Newsweek: Wikileaks May Be Planning More Releases
Fallout from Wikileaks’s release of more than 90,000 classified memos on the war in Afghanistan continues, as the Pentagon called the size of the leak “alarming” and vowed to find the individual who released the documents, Reuters reports. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that he didn’t “think the content” of the leaked documents was “very illuminating.”
The New York Times‘s At War blog follows the reaction to the WikiLeaks release from the media and across the Web.
The leak may make the White House’s effort to build and maintain support for its Afghan plans more difficult, with debate over the future of the American presence in Afghanistan now beginning earlier than the administration may have expected. According to Time magazine, a “recent national Bloomberg poll found that 58% of Americans considered the war effort a “lost cause.”" New York Times, Politico, Time.
One of the leaked memos, which is uncorroborated, suggests that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Afghan party Hezb-Islami, and someone named “Dr. Amin,” who is said to be Osama bin Laden’s financial adviser, traveled from Iran to North Korea in 2005 and purchased surface-to-air missiles to use against coalition forces in Afghanistan, according to the Washington Post‘s SpyTalk blog.
Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security argues in the New York Times that there is little new information in the leaked documents and that their release “dumps 92,000 new primary source documents into the laps of the world’s public with no context, no explanation as to why some accounts may contradict others, [and] no sense of what is important or unusual as opposed to the normal march of war.”
Newsweek‘s Declassified blog reports that “tens of thousands of additional U.S. government documents—including military reports relating to the Iraq War and State Department diplomatic cables—may surface in forthcoming document dumps,” according to unnamed sources.
Prosecutions
Prosecutors and defense counsel made closing arguments yesterday in the trial of two men accused of conspiring to bomb the fuel tanks at JFK airport. Prosecutor Zainab Ahmad argued that the defendants’ actions showed that they had the intent to carry out the plot, pointing to the fact that the two went as far as seeking help from notorious and dangerous terrorists such as Abu Bakr and Adnan El Shukrijumah. In her closing statement, Mildred Whalen, a lawyer for defendant Russell Defreitas, who allegedly came up with the plot, said that he was “a man with a small mind, a big mouth and an ugly imagination” but that “[t]hose are character flaws, not crimes.” Counsel for defendant Abdul Kadir said that his client “at no time ever had the intent to join this conspiracy.” The two defendants could serve life in prison if convicted. Bloomberg Businessweek, Wall Street Journal, AP.
On Monday U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis ordered Zachary A. Chesser, a Virginia man accused of attempting to join the terror group al Shabaab in Somalia, to remain in jail pending trial.
Guantanamo
The “ad hoc rules” for reporters at Guantanamo “come too fast, without rhyme or reason,” Carol Rosenberg says in a commentary piece at McClatchy. She contrasts conditions when the base first opened in 2004, when “reporters were VIPs” in the courtrooms, with today, when reporters are assigned seats and have to be escorted to the bathroom, and rules about what can and cannot be photographed seem to change daily. Rosenberg, a reporter for the Miami Herald, which is owned by McClatchy, was banned from Guantanamo court proceedings along with three other journalists after officials said that they had broken the rules on what may be published. The ban has since been lifted.
FBI
Yahye Wehelie, a U.S. citizen born and raised in Virginia, spent 11 weeks in Egypt because he was on the U.S. no-fly list. While there, he was questioned by the FBI about his 18-month stay in Yemen. Wehelie claims that the FBI eventually tried to convince him to become an informant, but Wehelie said he went to Yemen to find a wife and now wants to work in the IT business and “be a normal person,” according to the Washington Post.
CIA
The AP (via the Washington Post) outlines the steps leading to the destruction of videotapes the CIA had made of interrogation sessions that included “waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.” A Justice Department investigation into the tapes’ destruction may result in criminal charges.
Defense Spending
Members of a House subcommittee will likely vote to approve funding for a new engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, although Defense Secretary Gates has said that the program should be cut. Funding the engine would cost $485 million. President Obama has threatened to veto bills authorizing expenditures for the program.
