As the words fly, Venezuela corruption keeps creeping along...
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News
Posted: Thursday, June 19, 2003
By: Gustavo Coronel
"From Paraguay, President Chavez claimed that the State should be strengthened in order to be able to fight corruption in the hemisphere. The judicial power, he said ... was infiltrated by corruption in Venezuela..."
Union Radio, June 18, 2003.
VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: Visiting a country perceived as the most corrupt country in Latin America (Paraguay), the President of the country perceived as the second most corrupt in Latin America (Venezuela) ... according to Transparency International and to the work just published by University of Santiago de Chile's Raimundo Soto ... saw fitting to speak about how to fight CORRUPTION.
On this occasion the Venezuelan President offered his recipe: To strengthen the power of the State.
How is this accomplished?
The State becomes strong when its institutions are strong and, in turn, they are strong, when they are staffed by the best candidates, according to the proper rules of selection and when they are truly autonomous and independent. Only efficient and independent institutions can be strong.
In the Venezuelan case this is not what has happened ... the Executive power has had excessive discretionary power and has "captured" all other institutions ... there are no independent government institutions: the members of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) were named at will by Chavez and Luis Miquilena.
Later on ... when Chavez and Miquilena split ... the Supreme Tribunal of Justice became a battleground between these two persons' followers. Today, the government is attempting to pass a new Law on the composition of the Tribunal, which would increase the number of its members to 30 ... so that these new members are Chavez followers and can guarantee that all decisions satisfy the desires of the President?
This is what the President seems to understand by "strenghtening" the judicial system ... but, of course, the results of this maneuver will not help the fight against corruption, but will, in fact, reinforce it.
Similarly, the National Assembly is still in the hands of the President, although his originally ample majority has dwindled to one or two votes. Since the government block does not practice votes of conscience and always votes according to the desires of the President, there is no democratic discussion on any topic.
Whatever is needed by the President is offered to him at the earliest possible moment by the Assembly.
This state of subservience can not but result in higher corruption levels, as there are no checks and balances on Executive power. We have recently seen how internal debt has been increased to $11 billion by the Minister of Finance, with the bulldozing approval of the Assembly ... a move which puts the country closer to financial bankruptcy.
The Ombudsman, the Comptroller General and the Attorney General are only sad figureheads doing the President's bidding. To me, this is the reason great amounts of national financial resources can be utilized by the Executive power in anti-constitutional and illegal ways without any objection from those officers. It's obvious that, under this state of affairs, corruption will flourish rather than decrease, since the Executive power has no restraint.
The Armed Force is currently under a military high command that is not loyal to the nation and to the Constitution but to one man, the President. An independent high command would not accept the use of military force to support vandalism, as recently took place in the Petare area of Caracas. Similarly, an institutionally-oriented high command would have to remind the President that he can not rule until 2021 ... as he keeps boasting he will do ... unless he violates the laws of the country. In order to keep the members of this high command loyal to him, the President could be forced to give the group privileges which are not permissible under the law. This abnormal bond promotes corruption since the armed forces should exclusively be loyal to the Constitution and the Law.
The President's words during his visit to Paraguay have been most unfortunate ... they describe a theoretical model to fight corruption which he is not in practice following. As his words fly all over the world from Paraguay, corruption inexorably creeps up and takes firm roots among members of his government. Scandals take place almost around the clock.
This was to be expected, as corruption flourishes in those governments in which words do no fit deeds ... when there is a gap between what its is said and done, the politician or the bureaucrat loses credibility. Today, very few still believe the words of the President because they have seen that what is taking place is very different.
Citizens' tolerance of the issue of corruption is very low because this has been a problem for many years now ... and they had hoped that this President would have had the will to eradicate it. But this will does not exist. If it did, Venezuela would not still possess one of the most corrupt states of the western hemisphere.
Two cases of high level ... presumably corrupt ... practices have been denounced in the last weeks. One is the situation in the State of Barinas, where the Governor, President Chavez' father, has been the object of a highly-incriminating report by the State Comptroller describing how more than 50% of the total State budget has been wasted or pilfered.
