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Shame and blame: Just the ticket

"I'm sorry we left Afghanistan with so much war and death. I wish we had built hospitals or schools."

These aren't the words of a fringe anti-war politician here at home. They're from a Saudi man, a former al Qaeda terrorist and one-time Guantanamo detainee.

Khalid al-Hubayshi is living proof that former enemy combatants can have powerful psychological messages that can be used to undermine and demoralize al Qaeda and other extremist forces. From the perspective of the enemy a shameful, negative message that he is being defeated (and therefore is in disfavor with God) is more powerful than a positive message about the US.

The Washington Post interviewed al-Hubayshi in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where the government apparently rehabilitated him from al Qaeda extremism (and presumably toward the regime's official Wahhabi ideology, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

Look at the excellent themes that emerge from al-Hubayshi's story:

• Al Qaeda doesn't help Muslims; it harms them. "I'm sorry we left Afghanistan with so much war and death. I wish we had built hospitals or schools," says al Hubayshi.
• Local Muslims blamed al Qaeda - not the United States - for the deaths inflicted during the war in Afghanistan. "On Sept. 11, 2001, Hubayshi said, he was training Chechen fighters in explosives in the eastern city of Jalalabad. In October, when the first U.S. airstrikes hit Jalalabad, the Afghans 'blamed us . . . and forced us out of the city at night. We slept by the river for two weeks.'"

• Al Qaeda's ideology is shaky. Al-Hubayshi said he was attracted to al Qaeda during the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but by 2001 "the fight had changed from defending Muslims to attacking the United States. I wasn't convinced of his ideology. And I wanted to be independent, not just another minion in this big group." 

• Bin Laden is a liar who uses his people. "'What are my duties toward you, and what are your duties toward me, if I join with you?' Hubayshi said he asked. 'That you don't betray us and we don't betray you,' bin Laden responded, and offered him a plot of land, Hubayshi said." Read on.

• Bin Laden is a coward who betrayed his own fighters. After the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden dug in at Tora Bora to fight the Americans, and called his fighters into the mountain fortress. The Post paraphrases al-Hubayshi's story: "As the airstrikes moved closer, and with the United States' Afghan allies advancing, bin Laden decided to retreat and left one morning. His aides told 300 Arab fighters to make their way to Pakistan and surrender to their embassies. Pakistani authorities stopped the fighters near the border and handed them over to the US military, which sent them to Guantanamo Bay. Hubayshi remains bitter about what he considers bin Laden's betrayal: calling the fighters to Tora Bora and then abandoning them there."
• Bin Laden is no hero. "There was no dignity in what he made us do."
• "Jihad" does not mean to attack innocent civilians. "Hubayshi said he is sorry that Muslims carried out the Sept. 11 attacks because they targeted civilians: 'That was wrong. Jihad is fighting soldier to soldier.'"

There's a lot more in this story. This blogger has discussed problems with Saudi ideology before and will do so again, and has warned against viewing only the immediately violent extremists as strategic threats when subversive Islamist threats remain. But for the time being, let's just look at the example of Khaled al-Hubayshi and the opportunity it brings us to undermine the most immediate violent threat.

How did FBI/CIA infiltrator color US understanding of the enemy?

After looking at the mess the FBI made of part of the Hanssen espionage damage assessment, it might be too much to ask for the Bureau to make a proper assessment of how former Special Agent Nada Nadim Prouty may have warped US understanding of the Islamist enemy.

Prouty is the illegal alien who became one of the FBI's only Arabic-speaking special agents in the 1990s and went on to become what agency insiders are pooh-poohing as a mere "mid-level official" at the CIA.

Prouty pled guilty to crimes relating to stealing classified information on behalf of relatives in Hezbollah. US official response has been appalling, practically ruling out the idea that she was a spy for the terrorist organization (or for its main state sponsor, Iran),

Are the CIA and FBI in denial AGAIN? Is anybody in the counterintelligence business any more? Does the US still cling to the Cold War idea of counterintelligence as working or defending against the intelligence services of foreign governments - thus not treating terrorist organizations with their own intelligence services as counterintelligence threats?

