Defense in Treason Case Seeks Info on Al-Awlaki

Lawyers for a Muslim scholar convicted in 2005 of soliciting treason on Friday pressed a judge to order prosecutors to disclose information they believe could show that American-born al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki was once a government informant.

Ali Al-Timimi of Fairfax was the spiritual leader for a group of northern Virginia Muslims who played paintball to train for holy war. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for exhorting some of them to join the Taliban and fight against the U.S. after the Sept. 11 attacks. Several of them got as far as Pakistan, training with a militant group called Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Al-Timimi's lawyers said Friday at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria that they are suspicious about a 2002 visit al-Awlaki paid to al-Timimi. The defense now suspects al-Awlaki, who has since been killed, went there as an informant to get incriminating information on al-Timimi. If so, they say al-Awlaki's role as an informant should have been disclosed at trial.

At the meeting, al-Awlaki purportedly tried to get al-Timimi's help in recruiting men for jihad, but al-Timimi rejected him. Al-Timimi's lawyer, Jonathan Turley, said government documentation of the meeting would refute the case made at trial by prosecutors that al-Timimi was urging Muslims to fight. They also say it would show that al-Timimi had been in the government's crosshairs back in 2002, which would have contradicted other testimony that the government did not begin investigating al-Timimi until 2003.

The suspicions about al-Awlaki stem from newly discovered information that FBI agents involved in Al-Timimi's case may have facilitated al-Awlaki's return to the United States in 2002. Al-Awlaki had been imam of a northern Virginia mosque at the time of the 2001 attacks but left the U.S. shortly thereafter.

He had contact with some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and in years after the 2001 attacks emerged as a top al-Qaida leader before being killed in a drone strike in 2011. There has been debate as to whether al-Awlaki hid long-held al-Qaida sympathies in his time in the U.S. or radicalized after leaving the years after Sept. 11.

Also released earlier this year were FBI documents showing that agents observed al-Awlaki in 2001 and 2002 hiring prostitutes, but never brought charges against him.

Prosecutors say they've turned over everything required of them. In court papers and at Friday's hearing, they gave no information on whether al-Awlaki may have been an informant. Instead, they say they are only obligated to turn over information that would assist the defense, and said the law gives prosecutors the discretion to make that determination.

The law "does not entitle any defendant to the disclosure of the extent and nature of the government's investigative tools or tactics simply because he suspects that materials are in the government's possession that might prove interesting to him," prosecutor Gordon Kromberg wrote.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said she will issue a written ruling later on the motion, but expressed doubt about the defense requests. She said she was persuaded in part because of secret evidence the government submitted in the case, which even Turley, who holds a security clearance, has not been allowed to see.

Al-Timimi attended Friday's hearing but did not speak, wearing a jail jumpsuit and sporting long hair and a beard significantly grayer than at his 2005 trial.

Youths burn church, riot in Kenya's Mombasa after imam killed

By Joseph Akwiri

MOMBASA, Kenya

(Reuters) - Young Muslims set fire to a church, burned tires and clashed with police in Kenya's main port city of Mombasa on Friday, leaving at least four people dead after the killing of an Islamic cleric which his followers blamed on security forces.

The shooting of Sheikh Ibrahim Omar ignited religious tensions in the commercial and tourism hub, two weeks after Islamist militants killed at least 67 people in a raid on a Nairobi shopping mall.

 

 

The imam and three other men were found dead in a car on Mombasa's outskirts on Thursday night, police said. Television images showed the vehicle sprayed with bullet holes.

Police dismissed allegations by Omar's associates and people who attended his mosque that the shooting was part of a crackdown on Muslims after the mall attack or any wider campaign.

Riot police fired gunshots and teargas to break up the rioters who had set alight a Salvation Army church and blocked a main road, a Reuters witness said.

The Kenyan Red Cross said four people had died, all with gunshot wounds.
The worst of the running battles with police took place in Mombasa's downtrodden Saba Saba neighborhood, where traders shuttered their shops and residents fled for safety. An uneasy calm fell over Mombasa three hours after the clashes began.

ACCUSATIONS
Omar was killed on the main road to the resort town of Malindi, a few hundred meters (yards) from where another firebrand cleric, Aboud Rogo, was shot dead in his vehicle in August 2012 in a strikingly similar attack.

Al-Amin Kimathi, head of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, said the police were exploiting public anger over Westgate as a cover to extend what he believed was a campaign of killings.

"It is a continuation of what has been happening," said Kimathi.
Police spokeswoman Zipporah Mboroki said there was "no truth" to the accusations of a wider campaign.
Mombasa county police chief Robert Kitur dismissed accusations of police involvement In Omar's killing. "The police have nothing to do with the shooting. That's not how we operate," he told reporters.

The United States and Kenya had accused Rogo of recruiting and fund-raising for Somalia's al-Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants - the group that claimed responsibility for last month's mall raid.

Moderate Muslim leaders in Kenya said Omar had studied under Rogo and was nicknamed 'Rogo junior' after he publicly espoused the same hardline ideology of his former mentor.