As a result the State Legislative Chamber has rejected the Governor's Annual Report and elevated their charges to the attention of the Comptroller General who, it is expected, will promptly ... do nothing.
- The document is so explicit in its allegations that members of the government party in the State Legislature did not vote in favor of Governor Chavez.
The other case involves the Minister of Finance, Tobias Nobrega, denounced by Francisco Rodriguez (the main financial advisor to the National Assembly) for managing the sale of millions of dollars of Venezuelan debt bonds without Assembly approval and in a manner described as "uncompetitive bidding" which totally lacks transparency. By means of this mechanism the debt paper is sold to private investors for a pre-established top price which is lower than face value, only to be re-bought later at face value by the government.
Rodriguez' accusations, seconded by economist Gustavo Garcia and politician Carmelo Lauria suggest that these operations are conducted to satisfy the personal interests of government officers, including the Minister.
I do not know, of course, if such charges are true, since no proper investigation has been made. But what is beyond doubt is that excessive discretionary power among government bureaucrats and their lack of accountability inevitably leads to high levels of corruption.
Corruption can not be fought with empty and hypocritical words but with decisive action, even if (or, specially if) relatives or close friends are involved.
Our national poet Andres Eloy Blanco wrote a poem about the chief of police of a small town being forced to put his lifelong friend in prison for breaking the law but, then, going everyday to cultivate his friend's patch of land while he was in jail.
If the President wanted to be true to his creed, he would take action against the questionable activities of his circle of friends and relatives even while he keeps loyal to them.
Because, Loyalty is one thing and Complicity is quite another...
Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983. You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com
Commentary: Harry Potter 's Magic Is Moral Madness
By Caryl Matrisciana - Jesus Journal-ANS, Jun 19, 2003
MENIFEE, CA - J.K. Rowling admits her Harry Potter books teach “morality” but many argue it is an anti-Christian morality forwarding lying, cheating and stealing, all of which Harry is rewarded for when caught. The newest installment, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," continues that sordid saga.
The relativistic worldview supports much of the content of Outcome Based Education and Goals 2000 which is taught in public schools today. Perhaps that’s why the Potter books based on dubious values, life after death, elevation of nature and animals above humans and other pagan values is endorsed by educators and mainstream society. Paganism is mainstream it appears and mainstream has gone pagan.
Today, millions of children take Harry’s curse mark on their own foreheads to show their allegiance to Harry. The Bible teaches that at the ruling of the One World leader in the end times, the whole world will take “the mark of the beast” on their foreheads to show their loyalty to him. Are our children being conditioned for something much bigger than even we understand?
8.5 million copies of “The Order of the Phoenix” have been printed for the US market and millions will be able to purchase it on Saturday.
Britain’s Amazon.com, the internet booksellers, have 300,000 copies securely tucked away in a dedicated warehouse in the English countryside ready to send to UK buyers on its Saturday release. UK book chain Waterstones children’s book buyer said, the “books are arriving in sealed boxes. We need to keep them locked off from the shop floor until 12 0’clock. We have to make sure the customers can’t get to them, and staff can’t get to them, apart from the one person who has the key.”
The wait has been 3 years for Potter fans since book #4’s release in July 2000. They did however get their Harry-fix through Warner Brother’s blockbuster movies based on the first two books. Warner Bros. proudly flaunted that film #1 based on book #1 was “an accurate portrayal of Witchcraft”.
The young Wiccan, Harry Potter, then only 11 years has taken the world by storm. According to the Pagan Federation of England the interest of thousands of teens to learn about witchcraft has been stimulated through Harry Potter and television programs like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina The Teenage Witch.
Pacific News Service says that in the Spanish speaking world, where Harry’s sales top the bestseller lists in Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, Latin American, critics complain “that the world of magic through which Harry Potter travels is a metaphor for the New Age philosophy that is hostile to the Christian faith, and thus Harry Potter is an assault on Latin American values.”
