NEW YORK (AP) - Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways, two elected officials said, contending that the police department has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system.
The city began examining passengers' bags on subways and buses after the second bomb attack in London two weeks ago. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have said several times that officers will not racially profile.
But over the weekend, state Assemblyman Dov Hikind said police should be focusing on those who fit the "terrorist profile."
"They all look a certain way," said Hikind, a Democrat from Brooklyn. "It's all very nice to be politically correct here, but we're talking about terrorism."
And on Tuesday, City Councilman James Oddo, a Republican from Staten Island, said that his emotions relating to the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack by Middle Eastern men in hijacked airplanes caused him to publicly declare his support for Hikind's statements.
"The reality is that there is a group of people who want to kill us and destroy our way of life," he said. "Young Arab fundamentalists are the individuals undertaking these acts of terror, and we should keep those facts prominently in our minds and eyes as we attempt to secure our populace."
Oddo commended Hikind for "rushing headlong against the strong undertow of political correctness."
Hikind said he planned to introduce legislation allowing police to racially profile, and Oddo said he intended to introduce a resolution in the City Council supporting the measure.
But the director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Wissam Nasr, said their push for racial profiling is offensive and ignorant because "terror comes in all shapes and sizes, and certainly there's no legislation or system that's going to identify terrorists on the spot."
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005
21:04 ||
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. . . the director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Wissam Nasr, said their push for racial profiling is offensive and ignorant because "terror comes in all shapes and sizes . . .
He's right. There are fat muslims, and skinny ones, and darker ones, and lighter ones and saudi ones, and yemeni ones, and ethiopian ones and . . .
California's San Joaquin Valley for some time has had the dirtiest air in the country. Monday, officials said gases from ruminating dairy cows, not exhaust from cars, are the region's biggest single source of a chief smog-forming pollutant.
Every year, the average dairy cow produces 19.3 pounds of gases, called volatile organic compounds, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District said. Those gases react with other pollutants to form ground-level ozone, or smog.
With 2.5 million dairy cows ââ¬â roughly one of every five in the country ââ¬â emissions of almost 20 pounds per cow mean that cattle in the San Joaquin Valley produce more organic compounds than are generated by either cars or trucks or pesticides, the air district said. The finding will serve as the basis for strict air-quality regulations on the region's booming dairy industry.
The dairy industry will be forced to invest millions of dollars in expensive pollution-control technology in feedlots and waste lagoons, and may even have to consider altering animals' diets to meet the region's planned air-quality regulations. Not surprisingly, industry officials challenged the estimate as scientifically unsound.
Air-quality regulators defended their estimate as a conservative one based on the best available research. But it was criticized by some scientists ââ¬â including one whose work was used by the district to arrive at the figure.
Five members of Congress and 12 state legislators had demanded that the district reconsider a similar draft estimate, calling it absurdly high. Environmentalists and some community groups, meanwhile, called the same figure too low.
The entire exercise of estimating cow emissions has been lampooned on talk radio as "fart science" run amok ââ¬âalthough most gas actually comes from the front end of the cow.
"I'd like to challenge the people that came up with this information to enclose yourself in a shop with a cow, and at the same time have someone enclose themselves in a similar shop with a car or truck running," one critic, Steve Hofman of Ripon, Calif., wrote to the Modesto Bee. "Then let me know the results."
"This is not some arcane dispute about cow gases," said Brent Newell, an attorney for the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. "We are talking about a public health crisis. It's not funny to joke about cow burps and farts when one in six children in Fresno schools is carrying an inhaler."
The dairy industry is growing fast in the San Joaquin Valley as farms driven out of the Chino area in Southern California by urbanization move into the Central Valley. Government officials estimate that over the next several years, the number of cows in the San Joaquin air basin will increase from 2.5 million to about 2.9 million.
Although air-quality officials now have a figure on the extent of the cow pollution problem, it remained unclear how far they could push dairies to reduce bovine emissions.
Cow manure is also a major source of emissions and will probably be targeted for regulation. Officials said they may also require dairies to alter the food cows eat in order to reduce flatulence.
Possible measures include scraping manure from cow corrals more frequently so it won't fester in the heat and installing digesters to break down pollution in the lagoons where cow waste is later flushed.
"We need immediate regulation now. We know the pollutants are coming off these dairies," said Tom Frantz, a native of Shafter, Calif., who heads a group called the Assn. of Irritated Residents. He says that he developed asthma in the last five years as factory dairy farms moved into the region. "Ag hasn't been regulated in the past, but times are changing. Our lungs will not become an agricultural subsidy."
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005
20:09 ||
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Although air-quality officials now have a figure on the extent of the cow pollution problem, it remained unclear how far they could push dairies to reduce bovine emissions.
Can't speak to dairy cattle but back in the midwest the folks report that beef cattle raised in feedlots result in a profit of about $20/head at current prices. Much regulation and California will find that they're regulating agriculture right out of the state. Of course that likely won't bother them at all.
#4
Jebus, if the anti dairy types can't stop the daries from being built (and they try like hell) They come up with some junk crap like this. I live here. Most of the air I can see is dirt! Cow farts are a distraction.
Al Qaedaâs Appearance in Gaza is a Dangerous New Terrorist Manifestation
DEBKAfile Special Report
August 3, 2005, 1:43 AM (GMT+02:00)
This is from Debka, so take it as you may, but they generally have pretty good sources and break this type of sceurity/terrorism news from Israel first.This was the only place I could find reference to this new Al qaida branch, so all you Rantburger regulars please help find another source.
Tuesday, August 2, Al Qaeda claimed the establishment of a Gaza branch called âAl Qaeda-Palestine, Jihad Brigades in the Border Land.â As if Palestine didn't have enough targets for us to hit, I mean radical groups.See, pretty good sources. Debka has a story on this at their site too, seems Al Q has some publisher friends stepping up to the plate.
Al Qaedaâs Palestinian gunmen performing on the tape claim the new organization is already in action and assume responsibility for firing rockets at the Israeli communities of Neve Dekalim and Gunei Tal in the Gaza Strip Saturday night, July 30.
Military tests revealed that Sinjal rockets, which are used by the Jihad Islami and are inferior even to the hit-or-miss Qassam missiles, were indeed fired at those two places. They'll move up to potato cannons next.Upstanding citizens no doubt.
Israeli intelligence experts on al Qaeda have three diverse theories to explain the new development. As always Debka has theories and lots of em, though I'm sure they are much more informed and educated than my theories would be.
1. This theory holds that the three most violent Palestinian groups, Hamas, Jihad Islami and the Fatah-al Aqsa Brigades, established a new umbrella organization to execute terrorist and shooting attacks against Israelâs withdrawal operation in two weeks while eluding the charge of flouting Abu Mazenâs orders. This theory does not fully explain al Qaedaâs introduction to the Gaza Strip.
2. Al Qaedaâs agents infiltrated the Gaza Strip through northern Sinai, the Palestinian arms smuggling gangs who work both sides of the Rafah border or Hizballah cells in Gaza, and set u p a new organization based on the Hamas and Jihad Islami.
3. The Palestinian Popular Committees which bring together the al Aqsa Brigades and other terrorist splinters has split into feuding elements, one of which may have joined up with al Qaeda, promised allegiance and collaboration and received funds. That money would have paid for the film and the two attacks. I think an amalgamation of all three theories could also be possible.
Whichever mechanism was used, it is clear that the international Islamist organization has made its first public appearance as a terrorist force present in the Gaza Strip. In every country, this hostile penetration would have captured top headlines and the security authorities and government would have been challenged for explanations. However in Israel today, the government, defense officials are media are so deeply immersed in the task of rooting out every last civilian and soldier from the affected territory against all opposition, that they are incapable of reviewing that task in the light of the new invasion.This is Debka's hit at the Sharon withdrawal policy, but I do agree with them.
Methinks that most of us see no difference in the Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda, but obviously there are differences and plenty of them. However, that being said, they all will still catch bullets and missiles in the same way. And all of these groups will no doubt be in need of some ass kicking and may soon justify a more, shall we say hardline approach from Western powers in dealing with Palestine. Take note Abu Mazen, if you can't clean up your own backyard, we will do it for you.
EP
BERLIN (Reuters) Thus not as reliable as Drudge or WND - Left-wing Berlin senators want to reassemble a giant statue of Russian Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that was removed from the former eastern half of the city in 1991 shortly after German reunification.
A scene showing part of the 19-metre statue being borne through the air by a helicopter featured in the 2003 hit film "Goodbye Lenin!". Today it lies buried in pieces in a forest on the outskirts of Berlin.
Tourist industry experts say the monument would appeal to many of the German capital's six million visitors each year.
"The Communist period is the most asked-after period by tourists in Berlin," said Natascha Kompatzki of Berlin Tourismus Marketing GmbH.
One proposal is for the granite statue to be housed in Berlin's Museum of German History, Germany's Bild newspaper said on Monday.
TORONTO (Reuters) - An Air France Airbus burst into flames after apparently skidding off the runway at Toronto's Pearson International Airport on Tuesday, aviation officials said.
A ticket agent in Montreal with Air France said the plane was its AF358 flight from Paris to Toronto, an Airbus A340 . "That's all we know," the agent said.
Witnesses told Canadian television stations that the plane, which could carry 252 passengers, had apparently skidded off the runway after landing in rainy conditions.
It was too early to say what might have caused the plane to miss the end of the runway.
Live TV pictures showed huge clouds of black smoke and orange flames coming from the fuselage of the plane, which was off the end of a runway lying close to a main traffic artery.
Air France's Web site showed that flight 358 left Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris was due to arrive at Pearson's terminal 3 on Tuesday afternoon. The airline's A340s are generally configured for 252 passenger seats.
A spokeswoman for Aeroports de Montreal said no flights were landing at Pearson airport in Toronto following the accident.
Posted by: True German Ally ||
08/02/2005
17:17 ||
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From Big Ed's link: Several passengers have been taken to hospital, and while casualty counts arenât known, itâs apparent there have been some survivors. An unknown number were picked up on the Highway, fleeing the scene.
The airplane came in too high for the landing, bumped down hard, a tire burst, it slid off the runway, then came the fire, according to the article. It doesn't sound like a terror attack.
#13
I remember thinking, there's no way they're letting anyone land in this weather. EXTREMELY heavy rain, strong gusts of wind, lightning, poor visibility, all in the immediate vicinity. I was roughly 500 metres from the start of that runway outside a shopping mall, waiting for the rain to stop.
This is definitely weather related (barring any mechanical failure). Someone should be fired for letting this plane land in such conditions.
Posted by: Rafael ||
08/02/2005 17:54
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There are really enough other airports in the area, right? And you would come in with enough fuel to get there.
But information policy of Air France is non existant. airfrance.com is down, airfrance.fr has "no incidents".
#15
Just prior to the accident, the weather was bad, with rain, lightning, poor visibility and so forth, but it was not that severe to prevent landings. Just at that moment, at around 16:10 the weather turned severe with an extremely heavy downpour of rain. I haven't seen rain like this in years around here.
It may be the plane was already committed to land, and was unlucky enough to just catch this severe weather.
Posted by: Rafael ||
08/02/2005 18:06
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There aren't really any big commercial airports nearby. The closest one is about one hour flight time away (Ottawa, Montreal, New York, Detroit). There's also Buffalo just across the border but it may not have a long enough runway.
There's no question that they had enough fuel to wait this out, especially given that 30 minutes later the weather was fine (looking out the window now, I see blue skies).
A case of really bad luck, I think. Maybe even a lightning strike.
/reporting from the scene for Rantburg
Posted by: Rafael ||
08/02/2005 18:12
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The plane is usually configured for 252. but there were 309 passengers and crew according to this. Makes one really look forward to flying the A400, usually configured for 800, with Air France.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 18:18
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Confirmed: Passengers obviously got out before flames got too bad... Good everyone is safe...
So...
I think I know know where the confusion came from...
#19
By the way, that runway isn't very long as runways go at international airports, 9500ft, with a deep ravine at the end, which is where the plane ended up. Pearson airport will take some flak for this. I'm guessing that ravine will get filled in after this.
Posted by: Rafael ||
08/02/2005 18:25
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Awesome job, Rafael.
Posted by: Matt ||
08/02/2005 18:42
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Fox news show lightning bursts within 15 mins around the landing interval at the airport. It looked like a shotgun blast of bolts.
My money is on lightning hiting the plane.
#25
I don't know about runway length, but the Buffalo International Airport is very small, definitely 3rd tier. A pleasure to fly in and out of, if you don't have to make connections anywhere else (except that you probably will, just to get there).
#26
This may have nothing to do w/anything,but the EU issued a Directive that passengers on airliners that don't reach their original destination get a substantial reimbursement from the Airline. Strong incentive not to divert.
Posted by: Stephen ||
08/02/2005 22:14
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If the Airbus landed between 4pm - 4:15pm, then he pretty much flew over my head, though I didn't see the plane (or anything). From where I was he would have been about 20 seconds from touchdown, maybe even less. I can't imagine anything landing in that weather.
Amazingly, another witness reported seeing other "heavies" landing on the same runway just before this one. The pilot then, would have had the information that other planes are attempting to land, before him. Based on this, he may have concluded it was ok to land (obviously the final decision rests with him). But I'm still not willing to take the air traffic controllers off the hook for this one. Someone screwed up.
Thanks, Matt.
Posted by: Rafael ||
08/02/2005 22:42
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GAZA, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Hundreds of members of the dominant Palestinian movement Fatah began training in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday for what they said would be the foundation of a popular army to help keep law and order after Israel withdraws this month. But a senior Palestinian official close to President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been under pressure at home and from abroad to slim down security forces and rein in unruly militant factions, said the group was acting on its own accord.
Fatah wants to take credit for Israel leaving Gaza, this would be their force to do it
The group's appearance and the question of who might be behind it underscored confusion among Palestinian forces -- described in an independent report as being in disarray, undermined by corruption and internal rivalries.
Men, mostly dressed in military uniforms, began their training at Khan Younis training camp in the southern Gaza Strip under the supervision of some police and other security forces. Mohammad Zua'rub, head of the Fatah training school in Khan Younis said the current training plan involved 350 men and would take 45 days. "We have been instructed to train those men to found the nucleus of the Popular Army," Zua'rub told Reuters. "The course will include military training, psychological, security and political teachings." The Interior Ministry did not have immediate comment on the group.
It was far from clear how any new force might fit into the security structure and appeared certain to add to the current jumble of at least a dozen forces, many divided by deep rivalries and with a poor history of cooperation. The picture is further complicated by powerful militant factions waging an uprising against Israel since 2000. Zua'rub said the training had been ordered by Fatah leader Farouq Al-Qadoumi, who lives in exile and never accepted interim peace accords with the Israelis from the 1990s. But Qadoumi said he had nothing to do with any militia.
"There is the police and the security forces, why should I form militias, and I don't have the money to pay for these militias," he told Reuters by telephone.
A senior official in Fatah's leadership in the Gaza Strip who is close to Abbas also said the group had made no decision to form a popular army and accused unspecified people "trying to make personal gains" of being behind it. "The time now is to reinforce the Palestinian Authority and its security agencies and not to create new militias," said the official, who did not want to be named. But no apparent attempt was made to stop the training. Abbas has been under pressure from Israel and the United States to reorganise at least a dozen security forces and rein in militant groups, including groups within Fatah such as al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Palestinians also demand reforms to forces that are widely seen as ineffective and sometimes corrupt.
An independent survey from a Washington-based think tank said last week that security forces were in such disarray they may not be able to fill the vacuum after Israel withdraws from the occupied Gaza Strip this year. The report criticised Israel for undermining Palestinian forces during the uprising as well as internal factors.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
15:42 ||
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Zua'rub said the training had been ordered by Fatah leader Farouq Al-Qadoumi, who lives in exile and never accepted interim peace accords with the Israelis from the 1990s. But Qadoumi said he had nothing to do with any militia.
"There is the police and the security forces, why should I form militias, and I don't have the money to pay for these militias," he told Reuters by telephone.
I know some people who do. I'l bet you do too, don't you, Farouq?
Looks like somebody wants to get back into the show. And fast. So what if he's turned out by Iran or Syria?
POLICE are tracking the worldwide money trail behind the London bombers. They are also investigating the hundreds of telephone calls that the bombers made before the attacks. Intelligence agencies are studying a series of disturbing communications from Britain to well-known al-Qaeda terrorists sheltering in Saudi Arabia to see if it leads to another terror cell sheltering in Britain. The messages from Saudi Arabia include transfers of cash to Britain. At least one of the failed July 21 bombers spent time in Saudi Arabia.
Picking up funding
Scotland Yard made clear that their search for the support network and the âkey logistical figuresâ behind the bombings will stretch worldwide and could take months.
It was the flight of Osman Hussain, also known as Hamdi Isaac, the suspected failed bomber, to join his brother in Rome that has led to revelations in Italy about his familyâs alleged al-Qaeda links. Anti-terror detectives in Rome disclosed yesterday how his brother, Remzi Hussain, was already under scrutiny in relation to al-Qaedaâs secret financial network. Carlo De Stefano, the head of Italyâs counter-terror operations, said that Remzi Hussain, who lives in Rome, has been under surveillance since the attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.
He said that Remzi Hussainâs souvenir shop selling African artefacts on the Via Volturno near the cityâs railway station is being investigated for its links to al-Barakaat, a finance company that has been banned by the US and most Western countries. Al-Barakaat is the so-called al-Qaeda banking network that wires money around the globe. Investigators believe that it was such a system that was used to fund previous terror operations, including the attack last year on four trains in Madrid.
Terror financiers can shift cash to terror cells in any part of the world by simple money transfers that are hard to trace.
Last night police said that Remzi Hussain is under arrest for âfalsifying documentsâ. It was to his flat in Rome that his brother fled after escaping Britainâs biggest manhunt on July 29. When police searched the flat on the Via Aurelia at Tor Pignatarra, a Rome suburb, they found records of air tickets used in ârecent timesâ by Remzi Hussain to Dubai, Geneva, Zurich, Munich and Amsterdam.
In public, senior Italian officials said that Osman Hussain, who is thought to have tried to kill himself and others by blowing up a Tube train at Shepherdâs Bush, was part of âa rag tagâ group and not linked to a major terror network.
That's looking a little weak now
Behind the scenes, however, Italian security forces have stepped up their investigations, fearing that their country may be the next to suffer a terrorist strike.
At the weekend Giuseppe Pisanu, the Interior Minister, said that Hussain, his brothers and friends formed part of a âtightly knit networkâ that posed a threat to Italy. Alfredo Mantovano, Signor Pisanuâs deputy, said on Sunday that âthe support network that Hamdi Isaac found in Italy confirms the presence in our country of autonomous Islamic cells that may represent a concrete threatâ. Police have dismissed claims that other members of the July 21 bombing attempts recently visited Rome, though they have asked for Scotland Yardâs help in trying to trace phone calls made from England.
Signor De Stefano told yesterday how intelligence services tracked Hussain across Europe by surveillance technology to eavesdrop on his mobile phone conversations. Police and intelligence agencies listened as he desperately tried to find a way out of the net that was closing around him. They picked up Hussain speaking in an obscure Ethiopian dialect used on the border of Somalia and Eritrea, which encouraged them to believe they had the right man. Hussain was tracked as he travelled by train through France to Italy but dumped his British SIM card and replaced it with an Italian one that was picked up by investigators in Rome.
He has allegedly told Rome police that his name is Hamdi Isaac, that he was born in Ethiopia and came to Italy with five brothers. Two remain in Italy, and both are under arrest; one emigrated to Canada while he and one other went to Britain in 1992 claiming that they were refugees from Somalia.
Cue the "Family Affair" theme music
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
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He has allegedly told Rome police that his name is Hamdi Isaac, that he was born in Ethiopia and came to Italy with five brothers. Two remain in Italy, and both are under arrest; one emigrated to Canada while he and one other went to Britain in 1992 claiming that they were refugees from Somalia.
This little piggy went to market
This little piggy stayed home
This little piggy has roast beef pork
This little piggy had none
And
This little piggy ran all the way to the nearest subway terminal...
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 15:50
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All this phone chatter is pretty unprofessional I think. One would think the bad guys would have learned something by now about communications security.
POLICE are quizzing two more men over last month's failed bomb attacks as a suspect in Rome was charged with international terrorism. The pair were seized when three homes were raided in Stockwell, south London.
Hamdi Issac, also known as Osman Hussain, was charged by Italian prosecutors in a surprise move. It is not expected the charges, which include possessing false identity documents, will lead to a trial in Italy. The 27-year-old is said to be co-operating.
Chief anti-terrorist policeman Carlo De Stefano said the extradition should not take long. He revealed Italian police were probing links between Osman's family and an al-Qaida money-laundering network.
I knew that "one bad apple" meme was a little weak
One of Osman's brothers, Remzi, had been monitored since September 11, 2001 after the FBI placed his business on the list of companies involved with al Barakaat, the network used by al-Qaida to move money.
Immigration officers and police are investigating whether as many as four of those linked to the failed Tube and bus bombings on July 21 entered Britain on false papers. Immigration officers suspect the men, who have all been arrested, followed in the footsteps of Ethiopian-born Osman, who conned his way in by saying he was Somali. Osman, suspected of being the Shepherd's Bush bomber, was arrested in Rome after fleeing on the Eurostar. Downing St said an internal Home Office inquiry had been launched into how he was able to escape on the train and consideration was being given to reintroducing checks on everyone leaving Britain.
Another visitor to the Rome flat in recent weeks is said to have been Muktar Saed Ibrahim, 27, the suspected Hackney bus bomber, whom Osman alleges is the leader of the so-called East African cell.
Rome is looking more like a hub of operations than just a place Osman ran to hide
Police want to know why Remzi, one of four brothers now under arrest, flew to Dubai, Munich, Amsterdam, Zurich and Geneva in recent weeks.
That smells like a money trail
Mr De Stefano said Osman had made at least one mysterious phone call to Saudi Arabia on his journey. British and Saudi investigators are examining calls, text messages and emails between leaders of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia and unknown people in Britain in February-May.
Posted by: Steve ||
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Remzi was just on a little holiday. A well earned vacation from his demanding line of work. A whirlwind holiday including duty free shipping in Dubai and then a visit to a few of the cultural treasures of europe to take in the beauty of western society.
Saddam Hussein's lawyers are refusing to take part in any further legal proceedings until the Iraqi tribunal acknowledges an attack against the former dictator and guarantees the safety of all defendants and attorneys, one his lawyers has said. Members of Saddam's defence team claimed the former Iraqi president was attacked during a court appearance last week. The government denied the claim.
But lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi, who attended the court appearance, insisted the allegation was true and demanded the government acknowledge it.
Posted by: Steve ||
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Well they have that alternative of letting him hang without representation. They will however look even more like the total fools they are.
They just can't get it through their heads, Saddam isn't calling any shots anymore.
#3
Anybody remember ol' Nicky "Nosferatu" Ceausescu's harpy of a wife screaming "You can't do this! Don't you know WHO I AM?" just before the firing squad opened up on 'em?
While a girl dressed in a chicken costume and nine of her animal-rights activist friends protested outside a Logan restaurant Monday, hundreds of other people clucked their way indoors for a taste of drumsticks, thighs and wings.
Benjamin Goldsmith, a campaign coordinator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has been organizing a series of protests outside KFC restaurants because of the way the company kills its chickens.
Monday's campaign in Logan, however, may have backfired, as the store on 400 North saw one of its busiest days in recent memory. At one point around noon, more than 30 people stood in line to order chicken. Warning: Beverage Alert
"I think there's a place in this world for all of God's creations ... right next to the mashed potatoes," said Rusty Smith, a KFC customer who sat on a patch of grass outside the restaurant with a group of co-workers, watching the protest. Smith said his group chose to sit outside the restaurant because "there's so many people in there, it was a little crowded."
Jacqueline Newbold, a supervisor at KFC, said an uncommon rush of customers for about two hours required the store to call extra employees into work.
Posted by: john ||
08/02/2005 16:18
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Are you so sure it is chicken being served?
PETA or no PETA...
This didn't happen at that KFC, but who knows?
Someone is running away from something....
#5
Marcos Carillo, one of the protesters who came to Logan from Tremonton, said he thought the community's response to the protest was a result of ignorance. "People don't understand," he said. "I've found people in Utah are not as open-minded (as other places)."
They always seem so amazed that people don't seem to grasp the concept that chickens have "rights".
Which ones are the ignorant ones here again?
from the August 02, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0802/p04s01-wogi.html
Special briefing: How radical Islamists see the world
By Dan Murphy and Howard LaFranchi | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor This article is a good, sociological look at the history and methodology used by radical Islamists. It's meant for the completely uninformed, but I did find some interesting things in the article. Anyway, its a good, unbiased, detailed history in brief that explains the formation of current extremist Islamic thinking and organization.
Persistent suicide bombings in Iraq. Attacks on London subways. Explosions at an Egyptian resort.
Whether related or not, these recent incidents have heightened global concern about the spread of radical Islamist militancy. And they raise questions about the current reach of Al Qaeda and groups with similar ideology. Today and tomorrow, the Monitor examines the origins of Islamic terrorism and how it is evolving now.
What is Al Qaeda today compared to five years ago?
In some ways it is less like the Al Qaeda of 2001 than like the Al Qaeda of the mid-1990s, before it was able to build up organizationally with a base of operations in Afghanistan. It is best understood as a radical ideology loosely inspiring a disparate and very decentralized set of localized Islamist extremist organizations.
For some terrorism experts, Al Qaeda as an organization simply no longer exists. Its Afghan training and indoctrination sites are gone. Key leaders have been killed or captured, or are on the run. Yet Al Qaeda as an ideology of global confrontation and jihad, "struggle" or "holy war," still exists. And has proliferated
"That is why I speak of 'Al Qaedaism' as more of a factor today than Al Qaeda," says Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Who are Al Qaeda's leaders?
Osama bin Laden, still at large, founded the organization in 1988, along with Mohammed Atef (aka Abu Hafs al-Masri), an Egyptian who was killed in a US airstrike in Afghanistan. The group has a shura, or consultative council, the composition of which is unknown. But some of the people "most wanted" for organizing operations under Al Qaeda's name or ideology, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are not believed to be part of any centralized leadership.
Are they still organizing operations?
The Al Qaeda leadership may maintain some command-and-control capability from suspected locations in or near Pakistan - despite Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's recent declaration about a smashed Al Qaeda. One possible example: In a tape released June 17 by the Arab television network Al Jazeera, Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri called for revenge against Britain for allying with the US. Some experts believe such tapes are directives to proceed with an operation. In any case, the London bombings soon followed.
What do the militants want?
For Islamist militants, the long-term objective is an Islamic superstate, or caliphate. Narrower objectives include the end of the state of Israel and toppling secular Middle Eastern regimes like Egypt's. It is an article of faith that the US and all secular Western states stand in their way, and weakening those states is seen as positive for all their objectives. These Al Q asses want a caliphate, we want democratic friends in the area. Strangely enough, our goal of democratization of these secular regimes means we share similar goals with Al Q, but only in that we want these regimes gone. Strange to think that these goals met somewhere in Afghanistan in the 80's. What's the saying "many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, so true.
Who is their main enemy?
The global jihad has long named two types of targets: the "near enemy" (Israel or secular Arab regimes) and the "far enemy" - America and its allies. Zawahiri was always more interested in the "near enemy" that stood in the way of an Islamic state in his homeland, Egypt. Bin Laden was more interested in the "far enemy," because he felt success could not be achieved closer to home until US financial and military backing for these regimes was eroded. When Zawahiri merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad with Al Qaeda in 1998, the two trends were brought together.
What Is their ideal society?
They want a society that applies the Koran literally and adheres to the social practices that prevailed at the time of the prophet Muhammad. It would not be democratic in any modern sense, though there are provisions for shura, or consultation - generally interpreted to mean the leader should take advice from trusted community members. In their interpretation of Islam, women and men have defined roles, and women generally have fewer rights.
Their views stem from the Salafi movement within Islam's Sunni sect, the religion's largest I'm not sure if Iraq's Sunnis are Salafis or not, but one can see here how Zarq and the gang can find some safehaven amongst Iraq's Sunnis.. For a Salafi adherent, interpretation of the Koran stops 1,300 years ago, with Muhammad, his companions, and the three generations that followed them.
What about Wahhabi thinking - is that behind Al Qaeda?
While many in the West use the term Wahhabi, practitioners of this Sunni school reject the notion that they belong to any particular sect. To their thinking, they are simply following the true path of Islam. They are Salafi followers of Mohammed ibn abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Arabian preacher. Although the vast majority of Salafis are not involved in violence, almost all attacks linked to Al Qaeda have been carried out by people under the Salafi umbrella. The House of Saud helped this school become Saudi Arabia's dominant interpretation of Islam. Many Saudis refuse to view Osama bin Laden as a Wahhabi, rejecting his thirst for overthrowing the Saudi regime. Wahhabis are supremely intolerant of Shiites, seeing practices such as the veneration of historic Imams Hussein and Ali as a breach of monotheism. While a few of RB's most outspoken posters make comments that suggest there are no "good Muslims", the point made here should be taken to heart, Bin Laden, and the whole school of Wahhabi, think of all other schools of Islam as heretic. So, making no differentiation between the radical Bin Laden Wahabbis and Shiites or Sufis is like making no differentiation between Catholics, Protestants, Costics and Mormons. And having been to most of these sect's religious ceremonies as well as some Islamic ceremonies I can tell you they ain't the same.
