Aid convoy returns to Turkey amid more fracas

The Viva Palestina international aid convoy has experienced new crises and problems since it left Gaza to return home.

Egyptian police attempted to detain five people who were engaged in skirmishes in the port city of El Arish at the Cairo International Airport. In response, some passengers in the terminal building protested against the police while others voiced statements of support aboard the plane. A total of 322 people, including 98 foreigners, arrived in İstanbul after a six-hour delay. Meanwhile, Egyptian officials declared that they would not allow future humanitarian aid convoys to pass through their territory because of the recent incidents.

Members of the convoy -- which was allowed to stay in Gaza for only 34 hours -- endured a long and tiring journey home after skirmishes in El Arish. About 450 people who arrived at the Rafah border crossing at noon on Friday had to wait for hours to be processed by Egyptian authorities. The convoy was only able to proceed after 9 p.m. and was accompanied by a police escort on its journey to Cairo, which took 11 hours instead of the usual five.

When the group boarded a plane to leave the country, Egyptian authorities said the passports of five people -- two of them Turkish -- were lost after 130 people boarded the plane. This triggered another protest. Those waiting in the terminal building did not want to board the plane and the police did not allow those already on board to leave. The fact that those whose passports were said to have been lost were the same people who engaged in skirmishes in El Arish further exacerbated reactions. The six-hour crisis ended when the Egyptian officials backpedaled. When the lost passports were returned, the passengers waiting in the terminal boarded the plane.

A large group of people greeted the convoy members upon their arrival in İstanbul. The chairman of the Humanitarian Aid Foundation (İHH) set about organizing another convoy immediately after his return.

Egypt has already declared it will not allow further humanitarian aid to pass through the Rafah crossing. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said members of the Viva Palestina convoy had engaged in hostile acts on Egyptian territory and committed offenses. He added that according to a new arrangement, aid arriving via the port of El Arish will be delivered to the Egyptian Red Crescent for transfer to Gaza.

Meanwhile, speaking to the Egyptian Al-Ahram newspaper, Egyptian Ambassador to Turkey Ala Eldin al-Hadidi claimed that the Turkish press had unfairly condemned Egypt. Noting that the press played a great role in encouraging people to hold demonstrations in front of Egypt’s diplomatic offices in Turkey, al-Hadidi said: “In particular, a famous speaker claimed that Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu had called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and told him to call Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to stop the convoy. Such wrong and misleading news played a role in making people react against Egypt.”

Source: Today's Zaman.
Link: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-198172-102-aid-convoy-returns-to-turkey-amid-more-fracas.html.

Tunisia to sell Morocco-made cars

(Magharebia) Tunisia will begin selling a Moroccan-manufactured automobile, Trade Minister Reda Ben Mesbah said in Tunis on Friday (January 8th). The deal to market the "Renault Logan" comes nearly three years after the Agadir Agreement exempted cars made by member states Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt from customs tariffs, MAP noted.

Moroccan journalists discuss press freedom concerns

(Magharebia) Journalists, media experts and academics met on Friday (January 8th) to debate the state of press freedom in Morocco, MAP reported. Organized by the national press union (SNMP), the Rabat meeting addressed improper application of the press code, as well as the financial penalties and heavy prison sentences imposed on journalists.

Japan to come clean on secret nuke deals with US

By YURI KAGEYAMA, Associated Press Writer

TOKYO – To the government's critics, it was a long and shocking act of official stonewalling: Agreements long hidden in Foreign Ministry files allowed nuclear-armed U.S. warships to enter Japanese ports, violating a hallowed principle of postwar Japan. Yet their very existence was officially denied.

Now, in a clear break from the past, a new prime minister has gone where none of his predecessors dared go: He has ordered a panel of ministry officials and academics to investigate the secret agreements.

The findings, due out this month, are part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's wide-ranging campaign to wrest power from the bureaucracy and make government more open than under the conservatives, who ruled Japan for most of the past 50 years.

They also could intensify public debate about the future of Japan's long-standing security alliance with the U.S., which has bases here. Hatoyama, a liberal who took office in September, has called for making the relationship more balanced, starting with efforts to evict an unpopular U.S. base from the island of Okinawa.

