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MTA locks riders into terror trap

NY Daily News
8/21/05

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/339076p-289567c.html

Imagine this terrifying scenario: You're on a moving subway car when
the backpack carried by the man beside you starts to smoke. You see a
wire hanging out, hear a hissing sound and pop-pop-pop.

You instantly move away and push toward the end door. The door won't
open - it's locked. You're trapped beside a suicide bomber.

That very scenario took place in London, but with a crucial difference.
Underground riders fleeing smoking and hissing backpacks July 21 got
out of their moving cars through the end doors and into the next cars.

In New York, there's a good chance they would have been trapped because
of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's decision to lock the end
doors on 25% of subway cars.

Even as it searches passenger bags, the MTA has obvious security holes.
There are stations without security cameras or public address systems,
turnstile gates that are locked and train yards that are wide open. The
age of terror is upon us, and the MTA is behind the curve.

Nothing shows the problem as clearly as the locked doors on 1,600
subway cars. As wrong as that policy is, the reason behind it is absolutely
shocking. The agency is stuck in a time warp, more worried about a
safety problem of the late 1970s than a modern terror blast.

Fortunately, the July 21 London bombs - two weeks after the first
attack, which killed 52 people - malfunctioned. The fuses ignited, but the
explosives did not detonate.

But luck is not a strategy for safety. Nor is a foolish devotion to the
past.

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, transit systems were bedeviled by
accidents involving riders falling between cars. The National
Transportation Safety Board found that, over a five-year period, 25 of 48 rail
deaths involved "between car fatalities." Of the nine such fatalities
reported in 1981, eight were in the city.

The NTSB recommended that New York get better warning signs and
strictly enforce existing rules against riding between moving cars. According
to its 1982 report, the agency, which is advisory only, noted a
consensus among experts that locking doors "would be far more dangerous in
case of an emergency than the practice of leaving doors unlocked."

But MTA officials had already started locking some doors. That policy
continues to this day, unaffected by the menace of terror

(clipped)

'I Will Go to Do Jihad Again and Again'
Prisoner's Story Highlights Pakistan-Based Training Network for
Insurgents

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 21, 2005; A17

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/20/AR2005082001002.html

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The prisoner perched on a metal chair, hugging
his knees to his chest and rocking slightly, like a nervous child.

But his expression relaxed into a blissful smile as he described what
he would do if released from his cell in the headquarters of the
national intelligence service.

"When I get the chance, I will stick to my promise," said Sher Ali, 28,
a Pakistani man with cropped black hair and a long beard. "I will go to
do jihad again and again."

Ali said he took his vow to wage holy war against U.S. forces in
Afghanistan earlier this summer, just before embarking on what he described
as a 20-day weapons training course at a secret mountain camp in
northeastern Pakistan.

He was captured by Afghan police about three weeks ago, shortly after
crossing into Afghanistan's rugged, northeastern Konar province. The
area has been a haven for armed renegades from an assortment of groups,
including al Qaeda, the Taliban and backers of former Afghan leader
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is now a fugitive.

Over the last several months, insurgents have killed hundreds of people
in Afghanistan, including aid workers, religious and tribal leaders,
government officials, and Afghan and U.S. troops, many in ambushes and
bombings apparently aimed at derailing parliamentary elections scheduled
for Sept. 18.

American and Afghan forces have countered with an aggressive effort to
flush the fighters from their remote mountain hideouts, killing several
hundred in operations in border provinces from Konar in the north to
Kandahar in the south. They have also taken several hundred suspected
insurgents prisoner and allowed a few to speak to journalists.

Ali's story, which could not be verified independently,
( snipped)

Ali spoke in the presence of an Afghan intelligence official, but he
did not show signs of having been mistreated. Some details, such as the
existence of jihadist training camps and the recruitment of Islamic
fighters,
(snipped)

"We know where a lot of these training camps are. We have their names.
And we've given the Pakistanis all the information we have," said a
senior Afghan intelligence official. "We're waiting for Pakistan to show
the willingness to fight."

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has repeatedly pointed out
that his government has captured or killed more than 700 suspected al
Qaeda members in Pakistan since 2001. It also lost more than 250
soldiers last year in battles against al Qaeda bases in the largely lawless
semiautonomous tribal regions along the Afghan border.

