Jarret Brachman Testifies Before Subcommittee
On Wednesday, March 2, 2011 the Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence held a hearing entitled “Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland – Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”
Dr. Jarret Brachman’s [full text of testimony]
In a nutshell, here’s what the visible Internet personality Dr. Hani al-Sibai who is quite popular with online hardliners and pro-AQ types, had to say in a recent sermon about the CTC’s release:
1. The documents are legitimate:
“probably those documents are true”
2. They were likely tampered with by the USG for information operations purposes:
“some paragraphs and sentences could have been inserted into those documents,”
3. UBL wouldn’t have had such bad OP-SEC anyway:
“How could Bin Laden lead an internationally organized group, which has many branches” and “leave such information on his computer?”
4. What the documents show about UBL:
“this man was unrivaled in his intelligence”
If you want to download the sermon: http://shrta.com/files/VSROQMUJ/Al_Anaam_3.WMA
First, this is a really tough video to watch – not b/c there’s any violence – there’s not; it’s just Warren Weinstein seated and talking. Rather, it’s the psychology of abduction that makes this so difficult to see.
It’s about two minutes of footage of 70-year-old Warren Weinstein, the American citizen who was captured from his home last August in Lahore, Pakistan, calmly talking.
Seated in front of a platter of food, from which he takes a bite after stating:
My life is in your hands, Mr. President. If you accept the demands I live. If you don’t accept the demands, then I die.
Beyond the incredibly odd behavior of eating on camera right after talking about the realistic possibility of your death, everything else about the video strikes me as odd. The script, staging and delivery is surreal. He has likely been getting pumped full of pro-mujahidin rhetoric since his abduction. He’s now either suffering from a form of traumatic bonding or out of fear, is following the script to the letter – either way, the video is highly rehearsed.
IMHO, the script was likely penned by Adam Gadahn. The turns of phrase, even down to the hand gestures that Weinstein makes, feel eerily Gadahn’esque. He’s likely running the media op on this one.
- “accept the demands of the mujahidin”
- “it’s important that you accept the demands and act quickly and don’t delay.”
- “there will be no benefit in delay.”
- “i get the feeling that you’re not paying any attention or care about my problem or my needs…”
- “The demands of the mujahidin are not difficult, they are according to Islamic law.”
If you want to watch the video, it’s here:
A new post that I had the pleasure of co-authoring with Dr. Steven Corman is now available on the COMOPS Journal blog.
In it, we challenge the notion that is being advanced by some, most notably by James Carafano’s in a recent NY Post Op-Ed, that the decision to release the UBL Docs was strategically mistaken. Putting politics aside, we find that the document release makes a lot of sense from a strategic communication perspective, particularly by challenging the dominant story that UBL was an effective leader and that al-Qaida is an ideologically and strategically unified collective.
You can check the piece out here: http://comops.org/journal/2012/05/07/should-captured-aq-documents-have-been-released/
“‘Abd al-Hafiz” is another kunya for Shaykh Abu Yahya al-Libi.
Found it in SOCOM-2012-0000011-HT. To me, that’s a really find from the docs and I haven’t seen it published anywhere else in open source reporting before right now.
Here are some verbatim excerpts from SOCOM-2012-0000011-HT, which according to CTC, should be dated 28 March 2007, is addressed to a legal scholar by the name of Hafiz Sultan, and it is authored by someone who is of Egyptian origin:
Dear brother, write [to them] yourself, since al-Karrumi knows you and always asks me about you, calling you “(maternal) Uncle so-and-so.” Have ‘Abd-al-Hafiz (TN: AKA ((Abu-Yahya)) al-Libi, senior LIFG religious scholar and member of al-Qa’ida’s Shari’ah Committee) write to the brothers, and he should never tire of writing and pressuring them;
Another very important issue is that you must write to our
brothers in the Ansar al-Sunnah (AAS), who are waiting for
your responses to their earlier correspondence and grievances.
Ask for help from ‘Abd-al-Hafiz and Ahmad (TN: AKA ((Abu-
Layth)) al-Libi, senior LIFG official and al-Qa’ida regional
commander), and also try to have a letter issued to them from
‘Abd-al-Shafi.You should also urge them, the AAS, to unite with their brothers, as ‘Abd-al-Hafiz did on the tape [recording]. You should mention that you believe duty requires this, and despite the failings and problems that exist, disunion is worse than all of that.
In other news, while we’re talking about Abu Yahya, these docs have really helped to clarify my thinking about how the al-Qaida’s Senior Leadership view him. It seems to me that he is the equivalent of their on-call theological plumber. When AQ’s metaphorical toilets backed up from unresponsiveness, bad judgment, incompetence or wanton bloodshed, somebody tasks Abu Yahya al-Libi and Atiyatallah to start plunging.
