Eye of the Storm


J. Charles
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J. Charles
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2002-02-05T13:23:00Z
2002-02-05T13:23:00Z
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The article edited in
the TIME Magazine shows again how powerful Jewish controlled Media can be.

The accusation against Malaysia is nothing else then a ‘revanche’
against the honorable Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Dr. Mahathir
often used the International Media to counter attack fact like the Money
Speculation against the Far East Nations, the interference against the Politic
in Malaysia from foreign Countries.

I trust the World must see the TIME report with and under different
‘eyes’. If some of this, now in the whole World presented and existing Islam
Terrorist, members of al-Qaeda and others have been seen in Malaysia, so they
have also been in Germany, in France, in London and maybe are even in the
Editorial Office of the TIME. 

The now self appointed World Police against Islam
Fanatics should in fact more think how it could be possible that this Terrorist
exist, are present around the World and this with Secret Services, Embassy,
DEA, FBI, Mossad, BKA present around the world with a unlimited Budget.

Also, why the US waited until the first attack has been completed to
start a ‘World-wide-Hunting’ against Terrorist placed and known Worldwide and –
the must strange point is, ‘How the US knows that this Terrorist are here and
there and everywhere’?

If the USA were for an equal Globalization, so it would be more then
normal and proper that the USA had informed by ‘Official or unofficial
Channels’ his Globalization Partners.

Why there are two way of Globalization?

I think, that the USA is running his way of Globalization and some
Nation with the same Interest follows ‘willingly’ or because they have no
choice. Bush placed Korea, the Iran and few other Nation on ‘his list’. How
long it will take if the TIME reports stupid like the present articles, that
Bush under pressure of Israel will place on the same list Malaysia and
Indonesia?

Everyone who knows Malaysia more then only his Office in KL, should
know that Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is in fact a Muslim but
oppose any Fanatic Islamic Laws which some of the Imams would like to see
placed into Law. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has done more for
his citizen since he is Prime Minister then any other in Asia. He also helped
without restriction or limitation the children in Ex-Yugoslavia by giving them
a home at a time when all EU Countries has been looking from far what will
happen there.

Media like the TIME should report fairly and correct and not use
BUSH-ISRAEL Politic by placing Malaysia on the HOT LIST.

TIME EDITION

Eye of the Storm

Disturbing revelations
throw a spotlight on Malaysia as the region’s key meeting place for
al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and an exporter of jihad

Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S.,
speculation has been rampant about the extent of al-Qaeda’s ambitions in
Southeast Asia. Some analysts fingered sprawling, chaotic Indonesia as the
possible nexus of an Asian network, pointing to its thousands of radical
Muslims fighting bloody private wars against their Christian neighbors. Others
suggested the Philippines, whose lawless, predominantly Muslim south harbored
well-armed Islamic militias that have been waging war against the central
government for decades. Very few suspected peaceful, relatively prosperous
Malaysia, where Muslims make up two-thirds of the population but seemed to have
bought into the consumerist, essentially pro-Western views espoused by their
leaders.

But after months of investigation and hundreds of
hours interrogating detained terrorist suspects, even government officials in
Kuala Lumpur can no longer deny that Malaysia was the financial and planning
center for the region’s main al-Qaeda-linked terrorist network, the place Osama
bin Laden’s proselytizers chose to recruit a core of loyal followers, launch
new groups into neighboring countries, and coordinate with Southeast Asia’s
existing Islamic radicals. Increasingly, it seems clear Malaysia was one of a
number of hubs used in the worldwide preparations for the carnage of Sept. 11
in the U.S.

If that isn’t shocking enough, consider this: the
networks are still thriving. Underworld figures involved in Southeast Asia’s
flourishing illicit trade in arms assert—and senior Malaysian government
officials acknowledge—that representatives from the region’s most notorious and
violent radical Islamic groups still regularly gather in Malaysia to meet with
their al-Qaeda backers.  Listen to Mat,
a pony-tailed Indonesian who has been trading illegal arms for 20 years. “How
stupid can you be? Of course al-Qaeda is still here in Malaysia,” he snorts.
“This is their favorite place to have meetings with the other radical Islamic
groups in the region.”

