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Pilger: How Britain wages war

Friday, July 11th, 2008

By John Pilger | The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny

Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, which he won serving in the British army.

He has been refused entry to Britain and treatment for a serious heart ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Down ing Street to hand his Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to see him.

The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children. They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by Nato bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, Nato planes struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village: children, women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22 civilians died like this. All, including the roasted children, are described as “militants” or “suspected Taliban”. The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghan istan is “the noble cause of the 21st century”.

The third photograph is of a computer-generated aircraft carrier not yet built, one of two of the biggest ships ever ordered for the Royal Navy. The £4bn contract is shared by BAE Systems, whose sale of 72 fighter jets to the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia has made Britain the biggest arms merchant on earth, selling mostly to oppressive regimes in poor countries. At a time of economic crisis, Browne describes the carriers as “an affordable expenditure”.

The fourth photograph is of a young British soldier, Gavin Williams, who was “beasted” to death by three non-commissioned officers. This “informal summary punishment”, which sent his body temperature to more than 41 degrees, was intended to “humiliate, push to the limit and hurt”. The torture was described in court as a fact of army life.

The final photograph is of an Iraqi man, Baha Mousa, who was tortured to death by British soldiers. Taken during his post-mortem, it shows some of the 93 horrific injuries he suffered at the hands of men of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment who beat and abused him for 36 hours, including double-hooding him with hessian sacks in stifling heat. He was a hotel receptionist. Although his murder took place almost five years ago, it was only in May this year that the Ministry of Defence responded to the courts and agreed to an independent inquiry. A judge has described this as a “wall of silence”.

A court martial convicted just one soldier of Mousa’s “inhumane treatment”, and he has since been quietly released. Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families of Iraqis who have died in British custody, says the evidence is clear - abuse and torture by the British army is systemic.

Shiner and his colleagues have witness statements and corroborations of prima facie crimes of an especially atrocious kind usually associated with the Americans. “The more cases I am dealing with, the worse it gets,” he says. These include an “incident” near the town of Majar al-Kabir in 2004, when British soldiers executed as many as 20 Iraqi prisoners after mutilating them. The latest is that of a 14-year-old boy who was forced to simulate anal and oral sex over a prolonged period.

“At the heart of the US and UK project,” says Shiner, “is a desire to avoid accountability for what they want to do. Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary renditions are part of the same struggle to avoid accountability through jurisdiction.” British soldiers, he says, use the same torture techniques as the Americans and deny that the European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention on Torture apply to them. And British torture is “commonplace”: so much so, that “the routine nature of this ill-treatment helps to explain why, despite the abuse of the soldiers and cries of the detainees being clearly audible, nobody, particularly in authority, took any notice”.

Arcane rituals

Unbelievably, says Shiner, the Ministry of Defence under Tony Blair decided that the 1972 Heath government’s ban on certain torture techniques applied only in the UK and Northern Ireland. Consequently, “many Iraqis were killed and tortured in UK detention facilities”. Shiner is working on 46 horrific cases.

A wall of silence has always surrounded the British military, its arcane rituals, rites and practices and, above all, its contempt for the law and natural justice in its various imperial pursuits. For 80 years, the Ministry of Defence and compliant ministers refused to countenance posthumous pardons for terrified boys shot at dawn during the slaughter of the First World War. British soldiers used as guinea pigs during the testing of nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean were abandoned, as were many others who suffered the toxic effects of the 1991 Gulf War. The treatment of Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun is typical. Having been sent back to Nepal, many of these “soldiers of the Queen” have no pension, are deeply impoverished and are refused residence or medical help in the country for which they fought and for which 43,000 of them have died or been injured. The Gurkhas have won no fewer than 26 Victoria Crosses, yet Browne’s “affordable expenditure” excludes them.

An even more imposing wall of silence ensures that the British public remains largely unaware of the industrial killing of civilians in Britain’s modern colonial wars. In his landmark work Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, the historian Mark Curtis uses three main categories: direct responsibility, indirect responsibility and active inaction.

“The overall figure [since 1945] is between 8.6 and 13.5 million,” Curtis writes. “Of these, Britain bears direct responsibility for between four million and six million deaths. This figure is, if anything, likely to be an underestimate. Not all British interventions have been included, because of lack of data.” Since his study was published, the Iraq death toll has reached, by reliable measure, a million men, women and children.

