Al Qaeda in Europe
Page 40
Both men, financial experts with decades of experience, have devised a system of front companies, figureheads, and secret bank accounts in offshore banking paradises that allowed them to circumvent resolutions and shelter their finances from the authorities' action. And while Nada still maintains business interests in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Nasreddin still owns a luxurious hotel in downtown Milan.
LEGAL OBSTACLES
The problems faced by European authorities in tackling terrorism financing are the same that prevent them from successfully prosecuting and dismantling terrorist networks operating on the Continent. In many European countries, laws prevent intelligence agencies from sharing information with prosecutors or law enforcement agencies unless they follow a lengthy and complicated procedure. With few exceptions, the monitoring of individuals has to be authorized by a judge based on extremely strong evidence of the suspect's guilt presented to secure the order. Severe evidentiary requirements often prevent prosecutors from using information obtained by intelligence agencies in their cases. And prosecutors also have to prove the specific intent of an accomplice in a terrorist act, showing that he knowingly provided support to the person who carried out a terrorist attack.
These provisions are the product of centuries of democratic legal tradition and are meant to defend the citizen from the creation of a police state. They epitomize Europe's success in creating a civil society where the government cannot unduly interfere with its citizens' lives. But, at the same time, they create an ideal shelter for the terrorists. European laws need to be adapted to the new threat that it is facing.
"There has to be a balance between individual liberty on one hand and the efficiency of the system to protect the public on the other. In an ideal world, I would choose the first, but this is not an ideal world, and when dealing with Islamic extremists we have to be brutal sometimes," is the view of Alain Marsaud, a member of the French parliament and an antiterrorism magistrate. Marsaud's views represent France's attitude toward terrorism, as the French legal system provides investigators and antiterrorism magistrates with powers that have no equal in Europe and in the United States as well.
But France is an isolated case. The aftermath of 9/11 showed that most European legal systems are not prepared to efficiently face the new legal issues that have arisen with the war on Islamic terrorism. The excellent work done by European intelligence agencies and law enforcement has often been thwarted by the courts, which are forced to enforce laws that do not adequately punish individuals that associate themselves for terrorist purposes.
The German trials of Abdelghani Mzoudi and Mounir El Motassadeq, two of the accomplices of Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers in Hamburg, revealed how Europe often finds itself legally impotent against terrorism.
Mzoudi and Motassadeq, the only two men to go on trial in Europe in connection with the 9/11 attacks, have been engaged in a complicated legal battle against German authorities for more than three years. According to prosecutors, Mzoudi's Hamburg apartment served as the meeting place for a group of Islamic radicals who, bound by a common hatred for the United States and Jews, planned an attack that would shock the world. After countless meetings at Mzoudi's apartment, some members of the Hamburg cell went to the United States to attend flight schools and carry out the lethal 9/11 plan; others remained in Hamburg providing logistical help and wiring them money.
Prosecutors assert that while the men who worked from Germany may not have known every detail of the plot, they were well-aware of the fatal intentions of their US-based cohorts. For instance, Mounir Motassadeq allegedly told a friend, "[The 9/11 hijackers] want to do something big. The Jews will burn and we will dance on their graves."
Motassadeq and Mzoudi were charged in Hamburg with being accessories to the murder of more than three thousand people and being members of a terrorist organization. Motassadeq was initially found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years. Mzoudi's trial was more complicated, as, by the time it began, Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the key members of the Hamburg cell, had been arrested in Pakistan. Mzoudi's lawyers demanded that they could examine Binalshibh, whose testimony they alleged was essential to uncover Mzoudi's real role. Since the US government, which has detained Binalshibh since his arrest, refused to even disclose Binalshibh's location, German judges reluctantly acquitted Mzoudi. "Mr. Mzoudi, you are acquitted, but this is no reason to celebrate," said the presiding judge, adding that the court was not convinced he was innocent and that he had been acquitted only because the prosecution had failed to prove its case. A month after Mzoudi's acquittal, an appeal court ordered a retrial for Motassadeq, claiming that he had been denied a fair trial because the United States had refused to allow the testimony of Binalshibh.
The difficulty faced by German prosecutors in the case of both Mzoudi and Motassadeq lies in the fact that the two were facilitators, sending money and providing apartments to terrorists but not actually carrying out terrorist acts themselves. Indeed, the lawyers for both men have argued that their clients believed they were simply helping fellow Muslims. When asked why he wired money to 9/11 pilot Marwan al- Shehhi, Motassadeq explained: "I'm a nice person, that's the way I am."
Great Britain, America's closest ally in Afghanistan and Iraq, has similarly tied its own hands. Radical imams openly preach hatred for the West and incite worshipers in the mosques of London to carry out attacks inside England. And recruiters have operated freely in Britain for more than a decade, as the story of Hassan Butt proves. With British forces still battling the Taliban in Afghanistan, the British public was shocked to read in the tabloids the interview with Hassan Butt, a British-born Muslim who bragged: "I have helped to bring in at least 600 young British men. These men are here to engage in jihad against America and its alliesThat there are so many should serve as a warning to the British government. All of them are prepared to die for the cause of Islam." Despite his activities and his not-so-veiled threats to the British government, Butt was allowed to return to England undisturbed.
Upon his return to England, Butt was contacted by a reporter from the Mirror and agreed to be interviewed for the price of £100,000. When the Mirror's reporter informed British counterterrorism officials of the meeting and asked them if they wanted to interview Butt themselves, their response was shocking: "I know this sounds ridiculous," said a detective from the Anti-Terrorist Squad, "But we can't get involved. All our checks, all our intelligence, show that he is not wanted for any offences in the UK." Since recruiting for a foreign terrorist organization operating overseas was not a crime in Britain, Butt could not be charged with any crime.
