Two Congressmen More Concerned With Building New U.S. Embassy In Jerusalem Than Protecting Existing Buildings

By Lucille Barnes

At this writing four named suspects are in custody on suspicion of involvement in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which at least 258 persons were killed and more than 5,000 injured, or of involvement with renegade Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of having financed the bombings. In U.S. custody are Mohammad Saddiq Odeh, arrested in Pakistan on the day of the bombings while he was in transit to Afghanistan, Mohammed Rashid Daoud Owhala, arrested in Kenya after he was wounded in the bombing, and Wadih el Hage, a resident of Arlington, TX who was accused of having worked as Bin Laden’s personal secretary when Bin Laden lived in Sudan.

In German custody is Mamduh Mahmud Salim, accused of being a top financial official and arms purchaser for Bin Laden’s organization. The State Department also has posted a reward of up to $2 million for the arrest of another alleged Bin Laden associate, Haroun Fazil, a native of the Comoros Islands.

In the wake of the bombings, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright scrambled to explain why she had not protested when Congress cut back on funds requested by the State Department to “harden” more U.S. embassies against such attacks. But for some Israel firsters in Congress it was business as usual. Representatives James Saxton (R-NJ) and Brad Sherman (D-CA) introduced a bill to force President Bill Clinton to build a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, which, pending an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, is not recognized by any major country in the world as the capital of Israel, if the administration wants money to build a U.S. embassy in Berlin, the new, world-recognized capital of reunited Germany.

In their new book entitled A World Transformed, former U.S. President George Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, provide in alternating chapters their explanations for why the U.S. ignored opportunities to continue negotiations for a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait in the hours just before and after expiration of the Coalition deadline. Scowcroft wrote: “The unhappy reality of the situation, from my perspective, was that an Iraqi withdrawal would leave us in a most difficult position. Saddam could pull his forces back just north of the border and leave them there, poised for attack. U.S. forces, on the other hand, could not long remain in place.” Scowcroft also wrote that Bush was taken by surprise by the Iraqi invasion on Aug. 2, 1990 because, up until that moment, “diplomacy seemed to be working, if slowly.”

On Aug. 28 U.S. Federal Judge Thomas Penfield ordered the government of Iran to pay a total of $65 million in civil damages for its alleged role in the kidnapping of three Americans in Lebanon by Shi’i Muslim extremist groups in the late 1980s. Former American University of Beirut comptroller Joseph J. Cicippio, now 67, who was held in shackles for much of 51ã2 years, was awarded $16 million and his wife, Elham Cicippio, was awarded $10 million; Frank Reed, now 65, former headmaster of the Lebanese International School, who was so badly beaten during the three years and eight months he was held that his ribs were broken, was awarded $9 million and his wife, Fifi Delati-Reed, was awarded $10 million; and David P. Jacobson, former director of the American University Hospital who was held for 17 months, was awarded $9 million.

The judgment was made possible under legislation passed by Congress in 1996 allowing U.S. citizens who are victims of terrorist acts abroad to sue foreign countries in American courts if those countries have been classified by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism. “There is little doubt in anyone’s mind that Iran controlled the Hezbollah, which is responsible for the kidnapping and torture of these men,” said attorney James J. Oliver, who represented the former hostages.

In March, another federal judge ordered Iran to pay $247.5 million to the family of Alisa M. Flatow, a 20-year-old American citizen studying in Israel, who was killed along with a number of Israeli soldiers in the bombing of a bus en route to an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip. The Flatow family now is seeking to seize the closed Iranian embassy, built during the regime of the Shah and one of the most ornate diplomatic establishments in Washington, DC, and other Iranian real estate in the United States. The State Department opposes these efforts, saying the assets are in its custody and subject to international arbitration.

William Scott Ritter Jr., the longest-serving U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, resigned Aug. 26 after charging that reluctance by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the U.N. Security Council, and President Bill Clinton and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had turned U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq into a “farce.” International relief workers in Baghdad had criticized the aggressive attitude of the 37-year-old former U.S. Marine intelligence officer and some of his colleagues, and he had been described by the Iraqis as a “cowboy” and a spy. On the same day that he announced his resignation, CBS news reported Ritter was being investigated by the FBI for allegedly sharing classified information with Israel. Ritter denied that he had done anything wrong and said he would be exonerated.