The spiralling rise of militarism within Britain is rarely acknowledged, even by those alerting the public to legislation attacking basic civil liberties, such as the recently drafted Data Com muni cations Bill, which will give the government powers to keep records of all electronic communication. Like the plans for identity cards, this is in keeping what the Americans call “the national security state”, which seeks the control of domestic dissent while pursuing military aggression abroad. The £4bn aircraft carriers are to have a “global role”. For global read colonial. The Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office follow Washington’s line almost to the letter, as in Browne’s preposterous description of Afghanistan as a noble cause. In reality, the US-inspired Nato invasion has had two effects: the killing and dispossession of large numbers of Afghans, and the return of the opium trade, which the Taliban had banned. According to Hamid Karzai, the west’s puppet leader, Britain’s role in Helmand Province has led directly to the return of the Taliban.

Loans for arms

The militarising of how the British state perceives and treats other societies is vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out of 14 of the most impoverished and conflict-ridden countries are seduced into buying British arms and military equipment with “soft loans”. Like the British royal family, the British Prime Minister simply follows the money. Having ritually condemned a despot in Zimbabwe for “human rights abuses” - in truth, for no longer serving as the west’s business agent - and having obeyed the latest US dictum on Iran and Iraq, Brown set off recently for Saudi Arabia, exporter of Wahhabi fundamentalism and wheeler of fabulous arms deals.

To complement this, the Brown government is spending £11bn of taxpayers’ money on a huge, pri vatised military academy in Wales, which will train foreign soldiers and mercenaries recruited to the bogus “war on terror”. With arms companies such as Raytheon profiting, this will become Britain’s “School of the Americas”, a centre for counter-insurgency (terrorist) training and the design of future colonial adventures.

It has had almost no publicity.

Of course, the image of militarist Britain clashes with a benign national regard formed, wrote Tolstoy, “from infancy, by every possible means - class books, church services, sermons, speeches, books, papers, songs, poetry, monuments [leading to] people stupefied in the one direction”. Much has changed since he wrote that. Or has it? The shabby, destructive colonial war in Afghanistan is now reported almost entirely through the British army, with squaddies always doing their Kipling best, and with the Afghan resistance routinely dismissed as “outsiders” and “invaders”. Pictures of nomadic boys with Nato-roasted skin almost never appear in the press or on television, nor the after-effects of British thermobaric weapons, or “vacuum bombs”, designed to suck the air out of human lungs. Instead, whole pages mourn a British military intelligence agent in Afghanis tan, because she happens to have been a 26-year-old woman, the first to die in active service since the 2001 invasion.

Baha Mousa, tortured to death by British soldiers, was also 26 years old. But he was different. His father, Daoud, says that the way the Ministry of Defence has behaved over his son’s death convinces him that the British government regards the lives of others as “cheap”. And he is right.

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U.S. military to patrol Internet

Friday, July 11th, 2008

UPI | The U.S. military is looking for a contractor to patrol cyberspace, watching for warning signs of forthcoming terrorist attacks or other hostile activity on the Web.

“If someone wants to blow us up, we want to know about it,” Robert Hembrook, the deputy intelligence chief of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany, told United Press International.

In a solicitation posted on the Web last week, the command said it was looking for a contractor to provide “Internet awareness services” to support “force protection” — the term of art for the security of U.S. military installations and personnel.

“The purpose of the services will be to identify and assess stated and implied threat, antipathy, unrest and other contextual data relating to selected Internet domains,” says the solicitation.

Hembrook was tight-lipped about the proposal. “The more we talk about it, the less effective it will be,” he said. “If we didn’t have to put it out in public (to make the contract award), we wouldn’t have.”

He would not comment on the kinds of Internet sites the contractor would be directed to look at but acknowledged it would “not (be) far off” to assume violent Islamic extremists would be at the top of the list.

The solicitation says the successful contractor will “analyze various Web pages, chat rooms, blogs and other Internet domains to aggregate and assess data of interest,” adding, “The contractor will prioritize foreign-language domains that relate to specific areas of concern … (and) will also identify new Internet domains” that might relate to “specific local requirements” of the command.

Officials were keen to stress the contract covered only information that could be found by anyone with a computer and Internet connection.

“We’re not interested in being Big Brother,” said LeAnne MacAllister, chief spokeswoman for the command, which runs communications in Europe for the U.S. Army and the military’s joint commands there.

“I would not characterize it as monitoring,” added Hembrook. “This is a research tool gathering information that is already in the public domain.”