Officials from the two governments have recently exchanged pledges to
collaborate closely on security. But they must still contend with the
sympathy that many Pakistanis feel toward the Taliban, particularly in
tribal border towns such as Miram Shah, where residents share the same
Pashtun ethnicity as the Afghan militia.

It was in Miram Shah this summer, at the home of a friend, that Sher
Ali said he met Zubair, an Afghan in his late twenties, who recruited him
to fight in Afghanistan. Ali, who was visiting from his village, said
Zubair did not initially admit to being an insurgent. "But from the way
he talked, I could tell that he had been a fighter," Ali said during an
hour-long interview in the intelligence headquarters.

Ali said Zubair told him and his companions that Western troops were
bombing, arresting and torturing innocent Afghans. "He kept saying, 'It's
our duty as Muslims to go there and help,' " said Ali.

That night, Ali recalled, Zubair turned to him and asked point-blank:
"Do you want to join the jihad?"

The son of a truck driver, Ali said he had never belonged to any
religious movement and had never attended any of the thousands of free
religious schools that cater to impoverished Pakistani children. Instead he
had dropped out of public school at 13 to take a series of odd jobs,
most recently as a security guard.

During that pivotal evening in Miram Shah, Ali said he thought of his
wife and 1-year-old son, who lived with his parents in a mud hut. But he
also thought of how he had often seethed at the idea of U.S. troops in
Muslim lands such as Afghanistan and Iraq and at the U.S. military's
detention of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"It was like Zubair had poured the petrol, lit the match and set fire
to this issue of jihad for me," he said.

Several days later, Ali said he boarded a public bus for the four-hour
journey from Peshawar, the city nearest his village, to the
northeastern Pakistani mountain town of Mansehra. He carried only a backpack
stuffed with three changes of clothes and a bar of soap. His ears rang with
his mother's wails of protest at the news that he was setting off for
jihad.
(snipped)

"I knew then that when I was killed in jihad, I would go directly to
heaven," he said, smiling.

On reaching the bus stop in Mansehra, Ali walked to a stand selling
fried dumplings and looked for the contact Zubair had promised would be
waiting.

"Salaam aleikum," peace be to you, he said tentatively to a middle-age
man with a long beard.

"Are you the person who has come from Peshawar?" the man asked.

Ali nodded, and the man quickly led him to another bus, this one far
more dilapidated. They rode for an hour to a small town, then alighted
and began a steep hike up into the hills, following no discernable path.
For more than four hours they trekked in silence under a cool canopy of
trees, taller than any Ali had ever seen.

Finally they reached a small camp of five white tents, where about 20
men were preparing to perform afternoon prayers. Ali was introduced to a
soft-spoken Pakistani instructor who never gave his name, though Ali
said he overheard others refer to him as Maksud.

Maksud never gave the name of the group that was training him, Ali
said. However, the hills around Mansehra overlook Pakistan's border with
Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan province that is split between Pakistan and
India.

The area has long been a training ground for Kashmiri guerrillas,
unofficially supported by Pakistan. In recent years, several Kashmiri groups
have joined forces with al Qaeda or the Taliban to attack Western
targets, but critics charge that the Pakistani military remains reluctant to
defang them.

Every day, Ali said, the trainees awoke before dawn and did sprinting
exercises for 20 minutes. They spent several hours learning how to
assemble, aim and fire weapons, from Kalashnikov rifles to rocket-propelled
grenade launchers, although Ali said there was only one rocket, so the
trainees never actually fired it.

Despite the loud bangs emanating from the camp, Ali said, Maksud took
pains to conceal it and warned the trainees not to wander too far away.

Shortly after Ali returned to Peshawar, he said, Zubair arrived and
announced they would drive into Afghanistan the next morning. Ali said
Zubair never told him whom they would be joining, but an Afghan
intelligence investigator said Ali had confessed under interrogation that Zubair
was working for a senior Taliban commander, Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Ali said Afghan border guards waved them into Konar, assuming they were
Afghan. But some miles later, police stopped their taxi. When they
discovered Ali did not have identity papers, they arrested him.