If you recall, on 6 July 2009, Shaykhs Abu Yahya al-Libi and Atiyatallah jointly penned a eulogy under the names, Abd al-Karim al-Libi (aka Atiyatallah) and Yunis al-Sahrawi (aka Abu Yahya al-Libi) for two Mauritanian shaykhs under whom they had studied back in the 1990′s. That eulogy marked the first public tag-teamed effort between the two that I can recall. Atiyatallah would go on to pen the foreword for Abu Yahya’s December 2010 book, ”Forty Hadiths on the Virtues of Martyrdom, Seeking Paradise, and More Rewards.”
Beyond those two pieces, they’ve been appearing in As-Sahab vids together for awhile, sometimes wearing matching outfits. But these docs open a new chapter on the Abu Yahya and Atiyatallah relationship for me. Both UBL and others in the AQ-GC seem to have viewed them as a combo package.
Here’s UBL talking about the Libyan duo, from the compound docs:
We must avoid the stigma of being a one-dimensional sect, opposed to all others. We are Muslims following the teachings of Islam and we are not the owners of the Salafist way, and must avoid typifying (TN: religious stereotyping) each other. It is important to have a memorandum issued from Shaykh Abu Yahya and Shaykh Mahmud (JB: Atiyatallah) clarifying the issues of penitence, atonement, and the virtue of patience; refraining from accusing and judging without being qualified to judge; in addition to expanding the awareness of the followers in the arenas of politics and Shari’ah, which I believe publishing a letter in the form of questions and answers well help greatly. (0019)
And here he is requesting Abu Yahya’s works, also in the compound docs:
It would be nice if you can send us the book of Shaykh Abu Yahya (Enemy Usage of Bystanders in Present Jihad), and his book (Studies in Decisive Unanimity) and it would be better that you provide us with each theological work published by you. (0019)
There’s a lot more in the docs and if I have time, I’ll tease out all the quotes about Abu Yahya al-Libi and dig into the relationship between the two but, not right now.
I’m doing a series of these little featurettes as a way of extracting interesting quotes from the UBL docs around particular themes in a way that doesn’t make my eyes bleed from information overload.
Bin Laden to Atiyatallah:
it would be advisable for you and for Shaykh Abu Yahya to write some articles and provide advice to those working in the Jihad media in general to include the author partisans to the Mujahidin on the internet. (SOCOM-2012-0000019-HT)
But he didnt say anything about needing to wear matching outfits, did he??
I am going to issue a few of these smaller featurettes that highlight what I believe to be some key themes coming out of the UBL doc release. This first one focuses on UBL’s concerns about AQ’s operational and strategic errors.
Download: How To Destroy Al-Qaida: “By” Usama bin Laden
“How excellent would it be if you ask brother Basir to send us the resume, in detail and lengthy, of brother Anwar al-‘Awlaqi, as well as the facts he relied on when recommending him, while informing him that his recommendation is considered. However, we would like to be reassured more. For example, we here become reassured of the people when they go to the line and get examined there. ”
UBL to Atiyatallah – SOCOM-2012-0000003-HT
This is where I will be concentrating my analytical focus over the next several days. I’m in the middle of drafting this report:
The report is an expanded examination of at least these 10 points, which I’m working out with corresponding timelines and thematic comparisons:
Oh, the goodness keeps on coming. Ok, so we dont know who authored this letter, but CTC has an excerpt of it (SOCOM-2012-0000009-HT)
Some amazing insights about AQ’s name challenges:
This name (Qa?ida al-Jihad) was abridged by the people and only a few people remember this name; it has come to be
known as (al-Qa?ida) and this name reduces the feeling of
Muslims that we belong to them, and allows the enemies to
claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam and
Muslims, but they are at war with the organization of al-
Qa?ida, which is an outside entity from the teachings of
Islam and this is what was raised repeatedly in the past as
indicated by Obama, that our war is not on Islam or on the
Muslim people but rather our war is on the al-Qa?ida
organization, so if the word al-Qa?ida was derived from or
had strong ties to the word Islam or Muslims; or if it had
the name Islamic party, it would be difficult for Obama to
say that. It is clear from the past also that they (the
enemies) have largely stopped using the phrase “the war on
terror” in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims,
because they felt that saying the war on terror could
appear to most people to be a war on Islam, especially
after they unjustly spilled the blood of innocent Muslims
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, this sounds an awful lot like Atiyatallah. By forgetting the second part of al-Qaida’s name (al-Jihad), the author believes that Muslims are able to more easily buy into President Obama’s rhetoric that this is a war against a group, not a religion. If AQ changed its name to something more explicitly Islamic, then the ties between AQ and Islam would be more obvious to Muslims and Obama’s rhetorical shifts wouldnt be as effective as they had been.
Author is bemoaning the lack of and obvious religious mission implied within their name:
The name of an entity carries its message and represents it. Al-Qa?ida describes a military base with fighters without a reference to our broader mission to unify the nation.
The proposed list of alternatives from this author includes:
