War on Terror Archives

October 4, 2003

Repayment? Non!

I report, you decide ... but this just feels right to me. (Winds of Change)...

October 5, 2003

Mr. Kay's Report

The Washington Post has an intelligent, measured editorial aboutDavid Kay's report. This is the best coverage yet that I've seen on the report from the major media, and it doesn't surprise me that the Post was the newspaper that got there first. It makes an important point that hasn't really gotten the attention it deserves: our prewar intelligence was faulty, not faked, but we'd better figure out how to get it fixed....

More from David Kay

Here's more from David Kay ... information that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of play elsewhere, but explains that we were right in going to war. "We now have three cases in which scientists have come forward with equipment, technology, diagrams, documents and, in this case, actual weapons material, reference strains and botulinum toxin that they were told to hide and that the U.N. didn't find," he said Sunday....

October 6, 2003

U.S. to overhaul Iraq, Afghan efforts

Well, it's about time this administration started taking some action to win the peace. So far, while the Bush team is making all the right moves overseas, they've done a piss-poor job communicating back home. They've allowed the I-ANSWER stooges to occupy all the bandwidth, although Instapundit points out that this is now changing, too. The memo, which outlines working groups to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts, economic development, political affairs in Iraq and the creation of clearer messages to the media, is “a recognition by everyone that we are in a different phase now”, Rice told the Times in an interview Sunday....

FBI Funded Hamas?

I'm wondering if someone shouldn't be losing their job over this story: While President Clinton was trying to broker an elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the FBI was secretly funneling money to suspected Hamas figures to see if the militant group would use it for terrorist attacks, according to interviews and court documents...Several thousand dollars in U.S. money was sent to suspected terror supporters during the operation as the FBI tried to track the flow of cash through terror organizations, the FBI said in a rare acknowledgment of an undercover sting that never resulted in prosecutions. "This was done in conjunction with permission from the attorney general for an ongoing operation, and Israeli authorities were aware of it," the bureau said. One of the FBI's key operatives, who has had a falling out with the bureau, provided an account of the operation at a friend's closed immigration court proceeding....

The world's smallest violin ...

CNN.com - WTC bomber loses appeal - Oct. 6, 2003 I have nothing to add here....

October 7, 2003

Dionne's Take in the Post

I have to admit, at first this pissed me off, and it's still irritating me. However, it is worth a read, and Dionne is trying to introduce constructive criticism, which is encouraging. I think this is based on a couple of mistaken notion, however, chief among them that there actually was a post-9/11 consensus. Domestically, that may have been true -- maybe. If so, it was short-lived. Dionne is incorrect to say that the Afghanistan phase of the war received near-unanimous support, however. We were regaled with history lessons about how the British became lost in their Afghanistan entanglement, and how it was the Russian version of Vietnam in the 1980s. World reaction was decidedly more mixed. As Merde in France has repeatedly documented, French opinion was that we got what was coming to us, and our focus on Afghanistan should have been diplomatic rather than military, and our approach...

October 8, 2003

Chocolate HQ No More

The "chocolate makers" have dropped their plans to create a military organization outside of NATO. Apparently, France, Germany, Beligium, and that military powerhouse Luxembourg decided that their combined might would only challenge the Junior ROTC in Berkeley. Instead, they plan to create a military "planning" cell. Do these guys have any clue about how that sounds during a war on Al Qaeda? No, apparently not. (Via Merde in France)...

October 9, 2003

This boosts my confidence in air travel

I'm sure this all started with a directive that a certain percentage of all screeners had to pass their tests. From there, it's easy to get to this point. I mean, even if they weren't given most of the answers, how hard is it to answer questions like these: One question asked "How do threats get aboard an aircraft?" The possible answers were (a) In carry-on bags; (b) In checked-in bags; (c) In another person's bag; and (d) All of the above. The correct answer is (d). A second question asked why it is important to screen bags for improvised explosive devices (IEDs). A possible answer: "The ticking timer could worry other passengers." The right answer: "IEDs can cause loss of lives, property and aircraft." Chuck Schumer said that the questions "appear as if they were written by Jay Leno's gag writer," but that seems unduly harsh ... to Jay...

October 12, 2003

The Post gets it

The Washington Post proves that it is the leading voice in American politics in a well-written, thoughtful analysis of the Iraq front of the war on terror. The debate over intervention was fraught precisely because many people understood that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent danger. We argued nonetheless that the real risk lay in allowing him to defy repeated U.N. disarmament orders, including Resolution 1441, the "final opportunity" approved by unanimous Security Council vote. As noted endlessly in the blogosphere, and acknowledged in the Post's editorial in a more passive way, the Bush administration never argued that Saddam represented an "imminent" threat. In fact, in Bush's State of the Union speech earlier this year, and in the speech he delivered to the UN, he argued that the United States and the civilized world could not afford to wait until the threat was imminent. That was the whole "preemption" controversy....

October 13, 2003

Fisking the Whistleblower

Colleen Rowley, the FBI agent who blew the whistle on the bureau's lack of follow-up before 9/11 -- mostly due to political correctness concerns -- wrote a tedious and silly op-ed in Sunday's Star Tribune. James Lileks, who has a regular column and feature in the Strib (the Back Fence), fisks the hell out of Rowley. Rowley's article is another of those vague, unsupported complaints about how dissent is being stifled in John Ashcroft's America that seem to find themselves on the pages of major newspapers on almost a weekly basis. It would be delicious satire if these idiots actually had a sense of humor. (via Instapundit)...

October 14, 2003

Like Father, Like Son

Osama's son plays an increasignly important role in al-Qaeda, according to today's Washington Post, and is being protected by Iran: Saad bin Laden, one of Osama bin Laden's oldest sons, has emerged in recent months as part of the upper echelon of the al Qaeda network, a small group of leaders that is managing the terrorist organization from Iran, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The younger bin Laden speaks English and is computer literate, two rare qualities among al-Qaeda, and so his influence is even more pervasive than his family name would indicate. Saudi Arabia wants him extradited from Iran, but negotiations have gone nowhere: Similarly, Saudi Arabia, which in recent years has tried to thaw relations with its larger and more powerful neighbor across the Persian Gulf, is trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Iran to extradite Saad bin Laden and others suspected in the Riyadh bombing. Saudi officials...

Unofficial diplomacy reaches agreement -- but who will implement it?

Negotiators from outside the governments of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority reached a peace agreement, but one with no weight whatsoever as Israel strongly denounced the effort: Coming at a time when Middle East peace prospects are at a low ebb, the 50-page draft agreement was reached during the weekend in Jordan by the two delegations, which include current Parliament members and former cabinet members from both sides. But the proposal has no official blessing, and the Israeli government immediately denounced it, calling it irresponsible freelance diplomacy. "The public rejected these same political figures," Limor Livnat, Israel's education minister, said of the Israeli delegation, led by left-wing politicians. "In no democratic country would this be acceptable." The Palestinian Authority did not immediately comment, though the Palestinian team included senior political figures with close ties to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Put into terms that we might relate to, it would...

Someone finally bothered to ask the Iraqis

With all of the debate about how long we should be staying in Iraq, and the UN demanding that we leave so that the Iraqis can take care of themselves, Gallup cut out the middlemen and just asked the Iraqis what they want. A novel approach, to be sure, but one that the UN apparently never bothered to try. The Gallup poll found that 71 percent of the capital city's residents felt U.S. troops should not leave in the next few months. Just 26 percent felt the troops should leave that soon. Bear in mind that Baghdad is part of the Sunni Triangle, where you could expect to find significant hostility to the US presence that eliminated the Sunni minority's hold on power (to the extent it was Sunni-based, anyway). Gallup's polling did not include areas outside the Sunni Triangle, where you would expect approval for the US occupation to...

We're Winning, part 37b

The AP reports that the coalition has captured another senior terrorist in Iraq, this time from Ansar al-Islam, which is tied to al-Qaeda: The arrest of Aso Hawleri, also known as Asad Muhammad Hasan, late last week in the northern city of Mosul has not been announced. Larry Di Rita, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, told reporters, "I'm not in a position to confirm" Hawleri's capture. Hawleri was taken by soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division, said a defense official, who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity. The officials said Hawleri is thought to be the third-ranking official in Ansar al-Islam, most of whose fighters were believed to have fled their stronghold in northern Iraq before U.S. forces invaded in March. U.S. and Kurdish forces destroyed the group's main base in the early weeks of the war. Ansar al-Islam claimed responsibility for the car bombing in...

October 15, 2003

Gaza blast kills 3 Americans

Breaking news: a bomb attack in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 3 American officials who were apparently touring to monitor progress on the peace process. [Saeb] Erakat offered his condolences and condemned the attack. "These people were here to help us," Erakat insisted, saying an attack on what he described as U.S. monitors was not in the interest of the Palestinian people. "I don't think this was a deliberate attack against the Americans." Obviously, some of the "Palestinian people" felt it was in their interest to attack Americans. Would that be the Hamas-led "Palestinian people"? The Islamic Jihad "Palestinian people"? Or the al-Fatah "Palestinian people" who report to Yasser Arafat and blow people up as a sideline? "We offer to have an immediate, joint Palestinian-American investigation committee to investigate the matter," Erakat said. Perhaps we should have a US delegation meet up with Erekat and Arafat. I nominate...

UN Security Council Caves

There is no other way to describe this but as a diplomatic victory for the Bush administration: France, Russia and Germany on Tuesday dropped their demands that the United States grant the United Nations a central role in Iraq's reconstruction and yield power to a provisional Iraqi government in the coming months. The move constituted a major retreat by the Security Council's chief antiwar advocates, and signaled their renewed willingness to consider the merits of a U.S. resolution aimed at conferring greater international legitimacy on its military occupation of Iraq. If passed, the new Security Council resolution would effectively reject the obstructionism of Kofi Annan and the French. Jacques Chirac seems to have gotten the message that France, if the US ceased negotiating, would be revealed as a pretender to real power. The Bush administration refused to incorporate the French, Russian and German demands for a timetable for the transfer...

More on the Gaza bombing

Via Oxblog, more on the bombing from Haaretz: The blast went off around 10:15 A.M. Wednesday as a three-car U.S. diplomatic convoy drove near a gas station on the outskirts of the town of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, along the main north-south road. Both the militant Islamic Jihad and Hamas movements denied responsibility for the attack. Witnesses at the scene said a silver Cherokee jeep used by American diplomats was completely destroyed by the blast. Parts of the vehicle were strewn in a 30-meter radius around a crater created by the explosion. If Islamic Jihad and Hamas are denying responsibility, what about the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, a division of Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah faction? They've been known to plant bombs as well. My guess is that, unlike other attacks in the area, no one will be in a rush to claim this one as their own. As Oxblog...

October 16, 2003

The Responsibility Gap

The Washington Post excoriates Democrats for their irresponsibility regarding the rebuilding of Iraq and their intransigence in supporting proper funding: But political pressure doesn't excuse irresponsibility, and what's emerging in the Democratic Party is a gaping responsibility gap...On the wrong side is the rest of the Democratic field. Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and John Edwards (N.C.) say they won't vote for the funding because Mr. Bush hasn't come up with enough of a long-term plan or done enough to get allies on board. This righteous position may make them, or their voters, feel better, but the security of U.S. troops and the long-term interests of both Iraq and the United States still depend on improving Iraqi daily life. The candidates do not seem to realize that the rebuilding of Iraq is crucial to the overall effort to eliminate terrorism, and that trying to do it on the cheap will...

$5000 and France's Sympathy

The Dissident Frogman, an excellent bilingual blog, has an outstanding post about what's happening in Iraq, and how little of this gets out via the traditional, "independent" media: At the risk of repeating myself, I heard almost daily on France-Info's broadcast: "Yet another US casualty in Iraq." The Coalition is wiping out Saddam's SS and the Al-Qaeda skuzzballs by the hundreds. I never heard : "Yet another hundred of SS and terrorist skuzzballs eliminated in Iraq." The Coalition has completed 13,000 reconstruction projects, including 1,500 schools as of October the first -- and I'll assume this number includes the 330 that were rebuilt by the 101st Airborne with Saddam's money -- and "the teachers earn from 12 to 25 times their former salaries." I never heard: "Yet another school rebuilt and reopened in Iraq." There are 240 hospitals and more than 1200 clinics open, a pharmaceutical distribution that has gone...

October 17, 2003

The LA Times Unleashes Another Firestorm

As if it hadn't been burned enough with the 'get-Arnold' campaign John Carroll waged the past few weeks, the LA Times has demonstrated atrocious journalistic standards in its editorial section yesterday. The story concerns General Jerry Boykin, the man in charge of finding al-Qaeda leaders and Saddam Hussein, and the man Rumsfeld just nominated as deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence. General Boykin is a fervent Christian who feels God is calling the US to fight against Satan, and who regularly shares this opinion with others, when asked to do so. For instance, according to William Arkin, the Times' military affairs analyst, Boykin has been quoted as follows: In June of 2002, Jerry Boykin stepped to the pulpit at the First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow, Okla., and described a set of photographs he had taken of Mogadishu, Somalia, from an Army helicopter in 1993. The photographs were taken shortly...

You can add me to the list

Instapundit directed me to a Balloon Juice post about the Senate conversion of $10 billion in Iraqi reconstruction into a loan. A loan. Iraq currently struggles under almost $200 billion in debt, most of it to France and Germany for Saddam's military hardware. Prior to this, the Bush administration had been working towards agreements to retire some or all of this debt, efforts which may or may not have ever been successful. They would have allowed the Iraqi people to avoid shouldering the cost of their own prison and bleeding themselves dry to pay back Saddam's enablers and co-conspirators. The 51 senators who committed this embarrassment have made this nightmare a certainty now. Not only that, but now they will have to pay for their own liberation, after 12 years of being starved almost into genocide by the Western nations, ahead of investing in their own indepedence, their own security,...

Who voted for this idiotic amendment?

Votes > Roll Call Vote" href="http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=108&session=1&vote=00389">Find out who voted for oppressing the Iraqis and undermining our efforts to get their debts forgiven....

Oh, please

In the middle of this story about General Boykin apologizing for offending Muslims, a Saudi official makes the following statement: Asked about the general’s church comments, Adel al-Jubeir, the foreign affairs adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, told reporters Friday: “If true, outrageous. I thought they were insensitive. I thought they were unbecoming of a senior military official, and certainly unbecoming of a senior government official.” Of course, there has been no comment forthcoming, other than participating in a standing ovation, for these comments from a Prime Minister of an Islamic nation: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on Thursday told a summit of Islamic leaders that "Jews rule the world by proxy" and the world's 1.3 billion Muslims should unite, using nonviolent means for a "final victory." ... The prime minister, who has turned his country into the world's 17th-ranked trading nation during his 22 years in power, said Jews...

October 18, 2003

Saudis may be feeling the crosshairs

Recent public statements seem to indicate that the Saudis may increasingly be specifically targeted in the war on terror, as the FBI starts talking about the Saudis more as suspects than allies: John Pistole, assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, told a Senate hearing recently that the bureau has raised concerns with the Saudi government that paying legal bills and bond for Saudis being questioned in the terror probe could influence their testimony. ``To us, that is tantamount to buying off a witness, if you will. So that gives us concern if the government is supplying money for defense counsel,'' Pistole said. A year ago, this probably would have been buried ... the fact that the FBI has started talking about this tells me that the Saudis aren't cooperating as much as the government would like. If more stories such as this start popping up in the news, it...

A reply to Roger Simon

I read an excellent and, as advertised, depressing short essay by Roger Simon titled Could It Be More Depressing? I wrote this back in response. As a 40-year-old man who has studied 20th century history, I had always felt that the world in general had learned its lesson about anti-Semitism, and while general hatred of Jews may exist, it mainly existed in repressive Muslim societies. One of the benefits of liberating Iraq would therefore have been an opportunity for Arabs and Jews to work together in a mutually beneficial relationship, as a model for the region that could transform the Middle East. Unfortunately, while the radicalization of some moderate Muslims was to be expected, the Western response to anti-Semitic actions and speech has left me profoundly disappointed. Jacques Chirac blocks an EU resolution protesting Mahathir's remarks, while France convulses with more anti-Semitic violence than its seen since WWII. American media...

The Three Faces of the Democrats (or Four)

David Brooks has an excellent editorial in today's New York Times regarding the reconstruction loan. He separates the Democrats into three groups, and suggests a fourth for a man who's in a class all to himself: First, there are the Nancy Pelosi Democrats. These Democrats voted against Paul Bremer's $87 billion plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. ... Their hatred for Bush is so dense, it's hard for them to see through it to the consequences of their vote. ... Saddam Hussein would be jubilant in Pelosi's Iraq. He has long argued that America is a decadent country that will buckle at the first sign of trouble. If the Pelosi Democrats had won yesterday's vote, the Saddam Doctrine would be enshrined in every terrorist cave and dictator's palace around the world: kill some Americans and watch the empire buckle. The second group would be the Evan Bayh Democrats, who would...

Forgive the Iraqi Debt

Some facts about the massive amount of debt facing the Iraqi people underscore the despicable nature of the Senate decision to convert reconstruction funds to further debt: Iraq's overall financial burden, according to the CSIS figures, is $383 billion. Based on these figures, Iraq's financial obligations are 14 times its estimated annual gross domestic product (GDP) of $27 billion--a staggering $16,000 per person. Measured by the debt-to-GDP ratio, Iraq's financial burden is over 25 times greater than Brazil's or Argentina's, making Iraq the developing world's most indebted nation. Bear in mind that all of this debt was accumulated under the auspices of Saddam Hussein, a great deal of it was accumulated during the sanctions, and a lot of it is owed to Arab nations. These governments, who have protested the war by loudly proclaiming brotherhood with the Iraqis, have been curiously silent on debt forgiveness for their brethren. (Also, as...

Fence-Mending, Syrian Style?

The AP attempts to explain Syria's UN vote supporting the latest resolution on Iraq: The Syrian vote was "to ease the atmosphere with America and to be in harmony with the European position," said Syrian analyst Jad al-Karim Al-Jubai. He added the U.N. vote could win Syria support from Europe in the event of a confrontation with Israel and the United States. Syria, whose army is considered weak in the face of advanced Israeli weaponry, has not responded with force to the Israeli air raid on what Israel said was a Palestinian militant base. Syria complained to the U.N. Security Council, where any response is stalled because of the threat of an American veto. Al-Jubai said Syria did not seek a military confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites), and "went to the United States primarily to circumvent the possibility of military escalation" by Israel. Syria,...

Annan Won't Send U.N. Staff Back to Iraq

What a surprise -- Kofi Annan won't send more staff to Iraq: A day after the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted the U.S.-backed resolution, spokesman Fred Eckhard said Secretary-General Kofi Annan isn't prepared under current conditions to send back more than 500 international staffers who were ordered to leave after the bombings in August and September. "The security situation does not permit us to send any additional staff into Iraq," Eckhard said. What do you think of the UN's service to the Iraqis so far? After one bombing -- to which they were vulnerable because they hired former [heh] Baathists as security guards for their compound -- the UN mission packed up and went home. The terrorists chased Kofi Annan out of Iraq once before, and yet we still hear protests that we should let the UN run the reconstruction. And now they won't come back because of the "security...

October 19, 2003

Demosophia: Totalitarianism 3.0

Demosophia has written a series of essays this weekend that put today's struggle against "terrorism" in a historical context, and comes to a conclusion that many of us already understand: We are not fighting a "War on Terrorism," as some now call it. That's a misnomer, because suicide terrorism is not a movement, but simply a method that has always been one of the favorites of totalitarianism either seeking power, or on the verge of losing it. What we are involved in now is but the most recent stage in a war against Liberalism's ancient enemy. And it is far from won. Demosophia doesn't stop there. He predicts that the new conflict between traditional Liberalism and Totalitarianism 3.0 will create new political divisions and obscure or eliminate the old. In this there is ample precedent, at least in British politics. Prior to World War I, the Labor movement was a...

Poll: Majority of Palestinians Back Suicide Bombing

Once again, I have to ask the question: is it a smart idea to bestow sovereignty onto the Palestinians? Seventy-five percent of Palestinians support the suicide bombing at an Israeli restaurant two weeks ago in which 21 people, including four children, were killed, a Palestinian survey showed Sunday. The survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which questioned 1,318 respondents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (news - web sites), also showed that 85 percent of Palestinians support a "mutual cessation of violence by both sides." The poll found considerable anti-American feeling among Palestinians. Just over 95 percent of respondents said the United States was "not sincere" when it says it seeks to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Unfortunately, I think we are all too sincere about the two-state solution, which after all is mandated by UN resolutions which we supported, or at least allowed...

Uh ... You're Welcome, I Think

Jacques Chirac has locked up that all-important Psychotic World Leader endorsement: MALAYSIAN Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has thanked French President Jacques Chirac for blocking a European Union declaration condemning his comments last week that Jews "rule the world by proxy," news reports said today. Chirac, backed by Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis, stopped the EU from ending a summit on Friday with a harshly worded statement deploring Mahathir's speech, which also included suggestions that Jews get "others to fight and die for them." Lest we forget, Chirac is the head of state of the European nation that leads the West in anti-semitic violence. Guess he knows on which side his bread is buttered. I guess we all do. The report quotes University of Paris Professor of French Literature, Eric Marty, who wrote in LeMonde, "There has been no voice of political authority ready to say simply that there is nothing...

Who pays Joseph Wilson?

Remember Joseph Wilson? He's the one who has been screaming that top Bush officials outed his wife as a CIA covert agent. But according to Joel Mowbray, Wilson may be more connected than is known to anti-war partisans -- specifically the Saudis: The Middle East Institute, officially on the Saudi payroll, receives $200,000 of its annual $1.5 million budget from the Saudi government, and an unknown amount from Saudi individuals — often a meaningless distinction since most of the ‘‘individuals'' with money to donate are members of the royal family, which constitutes the government. MEI's chairman is Wyche Fowler, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1996 to 2001, and its president is Ned Walker, who has served as both deputy chief of mission in Riyadh and ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Also at MEI: David Mack, former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and deputy assistant secretary for NEA; Richard...

October 20, 2003

Fareed Zakaria Loses It

Fareed Zakaria wrote an impassioned but wrong-headed essay for MS-NBC calling for the Bush Administration to fire General Jerry Boykin over the story that the LA Times gave NBC late last week: President Bush’s commission on public diplomacy recently noted that in nine Muslim and Arab nations only 12 percent of respondents surveyed believed that “Americans respect Arab/Islamic values.” Such attitudes, the commission argued, create a toxic atmosphere of anti-Americanism that cripples U.S. foreign policy and helps terrorists. To address the problem the commission suggested a major reorganization of the American government, hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and the creation of a new cabinet position. I have a simpler, more urgent suggestion: fire William Boykin. Zakaria, a writer whose work I respect, starts this essay off with the ludicrous suggestion that the only reason that Muslims and Arabs have an overwhelmingly negative view of Americans is that we...

Never forget ... what?

A very intriguing Michael Ramirez cartoon about our short attention spans....

October 21, 2003

Brian Mulroney: Replace the UN

Brian Mulroney, Canada's Prime Minister from 1984 to 1993, writes in support of US action in Iraq and the need to reform the UN: Although the reality of pre-emptive action is new, so was the terrorist strike on America. What is also new is the suggestion that Security Council approval is--and has been--a sacrosanct precondition to action against a hostile state. The historical record is to the contrary. In any event, I would never have agreed to subcontract Canada's international security decisions and our national interest to 15 members of the Security Council. This would be a surrender of national sovereignty to which I'd never consent. Mulroney strikes at the heart of the anti-war argument of requiring the UN to agree to action: it is tantamount to surrendering our sovereignty and foreign policy to Britain, France, China, and Russia. Agreement at the UN Security Council would have been wonderful, but...

October 23, 2003

Senate: White House didn't pressure CIA on Iraq findings

I assume the apologies will be forthcoming: A Senate investigation has found no evidence that the Bush administration pressured CIA analysts to tailor their intelligence to suit the White House's views on the threat posed by Iraq. ... However, no current intelligence analysts came forward to the committee to back up that charge. And the White House says the intelligence it received on Iraq was unbiased and accurate. "None (of the analysts) have indicated any intimidation," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. As QandO observes, we still need to find out why our intelligence data was off, and how we can improve it in the future. Maybe now that the finger-pointing and screeching can come to a close, we can move forward in that area....

What Would Winston Churchill Do?

Strange Women Lying in Ponds returns from vacation with an insightful post about Churchill as the hinge of history in the 20th century: It is perhaps easy to view Churchill's staunch leadership through WWII as an inevitability; as a case of the right man being in the right place at the right time, etc. This is Churchill the Noble, the Invincible, given moral authority by his role as leader of an island nation that was Europe's last bulwark against the successful establishment of a Nazi empire throughout the Continent. Here he is a symbol of courage under fire, of a morally ascendant Great Britain defying an evil and militarily superior invader. The irony is that, had history turned out as Churchill would have liked, this image of him never would have come to pass. SWLIP reminds us that in order to avoiding repeating history, we have to know and understand...

Iraqi official says limited German, French help won't be forgotten - Oct. 23, 2003

A free Iraq fires a warning shot acrossFrench and German bows: Ayad Allawi, the current head of Iraq's U.S.-appointed governing council, said he hoped German and French officials would reconsider their decision not to boost their contributions beyond funds already pledged through the European Union. "As far as Germany and France are concerned, really, this was a regrettable position they had," Allawi said. "I don't think the Iraqis are going to forget easily that in the hour of need, those countries wanted to neglect Iraq." Oddly enough, it turns out to be the same countries that wanted to continue to leave Iraqis oppressed and tortured in Saddam's grip, and the same countries who funneled billions of dollars in cash and equipment to sustain their prison. Who'd a-thunk it? (via QandO)...

Syria -- Ruthlessly Secular?

That this article can run in the New York Times without a hint of irony is simply unbelievable: Two decades after Syria ruthlessly uprooted militant Islam, killing an estimated 10,000 people, this most secular of Arab states is experiencing a dramatic religious resurgence. ... The widespread sense that the faith is being singled out for attack by Washington has invigorated that appeal, at a time when the violence fomented by radicals had tarnished political Islam. In Syria, some experts attribute the sudden openness of the phenomenon to a far more local fear. The hasty collapse of the Baath government next door in Iraq stunned Syria's rulers, particularly the fact that most Iraqis reacted to the American onslaught as if they were bored spectators. Maybe Neil MacFarquhar has been living under a rock for the past 20 years, but Syria hasn't been "ruthlessly secular" -- Syria has been a major sponsor...

October 25, 2003

Critical security report means U.N. must change its ways, Annan says

Instead of blaming the US, a UN panel scolds the UN for security mistakes that led to the bombing of their facility in Iraq: The panel, chaired by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, issued a report Wednesday citing extensive security failures before the Aug. 19 truck bombing that killed 22 people, including top U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, and injured more than 150 others. ... The panel criticized the United Nations for shunning protection from U.S.-led coalition forces and for ignoring "credible information on imminent bomb attacks." Kofi hasn't quite smelled the coffee yet: But Annan -- speaking to reporters after returning from a donors conference for Iraq in Madrid -- sidestepped a question on whether he deserved blame for the security failures cited by the U.N.-appointed panel, saying he needed more time to study the report. I wonder if the report itself mentioned that employing Saddam's former security...

Chickens Coming Home to Roost Again

The British government has warned travelers to expect a fresh set of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia: Britain raised its warning Friday against travel to Saudi Arabia, saying terrorist attacks were imminent. "We advise British nationals against all but essential travel to Saudi Arabia. We believe that terrorists may be in the final phases of planning attacks," the Foreign Office warning said. The US isn't issuing any specific warnings: A U.S. counter-terrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said American authorities were unaware of any recent intelligence that would lead to new alerts in Saudi Arabia. Instead, U.S. officials have received a steady stream of information in recent months suggesting Al Qaeda operatives in the kingdom were close to mounting an attack....

Is This News?

The Post, inexplicably, links to this two-month-old story on its main web page: Abu Shanab was killed Thursday along with two bodyguards when an Israeli military aircraft fired three to six missiles at his car on a crowded street in central Gaza City. About 30 bystanders were injured in the attack, Palestinian hospital authorities said. I gathered this was not a breaking news story when I read this: Senior Israeli military officials warned that they would continue targeting Palestinian militant leaders if the government of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas did not move aggressively to arrest them, confiscate their arms, destroy their weapons workshops and dismantle their organizations. Oddly, if you replace Abbas with Qurei in this story, you wouldn't be able to tell this story was written August 22. By the time you read this, the Post will likely have corrected its web site, but it was strange to see...

Kofi Unclear on the Subject

This article on the highly critical report on UN security failures in Iraq, which led to the bombings in August and September and UN's complete retreat, contains a very revealing quote from Kofi Annan: The panel criticized the United Nations for shunning protection from U.S.-led coalition forces — the only source of security in Iraq — and for ignoring "credible information on imminent bomb attacks in the area." It also accused the United Nations of violating its own security rules. Annan said the United Nations' security system worked well for the past 50 years. "But the world has changed, and we will have to change our way of doing business to be able to protect our staff around the world," he said. Hasn't that been President Bush's argument all along -- that the security arrangements that kept the peace for 50 years won't work now and must be adapted to...

Bombing brought into focus the need for a fence

Oddly enough, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune printed this heartfelt and common-sense essay on the necessity of a security fence between the Israelis and the Palestinians: In fact, it is easier to pass from the West Bank to Israel than from the United States to Canada simply because there is no border, not even a white picket fence. The Israeli public finds this lack of a border troubling, to say the least, especially because fenced areas in the Palestinian territories have been surprisingly quiet. The Gaza Strip is a case in point: No suicide bomber has ever come out of the Gaza Strip because the entire area is fenced. People who oppose the building of the fence, especially here in the US, do not really understand the political implications or the motivation for the fence: For all its faults, Sharon's government didn't want to create this border. By building this fence the...

Germany's Schroeder and SPD in Political Free Fall - Anti-Americanism Backfiring

22% ... that's Gray Davis territory, isn't it?

October 26, 2003

The Myth Of David Broder's "Myth"

David Broder gets ridiculous in his op-ed piece in today's Post: When the Democracy Corps team asked whether voters in those three states wanted a Democratic nominee "who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning" or one "who supported military action against Saddam Hussein but was critical of Bush for failing to win international support for the war," voters in all three states chose the second alternative. Dean's position was preferred by only 35 percent of the likely voters in the New Hampshire Democratic primary -- fewer than supported it in Iowa or South Carolina -- while 58 percent chose the alternative. The myth behind this poll is that there is absolutely no practical difference between these two positions; the first is equal to the second. France (and Germany) would never have supported military action against its client-state, Saddam's Iraq. Chirac explicitly said so in February, sticking a knife into...

Hamas Says It's Ready to Renew Talks

I'll bet they are: Hamas said Sunday it is ready to talk to the Palestinian prime minister about halting attacks on Israelis, even though the Islamic militant group participated in a deadly attack on a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip two days earlier. ... Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, who took office on Oct. 5, has repeatedly said that he wants to reach a cease-fire in hopes of ending more than three years of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel has said, however, it will not begin negotiations until all Palestinian security forces are placed under one command and begin cracking down on militants. Until the Palestinian Authority agrees to consolidate all security forces under a single government control -- in other words, no Fatah, no al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, etc -- and start taking police and/or military action against terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Israel won't...

October 27, 2003

Why we fight, part 42d

Over 40 people died in four separate attacks overnight in Baghdad, including one particularly despicable attack using a Red Crescent vehicle: Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling of the U.S. Army confirmed that the attack on the Red Cross compound was a suicide bombing. "Initial indicators, and we're trying to confirm this, but we have eyewitnesses that say that the truck was, in fact, a Red Cross-Red Crescent truck, carrying the explosives -- like a panel van, a little bit larger," Hertling said. ... Red Cross officials vowed to continue their work in Iraq despite the attack. Good for them -- they do good work and are neutral in all conflicts. Normally this would keep them from being targeted in armed conflict, but as the UN has learned, no respect is given for neutrality: "Maybe it was an illusion to think people would understand after 23 years that we are unbiased. I...

Hezbollah Shells Israeli Positions

Iran and Syria cranked up the proxy war in Lebanon again as Hezbollah attacked Israeli positions for the first time in two months: Lebanese security officials said Hezbollah forces unleashed a volley of rockets and mortar shells at the Israeli military outposts of Roueissat el-Alam, al-Samaka and Ramtha inside the Chebaa Farms area. Hezbollah said in a statement in Beirut that its guerrillas attacked the three Israeli positions with rockets, scoring "direct hits." ... Israeli military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israeli fighter jets attacked Hezbollah targets in response to the attacks on the Chebaa Farms army outposts. "The jets hit several Hezbollah points," the officials said. Western nations talk about asymmetrical warfare as if the concept has just been realized in the past couple of years. Israel has been fighting asymmetrical warfare like this for decades. Note when the pious Hezbollah militants chose to stage this attack:...

October 28, 2003

A Message from the Front

I am lucky enough to know an individual who has given service to his country for decades, and is now putting his life on the line for us in Iraq. He's included me along with several of his friends and family on a broadcast e-mail list, where he periodically updates us on progress from his perspective. I'm going to modify just a couple of items in here to protect his privacy, but otherwise leave this unedited. Because of its length, you'll need to click the link below to read it. I find his courage and his faith humbling in the extreme, especially since I know what a fine human being he is. May we have faith in him and his comrades in the same measure....

Continue reading "A Message from the Front" »

The Left is Dazed and confused about Iraq

Michelle Goldberg tweaks the noses of her compatriots on the left for absolute incoherence and foolishness on Iraq: "We've made a giant mess," said Johnson, a handsome man who wore his long snowy hair in a ponytail and had a sparkling stud in one ear. "I would hate for the Bush administration to halfway fix things and then leave, and then blame the Iraqis if things go wrong. Once you go to somebody's house and break all the windows, don't you owe them new windows?" Why, then, was he marching at an End the Occupation rally? "I don't agree with all the people here, believe you me," he said. But his own sign? He glanced at it, startled, and explained that someone had handed it to him. "I didn't even look at it," he said. "I was just waving it." If there is a more damning anecdote regarding the knee-jerk...

October 29, 2003

Army files charges regarding interrogation tactics

The Army charged a colonel with assault during an interrogation of an Iraqi detainee: Lt. Col. Allen B. West says he did not physically abuse the detainee, but used psychological pressure by twice firing his service weapon away from the Iraqi. After the shots were fired, the detainee, an Iraqi police officer, gave up the information on a planned attack around the northern Iraqi town of Saba al Boor. But the Army is taking a dim view of the interrogation tactic. An Army official at the Pentagon confirmed to The Washington Times yesterday that Col. West has been charged with one count of aggravated assault. A military source said an Article 32 hearing has been scheduled in Iraq that could lead to the Army court-martialing Col. West and sending him to prison for a maximum term of eight years. Col. West's defense is that the Iraqi was never in any...

CNN Can't Understand Linear Time

In an article on a proposed new cease-fire, CNN doesn't seem to understand simple concepts of time and causality: In a previous cease-fire -- declared unilaterally by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- the militant offshoot of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement -- ended August 21. The groups, all of three of which have been declared terrorist groups by the U.S. State Department, declared the seven-week-old cease-fire over after a senior Hamas leader was killed in an Israeli missile attack. The Israeli attack followed a terrorist bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 20 people. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bus bombing. So Hamas and Islamic Jihad declared the cease-fire over after the Israelis killed a senior Hamas leader. But the Israelis killed him after the bus bombing that killed 20 Israeli civilians, and that bombing was done by ... Hamas...

Just a reminder ...

If you haven't yet had a chance to read it, I highly recommend this post from 10/28. It's an e-mail from a friend of mine serving in Iraq. It's long and detailed but highlights the successes of our mission there, as opposed to the litany of the real setbacks we hear about in the media to the exclusion of anything else....

October 30, 2003

UN Bugs Out of Baghdad

The UN ... the organization that supposedly holds all international prestige in dealing with terrorism and liberation ... is bugging out of Baghdad: International organizations continued their exodus from Iraq, with the United Nations announcing it was withdrawing staff from Baghdad following this week's string of car bombings in the capital and attacks against coalition troops. ... The U.N. decision to pull its remaining international staff out of Baghdad was announced on Wednesday, two days after a deadly suicide car bombing at the Baghdad headquarters of the Red Cross. "We have asked our staff in Baghdad to come out temporarily for consultations with a team from headquarters on the future of our operations, in particular security arrangements that we would need to take to operate in Iraq," U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said. She said it was not an "evacuation" and staff in the north would remain. Saddam's Fedayeen have scored...

Andrew Sullivan: The Myth of the Easy Aftermath

Read this post from Andrew Sullivan on the latest meme from the media -- that Bush promised us an easy aftermath in Iraq. For those of us who paid attention to what Bush said, this is a ridiculous idea, but it's getting play lately. I won't excerpt Sullivan's post, as it's just easier to read the whole thing there. It's good....

Let's see how long this will last

American military commanders are using confiscated Hussein funds to speed the reconstruction of Iraq: The speed and ease with which reconstruction money is being handed out by the military here contrasts sharply with the delays and controversy surrounding the handling of major reconstruction funds by the Pentagon and U.S. Agency for International Development. The fact that the money comes from seized Iraqi assets, the Saddam Hussein regime's overseas bank accounts and cash stockpiles found in palaces and the walls of government buildings in Iraq has provided a fortuitous loophole. Since the money was not appropriated by Congress, officials of the U.S.-led occupation government in Iraq believe that it does not have to be disbursed under the usual contracting regulations. The money for most military projects in Iraq goes through something called the commander's emergency response program. About $100 million has been allocated so far and the 101st Airborne Division, which...

Even A Broken Clock Is Right Twice a Day

Normally, I'd say that anyone who has to make a public statement like this has a blinding grasp of the obvious ... but seeing as how he's French: A U.S. pullout from Iraq (news - web sites) would be "catastrophic," French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said Thursday, urging countries to take a strong united stance to stabilize Iraq. ... When asked whether he could envision the United States pulling out of Iraq, de Villepin responded, "Obviously, a pullout from Iraq today would be catastrophic and would absolutely not correspond to the demands of the situation.["] De Villepin managed to say all this without his characteristic statements about unilateralism or demands that the UN be put in charge. Seeing as how the UN is high-tailing it out of Baghdad, that may be too ridiculous even for the French. (Hard to believe.)...

Well, that didn't take long

Remember that post I wrote about ten hours ago or so about the discretionary fund available to American commanders in Iraq? Well, fugeddaboutit. Instapundit reports that the program has been canceled: Yes, it was the most powerful tool commanders have had. But as of now, it has been cut off. LTG Sanchez has informed all the resource managers this past week that the funding is done and there will be no more. All of our humanitarian projects we had going are now stopped and some projects (including those in the troubled Sadr City) are put on hold. Given the utter disorganization of CPA, the battalion commanders here were making a significant impact. We fixed schools, sewage, markets, and got trash picked up. We put thousands of people to work. Now it's over, at one of the most critical times in this fight. Everyone on the line is dumbfounded over this...

November 1, 2003

Why Would They Blow Up My House with My Own Explosives?

In my mind, this Palestinian woman is lucky to be alive: A Palestinian woman expresses her anger after Israeli Defence Forces detonated an explosive belt they found in her house, destroying the ground and first floor of the building, in the village of Hizmeh near Jerusalem(AFP/Atta Hussein). The link will take you to the picture; there is no corresponding story, just the caption, which I've quoted in full. Power Line has a few pertinent thoughts on this, and I'll add my own: I think the Israelis need to detonate ALL confiscated explosives in the dwellings they find them. Perhaps that will send a message to the 75% of Palestinians who think that bombing Israeli civilians is a peachy idea. Maybe that will impress upon them that they have a personal stake in stopping the terrorism and getting rid of the leadership that's keeping them destitute and dislocated. One last thought...

We're Still Answering

I don't know how I missed this, but this is just another outstanding entry by Chris Muir. The sickos called 9-11, and we're still answering. Way to go, Chris!...

November 2, 2003

The Strib blindly follows the NY Times's lead

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune exercises little or no editorial control when purchasing fallacious stories from the NY Times: Two decades after Syria ruthlessly uprooted militant Islam, killing an estimated 10,000 people, this most secular of Arab states is experiencing a dramatic religious resurgence. Ruthlessly uprooted militant Islam? Really? Who's been hosting Islamic Jihad and Hamas for the past 20 years or so? Who's been co-sponsoring Hezb' Allah with Iran for 20 years? Read the entire article and see whether any of these groups, or Syria's support for them, are even mentioned in passing. This is an atrocious piece of writing, and for the Strib to republish it demonstrates their commitment to left-wing memes and mediocrity in general. This was my original post when this story first ran in the NY Times....

Muslim Troops' Loyalty a Delicate Question

The Washington Post published a thoughtful and balanced piece on whether Muslim troops can remain loyal to the US: Military sociologist Charles Moskos is traveling to Iraq this month to poll troops about morale issues. He plans to ask whether Muslim soldiers seem to have their hearts in fighting fellow Muslims, and whether the troops trust Muslims in their ranks. "I'll ask, 'How do you feel about having a Muslim in your tent?' " Moskos said. A black Christian Army chaplain based in this country said some of her fellow soldiers feel "tension" with Muslims in their units, many of whom are also black. "They say, . . . 'Can we really trust them?' " In past wars, this concern over disloyalty in a diverse military has come up again and again. Most famously, the Japanese formed a unit to themselves in World War II and became the most decorated...

One Mideast State May Be Future of Israel

Make no mistake about it: European anti-Israel sentiment is directly linked to centuries-old European anti-Semitism, and they're falling back on their old tropes of the secret Jewish conspiracy behind all the world's woes. Israel was founded as a way for Jews to escape the "gentle" clutches of genocidal Europeans, and now the same Europeans, less than 60 years removed from the gas chambers of Auschwitz, are ready to ethnically cleanse Asia Minor of the same Jews they failed to kill in Europe.

November 3, 2003

The Franco-American War, Part 42

Gregory Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch has a spot-on analysis of today's Washington Post article on Tariq Aziz and France's role in ensuring war was the only option: Aziz has told interrogators that French and Russian intermediaries repeatedly assured Hussein during late 2002 and early this year that they would block a U.S.-led war through delays and vetoes at the U.N. Security Council. Later, according to Aziz, Hussein concluded after private talks with French and Russian contacts that the United States would probably wage a long air war first, as it had done in previous conflicts. By hunkering down and putting up a stiff defense, he might buy enough time to win a cease-fire brokered by Paris and Moscow. Djerejian asks: And, it begs the question, is this the behaviour of an "ally"? If, on the cusp of a conflict, where the U.S. has amassed some 200,000 troops on the...

Does French Sweat Smell Like Perfume?

Buried deep within the Washington Post is this bit of very good news (via Power Line): The CIA has seized an extensive cache of files from the former Iraqi Intelligence Service....The records would stretch 9 1/2 miles if laid end to end, the officials said. They contain not only the names of nearly every Iraqi intelligence officer, but also the names of their paid foreign agents, written agent reports, evaluations of agent credentials, and documentary evidence of payments made to buy influence in the Arab world and elsewhere, the officials said. It's time for many luminaries on the world stage to start coughing nervously and updating their resumes. This not only promises to embarrass international figures, but will completely undermine domestic arguments that Bush could have worked harder to get more international support. My guess is that the list is heavy on French and German names: The officials declined to...

New Terror Attack Warnings from DEBKAfile

Posting messages in a forum where prior notice of attacks have been revealed before, Islamofascists have stated that several US cities will be attacked in the near future: A new message was posted in the last few hours by the Jeddah-based al-Qaeda-linked Al-Islah (Reform) society calling on Muslims to flee New York, Washington and Los Angeles in advance of major al Qaeda attacks in those cities. ... “The Jews rule the Pentagon by remote control and (are the cause) of Muslims being killed in every corner of the world. The United States should therefore expect more blows.” The message is signed on behalf of the al Bayan (The Threat) movement by “your warrior brother, Abul Hassan al Khadrami”. So far, nothing has been reported on CNN's web site. DEBKAfile gives background information on the forum and the history of al Khadrami. (via Little Green Footballs)...

November 4, 2003

WTF? The Incoherent Post

The Washington Post, whose editorial pages are generally clear-thinking on the war even when critical of the Bush administration, descends into self-contradictory babble in today's ultimately pointless second editorial: TWO MONTHS after the Bush administration embarked on an effort to attract greater international support for its mission in Iraq, it faces the latest surge of violence on the ground from a position that is more isolated than ever. Did I miss something? Has someone withdrawn from the established Coalition? Didn't Bush just get a unanimous resolution from the Security Council affirming the Coalition's mission in Iraq, something that the Clinton administration never did in the Balkans (where, by the way, we still have troops)? How is the Bush administration "isolated", let alone more isolated than ever? Rather than look for further help from India, Pakistan or Russia, or even NATO allies, the Bush administration has abruptly embraced a new strategy...

November 7, 2003

Josh Chafetz Wins the Day at Oxford

Josh Chafetz reprints his speech on OxBlog from the Oxford debate on the Iraq War, in which he participated yesterday: I must begin with a word of apology for my lack of preparation. Not only was I just asked yesterday to speak, but I was also laboring under the apparent misapprehension that we would be addressing the resolution that "This House believes that we are losing the Peace." Yet I find that the honorable gentleman who has just spoken in the affirmative [Jeremy Corbyn, MP] has talked about the war - about Vietnam, oil, Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair, international law, weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, and so on. While these are all issues worthy of serious discussion, I must confess to being somewhat baffled at how these normative questions bear on the empirical resolution that I was told we were to debate. Read the entire speech. It reminds us of...

November 8, 2003

Progress in Iraq

Reuters reports that US forces have captured 12 terrorists involved in the rocket attack on the Baghdad hotel last month: In overnight raids U.S. troops captured 12 people suspected of involvement in a deadly attack last month on a Baghdad hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying, a top commander said Saturday. The suspects appeared to have links to the former regime of ousted president Saddam Hussein, said Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division. I doubt that this will get a lot of play here, since it's Saturday and most people aren't watching the news. [What's your excuse? -- I have no life, that's why. Oh, and the First Mate is sick today, and Notre Dame is playing.] "Based on multiple sources who provided human intelligence, the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Armored Division conducted a raid overnight in western Baghdad...

Britain tried to spy on ally: report

I find it odd indeed that very little notice has been taken of this story from London's Sunday Times (reported by AFP): Britain's internal security service MI5 sought in 2001 to plant eavesdropping devices inside the walls of a London embassy belonging to one of its main allies, London's Sunday Times newspaper reported. ... "For four months from September 2001, MI5 infiltrated the embassy, stole codes used by embassy staff for sending secret messages, and planned to plant listening devices and remove documents," the Sunday Times said. The question is which one of Britain's "main allies" MI-5 penetrated. The composition of the Coalition limits the possible targets. The Sunday Times is enjoined from releasing that information, but offered tantalizing clues. This is from Cronaca, who had access to the original article: The Official Secrets Act prevents The Sunday Times from identifying the country concerned, but its leader has visited Tony...

November 9, 2003

North Korea Has the Bomb: CIA

You can thank the obstructive diplomacy of Jimmy Carter for this new analysis: The CIA has told Congress that it believes North Korea has mastered the technology of turning its nuclear fuel into functioning weapons, without having to prove their effectiveness through nuclear tests. The report goes beyond previous public CIA statements that North Korea built one or two weapons in the early 1990s -- a figure many intelligence experts believe has risen in the past few months. Carter insisted on a diplomatic solution that allowed North Korea simply to affirm that it wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons in exchange for all sorts of technical assistance. Even at the time when he was pursuing that fruitless policy, Kim Jong-Il already had a device or two and now can build as many as they like, while starving their people or herding them into labor camps. It's yet another reminder of the feckless...

Losing Faith?

The US government appears to be losing faith in the Iraqi Governing Council and may be considering alternatives: Increasingly alarmed by the failure of Iraq's Governing Council to take decisive action, the Bush administration is developing possible alternatives to the council to ensure that the United States can turn over political power at the same time and pace that troops are withdrawn, according to senior U.S. officials here and in Baghdad. The United States is deeply frustrated with its hand-picked council members because they have spent more time on their own political or economic interests than in planning for Iraq's political future, especially selecting a committee to write a new constitution, the officials added. "We're unhappy with all of them. They're not acting as a legislative or governing body, and we need to get moving," said a well-placed U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They just don't...

Further thoughts on the very quiet MI-5 scandal

I've updated my post on the MI-5 scandal in Britain that's been handled very, very quietly. I hope I'm just being paranoid. I don't think so....

November 10, 2003

Even If It Succeeds, It Fails

It's difficult to understand Israel's thinking when it commits to lopsided prisoner swaps with terrorist groups: About 400 Palestinians and several dozen prisoners from Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Sudan and Libya would be released in exchange for Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers, all captured in October 2000. I have always believed that negotiating with terrorists on this basis is a sure way to incentivize them to continue their operations, especially in 400-1 ratios. The plan may fail anyway, as there is strong disagreement over terms: However, Nasrallah has said the deal would not go through without Samir Kantar, a Palestinian from Lebanon. Kantar stormed an apartment in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya in 1979, killing a man and his daughter. Another daughter died when her mother smothered her while trying to hide. ... Mohammed Fneish, a Hezbollah legislator, said the group would try to...

November 11, 2003

Why the UN Can't Handle Iraq

Blackfive (The Paratrooper of Love) has a good post about the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 and why putting the UN in charge of Iraq is suicidal. He excerpts two articles from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Sydney Morning Herald, detailing the lawsuit being filed against the UN and the Dutch. He titles it, "Clark Would Bring In the UN," but in fairness it should be titled, "Every Democrat Running for President Would Bring In the UN." Blackfive has a good blog, too -- check it out. (via Instapundit)...

John Nerdahl, You're My Hero

The Strib published a counterpoint to its one-note, relentless campaign targeting President Bush from West Point graduateJohn Nerdahl: So the reasons for confronting Iraq was never just about WMD, Saddam's threat to the United States or his tyrannical regime. It's almost laughable that Saddam's overthrow is somehow illegitimate because, as the Star Tribune editorial noted, our nation is not equally willing to invade other tyrannical countries like Zimbabwe or Burma. Or that being in Iraq is somehow not about combating terrorism. Or that we are witnessing another Vietnam. Where is your intellectual honesty, objectivity and reasoned perspective? Your underlying motivation to get President Bush becomes obvious as you continue to obsess and "wring your hands" over such irrelevant and absurd analogies. Three cheers for Nerdahl for taking his argument directly to the source -- and at least one cheer for the Strib for printing it. As much as I disagree...

November 12, 2003

One More Time

If you haven't yet done so, be sure to drop by Electric Venom and let Venomous Kate know how much you appreciate the sacrifice that her and her husband are making for his defense of our freedoms. Her husband is about to be shipped out but is in limbo at the moment, and Kate's feeling the stress. Multiply that by all of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who put their lives on the line every day for us, and think about how awe-inspiring it is that the best of our young men and women are compelled to sacrifice so much to keep us from harm. Just drop by and say thank you. She can use the support....

November 14, 2003

Our Greatest Ally

Tony Blair gives an interview to the muscularly-named Stryker McGuire and demonstrates why America is blessed to count Blair and the British as our friends and allies. MS-NBC published some excerpts: Blair on leadership in the face of popular dissent: Firstly, on the really big issues, you owe people your leadership. There is no point in doing a job like this unless you do that. I believe passionately in the cause to which I have committed myself. ... There is a resurgent anti-Americanism. Now I happen to think that is wrong and misguided, but it is our job to go out there and show it is misguided, which is why I think it is important that President Bush is coming. Blair on progress and the seeming lack of it against terror: There is a stage at which when you begin to fight back, the conflict can sometimes seem even more...

November 15, 2003

Case Closed: The Most Important Story of the War, So Far

The Senate Intelligence Commitee has evidence, much of it developed during the Clinton administration, that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have been working together for over a decade. I'm not going to excerpt it; read the whole thing. Then, ask yourself this: When did Rockefeller's staff write that partisan memo, and if it was after October 27, why do you think the Democrats are suddenly desperate to make the Bush administration look like it's lying? Maybe because this information (and more on its way from the Iraqi Intelligence Service's files) will pull the rug out from under anti-war candidates like Howard Dean and John Kerry?...

November 16, 2003

BuzzMachine Goes On the Offensive

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine takes on anti-Americanism and makes a no-apologies stand against it: Pardon me, but I'm going to take a very dangerous and contrarian and by some views shrill, right-wing, illiberal stance and I'll take your barbs and the Guardian's with pride: I'm pro-American. Let me say that again, because I am one and because I was attacked and damned near killed because I am one (and yes, that matters): I am pro-American. This quote came from a previous Jarvis post, but he builds on this thought and expands on it: Let's be very clear: Just as anti-Semitism led directly to the Holocaust, anti-Americanism led directly to September 11th. Demonizing the people of this country made it acceptable to some and a goal for some to see fanatics murder thousands of us, just as demonizing Jews made it acceptable for fanatics to murder millions of them. I'm not...

November 17, 2003

Creative Thinking By Coalition Leadership

Today's Washington Post carries a story about creative thinking in opposition to the insurgency emanating from the Tikrit area and how it's allowed the Coalition to gather better intelligence, as well as more cooperation from local Iraqis: Frustrated by a persistent insurgency, the U.S. military has surrounded ousted president Saddam Hussein's birthplace with concertina wire, issued identification cards to all male residents and begun controlling access to this wealthy enclave of Hussein relatives on the outskirts of Tikrit. In order to pass through the wire and military checkpoints, all males have to present their ID cards. No card, no access, either in or out of Auja. The result is a much clearer picture of the town's residents, mostly wealthy Hussein backers and family, and better face-to-face contact with more sympathetic Iraqi leaders around the area. It avoided the intrusive and dangerous door-to-door searches that would have otherwise been necessary to...

A Challenge to the Blogosphere

So my challenge is this: Link to a different argument in the WS article each day and put your own thoughts on it in your blog. Skeptical? Good! Post about that. Because whether this memo is true or false, either way it is a huge story and deserves much more press than it's currently receiving. Keep going every day until we start to get some firm answers about the veracity and reliability of this data.

November 18, 2003

Challenge, Chapter 2: Osama's Peace with Saddam

Blogosphere Challenge, Part 2: Osama's Peace with Saddam. One of the constant themes of the anti-war media blitz was that Osama and Saddam were enemies due to Saddam's secularism (or skin-deep Islamism prior to the first Gulf War) and Osama's fanatical Islamist beliefs.

UN Buggers Out -- Again

The UN, which purports to be the only agency that can restore democracy to war-torn areas, is abandoning its efforts in Afghanistan after the death of a French aid worker: The U.N. refugee agency began pulling foreign staff out of large swaths of southern and eastern Afghanistan (news - web sites) on Tuesday in the wake of the killing of a French worker, a decision that could affect tens of thousands of Afghan returnees. ... The withdrawal of international staff follows a series of attacks on the United Nations in recent days, including the drive-by killing of Bettina Goislard, a 29-year-old UNHCR worker, as she traveled through a bazaar in a clearly marked U.N. vehicle in the city of Ghazni, 60 miles southwest of the capital. That same day saw a bomb attack on a U.N. vehicle in eastern Paktia province. And on Nov. 11, a car bomb exploded outside...

Slate Picks Up the Scent

Slate (no friend of the Bush administration) has picked up the story of the Hayes memo and the Saddam/al-Qaeda connection in two articles today; the first revisits the thread of the Prague-Mohammed Atta visit, and the second deals directly with the apathy of the press regarding the Feith memo. (via Croooow Blog) Edward Jay Epstein retraces the investigation into Mohammed Atta's travels prior to 9/11, specifically the Czech intelligence report -- never repudiated by the Czechs -- that Atta met with Iraqi officials known to be IIS operatives: The reason there had been joint Czech-American interest in the case traced back to the December 1998 when al-Ani's predecessor at the Iraq Embassy, Jabir Salim, defected from his post. In his debriefings, Salim said that he had been supplied with $150,000 by Baghdad to prepare a car-bombing of an American target, the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe. (This bombing never...

November 19, 2003

Challenge, Chapter 3: Independent Confirmation from the IIS

Taking a further look into Stephen Hayes' report on the Feith memo, we can see that Osama and Saddam spent the years between their initial rapprochement and the 1998 embassy bombings building the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Intelligence Services (IIS). In 1998, as tension was building between Saddam and UNSCOM, Iraq's upper echelons were escalating contacts with the terrorist group: IN ADDITION TO THE CONTACTS CLUSTERED in the mid-1990s, intelligence reports detail a flurry of activities in early 1998 and again in December 1998. A "former senior Iraqi intelligence officer" reported that "the Iraqi intelligence service station in Pakistan was Baghdad's point of contact with al Qaeda. He also said bin Laden visited Baghdad in Jan. 1998 and met with Tariq Aziz." 11. According to sensitive reporting, Saddam personally sent Faruq Hijazi, IIS deputy director and later Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, to meet with bin Laden at least...

A Taste of Defeatism at the LA Times

LA Times publishes a featured analysis today that reviews al-Qaeda's effectiveness and strategy in the wake of 9/11. Not surprisingly for the LA Times, it focuses on the negative: "Al Qaeda as an ideology is now stronger than Al Qaeda as an organization," said Mustafa Alani of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London. "What we are witnessing now is a major shift in Al Qaeda's strategy. I believe it is successful. Now they are not on the defensive. They are on the offensive." Large-scale terrorist groups never go on the defensive, unless you get them all trapped in a building, SLA-style. By their nature, they operate as distributed networks. This was true even prior to 9/11. It's not as if the entire group arrived in Kenya and Tanzania to bomb our embassies; they operate in cells. A U.S.-led assault on Al Qaeda has left...

A Little Perspective from The Politburo Diktat

There may be some in the blogosphere who are foolish enough to underestimate the Politburo Diktat, but not me, and this post is one reason why. The Commissar makes a point about commitment to victory by using a particularly apt historical analogy: Da, Comrade, Great Patriotic War. That was war. Commissar not understand Americans. Are they at war? Did enemies kill 3,000 citizens in one morning? How does America want to win war? Sit around campfire, on Peace Rug, sing Kumbaya? In Great Patriotic War, Soviet Union lost 20 million in four years of war. 5 million a year. 400,000 a month. 13,000 per day. 500 per hour. Comrades, by this scale, America has been at war in Iraq for about one hour. Now you talk "exit strategy?" Read the entire post. The Commissar has a terrific blog, both in content and style. And no, I'm not sucking up to...

November 20, 2003

Challenge, Chapter 4: Stephen Hayes Responds

Stepping away from the first Weekly Standard article for today, Stephen Hayes writes a powerful rebuttal to both the Pentagon non-response response and the naysayers in the mainstream media using it to justify their inaction (via Power Line): IF THE INTELLIGENCE REPORTING in the memo was left out of earlier "finished intelligence products" because the reporting is inaccurate, it seems odd that it would form the basis of briefings given to the secretary of Defense, the director of Central Intelligence, and the vice president. And it would be stranger still to include such intelligence in a memo to a Senate panel investigating the potential misuse of intelligence. If, on the other hand, the information in the Feith memo is accurate, it changes everything. An operational relationship between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, as detailed in the memo, would represent a threat the United States could not afford to ignore....

Turks In The Crosshairs Again

Blasts rocked Istanbul in another twin set of bombings this morning, killing at least 15 and injuring hundreds in attacks aimed at British interests: Two blasts have rocked Istanbul, killing at least 15 people and devastating both the HSBC Bank headquarters and British consulate in an apparent suicide attack the government has linked to Islamist militants. Turkish television, quoting city health officials, said that besides the 15 killed, 320 people were injured. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the strikes on Thursday bore "all the hallmarks of the international terrorism operations practised by al Qaeda and associated organisations". While Turkey has strong Western connections and is the only Islamic democracy operating in the Middle East, it is ruled by an Islamist party at the moment, making Turkey an odd target, especially since Turkey refused to militarily support the Coalition, inflicting an embarrassing diplomatic setback to George Bush just weeks after Bush...

UN Details al-Qaeda Threat

The UN, which has consistently been AWOL in the war on terror, reports on al-Qaeda capabilities: Some members of al Qaeda most likely possess portable surface-to-air missiles and may use them to target military transport planes, a U.N. report says. The threat was among several findings detailed in the report by the United Nations' al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee which also cited a shifting of the terror network's strategy, a move towards "softer" targets and a warning the group was working towards a biological or chemical attack. Gee, I wonder where they might have gotten chemical or biological weapons?? The report also identifies Iraq as "fertile ground" for al Qaeda, which receives the "funds it needs from charities, deep pocket donors, and business and criminal activities, including the drug trade." Iraq was fertile ground for al-Qaeda, as British and American intelligence knew for years. The report will be published...

November 21, 2003

Challenge, Chapter 5: Mainstream Media Gets Interested, But To What Purpose?

Finally, some of the mainstream media has taken an interest in the Feith memo, as reported by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard. Unfortunately, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball wrote a report that seemed to care more about the fact that the Weekly Standard is owned by Rupert Murdoch than in the evidence at hand. Here's the second paragraph: CASE CLOSED blared the headline in a Weekly Standard cover story last Saturday that purported to have unearthed the U.S. government’s “secret evidence of cooperation” between Saddam and bin Laden. Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor, touted the magazine’s scoop the next day in a roundtable chat on “Fox News Sunday.” (Both the Standard and Fox News Channel are owned by the conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch.) [bold emphasis mine -- CE] “These are hard facts, and I’d like to see you refute any one of them,” he told a...

November 22, 2003

Challenge, Chapter 6: Post-9/11 Connections

Continuing on the Blogosphere Challenge on the Feith memo, the last part deals with Iraqi/al-Qaeda connections after 9/11, which would be the biggest impetus for America to include Saddam's removal as an integral part of the war on terror. Hayes continues: Several reports indicate that the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued, even after the September 11 attacks: 31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for al Qaeda personnel. The analysis that accompanies that report indicates that the report fits...

November 23, 2003

Challenge, Chapter 7: Differences and Motivations

Hayes, in the summary of his original article on the Feith memo, makes the following observation: CRITICS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION have complained that Iraq-al Qaeda connections are a fantasy, trumped up by the warmongers at the White House to fit their preconceived notions about international terror; that links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been routinely "exaggerated" for political purposes; that hawks "cherry-picked" bits of intelligence and tendentiously presented these to the American public. The Bush Administration has not been the only target for this criticism. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News (the Weekly Standard is also owned by Murdoch) was the subject of a rather notorious study that purported to show that its viewers tended to be extraordinarily misinformed on the war on terror. One of the points that claimed to demonstrate the ignorance of Fox News viewers was the result that around 70% of them thought that...

November 24, 2003

Palestinian Toys Sending US Message: Do We Hear It?

Someone please explain to me again why we want to give sovereignty to people who produce children's toys such as these:...

Challenge, Chapter 8: The End, The Beginning

In the final paragraphs of his Weekly Standard article, Stephen Hayes notes that the Feith memo really just skims the surface of the contacts between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda. Hayes notes another possible connection: The memo contains only one paragraph on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the Iraqi facilitator who escorted two September 11 hijackers through customs in Kuala Lumpur. ... Other intelligence reports indicate that Shakir whisked not one but two September 11 hijackers--Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi--through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel where they met with Ramzi bin al Shibh, one of the masterminds of the September 11 plot. The meeting lasted three days. Shakir returned to work on January 9 and January 10, and never again. In this case, the US has intelligence reports of Iraq...

November 27, 2003

Chickenhawk? I Think Not

President George Bush flew into a hot zone in order to spend Thanksgiving in Iraq: President Bush made a Thanksgiving Day visit to Baghdad, appearing before delighted soldiers taken completely by surprise. After appearing before some U.S. troops in Baghdad and the Iraqi Governing Council, Bush left Baghdad at about 8 p.m. Iraq time, or noon EST. Air Force One stayed on the ground for just two-and-a-half hours, the White House said. I can't tell you how outstanding it is to see a commander-in-chief spending a family holiday with the troops that he has, wisely or foolishly, put into harm's way. Obviously, this visit could not be announced to either the troops or the press before it was made. Here's how the troops found out: Iraq's U.S. civil administrator L. Paul Bremer told the soldiers he wanted the most senior person in the room to read the president's Thanksgiving proclamation...

November 29, 2003

From the Soldier's Perspective

Andrew Sullivan posts this e-mail from a soldier at the Thanksgiving celebration in Baghdad where President Bush made his appearance: Mr. Sullivan, I was present for the surprise visit by the President. It was truly wonderful to be there, and my buddies and I really are grateful that President Bush would take a real risk to come see u. He flew about 12 hours to spend 2 hours with us, he served food to the troops, but he never got a chance to eat himself, at least not until he got on the plane, I'd imagine. For 2 hours, the President walked amongst us, not a receiving line where we came to him, stiff and formal, but coming to us, reading our names on our uniforms and greeting us by name. He looked me in the eye when he shook my hand, he joked with some, whispered to others, spoke...

November 30, 2003

Still A Distraction?

It amazes me, but some people insist that military action in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror. News stories like this tend to disprove it: American forces have captured three members of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s terrorist network in northern Iraq (news - web sites), a U.S. military commander told The Associated Press on Sunday. If confirmed, it would be the first disclosed detention of al-Qaida militants in Iraq. About 10 members of Ansar al-Islam — an Islamic group U.S. officials believe has al-Qaida links in northern Iraq — also have been arrested by U.S. troops in the past seven months, said Col. Joe Anderson, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. There are two explanations for al-Qaeda to be in Iraq. One: they were there all along, as our intelligence indicated, or they are coming to Iraq to fight American...

December 1, 2003

We Told You So, Part 47-B

Glenn at Instapundit directed readers to this extremely interesting story at the New York Times: For two years before the American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Hussein's sons, generals and front companies were engaged in lengthy negotiations with North Korea, according to computer files discovered by international inspectors and the accounts of Bush administration officials. The officials now say they believe that those negotiations — mostly conducted in neighboring Syria, apparently with the knowledge of the Syrian government — were not merely to buy a few North Korean missiles. Instead, the goal was to obtain a full production line to manufacture, under an Iraqi flag, the North Korean missile system, which would be capable of hitting American allies and bases around the region, according to the Bush administration officials. So much for Saddam not being a threat to America and its interests! And would we have found out about this without...

Why Is This Man Smiling?

Every time this idiot involves himself in international politics, I thank God he only served as President for four years. While appearing in Geneva, Jimmy Carter managed to blame Bush for Mideast violence, blame Jews for their own destruction, and argue for rewarding terrorism with territory, all in one speech (from the Jerusalem Post, via Power Line): Former US President Jimmy Carter unleashed a fierce attack against the Israeli and American governments in his speech at the Geneva Initiative's ceremony in Switzerland. ... In Geneva, Carter said Israel's settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the security fence are the main obstacles to peace. He called repeatedly for the return of Palestinian refugees to the territories, beyond what is called for in the Geneva Initiative. ... Carter said that is of equal importance that Palestinians renounce violence against Israeli citizens, but he said this must happen in exchange...

USS Clueless Captures the Philosophy of America at War

Steven den Beste at USS Clueless captures my thinking exactly, in explaining to an Iranian about why and how America goes to war: It's not a question of my nation making a decision whether people will die. Islamic militants made that decision. America's only decision now is who will die, and where and when. If we stand by idly and passively, then it will be Americans who die, whenever and wherever the Islamic extremists choose to kill them, probably in huge numbers. We don't consider that acceptable. That's surrender. That's not going to happen. Instead, we're attempting to take control of events, in hopes that we can minimize the total number of deaths caused by this war. That's why we've embarked on the highly risky and unprecedented strategy we're following. If we were only concerned with minimizing American casualties and if we didn't care about anyone else, then every major...

December 3, 2003

Hoagland Crystallizes the Iraqi 'Insurgency'

Jim Hoagland, in today's Washington Post, deflates the myth of popular insurgency in Iraq with the reality of the motives of this gang of thugs, using an entertaining metaphor: Think of the worst divorce case you have ever heard about, and then imagine the embittered ex-spouses armed with Kalashnikovs and bombs instead of legal motions over alimony and property, and you get some sense of what Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are going through right now. Other motives are also involved. Those so inclined can emphasize the religious fanaticism of the jihadists who have taken the battlefield in Iraq or the Arab fervor stirred by foreign occupation. I grant that both exist, and come back to the fundamental force of this counterrevolution: The warring Arab Sunnis of Iraq want the money. And they want to regain the privilege of dominating the country's other population groups. Hoagland underscores the mercenary/power motivation...

December 5, 2003

Christopher Hitchens Scolds the Anti-War Left

Christopher Hitchens, a liberal in the classic sense, has been a supporter of the war on terror and the Iraq war all along. As he has done during the run-up and aftermath of the war, Hitchens takes the left to task for its obtuseness: The truly annoying thing that I find when I am arguing with opponents of the regime-change policy in Iraq is their dogged literal-mindedness. "Your side said that coalition troops would be greeted with 'sweets and flowers!' " Well, I have seen them with my own eyes being ecstatically welcomed in several places. "But were there actual sweets and flowers?" Literal interpretations of predictions seem to be a one-way street, as Hitchens notes in his closing: There were predictions made by the peaceniks, too, that haven't come literally true, or true at all. There has been no refugee exodus, for example, of the kind they promised. No...

December 6, 2003

Yo, Al -- Ed & Pete Wanna Have a Word Wit' Ya

I heard about this editorial in yesterday's New York Post and it certainly tells a different story about the Patriot Act than our erstwhile Democratic presidential candidates, and a certain ex-Vice President as well. Ed Koch, former Democratic mayor of New York City, and Rep. Peter King (R) of New York wrote: THE brutal attacks of 9/11 brought home to the American people what should have been clear to our nation's leaders years before that fateful day: We are at war with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their radical Islamic terrorist allies throughout the world and within our borders. It is a war that threatens our national survival. Yet, listening to an increasingly shrill chorus of political voices, Americans could almost conclude that the real threat to our country comes not from bin Laden and al Qaeda but John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act. It seems like a wide...

December 9, 2003

Grover Norquist and Frank Gaffney, Grudge Match?

Hugh Hewitt moderated a debate this evening that was a lot more illuminating than that of the Democrats. Hewitt hosted Frank Gaffney and Grover Norquist, the latter of which was one of the subjects of the former's article in FrontPage.com's new article, A Troubling Influence. The article delineates in great detail the extent of the influence that radical Islamists have had on conservative circles, including but not exclusive to Grover Norquist. I haven't read the article in detail -- I plan to do so over the next day or so -- but I had read stories about the article and I was familiar with the general themes. The accusations are deeply disturbing. As Power Line capsulizes it: The thesis of Gaffney's article is that Norquist has worked on behalf of, and together with, an American fifth column of Islamists and Islamist organizations. According to Gaffney, Norquist has successfully sought to...

December 10, 2003

Al-Qaeda Suspect Arrested in Minneapolis

A suspected associate of Zacharias Moussaoui, and apparently he's talking: Authorities in Minneapolis on Tuesday arrested and jailed a man suspected of associating with the Al-Qaida terrorist network and having knowledge of some of the activities of Zacarias Moussaoui, a law enforcement official said. The official said the detainee has confirmed some of investigators' suspicions about Moussaoui, who was arrested while learning to fly a Boeing 747 jet at an Eagan flight school two years ago and now is the subject of the only U.S. prosecution related to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The jailed man, whose name was withheld, has described Moussaoui's activities at an Al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan several years ago, the official said. So far, the arrest has been kept pretty lo-profile. The suspect's name does not appear on the list of prisoners being held at the Minneapolis jail, and his arraignment proceedings were sealed. We...

Axis of Weasels Aren't Preferred Providers

Surprise, surprise! The Defense Department doesn't want to contract with French, German, or Russian companies in the rebuilding of Iraq: France, Germany, Russia and China -- countries that strongly opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq -- are not on a Defense Department list of countries eligible to compete for $18.6 billion worth of contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. Countries that either participated in the Coalition effort in the war or supported it -- including Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland, Turkey and Japan -- are on the list, which was in a memo posted on the Pentagon Web site Tuesday. Be prepared to hear a whole lot of blathering from leading Democrats on this issue for the next few weeks, demanding that the Bush administration quit insulting our "friends" and to quit making the list unilateral. However, if they do, the Bush administration can point out that 63 countries are...

December 11, 2003

Would You Buy a Used Car from This Man? Or This One Either?

Yasser Arafat hinted at recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, according to a transcription of an interview with Henry Siegman, which this article describes as an "American Jewish activist": Israel would receive sovereignty over the Western Wall — a remnant of the Second Temple compound — and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, "because we recognize and respect the Jewish religion and the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine," according to the transcript. Asked about Israel as a Jewish state, Arafat said that it was up to Israel to define itself, as long as it was democratic and guaranteed the rights of minorities. Arafat included the reference to democracy and the rights of minorities to appeal to American and EU audiences, but left unspoken the tripping point of refugee return, through which Arafat hopes to establish a Palestinian primacy in Israel. Dore Gold, a Sharon adviser, makes this...

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Politburo Diktat: Thomas Friedman, Arafat Mouthpiece?

The Commissar writes an open letter to Ariel Sharon, warning of the same tactic that Yasser Arafat is pushing by stealth, but that Thomas Friedman appears to espouse openly -- the "one-state" solution: To start, watch out for a certain reporter/worldbeater, friend of Saudi royals, ... da, the anti-zhid himself, Thomas Friedman. ... He and that Palestinian hottie, Diana Butto, are chatting, oh-so-earnestly, about "one state solution." Da! What if Palestinians say, "No problem. Israel exists. From Jordan to Mediterranean. All of historical Palestine. Is good country. We fly Star of David flag over our homes. NOW GIVE US VOTE." What will happen then? Do you think America would allow the Palestinians to exist within a Greater Israel without a vote? Of course not, and we shouldn't. But what will that lead to? It leads to the overthrow of Israel as we know it, replaced by yet another Arab thugocracy...

December 12, 2003

Now the UN is Bugging Out of Afghanistan

During this entire political campaign, we have been told over and over by the Democratic presidential candidates that Bush's failure to allow the UN to control the reconstruction of Iraq dooms the post-war to failure. The US does not have enough legitimacy, according to the Democrats, to implement a peaceful and successful rebuilding of a nation. However, the UN has proven yet again that they are not capable of doing the job -- now they want to abandon Afghanistan, where they are in charge: The United Nations may be forced to abandon its two-year effort to stabilize Afghanistan because of rising violence blamed on the resurgent Taliban, its top official here warned Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. ... "Countries that are committed to supporting Afghanistan cannot kid themselves and cannot go on expecting us to work in unacceptable security conditions," Brahimi said. "They seem to think that...

Saudis Scold the Axis of Weasels

President Bush got support for his Iraqi rebuilding contract policy from an unusual source earlier today: Countries that opposed the U.S. decision to invade Iraq (news - web sites) have no right to protest U.S. initiatives restricting reconstruction contracts to allies, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States, said Friday. Bandar said he thought it was "amazing" that war opponents now "feel they have a right to share in the pie" of reconstruction contracts. He said even more dangerous than terrorists themselves are those who say they condemn terrorism but don't actively fight it. There is a well-known saying in diplomatic circles that states, "Those who wish to join the feast must help to set the table." Had the Axis merely sat on the sidelines and not gotten involved -- like Canada -- that would be bad enough. But France, Germany, and Russia actively...

December 13, 2003

Underwhelming Irony

Walter Mondale and Zbigniew Brezinski, Vice President and national security advisor during the Carter administration, appeared in the Twin Cities yesterday to speak at Macalaster College, along with William Perry, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. With this line-up, you wouldn't expect a Bush love-in, and you'd be correct: Former Vice President Walter Mondale accused President Bush on Friday of forcing democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan "at bayonet point" — an approach creating more enemies for the United States than friends and doing little to prevent terrorism. The administration's policies are at odds with six decades of foreign policy through Democratic and Republican administrations aimed at forming international coalitions to address national security problems, Mondale said. ... "I cannot understand why the current administration believes that throwing all this out the window — to be replaced by what I see to be their radical, unilateral, go-it-alone, in-your-face approach —...

December 14, 2003

The Biggest Story Before the Capture

Before I flipped on the news and found out about Saddam Hussein's capture, I was preparing to write a post about a new article in the Telegraph regarding a hard connection between Iraq and 9/11: Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist. Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. ... In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta "displayed extraordinary effort" and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be "responsible for attacking the...

A Silly Lord of the Rings Analogy for Today

Today's capture reminded me of a scene from Tolkien, although it's not the Lord of the Rings, it's from The Silmarillion. I suppose it may be a bit silly to use this as a reference to Saddam Hussein, but it sounds oddly familiar to his capture. This passage comes from the chapter titled Of The Voyage of Earendil and describes the capture of Morgoth, who was Sauron's leader during the First Age of Middle Earth: ... and all of the pits of Morgoth were broken and unroofed, and the might of the Valar descended into the deeps of the earth. There Morgoth stood at last at bay, and yet unvaliant. He fled into the deepest of his mines, and sued for peace and pardon; but his feet were hewn from under him, and he was hurled upon his face. Then he was bound with the chain Angainor which he had...

The Post Buries Saddam-9/11 Connection

Power Line has an important post on the Telegraph story regarding the training of Mohammed Atta by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and why the story is not getting any attention from major US media outlets. In order to understand why the Washington Post, for example, does not appear anxious to look into this claim, Hindrocket notes the following exchange during an on-line chat this morning: Annapolis, Md.: Will the Post be looking into the story reported by the Telegraph about connections between Abu Nidal, Mohammad Atta and Saddam Hussein? Very likely to be untrue, but would be immensely significant if true. And there's no mention on the Post's Web site about it yet. Robert G. Kaiser: If we put every rumor and story in the British press (not to mention many others around the world) on the Web site, you'd be dizzy--and no wiser. The Post does not print other...

December 15, 2003

Afghans Start Constitutional Convention

Afghans today took a dramatic step towards building a peaceful, modern democratic society by starting a consitutional convention: A landmark constitutional convention began in Afghanistan on Sunday with solemn prayers, the songs of children and a stirring speech by the nation's former king, who echoed the aspirations of his war-weary countrymen with a call for unity and peace. Some 500 delegates -- from village mullahs to Western-educated exiles -- were gathered at a huge tent in Afghanistan's battle-scarred capital, Kabul, to hammer out a new constitution in a traditional loya jirga, or grand council. The meeting, which is expected to take several weeks, is being conducted under tight security, as Taliban terrorists are still a threat. Even the delegates are being searched prior to entry. One of the interesting issues the loya jirga must confront is womens' rights in a new Afghanistan. Women under Taliban rule were notoriously oppressed, unable...

Power Line Rebuts Mondale

Power Line's essay is a grim reminder of the dark days in modern American history when defeatists held power and America was in full retreat in global politics. While the post-office careers of both Mondale and Carter demonstrate the forgiveness that makes America great, it also demonstrates the historical amnesia that constantly puts America in danger.

Alterman: Dazed and Confused

Eric Alterman seems to have a lot of trouble with reality these days. Over at Altercation, he speculates on the "real" cause of the war in Iraq: I wonder if we went to war in part the way we did because Powell was too sick to mount a fight and did not have the courage to resign. It’s just a hypothesis, but you know, the course of the early Cold War had a great deal to do with FDR’s various secret maladies. Just a thought…. Well, yes, it's just a thought, but it's a stupid, malicious thought, and not terribly well-connected, either. FDR was President, and so the "secret malady" theory at least has some sense to it. (If you're not familiar with this quasi-conspiracy meme, FDR was dying while he negotiated with Churchill and Stalin regarding postwar Europe and seriously dropped the ball due to failing stamina and intellect....

December 16, 2003

Mark Steyn: Put Nihilism to Good Use

Mark Steyn, in another brilliant column, serves up a damning indictment of the creaky and increasingly sclerotic United Nations: For months the naysayers have demanded the Americans turn over more power to the Iraqis. Okay, let's start by turning Saddam over to the Iraqis. Whoa, not so fast. The same folks who insisted there was no evidence Saddam was a threat to any countries other than his own and the invasion was an unwarranted interference in Iraqi internal affairs are now saying that Saddam can't be left to the Iraqi people, he has to be turned over to an international tribunal. You can forget about that. The one consistent feature of the post-9/11 era is the comprehensive failure of the international order. The French use their Security Council veto to protect Saddam. The EU subsidises Palestinian terrorism. The International Atomic Energy Agency provides cover for Iran's nuclear ambitions. The UN...

Still Falling ...

Perhaps coincidentally -- or perhaps not -- US forces rouded up 78 "insurgents" in an extended raid Monday night and Tuesday morning: American soldiers arrested a rebel leader and 78 other people during a raid north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Tuesday. ... At 4:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, troops from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division arrested Qais Hattam, described as the No. 5 fugitive on the division's list of "high value targets," said Capt. Gaven Gregory of the 4th Infantry's 3rd Brigade. I suspect that as Saddam's interrogation continues and the materials found on him are evaluated, we will see more and more of these operations. During that period, the "insurgents" will be forced to speed up missions, making more and more mistakes and allowing us to either kill or capture them in greater numbers. Keep your eyes open....

Getting Tough Works with Both Friends and Enemies

Despite his would-be Presidential opponents' dire warnings, Bush's get-tough policy with the Axis of Weasels appears to be bearing fruit for the Iraqi people: U.S. special envoy James A. Baker III won German and French agreement Tuesday to work for Iraqi debt relief, but Washington did not say whether it would lift the ban on firms from those nations bidding for lucrative reconstruction projects in Iraq ... "Germany and the United States, like France, are ready not only for debt restructuring but also for substantial debt forgiveness toward Iraq," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's spokesman Bela Anda said in a statement after talks with Baker. The German statement indicated that the United States also was prepared to relieve debt, and that levels would be decided by the Paris Club of creditor nations. ... France, keen to carve a role in aiding Iraq, said Monday the Paris Club could strike a debt...

December 18, 2003

Kofi Annan Wants More Substantial Role for MIA UN

Kofi Annan today demanded a larger and more specifically delineated role in the reconstruction of Iraq, and requested a meeting with both the Iraqi Governing Council and the Coalition: Annan, clearly frustrated that Iraqi Governing Council or the U.S.-led coalition running the country have not given him specific answers, said it was time to sit down with representatives from both bodies. "It has to be a three-way conversation," the secretary-general said. "Once we have that, I will make a judgment." Make a judgment on what? Annan won't even allow a UN presence in Iraq because he claims that the Baghdad area is too dangerous for UN personnel. Before anyone takes the UN seriously, they will have to demonstrate some backbone in dealing with security issues in Iraq. The last thing the Iraqis and the Coalition needs is to hand over authority to the UN and then watch them bug out...

December 19, 2003

Strib Catches Dean Madness

Today's editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune asserts that, as Dean says, America is no safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein: We don't have a dog in the Democratic presidential fight, but we do know that front-runner Howard Dean, like him or not, is getting beaten up unfairly for telling an unpleasant truth: The capture of Saddam Hussein hasn't made America safer. It was an excellent piece of work, it may make Iraqis safer, and it may help protect American forces in Iraq. But the capture does nothing directly to secure the United States from the danger posed by terrorism. That's because the war on terrorism has nothing to do with Iraq. Saddam was an ogre who can legitimately be charged with crimes against humanity, genocide and assorted other nasty behaviors. But there's no evidence he was an international terrorist, and that's not likely to change no matter how many...

We? We??

Strange women lying in ponds may be no basis for a system of government, but Strange Women Lying In Ponds is a great basis for blogging. Brant takes on the inimitable (we hope) Robert Fisk, in his strangest column on the war to date: We have captured Saddam. We have destroyed the beast. The nightmare years are over. If only we could have got rid of this man 15 years ago -- 20 years ago -- how warm would be our welcome in Iraq today. But we didn't. In large part, Fisk can thank himself for that. 15 years ago, would Fisk have supported American military action against Saddam? If you have read his dispatches on this war, writing constantly about the supposed military setbacks the Coalition kept suffering in that three-week sacking of Iraq, how the bombs kept killing children in the streets of Baghdad (without even considering the...

Saddam's Capture Didn't Make US Safer?

In yet another breakthrough based on materials found with Saddam Hussein, ABC News reports that Coalition intelligence services have identified moles working for Saddam within the Coalition Provisional Authority: Among the documents found in Saddam's briefcase when he was captured last weekend was a list of names of Iraqis who have been working with the United States — either in the Iraqi security forces or the Coalition Provisional Authority — and are feeding information to the insurgents, a U.S. official told ABCNEWS. "We were badly infiltrated," said the official, adding that finding the list of names is a "gold mine." Would someone at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune like to send a reporter to cover this and inform their editorial board of this development? (via Politburo Diktat)...

This Is Why Saddam's Capture Makes Us Safer

Despite the blatherings of our local broadsheet, the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein paid off in a spectacular way today: Libya has tried to develop weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles in the past, but has agreed to dismantle the programs, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday in simultaneous televised speeches. Bush said Libya's leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, had "agreed to immediately and unconditionally allow inspectors from international organizations to enter Libya. "These inspectors will render an accounting of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and will help oversee their elimination," Bush said. Gadhafi approached US and British officials in March to discuss the disarmament of Libya. Does anyone remember what was going on in March? And does anyone want to hazard a guess as to why Libya approached Bush and Blair, rather than the UN? It's because with the Anglo-American...

December 20, 2003

Former Saddam Officials Targeted by Vigilantes

It was just a matter of time before this started happening: Iraqi sources with contacts among former and current security officials estimate that about 50 senior figures in Hussein's intelligence, military intelligence and internal security organizations have been gunned down in recent months. There has been an even larger toll among neighborhood party officials, such as Taee, who are blamed for having informed on the local community during Hussein's rule, these sources said. Neither the morgue nor officers in Iraq's new police force -- who concede they have little interest in probing these deaths -- have tallied the figures. But the phenomenon is citywide, according to a survey of police stations, with numbers varying widely from one district to another. It is difficult to blame the victims of Saddam's regime for taking matters into their own hands after 35 years of brutal oppression. After all, one way to make sure...

Recognition Comes Slowly but Surely

Media recognition of the stunning diplomatic victory of Bush and Blair -- and even Gadhafi -- in Libya's trilateral disarmament agreement yesterday comes slow. Most of the major newspapers covered it as a news story, although both local Twin Cities newspapers buried it. Editorial boards mostly ignored it, with a couple of major exceptions. For instance, the Daily Telegraph in the UK had no problem proclaiming it as a major vindication of the Bush/Blair global strategy in the War on Terror: The stick has been applied, now a carrot must be offered as an incentive to other rogue nations, like Iraq. As for Mr Bush and Mr Blair, with Saddam captured and Libya tamed, it cannot be denied they have had brilliant end to a difficult year. The world is gradually becoming a safer place. Both their approval ratings should reflect that. The title of this piece is "A Safer...

December 21, 2003

Washington Post Gets It

Gaddafi chose Bush and Blair not because he has some love for the Anglo-American alliance, but because he understood that defying them put him in mortal danger. And while it is true that Gaddafi has been trying to rehabilitate his image since Lockerbie, the development of his WMD program -- in conjunction with Iran and North Korea -- demonstrates his intentions of wielding doomsday power over North Africa and the Middle East. Iraq and Saddam Hussein's downfall changed all the equations, and while Gaddafi may be the first to understand it, he will not be the last.

Dominoes Continue Falling

The capture of Saddam Hussein continues to accrue benefits to the Coalition: Acting on intelligence gleaned from the capture of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), U.S. troops rounded up dozens of suspected rebels during two days of raids in towns where loyalty to the deposed president remains strong, officials said Sunday. Two Iraqis were killed. Smashing down doors, troops went house to house in Fallujah, a center of resistance west of Baghdad, early Sunday. Troops of the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment blockaded Rawah, near the western border with Syria, for a sweep dubbed Operation Santa Claws, the U.S. Army told Associated Press Television News. The continuing nature of these operations indicates a snowball effect from intelligence gleaned from the documents captured along with Saddam, if not directly from Saddam himself. His documents clearly gave the Coalition a good idea of the insurgency leadership structure and identification of these...

December 23, 2003

Le Spin, C'est Nous

The French have discovered that looking in from the outside on the Libya deal makes them appear less than dominant in foreign affairs: Dominique de Villepin, the foreign minister, took his hat off to London and Washington's "exemplary" diplomatic efforts over the past few months that led to the Libyan leader Col Gaddafi's surprise announcement on Friday, calling it a victory for "the entire international community". But he was forced to admit in Le Figaro that France knew nothing of the nine months of secret negotiations. "We were not kept informed," M de Villepin said. His disclosure underlined the continuing mistrust in relations between the English-speaking powers and France, which made much of its opposition to war in Iraq. It seems that even the French are starting to see that its obstinacy in opposing all things American may have cost it an inordinate amount of influence on world affairs: Even...

Dominoes Continue Falling

US forces continued apprehending Iraqi insurgents by the dozens after Saddam Hussein's capture today, including several leadership figures: U.S. soldiers arrested dozens of rebel suspects Tuesday, including several associates of a former aide to Saddam Hussein who is believed to have a leading role in Iraq's insurgency. A U.S. task force in Baqouba, 30 miles northwest of Baghdad, arrested five Iraqis, including one suspected of recruiting guerrillas, said Maj. Josselyn Aberle of the 4th Infantry Division. ... In an earlier raid in Baqouba, U.S. troops detained a former Iraqi army colonel suspected of recruiting ex-Iraqi soldiers to fight the U.S. military. ... Near Fallujah, to the west of Baghdad, a military statement said troops captured "26 enemy personnel including two former Iraqi generals and an Iraqi Special Forces colonel." More evidence, I suppose, of how Saddam's capture has not made America any safer....

Code Orange: Translation by Zygote Design

Many people express their confusion over the meanings of the Homeland Security Alerts. Like any good blogger, Zygote-Design is here to help with a handy translation of Tom Ridge's text: Your awareness and vigilance can help tremendously, so please use your common sense and report suspicious packages, vehicles, or activities to local law enforcement. Normal person translation: Enjoy your Christmas holiday but everything you encounter could kill you. Packages of death, vehicles of death and even activities of death. Merry Christmas from all of us here at the Department of Homeland Security who will be whisked away to an impenetrable mountain fortress at the slightest hint of trouble while you die en masse in the streets of your concrete graveyards. Being in the government is cool. Sheesh ... for a man who just found out that his wife is having a boy, Zygote sure can be cynical! Be sure to...

Russo-American Mission Retrieves Stranded Nuclear Fuel

Remember how a few of the Democrats complained recently about Bush's lack of attention to nuclear material that had not been tracked after the fall of the Soviet Union? Somehow, this story won't make them very happy: A Russo-American team of nuclear specialists backed by armed security units swooped into a shuttered Bulgarian reactor and seized 37 pounds of highly enriched uranium, in a secret operation intended to forestall nuclear terrorism, U.S. officials said Tuesday. ... It was the third time since last year that U.S. and Russian authorities have teamed up to retrieve highly enriched uranium from Soviet-era facilities. U.S. authorities have begun stepping up such joint operations with the Russians. In August 2002, a team from the two countries retrieved 100 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from an aging reactor in Yugoslavia. The second uranium seizure took place three months ago, when 30 pounds was removed from Romania. It...

December 24, 2003

Libyan Agreement vs The Carter Deal in North Korea

I wanted to write a brilliant column rebutting the buzz that Libya's deal was in essence no better than we had with North Korea in 1994 and would wind up being as large a failure as Carter's "trust us" capitulation proved. Even Frank Gaffney seemed pretty skeptical last night on Hugh Hewitt's show. However, before I had a chance to do my research [IOW, open up a can of Diet Rite Red Raspberry and opine madly], I found this brilliant post by Jon at QandO: Needless to say, the Agreed Framework was not the success we'd hoped it would be. In the end, it amounted to a deal whereby our side agreed to provide North Korea with sizable concessions, while North Korea agreed to pretend they weren't working on a nuclear weapons program. Fortunately, we appear to have learned from the Agreed Framework. The deal with Libya succeeds in exactly...

Someone Heard Something

In France, there are travelers who are likely highly annoyed to be kept from being home at Christmas -- but may be lucky to be alive: The French government has canceled three Air France flights to Los Angeles, California, because of fears of a possible terrorist attack, the French Interior Ministry said Wednesday. Air France flights 68 and 70 from Paris to Los Angeles and Flight 382 to Los Angeles via Cincinnati, Ohio, were listed as canceled Wednesday afternoon. The decision came after consultation between U.S. and French authorities, a senior U.S. official said. News of the cancellations came as U.S. officials said a high volume of good-quality intelligence indicated that the al Qaeda terrorist network wants to attack the United States during the Christmas holiday. No one will know for sure if these flights had been compromised by terrorists unless authorities were lucky or well-informed enough to capture specific...

December 26, 2003

David Fromkin: Be Careful What You Wish For

David Fromkin, who wrote a terrific book on Middle Eastern history over the past century titled "A Peace to End All Peace" (on my book list on the left, and you should buy it), wrote an article for today's Los Angeles Times which intends to warn the US about repeating Britain's mistakes in Iraq: When the war ended, in 1918, the victorious British found themselves in possession, among other things, of the three Ottoman provinces that were later merged to form a single unitary state that was to be called Iraq. In 1918 and 1919, its hour of triumph, the British Empire garrisoned the Middle East with an army of a million men. No other significant military force in the region could dispute Britain's mastery. Iraq's future seemingly was for Britain to determine. It is from Britain's experience in that respect that Americans entering the year 2004 have so much...

Why the Dominoes Fall

The Washington Post explains in more detail why the capture of Saddam Hussein has started to cripple the insurgency, and how American strategy had already impacted the insurgency even before that: Senior U.S. officers said they were surprised to discover -- clue by clue over six months -- that the upper and middle ranks of the resistance were filled by members of five extended families from a few villages within a 12-mile radius of the volatile city of Tikrit along the Tigris River. Top operatives drawn from these families organized the resistance network, dispatching information to individual cells and supervising financial channels, the officers said. They also protected Hussein and passed information to and from the former president while he was on the run. At the heart of this tightly woven network is Auja, Hussein's birthplace, which U.S. commanders say is the intelligence and communications hub of the insurgency. The...

December 27, 2003

LA Times: Applaud the Non-Event

The Los Angeles Times published an editorial today which reminds us that good intelligence and pre-emption can keep terrorist strikes from appearing, and that the lack of hard evidence of a terrorist mission does not mean one did not exist: Most national security intelligence is elusive, a connecting of dots — intercepted telephone calls, overheard conversations, confessions by people who know fragments of a plan. The result may be an unprovable negative: an event that does not occur. Thus it was when U.S. officials warned French counterparts about hints that an Air France plane would be used to attack Los Angeles on or around Christmas. The French heeded American requests and canceled six flights, and Los Angeles celebrated a peaceful holiday. Some inconvenience resulted, but how could security personnel have failed to act? The use of commercial airliners as bombs to kill thousands of people on 9/11 demands that credible...

Was The Vatican Al-Qaeda's Target?

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told reporters that al-Qaeda's Christmas Eve target was not Los Angeles, but the Vatican: Terrorists planned to attack the Vatican with a hijacked plane on Christmas Day, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi said in a newspaper interview published Saturday. ... "A hijacked plane into the Vatican," Berlusconi is quoted as saying. "An attack from the sky, is that clear? The threat of terrorism is very high in this instant. I passed Christmas Eve in Rome to deal with the situation. Now I feel calm. It will pass." He added, "It isn't fatalism, but the knowledge of having our guard up. If they organized this, they will not pull it off." Of course, Islamofascists could consider the Vatican as the center of the Crusader world, but if so, it shows a stubborn defiance of history and common sense. The Vatican's direct influence on warmaking has declined considerably...

