As an experiment (mainly because I can't keep up with my email) I've added a "Guest Poster" link. If you find an on-topic piece and you have something to say about it, go ahead and add it. I just know I'm gonna regret this. Everybody who isn't posting ads for their porn sites is gonna be a better writer than I am...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 01:15 pm ||
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Cool idea. I bet most of your readers are responsible enough to make this concept work. Something tells me you had one person in mind when you cooked this up though.
Cough cough Steve cough cough
Posted by: John B. ||
11/14/2002 17:48 Comments ||
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Little old me? Responsible?
Posted by: Steve ||
11/14/2002 19:03 Comments ||
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The CIA and Pentagon are assembling a list of cell-phone and fax numbers of Iraqi military leaders, as part of a massive, covert program to convince them to abandon Saddam Hussein in advance of any U.S. invasion, The Post has learned. I hope they're not calling them during dinner. If they do, the entire country will unite against them...
Thanks to J.J. for the link!
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:08 am ||
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#2
What a concept. Fax them a satellite picture of their unit with a set of crosshairs on it with the message "Sit still and live, move and die! Have a nice day."
Posted by: Steve ||
11/14/2002 12:51 Comments ||
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How much are you currently paying for long distance? It will more than triple if you have to make calls from Camp Xray.
The warning - from US Secretary of State Colin Powell - came after Baghdad indicated it may challenge the UN Security Council resolution approved unanimously last week. Baghdad grudgingly agreed to the return of the inspectors in a letter delivered to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in which it spoke of "dealing" with the resolution despite "its bad contents". But the nine-page letter also concluded with a warning that Baghdad would be sending another document laying out the clauses of the resolution which it deems contrary to international law. That would be Articles 1 - 14.
The insertion has prompted some speculation that the Iraqis may challenge the weapons inspections team, which is due to arrive in Iraq on Monday with a mandate to inspect all suspected weapons' sites. We're counting on it.
In an interview with the BBC, Mr Powell warned Baghdad not to block the inspections, adding that Saddam Hussein had no choice but to comply with the resolution. "We expect co-operation," he warned. Sure you do!
Posted by: Steve ||
11/14/2002 03:02 pm ||
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Conan had a good bit last night about weapons inspecting missles that will create terror free zones in Iraq.
#2
My understanding of the resos is that the (near) daily targetting of our planes in teh no-fly zones constitutes "material breach"... anyone have any guesses how long til that happens? an hour? two? It'll be amusing when the French have to decide to call it for what it is, long before the inspectors touch ground in Iraq. Either way, when they target our jets, and they will, W. has the will, the means, and the authority to go in
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/14/2002 18:28 Comments ||
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Is is just me, or didn't the resolution say that he was in material breach if he didn't fully accept it in 7 days?
And that absurd letter sure isn't what I would call "acceptance".
Friday is the 7th day.
Posted by: ray ||
11/14/2002 20:39 Comments ||
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U.S. authorities are searching for a Kuwaiti national believed to have ties to al Qaeda and wanted in connection with possible terrorist threats in the United States. The FBI has put out a notice asking law enforcement officials and the public to be on the lookout for Amer El-Maati, a 39-year old Kuwaiti-born Canadian citizen. "He's an individual we believe has associations with al Qaeda, and we're looking to find him," FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday. Mueller did not specify the nature of the alleged threat that prompted the search. The FBI Web site lists El-Maati as 6 feet, 209 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes. He is considered armed and dangerous. Cheeze. I think if I sat down next to this guy, I'd turn him in even without a BOLO...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:21 am ||
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Ah, crap, he's a Canuck!
The pissing and moaning level from north of the border just went up another notch.
You realize, if he shaves, no one will ever recognize him.
#2
Actually, I'm kinda hoping we "Told ya so. Now get off yer damn bums and DO something, Mr "Proof is the proof.."", moaners and pragmatists will finally get a little airtime. Pipedream.
