Congressional review of NIE Iran findings sought

The following article mentions a "growing backlash" against the Iran NIE by conservatives, neoconservatives, and Republicans in general. Pundita does not fall into those categories, and yet I've been in backlash mode ever since I saw Thomas Fingar's name attached to the NIE report.

Even without my concerns about Fingar's ability for threat assessment, I should think that anyone, including Democrats who have supported actions against Iran, would want to take a close look at the NIE findings.

Review of Iran Intelligence to Be Sought
by Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler for The Washington Post, December 7

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.

The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he plans to introduce legislation next week to establish a commission modeled on a congressionally mandated group that probed a disputed 1995 intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threat to the United States over the next 15 years.

"Iran is one of the greatest threats in the world today. Getting the intelligence right is absolutely critical, not only on Iran's capability but its intent. So now there is a huge question raised, and instead of politicizing that report, let's have a fresh set of eyes -- objective, yes -- look at it," he said in an interview.

Ensign's proposal calls for Senate leaders to put an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on a panel to study the NIE and report back in six months. "There are a lot of people out there who do question [the NIE]. There is a huge difference between the 2005 and 2007 estimates," he said. The 2005 intelligence estimate reported that Iran was still working on a clandestine military program, and the new assessment basically says the previous judgment was wrong on a key point.

"If it's inaccurate, it could result in very serious damage to legitimate American policy," said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). As recently as July, he noted, intelligence officials said in congressional testimony that they had a high degree of confidence that Iran was intent on developing the world's deadliest weapon. "We need to update our conclusions, but this is a substantial change," he said in an interview. [...]

Why is good intelligence on the worst regimes so hard to come by these days?

Spook86 has posted an illuminating discussion at In From the Cold about the limitations of sources and methods used for intelligence gathering in this era:

The growing imbroligo over the Iran NIE is raising new concerns about the intelligence sources and methods used to produce the document--and its controversial judgments. [...]

While there are legitimate concerns about the personal biases and suspected political agendas of the study's primary authors, Americans should also worry about the quality and reliability of the information used in formulating the assessment. [...]

As with any National Intelligence Estimate, we assume the new Iran assessment makes use of the full array of intel sources and methods--SIGINT, HUMINT, IMINT, MASINT and even open-source reporting. But we also recognize that information from these same sources led to a dramatically different conclusion just two years ago. Moreover, the volume and quality of collection from these platforms has not improved dramatically--as far as we can tell. Technological refinements in our intel systems are offset by the adversary's own advances, and their attempts at denial and deception.

Consider the example of signals intelligence, or SIGINT. The National Security Agency (NSA) remains the preeminent SIGINT organization in the world. But agency veterans will tell you that the SIGINT environment has become increasingly challenging, thanks to the proliferation of fiber-optic technology and low-cost encryption devices. Phone calls and other communications that once bounced between relay towers are now routed over fiber-optic cable; intercepting them means tapping into the line, a difficult proposition in places like Iran, Syria or North Korea.

The problem is further compounded by wide availability of personal encryption devices. Complex cyphers that were once the exclusive property of governments and intelligence services can now be downloaded from the internet. Increased use of these systems and devices slows the decrypt of adversary communication--and the flow of information to decision-makers.

What about cell phones, you ask? They operate on a tower-based line-of-sight system. True, but intercepting those transmissions (usually) means getting inside hostile territory, further complicating the collection task.

And SIGINT isn't the only intel discipline facing such challenges. In the internet era, there are scores of websites that offer information on the orbits and potential collection "windows" for spy satellites. Today, an effective satellite warning program is just a few keystrokes away--and there's little we can do about it.

HUMINT? The Robb-Silberman Commission Report (released in 2005) deplored the state of our HUMINT capabilities, noting the meager haul on Saddam's WMD programs in the run-up to the war, and the wholesale lack of reporting on Iraqi leadership intentions. Similar problems are said to exist with the Iranian "target," which presents similar challenges. Clearly, there have been no major "breakthroughs" in traditional collection methods over the past two years. [..]

Read more for the former spook's discussion of the intelligence used for the latest NIE report on Iran.

Aw, John Bolton takes Thomas Fingar's ouija board away from him. And unnamed officials scamble to explain away NIE problems

First I'll turn to John Bolton's discussion for today's Washington Post:

[...] Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.

First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."

Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.

Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments." [...]

How can I be sure that emphasis on trying to divine the psychology of the mullacrats reflects Thomas Fingar's stamp in particular? Plow through yesterday's Pundita post to see why, and give special attention to the David Kaplan report, Hey, Let's Play Ball in the 1:00 PM Update to the post. Fingar wants to turn intelligence work into sort of a university, where the opinions from many academic disciplines, such as psychology, are given much weight.

But then maybe I shouldn't say I'm sure. How about, "I have high confidence?"

Meanwhile, various unnamed "senior intelligence and government officials" have passed along to The New York Times their explanations for the NIE key judgments:

American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday.

The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why Iran’s leadership decided to halt the covert effort.

Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. It is not clear if those conversations involved the same officers and others whose deliberations were recounted in the notes, or if they included their superiors.

The American officials who described the highly classified operation, which led to one of the biggest reversals in the history of American nuclear intelligence, declined to describe how the notes were obtained.

But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004. [...]

I'll bet the exchange was vivid. The more details the unnamed officials supply, the more nervous I become. They're talking about notes and laptops, not about investigative work to determine the status of Iran's nuke weapons program.

Their reply should not be, 'We can't get such data so we have to assume notes and computer files are right.'

YIKES! Thomas Fingar one of three main authors of NIE report on Iran's nuke program! Start building a bomb shelter!

Just this past February I strenuously warned readers about Thomas Fingar's very limited capacity -- okay, zero capacity -- as a threat assessment analyst. And here he turns up as one of authors -- main authors, no less -- of the National Intelligence Estimate report that exonerates Iran from involvement in a nuclear weapons program.

The Wall Street Journal editorial that mentions this terrifying fact notes that Fingar and the other two main authors of the NIE are anti-Bush. That's neither here nor there. Read the Pundita post on Fingar to understand why he is not cut out for intelligence analysis -- not if it has to do with threat assessment.

And here he was given the task of assessing whether Iran was still a 'near' threat. In light of Fingar's involvement with the NIE analysis, it's doubly troubling that Israel's defense establishment didn't accept the main conclusion of the NIE:

"It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio. [...]

Barak uses careful language but it's apparent to me that I'm moving to a cave in the Himalayas unless the intelligence that contributed to the NIE is reconsidered without Fingar's input. Here is the Wall Street Journal editorial.

I hope that Rupert Murdoch will forgive me for publishing the entire thing, given that WSJ is still a subscription site. But this is in the interests of national survival -- and of how many nations, I don't want to consider at this time in the morning:

'High Confidence' Games
December 5, 2007; Page A24

In his press conference yesterday, President Bush went out of his way to praise the "good work" of the intelligence community, whose latest National Intelligence Estimate claims the mullahs of Iran abandoned their nuclear weapons program in 2003. "This is heartening news," Mr. Bush said. "To me, it's a way for us to rally our partners."

We wish we could be as sanguine, both about the quality of U.S. intelligence and its implications for U.S. diplomacy. For years, senior Administration officials, including Condoleezza Rice, have stressed to us how little the government knows about what goes on inside Iran. In 2005, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report underscored that "Across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors." And as our liberal friends used to remind us, you can never trust the CIA. (Only later did they figure out the agency was usually on their side.)

As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons" and do so "despite its international obligations and international pressure." This was a "high confidence" judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 "in response to increasing international scrutiny." This too is a "high confidence" conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these "estimates" -- the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies -- are conducted and accorded gospel status.

Our own "confidence" is not heightened by the fact that the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials," according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former
U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

For a flavor of their political outlook, former Bush Administration anti-proliferation official John Bolton recalls in his recent memoir that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage "described Brill's efforts in Vienna, or lack thereof, as 'bull -- .'"

Mr. Brill was "retired" from the State Department by Colin Powell before being rehired, over considerable internal and public protest, as head of the National Counter-Proliferation Center by then-National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

No less odd is the NIE's conclusion that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to "international pressure." The only serious pressure we can recall from that year was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program to mill and enrich uranium and produce heavy water at sites previously unknown to U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration's response was to punt the issue to the Europeans, who in 2003 were just beginning years of fruitless diplomacy before the matter was turned over to the U.N. Security Council.