That Japan agreed to let nuclear-armed ships enter its ports and waters ceased to be a secret some years ago with the declassification of American documents. Such ships had routinely docked in various Japanese ports since the 1960s, sometimes setting off protests.

But in a nation where memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki drive a fierce aversion to nuclear weapons, a formal admission of the secret agreements would be a stunning reversal, and confirm that previous governments systematically lied to the public.

"The Foreign Ministry repeatedly denied their existence, even in statements before Parliament," lawmaker Muneo Suzuki said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Suzuki held top political posts at the Foreign Ministry, yet although he had heard about the secret documents, he said that even he could not pry them out of his officials.

"The Foreign Ministry should be held deeply accountable," said Suzuki, who has switched sides and is now a member of Hatoyama's coalition.

Historical accounts show that Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, who died in office in 1980, considered going public on the secret pacts, but was advised against it by his aides as politically too dangerous.

Only a few Foreign Ministry bureaucrats have spoken out in recent years.

One, Kazuhiko Togo, said he and other high-ranking officials kept quiet for fear that disclosure of the agreements would trigger riots and perhaps topple the prime minister.

"The political costs were too great," Togo told the AP.

Even after American officials acknowledged the pacts in the 1990s, leaders of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party persistently denied them, right up to Taro Aso, the last LDP prime minister before Hatoyama's Democrats took over.

"They did not exist," Aso said in a nationally televised response to a reporter's question last July.

"It all goes to show how far behind Japan is in administrative transparency," said Koichi Nakano, professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Even the name of revered Eisaku Sato, the prime minister viewed as the architect of Japan's postwar pacifism and resistance to nuclear weapons, has been thrust into the debate.

Three weeks ago, Sato's son revealed a document he found in Sato's desk after his death in 1975 and which he kept hidden.

The 1969 document, signed by Sato and President Richard Nixon, showed they agreed that U.S.-occupied Okinawa would be returned to Japan, but the U.S. would retain the right to have nuclear weapons on the island if the necessity arose. The agreements on Okinawa were a key part of the secret pacts that also covered U.S. warships entering ports throughout Japan.

Back then, it was the height of the Cold War, and the U.S. felt it needed a free hand to confront nuclear-armed China and the Soviet Union.

But the deal with Nixon was a clear violation of Sato's pledge that Japan would not make, own or allow the entry of nuclear weapons. Sato won the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize in large part for pushing those principles. According to Japanese media accounts, the trade-off drove him to tears of remorse. But the principles became policy all the same.

The previously declassified U.S. documents include State Department papers on the 1960 U.S.-Japan security pact, accounts of meetings at which the entry of warships with nuclear weapons was discussed and a memorandum on the 1969 Nixon-Sato meeting, where the Okinawa deal was discussed.

And even in the 1990s, after U.S. warships stopped carrying battle-ready nukes and the issue became moot, it remained sensitive enough for governments to go on misleading the public.

Japanese today are more shocked by the cover-up than by the deed itself, but they remain attached to the non-nuclear principle.

A survey by the Mainichi newspaper, which interviewed more than 4,500 people, found 72 percent of the 2,600 respondents want to stick with the principles, and the number rose to about 80 percent among Japanese in their 20s and 30s. No margin of error was given.

Shoji Niihara, a scholar of U.S.-Japan relations, said Japanese are hoping their new reformist prime minister will redefine Japan's relationship with the U.S. and work with President Barack Obama in his call for a world free of nuclear weapons.

"There's a strong feeling that Japan was never truly treated as an independent country," he said.

Robert A. Wampler, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, an American group that seeks to declassify historical documents, welcomed Hatoyama's investigation.

"The longer they denied this, the harder it was for them to come forward and say they weren't telling the truth. They backed themselves into a corner on this one," Wampler said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

Bunroku Yoshino, a former Foreign Ministry official who oversaw relations with the U.S., did his part on Dec. 1.

Testifying in a lawsuit brought by a former newspaper reporter, 91-year-old Yoshino reversed his earlier denials and acknowledged signing some of the Okinawa agreements.

"It is a major historical truth," he said afterward.

UK reporter, US Marine killed in Afghan blast

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer

LONDON – An explosion outside a village in southern Afghanistan killed a U.S. Marine and a veteran war correspondent who became the first British journalist killed in the conflict, officials said.