I don't know, but something tells me that the answer isn't a good one. Prouty was at the center of the United States' most sensitive counterterrorism investigations in the late 1990s, at home and abroad, when she was one of only 7 (that's right: seven) FBI agents who could speak Arabic. Her pre-911 influence within the US counterterrorism, counterintelligence and intelligence communities is likely to have been considerable.

A Google News search doesn't show it, so we'll break some news here: Prouty told her closest friends in the 1990s that she was of Druze background in Lebanon. By inference, she would not have been an Islamist; the Druze split with Islam centuries ago and many are allied with Lebanese Christians and even with Israel. However, many Druze also support Hezbollah.

Prouty was one of the FBI's hottest agents at the time: hard-charging, tall and in excellent physical condition, and known to carry her Bureau-issued weapon in the most casual of dress. Prior to 9/11, when presented with evidence of Islamist networks in the Washington, DC area, she dismissed the evidence as of little importance. Those close to the matter trusted her judgment at the time, though after 9/11 US authorities, under the direction not of the FBI but the Justice Department, raided the offices in those networks, made several arrests, and got several terrorist-related convictions.

Bottom line: As with the Ana Belen Montes case of Cuban penetration of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and CIA must do fundamental and sweeping damage assessments of how Prouty might have colored American perceptions of the terrorist threat in ways damaging to this country.

At FamilySecurity, accuracy doesn't Matter

For some reason, FamilySecurityMatters.com has refused to permit corrections of falsehoods made in a recent column, and has denied the right or privilege of reply to those falsely accused of spreading Wahhabi propaganda.

The normally credible site ran a piece in July by Walid Phares, who himself is an ordinarily reliable figure. But this time accuracy fell between the cracks when Phares falsely labeled us as spreading Wahhabi or Muslim Brotherhood propaganda in assailing our argument that we should take advantage of splits within Islam to wage semantic warfare against the most extreme elements. The article contained a number of inaccuracies. The most serious was that Washington wordsmith Jim Guirard is a "lobbyist" who "concocted" a Wahhabi/Muslim Brotherhood line of argument that others, including this blogger, were allegedly spreading.

The "lobbyist" allegation came just days after Hugh Fitzgerald of JihadWatch.com (again, another otherwise excellent site) spread a false report that Guirard has close ties to the Saudis and had probably been taking money from them.

I've known Guirard for 25 years and he's always been a stand-up guy. I checked with him, the Justice Department and organizations that constantly monitor Wahhabi and Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, and am satisfied that the report is completely without basis. His last lobbying activity was 7 years ago for a Louisiana company and related to the US Army. No Saudi or Islamist connections whatsoever.

I notified FamilySecurityMatters.com editor Carol Tabor, whom I have known since I helped her set up and staff the site, of the sloppy reporting and editing on her site (an editorial comment was similarly misleading). After a few days' wait, she refused to publish a correction or clarification, refused to allow either Guirard or myself to post a response, and said she considers the matter closed. The contents of her email are private, so manners prevent me from disclosing some interesting details.

Of the several sites that ran the Phares piece, we contacted three: FamilySecurityMatters.com, AIM.org and FrontPageMag.com. In contrast to FamilySecurityMatters, the other two sites immediately agreed to run responses. AIM ran a detailed piece by Guirard on August 6. Two days later, FrontPageMag ran an item that I wrote advocating semantic warfare. FamilySecurityMatters' refusal is bizarre. But the record is corrected, and it's time for the circular firing squad to disband and charge onward.

Wahhabi propaganda? Not!

People who advocate waging semantic warfare to widen rifts among the radical Islamists and split them from their support bases are obviously doing the work of . . . the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. This blogger apparently is one of them.

That's untrue, of course, but it's the logic of a few otherwise well-informed critics out there. Meanwhile, one of the leading Americans who has promoted the concept of using Islamic terminology to split the bad guys is being accused - falsely - of taking money from the horrid Saudi Arabian regime. The rest of us, according to the false accusers, are dupes. In their view, it's much smarter for the US to unite our Islamist enemies against us - along with most of the Muslim world - than it is to split them apart from one another.

