Category: US Politics

It’s been more than six years since a team of Navy SEALs brought justice to Osama bin Laden in a raid on his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan, and captured a priceless trove of intelligence at the same time. The CIA has begun releasing some of bin Laden’s papers, The Hill reports, but the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has already had an advance review of the material. Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio delve deeply into the new insights that will emerge from this release, with the most significant likely to be the revelation of a partnership between al-Qaeda and Iran that many said was impossible:

One never-before-seen 19-page document contains a senior jihadist’s assessment of the group’s relationship with Iran. The author explains that Iran offered some “Saudi brothers” in al Qaeda “everything they needed,” including “money, arms” and “training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in exchange for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.” Iranian intelligence facilitated the travel of some operatives with visas, while sheltering others. Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, an influential ideologue prior to 9/11, helped negotiate a safe haven for his jihadi comrades inside Iran. But the author of the file, who is clearly well-connected, indicates that al Qaeda’s men violated the terms of the agreement and Iran eventually cracked down on the Sunni jihadists’ network, detaining some personnel. Still, the author explains that al Qaeda is not at war with Iran and some of their “interests intersect,” especially when it comes to being an “enemy of America.”

I’m old enough to recall when those who suggested an Iran/IRGC link to al-Qaeda got nothing but laughter. “Radical Sunnis and radical Shi’ites hate each other!” we’d be reminded. “They want to wipe each other out!” Well, it turns out that they hate something more than each other — and that’s the United States. As many of us suspected.

The partnership was not without its ups and downs, of course:

Bin Laden’s files show the two sides have had heated disagreements. There has been hostility between the two. Al Qaeda even penned a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei demanding the release of family members held in Iranian custody. Other files show that al Qaeda kidnapped an Iranian diplomat to exchange for its men and women. Bin Laden himself considered plans to counter Iran’s influence throughout the Middle East, which he viewed as pernicious.

However, bin Laden urged caution when it came to threatening Iran. In a previously released letter, bin Laden described Iran as al Qaeda’s “main artery for funds, personnel, and communication.” And despite their differences, Iran continued to provide crucial support for al Qaeda’s operations.

In a series of designations and other official statements issued since July 2011, the US Treasury and State Departments have repeatedly targeted al Qaeda’s “core facilitation pipeline” inside Iran. Sources familiar with the intelligence used to justify those designations say they are based, in part, on the Abbottabad files. It is likely that still more revelations concerning al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran remain to be found in the cache made available today.

This raises even more questions about Barack Obama’s deal with Iran over its nuclear-weapons program, and especially the release of $150 billion in assets to Tehran. By the time of the deal, the US had this information for almost five years. Bin Laden himself had written to his associates about the partnership with Iran being crucial to their operations. And yet Obama and John Kerry never made the ending of their state sponsorship of terrorism an explicit part of the agreement. In fact, Kerry told CNBC at the time that the Obama administration expected that some of the released assets would go to terrorist organizations:

The end of sanctions frees about $100 billion in frozen Iranian funds, but Kerry said Tehran will only have access to roughly $55 billion because much of that money will go toward repaying loans and other long-term commitments. The rest will likely be used to address Iran’s ailing oil operations and other infrastructure that went without maintenance for years, he added.

While there is no evidence that Iran is funneling newly released funds to organizations that the United States considers terrorist groups, Kerry said he believes Iran will eventually continue to support such groups.

At the time, Obama and Kerry were blocking the release of these papers that would have shown that one recipient of Iranian assistance was al-Qaeda — with whom the US was in a declared state of military conflict. Not only did the deal fail to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program — it claims to have stalled it for ten years — but it gave Iran a massive cash infusion for them to fund anti-American operations, including the perpetrators of 9/11.

Joscelyn and Roggio point out a few other nuggets from today’s release. Despite rumors of being cut off in Pakistan, the papers show that bin Laden very much remained in charge of al-Qaeda until the SEALs showed up in Abbottabad. Even the supposedly independent subsidiaries like AQAP and al-Shabaab received direction and advice from bin Laden until the very end. The most notorious satellite, al-Qaeda in Iraq/ISIS, should get a significant review in coming days, especially since one audio biography recovered in the raid puts Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iran prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

They conclude:

Today’s release creates a unique opportunity for experts, researchers and journalists to garner a better understanding of al Qaeda.

We hope they will join us in the effort to learn more.

Keep checking back at FDD’s Long War Journal as the files emerge. In the meantime, have some fun with this:

Osama bin Laden had a file called "assss.jpg" on his computer http://pic.twitter.com/dB88WsOf5L

— Stefan Heck (@boring_as_heck) November 1, 2017

So much for putting politics aside in the immediate wake of an attack, eh? After police identified Uzbeki immigrant Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov as the truck terrorist responsible for at least eight deaths in New York City yesterday, a few media figures tried manipulating the story to score points for their own hobby horses, and got promptly blasted on social media for it. Don’t play politics with tragedy, people demanded. Let’s keep the focus where it belongs — on stopping radical Islamist terrorism.

