Al Jazeera journalist responds to U.S, labeling him Al Qaeda

Earlier this month, The Intercept reported that the U.S. government secretly labeled a prominent Al Jazeera journalist a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a terror watch list.

The basis for the designation was unclear, but the reporter, Islamabad bureau chief Ahmad Zaidan, denies ever having been a member of the group. Reached last week in Doha, Qatar — where the state-funded Al Jazeera network is based — Zaidan spoke to The Intercept about the reaction to his work and the implications of being tracked by the U.S. government. “To monitor and bug journalists is absolutely immoral and unethical,” he said.

Zaidan was known for interviewing senior Al Qaeda figures, including Osama bin Laden, and he covered the wedding of bin Laden’s son in 2001. If it was those contacts that caused U.S. suspicions, Zaidan says, that runs counter to the purpose of journalism.

“Our job as journalists is to reach out to everybody. We are some sort of go-between in cases where the two parties are not talking to each other,” Zaidan said. “I was thinking that when I was interviewing bin Laden and interviewing these militants, that maybe at least [they can] hear each other, and maybe it can help humanity to reach some sort of middle way.”

Zaidan also sees discrimination behind the surveillance. “If Peter Bergen is meeting Osama bin Laden, or Robert Fisk is meeting Osama bin Laden, no problem,” he said. “But if a non-Westerner is meeting some wanted people, he should be doubted?”

Zaidan’s picture and watch list number appear in a 2012 National Security Agency presentation, which shows that analysts tracked his cell phone contacts and location data — or metadata — as part of a program that looked for people who moved like Al Qaeda couriers. The presentation and other NSA documents revealed that the U.S. was obtaining bulk call data records from Pakistani telecoms, and analyzing the metadata of tens of millions of Pakistani cell phones.

“Faisalabad, Lahore — these main cities are the residence of millions and millions of people,” Zaidan said. “They are following and surveilling every one of us. Who has made them the god of this globe?”

Zaidan says he has had good relations with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and has not had run-ins with U.S. authorities.

“I did not hide myself. Whenever I made an interview, I published it. If you have any objection to me, I am living in Islamabad, you can come ask for me anytime,” he said.

He noted that the United States is not the only country to have labeled him as Al Qaeda. Zaidan, who is Syrian, returned to his country for the first time in almost 35 years in early 2012, after the uprising began against President Bashar al-Assad. Zaidan reported from inside a stronghold of the Free Syrian Army, and soon after, he says Syrian state television aired a report claiming that he was a member of Al Qaeda and had been sent to Syria by the group’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The allegations make him fear for his security. “If you are Al Qaeda, it means they can eliminate you. And I am afraid if somebody else might do something against me and he will put the blame on America now,” Zaidan said.

But when I asked if he regretted The Intercept publishing the story, Zaidan said: “My take, as a journalist, is that you have done your job. I can’t say, ‘Ok, if I have some information about Osama bin Laden, I have to publish it, but if you have something against Ahmad Zaidan or Al Jazeera, you should not publish it.’”

“This is the right of our audience,” he said. “We should not keep our audience in the dark otherwise we are like, in fact, the National Security Agency.” More

 

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Israel’s gains from the death of Arafat cannot be ignored

It seems there are still plenty of parties who would prefer that the death of the long-time Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat continues to be treated as a mystery rather than as an assassination.

Yasser Arafat

It is hard, however, to avoid drawing the logical conclusion from the finding last week by Swiss scientists that the Palestinian leader’s body contained high levels of a radioactive isotope, polonium-210. An inconclusive and much more limited study by a Russian team published immediately after the Swiss announcement also suggests Arafat died from poisoning.

It is time to state the obvious: Arafat was killed. And suspicion falls squarely on Israel.

Israel alone had the means, track record, stated intention and motive. Without Israel’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, it may be impossible to secure a conviction in a court of law, but there should be evidence enough to convict Israel in the court of world opinion.

Israel had access to polonium from its nuclear reactor in Dimona, and has a long record of carrying out political assassinations, some ostentatious and others covert, often using hard-to-trace chemical agents. There is also plenty of evidence that Israel wanted Arafat “removed”. In January 2002, Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s military chief of staff, was caught on a microphone whispering to Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, about Arafat: “We have to get rid of him.”

With the Palestinian leader holed up for more than two years in his battered compound in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, the debate in the Israel government centred on whether he should be exiled or killed.