In the Siberian City of Novosibirsk, after the release of book #4, Harry Potter fans were believed to have been poisoned after drinking a “magic potion” inspired by the Potter books. Local police suspected that older children had stolen from a school lab and fed copper sulfate to 23 young children, who were taken to hospital, after a Potter initiation ceremony.
While critics say Rowling’s use of witchcraft in the Potter series is only a literary device, the sited examples only go to show that children believe the so-called fantasy of Harry to be real and a possible tool for the power they crave in their lives.
J.K. Rowlings promised “The books are getting darker….Harry’s going to have quite a bit to deal with as he gets older. Sorry if they get too scary!” In a Newsnight interview on BBC2 TV last week she tells how “she cried after killing off a ‘significant’ character” in her new fifth book.
The first three books were heavily promoted through the American school system by their American publisher Scholastic Inc who have provided school curriculum materials for over 80 years. It is a problem that while the teaching of Christianity has been banned from schools (through suppression of Bible reading, prayer or posting the Ten Commandments), the witchcraft and wizardry of Harry Potter can be read aloud in American classrooms.
The protean enemy
Posted by click at 5:16 AM
in
anti-US
Finantial Review, Jun 20
Jessica Stern
Where radicals would once have turned to ideologies such as Marxism or anarchism, today they look to Islamism.
Having suffered the destruction of its sanctuary in Afghanistan two years ago, al-Qaeda's already decentralised organisation has become even more so. The group's leaders have largely dispersed to Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere around the world (only a few still remain in Afghanistan's lawless border regions). And with many of the planet's intelligence agencies now focusing on destroying its network, al-Qaeda's ability to carry out large-scale attacks has been degraded.
Yet despite these setbacks, al-Qaeda and its affiliates remain among the most significant threats to the security of the US and its allies. In fact, according to CIA director George Tenet, they will continue to be this dangerous for the next two to five years. An alleged al-Qaeda spokesperson has warned that the group is planning another strike similar to those of September 11. On May 12, simultaneous bombings of three housing complexes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed at least 29 people and injured more than 200, many of them Westerners. Intelligence officials in the US, Europe and Africa report that al-Qaeda has stepped up its recruitment drive in response to the war in Iraq. And the target audience for its recruitment has also changed. They are now younger, with an even more "menacing attitude", as France's top investigative judge on terrorism-related cases, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, describes them. More of them are converts to Islam.
And more of them are women
What accounts for al-Qaeda's continued effectiveness in the face of an unprecedented onslaught? The answer lies in the organisation's remarkably protean nature. Over its life span, al-Qaeda has constantly evolved and shown a surprising willingness to adapt its mission. This capacity for change has consistently made the group more appealing to recruits, attracted surprising new allies, and - most worrisome from a Western perspective - made it harder to detect and destroy. Unless Washington and its allies show a similar adaptability, the war on terrorism won't be won anytime soon, and the death toll is likely to mount.
Malleable missions Why do religious terrorists kill? In interviews over the past five years, many terrorists and their supporters have suggested to me that people first join such groups to make the world a better place - at least for the particular populations they aim to serve. Over time, however, terrorism can become a career as much as a passion. Leaders harness humiliation and anomie and turn them into weapons.
Jihad becomes addictive, militants report, and with some individuals or groups - the "professional" terrorists - grievances can evolve into greed: for money, political power, status or attention.
In such "professional" terrorist groups, simply perpetuating their cadres becomes a central goal, and what started out as a moral crusade becomes a sophisticated organisation. Ensuring the survival of the group demands flexibility in many areas, but especially in terms of mission. Objectives thus evolve in a variety of ways. Some groups find a new cause once their first one is achieved - much as the March of Dimes broadened its mission from finding a cure for polio to fighting birth defects after the Salk vaccine was developed. Other organisations broaden their goals in order to attract a wider variety of recruits. Still other groups transform themselves into profit-driven organised criminals, or form alliances with groups that have ideologies different from their own, forcing both to adapt. Some terrorist groups hold fast to their original missions. But only the spry survive.