Here's the situation. Prof. Doug Streusand of the Marine Corps University, Col. Harry Tunnell of the National Defense University and I are allegedly doing the dirty work of the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. We are unwittingly helping them, according to one person, because we argue that the US should split the "jihadist" movement by taking the narrative away from al Qaeda, Palestinian extremists, and Ahmadinejad, and empowering disadvantaged Muslims who lack the inclination or will to make war on us.

We developed our ideas, according to a recent column by Walid Phares, by following the "concocted" words of a "lobbyist" whose paymaster Phares won't mention but whom the reader infers must be a really bad guy. Hugh Fitzgerald of JihadWatch.com, however, says it outright: the alleged Wahhabi paid propagandist is our colleague Jim Guirard.

Now, I like Walid Phares and respect his work, and the guys at JihadWatch.com are doing a tremendous service even though I don't always agree with them. Here's the problem: In this particular instance, they have their facts wrong.

First, we didn't develop these ideas on our own, but got them from Muslim scholars and Arabic linguists whom I cite in my writings. No Muslim should be expected to take a non-Muslim seriously on a theological question, which is why some of us urge merely that the US in its messaging amplify what the disadvantaged Muslims - who lack state backing from Riyadh or Tehran, or the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood - are saying.

Wahhabis have been trying to lay a claim on jihad that American policymakers generally have endorsed. Interpretations by non-extreme Muslims generally have gone unheeded. Having been one of the first to write about the "Wahhabi lobby" in Washington, I never found a case of Wahhabi-backed groups in this country questioning the absolutist, Saudi-sponsored propaganda theme, with one sole exception that was in direct response to an inquiry about a definition, and was a thematical part of a message. (If our critics would like to provide documentation to the contrary, I would like to see it and will gladly post it.)

In 2001 and 2002 I researched the Saudi-funded Grover Norquist network for my friend Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy, where I am a vice president, and published copies of the very checks that Muslim Brotherhood operative and convicted terrorist conspirator Abdurahman Alamoudi wrote to fund Norquist's Islamic Institute. Having written exposes of Islamist agitprop in this country and given Senate testimony about terrorist recruitment in prisons, I take it seriously when a good man like Phares says what he says.

But in this instance his facts are wrong. Phares' most damning allegation is that Guirard is a lobbyist who, we are led to believe, created his semantic warfare concept for his shadowy client. Though he uses the term "lobby" three times to try to discredit Guirard, Phares never says for whom Guirard lobbied, or when. If he had checked, he would have found that Guirard hasn't lobbied for about seven years, and he never lobbied for any Middle East interests.

Phares apparently got the "lobbying" misinformation from Hugh FitzGerald of Jihad Watch but didn't bother to check the facts himself. On July 9, Fitzgerald flatly - and wrongly - said that Guirard is "closely connected to the Saudis," and that "some say the Saudi Embassy and the Saudi lobby, all-powerful as ever, channel their views right through him...." Fitzgerald didn't say who "some" was, but we take it as editorializing in lieu of using the first-person.

There's no truth to the story. Guirard has no connection at all to the Saudis. That leaves us to wonder, Are these allegations a deliberate smear of Guirard over a policy diffence, or are they just sloppy and irresponsible reporting? I hope it's only the latter. In which case the accusers should retract and apologize.

Now, to tip the hat to Robert Spencer, any believing Christian or Muslim knows that the mankind cannot coexist in perpetuity on earth without his respective religion being supreme. Both faiths actively seek converts and teach doctrines based on their belief in divine revelation that their own religion will dominate the world. It doesn't take a "hater" to understand this theological fact. Much interfaith dialogue has addressed the issue. The fact that Muslims are more aggressive in spreading and enforcing their faith than are Christians is reason to give any true Christian pause.

