How I’ll Remember 9-11 This Year

By Karen Kwiatkowski

September 10, 2011 -- It’s been a decade since the attacks of 9-11. Since that time, the cost of the American government has more than doubled while American economic output has drastically slowed. Communication and public speech has suffered under the weight of the Patriot Act, and today, most Americans understand that their government tracks them and spies upon them. Travel across this beautiful land has been made more expensive, as fuel and food costs have skyrocketed. The new and wholly un-American Department of Homeland Security has settled in for the long war, apparently against the American people and American traditions of liberty.

A recent Frontline television program outlined the research effort by two reporters at the Washington Post in describing a "Top Secret" America. The real federal jobs program in the last decade has been in surveillance, monitoring, and intelligence-development – of Americans on American soil.

In the decade after 9-11, Washington, D.C. launched repeated land wars, government takeovers, and nation-building, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and later in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and now Libya. None of these wars, all sold as "wars against terrorism" were granted any public congressional debate, and none entailed a Congressional declaration of war.

In terms of truly discovering the facts of the events of 9-11, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, we saw a government reluctance to delve deeply, and a government desire to pack up the "stories" as quickly as possible. President Bush opposed and worked to delay the official 9-11 Commission, and its published results were then later partially disavowed by the very political appointees who led it. The FBI’s investigation into the Amerithrax case also followed a well-worn path. Select a culprit, publicize the name of the suspect, and harass that individual until they confess. The first FBI target was no coward, nor was he guilty. He successfully sued the federal government and was later awarded millions of tax-payer dollars for the FBI’s miscalculation and arrogance. A second FBI target was named and harassed until he committed suicide, and the case was immediately closed.

Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades.

Trillions of dollars have been wasted, more trillions in value have evaporated, and many thousands of lives have been needlessly sacrificed, all in the name of a post-9-11 era. The Founders believed that the Creator granted all men the right to a government that they themselves owned, and could hold accountable. The Founders believed that the people had the duty to dissolve that government when it no longer followed the law or conducted itself morally, in the best interest of the people. The Founders believed we could withdraw our consent. Today, you can’t even decline to be physically assaulted by a government agent in order to fly on a commercial aircraft using a ticket you bought with your own money.

The federal response to the attacks of 9-11 reflected a real government fear. Not of more attacks, but rather, a fear of average Americans who would begin to see the truth about their government in the 21st century. The truth is that this government does not exist to serve us, and it will not and cannot protect us.

I believe our government – outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution, and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name – cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law, and liberty.

That’s why on 9-11, I will not be celebrating America’s undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks ten years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law, and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God’s intent for America.

On this ten-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I’ll be in Charlottesville, Virginia, learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I’ll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won’t allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the 9-11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.

The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state’s veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity, and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities.

Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia's 6th district.

Beyond Cairo, Israel Sensing a Wider Siege

September 10, 2011
NYT
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — With its Cairo embassy ransacked, its ambassador to Turkey expelled and the Palestinians seeking statehood recognition at the United Nations, Israel found itself on Saturday increasingly isolated and grappling with a radically transformed Middle East where it believes its options are limited and poor.

The diplomatic crisis, in which winds unleashed by the Arab Spring are now casting a chill over the region, was crystallized by the scene of Israeli military jets sweeping into Cairo at dawn on Saturday to evacuate diplomats after the Israeli Embassy had been besieged by thousands of protesters.

It was an image that reminded some Israelis of Iran in 1979, when Israel evacuated its embassy in Tehran after the revolution there replaced an ally with an implacable foe.

“Seven months after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egyptian protesters tore to shreds the Israeli flag, a symbol of peace between Egypt and its eastern neighbor, after 31 years,” Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote Saturday. “It seems that the flag will not return to the flagstaff anytime soon.”

Egypt and Israel both issued statements on Saturday reaffirming their commitments to their peace treaty, but in a televised address on Saturday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned that Egypt “cannot ignore the heavy damage done to the fabric of peace.”

Facing crises in relations with Egypt and Turkey, its two most important regional allies, Israel turned to the United States. Throughout the night on Friday, desperate Israeli officials called their American counterparts seeking help to pressure the Egyptians to protect the embassy.

President Obama “expressed his great concern” in a telephone call with Mr. Netanyahu, the White House said in a statement, and he called on Egypt “to honor its international obligations to safeguard the security of the Israeli Embassy.”

Washington — for whom Israel, Turkey and Egypt are all critical allies — has watched tensions along the eastern Mediterranean with growing unease and increasing alarm. And though the diplomatic breaches were not entirely unexpected, they prompted a flurry of diplomatic activity in Washington.

The mayhem in Cairo also exacted consequences for Egypt, raising questions about whether its military-led transitional government would be able to maintain law and order and meet its international obligations. The failure to prevent an invasion of a foreign embassy raised security concerns at other embassies as well.

The Egyptian government responded to those questions Saturday night, pledging a new crackdown on disruptive protests and reactivating the emergency law allowing indefinite detentions without trial, one of the most reviled measures enacted under former President Hosni Mubarak.

Since the start of the Arab uprisings, internal critics and foreign friends, including the United States, have urged Israel to take bold conciliatory steps toward the Palestinians, and after confrontations in which Israeli forces killed Egyptian and Turkish citizens, to reach accommodations with both countries.

Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador a week ago over Israel’s refusal to apologize for a deadly raid last year on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza in which nine Turks were killed. The storming of the embassy in Cairo on Saturday was precipitated by the killing of three Egyptian soldiers along the border by Israeli military forces pursuing terrorism suspects.

Israel has expressed regret for the deaths in both cases, but has not apologized for actions that it considers defensive.

The overriding assessment of the government of Mr. Netanyahu is that such steps will only make matters worse because what is shaking the region is not about Israel, even if Israel is increasingly its target, and Israel can do almost nothing to affect it.

“Egypt is not going toward democracy but toward Islamicization,” said Eli Shaked, a former Israeli ambassador to Cairo who reflected the government’s view. “It is the same in Turkey and in Gaza. It is just like what happened in Iran in 1979.”

A senior official said Israel had few options other than to pursue what he called a “porcupine policy” to defend itself against aggression. Another official, asked about Turkey, said, “There is little that we can do.”

Critics of the government take a very different view.

Mr. Benn, the Haaretz editor, acknowledged that Mr. Netanyahu could not be faulted for the events in Egypt, the rise of an Islamic-inspired party in Turkey or Iran’s nuclear program. But echoing criticism by the Obama administration, he said that Mr. Netanyahu “has not done a thing to mitigate the fallout from the aforementioned developments.”

Daniel Ben-Simon, a member of Parliament from the left-leaning Labor Party, said the Netanyahu government was on a path “not just to diplomatic isolation but to actually putting Israelis in danger,” he said. “It all comes down to his obsession against a Palestinian state, his total paralysis toward the Palestinian issue. We are facing an international tide at the United Nations. If he joined the vote for a Palestinian state instead of fighting it, that would be the best thing he could do for us in the Arab world.”

The Palestinians have given up on talks with Israel, and within the next two weeks they plan to ask the United Nations to grant them membership and statehood recognition within the 1967 lines, including East Jerusalem as a capital.

Potential side effects of the diplomatic disputes have already emerged.

The growing hostility from Egypt could require a radical rethinking of Israel’s defense doctrine which, for the past three decades, counted on peace on its southern border. As chaos in the Sinai has increased and anti-Israel sentiment in Egypt has grown, military strategists here are examining how to beef up protection of the south, including by the building of an anti-infiltration wall in the Sinai.

A threat by Turkey last week to challenge Israel’s plans for gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean could threaten Israel’s agreement with Cyprus on gas drilling and could worsen tensions with Lebanon on drilling rights.

Initial Israeli fears about the Arab Spring uprisings have begun to materialize in concrete ways. When the uprisings began in Tunisia and Egypt at the start of the year, little attention was directed toward Israel because so much focus was on throwing off dictatorial rule and creating a new political order.

Traditionally, many Arab leaders have used Israel as a convenient scapegoat, turning public wrath against it and blaming it for their problems. The faint hope here was that a freer Middle East might move away from such anti-Israel hostility because the overthrow of dictators would open up debate.