Mat says the crackdown by police since the Sept. 11
attacks has yet to interfere seriously with his business, either with ordinary
criminal groups or with regular customers from a laundry list of Asian Islamic
militant organizations that he says are funded in part by al-Qaeda: the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf from the Philippines, the Laskar
Jihad and Free Aceh Movement from Indonesia and Malaysia’s own Kumpulan
Mujahideen Malaysia (KMM).

To learn that terrorist groups continue to hold such
meetings with apparent impunity is especially alarming in light of new details
interrogators have gleaned from the roughly 50 terrorist suspects being held in
Malaysian jails. For the first time, police have a detailed picture of how
al-Qaeda stepped in and—mostly through the liberal use of cash and the services
of two Indonesian clerics who acted as proxies—managed to transform a radical
Muslim group preoccupied with domestic concerns into a band of foot soldiers in
Osama bin Laden’s crusade against the U.S.

Malaysia is, in the words of one U.S. official, “a
perfect place for terrorist R. and R.,” where Islamic radicals from around the
region and their al-Qaeda backers can meet. The most notorious gathering of
al-Qaeda operatives took place in January 2000 and involved two hijackers who
died in the suicide attack on the Pentagon, the roommate of a third hijacker
and at least one of the suspects in the U.S.S. Cole bombing. Zacarias
Moussaoui, the Algerian-born French citizen now in custody in Virginia—the
so-called 20th hijacker—also made several visits to Malaysia. Last
week Washington labeled the country a staging area for the U.S.  attacks, a charge that has put the Malaysian
government on the defensive. “Malaysia is definitely not a primary launchpad
for terrorists’ activities,” says a government official. “But it appears that
Malaysia was used as a convenient meeting and transit point by some of these
people from the radical groups.”

Eye of the Storm

Despite the semantic disagreement, there’s little
doubt that Malaysia is cooperating with the U.S. in seeking to apprehend
militants. Although Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is known to rail
against U.S. policy in the Middle East and its conduct of the war in
Afghanistan, he has long warned of the threat of radical Islam. Malaysian
police made their first arrests—of 12 KMM members—in early August 2001, well
before last year’s attacks, at the time raising a chorus of complaints from
human rights advocates who said the arrests were politically motivated to stamp
out opposition.

That tough antiterrorist line has continued. Since
September, as part of the global crackdown on extremist Islamic groups,
Malaysian police have arrested some 50 alleged members of the KMM, which they
say sought the violent overthrow of the government for the purposes of
installing a fundamentalist Islamic administration. Despite the arrests, as the
Malaysian official notes, even with new, stringent surveillance of visitors and
tightened-up immigration checks, it’s nearly impossible to track what he
estimates are “several hundred” al-Qaeda-linked businessmen, bankers, traders
and tourists—many of them Arab—who pass through or live in the country.

“Let’s draw parallels with, say, the Tamils and
LTTE,” another official explains, referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, who have been waging a bloody campaign for two decades for an
independent state in Sri Lanka. “If Tamils set up businesses in Sri Lanka and
then support the Tamil Tigers, what can the Sri Lankan government do? It can
only monitor these businessmen but cannot arrest them without concrete proof.
It’s the same here.  Al-Qaeda
representatives are sent to ensure the radical groups in the region have the
necessary funding to buy arms and don’t have to worry about other logistics.
You must always remember that Osama’s main aim is to see powerful radical
groups emerging.”

Police in Malaysia say they now have a clear picture
of how al-Qaeda managed to reprogram just such a radical group. The Malaysian
authorities had been tracking the KMM for months before they moved to arrest
the 12 alleged ringleaders under suspicion of a rash of crimes, including a
bank robbery that left several members dead, a political assassination and
bombings of temples and churches.

The KMM, which official sources allege was founded
and led by the son of opposition leader Nik Aziz, had established branches in
all nine states in peninsular Malaysia. KMM members were told that the group
was conducting militia-style training to protect Nik Aziz’s fundamentalist
Islamic Party of Malaysia in the event of a government crackdown. But top KMM
leaders were actively planning the violent overthrow of the country’s
government in favor of an Islamic regime, police say.

