The questions in the following are: How much of the action is because of an Al Qaeda hatred of the regime in Yemen or Saudi Arabia that translated into hatred of the West and international terrorism because of the West’s backing for those regimes, and how much is actually a genuine secession desire because of great ethnic differences between parts of Yemen?

Misconstruing the latter by assuming the first can lead only to prolonged trouble, while accepting the latter and helping bring about peaceful separation might be an instrument for peace. The question is thus – Why does the US get trapped in situations that it ends up in fighting “glue wars” – like it did in Iraq, and it might yet do in Pakistan?

Policing the coast of Yemen against ship pirates is another matter! That situation  should be handled with clear participation of partners under a UN flag. That is neither a Yemen problem nor a Somalia problem – but a clear global security breech.

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24 August 2010 the BBC

Yemen ‘abandoning human rights’ in battle for security.

Yemen is accused of increasingly sacrificing human rights for security

Yemen has been accused by Amnesty International of abandoning human rights in the name of security.

The human rights group has documented what it says is a series of violations, including unlawful killings of those suspected of having links to al-Qaeda.

It also says the Yemeni government has ignored human rights as it tackles a breakaway movement in the south and Shia rebels in the north.

Authorities in Sanaa say they are doing all they can to protect civilians.

Yemen, the poorest Arab country, is struggling to deal with multiple threats.

As well as fighting al-Qaeda, the central government is trying to quell armed Shia rebels, known as the Huthis, in the north, and a southern separatist movement.

‘Sacrificing human rights’But according to an Amnesty report released on Tuesday, Yemen has carried out torture and arbitrary detentions.

The report says Yemen has also held unfair trials, using security concerns as a justification.

And it says there have been forced disappearances of people including journalists, dissenters and human rights campaigners.

The pressure group said: “The Yemeni authorities must stop sacrificing human rights in the name of security as they confront threats from al-Qaeda, Zaidi Shiite [Huthi] rebels in the north and address growing demands for secession in the south.”

In a statement, Malcolm Smart, Amnesty’s director for the Middle East and North Africa, said: “All measures taken in the name of countering terrorism or other security challenges in Yemen must have at (their) heart the protection of human rights.”

Amnesty further alleges that a worrying trend has emerged, where security is cited as a pretext to deal with opposition and stifle criticism.

And the rights group says not enough effort is made by security forces to detain suspects before killing them.

It alleges that when missiles were used against a southern village last December, more than 40 people were killed – mostly women and children.

Yemen has recently come under added international pressure to act decisively. The United States and Saudi Arabia are providing the government with aid and support.

The authorities in Sanaa say they are doing what they can to protect innocent civilians, vital state institutions and foreign interests.

Yemen has become the new centre of gravity for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, following the January 2009 merger of al-Qaeda in Yemen and al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia.

More on This Story

From other news sites

• UPI Yemen accused of human rights violations 3 hrs ago

• Al Jazeera Report: Yemen sacrificing rights 5 hrs ago

• Reuters Amnesty wants U.S. to clarify role in Yemen killings 15 hrs ago

• Forbes.com Amnesty International Report Cites Unlawful Killings and Torture Linked to Yemen’s… 21 hrs ago

• Mirror.co.uk UK-supplied planes ‘attacked Yemen’ 23 hrs ago

The US is pulling out its combat forces from Iraq, but the Sunday TV main topic was THE MOSQUE.  As always – the best conversation was on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN/GPS program.

His guest were Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal and Peter Beinart – Senior Political Writer at the blog The Daily Beast, Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York, and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation – till 2006 he was with The New Republic and still lives in Washington DC.

Stephens said that the legalities are clear but the issue is if this Mosque at that location advances interface dialogue and the answer is NO!

Beinart said you cannot divorce the right for building a Mosque from the right to decide where to build it. What about military bases? Will you next say that because there is sensitivity to Americans killed in wars in Muslim countries you cannot have a Mosque on a military base?

Stephens asked – wait – what if the German Government decides to build a tolerance center across the street from a concentration camp – this is much more like the present case.

Zakaria said – that is about irrational sensitivity – do you call this bigotry?

Stephens answered that the rights are indisputable and Bret said that you cannot ask people in the right not to use the right – this is equal to taking away the right.

Zakaria concluded that we talk past each other so the discussion is over. And that is the true state of these matters today.

We hope that Zakaria realizes now that his returning a prize to the ADL of the Bnei Brith was – well – premature.

Also, as he said that the discussion is really not ended – we suggest he invites next time also Anne Barnard whose article in today’s New York Times he did mention.

Anne Barnard is now on the city desk of the paper, but she is not a newcomer to these issues as sh worked in the Middle East – in Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. She has seen sensitivities from very close – not your regular city desk person. We know Anne for many years – actually since she was a kid – and have met her in different locations as well. We continue here with her material and hope she continues to keep her sights on the developments we expect when Imam Raouf returns from his Middle East tour.

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Further comments about Beinart. His parents immigrated to the US from South Africa and work in Cambridge where he was born. His mother remarried theater personality Robert Brustein. Beinart is Jewish and belongs to a liberal synagogue in Washington.

Peter Beinart has written: “The Icarus Syndrome – A History of American Hubris,” HarperCollins, June 1, 2010, and
“The Good Fight: Why Liberals–and Only Liberals–Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,” HarperCollins, May 2006,

Beinart was a supporter of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.[7] and in a recent essay, he has argued that the tensions between liberalism and Zionism in the U.S. may tear the two historically-linked concepts apart.[8]

After leaving The New Republic, in 2007-2009, Beinart was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Further comments about Bret Stephens: He was born in 1973 and grew up in Mexico City. Stephens went to the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics.[2]

Stephens began his career at the Journal as an op-ed editor in New York and later worked as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels. In 2006 he took over the “Global View” column from George Melloan, who has retired.

Between 2002 and 2004 Stephens was editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, a position he assumed at age 28 – the youngest person ever to hold that position. He is the winner of the 2008 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism.
In 2005, Stephens was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, where he was previously a media fellow. He is also a frequent contributor to Commentary magazine.[3]

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Fareed Zakaria promised that on his program this emotional discussion will be rational – what he did not say was that he is in effect pitting against each other two well qualified Jews. We do not believe that THE MOSQUE – that is that particular Mosque – is only an issue for Jews. We indeed believe that his next panel will pull in other “suffering souls” as well.

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Feisal Abdul Rauf’s Balancing Act in Mosque Furor – NYTimes.com

The full article by our friend Anne Barnard, as above, but as published front page The New York Times had the title:
Complicated Balancing Act for Imam in Mosque Furor – Complicated Balancing Act for Imam.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregi…

It includes The Imam’s history and his father’s history – both of them highly interesting people. While the father was an employee of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and eventually led to the construction of the New York Islamic Center cum Mosque at the corner of East 96th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, Feisal became the Imam of the Sufi congregation downtown. Then he attempted also the building of a large Center cum Mosque.

William Sauro/The New York Times

Mr. Abdul Rauf’s father, Muhammad, in 1968. He ran the Islamic Center of New York.

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Far away from New York, in Bend Oregon (by Western Communications, Inc.) retained the New York Times in print – name of the article – but our friend’s article was reshaped  as follows:
 http://bbedit.sx.atl.publicus.com/apps/p…

Complicated balancing act for imam in mosque furor.

By Anne Barnard / New York Times News Service

Published: August 22. 2010 4:00AM PST

Michael Appleton / New York Times News Service

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf inside his mosque, housed in a building near the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, in November. “We want to push back against the extremists,” the cleric says. Others worry about an anti-Muslim backlash.

For years, Feisal Abdul Rauf has encountered distrust as he tries to reconcile Islam with the West.

Muslims need to understand and soothe Americans who fear them; they should be conciliatory, not judgmental, toward the West.

That was Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s message, but not everyone in the Cairo lecture hall last February was buying it. As he talked of reconciliation between America and Middle Eastern Muslims — his voice soft, almost New Agey — some questions were so hostile that he felt the need to declare that he was not an American agent.

But one young Egyptian asked: Wasn’t the United States financing the speaking tour that had brought the imam to Cairo because his message conveniently echoed U.S. interests?

“I’m not an agent from any government, even if some of you may not believe it,” the imam replied. “I’m not. I’m a peacemaker.”

That talk, recorded on video six months ago, was part of what now might be called Abdul Rauf’s prior life, before he became the center of an uproar over his proposal for a Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center site. He watched his father, an Egyptian Muslim scholar, pioneer interfaith dialogue in 1960s New York; led a mystical Sufi mosque in Lower Manhattan; and, after the Sept. 11 attacks, became a spokesman for the notion that being American and Muslim is no contradiction — and that a truly American brand of Islam could modernize and moderate the faith worldwide.

In recent weeks, Abdul Rauf has barely been heard from as a national political debate explodes over his dream project, including somewhere in its planned 15 stories near ground zero, a mosque. Opponents have called his project an act of insensitivity, even a monument to terror.

In his absence — he is now on another Middle East speaking tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department — a host of allegations have been floated: that he supports terrorism; that his father, who worked at the behest of the Egyptian government, was a militant; that his publicly expressed views mask stealth extremism. Some charges, the available record suggests, are unsupported. Some are simplifications of his ideas. In any case, calling him a jihadist appears even less credible than calling him a U.S. agent.

Growing up in America

Abdul Rauf, 61, grew up in multiple worlds. He was raised in a conservative religious home but arrived in America as a teenager in the turbulent 1960s; his father came to New York and later Washington to run growing Islamic centers. His parents were taken hostage not once, but twice, by American Muslim splinter groups. He attended Columbia University, where, during the Six-Day War between Israel and Arab states like Egypt, he talked daily with a Jewish classmate, each seeking to understand the other’s perspective.

He consistently denounces violence. Some of his views on the interplay between terrorism and American foreign policy — or his search for commonalities between Islamic law and this country’s Constitution — have proved jarring to some American ears, but still place him as pro-American within the Muslim world. He devotes himself to befriending Christians and Jews — so much, some Muslim Americans say, that he has lost touch with their own concerns.

“To stereotype him as an extremist is just nuts,” said the Very Rev. James Morton, the longtime dean of the Church of St. John the Divine, in Manhattan, who has known the family for decades.

Since 9/11, Abdul Rauf, like almost any Muslim leader with a public profile, has had to navigate the fraught path between those suspicious of Muslims and eager to brand them violent or disloyal and a Muslim constituency that believes itself more than ever in need of forceful leaders.

One critique of the imam, said Omid Safi, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, is that he has not been outspoken enough on issues “near and dear to many Muslims,” from Israel policy to treatment of Muslims after 9/11, “because of the need that he has had — whether taken upon himself or thrust upon him — to be the ‘American imam,’ to be the ‘New York imam,’ to be the ‘accommodationist imam.’ “

Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University, said Abdul Rauf’s holistic Sufi practices could make more-orthodox Muslims uncomfortable, and his focus on like-minded interfaith leaders made him underestimate the uproar over his plans.

“He hurtles in, to the dead-center eye of the storm simmering around Muslims in America, expecting it to be like at his mosque — we all love each other, we all think happy thoughts,” said Ahmed.

“Now he has set up, unwittingly, a symbol of this growing tension between America and Muslims: this mosque that Muslims see as a symbol of Islam under attack and the opponents as an insult to America,” he added. “So this mild-mannered guy is in the eye of a storm for which he’s not suited at all. He’s not a political leader of Muslims, yet he now somehow represents the Muslim community.”

Andrew Sinanoglou, who was married by Abdul Rauf last fall, said he was surprised the imam had become a contentious figure. His greatest knack, he said, was making disparate groups comfortable, as at the wedding bringing together Sinanoglou’s family, descended from Greek Christians thrown out of Asia Minor by Muslims, with his wife’s conservative Muslim father.

“He’s an excellent schmoozer,” Sinanoglou said of the imam.

Many different Islamic influences

Abdul Rauf was born in Kuwait. His father, Muhammad Abdul Rauf, was one of many graduates of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the foremost center of mainstream Sunni Muslim learning, whom Egypt sent abroad to staff universities and mosques, a government-approved effort unlikely to have tolerated a militant. He moved his family to England, studying at Cambridge and the University of London; then to Malaysia, where he eventually became the first rector of the International Islamic University of Malaysia.

As a boy, Abdul Rauf absorbed his father’s talks with religious scholars from around the world, learning to respect theological debate, said his wife, Daisy Khan. He is also steeped in Malaysian culture, whose ethnic diversity has influenced an Islam different from that of his parents’ homeland.

In 1965, he came to New York. His father ran the Islamic Center of New York; the family lived over its small mosque in a brownstone on West 72nd Street, which served mainly Arabs and African-American converts. Like his son, the older imam announced plans for a community center for a growing Muslim population — the mosque eventually built on East 96th Street. It was paid for by Muslim countries and controlled by Muslim U.N. diplomats — at the time a fairly noncontroversial proposition. Like his son, he joined interfaith groups, invited by James of St. John the Divine.

Hostage crisis

Unlike his son, he was conservative in gender relations; he asked his wife to not drive. But in 1977, he was heading the Islamic Center in Washington when they were taken hostage by a Muslim faction; it was his wife who challenged the gunmen on their lack of knowledge of Islam.

“My husband didn’t open his mouth, but I really gave it to them,” she told The New York Times then.

Meanwhile, Abdul Rauf studied physics at Columbia.

In his 20s, Abdul Rauf dabbled in teaching and real estate, married an American-born woman and had three children. Studying Islam and searching for his place in it, he was asked to lead a Sufi mosque, Masjid al-Farah. It was one of few with a female prayer leader, where women and men sit together at some rituals and some women do not cover their hair. And it was 12 blocks from the World Trade Center.

Divorced, he met his second wife, Khan, when she came to the mosque looking for a gentler Islam than the politicized version she rejected after Iran’s revolution. Theirs is an equal partnership, whether Abdul Rauf is shopping and cooking a hearty soup, she said, or running organizations that promote an American-influenced Islam.

A similar idea comes up in the Cairo video. Abdul Rauf, with Khan, unveiled as usual, beside him, tells a questioner not to worry so much about one issue of the moment — Switzerland’s ban on minarets — saying Islam has always adapted to and been influenced by places it spreads to. “Why not have a mosque that looks Swiss?” he joked. “Make a mosque that looks like Swiss cheese. Make a mosque that looks like a Rolex.”

In the 1990s, the couple became fixtures of the interfaith scene, even taking a cruise to Spain and Morocco with prominent rabbis and pastors.

Abdul Rauf also founded the Shariah Index Project — an effort to formally rate which governments best follow Islamic law. Critics see in it support for Taliban-style Shariah or imposing Islamic law in America.

Shariah, though, like Jewish law, has a spectrum of interpretations. The ratings, Kahn said, measure how well states uphold Shariah’s core principles like rights to life, dignity and education, not Taliban strong points. The imam has written that some Western states unwittingly apply Shariah better than self-styled Islamic states that kill wantonly, stone women and deny education — to him, violations of Shariah.

After 9/11, Abdul Rauf was all over the airwaves denouncing terrorism, urging Muslims to confront its presence among them, and saying that killing civilians violated Islam. He wrote a book, “What’s Right With Islam Is What’s Right With America,” asserting the congruence of American democracy and Islam.

That ample public record — interviews, writings, sermons — is now being examined by opponents of the downtown center.

Those opponents repeat often that Abdul Rauf, in one radio interview, refused to describe the Palestinian group that pioneered suicide bombings against Israel, Hamas, as terrorist. In the lengthy interview, Abdul Rauf clumsily tries to say that people around the globe define terrorism differently and labeling any group would sap his ability to build bridges. He also says: “Targeting civilians is wrong. It is a sin in our religion,” and, “I am a supporter of the state of Israel.”

“If I were an imam today I would be saying, ‘What am I supposed to do?’” said John Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University. “‘Can an imam be critical of any aspect of U.S. foreign policy? Can I weigh in on things that others could weigh in on?’ Or is someone going to say, ‘He’s got to be a radical!’”

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Could it be that the solution leads to a true CORDOBA HOUSE OF CULTURE AND INTER-RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING with all Cordoba three religions having footholds at the center – not  a Mosque.

In this case what if Rabbi Marc Schneier who started together with the East 96 Street Islamic Center’s Imams his good-will exchanges gets a foothold and offices there? The Battery Park Holocaust Museum could be linked, and the Archbishop of the Trinity Church of the neighborhood as well – that is with offices in the building. This would call for a joint board and joint ownership in the name of good intentions. It would be considered a step towards healing within the possible of the memory of 9/11/o1 within reach of the 10th memorial of the event. Clearly – this does not answer the call for a larger Mosque, neither will this be a place with Synagogue and church – we know that the institutions must be separate.

If separation is preferred, then a gesture of exchange of real estate for a different location would be appreciated.

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President Obama also went on TV today – breaking his vacation because of the media attacks on him branding him a Muslim.

Obama blamed this crazzy media culture when the main issue is the pulling out from Iraq but the focus is on “THE MOSQUE” – is this just an August diversion? By whom?

Michel Martin (an Emmy Award winning American journalist and correspondent for ABC News and National Public Radio. After ten years in print journalism, Martin has for the last 15 years become best known for her news broadcasting on national topics.), asks whom are we talking about as media? It is just the Conservative Pundits that keep on drumming? Or is there by now a symbiotic relationship between the right wing bloggers and the main-stream media? It does not make sense to pretend that there is not a concern with Islam. We heard on TV that Glen Beck said Lincoln Day has no meaning for him – so he calls for a rally at the mall on that day. Aha I said – if that is so – why do you expect more consideration from adherents of Islam – Americans or otherwise? Are Americans so dam by now that they cannot see that insensitivity breeds more insensitivity?