But as the months of Arab Spring have turned autumnal, Israel has increasingly become a target of public outrage. Some here say Israel is again being made a scapegoat, this time for unfulfilled revolutionary promises.

But there is another interpretation, and it is the predominant one abroad — Muslims, Arabs and indeed many around the globe believe Israel is unjustly occupying Palestinian territories, and they are furious at Israel for it. And although some Israelis pointed fingers at Islamicization as the cause of the violence, Egyptians noted Saturday that Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, distanced themselves from Friday’s protests and did not attend, while legions of secular-minded soccer fans were at the forefront of the embassy attacks.

“The world is tired of this conflict and angry at us because we are viewed as conquerors, ruling over another people,” said Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a Labor Party member of Parliament and a former defense minister. “If I were Bibi Netanyahu, I would recognize a Palestinian state. We would then negotiate borders and security. Instead nothing is happening. We are left with one ally, America, and that relationship is strained, too.”

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

Ten years after 9/11, we’re still in the dark

By Omar Ashmawy, Friday, September 9, 8:13 PM
The Washington Post

Ijoined the U.S. military after law school to help my country defend itself against the threat of Islamic extremism. My final assignment in my eight years in the Air Forcewas as a war crimes prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. With access to our nation’s most intimate secrets, I shuttled between Guantanamo and the Pentagon from the summer of 2007 to the winter of 2009. I learned many lessons, but on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the most important lesson I can share is the most alarming: After so many years and so much sacrifice, nothing has changed.

Our greatest weakness remains today what it was 10 years ago, and what it was eight years before that, when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. We don’t understand Islam or Arab culture, and that ignorance prevents us from accurately predicting our relationship with Arab and Muslim countries and identifying our enemies.

From our government to the front lines, individuals are making decisions based on inaccurate, biased information. The White House’s August announcement on combating radical Islam acknowledged this reality. Our soldiers, agents and analysts don’t have the facts they need to make informed decisions about whom to trust, what to believe and how to keep the threat at bay.

Whether it’s the FBI recommending its agents read books by a known anti-Muslim author, misplaced anxiety over “sharia law,” the near absence of linguistic and cultural training in the military, or our government’s collective surprise at the Arab Spring, the effect of what we don’t know reverberates through U.S. policy. But the result is the same: We are caught off guard by events we should have anticipated or, worse, we confuse our enemy’s propaganda with knowledge.

As an American Muslim born and raised in New Jersey, I am frustrated that America still struggles with the basics: We don’t understand the difference between Islam and Islamic extremism, or that Arab culture is not the same as the religion. We divide Muslims into secularists and extremists and can’t tell the devout from the radical, the sympathizer from the opportunist.

Two of the most enduring examples are the military commissions and Guantanamo Bay — intractable problems that will never be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. They’re once and future disasters built by people who should have known better — people America trusted to know more. Both were operated and sustained by individuals so uninformed of our enemy’s religion, language and culture that they could not accurately process the information available to them. Attorneys couldn’t tell good cases from bad ones, and the agents assigned to the commissions didn’t know what questions to ask detainees.

I saw it firsthand. From lawyers to interrogators, the vacuum was enormous. It filled Guantanamo Bay with men who did not need to be there and barred their release. It was fuel on a fire set by a legal process that initially conflated the mutually exclusive missions of intelligence-gathering and the rendering of justice. The absence of knowledge and leadership permitted the worst of what happened — reports of the abuse of prisoners, the desecration of holy books, the legal pantomimes — and continues to prevent a resolution to the human drama playing out on that island.

We cannot close Guantanamo because the trials of the detainees who remain would be tainted by evidence from botched interrogations and because the men there are now radicalized — the result of decisions based in an ignorance tantamount to racism.

This ignorance is a degenerative disease that debilitates our efforts to protect our nation. It was tempting to think that with Osama bin Laden’s death we could end this conflict, if only we could end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While those wars must be concluded, neither their end nor the death of any individual terrorist will secure us against another attack by Islamic extremists. We’re not fighting a single enemy but a decentralized patchwork of groups that adhere to the same twisted, bankrupt ideology. Whether it is Jemaah Islamiah in Southeast Asia or al-Shabab in Somalia, our enemies are motivated and wait — patiently — until we forget.

As we honor the past, we must also commit to the future. This commitment must include an expectation that all Americans responsible for protecting us possess the education and knowledge to do so and be committed to accuracy and learning. A good place to start would be language and culture training for our soldiers, and training in Islam and Arab culture and history for policymakers. Similar education should be made available to local law enforcement and community leaders. At the height of the Cold War, we encouraged our best and brightest to study Russian language and history. Ten years after Sept. 11, this is a basic but necessary step. Ignorance is our vulnerability, and we must begin somewhere. Those individuals we remember Sunday deserve better. We all do.

The writer is a former Air Force officer and war crimes prosecutor. He prosecuted U.S. v. Hamdan and U.S. v. Al Bahlul, the first two litigated cases to be brought before a military tribunal since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Ten years after Sept. 11: The gains outweigh the mistakes

By Editorial, Friday, September 9, 5:52 PM
The Washington Post

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold. Yes, the nation made big mistakes over the past decade. When has America ever geared up without excess and error? But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon alerted Americans to genuine dangers that only a relative few had previously noticed. We have lived safely for the decade since not because we misread those dangers but because we responded to them in a manner in which, on balance, Americans can take pride.

The overreaction argument holds that al-Qaeda goaded the nation to curtail civil liberties and construct a monstrous homeland security apparatus while bungling into adventures abroad that birthed new enemies, sapped the American economy and distracted the nation from bigger problems. There is some truth to each element of the critique. The nation stained itself with its treatment of foreign detainees and particularly its use of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that had long been recognized as torture. By refusing to raise taxes to face the new reality, it endangered its fiscal health. The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence and was arrogantly ill-prepared for the responsibilities of occupation once Saddam Hussein fell. After initial successes in Afghanistan, it paid insufficient attention as the Taliban attempted a comeback. There’s a danger now that the nation will, once again, withdraw too soon from the challenges.

But al-Qaeda was a well-organized, capable organization intent on causing America mortal harm. It embodied an ideology that repelled most Muslims but was nonetheless attractive enough to permit continuous recruitment. And it was operating in an era when new technologies — nuclear, biological, chemical and cyber — allow small numbers of people to envision doing enormous harm to advanced and open democracies.

CONFRONTED with those realities, two administrations, one Republican and one Democratic, accepted the same strategic truths: The United States must protect itself at home as much as it sensibly can while taking the fight to its enemies overseas — and on both fronts, law enforcement and war are not enough. Abroad, aggression must be coupled with efforts to promote development and democracy in places that would otherwise breed terrorism. At home, vigilance must be coupled with tolerance and economic growth, so that the nation can remain both welcoming and strong. Altogether that is not an easy strategy for a democracy to sustain, because it is expensive, unproven and guaranteed to encounter setbacks. Given the scope of the challenge, the country should give itself some credit for what it has achieved.

There was in fact no large-scale assault on personal freedoms — no equivalent to the Supreme Court-sanctioned roundup of Japanese Americans, no repeat of the Red Scare infringements on freedom of speech and association. The Patriot Act enabled a modest, mostly court-supervised expansion of law enforcement vigilance. When there were excesses in the earliest, most panicked years, there was self-correction, with pushes from within the system (the Justice Department inspector general, for example), from members of Congress of both parties and from unfettered media and public interest groups. There have been hateful acts against Muslim Americans, but overall Americans accepted President Bush’s early insistence that the U.S. war was not against Islam. And though it took too long, Congress and a new administration eventually made clear that torture is not acceptable.

In fairly quick order, the federal bureaucracy reorganized itself around two new phrases: “homeland security” and “connect the dots.” The process brought annoyances to air travel, an occasional total lapse of common sense and undoubtedly a large dose of self-dealing in the contractor world, much of it hidden from view. But it also succeeded in disrupting plots that would have cost many lives.

Overseas, wielding a military that also regrouped and reorganized, the United States dismantled al-Qaeda’s leadership and made it increasingly difficult for the organization to operate. The toppling of dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan gave two nations at least a chance at freedom, removed potential havens for America’s enemies and, along with the fall of dictators elsewhere in the Arab world, opened for Muslim-majority countries an alternative path to the medieval caliphate championed by bin Laden.