What are the roots of violent jihad? This is good stuff
Ibn Taymiyah, a 13th century scholar, is an intellectual forerunner of the modern Salafis. He rejected Sufi and Shiite Muslims, describing the latter as apostates who deserved death.Many wars were fought amongst the sects over the centuries. Appearing in an era when crusaders remained in the Middle East, he advocated a muscular approach to Islam that called on believers to fight infidel invaders.Binny often quotes this dude's writings in his taped threats. The modern Salafi revival is generally traced to late 19th and early 20th century opposition to colonial rule, and was particularly taken up by Egyptian thinkers, who saw in it a way to oppose Western colonialism and modernize without giving up Islamic values. The foundation of Israel was seen by most Muslims, of all strains, as a hostile act that undermined Islam.
Here's where things get hairy for the rest of Islam, and this is perhaps why so many people think all Muslims are Bin Ladin sympathizers. Most Muslims hate the thought of an Jewish state controlling the holy city of Jerusalem, and I make no excuses for their bigotry or that of many of the Israelis. The question that rests here for me is this, are we, the West, so dedicated to an Israeli state that we would go to war with all Islam? If so, why? Is it strategic or philosphical reasoning? I have no philosophical preference toward a Israeli state as I support no religious establishment. I support Israel for strategic reasons, but have questioned the logic of supporting a religious state that is going to be part of an endless religious struggle that can end only in the destruction of one or both religious establishments if things continue as they have. However, the question remains is this the reason Muslims seem complacent about Bin Laden or is it really a longer hatred of the West and its principles. No easy answer here, just more questions. For Salafis it was a call to jihad, to regain the land and holy places they felt had been usurped. Frustration mounted with the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel, which many Muslims interpreted as a sign of God's displeasure. The Israeli's roundly whipped their asses, so naturally God was mad at them for not making their women stay at home behind curtains, give me a break!I personally saw their absolute defeat as a sign the Arab countries fighting the War were all a bunch of whiney, excuse making wusses who couldn't hack a real 20th century war.
But the Salafi group around bin Laden really took hold after the 1991 Gulf War. Bin Laden was a wealthy Saudi who had helped support Afghans and Arab volunteers in the jihad against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, with financial support from Pakistani intelligence and the CIA. He wanted to lead an Arab and Muslim effort to end Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait. He and his followers were enraged and humiliated that a US-led coalition repelled Hussein and that US troops were then stationed in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest places. I think we should all take special notice of this fact, Bin Laden is not, and never has been a lover of Saddam, a commie infidel in Binny's mind. Does that preclude Al Qaeda cooperation with a failing and desperate Baathists regime? No, but it is very noteworthy that Binny was more than happy to work with us, the "Great Satan" in overthrowing a country full of his Muslim brothers, Sunnis even. Citing this issue, bin Laden and Zawahiri announced the "World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews" in 1998.
What does the Koran say about violence against civilians?
As with most religions, it is a question of where emphasis is placed. The Koran has fairly clear injunctions against murder, including "Whoever slays a human being, unless it be for murder or for spreading corruption on earth, it shall be as though he had slain all mankind" (5:32). Suicide is warned against even more strongly: "Do not kill yourselves ... whoever does so, in transgression and wrongfully, we shall roast in a fire" (4:29). Warfare in certain circumstances is condoned, even urged, just as in the Old Testament, but there are limits. "Fight in the cause of God against those who fight against you, but do not transgress limits. God loves not transgressors" (2:190) and "let there be no hostility, except to those who practice oppression" (2:193).
In the most widespread interpretations, such verses bar both attacks on civilians and suicide attacks, while allowing Muslims to fight against those who directly attack them. But how does one define the meaning of "those who practice oppression" or "spreading corruption on earth" or even "those who fight against you?" It is here that the minority of Islamist radicals who attack civilians find their wiggle room. Wiggle room my ass, Binny and his boyz just rewrite history and religious doctrine as they see fit.
An Al Qaeda timeline
1988:
Osama Bin Laden establishes Al Qaeda ("the base") to channel arms and funds to the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance.
1989-1991:
Bin Laden becomes involved in movements opposing the Saudi monarchy, fueled by the kingdom's acceptance of US troops after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
1996:
Bin Laden joins the Taliban in Afghanistan as they seize Kabul. He now has a base for his training operations.
AUG. 7, 1998:
East African attacks: Nearly simultaneous car bombings hit US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 224 on the anniversary of the Saudi King's 1991 invitation to US troops to defend his country from Iraq.
OCT. 12, 2000:
Suicide bombers ram the USS Cole off Yemen, killing 17.
SEPT. 11, 2001:
Al Qaeda hijackers fly jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while a fourth hijacked jet crashes in a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 are killed.
OCT. 12, 2002:
In an attack blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian group linked to Al Qaeda, 202 are killed bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali.
2003 through present:
Iraq becomes a locus for radical Islamists, as insurgents battle the fledgling Iraqi government and the US-led forces that ousted Saddam Hussein. A key mastermind, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, aligns himself with Al Qaeda.
MARCH 11, 2004:
Bombs hit four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring more than 1,600. Attacks are blamed on Islamic militants with suspected ties to Al Qaeda.
JULY 7, 2005:
A group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe claims responsibility for bus and subway bombings in London that killed 56 people. Two weeks later another coordinated London subway bombing is attempted.
This is a two part series so I'll post the second part tommorrow, and I promise fewer comments.
#1
Islams biggest problem -Islam does not acknowledge any other religion or viewpoint as being legitimate. No other philosophy or outlook is to be tolerated and anybody who disagrees is an apostate that is to be killed by any means available. This is not how the world works, the 21st century world, not the 9th century world. In the 9th century maybe you could get away with shit like that, but now it doesnt fly. Islam has lost all legitimacy with me over the last couple of years because of this quality it has clung to. Even moderate muslims seem to deny the right of existance to Israel, and see western influence as evil. They see Iraq in 12th century terms as crusaders and occupiers, they need to wake up and get with the times before they get what the radicals want-isolation from the rest of the world. I don't think they would like that any more than they would like the current situation.
Jim I assume you grew up in a christian household and are a Southerner like myself. Maybe I assume too much, but regardless I totally agree with many elements of your statement.
However, I'll tell you this. Most people don't follow their religion's or denomination's teachings that far beyond reason as do Binny and the Wahabbis. Many of my Catholic buddies will laugh at yonder Pope's contraception ban when they throw religion to the wind and strap on those jimmies when going undercover!
Also for instance, the church I was brought up in does not tolerate any other religious views, it points to other views as sinful, even other christian views, and believes and propogates the same ideas about Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, hell all other religions as tools of the devil. It ain't a small denomination either, and it is pretty mainstream in its teachings.
Their way of dealing with non believers is to try to convert those people, not kill them, and believe it or not this is how many Muslims operate too. I remind you here that Christianity does have a history of forced conversion as does Islam.
Actually most sects of Islam are sometimes even a little more tolerant of other faiths than is my former denomination of Christianity. They at least see Christ as a prophet, while the Chrisitans I know see Muhammad as some dumb ass anti-christ. I have no preference either way and could care less about people's religious compunctions as they are a waste of my time outside of metaphysical and philosophical discussion.
I see your point about Islam though, as the loudest statements we hear from Islam are from the haters and killers, but most people are just people trying to get along Jim like me and you.
Most people, Muslims included, think about family and kids and putting food on the table rather than establishing a caliphate to rule the world. Binny may actually believe all the bullshit he's spittin, but mostly I think it is just convenient that he has history and his religion to point to as a reason for his want to rule over people and kill those who get in his way. If he didn't have Islam or Wahabbiism I should say, he would find some other excuse, just like Hitler did.
I think it is very ironic that the word Jihad and the German word Kampf mean basically the same thing, struggle. Binny's little Mein Kampf will hopefully end like Hitler's did, by him eating a bullet or some cyanide, but sadly I doubt Binny will go that easy.
I agree that we should crush, exterminate and destroy radical islamists bent on murder and the destruction of the west. But let's not group millions of people together with a few asshat extremists.
I know a few Christian extremists who sympathize with Eric Rudolph's crazy ass secretly. But we shouldn't paint all Christians as bad because of a few people's actions. That would be the greatest loss in the war on Terror. That's what Bin Laden seeks, a reason to inflame Muslims the world over. We in the civilized world don't need or want that.
I'm with you though. And I appreciate your point of view, I think we all just need to step back every now and then and examine why we think what we think and how it relates to the WoT and our future as a free and democratic nation.
I personally don't want anyone's religious views ruling over my life, and like you said I bet most other folks share that same fear of radical religion ruling the world, no matter what the religion would be. Unless of course that religion involves some hot naked young women, a couple of..., well I wont go there, but I think you get my point.
#3
Point of information: Israel is a secular Jewish state, in the same way that the U.S. is a secular Christian state. About 80% of the citizens are at least nominally Jewish, the rest being Moslem, Christian and "other". All have equal rights under the law, except that only the non-ultra-Orthodox Jews are required to serve in the IDF, although the others are welcome (lots of Druze and Beduins do so).
#4
2003 through present:
Iraq becomes a locus for radical Islamists, as insurgents battle the fledgling Iraqi government and the US-led forces that ousted Saddam Hussein. A key mastermind, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, aligns himself with Al Qaeda.
What a crock of shit! Zarq was in northern Iraq at the behest of Saddam since he fled Afganistan and Iran (circa, 2002)-- before the Iraq invasion.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/02/2005 23:03
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2 'robbers' die in 'crossfire'
Two alleged robbers were killed in "crossfire" between police and their associates in Araihazar upazila in the early hours yesterday. The victims, Benu, 26, and Dulu, 30, were accused of eight and four criminal charges including robberies and murders, police said.
Other than that, they were good boys
The police said they arrested the robbers from Baniapara in Araihazar on Sunday noon.
Step One..
Following the arrestees' statements,
Step Two..
the police took them to an abandoned textile mill
Ah, a classic Step Three...
to nab their accomplices and seize firearms
Step Four...
at around 2:45am.
Step Five..
The law enforcers said accomplices of the robbers opened fire on them,
Step Six..
forcing them to counter the attack.
Step Seven...
During an attempt to flee,
Step Eight..
Benu and Dulu were bullet-hit
Step Nine..
and pronounced dead on arrival at Araihazar Health Complex Level One Trauma Center doughnut shop, they added.
Step Ten..."They're dead, Jim"
Four policemen were injured in the gunfight. Police seized a revolver and 14 bullets from the spot.
Must have run out of shutter guns
Robbers kill policeman
A village policeman was killed by robbers at village Mugidanga under Kalikapur union in Rajbari early Sunday. The police and locals said a gang of armed robbers entered the house of Abdur Razzak of the village at about 2:30am and looted around Tk 25,000 in cash and gold ornaments from the house.
Interesting that Abdur the village cop gets picked to be looted
The gang took Razzak to a nearby pond, severely beat him up and strangled him. Then they tied his body with a tree and fled.
Methinks there was something personal about this crime
The police recovered the body in the morning and sent it to hospital for post-mortem examination.
"Paging Doctor Quincy!"
A case was filed. The additional police superintendent visited the spot. Headmaster shot dead in Munshiganj
MUNSHIGANJ, Aug 1:âArmed assailants shot dead the headmaster of Bagra High School in Sreenagar upazila on Monday morning, reports UNB. The deceased was identified as Shahabuddin, 58, also former chairman of Bagra union parishad. Witnesses said the assailants attacked Shahabudin at 7.45am when he was going to Bagra Bazar. The gunmen stabbed on his abdomen and fired several shots on his head, leaving him dead on the spot.
Yeah, that'll usually do the trick
Shahabuddin was one of the witnesses in the Monwar Ali murder case in which 16 people were sentenced to death.
Ah hah, a clue!
Following the incident, Shahabuddinâs supporters blocked the Dhaka-Dohar road for two hours. On information, police rushed to the spot and engaged in clashes with the agitating people that left several injured. Tension was prevailing in the area.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
14:06 ||
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#1
Four policemen were injured in the gunfight.
This seems like a new wrinkle. Unless they're all reporting scrapes and bruises.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 14:49
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#2
This seems like a new wrinkle. Unless they're all reporting scrapes and bruises.
"Dammit, if I told you once, I told you a hundred times! Lift with your legs, not your back when getting the body out of the car trunk!"
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005 15:38
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#3
They all get nominated to "The Order of the Golden Truss."
...
(Speculation alert) It hints at the strategic decisions America has taken, not always with success. Direct attacks on Syria may have been vetoed in favor of efforts to detach the insurgency from its Syrian rear, such as Operation Matador. The US apparently continues to build a workable Iraqi unitary state despite the temptation to unleash the Shi'ites on the Sunnis. ('Although civil war would be a tragedy, with immense costs, it would at least force a definitive outcome to the ongoing struggle in Iraq.' -- Keane) America tries not to tar Islam, or even certain sects of Islam, with the brush of terrorism, despite open incitements in mosques. ('anti-sedition laws should be passed so that those who incite violence in mosques and schools can be held accountable.' -- West). Yet the Iraqi operation is adjudged winnable despite these limitations. ('Indeed, if the United States withdraws from Iraq before the ISF is capable of sustaining itself, it would lose there as well. That, however, is not likely to happen.' -- Keane. 'Despite the many obstacles, victory is achievable.' -- West. 'Once people are in the voting booths, the insurgents will not be able to prevent them from voting their conscience.' -- White).
But what sort of victory would it be? Perhaps a shadow victory like that achieved in Korea 60 years ago. A Syria belligerent but not really; Islam still the 'religion of peace' -- whenever it is not inciting attacks against America; Bin Laden in Pakistan but only when he is actually spotted; an Iran with nuclear weapons which they will be bribed not to use. A West partially mobilized against enemies it cannot bring itself to name or destroy, a display of aggression from the civilized herd to prevent further attack from the circling pack of predators serving in lieu. Iraq dozing in an uneasy peace. An act of faith really; faith that things will work out if only we can keep the world spinning on its axis.
#1
Of course, he's right. We are doing another politically correct war (or, is it not "war" anymore). This shit is going to get us killed.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/02/2005 14:01
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#2
The 150,000 number isn't as bad as it sounds. It includes large numbers of criminal gangmembers. They are responsible for approx. half of the murders in Iraq.
The real issue is the foreign support. Why we don't make controling the Iraqi borders our top priority is beyond me.
Al
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
08/02/2005 14:45
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#3
Why we don't make controling the Iraqi borders our top priority is beyond me.
I don't have any secret knowledge, but how about, we don't have the manpower?
War is a political act. So it should be politically correct. That you and I don't happen to like the prevalent politics at the moment is unfortunate for us, but that's what Bush has to work with.
I am becoming fairly sure that the way we make war is a lot like the way we do business and make laws and sausages. It's pretty messy to watch, the waste and mistakes are more apparent than the succeses, it's hard to see where there's any organization or direction, but through the power of the invisible hand, everything turns out OK. Bismark is reputed to have said God watches out for children, drunks and the United States of America. I think this may have been what he meant.
Korea is mentioned. That was a fairly hot battle in what was usually called the cold war. Remind me how that one turned out?
We can keep this up longer than they can. Much longer.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 15:51
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PADUCAH, Ky. - A soldier pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges that he smuggled machine guns out of Iraq and tried to sell them in the U.S. Sgt. Beau Uran, 24, based at Fort Campbell, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to unlawfully import the weapons. He is the third person to plead guilty in the case. Sgt. Nigel Brown, 31, and his uncle, Guy Brown, 46, of Hopkinsville, pleaded guilty in July to the same charges. They face up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 fines when they are sentenced Oct. 25. Uran could get a lighter sentence because of his cooperation with authorities, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michele Theilhorn said in court Monday.
Beau being the smart one of this trio.
While in Iraq, Nigel Brown and Uran allegedly acquired 17 Russian-made AK-47s and an assault rifle.
Sigh, where do they find these reporters?
Prosecutors say they sawed the bottoms off oxygen tanks,
The thought of which scares the hell out of me...
placed the guns inside and welded the bottoms back on so the tanks could be shipped back to Fort Campbell.
Not bad, gets "A" for effort
After returning home, Brown and Uran allegedly retrieved the tanks and asked Guy Brown to help sell them. According to prosecutors, the uncle ended up offering the guns to an undercover ATF agent for $18,000.
Uncle Guy gets a "D-"
Both soldiers continue to serve at Fort Campbell, a fort spokeswoman said.
Soon to PCS to sunny Kansas
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
13:46 ||
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#3
Actually the weather is beastly sticky humid, soon to change to tornado season. Depending on their classification by prison officials, they may have the opportunity to do the ground work around the installation in those great outdoors. Most of that had been contracted out at other installations, but there is a lot of extra labor available at Leavenworth.
Shoot, my mouse already does this. It ain't supposed to, but it does.
The left and right buttons on my mouse---which is one of the few that will work on my ancient computer--wrap around to the side of the mouse, so I'm always clicking on them when I don't mean to. Certain mouse positions and click combinations lead to unintentional selecting, cutting, pasting, window activation, and for all I know nuclear weapons launch. Hours of wholesome fun! I predict the same for this.
#10
The left and right buttons on my mouse---which is one of the few that will work on my ancient computer-
What cable plugin does the mouse use?
Posted by: Phil Fraering ||
08/02/2005 17:43
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#11
Totally OFF TOPIC alert!!! (but I thought the heading appropriate)
My wife's cell phone died and can't be fixed.
She went to Verizon to have one of our older phones turned on to replace it temporarily.
THE STORE TOLD HER THAT IT WOULD BE ILLEGAL!!!!
ALL "NEW" PHONES HAVE TO HAVE A BUILT IN GPS!!!!
Has anyone else heard about this??
The "rationale" is that they can track you if you call 911, but, the phone store guy admitted that the GPS would be sending all the time.
repost - first attempt was without the link Operation Makalwain was no Kargil ...but it was perhaps one of the biggest operations since the mountain conflict: an entire Indian Army brigade (around 3,000 men) was involved in neutralising a large group of militants.
Troop-ferrying helicopters and artillery guns were used to illuminate the jungles and treacherous terrain in Tilel valley, west of Baraub. Until today, the Armyâs 109 Brigade had recovered 15 bodies of JeM militants with AK-47, AK-56 rifles, grenades and communication sets. The search is still on because the group was estimated to be 25-members strong.
Posted by: john ||
08/02/2005
13:21 ||
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EFL
Paul Hackett doesn't fit conventional political profiles. He is a Marine Reservist and an Iraq war veteran who opposed the war before the U.S. invasion and remains a harsh critic of President Bush's policy there. He is also a Democrat battling to win a special House election in Ohio in a district that has been in Republican hands for more than three decades.
On Tuesday, voters in Ohio's 2nd Congressional District will elect a successor to former representative Rob Portman, who quit Congress to become U.S. trade representative. Hackett hopes to beat the long odds by defeating Republican nominee Jean Schmidt, a former state representative, by stressing his military service and independence.
Paul Hackett -- an Ohio Democrat, a Marine Reservist and an Iraq war veteran -- has attracted GOP ire by criticizing the president. snip
A lawyer and a major in the Marine Reserves, Hackett volunteered last year to serve in Iraq and spent seven months there in a civilian affairs job, including service around Ramadi and Fallujah. He returned to Ohio in March and decided to jump into the race for Portman's seat, seeking to become the first Iraq war veteran elected to Congress.
His campaign has drawn support from Democrats across the country. Liberal blogs have defended him from GOP attacks. Former Ohio senator John Glenn, another former Marine, sent a message to online supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) asking them to pitch in financially. Democracy for America, the organization founded by former Vermont governor Howard Dean, says it has raised $80,000 for Hackett. snip
Hackett told USA Today that Bush's taunting line, "Bring 'em on!" was "the most incredibly stupid comment I've ever heard a president of the United States make." He also told the newspaper that, while he was willing to put his life on the line for the president, "I've said that I don't like the son-of-a-[expletive] that lives in the White House." snip
Hackett, hoping to capitalize on the widespread disarray in the scandal-plagued Ohio GOP, remains unapologetic about his characterization of the president. "I said it. I meant it. I stand by it," he said in a phone interview. "In this district, we need more straight-talking, straight-shooting politicians."
#3
He's merely following the John Kerry recipe for political success at the expense of personal integrity. If he plays it right, he, too, can spend the next 20-40 years in the US Congress and / or Senate, feeding at the public trough and not showing up for anything except fund-raisers. It's a proven method for the insanely ambitious.
I'll bet poor Hillary is terminally jealous of his "service". If only she had a few years in uniform, Mein Gott! She could Rule the Universe!
#8
Paul Hackett -- an Ohio Democrat, a Marine Reservist and an Iraq war veteran -- has attracted GOP ire by criticizing the president.
This is not true. He's ticked people off by simultaneously using President Bush in his ads and calling him the afore-mentioned epithet. He apparently thinks Ohio Republicans are too stupid to look past his ads.
Former Ohio senator John Glenn, another former Marine, sent a message to online supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) asking them to pitch in financially.
They sent one to me, so I sent what I could to his opponent. My bus home tonight drops me off at the polling station, so I'm also going to help out by voting for his opponent.
Hackett, hoping to capitalize on the widespread disarray in the scandal-plagued Ohio GOP
NB: The "scandal" mostly effects RINOs from Cleveland and Columbus. This district is in and around Cincinnati.
Hackett's only chances come from this being a special election.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 14:29
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#9
If he plays it right, he, too, can spend the next 20-40 years in the US Congress and / or Senate
Even if he wins this election -- special election, with small turnout, so it all depends on the "ground game" of each party -- it's highly unlikely he'd be able to hold the seat for a second term. This district covers all or part of seven counties, and only one of the counties has a sizable Democrat constituency.
And, curiously enough, that county happens to be #2 to Detroit in rate of population loss.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 14:32
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#10
Oh, and a prediction:
Should Hackett lose, he will join Max Cleland in the Democrat's parade of "Veterans Attacked by Republicans". We'll hear his name trotted out every time someone mentions supporting the troops: "If Republicans support the troops so much, why wouldn't they vote for one? Huh?! Huh?!"
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 14:40
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#11
Calling the Commander in Chief a '*&^%$#" in time of war is conduct unbecoming an officer. He should be brought up on charges of stupidity. That he is a lawyer fortifies indications of this lack of intelligence.
#12
Being a lawyer and doing stuff in civilian affairs really doesn't give him much weight in claiming to be a "war" veteran. He served in time of war in a rear echelon post. The war veterans were the marines that cleaned out Fallujah. Quite thoughouly too.
#13
Careful, murray. A local radio host pointed that out and his station ended up being flooded by calls. From California, Montana, Arizona, Oregon...
(They're a superstation, and once had the most powerful AM transmitter in the world, but, c'mon!)
SP0D -- I'm sure he didn't say that when he was in uniform.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 15:08
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#14
From his website:
Last year, Paul heard the call to service again. As his Marine Corps brothers fought a half world away, Paul could not sit in the comfort of his home and let others do the work he was prepared to do. After a serious discussion with his wife and children, Paul re-upped and joined his marines for a seven month tour with the 1st Marine Division and served as a Civil Affairs officer in Ramadi, took part in the Fallujah campaign and subsequent reconstruction. When Paul returned only a few weeks ago, he learned of Rob Portman's decision to vacate his congressional seat. Paul Hackett is continuing his service to his country by running for the United State Congress.
Sounds like a man with a plan. Wonder if he's got a lucky hat?
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
IIRC they issued a formal letter of reprimand [career ender] to an active duty officer during the Clinton Administration for this and sent out a warning notice to all. It got incorporated into an episode of 'JAG' as well.
#18
Polls close at 7:30 EDT. I'll keep an eye on the local sites and let you know ASAP.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 15:54
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#19
Straight talking, straight-shooting politicians, who are too ashamed to mention their party affiliation in their ads? Who open their ads with George W Bush talking about duty to country? Who talks about how he believes in helping the people of Iraq in his ad, but who had previously stated that we should never have gone. (Some help that would have been.)
#22
Elarson, I heard the ad on Rush: No mention of being a Democrat and agrees with the President. I guess a Democrat can't run as a Democrat. But then honesty isn't their strong trait is it.
#26
Just saw a Hackett commercial on some TV I had recorded. What a joke! Starts with Bush, talks about how he "agreed" with Bush, then talks about his opponent's "corruption". One of the "headlines" on the screen reads "Schmidt Among Lawmakers That Attended Bengals Game". Ooooohhhhh!!!
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 18:25
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#35
Where did those numbers come from? I can't find anything anywhere except placeholders showing zero votes.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 20:10
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#36
Ah. Skip that. Clermont County has started to show results. Since they still say no precincts reporting, these are probably absentees, too.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 20:11
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#37
Given all the hankey pankey that's been going on iwth vote counts, I wouldn't be surprised if they're playing "I won't show mine till you show yours."
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 20:18
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#41
305 precincts of 753 reporting
PAUL HACKETT 23,957 51%
JEAN SCHMIDT 22,846 49%
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 21:07
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#42
Still too close to call, but with over half of Clermont's precincts in, Schmidt has a lead -- in that county alone -- of over 1700 votes.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 21:20
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#43
Hamilton county burbs must be coming in -- 580/753 precincts, Schmidt leads by almost 3,000.
Cincinnati Enquirer site not responding, at least for me. Possibly slammed.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 21:25
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#44
Total: Schmidt: 35215 (50%)
Hackett: 35258 (50%)
81% of total precincts
Hamilton County (Containing the city of Cincinnati):
Schmidt: 23581 (51%)
Hackett: 22393 (49%)
92% of total precincts
Posted by: Mike ||
08/02/2005 23:49
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#61
She won't be there long, less than 1 term. She's a RINO who only won with 30% of the primary vote because there were 3 conservatives. Put her one-on-one with a Club For Growth candidate and she's toast.
Yes, it's good that someone supported by Kos loses (to keep up the perfect record). But a marginal win in a district Bush won handily last year is nothing to cheer about.
- EFL -
A renegade band of Mexican military deserters, offering $50,000 bounties for the assassination of U.S. law-enforcement officers, has expanded its base of operations into the United States to protect loads of cocaine and marijuana being brought into America by Mexican smugglers, authorities said.
The deserters, known as the "Zetas," trained in the United States as an elite force of anti-drug commandos, but have since signed on as mercenaries for Mexican narcotics traffickers and have recruited an army of followers, many of whom are believed to be operating in Texas, Arizona, California and Florida....
... The number of assaults on U.S. Border Patrol agents along the 260 miles of U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona known as the Tucson sector has increased dramatically this year, including a May 30 shooting near Nogales, Ariz., in which two agents were seriously wounded during an ambush a mile north of the border.
Their assailants were dressed in black commando-type clothing, used high-powered weapons and hand-held radios to point out the agents' location, and withdrew from the area using military-style cover and concealment tactics to escape back into Mexico.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada in Nogales said his investigators found commando clothing, food, water and other "sophisticated equipment" at the ambush site.
Posted by: Yosemite Sam ||
08/02/2005
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#4
I was referring to the assassination in Nogales. I'm in Tucson. Less than an hour's drive and I can be in a third-world country with an incompetent and corrupt government.
Though I guess anyone in Maryland or northern Virginia could say the same thing.
As for these guys, another punitary expedition a la Pershing might do the trick.
Set up sniper teams and shoot them dead, no questions asked. All this pussyfooting with Mexico needs to stop and it needs to be treated as the largely hostile nation that it is.
âThe fanaticism of a few ignorant mullahs is ruining the Muslims and the whole community remains a mute spectator,â the resolution said.
Terrorism had practically closed all doors of higher education and business for Muslims, who were being looked at with suspicion all over the world, it said.
Referring to the July 5 terrorist attack on Ayodhya, the Board said, âhad the bombs thrown by the militants fallen a few metres ahead the country would have witnessed unprecedented turmoilâ.
The Board appealed to the Muslims especially Shias to rise against the terrorism.
Posted by: john ||
08/02/2005
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Terrorism had practically closed all doors of higher education and business for Muslims, who were being looked at with suspicion all over the world, it said.
Fred - Where is the "Master of the Obvious" graphic?
EFL. Todays Revelation in Rock History...
SEATTLE â Jimi Hendrix might have stayed in the Army. He might have been sent to Vietnam. Instead, he pretended he was gay. And with that, he was discharged from the 101st Airborne in 1962, launching a musical career that would redefine the guitar, leave other rock heroes of the day speechless and culminate with his headlining performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock in 1969.
Hendrix's subterfuge, contained in his military medical records, is revealed for the first time in Charles R. Cross' new biography, "Room Full of Mirrors." Publicly, Hendrix always claimed he was discharged after breaking his ankle on a parachute jump, but his medical records do not mention such an injury.
In regular visits to the base psychiatrist at Fort Campbell, Ky., in spring 1962, Hendrix complained that he was in love with one of his squad mates and that he had become addicted to masturbating, Cross writes. Finally, Capt. John Halbert recommended him for discharge, citing his "homosexual tendencies."
Hendrix's legendary appetite for women negates the notion that he might have been gay, Cross writes. Nor, Cross says, was his stunt politically motivated: Contrary to his later image, Hendrix was an avowed anti-communist who exhibited little unease about the escalating U.S. role in Vietnam.
He just wanted to escape the Army to play music â he had enlisted to avoid jail time after being repeatedly arrested in stolen cars in Seattle, his hometown.