MIDEAST
Hamas’ Turn to Demolish Palestinian Homes.
By Mel Frykberg

Fighter from the Brej refugee camp in Gaza. Credit:Mel Frykberg/IPS

RAMALLAH, May 25, 2010 (IPS) – On Sunday approximately 150 Palestinians from 20 families were driven out of their homes in Rafah, in the southern Gaza strip, by heavily armed police and soldiers who menaced them with clubs.

The difference this time was that it was not the Israeli Defence Forces carrying out evictions and demolitions but Hamas security forces, including policewomen with their faces veiled.

Reporters trying to cover the event were barred by Hamas police.

Many of those expelled had already lost their homes and been forced into the streets when Israel carried out its brutal military assault over the coastal territory, which deliberately targeted Gaza’s infrastructure, during Operation Cast Lead at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.

Some of the homes destroyed on Sunday were temporary shacks built hastily after the Israeli assault. Other homes were concrete structures built prior to Israel’s crippling blockade, imposed on Gaza after Hamas took control in June 2007, which has prevented most reconstruction material from entering the territory.

The Hamas authorities argue that the homes were built on government land and without permission. Residents claimed they had been sold permits by a local landowner.

This is an explanation West Bankers regularly hear from the Israelis before Palestinian homes and buildings in the West Bank are destroyed, albeit the territory is illegally occupied by Israel whereas Hamas is a democratically elected government and the Gaza strip is Palestinian land.

Nevertheless, the harshness of the actions under the current conditions provoked anger from Gazans and condemnation from human rights organisations.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza expressed “its grave concern over these demolitions, which constitute a violation of civilians’ rights to adequate housing. These violations may affect an additional 180 houses in Rafah in the future.”

Meanwhile, attempts by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to provide some summer fun and entertainment for Gaza’s traumatised children suffered a setback when one of its recreational facilities was torched after 30 armed and masked men attacked the facility on Monday.

UNRWA released a statement saying, “The location is one of 35 beach facilities under construction, which will form part of UNRWA’s annual Summer Games programme for over 250,000 refugee children in Gaza, due to commence on Jun. 12.”

Before leaving the gunmen left a letter – containing threats against UNRWA officials and its director of operations in Gaza John Ging – and three bullets in the pocket of the security guard who was handcuffed and beaten with rifle butts.

Ging condemned the incident and said that “UNRWA will not be intimidated by such acts and will quickly rebuild the location in good time to host the Summer Games.”

Extremists in Gaza have expressed disapproval at the Western influence of UNRWA as well as some of its activities, including teaching girls swimming, fitness and dancing.

The Hamas authorities have been battling increasing incidents of Islamic extremism which have targeted beauty salons, coffee shops, Internet cafes, the YMCA and a Red Cross convoy.

Groups with links to al-Qaeda have also launched attacks against Hamas’ security forces. A shootout between Jund Ansar Allah and Hamas police last year in Rafah left more than 20 dead.

The Israeli daily ‘Haaretz’ reported on Monday that it is in possession of documents, sent by a group of Yemeni Shi’ite separatists who oppose al-Qaeda, which “point to regular, direct contact between the al-Qaeda organisation in that country and supporters in the Gaza Strip.”

“The Shi’ite rebels who passed the latest communication, and several previous ones, to Haaretz, are demanding Yemeni government’s recognition of their civil rights. They are keen to distinguish themselves from al-Qaeda,” said the daily.

The Israeli military has for some time warned of growing links between al-Qaeda elements and Gaza extremists. These links have involved the smuggling of weapon caches from Egypt’s Sinai peninsular into Gaza. Some of the caches have been uncovered by Egyptian security forces.

Although the Hamas authorities have cracked down on Islamic extremists, Gazans who tried to hold a protest march against the arson attack on the UNRWA facility were forcibly turned back by Hamas police.

This suppression of civil liberties came as the Hamas authorities simultaneously prevented a human rights workshop to discuss rights and freedom in the Palestinian territories from being held at a Gaza hotel on Monday.

The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights lashed out at the decision.

Mustafa Ibrahim, a jurist on the commission, said the hotel management had received a phone call forbidding the workshop.

“The decision to bar the event is an unprecedented interference in the work of human rights organisations. NGOs are not required to obtain a permit or seek the government’s permission to hold workshops,” said Ibrahim.

Yemen’s pitiful options to poverty and anger

From the UN information of May 12, 2010 that does not mention that Turkey is now leading the OIC and as such is trying to replace the ineffective Arab League.

To us, we long argued that Turkey is much better positioned as leader of its neighboring Islamic World then in its futile attempt of chasing after acceptance to the unintegrated Europe, we see in the following material proof that Turkey may finally be finding its correct location on the globe.

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SOMALIA: UN LOOKS TO ISTANBUL FORUM AS KEY STEP TO AID WAR-TORN NATION

On the eve of a major global conference on Somalia, the top United Nations envoy in the war-torn nation urged the world community to provide the needed resources on the military, political and humanitarian fronts now to prevent an even worse scenario from arising.

“If we do not make the right commitments and take the right action in Somalia now, the situation will, sooner or later, force us to act and at a much higher price,” Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah told the Security Council.

Speaking on the same day that the UN refugee agency called for stepped-up funding to help the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting in what he called a “horrendous” humanitarian situation, Mr. Ould-Abdallah praised next week’s conference in Istanbul as “an exceptional opportunity to show that Somalia has true friends ready to make a difference…

“This conference is first and foremost a show of political solidarity with the Somali people who have suffered so much and been taken hostage by various groups and individuals,” the envoy said, referring to the gathering to be convened by the Turkish Government and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 22 May.

“It is also a sign of hope sent to Somalis that they are not alone. In addition to addressing security issues and global threats including piracy, the conference will also provide a platform for the Somali private sector, international business and Governments to launch new initiatives for reconstruction and job creation.”

Despite suggestions that it is either too early or too late for such a high level meeting, “we should all recognize that, after years of anarchy, there will never be a right time in Somalia. We have to act, and to act now,” he added of a country that has had no central government and has been torn by factional conflict for nearly two decades.

The top UN political official also stressed the importance of the Istanbul meeting today. “We would not at any time, of course, underestimate the difficulties and the fragility of Somalia but we do believe that progress has been and can be built upon,” Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs B. Lynn Pascoe told a news conference.

He cited the survival of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against numerous attacks, its first steps towards developing its own police and security forces, and the interest it has aroused in the Somali business community and in bringing back investment to the country.

“This effort has to succeed but is clearly going to require determined, sustained efforts by both the Somalis and the international community to make it happen,” he said. “This is where the Istanbul conference fits in. It will give an opportunity to look at how far we’ve come and what still needs to be done. It should help us increase international awareness of what’s at stake in Somalia and increase international commitment to help in a coordinated way.

“It should also help focus the attention of the Somalis themselves, including the TFG, on where they need to step up their efforts.”

On the military front, Mr. Ould-Abdallah called for a big increase in and help for the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which now numbers less than 7,000 troops, as it carries out its task of protecting the TFG institutions and assisting the needy in the face of violent attacks from Islamic militants. At the same time, the international community should provide equipment and salaries for the TFG’s own nascent forces.

In the political field, he urged the TFG to show unity and a common purpose, calling on the international community to fulfil its commitments, especially by disbursing pledged resources. He noted that the TFG had succeeded in reaching out to other groups committed to peace, signing an accord with Ahlu Sunna Wal Jamaa, a key religious and resistance movement, which could provide a blueprint for future agreements.

“I would like to reiterate that the door of peace is open to all Somalis wishing to end the agony of their country,” stressed Mr. Ould-Abdallah, who serves as the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and head of the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS).

On the humanitarian front, where the situation “remains horrendous” despite the laudable work of the World Food Programme (WFP), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other agencies, he called for full cooperation between Governments, development agencies, business associations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), urging the agencies to again show a physical presence in the violence-shattered land.

“If we want to make a decisive difference, there is no alternative to moving the international community to Mogadishu to be closer to the victims,” he stressed. “The remote control from Nairobi (capital of neighbouring Kenya) is not leading to progress.”

Once this close collaboration is established, it can lead to a major move away from past practices of managing the status quo. “In that context, the Istanbul conference comes at the right time,” Mr. Ould-Abdallah declared. “It shows the Somalis and their leaders that there are personalities, countries and organizations that are genuinely ready and committed to working with them for peace and stability.”

In Geneva today, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched two supplementary appeals totalling $60 million for the nearly 2 million Somalis displaced both inside and outside their country, bringing its total budget for 2010 for Somalia and its four neighbouring countries – Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia and Djibouti – to nearly $425 million.

“The displacement crisis is worsening with the deterioration of the situation inside Somalia and we need to prepare fast for new and possibly large-scale displacement,” Deputy High Commissioner Alexander Aleinikoff said. “We need to be ready.”

Colombia Minister of Environment, Housing and Social Development Carlos Rufino Costa Posada – in short H.E. Carlos Costa is the fourth Latin America/Caribbean nominee out of the eleven nominees for the post of Executive-Secretary of  the UNFCCC – the position so called Climate Chief. With such eagerness on the part of Latin America it is quite clear why Brazil preferred not to put forward a delegate.

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Adopt A Negotiator UNFCCC Perspectives: Grace Akumu, Kenya Delegate – see http://vodpod.com/watch/2454614-grace-ak… {How to read Africa’s move trackback from post: Many of you might have heard of the African Group’s strategic move to block the Kyoto track of negotiations on Monday afternoon. Yesterday’s press conference and some interviews revealed, how this can be understood. Nov 5, 2009} is the Kenya recommendation.

That is the second African we know about besides the South African nominee who is a Cabinet Minister.

An outspoken Kenyan, Akumu’s work has focused on the disproportionate effects that global warming is having on African nations. Akumu is executive director for Climate Network Africa, where she has worked since 1992. In her role, Akumu has witnessed firsthand the way climate change has blindsided African states through floods, drought, and famine – affecting every aspect of life, industry and interstate relations.

The unintended consequences are many. Akumu says the snow on Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilimanjaro is melting away. By 2015, there will be no snow on Mt Kenya. That’s not only an aesthetic and spiritual loss – it’s a threat to Kenya’s way of life.

Hydroelectric power, which is how 70 percent of Kenya’s electricity is generated, is threatened. As the snowmelt continues, the streams fed by Mt. Kenya – which power the plants – are drying up.

“Agricultural communities, who are 80 percent of Kenya’s population, have become seriously water stressed,” Akumu says. “Rivers are drying up and their survival is our top priority, considering that they also live on less than $1 per day.”

Through her work with Climate Network Africa, Akumu has coordinated efforts to raise and address these issues over the past two decades.

Years of work  earned a Webster University, Geneva, Switzerland, campus 1986 alumna, the Nobel Peace Prize. Grace Akumu, who earned her B.A. in international relations, she was, a member and lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 prize with former U.S. vice president Al Gore.

Climate Network Africa (CNA) is a Non-profit Non-governmental Organization registered in Kenya. Started in 1991, CNA seeks to improve the chances for environmentally sustainable and socially equitable development in Africa in light of the serious danger of climate change, desertification and biodiversity loss. Among CNA’s major activities are policy analysis, research, EIA, public education and awareness, advocacy, campaigns, CDM training, natural resources management, promotion of sustainable energy development and services with the objective of poverty alleviation. CNA also facilitates information exchange with the aim of strengthening Africa’s many voices at local, national and international fora. CNA targets policymakers, researchers, scientists and key NGOs working on environment and development issues. Membership to CNA is open to all NGOs and any institution which subscribes to its objectives. CNA information services are available to all groups and individuals interested in environment and development issues.

An NGO is a very unusual nominee, but then Ahim Steiner, now the very successful head of UNEP, was also a very unusual nominee at the time. Perhaps this might turn out to be a winning formula? This time it may turn out that Africa is the winner after all.

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Despite what was said previously by others – not by us – Indonesia was believed to have a nominee – as per official words they have  not provided a name to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s office for a nominee to the UNFCCC position.

This, in addition to the previously SustainabiliTank.info posted seven nominees leaves us now with a total of 9 nominees.

WE ARE STILL MISSING TWO NOMINEES AND THEREFORE WE WILL EVENTUALLY HAVE TO RESORT  TO MAKING WILDEST GUESSES FOR WHO ARE THE FURTHER TWO STEALTH NOMINEES. WE SAY STEALTH BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT THE UN DOES NOT RELEASE ANY NAMES OF NOMINEES OR OF THE COUNTRIES THAT DID THE NOMINATIONS.

Judging from the presence of Colombia on the list, and our recent posting on the Washington meeting of the  Major Economies Forum
 http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2010/04…

we are now taking the guess that Yemen might be one of the missing two, but then looking also at the list of the 11 members of the Bureau of the UNFCCC, we might be inclined to think that Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, or Korea might be the missing two. Saudi Arabia has moved  to institute nuclear energy and renewable energy activities, while South Korea is taking green business initiatives.

Yemen is the chair of the G-77 and could claim interest in all of the above. Iran has had people involved in Sustainable Development and with its involvement in nuclear issues might also believe to have a claim to this position. As said – our guess is wild.

The eleven Bureau-of-the-COP of UNFCCC members are from:
Australia, Bahamas, Denmark, South Korea, Mali, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Sudan and Russia.

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Also, we learned that the travel itinerary of the UNFCCC COPs from Poznan (COP 14), Copemhagen (COP15),  Cancun (COP16), is now causing a fight on Asia’s turn of this circus – between Doha, Qatar and Seoul, Korea for the COP17 show.

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This week, The Columbia University and The Earth Institute’s STATE OF THE PLANET 2010 Conference brought to New York, and to all these other locations of the meeting, a feel for ALJAZEERA or Al Jazeera English. This was good!

As we noted in the previous article http://www.sustainabilitank.info/#14015 – we think that the most innovative step at the STATE OF THE PLANET 2010 event was the fact that the Master of Ceremonies, and sometime moderator, was Rizwan “Riz” Khan from Al Jazeera English, an important media network headquartered in Qatar which is a Middle East fossil fuel exporting State. Though without any footing in the program itself, Middle East oil producers got nevertheless a stake in the discussion, and we never said that oil and oil money should not be part of the effort of finding replacement for the addiction to oil.

Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rizwan_Khan

Rizwan “Riz” Khan (born April 1962) is a Yemeni-born British television news reporter and interviewer, who first rose to prominence while working for the BBC and CNN. He currently hosts his own television show on Al Jazeera English.

Khan was born in Aden to a Punjabi father and Yemeni mother. His mother’s roots go back to Kutch in the Indian state of Gujarat, while father’s roots hail from Kashmir. Khan moved with his family to London, England, at the age of four. He attended Wood Green High School and joined the Air Training Corps, graduated with a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Medical Physiology from the University of Wales, and then completed a postgraduate course in Radio Journalism at the University of Portsmouth.

In 1987 he was selected for the BBC News Trainee scheme – a two year BBC training system, usually taking only 6 people per course. Khan progressed to jobs as a BBC Reporter, Producer, and Writer, working in both television and radio, and would later become one of the founding News Presenters on BBC World Service Television News. He hosted the news bulletin that launched BBC World Service Television News in 1991.

In 1993, he moved to CNN International, where he became a senior anchor for the network’s global news shows. Events he covered included the 1996 and 1999 elections in India; the 1997 historic election in Britain; and in April 1998 the unprecedented live coverage from the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj.
In 1996 he launched his interactive interview show CNN: Q&A with Riz Khan, and he has conducted interviews with guests including former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former US Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, and genomic scientist J. Craig Venter. Khan also secured the world exclusive with Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf following his coup in October 1999. Khan also hosted Q&A-Asia with Riz Khan. These interactive shows put world newsmakers and celebrities up for viewer questions live by phone, e-mail, video-mail and fax, along with questions and comments taken from the real-time chatroom that opens half-an-hour before each show.

Khan currently hosts the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English. On his show, Khan interviews analysts and policy makers and allows viewers to interact with them via phone, email, SMS messages or fax.

Khan speaks Urdu and Hindi, the national language of Pakistan and the official language of India respectively, and understands other South Asian languages such as Punjabi and Kutchi. He has studied French, and can understand some other European languages, including Swedish.

In 2005 he authored his first book, Al-Waleed: Businessman Billionaire Prince, published by Harper Collins.

When asked by CNN’s Frank Sesno “Is Hamas a terrorist organization?”, Khan replied “I’m not one to judge.” When then asked “Is Hezbollah a terrorist organization?”, he said, “Same thing, you know, I’m not going to judge.” Khan’s statements led to strong criticism from American conservative media analyst L. Brent Bozell III.  Many of the world’s major leading media organizations ask their staff to avoid the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism,’ viewing it to be a barrier to understanding.

March 26, 2010, the day after the Columbia University meeting, out of Washington, the Riz Khan program ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhhwnoK3R9… – “Riz Khan – War and peace in Quran and Bible” – dealt with – “We examine what role the Bible and the Quran played in inciting violence through the ages.”

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Riz Khan was selected for the role he played in the March 26, 2010 because of his clear talent for doing this sort of thing – being a Master of Ceremony at a public meeting or TV program, and for the fast wit needed to ask prodding questions and tell humorous short stories.  But we kept in mind also an ulterior motive. That became clear to us as there was also a second event – Wednesday, March 24, 2010, the previous day in the afternoon, when Professor Peter J. Awn, Director of the Columbia University Middle East Institute, in co-sponsorship with The Columbia School of Journalism, had over Mr. Kahn’s boss – no other then the Director General of all ALJAZEERA Network, Mr. Waddah Khanfar, who after having been afraid to come to the US during the G.W. Bush Presidency years, is effectively investigating now, in the days of the Obama Presidency, the possibility of linking up with US TV networks. As we learned from him, besides reaching Al Jazeera English on the internet, it is already possible to see Al Jazeera News on TV in the Washington DC area.

