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"Un journal en ligne américain soupçonne une implication du Mossad israélien dans l'attentat terroriste manqué de Noël contre un avion de ligne américain à destination de Détroit, en décembre dernier. Selon l'American Free Press, son auteur et journaliste Victor Thorn, a effectué un entretien avec un analyste américain spécialiste du contre terrorisme, Gordon Duff, lequel a relevé plusieurs indices pertinents étayant cette supposition."

"For those worried that US President Barack Obama is particularly antagonistic toward Israel, there's good news and bad news: The good news is that Israel is hardly Obama's obsession; the bad news is that his administration's conduct toward it is consistent with its pattern of backing away from embattled American allies - a predictable byproduct of Obama's approach to foreign policy through dictator outreach."

‘Israeli keffiyeh’ ????

"Safar said that the scarves, which also have “Am Israel Chai” embroidered in Hebrew into the fabric, were created purely to express a deep love for and “the unity it creates among Jews.”

Gotta Love the Right’s Liberal Media Conspiracy Theory

"The belief that the corporate media is hopelessly biased towards the left is as powerful as any religious doctrine, and they’ve managed to hector the media itself into buying it."

Al Jazeera: The Most Hated Name in News?

"There are three forces shaping the world, an Arab reporter I met in the Gaza Strip once told me: money, women, and journalism."

"The Obama administration has selected some 50 Guantanamo prisoners to be held indefinitely, without charge or trial."

The TSA Is Funding Airport Mind-Reading Scanners

" Amid the media furor over the attempted Christmas Day attacks and a renewed political focus on enhancing airport security, attention is turning to a technological advancement that will have civil rights activists -- or, for that matter, anyone with a secret --seriously worried: Mind-reading machines.

"As far-fetched as that sounds, systems that aim to get inside an evildoer's head are among the proposals floated by security experts thinking beyond the X-ray machines and metal detectors used on millions of passengers and bags each year," AP's Michael Tarm reports.

Tarm focuses on an Israeli company called WeCU Technologies (as in "we see you"), which is building a system that would turn airport waiting areas into arenas for Pavlovian behavioral tests:

The system ... projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, company CEO Ehud Givon said.

The logic is that people can't help reacting, even if only subtly, to familiar images that suddenly appear in unfamiliar places. If you strolled through an airport and saw a picture of your mother, Givon explained, you couldn't help but respond.

The reaction could be a darting of the eyes, an increased heartbeat, a nervous twitch or faster breathing, he said. The WeCU system would use humans to do some of the observing but would rely mostly on hidden cameras or sensors that can detect a slight rise in body temperature and heart rate.

Homeland Security officials have long been keen on Israeli counter-terror technologies, given the country's extensive experience with terrorism and its reputation for having some of the most effective security systems in the world.

According to numerous news reports, WeCU has received two grants, from the US Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, for their research. Raw Story was unable to determine how much money WeCU received from the US government, but regulatory filings show the company spent at least $60,000 on lobbying in Washington in 2006 and 2007.

WeCU has already developed a prototype model of the mind-reading technology, which, according to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has already been demonstrated to government security officials in the US, Germany and Israel. It was evidently from that demonstration that US agencies decided to fund the project.

"It sounds like science fiction," WeCU CEO Ehud Givon told the Jerusalem Post. "But I can assure you that the technology is very real. We have accuracy rates that are higher than 95 percent."

Supporters of mind-reading technology argue that it would reduce waiting lines at security checkpoints and reduce the hassle for travelers. But the risks to personal privacy inherent in mind-reading technologies are self-evident. AP reports:

Some critics have expressed horror at the approach, calling it Orwellian and akin to "brain fingerprinting."

For civil libertarians, attempting to read a person's thoughts comes uncomfortably close to the future world depicted in the movie "Minority Report," where a policeman played by Tom Cruise targets people for "pre-crimes," or merely thinking about breaking the law.

WeCU's technology is by no means the only mind-reading security system in development today. Another Israeli company, Suspect Detection Systems, has developed a technology that reads a person's "hostile intent" by measuring bodily responses, through the person's hand, while being asked questions. That system was field-tested at the Knoxville, Tennessee, airport last summer.

Between 2005 and 2006, SDS received $460,000 in grants from the TSA and the science directorate of Homeland Security.

The company appears to have ramped up its public relations in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt.

"A simple five minute automated interrogation during the Visa application process, or at the airport security checkpoint, would have most assuredly exposed the evil intention of Christmas terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he ever boarded," SDS CEO Shabtai Shoval said in a press release.

But while these methods are still in development, other behavior-detection technologies, that have less to do directly with reading minds, are on the cusp of being ready for deployment. The Department of Homeland Security has given the green light to FAST, or Future Attribute Screening Technology, which uses a combination of biometric scanners to measure a person's pulse, breathing, pupil dilation and other signals that can determine "hostile intent."

While FAST isn't quite as intrusive as the WeCU system, it appears to be much closer to implementation, with field testing of the $20-million technology set to begin in 2011. "

© 2010 Raw Story All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145041/

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

"Aafia Siddiqui was born in Karachi, Pakistan, on March 2, 1972. She was one of three children of Mohammad Siddiqui, a doctor trained in England, and Ismet. She is a mother of three.

Aafia moved to Texas in 1990 to be near her brother, and after spending a year at the University of Houston, transferred to MIT. Aafia then married Mohammed Amjad Khan, a medical student, and subsequently entered Brandeis University as a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience.