Mr. Bush implied yesterday that the new estimate was based on "some new information," which remains classified. We can only hope so. But the indications that the Bush Administration was surprised by this NIE, and the way it scrambled yesterday to contain its diplomatic consequences, hardly inspire even "medium confidence" that our spooks have achieved some epic breakthrough. The truth could as easily be that the Administration in its waning days has simply lost any control of its bureaucracy -- not that it ever had much.

In any case, the real issue is not Iran's nuclear weapons program, but its nuclear program, period. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale -- that is, build the capability to make the fuel for a potential bomb. And it is doing so in open defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. No less a source than the IAEA recently confirmed that Iran already has blueprints to cast uranium in the shape of an atomic bomb core.

The U.S. also knows that Iran has extensive technical information on how to fit a warhead atop a ballistic missile. And there is considerable evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has been developing the detonation devices needed to set off a nuclear explosion at the weapons testing facility in Parchin. Even assuming that Iran is not seeking a bomb right now, it is hardly reassuring that they are developing technologies that could bring them within a screw's twist of one.

Mr. Bush's efforts to further sanction Iran at the U.N. were stalled even before the NIE's release. Those efforts will now be on life support. The NIE's judgments also complicate Treasury's efforts to persuade foreign companies to divest from Iran. Why should they lose out on lucrative business opportunities when even U.S. intelligence absolves the Iranians of evil intent? Calls by Democrats and their media friends to negotiate with Tehran "without preconditions" will surely grow louder.

The larger worry here is how little we seem to have learned from our previous intelligence failures. Over the course of a decade, our intelligence services badly underestimated Saddam's nuclear ambitions, then overestimated them. Now they have done a 180-degree turn on Iran, and in such a way that will contribute to a complacency that will make it easier for Iran to build a weapon. Our intelligence services are supposed to inform the policies of elected officials, but increasingly their judgments seem to be setting policy. This is dangerous.

1:00 PM ET Update
Partly in response to a reader suggestion I am tacking on the entire February 3, 2007 Pundita post about Thomas Fingar and the grim implications of his rise to great power in the US intelligence community. This will make the post very long, and I hope it doesn't overshadow my earlier post today about the upcoming Africa-EU summit -- an important meeting on many counts.

But the other part of my reason is that I came across a quote in The Washington Post about the NIE that Zenpundit scooped up from Arms Control Wonk for his mini-roundup of opinion on the NIE:

“Dafna Linzer reports in the Washington Post that a crucial bit of information was an intercepted communication by a senior Iranian military official “complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered.” The intercept - which Linzer notes was one of 1,000 footnotes in a 150 page document - was the final piece in the puzzle, and Linzer reports that the intercepts were briefed to the Bush Administration “beginning in July.” So, that timing would be consistent with Mike McConnell’s reference to “new information collected in late spring that caused a reconsideration of some elements of the assessment.”

See the ACW post or Zenpudit for links to the Washington Post article and McConnell's reference.

The Linzer note doesn't take on full import until you know that Fingar had a heavy hand in the NIE analysis of Iran's nuclear weapons program. If that one intercept was a "final" piece of the puzzle -- has no one in our intelligence agencies heard of counterintelligence? And did no one consider that the Iranians are well aware of SIGINT?

Okay, enough sackcloth and ashes; here is the February Pundita post:

February 3, 2007
Thomas Fingar and the scary new day in US intelligence work

"Happily, the severity of specific threats to our nation, our values, our system of government, and our way of life are low and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future." (1)
-- Thomas Fingar, while Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence And Research, speaking before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on current and projected national security threats to U.S., February 2001

“We get it. We [in the intelligence community] realize we have got to rebuild confidence [in intelligence work].”
-- Thomas Fingar, Chairman, National Intelligence Council and deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 2007

Thomas Fingar is no more suited for US threat analysis work than Miss Beazley. So if Pundita had a really dark sense of humor, she might quip that the DNI was created solely as a desperation measure to dislodge Fingar from State because the man couldn't be fired.

I can dream on but even with the will to fire him, it would have been virtually impossible to do so. Why? Because for decades Fingar's China analyses were very useful to US administrations that wanted to normalize relations with China and downplay intelligence suggesting that China posed any kind of security threat to the US. But about 15 years ago Mr Fingar's intelligence analysis work at the US Department of State began to encompass all countries. I don't believe it's coincidental that during those years State developed a terminal case of Clientitis and was rendered as a blind as a bat.

Yet State's ineptness at assessing security threats and significant political changes in every region on the globe has been held up as a model of effective intelligence analysis. State's INR (Intelligence and Research) bureau has been exempted from DNI (Director of National Intelligence Office) oversight and is deemed the winner in intelligence analysis when compared to the CIA. The comparison is akin to asking whether a tricycle or pogo stick is the fastest means of cross-country transportation.

If that's not enough to give you nightmares, today Mr Fingar is the "keeper of the crown jewels," as one writer termed it. John Negroponte plucked Fingar from State to be the Number Two at DNI:

"The intelligence reorganization legislation gives Fingar responsibility and authority for setting standards and coordinating objectives for U.S. intelligence efforts, although it leaves the analysts at their respective agencies with the goal of allowing them to present independent views. Fingar will also have what a senior intelligence official involved in the process described to reporters yesterday as "governance" over the President's Daily Brief, the summary of most important items given to Bush each day."(2)

Now what is Mr Fingar's idea of "standards" for the US intelligence community? Well, "objectivity" -- meaning intelligence that is not shaped to political ends -- is the buzzword in the new day. How does Fingar plan on bringing in more objectivity? We can glean clues from noting his scholarly background -- he's a China scholar -- and studying a program called SHARP. Watch carefully; don't blink:

Hey, Let's Play Ball
The insular world of intelligence reaches out for a few new ideas
By David E. Kaplan, U.S. News & World Report, October 29, 2006

At a modest office building just outside Boston last July, senior U.S. intelligence officials quietly set in motion an unusual experiment. For four weeks, a handpicked group of 20 outside experts brainstormed, argued, and chewed the fat with 20 top analysts from the CIA and eight other intelligence agencies. Their mission: to understand why people join terrorist organizations and other groups engaged in antisocial activity. The issues went to some of the most basic questions confronting Washington's intelligence mandarins: What's driving the spread of extremism around the globe, and how can it be stopped?

Dubbed the Summer Hard Problems workshop, or SHARP, the program is modeled after a highly successful project by the code-breaking National Security Agency, which for years has brought in top mathematicians to tackle cutting-edge issues in encryption. SHARP similarly threw together leading specialists, but from the social sciences: experts in anthropology, social psychology, insurgency, and Islamic thought, among other fields. But for all the esoteric talk about jihadism, group dynamics, and social networks, the SHARP participants had a second mission: to change the way U.S. intelligence agencies do their job, by opening the notoriously insular espionage community to the rest of the world.

SHARP is the brainchild of the 18-month-old Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is charged with overseeing and reforming the nation's sprawling $44 billion intelligence community. Key to that effort is an organized attack on the kind of "groupthink" that resulted in U.S. intelligence agencies getting dead wrong, among other things, nearly every facet of Saddam Hussein's banned weapons programs. Reformers at the DNI and other agencies hope to answer critics who call the nation's spy agencies obsolete -- a bunch of big bureaucracies so addicted to secrecy that they can't cope in the Internet age. "This culture of secrecy in an information-rich world is totally anachronistic," says Phil Williams, an international security expert at the University of Pittsburgh who often consults with intelligence agencies.

Wiki-spies?
To help change the way the nation's espionage agencies do business, senior DNI officials are pushing an effort unlike any seen since the height of the Vietnam War, nearly 40 years ago. The SHARP workshop is but one of a wide array of outreach projects now underway, involving millions of dollars in contracts, fellowships, conferences -- even wikis and blogs -- directed at scholars and other outside experts. DNI officials are mindful of the past, when Vietnam War-era funding drew loud protests on campus, amid charges that the CIA had skewed academic research on Asian studies and secretly backed groups like the National Student Association.