He is investigating with New York area TV and many other US markets, the possibility of similar arrangements. We clearly believe in the right to a free press and as such we did not mind that the two presentable gentlemen appearances might have had ulterior motives. We say, as it happened, the stage for the Riza performance of Thursday was actually set at Columbia University already on Wednesday, as we do not believe in mere coincidences. But we also say that opening the US door to Al Jazeera English will benefit the US by allowing flow of information into the US that has a more Middle East flavor, while also allowing flow of information from the US to the Middle East as seen by someone with Middle East perspective. If Israel allows this already for several years without fear, so should the US allow it now.

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Media Revolution in the Middle East.

Wednesday, March 24, 12:30-2pm

International Affairs Building, Room 1512

420 West 118th St.

A discussion with Al Jazeera Director General, Wadah Khanfar, who
transformed the single channel into a media network with multiple
properties including Al Jazeera English. Ranked as one of the most
“Powerful People in the World” by Forbes Magazine, Khanfar began
his career as a news correspondent in South Africa and later reported
on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of his first mandates as
managing director was to launch the Al Jazeera Code of Ethics and Code
of Conduct in July 2004 at the First Al Jazeera International Forum.

Co-sponsored with the Middle East Institute and Columbia’s School of
Journalism.

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Ranked as one of the most “Powerful People in the World” by Forbes Magazine, named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (Davos), recognized as the 3rd (another source says 8th) most influential Arab in the world by Arabian Business, and one of the most influential Muslims in the world (Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre), Wadah Khanfar is the Director General of the Al Jazeera Network. During his tenure Al Jazeera went from a single channel to a media network with multiple properties including the Al Jazeera Arabic channel, Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Documentary , Al Jazeera Sport, Al Jazeera’s news websites, the Al Jazeera Media Training and Development Center, the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, Al Jazeera Mubasher (live), and Al Jazeera Mobile.

Khanfar started his career with Al Jazeera in 1997 covering some of the world’s key political zones. Khanfar’s first role in the organization was as an analyst correspondent in South Africa. In 2001/2002 he was a war correspondent in Afghanistan and during the war in Iraq, he reported from Kurdish-controlled territory in the North. Later, he was appointed as the Chief of the Baghad Bureau. Khanfar became Managing Director of the Al Jazeera Channel in 2003 and Director General of the Al Jazeera Network in 2006. One of his first mandates as managing director was to launch the Al Jazeera Code of Ethics and Al Jazeera’s Code of Conduct in July 2004 at the First Al Jazeera International Forum.

Khanfar has addressed leading political and media think tanks including the Middle East Institute, New America Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, and George Washington University. He has appeared on the Charlie Rose Show, NPR’s Diane Rheem show, and presented at the Paley Center for Media. In 2009 Khanfar met with senior officials and advisors at the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon.

The day before the Columbia University meeting, March 23, 2010, Mr. Khanfar was the Keynote Speaker at the 2010 annual symposium of the Georgetown University, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), that is housed in the Rafic A.Hariri Building.  The topic was the basic “Information Evolution in the Arab World.”

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“LectureHop: A Golden Nugget for Wadah Khanfar” – as per BWOG – the blog incarnation of The Blue and White, Columbia University’s monthly undergraduate magazine.
After nearly suffering a nose bleed from the 11 floor climb through IAB to hear Director General Wadah Khanfar speak on “Media Revolution in the Middle East,” Sarah Camiscoli was both star-struck by Wadah Khanfar’s presence and impressed by his thoughts on current US Policy in the Middle East, his opinions on reclaiming the responsibility and the ethnics of journalism, and his genuine humility as he spoke to what seemed like the closest thing one could get to groupies.

Peter Awn introduced Wadah Khanfar with much excitement as one of the most Powerful People in the World by Forbes Magazine, a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (Davos), the third most influential Arab in the world by Arabian Business, and one of the most influential Muslims in the world.  To this, Khanfar ironically replied, “Thank you for pronouncing my name correctly.” Awn snickered. He was flattered.

While Khanfar was equally as pleased by Awn’s enthusiasm and the camera phones that subversively emerged from the crowd, Khanfar tried to change up the tone by starting with, “I do not have many answers to the issues of the media.  However, I will just share with you some thoughts and ideas.”

The first “thought” breached by Khanfar was his fear that news reporting is “drifting away from putting human being[s] at [the] center to putting centers of power and commercial at [the] center.”  To speak to “the voices that may not be able to express themselves,” Khanfar told a story from his experience covering the war in Kabul. The depth of this problem became even more haunting to Khanfar after paying the bill for tea he and several young Arab men shared over a casual conversation about their perspectives on the war.  When one of the young men realized that Khanfar had paid for the tea, he chased him down, scolded him for his insult of paying as the “guest” and had “tears in his eyes” as he begged him to allow him to take the bill—it was a tradition that he should not.  Khanfar emphasized how the tradition, culture, and marginal voices that are often seen as outside of politics must be reclaimed as another center for reporters and policymakers.

After speaking passionately against a US policy in Afghanistan that “plan[ned] a strategy in 10 days to replace… three and a half thousand years of government,” Khanfar spoke about how to handle centers of power while also acting as an agency that challenges the “tyranny of the state.” Quoting an interview with Edward Said, who advocated “speaking truth to power,” Khanfar revealed that “if you go to AlJazeera you will see that slogan on the wall—Al Jazeera speaks true to power.”  With this philosophy, Al Jazeera operates under the belief that there is “always a way where power and journalism can benefit, but… power can overtake.”

To illustrate how Al Jazeera “speaks true,” Khanfar explained how the agency is reconciling relations with the United States after suffering the arrest of several journalists for alleged ties to the Taliban, having one sent to Abu Ghraib and recovering after two headquarters were “bombed to the ground” by the US military. In order to pacify tensions with the US while still “empowering [their viewers] with comprehensive knowledge,” Al Jazeera has hosted interviews with leaders such as Joe Biden, and Khanfar visited the Whitehouse personally to get “some answers” as to who bombed the headquarters and who can take responsibility for such acts so they can “move towards the future.”  While relations may be somewhat amended with Al Jazeera, Khanfar was sure to note that “nothing has been achieved after that magnificent speech” that President Obama gave in Egypt in 2009 with regard to US policy.

As time came to a close, Khanfar made sure to squeeze in a few heavy one-liners to sum up his most poignant thoughts.  Warning that, “Words can kill,” Khanfar spoke about his discontent with the media he’s been exposed to during his stay in the US.  He stated, “I have seen a lot of acting.  It is not what I respect… News, the news… News should not be a commodity. This should be a news for people—not for particular party, religion, group, but for the human being.  Once we develop ways to create relationships with centers of power, we will get back on track.”

While Khanfar’s glorification of Al Jazeera can most definitely be challenged now that the celebrity has left the IAB  – The International Affairs building at Columbia University – the overall appreciation for his presence, thoughts and accomplishments was undeniable. For his ability to speak charismatically, candidly and humbly your correspondent gives the man a Golden Nugget.

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Wadah Khanfar was born 1968 in the Palestinian (West Bank) city of Jinin. He studied Engineering between 1985 to 1990 at the University of Jordan and went on to post-graduate studies in Philosophy, African Studies, and International Politics. During this time, Khanfar started a Student Union with a group of students and colleagues and started an inter-university dialogue group amongst students constituted from a range of political backgrounds. In 1989/1990, he helped to organize forums, protests, festivals and demonstrations for student rights.

Khanfar has covered some of the world’s key political zones for the Al Jazeera Channel since 1997. Khanfar’s first role in the organisation was as a correspondent in South Africa. In 2001/2002 he was a war correspondent in Afghanistan and during the war in Iraq, he reported from Kurdish-controlled territory in the North. Later, he was appointed as the Chief of the Baghdad Bureau – the biggest operation for Al Jazeera outside Al Jazeera’s Qatar headquarters – and was the biggest media operation inside Iraq. Al Jazeera at that time became the first TV station to cover the developments inside Baghdad, inside Iraq, and became the main source of information about the early military attacks against the Americans. During this time, Khanfar wrote a letter to U.S. Administrator Paul Bremer asking the U.S. to stop what was described as an intimidation campaign against Al Jazeera’s journalists. Khanfar became Managing Director of the Al Jazeera Channel in 2003 and Director General of the Al Jazeera Network in 2006. As a managing director, he launched the Al Jazeera Code of Ethics and Al Jazeera’s Code of Conduct in July 2004 at the First Al Jazeera International Forum. The Code stated that professional standards and balanced and fair coverage should govern and guide the Channel’s newsroom rather than political or diplomatic interference. He is based now in Ad Doha, Qatar.

Khanfar initiated a concept called ‘Journalism of Depth’ which is the framework for Al Jazeera’s approach to journalism. The concept refers to the idea that to properly convey the meaning of facts and figures journalists need to contextualize events in the social, cultural, historical, and political context from which they emerge. Khanfar contrasts this to ‘headline culture’ which may convey the immediacy of an event but conveys very little understanding. The background to journalism of depth is that contemporary news media are in a crisis and are suffering from a range of critical problems including reductionism, media elitism, and dissociation from context resulting in news that is fragmentary and chaotic rather than being informative and explanatory.

While Khanfar was leading the Al Jazeera Baghdad Bureau – the US made demands on the Channel to change its coverage of Iraq. This led to tension for the Channel’s many journalists and crew resulting in Khanfar sending a letter to Paul Bremer asking the US to stop the intimidation campaign against Al Jazeera’s journalists. Al Jazeera journalists and crew were at that time detained for months at the Abu Ghraib prison where some of them were tortured. In an earlier incident in 2003 a US bombardment of the Channel’s offices led to the death of one its journalist’s Tareq Ayyoub.

During the war American and British accusations against Al Jazeera intensified and Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush started to publicly criticize and blame Al Jazeera for America’s failure to restore order in Iraq. It later came to the attention of the Daily Mirror in the UK that a leaked memo documented a private discussion between George Bush and Tony Blair on bombing Al Jazeera headquarters, supposedly immediately before the attack on Fallujah in April, 2004. A Freedom of Information request was made by Al Jazeera for disclosure on the memo but no information was ever released. The public servants who leaked the memo were later sentenced by the British government.

First visit to the United States: In July 2009, Khanfar was invited to the United States by leading political and media think tanks including the Middle East Institute, New America Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, and George Washington University. This was the first time that a Director General from Al Jazeera has visited the US. During the visit Khanfar also met with senior officials and advisors at the White House, United States Department of State and the Pentagon, and perhaps signals a change in the inner circles of the government to dialogue with Al Jazeera under the new administration of President Barack Obama. On the visit to the US, Khanfar appeared on the Charlie Rose Show, NPR’s Diane Rehm show, and presented at the Paley Center for Media.

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We also received information from the Carnegie Council in new York City about a March 10, 2010 foray ALJAZEERA made to New York – that is outside the UN where Al Jazeera is present already for years.

Press Freedom in the Arab World.
By Khaled Dawoud, correspondent of Al Jazeera in New York covering the United Nations and any other significant events going on in the United States.
 http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/m…

March 10, 2010

DEVIN STEWART: I’m Devin Stewart from the Carnegie Council. Welcome to another excellent innovative program of the Carnegie New Leaders.

I’m going to turn it over to Robin van Puyenbroeck. Robin is one of our leading Carnegie New Leaders. He is on the newly formed steering committee. Robin really took the initiative, like some others have—and I encourage you to do the same—and put this all together for us today. So I’m going to turn it over to Robin.

Please think of this when you are thinking of programs to follow up, programs that you can put together like Robin has today. So, Robin, thanks so much and welcome.

ROBIN VAN PUYENBROECK: Thank you, Devin. Good evening, everybody. It’s my distinct pleasure to introduce Khaled Dawoud. Khaled is the correspondent of Al Jazeera in New York covering the United Nations and any other significant events going on in the United States.

He will talk for about 20 minutes, half an hour, about Al Jazeera— its history, what is it like to work at Al Jazeera as a journalist, who are the constituents of Al Jazeera, who is the audience, and how does the Arabic world views of Al Jazeera see the current events of today.

Interestingly, the topic “Freedom of the Press in the Arab World” I found very touching, because we all seem to know somehow the brand Al Jazeera, but we cannot watch it in the United States. It’s not on cable at least. It is available online— the English edition— but it is for various reasons not yet available on cable.

So I’ll pass on to Khaled, and then we will open it up for questions.

KHALED DAWOUD: Thank you very much, Robin, for this introduction. It is a great pleasure to see you again. Actually, I met Robin at one of these lectures before. I feel sorry that he may hear the same stuff all over again.

Anyway, as Robin explained, I came here to the United States eight years ago basically as a correspondent for an Egyptian newspaper, called Al-Ahram, which is the largest newspaper we have in Egypt, and it’s the oldest as well, and then four years later I came here to New York to work for Al Jazeera, the Arabic one, not the English one— the one that you cannot see here in the United States.

Mainly I cover the United Nations. Our office is inside the United Nations. So that basically makes us cover a lot of the UN—that’s in case the UN is doing a lot, but sometimes it’s not—and also New York itself, mainly related stories, like political stories; economic stories recently of course were a major important issue.

I’m always asked about Al Jazeera. There are lots of stereotypes about Al Jazeera, especially here in the United States—it’s different—and more in New York actually than even compared to Washington, D.C.

I always start these kinds of talks about Al Jazeera by stating definitely that I don’t know where bin Laden is, that I have no relation to him, and that I am just a reporter basically, and I now happen to be working for Al Jazeera. I take it as a job more than anything else. That’s really the claim of professionalim that we all make as reporters who work for Al Jazeera, that we don’t have that much of a political agenda, as some people, particularly in the United States, think to be the case.

I actually chose the issue of the freedom of the press and Al Jazeera’s contribution to it because that’s really how I see Al Jazeera personally as a reporter.

I have been working as a reporter for slightly over 20 years right now. I come from Egypt, as I stated, I witnessed the years of the introduction of Al Jazeera as a new channel in the Arab world, and why it was important and how it did affect our political reality—our media reality. A lot of things changed in the Arab world with the introduction of Al Jazeera, even more than what happened later, after 9/11 and what happened in Afghanistan.

Originally, as a reporter myself, the main reason why Al Jazeera was important is the context in which it came out from—I assume I don’t need to go through a lot of history.

In the Arab world—most of the Arab world—we were under occupation, whether French occupation or British occupation in Egypt’s case. In the 1950s and the 1960s of the past century, we started having these nationalist movements, gaining our independence.

It just happened that in many of the Arab countries, whether in Egypt or in Syria or in Iraq or in Algeria even later, it always happened that it was the army which led the process of change or the process of independence or whatever you want to call it. Of course, in the case of Egypt and in many other Arab countries, when the army takes over, it becomes an experience that was repeated and done similarly in several other Arab countries.

One of the first things that happened is that, for example, in the case of Egypt, a few years after the late President Nasser did his revolt, was that basically he nationalized the press. So all the newspapers, all the media, all the radio, all the television became basically government property.

It’s important to consider that because it affects, of course, the nature of the relation between the media in our countries and our audience, which are the people that we reach, when they know that we’re mainly government spokesmen or basically reproducing what the government wants us to say.

So that was the reality that existed in almost all Arab countries: that you had a very strong authoritarian government, which basically sees the press as a tool to tell the people what the government wants the people to know, rather than the case here. For example, in the United States, with all the limitations, or in Europe, the media or the press is a watchdog, someone to watch what the government is doing and report it and create issues and investigate matters. You know, all these concepts did not really exist in our case in Egypt and in the Arab world when the press started and when it was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s and at the later stage.

More important than even the press itself, such as print media, like newspapers and magazines, was television, of course. In all Arab countries the illiteracy rates are very high, ranging from 50 percent in some places to up to 80 percent in some other Arab countries. So with this illiteracy rate, television becomes the most important means of communication. If you want to control what the people see and watch and hear, you have to control television. So the television is government-owned, the radio is government-owned, the newspapers are government-owned.

It is not a means of communication in that case, or one way in which we inform people of the situation, how it is, or how the reality is. But we have a little bit, not dissimilar to the culture of the former Soviet Union and this kind of controlled media whereby the news has a certain order: we have to start with the news of the president, followed by the news of the prime minister, followed by the news of the other ministers. Usually, the picture is very rosy, “everything is fine, we have no problems, everybody is happy.” You know, that’s the kind of general atmosphere.

As I say, even for people who are experts on our part of the world, it even becomes a sign if you want to know how the government is doing. I mean is the president appearing on TV four or five times a week? If he is not, if he disappears for a couple of weeks, is he sick, is there something, is there a coup? So because there is really little information that is available, you become accustomed to a certain reading between the lines.

I remember very well growing up and reading the official newspapers that came out in Egypt. Sometimes you would see a very small news item made up of maybe 30-40 words, like you would never see anywhere else, about a certain government decision that was taken about someone you don’t know. But then it is in the newspaper, and then that becomes the beginning of the story—how did it happen, who died, where did it come from? But nothing is really said that is a real reflection of what our reality is, or what our problems are in the region, or what are our needs, which are no different from the needs of any other country.

People in my part of the world, of course, they want a government that is not corrupt, they want a government that respects their basic rights and freedoms—all these issues. But of course, these were taboo, things that were not to be spoken about.

