A New Face of Jihad Vows Attacks on U.S.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Deep in a violent and lawless slum just north of this coastal city, 12 men whose faces were shrouded by scarves drilled with Kalashnikovs.

In unison, they lunged in one direction, turned and lunged in another. “Allah-u akbar,” the men shouted in praise to God as they fired their machine guns into a wall.

The men belong to a new militant Islamic organization called Fatah al Islam, whose leader, a fugitive Palestinian named Shakir al-Abssi, has set up operations in a refugee camp here where he trains fighters and spreads the ideology of Al Qaeda.

He has solid terrorist credentials. A former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia who was killed last summer, Mr. Abssi was sentenced to death in absentia along with Mr. Zarqawi in the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan, Laurence Foley. Just four months after arriving here from Syria, Mr. Abssi has a militia that intelligence officials estimate at 150 men and an arsenal of explosives, rockets and even an antiaircraft gun.

During a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Abssi displayed his makeshift training facility and his strident message that America needed to be punished for its presence in the Islamic world. “The only way to achieve our rights is by force,” he said. “This is the way America deals with us. So when the Americans feel that their lives and their economy are threatened, they will know that they should leave.”

Mr. Abssi’s organization is the image of what intelligence officials have warned is the re-emergence of Al Qaeda. Shattered after 2001, the organization founded by Osama bin Laden is now reforming as an alliance of small groups around the world that share a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam but have developed...

Thanks for the pings! I remember the Cooke thing. Bobby Muller was involved with the Indochina Project:

Goodfellow’s Bedfellows: Who’s in Bed with the Washington Post

Alongside such groups, the Winter/Spring 1977 issue of the Coalition’s Action Alert publication listed the IRC [Indochina Resource Center, an antiwar lobbying group that worked with VVAW and Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda's Indochina Peace Campaign] as a member of the CNFMP. Later in 1977 the IRC changed its name to the Southeast Asia Resource Center and moved its headquarters from Washington, DC to Berkeley, California. After David Truong’s arrest for espionage in January 1978 it also spawned a spinoff called the Indochina Project, directed by Gary Porter and Washington Post Cambodia correspondent Elizabeth Becker, which lasted from 1978 until 1980.

The Southeast Asia Resource Center and Indochina Project continued to work with the CNFMP coalition, which included a project called the Indochina Working Group. Don Luce remained associated with the Southeast Asia Resource Center as its director. Gary Porter, who had been in Washington, DC testifying to Congress on behalf of the IRC, stayed there to join IPS when the IRC moved. Meanwhile William Goodfellow had already cofounded a new IPS spinoff linked to the CNFMP and Indochina Project: the Center for International Policy.

The War Called Peace: The Soviet Peace Offensive

Center for International Policy (CIP)-based at 120 Maryland Avenue, NE, Washington, D. C. 20002 [202/ 544-4666] is one of the projects spun-off from the Institute for Policy Studies in the mid-1970s and operating under the tax-exempt aegis of the Fund for Peace (FFP). . .At present, one-half of CIP's 1982 $220,000 budget is derived from a $100,000 grant from the Reynolds Foundation and targeted to its Indochina Project, a successor to the former Indochina Resource Center which dissolved at the time Vietnamese spy David Truong was arrested. The project is completing a study of "yellow rain"-Soviet nerve gas supplied to Vietnamese forces and used in Cambodia. But CIP's goal, according to the Zill report, is "to heal the wounds of war and to develop greater understanding between the U.S. and Southeast Asia; to promote an end to the economic embargo; and to work toward diplomatic recognition." CIP argues that a lack of U.S. recognition and aid to Vietnam, Laos and Vietnam-occupied Cambodia is "pushing these countries into the arms of the Soviet Union."

From Robert O. Muller, "U.S. Blocks Solution to Vietnam Refugee Crisis", New York Times, Oct 23, 1991. pg. A.22:

ROBERT O. MULLER Washington, Oct. 11, 1991 The writer is executive director of the Indochina Project, a Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation program.

From Barbara Crossette, "Veterans To Help Mine-Field Victims", The New York Times, Apr 19, 1992. pg. A.22

While the United States Government considers how much it can afford to contribute to the rebuilding of Cambodia, a Vietnam veterans' organization is already moving into the devastated country with a people-to-people aid project that is designed to restore mobility and productivity to some of the most tragic victims of war, the amputees.

The organization, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, hopes to raise the money by selling T-shirts and greeting cards decorated with reproductions of paintings and graphics by Indochinese artists whose work has not been seen in the United States. The foundation calls the effort the Indochina Project. SNIP

"There just isn't a whole lot of concern for Indochina out there," said Robert O. Muller, executive director of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. After several visits to the Cambodian capital, Mr. Muller decided that helping people handicapped by war might be something disabled American veterans could do best. He himself must use a wheelchair after being wounded in Vietnam in 1969.

Last year the foundation, created 12 years ago as a money-raising organization for the Vietnam Veterans of America, took over a struggling Cambodian rehabilitation clinic at Kien Khleang. Mr. Muller brought in three specialists from India who could teach Cambodians to make an aluminum and rubber prosthesis that costs only $35 to $50.

In Washington, the group brought in Dan Walsh, whose Liberation Graphics company, based in Alexandria, Va., has generated United States markets for Nicaraguan and Palestinian art and political posters from the former Soviet Union.

In February, the veterans' group received a license from the Treasury Department to import paintings and graphics from Vietnam although the United States maintains a near-total embargo on Vietnamese products. SNIP

The veterans' foundation will sell the T-shirts for $16 and the cards for $12 a dozen by mail order or through galleries. A brochure can be obtained from the Indochina Project, 2001 S Street N.W., Suite 470, Washington D.C. 20009.

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