The new effort has also begun to stir controversy, but for those who respond, the rewards can be considerable, including contracts, lucrative stipends, and a chance to influence analysis at the CIA and 15 other intelligence agencies. The scope is broad: A classified DNI survey this year yielded 240 pages of outreach efforts involving virtually every U.S. agency that generates intelligence information. Those interested (and invited) enter a world of exclusive conferences, workshops, studies, sabbaticals, and scholarships. Participants include not only academics but experts at think tanks, international groups, foundations, and businesses, as well as medical doctors and scientists.

"The intelligence community will never be big enough, will never have enough analysts," says Thomas Fingar, the DNI's chief of analysis. "There's an absolute need to go outside."

Fingar's office is spearheading the charge. The DNI's new plan, "A Strategy for Analytic Outreach," reviewed by U.S. News, calls for a major effort at building "communities of interest" with outside experts and revamping security regulations to allow far greater contact with the outside world. Fingar hopes to replicate what he accomplished as head of the State Department's small but respected intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. [...]

There you have it; Mr Fingar wants to do for all US intelligence agencies under DNI's oversight what he did for State. And he wants to inject into the intelligence community a high degree of dependence on scholarly opinion. The latter is another way of saying that Fingar wants more emphasis on forensic-style proofs in intelligence work, which of course is a contradiction in terms.

Set aside troubling questions about a much closer relationship between academia and intelligence work that Fingar's approach suggests, and which the U.S. News report examines in some depth. What are the biggest flaws in the SHARP approach to intelligence work?

Firstly, anyone who has seen the TV FBI drama "Numb3rs" knows that there is a very direct, very close relationship between mathematics and threat analysis. So the NSA mathematics project, on which SHARP is modeled, makes good sense. But where is the direct connection between anthropology and threat analysis? Between social psychology and threat analysis?

Secondly, even if you could develop a sound rationale for the All is Everything school of intelligence analysis, what the hell kind of data filters would you require, in order to make all the cross-discipline analysis useful for timely threat assessment?

You would end up with the same problem that NSA data analysts always face, which is Garbage In, Garbage Out. You would end up with zillions of teeny tiny data mosaics that may or may not add up to anything useful for threat assessment.

Mr Fingar is not stupid. He understands what I'm saying. So what is his real goal? He wants to purify US intelligence work of the dross of threat assessment.

That is another way of describing State's approach to intelligence work since being infected by the Clientitis bug. Over the decades, the mission of the US foreign office devolved from supporting US strategic objectives to "coordinating with the rest of the world," as one writer put it.

Now, after bringing Mr Finger to DNI, John Negroponte is headed back to State; it does not seem likely that Fingar will follow him back there. Keeping Fingar away from State would be a good thing for State, but keeping him at DNI would be very bad news for US intelligence work. Yet there is nothing you and I can do about the situation; Mr Fingar is burrowed too deep in the intelligence community to hope that anything but retirement will dislodge him.

So, taking a page from the cross-discipline approach, Pundita will attempt an assessment of the situation by quoting Tom Colicchio, head judge for the Top Chef competition. When a semi-finalist complained about the behavior of another semi-finalist in the kitchen throughout the weeks of competition, Colicchio replied:

"We're not judging your behavior in the kitchen. We're judging your food. I really don't care what happens in there, to tell you the truth."

By the same token, nobody outside the spy community really cares how spies make good evaluations. We just want the US government to become skilled at threat analysis. The only thing that will rebuild our confidence is if the intelligence community gets threat analysis right on the big stuff.

1) Fingar 2001 testimony

2) The Washington Post

Okay, Africa, how much will it cost to ease the pain and suffering you experienced under European colonialism?

Here's the good news about the Africa-EU summit this weekend in Lisbon, Portugal:

LISBON (Reuters) - European and African leaders will seek to forge a fresh partnership to tackle issues like trade, immigration and peacekeeping this week when they hold their first summit in seven years.

Pressed by China's growing investment and influence in Africa, EU leaders hope to reinforce ties with the world's poorest continent by improving cooperation on several fronts and moving away from dependence-inducing aid.

EU president Portugal says the EU-Africa summit is long overdue -- the last was held in Cairo in 2000. [...] Portugal says the summit will herald a multilateral European approach to Africa, moving away once and for all from the colonial heritage of the 1885 Berlin conference when European powers carved up Africa between them.

"The Berlin model of dividing (Africa) among ourselves was the model that has dominated EU-Africa relations before this summit," Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado told Reuters. "This summit marks the end of that model." [...]

The bad news is the colonial-era mentality still influences the actions of several African leaders:

(International Herald Tribune) - Zimbabwe's president has a simple answer to why his country's rich farmland is wasting away as inflation soars: colonialism.

While critics in and outside his country blame Robert Mugabe's land seizures and draconian rule for Zimbabwe's crisis, Mugabe told attendees at a recent state dinner that Britain, the former colonial master, was crippling his country.

Applause was loud and long. [...]

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade took Mugabe's side last week, calling the Zimbabwean president his "African brother" and praising Mugabe as a fighter for the dignity of Africa during a one-day visit to Zimbabwe.

Wade charged that Zimbabwe's problems stemmed from its harsh colonial history. [...]

Last year, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi blamed deadly riots in front of an Italian consulate on Libyans' hatred for Italy — which occupied parts or all of Libya from 1911 to 1943. Gadhafi demanded a goodwill gesture from Italy such as a highway or a hospital to show the colonizer's willingness to made amends for the past. Italy has since pledged to help create a trans-Libyan highway.

Even Mugabe's detractors often say they understand the urge to fight back against a condescending Europe.

John Nagenda, a senior adviser to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and harsh critic of Mugabe, said Zimbabwe's problems are an extreme version of what many former colonies experience with their one-time occupiers.

"There's the master-servant relationship, even if it's not as direct as it once was," Nagenda said. "Many ex-colonial masters feel, consciously or unconsciously, that they are the final arbiters of issues in the country."

Nagenda said this continues to play out in preferential trade agreements and lopsided foreign policy.

In this context, Britain's Gordon Brown, who is boycotting the Lisbon summit because Mugabe will be there, becomes the leader who is grandstanding — playing to a British crowd rather than trying to address Africa's problems on an equal footing with African leaders.[...]

What equal footing can there be, when you insist on taking alms from those you consider your former abuser?

Many Africans support my point but many don't seem to get it. And they won't get it, as long as their leaders continue to hold out their palms to the former colonial masters while whining about abuse.

Maybe the solution is for African governments to get together and hire 1,000 American psychologists specializing in recovering from abuse. Have the psychologists travel from country to country on the continent, giving workshops to Africans on how to disengage from a highly destructive co-dependent relationship.

For Pete's sake; 1943 was more than a half century ago. If you're still saying that what was done to you even a decade ago justifies your unproductive or violent behavior, that's your problem to fix. You learn this, or continue in a passive-aggressive cycle of behavior that always lands you back in the thinking of a beggar or a slave.

If Africans reading this post don't want to listen to Pundita's advice, maybe putting the argument in terms of cash will make a dent in your thinking.

So. Every African leader who feels their people should be compensated for pain and suffering under the colonialists should put a dollar figure to their victim status.

Next, tot up how much -- in today's dollars -- the European colonialists paid for the education, hospitals, roads, railroads, post offices, military training, etc. of the African peoples.

Then add to this the amount of low-interest loans (many now forgiven) and outright charity given to Africans by Europeans during the past half century.

Then subtract that amount from the victim payments deemed owed, or reverse that if the latter amount is larger than the former. Whichever, put the balance down on paper. Then send the paper to the embassy of every European country that was involved in colonialism.

Add these words to the paper: "You no longer owe me this much. I forgive the debt."

Or, if Africa owes on balance, write: "We will repay the balance as soon as we can."

Then -- then you will be thinking like free men and women.

Meanwhile, you can ring up the British Embassy to thank Gordon Brown for standing up to a despot who referred to the poorest among his people as "cockroaches" needing to be exterminated.

Finally President Bush speaks up about Qatif Girl case

This is not enough; President Bush needs to instruct the State Department to lodge a formal complaint with Saudi King Abdullah about the case. But Bush's public words are a start:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush on Tuesday expressed his anger about a Saudi Arabian rape victim who was sentenced to prison and 200 lashes for being alone with a man not related to her. [*]

"My first thoughts were these," Bush said, when asked about the case at a news conference. "What happens if this happens to my daughter? How would I react? And I would have been — I'd of been very emotional, of course. I'd have been angry at those who committed the crime. And I'd be angry at a state that didn't support the victim."