What about when the president uses it to hammer his political opponents on … immigration reform?

The terrorist came into our country through what is called the "Diversity Visa Lottery Program," a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

We are fighting hard for Merit Based immigration, no more Democrat Lottery Systems. We must get MUCH tougher (and smarter). @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

Trump followed up by quoting a Fox and Friends segment on the topic:

"Senator Chuck Schumer helping to import Europes problems" said Col.Tony Shaffer. We will stop this craziness! @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

It’s true that Saipov gained entry to the US through the lottery process, as Jazz noted in his earlier post. However, Saipov got here in 2010, long before the refugee crisis began in Europe. Furthermore, those refugees aren’t coming from Uzbekistan, a country in central Asia (not Europe, although it’s in the Europe region for the DV lottery system), but mainly from Syria and North Africa, mainly Libya. Uzbekistan has been a major recruiting source for Islamist terror networks, but it has also been a key partner in US military operations in Afghanistan. It’s a complicated part of the world.

Furthermore, the lottery program still requires the normal visa application process. Trump suspended visa and refugee applications from eight countries earlier this year over concerns about reliable information from those countries, but Uzbekistan was not on those lists. On top of that, there has been no evidence made public that Saipov was radicalized in Uzbekistan, then waited seven years and then decided to conduct a truck attack and arm himself with two non-firearm pistols (reportedly a paint-ball gun and a BB gun). That’s not the MO of a sleeper agent with years to prepare, but more of a recently radicalized impulse attacker.

Besides, Schumer didn’t have anything to do with it. The lottery system in question was part of the Immigration Act of 1990 signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 — twenty years before Saipov entered the US. That was initially introduced in the Senate by Ted Kennedy, not Chuck Schumer, who wasn’t among the co-sponsors either — because he didn’t start serving in the Senate until 1999. (Schumer was in the House, but didn’t serve on the Judiciary Committee that produced the bill.) [see update] The Senate co-sponsors were Democrats Chris Dodd and Daniel Moynihan, and Republicans Alan Simpson and Alfonse D’Amato.   Schumer had agreed to get rid of it in the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill, which got torched by Trump and his supporters during the presidential campaign, Seung Min Kim notes, but of course Saipov had been in the US for a few years at that point anyway.

Getting rid of the Diversity Visa Lottery program is a good idea for other reasons, as is tightening visa requirements on the basis of merit. However, that has little to do with the terrorist attack in NYC yesterday. The DV program admits 50,000 people a year to the US, and has for 27 years, for a theoretical total of 1.35 million visas over that period of time. Saipov appears to be the only entrant on that program that has committed a terrorist act. The DV program doesn’t appear to be this problem, even if it’s arguably a silly program that should be eliminated.

The DV program is not the proximate cause of the Saipov attack. We need to wait for the facts of the case to be established to see what can be done to prevent these attacks in the future, within the Constitution and our rights as free citizens. Jumping to conclusions won’t solve anything, and will only undermine efforts to find effective responses.

When Democrats seize on shootings to argue that free citizens can’t be trusted with firearm ownership, we accuse them of manipulating tragedy for their political agendas. When they ignore the facts of those cases to call for gun control policies that would have done nothing to stop the attacks, we rightly accuse them of exploitation. We should not fall into the same trap ourselves, no matter which of our allies do it.

Update: The Right Scoop says that a Numbers USA brief shows that the DV program was “Schumer’s baby” in the House version of the bill. Even that brief, though, shows that the DV program had already been proposed, and that Schumer was proposing a wider version of it in the House via the Immigration subcommittee. The eventual bill split the difference between those proposals. Did Schumer have some impact on it? Yes, but it didn’t start with him, and others had a lot more to do with its eventual bipartisan passage. Plus as noted above, there’s zero evidence that the DV lottery has turned into a terrorist sieve.

Update: Twitter pal Zaggs notes that the Washington Post gives Schumer a little more credit:

Um, even WaPo is disagreeing with you there. https://t.co/U2Ue94faWa http://pic.twitter.com/G88IvYQyor

— Zaggs (@Zaggs) November 1, 2017

Schumer offered a different version of a DV lottery that had already been floated, as Numbers USA notes in its analysis. At the time, Schumer was a House backbencher, a member of the Immigration subcommittee but not a leader in the Democratic caucus, or even a committee chair. He rose to prominence in the 1995 House investigation of the Waco shootings, helping to defend Bill Clinton and his administration. Schumer may have pushed for a wider DV program and helped expand it from its original proposed limit of 25,000, but he didn’t author it or the bill, and lots of people had much more influence on its passage. And again, there’s nothing on the table to suggest that the DV program had any real impact on this attack or any future vulnerabilities that differs in any way from the regular visa programs.