With the death of Sunday Mirror journalist Rupert Hamer, 18 reporters have been killed in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, according to figures kept by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

"Tragically it was a matter of time," former British forces commander Col. Richard Kemp told Sky News television. "Our journalists, the same as other journalists, our British journalists deploying on operations with forces in Afghanistan or Iraq face exactly the same risks as our soldiers face out there."

Hamer, 39, and photographer Philip Coburn, 43, were accompanying a U.S. Marine patrol Saturday when their vehicle was hit by a makeshift bomb near the village of Nawa in Helmand, the Defense Ministry said.

An U.S. Marine was also killed in the blast, the ministry said. Coburn was seriously wounded in the explosion but remains in stable condition, the military said.

The Defense Ministry originally said that an Afghan soldier had been killed in the attack, but later released a revised statement saying that "there were no Afghan nationals killed or injured in this incident." The statement cited new information gathered from the field, but gave no further details.

The statement also said that five Marines were left badly hurt. It did not elaborate on their condition.

The past year has been particularly deadly for those fighting the war and those covering it. Canadian journalist Michelle Lang died late last year while embedded with Canadian troops in Afghanistan. An Afghan translator for The New York Times, Sultan Munadi, was killed in September during a rescue operation.

The Sunday Mirror said that Hamer and Coburn had flown to the region on New Year's Eve and were embedded with the American military. Their trip was to have lasted for a month, the paper said.

Both were veterans of reporting from conflict zones. It was Hamer's fifth excursion to Afghanistan, while Coburn had previously reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and Rwanda.

"Rupert believed that the only place to report a war was from the front line, and as our defense correspondent he wanted to be embedded with the U.S. Marines at the start of their vital surge into southern Afghanistan," Sunday Mirror Editor Tina Weaver said in a statement.

The Sun's Tom Newton Dunn, who used to serve as the paper's defense correspondent, said he and Hamer often spent time together in the field.

"He was extremely good at getting news, and he really understood the armed forces," Newton Dunn told the BBC. "And was never afraid to go out to places like Afghanistan or Iraq."

Government officials lined up to offer their condolences, with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying Hamer and Coburn brought "courage, skill and dedication to reporting from the front line," something he said ensured that the world could see and read about what international forces were achieving in Afghanistan.

British defense minister Bob Ainsworth said the pair accompanied him on his most recent trip to Afghanistan and that he was "impressed by their hard work and professionalism.

"My thoughts and deepest sympathies are with the families, friends and colleagues of both men at this extremely distressing time," Ainsworth said.

Hamer is survived by his wife Helen and three young children, his newspaper said.

CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan

(WARNING): Article contains propaganda!

* * * * *

By Douglas Valentine

January 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Why?

“Why?” The grieving family members ask. “Why did the terrorists kill our loved ones?”

The hardnosed colleagues of the four fallen CIA officers comfort the wives and children (and one husband). They shake off their sorrow, huddle together by the graves, and vow vengeance. They bathe themselves in their seething anger like it was the blood of the lamb.

Why? The American public and its officials ask. Why? The media repeats, adding in shock and awe, “Don’t the terrorists know that you can’t kill CIA officers?”

Why, everyone wonders, did a Jordanian suicide bomber target the CIA, knowing that the wrath of the biggest, baddest, bloodthirstiest Gang on Planet Earth is going to start dropping bombs and slitting throats until its lust for death and suffering is satisfied?

Over the course of its sixty year reign of terror, in which it has overthrown countless governments, started countless wars costing countless lives, and otherwise subverted and sabotaged friends and foes alike, the CIA has lost less than 100 officers.

On a good day, one CIA drone, and one CIA hit team, kills 100 innocent women and children, and nobody bats an eye.

Why would the terrorists suddenly deviate from the norm – the sacred accommodation – and throw the whole game into chaos?

Why?

OK, I’ll Tell You Why

There is a phenomenon called The Universal Brotherhood of Officers. It exists in the twilight zone between imagination and in reality, in the fog of war. It is why officers are separated from enlisted men in POW camps and given better treatment. It is why officers of opposing armies have more in common with one another than they have with their own enlisted men.

Officers are trained to think of their subordinate ranks as canon fodder. Their troops are expendable. They know when they send a unit up a hill, some will be killed. That is why they do not fraternize with thee lower ranks. This class distinction exists across the world, and is the basis of the sacred accommodation. No slobs need apply.