Consider, for example, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. EIJ's original objective was to fight the oppressive, secular rulers of Egypt and turn the country into an Islamic state. But the group fell on hard times after its leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, was imprisoned in the US and other EIJ leaders were killed or forced into exile. Thus in the early 1990s, Ayman al-Zawahiri decided to shift the group's sights from its "near enemy" - the secular rulers of Egypt - to the "far enemy", namely the US and other Western countries. Switching goals in this way allowed the group to align itself with another terrorist aiming to attack the West and able to provide a significant influx of cash: Osama bin Laden. In return for bin Laden's financial assistance, Zawahiri provided some 200 loyal, disciplined and well-trained followers, who became the core of al-Qaeda's leadership.
A second group that has changed its mission over time to secure a more reliable source of funding is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which, like EIJ, eventually joined forces with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The IMU's original mission was to topple Uzbekistan's corrupt and repressive post-Soviet dictator, Islam Karimov. Once the IMU formed an alliance with the Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, however, it began promoting the Taliban's anti-American and anti-Western agenda, also condemning music, cigarettes, sex and alcohol. This new puritanism reduced its appeal among its original, less-ideological supporters in Uzbekistan - one downside to switching missions.
Even bin Laden himself has changed his objectives over time.
The Saudi terrorist inherited an organisation devoted to fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. But he turned it into a flexible group of ruthless warriors ready to fight on behalf of multiple causes. His first call to holy war, issued in 1992, urged believers to kill American soldiers in Saudi Arabia and the Horn of Africa but barely mentioned Palestine. The second, issued in 1996, was a 40-page document listing atrocities and injustices committed against Muslims, mainly by Western powers. With the release of his third manifesto in February 1998, however, bin Laden began urging his followers to start deliberately targeting American civilians, rather than soldiers. (Some al-Qaeda members were reportedly distressed by this shift to civilian targets and left the group.) Although this third declaration mentioned the Palestinian struggle, it was still only one among a litany of grievances. Only in bin Laden's fourth call to arms - issued to the al-Jazeera network on October 7, 2001, to coincide with the US aerial bombardment of Afghanistan - did he emphasise Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands and the suffering of Iraqi children under UN sanctions, concerns broadly shared in the Islamic world. By extending his appeal, bin Laden sought to turn the war on terrorism into a war between all of Islam and the West. The events of September 11, he charged, split the world into two camps - believers and infidels - and the time had come for "every Muslim to defend his religion".
One of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, later described violence as "the tax" that Muslims must pay "for gaining authority on earth". This comment points to yet another way that al-Qaeda's ends have mutated over the years. In his putative autobiography, Zawahiri calls the "New World Order" a source of humiliation for Muslims. It is better, he says, for the youth of Islam to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to this humiliation. One of al-Qaeda's aims in fighting the West, in other words, has become to restore the dignity of humiliated young
Muslims. This idea is similar to the anticolonialist theoretician Frantz Fanon's notion that violence is a "cleansing force" that frees oppressed youth from "inferiority complexes", "despair" and "inaction", making them fearless and restoring their self-respect.
The real target audience of violent attacks is therefore not necessarily the victims and their sympathisers, but the perpetrators and their sympathisers. Violence becomes a way to bolster support for the organisation and the movement it represents. Hence, among the justifications for "special operations" listed in al-Qaeda's terrorist manual are "bringing new members to the organisation's ranks" and "boosting Islamic morale and lowering that of the enemy". The US may have become al-Qaeda's principal enemy, but raising the morale of Islamist fighters and their sympathisers is now one of its principal goals.
