{"id":7688,"date":"2010-10-11T00:00:45","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T22:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=7688"},"modified":"2010-10-06T15:27:03","modified_gmt":"2010-10-06T13:27:03","slug":"al-qaeda%e2%80%99s-suspect-humanitarianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/10\/al-qaeda%e2%80%99s-suspect-humanitarianism\/","title":{"rendered":"Al-Qaeda\u2019s Suspect Humanitarianism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Bin Laden\u2019s Concern for Flood Victims a Ruse to Destabilise Pakistan?<\/em><\/p>\n

We seek him here, we seek him there,<\/em><\/p>\n

Those Yankees seek him everywhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

Is he in heaven?<\/em><\/p>\n

Is he in hell?<\/em><\/p>\n

That damned, elusive bin Laden<\/em><\/p>\n

–Sir Percy Blakeney<\/p>\n

If we are to believe the Associated Press, that damned elusive Osama bin Laden has spoken again.<\/p>\n

According to the world\u2019s oldest and largest newsgathering organization, the fugitive al-Qaeda leader, who some intelligence experts believe<\/a> has been dead since December 2001, has just released an audiotape<\/a> in which he calls for the creation of a new relief body to help Muslims affected by this summer\u2019s devastating floods in Pakistan. Bin Laden, AP suggests, is \u201cseeking to exploit discontent \u2026 by depicting the region\u2019s governments<\/a> as uncaring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seemingly unfazed by news<\/a> of the CIA\u2019s 3,000-strong Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams hot on its trail, al-Qaeda has, in recent weeks, according to the AP report, put out three messages, including the one featuring bin Laden, concerning the massive floods that affected around 20 million people in Pakistan, \u201csignaling a concentrated campaign by the terror group to tap into anger over the flooding to rally support.\u201d<\/p>\n

AP\u2019s sole source for the 11-minute tape, with the oddly contemplative title \u201cReflections on the Method of Relief Work,\u201d is SITE Intelligence Group. The U.S.-based group, which purportedly \u201cmonitors jihadi forums,\u201d provided AP with a copy of the message that it claims was posted on unnamed \u201cIslamic militant websites.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are questions, however, about whether SITE Intelligence is the most objective source of information about terrorism.<\/p>\n

SITE co-founder Rita Katz<\/a>, an Israeli Defense Forces veteran, is an Iraqi-born Jew, whose father was publicly hanged in Iraq after the 1967 Six-Day War as an Israeli spy. Considering Tel Aviv\u2019s obvious interest<\/a> in having the world\u2019s only superpower fight<\/a> a \u201cglobal war on terror\u201d against the Jewish state\u2019s Muslim neighbours, it somehow never occurred to Associated Press, or other mainstream media outlets, to ask the question, Like father, like daughter?<\/p>\n

Moreover, there are reasonable grounds for suspicion about <\/strong>al-Qaeda\u2019s other pronouncements on the floods in Pakistan.<\/p>\n

In a recent video, presumably<\/a> also found online by Rita Katz\u2019s SITE, al-Qaeda\u2019s California-born spokesman, Adam Gadahn, castigated Islamabad for its \u201csluggish and halfhearted\u201d response to the floods, and called on Muslims in Pakistan to join the Islamist militants fighting the government.<\/p>\n

Gadahn<\/a>, who has since 2001 run al-Qaeda\u2019s media wing, As-Sahab, found his way to the Islamic Society of Orange County while living with his grandfather, Carl Pearlman, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League. Ostensibly<\/a> a civil rights organization set up to fight anti-Semitism, the ADL is a de facto adjunct of the Israeli government which, significantly, has been caught spying<\/a> on American critics of Israel. Like grandpa, like grandson?<\/p>\n

In a previous video, Ayman al-Zawahiri, said to be al-Qaeda\u2019s second-in-command, also incited Pakistanis to rise up against their government due to its \u201cfailure\u201d to provide relief to flood victims.<\/p>\n

But when Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant, analysed a 2006 video of al-Zawahiri for alterations and enhancements, he discovered<\/a> that the logos of As-Sahab and IntelCenter (the other group supposedly tracking terrorists online<\/a>) had been added at the same time.<\/p>\n

IntelCenter is run by Ben Venzke<\/a>, former director of intelligence at iDefense, a VeriSign company. VeriSign is a partner of Verint, formerly known as Comverse Infosys, which was founded by former Israeli intelligence officer Jacob \u201cKobi\u201d Alexander. In 2006, Alexander fled to Namibia after the U.S. Department of Justice indicted<\/a> him on multiple counts of fraud. Comverse\/Verint, one of a number of Israeli eavesdropping and surveillance<\/a> companies created by veterans of Unit 8200, the technology intel unit of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps, has been widely suspected<\/a> of spying on Americans<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If, as seems likely, the al-Qaeda messages concerning <\/strong>this summer\u2019s floods in Pakistan are fakes<\/a>, they would seem to provide further evidence of an Israeli-inspired<\/a> campaign<\/a> to destabilise the world\u2019s only Islamic nuclear power.<\/p>\n

The question then becomes, what, if anything, Islamabad will do to counter such efforts before it too goes the way of Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

____________________<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maidhc \u00d3 Cathail<\/a> is a widely published writer based in Japan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AP\u2019s sole source for the 11-minute tape, with the oddly contemplative title \u201cReflections on the Method of Relief Work,\u201d is SITE Intelligence Group. The U.S.-based group, which purportedly \u201cmonitors jihadi forums,\u201d provided AP with a copy of the message that it claims was posted on unnamed \u201cIslamic militant websites.\u201d There are questions, however, about whether SITE Intelligence is the most objective source of information about terrorism. SITE co-founder Rita Katz, an Israeli Defense Forces veteran, is an Iraqi-born Jew, whose father was publicly hanged in Iraq after the 1967 Six-Day War as an Israeli spy. Considering Tel Aviv\u2019s obvious interest in having the world\u2019s only superpower fight a \u201cglobal war on terror\u201d against the Jewish state\u2019s Muslim neighbours, it somehow never occurred to Associated Press, or other mainstream media outlets, to ask the question, Like father, like daughter? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}