It is why the Bush Family flew the Bin Laden Family, and other Saudi Royals, out of the United States in the days after 9-11. If anyone was a case officer to the 9-11 bombers, or had knowledge about the bombers or any follow-up plots, it was these “protected” people.

CIA officers are at the pinnacle of the Universal Brotherhood. They are the Protected Few, blessed with false identities and bodyguards, flying in jet planes, living in villas, eating fancy food and enjoying state of the art technology. CIA officers tell army generals what to do.They direct Congressional committees. They assassinate heads of state and innocent children equally, with impunity, with indifference.

In Afghanistan they manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the shade.They know the Taliban tax the farmers growing the opium, and they know that Karzai’s warlords convert the opium into heroin and fly it to the Russian mob. They are amused by the antics of earnest DEA agents, who, in their ignorant patriotic bliss, cannot believe such an accommodation exists.

CIA officers are trained to exist in this moral netherworld of protected drug dealers, for the simple reasons that the CIA in every conflict has a paramount need to keep secure communication channels open to the enemy. This is CIA 101. The CIA, as part of its mandate, is authorized to negotiate with the enemy, but it can only do so as long as the channel is secure and deniable.

No proof will ever exist, so the American public can be deceived.

Take Iran Contra, when Reagan vowed never to negotiate with terrorists, then a team to Tehran to sell missiles to thee Iranians and use the money to buy guns for the drug dealing Contras.

There’s stated and unstated policy – and the CIA is always pursuing the unstated, which is why it relies so heavily on its patriotic and witless assets in the mainstream media.

In Afghanistan the accommodation is the environment that allows the CIA to have a secure channel to the Taliban to negotiate on simple matters like prisoner exchanges.

The exchange of British journalist Peter Moore for an Iraqi “insurgent” in CIA custody was an example of how the accommodation works in Iraq. Moore was held by a Shia group allegedly allied to Iran, and his freedom depended entirely on the CIA reaching an accommodation with America’s enemies in the Iraq resistance. The details of such prisoner exchanges are never revealed, but involve secret negotiations by the CIA and the resistance over issues of strategic importance to both sides.

The accommodation is the intellectual environment which provides a space for any eventual reconciliation. There are always preliminary negotiations for a reconciliation or ceasefire, and in every modern conflict that’s the CIA’s job.

And the Afghanis want reconciliation. Apart from the US and CIA, Karzai and his clique at every level have filial relations with the Taliban.

No matter how powerful the CIA is, it can’t overcome that.

Ed Brady, an Army officer detailed to the CIA and assigned to the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon in 1967 and 1968, explains how the accommodation worked in Vietnam.

While Brady and his Vietnamese counterpart Colonel Tan were lunching at a restaurant in Dalat, Tan pointed at a woman eating noodle soup and drinking Vietnamese coffee at the table next to them. He told Brady that she was the Viet Cong province chief’s wife. Brady, of course, wanted to grab her and use her for bait.

Coolly, Colonel Tan said to him: “You don’t understand. You don’t live the way we live. You don’t have any family here. You’re going to go home when this operation is over. You don’t think like you’re going to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids that go to school. I have a wife that has to go to market…. And you want me to go kill his wife? You want me to set a trap for him and kill him when he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they going to do to our wives?”

“The VC didn’t run targeted operations against them either,” Brady explains. “There were set rules that you played by. If you went out and conducted a military operation and you chased them down fair and square in the jungle and you had a fight, that was okay. If they ambushed you on the way back from a military operation, that was fair. But to conduct these clandestine police operations and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of immoral to them. That was not cricket. And the Vietnamese were very, very leery of upsetting that.”

Obama’s Dirty War in Afghanistan relies largely on such clandestine CIA operations, in which wives and children are used as bait to trap husbands – or are killed as a way of punishing men in the resistance.

The CIA plays the same role in Afghanistan that the Gestapo played in the cities and the Einsatzgruppen performed in the countryside for the Nazis in World War Two – killing and terrorizing the urban resistance and partisan bands.

Its unstated object is to rip apart working and middle class families and thus the whole fabric of Afghan society, until the Afghan people accept American domination, through its suppletif ruling class.