Citing the difficulty of living as Muslims in the United States after 9/11, Aafia and her husband returned to Pakistan. They stayed in Pakistan for a short time, and then returned to the United States. They remained there until 2002, and then moved back to Pakistan.

Some problems developed in their marriage, and Aafia was eight months pregnant with their third child when she and Khan were estranged. She and the children stayed at her mother's house, while Khan lived elsewhere in Karachi.

After giving birth to her son, Aafia stayed at her mother's house for the rest of the year, returning to the US without her children around December 2002 to look for a job in the Baltimore area, where her sister had begun working at Sinai Hospital.

Soon after Pakistani authorities arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Aafia and her children disappeared. A report in the Pakistani Urdu press said that Aafiai and her kids had been seen being picked up by Pakistani authorities and taken into custody.

According to Mrs. Siddiqui, Aafia left her mother's house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal in a Metro-cab on March 30, to catch a flight for Rawalpindi, but never reached the airport. Inside sources claim that Afia had been "picked-up" by intelligence agencies while on her way to the airport and initial reports suggest she was handed over to the FBI.

Aafia Siddiqui had been missing for more than a year when the FBI put her photographs on its website. The press was told that she was an Al Qaeda facilitator. After an FBI conference, a newspaper broke the story linking the woman involved in the 2001 diamond trade in Liberia to Aafia. The family's attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, says the allegation was a blessing in disguise because it places Siddiqui somewhere at a specific time. She says she can prove Siddiqui was in Boston that week.

In Pakistan, there has been no official report registered with the police regarding her disappearance, and the police are doing nothing to trace her. Mrs. Siddiqui alleges that an intelligence agency official came to her house a week after the incident, and warned her not to make an issue out of her daughter's disappearance and threatened her with dire consequences.

Both the Pakistan government as well as US officials in Washington denied any knowledge of Aafia's custody.

On 7th July 2008, a press conference led by Cageprisoners patron, Yvonne Ridley, and Director, Saghir Hussain, in Pakistan resulted in mass international coverage of Aafia’s case as her disappearance was questioned by the media and political figures in Pakistan. It was on 3rd August 2008 that an agent from the FBI visited the home of her brother in Houston, Texas and told him that she was being detained in Afghanistan.

On Monday 4th August 2008, federal prosecutors in the US confirmed that Aafia Siddiqui was extradited to the US from Afghanistan where they allege she had been detained since mid-July 2008. The US administration claims that she was arrested by Afghani forces outside Ghazni governor’s compound with manuals on explosives and ‘dangerous substances in sealed jars’ on her person. They further allege that whilst in custody she shot at US officers (none being injured) and was herself injured in the process.

According to her lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, “We do know she was at Bagram for a long time. It was a long time. According to my client she was there for years and she was held in American custody; her treatment was horrendous.”

Aafia’s claim is contrary to the heavily contested position of the US administration that she was detained in July by Afghan forces while attempting to bomb the compound of the governor of Ghazni. Her lawyers claim that the evidence was planted on her. The US has previously denied the presence of female detainees in Bagram and that Aafia was ever held there, bar for medical treatment in July 2008.

Aafia remains in a US detention facility in New York, in poor health, subjected to degrading and humiliating strip searches and cavity searches whenever she receives a legal visit or appears in court. She has subsequently refused to meet with counsel. It has been reported that she may suffer from brain damage and that a part of her intestine may have been removed. Her lawyers say her symptoms are consistent with a sufferer of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Aafia's eldest son, Ahmad, is believed to be in custody in Afghanistan. Despite the fact he is a US national he was not extradited along with his mother to the US. The whereabouts of Aafia's two youngest children, missing for the past five years, remain unknown. "

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"WHO'S AFRAID OF AAFIA SIDDIQUI?

She went to MIT and Brandeis, married a Brigham and Women's physician, made her home in Boston, cared for her children, and raised money for charities. Aafia Siddiqui was a normal woman living a normal American life. Until the FBI called her a terror

BY KATHERINE OZMENT

The men were ready. They knew the woman who would be joining them for the week was a high-profile Al Qaeda operative. They'd been told she should be treated with the utmost respect. She would arrive in Liberia's bustling capital, Monrovia, on a plane from Quetta, Pakistan. She was to be driven to the safe house, the Hotel Boulevard, where other Al Qaeda figures had stayed, and taken good care of until the deal was done.

The trip from the airport was a hot hour long, and the woman spoke in English to the driver on the way. The driver, who would later become the chief informant in a United Nations-led investigation, described her as a quiet Islamic woman who wore a traditional headscarf and kept mostly to herself. She spent the week holed up in her room, making trips into town for small errands.

About a week after her arrival, the woman left Monrovia as quietly as she had entered, but now she had what she had come for: a large parcel containing gems from Africa's illegal diamond trade. They would be used as a convenient, hard-to-trace way of funding Al Qaeda's global terror operations. It was mid-June 2001, three months before September 11.

The men never saw the woman again in person. But earlier this year, one of them says, he saw two photographs of her. At a news conference in May, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III announced that the FBI was looking for seven people with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. MIT graduate and former Boston resident Aafia Siddiqui was the only woman on the list. After the photos of her appeared on television, the informant picked up the phone and dialed investigators at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which is examining Africa's illegal diamond trade. The informant was convinced that the woman in the photographs was the woman who had come to Liberia.