#4
Whatevere else has been said about him: AFAIK, Jimi never publicly spoke out against the war. His only references to the war were to offer sympathy to the guys over there. (See: banter before Machine Gun on Band of Gypsys).
Via Fark:
An Arizona National Guardsman serving in Iraq has been demoted for posting classified information on his Internet Web log, an Army official said Monday. Leonard Clark, 40, was demoted from specialist to private first class and fined $1,640, said Col. Bill Buckner, a spokesman for the Multi-National Corps-Iraq.
Soldiers in Iraq are allowed to maintain blogs or Web sites but cannot post information about Army operations or movements. They also are barred from posting information about the death of a soldier whose family hasn't yet been notified. "The intent of the policy is not to violate soldiers' rights, but to safeguard soldiers," Buckner said. Blogs are "a growing phenomenon, I guess. It's something a lot of people do and has some uses." Buckner said he didn't know what kind of classified information Clark had posted.
Clark's blog contained two posts Monday, one with links to articles on him and one stating Clark would comply with a gag order. Calls to his home Monday by The Associated Press went unanswered and contact information for him in Iraq wasn't immediately available. Clark is a Glendale, Ariz., kindergarten teacher who has run for the state Legislature four times. He could have appealed the ruling but declined to, Buckner said. Clark's company was called to active duty in November and has been in Iraq since around January, said Capt. Paul Aguirre, a spokesman for the Arizona National Guard. The company is expected to be brought home next January.
His blog now only has information about his legal problems, but the sidebar looks like it was put together by MoveOn.org, with a running tally of the cost of the war and links to "conscientous objectors" like Pablo Paredes.
#3
Stationed just outside Baghdad, Iraq / This blog is ABOUT him, not BY him.
I don't think this is the blog in question. Looks like it was setup by lefty yahoos looking to cash in on their newest poster boy.
But, at least for us up in Boston, it's good to see Bill Buckner's alive and well.
Come on home, Billy. They won. All is forgiven.
#5
You donât understand, rules donât apply to liberals. All that stuff about not posting classified information or disseminating controlled information, that is for the common folk and not liberals. Yes his site looks like itâs a LLL montage for COs. If there were something wrong with his conviction he would challenge it. Sounds like he got off easy and maybe should keep his yap shut and just serve his time.
#8
The Press release from CENTCOM (obtained from this website - posted in full (it is a MS-Word .doc)
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Private First Class Leonard Clark Press Release
On July 19, 2005, Lieutenant Colonel James F. Switzer, Commander, 504th Military Police Battalion, 42nd Military Police Brigade, Multi-National Corps-Iraq, notified Specialist Leonard A. Clark, 860th Military Police Company, of his intent to dispose of alleged misconduct under Article 15, Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
After consulting with a Trial Defense Counsel, a military defense lawyer, Specialist Clark elected to accept disposition of the alleged offense using Article 15 proceedings. Specifically, Specialist Clark was charged under Article 15 with the following violations of the UCMJ:
Article 92 (Failure to obey order), 11 specifications; by releasing classified information regarding unit soldiers and convoys being attacked or hit by an improvised explosive devices on various dates, discussing troop movements on various dates, releasing Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures and Rules of Engagement used by the unit on various dates, in violation of a lawful general order prohibiting the release of such information.
Article 134 (Reckless endangerment), 2 specifications; by releasing specific information, on various dates regarding Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures and Rules of Engagement used by his unit and encouraging its widespread publication, such that the enemy forces could foreseeably access the information, such that with that information it was likely that the enemy forces could cause death or serious bodily harm to U.S. forces engaged in the same or similar mission.
On July 19, 2005, at a hearing before Lieutenant Colonel Switzer, Specialist Clark was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of all Specifications. As a result, Specialist Clark received the following punishment:
Reduction to Private First Class (E-3), forfeiture of $820 per month for two months, 45 days restriction, and 45 days of extra duty. Both the restriction and extra duty were suspended for five months.
Private First Class Clark has appeal rights, but he has chosen not to exercise those rights.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/02/2005 15:00
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#12
He could have refused the Art 15 and elected to face Courts Martial instead. If found guilty he'd have the right of appeal through the Military Courts of Appeal which is no where near any of the Command Chain and is indeed independent. However, conviction by both Special and General CM carries with it a record of federal felony conviction. The Summary CM does not. Not good on the job resume. Wondered if that was in his calculations?
#13
Accepting the Article 15 is not the same as a conviction that he most certainly would have got under a summary Courts Martial. Rule of thumb is if they offer an Article 15 it's best to take it. As far as being a SP4, the Guard is a wierd animal and rank doesn't come quickly, unless you get a lot of vacancies. I have seen some grey head jr enlisted types working weekends.
Seven U.S. Marines Killed in Iraq
American Forces Press Service
Not much detail on the seven, but a LOT of minor successes that'd never make it out to us any other way.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2, 2005 â Seven U.S. Marines were killed in Iraq Aug. 1, U.S. officials there announced today.
Six Marines assigned to Regimental Combat Team 2, 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward), were killed in action near Haditha. Elsewhere, a Marine assigned to the same unit was killed by a suicide car bomber while conducting combat operations near Hit. The names of the deceased are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
Three U.S. military personnel and two civilian interpreters assigned to a Multinational Security Transition Command Iraq special police transition team were injured today in central Baghdad when their Humvee was struck by a suicide car bomb. Two soldiers and one interpreter were later transported by helicopter to the 86th Combat Support Hospital, officials said.
In other news from Iraq, coalition forces captured 11 terror suspects and seized weapons and bomb-detonating devices during five separate sweeps through western and southwestern Baghdad on July 31, Task Force Baghdad public affairs officials announced today.
A task force unit securing a roadside bombsite at around 1 p.m. in southwest Baghdad saw two people parked on a nearby overpass. One of the men had a cell phone, and both were acting suspiciously.
As the soldiers went to investigate, another car drove up, and the two men jumped inside and the car sped off. The soldiers gave chase and detained the men. The vehicle was impounded after the soldiers found explosives material inside, and the two men were held for questioning.
At around 2:30 p.m., a U.S. patrol working in the western Baghdad district of Ghazaliya saw four men in a vehicle waving weapons in the air while driving along a major highway. When the unit stopped the vehicle, one of the occupants tried to run away and then pointed a weapon directly at the soldiers. "The patrol then fired and killed the terrorist," stated a release from Task Force Baghdad.
When the unit went back to the car, they detained the other three occupants and searched the vehicle, finding two AK-47 assault rifles and a pistol. The soldiers impounded the car and detained the three men.
In southwest Baghdad, anti-Iraqi forces driving a blue van fired on a Task Force Baghdad patrol at 6 p.m. The unit pursued the van for 10 minutes until the vehicle pulled over and the enemy fighters jumped out and tried to get away by running through a cornfield. The unit caught one of the attackers and took him into custody for questioning.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, Task Force Baghdad soldiers working in the western part of the city saw a car speeding down a road throwing items out the window just before 8 p.m. The unit found two of the items, which were hand-held radios. One of the radios was wired to a motorcycle battery. My radio battery was dead, so I had to improvise! Other members of the patrol chased the vehicle and detained five terror suspects for questioning.
Shortly after midnight, a terrorist fired on U.S. soldiers working in the Amin district of eastern Baghdad. No one was hit and the patrol returned fire, hitting the attacker in the arm. The soldiers then captured the attacker and brought him in for medical treatment before taking him into custody. Did I say this was the Armed Forces Press Service, not AFP? An hour later, the same patrol ran across an Iraqi woman who had injured herself in a fall. The soldiers suspected she was bleeding internally and brought the woman to a military medical facility for treatment. Just loadin' up on the humanitarian stuff, eh?
In northern Baghdad, task force soldiers manning a traffic control point stopped a minivan with four military-aged men just before 4 a.m. The van matched a description of a vehicle that was involved in a roadside-bomb attack earlier in the day. When the soldiers searched the minivan they found $4,000 in U.S. currency and explosive materials. All four men were taken into custody for questioning. One IED, $4,000. Not bad for a simple job!
Later, the soldiers stopped a car in western Baghdad and the driver gave them a fake I.D. card. The driver told the patrol he was from the area, but when the soldiers asked other residents in the neighborhood about him, no one recognized the man or confirmed his story. The soldiers then searched the vehicle, found explosive material inside, and detained the driver.
Just before noon, an Iraqi farmer led U.S. soldiers working in the Ghazaliya district of western Baghdad to a weapons cache hidden in a field. When the soldiers arrived at the site they found nine mortar rounds and two rocket-propelled grenades. A team of explosives experts safely detonated the munitions.
(Compiled from Multinational Force Iraq, Task Force Baghdad, and Multinational Security Transition Command Iraq news releases.)
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005
12:24 ||
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#1
i'm shocked i heard nothing about any of this on major networks
#6
Looks like somebody wasn't watching the back door. But they're prolly dead, now. My heart goes out to the families.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 20:30
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#7
So far TV News is hinting at pre-planned ambush, which leads to some disturbing CC questions that have to be asked, espec about intel reliability, mission security, and available fire support or rescue. Iff it is pre-planned ambush, then local US forces must have enemy informants/info leaks somewhere in their org!?
NEW DELHI, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- The United States seems uninterested in helping India to extradite mafia boss Dawood Ibrahim from Pakistan because it does not want to upset relations with its front-line ally in the war on terrorism, Indian intelligence analysts said Tuesday. "Getting Dawood is not important for the United States as his arrest goes against the interest of Pakistan with whom Washington does not want upset its relations," said senior intelligence analyst Rajeev Sharma. He said as Pakistan cannot afford to violate any U.S. directive, Washington should ask Islamabad to arrest Ibrahim, who has been living in the Pakistani port of Karachi, and extradite him to India.
Ibrahim, who was born Dawood Sheikh Ibrahim Kaskar, was Bombay's top underworld don before he fled the country for the safety of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. After he was implicated in the serial bomb blasts that rocked Bombay in 1993 he fled to Karachi and the Indian government has been pursuing him since then. After lying low for nearly a decade, Ibrahim surfaced in the news recently when his daughter Maharuk married the son of former Pakistani cricket captain Javed Miandad, Junaid, in a Dubai hotel July 24. It is not known if he attended the ceremony or not. Contradictory reports appeared in the Indian media about his presence. Some newspapers said it was a failure on the part of Indian intelligence agencies in identifying him as one of the burka-clad women present at the ceremony. "The marriage of Dawood's daughter irrespective of ... whether it was solemnized in Dubai or not, proves he is firmly entrenched in Pakistan and is a free bird despite the fact the U.S. designated him as global terrorist," said Sharma.
The Bush administration in October 2003 designated Ibrahim a global terrorist, saying he "has found common cause with al-Qaida, sharing his smuggling routes with the terror syndicate and funding attacks by Islamic extremists aimed at destabilizing the Indian government."
Indian intelligence officials say upon his first entry into Pakistan, Ibrahim was granted a welcome by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
"On his arrival in Pakistan from Dubai, Dawood was given a backdated passport in Rawalpindi and a 6,000-sq meter plot in the posh Clifton area of Karachi," a senior unidentified Intelligence Bureau official said. "His two trusted lieutenants, Abdul Razzak Memon alias Tiger Memon, and Shakeel Ahmed alias Chhota Shakeel, too were settled in Karachi by the ISI." He said Dawood was advised to take up the real-estate business, leading him to grab prime properties, often illegally, and to build shopping malls and apartments sometimes violating construction laws. "The day is not far when Dawood will emerge as a threat to the West not just India," said Sharma.
India has lodged complaints with Pakistan demanding the extradition of Dawood and his associates. It has also said Dawood has established links with terrorist organizations like Lashkar-e-Toiba, which operates in Kashmir, and al-Qaida. Dawood's activities and his links to Pakistan's ISI were pointed out by former Indian Home Minister L.K. Advani during a visit to India by Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2001. Pakistan denied any such person lived on its soil, however. Indian analysts complain Washington, despite designating Ibrahim a terrorist, has not done enough to ask Pakistan to extradite him. Others say, however, it in unclear what Washington can actually do.
"It is hard to know how much leverage the U.S. will actually be able to use in the case of Dawood Ibrahim to pave the way for his extradition to India," an unidentified senior Indian security official said.
He said the Jaish-e-Mohammad organization, which is on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, had been hostile to U.S. interests for years, but Washington was unable or unwilling to push Pakistan to take any meaningful action against the group's chief Mohammad Masood Azhar. He said Pakistan had an interest in protecting Ibrahim because he knows too much. "I don't think he will be panicking just yet," the official said.
There is not much evidence, however, available in the public domain about Ibrahim's role in acting as a bridge between the ISI and various religious and terror groups. An Interpol report in 1996 said Anees Trading Co., a shell company run by him, was luring young, unemployed men from the subcontinent with the promise of jobs and sent them to terrorist training camps.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
11:39 ||
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WASHINGTON - Former President Bill Clinton has hired a new spokesman, a veteran of the Howard Dean 2004 presidential campaign and New York City's 2012 Olympics bid.
Both of which turned out so well.
Jay Carson was also a former press secretary for Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and has worked for the Democratic National Committee. So
he's made a career out of flacking for failing democrats. He's certainly qualified to work for Bill.
Clinton's office announced Carson's hiring Tuesday. Carson replaces Jim Kennedy, who announced he is leaving to become a spokesman for Sony Pictures Entertainment.
"I'm outta here!"
Kennedy has worked since 2002 as the chief spokesman for the former president. He also worked in the Clinton White House from 1998 to early 2001.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
11:27 ||
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Wozzamatter? He couldn't get a spokewoman?
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 12:38
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LONDON -- Police dispatched more officers to guard the capital's Underground train system yesterday as investigators focused on a key question: Were the two sets of London bombers part of the same network, or did they operate independently?
Yes to both.
Meanwhile, Italian police said a man arrested for his role in the July 21 attempted subway bombings has a brother living in Canada. The groups struck exactly two weeks apart and both hit three subway cars and a red double-decker bus. The July 7 attacks killed 52 victims and all four suicide bombers, while the July 21 attackers' explosives failed to detonate and took no lives. It's likely the two cells - the first made up mostly of Pakistani Britons and the second of immigrants from East Africa - didn't know of one another but reported to the same organizer, said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest.
Or they each had a seperate handler who reported to a single "mastermind". Classic cell structure.
"That has to be the assumption (investigators) are working on at the moment," he said. "Only by uncovering the structure can they hope to discover whether there are further cells operating in the U.K."
I'd guess yes, but you'll have to locate the mastermind and work back down from him. People in each cell should not know members of another, unless someone slipped up.
In Italy, where one of the suspected July 21 attackers is being interrogated, Carlo De Stefano, head of the country's anti-terror police, said the investigation so far indicated that the suspect, Hamdi Issac, was "part of a loosely knit group rather than a well-structured group." Issac was charged in Italy with association with the aim of international terrorism and possessing false documents, said Antonietta Sonnessa, his lawyer. Abdulahai Issac, one of Hamdi Issac's four brothers, left Italy for Canada in 1996, Italian anti-terrorism police said. The Canadian government granted him the status of political refugee and gave him economic aid, but officials did not clarify whether he had assumed a false identity to obtain such a status, as his brother Hamdi had upon his arrival in London.
I'd be surprised if the Canadians even know who or where he is.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
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The first academic study into the sweaty pursuit of air guitar playing is to use the work of French philosophers to explain why men and women do it differently. Doctoral research has begun under the supervision of Britain's first professor of pop music, who is also overseeing a PhD into the art of "moshing", the vigorous head-shaking dance popular among concert crowds. For the next three years, Amanda Griffiths, 32, a dance teacher from north Wales, will attempt to explain, in 60,000 words, why the attractions of an invisible guitar are generally overlooked by women, and how the girls who get involved do it differently.
To do so, she will use the complex arguments of French post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Marxists such as Roland Barthes. Miss Griffiths, who is funding her research at a cost of about £10,000, said: "The time seems right for a cultural study of phenomenon, because there is a very hardcore air guitar scene that has been bubbling away for years. But as a feminist I am interested in why there are so few women at events."
Her work, one of the subtitles of which is "air guitar: celebrating the fakeness of the inauthentic", has come to the attention of the organisers of the World Air Guitar Championships, and she has been invited to address a training camp for competition entrants in Finland this month. Britain created the first world record for an air guitar ensemble when more than 4,000 people flailed along to Sweet Child o' Mine by the heavy metal band Guns 'n' Roses at the Guildford Festival in Surrey last month. But Miss Griffiths's interest grew after she entered a regional air guitar competition on the eve of her 30th birthday two years ago. Her unusual PhD was suggested by Prof Sheila Whiteley, chair of pop music at the University of Salford, whom she met on Radio 4's Woman's Hour, who has also overseen PhD studies into "post-anarcho punk" and heavy metal music. The mind boggles.
#3
Reminds me of a friend in college (professional student-type, 6-year plan, etc) who was taking a course in Deviant Sexual Behavior, one in Psychopharmacology, and was trying to work a course from the Recording Industry Management dept. into his schedule to complete the Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-roll trifecta.
#4
"why the attractions of an invisible guitar are generally overlooked by women," Because they're invisible?
I thought this was funny when I saw it, but now I wonder if someone really is writing a thesis on Derrida and eels . . .
Posted by: James ||
08/02/2005 14:52
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#5
There are easier ways to get PhD's.
Hans Blix was given a honorary doctorate after a "Russia with Love" report covering up the true radiation effects of the Chernobyl accident.
Also, Mohammed el Baradei received a PhD from Egypt after covering up terrorist activities.
I apologize for not having the links to back up the claims. I did some research a long time ago and now I can't find the links.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/02/2005 13:32
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#4
False piety. Fahd drank heavily, had sex with blondes flown in from the US and Europe, gambled heavily, blew millions on luxury goods.
This arab playboy is now recast as the pious muslim, buried simply in a plain grave.
Hope they dug it deep, the dogs may otherwise dig up the rotting carcass.
Posted by: john ||
08/02/2005 13:46
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#6
I see a photoshopped Far Side comic of dogs drinking from hose in front of house with wife dog commenting: "Your out of luck Barny, the graves unmarked."
EFL -- The accession of Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who is crowned as King of Saudi Arabia tomorrow, may only delay a struggle for power in the Royal House of Saud. ``This is the largest royal family in the world and there will be a struggle as princes compete for positions of power,'' said Mai Yamani, a gulf region specialist at the London-based research center Chatham House. ``The big question is who will Abdullah appoint as his deputy -- it's the post they all want.''
I think the big question is whether Abdullah's going to have enough time before pegging out to move his own kids and allies into positions of power. And whether he's dumb enough to take any helicopter rides or to go for a drive in the desert.
Abdullah will be one of two octogenarians controlling affairs in the kingdom. Abdullah's half-brother, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, currently minister of defense and also in his 80s, will become Crown Prince. King Fahd, ruler of 23 years, died Aug. 1 in the capital, Riyadh.
... also in his dotage 80s...
With Saudi Arabia holding the world's largest oil reserves, concern about the future direction of the kingdom helped drive oil prices to a record $62.30 a barrel on Aug. 1. Any reassurances from Abdullah and Sultan to western political and business leaders may be undermined as other royals dispatch their assassins jockey for position, said John Bradley, a Middle East historian. ``Saudi Arabia will see continuity under Abdullah but the issue of succession becomes serious now, bearing in mind that Abdullah and Sultan are themselves very old and are only a short- term solution,'' said Bradley, author of ``Saudi Arabia Exposed,'' in a telephone interview.
That's pretty much a statement of the obvious. I think we mentioned it here yesterday...
According to a report released Aug. 1 by research group Oxford Analytica, Abdullah has heart problems and is likely to be transitional ruler unlikely to fundamentally change the kingdom.
He's already done probably as much as he's going to do, since he's been running thing ever since King Fod became a broccoli...
The report also said the incoming Crown Prince Sultan has been treated for cancer.
We keep hearing these cancer stories, but nobody ever seems to croak from it. Muammar was supposed to be in the terminal stages three years ago. Yasser was supposed to have it.
Part of Fahd's legacy was to change the laws of succession in 1992, allowing for grandsons of the country's founder, Abdulaziz Ibn al-Saud to become king, Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.K., told reporters in London yesterday. The law decreed that the most capable prince would be selected as king by the Saud family, opening the way to a power struggle by removing the automatic nature of succession.
"There can be only one!"
"Most capable" can be translated as "last man standing"...
``Sultan and other senior princes all have sons from more than one wife who are potential rivals for positions of power,'' Bradley said.
Welcome to the Middle Ages where succession is still a contact sport
Potential leaders include Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, 56, the son of the incoming crown Prince Sultan and former Ambassador to the U.S.; Prince Salman ibn Adbul Aziz, 71; Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, 70, and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, 48, the world's fifth-richest man and largest shareholder in Citigroup Inc. Bandar and Alwaleed have extensive contacts with western business and political figures.
The so-called "moderate" branch of the family tree.
Prince Naif is a controversial figure, who Bradley doesn't believe the U.S. and other western nations would welcome as a contender to the throne. Shortly after the Sept. 11 2001 attacks on the U.S., Naif said he didn't believe Saudis were among the hijackers and that the attack was a Zionist conspiracy.
Voted "Most likely to smother his brothers in their sleep"
... and only half as bright as he thinks he is...
As the most influential member in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Saudi Arabia has led supply increases over the past few years, in a bid to satisfy a surge in world demand and benefiting from the sale of more barrels. It has also helped moderate demands for higher oil prices from other members of the group of 11 oil exporters, including Iran and Venezuela, aiming not to undermine demand for crude. ``I don't expect any change in policies, only continuity,'' Prince Turki al-Faisal said.
I wouldn't expect any overt changes in the coming months, but I expect there will be a lot of activity in the background, to include a few untimely departures from this vale of tears — let's call it a spike in the number of auto and aircraft accidents...
Bradley says the royal family must introduce additional social reforms to quell a population where the official unemployment rate is 25 percent and more than one-third of the population is under 14 years of age.
Or crack down even harder, which is more likely under Naif.
Abdullah had been in charge of day-to-day affairs in Saudi Arabia since Fahd suffered a stroke in 1996. Fahd's reign was marked by pro-U.S. policies, tense relations with Islamic clerics and an opening of the oil industry to foreign investment.
But, odds are, he ain't going to keep living much longer at his age.
Muhammad-Ali Zainy of the London-based Center for Global Energy Studies said future Saudi leaders must confront Islamic fundamentalists and may need to reduce the role religion plays in education. `They are already deep into Islamization, teaching people religion,'' he said in an interview. ``What really produced these fanatics and terrorists is too much focus on religion.''
We've noticed
Bandar was posted in Washington for 22 years and maintained close ties with the Bush family. President George W. Bush cited Bandar's ``charm, wit and humor'' and called him a ``tireless advocate for close ties, warm relations and mutual understanding between the United States and Saudi Arabia over 20 years,'' in a statement issued after his resignation from the diplomatic post July 21.
Yeah, yeah, we know. So did every one else in Washington.
The relationship between Bandar and the U.S. administration didn't lead to either country's intelligence service detecting the presence of 15 Saudi nationals in the U.S. in the months before Sept. 11, 2001. Those nationals joined with four other Islamic activists to carry out the hijackings.
Still, Bandar's experience and relationship to the current crown prince could give him an advantage among the younger rivals for the crown.
The big question is, did all those years hob-nobbing in Washington dull his skills at the close quarter knife fighting now being played out
Oxford Anayltica said the appointment of a ``second deputy prime minister'' to assist the crown prince will be a ``significant pointer'' in the direction of the kingdom. The person holding that position has traditionally become the next in line for crown princes, the report said. ``Two rival camps, the so-called reformers and the hardliners, are forming,'' Chatham House's Yamani said. ``If Abdullah can appoint a more open-minded younger figure, then there may be hope.''
Let the games begin!
"Mahmoud! I shall be calling on my half brother, Prince Ahmed. Fetch me my silken cord and the small bottle of 'special' seasoning!"
"Yes, effendi!"
"And... ummm... hire a new food taster. The last one died!"
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
10:37 ||
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DUEL!
Swords at 20 paces. Winner gets the Magic Kingdom, and the lamp with three wishes.
#5
Saudi Royals May Fight for Control After Fahd's Death
...From your lips to Allan's ears.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
08/02/2005 12:12
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#6
I really couldn't care less about those sandy assholes, but it seems like we are the ones who take it up the coat on oil prices every time something like this happens in arab-land. They have no reason to stabilize the region, and apparently every reason to destabilize it. (higher prices for the same barrel of oil) We simply can't win when it comes to arab oil.
#7
Let's see if my scorecard is up to date. Abdullah controls the National Guard, Bedu to the core and loyal to him. Sultan controls the Armed Forces [rotfl] [hey, they might be worth spit] [or not]. Nayef controls the police, interior sercurity and most probably the religious police.
#12
The mind boggles at the incredible things this man says.
It is like he wants to be infamous, so he goes over the top.
He sounds more Islamist than bin Laden.
What a complete bastard.
Remember a few months ago in the British election when he was surrounded by 30 or 40 Islamist thugs, angry as he was luring Islamists into kuffr voting? He was only saved by his PA who rocked up in a car? What a shame the Islamonazis didn't give him the beating he so richly deserved.
#13
Jeeze! Even Mikey Moore has been quiet lately. Doesn't this clown know when to shut up?
When is his term up, and is somebody with a few more brain cells going to oppose him?
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 12:33
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#14
Oh, I'm sure Micheal Moore is plenty active right now. Whatever he's up to is probably still in the planning stage. Now that he's tasted fame he's not going to let it slip away so easily.
Besides, it's his only chance of ever getting laid.
Posted by: Dar ||
08/02/2005 12:59
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#15
Remember he is married to Arafart's niece and a convert to Islam.
#18
I have to say it again. It is a wonder this subnormal cretin has not suffered a phyical assult yet. I don;t think his ability to speak publicly will save his hide from this much longer.
#20
Sung to
"You'll Never Walk Alone"
"Carousel"
Rogers & Hammerstein
When you walk through London-town,
Spouting off your mouth.
Insulting folks who disagree with you.
At the end of the day,
Thereâs a reckoning,
And karma comes on you Jihadi stooge!
You yap on and on,
More outrageous each day,
Though your friends tell you, âShut up!â
Talk on, talk on,
With nothing in your head,
And you never manage to cease.
Your time is coming soon!
#22
There's nothing wrong with Gorgeous Georgie that a .40 S&W Mozambique drill (two bullets to center of mass, with a third to the head)wouldn't cure. He's certainly earned it.
Posted by: mac ||
08/02/2005 20:46
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#23
Methinks it will be these anti-democratic, anti-reform, anti-benevolent Muslim fanatics whose hatred will induce them to end up destroying Jerusalem and Baghdad, iff not the world. The Radical Islamists and Commies are both fighting for the "status quo", a super-regulated, super-traditionalist/
conservative, regressed, stratified uniformist world where all wealth, modernity, and power is vested in Government and the Political/Ruling Elites, while the other classes are stuck with sod houses, permament poverty, super-inflation and camels = Geos-Yugos, etal.!? Despite massive levels of propaganda, the reality is both Islam and Leftism-Socialism have utterly failed to internally prove their merits such that their only resort is to TAKE BY FORCE, DECEPTION AND DESTRUCTIVE WARFARE, where the Victor (s), whom ever it is, gets all the marbles, how many is left. As of July 2005 Russia-China' s total economies are each roughly FIVE PERCENT OR LESS, IN TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, IN COMPARISON TO THE USA's, according to certain anlysts, YET THE DEMOLEFT'S ANSWER IS THAT SUCCESSFUL AMERICA MUST BECOME SUPER-REGULATED AND SOCIALIST, NOT FOR RUSSIA-CHINA TO BECOME DE-REGULATED IN THE US/WESTERN SENSE, DEMOCAPITALIST OR FEDERALIST, ETC. SUCCESSFUL AMERICA, AND ONLY AMERICA, IS THE ONE THAT HAS TO GIVE UP ITS HYPERPOWER-PLUS WEALTH AND ENDOWMENTS, in exchange for Support-Your-Local- Camel/Donkey
-Dealership and neighborhood ANTI-NAZI NAZIS-FOR-STALINISM, the Amerikaner Sozilizei Waffen SS StalinPanzers of the Clinton USSA SiegKorps!?
#24
Methinks it will be these anti-democratic, anti-reform, anti-benevolent Muslim fanatics whose hatred will induce them to end up destroying Jerusalem and Baghdad, iff not the world. The Radical Islamists and Commies are both fighting for the "status quo", a super-regulated, super-traditionalist/
conservative, regressed, stratified uniformist world where all wealth, modernity, and power is vested in Government and the Political/Ruling Elites, while the other classes are stuck with sod houses, permament poverty, super-inflation and camels = Geos-Yugos, etal.!? Despite massive levels of propaganda, the reality is both Islam and Leftism-Socialism have utterly failed to internally prove their merits such that their only resort is to TAKE BY FORCE, DECEPTION AND DESTRUCTIVE WARFARE, where the Victor (s), whom ever it is, gets all the marbles, how many is left. As of July 2005 Russia-China' s total economies are each roughly FIVE PERCENT OR LESS, IN TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, IN COMPARISON TO THE USA's, according to certain anlysts, YET THE DEMOLEFT'S ANSWER IS THAT SUCCESSFUL AMERICA MUST BECOME SUPER-REGULATED AND SOCIALIST, NOT FOR RUSSIA-CHINA TO BECOME DE-REGULATED IN THE US/WESTERN SENSE, DEMOCAPITALIST OR FEDERALIST, ETC. SUCCESSFUL AMERICA, AND ONLY AMERICA, IS THE ONE THAT HAS TO GIVE UP ITS HYPERPOWER-PLUS WEALTH AND ENDOWMENTS, in exchange for Support-Your-Local- Camel/Donkey
-Dealership and neighborhood ANTI-NAZI NAZIS-FOR-STALINISM, the Amerikaner Sozilizei Waffen SS StalinPanzers of the Clinton USSA SiegKorps!?
SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - Discovery's astronauts are preparing for a high-stakes task that's never before been attempted: sending a spacewalker beneath the craft to repair filler sticking out from ship's thermal tile belly.
NASA says the protruding material could cause dangerous overheating during re-entry and lead to another Columbia-type disaster.
The agency will put astronaut Stephen Robinson on the space station's 58-foot robotic arm Wednesday as part of an unrehearsed maneuver. The arm will be operated by astronauts inside the station, who will bend and wrap Robinson around so he can reach the shuttle's belly. A possible Earth-side spin-off of this technology is a new ride at Six Flags.
Once there, he'll tug out the ceramic-fabric filler with his gloved hands. If that doesn't work, he'll cut away the material, which is sticking out about an inch from two spots near Discovery's nose. And if that doesn't work, Duck Tape™
"I am pretty comfortable with using tools very carefully," Robinson said early Tuesday during a crew press conference from aboard the space station. "But no doubt about it, this is going to be a very delicate task. But as I say, a simple one."
Robinson said the makeshift saw will only be used if other methods to remove the gap fillers - one about the thickness of an index card and the other, the size of three index cards bonded together - are unsuccessful.
"There won't be any yanking going on at all," though there has been a lot of wanking at NASA headquarters Robinson said. "It will be a gentle pull with my hand. If that doesn't work, I have some forceps. I will give it a slightly more than gentle pull. If that doesn't work, I saw it off with a hacksaw."
Deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale says if none of the proposed methods work, there will likely be some head scratching for a day. Followed by prayer However, he says the agency will find another method and try the repair again Thursday or Friday.
Engineers simply don't know enough about potential problems that could be caused by the protruding gap fillers, some of which protect tiles from hitting one another during launch.
But after a careful review of information sent from the ground, Thomas said he believes the repairs are justified given "every indication is that the removal of the material should be pretty straightforward and pretty easy."
"The bottom line is there is large uncertainty because nobody has a very good handle on the aerodynamics at those altitudes and at those speeds," Hale said. "Given that large degree of uncertainty, life could be normal during entry or some bad things could happen."
Robinson and his spacewalking partner, Soichi Noguchi, will still install a tool platform onto the space station. But once the installation is complete, the spacewalk will alter from the way it was carefully choreographed before last week's launch.
"It's going to be like watching grass grow," Or judges getting confirmed by the Senate he stressed.
Discovery will remain docked at the station until Saturday. The shuttle is set return to Earth early Monday. All the snark was whistling in the graveyard. I pray that everything comes out all right. I want these people back safely with their families. Then shut down NASA and RIF everyone there.
All Praise is to Allah who has blessed us with an outpouring of daily news on the ongoing battles in Afghanistan, South Waziristan and Kashmir.
"Of course, if you read the infidel press, you might think things are going badly for our side. But, be assured, those are all lies!"
JUS now requires additional committed and steadfast Urdu translators to join our news desk to translate short news items from Urdu to English.
"The last person manning this desk was overcome by djinns and carried out of the office gibbering."
This position requires an individual who has the skills to produce this work quickly, in a quality and consistent manner, and who is sincerely seeking the blessings of Allah.
"Previous heavy drug usage considered a plus"
If you are that person and want to join a dynamic news department, please contact our Urdu Translation team leader, Ahmad Al-Marid at almarid@jihadunspun.com.
"Or dial our toll-free number; 1-800-LUV-JIHD"
Peace and Blessings to those who follow His straight path.
"Bees Pee Upon You!"
JUS News Team
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
10:01 ||
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Come work for us at Jihad UnSpun...
Marvelous working environment!
Management encourages the best from all Employees...
Tip The Corner (am I'm really Sherry, still can't get this thing to change my name. Some worrying pieces in this report
In 20 years' time, a new study predicts, almost the only thing British about Britain's Armed Forces will be the men and women serving in them, and the Union Flags sewn on their Chinese-made uniforms to distinguish them from their EU colleagues.
A wealth of evidence has come to light to show how, over the next two decades, the British Army will have been almost wholly reorganised and re-equipped as part of the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF), directed from Brussels, using equipment supplied almost entirely by other countries in the EU. No longer will it be technically or politically possible for Britain's Armed Forces to fight independently, or in alliance with those of the US.
Yet the scale and the speed of this astonishing transformation has been deliberately concealed by the Ministry of Defence - to the point where British firms are being instructed to buy foreign-made defence equipment which can be relabelled to look as though it is British-made. This startling picture emerges from an exhaustive study of current British and EU defence planning carried out by Dr Richard North, for a paper to be published this autumn on "The Secret Realignment of UK Defence Policy".
Britain's abandonment of its military co-operation with the US in favour of integration with our European "partners" has been prompted by the forthcoming revolution in warfare centred on satellites, electronics, and a new generation of vehicles, unmanned aircraft and weapons systems. Almost across the board, the MoD is turning its back on joint defence projects with the US, even where these involve British firms, in favour of equipment supplied or developed by firms in France, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
In the plan for integrating British forces into the 60,000 strong ERRF, with its command centre in Brussels, the key to co-ordinating future operations will be satellite systems that are largely French-built, led by Galileo, the EU's planned rival to the US GPS system. British troops will no longer be transported by US-built C130 and C17 aircraft, but by the A400M "Eurolifter". Under the £14 billion project known as Fres (Future Rapid Effects System), their armoured fighting vehicles will be supplied by Sweden and fitted with French guns and ammunition.
Joint US-British bids to supply £1.6-billion-worth of trucks were rejected in favour of Austrian-built models, with the name of the former British firm ERF added to imply a British contribution. US and other non-EU reconnaissance vehicles were rejected in favour of obsolescent and far more expensive ones from the Italian firm Iveco, although their origin is again disguised behind the name of the British firm BAE Land Systems.
A joint project with the US to develop a 155mm howitzer has been dropped in favour of a French gun firing German-designed shells. Battlefield radar systems are being built in Germany and Sweden. The development of unmanned aircraft - a vital element in future tactics - is led by France, while the RAF's main strike aircraft will be the Eurofighter, firing French-made missiles.
So the list continues, for projects large and small - not forgetting the three giant carriers to be shared between the Royal Navy and the French, with the French firm Thales playing a major part in the design and building. The consistent pattern in all this procurement policy is that, wherever possible, US firms are excluded, even where this means excluding British firms associated with them.
Such a gulf is now opening up between the US and EU defence forces that, on the battlefields of the future, co-ordinated by electronics and satellites, it will be impossible for them to fight alongside each other. And yet - while the evidence for what is going on can be found by anyone who knows how to use the internet - our politicians have so far remained astonishingly silent. In this respect our Opposition is almost as culpable as our ministers.
#7
I wonder how the Joint Strike Fighter fits in? The Brits have been part of the development all along. This will likely be the main fighter for any aircraft carriers they have since the JSF has VSTOL ability.
Where already more than half of all babies born muslim. Jolly good show. Be sure to pray facing Mecca, and carry on.
Posted by: ed ||
08/02/2005 13:41
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#9
so if this is how the people our grandfathers fought and died for are treating us now, what can we expect from the Iraqi (Middle-Eastern) peoples in the future that we're dying for today?
#10
so if this is how the people our grandfathers fought and died for are treating us now, what can we expect from the Iraqi (Middle-Eastern) peoples in the future that we're dying for today?
#11
Gratitude is a short-lived thing among most people, Shellback.
The bigger issue is how successful the French/Belgian/German axis has been in working to isolate Britain from the US for the long term. Sooner or later the UK is going to have to decide who they belong with.
It looks as if they've decided already. This has the same look/feel as the way in which British leaders quietly signed up to obey some EU laws without the British citizenry having known about it or voted on it. Wasn't there a stink about that last year, when the EUcrats argued that it was too late, the treaty forbade them from backing out of compliance?
We'd better get used to being basically on our own.
Washington, D.C.-Senator Norm Coleman today submitted a statement into the Congressional Record denouncing a final report issued by the United Nations' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) suggesting that the U.N. assume global governance of the Internet. Since its inception and creation in the United States, the U.S. has assumed the historic role of overseeing the Internet's growth and has overseen its development. The U.N. taskforce report suggests that in addition to terminating the U.S.'s leadership role, the authority and functions of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce, should be transferred as well. Senator Coleman strongly opposes these measures.
"My probe of the U.N. as Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed management that was at best, incompetent, and at worst corrupt," said Coleman. "The first priority for the United Nations must be fundamental reform of its management and operations rather than any expansion of its authority and responsibilities. The Internet has flourished under U.S. supervision, oversight, and private sector involvement. This growth did not happen because of increased government involvement, but rather, from the opening on the Internet to commerce and private sector innovation. Subjecting the Internet and its security to the politicized control of the UN bureaucracy would be a giant and foolhardy step backwards."Can I get an "Amen!" brothers?
"Recently, I introduced UN reform legislation with the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations, Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN), known as the Coleman-Lugar UN Reform Bill, to help put an end to a culture of corruption that was exposed by the Oil for Food scandal, peacekeeping sexual abuse scandals, and other instances of organizational failures at U.N.," Coleman said. "Putting the U.N. in charge of one of the world's most important technological wonders and economic engines is out of the question. This proposal would leave the United States with no more say over the future of the Internet than Cuba or China-countries that have little or no commitment to the free flow of information."
The WGIG taskforce report will be discussed at the next World Summit on the Information Society Tunisia in November.
"In light of this report, I also plan to consult with experts and stakeholders regarding Internet governance, and will assess whether legislation is needed as a remedy," Coleman continued. "The U.S. is willing to work with other countries that have an interest in the management of their own country code domains but UN control is out of the question. We will continue a dialogue with the rest of the world on these issues as we go forward."
"Putting the U.N. in charge of one of the world's most important technological wonders and economic engines is out of the question. This proposal would leave the United States with no more say over the future of the Internet than Cuba or China-countries that have little or no commitment to the free flow of information."
I think this is one of those "Bottom Line" moments so rare in the Senate...
I think the good Senator is telling Kofi to F-Off!
ANKARA - The second Turkey-U.S.-Iraq tripartite security meeting will start in Washington on Wednesday. First meeting was held in Ankara in January for elimination of terrorist organization PKK from the north of Iraq. Sources said that the meeting which will last for two days will be held on technical level and participants will discuss legal process of extradition of terrorist organization members to Turkey. Turkish Foreign Ministry Security Affairs Director General Hayati Guven will represent Turkey in the meeting.
In the first meeting, Turkey gave a list including its demands for elimination of PKK elements from the region. Among the demands, there was the extradition of terrorist organization members who were wanted with red and blue bulletin. U.S. Department of State spokesman Tom Casey said on Tuesday that talks with Turkey and Iraq continue regarding PKK and this joint study will be pursued until PKK terrorism is eliminated. On the other hand, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Matt Bryza who held talks in Ankara yesterday stated that they would continue to work in cooperation with Turkey to eliminate PKK terrorism.
Bryza stressed that cooperation between Turkey, the United States and Iraq should be increased and noted that the problem should be solved piece by piece. He added that those who support terrorist organization financially in Europe should be prevented.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
09:56 ||
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August 2, 2005: For the first time, a JDAM (GPS guided bomb) was dropped from a warplane (an F-22) traveling a supersonic speed. The F-22 frequently travels at supersonic (over 1,100 kilometers an hour) speed because itâs engines were designed and built to provide this kind of performance (called âsupercruiseâ) . The bomb dropped was a 1,000 pound JDAM. Further tests will check out performance of 500 and 250 pound JDAMs. The latter weapon, called the SDB (Small Diameter Bomb) is particularly important, as it enables the F-22 to carry the maximum number of bombs (eight) in its internal bomb bay. The U.S. Air Force wants to capitalize on the supercruise capability of the F-22, and is also testing the use of electronic reconnaissance sensors at supercruise speeds. This would enable an F-22 to quickly check out an area for enemy electronic equipment, and just as quickly drop a JDAM on any enemy transmitters found below. Speed and surprise have always been valuable capabilities in warfare, and a supersonic F-22 overhead, able to pinpoint hostile radars or radio transmitters, and promptly bomb them, would be pretty decisive.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
09:54 ||
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Better bombing targets over thar in Iranian nuke land. A target rich environment.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/02/2005 13:41
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Target rich, yes. But we'll have to break out the bunker busters to get to their nuclear infrastructure. The Iranians learned a valuable lesson from Osirak, and have spread their nuke production out very well and planted it very deep in the ground as well.
No reason not to bomb the shit out of them anyway, but that will begin soon enough.
August 2, 2005: China has agreed to provide Indonesia with the propulsion and guidance technology needed to build guided missiles with a range of up to 150 kilometers. Indonesia wants to build its own weapons, partly for national pride, partly to provide protection from arms embargos. Indonesia is currently under an arms embargo by the United States (for supporting murderous militias in East Timor). As a result, most of the air forceâs American made aircraft are grounded because of a spare parts shortage. Indonesia tried to build its own missiles once before, in the 1960s, but corruption and managerial incompetence caused that effort to fail. This time around, the effort is likely to succeed. These anti-ship missiles would, it a certain degree, replace the grounded American F-16 aircraft, and give Indonesia, an island nation, better defense against seaborne aggressors. The missiles would be launched from land and ships. Norinco, the company that would provide the technical assistance, is owned by the Chinese government.
Norinco is also under investigation by the United States for illegally transferring solid fuel rocket motor technology to Iran. Recently, Iran openly boasted of having âperfectedâ the ability to manufacture solid fuel rocket motors for its long range ballistic missiles. Most of the time, Norinco is less exposed to prosecution and sanctions for illegal activity when it just sells weapons manufacturing technology. This can be done by emailing documents and illustrations, or hand delivering a data CD. Follow this up with discreet visits by some engineers, and youâve got another few million bucks in the bank.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
09:48 ||
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Norinco, the company that would provide the technical assistance, is owned by the Chinese government.
Figures. People need to realize that we are still in a full blown cold war with communisim (see China) and Iran and the other small MHM nations are still pawns in the game.
Oh, and freeze and seize all Norinco assets.
August 2, 2005: Libya has become more active in the war on terror. This may seem strange, since Libya has hosted Arab terrorists for decades. Libya is also a dictatorship run by a very religious Arab nationalist; Moammar Khadaffi. Whatâs going on here? Several things. First of all, Khadaffi is also a monumental flake and incompetent when it comes to running a national economy. Despite vast oil wealth, Libya is poor, and itâs people are pretty pissed off about that. However, Khadaffi is good at one thing; running a police state. Itâs believed that over ten percent of the population are on the state payroll (for small amounts of cash, and favors) as informers. Khadaffi is such an oddball, that even his fellow Arab dictators consider him an oddball, and often make no secret of this opinion. Khadaffi, and Libyans, ignore this, for Khadaffi appears pretty off-the-wall most of the time.
But Khadaffi isnât stupid. After Iraq was invaded in 2003, he suddenly renounced terrorism and abandoned his attempts to create chemical and nuclear weapons. This new policy inflamed Islamic radicals in Libya, but did not produce an outbreak of Islamic terrorism in Libya. Thatâs because Islamic radicals have been fighting Khadaffi for over a decade already. Libya, like all other Arab nations, had thousands of its young men go off to fighting in Afghanistan during the 1980s. When they came home to Libya, they decided that their government wasnât Islamic enough, and tried to overthrow Khadaffi. They failed, and most of them were killed, imprisoned or driven into exile by the late 1990s. The few who survived in Libya kept quiet, until now.
Several Islamic terrorist groups have shown up in Libya over the past year. The most prominent of these (if only because of their ability to publicize themselves) has been The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (Jama'at al-Islamiya al-Muqatila), or LIFG. So far this year, there have been several violent incidents between LIFG members and the security forces. The terrorists have not proved themselves very terrible so far. In one incident, an LIFG killer, armed with a sword, went after some policemen. The cops pulled out their pistols, and, well, you may have seen that one play out in the movies.
The Islamic terrorists know who their real enemy is, and during the 1990s made several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Khadaffi. Groups like LIFG understand that most Libyans are fed up with Khadaffi and all his posturing and inefficiency. Before Osama bin Laden got distracted with killing infidels (non-Moslems), guys like Khadaffi were at the top of the al Qaeda hit list. But al Qaeda gave up trying to take Khadaffi down, because thugs like Khadaffi know how to deal with Islamic terrorists. For example, after the Iraq invasion of 2003, many Libyan Islamic radicals wanted to go to Iraq and fight the Americans. Khadaffi let them, and gave orders that any who survived and tried to return home, were to be shot on sight.
The traditional (in the Arab world) way of dealing with violent dissent (like Islamic terrorism) is to come down hard on the malcontents, and err on the side of too much violence. But Khadaffi also has to deal with some truly new, and very dangerous ideas circulating throughout the Arab world. No, not Islamic conservatism, but democracy. The last thing Khadaffi wants is democracy. He knows most Libyans are unhappy, and would vote him out of office if given a chance. Khadaffi is trying to improve the economy, and is bringing in lots of foreign experts to help him do it. Thatâs why he dumped support for terrorism and nukes, in order to get out from under UN embargos. But itâs going to take a while to undo decades of misadministration. In the meantime, all those foreigners just inflame the Islamic radicals. To cope with this, Khadaffi plans to hire at least another 100,000 people for the security forces. Life is not going to be easy for anyone in Libya over the next few years.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
09:42 ||
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In one incident, an LIFG killer, armed with a sword, went after some policemen. The cops pulled out their pistols, and, well, you may have seen that one play out in the movies.
#2
For example, after the Iraq invasion of 2003, many Libyan Islamic radicals wanted to go to Iraq and fight the Americans. Khadaffi let them, and gave orders that any who survived and tried to return home, were to be shot on sight
If this has any relationship with reality, well good. A pity he couldn't skip the middle steps and just shoot the Jihadis. That would actualy save him some trouble in the long run.
I guess he needed the fig leaf of being able to say "Sorry, I guess the Americans must have killed your young idiot son."
I wonder if we can exploit his need for a domestic fig leaf to the US's advantage?
Posted by: N guard ||
08/02/2005 11:35
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Posted by: Fred ||
08/02/2005 11:52
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PRESIDENT BUSH was within his rights yesterday to install John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations by recess appointment. Mr. Bolton's nomination has been pending a long time, and a majority of the Senate probably would have voted to confirm him. Yet Senate Democrats denied him an up-or-down vote, . . . . Using that power to circumvent the normal advice-and-consent process is politically provocative and should be quite rare. But having thwarted the usual process under which the Senate gets to vote on a president's nominee, it takes a bit of chutzpah for Democrats now to cry foul at Mr. Bush's decision to exercise his other option.
Mr. Bolton, as we have noted before, would not have been our choice for this job. . . . Moreover, Democrats are correct in noting that Mr. Bolton, by dint of the recess appointment, will go to the United Nations under less than optimal conditions. An ambassador who lacks the explicit support of Congress speaks less securely for the nation than one who enters the U.N. Security Council with the Senate's blessing. But, again, whose fault is that? Democrats had every chance to muster the votes to defeat the nomination; they couldn't do it. If Mr. Bolton is now heading to New York without the Senate's imprimatur but with a figurative asterisk beside his name, that's only because, having failed to defeat him, a minority refused to lose gracefully. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
08/02/2005
09:24 ||
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#1
This is from The Washington Post? The one in Washington, DC? Wonders never cease...
Posted by: Jonathan ||
08/02/2005 9:53
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#5
re: WAPO. It's really strange the way the dem dogs have been chained in over the last several days. Without all their senseless yapping - it's so quiet... it's almost creepy.
#8
I personally love the line about chutzpah, but I would add that it really takes gall to stand there and say that the President is overstepping his authority when clearly he is not. I watched Chris Mathews and the Donk on the show could not come up with one fact or specific reason to hold up the vote. He had a lot of innuendo and rumors but couldnât nail down a specific reason for Bolton not to get a vote. The best he could come up with is that Bolton lacked the âtemperamentâ to be the ambassador to the un. Chris pointed out that Kennedy sent Stevenson to the un to deal with the Soviets and we know how his âtemperamentâ was. I think he was the first ambassador to threaten the Soviets in open session. We desperately need someone just like that today. I really hope they spend the next three years whining, it will really help them in the polls.
#9
2b - that's because they are sill in complete shock after their SUGAR DADDY the AFL/CIO shattered over worthless contributions to Dems.
That's the big story. Note how the privately employeed types (Teamsters, Service Workers Int and others split) while the government emply types with secure jobs -you don't outsource teachers and cops- stayed. Expect to see the CIO turn into a bureaucrats union and sole support of the dems.
#12
Yes Bobby, he was a Democrat when that meant defending your country against dictators. Peace loving Kennedy (Invader of several countries) sent this bulldog to the un and he kicked ass (diplomatically) all over the communists block.
#14
Over at Arianne Huffnpuff she allowed as how Bush was thumbing his nose at the Senate. I replied to her that he wasn't thumbing his nose at the Senate, just the obstructionist Democrats. Someone else corrected me and said it wasn't his nose, but a certain middle finger. Way better than what I said.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/02/2005 16:34
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#15
*sob*
Posted by: G. Voinovich ||
08/02/2005 16:57
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#16
Ya know, I used to know there was a Voinovich important in Ohio - Governor, Senator, somesuch.
Buy I freely admit, comment #15 has me confused!
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 20:19
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Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz says his country will expand its intelligence-sharing with Britain following two London bombing attacks in July. However, Aziz told the Financial Times, "it would be simplistic" to assume the July 7 suicide bombers used their ties in Pakistan to plan the attacks. "There is no linkage of the visits to Pakistan and these terrible events," he said.
The "no linkage" meme is getting a bit tired.
At least one of the three ethnic Pakistani bombers is believed to have visited an Islamic madrassa in Pakistan to prepare for the attacks. Senior Pakistani intelligence officials told the newspaper they had nearly finished questioning various people who received phone calls from two of the July 7 bombers who visited their parents' country of origin in the past year.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
08:52 ||
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#1
Yeah, obvious to any idiot that there's no connection here.
This is the talkradio host who is under suspension for criticizing Islam. CAIR is still carrying out defamation activities against him.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 2005
THANK YOU....NOW PLEASE STOP!!!! On behalf of my friends who work hard at 630 WMAL every day, I'm asking all of you who've expressed your support for me to do me a HUGE personal favor: Please stop. The volume of calls and emails is hurting the ability of some very good people to do their jobs, and trust me--your message has been received.
Am I overwhelmed by the fact that websites and blogs have spontaneously risen up across the DC area and around the country to express their support? Yes, more than you know. I am flattered and amazed and humbled and generally astonished.
But if you really want to see a positive resolution to this story, I'm asking all you bloggers and callers and emailers and fellow First-Amendment freaks to please stop contacting 630 WMAL. Please. I'm begging you.
I don't know how many ways there are to say "Thank you," but I want to use them all. Thanks for what you've done, for the history you've made in Washington radio, and thanks now for sitting back for a few days and watching how things work out.
TEHRAN, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- An explosive device Tuesday rocked a building harboring foreign companies in central Tehran, causing damage but no injuries, the Iranian News Agency reports. IRNA said the building houses the offices of British Petroleum, British Airways and Mercedes Benz, producing panic among employees.
BP and BA, huh? Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
Police said an investigation was under way. Additional: The device exploded around 9:30 a.m. (0500 GMT) in a garbage bin on the 10th floor near the British Airways office. One witness told Reuters the blast was caused by a bomb hidden in a rubbish bin in the hallway of a large tower block on the floor shared by the two companies and car giant DaimlerChrysler. "It was at 9.15 a.m. (0445 GMT) outside the BA and BP office, there were no casualties but the building was damaged," said the witness who works in one of the offices.
"It was hidden in a rubbish bin," he said. "Windows were smashed, there was a lot of damage to the building, parts of the ceiling collapsed."
Police at the scene told Reuters it was a bomb blast. However, the UK's Press Association said the explosion was thought to have been caused by device similar to a concussion grenade which produces a loud noise and a shock wave. Just a little wake-up call
Iran's Interior Ministry said they had sent bomb disposal teams to the building. It was not immediately clear who was behind the blast.
A BA spokesman in London told CNN: "We can confirm that police in Tehran are investigating a very small explosion outside an office block in the city. No one from British Airways or its franchise carrier BMed has been injured in the incident. "British Airways' franchise BMed, which operates a daily service to the city, has its office on the 10th floor of the building which also includes many other Western companies.
"There was no damage to the BMed office given its height above the ground. It is likely that the office will be closed for the remainder of the day."
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
08:46 ||
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#1
Hmmm.... State-sanctioned terror against the west, or maybe some protesters against the current regime? Only the gummint knows for sure.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 8:59
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The Brits are certainly popular at the mo' - heh.
Posted by: Howard UK ||
08/02/2005 9:00
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TEHRAN, Aug 2 (Reuters) - A gunman on a motorcycle shot dead the judge trying the case of Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji, judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimirad said on Tuesday.
Mere coincidence?
Posted by: Mike ||
08/02/2005 9:24
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The Brits are certainly popular at the mo'
remember the Iranin poster that was intent on sowing seeds of discontent between America and Britain - going on about the American Revolution? It was the first shot across the brow I guess. Interesting. I wonder why.
#5
An explosive device Tuesday rocked a building harboring foreign companies in central Tehran, causing damage but no injuries, the Iranian News Agency reports.
Couldn't they have targeted a building full of mullahs instead?
#7
I just wonder (hoping) that the US is conducting a top-to-bottom discombobulation of the entire Iranian nation. Literally thousands of agents all on a mission to be naughty. Agitating minorities, assassinating monsterous tyrants, disrupting and sabotaging trade and business, sewing distrust and disaffection, spreading disinformation and information, increasing popular discomfort, fomenting superstition and confusion. Oh, life can be good.
If we had two agents to rub together, we could make a fire....
But I hope other, less organized, forces are accomplishing the same thing!
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 12:02
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I hope the folks in whatever agency in Iraq have been able to find the folks who want the MMs gone as much as we do. Congrats and keep up the good work!
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 13:08
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#10
Promote terror and that's what you will get. The prospect of financial loss probably never occured to them.
#11
I guess asking for a 10,000 meter mushroom cloud and massive blast and heat waves would be stretching things just a bit - nevertheless, I would love to hear about it. 'Couldn't hardly happen to a better candidate city.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 - One of the most puzzling aspects of the C.I.A. leak case has had to do with the name of the exposed officer. Why did the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak identify her as Valerie Plame in exposing her link to the C.I.A. in July 2003 when she had been known for years both at the agency and in her personal life by her married name, Valerie Wilson? Mr. Novak offered a possible explanation for the disconnect on Monday, suggesting in his column that he could have obtained Ms. Wilson's maiden name from the directory Who's Who in America, which used that name in identifying her as the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador.
Mr. Novak did not explicitly cite the directory as his source. Nor was this his first public reference to the Who's Who listing. In a column in October 2003, three months after he had first disclosed Ms. Wilson's name and her role, Mr. Novak cited the published listing as evidence that Ms. Wilson's identity was "no secret." But in drawing renewed attention to the published listing, Mr. Novak seemed to suggest more directly than ever before that the scrutiny that has focused on which of his sources provided him the name might have been misplaced, and that he might well have figured it out by himself. Any request that he withhold Ms. Wilson's name from his column of July 14, 2003, would have been "meaningless" once he had been told she was married to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Novak wrote on Monday, because she was openly listed in the directory. But Mr. Novak also wrote that he would never have used Ms. Wilson's name had anyone from the C.I.A. told him that doing so would endanger her or anyone else.
The special counsel in the leak case has been trying to determine whether government officials violated federal laws about the handling of classified information when someone leaked Ms. Wilson's identity and C.I.A. role to reporters. The fact that Mr. Novak identified her as Valerie Plame had seemed to some observers to narrow the field of possible suspects in the leak case, because she had not used that name since her marriage in 1998. A State Department memorandum drafted in 2003 and taken on board Air Force One the week before Mr. Novak's column ran identifies Ms. Wilson by her married name rather than Ms. Plame. The prosecutor has taken an interest in the memorandum - which outlines Ms. Wilson's role in suggesting her husband for a fact-finding trip to Niger - and has shown it to numerous witnesses in the case in an apparent effort to determine whether it was a source for Mr. Novak or the officials who leaked the information to him.
If not for Who's Who, it is not clear how Mr. Novak would have decided to identify Ms. Wilson as Ms. Plame rather than the name she commonly used. In the Who's Who directory for 2003, personal information about Mr. Wilson includes his origins in Bridgeport, Conn., and the names of his previous wife and his four children. His current wife is listed as Valerie Elise Plame, and the date of their marriage April 3, 1998. There is no mention of her employer.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005
08:32 ||
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From Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
[Attorney] Abdolfattah Soltani was arrested in Tehran on 30 July and taken to an unknown place, apparently for divulging the contents of a nuclear espionage case, Radio Farda and ISNA reported on 31 July. Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimi-Rad said on 31 July that Soltani discussed the case with the families of defendants. .... The Information Ministry, he added, has a full dossier on Soltani. But lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah told Radio Farda that Soltani should first have been summoned to court to hear charges. Dadkhah added that the judiciary spokesman has spoken about the charges as if Soltani were already convicted.