But for government policy purposes, we are not taking a supernatural view of the current war of ideas. We are looking at this war as a conflict of men. In our secular, post-Christian society that recoils in horror at the thought of our government waging ideological warfare against Islamism, we would rather pretend that the fight is all about politics and culture. Only the Islamists and their followers, and a smattering of Christians, believe that the issue is spiritual warfare. For the rest of the world, including the United States, it's all a question of superior firepower, politics and self-flagellation.

And that's too bad. The Spencers and Phareses of the world certainly do have a point: for the most part, the most militant believers in converting the world's faithful are Muslims. The other believers are patsies in comparison. Even so-called "good" jihad has world spiritual conquest as an ultimate if vague goal. So in this sense, Spencer and Phares are right. That's a long-term strategic issue, and a religious one. Speaking for myself, my policy recommendations - to break the Wahhabi/Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda narratives - are strictly tactical and temporal, as I spell out in Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

From a Christian standpoint, it's understandable why our critics like Spencer and Phares take the absolutist positions that they do. But let's win the current war first.

What is not understandable - or permissible - is that they or their sources use inaccurate and even phony "facts" as bludgeons against good people like Jim Guirard. 

A fake al Qaeda leader, a cross-dressing cleric, and a bunch of losers in the land of Sodom

It must be quite a letdown for Islamist fanatics to learn that one of their leaders in Iraq doesn't exist and that their chief "holy man" tough guy in Islamabad is a chicken who wears women's clothing.

Two more rogues in the parade of losers masquerading as moral leaders of the new revolution.

Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian sociopath with a fetish for beheadings and who knows what else? Remember the captured video showing that he didn't even know how to fire a machine gun, and how his aide was such a nitwit that he didn't have the sense not to grab a recently-fired automatic weapon by its 400-degree heated barrel? There are plenty of these guys out there. We should be heaping shame and ridicule on them as generously as we fling lead and steel.

During a long standoff with Pakistani authorities in June and early July, Red Mosque leader Maulana Abdul Aziz (in picture) brainwashed young captive girls to want to become "martyrs." But when the going got tough and Pakistani forces moved in and drilled his terrorist brother, the "holy man" tried to sneak away among a group of women and children, dressed head-to-toe in a ladies' black burqa.

“Our men spotted his unusual demeanor,” a Pakistani security official told Arab News on July 5. “The rest of the girls looked like girls but he was taller and had a pot belly.”

This week in Iraq, US forces say they unmasked another phony: the leader of the "Islamic State in Iraq," an al Qaeda affiliate or subsidiary. The leader, who went by the name Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, passed himself off as an Iraqi nationalist. Over the past year, al-Baghdadi has managed to escape attack.

In fact, according to American forces cited in the International Herald Tribune, al-Baghdadi doesn't exist at all. He's an elderly actor named Abu Abdullah al-Naima who records audio messages in al-Baghdadi's name. The reason: to cover up the fact that the organization is run by foreigners.

Al Qaeda invented al-Baghdadi to head its Iraqi front organization, then devised a plan to have its foreign members in Iraq swear loyalty to him as an Iraqi. The supposed #2 al Qaeda figure, Ayman al-Zawahiri, reinforced the deception by referring to al-Baghdadi in his Internet videos.

So the pot-bellied Islamists are wearing women's clothing in Islamabad, and can't even get a real Iraqi to lead al Qaeda in Iraq. Which brings us to the last item of the day: These guys are a bunch of losers!

Why do we accord them the respect befitting a worthy adversary? Why don't our spokesmen apply more appropriate labels?  Why the morally neutral language applied to them? The Islamist enemy is scum. The leaders are cowardly cross-dressers, when they exist at all.

So why don't we apply the same labels to them as Margaret Thatcher did to the IRA? A commentator asks that question in - of all places - the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the Chronicle's July 20 edition, University of Pennsylvania philosopher Carlin Romano writes, "What might we argue in favor of calling terrorists names?

"Let's mention just one key goal: the education of the world's Muslim youth. Instead of hearing moral praise and encouragement for terrorism from jihadists, which then gets mixed in their minds with the nonjudgmental, tactical talk of Western officials and media, they'd have to absorb a steady stream of insults of terrorists' intelligence, morality, decency, and reasoning. Young Muslims would have to get used to hearing jihadist heroes described as savages, scum, and uncivilized losers, along with the reasons why. It would intellectually force them, far more than they are forced today, to choose between two visions of the world.