Now imagine this: The woman in the photographs, Aafia Siddiqui, the same week, mid-June, 2001. She is a 29-year-old mother of two, consumed, like other Boston moms who volunteer or work outside the home, with the minutiae of everyday life. A deeply religious woman, she picks up Korans from a local mosque and distributes them to inmates in area prisons. She hosts play groups in her apartment on the 20th floor of the Back Bay Manor in Roxbury. She takes her sister Fowzia's child into her care while Fowzia finishes a fellowship in neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She does the grocery shopping and prepares meals for her children and husband, an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women's.

This is what Aafia Siddiqui's family says she was really doing during the summer of 2001. Not brokering diamond deals for Al Qaeda with murderous brutes from the killing fields of Africa, but hosting play groups in her apartment. "Aafia Siddiqui was here in June 2001," says the family's attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp. "And I can prove it."

Sharp is best known as one of the lawyers who defended Louise Woodward, the English nanny found guilty of shaking infant Matthew Eappen to death in 1997. If she can prove Siddiqui wasn't in Liberia that week, she'll damage one of the most puzzling cases of alleged terrorism to emerge from the ashes of 9/11. The claim that Siddiqui was involved in diamond trading is another in a series of sometimes surprising, sometimes vague accusations by government officials. In Siddiqui's case, the allegations have been further clouded by the often inaccurate, even hyperbolic descriptions of her by the media.

To those who knew her, Aafia Siddiqui was a kind, quiet woman living the normal life of a Pakistani expat in Boston. To the FBI, which displayed her photograph at that press conference in May, she was a suspected terrorist with ties to a chief mastermind of 9/11 -- and the knowledge, skills, and intention to continue Al Qaeda's terror war in the United States and abroad. Could one woman embody such diametrically opposed identities? Who is the real Aafia Siddiqui? And where has she gone?

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, on March 2, 1972, Aafia was one of three children of Mohammad Siddiqui, a doctor trained in England, and Ismet, a homemaker. You might think the daughter who eventually got into MIT was the smart one in the family, but her siblings are just as accomplished. Mohammed, Aafia's brother, is an architect living in Houston with his wife, a pediatrician, and their children. Fowzia, Aafia's sister, is a Harvard-trained neurologist who was working at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore until she decided to go back to Pakistan.

Aafia Siddiqui moved to Texas in 1990 to be near her brother and had good enough grades after spending a year at the University of Houston to transfer to MIT. She requested a room in the university's only all-female dorm, McCormick Hall, which consists of two modern, block-like towers set along the Charles. Siddiqui's fellow students say she was a quiet, studious woman who was devout in her religious beliefs but not a fundamentalist. She often wore a headscarf, for example, but didn't cover her face.

"She was religious, but that wasn't unusual in McCormick," says a former MIT student who lived in the dorm at the time. "She was just nice and soft- spoken," says Marnie Biando, a student who worked at the front desk. "She wasn't terribly assertive."

While at MIT Siddiqui apparently joined an association for Muslim students. She wrote three guides for members who wanted to teach others about Islam. On the group's website, Siddiqui explained how to run a daw'ah table, an informational booth used at school events to educate people about, and persuade them to convert to, Islam. Some of what Siddiqui wrote -- about needing enough money to buy Islamic literature and posterboard -- sounds like a handout for a PTA meeting.

Other references, however, reveal a passion for Islam that could be called hard line. In the guides she wrote, "Imagine our humble, but sincere daw'ah effort turning into a major daw'ah movement in this country! Just imagine it! And us, reaping the reward of everyone who accepts Islam through this movement, through years to come . . . Think and plan big." So big was her thinking that she envisioned an outcome that might surprise many of her adopted countrymen: "May Allah give this strength and sincerity to us so that our humble effort continue, and expands until America becomes a Muslim land."

Even in her academic pursuits, Siddiqui's sights were trained on her faith. A biology major, in her sophomore year she won a $5,000 grant to study the effects of Islam on women in Pakistan.

A photo of her on graduation day shows an attractive woman smiling beside the Charles River. She wears a simple necklace and dangling earrings. It's easy to understand why students who knew her were so surprised to hear her name on the nightly news. In the perpetually updated photo gallery of terrorist suspects that has made its way into our living rooms since 9/11, her face is among the most angelic.

Sometime after their daughter's graduation, Siddiqui's parents, concerned about her prospects for marriage, went out and found her a husband. Mohammed Amjad Khan seemed like a great catch. The son of a wealthy family and a medical student, he, like Siddiqui, was a well-educated Pakistani trying to make a life for himself in Boston. He also shared Siddiqui's faith but did not seem threatened by her desire for a career.

Siddiqui, after all, wasn't done with school. She entered Brandeis University as a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience. Though media reports in the past year have erroneously given her such technical-sounding titles as microbiologist, geneticist, and neurologist, the truth is that Siddiqui's training didn't lend itself easily to the type of terrorist acts that haunt us in our worst nightmares.

"They started with the whole idea that Aafia was involved in biochemical warfare," says Sharp. "She wasn't taking brain cells and testing how they reacted to gases. But there's all this news in the media about the changing face of Al Qaeda and the neurobiology scare, and now we've got this MIT graduate with a Brandeis Ph.D. who's cooking up all these viruses."

What Siddiqui was actually cooking up at Brandeis was more mundane. Her graduate work was based on a simple concept: that people learn by imitation. To study this, she devised a computer program and used adult volunteers, who came to her office and watched various objects move randomly across the screen, then reproduced what they recalled. The point was to see how well they retained the information having seen it on the screen.

Paul DiZio, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Brandeis who was on Siddiqui's dissertation committee, laughs when asked if such work could be applied to Al Qaeda operations. "I can't see how it can be applied to anything," he says. "It's not very applied work. It didn't have a medical aspect to it. And, as a computer expert, she was competent. But you know, calling her a mastermind or something does not seem -- I never saw any evidence."

What DiZio did see evidence of was Siddiqui's obvious passion for Islam. "She made many references to her faith in scientific conversations," he says. "When presenting a proposal about how some results would come out and whether they would support her theory, she would say, 'Allah willing.'" Though such comments may have seemed strange in an academic setting, DiZio says there was nothing radical about Siddiqui. "She just seemed like a very kind person."

She was also a person whose life was rapidly changing. DiZio recalls asking Siddiqui what she would do after earning her Ph.D. "She said something about how she had commitments to her children and her family, and that this is the way it was," he says. Somehow, Siddiqui's plan for a career outside the home had been lost.

By the time Siddiqui finished her dissertation, she and Khan, who was nearing the end of his residency at Brigham and Women's, had two children. According to Sharp, the couple was beginning to argue over how to raise them.

"Aafia wanted to live in the West," Sharp says the family told her, adding that Khan wanted to return to Pakistan and raise the children as conservative Muslims. When Siddiqui's parents had arranged their daughter's marriage to Khan, they were under the impression that he was progressive. Now they were worried.

Hassan Abbas, a Pakistani visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and the author of the recently published Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America's War on Terror, remembers the story of the couple's marital troubles differently. Once, when speaking with a colleague of Khan's who worked at Massachusetts General Hospital, Abbas was told Siddiqui was the more fundamentalist of the two. But he never met her. When he moved to Boston in 2001, Abbas tried to set up a network of Pakistani academics and hoped to add Siddiqui to his listserv. "To my surprise," he says, "despite my good contacts and friendships, nobody was willing to say even a single word about her."

What is known about the couple is that they lived with their children on the 20th floor of Roxbury's Back Bay Manor, a popular housing choice for medical residents and foreigners seeking medical treatment because of its proximity to the city's hospitals. The apartment was home base for a nonprofit organization the two started with Fowzia in 1999, called the Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching.

The Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Roxbury is a simple brick building with a double arched doorway out front and a Middle Eastern café next door. In his cluttered second-floor office, Abdullah Faruuq, the mosque's imam, crams his tall body behind his desk and crosses his stocking feet on a chair in front of him.

"What I know of her," he says, "is that she was living here in America, and her organization was for sharing Islamic information with the American people."

Siddiqui ordered Korans and other books to be distributed to prisons and on school campuses. Boxes of them would arrive at Faruuq's mosque, and he'd wait for her to come pick them up. Though she was a small woman, Siddiqui never asked for help carrying the heavy boxes down the steep flight of stairs.

Faruuq was impressed with Siddiqui's devotion but says she wasn't a radical. "'As long as it's not evil, I can do it,'" he says, paraphrasing what Siddiqui herself might have said of her acceptance of the western world. "'I show my hands, show my face. I drive my own car. I have my credit cards.' She had all of that. She was an American girl. Put that down: Aafia Siddiqui was an American girl. And a good sister."

Siddiqui's missionary work stemmed from her belief that it was her duty to bolster the Muslim community around her. "She was always very frustrated here that Muslims were not addressing the needs of their community," says a woman who was a student of Siddiqui's. "She said we needed to be doing more to help our people and that we needed to address the needs of the community." She says Siddiqui wanted her husband to use his medical skills to help the less fortunate.

Talal Eid, imam of the Islamic Center of New England in Quincy, also knew Siddiqui through the charitable work she did. He recalls her raising money for Bosnian orphans. "You know, we were all active, but to see a woman who was active in this way was really something nice."

People who lived on the same floor of Back Bay Manor as Siddiqui have a different impression of her. "In some ways we knew her kids better than we knew her," says Matthew Parfitt, who lived down the hall. "She'd leave them to play in the hallway a lot. "

The only people Parfitt noticed going in and out of Siddiqui's apartment were a woman she seemed close to, possibly her sister Fowzia, and an older woman who came to visit for some time, possibly her mother, Ismet.

Another neighbor, Pat Shechter, remembers seeing Siddiqui in the elevator with her son, who was on his way to school. "I said, 'Oh, what do you study in school?' And he said, 'the Koran.'"

The FBI suspects Siddiqui was doing a lot more at Back Bay Manor than sending her kids out to play in the hallway or having her sister over for tea. In the weeks after 9/11, when the FBI was scrambling to make up for past oversights, the agency became suspicious of several people in the building, particularly Khan and Siddiqui. At least some of that suspicion stemmed from the couple's connection to two Saudi nationals with financial dealings that in a post-9/11 world set off warning bells. Workers at Fleet reviewing past bank transactions reportedly flagged as suspicious some that occurred just months before the attacks.