Radio Farda reported on 31 July that men presenting themselves as judiciary agents searched Soltani's house "five days before" his arrest, and took away unspecified papers and documents. Soltani told Radio Farda on 23 July that he believed the Tehran chief prosecutor Said Mortazavi was taking measures that would lead to his "arrest and torture." Iranian officials reported the arrest of a dozen "nuclear spies" in December 2004.
Intelligence and Security Minister Hojatoleslam Ali Yunesi said in Tehran on 22 December that over the last few years Iran has arrested more than ten "nuclear spies" in Tehran and Hormozgan who were working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Israel's Mossad, state television reported. Yunesi said, "Three of those spies were employees of the Atomic Energy Organization. Some of them were military officers and some of the others were self-employed."
Yunesi added that any information the U.S. got through these agents was "worthless." The Mujahedin Khalq Organization, an exile opposition group that is on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, has been the source of several reports on covert Iranian nuclear activities. Yunesi claimed that the U.S. let the MKO make these announcements in order to divert attention from its principle agents.
Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
08/02/2005
07:39 ||
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#1
What did you expect? It's freakin Iran. Have you guys forgotten all those yellow ribbons on the trees for what seemed like forever?
In the wake of the London bombings, New York City is now searching the bags of subway riders. As you might expect, this is provoking the usual cluster of perverse reactions. Someone on Air America, the liberal talk radio network, suggested that riders carry many bags to confuse and irritate the cops. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, normally a sane fellow, has ordered that the searches be entirely random, to avoid singling out any one ethnic or religious group. So if someone fits the suicide bomber profile--young Muslim male, short hair, recently shaved beard or mustache, smelling of flower water (a preparation for entering paradise)--the police must look away and search the nun or the Boy Scout behind him. What's the point of stopping a terrorist if you have to trample political correctness to do it? Besides, the New York Civil Liberties Union opposes all bag searches. No surprise there. The national American Civil Liberties Union still opposes passenger screening at airports. In a speech at the Brookings Institution, historian Fred Siegel said that the Democrats, pegged as the party of criminals' rights, are in danger of becoming the party of terrorists' rights.
From the first moments after the attacks of 9/11, we had indicators that the left would not be able to take terrorism seriously. Instead of resolve, we got concern about emotional closure and "root causes," warnings about the allegedly great danger of a backlash against Muslim Americans, arguments that violence directed at America is our own fault, and suggestions that we must not use force, because violence never solves anything. "We can't bomb our way to justice," said Ralph Nader.
The denial of the peril facing America remains a staple of the left. We still hear that the terrorism is a scattered and minor threat that should be dealt with as a criminal justice matter. In Britain last October, the BBC, a perennial leader in foolish leftism, delivered a three-part TV series arguing that terrorism is vastly exaggerated. Al Qaeda barely exists at all, the series argued, except as an idea that uses religious violence to achieve its ends. Besides, the series said, a dirty bomb would not kill many people and may not even kill anyone. This ho-hum approach isn't rare. Though evidence shows that the terrorists are interested in acquiring nuclear weapons to use against our cities, a learned writer for the New York Review of Books insists that the real weapons of mass destruction are world poverty and environmental abuse. Of course, world poverty is rarely mentioned by terrorists, and those known to be involved have almost all been well fed and are well to do.
Trade-offs. The "our fault" argument seems permanently entrenched. After the London bombings, Norman Geras of the University of Manchester wrote in the Guardian that the root causes and blame-Blair outbursts were "spreading like an infestation across the pages of this newspaper ... there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do." That has been the case on both sides of the Atlantic. After 9/11, Michael Walzer, one of the most powerful voices on the left, warned about "the politics of ideological apology" for terrorism. In the June 2005 issue of the American Prospect, he returned to the theme. "Is anybody still excusing terrorism?" he asked. "The answer is yes: Secret sympathy, even fascination with violence among men and women who think of themselves as 'militants,' is a disease, and recovery is slow." Though the argument has shifted somewhat, he wrote, the problem is "how to make people feel that the liberal left is interested in their security and capable of acting effectively. We won't win an election until we address this."
Walzer's analysis is a strong one. The Bush administration has botched many things, but large numbers of Americans go along with the president because he displays what the left apparently cannot: moral clarity and seriousness about what must be done. When the ideas of the left come into view, the themes often include the closing of Guantánamo, attacks on the Patriot Act, opposition to military recruitment on campuses, casual mockery of patriotism (a whole art exhibit in Baltimore was devoted to the theme), and a failure to admit that defeating terrorism will require some trade-offs between security and civil liberties. Is this a serious program? Real security, Walzer says, will depend on hunting down terrorist cells, cutting off the flow of money, and improving surveillance at key sites. He writes: "The burden is on us--nobody else--to make the case that these things can be done effectively by liberals and leftists who will also, in contrast to today's Republicans, defend the civil liberties of American citizens." Good argument. How will the left respond?
To hear some on the left tell it, terrorism is exactly what the West deserves for its many sins.
#1
Real security, Walzer says, will depend on hunting down terrorist cells, cutting off the flow of money, and improving surveillance at key sites. He writes: "The burden is on us--nobody else--to make the case that these things can be done effectively by liberals and leftists who will also, in contrast to today's Republicans, defend the civil liberties of American citizens." Good argument. How will the left respond?
Certainly not in the way that any rational person would be expected to respond....
#4
The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence of post-World War II guest-worker programs. Backed by friendly politicians and sympathetic judges, foreign workers, who were supposed to stay temporarily, benefited from family reunification programs and became permanent. Successive waves of immigrants formed a sea of descendants.
#7
There's plenty of room for them--and their offspring--back in the hellholes they originally came from. The Jews have it right: no Muslims=no terror. Run 'em! Now! Muslims Out of Europe and the US!
Posted by: mac ||
08/02/2005 21:09
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DIRTY, hungry, tired and humiliated, Osman Hussain was already a broken man when Italian security officers took him in for questioning. The suspected bomber had been seized in Rome the previous day as part of an astonishing intelligence operation that snared all of the fugitives being hunted for bringing Islamic terrorism to the UK.
In London four other suspects, Muktar Said-Ibrahim, Yasin Hassan Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Wahbi Mohammed, were being grilled by specialist interrogators at the high-security anti-terrorist unit at Paddington Green.
Unable to sleep on the uncomfortable concrete slabs and under the round-the-clock glare of the strip lighting in their cells, the prospect of hours of endless questioning will have been daunting.
It seems Osman was the first to break.
Yesterday morning, Italian officials alleged that the 27-year-old Briton, who has Ethiopian citizenship, had begun to give up information, giving the first insight into how the July 21 gang, which tried and failed to blow up London's public transport, operated.
In what was said to be a signed confession he admitted carrying the rucksack containing explosives but insisted he never intended to kill anyone. Instead he wanted to sow the "seeds of terror".
He accused fellow suspect Said-Ibrahim of being the "head" of their group and said they had watched videos of women and children dying in Iraq together. He also denied his group had any connections to the July 7 attacks which killed 56 people and said that those bombings had "come as a surprise".
This frank insight into the inner workings of the terror gang came at the end of an extraordinary week that ended in the dramatic arrests of the suspected bombers.
For Mohammed and Esha Ibrahim, the face staring out of the front page of the national newspapers a week ago was all too familiar. It was their son Muktar Said-Ibrahim. It was a nightmare discovery. The 27-year-old Somali had been captured in CCTV footage on the top deck of the No 26 bus in Hackney just moments before a failed attempt to blow it up on July 21.
At their home in Stanmore, north London, the couple faced an agonising dilemma. Could their son, a shy child when he came to Britain aged 14, really have grown up to plot mass murder?
As a teenager, Muktar had been an unemployed trouble-maker, sent to prison when his gang robbed another teenager at knifepoint. At Canons High School in Edgware, north London, he was known as a drug-smoking bully.
But he was also a keen footballer who admired his idols Manchester United and who enjoyed a kickabout with friends.
"We were shocked when we saw Muktar's picture in the national news," a statement from his relatives said. "We are a peaceful family. We immediately attended the police station and made statements to the police."
Their brave actions provided police with the breakthrough they desperately needed, giving them the first firm information about the identity of bomb suspects. It marked the start of breakneck developments in the investigation into the bomb attempts of July 21 and the deadly attacks on July 7.
Using the information from Said-Ibrahim's family, corroborated by a tip-off from a member of the public, anti-terror officers tracked down the flat on a rundown north London housing estate where he lived.
Said-Ibrahim, also known as Muktar Mohammed-Said, shared the scruffy £75-a-week flat, in a building known as Curtis House, with his friend Yasin Hassan Omar. There the pair are accused of planning and preparing the weapons for the bombings. Omar, 24, is suspected of trying to blow himself and other passengers to pieces on a Tube train at Warren Street station.
But when armed police stormed the flat on Monday morning they found it empty. Instead they discovered a large quantity of chemicals in a nearby lock-up garage as well as traces of the chemicals at the one-bedroom flat. Documents recovered also gave more evidence as to the identities of the bombing suspects.
During the raids a man was arrested near the building while another was arrested in the block itself. Neither were the bombers, but are believed to have been associated with them.
Stunned neighbours later revealed the police had missed the two bomb suspects by only a couple of days. They said the pair returned to the flat on the Friday after the failed attacks.
"I came out of the lift and saw three guys in the flat," said 32-year-old Tanya Wright. "They were nervous. They jumped back inside and slammed the door. When the police made the raid I realised one of them looked like the photograph."
Residents in the block of flats knew Said-Ibrahim and Omar as jobless layabouts who regularly played football with friends in the area. "They always spoke to my children," said Zandile Mthethwa, 39, who lives nearby. "They looked so normal, I was never intimidated by them.
"They were always very smart as well, especially Muktar, who always had on a clean shirt, although you often saw them in football gear as well. I have two boys aged five and three. My five-year-old son loves football and they said they would teach him how to play properly. I'm so glad I never let him go."
Their interest in Islam and their backgrounds are believed to have drawn the two men together. Both fled as children with their families to the safe refuge of Britain from bloody conflicts in their home countries.
While Said-Ibrahim came with his parents and brother Amir in 1991 from Eritrea, Omar came with his elder sister and her husband from Somalia the following year.
A tip-off from a member of the public eventually helped the police catch up with Said-Ibrahim. He had been spotted at a flat in North Kensington. Surveillance teams using hi-tech listening equipment quickly established that he was inside the two-bedroom flat in Delgarno Gardens together with another man, later identified as Ramzi Mohammed, the suspect in the attempted Oval bombing.
Police and SAS specialists dressed in gas masks and body armour surrounded the building and ordered the men to give themselves up. The cornered suspects could be heard pleading not to be shot and refusing to emerge.
A barrage of gas canisters were then sent hurtling into the third-floor flat, setting off a smoke alarm. With a flash as the door was blown open and stun grenades hurled inside, officers then stormed the flat. Residents reported hearing shouts ordering those inside to remove their clothes.
Minutes later, as trails of gas continued to pour out of the open door, Muktar and Ramzi appeared outside.
The two men were left humiliated on a cold, grubby balcony as their arrest was broadcast on international television. Stripped to their underwear, arms held aloft and choking on the effects of CS gas, it was a far cry from death as an Islamic "martyr".
Desperately trying to wipe the stinging smoke from his face, the stunned look on Said-Ibrahim's face revealed how quickly the onslaught from the security services had come. As he knelt before his captors, their guns trained on him at all times, it may never have occurred to him that his downfall had started at the hands of his own family. A third man, Mohammed's brother, Wahbi, was arrested in another dramatic siege a mile away in the Notting Hill area of London. He is alleged to be the "fifth bomber" who dumped a explosive-filled rucksack on Little Wormwood Scrubs, West London, after failing to blow up a Tube train on the Central line.
Two women carrying rucksacks and large boxes were also bundled to the ground and arrested at Liverpool Street station.
Earlier in the week, the police's first stroke of luck had arrived with a breathless phone call from a woman in Birmingham. The trail of the suspected bombers had gone cold after police failed to find them at the flat in Curtis House.
Now, the woman described how four suspicious looking men had been carrying cardboard boxes and bulging bin bags into a dilapidated ground-floor flat a couple of doors away from her home in the Hay Mills area of the city.
One of the men, she claimed, looked similar to one of those in the photographs issued by Scotland Yard. Her detailed account brought plain clothes officers to the tree-lined street to watch the activity at the flat. Their surveillance established Omar was inside.
Rather than risk him escaping, security officials decided to seize him and at 4.30am the raid began. Armed MI5 agents and more than 50 police poured into the flat as stun grenades were fired through windows.
They found Omar, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, lying on a sofa. It is claimed that he made a desperate grab for a rucksack lying a few feet away as the officers burst in. Fearing it may contain explosives one officer shot him in the chest with a Taser gun, sending 50,000 volts of electric current through his body. It left him temporarily paralysed as he was overpowered.
Investigators believe the alleged terror cell had been using the flat as a safe house with support from a group of other East Africans. A second address in Birmingham was also raided, the entire door wrenched from its frame as police arrested three men inside.
Omar was later taken away to the high-security anti-terrorist unit at Paddington Green Police Station in London, where he was subjected to intense interrogation by specialist officers. A series of further raids followed as detectives pieced together the identities of the other bombing suspects. A flat in the Stockwell Gardens area of South London, where Osman had lived was raided and three women arrested on suspicion of harbouring offenders.
A further nine men were arrested in another major operation at two properties in the Tooting area of south London.
As his fellow suspects were gradually rounded up, Osman was fleeing across Europe, unaware his movements were being tracked by British, French and Italian secret services.
In the days after the failed bombings he took a train from Waterloo Station to Paris through the Channel Tunnel. From Paris he moved to Milan and then finally to Rome where his brother-in-law lived.
He was traced through intercepted calls to a relative's mobile phone. Italian police swooped on his brother-in-law's flat on Friday and Osman surrendered. He is now expected to be extradited to the UK.
Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, described the hunt for the bombers as "the greatest operational challenge that the Metropolitan Police Service has faced since the Second World War". Costing more than £500,000 a day, the investigation was fuelled by more than 5,000 calls to the anti-terrorist hotline.
Using information they have managed to extract, police will hope to start tracing back through the terrorists' network to the shadowy organisers of the bomb plots.
While many in Britain will today be breathing a little easier in the knowledge the suspects have been captured, security sources claim they are just foot soldiers. The more dangerous financiers, recruiters and planners are still at large.
"The people behind the plots were expecting the bombers to die," explained Aberdeen University terrorism expert David Capitanchik. "Consequently they may have given them more information than they would have liked."
Even if the police cannot identify the masterminds directly, they may be able to obtain crucial information that will lead them further back to the head of the network that has so effectively infiltrated the country.
Forensics officers searching the flats the men had been using as hide-outs may also uncover vital lines of inquiry.
Police will also be hoping to confirm links between the July 7 atrocities on the London transport network and the failed attacks of July 21.
Investigators are also expected to start examining foreign links to the plots. At least four of the suspected bombers came to Britain with their families seeking sanctuary from the war-torn Horn of Africa. The majority of the other arrests surrounding the bombings have also been of people of East African origin.
Another suspect being hunted in connection with the bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British man of Indian origin alleged to have helped mastermind the London July 7 bombings, was also arrested in Zambia last week.
"East Africa has been a major recruiting ground for Islamic extremists," explained counter-terrorism expert Rebecca Cox, from the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London.
Since the collapse of the previous Somali government in 1991 and the civil war that followed, the country has been eyed with suspicion by Western intelligence forces. The US has long suspected money and guns for al-Qaeda flow through Somalia from its long, unpoliced coastline.
Bombers who attacked US embassies in Nairobi, Nigeria, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998 and a hotel in Mombassa, Kenya, popular with Israeli tourists in 2002 are thought to have come though Somalia.
Neighbouring Eritrea has also become a focal point for training camps set up by several radical groups. Among them is the Eritrean Islamic Jihad Movement. Growing numbers of moderate Muslims have also become radicalised in the country after the government there imprisoned Muslim leaders without trial for over two years.
With Osman and his accomplices now in custody, the police investigation will expand. Nothing, however, suggests that with one cell down Britain is close to being safe from Islamist terror.
#1
he had been watching videos of women and children dying in Irak
Here is where the treason of the MSM comes to haunt us. He should have been subject to a steady dose of women and children starving or dying without medcal care in Afghanistan due to Islamicists (aka Taliban), women and children killed in Irak by Islamicists, of atrocities perpetrated in Soudan by Islamicists, of continual agression against people of other confessions by . And not through a sanitized sentence ("militants") at the end of the news space but to long and graphic reportings. This until guys like him start attacking on sight people with islamic attire.
In a terrorist war the key factor is winning the propaganda battle and the MSM are doing their utmost for having people like this guy hate us.
#2
We were shocked when we saw Muktar's picture in the national news," a statement from his relatives said. "We are a peaceful family. We immediately attended the police station and made statements to the police."
Their brave actions provided police with the breakthrough they desperately needed, giving them the first firm information about the identity of bomb suspects. It marked the start of breakneck developments in the investigation into the bomb attempts of July 21 and the deadly attacks on July 7.
Using the information from Said-Ibrahim's family, corroborated by a tip-off from a member of the public, anti-terror officers tracked down the flat on a rundown north London housing estate where he lived.
This family turned in their kid at the start of the investigation.
Worth keeping in mind when someone says there are NO moderate muslims and none who put the country and society ahead of their religious identity.
I'm not saying it happens often, but this family did an agonizing thing and deserves credit for it.
Now, why did the biggest mosque on America's east coast pick a terrorist apologist for an imam?
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 8:44
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#4
So they watched a video and then decides to scare people (not a chance they were just incompetent killers is there!) with bombs. The notable thing is they meant to kill their fellow countrymen over events in a place miles from the UK. The MSM's portrayal of things doesn't help but I can't help but feel that nothing is going to disabuse an ignorant sociopathic murderer of what they can easily be convinced is reality. For a number of reasons they are primed and want to believe it. It allows the lazy street thug and dole tapeworm to feel and be important for the first time in their lives. They may not vote or engage in politics but they do know how to go about killing. The jihadi PR machine, apologists, "moderate" muslim slipspeakers, Galloways, MMoors, Fiskies, Pilgphers and Chumpskies do have a more concrete connection. They create and/or support the "reality" that provides a general justification and rationale for murdering. They bemoan the evil of killing quickly before the "but" and the torrent of apologist BS and twisted justifications for such behavior. They reinforce opinions and help the terrorists and their potential and real supporters feel that is not simply a matter of vicious and cruel violence in the name of religious/political repression when a loser thug goes out and kills as many innocent civilians as possible. They go a long way in helping provide the stamp of legitimacy to an unthinkable sickness of the mind.
#6
Hell, look at how many American parents excuse their kids' drugs, bad grades etc. rather than hold them accountable for their choices. Ask any teacher how much they have to deal with parents who want their kids to get off of punishment or getting a bad grade they earned.
Then look at this family that turned their kid when the cops didn't have a lead yet. Family has guts and deserves praise.
#7
RC, it's exactly that trend that makes it especially important to honor those who buck it.
We should be pressuring those who follow the trend, not praising those who merely do what's expected.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 9:06
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#8
Was the family 'moderate' or acting out of self preservation. If they knew the trail could lead back to them, what stops the football hooligan types from visiting the family?
There has got to be a bit of intelligence in the Muslim community that given the right series of acts, the authorities won't be able to protect them all. When you're in a sea of infidels, that is not a healthy situation. The lesser of the two evils, in their eyes, is to cop the perp now.
#9
Maybe. But I still think this family deserves praise and support. They're just as vulnerable to the idiots within the Muslim community there as to the white idiots nearby.
#10
We should be pressuring those who follow the trend, not praising those who merely do what's expected.
I don't know if I understand you correctly RC, but turning in one's child to what may well be a death sentence is not "merely" doing what is expected, it is an extraordinarily unselfish and painful task.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 9:53
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#11
I don't know if I understand you correctly RC, but turning in one's child to what may well be a death sentence is not "merely" doing what is expected, it is an extraordinarily unselfish and painful task.
When that child is committing murder, it is what is expected of you.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 10:00
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#12
They found Omar, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, lying on a sofa. It is claimed that he made a desperate grab for a rucksack lying a few feet away as the officers burst in. Fearing it may contain explosives one officer shot him in the chest with a Taser gun, sending 50,000 volts of electric current through his body. It left him temporarily paralysed as he was overpowered.
All the hoopla over using the taser and possibly setting of a bomb was BS. A bomb can't be hidden under a tee-shirt and shorts.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/02/2005 10:02
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#13
it is what is expected of you
Remind me again, RC - you have kids? How many and what ages?
Ever struggled to help a kid of yours with serious problems?
If not, you don't have any idea how agonizing this is.
#14
It may be what's expected, RC, but that doesn't mean it's easy. That's why so many parents go into denial when confronted with the thought that their child might be a monster.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 10:31
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#15
From the number of arrests it seems that there were plenty of people willing to provide this cell with support after the abortive bombings. RC's point is fair - that at a time where everyone in this city is under threat, there exists more pressure to be a good citizen. The Ibrahims have acted within these expecations to their credit - I think the gravity of the situation should overcome any familial loyalties.
Posted by: Howard UK ||
08/02/2005 11:02
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#16
Remind me again, RC - you have kids?
No I don't.
Don't know what difference that makes in recognizing what's right and expected.
It may be what's expected, RC, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
Didn't say it was easy. I said it's what's expected of them.
And, hell, if you want to throw a party for them, go for it. Just don't expect me to applaud.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 11:04
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#17
No parties. No applause. Just hope.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 11:06
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#18
I usually agree with you, RC, but I'd suggest you take a second look on this one.
Didn't say it was easy. I said it's what's expected of them.
You said "merely" expected.
This is one where the chickenhawk argument actually has a lot of weight for me. Things are different when it is your child in a way one can't really understand until one has a child and that's why it can't really be explained with merely words.
You're missing a great part of life. I hope you've made the right decision for yourself or you get the opportunity to have total responsibility for the growth and development of another human being. There's nothing quite like it, and that's not all good or bad.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 11:19
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#19
I am reminded by what Aussie PM Howard said about "never being able to get into the mind of a successful suicide bomber". So all of a sudden, Al Qaida produces these incompetent clowns who appear to rationalize their action, using the same sad LLL story line parroted by the MSM because they know it will be re-amplified by the same MSM until the perperators become the victims. And just to make sure the plan works, the parents come trotting out. The bomb failures were intentional.
Posted by: john ||
08/02/2005 11:24
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#20
RC - I never understood why children should be a part of "women and children first" until I had one. The horror of innocent children being killed took on a whole new meaning.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 12:07
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#21
Bobby -- Muktar was not a child. Do you think he would have hesitated if the bus he got on had been packed with school children?
Mrs. Davis -- The "chickenhawk" argument is as applicable here as it is anywhere. The Ibrahim's "baby" was plotting to murder other people's "babies", so that aspect balances out. No matter how hard it was for his parents, had he succeeded, dozens of families would have had it much, much worse.
They had it easy, no matter how hard you think it was for them.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 12:29
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#22
They had it easy, no matter how hard you think it was for them
Like I said, RC, that's where your lack of personal experience leads you astray here.
They did what they should have done. But the idea that it was EASY ... nope, it was damned hard and would be for pretty much any parent.
Lots of what we give medals and awards for are what people 'should' have done: firemen going into burning buildings, soldiers rescuing buddies in firefights. The reality is that what we 'should' do is sometimes damned hard, painful and requires real courage and conviction of principles. And when people manage to do things despite that pain and danger, we rightfully recognize the courage it took to act.
This family was courageous. Not only did they turn in their young member, they did so in the context of an extremist community that might well be expected to turn on them.
AND they did it in the face of people like you who don't even recognize what it took to do what they did.
#23
Parents first usually give their child unconditional love, but for those who overcome denial in the face of overwhelming evidence that their child is truly evil, many times though no fault of theirs, it must be almost as though that child died...
And, when like me you watch a child grow, you pray that he turns out to be someone you are truly proud of... (Son is 4-1/2)
#24
They did what they should have done. But the idea that it was EASY ... nope, it was damned hard and would be for pretty much any parent.
As I said:
No matter how hard it was for his parents, had he succeeded, dozens of families would have had it much, much worse.
That's my last word on the subject.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 13:26
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#25
Don't humanize these Islamofuckers. Just flush them down the stool with the other turds.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/02/2005 13:50
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#26
Anon, that last line was cheap. JC acknowledged the obvious as anybody would. The difference arises elsewhere. JC's not the only one who has a slightly different perspective regarding the nature of one's responsiblities to family and society. And yes, I do have a child and love him dearly. The family did it and for that I have a certain measure of respect for them regardless of motives. Oh, and by the way anon, they did have it very fucking easy inasmuch as their son was not killed for nothing that son did or said by some murderous thug. There's a special difference in that is there not? It is easier when your child is still alive (there is always hope if you're alive, right?) and not dead, and burned and mutilated by the hands of a sick sociopath.
I know it would be easier to hate them, dehumanize them. But these parents are human and acted that way. And you would lessen your own humanity if you denied that.
#30
I think we need to recognize that the terrorist-loving Muslim "spokesmen" from CAIR get the ink for suggesting that Muslims should protect the terrorists in their midst, but ordinary Muslims, even as they continue to disagree with US foreign policy, are turning in some of the people who are organizing these attacks. We can continue to disagree with these loyal Muslims about our foreign policy, but be thankful that they are turning in the mass murderers in their community. I believe, for example, that there is no way that the Buffalo plotters could have been arrested without someone in their mosque sticking it to them.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/02/2005 13:36
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#2
Jeese... I went looking to see the similarities but found it was all one vast conspiracy! Which means it must be run by the most powerful, almost eradicated cabal on the planet! The Joooos!
Actually, I didn't get far enough into the drivel to see if they had a candidate scapegoat. Prolly Bu$hitler...
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 16:38
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#3
Yikes. Governement cover-up is not an indicator of involvement in the act inself. There are things in wartime that governments are dishonest about. Some of the items in this article are just nonsensical accusations -- notice how the London bombers pictures were published so quickly! It's like this person never heard of the ubiqutous CCTV cameras.
. . . American troop levels [in Iraq] are down from a peak earlier this year, when extra troops were on hand to ensure the January elections went off without a hitch. And the U.S. has long planned to cut troop levels when the Iraqis were able to take over the job of hunting down and battling it out with terrorists and insurgents. Whether the U.S. really will cut its force to just 40,000 in Iraq by the end of 2006, the exit strategy has always been victory. . . .
A persistent chorus, however, continues to sing the praises of retreat. A year ago, as U.S. troops were preparing to clean out Fallujah, and even up to the January elections, this was at least somewhat understandable. After all, war is a tough business. There will always be some voices in a free society to argue that victory isn't worth the sacrifice.
Today the sacrifices have been made, the election is over, a constitution is being hammered out, and all that's left is victory--and victory is inevitable if the U.S. forces continue to stand up Iraqi forces while facing an unpopular insurgency that isn't propped up by a large foreign power. Yet opposition to the war hasn't abated. Indeed, in Congress it's actually gotten more organized. In late June 50 House Democrats formed the Out of Iraq Caucus. . . .
We may come to miss the days when the Kerry campaign was calling the shots for the Democratic Party. At least then, with a national election to win, the party had a reason to stay disciplined, and Mr. Kerry, as the party's standard barer, paid lip service to winning this war. Today Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat and an organizer of the Out of Iraq Caucus, feels no compunction to adhere to anything resembling a national consensus on the war.
The interesting question is where this is all heading for Democrats. There's no election this year, so not much to lose in the short term by opposing the war and plenty of money to be raised by appealing to the Angry Left. But this isn't a cost-free political strategy. One thing that the diminished coverage of the Iraq War indicates is that the U.S. is now making headway and is on the path to winning. Maybe the voters will forget who stood where once the war is won--much the way they did in electing Bill Clinton in 1992, after the Cold War. But that's not a sure bet, nor is it even likely.
One trap Ms. Waters, Mr. Kerry and quite a few Democrats fell into was the idea that the war in Iraq was somehow separate from the war on terror. The American people never really believed that, as polls showed in the run up to the war that many believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with the Sept. 11 attacks. President Bush never made that direct of a connection. Instead the reason for the war in Iraq has long been to transform the politics in the Middle East in our favor.
Saddam is now in prison and awaiting trial at the hands of the people he oppressed. But even once a stable and prosperous democracy is in place in Iraq, the war on terror will not be over. Iraq is a central front, but it's far from the only one. Other battlefields of various sorts can be found in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran, Syria, Somalia and other nations in the Horn of Africa. And that's not to mention the low-intensity battlefields found in England, France, Germany and the U.S. It's not called the Global War on Terror for nothing.