Bush, however, said he has not made his views known directly to Saudi King Abdullah, an ally. But he added: "He knows our position loud and clear."

The woman was found to be in violation of the kingdom's strict segregation of the sexes. Saudi Arabia has faced enormous international criticism about the sentencing.

* Actually, the sentence was 90 lashes for the crime of sitting in a car with a man who was not related to her. The sentence was increased to 200 lashes and six months in jail because she had the impertinence to tell her story to a human rights organization and the Saudi press.

Catch us if you can: a possible sign that Qaeda is moving into Gaza

The US military announced today that forty senior al Qaeda in Iraq members were captured or killed in November.

A spokesman for the US military noted that the kills include Abu Maysara, a Syrian who was a senior adviser to al Qaeda in Iraq leader, Egyptian Abu Ayyub al-Masri. The good news is accompanied by a caution:

"There is no question that al Qaeda in Iraq remains a dangerous and vicious threat to the Iraqi people and to the security forces and the coalition forces," U.S. military spokesman Major-General Kevin Bergner told a news conference.

"Al Qaeda continues to try to seek spectacular attacks which were so damaging and which continue to be so damaging in inciting sectarian tensions ... we still have a tough fight ahead of us even amidst the progress," he said.

Cautions aside, Qaeda is taking a pounding in Iraq. Yet the deadly game of Whack-a-Mole continues. John Loftus mentioned last night on his radio show that intelligence monitors have "picked up Chechen voices in Gaza." He noted that this turn of events could signal that Qaeda is moving fighters into Gaza.

John's observation comports with the November 30 "bin Laden" audio tape announcement, which reveals a new claim supposedly by Osama bin Laden: "The events of Manhattan were a response to the American-Israeli coalition's murder of our people in Palestine and Lebanon, and it was I who was responsible for 9/11."

The audio tape was released on the heels of the November 27 Annapolis conference and in the run-up to the December 7 presidential vote in Lebanon.

This is the fourth announcement since September that is purportedly from bin Laden. The announcements, taken as a whole, suggest that Qaeda leaders are trying to show their followers that Qaeda has influence on every political situation involving Muslim territories.

Perhaps that is why Qaeda followers have become great fans of objective journalism. Welcome to the revolution, guys.

But Qaeda inserting themselves into Gaza would be an interesting development; it might be the final straw for Palestinians who want peace and a speedy resolution to the two-state negotiations.

I assume at this moment that any Chechen terrorists now in Gaza are working under the direction of Iran's military via Hamas, but Loftus has indeed raised a question about Qaeda's next move.

For more on the latest audio tape announcement, see Neil Doyle's analysis.

Northern Nigeria backs away from purely Islamic justice system while still able to do so

I have not had time to write the post I intended to publish around 4:00 PM today; it will have to wait until tomorrow. For now:

The quest for a 'humane Shariah' in Nigeria
by Lydia Polgreen, International Herald Tribue

(KANO, Nigeria) Just last year, the morality police roamed these streets in dusky blue uniforms and black berets, brandishing cudgels at prayer shirkers and dragging fornicators into Islamic courts to face sentences like death by public stoning.

But these days, the fearsome police officers, known as the Hisbah, are little more than glorified crossing guards. They have largely been confined to their barracks and assigned anodyne tasks like directing traffic and helping fans to their seats at soccer games.

The Islamic revolution that seemed so destined to transform northern Nigeria in recent years appears to have come and gone — or at least gone in a direction few here would have expected.

When Muslim-dominated states like Kano adopted Islamic law after the fall of military rule in 1999, radical clerics from the Arabian peninsula arrived in droves to preach a draconian brand of fundamentalism, and newly empowered religious judges handed down tough punishments like amputation for theft. Kano became a center of anti-American sentiment in one of the most reliably pro-American countries in Africa.

But since then, much of the furor has died down, and the practice of Islamic law, or Shariah, which had gone on for centuries in the private sphere before becoming enshrined in public law, has settled into a distinctively Nigerian compromise between the dictates of faith and the chaotic realities of modern life in an impoverished, developing nation.

"Shariah needs to be practical," said Bala Abdullahi, a civil servant here. "We are a developing country, so there is a kind of moderation between the ideas of the West and traditional Islamic values. We try to weigh it so there is no contradiction."

The federal government cracked down on the Hisbah last year, enforcing a national ban on religious and ethnic militias, and the secular, federally controlled police force has little interest in enforcing the harshest strictures of Shariah. Violence between Muslims and Christians has also begun to subside in the north.

But even before then, the feared mutilations and death sentences almost never materialized. Public floggings are quite common, and in Zamfara, the first state to adopt Shariah as the basis of its criminal code, at least one man had his hand amputated in 2000 for stealing a cow, but other sentences of mutilation have rarely been carried out.

And despite several internationally known adultery sentences of death by stoning in a public square — including that of Amina Lawal, a woman from Katsina State who gave birth to a child out of wedlock that a Shariah court in 2002 took as evidence of the crime — not one stoning sentence has been carried out. Lawal's conviction was overturned the following year, and she is now active in local politics, living freely with her daughter Wasila in her hometown.

The change has little to do with religious attitudes — northern Nigeria remains one of the most pious Muslim regions in Africa, as it has been since the camel caravans across the Sahara first brought Islam here centuries ago. In Kano, the main city of Kano State, thousands of men spill out in neat rows onto the city's main boulevards on Friday afternoon, an overflow of devotion for the week's most important prayer, and virtually all Muslim women are veiled.

The shift reflects the fact that religious law did not transform society. Indeed, some of the most ardent Shariah-promoting politicians now find themselves under investigation for embezzling millions of dollars. Many early proponents of Shariah feel duped by politicians who rode its popular wave but failed to live by its tenets, enriching themselves and neglecting to improve the lives of ordinary people.

"Politicians started seeing Shariah as a gateway to political power," said Abba Adam Koki, a conservative cleric here who has criticized the local government's application of Shariah. "But they were insincere. We have been disappointed and never got what we had hoped."

Facing backlash from citizens and criticism from human rights groups at home and abroad, state governments that had swiftly enacted Shariah and embraced its harshest tenets are now shifting the emphasis from the punishments and prohibitions to a softer approach that emphasizes other tenets of Muslim law, like charity, women's rights and the duty of Muslims to keep their environment clean.

"Shariah is not only about the cutting off of wrists," said Muzammil Sani Hanga, a member of Kano State's Shariah Commission and a legal expert who helped draft the state's Islamic code. "It is a complete way of life."

New programs have sprung up to encourage parents to send their daughters to hybrid public elementary schools that offer traditional Islamic education along with math and reading, in keeping with Islamic principles that call for the education of girls. In many of these classrooms, girls outnumber boys, and the United States Agency for International Development is so impressed with the potential of these programs that one third of the schools it supports across Nigeria are integrated Islamic and secular, according to officials at the agency.

State officials are using Islamic exhortations on cleanliness to encourage recycling of the plastic bags that choke landfills and gutters. One governor, citing the Islamic duty to care for the indigent, recently instituted a monthly stipend for disabled beggars.

"Our approach is a humane Shariah, not a punitive Shariah," said Bala Muhammad, director of a state program in Kano called A Daidaita Sahu. The name, a Hausa commandment, means "straighten your rows," a reference to the razor-sharp lines formed by Muslims as they line up to pray and a metaphor for the orderliness required in everyday life by the Koran.

Hundreds of yellow motorized rickshaws purchased by the state government make it easier for women, who had been barred from taking motorcycle taxis, to get around.

"As a Muslim woman I want to be modest," said one commuter, Amina Abubakar, as she stepped daintily into the back seat of a rickshaw and pulled its privacy curtain closed. "This is more comfortable, and the safety is better."

To be sure, conservative elements hold sway in some areas. In October, a Shariah court in Kaduna upheld the ban of a satirical play by the human rights activist Shehu Sani about a corrupt politician who uses Shariah to manipulate his constituents.

But the shift may also be helping to ease tensions between Muslims and Christians in a country where sectarian conflicts, often stoked by politicians to stir up support, have killed thousands over the past decade.

"The thing has caused a lot of harm," said the Rev. Foster Ekeleme, a Methodist bishop in Kano who leads a flock of mostly Ibo tribespeople from southeastern Nigeria. "There was burning of Christian churches. Christians were killed. So many people were displaced. But now, the tempo is cooling down."