Virginia is moving ahead with the scheduled execution of a Pakistani man who went on a 1993 shooting rampage outside CIA headquarters -- an attack motivated by his anger toward Washington's Middle East policies. The execution of Mir Aimal Kasi, 38, scheduled for 9 p.m. ET Thursday, has prompted the State Department to issue warnings that his death may trigger retaliatory attacks against U.S. interests overseas. Kasi was convicted in 1997 for the killings of two CIA employees — Frank Darling, 28, and Lansing Bennett, 66 — as they sat in their cars in morning traffic outside CIA headquarters. Three other CIA employees, all in separate cars, were wounded in the attack. "I was real angry with the policy of the U.S. government in the Middle East, particularly toward the Palestinian people," Kasi said in a prison interview with CNN-affiliate WTTG. I imagine the usual suspects will be outside the pen this evening, holding their candles and explaining that when Islamists get angry over anything, as we all know, they're not responsible for their actions, so this execution is obviously unjust and unwarranted. Say what you will about the death penalty, it certainly cuts the recidivism rate...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:25 am ||
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It might cut recidivism, but it also kills innocents sometimes. But even worse is that when this whackjob gets fried, we lose all the intel still left in his tiny brain. Better to keep him in forced labour for the rest of his days, and using the profits of his work to fund the CIA, in my opinion.
Israeli forces Thursday arrested the man suspected of planning a deadly weekend attack on a northern Israeli kibbutz, after surrounding the West Bank house where he was holed up for several hours, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Muhammed Neifeh surrendered along with two other Fatah activists in the village of Shweike, north of Tulkarem, the IDF said. When CNN calls them "activists" it always makes me think they go knocking on doors to get people to get out and vote for Yasser, or write letters to the Palestine Chronicle editor...
"Muhammad Neifeh belongs to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and is responsible for sending the attackers to Kibbutz Metzer on Nov. 11 where five civilians were murdered and the attack in Hermesh on the Oct. 29 where three civilians were killed and others wounded," the IDF said. Among those killed in the kibbutz attack were a mother and her two young sons. Somehow "activist" just doesn't carry the same flavor as "ruthless murderer" or "crazed killer," does it?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:31 am ||
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In Gaza, eyewitnesses said that a microbus intercepted at dawn Tuesday lawyer Dia' Al-Madhoon, 30, who was heading to offer the dawn prayers. Eight armed men surrounded the man (who is known for his affiliation with the Hamas Movement), beat him up then took him by force to an apartment, which apparently served as their headquarters. Half an hour later he was released after telling him that he was not the wanted person. Eyewitnesses said that the armed men were known elements in the PA security apparatuses who only wished to spread tension in the Palestinian arena. Guess that's life in Islamic Paradise...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 11:02 am ||
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Jordanian officials started collecting weapons from residents of Maan on Thursday. Caches of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making materials, have been seized, authorities said. Guess elk hunting season's over...
The Jordanian government has declared the city of Ma'an a demilitarized zone, banning holding or possessing of any types of weapons without the approval of the interior minister. It said Jordan would not compromise on its security or the higher national interests. "Hello? Is this the interior minster?... Yeah. Lookee here, I need a chit to carry my rocket launcher... What do I need a rocket launcher for?... 'Coons. They're really bad around here..."
Meanwhile, the Egyptian news agency MENA reported that the Jordanian government rejected late Wednesday a mediation offer by Islamic Action Front. According to a statement by Abd-al-Latif Arabiyat, the Shura Council speaker president of the Islamic Action Front, Prime Minister Ali Abu-al-Ragheb phoned him earlier in the day to inform him of the government's apology for not accepting the mediation offer in this case. Abu-al-Ragheb said the parties concerned were pressing ahead with their procedures to finish this task. Y'see, the Jordanian government thinks they're the ones who should be in charge in Jordan, not the Islamic Action Front...
Arabiyat regretted the government's rejection of the mediation offer to work out a solution to the crisis. He reiterated previous requests to lift the siege imposed on Ma'an and enforce legal and civil procedures. Yeah. That always works when it comes to people with grendades and rocket launchers. You betcha.
Thanks to Steve for the link...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 01:31 pm ||
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The invaluable Steve passes this one along...
THE ownership of the Al Islam school in the village where chief bombing suspect Amrozi lived is under intense investigation by the Indonesian Government after an assessment by spy agencies that it was established with the help of Omar Al Faruq, the Jemaah Islamiah member who later informed on his former colleagues. It'd probably be a real good idea to make that a really thorough investigation. And to investigate kindred garrisons schools...
Sources within Indonesia's domestic intelligence service BIN and police in the East Java city of Lamongan confirmed that Al Faruq, who has given valuable information about JI to the CIA, helped set up the school in 1992, along with one of Amrozi's brothers, Kosyin. Police spent yesterday trying to track down records from local authorities and village elders, but were stymied by poor book-keeping and a reluctance by school leaders to talk about their financial backers. "It does appear Al Faruq has played a role here, although we have to confirm this more," said an intelligence official. Al Islam continues to be funded largely through Malaysian ringgits and donations from other fundamentalist Islamic networks near the central Java cities of Solo and Borobodur. ... rather than directly from Arabia.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:07 am ||
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INDONESIAN authorities may have blown their chances of catching more Bali bomb plotters, Australia's top policeman claimed yesterday. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said leaks and intense publicity surrounding the detention and alleged confession of suspect Amrozi - including Wednesday's controversial public interrogation - had given anyone associated with him ample warning to flee Indonesia. Hmmm... That's certainly never happened before. Certainly not in Indonesia. I mean, they're usually so well organized, and they're just merciless of terrorists. Aren't they?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:07 am ||
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Officials have announced the arrest of a suspected Muslim extremist they said has admitted to being the mastermind behind a series of bombings in Zamboanga City in the southern Philippines and planning possible future attacks in the capital. Abdulmukim Edris was apprehended Tuesday in a Manila suburb after being put under surveillance by the Philippine Armed Forces and the Philippine National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, said armed forces spokesman Gen. Eduardo Purificacion. According to Philippine National Police, he was allegedly recruited by a top Abu Sayyaf leader, Khadafy Janjalani, to head the group's explosives team and was planning to bomb government and public places when apprehended. Khadafy seems to be almost the sole remaining proprietor of Abu Sayyaf. Perhaps the Filipinos should make killing him their top priority for awhile?
Another link from Steve...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:14 am ||
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Antara
Indonesia's House of Representatives disclosed here Thursday that it would send to Australia a team of 10 legislators to inquire into the alleged high-handed treatment of Indonesian Moslems by the country`s security authorities. Ibrahim Ambong, chairman of the House defense and foreign affairs commission said he and nine commission members are planning to meet with Indonesian Moslems living in Perth, Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, whose homes had been raided by officers of the Australian Security and Intelligence Office (ASIO) on suspicion of terrorism. 'We want to get first-hand information on their living condition and to ascertain their status in Australia,' Ambong said. Sounds fair, doesn't it? After all, Australia's sent a team to investigate allegations that Indonesians used dynamite against its citizens in Bali... Ummm... By the way: how many Indons have been dynamited in Australia lately? Just to be on the safe side, maybe Indonesia would like to have all its expats back?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:35 am ||
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Hey, maybe they'd like to go swimming in one of Australia's famous billabongs!...
Authorities on Wednesday named four more suspects in the Bali nightclub bombings. The prime suspect Amrozi, a mechanic from East Java, last week confessed to his involvement in the October 12 blasts. Police on Tuesday named three of his brothers, Ali Imron, Ali Fauzi and Mukhlas, also as suspects. "There are many other suspects...Idris, Hudama also known as Imam Samudra, Umar and another Umar," National Police chief General Dai Bachtiar was quoted as saying by Reuters. The exact roles played by these men in the bombings has not yet been revealed. Yep. Takes a while to sort things out, especially with some powerful politicos looking over your shoulder...
Amrozi reportedly met several times with Imam Samudra and Idris in the Central Java city of Solo in late August and early September to discuss the bomb plot. Samudra was apparently the one who gave orders to Amrozi. The Indons said early on that the attack was run by a Malay — that would be Samudra — and a Yemeni...
Amrozi admitted to involvement in other bombings in Indonesia, including Ambon, Maluku province, but denied being an Islamic extremist, claiming he was merely a delinquent who had been led astray by radicals. However, he did admit to being strongly influenced by his brothers, two of whom had taught at the Al-Islam Islamic boarding school in their hometown of Tenggulun, East Java. They would be the "radicals"...
The suspect also said he idolized radical Islamic clerics Abu Bakar Baasyir and Jafar Umar Thalib.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 08:42 pm ||
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Source: MSNBC
U.S. intelligence officials say they feel confident that the voice on an audiotape broadcast on an Arabic television network is that of Osama bin Laden. The disclosure, during the runup to a possible U.S. military campaign in Iraq, highlighted one of the most significant loose ends from Afghanistan, the first stop in the war on terrorism and the last known location of bin Laden. And some security officials fear that the tape may be a signal to bin Ladenâs al-Qaida network to launch new attacks. President Bush said Wednesday that he would leave it to the experts to determine whether bin Laden recorded the threatening new audiotape, but âwhoever put the tape out has put the world on notice yet again that weâre at war.â President Bush bristled when asked if the leader of al-Qaida should have been captured sooner. âWeâre making great progress on the war on terrorism,â he said. âSlowly but surely, weâre dismantling the terrorist network.â Binny himself is just a cog in a greater machine, run by the Soddies with the money we pay them for their oil. But it would be nice to have his head on a pike...
U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News said they believed the recording is probably authentic, and Bush said he was taking the tape âvery seriously.â NBCâs Jim Miklaszewski reported that while officials believe the voice is that of bin Laden, CIA analysts have been unable to determine this definitively from the recording aired by Al-Jazeera. According to the officials, it appears the taped message was recorded over a telephone, reducing the quality, making comparisons more difficult, and that the initial analysis is âinconclusive.â Nevertheless, the speech patterns, rhetorical style, choice of words all match Bin Laden, proving that he is in fact, alive, they said. If he phoned the message in to a recorder, he could actually be calling from anywhere. They said on the terriblevision yesterday that the tape had originated in Pakistan â my offhand guess would be from Karachi â but he could have been calling from anywhere. Ben (aka Aracona) sent me a Debka story about three weeks ago that said he was in Arabia. I didn't use it because the guy's had more sightings than Elvis by now. A week before that, there had been a story that an Israeli woman had seen him in the check-in line at the airport in Bali. With the voice quality being too bad for printing â something I actually doubt â I think I'd just drop the probability of him being dead to under fifty percent. And there's a reason there's no video, too, and it's not because they can't pass video over a phone line...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
11/14/2002 10:56 am ||
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I for one would like to encourage him to talk as much as he can as often as he can. Everytime he opens his yap, we get more valuable information about where he is. We also get a nice reminder that the jobs not done yet. My biggest fear about OBL is that we will find his rotting maggot infested carcass and 20 seconds afterwards the 'hue and cry' of the lefties will be "the war is over, back to the domestic agenda!"
Personally, I still think he's dead. This recording is of such low quality that they could not even tell how the sound was recorded, either over the phone or over the internet. It sounds like a paste up job to me. Notice how they dont have low quality video tape, but they always have low quality audio, guess which is easier to fake.
Posted by: Frank Martin ||
11/14/2002 11:34 Comments ||
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I agree with the sentiment that he is still dead. I do think he is perhaps just as valuable alive to the anti-terror coalition as he is to al qaeda et al.
I heard an interview last night with an Egyptian professor of Islamic Studies who had actually interviewed Bin Laden. He stated that he was very suspicious due to the choice of words. For instance, since when did Bush become the "pharaoh" of the century? Also, as the professor above points out regarding the reference to Rumsfeld as "Butcher of Vietnam", why would Bin Laden identify w. Vietnamese, as they are infidels in his eyes just as much as the US?
Of course, these could be geographical code words to his followers, but despite what CIA analysts say, the rhetorical style does not match (at least after translation).
#3
The (NPR) interview mentioned above was with Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian political scientist and expert on Islamic fundamentalists and can be heard here if interested:
#4
I posted earlier on another site - same subject my theory which is the inverse: he is alive in the CIA/DOD/POTUS mind only in order to keep the fire lit. You need a bulls-eye or as the poster above said - game over! I agree - the lefties and idiotarians would use his death as the end of it all and start beating the drums of distraction.
Posted by: Jack ||
11/15/2002 5:21 Comments ||
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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.
U.S. authorities are searching for a Kuwaiti national believed to have ties to al Qaeda and wanted in connection with possible terrorist threats in the United States. The FBI has put out a notice asking law enforcement officials and the public to be on the lookout for Amer El-Maati, a 39-year old Kuwaiti-born Canadian citizen. "He's an individual we believe has associations with al Qaeda, and we're looking to find him," FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday. Mueller did not specify the nature of the alleged threat that prompted the search. The FBI Web site lists El-Maati as 6 feet, 209 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes. He is considered armed and dangerous. 