Friends of convenience Apart from the flexibility of its mission, another explanation for al-Qaeda's remarkable staying power is its willingness to forge broad - and sometimes unlikely - alliances. In an effort to expand his network, bin Laden created the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders (IIF) in February 1998. In addition to bin Laden and EIJ's Zawahiri, members included the head of Egypt's Gama'a al Islamiya, the secretary-general of the Pakistani religious party known as the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam, and the head of Bangladesh's Jihad Movement. Later, the IIF was expanded to include the Pakistani jihadi organisations Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the last an anti-Shia sectarian party. Senior al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah was captured at a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Faisalabad in March 2002, suggesting that some of Lashkar-e-Taiba's members are facilitating and assisting the movement of al-Qaeda members in Pakistan. And Indian sources claim that Lashkar-e-Taiba is now trying to play a role similar to that once played by al-Qaeda itself, co-ordinating and in some cases funding pro-bin Laden networks, especially in South-East Asia and the Persian Gulf.
In addition to its formal alliances through the IIF, bin Laden's organisation has also nurtured ties and now works closely with a variety of still other groups around the world, including Ansar al Islam, based mainly in Iraq and Europe; Jemaah Islamiyah in South-East Asia; Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines; and many Pakistani jihadi groups. In some cases, al-Qaeda has provided these allies with funding and direction. In others, the groups have shared camps, operatives and logistics.
Some "franchise groups", such as Jemaah Islamiyah, have raised money for joint operations with al-Qaeda.
Perhaps most surprising (and alarming) is the increasing evidence that al-Qaeda, a Sunni organisation, is now co-operating with the Shia group Hezbollah, considered to be the most sophisticated terrorist group in the world. Hezbollah, which enjoys backing from Syria and Iran, is based in southern Lebanon and in the lawless "triborder" region of South America, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet. The group has also maintained a fundraising presence in the US since the 1980s. According to the CIA's Tenet, however, the group has lately stepped up its US activities and was recently spotted "casing and surveilling American facilities". Although low-level co-operation between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah has been evident for some time - their logistical co-operation was revealed in the trial of al-Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 embassy bombing attacks in east Africa ) the two groups have formed a much closer relationship since al-Qaeda was evicted from its base in Afghanistan. Representatives of the two groups have lately met in Lebanon, Paraguay and an unidentified African country. According to a report in Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper, Imad Mughniyah, who directs Hezbollah in the triborder area, has also been appointed by Iran to co-ordinate the group's activities with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The triborder region of South America has become the world's new Libya, a place where terrorists with widely disparate ideologies - Marxist Colombian rebels, American white supremacists, Hamas, Hezbollah and others - meet to swap tradecraft. Authorities now worry that the more sophisticated groups will invite the American radicals to help them. Money raised for terrorist organisations in the US is often funnelled through Latin America, which has also become an important stopover point for operatives entering the US. Reports that Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, is allowing Colombian rebels and militant Islamist groups to operate in his country are meanwhile becoming more credible, as are claims that Venezuela's Margarita Island has become a terrorist haven.
As these developments suggest and Tenet confirms, "mixing and matching of capabilities, swapping of training, and the use of common facilities" have become the hallmark of professional terrorists today. This fact has been borne out by the leader of a Pakistani jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaeda, who recently told me that informal contacts between his group and Hezbollah, Hamas and others have become common. Operatives with particular skills lend themselves out to different groups, with the expenses being covered by the charities that formed to fund the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Bush administration claims that al-Qaeda co-operated with the "infidel" (read: secular) Saddam Hussein while he was still in office are now also gaining support, and from a surprising source. Hamid Mir, bin Laden's "official biographer" and an analyst for al-Jazeera, spent two weeks filming in Iraq during the war. Unlike most reporters, Mir wandered the country freely and was not embedded with US troops. He reports that he has "personal knowledge" that one of Saddam's intelligence operatives, Farooq Hijazi, tried to contact bin Laden in Afghanistan as early as 1998. At that time, bin Laden was publicly still quite critical of the Iraqi leader, but he had become far more circumspect by November 2001, when Mir interviewed him for the third time. Mir also reports that he met a number of Hezbollah operatives while in Iraq and was taken to a recruitment centre.
New-style networks Al-Qaeda seems to have learned that in order to evade detection in the West, it must adopt some of the qualities of a "virtual network": a style of organisation used by American right-wing extremists for operating in environments (such as the US) that have effective law enforcement agencies. American anti-government groups refer to this style as "leaderless resistance".