Ekeleme had just been visited by a senior adviser of the Kano State governor, an Ibo Catholic, Chris Azuka, who was appointed to try to improve interfaith relations in the state.

"The idea of Shariah is to promote social justice, not create religious conflict," Azuka said. "Shariah is not about violence."

Northern Muslims and southern Christians have long coexisted uneasily across what is now modern Nigeria. Two centuries ago, the Hausa rulers of the north waged a jihad to convert southerners to Islam, and while they only reached the middle of the country, the aftershocks of the period can be felt to this day.

More recently, the Hausa elite have dominated the military, while southern Christians, like the Yoruba and the Ibo, have dominated commercial and intellectual life. According to international human rights organizations, 11,000 to 15,000 people have been killed in sectarian and ethnic conflicts in Nigeria since the return of democracy in 1999.

In Jigawa State, religious violence exploded in September 2006, amid political tensions before elections in 2007. A Muslim woman claimed that a Christian one had insulted the Prophet Muhammad, and mobs of Muslim youths descended on Christian churches in the state capital, Dutse, burning several to the ground.

The mob arrived at the Assemblies of God church, where the pastor's wife, Nadi Dangana, said she barely escaped over the wall before the youths broke down the gate.

"We escaped with our lives, but all our property is gone," she said.

The church was left in ashes, its altar and crosses charred stumps. A makeshift sanctuary without walls stands in its place. Blackened bits of salvaged corrugated roofing keep out the rain.

But these days tensions have cooled, said Garba Shehu, a former Muslim from Dutse who converted to evangelical Christianity. When the governor signed the law creating a stipend for beggars, he invited three Christian clergy members to pray alongside three Muslim clerics.

"We thank God we don't see the same tensions as before," Shehu said. "We are free to practice our faith without fear."

Iran halted nuke weapons program in 2003 according to latest US National Intelligence Estimate report

The consensus view of 16 US intelligence agencies is that Iran halted its weapons project in 2003 because it feared international sanctions:

By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 3, 2007

WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the threat of international sanctions has worked in compelling the Islamic republic to back away from its pursuit of the bomb.
These judgments were among the key findings of a long-awaited intelligence report in which U.S. spy agencies retreated from earlier assessments that were more hard-line in their view of Iran's nuclear ambitions and intentions.

The document, and the nuanced tone it strikes toward Iran, is likely to generate fierce new debate within the U.S. government, challenging the positions of officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who have urged taking a hard line against Tehran.

The report also concludes that Iran "does not currently have a nuclear weapon," and that the country is unlikely to be capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb before 2009 at the earliest.

The findings were included in a National Intelligence Estimate titled "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" that represents a consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program," the report says. "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."

But the intelligence community also acknowledged that emerging evidence has forced analysts to alter their views on Iran's intentions and capabilities. The changes portray Iran as more responsive to international pressure than previously thought.

"Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military cost," the report concludes. Overall, the report notes that Iran "is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005."

Vladimir Putin and US policy toward Russia

"Pundita, dear, there has not been a peep out of you for many months, or has it been more than a year? about Putin or Russia. Are you still defending Putin, or can you squeeze out a few words about Russia's fall from democracy under Putin, which is now evident even to the blind since the parliamentary election.
Boris in Jackson Heights"

Dear Boris:
Are you telling me that Russia had democracy under the rule of the Oligarchs? The Oligarchs were backed by American and West European business interests and governments that did not give a fig whether Russians starved, much less whether they had democracy. But yes, I will say it: Vladimir Putin and the group around him have gone too far. Are you happy now?

Putin has also been lucky; Russia's economic turnaround has been greatly due to high oil prices. But given that a majority of Russians were starving under the rule of the Oligarchs, one can hardly blame the majority of Russians, who are now not starving, for their gratitude toward Putin and his government. This includes their willingness to overlook government actions that would not be acceptable in a true democracy.

If you listened to Stephen Cohen on John Batchelor's show last night, Steve's analysis of the election makes it clear that Putin engaged in below-board maneuvers in order to offset the Communist Party's power in the Duma.

The biggest losers from the maneuvers were Russia's genuinely 'liberal democratic' parties, which combined wouldn't have taken more than 10% of the vote -- but a percentage that Putin's party needed as a hedge against the Communists. Thus, Putin used every means to squash the opposition parties.

Is this what I mean by going too far? The maneuvers were undemocratic. Yet the most troubling situation at this time is that Putin has allowed major corruption into his government.

Putin's argument for his authoritarian government was always that he was preparing the ground for genuine democracy to develop in Russia. However, he has in effect created a new class of oligarchs, which works against democratic government.

The new oligarchs steal less from the Russian people than the old ones and they are under Putin's thumb. And clearly, Putin is determined that Russians should do well. Yet in the end there is no such thing as the 'good king,' for the task of keeping the throne eventually causes him to betray the best interests of his people.

And it's all come down to one man. I don't want to think about what would happen to Russia right now, if Putin should die or become too ill to function.

Meanwhile, the US policy on Russia has made it impossible for Washington to wield any influence with Moscow. As Cohen said last night, Putin's government has simply given up on the US government. Moscow believes that no matter what they do, they will still be demonized by the US government. Moscow now considers the US policy to be simply irrational.

As to what, if anything, the US Department of State can do to overturn this perception: for starters, they can cease basing Russia policy on editorials in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times that decry the loss of democracy in Russia under Putin. As Steve Cohen astutely pointed out last night, the businesspeople who read those papers are not the ones who write the editorials.

Russia is still the poor little rich country; business interests outside the country want what they've always wanted: control of Russia's natural resources via control of Russia's government. Until US policymakers acknowledge in their thinking this bald fact, it's not possible to devise a rational US policy on Russia.

The US government can also do what they've done before after they've realized it's far too late to do anything: consult with Steve Cohen, who is one of the best American experts on Russia.

If you missed Steve's discussion last night, you can listen to the Batchelor show podcast at KFI 640 AM when it becomes available in the next day or so. The discussion started about 95 minutes into the broadcast and spanned two segments.

Gillian Gibbons pardoned and freed, but the matter will not end there

Two of Britain's peers were successful today at wangling a pardon from Sudan's president for Gillian Gibbons. She has been released into the care of British officials. The exact time of her leaving Sudan has not been announced for security reasons but a spokesman for Sudan's president said she would "fly back to England today." According to the Guardian Unlimited:

A spokesman said President al-Bashir insisted that Mrs Gibbons had a "fair trial," but he agreed to pardon her because of the efforts by the British Muslim delegation. [...]

Lord Nazir Ahmed, who met President al-Bashir along with Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, said the case was an "unfortunate misunderstanding" and stressed that Britain respected Islam. He hoped "the relations between our two countries will not be damaged by this incident".

The Guardian also reports on Gillian's statement after her release:

"I have a great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone. I am looking forward to seeing my family and friends, but I am very sorry that I will be unable to return to Sudan."

Gillian seems unaware that if not for the huge outcry about her case from many citizens and governments around the world, she could easily have been found guilty of the more serious charge of inciting hatred against Islam. That charge carries the penalty of 40 lashes -- administered immediately after sentencing -- and six months in prison and a fine.

During the post-trial protests in Khartoum calling for Gillian's death, a BBC reporter interviewed a protestor who explained that Gillian's insult to Islam "crossed a red line." Likely the protestor, and Gillian, are unaware that her case also crossed a red line. See my Saturday post Death to Gillian Gibbons, brings us the head of Taslima Nasrin, hang Atefeh Sahaaleh, 200 lashes for the Qatif Girl: Islamic justice in action.

Odd to think that such a foolish woman would set in motion events that will change in the course of history. I suppose that's why I termed her an unlikely Helen of Troy. Later today -- maybe around 4:00 PM ET -- I will publish another post on the topic.

Now that Sudan's government realizes their prosecution of Gillian has ricocheted against Islam, they are scrambling to spread the blame:

KHARTOUM, Sudan (CNN)-- In an effort to shut down Khartoum's Unity High School, a disgruntled former employee alerted Sudanese officials that a British teacher had allowed her class to name a teddy bear "Mohammed," a British source and Sudanese presidential palace source told Time magazine's Sam Dealey.

The two sources said Sarah Khawad was fired as the school's secretary in November after an employment spat and threatened to shut down the school.

