-Caveat Lector- from: a friend: http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=8326 Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=8326";> yaledailynews.com - Blindness and blowback in t�</A> ----- Round and round . . . Om K ---- Published Thursday, February 15, 1996 Blindness and blowback in the World Trade Center case E-mail this article Format this article for printing Comment on this article Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman will probably spend the rest of his life in prison. Sentenced on Jan. 18 for "hatching" a grandiose anti-Western conspiracy that included planting bombs all over Manhattan, the 57-year-old cleric faces a future of almost total isolation. Most likely, he will serve out his days at the supermaximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, where, blind and unable to communicate with English-speaking guards, Rahman will pass some 23 hours a day in his cell alone. Many reckon that this damned fate is an appropriate dose of American justice. The New York Daily News applauded the sentencing, and that of nine co-defendants, as a blow "against the forces of darkness ... who seek to write their will across the world in blood." These defenders of "what America is all about," however, might not be so smug if they stopped to consider what makes Rahman's religious and political sermons more than isolated cries in the desert. Throughout the sheikh's career, his supposed foes (including the U.S. government) not only used Rahman to further their own political agendas, but they also created divisive social conditions that helped his message spread like fire in the wind. Most concretely, while Rahman assailed secularists, nonbelievers and Muslim moderates, he often did so under the sponsorship of major governments. When Anwar Sadat sought to bolster his rightist regime in the 1970s, for instance, he enlisted conservative clerics, including Rahman, to help crush the Egyptian left. According to legal documents, the CIA first turned to Rahman in 1989. Building a world army to fight their $10 billion jihad in Afghanistan, the Agency sent Rahman first to Pakistan and then to the United States to inspire mujahideen recruits. Here, in New York and New Jersey, many of Rahman's eager followers learned to be all that they could be. The Green Beret's Psychological Operations Group in Fort Bragg provided advanced military training. And, once the new soldiers were ready, the CIA shipped them off to the Afghani front, where they waged guerrilla, and often-terrorist, warfare against Soviet occupation. As one defense attorney described it, Rahman's followers were "on Team America." Trouble is, Team America tended to get a little out of hand. "After every covert war," explains Jack Blum, a former investigative counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "there is an unintended disposal problem." In spook jargon they call it "blowback." Unfortunately, we may never know just what blew black from Afghanistan, because the Rahman trial was among the most farcical in memory. None of the defendants were convicted of actually bombing the World Trade Center, but only of "seditiously conspiring" to do so -- a crime defined by a Civil-War-era statute that allows innuendo, hearsay and taped phone conversations to replace material evidence. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst revealed that the FBI's crime lab tried to taint key evidence in the case. And federal judge Michael Mukasey barred expert testimony on Islamic thought, despite the fact that Rahman's conviction rested on his unorthodox interpretations of Islamic law. Most dubiously of all, the prosecution's case relied almost entirely on the actions and testimony of Emad Salem, a shadowy figure who worked simultaneously for U.S. and Egyptian intelligence agencies and was paid up to $1 million for his services. Salem not only informed on Rahman's inner circle for years but also made key logistical arrangements and even suggested bombing targets. It was Salem who rented the infamous "safe house," where defendants ostensibly concocted their "witches brew" (later revealed to be nonexplosive). Highlighting the issue of entrapment, Salem bragged to his wife, "I am the shepherd [of the group] ... They are the sheep." Indeed, reviewing the irregularities of Rahman's trial lends credence to the defense's assertion that the case was not about any direct crimes (for which he was not even accused) but about Rahman's intemperate view of the world. As he told his attorney, Lynn Stewart, after the sentencing, "I am not the first person to go to jail for his beliefs and I won't be the last." But even if Rahman and his co-defendants were involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- which is near impossible to determine from the travesty of their trial -- the most unsettling questions remain. Why did Rahman's message of religious zealotry and antipathy toward the West resonate so powerfully with his audience? Why was Rahman's claim that the United States and the West are "enemies of Islam" so easy for many to believe? These, unfortunately, also are among the easiest questions to answer; for a review of headlines just over the last few weeks highlights a march of events in the Muslim world that could incite paranoia even among the most skeptical. On December 31, for example, Congress approved an $18 million covert operation to destabilize the government of Iran (a country, incidentally, whose government already was overthrown once by the United States in 1953). Some two weeks later, Russian forces leveled the Dagestani village of Pervomayskoye in their ongoing war against predominantly-Muslim Chechnya. Already the colonial conflict has killed more than 30,000 people, but it has yet to illicit even diplomatic condemnation from other Western powers. Justifying U.S. silence after the most recent attack, Defense Secretary William Perry explained, "I don't want to ... second-guess ... the Russian military." In Algeria, some 40,000 people have lost their lives since 1992, when the French-supported government annulled democratic elections to block the victory of the conservative Islamic Salvation Front. In Egypt -- which, along with Israel ranks among the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid -- the governing party overwhelmingly won parliamentary elections in December, after banning religious opposition parties and sentencing non-violent dissidents to long prison terms from sequestered military tribunals. And the list goes on and on: war crimes investigators unearth mass graves filled with mostly Muslim men and boys in Bosnia; Israel blows the head off a military leader of Hamas; Bahrain seizes Shiite activists in order to dismantle "a subversive organization;" and so on. Thus, it is no small wonder that there might be significant blowback from Western powers' recent adventures abroad. The United States spared no expense to create an expansive army of true-believing mercenaries in its contest against the Soviet Union; it has fostered a world economic order that makes local cultural autonomy increasingly difficult to preserve; and it has tacitly approved, and at times directed, a long list of anti-Muslim bloodbaths over the last half-century. Thus, while Sheikh Abdel-Rahman may rot his life away in silence, his fiery rhetoric is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. Instead, as Jerusalem Post editorialist Moshe Zak recently observed, "these mistakes are creating a dynamic of rage ... of which the end cannot be foreseen." Copyright � 2001 Yale Daily News. All rights reserved. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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