After several days silence from the Registanis on their theory that the case against Jamshid Muhtorov is all trumped up by the evil Muslim-hating feds, first, more stubborn skepticism pretending its not conspiracy theory from Foust, in a post, "The Merits of the Mukhtarov Case, and Why Skepticism Is Not Conspiracy."
It's a response to a tasty intellectual beat-down of Foust from Gunpowder & Lead which does a pretty good job of tackling the "college stuff " like the "epistemological errors" and does a "critical" reading pointing out that the indictment doesn't even mention "chat rooms" -- a good answer to Foust's nonsense. The Gunpowder & Lead bloggers Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Lauren Morgan then proceed to question the basic Foustian premise that "the IJU doesn't exist." They also call out Foust, as I have done with another author misrepresented in this way by Foust on the Atlantic, for misrepresenting an author on the global jihadi movement, JZ Adams.
And I'm so glad that these authors also called out the obvious -- that the groups themselves actively portray themselves as global jihadi, and that's important to document even if they don't have the capacity to really go big-time -- which I did with Foust on his claim that the extremist group in Kazakhstan was invoking the Zhanaozen killings.
Oh, you can't win if you try to prove that Foust is or isn't in a conspiracy theory, but I do point out that there are schools of thought that form around power groupings of various sort that have a vested interest in either minimizing or maximizing the terrorist threat in Central Asia, as I outlined them. This prevents open-minded and clear analysis of the real situation because those in the schools become attached to their theories -- the anti-anti crowd has the mindshare much of the time in public discussions and it makes it impossible to judge whether the government is in fact making its case because looking at any piece of it only earns withering scorn from the punditocracy -- and questioning them only causes their knee-jerk reaction to put you in the same basket as Atlas Shrugged.
(On the 2004 bombings, while I don't think we have to take the Uzbek government's word about anything, I do think we have to show the mechanisms and mindsets that bring even a brutal government to deliberately setting off bombs and destroying property or even killing their own people in an "active measure" and nobody really does have the facts of what really happened there as there has never been a credible Uzbek defector or WikiLeaks of the regime.)
Like Kendzior, Foust attaches Muhtorov to the human rights movement. Is that deliberate so as to smear the human rights movement -- the human rights movement they both often scorn (in favour of the establishment in Uzbekistan and a soft touch for Karimov). Muhtorov was not representative of the human rights movement. He joined a group because he appeared to have family reasons to protest injustice -- his sister was accused of murder at the age of 19 that she appeared not to have anything to do with, but that may have been gang-related. He was not in Andijan nor did he flee the persecution related to Andijan. He was kicked out of the group that he was in by its chair because he demanded more money but didn't file financial reports. He joined another more radical farmer's group and then fled to Kyrgyzstan where he was portrayed at least by the official refugee committee as an "opportunist". He may or may not be a double agent and so forth and so on -- in other words, he is not a credible human rights activist by anyone's account, and yet these two keep describing him as one in a two-for that both smears the human rights movement that in fact disbanded the chapter he headed to get rid of him (!) and which also seems to exonerate him in advance from terrorism charges.
Next Foust does one of those reversals and double-backs for which he is infamous:
As Daveed notes, Mukhtarov does seem to have fallen afoul of the “material support” laws in the U.S. My argument, poorly stated in that initial post, was that those laws are themselves inherently flawed, a point JM Berger also picked up on in the comments and as I repeated. Saying the law is flawed is not the same as saying Mukhtarov broke no law, which is what Daveed (incorrectly) reduces my argument to.
This is so much like the way he nimbly evades any moral condemnation associated with drones, by saying "drones don't kill people, bad 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation kills people" -- and puts it all off to a meta layer that he doesn't have to analyze then because it's too big and complex and removed from the specific drone.
Perhaps these laws are inherently flawed -- I'd have to think about that some more. There are many legal critiques of the war on terror that find it overbroad. In Muhtorov's case, however, the "progressives" at Registan have to explain why it isn't material support to make travel plans to go meet up with a group of extremists watched by the Turkish government in a group that appears to have committed terrorist acts already, using a code word that has been used by Al Qaeda, and promising to die and only see his little daughter in heaven. Do they really believe he was only going to a relative's wedding and saying the bride's dress was "to die for"?
Having pitched that lie mispresenting his own original position which -- we can all read the record -- claimed the US was "crazy" for making these charges against this specific man (not that "the law" was bad and misused) he goes further and suddenly disassociates himself from the original claim by Gazistan and The Bug Pit:
All that being said, and this is separate from me and Daveed, there is a growing chorus of skeptics that seem to allege some sort of weird-ass plot between the Uzbek government and the State Department, or whatever, to trade Mukhtarov, a prominent dissident, in exchange for access to the NDN. That is, put simply, silly and completely without data even to suggest it is the case.