Another example of this frustrating situation and of its dangerous consequences is represented by the results of a 2003 Dutch intelligence investigation on a group of forty to fifty young North African radicals. Dutch intelligence had collected important information on the men, revealing their ties to some of the masterminds of the May 2003 Casablanca bombings and other terrorists throughout Europe. Moreover, some of the men had expressed their desire to die as martyrs and to kill prominent members of the Netherlands' political and cultural establishment. In the fall of 2003, some of the men were arrested. Nevertheless, the men had committed no crime, and the Dutch legal system forbade the use of information obtained by intelligence agencies in a trial. As a consequence, the men had to be released.
Predictably, after a few months, the group decided to go into action. Last November, one of its members, Mohammed Bouyeri, who had been under surveillance for months, gunned down and tried to ritualistically behead in the middle of one of Amsterdam's busiest streets Theo van Gogh, a popular Dutch filmmaker who, according to Islamists, had dared to offend Islam with a controversial movie about the treatment of Muslim women.
A similar situation occurred in Spain, as some of the key planners and perpetrators of the Madrid train bombings had been known to Spanish intelligence as radical Islamists with ties to terrorism since 1999. Some of them had had their phone conversations intercepted and the
ir apartments searched, but no charge could be brought against them since, technically, they had committed no crime.
Unfortunately, the results in the cases in Britain, Holland, and Spain are not the exception, but the rule. The legal systems of most European countries do not have provisions that provide authorities with preemptive measures that can be taken against a known fundamentalist who is overheard saying he wants to "die as a martyr," unless evidence of a specific plan is also uncovered. Moreover, the laws of few European countries adequately punish activities that, while not directly harming people, are instrumental and necessary to the execution of a terrorist attack. Enabling a terrorist to enter the country by supplying him with a false document is equally important as providing him with the explosives, but few countries punish the two crimes with the same severity.
THE IRAQI CONFLICT AND OTHER REPERCUSSIONS FOR THE UNITED STATES
Before 9/11, recruiting individuals for a terrorist organization, as long as the group operated outside of the country, was not a crime in most European countries. While some countries have recently changed their laws to allow prosecution, the phenomenon of recruitment in Europe is taking place with even greater intensity than it did prior to 9/11, and its consequences are dire for both Europe and the United States. Shielded by the fact that recruitment for a terrorist organization is difficult to prosecute, and exploiting the widespread opposition to the Iraqi war within Muslim communities in Europe, recruiters have been sending hundreds of European Muslims to Iraq, joining the ranks of the insurgency that is fighting US and Iraqi forces on the ground.
In 2003 an investigation launched by Italian authorities dismantled a network that recruited more than two hundred young Muslims in Germany, France, Sweden, Holland, and Italy to train and fight with Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked group led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi that has carried out dozens of attacks against American and Iraqi civilian targets.
Reportedly, five young Muslims recruited in Milan have died in suicide operations in Iraq, including the attack against the Baghdad hotel where US deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz was staying. The investigation revealed that the network that had sent the volunteers to Iraq was the same that had recruited hundreds of militants before 9/ 11 for the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, showing the continuity and adaptability of terrorist networks that have been operating in Europe for more than a decade.
The Iraqi war is also presenting evidence of a different phenomenon, the involvement of extremely young European Muslims who do not belong to any organized network or terror group, but who, nevertheless, feel the sudden urge of fighting "the infidels." While the Italians dismantled a very sophisticated network that had close links to Zarqawi and al Qaeda's leadership, investigators throughout Europe have noticed that many of the volunteers who leave for Iraq are groups of teenagers, highschool students, and petty criminals from the Continent's poor immigrant neighborhoods with no connections to a terrorist group, who seemingly decide to act on their own.
This phenomenon is the direct consequence of the social crisis that is affecting Europe, as local governments are struggling to integrate the Continent's soaring Muslim population.
And while it is true that only a minority of the millions of Muslims living in Europe espouse radical views or support violent activities, the dangerous consequences of the actions of this minority cannot be overstated. Every act of violence or foiled terrorist plot increases the rift between Muslims and the native European population. The brutal killing of Van Gogh, for example, brought turmoil to the Netherlands, traditionally one of Europe's most tolerant and peaceful societies. Mosques and Islamic schools were firebombed in the wake of the filmmaker's assassination and a poll conducted after the attacks revealed that 40 percent of Dutch hoped that Muslims "no longer felt at home" in Holland. In retaliation, groups of Dutch Muslims attacked churches, igniting a spiral of hatred.
The spread of Islamic radicalism and terrorism in Europe needs to be closely monitored by the United States and not only for the historical and cultural links between the United States to Europe. Hundreds of Islamist terrorists have, either by birth or through naturalization, European passports and can, therefore, enter the United States without a visa and with just a summary scrutiny once they attempt to enter the US borders. It is not a coincidence, for example, that the three men who have been charged just two weeks ago for their role in a plot to attack various financial institutions in the United States were all British citizens whom al Qaeda had dispatched on several surveillance missions to the States, counting on the fact that their British passports would have made their entrance into the United States easier.
As the attacks of 9/11 have painfully shown, events that occur overseas can have a direct impact on the security of this country and its interests abroad. It is therefore crucial for the United States to follow carefully the events taking place in Europe and to closely cooperate with its European counterparts, as only a global effort can defeat this global enemy.
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