Stiffing the Poles

Poland has long had my admiration. Before France threw in with the colonies, Polish lovers of freedom allied itself with our Founding Fathers -- names like Kosciusko should be as much a part of our national lexicon as Lafayette -- and despite being overrun and torn apart for centuries, Poland has always retained a burning love of freedom and self-determination. Earlier this week, Ralph Peters wrote an excellent column about this aspect of Polish history, and the unfortunate treatment they are receiving from the US after giving us the best of their support: But the Poles never gave up their belief in their country - or in freedom. During our own revolution, our first allies were Polish freedom fighters such as Casimir Pulaski and Tadeusz Kosciusko. (Paris only joined the fight when it looked like we might win. And France intervened to spite Britain, not to help us.) Throughout the...

December 28, 2003

Rushing Towards Disaster?

The insurgency in Iraq and global pressure to end the civil occupation are forcing the Coalition to abandon key goals in order to meet a summer deadline to transfer sovereignty back to the Iraqis, according to the Washington Post: The United States has backed away from several of its more ambitious initiatives to transform Iraq's economy, political system and security forces as attacks on U.S. troops have escalated and the timetable for ending the civil occupation has accelerated. Plans to privatize state-owned businesses -- a key part of a larger Bush administration goal to replace the socialist economy of deposed president Saddam Hussein with a free-market system -- have been dropped over the past few months. So too has a demand that Iraqis write a constitution before a transfer of sovereignty. With the administration's plans tempered by time and threat, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and his...

December 30, 2003

LA Times: Syria Undermined Iraq Sanctions, Armed Saddam

The Los Angeles Times translated reams of documents seized after the fall of Saddam Hussein and reports that Syria ran extensive smuggling operations on behalf of the Iraqi dictator's regime, designed to undermine UN sanctions: A Syrian trading company with close ties to the ruling regime smuggled weapons and military hardware to Saddam Hussein between 2000 and 2003, helping Syria become the main channel for illicit arms transfers to Iraq despite a stringent U.N. embargo, documents recovered in Iraq show. The private company, called SES International Corp., is headed by a cousin of Syria's autocratic leader, Bashar Assad, and is controlled by other members of Assad's Baath Party and Alawite clan. Syria's government assisted SES in importing at least one shipment destined for Iraq's military, the Iraqi documents indicate, and Western intelligence reports allege that senior Syrian officials were involved in other illicit transfers. Iraqi records show that SES signed...

December 31, 2003

LA Times: Part 2 of Iraq's Violations of Arms Embargo

The Los Angeles Times concludes its two-part series on documents discovered in Baghdad which clearly delineate how the international community assisted Saddam Hussein in avoiding the effects of the UN-imposed arms embargo. Today's installment focuses on Polish arms dealers and how they evaded their own government to sell military hardware to Iraq, via (as in yesterday's article) Syria: Desperate for missile technology in the summer of 2001, Iraq's arms brokers and spies homed in on the military scrap yards of this former Soviet Bloc nation. They operated out of this town, scavenging and assembling decades-old parts that were shipped to Syria, then trucked across deserts and mountains toward Baghdad. Documents were forged and lies were told in an elaborate network built to evade United Nations sanctions. The shipment of up to 380 missile engines from Poland was critical to Saddam Hussein's covert program to extend the range of his new...

January 1, 2004

International Flight Cancellations Due to Intelligence

The US, in cancelling at least one of the several international flights grounded during the holiday, acted on specific intelligence and not just names from passenger manifests, national security sources told the AP: U.S. authorities were acting on intelligence information — and not just suspicious passenger names — when they boarded a British Airways jet on New Year's Eve at nearby Dulles International Airport, a national security official said Thursday. Meanwhile, the security concerns affected the same British Airways scheduled flight again on Thursday, when the airline canceled one of its three daily flights from Heathrow Airport to Washington. Thursday's decision was based on security advice from the British government, a spokesman for the airline said. I think terrorist groups were either trying very hard to make a statement over the holidays, or they were engaging in a counter-intelligence mission to uncover spies and moles within their organizations. Regardless of...

January 3, 2004

Secret Case Before the Supreme Court?

The California Yankee notified me of a notable development: the US Supreme Court has agreed to consider an appeal of a case that, up to now, doesn't appear to exist. California Yankee provides plenty of background on the case, discussing what is known and what isn't, and why this case involving a Muslim illegally in the US should cause us concern. Take a look at this; it certainly looks like a problem to me....

January 4, 2004

A Giant Step For Freedom

After teetering on the brink of collapse, the loya jirga in Afghanistan has almost miraculously reached agreement on a new constitution, giving men and women equal rights and striking a balance between a strong presidency and Parliamentary oversight: Just a day after warning that the meeting, or loya jirga, was heading toward a humiliating failure, chairman Sibghatullah Mujaddedi announced that last-ditch diplomacy had secured a deal. ... The charter was amended to grant official status to northern minority languages where they are most commonly spoken, an issue which had brought the meeting close to collapse. ... After the new draft was circulated, the 502 delegates gathered under a giant tent in the Afghan capital rose from their chairs, standing in silence for about 30 seconds to signal their support for the new charter. Is it perfect? Not really; Islamist factions insisted and received provisions for Afghanistan to be an Islamic...

January 6, 2004

Don't Let The Cabin Door Hit You On The Way Out

Two international air carriers insist that they will not comply with US requirements to have armed sky marshals on board designated flights: The decisions by South African Airways and Thomas Cook Airlines, the charter flight arm of Europe’s second biggest travel firm, deepened a dispute over a move Washington sees as essential to outwitting al-Qaida and other extremist groups. ... German-owned Thomas Cook Airlines, which flies to Orlando, Fla., from Britain and also flies through U.S. airspace to the Caribbean, ruled out using marshals in any circumstances. “Thomas Cook Airlines has not changed its policy that if presented with a sky marshal on any of our routes, the flight would be canceled,” it said in a statement. South African Airways, which has 28 return flights a week to Atlanta and New York, also said it would not for the time being meet U.S. demands. Without trying to sound too jingoistic...

Israel and Libya: Together Again For The First Time?

The Jerusalem Post is reporting in its latest edition that diplomatic talks have quietly begun between Israel and Libya aimed at normalizing relations (may require free registration): Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom's bureau chief, Ron Prosor, met with a Libyan representative in Paris two weeks ago to talk about opening a dialogue between the two countries, Channel 2 reported Tuesday night. ... Kuwati newspaper A-Siyasa, meanwhile, reported Tuesday that a high-ranking Israeli delegation is expected to visit Libya in the near future with the aim of laying the ground for the signing of a peace agreement. According to the paper, Israeli and Libyan officials met last Friday in Vienna in the presence of a senior American diplomat and agreed to send an Israeli delegation to Libya in the near future. If true -- and the Kuwaiti newspaper seems to be confirming it -- this could be a blockbuster development for a...

Saudi Arrested with Firecrackers in Boston Airport

German air security seems questionable after a Saudi man was arrested after arriving in Boston with firecrackers in his carry-on luggage: A Saudi man was charged yesterday for having firecrackers in carry-on luggage on a plane from Germany to Boston amid United States warnings of a possible attack bigger than the September 11, 2001, hijacked plane strikes. US officials in Boston said that Essam Mohammed Almohandis, 33, of Riyadh had "three small firecracker-type explosive or incendiary devices" in his carry-on luggage on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt on Sunday. The Saudi first told authorities that the tubes in his bag were "artist's crayons," then claimed not to know what the devices were and said that his wife had packed his bag. He is being held for arraignment and faces 10 years in prison. What could the man have done with firecrackers? Depending on the size of the charge, he could...

January 8, 2004

Blog Update: Iraq War Casualties Website

A new reader of CQ in San Diego sent me an e-mail that asked if I had a link to a website that had updated casualty counts. I didn't, but it seems to me that I should -- so, in the Battleships section, I've added a link to this site at Lunaville. The data appears correct and the sources are solid....

January 9, 2004

Qureia: We Want One Middle-East State

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia threatened Israel with the bomb -- the population bomb, that is: Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said Thursday that if Israel unilaterally imposed a new boundary with Palestinian areas he would respond by pushing for a single Arab-Jewish state — a move that could spell disaster for Israel. A single country including Gaza, the West Bank and Israel would mean that the Jewish state would soon have an Arab majority. That would force Israel to choose between giving Palestinians the right to vote and risk losing the country’s Jewish character, or becoming a minority-ruled country like apartheid South Africa. Of course, this has always been the idea behind the Palestinian offensive against the existence of Israel. The Palestinians have a higher birth rate and at some point will outnumber the Israelis. When that happens, all they need to do is recognize Israel not as...

January 10, 2004

Danes Find Liquid-Filled Mortars in Iraq

If it does turn out to be chemical or biological weaponry, however, it won't make a bit of difference if it dates back to the Iran-Iraq War of the 80s. The UN resolutions required Iraq to account for and destroy all nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry, not just those created after 1991. These mortars, if proved to be WMDs, would prove that Iraq continued to possess and hide prohibited weaponry in defiance of the UN.

Bush Planned Iraq Invasion -- So What?

In a 60 Minutes interview to be aired tomorrow, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill alleges that the Bush administration planned the invasion of Iraq in early 2001: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap." ... In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting asked why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" O'Neill said. Of course, this being an election year, Democrats have something...

January 12, 2004

Sympathy For The Devils

I'm puzzled by this piece in tomorrow's Washington Post that tells the story of former Ba'athists in Iraq and how difficult life has become, now that their privileges have been revoked: Less than a year ago, Ismael Mohammed Juwara lived high in the food chain of President Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He was a secret policeman feared and respected among his comrades and in his hometown, enjoying a cornucopia of privileges from the government. ... Now, as he scrapes out a living by selling diesel fuel illegally, he is a pariah in the new Iraq. "We were on top of the system. We had dreams," said Juwara, a former member of the Mukhabarat, the intelligence service that reported directly to the now-deposed president. "Now we are the losers. We lost our positions, our status, the security of our families, stability. Curse the Americans. Curse them." The entire article consists of several...

January 15, 2004

Oh, Those Training Camps!

It's amazing what you find when you start looking around the home ... dustbunnies, missing socks, and terrorist training camps: Saudi authorities have discovered a number of camps outside Saudi cities used for training al-Qaida militants to carry out terror operations, an Interior Ministry official said Thursday. Two militant figures killed in terror sweeps last year — Turki Nasser al-Dandani and Yosif Salih Fahd Ala'yeeri — commanded the camps, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. More camp leaders are being sought, the official said. The Saudis, who at first kept minimizing Saudi involvement in 9/11 and al-Qaeda, changed their tune dramatically last May when al-Qaeda killed dozens of Saudis in a car-bomb attack. Since that time, they've been motivated to actually look around for the terrorists. I imagine that they were shocked, shocked! to find terrorist infrastructure right there in the heart of radicall Wahhabi country....

January 18, 2004

Memo to Telegraph: It's Not All Carrot, No Stick

The Daily Telegraph, normally a sensible if not terribly supportive newspaper, gets itself curiously confused on the meaning of diplomacy: The capture by the United States of thousands of centrifuges on board a German-owned vessel, the BBC China, en route to Libya has raised suspicions in Washington and London that Col Gaddafi offered to abandon his weapons programme after threats from America, rather than the lengthy British and American diplomacy vaunted by Tony Blair. The Telegraph story focuses more on the refusal of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to answer questions about the seizure, but its recitation of a false tautology is a little disappointing. Gaddafi responded to both threats and promises, because that's what diplomacy entails. If the Telegraph feels that diplomacy is only showering money and compliments on other nations that express desires to kill you by, say, bombing your airlines and nightclubs frequented by your military personnel, then...

January 21, 2004

Le Taliban, C'est Nous

Does anyone remember the stories of Taliban-led Afghanistan, where kites were outlawed and officials roamed the streets looking for men with no beards? Apparently the French remember them all to well and are about to adopt some of the same tactics: France’s plan to bar religious symbols from state schools took a further confusing turn by Wednesday after the education minister said a proposed ban on Muslim veils could also outlaw beards and bandannas if they were judged to be a sign of faith. ... Education Minister Luc Ferry made the surprising statement about disciplining bearded students on Tuesday in a National Assembly legal committee hearing about the draft law on the ban due to be debated next month. Discussing the plan to remove Islamic headscarves from state schools, he told a communist deputy who asked about a pupil with a beard, “As soon as it becomes a religious sign...

9/11: An Iranian Operation?

A German trial of an alleged al-Qaeda accomplice was halted when a surprise witness implicated the Islamic government of Iran in the 9/11 attack on the United States: On what had been the eve of his widely expected acquittal, the trial of the second person charged by German authorities as an accomplice of the Sept. 11 hijackers was thrown into turmoil Wednesday after prosecutors disclosed the existence of a surprise witness purporting to link Iran to the hijackings. The mysterious witness, who goes by the name Hamid Reza Zakeri and claims to have been a longtime member of the Iranian intelligence service, is said to have told German investigators that the Sept. 11 plot represented what one termed a "joint venture" between the terrorist group al-Qaida and the Iranian government. German authorities are skeptical of this assertion, according to the article, saying that the two-year delay in relating this connection...

Dead Scientist Believed Iraq Had WMDs

Months after the suicide of a British government scientist threw into doubt Anglo-American claims of WMD possession by the Iraqis and touched off accusations of a murder conspiracy to silence the analyst, the BBC admits that it has an unbroadcast interview with the late David Kelly in which he insists that Iraq had WMDs and posed an immediate threat: The weapons expert slashed his wrists near his home in Oxfordshire, southern England, in July 2003 after being exposed as the source of a claim by a BBC reporter that the prime minister's team inflated the threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, to justify war. One week before senior judge Lord Hutton delivers his report on Kelly's death -- a judgment that could be critical of ministers -- the BBC said it would broadcast later Wednesday an interview it recorded with Kelly in October 2002, which it has never shown....

January 22, 2004

UK: Anti-War Demonstrators Caused Materiel Shortages in Iraq

Anti-war demonstrators claiming to "support the troops" despite their protests may have trouble explaining this report from the UK's Black Watch: The commanding officer of the Black Watch yesterday blamed the Government's reluctance to be seen preparing for war for equipment shortages suffered by troops in Iraq. While careful to make clear that the Government's decision to wait until the last minute was understandable, Lt Col Cowan said it was partly forced on it by anti-war feeling among its own backbenchers. "As a result, many items of equipment were not available in the right numbers, in the right place, in the right working order at the time they should have been and I think that is widely acknowledged," he said. London, you may remember, hosted several large anti-war demonstrations in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Due to a certain lack of intestinal fortitude among members of Tony Blair's...

January 23, 2004

US Battles Al-Qaeda Cell in Fallujah

The US has discovered an al-Qaeda cell in the troublesome city of Fallujah, and is rounding up as many of its members as it can find: The U.S. military is fighting to uproot a suspected cell of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network in the staunchly anti-American town of Fallujah, a military official said Thursday. Two Egyptians and an Iraqi, all believed to be couriers among al-Qaida terrorists and financiers, were arrested Sunday in a Fallujah apartment building where slogans supporting bin Laden were written across a wall in sheep's blood. Capt. Scott Kirkpatrick, of the Army's 10th Mountain Division, who led the raid, said the men were found with al-Qaida literature and photos of bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Kirkpatrick said the U.S. military doesn't know how big the al-Qaida cell in Fallujah is, "but...

Power Line: Battle of the Mosque

Big Trunk from Power Line has an outstanding post based on a report of a little-known Marine battle in Baghdad. If you don't get goose bumps thinking about the heart and courage of these Marines, check for a pulse. You may be dead.

US Captures Key Al-Qaeda Figure

US forces in Iraq captured a key al-Qaeda associate and a leader in Ansaar al-Islam and the Iraqi insurgency: U.S. forces in Iraq captured a leader of the insurgency who is believed to be a close associate of Abu Musab Zarqawi, described by some as a key link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, a senior American official said in Washington on Friday. U.S. troops captured Husam al-Yemeni Thursday, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He is described by U.S. officials as a top member of the al-Qaida linked Ansar al-Islam group and the leader of an insurgency cell in Fallujah, west of Baghdad. As in earlier events, US forces gave no details of the capture, nor have they made an official statement, but this looks like a fairly significant win for the Coalition. They've been battling an insurgency cell for a while in Fallujah, and capturing its leader,...

French Intelligence: Al-Qaeda Severely Damaged, Not Destroyed

The head of French intelligence substantiated George Bush's State of the Union contention that al-Qaeda has been significantly damaged but remains a threat against American and Western interests: The al-Qaida network has been severely destabilized but not destroyed by the war on terror and still represents a "very motivated and very dangerous" threat, the head of France's domestic intelligence agency said Friday. ... Bousquet de Florian said it "has been destabilized to a large extent" but "retains a capacity to carry out operations." "Very apparently," November's suicide bombings in Istanbul, Turkey, were, if not ordered by al-Qaida, then "validated by the heads of al-Qaida or by Osama bin Laden himself," he said, referring to the terror network's fugitive leader. Despite losing leaders, fighters, training camps and financing to the war on terror, al-Qaida "remains a structure that is very motivated and very dangerous," said Bousquet de Florian. President Bush warned...

January 26, 2004

CIA and FBI Missed Clues to 9/11 Hijackers: Panel

The LA Times reports that the federal 9/11 commission has concluded that the CIA and FBI missed opportunities to recognize the hijackers as a threat: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, obtained a visa to come to the United States just weeks before the attacks despite being under a federal terrorism indictment, a report by the federal commission investigating the attacks revealed Monday. As many as eight of the hijackers entered the United States with doctored passports that contained "clues to their association" with al-Qaida that should have been caught by immigration authorities, commission investigators said. The newly disclosed findings challenge previous claims by top CIA and FBI officials that the hijackers' records and paperwork were so clean that they could not have aroused suspicion. The commissioners heard testimony all day on improvements made to the security system of the US, including technological as well...

January 28, 2004

Our Friends, The French

UPI and the UK Independent report that official Iraqi government documents show that Saddam Hussein engaged in a series of bribes of high-ranking European officials: Documents from Saddam Hussein's oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The oil ministry papers, described by the independent Baghdad newspaper al-Mada, are apparently authentic and will become the basis of an official investigation by the new Iraqi Governing Council, the Independent reported Wednesday. "I think the list is true," Naseer Chaderji, a governing council member, said. "I will demand an investigation. These people must be prosecuted." If true, these documents would explode the Presidential race. Democrats consistently attack Bush for "unilateralism" and, in John Kerry's words, building an "illegitimate" coalition because the French opposed the US. Chirac even reversed course and stabbed Colin Powell in the back by reneging on an agreement...

January 29, 2004

What Happened To The Left?

Dissent Magazine published an excellent essay on the moral abdication of the Left in the fight against fascism. It's written by a Leftist who is dismayed by his sudden isolation: "And yet," I insisted, "if good-hearted people like you would only open your left-wing eyes, you would see clearly enough that the Baath Party is very nearly a classic fascist movement, and so is the radical Islamist movement, in a somewhat different fashion-two strands of a single impulse, which happens to be Europe's fascist and totalitarian legacy to the modern Muslim world. If only people like you would wake up, you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism." I grew still more heated. "What a tragedy that you don't see this! It's a tragedy for the Afghanis and the Iraqis, who need more help than they...

January 30, 2004

ABC: Saddam's List

ABC News reports further on the list of global government officials on Saddam's bribe list: All of the contracts were awarded from late 1997 until the U.S.-led war in March 2003. They were conducted under the aegis of the United Nations' oil-for-food program, which was designed to allow Iraq to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods. The document was discovered several weeks ago in the files of the Iraqi Oil Ministry in Baghdad. According to a copy obtained by ABCNEWS, some 270 prominent individuals, political parties or corporations in 47 countries were on a list of those given Iraq oil contracts instantly worth millions of dollars. These bribes worked by assigning barrels of oil to people at a rate 50 cents below the market value as a commodity, which allowed the recipients to sell the oil to legitimate brokers for a a profit, without ever touching a barrel themselves....

Al-Qaeda: Fighting On

A message purportedly from al-Qaeda states that they are still valiantly hanging on in their struggle to remain deadly: Al-Qaeda vowed in its Thursday statement to continue fighting the Saudi government and its Western supporters, swearing to "take revenge on anyone who fights the faith and its people, or stands as a line of defence for the Crusader forces". ... The alleged al-Qaeda statement, a copy of which was emailed to The Associated Press today, also said government forces detained one of its members, Khaled al-Juwaiser al-Farraj, and that al-Farraj's father was wounded in a shootout with security forces, but that the rest of the group escaped. The Interior Ministry, said, however, that al-Farraj's father was killed - but not by security agents. This statement followed either (a) a deadly shootout with Saudi security forces, or (b) an ambush on them by al-Qaeda, depending on who's doing the talking. It...

January 31, 2004

Congress: No Evidence CIA Slanted Iraq Intelligence

Despite the shrill rhetoric emanating from the Democratic primaries and certain broadsheets, two Congressional investigations have concluded that no one pressured intelligence agencies to slant their data to support the Administration's casus belli: Congressional and CIA investigations into the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism have found no evidence that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials, according to intelligence officials and congressional officials from both parties. Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who is leading the CIA's review of its prewar Iraq assessment, said an examination of the secret analytical work done by CIA analysts showed that it remained consistent over many years. "There was pressure and a lot of debate, and people should have a lot of debate, that's quite legitimate," Kerr said. "But the bottom line is, over a period of several years,"...

More Canceled Flights

Several international flights to the US have been canceled for the weekend: British Airways and Air France on Saturday announced the cancellation of seven flights to and from the United States because of security concerns. BA canceled four flights between Heathrow Airport and Washington on Sunday and Monday and one from Heathrow to Miami on Sunday. Air France canceled two Paris-to-Washington flights. There seems to be less information forthcoming on these cancellations than the ones over Christmas, and that's probably a good thing. The spectacular attention those received may have exposed intelligence assets and scared off the terrorists. Let's hope that security agencies have better luck this time around....

February 2, 2004

Blair, Bush Nominated for Nobel

Norwegian legislator Jan Simonsen has nominated George Bush and Tony Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to remove Saddam Hussein: Even though the five-member Norwegian awards committee keeps the nomination list secret, those making the nominations often announce their candidate. Norwegian lawmaker Jan Simonsen has nominated Bush and Blair several years in a row. Simonsen wrote that by removing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, they lessened the chance of a war. Look for this nomination to fail. Two years ago, the Nobel committee gave the award to Jimmy Carter for his work on the treaty with North Korea ... the one that allowed the Kim Jung-Il regime to arm itself with nuclear weapons, thanks to the toothless agreement that Carter championed. They also famously gave one to Yasser Arafat, the godfather of terrorism, for showing up in Oslo and not agreeing to much and eventually reneging on the...

Germany Repents?

Germany, whose Chancellor acted as though he was married to French President Jacques Chirac, now regrets its diplomatic breach with Britain and the US and will start distancing itself from French foreign policy: Germany is seeking to distance itself from France's tight embrace and realign itself more closely to Britain and America, senior German officials signalled yesterday. They said the row with Washington over Iraq had been "catastrophic" for Berlin and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had become "a prisoner" of President Jacques Chirac's campaign to oppose the war to topple Saddam Hussein last year. After two years of standing so close to France that the two leaders literally stood in for one another at EU conferences, the Germans have belatedly discovered the world doesn't love the French. Now that the Chirac administration is buried in scandal and especially since Germany found out that French opposition to the war in Iraq had...

February 3, 2004

Deadly Ricin Found: New Terrorist Attack

Just in case anyone thought that the war on terror had ended, reality intruded overnight as the deadly poison ricin was found in the Senate complex: Following the discovery of the deadly toxin ricin in the mailroom of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, much of the Senate complex will be shut down Tuesday, the Senate Web site said. "The Capitol will be open for essential personnel only. All tours will be canceled until further notice. Senate office buildings will be closed today. This includes the Hart, Dirksen, and Russell Senate Office Buildings," according to a statement on the Web page. Tests on a white powdery substance found in the mailroom indicate the presence of ricin, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer and Frist said late Monday. Frist said he considers the incident a "terrorist activity." Of eight tests conducted throughout the day, six were positive for the toxin, with a...

February 6, 2004

Walk Right In, Sit Right Down

In the middle of a winter punctuated with flight cancellations and delays due to heightened fears of terrorist attacks, the LAX security detail allowed a known felon to stroll past security and lodge himself onto an airplane without a ticket: Airport cameras captured it all: On a busy morning at Los Angeles International Airport last month, a convicted felon wearing a sweatshirt, sunglasses and gloves strolled unnoticed past two security checkpoints in Terminal 5 and walked onto a jumbo jet without a ticket. Kareem Thomas, a 19-year-old Decatur, Ga., resident on probation for burglary, was discovered hiding in an airplane restroom by passengers and was apprehended by police before takeoff. Thomas was unarmed and passed through the airport's metal detectors along with other travelers. But the ease with which he boarded the Jan. 15 Delta Airlines Flight 1972 to Atlanta — particularly at a time of heightened security at the...

February 7, 2004

America's "Victim" Enjoyed Guantanamo

The Telegraph will disappoint many America-haters in the UK and around the world tomorrow by publishing the account of a teenager who spent 14 months at the controversial detention center in Guantanamo, where critics accuse the US of cruel treatment of its inmates: An Afghan boy whose 14-month detention by US authorities as a terrorist suspect in Cuba prompted an outcry from human rights campaigners said yesterday that he enjoyed his time in the camp. Mohammed Ismail Agha, 15, who until last week was held at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, said that he was treated very well and particularly enjoyed learning to speak English. Oh, the horror! But if your fragile psyche can handle it, Agha details the tortures he survived at Camp Delta: "At first I was unhappy . . . For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later...

February 9, 2004

The Arab League Discovers Humor

The Arab League, of all things, issued a report this morning critical of the US-led coalition's administration of Iraq -- on human-rights grounds: Violations of human rights and international law by U.S.-led forces in Iraq have embittered the populace, an Arab League report obtained Monday said. ... "It (the treatment of Iraqis) is not in conformity with relevant international legal rules or with human rights documents in general," said the report obtained by Reuters. The report quoted some Iraqis who were critical of Arab indifference toward their plight under the brutal rule of former President Saddam Hussein and said a change in methods by U.S.-led occupation forces could ease tensions. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Perhaps our response should be, "When you can announce these reports filled with your concern over human-rights abuses from the door of synagogues and Christian churches, then we will listen to your...

Best Damn War Analogy, Period

I have to hand it to Jon at QandO. In response to Joseph Wilson's tired assertion that Bush opened up an "unnecessary second front" on the war on terror by invading Iraq, Jon uses this analogy: You know, I once bought pesticide to deal with the fleas that had found my dog. I had two choices. 1: I could spray the entire can at the dog. or: 2: I could spray the dog...and other areas in which the fleas lived. I guess I should have chosen the first. Instead I opened an "unnecessary second front" on the fleas. Worked, too, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Joseph Wilson kills every last flea on his dog, every time he sprays him down. ......which is about once every two weeks, since all the fleas just go elsewhere for a while. Perhaps there's a parallel there, but let's not think about it...

February 10, 2004

We're Winning, Part 178a

The "resistance" in Afghanistan is running out of steam, according to the commander of NATO forces in the country: The armed resistance against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan is dwindling despite claims by the al-Qaida terror network that it has launched a renewed campaign in the country, NATO's military commander said. U.S. Marine Gen. James L. Jones said there are fewer than 1,000 fighters of the ousted Taliban regime and their al-Qaida allies in Afghanistan. "The level of the threat ... is quite a bit lower than I had thought," Jones said late Monday as he returned from a one-day visit to Afghanistan. ... Coalition commanders believe "the opposition is running out of energy," Jones said. This is despite the winter snows that hamper Coalition patrols. The approval of the new Afghani constitution has created a new political situation in Afghanistan, one that will exclude the Taliban as more and more...

February 12, 2004

Powell: "You Don't Know What You're Talking About"

The normally even-tempered Secretary of State, Colin Powell, became angry at a Congressional hearing and scolded a Congressman and a staffer: Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star general known for his even temperament, paused yesterday during a congressional hearing to berate a Hill staffer for shaking his head as Powell offered a defense of his prewar statements on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. The public scolding came after Powell had already endured a number of attacks by Democrats on the administration's Iraq policy during an appearance before the House International Relations Committee. He had just snapped at a member of Congress who had casually declared President Bush "AWOL" from the Vietnam War. The staffer, who sat behind the panel members, was shaking his head at Powell's testimony, a rude gesture by any stretch of the imagination, and after grinding his teeth throughout the angry and accusatory...

Osama's Navy?

The British believe that al-Qaeda has up to 15 ships that they will use for terror attacks, possibly against Parliament, just off the Thames in London (via Drudge): A private memo sent to police chiefs by the Met's marine unit is headlined: Next Terror Attack Waterborne? Ship insurer Lloyd's of London is said to be helping MI6 and the CIA trace vessels bought by al-Qaeda from a Greek shipping magnate with links to bin Laden. The memo states shipping agents have been asked to help in the search. The report by the Met - which says it obtained its intelligence from maritime agencies - states: "Al-Qaeda has reportedly taken possession of 15 ships, forming what could be described as the first terrorist navy. The ships fly the flags of Yemen and Somalia where they are registered - and are capable of carrying lethal cargoes of chemicals or a dirty bomb."...

February 15, 2004

Score One for the Iraqi Police

The new Iraqi police force have captured their first important fugitive, the Four of Spades in the US deck of cards: Mohammed Zimam Abdul-Razaq -- the four of spades in the military's "deck of cards" of 55 most-wanted Iraqis -- was arrested at one of his homes in western Baghdad, Deputy Interior Minister Ahmed Kadhum Ibrahim told journalists. Abdul-Razaq sat next to the Iraqi official wearing a traditional black robe. Ibrahim said he did not resist arrest. ... While presenting Abdul-Razaq to reporters, Ibrahim appealed to the top Iraqi fugitive, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, to surrender, promising he would be treated with dignity. Al-Douri is the former vice chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council. This couldn't come at a better time, as the Iraqi police have weathered a series of attacks, culiminating in yesterday's daring raid on an Iraqi police jail that freed dozens of insurgents and killed over 20...

February 16, 2004

Terry Waite: Still Crazy After All These Years

One of the early direct victims of Islamofascist terror, Terry Waite, has returned to Beirut, where he was kidnapped and held for five years before being released in 1992. Unfortunately, his experiences and the passage of time has not dimmed the almost legendary naivete that caused Waite to become a hostage in the first place: Self-knowledge has never been, even his friends acknowledge, his greatest virtue. He went to Lebanon in 1987, the year he was kidnapped, as the envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury after successfully negotiating the release of British hostages in Iran and Libya. At the time he naively believed, to the alarm of some colleagues in Lambeth Palace, that his status as church representative would keep him safe. The article in the Independent goes on to blame his association with Oliver North for the kidnapping by Islamic "militants", as the paper calls them. I recall when...

February 17, 2004

Arafat -- Keep The Graft Rolling

Yasser Arafat continues to defy efforts to reform the Palestinian Authority, now by blocking a basic reform intended on reducing the levels of corruption in Palestinian security forces: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is preventing his prime minister from carrying out a key financial reform, and the dispute is threatening to hold up much-needed foreign aid, Cabinet ministers said Tuesday. ... The argument between Arafat and Qureia broke out after the Palestinian Cabinet decided Saturday to pay members of the security forces through deposits to their bank accounts, Cabinet ministers said. Currently, security officers are given lump sums of cash and then distribute the money to their employees an invitation to corruption. Qureia needed the Cabinet decision ahead of a trip to European capitals this week, ministers said on condition of anonymity. Qureia knew European leaders would ask him about the issue and might condition further aid on the reform,...

February 18, 2004

NBC: Kerry Unwittingly Assisted Chinese Spy

Yesterday afternoon, NBC reported that John Kerry provided material assistance to Liu Chaoying [spelled differently throughout the article], an arms dealer and espionage agent for China, in exchange for campaign contributions: In 1996, Senator John Kerry was locked in a hard-fought and close reelection campaign with Massachusetts Governor William Weld. Kerry was the policy wonk, noted for his expertise in international crime, arms and drug dealing, and intelligence. ... [Johnny] Chung gave $10,000 to Kerry's campaign -- most of it illegally -- hosted a fund-raising party in Beverly Hills, and threw in an extra $10,000 to honor Kerry at a Democratic Senate Campaign Committee event. Kerry eventually returned all the Chung money. In return, Kerry opened a door for a friend of Chung: Liu Chaoying. So the man who claims he opposes special interests and claims he can't be bought certainly seems available for rent when necessary. While helping contributors...

February 19, 2004

After All That ...

After a highly-publicized effort to inject itself into the question of power transfer in Iraq, the UN has determined that the US was right all along and that direct elections will not be possible in the near future: U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan will endorse the U.S. position that direct elections cannot be held in Iraq before the United States hands over political power to Iraqis on June 30, senior U.N. officials said Wednesday. But Annan, scheduled to brief the Security Council and other U.N. members Thursday, will delay for at least another week his recommendations on the sensitive question of how to choose a provisional government, officials said. Annan's decision is a major boost for the Bush administration, which has struggled to address the demand of Iraq's leading cleric that direct elections be used to select an interim government, rather than the complex system of regional caucuses that the...

February 20, 2004

Israelis to Evacuate More Settlements

Israel's deputy Foreign Minister, Ehud Olmert, said that Israel is not only preparing to evacuate all Gaza Strip settlements but also a number of West Bank settlements as well: Israel will seek to retain major settlement blocs in the West Bank, but will dismantle Jewish settlements close to Palestinian towns and villages "wherever possible," the deputy prime minister said Friday. ... Olmert said that as part of a West Bank withdrawal, "the major settlement blocs have to stay under our control." "The Americans understand this ... the argument is over all those areas where the Jewish settlements are mixed in with the Palestinian population in a way that causes confrontation and damage to both sides," he said. It's difficult to determine whether this represents a reluctant acknowledgement of a difficult, if not impossible, tactical and political situation or a unilateral surrender to terrorism. Yasser Arafat has waged a war of...

Libya Able To Create Weapons-Grade Plutonium

Far from taking advantage of Bush's need for a PR win and surrendering a useless WMD program, the UN has discovered that Libya successfully manufactured small amounts of weapons-grade plutonium: Libya succeeded in making weapons-grade plutonium before announcing it would abandon its efforts to build a nuclear bomb, United Nations inspectors said yesterday. ... Libya's nuclear experiments included the separation of plutonium, albeit "in very small quantities", it said. Anyone doubting Libya's earlier intentions now? If we had not shown the fortitude necessary to chase Saddam into a hole in the ground -- and then drag him out of it -- Ghadafi would still deny the existence of his programs and wait the West out on sanctions. Only after we demonstrated that our passive security policy had passed unmourned into history did Ghadafi calculate his risk-to-benefit ratio and come clean with the West. Only after we showed that we finally...

February 21, 2004

Scott Ritter: Bribed?

Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector who took on the Clinton Administration's lack of action against Iraq and then mysteriously started singing a different tune in 2002, may have had good reasons for his change of heart -- 400,000 of them, approximately, as Jon at QandO notes: MEMRI is reporting on the alleged documents revealing who was in the pay of Saddam Hussein. ... It's well-known that Iraq was actively subverting the Food-for-Oil sanctions by exporting oil to to tune of 200-400,000b/day to neighboring nations like Syria. However, if his end-arounds included political pay-offs, it will require diplomatic consequences....and possibly legal consequences. Case in point: Shaker Al-Khaffaji (7 million barrels) advanced $400,000 to Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. Ritter produced a documentary purporting to tell the true story of the weapons inspections, which in his telling were corrupted by sinister U.S. manipulation. [47] Again, let me state:...

February 23, 2004

Washington Times and UK Telegraph: We're Closing In

The UK Telegraph and the Washington Times report that Task Force 121 is on its way to Afghanistan to hunt for "high-value targets": Telegraph: The top-secret US commando team that spearheaded the capture of Saddam Hussein is heading for Afghanistan in the latest sign that the hunt for Osama bin Laden is coming to a head. Battle-hardened units from Task Force 121 are being shifted as intelligence reports increase on the possible whereabouts of the terrorist leader, according to an article in the Washington Times by a reporter known for his access to the special forces. Most of the "high-value targets" from Saddam's regime have been caught or killed, Pentagon officials told the paper. "Iraq has become more of a policing problem than a hunt for high-value Iraqis. Afghanistan is the place where 121 can do more." Times: The new task force to hunt bin Laden in the Afghanistan area...

February 24, 2004

Libya Backtracking on Lockerbie Responsibility

With all of the recent good news coming from Tripoli's cooperation in eliminating its WMD programs, it's a bit disappointing to see them retreating from the positions that allowed them entry to the West in the first place: Libya's prime minister, Shokri Ghanem, appeared to backtrack today over the country's admissions of responsibility for the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and the Lockerbie bombing. In a switch from the more concilatory tone of the country's foreign minister earlier this month, Dr Ghanem said that the police officer's death was now "settled" and that Libya had paid compensation to the Lockerbie relatives to "buy peace" and an end to sanctions. "We thought it was easier for us to buy peace and this is why we agreed to compensation," he told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Last year, Libya had finally concluded a two-decade battle for compensation and justice for the...

February 26, 2004

Probably Not Eligible For Early Release

The Telegraph has an exclusive interview with a female Palestinian terrorist, a wanna-be suicide bomber who got caught by Israeli security forces before she detonated her explosives. To say she's not remorseful is an understatement: "Yes, I will do it again if I can," said Obeida Khalil, 27. "When I put the suicide explosives belt on I felt very happy, very content. I was angry when they caught me because I was not able to be a martyr. I wanted to be the first female martyr and to kill as many Israeli soldiers as possible. I chose the bus station because my brother blew himself up there." Khalil claimed that she became a suicide bomber to avenge the death of her fiance, who was killed by an Israeli helicopter attack earlier. However, it's not as though his death put that thought into her head, as she says in the very...

February 28, 2004

Iranians: Great Candidates for MoveOn.Org

The new hard-line Iranian government apparently wants to play a role in the Presidential election by emulating the global-conspiracy nuts at MoveOn.org and International Answer. Iranian state radio claims that the US and Pakistan captured Osama bin Laden "a long time ago," and is holding him secretly until the right moment for the Bush campaign: Pentagon and Pakistani officials on Saturday denied an Iranian state radio report that Osama bin Laden was captured in Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan "a long time ago." ... The report was carried by Iran radio's external Pashtun service, which is designed for listeners in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the language is widely spoken. Iran state radio's main news channel the Farsi-language service for Iranian listeners did not carry the bin Laden report. Iran state television also did not carry the report. ... The director of Iran radio's Pashtun service, Asheq Hossein, said...

March 1, 2004

Better Late Than Never

The Iraqi Governing Council has finally agreed on a transitional constitution, two days past an American deadline but with broad agreement on its contents: Besides a comprehensive bill of rights, including protections for free speech, religious expression, assembly and due process, it also spells out the executive branch. Under the terms of the document, Iraq will have a president with two deputies, a prime minister and a cabinet. ... The document "strikes a balance between the role of Islam and the bill of individual rights and democratic principles," the official said. It also contains a "goal" of having the Iraqi Parliament consist of at least 25% women, although this is not a quota. The documents attempts to establish individual rights as the basis of government, including freedom of religion, and aspires to be not only historic for Iraq but for the entire region, one official said. The new constitution still...

US, Pakistan Agree on Osama Hunt

Reports have surfaced claiming that Pakistan has finally agreed to allow US troops to operate on Pakistani soil in the upcoming Special Ops spring offensive on al Qaeda (via Drudge): Thousands of U.S. troops will be deployed in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan in return for Washington's support of President Pervez Musharraf's pardon of the Pakistani scientist who this month admitted leaking nuclear arms secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in the issue [of the New Yorker] that goes on sale on Monday. Musharraf came under fire earlier for his breathtaking pardon of the man responsible for nuclear proliferation to the "Axis of Evil" and seemingly everyone else. The Bush administration leveraged that into a sweeping deal which Musharraf publicly claimed he'd never allow. And without being able to freely operate on both sides of the border, we wouldn't be likely to get...

March 2, 2004

Politburo Diktat: The AWOL Media

The Commissar notes a story that has escaped attention from the ever-vigiliant mainstream media: Comrades, February has ended, and evil Amerikan forces lost 23 soldiers in Iraq. To date, MiniTruth has employed appropriate full media blackout on this development. ... As far as Commissar has been able to Google, there are no reports of February casualties in this context. Therefore, Commissar will award new dacha, Hero of Soviet Union medal, and bolshoi linkage to any comrade identifying traitorous, counter-revolutionary mention of low February casualties in any mainstream MiniTruth media. Full blackout, comrades; enemy bombers overhead! Jay Reding also notes that this has received no media coverage whatsoever. Why not? When we sustained a (relatively) high rate of casualties in November, it's all we heard about from the mainstream news media. Gee ... you don't suppose they've got an agenda, do you?? Try Googling it yourself, or use the search engines...

March 5, 2004

Libya: 44,000 Pounds of Mustard Gas

George Bush's alliance with Tony Blair in using force to unseat Saddam Hussein continued to bear fruit as Libya revealed the extent of their chemical weapons programs at the Hague earlier today: Libya acknowledged stockpiling 44,000 pounds of mustard gas and disclosed the location of a production plant in a declaration submitted Friday to the world's chemical weapons watchdog. Libyan Col. Mohamed Abu Al Huda handed over 14 file cartons disclosing Libya's chemical weapons programs to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said general director Rogelio Pfirter. ... Libya also declared thousands of tons of precursors that could be used to make sarin nerve gas, and two storage facilities, Pfirter said. The production and storage facilities were near Tripoli and in the south of the country, Pfirter said. Even Moammar Gaddafi acknowledges that the military action by the Anglo-American Coalition, which included support from over thirty other nations,...

Why We Can't Trust the French

The Italians are learning how trustworthy the French are as allies against terrorism: The Left-wing intelligentsia of Paris have manned the barricades to defend an Italian terrorist turned novelist who is fighting extradition to serve a sentence for political killings in the late 1970s. Cesare Battisti, 49, was convicted by a Milan court in absentia in 1988 of four murders, several attempted murders and robberies while leader of a group called the Armed Proletarians for Communism. ... The terrorist's lawyers claim that the refusal is a legal precedent which still protects their client. The government's lawyers say the decision was political rather than legal and is therefore reversible. Just as when the French decided to block the extradition of Ira Einhorn, the hippie murderer, the French literati are more interested in giving aid and comfort to a murder and a terrorist than in cooperating with their Italian neighbors and supposed...

March 8, 2004

Better Late Than Never

Iraq took another step in its long journey to freedom with the signing of its new, interim constitution -- a signing delayed by a demonstration of power by a leading Shi'ite cleric: Members of Iraq's Governing Council signed a landmark interim constitution Monday after resolving a political impasse sparked by objections from the country's most powerful cleric. The signing was a key step in U.S. plans to hand over power to the Iraqis by July 1. ... The charter which includes a 13-article bill of rights, enshrines Islam as one of the bases of law and outlines the shape of a parliament and presidency as well as a federal structure for the country. It will remain in effect until a permanent constitution is approved by a national referendum planned for late 2005. Originally scheduled to be signed last Friday, the Shi'ite members of Iraq's Governing Council suddenly boycotted at...

March 9, 2004

Tenet Explains It Again, Uses Smaller Words This Time

George Tenet appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to explain to them -- again -- that the intelligence on Iraq was the same that the Senate had seen when they voted for an official policy of regime change in 1998, and that Bush just happened to have the stones that the previous administration and the nation lacked before 9/11. I'd go into detail, but Jon at QandO deals with it succinctly and humorously. Make sure you read everything Jon and McQ are writing at QandO while you're there -- definitely one of the outstanding blogs, especially for those with libertarian views or leanings....

March 11, 2004

Pray for Spain

The Spaniards were brutally attacked this afternoon by terrorists, using coordinated bombings that occurred almost simultaneously, that has left almost 200 people dead and more than 1,400 injured: Spanish government officials pinned the blame on the Basque separatist group ETA for Thursday's blasts in Madrid that killed at least 192 people, but investigators were also exploring a lead with Arabic and Islamic links. The brazen morning rush-hour terror strikes at city train stations also wounded at least 1,400. It's far too early to know who committed these cowardly attacks and why, but thus far ETA has denied responsibility when it normally claims credit, and an al-Qaeda-affiliated group has announced that they committed the bombings: A U.S. official cautioned it was "still too early to say" whether the bombings were the work of ETA or other terror groups, including al Qaeda. Referring to a statement claiming responsibility and attributed to a...

Reviewing al-Qaeda's Claim of Responsibility

While we don't know for sure whether the claim of responsibility from al-Qaeda for today's bombing in Spain is genuine or a sick attempt at PR, the statement itself is useful for focusing us on the true nature of our enemies: The five-page e-mail claim, signed by the shadowy Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, was received at the paper's London offices. It said the brigade's "death squad" had penetrated "one of the pillars of the crusade alliance, Spain," and carried out what it called Operation Death Trains. "This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam," the claim said. ... "When we attacked the Italian troops in Nasiriyah and sent you and America's agents an ultimatum to withdraw from the anti-Islam alliance, you did not understand the the message. Now we have made it clear and hope that this time...

March 12, 2004

Krauthammer Pounds Le Monde Editor

In today's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer fisks a Wall Street Journal editorial by Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor of the French magazine Le Monde: Colombani glories in Europe's post-Sept. 11 "solidarity" with America: "Let us remember here the involvement of French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the operations launched in Afghanistan to . . . free the Afghans." Come again? The French arrived in Mazar-e Sharif after it fell, or as military analyst Jay Leno put it, "to serve as advisers to the Taliban on how to surrender properly." Afghanistan was liberated by America acting practically unilaterally, with an even smaller coalition than it had in Iraq -- Britain and Australia, with the rest of the world holding America's coat. But then came Iraq. "The problem was not so much the war itself, but the fact that it was launched without U.N. approval," Colombani explains. Rubbish. The Kosovo...

The Nobility of the Insurgency

Somewhat lost in the shuffle of the news from Spain is this story from the New York Times, which demonstrates the depravity of the former Ba'athists who terrorize the new Iraq: A day after two American civilians and their Iraqi translator were killed in a roadside ambush, two Iraqi washerwomen working for American forces were attacked by masked gunmen and shot to death, police officials said Thursday. Maj. Riyadh Kadhem Jawad of the Iraqi police said the women, who cleaned and ironed clothes for American soldiers in the southern city of Basra, were driving home Wednesday night in a taxi when four gunmen surrounded their car, ordered the taxi driver out and then shot the women. The Ba'athists deliberately targeted the women, eschewing the car that the driver offered to the gunmen thinking they were robbing him. Each woman was shot five times, or as the driver put it, "five...

March 13, 2004

Al-Qaeda Claims Responsibility for Madrid Bombings

Reuters reports that Spanish authorities have found a videotape of a Moroccan spokesman for al-Qaeda, taking responsibility for the Madrid rail bombings, according to the Spanish Interior Minister: "It's a claim made by a man in Arabic with a Moroccan accent. He makes the declaration in the name of someone who says he is the military spokesman of al-Qaida in Europe," he told reporters. This story is breaking just now, but it seems to confirm what we suspected all along....

March 14, 2004

UN Acknowledges Oil-For-Food Scandal, Finally

The UN has belatedly acknowledged the rampant corruption and abject failure of its administration of the Iraq oil-for-food program, finally agreeing to investigate more than six weeks after the list of payoffs from Saddam Hussein was published: The United Nations has bowed to international pressure to investigate allegations of corruption surrounding its oil-for-food programme, under which Iraqi oil was sold on behalf of Saddam Hussein's regime. The move follows claims that UN officials were caught up in a reward system set up by Saddam, which apparently granted proceeds from the sale of million of barrels of oil to friendly politicians, officials and businessmen around the world. And why this sudden desire to set things straight? The new Iraqi government seems intent on finding where the money went, and have hired some big guns to hunt it down -- which may wind up embarassing more than the people currently on the...

Power Line Says It All ...

... in two posts this afternoon. Rather than doing an analysis on my own and elliptically winding up at the same place, I'll just refer you to these two excellent pieces by the Rocket Man First, my colleague dissects the news from Spain that shows the Socialists making enormous gains in today's elections, possibly winning a majority over the Conservatives, probably as a result of the Madrid bombings. Rocket Man expresses his disappointment in the Spaniard's failure to rise to the occasion, instead allowing al-Qaeda the victory they intended -- and wonders whether Americans may wind up doing the exact same thing: News reports are conflicting; some exit polls show the Socialists winning, others show Aznar's Popular Party suffering major losses, but clinging to a slight majority. Whatever the result turns out to be, it seems that al Qaeda's goal of influencing the Spanish election in favor of the Socialist...

New Afghan Offensive Gets Results

The Telegraph reports in tomorrow's edition that the new US offensive on al-Qaeda and Taliban holdouts in Afghanistan has already reaped rewards -- three top Taliban commanders have been taken out of the action as well as a dozen Taliban fighters, the latter in the most permanent way possible: Three Taliban commanders have been arrested and 12 of the movement's fighters killed as the American military launched an operation in southern Afghanistan aimed at capturing militants, including Osama bin Laden. The leaders were captured in Zabul, a lawless province in the south where remnants of the ousted regime are fighting for control by bribing and intimidating the local population. Spring is coming to the mountains of Afghanistan -- and so are the US armed forces....

March 15, 2004

Spain Bugs Out

In what can very accurately be termed the first surrender in the war on terror, the new Spanish government has explicitly stated that Spain will withdraw from the anti-terror Coalition and will immediately withdraw its troops from Iraq as soon as it takes office: Pulling a major ally from the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, Spain's prime minister-elect will withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq in the coming months, a Socialist Party spokesman said. ... "Today, the Spanish people have spoken, and they said they want a government of change," he said in a victory speech. The surprise victor in national elections vowed that fighting terrorism would be his first priority as he sets about creating an administration "that will work for peace." As if al-Qaeda is interested in "peace", unless by peace you mean the reconquest of Andalusia. Looks like they're off to a great start. It's not too far off...

Violets Are Blue, Roses Are Red, You Were A Monster and Now You're Dead

US officials announced the death of senior al-Qaeda leader Kahlid Ali Hajj, also known as "The Poet", in a shootout in Saudi Arabia: A senior al Qaeda leader -- described as the group's "chief of operations in the Arabian Peninsula" -- was killed in a shootout in Saudi Arabia, U.S. officials told CNN on Monday. A U.S. counterterrorism official called the death "very significant, and a major blow to al Qaeda." The man was identified as Abu Hazim al-Sha'ir, also known as Kahlid Ali Hajj. He was also nicknamed "the poet," officials said. "This was a very significant senior al Qaeda figure in Saudi Arabia," the counterterrorism official said. So much of this war goes on behind the scenes, it often appears that nothing is happening, leading to charges of complacency or distraction, especially in regard to Iraq. People tend to forget that the fighting continues on many fronts, some...

Ripples of Madrid Felt Down Under

The impact of the Madrid bombings are being felt all throughout the Coalition. Now Australia has gotten a case of the jitters, and the Aussie leftists are questioning John Howard's support of the US in the war on terror following an intelligence report stating that Australia is at risk because of their foreign policy: A senior FBI counter-terrorism expert today confirmed that a terrorist attack on Australia was inevitable, and the nation was clearly more of a target because of its alliance to the US. The assessment of the FBI's executive assistant director of counter terrorism John Pistole backs comments by Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty that, if Islamic extremists were behind the Madrid bombings, it was likely because of Spain's pro-US position on Iraq. Howard stirred up a hornet's nest by denying the specific attraction of al-Qaeda to US allies in response to Keelty's initial assertion of terrorist...

March 16, 2004

A Tale of Two Editorials

This morning, I read two editorials, one from the local Star-Tribune and the other from the Washington Post, the former demonstrating the Left's lack of coherence, logic, and vision on the war on terror, and the latter which gets it right. The Strib manages to encapsulate the effort on the Left that I predicted last night -- to use the Madrid bombing as an excuse to retreat from the war and to blame the Bush administration for the bombing by insinuation: But the Spanish -- along with most other peoples of the world -- never did believe that invading Iraq was a necessary or constructive action. Only 1 in 10 supported their government's decision to join with the United States and Britain in carrying out the invasion. Al-Qaida or someone operating in its name has now driven a large wedge into that seam of dissension. Full of rage, bitterness and...

March 17, 2004

Dean Acknowledges Al-Qaeda/Iraq Connection

... or at least that's what can be taken from Howard Dean's comments during a conference call defending his former adversary in the primaries, John Kerry. Dean made these remarks: "The president was the one who dragged our troops to Iraq, which apparently has been a factor in the death of 200 Spaniards over the weekend." After thinking about the implications of blaming George Bush for a bombing that killed 200 people, the ever-classy Dean later issued a "clarification", a uniquely Democratic mechanism in which a candidate retracts their stupidity while trying to make it sound like genius: "Let me be clear, there is no justification for terrorism. Today I was simply repeating what those who have claimed responsibility for the bombings in Spain said was the reason they carried out that despicable act." Dean also offered the excuse that he was merely repeating what was said on al-Qaeda's tape,...

March 18, 2004

Pakistanis Have "High-Value" AQ Target Surrounded

CNN reports that the Pakistani Army has surrounded a "high-value" al-Qaeda target being protected by 200 or more AQ fighters, and quotes sources that the target may be #2 man Ayman al-Zawahiri: Pakistani forces have surrounded what may be a "high-value" al Qaeda target in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, President Pervez Musharraf told CNN. "We feel that there may be a high-value target," Musharraf told CNN. "I can't say who." Two Pakistani government sources told CNN that intelligence indicates the surrounded figure is Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's number two leader. This is the second significant engagement for the Pakistanis this week; Monday's action resulted in 24 AQ fighters dead and another 18 captured. Presumably, the interrogation of those prisoners had some influence on today's battle. More later ... (via Citizen Smash)...

March 19, 2004

Arabs Blame Powell for Arab Terrorism

In a surreal moment earlier today, Arab journalists walked out of a Baghdad press conference with Secretary of State Colin Powell to protest the death of two Iraqi reporters and the lack of security in Iraq: One Arab journalist stood up as soon as Powell walked into the room at the Baghdad convention center and read a statement saying that after one year of "U.S. occupation," Americans cannot provide security in Iraq. "We demand an open investigation in front of the mass media," the Arab journalist said. "We also demand that security be guaranteed to journalists" working in Iraq, he said. Seconds later, more than 20 journalists walked out of the room. Thus continueth the process by which those who try to provide security are continually blamed for the actions of those who defy it. Does it strike anyone else as ridiculous to blame the policeman for the burglar, especially...

March 20, 2004

Tory Leader Strongly Supports Blair on Terror

Today's Telegraph notes the strong bipartisan support for the UK's approach on the war on terror. Michael Howard, the Conservative Party leader, had been suspected of trying to exploit Tony Blair's vulnerability on Iraq for political gain, but in a speech to News Corporation executives in Cancun, Howard not only fully supported Blair but also blasted the Spanish Socialists for "moral cowardice": Michael Howard accused the new Spanish government of "moral cowardice" in the face of Islamist terrorism last night as he vowed to match Tony Blair's tough line against the threat of al-Qa'eda. ... "Countries cannot insulate themselves from terrorist attack by opting out of the war on terror," he said. "We cannot buy ourselves immunity by changing our foreign policy. Apart from the moral cowardice of that position, it can never work in practice." In a speech to executives of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in Cancun, Mr Howard...

Jack Straw to Spain: No Guts, No Glory

In another article in today's London Telegraph, Jack Straw lays a smackdown on Spain equal to that of Michael Howard, noting that the Brits are "made of sterner stuff": Mr Straw said the reason why many Spaniards changed their vote to the anti-war Socialists in last weekend's election was unclear. Were there to be a terrorist attack here, he said, the British electorate would not be "blackmailed" by al-Qa'eda. "They are made of sterner stuff than that." Translation, as provided by the ever-excellent Strange Women Lying in Ponds: "Mr. Straw says that the Brits have more cojones than you." Mr. Straw, Britain's Foreign Secretary, also had some harsh words for the previous American administration, noting that intelligence had been gathered at the time of the first World Trade Center attack that al-Qaeda had been involved and were planning on continuing their campaign against America and the West. Straw insists that...

March 21, 2004

Why The Law-Enforcement Approach Doesn't Work

The AP reports on the legal front of the war on terror -- and the news is not looking good: The post-Sept. 11 war against terrorism is suffering as much in the courts as in the streets with several legal setbacks involving suspected 20 members and other groups around the world. The biggest reversal came in Germany when a court threw out the only conviction of a Sept. 11 suspect. But other cases have been hindered, too, including against a militant Indonesian cleric and Zacarias Moussaoui, the only alleged Sept. 11 conspirator charged in the United States. The U.S. reluctance to let witnesses in custody testify and the sheer complexity of cross-border investigations are mostly to blame. The article goes on to define the lunacy of treating al-Qaeda terrorists as defendants in civilian courts. In order to defeat al-Qaeda, Western nations need to stop the terrorists before they strike --...

The High-Water Mark for Islamists?

Islamists suffered an unexpected setback in Malaysia, where they wound up on the wrong end of an electoral landslide that put moderates firmly in control of the world's largest Muslim nation: Malaysia's ruling moderates have won an unexpected landslide victory over the fundamentalist Islamic opposition in Sunday's elections. The results are being seen as a personal endorsement for Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and a setback for Islamic hardliners. Voters were choosing 219 members of paliament and 505 state assembly members. Abdullah's National Party has so far taken almost 90 percent of parliament's seats giving the prime minister a mandate for change. Abdullah, who took over from longtime leader Mahathir Mohamad in October, was always expected to win, but the margin was a surprise. While we hear the worries on the left that George Bush is radicalizing Muslims around the world, we're seeing the opposite: Iran negotiating compliance on non-proliferation,...

Sheik Yassin Killed in Gaza

Israeli military forces killed Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the "spiritual leader" of the Hamas terrorist group, in a raid on his Gaza City neighborhood: Witnesses said Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at Yassin and two bodyguards as they left the mosque, killing them instantly. Hamas officials confirmed that he had been killed. Yussef Haddad, 35, a taxi driver, said he saw the missiles hit and kill Yassin and the bodyguards. "Their bodies were shattered," he said. Yassin was by far the most senior Palestinian militant killed in more than three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Predictably, hundreds of Palestinians called for revenge. But here's the problem -- over 75% already support the indiscriminate killing of Israeli citizens that this "spiritual" leader directed, so calling for revenge is nothing but a redundancy. The Israelis literally have nothing to lose anymore by targeting senior terrorist leadership, since none of them have ever given any...

March 22, 2004

Iraqi Militias to Disband

The Anglo-American led Coalition administration in Baghdad is close to reaching a deal to disarm two of the largest Iraq militias, absorbing them into a centrally-controlled security apparatus and defusing one of the biggest obstacles to domestic stability: Leaders of Iraq's two largest militias have provisionally agreed to dissolve their forces, according to senior U.S. and Iraqi officials. The move is a major boost to a U.S. campaign to prevent civil war by eliminating armed groups before sovereignty is handed over to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, the officials said. Members of the two forces -- the Shiite Muslim Badr Organization and the Kurdish pesh merga -- will be offered a chance to work in Iraq's new security services or claim substantial retirement benefits as incentives to disarm and disband. Members of smaller militias will also be allowed to apply for positions with the new security services, but...

Bummer of a Birthmark, Yasser

Now that Israel has signaled to the Palestinians that it's tired of negotiating with people who want nothing less than their extermination by executing the leader of Hamas, another leader in the Palestinian Authority has realized that he might be next: The missile strike that killed Yassin may have shaken Arafat in more ways than one. The killing sparked huge demonstrations throughout the West Bank and Gaza, showing just how formidable a rival Hamas has become to Arafat's Palestinian Authority. ... After Yassin's killing, Arafat expressed concern he, too, might be targeted. "Arafat feels he is threatened, and we feel he's threatened because when they target Sheik Yassin, they are not far from Arafat," said Palestinian Communications Minister Azzam Ahmed. Well, the reason he may be targeted is that Ahmed is more correct than I suspect he wants to be: Arafat is little different from Yassin in his terrorist tactics....

March 23, 2004

Israel Signals The End of One-Sided Negotiations

Israel has clearly signaled its refusal to take part in any more meaningless negotiations, announcing that it intends to kill the leadership of any organization that targets its citizens, including the Palestinian Authority: With tension between Israelis and Palestinians at intense levels following the assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin (search), an Israeli security official on Tuesday said they will continue the targeted killings of the entire Hamas leadership without waiting for the terror group to strike again. ... Israel's army chief also suggested Tuesday that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah could eventually be assassinated by Israel. "I think that their (Arafat's and Nasrallah's) responses yesterday show that they understand that it is nearing them," Yaalon said. "In the long term, I hope that this will be a sign to all those who choose to hurt us that this will be their end," Yaalon said....

Telegraph Can't See Past the Wheelchair

A foolish and ignorant editorial in the normally sensible London Telegraph had me seeing red, and led to a sharp exchange at NRO's The Corner, where they're having trouble analogizing Sheik Yassin. The Corner's Andrew Stuttaford posted this quote with the admonition that the US needed to be saying the same thing: Whatever Yassin's death was meant to achieve, its symbolism is disastrous for Israel. Did Mr Sharon and his advisers consider how the spectacle of helicopter gunships rocketing an old man in a wheelchair outside his mosque would appear to the world? Did they intend to turn this merchant of death into a victim - the Palestinian equivalent of Leon Klinghoffer? Of course, this equation of Yassin with Klinghoffer is nothing less than repulsive. Just to remind everyone, Leon Klinghoffer was executed by Palestinian terrorists (aligned with Yassin, if not working directly with him) in the 1980s while taking...

Just For The Record

I know that this has been commented on in the blogosphere, but I feel the need to make it clear here as well. There seems to be a lot of blather from the Left about how Bush somehow didn't do enough in eight months to eliminate al-Qaeda; Richard Clarke claims that Bush should have attacked al-Qaeda in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 to prevent AQ terrorism from reaching American soil. However, when Bush took action against Saddam's Iraq -- who, after all, tried to assassinate a former President, was involved in the first World Trade Center bombing, had been shooting at our aircraft in the no-fly zone, and was harboring Abu Abbas, among others -- in order to make sure Saddam couldn't perpetrate an act of terrorism against the US, the Left has done nothing but scream at him ever since. Hmmm. Also, as a somewhat related note, do you notice...

How We Will Win in the Middle East

Tomorrow's New York Times analyzes the Kurdish uprising in Syria that has spread over the past few weeks, and determines that the cause of the unrest originates with the Iraqi Kurds -- and their newfound freedoms in a liberated Iraq: Kurdish Syrians, 2 million of Syria's 17 million people, say that watching rights for Kurds being enshrined in a new if temporary constitution next door in Iraq finally pushed them to take to the streets to demand greater recognition. In their wake is a toll of blackened government buildings, schools, grain silos and vehicles across a remote swath of the north. "What happened did not come out of a void," says Bishar Ahmed, a 30-year-old Kurd whose cramped stationery shop sits right next to a cluster of blackened buildings in Malikiya. "The pressure has been building for nearly 50 years. They consider us foreigners; we have no rights as citizens."...

March 24, 2004

Surprise! The Appeasers Aren't Safe, Either

Germany learned a lesson last night about the fate of all appeasers, and fortunately for them may have learned it the easy way -- this time: German President Johannes Rau canceled a trip to Djibouti Tuesday after receiving threats that Islamic terrorists were planning to try and assassinate him, his office said. Rau had planned on wrapping up a three-nation African tour in the tiny country on the Horn of Africa on Wednesday, where he was to meet with German naval troops patrolling the Indian Ocean coast as part of the U.S.-led war on terror. Germany, of course, offered up a very public Nein! when asked to support the Anglo-American proposal to topple Saddam Hussein for its twelve-year nose-thumbing of UNSC demands for compliance to 1991 cease-fire terms. Gerhard Schroeder hitched his wagon to Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin in joining the Axis of Weasels, although Germany never went...

Bush Clarifies Position on Yassin, Israel

George Bush clarified his position on Israel after a press release from the White House left some doubt as to the administration's position on the fate of terrorists: President Bush yesterday defended Israel's "right to defend herself from terror," one day after a spokesman said the administration was "deeply troubled" by the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin and concerned it could derail efforts to jump-start the peace process. Bush made his remarks to reporters shortly before the U.N. Security Council began a debate on the Israeli action and as a group of Israeli officials met with White House officials to discuss Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to unilaterally separate from the Palestinians. Bush announced that next week a team of senior U.S. officials will likely make their third trip to Israel in two months to continue discussions on the Sharon plan. What peace process? You cannot have a peace...

Reason: Administration Critics On Iraq Missing The Point

Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Daily Star in Lebanon, published a thoughtful column on the debate over Iraq in Reason today, reminding his readers about the overall strategy of Bush's approach to terror and why Iraq is central to its success: The last pillar, however, was the most interesting, and went to the heart of the strategy adopted by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and, ultimately, Bush. By intervening in the relationship between the brutish Iraqi regime and its long-suffering subjects, the US adopted a policy of enforced democratization. As far as the Bush administration was concerned, a democratic Iraq at the heart of the Arab world could become a liberal beacon in the region, prompting demands for openness and real reform inside neighboring states. Ridiculous you say? The Syrian regime, faced in the past two weeks with protests by individuals seeking greater freedom and a revolt by disgruntled Kurds,...

March 25, 2004

Maybe The Wrong Kerr(e)y Is Running For President

The 9/11 Commission has been mostly a dog-and-pony show for venting a lot of rage and frustration and for generating a lot of partisan blame-throwing for supposed security lapses that led to the deaths of 3,000 Americans in the worst attack on American soil ever. It's one of those political exercises that you know is obligatory, under the circumstances of its time, but the public aspect of it will only serve to reward grandstanding and the press that covers it. A great example of this is the griping by members of the commission and the press about NSA Director Condoleezza Rice's insistence on testifying in private. If the point of this process is for the panel to make a determination of how we can avoid another 9/11, then private testimony from someone who is actively pursuing terrorists shouldn't keep the commission from doing its job. But when commissioners like former...

Now the Carrot

Tony Blair has taken the lead in working the diplomacy front of the war on terror by taking a politically risky trip to Libya and welcoming Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi back into the international fold: Tony Blair has shaken hands and is the middle of his controversial meeting with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Thursday's Tripoli talks follows Libya's decision last December to renounce weapons of mass destruction. Mr Blair's visit has been criticised by some politicians and received a mixed response from relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. No doubt, many issues separate Libya from the West, both specific (the Fletcher murder case) and general (Libya's human-rights record). However, if we are to convince rogue states like Libya to cough up their WMDs and to fight terrorism, the West has to provide some positive incentives for that transition. Libya also demonstrates that the West doesn't have imperial ambitions...

Rich Lowry Dissects Richard Clarke

Rich Lowry, in today's New York Post, takes apart Richard Clarke and outlines why Clarke has sacrificed his credibility for thirty pieces of silver (via Instapundit): DEAN Acheson famously titled his memoir of his years as secretary of state after World War II "Present at the Creation." Anyone close to Richard Clarke these last few days could write a memoir called "Present at the Self-Immolation." Rarely has a former public servant with such a sterling reputation shot it all away so quickly. ... For evidence of this, look no further than Clarke's August 2002 briefing for reporters while he was still at the National Security Council. ... In his 2002 briefing, Clarke said that the Bush administration decided in "mid-January" 2001 to continue with existing Clinton policy while deciding whether or not to pursue more aggressive ideas that had been rejected throughout the Clinton administration. Nowhere does this appear in...

We Keep Them Running

US and Afghan officials told the press today that the new spring offensive in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan -- which isn't even fully underway yet -- has impacted al-Qaeda's ability to mount their own offensive and has forced them into spending their time on the run: Al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, increasingly pursued by American and Pakistani forces, are on the run or hunkering down rather than mounting a threatened spring offensive of their own, U.S. and Afghan officials say. ... "We're doing a great deal to disrupt operations," the spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, said in Kabul. "The absence of violence against the Afghan people generally shows how well we're doing." With spring "we would expect stepped-up activities against the Afghan people and aid agencies and that's one of the things Mountain Storm is designed to prevent," Hilferty said. Spokesmen for the Taliban militia, the...

March 26, 2004

Clarke's Story Contines to Crumble

Richard Clarke's testimony to the 9/11 Commission and his new book continues to be contradicted by stubborn facts, this time in today's Boston Globe: FBI officials vehemently denied yesterday recent assertions by former White House terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke that the FBI learned in December 1999 that terrorists had been slipping into Boston on liquefied natural gas tankers from Algeria, yet failed to notify local authorities. We did thoroughly investigate that LNG tanker situation and came to the conclusion they were not being used to transport terrorists into our country, said Kenneth Kaiser, the special agentin-charge of the FBIs Boston office. We didnt brief the mayor that there was an Al Qaeda cell here, because there wasnt one. According to Kaiser, the FBI was investigating the thwarted 1999 millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport when it learned that several people being questioned in Boston had entered...

March 28, 2004

Syria May Be Getting the Message Now

The Australian reports today that Syria, long a haven for Islamic terrorists and a sister dictatorship to Saddam's own Ba'ath regime in Iraq, has approached the Australian government to intercede on its behalf to improve its relations with the US (via Instapundit): SYRIA has appealed to Australia to use its close ties with Washington to help the Arab nation shake off its reputation as a terrorist haven and repair its relations with the US. Secret talks between the two nations have been under way for months but have become more urgent as rogue nations reconsider their role in allowing terrorists to thrive, in light of the US determination to take pre-emptive military action. ... Syria's Melbourne-based honorary consul, Antonios Zyrabi, confirmed to The Weekend Australian last night that Syria wanted Australia to help it come in from the diplomatic cold. As I noted earlier, Syria has been rocked in recent...

March 29, 2004

UN Shifts Blame on Baghdad Bombing in August

The UN finally released its official report on the August bombing of the Baghdad UN headquarters, and Kofi Annan has cashiered the chief security specialist and reprimanded two others: The UN secretary general has asked for security coordinator Tun Myat to quit after a scathing report on last year's bomb attack on the UN's HQ in Baghdad. But Kofi Annan refused an offer to resign from his deputy Louise Frechette, his spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters at the United Nations. ... The report suggests that UN officials failed to ask searching questions before deciding to return UN staff to Baghdad, under heavy international pressure. The report was particularly critical of two UN officials in Baghdad, accusing them of "a dereliction of duty" and "a lethargy that is bordering on gross negligence" for failing to shield the office windows with blast-resistant film. The report also blamed the deceased special envoy Sergio...

Al-Qaeda Intelligence Chief Dead?

Pakistan's recent military offensive may have been more successful than first thought -- according to radio intercepts, their intelligence chief, a mysterious man known only as Abdullah, may have been killed: The radio transmissions disclosed that a man named Abdullah had been killed and that the death caused a great deal of distress among the al-Qaida forces, a Pakistani intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. "He was a very important person for al-Qaida," the official said. He added that interrogations of suspected al-Qaida members led the Pakistanis to believe that Abdullah was the group's top intelligence official. US intelligence officials confirmed that an Abdullah was indeed considered to be the top intelligence official, but they are careful to remain noncommittal on whether the Abdullah reportedly killed is the same man. If so, the death combined with the dispersal of what remained of the AQ brigade that the Pakistanis attacked...

March 30, 2004

Brits, Filipinos Score Victories Against Terrorism

Twelve terrorists are in custody in the UK and the Phillipines today as major terrorist operations have been disrupted. In the Phillipines, four Abu Sayyaf Islamic terrorists were arrested and eighty pounds of explosives confiscated: The Philippine president, Gloria Arroyo, today said that a terrorist attack on the scale of the Madrid bombings had been averted with the arrest of four Abu Sayyaf members and the seizure of 36kg (80lb) of explosives. The suspects, who allegedly trained with Jemaah Islamiyah, south-east Asia's al-Qaida-linked terrorist network, had planned to bomb trains and shopping malls in Manila, Ms Arroyo said. ... One of the arrested men, Redendo Cain Dellosa, had claimed responsibility for a February 27 explosion on a passenger ferry in which more than 100 people were killed, Ms Arroyo added, although no official conclusion about the cause of the blast had yet been reached. Dellosa is said to have trained...

Did Clarke's Team Keep the FBI In The Dark?

Dueling statements by members of former counterterrorism "czar" Richard Clarke's team andthe FBI leave the impression that they didn't tell the FBI everything that they needed to know about terrorist activities in the US, calling into question Clarke's contention that the FBI failed to aggressively pursue terrorism: The nation's former deputy counterterrorism czar said yesterday that Al Qaeda operatives trained in Afghanistan came through Boston Harbor on liquid natural gas tankers from Algeria and that officials considered Boston a "logistical hub" for the terror network's activities in New England before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "The LNG tanker was an underground railroad for these guys to come into the country illegally," he said. "Were a majority just looking to come to the US and start over again? I think that's a safe bet. What we don't know is what percentage had other motives." Cressey's description of what counterterrorism officials...

QandO Review of 9/11 Commission

My laptop has gone in for repairs, so I'm not able to comment too much on the news this morning -- or even receive e-mail, for that matter. While I'm working on that issue, please make sure you take a look at QandO today on the 9/11 Commission and its reports. McQ is all over the data contained in the reports, pointing out the fallacy of Clintonian prioritization of terrorism, especially in regards Osama and the Taliban. He's done some eye-opening work. Don't forget that the Captain's Caption Contest finishes up at 6 pm CT today, and Jon from QandO will be our guest judge. In the meantime, if you've sent me e-mail, I will eventually get it ... but it may take a bit, so your patience is very much appreciated!...

The Uzbek-Guantanamo Connection Keeping The Lid On Terrorism: BBC

US detainment at the Guantanamo military camp has received more than its share of abuse, especially from the BBC, as an affront to "international law". However, deep within a story about the latest violence in Uzbekistan, the BBC itself shows that the Guantanamo policy has kept terrorism from spreading in Central Asia. First, the report shows that the Uzbek secular dictatorship gets results in its battle with terrorism: Uzbekistan says 20 suspected militants have blown themselves up during a fierce gun battle with special forces in the capital, Tashkent. ... Witnesses said four armed militants entered a house, which was then surrounded by the security forces. An interior ministry statement read out on television said 20 militants blew themselves up with home-made explosives after being surrounded. Three policemen were killed and five were injured. Uzbek authorities blame a long-standing Islamic group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, for the violence, but its London representatives...

No WMDs -- Semicolon

For the past few months, the American public has accepted as established fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, thanks in part to the David Kay report, which held out little hope of finding any WMD caches in Iraq. However, the finality of the WMD status may not be as cut-and-dried as Americans imagine, as the current weapons inspector keeps finding more references to them in his ongoing investigation: In prepared testimony, the CIA's new chief Iraq weapons inspector said he does not rule out finding weapons of mass destruction, adding "we regularly receive reports, some quite intriguing and credible, about concealed caches" of weapons. ... Duelfer is testifying Tuesday behind closed doors before the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees. His comments contrast with those of his predecessor, David Kay, who has said he does not expect that any weapons of mass destruction will be found in...

March 31, 2004

Don't Run

In an effort to invoke the ghosts of Somalia, Iraq' "insurgents" have mutilated the bodies of five Americans and dragged them through the streets of Fallujah, dismembering them and hanging them from a bridge in the heart of the Sunni Triangle: Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four foreign contractors including at least one American through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Five American soldiers died in a roadside bombing nearby. ... Associated Press Television News pictures showed one man beating a charred corpse with a metal pole. Others tied a yellow rope to a body, hooked it to a car and dragged it down the main street of town. Two blackened and mangled corpses were hung from a green iron bridge across the Euphrates. "The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered...

The EU's Slow Surrender to Islamic Anti-Semitism

The European Union, faced with a growing and increasingly restive Muslim population from centuries of colonialism and proximity to the Middle East, consistently refuses to face the problems caused by this community. In its latest report on anti-Semitism, the EU has rewritten its conclusions to avoid offending Islamist groups: A study released by the EU's racism and xenophobia monitoring centre astounded experts by concluding that the wave of anti-Jewish persecution over the last two years stemmed from neo-Nazi or other racist groups. "The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said a summary released to the European Parliament . "A further source of anti-Semitism in some countries was young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction. "Traditionally, anti-Semitic groups on the extreme Right played a part in stirring opinion," it added. The headline findings contradict the body of the report. This says...

April 1, 2004

Muslim Cooperation in the UK

Two stories from the London Telegraph show how the war on terror has divided the Muslim community -- and how imams and other leaders of Islam continue to demonstrate their disloyalty to their nation and their insistence that the only law worthy of recognition is Islam. The first article looks at the reaction of the families of the eight Muslims arrested in the UK after months of surveillance, netting a half-ton of explosives and preventing a large-scale terrorist attack: Britain's most prominent Muslim leader last night demanded a crackdown on "rogue" Islamic preachers, blaming them for brainwashing young men with sermons promoting holy war against the West. Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, was backed by the families of some of the eight men arrested in Tuesday's anti-terrorism raids in south-east England. ... People such as Omar Bakri Mohammed, the leader of Al-Muhajiroun, which campaigns for...

Iraqi Scientist: I Saw the WMDs

The Australian newspaper, The Age, features an interview with a scientist formerly in Saddam's employ who insists that Iraq maintained stockpiles of WMDs, at least until he was arrested and almost executed in 1998 (via Drudge): For seven years, before he was tortured and sentenced to death, Rashid (not his real name) worked at the top of Iraq's scientific establishment. He says he regularly met Saddam Hussein and his cousin and strongman deputy prime minister Abdul Tawab Huweish. After the Gulf War he was put in charge of a taskforce code named "Al Babel" to develop stealth technology to make aircraft and missiles undetectable on radar. Rashid, who now lives in Melbourne, also claims to have had access as a trusted insider to secret underground bunkers where chemical weapons were stored. "Saddam gave me access to everything, he was so desperate to perfect the stealth technology," he says. Now Rashid's...

April 3, 2004

BBC: Spanish Suspect Islamists in Rail Bomb

While I initially held off on commenting on the Spanish rail bombs discovered this week, it's becoming more apparent -- at least to the Spanish -- that radical Islamofascists have targeted Spain despite their appeasement: The explosives found on a high-speed rail track on Friday were of the same type and brand used in the Madrid train blasts, Spain has confirmed. But Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes said it was still too soon to draw any conclusions about who planted the unexploded device. ... Several newspapers reported on Saturday that the Spanish embassy in Egypt had recently received a letter signed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades threatening to attack Spanish embassies and Spanish interests in north Africa and the southern and eastern Mediterranean region. The letter warned that the attacks would go ahead unless Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan within four weeks, El Mundo reported. ......

April 4, 2004

Guardian: Bush, Blair Agreed on Iraq War 9/20/01

Tomorrow's UK Guardian/Observer reports that George Bush and Tony Blair reached a personal accord nine days after 9/11 to go to war in Iraq, in a story that's bound to have electoral impact on both sides of the Atlantic: According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal - dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.' Regime change was already US policy. It was clear, Meyer says, 'that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions'. Elsewhere in...

April 6, 2004

Sami al-Arian: Snitch for Feds?

The case against former professor Sami al-Arian turned a bit more strange yesterday when the US government revealed in a court motion that al-Arian had briefly worked as an FBI informant: Federal prosecutors say a former professor accused of financing terrorism was briefly an FBI informant, according to court documents. The disclosure came in the government's response to efforts by lawyers for Sami Al-Arian to obtain the taped conversations the former University of South Florida professor had with congressmen and top aides in the Bush and Clinton administrations. His status as an informant, apparently confirmed by both sides now in these court motions, raises some uncomfortable questions for the FBI and some government officials. First, Congress will want to know why the FBI felt it necessary to tape conversations between their members and al-Arian. Did the FBI suspect one or more of them of aiding and abetting terrorist organizations? Next,...

Washington Times: No Mention of AQ in Clinton Wrap-Up

The Washington Times has unearthed the final national security report from the Clinton administration to Congress, written in December 2000, and has discovered that it never mentions al-Qaeda and only mentions Osama bin Laden four times (via Drudge): The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress 45,000 words long makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times. The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an "urgent" threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "ignored" it. The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly...

Clinton Report: Identifying the Threats

During the day today, I will be reviewing the national-security report that the outgoing Clinton administration submitted to Congress in December 2000, when certain members of his team claim that they handed the incoming Bush administration a comprehensive strategy to deal with terrorism. In fact, their report belies the notion that anyone took al-Qaeda as a specific threat, and it demonstrates that they focused on state-on-state threats much more seriously -- as could reasonably be expected, under the circumstances. For instance, in the first section of the report, under the subheading Responding to Threats and Crises, the report addresses the major themes of international threats against the United States, and its first statement regards unfriendly states: The persistence of major interstate conflict has required us to maintain the means for countering potential regional aggressors. Long-standing tensions and territorial division on the Korean peninsula and territorial ambitions in the Persian Gulf...

Clinton Report: Pre-emption and Reorganization?

Before the 9/11 Commission questioned Richard Clarke, who as the terrorism "czar" of the Clinton administration prepared this national-security report to Congress, opposition to George Bush from both former members of the prior administration and some members of Congress focused on Bush's strategy of pre-emption -- stopping threats militarily before they became "imminent". Vast amount of energy and debate has gone into whether Bush declared Iraq an imminent threat explicitly (he didn't) or implicitly. Based on this, Bush's opponents have declared the military action in Iraq a violation of international law. However, this report to Congress clearly indicated that the previous administration felt differently. For instance, under the subheading Preparing for an Uncertain Future, the administration made the following suggestions: In addition, preventative diplomacy, often undergirded by the deterrence of our full military capabilities, may help contain or resolve problems before they erupt into crises or contingency operations. You can...

Clinton Report: Protecting the Homeland

Another interesting subsection of Part 2 of the Clinton national-security report is titled Protecting the Homeland. Remember when George Bush was criticized for using the term "homeland" in national security planning? Pundits associated the word with Nazi Germany and claimed that it promoted a "sacred earth" notion that went against everything that American principles represented. Apparently, we know now where that term originated. Under that heading, the report details the strategy for protecting US territory in this order: 1. National Missile Defense 2. Countering Foreign Intelligence Collection 3. Combating Terrorism 4. Domestic Preparedness Against WMDs 5. Critical Infrastructure Protection 6. National Security Emergency Preparedness 7. Fighting Drug Trafficking and Other Int'l Crime Again, national missile defense appears to be the primary concern of the Clinton administration's national-security strategy, while terrorism is addressed third, after NMD and foreign espionage. In fact, it was Bill Clinton who made it our national policy...

Clinton Report: Regional Priorities

Section 3 of the national-security report submitted to Congress in December 2000 deals with regional issues and strategies for confronting them individually as well as integrating approaches across regions. Interestingly, for an administration that Richard Clarke said was focused on al-Qaeda as the greatest threat to American security, the report leaves the two regions most closely associated with Islamofascist terror to last. The structure of Section 3 is shown in the table of contents: Europe and Eurasia East Asia and the Pacific The Western Hemisphere Middle East, North Africa, Southwest and South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa The first topic takes up over a third of Section 3 and covers a number of different state-on-state or ethnic-centered conflicts, mostly in Southeastern Europe, and reviews the Balkans in depth. After talking about the primary goal of the European strategy was to accomplish the complete integration of Europe into a democratic organization of nations,...

Clinton Report: Its Conclusions and Mine

Perhaps the most striking feature of the December 2000 national-security report's conclusion is its banality. It starts out by mouthing platitudes about how the world holds the US in high regard, relying on us as a "catalyst of coalitions" -- as if forming coalitions alone have any merit without an indication as to whether they contribute to success, or mire us in paralysis of endless debate and resolution issuance. Nothing specific about terrorism or even missile defence or any other strategic policy discussed in the report makes it into the conclusion. Instead, it closes with a recommendation to remain engaged globally and a warning to avoid our isolationist impulses, for our own good as well as that of the world. It makes an oddly bureaucratic, bland ending to what actually is an interesting and well-written report. The report represents Clinton foreign-policy objectives fairly well -- and that's why this report...

April 7, 2004

NYT: Sadr's Forces Bring Knives To a Gunfight

Thanks to some rather unfortunate circumstances, a New York Times reporter and photographer got an unplanned up-close-and-personal look at Moktada al-Sadr's militia, which has started an insurrection challenging American and Iraqi authority in Kufa. The quality of military discipline left journalist John Burns a bit shy of impressed: If Moktada al-Sadr has chosen a grand mosque in this Euphrates River town for a last stand against American troops, as many of his militiamen have claimed in recent days, he appears to be relying more on the will of God than anything like military discipline to protect him. Many hundreds of militiamen in the black outfits of Mr. Sadr's Mahdi Army were visible on Tuesday on roads approaching the golden-domed mosque and inside the sprawling compound leading to the inner sanctuary. But they seemed unmarshaled, at least to the layman's eye more milling about than militant. Burns and his photographer...

9/11 Commission "Reconsidering" Clarke Testimony: Washington Times

Thanks to the Washington Times' publication of the national-security report submitted to Congress in December 2000 by the Clinton administration, the Times reports that the 9/11 Commission will be "reconsidering" testimony from former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, whose claim that al-Qaeda was the previous administration's top focus was undercut by the report's anemic approach to terror (via Power Line): The September 11 commission will look at the discrepancy between the testimony of Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered the threat of al Qaeda "urgent" and its final national-security report to Congress, which gave the terror organization scant mention. Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, said commission members are familiar with an article in yesterday's editions of The Washington Times, which showed that President Clinton's final public document on national security never referred to al Qaeda by name and mentioned Osama...

April 8, 2004

The Folly of "Peacekeepers"

Over the past twenty years or so, we have seen the emergence of a new philosophy of military deployment called "peacekeeping". The theory is that if you can negotiate a cessation of open hostilities, you can inject soldiers from a third party or outside coalition to keep people separated long enough to reach a peaceful accommodation. This notion sprngs from a serious misreading of the military standoffs in Korea and Cold War Europe, and in almost every instance it's been used, it has led to either disaster or quagmire. Governments that send troops to be "peacekeepers" inevitably sell this idea to their constituencies like this: Coalition governments could tell their nervous publics that the troops were in Iraq on humanitarian missions repairing roads, digging wells, providing security and generally helping a shattered people recover from decades of war and tyranny. ... Japan's government sold the mission to a skeptical...

Not One Dollar to Arafat

You have to admire the chutzpah of the Palestinians. After killing three of our envoys in Gaza last year and chanting "Death to America" on any occasion they can find, they turn around and hit us up for cash: The Palestinians expect a large aid package from the United States and other donor countries to help rebuild the Gaza Strip after an Israeli withdrawal, the Palestinian foreign minister said Thursday. ... In the event of a Gaza withdrawal, "the Americans should be ready with the World Bank and other donors to make massive economic support for the Palestinian Authority," Shaath said in interview with Israel Radio. He did not give a sum. The Palestinians, already heavily dependent on international aid, are hoping for more money to help rebuild an economy shattered in more than three years of fighting with Israel. Shaath said the funds were needed for "relief, reconstruction, economic...

April 9, 2004

Hostaging: What It Reveals About the Enemy

The world reacted in disgust and anger yesterday when Islamofascist insurgents released video of helpless Japanese civilians kidnapped by the "Mujahideen Brigades" that was broadcast by al-Jazeera, naturally: Iraqi gunmen took three Japanese civilians captive yesterday and threatened to burn them alive unless Tokyo withdrew its forces, sharply raising the stakes in the uprising that has swept central and southern Iraq. As coalition troops fought house-to-house to subdue the town of Fallujah, having earlier lost control of several towns, the insurgents opened up a new front with a rash of kidnappings. First and foremost, the act of kidnapping civilians and holding them hostage should be recognized for what it is: desperation. Yes, the uprising caught Coalition troops by surprise, mostly if not entirely second-line units. However, that's not who the terrorists will be facing now, and they know it. That's why the city elders in Fallujah are trying to negotiate...

April 10, 2004

CNN: PDB Contained No Actionable Items

Although CNN's headline, "Key document warned of possible al Qaeda scenarios," and its lead paragraph imply something else, the August 6th PDB in fact contains no items regarding hijackers using planes as missiles, nor does it sketch any scenarios that went unresponded: CNN confirmed highlights of the classified August 6, 2001 presidential daily briefing, or PDB, which is expected to be declassified and released in the next several days. ... Sources aware of the PDB say much of the intelligence is uncorroborated, and none of it is related to the eventual September 11 terrorist plot [emph mine]. To get that last nugget of information that I bolded, you have to read down to the penultimate paragraph. Prior to that, CNN emphasizes al-Qaeda's intent to strike the US -- but who would be surprised to learn that Islamofascists who had already blown up two of our embassies, committed a suicide attack...

The Reign of Spain Stayed Mainly Off The Plane

According to the Miami Herald (via Drudge), the Crown Prince of Spain and his fiance were furious at the prospect of going through airport-screening procedures at Miami International Airport and may turn their search into an diplomatic breach between Spain and the US: Members of the prince's entourage called the required inspection of their private belongings an ''insult'' and ''humiliating'' -- sparking a diplomatic flap that has the United States and Spain on the brink of a protocol war. Crowning it off, Iberia Airlines, the prince's carrier of choice, is suggesting it might pull out of the airport, according to two sources close to the international incident. ... ''We're your allies!'' one member of the royal delegation shouted in Spanish to inspectors at a particularly tense moment. But according to Lauren Stover, spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration in Miami, the screeners were only doing their jobs. The mandates of...

August 6, 2001 PDB Declassified

What in God's name in this report gave any specific warning that coordinated hijackings would turn planes into guided missiles? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing in this PDB that could have prevented 9/11, and Ben-Veniste and Kerrey knew it -- because they had already read it. Why did Ben-Veniste and Kerrey demand its declassification? Because they thought they wouldn't get it, and wanted to suggest that the Bush administration was covering up something. Ben-Veniste and Kerrey bluffed, and today their bluff got called. Game over. They've been exposed as political hacks, and should withdraw immediately from the commission, or else the commission should disband.

April 12, 2004

Guardian: It's Israel's Fault

Once again, the London Guardian doesn't miss a chance to blame Israel for the rotten state of the Middle East, including the thugocracies at work in the 22 Arab nations surrounding it. Brian Whitaker casts the Israeli-Palestinian war as the central culprit in maintaining oppressive regimes in the area: For more than a generation, one issue has dominated political discourse in the Middle East. It has spawned militant and terrorist groups of almost every hue, from nationalist to Islamist. It has impeded peaceful change and modernisation in the region, and it has helped to keep authoritarian regimes in power. The Arab-Israeli conflict has not only blighted the Middle East but also provided a smokescreen for that malaise, diverting the attention of Arabs from their internal problems and providing an excuse for tired governments to survive well beyond their sell-by date. "We have emergency laws, we have control by the security...

April 13, 2004

Why al-Sadr Was Inevitable

A statement by Iraqi Shi'ite clerics this morning demonstrates clearly why the Coalition and the Iraqi Governing Council would eventually be forced to deal with al-Sadr or another radical cleric eventually -- and why we may be fortunate that al-Sadr wound up as the opponent: In a statement issued Monday after a meeting with radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the clerics and members of the country's religious authority also cautioned the coalition against doing battle in the holy city of Najaf -- and warned against any attempt to kill al-Sadr. "The current crisis in Iraq has risen to a level that is beyond any political groups, including the Governing Council, and it is now an issue that is between the religious authority and the coalition forces," the statement said. "Those who have brought on this crisis must pay for what they have done." Shi'ite clerics have forced the issue of the...

Jamie Gorelick: Part of the Solution, or the Problem?

Former deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick has been one of the more partisan members of the 9/11 Commission, clashing sharply with Condoleezza Rice during her public testimony, although not as rudely as her colleagues Richard Ben-Veniste and Bob Kerrey. Gorelick has been particularly critical of statements regarding the collection of intelligence and the failure to "connect the dots" by national-security agencies and the NSC themselves. However, as Andrew McCarthy points out in today's National Review Online, Gorelick is no disinterested observer to the structural problems between the FBI's efforts at coordinated intelligence with law-enforcement investigations into terrorists: For those of us who were in the trenches of the struggle against militant Islam beginning in the early 1990s, it is jarring to hear, of all people, Jamie Gorelick now a member of the 9/11 Commission hectoring government officials about their asserted failure to perceive how essential it is that...

Zarqawi in Fallujah?

An Australian news website reports that Abu al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda operations chief reportedly behind part of the Iraqi insurgency, may be trapped in Fallujah (via Instapundit): THE alleged mastermind of the al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, is believed to be in the city of Fallujah, which is under US marine siege, a senior coalition spokesman said today. "Zarqawi is believed to be in Fallujah or nearby," said Dan Senor. Remind me again -- why is Iraq a "distraction" from the war on terror?...

April 14, 2004

Media: Dances With Gorelick

Walter Branigin filed a report yesterday at the Washington Post on the testimony of John Ashcroft at the 9/11 Commission, as well as that of Louis Freeh, Thomas Pickard, and Janet Reno. Imagine my surprise when the Post managed to miss the most intriguing part of Ashcroft's testimony -- that commissioner Jamie Gorelick had played an integral part in defending the flawed structure that stymied counterterrorism efforts for a decade and more: For nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, "our government had blinded itself to its enemies." He said U.S. covert action authorities were "crippled" in their ability to go after bin Laden by "a battery of lawyers" in the government who insisted that the United States should try to capture him before taking any lethal action. Branigin never even mentions Gorelick by name, let alone discuss her memo to the FBI instructing them that their...

Sensenbrenner Calls for Gorelick Resignation

Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner notes that Congressman James Sensenbrenner has called for the resignation of 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick: Yesterday, a 1995 memo written by 9/11 Commission Member Jamie Gorelick, in her former role as the second in command at the Justice Department, revealed her actions in establishing the heightened 'wall' prohibiting the sharing of intelligence information and criminal information. Scrutiny of this policy lies at the heart of the Commission's work. Ms. Gorelick has an inherent conflict of interest as the author of this memo and as a government official at the center of the events in questions. Thus, I believe the Commission's work and independence will be fatally damaged by the continued participation of Ms. Gorelick as a Commissioner. Reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that Ms. Gorelick should resign from this Commission. "The Commission's Guidelines on Recusals state, 'Commissioners and staff will recuse themselves...

April 15, 2004

Osama Sues for Peace?

Something tells me that this will turn out to be a fake, but the Arab television network Al-Arabiya aired a new audio tape reportedly by Osama bin Laden himself offering European nations a "truce" if they leave Muslims alone: In a recording broadcast on Arab satellite networks Thursday, a man who identified himself as Osama bin Laden offered a "truce" to European countries that do not attack Muslims, saying it would begin when their soldiers leave Islamic nations. ... "I announce a truce with the European countries that do not attack Muslim countries," the taped message said as the stations showed an old, still picture of al-Qaida leader. ... This truce, the message said, was to deny "the war mongers" further opportunities and because polls have shown that "most of the European peoples want reconciliation" with the Islamic world. As a Tory leader in Britain remarked, the tape (if authentic)...

LA Times: Iraqi Economy Rebounding

Proving that major media outlets can ignore news for only so long, the Los Angeles Times notes in a featured Mark Magnier article that the Iraqi economy shows signs of a strong rebound and the Iraqi middle class is gathering strength: Wedged between the reports of murder and mayhem, the headline in the local paper was eye-catching: "Should you change your wallpaper for lighter tones?" it asked. "Do it once and you'll see the results." ... Slowly but surely, ordinary Iraqis are redoing floors, hanging curtains, buying new pictures and feathering their nests after years of doing without. Furniture and upholstery sellers are reporting strong demand, as are lighting firms, building contractors and plant stores. "I've been in this business a long time," said Muthana Fahawi, a carpet merchant for 25 years in Baghdad's Karada neighborhood. "Anyone who says the economy isn't improving isn't telling the truth. You can feel...