Oh, are we going to see that rapprochement established with at least some "good" EurasiaNet writers now start to evaporate?! Oh, and thanks for claiming falsely that Muhtorov was a "prominent dissident". Fake!
I agree that it was without data and was pure speculation and I characterized it as such during the days Registan was silent and treading water and talking to their hook-ups, whatever they are.
THAT Foust has hook-ups (as every good defense pundit would be expected to have) is revealed (bragged about) in his next paragraph:
I can say that more than one U.S. official working on Uzbek policy was genuinely surprised by Mukhtarov’s arrest, and it almost certainly wasn’t a feature of the NDN negotiations (and it isn’t something either State or DOD would do anyway)
I agree it's fake, but I don't agree that it's something DOD "wouldn't do". Of course, it doesn't work in some a literalist, instrumental way. But THAT Karimov literally put the NDN on the block over the State Department's award to a dissident is revealed in a WikiLeaks cable and it stands to reason State might tip-toe. The DOD might well get into talks, which State would then have to be part of, about designating certain groups as terrorists formally on the US list. That process isn't something that necessarily proceeds with all due legal and IHL rigour but can indeed be bargained with.
Foust provides more cover for Muhtorov's actions:
Turkey does have a large Uzbek population, and that population is vocal in its dissidence and opposition to the Karimov regime. There are perfectly legitimate and innocent reasons for Mukhtarov to travel there, whatever his emailed statements have said.
Well, sure. But to a non-existent wedding? To a group that is characterized as a terrorist group?
Then all Foust can do is say "there's no such thing" despite the evidence:
Back to Daveed’s point: about the real threat posed by the IJU, he too engages in some epistemological perfidy. While scolding me for reducing the Mukhtarov indictment to “crimes on a chatroom,” Daveed pulls from the indictment itself a list of crimes that include sending emails favorable of Juma Namangani and saying he supports the goals of a website administrator. I fail to see the distinction, even if he is working on semantics rather than specifics, between “email correspondence with a website administrator” and “crimes on a chatroom.” It comes down to a lot of big talk on the Internet (including the bay’ah, because who ever engages in hyperbole on the Internet, ever?) and the purchase of a plane ticket. I don’t dispute that that can constitute a U.S. crime — I do, however, think that is a dumb basis for a law.
Ultimately, Foust's argumentation hinges on the idea that "the US gets very bad information from the Uzbek government." He was not available at all to question the case of the Uzbek who wanted to assassinate Obama -- no comment at all. He wasn't available to question the cases of trafficking by Uzbeks which coincided in time with big cases solved in Europe and Uzbekistan to make it possible to declare Uzbekistan as fighting traffickers in the annual State Department reports -- although all these cases may have had Uzbek intelligence, too. (And maybe Uzbek government intelligence, as awful a regime as it is, isn't always wrong? How can we tell?)
He reverts finally to claiming it's all just big talk in a chat room (something Foust knows a lot about himself, personally, with all of Twitter's big-talk chat room and his 5,000 followers) and getting on a plane to a country where a lot of your fellow countrymen happen to live isn't a crime -- and ducks from explaining why connection to a terrorist group isn't a crime, the crime of "material support" -- leaving only the very dubious claim that this group -- which is shown to have had explosives in Germany and charged with making attacks on Coalition Forces -- as "fake".
Nathan Hamm then appears to Ask Some Important Questions and essentially "defend the honour of uniform" (as they say in Russian) so that the powers-that-be don't think Registan is just a tabloid with Jousting Faust at the helm.
I don't know if he read my own notes on the case -- with skepticism about Registan's skepticism -- but he, too, does respond to Joshua Kucera's claim that the US was "selling out dissidents" for the sake of the Northern Distribution Network (the NATO cargo lane through Central Asia). I had a lot of questions about that dubious thesis even though I'm quite prepared to say that the US doesn't do enough for dissidents and may sacrifice human rights principles at times. (It's precisely because I think this that I think you have to make the case as carefully as you can -- after all, they are professionals, we are amateurs.)