And of course, it’s not only the government issues that I want to really make an issue about. It’s also even our own social problems. Because of the controlled nature of the media, even problems in every country—like, say, for example, in Egypt we have a Christian minority, and we know that there are problems beneath the beautiful surface; the president receives the patriarch and they shake hands and supposedly that’s the sign that everything is good. But then you know that there are problems, but you are not really talking about them in the official media because that goes against the general rosy picture that you are supposed to have in general.

Or like, say, in Jordan, for example, where there are ruling Jordanian people from the country itself and then there are Palestinians. There are always questions. Everybody talks about it in the streets—like what is the relation between the Palestinians and the Jordanians, what are the problems that are existing—but nobody really writes about them or speaks about them in the media because, again, that’s a taboo.

And you can mention many other things—the status of women, the issues of human rights. I mean all these topics were not issues that we were able to discuss openly until maybe the mid-1980s, early 1990s, when we started a little bit of opening here and there. Like in Egypt, for example, after many years of having government-controlled press, you start having the government—because the president felt like it, because former president Sadat wanted to have a good relation with the United States, so he said, “Okay, now I will have three opposition parties with three opposition newspapers.”

And then the experiment goes on. Besides the government papers, you have the three opposition papers. But then, when the opposition papers go so far, he closes them down in one night, arrests 1,000 people, and the experience is over. So that was the nature of the thing.

And being Al Jazeera, being TV—I think of even CNN as a kind of a new form of media, where you follow live news and going out—the classic form of news that we have had for many years only came out, again, I think, maybe in the early 1980s, or around that time.

So we have never had something like that in the Arab world. We have never had live news coverage, talk shows where people discuss their topics openly and debate them and all these kinds of things.

The BBC Arabic Service has had a very long history in the Arab world. Bearing in mind all I told you about the government-controlled media and attempts to limit what we listened to, I remember growing up that my main source for outside media information, even about my own country, was from the BBC. So everybody would have a radio at home, and you would really try hard with your shortwave, turning left and turning right, until you got a little bit, to know that there was a demonstration in Cairo, the same city that you are living in, or in Jordan, and that maybe ten of your friends were arrested or something. But you really don’t get to know it from your own local media, you get to know it from these sources of information.

The BBC had this long tradition of being one of the sources of information which a lot of people really trusted—I think maybe relatively until today. But they had a good name, and they did offer this kind of alternative source of information. But they decided to do TV. They said, after maybe 60 years or 55 years at that time of doing radio in Arabic, “We want to do TV in Arabic too.”

But of course, as you guys know, TV is an expensive business, really very expensive. It’s different from having a newspaper. The technology is very expensive. Maybe now it’s becoming a little bit cheaper, but originally it was a very expensive operation, with the logistics, the travel, many things.

So the BBC, as far as the story at that time went, had to have a partner, they had to have someone to pay for that project basically, and that came through the Saudi government. Maybe I didn’t mention Saudi, because I’m mentioning the Arab countries that are non-oil-rich nations, but the situation in even the oil countries as well is not any different from the rest of the Arab world. The media’s job is to cover the government, the government always has the high priority, and don’t talk about the bad issues that make the government look negative, or something like that.

So the Saudis decided to put some money with the BBC and to have BBC television in Arabic. At that time, all those who were working in the media had the basic question “Is this experiment going to succeed?” because we all knew the Saudi limitations and the BBC’s claim or desire to maintain a certain level of objectivity. The question was: What will happen when some negative news comes out about Saudi Arabia; how will the BBC cover this story? That was what everybody was waiting for.

You know what basically happened is that this day came. The BBC—because everybody was saying, “Oh, okay, you’re over-covering Saudi, you’re not covering Saudi”—and then they did a one-hour documentary, I think, about human rights in Saudi Arabia or something like that.

Unfortunately, the experiment was very short-lived and the BBC Arabic TV didn’t last more than a year, a year and a half, and they pulled out. Then, suddenly, you had 100, or over 100, very good journalists, very well trained, who were basically jobless.

At that time comes Qatar, Doha. There was a change in government there. The ruler of Qatar was Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, and then came the political changes there with his son; he took over the power from his father.

A lot of people asked the question about “Why Qatar?” [Al Jazeera's headquarters are in Qatar.] I mean Qatar is such a small country in the Gulf region.

But, I guess, people are entitled to think of ways to make their name known, to put their fingerprint on regional politics and world politics. It seems that the Emir of Qatar at that time, the present ruler, he thought that one of the contributions that he can make and make his country known through is to have a channel like Al Jazeera in Qatar itself presenting this alternative media instead of the government-controlled television channels.

So he basically decided to take all the guys who worked for the BBC Arabic Service, this new television project, and told them: “Okay, guys, you all come to Doha and do the project that you were presumably supposed to do but do it from Qatar itself.” That’s basically how Al Jazeera started.

One of the first slogans or mottos, whatever you want to call them, of Al Jazeera was “the opinion and the counter-opinion”. That is one of the concepts that might seem like an ipso facto, like something easy for you to take—of course, each story has two sides —but it was not always the case for us in the Arab world, as I tried to explain, and that’s why it was an important motto, to have an opinion and to have a counter-opinion.

Al Jazeera came in with that perspective—on the one hand, that this is a channel that has reasonable funding, funding from a relatively oil-rich Gulf country; and at the same time, they have the experience and they have a message, which is that “we are not going to be like the official government-owned TV, whether in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq, or in Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, and we are going to try to present something different.”

Another thing that’s really a contribution for Al Jazeera, for us, besides having this live news coverage and keeping people informed about what’s happening in the world and setting the agenda of what people would expect to see in the news—I mean if there is something important for us, we don’t have to start with the government news if there is something more important than the government news. So that was the most important thing: try to know who your audience is and try to think, like they do in old news rooms, about what are going to be the most important issues that your readers or audience want to listen to today.

And then the talk shows; that was another important contribution that Al Jazeera made to the media scene in the Arab world. Again, I use Egypt always because that’s where I come from, but for the first time for us Egyptians—or Iraqis or Algerians or Jordanians—you would see a government official sitting with an opposition figure. First of all, we would not see opposition figures on our TVs—that was out of the question—for many, many, many years.

So you have like: Oh my God, this government guy sitting with the opposition guy, and the opposition guy telling the government guy openly, “You are torturing people in prison, you are oppressing this, you are not allowing us freedom of expression,” and bringing the taboos—the unspoken—to the surface. Now we are talking about them—the treatment of women; is it like oppressive societies—many things, many things, but in each and every Arab country.

And of course, the result was that most Arab governments basically were not very happy with Al Jazeera. But that’s where it started from.

It’s a very strange twist actually, because when Al Jazeera became a big name in the first early years, I think that the reaction in Washington and the United States was a very positive one. It was like “Oh, this is the new media that we want to encourage, Al Jazeera is really good,” if you go back to the years of 1997–1998, until 9/11 happened. So at that time it was seen as something positive.

Then another change again puts Al Jazeera in a very peculiar position. I don’t want to jump to the post-9/11 era. But, of course, right now we are seen as the channel that supports Palestinian radicalism, this is the channel that backs fundamentalists, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff.

But then, in the Arab world, strangely enough, a lot of people see Al Jazeera as being the first channel that introduced Israeli speakers to Arab households. Again, with all the Arab TV stations, with all the Arab-Israeli conflict business that we were in for the past 60 years in our part of the world—but for us, the Arab audience, when I watched my Egypt TV, Iraq IV, Algeria TV, Saudi TV, I would never see an Israeli official. I would never hear from them about what they say, how they think, what their arguments are. Al Jazeera broke this taboo. This was a real taboo, to have an interview with an Israeli foreign minister, to have an interview with Sharon; they had an interview with Peres—many interviews with Peres actually because he has been around for so many years as well.

But this was again another thing that made a lot of people think, “Oh, you are an American tool because you are introducing Israelis to our households and you are making us get to know what the enemy wants to hear” and stuff like that.

So on one hand, you have here in the United States all this reputation about “you’re being pro-radical and pro all those kind of things,” and in the Arab world you would be very strange. I mean I would be very, very amazed coming from here in the States to Cairo streets.

I would go in a cab and the driver would tell me, “Oh, you work for a Zionist channel.”

I said, “What? I work for a Zionist channel?”

He would say, “Yes, because I see all the Israelis on your TV.”

“Okay, fine.”

But that kind of makes me mad, because here it’s like “you are supporters” and “where is Osama bin Laden?” and there it’s like “you’re a Zionist,” whatever. So it kind of makes you feel, “Okay, maybe I’m okay. Like everybody’s so mad, so maybe.…”

But that was how Al Jazeera first started and how it caused a lot of controversy back in the Arab world in the late 1980s. They started in 1996 exactly, so that’s 14 years ago. So it’s not too old, but a reasonable number of years to be around.

And then, of course, I switch to the 9/11 period, because, of course, that changed a lot of things about how Al Jazeera is seen and how Al Jazeera is perceived, especially here in the United States and in the West. That was a different story.

Because 9/11 occurred, this terrorist attack, it shook the lives of everybody all over the world. Still today, personally, as an Arab and a Muslim, I am bearing the consequences. This subject did not disappear, even though it’s eight or nine years later.

So 9/11 came, and came the so-called bin Laden tapes issue, which is again another very strange situation that we found ourselves in. After bin Laden did the 1998 bombing of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, almost every single American channel did interviews with bin Laden. That was the hit of ABC, CBS, CNN—you name it. Everybody did bin Laden interviews. They would go for him, really. There was no question about this.

And then 9/11 occurred, and this man, this group, is claiming responsibility. You are a news channel, you are one of the most widely watched—in the Arab world at least, and actually became all over the world—because people know that you present a different kind of news and a different view about the Arab world that people don’t usually see, so you receive a tape from bin Laden and he’s claiming certain things after 9/11. So the question becomes: Are you going to air this tape or are you not going to air this tape?

My background originally was working for news agencies like Reuters and AP. That’s where I worked after I graduated from the American University in Cairo. I would always find myself in this situation. I was working in the office in Cairo in the period of 1995-1998, where there were almost daily terror attacks in Egypt, and you would receive statements from terrorist groups and all this kind of stuff. We used to report them. We used to report what these guys were saying and we used to report what the government was saying. That’s part of what we see, what I was told by my American professors, the two sides of the story.

The issue is: what would any other agency do about this issue—such a hot topic, such a big event—and you have this guy providing you with tapes and saying “This is what we did and this is what’s happening and this and this and this?”

But it just happened that way, because that became—at least, again, here now I’m speaking on the basis of my experience of living here in this country—it became this association, that “this is Al Jazeera that runs the bin Laden tapes.”

So when I first arrived here and moved to New York, I go to Crate and Barrel to buy some stuff, and I meet this nice young lady there, 19 years old. She does not know how to spell my name, Khalid Halid Khaled. So I give my card and it has Al Jazeera on it. She turns blue and she says, “You’re the bin Laden channel.” I said, “Oh my God, even here.”

This is maybe part of the topic: how is my job here, how is my work here in the United States, working for Al Jazeera?

So it’s an issue we can always debate really. I mean how are you going to handle this kind of thing? We debated. We debated within Al Jazeera, we debated among ourselves, as journalists, how you handle this kind of material, information, coming from groups that are charged and accused and involved in terrorist acts; how are you going to handle these kinds of things?

But I don’t really think—like in Arabic we say those who convey the heresy or the bad news are not necessarily the ones who made the bad news. I’m just reporting the bad news, so I shouldn’t be really blamed for that.

VOICE: Don’t shoot the messenger.

KHALED DAWOUD: Exactly, don’t shoot the messenger. Maybe that’s a better way to put it.

That’s really my point of view about it. But again, we have to be real in my opinion, you have to put things into context, as we say, which is that we were also dealing with an administration, the former Bush Administration, that basically also didn’t like controversy. It was one of the main criticisms that was directed against President Bush when I was reporting on the White House almost on a daily basis, that he only listened to people who agreed with him.

Even in the lead-up to the Iraq war, when this was a very important decision, who was the person he was meeting with all the time? Mr. Blair, 90 times. But is he meeting with any other world leaders who have a different point of view? Is he meeting with the French? Is he meeting with the Germans? So that was another thing with the previous administration, again, being a reporter at the White House myself, how difficult it was; any reporter who’s kind of guaranteed that he’s going to ask a positive question was given a question.

Even in former President Bush interviews, and again of course with Mr. Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, and Mr. Cheney, coming out all the time, “Al Jazeera did this, Al Jazeera does that.” Of course, this doesn’t really help in creating a positive image about the place that you work for. And again, really not on the basis of real charges.

I don’t think that—again, when we report what’s happening—and this is really part of my job as a reporter, and I think I owe it to the people who watch and read our material. When the United States is launching a war against Afghanistan or launching a war against Iraq—I mean okay, fine, this is war. I see there are some reporters who are here attending with us, and they can tell you as well. I mean covering war is not an easy issue, sacrificing your own life. When you have a war, you have to be one way or the other definitely embedded. But you have to be embedded with both sides; you can’t be embedded with one side only. That’s the problem that was faced, whether the Afghanistan war or the Iraq war.

I mean it was seen in the aftermath of 9/11 as nationalist feelings, “let’s take revenge.” I think even here in the American press, after the Iraq war in particular, they did a lot of self-criticism about how we didn’t really do our job as reporters, because it was becoming non-national behavior or anti-American behavior to question anything at that time about President Bush’s policies— about his decision to go to war in Afghanistan or his decision to go, more important later, to war in Iraq.

That is, again, really my interpretation of why. Of course, during the Bush years it wasn’t easy for us, even Al Jazeera, here in America. In the Arab world, as I was explaining in the beginning, it’s more about lack of information, the blackout on behalf of the government, not letting you get to know anything. But here in America there is a lot of information, but there is also access. Access is very important.

So if you are on bad terms with the administration, the George Bush Administration, you don’t get access. You don’t get interviews with the White House people, you don’t get interviews with the State Department people, of course no interviews with Pentagon people under Mr. Rumsfeld. That was out of the question. So of course, that doesn’t help you do your job.

In the Afghanistan war, we were the only channel that was present on the ground in Afghanistan because the former Taliban regime only allowed Al Jazeera to be there at that time. You know what I mean? So when the war started, we were the only crew there, and it just happened that we showed at that time the effect of the war.

I was on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border at that time as a reporter myself. You could see the airplanes bombing and hitting here and hitting there and doing all this stuff. But then nobody’s really showing where these bombs are falling. Were they falling on civilian houses? Were they falling on military targets? Someone has to report this. That’s what I mean by “we owe it to the audience to give them a full picture.”

In war, like anything else, there are two sides in the war. Whether you think there is one right side and one wrong side, but it’s a war. At the end of the day—that’s the way I see it personally—it’s human beings who pay the price for the war, and we should not show it as something easy, that it’s like a cakewalk, that an occupier is going to be received as a liberator with flowers and stuff like that.

If you take part in this, if I take part in this, I’m not doing my job and I’m deceiving the people. My job is—you know, again, after all of these years of working in the business, we can all talk about objectivity. But if I achieve like 60–70 percent objectivity, I think I’ll be happy and I will feel satisfied relatively, because it’s impossible to be 100 percent objective.

That is why we are privileged these days, in this time and age that we are living in, that we have this diversity in all these media. So you have Al Jazeera, but you have others, you have CNN, you have CNBC, you have Fox.

So it is also your job, as people who are receiving news, to try to form a balanced picture out of all these little things here and there. But there has to be something or someone that reports the two sides of the story.

As much as Al Jazeera was accused of supporting a certain radical antiwar point of view, we were also the channel that gave a lot of space for the American officials during the peak of the Iraq war to speak on our channel all the time. But the problem is that that administration, it just reminded me sometimes of the governments back home, which is that they only want to listen to their point of view, and if you get someone else to have a different point of view, they consider this to be like crossing the lines.

So in the Afghanistan war when you show civilians getting killed, that’s like you’re a bad boy. And then in the Iraq war, when you’re not embedded and you also try to show how the war is affecting negatively, how the war is basically destroying the lives of the Iraqis there, you’re not on good terms of course.

I don’t know. But it just surprises me, let us put it this way, that at the end of the Afghanistan war the last act of the war was the bombing of the Al Jazeera office in Afghanistan.

And then came the Iraq war. In the Iraq war—and I know this from my bosses and people who worked at that time—they were very specific in going to the U.S. Army and saying, “This is our position, this is our location, we are airing from here, this is our satellite position, please don’t bomb us.” That was very clear.

And then the war ends. April 9th, the last day of war, the Al Jazeera headquarters get bombed in Baghdad and a colleague of mine gets killed, Tarek Ayoub. They say it’s a mistake. But again, that is all that I can say, because nobody has evidence about that. But it raises questions, let’s put it this way, to be objective, to try to be.

There is another thing that I’d like to note. It’s not out of the creativity of my imagination. This story that emerged about one of the aides of Mr. Tony Blair who leaked a memo, basically a transcript of one of the meetings between former President Bush and former Prime Minister Blair, in which the president openly—he was very mad at Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Iraq war, especially during the Fallujah days—he discussed openly bombing of Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha. This civil servant who leaked that memo is out of jail by now, but he got a jail term for about a year.

So that’s another side of the story that maybe a lot of people don’t really get to know about, that it’s not only words, there is action as well.

And then, of course, there is my colleague who has only been recently released. His name is Sami al-Haj. He’s a Sudanese guy. He’s a cameraman for Al Jazeera. He was there in Afghanistan. Basically, it was charged that he filmed one of the interviews with bin Laden. He spent more than six years in Guantanamo. He was released, like many others who were released, from that place.

