When news broke that the United Arab Emirates had hired Xe Services, LLC (formerly Blackwater) founder Erik Prince to set up a secret, private army made up of non-Arab soldiers, it presented a dangerous possibility for rulers in the Middle East and North Africa who aim to reassert control over their increasingly discontented populations. Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan hired Prince (a fundamentalist evangelical Christian nationalist who has been accused of fueling a “holy war” with Islam) to set up a paramilitary force of roughly 800 soldiers, drawn mostly from Latin America and South Africa, and trained by military veterans from the United States, United Kingdom and France.

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Outsourcing Repression: The UAE and the Future of the 2011 Revolutions

The following piece,Was Osama bin Laden a relevant, popular leader in the Middle East at the time of his killing? written by Aslan Media Founder Reza Aslan, originally appeared at KCET.com. Reza takes a closer look at what the death of Al-Qaeda’s leader means for the future of the terrorist group. Here are a few things to keep in mind as news continues to circulate about Osama bin Laden’s death. According to poll numbers: not really. In Lebanon, according to a Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project poll conducted this year, he had a 1 percent support base. In Turkey, his approval rating was at 3 percent, and in countries like Jordan and Egypt, bin Laden only had 13 percent and 22 percent popularity, respectively. Even in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment is usually high, his popularity is only at 18 percent. It wasn’t always this way. For example, in Jordan, bin Laden’s popularity reached a staggering 56 percent in 2003, but al-Qaida’s attacks on Muslims had by 2006 begun to deeply alienate the “Arab Street.” Indeed, as former Ambassador Marc Ginsberg noted in a Huffington Post column yesterday, “15 percent of the 3,010 victims resulting from al-Qaida’s attacks between 2004 and 2008 were NON-Muslim.” A Sheik from Anbar Province in Iraq described his reaction to bin Laden’s death this way : “All orphans, widows and people who suffered that butcher should be happy now … The killing of Bin Laden is victory for all humanity, not only for Americans.” How relevant is Bin Laden’s death in “ending” the “War on Terror” and to the region as a whole? Perhaps al-Qaida’s most effective branch is in Africa, where the al-Shabab group in Somalia have successfully attacked and killed numerous Africans, including a deadly attack in Uganda last summer. Just last week, al-Qaida organized and planted a bomb in the popular Moroccan café Argana (one of my favorite destinations in the country), killing 16 people. So while it has recently been less of a lethal force, al-Qaida’s attacks will most likely continue with or without bin Laden. Analysts like Shadi Hamid with Brookings Doha Center view bin Laden’s death as a minor event in terms of its regional significance. Hamid tweeted yesterday, “Al Qaeda, in recent yrs, morphed from an organization into an idea. And the idea has proven increasingly unattractive to most Arabs.” Others, like popular Arab blogger The Arabist , agree. “But the sentiment Bin Laden evokes today is probably indifference. Bin Laden simply wasn’t an important figure in recent years, and was particularly irrelevant to the Arab uprisings.” Indeed, the world had not heard from bin Laden in more than six months; he was conspicuously silent about the recent democratic movements in the Arab world. Al-Qaida had tried on numerous occasions to tie itself in with the Arab uprisings but its words fell on deaf ears. Khalil el-Anani, an expert on al-Qaida, told the Associated Press , “Bin Laden became part of the past, just like the Arab regimes that have been toppled” What a coincidence that the same year Arab authoritarian rulers collapse, bin Laden dies.” Regardless of bin Laden’s relevance to the recent Arab uprisings, many believe that his death will fracture an already weak organization. Lawrence Wright, writer of the popular book on al-Qaida, The Looming Tower, says the death of bin Laden is a milestone . “He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade — or more than a decade, if you go back to the embassy bombings in 1998 when we first went after him — he’s been a symbol of resistance and of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe. So getting bin Laden is immeasurably important.”   Read more of Reza Aslan’s piece here , at KCET.org Photo Credit: Mike Kline

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Bin Laden’s Dead. What Now?

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials.

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Opposition to U.S. trial likely to keep mastermind of 9/11 attacks in detention