"We should not minimize the thirst for respect among terrorists and their potential sympathizers. When we treat terrorists only as tactical foes, as though we're too jaded for moral talk, we raise the self-respect of terrorists and their appeal to young people."

Chopping up such vermin with bullets and bombs is only part of the fight, but it won't win the war. A most potent companion weapon is words - the unvarnished truth. If we use the truth better and more creatively, we can defeat the enemy.

It looks like our military in Iraq has caught on. Its exposure of the fake al Qaeda leader is an encouraging sign to split the terrorists and insurgent cadres from their commanders. We can defeat this freak show. Let's support our warfighters' change in approach.

Masterwork: RFE/RL briefing on Iraqi insurgent websites

Here's a real masterpiece of research that deserves a lot of attention: A 70-minute briefing on the insurgent and terrorist websites in Iraq.

It's relevant scholarship at its finest. I received a sneak preview of this presentation last spring, and thought it so important that I arranged a live briefing for senior-level policymakers in Washington prior to the report's completion. Now it's available to the public.

"The greatest strengths of the Iraqi Sunni-based insurgency's media strategy - decentralization and flexibility - are also its greatest weaknesses," according to a report released June 26 by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

"The book-length report, Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War Of Images And Ideas by RFE/RL regional analysts Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, provides an in-depth analysis of the media efforts of Sunni insurgents, who are responsible for the majority of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq," according to a release.

The 26,000-word report and a 70-minute audio briefing are available by clicking here. It's true to the highest standards of the old RFE/RL Research Institute and is one of the most relevant pieces of work to help win the war. I can't recommend this report highly enough.

Ex-Islamist says Western policies don't drive extremism - the theology does

Western foreign and military policies don't fuel Islamist extremism, a former militant says in Britain. The theology itself is the driving force, and it has little to do with the Western powers, says Hassan Butt, a former extremist who says he was part of the same terror network as July 7 London transit mass murderer Mohammed Sidique Khan.

Butt blames the extremist theologians who push murderous ideology based on anachronistic thought, and the Muslim community at large, which he says has failed to challenge the murderers.

"Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day," he says in a piece he wrote for the Daily Mail.

"I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

"Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

"If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.

"And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism."

Westerners who blame their own governments unwittingly aid the terrorists, former extremist says

Westerners who blame their own governments for the rise of Islamist extremism are unwittingly doing "propaganda work" for the terrorists themselves. So says a former Islamist extremist in Britain, who blames militant ideologues who seek an Islamist state in what they see as a world of unbelievers.

"By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us," the former Islamist extremist, Hassan Butt, writes in the Daily Mail.

"More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

"The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

"And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

"For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone [pictured], said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

"I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

"And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice."

Why advocates of Islamic law in US should be considered subversive

Advocates of instituting Islamic Sharia law in the United States are not protected by the Constitution's freedom of religion provisions.

Sharia law, in which a civil constitution is abolished and replaced by arbitrary interpretations of the Koran, is coercive political warfare. Advocacy of Sharia law by definition means advocacy of the overthrow of the Constitution - a political position, not a religious one. Due to Sharia's usually coercive nature, taking action to advocate the imposition of Sharia law in the US is therefore a crime in this country.

Such activity - even if expressed as verbally, with no direct political action - is a felony under the "treason" chapter of the US Criminal Code (Title 18, Part I, Chapter 115, Section 2385).

According to Section 2385, "Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

"Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

"Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

"Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

"If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

"As used in this section, the terms 'organizes' and 'organize', with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons."  [Emphasis added]

It's time to start enforcing the law.

War of Ideas strategy now available on Amazon

My new book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War, is now available from online booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Armed Forces Journal recently ran a profile of the book. Editor-in-chief Karen Walker writes, "this guide offers ways that could discredit, divide and ultimately squelch the enemy into a blob of irrelevance."