So that’s the background. Unfortunately, as I said, on one hand, our governments were not happy at all with Al Jazeera. We got our offices closed in many countries. Let me try to think. Some Arab countries either closed us totally or open-and-close, or sometimes taking a reporter to prison for a while and then releasing him. So it’s a variety of different degrees of treatment.

And of course, some countries banned us from working immediately—Iraq, for example, we were banned from covering there immediately after the liberation of Iraq or the overthrowing of the regime. It’s a very difficult job.

It’s really a very difficult job, especially within the goals that you’re really trying to work. It’s impossible to make everybody happy, but it just happens. For many years we were not allowed to work in Saudi Arabia at all, and only recently they allowed us to go cover the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage. I think our office was being closed in Algeria for a while, on and off. In Tunis we are not allowed to operate. In Morocco we used to air for about an hour a day live from there, but then Al Jazeera heard a report about some demonstration that took place in Morocco, and the government wasn’t happy, so they closed the operation.

I’m just saying that we work in a very tough environment. We are trying to do our best. We are working in an environment in which we are still even trying to find our steps as you might say, because 13–14 years of a new tradition, of a new experiment, I think is not really that long.

As I said, even on issues like the bin Laden tapes, for example, we made a lot of reviews. We even thought about them. It’s like when some people in the previous U.S. administration said, “These might be some coded passages. Maybe he’s sending orders to federal terrorists to do certain things by putting words in a certain order.” Well, it makes sense. So then there is that kind of cooperation that occurred. Okay, fine, get the speech and listen to it and see if it’s coded or not coded, and then we pick out the parts that we are going to air.

After that, this entire tape business basically came to an end in my opinion, with the Internet posting thing, the bin Laden and company, and Zarqawi, and I don’t know what, and all these big names that we all know about. They don’t need us anymore, they don’t need the TV channels, because basically now you can record yourself with a webcam and post it on the Internet on some of these websites and everybody has it basically.

But, unfortunately, it really kind of annoys me sometimes that when people want to speak about bin Laden on any American channel they use the pictures of 2001–2002 with the Al Jazeera logo on it. So it’s like something that never goes away.

But it changes, even on the practical level it changes, and we are trying to change as well.

I don’t want to take a lot of your time, but Robin asked me quickly to speak—maybe we met a few months ago when the Obama Administration had just taken office, and also because I spoke a lot about the former Bush Administration and our experience with it, which was not a very positive one. But again, I assure you, it was not only us.

At the time I was covering the Obama election, I was in Virginia, which is of course a very Republican state, as those of you who follow the news know. Even as journalists, at that time a lot of questions would come: “Which one would you support? Would you support McCain or would you support Obama?”

Of course, being Al Jazeera, I had to do a very shy behavior of hiding my feelings and truth. Of course I said, “I don’t know. I have no opinion. What are your feelings?”

If you say, “I like Obama, I want Obama to win,” this becomes “Al Jazeera reporter supports Obama.” So Obama is gone because an Al Jazeera reporter did this or did that.

So I have to think about it in those terms. It’s like that day when the spokesman for Hamas said, “Well, maybe we think if Obama wins it will become a positive development.” Of course the next day there were all the ads, the anti-Obama things. So I could just envision myself in such a situation, and I decided to shut up.

But, of course, I’m just saying this because I assume it’s no surprise for you that the outside world at least—I’m not going to talk about America, because maybe, after living here for eight years—Americans can be self-critical of themselves, but when it comes from an outsider it’s a different story.

So let’s speak about the rest of the world. The rest of the world loves us, I think, whether in Europe or—and that’s another thing, that really I think you know me a lot as a person, as an Arab and Muslim, which is this business that during the Bush years about “the Arabs and the Muslims hate us, they hate our lifestyle, they hate us because they don’t like democracy”—all these kinds of big slogans that were basically making things worse in my opinion, not even helping at all in any way in making things better, even after this terrible terrorist attack that took place on 9/11.

But anyway, when Obama came there was this feeling of relief in a lot of parts of the world, because during the Bush years those who opposed the Iraq war were not only the Arabs and Muslims. This was one fact which the U.S. media always used to kind of ignore in this regard, that it was not only the Arabs and Muslims who were against the war, but I think people in Latin America were against the war, people in Europe were against the war, people in Asia were against the war. But of course it helped ideologically at that time to put it that way.

So there were a lot of positive feelings, a lot of hopes, that when President Obama comes things will change. There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic. This is an open-minded person, he has traveled, he is intellectual, he listens, he doesn’t depend on his guts, he doesn’t look someone in the eyes and see whether he likes him or not, and that becomes the basis of taking decisions. It’s like a totally different story.

Maybe now comes the problem, which is that he made a lot of promises, and now, maybe one year later—again, I was personally very reserved about expressing any opinions. Of course, people back in Egypt, back in Palestine, where a very bad situation exists on the ground, whether in Gaza or on the West Bank and Jerusalem, the occupied East Jerusalem—but nevertheless there was a lot of hope that when he comes, things could relatively change, so let’s give him time.

But people were impatient. Of course, already eight years of the former administration, a lot of war, a lot of people getting killed, threats of new wars all the time, very tough language—”smoke them out” and “you’re either with us or against us.”

I think everybody wanted to calm down relatively at the international level. And even here in America itself, I think people were starting to recognize that the picture is not as rosy as it was supposed to be. I’m not going to speak about no weapons of mass destruction, but also a lot of the rest that came with that.

So I was very reserved about expressing any opinions. But then a year has gone by and people maybe are entitled to start to raise questions.

Of course, President Obama, when he first came, one of the first things was he appointed Senator George Mitchell as his special envoy to the Middle East. That was a very good move. A lot of people have a lot of respect for Senator Mitchell worldwide because of his role in mediating the peace agreement in Ireland. He’s an honest guy. More important than the character of Senator Mitchell himself, how immediately this came, that it was one of the things that he did right away, which was a sign of concern, that he wants things to change.

But now a lot of time has passed and a lot of the promises that the President has made seem to be not coming true. Even worse, there seems to be a kind of a retreat from those original promises, which makes people a little bit worried.

But it’s my role as a reporter here, like throughout all media, to present to people back home how complicated the situation is here in the United States and how a lot of domestic challenges face the President and how he also made a lot of promises on the domestic level as well.

What I’m trying to say is that President Obama raised a lot of high expectations, and that’s my worry right now, that when you raise so many expectations—that you’re going to work on ending the Iraq war and you’re going to find a solution for Iran and you are going to finish the Afghanistan war and you are going to make peace between Arabs and Israelis. So a lot of topics on the agenda within a very difficult environment.

So we are still waiting and seeing, but I am seeing signs here and there of people saying, “When is this change really coming?”

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: Because you were mentioning at the beginning that we don’t really have access to the broadcast media that comes out of Al Jazeera here, this is literally just a question that I’d like you to comment on, not coming from anything that I have seen.

I saw a documentary a few years ago, called Control Room, that’s main point was that in Al Jazeera’s attempt to show the opinion and counter-opinion there’s a lot of sensationalism involved.

The reason I prefaced my question the way I did was because I don’t think the American media does things any better. But I was just wondering if you could comment on a little bit if you thought that Al Jazeera was more or less sensationalist, if that’s necessarily a bad thing, and just your general views on that.

KHALED DAWOUD: It’s in the eye of the beholder what’s sensational. That’s the issue. Al Jazeera has a lot of interest, for example, in covering the Palestinian-Israeli topic because the Palestinian-Israeli topic is very popular back home. I mean some people would say, “Oh, this is a lot of sensationalism. You show a lot of pictures of children that are getting killed or people who are dying.” But someone has to show this. You know what I mean?

But again, everybody makes mistakes sometimes. Maybe in certain incidents we went through the sensational line. People always like to satisfy their viewers. You always think about “What does my audience want to see?” Maybe we fall into these mistakes sometimes. But you always try to—

Personally, I don’t think we are like that, of course, I don’t think we’re sensational. I think we are, first of all, presenting a picture that nobody else wants to show, again like when you have a war going on in Somalia. We also try to take care of cases that nobody is talking about, places like in Sudan, like in Somalia, like in Yemen, even in other areas that nobody covers. We also want to show some problems that are happening in certain places that nobody speaks about, not even here in the American media. I think that the international audience deserves that.

I think even the American audience actually deserves much better than they are getting right now in terms of international news. I watch CNN local here or I watch Fox local or any of the locals. As an international journalist or someone, I feel like, “Oh my God, I can never get information out of this if I have to spend my entire day watching seven or eight days of continuous coverage of Michael Jackson, as if nothing else existed in the world, or Anna Nicole Smith, or the kid in the balloon, or all that stuff.”

Is this sensational? What is this? I don’t know. So I cover political news. I show tough stuff. I show some bad pictures that nobody else wants to see. But others I don’t think are doing a good job for their audience by setting a different agenda for reasons that are also very political in my view.

QUESTION: You said that you were a journalist at the White House during the previous administration.

KHALED DAWOUD: Yes.

QUESTIONER: Are you still there with this new administration; or, if not, what have you heard from your colleague about how has it changed? What’s the mood? Does the president feel more accessible, and in what way? So it’s more than one question.

ROBIN VAN PUYENBROECK: You work for Fox?

QUESTIONER: No, I work for Bloomberg.

KHALED DAWOUD: He’s my neighbor at the UN, so we’re on good terms. Actually, I moved to New York four years ago. I stopped covering the White House four years ago. The situation now is much better. Even I can feel it here at the United Nations. I get interviews with the UN ambassador, Ambassador Susan Rice. She gives me interviews. Actually they approach us.

My bureau chief, who is in Washington—our main office is in Washington—got an interview maybe twice with Hillary Clinton. He got an interview with Defense Secretary Gates. So of course we are having better access.

We didn’t get the White House yet. We didn’t get Mr. Obama. He gave it to al-Arabiya, which is our main competition, when he first took office. Maybe soon, hopefully. It’s like a little bit too much maybe, like taking office and three days later giving an interview to Al Jazeera.

QUESTION: In Washington have you seen any noticeable impact on how other channels cover the Middle East or the region based on Al Jazeera’s approach—and maybe not just the big ones, like CNN and BBC, but maybe the influence that Al Jazeera may have in other less covered regions, like Latin America or South Asia?

KHALED DAWOUD: Yes. If you talk about Latin America and South Asia, that falls more into the Al Jazeera English influence, because Al Jazeera [inaudible] before speaking. Al Jazeera English does cover very well, I think, those parts of the world, Latin America and Asia.

But for us in the Arab world, if I can just mention the effect of Al Jazeera, when it first came out in 1996, maybe there were two or three satellite channels like Al Jazeera. Right now there are about 200–300 satellite channels and each country wants to have its own satellite channels. So it has basically opened the door to an entire new market of people trying to present various points of views.

I think this is also one of the main important, positive effects of Al Jazeera itself, in my opinion, in terms of its effect on other media. It means opening the debate and opening, as I said, different models for people to see and to judge and to have different sources of information and reach their own conclusions.

ROBIN VAN PUYENBROECK: Thank you, on behalf of Carnegie, for joining us tonight. Khaled is flying off home for Egypt tomorrow, so we just got him right in time. It shows again how important it is to understand how other people in the world see the world we live in. So thank you again.

KHALED DAWOUD: Thank you.

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The following is an interview given even before that by Mr. Wadah Khanfar and it says basically very similar things though obviously not emphasizing Egypt. It is an added witness to the ALJAZEERA effort in the US.
 http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/storie…

————————

a www.SustainabiliTank.info previous posting quoting Al Jazeera was: http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2010/01…

and in full:

Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Chevron Oil, Remind us of Climate Change By Quoting From Cairo Osama Bin Laden Saying That The World Should Boycott American Goods And The US Dollar Because Of Liabilities On Global Warming. YOU BET – THIS IS INTENDED TO DISCREDIT FURTHER THE ISSUE! THANKS – WE DO NOT NEED FRIENDS LIKE BIN LADENS.

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 29th, 2010
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

News Alert: Bin Laden blasts U.S. for climate change
06:49 AM EST Friday, January 29, 2010
——————–

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called in a new audiotape for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming. In the tape, aired in part on Al-Jazeera television Friday, bin Laden warns of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt

This information we picked up on a page of The Washington Post that includes a large advertisement from CHEVRON Oil Company:

“HUMAN ENERGY” “Every day Chevron invests $59 million in People. In ideas. In progress – Learn more”
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con…

Bin Laden blasts US for climate change.

Includes also a photo from the FILE – “This is an undated photo of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden issued a new audio message claiming responsibility for the Christmas day bombing attempt in Detroit and vowed further attacks. (Anonymous – AP)

The Associated Press
Friday, January 29, 2010; 6:52 AM
CAIRO — Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called in a new audiotape for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming.

In the tape, aired in part on Al-Jazeera television Friday, bin Laden warns of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt.

He says the world should “stop consuming American products” and “refrain from using the dollar,” according to a transcript on
Al-Jazeera’s Web site.

The new message, whose authenticity could not immediately be confirmed, comes after a bin Laden tape released last week in which he endorsed a failed attempt to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day.

UNFCCC should take notice of this when next time Saudi Arabia will claim to be paid US Dollars for the losses that it will incur when the world will finally decide to use less oil – their hidden treasure under the desert sand. Whatever we think of Bin Laden – we know that it is the US dollars paid for oil that fuelled both – the monarchy of The House of Saud and the Bin Laden family complaints that these dollars corrupted the purity of the faith as they see it. Now – that is why we post the piece also on our “cartoons” column – not really because of our disbelief in the Chevron statement or the actual content of what is attributed to Osama.

We are afraid that some narrow minded people might actually say that because Osama says that the US is to be blamed for Global Warming – it is obvious that Global Warming is a non-issue – and US CATO will thus bless on Bin Laden – so The Heartland Institute can put him up im its Gallery of Fame. Crazy – I told you so.

The EU refuses to see the multi headed Hydra it has become and expects President Obama to play along. Reality calls – EU please get serious at becoming some sort of one headed entity! The US President is a busy man now with all that US Jazz.

It slowly starts sinking in – we said it a long time ago!

Battling the ‘Multilateral Zombie’ – EU climate strategy after Copenhagen.
LEIGH PHILLIPS

February 3, 2010, http://euobserver.com/9/29354/?rk=1,
 http://old.norden.org/analysnorden/defau…

EUOBSERVER / ANALYSIS – “The EU’s post-Copenhagen strategy should be
just to have a strategy, any strategy,” quips one Brussels think-tank
wag during an interview.

The rough hip-check Europe received in the Danish capital in December,
sidelining the bloc during the eleventh-hour huddle between major
powers that produced the Copenhagen Accord, has produced a wave of
despondency and cynicism amongst Brussels politicians, green
lobbyists, and analysts – and carbon traders across the continent to
boot. They’re all having a crack at how poorly the EU played its hand
during climate negotiations.

For the last three years, if it hasn’t been the institutional reform
of the Lisbon Treaty, it’s been the bloc’s obsession with climate
change that has dominated the EU agenda. Even if the EU is well off
the at least 40 percent cut in emissions that science demands if we
are to avoid catastrophic climate change, it remains the case that as
a result of its 2008 climate and energy package, Europe remains the
most advanced rich-country power on the planet in terms of its binding
CO2 reduction commitment.

With its climate boy-scout badge afixed to its sleeve, Brussels headed
off to Camp Copenhagen expecting at least to see its self-proclaimed
leadership reflected in winning something along the lines of a broad
commitment from other powers to at least a 20-percent cut in carbon
emissions below 1990 levels by 2020.

But in the end, the EU ended up the goody-two-shoes pupil who’s top of
the class, but yet, when he invites all the other kids over for a
party, glumly watches as they end up playing among each other instead
of with him. It was the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa that
cobbled together the last-minute three-page-long Copenhagen Accord
without the EU even in the room, while most of the developing world
complained throughout the two weeks that Brussels was at best just a
cat’s paw for Washington.

Denmark’s Connie Hedegaard, now incoming EU
climate commissioner, was repeatedly attacked for favouring rich
countries over the developing world.

“It was the strangest conference I have been at in my life, from all
points of view,” Mr Barroso told a pow-wow of the leading European
think-tanks in early January.

Typical of the initial EU reaction were comments from Swedish
environment minister Andres Carlgren, who, when meeting in Brussels in
late December with his EU counterparts to debrief after the UN summit
and begin the discussion of what to do next, slammed the result as a
“disaster.”

“It was a really great failure and we have to learn from that,” he
said at the time. { but the gentleman forgot to say whose failure it was!}

Glass half full!

However, after the holidays, a clutch of pollyanna-ish EU officials
have since fervently urged everyone to consider the Accord’s silver
lining. Both President Barroso and the bloc’s chief climate
negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, in various venues have emphasised
that many of the things the EU had been pushing for were contained in
the final result – developed countries agreed for the first time a
concrete sum for climate finance, a target maximum average global
temperature increase of two degrees was embraced and a review,
allowing for a ratcheting up of targets if necessary, is foreseen for
2015.

At the same time, EU member states that have never been comfortable
with the bloc’s climate ambitions have used the opportunity to delay
or block European plans to boost its CO2 emissions reduction
commitment from 20 percent on 1990 levels to 30 percent. On 18
January, environment ministers met in Seville, to assess, for the
second time, the reasons for the failure in the Danish capital. UK,
France, Germany, Belgium and Spain continued to push for the increased
pledge, while Italy and Poland said now was not the time given the
poverty of ambition by other states at Copenhagen.

As of this week, the consensus in the bloc is to maintain its target
of 20 percent and conditional offer of 30 percent if other powers make
comparable efforts – in other words exactly the same position the EU
has held for the last year, although Ms Hedegaard has publicly said
she hopes to see a move to 30 percent “by Mexico,” meaning the next UN
climate summit in the Central American nation at the end of 2010.