A Contractor Tells About His Mission

One of my friends is a Special Forces veteran who has spent decades in active service and the reserves. He took some time off to work as a security contractor with a company whose name has been in the news. After the horrible deaths and mutilations of four contractors in Fallujah, my friend sent out a long e-mail detailing his experiences in Iraq in order to set our minds at ease about his mission and the work the US is doing in Iraq. I asked him to allow me to share his experiences with you, and after a few day's delay, he gave me permission to do so as long as I edited out the pictures (for the privacy of his colleagues) and removed any references that would disclose his identity, to protect his family and himself. Please read this very long post in order to learn for yourselves exactly...

Continue reading "A Contractor Tells About His Mission" »

April 17, 2004

Israel Kills Hamas Leader of the Month

Something tells me that the Employee of the Month award at Hamas won't be nearly as popular as it was before ... Israel, obviously undeterred from the protests following the killing of Hamas founder Sheik Yassin last month, has successfully carried out a targeted killing of his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi: An Israeli missile strike killed Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi as he rode in his car Saturday evening, hospital officials said. Rantisi's son Mohammed and a bodyguard were also killed in the attack. The militant Hamas leader was one of Israel's top targets after it assassinated Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin in an airstrike last month. Rantisi's car was hit with missiles Saturday evening on the road outside his home, leaving only the burned, destroyed vehicle. After the explosion, Israeli helicopters were heard in the area. Undoubtedly, this action will once again provoke outrage from a wide collection of...

April 18, 2004

Hamas Cancels Its Inaugural Ball

After seeing its founder killed by Israel and his replacement likewise killed less than a month later, Hamas has decided that discretion may be the better part of terrorism: Hamas secretly appointed a new Gaza Strip chief early Sunday, but refused to reveal his identity after Israel assassinated two Hamas leaders in less than a month. Unfortunately, not all of the Hamas leadership has read the memo on secrecy quite yet: "Hamas will move ahead and will continue the resistance march," said local Hamas leader Ahmad Sahar, a friend of Rantisi's. ... "Yesterday they said that they killed Rantisi to weaken Hamas. They are dreaming. Every time a martyr falls, Hamas is strengthened," Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, told more than 70,000 mourners gathered at the city's largest mosque for the funeral. Sounds like the Israelis have two more names that they can add to the probable nominees for the...

Gorelick Swings, and Misses

Beleaguered 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick, whose memo strengthening the so-called "wall" between intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement efforts caused a sensation in the commission hearings last week, writes a defense in today's Washington Post that mostly misses the mark: The commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has a critical dual mission to fulfill -- to help our nation understand how the worst assault on our homeland since Pearl Harbor could have occurred and to outline reforms to prevent new acts of terrorism. Under the leadership of former governor Tom Kean and former congressman Lee Hamilton, the commission has acted with professionalism and skill. Its hearings and the reports it has released have been highly informative, if often disturbing. Sept. 11 united this country in shock and grief; the lessons from it must be learned in a spirit of unity, not of partisan rancor. First off, this lead paragraph contains...

Another Grandstand Tour?

Jesse Jackson wants to insert himself into the hostage strategy currently being employed by the desperate Islamofascists operating in Iraq, continuing his self-aggrandizing world tour and threatening to legitimize the al-Sadr and Fallujah terrorists: American civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Sunday that he has "had prayer" with the wife of Thomas Hamill, an American contractor abducted in Iraq, and promised his family he would try to win his freedom. ... "If I knew who was holding them, I would appeal to them directly," Jackson said. "We've already begun to make some back-channel contacts to them." He said he was willing to travel to Iraq to negotiate for the hostages, but only "if I know with whom to talk and know where to go." Jackson, whose political influence has waned severely over the past few years thanks to personal difficulties, obviously wants to put himself back into the...

April 19, 2004

Washington Times: Gorelick Not Playing By the Rules

In today's Washington Times, Charles Hurt notes that 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick has not played by the rules set forth in her defense by both herself and commission chair Thomas Kean -- that she must recuse herself when discussion of events arises that personally involves her (via Drudge): Former acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard told the September 11 commission in a private interview earlier this year that he was surprised that Jamie S. Gorelick is serving on the panel because she had played a key role in setting the very counterterrorism policies being investigated. According to a summary of that interview obtained by The Washington Times, Mr. Pickard said Ms. Gorelick who was No. 2 in the Clinton Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno resisted efforts by the FBI to expand the counterterrorism effort beyond simple law enforcement tactics and agencies. ... But in that open,...

Al-Sadr: Muchas Gracias, Amigos

As promised, Spain's new Prime Minister Jose Zapatero has pulled out the Spanish contingent of soldiers from Iraq, resulting in high praise from a likely source: Radical Islamic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has welcomed Spain's decision to withdraw its troops from Iraq "in the shortest time possible," as U.S. officials braced for more possible pullouts. According to a spokesman in the Iraqi city of Najaf, the Shiite cleric praised Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's decision Sunday to pull Spain's 1,400-plus troops from Iraq. Al-Sadr also is asking that people from all coalition countries put pressure on their governments to follow Spain and recall their forces, spokesman Fuad al-Turfi said. Why is Moqtada smiling? Because the Spanish troops belong to a Polish-led multinational force based in the Najaf area -- coincidentally, just where al-Sadr has been hiding out from Coalition forces looking to capture him and stamp out his insurgency. Spain's...

April 20, 2004

US to Consider Lowering Airport Security?

US airport security, after having been tightened up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, may be loosened up again in order to allow airport retail businesses to recapture their lost revenue streams: Pittsburgh International could become the nation's first major airport allowed to abandon the federal government's post-Sept. 11 rule that lets only ticketed passengers proceed past security checkpoints to the gate. If successful, the test might become a model for other airports. Pittsburgh is a candidate for the experiment for two reasons: It has a centralized security checkpoint, in one terminal, and it has a 100-store shopping mall that has suffered a drop in business because it can be reached only by ticketed passengers. If successful, I would imagine that Minneapolis-St. Paul airport might be next in line, as our airport has a similar configuration and a substantial retail presence. However, I can't think of a dumber security...

Thanks For The Help

Iraqi insurgents attempted a prison break in Baghdad today, shelling a compound where American forces hold several thousand Iraqis suspected of being part of Saddam's Ba'ath regime and/or the post-liberation insurgency. Unfortunately, the Gang That Can't Shell Straight wound up causing over a hundred casualties -- entirely in the inmate population: Guerrillas fired a barrage of mortar rounds at Baghdad's largest prison Tuesday, killing 22 prisoners in an attack a U.S. general said may have been an attempt to spark an uprising against their American guards. ... Ninety-two prisoners were wounded in the mortar attack on the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison, 25 of them seriously, said Col. Jill Morgenthaler, a U.S. military spokeswoman. "This isn't the first time that we have seen this kind of attack. We don't know if they are trying to inspire an uprising or a prison break," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told The Associated Press. All...

The CPA Memo: We Need To Take Forceful Action

The Village Voice published an article earlier today based on an e-mail from the Coalition Provisional Authority which was forwarded to them. The memo, which dates back to March, foresaw civil war if the CPA and the US did not start exerting its authority in Iraq, and specifically mentions a renegade cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr. The Voice, typically, takes the small mention of civil war and explodes it into the entire point of the memo. The subhead of the article, in fact, reads "A Coalition memo reveals that even true believers see the seeds of civil war in the occupation of Iraq". However, in reading the actual memo, the author points not to an inevitable civil war but instead to the numerous opportunities surrounding the CPA to improve its performance and its position with the Iraqis, the vast majority of which want to see the US succeed. The anonymous writer...

April 21, 2004

London Telegraph: Americans More Phlegmatic Than Media Suggest

The London Telegraph has reviewed the results of two polls, one by CNN/USA Today and the other by Gallup/ABC/Washington Post, and reports that American determination regarding Iraq has been underestimated, as has support for George Bush: In a boost for President George W Bush, opinion polls yesterday showed that the American public strongly backs a continued presence in Iraq, even though they believe the effort there is in trouble. Though 59 per cent of Americans believe the US is "bogged down", two thirds said troops should remain until order is restored, even if that means more casualties. ... The polls refute the belief that ordinary Americans have no stomach for casualties or are oblivious to the problems facing coalition forces. Although our national media continues to operate from hysteria mode, making numerous Tet analogies every time someone shoots a gun off in the Sunni triangle, Americans as a whole understand...

ABC: Oil-For-Food Corruption at Highest Levels

ABC News continues its excellent series on the United Nations Oil-For-Food program, which descended into a massive scam that netted Saddam Hussein -- supposedly the target of the sanctions that prompted the program -- more than $10 billion, and apparently lined the pockets of many others at the UN (via Instapundit): At least three senior United Nations officials are suspected of taking multi-million dollar bribes from the Saddam Hussein regime, U.S. and European intelligence sources tell ABCNEWS. One year after his fall, U.S. officials say they have evidence, some in cash, that Saddam diverted to his personal bank accounts approximately $5 billion from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. This story has bounced around for a while since January, when ABC produced a list of people, some of whom ran the program and some of whom actively blocked UN enforcement of resolutions against Iraq. What ABC has now is independent evidence...

WaPo: Kerry Goes Wobbly

The Washington Post editorial board noticed a not-so-subtle shift in John Kerry's policy statements on Iraq. John Kerry has abandoned the goal of building a democracy in Iraq for mere "stability" to give expedient cover to a fast American retreat: "WE NEED A reasonable plan and a specific timetable for self-government" in Iraq, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said in December. "That means completing the tasks of security and democracy in the country -- not cutting and running in order to claim a false success." On another occasion, he said: "It would be a disaster and a disgraceful betrayal of principle to speed up the process simply to lay the groundwork for a politically expedient withdrawal of American troops." Contrast that with what Mr. Kerry told reporters last week: "With respect to getting our troops out, the measure is the stability of Iraq. [Democracy] shouldn't be the measure of when...

Everything You Need To Know About UNSCAM

Claudia Rosett wrote a lengthy and detailed explanation for today's Commentary website which takes readers on a well-written tour of the disaster that the UN Oil for Food program became. Rosett, who has been tenacious in her investigative reporting on this subject for the Wall Street Journal, collects the sorry mess into a coherent and chronological narrative that lays out the scandal in devastating fashion (via Hugh Hewitt): The tale has been all very interesting, and all very complicated. For those who look yearningly to the UN for answers to the worlds problems, it has provoked, perhaps, some introspection about the pardonable corruption that threatens even the most selfless undertakings. For those who believe the UN can do nothing right, Oil-for-Food, whatever it was about, is a delicious vindication that everyone and everything at the world organization is crooked, the institution a fiasco, and politicians who support it fit for...

April 22, 2004

Bummer Of A Birthmark, Yasser (Part II)

The Israeli get-tough policy on terrorist leadership apparently has made its point -- Yasser Arafat, at least, has learned that the Israelis mean business: Yasser Arafat forced 20 fugitives hiding in his West Bank headquarters to leave the premises early Thursday, fearing the Israeli army would invade the complex to grab them, one of the departing fugitives said. The fugitives, all members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a militant group linked to Arafat's Fatah faction, have been hiding from the army in Arafat's headquarters for months. Israel has repeatedly demanded they be kicked out. Israel has complained about Arafat's sheltering of al-Aqsa terrorists ever since he holed up in his Ramallah compound, but had always refused to give up his protection of his organization's men. AAMB, after all, belongs to Arafat's own Fatah faction of the PLO. However, after the elimination of Sheik Yassin and Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, Arafat has...

Funny You Should Ask That

I'm speechless: A crow sitting on a utility pole triggered the third power failure in 10 days at Los Angeles International Airport, prompting security experts to ask whether the electrical grid serving the airport area is vulnerable to sabotage. Uh, gee ... ya think?...

Spirit Of America

Rather than rewrite the moving explanation of Spirit of America, I'm going to just repost it here. You can donate here. I already have! US Marines seek to equip seven (7) television stations serving local communities within Al Anbar Province, Iraq. The Province includes the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. These stations will offer information that is more accurate and balanced than existing alternatives. The goal is to improve understanding between Americans and Iraqis, build trust and reduce tensions. Current TV news in Iraq often carries negative, highly-biased accounts of the U.S. presence. Unanswered, its effect is to stoke resentment and encourage conflict. The Marines seek to ensure the Iraqi people have access to better, more balanced information. By equipping local television stations and providing the ability to generate news and programming, the Marines will create a viable news alternative - one owned and operated by local Iraqi citizens. The...

April 23, 2004

Pat Tillman, American Patriot, KIA

I was in an office meeting most of this morning, and only got back to my desk at lunchtime. By that point, I had received several e-mails from friends around the blogosphere telling me that Pat Tillman had been killed in action in Afghanistan. After 9/11, Tillman left a multimillion-dollar contract with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals, and all the potential endorsement contracts and all of the adulation, in order to fulfill his dream of serving his country in the Army Rangers while he was still young enough to enlist: Tillman, who was serving with the 75th Ranger Regiment, was involved in a search-and-destroy mission in southeastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan, military officials told Fox News. The unit was acting on intelligence about possible Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters when a firefight erupted. Tillman was the only Ranger killed in his unit, although military officials said two other U.S....

Sessions: "A Problem With Confidence" in 9/11 Commission

CNN reports that Senator Jeff Sessions (R) has become the first Senator to publicly call for Jamie Gorelick to resign her seat on the 9/11 Commission due to the conflict-of-interest issues revolving around her role in barring intelligence and law-enforcement agents from sharing information: Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, called on Gorelick to resign, becoming the first senator to do so. He told CNN that such a move would help the commission salvage its credibility. "We have a little bit of a problem now with confidence in that commission," said Sessions. "For her to continue to play a key role in it when she herself really should be one of the people being reviewed is difficult for me to swallow." Gorelick, meanwhile, adamantly insists that she will not resign her seat, and so far has the backing of the Republican chair of the commission, Thomas Kean. However, ever since the release...

April 27, 2004

Washington Post: Congress Fumbled on Intelligence

While the 9/11 Commission has publicly played a game of Pin The Blame On The Elephant, Dana Priest at the Washington Post puts together a devastating look at Congress' role in ignoring security threats and undermining the systems designed to detect them and protect the US: In the fall of 2002, as Congress debated waging war in Iraq, copies of a 92-page assessment of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction sat in two vaults on Capitol Hill, each protected by armed security guards and available to any member who showed up in person, without staff. But only a few ever did. No more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page National Intelligence Estimate executive summary, according to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material. ... Committee members acknowledge in hindsight that they presided over damaging cuts in the CIA's operational budget over...

WMD Not Missing At All

Ever since the David Kay interim report was released in December stating Kay's pessimism about ever finding actual weapons and chemical/biological agents, conventional wisdom has held that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction -- and in fact that our intelligence and that of most of the world was so faulty that we all missed Saddam's disarmament after the first Gulf War. Little attention has been given to the rest of Kay's report, which clearly laid out that Saddam had been in material violation of UNSC Resolution 1441 and the other sixteen which preceded it by hiding and maintaining the activities and systems which could quickly reconstitute WMD programs as soon as the heat was off. Now Kenneth Timmerman has provided a second look at the WMD question, informing us that WMD has indeed been found in Iraq -- even though our national media apparently prefers to stick with the...

April 28, 2004

Whither the Hero?

Reader Limpet6 e-mailed me a link to a fine article, originally from the Naval Institute, on the attention paid to victims at the expense of heroes in the war on terror. Captain Roger Lee Crossland, a SEAL reserve officer, notes that in previous conflicts Americans knew the heores of the age as household names: In earlier times, the American public could recite names such as Boatswains Mate Reuben James, Lieutenant William Cushing, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, Sergeant Alvin York, Mess Attendant Dorie Miller, and Sergeant Audie Murphy as easily as they could their own home addresses. The individual heroes of the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, generally are unknown. Deluged by lengthy, detailed stories of the extreme efforts taken by terrorists, we have heard little of the extreme efforts taken by members of the U.S. armed forces. In his article, Captain Crossland places the blame for this point at...

April 29, 2004

Fallujah As Microcosm of the War on Terror

For 24 days, the US Marine Corps has surrounded Fallujah, the center of a nagging insurgency that made headlines when their successful ambush of four contractors turned into a macabre party, with people literally tearing the bodies to pieces in front of reporters and photographers. However, the US has been reluctant to move past siege status for a number of reasons, as this Los Angeles Times article states: The plans have been laid, the troops are positioned, and all is ready for a massive Marine assault on Fallouja and with it the long-dreaded prospect of major urban warfare in Iraq. "We got the last unit in place today. We're tightening the noose," Col. John Toolan declared with grim satisfaction, standing on the roof of the Marine command post at the edge of the volatile Sunni Muslim city on Wednesday as occasional hostile rounds zinged overhead and American tanks rumbled...

Insurgency Led By Saddam Remnants: Pentagon

The New York Times confirms that Pentagon analysts have concluded that the apparatus of the Saddam Hussein regime has financed, advised, and even led the insurgencies inside Iraq. In fact, intelligence shows that the insurgencies are the result of pre-war planning, as many had suspected: A Pentagon intelligence report has concluded that many bombings against Americans and their allies in Iraq, and the more sophisticated of the guerrilla attacks in Falluja, are organized and often carried out by members of Saddam Hussein's secret service, who planned for the insurgency even before the fall of Baghdad. The report states that Iraqi officers of the "Special Operations and Antiterrorism Branch," known within Mr. Hussein's government as M-14, are responsible for planning roadway improvised explosive devices and some of the larger car bombs that have killed Iraqis, Americans and other foreigners. The attacks have sown chaos and fear across Iraq. In addition, suicide...

Coincidence?

The BBC reports that US analysis shows international terror attacks declined last year and the number of civilian deaths at a 30-year low: US government figures suggest that terrorist attacks have fallen to the lowest level for more than 30 years. The annual report records a slight fall in the number of international attacks last year and a dramatic decrease in the number of victims. The report says that less than half the number of people lost their lives in such attacks last year compared with the year before. Attacks in Iraq have not been counted as terrorist attacks, primarily due to the targeting of military assets rather than civilians. Cofer Black, the State Department spokesman, credited improved international cooperation against terrorism, especially crediting Saudi Arabia. Malaysia also received praise for its cooperation, as CNN reports, and progress noted in both Libya and the Sudan. The State Department reports that...

April 30, 2004

It's Not Just Bombs and Bullets

The New York Times shines a light on a little-mentioned facet of the Bush adminsitration's approach to combating terrorism. While wars and captures understandably occupy the headlines, the strategy also works towards building stronger relationships with Muslims in areas where we can provide humanitarian assistance: From remote Siyu, investigators say, the bombing of a Mombasa hotel that catered to Israeli tourists, and the simultaneous failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli-chartered airliner, were planned in 2002. The well is one of many public works projects being undertaken by the American military throughout the Horn of Africa aimed at changing the locals' view of a country many of them had learned to hate. "The war on terrorism is not necessarily a shooting war," said Maj. W. Brice Finney, commander of theArmy's 412th Civil Affairs Battalion. Still, these are good deeds with a strategic edge. The main purpose is to monitor the...

Becoming What You Oppose

The new nation of Macedonia, eager to prove its anti-terror chops on the world stage, made much of stopping a terrorist cell in its capitol city of Skopje, killing seven Pakistanis identified as terrorists conspiring to attack embassies and diplomats throughout the country. However, prompted by US intelligence agencies that remained skeptical of the plot, Macedonian authorities have discovered that several police officers and a businessman smuggled the Pakistanis into Macedonia to act as clay pigeons: Macedonian police gunned down seven innocent immigrants, then claimed they were terrorists, in a killing staged to show they were participating in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism, authorities said Friday. Police spokeswoman Mirjana Konteska told reporters that six people, including three former police commanders, two special police officers and a businessman, have been charged by police with murder. ... She described a meticulous plan to promote Macedonia as a player in the fight against...

May 1, 2004

Religion of Peace, Part 37b

The governor of Nigerian province Zamfara State has implemented Shari'a law, and in the continuing rollout of the strict Islamic practice, has ordered all churches to be demolished in accordance with the Qu'ran: Speaking at the launch in Gusau, the state capital, Governor Sani disclosed that time was ripe for full implementation of the programme as enshrined in the Holy Quran. He added that his government would soon embark on demolition of all places of worship of unbelievers in the state, in line with Islamic injunction to fight them wherever they are found. With respect to being a religion of peace, it would appear that Islam offers only the peace of dhimmitude for those who don't convert. As Islamofascism spreads, this is the attitude towards human rights and freedom we can expect to encounter. (via The Corner)...

May 2, 2004

Hamill Escapes

The American contractor held hostage by Iraqi insurgents escaped from captivity, found an American convoy, and led them back to his captors, according to the AP: American hostage Thomas Hamill, kidnapped three weeks ago in an insurgent attack on his convoy, was found by U.S. forces Sunday south of Tikrit after he apparently escaped from his captors, the U.S. military said. An official said he was in good health. Hamill, 43, of Macon, Miss., was discovered when he approached a U.S. patrol from the 2nd Battalion 108th Infantry, part of the New York National Guard, in the town of Balad, 35 miles south of Tikrit, a spokesman for U.S. troops in Tikrit said. ... Hamill identified himself to the troops, then led the patrol to the house where he had been held captive. The unit surrounded the house and captured two Iraqis with an automatic weapon, said the military spokesman,...

Sharon Plan Defeated By Own Party

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may face the end of his career now that his high-stakes gamble on withdrawal from Gaza has apparently backfired: TV polls indicated Sunday that the ruling Likud Party overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposal to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and four small West Bank settlements. ... The telephone polls, conducted by Israel's three main TV stations, gave opponents a large lead of between 12 and 24 percentage points. A survey by Channel 2 had the smallest lead for opponents, with 56 percent against the plan and 44 percent in favor. On Channel 10, the poll indicated 58 had voted against and 42 percent in favor. The greatest gap was given by Channel 1, with 62 percent against and 38 percent in favor. In a stunning defeat, Sharon could not even secure a bare majority of his own party for his policy of disengagement...

May 3, 2004

Pakistan: Let's All Just Get Along

The BBC reports that the American military commander in Afghanistan is worried that the Pakistanis have gone somewhat wobbly in the war on terror, especially against al-Qaeda. The Pakistanis appear reluctant to actually capture "militants", as the BBC calls them, instead asking for pledges to renounce terrorism: The commander of US forces in Afghanistan has expressed concern at Pakistan's strategy against foreign al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters. Lieutenant-General David Barno said Pakistan must eliminate a "significant number" of militants along the border. "There are foreign fighters in those tribal areas who will have to be killed or captured," he said. Pakistan says foreign fighters can stay in the region if they renounce terrorism and live peacefully. ... On Friday, Pakistan extended a deadline for foreign militants to give themselves up to authorities after no one surrendered. Even apart from the war on terror, when a sovereign state tolerates the existence of...

A Marine's Plea

Hugh Hewitt posted this at his site, and I think it's required reading for anyone who thinks that the overwrought oracles of doom about Iraq that dominate the mainstream news media have no effect on the troops they claim to support. Pass this around, and make sure people understand it. Yes, it's just one Marine's opinion, but he's the one that's out there on the line. We shouldn't let him down. Hello Everyone, I am taking time to ask you all for your help. First off, I'd like to say that this is not a political message. I'm not concerned about domestic politics right now. We have much bigger things to deal with, and we need your help. It seems that despite the tremendous and heroic efforts of the men and women serving here in Iraq to bring much needed peace and stability to this region, we are losing the...

May 5, 2004

Rumsfeld Fails the First Commandment of the Subordinate

According to a report on CNN posted less than an hour ago, George Bush has expressed his severe displeasure to Donald Rumsfeld for not informing him of the nature and scope of abuse allegations prior to the President learning of both from media reports: President Bush told Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday that he was "not satisfied" at the way he received information about charges that Iraqi prisoners had been abused by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, a senior administration official told CNN. At a private Oval Office meeting, Bush complained about learning of the existence of photographs showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and degraded from media accounts, the official said. "He was not happy, and he let Secretary Rumsfeld know about it," the official said. Bush also voiced concern that he was not kept up to speed on important information about the scope of the problem...

May 6, 2004

Zapatero Refuses to Quit Digging

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero ignores the proverb that instructs those who find themselves in a hole to quit digging. The New York Times reports in tomorrow's paper that Zapatero insists that Spain remains a loyal ally of the United States, even while he informs the Times that he has backtracked even from the appeasement stance he took when he was first elected: Spain's new prime minister said on Thursday that he would never send Spanish soldiers back to Iraq, even if foreign troops there were put under the authority of the United Nations or NATO. "Spanish troops have spent time there and have completed their mission in Iraq," said Prime Minister Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero. "There's no point in them going back." This contradicts Zapatero's claim that he only opposed having Spanish troops in Iraq due to the lack of a UN Security Council resolution governing the Coalition Provisional...

May 7, 2004

Washington Post/ABC Poll: Let Rummy Stay On

The numbers are in, and they indicate that the Democrats overplayed their hand, and badly. According to a new Washington Post/ABC poll, majorities of Republicans, independents, and Democrats reject forcing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from office during wartime due to the actions of soldiers in the field: Seven in 10 Americans said Rumsfeld should not be forced to quit, a view held by majorities of Republicans, Democrats and self-described political independents. The survey comes a day after President Bush gave Rumsfeld a vote of confidence, and as Rumsfeld faced stiff questioning by members of Congress enraged that they were kept in the dark about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. ... Republicans and Democrats largely agree on the seriousness of the allegations, the scope of the problem and the future of the secretary of defense, but differ dramatically when it comes to Bush's role in the process...

Minnesotans Owe You An Apology

I just heard the exchange between Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton, Donald Rumsfeld, and General Richard Myers at the Senate hearings regarding the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The transcript of the exchange has to be either read or heard to be believed. The worst of it -- but not all of it -- revolved around Myers' request to CBS to delay the publication of the pictures until the hot spots where troops were taking fire, and could conceivably be captured, until after they had pacified those areas. Dayton became hysterical at the notion that the military might ask the media to assist them in keeping American troops as safe as possible, under the circumstances: DAYTON: Mr. Secretary, is that standard procedure for the military command of this country to try to suppress a news report at the highest level? MYERS: It didn't -- let me just -- Senator...

May 8, 2004

Brooks: Ctrl-Alt-Del

David Brooks gets uncharacteristically hysterical in today's New York Times op-ed piece, but in his wildly pessimistic viewpoint he does score one important point regarding international relations and the role of the UN. In order to get there, though, you have to wade through a lot of hair-shirt rhetoric: It's pretty clear we're passing through another pivot point in American foreign policy. A year ago, we were the dominant nation in a unipolar world. Today, we're a shellshocked hegemon. We still face a world of threats, but we're much less confident about our own power. We still know we can roll over hostile armies, but we cannot roll over problems. We get dragged down into them. We can topple tyrants, but we don't seem to be very good at administering nations. Our intelligence agencies have made horrible mistakes. Our diplomacy vis--vis Western Europe has been inept. We have a military...

Bush to Arafat: No Rush

George Bush made it clear that in order to proceed to a two-state solution in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinians need to stop terrorism and begin complying with the road map, starting with security issues. Otherwise, the timetables will be adjusted accordingly, according to the BBC: US President George W Bush has said the deadline for setting up a Palestinian state has slipped due to violence and a change of Palestinian leaders. "I think the timetable of 2005 is not as realistic as it was two years ago," Mr Bush told Egypt's al-Ahram daily. ... Mr Bush said the US remained committed to the internationally-accepted peace plan for the Middle East - the roadmap, and would underline this with a letter to Mr Qurei. "Well, 2005 may be hard, since 2005 is right around the corner. I readily concede the date has slipped some, primarily because violence...

NYT: Abandon Ship

Roger Cohen signals our surrender in tomorrow's New York Times, arguing that the Abu Ghraib scandal has so damaged our credibility that our best option is to pull up stakes and crawl back home: A military defeat is a damaging thing, and Iraq remains a tense battleground. But a moral one may be more devastating and more enduring for a power like the United States that has long held that its actions are driven, at least in part, by the desire to be a force for good with a liberating mission for all humanity. It is precisely such a rout of the American idea that now confronts the United States in Iraq. The world is asking what sort of liberation is represented by an American woman holding a prone, naked Iraqi man on a leash in Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison, of all places. No matter that the offenders represent...

May 9, 2004

Marines Making Friends In Fallujah

After over a month of bad news, especially in Abu Ghraib, Fallujah and Najaf, Americans have been fed a steady diet of our troops under fire and under suspicion. Today's Los Angeles Times looks at another aspect of our troops on the front lines by reporting on Marine efforts to build relationships with the people of the area around Fallujah: When the Marines in mid-March assumed responsibility for much of Al Anbar province from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, they hoped to emphasize the first part of the 1st Marine Division's motto, "No better friend." Instead they found themselves emphasizing the second part, "No worse enemy." Now they're attempting a new beginning. ... Accompanied by Navy corpsmen and a chaplain, the Marines spent much of the day handing out toys, candy, crackers, backpacks and soccer balls to eager children in this farming village adjacent to Fallouja. For adults, the Americans...

NATO Won't Go To Iraq: LA Times

The Los Angeles Times reports more news on the efforts to internationalize the efforts in Iraq, this time with NATO. According to Paul Richter, diplomats and defense officials tied to NATO will not consider joining the Anglo-American efforts until, oddly enough, after the US presidential election: The Western military alliance had expected to announce at a June summit that it would accept a role in the country, perhaps by leading the international division now patrolling south-central Iraq. But amid continuing bloodshed and strong public opposition to the occupation in many nations, allies want to delay any major commitment until after the U.S. presidential election in November, officials say. NATO suffers from the same disease that has crippled the UN -- namely, the reluctance to commit troops to anyplace where they might take fire. Unsurprisingly so, as the same member-nations that decry the lack of international input in Iraq are the...

Post: Tougher Interrogation Techniques OK'd By Pentagon

Dana Priest and Joe Stephens report in today's Washington Post that the Pentagon approved a list of tough interrogation techniques designed to extract intelligence from reluctant detainees at Guantanamo, in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, given the nature of the threat, the approval process and techniques employed seem reasonable: In April 2003, the Defense Department approved interrogation techniques for use at the Guantanamo Bay prison that permit reversing the normal sleep patterns of detainees and exposing them to heat, cold and "sensory assault," including loud music and bright lights, according to defense officials. The classified list of about 20 techniques was approved at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the Justice Department, and represents the first publicly known documentation of an official policy permitting interrogators to use physically and psychologically stressful methods during questioning. The use of any of these techniques requires the approval of senior Pentagon officials -- and...

Smash: Troops' E-Mail Not Going Away

One of the most effective and relentless advocates for our men and women on the front lines, Citizen Smash, notes a hoax floating around the blogosphere based on a misunderstanding. Rumors are swirling that the military wants to cut off Internet access to troops in Iraq, but the truth is a bit more complex -- and for those of us who sometimes take the pragmatic approach to "borrowing" bandwidth, all too familiar: A POST by milblogger Ginmar has sparked a rumor that the military is planning to cut off Internet access to all GIs in Iraq. At the very least, KBR is not allowing any private computers on their system for the next ninety days. There might be one other option, but if you don't hear from me for a while... Several bloggers have picked up on this story, and speculation is rampant on why the military is asking KBR...

May 10, 2004

Sharon Tries Again

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refuses to give up on his plan to withdraw from Gaza, again announcing plans to submit a modified version which has yet to be seen. John Ward Anderson reports in today's Washington Post that Sharon's cabinet reacted strongly -- in both directions -- once the subject aired itself in his weekly cabinet meeting: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told cabinet ministers Sunday that he was devising a new plan to withdraw Israeli troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and expected to present it to the government in about three weeks, the officials and their aides said. Sharon's announcement reportedly set off fireworks in the weekly cabinet session between ministers who threatened to leave the government if the Gaza settlements were not evacuated and those who have vowed to quit if they are. Either scenario could lead to the collapse of Sharon's four-party coalition...

Victor Davis Hanson Explains It All

Victor Davis Hanson may wind up as the leading intellectual voice behind the war on Islamofascist terror. In today's lengthy essay on OpinionJournal, Hanson relates the historical context of our current conflicts and the debilitating philosophies that brought us, finally, to this pass: The 20th century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler's contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of "appeasement"--a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of "deterrence" and "military readiness." ... Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end...

May 11, 2004

Shi'a to Sadr: Drop Dead

Reuters reports that far from leading a popular uprising against the infidel Anglo-American armies, the Shi'ite general population and religious leaders have begun counterdemonstrating to push Moqtada al-Sadr and his dwindling militiamen out of the holy city of Najaf: Hundreds of people marched in Najaf on Tuesday calling on rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to pull his militia out of the Iraqi holy city. Witnesses said they marched to the central shrine area of the city before dispersing peacefully. Some Sadr gunmen fired in the air toward the end of the march, but most marchers had dispersed by then. The demonstration, organized by Sadr's political foes, followed a smaller one on Monday and reflected increasing pressure from Shi'ite elders on Sadr to move his men out of the city as U.S.-led forces tighten their noose around it. The al-Sadr militia have been reduced in number from continuing pressure by Coalition...

Waziristan to Osama: Drop Dead

More good news, this time from Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf has united the tribes in South Waziristan in the mission to find, capture, and/or kill al-Qaeda 'militants', as the BBC calls them: Tribesmen in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan say they will raise a force of 1,800 armed men to capture suspected al-Qaeda militants. The force would be the biggest armed militia - or Lashkar - so far raised for such a purpose. The decision to form it was made by the Ahmedzai Wazir tribe in the main town of Wana, 400 km southwest of Peshawar. It is the first time that all the clans and sub-clans of the region have unified against al-Qaeda. Musharraf has not won much popularity with his campaign against al-Qaeda in the western border regions of Pakistan. The tribes have felt pushed around and under attack themselves as Musharraf's army has campaigned against "foreigners",...

Americans In Iraq: The Contractors Connect With Iraqis As Well

Glenn at Instapundit points out that Sissy Willis has a photo up showing the oppression of the Iraqi people by the American military. Since we're back on that subject lately, I thought I'd show you how those evil contractors also continue to pursue their hatred of Iraqis: The contractor shown is a friend of mine who currently works in Iraq, and this photo was taken, I believe, in March. I've blurred the face, with no particular skill as you can see, based on some of the reactions I received to his e-mail that I posted last month after the Fallujah murder of the four American contractors there. Some people just want to vent hatred towards anyone who doesn't believe that surrender brings peace....

Mylroie: More Evidence of Saddam-9/11 Ties

Laurie Mylroie writes in today's Front Page that the Czechs have further confirmation of contacts between the Iraqi Intelligence Services (IIS) and Mohammed Atta, one of the leaders of the 9/11 plot that killed 3,000 Americans and launched the war on terror: Important new information has come from Edward Jay Epstein about Mohammed Attas contacts with Iraqi intelligence. The Czechs have long maintained that Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers in the United States, met with Ahmed al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence official, posted to the Iraqi embassy in Prague. As Epstein now reports, Czech authorities have discovered that al-Anis appointment calendar shows a scheduled meeting on April 8, 2001 with a "Hamburg student." That is exactly what the Czechs had been saying since shortly after 9/11: Atta, a long-time student at Germanys Hamburg-Harburg Technical University, met with al-Ani on April 8, 2001. Indeed, when Atta earlier applied for a visa...

Get The Picture Now?

I abhor the illegal abuses that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison by a few American servicepeople. Their arrest and courts-martial please me no end, and anyone who participated in such un-American and inhumane treatment should get the punishment they richly deserve. But before anyone starts drawing equivalencies between those actions in Abu Ghraib and the terrorists we fight, try this on for size first: A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site appeared to show a group affiliated with al-Qaida beheading an American in Iraq, saying the death was revenge for the prisoner-abuse scandal. The video showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit who identified himself as an American from Philadelphia. After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and cutting off his head with a large knife. They then held...

May 12, 2004

9/11 Panel Grandstanding Again

The Washington Post reports today that the 9/11 Commission, whose public hearings provoked bitter partisan bickering but produced little in the way of actionable information, now wants to question al-Qaeda detainees: The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is trying to gain access to some members of al Qaeda in U.S. custody to pose questions to them, panel officials said yesterday. ... The Sept. 11 panel, which has sporadically feuded with the Bush administration over access to information and witnesses during the past year, already has had access to transcripts and reports about al Qaeda detainees in U.S. custody, officials said. But an ability to directly question them would give the panel a remarkable level of access to detainees held in secrecy and generally off limits to defense attorneys. The panel has particular interest, the Post reports, in interviewing Zacarias Moussaoui and Ramzi Binalshibh. Lee Hamilton, the ranking Democrat,...

A Letter To America, From One Of Its Sons

Amy Ridenour at the National Center for Public Policy posted a letter from a serviceman, Army Specialist Joe Roche, that explains to us what he faces on the front lines against Moqtada al-Sadr's militia and in Iraq in general. I know I'm not the only blogger to point this out, but it's important to get this out as widely as possible: The fighting we are engaged in against the uprising of Muqtada Al-Sadr is one that is extremely sensitive and risks catastrophe. Had we entered this previously, it would not have been possible for us to win. Over the months, we have been involved in preparations and much planning. Thus, today we are scoring amazing successes against this would-be tyrant. I ask that the American people be brave. Don't fall for the spin by the weak and timid amongst you that are portraying this battle as a disaster. Such people...

Should We Release The Pictures?

CNN reports that Congressional leaders have reviewed all of the confiscated pictures and video of Iraqi prisoner abuse, and the bipartisan consensus is that the images are "disgusting", "appalling", and "horrifying". Where that consensus disappears is in the ultimate disposition of the pictures -- should they be made public? Top GOP leaders said Wednesday they oppose the release of hundreds of fresh images showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, saying they could compromise the prosecution of those soldiers implicated in the acts and further inflame tensions in Iraq. ... McConnell, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, and Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, all said the pictures should be kept under wraps. "In my view, and it's solely my view, these pictures, at this time, by the executive branch, should not be released into the public domain," Warner, R-Virginia, said, citing the possibility that more images...

May 13, 2004

Stop The Presses: CIA Uses "Harsh" Interrogation Techniques on Al-Qaeda Leaders

The New York Times reports today that the CIA uses "harsh" interrogation techniques on top al-Qaeda leaders and often uses a rotating jurisdictional strategy in order to protect Special Ops interrogators, in an article certain to raise the ire of anti-war protestors: The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials. ... In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown. These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of...

Stark's Constituents Not Impressed By His Responsiveness

On Monday, Best of the Web pointed us to KSFO, which reported on the response Rep. Pete Stark left on the voice mail of a constituent who disagreed with his "nay" on a resolution deploring the Abu Ghraib abuse while honoring American servicepeople. The letter-writer, Daniel Dow, had written a polite, respectful, but critical letter, summarized thusly: I urge you to stop your contemptuous display of bitter partisanship and your politicization of this War. Your actions are very divisive and destructive to the morale of our troops and the morale of our nation. I know that a majority of the population of the 13th Congressional District are very strong in their support of our soldiers and in their support of the War in iraq [sic]. Your "NO" vote today reflects that you are way out of touch with the people of this district. Stark's response to his constituent? Dan, this...

May 14, 2004

Blair's Loyalty

The London Telegraph reports that Tony Blair made it clear in an interview that he has no intention of turning his back on George Bush, despite political trouble at home: Tony Blair has dismissed calls for him to distance himself from President George W Bush, insisting he will not change course over Iraq. ... Mr Blair was scathing about "this idea that at the time of maximum difficulty you start messing around your main ally", adding: "I am afraid that is not what we are going to do." He said: "I know we are going through a difficult time. People should just take a step back and look at the fundamentals. Despite the appalling stuff about prisoner abuse, we are trying with the majority of the Iraqi people to get the country on its feet. "The people who are attacking coalition forces and assassinating construction and aid workers are trying...

Battle of the Valley of Peace

It appears the battle for Najaf is back on. A few hours ago, American forces pushed deep into the city and wound up engaging Moqtada al-Sadr's militia in the world's largest cemetery, ironically called the Valley of Peace: Backed by helicopters, American tanks charged into the center of this holy city on Friday and shelled positions held by fighters loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who launched an uprising against the U.S.-led coalition last month. In a sermon in a nearby city, a defiant al-Sadr condemned the United States and its chief coalition partner, Britain. The U.S. attack represented a strongest U.S. push yet against al-Sadr, whose forces fought intense battles with American forces this week in another holy city, Karbala. The intensifying battles have eclipsed efforts by Iraqi political and tribal leaders to seek a peaceful solution to the confrontation ahead of a planned transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on...

VDH: Taking Our Eyes Off The Ball

Victor David Hanson writes another brilliant essay for National Review Online, reminding us why we went to war in the first place, and how some people are allowing themselves to be distracted from the stakes. In particular, Hanson focuses on the silly and hysterical calls for the resignations of Donald Rumsfeld and now Richard Myers, the two men who put together perhaps the most efficient and successful major war plans ever into operation, liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from two of the worst tyrannies in recent memory (via Hugh Hewitt and Memeorandum): The idea that anyone would suggest that Donald Rumsfeld and now Richard Meyers! should step down, in the midst of a global war, for the excesses and criminality of a handful of miscreant guards and their lax immediate superiors in the cauldron of Iraq is absurd and depressing all at once. What would...

Better Late Than Never, I Suppose

In the current war on Islamofascism, we have been repeatedly warned by elites not to conflate the hooded terrorists who bomb and behead innocent civilians and the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims, who reject violent jihad in favor of internal, spiritual warfare. However, as many have noted, Islamic public-interest groups such as CAIR as well as Muslim communities have seemed much more focused on carping about anti-Islam sentiment in the US and how Americans have mistreated Muslims rather than the supposed hijacking of of their faith by genocidal maniacs. Almost three years after 9/11, it finally took the brutal imagery of an unarmed civilian having his head hacked off his body and proudly displayed to a video camera to get American Muslims off the dime: Alarmed by resurgent anti-Muslim rhetoric in the aftermath of the beheading of an American in Iraq, U.S. Muslim leaders launched a new campaign Thursday to...

Love Or Let Them Be Lonely

General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US forces in Iraq, has issued an order putting some of the most coercive interrogation techniques out of bounds, the Washington Post reports in tomorrow's edition. In fact, the Iraqi commander made it clear to his staff that anything more coercive than isolation or segregation would not even be considered: The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has barred military interrogators from using the most coercive techniques potentially available to them in the past, declaring that requests to employ the measures against detainees will no longer even be considered, officials said yesterday. ... Under the new order, which was issued Thursday, Sanchez and his staff will no longer consider any extraordinary interrogation methods other than putting prisoners alone in cells or in small groups segregated from the general prison population for more than 30 days. Regular interrogation techniques such as direct questioning of detainees without...

May 16, 2004

Post: A Confusion of Chaos and Purpose?

The Washington Post reports today on the continuing investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, reducing the story to two somewhat contradictory themes. The first theme, and the one which grabs the headline, says that the abuses resulted from decisions made within the command structure to allow for harsh interrogation techniques and the conflating of MP and intelligence roles, something that the military normally avoids. The second theme lays the blame on a lack of discipline that extended even to casual dress within the prison facilities themselves. On the first theme, R. Jeffrey Smith names Col. Thomas M. Pappas as the author of the first theme by his insistence that Army reservists assigned MP duty at Abu Ghraib set the table for interrogations: But the fact that a plan for such intense and highly organized pressure was proposed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas -- a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq...

May 17, 2004

Early Iraqi Elections -- Kaus v. Zakaria

Mickey Kaus and Fareed Zakaria debate the wisdom of early Iraqi elections -- or any elections at all -- due to the current security environment in occupied Iraq. Zakaria argues that the current lack of a reasonably secure and stable environment means that any elections will make the results meaningless, and possibly self-destructive: Some in America are now urging elections even sooner than January 2005. This is not a democratization strategy. It is an exit strategy. But it will not work. Elections held in an uncertain security environment with militias running around the country will produce contested results and a renewed power strugglein other words, a road neither to peace nor to pluralism. ... In the Kurdish regions, the United States has allowed the two parties and their peshmerga military force free reign, which has included some ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Kirkuk. In Fallujah, the Army has agreed that...

Sarin Artillery Shell Discovered In Iraq

It looks like the death of the WMD justification has been somewhat exaggerated: A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. Two people were treated for "minor exposure," but no serious injuries were reported. "The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy. Jon at QandO (one of my favorite blogs) points out that only one shell has been found, and it's likely of older manufacture -- so, he argues, it's insufficient to re-energize the WMD argument all by itself. Fair enough, and after numerous false alarms, rhetorical caution should be the order of the day anyway. However, as the AP...

May 18, 2004

Testimony: Abu Ghraib Abuses Exceeded Orders

The New York Times reports briefly this morning that testimony in a preliminary hearing for Sgt. Javal Davis, one of the soldiers accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib, demonstrates that the abuses originated with the soldiers involved and were not the results of orders from above: Interrogators from military intelligence and other government agencies told guards at the Abu Ghraib prison to deprive detainees of sleep and food, and would strip detainees and make them sleep naked in their cells, but their orders stopped well short of the abuse at the center of the prison scandal, guards and investigators have testified at a preliminary hearing for one of the soldiers accused of abuse. ... But the testimony offered no evidence to back up what lawyers for the accused soldiers have said: that their clients were following orders when they threw naked detainees in a pile, stomped on their hands and...

Homeland Security Operations Center Makes A Difference

According to the Washington Post, the new Homeland Security Operations Center has made a big difference in the war on terror, providing a focus point for intelligence and investigators working the domestic beat: The center is critical to the government's efforts to address an issue raised by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: the failure of agencies to share information with one another. That problem has come under intense scrutiny since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. All sides have vowed to change the culture, but some skeptics doubt that intelligence agencies will share their deepest secrets with one another. The director of the CIA, for example, oversees another multiple-agency command center set up a year ago by the president -- the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. But Broderick says the two aren't in competition: His center focuses on activities in the United States, while the other...

Four Held In Berg Butchery

Britain's Sky News reports from Iraq that four men have been detained in the butchery beheading of American Nicholas Berg: Four people have been arrested over the beheading of American Nicholas Berg, Iraq sources say. The 26-year-old businessman's decapitated body was found 10 days ago in Baghdad. His killing was shown around the world on the internet. ... The website said the execution was performed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a top ally of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. It is not known if he was among the four people arrested. Thus far, Sky News is the only outlet reporting their capture. The report is (at this time) about 45 minutes old. I'll update this post as more information comes through. (via Memeorandum) UPDATE: From the French news service AFP: Four people have been arrested over the beheading of US businessman Nicholas Berg, whose killing was shown earlier this month...

Defense Confirms Sarin Find

Fox News reports that the Defense Department has confirmed that the shell that partially exploded by the roadside yesterday contained four liters of sarin -- enough to kill thousands of people under the right conditions. The discovery indicates that more such shells will come to light (via Instapundit): Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin, Defense Dept. officials told Fox News Tuesday. The artillery shell was being used as an improvised roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. The 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent. ... New weapons caches are being found every day, experts said, including "hundreds of thousands" of rocket-propelled grenades and portable anti-aircraft weapons. "Clearly, if we're gonna find...

"Despicable"

The 9/11 Commission jumped the shark once and for all this afternoon when Commissioner John Lehman launched a hyperbolic, unfair, and grandstanding attack on the leaders of the New York police and fire departments -- who lost scores of men in the disaster of the World Trade Center: The former police and fire chiefs who were lionized after the World Trade Center attack came under harsh criticism Tuesday from the Sept. 11 commission, with one member saying the departments' lack of cooperation was scandalous and "not worthy of the Boy Scouts." Commission members, in New York for an emotional two-day hearing, focused on how leaders of the two departments failed to share information effectively in the early frantic moments after two hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center. Former fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen and former police chief Bernard Kerik shot back with infuriated responses to commissioner John Lehman's...

May 19, 2004

ABC Witness Says "Cover-Up"

ABC News features an interview on its website with a "military intelligence analyst" who claims that the Army is conducting a deliberate cover-up of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In an article by Brian Ross and Alexandra Salomon, Sgt. Samuel Provance says that "dozens" of people knew about the abuse, and that it stemmed from orders given by military intelligence. The emphasis in the excerpt are mine: "There's definitely a cover-up," the witness, Sgt. Samuel Provance, said. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet." Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite orders from his commanders not to. "What I was surprised at was the silence," said Provance. "The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something." Provance, now stationed in...

"Wedding" Attack At 3 AM? Pentagon Says No

Earlier today, the AP and others reported that American military forces fired on a wedding celebration near the Iraqi-Syrian border after mistaking celebratory gunfire for an attack. Now, however, the Pentagon disputes that story and insists that forces attacked a terrorist safe house: "Our report is that this was not a wedding party, that these were anti-coalition forces that fired first, and that U.S. troops returned fire, destroying several vehicles, and killing a number of them," a Pentagon spokesman said. He was responding to a video distributed by The Associated Press showing Iraqi witnesses who said that at least 20 people were killed and five others critically wounded early Wednesday when planes fired on a wedding celebration. A man on the video said all homes in the village near the Syrian border were destroyed in the attack at about 3 a.m. local time Wednesday [emph mine]. ... A coalition official...

9/11: The Circus Continues

The 9/11 Commission, which has lately become the (Grand)Standing Committe on National Scolding and Punditry, interrogated former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani from a site less than two miles from Ground Zero. This hearing provided yet another opportunity for a handful of victim family members to act irrationally in order to get their faces on the evening news: Outraged relatives of World Trade Center victims heckled former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday as their hopes that he would be grilled by the Sept. 11 commission faded in the face of gentle questioning and effusive praise from panel members. "My son was murdered because of your incompetence!" shouted Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son died in the trade center. Seated three rows behind Giuliani, she jabbed her finger at the former mayor and waved a sign that read "Fiction" as he gave the city's emergency response a glowing review. Regenhard may want...

May 20, 2004

The Handy And Media-Friendly Excuse For All Deserters

Fox News reports on a soldier who deserted his unit by failing to return from leave who now faces a court-martial. However, the soldier plans on using two different and interesting defenses for abandoning his unit while it currently serves under fire in Ramadi, Iraq. Can anyone guess which one will get all the media attention he could wish? A U.S. soldier charged with desertion for leaving his unit in Iraq contended Thursday at this court-martial that he did not commit a crime because the Army had improperly failed to discharge him. Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, an infantry squad leader in the Florida National Guard, acknowledged disobeying his commanders' orders to return to Iraq in October after a two-week furlough. Mejia said he asked to be discharged under a National Guard regulation barring non-U.S. citizens from serving more than eight years. Mejia, who joined the Army nine years ago, has...

May 21, 2004

The Story Behind The Pictures

Tomorrow's Washington Post outlines the abuses at Abu Ghraib in a detailed and disturbing report based on declassified sworn statements from the victims themselves. They describe a disgusting example of inhumanity, but interestingly, the article only implicates a small number of MPs at the Iraqi prison: Previously secret sworn statements by detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq describe in raw detail abuse that goes well beyond what has been made public, adding allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets. ... Some of the detainees described being abused as punishment or discipline after they were caught fighting or with a prohibited item. Some said they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in...

Post: Material Witness Will Prove Abuse Localized

The Washington Post's Jackie Spinner analyzes the plea deal that Spc. Jeremy Sivits completed with his conviction and sentencing at his court-martial yesterday in Baghdad and concludes that he will make a powerful witness for prosecutors in upcoming cases: Spc. Jeremy Sivits's tearful apology and no-excuse testimony at his court-martial on Wednesday will make him a credible witness against other soldiers charged with mistreating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and could undermine arguments that they were simply following orders, military legal experts said Thursday. Sivits, the first of seven U.S. soldiers charged with prisoner abuse to be convicted, told an Army judge that he knew what he was doing was wrong, saying, "sir, I am truly sorry. I am sorry for what I've done." The 24-year-old Army reservist agreed to testify against his fellow soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company in exchange for a lighter sentence. A judge...

Herbert Rehabilitates Camilo Mejia

Normally I skip over Bob Herbert in the New York Times as he reliably demonstrates a complete lack of understanding on almost anything he writes. However, today's column covers the story of Sgt. Camilo Mejia, whose story I noted in a post late last night. As expected, Herbert insists on rehabilitating Mejia by excusing his desertion on the basis of ... well, on the basis of his working for Rumsfeld, as Herbert concludes: When there is time later to reflect on what has happened, said Sergeant Mejia, "you come face to face with your emotions and your feelings and you try to tell yourself that you did it for a good reason. And if you don't find it, if you don't believe you did it for a good reason, then, you know, it becomes pretty tough to accept it to willingly be a part of the war." A military...

Michael Berg, Moral Coward

I can understand the grief of a parent mourning the loss of a treasured son, and how that grief can lead a father to lash out irrationally. I try to make allowances for those unfortunate enough to find themselves in that situation. However, Michael Berg has completely exhausted my sympathy and patience with a twisted and craven opinion piece published by the London Guardian today, in which he romanticizes his son's killers while saving his venom for George Bush (emphases are mine): People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son's tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration. They ask: "Don't you blame the five men who killed him?" I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration, but I am wrong: I am sure, knowing my son, that somewhere during their association with him these men became aware...

The Veneer of Civilization

Dale Franks at QandO posted a difficult lesson for Americans and people of Western civilization, one that we have forgotten but that history proves time and again: Scott Higham and Joe Stephens of the Washington Post continue the rollout of allegations from Abu Ghraib. And it just keeps getting worse and worse. The Post has also obtained more pictures from Abu Ghraib, which they present along with the article. Seeing, the pictures, they remind me of nothing so much as something you'd hear about going on in the gulag or the konzentrationslager. We like to think that, because we are Americans, we don't do stuff like this. That we are better than that. That's something the Nazis or the commies would do, probably because they are, in some way, morally deficient in a way that Americans are not. That is a bright and shining lie. The awful truth is that,...

Did Saddam's Nephew Help Kill Nick Berg?

While Michael Berg continues to blame everyone except the people who sawed his son's head off while he was still alive for Nick Berg's death, US and Iraqi forces continue their investigation into his brutal murder. The London Guardian reports that Iraqi forces have arrested an uncertain number of people in the case, including a nephew of Saddam Hussein: The mystery of who killed Nick Berg, the freelance contractor beheaded on video, took a new twist last night when Iraqi police claimed they had arrested four suspects with links to Saddam Hussein's family. Iraqi security officials said Berg's alleged killers were part of a group led by a close relative of Saddam - his nephew Yasser al-Sabawi. The men were seized a week ago after a tip-off, they said. All were former members of the Fedayeen Saddam, the para military group notorious for its loyalty to Iraq's ex-president. American commander...

May 22, 2004

Country's Secrets Lost -- Again?

Noel Schachtman at Wired reports that the Los Alamos National Laboratory reports that the lab has once again lost a data-storage device containing classified information, which at this facility would consist of nuclear technology -- something that al-Qaeda, North Korea, Iran, and a host of other hostile countries and organizations would love to have fall into their hands: The latest episode came to light Thursday, after Los Alamos admitted that, since a Monday inventory check, its custodians hadn't been able to find a "classified removable electronic media," or CREM -- disks and drives inscribed with the country's secrets. A Los Alamos press release played down the incident, calling it "a single accounting discrepancy (that) in no way constitutes a compromise of national security." Los Alamos has tens of thousands of removable hard drives, discs and memory sticks. When one can't be found, it's usually because of something innocent, like "administrative...

WaPo: Abuse Not Intended For Interrogations

Scott Highan and Joe Stephens report in today's Washington Post that witness and suspect statements in the Abu Ghraib abuse investigation cast doubt on the notion that the abuse stemmed from military intelligence direction, but instead serviced the amusement and frustration of the MPs assigned to guard them: Prisoners posed in three of the most infamous photographs of abuse to come out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were not being softened up for interrogation by intelligence officers but instead were being punished for criminal acts or the amusement of their jailers, according to previously secret documents obtained by The Washington Post. ... In one of the most striking images to surface, a detainee jokingly referred to as "Gilligan" by the MPs was forced to stand on a box of food, with wires connected to his fingers, toes and penis. [Spec. Sabrina] Harman said she attached the wires to...

Wedding Bell Blues

The Coalition Provisional Authority released more information on the "wedding" attacked by US forces near the Iraqi-Syrian border. Not only did that "wedding" take place at an unusual time, but its celebrants all seemed to be about the same age: Senior coalition military spokesman said that dozens of people killed in a U.S. attack in the Iraqi desert early Wednesday were attending a high-level meeting of foreign fighters, not a wedding. Photos shown to reporters in Baghdad support that contention. ... Kimmitt said troops did not find anything -- such as a wedding tent, gifts, musical instruments, decorations or leftover food -- that would indicate a wedding had been held. Most of the men there were of military age, and there were no elders present to indicate a family event, he said. No one found dead children at the site of the attack, either, despite earlier reports. Kimmitt told CNN...

May 23, 2004

WaPo Uses More Hearsay, Pentagon Issues Denial

In its continuing coverage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, the Washington Post reports today on statements made by defense counsel that Gen. Ricardo Sanchez may have been present for some of the abuse, and that Gen. Janis Karpinski seems to have switched from defense to offense as a result: The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath. "Are you saying that Captain Reese is going...

May 24, 2004

Detroit News: 9/11 Families Ungrateful, Rude

Nolan Finley, the opinion editor of the Detroit News, has also lost all patience with the 9/11 victims' families that have chosen to politicize themselves and promote themselves at every opportunity. In a signed editorial yesterday, Finley scolds those who acted so rudely during former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony last week: America adopted the families of the September 11 terrorism victims, showered them with support and sympathy, and lifted them up as a living emblem of the national wound suffered. But now, some of the family members are wearing thin. Some groups have morphed into quasi-political organizations, using their mourner status to gain a platform for pushing their views on everything from immigration laws to the Patriot Act to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Others express their grief in the form of endless protest, rallying against the design of the September 11 memorial, carping about the inadequacy of the...

May 25, 2004

AP: Terrorists Planning Summer Surprise

The AP reports that US intelligence has "highly credible" information that al-Qaeda terrorists plan on staging a large attack or series of attacks in America this summer: U.S. officials have obtained new intelligence deemed highly credible indicating al-Qaida or other terrorists are in the United States and preparing to launch a major attack this summer, The Associated Press has learned. The intelligence does not include a time, place or method of attack but is among the most disturbing received by the government since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a senior federal counterterrorism official who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity Tuesday. Of most concern, the official said, is that terrorists may possess and use a chemical, biological or radiological weapon that could cause much more damage and casualties than a conventional bomb. "There is clearly a steady drumbeat of information that they are going to...

May 26, 2004

Going To The Dogs

According to a Washington Post article today, military intelligence specialist Col. Thomas Pappas claims that the idea of using dogs during interrogations in Abu Ghraib came from the commanding general of the detention facility at Guantnamo. However, buried below the jump is an admission by Pappas that he disobeyed orders in unmuzzling the dogs: A U.S. Army general dispatched by senior Pentagon officials to bolster the collection of intelligence from prisoners in Iraq last fall inspired and promoted the use of guard dogs there to frighten the Iraqis, according to sworn testimony by the top U.S. intelligence officer at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to the officer, Col. Thomas Pappas, the idea came from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who at the time commanded the U.S. militarydetention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and was implemented under a policy approved by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. military official...

ABC News: Saddam, Al-Qaeda Linked Through Al-Zarqawi

ABC News posted a story to its website yesterday on the hunt for Ayman al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader whose attacks in Istanbul and the beheading of Nicholas Berg have catapulted him to the forefront of the war on terror. According to their final section of the story, titled "Training Under Bin Laden," ABC reports (hat tips RantingProfs, Blogosapien): During the 1990s, Zarqawi trained under bin Laden in Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban, he fled to northwestern Iraq and worked with poisons for use in potential attacks, officials say. During the summer of 2002, he underwent nasal surgery at a Baghdad hospital, officials say. They mistakenly originally thought, however, that Zarqawi had his leg amputated due to an injury. In late 2002, officials say, Zarqawi began establishing sleeper cells in Baghdad and acquiring weapons from Iraqi intelligence officials. Late 2002? That preceded the American effort to get UNSC Resolution...

May 27, 2004

WSJ: Another Saddam-AQ Link Discovered

Two days after ABC News reported, deep into a story on Abu al-Zarqawi, that the al-Qaeda operative and beheader of Nick Berg had received support, shelter, and arms from Saddam Hussein at least as far back as "late 2002", the Wall Street Journal discovers another link to Islamofascists and Saddam Hussein. In this case, the terrorist in question has long been suspected of having involvement in 9/11 and now appears to be a commander in the Saddam Fedayeen: One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime's dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen,...

Telegraph: Abu Hamza To Be Extradited To US

The London Telegraph reports this morning that Abu Hamza, a radical muslim cleric linked to Britons held in Guantanamo, has been arrested in a dawn raid and will soon be extradited to the US: Police were acting on an extradition warrant issued by the US government: it is thought the US authorities plan to charge him with terror-related offences. ... According to The Sun, the preacher faces deportation to the US on terror charges. The newspaper also claimed that sources in Washington revealed that the extradition process has been under way in secret for weeks. While this article does not detail the charges pending against Hamza, an earlier Telegraph article from February reported that the US wanted Hamza in relation to al-Qaeda recruitment activity in Oregon: The American authorities are understood to be close to presenting a formal request for Hamza's extradition to face accusations contained in US court papers...

NYT: Abu Ghraib MPs Chronic Discipline Problems

I have repeatedly asserted that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses resulted from a lack of discipline in the unit and the command, not from some sort of insidious conspiracy to humiliate Iraqis. Now the New York Times reports this morning that three of the seven soldiers involved in the abuse scandal had long histories of poor discipline, including Spec. Charles Graner, considered to be the ringleader: In the six months leading up to the investigation of prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, three of the seven soldiers now charged with abuse repeatedly committed infractions and disobeyed orders but received only the mildest of punishments. Their violations of military rules included entering buildings they had been ordered to avoid, continuing improper sexual relations with one another and being aggressive with detainees, according to records obtained by The New York Times. ... Among [Taguba's] concerns were flippant comments in logbooks, lack of standards...

Another Roll Of The Dice, In Najaf This Time

The CPA and the Bush administration rolled the dice again today, reaching a negotiated settlement with radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Under the agreement, the Americans and al-Sadr's al-Mahdi army will both pull back from Najaf as well as Kufa and allow Iraqi civilian authority to once again take control of the cities: American forces and guerrillas loyal to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed today to pull back from the holy Shiite city of Najaf, in a deal that signaled the end of a seven-week-old stand-off that has left hundreds of Iraqis dead. The agreement, hammered out between Mr. Sadr and Iraqi leaders and approved by the Americans, calls for the Mahdi Army, whose fighters have held the city since April 5, to put away their guns and go home, and for the American forces to pull most of their forces out of the city. Under the agreement, the...

May 28, 2004

New Iraqi PM Selected Unanimously

The BBC reports that the Iraqi Governing Council has unanimously approved a leading Shi'ite exile during the Hussein regime to lead the new, liberated Iraq after the transfer of sovereignty: Former exile Iyad Allawi has been chosen to head an interim Iraqi government after sovereignty is handed back on 30 June. Mr Allawi - a Shia Muslim - was endorsed unanimously by the Governing Council, member Mahmoud Othman said. An aide to Mr Allawi said his nomination had been approved by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi - who is charged with putting together a new government. He will lead the administration until direct elections scheduled for 2005. The unanimity displayed by the council gives the hope of a smooth and politically viable transfer to civilian authority. Mr. Allawi's Shi'a background will allay fears of continued Sunni domination, especially after the dissatisfying resolution of the crisis in Fallujah, at least from the...

From KIA To Murdered: One Casualty's Story Changes

The AP and the Washington Post report on a change made in the status of an American casualty of the initial invasion, a soldier in the same unit as Jessica Lynch and who had been listed as killed in action. The Pentagon changed the status of Sgt. Donald Walters based on new evidence from an Iraqi civilian and the tenacity of Walters' parents, fighting to find out the truth: A soldier in the same ambush as former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch was not killed in action but captured by Iraqi fighters and then executed, officials said. The family of Sgt. Donald Walters of Salem -- who had pressed officials for an investigation of their son's death -- learned the new information from the Oregon National Guard. Guard officials released the details to the public Thursday, more than a year after the March 23, 2003, ambush. ... "He was executed...

May 29, 2004

Slaves? I Think Not

The First Mate and I had dinner last night with a couple who are good friends of ours from a non-profit for which we all volunteer. As usual when we get together, the conversation flowed over many topics for several hours, which is why you didn't see me post at all last night. We talked about everything except politics until the end of the evening when our friends were ready to leave. We usually skip politics because our friends are fairly liberal and they know that Marcia and I are fairly conservative. On the way out, however, "Sally" asked me how long I thought we would be in Iraq, to which I replied, "Well, we're still in the Balkans, and I think we'll be out of Iraq before we leave there." This prompted a brief but spirited conversation, at the end of which she claimed that the Bush administration, specifically...

Slaves, Revisited

One last point regarding Reggie Rivers' screed yesterday: the NFL seems to produce slavery analogies on a regular basis. After reading his column, it reminded me of another, more famous NFL star who claimed to be the victim of slavery: The way Warren Sapp apparently sees it, his human rights have been violated. ... If you missed it, his comments followed a spat involving LaVar Arrington of the Washington Redskins. Arrington threatened retaliation if Sapp ran or jumped through the Redskins' pregame warmup line at FedEx Field, as he has done in the past. The NFL responded by warning that a 15-yard penalty would be assessed on the opening kickoff if a player disrupted warmups - and that anyone involved in fighting would face ejection. Sapp told Jay Glazer of cbs.sportsline before Sunday's game: "(Arrington) got what he wanted. He snitched, and the slave master came down. Stop a man...

Resplendent Mango: Give War A Chance

I've seen this math before, but it bears repeating again. Katie at the Resplendent Mango offers up an accounting lesson to the folks at Win Without War: If there was one thing I could drill into the heads of the loony leftists (pointy things not withstanding) it would be the fact that we are not necessarily at peace just because we're not at war. Nor is that faux-peace necessarily better than war. By some estimates, 11,000 Iraqis have died from unnatural causes in the past 14 months. As opposed to approximately 36,000 a year under Saddam. Now, I understand that the Left believes that the US is evil as a matter of faith, but I fail to understand how 25,000 people not dying in the past year, people that would have either starved, or been raped and killed, or dismembered, or buried in mass graves, or some combination thereof, is...

Hayes: Saddam, Al-Qaeda Links Verified By Clinton Administration, NPR, ABC, et al

Stephen Hayes, a contributor to the Weekly Standard, will release a new book this week titled The Connection, describing in great detail the ties between al-Qaeda and the deposed Iraqi strongman. The Weekly Standard features an excerpt from the Hayes book in its latest online edition which discusses the curious and massive case of amnesia that the media suffers on the question of these ties: "THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED THE COUNTRY with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday. "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in an interview on March 21, 2004. The editor of the Los Angeles Times labeled as "myth" the claim that links between Iraq and al...

May 31, 2004

Wes Clark's Rambling Fantasy

While I regarded Gen. Wesley Clark as a terrible candidate, I had respect for his experience in uniform and his outlook on foreign-policy issues. However, in his essay in The New Republic, Clark endorses a series of proposals more rooted in fantasy than reality and demonstrates his unsuitability for involvement in the war on Islamofascist terror -- in which he would surely play a significant role during a Kerry administration. Clark argues for a course correction in Iraq without clearly explaining why the current course is a failure, except by pointing at polls that says people think it's failing: But today, 14 months later, the mission is in shambles, scarred by rising Iraqi popular discontent, continued attacks against U.S. forces, infiltration of foreign fighters, mounting civil strife, and no credible sense of direction. Despite President George W. Bush's calls for staying the course, American public opinion has clearly turned against...

Arafat On The Way Out?

Despite the blatherings of Wesley Clark (see below), the days of Yasser Arafat may be numbered, according to a report from the Jerusalem Post (via Drudge). The pan-Arab news source Al-Quds-al-Arabi reports that the Egyptian government has issued an ultimatum to Arafat to reform or face an Israeli response unrestrained by either the US or Egypt itself: According to a report Monday in the pan-Arab Al-Quds-al-Arabi, Suleiman handed Arafat three demands: First, to unite all the Palestinian security forces under one command authority, and into three components. These include the police, the Preventative Security Service (equivalent of Israel's General Security Service), and the Palestinian foreign security service (equivalent of Israel's Mossad). Secondly, give PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei complete authority to conduct negotiations with Israel over Ariel Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan. Thirdly, stand aside and accept a symbolic position and let others lead the Palestinian Authority. If these demands are...

June 1, 2004

Why This Is War And Not Crime

The Justice Department released documentation on the Jose Padilla case, the only US citizen seized outside the battlefield being held as an enemy combatant, showing the scope of the al-Qaeda contacts and plans with which Padilla was involved: Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member held as a terrorism suspect for two years, sought to blow up hotels and apartment buildings in the United States in addition to planning an attack with a "dirty bomb" radiological device, the government said Tuesday. The Justice Department, under pressure to explain its indefinite detention of a U.S. citizen as an "enemy combatant," detailed Padilla's alleged al-Qaida training in Afghanistan and contacts with the most senior members of the terrorist network, his travel back into the United States and preparations to rent apartments and set off explosives. The DoJ shows how Padilla signed an application to join al-Qaeda and worked with known AQ leaders...

Cautiously Optimistic

Iraq took large steps towards independence and representative government with the formal creation of an interim Iraqi executive and cabinet, which will replace the US-formed Iraqi Governing Council. The IGC, which suffered from its association with the occupation, used its considerable political heft to install its own choices in key positions despite some opposition from both the US and the UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi. The BBC reports that President Bush waxed ebullient about these developments and the people chosen by the Iraqis: US President Bush has welcomed Iraq's interim government saying it represents a broad cross-section of society and has the "talent" to guide the nation. He said that the first priority for the new leadership will be to pave the way to nationwide elections by January. Mr Bush insisted the US had played no role in selecting the new cabinet, and instead praised the UN for their input. The...

Iran: You Caught Us, We're Innocent

Iran reversed itself today and finally admitted that it had imported parts for nuclear centrifuges designed to create weapons-grade fissile material, but still claims that the US falsely accuses it of pursuing a nuclear-weapons program, according to the AP and CNN. The AP covers the Iranian reversal: In a reversal, Iran has acknowledged importing parts for advanced centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Tuesday in a confidential report obtained by The Associated Press. ... In an interview with The Associated Press before the report was leaked, U.S. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton accused Tehran of engaging in "denial and deception. ... We are convinced that they are pursuing a clandestine program to acquire nuclear weapons," he said. ... Iran has rejected the U.S. allegations, saying its nuclear program is geared only toward generating electricity. CNN, meanwhile, covers another aspect of the...

June 2, 2004

Telegraph: Fallujah Nightmare

The London Telegraph, normally pro-American and somewhat supportive of the war in Iraq, writes a tough article on the result of the Fallujah truce, where it appears that we will eventually need to face an undiminished insurgency in the heart of the Sunni Triangle: The town is currently a no-go area for US troops, and by extension, any westerner. Despite lucrative rebuilding contracts, none has entered the city since four contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated in March, prompting the American incursion. ... My escort, a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which negotiated the peace deal with the marines, warned me that he would not be able to guarantee my safety if I set foot outside the car. The reason for such caution was obvious. Brown-shirted members of the Fallujah Brigade, most of them former resistance fighters, manned checkpoints across the city. The few residents who agreed to...

June 3, 2004

Karpinski Dodges Responsibility

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commanding officer of the Abu Ghraib unit where American soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners, has decided that the best defense is a good offense and actively courts the media to respond to their allegations and questions. Today's Los Angeles Times has a profile of Karpinski in which the general takes the decidedly un-military position of refusing responsibility for the actions of her unit: The woman who commanded the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade and supervised the guards at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison has become one of the most recognizable and relentlessly pursued players in an erupting international scandal over prisoner abuse. In part, that's because Karpinski has not followed the route of the traditional commander who stoically accepts responsibility for failure on her watch and quietly retires. Instead, Karpinski has actively cooperated and sometimes sought out the media in a one-woman campaign to defend...

Tenet Exits

CIA Director George Tenet resigned today, according to President George Bush and reported by USA Today (via Instapundit): George Tenet has resigned as CIA director, President Bush announced Thursday, ending the increasingly stormy tenure of a man under fire for the department's intelligence before the Iraq war. In a brief appearance before leaving for Europe, Bush told reporters he had met Wednesday night at the White House with Tenet. "He told he me was resigning for personal reasons. I told him I was sorry he was leaving," Bush said. Tenet will serve until mid-July and will be temporarily replaced by Deputy Director John McLaughlin, Bush said. Glenn Reynolds says, "It's about time," and it's difficult to argue with that assessment. Whatever the reasons, our intelligence services failed to gather a comprehensive look at the gathering threat of Islamofascism. It would be terribly unfair to lay the blame entirely at Tenet's...

Sistani Signs Off On New Iraqi Gov't

The Coalition garnered a qualified endorsement from Ayatollah Ali Sistani today, the most influential Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, for the new transitional government. Sistani issued a rare written statement indicating his modest, if unenthusiastic, approval: Iraq's new interim government Thursday won crucial recognition Thursday from Iraq's most revered cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Iraqi Shiites' supreme religious leader. Sistani, in a written statement issued by his office in the holy city of Najaf, shied away from a formal endorsement of the new government. But he said it could make itself worthy by improving life for Iraqis and by erasing "the consequences" of the U.S. occupation. ... Sistani's rare comments were considered highly significant. He holds considerable sway among Iraq's majority Shiite population, so much so that he was able to force the United States to significantly modify its timetable for Iraqi self-government earlier this year. While his words were...

June 4, 2004

Captain Daniel Eggers, American Hero

Bill at INDC Journal posted about the tragic death of Captain Daniel Eggers this past weekend in Afghanistan. Captain Eggers served in Afghanistan with the Green Berets and died when his HUMVEE ran over a mine. Bill relates Eggers' personal history, interspersed with an NBC report of his death -- because Dan Eggers was a school friend of Bill's: His uncompromising character pushed him to speak critically of the school he loved in 1997, recalled Craig Belsole, Eggers' best friend at The Citadel. Eggers was a senior in 1997, during the first school year women were admitted after The Citadel dropped its all-male admissions policy. Eggers and Belsole appeared on "60 Minutes" that year and suggested top school officials covered up incidents of hazing against two female cadets. Eggers and Belsole said they reported their concerns to an officer at the school but were told to keep quiet or lose...

A Muslim Calls For Rational Thought In Islam

Captain's Quarters reader Roger Crossland pointed me to an article in today's Arab News by Suraya al-Shehry, a Saudi woman, who argues for intellectual curiosity and openness to individual interpretations of Islam. Because of the decentralized nature of Islam, al-Shehry's essay doesn't equate to Martin Luther's theses nailed to the church door, but it does infer that the Saudi government may be rethinking radical Wahhabi philosophy in light of its targeting by radical Islamists. Regarding the closed-mindedness of current Islamic scholarship, al-Shehry protests: The Quran, in fact, censures those who merely unthinkingly follow others. And they would say: Our Lord! We obeyed our chiefs and our great ones, and they misled us as to the (right) Path. Reflection in Islam is an essential requirement. Without it the very basis of Islamic thought will begin to crumble. It is that painful reality that is behind our backwardness. The Prophet (peace be...

New Iraqi PM Hails US Troops

Far from being hostile to the US or its security, the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, has gone on national television to both praise the work of Americans and their allies in Iraq and call for an end to attacks on them: Iraq's new interim leader has praised the US-led coalition, saying it will guarantee security after the country regains its sovereignty on 30 June. In his first televised address to the nation, Iyad Allawi also urged an end to attacks on coalition forces who, he said, were making sacrifices for Iraq. Anti-coalition militants brought Iraqis "nothing but evil", he said. The speech follows an announcement by Iraq's new government endorsing a UN draft on the transfer of power. It's great to see the new interim Iraqi government take the time to both praise and defend the American forces trying so hard to give them their first real chance...

June 5, 2004

The Brilliance Of Anti-War Thought

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune notes that anti-war activists protested the Iraq War in front of the Walker Community Library this afternoon, despite a lack of evidence that the library had any overt involvement in the conflict. Nevertheless, the protestors demanded an end to a war that has already ended with the typically deep philosophical thought that goes into these demonstrations: Demonstrators carried banners, flags and signs that read "War sucks" and "Starve the war" as they used chalk to draw peace symbols and footprints on the sidewalk, listened to passionate speakers and passed out fliers announcing upcoming local anti-war events ... Several motorists honked their horns in approval as they drove by on Hennepin Avenue. War sucks? How come no one told me that before? Well, that's an entirely different kettle of fish. And you have to love the news that "several people" honked their horns during the 90-minute demonstration. It's...

June 6, 2004

Steyn: Why Was Tenet Still Around?

Mark Steyn writes a powerful indictment against the CIA and Congressional Democrats in his latest column on the resignation of George Tenet. Writing for the London Telegraph, the always-acerbic Steyn wonders why Tenet held off resigning so long after the debacle of 9/11 and even after it was made clear that the CIA had failed miserably to provide adequate intelligence to George Bush. Steyn focuses on the PDB for which the 9/11 Commission demanded declassification as his prime evidence: Everything that is wrong with the agency was made plain a few weeks ago with the much-anticipated release of a classified CIA "Presidential Daily Brief" from August 6 2001. This was supposed to be the smoking gun which would reveal that Bush knew 9/11 was coming. It turned out to be far more damaging than that. It revealed somewhat carelessly that the CIA - the most sinister acronym in the world,...

June 7, 2004

Burning Down The House

Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, which had claimed to protect the sacred mosques of Shi'ite Islam, instead may have seriously damaged one of them this morning. The al-Mahdi army used a mosque in the "holy city" of Kufa to store ammunition which caught fire, causing an unknown number of injuries and damage: Explosions rocked the compound surrounding the Kufa mosque on Monday after ammunition used by fighters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr apparently caught fire, witnesses and Shiite militia members said. At least nine people were hurt. Flames and smoke rose above the building. Firefighters and ambulances raced to the site, where fighters in al-Sadr's al-Madhi army had been holed up. One of the terrorists holed up in the mosque told reporters that he heard a "whooshing" noise and blamed Americans for shooting a missile at the compound. US forces deny they were anywhere near the mosque and note that Iraqi police called...

More Success For Interim Iraqi Gov't, CPA

Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi Prime Minister, announced this morning that the new interim government has reached agreement with most of the organized insurgencies to disband and return to civilian life: Nine of Iraq's major militias have agreed to disband, the country's interim prime minister said Monday, but the deal does not cover radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia. "I am happy to announce today the successful completion of negotiations on the nationwide transition and reintegration of militias and other armed forces previously outside of state control," Iyad Allawi said in a statement. Well, it's amazing how unsuccessful this transition has been, isn't it? And doesn't it seem that democracy has a lot more attraction for Iraqis than it does to certain elements of the American political scene? As CNN put it yesterday, the Iraqis took control of their government and since then good things keep happening. All that the...

Arafat Rolls Dice, Blinks On Purpose

Yasser Arafat has made his calculations and decided not to call Egypt's bluff but Israel's instead, agreeing to Egyptian demands that he reform the structure of Palestinian security forces throughout the occupied territories. Arafat decided not to buck his Arab neighbor and guarantor any longer, shifting the onus to the Sharon government to fully evacuate Gaza: Yasser Arafat told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak he accepted his demand for Palestinian security reforms as a condition for Egypt to help stabilize Gaza if Israelis withdraw, officials said Monday. The Palestinian president was responding by letter to Egypt's mid-June deadline to agree to security overhauls or risk losing Cairo's offer to promote order in Gaza after a pullout, which the Israeli cabinet approved in principle Sunday. "Arafat has accepted the Egyptian ideas and is now awaiting the Israeli response. This will help the Egyptians take steps to retrain our police force and send...

INDC Journal Interviews Michael Berg

Bill from INDC Journal took an afternoon to attend an International ANSWER rally this weekend and has posted excerpts from a speech given there by Michael Berg. Bill had an opportunity to participate in an interview with Berg after the speech -- actually, Bill pushed the envelope on blogging vs journalism by getting himself in the middle of the traditional media representatives for the Q & A. Berg's incoherence comes through during his speech and his press conference, which Bill captures in words and photographs: INDC Journal: "Well, you think that we need to pull troops out now, correct?" Michael Berg: "Yes." INDC Journal: "Without providing some sort of alternate security?" Michael Berg: "No, I think we need to I think we need to trade our troops for a truly international " INDC Journal: "And how should they go about doing that?" Michael Berg: (Becoming animated) "I dont know...

Bush About To Score Another Diplomatic Victory At UN?

The much-maligned foreign policy of the Bush Administration may be about to score another foreign-policy coup, according to the AP and the BBC. Edith Lederer (AP) reports that the UN Security Council, according to German and French sources, may wind up passing a US resolution on Iraq on legitimizing the interim government -- unanimously: The United States and Britain made a last-minute addition Monday to their Iraq resolution that appeared to satisfy French and German demands to spell out Iraq's "security partnership" with U.S.-led forces. U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said he expects the Security Council to approve the resolution on Tuesday afternoon, and council diplomats said the vote could be unanimous. The French and German delegations had demanded that explicit language be included in the resolution giving Iraq command over any security forces in the country. However, American negotiators apparently have overcome that obstacle: The text now welcomes the exchange...

June 8, 2004

Bush Wins At The UN

As I predicted yesterday, the Bush administration scored another foreign-policy victory in an arena where they are supposedly "inept" -- at the UN: The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a resolution on the June 30 transfer of power in Iraq. The U.S.- and British-backed resolution gives additional international support to the new interim Iraqi government and adds more international support for the U.S.-led coalition force. All 15 members of the council voted for the resolution. Not only did Bush avoid a veto, not only did he avoid a single No, he didn't even get an abstention -- even Syria voted for the resolution. He didn't bend to French and German demands to allow Iraq to have a veto on American command of the CPA, although he pledged to work with the interim government on missions, which we would undoubtedly do anyway. (After all, the last thing we...

June 9, 2004

Kurds May Pull Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

Winston Churchill once said that one of his great regrets after World War I was the failure of the Great Powers to establish an independent Kurdistan out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. In the 80 years since the settlements from the Great War, the Kurds have been instead relegated into minority status in a number of countries, including Iraq, and most of them dictatorships (Turkey is the only exception). As a result, Kurds rarely achieve any political power, partly due to their fierce independence and unwillingness to assimilate, but mostly due to the attitudes of the dominant cultures in each of these countries. In Iraq, the Kurds have enjoyed a level of self-government the past twelve years never experienced in their history. Due to the cease-fire arrangements, the US and UK kept Saddam from exercising any authority in Northern Iraq, where Iraqi Kurds instead established an autonomous representative...

Japanese Hostage Sues Own Government For Abduction

Perhaps legal idiocy doesn't exclusively occur within the United States after all. One of the Japanese hostages taken in Iraq by Islamofascist and/or Fedayeen remnants has sued the government of Japan for making the bad men angry at him, and he wants $46,000 for his mental anguish: A Japanese activist who was briefly held captive in Iraq has sued his own government, saying its decision to send troops to the region angered his kidnappers and was to blame for his ordeal. Nobutaka Watanabe, 35, is seeking the equivalent of $46,000 for mental and physical hardship he suffered during his four days as a hostage, his lawyer Masatoshi Uchida told The Associated Press Wednesday. "Mr. Watanabe believes his kidnapping was the result of Japan's military presence," said Uchida. "His captors told him that he had been taken because he was from a country that had sent troops to Iraq." I suppose...

9/11 Commission Members Still Looking To Blame People

The AP reports this morning that while the 9/11 commission wants to avoid pinning blame on individuals in either the Bush or Clinton administrations, some commission members still hold out hope of inserting finger-pointing language in editorial notes: Hoping to avoid partisan attacks, the Sept. 11 commission has drafted a final report that avoids placing blame on individuals in the Bush or Clinton administrations but sharply criticizes the FBI and intelligence agencies for missteps prior to the catastrophe. ... Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste said members remain hopeful they can produce a unanimous report, although some are holding out the option of inserting editorial notes if commissioners disagree on certain points or want to flag a particular individual as blameworthy. "The failure to thwart the 9/11 catastrophe was in part the result of the failure to communicate both internally and externally about information collected by our intelligence agencies," he said. "Had...

June 10, 2004

Another Good Reason For Saudi Cooperation

The Saudi royal family has presided over their Wahhabist kingdom for eighty-plus years now, spreading their firebrand fundamentalism throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. While they've cooperated and done business with the West, their mosques also inspired terrorist groups by spreading hatred, somewhat schizophrenically, against their business partners. Over the past year their chickens have come home to roost as the terrorists led by a scion of a wealthy Saudi family have increasingly attacked royal assets and foreigners. Now the New York Times reports that Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi also wanted to decapitate Saudi leadership: While the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was renouncing terrorism and negotiating the lifting of sanctions last year, his intelligence chiefs ordered a covert operation to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia and destabilize the oil-rich kingdom, according to statements by two participants in the conspiracy. Those participants, Abdurahman Alamoudi, an American Muslim leader now in...

No War For Oil

The No War for Oil crowd should be very pleased -- it turns out that we didn't go to war for oil after all, according to the BBC: Iraq's new Oil Minister Thamir Ghadhban has reportedly said that all coalition advisers will leave Iraqi ministries after the 30 June handover. Quoted by the UK's Financial Times, he said that the ministry would reassert full control over the country's lucrative oil industry. ... "When sovereignty is regained it means that there will be no more US advisers, not only in the ministry of oil, but in every ministry in Iraq," he was quoted as saying in Thursday's edition of the FT. Of course, the whole "war for oil" meme never had any intellectual heft, anyway. Economists and oil-industry analysts repeatedly told anyone who would listen that we could easily have secured lucrative contracts with Saddam had we allowed him to shrug...

June 11, 2004

Putin: I Scoff At Your Moral Outrage

Russian President Vladimir Putin dipped his toes into American politics yesterday after being asked about Russia's presence at the G-8 summit. Obviously, Putin has no qualms about swimming in deep waters, as he used the question to dive into Democratic objections to the Iraq War, revealing barely-submerged resentment over a previous Democratic administration's decision to go to war without UN approval: Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped into the U.S. political campaign on Thursday, saying the Democrats had "no moral right" to criticize President Bush over Iraq. The Kremlin leader, answering a reporter's question in Sea Island, Georgia, suggested that the Democrats were two-faced in criticizing Bush on Iraq since it had been the Clinton administration that authorized the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by U.S. and NATO forces. ... He went on: "I am deeply convinced that President Bush's political adversaries have no moral right to attack him over Iraq because...

Al-Sadr Blinks?

Moqtada al-Sadr surprised followers and opponents alike today when he used his Friday sermon to endorse the American plan to hand sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government: Radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr has reportedly backed for the first time US moves to gradually hand powers over to an interim Iraqi government. The change of heart came in a sermon at Friday prayers in the town of Kufa, two weeks after the government was formed. Mr Sadr, a firebrand whose militia has fought US forces since March, called for a new start and an end to conflict, according to witnesses. ... Mr Sadr called upon the interim government to work to end the occupation according to a timetable set by Iraqi officials, reported a correspondent for Voice of Mujahidin radio present at the sermon. Mr Sadr added that the formation of the government was a good opportunity to bury past differences...

June 14, 2004

Pakistan Nails One

Pakistan announced that its latest offensive against al-Qaeda terrorists has already been more productive than its last one: Pakistani officials said Sunday that the government had arrested the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's former head of operations. Separately, the government detained nine people said to be part of a newly uncovered Qaeda-linked group responsible for a series of terror attacks. The interior and information ministers announced that Mr. Mohammed's nephew, Mosabir Aroochi, was arrested this weekend in the port city of Karachi. Sheik Rashid Ahmed, the information minister, said a $1 million reward had been posted for Mr. Aroochi's arrest. The Pakistanis seem to be getting better at this. Let's hope they continue to push the battle in Waziristan, or at least push the terrorists into Afghanistan where we can get our hands on them....

Another Plot Thwarted?

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a new criminal indictment against a Somali immigrant, whom a grand jury has accused of conspiring as part of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up an Ohio shopping mall: According to an indictment unsealed in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday, Nuradin Abdi, 32, attended a camp in Ethiopia for military-style training in "preparation for violent jihad." Ashcroft said after receiving his training in Africa, Abdi returned to the United States and he and others "initiated a plot" to blow up a Columbus area shopping mall. ... In the indictment handed up by a grand jury in Columbus, Abdi was charged with conspiracy to provide material support to al Qaeda and with obtaining and using fraudulent travel documents. Ashcroft would give no details on how far along the planning was for the planned attack on the mall. But he said Abdi had connections to Iyman Faris, an...

OIC Officer: Islamic "Backwardness" Causes Extremism

The Secretary-General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which consists of 57 member states, blasted members in an opening speech for creating the conditions for Islamic extremism, the BBC reports: A top Muslim official has denounced what he called the extensive backwardness of the Islamic world. Abdelwahed Belkeziz - Secretary General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) - made the stinging attack at meeting in Turkey. He blamed the rise of Muslim extremism on the feeling of "powerlessness" felt by members of the Islamic world. ... Mr Belkeziz told the foreign ministers from the 57-member states that their countries had a poor record on issues ranging from education and health to economic development. "The aggregate gross domestic product of all our member states remains lower than that of one single advanced country such as France or Britain," he said. Mr. Belkeziz brought the meeting to the...

June 15, 2004

Malkin: Krugman Senility, Part 37b

Michelle Malkin -- who recently added Captain's Quarters to her blogroll, thank you very much -- rips the New York Times' Paul Krugman, who scoffs at John Ashcroft's announcement yesterday: First, there's the absence of any major successful prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly significant that of the "Detroit 3" appears to be collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. It sounds a bit like Krugman hedged his bets there, especially (as Malkin also notes) as Krugman tripped up a month ago by claiming that no one had been successfully prosecuted for terror. Malkin gives a short but devastating response: Oh? What about shoebomber Richard Reid? What about Taliban solider John Walker Lindh? What about Yahya Goba, Shafal Mosed, Yasein Taher, Taysal Galab, Mukhtar al-Bakri and Sahim Alwan of Lackawanna, New York? What about Jeffrey Battle, Patrice Ford, Ahmed Bilal, Muhammad Bilal, and October Lewis of...

Islamic Conference Recognizes Iraqi Interim Government

The American-supported Iraqi government received a huge boost as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which consists of 57 primarily Islamic member-states, formally voted to recognize the new interim government, the AP reports: The new Iraqi interim government received a key boost Tuesday when the country's neighbors endorsed the U.S.-backed leadership, a move that could help stem an increasingly violent insurgency. Hours later, the political committee of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the world's largest Islamic organization, unanimously approved a resolution backing Iraq's interim government and calling for help in rebuilding the war-shattered nation, a delegate who attended the discussions said. The resolution is expected to be formally declared at the closing of the three-day meeting on Wednesday, the delegate added, speaking on customary condition of anonymity. Formal recognition from the OIC will allow moderates within neighboring Islamic states to work directly and openly with the Iraqi government...

June 16, 2004

Sadr Retreats

Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his forces to leave the holy city of Najaf unless individuals live there, according to the BBC and Reuters: Radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr has told his militia to leave the southern city of Najaf, the scene of frequent clashes with US-led forces in the past. Mr Sadr issued a statement calling on his men who are not from Najaf to "do their duty" and go home. He agreed a truce earlier - although isolated outbreaks of fighting between militia and police continued in Najaf. Last week the cleric announced he would set up a political party to contest elections next year. Unlike the outcome in Fallujah, the US-led CPA seems to have done an excellent job in isolating Sadr, turning other Shi'ite clerics against him and stripping him of any political cover he enjoyed. At the same time, the CPA has enabled the Iraqi government...

June 17, 2004

"The Weenie Caucus" Tees Off On Bush

I had little to say initially about the statement signed by the group Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change blasting the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror, mostly because they seem to comprise the worst of the teams that kept us blinded to the fact that Islamofascists declared war on us far before we returned the favor. Reading the Post article, I was struck by the tone set in their press conference, where popularity seems to be a greater concern than security: The former officials said the administration "adopted an overbearing approach to America's role in the world, relying on military might and righteousness, insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and allies, and disdainful of the United Nations. . . . Motivated more by ideology than by reasoned analysis, it struck out on its own." Charles W. Freeman Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, cited a...

9/11 Commission Report: Seriously Flawed

By now, you have read that the 9/11 Commission report that found "no credible evidence" that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq collaborated on any level, despite the 1998 indictment by the Clinton administration -- pursued by Commissioner Jamie Gorelick during her tenure in the DoJ -- alleging exactly that connection: Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq. I have more about the connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda in this post reviewing the Stephen Hayes book, The Connection. This excellent book makes hash out of any notion that Iraq and al-Qaeda had no connections, and also shows that the media and the Clinton administration had no qualms about trumpeting those connections until 2001. However, to get a good grip on...

June 18, 2004

More Rampant Unilateralism

Two items from this morning's AP wire demonstrate the rampant unilateralism of the Bush administration. First, South Korea has increased its troop commitment to the security forces in Iraq: South Korea will send 3,000 soldiers to northern Iraq beginning in early August to assist the U.S.-led coalition, the Defense Ministry said Friday. Once the deployment is complete, South Korea will be the largest coalition partner after the United States and Britain. South Korea plans to send 900 troops to Kurdish-controlled Irbil in early August, followed by about 1,100 troops between late August and early September, Defense Ministry spokesman Nam Dai-yeon said. Another 1,000 soldiers will travel to Iraq later. South Korea already has 600 military medics and engineers in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. They are expected to head to northern Iraq beginning in mid-July to prepare facilities ahead of the arrival of the main force, South Korea's Yonhap...

BBC: Pakistan Scores Victory Against AQ

The BBC reports this morning that the new Pakistan offensive against al-Qaeda and its supporters in its frontier regions with Afghanistan has produced another big victory, in this case the death of an opposition tribal leader who openly supported the Taliban and sheltered AQ operatives in South Waziristan: Nek Mohammed, who is accused of sheltering al-Qaeda militants, had led several deadly attacks against Pakistani forces in South Waziristan. "We were tracking him down and he was killed [Thursday] night by our hand," military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said from Islamabad. ... If the reports of Mohammed's death are borne out, a big obstacle in the army's path to bringing to the rebellious tribes under its control will have been removed, says the BBC's Paul Anderson in Islamabad. Mohammed had been one of the most openly defiant leaders in South Waziristan, whose intransigence led to the breakdown of negotiations between...

Putin: Saddam Planned Terrorism In US

Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters this morning that Russia had learned of terrorist attacks planned by Saddam Hussein and had passed the warnings on to the Bush administration following 9/11: Russia warned the United States on several occasions that Iraq's Saddam Hussein planned "terrorist attacks" on its soil, President Vladimir Putin said Friday. "After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received such information and passed it on to their American colleagues," he told reporters. The Kremlin leader, who was speaking in the Kazakh capital, said Russian intelligence services had many times received information that Saddam's special forces were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States "and beyond its borders on American military and civilian targets." "This information was conveyed to our American colleagues," he said. He added that Russian intelligence had no proof that...