Once the battle is won in Iraq, the voters are likely to remember who supported the course to victory there because it will be immediately relevant in deciding who might lead us to other victories on other fronts. The only hope Democrats have of winning support for their antiwar activities is if a large-scale attack--on par with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam--convinces Americans this isn't a winnable war. But with the home front under attack and the history of Tet now well understood as a colossal defeat for the communists, it's not a good bet that the American electorate would turn against the war even then.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/02/2005
06:47 ||
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#1
The Dems hope is that Iraq is resolved one way or the other before spring of 2008. If Iraq goes bad - a "quagmire" or, if the admin itself cuts and runs, then they will probably nominate an Iraq dove, Dean or Gore. If its a victory, then the nod goes to an Iraq hawk, Rodham-Clinton, Biden, or Bayh.
If the situation is unresolved and unclear, then its major internecine bloodletting over the issue, and an attempt to find a candidate (Edwards?) who can paper over the differences, as they tried to do in 2004. And they probably lose, as in 2004.
#2
If things are going as they are now, the Dems are gonna loose in '06 and get pummled again in '08. People preaching the nanny state and the rich are killing your grandma and babies mantra for the last 50 years isn't really appealing anymore.
#3
The most important thing the Internet can do right now is to detail *who* in the US consistently tried to undermine the war effort, and *who* supported our enemies by encouraging terrorism, tyranny, and oppression. Then, when all is said and done, that this collection be compiled into a "Who's Who" of scoundrels, so that in the future when they pretend to reasonableness in an effort to gain support and power, their names shall be easily found. Much like John Kerry's past came back to haunt him, we must remember who betrayed America *this time*.
#1
Sensor could detect concealed weapons without x-rays
Huuum...that means the sensor could see other concealed objects through clothes.
i better start saving.
Posted by: Mr. Peepers ||
08/02/2005 3:38
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#2
This isn't new at all, several companies worked on this in the late 90's but the ultra-libs (they call themselves privacy advocates) make a stink. They acted like it was a clever way for perverts to look at womens tits, not screen for weapons, so it never got off the ground. I think sony even had a quick brush with this kind of trouble, but gave up on the tech right away as soon as someone complained. I'm sure the libs will try to axe it this time too, under the pretence of "invasion of privacy" or the ever popular "infringement of constitutional rights", which can be almost anything a lib doesnt like.
Bangladeshi troops, during the ongoing Army-Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) joint 'anti-crime' campaign, which began on May 21, 2005, are reported to have neutralised several camps of Myanmarese rebel groups in a series of raids in the border district of Bandarban in July...It is easy to set a pattern to these ongoing activities and the 'results' that they produce in terms of the neutralisation of the terrorist and criminal elements in the country. In fact, Bangladesh is in a desperate search for a refurbished image amidst growing global concerns of the state's tolerance and promotion of Islamist fundamentalist and extremist values. The reality, unfortunately, is that these events are feeble attempts to please the Myanmarese military junta, whose goodwill is becoming an increasingly necessary commodity, as the Myanmar-Bangladesh-India gas pipeline negotiations hit roadblocks and both Myanmar and India start thinking in terms of circumventing Bangladesh altogether...Indeed, the recent arrests of Myanmar rebels are essentially aimed at diverting attention from more radical Rohingya outfits such as the RSO. Set up in the early 1980s when extremist elements among the Rohingyas broke away from the more moderate main grouping, the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF), the RSO has a history of association with jihadi elements in Bangladesh. In association with radical Islamist groups, the RSO is known to have set up several madrassas (seminaries), allegedly with foreign assistance, in the Bandarban area. Most of these 'centres of excellence' allegedly provide training to militants in the name of religious studies.
By contrast, the military operations against Myanmarese fugitives have focused only on the weakest and least problematic of the rebel groups based in the country, while the most radical continue to be given a free run, along with their home-grown Islamist extremist associates. For instance, NUPA, a coalition of the Rakhaings or Buddhists formed in 1994 in the Arakan region consisting of several Arakanese rebel groups under the leadership of Bo Khaing Raza, has undergone at least four splits (in 1995, 1996, 2001 and most recently in May-June 2005), each time reducing the number of its cadres and also the number of guns and other arms in their possession. Similarly, ARNO, set up in 1999, describes itself as "an organisation advocating democracy, peace, justice, equality and human rights in Myanmar". A pale shadow of an outfit that once had 5,000 armed cadres brandishing AK-47 rifles, LMGs and rocket launchers, ARNO constitutes no significant threat, either to Bangladesh or to Myanmar. Both NUPA and ARNO have, however, been involved in the small arms trade and a nexus with bigger players in the game, but their potential is severely limited. Overt attempts at establishing active linkages with Islamist extremists do continue, but have had limited success.
The southern districts of Chittagong, Bandarban and Cox's Bazaar, spread over 11,734 square kilometres, have, over the years, turned into meeting points for the Islamist jihadis in Bangladesh and the Rohingya groups from Myanmar. The willingness of the regime to tolerate such growth has not only led to the establishment of an effective and well-oiled machinery for producing jihadis within the constituency of the 100,000 Rohingyas living outside the UNHCR camps, as well as the larger native Bangladeshi population, but has provided a safe haven for jihadis seeking passage or temporary refuge from various theatres of conflict around the globe.
Bangladesh's efforts at capping the growth of Islamist extremism have been, at best, nominal. Since February 24, 2005, when the Government announced a ban on two outfits, the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB) and Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), after years of denying their existence, a handful of their cadres and leaders were arrested. Most of them have since been released. The more extreme of the Rohingya groups are essentially part of this protected network, though elements within the marginal groups may be symbolically 'sacrificed'. Such symbolism underlies Bangladesh's ostensible 'return to sanity' on the Myanmarese rebels. Unfortunately, none of this contains within it the policies, the actions or the necessary transformations that could reverse the country's steady slide into disorder.
Posted by: Paul Moloney ||
08/02/2005
01:30 ||
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#1
I suspect that whoever wrote this has real sour grapes with the Bangladeshis. Long ago, I think the Bs decided that they were going to crush the Islamists the old fashioned way (read "crossfire"), and have been pretty effective, if rather discreet, in doing so.
#2
There are factions within the BD governmnet and security services that are rabid islamists.
Any crackdown is to be taken with liberal amounts of salt.
They have learned well from their Pak brethern.
Posted by: john ||
08/02/2005 14:18
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#3
they were going to crush the Islamists the old fashioned way (read "crossfire")
Except most of the radicals killed in 'crossfire' incidents are Maoists, against whom the Islamists and the Police are in an alliance to eradicate.
Remember, Banlgadesh is governed by a coalition that includes rabid Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, and they have been cracking down hard on Hindus, Ahmadis and anyone who claims the country is drifting towards extremism.
Posted by: Paul Moloney ||
08/02/2005 21:32
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#1
Miss Everett Teen USA 2004 is putting away her sash to put on a U.S. Army uniform. "I'm capable, I'm healthy. This is the right thing to do," she said.
#2
But notice as the article ends giving more space to the anti-war grand mother than toi the girl just because, allegedly she helps the girll lacing her boots (reporter obviously thinks that ifyou are pretty you are stupid or perhaps is that if you are a patriot you are stupoid).
Posted by: Mike ||
08/02/2005 8:36
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#5
JFM, it sounds to me like its an antiwar Grandfather, and my guess is he gets the news from the Seattle press and comes from the generation that trusts the media still so he has no idea that he's only getting one side.
I give the old guy the benefit of the doubt and blame the reporter who honed in on it hoping to provide 'balance' where none was needed.
parts models can get a lot of lucrative work. I had a friend years ago whose hands and feet were in some TV ads ... she got residual income for years from it. her face was just so-so, but she had lovely hands, long fingers and nails, and elegant feet.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 1 - As Iraqi leaders reaffirmed their decision to finish writing the country's constitution by the middle of the month, the new American ambassador here spoke in specific terms about the pending withdrawal of American troops from the country.
In his first press conference, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said that American forces would hand over control of specific areas to Iraqi forces and "withdraw its own units from these areas." He declined to say which Iraqis cities American soldiers would leave first, but said he had formed a committee with Iraqi leaders to draw up a detailed withdrawal plan. "After this transfer occurs in more and more areas, there will be a smaller need for coalition forces, and elements of the multinational forces will leave Iraq," the ambassador said.
Mr. Khalizad's remarks, a public reminder to the Iraqis that the Bush administration is moving ahead with its plans to reduce the number of foreign troops here, followed the decision by Iraqi officials Sunday to stick to the timetable for completing the country's constitution.
His remarks were the latest demonstration of the highly visible role that Mr. Khalizad has played in the weeks since his arrival here. The former ambassador to Afghanistan, where he was deeply engaged in the affairs of the country, Mr. Khalilzad has departed from the previous American practice of standing back while the Iraqis work out their problems themselves.
Before Sunday's decision, Ambassador Khalizad urged Iraqi leaders to stick to the Aug. 15 deadline and set aside for later any issues that could not be resolved before then. The Americans are eager to keep the democratic process here on track, as a means to drain away anger from the insurgency and also to help set the conditions for the American troop drawdown.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/02/2005
00:49 ||
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#1
Khalilzad is beating on the Iraqis just as he beat on the Afghans. I think this guy is wasted in the diplomatic service. He ought to run for office. He's certainly shown formidable executive skills, keeping Afghanistan on an even keel. Just look at how much difficulty the Soviets had, administering that territory.
#2
Khalilzad is also a lightening rod for the Mike Moore conspiracy nuts because he was on the team that did an analysis for a pipeline thru that region (during the Clinton administration).
Of course the sponsors of the pipeline (mainly Unocol) had withdrawn all their proposals by early 2001. This didn't stop Mike Moore from implying in his anti Bush film that the Afghan operation was to help the companies.
#1
Japan, along with other nations, challenged the law and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) declared it illegal. The European Union and Canada already have imposed retaliatory sanctions.
Anti-dumping sanctions. You financial types go ahead and duke it out. I'm not even going to try to venture and opinion. ;-)
#2
Ditto; I'm for free trade, but I'm into military and world geopolitics stuff, and I need Z's!
Posted by: Edward Yee ||
08/02/2005 8:28
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#3
The US, unfortunately, does use a lot of protectionism for its buisnesses. Results of political bribes, I think. I'm all for free trade and letting the Darwinism of buisness do its magic.
#4
It's not the anti-dumping law that's the issue here, nor is it the penalty, it's the fact that the penalty is handed back to affected industries directly as a subsidy rather than being kept by the government that's triggering the sanctions.
And anti-dumping laws aren't protectionist at all. It's every bit as illegal for a US company to dump in order to damage a competitor as it is for a foreign company to do the same.
It seems to me, however, that the primary allegiance might best be given to the nation, America, and not Kapital, if in obeying the second we give up the first.
Did you know that some essential American military technology is sourced ONLY in Taiwan?
Perhaps certain shareholders are pleased with this low cost arrangement, it saves them, after all, from having to hire a contingent of greedy SUV driving engineers in Waltham, or Palo Alto, or Missoula.
I'm sure that when the Straits of Taiwan are closed, replacement parts can readily be cobbled together on Wall Street.
Posted by: Red Lief ||
08/02/2005 23:42
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#2
They say they want to build a system to overcome the shuttle's weaknesses, but they want to use the weakest part of the shuttle program to build the new one: segmented solid rocket boosters.
(Rand Simberg has pointed this out too.)
Posted by: Phil Fraering ||
08/02/2005 1:32
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#3
Rand has a point but the redesign also stacks instead of configuring side-by-side which should eliminate the falling debris problems that have plagued the shuttle lately. I think the shuttles main weakness though was compromised design from the beginning and this should solve that.
When the manned component becomes more expensive than buyin tickets on Virgin Space it can be shut down and the unmanned component will still have value.
#7
We're long overdue for the commercialization of LEO deliveries. NASA could likely support 3-4 competing commercial ventures for less than the cost of building the next-gen LEO delivery ship in house.
#8
What's the cost of delivering a pound of supplies or humans to the station today? What is the cost of putting a pound of satellite into geo-sync orbit?
If you can answer those questions, then the issue isn't one of 'what the next shuttle or booster' should be, but rather who can do it cheaper and more reliable. Only need to keep lift capability for military cargo for security reasons.
NASA's shaggin' wagon. Yeah...
--
On a serious note, how much time and money was spent to [try to] solve the problem of foam falling off during launch?
#13
A better question, how much time and money was spent building the ISS with no real purpose in mind beyond a works program for our international friends.
The Air Force had better ideas with space planes that were dumped when NASA took over. Some of those programs should be relooked at considering new technology.
#14
The biggest problem is that the scientists and engineers at NASA are so utterly focused on "raw science", that they miss the big picture. For example, they sent two Mars rovers that were a success, so for a follow-up, they want to send a much bigger version of the same contraption. If they were left to do Mars research, they would still be sending modified rovers to Mars for 100 years. To do much the same basic research. They would be shocked if someone was to propose sending a totally different vehicle *not* with the purpose of re-discovery, but with the idea of scouting a location for a human landing. They cannot understand that if people go to Mars they have to be practical, and use Martian resources if at all possible. NASA would have them go in self-contained pods on a hundred short missions instead of actually thinking of building a permanent habitation out of Martian rock and dirt. If I was in charge of our space program, for every pure science mission, there would be another that in some way encouraged free enterprise space use. First, by modifying the ISS to become a space-produced goods manufacturing plant. It would get a heck of a lot more support if it not only paid for itself, but made a profit; which it could do with little or no restriction on its science missions. How quickly would we be on the Moon if corporations were paid to bring back H3? Give Exxon $500B, and we will get shiploads of H3 in five years, and save $3 Trillion in oil money. That sounds like a darn good investment.
#15
He-3 isn't any easier to get fusion reactions from than normal tritium-deuterium reactions, it just tends to be the least polluting in the sense that its by-products are the shortest lived for half life and radiation emissions. (Hence the 1 trillion bucks assumes we ever get a workable fusion reaction going). If we ever get it to work you can bet we'll just use a tritium based reaction system unless we find a cheaper solution.
I'm not smart enough to decipher this. OldSpook, please jump in.
A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new analysis.
The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House. Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof, that Tehran is moving determinedly toward a nuclear arsenal. The new estimate could provide more time for diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. President Bush has said that he wants the crisis resolved diplomatically but that "all options are on the table."
The new National Intelligence Estimate includes what the intelligence community views as credible indicators that Iran's military is conducting clandestine work. But the sources said there is no information linking those projects directly to a nuclear weapons program. What is clear is that Iran, mostly through its energy program, is acquiring and mastering technologies that could be diverted to bombmaking.
#4
Sock Puppet, I think you're right, though perhaps it's not just the Iraq NIE that is relevant background. Many -- most? -- intelligence estimates are wrong, which is why they're called estimates. Of course they have to write something down and hand it in at some point, but I would think after the UNSCOM episode (discovering Iraq was far ahead of estimate timetables and pursuing a much broader program than assessed) and then the AQ Khan episode (which potentially placed all proliferators far ahead of conventional timetables) the hedging on this particular item would be high as a t-wall in the Green Zone.
One great failure of the administration in connection with the Iraq war and associated intelligence -- and directly in connection with the pre-emption tactic -- has been not to educate. Intelligence is unavoidably flawed and limited. Down-side surprises are harmless, but in matters of WMD and terrorism, up-side surprises are potentially catastrophic and therefore unacceptable.
Thus, one must make judgements based on unavoidably flawed intel to cover the up-side surprises. Pre-emption is the chief tactic to achieve this prudent coverage. Simple common sense -- though each judgement call can go either way, and be horribly difficult.
Tenet and others were urged to educate the public and shape the debate into an intelligent discussion, but clearly opted not to do so. Too bad.
#5
For me, Iran being a major supp of revolutionary Islam and Internat Terror is, by itself, a reason for mil action, regardless of whether it actually has a nuke bomb. Internat Terror is a diversified coalition, a congregate of collusory cells, persons, networks/orgs, and State govts - Dubya is absolutely correct in going after Govts that supp terror.
#8
Tenet and others were urged to educate the public and shape the debate into an intelligent discussion, but clearly opted not to do so. Too bad.
It would have gotten in the way of their anonymous leaks to the press.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 7:25
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#9
The thing we've discovered is that the only way to discover the truth (and thus more closely correlate intel estimates to reality) is to invade the country and let the troops examine the evidence.
#14
Perhaps the only organization in the Federal government more dysfunctional than NASA is the CIA. These guys should look at what the military did after Vietnam to reconstitute itself as the world's premier military organization. It wasn't easy or quick, think Desert One and the fiasco at Grenada. But they stuck with it and it paid off. Go Goss, Go!
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 9:44
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#15
A Journalist who may or may not have her own agenda has not read the report. I assume it's highly classified. She interviews a few people willing to leak talk who may or may not have their own agendas. An Editor who may or may not have an agenda puts a headline on the article. But the writer is able to state with certainty that the Bush Administration who have access to this an all previous reports have their own Agenda. Sigh. The truth is out there somewhere.
Posted by: john ||
08/02/2005 10:29
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#16
Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof
As contrasted with your three leaking sources who brought us the flawed estimates highlighted above. Do your sources have proof, sweetheart? Wodda dope!
Hey! Isn't this Valerie's secret section? Maybe she's leaking classified information to get back at Bush? Or Wilson is making up stuff as he goes along? Sheesh!
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 11:05
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#17
Now wait a moment, this finding has instant credibility because it was based upon a "consensus" of idiots (I mean intelligence experts).
The wacky WaPo always goes for the consensus, meaning that all those with foresight are automatically ruled out.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/02/2005 12:56
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Giant floating platforms use scanners and X-ray machines to probe rows of cargo containers while still miles away from port. Crane-topped ships perform surgical extractions of suspect containers on the pitching sea. A ring of computer-filled buoys beeps approval to ports around the country.
This isn't the plot of an upcoming science fiction movie. This is the big-budget idea from a group of local [Florida] entrepreneurs who want to prevent a terrorist from getting biological agents, explosives or a suitcase-sized "tactical nuke" into our ports. The system would cost a total of $2.1 billion or more to install at ports nationwide.
Officials at Titusville-based SeaAway Habitat Technologies have been shopping their idea to bigwigs in homeland security, as well as executives at big container ports like Jacksonville and Miami.
Not everyone, however, agrees with SeaAway's approach. Some competitors in the port-security business say it would be cheaper and just as safe to train special inspectors to find problems, have them staff foreign ports and sign off on American-bound goods before a ship ever sets sail. Still, security gurus agree something needs to be done. Analyses since the 9-11 terrorist attacks have shown only 4 percent of cargo containers ever get fully checked...
Actually, it's closer to 7 percent - still low. Not included in this is a profiling process to find possible problem containers.
Whoever is right, the government likely will "jump on anything that will be an improvement" over current port-security measures, said Canaveral Port Authority Chairman Ray Sharkey. "Security is always on my mind. The biggest problem is there are so many areas you are vulnerable to. You can't guarantee there won't be a problem unless you build a magic dome."
#1
I think this is further evidence that a lot of terrorist prevention efforts have to be taken up at more than just the federal level (statre & local) - the greater the threat from X, Y or Z for a given state / locality, just react and adapt to it. Worry about financial repercussions later.
#2
An old idea but still a goodie - the real prob is that US GMD/TMD still needs internal "layered defense" to protect from short-range missles whether enemy nation or terrorist, which for me is why Dubya, Rummy and even FOXNEWS, etal. are focusing on these "missing blondes/babes" stories.
*INVADE ARUBA-CUBA NOW, D *** YOU - DEM DAR BEACHES, COCONUT BEERS, AND BEACH BABES, ETC. MUST BE SAVED BY THE USMC, SSSHHHHHHHHHHH, FOR GMD! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA... - SO MANY MARRIOTS, SO MANY TERRORISTS!?
#3
What they should do is have certain trusted companies inspect and seal and guarantee certain ships are safe before they leave port. Those ships get priority in the destination port, all others can wait. Then have the feds randomly check the ships, if anything is out of order the trusted company may lose the trusted status.
All other shipping can be checked more thoroughly. I think you'd find every major shipper doing whatever they could to play ball and avoid the inspections by keeping their ships clean so the number that had to be checked thoroughly would be rather small.
Of course Ralph Nader will probably complain that the smaller companies cannot afford this and that but they can alway ship to Canada if they don't like the system and Ralph, those smaller boats are dumping diesel into the harbor, the poluting rotters, get 'em!
MUSCAT â Oman yesterday expressed its profound sorrow over the death of King Fahd bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and declared three days of mourning. All government offices will remain closed during this period and private establishments for one day. A statement issued by the Diwan of Royal Court said His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said received the news of King Fahdâs demise with grief.
"Old Fahd? Dead? Dead, is he?"
"Yes, yer majesty. Passed on!"
"Shot through to the Great Beyond, did he? "
"Yes, yer majesty. No longer with us."
"Are they sure? How can they tell?"
"I think he was starting to stink, yer majesty!"
"Oh. Well. Send some flowers or something. Call out the Royal Weeping Corps. Give 'im a good send-off, eh?"
"Yes, yer majesty!"
"How about Abdullah? Is he still alive?"
"He says he is, yer majesty!"
"Hmph. Not sure I believe him..."
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/02/2005
00:24 ||
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#1
Locals will observe the traditional day of no work practiced on the other 364 days of the year. Foreign lackies will however be required to carry on despite their immense sorrow they must surely feel.
The Zimbabwe dollar tumbled to an all-time low yesterday as it became apparent that President Robert Mugabe had failed to get the billion dollars he sought from China to relieve the country's shortages of fuel, food and power. One US dollar purchased 45,000 Zimbabwe dollars yesterday on the illegal black market. The official exchange rate is US$1 to Z$17,000, but neither banks nor corporations use it.
Mr Mugabe returned from Beijing over the weekend with pledges from the Chinese government of $6m (£3.4m) for food, a passenger aircraft and 100 computers, according to the state media. He will now have to go back to South Africa for financial assistance. South African officials have made it clear they will demand substantial political and economic reforms in return.
So much for the China junket. At least Bob got fed.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/02/2005
00:21 ||
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#1
On Friday, according to one source in Zimabwe, the rate was US $1 = Z$ 36,000. A Z$ 9K increase in 3 days.
China also reportedly is going to build a hydroelectric plant in addition to giving Bob all the other goodies.
#4
That would be Bob's escape plane when the defecated matter hits the air circulation device. (Just trying to calm those easily offended people who were complaining about the foul language on this site yesterday.)
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005 9:36
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#5
Steve, you get today's Roget Award for Creative Synonyms! :)
Anybody know what return the Chinese expect to get on this investment?
#9
lol, Dread! I'm actually awaiting the e-mail from Queen Mugabe, who wants to give me $10 million if i'd just give her my bank acct #. Although, I do need to follow up on if she means U.S. dollars or ZimBOBwean "dollars."
Posted by: BA ||
08/02/2005 14:03
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#10
$20.00 Zimbabwe - Worth less than an S&H Green stamp from the 1960s
If the ZimBob Bux inflate too much then there still is a use...
Natural resources: Deposits of more than 40 minerals including ferrochrome, gold, silver, platinum, copper, asbestos; 19 million hectares of forest (2000).
About 60% of the country is covered by an Archaen Granite Greenstone terrain well known for its rich endowment of gold and base metals. Cutting across the entire Archaen is the famous Great Dyke hosting one of the worldâs largest reserves of chrome and platinoids. Covering the edges of the Archaen terrain are younger sedimentary rocks hosting huge reserves of coal.
France has expelled two radical Islamist leaders in the wake of the London bombings and plans to round up and send home up to two dozen more by the end of the month, the interior ministry said yesterday. Underlining the difference in approach between London and Paris, a ministry spokesman said France had "no problem" deporting speakers accused of inflaming anti-western feeling even if they were French citizens and recognised as preachers by France's 6 million-strong Muslim community.
Reda Ameuroud, a 35-year-old Algerian who was staying in France illegally, was deported on Friday, the spokesman said. Mr Ameuroud's "violent and hate-filled" speeches at a radical mosque in Paris's 11th arrondissement prompted the French intelligence services to classify him as an "ideological reference point". He is the brother of Abderahmane Ameuroud, 27, who was sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from French territory in May after being convicted of giving "logistical support" to two Tunisians who assassinated the Afghan resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massood in 2001.
Runs in the family.
Another "part-time" imam, Abdelhamid Aissaoui, 41, was expelled from France earlier last week for urging youths to join the jihad or holy war, the spokesman said. He had already served a four-year jail term for his role in an attempted 1995 bomb attack on a high-speed TGV train near Lyon, mounted by an Algerian extremist group, the GIA.
And he was still in the country after he completed his four-year term because ...
The spokesman said about 1,100 imams have been identified in France and "the vast majority pose no problem at all". About 50% are regular speakers, 150 preach occasionally, and the remainder officiate only at bomb-making festivals Friday prayers. Some 30% are Moroccan, 20% Algerian and 15% Turkish. According to the ministry, the radical imams and ideologists targeted for expulsion are mainly North African and Turkish, and based in or around major cities with large Muslim populations such as Lyon, Marseille and Paris. French intelligence services consider that about 40 of the country's 1,500 mosques and prayer centres are under the influence of radical ideologies ranging from "classic fundamentalism to violent and hate-filled rhetoric".
Any plans to 'doze them? No? Guess you're not yet serious.
Police and ministry officials acknowledge that the greatest threat comes from occasional speakers who often have no formal training and little knowledge of the Qur'an but can exercise considerable influence over the youth of France's deprived big-city suburbs.
Now now, they can recite the Quran from memory; they learned at the Pakistani madrassa where they went on 'scholarship' as a yout.
The planned arrests and expulsions follow remarks by the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who said in the immediate aftermath of the London attacks that France "has to act against radical preachers capable of influencing the youngest and most weak-minded". French officials, who rarely allow such concerns as freedom of speech or human rights to get in the way of security interests, have often accused Britain of not being tough enough with Islamist "preachers of hate", coining the name "Londonistan" for London.
We don't appreciate this point about the French enough -- they really, truly have no trouble bashing skulls at home when motivated. We just need to motivate them.
A fair point, but then they ruin everything by sneering at Dubya when he tries anything similar.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/02/2005
00:14 ||
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#1
Why does France have not fear of the dreaded EU Human Rights Court that the UK is incapable of acting for fear of?
#5
Does anyone remember the terrorist attacks in France in 1995-6?
The bombing of the St Michel Metro--The French Police cracked down on the Islamic extremists and haven't had a problem since--BUT the Brits allowed the Imams to continue their BS in London
RIYADH - Saudis and a host of foreign dignitaries were Tuesday to pay their respects to King Fahd in a funeral which is the final act in an era that saw the monarch steer his country through the most turbulent decades in its history. Several Arab leaders, including Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordanian King Abdullah II and Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, were to attend the funeral in Riyadh of the man they have hailed as a great Arab leader. But emphasising the close ties Fahd forged with the Western world, French President Jacques Chirac and Britainâs heir to the throne Prince Charles were also due in Riyadh Tuesday to pay their respects to the late king.
John Bolton will represent the US...
Saudi government forces would be applying tight security measures during the funeral of King Fahd at the Imam Turki bin Abdullah mosque in the center of the capital, an interior ministry spokesman said. âSecurity forces will enforce tight measures along the routes which the convoys of dignitaries will take and at the location of the funeral ceremonyâ, General Mansur al-Turki told AFP.
"We wish the mourners to hold the automatic weapons fire until the dignitaries and all their teevee cameras are safely out of range..."
Regional governors were also instructed by the new King Abdullah to open centres to allow people to pay condolences without having to travel to the capital for the funeral.
So they won't have to go back home to the tribes and discuss that...odd smell.
State television interrupted programmes to air verses from the Koran and many members of the ruling family crowded the Riyadh hospital where the monarch passed away to pay their last respects and to inquire whether the checks would still be coming each month.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/02/2005
00:11 ||
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#1
bye fahd! sleper well an doen let teh bedbugs byte. :)
#6
Another note regarding the directive to the regional tribal leaders...my guesstimate is that the princelings are busy playing the ultimate game of Liars' Poker, with the future of Arabia and the heart and gonads of Islam at stake. They are not done carving up the booty, and they do not want to tip their hands with public displays of fealty from the tribes just yet, especially with all the infidels and Arab potentates hanging about. The tribal leaders must be courted, carefully and in confidence. PD might call this wasta. The princes have been waiting their entire lives to play this hand.
#7
For the analogy-deficient among us (like me), could you explain what liar's poker is?
Posted by: Phil Fraering ||
08/02/2005 2:02
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#8
One more thought: The reason ol' Fahd had to "die" in August was to give the royals a plausible excuse to tell the tribals to stay home..."Yasss, it's much too hot for you to make the trip, please stay home and drink cool tea..."
#10
The Saudis all, and I mean everyone with a steady job, go on vacation for much or all of August. Those who used to read The Religious Policeman are aware of this custom. Those that can afford it leave the country. Lebanon and the Med used to soak up much of the outflow, but the West and, recently, the UAE skim off the big money, these days.
#11
I'm reminded of something my Soviet History professor said. (This was back in 1979, he says, showing his age, when we still had the USSR.) "The USSR has never solved the succession problem." There was no mechanism for an orderly transition of executive power. Thus, Lenin croaks, and you have a struggle between Stalin and Trotsky; Stalin kicks off, and you have the struggle between Beria and Krushchev and Brezhnev, and so on . . . .
This is hardly an original thought, but that pronouncement is true, not only of the old USSR, but of tyrranies in general.
Saudi Arabia has the same issue. There's no orderly mechanism of succession, which is why Fahd has been on the ventilator so long.