Experts say Islamic extremist groups like al-Qaida use the Web for propaganda and fundraising purposes. Although the extent to which it is employed in operational planning is less clear, most agree that important information about targeting and tactics can be gleaned from extremists’ public pronouncements.

Hembrook said the main purpose of the contract is to analyze “trends in information.” The contractor will “help us find those needles in that haystack of information.”

The solicitor says the contractor’s team will include a “principal cyber investigator,” a “locally specialized threat analyst” and a “foreign-speaking analyst with cyber investigative skills,” as well as a 24/7 watch team.

The contractor will produce weekly written reports, containing “raw data and supporting analysis.”

The addresses of the Web page sources will be “captioned under alias to preserve access,” says the solicitation. Experts have noted in the past that publishing the addresses of some extremists’ sites has led to them being attacked or moving. However, the contractor will “consider releasing specific (Web page addresses) on an as-needed basis … if explicit threat materials or imminent threat to personnel or facilities are discovered.”

The contractor also will notify the command immediately “upon receipt of any and all stated or implied threats that contain timing and/or targeting information relating to personnel, facilities or activities, and to specifically designated areas of concern.”

While declining to comment on the specific solicitation, Ben Venzke, CEO of IntelCenter, an Alexandria, Va.-based company that monitors Islamic extremist propaganda for clients including U.S. government agencies, said it was “common” for the military or other agencies to employ contractors “to support their own work on these issues.”

“What most people don’t get,” he said, “is that (each agency or entity) has their own very specific requirements. … They are looking for one type of thing in particular.”

Venzke explained that while an analyst for a big-city police department might be looking at extremist Web sites for certain kinds of information, their requirements would be different from those of intelligence analysts looking for evidence of trends in extremist targeting or ideology, which in turn would be different from those concerned — like the Fifth Signal Command — with force protection.

“There is some overlap,” he said, “and you always have to work to minimize that, but generally, there are so many different … pieces you can look at … it’s not duplication.”

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Iran’s top nuclear negotiator faces charges over Halliburton ties

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Iran Focus | Iran’s judiciary has arrested several executives of a privately-owned oil drilling company over their dealings with the U.S.-based oil giant Halliburton and one of the country’s top nuclear negotiators is facing charges of involvement in an oil scam, a semi-official news agency reported.

Fars News Agency said Mehrdad Safdari, chairman of the Board of Directors of Oriental Oil Kish, and several of his collegues are being interrogated over the company’s trading.

A senior member of Iran’s nuclear negotiations team, Sirus Nasseri, is the vice-chairman of the Board of Directors of the oil company. The news agency said “a well-informed source” close to the investigation sharply criticized Iran’s “security and political agencies” for their “blatant weakness” in preventing Nasseri from dealing with Halliburton.

“The authorities must be particularly vigilant about the extensive economic activities of some of the country’s officials”, he said. The source noted that “Nasseri had access to the country’s most secret information as a member of Iran’s nuclear negotiations team and was at the same time dealing directly with the American company, Halliburton, which used to be run by Dick Cheney”.

Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies, was set up in 2003 with an initial capital of 10 million tomans. In a few weeks, the company’s capital rose to 200 million dollars and soon jumped to seven billion tomans, a startling 700 percent rise in less than a year.

“The judiciary has been investigating this company for six months and after the collection of sufficient information and completion of inquiries, prosecution has begun”, Fars news agency, which is close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reported.

Other senior executives of the oil company facing charges include managing director Mohammad Madani, Chief Executive Officer Ali Matin Nejati, and operations director Ahmad Salari.

The Tehran-based daily Kayhan reported that investigators had discovered one million dollars in cash at the home of one of the detained oil executives. “Powerful figures have been exerting pressure to secure his release, but Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi has insisted that the case be prosecuted”, the daily wrote, adding that it would uncover “a chain of corruption and embezzlement scams”.

Oriental Oil Kish first blipped on the international media’s radar screen in January, when it was announced that the company had subcontracted parts of the South Pars drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services registered in the Cayman Islands.

“Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme is at the heart of deals with US energy companies to develop the country’s oil industry”, the Financial Times wrote.

The next day Halliburton announced the South Pars gas field project would be its last in Iran. The BBC reported that Halliburton, which took in $30-$40 million from Iranian operations in 2003, “was winding down its work due to a poor business environment.”