The sources said Khawad did not appear to have a vendetta against Gibbons, but hoped that by bringing the teddy bear incident to the education minister's attention, he would close down the school for anti-Islamic teachings.

The private school was shut down after the controversy came to light last week. It is unclear if it will reopen.

Although there is no ban in the Quran on images of Allah or the Prophet Mohammed, Islam's founder, some Muslims consider likenesses highly offensive.

The sources said they have confirmed the account with Gibbons.

Defense attorneys confirmed that it was Khawad who launched the initial complaint against Gibbons, not a parent as originally thought. Khawad also testified at Gibbons' trial.

Before approaching Sudan's education minister, the two sources said Khawad tried to enlist two parents, who were also teachers at the school, to join in her protest against the teddy bear's name, but they declined.

Good luck, Venezuela

Enough Venezuelans woke up to defeat the referendum yesterday on giving Chavez new powers and scrapping term limits on his rule. The national electoral authority said early today that the "No" camp won 51 percent of the vote compared to the "Yes" camp's 49 percent. So Venezuelans hang onto their democracy by the skin of their teeth, at least for the present.

Death to Gillian Gibbons, bring us the head of Taslima Nasrin, hang Atefeh Sahaaleh, 200 lashes for the Qatif Girl: Islamic justice in action

Ibrahim Ramey, who has the title of Civil and Human Rights Director of MAS Freedom, a sister organization to the Muslim American Society, has published a commentary about the Gillian Gibbons case that is curiously dated in tone. He writes as if were 1999 -- back in the day when publics outside Muslim countries were greatly ignorant of the atrocities carried out by Islamic systems of justice.

Mr Ramey takes Gillian's side in the matter, arguing that she should not be punished for what was clearly an innocent mistake. Yet running throughout his commentary, which is self-pityingly titled, The 'Teddy Teacher' Incident - More Than Muslims Can Bear, is the warning that non-Muslims should not see in the Gibbons sentence a reason for prejudice against the Muslim religion.

Mr Ramey needs to notice what year this is. With the exception of countries where the press is censored, publics are becoming aware that matters of religious faith are not the big issue. Repressive governments are the issue -- including governments that term themselves Islamic: Governments using the power of the state to enforce a legal code that trammels the rights of the individual, the right to dissent, and every other right accorded under a humane government; governments that through their legal code foster the cruelest of societies.

The question is what democratic governments will do about the issue as applied to Islamic governments. Will they continue to dodge, as the governments of the United States and Britain are doing? Will they continue to divert attention from the issue by keeping to a discussion of "extremist" Muslim groups?

I'm afraid that the answer is yes, at least for the foreseeable future. Pakistanis and refugees from other poverty-stricken Muslim countries are to Britain what Mexicans are to America -- a source of very cheap labor.

Communities in Britain made up of such workers are now recognized as a breeding ground for terrorism. Thus, every attempt has been made by Britain's government to pander to the religious sensitivities of Muslims, even to the point of allowing them to ignore British law in favor of Sharia's interpretation of justice.

As for the United States, the government presumes it needs so much help from Saudi Arabia that it is willing to be silent, or very muted in protest, no matter how inhumane the Saudi justice system.

To put this another way, the American government can loudly decry the inhumanity of Burma's junta, yet the official stance is that it cannot loudly decry the inhumanity of the Saudi government.

But then what is Than Shwe to make of the US government's double standard -- or for that matter what does Robert Mugabe, China's rulers, and every other despot make of it?

One may argue that the price on Taslima Nasrin's head was not set by the Bangladesh government but by an "Islamist" group in India, and that other calls for her murder came from Bangladeshi citizens, not the Bangladesh government.

Yet it was the Bangladesh government that created the climate to call for Taslima's murder by banning one of her books, confiscating her passport, and issuing an arrest warrant, which eventually turned her into a fugitive from her country.

For what offense was Taslima hauled to court? The official charge was blasphemy. She wrote columns decrying the treatment of women under Islamic law and wrote a book that exposed the government-sponsored persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh.

Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh , 16 years old, was not sentenced to hanging in an Iranian court because of her alleged crime of having an affair with a married man -- an affair she considered statutory rape.

Ateqeh was given the death penalty because she did not grovel before the judges to seek mercy. She stood straight and demanded that the court recognize that the rapist, not the victim, should be charged in a rape case.

She argued her own case because no lawyer dared take it. She argued haltingly, and she had the bad judgment to hurl her shoes at the judge -- a grave insult in Islamic countries. Yet for her insult and "sharp tongue" she was hanged -- and for no other reason, as the judge in the case clearly explained.

A Saudi victim of gang rape, who is known only as the Qatif Girl because the Saudi press will not release her name, was originally sentenced to 90 lashes for the crime of sitting in a car with a man who was not related to her. The sentence was increased to 200 lashes and six months in jail because she had the impertinence to tell her story to a human rights organization and the Saudi press.

Or, as the Saudi authorities explained it, her sentence was increased because she made an "attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media," according to Saudi Arabia's English-language newspaper Arab News.

Last week Prince Saud al-Faisal said that a Saudi court would review the case. However, according to tonight's NBC Nightly News, the judge most likely to hear the appeal has already stated that if the case had been his to begin with, he would have sentenced the Qatif Girl to death.

(A Saudi blog mentions that Ibrahim Al Khodhairi, a judge at the appeals court in Riyadh, said on November 27 that "the judges in this case should have imposed the death penalty on all the parties involved, including the girl.")

So one may consider Gillian Gibbons very lucky because she holds a British passport and has the support of the British government in trying to secure her pardon for the crime of insulting Islam -- and because she dredged up enough sense of self-preservation to cry her eyes out before the court.

Right now two British Muslim peers are in Sudan, trying of their own accord to secure her release. And Gillian has been transferred from the infamous Omdurman women's prison to a secret (and one hopes better) place of confinement; this, after thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of her and demanded her execution. The Washington Post notes that while there was no overt sign that the government organized the protest, such a rally could not have taken place without at least official assent.

Yet to consider what would happen if a northern Sudanese had committed Gillian's crime is to recall the fate of Taslima Nasrin, Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh, and the Qatif Girl. These are not unusual cases; they are only some of the most recently famous examples of justice under Islamist government.

Ibrahim Ramey closes his commentary with the observation that "people in the Christian world" should not use the case of Gillian Gibbons "to mischaracterize or stereotype all Muslims as extremists."

I do not live in the Christian world; I live in a democracy. My condemnation of Islamist government would extend to a Christian government -- or Jewish or Hindu government -- or any government based on theology and laws deriving from religious beliefs. Such laws invariably boil down to the deadly idea that the worth of a human is circumscribed by his submission to a set of metaphysical beliefs.

We in the West did not fight countless wars against the tyranny of such laws, only to end up tolerating the laws of Islamic governments. But again, the question is whether democracies are willing to make such a stand today.

Prince Faisal had the gall to whine, during his attendance at the Annapolis meeting last week, "What is outraging about [the Qatif Girl] case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people."

That's akin to a thief complaining he has appear in court because he was caught red-handed.

Maybe Faisal would have considered the case itself to be outrageous, if the US Department of State had spoken up strongly. Yet all that a State spokesman could manage to squeak out, when he found himself unable to dodge questions from the press about the case, was that "most would find this relatively astonishing that something like this happens."

Relatively astonishing? But then this was during the run-up to the Annapolis meeting, where the Saudi presence and support was deemed critical by State.

If you think that democracies can stave off, at least for a few decades, wrestling with the question of Islamic government, the issue is already on top of us. The big controversy is whether it's valid to make a distinction between Islam and what is termed Islamism; i.e., whether Islam is inherently political or whether the concept of Islamic government can be separated from the religion.

In any event, so many Muslims in so many countries are calling for Islamic government that it's ridiculous to dismiss calls for such government as "extremist" or "radical fringe." See the Wikipedia article on Islamism for a balanced introduction to the issue.

I interject that non-Muslims did not likely coin the term "Islamism;" I first heard it from a Turkish Muslim who was worried that her government would be taken over by what she termed 'Islamists," and I've heard the term many times since from Muslims in other countries.

What is at stake here, for those who value a fair system of justice? I think Dr Khalid al-Mubarak, of the Sudanese embassy in London, said it best the other day. He noted that a source told him "innocence alone isn't enough" to ensure freedom for Gillian Gibbons.