And this is why the CIA was targeted.

The CIA is utterly predictable. It will invoke the “100-1 Rule” used by the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen and go on a killing spree until its vengeance is satisfied. At the end of the day, the Afghan people will only hate the Americans more. This makes the CIA happy, on the premise that terror will make the people submit. But in Afghanistan it spells protracted war, and as in Vietnam, eventual defeat.

Source: Information Clearing House.
Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24350.htm.

Heavy snow halts planes, trains and cars in Europe

By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER, Associated Press Writer

BERLIN – Europeans were struggling to restore roads and railways Sunday after heavy snow caused hundreds of traffic accidents, halted flights from Germany and France, downed power lines in Poland and trapped more than 160 people overnight on a frozen German highway.

The 148 adults and 19 children stuck on Germany's coastal A20 highway survived by running their car engines until rescuers using snow plows and excavators pushed through 6.5-foot (2-meter) drifts to free them Sunday morning, police in the town of Altentreptow said.

"At least the firefighters were able to bring them hot beverages and food while they were waiting," said Jens Apelt, a spokesman for the Altentreptow highway police. After being rescued, the people were brought to tents set up by local aid organizations until rescuers could unblock all the cars.

"We're trying to free all cars from the snow so that the drivers can get back to their vehicles and take a different road instead," Apelt said.

Hundreds of weather-related road accidents were reported in Germany after a second day of heavy snowfall, especially along the Baltic Coast. Two men were killed when their car hit a tree in Nordvorpommern.

Ferry service across the Baltic to Scandinavia was canceled, and rough sea swells flooded several streets in the cities of Flensburg and Luebeck while threatening to break levees in the village of Dahmeshoeved. Rescue teams were busy repairing damage, the Germany news agency DAPD said.

"The waves of the Baltic Sea are whipping against the boardwalk, pulling bricks out of the wall with incredible power which are flying around uncontrollably," police in Luebeck-Travemuende said in a statement.

In southeastern France, about 800 people at a snowbound airport in Lyon spent the night huddled on waiting room armchairs or camping cots, after flights in and out of the southeastern city were halted Saturday night. Flights resumed gradually Sunday morning.

France's TF1 TV said freezing rain overnight made a virtual skating rink out of one highway near Tours in France's Loire Valley, with some cars skidding out of control and crashing into road barriers.

In southern Poland, about 80,000 people were without electricity Sunday after snow-laden tree branches cracked, damaging several power lines, the news agency PAP reported.

In the German city of Anklam, near the Polish border, rescue team freed a regional train carrying 14 passengers that was stuck in drifts, DAPD reported. Many trains in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania were not running because of snow blocking tracks, the railways said.

Several German coastal and island towns were also cut off from electricity.

At Frankfurt airport, 61 flights were canceled and more than 400 people spent the night at the airport.

In southern Denmark, strong winds and snowfall also caused chaos on the roads. Armored military tanks were put on duty to assist emergency vehicles through the snow, while authorities warned that big "wind-sensitive vehicles" should not cross the Oresund bridge to Sweden.

In Britain, Press Association news agency put the number of weather-related deaths at 26 — including a woman who died after being found lying in the snow in a wooded area in northern England, and a 90-year-old woman who fell and froze to death in her garden earlier this week.

British forecasters predicted temperatures would remain frigid in many areas for the next week. The Red Cross and the military have been mobilized to deliver supplies to snowbound Britons. British Gas said it had experienced its busiest week on record with many calls reporting broken boilers and frozen pipes.

In Croatia, snow swelled rivers and triggered emergency anti-flood measures. A number of houses were flooded in the southern town of Metkovic, forcing some residents to use small boats to reach polling stations during Sunday's presidential runoff, state-run news agency HINA reported.

China becomes biggest exporter, edging out Germany

By JOE McDONALD, AP Business Writer

BEIJING – Already the biggest auto market and steel maker, China edged past Germany in 2009 to become the top exporter, yet another sign of its rapid rise and the spread of economic power from West to East.

Total 2009 exports were more than $1.2 trillion, China's customs agency said Sunday. That was ahead of the 816 billion euros ($1.17 trillion) forecast for Germany by its foreign trade organization, BGA.