An Israeli judge took a half-step toward resolution of an extradition request by the state of Maryland for 18-year-old murder suspect Samuel Sheinbein. The U.S.-born youth, whose father, Sol Sheinbein, was born in British-mandated Palestine and who was brought to the U.S. as child, fled to Israel and claimed Israeli citizenship to avoid prosecution for the murder of 19-year-old Enrique Tello Jr. The Israeli judge ruled that Sheinbein was not an Israeli citizen, opening the way to U.S. extradition proceedings.

Manhattan federal Judge Denise Cote released 39-year-old Abdelhaleem Ashqar Aug. 21 from federal detention where he had been on a hunger strike for six months after refusing to testify in secret grand jury proceedings investigating alleged money-laundering in the United States by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). Ashqar supporters said that although he was not a target of the investigation, he told the grand jury he would rather die than betray “long-held and unshakable religious, political and personal beliefs... and commitments to freedom and democracy in Palestine.” Ashqar had been kept alive by forced feeding since June in the Westchester Medical Center in New York, where his lawyers said his hands had been shackled to his bed to keep him from removing feeding tubes. The lawyers said Judge Cote released him after hearing testimony that further imprisonment would have no effect in compelling Ashqar to testify.

Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, the smartest man in Madeleine Albright’s State Department, didn’t look so bright and shiny when he appeared Aug. 26 at the Foreign Press Center in Washington, DC’s National Press Building to defend U.S. retaliatory attacks for the two embassy bombings. “Muslims certainly were killed” in the embassy bombings which, under Islam, are “totally impermissible, totally unjustified, totally reprehensible,” Pickering said. Granted. However, in asking for the “understanding” of “Muslims around the world...of the need for our response under imminent threat,” he was dodging the issue of why the U.S. had bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum (in which, fortunately, no one was killed) but now wouldn’t agree to a Sudanese demand for a U.N. inquiry into U.S. charges that the factory was making a component of nerve gas. Now it’s clear why. The charge apparently was a mistake.

In the Middle East Ben Zion Netan ya hu, father of Israeli Prime Minister Bin yamin Netanyahu and an early supporter of the Revisionist movement that gave birth to Israel’s Likud Party, said his son is trying to extricate Israel from the “Oslo Trap” and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, according to the AFP news agency. In Jerusalem remarks released Sept. 17, the elder Netanyahu, a university professor in Pennsylvania, said the peace process and the Oslo accords concluded by his son’s predecessors have put the Jewish people and the state of Israel in “mortal danger.”

Renegade Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal’s name figured prominently in the news in August. Since his 1974 expulsion from the PLO, the 61-year-old terrorist, whose real name is Sabri Al Banna, has headed an organization that killed moderate Palestinian leaders; allegedly tried to kill Yasser Arafat; is suspected of the 1991 assassination of top Arafat aide Abu Iyad; supplied hit men for Middle Eastern dictators when Abu Nidal was living, consecutively, in Tripoli (Libya), Baghdad, Damascus and back in Tripoli; and killed 19 and wounded 120 civilians waiting to board planes in the Vienna and Rome airports in December 1985. (He said they were passengers checking in for planes bound for Israel but was mistaken in both instances.)

Abu Nidal first was reported by the Arab and German press to have been intercepted by Egyptian authorities while leaving Libya, where he has lived in recent years, for treatment for cancer. Later reports said he did not have cancer and had been working secretly with Egyptian authorities to thwart terrorist actions in Egypt, but was arrested when he stopped cooperating. The Washington Post reported that an unnamed Clinton administration official confirmed that Abu Nidal was in Egyptian custody.

King Hussein of Jordan, who is undergoing treatment for cancer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, turned over power to his brother, Crown Prince Hassan, to dismiss the Jordanian cabinet in mid-August, but barred the prince from declaring war, signing peace treaties, or changing the constitution.

Also in mid-August Saudi Arabian King Fahd underwent surgery to remove his gall bladder by a medical team headed by Dr. Ted Pappas of Duke University. King Fahd later returned briefly to the hospital for a checkup but was released shortly afterward. His half-brother and designated successor, Crown Prince Abdullah, who has been carrying out the royal responsibilities whenever the King is incapacitated by failing health, planned to visit Britain, France, Japan, China and the United States on a tour originally scheduled to begin Sept. 16.