Sunday, Dec 2, 11:15 AM ET Update
The facility Gillian was transferred to from Omdurman prison is a secret location for her safety but it's "not a prison, it's an office, like a small villa, with many security guards for her safety. It's a decent room," said her lawyer Kamal Gizouli. Gillian reports being well fed and in good spirits.

British Labor peer Lord Ahmed and Conservative peer Baroness Warsi, on a private mission to secure Gillian's release, are set to hold talks today with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to press their case for Gillian to be pardoned. It's believed the peer's chances to obtain a pardon are better than those of the official British delegation working for Gillian's release.
6:45 PM ET Update
The peers' meeting with Sudan's president is now scheduled for Monday. According to the London Times: "Analysts say that President al-Bashir faces opposition within his own Government - from the powerful Ministry of Interior and state security apparatus - if he is seen bending to Western pressure. A deal with two British Muslims who have funded their trip from their own pockets may be more acceptable to his opponents."

The strange case of Gillian Gibbons: sometimes it takes the actions of a dolt to clarify a situation

Thousands of protesters, many brandishing clubs and swords, took to the streets of Sudan’s capital Friday, demanding the execution of a British teacher who let her students name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, was found guilty Thursday of insulting Islam and sentenced to 15 days in jail. She was spared the more serious punishment of 40 lashes.

That angered many in Khartoum, who rallied in Martyrs Square outside the presidential palace. Protesters waved sticks, knives, axes and swords.

“Kill her, kill her by firing squad!” they chanted. “No tolerance, execution!” (1)

"Ms Gibbons’s son, John, 25. a marketing consultant, told the Daily Mail the family was struggling to take in the punishment. He said: "It’s really difficult at the moment, my head is everywhere. I don’t want the verdict to lead to any anti feeling towards Muslims.

"Everyone has been very nice, but one of my fears, and I imagine my mother’s also, will be that this results in any sort of resentment towards Muslim people." (2)

Let us be clear. It is an insult to idiots to brand Gillian as such; she is simply a dolt. When you see that a government is carrying out genocide, this is not the place to take yourself for a mission to spread happy feelings -- not without an army at your back, or at the least a thorough understanding of the situation you're walking into.

One Sudanese cleric demanding Gillian's execution called her "arrogant." There is a kind of arrogance about Gillian's attitude -- as if the Sudanese Muslims can be petted and stroked into tameness, in the manner of the now-famous photograph of her petting a leopard.

But Gillian's escapade in Sudan most reflects the arrogance of the British government, which bends over backward to pander to the "sensitivities" of Muslims. Yet the situation is clearly not about religious sensitivities. It's about a primitive and repressive form of government.

That it's not Sudan's government calling for Gillian's execution is beside the point. The Islamist government in Khartoum brands Gillian's action a crime, so it's only a difference in interpretation as to the severity of the punishment.

When one considers that Gillian's crime was to allow small children to name a toy "Muhammad," the question is how apologists for Islamic government think there is some way to come to terms with barbarism.

1) New York Daily News

2) London Times Online

Gillian Gibbons, an unlikely Helen of Troy

Crikey, this story is getting bigger, nastier, and more surreal by the hour -- ever since Khartoum decided on Wednesday to charge Gillian with blasphemy, inciting hatred and insulting Islam. This, because she allowed her seven-year-old students in Sudan to name a class teddy bear "Muhammad."

The British government, not to mention the British people and reasonable people the world over, are furious about the situation. One Briton called for 10,000 British paratroopers to land in Sudan and rescue Gillian from her jail cell.

According to The New York Times, some Sudan analysts speculate that Khartoum's decision could be retaliatory:

On Tuesday, the British ambassador to the United Nations asked the Security Council to address warrants against a Sudanese official and a militia leader accused of war crimes in Darfur [...]

But Islamic militants in Sudan are calling for mass demonstrations against Gillian and want her punished to the extent of the law.

If Gillian is found guilty and flogged, international outrage will translate into serious consequences for Sudan. The London Times reports today that

Britain is “reviewing its options” for retaliatory measures against Khartoum should Ms Gibbons be hurt. These could include the expulsion of Sudanese diplomats, tightening travel restrictions on the regime’s leading figures and cutting aid.

The consequences could also be serious for Islam. It seems Islamists are hell bent on portraying Islam as the world's most primitive religion and form of government.

I can't believe that in this era, a defense attorney might have to ask questions such as, 'Why didn't the authorities charge Gillian's class with blasphemy, given that it was the children who actually named the teddy bear?'

And, 'Why do the authorities insist on identifying a stuffed toy as an animal? Does the law state that it is blasphemy to give the Prophet's name to a toy?'

This is going beyond surreal. This is Twilight Zone stuff.

Did the Annapolis meeting accomplish anything? The Blue-Eyed Genie to the rescue.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius believes something was accomplished, and I think you can read into his analysis how Condoleezza Rice and President Bush are interpreting results of the Annapolis meeting.

Reuters provides a handy checklist on the key demands by each side, and how these fared in the agreement between Olmert and Abbas.

Steven Erlanger at The New York Times, which often reflects the CIA view of things, penned the most unintentionally ironic analysis out of the 30 or so I plowed through last night:

The Middle East peace conference here on Tuesday was officially about ending the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. But there was an unspoken goal just below the surface: stopping the rising regional influence of Iran and Islamic radicalism.

That is why, despite enormous skepticism about the ability of the Israelis and Palestinians to reach a final peace treaty, there is enormous relief among the many Sunni Arab countries in attendance that the United States has re-engaged in what they see as the larger and more important battle for Muslim hearts and minds.

“The Arabs have come here not because they love the Jews or even the Palestinians,” said an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They came because they need a strategic alliance with the United States against Iran.” [...]

Hovering over Annapolis are deep anxieties over the challenge from a resurgent Shiite and non-Arab Iran, with its nuclear program and its successful allies and proxies in southern Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Those Arab nations fear that the tide of history is moving away from them, and that they are losing their own youth to religious militancy.

So. After several decades of doing everything they could to promote religious extremism, bigotry and militancy, the Middle East's Arab leaders now find themselves quite alarmed with the results.

But never fear, the Blue-Eyed Genie is here. That's what the previous Saudi ruler called the Americans, who magically popped from a lamp to chase Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and finally off the face of the earth.

At the bottom of all the discussion about what happened in Annapolis, the words not spoken keep coming to my mind: US troop deployment.

It's all very well for David Ignatius to say from behind the safety of his desk in Washington, DC that Hamas and Iran will just have to suck eggs, if they don't like the negotiations to arise from Annapolis. But the reality is that from their stronghold in Gaza, Hamas is lobbing, on average, one rocket every three hours into Israel, round the clock. And if Ignatius thinks that the UN's blue helmuts will be able to stand up to Hamas, they will run as they ran from Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So that leaves -- let me use my special binoculars and scan the Four Quarters for a moment -- why I believe that leaves the United States of America to figure out how Abbas's weak government can defang Hamas and the other militant groups sworn to destroy Israel.

I think President Bush is serious about bringing a Palestinian state into existence, but the only way that's going to happen is if the Palestinians acknowledge that they long ago forfeited the ability to bargain in good faith. It's no longer their call; it's Iran's call. And the only way Iran will back off is through force of arms.

I also think the Palestinians need to recognize that the Palestine state they envision, if it's to come into existence, will be run by international organizations and a coalition of Western governments, and backed by a US-led military force. If Palestinians are not willing to accept that kind of country, they can continue to wait around for Israel to disappear.

British teacher jailed in Sudan, facing 40 lashes over naming of a teddy bear

The woman sounds a complete dolt but -- 40 lashes? I am afraid that apologists are running out of creative ways to argue that Islam must be distinguished from the worst aspects of tribal law. From the London Times

A British teacher facing 40 lashes in Sudan over a school teddy bear named Muhammad will discover today whether she will be charged with blasphemy.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, is being questioned for a second day by police in Khartoum on suspicion of insulting Islam's prophet for allowing her seven-year-old pupils to give the toy the name of the prophet.

She was moved to a cell at the CID Criminal Police Exploration Bureau for further questioning. A file on the case will be sent to the department of public prosecutions and a judge should decide today whether she should be charged.

Robert Boulos, the director of Unity High School, the British school where Ms Gibbons worked, said that she was in “very high spirits and being treated well”.