In July 2001, two Saudi nationals, Abdullah Al Reshood and Hatem Al Dhahri, had taken over Khan and Siddiqui's lease when the couple decided to move to Malden (though the Saudi embassy and Sharp deny they lived in the apartment). During that time, Al Reshood received a $20,000 wire transfer from the Saudi government. The money, a Saudi official later explained to the Boston Globe, was sent by the Saudi government to Al Reshood to pay for medical treatment for his wife.

The Fleet employees filed a suspicious activity report, or SAR, with the Treasury Department, which alerted the FBI. Investigators were reportedly stunned when they realized the SAR had been filed for someone so closely connected to Siddiqui and Khan, already under suspicion for having used a debit card to buy night-vision goggles, body armor, and military manuals from American websites, and for donating to charities the FBI watches closely.

When questioned, Sharp says, Khan told authorities he had purchased the military items for big-game hunting in Pakistan, saying goggles and armor weren't available there. Siddiqui, who was questioned only incidentally, was quickly released. Shortly after that, citing the difficulty of living as Muslims in the United States after 9/11, the couple returned to Pakistan.

Siddiqui and Khan stayed in Pakistan for a short time, then returned to the United States. They remained until 2002, then moved back to Pakistan. The tension between the couple had continued to grow and finally reached the breaking point in August 2002. Siddiqui was eight months pregnant with their third child, and she and Khan were now estranged. She and the children stayed at her mother's house, while Khan lived elsewhere in Karachi.

One day, according to Sharp, Khan came over to Aafia's parents' house bearing a letter explaining that he was going to divorce Siddiqui. He started reading the letter, and a heated argument began between Khan and Siddiqui's parents. The fight was too much for Siddiqui's father, Sharp says. He had a heart attack and died. Within weeks, Siddiqui gave birth to a son.

Siddiqui stayed at her mother's house for the rest of the year, returning to the United States without her children around December 2002 to look for a job in the Baltimore area, where her sister had begun working at Sinai Hospital. Siddiqui had interviews at Johns Hopkins and SUNY, says Sharp. The real purpose of her trip, the FBI suspects, was to open a post office box for Majid Khan, a purported Al Qaeda operative who allegedly had plans to blow up gas stations and fuel tanks in the Baltimore-Washington area. Siddiqui's family contends that her trip to Baltimore was for the sole purpose of finding a job, and that if she did open a post office box it was for the replies she hoped to get.

Months later, the FBI would make its most devastating claim against Siddiqui.

It was still dark on the morning of March 1, 2003, when Pakistani authorities arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a known September 11 mastermind, at a Karachi safe house. The arrest made news around the world. It also presaged the extraordinary vanishing act of Aafia Siddiqui and her three small children.

"Apparently Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave up Aafia's name as being a major Al Qaeda operative," says Sharp. Asked how he could possibly have known her name if she were innocent of the FBI's claims against her, Sharp says Siddiqui's identity was likely stolen. "Aafia was, I think, probably a pretty naive and trusting person," Sharp says, "and my guess is it would be pretty easy for somebody who wanted to steal an identity to just steal it."

Because of the secretive nature of the interrogation, we may never know what, if anything, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said about Siddiqui. About a month after his capture in the spring of 2003, however, she disappeared. The last her mother remembers, Siddiqui was piling herself and her kids, then seven, five, and six months old, into a taxi headed to the train station, the first step of what she said was her planned trip to visit an uncle in Islamabad. Her mother said goodbye to her daughter and grandchildren -- and hasn't seen them since.

What happened to Aafia Siddiqui and her children that day is anyone's guess. Siddiqui's mother, Ismet, claims that a few days after Siddiqui's disappearance, a man on a motorcycle arrived at her house in a leather suit and helmet and told her Aafia was being held and that she should keep quiet if she ever wanted to see her daughter and grandchildren again.

A report in the Pakistani Urdu press said that Siddiqui and her kids had been seen being picked up by Pakistani authorities and taken into custody. Even a spokesman for Pakistan's interior ministry and two unnamed U.S. officials confirmed this in the press. Several days later, however, Pakistani and American officials mysteriously backtracked, saying it was unlikely that Siddiqui was in custody.

Ismet, hysterical, decided to board a plane to the United States in an attempt to find her daughter. When official-looking men greeted her at JFK Airport in New York, she thought they were there to help her find her daughter.

"She's detained for four hours by the FBI, NYPD, Homeland Security," says Sharp. "She thinks they're all there to help her. That's how naive she was. And she's crying and saying, 'Tell me where my daughter is,' and they don't know where her daughter is and they let her go."

Siddiqui's sister Fowzia picked up Ismet and took her back to Baltimore. "And the next thing they know," Sharp says, "there's a knock at the door, and it's the FBI and they're very aggressively serving a subpoena for Ismet Siddiqui to come here to Boston to testify before a grand jury." It was then that Siddiqui's brother, Mohammed, who had been referred to Sharp by a professional connection in Houston, hired her to represent the family.

In the days after Ismet Siddiqui was served the subpoena, she, Fowzia, and Mohammed all spoke at length with agents from the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office. "We just gave them everything," says Sharp. "And they were saying, 'We still think she's got another life that you don't know about.'"

Aafia Siddiqui had been missing for more than a year when the FBI put her photographs on its website. It was May 26, and Ashcroft and Mueller told the press that Siddiqui was an Al Qaeda facilitator -- someone knowledgeable about the United States and fluent in English who can get things done for other operatives.