But the controversy over a key nuclear negotiator signing up big oil contracts with a U.S. oil giant did not die down in Iran. Hard-line members of Iran’s parliament demanded to question Nasseri over his oil deals and an influential Tehran daily reported that the Ministry of Oil was handing over multi-million-dollar contracts to Oriental Oil Kish while much of the company’s operations exist only on paper.

“This company has won contracts worth more than 500 million dollars from the Oil Ministry in the past three years, while it is not even registered in Iran”, the daily Kayhan wrote in an editorial on January 20, 2005.

Evidence shows that Oriental Oil Kish was set up by entrepreneurs and officials close to ex-President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Nasseri himself is a long-time protégé of Rafsanjani.

Investigators have pointed out that the company’s operational centre in Dubai is a small office with seven, mostly Indian, employees. Its two offices in Tehran’s Vali-Asr and Africa streets have no signboard and have a staff of about 15 persons. The company’s letterhead has no address and only provides one telephone number.

While there is a strong case for the prosecution of the senior executives of Oriental Oil Kish, Iran analysts see the crackdown on the company as a frontal assault by the ultra-conservative camp on the oil businesses of Rafsanjani and his allies. The new hard-line President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top election pledge was to “purge the country’s oil industry of Mafia-like influence and corruption”. This was widely seen as a thinly-veiled allusion to election rival Rafsanjani’s involvement in privately-owned oil companies in Iran.

“By targeting the private oil companies run by the Rafsanjani clan, Khamenei is going for the ex-President’s jugular”, said Ahmad Nassehi, a Dubai-based financial analyst. “Rafsanjani has lost much of his political clout in the elections. If his economic power is undermined, too, he’ll be out of the game for good”.

Analysts say the prosecution of Oriental Oil Kish executives will provide an indication as to how far, and how high, the incoming hard-line government is going to pursue the anti-corruption campaign.

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9/11 defendant argues to see classified evidence

Friday, July 11th, 2008

By Carol Rosenberg | An alleged al Qaida fighter accused of training the Sept. 11 hijackers sought access to classified evidence Thursday, reassuring the war court here that, once convicted, he’ll take U.S. secrets to his grave.

”If I am going to receive the death sentence, this evidence will go with me,” declared Waleed bin Attash, a one-legged Yemeni captive accused of running an al Qaida camp in Afghanistan.

After execution, he said, the secrets “will be better protected than in the hands of the FBI and CIA.”

Bin Attash made the remarks at a hearing before Judge Ralph Kohlmann, a Marine colonel who will preside at the war crimes trial of five Guantánamo captives accused of conspiring in the mass murder of 2,973 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

At least four of the men want to defend themselves. Kohlmann has been warning them that, even as their own lawyers, they can’t see or challenge classified evidence until their trial.

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Double standards of our ‘war on terror’

Friday, July 11th, 2008

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Whistleblower Says Pentagon Putting KBR Above Soldiers

Friday, July 11th, 2008

By DAVID IVANOVICH | The Pentagon’s oversight of Houston-based KBR’s work in Iraq and Afghanistan has been “irregular and highly out of the ordinary,” a former Army contracting official told Senate Democrats Wednesday.

Charles Smith, the former chief of the Army Field Support Command with responsibility for overseeing KBR’s massive contract with the Army, contends he was forced out of his job in 2004 for objecting to the Pentagon’s treatment of KBR.

“The interest of a corporation, KBR, not the interests of American soldiers or American taxpayers, seemed to be paramount,” Smith told the Democratic Policy Committee, a Democrats-only panel.

Dan Carlson, a spokesman for the Army Sustainment Command, acknowledged that Smith was reassigned within the command. Smith later retired.

Carlson said Smith’s allegations are “under investigation by appropriate authorities within the Army.”

KBR, the largest military contractor operating in Iraq, builds bases, serves meals and provides a host of other support services for U.S. troops. To date, the company has been paid nearly $26 billion for its work under the contract, Army officials say.

During his tenure, Smith said, he saw KBR submit more than $1 billion in billings to the government that lacked the necessary documentation to merit reimbursement.

KBR had come under particular criticism for its bills for providing meals at base dining halls. The Pentagon’s own auditors, the Defense Contract Audit Agency, objected to $200 million worth of billings, Smith said. But rather than pursue the issue, the Army agreed to change the contract, effectively barring the government from going after that money.

“It was at least a $200 million relief for KBR,” Smith said.

KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne, in a prepared statement, said the company “remains committed to providing high-quality service to our customer and conducting our business with ethics and integrity.

“The company in no way condones or tolerates anything to the contrary. When questions have been raised about our work, we have fully cooperated with the government in providing information requested of us. We remain committed to finding quick resolution to issues when they arise.”

Smith argued that rather than tighten control over the contract when billing issues arose, Army officials waived rules that would have allowed the government to withhold 15 percent of expected reimbursements until KBR provided the necessary documentation.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Democratic Policy Committee chairman, noted what he called “a concerted effort in the Pentagon to award huge contracts to certain companies and to protect it at all costs.”

Smith said the Pentagon essentially “outsourced” oversight of the contract to a firm called RCI, later acquired by Virginia-based Serco.

Serco spokesman Steve McCarney said the firm does not oversee any contractor.

“We simply provide independent economic cost analysis to our client, which is the U.S. Army,” McCarney said.

Carlson, the Army Sustainment Command spokesman, pointed to improvements in recent years, including deploying contracting officers overseas, establishing a requirement review process and improving contractor business systems to better meet the standards of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

Underlying discussion of KBR’s treatment by the Army was apparent concern among at least some at the Pentagon that the company would, if pushed too far, withdraw from Iraq. That would have dealt a huge blow to a war effort heavily dependent on the work of private contractors.

Smith discounted that notion, saying KBR would not risk its corporate reputation — and its business as a military contractor — by deserting the troops in the field.

After the hearing, Smith said that while he oversaw KBR’s contract, he occasionally heard from midlevel KBR officials complaining about cash flow and warning that the company might fail to complete tasks assigned under the contract. These calls, however, invariably were followed by assurances from higher-level managers of the company’s commitment to the contract, Smith said.

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The FBI’s Plan to ‘Profile’ Muslims

Friday, July 11th, 2008

By Juan Cole | The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask “open-ended questions” concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person’s travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation.

The rumored changes have provoked protests from Muslim American and Arab-American groups. The Council on American Islamic Relations, among the more effective lobbies for Muslim Americans’ civil liberties, immediately denounced the plan, as did James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute. Said Zogby, “There are millions of Americans who, under the reported new parameters, could become subject to arbitrary and subjective ethnic and religious profiling.” Zogby, who noted that the Bush administration’s history with profiling is not reassuring, warned that all Americans would suffer from a weakening of civil liberties.

In fact, Zogby’s statement only begins to touch on the many problems with these proposed rules. The new guidelines would lead to many bogus prosecutions, but they would also prove counterproductive in the effort to disrupt real terror plots. And then there’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s rationale for revising the rules in the first place. “It’s necessary,” he explained in a June news conference, “to put in place regulations that will allow the FBI to transform itself as it is transforming itself into an intelligence-gathering organization.” When did Congress, or we as a nation, have a debate about whether we want to authorize the establishment of a domestic intelligence agency? Indeed, late last month Congress signaled its discomfort with the concept by denying the FBI’s $11 million funding request for its data-mining center.

Establishing a profile that would aid in identifying suspects is not in and of itself illegal, though the practice generally makes civil libertarians nervous. When looking for drug couriers, Drug Enforcement Agency agents were permitted by the Supreme Court in United States v. Sokolow (1989) to use indicators such as the use of an alias, nervous or evasive behavior, cash payments for tickets, brief trips to major drug-trafficking cities, type of clothing, and the lack of checked luggage. This technique, however, specifically excluded the use of skin color or other racial features in building the profile.

In contrast, using race and ethnicity as the — or even a — primary factor in deciding whom to stop and search, despite being widespread among police forces, is illegal. Just this spring, the Maryland State Police settled out of court with the ACLU and an African-American man after having been sued for the practice of stopping black and Latino men and searching them for drugs. New Jersey police also got into trouble over stopping people on the grounds of race.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled last year in State v. Calvin Lee that a defendant’s plausible allegation that the arrest was initiated primarily because of race would be grounds for discovery: The defense attorney could then request relevant documents from the prosecution that might show discriminatory attitudes and actions on the part of the police. Because racial profiling is most often felt by juries to be inappropriate, its use could backfire on the FBI. Suspects charged on the basis of an investigation primarily triggered by their race could end up being acquitted as victims of government discrimination.