Teachers from the Khartoum school, which teaches the children of Sudanese professionals, expatriates and oil workers, have visited her in jail to deliver food and water.

A former colleague of Ms Gibbons, Gill Langworthy, said that the teacher had recently contacted her to say how much she was enjoying her work.

“I saw her in July and had farewell drinks and she was so excited about going. Since then we have been in e-mail contact at least once a week.

“Last week she sent one with pictures of her sitting on a camel and a beach, loving it, she felt so welcomed and loved teaching the children.”

Miss Langworthy, who taught with Ms Gibbons at Garston Primary School in Liverpool, said teaching abroad had always been her friend's dream.

But she added that she feared for her safety and thought that the experience would have damaged her deeply.

She said: “I am constantly worried, and thinking about her sitting in the prison cell is horrible. When we e-mailed, she never mentioned a thing about any problems and only said positive things about the staff and children because I asked her.

“She was just having a great time and said nothing negative at all.”

Miss Langworthy, an assistant headteacher, said that her friend had endured a tough few years with the end of her marriage and several bereavements.

She added that Ms Gibbons would be “petrified” about her children, John, 25, and Jessica, 27.

“She'll be more worried about them. But obviously, she will be scared for her own safety."

Speaking of Ms Gibbons' desire to see the world, she added: “It was always a dream of hers. Gillian is such a traveller and wanted to increase her knowledge of different cultures and countries and every year would go on mad explorations.

“She always said she fancied teaching abroad. She was just fascinated by Sudan and wanted to learn more about their culture and experience life there — which is just Gillian down to a T.”

She continued: “This was supposed to be a fresh start for her but it's just ended like this. I want her happy, healthy, returning to her home, but she has a fighting spirit.”

She added that Ms Gibbons would be “devastated that she has insulted and offended anyone” with “an innocent mistake”.

Catherine Wolthuizen, chief executive of Fair Trials International, said that information about the Sudanese legal system was hard to come by.

She said: “All the major reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and the UN Convention on Human Rights have tended to focus on the Darfur region.

"What has been evident in those reports is that the independence of the judiciary has been compromised and that the inclusion of Sharia law into the legal code has led to some confusion.

“In these circumstances, it is hard to say what Gillian Gibbons and her family and supporters can expect."

Ms Wolthuizen added: “One would hope that the authorities will look at this and realise that there was no blasphemous intent.

“Gillian Gibbons had no appreciation of what she was doing. The bear was never intended to be an effigy and I would expect the British Embassy officials to be pressing that message to the Sudanese authorities.”

Why the hell was China's foreign minister invited to Annapolis?

And why Portugal, Slovenia, Mexico and the Vatican for that matter? Look at the guest list! It's not a conference on developing a new framework for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. It's a circus.

No wonder a member of the Palestinian delegation, or maybe it was a member of the Israeli delegation, said that Annapolis was going to be "The mother of all photo-ops."

But toward what end? Maybe Condoleezza Rice's idea is to show Hamas and Iran that the whole world is wishing Israel and the Palestinians well in their attempts to negotiate? But in that case why not invite Hamas -- and Iran? Even if they refused the invitation, something akin to a point would have been made. But I'm not sure that is the point. Maybe the point is the high school snub? It's our party and you're not invited?

I give up. I just give up. If I don't give up, I'm going to go mad trying to fathom Condoleezza Rice's logic. I think I shall spend the winter in the south of Italy and go nowhere near a newspaper, radio, television set or computer. Do nothing but eat pasta, drink wine and laugh. Maybe this way I can return to Washington, DC in the spring with my sanity still intact.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The heads of each delegation attending the Mideast peace summit in Annapolis, Md., as provided by the State Department.

_ Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

_ Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas

_ United States, President George W. Bush

_ European Union Commission, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, external affairs commissioner

_ European Union High Representative, Javier Solana, high representative for common foreign and security policy, secretary general of the council of the European Union

_ European Union Presidency, Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado

_ Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

_ United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

_ Quartet Representative, Tony Blair, Middle East envoy

_ Algeria, Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci

_ Bahrain, Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa

_ Egypt, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit

_ Jordan, Foreign Minister Salaheddine al-Bashir

_ Lebanon, Foreign Minister Tarek Mitri

_ Morocco, Foreign Minister Taieb Fassi Fihri

_ Qatar, Foreign Minister Ahmed bin Abdulla Al-Mahmoud

_ Saudi Arabia, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal

_ Sudan, Ambassador John Ukec

_ Syria, Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad

_ Tunisia, Foreign Minister Abdelwahab Abdallah

_ Yemen, Foreign Minister Abubakr al-Qirbi

_ Arab League, Secretary General Amr Moussa

_ Canada, Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier

_ China, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi

_ France, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner

_ Germany, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier

_ Italy, Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema

_ Japan, Tatsuo Arima, special envoy for the Middle East

_ United Kingdom, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs David Miliband

_ Brazil, Foreign Minister Celso Amorim

_ Denmark, Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller

_ Greece, Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis

_ India, Kapil Sibal, minister of science and technology and earth sciences

_ Indonesia, Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda

_ Malaysia, Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar

_ Mauritania, Foreign Minister Mohamed Ahmed Ould Mohamed Lemine

_ Mexico, Foreign Relations Undersecretary Lourdes Aranda

_ Netherlands, Frans Timmermans, minister for European affairs

_ Norway, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store

_ Organization of the Islamic Conference, Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu

_ Oman, Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdulla

_ Pakistan, Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan

_ Poland, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski

_ Senegal, Foreign Minister Cheikh Tidiane Gadio

_ Slovenia, Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel

_ South Africa, Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma

_ Spain, Minister of Foreign Affairs Miguel Angel Moratinos

_ Sweden, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt

_ Turkey, Ali Babacan, foreign minister and chief EU negotiator

_ United Arab Emirates, Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

_ Vatican, Pietro Parolin, undersecretary of foreign affairs

_ International Monetary Fund, Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn

_ World Bank, President Robert Zoellick

We'll take the deal, for now

On November 19 Threats Watch listed various signs that Iran has recently begun cooperating to help stabilize Iraq at least temporarily. The organization warned that Tehran's strategy shift "has more to do with a desire to further its nuclear program than to build a stable Iraq."

Yes, well, TIW -- this is war. We need to keep following down this road, even though it justifiably worries opponents of Iran's nuclear program.

Here is the rundown on signs of cooperation from the Threats Watch article; visit the site to obtain the source links and for the rest of the report, which focuses on signs of Iran's nuclear advancement:

[...] In recent meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Iran made “guarantees” to stop supplying explosively formed penetrators (EFPs). While these guarantees and those before them were met with skepticism, Major General James Simmons, the deputy commanding general of Multinational Corps-Iraq, sees reason to be optimistic:

“I’m hopeful… What I see is a diplomatic effort being undertaken by the United States government – and I see a positive response from the Iranian government and that’s good.”

A few weeks later, Simmons once again noted additional signs of Iranian cooperation: “We have not seen any recent evidence that weapons continue to come across the border into Iraq.”

Simmons’ comments echo an early November statement by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Iran was playing some role in the reduction of bombings by Shi’a militias. Gates did acknowledge, though, that it was difficult to quantify exactly how much of a positive influence Iran was playing in this matter. Nevertheless, there was a clear recognition that positive steps were being taken.
Similarly, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari noted Iran’s effort to “rein in” Shi’a militias. In a November 6 interview with Ross Colvin of Reuters, Zebari clearly stated that “Iran has been instrumental in reining in the militias and the Mehdi Army by using its influence.” As such, “Part of the security improvement was their [Iran’s] control of the militias. We see this as a positive development.”

For its part, the United States is making a few overtures to Iran as a gesture of goodwill. On November 6, Rear Admiral Gregory J. Smith announced that the U.S. military would release 9 of the 20 Iranians they have captured in Iraq. And while the 9 released Iranians do not include the highest ranking or “most troubling” of the detainees, the U.S. is clearly offering Iran a carrot in the hopes of continuing the cooperation.

The release of these detainees reflects a shift in policy for the U.S. as well. Among the 9 being returned are 2 of the 5 Iranians captured in a raid on an Iranian consulate in Irbil in January 2007. Last month while speaking to editors and reporters at the Washington Post, Lieutenant General Raymond T. Odierno argued that “militarily, we should hold on to them.” Thus, the release of these IRGC members indicates that America sees an opportunity to move the diplomatic process forward. [...]