Quran-Burning Threat

FBI Keeping Watch on Quran-Burning Threat

John Raoux / AP

Pastor Terry Jones at a Sept. 8, 2010, press conference.

The FBI has begun to collect information relating to a plan by a radical Christian pastor in Florida to stage a public Quran burning on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this Saturday. Given constitutional provisions protecting the freedom of expression, however, officials say they don't believe the FBI or any other federal authority has the power to stop at least a token Quran burning by the Rev. Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center.

Craig Lowe, mayor of Gainesville, the Florida university town where Jones's church is located, has confirmed to Declassified that local authorities have been in contact with both the FBI's small resident office in Gainesville and with the bureau's larger field office in Jacksonville to discuss the Quran-burning threat. The FBI, Lowe says, is "gathering information that might be related" to the church's plans, but he declined to elaborate on what kind of information was being gathered or what the bureau or other authorities might be able to do with it. Jeff Westcott, a spokesman for the FBI's Jacksonville office, refused to comment on or confirm Lowe's claims.

Mayor Lowe says that Jones's church applied last month for a permit to stage a bonfire to burn Qurans on the 9/11 anniversary. The mayor says Gainesville city authorities rejected the permit application on grounds of public safety and environmental protection. What city or other authorities—local, state, or federal—can or will do if Jones and his followers stage a bonfire without a permit is unclear. The mayor says the city's response would be "based within the law" and would be framed so as to ensure "compliance with the law." He says that authorities have been making contingency plans for such an eventuality, which they are "updating . . . as we receive new information." However, he declined to discuss the details of these contingency plans or any possible responses to a Quran burning that might be under consideration.

Lowe confirms that when he was running for mayor earlier this year, Jones and his church launched a personal attack on him because he's gay. During the election, Jones's church posted a sign reading "No Homo Mayor," similar to one currently posted announcing the Quran-burning event. After a secularist group filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service questioning whether such a proclamation by the church constituted a potential violation of its tax-exempt status because it constituted a political statement, the sign was then truncated to "No Homo," the mayor says. He says he doesn't believe the church's opposition to his election had a significant influence on his successful campaign for mayor.

Numerous religious and political leaders, including such Obama administration figures as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, have condemned the Quran-burning threats by Jones, an outspoken fundamentalist who previously headed a church in Germany, from which he was ousted by local parishioners last year, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The FBI has evidently been paying attention to the uproar surrounding the Quran-burning plan for several weeks; an "Intelligence Bulletin" issued by the Jacksonville office on Aug. 19 refers to scraps of information suggesting Muslim "Extremists Likely to Retaliate Against Florida Group's Planned 'International Burn A Koran Day' Scheduled for 11 September 2010."

A government official following the developments, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, says that the FBI's current monitoring of events does not constitute an "investigation" of Jones or his church because authorities at this point do not believe there is any federal law under which an FBI investigation could be launched.

Largest Electronic Spy Base

Israel has the Largest Electronic Spy Base in the Region..

New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, who writes in Paris-based magazine Le Monde Diplomatique, published a shocking report, not only for the leaders of the Arabs countries in the Middle East, but also for those in Europe and also in United States..

According to the report, Israel has one of the largest signals intelligence (SIGINT) bases in the world in the western Negev. The data collected at the Negev site is relayed for processing to a 8200 base near Herzliya, the paper says. Other reports say 8200's base is near the Mossad headquarters, which receives the intelligence along with IDF units, the paper says.
It has 30 antennas and satellite dishes of different sizes and types, capable of eavesdropping on telephone calls and accessing the e-mail of "governments, international organizations, foreign companies, political groups and individuals."

One of the base's main purposes is to listen to transmissions from ships passing in the Mediterranean, the report says. The base is also the center of intelligence activity that "taps underwater communication cables, mostly in the Mediterranean, connecting Israel with Europe."

Hager compared the Israeli base's capabilities to those of the US National Security Agency, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters and a similar organisation in France. "However, there is one difference," Hager said at the end of the report. While those units were uncovered long ago, "the unit at Urim remained unknown until this report".

What America Has Lost

It’s clear we overreacted to 9/11.

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Tim Hetherington for Newsweek

Photos: Life Returns to Ground Zero

Life Returns to Ground Zero

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.

Why Bin Laden Still Matters

Al Qaeda never had more than a few hundred sworn members. The real danger was its ability to train and inspire jihadis around the world.

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In late January, Osama bin Laden released an audiotape praising the Nigerian who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009. “The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of [September] 11th,” he said.

While the tape was proof that Al Qaeda’s leader was still alive, it also raised the question of whether he’s now only an irrelevant militant seeking to associate himself with even failed attacks originated by groups he doesn’t control. After all, the organization behind the botched bombing was Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, headquartered in Yemen, thousands of miles from bin Laden’s presumed base on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Bin Laden’s irrelevance seemed further confirmed in June, when CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News that Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan is now “relatively small…I think at most we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100.”

For some, these small numbers suggest that bin Laden’s organization is fading away, and that the war against it is largely won. But the fact is that Al Qaeda has always been a small organization. According to the FBI, there were only 200 sworn members at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and the group has always seen itself primarily as an ideological and military vanguard seeking to influence and train other jihadist groups.