate over whether Bin Laden had gotten a proper Muslim burial. Although Bin Laden's body was washed, wrapped in a white shroud, prayed over in Arabic and English and dumped into the sea within 24 hours of his death – which is more consideration that the thousands of his Muslim and non-Muslim victims alike received -- Ahmed al-Tayeb, the sheikh of Al Azhar, Egypt's preeminent authority on Islamic issues, called the burial "inappropriate."

So, too did Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood whom the Bush administration had banned from America but to whom the Obama administration gave a visa to speak here.

Bin Laden's death and burial were also attacked by the militant Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza, newly triumphant from its "reconciliation" with the Palestinian Authority's "Fateh" on the West Bank, a merger designed to strengthen the Palestinians' hand against their true enemy, Israel.

Writing in the Evening Standard, Lee Smith gives this idiotic argument about Islamic burial the rhetorical burial it deserves. Examining what leading Islamic authorities have said about disposing of the dead since the birth of Islam, Smith, a frequent critic of the administration's foreign policy, nonetheless concludes that the Obama administration "has more justice on its side here." It's a lengthy, complex discussion, which boils down to this: burial at sea is permissible if a person died at sea or would be difficult to bury on land. The latter was certainly true for Bin Laden, since even his family had disowned him and no country wanted to play host to what might well have become the dead "martyr's" shrine. (Never mind that most fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, including the Wahabi sect that spawned Bin Laden, ban such shrines and bury even Saudi kings in unmarked graves).

The argument was followed by an equally unseemly dispute over whether torture (the euphemism is "enhanced interrogation techniques") played a role in unearthing information that ultimately led to the Abbottabad compound.

Here, former CIA director Michael Hayden cut thru the hyperbole. The man who told George Bush about the existence of a courier who might lead the U.S. to Bin Laden adroitly dodged the specific issue of whether such techniques directly produced the information at the base of the intelligence pyramid that led years later to the raid. But on Zakaria's program, Hayden confirmed that initial clues to Bin Laden whereabouts came from detainees who had been interrogated at the CIA's infamous "black sites," which he still declined to name or locate, and after – how long after he did not say – some of them had been subjected to such extreme measures. Yet no single bit of intelligence had been dispositive, he said. Rather, it was "one pebble" rather than "one brick" at a time. All of the intelligence community's many capabilities – among them "humint," or human intelligence, electronic signals, satellite feeds, wiretaps, etc etc. – had played a role.

A confession here is in order: For me, the issue of whether such measures work – I concede that they sometimes do -- is secondary to the moral aspects of the debate. As a rule, people who believe in civilized government and the rule of law should not engage in such barbaric activity. It's antithetical to everything America stands for, shatters the nation's moral high ground and therefore reduces our reputation and influence at home and abroad. In non-moral, marketing terms, it's bad for the brand.

Finally, we ended the week with a debate over whether Bin Laden's killing was legal. My usually wise friend, Kenneth Rothman, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, whose group has done excellent work in the complex, politically charged arena of domestic and international law, tweeted that Bin Laden's murder was unjust because there had been "no trial" or "conviction." Never mind that the man and his organization explicitly declared war on Americans back in 1998, or that it openly claimed credit for the death of thousands of victims throughout the world – most of them Muslim, incidentally –during his rampage of terror.

Roth's tweet was more proof that our country has too many lawyers. Yes, Bin Laden was unarmed and may not have been given a chance to surrender. And yes, it is still unclear what kind of "resistance" he offered, as the White House called it in its competing descriptions of the raid and his death. No, he was probably not told to drop his weapon, raise his hands above his head and get down on the ground. He was not read Miranda rights.

But in the court of public opinion, this was a no-brainer. Every now and then, law courts and trials are not the only appropriate venues for justice. Bin Laden has gotten what for so long he has so richly deserved. End of discussion.

Amidst all the kvetching, one group may deserve some sympathy. Soon after Obama's announcement, Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, a Washington-based Native rights group, denounced as "shocking" and "insulting" the military's use of the Indian hero Geronimo as a code name for Bin Laden. She had a point, said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Indian Affairs panel, who called the Navy SEALs' inadvertent comparison of the legendary Indian warrior to a terrorist "unfortunate."

Compared to Bin Laden, Geronimo was a pussycat.