Ali complained that the Konar police kept him tied up for several days
and threatened to hurt him. But he said that he was never beaten and
added he had been pleasantly surprised by the extent to which Afghans
appeared to be in charge of their country.

Still, the Pakistani prisoner remained skeptical and defiant. The
interview over, Ali rose from his chair in the investigator's office and
began to shuffle out of the room. Suddenly, he stopped and popped his head
back through the door.

"So," he demanded, "when are you taking me to Guantanamo?"

Iran 'supplies infra-red bombs' that kill British troops in Iraq
By Toby Harnden, Chief Foreign Correspondent
(Filed: 21/08/2005)

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/21/wiran21.xml

British soldiers in Iraq are being killed by advanced "infra-red" bombs
supplied by Iran that defeat jamming equipment, according to military
intelligence officials.

The "passive infra-red" devices, whose use in Iraq is revealed for the
first time by The Sunday Telegraph, are detonated when the beam is
broken, as when an intruder triggers a burglar alarm. They were used by the
Iranian-backed Hezbollah group against Israel in Lebanon from 1995.

A radio signal is used to arm the bomb as a target vehicle approaches.
The next object to break the infra-red beam - the target vehicle -
detonates the device.

Coalition officials see the disturbing development as a key part of an
aggressive new campaign by Teheran to drive coalition forces out of
Iraq so that an Islamic theocracy can be established.

American and British intelligence officials believe that the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard is training, supplying and funding part of Iraq's
insurgent Shia network and that its activities have been stepped up since
the spring.

Links between Shia and Sunni Muslim groups, usually via trading by
criminal arms dealers, means that expertise quickly spreads across Iraq.

"These guys have picked up in two years what it took the IRA a
quarter-century to learn," said an Army bomb disposal officer in Iraq.

Four British soldiers are believed to have been killed by infra-red
devices made in the town of Majar-al-Kabir. The bombmaker, in his early
forties, was one of the agitators behind the mob killing of six Red Caps
there in June, 2003. The man, whose name is known by this newspaper but
has not been published for security reasons, has connections to Iran,
and has reportedly been seen with agents from Teheran. His arrest has
been ordered, and two of his lieutenants were detained in June.

After the arrests, however, three soldiers from the Staffordshire
Regiment were killed when their armoured Land Rover was blown up by a
roadside bomb in al-Amara, last month as they were lured into a trap.

Second Lt Richard Shearer, Pte Leon Spicer and Pte Phillip Hewett died
instantly as they investigated gunfire.

Guardsman Anthony Wakefield of the Coldstream Guards died from wounds
inflicted by a similar infra-red device in al-Amara in May. As the "top
cover" gunner, his head and shoulders were exposed in an armoured Land
Rover. The bomb was set at a precise height and directed towards the
road so it would hit a soldier in this position.

"This was something completely new," said one military intelligence
officer. "Before, they used to keep bashing away with the same crude
devices again and again. The Iranian influence has shown itself in the
sophistication of their bombs and a new ability to innovate."

British intelligence reports indicate that complete infra-red devices,
carefully machined in military workshops, are being delivered to Shia
militants in Iraq.

British officials said Iran had also been providing Shia insurgents
with "shaped charges", which use a directional explosive force to fire a
metal projectile that penetrates heavy armour.

Iran's interference threatens to inflame sectarian tensions in Iraq and
hasten what coalition officials dread most - civil war between the
Shias and the Sunni minority.

Iran's recent elections, in which the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was
elected president gave fresh impetus to its "meddling" in Iraq,
according to Mohammad Mohaddessin, an Iranian opposition leader in exile in
Paris.

"The regime in Teheran is very concerned about a democracy being
created right next to Iran," he said. "They also believe that the more chaos
there is in Iraq, the less attention will be paid by America and
Britain to Iran's nuclear ambitions."

Iranian policy had already been boosted by Iraq's elections. They
returned a Shia-dominated government led by Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who lived in
exile in Iran, rather than the secular Iyad Allawi, the candidate
preferred by Washington.

Before the introduction of infra-red devices, bombs in Iraq were
usually set off by an electronic remote control signal found in a mobile
telephone, car locking device, garage door opener or even a child's toy.