At the same time, the commission itself is in the ‘twenty-percenter’
camp, pushing this position in Copenhagen, “afraid to be naked” with
nothing left to put on the table in the game of climate strip poker.
Moreover, crucially, the executive’s goal of a transatlantic emissions
trading system is unworkable with cuts pledges that are wildly
divergent and without legally binding commitments from Washington.

The US is looking to a 17 percent emissions reduction on 2005 levels,
which works out to be just three percent when using the same 1990
baseline year as the EU. Watch for the US, if legislation gets
through, at some point to somehow nudge up its cut to 20 percent and
the EU to stick to the same figure, dressed up in language about how
the two targets are now comparable, with a fudge over the differing
baseline years.

Support unravelling:

Separately, four of the five architects of the Accord, Brazil, South
Africa, India and China, have themselves gone lukewarm on the project,
smarting from accusations from much of the rest of the developing
world that these four richest of the poor countries had broken ranks
after a year of unprecedented global south unity.

“The two-track negotiating process …is the only legitimate process
to reach a legally binding treaty in Mexico,” he added.

Meanwhile, the cornerstone of the Accord, an understanding that
however limited America’s commitment, Washington would at least be
able to deliver on this promise.

But with the surprise election to the US Senate of Massachusetts
Republican Scott Brown on an anti-climate-bill ticket, killing the
Democrat’s filibuster-proof majority, the country’s climate
legislation is threatened. A defeated or heavily watered down bill
only engenders further reservations in the minds of Chinese, Indian
and even European leadership about promising tough reduction targets.

For all the public talk of Latin American, Chinese and African climate
“villains” blocking the process in Copenhagen, privately, there is
frustration with Washington as well. A senior EU policy official
speaking to EUobserver described President Obama’s position as the
same as that of George Bush. “We are willing but only if others move,”
the official said, attributing the position to both the current and
former US leaders.

One EU climate voice {?}

A popular post-Copenhagen analysis from the Brookings Institute, the
centrist US think-tank, that has made the rounds of officialdom and
NGO-land warns of a slow-motion failure scenario similar to the Doha
round of WTO talks, a process it describes as a “multilateral zombie”
in which climate negotiations “stagger on piteously, never making much
progress while never quite dying either.”

Nevertheless, despite the dark days and the cynicism of some
onlookers, we can already begin to sense the outlines of a European
strategy.

EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy has already said he hopes to
see a common climate strategy emerge from an 11 February extraordinary
EU summit originally scheduled to deal with the economy. Angela
Merkel, as well, has upgraded a climate meeting in Bonn in June from
expert to ministerial level and the European Commission is preparing a
series of proposals that it is to put to the member states.

While this sort of member-state activity is likely to continue, the
Lisbon Treaty has given the commission a powerful new diplomatic
weapon it intends to use to the fullest.

Sidelining the UN:

Related to this, the major task will be to break the remarkable unity
shown by developing nations. The UNFCCC’s principle dating back to
Kyoto of “common but differentiated responsibility,” is understood by
developing nations to mean that those countries that caused the
problem should pay for solving it and make binding commitments to CO2
reductions.

The third world has said that it would be happy to develop along a
low-carbon path itself, but that the rich north will have to pay for
this and that their emissions cuts should in any case be voluntary.
The World Bank, unhelpfully, has estimated the cost of all this to be
$400 billion a year. Meanwhile, wealthy nations, would rather that the
developing world, but specifically China and to a lesser extent India,
agree to binding, verifiable CO2 cuts without the price tag.

The key advantage of the Copenhagen Accord for rich countries is that
it “weakens or even does away with the principle of common but
differentiated responsibilities,” as the South Centre, a Geneva-based
think-tank close to developing world governments, warns – another
reason why the Basic countries, upon reflection, have taken a distance
from the deal.

In many ways, Copenhagen was a victory for the developing world, in
that it managed to hold off against pressure to junk the Kyoto
Protocol and in the end ensured that the Copenhagen Accord was only
“noted” by the UN plenary instead of endorsed, making it a document
floating in a legal limbo.

Border tariff:

It should also be remembered that many other major powers were
sidelined at Copenhagen. Japan and Russia were also absent from
Copenhagen’s endgame. In many ways, the EU’s limited influence has
been largely a product of its own climate success. Although Europe is
the world’s third largest emitter, this will likely change in the near
future. Ironically, if the continent isn’t going to be as much of a
problem in absolute (as opposed to per capita) terms as China or India
by 2030, it doesn’t have much of a bargaining chip. Washington was
always going to be far more interested in Beijing.

Copenhagen was very much the US and China show, but it won’t always be.

——–

This feature was originially written for the Nordic Council’s Analys
Norden website.

{ We wonder at the last sentence of the article because we think that unless the EU does in fact unite under  one leadership it will not amount to much when the US continues to deal with the BASICs – I mean the countries that are form the basic future. The EU should aim at becoming the G3 to be added to China and the US in future global negotiations that will include also the IBSA and one or two more states. See please next article.}

——————————————————————————-

US blames Lisbon Treaty for EU summit fiasco. Mr Obama – the Madrid summit decision is being seen as a diplomatic snub to Spain.
by ANDREW RETTMAN from Brussels.

February 3, 2010, http://euobserver.com/9/29398/?rk=1
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS  writes -  The US State Department has said that President Barack Obama’s decision not to come to an EU summit in Madrid in May is partly due to confusion arising from the Lisbon Treaty.

State department spokesman Philip J. Crowley told press in Washington on Tuesday (2 February) that the treaty has made it unclear who the US leader should meet and when. { that sounds very clear to me.}

“Up until recently, they [summits] would occur on six-month intervals,
as I recall, with one meeting in Europe and one meeting here. And that
was part of – the foundation of that was the rotating presidency
within the EU. Now you have a new structure regarding not only the
rotating EU presidency, you’ve got an EU Council president, you’ve got
a European Commission president,” he said.

“We are working through this just as Europeans themselves are working
through this: When you have a future EU-US summit meeting, who will
host it and where will it be held?” he added. “All of this is kind of
being reassessed in light of architectural changes in Europe.”

The Lisbon Treaty came into force on 1 December, 2009. It created the post
of a new EU Council president and EU foreign relations chief in order
to give the union a stronger voice abroad.

It kept the institution of the six-month rotating EU presidency as
well, with the member state holding the chairmanship to do the bulk of
behind-the-scenes policy work in Brussels.

The Spanish EU presidency is being closely watched to see how the EU
manages the transition to the new power structure. The EU Council
president has so far taken charge of summits in the EU capital. But
Madrid was to share the limelight with a few top-level events at home.

The state department’s Mr Crowley said the US and Spain have been in
touch “directly” to discuss Mr Obama’s decision after Madrid learned
about it through the media on Monday.

“Obviously, there’s been some disappointment expressed by the
government of Spain, and we understand that and we’ll be working with
them on that,” he said.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero and Mr Obama are both
expected to attend the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on
Thursday. But no bilateral meeting has been announced so far.

Mr Zapatero, a centre-left secularist, has taken flak for his trip in
Spanish media, with the El Pais daily calling his decision to attend
the prayer event “shocking.”

News Alert: Bin Laden blasts U.S. for climate change
06:49 AM EST Friday, January 29, 2010
——————–

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called in a new audiotape for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming. In the tape, aired in part on Al-Jazeera television Friday, bin Laden warns of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt

This information we picked up on a page of The Washington Post that includes a large advertisement from CHEVRON Oil Company:

“HUMAN ENERGY” “Every day Chevron invests $59 million in People. In ideas. In progress – Learn more”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012901463.html?hpid=topnews

Bin Laden blasts US for climate change.

Includes also a photo from the FILE – “This is an undated photo of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. Bin
Laden issued a new audio message claiming responsibility for the Christmas day bombing attempt in Detroit and vowed further attacks. (Anonymous – AP)

The Associated Press
Friday, January 29, 2010; 6:52 AM
CAIRO — Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called in a new audiotape for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming.

In the tape, aired in part on Al-Jazeera television Friday, bin Laden
warns of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop
it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt.

He says the world should “stop consuming American products” and
“refrain from using the dollar,” according to a transcript on
Al-Jazeera’s Web site.

The new message, whose authenticity could not immediately be
confirmed, comes after a bin Laden tape released last week in which he
endorsed a failed attempt to blow up an American airliner on Christmas
Day.

—————-

UNFCCC should take notice of this when next time Saudi Arabia will claim to be paid US Dollars for the losses that it will incur when the world will finally decide to use less oil – their hidden treasure under the desert sand. Whatever we think of Bin Laden – we know that it is the US dollars paid for oil that fuelled both – the monarchy of The House of Saud and the Bin Laden family complaints that these dollars corrupted the purity of the faith as they see it. Now – that is why we post the piece also on our “cartoons” column – not really because of our disbelief in the Chevron statement or the actual content of what is attributed to Osama.

We are afraid that some narrow minded people might actually say that because Osama says that the US is to be blamed for Global Warming – it is obvious that Global Warming is a non-issue – and US CATO will thus bless on Bin Laden – so The Heartland Institute can put him up im its Gallery of Fame. Crazy – I told you so.

The Arab Peninsula and the Horn of Africa -too narrow  straights for the West.

POLITICS: Russia, China Sustain Military Toehold in Yemen.
By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 5 (IPS) – Russia has stolen a march over the United States in the multi-million-dollar arms market in cash-strapped Yemen, whose weapons purchases are being funded mostly by neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

The Yemeni armed forces, currently undergoing an ambitious military modernisation programme worth an estimated four billion dollars, are armed with weapons largely from Russia, China, Ukraine and the former Eastern Europe and Soviet republics.

With the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day by a Nigerian student, reportedly trained by al Qaeda in Yemen, the administration of President Barack Obama has pledged to double its military and counterterrorism aid, to nearly 150 million dollars, to strengthen the besieged government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Currently, Yemen receives assistance under several U.S.-funded programmes, including Foreign Military Financing (FMF), International Military Education and Training (IMET), Non-Proliferation, Anti-terrorism and De-mining, and Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction.

But the proposed military aid to Yemen – all of it gratis – along with U.S. arms supplies, is negligible compared with weapons, military training and technical expertise from non-U.S. sources.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), one of the world’s best known think tanks researching arms control and disarmament, Russia accounted for nearly 59 percent of all major weapons deliveries to Yemen during 2004-2008, followed by Ukraine at 25 percent, Italy at 10 percent, Australia’s five percent, and the United States at less than one percent.

Dr. Paul Holtom, director of SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Programme, told IPS that at the beginning of this year, the Russian media reported that Yemen had signed a deal to buy an estimated one billion dollars worth of arms from Moscow (with some reports giving figures as high as 2.5 billion dollars).

These weapons, he said, included additional MiG-29 combat aircraft, helicopters, tanks and armoured vehicles.

Holtom said there were also published reports suggesting these purchases were part of a proposed four-billion-dollar military modernisation programme.

But he said he does not have an update on the degree of progress made on these arms deals.

Dan Darling, Europe & Middle East Military Markets analyst at the Connecticut-based Forecast International Inc., a leading provider of market intelligence on the military, told IPS that in terms of primary arms suppliers to Yemen, “almost everything revolves around Russia”.

The core of the Yemeni Air Force is of Russian-legacy, including MiG-21s and MiG-29s and Su-22s, he pointed out.

From 2001 through 2008, Yemen received 1.4 billion dollars worth of arms, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), with 600 million dollars in weapons from Russia.

China provided 200 million dollars worth of armaments, while about 400 million dollars in arms were from a mix of former Soviet republics and East European nations (mainly Ukraine, but also Belarus, Czech Republic, Poland, Italy and others).

A resource-starved Middle Eastern nation, Yemen has negligible quantities of oil and is categorised as one of the world’s poorest nations.

The U.S. State Department has described Yemen as “desperately poor” but a “vital counterterrorism partner”.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Saudi Arabia had provided about two billion dollars in aid to Yemen last year – “an amount that dwarfs the 150 million dollars in security assistance that the United States will ask Congress to approve for the 2010 fiscal year”.

With the new terrorist threat from insurgents in Yemen, the United States is gearing itself for a virtual new battle front against al Qaeda – besides Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

Darling of Forecast International Inc told IPS: “My take is that Washington understands how crucial Yemen is to regional security and stability.”

He said Yemen’s proximity to Saudi Arabia – from which many al Qaeda operatives are believed to have crossed into Yemen – and its importance in terms of shipping lanes at the mouth of the Red Sea and in terms of combating piracy in the area make ignoring Yemen a risk the U.S. is unwilling to take.

The recent spate of fighting with rebels in the north, combined with the pressures facing President Saleh and the belief that al Qaeda may have found a sort of sanctuary in Yemen, means that the country will garner more and more attention within U.S. government circles, he added.

“The State Department realises the looming potential for disaster in Yemen, where a combination of civil strife, an exploding population, negligible oil reserves, a structurally weak economy, high rates of poverty and unemployment, and deteriorating water supplies all threaten to turn the country into the proverbial failed state,” Darling said. “How they intend to combat this possibility is beyond my purview, but I’m guessing that you will see greater degrees of development assistance and oversight as to how the money is allocated,” he added.

From the latest news coming from Washington – “Under the new airport
rules, all citizens of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq,
Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen must receive a pat
down and an extra check of their carry-on bags before boarding a plane
bound for the United States, officials said. Citizens of Cuba, Iran,
Sudan and Syria — nations considered ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ —
face the same requirement.”

That means Cuba and thirteen Muslim states: Afghanistan, Algeria,
Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia,
Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

These news caused a lot of comments, but we think the wrong comments.

We assume obviously that Washington is ready finally to address the
terrorism issue. Airplane terrorism, as we learned on 9/11, is not
about transport of weapons but about terrorists – to be specific since
9/11 – we speak here about Islamic terrorists. If you want to catch
terrorists you must look for terrorists. Looking for baby formula is
not the answer – but looking for those passengers whose profiles are
suspicious might be a better bet. Sure, obviously, not all Muslims are
terrorists, and profiling is terrible – even illegal, but if you want
to catch terrorists you start with the profile that most fits Islamic
terrorists, and you bet – they are Muslims of any color. Even though
they may be traveling with documents issued by non-Islamic States,
i.e. the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Switzerland, or even the
US.

So, it is not easy to define exactly what papers are carried by the
terrorists, but you can have some guidelines to increase your chance
of catching them. looking for a profile of an Asian or African Muslim.
Then, learn from the Israelis how to talk to them – you may even find
out that they are so convinced that their cause is the right one, that
they will lower their guard and just plainly disclose that what you
see is all they got.

There may be a Jamaican convert to Islam who preached terrorism in the UK
and resides now in Kenya – a case in point. Kenya does want him either and
he will be sent back to Jamaica a second time. yes, this is a problem if you
are American and Jamaica does not cooperate – but he is a Muslim and no
Anti-Defamation league is enrtitled to tell you Mr. President that he should
not be stripped and searched if he wants to travel via the US to Jamaica.
This is simple.

But what about Cuba? Fidel Castro is more atheist then Catholic, surely
no Muslim. Whatever went on in the past is history to me and I do not believe
prologue to Mr. Castro. So why mix him and his country up with 13 Islamic
States involved in Islamic Terrorism? That is unless someone in the US longs
to see him give cover to such terrorists in the future so they get new reasons
to be after him? If the Jamaica case has anything to teach us – it is that the
US is better off reinsuring its rear parts from anger caused by mistreatment
and friendship is not achieved by mulling over past grief. Specially, as several
hundred former sugar baron families living in Florida should not be allowed to
hold hostage the US when it comes to real US interests.

Mr. President, I watched Bolivia and Venezuela leaders speak in Copenhagen,
they fumed and brimmed with words – no stones or missiles. Their ALBA is,
I think, the natural ally of a US that manages to disengage from the Islamic
world of oil. So, it is the US self interest that calls for you, Mr. President, to
invite Fidel Castro to Washington for a tete-a-tete and start on a way that
eventually will give the US the wall of safety it needs when addressing the 21st
Century centers of terror – the Islamists’ terror cancer that will continue to ooze
as long as we use oil.

Please start by taking him of that list!

The thirteen on that list include the obvious Iran – Syria – Lebanon
trio of the Shii’a Islam, it includes the Afghanistan/Pakistan US
theater of operations and Iraq, as well as the other US theater Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan that misses Egypt and the Gaza strip. A
fourth historic region includes Libya and Algeria, then with Nigeria,
these are newer sources of oil for the US, and as such clear potential
sources of unhappy Islamists who complain about the changes in their
countries as fueled by oil money. In very few countries terrorism
against the US was actually started by rulers decree. Libya, Iran,
Syria, Sudan, Somalia may be the exceptions, but Saudi Arabia and
Yemen may have seen rulers who deflected anger against themselves into
anger against foreigners. In the majority of cases the terrorist is a
person of convictions and the situation could have been avoided had
the US and the rest of the Western World, tried to be less squanderous
with the oil we got addicted to.

Having said the above – let us get now to the point – MR PRESIDENT -
PLEASE – TAKE CUBA OFF THAT LIST BECAUSE THEY DO NOT BELONG ON THAT
LIST IN 2010.

* * * *

Please look – I am posting here four reference – links to news
articles of today’s New York Times.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05t…

New Air Security Checks From 14 Nations to U.S. Draw Criticism
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/…

In Yemen, U.S. Faces Leader Who Puts Family First
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/…

Behind Afghan Bombing, an Agent With Many Loyalties
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/…

Kenya Seeks to Deport Muslim Cleric to Jamaica

————————

THE UPDATE:

We have received a comment on this post and it presents a very valid point supposedly made at the UN General Assembly by the Foreign Minister of Cuba: “I mean if they were going to include us, then they should have at least thrown in North Korea.”

