|
Program Won't Start a "Witch Hunt" Against Muslims: State Department Official
By Ayesha Ahmad
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 (IslamOnline) - The U.S. State Department does not expect its new "Rewards for Justice" program, which offers monetary compensation for information leading to the prevention of terrorist attacks or apprehension of suspected terrorists, to contribute to an anti-Arab or Muslim "witch hunt", Assistant Secretary David Carpenter said Thursday.
"We are not trying to suggest a witch hunt or anything like that," Carpenter said during a briefing at the State Department, "but… we are asking for people to have an understanding of what we do know and things that they should be leery of and wary of."
One of the State Department advertisements features a photograph of Mohammad Atta, suspected to be the ringleader of the deadly September 11 hijackers, and explains that a person asking certain types of questions - about flight training or cropdusters, for example - should be held in suspicion.
In response to questions about the possibility of such an ad "exacerbating" the sense of profiling of Arab- or Muslim-Americans, Carpenter explained that elements of the suspected hijackers' profiles showed "patterns" that had to be provided to the public to look for.
"When we have something that indicates things and patterns to look for, we think it is prudent to pass these on to the public," he said. "That is what these ads are doing. No one is suggesting that this is the only thing you should look at," he added. "But these are just things that key interest in people's minds, get the interest there."
Under-Secretary Charlotte Beers, who also briefed reporters on the new program which officially opened Thursday, added that the recent indictment of Zacharias Moussaoui showed that there are certain patterns in which things like cropdusters or flight training should ring alarm bells.
"It probably isn't unusual in any one day," she said. "But I don't think you can ignore the pattern. The pattern is there and the pattern is simply reflected in all the information that has been released by the FBI. And we are referring to it in here."
However, the Assistant and Under-Secretaries did not elaborate on the racial aspect of some of the ads or their profiling nature, saying only that they were facts that the public would need in order to know what to inform authorities about.
Carpenter said the program will provide protection for informants, paying for relocation and other requirements if necessary for their safety, and that compensation with the new program would be even higher than in the past.
He gave the example of Pakistani national Ramzi Yousef, who was indicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. An individual contacted the American embassy in Pakistan in 1995 with information that eventually led to Yousef's apprehension and prevention of "additional horrific terrorist attacks."
Yousef is now serving his sentence, and the informant was paid $2 million for the risk he took in giving the information. "While the payment is still our largest to date, today we are offering to pay even more," Carpenter said.
October's Patriot Act gave Secretary of State Colin Powell the authority to offer and pay more than $5 million in rewards, if warranted; the price on Osama bin Laden's head, and those of his al-Qaeda associates, is currently $25 million.
Advertisements for the Rewards program will run in print and radio initially, and only in English, then will be translated into Spanish and Arabic as well, Beers said. The ads would move to international media by January 2002.
Aside from the Atta ad, another ad targets women with the headline, "Can a Woman Stop a Terrorist?" Another describes "You vs. Terrorism," and the radio ad played during the briefing began with the words, "Do you know a terrorist?"
|