The idea was popularised by Louis Beam, the self-described ambassador-at-large, staff propagandist and "computer terrorist to the Chosen" for Aryan Nations, an American neo-Nazi group. Beam writes that hierarchical organisation is extremely dangerous for insurgents, especially in "technologically advanced societies where electronic surveillance can often penetrate the structure, revealing its chain of command". In leaderless organisations, however, "individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organisation". Leaders do not issue orders or pay operatives; instead, they inspire small cells or individuals to take action on their own initiative.
Lone-wolf terrorists typically act out of a mixture of ideology and personal grievances. For example, Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani national who shot several CIA employees in 1993, described his actions as "between jihad and tribal revenge" - jihad against America for its support of Israel and revenge against the CIA, which he apparently felt had mistreated his father during Afghanistan's war against the Soviets. Meanwhile, John Allen Muhammad, one of the alleged "Washington snipers", reportedly told a friend that he endorsed the September 11 attacks and disapproved of US policy towards Muslim states, but he appears to have been principally motivated by anger at his ex-wife for keeping him from seeing their children, and some of his victims seem to have been personal enemies. As increasingly powerful weapons become more and more available, lone wolves, who face few political constraints, will become more of a threat, whatever their primary motivation.
The internet has also greatly facilitated the spread of "virtual" subcultures and has substantially increased the capacity of loosely networked terrorist organisations.
For example, Beam's essay on the virtues of "leaderless resistance" has long been available on the web and, according to researcher Michael Reynolds, has been highlighted by radical Muslim sites. Islamist websites also offer online training courses in the production of explosives and urge visitors to take action on their own. The "encyclopedia of jihad", parts of which are available online, provides instructions for creating "clandestine activity cells", with units for intelligence, supply, planning and preparation and implementation.
The obstacles these websites pose for Western law enforcement are obvious. In one article on the "culture of jihad" available online, a Saudi Islamist urges bin Laden's sympathisers to take action without waiting for instructions. "I do not need to meet the Sheikh and ask his permission to carry out some operation," he writes, "the same as I do not need permission to pray, or to think about killing the Jews and the Crusaders that gather on our lands." Nor does it make any difference whether bin Laden is alive or dead: "There are a thousand bin Ladens in this nation. We should not abandon our way, which the Sheikh has paved for you, regardless of the existence of the Sheikh or his absence." And according to US government officials, al-Qaeda now uses chat rooms to recruit Latino Muslims with US passports, in the belief that they will arouse less suspicion as operatives than would Arab-Americans. Finally, as the late neo-Nazi William Pierce once told me, using the web to recruit "leaderless resisters" offers still another advantage: it attracts better-educated young people than do more traditional methods, such as radio programs.
Already the effects of these leaderless cells have been felt. In February 2002, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British national who was recently sentenced to death for his involvement in the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, warned his Pakistani interrogators that they would soon confront the threat of small cells, working independently of the known organisations that Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had vowed to shut down. Sure enough, soon after Omar Sheikh made this threat, unidentified terrorists killed five people in an Islamabad church known to be frequented by US embassy personnel, and another group killed 11 French military personnel in Karachi in May. And in July, still other unidentified terrorists detonated a truck bomb at the entrance of the US consulate in Karachi, killing 12 Pakistanis.
Joining the family Virtual links are only part of the problem; terrorists, including members of bin Laden's IIF, have also started to forge ties with traditional organised crime groups, especially in India. One particularly troubling example is the relationship established between Omar Sheikh and an ambitious Indian gangster named Aftab Ansari. Asif Reza Khan, the "chief executive" for Ansari's Indian operations, told interrogators that he received military training at a camp in Khost, Afghanistan, belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba, and that "leaders of different militant outfits in Pakistan were trying to use his network for the purpose of jihad, whereas [Ansari] was trying to use the militants' networks for underworld operations".