Even if the e-mail we received from ajay -   akazif at gmail.com  as presented by www. eggplantpost.com in http://eggplantpost.com/2010/01/05/cuba-… were a made up story, the argument holds water nevertheless. DID THE US INCLUDE CUBA ON THAT LIST BECAUSE IT WANTED TO AVOID BEING SEEN AS GOING AFTER A RAG-TAG OF ISLANIC COUNTRIES? Now, we believe that US security should be spoken here – not again US appeasement-for-oil please!

“Full-body scanners on display at Reagan National Airport: Many experts say the full-body scanners would have detected the explosives carried aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, but the
machines have also raised privacy concerns over the detailed body image that is displayed as part of the screening.”

TSA – Transportation and Security Administration – tries to assuage privacy concerns about full-body scans.

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 4, 2010
It has come to this.

Already shoeless, beltless and waterless, more beleaguered air passengers will be holding their legs apart, raising their arms and effectively baring it all as they pass through U.S. airport security
checkpoints.

Add the “full-body scan” to the list of indignities that some travelers are confronting in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era of vigilance.

Federal authorities, working to close security gaps exposed by the thwarted Christmas Day terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, are multiplying the number of imaging machines at the nation’s biggest
airports. The devices scan passengers’ bodies and produce X-ray-like images that can reveal objects concealed beneath clothes…….

- – - – - -

now add the “me-au” from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC Legal Director   nshora at adc.org

Washington, D.C. | January 5, 2010 | www.adc.org |

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is deeply concerned by the new Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) directives, which went into effect on January 4th at midnight.  According to news sources, these directives will require citizens from 14 countries, all Arab or Muslim countries, with the exception of Cuba, to go through enhanced security screening. Such screening can include full pat-downs, scans, delays, and anything associated with secondary screening – an extra search of the passenger’s carry-on luggage may also be required.  News sources also stated that the directives are applicable to any travelers, including US CITIZENS, who have passed through one of these 14 countries, or who have taken flights that have originated from these 14 countries.

ADC is very troubled as such directives will have negative ramifications on Arab-Americans, citizens of the 14 countries, and all Americans who visit these countries. A disparate segment of the Arab-American community will be scrutinized because of these new guidelines. The blanket labeling of hundreds of millions of civilians based solely on their country of citizenship or travel is not only unfairly discriminatory based on national origin, but also improperly labels millions of innocent people as somehow suspect or possible terrorists.

The new directives came following the Christmas Day attempted airline attack that threatened our national security, and which ADC has strongly condemned. Implementing an effective and productive counterterrorism tool is paramount. However, casting a wide net against individuals based on their country of origin, race or religion is not an effective counterterrorism tool. During the past decade, similar racial, ethnic and religious profiling tactics and practices have time and again misdirected precious counterterrorism resources, damaged foreign relations with key allies, fueled the fires of extremists by giving them an excuse, stigmatized communities, and most importantly did not have any discernible impact on security. Based on precedent, these new directives will be no different than these past practices and their adverse consequences; and while such directives may appear to make us feel safer, the reality is that they discriminate against innocent persons and divert attention from real threats.

Resources must instead be focused on high-risk individuals based on proper intelligence, better coordination and communication between different governmental agencies. In addition, continued engagement with the Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian community groups must be strengthened, and must not be discouraged by ethnic profiling tactics.

ADC has been in contact with TSA and the Department Homeland Security (DHS) and is planning to file a complaint and request for additional information with the Department.  ADC urges all travelers affected by these new guidelines to always comply with the Transportation Security Officer’s (TSO’s) request.  In the event of any abuse or misuse of authority, please request the TSO’s name and badge number, and file a complaint with ADC’s Legal Department at  legal at adc.org.

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Honestly, I feel the pain of decent members of the ADC, but am appalled at the chutzpah to announce the complaints of that organization without a single word attached saying that as loyal citizens to this country they are ready to organize themselves in units of informers when it comes to transgressions by people from their country of birth, that are endangering the security of the country that gave to the ADC members the privilege of life under a secular democracy.

Yes, I know that the ADC has members that are Muslim, Christian or atheists. I know they have no Jews in ADC, but that is not the issue. The Arab countries, other Asian countries, and the African Arabized countries, on the list of 13, are all Islamic countries – in all of them Christians and Jews face very serious difficulties. Further, I know of good Muslims in the US and overseas, that participate with enlightened Jews in order to build bridges between communities. in Copenhagen I actually participated during the Climate conference at a pilgrimage that took us to places of worship that were Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim (that last meeting was held in the rooms of a Danish humanist society) – in this time sequence. Yes – good relationships are possible, but that will happen only when, and if, there is a clear understanding, and voiced recognition, that Islamic terrorism originates with Muslim individuals, and that in order to safeguard ourselves, profiling in search of instruments of terror is not a dirty word, but a means of self defense.

Also, in order to avoid needless friction, I suggest that the ADC moves front and center in the global effort to disengage from the addiction to oil.

And one more item – this website does speak up for Cuba as they surely are not part of the group of countries responsible for Islamicists performing acts of terror. So, they do not belong on that list of 14.

The US and Britain, followed by Japan, Germany and others, close their Embassies in Sanaa, Yemen.

About a dozen Yemenis were released by the Bush Administration from Guantanamo and sent back to Yemen. It turns out that they were about the organizers of a stronger Al-Qaeda presence in the country. The Obama Administration has ewleased seven more and still holds 90 Yemenis at Guantanamo. What should they do now with these detainees.

The Bush Administration has released all Saudi detainees from Guantanamo and TV pundits contend that the Bush Administration did not look at these releases as a securuty issue, but rather as an issue of diplomacy. Things get even worse when you listen to Marissa Porges from the Council of Foreign Affairs, who speaks of a Saudi Al-Qaeda unit and a Yemeni Al-Qaeda unit as if the Islamists are divided indeed according to lines the rulers of these countries have literally drawn on the sand. Then she gets even worse by noting that Saudi Arabia to the north has the oil fields that can be attacked if the terrorists are pushed out of Yemen. So, US security better be held at hock by the Saudi oil and the US interests that want the oil?  Not so?

Yemen downplays threat, need for Western intervention.
Yemeni government officials downplayed the threat of al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists operating from and within Yemen and the prospect the U.S. military would intercede in fighting militants in the country on the government’s behalf. The statements reflect concerns regarding the appearance of President Ali Abdullah Saleh before a domestic audience critical of U.S. intervention efforts. Yemeni officials say the government welcomes intelligence sharing but has not committed to conducting joint counter-terrorism operations with Western forces — seemingly contradicting U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus. Los Angeles Times

Yemen’s al-Qaida problem adds to long list of woes: Yemen’s internal problems — which range from water shortages and economic problems to two homegrown insurgencies — have kept the government’s attention focused elsewhere as the country increasingly becomes fertile operational grounds for al-Qaida. Groups from Yemen and Saudi Arabia have joined forces to form a larger, more capable al-Qaida structure. The New York Times

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LA Times -By Borzou Daragahi
January 4, 2010

Reporting from Beirut – Yemeni officials on Sunday dismissed the threat posed by Al Qaeda in their country as “exaggerated” and downplayed the possibility of cooperating closely with the United States in fighting Islamic militants, even as the U.S. and Britain temporarily closed their diplomatic outposts in Yemen because of unspecified Al Qaeda threats.

The statements by Yemen’s foreign minister, chief of national security and Interior Ministry came a day after the region’s top American military commander vowed to step up U.S. military support for the beleaguered Arabian Peninsula nation.

Analysts said the Yemeni statements reflected domestic political concerns about President Ali Abdullah Saleh appearing weak and beholden to the West as he faces numerous political challenges.

The group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the failed attempt at bombing a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day. The alleged attacker’s claim that he was tutored in Yemen set off alarm bells in Western capitals about the relatively lawless nation of 23 million, which is also facing an insurgency in the north and a separatist movement in the south.

U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus visited Yemen on Saturday and vowed to give Saleh increased aid to fight Al Qaeda. His promise was echoed by President Obama, who said the United States would step up intelligence-sharing and training of Yemeni forces and perhaps carry out joint attacks against militants in the region.

But Yemeni officials Sunday appeared to rebuff any close cooperation with the West. Foreign Minister Abubakr Qirbi told a government-run newspaper that his country welcomed intelligence-sharing but had made no commitment to conducting anti-terrorism operations in conjunction with the West.

“Yemen has its own short-term and long-term schemes to tackle terrorists anywhere in the republic that only call for intelligence and information coordination with other countries,” he told the daily newspaper Politics, the official Saba news agency reported.

A statement posted to the U.S. Embassy website cited “ongoing threats by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attack American interests in Yemen.” The British Foreign Office confirmed that its embassy had been closed for security reasons and said discussions would be held today on when to reopen the facility.

Both diplomatic missions in Sana, the Yemeni capital, normally are open Saturday through Wednesday.

The U.S. Embassy has been the site of attacks in the past. At least 16 people died there in a Sept. 17, 2008, car bomb attack that was claimed by Al Qaeda. Three mortar rounds missed the embassy and crashed into a nearby high school for girls in March 2008, killing a security guard. Police and alleged Al Qaeda militants exchanged small-arms fire near the embassy a year ago.

On Sunday, Obama’s top counter-terrorism advisor said the U.S. had evidence of a viable threat against the embassy, which led to the decision to close it.

“There are indications that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is targeting our embassy and targeting our personnel,” John Brennan said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding: “We’re not going to take any chances with the lives of our diplomats and others who are at that embassy.”

Asked whether Americans in the country are safe, Brennan said, “I think until the Yemeni government gets on top of the situation with Al Qaeda, there is a risk of attacks. A number of tourists have been, in fact, kidnapped. A number of tourists have been killed.”

But Yemen’s Interior Ministry posted a message to its website Sunday boasting that Al Qaeda militants were “under surveillance around the clock.”

And Saleh’s national security chief, Ali Anisi, said Sunday that Al Qaeda’s presence in Yemen was “exaggerated” and touted the success of his nation’s forces in stemming terrorism, according to an account of his comments reported by Saba news agency.

He reportedly insisted that Yemen was not a haven for Al Qaeda and pointed to “preemptive operations against militants which thwarted planned attacks on vital domestic and foreign interests in the country.”

According to Saba, he said that only 40% of the five dozen attempted terrorist attacks in the country since 1992 had succeeded.

Analysts say the increased focus on Yemen’s security situation creates a dilemma for Saleh, who is worried about appearing to cede sovereignty to the Americans when he is being politically assailed from all segments of the population.

“It’s about control,” said Abdullah Faqih, a professor of political science at Sana University. “The international actors need to assure the Yemeni government about its control. They don’t want to give concessions” to their rivals in the north or south.

A member of a smaller Shiite Muslim sect, Saleh has been accused for years of gaining political allies by turning a blind eye to the growing influence of Sunni extremists who have begun enforcing Islamic dress codes and setting up religious schools.

Qirbi, the foreign minister, emphasized in the interview published Sunday his nation’s “continuing rehabilitation of and advising misled terrorists,” a reference to its controversial program of re-educating and releasing convicted Islamic militants, some once held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay. About 90 Yemeni detainees are still being held at Guantanamo.

Faqih suggested that the United States and Britain announced the temporary closures of their embassies as a way of turning up the heat on Saleh, whose government depends on international assistance to combat a number of issues, including piracy off its Gulf of Aden coast and a drought along its mountain ridges.

“This could also be a kind of pressure,” he said. “If the World Bank decides to close its office, the country might collapse.”

Saleh has presided for decades over the Arab world’s poorest nation, a generally lawless and mountainous land that faces vast unemployment, high birthrates and a plummeting water supply. Rampant corruption and festering tribal disputes exacerbate the problems.

U.S. officials have limited direct aid to Yemen in the past for fear it would disappear into a government widely considered corrupt and unaccountable. But Washington increased the total anti-terrorism assistance from $4.6 million in 2006 to $67 million in 2009, according to the Pentagon.

Following a Dec. 24 airstrike against suspected Al Qaeda militants in Yemen, which killed 30 and was suspected by many of having been directed by Americans, some Yemenis fear U.S. involvement could further destabilize their country.

“We’re afraid that you will repeat the same mistake as in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Mohamed Abdul-Malik Mutawakil, a political scientist at Sana University. “The real challenge is to correct the situation. If you come to Yemen and you push for reform, justice, political change, a better economy, then you will pull the rug out from under Al Qaeda.”

 daragahi at latimes.com

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The New York Times, By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: January 2, 2010
SANA, Yemen — Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has rapidly evolved into an expanding and ambitious regional terrorist network thanks in part to a weakened, impoverished and distracted Yemeni government.While Yemen has chased two homegrown rebellions, over the last year the Qaeda cell here has begun sharing resources across borders and has been spurred on to more ambitious attacks by a leadership strengthened by released Qaeda detainees and returning fighters from Iraq.

The priorities of the Yemeni government have been fighting a war in the north and combating secessionists across the south. In the interim, Al Qaeda has flourished in the large, lawless and rugged tribal territories of Yemen, creating training camps, attacking Western targets and receiving increasing popular sympathy, Yemeni and American officials say.

Al Qaeda’s growing profile in Yemen became clear after a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, was able to overstay his visa here by several months, connect with Qaeda militants and, American officials believe, leave this country with a bomb sewn into his underwear.

In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama for the first time directly blamed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula for the bombing attempt and said that fighting the group would be a high priority. “In recent years, they have bombed Yemeni government facilities and Western hotels,” he said, adding, “So as president, I’ve made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government.”

The core of the group here is still thought to be small, perhaps no more than 200 people. But the group has the important advantage of being part of a larger, regional structure, having merged a year ago with the Saudi branch of Al Qaeda to form Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And it has been able to originate fairly sophisticated operations here, in Saudi Arabia and now on an airliner headed for Detroit.

Though Yemen played an early role in Al Qaeda’s history — it is Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, and it was the staging ground for the 2000 attack on the American destroyer Cole — the key chapters in the story of Al Qaeda’s rise here have been written recently by leaders who were released from detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, escaped from Yemeni prisons or were drawn to shelter here by common cause and ideology.

Those men have transformed and reoriented a weak local Qaeda cell that had made a kind of peace with the government after 2003. In the year since the Saudi and Yemeni branches merged, Al Qaeda has taken full advantage of the government’s preoccupation with the rebellions, building support from the tribal structures and traditions in Yemen’s poor and lawless territories.

One big moment came in February 2006, when 23 imprisoned men suspected of being members of Al Qaeda escaped from a high-security prison, reportedly with the aid of some Yemeni security forces. All but three or four of the men were eventually recaptured or killed by Yemeni security forces. But one prisoner, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, became leader of the Qaeda cell in Yemen and moved to reorganize it, focusing it on attacks against nearby Western targets. Another prisoner, Qassim al-Raimi, became the military commander.

The next year, Mr. Wuhayshi found a deputy and, perhaps, a rival for leadership, Said Ali al-Shihri, 36, a Saudi citizen. He was released from six years’ detention in Guantánamo Bay in December 2007 to a Saudi-run rehabilitation program. He disappeared from Saudi Arabia and emerged in Yemen, and he is considered by many to be the rising star of the local movement. Mr. Shihri had traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 and was apparently wounded there, and he was captured crossing back into Pakistan in December of that year.

Another Guantánamo detainee, also captured in Pakistan in 2001 and released to a Saudi rehabilitation program, is Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaysh, 30, a Saudi who also disappeared and is now described as the mufti, or theological guide, to Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.

Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born, English-speaking Internet imam of Al Qaeda here, returned to Yemen, his family’s home, in 2004. He was arrested in 2006 on security charges and was released in December 2007 after 18 months in prison. He then went to Britain and is believed to have returned to Yemen last spring.

Mr. Awlaki, 38, is not thought to have a major operational role. Still, American and Yemeni officials say they believe he provided a crucial link to Mr. Abdulmutallab, first through the Internet and then by meeting him in Yemen and helping to recruit him to the airliner bomb plot. He also provides Qaeda operatives here with a crucial shield against the government: the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis. As in Afghanistan and Pakistan, tribal codes require the protection of those who seek refuge and help — even more so for a clan member and his colleagues. Mr. Awlaki is also said to have helped negotiate deals with other tribal leaders.

Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist who studies Al Qaeda and knows Mr. Awlaki, denied in an interview that the imam was a member of Al Qaeda, saying instead that he served as an articulate window to jihadism for English speakers.

Yemeni officials, in two major strikes against Qaeda targets in December, first said that they had killed Mr. Awlaki, but he later spoke to Mr. Shaea to prove that he was alive, as other key leaders seem to be. But dozens of Qaeda family members and local residents were killed, increasing antigovernment sentiment.

In recent years, Al Qaeda has had an increasingly rich recruiting pool.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, said that many of the nearly 2,000 Yemenis who were believed to have fought in Iraqi insurgencies had returned to join the cause here. And many Yemenis who went to Saudi Arabia to seek work — like Mr. bin Laden’s father — have had children who have been influenced by the more radical Islam of Saudi Arabia, bringing ideas of jihad home to an already conservative Islamic Yemen.

There has also been an influx to Yemen of at least 200,000 refugees from Somalia, according to official figures, and probably many more than that. Al Qaeda has also been very active in Somalia, seeking refuge and recruits among the Islamist groups there. And now that Yemen has proved to be a safe training ground for Al Qaeda, a link between the Yemeni and Somali contingents has strengthened.

