TERRORIST TRAINING SCHOOL = MADRASSA

This is something Mr. Bush the bloated self righteous idiot completely

ignores while wasting our money in Iraq. The world is a safer place

now Mr Republican? come again?

Pakistan : Manufacturing terrorists in Madrassas

Surveying only those madrassahs that provide boarding facility and

house more than 30 students, the pak interior ministry found 11,805

madrassahs, of which 5,672 were not registered pursuant to the law,

and in which it appears that over 1,200,000 jihadis were being

brainwashed.

(What the article does not say: how many this "survey" could have

missed in tribal areas; number of jihadis in non-residential

madrassahs or madrassahs housing less than 30; and that the Saudis

send billions of dollars per year for these assembly lines to

manufacture terrorists)

A madrassa is an Islamic religious school. Many of the Taliban were

educated in Saudi-financed madrassas in Pakistan that teach Wahhabism,

a particularly austere and rigid form of Islam which is rooted in

Saudi Arabia. Around the world, Saudi wealth and charities contributed

to an explosive growth of madrassas during the Afghan jihad against

the Soviets. During that war (1979-1989), a new kind of madrassa

emerged in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region -- not so much concerned

about scholarship as making war on infidels. The enemy then was the

Soviet Union, today it's America. Here are analyses of the madrassas

from interviews with Vali Nasr, an authority on Islamic

fundamentalism, and Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the

U.N.

Glimpses inside the minds of the brainwashed

Tooba Khan, 20, from Abbottabad, said that she along with her 3

sisters came to Jamia Hafsa to study religion. "The government has

injured the sanctity of women by staging armed action against us," she

said, adding that she and her sisters were forced by the parents to

leave the Jamia.

To a question, Tooba's sister, Sana Khan, claimed that the government

had showed the real extremism and that if she got a chance in her

life, she would return to the Madrassa and would keep following its

teachings for the rest of her life.

Nuzhat Talib, 18, a Kashmiri girl, was of the view that leaving the

Madrassa on the order of her parents was the biggest mistake of her

life. "I have rebelled against Islam, I am rebellious and I can't

forgive myself for the rest of my life," Nuzhat cried with tears

rolling down her cheeks.

Amina, 13, also a Kashmiri girl, said that she was in Jamia Hafsa to

study religion and not for Jihad. However, she continued, "I would

keep fighting against obscenity and illegal activities to the best of

my capacity." The mother of a student, who came from Rawalpindi to

take her daughter Maryam back, condemned the defiant Ghazi brothers

for endangering the lives of innocent students.

When asked about her coming so late to take her daughter back, she

kept silence. However, her daughter, Maryam, said that it was she who

had stopped her parents from taking her back. "It was my decision to

stay in the Madrassa," she said.

To a question about the availability of food and drinking water inside

the Madrassas, Maryam said the students were not informed about the

availability of food or water. Same was her response when she was

asked about the quantity of ammunition inside the Lal Masjid and Jamia

Hafsa and also as if there were some suicide bombers ready to attack.

It was also surprising that none out of 100 girls, who surrendered

voluntarily, accepted the amount, Rs 5000, offered by President

Musharraf for those who surrendered voluntarily.

Most of them described it as Haram (prohibited) and said that how

could they accept 'aid from a killer'.

Maulana Aziz's daughter and two of the children of his brother, deputy

mosque leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi, were also arrested, officials said.

Ghazi remained inside the mosque along with as few as 200 students and

60 children, officials said. Religious leaders were negotiating with

him by telephone to give himself up and end the siege.

History of the Mosque..

The controversial Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) that is the focus of a

bloody confrontation between Pakistani security forces and radical

clerics and students is located near the centre of the capital,

Islamabad. A religious school for women, the Jamia Hafsa madrassa, is

attached to the mosque. A male madrassa is a few minutes drive

away.Pakistan's longest-ruling dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, was said

to be very close to the former head of the Lal Masjid, Maulana

Abdullah, who was famous for his speeches on jihad (holy war). This

was during the 1980s when the mujahideen's fight against Soviet

invasion of Afghanistan was at its peak, and jihad was seen as an

acceptable clarion call in the Muslim world. In speeches after Gen

Musharraf openly announced his support for the war on terror", the

mosque has been the centre of calls for his assassination.

One of these speeches was delivered by Maulana Masood Azhar, whose

Jaish-e-Mohammad fundamentalist group members were later involved in

several failed attempts on the life of the president. Gen Musharraf is

thus understandably perturbed by the mosque and its leaders and has

repeatedly ordered action against them.

So far all attempts to rein the mosque and its leaders in have been

unsuccessful. The Lal Masjid and its madrassa also have strong links

to the tribal areas of Pakistan, which provide many of their students.

In a recent interview, Abdul Rashid Ghazi said that they had the

support of the Waziristan Taleban and any actions against the madrassa

would have an "appropriate response". The Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa

were in the news in July 2005 when Pakistani security forces tried to

raid the mosque following the suicide bombings that month in London.

Authorities said the security forces were investigating a link between

the seminary and Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7 July bombers.

The recent pronouncements of the burqa clad Jihadi aunt..

