Email from Turkey and mixed news on the terror front

Imme­di­ately after yesterday’s vote that rejected U.S. requests to use Turkey as a stag­ing area for a north­ern front, I emailed my old friend Aykut about the devel­op­ments there. His email follows:

Dear Chris, This is also a very big sur­prise for us. Per­son­ally, I am proud of being a cit­i­zen of a coun­try which shows her dig­nity like this. Our deputies show that the Turk­ish par­lia­ment is not an approval office and Turkey is not a coun­try for sale…
Shortly the story is this: In fact, AKP [Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party] gov­ern­ment had decided to bring the deci­sion to the par­lia­ment last Thurs­day, but sud­denly on the last minute they changed their mind and decided to bring it today [Sat­ur­day]. Some ana­lysts claim that the AKP lead­er­ship did not want to take all of the respon­si­bil­ity and wants to share it with the National Secu­rity Com­mit­tee which was going to meet on Fri­day. You know The National Secu­rity Com­mit­tee is a con­sti­tu­tional insti­tu­tion in which the Pres­i­dent and the gen­er­als are rep­re­sented as well as the the mem­bers of the civil gov­ern­ment. (Suit­abil­ity of such insti­tu­tion in democ­ra­cies is another sub­ject of debate). But the National Secu­rity Com­mit­tee did not even men­tion about this deci­sion in their con­clu­sion report. So they wanted the AKP gov­ern­ment to take the all the polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­ity by them­selves. In fact you know AKP holds the 2/3 of the par­lia­ment. We knew that Erdo­gan had some dif­fi­cul­ties of per­suad­ing some of his own deputies. There are demon­stra­tions all around Turkey. More than 50.000 peo­ple gath­ered in Ankara today, but still nobody was think­ing about such a result. Now, the prime min­is­ter with some other min­is­ters are in the meet­ing. It seems that they are going to bring the deci­sion to the par­lia­ment next Tues­day one more time. But we know that there are min­is­ters in the gov­ern­ment in fact they are against this deci­sion, so you see, last week we were sure that this deci­sion would def­i­nitely be passed, but now nobody knows what will hap­pen. Tomor­row [Sun­day] AKP will declare what are they going to do… It will be a very inter­est­ing week….
When some­thing inter­est­ing hap­pens in here, I will write…. Stay well….

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p>Well, as we now know, the AKP has shelved any plans on intro­duc­ing a new pro­posal on Tues­day as Aykut thought yes­ter­day. “The pro­posal has been delayed to an open-ended time. There is no pro­posal for the fore­see­able future,” said Eyup Fatsa, deputy head of AKP. Turkey, how­ever, wants to mend fences with the United States, and may intro­duce a new plan in par­lia­ment if the United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil approves the U.S. and U.K. pro­posal sub­mit­ted Mon­day last week. A vote on that pro­posal won’t be com­ing for another two weeks in all like­li­hood, how­ever, so even if Turkey does intro­duce a new troop deploy­ment pro­posal, it will likely be too lit­tle too late.
Which could be the Turks’ plan all along! If Turkey had the polit­i­cal cover of a UNSC res­o­lu­tion but no time to make the troop approval logis­ti­cally fea­si­ble, the Turks could always say, “Look, we approved your troops. Too bad things didn’t work out time-wise. Maybe next time.”
In other hap­pen­ings, it’s very, very good news that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mas­ter­mind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Wash­ing­ton, D.C., was cap­tured in Pak­istan. Also, intel­li­gence offi­cials said he was “car­ry­ing the names and phone num­bers of mem­bers of al-Qaeda sleeper cells in North Amer­ica.” The most dis­turb­ing detail about his life, how­ever, was that he appar­ently learned “flaw­less” Eng­lish at Chowan Col­lege, a Bap­tist uni­ver­sity in North Car­olina. Also, and per­haps most per­sonal for me as a jour­nal­ist, he appar­ently ordered the killing of Wall Street Jour­nal reporter Daniel Pearl, and may have been the man who slit his throat.
There are con­flict­ing reports of where he is or who has cus­tody of the sus­pect. An unnamed Pak­istani gov­ern­ment min­is­ter said he had been handed over to U.S. cus­tody shortly after his arrest, along with two other al Qa’ida sus­pects, in the Pak­istani city of Rawalpindi on Sat­ur­day. But Pak­istani Inte­rior Min­is­ter Faisal Saleh Hayat denied this.
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in the cus­tody of Pakistan’s law enforce­ment agen­cies and until we have sat­is­fied our­selves, after the inter­ro­ga­tion process, of the nature of his activ­i­ties in Pak­istan, there is no ques­tion of hand­ing him over to any­one.”
He is also, accord­ing to Hayat, still in Pak­istan.
But there are dis­turb­ing aspects to his arrest. The same Reuters story said another unnamed source, this time for the U.S. gov­ern­ment, expected Mohammed to be “interrogated” — read, “tortured” — in an undis­closed for­eign coun­try. I under­stand the neces­sity of it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it or approve of it.
And a P.S. to every­one who says mak­ing war on Iraq will make the world safer from ter­ror­ism should know that al Qa’ida recruit­ment is up all over Europe, and the war hasn’t even started yet.

The after­math of Sept. 11 and the prospect of war in Iraq have increased the num­bers of angry anti-American young men who have been pushed into the embrace of Islamic extrem­ism, accord­ing to counter-terrorism offi­cials. Extrem­ists are muscling into Euro­pean mosques, cre­at­ing new places of wor­ship and win­ning con­verts. … A war in Iraq could turn many mod­er­ate Mus­lims into extrem­ists and drive many extrem­ists over the line between mali­cious intent and action, experts say. “The strat­egy of the ter­ror­ists is to cre­ate a clash of civ­i­liza­tions,” [Jean-Louis] Bruguiere, [France’s top anti-terrorist judge] said. “And they will use the war to incite vio­lence against the West. A war will have a direct impact on the level of recruitment.”

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p>This is one of my main crit­i­cisms against a war with Iraq. There are much bet­ter ways of deal­ing with ter­ror­ism, as the arrest of Mohammed shows, than embark­ing on mil­i­tary adven­tures with only the most pollyanna-ish of con­se­quences envisioned.

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