In the mid-‘90s, that domestic focus changed with
the appearance in Malaysia of two Indonesian ulema, or Islamic teachers. The
two men, Abubakar Ba’asyir and Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali,
preached a radical new vision of Islam, heavily influenced by the worldview of
Osama bin Laden, a man Hambali claimed to have met personally on two occasions.
The militant clerics found a receptive audience among many KMM members,
government officials say, focusing their attention on a KMM branch in the state
of Selangor, outside the capital Kuala Lumpur.

With Abubakar acting as the spiritual leader and
controller of the purse strings and Hambali responsible for most of the
planning and day-to-day administration, the two men wooed KMM members in
Selangor and elsewhere into a new organization they established in the late
1990s, called the Jemaah Islamiah. 
Abubakar hammered home the themes he still preaches at his school in central
Java today: the glory of a martyr’s death and the overriding goal of setting up
a Muslim government. Officials say he espoused the formation of a new Islamic
state encompassing Malaysia, Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Singapore and
Brunei. To fund such an ambitious vision, he was in contact with al-Qaeda
paymasters and responsible for funneling money through branches of some Middle
Eastern banks in Malaysia to his own newly founded cells of Jemaah Islamiah,
which gradually stretched through peninsular Malaysia to Singapore, as well as
to other Islamic groups in the region.

If Abubakar was the founding father and spiritual
leader, Hambali was his chief executive officer. A 36-year-old veteran of the
Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union, Hambali was the practical man who
made the plans and gave the orders. Officials say he was responsible for
organizing paramilitary training stints for Jemaah Islamiah members in
Afghanistan and Pakistan.

These sources also say he was the mastermind behind
a series of bombing missions around the region. In one example, Hambali sent a
known associate; Malaysian Taufik Abdul Halim to Jakarta, where he was arrested
on Aug. 1, 2001, after a bomb he was carrying exploded and blew off one of his
legs. Last fall in Malaysia itself, Hambali instructed Yazid Sufaat, a former
Malaysian army captain now under detention in Kuala Lumpur, to place an order
for four tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be used as a
bombmaking ingredient. The current whereabouts of the chemical remains a
mystery.

The role of bombmaker was a surprising one for
Yazid, who officials say was a minor figure in the Selangor branch of the KMM,
a “runner” as one puts it. But Yazid flourished in the Jemaah Islamiah, rising
to become Hambali’s most trusted lieutenant. Hambali ordered Yazid to host the
two hijackers who died in the Pentagon attack at his condo in Kuala Lumpur.
Yazid has told his interrogators that he had no knowledge of the Sept. 11
attacks but, one official says, he suspected the men who stayed at his
apartment had some role in the attacks because “they had asked if there were
flying schools in Malaysia. Yazid recommended one in [BRACKET {Melaka}] but
they said it would not be suitable for them.”

Yazid has admitted to giving suspected hijacker
Moussaoui a cover letter from a Malaysian company introducing him as its
U.S.  Marketing consultant. The letter,
U.S. sources say, contained a guarantee that Moussaoui would be paid $35,000
for his services.  Malaysian officials
deny reports, however, that Yazid confessed to actually giving money to
Moussaoui during his visits to Malaysia. 
“Yazid has told us no money changed hands,” one official says.

Despite the growing list of allegations against
Abubakar and Hambali, Indonesian officials have been circumspect in dealing
with Abubakar, who recently moved back to Indonesia after 15 years. (Hambali,
who is wanted by police in Indonesia and Malaysia, has disappeared). Recently
questioned by police, Abubakar was released after two days and continues to
teach at his religious school in the town of Solo. In an interview with Time,
the soft-spoken 63-year-old vigorously denies any connection with a terrorist
network. “I am not advocating the overthrow of any government,” Abubakar says.
“What I want to see is a government committed to Islam.” He blames Mahathir,
the U.S. and a worldwide Jewish conspiracy for his problems (see
interview).  “This is just a political
game,” he says of the charges. “Jemaah Islamiah is an invention by Mahathir to
instill fear [BRACKET {into}] the Muslim community.”