One month after the FBI press conference, a bombshell from the Wall Street Journal hit Sharp's desk, and she knew it was just the thing she needed. The newspaper broke the story linking the woman involved in the 2001 diamond trade in Liberia (a story detailed by Douglas Farah, a senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center, in his book Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror) to Aafia Siddiqui.

Sharp says the allegation was a blessing in disguise because it places Siddiqui somewhere at a specific time. She says she can prove Siddiqui was in Boston that week. "If we can show that Aafia was here and not in Liberia, then that's the stone that slays Goliath," Sharp says.

"The rumor among well-informed Pakistanis is that Pakistani intelligence arrested Aafia and then killed her," says Harvard's Hassan Abbas. If Siddiqui was captured, why would she be killed? Generally, terrorism suspects are captured and paraded before the press to show that the government is doing its job. The fact that Siddiqui has been missing so long does not bode well for her reappearance.

"ISI does not keep people for so long," says Muzamal Suherwardy, referring to the Pakistani intelligence agency. The case is unusual, says Suherwardy, a Pakistani journalist, because "it was alleged that she was in the custody of ISI and then she disappeared." If there had been evidence against her, "she could be put under trial in Pakistan."

It's possible Siddiqui was killed while in the custody of ISI. Suherwardy points out that this is especially likely if "she is believed to be a double agent working both for Al Qaeda and ISI." He also wonders if "some high official of ISI" was involved in the Liberian diamond deal.

And the children? "One thing is clear so far," Suherwardy says. "Where she is, her children are there with her."

In her writings about setting up and running a daw'ah table, Siddiqui advised, "As with starting any endeavor, the most important thing is the intention behind it." She then quoted the Muslim prophet Muhammad as saying: "Indeed actions are based on intentions. For every person is what he intended."

Perhaps Aafia Siddiqui intended her life to be one of devotion to her family, education, and religion. Or perhaps she sought a more radical outlet for religious beliefs. Whatever the truth, it's doubtful Aafia Siddiqui ever intended to go missing at the age of 31 -- or to jeopardize the lives of her children, who went missing with her. Whatever her ultimate intention, forces larger than Aafia Siddiqui herself may well have made sure that she will never be seen or heard from again.

As one source who knew Siddiqui in Boston says, "Only God knows where she is now." "

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"For just over a week, a Pakistani neuroscientist being tried on charges of trying to kill American soldiers and F.B.I. agents in Afghanistanhas been kicked out of the courtroom nearly every time she has spoken, her angry outbursts judged a disruption.

But on Thursday afternoon, she was finally allowed to speak without interruption or repercussion as she took the stand to deny the attempted murder and assault charges against her.

In nearly two hours of spirited testimony, the neuroscientist, Aafia Siddiqui, 37, denied that she had grabbed an M4 rifle in a police station in the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, on July 18, 2008, and fired on American officers and agents."

Source

Z 32 DE AVI MOGRABI

Stephen M. Walt : The Shores of Tripoli

"The final item on my itinerary was thirty-six hours in Tripoli, Libya. I was invited to give a lecture to its Economic Development Board, following in the footsteps of a number of other recent American visitors, including Frank Fukuyama, Bernard Lewis, Joseph Nye, Robert Putnam, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Richard Perle (!). I'd never been to Libya before, and was looking forward to hearing what the audience had to say."

Prof. Stephen M. Walt – Time for George Mitchell to resign

" If Mideast special envoy George Mitchell wants to end his career with his reputation intact, it is time for him to resign. He had a distinguished tenure in the U.S. Senate — including a stint as majority leader — and his post-Senate career has been equally accomplished. He was an effective mediator of the conflict in Northern Ireland, helped shepherd the Disney Corporation through a turbulent period, and led an effective investigation of the steroids scandal afflicting major league baseball. Nobody can expect to be universally admired in the United States, but Mitchell may have come as close as any politician in recent memory.

Why should Mitchell step down now? Because he is wasting his time. The administration's early commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace was either a naïve bit of bravado or a cynical charade, and if Mitchell continues to pile up frequent-flyer miles in a fruitless effort, he will be remembered as one of a long series of U.S. "mediators" who ended up complicit in Israel's self-destructive land grab on the West Bank. Mitchell will turn 77 in August, he has already undergone treatment for prostate cancer, and he's gotten exactly nowhere (or worse) since his mission began. However noble the goal of Israeli-Palestinian peace might be, surely he's got better things to do.

In an interview earlier this week with Time's Joe Klein, President Obama acknowledged that his early commitment to achieving "two states for two peoples" had failed. In his words, "this is as intractable a problem as you get … Both sides-the Israelis and the Palestinians-have found that the political environments, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I think we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that" (my emphasis).

This admission raises an obvious question: who was responsible for this gross miscalculation? It's not as if the dysfunctional condition of Israeli and Palestinian internal politics was a dark mystery when Obama took office, or when Netanyahu formed the most hard-line government in Israeli history. Which advisors told Obama and Mitchell to proceed as they did, raising expectations sky-high in the Cairo speech, publicly insisting on a settlement freeze, and then engaging in a humiliating retreat? Did they ever ask themselves what they would do if Netanyahu dug in his heels, as anyone with a triple-digit IQ should have expected? And if Obama now realizes how badly they screwed up, why do the people who recommended this approach still have their jobs?