Over the decade, the United States devoted a far smaller share of its gross domestic product to defense than it did throughout the Cold War. Although it would be nice if those resources could go toward something more peaceful and constructive, the spending is not the cause of America’s economic difficulty. And if the U.S. foreign policy establishment hasn’t paid enough attention to the rise of China or the spread of AIDS, that shouldn’t be blamed entirely on the fight against terrorism; a great power will always have to do more than one thing at a time.

NONE OF THIS means that the United States must remain perpetually at war. Having created an enormous apparatus to protect the country, we should be vigilant that it does not exaggerate the threat to justify its existence. But the risks from cyber attack and concealed weapons of mass destruction are here to stay. And al-Qaeda and like-minded groups, while weakened, have not been defeated, as warnings of a plot timed to the anniversary remind us.

In fact, with politicians from President Obama to Republican challenger Jon Huntsman Jr. calling for the country to (in Mr. Obama’s words) “focus on nation-building here at home,” the greatest danger now may be premature retreat from a difficult battlefield. “I know Americans are tired of war,” says Ryan Crocker, who served the Bush administration as ambassador to Pakistan and Iraq and has returned to service, at Mr. Obama’s request, as ambassador to Afghanistan. “I’m kind of tired, too. . . . But we’ve got to get it right. . . . I don’t think al-Qaeda is out of business because they lost bin Laden — not by a long shot.”

Perhaps ironically, the 10th anniversary has brought nostalgia not only for the innocence of the pre-Sept. 11 era but also for the togetherness that immediately followed — for what Mr. Obama called, in a USA Today op-ed Friday, “the unity that we needed to move forward together . . . the sense of common purpose that stirred in our hearts.”

We, too, hope the nation can muster the common purpose to sustain the effort that Mr. Crocker refers to. But we do not mourn the reemergence, not long after Sept. 11, of disagreement and dissent. The fights sometimes got ugly during the past 10 years, but those arguments — over Iraq and Afghanistan, wiretapping, and waterboarding — are a testament to the nation’s resilience and character, not by any means a weakness.

And what of the vows we made, in the shock of vulnerability, to engage in acts of kindness, to spend more time with loved ones, to live lives less distracted by frivolous or material desires? To the extent we’ve fallen short, we can mourn those, too. But it is human nature to be recaptured by the bustle of ordinary life. That we have had the luxury to do so is a testament to the dedication of compatriots, in uniform and out, seen and unseen, fallen and surviving, who have fought and worked to keep the country safe.

Israel asks U.S. to help protect embassy in Cairo after protesters attack building

By Michael Birnbaum and Ingy Hassieb, Friday, September 9, 8:58 AM
The Washington Post

CAIRO — Israel sought U.S. protection for its embassy here early Saturday, hours after thousands of Egyptian protesters besieged the building, with several managing to gain entry and fling Hebrew-language documents from a balcony.

Protesters knocked down a 12-foot concrete wall that had been built last week to protect the embassy, which is near the top floor of a 21-story residential building in the upscale Dokki neighborhood. At least two protesters scaled the front of the building to pull down the Israeli flag, hanging from the 20th floor. It was the second time in recent weeks that demonstrators had removed the flag.

The crowd burned Israeli flags and threw rocks at security forces as protesters denounced the deaths of five Egyptian border guards last month. The five were killed as Israeli troops pursued militants who they said had crossed into Egypt from Gaza to attack the Israeli resort town of Eilat.

Late Friday, protesters appeared to have reached the embassy’s foyer, throwing documents from a balcony, according to an Israeli official quoted by the Reuters news agency. It was not clear whether the documents were sensitive. Egyptian security forces used tear gas and sent a string of armored personnel carriers to try to clear away the protesters.

An Israeli official in Jerusalem confirmed that the embassy had been broken into.

President Obama spoke by telephone to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express “great concern” about the embassy situation and called on the Egyptian government to protect the building.

Early Saturday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak asked U.S. officials for assistance in protecting the Cairo embassy, Reuters reported. Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador, Yitzhak Levanon, his family and other embassy staff were waiting at Cairo’s airport for a military plane to evacuate them, the Associated Press reported airport officials as saying.

Anger toward Israel has united Egyptian protesters like nothing else. Thousands returned to Tahrir Square on Friday calling for a faster transition to civilian rule, in the largest demonstration since activists canceled a sit-in at the beginning of August. But the gathering in Tahrir — in which disparate groups clustered separately, each pressing their own issues — lacked the energy of the evening confrontation at the embassy, which developed after protesters broke away from the square and marched the two miles to the mission.

Friday’s gathering, which organizers called “Correcting the Path,” was intended to pressure Egypt’s military rulers to provide a timeline for ceding power to civilian control, after months in which elections have been proposed and then postponed.

Parliamentary elections are set for November, with a presidential election to follow, but no dates have been set for either vote.

Protesters also called for an end to military trials of civilians, which have continued unabated since longtime president and former military general Hosni Mubarak was ousted Feb. 11, after weeks of massive but peaceful civilian protests.

“Mubarak’s men are still in control, and we can’t do anything about it,” said Mohammed Saad, 24, a student at al-Azhar University, Egypt’s preeminent Islamic school. “The poor are still poor, and the children of the rich are the only ones getting jobs.”

Tahrir Square, the heart of bustling Cairo, has been the center of Egypt’s political unrest. Hundreds of protesters were killed there in January and February — deaths for which Mubarak is now on trial.

Liberal Facebook activists have gathered there repeatedly since Mubarak’s departure in an attempt to make their voices heard. Islamic groups have come to show their strength and organization. From time to time, the army has swept them all away in clashes that show it is still the force in power.

Military security forces and riot police have clashed with protesters at previous demonstrations, but this week the army issued a statement saying it would allow peaceful gatherings Friday as long as no property was damaged.

And after weeks under tight military control, Tahrir Square appeared to have no security presence Friday.

Instead, protest organizers in street clothes checked identification at entrances to the square.

Despite thousands of protesters, the square was less than half full, and one important group was glaringly absent: Islamic fundamentalists, who have emerged as a powerful political force since Mubarak stepped down.

Once outlawed, the Muslim Brotherhood now can hang its campaign signs everywhere, and Cairo is speckled with them. Salafists — adherents to a puritanical, conservative form of Islam — also can operate far more openly than they once did. But the Brotherhood’s political party, called the Freedom and Justice Party, and the Salafists had announced before Friday’s protest that they would not participate.

Their absence was a marked difference from a much larger protest in late July, when tens of thousands of mostly Salafist protesters packed Tahrir Square to resist what they saw as attempts by the military and liberal protesters to enact constitutional changes that would enshrine Egypt as a secular state.

The July gathering demonstrated the highly organized Islamic groups’ ability to turn out a crowd. Friday’s event revealed the liberals’ relative weakness in that area, a combination that could have important electoral consequences in the November parliamentary elections.

The uncertainty surrounding politics in Egypt extends to whether Mubarak will be convicted on charges of corruption and complicity in the deaths of protesters. On Sunday, Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the country’s de facto head of state, is scheduled testify in a closed courtroom about Mubarak’s actions during the January and February protests. Many in Tahrir on Friday were skeptical that Tantawi would implicate his former boss.

“We all hope that he will testify against him,” said Mohammed Yusef, 25. Whether that will actually happen, he said, is another question.

Hassieb is a special correspondent. Special correspondent Muhammad Mansour contributed to this report.

After 9/11, woman who was at Pentagon remains skeptical

By Steve Hendrix, Friday, September 9, 9:42 PM
The Washington Post

Ninth in a series.

“You want to play in the back yard, son?” April Gallop says to the lanky 10-year-old tailing her on the front walk of a neat frame house in a Richmond suburb. “You go around; I’ll be right there.”

Elisha Gallop wears a straw hat and flip-flops in the heat of a July afternoon. He gives his mom a smile and runs to lift a heavy padlock from a side gate. The half-finished fence, being built by volunteers, remains open at the rear; anyone could walk in. But she still craves the reassuring click of a solid padlock.