As I studied Kucera's links in his blog making this hyped-up claim, I could see that he likely got it from Gazistan -- because Gazistan put out the idea first, and more starkly. To be sure, Kucera constantly links human rights and the NDN, and scours the landscape to find human rights activists inside the country complaining about the US so he is capable of coming up with this concept on his own. Still, I think the musings of Gazistan on Muhtorov helped
Gazistan is written by "Aslan Juhayman Khan" which translates as "Scowling Lion King" from Arabic. I haven't read enough of his posts to figure out where he might be from, or whether he's actually an Arabic-speaker. He sounds like a typical foreign student in the US or the West dumping on Western civilization and with many grievances about US power in the world. His story of a visit to the Met's new Islamic art exhibit is telling -- he drips with cynicism and contempt at the way this exhibit was put together -- which boils down to um, white northern ice people putting vibrant tan Arabic -- and Persian! -- people in constrictive boxes...or something... I visited the exhibit -- very crowded -- and found it fascinating and educational although I felt there was not enough "story" in the placards at each item. I got much more enjoyment from it by coming with a friend who studied in Central Asia and knows a lot about the cultures and could unpack some of it -- and she was more interesting than the tour guides whose canned explanations I could catch here and there. Of course it needs more visits, but I don't anything deliberately different was done about the Islamic exhibit versus the Indian paintings (I do think it's possible the exhibit was rushed to opening for various reasons -- I did an analysis of the craven misuse of museum art to suck up to Berdymukhamedov in a preview). For Aslan, it's a study in evil Western Orientalism.
Aslan has persisted in his defense of Muhtorov -- "Internetting While Muslim" (i.e. like "driving while black," like the phrase used to describe American policemen's excuse to stop and search black drivers).
His defense basically seems to be: Muslims get in touch with various groups that don't really exist or if they exist aren't so terrible; they sometimes say things like they hope to die for their cause but they don't really mean it; the FBI shouldn't listen in on Muslims' chat like this because it's racist and they are nabbing the wrong people.
He made this conclusion after reading the complaint and the indictment which I provided; Kucera hadn't seen these, and hasn't returned to the topic.
Interestingly, Hamm doesn't get into the group-think supplied by Foust (who claimed the entire prosecution of Muhtorov was "crazy") and Kucera and others, notably Uzbek social media expert Sarah Kendzior, who has made out Muhtorov and his group affiliations to be "philosophically like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International" (wrong, or at least, partly wrong, as AI does defend "defensive jihad" and has dropped its once-noble credo of supporting only non-violence cases).
He steps out of it slightly because he can see that they are all cruisin' for a bruisin' if they continue that unsupportable line, and he inquires about The Facts -- although in doing so, he reveals his own deep "anti-anti" prejudices:
I get the reasoning you’re using in claiming the IJU might not even exist. Since the position is philosophical, where you do draw the line? When is the organization “real?” There was a period when the fair question would have been whether or not the IMU existed anymore. The tables are now turned, and the IJU doesn’t do much beyond an odd job here and there and, apparently, practice horrible communications security. Small and unsuccessful as it now is, it’s not non-existent. They don’t pose much of a threat, but they are still active. Are you arguing instead that they don’t rate high enough to be a designated terrorist organization? Or are you saying that they aren’t actually active they’re just some dudes who talk big on the internet? You’re right that they’re hard to pin down, and we’ve both seen people fill in gaps with a lot of bullshit, but in laying out the realities of the organization and putting its threat into context, I think you have to be careful not to go overboard
Given how Hamm normally defends Foust, and given how Fousts literally lies about and misportrays the writings of people on terrorist groups, making claims about them that aren't supportable which you can debunk merely by reading the people's texts, I would be more inclined than ever to think the IJU exists. And it doesn't have to be part of the global conspiracy, and can be the gang that didn't shoot straight, and still constitute a crime for a US resident to be in touch with.
Then here's some truly Foustian fancy foot-work in response to Hamm:
To be precise, I did not actually say “the U.S. government is doing the Uzbek government’s dirty work for it, about a group that probably doesn’t really exist.” I’ll cop that one can read that into what I was writing, which you’re right is the result of an off-the-cuff history of how the government forms its opinion about these groups. But I most certainly didn’t say that quote, and I don’t think that’s an accurate distillation of what I did write.
As for the threat Mukhtarov poses… I mean yeah. I’m still lost for what he did that would actually constitute criminal activity, at least apart from the “material support” laws (and that’s what really worries me). I’m not sure, however, that you can neatly disaggregate Mukhtarov’s indictment from a broader overreaction to some Uzbek groups — especially when the one we even really talk about as a “threat” anymore, the IMU, is bottled up in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus.
And I have to conclude this: how is Foust so sure that the US government, that has far more resources than he, even if he used to work for the DOD, is out of date? Maybe he's out of date? He's on the outside now, right? And what's so terrible about the material support laws in this narrow construction -- traveling to help a group apparently commit a terrorist act of some kind that was coded as a "wedding"? Whether or not they were capable of putting it on or whether they really are "global," it's still wrong. There are 4,000 Uzbeks fighting in the Afghan war. Do the Registanis really think they do nothing but just wander around getting lost in the AfPak nexus?