China's new status is mostly symbolic but highlights its growing presence as an industrial power, major buyer of oil, iron ore and other commodities and, increasingly, as an investor and key voice in managing the global economy.

Its ability to unseat longtime export leader Germany reflects the ability of agile, low-cost Chinese manufacturers to keep selling abroad even as other exporters have been hammered by a slump in global demand.

China overtook Germany in 2007 as the third-largest economy and is expected to unseat Japan as No. 2 behind the United States as early as this year. Its trade boom has helped Beijing pile up the world's biggest foreign currency reserves at more than $2 trillion.

The global crisis speeded China's rise up the ranks as a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) government stimulus kept its economy and consumption growing while the U.S. and other markets struggled with recession. Chinese economic growth rose to 8.9 percent in the third quarter of 2009 and the government is forecasting a full-year expansion of 8.3 percent.

On Friday, data released by an industry group showed China topped the slumping United States in auto sales in 2009 — a status industry analysts a few years ago did not expect it to achieve until as late as 2020.

Economists and Germany's national chamber of commerce said earlier the country was likely to lose its longtime crown as top exporter.

China's exports per person are still much lower than those of Germany, which has a much smaller population of 80 million people. China sells low-tech goods such as shoes, toys and furniture, while Germany exports machinery and other higher-value products. German commentators note their country supplies the factory equipment used by top Chinese manufacturers.

"If China grows, this pushes the world's economy — and that's good for export-oriented Germany as well," an economist for the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Volker Treier, said last month.

Of course, with 1.3 billion people, China is still one of the world's poorest countries. It ranked 130th among economies in per capita income in 2008, according to the World Bank.

China's trade ended 2009 with exports rebounding in December, jumping 17.7 percent after 13 months of declines, the customs agency said.

The upturn was an "important turning point" for exporters, a customs agency economist, Huang Guohua, said on state television, CCTV.

"We can say that China's export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports," Huang said.

Plunging demand in 2008 forced thousands of factories to close and threw millions of laborers out of work.

China's trade surplus shrank by 34.2 percent in 2009 to $196.07 billion, the customs agency said. That reflected China's stronger demand for imported raw materials and consumer goods.

Iron ore imports rose 41.6 percent to 630 million tons, while oil imports rose 13.9 percent to 1.4 billion barrels, the agency said. Economists say the buying binge has been driven in part by a Chinese effort to build up stockpiles while global prices are low.

The United States and other governments complain that part of China's export success is based on currency controls and improper subsidies that give its exporters an unfair advantage against foreign rivals.

Washington has imposed anti-dumping duties on imports of Chinese-made steel pipes and some other goods, while the European Union has imposed curbs on Chinese shoes.

The U.S. and other governments also complain that Beijing keeps its currency, the yuan, undervalued. Beijing broke the yuan's link to the dollar in 2005 and it rose gradually until late 2008, but has been frozen since then against the U.S. currency in what economists say is an effort by Beijing to keep its exporters competitive.

The dollar's weakness against the euro and some other currencies pulls down the yuan in markets that use them and makes Chinese goods even more attractive there, adding to China's trade surplus.

Yemen's president open to dialogue with al-Qaida

SAN'A, Yemen – Yemen's president said he is ready to talk to al-Qaida members who renounce violence, suggesting he could show them the same kind of leniency he has granted militants in the past despite U.S. pressure to crack down on the terror group.

Yemen is moving cautiously in the fight against al-Qaida, worried over a potential backlash in a country where anger at the U.S. and extremism are widespread. Thousands of Yemenis are battle-hardened veterans of past "holy wars" in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Iraq, and though most are not engaged in violence now they preserve a die-hard al-Qaida ideology.

"Any movement against al-Qaida will lead to the fall of the Yemeni regime," warned Ali Mohammed Omar, a Yemeni who fought in Afghanistan from 1990-1992 and says he met Osama bin Laden twice during that time.

If the U.S. or its allies become directly involved, "the whole (Yemeni) people will become al-Qaida. Instead of 30 or 40 people, it would become millions," he told The Associated Press in an interview.

Yemeni forces recently launched their heaviest strikes and raids against al-Qaida in years, and Washington has praised San'a for showing a new determination against al-Qaida's offshoot in the country.