The Left Covers Their Eyes And Ears

After the revelation this morning that Russia had repeatedly warned the US between 9/11 and the kickoff to the Iraq War about Saddam Hussein planning terror attacks inside the US, I expected the left to either ignore it or to create conspiracy theories on its meaning. Fortunately, they've managed to do both at the same time. For instance, over at ABC News, their web site has not one single mention of the statement by Vladimir Putin, more than five hours after wire services broke the story. At CBS, the breaking story about pregnant Aussies postponing births to get a cash bonus seems to have driven it off the radar screen at the Tiffany Network. CNN carries the story on their main web site -- below the urgent story that Clinton slept on the couch after admitting his affair with Monica Lewinsky. MS-NBC runs the story in a similar position, but...

June 19, 2004

9/11 Commission Report on AQ/Iraq Connections Misleadingly Vague: Hayes

Stephen Hayes, author of The Connection, responds to the 9/11 Commission's assertion that no credible evidence exists of collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq in the Weekly Standard. He also takes the media to task for misinterpreting the already misleadingly vague staff report: IT'S SETTLED, APPARENTLY. Saddam Hussein's regime never supported al Qaeda in its "attacks on America," and meetings between representatives of Iraq and al Qaeda did not result in a "collaborative relationship." That, we're told, is the conclusion of two staff reports the September 11 Commission released last Wednesday. But the contents of the documents have been widely misreported. Together the new reports total 32 pages; one contains a paragraph on the broad question of a Saddam-al Qaeda relationship, the other a paragraph on an alleged meeting between the lead hijacker and an Iraqi agent. Nowhere in the documents is the "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link...Dismissed," as Washington Post headline writers...

Clinton: Bush Had No Choice On Iraq

First, Vladimir Putin tells people that Saddam Hussein planned terror attacks in the US, and the Left scoffed. Now, Bill Clinton says that George Bush had no choice but to remove Saddam Hussein after 9/11, based on the intelligence reports both men saw as President: Clinton, who was interviewed Thursday, said he did not believe that Bush went to war in Iraq over oil or for imperialist reasons but out of a genuine belief that large quantities of weapons of mass destruction remained unaccounted for. Noting that Bush had to be "reeling" in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clinton said Bush's first priority was to keep al Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining "chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material." "That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for," Clinton said in reference to Iraq and...

June 20, 2004

Al-Qaeda Under Fire

So far, June has been the worst of months for the terrorist association al-Qaeda. First the Pakistanis kill a tribal leader, one of their allies in Waziristan. Now over this weekend, two more AQ leaders have gone on to their 72 virgins (or white raisins of wisdom, take your pick). Saudi terrorist chief Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin's death after the beheading of American Paul Johnson is considered a "major blow" to AQ's network in the Saudi kingdom, according to CNN: "A major blow" has been dealt to al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia with the killing of four of its top leaders in the kingdom, Saudi foreign policy adviser Adel al-Jubeir said Saturday. Among the dead is Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, the nation's most-wanted militant and the self-proclaimed leader of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Al-Muqrin claimed responsibility for the beheading of U.S. hostage Paul Johnson Jr. CNN also reports that al-Qaeda has...

9/11 Commission Wakes Up, Smells Coffee

The Washington Post reports in tomorrow's edition that the 9/11 Commission has just heard about new evidence supporting the Bush administration's contention that the Saddam Hussein regime had serious connections to al-Qaeda: The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been told "a very prominent member" of al Qaeda served as an officer in Saddam Hussein's militia, a panel member said yesterday. Republican commissioner John Lehman told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the new intelligence, if proved true, buttresses claims by the Bush administration of ties between Iraq and the militant network believed responsible for the attacks on the United States. ... "Some of these documents indicate that [there was] at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda," Lehman said. "That still has to be confirmed, but the vice president was right when he said that he may...

June 21, 2004

Safire: 9/11 Commission "Manipulated" By Runaway Staff

In his column today, William Safire excoriates the 9/11 Commission (well, who isn't?) for allowing its staff to issue an incendiary interim report without any of the commissioners' signatures or, for that matter, supporting evidence. Safire points out the enthusiasm demonstrated by the broadsheets -- including his own -- in trumpeting the fallacious conclusions reached by staff partisans such as Philip Zelikow: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie" went the Times headline. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" front-paged The Washington Post. The A.P. led with the thrilling words "Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. . . ." This understandably caused my editorial-page colleagues to draw the conclusion that "there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. . . ." All wrong. The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below...

AQ Accuses Saudis Of Assisting Johnson Abduction

According to an al-Qaeda website, sympathizers within the Saudi security forces assisted the AQ abduction of Paul Johnson, both materially and tactically, CNN reports: Islamic militants who abducted and beheaded American engineer Paul Johnson say sympathetic Saudi security forces aided their kidnapping operation with police uniforms and vehicles -- an allegation a top Saudi official denied. ... In a lengthy narrative about the kidnapping that was posted Sunday on the Islamist Web site Voice of Jihad, Johnson's kidnappers said they stopped his car at a fake checkpoint, transferred him to another car and took him to another location. The VoJ site claimed that security forces supplied the terrorists with uniforms and vehicles as well as some operational security for the abduction in a scenario that some had already hypothesized. The Saudis, predictably, refuted the notion: But Adel al-Jubeir, the foreign policy adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, told CNN the...

June 22, 2004

Memos: Rumsfeld Disapproved "Waterboarding", Other Coercive Techniques

CNN reports that internal memos about to be released by the Pentagon regarding interrogation methods will show that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld specifically denied approval to such techniques as "waterboarding" and other strongly coercive physical measures, and in fact only approved light, noninjurious physical contact: The White House and Pentagon are expected to release a series of memos Tuesday related to U.S. military policy on prisoner interrogation and the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. The release of the Pentagon memos will show that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld never approved a controversial interrogation technique called "water boarding," according to a source who had told CNN the opposite on Monday. The senior defense official who provided the original information to CNN now says Rumsfeld only approved "mild, noninjurious physical contact" with a high-level al Qaeda detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and specifically did not approve a request to use water boarding. CNN's...

No Ties?

Either this qualifies as a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden or, as Glenn Reynolds says, it demonstrates a lot more foresight and media savvy than Bush's critics may be willing to credit him (also via reader Soybomb): February 13, 1999 Web posted at: 10:55 a.m. EST (1547 GMT) ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire accused by the United States of plotting bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, has left Afghanistan, Afghan sources said Saturday. Bin Laden's whereabouts were not known, said the sources who declined to be identified. ... Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers. [emph. mine -- C.E.] Glenn also points out this Guardian article from the week before that: By Julian Borger in Washington Saturday February 6, 1999 The Guardian Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with...

June 23, 2004

AP Indulging In Moral Relativism

The AP reports today that the US has retaliated against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an airstrike earlier today for the beheading of Kim Sun-Il. Zarqawi's Monotheism and Jihad terror cell also threatened to continue assassination attempts against Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi PM: U.S. forces launched an airstrike targeting militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after his group beheaded a South Korean who had pleaded "I don't want to die" in a heart-wrenching videotape. Another audio recording purportedly made by al-Zarqawi and found online Wednesday threatened to kill Iraq's interim prime minister. ... Al-Zarqawi's Monotheism and Jihad movement is believed to be behind Tuesday's slaying of Kim Sun-il, the third foreign hostage decapitated in the Middle East in little over a month. So how does the AP describe the murder of Kim? By describing how he was dressed, in a somewhat subtle attempt to draw parallels between the treatment of hostages by...

Iran: Second Thoughts Or Point Made?

Bowing to international pressure -- or simply having made its point -- the Iranian government announced it would release eight British sailors and Marines captured in the waterway shared by Iran and Iraq: Iran says it has released eight British sailors detained for illegally entering Iranian waters, according to The Associated Press news agency. Three British boats were stopped and the eight British service members -- two sailors and six marines -- were detained Monday after Iran said they crossed into its territorial waters in the Shatt al-Arab waterway. "The eight British sailors, including six soldiers and two ranking military officials, have been released," a Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told AP. After making threats yesterday to put the eight on trial for illegal incursions into Iranian territory, it appeared that the Islamic Republic had deliberately attempted to start a diplomatic row with the UK, and by association the US. However,...

Finally, A Newspaper With Guts

Today's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review contains an apologia from the editor, Frank Craig, regarding his decision to carry photographs of the decapitated body of American Pual Johnson, a hostage of al-Qaeda who was brutally murdered earlier. Not many news outlets carried the photographs of Johnson, but just about every broadsheet and media Internet site carried photo after photo of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and Craig won't tolerate the hypocrisy any longer: Like many newspapers and magazines, we previously published a photo of a smiling Pennsylvania soldier leaning over a corpse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. I felt that image was important to see, because it inarguably conveyed the cruelty that occurred there. ... I decided to publish the letter and its photos on an inside page, in black-and-white rather than in color and in a scale far reduced from the original size, to somewhat minimize its gruesome impact. I added a...

June 24, 2004

Iraqi Terrorists Stage Desparate Attacks

Iraqi terrorists staged a wave of coordinated attacks across Iraq today, six days before the CPA transfers sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government that intends on establishing a representative democracy in the heart of the Middle East: Rebels bent on disrupting a handover to Iraqi rule bloodied five cities Thursday with coordinated assaults on local security forces in which about 75 people, including three U.S. soldiers, were killed. The violence in Baquba, Falluja, Ramadi, Mosul and Baghdad intensified a sustained campaign by Iraqi insurgents and foreign militants to sabotage Iraq's formal transition from U.S.-led occupation to an interim government in six days' time. Scores of black-clad gunmen, some claiming loyalty to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, attacked a police station and other government buildings in Baquba, 60 km (40 miles) northwest of Baghdad, in a dawn assault. A U.S. military spokesman said two American soldiers had been killed in an...

An Angry Tenet Fires Back

After the release of a scathing report by the House Intelligence Committee calling the CIA "dysfunctional" and on the verge of incompetence, outgoing DCI George Tenet fired back in an angry letter to the committee's chairman, Porter Goss: Outgoing CIA Director George Tenet has fired off an angry letter to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, after the committee issued a scathing report criticizing the agency's human intelligence gathering as "dysfunctional" and averse to risk. "Dysfunctional organizations do not perform the way the Directorate of Operations performed in Afghanistan and in support of the military in Iraq before and after the conflict," Tenet wrote to Rep. Porter Goss. "Dysfunctional organizations do not take down or eliminate the most dangerous proliferators in the world ... nor do they aid in the disarmament of a country like Libya. To suggest that the organization that was key to all these victories, not...

June 25, 2004

Even The NY Times Finds Collaboration, But Hides It From Its Readers

The New York Times, less than a week after demanding apologies from George Bush and Dick Cheney for supposedly misleading Americans on ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, publishes a report detailing even more ties and evidence of collaboration between Saddam and bin Laden (via Power Line): Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq. American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before Al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization. He was based in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, when that country forced him to leave and he took...

What WMD Scientists? And Where Did That WMD Come From?

Via the excellent compendium Memeorandum, I found that Fox News has reported that terrorist groups in the Middle East are wooing Iraqi WMD scientists for assistance in developing their own weapons: Al Qaeda-connected terror chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (search) and other terrorists are apparently trying to recruit Iraqi weapons of mass destruction experts and resources for possible future attacks against the U.S.-led coalition, the head of the Iraq Survey Group (search) told FOX News Thursday. In an exclusive interview with FOX News Brit Hume, Charles Duelfer (search) whose ISG is leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction said terrorists in Iraq are trying to tap into the Iraqi WMD intellectual capital. When we have investigated certain labs and contacted certain former experts in the WMD program, we have found that they are being recruited by anti-coalition groups, Duelfer told FOX News. They are being paid by anti-coalition...

June 26, 2004

Labor Down Under Puts Target On Australia

Leaders of the Australian Labor Party have already forgotten the lesson of Madrid and have pledged to unilaterally withdraw from Iraq if given a majority in their upcoming elections: An Australian Labor Party opposition pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq will present a major challenge to US ties if his party wins office in elections later this year, a senior party figure has warned. ... The policy has become a key issue in the election, with the government accusing Labor leader Mark Latham of anti-Americanism and reiterating its policy of remaining in the US-led campaign "until the job is done". Spanish Socialists made essentially the same argument and were trailing in the polls until helpful terrorists killed 191 Spaniards and changed the outcome of the election. One has to wonder if that thought has even occurred to the Australian Labor's leadership. After all, scores of Aussies lost their lives in...

Iraqis Discover A Sense Of National Mission?

The decision by the American-led CPA to remain steadfast in its decision to transfer sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government has, predictably, resulted in more desperate measures by Islamofascist terrorists in Iraq, with a wave of coordinated attacks this week resulting in over 100 dead Iraqis. Now even the more radical native elements within Iraq have come out in support of the new government, decrying the hijacking of Islam by the foreigners and calling for their expulsion from the new nation of Iraq: The objections -- from anti-U.S. Shiite and Sunni Muslim leaders, including rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr, and even from militia fighters in the embattled city of Fallujah -- arose in part from revulsion at the fact that victims of the car bombings and guerrilla assaults in six cities and towns Thursday were overwhelmingly Iraqis. But they also betrayed Iraqi nationalist concerns that the fight against U.S. occupation forces...

The Minneapolis Hotbed Of AQ

For some reason, the Twin Cities keeps coming up as a critical location for al-Qaeda operations. This dynamic first appeared shortly before the 9/11 attacks with the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in the Captain's home port of Eagan, and now Power Line reports that the latest instance occurred yesterday with the arrest of an associate of Abu al-Zarqawi: A Lebanese national who allegedly told Minneapolis FBI agents he trained with Al-Qaida and knew three of its leaders, including one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq, has been charged in connection with an international terrorism inquiry. On Friday, a federal judge in New York ordered the suspect, Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, who has lived in Minneapolis, transported to Minnesota without bail on charges of lying to federal agents. During a series of voluntary interviews in April, Elzahabi told Minneapolis FBI agents that while in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and 1990s,...

More Unilateralism On Display

George Bush demonstrated more of his notorious "go-it-alone" cowboy unilateralism today in Ireland as he negotiated an agreement with the EU to back an Iraqi request for NATO military support: The United States and the European Union offered strong support for Iraq's urgent request for NATO military help Saturday. "NATO has the capability and I believe the responsibility to help the Iraqi people defeat the terrorist threat that's facing their country," President Bush said. ... The United States and the European Union agreed in a joint statement to back Iraq's request for NATO military and support the training of Iraqi security forces, and to reduce Iraq's international debt, estimated to be $120 billion. So that's what unilateralism looks like? Seems to me that the unilateralism about which the left complains so much appears awfully crowded at news conferences....

June 28, 2004

Iraq Now Sovereign After Early Handover

The Coalition Provisional Authority turned over sovereignty to Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the interim Iraqi government two days earlier than expected, in what the Washington Post describes as a "hastily arranged ceremony" at 10:26 Baghdad time this morning: The United States transferred political authority to an interim Iraqi government in a high-security but low-key surprise ceremony on Monday morning that was held inside the U.S.-controlled Green Zone two days before the planned June 30 handover date because of fears of insurgent attacks. At the hastily arranged ceremony, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer handed over a signed document in a blue portfolio conveying political authority to the chief judge of Iraq's highest court. The transfer of power occurred in the office of Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, at 10:26 a.m. local time (2:26 a.m. EDT) before a handful of Iraqi and U.S. officials and journalists. "You are ready...

Zarqawi Captured?

The US military is investigating reports that the chief terrorist in Iraq, the al-Qaeda connected Abu al-Zarqawi, may already be in custody, according to Reuters: The U.S. military said on Monday it was checking unconfirmed reports that al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been captured in Iraq. The Jordanian-born Zarqawi, who Washington says is its number one enemy in Iraq, is accused of masterminding a string of suicide bombings and of the execution of an American and a South Korean hostage. The reports suggested that Zarqawi had been captured near the town of Hilla, south of Baghdad and in the Polish military area of responsibility. "We are working on that issue," a U.S. military official said. A Polish spokesman added: "I cannot confirm that information... When the operation is ongoing at the moment I cannot make any comment." Wouldn't that be a red-letter day? Capturing Zarqawi and a successful...

Oh, Those Tunnels, And That Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade

The London Telegraph reports that Israeli security forces found several Palestinian terrorist leaders in a tunnel last night and killed them when they refused to surrender, during an operation launched after an attack on a military post earlier: Israel's most wanted man and six other Palestinian militants have been killed in a raid by paratroopers who found the men huddled in a secret tunnel beneath a house in the old city of Nablus. Among the dead was Nayef Abu Sharkh, 40, the commander of the militant group the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank. Local leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and four other gunmen were also killed. They found the militants' hideout on Saturday after seeing a fugitive from an earlier encounter in Nablus slip into the house, military officials said. After the men in the tunnel ignored orders to surrender, the paratroopers lobbed hand grenades and fired...

Saudis Bolster Security, Move To Protect Foreign Workers

The London Telegraph notes that the Saudis have changed their tune on security concerns, especially as Western civilians have begun to leave due to a lack of confidence in Saudi security: Saudi Arabia has agreed to improve security and to accept help from foreign troops in checkpoint controls after an unprecedented meeting between alarmed expatriates, western ambassadors and the Saudi foreign minister. The four-hour meeting, originally suggested by British Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Cole, assembled 40 expatriate employees and the ambassadors of the G8 countries plus 11 other nations in an ornate conference hall overlooking the Red Sea in the hope of stemming the flow of foreign workers fleeing attacks by extreme Islamists. James Oberwetter, the American ambassador, said Saudi Arabia had agreed to accept foreign assistance in improving the training of security forces at checkpoints, whose often lax appearance has seriously undermined the confidence of expatriates in the police. Checkpoints set...

Iraqis Rejoice

After the surprise handover of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government took place today two days ahead of schedule, a move some Americans stretched into an expression of desperation, Iraqis would not countenance such cynicism. The AP reports that callers flooded the first independent talk-radio station in Iraq with expressions of joy and pride in their first opportunity for legitimate self-government in 35 years: The callers clogged Radio Dijla's telephone lines to congratulate interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, urging him to be strong, while warning insurgents against continued violence. "I send my congratulations to all Iraqis and every Iraqi home," a woman who identified herself as Um Yassin gushed, her voice choked with emotion. "I want to tell Dr. Allawi to be bold, to be strong. We need him to build up the army because we need them at a time like this." Her message was echoed by dozens on...

June 29, 2004

Iranians: Maybe They Just Dig Photography

CNN reports that the US has expelled two members of the Iranian security detail at the UN for suspected espionage, and their activities certainly call into question the Islamic Republic's intentions towards the West: The United States has expelled two Iranian security guards at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations for conduct unbecoming to their status, according to a U.S. official. The two were seen taking pictures of New York City and transportation systems, the official said. It was the third occasion that they were spotted videotaping and taking photographs, the official said. The pair was expelled over the weekend, but one assumes that after three sightseeing tours, they have the film they need to further their mission, whatever that may be. The official who sourced the story refused to name the landmarks involved, and in New York, the possibilities are almost unlimited. It recalls the information gathered after...

NYT: Captured Muslim Marine A Deserter

The New York Times reports tonight that Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, captured by Islamofascist terrorists in Iraq, had deserted his post and naively trusted his captors to sneak him out of the country and into Lebanon: The American marine who is being threatened by his kidnappers with beheading had deserted the military because he was emotionally traumatized, and was abducted by his captors while trying to make his way home to his native Lebanon, a Marine officer said Tuesday. The officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he believed that Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun was betrayed by Iraqis he befriended on his base and ended up in the hands of Islamic extremists. The officer said Corporal Hassoun, a 24-year-old Marine linguist who was born in Lebanon, was shaken up after he saw one of his sergeants blown apart by a mortar shell. "It was very disturbing to him,"...

June 30, 2004

Grateful Iraqis Say "Thank You, America"

Fifteen new Iraqi and Iraqi-American civilian groups have banded together to take out a full-page advertisement in USA Today thanking America and Americans for freeing Iraq from its bloodthirsty tyrant: Following the formal handover of sovereignty to Baghdad, 15 Iraqi and Iraqi-American groups have issued an open letter to the American people, thanking them for the sacrifices they endured to liberate their country. The letter will be delivered to President Bush at the White House today and published in a full page ad in USA Today. "Just as we mourn for the victims of Saddam's regime, we also grieve for the Americans and Iraqis who were killed or injured during the liberation or by terrorists determined to hold us back," the letter reads. "We will honor those who have sacrificed for our freedom by building a new Iraq that lives in peace with the nations of the world, without fear...

AQ Suspect Licensed To Haul Hazardous Materials

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports this morning that Mohamad Elzahabi, arrested for suspected connections to al-Qaeda and terrorist-related activities, received licenses to drive school buses and transport hazardous materials: The FBI identified Mohamad Elzahabi as a suspected terrorist well before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and more than 2 years before his arrest last week, law enforcement officials said Tuesday. Yet officials of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said they had no clue that Elzahabi was suspected of having Al-Qaida connections when he applied for, and in early 2002 received, a commercial driver's license to drive a school bus and to haul hazardous materials. Before the Minneapolis man got final approval for the commercial license, the FBI ran Elzahabi's name through a database and cleared him on Jan. 18, 2002, said Pat McCormack, interim director of the department's Division of Driver and Vehicle Licensing. This demonstrates that mush work needs...

Allawi: Saddam "Natural Partner" of Al-Qaeda, Terrorism

New Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi told a skeptical Tom Brokaw in an interview yesterday that Saddam Hussein maintained connections to al-Qaeda that began in the Sudan, and more broadly, that Saddam's reign provided a "natural partner" to terrorism: Brokaw: I know that you and others like you are grateful for the liberation of Iraq. But cant you understand why many Americans feel that so many young men and women have died here for purposes other than protecting the United States? Allawi: We know that this is an extension to what has happened in New York. And the war have been taken out to Iraq by the same terrorists. Saddam was a potential friend and partner and natural ally of terrorism. Brokaw: Prime minister, Im surprised that you would make the connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq. The 9/11 commission in America says there is no evidence...

July 1, 2004

Homeland Security Sloppy With Wireless

CNN reports that the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security has completed an audit of internal security and found that its own wireless communications systems leave gaping holes into their networks: Although charged with making the nation more secure, the Department of Homeland Security has not taken the steps needed to secure its own wireless communications, according to a report from the department's Inspector General. ... In some tests, investigators detected Homeland Security wireless signals broadcasting beyond the perimeters of secure facilities. "We detected wireless signals ... in the parking lot, on public roads behind the facility, and in the surrounding residences," the report says. "These wireless signals create security vulnerabilities such as eavesdropping and denial of service attacks." Investigators also detected wireless signals from surrounding residences and businesses within some Homeland Security facilities. "These signals can be used to monitor or gain access to DHS wireless networks...

Jordan Offers Troops To New Iraqi Government

In a blockbuster announcement that underscores the massive political victory that the handover of sovereignty represents to the US, Jordan's King Abdullah announced that Jordan would send troops to assist the new Iraqi government if asked: Jordan's King Abdullah II said Thursday his country would be willing to send troops to Iraq, potentially becoming the first Arab state to do so. The statement marked a major shift in Jordan's position on Iraq. Abdullah had initially refused to send troops. In an interview Thursday with the British Broadcasting Corp. television "Newsnight" program, he said the new Iraqi interim government had changes his mind. "I presume that if the Iraqis ask us for help directly it would be very difficult for us to say no," he said. "Our message to the president or the prime minister is: Tell us what you want. Tell us how we can help, and you have 110...

July 2, 2004

Poland: We Found WMD, Bought It Ahead Of Terrorists

More evidence that the WMD we believed existed in Iraq still waits to be discovered, this time from the Poles patrolling in southern Iraq. The AP and the BBC report that the head of Polish military intelligence revealed that Polish troops outbid terrorists for rockets laden with chemical weapons: Terrorists may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered last month in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence said Friday. Polish troops had been searching for munitions as part of their regular mission in south-central Iraq when they were told by an informant in May that terrorists had made a bid to buy the chemical weapons, which date back to Saddam Hussein's war with Iran in the 1980s, Gen. Marek Dukaczewski told reporters in Warsaw. "We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads and offered $5,000...

July 3, 2004

LA Times Lacks A Research Department -- Or Even Google

The Los Angeles Times breaks the "big" story this morning that the American military engineered the destruction of the Saddam Hussein statue in the Baghdad square as the city fell into American hands, and used Iraqi civilians to make it look more spontaneous: As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking. After the colonel who was not named in the report selected the statue as a "target of opportunity," the psychological team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to...

Every Little Bit Helps

Coalition forces discovered a car-bomb manufacturing center and captured a number of people connected to the operation during two raids in south Baghdad, the BBC reports: A large cache of weapons and cash was also found at the unidentified site, a US military statement said. Bomb-making equipment, weapons and ammunition were found in raids at other locations - and 51 people have been taken in for questioning. ... The US said the Baghdad raid uncovered vehicles loaded with explosives for use as car bombs. ... On another raid, US soldiers found "partially assembled improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, eight RPG [rocket propelled grenade] rounds, approximately 50 pounds of C-4 explosives, TNT, five blasting caps, one detonator and other various munitions". Coalition forces think they captured most of the key people involved in this ring, including the financier, the bombmaker, and the triggerman. No one thinks that this is the...

So Much For Sadr's Political Power

Moqtada al-Sadr tossed the dice again yesterday, apparently eschewing his previously-stated desire to enter Iraqi politics and calling again for armed resistance to the "occupation." The Washington Post reports that Sadr and his organization appears less coherent than ever: Moqtada Sadr, the rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric, insisted Friday that the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq had not ended with the recent handover of limited political powers to an interim government, and called on his followers to continue resisting the large presence of foreign troops in the country. "I want to draw your attention to the fact there was no transferring of authority," said Jabir Khafaji, a top Sadr lieutenant, reading from a letter from the cleric during Friday prayers at a mosque in the southern city of Kufa where Sadr commonly preaches. "What has changed is the name only." Khafaji also demanded that the new Iraqi government defer to the Shiite...

July 4, 2004

Not Yet, At Any Rate, We Think

After reports came out yesterday that captured US Marine Wassef Hassoun had been beheaded by the Islamofascist terrorists holding him, the group taking responsibility for his kidnapping now says those reports were false: An Islamic extremist group denied in a statement posted on its Web site Sunday that it had killed a U.S. Marine taken hostage last month. The Ansar al-Sunna Army issued the statement in response to reports by the Lebanese Foreign Ministry that the group killed Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, an American of Lebanese descent. ... "The media have published, quoting the Lebanese foreign ministry, that the Ansar al-Sunna Army has killed the American hostage, from Lebanese origin, who was kidnapped in Iraq (news - web sites)," the statement said. "In order to maintain our credibility in all issues we declare that this statement that was attributed to us has no basis of truth," the statement said. It...

Where Freedom Can't Be Taken For Granted

The London Guardian reports on a story that Americans should be reading on Independence Day, to remind us that the job isn't over in Afghanistan yet and that the freedoms we take for granted can still be denied to others who crave it: Mahadad was resting on a cushion in her sitting room, with a thick bandage covering the burns on her legs. "I'm never going back," she said. "Look at my leg. How can I go back? In my heart, I never want to go again." Mahadad, 38, is one of the 12 survivors of last week's bomb attack by Taliban on a bus that was carrying women election workers and a child near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Two of the women and the child were killed in the explosion. They had been on their way to a registration site to hand out identification cards to women which would...

Libyans Finds Al-Qaeda Base, Informs West

Proving again that the Bush approach on Iraq integrates into the wider war on Islamofascist terror, the newly repentant Libya has discovered an al-Qaeda operations base near its border with Chad: Libyan secret services have found a desert operations camp belonging to an al Qaeda-linked group called the GSPC after "intercepting" members of the group near the border with Chad, a French newspaper said on Sunday. The paper, Le Journal du Dimanche, said that a source close to the counter-espionage services of a European country told it of the discovery by Libyan agents 10 days ago in the mountainous region of Tibesti that spans Libya's southern border with Chad. ... The French newspaper said that the GSPC -- the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat -- was recruiting actively in the Tibesti region and buying arms and vehicles with German ransom money paid for the release of tourists in the...

July 6, 2004

Iranian Intelligence Officers Captured In Iraq

In a development certain to embarrass the Iranian government and possibly bring the West to the brink of war against the mullahcracy there, Fox News reports that joint US-Iraqi patrols have captured admitted Iranian intelligence officers in Baghdad -- carrying explosives: American and Iraqi joint patrols, along with U.S. Special Operations teams, captured two men with explosives in Baghdad on Monday who identified themselves as Iranian intelligence officers, FOX News has confirmed. Senior officials said it was previously believed that Iran had officers inside Iraq stirring up violence, but this is the first time that self-proclaimed Iranian intelligence agents have been captured within the country. ... The arrest of the two Iranians suspected of attempting to carry out a vehicle bombing has focused new attention on how Tehran is trying to protect its interests in the country it fought for eight years in a devastating war. So far, Iran is...

July 7, 2004

Financial Times: Iraq Tried To Get Uranium From Niger

In a further repudiation of the "Bush Lied!" meme, the Financial Times in London reports that Lord Butler's investigation into prewar British intelligence confirms that Iraq did attempt to get uranium from Niger in defiance of cease-fire agreements and UN resolutions: A UK government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger. ... The UK government has remained adamant that negotiations over sales did take place and that the fake documents were not part of the intelligence material it had gathered to underpin its claim. The Financial Times revealed last week that a key part of the UK's intelligence on the uranium came from a European intelligence service that undertook a three-year surveillance of an alleged clandestine uranium-smuggling operation of which Iraq was a part. Intelligence...

Filipinos Take The Spanish Approach

Islamofascist terrorists abducted another foreigner in Iraq today, a Filipino civilian working for a Saudi company. In an action certain to encourage the kidnapping of more foreigners, the Filipinos have run up the white flag, at least for the moment: Armed Iraq insurgents threatened to kill a Filipino hostage if his country does not withdraw from Iraq, according to a video that aired Wednesday. ... Three armed and masked men stood behind the seated hostage, threatening to kill him if the Philippines doesn't pull out within three days. A banner on the wall behind them identified the captors as a previously unknown group, the Iraqi Islamic Army-Khaled bin al-Waleed Corps. Thursday, the Philippines government suspended further deployment of Filipinos to Iraq. Philippines officials did not provide details but said the Cabinet would meet later in the day to discuss the situation. I understand the need to review policy as situations...

The Hassoun Hoax?

MS-NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports tonight that the Pentagon is now investigating what exactly happened to Cpl. Wassef Hassoun, a Marine supposedly kidnapped by Islamofascist terrorists. Now, however, military sources say Hassoun may have hoaxed the world: Late Wednesday, FBI agents showed up at the Hassoun family home in West Jordan, Utah. And Pentagon officials tell NBC News that the Navy has now launched a criminal investigation into Hassoun's disappearance, and the possibility that his kidnapping may be part of an elaborate hoax. Hassoun disappeared from his Marine unit on June 20. He showed up a week later in a hostage-style video, with a sword held over his head and his alleged captors threatening to kill him. Terrorist experts say, however, the group said to have held Hassoun is unknown. "We don't know whether this group is simply an Internet address. ... We don't know if they were simply fabricated. We...

July 9, 2004

Still At War

The Bush Admninistration warned yesterday that intelligence services have received a stream of non-specific data indicating that al-Qaeda intends on disrupting the upcoming election with a "catastrophic" attack -- perhaps more than one: Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts suspected to be along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the United States sometime this year, senior Bush administration officials said on Thursday. ... Counterterrorism officials have said for weeks that they are increasingly worried by a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on United States soil this year. But until the comments of the senior administration officials on Thursday, it was not clear that Mr. bin Laden and top deputies like Ayman Zawahiri were responsible for the concern. Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports...

Boxer: Madrid Bombings 'Rail Accident'

Continuing our series on the unseriousness of Democratic leadership, last night our friend and mentor Hugh Hewitt played a clip of California Senator Barbara Boxer delivering a speech on ... whatever Boxer happened to bloviate on. In the middle of this speech, Boxer referred to the al-Qaeda bombings in Madrid not as an act of war, not even as a crime -- but as a simple mistake: Today, on the floor of the United States Senate, Barbara Boxer referred to the Madrid bombings as a "rail accident." Honest. A rail accident. Boxer is a Senate accident. What an embarassment. A caller got us all laughing when he said that had Boxer been in the Senate in 1942, she would have demanded that the US apologize to the Japanese for overreacting to a mishap at a boating and flying exhibition off the shores of Pearl Harbor. I'm surprised she hasn't asked...

July 10, 2004

Senate Report: Wilson Lied

One of the supposed martyrs of the Left in the war on terror, former Ambassador and newly-minted author Joseph Wilson, lied to the public about how he got that questionable assignment to Niger, according to a Senate report: Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. So Joe Wilson came back from Niger and...

July 11, 2004

Palestinians Prove ICJ Irrelevant

Just two days after the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel had to tear down its wall between Israel and the Palestinians, a terrorist group with ties to the Palestinian Authority has bombed downtown Tel Aviv, proving the ICJ irrelevant at best, and dangerous: Palestinian militants detonated a bomb near a Tel Aviv bus stop early Sunday, killing a woman and wounding more than 20 other people, police and Israeli media said. The explosion shattered a period of relative quiet inside Israel and came two days after the U.N. world court ruled that Israel's West Bank separation barrier is illegal. Israel says the barrier is meant to block Palestinian attackers. The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a Palestinian militant group loosely linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility, saying the attack was in revenge for Israeli army operations in the West Bank city of Nablus. Israel recently killed the...

July 12, 2004

Uh, Go Back To The Drawing Board, Please

I understand the need to think out of the box in terms of national security in time of war. I know that terrorists would like nothing better than to disrupt our elections this November, and maybe some other events previous to that as well. Given all of that, you can understand why this idea would be inevitable -- and it's still tremendously foolish (via Power Line): U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda, Newsweek reported on Sunday. ... The magazine cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the election if an attack occurred on the day before or the day of the election. The argument that "if [X]...

Women See Progress In New Iraq

One of the subtexts of the war on terror is the liberation of women from the oppression to which radical Islamists wish to condemn them. Even in more open-minded Muslim societies such as Egypt, women have faced increasing pressure to cover themselves while in public and curtail their efforts towards economic independence. In Iraq, meanwhile, the new interim government has hired over one hundred women into highy public roles -- as police officers: Whipping out her handgun and slamming a magazine into the grip, 20-year-old Hadeel Alwan can't wait to start catching criminals. "My biggest wish is to destroy terrorism," said Alwan, one of the youngest of Iraq's new women police recruits. "I want to go out on the streets and do everything a man does." ... Iraq has not hired women recruits since the force experimented with the idea in the 1960s, according to senior officers, but that changed...

Women Progress In Iraq, Still Prey To Radicals Elsewhere

While the new Iraqi nation progresses by including women in its security infrastructure, radicals reminded the world today why the Iraqis are so singular in this accomplishment. The AP reports that "guerillas" -- assuredly Islamofascist militants -- have mutilated a teenage girl for cooperating with authorities in the disputed Jammu-Kashmir state in India: Guerrillas on Monday chopped off the ears, nose and tongue of a teenage girl they suspected of helping police, while at least nine other people were killed in separate violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The girl was held captive for eight days before the rebels abandoned her in a field outside the village of Manoh, 190 miles southwest of Srinagar, the capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, police said. It's helpful to understand the type of people who wish to impose their radical version of Islam on others. Regardless of motivation, people who would commit such an act on...

A White Flag, Followed By Some First-Class Asskissing

The Philippines ran the white flag up to Islamic terrorists today, caving in to the demands of kidnappers to expedite their scheduled withdrawal from Iraq: The Philippines said on Monday it would withdraw its troops from Iraq as soon as possible to save a Filipino hostage threatened with death by militants. CNN quoted unidentified Philippine officials as saying they expected truck driver Angelo de la Cruz to be released on Tuesday, but no independent confirmation was available. Al Jazeera broadcast footage of Philippine deputy foreign minister Rafael Seguis reading out a statement, which the television station translated into Arabic, shortly after the expiry of a new execution deadline set by the militants. "In response to your request, the Philippines ... will withdraw its humanitarian forces as soon as possible," Seguis said according to the translation of the statement, addressed to the Islamic Army in Iraq group holding 46-year-old de la...

July 13, 2004

Iran: It's The Yahoods, We Tell Ya

The Iranian mullahcracy injected a little conspiratorial nonsense into the diplomatic debate over terrorism this morning with an assertion that Muslims couldn't possibly be capable of kidnapping and beheading foreign nationals in Iraq. However, they do claim to have solved the mystery: Iran's Supreme Leader said on Tuesday he believed the United States and Israel, rather than Muslims, were behind the kidnapping and killing of foreign nationals in Iraq. "We seriously suspect the agents Americans and Israelis in conducting such horrendous terrorist moves," the official IRNA news agency quoted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying in a meeting with visiting Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. "(We) cannot believe that the people who kidnap Philippine nationals, for instance, or beheaded U.S. nationals are Muslims." That must be it! The Jews and the Americans --who, after all, are nothing but puppets of the Jews -- must secretly be forming their...

Winning The Peace

The AP makes a rare report of some good news from Iraq, filing a story today on the hard work of the civil affairs soldiers in the US Army and their function in rebuilding the nation, one piece at a time: Sgt. Abubakar Senge walks through the secondary school with his rifle slung across his chest, his helmet hanging off his arm and a notebook in his hand, inspecting the work he hired an Iraqi builder to perform. Checking every room, he wants to make sure everything is perfect before the students return at the end of August. "I'm not that much older than the guys going to school, so I know how they feel," said the 21-year-old college student from Portland, Ore. ... The Army has assigned a civil affairs team to almost every battalion to take charge of reconstruction projects and set up neighborhood councils to get Iraq...

Bush Makes The Case, WaPo Develops One (Of Amnesia)

George Bush, in remarks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, gave an impassioned defense of the Iraq war, arguing that the result has made America and the world safer due to subtraction: Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take. Today, the dictator who caused decades of death and turmoil, who twice invaded his neighbors, who harbored terrorist leaders, who used chemical weapons on innocent men, women and children, is finally before the bar of justice. Iraq, which once had the worst government in the Middle East, is now becoming an example of reform to...

July 14, 2004

Mexican Anti-Kidnapping Technology -- Why Not In Iraq?

CNN reports on a new development for Mexico's war on internal terror, as it has started inoculating its political class against abductions: Mexico's attorney general said on Monday he had had a microchip inserted under the skin of one of his arms to give him access to a new crime database and also enable him to be traced if he is ever abducted. ... "The system is here and I already have it. It's solely for access, for safety and so that I can be located at any moment wherever I am," he said, admitting the chip hurt "a little." The chips would enable the wearer to be found anywhere inside Mexico, in the event of an assault or kidnapping, said Macedo. And kidnapping is a huge problem here. From 1992 to 2002, Mexico saw some 15,000 kidnappings, second only to war-torn Colombia, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. The...

Clinton: No Government Could Have Avoided Iraq, Post-9/11

The BBC reports that Bill Clinton, speaking on tour while promoting his autobiography, not only says he agreed that action had to be taken against Iraq after 9/11, but that the UN Security Council's failure to approve a final resolution threatening war left no choice to Tony Blair: Bill Clinton says that no government could have failed to act against Iraq after the 11 September 2001 attacks in view of intelligence provided. The former US president told the BBC that UK intelligence on the activity of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was more "aggressive" than Washington's. He added that the world was right to demand weapons inspections in 2002. But he said war could have been avoided if the UN had passed a resolution threatening military action. ... He said that while containment of Iraq was working the situation regarding Saddam Hussein was different after the 11 September attacks. ......

Minneapolis-AQ Connection, Cont'd

Local television station KSTP-TV, our ABC affiliate, broke the news story that the FBI detained a traveler at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport on immigration violations, finding evidence of terrorism connections in his personal belongings (via my friend Big Trunk at Power Line): Federal sources told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS the man was arrested last Wednesday at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Sources in the Twin Cities and in Washington D.C. said the man arrived on a flight and was taken into federal custody. Along the way, customs agents found disturbing items in his possession. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that Ali Mohamed Almosaleh is in federal custody in the Twin Cities. He was being detained on an immigration law violation, but federal sources confirmed there is much more than that to this investigation. Sources confirm Almosaleh was carrying a suicide when he was arrested....

Wouldn't This Be Collaboration?

The Butler Report states that Abu Zarqawi began establishing terrorist cells in February 2003 in advance of the Iraq war, to fight a rearguard action in Baghdad against the invading Coalitions forces, according to the Washington Post: In February 2003, a month before the United States and coalition forces invaded Iraq, British intelligence received reports that Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi was establishing sleeper cells in Baghdad that would attack U.S. forces after they occupied the city, according a report on British prewar intelligence released yesterday in London. In a prediction that has proved deadly accurate, the British Joint Intelligence Committee in March 2003 wrote, "These cells apparently intend to attack U.S. targets using car bombs and other weapons," according to yesterday's report by the Butler Commission. In the past year, Zarqawi has publicly claimed to have put together an Iraqi network that has committed dozens of bombings and killings,...

July 15, 2004

A New Vision Of Shi'ite Islam From Iraq?

This report from the AP looks suspiciously like progress in the war on Islamofascist terror, if subtle progress: Now, with Shiites empowered in postwar Iraq, the gloves are off again. But this time, the antagonists are the Shiite ayatollahs of Iraq, a mainly Arab country, and Iran, formerly Persia. At stake is the leadership of the world's estimated 170 million Shiites and the outcome will have profound consequences not only for the two nations but the entire Islamic faith. At the heart of the conflict is a rivalry between the holy cities of Najaf in Iraq and Qom in neighboring Iran. A victory by Najaf's "quietist" school of thought, which places a cleric's spiritual calling ahead of involvement in politics, could deal a serious blow to the claim of legitimacy by Iran's ruling clergy. It could also provide a counter-ideology to the militant political Islam adopted by some Sunni...

More Iraqi-AQ Connections In Butler Report

The Washington Times' Bill Gertz reports that the Butler Report of the British investigation into its pre-war intelligence shows previously undisclosed connections between Iraqi intelligence services and Al-Qaeda, including in chemical arms and training (via Memeorandum): A British government report made public yesterday provides new information showing that al Qaeda terrorists had contacts with Iraqi intelligence in developing chemical arms and that the group worked with a Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist. The special report by former top civil servant Robin Butler on British prewar intelligence found gaps in reporting on Iraq's weapons and also disclosed new details of terrorist activities of al Qaeda associate Abu Musab Zarqawi, who is leading attacks in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. I noted the Zarqawi connection earlier, from a Washington Post article. Gertz has more specific details about the chemical-arms trade between Iraq, Pakistan, and AQ: British intelligence assessments of connections between al Qaeda and Saddam's...

Afghans Overwhelmingly Satisfied With Country's Direction

The London Telegraph reports more good news resulting from American military intervention in the war on Islamofascist terror. A poll conducted in Afghanistan by an American charity finds that Afghanis far prefer the current direction of their country: In the most comprehensive survey to be held in Afghanistan 64 per cent of those polled said they were satisfied with the direction the country was taking, two and a half years after the American invasion removed the Taliban. Only 11 per cent said they were dissatisfied. The survey, commissioned by the Asia Foundation, an independent, privately funded American charity, showed that 81 per cent of people planned to vote in the presidential election in October, with 77 per cent of them believing the vote, and a parliamentary poll next April, would "make a difference". So much for the argument that American indifference is causing Afghanistan to slide back into anarchy. When...

July 16, 2004

Wilson Fires Back With A Water Weenie

Ambassador Joseph Wilson has fired back across the funeral pyre of his reputation after the release of the SIC and Butler reports make clear that Iraq had approached Niger and that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, pushed for Wilson's assignment despite his earlier denials. Salon's Mary Jacoby carries Wilson's water (annoying ad required for reading) in attempting to counter the "choreographed editorials" supposedly libeling Wilson: Choreographed editorials and Op-Ed pieces on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal and National Review and by conservative columnist Robert Novak signaled the revving up of a Republican campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his claims that President Bush trumpeted flimsy intelligence in the drive to invade Iraq. ... The dispute over the committee report centers on its interpretation of two facts. One is that Wilson told his CIA debriefers that during his Niger trip, he spoke to the country's former prime minister, who...

Terror In The Skies?

I have been asked why I have been silent on the "Terror In The Skies, Again?" story from Womenswallstreet.com. It's a harrowing account by Anne Jacobsen, one of WWS's regular writers, and supposedly well-vetted by their editorial staff. Here's a typically chilling excerpt of Jacobsen's experience with a flight where Arabic men acted in a highly unusual manner: Suddenly, seven of the men stood up -- in unison -- and walked to the front and back lavatories. One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves and to the man in the yellow shirt sitting nearby. One of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the...

July 17, 2004

Palestinian Authority Losing Steam

In a move that looks deliciously like chickens coming home to roost, Islamists have begun a string of kidnapings in the Gaza Strip, forcing Yasser Arafat to sumbit to their demands and pushing the territory Israel plans to abandon towards anarchy: Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian president, has rejected the resignation of the prime minister Ahmed Qurie, according to a cabinet minister. Mr Qurie submitted his resignation this morning after complaining of "unprecendented chaos" following series of kidnappings in the Gaza Strip. ... Earlier, the Palestinian Authority declared a state of emergency in the Gaza Strip after four French aid workers captured on Friday were released by militants. The kidnappings are linked to demands for anti-corruption reforms from Arafat. These reforms are similar to those the Egyptians demanded in return for continuing its guarantee of Arafat's life from Israeli attack. Egypt gave Arafat a deadline that quietly expired almost a month...

July 19, 2004

Arafat Reeling

Yasser Arafat has replaced his replacement to head security in the Gaza Strip after his elevation of a close family member touched off riots and demonstrations in Gaza: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on Monday reinstated a security chief whose replacement by the veteran leader's cousin touched off turmoil in the Gaza Strip, officials said. Abdel-Razek al-Majaideh was named director of General Security for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, replacing Moussa Arafat, whose appointment to the post on Saturday triggered clashes between gunmen and his loyalists. Moussa Arafat's apparent demotion seemed to be an attempt by the Palestinian president to defuse the most serious leadership crisis he has faced since returning from exile a decade ago. The Palestinians have realized, belatedly, that the intifada has failed miserably to release them from the occupation or to create a self-government that can be trusted not to exploit them. Arafat's move towards family...

WaPo Ombudsman: Wilson, JMM Lied, Not Bush or SSCI

The Washington Post took the unusual action of offering criticism to a blogger, although one with journalistic credentials, in its ombudsman column yesterday on the Wilson/Plame portion of the SSCI and Butler reports. Seeing that the majority of criticism towards its coverage of the SSCI report and its implications referenced Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog, the Post fisked Marshall in the grand tradition of blogging (via Belgravia Dispatch), as well as Joe Wilson himself: Marshall takes issue with The Post's reporting that "contrary to Wilson's assertions . . . the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the African intelligence that made its way into the 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address." Actually, the CIA fought hard, and successfully, to keep the material about Africa, aspects of which were a matter of dispute, out...

July 20, 2004

UN Admonishes Israel Defence While Ignoring Palestinian Terror

Proving once again its uselessness as a partner against terrorism, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to push Israel into dismantling its defensive perimeter wall, the one non-lethal tactic against Palestinian terrorists that has actually worked to reduce civilian casualties: Israel must obey a World Court ruling and tear down its West Bank barrier, the U.N. General Assembly demanded in a resolution adopted by an overwhelming vote on Tuesday. The vote in the 191-nation assembly was 150-6, with 10 abstentions, to adopt the measure aimed at dismantling the 370-mile barrier that Israel says is needed to keep out suicide bombers but Palestinians see as a land-grab aimed at dashing their hopes for eventual statehood. Demonstrating their usefulness against terrorists, the EU voted as a block for the demand that Israel strip its defense against Palestinian terrorism, all without a word of any resolution telling the Palestinians to stop bombing civilian targets...

July 21, 2004

WaPo: Wilson Lied

Even the Washington Post, in an editorial that had to hurt, has decided that the notorious 16 words from the State of the Union speech in 2003 have turned out to be true, despite Ambassador Joe Wilson's assertions to the contrary. While the WaPo doesn't actually come out and call Wilson a liar, it comes close enough for the Kerry campaign to reassess its association with yet another embarrassment in its advisory council: A year ago this month official Washington was convulsed by a controversy over whether President Bush had knowingly twisted the truth about Iraq to persuade the country to go to war. A former U.S. ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, made that charge. As evidence he cited Mr. Bush's statement in his January 2003 State of the Union address that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," a finding...

Sense From The NYT's Op-Ed Section

Now that the "Bush Lied!" meme has been thoroughly debunked and its proponents running for the hills, Stephen Sestanovich, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, injects a little reality into the debate about going to war with Iraq. He uses an experience from his State Department days to show the imperfection of intelligence and how to use it strategically: When policymakers have imperfect information about a serious problem (which is almost always), what should they do? The answer, then as now, is to shift the burden of proof to the other guy. If we had been denied that meeting with Mr. Yeltsin, it would hardly have proved that he was dead. But we would have canceled the trip all the same. Russian uncooperativeness - not our poor intelligence - would have left us no choice. Going to war and canceling a trip are vastly different matters, but what...

UN Proves Useless In Iraq -- Again

The Los Angeles Times offers an analysis of the UN's ongoing non-efforts to support the nascent democracy in Iraq. After loudly demanding an end to the CPA occupation of the country and pressing for elections at the earliest possible moment, the United Nations has not done much about getting member states to assist with electoral security: When the U.N. Security Council voted six weeks ago to authorize a protective force, it expected contributors to step forward. But countries have balked at taking part in a force expected to include 1,000 troops and several dozen bodyguards. Diplomats said many nations were hesitating because of the dangers including a wave of kidnappings and costs as well as the continuing unpopularity of the U.S. invasion. ... The U.S. considers a U.N. mission in Iraq an important step toward making the reconstruction a more international effort. But U.N. officials, still traumatized by...

Arafat's Grip On Power Slipping Away

In what could present the best opportunity to finally achieve real progress towards peace in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Parliament took an unprecedented step towards independence. The Washington Post and AP report that the assembly demanded that Yasser Arafat accept Ahmed Qureia's resignation and form a cabinet that can address the deteriorating security situation in Gaza: The Palestinian parliament passed a resolution Wednesday calling on Yasser Arafat to accept the resignations of his prime minister and Cabinet, stepping up pressure on the Palestinian leader to relinquish some of his power. In a rare show of independence, the legislature asked Arafat to form a new Cabinet better equipped to handle the internal unrest after a week of turmoil in the Gaza Strip. ... Rauhi Fattouh, speaker of the Legislative Council, said the legislature will hold an emergency session Thursday to decide on further action. Lawmakers are considering...

July 22, 2004

NY Daily News: Berger Allowed Phone Calls When Reading Top-Secret Documents

The New York Daily News reports that "Soxy Sandy" (love the tabs, man) distracted security monitors at the National Archives by taking a number of bathroom breaks and convinced them to give him more privacy: Former national security adviser Sandy Berger repeatedly persuaded monitors assigned to watch him review top secret documents to break the rules and leave him alone, sources said yesterday. Berger, accused of smuggling some of the secret files out of the National Archives, got the monitors out of the high-security room by telling them he had to make sensitive phone calls. ... Berger also took "lots of bathroom breaks" that apparently aroused some suspicion, the [senior law-enforcement] source added. ... Asked if guards left Berger alone in the classified reading room while he made calls, archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper replied, "I'm not going to say I haven't heard that." Let me get this straight. The former...

'A Failure Of Imagination'

The 9/11 Commission report, being released today, will avoid blaming either the Bush or Clinton administrations and instead talk about a "failure of imagination" in developing new approaches to fight al-Qaeda and terrorism, the AP reports: The Sept. 11 commission concludes that a "failure of imagination," not governmental neglect, allowed 19 hijackers to carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. The panel calls for an intelligence overhaul to confront an al-Qaida organization intent on striking again. While faulting institutional shortcomings, the bipartisan report being released Thursday does not blame President Bush or former President Clinton for mistakes contributing to the 2001 terrorist attack, Bush administration officials familiar with the findings said. The report will be released at 11:30 EDT on the Commission's website, which I imagine will only rival the Starr report's bandwidth requirements today. The release will not put a halt to genuinely stupid commentary, such as...

9/11 Download Complete

I've downloaded my copy of the 9/11 report and will read it in its entirety before commenting on it in my blog. However, if you'd like to see some interesting commentary on the report, check out The Corner at NRO, as they are tearing through it right now. One passage that they excerpt seems to demolish Richard Clarke as a credible commentator on security issues: We apparently identified bin Laden at a camp, but held off an attack partly because of worries that a member of the UAE royal family was there too. But we hoped bin Laden might return to the camp and we would be able to target him then. Enter Richard Clarke and here is the commission's narrative: Even after bin Ladens departure from the area, CIA officers hoped he might return, seeing the camp as a magnet that could draw him for as long as it...

Executive Summary: 'We Believe We Are Safer. But We Are Not Safe.'

For those who wish to review the 9/11 Commission's work without immediately tackling the 500+ pages of the full report, I would recommend reading the Executive Summary. Most of the gist of their work, and all of their recommendations, can be found in there. I spent my lunch break reading through it but do not have time to break it down at the moment. I will say that the summary seems to be an evenhanded and sober product, and its recommendations appear sound. Just before it launches into recommendations for "unity of effort", it makes this statement which should resonate with Americans everywhere: Because of offensive actions against al Qaeda since 9/11, and defensive actions to improve homeland security,we believe we are safer today. But we are not safe. Both parties and all branches of the government intend, and have worked, to make this country safer, but anyone in their...

Lehman: 9/11 Commission "Mugged" By Viacom, Richard Clarke

Now that their work has been completed, 9/11 Commissioners will hit the road to promote the publication of their report, although none of them will profit from its release. One of the first revelations from the freedom of commissioners to speak out comes from former Navy Secretary John Lehman, and he wasted no time singling out the culprits who politicized the Commission's work -- Richard Clarke and Viacom, parent of CBS and publisher of Clarke's book: It is a day of 9/11 Commission unanimity, but one commissioner, looking back at its public work, is remembering the partisan past. "We were mugged by Viacom," Republican commissioner John Lehman says, referring to the owner of the publisher of Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, and the owner of CBS, which broadcast a long, loving segment devoted to Clarke just prior to the release of his book. "I think we were mugged by...

Executive Summary: Balanced And Disappointing

In reading the Executive Summary, one gets the impression that a lot of effort went into writing a document that maintained a level of professional detachment that, unfortunately, gets a bit lost in the earnest but often odd recommendations at the end. The recommendations start off by defining the enemy a bit more clearly than others have, but not quite as clear as one would hope from a commission that has studied this problem so thoroughly: The enemy is not just terrorism. It is the threat posed specifically by Islamist terrorism, by Bin Ladin and others who draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a minority strain of Islam that does not distinguish politics from religion, and distorts both. The enemy is not Islam, the great world faith, but a perversion of Islam. The enemy goes beyond al Qaeda to include the radical ideological movement, inspired in part...

July 23, 2004

9/11 On Iraq: A Lot More Than You've Heard

I wanted to peruse the full report from the 9/11 Commission to check out their final say on Iraq and how that compared to all of the rhetoric during the past year, while the Left did their best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fortunately, Jon from QandO (one of the best blogs out there) has already done his homework. What he's found in the 9/11 report should devastate the memes repeatedly pushed from the left. For instance, did you know that Bush is the one who took Iraq off the table following 9/11 (page 335)? President Bush told Bob Woodward that the decision not to invade Iraq was made at the morning session on September 15. Iraq was not even on the table during the September 15 afternoon session, which dealt solely with Afghanistan.69 Rice said that when President Bush called her on Sunday, September 16, he...

Terror Or Panic On Northwest 327?

Anne Jacobsen turned the blogosphere upside down one week ago with her harrowing recounting of her flight from Detroit to Los Angeles on Northwest 327. At the time, I remarked that I felt that cold nugget of fear in my guts, telling me that this flight was fortunate to have arrived at its destination. However, several details about the story bother me. For one, the flight attendants shouldn't have acted the way the did in Jacobsen's account, especially divulging the air marshals' presence on the plane. I also doubt that there were "several" air marshals on one flight. Lastly, if the pilots knew of the disturbances early in the flight, they should have put the plane on the ground immediately, not risked the long journey to LAX (especially LAX, as the potential for ground destruction is more pronounced). Nor was I the only one who questioned some of the details...

July 24, 2004

A Premonition Of Things To Come?

Alert CQ reader -- do we have any other kind? -- William Sauer sent me this item earlier today on Clinton-era efforts to safeguard national-security data. In a foreshadowing of events to come with his NSA, Sandy Berger, Clinton forced Congress to remove key language from a bill in November 2000 that made leaking government secrets a felony: The House gave in to President Clinton on Monday and removed language from a major intelligence spending bill that would have made leaking of government secrets a criminal act. The president vetoed the bill, which authorizes an estimated $30 billion in spending by the CIA, National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, because he disagreed with the provision on classified data leaks. ... The crackdown on government officials' leaking of classified material had some support within the administration. Attorney General Janet Reno said it would have no dramatic increase in the number...

9/11 Suspect, On The Run, Surfaces Via E-Mail

The London Telegraph reports that the last of Mohammed Atta's Hamburg al-Qaeda cell to be alive and outside of custody has surfaced long enough to e-mail his wife in Germany, prompting a new effort to track him down: Said Bahaji, 29, a German of Moroccan origin who is alleged to have been the link between the Hamburg al-Qaeda cell - which masterminded the attacks - and Osama bin Laden, is believed to have been hiding in Pakistan and Afghanistan ever since the attacks. In an email to his wife, Nese, who still lives in Germany, Bahaji revealed that he was being well looked after despite being on the run. Addressing her as "My Rose", Bahaji wrote: "The people here love Arabs. The simplest of people welcome us. Their wives can't wait to cook and do our laundry for us." German Federal Police (BKA) revealed last week that they have intercepted...

July 25, 2004

But We're Appeasers!

Kenyans have reacted in shock to find out that their pro-appeasement stance regarding Saddam Hussein and Iraq has not shielded them from terrorism, as Islamofascists kidnapped three Kenyan hostages: The capture of three Kenyan hostages in Iraq has bewildered newspapers back home, who demand to know why the insurgents have picked on a country that refused to join the US-led invasion. "Spare Kenyans, we were not in the war," the East African Standard cries in a headline, and says Iraq is now "scary" even for those not directly involved in the conflict. Unfortunately, Kenyans have not taken the proper lesson from this, nor from the 2002 Mombasa bombing that destroyed an Israeli-owned hotel. Their media now urges their government to negotiate directly with the terrorists in order to magnify their appeasement policies: Pointing out that Kenya was one of the first to condemn the decision to invade Iraq, the paper...

History Repeats Itself In Palestine

Yasser Arafat faces even more questions in his reign as Palestinian dictator, as a Palestinian legislative analysis shows that the cement for the Israeli security wall came from Palestinian sources. Arafat himself saw the contracts even as he called for demonstrations against the construction: Palestinian businessmen have made millions of pounds supplying cement for Israel's "security barrier" in the full knowledge of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader and one of the wall's most vocal critics. A damning report by Palestinian legislators, which has been seen by the Telegraph, concludes that Mr Arafat did nothing to stop the deals although he publicly condemned the structure as a "crime against humanity". The report contains testimony that the cement originated with the Egyptians, who sold it at a discount to the Palestinians in order to help rebuild the homes of those displaced by Israeli demolitions of terrorists' houses. Instead of making use of...

July 27, 2004

George Bush: Dances With Bears

Instapundit and Memeorandum both point out a strategy analysis from Asia Times published yesterday, which claims that sources reveal that George Bush and Vladimir Putin have made a deal to bring 40,000 Russian troops into Iraq. The Russians would be given the free hand in Fallujah that domestic politics withheld from American Marines, and in return, Putin plans to pay back the architects of the war on Serbia: Do not be surprised to see three or four divisions of the Russian army in the Sunni triangle before year-end, with an announcement just prior to the US presidential election in November. Long rumored (or under negotiation), a Russian deployment of 40,000 soldiers was predicted on July 16 by the US intelligence site www.stratfor.com, and denied by the Russian Foreign Ministry on July 20. Nonetheless, the logic is compelling. Russian support for US occupation forces would make scorched earth of Senator John...

Iran Defies World Community, Breaks Seal On Equipment

Iran has broken the seal on its proscribed nuclear equipment and started rebuilding the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium into weapons-grade material, according to the London Telegraph. The move comes despite the intense negotiations that European countries have used to keep the issue from coming to the UN Security Council: Teheran's move, revealed to The Daily Telegraph yesterday by western sources, breaks a deal with European countries under which Iran suspended "all uranium enrichment activity". ... America has in recent weeks renewed its call for Iran to be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. However, diplomats said senior officials from the "EU-3" - Britain, France and Germany - would try to coax Teheran back to the path of co-operation at a secret meeting in Paris on Thursday. Anton La Guardia writes in his analysis that the Iranians have chosen this moment to press its luck as it...

July 29, 2004

Allawi Endorses Powell Effort To Build Muslim Coalition

Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi voiced his approval for the diplomatic efforts of Colin Powell to bring together a coalition of Muslim nations to provide security for Iraq, especially for a UN delegation to oversee elections in the winter: Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi called on Arab and Muslim nations on Thursday to join a proposed force of Islamic troops in Iraq that the United States said could provide protection to the United Nations. Allawi and Secretary of State Colin Powell met in Saudi Arabia and embraced a Saudi proposal for Muslim nations other than Iraq's immediate neighbors to contribute troops to help secure Iraq in the face of a fierce insurgency. No one doubts the brief analysis at the end by Reuters that such a coalition could boost the Bush administration's standing in global diplomacy, which is one of the reasons I think that the Islamic nations will give...

Sticks And Stones Will Break My Bones, But Names Will Be Reported

In a genuinely silly piece on supposed discrimination against our beleagured Muslim population, the Washington Post reports on the results of a survey among American Muslims which indicate that their feelings have been hurt at slightly higher than the national average: Fifteen percent of Arab Americans in the Detroit area said they have experienced harassment or intimidation since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and a significant number wish other Americans understood them better, according to a University of Michigan report to be released today. Derogatory comments -- "Go back where you came from!" or "Ooh, are you a member of al Qaeda?" -- were the most common form of abuse. Others alleged job discrimination and a small number reported physical assaults, researchers said. Forty-two percent of Muslim Arabs interviewed for the survey in Detroit -- an area with one of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the nation --...

July 30, 2004

The Arabian Rumor Mill: US Got Zarqawi

We've been down this road before, but what the hell -- Arab newsline Al-Bawaba reports that Abu Musab Zarqawi has been captured along the Syrian-Iraqi border: Reports in Kuwait on Friday said a man assumed to be Al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi has been captured near the Syrian border. Zarqawi, whose Tawhid and Jihad group has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks in Iraq, was captured during a joint operation by US forces and Iraqi police, Al Siyasah newspaper, quoting informed Iraqi sources, said Friday. The US and Iraqi investigators are trying to identify the captive and has sent his DNA sample for testing, the unconfirmed report indicated. So far, that's all we have on the capture, but I suspect that an announcement one way or the other will be made within a few hours. If it turns out to be correct, you can expect to hear a...

July 31, 2004

Bipartisan Opposition To Key 9/11 Proposal

The 9/11 Commission recommendations took a surprise hit from bipartisan criticism of a key component -- a centralized intelligence center under the control of the White House. Not only has the Bush Administration quietly opposed it, but now key senators from both parties have voiced their concerns. Even the ACLU appears to back Bush: The White House and senators from both parties raised objections yesterday to one of the key reforms recommended by the Sept. 11 commission, even as the panel's leaders warned that the nation would remain at greater risk of terrorist attack unless the changes are enacted quickly. The criticisms from Capitol Hill and the Bush administration represent the first significant challenge to a central recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, which argues in its 567-page final report that a single intelligence director should work out of the president's office to coordinate the war on terrorism. During the...

Franks: Even Muslim Nations Warned Of WMD Attacks

Matt Drudge reports on an interview which will appear tomorrow in Parade Magazine with General Tommy Franks, who led the effort in Afghanistan and Iraq. Franks talked with Parade to promote his new book, American Soldier, and has a few surprises for readers: * The biggest surprise for him was that they've found no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the "reason we went to war." He says multiple Middle Eastern leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, told Franks that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In January 2003, Mubarak said point blank to Franks, "Saddam has WMD - biologicals, actually-and he will use them on your troops." * Franks singles out White House Counter-terrorism Czar Richard Clarke as never providing him with "a single page of actionable intelligence" and of engaging in mostly wishful thinking. Franks also believes the U.S. invested too much in electronic spy surveillance...

August 1, 2004

Did The Minutemen Bomb Churches?

Car bombs in Baghdad exploded outside two churches, one Catholic and one Armenian, causing dozens of injuries and pointing towards a widening of targets in Iraq by Islamofascist terrorists: Two car bombs exploded just minutes apart outside two nearby churches in central Baghdad during Sunday evening services, injuring at least 20 people, witnesses said. The attacks appeared to be the first targeting churches during the 15-month violent insurgency. U.S. military officials said at least one and possible both of the blasts appeared to have been booby-trapped cars in the city's Karada neighborhood. More news will be forthcoming; as I'm posting this, it's been announced that two people have died in the attacks. However, the deliberate targeting of churches announces a new low for the Islamofascists, and perhaps a true revelation of their aims. These are not freedom fighters -- these are people determined to wipe out all non-Muslims, or at...

August 2, 2004

The Slow-Burn Civil War

Palestinian forces fired on Fatah reformers in the West Bank yesterday, injuring no one but sending the message that any challenge to Yasser Arafat's grip on power would result in a bloody civil war. Meanwhile, Arafat's Palestinian critics grew more bold in calling for an end to corruption: Gunmen claiming allegiance to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat fired warning shots outside a meeting hall in the West Bank city of Nablus where members of his Fatah movement gathered Sunday to discuss internal reforms, witnesses said. No one was injured when about 15 masked members of the Al Awda Brigade fired their weapons to express displeasure over what they said was a move against the Palestinian leader. About 60 Fatah activists from rural areas outside Nablus were meeting to discuss the recent political turmoil in the Palestinian Authority and draft a protest statement to Arafat, said one of the activists, Ghassan...

Sistani: All Iraqis Must Collaborate Against Islamofascist Terrorists

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani again emphasized his moderating influence on Iraq by strongly condemning the wave of Islamofascist bombings targeting Christian churches in Iraq this weekend, killing eleven in five coordinated attacks. Sistani urged all Iraqis to "collaborate" with the interim Iraqi government in order to end the terror, and he was not only Muslim cleric to do so: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani said in a statement that Sunday's assaults on Christian churches "targeted Iraq's unity, stability and independence." ... The more senior al-Sistani said: "We condemn and reproach these hideous crimes and deem necessary the collaboration of everyone the government and the people in putting an end to aggression on Iraqis," said the cleric, who is based in the southern city of Najaf. "We assert the importance of respecting the rights of Christian civilians and other religious minorities and reaffirm their right to live in their...

Commissar Live-Blogs From Alert Center

My good friend, the Commissar at the Politburo Diktat, will live-blog all day today from the Citigroup building, one of the threat targets identified this weekend by the Department of Homeland Security. Keep checking back all day today on the status of security. In fact, keep checking back at PD as a regular habit -- it's a great blog, one of the best satirical sites as well as featuring straightforward insightful commentary. UPDATE: The AP reports on security measures being taken on the ground and notes that workers in the area are "defiant" to Islamofascists: Financial institutions identified as targets of a terrorist plot in three cities opened for business Monday under stepped-up security and defiant words from people who said they won't be cowed by the extraordinary intelligence pointing to a potential attack. Police sealed off some streets in New York, put international-finance employees in Washington through extra security...

Bush Adopts The Expanded Bureaucracy Approach

George Bush announced today that he will implement the key recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, creating a new national intelligence "czar" and layering two levels of management onto existing intelligence agencies. However, Bush plans to avoid having the new position placed in the White House in order to maintain more independence for the new organization: President Bush said Monday he is asking Congress to create the position of a national intelligence director, to serve as the president's principal intelligence adviser. ... The national director of intelligence will report to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bush said. The president also revealed plans to create a national counter-terrorism center. "This new center will ... become our government's knowledge bank for known and suspected terrorists," Bush said. The reporting structure reverses that recommended by the 9/11 Commission if CNN has its information correct, which I suspect they do not. The commission's...

August 3, 2004

Pakistan Rolling Up AQ Network?

Pakistan has suddenly hit a hot streak in capturing al-Qaeda suspects, arresting two more to bring their total to four over the past month. Either their intelligence has improved or someone's singing: In the latest arrests, one of the men was apprehended at a bus stop in the Hafizabad town in Punjab province but the officials were unsure of his nationality. "He first said he was from Yemen but later changed his statement to say he was Egyptian," one of the officials who asked not to be named told Reuters. "We are still checking his nationality. He does not have a passport." In another swoop, authorities arrested a foreign al Qaeda suspect along with two Pakistanis who were traveling to the eastern city of Lahore, also in Punjab, from the nearby town of Sheikupura Monday night. The key capture, the one that made headlines last week, was Pakistan's arrest of...

August 4, 2004

Not Just A Computer Nerd

Senior security officials told AFP that the al-Qaeda computer expert captured three weeks ago played a much more important role for AQ than simply technical support, and that the data captured along with him revealed much of AQ's communications infrastructure: Naeem Noor Khan, 25, alias Abu Talha, arrested in the eastern city of Lahore on July 12, "is in the top hierarchy of Al-Qaeda's external operations wing," a security official closely associated with the latest Al-Qaeda swoop told AFP Wednesday. Khan had not only been creating websites and secret email codes for Al-Qaeda operatives to communicate with each other, he had also actively plotted terror attacks, the official said on condition of anonymity. "He was involved in planning for attacks at Heathrow airport London some time ago and was wanted by the US government," the official said, but was unable to say exactly when the Heathrow attack was planned. Capturing...

Timing Of Alert Rather Obvious -- But Not How You Think

The AP's Ron Fournier analyzes reaction to the orange alerts issued this week by the Department of Homeland Security and deconstructs the politics rather adeptly. However, Fournier and many others missed a key issue in the debate over using the so-called "old" material for a fresh alert: The politics of terrorism has Democrats tied in knots. Each time President Bush raises fears of a possible attack, the political debate shifts from his most troublesome issue to one of his strongest (the war on terrorism) while Democrats fight their impulse to question the president's motives. ... Campaign officials said Kerry would like to believe that Bush is acting in the nation's interest. Even if he didn't give Bush the benefit of the doubt, there are enormous political risks to Kerry questioning the president's motives, the officials said, because a subsequent terrorist strike would make him look politically craven and shortsighted. Criticizing...

Recent Captures Related To British Heathrow Alert In 2003?

An alert reader who wishes to remain anonymous sends over this tip regarding British security alerts in February 2003 at Heathrow. As reported in the London Guardian, British security went on high alert that month as the Islamic festival of Eid came to a close: Heathrow was last night being patrolled by 1,500 anti-terrorist police and troops after intelligence warnings identified it as a likely target for an imminent attack by al-Qaida-linked militants armed with anti-aircraft missiles. The move was sanctioned late on Monday after high level meetings at Scotland Yard headed by Assistant Commissioner David Veness, who requested immediate army back-up and support from Heathrow's neighbouring forces, Surrey and Thames Valley. The prime minister was told of the threat and rubber stamped the deployment of 450 soldiers from the Ist Battalion the Grenadier Guards and the Household Cavalry. Those warnings turned up nothing significant, and eventually Tony Blair faced...

Experts To Congress: Not So Fast On 9/11 Recommendations

With John Kerry constantly harping on the theme that George Bush hasn't yet implemented all of the recommendations in the weeks-old 9/11 Commission report, and with Bush himself promising to use executive orders to push them through quickly, one gets the impression of a broad consensus that these results are beyond question. However, at a public hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, several former national-security officers advised Congress to go slow and rethink the commission's conclusions: Former government officials told Congress on Wednesday not to rush to adopt all of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. They expressed reservations about a key recommendation creating a national director of intelligence and questioned whether focusing on issues related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks might worsen other problems that became apparent after the war in Iraq. The people urging caution aren't just Congressional staffers and low-level functionaries looking...

August 5, 2004

Al-Qaeda Takes Body Blows, Shifting Direction?

Pakistan's capture of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan continues to roll up both terrorists and their operational plans, as the AP reports this morning. Using the data recovered from Khan and Ahmed Ghailani, the UK has arrested a number of suspected Islamofascists based in part on surveillance data of Heathrow airport and other recovered data: Pakistan gave British authorities images of London's Heathrow Airport and other sites that were found on the computers of two arrested al-Qaida fugitives, intelligence officials said Thursday. ... Several news reports in Britain said that one of the suspects arrested in a sweep against militants late Tuesday, variously identified as Abu Eisa al-Hindi or Abu Musa al-Hindi, was believed to be a senior member of al-Qaida, and had been plotting an attack on Heathrow. Britain's Metropolitan Police refused to say whether al-Hindi was among those arrested, and Pakistani officials contacted by The Associated Press had no...

Gray Lady Undone By Itself, Howard Dean

Today's editorial from the New York Times sets new lows for intellectual bankruptcy and is made largely irrelevant by Howard Dean going off his meds last night. The Times castigates the Bush administration for botching security alerts in a self-contradictory morass of insinuation and innuendo. It starts out by acknowledging the warnings this week were justified by the data at hand, but quickly goes downhill from there: The administration was obviously right to warn the country that Al Qaeda had apparently studied financial institutions in three cities with the idea of a possible attack. But the delivery of the message was confusing. The color-coded threat chart doesn't serve the purpose for which it was invented, and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is hopeless as a public spokesman on this issue. The Bush administration needs to come up with a method of communication that informs the public in a calm, clear...

UN: Terrorism Overrated

CQ reader and blogger Athena pointed out a report from Reuters which demomstrates the futility of relying on the United Nations as a genuine partner in the struggle against Islamofascist terrorism. A UN investigator has submitted a report claiming that terror fears are exaggerated in order to erode human rights: A United Nations investigator has called on governments to stop whipping up exaggerated fears of terrorism among their populations, in an apparent reference to the United States and Britain. And in implicit criticism of Russia and China, Greek Lawyer Kalliopi K. Koufa said in a report that the world community should be more alert to a growing trend to label as terrorists groups seeking to exercise the right of self-determination. Fear of terrorism "out of proportion to its actual risk and generated by states themselves or other actors" can be exploited to make people accept "counter-terrorism measures that unduly curtail...

August 6, 2004

Moqtada al-Sadr, The John Kerry Of Iraq

Radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr executed a flip-flop on his part-time insurgency again, this time within 24 hours, which has to be a record of some sort. The New York Times reports that less than a day after initiating armed insurrection -- again -- and getting the worst of the battle -- again -- Sadr appealed for a truce with Iraqi and American security forces ... again: The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for a national uprising against American and allied troops Thursday morning, then backed off near midnight after a day of fighting between his guerrillas and American and Iraqi forces. ... One American marine and several insurgents were killed in Najaf, where marines fought alongside Iraqi policemen and National Guard troops. At least a dozen more soldiers and dozens of insurgents were wounded in both Baghdad and Najaf, though exact casualty counts were unavailable late Thursday night....

Naval Intelligence On The Market?

The BBC reports this morning that an al-Qaeda suspect arrested by the British last year but released until this week carried detailed plans of US Navy battle group formations, allowing him to advise other terrorists how to evade American pickets at sea: Lawyers trying to extradite a British man to the US on terrorism charges have told a court he was found in possession of US naval intelligence. ... Details of US battleship formations in the Gulf had also been found during an earlier arrest, the court heard. British police had arrested Mr Ahmad, but released him without charge, in December 2003. Bow Street Magistrates' Court was told documents containing details of battleship formations and vulnerabilities were found near him during that arrest. Not only could that information aid AQ operations avoid detection by the American Navy, but also could have helped develop plans to attack the ships themselves. Many...

No Honor Amongst Terrorists

Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan's friends and colleagues at al-Qaeda headquarters will be irate when they read that Khan decided to assist infidels in a sting operation after he was captured, leading to the string of AQ arrests worldwide: A high alert for U.S. financial institutions against a possible al Qaeda attack was also prompted by information gathered from the Pakistani computer engineer, according to intelligence and government sources. "After his capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," the source said. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz," he added. So much for honor amongst thieves! Computer hackers may be a different breed anyway, and AQ leadership may well decide to avoid using them in the future after getting burned in such a trite fashion. It...

August 8, 2004

AQ Networks Rolling Up

Al-Qaeda leadership and their networks continue to roll up into hostile hands this summer, as now the United Arab Emirates announce the capture of a "senior" AQ leader and his extradition to Pakistan: A senior Pakistani al-Qaida operative who used to run one of the terror group's training camps in Afghanistan has been arrested in the United Arab Emirates and handed over to Pakistani officials, the information minister said Sunday. Qari Saifullah Akhtar is in Pakistani custody, the latest in a string of major breakthroughs against the al-Qaida network, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press. Akhtar ran an al-Qaida training camp in Rishkhor, Afghanistan, where terrorists learned kidnapping and assassination techniques, as well as traditional combat skills used by Taliban fighters in their war to win control of the country before they were ousted in late 2001. When President Bush announced that the US would go to...

Bush Foreign Policy, Patience Pays Off In Saudi Arabia

The Bush administration's efforts in the war on terror gets a boost from an unlikely source today -- the Los Angeles Times. Albeit a silent endorsement, the Times' analysis of Saudi Arabia's evolution from tacit supporter of terror to a key ally of the war on al-Qaeda demonstrates that the Bush strategy of patience and diplomatic pressure have paid off with the Saudis, and has resulted in vital cooperation between intelligence services: After years of giving tacit support and back-channel financing to Islamic extremists, the Saudi government has joined forces with the United States in an intensive battle against Al Qaeda in the desert kingdom. For the last year, U.S. intelligence analysts have been sitting side by side with their Saudi counterparts at a secret location here in the capital, sharing raw intelligence and plotting counterattacks, said a former U.S. ambassador to the country, Robert Jordan, and a senior Saudi...

August 9, 2004

Najaf Governor Gives Green Light To Military Action

Moqtada al-Sadr lost important political cover overnight when the governor of Najaf agreed to allow joint Iraqi-American forces to begin military operations to eject Sadr from the Imam Ali mosque, one of the holiest Shi'a shrines and a site that the Americans had carefully avoided attacking: The governor of Najaf cleared the way Monday for military operations around the Iman Ali shrine, the most holy place in Shiite Islam, where fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are holed up, said a commander for the U.S.-led multinational forces. ... At a briefing Monday afternoon, a senior multinational forces commander said the governor of Najaf had approved the operations in coordination with the Iraqi National Guard. The commander estimated that more than 360 of al-Sadr's fighters -- believed to number around 2,000 -- have been killed since the governor of Najaf requested assistance last week from the multinational forces to put...

August 11, 2004

Day Of Reckoning For Sadr?

Reuters reports that the US Marines are poised to deliver a final resolution to part-time insurrectionist Moqtada al-Sadr: U.S. marines said on Wednesday they were preparing a final assault on Iraqi Shi'ite militia in the holy city of Najaf, after a radical cleric ordered his men to keep fighting even if he was killed. ... "Iraqi and U.S. forces are making final preparations as we get ready to finish this fight that the Moqtada militia started," Colonel Anthony Haslam, commanding officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Najaf, said in a statement. Haslam gave few details, but his threats and Sadr's defiance have raised the stakes in a battle that is the toughest test yet for Allawi's six-week-old government. Most of Sadr's men and the young cleric himself are holed up around Najaf's ancient Shi'ite cemetery or the adjoining Imam Ali Shrine. Storming such holy symbols could touch off...

Surveillance Tapes Set Off New Worries: NYT

The New York Times reports today that the FBI has held a Pakistani and his videotapes, narrated in Arabic, of some unusual sightseeing activities -- building and transit systems in the South and a dam in Texas: The federal authorities, on heightened alert over the prospect of another Al Qaeda attack, are conducting a terrorism investigation into an illegal immigrant from Pakistan found with videotapes of downtown buildings and transit systems in four Southern states and of a dam in Texas, officials said on Tuesday. Officials acknowledged that they had no direct evidence linking the suspect, a former Queens resident named Kamran Shaikh, to terrorism. But they said they remained keenly interested in determining why he made the extensive videos, which included narratives in Arabic. "These were not your normal tourist videos," said a senior law enforcement official in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity...

August 13, 2004

Sadr Injured As Mahdis Reel From Blow

The BBC reports that radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has been injured "in three places" in the heavy fighting in Najaf, and the joint Iraqi-American offensive against the Mahdi militia has resulted in stunning losses for the part-time rebel: The radical Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr has been wounded in fighting in the holy city of Najaf, according to his spokesmen. There are no details as yet about Mr Sadr's condition, though he was said to have been wounded "in three places". ... Mr Sadr is said to be holed up in the sacred compound housing the shrine with his followers. He has urged supporters to keep up the fight even if he is killed or arrested. His aides had tears in their eyes as they spoke of his injuries. It's not their only reason to cry; according to the BBC, the battle has them almost at the point of...

August 14, 2004

Auf Wiedersehen, Gerhardt

The Financial Times in London reports that the US plans on substantial reductions in its military deployments in Europe as part of a global repositioning of American military forces. 70,000 troops -- the bulk of the shift -- will leave Germany, in a move that will no doubt heavily impact the German economy just in time for Gerhardt Schroeder's re-election: The US is expected to announce on Monday that it is pulling 70,000 troops out of Europe and Asia in the largest restructuring of its global military presence since the second world war. People briefed on the plan say two-thirds of the reductions will come in Europe, most of them military personnel stationed in Germany who will be sent back to US bases. An additional 100,000 support staff and military families worldwide will be part of the realignment. Some of the forces being moved are coming out of Korea, but...

August 19, 2004

Bye-Bye-atollah

Moqtada al-Sadr, trying to burnish his credentials as an American-style politician, flip-flopped yet again on his burning desire to foment revolution by giving into his burning desire to remain alive and out of the hands of the Iraqi government tonight. The AP reports that Sadr has ordered his Mahdi militia to abandon the Imam Ali mosque: Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his fighters Thursday to hand control of a revered Najaf shrine to top Shiite religious authorities, hours after U.S. forces bombed militant positions and Iraq's prime minister made a "final call" for the cleric's militia to surrender. ... In a speech, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi had warned the radical cleric to disarm his forces and withdraw from the shrine after his government threatened to send a massive Iraqi force to root them out. Defying that ultimatum, al-Sadr sent a telephone text message vowing to seek "martyrdom or victory,"...

August 23, 2004

New Intelligence Reorganization Proposal Not Much Better

Dan Eggen reports in today's Washington Post that Republican Senators have developed a new reorganization plan for American intelligence to compete with that drawn up by the 9/11 Commission. Senator Pat Roberts surprised Democrats and the White House alike by announcing this new proposal on Face The Nation yesterday and almost immediately, both reacted negatively towards it: The Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee unveiled a radical proposal yesterday to remove most of the nation's major intelligence-gathering operations from the CIA and Pentagon and place them directly under the control of a new national intelligence director. The plan, announced by Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and endorsed by eight other committee Republicans, is more extensive than the reorganization proposed last month by the Sept. 11, 2001, commission and would result in the virtual dismantling of the CIA. It also would severely curb the power and influence of the Defense Department,...

August 25, 2004

Too Many Coincidences

Just as on 9/11, the juxtaposition of multiple airline crashes generates a heavy suspicion of terrorism -- only this time the target is Russia and not the US: Two Russian passenger jets on domestic flights crashed nearly simultaneously after departing from the same terminal in Moscow on Tuesday night, officials said. At least 88 people were presumed dead. While precise details surrounding the crashes were unclear, the Russian news service Interfax, citing an anonymous official source, reported that minutes after the first plane went down, the second jet issued a distress signal indicating it had been hijacked. Then it, too, disappeared from radar. As airport security was tightened throughout Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin, who has been vacationing and working in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, ordered the F.S.B., one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B., to begin immediate investigations into the crashes, a spokesman for the president...

Sistani Returns To Iraq While Allawi Fiddles

The Allawi government continues to let the situation in Najaf drag on without taking action to eject the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr from the Imam Ali shrine, despite issuing several ultimata over the past few days. In the meantime, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has returned from his medical treatment in London and wants to lead a march into Najaf to quell the crisis: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani arrived Wednesday in Basra, Iraq, from London, where he had been receiving medical treatment, according to a spokesman for al-Sistani in Baghdad. Before he arrived, al-Sistani -- one of Iraq's most influential Shia leaders -- asked all Iraqis to "march to Najaf in order to rescue the city," according to his spokesman in his Damascus, Syria, office. ... On Tuesday, Iraq's interim government again gave the militiamen an ultimatum to leave the mosque. Shortly afterward, an al-Sadr aide said the cleric was ready...

August 27, 2004

Score One For Sistani

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani scored a huge political victory and put the Allawi government further in his debt today by accomplishing what they could not do alone -- force rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army to both abandon the Imam Ali shrine and disarm, according to this Reuters report: Shi'ite fighters left the holiest shrine in the Iraqi city of Najaf Friday and began turning in their weapons, after tens of thousands of pilgrims celebrated a peace agreement that ended a bloody rebellion. Religious authorities locked the doors of the Imam Ali mosque after the Mehdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr left. The fighters had defied U.S. military firepower and the interim Iraqi government for three weeks. ... Militants tossed AK-47 assault rifles and mortar launchers into wooden carts being pushed around near the shrine. Mosque loudspeaker announcements in Sadr's name gave the order. Al Arabiya...

NYT: Alleged Israeli Spy No Influence On American Policy

When CBS broke the news earlier this evening that the FBI had investigated a high-ranking assistant in the Defense Department on suspicion of espionage on behalf of Israel, the immediate suspicion was that Israel may have unduly influenced American security policy in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Later revelations that the suspect worked as a staffer with contacts to Paul Wolfowitz and other so-called neocons seemed to reinforce that notion. However, the New York Times now reports that the staffer was a desk officer working in Douglas Feith's office and had no influence on policy development: The espionage investigation has focused on an official who works in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, officials who have been briefed about the investigation said. The F.B.I. has gathered evidence that the official passed classified policy documents to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a...

August 28, 2004

This Makes Me Feel Better About My Trip

The AP reports that two men have been arrested in New York City on the eve of the Republican National Convention, for plotting explosive attacks on the subway system: A U.S. citizen and a Pakistani national were arrested in an alleged plot to bomb a subway station in midtown Manhattan and possibly other locations around the city, police said Saturday. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the men were not thought to be connected to al-Qaida or any other international terrorist organization, although he said they expressed hatred for America. The arrests come two days before the start of the Republican National Convention, which is drawing tens of thousands of visitors into the city. Though there was no clear tie to the convention, authorities moved to arrest the two men before it began, two law-enforcement sources told The Associated Press. The police report that the men were apprehended before getting their...

September 1, 2004

Deep Cover Iraqi Spy Arrested

Federal agents have arrested a Des Plaines, Illinois man as a deep-cover Iraqi spy living undercover in the US for eleven years, awaiting orders from his IIS handler that apparently never came: After the arrest of Sami Khoshaba Latchin, 57, prosecutors said he became a naturalized citizen after making false statements to immigration officials in 1999 and planned to "lay low" until contacted by his Iraqi handler. Latchin entered a not guilty plea at a hearing Monday. According to a federal indictment returned July 21 and unsealed Monday, Latchin worked for the Iraqi Intelligence Service, known as the Mukhabbarat, the foreign intelligence arm of the Iraqi government. The indictment said that in addition to failing to disclose his ties to Iraqi intelligence, Latchin, a Baath party member, lied about overseas trips he made in 1994, 1996 and 1997. Latchin, who was born in Dohuk, Iraq, and has lived in the...

September 2, 2004

The Symptoms Of Unseriousness

The BBC brings us an update on the lack of seriousness shown about worldwide terrorism in Bali, as a convicted conspirator in the bombing that killed hundreds in a nightclub has been allowed out for a latte break: Convicted Bali bomber Ali Imron has been allowed on an outing to a Starbucks coffee shop in Jakarta. Reporters spotted him laughing and joking with Brigadier-General Gorries Mere, one of the officers investigating the Bali attacks. A police spokesman said the excursion was part of an ongoing effort to investigate cases of terrorism. Did al-Qaeda decide to target baristas in Bali? Does he have some insight into what coffee blend Osama finds irresistable, in order to set up a trap for him at the game tables? Stories like this make Michael Dukakis' prison-release policies look like a Georgia chain gang by comparison. The man has been sentenced to life in prison, which...

September 4, 2004

Osama bin Tracked?

Matthew Pennington at the AP reports that a State Department counterterrorism official says that the US is closer than ever to catching Osama bin Laden and his top deputies: "If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught," Joseph Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, told private Geo television network. Asked if concrete progress had been made during the last two months when Pakistan has arrested dozens of terror suspects including some key al-Qaida operatives Black said, "Yes, I would say this." Black, who briefed a group of Pakistani journalists after talks with officials here Friday, said he could not predict exactly when bin Laden and other top al-Qaida fugitives would be nabbed. "What I tell people, I would be surprised but not necessarily shocked if we wake up tomorrow and he's been caught...

A Happy Anniversary?

Some British Muslims apparently will mark the upcoming third anniversary of 9/11 in their own unique way -- by holding a convention celebrating the murder of 3,000 "infidels", according to this MEMRI report: Al-Muhajiroun leader Omar Bakri, a Syrian residing in London, told the paper by phone that the convention would feature Al-Qa'ida "surprises," with the screening of a never-before-shown video. He said that the convention will focus on "the anniversary of the division of the world into two great camps the camp of faith and the camp of unbelief," and would take place September 11, 2004 from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Bakri added: "On this day, we will talk about the ramifications of these [9/11] operations for Afghanistan and Iraq We want the world to remember this operation that lifted the head of the [Muslim] nation." Bakri called 9/11 "a cry of Jihad against unbelief and...

September 5, 2004

King Of Clubs Joins Saddam

Reuters reports that Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's #2 on the military side and long suspected of leading the terrorist insurgency in Iraq, has been captured by Iraqi forces in Tikrit: The most-wanted Saddam Hussein aide in Iraq, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was captured in the town of Tikrit on Sunday, Iraq's defense ministry said. The ministry said Ibrahim was captured by members of Iraq's national guard backed by U.S. forces. Tikrit was Saddam's hometown and one of the powerbases of his regime. ... The U.S. military has said Ibrahim was directly involved in organizing and funding attacks on U.S. forces since the fall of Saddam. There was a $10 million bounty on his head, and in a deck of cards issued to U.S. troops to help them identify fugitives, Ibrahim was the King of Clubs. ... Ibrahim was Saddam's number two in the Revolutionary Command Council, and held a senior post...

September 6, 2004

Understanding Slowly Dawns

For years, the US has been explaining that the threat posed by Islamofascist terror was not limited to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, nor bounded by Afghanistan's borders. Our enemy has broad support, fights on many fronts, and has a pan-Islamic goal of eliminating Western civilization and its influence, starting in Southwest Asia but certainly not stopping there. And, we have insisted, one of the main fronts of this new world war has been Israel. This last lesson has taken the longest to sink in, given the Left's infatuation with the Palestinian cause. They march and holler on behalf of the Palestinians who suffer under occupation, without ever explaining the context of two major wars being launched against Israel through their territory preceding that occupation. And the Left continues to laud Yasser Arafat as a statesman, despite his long track record of terrorism, including the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich...

September 7, 2004

Are We Encouraging Chechen Terrorists?

Vladimir Putin, obviously angry from the massacre in Beslan that left hundreds of children dead at the hands of militant Islamists, lashed out at both the European Union and at the US for refusing to take the Chechen insurgents seriously as terrorists rather than freedom fighters. Regarding American policy, Putin charged that the US encourages the ongoing rebellion by maintaining diplomatic ties to the insurgents: Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that mid-level officials in the U.S. government were undermining his country's war on terrorism by supporting Chechen separatists, whom he compared to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. ... But Putin said each time Russia complained to the Bush administration about meetings held between U.S. officials and Chechen separatist representatives, the U.S. response has been "we'll get back to you" or "we reserve the right to talk with anyone we want." Putin blamed what he called a "Cold War...

The Silence Of The Lions As The Lambs Weep

One of the most striking actions of the past few days has been the almost-total silence of the American media on the horrific massacre in Beslan, where over 350 people died, mostly children. Mainstream news media outlets have covered this story only in the most superficial manner; they gave much higher prominence, for instance, to the hurricanes in Florida, which killed 17 and did billions of dollars in damage. The biggest outlets that arguably could commit the most resources to the story have instead glossed over the atrocities committed by the Islamist terrorists, preferring to present the nuances of Russian politics rather than a true picture of the animalistic nature of the Beslan mass murderers. For instance, in today's coverage -- mere days after the slaughter of the children in Beslan -- the New York Times prefers to review the anger of the victims' families and its potential political impact...

September 8, 2004

Guardian Rants Incoherently On Terror

Talk about missing all the important lessons! The Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor continues the benighted direction of the London Guardian with this incoherent, self-contradictory rant about how the West is losing the terror war because we aren't paying attention to poverty and illiteracy. And guess who the biggest obstacle to peace is, according to Norton-Taylor: It is hard not to conclude that one of the greatest obstacles to the kind of better world Blair says he wants - one with less cause for terrorism, even if terrorists will always be around - is the Bush administration, and notably the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They have consistently dismissed British interests and embarrassed a prime minister who has attached himself so closely to the president with such little reward. ... We have just witnessed the latest manifestation of the so-called war on terror in the Caucasus. Further east, across the...

September 9, 2004

Sadr Loses Momentum, Cash After Najaf

Part-time rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the 21st century reincarnation of Enver Pasha in his military skills, has seen his position erode considerably since his ejection from Najaf and the Imam Ali shrine. The AP's Hamza Hendawi reports that Sadr's once-rabid militia has lost its zeal and the loss of senior members undermines their ability to rebuild: The erosion of some of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's status showed recently when his supporters gathered outside his office here. They chanted a prayer for their leader but showed none of the zeal that marked similar rituals just weeks ago. ... [T]he mood among al-Sadr's followers has become somber. Gone is the swagger of the men loathed and feared by many people here for bringing death and destruction to one of Islam's holiest cities. ... Some al-Sadr aides believe joining the mainstream would transform a charismatic movement into just another political party and cost...

Islamists Attempt To Throw More Elections

Islamic terrorists have apparently attacked the Australian embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia this morning, killing eight people and again injecting themselves into two election cycles: At least eight people have been killed and about 100 injured in a massive blast outside the Australian embassy in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. Jakarta's police chief said a suicide car bomb may have caused the blast, and linked it to bomb expert Azahari Husin. ... Police chief General Da'i Bachtiar said police believed the explosion was caused by a car bomb, similar to those used to attack the Marriott Hotel last year and the Bali nightclubs in 2002. Mr Bachtiar said it bore the hallmark of militant Islamic group Jemaah Islamiah (JI), which is widely blamed for both bombings. The BBC's report notes that not only does this bombing attack one of America's staunch allies in the war on terror but also comes on the eve...

September 11, 2004

Remembering 9/11

Each generation shares a "Where were you then" moment, an event so awful that its memory sears itself into the collective psyche and the circumstances surrounding one's first awareness of it can be instantly recalled. For my grandparents, that event was Pearl Harbor, and for my parents it was the assassination of John Kennedy. My generation had two within four years of each other -- the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the accidental destruction of the space shuttle Challenger. And yet none of these really quite compares to the impact that 9/11 had on Americans. Perhaps only Pearl Harbor is analogous, but still not quite the same. For the first time in almost 200 years, Americans had suffered massive casualties in an attack on our homeland, something we thought we could defend with our massive Navy and Air Force. But it wasn't just the attack or the deaths; it...

NoKo "Anniversary" Mushroom Cloud Spotted By China

Two days ago, spotters in Beijing reported a large mushroom cloud in an area of North Korea where the Kim Jong-Il regime stations missiles, the Associated Press reports: A large explosion rocked the northern part of North Korea, sending a huge mushroom cloud into the air on an important anniversary of the communist regime, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Sunday. Citing an unidentified source in Beijing, Yonhap said the explosion happened on Thursday in Yanggang province near the border with China. The damage and crater left by the explosion in Kim Hyong Jik county was big enough to be noticed by a satellite, the source said. "We understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 2.2 miles to 2.5 miles in diameter was monitored during the explosion," Yonhap quoted an unidentified diplomatic source in Seoul as saying. The timing of the explosion would indicate that it was no accident. The regime...

September 12, 2004

Russia Moves Towards US After Terrorist Attacks

Russia, reeling from a flurry of terrorist attacks that have left hundreds dead, signalled today that it intends to pursue closer ties to the US rather than Europe based on anti-terrorism priorities, according to Reuters: Russia will revamp its security forces and seek international cooperation to hunt militants in the wake of a school siege which killed more than 300 people nine days ago, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Sunday. ... He added that the United States was best placed to understand Russia's situation because it had also been the target of major attacks, and he said he had discussed the issue with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld twice this week. "In this sense it seems easier to find grounds for an understanding with the United States than with some European states," Ivanov said. France and the Netherlands angered Russia by asking for an explanation of what had happened at the...

September 13, 2004

Putin Moves To Consolidate Power In Russia

In a move that has been widely anticipated, Russian President Vladimir Putin made sweeping changes to the Russian electoral system, citing the massacre in Beslan to excuse the emergency action: The Kremlin leader, speaking in the wake of the hostage crisis in Beslan, told top officials he wanted a new election law to limit the number of political parties and to have full control over nominating regional leaders. ... The president later issued a decree giving the government two weeks to draft proposals to deal with emergencies and a month to prepare "appropriate measures on foreseeing and preventing terrorism in any form." In acting to limit the number of political parties and to force all seats in the Duma to be elected directly from their lists, Putin hopes to contain any radical elements from blocking his legislative programs and causing any disruption in his executive power. It also will have...

US Finally Pushes IAEA To The UN On Iranian Nukes

After two years of allowing the EU-3 to vacillate on Iranian defiance of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US has decided to push the Internation Atomic Energy Agency to take Iranian violations to the UN Security Council, where serious economic and military sanctions could result: Buoyed by growing European support, the United States lobbied the U.N. atomic watchdog agency Monday to send Iran before the U.N. Security Council for refusing to freeze work that can produce nuclear weapons. A European diplomat said Washington had revised a resolution originally drafted by France, Germany and Britain, adding an Oct. 31 deadline and toughening language meant to force Iran to dispel all suspicions it is trying to make nuclear arms in violation of treaty commitments. The draft, summarized by the diplomat for The Associated Press, demands "complete, immediate and unrestricted access" to all sites and information requested by the International Atomic Energy Agency...

September 14, 2004

IAEA Dithers

After the US finally started talking tough about Iran's nuclear research and development and the EU stiffened its own backbone this past week, the focus shifted to the International Atomic Energy Agency for completion of its investigation and inspection of Iranian nuclear efforts. The West seems to agree in principle to a deadline of October 31 for Iranian compliance with its non-proliferation responsibilities. The IAEA, on the other hand, argues that deadlines are meaningless altogether, revealing the uselessness of the agency and its head, Mohammed ElBaradei, in combating proliferation and its connections to terrorism: The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Tuesday that he cannot guarantee his probe of Iran's suspect nuclear activities will be complete by November, the deadline sought by the United States and its European allies. Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, also repeated that his investigation has not definitely established...

Die Welt: Syria Used Chemical Weapons In Darfur

Channel News Asia reports that tomorrow's edition of the German paper Die Welt will publish allegations that Syria used chemical weapons in Darfur: Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people. The German daily Die Welt newspaper, in an advance release of its Wednesday edition, citing unnamed western security sources, said that injuries apparently caused by chemical arms were found on the bodies of the victims. ... Die Welt said the sources had indicated that the weapons tests were undertaken following a military exercise between Syria and Sudan. Syrian officers were reported to have met in May with Sudanese military leaders in a Khartoum suburb to discuss the possibility of improving cooperation between their armies. According to Die Welt, the Syrians had suggested close cooperation on developing chemical weapons, and it was proposed that the arms be tested on...

September 17, 2004

Saddam-AQ Link Through UNSCAM?

Claudia Rosett, who has dedicated the past year of her life to the UN Oil-For-Food scandal, has uncovered some interesting financial connections between Saddam Hussein and known al-Qaeda associates through Saddam's business contracts. Rosett and George Russell report for Fox News that documents uncovered by the Iraq war and the UNSCAM investigations show deliberate overpayments to companies run by AQ operatives: Now, buried in some of the United Nations own confidential documents, clues can be seen that underscore the possibility of just such a Saddam-Al Qaeda link clues leading to a locked door in this Swiss lakeside resort. Next to that door, a festive sign spells out in gold letters under a green flag that this is the office of MIGA, the Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber. Registered here 20 years ago as a society to promote business between the Gulf States and Asia, Europe and Africa, MIGA...

Duelfer Report: Saddam Intended To Reconstitute WMD Programs

The New York Times reports today on the final summation of American arms inspector Charles Duelfer, who concludes that Saddam Hussein had no significant stocks of WMD but had every intention of producing them as soon as UN sanctions were weakened or removed: A new report on Iraq's illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein's government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said. The most specific evidence of an illicit weapons program, the officials said, has been uncovered in clandestine labs operated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which could have produced small quantities of lethal chemical and biological agents, though probably for use...

At The Front: No Doom And Gloom Here

Longtime CQ reader Bob Stakel forwards me a message from his neice's husband, a Major in the Marine Corps who cannot understand why the American media keeps painting such a gloomy picture of their work. I've copied it, unedited, for CQ readers: A thought from Iraq Doom & Gloom about Iraqs future.I dont see it from where Im sitting. [For those of you who havent gotten my Thoughts before, Im a Major in the USMC on the Multi-National Corps staff in Baghdad. The analysts and pundits who dont see what I see on a daily basis, in my opinion, have very little credibility to talk about the situation especially if they have yet to set foot in Iraq. Everything Americans believe about Iraq is simply perception filtered through ones latent prejudices until you are face-to-face with reality. If you havent seen, or dont remember, the John Wayne movie,...

September 18, 2004

France Behind Forged Niger Documentation

The Italian spy who passed on forged documents to American and British intelligence services has confirmed that he did so on orders and under the pay of France, the London Telegraph reports in tomorrow's edition: The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France. ... His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq. Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France...

September 19, 2004

Egypt Legitimizes Hamas

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal paid a surprise visit to Egypt and was received by the Egyptian chief of intelligence today, the AP reports: Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, who's kept a low profile since last month's twin suicide bombing in southern Israel, made a surprise visit to Egypt on Sunday, holding talks with Egypt's intelligence chief about an anticipated Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Mashaal has remained largely out of sight since Israel threatened to target Palestinian militant leaders after the Aug. 31 suicide bombings in Beersheba, Israel, that killed 16 Israelis. Hamas claimed responsibility on Sept. 2, the last day Mashaal appeared in public. Egypt has been trying without success for more than a year to arrange a dialogue among Palestinian factions to explore calling a ceasefire in attacks against Israel alongside the planned Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. But Mohammed Nazal, a Syria-based Hamas official accompanying Mashaal, denied the...

Kerry Campaign Attempts To Destabilize Australian Partnership

In a move that should shock both American and Australian voters, John Kerry's campaign has sent Kerry's sister Diana down under to tell Australians that their American alliance makes them less safe: John Kerry's campaign has warned Australians that the Howard Government's support for the US in Iraq has made them a bigger target for international terrorists. Diana Kerry, younger sister of the Democrat presidential candidate, told The Weekend Australian that the Bali bombing and the recent attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta clearly showed the danger to Australians had increased. "Australia has kept faith with the US and we are endangering the Australians now by this wanton disregard for international law and multilateral channels," she said, referring to the invasion of Iraq. Asked if she believed the terrorist threat to Australians was now greater because of the support for Republican George W. Bush, Ms Kerry said: "The most...

September 20, 2004

Howard Endorses Pre-Emption Despite Kerry's Meddling

Australian Prime Minister John Howard answered the Kerry campaign's meddling in their election by proclaiming a policy of pre-emption, promising overseas strikes on terrorist bases before threats turn into attacks on Australians at home or abroad: Prime Minister John Howard unveiled a plan for "flying squads" of police to stop terrorist attacks in the region, stressing he would not hesitate to order a pre-emptive strike overseas if needed to protect Australia. The idea was condemned as "clumsy foreign policy" by opposition leader Mark Latham, who said it would make Australia less safe, rather than more safe. Howard sounded much like his American ally, George Bush, in declaring that "We will not wait for a terrorist threat to eventuate before we take action." He promised close cooperation with Australia's neighbors but made clear that Australia determines her own national-security policy. He proposed the equivalent of $70 million US to establish "flying...

September 21, 2004

Kerry's New Iraq Plan The Same As Bush's: WaPo

John Kerry got a lot of press yesterday for a new policy speech on Iraq which supposedly clarified his myriad positions on the war. Robin Wright reports that the speech was part of a new Democratic effort to push Iraq to the forefront of Kerry's campaign, but as Wright points out, the only thing different between Kerry's plan and Bush's operational strategy already in place is Kerry's faith in those elusive "foreign leaders": John F. Kerry's four-point plan for Iraq proposes ambitious solutions to accelerate the military transition, refocus reconstruction and ensure that democracy takes root, all while lessening the burden on the United States by bringing in greater foreign aid and support. ... The premise in all four points is that Kerry will be able to mobilize an international community that has been alienated by President Bush's strategy of preemptive strikes and by U.S. defiance of close allies and...

September 22, 2004

Spiritual Leader Of Zarqawi's Group Killed

The AP reports that American airstrikes in Baghdad killed Sheik Abu Anas al-Shami, described as the spiritual leader of the terrorist group headed by Abu Masab al-Zarqawi: The spiritual leader of a major militant group in Iraq, Tawhid and Jihad, has been killed in a U.S. airstrike and his Jordanian family is preparing a wake, a newspaper and Islamic clerics said Wednesday. The spiritual leader of a major militant group in Iraq (news - web sites), Tawhid and Jihad, has been killed in a U.S. airstrike and his Jordanian family is preparing a wake, a newspaper and Islamic clerics said Wednesday. Either the US and Iraqi forces got incredibly lucky and just happened to hit the car in which an insurgent leader traveled, or their intelligence operations are improving dramatically. I suspect it's the latter and not the former. As the US continues to build up native Iraqi security forces,...

More Messages From The Front, And A Call For More

One of the more loyal readers of CQ, LoveMyMarine, sends me two e-mails today regarding her husband, who is currently deployed to Iraq. The first e-mail is her response to my post on the death of Sheik al-Sharmi, the "spiritual" leader of Zarqawi's murderous thugs, and the second is a message from her husband. Both messages underscore the frustration our fighting men and women feel at the relentlessly negative coverage of our efforts in Iraq. I'm redacting names and select passages to keep identifications confidential. Thank you for today's post. I get so frustrated when I hear the continual slamming of the Intel community in the press; it's a popular pasttime, and it's not like they can fight back to defend themselves. I would have to say, yes, not only is the intel getting better, but so is the focus. As you know, Gen Natonski has taken over at the...

The Ayatollah Is Not Pleased

The road to Iraqi elections may or may not have hit a snag this evening, as the New York Times reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has expressed deep reservations about the new Iraqi electoral system but has given no specific demands or requests for changes: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the nation's most powerful Shiite leader, is growing increasingly concerned that nationwide elections could be delayed, his aides said, and has even threatened to withdraw his support for the elections unless changes are made to increase the representation of Shiites, according to one Iraqi source close to him. ... According to people with knowledge of the talks, Ayatollah Sistani is concerned that the nascent democratic process here is falling under the control of a handful of the largest political parties, which cooperated with the American occupation and are comprised largely of exiles. In particular, these sources say, Ayatollah Sistani...

September 23, 2004

Carter Advocates Cut And Run

For those of us who remember the Jimmy Carter presidency, this story will come as no shock; it merely reminds us where we've heard the (latest) John Kerry war policies before. Speaking at a town-hall meeting on Tuesday and reinforcing his remarks on Wednesday, Carter called for an early withdrawal of American troops in Iraq in order to reduce the insurgency: Former President Carter said Tuesday that violence in Iraq could be greatly reduced if the U.S. government set a date to withdraw its troops. "The main thing that sustains violence there is the apparent long term presence of U.S. troops," he said. ... Carter said he would like to see troops withdraw as early as next year if Iraqis show they can establish self-government. Once again, we have Jimmy Carter advocating American withdrawal in the face of the enemy. During his administration, that happened in both our Cold War...

Allawi: Iraq Is Ready For Democracy

Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi spoke to a joint session of Congress this morning, telling the gathered representatives that Iraq could hold free elections in 15 of 18 provinces and thanking them for freeing Iraq from the grip of a murderous thug: Offering a simple, ``Thank you America,'' Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi declared Thursday that his country is moving successfully past the war that ousted Saddam Hussein and vowed that elections will take place next year as scheduled. ``Elections will occur in Iraq on time in January because Iraqis want elections on time,'' Allawi told a joint meeting of Congress, an appearance that President Bush's advisers hoped would ease American voters' doubts about the troubled campaign in Iraq. Allawi told lawmakers that the Iraqi insurgency intended on disrupting elections, but that they were small in number and their efforts had not and would not resonate with the...

Bush Gets NATO To Train Iraqis In Baghdad

In a coup that will act to deaden John Kerry's latest Iraq broadsides, like calling the visiting Prime Minister of Iraq a liar, George Bush won agreement from NATO to supply training for new Iraqi security forces in Baghdad: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreed Wednesday to expand the training of Iraqi security force officers at a facility outside Baghdad in preparation for planned elections in January. The compromise agreement, overcoming resistance from Germany and France, will expand NATO's training mission in Iraq from about 50 officers to as many as 300 personnel, the alliance said. The accord, announced at NATO headquarters in Brussels, was reached after weeks of debate and opposition from members who have opposed the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. ... France, Germany, Belgium and Spain have said they would not contribute personnel to the training program. Among those countries, Spain had a 1,300-member troop contingent...

September 25, 2004

Putin Talks A Good Game

Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to critics who claim that electoral changes he has forced through herald a return to totalitarian political life in the former Soviet Union. Putin replied that there is no going back to the old days: President Vladimir Putin vowed yesterday that Russia would remain on the path to democracy. "There will be no turnabout in the country's life," said Mr Putin, who has come under intense international criticism for strengthening his political control after a wave of terrorist attacks. "Russia made its choice 10 years ago for a democratic, free market, socially oriented state." Putin may say all the right things about democracy, but his actions are troubling. Russia's 89 regional governors had prevously been elected directly by the people, but under Putin's changes, now are appointed by the Kremlin. It reduces the governors from real leaders to apparatchiks for the executive, a move which...

Iraq Hid Nuclear Program Intending On Rebuilding It

In the final report from the Iraq Survey Group, a team of American weapons inspectors in Iraq concluded that Saddam Hussein had no WMD stockpiles at the time of the US invasion that led to Iraq's liberation, but that Saddam fully intended to produce them as soon as economic and military sanctions were lifted. Now an Iraqi nuclear scientist has written a book detailing exactly how Saddam protected his nuclear-weapons secrets and making clear that he had every hope of controlling the Middle East with them (hat tip: Cranial Cavity): AN IRAQI scientist-turned-author says the most significant pieces of his countrys dormant nuclear programme were buried under a lotus tree in his backyard, untouched for more than a decade before the US-led invasion in 2003. But their existence, Dr Mahdi Obeidi writes in a new book, is evidence that the international community should remain vigilant as other countries try to...

Telegraph: Syria To Send Iraqi Scientists To Teheran

Answering in part the question of the disposition of Saddam's WMD efforts, the London Telegraph reports tonight that Syria is negotiating with Iran to send Iraqi nuclear-weapons scientists to Teheran in order to keep from being the next target of the American war on terror: Syria's President Bashir al-Asad is in secret negotiations with Iran to secure a safe haven for a group of Iraqi nuclear scientists who were sent to Damascus before last year's war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. ... A group of about 12 middle-ranking Iraqi nuclear technicians and their families were transported to Syria before the collapse of Saddam's regime. The transfer was arranged under a combined operation by Saddam's now defunct Special Security Organisation and Syrian Military Security, which is headed by Arif Shawqat, the Syrian president's brother-in-law. The Iraqis, who brought with them CDs crammed with research data on Saddam's nuclear programme, were given new...

September 26, 2004

Obeidi, Part II

The New York Times publishes today a follow-up of an article on Saddam's nuclear program that appeared in The Scotsman yesterday, which I noted here. The Times allows Dr. Mahdi Obeidi to speak for himself, which he already has done in a book, The Bomb In My Garden. Dr. Obeidi's article has a little bit for everyone on all sides of the Iraqi debate: What was really going in Iraq before the American invasion last year? Iraq's nuclear weapons program was on the threshold of success before the 1991 invasion of Kuwait - there is no doubt in my mind that we could have produced dozens of nuclear weapons within a few years - but was stopped in its tracks by United Nations weapons inspectors after the Persian Gulf war and was never restarted. During the 1990's, the inspectors discovered all of the laboratories, machines and materials we had used...

September 27, 2004

Israel Points The Finger

Israel has apparently decided that a forward strategy against terrorism has to include not only the West Bank and Gaza Strip but those nations who harbor and shelter them. Sound familiar? Israel gave notice to the closest such nation this morning, warning Syria that its friends will get them more trouble in the future: Israel accused Syria on Monday of "directing terrorism" and warned it could face pre-emptive strikes against militants on its territory, but stopped short of saying it killed a Hamas leader in Damascus. Syria had accused Israel of terrorism following the Palestinian militant's death in a car bombing on Sunday, three weeks after Hamas killed 16 Israelis in bombings Israel blamed on Hamas exiles in Damascus. Targeting and killing the individual leaders of organizations that have sworn to destroy Israel and that set off bombs in pizzerias is not terrorism -- it's war, and Syria may need...

Palestinian Free Speech Commitment

The Palestinians showed their commitment to free speech and the renouncement of terror today in Gaza, where an armed gang kidnapped an Israeli CNN producer, beat his employees, and stole their equipment just a few minutes ago: Four armed Palestinians kidnapped an Israeli citizen on Monday evening in Gaza City. The Israeli, Riad Abu Ali, works as an assistant producer for the American CNN television news network. ... According to initial reports, the armed men tracked Abu Ali's car as he departed CNN's production offices in Gaza City. When he reached the city's Rimal neighborhood, the armed men stopped the car and grabbed Abu Ali. "We had no indication that this was going to happen," said CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman Monday evening in a live broadcast. "This is something I've never experienced... These men were not very communicative. They asked which was of us was Riad and that was it."...

Black-Market Plutonium Dealers Arrested In Kyrgyzstan

Another set of black-market dealers of nuclear material have been arrested in Kyrgyzstan -- this time dealing in plutonium: Authorities in Kyrgyzstan say they have arrested two men who were trying to sell a large quantity of plutonium on the black market. The men were detained last week near the capital, Bishkek, but the news was not immediately released. ... The national security service in the remote mountainous republic says it arrested two Kyrgyz citizens and confiscated 60 small containers containing plutonium-239. There is no information on exactly what quantity of plutonium was in the containers. Kyrgyz security agents tracked the men who were attempting to sell the plutonium and arrested them while posing as buyers. The origin of the material is unknown. Security officials say it is not used in Kyrgyzstan, so they think it may have come from one of the neighbouring republics or from Russia. Earlier this...

September 28, 2004

Ooops -- Our Bad

After seventeen years of on-and-off intifadah, the Palestinians have slowly come to the realization that bombing civilians in pizzarias may not be the most effective way to generate sympathy for their cause: When Abu Fahdi joined a Palestinian militant group and took up arms against Israel, he thought he was serving his people. Now he believes he did them only harm. "We achieved nothing in all this time, and we lost so much," said the baby-faced 29-year-old, who, because of his status as a fugitive, insisted on being identified by a nickname meaning "father of Fahdi." "People hate us for that and wish we were dead." Well, boo hoo, but when people shoot indiscriminately at civilian vehicles as Abu Fahdi confesses and blow up civilians on buses and in shops, they don't attract love from anyone except the Che Guevara fans of mass murder (of which there are far too...

September 29, 2004

Lasers As Terror Weapons?

Michelle Malkin points her readers to this odd Washington Times story about a pilot whose retina was burned by in-flight exposure to a laser: A pilot flying a Delta Air Lines jet was injured by a laser that illuminated the cockpit of the aircraft as it approached Salt Lake City International Airport last week, U.S. officials said. The plane's two pilots reported that the Boeing 737 had been five miles from the airport when they saw a laser beam inside the cockpit, said officials familiar with government reports of the Sept. 22 incident. The flight, which originated in Dallas, landed without further incident at about 9:30 p.m. local time. The pilot will apparently return to flight status in a week or so as the damage was not permanent, and with three flight officers on the plane, it would not have disabled the aircraft anyway. However, a spokesman for the pilot's...

Italy Sold Out -- UPDATE: Maybe?

I have tremendous respect for the Italy's solidarity with the US on the war on terror and the Iraqi front; they have bled and died with us, despite whatever John Kerry says about their character. That's why the news that they paid a million-dollar ransom to Islamofascists for the release of two hostages disappoints so bitterly: A senior Italian politician says he believes a ransom of $1m or more was paid for the release of two female Italian aid workers kidnapped in Iraq. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said no money had been paid but MP Gustavo Selva described the denial as purely "official". ... Gustavo Selva is head of the Italian parliament's foreign affairs committee and a member of the National Alliance, one of the parties in the governing coalition. "The young women's life was the most important thing," he told French radio on Wednesday. "In principle, one should...

September 30, 2004

Back To Targeting Children

Islamic terrorists in Iraq set off coordinated attacks today, killing dozens and wounding over 130 people. Children comprised the vast majority of the deaths, mostly from a three-bomb attack on a neighborhood celebration of a rebuilt sewage system: Three bombs exploded at a neighborhood celebration Thursday in western Baghdad, killing 35 children and seven adults, officials said. Hours earlier, a suicide car bomb killed a U.S. soldier and two Iraqis on the capital's outskirts. The bombs in Baghdad's al-Amel neighborhood caused the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the conflict in Iraq began 17 months ago. The children, who were still on school vacation, said they had been drawn to the scene by American soldiers handing out candy. The blasts at least two of which an Iraqi official said were suicide car bombs went off in swift succession about 1 p.m., killing 42 people...

The Chinese Rebuttal To John Kerry

John Kerry tried to put George Bush on the defensive in tonight's debate by faulting Bush's refusal to use bilateral talks to disarm North Korea. Bush insisted that the US needed global leverage, and shortly afterwards, the BBC provided Bush with some support for his position: The US and China have said they were confident North Korea will return to six-party talks to end the stand-off over Pyongyang's nuclear programmes. US State Secretary Colin Powell said after talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing the format was "what we should be concentrating on". Mr Li described the talks as the "only feasible and correct option". After excoriating Bush for not working hard enough to build a larger coalition to handle Iraq, Kerry reversed course and accused Bush of too much multilateralism on North Korea. Kerry said he'd hold concurrent multilateral and bilateral talks -- which Bush rightly pointed out would...

October 1, 2004

US, Iraq Attack Samarra Terrorists

The BBC reports that the US and Iraqi forces have moved into Samarra with brigade strength and coordinated jet and tank attacks on 2,000 fighters in the city has been a terrorist stronghold in answer to the ongoing kidnapings and attacks. They have killed 80 terrorists and retaken key positions in the city: The US military says it has killed more than 80 insurgents in a major offensive in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra. US and Iraqi forces say they took control of government and police buildings in the restive city, in a raid that began just after midnight. The US claim that 80 insurgents had died came after local doctors said at least 20 civilians had been killed. The attack targeted 2,000 fighters who the US says have made Samarra a base for attacks across the country. This is the opening salvo in a larger plan to eliminate...

Italians Pay Million-Dollar Ransom For Islam Converts?

If the rumors are true and the Italians paid $1 million for the return of the "Two Simonas", they likely will ask for a refund now that the two women have started giving interviews after their return to Italy. The two women have turned into mouthpieces for the Islamofascists who terrorized them: Italy's adoration of the "two Simonas", the women aid workers abducted in Iraq, began to sour yesterday, as the extent of their sympathy for the Iraqi fight against the allied occupation became clear. Simona Pari, Simona Torretta and Lello Rienzi talk to the press In their first big interviews given since their release in return for a reported $1 million ransom on Tuesday, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, both 29, gave their backing to insurgents opposing the allied forces. ... "If you ask me about terrorism, I'll tell you that there is terrorism and there is resistance. The...

October 2, 2004

Another Perspective On Freed Hostages

CQ (and more famously Power Line) reader Dafydd ab Hugh posted an interesting take in our comments on the two Italian hostages who were released unharmed, only to proclaim their captors' cause on their return. He makes an interesting connection between the Two Simonas and the Japanese hostages that were released earlier this year. In case anyone misses it there, I'm posting them here: My wife was born and raised in Japan, and she at first was very upset about the Japanese "hostages" in Iraq. Sachi lives here in America (she's a US citizen), and she got on some Japanese bulletin boards, trying to find out what was going on. She was startled to find that nobody on those boards seemed particularly sympathetic; and that was when she found out that the Japanese had already by and large concluded that the "kidnapping" was in fact a set-up: the Japanese who...

Does This Mean The Palestinians Passed The Global Test?

UN officials are investigating a video showing Palestinians loading suspicious, elongated objects into UN ambulances after Israel released the images and accused UN personnel of collaborating with the terrorists: UN officials said Saturday they are investigating a claim by the Israeli military that Palestinian terrorists transported a rocket in a vehicle with UN markings, but accused Israel of having made false allegations in the past. On Friday, the IDF released video footage taken from an unmanned aircraft, or drone, flying over the Jebalya refugee camp. The blurred black-and-white video showed three men walking toward the U.N. vehicle, including one who carried an elongated object. The army said the object was a rocket. Don't expect too much from this investigation, however. As the above indicates, the UN "investigator" assigned to the case has started out his probe by assuming the Israelis are a bunch of liars: "This won't be the first...

October 3, 2004

One Down

US and Iraqi forces completed their liberation of Samarra from the control of terrorist forces, having seized all government and Muslim facilities and have embarked on door-to-door searches for weapons and stragglers, the AP reports: Iraqi security forces patrolled the streets, and U.S. troops went door to door searching for weapons and fighters Sunday after the military claimed success in wresting control of Samarra from Sunni insurgents in fierce fighting. ... U.S. commanders have praised the performance of Iraqi security forces in the offensive in Samarra, 60 miles northwest of Baghdad, calling the assault a successful first step in a major push to wrest key areas from insurgents before January elections. As the gunfire subsided, Samarra residents emerged from their homes on Sunday to survey the damage and bury the dead. At the main hospital, bodies in black plastic bags were loaded on a truck to be taken to the...

Obeidi, Part III

Frequent CQ contributor Bandit points me to this Los Angeles Times article on Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, about whom I have written two posts. Obeidi ran the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program during the run-up to the first Gulf War, and afterwards managed to hide the core of his research -- and a prototype centrifuge for enriching uranium -- from UN weapons inspectors until the American invasion in early 2003. The Times gives a more personal view of Obeidi than the Scotsman article did and touches less on Saddam's desire to keep the nuclear-weapon development option open for his post-sanctions ambitions. Bob Drogin does report that Obeidi had more help than he first let on, and that more of his colleagues have evaded accounting than first thought: But it is far less clear what happened to most of the 500 other scientists U.S. officials considered to be at the core of Hussein's programs...

Moqtada Al-Sadr, The John Kerry Of Iraq

If one figure in Iraq could be said to be comical, even in a dark way, it would have to be the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Caught between the idiocy of his generalship and the poor fighting quality of his militias, he has at least three times decimated his Mahdi Army supporters by initiating hostilities against the US forces in Iraq. In Najaf, he almost completely wiped them out, only surviving thanks to a belated rescue by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who wanted to save the Imam Ali mosque there from destruction. Now, for at least the third time as well, Sadr has decided to create a political party instead of an army, only this time it looks like he means it. Not because he doesn't want to fight, but mostly because he's realized that he's incapable of it: The Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has begun laying the groundwork to...

October 4, 2004

CNS News: Documents Link Saddam To AQ, WMD, Other Terrorists

In a blockbuster article if their sources pan out, CNS News reported today that it has documents from the Saddam regime which not only document active operational links to al-Qaeda and other terrorists as late as 2000 but also contain directives to use WMD stocks to attack Americans: Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders. ... Among the organizations mentioned are those affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, two of the world's...

October 5, 2004

Another Victory For The US-Iraqi Alliance

The anti-insurgency effort appears to be gaining momentum: More than 3,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops launched an operation in the southern approaches to Baghdad on Tuesday, seizing a suspected insurgent training camp and capturing more than 160 alleged rebels, the U.S. military command said. The force also took control of a bridge across the Euphrates River believed to be a favored corridor for insurgents moving into and out of key cities, including Baghdad and the Sunni rebel stronghold of Fallujah, a command release said. The operation involved the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit as well as U.S. and Iraqi army troops and members of the Iraqi National Guard. The release did not report any casualties taken or inflicted. Other than the AP's insistence on calling the terrorist bands "rebels", the announcement gives more evidence that the Iraqi security forces have begun to have an impact on the situation on the ground....

October 6, 2004

Sadr City Gets The Message

A few days after the lightning-quick recapture and liberation of Samarra from terrorist thugs, the residents of Sadr City have suddenly launched a cease-fire negotiation with the Iraqi government. Reports conflict about whether an agreement has actually been reached, but the Iraqi PM left no doubt as to who initiated the talks: The Iraqi government and followers of Muqtada al-Sadr were nearing agreement on a formula to end weeks of clashes between U.S. forces and the radical cleric's militia in the Sadr City district of the capital, representatives of both sides said Wednesday. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told reporters there was no cease-fire between the two sides but that a committee was being formed to discuss what he termed an "initiative" by the "people of Sadr City" to end the conflict. "There is a committee being formed to discuss the details and the timing," Allawi said. "Once the committee will...

UN Prepares To Cut And Run Again

The organization whose approval John Kerry requires for global action in defense of our national security has been urged to run away yet again from Iraq due to the danger of confronting terrorists, the AP has just reported: Two organizations representing more than 60,000 United Nations staff members urged Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Wednesday to pull all U.N. staff out of Iraq because of the "unprecedented" risk to their safety and security. In a joint letter to Annan, the staff organizations cited a dramatic escalation in attacks in Iraq and said the United Nations regrettably "has become a direct target, one that is particularly prone to attacks by ruthless extremist terrorist factions." "Just one staff member is one staff member too many in Iraq," they said. "We ... appeal to your good judgment to ensure that no further staff members be sent to Iraq and that those already deployed be...

Duelfer Report: Saddam Bribed Jacques Chirac To Veto War

In yet another revelation that the French conspired to undermine US and global security, the Duelfer report from the Iraq Survey Group provides evidence that Saddam Hussein had bribed the French to not just sit out the war but to actively undermine any attempts to enforce the UNSC resolutions against Iraq: SADDAM HUSSEIN believed he could avoid the Iraq war with a bribery strategy targeting Jacques Chirac, the President of France, according to devastating documents released last night. Memos from Iraqi intelligence officials, recovered by American and British inspectors, show the dictator was told as early as May 2002 that France - having been granted oil contracts - would veto any American plans for war. The Scotsman also reports what the American media is blaring to the exclusion of everything else in the ISG final report: Iraq had no stockpiles of WMD. Most mainstream outlets are playing down the finding...

October 7, 2004

Surprise!, Saddam Said

The Los Angeles Times takes an interesting look at one aspect of the Duelfer report that paints Saddam Hussein in a different and far more Machiavellian light than first thought. Once Operation Iraqi Freedom was complete and the WMD had not been found, analysts presumed that military and scientific leadership had fooled Saddam into thinking Iraq had WMD to protect themselves from Saddam's wrath, or that Saddam had gone mad and refused to accept the weapons no longer existed. However, that's exactly the opposite of what the Iraq Survey Group found: Shortly before the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq last year, Saddam Hussein gathered his top generals together to share what came to them as astonishing news: The weapons that the United States was launching a war to remove did not exist. "There was plenty of surprise when Saddam said, 'Sorry guys, we don't have any' " weapons of...

October 8, 2004

Scotsman: Saddam Crazy Like A Fox

The Scotsman today publishes an analysis of Saddam Hussein's use of the Oil-For-Food program and the UN system to bolster his security and his ability to re-arm his military in the face of so-called "global" sanctions. Far from keeping Saddam in his box, as critics of the war claim, the Duelfer report from the Iraq Survey Group shows how the same nations from whom Kerry craves approval happily supported Saddam's regime: SADDAM Hussein believed that the United Nations system was so corrupt that it would protect his dictatorship from American aggression and allow him to complete quickly his quest for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Detail from the full Iraq Survey Group report - compiled from scores of former Iraqi officials and captured intelligence documents - shows that Saddam was intending to resume his WMD programme as soon as UN sanctions were dropped. His officials believed they could make WMD...

October 11, 2004

Sadr City Begins Disarming

While I was disconnected this weekend, Moqtada al-Sadr finally cut a disarmament deal for the insurgents of Sadr City, agreeing to trade weapons for cash and allowing the Iraqi National Guard to take over the Baghdad slum area. Disarmament started today, with Shi'ite leadership in the area encouraging their followers to abide by the terms of capitulation: "I've given up my weapons, I'm with the interim government now," said Ahmed Hashem after handing over 22 rocket-propelled grenades. "We want peace and I won't fight the Americans." The U.S.-backed government aims to retake control of rebel-held areas throughout Iraq by political or military means ahead of national assembly elections due in January. Mehdi Army fighters led by Moqtada al-Sadr began handing in weapons at the start of a five-day period in which they have agreed to disarm in the flashpoint Sadr City district. It's going slowly, and understandably so; Sadr had...

By The Company He Chooses

Last week, Spain showed up the US by refusing to allow them to participate in a march in their national holiday parade, replacing the American troops with the French. The Socialist government wanted to demonstrate that Spain was "no longer subordinated and kneeling" before Washington. Now word comes that Spain has invited more than just the French to replace the US: The Spanish government has sparked a fierce row by inviting a soldier who fought with Hitler's Wehrmacht to share the podium at the national day military parade today with a republican veteran of the Spanish Civil War. The defence minister, Jose Bono, who was once caught on microphone calling Tony Blair a "complete dickhead", said the presence of the former member of the Spanish Blue Division, recruited to fight for the Nazis in the Second World War, was part of the reconciliation process between the two opposing sides in...

October 12, 2004

US Steps Up The Pressure On The Sunni Triangle

Joint Iraqi-American operations in Ramadi resulted in raids on several mosques to flush out terrorists, signaling an end to unilateral American respect for Muslim places of worship when used as military staging grounds: Iraqi forces backed by U.S. soldiers and Marines raided mosques Tuesday in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi and detained a prominent cleric following fierce clashes that hospital officials said killed at least four people. U.S. aircraft also rocketed a mosque northwest of Ramadi on Monday after insurgents opened fire from there on U.S. Marines, the command said. The seven mosques targeted in Ramadi are suspected of supporting insurgents through a range of activities, including harboring terrorists, storing illegal weapons caches, promoting violence and encouraging insurgent recruitment, the U.S. command said. Sheikh Abdul-Aleim Saadi, the provincial leader of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, was detained at Mohammed Aref Mosque, his relatives and followers said. US command has...

Iranians Preparing To Infiltrate Iraqi Electoral Process

The Washington Times reports this morning that the Iranian mullahcracy has made plans to infiltrate Iraq during Ramadan, spreading their Qumian brand of Shi'ite radicalism and disrupting elections in the south: A top Iranian dissident living in Paris says up to 800 clerics and theology students from Iran are in the process of infiltrating cities in neighboring Iraq in time for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which begins Friday. Ayatollah Jalal Ganje'i, a prominent critic of the Iranian regime, said in an interview with The Washington Times that the influx is part of continuing efforts by Tehran's power brokers to exploit the crisis in Iraq in order to set up a sister fundamentalist Islamic republic. The religious leaders, dispatched by the Islamic Propaganda Organization, plan to use the holy month to propagate militant Islamic views, he said, with the goal of strengthening Iraqi political groups whose philosophy and aims...

October 13, 2004

Insurgency Cracking In Iraq

In a sign that the joint Iraqi-American initiative to pursue the terrorists of the Sunni Triangle has paid off, the insurgency appears to be turning in on itself. The Washington Post reports that a deadly rift has been created between foreign terrorists and the native Ba'athist remnants in Fallujah and elsewhere which promises to help bring a swift end to their campaign: Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials. Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at...

Evidence Of Saddam's Genocide Mounts From Unlikely Sources

The case for removing Saddam Hussein from power has been made clearer by a media organization known for its overwhelming bias. Fox News? NewsMax? No -- Al-Jazeera: Hoping to unearth crucial evidence that could help in convicting deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, investigators said nine trenches in a dry riverbed at the Hatra site in northern Iraq contained at least 300 bodies, and possibly thousands. Those buried included children still clutching toys [emph mine - CE]. "It is my personal opinion that this is a killing field," said Greg Kehoe, a US lawyer appointed by the White House to work with the Iraqi Special Tribunal. "Someone used this field on significant occasions over time to take bodies up there and to take people up there and execute them". "I have been doing grave sites for a long time, but I have never seen anything like this, women and children executed...

Blix Believed Pre-War WMD Assessment "Understated" Threat

The Scotsman reports today that UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told British officials that the dossier compiled by Anglo-American intelligence services actually understated Saddam's capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons (hat tip: Secure Liberty): Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix believed the Governments controversial Iraq weapons dossier actually understated the case against Saddam Hussein, according to documents released today by the Foreign Office. The papers released by the FO show that British officials at the United Nations in New York showed a draft of the dossier to Dr Blix in September 2002, two weeks before the final version was published. A note from one official, Adam Bye, said that Dr Blix had liked the section on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons as he believed that it did not exaggerate the facts. According to the note, Dr Blix said that the dossier even risked understating Iraqs ability to produce...

October 14, 2004

The Check's In The Mail

Donor nations for the rebuilding of Iraq met this week in Tokyo, after having stiffed the new interim Iraqi government last year from the $13.6 billion that they pledged for the stabilization effort. This conference led to much fewer pledges, but may have shaken loose the money promised in the first conference: The meeting of 57 donor nations and international organizations is a follow-up to a conference a year ago in Madrid, where the international community vowed to contribute tens of billions of dollars to rebuild wartorn Iraq. Iraq's delegation, headed by Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, expressed strong frustration with the slow pace of funding, arguing that many parts of the country are safe enough for projects to go forward and warning that delays could ruin Iraq's chances of a sustainable recovery. Thursday's final, closed-door session focused on how two trust funds operated by the United Nations and the...

Senator Rabbit Gets Help From A Byrd

Senator Mark Dayton continued to defend his singular decision to shut his DC office down and evacuate the Capitol, even though no specific threat exists and no other Senate offices will close. CNN reports that Dayton claims his staff would have been little more than "human shields" had he kept his offices open: Sen. Mark Dayton Wednesday defended his decision to close his Capitol Hill office until after the November 2 election, saying it would have been "immoral" to leave his staff members as "human shields" facing a possible terrorist attack while he returned home to Minnesota. "I can't predict the future. I don't know what the future holds, but I do know that the safety and lives of my staff are my responsibility," Dayton told CNN's "Wolf Blitzer Reports." "And I'm not going to leave them there exposed to risks that I'm not there to take myself." ... Elaborating...

Marines Begin Push Into Fallujah?

The AP reports that some sources indicate the US Marines have begun the long-anticipated push into Fallujah after negotiations broke down earlier in the day: U.S. Marines launched air and ground attacks Thursday on the insurgent bastion Fallujah after city representatives suspended peace talks with the government over Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's demand to hand over terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Late Thursday, residents of the city, 40 miles west of Baghdad, reported shuddering American bombardments using planes and armored vehicles in what they said was the most intensive shelling since U.S. forces began weeks of "precision strikes" aimed at al-Zarqawi's network. Earlier, attempts to reach a peaceful conclusion to the Fallujah problem broke down, as city leaders balked at turning over Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, an ironclad demand of both the US and the interim Iraqi government. The religious council that headed the Fallujah side of the negotiations claimed the...

Saddam Funded Terrorists

The Scotsman, doing yeoman work on the Duelfer report on the Iraq Survey Group investigation, reports that recently uncovered documents reveal a series of payments to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is a PLO splinter group that has spent most of the time since Oslo setting off car bombs to derail the peace processes, such as they are: The PFLP, whose history of terrorism dates back to the "black September" hijackings of 1970, was personally vetted by Saddam to receive oil vouchers worth 40 million. The deal has been uncovered by US investigators, trawling millions of pages of documents showing a network of diplomats bribed by Saddams regimes, and political parties who qualified for backhanded payments from Baghdad. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which is still working its way through 20,000 boxes of documents from Saddams Baath party discovered only recently, found a list of...

October 15, 2004

Iranians Taking Control Of Palestinian Terror

In a report that underscores the urgency of stopping Iran's nuclear-weapons program, the London Telegraph reveals that Palestinian terror groups have increasingly fallen under the influence or direct control of Teheran: Iran has taken control of many Palestinian terrorist cells from Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, giving them funds and orders to attack Israeli targets, and even rewarding successful missions with "bonuses", according to a senior Israeli security source. For many years, Iran has given money and ideological support to radical Palestinian groups, especially Hamas and Islamic Jihad, responsible for most of the Israeli deaths in the past four years of the Palestinian uprising. But Israel believes that much of the Fatah-affiliated armed faction, calling itself the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, has now come under Iran's sway, especially in the West Bank. Even Yasser Arafat has complained about Iranian interference. The Telegraph reports that Arafat called Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini a...

Terrorist: Canada Unfair

So much for the rough, tough terrorist facade ... The Boston Globe reports that a captured terrorist complains that the Canadians tricked him into going to the US, where he's been held since 2002 after admitting to attempting to kill US citizens abroad: Mohammed Jabarah, identified as a member of Al Qaeda by police in Singapore, Canada, and the United States, was arrested in Oman in March 2002 and deported to Canada. After four days of interrogation by agents of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Jabarah was transferred to the United States in April 2002 and is still in custody. Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has written to Public Security Minister Anne McLellan to urge an investigation into whether Jabarah had been misled by the intelligence service. ... Jabarah's father, Mansour, told the Canadian news program his son was convinced that the intelligence service had...

October 16, 2004

Al-Qaeda Focusing On Pakistan

Analysts have determined that al-Qaeda has shifted its focus from American targets to Pakistan instead, trying to destabilize what it sees as the weak link in the coalition to stomp out Islamofascist terror: Diplomats and other analysts believe al Qaeda cells are using Pakistan as a key battleground in its broader war against the United States and are exploiting long-standing enmity between Sunni and Shi'ite extremists to further this aim. They say the government's failure to crack down on groups it has used for years as tools of policy in the divided Kashmir region and in Afghanistan has played into al Qaeda's hands. ... In the past month, Pakistan has been rocked by a fresh wave of bombings of majority Sunni and minority Shi'ite Muslim gatherings that have killed nearly 80 people. It has also seen its ties with its closest ally China tested by the kidnapping of two Chinese...

Saddam's Lawyer Met With Osama In Baghdad: MEMRI

The Arab news translation service MEMRI reports in a breaking-news crawl that Osama bin Laden met with Saddam's Italian attorney in the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad in 1998: Saddam's Italian attorney Giovanni de Stafano told a London-based daily that a meeting was held between himself and Osama bin Laden at the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad in 1998. (al-Sharq al-Awsat) Big hat tip to Kevin McCullough. I have yet to find an English-language link to al-Sharq, even though it's based in London, nor have I seen this break anywhere else in the English-language media. Needless to say, if this report pans out, it puts a completely new light on our efforts to depose Saddam -- not so much for those of us who understand the strategic necessity of removing Saddam, but for those who can only think tactically. More to come ......

October 18, 2004

More Evidence Of The Obvious

The Washington Post reports that investigators into the Madrid bombings this year have uncovered new evidence that the Islamic terrorists that attacked the Spanish transportation system specifically intended to warp the election three days later: Seven months after bombs exploded aboard morning commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people, the precise motives of the attackers remain unclear. But new evidence, including wiretap transcripts, has lent support to a theory that the strike was carefully timed to take place three days before a national election in hopes of influencing Spanish voters to reject a government that sent troops to Iraq. ... Newly disclosed wiretaps of an alleged organizer of the bombings expressing glee that "the dog Aznar" had been put out of office have prompted some analysts here to conclude that the perpetrators sought to try to bring about specific reactions through the attacks. Obviously, it's good to be precise and...

Guantanamo Spanish For Revolving Door?

Thanks to our so-called friends and allies, the US military has been playing a bit of catch-and-release with the terrorists originally captured in Afghanistan. International pressure and domestic legal action have caused the Bush administration to be cautious about indefinite detention -- perhaps a bit too cautious, CNN now reports: t least seven former prisoners of the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been involved in terrorist acts, despite gaining their freedom by signing pledges to renounce violence, according to the Pentagon. At least two are believed to have died in fighting in Afghanistan, and a third was recaptured during a raid of a suspected training camp in Afghanistan, Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman, said last week. Others are at large. ... The small number returning to the fight demonstrates the delicate balance the United States must strike between minimizing the appearance of holding people unjustly and...

October 19, 2004

So Much For The Truce!

The cease-fire that Spain bought with Islamists with their capitulation after the Madrid bombings appears to have been an illusion, as predicted. Spain announced that it captured seven terrorists plotting to bonb their High Court, according to Reuters: Police arrested seven suspected Islamic militants in raids across Spain on Monday to foil a planned bomb attack on the High Court, judicial sources said. The arrests came seven months after train bombs killed 191 people in Madrid. The seven suspects, including four Algerians and one Moroccan, were arrested in the southern region of Andalusia, the Mediterranean city of Valencia and Madrid. Further arrests could be made in the coming hours as part of the operation against a radical and violent Muslim network, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. Perhaps the Spanish electorate will understand now that appeasing terrorists only leads to more terrorism, a lesson that Europeans learned the hard...

October 20, 2004

The Afghan Success Story

Today's New York Times analyzes the impact of the successful Afghanistan elections which appear to affirm Hamid Karzai's leadership and demonstrate that the Afghanis enthusiastically support the ideas of freedom and representative government. Typically, the Times gives short shrift to the American efforts that allowed Afghanistan to shake off one of the most oppressive regimes in recent memory, but the point gets made anyway: The success of the Oct. 9 election, experts and officials said, stemmed from three things: an aggressive American-led security and reconstruction effort in Afghanistan in 2004, pressure on neighboring Pakistan to rein in Taliban remnants, and most important, a passionate desire among average Afghans to choose the country's leader through a peaceful, democratic election. Whether all three factors can be sustained, especially as the country looks ahead to far more complex parliamentary elections in the spring, is an open question. ... A sea change in Bush...

Is Kerry Supported By Kosovo Terrorists?

The Australian blog House of Wheels believes it has discovered fundraising links between the John Kerry campaign and the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization that the Department of Homeland Security appears to label as a terrorist organization. Leigh from HoW links to a heavily-footnoted essay by Andy Wilcoxson at a website defending Slobodan Milosevic, not exactly a source that fills me with a sense of confidence about the material. However, some of the connections Leigh makes appear to point to sloppiness among Kerry's campaign staff, at the least: The leader of the KLA is a man named Hashim Thaci. Thaci, who goes under the nom de guerre "Snake," attended the Democratic Partys convention in Boston earlier this year. Upon returning from the convention, Thaci told the Albanian-Language KosovaLive agency, "It was a very successful visit at the Democratic Convention, where the PDK [Thachi's political party] had been invited as a...

Iranian Ayatollah Cuts Ties With Sadr, Says Insurrection "Incorrect"

In an odd twist, the BBC reports that Moqtada al-Sadr's mentor, Iranian Grand Ayatollah Kazem Haeri, has denounced Sadr for fighting US troops and has essentially fired Sadr as his representative in Najaf: A senior religious leader in Iran has severed ties with radical Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr for encouraging his followers to fight US troops. Grand Ayatollah Kazem Haeri, one of the top authorities in Shia Islam, said Mr Sadr was no longer his representative in the holy city of Najaf. A spokesman said that Mr Sadr's actions no longer reflected the ideas of the Grand Ayatollah's teachings. But he praised a scheme to disarm Shia militias in Baghdad's Sadr City slum. Haeri went on to blame US and British troops for damage done to shrines in Najaf, but scolded Sadr for mounting armed attacks in the first place. Haeri leads the Shi's from Qom, known for its...

Pakistan Bags Another One

Pakistani officials confirm that a major al-Qaeda operative was captured in Peshawar a few days ago, Agence France-Presse reports today: Pakistani security forces arrested an Egyptian Al-Qaeda operative in the northwestern city of Peshawar bordering Afghanistan, a security official said. The official identified the man as Abdul Rehman and said he was on the most wanted list of the US Central Intleligence Agency. "He is an important Al-Qaeda operative who had been hiding in Pakistan," the official who could not be identified told AFP on Wednesday. The Pakistanis continue to roll up major AQ players in their country, which indicates that the new democratic movement in Afghanistan ill suits them for continued operations. Reuters describes Rehman as a "communications expert" but not a senior man. However, they report that the Pakistanis also captured a more senior AQ leader, Saleh Nauman, ten days ago while he tried to flee Pakistan. The...

UN Finally Allows US The Privelege Of Protecting It

After over a year of avoiding the US military for their security needs in Iraq, the UN has given up and decided that the Americans can provide their mission with protection: The United Nations no longer objects to American soldiers to guard its staff in Iraq after the search for separate contingents from around the world failed, diplomats and U.N. sources said on Wednesday. ... U.N. officials originally distanced themselves from American troops when traveling outside of Baghdad, believing their staff would become more of a target of the sporadic and growing violence in the country. But without volunteers, the United Nations asked the U.S. command of the Multinational Force to supply protection, whether or not American soldiers were involved, diplomats said. Let's hear how well Kofi Annan gets assistance from the beloved international security organiztion he runs: Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in London on Tuesday he had tried to...

October 21, 2004

AQ Targets Chinese In New Focus On Musharraf

In a sign that the Pakistanis have done significant damage to its network, al-Qaeda operations now primarily target the Pervez Musharraf regime, seen as a cornerstone to the American-led war on terror. The kidnapping of two Chinese industrial experts aims to drive a wedge between Musharraf and his oldest ally: Al-Qaeda linked militants involved in the fatal Chinese hostage crisis targeted Chinese in Pakistan to sabotage president Pervez Musharraf's economic agenda and avenge their comrades' deaths, analysts said. They said the abduction on October 8 of two Chinese engineers working on a dam in the wild tribal region of South Waziristan was a pressure tactic to secure the release of Al-Qaeda militants detained in army operations in the region which hugs the Afghan frontier. ... Since March Pakistani forces, sweeping Al-Qaeda and allied fighters from the rugged frontier district, have killed 246 foreign and local militants, a regional army commander...

October 22, 2004

Iraqi Elections "On Track": UN

In a body blow to the hysterics and Chicken Littles in American politics, the top UN electoral expert in Baghdad told the Associated Press that Iraqi elections were "on track" and that there is no necessity for large-scale observation missions to establish their credibility: Preparations for the crucial January election are "on track" and the absence of international observers due to the country's tenuous security should not detract from the vote's credibility, the top U.N. electoral expert here said. ... "International observation is important only in that it's symbolic," Carlos Valenzuela told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday. "I don't think that the process will be less credible without observers, absolutely not. They are not the essence. They are not essential. They are not important. If they can come, fine, of course." Valenzuela was responding to a complaint from Iraqi officials that the UN was shirking its duties to...

October 24, 2004

FBI Disputes CIA's Election-Terror Conclusion

Earlier this week, the CIA expressed its doubts that terrorists planned any kind of operation against the US to impact our elections, a conclusion heralded by the Left as an indictment against the administration for employing "scare tactics". However, the AP reports today that the FBI has drawn the opposite conclusion based on a large number of interviews and ongoing investigations: FBI investigators have made new arrests and developed leads that reinforce concerns that terrorists plan to strike around the presidential election, officials said Saturday, even though the CIA has discredited a person who told its agents of such a plot involving al-Qaida. A senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some of the leads were culled from interviews with thousands of individuals that agents have conducted in the Muslim community. The official would not be more specific, but said the FBI continues to have misgivings about possible...

Afghanistan Elects Its First President - Karzai

Afghanistan has its first popularly-elected leader as Hamid Karzai has been declared the winner and his main rival conceded defeat. Yunus Qanuni told his countrymen that he accepted Karzai's election, allowing for an orderly transition to a representative government for the long-oppressed Afghanis: The main rival of President Hamid Karzai has conceded defeat in Afghanistan's presidential election with less than six per cent of the vote left to be counted. Yunus Qanuni said he would accept Mr Karzai's victory despite an investigation into allegations of electoral fraud in the poll on Oct 9. Mr Karzai required more than half the vote to win the election and had polled 55.3 per cent of support after 94.4 per cent of the more than eight million ballots had been counted. Qanuni finished a distant second to Karzai's 55% as multiple candidates ran for president, so the concession actually came rather late. It does...

Telegraph: Kosovo Vote Shows UN Leadership Failure

For those who prefer to leave issues of global leadership up to the United Nations, the London Telegraph reports that five years of UN governance in Kosovo has left the disputed province more deeply divided and hostile than ever, and no closer to a resolution: Early results from the weekend's general election showed that five years of UN rule had only deepened ethnic divisions as Kosovo's voters signalled their despair with the Balkan province's administrators. Barely more than half of Kosovo's 1.4 million voters went to the ballot box. While the province's majority ethnic Albanians were struck by apathy, its 130,000-strong Serb minority was seized by anger and completely boycotted the poll. Only a handful of Serbs voted, following calls from Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian Prime Minister, and the Serbian Orthodox Church to stay away. Mr Kostunica described the election as a "failure". American politicians, notably John Kerry, have repeatedly...

October 25, 2004

Chrenkoff: The Iraq That Goes Unnoticed

Arthur Chrenkoff has a great column in today's OpinionJournal (also on his blog) that he e-mailed to me this morning regarding the progress in Iraq. When you read his column, you won't recognize the Iraq he describes if your information has come strictly from the mainstream media: There are two Iraqs. The one we more often get to see and read about is a dangerous place, full of exploding cars, kidnapped foreigners and deadly ambushes. The reconstruction is proceeding at a snail's pace, frustration boils over and tensions - political, ethnic, religious - crackle in the air like static electricity before a storm. The other Iraq is a once prosperous and promising country of twenty-four million people, slowly recovering from physical and moral devastation of totalitarian rule. It's a country whose people are slowly beginning to stand on their own feet, grasp the opportunities undreamed of only two years ago,...

380 Tons Of Explosives Missing -- But When?

The New York Times has created a storm of controversy with its lengthy and detailed reporting of 380 tons of high explosives that disappeared from the Al-Qaqaa munitions bunker in Iraq (also CNN): The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations. The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year. However, that last statement isn't quite accurate. The Administration acknowledged that it disappeared...

Just A Little Too Convenient

Egypt claims that the mastermind of the Taba bombing inadvertently killed himself in the attack's biggest blast, the AP reports tonight: A Palestinian refugee plotted the coordinated bombings targeting Israeli tourists at resorts in the Sinai and accidentally killed himself while carrying out the deadliest blast, Egyptian authorities said Monday. Discounting the theory of al-Qaida involvement, an Interior Ministry statement said Ayad Said Saleh was motivated by the deteriorating situation in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, which his relatives fled in 1967, and carried out the attack with the help of local residents. But security officials speaking on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press they believed the Oct. 7 attacks on the Taba Hilton and two beach camps packed with Israelis may have been carried out with help from Islamic groups based outside Egypt, though not necessarily Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida group. It certainly makes Egypt's investigation easier if they...

October 27, 2004

FBI Investigating Bin Laden Sighting In Pakistan

CQ reader Bill W, who works homeland security in the private sector, sent me this article from the South Asia Tribune that reports that the FBI is investigating sightings of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, near the borders with India and China: Fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been spotted in the Tibet-Laddakh region, close to the North-Eastern tip of Pakistan, bordering India and China, Indian and US officials believe. A high-ranking official of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) flew from Islamabad on Sunday to meet top Indian officials here in Delhi after reports of Bin Ladens presence in the region. According to sources, following the meeting between Indian security bosses and the FBI, the New Delhi Government has put its security forces in the North Western region, specially the Kashmir Valley, on 'red alert.' Sources in New Delhi suspect that bin Laden may have made...

October 28, 2004

Putin, you've got some 'splainin' to do

According to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the U.S. invasion: John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad. "The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units." You get two guesses where the Russians shipped the goods. According to Mr. Shaw: Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to...

Did 'Starving Soviets' Back The Moving Van Up To Al Qaqaa?

The Financial Times follows up on the remark made yesterday by John Shaw, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, suggesting that the Russians took the heavy tonnage of high-tech explosives out of Al Qaqaa and transported them to Syria: The controversy over Iraqs missing explosives intensified on Wednesday as the Bush administration rejected charges of incompetence and a senior Pentagon official claimed the munitions may have been removed by Russians before the US-led invasion. ... But in a further development, John Shaw, a deputy under-secretary of defence, suggested that Russian units had transported the explosives out of the country. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Shaw said: For nearly nine months my office has been aware of an elaborate scheme set up by Saddam Hussein to finance and disguise his weapons purchases through his international suppliers, principally the Russians and French. That network included. . . employing various Russian units...

October 29, 2004

Osama Weighs In

Just in time for the election's final stretch, Al Jazeera aired a new Osama bin Laden videotaped statement warning Americans that we will face more "Manhattans" unless we abandon Israel and bug out of Southwest Asia: Osama bin Laden, addressing the American public four days ahead of presidential elections, said in a video aired Friday that the United States can avoid another Sept. 11 attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims. Reading a statement, the al Qaeda leader refrained from threats of new attacks and instead appealed to Americans. "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said, referring to the president and his Democratic opponent. "Each state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security." Admitting for the first time that he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, bin...

Scripps Howard Presents Ludicrous Analysis Of OBL Tape's Effect

Lisa Hoffman at Scripps Howard News Service attempts to write a balanced view of the effects that the new Osama bin Laden missive will have on our upcoming election. Reprinted by the Minneapolis Star Tribune for tomorrow's paper, Hoffman's analysis emphasizes that Islamic terrorists feel that George Bush has been "good for business", and winds up in left field: In fact, critics of the war in Iraq and other U.S. foreign policies say, the Bush tenure has actually been a boon for bin Laden. Those bent on global Islamic holy war see the U.S. president as the personification of arrogance and imperialism - a tailor-made poster boy for recruiting jihadis across the globe. Just because they vilify him doesn't mean they want him evicted from the White House. "If you ask them if they are better off now than they were four years ago, (Islamic extremists) would say the past...

October 30, 2004

Kaplan Becomes What He Debunks

Fred Kaplan at Slate is always an interesting read, a partisan who still is interested in the truth. Both sides of Kaplan are displayed in his latest article, a devastating critique of the Johns Hopkins study published by the New York Times that asserted that the American invasion of Iraq caused 100,000 "extra" deaths. The Hopkins study sampled 33 neighborhoods in Iraq and interviews around a thousand families to determine how many Iraqis died in the fourteen months leading up to the war, and how many died after the invasion, and from what causes. The difference between the two sets of deaths (pre- and post-invasion), extrapolated for the entire country, was given as the extra deaths caused by the US invasion. This has heavy political implications, as part of the American rationale relied on estimates by te UN and human-rights organizations that the Saddam regime killed thousands of Iraqis every...

Brooks: Kerry Continues His Tone-Deafness On OBL

Betsy's Page directs readers to the latest David Brooks column in today's New York Times, where Brooks takes John Kerry to task for playing politics with the new Osama bin Laden videotaped message. Brooks reaches the same conclusion that I did last night after reading Kerry's response during a radio interview a few hours after the OBL tape aired on Al-Jazeera and American news outlets: Kerry did say that we are all united in the fight against bin Laden, but he just couldn't help himself. His first instinct was to get political. On Milwaukee television, he used the video as an occasion to attack the president: "He didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden. He outsourced the job." Kerry continued with a little riff from his stump speech, "I am absolutely confident I have the ability to make America safer." Even in this shocking moment,...

Don't Be Fooled By His Measured Tone

Wretchard at the Belmont Club posted a provocative analysis of the Osama bin Laden tape yesterday, linked today at Power Line, which considers the measured tone and reasonableness of OBL a signal to the US of surrender: It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out....

Time out!

The Belmont Club characterizes the latest from OBL as a peace offering to the American electorate: It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out. OBLs appearance in the video provides some corroboration for Wretchards analysis. Hes no longer sporting the camouflage look and has put...

Jihad And Fashion Were Always Her Passion

With Yasser Arafat in Paris being examined by a team of doctors looking to identify his mystery illness, the London Telegraph focuses on his younger wife and her sacrifices for the Palestinian cause. It turns out that Suha Arafat has done her part for the intifada at fashion-show runways and expensive shops: If anything was guaranteed to annoy the Palestinians, it was a comment made by Yasser Arafat's wife after the birth of their daughter, Zahwa. As Suha Arafat proudly showed off the Palestinian leader's only child at the 1,100-a-night hospital in Paris in July 1995, she declared: "Our child was conceived in Gaza, but sanitary conditions there are terrible. I don't want to be a hero and risk my baby." ... The spendthrift image of Mrs Arafat was further enhanced when French authorities launched an investigation into claims that $11.4 million (6.22 million) had been transferred from Switzerland to...

October 31, 2004

Osama Not So Cocky After All?

The New York Post reports that Osama's videotape last Friday may have been more than just an attempt to swing the American elections. The full tape, of which Al-Jazeera played only a small part, turns out to be an al-Qaeda State of the Gang speech, and Osama isn't very pleased with its present condition (hat tip: NZ Bear): Osama bin Laden's newest tape may have thrust him to the forefront of the presidential election, but what was not seen was the cave-dwelling terror lord talking about the setbacks al Qaeda has faced in recent months. Officials said that in the 18-minute long tape of which only six minutes were aired on the al-Jazeera Arab television network in the Middle East on Friday bin Laden bemoans the recent democratic elections in Afghanistan and the lack of violence involved with it. On the tape, bin Laden also says his terror...

November 1, 2004

OBL Transcript Posted (Updated)

Matt Drudge has posted a transcript of the new OBL tape. I'm with my partner on this: OBL has definately been watching too many Michael Moore videos in his cave. As Captain Ed also noted, the emergence of two AQ tapes signals something very, very bad. Apparently federal officials agree. On Fox News, Shepard Smith is reporting that analysts believe the first tape symbolizes brute force and AQs presence in the US while the tone of the OBL video justifies killing of innocents. While that's a plausible analysis, it is also possible (knock on wood) the videos were made because AQ no longer has the ability to attack us here and hopes to influence the election via propaganda. I think it must come down to either of those scenarios. Or maybe he's seeking a larger speaking part in the next Michael Moore mockumentary. UPDATE: Aljeezera has posted the full transcript....

Mike Weighs In On Iraq, Al Qaqaa, and Osama - Part I

I had an opportunity to interview my friend "Mike", the Navy SEAL and private contractor who spent the last three years in Iraq. I wanted to get his perspective since the Al Qaqaa story broke, since part of Mike's work as a private contractor dealt with explosives demolition. Part I of the interview focuses on that issue. Q. What do you know about the ASP at Al Qaqaa and the missing 380 tons of explosives? A. Not much first-hand knowledge That was not one of the sites I was sent to blow anything up or acquire any of the explosives that were there. I had access to a lot of different site maps, and I dont remember seeing it on a site map. It may have been there, but I dont remember it. If it was the size they say it is, I cant imagine that we need to...

November 4, 2004

25th Annniversary Of Islamofascism

Rusty at My Pet Jawa noticed an anniversary that escaped my notice -- twenty-five years ago, Islamic revolutionaries in Iran commandeered our embassy in Teheran and took dozens of Americans hostage. This act of war went without effective response from the USA and set the stage for our present war against Islamist terrorism. Indeed, it informs our present muscular foreign policy so much that this could be considered an anniversary of the Bush Doctrine. Rusty writes: Like the English before us, America found itself in the position of standing between the Iranian revolutionaries and their vision of the global caliphate. The US became the 'Great Satan', the obstacle, the one nation with the power to stall the inevitable coming of Sharia law to all Muslim nations (and eventually beyond). So, the jihadis declared war on that day. Their war aims were simply stated and straightforward--weaken American resolve so that jihad...

November 6, 2004

Annan, UN Prove Their Fecklessness

Kofi Annan sought to protect the terrorists who continue their bloody grip on Fallujah by writing a letter to the governments of Iraq, Britain, and the US demanding a cessation of hostilities. The three governments reacted with scorn to the notion that Iraq should somehow live with terrorists setting up their own city-state within Iraqi borders, allowing them to maintain a base of operations with which to terrorize the entire country: In letters dated Oct. 31 and addressed to President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and interim Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi, Annan said using military force against insurgents in the city would further alienate Sunni Muslims already feeling left out of a political process orchestrated largely by Washington. "I wish to share with you my increasing concern at the prospect of an escalation in violence, which I fear could be very disruptive for Iraq's political transition," Annan wrote to...

November 7, 2004

Iraq Declares Martial Law As Talks Drag On

After a series of bombings that killed dozens of people yesterday, the Iraqis declared a country-wide emergency, excluding Kurdistan. The measure placed the country into an equivalent status of martial law while the Allawi government continued its efforts to negotiate with the terrorists of Fallujah: Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi declared martial law on Sunday and said a U.S.-led military offensive against the rebel-held city of Falluja could not be delayed much longer. ... Allawi was doing all he could to find a peaceful solution, his spokesman Thair al-Naqib said. "He still hopes that it may be possible to avoid a major military confrontation in Falluja ... He is, however, not optimistic," Naqib said. The Americans say they are only awaiting the word from Allawi, who returned from Europe on Saturday, to attack. Why does Allawi hesitate? First, the battle of Fallujah will certainly be bloody, more bloody than...

Europe Reconsiders Muslims In Wake Of Filmmaker's Murder

AP religion analyst Brian Murphy reports that tensions are rising between mainstream European society and the growing Muslim community in its midst, especially after the brutal murder of Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who criticized Islamic practices with regards to women. More Muslim threats against Dutch politicians followed the murder, and Europeans are beginning to ask themselves whether Muslims can ever be assimilated into their communities: But those big issues fade on the streets of many European centers. Here even in places like tolerant Amsterdam it's often expressed as a gnawing feeling that militant factions in Islamic immigrant communities are gaining ground and chipping away at values such as free speech and secular politics. "There is a general feeling that a social collision is becoming inevitable," said Jan Rath, co-director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. "People think it's been...

Marines Unleashed at Last

The Marines have finally been given the green light for the assault on Fallujah. From Fox News: U.S. forces stormed into western districts of Fallujah (search) early Monday, seizing the main city hospital and securing two key bridges over the Euphrates River (search) in what appeared to be the first stage of the long-expected assault on the insurgent stronghold. An AC-130 gunship (search) raked the city with 40 mm cannon fire as explosions from U.S. artillery lit up the night sky. Intermittent artillery fire blasted southern neighborhoods of Fallujah, and orange fireballs from high explosive airbursts could be seen above the rooftops. U.S. officials said the toughest fight was yet to come when American forces enter the main part of the city on the east bank of the river, including the Jolan neighborhood where insurgent defenses are believed the strongest....

November 9, 2004

Are They Keeping Arafat Alive To Find The Money?

As Yasser Arafat lies dying, a conclusion that appears less in doubt each day, the AP reports that the search has begun for millions -- possibly billions -- of dollars that the PLO leader may have stashed away during his forty-year reign as Palestinian leader: In his four decades as Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat has run a murky financial empire that includes far-flung PLO investments in airlines, banana plantations and high-tech companies, and money hidden in bank accounts across the globe. ... Forbes magazine ranked him No. 6 on its 2003 list of the richest "kings, queens and despots," estimating he was worth at least $300 million. Shalom Harari, a former top Israeli intelligence official, said Arafat may have stashed away up to $700 million, part of it for an emergency such as a new exile, especially with Israel threatening to expel him. Two names frequently come up in connection...

Marines Rout Fallujah Terrorists

The Marines are steadily and successfully killing terrorists and breaking things in Fallujah. The AP reports: Faced with overwhelming force, resistance in Fallujah did not appear as fierce as expected, though the top U.S. commander in Iraq (news - web sites) said he still expected "several more days of tough urban fighting" as insurgents fell back toward the southern end of the city, perhaps for a last stand. Some U.S. military officers estimated they controlled about a third of the city. Commanders said they had not fully secured the northern half of Fallujah but were well on their way as American and Iraqi troops searched for insurgents. The commander on the ground, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, believes al-Zarqawi escaped Fallujah before the assault. This is unfortunate, but Im certain there is still a Hellfire missile with his name on it. The Marines are advancing rapidly toward victory. Of course the...

November 10, 2004

Cleaning House In Fallujah

The AP reports that Iraqi armed forces have found the houses where terrorists led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheaded their hostages, a grisly confirmation of the necessity of cleaning up Fallujah: Iraqi troops have found "hostage slaughterhouses" in Fallujah where foreign captives were held and killed, the commander of Iraqi forces in the city said Wednesday. Troops found CDs and documents of people taken captive in houses in the northern part of Fallujah, Maj. Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem Mohan told reporters. ... "We have found hostage slaughterhouses in Fallujah that were used by these people and the black clothing that they used to wear to identify themselves, hundreds of CDs and whole records with names of hostages," the general said at a military camp near Fallujah. If nothing else, we've now confirmed that the ghouls that perform these beheadings stationed themselves in the so-called City of Mosques, and that...

See Ya, Yasser

The world's first celebrity terrorist died peacefully today, a fate that he denied thousands of others during his murderous life: Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, 75, the leader who passionately sought a homeland for his people but was seen by many Israelis as a ruthless terrorist and a roadblock to peace, died early Thursday in Paris. Arafat had been sick with an unknown illness that had been variously described as the flu, a stomach virus or gallstones. He flew to Paris nearly two weeks ago seeking medical treatment and was hospitalized with what Palestinian officials said was a blood disorder. He had been on a respirator since slipping into a coma November 3. A hospital spokesman said he died at 3:30 a.m. Thursday (9:30 p.m. Wednesday ET). For all the crimes he committed and people he terrorized, the most ironic legacy Arafat left was the utter poverty and degradation he...

November 11, 2004

Happy Veteran's Day From Captain's Quarters

Today is Veteran's Day, when we honor the sacrifice of our men and women who served and are serving to defend and protect our nation and spread liberty around the world. When I got up this morning, I wondered how I would celebrate veterans like my father, my uncles, and many friends and co-workers and the many who have served among CQ's readership. Fortunately for me, CQ reader Bob S. forwarded another e-mail from his neice's husband, a major in the Marine Corps currently stationed in Iraq. Not only does he speak eloquently regarding the Corps' birthday yesterday, but he reminds us of the spirit and sacrifice of the US fighting men and women in all branches of the service. Camp Victory, Iraq 10 November 2004 A Thought from Iraq Traditions & Reality In 1921, then-Commandant of the Marine Corps John A. Lejeune, initiated the now storied tradition of...

Arafat As Rohrschach Test

The death of uberterrorist Yasser Arafat, the man who masterminded hundreds of attacks on civilians and inspired thousands of Islamic lunatics, provides a moment of clarity and insight into the leaders of our time. While heads of state should exercise judicious diplomacy in their official reactions in order to reach out to the Palestinians that Arafat victimized almost as badly as he did everyone else, the extent of their remarks provide an interesting look at the values of so-called friends. For instance, Bush gave a carefully-crafted statement which avoided even speaking about Arafat or his deadly legacy. Instead, Bush wisely focused on the future: The death of Yasser Arafat is a significant moment in Palestinian history. We express our condolences to the Palestinian people. For the Palestinian people, we hope that the future will bring peace and the fulfillment of their aspirations for an independent, democratic Palestine that is at...

Marines Free Hostages In Fallujah

In another demonstration of the need for action, a US Marine Corps contingent freed four hostages taken by terrorists in Fallujah during their efforts to eliminate the Islamofascist and Ba'ath remnants in the city: US-led troops involved in fighting against insurgents in the Iraqi city of Falluja have found four imprisoned men believed to be Iraqi hostages. Three of the men were contractors working for the US military, a US marines spokesman said, and the fourth said he was a taxi driver. All of the men had been beaten and starved and were wearing handcuffs. ... They were found blindfolded, handcuffed and in a locked room. In the same building, marines found surface-to-air missiles, night-vision equipment, black uniforms, computers and a weapons cache. They also retrieved what they called anti-coalition propaganda and videotapes showing torture of hostages and weapons training. In a moment of farce, the BBC reports that this...

Sarin nerve gas found in Fallujah

CQ reader Jeff Miller has alterted us to Glenn Reynolds' post on sarin gas in Fallujah. According to NPR's Anne Garrels, a reporter embedded with a Marine unit in Fallujah, the Marines found a suitcase filled with cannisters labeled "sarin nerve gas." You can listen to her report here. No word yet on how many cannisters were found or the origin of said weapons. Looks like some of Saddam's "nonexistent" WMDs didn't make it to Syria after all. (Hmm . . perhaps they did leave the country but have been imported back.) I'm not surprised the terrorists had a nerve agent. I'm only confounded by the fact they didn't either use the weapons against the Marines or take them with while fleeing the city. Must have been in a real rush to get out of there. Or they have more stashed away somewhere. In the immortal words of Matt Drudge:...

Jimmy Carter Eulogizes Terrorist; No One Surprised

To no one's great shock, Jimmy Carter decided to wax eloquent about the world's premier terrorist at his passing. Carter continues his unbroken streak of poor judgment in his remarks on Yasser Arafat, his fellow Nobel laureate who incidentally murdered a whole lot of people, Americans included: Former US President Jimmy Carter called Yasser Arafat "a powerful human symbol and forceful advocate" who united Palestinians in their pursuit of a homeland. "Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era and will no doubt be painfully felt by Palestinians throughout the Middle East and elsewhere in the world," Carter said. "He was the father of the modern Palestinian nationalist movement. A powerful human symbol and forceful advocate, Palestinians united behind him in their pursuit of a homeland," he said in a statement distributed by his Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center. To hold up Arafat as a "powerful human symbol" after all...

Insurgents Discover That French Reporters Uphold Gallic Military Tradition

Jackie Spinner at the Washington Post hosted a live-chat Q&A on the war in Iraq and journalists' efforts to cover the action. Spinner joined the chatroom live from an Army outpost near Fallujah, and the very first question asked about the benefits of embedding reporters within military units as opposed to freelancing in a war zone: Q - Is it preferrable to report from an embedded military unit, or do you prefer to roam about the city without their protection? I presume the quality of reporting is better if you aren't chained to a branch of the military, but it certainly seems much more dangerous to move about Iraq without their security. ... A - Unfortunately, it is impossible to roam about the city without protection. The only way we can cover this offensive for now is with the military. I should note that the insurgents offered embed spots to...

Terrorists Get Desperate

The AP reports that terrorists trapped in Fallujah tried to break through an American cordon to the south of the city to escape. The failed attack is another bid to take the pressure off of the Islamofascists and Saddam holdouts, as their brethren in Iraq desperately attacked all around the country to distract the Americans: Insurgents tried to break through the U.S. cordon surrounding Fallujah on Thursday as American forces launched an offensive against concentrations of militants in the south of the city. Some 600 insurgents, 18 U.S. troops and five Iraqi soldiers have been killed in the four-day assault, the U.S. military said. In an apparent bid to relieve pressure on their trapped allies, insurgents mounted major attacks in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city 220 miles to the north. Guerrillas assaulted nine police stations, overwhelming several, and battled U.S. and Iraqi troops around bridges across the Tigris River in the...

November 12, 2004

Don't Let Scowcroft Back In

Former Bush 41 advisor Brent Scowcroft published an opinion piece in today's Washington Post that should remind us all that American cluelessness in Middle East policymaking has a rich bipartisan history. Scowcroft's advice to George Bush in his second term explains why 43 famously bypassed his father's counsel in favor of prayer. The first red flag for me popped up when Scowcroft writes that our new aim in securing peace in the Middle East requires us to "reach out" to Europe in generating a new policy: But American resolve will not suffice without the willing engagement of other states, especially those of Europe and the region itself. Our appeal to the Europeans, with whom our differences over the Middle East have been significant, must be based on reaching out to them on the Palestinian peace process and Iran, and soliciting their help on Iraq. Unfortunately, what Scowcroft wants us to...

November 13, 2004

The Result Of Desperation

Government exists to protect its citizens, and free societies give up a certain level of their liberty in order to enable their government to fulfill its mandate. The definition of protection varies, but the concept is the same; in America, we traditionally limit government to national defense and a certain level of social support for the neediest, while countries like France and Germany define protection in their cradle-to-grave social systems. But the one definition on which we all agree is the guarding of our lives and our ability to exercise our freedom. When government fails in this primary obligation, the social contract breaks down and people take action themselves for their own security -- and the chaos that results creates a further distortion in society. Vigilante justice becomes the tyranny of the strong and the law, which exists to ensure liberty and equal treatment for all, no longer functions as...

How You Can Support The Troops

I got this e-mail yesterday from CQ reader and commenter LoveMyMarine, a Marine Corps wife who works on behalf of her husband and his comrades in arms. She lets us know how we can help support our troops in the field, especially the Marines that just celebrated the Corps' 229th birthday by battling to eliminate the terrorists in Fallujah. Our six year old started a banner that states simply, "THANK YOU MARINES". We were at the VRE station on Nov 10th (Marine Corps Birthday) and at the Vietnam Wall Nov 11th asking people to sign the banner, which I will be sending to Iraq along with the Christmas Care Packages for 1st Marine Division. I wonder if I could please ask you to post a link to two other worthwhile grassroots organizations? Wounded Warriors got a plug on Bill O' Reilly, but as I called to remind them, they forgot...

November 14, 2004

Arafat's Money Lies Hidden Still

The Scotsman reviews the legacy of poverty that the so-called hero of the Palestinian people has left his erstwhile countrymen. Yasser Arafat managed to siphon off most of the incoming aid to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, perhaps as much as three billion pounds, and even his overindulged and Machiavellian wife may not know where Arafat stashed it: IN THE poverty-stricken West Bank and Gaza, thousands languish in refugee camps. Outside Yasser Arafats former headquarters in Ramallah children beg in the streets. The late leader himself was also said to have lived frugally, but his fortune, skimmed from foreign aid and taxes and salted away in a network of secret bank accounts, has been estimated at up to 3bn. Among his officials, there was always the fear that if something happened to Arafat, no one would know where all the money was, such was the culture of mismanagement and...

AQ Targeting US Through Mexico?

Time Magazine reports that al-Qaeda has worked on plans to smuggle nuclear weapons out of Europe and into the US through Mexico, putting border security and immigration back to the center of war strategy: A key al-Qaeda operative seized in Pakistan recently offered an alarming account of the group's potential plans to target the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction, senior U.S. security officials tell TIME. Sharif al-Masri, an Egyptian who was captured in late August near Pakistan's border with Iran and Afghanistan, has told his interrogators of "al-Qaeda's interest in moving nuclear materials from Europe to either the U.S. or Mexico," according to a report circulating among U.S. government officials. Masri also said al-Qaeda has considered plans to "smuggle nuclear materials to Mexico, then operatives would carry material into the U.S.," according to the report, parts of which were read to TIME. Masri says his family, seeking refuge from...

You Thought Our Election Was Bad ...

With the death of uberterrorist Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians have the opportunity to shake off the years of corrupt strongman rule and attempt to follow the Afghanis into a functional democracy. So far, as the Telegraph reports, the Palestinians have not jumped out to an auspicious start: Fears that the struggle to find a new Palestinian leader could bring bloodshed and instability were confirmed last night when the PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas was caught in a gun battle during a visit to Gaza. Two people were killed and 10 wounded when fighting broke out as militiamen opposed to the visit confronted the bodyguards of Mr Abbas, who was yesterday named as the dominant Fatah faction's candidate for the "presidency". The Palestinians have shown no predilection for democracy or due process of law -- they've ruled and been ruled by the gun for decades. Arafat never held another presidential election after...

November 15, 2004

AP: Muslim Extremists Increase "Fault Lines" In Islam

Using the brutal murder of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands and a Buddhist worker in Thailand, the AP reports that Islam has increasingly become unmoored from the wider world, and that even Muslims now concede that extremists have hijacked the Religion of Peace to excuse their murder sprees: "The fault lines are growing," said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern and International Affairs at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. "It's not just between the Muslims and non-Muslims. It's also within Islam itself. It's a battle between moderate Muslims and extremist forces that threaten to hijack Islam." The most recent hot spots zigzag around the atlas from Liberia in West Africa to the Netherlands to Southeast Asia. They join a growing roster of places already feeling the strains of religious conflict and terrorism along the edges of the Islamic world regions as diverse as Chechnya, Nigeria,...

Good News From Afghanistan

Since the mainstream media has decided that Afghanistan, without gunfire and kidnappings, is rather boring, Arthur Chrenkoff has continued his efforts to inform Americans about the excellent progress being made in the former Taliban tyranny. His work appears in both OpinionJournal and in his own blog. It's impossible to excerpt and too important to miss; be sure to read the entire article....

CIA Shake-Up Reveals Democratic Hypopcrisy ... Again

Less than six months after the release of the final report from the 9/11 Commission, new CIA Director Porter Goss promises to deliver what the panel recommended and the Democrats demanded -- a shake-up of the intelligence community that received such harsh criticism for its overreliance on technology and closemindedness. Now that Goss has actually taken action, however, Democrats have been howling about the "purge" at Langley. Today, though, Goss picked up important political support for the housecleaning from the one Republican that every Democrat hailed during the election cycle: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) yesterday supported CIA Director Porter J. Goss's shake-up of the intelligence agency, which he described as "dysfunctional" and not providing President Bush with the information needed to conduct the war on terrorism. Reacting to stories about potential resignations of CIA officials in response to actions taken by Goss and his staff, McCain, appearing on ABC's "This...

Another Example Of Bipartisan Cluelessness

Last week, Brent Scowcroft demonstrated that Democrats don't hold a monopoly on cluelessness. That same day, another Bush 41 advisor showed off his own cluelessness on terrorism. James Baker urged Israel to release a Palestinian who masterminded several of the attacks that murdered scores of Israeli civilians (via Power Line and LGF): uring an interview with host Larry King on CNN last night, James. A Baker, the former U.S. secretary of state, who currently serves as the Bush administration's special envoy on Iraqi debt, called on the Israeli government to release Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Palestinian leader who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for ordering attacks against Israel. Israel has ruled out any early release for the popular Barghouti, often mentioned as a successor to Yasser Arafat, who died on Thursday. Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom was quoted yesterday saying that Barghouti would remain in prison...

November 16, 2004

Marine Shoots Wounded Iraqi, Film At 11

An NBC News embed videotaped a Marine shooting an apparently wounded Iraqi POW in a Fallujah mosque yesterday, giving American audiences a front-row seat to an apparent war crime and sending antiwar activists into paroxysms of recrimination: The U.S. military is investigating whether a Marine shot dead an unarmed, wounded insurgent during the battle for Falluja in an incident captured on videotape by a pool reporter. The man was shot in the head at close range Saturday by a Marine who found him among a group of wounded men. The wounded men were found in a mosque that Marines said had been the source of small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire the previous day. ... The Marines told the pool reporter that the wounded men would be left behind for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. But Saturday, another squad of Marines found that the mosque...

The Honor Of Radical Islam

Islamofascist terrorists apparently butchered their second female captive, CARE worker Margaret Hassan, as Al Jazeera claims to have a videotape of her murder: Kidnapped aid worker Margaret Hassan was believed to be dead Tuesday after a video received by Al-Jazeera television showed a hooded figure shooting a blindfolded woman in the head. ... The video shows a militant firing a pistol into the head of a blindfolded woman wearing an orange jumpsuit, Al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout said. "She was presumed to be Mrs. Hassan," he told The Associated Press. The station initially said it would air parts of the video, but Ballout then said it would not. Kidnaping civilians as hostages paints a cowardly enough picture of Islamist lunatics, and carving their heads off for the camera makes them look almost infantile in their perversity. Putting a bullet into a woman's hooded head is so cowardly that it takes one's...

Looks Like A Link To Me

Those who keep claiming that Saddam Hussein had no links to terrorism have yet another report from which to avert their eyes. The AP reports that Congressional investigators keep documenting more destinations for the $21 billion Saddam stole from the UN Oil-For-Food program: Saddam Hussein diverted money from the U.N. oil-for-food program to pay millions of dollars to families of Palestinian suicide bombers who carried out attacks on Israel, say congressional investigators who uncovered evidence of the money trail. The former Iraqi president tapped secret bank accounts in Jordan where he collected bribes from foreign companies and individuals doing illicit business under the humanitarian program to reward the families up to $25,000 each, investigators told The Associated Press. So Saddam stole money from the UN, most of it from the US and the West, and put a significant chunk of it into the pockets of the families that...

November 17, 2004

Marines Find Sarin In Fallujah

Big Trunk at Power Line points readers to a slideshow on USA Today's website that reveals a disturbing find in the soon-to-be former terrorist stronghold in the Sunni Triangle. The second image presented is this: The caption on this photograph reads: "Marines discover 40 vials of suspected Sarin gas while searching a house in Fallujah, Iraq. It was secreted in a briefcase hidden in a trunk in the courtyard of the house. Two mortar tubes, three mortar rockets, compass and fire maps were also found." So here we have the WMD for which we sought, hidden in Fallujah either by foreign al-Qaeda terrorists or, more likely, remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime that knew where to get them. I'm no expert, but I think that 40 vials of this chemical could ruin the day for thousands of Iraqis, American troops, or people anywhere in the world that the terrorists could...

November 18, 2004

How Europeans Resemble Radical Muslims

Irshad Manji writes a brilliant op-ed piece in today's New York Times giving her impressions of the difference between Europe and North America in how liberal Muslims are treated. She also includes her thoughts on the role of religion in Western life, one of the best rational answers I've yet seen. Manji, who has traveled extensively between North America and Europe, and writes about the difference between the two in how they react to Muslims. For North Americans, she writes, the issues revolve around radicals who use Islam to justify terrorism. In Europe, they're much more concerned about headscarves than terrorists: To get there, allow me to observe key differences between the debate over Islam in Western Europe and North America. In Western Europe, the entry point for this debate is the hijab - the headscarf that many Muslim women wear as a signal of modesty. By contrast, the entry...

More Progress In Iraq

Two breaking stories demonstrate the level of success that the combined Iraqi-American forces have achieved in their pacification mission throughout the Sunni Triangle. First, US troops in Fallujah have found the base of operations used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda group: U.S. troops sweeping through Fallujah on Thursday said they believe they have found the main headquarters of the insurgent group headed by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In video shot by an embedded CNN cameraman, soldiers walked through an imposing building with concrete columns and with a large sign in Arabic on the wall reading "Al Qaida Organization" and "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger." Inside the building, U.S. soldiers found documents, old computers, notebooks, photographs and copies of the Quran. The terrorists apparently left so quickly that they had to leave their documentation behind, which may allow the Coalition forces many...

Osama Impotent: Central Command

The deputy commander at Central Command told a press conference today that the Pakistani Army has cut off Osama bin Laden from his organization to such an extent that bin Laden can no longer direct terror operations (via Drudge): Pakistan's military has been so effective in pressuring al-Qaida leaders hiding in the tribal region of western Pakistan that Osama bin Laden and his top deputies no longer are able to direct terrorist operations, a senior American commander said Thursday. "They are living in the remotest areas of the world without any communications other than courier with the outside world or their people and unable to orchestrate or provide command and control over a terrorist network," said Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of Central Command. "They are basically on the run and unable to really conduct operations except, in the very long term, provide vision and guidance as...

The French Fought in Iraq . . .

. . . . . for the enemy. The BBC reports that three Frenchmen died fighting for the terrorists in Iraq. All were young men of Arab origin. (Note: This does not indicate a profile! We would never be so politically incorrect as to suggest such.) At least a dozen other Frenchmen have traveled to Iraq to join the insurgency, but this report is probably grossly underestimated. At this rate, the only Frenchmen with military experience will be those making such a mess of the Ivory Coast and those fighting for the Islamofacists. Democrats will continue to insist our efforts are not legitimate without help from that courageous nation....

November 19, 2004

Pakistan Bags Another One

Our Pakistani allies have racked up another high-profile al-Qaeda capture, this one wanted for the attempted assassination of Pervez Musharraf and the murder of an American diplomat's family. Osama Nazir planned and executed several bombings of Christian targets and served as an important AQ conduit: Osama Nazir, considered an important catch, was nabbed from the industrial city of Faisalabad in central Punjab province on Tuesday, a senior security official told AFP. "He is the most important Pakistani Al-Qaeda operative who was facilitating foreign Al-Qaeda operatives for attacks in Pakistan," the official, who asked not to be identified, said. "He is a prized catch and was a main link between foreign Al-Qaeda operatives and local jihadi (Islamic militant) groups." Nazir headed a group of 24 militants and masterminded the March 2002 attack on a Church in Islamabad's high security diplomatic enclave in which five people including a US diplomat's wife and...

The Gloves Are Off

In a welcome development, joint US-Iraqi forces have decided that mosques are no longer privileged areas after seeing so many of them used as terrorist bases in Fallujah. A Baghdad mosque used to exhort Sunnis to join the insurgency was raided earlier today and a firefight broke out: Iraqi forces, backed by U.S. soldiers, stormed one of the major Sunni Muslim mosques in Baghdad after Friday prayers, opening fire and killing at least three people, witnesses said. In the battle for control of Mosul, Iraqi forces raided several areas overnight, killing 15 insurgents, Iraqi and U.S. military officials said. ... About 40 people were arrested at the Abu Hanifa mosque in the capital's northwestern Azamiyah neighborhood, said the witnesses, who were members of the congregation. Another five people were wounded. The message should be clear to terrorists and the would-be lunatics: no hiding place is safe from the new Iraqi...

November 20, 2004

The Face Of Victory

UPI reports on the changing face of liberated Iraq by featuring sergeant in the new Iraqi Army, Ismin Norhan. The 19-year-old non-commissioned officer is trained, tough, and motivated for victory. And, by the way, she's a woman: Norhan's brown hair is pulled back into a bun and tucked under an army cap, unlike the heads of virtually every woman she checks, which are covered by long scarves. She commands at least eight privates as a sergeant. And she speaks English. "It's good for me to be here," Norhan said. "People are surprised when they see me, but I like the work." ... It's not easy to be a woman in the fledgling military corps, which is under attack by insurgents and fighting other security problems. Norhan says many people look her in the eye and say it's not suitable for a woman to work outside the house. In Iraq's traditional...

November 21, 2004

Ten Weeks To Victory

The Iraqi government has set January 30th as their Election Day, promising to conduct balloting in every area of the country regardless of the so-called insurgency: Iraq's Electoral Commission on Sunday set national elections for Jan. 30, and a spokesman said ballots would be cast nationwide, including in areas now wracked by violence. ... Farid Ayar, spokesman of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said areas still beset by violence including the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, as well as northern Mosul will participate in the elections. "No Iraqi province will be excluded, because the law considers Iraq as one constituency, and therefore it is not legal to exclude any province," he said. The Islamofascists and the Ba'ath remnants stepped up their bloody campaign to destabilize liberated Iraq in September, also hoping to affect the election in the United States. So far their efforts have met with...

November 22, 2004

Context

In the disputed shooting of a wounded "insurgent" on 13 November, critics of the liberation of Fallujah accused a Marine of committing a war crime, despite the fact that terrorists have attacked Iraqi and US forces after playing dead a number of times. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports on another such incident today, providing even more context for the action on 13 November: The US military says Marines in Fallujah have shot and killed an insurgent who engaged them as he was faking being dead, a week after footage of a marine killing an apparently unarmed and wounded Iraqi caused a stir in the region. "Marines from the 1st Marine Division shot and killed an insurgent who while faking dead opened fire on the marines who were conducting a security and clearing patrol through the streets," a military statement said. The Geneva Convention, which antiwar activists and pundits accused the...

Support Our Troops

This holiday season thousands of American troops will be deployed away from their homes and loved ones. If you wish to offer support but aren't sure how to go about it, the Department of Defense has launched a new website "America Supports You." The troops welcome gifts like care packages, phone cards, and messages. Although the DoD is not allowed to endorse any particular charitable organization, the website offers links and information about such groups. Even a simple Thank you will mean a lot to our men and women overseas. Click here to send yours....

Did Britain Stop A 9/11-Style Attack On London?

The French press service AFP and the UK service ITV report that unnamed sources in the British government claim that the UK prevented a specific Islamist plot to hijack commercial aircraft for suicide missions on London: British security services have foiled an Al-Qaeda plot to fly planes into targets in London in a September 11-style attack, Britain's independent ITV News network reported. "This is the story of what could have been a nightmare averted," said ITV's political editor Nick Robinson. "A story not of failure, but of success." "That, at least, is what I am told by a senior authoritative source who says that the security services managed to avert a plot to fly planes into Canary Wharf here, and also into Heathrow Airport," he said. AFP provides no specifics on the plot, not even if it was a recent development or something that happened a while ago. Hopefully more...

November 24, 2004

Someone Sounds Desperate

A new statement by the leading terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, sounds a desperate tone as he lashes out at Muslim intelligentsia for not supporting his gang of butchers. According to the AP, Zarqawi also sounds pretty pessimistic these days: An audiotape purportedly made by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lashed out Wednesday at Muslim scholars for not speaking out against U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying they have "let us down in the darkest circumstances." ... "You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy... You have quit supporting the mujahedeen," he said. "Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence." Zarqawi obviously doesn't read the New York Times or watch CBS News. If he did, he wouldn't report that Muslims have quit supporting the mujahedeen. The party...

Israelis Get Serious About Aviation Security

The BBC reports that Israel has finalized a deal to fit its commercial aircraft with antimissile systems to defend against terrorist attack. El Al will fit the invisible-flare system initially on its high-risk flights -- but not to the US or Europe: The Flight Guard system has been developed by Israel's largest defence firm, Israel Military Industries, and Elta, a subsidiary of Israel Aircraft Industries. It is expected to be installed on six El Al jets if initial tests prove successful, and eventually on the rest of the airline's 30-strong fleet, Haaretz reported. While one supposes that terrorists would target flights to Europe and the US over those to Asia and Africa, none of the Western nations to which El Al flies will approve the new system. The US and Europe reportedly want to wait for infra-red jamming systems, rather than the invisible-flare system which Israel will purchase at a...

November 25, 2004

Zarqawi Lieutenant Arrested, With Chemical And Biological Weapons

Abu Saeed, identified by Iraqi and American sources as a key lieutenant to terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was arrested earlier this week by Coalition forces in Mosul, where insurgents had recently stepped up their activity. Not only did the Coalition capture Saeed, but they also captured material he worked towards deploying -- like anthrax: A lieutenant of Iraq's most feared terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was captured a few days ago in Mosul, and Iraqi troops searching suspected terrorist hideouts in Fallujah discovered a laboratory with manuals on manufacturing explosives and toxins including anthrax, Iraq's national security adviser said Thursday. Also, the U.S. military said it discovered the "largest weapons cache to date in the city of Fallujah." The weapons including anti-tank mines and a mobile bomb-making lab were found inside a mosque used by an insurgent leader. Troops also found documents detailing hostage interrogations, the...

Our Friends, The Yemenis

The Yemenis showed their commitment to the fight against terrorism by setting free over a hundred al-Qaeda operatives, on their promise to be good little boys and stop killing people: Yemeni authorities have released 113 militants belonging to the Al Qaeda network including at least five once accused of involvement in the deadly bombing of the USS Cole after they recanted their extremist views, security officials said Thursday. The militants once accused in the USS Cole bombing were later cleared. The 15 Yemeni militants convicted in August of involvement in the 2000 bombing, which killed 17 U.S. sailors, were not released. The 113 men were released during the past two weeks after signing pledges not to carry out terror acts or criminal activities. Wow -- they signed pledges? How tough on crime can the Yemenis get?...

November 26, 2004

ACLU Objects To Passport Modernization

With so many of the 9/11 terrorists able to get through our legal immigration processes, the US government created new requirements for a modernized passport system that would resist counterfeiting and manipulation. The proposed changes include embedding a chip in the cover that can be read at immigration checkpoints and compared to the information inside the passport, allowing border security to catch anyone coming into the US with falsified papers. However, the ACLU has launched objections to the practice, claiming that the new technology will point out Americans abroad and allow others to "skim" private information from the passport: Privacy advocates say the new format - developed in response to security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks - will be vulnerable to electronic snooping by anyone within several feet, a practice called skimming. Internal State Department documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act,...

Was Ransom Paid For Afghan Hostages?

Reuters reports this morning that new questions have arisen regarding the release of three hostages from the grip of Islamist kidnappers in Afghanistan. According to an unnamed Afghani government source, a ransom was paid to the terrorists in exchange for their hostages, a move that the US warned against earlier and that all other governments deny making: A government official, meanwhile, said he understood the hostages were freed on Tuesday after the payment of a ransom, but he did not know by whom it was paid or to whom. "As far as I understand money has been given," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The United States had warned again paying a ransom for the release of the hostages -- Annetta Flanigan of Northern Ireland, Shqipe Hebibi from Kosovo and Philippine diplomat Angelito Nayan -- saying that compromises would only provoke more kidnappings. A former British journalist now running...

Jailed Palestinian Takes A Pass

Marwan Barghouti, currently serving multiple life terms in Israel for his role in planning and execution of several civilian bombings, has withdrawn his name from consideration in the upcoming election to replace Yasser Arafat. His Fatah faction of the PLO reportedly pressured him to endorse Mahmoud Abbas instead: Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi has decided not to run in Palestinian presidential elections, an official said on Friday, following pressure from the ruling Fatah faction to support Mahmoud Abbas. Cabinet minister and group member Qaddoura Fares, who visited him earlier in prison, said Barghouti had called to endorse Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to succeed Yasser Arafat for president in a Jan 9. ballot. "In order to maintain the unity of the movement..(Barghouti) is calling upon the sons of the movement and his supporters to support the movement's nominee Mahmoud Abbas," Qaddoura told reporters in the West Bank town...

November 28, 2004

FBI: Madrid, 9/11 Attacks Linked

The FBI has informed Spain that they have established direct links between the Madrid rail bombings and the 9/11 attacks that touched off the Western response to Islamofascist terror. The AP and ABC reports that the FBI has identified the al-Qaeda leader who helped plan and gave approval to both terrorist plans: The FBI has told Spanish investigators that one of three men believed to have planned the Sept. 11 attacks from Spain in the summer of 2001 also gave the order to carry out the Madrid blasts, the newspaper ABC reported. ... Investigators have long concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were partially planned in Spain in July 2001. Hijacker Mohammed Atta, believed to have piloted one of the airliners that crashed into New York's World Trade Center, visited Spain two months before the attacks and met two men. One was Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, who is being held by...

Sistani Fights Delay In Iraqi Vote

One of the topics we left in the green room for yesterday's Northern Alliance Radio Network program was the calls for a delay in the Iraqi elections, now set for January 30. In the end, we felt that the Ukrainian political crisis was a larger and more urgent story, but the general consensus in the studio was that a postponement would be equivalent to a retreat in the face of terrorism. Apparently Ayatollah Ali Sistani agrees with us, and he has made clear that the Iraqi national elections should be held on schedule: Over the past week, a movement spearheaded by Sunni Arabs to delay the elections has gathered momentum, as they have argued that the nation remains too violent to allow safe voting. Responding to those calls, the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has insisted on keeping the Jan. 30 date. All along, he has argued that elections...

Pakistan Withdraws From Wana

Pakistan has decided it has done all it can with troops in the South Waziristan area of the border regions with Afghanistan and has withdrawn its checkpoints and most of its troops: The Pakistani army announced Saturday that it would withdraw hundreds of troops from a tense tribal region near Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden and his top deputy were believed to be hiding. The withdrawals from the South Waziristan area come after several military operations by thousands of troops against bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and its supporters in recent months. Although the Pakistanis claim that no trace of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri has been found, some still believe the terror masterminds to be hiding in that region. Pakistan, however, has alienated the local tribes during its missions to seek out and destroy al-Qaeda assets in the region, and this move looks like an attempt to mollify...

40 Years Later, Germans Confront Their Immigrant Problem

Forty years after opening the floodgates to Turkish immigration -- and allowing them to form their own subculture without either side working towards integration -- the murder of Theo Van Gogh has finally prompted Germany to insist on assimilation from its Muslim population, the AP reports: Fears that growing alienation between immigrants and majority Germans could lead to strife have prompted politicians including Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to send a message to Muslims immigrants: Learn German, fit in, commit to democratic rules. In Neukoelln, where 80 percent of elementary school students are not German, some civic leaders say the debate underscores something they have said for some time: Immigrants are not going to conform to mainstream German society over time. "Pointing out the problem doesn't make you a racist," said Leopold Bongart, who has taught German language courses in Neukoelln since the 1970s. "We told ourselves that the process in many...

UN Warned To Outlaw Terrorism Or Risk Irrelevancy

The London Telegraph reports that a blue-ribbon panel of "wise men" appointed by Kofi Annan will deliver a report on Thursday warning the United Nations to outlaw terrorism and define it as any attacks intended to target civilians: After decades of argument over whether one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, a group of international "wise men" will this week tell the United Nations to outlaw all terror attacks on civilians or risk losing its moral authority. In a report to be unveiled on Thursday, seen in part by The Telegraph, a panel appointed to reform the UN said it must send "an unequivocal message that terrorism is never an acceptable tactic, even for the most defensible of causes". One would think that the UN would already have defined terrorism, but in fact the General Assembly has refused to pass a definition of terrorism -- out of support for...

December 1, 2004

Barghouti Reconsiders

Last week I posted about jailed Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti declining to run for the Palestinian presidency. His decision caught me by surprise, as I expected Barghouti to use a presidential campaign to embarrass his Israeli jailers, who convicted him of terrorist acts as the chief of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (now renamed the Yasser Arafat Martyrs Brigade). His withdrawal appeared to hold out promise that the Palestinians had finally gotten serious about pursuing peace with Israel. Apparently, my analysis was a bit too optimistic: Associates of Marwan Barghouti said Wednesday that the jailed Palestinian uprising leader has decided to run for president, reversing an earlier decision and throwing Palestinian politics into disarray. ... Barghouti's decision came after he met with his wife and two senior Palestinian officials at an Israeli prison where he is serving multiple life sentences, the associates said on condition of anonymity. Hmmm. The Palestinians either...

December 2, 2004

Tenet Joins Fight Against 9/11 Intelligence Reform

As the debate grows on the 9/11 intelligence-reform bill and the voices of political correctness face increasing challenge, George Tenet added his own voice to the opposition. The Washington Post reports that Tenet objects to severing a national intelligence "czar" from the operatives who collect and analyze the data with an extra level of bureaucracy, a point I made at the time the commission released its report: Former CIA director George J. Tenet yesterday criticized an intelligence restructuring bill's plan to create a director of national intelligence, saying it would separate the new intelligence chief from direct control over the case officers and analysts who are overseas and "taking risks." ... A senior administration official echoed that position privately yesterday, asking "who will brief Congress and the president" under the new proposal? "Since the CIA director would continue to supervise all-source intelligence analysis within the government," said this official, who...

Palestinian Leadership Opposes Barghouti

In a sign that the Palestinians may finally be getting serious about making peace and establishing a stable state in the West Bank, leading Palestinians spoke out against the announced candidacy of Marwan Barghouti, the terrorist mastermind currently serving multiple life sentences in Israel. The New York Times reports in tomorrow's edition that influential Palestinians openly rejected Barghouti's entry into the presidential election: Senior Palestinian figures in the main political group, Fatah, closed ranks on Thursday against the on-again off-again presidential candidacy of the popular Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. The old guard was joined by some prominent younger Fatah militants of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, who once saw Mr. Barghouti, 45, as their leader, but now criticize him for putting himself above Palestinian unity. Outspoken opposition from Israel, including a refusal to release Barghouti and to use him as a negotiating partner,...

December 3, 2004

Ukrainian Rada Presses To Abandon Iraq

In an unpleasant side effect of an otherwise delightful progression of open democracy in Ukraine, the newly-emboldened Rada demanded that the Kuchma government withdraw Ukraine's 1600-troop contingent from Iraq, an unwelcome development so close to the Iraqi elections: Ukraine's parliament voted to demand the withdrawal of the 1,600 Ukrainian troops from Iraq, the Interfax news agency reported. The lawmakers voted by 257 out of 397 present in the 450-member chamber to ask outgoing President Leonid Kuchma to pull out the Ukrainian contingent serving in the US-led coalition force in Iraq. The demand mirrors opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko's campaign position on the war and demonstrates the level of support and courage the Orange Movement has gained in the assembly. As a vote of no-confidence for Kuchma, it's pretty convincing -- roughly a 5:3 ratio of those members in attendance and a 55% majority overall. It gives more evidence that the credibility...

Hamas Softens Its Stance On Israel

For the first time, Hamas announced that the radical terrorist group would work towards coexistence with Israel and support a Palestinian state in the West Bank, even as their leader called it a "stage", the AP reports from Ramallah: In an apparent change in long-standing policy, a top Hamas leader said Friday the militant group would accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as a long-term truce with Israel. ... "Hamas has announced that it accepts a Palestinian independent state within the 1967 borders with a long-term truce," Sheik Hassan Yousef, the top Hamas leader in the West Bank, told The Associated Press, referring to lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. Yousef said the Hamas position was new and called it a "stage." In the past, Hamas has said it would accept a state in the 1967 borders as...

Welcome To Terroristland! It's A Small World (Domination) After All

The London Telegraph reports that Afghanistan plans to make money off of the war that liberated the country from the oppressive rule of the Taliban -- by transforming the notorious hideout of al-Qaeda in the mountains into a tourist trap: The Afghan authorities plan to invigorate the country's fledgling tourist industry by developing Osama bin Laden's Tora Bora mountain hideout as a visitor attraction. Dr Hassamuddin Hamrah, the man in charge, believes that the caves which once housed bin Laden and his fighters, together with the remains of mangled Russian tanks and crashed helicopter gunships from the 1980s, will prove a tourist magnet. ... "We have plans to make a tourist site at the Tora Bora caves. Many Americans wish to go there," Dr Hamrah said. "Our main problem is lack of budget so we are approaching the private sector. We request that anybody, any company, who is interested should...

December 5, 2004

Further Signs Of Israeli-Egyptian Rapprochement

In another significant sign that Egypt and Israel may be drawing closer, the two nations swapped prisoners at the Taba checkpoint today, resolving another irritant between the two nations: Egypt freed an Israeli Arab man convicted of spying in exchange for Israel's release of six Egyptian students Sunday, a swap that signaled a warming of relations that had been severely strained by the four-year-old Palestinian uprising. ... Egypt released Azzam Azzam, who was sentenced in 1997 to 15 years in prison after an Egyptian court convicted him of espionage. At the time, Azzam ran a textile factory in Egypt, and Israel has denied he was an agent. ... Israel, in turn, released six Egyptian students who had sneaked into the country in August and were arrested on suspicion they tried to kidnap Israeli soldiers and commandeer a tank. The swap is the second major development in this past week that...

Pardonnez-Moi, Mon Bombe Est Dans Votre Valise

In a rare moment of levity in the war on terror, the AP reports that French police lost track of explosives they planted in travelers' suitcases in order to train their bomb-sniffing dogs. Their actions caused 90 planes to get delayed around the world: Police at Paris' top airport lost track of a passenger's bag in which plastic explosives were placed to train bomb-sniffing dogs, police said Saturday. Warned that the bag may have gotten on any of nearly 90 flights from Charles de Gaulle, authorities searched planes upon arrival in Los Angeles and New York. ... French police at Charles de Gaulle deliberately placed up to five ounces of plastic explosives into a passenger's luggage Friday evening, police spokesman Pierre Bouquin said. But a "momentary lack of surveillance" led to the bag being lost on a conveyor belt carrying luggage from check-in to planes, he said. Authorities immediately alerted...

December 6, 2004

American Consulate In Saudi Arabia Under Attack

Gunmen of unknown identity shot their way into the American consulate in Jiddah, injuring two people and reportedly taking foreign workers hostage, according to the AP: Attackers using a car struck the heavily guarded U.S. consulate with explosives and machine guns on Monday, injuring several people but no Americans. After a gunbattle inside, one attacker was killed, two were arrested and two others were surrounded, Saudi security officials said. Saudi security forces also said they believed four of the attackers had seized an unknown number of hostages inside the building amid the fighting. Area residents spoke of seeing Saudi forces enter the consulate shortly before a fierce gunbattle was heard inside. A short time later, the gunfire stopped. In Riyadh, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Carol Kalin said two local staff members were injured, but all American staff were safe. Saudi Arabia had been relatively quiet over the past year, although...

December 7, 2004

More Doom And Gloom From Langley

The New York Times rehashes some old news on Iraq in today's edition, as they report on a CIA cable that gives a pessimistic prognosis for Iraq. The cable acknowledges the progress made by the Coalition to some extent but predicts a long and rocky road ahead -- as if that should be news to anyone: The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq. The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient. But over all, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as...

Barghouthi Runs The Mario Cuomo Playbook

First he's in, then he's out. Then he's in after his wife drafts him, but now he's got second thoughts. Mario Cuomo? John Kerry? No, we're talking about Marwan Barghouthi, the living martyr of the Palestinians, who currently resides as a guest of Israel under tight security -- having been convicted of multiple counts of murder from his career running the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Barghouti, it seems, has had second third fourth thoughts about running for the Palestinian Authority presidency: Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi is considering pulling out of a presidential race to avoid splitting his mainstream Fatah faction, an Israeli-Arab lawmaker said after visiting him in jail. ... He said that Barghouthi told him that he planned to hold discussions on a number of unspecified issues with [Mahmoud] Abbas and other Palestinian Authority leaders and then he would "make his decision whether he will take part in the election...

Intelligence Bill Gains Enough Support To Pass

The intelligence bill that encompasses many of the 9/11 Commission's recommended changes in the structure of military and civil bureaucracies in order to consolidate their assets appears assured of passage, now that the main critics of the bill have been mollified by last-minute wording changes. The New York Times reports that Duncan Hunter has agreed to endorse the bill with a new proviso: Congressional leaders reached final agreement Monday allowing passage of a bill to overhaul the nation's intelligence community and enact the major recommendations of the independent Sept. 11 commission, including creation of the job of national intelligence director to force the C.I.A. and other government spy agencies to share intelligence about national security threats. The agreement ended a nearly monthlong stalemate over the bill, which had been endorsed by President Bush and the Sept. 11 commission but had been opposed by a group of Republican lawmakers close to...

Egypt Announces Peace In The Middle East (Film At 11?)

The French news agency AFP reports that Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak has announced a comprehensive peace agreement for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been achieved -- and then clammed up: "An important understanding, that could constitute an agreement in principle, has been reached by Egypt, Israel, the Palestinians and the significant international parties -- the United States and the European Union -- on a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," the official news agency MENA quoted senior Egyptian sources as saying Tuesday. No other information was included in the announcement. We'll be sure to keep our eyes on this situation as it develops. If this turns out to be substantial, the Northern Alliance will cover it as we sub for Hugh Hewitt tonight at 5 pm CT. Be sure to tune us in....

December 8, 2004

Hinzman For President in 2036!

Michelle Malkin reports on the activities of Jeremy Hinzman, a deserter who ran to Canada rather than fulfill his obligation to the Army. Already a darling of the anti-war Left, Hinzman apparently wants to crank up a career in politics, John Kerry style, by reviling his former comrades of the 82nd Airborne (the ones who didn't run squealing into the Great White North) as war criminals: Hinzman and his lawyer plan to argue to Canadian immigration officials that American soldiers are guilty of war crimes and that forcing Hinzman to fight in Iraq would have likely made him a war criminal. Among the witnesses testifying on Hinzman's behalf is former U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey, the Winter Soldier of the 21st century, who claims his platoon killed a bunch of innocent civilians. Massey has been making the rounds in the French media and other America-hating swamps. Beautiful, isn't it?...

Does Anyone Like This Intelligence Reform Bill?

UPDATE: Easily the best analysis of the machinations behind this bill appears on Power Line in a post by Deacon.

December 9, 2004

Bribing Europe Through Palestine

The Bush administration announced a new $20 million aid package to be paid directly to the Palestinian Authority, breaking a long-time reluctance to fund the organization while led by Yasser Arafat. The Washington Post reports that Bush wants to make a gesture of support for Palestinian elections: The money will go straight to the authority, breaking a U.S. restriction on direct financing for the government formerly run by Arafat. It comes as Palestinians are struggling to finance their Jan. 9 presidential election, the logistics of which were agreed upon yesterday by Israel and the Palestinians. Bush views the $20 million as a token of the United States' renewed commitment to jump-starting the peace process during his second term, according to a senior administration official. This is a "new opportunity to assist in the emergence of a responsible, democratic, moderate Palestinian leadership," the official said. Certainly the money will help, although...

Smash Takes On Cowardice

LT Smash has had enough of the media turning refuseniks from the all-volunteer armed services into anti-war superstars, and he's also had more than enough of the deserters themselves. In an open letter to Pablo Paredes, who refused to go aboard his ship for deployment to the Arabian Gulf, Smash points out the essential issue with desertion during wartime and why it's anything but courageous: When you were planning your dramatic statement, did you think for a minute about how this would affect your shipmates? You are a fire control technician on the Sea Sparrow surface-to-air missile system. The Navy doesnt have a bunch of spare FCs sitting in cold storage. Your ship is going to the Arabian Gulf, and will have to pass through the threat arcs of Irans Silkworm anti-ship missiles and in case you havent noticed, were not exactly buddy-buddy with the mullahs these days. The...

December 10, 2004

The Many Fronts Of The War On Terror

Two stories off the wire this morning show the diverse effort put into finding creative ways to wage the war on terror. The Pakistan Daily Times publishes a report this morning stating that an amnesty program offered by the US to Taliban members who willingly surrender their arms and commit to a peaceful political process appears to have made significant headway: The US-led military in Afghanistan said on Wednesday that it had been contacted by Taliban members willing to lay down their weapons following an arms-for-amnesty offer by the US envoy to the country. US military commanders operating in south and southeastern Afghanistan have been contacted by Taliban members declaring their desire to join the peaceful political process, the US-led military spokesman, Major Mark McCann, told a news briefing in Kabul. This new strategy splits the enemy into hardliners and pragmatists and allows the pragmatists a way out of the...

Powell: No Negotiations Until After Elections

Colin Powell threw a bit of cold water on Palestinian hopes for new negotiations on statehood, declaring that the US would stick by the "road map" and any other negotiations before the Palestinian Authority elections would be premature: Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Friday an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal could not be rushed, as Palestinians must first elect a president and both sides must begin to carry out the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan. "We can't rush it and the road map is the way and the road map is quite detailed with respect to the obligations and the responsibilities of the parties," he told a news conference. His words may dent Palestinian hopes for a quick return to negotiations leading to a Palestinian state. Everyone feels a sense of optimism that progress can finally occur with the death of Yasser Arafat -- the palpable relief from all concerned...

Drop Negative Attitudes Towards Israel: Egypt

Buffalo Springfield once sang, "There's something happening here, and what it is ain't exactly clear" -- which would provide an excellent analysis about Egypt's sudden fondness for the Sharon government in Israel. After warning Palestinians earlier this month that the Sharon government afforded them the best chance for a lasting peace, the official government news service editorialized that negative attitudes towards Israel in Egypt should be shunned: Egyptian-Israeli relations occupy an important place in Egypt's foreign policy and the first serious signs of openness in [Egyptian-Israeli] relations that we are now observing are important. ... In addition, the development of relations with Israel and interest in [these relations] can open a window [of opportunity] that will free Egyptian-Israeli relations from any form of reliance upon [Egypt's] relations with the U.S. It is not natural, necessary, or essential for relations with Israel to be influenced by [Egypt's] relations with the U.S....

December 12, 2004

Vatican Supports Tariq Aziz

One of the greater disappointments of the Iraq phase of the war for this Catholic was the reaction of the Vatican to the effort to unseat Saddam's genocidal government. The Vatican ignored the suffering, torture, and mass murder of Iraqis by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athists in order to buy peace at any cost, claiming that the failing sanctions regime and continuing the twelve-year "negotiations" could still free Iraqis from their plight. Now that Saddam's regime has been removed and the full extent of the corruption and genocide he caused has been revealed, one would expect the Vatican to act in at least mild repentance for averting their eyes to evil. Instead, the Vatican now supports one of the murderous regime's top officials, trying to get Saddam's right-hand man and Western-style mouthpiece, Tariq Aziz, off the hook: Saddam Hussein's former foreign minister and right-hand man has persuaded sympathisers in the Vatican to...

More Signs Of Progress In Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

After an unexpected full-court press by Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak over the past month, events seem to be accelerating towards better relations in the dispute between Israel, the Palestinians, and the larger Arab world. Israel announced plans to release hundreds of jailed Palestinians in order to both thank Egypt and to bring more enthusiasm to the Palestinian Authority elections to be held next month. On the same day, the Palestinians have finally attempted to reconcile with the Kuwaitis whose oppression they once cheered: The prisoner release was part of a pact with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. That accord resulted in the release last week of six Egyptian students in exchange for the return of Azzam Azzam, an Israeli jailed by Egypt on espionage charges. The new release, which could involve 100-200 of the 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, would only include those not involved in the killing of Israelis...

Barghouti's New Pre-Re-Entry Withdrawal

Marwan Barghouti remains on target in his quest to become the Moqtada al-Sadr of Palestinian politics. In yet another tiresome reversal, Bargouti will now withdraw from the Palestinian presidential election: Imprisoned uprising leader Marwan Barghouti is dropping out the Jan. 9 election to replace Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority, associates said Sunday. ... Barghouti's wife, Fadwa, called a news conference in Ramallah to read a letter from her husband harshly critical of the Fatah leadership but implying that he would pull out of the race. Associates said Fadwa would formally withdraw his candidacy on Monday. His harsh criticism of Fatah leadership springs from their sudden focus on creating the possibility of a negotiated settlement on statehood with Israel and the sudden dearth of financing now that their sponsor Saddam Hussein got pulled out of his spider hole. Before Arafat's death, Fatah may have been pleased to run...

December 14, 2004

Abbas Says Intifadas A "Mistake", Calls For End To Attacks

Palestinian interim leader and presidential candidate Mahmoud Abbas today called the intifadas against Israel a "mistake" and called for an end to violence as a means of ending the occupation, the AP reports: The armed uprising against Israel is a mistake and must end, interim Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview published Tuesday, signaling his determination to change direction after Yasser Arafat's death. ... In an interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat published Tuesday, Abbas said Palestinians should resist Israeli occupation without resorting to violence. It is important to "keep the uprising away from arms because the uprising is a legitimate right of the people to express their rejection of the occupation by popular and social means," Abbas said. "Using the weapons was harmful and has got to stop," Abbas said, referring to shootings and bombings by Palestinian militants that have killed hundreds of Israelis since...

Getting Closer To Omar (Updated)

The London Telegraph reports that Afghani security forces captured a key lieutenant of Mullah Omar and a Taliban commander yesterday after a tip from an inside informant: The personal security chief for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has been captured in southern Afghanistan. The arrest of Toor Mullah Naqibullah Khan as he travelled in a van to Kandahar, gives hope to US and local forces searching for other key Taliban figures and Osama bin Laden. "We have arrested top Taliban figures Toor Mullah Naqibullah Khan and Mullah Angar on the way between Arghandab and Kandahar," provincial security forces said. "They were carrying a satellite telephone and some important documents. We are hopeful we will arrest more Taliban figures and we hope that we can arrest their leader Mullah Omar." Finding a satellite phone on the prisoners is an interesting development. Most of the al-Qaeda hierarchy had given up on satellite...

December 15, 2004

Pentagon Not Playing The Grinch

The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon will not transmit packages or letters addressed to "any soldier", a common practice at the holidays that has been banned since the 9/11 attacks: The Defense Department has a stern message for those considering playing Santa Claus this holiday season to troops abroad: If you don't know them, don't send it. The agency is reminding the public that it does not accept unsolicited packages -- even holiday gifts -- to troops stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, the Pentagon explains that unsolicited gifts not only overtaxes their mail-delivery system, delaying packages and letters from family and friends back home, but it also represents a security risk that they hardly need in a time of war. The Pentagon suggests a reasonable alternative -- giving our thanks and our gifts, letters, etc to the families of those...

Iraqi Terrorists Target Sistani Aide While Sunnis Sign Onto Election

A bombing in Karbala attempted to kill a key aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in order to discourage the upcoming elections, the AP reports. The bombing killed seven people, mostly bodyguards, and wounded Sistani's aide: The attack in Karbala, which wounded the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, came hours after the campaign kicked off, with Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi announcing his candidacy. Allawi's defense minister accused Iranian and Syrian intelligence agents of helping insurgents in Iraq. ... The blast went off at the western gate of the Imam Hussein Shrine in Karbala, killing seven people and wounding 31, said Dr. Abdul-Abbas Al-Timimi, director of Al-Hussein hospital. Al-Sistani's representative, Sheik Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalayee, was among the wounded, and an al-Sistani spokesman said al-Karbalayee was the intended target of the blast. Several of his bodyguards were among the dead and wounded, the spokesman Hamed al-Khafaf told...

December 18, 2004

One Of The Chief Rats Abandon The Sunken Ship

Tariq Aziz, the Chaldean Iraqi that helped prop up the genocidal maniac Saddam Hussein in his quest for first a pan-Arab and then pan-Islam empire, has now decided that indiscretion is the better part of avoiding the Iraqi execution squad. MS-NBC reports that Aziz has been warming up his singing voice and could become the star attraction at the trials of Saddam and his aides: David Kay a former U.S. adviser in Iraq spent months questioning Aziz and others. He says Aziz quickly turned on Saddam and could testify at any trial. "He talks about direct orders to murder, to assassinate, to kill," says Kay. Even more interesting, the US and the Volcker Commission intend on interviewing Aziz about the UN Oil-For-Food program. As the face of the Hussein regime and the de facto foreign minister, Aziz conducted most of the regime's diplomacy and would have critical knowledge...

The Wheels Of Iraqi Justice Begin To Turn

After being liberated by the Anglo-American coalition of nations in spring 2003, one of the big questions was whether the Coalition would try the captured members of the Saddam Hussein regime for war crimes, la Nuremberg, or if the Iraqis could establish a system of justice that could handle the task themselves. Today the Iraqis begin to give the world its answer as investigative judges start questioning the prisoners as the opening of the trial process: Iraqi judges on Saturday started interrogating Saddam Hussein's former defense minister and the notorious general known as Chemical Ali, who is accused of gassing thousands of Kurds in the 1980s, the lead judge said. The investigative hearings for Sultan Hashim Ahmad, Saddam's last defense chief, and Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali mark the opening of the trial process the first among 11 Saddam deputies who, along with Saddam himself, face...

A Slow Syrian Retreat In Lebanon?

Syria seems to have responded to international pressure -- and the presence of 150,000 American troops on its eastern border -- and has "redeployed" its Lebanese contingent, moving them closer to Syria and out of the Beirut area: Syria, under intense pressure to quit Lebanon, pulled out its security forces from three key positions in Beirut and north Lebanon on Saturday and redeployed them in eastern Lebanon. The Lebanese army said in a statement the security positions that were vacated were in Beirut's international airport, the capital's Shi'ite southern suburb and one in northern Lebanon. Syria has around 14,000 troops in its tiny neighbor. Syria has been pressured for years to end its occupation of Lebanon, but has resisted closing out its second front against Israel. Since the American invasion of Iraq, however, Syria has learned that the politics of the region have changed rather dramatically. With George Bush's re-election,...

December 19, 2004

Chemical Ali's Salad Bar

The judicial investigation of Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known to Westerners as "Chemical Ali," has already revealed more about the character of the man than expected. The London Telegraph reports that tapes of Ali's tirades show the extent of the inhumanity endemic to the Saddam Hussein regime: Gruesome tapes of Saddam Hussein's most feared henchman threatening to cut up his thousands of victims "like cucumbers" have been disclosed as Iraqi war-crimes judges began court proceedings against him yesterday. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin and the man nicknamed "Chemical Ali" for gassing up to 5,000 Kurds, is also heard vowing to swamp Kurdish villages with clouds of poison for up to 15 days as part of his brutal campaign of suppression in the late 1980s. In chilling words that foreshadow the mass graves that now litter the country, he gives warning that the body count will be so great that Iraqi...

AQ In Decline In Saudi Arabia

Al-Qaeda has apparently declined in stature in its own Wahhabist birthplace to such an extent that its strategies have had to shift towards avoiding Saudi targets, curtailing a key AQ goal of undermining and overthrowing the Saudi royal family. Today's Washington Post reports that AQ operations have a much narrower focus than before: Al Qaeda forces in Saudi Arabia have shifted their strategy and are now almost exclusively searching for U.S. and other Western targets in the kingdom while avoiding attacks on domestic institutions in a bid to strengthen their flagging network, according to security officials and Saudi experts on radical groups. While al Qaeda retains its primary goal of eventually toppling the Saudi royal family -- as Osama bin Laden made clear in an audio recording released Thursday -- an 18-month campaign of car bombings, gun battles and kidnappings has so far failed to generate many new recruits and...

Palestinians Choosing Annihilation

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Palestinian leadership has once again insisted that they will never accept any "settlement" that does not include an absolute right of return for refugees -- a right that would completely destabilize democratic Israel and touch off the population bomb that Palestinians hope to use to destroy it: The Palestinian Authority will never give up the right of return for all refugees to their original homes inside Israel, Zakariya al-Agha, head of the PLO's Refugees Department, said on Saturday. ... The Palestinian leadership, [al-Agha] emphasized, will never sign any deal with Israel that abolishes the right of all the refugees to return to their original homes. It is "a red line for the Palestinian leadership that can't be trespassed," he said. "There won't be stability in the region until each one of the refugees feels that he has attained his freedom to return to his...

December 21, 2004

Death To The Infidel! And Where The Hell Is My Money?

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, currently in jail in Britain for incitement to murder and subject of an American extradition effort for terrorist activities, wants the West to pay. Specifically, he wants Britain to pay for the welfare benefits he claims that are owed him: Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who is in a British jail on incitement to murder charges, is to sue welfare officials for thousands of pounds in extra state benefits. Hamza, who is due in court next month on incitement to murder charges, claims he has been denied benefits worth 200 pounds a week for nearly three years, The Sun newspaper said Tuesday. His family are already taking in benefits worth over 1,000 pounds a week, it said. Meanwhile, he is kept at the taxpayers' expense in jail, has his own personal nurse and even received a new hook worth 5,000 pounds, which is...

Boarded-Up Bethlehem Israel's Fault?

The UN released a typically biased report about the critical economic condition in the town of Bethlehem, whence our Christmas celebration springs. It notes the rapid decline in tourism and blames Israeli defensive actions: Urban Bethlehem, with a population of about 61,000, is now surrounded by nine Israeli settlements, roads restricted to Israelis, a multitude of checkpoints, 78 physical obstacles, and an Israeli barrier nearing completion on two sides of the town to protect against suicide attacks and other violence, the report said. As a result, Bethlehem has become isolated from the rest of the West Bank and most importantly from Jerusalem which is only a few miles away, it said. Tourism has plummeted from a monthly average of 91,726 visitors in 2000 to 7,249 in the first 10 months of 2004, a slight increase over 2003, it said. Since Bethlehem's residents rely overwhelmingly on the tourism sector, the economy...

December 22, 2004

Remembering That We're At War (Updated)

Yesterday's attack in Mosul that left 15 American soldiers dead, along with scores of others wounded, serves as a reminder to Americans that we remain at war with terrorists, and not that the terrorists are winning. However, judging from some of the rhetoric that one finds coming from TV analysts, it's apparent that this lesson is somehow lost on our fellow citizens. According to initial news accounts, the terrorists mounted a rocket attack on a vulnerable position within our base in Mosul, a forward station that expects to be targeted for attack. The Washington Post updates that with more ominous speculation: The explosion, which came at noon, was at first believed to be caused by a mortar round or rocket that pierced the white canvas tent that serves as mess hall at Forward Operating Base Marez, near the Mosul airport. But in an online assertion of responsibility for the attack,...

December 23, 2004

How Not To Dress For Your Flight

Michelle Malkin takes the Transportation Security Administration and its Federal Air Marshal service to task this morning, and for good reason. Earlier this month, Michelle reported on a silly dress code that the FAM hierarchy insisted on enforcing with its agents. The dress code required collared shirts and sport coats at a minimum, making the air marshals rather easily identifiable in an age of casual wear, especially while traveling. In fact, Malkin noted at the time that FAM chief Thomas Quinn threatened to suspend dozens of air marshals at Reagan International when he spotted them wearing non-conforming clothes. After her initial report, Quinn had spokespeople hit the cable talk circuit denying any dress code exists. However, Michelle had struck a nerve with the air marshals, and now has plenty of sources that pass along information to the contrary. She posts a memo from a SAC citing a Quinn directive that...

Rummy Steps Up

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a surprise visit to the troops in Iraq, spending Christmas Eve with the men and women in Mosul where a bomber killed twenty-two earlier this week: U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on a surprise Christmas Eve visit with the troops three days after the devastating attack on a U.S. military dining hall here, told soldiers he remained confident of defeating the insurgency and stabilizing Iraq, while noting that to some "it looks bleak." "There's no doubt in my mind, this is achievable," Rumsfeld, who flew here under tight security, told a couple of hundred 1st Brigade soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division at their commander's headquarters. He promised them that later in life they will look back and feel pride at having contributed to a mission of historic importance. "When it looks bleak, when one worries about how it's going to come out, when...

December 25, 2004

While We Gather Around The Christmas Tree ...

... our brothers in Christ living in Iraq hide around theirs, afraid to demonstrate their Christianity or celebrate Christmas in public. The atttacks on churches by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has made the Chaldean and Orthodox communities in Iraq frightened into silence for this holiday season: Huddled with his family around a kerosene heater, Sirab Suleyman, a 28-year-old Iraqi Christian, retreats into memories of Christmases past. Before the church bombings, the threats against Christian businesses and the gathering exodus of Iraq's Christian minority, there was a time when Suleyman and his Muslim friends used to spend Christmas caroling in the streets, enjoying each other's company. "Before the war, Muslims and Christians used to celebrate Christmas together," he said, as he rubbed his hands for warmth in his modest living room. "Muslims used to visit their Christian friends and greet them. It was a true celebration. That's over now." Not all Iraqi...

December 27, 2004

Israel Frees 159 Prisoners, Abbas Not Satisfied

As part of Israel's attempt to exploit the diplomatic opening left by the death of Yasser Arafat and to strengthen the hand of Abu Mazen/Mahmoud Abbas in upcoming Palestinian elections, 159 Palestinians were released from Israeli jails today. True to form, Abbas declared the exercise wholly unsatisfactory: Israel freed 159 Palestinian prisoners Monday as a gesture to Egypt and moderate new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, but he called for a "serious release" of thousands of security detainees. Abbas, trying to persuade Palestinian militants to stop fighting to help revive talks on Palestinian statehood with Israel, has made prisoner releases part of his campaign for a Jan. 9 presidential election after Yasser Arafat's death. Palestinian leaders want all of the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel released, even (and maybe especially) those who murdered Israeli civilians in pizzerias and buses, and their leadership. Abbas also made headlines this weekend by declaring...

December 28, 2004

Osama Demands Boycott, Sunnis Respond: Coincidence?

On the day that Osama bin Laden issued a call for Muslims to boycott the upcoming Iraqi elections, the country's largest Sunni party pulled out of the elections, claiming that they should be delayed by six months or more: The largest political party representing Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority announced Monday that it would drop out of the Jan. 30 election, dealing a fresh blow to the vote's credibility on the same day the top Shiite Muslim candidate survived a car bombing. The withdrawal of the Iraqi Islamic Party, combined with the assassination attempt on cleric Abdul Aziz Hakim, heightened concerns that the parliamentary election may produce a lopsided result, further alienating Sunni areas where the armed insurgency is growing. The withdrawal of the Islamic Party may cause a loss of some credibility amongst the Sunni in Iraq, but the Sunni as a group hardly have supported the concept of democracy...

December 29, 2004

Nuclear Weapons Out Of Al-Qaeda's Reach?

The Washington Post starts a three-part series today on the threat of nuclear terrorism which concludes that the threat of a chemical or biological attack is more likely. Unless al-Qaeda can get high-level assistance from Russian or Pakistani nuclear forces in detonating the devices, nuclear weapons appear to be outside their capability. Experts have concluded that AQ does not have the capacity to manufacture its own nuclear devices, which means that they would have to steal or purchase one. However, setting off a nuclear bomb requires a high level of expertise, as the weapons have safeguards built into them to avoid such a scenario from playing out: Newer Russian weapons, for example, are equipped with heat- and time-sensitive locking systems, known as permissive action links, that experts say would be extremely difficult to defeat without help from insiders. "You'd have to run it through a specific sequence of events, including...

Tear Down This Wall (And/Or We'll Kill You)

Mahmoud Abbas apparently tried to reach Reaganesque levels of rhetoric this afternoon while campaigning through West Bank towns for the presidential election. He stopped in Tulkarem and Qalqiliya and told crowds gathered there that Israel had to tear down the wall in order to get peace: Interim Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas made a campaign run Wednesday through West Bank towns living in the shadow of Israel's separation barrier, urging Israel to tear down the huge structure that he said would never help peace. ... "I say to our neighbors ... no fence will bring peace or bring you security," Abbas told a rally at a Tulkarem stadium just 500 yards from the barrier. ... Later, Abbas traveled to the nearby town of Qalqiliya, which is almost entirely cut off by the barrier. Abbas toured the wall and addressed a crowd of several hundred supporters. "We hope the Israelis will take...

Lieberman: No Delay In Iraqi Elections

Senator Joe Lieberman told the American media today that Iraqi elections must go forward as scheduled, negating a push for delay that had started to gather some momentum among the mainstream punditry: Sen. Joe Lieberman, traveling in the Middle East Wednesday, said there is strong support in Iraq for the Jan. 30 election, and postponing it would only be a victory for the insurgents. In a telephone call from Tel Aviv, Israel, the Connecticut Democrat said conditions in Iraq, including an increase in trained Iraqi security forces, have improved since his last visit in July. And he said the escalating violence aimed at intimidating Iraqis to postpone the election or not vote is not working in most of the country. Lieberman could have won the last presidential election if the Democrats had been smart enough to nominate him. Instead, they ran their worst candidate since Michael Dukakis and wound up...

Iraqi Terrorists Get Stupid -- Really Stupid

In the aftermath of the Mosul bombing last week, the Washington Post reported comments made by former DIA analyst Jeffrey White that the next phase could be a full frontal assault on an American military base. At the time, I wrote that such an attack would be so blindingly stupid that American military planners should welcome it. I also wrote that Iraqi terrorists were lunatics, not idiots, and that the Saddam remnants knw better than to take on American forces in open battle. Apparently I overestimated the intelligence of the enemy: United States troops and warplanes killed at least 25 insurgents who used car bombs and rocket-propelled grenades to try to overrun an American combat outpost in Mosul on Wednesday afternoon, the American military said. It was the fiercest fighting the restive northern city has seen in weeks. ... The attack began about 3:45 p.m., when insurgents armed with a...

Operation Pentagon Patriots Scheduled For Monday

After receiving and posting an e-mail from an active-duty career officer at the Pentagon regarding the demoralizing effects of walking past anti-military moonbats every day, I had hoped that a few readers in the DC area could put together a small demonstration of support. I'd hoped that even a few people could help keep spirits high among those working tirelessly for our security and freedom. Am I happy to tell you how wrong I was to set my expectations so low! Thanks to Pierre at the Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill blog and Kfir Alia at Protest Warrior, we may have started something that will not only perk up the people entering the Metro gate at the Pentagon but will show DC and the media just how much support America has for its fighting men and women. Kfir e-mailed me today with the good news: Operation Pentagon Patriots is...

December 31, 2004

Did Abu Marwan Talk?

A few days after the capture of Abu Marwan, the leader of an insurgent affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Coalition forces captured almost 50 terrorists in Saddam Hussein's hometown: U.S. troops rounded up 49 suspected guerrillas near Saddam Hussein's hometown on Friday, a day after Iraq's most violent rebel groups warned voters against taking part in crucial elections for a constitutional assembly on Jan. 30. Soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division detained the suspects during a midnight raid in Duluiyah, 45 miles north of Baghdad, codenamed Operation Powder River, the U.S. military said. The US and Iraqi forces withheld notice of Abu Marwan's capure for six days, a normal procedure that allows for confusion and surprise when dealing with terrorist networks. It also allows for American intelligence agents to interrogate the detainees. The two events may not be connected, but the coincidence certainly appears provocative....

Mrs. Anthrax Wants Your Sympathy

The lawyers working for Saddam's ghoul squad wants the court to show some mercy to one of their clients, Dr. Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash. Dr. Ammash is better known to Americans by her nickname, Mrs. Anthrax, for her work in developing biological weapons for the genocidal regime: The jailed Iraqi microbiologist dubbed Mrs Anthrax is seriously ill and should be freed, an Iraqi lawyer has said. Dr Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash is dying from cancer, according to Badih Aref - who represents imprisoned former Iraqi deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. The lawyer said his client had asked him to help Dr Ammash, who was in "terrible pain". Ammash reportedly had breast cancer before the fall of Saddam but had been in remission. Now her lawyers want her freed to get treatment for a relapse, in order to free her from her pain. Well, at the risk of seeming somewhat callous...

January 1, 2005

Iraqis Get Enthusiastic For Elections

Over the past three months, all we've heard about elections in Iraq is a steady drumbeat of pessimism -- that the violence of the so-called insurgency will keep Iraqis away from the polls, and even that the Iraqis don't truly want democracy. Despite our men and women in Iraq telling everyone they can that this meme doesn't apply in their experience, the mainstream media in America insists on reinforcing this dreadful analysis with every terrorist bombing, making the Islamist strategy pay off in spades. Tomorrow's Washington Post takes a surprising point of view instead: The number of Iraqis making sure they are properly registered to vote has surged dramatically, officials said Saturday, calling the rise evidence of enthusiasm for the Jan. 30 elections despite continuing security concerns that have blocked the process in two provinces. After a slow start to the six-week registration process that began Nov. 1, the number...

January 2, 2005

Syria Injects Itself Into Iraqi Elections

Syria has started an initiative to facilitate voting amongst its Iraqi expatriate community in the upcoming elections, according to the AP: Iraqi expatriates in Syria will have the opportunity to vote in this month's Iraqi elections under an agreement signed Sunday between the Syrian government and the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration. More than 250,000 Iraqis are believed to be living in Syria. Many of them fled here to escape worsening security conditions since the onset of the U.S.-led war that ousted former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein last year. The agreement says Iraqis wishing to cast their votes in Syria must prove their eligibility and register at a Damascus election center from Jan. 17 to 23. Polling will take place over three days, from Jan. 28 to 30. Does anyone in the State Department think this is a bad idea? The Iraqis in Syria likely will be the Saddam loyalists...

January 3, 2005

Osama's Nightmare

Claude Salhani at the Washington Times presents an analysis of Osama bin Laden's reaction to the two outbreaks of democracy in Southwest Asia this month, and talks about how desperate the terror chief is to stop them: Osama bin Laden, the man who since 9/11 brought fear into the hearts of millions, is now running scared. The master terrorist is afraid; he is very afraid. What frightens bin Laden today are not American B-2 super-stealth bombers capable of dropping tons of high explosives on him from unseen heights, nor the tens of thousands of troops and legions of intelligence officers looking for him since September 2001. He knows how to cope with them. What frightens bin Laden today is the ballot box. The leader of al-Qaida appears particularly concerned over the prospects of pending elections in two Arab countries -- the Palestinian Authority and Iraq -- both scheduled for later...

January 6, 2005

Don't Get Your Hopes Up

USA Today and the AP have two different analyses of the reception US aid to tsunami victims has received from Muslims in the Middle East. Barbara Slavin and Kathy Kiely take a rosier view of the effect on the Islamic world that our efforts may bring: U.S. relations with Indonesia have been strained in recent years. Though most Indonesians practice a moderate form of Islam, the country is home to a number of extremist groups that have advocated violence against Christians and other non-Muslims. The U.S.-led war in Iraq prompted protests in some Indonesian cities; a group known as the Islamic Defenders Front claimed to have signed up 400 volunteers in "jihad registrations." But in Aceh, the province where Islam first took root in Indonesia and where a less tolerant, more conservative form of the faith is practiced than elsewhere in the country, residents this week were showering praise on...

January 7, 2005

Islamists Begin Infiltrating Tsunami Relief Efforts

As predicted, Islamists have begun their own relief efforts in Indonesia in an attempt to establish their credentials in the Muslim nation. In Banda Aceh, the Washington Times reports that Western military units providing humanitarian assistance have been warned about the potential security risks: An extremist Islamic group with links to al Qaeda has set up relief operations in Aceh province on Sumatra island, raising concerns that international relief workers will become terrorist targets as in Iraq. Amid hundreds of aid workers near the airport in Banda Aceh, Laskar Mujahidin posted an English-language sign that reads "Islamic Law Enforcement." The group, known for hunting down and killing Christians during a long-running sectarian conflict in another part of Indonesia, said yesterday it is collecting corpses, distributing food and spreading Islamic teachings among refugees. U.S., Australian and South Korean government officials said they were aware of security threats in the region and...

Accountability At The CIA?

The inspector-general of the CIA has completed his investigation into the agency's performance prior to 9/11 and has readied his report to Congress, according to the New York Times. Douglas Jehl reports that the conclusion reached by John Helgerson points to George Tenet and Director of Operations James L. Pavitt for poor performance and providing inadequate counterterrorism resources: An internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that officials who served at the highest levels of the agency should be held accountable for failing to allocate adequate resources to combating terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to current and former intelligence officials. The conclusion is spelled out in a near-final version of a report by John Helgerson, the agency's inspector general, who reports to Congress as well as to the C.I.A. Among those most sharply criticized in the report, the officials said, are George J. Tenet, the former...

Rumsfeld Wants Another Set Of Eyes On Iraq

One of the recent memes abounding on the Left these days is that George Bush and his administration surrounds itself with "yes-men", people who agree so closely with Bush's policies that Bush gets no dissenting information. (They also claim he's a puppet, which seems a bit contradictory to me.) The biggest issue for this meme is the war on terror and specifically in the Iraq theater, where Democrats claim the administration has lost touch with reality. Those people should delight in the presence of Donald Rumsfeld if that is what they believe. The Defense Secretary has selected a retired four-star general, Gary E. Luck, to take a team of analysts into Iraq and perform an open-ended review of the situation and progress there: The Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual "open-ended" review of the military's entire Iraq policy, including troop...

January 8, 2005

Nabbing Another Terrorist Leader In Mosul

Carrying out terrorist operations contains a certain amount of risk, as operatives get exposed during planning and rehearsals and witnesses watch as action unfolds. These risks usually get minimized by using "cells" to shield higher leadership in the organization. So it is surprising that the US has captured its second major leader of the Zarqawi organization within hours of each other, this time the chief of operations in the Mosul area: A statement identified the man as Abdul Aziz Sa'dun Ahmed Hamduni, also known as Abu Ahmed, and said he had assumed command of "terrorist operations" in the northern city of Mosul. He had served as the deputy of the top Mosul militant leader identified as Abu Talha, the statement said. "Abu Ahmed admitted to receiving money and weapons from Abu Talha as well as coordinating and conducting terrorist attacks in Mosul, the statement said. It said Hamduni was detained...

January 9, 2005

A Notable Lack Of Enthusiasm

The long-awaited elections in the West Bank and Gaza seem to have come a bit of a cropper. Despite the high hopes of many involved in the peace process, the Palestinians themselves have demonstrated a curious and disappointing lack of enthusiasm, with turnout so low that the polls were left open an additional two hours to get more votes: Mahmoud Abbas, the candidate of Arafat's ruling Fatah movement, was expected to win easily. But he was struggling to capture a clear mandate to push forward with his agenda of resuming peace talks with Israel and reforming the corruption-riddled Palestinian Authority. Palestinians initially said polls were being kept open another two hours because of heavy turnout. Subsequently, however, officials said the polls were being kept open to encourage turnout, which was only about 30 percent of 1.8 million eligible voters by noon local time (5 a.m. EST). The poll extension came...

January 10, 2005

The "Landslide" Of Abbas

The election victory of Mahmoud Abbas gets the "landslide" treatment in the world press this morning, despite low turnout and an election commission that changed the voting rules halfway through the day. At least the British newspaper Guardian acknowledges the problems with the election in its coverage: Mahmoud Abbas last night won a landslide victory in the Palestinian presidential election and was today expected to outline his vision of a post-Yasser Arafat future. ... Mr Barghouti praised the process as a victory for Palestinian democracy, although earlier he had complained that thousands had been unable to vote. The central election commission changed voting procedures midway through the election, keeping polling stations open an additional two hours and allowing voters to cast their ballots at any location, not just in their hometowns, One election official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the changes came after heavy pressure from Mr Abbas's Fatah...

January 13, 2005

The Courage Of Iraqi Election Workers

Today's New York Times takes a fair look at the men and women most at risk in Iraq's upcoming elections -- the workers themselves. Christine Hauser paints a portrait of a group literally under fire for trying to bring their dream of self-government to the Iraqi people: Threatened, attacked, kidnapped and killed, Iraq's election workers are finding that being at the forefront of the electoral process means surviving the frontlines of an insurgency determined to stop it. Things are so bad that one of the officials from the Independent Electoral Commission, Adil al-Lami, compared the workers to a clandestine political movement. "They function like an underground," he said in an interview. This particular worker says he does it to serve his country. "There are a lot of people around the world who also would fight for what I do," he said after finishing his day recently at the election commission....

Living In Denial On The River Jordan

With the election of Mahmoud Abbas, all sides expect the Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table with new motivation to reach a deal ending the 37-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The last such serious negotiations occurred in 2000, when a recalcitrant Yasser Arafat refused to back down from any of his demands, touching off a second intifada and forcing Israel to finally get serious about eliminating terrorist leaders. Now, with a peaceful transition of leadership accomplished by the Palestinian Authority, Abbas can finally become a legitimate -- and hopefully serious -- negotiating partner with Ariel Sharon. However, Abbas fanned the flames of the most radical planks in the Palestinian platform and raised hopes beyond reason that he would deliver Jerusalem and the so-called "right of return" to Israel. The New York Times reports on the effect Abbas' campaign has had on Palestinian refugees...

News Flash To Terrorists: Saving Lives Is More Attractive Than Blood-Drinking Murder

Australian News reports this morning that the massive tsunami-relief staged by the "stingy" Western nations has had a profound effect on victims. Many in the heavily-Muslim Indonesian areas most affected by the killer waves now see the US, Australia, and other Western nations in a much more positive light. This has caused dismay in predictable circles: THE spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiah says he is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of Aceh's tsunami survivors because of the humanitarian assistance from Australian and US military forces. A spokesman for Abu Bakar Bashir said the Indonesian cleric, who is on trial for terrorism, regarded the relief operations by Australian and US military personnel as a dangerous development, overshadowing the role of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI). "We are suspicious of the presence of foreign soldiers and their show of force and the minimum publicity given to assistance from Arab...

January 14, 2005

Does This Sound Like It Was Ordered From On High?

The more that one hears of the testimony in Spc. Charles Graner's court-martial over the Abu Ghraib abuses, the less supportable that a high-level conspiracy to commit war crimes were at the heart of them. The New York Times manages to bury the relevant portions of the testimony near the bottom of their report: Megan Ambuhl, who has been discharged from the military for taking part in the events seen in the photographs, said interrogators had ordered her to humiliate male detainees by pointing and laughing at them as they showered. Interrogators, she said, "encouraged us all the time." "We were all going to save the lives of the soldiers who were outside the wires," she testified. "The detainees had information that the interrogators had to find out." Questioned by the prosecution, Ms. Ambuhl acknowledged that she had been sexually involved with Specialist Graner for a month before the investigation...

Graner Convicted

Spc. Charles Graner was convicted in his court martial on all specifications against him, putting him at risk of 15 1/2 years in prison: Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., the reputed ringleader of a band of rogue guards at the Abu Ghraib prison, was convicted Friday of abusing Iraqi detainees in a case that sparked international outrage when photographs were released that showed reservists gleefully abusing prisoners. ... The jury of four Army officers and six senior enlisted men rejected the defense argument that Graner and other guards were merely following orders from intelligence agents at Abu Ghraib when they roughed up the detainees. The so-called "following orders" defense extended its long and failed history from Nuremberg forward to today. It appears that the jury rejected the idea that Graner operateed under any orders when he sexually abused and physically beat Iraqi prisoners, along with other members of his unit...

January 15, 2005

Palestinian Elections Rigged: Workers

In a further confirmation of the corruption and machinations behind the Palestinian elections last weekend, dozens of election workers walked off their jobs protesting Mahmoud Abbas' victory: Forty-six members of the Palestinian election commission, including top managers, resigned Saturday, saying they were pressured by Mahmoud Abbas' campaign and intelligence officials to abruptly change voting procedures during the Jan. 9 presidential poll. Two senior members of the commission, Ammar Dwaik and Baha al-Bakri, resigned early Saturday, and officials later said 44 more members resigned. Six top election officials were among those who resigned. The resignations raised questions about Sunday's vote giving Abbas an overwhelming victory with 62.3 percent, though the officials who quit said the alleged irregularities did not fundamentally affect the final vote tally. The resignations didn't raise the questions, or at least the questions shouldn't have waited for them to be raised. Last week, newspapers and broadcasters around the...

January 17, 2005

The Palestinian Three-Step

Mahmoud Abbas has called for an end to attacks on Israeli citizens in a move that will either prove his control over the regions or present the world with yet another Palestinian three-step: Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has ordered his security forces to try to prevent militant attacks on Israelis, a Palestinian cabinet minister has said. Qadoura Fares said Mr Abbas gave orders for all violence to be stopped, "including attacks against Israel". ... Reports say Mr Abbas is due to travel to Gaza on Monday to try to persuade militant groups to agree to a ceasefire. If Abbas can end the violence against Israeli citizens, then I find this a promising development. However, I remain deeply skeptical of both his desire and his power to do so. The Palestinians have played this game for decades now between the three power centers of Palestinian politics: the PA (Fatah), Hamas, and...

Baghdadis Want To Vote: Reuters

Despite the doom-and-gloom predictions of the Western media and the American left about the upcoming Iraqi elections, Baghdad voters intend on turning out in numbers that would embarrass Americans: Two-thirds of registered voters in the Iraqi capital say they will cast their ballots in the Jan. 30 election despite the threat of violence, an independent Iraqi newspaper survey found Monday. A high turnout in Baghdad, a city of 5-6 million people, could raise the credibility of polls which are expected to be marred by suicide bombings by insurgents bent on sabotaging the vote in the country of 27 million. ... The survey in the al-Mada newspaper, one of Iraq's most respected dailies, was conducted last week in eight main districts of Baghdad, one of the cities where insurgents are expected to launch attacks. Based on a sample of 300 people, it found 67 percent of Baghdadis planned to vote. Twenty-five...

January 21, 2005

Air Marshals Snow-Blindness Leaves America Unprotected

First we have the Federal Air Marshals making themselves obvious to anyone flying by wearing professional clothing on board flights, a highly visible target for any terrorists who want to commandeer a commercial flight. After we complained that the air marshals should blend in, we find out that they in fact disappear entirely when it snows: Hundreds of federal air marshals were grounded and unable to access critical information to pinpoint potential terrorist activity for eight hours on the eve of President Bush's inauguration after snow paralyzed the Mission Operations Center in Washington, said several air marshals and a supervisor. The marshals said they could not reach the Mission Operations Center (MOC) by telephone to be placed on other flights after hundreds of flights were rerouted because of the snow, and marshals seeking information on reports of a dirty bomb in Boston were unsuccessful. "They were flying blind," said the...

WaPo Buries Iraqi Enthusiasm

Despite the steady drumbeat of mainstream media analysts, the Iraqi people actually look forward to the opportunity to vote in the upcoming elections. A poll conducted by the International Republican Institute, part of Congress' National Endowment for Democracy, shows that over 80% of Iraqis plan on voting: The poll, conducted in late December and early January for the International Republican Institute, found 80 percent of respondents saying they were likely to vote, a rate that has held roughly steady for months. The 64 percent who said they were "very likely" to vote represented a dip of about 7 percentage points from a November survey, while those "somewhat likely" to vote increased 5 points. Western specialists involved with election preparations said they were struck by the determination and resilience of ordinary Iraqis as they anticipate their country's first free election in half a century. "Despite the efforts of the terrorists, Iraqis...

January 22, 2005

Zarqawi Arrested?

The Jerusalem Post reports that Iraq's Interior Minister has suddenly gone coy about the latest rumors of an arrest of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda terror chief in Iraq: Iraq's interior minister on Saturday refused to comment on rumors that the top terror leader in the country had been taken into custody. "I wouldn't like to comment for the time being," Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said when asked about rumors that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been arrested. "Let's see. Maybe in the next few days we will make a comment about it." Pressing him, a reporter asked, "Does that mean he is in custody?" "No comment," the minister repeated. Keep your eyes peeled; I'll try to track more down on this story. Bear in mind that we've been down this road before and found nothing. The curious response of the Interior Minister -- the non-response response -- certainly sounds encouraging....

More Evidence Of Iraqi Enthusiasm

After the International Republican Institute released the results of a poll that showed a likely turnout of over 80% in the upcoming Iraqi elections, many news outlets responded with a yawn. The Washington Post covered the news but ran their story on page A13; many didn't bother to cover it at all. So I expect even less coverage of a Department of Defense statement that reports an Iraqi poll verifies the IRI data (via Kokonut Pundits): According to a public opinion survey in Iraq taken in early January, more than 90 percent of Iraqis believe it is important to vote in the election. A total of 82.9 percent said it was "very important," and 9.4 percent said it was "somewhat important." And what of the theological difference between the Shi'a and the Sunni? Apparently that has been exaggerated, according to the Iraqi pollsters: The breakdown along religious lines shows 70.1...

January 23, 2005

Abbas Gets Hamas And Islamic Jihad On Board: Guardian

New Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has reached an agreement with all three major terrorist organizations in the West Bank and Gaza to commit to a cease-fire if Israel halts counterterrorist activity in Palestinian areas, according to the Guardian (UK). Abbas warns that the agreement will not hold long if Israel does not agree to its terms: Hamas and Islamic Jihad have agreed to suspend attacks on Israel in order to give the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, time to secure international guarantees for a comprehensive ceasefire that would end more than four years of intifada. Mr Abbas told Palestinian television yesterday that it was "essential" that Israel reciprocate by ending its targeting of armed Islamist groups. He said he had made "significant" progress in talks with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and expected to reach a comprehensive agreement with them soon on an array of political and security issues that would...

AQ Branches Out To Insurance Scams For Funding

In a sign that the global effort to dry up terrorist funding has had an impact, the Germans arrested two al-Qaeda operatives allegedly planning an attack in Iraq. Before the attack, however, one planned to fake his death in order to use insurance money to fund AQ operations: German police arrested two suspected al-Qaida members Sunday believed to have plotted a suicide attack in Iraq with a side venture in insurance fraud, taking out a policy on the suicide bomber to use the money to fund the terror organization. The chief suspect, 29-year-old Iraqi Ibrahim Mohamed K., is also believed to have tried to obtain nearly two ounces of uranium in Luxembourg. He also "played a not unimportant role in al-Qaida, because he showed signs of contact with Osama bin Laden and met with Ramzi Binalshibh," one of the plotters of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United...

January 24, 2005

Iraqis: No Shi'ite Clerics In Government

The New York Times reports today that another argument from the Left against the Bush Administration's efforts to spread democracy throughout Southwest Asia has collapsed. Before and after the Iraqi invasion, the media and the Left screeched warnings that free Iraqi elections would result in an Iranian-style mullahcracy seizing power. However, the largest umbrella Shi'ite political party in Iraq has now rejected theocratic rule: The senior leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of mostly Shiite groups that is poised to capture the most votes in the election next Sunday, have agreed that the Iraqi whom they nominate to be the country's next prime minister would be a lay person, not an Islamic cleric. The Shiite leaders say there is a similar but less formal agreement that clerics will also be excluded from running the government ministries. "There will be no turbans in the government," said Adnan Ali, a...

Two More Zarqawi Lieutenants Captured

The Iraqi government announced today that they captured a key lieutenant of terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last month -- a man responsible for dozens of car-bombings in the Sunni Triangle: Iraqi forces have captured one of al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's top bomb-makers in Iraq, the prime minister's spokesman said Monday. Sami Mohammed al-Jafi, known as Abu Omar al-Kurdi, is accused of being behind some 32 car bombings since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it said. ... Iraqi forces said they also captured another insurgent earlier this month, Nayef Abbas al-Zubaydi, who heads the Abu Talha group linked to the Jordanian militant Zarqawi in the lawless northern city of Mosul, Naqib said. Zubaydi, known as Abu Moawiya, was captured barely two weeks after the arrest of the previous leader of the group, Zain Abdallah Salah Khalaf al-Jib, or Abu Karam. The rate of captures in Iraq continues to...

Shawcross Calls Out The West

William Shawcross launches an attack on so-called democrats who remain AWOL on the upcoming Iraqi elections in today's Guardian (UK). Shawcross goes directly to the heart of the issue -- which side are these people on? Just look at who is trying to stop Iraqis voting and by what methods. That alone shows how important this week's elections are to Iraq. The horrific war against the Iraqi people is being run by the same people who oppressed and tortured them for decades - Saddam's henchmen and gaolers. They are more than ably abetted by the Islamofascist jihadists led by Osama bin Laden's Heydrich in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Elections really do matter to people - especially to people who have been denied them. We saw that in 1993 when millions of Cambodians braved threats from the Khmer Rouge. We saw it in Algeria in 1995, when the government, almost overcome...

January 25, 2005

A Preview Of The Insurgency's Plan To Disrupt Elections

A friend of CQ forwarded an e-mail from a family member serving in Iraq and working on the elections slated for Sunday. In his e-mail, he alerted his friends and family to these instructions on the Arabic forum "Lion's Den" frequented by terrorists and their sympathizers, giving instructions on how to disrupt polling on January 30. None of the following is terribly surprising, but it shows how sophisticated and detailed their plans have become. "Mudad Iluj" instructed the Iraqi dead-enders last January 1 on specific tasks to wreak havoc: My brothers the mujahidin in the Land of the Two Rivers. This is how you should participate in the upcoming elections on 30 January. A practical and clear plan to disrupt and distort [the results of] the Iraqi elections. I know that the mujahidin brothers in Iraq know what they are doing but since they have not witnessed the elections process...

Ready To Vote In The Sunni Triangle

CNN reports on a town that most other mainstream journalists seem to have missed in their reporting from Iraq. Nine miles from the former heart of the insurgency, the town ironically named Karma intends to prove that Iraqis are ready for democracy: The concept of democracy appears to have taken root in the dusty town of Karma, a predominantly Sunni community of 75,000 people about nine miles (15 kilometers) northeast of Falluja. ... Although most say they don't know who the candidates are or where to go to vote, they say they will vote come January 30. Shakir Jiyad Aswad, father of 10, said Karma residents want to elect a nationalist, someone to preserve religion and defend holy places. "We want one Iraq," he said. "I'll probably vote for [Iraq's interim President Ghazi] al-Yawar." ... Farther down the road, Iraqis are also preoccupied with what's lacking. They tell Col. Tucker...

January 26, 2005

Islamist Terrorists Start Their Election Playbook

The Zarqawi-led terrorist insurgency started running its game plan today as outlined in a missive from an Arabic Internet forum, attacking polling stations in areas where they hope to suppress the Sunni vote especially and discredit the election results: Insurgents staged attacks against U.S. forces, schools to be used as polling stations and political party offices on Wednesday, as they pressed a bloody campaign to undermine Iraq's weekend elections. A U.S. Marine transport helicopter crashed in western Iraq. Three car bombs exploded Wednesday in Riyadh, a tense town north of Baghdad, killing at least five people, including three policemen. One of the car bombs targeted a U.S. convoy but there was no report of casualties, police said. ... U.S. troops found at least six bombs at different locations around Baghdad, the military said. Iraqi police discovered two more bombs in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where turnout in the...

Saudis Funding Iraqi Media For Propaganda?

The Guardian (UK) reports on documents filed as part of a slander case in London which show millions of pounds transferred from the Saudi royal family to the "Rupert Murdoch of Iraq," the first independent Iraqi media mogul. At question is the motives of Saad Al-Bazzaz in publishing untrue stories about the wife of a Qatar emir in 2001: Iraq's first independent media mogul has been running his empire with millions of pounds secretly provided by the Saudi regime, according to allegations made in the high court in London. Based on documents lodged with the court, Saad Al-Bazzaz - dubbed the Rupert Murdoch of Iraq - was alleged to have received the money for the launch of his newspaper Azzaman, which is now the most widely read daily in Iraq. Mr Bazzaz also controls Iraq's first private satellite TV channel. The papers emerged during a libel action in which Mr...

January 27, 2005

Gaza Going For Hamas Instead Of Abbas

The BBC reports that in early exit polling, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have elected Hamas majorities in local councils. These results would appear to offer a surprising repudiation to the newly-elected president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas: The Palestinian militant group Hamas is reported to have done well in local elections in the Gaza Strip. One exit poll indicates that it is likely to take three out of the four biggest districts in territory. ... Opinions polls suggest that Hamas - which also runs charities and is regarded by many Palestinians as untainted by corruption - has about 25% support. Just over a third of Gaza's councils are being contested, and turnout is reported to have been high. The government will release official results tomorrow, although the Abbas administration already disputes the exit polling. A Hamas victory in Gaza on the scope that the BBC describes will communicate...

January 28, 2005

More Evidence Of Iraqi Enthusiasm, Part II

The news of Iraqi enthusiasm in advance of their first free elections after decades of oppression keep leaking through the indifference of the mainstream media. In this case, the Times of London sent their correspondent, Richard Beeston, to Baghdad in order to gauge public sentiment. Surprisingly, he reports a palpable sense of historical change: FOR decades, voting in Iraq meant taking part in a national exercise of state-enforced adulation, as 99 per cent of the electorate would dutifully turn out to tick the box beside the name Saddam Hussein. Yesterday the contrast could not have been starker, as the campaign for Sundays elections picked up pace and voters were presented with a dizzying selection of dozens of candidates and parties. Notwithstanding insurgent terror aimed at wrecking the polls, there is finally a palpable sense in Baghdad, and other Iraqi cities, that the country is entering a new era. ... I...

Zarqawi Network Collapse Continuing

The Iraqi government announced the capture of two more lieutenants of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi today as the Coalition continues to roll up Zarqawi's networks. The Iraqis say one of the men was Zarqawi's chief operational officer for Baghdad: The government on Friday announced the arrests of two close associates of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, including the chief of the terror mastermind's Baghdad operation. The announcement came two days before historic elections that extremists have vowed to subvert. ... Qassim Dawoud, a top security adviser, told reporters that the arrests of the al-Zarqawi lieutenants occurred in mid-January but gave few details. Dawoud said one of the men, Salah Suleiman al-Loheibi, headed al-Zarqawi's Baghdad operation and had met with the Jordanian-born terror leader more than 40 times over three months. The other was identified as Ali Hamad Yassin al-Issawi. The announcement brings to three the number of purported al-Zarqawi lieutenants arrested...

Just How Much Juice Has Abbas Got?

Gaza held its local council elections, the first elections ever that included the terrorist group Hamas as a political organization. After boycotting the presidential election earlier this month, these council elections promised to give a better look at the internal politics of the Palestinians. As I reported last night, the Hamas candidate appeared poised to win big, and the BBC confirms that Hamas took over two-thirds of the seats it contested: Palestinian militant group Hamas has won a huge victory in local polls in Gaza, unofficial results indicate. Seen in Israel as a terrorist group, Hamas appears to have won roughly two-thirds of the seats it contested. ... In elections held in 10 districts of Gaza this week, Hamas appears to have won 77 out of 118 seats. The ruling Fatah faction of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas won 26 seats. The BBC is quick to caution that these elections were...

Why Afghanistan Fell Off The Map

A curious phenomenon happened after the fall of the Taliban and the initial preparation for the Iraq invasion -- Afghanistan disappeared. Oh, not physically, perhaps, although judging from the paucity of news coverage from the newest democracy in Southwest Asia, one could be tempted to reach that conclusion. Now American Journalism Review reports on the vanishing Afghanis and the reason why we hear nothing of their progress: Once a journalism hot spot, Afghanistan was all but left behind when the media's spotlight turned to the conflict in Iraq. In June/July 2003, AJR reported that only a handful of reporters remained in the struggling country on a full-time basis, while other news organizations floated correspondents in and out when time and resources permitted. A year and a half later, Afghanistan has become even more of an afterthought. Only two news organizations--Newsweek and the Washington Post--have full-time reporters stationed in Kabul, the...

January 29, 2005

Iraqis In Saddam Home Area Looking Forward To Vote

The AP reports that Iraqis in Alam, near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, can't wait to vote in tomorrow's elections. They understand that a free Iraqi government provides the only method of seeing the American troops leave: Many Iraqis living near Saddam Hussein's hometown said they will vote Sunday because the ballot not violence will end Iraq's occupation by U.S.-led coalition troops. ... The local leader of one of Iraq's largest clans here is bidding for a seats in the 275-member National Assembly that will govern the country and draft a permanent constitution. Mashaan al-Jbouri, who heads the 37-member Liberation and Reconciliation Front, has said the country can be freed from occupation only through peaceful means. Hasan Mohammed Khazaal, a 24-year-old university student, backed that notion. "We will have a new constitution and I can get rid of the occupiers through elections. This is the only way to...

First Hour -- Looks Light But Clear

I'm watching Fox News while keeping an eye on the news wires for updates on the Iraqi elections, and so far the news looks pretty good. While the Fox cameras show light traffic at the Green Zone polling station, the first hour of the election has passed without any major attacks: Voters trickled into polling stations under tight security Sunday in Iraq, casting ballots despite promises by insurgents to sabotage the country's first free election in a half-century. Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawer was one of the first to vote at election headquarters in the heavily fortified Green Zone, calling the action his country's first step "toward joining the free world." Across the nation, the nearly 5,200 polling stations opened on schedule, with workers checking voter identifications and police standing guard. Turnout was expected to be slow in the early hours. Most attacks occur in the morning, and many Iraqis were...

Car Bombing In Western Baghdad

The first reports of an attack have come in at the 90-minute mark. Fox News reports on its televised coverage that a polling station in western Baghdad has suffered a suicide car bombing. They're crediting Reuters for the report, which says that it resulted in one casualty, an Iraqi policeman. More when I get a wire report. UPDATE: Fox News reports "multiple blasts" in central Baghdad. UPDATE II: The first explosion appears to have come from the Monsour area, which according to the Fox News expert houses some ambassadors and VIPs. The attack apparently occurred at the checkpoint and not the polling station itself -- which tends to give confidence that the security arrangements have made the elections safer. UPDATE III: Some link love. Slant Point's Scott Sala is up late and writing with his usual panache. Brant at SWLiP weighs in on the Andrew Sullivan-Mickey Kaus feud with a...

January 30, 2005

"Election Is What I Am Need"

Geraldo Rivera has been reporting from an undisclosed town that has a mixed Shi'a-Sunni population, and now he's saying that the polling station is "packed" with men and women. He's talking about how the scene -- which I'm watching as he speaks on video -- inspires him, taking Jesse Jackson's civil-rights reference and putting in proper context. Geraldo is interviewing an Iraqi voter, who told him: "I am very happy, because I am not afraid of terrorists. ... I'm not afraid, because election is what I am need." Geraldo's emotions have overcome him, and he's not alone. UPDATE: Better video now (12:24 AM CT), and you can see the crowd of smiling Iraqi voters, not minding the cameras one bit. If they're afraid, you sure as hell can't see it in their delighted faces. One man even gave the cameras two thumbs up....

Mosul Elections Build A Crowd

Fox News now reports that Mosul voters have gotten over their initial trepidation and have built to a crowd at the polling station they are televising through a videophone. Fox also reports a few mortar attacks that hasn't seemed to dampen the enthusiasm. The polling station in Mosul bustled with activity behind the reporter (didn't catch his name), who reports that after the Iraqi soldiers broke the ice by casting their own votes, the neighborhoods have begun to join them. I don't know why, but the wire services have been rather quiet so far. Or perhaps I do know why....

More Details On Election Attacks

The AP has updated its earlier story to provide more details on the election-day attacks on Iraqi polling stations: The suicide attack in western Baghdad claimed the life of one policeman and wounded several other people, while mortar attacks in Khan al-Mahawil, 40 miles south of Baghdad, killed another policeman at a polling station. Witnesses said three other people were wounded when a rocket or mortar landed near a polling station in Sadr City, the heart of Baghdad's Shiite Muslim community. Heavy explosions and dozens of mortar attacks broke out across Baghdad, and in several other cities, including Baquoba, Basra and Mosul. Two mortars hit near the Ministry of Interior on the city's eastern edge, one witness said. And there were exchanges of gunfire in the New Baghdad area in the eastern part of the city. Explosions also were heard in Baquoba northeast of Baghdad, and in the southern city...

BBC Reports High Turnout Except In Former Terror Strongholds

The BBC now reports that turnout for the Iraqi elections has been surprisingly high, except in the Sunni cities that once hosted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist network: Voting officially started at 0700 local time (0400 GMT), though some polling stations opened even earlier. The BBC's Ben Brown in Basra says electoral officials have been surprised by the high turnout there, and some polling stations had to open early. But correspondents in central Sunni cities, such as Falluja, Samarra and Ramadi, have seen virtually no voting activity. The BBC never even mentions that these three cities had to be cleared of terrorists with major military actions in the past three months, and that they have always been considered too sympathetic to Zarqawi to cooperate with the elections. We know, however, that Baghdad has seen significant turnout despite a number of suicide bombers on the west side of town. Fox News reports...

The 21K Walk To Freedom

Thousands of people are now walking a 13-mile stretch between Abu Ghraib and Gazaliyah to cast votes in the elections, military sources tell Fox News. The mass march has been caught by unmanned drones, and Fox says they will soon have pictures of the subtle demonstration of the Iraqi desire for liberty. More as it develops. Fox also reports long lines in most polling stations, with some even calling for more ballot materials as they run out of ballots faster than they anticipated....

The Seventy-Two Percent Solution

"Election is what I am need!" An election is what Iraq needed, as the country's election commission estimates that 72% of eligible voters stormed the polls in today's elections, with the figure approaching 90% in areas such as Basra. Here's what the BBC says, and check out how they buried the lead: Suicide attacks and explosions have killed 22 people - mainly in Baghdad - as voters take part in Iraq's first multi-party elections for 50 years. Correspondents said there were crowds and smiles in the south and north as voters made their choices for a 275-member national assembly. But few voters turned out in Sunni areas around the capital, reports said. Iraq's electoral commission says up to 72% of voters cast ballots but the UN offered a more cautious assessment. Before discussing the remarkable turnout in the face of widely-reported terrorist warnings of bloodbaths, the BBC discusses each and...

Even Reuters Acknowledges Victory

Reuters appears to have outperformed the BBC in reporting the historical turnout in Iraq's first multiparty elections in over fifty years. Luke Baker writes about the "festive voting" and the enthusiasm of Iraqis for democracy: Some came on crutches, others walked for miles then struggled to read the ballot, but across Iraq, millions turned out to vote Sunday, defying insurgents who threatened a bloodbath. Suicide bombs and mortars killed at least 27 people, but voters still came out in force for the first multi-party poll in 50 years. In some places they cheered with joy at their first chance to cast a free vote, in others they shared chocolates. Even in Falluja, the Sunni city west of Baghdad that was a militant stronghold until a U.S. assault in November, a steady stream of people turned out, confounding expectations. Lines of veiled women clutching their papers waited to vote. "We want...

Turnout Numbers By Region

Fox News reports on the Iraqi voter turnout by region, using figures from the Iraqi election commission. I've frozen the graphic on my TiVo to make sure I get this right: Nationwide: 72% Baghdad: 80% South: 92% Najaf: 80% Karbala: 90% Hell, you can't find numbers like that in America -- except in certain precincts in King County, WA and Milwaukee....

Gray Lady Acknowledges Victory

The New York Times gives an unequivocal look at the astounding victory for democracy won by the defiant Iraqi people and steadfast Coalition partners. Dexter Filkens filed a surprisingly blunt assessment of the complete defeat of terrorism and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in attempting to drag the Iraqis into a second darkness: After a slow start, voters turned out in very large numbers in Baghdad today, packing polling places and creating a party atmosphere in the streets as Iraqis here and nationwide turned out to cast ballots in the country's first free elections in more than 50 years. ... The voting in Baghdad streets of Baghdad were closed to traffic, but full of children playing soccer, and men and women walking, some carrying babies. Everyone, it seemed, was going to vote. They dropped their ballots into boxes even as continuous mortar shells started exploding at about noon. Thirty-six civilians and three...

Seeing Is Believing

I wrote earlier about watching how the Iraqis openly defied the terrorists by walking so casually and forcefully to the polls inspired me. Rich at the excellent milblog Beef Always Wins had a chance to take some pictures while circling Baghdad in his helicopter, and he tells me that those prove the point. Here's one that I've hosted, but I encourage you to check out the rest at Rich's: Take a look at Kevin McCullough's montages of Iraqi and expatriate voting, too. Very moving. UPDATE: You should definitely read this Radioblogger entry about Iraqis voting in Lake Forest, CA, at the old El Toro MCAS. Hugh Hewitt broadcast live there on Friday and Duane has some terrific pictures posted, along with some great stories....

Chris Muir Says It All

Day By Day: If you're not reading Chris every day, you're missing out the most intelligent political satire....

Idiots On Parade

Part of the amusement of watching the coverage of the historic Iraqi elections comes from seeing certain Democrats making asses of themselves on national TV. I'm watching MS-NBC, where former Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin just dismantled Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) on a military pull-out from Iraq. Babbin couldn't contain himself when Woolsey tried using a page from the Left's new post-election playbook: WOOLSEY: ... We also would like to see, ah, the United States military take a step back and the multinational, ah, humanitarian groups step forward so we can help the Iraqis now with their, ah, rebuilding their infrastructure, rebuilding their economy, and helping take the military presence, ah, to help them instead to train their, ah, their security. HOST: Congresswoman, are you calling for an immediate phased withdrawal along the lines of what Senator Kennedy suggested last week? W: Well, I'm calling for immediate planning for withdrawal,...

Turnout Numbers Settle In At 60%

The London Telegraph reports in its morning edition that the estimated turnout in the Iraqi election has settled to 60% as more data has come in from the polling. The number is still spectacular, considering that it equals our best election turnout over the past 40 years while under the threat of murder and terror: On foot, on crutches and in wheelchairs Iraqis defied the death threats of extremists and voted in their millions yesterday in their country's first free election in half a century. After decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein, three major wars and almost two years of occupation, chaos and insurgency, the people turned their election day into a festival of democracy. Election officials estimated that about 60 per cent of eligible voters cast their ballots despite a wave of suicide bombings, mortar and gun attacks. The turnout was highest in Shia and Kurdish regions, but even...

Reuters Playing Headline Games Again

In an attempt to underscore the notion that violence wrecked the Iraqi elections -- which anyone watching the live coverage and aware of the high turnout knows is false -- Reuters uses the following headline to characterize the historic developments: Violence-Weary Iraqis Await Poll Results How do they support the headline in the story? They show these examples of "violence-weary" first-time voters: Up to 8 million Iraqis, some ululating with joy, others hiding their faces in fear, cast ballots across the country on Sunday as guerrilla attacks proved less ferocious than anticipated in the face of a massive security crackdown. ... Samir Hassan, 32, who lost his leg in a car bomb blast last year, said as he waited to vote in Baghdad: "I would have crawled here if I had to. I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me." ... Voters created an...

January 31, 2005

Burns Provides Balance On Pages Of NYT

Despite my dislike for the New Yorks Times' editorial policies and the way it appears to infect its news reporting, one of the bright spots of the mainstream news media is John Burns, the veteran Times correspondent for the Middle East. His work cannot usually be characterized as biased, and he regularly provides balanced coverage. His report today on the Iraqi election is no exception. Burns notes that while the Iraqis still remain skeptical about American motives, they clearly delighted in the ability to select their own leadership, and that the religious differences that has frightened the Left into hysteria is overblown: Nobody among the hundreds of voters thronging one Baghdad polling station on Sunday could remember anything remotely like it, not even those old enough to have taken part in Iraq's last partly free elections more than 50 years ago, before the assassination of King Faisal II began a...

February 1, 2005

Sunnis: What, You Guys Were Serious?

The Washington Times reports this morning that the heavy turnout for the Iraq elections not only surprised those in the West who thought that the threat of violence would suppress the vote, but shocked the Sunnis, who counted on it: Sunni Arabs yesterday appeared shocked by the large turnout of Shi'ites and Kurds in Sunday's elections, with some anxiously looking for ways to bolster their representation in the new government that will emerge from them. But many Shi'ites, triumphant after voting in high numbers in spite of terrorist threats, had a simple message for the Sunnis who stayed home: Tough luck. Yazin al-Jabouri, a spokesman for the Sunni-led Homeland Party, said many people in Sunni parts of the country hadn't voted because the electoral commission had not sent enough ballot boxes and forms. "They didn't think people were going to vote," he said, adding that he had sent a letter...

Iraqi President: American Withdrawal "Nonsense"

In a slap at the Democratic leadership that has screeched about "exit strategies" after Sunday's historic victory for democracy, the Iraqi president proclaimed talk of withdrawing American troops "nonsense" and a recipe for disaster in the region: Iraq's interim president said Tuesday it would be "complete nonsense" to ask U.S. and other foreign troops to leave Iraq at this point but some of the 170,000 soldiers could be leaving Iraq by the end of the year. Ghazi al-Yawer, who had been a strong critic of some aspects of the U.S. military operation in Iraq, said foreign troops should leave only after Iraq's security forces are built up, the security situation has improved and some pockets of terrorists are eliminated. "It's only complete nonsense to ask the troops to leave in this chaos and this vacuum of power," al-Yawer told reporters. Perhaps Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, Mark Dayton, and...

Kuwait Kills AQ Operatives As Terror Focus Shifts Off Saudis

Kuwait killed five al-Qaeda operatives and captured three more, including the cell leader, as AQ has shifted its focus from Saudi Arabia to the American ally in the Persian Gulf. The AQ cell had targeted American homes in the kingdom for destruction: Kuwait passed emergency anti-terrorism laws yesterday that granted police wider search powers after foiling a plot to bomb an American residential complex and breaking up an al-Qa'eda cell. ... Security forces said the group were part of a 24-member cell that had been virtually eliminated in four gun battles in the last month. Eight terrorists had been killed and 14 captured. Two were still on the run. Police discovered plans to bomb the Alia-Ghalia apartment complex, also known as Fintas Towers, twin high-rise buildings overlooking the sea south of the capital. Apparently, AQ has found the going a bit too tough in Saudi Arabia these days. Either the...

February 2, 2005

Sunnis: Do-Over!

The Sunnis in Iraq still appear to suffer from an electoral hangover. Earlier today, Sunni clerics declared that Sunni underrepresentation in Iraq's historic election -- which they psrtly caused by calling for the Sunni boycott -- renders the resultant government merely temporary. They demand that the new parliament assume only limited powers and schedule new elections immediately: In its first statement since the balloting, the Association of Muslim Scholars said the balloting lacked legitimacy because of low Sunni participation. The Association called months ago on Sunnis to shun the polls because of the presence of U.S. and other foreign troops. ... In its statement, the Association said the election "lacks legitimacy because a large portion of these people who represent many spectra have boycotted it." As a result, the Association said the new leadership lacked a mandate to draft a new constitution and should be considered a temporary administration. "We...

February 5, 2005

Sunnis Don't Need A Weathervane (Anymore, That Is)

The Sunnis of Iraq, who largely boycotted the elections due to their loss of power after the fall of Saddam, have slowly begun reconciling themselves to the new power structure in Iraq after the elections. Stunned by the enthusiasm for their fellow citizens for democracy and in danger of complete marginalization, Sunni leaders have reached out for the lifeline offered magnanimously by th Kurds and Shi'ites: In a bid to avoid marginalization, a group of Sunni Arab parties that refused to participate in the election said Saturday they want to take part in the drafting of a permanent constitution a chief task of the new National Assembly. "The representatives of these political bodies that did not participate in the elections have decided in principle to take part in the writing of the permanent constitution in a suitable way," a statement from the group said. The groups were mainly small...

February 6, 2005

Let's Play "Guess Who Talks Like General Mattis"

Ralph Peters writes a passionate defense of Lt. General Jim Mattis in today's New York Post. Peters, himself a former Army officer, finds himself encouraged by Mattis' honest and direct appreciation for his job: Gen. Mattis may have been unusual in his honesty, but he certainly isn't unusual in our history. We picture Robert E. Lee as a saintly father figure, but Lee remarked that it's good that war is so terrible, since otherwise men would grow to love it too much. He was speaking of himself. Andy Jackson certainly loved a fight, and Stonewall Jackson never shied from one. Sherman and Grant only found themselves in war. WE lionize those who em braced war in the past, but condemn those who defend us in the present. George S. Patton was far blunter than Jim Mattis but Patton lived in the days before the media was omnipresent and biased...

February 7, 2005

Transformative Power Of Democracy Redux

I have written several times about my belief in the transformative power of democracy, and how giving a long-oppressed people the right to select their own leaders is the best defense against terrorism and the best offense against its origins. The Washington Post files a report that demonstrates exactly what I meant in today's edition. Douglas Struck writes from Baghdad about a new sense of civic pride and a turning point in the insurgency that all springs from the successful elections in Iraq: With a hero who gave his life for the elections, a revived national anthem blaring from car stereos and a greater willingness to help police, the public mood appears to be moving more clearly against the insurgency in Iraq, political and security officials said. In the week since national elections, police officers and Iraqi National Guardsmen said they have received more tips from the public, resulting in...

February 8, 2005

Will We See The Palestinian Triangle Play Again?

The Israelis and the Palestinians will declare a formal cease-fire at their upcoming summit, ABC News reports, but a familiar tone comes from Hamas in response: Israeli and Palestinian leaders announced late Monday that they would declare the formal end to more than four years of fighting during the summit in this Egyptian resort. It was the clearest indication yet of momentum following Yasser Arafat's death, the election of a new Palestinian leader and a signal from the White House that it plans a renewed push for peace. "The most important thing at the summit will be a mutual declaration of cessation of violence against each other," said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator. Erekat said the agreement also includes the establishment of joint committees one to determine criteria for the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, and the other to oversee the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from...

Sistani: No Shari'a Need Apply

Contrary to the desperate analyses from Western journalists that have appeared almost daily since the Iraqi elections, the most influential Shi'ite cleric does not want an imposition of Shari'a law. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani instead wants the government to follow parliamentary processes to codify a new direction for the world's newest democracy: A spokesman for Iraq's most influential Shia cleric has denied reports that the cleric is demanding that Islam be the country's sole source of law. Hamed Khafaf said Ayatollah Ali Sistani believes Iraq's new constitution should respect what he described as the Islamic cultural identity of Iraqis. ... In Ayatollah Sistani's view, his spokesman went on to say, it was up to the elected representatives of the people in the new National Assembly to decide the details. Mr Khafaf said the ayatollah had approved the current wording of Iraq's interim constitution, which states that Islam is a source...

February 9, 2005

Palestinian Triangle Offense At The Ready; WaPo Gets The Assist

As I predicted yesterday, the Palestinian triumvirate of terror still holds open their normal triangle strategy of using cease-fires as a cover for more violence, as key terrorist groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip refused to endorse the informal truce announced yesterday at Sharm el-Sheikh by Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon. Hamas in particular went out of its way to inform the world that they will not feel bound by the latest Israeli-Palestinian agreement: Officials from each side said the success of Tuesday's agreements depends on the other side meeting its obligations. For Abbas, that means persuading guerrillas to stop attacks on Israelis and ensuring that Palestinian security agencies work to help prevent such attacks. For Sharon, it means an end to assassinations of militants, military incursions into Palestinian cities and destruction of Palestinians' homes. But while Abbas committed the Palestinian Authority to refrain from violence, the two...

February 10, 2005

Triangle Play Opening?

It didn't take long for the Palestinians to live down to my predictions. While I had expected a few days for the newly-minted cease-fire to settle in, Hamas had already set a major mortar attack into action. The Jerusalem Post reports on the hail of mortars and Kassam rockets that hit Israeli targets in Gaza: At least twenty-five mortar shells and Kassam rockets have landed on Gaza Strip settlements since 2:00 a.m. Thursday, hitting settlements in Gush Katif, southern Gaza, and northern Gaza, according to the IDF. ... Meanwhile, the settlers are claiming a total of 38 Kassam rockets and mortar shells have been fired at settlements. ... No wounded have been reported, but early Thursday damage was caused to one building and to the electrical system in one of the settlements. The Abbas government couldn't even hold a truce for twenty-four hours without Hamas demonstrating its power to disrupt...

February 11, 2005

After Further Deliberation, Jimmy Carter Endorses Democracy

After a presidency where he kept demonstrating his ineptitude on foreign policy, and a post-presidential career of personal diplomacy that has without exception proved disastrous to the United States, you would expect that Jimmy Carter would have learned that he has no particular talent for international politics. Finally, some light must have shown through, as Carter now acknowledges that he was dead wrong on Iraq's elections: Former President Jimmy Carter, who predicted that elections in Iraq would fail and in the past year described the Bush administration's policy there as a quagmire, this week ended 10 days of silence to declare the historic Iraqi vote "a very successful effort." "I hope that we'll have every success in Iraq," Mr. Carter said in a CNN interview. "And that election, I think, was a surprisingly good step forward." The Nobel Peace Prize winner's comments on Wednesday contradicted his September assertion that the...

February 13, 2005

Iraq's Democracy Yields Shared Power

The elections held in Iraq last month have resulted in a parliament where no one faction gained a majority, meaning that a legislative coalition will have to form in order to select the executives of the new Iraqi government. The Iraqi turnout amounted to 8.5 million votes, close to the estimates of 60% that came after the polls closed: The Shiites likely will have to form a coalition in the 275-member National Assembly with the other top vote-getters the Kurds and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's list to push through their agenda and select a president and prime minister. The president and two vice presidents must be elected by a two-thirds majority. ... The Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance ticket received 4,075,295 votes, or about 48 percent of the total cast, Iraqi election officials said. The Kurdistan Alliance, a coalition of two main Kurdish factions, was second with 2,175,551 votes,...

February 15, 2005

Iraqi Sunnis Finally Get The Hint

The British newspaper The Guardian reported earlier today that the Sunni hardliners who called for a boycott of the January elections have now admitted the move was a mistake. Rory Carroll confirms that Sunni leaders now want to support the new democratic processes and hope that the new government will reach out to them as a result: Iraq's Arab Sunnis will do a U-turn and join the political process despite their lack of representation in the newly elected national assembly, Sunni leaders said yesterday. ... All three blocs have promised to reach out to the Sunnis, who comprise a fifth of the population but won just a handful of seats because of low turnouts in their areas. This will soon be tested as parties forge alliances and tussle for government posts, including that of prime minister and president. Secular Sunni leaders yesterday accepted the victors' invitation to participate, potentially draining...

February 17, 2005

EU Won't Recognize Hezbollah As Terrorist Group

The New York Times reports today that the European Union has resisted the Bush administration's efforts to get long-time terror group Hezbollah recognized as such in order to cut off its overseas funding. In a further indication of EU weakness on confronting terror, so-called "Old Europe" nations, especially France, want to open dialogue with the masters of Iranian terror efforts in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East: As rising instability in Lebanon increases tensions in the Middle East, the Bush administration is arguing with European governments over whether they should designate the Lebanon-based Shiite group Hezbollah a terrorist organization, American and European officials say. The United States is already stepping up pressure on Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's main sponsors. The American rift with Syria deepened this week, with suspicions that Syria might have been behind the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister in Beirut on Monday. ... In the...

February 18, 2005

Outsmarting Themselves

Defense attorneys for accused terrorist funder Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, a Yemeni sheikh thought to be one of Osama bin Laden's spiritual advisors, may have outsmarted themselves yesterday. Prosecutors in the case attempting to convict al-Moayad of conspiring to funnel money to al-Qaeda dropped one of their key witnesses to the case when he set himself on fire in front of the White House three months ago, protesting his handling by the government, and had to drop some charges from the indictment as a result. Instead of counting their blessings, however, the defense called Mohammed Alanssi in a bid to show that investigators used an unstable crook to set up al-Moayad. Big mistake: Defiant, still obviously bitter about his treatment by government agents and expressing entitlement to millions he has not been paid, the Yemeni-born Mr. Alanssi said he deserved money for the risks he took in helping America fight...

February 20, 2005

Marines To Retake Ramadi

Reuters reports this morning that Marines intend on clearing out Ramadi, one of the last cities still controlled by Islamofascist terrorists in Iraq and presumed to be a source of the latest round of terror attacks: U.S. forces launched a major security operation around Ramadi on Sunday, saying they hoped to restore order to a western Iraqi city which has been in rebel hands for much of the past year. Troops from the 1st Marine expeditionary force, backed up by Iraqi security forces, imposed an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in and around the city, 110 km (70 miles) west of Baghdad, as part of what has been dubbed Operation River Blitz. The operation "is designed to target insurgents and terrorists who have attempted to destabilize the Anbar province by terrorizing the populace through wanton acts of violence and intimidation," the U.S. military said in a statement. So far,...

Hariri Assassin Traveled Through Syria For Murder: Lebanon

The self-proclaimed suicide bomber of Lebanese statesman Rafik Hariri traveled through Syria from Iraq to get to Lebanon, an investigative judge announced today, providing further circumstantial evidence tying the Assad regime to the political assassination. The London Telegraph also reports that the assassin had open al-Qaeda ties, pointing to an even bigger problem for Damascus: Rachid Mezher, the senior investigator for the Lebanese military tribunal, said that the organisers had been recruited from Islamist groups linked to Syria and operating against the US-led coalition in Iraq. ... Investigators believe that a suicide bomber drove a car laden with explosives into the 60-year-old billionaire's convoy last Monday, killing him and 14 others. Judge Mezher said that a video in which a fanatic called Ahmed Abu Adas said the attack was the work of "Victory and Jihad in Greater Syria", an unknown group, was a genuine claim of responsibility. Abu Adas, 23,...

Iraqi Leader Urges Allies To Stay The Course

The leader of the winning Islamic party in last month's Iraq elections urged Tony Blair to keep his troops in Iraq while the nascent indigenous security forces grow and train enough to keep its people safe, the London Telegraph reports tonight: Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who would be the first Shia to be in charge of the Iraqi government, confounded his critics by saying that his country could not maintain order without the help of foreign soldiers. "Iraq's security services need more personnel, training and equipment," he said yesterday. "We need their presence for a certain time till we can depend on ourselves 100 per cent. "There are many people still working for Saddam Hussein, terrorists from outside, and there is still the 'mafia'. Blood is spilled. How would it be if the troops left?" That represents quite a shift for Dr. Jaafari, who ran on a platform that indicated a willingness...

February 21, 2005

Taliban Giving Up In Afghanistan?

The Taliban, who once embodied the ideal of Islamofascism in their brutal tyranny over the Afghan people, have all but stopped their terrorist war against the Hamid Karzai democracy. In fact, thanks to a high-ranking and popular defector from the previous regime, the Taliban remnants have surrendered in order to join an amnesty program that promises to end the civil war and secure the Afghani democracy: One of the Taliban's most senior and charismatic commanders has become a key negotiator as more and more members of the Islamic militia in Afghanistan give up the fight against the Americans. The commander, Abdul Salam, earned the nickname Mullah Rockety because he was so accurate with rocket propelled grenades against Russian troops. ... After the Taliban's three-year struggle against a superior US force, there is growing optimism among the Americans and Afghan government that the end is close. More than 1,000 people have...

February 22, 2005

Jaafari In, Chalabi Out

The AP reports that Ahmed Chalabi has withdrawn his name from the Iraqi Prime Minister contest and endorsed Ibrahim Jaafari as the new leader of a free Iraq. Chalabi, whose candidacy had always been considered a long shot, took three days of convincing before agreeing to back the candidate of the top vote-getting slate in the National Assembly elections last month: Pressure from within the ranks of the United Iraqi Alliance, which won Iraq's landmark Jan. 30 election, forced the withdrawal of Chalabi, a one-time Pentagon favorite, said Hussein al-Moussawi from the Shiite Political Council, an umbrella group for 38 Shiite parties. "They wanted him to withdraw. They didn't want to push the vote to a secret ballot," al-Moussawi said. The 140 members were to put the decision between Chalabi and al-Jaafari to a secret ballot by Tuesday's end. The decision came after three days of round-the-clock negotiations by senior...

February 23, 2005

Virginia Jihadi Plotted To Kill President

In what should be considered an act of treason, an American citizen has been charged with several counts of conspiring to assist al-Qaeda in terrorism. If that wasn't bad enough, the indictment also alleges that Ahmed Omar Abu Ali planned to assassinate the US president by using a car bomb or sniping him on the street: Federal prosecutors unveiled broad terrorism charges yesterday against a Northern Virginia man who had been detained in Saudi Arabia for nearly two years, accusing him of plotting to assassinate President Bush and trying to establish an al Qaeda cell in the United States. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 23, conspired with confederates in Saudi Arabia to shoot Bush on the street or kill him with a car bomb, according to a six-count indictment unsealed yesterday. The indictment said Abu Ali sought to become "a planner of terrorist operations" and compared him to leading al Qaeda...

Tranformative Power Of Democracy, Part III

Jim Geraghty of TKS notes this auspicious quote in today's David Ignacius column in the Washington Post: The leader of this Lebanese intifada [for independence from Syria] is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria's occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud. The old slogans about Arab nationalism turned to ashes in Jumblatt's mouth, and he and Hariri openly began to defy Damascus... "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark...

Pressure Builds On Syria

President Bush kept the heat on Syria, Reuters reports, and he had plenty of help as well. Protests have continued in Beirut, calling for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the Mediterranean country, and France joined the chorus. Even Hosni Mubarak in Cairo gets the message: President Bush demanded Wednesday that Syria pull its security services as well as its army out of Lebanon, echoing France's remarks that Syrian intelligence controlled the country. ... In Beirut opposition deputies, riding high on mass protests against Hariri's killing over the past week, piled on the pressure, saying they would try to topple the Syrian-backed government in parliament and calling for a one-day national strike next week. "Opposition MPs confirm that they will seek a no-confidence vote in the government during (the Feb. 28) general assembly meeting" called to discuss the assassination, they said in a statement after a meeting of 38 MPs....

February 24, 2005

Does Assad Hear Warning Sirens?

Kevin McCullough has a good rundown on the current events in Syria this morning, but he adds a warning from an inside source at the Pentagon that Bashar Assad should heed: Warning: These articles and others like them are building momentum for a credible military confrontation should President Assad refuse to back down. I don't expect him to change his clandestine approach until he sees meaningful force at his doorstep. One can bet that Israel is working doubletime behind the scenes to encourage American action. I would expect the next steps to be taken by surrogates like Hezbollah. Likely, Syria's meddling in Iraq and the upcoming Lebanese elections will provide sufficient trigger for some "coalition" action. That action may well have an "Iraqi" face. It remains to be seen if Assad is paying the right amount of attention, but I suspect he's getting the message....

February 25, 2005

Another Zarqawi Aide Plucked

The Iraqi government announced today that it has captured another key figure in the Ansar al-Islam terror network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Abu Qutaybah had been considered one of the high-value targets in the network due to his extensive contacts throughout western Iraq, and sure enough, Iraqi forces arrested him within miles of the Syrian border: Iraq's government said on Friday it had captured a key lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is al Qaeda's leader in Iraq and has been behind some of the country's worst attacks. It said Talib Mikhlif Arsan Walman al-Dulaymi, also known as Abu Qutaybah, was captured on Feb. 20 in Anah, a town northwest of Baghdad, about 35 miles from the Syrian border. "Abu Qutaybah was responsible for determining who, when and how terrorist network leaders would meet with Zarqawi," the government said in a statement. "Abu Qutaybah filled the...

Palestinian Triangle Offense Begins

A Palestinian suicide bomber killed four people in Tel Aviv today, shattering the cease-fire that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas claimed had support from the terror groups in the occupied territories. Abbas decried the attack as sabotage on the Palestinians by isolated radicals as several groups claimed credit for the attack, while their leadership issued denials to the press: Police said the bomber detonated his device in a crowd of young people waiting to enter the Stage nightclub on the city's popular Mediterranean beachfront promenade, about 600 yards south of the U.S. Embassy. More than 50 people were injured in the explosion, many seriously, police said. ... There were several conflicting claims of responsibility by Palestinian groups, but none was definitive and all were subsequently denied by senior members of the organizations. An Islamic Jihad cell initially asserted responsibility for the attack, but a top official of the group in the...

February 26, 2005

Israel And Palestinians Quick To Blame Hezbollah

Both Israeli and Palestinian security forces have made arrests this morning from the Tel Aviv suicide bombing yesterday that killed four and injured dozens. The BBC reports that both sides blame Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror group with a vested interest in disrupting the peace process, but the details buried in the report appear to dispute that notion: Israeli troops and Palestinian police have arrested seven people in connection with Friday's suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv nightclub. Israeli soldiers detained five people near the West Bank town of Tulkarem, including two brothers of the man identified as the suicide bomber. Palestinian police separately arrested two people over the blast, which killed four people and injured about 30. ... Mr Abbas blamed a "third party" but went no further. Other Palestinian officials have blamed Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant organisation. All the Palestinian militant groups have denied responsibility. As the BBC notes,...

Euro Islamofascists Linked To Iraq: Spain

According to a Spanish investigative judge, Islamic radicals operating in Europe and North Africa have direct connections to Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist network in Iraq headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Baltasar Garzon's allegations put new light on Europe's stance regarding Iraq and the fight on terror: Armed Islamist militants that operate in Europe are also helping support the armed insurgency in Iraq, one of Europe's foremost experts on such groups told Reuters. Spanish High Court Judge Baltasar Garzon, who has been investigating Islamist militants in Spain since 1991, warned that groups such as the Algerian Salafist movement and the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group were particularly dangerous for Europe. "They are groups that have membership inside and outside Europe and in any case we have to keep close watch on the relationship these groups have with others like Ansar al-Islam," Garzon told Reuters in an interview late on Friday. "It's obvious...

Islamic Jihad Claims Credit For Tel Aviv Bombing

Islamic Jihad has claimed credit for the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, blowing holes in the theory promoted by both Palestinian and Israeli officials that Hezbollah did it to undermine the peace process. Now Mahmoud Abbas has to either crack down on IJ leadership or surrender his credibility as a peace partner: Islamic Jihad carried out a suicide bomb attack in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv that killed four people on Friday, a Beirut-based official from the organization said on Saturday. "We confirm that we carried out the operation," the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters. Friday's bombing at a Tel Aviv nightclub dealt a heavy blow to peace hopes that had brightened since Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to a ceasefire at a Feb. 8 summit. Now we know how successful Abbas has been in convincing the militants to observe...

Father And Son Day At The Iraqi Genocide Tribunal

The Iraqi Special Tribunal for genocide during Saddam Hussein's bloody reign of terror has two new defendants to consider. US forces turned over a father-son partnership reportedly responsible for the murders of over 140 murders in a retaliation for a Dawa assassination attempt on Saddam in 1982: U.S. forces have arrested an Iraqi father and son accused of participating in a 1982 massacre in the predominantly Shiite Muslim village of Dujail in retaliation for an assassination attempt on then-President Saddam Hussein. Senior U.S. officials said in interviews that Abdulla Rwayid and Muzhir Abdulla Rwayid were arrested Monday and charged with crimes against humanity for their alleged role in the killing of hundreds of people associated with the Dawa party, a Shiite group that carried out the attempt on Hussein's life on July 8, 1982. Charges against the two detained men were referred to the Iraqi Special Tribunal, the entity responsible...

Palestinians Shocked, Shocked! To Find Terrorists Among Them

The AP reports tonight that ordinary Palestinians are outraged by the Tel Aviv bombing that killed four Israelis yesterday. Instead of the usual ululations and street celebrations, Mohammed Ballas reports that Palestinians voiced complaints instead: Palestinians expressed anger Saturday at an overnight suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed four Israelis and threatened a fragile truce, a departure from former times when they welcomed attacks on their Israeli foes. Official condemnations and denials were followed by public anger toward the perpetrators as Israeli blamed Syria and the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the attack. The Palestinians pointed fingers at the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah. Syria denied the allegations. ... In contrast to the dozens of previous suicide bombings, no celebrations were held in the West Bank on Saturday and militant groups didn't hang the customary posters of congratulations at the bomber's home. What a blow that...

February 27, 2005

Saddam's Brother Scooped Up By Iraqis

For the first time in a year, the Ba'athists have lost a card from the American deck of fugitives. This time, the Iraqis themselves have captured the six of diamonds, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti -- otherwise known as Saddam Hussein's half brother: Security forces in Iraq have captured Saddam Hussein's half-brother, one of the country's most wanted men and the first top-level Baathist to be caught in a year, the government announced Sunday. Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti, an intelligence chief and one-time adviser to the former president, was number 36 on the U.S. military's list of the 55 most-wanted people in Iraq -- the six of diamonds. A statement from Iraq's government did not say when or where he was seized or whether U.S. or Iraqi forces had captured him. Details were expected at a news conference later Sunday. Last year, Iraqi officials said Ibrahim, who was born to the...

When Political Correctness Kills

In a lesson about the danger of political correctness in the age of terrorism, the Germans now face an increasing wave of Muslim "honor killings," the practice of killing women who refuse to live under the thumb of male family members. Unfortunately, Germans feel restrained from investigating threats of such killings for fear of appearing racist. The issue has finally come to the fore after the brutal murder of a woman by her three brothers for the crime of leaving the cousin she was forced to marry at 15, but it hardly is the first such killing in Berlin: Police records show that 45 "honour killings" have been committed within Germany's two million-plus Muslim community in the past eight years. Now that at least five have occurred in just four months in Berlin alone, the German authorities and local Turkish leaders are desperately trying to find out why. Karl Mollenhauer,...

Jack Kelly: Iraq War Won

Jack Kelly tells us in his column today what really should have been obvious since January 30th -- that the Iraq War has been won, and the media has missed the story entirely: It will be some months before the news media recognize it, and a few months more before they acknowledge it, but the war in Iraq is all but won. The situation is roughly analogous to the battle of Iwo Jima, which took place 60 years ago this month. It took 35 days before the island was declared secure, but the outcome was clear after day five, with the capture of Mt. Suribachi. Proof of this was provided by Sen. Hillary Clinton. Iraq is functioning quite well, she said in a press conference in Baghdad Feb. 19. The recent rash of suicide attacks is a sign the insurgency is failing, she said. "When politicians like [Clinton] start flocking...

Step Two Of The Palestinian Triangle Offense

Israel has reacted to the Tel Aviv bombing this weekend by suspending planned prisoner releases, one of the key demands of the militant groups, Reuters reports: Israel will reconsider whether to free 400 Palestinian prisoners as it had promised before a suicide bombing that killed four Israelis in Tel Aviv, Israel Radio said Sunday. The radio quoted Justice Minister Tsipi Livni as saying Israel may not release these prisoners that were to have been freed in addition to 500 released last week, following a promise to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at a Feb. 8 summit. Israeli leader Ariel Sharon demanded Sunday the Palestinians smash militant groups after the bombing Friday, saying he would freeze peace efforts and take military action if they did not heed his call. Hamas and Islamic Jihad had already criticized the planned releases as too modest for their tastes, demanding the immediate release of all 8,000...

Syria Coughed Up Saddam's Brother

As I earlier predicted, the Iraqis got their hands on Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti through the intervention of the Syrian government: Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syrian authorities captured Saddam Hussein's half-brother in Syria and handed him over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture. Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, who was also a former adviser suspected of financing insurgents after U.S. troops ousted the former dictator, was captured in Hasakah in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border, two senior Iraqi officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The officials did not specify when al-Hassan was captured, only saying he was detained following the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, Lebanon, in a blast that killed 16 others. What did I tell you? With the wave of popular sentiment sweeping across Southwest Asia for democratic self-determination and pressure from both America and France to...

Lebanese Protestors Defy Syrian Ban

Thousands of protestors in Beirut have defied a ban on public demonstrations to protest against the Syrian occupation and the Damascus-backed government: Thousands of demonstrators massed in central Beirut overnight to defy a government ban on protests on Monday ahead of a fiery debate in parliament over the assassination of the country's former prime minister. Opposition groups have called a demonstration at central Martyrs Square and a one-day strike to coincide with the debate on Rafik al-Hariri's killing on Feb. 14 that for many recalled Lebanon's bitter 1975-90 civil war. Interior Minister Suleiman Franjieh called on security forces in a statement on Sunday "to take all necessary steps to preserve security and order and prevent demonstrations and gatherings on Monday." The Syrians still want to hang onto the illusion of control in Beirut, but they may wind up setting off another public-relations nightmare instead. US Deputy Secretary of State David...

February 28, 2005

Israel Plays Daniel

Israel plans on doing something rather remarkable today, an act of faith that has echoes of Daniel in the lion's den. Israel will request that the United Nations Security Council condemn the terrorist bombing that killed four people in Tel Aviv this weekend and demand that the Palestinian Authority dismantle the terrorist groups operating in its territories as a prerequisite to further negotiations on autonomy: Israel will ask the U.N. Security Council today to condemn a weekend suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and press Palestinians to act against militants, marking a rare diplomatic offensive in the international forum by the Jewish state, officials said. In Israel yesterday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he had stepped up military measures against terrorists in response to the attack at a seaside nightclub that killed four, and would condition future peace talks with the Palestinians on concrete steps to fight terrorism. ... The U.N....

Defiance!

Beirut took to the streets this morning to protest the continuing occupation of Lebanon by Syrian military and intelligence forces and the existence of the puppet Lebanese government, despite a ban on such demonstrations and the intimidation of armed forces cordoning the city: Defying a ban on protests, about 10,000 people demonstrated against Syrian interference in Lebanon on Monday, as opposition lawmakers sought to bring down the pro-Damascus government two weeks after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Hundreds of soldiers and police blocked off Beirut's central Martyrs' Square, but there was no violence, even as more and more protesters managed to evade the cordon and join the demonstration. Protest leaders urged their followers not to provoke the security forces, who refrained from trying to disperse the crowd. The Syrians must know now that the world has finally focused on their oppression in Lebanon. For over a...

Pro-Syrian Lebanese Govt Resigns Under Pressure

Reuters reports that the pro-Syrian Lebanese government has resigned under pressure from the unprecedented demonstrations of dissent in the streets of Beirut today, giving an opportunity for activists of liberty to wrest control of Lebanon from Damascus for the first time in decades: Lebanon's Syrian-backed Prime Minister Omar Karami, under popular pressure after the assassination of an ex-prime minister, said Monday his government was resigning. "Out of concern that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country, I announce the resignation of the government I had the honor to lead," Karami told parliament in Beirut. The government came under fire in parliament Monday over the assassination of Rafik al-Hariri in a huge bomb two weeks ago, while streets away thousands defied a protest ban to demand it stand down. The debate had been expected to close with a no-confidence vote in the government, but after...

Why Now?

In the past two months, we have seen an explosion of momentum in Southwest Asia for political reform and democratization. Despite European warnings that democracy cannot be imposed at gunpoint, two longtime tyrannies (Afghanistan and Iraq) successfully held popular multiparty elections for the first time in their histories, freeing almost 50 million people from two of the most oppressive governments in modern history. Just before that, Ukrainians took to the streets to bring down a puppet government and a sham election that would have perpetuated it, and now we see popular demonstrations for liberty where we would least have expected it -- on the streets of Beirut and Cairo. The pro-Syrian puppet Lebanese government has fallen today as a result, while Hosni Mubarak has managed to stay one step ahead by promising multiparty elections later this year for the executive. After watching nothing but stagnation for decades and an Arab...

The Cedar Revolution, In Pictures

The BBC has a few pictures of the Cedar Revolution that started today and continues to this hour, as the demonstrators refuse to leave until pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud resigns and the Syrians completely withdraw from Lebanon. Reports have the crowds now numbering over 200,000 and still growing. Let's hope they all have flowers and that the security forces remain on the sidelines....

March 1, 2005

Has Musharraf Prepared For Democratization?

Agence France-Presse reports this morning that Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf has created a website to explore his "softer side" -- a professionally-produced site that combines a bit of tourist-baiting with an undeniable sense of a serious campaign effort: His favourite food is a spicy lentil dish, the best book he read recently was on Richard Nixon and he was nearly court martialed in 1965. Welcome to the world of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, via the Internet. Pakistani officials say a slick new website devoted to the general, which mixes moments of unusual frankness with a glowing, hagiographical tone, puts the country's people a mere mouse-click away from the "man behind the leader". But according to analysts, the aim is not so much to reveal the truth about Musharraf as to project a softer image of both the president and his country, after years of foreign media coverage focused on...

Revolution!

Michael Ledeen puts the dizzying series of events occuring in Southwest Asia into perspective in today's National Review. He points out that the current revolution towards democracy started in a European state that had stagnated under the last Western dictator, but only took flight when America elected a visionary leader to nurture its development: We are living in a revolutionary age, that started more than a quarter century ago in Spain after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. At that time, hardly anyone believed it possible to go from dictatorship to democracy without great violence, and most Spaniards feared that the terrible civil war of the 1930s which ended when Franco seized power and installed a military dictatorship would begin anew. Instead, thanks to a remarkable generation of political leaders, some savvy priests, and the grossly underrated King Juan Carlos, Spain passed smoothly and gracefully into democracy. It...

Assad: We'll Be Gone No Later Than A Few Months

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has told Time Magazine in an interview that the Syrian presence will be gone in "a few months," the AP reports: "It (withdrawal) should be very soon and maybe in the next few months. Not after that. I can't give you a technical answer. The point is the next few months," he told Time magazine. Joe Klein has the story for Time, and the blurb on their site has plenty of weasel room, but the commitment is explicit: TIME: Could you give me a timetable? ASSAD: It's a technical issue, not political. I could not say we could do it in two months because I have not had the meeting with the army people. They may say it will take six months. You need to prepare when you bring your army back to your country. You need to prepare where you will put the troops. Assad...

Meeting The Proof Threshold

Hugh Hewitt notes that Ed Kilgore, filling in yesterday for Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo, scoffs at the notion that the Cedar Revolution this week in Lebanon has anything to do with the Bush administration: But it literally never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment. This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese...

Iraqi Judge Killed Not The One Outed By Robert Fisk

Despite the early report by NBC News, promoted by the Drudge Report, the Iraqi Special Tribunal judge assassinated today by terrorists was not Raid Juhi, the presiding judge. NBC has corrected its preliminary reporting with an update from the same reporter that originally reported it was Juhi: A judge working on the special tribunal established to try Saddam Hussein and other senior officials in his toppled regime was assassinated Tuesday in Baghdad, but U.S. officials told NBC News that initial reports that the victim was the presiding judge were erroneous. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the person killed by unidentified gunman was not Raid Juhi, the 35-year-old chief investigative judge of the special tribunal set up to try Saddam and senior officials, but was another judge working for the tribunal. The officials did not immediately identify the victim. None of this lets the ever-execrable Robert Fisk...

March 2, 2005

Ukrainians Arrest Man Carrying Uranium At Airport

Reuters reports that Ukrainian security personnel detained a man at Kiev's airport carrying 1.28 pounds of uranium-238 in his car: Ukraine's SBU security service arrested a man at Kiev's airport who had a case containing radioactive uranium-238 in his car, the Emergencies Ministry said Tuesday. It said the man was detained at Boryspil airport, Ukraine's main international gateway, with 582 grams of uranium. It did not say when the arrest took place or whether he had been attempting to leave the country. ... Depleted uranium, where uranium-238 is normally found, can theoretically be used to make nuclear "dirty bombs," but it is often used in gun ammunition and armor because of its high density. Ukraine still has a heavy reliance on nuclear power, even after the Chernobyl disaster, and depleted uranium doesn't necessarily make good material even for dirty bombs. Still, one has to wonder what the man intended to...

March 3, 2005

Air Marshals Claim Flight Numbers Have Been Padded

Signs keep appearing of widespread discontent from the Federal Air Marshal service. In today's Washington Times, sources within FAMS tell Audrey Hudson that FAMS management routinely pads numbers to demonstrate coverage mandated by Congress, sometimes doubling the actual number of protected flights -- and even the inflated numbers fall short of 10%: Flight reports by the Federal Air Marshal Service show that federal agents were on less than 10 percent of the nation's flights in December, a number several air marshals say was inflated to make it appear to Congress that commercial air travel is better protected than it is. "The numbers reported to headquarters come back higher than originally reported and are sometimes upwards of double the number of what is actually flown," an air marshal said. "Everyone knows they are padding the numbers." FAMS flight reports for December, obtained by The Washington Times, show air marshals were on...

The Asymmetrical Offense

The recent impulse for democratization has surprised and delighted the West as oppressive regimes thought untouchable have suddenly rethought their strategies in the face of popular discontent. The most dramatic example would be Egypt and Lebanon, two countries which suffered under some of the most constraining dictatorships in Middle East after the departure of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The two controlling regimes, Mubarak and Assad in Syria, have reacted in opposite directions, at least at first, but the movements have continued to pressure for democracy regardless. They join with the popular will of the Iraqis, the Afghanis, and even a watered-down impulse of the Palestinians. Even Saudi Arabia has a nascent democratization program, and Iran has had street demonstrations for the past two years or more demanding freedom. The wave of democratization promises to free the Muslim world from the grip of kleptocracies and mullahcracies, a welcome development all...

March 4, 2005

Look Who's Reconsidering The Bush Strategy On Terror

A number of Bush critics have watched the wave of popular demand for democratization sweep across the Middle East since the staging of the Iraqi elections on January 30th and have started to question their previous assumptions. The New York Times did this, with reservations, in its unsigned editorial last Tuesday. Today, the Christian Science Monitor published an opinion piece wondering if Bush has been right all along. Try to guess who wrote this: The movements for democratic change in Egypt and Lebanon have happened since the successful Iraqi election on Jan. 30. And one can speculate on whether Iraq has served as a beacon for democratic change in the Middle East. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that "a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region." He may have had it right. That conclusion came from the pen...

March 5, 2005

Pakistan Gathers More AQ Assets

Operating from new intelligence, the Pakistani Army attacked a suspected al-Qaeda hideout in North Waziristan, capturing eleven foreigners and killing two other suspected terrorists: Pakistani troops raided a hideout of suspected al-Qaida militants Saturday in a remote tribal area near Afghanistan, triggering a shootout that left two foreigners dead, an army spokesman said. Eleven people were arrested. The troops also seized a large number of weapons in the raid near Miran Shah, the main town in northwest Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region, said Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan. Miran Shah is near the Afghan border, in a region known for its sympathies to the Islamists. The Pakistanis had recently come to terms with the tribal chiefs in the area and had quit attacking on a broad front in both North and South Waziristan. While they weren't satisfied that the al-Qaeda operatives in the area had all been rounded up, they promised...

Zarqawi Ought To Be In Pictures

CNN has new pictures of terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, updating the psycho-lunatic photo commonly used with reports on his activities with a kindler, gentler image: CNN recently obtained new pictures of a man believed to be terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose network in Iraq has been responsible for attacks on military and civilian targets. Al-Zarqawi is thought to be a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and has pledged his allegiance to bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. In the photos, he is chatting and laughing with unknown men. ... Intelligence officials said this week that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has enlisted the help of al-Zarqawi to plan new attacks inside the United States. Sources tell CNN the man in the photos is indeed al-Zarqawi. It's not SOP for terrorists to have their pictures taken at parties, which makes me wonder about the circumstances of this...

March 6, 2005

Hezbollah Endorses The Occupation

Hezbollah had mostly remained silent in the face of the Cedar Revolution, presumably to avoid drawing attention to its special status and relationship to the Syrian occupiers. Now it has decided to fight for the occupation to continue rather than face a free Lebanon, calling for counterdemonstrations to support continued Syrian administration of the country: Hizbollah, Lebanon's most powerful party, threw its weight against Syria's opponents on Sunday, calling for a peaceful mass rally in central Beirut on Tuesday in support of Damascus and against Western meddling. The Shi'ite Muslim group, which has the largest following in the country and is the only one with weapons, has in the past steered clear of plunging into internal Lebanese politics or flexing its political muscles against domestic rivals. ... In the name of loyalist parties, he called for a mass rally Tuesday at a square in central Beirut close to another square...

War On Terror Bolstering Moderates, Not Radicals

One of the arguments from the Left after 9/11, and especially in the build-up to the Iraq invasion, was that George Bush and Tony Blair's prosecution of the war on terror would only result in further extremism. Many argued that Bush became al-Qaeda's best recruiter, and that the US had blundered into following Osama bin Laden's playbook. Predictions of massive shifts towards radical Islamism in previously moderate populations abounded, complete with allusions to a global uprising of Islam against Western civilization -- Armageddon. Unfortunately for the Chicken Littles, those predictions have suffered the same fate as those proclaiming disasters in the Iraqi desert or Afghani mountains for American military forces. The New York Times reports that the forward engagement of Islamofascists have empowered Muslim moderates and liberals to marginalize the radicals as never before, even within the mosques themselves: Inayat Bunglawala had just finished his talk on "Islamophobia and the...

Spiderhole Nightmares, Part II

For those who still doubt that the invasion of Iraq has anything to do with the wave of democratization sweeping across the Middle East and the thus-far impotence of the dictatorships to stop it, the Commissar at the Politburo Diktat noticed this comment from Bashar Assad in an interview with the Turkish press: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, under pressure to withdraw troops from Lebanon, insisted he should not be compared to Saddam Hussein and that he wanted to cooperate with international demands, according to an interview released Sunday. ... At the end of the interview, which was conducted last week, Assad said: "Please send this message: I am not Saddam Hussein. I want to cooperate." Watching Saddam get pulled out of that spider hole by American soldiers has generated an entirely new calculus in the cesspool of tyranny and corruption throughout the Muslim world. When Moammar Gaddafi and Bashar Assad...

300-400 Bullets Hit This Car? (Updated!)

The British newspaper The Guardian reports that freed Italian hostage Giuliani Sgrena claims that Americans fired between 300 and 400 rounds from an armored vehicle after the car had already stopped and Americans had looked inside with a flashlight: The US Army claimed the Italians' vehicle had been seen as a threat because it was travelling at speed and failed to stop at the checkpoint despite warning shots being fired by the soldiers. A State Department official in Washington said the Italians had failed to inform the military of Sgrena's release. Italian reconstruction of the incident is significantly different. Sgrena told colleagues the vehicle was not travelling fast and had already passed several checkpoints on its way to the airport. The Americans shone a flashlight at the car and then fired between 300 and 400 bullets at if from an armoured vehicle. Rather than calling immediately for assistance for the...

Ayman Nour: Did I Take Democracy Too Seriously?

When Egyptian democracy activist Ayman Nour was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, it resulted in an unusually harsh rebuke from Secretary of State Condi Rice, who cancelled a planned meeting with Hosni Mubarak. In response, Mubarak surprisingly announced that Egypt would allow multiparty elections for president, promising free and open elections for the first time in decades, if ever. And yet, Ayman Nour remains in prison, ostensibly for forgery but really for the crime of forming a liberal political party of the type Mubarak promises to allow in the next election. Nour wonders if he gambled on democracy without a good reason, and he sent a missive out from prison to plead his case to the world. Newsweek publishes it in tomorrow's edition: On Jan. 29, Egyptian security forces snatched me as I was leaving my seat in Parliament amid the cries of my political allies and the suspicious indifference...

March 7, 2005

Reality Check For Italian Conspiracy Theorists

The death of an Italian commando and the wounding of Giuliana Sgrena has led to hysterical charges of assassination attempts and war crimes, all of which approach the ridiculous. Michelle Malkin has the best round-up of the media coverage today, including multiple reports that the Italians paid millions of dollars in ransom to free Sgrena -- money that will undoubtedly go towards murdering Iraqis and American soldiers, and certainly a reason to play a little misdirection with an accidental shooting. The Washington Post provides a look at why Sgrena's car likely got shot in an otherwise rather hostile article by Jeffrey Smith and Ann Tyson: The automobile was traversing onto a route -- the road to the airport -- where soldiers have been killed in shootings and by roadside bombs. U.S. soldiers had established an impromptu evening checkpoint at the entrance to the road about 90 minutes earlier and had...

In Sgrena's Own Words

CNN has a translation of Giuliana Sgrena's account of the incident with American troops that left her wounded and her negotiator dead. Stripped of the dramatics with which she surrounds the narrative, this is Sgrena's recollection of the friendly-fire incident, as published in Il Manifesto: The car kept on the road, going under an underpass full of puddles and almost losing control to avoid them. We all incredibly laughed. It was liberating. Losing control of the car in a street full of water in Baghdad and maybe wind up in a bad car accident after all I had been through would really be a tale I would not be able to tell. Nicola Calipari sat next to me. The driver twice called the embassy and in Italy that we were heading towards the airport that I knew was heavily patrolled by U.S. troops. They told me that we were less...

When Political Correctness Kills, Part II

MS-NBC has a breaking story from the AP regarding the screening of 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta, the last chance to stop him, and why it slipped through our fingers. The airport security agent at Logan Airport remembers Atta well from that day: Michael Tuohey of Scarborough said he was suspicious of Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari when they rushed through the Portland International Jetport to make their flight to Boston that day. Attas demeanor and the pairs first-class, one-way tickets to Los Angeles made Tuohey think twice about them. I said to myself, If this guy doesnt look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does. Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, its not nice to say things like this, Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram. Youve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and youve never done that. I felt kind of...

Cooler Italian Heads May Yet Prevail

After the outpouring of understandable grief at the loss of Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, some members of the Italian press want to cool the rhetoric spawned by the far-left Communist mouthpiece Il Manifesto, in which Giuliana Sgrena has accused the US of attempting to assassinate her after the Italians ransomed her from her Iraqi captors. The publication Italian Life (Corriere Della Sera IT) calls for a bit of common sense from Italians when dealing with Sgrena's outburst: [I]s it true, as the self-styled Communist Daily headline puts it, that the death of Nicola Calipari was a preemptive and therefore premeditated, homicide? Is it true, as Rossana Rossanda writes, that the Americans were shooting to kill, and that Caliparis death was an assassination? Can we really subscribe to the picture painted by Ms Rossanda of arrogant Yankee roughnecks, beardless and/or whisky-soused, complying with the American maxim, shoot first, ask questions...

March 8, 2005

Hezbollah Sponsors Counterprotests In Beirut

True to their word, pro-Syrian Hezbollah leadership staged a protest in Beirut to counter the people power demonstrations creating so much pressure for a complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. In the AP report, however, no mention is given on how many people Hezbollah attracted for their paean to foreign domination: Pro-Syrian protesters gathered in a central Beirut square Tuesday, answering a nationwide call by the militant Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group for a demonstration to counter weeks of massive rallies demanding Syrian forces leave Lebanon. Loudspeakers blared songs of resistance and organizers handed out Lebanese flags and directed the men and women to separate sections of the square. Black-clad Hezbollah guards handled security, lining the perimeter of the square and taking position on rooftops. Trained dogs sniffed for bombs. Large cranes hoisted two giant white and red flags bearing Lebanon's cedar tree. On one, the words "Thank you Syria" were written...

Syria: Withdrawal Includes Intelligence Services

Syria clarified its position on the withdrawal of its forces from Lebanon this morning, assuring the international community that their withdrawal will include their espionage agents as well as military personnel: Syria's promised troop pullout from Lebanon will include intelligence and security personnel, a Syrian official source said Tuesday. The source gave no timetable for the second phase of the pullout announced Monday, but said: "This doesn't mean it won't be soon." "The fact that security forces were not mentioned in the statement is merely because they move along with the armed forces. It is a given. The withdrawal is of all Syrian forces," the source told Reuters. ... A statement after the talks did not mention Syrian security services. The United States, which has demanded that intelligence agents leave along with the troops, has dismissed the plan for failing to set a deadline for a full pullout. That may...

The Sgrena Vehicle Exposed

Giuliana Sgrena described the American "assassination" attempt on her life as a "rain of bullets" that still somehow managed to leave her alive. We have asked to see the car that the Italians used to transport her and the deceased negotiator, Nicola Calipari, to the Baghdad airport to see whether the damage matches her description of the incident. Now La Repubblica has a slideshow of photographs that pretty much demolished the notion that the American soldiers at the checkpoint fired indiscriminately at Sgrena's vehicle: This clearly shows that the vehicle did not come under heavy fire but probably got shot by handheld weapon trying to disable the vehicle. This picture is last in the slideshow; others show bullet holes on the fringe of the front windshield, which otherwise remains intact. Whatever else happened, this vehicle did not come under heavy-weapons fire or indiscriminate automatic-arms fire. The fact that it's still...

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March 9, 2005

Lebanon Backsliding?

After a massive pro-Syrian rally sponsored by Hezbollah and possibly bolstered by Damascus, Lebanese president Emile Lahoud has decided to reinstate Omar Karami as Prime Minister -- the same PM that the pro-democracy rallies chased from office: Lebanon's president looked set to ask the outgoing pro-Syrian prime minister to form a government on Wednesday, a step sure to anger the anti-Syrian opposition who pressured him to resign in the first place. President Emile Lahoud, buoyed by a mass rally in support of his Syrian backers, began consultations with MPs that were likely to preserve Syria's political grip on its much smaller neighbor. Speaker Nabih Berri's bloc named Omar Karami as prime minister, as did the deputies of guerrilla group Hizbollah. Karami resigned as prime minister last week after huge anti-Syrian protests in Beirut but stayed on as caretaker. Other pro-Syrian MPs were expected to follow, making it all but certain...

The Stupidity Of Terror (Western Version)

Sometimes, people act so stupidly that one has to marvel that they remember to breathe. In the case of the IRA and Sinn Fin, that has almost reached the level of parody. The IRA managed to get itself involved in what started off as a simple bar fight, which of course is stupid enough for a supposedly experienced underground paramilitary force. During this bar fight, at least three and maybe more of these geniuses decide to stab one of the combatants and wind up killing the man who tried to stop the fight. Because the men involved were well-known in their Northern Ireland community, the family of the victim, Robert McCartney, has called for the IRA to cough up the men involved in this senseless, brutal, and needlessly provocative murder. The IRA refuses, of course, as it's not really an experienced underground paramilitary force but a terrorist group run more...

March 10, 2005

Palestinian Democrats In Action

For those who believed that the fraudulent presidential elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip signaled a turn towards peace and stability in Israeli-Palestinian relations, be prepared for more disappointment. Not only has President Mahmoud Abbas failed to control the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in the territories, allowing them to continue attacks in Israel, but now it at least appears he can't even control the terrorists in his own political faction: More than 20 Palestinian gunmen burst into a large gathering of the ruling Fatah party on Thursday, ordering people out of the building and firing shots into the air. Roughly 1,200 Fatah activists had gathered in a Ramallah hotel to discuss upcoming parliamentary elections when the gunmen burst into the building, said Dimitri Diliani, a party activist from Jerusalem. The gunmen broke chairs, ordered everyone out of the building and fired shots into the air outside the...

Kevin McCullough: Church Report To Vindicate Pentagon

Kevin McCullough has a source within the Pentagon which claims that the report from the Admiral Church investigation into torture and detainee abuse will vindicate the Pentagon's actions and administration. The report will find the following, according to Kevin: 1. There was no policy that condoned torture. 2. There was no policy that encouraged abuse. 3. There was a lot of inconsistency across interrogation techniques. Many of those techniques were developed in the combat theater and migrated to other areas. 4. There was a general lack of military command guidance in dealing with the CIA. He found 30 ghost detainees. One such detainee was in that status for 45 days. 5. There were missed interrogation opportunities in part because the military failed to take account of lessons from prior conflicts. 6. There was no guidance to CENTCOM or by CENTCOM on interrogations. The New York Times has a preliminary look...

Iran Got Centrifuges From AQ Khan

Pakistan finally admitted today that the Iranian nuclear program got a big boost from the father of the Pakistani atomic-weapons program, AQ Khan. Up to now, Pakistan has not given any specifics about the work of Khan in spreading nuclear technology across the Asian continent, but atomic-energy watchdogs believe that his work enabled North Korea and Libya to develop their own programs far faster than analysts predicted. Libya, in fact, confirmed this when they abandoned their WMD programs in January 2004. This time, Pakistan did get specific about the support Khan gave the Iranian mullahcracy: Pakistan has admitted in the past that Khan, dubbed the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, smuggled nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya, but has not given specifics as to what he supplied. "He has given centrifuges to Iran, but the government was in no way involved in this," Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid...

March 11, 2005

Rendition Policy Works: CIA Dissenter

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA agent who wrote the book Imperial Hubris which attacked the Bush war strategy last year, writes in today's New York Times that not only has rendition been a US policy for two administrations, but it keeps America secure. He should know; he reveals that he ran the program for over three years: AS Congress and the news media wail about the Central Intelligence Agency's "rendition" program - its practice of turning suspected terrorists over for detainment and questioning in third countries - it is time to focus on the real issue at hand. A good starting place is Page 127 of the tablets on which are inscribed the scripture handed down by the 9/11 commission. Here we find a description of a 1998 conversation between National Security Director Samuel Berger and his counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, about the capture of Abu Hajer al Iraqi, the...

Italian Story Continues To Fall Apart

The AP reports that the Italian story of Giuliana Sgrena's release and later wounding at an American checkpoint, which also resulted in the death of intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, continues to fall apart. Two Italian newspapers now say that the general in charge of the Sgrena operation did not inform the US that Calipari's mission was to free Sgrena, and one of them reports that General Mario Maroli didn't even know it himself: U.S. forces in Iraq were only partially informed about last week's Italian intelligence mission to release a hostage, which ended with a shooting on the road to Baghdad airport and the death of secret service agent Nicola Calipari, Italian newspapers said Friday. ... Both newspapers cited a report by Gen. Mario Marioli, an Italian who is the coalition forces' second-in-command. The report has been given to Rome prosecutors investigating the killing. According to the newspapers, Marioli informed...

Sgrena Sets Tinfoil-Hat Brigade Loose

The allegations of deliberate assassination by Giuliana Sgrena against the US military have provoked the lunatics of the International Tinfoil Hat Brigade, which unfortunately has to come up with increasingly ridiculous explanations of how American soldiers filled a car with bullets but left only two or three holes in the car, killed one person but left two people alive, including the one who was the supposed target of the attempted assassination, and covered it up while letting the eyewitnesses go. The latest to attempt this is Uruknet, a bizarre website that appears to dedicate itself to substantiating every loopy hypothesis about the US presence in Iraq. Normally, I just ignore these people, but the explanation at Uruknet simply provides too many laughs to pass up. Here's what Uruknet wants you to believe: By combining photo evidence and eyewitness accounts of the Baghdad airport shooting in which Giuliana Sgrena was wounded...

Italy To Sgrena: You Can Shut Up Any Time Now

After having listened to the reporter from the Communist newspaper Il Manifesto spout contradictory stories and hysterical conspiracy-mongering, even the Italian government has had enough of Giuliana Sgrena. In their first direct criticism of the former hostage, the justice minister publicly scolded Sgrena for her ever-changing accusations: Italy's justice minister urged former hostage Giuliana Sgrena on Friday to stop making "careless" accusations after being shot by US forces in Baghdad, saying she had already caused enough grief. Sgrena has repeatedly suggesting US soldiers shot her on purpose and said on Friday she had little faith in a joint investigation by Italy and the United States into the "friendly fire" incident. "She has created enormous problems for the government and also caused grief that perhaps was better avoided," Justice Minister Roberto Castelli told reporters in Bologna. Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari was shot dead by U.S. forces as he shielded the...

Saddam's Bribery

The London Telegraph reports that former UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus received and turned down a $2 million bribe offer from Saddam Hussein in the mid-1990s. Ekeus told Reuters that the bribe came through Tariq Aziz, who now sits in US and Iraqi custody awaiting trial for selling Iraqis out in a similar manner: Saddam Hussein's regime offered a $2 million (1.4 million) bribe to the United Nations' chief weapons inspector to doctor his reports on the search for weapons of mass destruction. ... Mr Ekeus told Reuters news agency that he had passed the information to the Volcker Commission. "I told the Volcker people that Tariq [Aziz] said a couple of million was there if we report right. My answer was, 'That is not the way we do business in Sweden.' " A clean report from Mr Ekeus's inspectors would have been vital in lifting sanctions against Saddam's regime....

March 12, 2005

The Never Ending Story Changes ... Again

Giuliana Sgrena has changed her story yet again, proving if nothing else that the Il Manifesto reporter understands the news cycle. The Independent (UK) reports that Sgrena now says she doesn't think the Americans were trying to kill her: The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was wounded by American fire last Friday soon after being released by kidnappers in Baghdad, has said that she does not think that the Americans were trying to kill her. "I never said that they wanted to kill me," she said on a television talk show, "but the mechanics of what happened were those of an attack." In an interview with The Independent, her partner, Pier Scolari, said: "None of us is so stupid as to think the Americans did it on purpose. But the dynamic was that of an ambush and we want a convincing explanation of what happened, because the first American explanation...

UN: Syrian Agreement, Timetable On Complete Pullout

The UN envoy sent to Damascus to enforce the UNSC resolution calling for a complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon told reporters that he has an agreement to take back to Turtle Bay, implying that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has agreed to a timetable for complete withdrawal: President Bashar Assad reiterated his commitment to withdrawing all Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon, a U.N. envoy said Saturday, indicating that he had received a timetable for the pullout. Meanwhile, a convoy of Syrian troops returning home received a rousing welcome. ... "I will present U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annanwith further details of the timetable for a complete Syrian pullout from Lebanon upon arrival in New York early next week," Roed-Larsen said in a statement read to The Associated Press by Roed-Larsen's spokesman Najib Friji. Roed-Larsen also told reporters that the agreement complies with Resolution 1559 and that Assad has agreed to...

Italy Retreats Further On Sgrena

The Times of London reports in tomorrow's edition that the Italians have agreed to stop paying ransoms to kidnapers in Iraq, a policy change that brings Rome into line with other Western nations. In further developments, an Italian parliamentarian indicated that despite earlier assertions that the Americans had been alerted to Sgrena's release and Calipari's itinerary, the Italians never got clearance for their vehicle: THE Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has promised President George W Bush that he will not pay more ransoms to free hostages in Iraq. The Italian government has denied newspaper reports that $6m (3.1m) was paid for the release of Giuliana Sgrena, who worked for the Communist daily Il Manifesto. But senior officials and intelligence sources have confirmed that money did change hands. ... Last year Italy paid a reported $5m (2.6m) for the freedom of two aid workers, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta. Hours after...

March 13, 2005

Hubris

Jack Kelly writes today about the Giuliana Sgrena affair, taking the longer-view perspective of Sgrena's motivations and naivet. He remains mostly neutral, if skeptical, on her assassination claims, but instead demolishes her credibility by pointing out her monumental hubris: Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her. "Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena. "You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account last week in Nederlands Dagblad. (Excerpts were translated into English and posted on a Dutch writer's Web blog.) "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear." Sgrena left her hotel the morning of Feb. 4 to interview refugees from Fallujah, the resistance stronghold captured by U.S. Marines in November. The interviews didn't go well. "The refugees ... would...

Sgrena Flip-Flops Again

In an otherwise unremarkable interview with John Follain for the Times of London, Giuliana Sgrena has changed her mind again about the American motivation for attacking the vehicle which was to take her to the Baghdad airport: A joint American-Italian investigation is due to report within a month on the shooting, but Sgrena refuses to accept that it might have been simply a blunder. This was an ambush. No sign was given for us to stop. We were going at a normal speed and we were fired at, she insists. American and Italian authorities have branded as absurd the suggestion this was no accident but Sgrena remains undaunted: The Americans dont approve of the Italian policy on hostages, because of ransom payments, and the thing I want to know is whether the Americans tried to put a stop to this policy by preventing one of these operations from being completed,...

March 14, 2005

Irish-American Politicians Drop Sinn Fin, Finally

Americans of Irish descent have always had a soft spot for the old IRA and Ireland's struggle for freedom. Not only do they see the Irish as a parallel to the American revolutionaries, but most of their ancestors fled Ireland as a result of British colonalialism, maladministration, and outright oppression. This has led us to keep blinders on to the nature of the modern conflict in Northern Ireland. American politicians of Irish descent have proven to have a soft spot in their head for supporting the modern IRA's political wing, Sinn Fin, despite the IRA being little more than an American-style street gang -- opposing Loyalist groups of exactly the same timbre -- more reminiscent of a Baader-Meinhof without the discipline. Those days have come to an end, at least for now. CNN reports that Gerry Adams has finally been shunned by the American government, even those politicians he once...

Lebanon Answers Hezbollah In One Voice: Freedom!

In response to the massive, organized rally by Hezbollah last week that had significant Syrian support, the Lebanese have flocked to Martyrs Square again today in the hundreds of thousands, according to Reuters, demanding an end to Syrian occupation. Unlike the Hezbollah protests for continued foreign domination, today's demonstration crosses sectarian lines: Hundreds of thousands of people rallied in central Beirut on Monday in the largest anti-Syrian protest in Lebanon since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri exactly a month ago. ... Unlike previous anti-Syrian opposition protests since a bomb blast killed Hariri on Feb. 14, many Sunni Muslims joined Druze and Christians in taking to the streets. Hariri was a Sunni. The opposition rally came a day after huge crowds turned out in the south for a anti-U.S. demonstration organized by Lebanon's Shi'ite Muslim Hizbollah group, an ally of Syria. Westerners worried that the massive show...

March 15, 2005

Pro-Syrian Demonstrators Short On Math

Apparently, Syrian education does not include mathematics. Around 2,000 pro-Syrian demonstrators converged on the American embassy in Beirut to protest American support for democracy activists in Beirut, demanding the expulsion of the ambassador to make Lebanon "free": At least 2,000 pro-Syria demonstrators denouncing what they said was U.S. interference in Lebanon marched toward the U.S. Embassy in a Beirut suburb Tuesday, and scores of riot police and soldiers used barbed wire to block the approaches to the compound. The protesters, waving Lebanese flags and chanting, "Ambassador get out! Leave my country free!" stopped at the barbed wire blocking the road about 500 yards from the fortified hilltop compound. The crowd did not attempt to break through. We're Americans, however, so we can actually use math to solve problems. Let's see ... we have one American ambassador in Beirut, who probably has a staff of around 200 or so people, including...

The Other Italian Ransom Payment

Italy retreats: Italy will start to withdraw its troops from Iraq this September, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Tuesday. "We will begin to reduce our contingent even before the end of the year, starting in September, in agreement with our allies," he said in an interview on state television RAI. One wonders if this wasn't a negotiated commitment between Italy and Giuliana Sgrena's kidnappers. It certainly looks that way, or else it appears to be a reaction to American demands to stop paying ransoms to terrorists. Italy had been a reliable ally in liberating Iraq and bringing democracy to the Iraqis, but if all they can do is pay off the people killing American soldiers and Iraqis by the score, then we're probably better off seeing them depart....

Syrian Intelligence Starts Packing

The latest demonstrations of people power in Beirut may have convinced the Syrians to keep packing. Military intelligence units around the city began dismantling outposts and packing to leave under the careful watch of Lebanese security officers, the AP reports this morning: A day after the country's biggest opposition demonstration, Syrian military intelligence on Tuesday was vacating an office in Beirut, moving furniture into trucks protected by Lebanese police. Police blocked the road in the Hamra district of Beirut in the morning as three trucks started loading the furniture from the office. Two agents sat at the entrance of the building amid the chairs and tables. A policeman at the scene said some Syrian agents had already left and others were on their way out. However, Syrian agents remained at their main office for the Lebanese capital, located at Ramlet el-Baida on the edge of the city. Despite Syria's troop...

The Military Perspective On Iraq

A CQ reader who wishes to remain anonymous forwarded me an e-mail from military sources regarding an unclassified presentation given by Major General Pete Chiarelli, the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. The New York Times featured Gen. Chiarelli in a Roger Cohen column that managed to capture the general's feeling of optimism only in vague terms. The presentation described by the e-mailer sounds much more hopeful than Cohen's otherwise serviceable column did. I'll excerpt the highlights and put the entire message (minus the identifying headers) in the extended entry. 3. He showed a graph of attacks in Sadr City by month. Last Aug-Sep they were getting up to 160 attacks per week. During the last three months, the graph had flatlined at below 5 to zero per week. 4. His big point was not that they were "winning battles" to do this but that cleaning the place up, electricity,...

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March 16, 2005

Lebanon Rejoices In Freedom, Hezbollah Cowers

Two wire stories reflect the different directions that freedom and tyranny have taken in the Middle East since the free elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. After Syrian intelligence personnel abandoned their stations in all but the easternmost part of Lebanon today, the Lebanese can now give voice to the frustrations and degradations of living under the Syrian thumb for decades: Syrian intelligence agents ended their 18-year presence in Beirut on Wednesday, and emboldened residents of the capital came forward to celebrate. Some kissed the ground and others wept, wandering the basement cellblock at the headquarters and describing torture there. ... Others were forthright. "It's a feast and great joy for me today because they're gone. I consider that Lebanon was born today with its liberation from Syrian forces," said Imad Seifeddine, a 47-year-old blacksmith. Seifeddine said he was imprisoned by the Syrians for four years in the 1990s. "They tortured...

March 17, 2005

The Al-Qaeda Bund Of West Seattle High

Michelle Malkin notices this disturbing story of political indoctrination gone awry at West Seattle High School. Susan Paynter reveals an attempt to hijack a legitimate panel discussion about the Iraq War and the broader war on terror among those, as Paynter notes, who may soon fight it by radical elements more intent on slandering the US military than an actual debate: Three invited pro-military speakers were shocked last Friday when they arrived for a West Seattle High student assembly to confront a theater stage strewn with figures costumed as Iraqi men, women and children splashed with blood. It was a warm-up for the "Iraq Awareness Assembly" so no students except the actual actors saw the skit before the military guests complained to principal Susan Derse and she put a stop to it. And here comes the crucial part: no teachers or advisers were on hand or evidently even aware of...

March 18, 2005

NYT Gets Hysterical About "Un-Volunteering"

It's difficult to fathom what constitutes news to the New York Times. For instance, the head of a major American news network makes repeated and unsubstantiated allegations of American servicemen assassinating and torturing journalists, and the Paper of Record doesn't bother to report it until two weeks later, hours before the executive resigns in disgrace. However, when a handful of American servicemen attempt to evade the service for which they volunteered, they splash that all over the paper: One by one, a trickle of soldiers and marines - some just back from duty in Iraq, others facing a trip there soon - are seeking ways out. Soldiers, their advocates and lawyers who specialize in military law say they have watched a few service members try ever more unlikely and desperate routes: taking drugs in the hope that they will be kept home after positive urine tests, for example; or seeking...

March 19, 2005

Iraq Insurgency Fading, General Reports

The top-ranking Marine in Iraq tells the New York Times that the insurgency has tailed off to its lowest level in months, evidence that the Ba'athist remnants and the foreign jihadists have lost the momentum and any popular support they might have had: The top Marine officer in Iraq said Friday that the number of attacks against American troops in Sunni-dominated western Iraq and death tolls had dropped sharply over the last four months, a development that he called evidence that the insurgency was weakening in one of the most violent areas of the country. The officer, Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, head of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, said that insurgents were averaging about 10 attacks a day, and that fewer than two of those attacks killed or wounded American forces or damaged equipment. That compared with 25 attacks a day, five of them with casualties or damage, in...

March 20, 2005

Fighting To Rescue All Women From Islamist Oppression

Newsweek profiles a courageous Pakistani woman who Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain compare to Rosa Parks, one who wants to transform a horrific and brutal gang-rape into a passage for freedom for Muslim women throughout Islam. Three years ago, a village council used Mukhtar Mai in order to punish her clan for the supposed adultery of her teenage brother and sent 14 men to rape her, making Mai so undesirable in the eyes of her society that she had little choice except exile or suicide. Mai had other ideas: The local Mastoi clan, which dominates the village council, expected her to keep her mouth shut or simply disappear. Her own Gujar clan refused to support her. "My choice was either to commit suicide or to fight back," Mai recalled last week. "I decided to fight back." ... Using government compensation and contributions from supporters, Mai built the first school for...

Taliban Claiming Amnesty

As I noted a month ago, the Afghan government and the American military leadership in Afghanistan have begun to pursue an amnesty program to entice lower-level Taliban fighters to give up and join the democractic process. Hamid Karzai has employed well-known Taliban leaders who have pledged loyalty to the new Afghani government to assure these worn-out remnants of Mullah Omar's militia that they will receive fair treatment if they pledge allegiance to the new democracy. As Cori Dauber points out, the New York Times finally reports on this phenomenon, only after waiting weeks between reprinting a Reuters prediction that Omar would mount a major spring offensive in early March: Although many senior officials in the frontline provinces were initially skeptical last year when Mr. Karzai spoke of an amnesty for all except the Taliban senior leadership, many of them now voice support for the policy. In the absence of the...

March 22, 2005

The Ayatollah Says, Get To Work

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has expressed his frustration with the political impasse between Shi'ites and Kurds in the new Iraqi assembly, and the influential cleric hopes a few well-chosen words will push both sides towards finally forming a coalition government: The most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq called late Sunday for quick agreement on a new government, expressing displeasure with the weeks of drawn-out haggling, which has begun to stir unrest in the Iraqi public. The cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, appeared to be putting pressure on Kurdish politicians in talks on forming a governing coalition. Even though he has no constituency in the mostly Sunni Kurdish territory, the ayatollah has proved to be the most influential authority in the new Iraq. He brought together the largest and most successful Shiite bloc in the elections, and he has been able to call up huge street protests and get voters to...

March 23, 2005

Second Bombing In Lebanon Kills Three

The second bombing in Lebanon this week has people pointing towards Damascus again, believing that Bashar Assad may want to destabilize Lebanon in order to build a pretense for a re-occupation of their country: A bomb killed three people in a Christian commercial center early Wednesday, the second attack in an anti-Syrian stronghold in five days, raising fears that agitators were trying to show a need for Syria's military presence in Lebanon. A major opposition group, Qornet Shehwan, accused the pro-Damascus authorities of seeking to "terrorize" the people through the blasts. The local member of parliament called on his constituents to resist attempts to draw them into sectarian strife. Meanwhile, the magistrate investigating the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which brought Syria's long domination of the country into the spotlight, has asked to step down, the Justice Ministry said Wednesday. The move comes ahead of a...

March 25, 2005

Iraqi Prisoners Attempt Remake Of Stalag 17

The Hill reports that US forces in Iraq caught onto an elaborate escape attempt by thousands of terrorists held in a prison camp in southern Iraq, just ahead of an inspection tour by top military leadership: U.S. military police Friday thwarted a massive escape attempt by suspected insurgents and terrorists from this southern Iraq Army base that houses more than 6,000 detainees when they uncovered a 600-foot tunnel the detainees had dug under their compound. ... Within hours of the discovery on the first tunnel, a second tunnel of about 300 feet was detected under an adjoining compound in the camp, which holds 6,049 detainees. The elaborate escape is reminiscent of the 1994 movie, "The Shawshank Redemption," where a prisoner burrows his way out of prison. The key difference, however, is that not one Iraq prisoner got out. I think the better reference is to Stalag 17 or maybe Hogan's...

FT: Iraqi Insurgents Want A Way Out

The Financial Times of London reports that native insurgent leaders in Iraq -- as opposed to the smaller band of foreigners led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- have lost heart and want a face-saving way out of the battle against American and Iraqi forces. They want Iraq to offer some security guarantees in return for their surrender and an ability to join in the political process: Many of Iraq's predominantly Sunni Arab insurgents would lay down their arms and join the political process in exchange for guarantees of their safety and that of their co-religionists, according to a prominent Sunni politician. Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, who heads Iraq's main monarchist movement and is in contact with guerrilla leaders, said many insurgents including former officials of the ruling Ba'ath party, army officers, and Islamists have been searching for a way to end their campaign against US troops and Iraqi government forces...

March 27, 2005

Second British Newspaper Notices We're Winning, American Media Still Clueless

The Guardian (UK) follows up on a report yesterday by the Financial Times that the Iraqi elections have severely undermined at least the native insurgency, and have even resulted in an internecine war among them: The Iraqi resistance has peaked and is 'turning in on itself', according to recent intelligence reports from Baghdad received by Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. The reports are the most optimistic for several months and reflect analysts' sense that recent elections in Iraq marked a 'quantum shift'. They will boost the government in the run-up to the expected general election in May. ... One foreign intelligence report cites a recent incident in which members of the al-Dulaimi tribe, previously known for their antagonism to the coalition and the new government in Iraq, shot dead a number of Islamic militants from outside Iraq, whom they believed responsible for killing a senior al-Dulaimi sheikh. Although the sheikh was...

Iraqis Grab 131 Terrorists Targeting Kerbala

Iraqi security forces have demonstrated their increasing effectiveness by leading a raid on a terrorist stronghold outside of Kerbala, capturing 131 operatives, many of them the foreigners that cause the worst attacks on Iraqis and Americans: Iraqi soldiers, backed by US helicopters, are reported to have seized 131 suspects in a dawn raid on insurgents planning attacks on the holy city of Kerbala. The Defence Ministry says troops also retrieved tonnes of explosives. The Defence Minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, described it as a very successful operation based on intensive surveillance. Several suspected militants were reported killed in the operation, which began late on Friday and culminated in the dawn raid just outside Kerbala, about 100 kilometres south-west of Baghdad. Officials say say those arrested included foreigners using fake Iraqi identification papers. Next week brings an expected large pilgrimage to Kerbala for Arbain, one of the mourning rites of the Shi'a. Undoubtedly,...

March 28, 2005

Housecleaning In Iraqi Security Services?

The newly-elected Shi'ite leaders of Iraq want to clean out the ex-Ba'athists who have returned to work in the new Iraqi police, setting up what could be a major division within the forces that Iyad Allawi has slowly rebuilt to credibility: Members of the Shi'ite coalition that won Iraq's elections are demanding that the new government, when it is formed, cleanse the security services of terrorist informers and Saddam sympathizers as its first order of business. Pressure for a purge of the new services is coming from within the ranks of the United Iraqi Alliance, many of whose mainly Shi'ite members complain of being harassed by Sunni officers much as they were persecuted under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. "There's a certain grass-roots feeling on the Shia side, a concern at what they claim to be a sort of re-Ba'athification process in the security ministries," said a senior British diplomat, who...

March 31, 2005

Abbas: OK, Now I'm Serious

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has had a credibility problem ever since Yasser Arafat named him as Prime Minister. He has never had a mandate for action of any kind, as the Palestinian electoral fraud that hoisted him into the presidency demonstrated. His Fatah faction has only minority support, as the Palestinians have openly endorsed Hamas by a 2-1 margin in the only election cycle that Hamas contested. Now it appears that even his Fatah faction may be deserting Abbas, as their al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has now overtly turned their guns on their leader -- and Abbas suddenly has become a convert to the rule of law: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ordered a crackdown on Thursday on Ramallah militants who defied demands that they lay down their arms under peace moves he had agreed with Israel. Abbas took a tougher line after half a dozen gunmen from his own ruling...

When Bureaucracies Grow, They Tend To Collide

One of my main criticisms of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission was that the ultimate resolution called for a greater bureaucracy rather than a reorganization along functional lines. In other words, rather than take the alphabet soup of intelligence services and reorganize them into two agencies -- FBI for all domestic counterintelligence and the CIA for everything else -- the 9/11 Commission recommended that two more layers of management be added on top of all the existing agencies and that a new Director of National Intelligence would become the President's sole advisor for all intelligence work. At the same time, the 9/11 Commission recommended the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center to act as a clearinghouse for all these agencies to coordinate their efforts. Again, had the Commission exercised better judgment, the NCTC wouldn't be necessary as the only coordination required would be between two agencies, the FBI and...

American Intelligence 'Dead Wrong' On WMD: Panel

The presidential panel report on WMD intelligence has determined that the spy agencies got its information "dead wrong" but did not politicize or distort its findings to suit any particular policy, the AP reports this morning: In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the weapons programs and threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries. The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined more than 70 recommendations, saying that President Bush must give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, broader powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies. It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office. On...

Coalition Holds American Aide To Zarqawi

The Associate Press reports that the US forces in Iraq have held an American citizen who they claim served as a chief aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi since late last year. The Pentagon has declined to identify the man, but describes him as a Jordanian-born naturalized US citizen who has lived in several different American cities over a 20-year span: U.S. forces in Iraq are holding a senior operative of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who has joint American-Jordanian citizenship, defense officials said Thursday. The man was captured in a raid by U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq late in 2004, said Matthew Waxman, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. "Weapons and bomb-making materials were in his residence at the time he was captured," Waxman said. Waxman described the man as an associate of Zarqawi and an emissary to insurgent groups in several cities in Iraq. Zarqawi,...

April 1, 2005

The New Axis of Evil

Voices on both the left and right have criticized the Bush administration for failing to progress in the so-called War on Terror. Now that one player from the original Iraq-nK-Iran Axis of Evil has been taken out, where do we go from here? Does war require striking terrorists everywhere? Probably. Does eliminating Iraq mean we have to focus on North Korea or Iran next? Charles Krauthammer thinks not. In today's column for the WaPo, he proposes Syria as the logical replacement in a "New Axis of Evil." Citing the recent bombings in Lebanon and trysts in Iran, he concludes: All this regional mischief-making is critical because we are at the dawn of an Arab Spring -- the first bloom of democracy in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and throughout the greater Middle East -- and its emerging mortal enemy is a new axis of evil whose fulcrum is Syria. The axis...

Sunni Clerics Tell Followers To Join Government

Sunni clerics in Iraq surprised Coalition forces -- and likely their followers -- by urging Sunnis to join the security forces supporting the interim government: Influential Sunni Muslim clerics who once condemned Iraqi security force members as traitors made a surprise turnaround Friday and encouraged citizens to join the nascent police and army. If heeded, the announcement could strengthen the image of the officers and soldiers trying to take over the fight against the Sunni-led insurgency. ... Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samarrai, a cleric in the Association of Muslim Scholars, read the edict during a sermon at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad. He said it was necessary for Sunnis to join the security forces to prevent Iraqi police and army from falling into "the hands of those who have caused chaos, destruction and violated the sanctities." Iraqis across all divisions will welcome this development. It shows that the Sunni resistance...

April 2, 2005

Islamists Increasingly Irrelevant In Pakistan

Pakistan has long been considered one of the centers of radical Islam, from its madrassas to its early support for the Taliban and ties to al-Qaeda. However, more than three years after 9/11 and Pervez Musharraf's open opposition to Islamists -- and surviving two assassination attempts by them -- their appeal in Pakistan has waned almost to the point of non-existence, if the result of their latest call for a general strike gives any indication: Pakistani police fired tear gas and used batons in on Saturday to disperse small groups of Islamists whose call for a nationwide general strike fizzled in most parts of the country. The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) alliance of six Islamic opposition parties called the strike to demand that President Pervez Musharraf give up power. Police in the eastern city of Lahore said they fired tear gas to disperse a group of activists who hurled stones at...

April 3, 2005

Iraq Political Deadlock Breaks

The new Iraqi parliament made significant progress this morning towards forming a governing coalition. They selected Hajem al-Hassani, a Sunni, as their new Speaker of Parliament and have settled on all but one vice-presidential position that has been designated to the Sunni as well: In a ballot, the members of the 275-seat National Assembly voted overwhelmingly to elect Hajem al-Hassani, the current industry minister, as speaker. Hassani, a religious Sunni, is an ally of Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. "We passed the first hurdle," Hassani told reporters afterwards. "The Iraqi people have proven that they can overcome the political crisis that has plagued the country for the last two months." But he also warned against complacency. "If we neglect our responsibilities and fail, we will hurt ourselves and the people will replace us with others," he said. Shi'ite politician Hussain Shahristani and Kurdish lawmaker Arif Tayfor were elected deputy speakers....

April 4, 2005

Islamofascists Disenchanted With Arab TV Networks?

Islamofascist groups like al-Qaeda and Tawid and Jihad have used Arabian satellite TV networks as a propaganda arm for their terrorist causes. Terrorists routinely select stations like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya to publicize their videotaped butchery or their exhortations to the faithful. However, the Lebanon Daily Star reports that the Islamists may no longer be enamored of these media outlets after their coverage of Pope John Paul II's death: [R]adical Islamists, who advocate the expulsion of non-Muslims from Islamic countries, have been using Islamist Web sites to vent their anger at Arab television stations for according the pope such importance. One such user lashed out at Al-Jazeera, saying viewers were "annoyed" with extensive reports eulogizing the pope, who the user described as an "old tyrant." "What is mortifying is that this hooligan channel pretends [to defend] Islam," added the user, who wrote under the name Muhib al-Salihine on the Islamic News...

April 5, 2005

More Iraqi Movement Towards Government

The Iraqi National Assembly took another big step towards seating its first democratically elected government in decades today, agreeing to the key positions of the presidency and two vice-presidents and enabling the Assembly to finally select a prime minister: The assembly is expected to name Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, as president; Adel Abdul Mahdi, a prominent Shiite Arab politician, as vice president; and Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, the Sunni Arab president of the interim government, as the other vice president, said Hussein al-Shahristani, an assembly vice speaker. The agreement ends a stark impasse between the main parties that had threatened to wreck the confidence built during the Jan. 30 elections, when Iraqis defied insurgent threats to walk in droves to polling stations. The Iraqi public has shown increasing impatience with the gridlock, and American military commanders have warned that a continued lack of a government could lead to a rise...

April 6, 2005

Poor Saddam!

You're Saddam Hussein, and you're depressed. Imagine that you are the dictator of an oil-rich country, where your whims are law and any irritating presence gets immediately dispatched. Potentates bow before you; heads of state from Western nations greedily take your kickbacks in order to help you sell your natural resources to the highest bidder, and in exchange continually thwart your enemies. You've managed to consolidate all power into the hands of your family and closest cronies, and the only question about your death is which of your sons to put on the throne after you. Then imagine that all of the money you've paid out in bribes and kickbacks stops working, and that your partners in graft can't stop the world's most powerful military force in history from grinding your army into mincemeat in a matter of weeks. Your sons put up a better fight than you do, dying...

April 7, 2005

Testing Their Mettle

The Iraqi security forces will get their first test of effectiveness in Mosul, as the Americans have assigned an Iraqi army group to secure a strategically significant area of Mosul. So far, the experiment appears to be a success, although others caution about a rush to expand it: The two dozen Iraqi soldiers marched in formation into downtown Mosul, streets emptying in their path. The men trained their rifles on potential bomb threats: a donkey-drawn vegetable cart, a blue Opel sedan, a man with a bulge beneath his tattered gray coat. Less than a month ago, U.S. forces patrolled these dangerous streets. But on this humid morning there were only the Iraqis and a lone U.S. adviser, Marine Staff Sgt. Lafayette Waters, 32, of Kinston, N.C., who blended unobtrusively into the patrol. This is Area of Operations Iraq, slightly more than two square miles in the heart of Iraq's third-largest...

April 8, 2005

Zero Hour

After having slept most of the day away, thanks to a flu or cold I haven't been able to shake for more than a week, I've missed most of the day's news and haven't blogged much as a result. I woke up in time for dinner and watched a movie with the First Mate, and now that she's ready to go to sleep ... I'm wide awake, of course. Right now, I'm watching "Zero Hour" on the History Channel, a recreation of the last hour of American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11. It's pretty gripping, and so I'm caught up in this show rather than blogging. History Channel will repeat the show in about three hours or so, and if you get the opportunity, I'd recommend taping it. UPDATE: Maybe when people watch this show, they'll understand why Michelle Malkin writes about idiotic lapses such as these: An anti-terrorism task...

April 11, 2005

Saddam To Avoid Execution?

The Iraqi government will reportedly consider limiting Saddam Hussein's potential sentence to life imprisonment instead of execution in exchange for an end to the ex-Ba'athist insurgency, the London Telegraph reports this morning. The former Saddamite leaders of the native insurgency, which has lost steam and wants to fold its tents, needs a major concession to save face amongst its troops and ensure their compliance, and the new Iraqi leadership apparently considers this a reasonable request: A reprieve is understood to be among the central demands of Sunni nationalists and former members of Saddam's Ba'ath party who have reportedly begun negotiations with the government amid the backdrop of a bloody insurgency which claimed 30 lives during the weekend. Officials say they are looking for a way of joining the political process after January's election, which was boycotted by most of the once-powerful Sunni minority. "We are trying to reach out to...

April 12, 2005

Bagging Another Ba'athist

The new Iraqi government added another feather in its cap today with the capture of Fadhil Mashadani, one of the higher-ranking former Saddamists to be captured in recent months. Mashadani had served Saddam as the head of the Ba'athist military bureau in Baghdad before the war and was suspcted of conducting a major part of the post-war insurgency: The Iraqi government said its forces captured an insider from Saddam Hussein's ousted regime Tuesday. Fadhil Ibrahim Mahmud al-Mashadani, a former high-ranking member of Saddam's Baath Party, is among "the main facilitators of many terrorist attacks in Iraq," the government said in a statement. Authorities arrested him at a farm northeast of the capital, the statement said. Al-Mashadani led Iraq's military bureau in Baghdad during Saddam's rule. "Al-Mashadani is believed to be personally responsible for coordinating and funding attacks against the Iraqi people, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi security force," the...

April 13, 2005

An Invitation From The Afghanis?

The BBC reports that Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai publicly stated that he wants a broader security relationship with the United States, possibly opening up an opportunity to build a network of outposts from which to fight Islamist terror. His remarks came during a brief visit from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who refused to elaborate on its specifics: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said his country wants a long-term security relationship with the United States. ... Reports say the possibility of setting up permanent US military bases in Afghanistan figured in the discussions. But Mr Rumsfeld skirted the issue. "What we generally do when we work with another country [is] we find ways we can be helpful, maybe training, equipment or other types of assistance," he told a news conference. Opening bases in primarily Muslim countries remains a sensitive topic during the war on terror, for obvious reasons, but an invitation...

Karami Resigns Again

Pro-Syrian Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami has resigned again, this time unable to form a cabinet for a caretaker government to run the expected spring elections: Omar al-Karami said he had hit a wall in trying to form a cabinet, whose main task would be to supervise the elections which the United States and United Nations say must go ahead on time. "We have once again reached a dead end," Mr Karami said. "That is why I have invited you today to present my resignation." Political sources have said the elections, due to be held by the end of May, could be pushed back by weeks or months by the delay. But Mr Karami said there was still time for the poll to be held on time. Karami first resigned his position with President Emile Lahoud, widely considered a puppet for Bashar Assad in Damascus, after the unprecedented demonstrations of...

April 16, 2005

EU Wants To Embrace Faith-Based Organizations, Except For Christians And Jews

The European Union has started discussion about reaching out to "moderate" Islamists as a strategy of dealing with terrorism, declaring that their beloved secularism won't hold them back from legitimizing proponents of shari'a: European Union foreign ministers were urged on Saturday to consider the previously taboo idea of dialogue with Islamic opposition groups in the Middle East to encourage a transition to democracy. They also discussed ways to strengthen emerging democracy movements in several Arab states and persuade authoritarian governments to relinquish some power and accept the principle of alternation, diplomats said. On the second day of an informal brainstorming session at a chateau in Luxembourg, the ministers were presented with a paper that suggested, at least in the form of questions, that the EU should reach out beyond its traditional secular interlocutors. "In the past the EU has preferred to deal with the secular intelligentsia of Arab civil society...

April 17, 2005

Palestinian Amnesty Backfires, MPs On The Run

President Mahmoud Abbas' new amnesty program for fugitive militants has resulted in incentivizing new attacks, and the latest has put Palestinian parliamentarians on the run from Fatah's own al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorists: Armed Palestinian militants shut down a government building in the West Bank on Sunday and threatened to kill members of the Palestinian parliament, demanding the Palestinian Authority provide jobs to former prisoners and to relatives of people killed in fighting. ... In the West Bank city of Jenin, about 40 militants gathered in the main intersection, firing into the air as several hundred sympathizers encouraged them. The armed men were led by Zakariye Zubeydi, the head of Jenin's branch of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades a militant group linked to Abbas' Fatah movement. Zubeydi told the crowd he was ready to march on the offices of local parliamentarians. "In half an hour, if we find any of...

The Prince Of Clubs Gets Pinched

The nephew of the highest-ranking ex-Saddamite still left on the wanted list, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, has been captured by Iraqi security forces. Hashim Hussein Radhan al-Jabouri worked directly for his uncle and set up his own terrorist network in northeastern Iraq, mostly focusing on attacking the same Iraqi security forces that now host him: Jabouri, a former officer in Saddam Hussein's intelligence services, received funding from Ibrahim to set up his network and carry out insurgent operations, according to the statement. Ibrahim, one of Saddam's top aides, is the most senior member of the former regime still at large. He is number six on the U.S. military's list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis, with a $10 million reward offered for his capture. ... Over the past year, U.S. and Iraqi forces have also detained several members of Ibrahim's extended family, and claimed at one point to have captured Ibrahim himself,...

April 18, 2005

Hostage Drama, Without The Hostages

Yesterda afternoon, the news services began reporting on a huge story coming out of the Sunni Triangle -- that as many as 200 hostages had been taken at once in a major offensive by an insurgency that had appeared to lose momentum. American and Iraqi security forces descended in force on Madain to rescue the farmers and their families while the terrorists demanded that all Shi'ites leave the area. It appeared perfectly suited for the American evening news. Of course, it would have been perfect, had it been true: Iraqi security forces searched this small farming town on Monday after reports that Sunni militants had kidnapped as many as 100 Shiite residents and were threatening to kill them unless the entire Shiite population left town a display of sectarian violence brazen even by Iraqi standards. But by late in the day, officials had produced no hostages and there were...

April 26, 2005

Grounded Air Marshal Sues To Get Common Sense Into Security

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that a federal air marshal has been reinstated to flight status after a suspension for criticizing the nonsensical dress code that practically identifies them to terrorists. The day after Frank Tereri filed a lawsuit alleging that his right to free speech had been infringed, the FAMS suddenly completed its seven-month investigation into allegedly hostile acts by Tereri and decided that they had no basis in fact: An air marshal who was grounded after criticizing the Federal Air Marshal Service over security issues was told last week to come back to work, a day after he and the ACLU filed a lawsuit that threatened to call wider attention to his complaints. Frank Terreri contends a dress code requiring many agents to wear coats and ties makes them easy to spot in the mass of casually dressed passengers and undermines the marshals' ability to protect...

Syria Leaves Lebanon After 29 Years

The Syrians have accomplished what almost no one expected -- they have actually left Lebanon without a shot being fired to chase them back across the Bekaa Valley. Even the Syrian intelligence services have packed up, or at least that's what the Syrians say: Syria will declare a formal end to its 29-year military involvement in Lebanon today with a "farewell" ceremony in the Beka'a valley - four days earlier than expected. Hundreds of Syrian troops left the country over the weekend after burning documents, demolishing walls and filling bunkers. Yesterday, Syrian intelligence abandoned Anjar, the headquarters of Rustum Ghazaleh, the intelligence chief who was once the most feared man in Lebanon. He was reported to have left for Damascus last night but was due to return for today's ceremony. The Syrians chased themselves out of Lebanon after the idiotic assassination of Rafik Hariri, one of Lebanon's wealthiest men and...

April 27, 2005

No Syrian WMD Transfer? Not So Fast ...

Reports based on the release of addenda from last year's Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) report by Charles Duelfer claim that the ISG stated categorically that no evidence existed of WMD being shipped into Syria, one of the explanations given by several high-ranking officers at CENTCOM for the lack of WMD found in Iraq. However, the Washington Times reports this morning that the ISG report did not make any such categorical denial of WMD transfers. In order to understand the nuances of the ISG addenda, take a look at the wording of the original CNN report: "ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place," the report said. The group also said it had been unable to complete its investigation because of security concerns and couldn't rule out an "unofficial" transfer of material. ... "It is worth noting that even if...

April 30, 2005

CBS: Satellites Show Sgrena Lied

CBS News reports that the American and Italian investigators looking into the death of Italian commando Nicola Calipari and wounding of hostage/journalist Giuliana Sgrena have evidence that Sgrena lied about the incident from the beginning. Sgrena has long insisted that the Italian driver slowed down to under 30 MPH before approaching the checkpoint, whereupon American soldiers opened fire without warning. However, CBS now claims that data from military satellites clearly showed the car traveling towards the checkpoint at over 60 MPH without slowing down at all, triggering the defensive response from the American soldiers: A US satellite reportedly recorded a checkpoint shooting in Iraq last month, enabling investigators to reconstruct how fast a car carrying a top Italian intelligence official and a freed hostage was traveling when US troops opened fire. The report, which aired Thursday on CBS News, said US investigators concluded from the recording that the car was...

Mass Grave Of Saddam Victims Found

For those who forget why Saddam presented such a unique threat to the region of Southwest Asia, the Washington Post carries this reminder today. American investigators exhumed the corpses of 113 Kurds, all but five women and children, in southern Iraq, and as many as 1400 may still be buried there -- victims of Hussein's genocide against the Kurds and his other ethnic enemies: U.S. investigators have exhumed the remains of 113 people -- all but five of them women, children or teenagers -- from a mass grave in southern Iraq that may hold at least 1,500 victims of Saddam Hussein's campaign against the Kurdish minority in the 1980s, U.S. and Iraqi officials said this week. ... The non-acidic soil at the grave site preserved layers and layers of distinctive Kurdish clothing worn by many of the victims, suggesting that they may have piled on their best clothes expecting to...

May 1, 2005

The Despicable Leak

Michelle Malkin is rightly outraged over a leak that has exposed the names of American servicemen in Iraq involved in the Giuliana Sgrena incident, and much more. The PDF file has been published by the Italian media, and lists not just the names of the men cleared in the accidental death of Nicola Calipari, but also the following strategic information: * An itemization of IEDs and VBIEDs deployment techniques which have been most effective, * An analysis of the tactical strengths and weaknesses of specific checkpoints along "Route Irish", * Combat readiness assesment of the units and soldiers involved, * A detailed description of how the checkpoint is laid out, * Exact grid locations of various assets. * Details of how checkpoint searches are set up and executed * Details of how checkpoints are expected to deal with approaching vehicles, including threat assesment methods. * A statistical analysis of "normal"...

May 2, 2005

Italians To Present Rebuttal Today

Italian investigators working with Americans on the shooting that left commando Nicola Calipari dead and Giuliana Sgrena wounded will present a rebuttal to the American report that they released yesterday without proper redaction, which the BBC reports will challenge American conclusions about the nature of the incident. The Italians plan on disputing earlier contentions that Italy kept Calipari's mission a secret and a key issue of the timing of the warnings: Correspondents say the Italian report will reply point by point to the Pentagon inquiry, which recommended that no disciplinary action be taken against the soldiers involved in Calipari's death. ... Italy says at least three troops opened fire on the car taking freed hostage Giuliana Sgrena to Baghdad airport with Calipari and a second Italian intelligent agent. Italian newspapers say an Italian reconstruction of events show the US authorities were informed of the operation to release Sgrena several hours...

May 3, 2005

And The Jihadis Would Like A Better Vision Plan, Too

The American military has seized a letter intended for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi which chastises the terrorist leader of the Iraqi "insurgency" for huge failures and plummeting morale of the jihadis. The letter, written by another al-Qaeda figure, starts by greeting Zarqawi respectfully but quickly dresses him down for poor performance: The letter -- which never refers to al-Zarqawi by name -- is written to Sheik Abu Ahmad, a name not known to be used by the militant leader or his followers. But supporters often call al-Zarqawi the Sheik or Sheik Abu Musab in letters and on Web sites. "What has happened to myself and my brothers is an unforgivable crime, but God will punish the oppressor," the letter reads. "I swear by God that you will be asked about what happened to us because you have not asked about the situation of the migrants. Morale is down and there is...

25 Years Ago: Operation Nimrod And The First Saddam Test

Twenty-five years ago this week, Saddam Hussein first tested the mettle and will of the West by covertly launching a terrorist attack against an Iranian embassy in London, ostensibly by Iranian rebels against the Ayatollah Khomeini. Six terrorists took over the embassy at Princes Gate on April 30, 1980, touching off a six-day standoff that ended after the crack British commando squad SAS saved all but two of the hostages and killed all but one of the terrorists. The Scotsman publishes a retrospective today of Operation Nimrod, the rescue plan which the SAS implemented almost flawlessly and which still remains one of the most successful counterterrorist operations ever. Michael Howie spoke with operation designed Clive Fairweather to review the politics involved, both before and after, and the effect that Saddam's attack and the SAS response had on global politics. A number of aspects of the Princes Gate attack continue to...

May 4, 2005

Guardian: The Neocons May Have Been Right After All

It isn't often that one reads an endorsement of George Bush's foreign policy in the pages of the British left-wing newspaper The Guardian, even with a string of caveats and wait-and-see admonitions. Today, however, the Guardian runs an opinion piece by Max Hastings warning the British Left that dismissing the efforts of Bush and the so-called neocons on transforming the Middle East risks ignoring the real progress that has been made: The greatest danger for those of us who dislike George Bush is that our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail. No reasonable person can oppose the president's commitment to Islamic democracy. Most western Bushophobes are motivated not by dissent about objectives, but by a belief that the Washington neocons' methods are crass, and more likely to escalate a confrontation between the west and Islam than to defuse it. Such scepticism, however,...

Senior AQ Leader Arrested In Pakistan

The Pakistanis arrested a senior al-Qaeda leader who not only ran the terrorist network in Pakistan but also allegedly masterminded two assassination attempts on Pervez Musharraf. Abu Farraj al-Libbi has been held for several days by security forces, who held off on announcing his arrest until this morning: Pakistani security forces have arrested the al Qaeda mastermind who planned assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said on Wednesday. ... Al-Libbi, a native of Libya who authorities say is a close associate of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and acted as al Qaeda's operational chief in Pakistan, was arrested earlier this week, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press. ... Al-Libbi is accused of masterminding two bombings against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in December 2003. The military leader escaped injury but 17 others were killed in one of the attacks. He is accused of...

It's A Family Affair

Iraqi security forces captured Saddam's nephew over the last few days near Tikrit, where he had been financing and directing the ex-Ba'athist insurgency. Ayman Sabawi is the son of Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, the captured half-brother of Saddam who wound up in Iraqi hands after Syria turned him over to Baghdad. Sabawi himself has been a naughty boy. He and a contingent of his fellow dead-enders got caught red-handed with a cache of arms, apparently trying to carry on the work of his father and uncle. No word on whether he holed up in an unusued latrine hole like Uncle Saddam before surrendering to the countrymen he tried so desperately to kill in increasingly cowardly ways....

May 5, 2005

Palestinians Refuse To Disarm Terrorists

For those who keep thinking that the Mahmoud Abbas era of Palestinian politics has anything new to offer, the news keeps offering one rebuttal after another. Reuters reports today that key Palestinian Authority security figures have no intention of disarming terrorists within Gaza or the West Bank, despite the roadmap initiatives for peace and any pledges made by Abbas to the Israelis: The Palestinian Authority reiterated Wednesday it had no intention of disarming militants despite constant Israeli calls for such a move and a recent pledge to crack down on unlicensed weapons. The announcement came amid growing friction between armed factions and security forces following the arrest of two Hamas men after a gunfight Monday night. The militants were accused of planning to attack Israel in defiance of a cease-fire. "We have no intention of withdrawing arms of resistance," Rashid Abu Shbak, the head of the internal Preventive Security Service,...

Palestinians To The Polls, To Embrace Hamas

To emphasize a point I made earlier today, the AP reports that Palestinians have begun voting in municipal elections across most of the territories today -- and are expected to deal the so-called moderates of Fatah a blow. Election observers expect a big mandate for Hamas, and even PA president Mahmoud Abbas tried to cut a deal with the terror organization to delay mid-summer parliamentary elections in the face of withering public support for Fatah: Palestinians voted for local governments in dozens of towns and villages across the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Thursday in a contest that is expected to boost the Islamic militant group Hamas and could foreshadow results of parliamentary elections in July. The ruling Fatah party of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, plagued by allegations of corruption after 10 years in power, is increasingly concerned Hamas will rout it in local voting and in the...

May 6, 2005

AIPAC Got Top Secret/Codeword Information

Michelle Malkin has been following the case of Larry Franklin, who had been accused of stealing classified information on Iran from his post at the Office of Special Plans and passing it to AIPAC, a pro-Israeli group. This case has received little fanfare from the media and the blogosphere, probably in part because of the Sandy Berger case and the strange unwillingness on the part of the government to aggressively pursue Berger's violations, especially before the election. However, Michelle points out a Newsday report from yesterday which shows why the Franklin case should be making more of a splash. It turns out that not only was the material classified, it actually had one of the highest possible classifications -- Top Secret/Compartmentalized, also known as Codeword classification, meaning that the information directly impacts the national security of the United States: An analyst in a controversial Pentagon intelligence office was charged yesterday...

May 7, 2005

This Is A Cease Fire?

While Mahmoud Abbas talks about Israeli provocations and his Gaza security chief refuses to disarm the terrorists, the Palestinians themselves have taken their cues and acted accordingly. This morning, Palestinians shot an anti-tank missile at a school bus full of children in a Gaza settlement: Palestinians on Friday morning fired an anti-tank rocket on Friday morning at school bus carrying children outside the southern Gaza Strip settlement of Kfar Darom, shaking the fragile lull in violence. The rocket failed to hit the bus. A mortar shell also hit a Gush Katif settlement. No damage or casualties were reported in either case. Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired four Qassam rockets at the southern Israeli town of Sderot predawn Friday. The Magen David Adom ambulance service said that several people had been treated for shock. Soon we will hear the usual excuses from the Palestinians. The attackers were from Islamic...

The Return Of Michel Aoun

The Cedar Revolution either gained a large amount of credibility or a giant headache this morning as exiled resistance leader Michel Aoun returned to Lebanon for the first time since Syria forced him to flee in 1990. Aoun wants to run for office in the newly-freed country, describing himself as the "grandfather, father and son" of the democracy movement: Exiled Lebanese opposition leader Michel Aoun has arrived in his homeland for the first time in 14 years. The anti-Syrian former prime minister's chartered flight from France touched down in Beirut at 1400 GMT. He is due to address crowds at a mass rally celebrating his homecoming in the capital's Martyrs Square. Mr Aoun, 70, a Christian hardliner, was expelled from Lebanon in 1991 after failing in his attempt to end Syria's military presence. Aoun didn't exactly represent unfettered democracy during his tenure as Prime Minister. He tried to retain Christian...

May 11, 2005

Will Racism Destroy Al-Qaeda?

Osama bin Laden built al-Qaeda from many component groups across Southwest and Central Asia, North Africa, and even Europe, all focused on the Islamist ideal. Holding these disparate groups together must have had its difficulties even while AQ had momentum. Now that it has had almost four years of unrelenting pressure, the AP reports that the fissures have started larger cracks in AQ, which may lead to its total collapse: American and Pakistani intelligence agents are exploiting a growing rift between Arab members of al-Qaida and their Central Asian allies, a fissure that's tearing at the network of Islamic extremists as militants compete for scarce hideouts, weapons and financial resources, counterterrorism officials say. The rivalry may have contributed to the arrest last week of one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, a Libyan described as al-Qaida's No. 3 and known to have had differences with Uzbeks. Captured Uzbek, Chechen and...

Will Iraq Be Al-Qaeda's Last Stand?

Today's Washington Times analyzes the fighting in Operation Marador and asserts that Iraq has transformed itself into al-Qaeda's last stand -- which was one of the objectives of the Bush administration: The war in Iraq is increasingly looking more like a showdown with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda followers than a battle primarily against Saddam Hussein loyalists. The shift is making the fight a focal point of the U.S. global war against Islamic terrorists and one that might dictate whether the U.S. wins or loses, said a senior official and an outside expert. "If they fail in Iraq, Osama and his whole crew are finished," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, a military author and analyst. The changing dynamic was highlighted this week when the U.S. military launched a major offensive in western Iraq, primarily against foreign jihadists who crossed the border with Syria to join the al...

Is Zarqawi A Matador Casualty?

An Italian news site reports that Iraqi forces have claimed to have either killed or seriously wounded terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during Operation Matador. While this is not the first time such a rumor has been floated, it would come as no surprise that Coalition forces hope to capture or kill the al-Qaeda leader (via Hugh Hewitt): The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is "serious injured, possibly dead" according to Colonel Fouad Hani Hassan, commander of the fifth division of the Iraqi armed forces, cited by 'Elaph', a popular website in the Arab world. Al-Zarqawi, considered al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, is believed to have been injured in the major offensive US-led forces have been carrying out in the western Anbar province over the last few days. Operation Matador is centred around the town of Qaim, just a few kilometres from the Syrian border, and is aimed at destroying the...

May 12, 2005

So Much For The Rule Of Law

The Palestinians have a parliamentary election scheduled for July 17th that appears to be headed for a significant victory for Hamas. The Fatah faction supporting President Mahmoud Abbas has agitated for a postponement to avoid this political debacle, which would surely reveal his status as an unmandated leader elected on the basis of a fraudulent vote. Today, one of Abbas' senior aides upped the ante, saying that the current Parliament had not yet passed a new election law, making elections in July almost impossible: The Palestinian parliamentary election set for July should be postponed, a senior Palestinian official said in an interview published Thursday, another sign that the ruling Fatah Party is deeply worried about the electoral prospects of militant Islamic groups. The election, only the second in the 11 years since the Palestinian Authority was founded, is scheduled for July 17, but Tayeb Abdel Rahim, a senior aide to...

May 13, 2005

Uzbekistan Crumbling; Islamists Poised To Take Over?

A mob of outraged and disaffected Uzbeks have freed 23 Muslim defendants from the prison where they awaited trial on terrorism charges, and created a riot in the streets of Andijan. Soldiers have been taken hostage and the government has forbidden news agencies from the area, while Uzbekistan's neighbors have sealed their borders: Outrage over the terror trial of 23 Muslims exploded into broader unrest in eastern Uzbekistan on Friday when armed protesters stormed a jail to free defendants, clashing with police in violence that brought thousands of protesters into the streets. At least nine people were killed and dozens wounded, witnesses and officials said. One protester, who put the death toll as high as 20, said 30 soldiers were being held hostage because they were shooting at demonstrators. Two of the dead were children, Sharif Shakirov, a brother of one of the defendants told The Associated Press. President Islam...

May 16, 2005

Kuwait Suffrage A Reality

One of the complaints about our choice of allies in the War on Terror reflected on Kuwait's restrictive political environment, especially towards women. This was especially true after American troops led the way for a UN coalition to liberate Kuwait from Saddam's invasion in 1991, but that criticism got revived recently with the current Bush administration's focus on democratization. Now that issue can be put to rest, as Kuwaiti women have finally been granted complete political rights in the conservative Arabic country: Kuwaiti lawmakers approved political rights for women Monday, clearing the way for females to participate in parliamentary elections for the first time in the Gulf nation's history. ... The nation's Cabinet asked for the vote Monday in a surprise move after a number of attempts had been stymied by fundamentalist lawmakers. The bill was approved 35-23 with one abstention and immediately became law. Scores of women activists in...

May 19, 2005

Saddam Protected Zarqawi: Jordan

The UPI reports today that King Abdullah of Jordan told a Saudi newspaper that Jordan wanted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi extradited to Amman prior to Saddam Hussein's removal by US forces. Saddam refused to extradite the terrorist mastermind, providing him sanctuary instead (courtesy of Laurie Mylroie): Jordan's King Abdullah revealed Thursday that Iraq's former Baath regime had refused to deport Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for ongoing terrorism in Iraq. Speaking in an interview with Saudi daily al-Hayat, Abdullah said Zarqawi, a Jordanian, is well entrenched in Iraq and that "he and terrorists like him thrive in such places where security and stability are non-existent." ... "Since Zarqawi entered Iraq before the fall of the former regime we have been trying to have him deported back to Jordan for trial, but our efforts were in vain," Abdullah added. One of the arguments that anti-war protestors have made against George Bush was that...

May 21, 2005

Russian Oppression Sets Fire To The Caucasus

The London Telegraph has a disturbing report on Russia's increasing police state spinning out of control in the Caucasus, which not only will complicate the war on terror but threatens to create an explosion of terror across the region. Vladimir Putin's security forces have reverted to Soviet-style corruption, brutality, and accountability, leaving little choice for the residents of the southern area of the Russian federation but to fight: To the West, President Vladimir Putin presents the face of a staunch partner in the war on radical Islam, waging a legitimate fight against extremists in the south of his country. As evidence of what he is up against he cites the brutal seizure of the school in Beslan last year, the downing of two Russian airliners by Chechen suicide bombers and numerous other attacks that the Kremlin regards as terrorism pure and simple. But even as he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with western...

When Hamas Is Just Not Radical Enough

For those who have argued for a Palestinian state as a resolution to Middle East violence, this development should cause some hesitation about the idea of sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Scotsman reports that al-Qaeda has gained a toehold in Gaza by recruiting disenchanted terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad: AL-QAEDA has established a foothold in Palestine with a new militant group based in Gaza formed by extremists who have become disillusioned with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Amid the biggest flare-up of violence in Gaza since a ceasefire was declared three months ago by Palestinians and Israelis, the Jerusalem Post has quoted unnamed Palestinian Authority security officials as saying that a new group called Jundallah or 'Allah's Brigade' had links to the terrorist organisation headed by Osama bin Laden. The new terror group consists mainly of former Hamas and Islamic Jihad members who believe these two...