In September 2003, the cabinet even issued a warning that Israel would “remove this obstacle in a manner, and at a time, of its choosing”. The then-deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, clarified that killing Arafat was “one of the options”.

What stayed Israel’s hand – and fuelled its equivocal tone – was Washington’s adamant opposition. After these threats, Colin Powell, the US former secretary of state, warned that a move against Arafat would trigger “rage throughout the Arab world”.

By April 2004, however, Mr Sharon declared he was no longer obligated by his earlier commitment to George Bush not to “harm Arafat physically”. “I am released from that pledge,” he said. The White House too indicated a weakening of its stance: an unnamed spokesman responded feebly that the US “opposed any such action”.

So what about motive? How did Israel gain from “removing” Arafat? To understand Israel’s thinking, one needs to return to another debate raging at that time, among Palestinians.

The Palestinian leadership was split into two camps, centred on Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, then Arafat’s heir apparent. The pair had starkly divergent strategies for dealing with Israel.

In Arafat’s view, Israel had reneged on commitments it made in the Oslo accords. He was therefore loath to invest exclusively in the peace process. He wanted a twin strategy: keeping open channels for talks while maintaining the option of armed resistance to pressure Israel. For this reason, he kept a tight personal grip on the Palestinian security forces.

Mr Abbas, on the other hand, believed that armed resistance was a gift to Israel, delegitimising the Palestinian struggle. He wanted to focus exclusively on negotiations and state-building, hoping to exert indirect pressure on Israel by proving to the international community that the Palestinians could be trusted with statehood. His priority was cooperating closely with the US and Israel in security matters. More

 

Killing Arafat

From Wikipedia:

Polonium is a very rare element in nature because of the short half-life of all its isotopes. It is found in uranium ores at about 0.1 mg per metric ton (1 part in 10¹⁰),^[43][44] which is approximately 0.2% of the abundance of radium. The amounts in the Earth's crust are not harmful. Polonium has been found in tobacco smoke from tobacco leaves grown with phosphate fertilizers.^[45][46][47]

Because of the small abundance, isolation of polonium from natural sources is a very tedious process. The largest batch was extracted in the first half of the 20th century by processing 37 tonnes of residues from radium production. It contained only 40 Ci (9 mg) of polonium-210.^[48] Nowadays, polonium is obtained by irradiating bismuth with high-energy neutrons or protons.^[16][49]

In 1934, an experiment showed that when natural ²⁰⁹Bi is bombarded with neutrons, ²¹⁰Bi is created, which then decays to ²¹⁰Po via beta-minus decay. The final purification is done pyrochemically followed by liquid-liquid extraction techniques.^[50] Polonium may now be made in milligram amounts in this procedure which uses high neutron fluxes found in nuclear reactors.^[49] Only about 100 grams are produced each year, practically all of it in Russia, making polonium exceedingly rare.^[51][52]

One has therefore to question how many states in the Middle East have nuclear reactors?

Arafat was killed – just as Sharon promised

Scientists have finally produced the evidence that Yasser Arafat was poisoned, using radioactive polonium. Traces were found in Arafat’s body and the surrounding earth (i.e. after dispersion from decomposition) 18 times higher than normal.

PLO Leader Yasser Arafat

The documentation can be seen here.

Now there aren’t so many countries that have access to polonium, or to the techniques necessary for its use in a political assassination. Israel would be one of those few countries.

But hold on. Israel says it didn’t do it. Here’s spokesman Yigal Palmor:

There’s no way the Palestinians can stick this on us. It’s unreasonable and unsupported by facts.

And Dov Weisglass, adviser to Ariel Sharon, who was Israel’s PM at the time of Arafat’s death, is also adamant that Israel is not culpable.

All of which means that the threats Sharon made in April 2004, a few months before Arafat’s death, to kill the Palestinian leader were simple joshing:

I told the president [George Bush] the following. In our first meeting about three years ago, I accepted your request not to harm Arafat physically. I told him [in the most recent meeting] I understand the problems surrounding the situation, but I am released from that pledge.

The Guardian reported at the time:

Mr Arafat responded by saying he took the threat seriously, but would stand his ground. “I am not afraid of Sharon’s threats. He has a history of attempting to target me.”

Unwisely, many of us had assumed at the time that Sharon was intending to fire a missile, tank shell or sniper’s bullet into the Muqata compound in Ramallah to finish off Arafat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its track record, Israel preferred something quieter and harder to trace, as it has done so many times before. More

www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.556656#sthash.gPQvIwUR.dpuf