Khan told his interrogators that the don provided money and hideouts to his new partners, in one case transferring $US100,000 to Omar Sheikh - money that Omar Sheikh, in turn, wired to Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker in the September 11 attacks. According to Khan, Ansari viewed the $US100,000 gift as an "investment" in a valuable relationship.
Still another set of unlikely links has sprung up in American prisons, where Saudi charities now fund organisations that preach radical Islam. According to Warith Deen Umar, who hired most of the Muslim chaplains active in New York state prisons, prisoners who are recent Muslim converts are natural recruits for Islamist organisations. Umar, incidentally, told The Wall Street Journal that the September 11 hijackers should be honoured as martyrs, and he travelled to Saudi Arabia twice as part of an outreach program designed to spread Salafism (a radical Muslim movement) in US prisons.
Another organisation now active prisons is Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a terrorist group committed to purifying Islam through violence. (Daniel Pearl was abducted and murdered in Pakistan while attempting to interview the group's leader, Sheikh Gilani, to investigate the claim that Richard Reid - who attempted to blow up an international flight with explosives hidden in his shoes - was acting under Gilani's orders.) The group functions much like a cult in the US; members live in poverty in compounds, some of which are heavily armed. Its members have been convicted of fraud, murder and several bombings, but so far, most of their crimes have been relatively small scale. Clement Rodney Hampton-El, however, convicted of participating with Omar Abdel Rahman in a 1993 plot to blow up New York landmarks, was linked to the group, and US law enforcement authorities worry that the Fuqra has since come under the influence of al-Qaeda.
Still another surprising source of al-Qaeda recruits is Tablighi Jamaat, a revivalist organisation that aims at creating better Muslims through "spiritual jihad": good deeds, contemplation and proselytising. According to the historian Barbara Metcalf, TJ has traditionally functioned as a self-help group, much like Alcoholics Anonymous, and most specialists claim that it is no more prone to violence than are the Seventh-Day Adventists, with whom TJ is frequently compared. But several Americans known to have trained in al-Qaeda camps were brought to South-West Asia by TJ and appear to have been recruited into jihadi organisations while travelling under TJ auspices. For example, Jose Padilla (an American now being held as an "enemy combatant" for planning to set off a "dirty" radiological bomb in the US) was a member of TJ, as were Richard Reid and John Walker Lindh (the so-called American Taliban). According to prosecutors, the "Lackawanna Six" group (an alleged al-Qaeda sleeper cell from a Buffalo, New York, suburb) similarly first went to Pakistan to receive TJ religious training before going to the al-Farooq training camp in Afghanistan.
A Pakistani TJ member told me that jihadi groups openly recruit at the organisation's central headquarters in Raiwind, Pakistan, including at the mosque. And TJ members in Boston say that a lot of Muslims end up treating the group, which is now active in American inner cities and prisons, as a gateway to jihadi organisations.
As such evidence suggests, although it may have been founded to create better individuals, TJ has produced offshoots that have evolved into more militant outfits. In October 1995, Pakistani authorities uncovered a military plot to assassinate prime minister Benazir Bhutto and establish a theocracy. Most of the officers involved in the attempted coup were members of TJ. The group is said to have been strongly influenced by retired lieutenant general Javed Nasir, who served as Pakistan's intelligence chief from 1990 to 1993 but was sacked under pressure from the US for his support of militant Islamists around the world.
Totalitarian Islamist revivalism has become the ideology of the dystopian new world order. In an earlier era, radicals might have described their grievances through other ideological lenses, perhaps anarchism, Marxism or Nazism. Today they choose extreme Islamism.
Radical transnational Islam, divorced from its countries of origin, appeals to some jobless youths in depressed parts of Europe and the US. As the French scholar Olivier Roy points out, leaders of radical Islamic groups often come from the middle classes, many of them having trained in technical fields, but their followers tend be working-class dropouts.
