PERIGUEUX, France, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- We live in cynical and suspicious times. Within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, the false tale was circulating that Jews had been warned to stay away from the World Trade Center that day, and that Israeli intelligence rather than Islamic intelligence must have been to blame. And now in the wake of the arrests in the London bomb plot, similar suspicions are being peddled, particularly in the Islamic world.
Indian security officials, who carefully make a point of monitoring the themes and tone of the Friday sermons in certain mosques in Pakistan, were struck not only by the substance but also by the speaker at Lahore's Jamia Mosque Mansoorah last Friday. The emir (leader) of the radical group Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, told the assembled worshippers and followers: "the hoax of the bombing plan in passenger planes is a well-orchestrated American and British ploy to divert the attention of world media from the humiliation meted out to Zionist forces at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon."
The argument was the more easily made because the audience in much of the Muslim world is only too ready to receive it. They have learned skepticism about the official Western version of the facts after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. President George W. Bush's boast of "mission accomplished" and Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion two years ago that the Iraqi resistance was "in its last throes" have not helped. After Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the Bush administration's reputation for fair dealing is as low as its credibility, a phenomenon that touches American voters as well as Pakistani radicals. It seems to have played some part in the defeat of the pro-war Sen. Joe Lieberman in his own party primary election last week.
So if American voters are getting skeptical, it is not altogether unexpected that even some of the most reputable newspapers in the Islamic world are taking the latest claims about the London bomb plot with several grains of salt. An editorial in the Daily Times of Pakistan over the weekend illustrates the widespread skepticism.
"The lack of information following the bust does not square, either with the commotion in the foreign media or the fact that the intelligence agencies in Pakistan or abroad should have the low-down on these people and be happy to share it with the media," it said.
"We say this because the arrests by the Canadian authorities of dozens of people some months ago have proved to be trumped-up," it went on. "Similarly, this revelation comes close on the heels of the disappearance of 11 Egyptians in the United States. There is also a horrible war going on in Lebanon and it is not unfolding in favor of Israel, the United States and (the) United Kingdom. Iraq has gone bad; Afghanistan is getting worse. The Bush-Blair duo is in trouble at home and both need something really big to happen to justify their policies and distract attention from their losses."
The Daily Times is the establishment voice, if not the official newspaper, of Pakistan, the country which has been praised for the help its security services gave to the British in the course of the inquiry that managed to abort the plot to bring down as many as nine passenger aircraft with liquid explosives.
This latest plot seems to have begun when a number of British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin, mainly Punjabi but including some Mirpuri, flew out to Pakistan to volunteer their help after the devastating earthquake of October 2005. They became aid workers in refugee camps run by the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a civilian organization with close links to the Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group which India says runs terrorist operations in Kashmir, and is funded and protected by the ISI, Pakistani intelligence.
Whether they intended to volunteer for Jihad before they flew to Pakistan or were recruited while working at the camps, the young men then moved to paramilitary training camps in Pakistan's tribal areas run by Jundullah, a new jihadist group close to al-Qaida. And before they returned to Britain, they called in at the prison in Sindh that houses Omar Sheikh, the British-educated Muslim convicted of the beheading of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Interestingly, Omar Sheikh was also visited in prison by two of the suicide bombers in the 7/7 attacks on the London underground last year.
There are a number of obvious points, from flying to Pakistan to visiting Omar Sheikh in prison, when such a group was likely to excite the interest of British and Pakistani security. British sources also suggest that Pakistani officials further helped their inquiries, based on interrogations of some militants recently arrested in Karachi.
This is a tricky matter for the Pakistani government. The connection of these British-born suspects to the LET, which seems to operate with the near-impunity that means close links to some government agencies, is embarrassing for President Pervez Musharraf. It suggests that either he is lying about his intent to clamp down on terrorist groups in Pakistan, or he has no control over his own intelligence services, or perhaps a bit of both. To show that least he was doing something, Musharraf last week sentenced the leader of the JUD, Professor Hafeez Mohammad Sayeed, to one month of house arrest.
Pakistan's credibility in the West is low. Nobody seriously believes that A.Q. Khan's secret supermarket of one-stop shopping for nuclear weapons technology was unknown to the Pakistani authorities. And A.Q. Khan's own "punishment" of house arrest has always seemed somewhat lenient for a country that has the death penalty and whose judiciary has never been squeamish in its punitive policies.
Moreover, Pakistan's reputation as a staunch anti-terror ally suffers from the widespread assumption that Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in Pakistan's frontier districts (some say with regular visits to the hospitals of Peshawar), where the Taliban have been resting and recuperating before launching this year's offensive in Afghanistan.
Put together the skepticism in the Islamic world about the West's claims of a terrorist plot with the skepticism in the West over Musharraf and the real loyalties of his intelligence services, and a double credibility gap emerges. The dismaying conclusion is that despite all the claims of cooperation and joint solidarity against terror and despite the occasional success, East and West are not just talking past one another, but hardly even trying to believe each other.