But the Jemaah Islamiah’s reach extends far beyond
just Malaysia. In December, Singaporean police arrested 13 alleged members of
the Jemaah Islamiah and uncovered detailed plans to bomb U.S. targets in the city-state.
In addition to the scheme involving the missing tons of ammonium nitrate that
were destined for Singapore, police there have unearthed another Jemaah
Islamiah plot to order a further nine tons of the chemical.  (For comparison, the devastating Oklahoma
City bombing required only one ton of ammonium nitrate.) More arrests might be
in store. Malaysian officials say that despite the 50 previously detained
suspects, several hundred more are still at large. And in Singapore, Prime
Minister Goh Chok Tong recently warned residents that despite the arrests there
could well still be terrorists in their midst. “I do not want to alarm you,” he
said, “but it is prudent for us to work on the assumption that a bomb may go
off somewhere in Singapore someday.”

There is plenty of evidence that al-Qaeda
operatives, or their proxies, are still active in the region. According to
sources at all levels of the clandestine arms trade in Southeast Asia,
meetings—sometimes several a month—between representatives of militant Islamic
groups and their al-Qaeda financiers continue to take place in Malaysia: in
cheap hotels and guest houses outside Kuala Lumpur, in the beach resort of Port
Dickson and in the cities of Melaka and Johore Baru across the strait from
Singapore.  “These groups use the
Internet to set up the venue and date for their meetings,” says Mat, the arms
trader. “The messages are sent in encrypted codes. For example, MILF might want
3,000 M-16s and the al-Qaeda member will agree to pay for the weapons.”

Just how effectively this system operates is made
clear by a spokesman for the fundamentalist Free Aceh Movement, better known by
its Indonesian acronym gam. Agreeing to talk only by telephone and refusing to
give even a nickname, the 10-year veteran of the murderous struggle—his wife
and three children have all been killed in the fighting—says that he regularly
places orders with arms syndicates for hundreds of weapons: M-16 and AK-47
automatic rifles, handguns and ammunition. Tracing a well-worn route, the weapons
are bought in Thailand, sent down to Malaysia and then carried on boats through
the Strait of Malacca.

But, he adds, he has nothing to do with the
financing of the deals.  He doesn’t have
any idea how much the weapons cost. Payment is taken care of by sympathizers,
such as al-Qaeda. “My job is only to place orders with the arms brokers,” he
says. “When the weapons arrive, I will be notified.”

That notification comes from middlemen like Mat, who
are present at the initial meetings, then take over the ordering and delivery,
working through the several criminal syndicates that control the region’s flow
of illegal arms. Due to the sensitivities and dangers involved, only one
syndicate actually buys arms for the radical groups. Because the profits for
the transactions are so high, official sources say, and al-Qaeda is still
apparently able to command significant funds, non-Muslim criminals—some of them
outwardly respectable businessmen—are a key part of the process.  “The syndicate is based in Malaysia,” says
Mat, “and is made up largely of Overseas Chinese and some Malaysian Chinese.”
The middlemen and their sponsors represent the murky underworld where Islamic
ideology becomes entwined with the straightforward criminal activity of
gunrunning. The size and complexities of that network illustrate the
difficulties of an effective government crackdown.

Malaysian officials say the security problem is
compounded by the country’s successful push in recent years to boost the
numbers of visitors from the Middle East, attracted in part by Malaysia’s
policy of visa-free entry for citizens of most Islamic countries. “How do we
stop these Arabs?” asks one official. “Even if we suspect them we can’t just
arrest people.”

While the scope and reach of Malaysia’s terror network
is alarming, what is more surprising is that fundamentalist and separatist
movements throughout Southeast Asia have been funded and armed by al-Qaeda
operatives, sometimes without the guerrillas themselves knowing the identity of
their backers.  Equally troubling is the
fact that the al-Qaeda terror network is linked with not only extremist Islamic
groups but a host of criminal syndicates. Kuala Lumpur and the other
governments can no longer blame foreigners, especially Arabs, for their
domestic terrorist problems. The money might come from abroad, but the
extremism and criminal support networks are largely homegrown.  How Malaysia and the other countries counter
this threat will become increasingly the concern not just of the U.S. and other
potential targets of terrorism, but of other Asian populations and governments
that will face persistent unrest until the War on Terror is finally won.

By: J. Charles

Email:  cee@post.com

All Rights Reserved 2002 IAC Society

Released: February 5,2002