If the aim is to identify al-Qaida operatives or close sympathizers in the United States, racial profiling is counterproductive. Such tiny, cultlike terror organizations are multinational. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, is a Briton whose father hailed from Jamaica, and no racial profile of him would have predicted his al-Qaida ties. Adam Gadahn, an al-Qaida spokesman, is from a mixed Jewish and Christian heritage and hails from suburban Orange County, Calif. When I broached the topic of FBI profiling to some Muslim American friends on Facebook, a scientist in San Francisco replied, “Profiling Muslims or Arabs will just make al-Qaida look outside Islam for its bombers. There are many other disgruntled groups aside from those that worship Allah.”

It is a mystery why the Department of Justice has not learned the lesson that terrorists are best tracked down through good police work brought to bear on specific illegal acts, rather than by vast fishing expeditions. After Sept. 11, the DOJ called thousands of Muslim men in the United States for what it termed voluntary interviews. Not a single terrorist was identified in this manner, though a handful of the interviewees ended up being deported for minor visa offenses. Once it became clear that the interviews might eventuate in arbitrary actions against them, the willingness of American Muslims to cooperate declined rapidly, and so the whole operation badly backfired.

The fiasco of the prosecution of the Detroit Four should also have been instructive. These four Arab men apparently had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, having moved into an apartment in southwest Detroit recently vacated by a man suspected of al-Qaida ties. The prosecution alleged that innocent vacation videotapes of places such as Disneyland found in the apartment were part of a terror plot, and that vague doodles in a notebook depicted targets abroad such as a Jordanian hospital and Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey. The prosecution relied heavily on an Arab-American informer who might reduce his own prison sentence for various acts of criminal fraud if a conviction were obtained, and whose testimony against the four suspects evolved dramatically over time. The initial conviction of two of the men, Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi on charges of giving material support to terrorism, which was hailed as an achievement by the Bush administration, was overturned when the prosecution was discovered to have withheld key exculpatory evidence.

In a startling reversal, two members of the prosecuting team were tried for criminal misconduct, and although they were acquitted, their misconduct was not in question. A Detroit judge even apologized to a third man, who was held for three and a half years on a minor fraud charge and then deported. The entire affair raised questions about whether Muslim-Americans could hope for justice if for any reason they got accidentally caught up in the Justice Department’s frantic search for Muslim terror cells on American soil (very few have been found). The flimsy case against the four men would have had no plausibility at all had they been white upper-middle-class residents of Connecticut.

Not only has the Justice Department engaged in prosecutorial misconduct with regard to Muslims, but at least one FBI operation also appears to have involved actual entrapment. Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Burson Augustine, Rothschild Augustine, Stanley Grant Phanor, Naudimar Herrera and Lyglenson Lemorin were arrested in June 2006, and accused of being an al-Qaida cell plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Batiste, aka Brother Naz or Prince Manna, led a small cult in a poor neighborhood of Miami called Seas of David, which was apparently an offshoot of the Moorish Temple Science, an African-American folk religion. The cult mixed themes from Judaism, Christianity and Islam but was not identifiably Muslim. The group met in a warehouse and talked big.

The FBI put an informant among them who repeatedly offered them money and equipment for their activities, some of which he appears to have suggested. Batiste maintained in the trial that he was just stringing along the informant in hopes of extracting a promised $50,000, and that he was insincere in pledging allegiance to al-Qaida. When the Justice Department announced the arrest in 2006, the indictment went on about the belief of the group in jihad, or Muslim holy war, but it is a little unlikely that these individuals knew anything about Islam at all. Both attempts to prosecute them ended in mistrials, primarily because the FBI could produce no evidence that when they were arrested they had any weapons or explosives in their possession. They were full of crazy talk, but even some of that was suggested to them by the Department of Justice.

Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans, along with members of some other ethnic groups, are therefore understandably alarmed that the Department of Justice may soon have the tools to bring them under investigation without any proof of wrongdoing. As CAIR national legislative director Corey Saylor noted in a statement, “Any new Justice Department guidelines must preserve the presumption of innocence that is the basis of our entire legal system … Initiating criminal investigations based on racial or religious profiling is both unconstitutional and un-American.” Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans have already suffered from being profiled in a de facto sense. Unsurprisingly, to have that injustice become policy concerns them. The protests would be even louder if so many in the community were not afraid to speak up and draw attention to themselves, as one of my Muslim American Facebook correspondents pointed out to me. Another remarked sadly that not only had George W. Bush not brought democracy to the Muslim Middle East, but he had also damaged its prospects in America itself.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

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