Might be popcorn time.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/02/2005 6:44
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#12
I suspect they kept Fahd "stable" until the question of succession had been decided. I wouldn't be surprised to hear news of a couple of car accidents on the way to the funeral, maybe even a few people suddenly being discovered to have died in the last month.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 7:27
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#13
Oh, RC! You're a suspicious guy! ;-)
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 12:11
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#14
This isn't nice, but I'm gonna post it anyway:
Don't you ever laugh as a hearse goes by,
For you may be the next to die.
They wrap you up in a big white sheet,
And cover you up from your head down to your feet.
They put you in a big black box,
And cover you up with dirt and rocks.
All goes well for about a week,
And then your coffin begins to leak.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout.
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.
A big green worm with rolling eyes,
Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes.
Your stomach turns a slimy green,
And pus pours out like whipping cream.
You spread it out on a slice of bread,
And that's what you eat when you are dead.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/02/2005 12:59
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#15
Could be worse, could be a sealed coffin with little free O2. That's slower, but way grosser.
CHIZHOU, China -- Liu Liang, a slightly built computer student with big glasses, was home in Chizhou for summer vacation. At about 2:30 on the hot afternoon of June 26, he was pedaling his bicycle by the downtown vegetable market on Cuibai Street.
Driving down the same street in his new-looking black Toyota sedan was Wu Junxing, deputy manager of a hospital in nearby Anqing. Wu, accompanied by a friend and two bodyguards, had come to Chizhou that day to attend opening ceremonies of a new private hospital and, associates said, survey the market to judge whether he should invest in his own facility.
Liu's bicycle and Wu's shiny four-door sedan collided, sending Liu crashing to the ground. Almost immediately, witnesses said, Liu, 22, and Wu, 34, began arguing over who was at fault. In the heat of the dispute, they said, Liu damaged one of Wu's side-view mirrors, prompting Wu's muscular bodyguards to burst from the car and beat the skinny young man senseless, leaving him bleeding from his mouth and ears.
Well, to be fair, you don't mess with a man's car. He was asking to get beaten, and I don't care if you're in China or Chicago.
The beating, part of a minor traffic incident on a slow Sunday afternoon, ignited a spark of anger. The spark became a riot, evolving over eight chaotic hours into an expression of rage against the Chinese Communist Party's new fascination with businessmen, profits and economic growth.
After they saw what happened to Liu, Chizhou's self-described "common people" rose up against what they perceived as their local government's willingness to side with rich outside investors against Chizhou's own. By the end of the evening, 10,000 Chizhou residents had filled the streets, some of whom torched police cars, pelted overwhelmed anti-riot troops with stones and looted a nearby supermarket bare.
The violence in downtown Chizhou startled the leaders of this forward-looking city of 120,000, set in the rich alluvial farmland of Anhui province near the Yangtze River, about 250 miles southwest of Shanghai. Dismayed city officials deplored the impact on their campaign to attract investment and broaden Chizhou's economic base. "Illicit elements" were to blame, they said.
But the riot here, like a growing number of flare-ups in other Chinese cities, was in fact directed against the flourishing alliance of Communist Party officials and well-connected businessmen that runs Chizhou. Before calm returned to the streets, the disturbance had become a political rebellion against the increasingly intimate connection in modern China between big money and Communist government.
Someone else said, "Teach a nation that a corrupt exploitative ruling class deserves to be overthrown at your own risk, comrades."
#1
Something tells me the "peoples cadres" don't represent the people even remotely and the "people" are catching on ain't that a drag (not be me but.)
#4
Article: After they saw what happened to Liu, Chizhou's self-described "common people" rose up against what they perceived as their local government's willingness to side with rich outside investors against Chizhou's own.
The Chinese are xenophobic to a fault - even against people of other regions of China. I have been told that I should not drive in China. As a foreigner, any accident I get into automatically becomes my fault. And the reason isn't necessarily that government officials are biased - it's that the local population expects them to side with locals against outsiders, especially foreigners. This applies to road accidents, business disputes - everything. Nothing to do with the law - just popular expectations, backed up by the threat of violence.
The docile Chinese laundrymen of old (stateside) were docile perhaps they were foreigners in a strange land. Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the first Chinese republic, described his countrymen as a dish of loose sand. By this, he meant that unlike the docile Japanese, who obeyed authority without question, the Chinese stood up for their interests over the interests of whatever ruler was in power.
#8
Yes MunkarKat, and unless you have significant economic pull, either with the company (ie it going out of buisness if you pullout) or with the government (see bribes) you can pretty much kiss any money lost goodbye. You just have to either swallow your pride and do buisness again (after apologizing for the misunderstanding) or go with someone else. Most buisnesses here that work with China are willing to take the risk because the good usually outweighs the bad. When that happened to a company I worked for, I was all for sending over a "Thank-You" bomb to those cheating bastards. Fortunately, I wasn't in management. :D
#9
Penguin: Why does a guy who manages a hospital require two bodyguards? I think the MSM isn't telling everything about what is going on in China.
They may not have been bodyguards. Maybe the guy's job is kind of like the positions that NY mobsters hold in various unions and garbage collection companies. The other aspect of the accident that isn't clear is whether the cyclist caused the incident and then compounded it by smacking the other guy's mirror. Vigilantism is the rule of the road in China. Someone who steals someone else's bike and is caught can expect to get smacked around by the bike's owner while the local cops watch passively (the cops will typically have had a hand in apprehending the offender and bringing him over to the would-be victim).
Another important point is the fact that Chinese pedestrians, cyclists, motorists and motorcyclists do not use the road defensively. Cyclists will suddenly swerve directly onto the path of moving cars. My feeling is that the accident could have been the cyclist's fault, and the fight was of the kind you get occasionally in traffic altercations.
And the city rallying against outsiders isn't particularly remarkable - in this respect, China may be returning to the mores of the pre-communist era, where regional parochialism was intense enough that Westerners remarked upon the Chinese capacity for inter-village or -regional violence over apparently trivial issues.
#10
Article: But the riot here, like a growing number of flare-ups in other Chinese cities, was in fact directed against the flourishing alliance of Communist Party officials and well-connected businessmen that runs Chizhou. Before calm returned to the streets, the disturbance had become a political rebellion against the increasingly intimate connection in modern China between big money and Communist government.
I think this is overstated. No one wants to take on the Communist government. The general consensus in China is that local officials may be corrupt, but the central government means well. And corruption has been a central feature of officialdom on the land that is now China even before there was a China.
Mao has a god-like reputation in China. The communist party's reputation isn't at stake - what the locals seek is the replacement of specific officials, not the destruction of the system. And if there is a minority that seeks systemic change, it is change in favor of a return to the practices of the Maoist era.
#11
MK: I know the MSM are not reporting it all too well.
Reporters are leftists. What they see in China is laissez faire capitalism, similar to the kind we saw in 19th century America, when economic growth rates in the high single digits were not exceptional. Laissez faire in the 19th century meant essentially no regulation - public officials were regularly bribed for favorable rulings, and all kinds of sleazy undertakings were not regulated, let alone prosecuted. Reporters don't like the regulated capitalism we have today, let alone laissez faire capitalism in China. China has no welfare state, because it doesn't impose enough taxes to maintain one. To a Western reporter, this must mean that unrest and the overthrow of the government is inevitable, since it is his religious belief that the welfare state is what keeps the long-suffering proletariat from revolting.
#13
TH: why didn't the rioters beat the shit out of said dude and his body guards?
Probably because the guy and his bodyguards got out of Dodge in a hurry. The rule in China is that if you're going to beat the crap out of someone, do it in your hometown, or beat feet back to your hometown right after administering the beating. Note that there were no riots in the motorist's hometown - this was primarily a sectarian issue pitting locals against outsiders.
#14
ZF, Thanks for the education. That's why I scan for your comments.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/02/2005 10:25
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#15
It's not the wealth that's the problem, it's the ostentatious wealth. This often happens in noveau riche societies, where the rich flaunt their wealth in a still fairly poor society. It often results in extreme hatred of the wealthy, until they learn to be discreet with their money. Compare this with America, which is crawling with relatively wealthy people. They have their own neighborhoods, their own stores, their own entertainments, even their own cities. They almost never mingle with "the common folk" unless they dress down and act middle class, otherwise they would stick out and attract unwanted attention here, too.
#16
A: It's not the wealth that's the problem, it's the ostentatious wealth. This often happens in noveau riche societies, where the rich flaunt their wealth in a still fairly poor society. It often results in extreme hatred of the wealthy, until they learn to be discreet with their money.
Ostentation has been a feature of Chinese culture for thousands of years. There is a certain amount of noblesse oblige - but vanishingly small compared to what exists in the West. The Oriental attitude appears to be winner takes all. This is why you'll notice that people in the Far East tend to wear expensive labels. During my trips there, I see a lot of Rolex and other expensive Swiss watches. Some of this materialism is reflected among Asian Americans, many of whom seem to flock to expensive cars and designer labels. The attitude seems to be this - why be successful if nobody knows about it?
#19
Article: "Chinese Communist Party's new fascination with businessmen, profits and economic growth"
PR: WTH, Am I missing something? No one told me about a sale on "Contradiction".
China isn't really a communist dictatorship any more. It's a capitalist dictatorship. Why do the Communists keep on referring to Chinese capitalism as "communism with Chinese characteristics"? Because to explicitly repudiate communism would be to repudiate their right to rule. By calling China's conversion to capitalism "communism with Chinese characteristics", they are avoiding the question of the immense damage that communist economic policies have wreaked upon the Chinese people, and the consequent potential damage to the party's prestige. Most Chinese I have spoken to appear to have accepted the Communist Party's explanation of the past, and are hopeful that the capitalist economic policies implemented since Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the late 1970's will not be reversed.
How stable do you think the current regime is? Is there a "succession plan" for the old guard?
Posted by: Matt ||
08/02/2005 15:28
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#21
China isn't really a communist dictatorship any more. It's a capitalist dictatorship.
So Zbigniew Brzezinski was more or less correct when he said the best policy on China was to leave them alone, because communism and capitalism were two divergent paths. Nonetheless, it's still a dictatorship that we see in China, and a dangerous one.
The question is, can the Chinese "communists", then, continue down this road for long? Will there be a time when they give up on communism?
Posted by: Rafael ||
08/02/2005 23:11
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WASHINGTON (AP) - A shake-up of dozens of Air National Guard units has emerged as the most contentious part of the Pentagon's proposal to close or restructure hundreds of military bases across the country. States are suing over the issue. Lawmakers in both parties are griping. And the independent commission reviewing the sweeping proposal has serious concerns about the impact of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's Air Guard plan.
A major question about that plan also remains unresolved just weeks before the commission's September deadline to send its recommendations to President Bush, himself a stateside Vietnam-era pilot in the Texas Air National Guard: Does the law even allow the Pentagon to move Air Guard units without the consent of state governors, who through their adjutants general share authority over the units with the president?
In May, Rumsfeld proposed shutting or consolidating 62 major U.S. military bases and hundreds of smaller facilities, prompting lawmakers and communities to feverishly lobby the commission to spare their hometown facilities. Only a fraction of the $49 billion Rumsfeld says his plan will save over 20 years would come from the Air Guard reorganization. But the impact on the Air Guard would be dramatic.
With roughly 106,000 members, the Air Guard currently has units stationed at about 95 Air Force bases and separate Air Guard installations and on leased land at about 78 civilian spots, including local airports. Rumsfeld's proposal would shift people, equipment and aircraft around at least 54 sites where Air Guard units are stationed. Roughly two dozen sites would grow. About 30 are slated for closure or downsizing. In many of those cases, units would continue to exist but no planes would be assigned to them.
The Pentagon says the Air Guard changes are part of an overall effort to reshape the Air Force ``into more effective fighting units'' by consolidating a force that is now ``fragmented into small, inefficient units.''
Lawmakers, states and commissioners worry about the potential impact of the Pentagon proposal on recruitment, retention and training, and question whether the Air Guard will be able to fulfill its homeland security mission.
Anthony Principi, the commission's chairman, has appealed to all involved groups ``to work to a solution that best serves the interests of our national security and our country.''
``The commission believes a solution is needed,'' Principi told defense officials last month. However, he said, throwing out all of Rumsfeld's Air Guard recommendations would be ``irresponsible.'' Principi has since scheduled an Aug. 11 hearing to address the Air Guard plan.
Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, the Army general in charge of the National Guard Bureau, told lawmakers he's committed to ensuring each state has at least one Air Guard flying unit. ``If I don't have a flying unit in a state or territory, very shortly thereafter I will have no Air National Guard in that state or territory,'' he said.
Comments like those don't ease the fears of states - and lawmakers - facing pork barrel losses. ``This doesn't work,'' Rep. Joe Schwarz, R-Mich., told Air Force officers at a recent House Armed Services Committee hearing. ``This thing is amazing in its incompleteness and in the disruption that it's caused, the insecurity that it has caused. And, I'm just, frankly appalled,'' added Rep. John Kline, R-Minn.
Pennsylvania was the first state to sue to try to stop the Pentagon. It's concerned about the fate of the Pennsylvania National Guard's 111th Fighter Wing, which is stationed at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station that the Pentagon wants to close. Illinois quickly followed with a lawsuit arguing that the federal government is out of bounds because it failed to consult the states. Other states may join those suits.
The commission's legal counsel has said relocating, disbanding or moving Air Guard units from one state to another could be outside the commission's authority. The Pentagon wants the commission to wait for a Justice Department opinion before changing Rumsfeld's plan.
Maj. Gen. Roger Lempke, president of the Adjutants General Association of the United States, said the Air Guard plan is ``beyond the scope'' of the law authorizing the first round of base closings in a decade. He said the law ``pertains to installations, not to units, unit equipment, people or positions.'' Lt. Gen. Stephen G. Wood, an Air Force deputy chief of staff, said, ``We believe that we are within the full extent of the law.''
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/02/2005
00:06 ||
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#1
States are suing over the issue
Article I, Section 8, U.S. Constitution.
The Congress shall have the power to... To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.
Seems clear cut to me. However, what do I know, its old colonial English, and the Courts have long held, only they know the secret language of the Constitution. It was never intended for us mere mortals to comprehend.
Slag them as you might, few papers do obits as well as the Guardian. Very long, which is why I didn't post the whole thing here.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/02/2005
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#1
pshaw, no matter how well written and no matter how many facts they get right, I don't like reading when they always throw in stuff that is petty or inaccurate with the facts. It's like eating yummy cake that has little patches of sand inside.
Now here was Fahd heaping yet more dazzling new hardware on his armed forces, in which, for internal political reasons, he must have had less confidence than ever. It was not so much fear of another Saddam that prompted him, it was the princes' greed for commissions and the desperate need of western arms manufacturers to sell their products.
Guardian then goes on to say that increase in military spending and wild spending by the princes fuels resentment...all fair enough...but then we finally get around to blaming what the Guardian staff religiously believes is responsible for all the world's ills..the true To get this in everything they ever write is almost like a freaking disclaimer on a pack of cigarettes...so here we go....
The way the west, especially the US, treated the world's largest oil exporter as a milch cow for its weapons, and other high-priced goods and services, was a source of growing resentment too. So was Fahd's acquiescence in it. That western-Saudi bargain he had struck in the 1970s seemed a thoroughly one-sided one now. But the greater the resentment, the more dependent, in the end, he became on the US as his ultimate protector against enemies within and without.
And thenthey didn't even get the date of the King's death right - as any rantburger would know.
Fahd bin Abdul Aziz bin Saud, King of Saudi Arabia, born 1921; died August 1 2005.
#4
I call BS. Even in the movie "Lawrence of Arabia", Lawrence is meeting with ol' King Faisal in the tent, where TE wants to talk politix and Faisal wants to know how many guns he will get and how big they will be.
Pakistan said on Monday that foreign students studying in local religious seminaries would have to return to their respective countries and only President Pervez Musharrafâs statement on the issue was correct. âOnly what President Musharraf has said about sending back foreign students is correct. They will have to return to their countries. The Interior Ministry will work out the modalities in this respect,â said Foreign Office spokesman Naeem Khan at his weekly briefing.
Yeah, yeah. Tell 'em about how you stood firm on the religion column on the passports, too...
Posted by: Fred ||
08/02/2005
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You know how cooperative muslims are, I'm sure they will just drop everything and hit the road. You don't think they will be the ones telling him to FO do you?
The trial of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein will be shown on live television, Iraq's top security adviser has announced. The trial will show the Arab and Muslim world "that this is going to be a fair, just trial with a defence counsel in there, with a proper prosecuting counsel as well there", Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq Rubaie told CNN. "And everybody will watch this trial live on television."
An Iraqi tribunal filed the first charges last month against Saddam over the 1982 killing of 143 residents of the village of Dujail, northeast of Baghdad, where he had been the target of a failed assassination bid. No date for his trial has been set.
The announcement over his trial came ahead of a confirmation in Iraq's parliament that a constitutional committee would submit a draft document for debate by an August 15 deadline. A national conference of top political leaders will take place on Thursday to help iron out remaining differences on the constitutional draft. Unresolved issues include federalism and how it will work, and whether the Kurds, in their semi-autonomous area in the country's north, should be allowed a future vote on self-determination. There is also disagreement on the division of revenue between the federal government and the regions, on the status of the ethnically tense city of Kirkuk, on whether Kurdish and Arabic should be official languages and on the role of Islam in the constitution.
#1
Sung to
"Prisoners of Love"
from "The Producers"
Mel Brooks
Prisoner of Bush
Showed off my toosh
But my assâ still in jail
Prisoner of Bush
My sons a-squosh
The defense better not fail
Oh, you can lock me up
And lose the key
But in my heart
Tigris palace for me!
Prisoner of Bush
My mind is mush
'Cause Iâm still prisoner
Iâm still prisoner
Iâm still prisoner of Bush
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005 8:31
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#5
A great Hollywood script would have him rescued from the infidel forces and spirited away, to rise again and restore Iraq to its former glory. Except there may not be enough of his supporters left alive to pull it off. OBL doan wan him. Zark doan wan him eider.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 10:43
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#6
I wonder who the TV sponsors will be... Roach Hotel?
Roto-Rooter.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 10:50
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#7
An OJ trial with a muslo-twist?
Posted by: Scott R ||
08/02/2005 12:53
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A bomb exploded on Monday near the house of the Palestinian Authority's Attorney-General Hussein Abu Asi in the Sabra district of Gaza City. Palestinian security sources said Abu Asi was unhurt in the explosion, which caused material damage. Palestinian police, who rushed to the scene, opened an investigation into the incident.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/02/2005
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#1
Palestinian police, who rushed to the scene, opened an investigation into the incident. The image that comes to mind is more Keystone Cops than CSI.
SIALKOT/MULTAN: The government's crackdown against religious extremists continued on Monday with law enforcement agencies arresting five leaders of two banned religious organisations in Sialkot district and 63 people including three activists of banned organisations in southern Punjab. Police said four of the five leaders arrested from Sialkot district belonged to banned Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) while one belonged to Sipah-e-Muhammad. Police said one of the SSP leaders was arrested from Pasrur, two from Sialkot and one from Daska while the Sipah-e-Muhammad leader was arrested from Sialkot. Separately, three activists of banned organisations and 60 clerics were arrested in Bahawalnagar, Multan, Mailsi, Vehari, Muzaffargarh, Hasilpur, Bahawalpur and Ahmedpur East.Police said the three activists had been detained for 90 days under Section MPO-3. Police also said 60 clerics had been arrested for violating the ban on loudspeakers.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/02/2005
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Patients in the King Faisal Hospital were surprised when their dinner was delayed, Okaz daily reported. The food was delayed because the hospital chefs and cleaners were engaged in a fight over tips.
"Food fight!"
The staff engaged in the fight used plates, chairs and spoons and anything that came conveniently to hand.
"Ow! Ow! Hey! That ain't no pie!"
Hospital security intervened and ended the fight and took the injured to the emergency department for treatment.
Always bring a spork to a food fight, is my motto.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/02/2005
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France is looking at stepping up surveillance at its borders after a prime suspect in the failed London bombings on July 21 managed to traverse the country despite a Europe-wide alert for him, Transport Minister Dominique Perben said Monday. "That a man leaves Great Britain, goes across France and makes it to Italy by getting around all our system of checks requires us to think about our border surveillance system. This is what the French government is working on," Perben said. France's interior ministry is preparing a new anti-terror law that would allow French officials to inspect passengers' travel documents on all international trains entering and leaving the country, regardless of jurisdictional considerations. "We have to take into account the lessons from the attacks and underline the importance of the video surveillance in place in the airports" around Paris, said Perben during a visit to inspect security measures at Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris.
During all the road trips I have taken through El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, it never occurred to me that lurking in the dunes along the highway just 50 kilometers south of the U.S.-Mexico border city area lie heaps of uncontained radioactive waste.
The secret in the desert sands recently was revealed by Mexican nuclear physicist Bernardo Salas Mar, a former employee of the federal atomic power plant in Veracruz state who was fired after publicly disclosing its radioactive contamination of the Gulf of Mexico.
...snip...
The location is on top of the burial grounds of the waste from what Chihuahua journalist Ignacio Alvarado Ãlvarez calls the worst nuclear disaster of this hemisphere, "Our Chernobyl." That is the fiasco that began 21 years ago in 1984 when guards at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories near Santa Fe, New Mexico, detected a truckload of rebar from Old Mexico contaminated by radioactive Cobalt-60.
In one of the twisted tales typifying the bi-national boundary line's environmental predicament, the contamination originated from a U.S. source sent to Mexico illegally; the resulting product then was shipped for sale in the United States, where it was discovered to be dangerous and returned to Mexico for confinement.
The now inactive state-run Aceros de Chihuahua foundry had made the rebar by recycling scrap obtained at the Ciudad Juárez Yonke Fenix. The junkyard is now famous because among the metals it received for resale was a gamma radiation chamber with pellets of Cobalt-60 that the most expensive private hospital in the city had acquired as contraband from a U.S. supplier.
U.S. importers of the resulting rebar were located. The rebar in the United States was returned to Mexico for confinement. But many shipments of metal that different foundries made with the contaminated scrap from the Fenix junkyard were delivered in at least half the states in Mexico and never recovered for burial.
Perhaps the waste mounds that Salas verified are a miniscule part of what somehow was recovered in Mexico.
I'd be concerned about what this could be used for...
#4
Co 60 has a half-life of 5.27 years, so after 21 years, its radioactivity would only be 1/16 of the original. The burial is actually a pretty good remedy since it is isolated and the radiation (electrons and gamma rays) contained.
#8
On a trip to El Paso/Juarez, we saw the soft glow of the mounds of this radioctive dump. When inquiring what it was, we were told by some nuns that there was a lot of illegal dumping there but no one would listen. They were upset because this is a squalid camp they visited daily, to take formula and food to mostly women and children sheltered in cardboard shantys and without clean water. Geraldo Rivera even did an investigative story on it clear back in the 80's, but we dismissed most of it as liberal hype as it was his pre-Fox days.
One person has been killed and another injured in an explosion on a Russian nuclear submarine in dock for decommissioning. The blast occurred at the Zvyozdochka shipyard, in Severodvinsk, where the vessel had been sent to be dismantled. Igor Grigoriyev, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry in the region, said a welding torch apparently ignited fuel vapours that had built up in one compartment of the submarine. The Viktor class submarine arrived at the yard in June and the work was due to be carried out using funds from Canada. The fire caused by the blast was extinguished after nearly four hours. Oleg Frolov, chief engineer for the shipyard, said there was no danger of radioactive contamination from the incident.
Edited for new information.
Democrats gathered [in Columbus, Ohio] last week and heard an uncomfortable message from DLC founder Al From. Employing statistics from the national census and the 2004 presidential election, From hit his audience, including some 300 elected Democratic officials, with this grim picture of why he believes Democrats need a new act: For every two Americans who say they're liberals, three are conservatives. Democrats lost 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the country last year. Small cities and most suburbs buried the Democratic ticket. Ditto married couples with children. The Democratic vote among the Hispanic population fell 40 percent from 2000. And it collapsed among voters earning more than $40,000 a year. Noting that Sen. John Kerry got a bigger vote among Democrats in losing than Bill Clinton did in winning, From declared that "the Democratic base is not big enough to win. The country is more conservative."
How can Democrats win? With a tougher, pro-military stance on security, From said, and a platform that makes sense to both "the working class (labor) and the learning class (information workers and academia). Globalization of work is going to be a big issue over the next 10 years." And to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Washington -- and Bush -- Democrats, From said, must be the party of reform. "Democrats must change," he said.
But change could put party unity to a severe test. That was apparent here in the angry reaction of several black participants to the heavy emphasis cultivating the Hispanic vote. For decades Democrats have built their national campaigns around an electoral base that included a heavy black vote. But Hispanics, now the nation's largest minority, are seen increasingly by both parties as a key to electoral success. As From discovered, some blacks see the Hispanic rise as a zero-sum game -- the more Democrats court the Latino vote, the less they're likely to court African-Americans. Mary Flowers, an African-American state representative from Illinois, delivered an impassioned speech warning Democrats they risk losing black voters to Republicans busy courting the black church vote.
Some liberals and a few black leaders, notably the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have long been critical of the DLC because of its closeness to corporate America -- the source of much of its money -- and its message that beating up on business is no way to create jobs. For example, Democratic National chairman Howard Dean, a darling of the party's vocal liberals, was a conspicuous absentee.
Al From continued, "We must change our convictions, however we are having trouble getting consensus on which convictions will attract the most voters. Whatever convictions we adopt - they must be different than the convictions we have now. Tommorrow morning, we need to all wake up with a new set of convictions."
#3
The Dems call themselves "liberal", where somehow universal, Individual- and Society-specific laissez faire & libertarianism = Regulation or Regulatory Centralism/Governmentism. Worse, they don't want to ascribe themselves as either Regulators andor Socialists andor Orientalists/Asianists, etc. despite supp these agendas. "Realism" & "Secular Moralism" & Universal Intellectualism = national/universal dependence on Propaganda & Info Control. As illustrated by Hollywood's on-going penchant for "Reality Shows" and Leftpert movie films, etc. the Dems and Lefties celebrate the "realism" andor "hardness" of life and mortal mankind to QUIETLY/SUBTLELY and PC argue that ORDINARY BEINGS, HOWEVER WELL-MEANING, LIKABLE, OR SKILLED, CANNOT BE TRUSTED, ERGO WASHINGTON DC AND AMERICA NEEDS REGULATION AND MORE REGULATION, CONTROL AND SUPER-CONTROL, SOCIALISM, CENTRALISM AND BUREAUCRACY, FOR RELIABLE AND EFFECTIVE NATIONAL-SOCIAL ORDER AND IMPROVEMENT,and of course the usual "OOOPS, GOP/US-led ergo only GOP/US-blamed". Iff you wanna know the real threat to America from 9-11, listen to LeftRadio, and how AMERICA [ALLEGEDLY] CAN NEVER RETURN TO THE DAYS OF LIMITED GOVERNMENT OR DE-REGULATION, and or how AMERICA CAN PROTECT ITS BORDERS AND CITIES FROM NEW TERROR BY SPENDING MORE ON INTERNATIONAL AID, DEVELOPMENT, AND ENVIRO PROGRAMS, aka the USA unilateraly modernizing the world, and paying for same, sub-aka America and American taxpayers putting out the money without asking questions on how said monies are spent. ITS "SAFETY" AND "SECURITY", ETC. NOT SOCIALISM OR COMMUNISM - THE DEMOLEFT BELIEVES IT AND SOCIALISM WILL WIN BECAUSE THEY'LL PC BETRAY AND LIE TO EVERYBODY ANYWAYS!? THE ONLY THING THE LEFTIES HAVE ARE [DESIRES FOR] US CASUALTIES, POLICY FAILURES/DEFECTS, AND ANTI-US NUKE WAR(S) -WITHOUT PC AND MEDIA-MOVIE PROPAGANDA, THE LEFTIES ARE DUMBFOUNDED TO SAY ANYTHING!
#5
The Dems will fall back on denial and tactics, like their traditional ballot stuffing in Washington, Wisconsin, and E.Saint Louis. To have a real long term stategy the Dems have to split, those to whom the kinder gentler form of Marxism is still and will remain a religion, and those who want to participate in the American politicial process. The longer the party delays this division, the longer their removal from power will be. However, bet on them to keep to the "we can fool all the people some of the time" strategy for the near future. Wake up day will be when the Reps have 2/3rds of both Houses and the White House, and not a day sooner.
#6
Joseph - try using the enter key to break your treatise into paragraphs. It'll be easier to read, and therefore, comprehend.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 9:04
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#7
The Democrats should actually stick with their convictions. Changing convictions is foolish and shows you'll do anythign to win. If your party has two sets of convications that means you should split (as the Republicans did when they told Buchanon he was not welcome).
#8
The problem with the Democrat's convictions is that they suck and have been proven not to work. Socialism and handouts don't breed national safty and productiveness. If the Dems really want to get through to the American people, they really need to lay off the nanny state idea. Privatized national health insurance, bulk group policies that non-insured can afford, getting people off welfare with green projects and jobs, etc.
All that would appeal to the just left of center Americans that voted for Bush last time. Until they change the communist and socialist plug, they will loose. And I don't think the current leadership (ie Dean) will get it, even if the Republicans hold 90% of the house and senate. They will just spin more conspiracy theories and blame Rove. The Dems need to eject the solidly left leadership and look elswhere for their inspiration. Fred would be a good start.