They could be blocked by electronic countermeasures developed by the
Army in Northern Ireland.

These are powerless, however, against infra-red beams, which can be
modified from burglar alarm systems. Military commanders have briefed
soldiers to be more cautious and avoid rushing into potential attacks.
Patrol routes are varied so that no pattern is set.

Infra-red beams have been used by the IRA, and by the Red Army Faction
to kill Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of the Deutsche Bank, in 1989.

"There has always been cross fertilisation of terrorist technology
across the terror diaspora," said a former Army bomb disposal officer.
"Infra-red is virtually impossible to jam whereas radio control and cell
phone systems are jammable."
# Maj Gen Ali Hamadi, who commands Iraq's border defence force, was
wounded in the stomach and accused American troops of opening fire on his
vehicle in Baghdad, local police reported. A US military official
denied that any of their soldiers had been in the area at the time. Iraqis
often accuse US troops of opening fire on motorists, sometimes killing
them.

Top job fighting extremism for Muslim who praised bomber
By Alasdair Palmer
(Filed: 21/08/2005)

Bunglawala called bin Laden a 'freedom fighter'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/21/nbung21.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/08/21/ixhome.html

A Muslim accused of anti-Semitism is to be appointed to a government
role in charge of rooting out extremism in the wake of last month's
suicide bombings in London.

Inayat Bunglawala, 36, the media secretary for the Muslim Council of
Britain, is understood to have been selected as one of seven "conveners"
for a Home Office task force with responsibilities for tackling
extremism among young Muslims, despite a history of anti-Semitic statements.

Mr Bunglawala's past comments include the allegation that the British
media was "Zionist-controlled".

Writing for a Muslim youth magazine in 1992, he said: "The chairman of
Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has
joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade
[then the chief executive of Channel 4 and now BBC chairman] and Alan
Yentob [BBC2 controller and friend of Salman Rushdie]."

The three are reported to be "close friendsâ€¦ so that's what they mean
by a 'free media'."

In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the
satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman
"courageous" - just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in
New York. After Rahman's arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said
that it was probably only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfil
their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors
everywhere".

Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of
Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a "freedom fighter", to hundreds of
Muslims in Britain.

The Muslim Council of Britain was one of several organisations invited
to a meeting held by Tony Blair after the London bombings. The Prime
Minister said afterwards that he would set up a task force to tackle
extremism "head on".

Mr Bunglawala's job at the Home Office will be to help to organise a
programme to tackle radicalism and extremism among young Muslims.

News of his appointment comes 10 days after he wrote to Mark Thompson,
the BBC Director General, accusing a forthcoming BBC1 Panorama
programme of possessing "a pro-Israeli agenda".

Although the programme had yet to be completed, Mr Bunglawala said that
the BBC had allowed itself to be used by "highly placed supporters of
Israel in the British media to make capital out of the July 7 atrocities
in London".

The programme, A Question of Leadership, which will air tonight at
10.20pm, seeks to discover whether British Muslim leaders can tackle the
extremism in their midst.

It features an interview with Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary general
of the Muslim Council of Britain, who says members of the Palestinian
terrorist organisation Hamas are "freedom fighters".

Sir Iqbal compares Hamas suicide bombers to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma
Ghandi.

He says: "Those who fight oppression, those who fight occupation,
cannot be termed as terrorist, they are freedom fighters, in the same way as
Nelson Mandela fought against their apartheid, in the same way as
Gandhi and many others fought the British rule in India."

Sir Iqbal also refers to the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas,
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as "the renowned Islamic scholar".

Sir Iqbal attended a memorial service at the Central Mosque in London
for Sheikh Yassin after he was killed in an Israeli air strike last
year.

The programme also shows a leading Saudi cleric, an honoured guest of
the East London Mosque, claiming that Islam is "the best testament to
how different communities can live together", while back in his pulpit in
Mecca, he has referred to Jews as "monkeys and pigs" and also as "the
rats of the world". Christians are "cross worshippers" and Hindus "idol
worshippers".

Mr Bunglawala said: "Those comments were made some 12 or 13 years ago.
All of us may hold opinions which are objectionable, but they change
over time. I certainly would not defend those comments today."

The Home Office refused to confirm or deny the appointment.