[Intelforum] Secrecy News -- 09/22/08

Mon Sep 22 13:07:05 EDT 2008

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 92
September 22, 2008

Secrecy News Blog:  http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

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**	IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT PUTS AL QAEDA ON THE DEFENSIVE
**	BOOK: THE SECRET WAR WITH IRAN

IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT PUTS AL QAEDA ON THE DEFENSIVE

Al Qaeda is "imploding," a State Department counterterrorism official told
the Associated Press last week, as a result of growing opposition in the
Muslim world.

The implication that al Qaeda's demise may be imminent is almost certainly
incorrect.  But what is true is that "a severe intellectual conflict has
emerged" within the jihadist movement, said Kamal Habib, a former official
of the Egyptian Jihad Organization (Al Arab, September 14).

Over the past year, al Qaeda has been publicly criticized by several of
its own former supporters and ideological leaders, most notably Sayyid
Imam Al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, who once saved the life of Usama
bin Laden.

"Sayyid Imam is viewed as the greatest and most important authority for
all of the jihadist salafist groups," said Kamal Habib.

So when Sayyid Imam declared in a November 2007 book that killing
non-combatant civilians, including Christians and Jews, is prohibited and
that Al Qaeda's conduct of jihad against the west was illegitimate, it
produced an ideological earthquake within Islamist ranks.

"Fadl's arguments undermined the entire intellectual framework of jihadist
warfare," wrote Lawrence Wright in an illuminating article in The New
Yorker (June 2, 2008).

 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright

"Al Qaeda senior leaders in 2008 have devoted nearly half their airtime to
defending the group's legitimacy," observed National Intelligence Officer
Ted Gistaro in an August 12 speech.  "This defensive tone ... reflects
concern over allegations by militant leaders and religious scholars that
al Qaeda and its affiliates have violated the Islamic laws of war,
particularly in Iraq and North Africa."

One of the major al Qaeda responses came in a book by bin Laden deputy
Ayman al Zawahiri called "The Exoneration."  The book is an attempt to
defend the legitimacy of al Qaeda's tactics, including the killing of
civilians, against the critiques of Sayyid Imam and other Islamic
figures.

"Those who claim that killing innocent persons is absolutely forbidden are
in a position of accusing the prophet, may God's peace and prayers be upon
him, his companions, and the generation following them that they were
killers of innocent persons, as they see it," wrote Zawahiri.

He noted that the prophet authorized the use of catapults, which do not
discriminate between innocent and guilty, and he also killed all the males
of a Jewish tribe "and made no distinction between one person and
another."

"The Exoneration," which was published in January 2008, was translated a
few months later by the DNI Open Source Center.  The translation has not
been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy
News.

     http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/exoneration.pdf

"Zawahiri's strategic thinking and understanding of asymmetrical warfare
and revolutionary violence is heavily indebted to vanguardism, a Leninist
theory of revolution which posits that a small, revolutionary elite uses
violence to rouse the people to fight against the government," according
to a contractor analysis performed for the Department of Defense and
obtained by Secrecy News.

"The potential problem with Zawahiri's application of the theory of
vanguardism... is that terrorism usually diminishes the support of both
the government as well as the terrorist organization," as appears to be
the case today.

See "Zawahiri Tries to Clear Name, Explain Strategy," Transnational
Security Issues Report, prepared for the Department of Defense by the
International Research Center, April 21, 2008:

     http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/zawahiri.pdf

"Is Al Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the criticism from its
former mentors and allies?  Despite the recent internal criticism,
probably not in the short term," said analyst Peter Bergen at a July 30
congressional hearing.

"However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like Al Qaeda
are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: Their victims are often
Muslim civilians; they don't offer a positive vision of the future; they
keep expanding their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't
precisely share their world view; and they seem incapable of becoming
politically successful movements because their ideology prevents them from
making the real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in
genuine politics," Mr. Bergen said.

BOOK: THE SECRET WAR WITH IRAN

In 1997, acting on intelligence that a Hizballah cell was preparing to
blow up the American embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay, a U.S. special forces
team reportedly flew to the scene in several giant transport planes where
it arrested the conspirators and prevented the attack.

If that episode happened as described (and it cannot readily be
confirmed), it left no traces on the public record.  It "is only one of
many hidden battles" between Iran and the West, writes Israeli journalist
Ronen Bergman in his new book "The Secret War with Iran" (Free Press,
2008).

     http://www.thesecretwarwithiran.com/

The book, translated from the Hebrew and based on extensive interviews
with Israeli intelligence officials and others, provides a wealth of
insights, unfamiliar anecdotes, and telling observations regarding the
three-decade-old confrontation with Iran. A few random examples:

Hizballah, acting as a proxy for Iran, temporarily refrained from taking
American hostages between June 1985 and September 1986 in support of the
arms sales deal between the U.S. and Iran that later became known as the
Iran-contra affair.

Israel itself helped arm revolutionary Iran in an operation codenamed
"Seashell" and described in the book.  Earlier, Israel had also supplied
advanced weaponry to the Shah, and "if Khomeini had not taken power as
early as he did, he might have taken over a country [equipped] with
long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads... as well as a
jet fighter that was supposed to be the best in the world."

Out of a list of some 500 opposition figures targeted by Khomeini, nearly
200 of them were killed by Iranian assassins in Europe between 1980 and
1997.

Writing from an Israeli perspective, Mr. Bergman does not delve deeply
into Iranian grievances or aspirations.  But neither does he flatter the
competence, judgment or morality of Israeli intelligence and military
officials.

Categorized as "political science," the book is more of a work of
intelligence history, with numerous strange tales of intelligence deeds
and misdeeds, like the Israeli intelligence officer who was arrested for
murdering his agent, and the Lebanese source who provided perfect warning
of an impending attack only to be ignored in a turf battle between Israeli
security agencies.  The CIA is credited with "brilliantly" dismantling the
Abu Nidal Organization, "sewing discord among its members by getting them
to believe that they were being robbed by other operatives."

Mr. Bergman, an investigative journalist who writes for Israel's Yediot
Aharonot, earned his doctorate under historian Christopher Andrew at
Cambridge University.  His dissertation explored Israeli intelligence
operations in Africa.

_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

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_______________________
Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
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email:  saftergood at fas.org
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