As for Mitchell himself, he should resign because it should be clear to him that he was hired under false pretenses. He undoubtedly believed Obama when the president said he was genuinely committed to achieving Israel-Palestinian peace in his first term. Obama probably promised to back him up, and his actions up to the Cairo speech made it look like he meant it. But his performance ever since has exposed him as another U.S. president who is unwilling to do what everyone knows it will take to achieve a just peace. Mitchell has been reduced to the same hapless role that Condoleezza Rice played in the latter stages of the Bush administration — engaged in endless "talks" and inconclusive haggling over trivialities-and he ought to be furious at having been hung out to dry in this fashion.

The point is not that Obama's initial peace effort in the Middle East has failed; the real lesson is that he didn't really try. The objective was admirably clear from the start — "two states for two peoples" — what was missing was a clear strategy for getting there and the political will to push it through. And notwithstanding the various difficulties on the Palestinian side, the main obstacle has been the Netanyahu government's all-too obvious rejection of anything that might look like a viable Palestinian state, combined with its relentless effort to gobble up more land. Unless the U.S. president is willing and able to push Israel as hard as it is pushing the Palestinians (and probably harder), peace will simply not happen. Pressure on Israel is also the best way to defang Hamas, because genuine progress towards a Palestinian state in the one thing that could strengthen Abbas and other Palestinian moderates and force Hamas to move beyond its talk about a long-term hudna (truce) and accept the idea of permanent peace.

It's not as if Obama and Co. don't realize that this is important. National Security Advisor James Jones has made it clear that he sees the Israel-Palestinian issue as absolutely central; it's not our only problem in the Middle East, but it tends to affect most of the others and resolving it would be an enormous boon. And there's every sign that the president is aware of the need to do more than just talk.

Yet U.S. diplomacy in this area remains all talk and no action. When a great power identifies a key interest and is strongly committed to achieving it, it uses all the tools at its disposal to try to bring that outcome about. Needless to say, the use of U.S. leverage has been conspicuously absent over the past year, which means that Mitchell has been operating with both hands tied firmly behind his back. Thus far, the only instrument of influence that Obama has used has been presidential rhetoric, and even that weapon has been used rather sparingly.

And please don't blame this on Congress. Yes, Congress will pander to the lobby, oppose a tougher U.S. stance, and continue to supply Israel with generous economic and military handouts, but a determined president still has many ways of bringing pressure to bear on recalcitrant clients. The problem is that Obama refused to use any of them.

When Netanyahu dug in his heels and refused a complete settlement freeze — itself a rather innocuous demand if Israel preferred peace to land — did Obama describe the settlements as "illegal" and contrary to international law? Of course not. Did he fire a warning shot by instructing the Department of Justice to crack down on tax-deductible contributions to settler organizations? Nope. Did he tell Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to signal his irritation by curtailing U.S. purchases of Israeli arms, downgrading various forms of "strategic cooperation," or canceling a military exchange or two? Not a chance. When Israel continued to evict Palestinians from their homes and announced new settlement construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in August, did Obama remind Netanyahu of his dependence on U.S. support by telling U.S. officials to say a few positive things about the Goldstone Report and to use its release as an opportunity to underscore the need for a genuine peace? Hardly; instead, the administration rewarded Netanyau's intransigence by condemning Goldstone and praising Netanyahu for "unprecedented" concessions. (The "concessions," by the way, was an announcement that Israel would freeze settlement expansion in the West Bank "temporarily" while continuing it in East Jerusalem. In other words, they'll just take the land a bit more slowly).

Like the Clinton and Bush administrations, in short, the idea that the United States ought to use its leverage and exert genuine pressure on Israel remains anathema to Obama, to Mitchell and his advisors, and to all those pundits who are trapped in the Washington consensus on this issue. The main organizations in the Israel lobby are of course dead-set against it — and that goes for J Street as well — even though there is no reason to expect Israel to change course in the absence of countervailing pressure.

Obama blinked — leaving Mitchell with nothing to do-because he needed to keep sixty senators on board with his health care initiative (that worked out well, didn't it?), because he didn't want to jeopardize the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party, and because he knew he'd be excoriated by Israel's false friends in the U.S. media if he did the right thing. I suppose I ought to be grateful to have my thesis vindicated in such striking fashion, but there's too much human misery involved on both sides to take any consolation in that.

So what will happen now? Israel has made it clear that it is going to keep building settlements — including the large blocs (like Ma'ale Adumim) that were consciously designed to carve up the West Bank and make creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, and other moderate forces will be increasingly discredited as collaborators or dupes. As Israel increasingly becomes an apartheid state, its international legitimacy will face a growing challenge. Iran's ability to exploit the Palestinian cause will be strengthened, and pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere will be further weakened by their impotence and by their intimate association with the United States. It might even help give al Qaeda a new lease on life, at least in some places. Jews in other countries will continue to distance themselves from an Israel that they see as a poor embodiment of their own values, and one that can no longer portray itself convincingly as "a light unto the nations." And the real tragedy is that all this might have been avoided, had the leaders of the world's most powerful country been willing to use their influence on both sides more directly.