Lebanon’s best-loved singer, Fairouz, made her first appearance in a quarter-century this summer at the Baalbek festival, an annual series of summer performances set in the world’s largest and best-preserved Roman ruins. She is now 65 and lip-synched part of the time to her recorded music. She remains Lebanon’s best-known symbol of co-existence and unity because of her refusal to perform in any part of Lebanon so long as the country was divided by civil war.

History repeated itself when Israeli forces used a helicopter gunship to ambush and kill Hossam al-Amin, a top commander of the Amal militia, in mid-August, setting off a retaliatory barrage of rockets into northern Israel in which at least 19 people were injured. A similar Israeli ambush in February 1992 killed Sheikh Abbas Musawi, a Hezbollah militia leader, along with his wife and five-year-old son. Hezbollah was believed to have carried out as retaliation the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which 29 peo ple were killed, one month later.

Palestinian Bassam Eid said his Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group has documented 40 cases in which Palestinian businessmen have been accused of avoiding taxes and imprisoned for up to four years until they pay money that never reaches the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Finance. One of the witnesses, former journalist Issam Feisel Ramzi, said he was held and tortured for 14 months at the direction of Jericho special prosecutor Ibrahim Amru, who called him a spy and warned him: “I am the judge, I am the court, I am the police, I am the Palestinian Authority,” all in an attempt to get him to make false charges against others and pay a 30,000-shekel fine. He was released only after his case came to the attention of Palestinian Authority Attorney General Fayez Abu Rahme, a former human rights lawyer.

The Palestinian Authority carried out the first executions in its brief history against brothers Raed and Mohammed Abu Sultan. They were accused of killing brothers Madji, 32, and Mohammed, 30, al Khalidi at a wedding celebration. The brothers were tried and sentenced to death the day after the killings, and executed the following day. A third brother, Faris Abu Sultan, was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Of the convicted brothers, Raed was a bodyguard to a general, Mohammad was a member of military intelligence, and Faris was an officer with a security force. The two murder victims were members of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. Nabil Abu Zaid, a Fatah official who witnessed the trial and executions, told The New York Times, “the Palestinian people are in general fed up with all these people carrying guns. We want to stop this.” Bassam al-Khalidi, an older brother of the murdered men and a senior official at the United Nations office in Gaza, said he had issued an appeal to some 2,000 young men of the Al Khalidi family that there be no more bloodshed. More than 20 Palestinians have been sentenced to death by the Palestinian Authority in the four years since it assumed power in Gaza, but until now Arafat has allowed none of the executions to proceed.

Chief prosecutor Vural Savas in Tur key’s secular government has requested that fraud charges of misappropriating $3.6 million in party funds be leveled against 12 of Turkey’s top Islamist leaders. Among the leaders he is seeking to prosecute are former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who was forced to resign by the Turkish military and who headed the now banned Refah (Welfare) Party, and Recai Kutan, head of the Virtue Party, to which former members of the Welfare Party have turned, and which leads in public opinion polls looking toward next April’s Turkish election. Seven of the accused are Virtue Party members of parliament, and therefore hold parliamentary immunity. Islamist politicians expressed the hope that the resignation of Gen. Ismail Hakki Karadayi as Turkish chief of staff, and his replacement by Gen. Huseyin Kivrikoglu at the end of August will initiate a change in the hard line the military is pursuing against the Islamist movement.

In South Asia, the last few years have been bad for most Pakistanis, except perhaps the lawyers. But this year is even bad for them. Former Prime Minister and People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto complained in an Aug. 29 letter to human rights organizations that not only has she been “facing persecution at the hands of the present regime,” but now police have arrested her defense counsel, Babar Awan, on charges of “robbery,” after the editor of an Urdu newspaper charged Awan and a companion seized a briefcase from him at gunpoint. Benazir, who is facing at least a half- dozen charges of corruption, said authorities had kidnapped another counsel, Pir Mazharul Haq, then detained yet another lawyer, Abu Bakar, three times to delay court orders for Haq’s release. Her main counsel, Farooq Naik, has been barred from traveling abroad, and her senior counsel is ill. “How can I brief lawyers or get defense when counsel are repeatedly threatened with arrest?” she asked in her letter.

Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, has been in jail on corruption charges since she was dismissed in November 1996 on charges of misrule and corruption. The lawyers’ community in Rawalpindi suspended work to hold a protest meeting and procession demanding the release of her lawyer. The following day, however, a Pakistani court rejected a Bhutto petition to stop the Pakistani government from discussing money laundering charges against both Bhutto and Zardari with Swiss bank officials.