“I won’t let him outside by himself,” Gallop says in a low voice, looking down the street. A woman walks her dog across the way, not glancing over, not giving a neighborly wave. “There have been some comments.”

Gallop leans against her car, a cherry-red BMW with a license plate that reads “A OVRCMER” and a fuel door that is slightly ajar.

“Now who’s been messing with this?” she murmurs, pushing it closed, scanning the yard again.

A “No Trespassing” sign is tucked into a trellis. Another is planted by the door. A third, askew between the glass and the closed blinds of a front window, warns that the property is under video surveillance. On a tidy, sunny block, it’s a house in a defensive crouch.

Gallop leans against the car and pulls papers from an envelope that a Chesterfield County deputy sheriff hand-delivered a few hours earlier. It’s another threat from the landlord.

“Why is this happening?” she asks.

The lease payments are up to date, paid during the past six years by a Pentagon Sept. 11 survivors’ fund. She thought she was renting to own, but now the property owner wants the house back. Gallop has an appointment with a lawyer the next morning. A new one. Is this the sixth or the seventh? It’s hard to remember all the lawsuits filed, the claims denied, the appeals that go ’round and ’round.

“Evidently he has formed some kind of opinion about me,” she says of the owner.

Maybe he’s like the neighbor who spit on her driveway a few months ago as Gallop hustled back behind the lowered blinds, away from the growing wariness of the neighborhood, ignoring the invitation to explain her “un-American” views and this business of Gallop v. Cheney.

“I think they Googled ‘April Gallop’ and didn’t like what they saw,” she says.

Ten years ago, there was no contrail of derision attached to her name. That was before she had fought with government agencies and private charities and school systems and she hadn’t yet sued airlines and banks and Osama bin Laden and the highest officials in the United States.

Before she had formally accused her government of making up that story about an airliner crashing into her Pentagon office.

She holds up her hands.

“All I’m doing is asking questions. When you walk out barefoot and you don’t step on any plane parts. . . .”

The hands come down, tired.

“Lord, help me make sense of this.”

Things stopped making sense on that brilliant September morning just as she pushed the button on her computer to start the day. In that moment, everything secure and understandable in the world fell on her head in a deafening avalanche of ceiling tiles and body parts.

She doesn’t know how long she was out. “Oh my God, am I in hell?” she wondered as her eyes strained to decipher the jagged heaps of wallboard and office furniture, the computers spitting sparks, the legs and arms sprouting bizarrely from the debris, some waving for help, others crazy-broken and still.

The sound was as demonic as the scene, a sustained wail of agony and panic. And then beneath that, muffled and weak, she heard . . . what? . . . a baby? “Oh my God, is there a baby in hell?” she asked.

A baby. Elisha.

On her first day back from maternity leave, her boss had asked the new single mother to come straight to the office, newborn and all. Just handle a bit of urgent paperwork and then take little Elisha Zion to the Pentagon day-care center.

He had been sleeping in his stroller next to her desk.

She pushed through the crust of chairs and cabinets and the pain that felt like hammers pounding her skull and spine. Others were upright now, shouting, shoving rubble away from the loudest screams. She tried to help. The only light was a flare of gritty sun from a hole high above the mountains of debris.

Finally she found the place where the feeble cry was the clearest. She reached into the rubble, shouldered aside rocks of concrete and felt cotton on her fingertips. She pulled out her 10-week-old son by his onesie.

“Elisha,” she calls into the back yard. His hat pops over the edge of the playground set that the VFW volunteers brought a few years ago. She calls them “my angels,” folks who still think of her simply as a hallowed Sept. 11 survivor, her son as a miracle baby.

The boy comes up. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Let’s go see if they’ve picked the squash. Lock the gates now.”

They step around a pile of new gardening stuff that blocks the front walk, lying untouched where the angels left it in May: bags of mulch, some withering plants, a bottle of Roundup. Gallop doesn’t like being in the yard enough to do much work on it.

But they drive a few miles to the garden of their church, Mount Gilead Full Gospel, a fenced acre of earth free of peering neighbors.

Elisha trots ahead and opens the gate, running along the furrows.

“He’ll walk up and down here all night if I let him,” Gallop says.

There is nothing visible to mark Elisha’s early trauma. He’s lean and agile, with wide brown eyes and a smile dimpled and gleaming. He has head shots on file with a local modeling agency.

But there are subtler echoes of that day, she says. He learns slowly, his retention is soft. Repeat, repeat, repeat, or the lessons fade. Every few months, his “glitch” shows up; he’ll have trouble telling whether a door is open or the page of a book is right-side up. His teachers put him in a special education class when he was 6, but Gallop took him out halfway through the year when he began to regress. “Suddenly he didn’t want to feed himself,” she said. “I couldn’t do that to my son.”

Now she strings together a battery of private teachers, some volunteer and some paid, who teach Elisha for six hours each day at a public library. He’s reading at grade level. On Fridays, he learns piano, guitar and violin. He’s taking figure-skating lessons.

“It was just one more fight,” Gallop says of her grapples with the school system. “I never imagined in a thousand years everything would be so hard.”

They told her it wouldn’t be. From the time she woke up on the grass outside the Pentagon, people told her she and her son would be taken care of. Politicians on TV said it was the nation’s duty to care for the victims; functionaries in hotel meeting rooms across Northern Virginia assured her and other survivors that the money was coming, the systems in place.

But Gallop says those well-intentioned systems failed her and the boy she had carried over the smoking rubble to that high shaft of sunlight above. That had looked like the way to safety.

One by one, she became enmeshed in paperwork tangles, bureaucratic standoffs, exhausting delays, with the Army, the Veterans Affairs Department, the Pentagon Survivors’ Fund.

She did receive help, the housing aid and vouchers for groceries. Anonymous donors gave tens of thousands that paid for Elisha’s rehabilitation costs and other needs.

But 10 years on, Gallop says confusion about what support agencies would and wouldn’t cover has left her deeply in debt and with no income other than her pension and the spotty child-support payments she receives from Elisha’s father, a soldier. Everything else is pending: settlements from lawsuits, disputed back pay, a star-crossed application for a VA self-employment grant.

“Right now, it’s pretty close to the bone,” she says. “Thank God for coupons.”

Gallop acknowledges that she is not blameless in the bureaucratic relationships that soured one after another. She was “a yeller,” she says, before a therapist helped her learn coping skills.

And sometimes she just disappears. “If I’m feeling bad, I don’t work,” Gallop says. “I won’t call back for a few days. But I told them that in the beginning. So I’m a complainer. Aren’t you trained to deal with that?”

She watches Elisha, only his hat visible cruising along the top of the cornstalks.

“I don’t care. I’ve got my son. I am going to fight for my benefits.”

At that moment, a timer clicks and sprinklers launch twin arcs of water over the crops, and over the Gallops.

The mother shrieks and speed-walks toward the gate, giggling. The boy whoops and runs back and forth, chasing the drops.

She had assumed it was a bomb. Maybe even a bomb attached to her computer. She had pushed the button and the place had blown up.

But an airplane?

How could that be?

It was an article of Army faith to her that she was working in the most secure building in the world. They had told her that over and over when she was transferred from Germany to the Pentagon in 2000, the days of briefings about air defenses, early warning systems, impregnable security. They said it couldn’t happen.

And then it did happen, and since then she has wondered, “Where was the plane?” The scene is still vivid in her nightmares: rubble, yes, but no aircraft wreckage; smoke and flames, but no jet-fuel inferno.

“I was 50 feet from the impact zone,” Gallop says. “The engine should have been in my lap.”

But it wasn’t.

She waited for clarity that wouldn’t come, not with the lengthening trail of official statements, not with the 9/11 Commission report, the DNA matches from the passengers of American Airlines Flight 77.

She didn’t see a plane. They said it couldn’t happen. No one is taking responsibility.

She knows they call her crazy on the Internet, or an opportunist seeking attention or money.

But she says she doesn’t enjoy being a darling of 9/11 truthers, the skeptic who was there. She doesn’t spend much time on their Web sites and has rarely watched video from the twin towers or the Pentagon, either.

“It’s hard for me to look at,” she says, patting her chest with a stricken expression. “It makes me cry.”

And money? Well, she needs money. She is clipping coupons and going to midnight sales at the PX at Richmond’s Fort Lee and waiting on payoffs that are always a few more documents away.

Gallop joined a class-action lawsuit that accused Riggs Bank of laundering money for the terrorists, and another that named pages of defendants around the Muslim world, including Bin Laden. Both were dismissed.

She is in the process of settling a suit against American Airlines. On instructions from her attorney, she won’t discuss it. But she does not step around the incongruity of suing for damages over the plane that she contends did not hit the Pentagon.

“If there are claims out there that these things took place that day, the airlines are liable,” she says. “If they are liable, I’m one of the victims. I have to do that for my son.”

The two of them are waiting on orders of Mongolian beef at a Noodles and Co. across the street from the law offices where they’ve been for the past two hours. Gallop wears a black T-shirt with “Women of P.O.W.E.R.” spelled out in rhinestones.

Elisha sits quietly now, next to his mother, fiddling with chopsticks and straw wrappers and not paying much attention to the litany of doubts and frustrations he has heard hundreds of times before.

When the food arrives, they hook pinkies. “Lord Jesus, I thank you for this meal,” Elisha says.

The two are rarely apart. She used to make “Gallop Family Team” badges for their shirts. When he was 7, she began coaching him on his role: cleaning up after himself and being patient during Mommy’s long talks with bureaucrats, landlords, lawyers.

It took her months to find an attorney willing to go to the top, to try to get a vice president, a defense secretary, a Joint Chiefs chairman at the table for sworn discovery.

William Veale, a former public defender from Walnut Creek, Calif., and a founder of the Center for 9/11 Justice, agreed. They filed Gallop v. Cheney in 2008.

The suit asserted that the story about a hijacked plane hitting the Pentagon “is false,” that the defendants were “complicit” in the attacks because they wanted to create conditions that would allow them to reassert “U.S. military power abroad, particularly in Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and other oil-producing areas.”

Gallop says she isn’t sure about all the claims in the suit that bears her name. The lawyers wrote them.

“I can’t say I absolutely agree with everything in the lawsuit,” she says. “But I do think the case should be allowed to get to discovery.”

The suit was thrown out as frivolous in 2010. An appeals court upheld the dismissal in April. A motion to reconsider was denied in July.

“We’re appealing,” Gallop says. The last option is the U.S. Supreme Court.

She looks at her son struggling with the chopsticks. “We’re going to be fine.”

After lunch, they walk to a comic-book store. Now Elisha is bouncing. After hours of dutiful calm, he runs ahead, then runs back to the door to hold it open for his mother, then runs off again.

He shops a bookstore the way he walks the garden, up and down every aisle, hardly stopping. In a minute, he has a handful of comic books, a minute later he has returned those and picked up some others.

Finally, he is back with the one he wants most of all. Just one. His mother looks through her purse.

“I left my money at home,” she says.

Elisha glances at the comic. “That’s okay,” he says. “I’ll get it next time.”

He skips two aisles over and returns it to the exact slot where he had found it.

On the slow, hot walk across the parking lot, Elisha says that if he could be a comic-book hero, a hero with a super power, he’d choose invisibility. Good for hide-and-seek.

His mother walks slowly, limping a bit in the heat. “Super strength,” she says.

“You want super strength?” Elisha asks.

She smiles down at him.

“I could do it all!” she says.

“You could fly!” he says, grabbing her hand, pulling her off her stride.

“I would fly to the VA office,” she says, starting to laugh. “I’d fly to the VA and I wouldn’t even sit down. I’d just float in the air.”

They are at a stoplight. Her son is holding her hand, looking up at her face.

“ ‘Won’t you have a seat, Ms. Gallop,’ ” she says in a timid voice, imagining what they would say to this woman floating in the air.

“No!” she thunders, and now both she and Elisha are laughing and hanging onto each other as they cross the street, back to the lawyer’s office, back to a world in which you can touch a computer key and a bomb goes off.

Or was it a missile?

Or was it a plane?

Back to trying to make sense of it all.

N.Y. subway ad campaign calls for end of U.S. aid to Israel

September 9, 2011

NEW YORK (JTA) -- Beginning this month, New York City subways will feature advertisements calling for the end of U.S. military aid to Israel.

The posters will run in 18 subway stations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. They will feature images of Palestinians and Israelis with their children and the message “two people, one future.”

The group Be On Our Side is the national campaign behind this effort. This is the seventh city in which these advertisements have been displayed.

Since 9/11, at least 35,000 convicted under anti-terror laws

By MARTHA MENDOZA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 4, 2011 | 12:01 a.m. CDT

EDITOR'S NOTE: After the 9/11 attacks, the world launched a war on terror. Here, in the first tally of anti-terror prosecutions ever done, The Associated Press examines how many people have been put behind bars under anti-terror laws, and who they are. AP reporters in more than 100 countries filed requests under freedom of information laws, conducted interviews and gathered data for this story.

At least 35,000 people worldwide have been convicted as terrorists in the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. But although some bombed hotels or blew up buses, others were put behind bars for waving a political sign or blogging about a protest.

In the first tally ever done of global anti-terror arrests and convictions, The Associated Press documented a surge in prosecutions under new or toughened anti-terror laws, often passed at the urging and with the funding of the West. Before 9/11, just a few hundred people were convicted of terrorism each year.

The sheer volume of convictions, along with almost 120,000 arrests, shows how a keen global awareness of terrorism has seeped into societies and how the war against it is shifting to the courts. But it also suggests that dozens of countries are using the fight against terrorism to curb dissent and throw political opponents in jail.

The AP used freedom of information queries in dozens of countries, law enforcement data and hundreds of interviews to identify 119,044 arrests of terrorism suspects and 35,117 convictions in 66 countries, which account for 70 percent of the world's population. The actual numbers undoubtedly run higher because some countries refused to provide information.

That included 2,934 arrests and 2,568 convictions in the U.S. — eight times more than in the decade before.

The investigation also showed:

More than half the convictions came from two countries that have been accused of using anti-terror laws to crack down on dissent, Turkey and China. Turkey alone accounted for a third of all convictions, with 12,897.
The range of people in jail reflects the dozens of ways different countries define a terrorist. China has arrested more than 7,000 people under a definition that counts terrorism as one of Three Evils, along with separatism and extremism.
The effectiveness of anti-terror prosecutions varies widely. Pakistan registered the steepest increase in terror arrests during recent years, AP's data show, yet terror attacks there are still on the rise. But in Spain, where convictions per year are more or less steady, the armed Basque separatist group ETA has not planted a fatal bomb in two years.
The broad use of anti-terror laws to get rid of dissent can backfire. Authoritarian governments in the Middle East relied on strict anti-terror laws as one way to keep order, only to face a backlash in the Arab Spring uprisings.

AP's findings start to fill in the largely blank picture of what has happened with the global war on terror, launched by the United Nations with the strong backing of the U.S.

"There's been a recognition all around the world that terrorism really does pose a greater threat to society and that it needs to be nipped in the bud early," said John Bellinger, who, as legal adviser to the National Security Council, was in the White House Situation Room during the al-Qaida attack on the World Trade Center. "Also, more authoritarian countries are using the real threat of terrorism as an excuse and a cover to crack down in ways that are abusive of human rights."

A fine line between use and abuse

After 9/11, the U.S. and the U.N. declared war not just on al-Qaida, but also on terrorism worldwide. The U.N. immediately sent millions of dollars in foreign aid and lucrative contracts to press countries to adopt or revise their anti-terror laws. The term "global war on terror" was born.

Since then, almost every country has passed new or revised anti-terror laws. The countries vary in size — tiny nations, such as Tonga and Luxembourg, and giants, such as China.

During the past nine months, AP reporters in more than 100 countries set out to find how — and how much — anti-terror laws were used. But some countries claimed they had no records, declared anti-terror information top secret or were reluctant to report any terrorism at all, lest it hurt their image.

The numbers show how much countries have come to rely on anti-terror laws and how thin the line is between use and abuse.

Turkey, long at odds with its Kurdish minority, tops all other countries AP could tally for how many anti-terror convictions it has and how fast the number is rising.

One of Turkey's terrorists is Naciye Tokova, a Kurdish mother of two who lives in a small village in arid southeastern Turkey. Last year, she held up a sign at a protest that said, "Either a free leadership and free identity, or resistance and revenge until the end."

She couldn't read the sign because she cannot read. Tokova said she was asked to hold a banner she thought was about peace.

She was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.

"Of course, I'm not a terrorist," Tokova, who is free on appeal, said as she sat on a floor cushion in her home, wearing a traditional flowered shawl. She was defiant, replying curtly to questions after long pauses.

In the past, Tokova has inked her thumbprint on a petition honoring the Kurdish rebel chief and gone to a rally where protesters clashed with police. And she speaks only Kurdish, a language Turkey has barred in schools, parliament and most official settings, including court.

Kurds make up 20 percent of Turkey's 75 million people, and the Kurdistan Workers' Party is responsible for much of the violence in the country. The U.S. and European Union label the Kurdish party as terrorist but urges Turkey to do more for the Kurdish people.

Although Turkey has for decades imprisoned Kurds, it stepped up its campaign against Kurdish autonomy in 2006, when it followed the lead of its European neighbors and revised anti-terror laws. The new laws considered peaceful protests as security threats and gave protesters sentences similar in length to those of convicted guerrillas.

Anti-terror convictions in Turkey shot up to 6,345 in 2009, from 273 in 2005. The latest year available is 2009, according to information from an AP request under Turkey's right to information law.

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said the country is fair to its Kurds.

"We have never compromised on the balance between security and freedom," Erdogan said.

No clear definition of 'terrorist'

The broad use of anti-terror laws worldwide shows that what constitutes a terrorist depends largely on where you are.

The day after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush told the U.N. General Assembly that the world stood "at a difficult and defining moment."

The trouble is, no one actually agrees on what makes a terrorist. Definitions range from those who set an almost impossibly high bar for terrorism to those who sweep up anyone who might oppose the government.

"If anything should have revealed to the world the essence of unacceptable terrorism, it was 9/11," said law professor Kent Roach at the University of Toronto, whose book on 9/11 and its impact on anti-terrorism will be published in September. "Unfortunately, a decade later, we seem no closer to reaching agreement."

Even the U.S., which fought to get anti-terror laws passed, has come under criticism for allegedly not handling terrorist suspects fairly — especially at the military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — and for not defining terrorism clearly. In fact, the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department don't agree on what terrorism is.

China has an anti-terrorism statute, but it prefers to consider terrorism part of a vague charge of "endangering state security," under which it has arrested more than 7,000 people, mostly in Xinjiang, according to the government's annual crime reports. Xinjiang is known as East Turkistan to ethnic Uighurs fighting for an independent homeland.

Strong anti-terror laws are necessary to crack down on violence and ensure safety, State Councilor Meng Jianzhu said during a national anti-terror conference this summer. Meng pledged to handle terrorists with an "iron fist."

That doesn't mean just violent offenders.

Two years ago, Dilshat Perhat, an Uighur entrepreneur in China, asked visitors to his popular Uighur-language website not to post political comments because he knew they were illegal. Even so, someone posted a call for a demonstration on the website in the middle of the night.

Perhat deleted the comments the next day and informed the police, as required. But he was arrested anyway, amid an outbreak of violence that killed 197 people in China's Muslim-majority northwest. Perhat was convicted in a one-day trial last year and was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of endangering state security.

China quickly accused Uighur activists abroad of organizing the violence as an act of terrorism. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Uighurs were rounded up and arrested in house-to-house sweeps. At least two dozen were executed, and an unknown number remain unaccounted for.

Even those with no hand in the violence, such as Perhat, were sentenced to prison for up to 15 years. Two other website operators were sentenced to three and 10 years.

"They wanted to use him as an example, to threaten and show their power to the Uighur people," said Perhat's brother Dilmurat, a graduate student in the U.S. "Inside China, any peaceful protest by the Uighurs is labeled as an act of terrorism by the Chinese government."

A mixed record of success

The increase in anti-terror prosecutions reflects how much they have become a weapon, however blunt, in the fight against terrorism. But when it comes to actually stopping violence, the record is mixed.

The rise in terror arrests in Pakistan, with the help of billions of dollars from the U.S., was steeper than in any other country the AP examined. Arrests went up to 12,886 in 2009, from 1,552 in 2006, partly because of four military operations that year.

Since amending its terror laws in 2004, Pakistan has made 29,050 arrests in all, according to the independent Pak Institute for Peace Studies.

Yet terror attacks in Pakistan are still on the rise. Pakistan suffers more deaths from terror than any other country in the world, except for Iraq.

Only about 10 percent of terrorism cases in Pakistan end in conviction, according to the country's human rights commission. That compares with 90 percent in the U.S. Pakistani witnesses usually refuse to testify because of death threats and the lack of protection. And prosecutors have no power to make plea bargains, making it hard to get co-defendants to turn on each other.

Pakistan's anti-terror laws might even make things worse, at least in the short term.

When arrests go up, so do attacks, according to Syed Ejaz Hussain, a Pakistani police officer who studied thousands of cases for his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. And when police arrest hard-core terrorists, Hussain found, casualty rates go up almost 25 percent.

"It's defiance," said Hussain, whose house in Lahore was bombed while he was in the U.S. "Terrorists want to punish the government in a bigger way after the arrest of their hard-core group member, and one way to do so is to commit a mass-killing event."

Back in Pakistan now, he said that despite his standard-issue gun and bullet-proof jacket, terror is never far from his mind.

Like Pakistan, Spain is no stranger to terrorism but has had some success fighting it. Spain stands out for how steadily it has convicted people during the past decade, with about 140 convictions a year, according to data from AP's freedom of information request.

ETA, the Basque separatist group, once was responsible for killings every month. Today, it is severely weakened.

No one is shouting victory yet — this is ETA's 11th ceasefire — but the group annnounced earlier this year that it has ended a "revolutionary tax" levied for decades on Basque businesses to finance its terror campaign.

"The terrorist attacks 10 years ago on the World Trade Center and the Madrid bombings helped forge a strong feeling of rejection toward ETA," said Spanish journalist Gorka Landaburu, who is Basque and himself a victim of an ETA mail bomb that blew off his thumb and fingertips. "Society lost a bit of its fear."

After 9/11, Spain passed a tough new law under which it can ban political parties that support terrorist acts, collaborate with terrorist groups or refuse to condemn violence. By 2003, Spain had outlawed Basque political party Batasuna, which had ties to ETA. Convicted terrorists in Spain face a maximum of 40 years, 10 more than for other crimes, including murder.

Political science professor Roman Cotarelo of Spain's National Open University notes that Spain's Political Party Law was introduced "in a period made fertile" by the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Every democratic country has to resort at one time or another to exceptional measures to defend itself," Cotarelo said.

A new Basque pro-independence political coalition won a local election after it made clear it rejected violence — something unimaginable a decade ago. It now controls dozens of Basque town halls. And polls say ETA is no longer Spaniards' chief worry.

For Landaburu, a gray-haired, chatty journalist who runs the magazine Cambio 16, the terror is still there. The fear manifests itself in his pinched brow and the two bodyguards who follow him to work, to a bar for a beer or even just walking with his family. When he gestures with his hands, which he often does, there's a stump where his thumb once was.

But he feels ETA's days are numbered.

"Things are much calmer," he said. "People can breathe more easily."

Anti-terrorism and the Arab Spring

Anti-terror laws are still playing out in unexpected ways, particularly in the Middle East, long seen as the cauldron of terrorism.

After the terrorist attacks on the U.S., many Middle Eastern countries quickly adopted strict anti-terror laws. But the laws inadvertently united activists of all stripes — trade unionists, Islamists, Internet bloggers — in the Arab Spring.

Tunisia passed its anti-terror laws in 2003. The staunchly secular regime used the laws to crack down on signs of piety, to protect itself and to prevent the rise of Islamic militancy. It convicted 62 people under the laws in 2006, 308 in 2007 and 633 in 2009, according to the U.N.