Formally announcing the establishment of a parallel judicial system,

the pro-Taliban Lal Masjid administration on Friday vowed to enforce

Islamic laws in the federal capital and threatened to unleash a wave

of suicide bombers if the government took any action to counter it.

"Our youth will commit suicide attacks, if the government impedes the

enforcement of the Sharia and attacks Lal Masjid and its sister

seminaries," Maulana Abdul Aziz, the in-charge of the mosque said in

his Friday sermon.

The fresh suicide bombing threat is stated to be the strongest given

so far by the hard-line clerics of the Lal Masjid, intensifying fear

among Islamabad residents.

President Gen Pervez Musharraf had recently stated that he knew that

the Lal Masjid's management wilfully harboured suicide bombers. He

said that the suicide bomber who had attacked Islamabad's Marriott

Hotel in January 2007, had been seen near the mosque the same day.

Maulana Abdul Aziz announced the setting up of a Qazi court in his

sermon that also marked the opening of a three-day 'Nifaz Sharia-o-

Azmat Jihad Conference'. A large number of supporters had reached the

mosque.

The government did nothing to stop the groups of people coming from

different cities and nearby areas throughout the day to participate in

the conference.

U.S. Figures Show Sharp Global Rise In Terrorism

State Dept. Will Not Put Data in Report

By Susan B. Glasser

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, April 27, 2005; Page A01

The number of serious international terrorist incidents more than

tripled last year, according to U.S. government figures, a sharp

upswing in deadly attacks that the State Department has decided not to

make public in its annual report on terrorism due to Congress this

week.

Overall, the number of what the U.S. government considers

"significant" attacks grew to about 655 last year, up from the record

of around 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides who were

briefed on statistics covering incidents including the bloody school

seizure in Russia and violence related to the disputed Indian

territory of Kashmir.

Terrorist incidents in Iraq also dramatically increased, from 22

attacks to 198, or nine times the previous year's total -- a sensitive

subset of the tally, given the Bush administration's assertion that

the situation there had stabilized significantly after the U.S.

handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government last

summer.

The State Department announced last week that it was breaking with

tradition in withholding the statistics on terrorist attacks from its

congressionally mandated annual report. Critics said the move was

designed to shield the government from questions about the success of

its effort to combat terrorism by eliminating what amounted to the

only year-to-year benchmark of progress.

Although the State Department said the data would still be made public

by the new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which prepares the

information, officials at the center said no decision to publish the

statistics has been made.

The controversy comes a year after the State Department retracted its

annual terrorism report and admitted that its initial version vastly

understated the number of incidents. That became an election-year

issue, as Democrats said the Bush administration tried to inflate its

success in curbing global terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Last year was bad. This year is worse. They are deliberately trying

to withhold data because it shows that as far as the war on terrorism

internationally, we're losing," said Larry C. Johnson, a former senior

State Department counterterrorism official, who first revealed the

decision not to publish the data.

After a week of complaints from Congress, top aides from the State

Department and the NCTC were dispatched to the Hill on Monday for a

private briefing. There they acknowledged for the first time the

increase in terrorist incidents, calling it a "dramatic uptick,"

according to participants and a letter to Secretary of State

Condoleezza Rice from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

The administration aides sought to explain the rise in attacks as the

result of more inclusive methodology in counting incidents, which they

argued made year-to-year comparisons "increasingly problematic,"

sources said.

In his letter urging Rice to release the data, Waxman said that "the

large increases in terrorist attacks reported in 2004 may undermine

administration claims of success in the war on terror, but political

inconvenience has never been a legitimate basis for withholding facts

from the American people."

Both Republican and Democratic aides at the meeting criticized what a

GOP attendee called the "absurd" explanation offered by the State

Department's acting counterterrorism chief, Karen Aguilar, that the

statistics are not relevant to the required report on trends in global

terrorism. "It's absurd to issue a report without statistics," said

the aide, who is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "This

is a self-inflicted wound by the State Department."

Aguilar, according to Hill aides, told them that Rice decided to

withhold the statistics on the recommendation of her counselor, Philip

D. Zelikow. He was executive director of the Sept. 11 commission that

investigated the terrorist attacks on the United States.

The terrorism statistics provided to the congressional aides were not

classified but were stamped "for official use only." Last week, State

Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said the government would

publish "all the facts," but at Monday's session Aguilar told the

staff members that even if the NCTC decided not to release the data,

the State Department would not reconsider and publicly do so itself.

A State Department spokesman said last night that he is confident the

data will be officially released. He said the government is committed

to "providing the public all the information it needs to have an

informed debate on this issue."

Under the standards used by the government, "significant" terrorist

attacks are defined as those that cause civilian casualties or

fatalities or substantial damage to property. Attacks on uniformed

military personnel such as the large number of U.S. troops stationed

in Iraq are not included.

The data provided to the congressional aides also showed terrorist

attacks doubling over the previous year in Afghanistan, to 27

significant incidents, and in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, where

attacks rose to about 45, from 19 the year before. Also occurring last

year were such deadly attacks as the seizure of a school in Beslan,

Russia, by Chechen militants that resulted in at least 330 dead, and

the Madrid train bombings that left nearly 200 dead.

The State Department did not disclose to the aides the overall number

of those killed in incidents last year. Johnson said his count shows

it was well over 1,000.