“The Somalia problem is merging with the Yemeni issue,” Mr. Ranstorp said.

But Al Qaeda here also has problems, including a possible leadership struggle.

Although Mr. Wuhayshi is still widely believed to be in control, he is considered uncharismatic, and his leadership and the merger were not endorsed by Mr. bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, until spring 2009. But the airliner plot has brought praise from Qaeda-associated Web sites, as did a bold but unsuccessful effort to kill Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who was wounded last August by a suicide bomber equipped with the same explosive provided to Mr. Abdulmutallab.

Al Qaeda’s growth here has come as President Ali Abdullah Saleh, 67, has intensified the war in the north against Houthi rebels, who are Shiites with support from Iran, according to Yemeni officials and analysts. Mr. Saleh’s second priority is a spreading secessionist movement in the south, which has been largely peaceful until now but which further threatens his long hold on power, with his own succession unclear.

“President Saleh’s first priority is to stay in power,” said Abdullah al-Faqih, a political scientist at Sana University. “Two, at this point, is the war in the north. Three is the south. And sometimes Al Qaeda doesn’t even make the list at all — it drops from the agenda.”

In that regard, American officials are finding an uncomfortable resemblance to their fight in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda’s leadership is believed to have sanctuary in rugged tribal areas while the government is preoccupied with its archrival India and the disputed territory of Kashmir. And as in Pakistan, the American military and intelligence involvement in Yemen must be cautious and seen as advisory, without putting troops on the ground.

In addition to sending money, the United States has sent Special Forces troops to help train and equip Yemeni forces and has provided sophisticated satellite and communications intelligence.

Yemen is also the Arab world’s poorest country, with a major water shortage and 70 percent of the gross domestic product coming from oil that is expected to run out in seven years, and it is also deeply corrupt.

The new American focus and money have caught Mr. Saleh’s attention, Mr. Faqih, the political scientist, said. “But right now we have the military in the north and the security services in the south,” he said. “Of course, we’re not ready to fight Al Qaeda. You’d have to reposition the government and the security forces, and it would take months.”

Still, Al Qaeda is also becoming more of a threat to Yemen. In November, Al Qaeda attacked government forces in the Kushum Al Ain area of Hadramawt Province. Three officials were killed. Later that month, near Marib, Al Qaeda executed a senior intelligence officer after holding him for months and then trying him, as if it were the real government of the area.

Al Qaeda has also declared support for the secessionist protests in the south and is thought to be strong in southern Abyan Province, which gives it access to the sea.

Despite the threat, “relations between the government and Al Qaeda are very tricky,” Mr. Faqih noted.

“There is, as in Pakistan, some intertwining of politics, society and the security forces with Al Qaeda,” he said. Al Qaeda has been skillful in making alliances of its own with important tribes in provinces like Hadramawt, Shabwah, Marib, where much of the oil is, and Abyan.

Some of that intertwining has happened because President Saleh has been encouraging a radical Sunni Islamist group to help fight the Shiite Houthi rebellion in the north. Some analysts say they believe that movement is also feeding the support for Al Qaeda. Mr. Saleh has also used jihadis who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq against the Houthis, as he used some of them to fight in the south during the country’s 1994 civil war.

Mr. Faqih warned that Mr. Saleh must seek political ways to calm the rebellions or risk creating even more recruits for Al Qaeda. The war against the Houthis is pushing them toward some kind of alliance with Al Qaeda, despite religious differences, much as Shiite Iran backs the Sunni Hamas movement in Gaza, he said.

“It can happen,” Mr. Faqih said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and you can turn it into the Kandahar of Yemen.”

They believe Obama is trying to do the right thing, so about Hillary Clinton at State.

From:

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
30 December, 2009

The Global Nannies at the UN end the year with fairy tails on Copenhagen, Tehran and they tell us how they supply Yemen with better science know-how. We are sure that some world leaders might actually have reached the point that they tell the UN well-wishers – don’t call us – wait for us to call you! From us to our remaining friends at the UN – stick it out – there may yet come a day you will be needed. Happy New Year in the meantime.

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SECRETARY-GENERAL CONFERS WITH WORLD LEADERS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been speaking to numerous world leaders on the heels of the historic United Nations conference in Copenhagen which recently wrapped up with nations reaching a political agreement on climate change.

Following the summit’s end less than two weeks ago, Mr. Ban has made calls to leaders from countries such as China, the United States, Ethiopia, the Maldives, Grenada, France, Brazil and Australia.

The Copenhagen Accord was struck in the Danish capital on 19 December after the Secretary-General intervened at the last minute to assuage nations that felt they had been excluded from parts of the negotiations.

It aims to jump-start immediate action on climate change and guide negotiations on long-term action. It also includes an agreement to working towards curbing global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius, efforts to reduce or limit emissions, and pledges to mobilize $100 billion a year for developing countries to combat climate change.

“While I am satisfied that we sealed a deal, I am aware that the outcome of the Copenhagen conference, including the Copenhagen Accord, did not go as far as many have hoped,” Mr. Ban told reporters after returning to New York from Denmark.

The two-week-long UN conference in Copenhagen, attended by more than 100 heads of State and government, was marked by interruptions in negotiations due to divisions between States over transparency and other issues.

“The leaders were united in purpose, but they were not united in action,” Mr. Ban pointed out, exhorting world leaders to act in concert to ensure that a legally binding treaty is reached next year.

Nonetheless, he said that the talks “represent a beginning – an essential beginning,” because without nations hammering out a deal in Copenhagen, the financial and technical support for poorer nations agreed upon would not take immediate effect.

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FACING CLIMATE CHANGE, DEVELOPING WORLD BENEFITS FROM UN ONLINE SCIENTIFIC SCHEME

As part of a project to promote scientific knowledge in the developing world in the face of climate change, the United National environmental agency this month extended its online programme to Yemen, offering it a chance to gain greater access to leading scientific journals.

Yemen is now one of 108 developing countries which have free access to the latest in scientific literature through the Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) project of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

UNEP, Yemen’s Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) and the Ministry of Water and Environment worked together with the UN World Health Organization (WHO) to train 30 Yemeni researchers, scientists, planers, and lecturers about the use of OARE to support the country as it faces increasing environmental challenges due to climate change, food crisis and water scarcity.

Yemen’s economy depends largely on the oil and fishing industries. Even though recent reports show a 25 per cent increase in fish product exports and a 30 per cent increase in fish volume, according to a recent World Bank report, the country is facing an alarming decline in fish stock and production in some areas.

“We need to do much more to get to a climate-smart world,” Katherine Sierra, Vice-President for Sustainable Development at the World Bank, said. “On the energy front, we must tackle difficult issues like technology transfer, investment, and climate finance. But when it comes to adaptation and building climate resilience, the challenge is more complex and the role of knowledge will be key.”

So far, more than 1,600 institutions are registered with OARE to use the wide collection of scientific research and the increasing number of scientific databases and portals. OARE’s expanding role in developing countries comes at a time when the world is focusing on knowledge and technology transfer to promote more sustainable development. Access to the latest findings in environmental science will help those countries adapt to an increasingly changing environment.

In November, a similar workshop was organized in Amman, Jordan, where 35 Jordanian and Iraqi participants were trained. Other trainings are scheduled for Tunisia, Morocco and Afghanistan in early 2010.

The crucial transfer of scientific information to the developing world began two years ago when UNEP negotiated a deal with leading publishers to build one of the largest electronic collections of scientific knowledge in environmental and related areas, in partnership with WHO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Yale and Cornell universities in the United States, international publishers, and private sector groups like Microsoft.

The result is a collection that is available online and contains more than 2,900 scientific and peer-reviewed journals with a value of around $1.5 million a year.

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Exclusive report by Robert Fisk for The Independent of London.
The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

By Robert Fisk
Tuesday, 6 October 2009

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars.

China Threatens Dollar
Find out why China is deliberatelydestroying the Dollar. Free Report
MoneyMorning.com/dollar_china

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-arab-future-conspiracy-vs-reality

Water Wars

By Jeffrey Sachs

May 1, 2009

Many conflicts are caused or inflamed by water scarcity. The conflicts from Chad to Darfur, Sudan, to the Ogaden Desert in Ethiopia, to Somalia and its pirates, and across to Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, lie in a great arc of arid lands where water scarcity is leading to failed crops, dying livestock, extreme poverty, and desperation.

Extremist groups like the Taliban find ample recruitment possibilities in such impoverished communities. Governments lose their legitimacy when they cannot guarantee their populations’ most basic needs: safe drinking water, staple food crops, and fodder and water for the animal herds on which communities depend for their meager livelihoods.

Politicians, diplomats, and generals in conflict-ridden countries typically treat these crises as they would any other political or military challenge. They mobilize armies, organize political factions, combat warlords, or try to grapple with religious extremism.

But these responses overlook the underlying challenge of helping communities meet their urgent needs for water, food, and livelihoods. As a result, the United States and Europe often spend tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to send troops or bombers to quell uprisings or target “failed states,” but do not send one-tenth or even one-hundredth of that amount to address the underlying crises of water scarcity and under-development.

Water problems will not go away by themselves. On the contrary, they will worsen unless we, as a global community, respond. A series of recent studies shows how fragile the water balance is for many impoverished and unstable parts of the world. The United Nations agency UNESCO recently issued the UN World Water Development Report 2009; the World Bank issued powerful studies on India and Pakistan; and the Asia Society issued an overview of Asia’s water crises.

These reports tell a similar story. Water supplies are increasingly under stress in large parts of the world, especially in the world’s arid regions. Rapidly intensifying water scarcity reflects bulging populations, depletion of groundwater, waste and pollution, and the enormous and increasingly dire effects of manmade climate change.

The consequences are harrowing: drought and famine, loss of livelihood, the spread of water-borne diseases, forced migrations, and even open conflict. Practical solutions will include many components, including better water management, improved technologies to increase the efficiency of water use, and new investments undertaken jointly by governments, the business sector, and civic organizations.

I have seen such solutions in the Millennium Villages in rural Africa, a project in which my colleagues and I are working with poor communities, governments, and businesses to find practical solutions to the challenges of extreme rural poverty. In Senegal, for example, a world-leading pipe manufacturer, JM Eagle, donated more than 100 kilometers of piping to enable an impoverished community to join forces with the government water agency PEPAM to bring safe water to tens of thousands of people. The overall project is so cost effective, replicable, and sustainable that JM Eagle and other corporate partners will now undertake similar efforts elsewhere in Africa.

But future water stresses will be widespread, including both rich and poor countries. The United States, for example, encouraged a population boom in its arid southwestern states in recent decades, despite water scarcity that climate change is likely to intensify. Australia, too, is grappling with serious droughts in the agricultural heartland of the Murray-Darling River basin. The Mediterranean Basin, including Southern Europe and North Africa is also likely to experience serious drying as a result of climate change.

However, the precise nature of the water crisis will vary, with different pressure points in different regions. For example, Pakistan, an already arid country, will suffer under the pressures of a rapidly rising population, which has grown from 42 million in 1950 to 184 million in 2010, and may increase further to 335 million in 2050, according to the UN’s “medium” scenario. Even worse, farmers are now relying on groundwater that is being depleted by over-pumping. Moreover, the Himalayan glaciers that feed Pakistan’s rivers may melt by 2050, owing to global warming.

Solutions will have to be found at all “scales,” meaning that we will need water solutions within individual communities (as in the piped-water project in Senegal), along the length of a river (even as it crosses national boundaries), and globally, for example, to head off the worst effects of global climate change. Lasting solutions will require partnerships between government, business, and civil society, which can be hard to negotiate and manage, since these different sectors of society often have little or no experience in dealing with each other and may mistrust each other considerably.

Most governments are poorly equipped to deal with serious water challenges. Water ministries are typically staffed with engineers and generalist civil servants. Yet lasting solutions to water challenges require a broad range of expert knowledge about climate, ecology, farming, population, engineering, economics, community politics, and local cultures. Government officials also need the skill and flexibility to work with local communities, private businesses, international organizations, and potential donors.

A crucial next step is to bring together scientific, political, and business leaders from societies that share the problems of water scarcity—for example, Sudan, Pakistan, the United States, Australia, Spain, and Mexico—to brainstorm about creative approaches to overcoming them. Such a gathering would enable information-sharing, which could save lives and economies. It would also underscore a basic truth: The common challenge of sustainable development should unify a world divided by income, religion, and geography.

• Water: A Global Innovation Outlook Report (Policy Library)
• Managing Water Well (Briefings)
• Ethics Be Dammed? China’s Water Projects (Commentary)
• Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis (Policy Library)

Hijacked Ship Holds $100 Million in Oil

By BARBARA SURK, AP

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (Nov. 18) – The owner of a Saudi oil supertanker hijacked by Somali pirates over the weekend said the company is working to win the release of the crew and vessel, which is carrying about $100 million in cargo.

Dubai-based Vela International Marine Ltd., a subsidiary of Saudi oil company Aramco, said in a statement Monday that company response teams have been created. The MV Sirius Star is the largest ship ever taken by Somali pirates, according to the U.S. Navy.

Dangerous Waters ? …. and How Many Boing 747 Can Feed This Ship? Then How Many Fish Can Kill This Ship?

Sirius Star: Somali pirates hijacked the oil tanker, here in an undated photo, about 450 nautical miles off the Kenyan coast Nov. 15. It is the farthest from shore Somali pirates have struck and is thought to be the largest ship ever hijacked. The aircraft-carrier-sized tanker, owned by Saudi oil company Aramco, was carrying crude oil. It can carry about 2 million barrels.

The statement gave no further details. Employees who answered the phone said no one was immediately available to comment and that Vela executives were meeting to discuss the situation. They declined to give their names.
The Navy said the brand-new MV Sirius Star, with a crew of 25, was seized far off the coast of Kenya on Saturday and the bandits were taking the ship to a Somali port known as a hub of pirate activity. It announced the hijacking on Monday when it first received the information.

The statement posted on Vela’s Web site late Monday said the ship was hijacked Sunday. The discrepancy could not immediately be explained.
Attacks by Somali pirates have surged this year as bandits have become bolder, better armed and capable of operating hundreds of miles from shore.

A coalition of warships from eight nations and from NATO and the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet is patrolling a critical zone in the Gulf of Aden leading to and from the Suez Canal. The gulf is where most of the more than 80 attacks this year have taken place.

The Saudi tanker, however, was seized far to the south of the patrolled zone, about 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya, according to the U.S. Navy.

Maritime security experts said they have tracked a southward spread in piracy over the last several weeks into a vast area of the Indian Ocean, noting with alarm that the area would be almost impossible to patrol.
The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet said Tuesday it was monitoring the situation but did not expect to send warships to surround the vessel as it has done with a Ukrainian ship loaded with tanks and other weaponry the was seized off the Somali coast on Sept. 25 and remains in pirate hands.

“I don’t anticipate any U.S. ships on station,” said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the 5th Fleet, speaking from its headquarters in Bahrain. He would not elaborate on how the Navy was watching the hijacked tanker.
“We remain deeply concerned because this attack represents a fundamental change in pirates’ ability to hijack bigger vessels farther out at sea,” he said.
The Sirius Star is the “largest pirated vessel in the region” to date, Christensen said.
At 1,080 feet, the Sirius Star is the length of an aircraft carrier and can carry about 2 million barrels of oil.
“We are very concerned that a (ship) of this size has been hijacked. We have safety concerns, security concerns, environmental concerns,” said Noel Choong, the head of the International Maritime Bureau’s regional piracy center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

“Of course, as long as there is no firm deterrent, pirates will continue to attack. The risk is low and returns are extremely high. You will see more and more of such attacks,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Somali fishermen and witnesses on shore said the pirates apparently anchored the ship last night in Harardhere, a pirate stronghold some 265 miles by land from Eyl.

The Saudi tanker was just a few miles from shore Tuesday morning, said Abdinur Haji, a fisherman.
“As usual, I woke up at 3 a.m. and headed for the sea to fish, but I saw a very, very large ship anchored less than three miles off the shore,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
He said two small boats floated out to the ship and 18 men — presumably other pirates — climbed aboard with ropes woven into a ladder.

“I have been fishing here for three decades, but I have never seen a ship as big as this one,” he said. “There are dozens of spectators on shore trying to catch a glimpse of the large ship, which they can see with their naked eyes.”
Vela, the ship’s owner and operator, says it is one of the largest crude oil tanker companies in the world.

Including the Sirius Star, Vela owns and operates a fleet of 19 vessels classed as Very Large Crude Oil Carriers and five product tankers of various sizes. It transports supplies primarily between the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. Gulf Coast, according to the company’s Web site.

The Sirius Star was sailing under a Liberian flag and its crew includes citizens of Croatia, Britain, the Philippines, Poland and Saudi Arabia. A British Foreign Office spokesman said there were at least two British nationals on board.
Associated Press Writer Mohamed Olad Hassan contributed to this report from Mogadishu, Somalia.

Hijacked Ship Holds $100 Million in Oil

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The UN sensation   of the day as per Title of UN Wire:

From:          un.wire at smartbrief.com
Subject:         Pirates seize Saudi oil supertanker; Court to hear Croatia’s genocide case against Serbia
Date:         November 18, 2008

Pirates seize Saudi supertanker
Los Angeles Times (11/18)

Piracy abates in Southeast Asia
Piratical activity has dropped along the Asian coasts where it once proliferated, falling 11% from last year and 32% from 2006. Many of those attacks off Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia were low-level attacks against small ships or incidents of petty theft of cargo. Naval patrols along the “littoral states” of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are credited for the sharp decline. The New York Times (11/18)