Looking ahead, one can see two radically different possibilities. The first option is that Israel retains control of the West Bank and Gaza and continues to deny the Palestinians full political rights or economic opportunities. (Netanyahu likes to talk about a long-term "economic peace," but his vision of Palestinian bantustans under complete Israeli control is both a denial of the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations and a severe obstacle to their ability to fully develop their own society. Over time, there may be another intifada, which the IDF will crush as ruthlessly as it did the last one. Perhaps the millions of remaining Palestinians will gradually leave — as hardline Israelis hope and as former House speaker Dick Armey once proposed. If so, then a country founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust — one of history's greatest crimes-will have completed a dispossession begun in 1948 — a great crime of its own.

Alternatively, the Palestinians may remain where they are, and begin to demand equal rights in the state under whose authority they have been forced to dwell. If Israel denies them these rights, its claim to being the "only democracy in the Middle East" will be exposed as hollow. If it grants them, it will eventually cease to be a Jewish-majority state (though its culture would undoubtedly retain a heavily Jewish/Israeli character). As a long-time supporter of Israel's existence, I would take no joy in that outcome. Moreover, transforming Israel into a post-Zionist and multinational society would be a wrenching and quite possibly violent experience for all concerned. For both reasons, I've continued to favor "two states for two peoples" instead.

But with the two-state solution looking less and less likely, these other possibilities begin to loom large. Through fear and fecklessness, the United States has been an active enabler of an emerging tragedy. Israelis have no one to blame but themselves for the occupation, but Americans — who like to think of themselves as a country whose foreign policy reflects deep moral commitments-will be judged harshly for our own role in this endeavor.

The United States will suffer certain consequences as a result-decreased international influence, a somewhat greater risk of anti-American terrorism, tarnished moral reputation, etc.-but it will survive. But Israel may be in the process of drafting its own suicide pact, and its false friends here in the United States have been supplying the paper and ink. By offering his resignation-and insisting that Obama accept it-George Mitchell can escape the onus of complicity in this latest sad chapter of an all-too-familiar story. Small comfort, perhaps, but better than nothing.

* Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Professor Walt is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy."

Source.

Rapport sur l'environnement, la sécurité et la politique étrangère

"S'agissant des aspects légaux des activités militaires

26. demande à l'Union européenne de faire en sorte que les nouvelles techniques d'armes dites non- létales et le développement de nouvelles stratégies d'armements soient également couverts et régis par des conventions internationales;

27. considère que le projet HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project), en raison de son impact général sur l'environnement, pose des problèmes globaux et demande que ses implications juridiques, écologiques et éthiques soient examinées par un organe international

indépendant avant la poursuite des travaux de recherche et la réalisation d'essais; déplore que le gouvernement des États-Unis ait à maintes reprises refusé d'envoyer un représentant pour apporter un témoignage sur les risques que comporte pour l'environnement et la population le projet HAARP financé actuellement en Alaska, durant l'audition publique ou à l'occasion d'une réunion subséquente de sa commission compétente;

28. demande à l'organe chargé de l'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques (STOA) d'accepter d'examiner les preuves scientifiques et techniques fournies par tous les résultats existants de la recherche sur le programme HAARP aux fins d'évaluer la nature et l'ampleur exactes du danger que HAARP représente pour l'environnement local et global et pour la santé publique en général;

29. invite la Commission à examiner les incidences sur l'environnement et la santé publique du programme HAARP pour l'Antarctique, en coopération avec les gouvernements de Suède, de Finlande, de Norvège et de la Fédération de Russie, et à faire rapport au Parlement sur le résultat de ses investigations;

30. demande en particulier que soit établi un accord international visant à interdire au niveau global tout projet de recherche et de développement, tant militaire que civil, qui cherche à appliquer la connaissance des processus du fonctionnement du cerveau humain dans les domaines chimique, électrique, des ondes sonores ou autres au développement d'armes, ce qui pourrait ouvrir la porte à toute forme de manipulation de l'homme; un tel accord devrait également interdire toute possibilité d'utilisation réelle ou potentielle de tels systèmes;

31. demande à l'UE et à ses États membres d'oeuvrer à la conclusion de traités internationaux visant à protéger l'environnement contre des destructions inutiles en cas de conflit;

32. demande à l'UE et à ses États membres de veiller à ce que les incidences environnementales des activités des forces armées en temps de paix soient également soumises à des normes internationales;

33. demande au Conseil des ministres de l'UE de prendre une part active à la mise en oeuvre des propositions de la Commission de Canberra et de l'article VI du TNP;

34. invite le Conseil et les gouvernements britannique et français en particulier, à prendre la tête dans le contexte du TNP et de la conférence sur le désarmement en ce qui concerne la poursuite de négociations relatives à la pleine application des engagements pris quant à la réduction des

armes nucléaires et à un désarmement aussi rapide que possible, de façon à atteindre un niveau où, provisoirement, le stock global des armes encore existantes ne constitue plus une menace pour l'intégrité et la durabilité de l'environnement global; "

Rapport téléchargeable ici.

Finkielfraude

"Selon un témoin digne de foi, le philosophe sioniste, Alain Finkielkraut, a commis ce matin une grave « incivilité », de celles qu’il aime à dénoncer chez les nègres et les bougnoules de banlieue. Il a en effet été surpris dans une rame du RER en train de se faire sévèrement sermonner par des contrôleurs qui lui reprochaient de frauder."

"Former Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged Friday that Saddam Hussein didn't become a bigger threat after Sept. 11"

Arundhati Roy on the Palestinian / Israeli Conflict (Entire film)