Afghanistan
The Afghan government has claimed that 52 civilians were killed on Friday by a NATO strike in the village of Rigi. Western and Afghan forces are conducting a joint investigation, and U.S. officials said yesterday that the investigation “has thus far revealed no evidence of civilians injured or killed,” according to the New York Times. NATO says they struck a Taliban outpost several miles from Rigi and killed 6 militants. New York Times, Los Angeles Times.
NATO has confirmed that the body of one of two missing Navy sailors has been found in eastern Afghanistan. The man is reported to be Justin McNeley, 30, from Colorado. NATO forces are still engaged in a widespread search for the second sailor, and have distributed hundreds of flyers offering $20,000 for information leading to his location.
Amid growing concerns over the privatization of intelligence, two NATO solicitations for contracts are being limited in their scope. In language apparently tracking defense authorization legislation by Congress, the contractors cannot be used “in direct support of combat operations [or] used to conduct source operations,” according to the Washington Post. Also, those hired will “not direct or supervise government personnel … [or] contuct or directly participate in interrogations under any circumstances.”
At TomDispatch, Tom Engelhardt uses a recent Los Anegeles Times story about the U.S. buying Russian helicopters for the Afghan air force as starting point to discuss the “surpassing strangeness” of the American foreign policy. He focuses on chronic problems in training Afghan forces, the plan for U.S. withdrawal, and the possibility of the U.S. using the Russian aircraft for secret missions. “For Washington, there seems to be no learning curve in Afghanistan, not when it comes to ‘training’ Afghans anyway,” he argues.
Pakistan
Sultan Amir Tarar, a former member of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency who was kidnapped in March, has appeared in a video saying that he would “expose the government’s ‘weaknesses’” unless it complies with his captors’ request for prisoners to be released, according to the AP .Tarar, who in the video says he is in the custody of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami, helped the Taliban rise to power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. He was kidnapped along with another former spy, Khalid Khawaja, and a filmmaker. Khawaja has since been killed.
Iraq
A suicide bombing at the al Arabiya television station’s offices in Baghdad, for which Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has claimed to be responsible, killed six people and injured 16 yesterday. Separately, an attack on Shia pilgrims killed nearly 20 people.
Reports from Iraq say that al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been robbing hospitals and blood banks of blood to treat injured fighters since as early as 2005, according to the New York Times.
Yemen
Six Yemeni soldiers and three people believed to be members of al Qaeda, one believed to be a high-ranking member, were killed in an al Qaeda attack in the Shabwa province of southern Yemen on Sunday. Al Qaeda says that only one of the people killed belonged to the group. In the north, “dozens” of people were killed yesterday in fighting between Houthi rebels and those loyal to the government, the New York Times reports. CNN, New York Times.
Algeria
Aziz Abdul Naji, an Algerian former Guantanamo detainee who campaigned along with other Algerian detainees to remain at Guantanamo rather than be repatriated, was missing for a week but is now home. Naji has been indicted in Algeria under an unspecified law, according to the AP. He had been detained under an Algerian law under which “suspects in terror-related probes can be held for up to 12 days.” His family and lawyers feared he was being held in secret detention, but his brother told Reuters that Naji “did not say that he had been abused during his detention.” Naji remains under “judicial control,” which requires him to report to a local police station once a week. AP, Reuters.
Somalia
Abdirahman Sheik Mohamed, president of the semi-autonomous region of Puntland in Somalia that is allied with the Western-backed government, said that 13 al Shabaab fighters and at least two security officials were killed after an attack on an army base, according to the BBC. Puntland officials have recently sent hundreds of suspected al Shabaab sympathizers to Mogadishu.
In the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen argues that the Obama administration wasted a valuable intelligence opportunity when it decided to kill rather than capture Saleh Ali Nabhan, who Thiessen describes as the leader of al Qaeda in East Africa as well as a leader of al Shabaab.
France and North Africa
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has said that Michel Germaneau, a 78-year-old French citizen killed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, may have been killed prior to a raid by French and Mauritanian forces attempting to free him. France intends to intensify their support for the fight against militants in North Africa.
News stories compiled by the staff of the Center on Law and Security