Focusing on economic and social alienation may help explain why such a surprising array of groups has proved willing to join forces with al-Qaeda. Some white supremacists and extremist Christians applaud al-Qaeda's rejectionist goals and may eventually contribute to al-Qaeda missions. Already a Swiss neo-Nazi named Albert Huber has called for his followers to join forces with Islamists. Indeed, Huber sat on the board of directors of the Bank al Taqwa, which the US government accuses of being a major donor to al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, Matt Hale, leader of the white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, has published a book indicting Jews and Israelis as the real culprits behind the attacks of September 11. These groups, along with Horst Mahler (a founder of the radical leftist German group the Red Army Faction), view the September 11 attacks as the first shot in a war against globalisation, a phenomenon that they fear will exterminate national cultures. Leaderless resisters drawn from the ranks of white supremacists or other groups are not yet capable of carrying out massive attacks on their own, but they may become so if they join forces with al-Qaeda.
Modern methodology Al-Qaeda has lately adopted innovative tactics as well as new alliances. Two methods are particularly alarming to intelligence officials: efforts to use surface-to-air missiles to shoot down aircraft and attempts to acquire chemical, nuclear or biological weapons.
In November 2002, terrorists launched two shoulder-fired missiles at an Israeli passenger jet taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, with 271 passengers on board. Investigators say that the missiles came from the same batch as those used in an earlier, also unsuccessful attack on a US military jet in Saudi Arabia. And intelligence officials believe that Hezbollah contacts were used to smuggle the missiles into Kenya from Somalia.
Meanwhile, according to Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, documents seized in Pakistan in March 2003 reveal that al-Qaeda has acquired the necessary materials for producing botulinum and salmonella toxins and the chemical agent cyanide - and is close to developing a workable plan for producing anthrax, a far more lethal agent. Even more worrisome is the possibility that al-Qaeda, perhaps working with Hezbollah or other terrorist groups, will recruit scientists with access to sophisticated nuclear or biological weapons programs, possibly, but not necessarily, ones that are state-run.
To fight such dangerous tactics, Western governments will also need to adapt. In addition to military, intelligence and law enforcement responses, Washington should start thinking about how US policies are perceived by potential recruits to terrorist organisations. The US too often ignores the unintended consequences of its actions, disregarding, for example, the negative message sent by America's neglect of Afghanistan and the chaos in postwar Iraq. If the US allows Iraq to become another failed state, groups both inside and outside the country that support al-Qaeda's goals will benefit.
Terrorists, after all, depend on the broader population for support, and the right US policies could do much to diminish the appeal of rejectionist groups. It does not make sense in such an atmosphere to keep US markets closed to Pakistani textiles or to insist on protecting intellectual property with regard to drugs that needy populations in developing countries cannot hope to afford.
In countries where extremist religious schools promote terrorism, the US should help develop alternative schools rather than attempt to persuade the local government to shut down radical madrasahs. In Pakistan, many children end up at extremist schools because their parents cannot afford the alternatives; better funding for secular education could therefore make a positive difference.
The appeal of radical Islam to alienated youth living in the West is perhaps an even more difficult problem to address. Uneasiness with liberal values, discomfort with uncertain identities and resentment of the privileged are perennial problems in modern societies. What is new today is that radical leaders are using the tools of globalisation to construct new, transnational identities based on death cults, turning grievances and alienation into powerful weapons.
To fight these tactics will require getting the input not just of moderate Muslims, but of radical Islamist revivalists who oppose violence.
To prevent terrorists from acquiring new weapons, meanwhile, Western governments must make it harder for radicals to get their hands on them. Especially important is the need to continue upgrading security at vulnerable nuclear sites, many of which, in Russia and other former Soviet states, are still vulnerable to theft. The global system of disease monitoring - a system sorely tested during the SARS epidemic - should also be upgraded, since biological attacks may be difficult to distinguish from natural outbreaks. Only by matching the radical innovation shown by professional terrorists such as al-Qaeda - and by showing a similar willingness to adapt and adopt new methods and new ways of thinking - can the US and its allies make themselves safe from the threat of terrorist attack.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Jessica Stern is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government and the author of The Ultimate Terrorists and the forthcoming Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.