The United States has increased money and training for Yemen's counterterror forces, calling al-Qaida in Yemen a global threat after it allegedly plotted a failed attempt to bomb a U.S. passenger jet on Christmas Day.

But President Ali Abdullah Saleh's comments raised the possibility he could continue a policy that has frustrated U.S. officials in the past — releasing al-Qaida militants on promises they will not engage in terrorism again.

Several have since broken those promises and are believed to have returned to al-Qaida's ranks.

"Dialogue is the best way ... even with al-Qaida, if they set aside their weapons and return to reason," Saleh said in an interview with Abu Dhabi TV aired late Saturday.

He said Yemen would pursue those who continued violence, but "we are ready to reach an understanding with anyone who renounces violence and terrorism."

In the past, Yemeni officials have defended the reconciliation policy as a necessity, saying force alone cannot stop al-Qaida.

Saleh's government has been weakened by multiple wars and crises. It has little authority outside a region around the capital, and tribes dominate vast areas of the impoverished mountainous nation — many of them bitter at the central government for failing to develop their regions.

Hundreds of al-Qaida fighters, foreigners and Yemenis, are believed to be sheltered in mountainous areas. Al-Qaida Yemenis get help from relatives, sometimes out of tribal loyalty more than ideology — and when the government kills or arrests militants or their relatives, it risks angering the heavily armed tribes.

Another factor is the regime's alliances with hardline Islamists, such as Sheik Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, one of Yemen's most prominent clerics. The U.S. has labeled him a terrorist for alleged links to al-Qaida. But the government relies on his tacit support and denies he is a member of the terror group.

In a prayer sermon Friday, al-Zindani railed against U.S. pressure to fight al-Qaida, accusing Washington and the United Nations of seeking to "impose an international occupation of Yemen."

In Yemen, "it is difficult to draw the line between who is a fundamentalist and who is al-Qaida. It's a spectrum," said Ali Saif Hassan, who runs a Yemeni group that mediates between the government and opposition.

But those with extremist thought "are everywhere, in the government, in the military, among the tribes and the wealthy," he said, and some could oppose cooperation with the U.S. against al-Qaida.

The regime has also used Islamic radicals to fight in an ongoing bloody war against Shiite rebels in the north and to oppose secessionists in the south — two threats that many feel the government sees as more dangerous than al-Qaida.

Omar, the Afghan veteran, is a case in point. He heads an organization in the southern city of Aden mobilizing against the secession movement.

During his time in Afghanistan, the 42-year-old Omar recalled meeting bin Laden twice in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. He said they discussed the situation in Yemen, the al-Qaida chief's ancestral homeland.

Bin Laden told him al-Qaida bought thousands of weapons sold off illicitly by the former independent government in south Yemen when it unified with the north in 1990, arms that remain in Yemen, Omar said.

After returning to Yemen in 1992, Omar — who says he is not in al-Qaida — was imprisoned twice, including a year-long stint in 2005 on charges he helped send militants to fight American troops in Iraq. He was acquitted and released.

He estimated Yemen has some 20,000 veterans from the Afghan war in the 1980s and 1990s as well as other Islamic extremist fronts like Chechnya and Bosnia. A smaller number have returned home from more recent jihads, like the war in Iraq, he said.

They and younger generations form a bedrock of sympathy for al-Qaida that could turn to outright support. "If the government draws them into a fight, they will fight the government."

San'a points to successes in its reconciliation programs, saying they have turned some 600 former mujahedeen into "good citizens."

But there have been security lapses.

The leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, Naser al-Wahishi, and other senior figures escaped from a San'a prison in 2006 — with help, it is believed, from sympathizers in the security services.

Hazem al-Mujali, accused in the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker off Yemen, was recently released from prison. Last month, he escaped a government raid outside the capital on an al-Qaida cell suspected of plotting attacks.

Another released militant is Fahd al-Quso, wanted by the United States for his role in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 American sailors. He served three years of a 10 year sentence before being freed in 2008.

Now he is on the run with other al-Qaida fighters in the mountains of Shabwa province, said Ali Hassan al-Ahmar, the province's governor.

Al-Quso long reassured authorities he was staying peacefully at home in Aden, but it became "clear he was meeting with al-Qaida elements," al-Ahmar said in an interview with the Sharq al-Awsat newspaper.