(They are drafting you Fred!)
#10
Some liberals and a few black leaders, notably the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have long been critical of the DLC because of its closeness to corporate America -- the source of much of its money -- and its message that beating up on business is no way to create jobs.
As opposed to Jesse Jackson's PUSH, whose source of money is corporate America. Of course, his MO is to extort money from corporations by threatening spurious lawsuits and boycotts, not by beating up on them.
#11
"The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is," Dean said, not mentioning that until he nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court this week, Bush had not appointed anyone to the high court. Howard Dean is such a nutball I can't really tell WHAT the Democrats are for or against. With Hillary talking more like a Republican and Howlin' Howie seemingly calling for a more conservative Supreme Court but opposing any conservative nominee my head hurts trying to sort it all out.The Democrats are fracturing before our very eyes. It's sad that a once-great party has descinded to such lows.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/02/2005 12:03
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#12
once great party - pswhaw. You have good posts, Deacon but other than civil rights - great with what? Other than the legacy of great marketing - selling ice to eskimos - I can't see one legacy they are left with except piles of dead skulls in southeast Asia, the decline of independent thought in our Universities, the rise of welfare mothers and children, the scamming of union funds into the pockets of union bosses and corrupt politicians, the undoing of the "melting pot" that made our country the steel of the world and the rise of political correctness with it's self-righteous shaming and blaming and screeching "burn the witch" at the the slightest variation from their texts. They like to pretend they are responsible for "women's liberation" but the birth control pill is responsible for that.
color me unimpressed with the "once great party that never was"
Posted by: Scott R ||
08/02/2005 13:20
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#16
2b, I've given your comment some thought and I have come to the conclusion you are right. Civil Rights is about it. In the 19th Century they were the party of States Rights, which I think is still very much an issue, but they took it to extremes to include the States Rights to legalize slavery. After the Civil War the Democrats enacted all the Jim Crow laws that kept Blacks in virtual slavery while the Radical Republicans tried their best to completely destroy the South which is the reason the South remained the "Solid South" for nearly 100 years after the War. When I became of voting age I was a Democrat because the Southern Democrats, not to be confused with the Dixiecrats, seemed to me to be the strongest on defense and Civil Rights. This was during the late '60s and believe it or not there were a lot of us Southerners who were tired of the "Good Ole Boy" system and were all for equal rights for everyone. It was during the Carter administration that I became disilusioned with the Democratic Party as a whole and the direction it was taking. I believe the extreme liberalization of the Democratic Party is why Republican Governers were elected in States that had not had a Republican Governer since Reconstruction. The South has always been conservative and the Republicans picked up on this and ran candidates who were more conservative than the Democrats. There is still a strong Democratic presence in the South but it consists mostly, in my opinion, of people who were old time Democrats and will never change, the "Acedemic Elite" and their student followers, and what I call the "Gimmie" group, the people who recieve "entitlements". Just my thoughts. I still think the Democratic Party was once great if only for a brief period.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/02/2005 13:24
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#17
interesting post, Deacon. I voted for Perot (blush) because I was tired of GW1's good ol' boy network and couldn't bring myself to vote for the lying Clinton - and well, there was no one else. I naively thought I could make a statement. But who knows, in the long run, maybe I did - as did you.
#18
"as did you" not to imply that you voted for Perot - but that you are clearly a person who tried to vote for what you best believed would move the country forward at the time. I believe in the end - it's people like you that move the country forward with your belief that we can do better.
#19
Deacon makes the argument that even civil rights aren't a legacy of the Donks. I'd agree. In addition to his candid history...I'd say look at the 50s/60s...the Demos were against the Civil Rights Acts back then, and they were passed with the push from the Repubs. Basically, they have nothing, except wanting your money.
Posted by: BA ||
08/02/2005 14:00
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#20
What do you think will become of the liberals if they recieve(and from the looks of the 2008 candidates, it's coming) a complete trouncing in the next election? Will they kill themselves, move to canada, or just shut the hell up and live in hatred and loathing?
#21
Thanks, 2b, I hope I clarified my position a little. I actually met Ross Perot in 1984 and I was impressed with his ideas at the time. I didn't vote for him because I didn't believe he could win although I wish I had. I couldn't stomach Clinton so I voted for Bush. That is the only time so far when I felt I had no real choice. My feelings during the mid '60s to mid 70's and even now is that Democrats like Byrd and a lot of Southern Democrats opposed equal rights. The influence of the liberal Democrats on the college campuses in the South did make a big difference in the Civil Rights Movement. However they went way to far in pushing a more socialist agenda and pushed the more conservative Democrats into the Republican ranks. I did not start college until 1972, well after High School and a lot of the teachers I had, even at Auburn University, were way too far to the left. They didn't have the even small real-life experience that I and the veterans that were there had but still wanted to tout their moral superiority over us. we just laughed at them. Title IX was enacted at that time and most of us felt it was high time for women's equality. As an example, at that time freshman women were required to live in a campus dormatory regardless of age if they were single. Men were not. after Title IX they were not. The University would have had to require single men to live on campus and would have had to buils a lot more dormatories. I think the split in the Democratic party between conservative and liberal Democrats probably intensified during this period. This is just my opinion from my limited experience of politics during this time. By limited I mean I didn't pay much attention to politics outside the South.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
08/02/2005 14:35
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#22
What do you think will become of the liberals if they recieve(and from the looks of the 2008 candidates, it's coming) a complete trouncing in the next election? Will they kill themselves, move to canada, or just shut the hell up and live in hatred and loathing?
I suspect we'll see a resurgence in the tactics that mdae the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and SLA go down in history. It's not like the left would have to go very far to find information -- their friends in ALF, ELF, Black Block, and ISM have all the information they need.
Heck, remember the mobs attacking Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters last year?
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/02/2005 14:45
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#23
Very true, DB! And, I won't even tell you when I attended Auburn, except to say I was born when you started college. Anyhoo, that's the main difference between Southern Demos and other Demos...the Southern Demos are much more conservative (especially in social issues...abortion, gay "rights", etc.). Look at Zell Miller....to call him a Democrat in light of national political parties is hilarious, so he went and campaigned for Bush. And many who research history will see the Civil Rights Act was basically passed by Repubs (not to say there weren't some bigoted Southern Repubs before that, but Southern Dems don't tend to fall for the socialist tendencies of the national party). Winning 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the union speaks volumes of where the national Demo. party is headed (in addition to their urban cores losing population).
Posted by: BA ||
08/02/2005 14:49
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#24
And, oh yeah, DB, by the time I got there, Auburn's "Liberal Arts" programs were full of moonbats. Surprised me greatly to see these professors in small, college town in nowhere Alabama, in addition to all your "rights" groups. Heck, the president of the AU GLBT group lived 2 doors up from me in a dorm. I became very suspicious when he was living there in his senior year, whereas everyone else was freshmen/sophmores and wanted to get out to apartment/house life! Thank God for the Engineering Dept, or else AU would be taken over by moonbats for sure.
Posted by: BA ||
08/02/2005 14:52
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#25
My own suspicion is that the Dems will go the way of the British Liberal party, and be replaced by a new Centrist party. Future elections will be between the centrists and the GOP. Until then, I can't see the Dems winning any national elections.
Al
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
08/02/2005 14:52
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#26
Frozen Al, that is more or less what I'm thinking as well, except I see the far left fleeing the Dems for the Greens. The remaining centrist Dems (call them Dinos) could draw the Rinos out of the Republicans giving them a chance.
France paid millions of dollars for the release of three journalists kidnapped in Iraq and its foreign intelligence service now knows the identity of the abductors, a reporter who was himself held hostage in Lebanon in 1987 said on Monday in a magazine interview. Roger Auque told the August-September issue of Afrique Magazine that - despite official denials - the French government had paid $6m to free Liberation newspaper correspondent Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi interpreter in June. Two other French journalists who had been released last December, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, were handed over in exchange for $2m, Auque said, relying on what he described as "a reliable source" for his information.
Officers in DGSE foreign intelligence service "have identified the abductors and the place they had been held", said the journalist, who has written a book about his own captivity at the hands of Hezbollah. "In the basement of the DGSE in Paris the cellphone numbers of the abductors and their photos are stuck on a wall next to a map of Iraq," he said. "Kidnappers never say at the start that they want money. They prefer to depict themselves as a political or religious movement. Then they make it understood that all that costs a lot of money and that financial help would be welcome. A figure is then suggested," he told the magazine.
#1
Though I don't know well his work (he's written a book about this subject), in his media appearances Roger Auque has struck me as a non-idiotarian.
This is certainly credible, though some others sources have mentioned higher sums ($15 millions was asked for Florence Aubenas, according to Reporters without borders).
Check this
http://trans-int.blogspot.com/2005/06/ransom-and-terror-in-iraq.html
for the linkage between (supposed, none was acknowledged) ransom deliveries for french journalists and upsurges in Iraq terror : very revealing!
#3
In light of the new threats the frech terror alert system has upgraded the terror threat level from run to hide and all french citizens have been told to "leave your money and women on your front porch and get to your pre-arranged hiding spot quick."
Iraqi security forces found 12 bodies in a garbage dumping place in Baghdad Monday, a police officer said. Major Abu Saqer Al-Saedi told reporters the unidentified bodies were found while a patrol was inspecting Umm Al-Maalef area in the capital. The bodies were hand-cuffed and they were blind-folded, he added. There were military uniforms near the bodies.
Meanwhile, the Mutli-National Force (MNF) said it had arrested nine insurgents in northern Iraq. A statement by the MNF said the insurgents were arrested in different areas in Mosul. On the other hand, the US command in Iraq said it released 900 Iraqi prisoners out of 2,000 inmates during July.
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Seperately, Al-Qaida in Iraq reported a sucessful summer recruiting drive that bolstered it's membership by 899 new recruits.
WASHINGTON: The appointment of former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal as ambassador to the United States should be the occasion for Riyadh to clear up its past relations with Islamic extremists and terrorists, the New York Times said Sunday. Pointing to his former oversight of Saudi Arabia's relationship with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, Prince Turki represents the Saudis' longstanding ambiguous relationship with Islamic extremism, the Times said in an editorial. "His appointment should stimulate serious discussion of the darker aspects of Saudi Arabia's historic relations with the world of Islamic extremists and terrorists," the newspaper said. While stressing that Turki is "neither a terrorist nor a religious zealot", the Times said he was closely connected to Saudi Arabia's decades of aggressive Islamic diplomacy, some of which eventually spawned militant extremist groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Posted by: Fred ||
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#1
In one way this is good: it should be easier to remember that he's not on our side. With Bandar, many assumed that he was on our side and gave him access, took his money, etc. Keep all Soddies at arm's length (and maybe hold a gun on them too).
#3
ahhh, I bet they will just explore all of his darker sides and then after their "exhaustive examination", proclaim him fit as fiddle. Phew! I feel much better now.
#5
Oh, I'm sure he'll still have that magic bag filled with presents for all the good little girls and boys, which will magically erase certain "unpleasantries". I wonder if Bandar will let him use his old one. It's probably lying around the embassy someplace...
#7
Bandar's Rolodex will be passed on or copied. The goodies will continue to flow to those in the State Dept Retirement Plan who deliver. Turki's as smooth as silk - he did the same gig, just as effectively as Bandar, in the UK, i.e. money talks everywhere. With a socialist Govt, he certainly didn't have to twist any arms there.
The eleven young men in jail on suspicion of membership in the Hofstadgroep terror network will remain in detention until the next pro forma hearing in late September, a Rotterdam court ruled on Friday.
The revolving door seems to be turning much more slowly these days...
The court also ruled their attorneys could question witnesses including the head of the state security service AIVD and MPs Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders. The court found there were sufficient objections to releasing the eleven men.
Roughly nine rucksacks full of objections, I'd wager.
I see two probabilities: first, they confused Mullah Diesel with Fazlur Rehman Khalil and didn't want a known terrorist tromping around, meeting with who knows whom. Or they might simply find Fazl boring and tedious and not want him under foot, making the point that back home in Peshawar he might be a big man, but in the bright lights of Dubai he's just a fat guy of no consequence.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) government on Sunday night refused to grant a transit visa to Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Maulana Fazlur Rehman. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed claimed that the UAE government had blacklisted Fazl and that was why he was refused a transit stay in Dubai. He also said the Pakistani Embassy was coordinating with the UAE government to allow Fazl to enter Dubai, but the UAE were independent emirates and Pakistan could not force it to do so. However, Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, acting secretary general of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), said Fazl would be deported to Pakistan and would land at Peshawar airport on Tuesday (today).
âFazl landed at Dubai airport late Sunday night and was on his way to Saudi Arabia from Libya for Umra,â Hafiz Hussain said. Upon his arrival, Fazl asked the authorities to grant him a transit visa for 48 hours, he said, adding that immigration authorities were first willing to grant him the transit visa, but later refused to do so. He said Fazl remained at airport till Monday evening and was later taken to an airport hotel. Hafiz Hussain said he had been trying to contact Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri since Sunday night, but nobody was available. He also said the UAE governmentâs behaviour was condemnable and the MMA would protest against the act. He condemned Sheikh Rashidâs statement about the UAE government blacklisting Fazl. He asked why Sheikh Rashid had not told the FO or taken up the issue with the UAE government if he knew of the blacklisting by Sunday night.
Later, Fazl told Geo television that he wanted to know when and why the UAE government had blacklisted his name, agencies reported. Fazl also said he would sit back and see how the Pakistani government handled the situation. He also said Sheikh Rashid should have clarified why a friendly government had blacklisted him. âThis incident is a result of the Pakistani governmentâs weak foreign policy.â He said that the Pakistani ambassador to the UAE had earlier told him that the issue had been resolved and that he could visit Dubai, but later said the problem had not been resolved.
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#1
A third possibility: UAE requires dress turban, not something one wears on Thursday to mow the lawn.
#2
Hmm perhaps it's because the MMA are not the government of Pakistan and are just known trouble makers? To top that off he is not an Arab. Well it might be that pathetic dishtowel he wears on his head too.
John Garang, who led Sudanâs southern rebels for two decades before making peace and joining the government he fought, has died in a helicopter crash, sparking riots and fears for the countryâs hard-won stability. At least 24 people were killed in Khartoum, a policeman said, after rioters torched vehicles and looted shops. Witnesses said southerners, who have long said the northern government discriminated against them, attacked Arabs in the street. âPeople have been running all over the streets. The policemen are taking people from the streets. There is fire and smoke,â a Reuters TV witness said.
Garang, 60, a key figure in a January peace deal hailed as a rare success story for Africa, became the countryâs first vice president on July 9. He died over the weekend after the Ugandan presidential helicopter he was traveling in went down in bad weather. Six of Garangâs companions and a crew of seven also died in the crash near the Sudan-Uganda border, Khartoum said yesterday, though a member of the southern Sudan leadership council said 17 bodies were recovered.
Members of Garangâs southern Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the government in Khartoum â bitter enemies during the 21-year conflict â both promised to maintain the peace agreement Garang helped bring about. Just weeks before, he had come north to take his place in government amid a tumultuous popular welcome in Khartoum. But as news of his death was confirmed yesterday morning, thousands of his southern Sudanese supporters took to the streets of Khartoum in a different mood, wielding knives and bars, looting shops, starting fires and clashing with police. A Reuters witness saw 12 bodies in a morgue in the capital and a police official said all the dead, which included police, were killed in the rioting. A Khartoum resident earlier said two people had been killed in his street.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/02/2005
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Well, nothing guarantees stability like a good riot.
The Israeli Army and police were deploying in unprecedented numbers yesterday to block an attempt by tens of thousands of settlers and their supporters to march towards doomed Gaza Strip settlements. The government ordered organizers of the rally to change their plans, charging that a mass descent on the main settlement bloc of Gush Katif would be "illegal" and exacerbate the risk of violent clashes. Security sources said 17,000 soldiers and a further 8,000 police were taking part in the operation in southern Israel ahead of the rally today, 15 days before the scheduled start of the pullout of the 8,000 Gaza settlers.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/02/2005
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How come the IDF can mass 25,000 troops/cops to fight their own people, but they cant stop Hamas from walking across the border and blowing up the same people?
#2
Cause the pro-settler protesters are trying to move en masse, in order to make the pullout more difficult. A hamas suicide bomber is a single individual moving stealthily (even so they catch quite a bunch). If the settler protesters were just trying to get one guy into Gaza, that would be a lot harder to stop - but what would be the point?
SRINAGAR: A militant in Held Kashmir shot dead five horses carrying supplies for troops in the first recorded attack of its kind, police said on Monday. The militants have never been known to target horses used by the army since the insurgency against New Delhi's rule erupted in 1989, police said in a statement. The horses were ferrying food rations and clothing to an army camp when they were killed late Sunday. The attack took place in Arigam village. "A solo militant killed five horses from point-blank range and beat up two locals who were leading the horses," army spokesman Vijay Batra said.
Posted by: Fred ||
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... A SINGLE mujahid from the LapLion of Islam Equine Death Brigades in the Land of the Lost destroyed, at point blank range, one old mig, five helicopters and six tanks as well as 37 infidel hindu crusaders with 2 RPG7 rounds, 3 120 mm mortar rounds and half a box of rounds from a PKM. The brave mujahid then took a lollypop from a child and took a piss on 3 other helicopters before they could withdraw in abject fear. - JU - really!
#3
Let's get the lefties on this. They'll be really upset when they found out horsies have been wacked!
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/02/2005 9:08
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#4
They'll be really upset when they found out horsies have been wacked!
"It's Bushitler's fault for using these poor oppressed members of the equine race to haul weapons of death to the racist butchers in Occupied Ira.....what's that? Kashmir? Oh, never mind."
Posted by: Steve ||
08/02/2005 9:31
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#5
So what do the low-lifes at PETA have to say about this?
#6
Next thing you know the horsies will be taken captive, blinfolded, hook-hooked and forced on camera to denounce their stable boys and filthy fillies.
#7
Steve, you can't blame Bushitler, he is only a pawn to his Zionist Masters . The entire incident is probably mis-reported by the media and their Zionist Masters . I personally believe that the army and their Zionist Masters are to blame and that the horses died a martyrs death.
Two separate gunbattles in the Indian-held Kashmir left five suspected militants dead, while another was captured by plainclothes security officers, officials said. Soldiers raided Handwara town on Monday, triggering a gunfight that killed three suspected militants, said army spokesman Lt-Col VK Batra. Handwara is about 90 kilometers (55 miles) north of Srinagar. Two more suspected militants died in a separate shootout in Kulgam, south of Srinagar, Batra said.
Police claimed they had captured a suspected militant after a chase in Srinagar. Special operations police chased two young men on a motorcycle Monday and captured one, who was injured in the scuffle, said Deputy Inspector General of Police HK Lohia. The other escaped and police were looking for him. Witnesses said police had dragged one of the men and beat his head in with a rock bludgeoned his head with a brick before whisking him away in an armored truck. Lohia said recent intelligence had suggested militants were planning several attacks in Srinagar. âOur reports led us to these two men,â he said.
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A member of the Fatah Movement was shot dead Monday by unknown gunmen in the Saftawi area of Gaza City. Palestinian security sources said four gunmen stopped the car of Ahmad Abu Zayed, 36, and tried to kidnap him but when they failed they shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. In a separate incident, unidentified gunmen opened fire at two members of the military intelligence in the Wihda Street of Gaza City. The two men were seriously injured.
UPDATE; "It was da Joooos!"
TEL AVIV, Israel, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- Fatah's al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades Tuesday accused Israel of killing one of its senior members in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp. The militant group vowed to retaliate "well inside Israel," a group member told Yediot Aharonot's Web site, Ynet.
The dead man was identified as Ahmed Abu-Zaide, the group's commander in northern Gaza. Unidentified men killed him and his death was initially thought to be related to internal struggles among Palestinian organizations, Ynet said. However a member of the group said that several hours before the shooting Israeli security personnel at the Erez Crossing questioned Abu-Zaide's relatives about the car he drives, who are his escorts, and the gun he owns.
Israeli military sources denied connection to the incident.
"Who? Us? Nah"
Posted by: Fred ||
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#1
Its all the fault of the Jews---if they hadn't put up that racist fence, we'd be killing them instead of each other. Can you get me a visa to UK?
Even bus drivers -- a pack, not a herd.
About 200 of the state's safety instructors will be trained so they can teach drivers at the regional and local level. The training will include who and what to look for and how to perform routine inspections of buses before picking up students. The program is based on a national effort by the American Trucking Association in response to potential terrorist threats.
Pakistan arrested five senior Taliban leaders Monday, including a deputy to fugitive Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, officials said to a foreign news agency. The arrests were made after security men raided several homes in northwestern Pakistan. Two of the captured men are reported to have been identified as Maulvi Abdul Qadeer, a deputy to Omar and formerly chairman of the Taliban Special Council, and Abdul Kabir, a former Governor in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. Names of the remaining three are not known, but they are also reported to be important Taliban leaders, now being interrogated by authorities.
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Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister and Chairperson of Pakistan People's Party Ms Benazir Bhutto has said that the Hisba bill was a bid to copy the polices of the Taliban regime. She said that the bill did not bode well for the strength and stability of the nation, adding that it would empower the intrusion into the private lives of the country's citizens. The bill, Ms Bhutto said was also un-Islamic as Islam prohibited its followers to spy on each other. The bill, on the other hand is aimed at setting up a moral brigade to deny citizens, a freedom of choice and allow the clergy to judge at what they regarded as virtue, Ms Benazir Bhutto said.
Qazi was "for" this bill yesterday, hence all thinking folk should be "against" it. This being Pakistan, all bets are off.
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
2 'robbers' die in 'crossfire'
Apple introduces "Mighty Mouse", a clickable, squeezeable, scrolling multi-button mouse.
Operation Makalwain was no Kargil ...but it was perhaps one of the biggest operations since the mountain conflict: an entire Indian Army brigade (around 3,000 men) was involved in neutralising a large group of militants.
NEW DELHI, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- The United States seems uninterested in helping India to extradite mafia boss Dawood Ibrahim from Pakistan because it does not want to upset relations with its front-line ally in the war on terrorism, Indian intelligence analysts said Tuesday. "Getting Dawood is not important for the United States as his arrest goes against the interest of Pakistan with whom Washington does not want upset its relations," said senior intelligence analyst Rajeev Sharma. He said as Pakistan cannot afford to violate any U.S. directive, Washington should ask Islamabad to arrest Ibrahim, who has been living in the Pakistani port of Karachi, and extradite him to India. 
LONDON -- Police dispatched more officers to guard the capital's Underground train system yesterday as investigators focused on a key question: Were the two sets of London bombers part of the same network, or did they operate independently? 
The first academic study into the sweaty pursuit of air guitar playing is to use the work of French philosophers to explain why men and women do it differently. Doctoral research has begun under the supervision of Britain's first professor of pop music, who is also overseeing a PhD into the art of "moshing", the vigorous head-shaking dance popular among concert crowds. For the next three years, Amanda Griffiths, 32, a dance teacher from north Wales, will attempt to explain, in 60,000 words, why the attractions of an invisible guitar are generally overlooked by women, and how the girls who get involved do it differently.
-- The accession of 
I think this might server as a better tool.
August 2, 2005: Libya has become more active in the war on terror. This may seem strange, since Libya has hosted Arab terrorists for decades. Libya is also a dictatorship run by a very religious Arab nationalist; Moammar Khadaffi. Whatâs going on here? Several things. First of all, Khadaffi is also a monumental flake and incompetent when it comes to running a national economy. Despite vast oil wealth, Libya is poor, and itâs people are pretty pissed off about that. However, Khadaffi is good at one thing; running a police state. Itâs believed that over ten percent of the population are on the state payroll (for small amounts of cash, and favors) as informers. Khadaffi is such an oddball, that even his fellow Arab dictators consider him an oddball, and often make no secret of this opinion. Khadaffi, and Libyans, ignore this, for Khadaffi appears pretty off-the-wall most of the time. 
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz says his country will expand its intelligence-sharing with Britain following two London bombing attacks in July. However, Aziz told the Financial Times, "it would be simplistic" to assume the July 7 suicide bombers used their ties in Pakistan to plan the attacks. "There is no linkage of the visits to Pakistan and these terrible events," he said. 
MUSCAT â Oman yesterday expressed its profound sorrow over the death of King Fahd bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and declared three days of mourning. All government offices will remain closed during this period and private establishments for one day. A statement issued by the Diwan of Royal Court said His Majesty 
The trial of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein will be shown on live television, Iraq's top security adviser has announced. The trial will show the Arab and Muslim world "that this is going to be a fair, just trial with a defence counsel in there, with a proper prosecuting counsel as well there", Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq Rubaie told CNN. "And everybody will watch this trial live on television." 
A bomb exploded on Monday near the house of the Palestinian Authority's Attorney-General Hussein Abu Asi in the Sabra district of Gaza City. Palestinian security sources said Abu Asi was unhurt in the explosion, which caused material damage. Palestinian police, who rushed to the scene, opened an investigation into the incident.
SIALKOT/MULTAN: The government's crackdown against religious extremists continued on Monday with law enforcement agencies arresting five leaders of two banned religious organisations in Sialkot district and 63 people including three activists of banned organisations in southern Punjab. Police said four of the five leaders arrested from Sialkot district belonged to banned Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) while one belonged to Sipah-e-Muhammad. Police said one of the SSP leaders was arrested from Pasrur, two from Sialkot and one from Daska while the Sipah-e-Muhammad leader was arrested from Sialkot. Separately, three activists of banned organisations and 60 clerics were arrested in Bahawalnagar, Multan, Mailsi, Vehari, Muzaffargarh, Hasilpur, Bahawalpur and Ahmedpur East.Police said the three activists had been detained for 90 days under Section MPO-3. Police also said 60 clerics had been arrested for violating the ban on loudspeakers.
Patients in the King Faisal Hospital were surprised when their dinner was delayed, Okaz daily reported. The food was delayed because the hospital chefs and cleaners were engaged in a fight over tips. 
France is looking at stepping up surveillance at its borders after a prime suspect in the failed London bombings on July 21 managed to traverse the country despite a Europe-wide alert for him, Transport Minister Dominique Perben said Monday. "That a man leaves Great Britain, goes across France and makes it to Italy by getting around all our system of checks requires us to think about our border surveillance system. This is what the French government is working on," Perben said. France's interior ministry is preparing a new anti-terror law that would allow French officials to inspect passengers' travel documents on all international trains entering and leaving the country, regardless of jurisdictional considerations. "We have to take into account the lessons from the attacks and underline the importance of the video surveillance in place in the airports" around Paris, said Perben during a visit to inspect security measures at Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris.
France paid millions of dollars for the release of three journalists kidnapped in Iraq and its foreign intelligence service now knows the identity of the abductors, a reporter who was himself held hostage in Lebanon in 1987 said on Monday in a magazine interview. Roger Auque told the August-September issue of Afrique Magazine that - despite official denials - the French government had paid $6m to free Liberation newspaper correspondent Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi interpreter in June. Two other French journalists who had been released last December, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, were handed over in exchange for $2m, Auque said, relying on what he described as "a reliable source" for his information. 
Iraqi security forces found 12 bodies in a garbage dumping place in Baghdad Monday, a police officer said. Major Abu Saqer Al-Saedi told reporters the unidentified bodies were found while a patrol was inspecting Umm Al-Maalef area in the capital. The bodies were hand-cuffed and they were blind-folded, he added. There were military uniforms near the bodies.
WASHINGTON: The appointment of former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal as ambassador to the United States should be the occasion for Riyadh to clear up its 
The eleven young men in jail on suspicion of membership in the Hofstadgroep terror network will remain in detention until the next pro forma hearing in late September, a Rotterdam court ruled on Friday.
At least 24 people were killed in Khartoum, a policeman said, after rioters torched vehicles and looted shops. Witnesses said southerners, who have long said the northern government discriminated against them, attacked Arabs in the street. âPeople have been running all over the streets. The policemen are taking people from the streets. There is fire and smoke,â a Reuters TV witness said.
A member of the Fatah Movement was shot dead Monday by unknown gunmen in the Saftawi area of Gaza City. Palestinian security sources said four gunmen stopped the car of Ahmad Abu Zayed, 36, and tried to kidnap him but when they failed they shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. In a separate incident, unidentified gunmen opened fire at two members of the military intelligence in the Wihda Street of Gaza City. The two men were seriously injured. 
Pakistan arrested five senior Taliban leaders Monday, including a deputy to fugitive Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, officials said to a foreign news agency. The arrests were made after security men raided several homes in northwestern Pakistan. Two of the captured men are reported to have been identified as Maulvi Abdul Qadeer, a deputy to Omar and formerly chairman of the Taliban Special Council, and Abdul Kabir, a former Governor in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. Names of the remaining three are not known, but they are also reported to be important Taliban leaders, now being interrogated by authorities.
Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister and Chairperson of Pakistan People's Party Ms Benazir Bhutto has said that the Hisba bill was a bid to copy the polices of the Taliban regime. She said that the bill did not bode well for the strength and stability of the nation, adding that it would empower the intrusion into the private lives of the country's citizens. The bill, Ms Bhutto said was also un-Islamic as Islam prohibited its followers to spy on each other. The bill, on the other hand is aimed at setting up a moral brigade to deny citizens, a freedom of choice and allow the clergy to judge at what they regarded as virtue, Ms Benazir Bhutto said.