One of those convicted was Saber Ragoubi, a slim, soft-spoken young man with a full beard and an engaging smile. The smile is a recent addition — he was just fitted with two new front teeth to replace the ones kicked out of his mouth by the heavy boot of a prison guard, he said.

Ragoubi joined an anti-government group in 2006, he said, because he wanted religious freedom. The group was trained by an Algerian group that later declared allegiance to al-Qaida.

Ragoubi said he never held or planned to hold a weapon, but he did support plans to attack police stations and the much-hated secret police.

When the police found him, Ragoubi was tried and sentenced to life in prison. For years, he said, he was kicked and beaten, his hands and legs chained to an iron bar in what was called the "chicken on a spit" position. He said he was shackled to a metal chair and electrically shocked and was told his mother and sisters would be raped in front of him if he didn't sign a confession.

"To this day, I don't know how I bore all that torture during that time," said Ragoubi, who now lives in an unfinished neighborhoood where goats graze under straggly olive trees in trash-filled empty lots.

Under former leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, as many as 2,000 Tunisians were detained, charged or convicted on terrorism-related charges, according to a 2009 State Department report. The U.N. says some were tortured.

But five days after Ben Ali fled in January, the new ministers released everyone convicted under the anti-terror laws — even those who had indeed committed violent crimes. The danger is now that militant Islam could rise without the check of strong anti-terror laws. At least one formerly banned Islamist party, the progressive and nonviolent Ennahda, is back, and Ragoubi said he has turned down an offer to represent it.

The role of anti-terror laws in — and against — the Arab Spring continues.

Bahrain and Syria have charged protesters under their own anti-terror laws. Saudi Arabia, concerned with keeping al-Qaida from taking root in the kingdom, is considering an anti-terror law that would carry a minimum prison sentence of 10 years for challenging the integrity of the king.

"Regional unrest provides a breeding ground for new threats," a statement from Saudi authoritites read.

Anti-terrorism's collateral damage: human rights

Ten years after 9/11, the push for a global assault on terrorism still runs strong. Mike Smith, director of the U.N.'s Counter-Terrorism Committee, called prosecuting terrorists "incredibly important."

"These are not ideological warriors. These are common criminals," said Smith, one of the highest-ranking officials in the world dedicated to anti-terror laws. "When prosecutions are carried out, it helps to take the glamour out of what they are doing."

But almost everyone, including the U.N. and the U.S., agrees that the cost is some erosion of human rights.

In 2005, the U.N. named Finnish law professor Martin Sheinin as special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism. His job is to report on how anti-terror prosecutions are playing out. After six years, Sheinin agreed with the need to sweep out terrorists but concluded that the brush being used is too broad.

"Originally the approach was the more the merrier, the stronger counter-terror laws, the better for the security of the world," he said. "But that was a serious mistake. Nowadays, people are realizing the abuse and even the actual use of counterterror laws is bad for human rights and also bad for actually stopping terrorism."

AP IMPACT: 35,000 worldwide convicted for terror

AP
By MARTHA MENDOZA - AP National Writer | AP – 7/4/2011

In this July 29, 2011 photo, Naciye Tokova, a Kurdish mother and housewife, who was sentenced to seven years in jail for helping rebels who are described by Turkey as terrorists, and her husband Sadik speak during an interview in her home in Kurtalan, Siirt in southeastern Turkey. The key piece of evidence against Tokova, who is illiterate, was the sign that she held up at a protest. It said: "Either a free leadership and free identity, or resistance and uprising until the end." The punishment stems from the Turkish state's homegrown narrative of terrorism, one that pre-dates the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and is rooted in the bloody legacy of Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan, jailed since 1999. Activists counter that Tokova was denied the right to free assembly and expression and hardly qualifies as a terrorist accomplice.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

In this July 29, 2011 photo, Naciye Tokova, a Kurdish mother and housewife, who was …
In this July 29, 2011 photo, Naciye Tokova, a Kurdish mother and housewife, who was sentenced to seven years in jail for helping rebels who are described by Turkey as terrorists, speaks during an interview in her home in Kurtalan, Siirt in southeastern Turkey. The key piece of evidence against Tokova, who is illiterate, was the sign that she held up at a protest. It said: "Either a free leadership and free identity, or resistance and uprising until the end." The punishment stems from the Turkish state's homegrown narrative of terrorism, one that pre-dates the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and is rooted in the bloody legacy of Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan, jailed since 1999. Activists counter that Tokova was denied the right to free assembly and expression and hardly qualifies as a terrorist accomplice.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

In this July 29, 2011 photo, Naciye Tokova, a Kurdish mother and housewife, who was …

At least 35,000 people worldwide have been convicted as terrorists in the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. But while some bombed hotels or blew up buses, others were put behind bars for waving a political sign or blogging about a protest.

In the first tally ever done of global anti-terror arrests and convictions, The Associated Press documented a surge in prosecutions under new or toughened anti-terror laws, often passed at the urging and with the funding of the West. Before 9/11, just a few hundred people were convicted of terrorism each year.

The sheer volume of convictions, along with almost 120,000 arrests, shows how a keen global awareness of terrorism has seeped into societies, and how the war against it is shifting to the courts. But it also suggests that dozens of countries are using the fight against terrorism to curb political dissent.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE: After the 9/11 attacks, the world launched a war on terror. Here, in the first tally of anti-terror prosecutions ever done, The Associated Press examines how many people have been put behind bars under anti-terror laws, and who they are. AP reporters in more than 100 countries filed requests under freedom of information laws, conducted interviews and gathered data for this story.

___

The AP used freedom of information queries, law enforcement data and hundreds of interviews to identify 119,044 anti-terror arrests and 35,117 convictions in 66 countries, accounting for 70 percent of the world's population. The actual numbers undoubtedly run higher because some countries refused to provide information.

That included 2,934 arrests and 2,568 convictions in the United States, which led the war on terror — eight times more than in the decade before.

The investigation also showed:

— More than half the convictions came from two countries accused of using anti-terror laws to crack down on dissent, Turkey and China. Turkey alone accounted for a third of all convictions, with 12,897.

— The range of people in jail reflects the dozens of ways different countries define a terrorist. China has arrested more than 7,000 people under a definition that counts terrorism as one of Three Evils, along with separatism and extremism.

— The effectiveness of anti-terror prosecutions varies widely. Pakistan registered the steepest increase in terror arrests in recent years, yet terror attacks are still on the rise. But in Spain, the armed Basque separatist group ETA has not planted a fatal bomb in two years.

— Anti-terror laws can backfire. Authoritarian governments in the Middle East used anti-terror laws broadly, only to face a backlash in the Arab Spring.

"There's been a recognition all around the world that terrorism really does pose a greater threat to society," said John Bellinger, former legal adviser to the U.S. State Department. "Also, more authoritarian countries are using the real threat of terrorism as an excuse and a cover to crack down in ways that are abusive of human rights."

Since 9/11, almost every country in the world has passed or revised anti-terror laws, from tiny Tonga to giant China.

Turkey, long at odds with its Kurdish minority, tops all other countries AP could tally for anti-terror convictions and their steep rise. The Kurdistan Workers' Party is responsible for much of the violence in the country of 75 million.

Naciye Tokova, a Kurdish mother of two, held up a sign at a protest last year that said, "Either a free leadership and free identity, or resistance and revenge until the end." She couldn't read the sign, because she cannot read.

She was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison under anti-terror laws.

"Of course, I'm not a terrorist," said Tokova, who is free on appeal. She was defiant, replying curtly to questions after long pauses.

Turkey passed new and stricter anti-terror laws in 2006. Convictions shot up from 273 in 2005 to 6,345 in 2009, the latest year available, according to data AP got through Turkey's right to information law.

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says the country is fair to its Kurds.

"We have never compromised on the balance between security and freedom," Erdogan said.

Turkey clearly reflects the saying that one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. What makes a terrorist depends on where you are and whom you ask. In the U.S., the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department don't agree on what terrorism is.

"If anything should have revealed to the world the essence of unacceptable terrorism, it was 9/11. Unfortunately, a decade later, we seem no closer to reaching agreement," said law professor Kent Roach at the University of Toronto.