Both imams were popular among youths in Mombasa and along Kenya's Indian Ocean coastline where many Muslims feel marginalized by the predominantly Christian government.
Rogo's death last year unleashed deadly riots in Mombasa.

The assault on the Westgate mall was the worst militant strike on Kenyan soil since al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. The raid shocked Kenyans and the world and has raised questions over intelligence failures.

"They (authorities) have panicked because of their own laxity which killed Kenyans at Westgate. Now they are trying to save face by sacrificing innocent Muslims ... We are not going to take this lightly," said Hatib Suleiman, 21, who prays at Omar's Masjid Mussa mosque.

Tunisia’s Government Falls, Arab Democracy Is Born

If you blinked, you missed it, but the democratically elected Islamist government of an Arab country just promised to resign peacefully, with no threat of a coup d’etat in sight.

Tunisia is still a long way from political stability. Yet once again, the nation that started the Arab Spring is showing the rest of the region how it’s supposed to be done. Reasonable people facing deep disagreements are negotiating and power-sharing their way to the Holy Grail of legitimate constitutional democracy.

Start with the deal. Ennahda, the Islamic democratic party that formed a government after Tunisia’s free elections in 2011, didn’t agree to step down for nothing. In exchange for agreeing to resign in favor of a caretaker government of nonpartisan technocrats, Ennahda got the opposition to agree to ratify a draft constitution that has been painstakingly drafted and debated over the last year and a half.

Under the rules of the road, adopted after the old regime fell in January 2011, the constituent assembly can approve the constitution if two-thirds of its members vote in favor. That structure put a premium on consensus, the political value most valued by Tunisian political culture. It also put Ennahda in a tough position during the drafting process: Its slight coalition majority in the assembly gave it almost no leverage, because it needed lots of opposition votes to get to two-thirds. The only alternative was to go to the public, which might have approved the constitution by a bare majority. But that would have violated the goal of consensus, and Ennahda consistently refused to treat it as an option.

Egypt’s Errors

A culture of consensus is usually a curse for an elected majority -- but in Tunisia, it’s turned into a blessing. Instead of distrusting the opposition and trying to ram through its proposals, the way the Muslim Brotherhood tried to in Egypt, the Tunisian Islamic democrats have compromised from the start. Former Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, convinced (correctly, to be sure) that the Deep State wanted him out, failed utterly to include independent secularists in his government. He became so focused on the fact that a majority of the public had elected him that he forgot that it hadn’t taken a majority to bring down his predecessor, the dictator Hosni Mubarak -- just the potent combination of millions in the streets and a restive Army. Attempting to govern without broad-based support, he found himself hamstrung, thwarted and, eventually, alone.

In Tunisia, the government has been very attuned to the precariousness of its mandate. When secularists opposed putting Shariah into the constitution, Ennahda fumed -- then agreed. When a prominent secularist politician was assassinated in February 2012, Ennahda sought to distance itself from the radicals who carried it out -- but its own prime minister resigned in a show of contrition for failing to prevent it.

More recently, after the assassination of a second secularist leader in July, the Islamic democrats faced their deepest challenge yet. Secular opponents were buoyed by outrage at the killing and widespread frustration with an economy that still hasn’t turned around. Sensing that the tide was turning, the opposition essentially decided to block the constitution.

In crisis, Ennahda made an extraordinary decision: It would put the secular constitution it had helped draft ahead of its party interests. A starker contrast to Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood could hardly be imagined. Where Morsi forced a hastily drafted, highly religious constitution through a badly fractured assembly, only to see himself ousted, Ennahda put principle first. Offering to resign not only staked the moral high ground, but also foreclosed any threat of removal by force. There’s no point in plotting a coup against a government willing to step down of its own accord.

Electoral Test

The obvious gamble Ennahda is taking might be imaginable in other regions: The government is effectively calling for new elections in a few months and hoping that the public respects its success in getting a constitution through and its modesty in putting itself up to the electoral test. But this is the Arab world we’re talking about. When was the last time power was transferred peacefully in a sovereign Arab state through free and fair elections? That would be, uh … oh yeah: never.

Ennahda is staking everything on the hope that Tunisia is going to become the first Arab democracy worthy of the label. Will the gamble pay off? If it does, the reason will be precisely the Tunisian norm of consensus and Ennahda’s realization that it must respect it.

In new democracies, it can be hard to avoid the temptation to mistake an electoral majority for the capacity to rule. But majorities don’t make democracy work. Alternating governments do. The secret sauce of democracy is no secret at all. The opposition must believe that it will someday have a chance to govern, and the majority must have the same expectation. Then, with luck, self-interest will prevail, and the majority of the moment will treat the opposition with respect in the hope and expectation of receiving the same treatment when it goes out of power.

By compromising on a constitutional draft and offering to resign, Tunisia’s moderate Islamists have done their part. What remains now is for the secularists to do the same, and not to repress Ennahda when they eventually get the chance. Fingers crossed.