China considers terrorism part of a vague charge of "endangering state security," and calls strong laws necessary to ensure safety. The people arrested under the laws come mostly from Xinjiang, known as East Turkistan to ethnic Uighurs fighting for an independent homeland.

Two years ago, Uighur entrepreneur Dilshat Perhat warned visitors to his popular Uighur-language website not to post political comments. Even so, someone posted a call for a demonstration in the middle of the night.

Perhat deleted the comments the next day and informed the police, as required. But he was arrested anyway, convicted in a one-day trial and sentenced to five years in prison.

"They wanted to use him as an example, to threaten and show their power to the Uighur people," said Perhat's brother Dilmurat, a graduate student in the U.S. "Inside China, any peaceful protest by the Uighurs is labeled as an act of terrorism by the Chinese government."

The increase in anti-terror prosecutions worldwide reflects how much they have become a weapon, however blunt, against terrorism, but their record is spotty.

Pakistan had the steepest rise in terror arrests of any country the AP examined, with the help of billions of dollars from the U.S. Pakistan amended its terror laws in 2004. Arrests went up from 1,552 in 2006 to 12,886 in 2009, partly because of four military operations that year.

Yet terrorism in Pakistan is still on the rise, and only Iraq beats Pakistan for deaths from terror. One reason may be a conviction rate of only 10 percent in terrorism cases, compared to 90 percent in the U.S.

Like Pakistan, Spain is no stranger to terrorism, but has had some success fighting it. Spain has about 140 convictions a year, according to data from AP's freedom of information request.

ETA, the Basque separatist group, once was responsible for killings every month. Today it is severely weakened.

"The terrorist attacks 10 years ago on the World Trade Center and the Madrid bombings helped forge a strong feeling of rejection toward ETA," said Spanish journalist Gorka Landaburu, who is Basque and himself a victim of an ETA mail bomb in May 2001 that blew off his thumb and fingertips. "Society lost a bit of its fear."

Under tough new anti-terror laws passed after 9/11, convicted terrorists in Spain face a maximum of 40 years, 10 more than for other crimes.

"Every democratic country has to resort at one time or another to exceptional measures to defend itself," said Roman Cotarelo, a political science professor at Spain's Open University.

For Landaburu, the terror is still there, in his pinched brow and in the two bodyguards who follow him. When he gestures with his hands, which he often does, there's a stump where his thumb once was.

But he feels ETA's days are numbered.

"Things are much calmer," he said. "People can breathe more easily."

Anti-terror laws are still playing out in unexpected ways, particularly in the Middle East, long seen as the cauldron of terrorism.

After 9/11, many Middle Eastern countries quickly adopted strict anti-terror laws. Secular Tunisia used its 2003 laws to crack down on piety and protect against Islamic militancy. It convicted 62 people under the laws in 2006, 308 in 2007 and 633 in 2009, according to the U.N.

Former prisoner Saber Ragoubi joined an anti-government group in 2006 because he says he wanted religious freedom. The group was trained by an Algerian group that later declared allegiance to al-Qaida.

Ragoubi says he never held or planned to hold a weapon, but he did support plans to attack the police.

When the police found him, Ragoubi was tried and sentenced to life in prison. For years, he said, he was kicked and beaten, his hands and legs chained to an iron bar in what was called the "chicken on a spit" position. He said he was shackled to a metal chair and electrically shocked, and told his mother and sisters would be raped in front of him if he didn't sign a confession.

"To this day, I don't know how I bore all that torture during that time," said Ragoubi. He was just fitted with two new front teeth to replace the ones kicked out of his mouth by the heavy boot of a prison guard, he said.

Under former leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, as many as 2,000 Tunisians were detained, charged or convicted on terrorism-related charges. The U.N. says some were tortured.

But five days after Ben Ali fled in January, the new ministers released everyone convicted under the anti-terror laws, even those who had indeed committed violent crimes.

The role of anti-terror laws in — and against — the Arab Spring continues.

Bahrain and Syria have charged protesters under anti-terror laws. Saudi Arabia, citing concerns about al-Qaida, is considering an anti-terror law with a minimum prison sentence of 10 years for disloyalty to the king.

Ten years after 9/11, the push for a global assault on terrorism still runs strong. Mike Smith, director of the U.N.'s Counter-Terrorism Committee, calls prosecuting terrorists "incredibly important."

But almost everyone, including the U.N. and the U.S., agrees that the cost is some erosion of human rights.

"Originally the approach was the more the merrier, the stronger counter-terror laws, the better for the security of the world. But that was a serious mistake," said Martin Sheinin, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism. "Nowadays people are realizing the abuse and even the actual use of counterterror laws is bad for human rights and also bad for actually stopping terrorism."

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AP staff writers who contributed to this report include: Christopher Torchia from Turkey; Christopher Bodeen from China; Paul Schemm from Tunisia; and Ciaran Giles from Spain.

EDITOR'S NOTE: After the 9/11 attacks, the world launched a war on terror. Here, in the first tally of anti-terror prosecutions ever done, The Associated Press examines how many people have been put behind bars under anti-terror laws, and who they are. AP reporters in more than 100 countries filed requests under freedom of information laws, conducted interviews and gathered data for this story.

CIA, MI6 helped Gaddafi on dissidents: rights group

By Yvonne Bell | Reuters – 9/3/2011

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Documents found in the abandoned Tripoli office of Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence chief indicate the U.S. and British spy agencies helped the fallen strongman persecute Libyan dissidents, Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.

The documents were uncovered by the human rights activist group in the abandoned offices of Libya's former spy chief and foreign minister, Moussa Koussa.

The group said it uncovered hundreds of letters between the CIA, MI6 and Koussa, who is now in exile in London. Letters from the CIA began, "Dear Moussa," and were signed informally with first names only by CIA officials, Human Rights Watch said.

The current military commander for Tripoli of Libya's provisional government, Abdel Hakim Belhadj, was among those captured and sent to Libya by the CIA, Human Rights Watch said.

"Among the files we discovered at Moussa Koussa's office is a fax from the CIA dated 2004 in which the CIA informs the Libyan government that they are in a position to capture and render Belhadj," Human Rights Watch's Peter Bouckaert, who was part of the group that found the stash, told Reuters.

"That operation actually took place. He was captured by the CIA in Asia and put on a secret flight back to Libya where he was interrogated and tortured by the Libyan security services."

The files shed new light on the practice known as rendition, used by the United States under former President George W. Bush, in which the terrorism suspects were handed over to other countries for interrogation. Rights groups have criticized the United States for sending these suspects to countries where they were likely to be tortured.

HANDED OVER FOR TORTURE

Belhadj has said that he was tortured by CIA agents before being transferred to Libya, where he says he was then tortured at Tripoli's notorious Abu Salim prison.

Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after Gaddafi abandoned his programme to build unconventional weapons in 2004. But the files show his cooperation with the CIA and MI6 may have been more extensive than previously thought, analysts say.

The depth of the ties could anger officials in Libya's provisional government -- many of whom are long-term opponents of Gaddafi and are now responsible for charting a new path for Libya's foreign relations.

Bouckaert showed Reuters photos of several documents on his computer and also photos of letters he said were from the CIA to Koussa and were signed, "Steve." He also displayed photographs he said were of letters from MI6 giving Libyan intelligence information on Libyan dissidents in Britain.

"Our concern is that when these people were handed over to the Libyan security they were tortured and the CIA knew what would happen when they sent people like Abdel Hakim into the hands of the Libyan security services," Bouckaert said.

In Washington, CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood, without commenting on any specific allegation or document, said: "It can't come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats. That is exactly what we are expected to do."

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, added: "There are lots of countries willing to take terrorists off the street who want to kill Americans. That doesn't mean U.S. concerns about human rights are ignored in the process."

"Let's keep in mind the context here," the official added. "By 2004, the U.S. had successfully convinced the Libyan government to renounce its nuclear weapons program and to help stop terrorists who were actively targeting Americans in the US and abroad."

A British government spokesman told Reuters that Britain did "not comment on intelligence matters."

More recent documents showed that after the war broke out six months ago, Libya reached out to a former rebel group in the breakaway Somali state of Puntland, the Somali Salvation Front, asking them to send 10,000 fighters to Tripoli to help defend Gaddafi.