May 22, 2005

First Lady Takes Flack For Newsweek's Lie In Jerusalem

First Lady Laura Bush encountered vociferous protests in Jerusalem as she toured the city, trying to use her normally calming and diplomatic presence to encourage Palestinians and Israelis to push for a peaceful, negotiated resolution to the issues facing them. Instead, when she visited the mosque at the Dome of the Rock, militant-led protestors decried the visit in light of the false Newsweek reports of Qu'ran desecration: Protesters besieged Laura Bush during her visit Sunday to two of Jerusalem's most sacred sites, with Israeli police locking arms to restrain the crowd and Secret Service agents packed tightly around America's first lady. ... Anti-American sentiment is running high in the Mideast because of a variety of factors, including a now-retracted report in Newsweek that Pentagon investigators had found evidence interrogators at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, in washrooms to...

May 23, 2005

Arab World Recognizes Democratization Policy's Power

I missed this yesterday in my busy day, but don't miss it if you haven't yet read it. For those who doubt whether George Bush's policy of democratization as a weapon against Islamist terror in the Middle East will prove successful, Fouad Ajami writes about his experiences on a tour of the region and the recognition and admiration that Bush has achieved from Arabs in giving them hope for modernization and liberty. His essay, adapted by Opinionjournal from a recent lecture, makes clear that pursuing Scowcroftian "stability" no longer remained a possibility: "George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here--the borders of these...

May 26, 2005

Allawi Corroborates Abdullah On Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda Connections To Saddam

While Western press agencies continue to report years-old allegations of Qu'ran abuse from detainees as if they were new, the Exempt Media completely missed important corroboration from Iraq's new government that Saddam sheltered and even encouraged al-Qaeda terrorists during his reign of terror. CQ reader Jason Smith at Generation Why? notes this revelation from the Italian news portal AKI which confirms that Saddam's regime sponsored an Islamist conference and specifically invited AQ's #2 man and Zarqawi to attend: The number two of the al-Qaeda network, Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Iraq under a false name in September 1999 to take part in the ninth Popular Islamic Congress, former Iraqi premier Iyad Allawi has revealed to pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. In an interview, Allawi made public information discovered by the Iraqi secret service in the archives of the Saddam Hussein regime, which sheds light on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Islamic terrorist...

Baghdad Sweep Coming

The London Telegraph reports this morning that Iraqis intend on conducting a major military sweep of Baghdad to combat the bloody series of bombings that have left hundreds of civilians and police dead. More than 40,000 Iraqi security troops will take part in this new operation, making it by far the most extensive military event in the nascent democracy's life: More than 40,000 Iraqi troops are to be deployed in Baghdad to hunt down insurgents and their weapons, Iraq's defence minister has announced. Sadoun al-Dulaimi said the force would include troops from the interior and defence ministries and would be by far the largest anti-insurgent operation carried out in Baghdad by Iraqi security forces. He said: "We will divide Baghdad into seven main areas, and the number of the forces who will take part in the operation from the interior and the defence ministry will be more than 40,000 security...

Syrian Operative Captured In Iraq?

The Daily Star in Lebanon reports that Iraqi security forces have captured a Syrian intelligence officer, one who staged a June 2003 attack on a television station owned by the late Rafik Hariri as a warning to get out of politics. The agent, Hussein Ahmed Tah, was captured in Baghdad attempting to bomb public facilities there as part of the so-called insurgency. If true, it may significantly shift Middle Eastern politics and strategy: A Syrian intelligence officer detained in Baghdad has admitted to launching the missile attack on the late premier Rafik Hariri's Future Television in June 2003, according to Al-Rai al-Aam Kuwaiti newspaper. In an article published on Wednesday, the newspaper said Hussein Ahmad Tah, 32, was arrested by Iraqi police when he was attempting to assassinate employees in an Iraqi public institution. Following his arrest, Tah decided to admit to his previous crimes, among which is the Future...

May 29, 2005

Another Sign Of Insurgency's Failure

Today's Washington Post notes a significant event in the foreign-based "insurgency" that has killed hundreds of Iraqis as well as American troops in Iraq. The terrorists of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi found themselves faced off against native Iraqi forces after killing a local tribal chief while the Marines watched from the sidelines. Most significantly, the Iraqis who had had enough of the Zarqawi insurgency were Sunnis: For four days this month, U.S. Marines were onlookers at just the kind of fight they had hoped to see: a battle between suspected followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a foreign-born insurgent, and Iraqi Sunni tribal fighters at the western frontier town of Husaybah. In clashes sparked by the assassination of a tribal sheik, which was commissioned by Zarqawi, the foreign insurgents and the Iraqi tribal fighters pounded one another with small weapons and mortars in the town's streets as the U.S. military watched from...

June 1, 2005

Iraq: US Not An Occupying Force

The newly elected government of Iraq has requested an extension of the US mandate for providing their security from the United Nations, telling the world body that arbitrary timetables should be put aside and the Iraqis themselves should determine when the US presence would no longer be necessary. The Shi'ite Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jafaari, emphasized that American forces are not occupying Iraq but serve as "friendly forces" assisting the newly elected democratic government: Iraq's month-old transitional government announced Tuesday that it had asked the United Nations Security Council to extend the mandate of the American-led forces here beyond the end of this year, and said Iraq's need for outside military assistance, not pre-set deadlines, should determine when American troop withdrawals should start. ... Mr. Jaafari said Iraq's need for outside military assistance, not pre-set deadlines, should determine when American troop withdrawals should start. "The multinational forces are not occupying forces,...

June 3, 2005

Iraq Wants More US Involvement, Not Less

Today's Washington Post reports (on page A19) that the Iraqis, far from viewing Americans as an occupying force manipulating their politics and security, instead believe that we have withdrawn too much from both. The new government's foreign minister met with top US officials to request that the US involve itself more closely with efforts to get their permanent constitution written and to provide more leadership on security: To prevent the breakdown of Iraq's troubled transition and a potential civil war, Iraq's new government appealed to the Bush administration yesterday to take a much more assertive role, particularly on four key political and military issues, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials. In talks with Vice President Cheney yesterday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari requested greater U.S. and coalition help in crafting a new constitution. The deadline is now less than three months away, but...

Is Zarqawi Dead?

Rumor #279b on the Zarqawi circuit now has it that the mastermind of the Iraqi al-Qaeda network has died on the operating table -- and is currently six feet under the Iraqi soil that he has bloodied so badly (via Mystery Achievement and CQ reader Soccer Dad): The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq - died on Friday and his body is in Fallujah's cemetary, an Iraqi Sunni sheikh, Ammar Abdel Rahim Nasir, has told the Saudi on-line newspaper Al-Medina. He claims that gunfights which broke out in Fallujah in the last few days involved militants trying to protect the insurgency leader's tomb from a group of American soldiers patrolling the area. During a telephone conversation from the city of Fallujah with the Saudi newspaper, Nasir said al-Zarqawi was taken there after being injured in the city of Ramadi around three weeks ago, and may have...

Guantanamo Fog

One of my favorite columnists and bloggers, Michelle Malkin, writes a must-read column in today's Washington Times about the mythology of Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray being the equivalent of the Soviet gulag, as Amnesty International accused earlier this week. This is how the Americans have mistreated the poor dears at Guantanamo: Erik Saar, an army sergeant at Gitmo for six months and co- author of a negative, tell-all book titled "Inside the Wire," inadvertently provides us more firsthand details showing just how restrained, and sensitive to Islam -- to a fault, I believe -- detention facility officials have been. Each detainee's cell has a sink installed low to the ground, "to make it easier for the detainees to wash their feet" before Muslim prayer, Mr. Saar reports. Detainees get "two hot halal, or religiously correct, meals" a day in addition to an MRE (meal ready to eat). Loudspeakers broadcast the Muslims'...

June 4, 2005

Another Great Moment In Palestinian Democracy

The London Telegraph reports this morning that Mahmoud Abbas has suspended parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories, an unsurprising move considering the popularity of the Hamas opposition in comparison to Abbas' Fatah faction: Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has decided to postpone parliamentary elections which had been planned for next month. The widely-expected move has been criticised by Hamas, the militant group, which said it stemmed from fears it would do well at the ballot box. Mr Abbas said he had decided to postpone the July 17 poll to allow time to resolve a dispute over proposed reforms to the voting law. He gave no new date for the election. The delay could stoke tensions between Abbas's Fatah faction and Hamas, which had been poised to make a strong showing in its first legislative campaign. Hamas had reacted to earlier hints of a delay by accusing Fatah of manoeuvring to...

The Self-Indulgence Of The American Media And Leftist Establishment

Ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, dear readers, and friends, I submit to you that this week represents the nadir of responsible thought about the war on terror. We face Islamofascist lunatics who wish to establish Taliban-like tyrannies throughout the Middle East -- and eventually the world -- and who commit real atrocities in their efforts to bring those twisted dreams to fruition. We have seen their videos showing the beheadings of helpless hostages with dull knives, literally sawing off the heads of these victims while alive. They slaughter women and children as indiscriminately as possible. They even blow up Islamic mosques to kill Muslims at prayer. Now we have had two weeks of debate over whether we have mistreated six hundred or so of these terrorists captured on the battlefield, out of uniform, bearing arms against us. What has been the focus of this controversy? Cattle prods and bullwhips...

NYT's Wayback Machine Takes Editorial Board To 9/10

The New York Times has an editorial for tomorrow's edition that argues for a return to the failed counterterrorism strategies that brought us the 9/11 attacks. Not only does the Gray Lady continue the fortnight-long harangue about Guantanamo Bay, but also insists that the only way to deal with terrorists is through law enforcement: Now that the Bush administration has made clear how offended it is at Amnesty International's word choice in characterizing the Guantnamo Bay detention camp "the gulag of our times," we hope it will soon get around to dealing with the substantive problems that the Amnesty report is only the latest to identify. What Guantnamo exemplifies - harsh, indefinite detention without formal charges or legal recourse - may or may not bring to mind the Soviet Union's sprawling network of Stalinist penal colonies. It certainly has nothing in common with any American notions of justice or the...

June 5, 2005

No Wonder The Exempt Media Loves Amnesty International

The Exempt Media's love affair with Amnesty International suddenly become more understandable when AI's executive director, William Schulz, responded to questions about the use of the "gulag" analogy to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo. When asked to defend its allegation, Schulz said he didn't know that it was accurate, but he also didn't know that it was: Despite highly publicized charges of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag." Executive Director William Schulz said Amnesty, often cited worldwide for documenting human rights abuses, also did not know whether Secretary Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved severe torture methods such as beatings and starvation. Schulz recently dubbed Rumsfeld an "apparent high-level architect of torture" in asserting he approved interrogation methods that violated international law. "It would be fascinating to find out....

June 6, 2005

Afghani Clerics Strip Mullah Omar Of Authority

In the Muslim world, as opposed to Catholocism and some Protestant sects, the lack of a central authority for reference and authentication has made it difficult to declare clerics as radical or extreme. Clerics attract their own followings, and have the authority to make their own proclamations, and even the opposition of a number of other clerics doesn't necessarily negate the actions of the single cleric. However, when hundreds of clerics band together to make a declaration, it does carry some weight. That's exactly what has happened in Afghanistan, where 600 Muslim clerics announced that Mullah Omar has been stripped of all spiritual authority, with another 400 signatories from other regions: A crowd of 600 Afghan clerics gathered in front of an historic mosque yesterday to strip the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar of his claim to religious authority, in a ceremony that provided a significant boost to the...

June 7, 2005

I Love Hate To Say I Told You So ...

Do you remember when the 9/11 Commission released its final report, which contained a narrative of the attacks, an analysis of how the various intelligence and defense systems failed us, and recommendations for improvement? My final analysis was that the overall report merited a C-; an A for the narrative, a low-end C for the analysis, and a solid F for the recommendations. I warned that the solution that the Commission insisted on imposing amounted to nothing more than sticking two more levels of bureaucracy on top of all the existing alphabet soup of intelligence services, and that such an approach would do nothing towards solving the lack of communication between the agencies. In fact, I warned, it would make it worse. It didn't take long for that analysis to be proven correct: Overlapping responsibilities among U.S. intelligence agencies could lead to failures in assessing terrorism threats, experts said Monday...

Defeatists Take Over Ground Zero

Michelle Malkin has a must-read expos about how Leftist defeatists have taken over Ground Zero remembrances. The culprits? Human Rights First, the ACLU, Eric Foner -- the Columbia U professor who called for "a million Mogadishus" -- and of course, George Soros. Read the whole thing. UPDATE: From CQ readers Chris M and Ric J, Nicholas DeGenova made the "million Mogadishus" comment. Foner organized the event but had no idea that DeGenova would make that comment and did not condone it. My apologies to Eric Foner for the error....

June 8, 2005

Great Moments In Border Control

Question: If you're a border guard for a country at war with terrorists and you stop someone who has in his possession a homemade sword, brass knuckles, a hatchet, and a chainsaw which looks like blood all over it, what do you do? A. Shoot the man on sight. B. Arrest him and call for a psychiatrist. C. Take his weapons and welcome him to America. Apparently, choice C is American policy for security. A border guard in Maine made that decision and allowed a double murderer across the border in order to flee the scene: Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, on April 25 carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States. The next...

Saddam's London Embassy Stockpiled Arms

For Brits who have spent most of the last three years protesting on behalf of the Saddam regime, the discovery of a major arms cache at the abandoned Iraqi embassy in London should force them to reconsider their opposition to his removal from power. London police have discovered not only firearms, but also bugging devices and even cattle prods in the safes within the empty building: A cache of guns, bugging devices and other equipment has been discovered at Iraqs abandoned embassy in Britain, the countrys newly appointed ambassador said on Wednesday. Scotland Yard confirmed a number of firearms had been recovered from the embassy in an upmarket area of southwest London but declined to say when. The guns could be explained as necessary for embassy security, but the cattle prods and the cameras and bugging devices reveal a different use of the embassy than most Londoners know. The bugging...

American Jihadis

Police have arrested a father and son and two other men in a counterterrorist roundup in Lodi, California. The pair, US citizens, face charges of lying to federal investigators but remain in custody under suspicion of operating an al-Qaeda sleeper cell: A father and son were in custody Wednesday after federal authorities arrested the U.S. citizens when the younger man allegedly confessed that he attended an al-Qaida camp in Pakistan to learn how to kill Americans. Hamid Hayat and his father, Umer Hayat, 47, were arrested Sunday on charges of lying to federal agents and appeared in court Tuesday. According to prosecutors, Hamid Hayat trained with explosives and other weapons, using photographs of President Bush and other political leaders as targets. The Sacramento Bee reported his age as 22; the Los Angeles Times said he is 23. Umer Hayat was charged in the complaint with lying about his sons involvement...

June 9, 2005

Iraqi Government To Meet Sunni Native Insurgents

The transitional Iraqi government will have its first formal meeting with representatives of the native Sunni insurgency in hopes of reaching an amnesty or other arrangement to quiet the violence and bring more Sunnis into the political process. Not only would such an agreement result in fewer civilian deaths, but it would also ironically hasten the rebuilding of Iraq and allow the foreign troops to leave the country quicker: Iraq's new government plans to hold its first official meeting as early as tomorrow with members of the Sunni resistance in an effort to end the brutal violence that has left hundreds of civilians dead across the country. Representatives of Sunni insurgent forces from the restive western al-Anbar province plan to sit down with members of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's government tomorrow or Saturday, an Iraqi official said on the condition of anonymity. Experts are not eager to predict whether the...

Did Amnesty International Call For Kidnapping Of American Leaders? (Updated)

John Leo wrote earlier this week about the ridiculous Amnesty International assertion that Guantanamo Bay has become the "gulag of our time" in the statement issued by AI's Secretary-General Irene Khan, in his column about Stories Not Told. The "gulag" analogy has received the thorough thrashing it deserved from bloggers and even some in the media. However, according to Leo at the end of his column, AI also issued a press release accompanying their annual report that the media mostly ignored. In that release, Amnesty International apparently called for other nations to kidnap George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other American officials and haul them off to the ICC for prosecution on charges of crimes against humanity: A different omission marred the reporting of Amnesty International's report charging torture in U.S. detainment camps. The group didn't just call Guantanamo a "gulag," an over-the-top remark that was universally reported. In a press...

June 10, 2005

Report: The Five Missed Chances Of The FBI

A report now being released due to the Zacarias Moussaoui trial determined that the FBI had five opportunities to find out about the 9/11 attacks before they happened, but that systemic problems and a lack of urgency led the agency to miss them. The report mirrors the findings of Congress and the 9/11 Commission, but brings to light the shortcomings of the FBI, which escaped most of the post-attack criticism: The F.B.I. missed at least five chances in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, to find two hijackers as they prepared for the attacks and settled in San Diego, the Justice Department inspector general said in a report made public on Thursday after being kept secret for a year. Investigators were stymied by bureaucratic obstacles, communication breakdowns and a lack of urgency, the report said. The blistering findings mirror those of the independent Sept. 11 commission last summer and a...

Bush's Shot Across Assad's Bow

The Bush administration sent a message to Syrian strongman Bashar Assad that the former opthalmologist could not help but see, if he keeps his eyes open. A "senior administration official" told at least two media outlets yesterday that the US has credible intelligence of Syrian plans to assassinate Lebanese leaders in their new, free electoral system: The United States has received "credible information" that Syrian operatives in Lebanon plan to try to assassinate senior Lebanese political leaders and that Syrian military intelligence forces are returning to Lebanon to create "an environment of intimidation," a senior administration official said Thursday. The official said that the information had come from "a variety of Lebanese sources" and that "we assess it as credible." The information, he said, was gathered after the recent assassinations of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February, and of Samir Kassir, a well-known journalist, a week ago. ... The...

June 11, 2005

The Difference Between Fanatical Idiocy And Rationality ...

... is that we don't ululate and demand a World Court trial whenever people do pointless crap like this (via Gateway Pundit and Michelle Malkin): However, we might prosecute the three or four adults who forced a young boy to display his genitalia for the delight of the sickos in the crowd in this photograph. Makes one wonder, doesn't it? Why didn't one of the grown men drain the lizard instead? (Or why didn't the men encourage one of the women to drop trou?) I did like this next photograph, which prompted one of Gateway Pundit's commenters to ask if the Indian Muslims thought Allah suffered from senility: Does Allah need a reminder? Do the Muslims in Mumbai think it slipped Allah's mind? I hope Newsweek is covering this event. After all, they did help stage it. Perhaps, as Michelle Malkin suggests, they can even use that first picture as...

June 12, 2005

Debunking The Downing Street Memo

I don't often agree with Michael Kinsley, but I enjoy reading his columns; he has fun with language and brings an insouciant tone to almost every article. Today, however, he scores on the ridiculous nature of the Downing Street Memo that has the Left all atwitter. After noting that Air America fans have accused him of personally covering up for the Bush White House -- a hilarious assertion for anyone who's read Kinsley -- by failing to comment on the DSM, Kinsley explains why it's not news: It's a report on a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some aides on July 23, 2002. The key passage summarizes "recent talks in Washington" by the head of British foreign intelligence (identified, John le Carre-style, as "C"). C reported that "military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of...

Time Magazine Goes Inside A Gitmo Interrogation

Time Magazine has acquired a secret interrogation log from Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-ray, one that tracks the investigation of the suspected 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani. The diary shows the range of methods used in his interrogation, and Time Magazine certainly plays this angle to the hilt in its press release: The log reads like a night watchmans diary. It is a sometimes shocking and often mundane hour-by-hour, even minute-by-minute account of a campaign to extract information. The log records every time al-Qahtani eats, sleeps, exercises or goes to the bathroom and every time he complies with or refuses his interrogators requests. The detainees physical condition is frequently checked by medical corpsmensometimes as often as three times a daywhich indicates either spectacular concern about al-Qahtanis health or persistent worry about just how much stress he can take. Or, more likely, Qahtani's self-declared hunger strikes and resultant dehydration created the need...

June 13, 2005

The Emily Litella Memo (Updated!)

David Sanger at the New York Times discovers another memo from British sources that completely undermines the central argument of the Downing Street Memo -- which is that the Bush administration had fixated on a military solution to Iraq and had started to twist the intelligence in July 2002 to justify the invasion. Instead, as Sanger reports, another memo dated the same week at the DSM reported to Tony Blair that Bush had not yet made up his mind what approach he wanted to take with Saddam Hussein: A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no political decisions" to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. The memo also said American planning, in the eyes of Mr. Blair's aides, was "virtually silent" on the problems of a postwar occupation. "A...

June 14, 2005

Cheney: Guantanamo Or Something Like It

Vice President Dick Cheney told the American public twice yesterday that Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay would remain open despite calls for its closure for better public relations. The Washington Post reports on Cheney's appearance at the National Press Club, where he echoed similar remarks from his interview on Fox: Vice President Cheney offered a vigorous defense yesterday of the secretive prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said the United States has no plans to shut it down. Although President Bush kept open the possibility of closing the prison outpost in Cuba, Cheney said such a move would be unwise because the United States needs a special prison to hold and interrogate potential terrorists captured around the world. Cheney said prisoners there are treated "far better" than they would be by any other government and disagreed sharply with critics who charge the United States' image has been...

June 15, 2005

Canada Discovers AQ Information Trove

Canadian authorities impounded a computer and recordings from a woman whose family has ties to al-Qaeda as she entered the country, and discovered a wealth of information that may lead back to Afghanistan. The RCMP has held the laptop, DVDs, and tapes for three months, but now has to publicly give a reason for continuing to retain them to keep Zaynab Khadr from taking them back: The RCMP and Canadian military believe they've discovered a vital cache of information on Al Qaeda that includes the whereabouts of wanted members and details of attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan. The information is allegedly contained in a laptop, dozens of DVDs, audiocassettes and the pages of diaries, seized by the RCMP officers who met Zaynab Khadr at Pearson airport with a search warrant as she arrived back in Canada in February, court documents state. ... With the three-month time limit allotted to...

Iraqis, Americans Free Aussie Hostage

Details are thin, but the AP reports that a joint Iraq-American security force has freed Australian hostage Douglas Wood in a military operation: Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. forces, freed an Australian hostage after six weeks in captivity, officials said Wednesday. The release came as a suicide bomber dressed in an Iraqi army uniform blew himself up in a mess hall north of Baghdad, killing at least 25 Iraqi soldiers and injuring 27. No details were available on the operation in Baghdad that led to the release of Douglas Wood, a 64-year-old engineer who lives in Alamo, Calif. He was abducted in late April by a militant group calling itself the Shura Council of the Mujahedeen of Iraq. The Australian government refused to bend to the kidnappers' demands that its 1,400 troops be withdrawn from Iraq. It sent diplomats, police and military personnel to Baghdad to seek his release. "I...

June 16, 2005

Durbin: US Operates Death Camps (Without The Death)

The hysteria and historical illiteracy, not to mention irrational moral equivalency, continued on the floor of the Senate yesterday as Dick Durbin equated American military personnel at Gitmo to Nazis, Stalinist thugs, and the genocidal Pol Pot: The Senate's No. 2 Democrat has compared the U.S. military's treatment of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay with the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, three of history's most heinous dictators, whose regimes killed millions. In a speech on the Senate floor late Tuesday, Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, castigated the American military's actions by reading an e-mail from an FBI agent. The agent complained to higher-ups that one al Qaeda suspect was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music. The Justice Department is investigating. ... After reading the e-mail,...

Dick Durbin: The Ring Of Familiarity

Tuesday's rant from Dick Durbin has enraged members of the Senate and the military, as he equated military personnel at Gitmo with Nazis, Stalinists, and the Khmer Rouge while also drawing moral equivalence between the Japanese-American WWII detainees and the Islamofascist prisoners of Camp X-Ray. Today, Durbin refused to apologize or back down appreciably from his comments: Defending himself, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat said Thursday it was "just plain wrong" to say he was diminishing past horrors. He said he was comparing interrogation techniques that the FBI report said were used at Guantanamo with those in foreign detainee camps. "This is the type of thing you would expect from a repressive regime. This is not the type of thing you would expect from the United States," Durbin said. This kind of obstinacy sounded familiar to me, as it did to long-time CQ reader and friend River Rat. Both he...

June 17, 2005

Durbin Oddly Silent About The Torture Closer To Home

Dick Durbin set himself apart in the Senate on Tuesday by proclaiming that one could not tell the difference between the behavior of detainees at Gitmo by American military person and that of Nazis, Stalin's gulag guards, or Pol Pot. Despite a national furor over his remarks, Durbin has refused to retract them, although he laughingly added yesterday that it was wrong to think that he had minimized the horrors of the Holocaust and the gulags by equating them with a lack of climate control and indoor plumbing in Gitmo interrogation rooms. However, in his zeal to protect America from the Creeping New FascismTM of American servicemen, Durbin somehow missed an opportunity to find similar horrors much closer to home. John in Carolina notes that Durbin's political ally and fellow Democrat in Chicago, Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, operates a jail that sounds like it has a lot more problems...

Iraqi Democracy Working As We Capture Another Zarqawi Lieutenant

In another sign that the Iraqis have started to get the hang of democracy, the new government announced that it had successfully completed negotiations with leading Sunni groups to involve them in the writing of the new Constitution: Iraqi political leaders reached a compromise Thursday to include more Sunni Muslim Arabs on the committee responsible for writing the country's new constitution, ending weeks of stalemate and raising hopes that the document can be crafted before the panel's deadline expires in two months. "The problem is solved and ended. The Sunnis will participate in the process of writing the constitution," said Tariq Hashimi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni organization. ... Under the compromise, the new panel will include members of the existing committee, 15 additional Sunni Arabs with full voting rights and 10 more Sunnis in an advisory, non-voting role. A member of Iraq's Sabean...

Durbin: I'm Sorry You Didn't Comprehend My Genius

Under fire for his remarks comparing humiliation techniques for interrogations at Gitmo to the atrocities of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union's gulags, and the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, Senator Dick Durbin has finally attempted to calm the waters with a statement of "regret": Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Friday that he regretted any misunderstandings caused by his comments earlier this week comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis. The White House, Senate Republicans and others had called for an apology after Durbin's comments Tuesday. ... On Friday, Durbin tried to clarify the issue. "My statement in the Senate was critical of the policies of this Administration, which add to the risk our soldiers face," he said in a statement released Friday afternoon. "I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true...

June 19, 2005

Nazi Alert For Senator Durbin!

When Senator Durbin stood on the Senate floor and compared American troops to genocidal maniacs based on our treatment of Islamofascist terrorists at Gitmo, he revealed a wealth of ignorance on his behalf. Not only did Durbin show his historical illiteracy about the Nazis, Soviets, and the Khmer Rouge, not only did he demonstrate an ignorance of the meaning of abuse -- let alone torture -- but Durbin also failed to recognize the true monsters of this war. The New York Times doesn't make that same mistake in this report by Sabrina Tavernise: Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents that began Friday broke through the outside wall of a building in this small rural village to find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual - and four beaten and shackled Iraqis. The American military has found torture houses after invading towns heavily...

AP: FBI Doesn't Require Terror Expertise For Counterterrorism

The AP reports this morning on testimony in a civil lawsuit against the FBI by one of its counterterrorism experts that indicates the agency still does not place the appropriate value on terror-related expertise when assigning agents to terror-related duties. Bassem Yousef has sued the FBI for bypassing him for promotions in favor of less-qualified agents, and the depositions promise to inspire some questioning of the FBI's top brass on Capitol Hill: In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI managers who crafted the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorism say expertise about the Mideast or terrorism was not important in choosing the agents they promoted to top jobs. And they still do not believe such experience is necessary today even as terrorist acts occur across the globe. "A bombing case is a bombing case," said Dale Watson, the FBI's terrorism chief in the two years...

Did Lucy Ramirez Find The Downing Street Memos?

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive. Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper): The eight memos all labeled "secret" or "confidential" were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith,...

June 20, 2005

Lebanon Stands On Its Own Two Feet

Despite the efforts of Syria and its ally Hezbollah in the south, the reformers in Lebanon have delivered a historic victory in parliamentary elections this weekend. Saad Hariri took his revenge for his father's assassination by driving out the pro-Syrian politicians from northern Lebanon, capturing three-quarters of the contested seats and defying traditional clan-based electoral politics: Opponents of Syrian domination claimed a stunning majority victory in the final round of Lebanon's parliamentary elections on Sunday night in a rebellion touched off by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri four months ago. An anti-Syrian alliance that tried to bridge religious lines and was led by Mr. Hariri's son, 35-year-old Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, won at least 21 of 28 contested seats in northern Lebanon, the last polling area in the elections that have been staggered over the past four weekends. That gave the alliance a majority in the...

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Palestinian Edition

The title of this post is a proverb that keeps proving its wisdom over and over again, in large things and small, but in this particular case it has taken on a despicable hue. The Israelis agreed to admit a Palestinian woman to its country in order to treat her for severe burns after a kitchen explosion left her scarred and in great pain. What did they get for their compassion and generosity? A suicide bomber -- but fortunately, an incompetent one: A badly burned Palestinian woman was alternately defiant and tearful Monday after Israeli soldiers caught her trying to enter Israel with 22 pounds of explosives hidden on her body. The woman, who suffered serious burns on her hands, feet and neck in a kitchen explosion five months ago, had been granted permission to cross into Israel from the Gaza Strip for medical treatment when she raised the suspicion...

June 21, 2005

The Syrians Send Another Message

After watching control of Parliament pass out of the hands of their collaborators and into the hands of their oppponents, the Syrians sent a message to Lebanon this morning. Instead of congratulating them on their successful, free elections, Bashar Assad reminded them of their previous vassal status by blowing up another anti-Syrian public figure: An anti-Syrian politician in Lebanon was killed on Tuesday when a bomb ripped through his car, two days after parliamentary elections brought victory for an alliance opposed to Damascus's role in the country. George Hawi, a former leader of the Lebanese Communist Party, died instantly in the blast in the Wata Musaitbi neighborhood of Beirut, witnesses and security sources. "The car kept going and then I saw the driver screaming and he jumped out of the window. We rushed to the car and saw Hawi in the passenger seat with his guts out," Rami Abu Dargham,...

FBI Chief: No Experience Necessary For Leadership

As I reported here on Sunday, the FBI has ignored people with Middle East and counterterrorism experience while promoting others to leadership positions within the bureau for those units that handle the defense against Islamist terrorists. New testimony in the Bassem Youssef lawsuit shows that the attitude starts at the very top: Director Robert Mueller says he doesn't believe his counterterrorism supervisors need to have a background in Arabic, the Middle East or international issues. "Let me tell you that we want to develop that within the bureau, but making that an absolute requirement if you do not have it you would be precluded from advancing in counterterrorism no," Mueller testified recently in an employment lawsuit. Mueller described his own expertise in Middle Eastern terrorism as having been "relatively limited" when he took over the FBI a week before the Sept. 11 attacks. Mueller also testified he didn't...

Poll Shows Gitmo Support Extends Beyond GOP, Bush

CNN/USA Today/Gallup released its latest poll numbers among adults, not voters, and not surprisingly it shows that George Bush has not made much of a rebound since last month's poor showing. His negatives outweigh his positives, and support for the war also has ebbed to its lowest levels in months. Without getting into hyperanalysis of the polling sample and methodology (Gerry always does that well, as does ABP), it's clear that Bush needs to get back in front of the American people and start talking about the successes in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Arthur Chrenkoff and even Kofi Annan can do it, certainly we should be hearing more of it from the Bush administration. However, as Michelle Malkin points out, the polling does show something very interesting -- and should lead to a quick change in the public debate. Even with Bush's numbers dropping, the public supports the detention at...

June 22, 2005

Abbas Defies Sharon On Disarming Militants, Qurei Discovers Why He's Wrong (Updated)

The Israeli-Palestinian summit between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas collapsed into bitter recriminations yesterday, as Sharon insisted that the peace process cannot continue until Abbas and the Palestinian Authority disarms the militias and takes control of security. Abbas refused, a position he would later have reason to regret: A rare meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ended bitterly Tuesday after they failed to reach new agreements on issues related to Israel's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and on measures to rein in violence by Palestinian radicals. Less than two months before the scheduled Israeli evacuation, the leaders clashed over Abbas's efforts to confront such militant groups as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the release of additional Palestinians from Israeli jails and the reopening of the Gaza airport that Palestinians see as key to the future of the local economy after the pullout....

Snort Cocaine And Fund More Bombings

The BBC reports that Ecuador has broken up a drug ring that explicitly existed to fund terrorist operations for Iranian-backed and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. The ring specialized in providing cocaine for users in South America, the Middle East, and Europe: Police in Ecuador say they have broken up an international drugs ring which was raising money for the Islamic militant group, Hezbollah. The authorities have declined to give details of the gang's alleged links with the group, but say it was sending Hezbollah up to 70% of its profits. Ecuadorean officials say the drugs network was run by a Lebanese restaurant owner in the capital, Quito. ... The police investigation, codenamed Operation Damascus, led to the arrests of a further 19 people Brazil and the United States. Whoever got arrested in the US for participating in this trafficking scheme should face charges of treason, if the suspects hold American citizenship and...

Why Detain Terrorists? Maybe This Will Explain It

According to a Congressional study on the proliferation of WMD and the threats posed by state and non-state actors, the likelihood of an attack on a civilian population using WMD runs between 50-70% over the next ten years. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee surveyed a group of 85 security analysts from around the world to reach this gloomy prediction: The study was commissioned by committee Chairman Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., whose nonproliferation efforts in Congress have been credited with helping the states of the former Soviet Union lessen their stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. "The bottom line is this: For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," Lugar said in a statement. Committee aides sent out surveys asking respondents the percentage probability that a biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological attack would...

British Link To 9/11 Held In Mexico

The London Telegraph reports today that a itinerant Lebanese-born British pilot has been held in Mexico, suspected of having a link to the 9/11 attacks in the US. Mexican and US intelligence services jointly arrested Amer Hykel near the resort city of Cabo San Lucas, but have yet to give any specifics on the role he may have played: A Briton who described himself as a wandering pilot has been detained by Mexican authorities and could be linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, officials have said. Amer Haykel, 45, identified as a British citizen of Lebanese descent, was arrested on Monday at the volunteer fire station of Todos Santos, on the Pacific coast about 35 miles north-west of Cabo San Lucas. Mexico's federal attorney general's office said US authorities linked Haykel "to extremist groups believed to be involved with September 11 attacks in New York". It...

June 23, 2005

May Your Wishes Come True

USA Today reports that a terrorist on Saudi Arabia's most-wanted list was killed in an American attack on an al-Qaeda stronghold in northern Iraq. A message from terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi confirmed that Abdullah Mohammed Rashid al-Roshoud "got what he wished", which is to say, he died with a gun in one hand and the Qu'ran in the other: The Web statement said Abdullah Mohammed Rashid al-Roshoud was killed in fighting near Qaim, on the border with Syria. It was signed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most notorious terrorist leader in Iraq. The statement did not say when al-Roshoud was killed, but U.S. forces have launched a series of offensives near Qaim in past weeks against militants coming across the border. ... "When the Crusaders could not enter the area, the only thing they could do was bombard the mujahedeen with warplanes," it said. "Our sheik (al-Roshoud) got what...

But The Chemicals Came Out Of Nowhere, Apparently

Instapundit and Trey Jackson link to a Washington Post story about a trial of 13 terrorists who attempted to stage a massive chemical attack on Amman, Jordan last year. Jordanian intelligence caught the Zarqawi-led ring before they had a chance to detonate chemical weapons on a scale that could have killed thousands: Islamic militants planned to detonate an explosion that would have sent a cloud of toxic chemicals across Jordan, causing death, blindness and sickness, a chemical expert testified in a military court Wednesday. Col. Najeh al-Azam was giving evidence in the trial of 13 men who are alleged to have planned what would have been the world's first chemical attack by the al-Qaida terror group. The accused include al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi, and three other fugitives who are being tried in absentia. Jordanian security services foiled the plot in April last year. Jordanian officials say that had...

Iraqi PM: No Timetables

With Democrats renewing their calls for an exit timetable for American troops in Iraq, the head of the Iraqi government traveled to the United States to confirm what the Bush administration and the Pentagon have said all along -- that so-called "exit strategies" amount to little more than retreat plans in the face of terrorists: The U.S.-led multinational force must stay in Iraq until Iraqi forces are fully prepared to defend the country by themselves, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said Thursday. Setting of a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces would be a sign of weakness, he said. "The country would be open to increased terrorist activity," he said at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ahead of his White House meeting Friday with President Bush, al-Jaafari said Iraq's insurgency consisted of a "very, very limited minority" of people. The Iraqi sees this issue for what it is. Dictating a...

June 24, 2005

Guess Who's Paying Zarqawi?

According to the US News and World Report, Islamist terrorist groups in Iraq not only get support and funding from dispossessed Saddamites and disgruntled Syrians, but also have a stream of donations coming from Europe itself. David Kaplan discovers that "liberal" Europe has a network of donors stuffing spare euros into Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's pockets: Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists. Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up...

US Acknowledges Torture, And Prosecution Of Those Committing It

The United States has submitted a report to the United Nations that acknowledges its personnel has committed isolated acts of torture on detainees, the French wire service AFP reports. Its unnamed source says that the American report was very forthright and involved a handful of cases which the US military intends on prosecuting as crimes: Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said. The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity. "They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN," the Committee member told AFP. ... "They haven't avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq,...

Time To Send A Little Reassurance To The Troops

The Emperor Darth Misha at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler received an e-mail about a soldier in Iraq who questions our support for the troops and the mission based on the media reports that our men and women have been hearing. The Emperor is starting an e-mail campaign for bloggers and blog-readers to send messages to this soldier and his friends. Take a moment to send a supportive message to the troops through the auspices of Darth Misha as soon as you get an opportunity....

June 26, 2005

US Negotiating With Iraqi Insurgency

The Times of London reports this morning that the US has opened negotiations with the native insurgents in Iraq, attempting to find a way to bring the Iraqis opposing the new order in Iraq into the mainstream without violence. Hala Jaber reports that sources within the insurgency have disclosed the meetings and that progress went well enough to stage a second round of talks ten days later and to plan for even more talks: After weeks of delicate negotiation involving a former Iraqi minister and senior tribal leaders, a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies. The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings. Details provided to The Sunday Times by two...

The Dreams Of Palestinian Women

Manuela Dviri of the Telegraph follows up on the story of Wafa Samir al-Biss, the young Palestinian woman who tried to repay the Israelis for their generosity in providing her medical assistance for her burn scars by becoming a suicide bomber for Fatah. Dviri interviewed Biss about her attempt to kill Israelis and the motivation for suicide bombing: The girl had big, brown eyes and her black hair was tied in a ponytail, but it was the strangeness of her gait that attracted the attention of the security officials at the Erez crossing, the main transit point between Israel and the Gaza Strip. When a soldier asked her to remove her long, dark cloak, she turned to face him. All her movements were taped by the military surveillance camera at the checkpoint: calmly, deliberately, she took off her clothing, item by item, until she looked like any normal young woman...

What A Difference Actual Research Makes

After blathering on for weeks about the supposed gulag-like conditions at Guantanamo Bay, members of Congress finally visited the facility for themselves this week. To no one's great surprise, they left with a considerably change in their attitude after having done some actual research: During a tour of the U.S. prison for suspected terrorists on Saturday, House Republicans and Democrats, including one who has advocated closing the facility, said the United States has made progress in improving conditions and protecting detainees' rights. ... "The Guantanamo we saw today is not the Guantanamo we heard about a few years ago," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif. Still, lawmakers from both parties agree more still must be done to ensure an adequate legal process is in place to handle detainee cases. In the meantime, said Rep. Joe Schwarz, R-Mich., "I think they're doing the best they can to define due process here." ......

June 27, 2005

Another Jihadi Gets His Wish

The UAE-based Khaleej Times reports that US and Iraqi forces killed the number-two man in the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi network over the weekend, using a Jordanian newspaper as its source. Khalid Suleiman Darwish had apparently been regarded in Arab circles as Zarqawi's successor during the period when Zarqawi's condition appeared serious enough that a transition appeared possible. Now the dentist has transitioned himself into the ground: A senior member of Iraqs Al Qaeda branch was killed recently in a US crackdown on insurgents in the Iraqi town of Qaim near the Syrian border, a Jordanian newspaper reported yesterday. Khalid Suleiman Darwish, better known as Abu Alghadiya, was among those killed in the operation, the daily Alghad quoted well- informed sources as saying. Abu Alghadiya, a Syrian dentist married to a Jordanian woman, was described by Arab media as the number two in Iraqs Al Qaeda network and tipped to succeed...

Jaafari Calls Europe To Pay It Forward

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari writes a lengthy call for Europe to step up to the plate in today's Times of London, regarding Iraqi reconstruction after its establishment of Western-style democracy. Invoking the Marshall Plan that rescued the Continent after the devastation of two World Wars, Jaafari pleads with a revitalized Europe to now adopt Iraq and the Middle East the way America adopted Germany and Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II: Marshall said: Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Today is the time for a new international Marshall plan towards Iraq and the broader Middle East directed not for or against any policy but against ignorance, tyranny, hatred and anarchy. Marshall repaired the decaying infrastructure of Germany after six years of war and 12 years of Nazi rule. In Iraq we have had nearly...

The Friends Of Our Enemies

The Bush administration may promulgate new sanctions against entities that do business with sanctioned firms suspected of trading in WMD or assisting terrorist groups around the world. Existing sanctions target the firms or entities themselves, but the new concept is to expand that ring one level outward to encompass anyone doing business with those firms: The Bush administration is planning new measures that would target the U.S. assets of anyone conducting business with a handful of Iranian, North Korean and Syrian companies believed by Washington to be involved in weapons programs, administration officials said yesterday. ... But the draft executive order goes far beyond previous measures by threatening the U.S. assets of individuals or companies, including foreign banks, that do business with those on the list. "If there is a bank in some European capital that is participating in working with one of the entities and that bank has some...

Britain Acknowledges Contacts With Insurgents

In a press conference this afternoon, British PM Tony Blair confirmed that the UK had made contacts with the native Iraqi insurgency in an attempt to push them into the legitimate political process. This comes after the Times of London revealed this weekend that the Americans had held two or more meetings with the primarily Sunni bombers, hoping to leverage tribal and family connections to convince the Iraqi component that further fighting was senseless: Britain has been involved in political negotiations with some Iraqi insurgents, Tony Blair revealed today, as he predicted the next year would be "decisive" in determining the country's future. After a weekend which saw the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, admit that American officers had been meeting insurgents in a bid to split the resistance, the prime minister told reporters Britain was also "engaged" in behind the scenes talks. Mr Blair refused to speculate on when...

The Further Education Of Dick Durbin, Amnesty Int'l, Et Al

Today's Independent (UK) reports on the experience of a Tibetan nun who had the misfortune of once declaring her loyalty to the Dalai Lama and a free Tibet. When she was thirteen years old, Chinese authorities arrested Ngawang Sangdrol for taking part in a peaceful demonstration for Tibetan freedom. Once behind bars, her jailers made no distinction for her age or gender in tormenting the teen almost to her death: Ngawang Sangdrol was just 13 when she was first imprisoned by China in Tibet. She was so small her prison guards found it easy to pick her up by the legs and drop her, head first, on to the stone floor of her cell. They beat her with iron rods, placed electric shock batons in her mouth and left her standing in the baking heat until she collapsed of exhaustion. They called her the "ballerina", because when the pain became...

June 28, 2005

Sistani Blesses Major Concession To Sunnis

In another sign that the Iraqis continue to adapt quickly to democratic politics, the spiritual leader of the Shi'a in Iraq gave his blessing to a major concession to his rival Sunnis that could result in greater representation for the former ruling minority in Parliament. That promises to create less tension over the development of the new Iraqi constitution and create serious momentum for the scheduled December elections: Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric appeared to offer a major concession to the Sunni Arab minority on Monday when he indicated that he would support changes in the voting system that would probably give Sunnis more seats in the future parliament. In a meeting with a group of Sunni and Shiite leaders, the cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, outlined a proposal that would scrap the system used in the January election, according to a secular Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Yasiri, who was...

Speaking To The Choir?

President Bush will give a speech tonight from Fort Bragg to revive American support for the extended effort needed to secure Iraq and establish a major base for the expansion of democracy in the Middle East. With unrelenting negative coverage coming from Baghdad, Bush hopes to use his prime-time address with a presumably enthusiastic Fort Bragg audience to highlight the mission's successes and the progress made towards democracy. Bush hopes to bolster the national morale and secure a mandate for our continued work in that effort. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, that may not be as tough a sale as first predicted. Despite some skepticism about our efforts to reduce the insurgency so far, a majority of Americans already reject the cut-and-run option: As President Bush prepares to address the nation about Iraq tonight, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that most Americans do not believe the...

Bush Speech: Live Blog

7:00 - The audience is coming to attention as Bush walks across the stage. He looks a bit nervous but as soon as he got to the podium, he looks happy to face this audience. 7:03 - He underscores Iraq as one phase of the overall war on terror, vowing that terrorists will not chase us from the battle with a couple of blows. 7:06 - It appears to me that the soldiers at Fort Bragg have orders not to react. Bush has not paused much in his delivery, as he normally would if he expected applause or cheers, such as a stump speech. His pace, therefore, is better than normal. 7:10 - He will not allow defeat on his watch -- nice touch. 7:11 - Notes that only a year ago, Iraqi sovereignty was restored. Notes that progress has been uneven but has kept moving forward. Int'l orgs and...

June 29, 2005

Editorial Response To Bush Speech: Predictable

A read through the editorial pages of the three largest and most influential newspapers in the US shows nothing terribly surprising in terms of their response to George Bush's speech last night. The Washington Post offers limited and qualified support, while the Los Angeles Times takes the glass-half-empty approach and the New York Times ... well, the NYT just takes the MoveOn position of screaming every time 9/11 gets mentioned in connection with fighting terrorists. The Post acknowledges that the connections between the fight in Iraq are legitimate, something that neither of the other two papers will admit, but claims that Bush erred by giving nothing but the sunny side of the situation in Iraq. They also fault Bush for not explaining how the strategic position changed: PRESIDENT BUSH sought last night to bolster slipping public support for the war in Iraq by connecting it, once again, to the attacks...

Got Milk?

Today's Los Angeles Times runs a scare story on the security holes in the nation's food supply, focusing on milk production and delivery. In a report that the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to keep quiet, Stanford researchers determined that a third of an ounce of botulinum toxin poured into a milk tanker could kill hundreds of thousands of people and potentially destabilize the food industry: About a third of an ounce of botulinum toxin poured into a milk truck en route from a dairy farm to a processing plant could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses, according to a scientific analysis published Tuesday despite efforts by federal officials to keep the details secret. The study by Lawrence M. Wein and Yifan Liu of Stanford University discusses such questions as how terrorists could release the toxin and what effective amounts might...

Muslims For America?

MS-NBC reports that an Islamic community in California has fired its imam for speaking out in support of Osama bin Laden, perhaps the first time an American Muslim cleric has been publicly disciplined for anti-American rhetoric. However, it took a federal arrest for the mosque's directors to make a stand on behalf of their country: A mosque has fired a religious leader accused of speaking out against the United States and supporting Osama bin Laden in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Shabbir Ahmed, 39, is one of two imams detained on immigration charges as part of an FBI investigation into alleged terror activities in the Islamic community in Lodi, a wine-growing region about 30 miles south of Sacramento. The mosques board of directors unanimously voted to fire Ahmed in a special session Sunday night, said Mohammed Shoaib, president of Lodi Muslim Mosque. The Lodi Muslim Mosque deserves some...

Passport Fraud On The Rise

One of the major areas of concern during this global war on terrorism is border security -- keeping out those who don't belong here while keeping the borders flexible enough for normal trade and tourism. Passports should be the primary tool for ensuring security, but as the New York Times reports, passports routinely get issued to people whose applications should raise red flags: The names of more than 30 fugitives, including 9 murder suspects and one person on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most-wanted list, did not trigger any warnings in a test of the nation's passport processing system, federal auditors have found. Insufficient oversight by the State Department allows criminals, illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists to fraudulently obtain a United States passport far too easily, according to a report on the test by the Government Accountability Office to be released Wednesday. The lapses occurred because passport applications are not...

June 30, 2005

The French Fascination With Terrorism

When the Left bemoans the "loss of sympathy" that followed the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11, they generally point to the French reaction, as typified by Le Monde, which proclaimed all the world to be Americans on that day. Shortly afterwards, when we determined to discard the obviously-insufficient previous counterterrorism approach of criminal investigation in favor of a military response, that sympathy quickly evaporated into a fear of American overreaction. The French went even farther, using the war on terror in a pathetic attempt to position itself into a diplomatic "hyperpower" in opposition to the US, bullying other nations into opposing our efforts to force the UN to confront Saddam Hussein. Now, of course, we know all about the corruption of the Oil-For-Food program at the UN which lined French, German, and Russian pockets as one proximate cause for the loss of this "sympathy" that the American Left mourns so...

July 1, 2005

Dafydd: That Ain't the Half of It

In a blogpost that the Captain slapped up a few days ago -- Oh. Wait, let me introduce myself: this is Dafydd ab Hugh, guest-blogging for Captain Ed while he recuperates from winning $2.8 million in the World Series of Poker finale, playing (as is his wont for FEC reasons) under the name Tuan Le. If someone posts here under the name "Captain Ed" (including the quotation marks) in the next few weeks, it's actually the nom de plume du jour of well-known labor leader and founder of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene Debs. I may be the most well-known blogger in the blogosphere who doesn't actually have a blog (yet; shortly). You may remember me from my high-school filmstrip series "It's All About Adhesives." Getting back to the point at hand, in this post, Captain Ed (the original) noted that evidence is mounting that the recently elected president...

Palestinian Security Forces Inadequate And Mostly AWOL

Glenn Kessler reports on the status of Palestinian efforts to secure their territories for more far-reaching peace initiatives in today's Washington Post, and finds that the Palestinian Authority has fallen far short in even forming a unified security force under civilian control. The Palestinians still refuse to confront and disarm militants, perhaps because a majority of their official state security forces don't really exist: Though Israel is scheduled to depart the Gaza Strip in six weeks, the badly fractured Palestinian security forces are still struggling to consolidate into a body capable of maintaining control, a top U.S. general told Congress yesterday. Lt. Gen. William E. Ward, who four months ago was assigned to assist the Palestinians with their security services, described a difficult and at times frustrating experience of trying to reorganize a "dysfunctional" system of individual fiefdoms and an almost nonexistent chain of command. The Palestinian police also have...

Saudi Columnist: We Owe America For Our Development

MEMRI provides a translation of a column that ran earlier this month in the influential Saudi newspaper, Al-Jazirah. In an interesting departure from normal Arab anti-American rhetoric, the state-approved daily published this reflection on the historical benefits that the Saudi-American association has provided the oil-rich kingdom. It also argues against the pan-Arabist impulse that has destabilized the entire region of Southwest Asia: What have the Arabs given us Saudis in comparison to what we have gained from our relations with America? I know very well that this is an extremely sensitive issue that many would hesitate to address; they are restrained by a culture of fear that prevents them from confronting controversial and sensitive issues head-on. The late King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, was a resourceful and far-sighted statesman when he chose the Americans rather than the British to come and search for oil in the...

Dafydd: Why I Don't Write "Islamofascist"

First, why is this even important? Because language frames thought. I won't go as far as George Orwell in the "Newspeak" chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four; I don't believe that absent a word for a concept, the concept itself becomes literally unthinkable. But I do believe language structures thought, changing how we think about an idea. So creating a new word for Islamic terrorism changes how we perceive it, which affects how we fight it. This is especially true when the new word is actually a contraction of two other words, Islamic and fascism, into Islamofascism. The shortening restricts the ability to think critically about the alleged connection, short-circuiting rational thought and heading straight for the emotional centers. Or as Orwell put it, "Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily."...

Gitmo Papers Show Inmates Initiating Violence

AP reports that it has reports showing that inmates at Gitmo initiate violence against the guards at Camp X-Ray, and incidents of retaliation result in disciplinary action. Rather than the unfortunate victims of American oppression that Amnesty International has painted, the detainees actively attempt to provoke guards into confrontations, showing the dangerous nature of Gitmo's inmates: Military authorities have previously disclosed some incidents of guard retaliation at Guantanamo Bay, which resulted in mostly minor disciplinary proceedings. What emerges from 278 pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press is the degree of defiance by the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo. The prisoners banged on their cells to protest the heat. They doused guards with whatever liquid was handy from spit to urine. Sometimes they struck their jailers, one swinging a steel chair at a military police officer. And the American MPs at times retaliated with force punches, pepper spray and a...

July 3, 2005

A Soldier Says Farewell To His Family

I received this in e-mail today from The Mahaka Surf Report, a blog that I had not yet read. While I'm pausing from my busy day seeing the sights of Washington DC, the capital of freedom and liberty, perhaps this can serve as a reminder of the brave men and women who have made it that. I pray Caelestis makes it back home, safe and sound, at the end of his tour of duty. I also pray that we Americans remember how fortunate we are to have someone like him defending and representing us. I hope Mahaka doesn't mind my reproducing this in full. Today I leave for the war Well it's time to go and do what I have been called to do. Today I head for to the war for the third time and I have some things to say. To me this is a blessing, a calling...

July 4, 2005

Red On Red In Iraq

The London Telegraph reports this morning that Iraqis have increasingly become so disenchanted with the insurgents -- both foreign and domestic -- that the tribal leaders have organized their own counterinsurgencies in areas like Qaim. These clan-based factions have turned on those who attempted to impose their own Taliban-like rules on communities: Tribal leaders in Husaybah are attacking followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist who established the town as an entry point for al-Qa'eda jihadists being smuggled into the country. The reason, the US military believes, is frustration at the heavy-handed approach of the foreigners, who have kidnapped and assassinated local leaders and imposed a strict Islamic code. ... Captain Thomas Sibley, intelligence officer of 3rd battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, based in Qaim, said: "People here were committed supporters of the insurgency but you cannot now even get a marriage licence." ... The trigger was the assassination of...

A Fourth For Remembrance

Yesterday, our family toured the DC area by bus, which allowed us to see most of the sites we intended to visit on our trip. We made it to the Vietnam War memorial, where the First Mate found the name of a family friend, William Rowland (picture in extended entry), who gave his life for his country in June 1968. The tour took us through other inspiring and thought-provoking monuments, such as the World War II memorial, the FDR monument, and Arlington Cemetery, where we visited John Kennedy's gravesite and thousands of others. We found all of these exhibits and remembrances remarkable. However, we found one particular display to resonate most with all of us, one that moved us the most. At the Smithsonian American History Museum, one of the newest exhibits greets visitors almost immediately upon entry. That is a three-story-long American flag -- a star-spangled banner with a...

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July 5, 2005

Al-Qaeda Diplomacy

The Arabic world has now gotten a taste of al-Qaeda diplomacy over the past week, as Iraq-AQ ringleader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has changed tactics. Instead of just blowing up Iraqis in an attempt to demoralize the populace -- a strategy that clearly has backfired -- he has now turned his guns and bombs on diplomats posted to Iraq from neighboring Middle East countries: Gunmen fired on a convoy carrying Pakistan's envoy to Iraq on Tuesday in the third attack on a senior diplomat in three days, police sources said. The sources said two cars of gunmen fired at the convoy in the wealthy Mansour district of Baghdad but sped off after guards returned fire. Nobody was reported hurt, they said. Earlier in the day, Islamist terrorists wounded the envoy from Bahrain in another spray of gunfire. This follows the kidnapping of the Egyptian ambassador on Saturday, demonstrating that Zarqawi has...

Dafydd: It Ain't Even the Quarter

A few days ago, when July was fresh and new, I argued in That Ain't the Half of It that it really doesn't matter whether Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was or was not a leader of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, because the enormity of his undisputed post-revolutionary career as an assassin for the Revolutionary Guard -- during which he murdered hundreds of Iranian dissidents living abroad -- simply overwhelmed the question of whether he was also a student radical. The only objection that could reasonably be raised (apart from dredging up some evidence to contradict the biography at GlobalSecurity.org) is that Ahmadinejad's homidical vocation, as horrific as it was, was not directed at us, and that we should only be concerned with attacks on America -- which moves the embassy-seizure question back to front and center. Now I argue that if that is your...

July 6, 2005

ACLU Still Wants To Define Warfare As Criminal Investigations

The capture of five American citizens in Iraq who allegedly have plotted attacks against the Iraqi government and American troops has caught the attention of the ACLU. The civil-rights group now insists that those Americans captured in a theater of war must have due process through civilian courts and have filed habeas briefs for their release: The U.S. military in Iraq has detained five Americans for suspected insurgent activity, Pentagon officials said Wednesday. The five have not been charged or had access to a lawyer, and face an uncertain legal future. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to identify any of them, citing the military's policy of not providing the names of detainees. They are in custody at one of the three U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. One was identified by his family and U.S. law enforcement officials as Cyrus Kar, an Iranian-American filmmaker and U.S. Navy veteran. Saying Kar is being...

July 7, 2005

Dafydd: Future Shock & Awe

Extree, extree, getcha red-hot future combat today! As has been the case for, oh, a few thousand years, the violent tendencies of human beings are leading the way to tomorrow's technology. War is not only good for business, it's good for science. Here are just a few of the goodies that await us in future battlefields. Warning! This is a very long post, nearly all of which is tucked into the extended-entry section. Forwarned is forlorned!...

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Al Qaeda Bombs London

London suffered a series of coordinated bombing attacks this morning on the cusp of the G-8 conference in Gleneagles, Scotland, targeting its transportation systems just as in Madrid last year. Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for these attacks, which has caused an unknown number of deaths and injuries: Two people have been killed and scores have been injured after three blasts on the Underground network and another on a double-decker bus in London. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said it was "reasonably clear" there had been a series of terrorist attacks. He said it was "particularly barbaric" that it was timed to coincide with the G8 summit. He is returning to London. An Islamist website has posted a statement - purportedly from al-Qaeda - claiming it was behind the attacks. London's police chief Sir Ian Blair said there had been "many casualties" but it was too early to put a...

We Are All Britons Today

On July 7, 2005, let it be known that the world united behind our British brothers and sisters as fellow members of Western Civilization under attack by the forces of tyranny and oppression. We stand with our friends who have suffered a terrible act of war on their civilian population, a cowardly and shameful act that amply demonstrates the depths of depravity of the enemies of freedom and liberty. We are all Britons today. When we say that, we don't mean it to imply that this is conditional on Britain engaging in self-flagellation to maintain our sympathy. We don't mean that we expect our friends to simply remain victims to retain our friendship and support. We don't mean that the people who have been attacked should withdraw into a corner in order to somehow earn our tears. We mean that we support our friends -- and that support means that...

AQ Executes Egyptian Hostage

As if the bombings in London didn't demonstrate their brutality clearly enough, al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq have executed their Egyptian hostage. They released a video of the diplomat identifying himself for the camera before apparently killing him immediately afterwards: Al-Qaida in Iraq said in a Web statement Thursday that it has killed Egypt's top envoy in Iraq, posting a video of the blindfolded diplomat identifying himself. "We announce in the al-Qaida in Iraq that the verdict of God against the ambassador of the infidels, the ambassador of Egypt, has been carried out. Thank God," a written statement in the Web posting said. The video does not show the envoy, Ihab al-Sherif, being killed. Al-Qaida in Iraq, headed by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said a day earlier that it had sentenced al-Sherif to death as an "apostate" for his country's support of the United States and the Iraqi government. The...

Dafydd: Calling London

When a people are attacked, brutally and without warning, there are two possible responses: they can get up, scamper for safety, and there cower; or they can get up, stand on their own two feet, and hit back with everything they have. When a people are attacked in their own homes, they can't run anywhere else, so the only alternative is crawling and begging for mercy, doing what they're told, and hoping to be spared. Or they can fight. We will find out in a few days which path the Britons will take: that of Spain under Zapatero -- or that of Great Briton under Winston Churchill. The terrorists bet on the first, just as they bet in 2001 that we were the America of Vietnam, Beirut, and Somalia. But I'm betting on the second. Once again, the butchers have misunderestimated their expected victims. Of all people in the world,...

Dafydd: The Battle of London

One reason I have such faith in the British is that I remember my history. Great Britain did not simply endure the Battle of Britain, the attempt by Nazi Germany to subjugate the British people. They fought back. The RAF was in the air every damned day and hellish night, fighting, killing, and defying the enemy. In 1940, while America still slumbered in splendid isolationism and Stalin was still allied with Hitler, Great Britain became the very first country to refuse to join the Nazis, to refuse to surrender to the Nazis, and actually to defeat the Nazis and drive them off. Adolf Hitler was dumbfounded. After Dunkirk, he made the same mistake the terrorists make today: he thought Great Britain was defeated and would quickly offer her surrender. But instead, the British dug in and fought back, despite staggering losses -- more than 20,000 dead and 30,000 wounded --...

July 8, 2005

Strib Still Not Quite Getting It Again

The Minneapolis Star Tribune demonstrates in its lead editorial today that it still doesn't quite understand the terror war, even after the London bombings yesterday. The editorial board knows enough not to engage in its usual Bush-bashing, so it hasn't succumbed to its usual tone deafness. Yet they still use the occasion to not only argue against the war in Iraq, but also to argue contradictorily that the war on terror mainly amounts to a law-enforcement problem: [T]here are ways to fight it. Some are better than others. Just days ago, Bush said again that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. He asserted that the United States fights terrorists there so it won't have to fight them at home. The London bombings illustrate the fallacy at the heart of that argument: Terrorists aren't a finite army that you can defeat on a battlefield and achieve victory....

London's Muslims Feel The Pressure

In contrast to the reaction of American Muslims after 9/11, when organizations like CAIR spent far more time declaring themselves as victims rather than working constructively to fight terrorism, London's Muslims wasted no time yesterday decrying the bloody attacks on Britain's civilian transportation systems: Muslim leaders in Britain yesterday were swift to condemn a series of deadly bomb blasts in London and they appealed to Britons not to single out their community for reprisals. The leaders also made an unprecedented appeal to the estimated 1.7 million Muslims living in Britain to tip off the police about who had carried out the bombings. "These evil deeds makes victims of us all," the Muslim Council of Britain said. "The evil people who planned and carried out these series of explosions in London want to demoralize us as a nation and divide us as a people. "All of us must unite in helping...

More Progress In Afghanistan You're Likely To Have Missed

The Army News Service reports that eighteen top Taliban commanders have turned themselves over to the Karzai government for its amnesty program. The commanders come from the splinter Taliban group Hezb-i Islami, which often found itself at odds with Mullah Omar: Eighteen of Gulbiddin Hekmatyars Hezb-e Islami commanders turned themselves over to government officials in the Paktia Province June 12. Under the terms of the Afghan governments reconciliation program, Pakhm-e Sohl, the former commanders returned home after years of living in Pakistan. ... The loyalty statement to the Afghan government includes an agreement not to possess heavy weapons or take up arms against the Afghan government or Coalition forces. The commanders received new reconciliation identification cards and were embraced by Taniwal who welcomed them back to Afghan society. Talking through an interpreter, Taniwal said today is another important step toward bringing complete peace to the province. By working together and...

July 9, 2005

Bombings Boomerang On Islamofascists

If the Islamist lunatics who bombed London two days ago expected the Brits to react as the Spaniards did after Madrid, their mission has failed utterly. The London Telegraph has a new poll taken in the aftermath of the bombings that show increased support for Tony Blair, the fight against Islamofascism, and the battle to establish democracy in Iraq (via USS Neverdock): The response of Tony Blair and his ministers to the attacks has clearly boosted the standing of both. Early this year, twice as many people said they were dissatisfied with Mr Blair as Prime Minister as said the opposite. In the aftermath of Thursday's bombings, Mr Blair's approval rating has flipped from negative to positive for the first time in five years. Moreover, the bombings have failed - despite Mr George Galloway's best efforts - to undermine support for the British presence in Iraq. The proportion wanting British...

July 11, 2005

Javier Solana's Fantasy World

One would expect that after the London bombings, European officials might have experienced some change in their outlook on the Middle East peace process and the necessity of self-defense for democracies the world around. However, one would have to ignore the deeply ingrained moral relativism that has infected the European consciousness, especially outside the Anglosphere, to be surprised at the latest nonsense from the EU foreign office. Javier Solana has once again spent his energy criticizing a wall for damaging peace efforts while ignoring the reason why the wall has to be built in the first place: European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana criticized Israel on Monday for a barrier it is building around Jerusalem, and the Palestinian prime minister said it made a farce of efforts to restart the peace process. srael faced new pressure over its controversial network of walls and fences a day after giving final...

July 12, 2005

Bombers Died, Arrest Made: London Investigation Continues

British intelligence and law-enforcement specialists continued their torrid pace in investigating the terrorist bombings of last week. Today, Sky News reports that the four bombers likely died in the explosions, while the BBC flashes that an arrest has been made in Yorkshire: It is "highly likely" one of the Tube bombers died in the attacks on the Underground network, police say. The suspected bombers travelled down from the West Yorkshire and met at Kings Cross station shortly before the attacks were launched on Thursday morning, police said at a press conference. Their images were captured by CCTV cameras. Personal documents have been found at all four bomb scenes and although the four attackers are thought to have died police were careful not to say whether Britain had suffered its first suicide bomb strike. Those personal documents have been received with some skepticism by investigators. They worry that the papers could...

Hamas: Israel's Days Are Numbered, Agreement Or No

For those who keep insisting that the Palestinians only want to live in peace and only resort to violence because of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the popular Hamas "Party" would like clear up that misunderstanding. Senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar told an Italian journalist that any agreement reached with the Israelis only amounts to a temporary solution, allowing them to gather strength to wipe out the Jewish state within a decade: Hamas will not compromise on one inch of Greater Palestine, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar told an Italian newspaper earlier this week. Speaking to the Corriere Della Sera newspaper, al-Zahar said Hamas would "definitely not" be prepared for coexistence with Israel should the IDF retreat to its 1967 borders. "It can be a temporary solution, for a maximum of 5 to 10 years. But in the end Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in...

July 13, 2005

'I Can't Feel For You Because You're An Unbeliever'

A Muslim terrorist on trial for the brutal murder of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands gave the world a glimpse of the reasons that Islamists have gone to war against the West for more than a decade. Mohammed Bouyeri, who almost decapitated Van Gogh before using his body as a pincushion to display Bouyeri's manifesto, told the victim's mother that killing her son meant nothing to him because Van Gogh wasn't a Muslim: Turning his chair towards Anneke van Gogh as she watched from the public gallery, Mohammed Bouyeri said: I dont feel your pain. I dont have any sympathy for you. I cant feel for you because I think youre a non-believer. The Islamic radical admitted killing Mr van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker, saying that he had been driven by his religious beliefs and would do the same again. Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants to the Netherlands,...

Unprecedented Consultation Not Enough; Schumer Wants A 'Summit'

Senate Democrats, relying on a single instance where Bill Clinton asked Judiciary Committee chair Orrin Hatch his opinion on a potential nominee, have demanded that President Bush "consult" with them before selecting a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. Bush has now contacted 60 senators to get their input on the nomination, far exceeding what Clinton or any other President has done in the past -- and yet the Democrats still complain that it's not enough: White House officials and Senate Republicans have already declared that the outreach to lawmakers about the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is unprecedented, with more than 60 senators contacted or consulted about the choice. "He has gone way beyond what any president has ever done," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). But Democrats are trying to establish their own standard for the consultation, with demands likely...

Only Three Violations Of Rules At Gitmo

An independent investigation into the detention facility at Gunatanamo Bay housing terrorists captured by the US only turned up three violations of Army regulations and the Geneva Conventions, the AP reports today. None of these involved torture of any kind, although one investigator found that the totality of techniques used on one prisoner qualified as "abusive": The chief investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, described the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It was learned later that he had tried to enter the U.S. in August 2001 but was turned away by an immigration agent at the Orlando, Fla., airport. Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was in the airport at the same time, officials have said. Schmidt said that to get him to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores,...

Minneapolis Airport Terminal Evacuated On Possible Bomb Threat

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Minneapolis-St. Paul airport has evacuated its Humphrey terminal, where most charter flights embark and disembark, after an unattended package got the attention of a bomb-sniffing dog: The Humphrey Terminal at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was evacuated this evening after bomb-sniffing dogs smelled something suspicious in an unattended bag. Passengers and employees were sent to a parking garage across the street. The Bloomington bomb squad was on the scene. The Lindbergh Terminal was not affected by the evacuation. No more details are available at the moment. Keep checking back. (h/t: Hugh Hewitt) UPDATE: The story has been updated. Now it appears that two dogs sniffed something suspicious in two vending machines. The machines were separated within the terminal, one being roughly in the center and the other located at the south end. Air traffic continues to get processed at the larger Lindbergh terminal, but Humphrey has...

July 14, 2005

Sunnis Campaign For Democracy, Participation

After seeing themselves politically marginalized for boycotting what turned out to be hugely popular elections, Iraq's Sunni leaders have now begun to urge their communities to take part in the electoral process: In mosques, conferences and on the street, some Sunni Arab leaders are rallying members of their once dominant community to join forces and participate in upcoming elections in a bid to find their place in the new Iraq. ... "Boycotting the last elections ... deprived the people of opportunities," said Sheik Adul Jabbar Qadri, preacher at the Fattah mosque in the largely Sunni town of Beiji. "Now everyone feels this was a mistake and that all Iraqis should participate." Qadri has been using his weekly Friday sermons to encourage Sunnis to cast ballots. "We also urged them to put their differences aside and to keep away from violence," he said. Qadri said a recent meeting in Beiji brought...

US Captures Terrorist Executioner Of Egyptian Diplomat

US forces in Iraq announced today that they captured the al-Qaeda leader in charge of the operation that kidnapped and later executed a diplomatic envoy from Egypt last month. American military forces found Abu Seba in Ramadi last Saturday as part of an ongoing mission to disrupt Zarqawi's terrorist network: The U.S. military on Thursday announced the capture of two key members of Iraq's most-feared terror group, including one suspected in the kidnap-slaying of an Egyptian envoy and attacks on senior diplomats from Pakistan and Bahrain. Khamis Farhan Khalaf Abd al-Fahdawi, known as Abu Seba, was arrested last Saturday following operations in the Ramadi area west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement. He was accused of involvement in the abduction and killing of Egypt's top envoy in Iraq and attacks on Pakistani and Bahraini diplomats earlier this month. "Seba served as a senior lieutenant of al-Qaida in...

Dafydd: Cold Water On Hot Blood

A new paradigm is sweeping the blogosphere -- well, that portion of it that I view in between my frequent naps, experiments in animal husbandry, and trips to the taxidermist. The global war on terrorism, or GWOT, is really not a war at all but more akin to a "blood feud." The idea has been discussed by Hugh Hewitt, both online and on the air; by Wretchard (Richard Fernandez) at The Belmont Club; at Free Republic; NoLeftTurns; a Canadian blog called ThePolitic; and many other sites. I think the originator of this new simile is one Lee Harris. Writing in Tech Central Station on July 8th, "War in Pieces: The Blood Feud," Harris opined: After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent...

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Osama Fades As Democracy Gains

An opinion poll in six Muslim countries shows surprising results for attitudes about Islamists and Western-style democracy. Support for Osama bin Laden has fallen to half of what it had been in previous surveys, while support for democratization and freedom has grown enormously: Osama bin Laden's standing has dropped significantly in some key Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has "declined dramatically," according to a new survey released today. In a striking finding, predominantly Muslim populations in a sampling of six North African, Middle East and Asian countries are also as alarmed as Western nations about Islamic extremism, which is now seen as a threat in their own nations too, the poll found. ... Compared with previous surveys, the new poll also found growing majorities or pluralities of Muslims surveyed now say democracy can work in their countries and is not just a political...

The Latest Gitmo Stupidity: Islamists May Mistreat US Soldiers

Sometimes I wish I could buy some people a clue in the same manner as Wheel of Fortune contestants can purchase vowels from Vanna White. The latest meme coming from Senate Democrats regarding Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay -- now that their characterizations of torture chambers worthy of Josef Mengele have been debunked -- holds that our failure to give full POW status to terrorists at Gitmo will lead our enemy to abuse captured US soldiers. Quit laughing. I'm serious: The U.S. Congress should pass legislation defining the legal status of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay to avoid more damage to the United States' image abroad and reprisals against U.S. soldiers, senators said on Thursday. ... Senators said harsh interrogation practices and the refusal to grant prisoner of war status to detainees could backfire when U.S. soldiers are captured. "Our troops are looking at us to see whether we're going...

London Bombers Were The B-Team

According to ABC News, British intelligence thought they had stopped the coordinated attack on the London subway and bus system when they first discovered the plot -- when Pakistani officials arrested al-Qaeda computer expert Naeem Noor Khan a year ago this week. His laptop contained a remarkably similar plan for the attack, and the British arrested a "senior" AQ operative at the time: Officials tell ABC News the London bombers have been connected to an al Qaeda plot planned two years ago in the Pakistani city of Lahore. The laptop computer of Naeem Noor Khan, a captured al Qaeda leader, contained plans for a coordinated series of attacks on the London subway system, as well as on financial buildings in both New York and Washington. "There's absolutely no doubt he was part of an al Qaeda operation aimed at not only the United States but Great Britain," explained Alexis Debat,...

July 15, 2005

Dafydd: Associated Press Chooses Up

And so it begins -- the canonization of the London bombers. Whenever I become convinced that the MSM cannot sink lower into their miasmic bolgia, they invariably find a way to tumble to a deeper circle of Hell. Now the "useful idiot" Scheherezade Faramarzi (if that is her name) profiles the four slayers of the innocent in London. Through her thousand and one tales of passion, spirituality, and beauty, we discover they were all fine, upstanding citizens who were driven into the frenzy of madness by the evil Bush and his wicked incursion into innocent Iraq. She starts with a bang, making certain that even the most casual reader will understand that IT'S ALL GEORGE BUSH'S FAULT: London Bombers Were Angered by War in Iraq by Scheherezade Faramarzi AP July 15, 2005 LEEDS, England (AP) - Shahzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old son of a Pakistani-born affluent businessman, turned to Islam, the...

'Arabic Assassin' Rapper Worked In Airport Security

The AP reports that a Muslim baggage screener for the Transportation Security Agency moonlighted as a rapper, calling himself the 'Arabic Assassin' and writing lyrics about killing people and blowing up buildings. The TSA fired Bassam Khalaf despite his assertion that he only used that identity as a publicity generator: When Bassam Khalaf raps, he's the Arabic Assassin. His unreleased CD, "Terror Alert," includes rhymes about flying a plane into a building and descriptions of himself as a "crazy, suicidal Arabic ... equipped with bombs." Until last week, Khalaf also worked as a baggage screener at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. ... Khalaf, 21, was hired on Jan. 16 and fired July 7, according to a TSA termination letter that cited his "authorship of songs which applaud the efforts of the terrorists on September 11th, encourage and warn of future acts of terrorism by you, discuss at length and in grave...

Catching The Chemist

Egyptian authorities arrested the chemist sought by British investigators after last week's bombings in London: Egyptian police on Friday arrested an Egyptian biochemist sought in the probe into the London bombings, an Egyptian government official said. Metropolitan Police in London said a man has been arrested in Cairo, but they would not confirm his name or characterize him as a suspect. Magdy el-Nashar was arrested in Cairo early Friday, the Egyptian official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because an official announcement of the information had not yet been made. That happened pretty quickly. Apparently Nashar made a mistake thinking that he could find shelter in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood and its al-Qaeda allies must not have as much popularity as they once did in the North African nation -- but we hear that's going around these days....

No Delay For Iraqi Constitution

Reuters reports this morning that despite initial widespread skepticism about the timeline for the Iraqi constitution, it will now arrive on time. The delivery of the draft by August 15th sets up the scheduled October referendum and the new general election at the end of the year: In a month, Iraq should have a constitution, meeting a deadline set as part of a U.S.-backed timetable for its transition from occupation to independence. Three months ago, after it had taken 12 weeks just to form a government, many doubted the Aug. 15 target for the draft constitution could be met; long, bitter wrangling had dented hopes raised by an election held, on schedule, on Jan. 30. Now, few doubt that some form of draft constitution will appear more or less on time -- even though the parliamentary committee working on it has not, as it once suggested, unveiled a preliminary text...

Military Tribunals Upheld

A federal appeals court has overturned an earlier ruling that attempted to give Gitmo detainees access to American courts for determination of status. In a sweeping victory for the Bush administration, the appeals court also ruled that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Salim Ahmed Hamdan or any al-Qaeda or terrorist detainees, making the military tribunals legal and appropriate: A federal appeals court put the Bush administration's military commissions for terrorist suspects back on track Friday, saying a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison who once was Osama bin-Laden's driver can stand trial. A three-judge panel ruled 3-0 against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, whose case was halted by a federal judge on grounds that commission procedures were unlawful. "Congress authorized the military commission that will try Hamdan," said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The protections of the 1949 Geneva Convention do not apply to...

Spaniards With Convictions Fight Terrorists

After the Madrid bombings last year, the Spanish electorate voted out the Jose Aznar government and elected Jose Zapatero, who ran on a platform of withdrawal from Iraq. Zapatero took a lot of criticism, even from the troops he recalled from their posts, for flinching in the face of terror and holding up the nation to ridicule. Fortunately for Zapatero, some Spaniards have demonstrated that they have the convictions to fight terrorists where they find them: Inmates on Friday beat up a suspected al-Qaida cell leader jailed on charges he helped plot the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, breaking his jaw, nose and a tooth and injuring one of his eyes, Spanish officials said. Imad Yarkas, 42, a Syrian-born Spaniard, was set upon by other prisoners in the dining hall of a prison in the eastern city of Castellon, said officials at the Interior Ministry department that oversees...

A Primer On The Credibility Of Joseph Wilson

After all of the hysteria coming from the Left about Karl Rove and his alleged leak of Valerie Plame's status as a covert agent -- for which her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, demanded Rove's firing -- perhaps we need to revisit the Wilsons and their involvement in the Niger investigation. In his New York Times opinion piece published on July 6, 2003, Wilson claimed that the CIA asked him the previous year to investigate claims that the Iraqis tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. This is the conclusion he said he reached (emphases mine throughout post): Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine,...

July 16, 2005

Abbas No Match For Hamas In Gaza

As could have been predicted by almost anyone watching events in the Palestinian territories, Hamas proved itself the stronger faction in an internecine confrontation yesterday that wound up drawing an Israeli response. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, under pressure to curb violence and disarm terrorists, finally authorized his security group to use force against Hamas in Gaza to keep them from firing rockets at Israelis. The patronage-riddled Fatah police fared badly against the more popular Hamas terrorists: Palestinian police and Hamas gunmen fought running battles, killing at least two civilian bystanders, after Mr Abbas sought to exert his authority on the militants who threaten to wreck the planned Israeli withdrawal from settlements in Gaza next month. ... The crisis in Gaza began late on Thursday when Hamas attacked Jewish targets. A volley of four rockets was launched towards the village of Netiv Ha'asara, which lies just inside Israel, killing a 22-year-old...

Dafydd: Why Do the Bombings Continue?

Actually, the answer is absurdly simple. There are many, many, many Sunnis in Iraq who are not themselves terrorists; but they know who the terrorists are, where they can be found, and they know that they are plotting to murder dozens of children, women, and other innocents. But because the victims are largely Shia, these Sunni simply do not care enough to become "rats" or "tattletales;" thus the bombings continue. This probably describes a minority of Sunni, but it must be a sizeable minority, and sufficiently clustered together that there are "safe zones" known to the terrorists where they can plan, plot, and produce their deadly product. That is why the Iraqi forces cannot round them all up: a core group of several thousand are being shielded and supported by a group of cheerleaders for al-Qaeda among the Sunni in Iraq. There might be a smaller group of Shia in...

July 18, 2005

Tancredo Fouls The Water (Updated)

We have enough problems fighting the war on terror in the measured, strategic method used by the Bush and Blair administrations without Republican Congressmen recommending the bombing of sites held sacred by Muslims across the political spectrum. Yet today, Tom Tancredo (R-CO) suggested that a nuclear attack on an American city could result in a bombing run on Mecca: A Colorado congressman told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons. Rep. Tom Tancredo made his remarks Friday on WFLA-AM in Orlando, Fla. His spokesman stressed he was only speaking hypothetically. ... "Well, what if you said something like if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered. "You're talking about bombing Mecca,"...

July 19, 2005

Dafydd: Hugh's Got a Point, For Once

(All right, that's not fair. Hugh has had points before. So maybe "twice.") But this one is pretty big. Hugh was one of the first to jump on Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) for his hoof-in-mouth suggestion that if America is nuked by some militant Islamist group, we should increase the danger to the United States by orders of magnitude by bombing Mecca. (Michael Medved was also quick off the mark.) Here's Hugh: I want to be very clear on this. No responsible American can endorse the idea that the U.S. is in a war with Islam. That is repugnant and wrong, and bloggers and writers and would-be bloggers and writers have to chose sides on this, especially if you are a center-right blogger. The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion. It cannot be welcomed into mainstream thought because it is factually wrong. If Tancredo's...

Why The Law Enforcement Approach To Terrorism Doesn't Work

Germany has shown once again why using a law-enforcement approach with terrorists ultimately fails to protect Western nations. A German court released suspected terrorist financier Mamoun Darkanzli because of a dispute over an extradition request and the reversal of a newly-passed German law intended to strengthen legal tools to fight terrorism: In a ruling seen as a sharp blow to coordinated counterterrorism efforts in Europe, Germany's highest court refused Monday to turn over to Spain a citizen suspected of aiding Al Qaeda, arguing that a recent European agreement to streamline extradition procedures violated the rights of German citizens. ... But on Monday the German Constitutional Court declared the law creating the European warrant void, even though it was ratified by the German Parliament in November. The court reasoned that the law infringed on the right of every citizen of Germany, enshrined in its Basic Law, to a court hearing in...

Zarqawi Starts Targeting Sunnis

Iraqi terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has concentrated his effort in recent weeks on inflaming sectarian passions in Iraq by targeting Shi'ites and Kurds for attack, rather than Americans or the thus-far sympathetically inclined Sunni population. That changed today as a terrorist assassinated a prominent Sunni politician working on the new Iraqi constitution: Mijbil Issa was gunned down, along with an adviser to the committee and a bodyguard, in the Karradah area of Baghdad, according to Mohammed Abed-Rabbou, another Sunni member of the drafting committee. Issa was among 15 Sunnis named last month to a committee charged with drafting a new constitution by Aug. 15. The Sunnis were added in an attempt to reach out to the religious community at the heart of the insurgency. However, two Sunni committee members had already quit because of threats from the insurgents who oppose the U.S.-backed, Shiite-dominated government. Zarqawi seems to have decided...

Dafydd: The New Antisemitism

...Is Moslem Derangement Syndrome. Do I mean the undenial derangement of some but not all Moslems, who murder the innocent to make some irrational point of religious bigotry? Oh, not this time. By Moslem Derangement Syndrome, I mean those Americans who advocate the murder of hundreds of thousands of Moslems, just to make an equally irrational point arising from their religious bigotry. I explicitly refer to all those who propose, demand, and practically salivate over "nuking Mecca." I'm not talking about Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO). He never went that far. As far as he did go, he was still a dangerous fool; but just as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) does not really believe that American guards at Guantanamo Bay are just like Nazi concentration-camp guards, Stalinist gulag torturers, and Khmer Rouge butchers -- he was just stretching for a ridiculous (but dangerous) intensifier -- neither does Tancredo really support the...

July 21, 2005

London Bombers Got Long-Distance Pep Talk?

Pakistani and British investigators have found phone records indicating that al-Qaeda leaders may have contacted the London bombers the night before the terrorist attacks that killed at least 56 and left hundreds injured on July 7. Haroon Rashid Aswat, now in custody in Pakistan, also visited all four bombers in the weeks leading up to the attack: Haroon Rashid Aswat has emerged as the figure that Scotland Yard have been hunting since he flew out of Britain just hours before the attacks which killed 56 people. Aswat, 30, who is believed to come from the same West Yorkshire town as one of the bombers, arrived in Britain a fortnight before the attacks to orchestrate final planning for the atrocity. He spoke to the suicide team on his mobile phone a few hours before the four men blew themselves up and killed fifty-two other people. Intelligence sources told The Times that...

Osama's Ambassador Loses Diplomatic Immunity In Britain

The Scotsman reports that Britain may finally get serious about deporting radical imams and activists preaching hate and jihad in the wake of its first-ever suicide bomb attack. Abu Qatada now faces deportation to Jordan in a hastily-arranged agreement with the Hashemite Kingdom not to execute or torture deportees from the UK: ABU Qatada, the extremist cleric known as "Osama bin Laden's ambassador in Europe", is finally facing deportation to Jordan after British officials brokered a potentially groundbreaking extradition deal. Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, announced yesterday that authorities in Amman had agreed to give verifiable commitments not to impose the death sentence or impose torture on anyone handed over. This was billed by ministers as the first in a string of deals aimed at dismantling what critics have called "Londonistan" - the community of Islamic extremists being protected from extradition. Qatada, a Jordanian national, is wanted by eight police...

Dafydd: Either/Or

A puzzling and intriguing story from AP raises -- and begs, of course -- a conundrum of the first order: who killed them? In "Sunni Arabs Continue Constitution Boycott," Qassim Abdul-Zahra writes that the Sunni delegation to the Iraqi constitutional convention are "continuing" their boycott, which I didn't even know was ongoing. Jeeze, you go away for a day, and all heck breaks loose. BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Sunni Arabs decided Thursday to continue boycotting the committee drafting Iraq's new constitution, casting doubt on whether the group can meet an August deadline to complete its work. Insurgent attacks, including two car bombings, killed 15 people, officials said. If that looks like two stories got accidentally shuffled together, get used to it; it's all through this piece. On the one hand, we have boycotting Sunni; on the other hand (now I sound like JFK), we have various people killed in terrorist...

Close Call For London's Round Two

It appears that terrorists have attempted a second wave of bombings targeting London's transport systems, but in this case failed to do much damage. The BBC reports that several incidents occurred in subways and buses, but that the only explosions came from the detonators and not from any other explosive material: Minor explosions using detonators only have sparked the evacuation of three Tube stations and the closure of three lines, a BBC correspondent has said. Police cordoned off large areas around Warren Street, Oval and one of the Shepherd's Bush Tube stations. A route 26 bus in Hackney Road in Bethnal Green had its windows blown out by a blast. There were no injuries. Police in London say they are not treating the situation as "a major incident yet". One person was injured at Warren Street. There were reports the injured person may have been holding a rucksack containing the...

July 22, 2005

Shooting In The Tube

After the second series of bombings in as many weeks in London's transport systems yesterday, police have tightened security to avoid another attack. This morning, that heightened scrutiny resulted in the death of an "Asian" man on the Tube when he tried to board a train despite a police warning to stop: Chris Wells, a 28-year-old company manager, said he was travelling on the Victoria Line towards Vauxhall when he left the train at Stockwell. He saw about 20 police officers, some of them armed, rushing into the station before a man jumped over the barriers with police giving chase. He said: "There were at least 20 of them [officers] and they were carrying big black guns. "The next thing I saw was this guy jump over the barriers and the police officers were chasing after him and everyone was just shouting 'get out, get out"'. ... Witness Mark Whitby,...

Zarqawi Continues To Alienate Muslims

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi continued his strange new strategy of alienating Muslims by kidnapping yet another diplomatic envoy to Iraq. This time, terrorists captured the Algerian charges d'affaires nearby his embassy in an ambush: Algeria's top diplomat in Iraq was abducted Thursday by masked gunmen, witnesses said, nearly three weeks after the group called al Qaeda in Iraq kidnapped and killed an Egyptian envoy and threatened to seize more diplomats. Ali Belaroussi, the charg d'affaires at the Algerian Embassy, was accosted by gunmen about 100 yards from the embassy in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour and forced into the back of a car, according to witnesses. One witness said a bodyguard was abducted along with Belaroussi; another said that only the envoy was seized. ... Because Algeria has not posted an ambassador to Iraq, Belaroussi is chief of his country's diplomatic mission here. No Arab country has sent an ambassador...

Rallies For Oppression Shockingly Disappoint

Islamists in Pakistan called for massive rallies against the Pervez Musharraf government after it rounded up hundreds of suspected terrorists while investigating the London bombings. The grassroots effort to support Taliban-style tyranny fell somewhat short of expectations: An Islamist call for nationwide protests in Pakistan against a crackdown on militants after the July 7 London bombings fell flat on Friday with rallies in big cities failing to attract more than a few hundred people. ... Up to 700 Islamists, most of them teenagers or in their 20s, chanted anti-Musharraf and anti-U.S. slogans at Islamabad's Lal or Red Mosque, which was raided by security forces searching for militants on Tuesday. Some shouted slogans in support of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban government, which was overthrown by U.S.-led forces after the al Qaeda attacks on U.S. cities on Sept. 11, 2001. The protesters pelted a police post...

July 23, 2005

AQ Kills Muslims In Egypt, Belies Iraq As Cause

Al-Qaeda took responsibility for the horrendous coordinated series of bombings in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday, killing 83 and wounding hundreds. The suicide car-bomb attacks targeted Egypt's tourist business, which hoped to recover from the Luxor bombings in 1997 and a series of attacks last year: The attacks dealt a fresh blow to the tourism industry so crucial to Egypt's economy, which was still recovering from the fallout of last year's bombings. There have also been several attacks in tourist areas in Cairo in recent months, as Egypt prepares for its first multi-candidate presidential election in September. The Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Levant and Egypt said it carried out the multiple bombings as a "response against the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya." Where has Egypt stationed its soldiers in any of these areas? Nowhere. Why does AQ want...

Collateral Damage

At first blush, the news reports from Britain indicated that special operations forces had averted another suicide bombing in the London subway system when they shot and killed a suspect who gate-crashed and attempted to escape on the Tube. The man had ignored several commands to stop and cooperate, and instead headed for the same system that had recently seen two coordinated attacks. When police stopped him, they immediately killed him to stop the suspect from blowing up the train, themselves, and surrounding Londoners. They had every reason to believe that they had saved dozens of lives. Every reason, until they discovered he had no bomb: Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers gunned down at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here. The man was identified by police as Jean Charles de...

July 25, 2005

Why India?

In a little-noticed blurb in yesterday's London Times, India sentenced an al-Qaeda operative for his participation in the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed Afroze got seven years for plotting attacks overseas on 9/11 to coincide with the attacks on America. However, Afroze's choice of targets certainly bears review, as Melanie Phillips and RattlerGator point out: AN INDIAN man was jailed in Bombay yesterday for plotting to fly passenger jets into the House of Commons and Tower Bridge in London on September 11, 2001. Mohammed Afroze was sentenced to seven years after he admitted that he had a role in an al-Qaeda plot to attack London, the Rialto Towers building in Melbourne and the Indian Parliament. ... Afroze admitted that he and seven al-Qaeda operatives planned to hijack aircraft at Heathrow and fly them into the two London landmarks. The suicide squad included men from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afroze said. They booked...

'Army People Are Respected'

The London Telegraph published a fascinating look at the Iraqis who defy the suicide bombers to serve their nascent democratic republic in the security services. Despite the targeting of recruiting offices, Iraqis still have enlisted in droves to oppose the Islamofascist lunatics that threaten to start a civil war: The young men and handful of women in the queues say they are as keen for the private's salary of $400 a month as they are to serve their country to rid it off insurgents. There are others who have had friends and relatives among the estimated 25,000 civilians killed over the past two years. Some also believe that the only way to get an American withdrawal from Iraq is to build a secure and substantial security force. But all have an air of defiance, and in some of the fresh recruits there is a hint of gratitude for just making...

Dafydd: The Tancredo Threat

I cannot believe that this controversy is still roiling within the blogosphere. The newest argument I've seen is that threatening to bomb or even "nuke" Mecca is just the same as MAD, the Cold-War strategy of threatening massive retaliation in response to a Soviet first-strike on the American homeland. But it's not. And there is a very good reason why it is not analogous. The reason that MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, worked is that the Soviets were modernist dictators; they were a modern, industrial society run by atheists who believed that this life was the only life, and who were motivated not by a transcendent religion but rather by an ideology of absolute temporal power. They took seriously the threat to destroy their realm and kill the leaders themselves. Now, I realize it seems crazy to postulate a group that literally believes that the fastest way to paradise is to...

July 26, 2005

Steyn: Don't Excuse London Police

Mark Steyn takes the London police to task in a surprising Telegraph column this morning for the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who got shot eight times after running from plainclothes police in the London subway system. After watching various people -- such as myself -- come to the defense of London's special operations police, Steyn argues that we should not let them off the hook so easily: [W]e turn to Jean Charles de Menezes, the supposed "suicide bomber" who turned out to be a Brazilian electrician on his way to work. Unfortunately, by the time the Metropolitan Police figured that out, they'd put five bullets in his head. We're told we shouldn't second-guess split-second decisions that have to be made under great stress by those on the scene, which would be a more persuasive argument if the British constabulary didn't spend so much time doing...

Pointing To A Failed State

An independent study on the effectiveness of official Palestinian security forces show them to be understaffed, outgunned, ineffective and corrupt. The BBC reports on the unsurprising results, which the Dutch and Canadian governments funded, that point to the folly of granting sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority: The lack of equipment includes shortages of ammunition, of means of communication beyond mobile phones and of all-terrain vehicles. Other problems include the continuing power of personalities and clans, which often create alternative, informal chains of command and weaken the authority of the man in overall charge, Palestinian Authority Interior Minister Nasser Yousef. BBC Jerusalem correspondent Nick Thorpe says the problems are closely tied to the history of the conflict in recent years - the destruction of the Palestinian police infrastructure by the Israelis since the start of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2000. Continuing attempts to streamline the forces are praised...

Iraq Issues Ultimatum To Syria

The new government of Iraq apparently feels sufficiently established to flex its muscle with one of its more intransigent neighbors. Clearly fed up with the uninterrupted flow of terrorists into the Sunni Triangle, the new Iraqi defense minister warned Syria that its interference in Iraq could create a volcano that would flow lava over Damascus: Iraq's defense minister criticized Syria on Tuesday for ignoring Iraqi demands "to stop the infiltration of terrorists." The official, Saadoun al-Dulaimi, singled out Iraq's western neighbor as among states that are slack on stopping the flow of militants into his country. "When the lava of the exploding volcano of Iraq overflows, it will first hit Damascus," al-Dulaimi warned during a news conference to discuss an upcoming nationwide security plan. He said militants are coming into Iraq from Syria via three routes, with the intent of targeting the Baghdad region. Syria claims that it is trying...

Egypt Got Tip On Bombing

The Scotsman reports tonight that Egyptian authorities had received a warning about the bombings at Sharm el-Sheikh that killed 88 people and injured hundreds more. Security officials misunderstood the intended target of the al-Qaeda terrorists, however, leaving the hotels unprepared for the attack: THE Egyptian authorities received information about an imminent terror attack in Sharm el-Sheik days ahead of the devastating weekend bombings, security officials revealed yesterday. But they believed it would target casinos, so security was increased around those sites, said two officials. ... The officials, who have knowledge of the investigation, would not say where the tip came from, but said security had been put on alert in the resort on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula several days before the pre-dawn attacks on Saturday. Instead of casinos, the bombers, in two explosives-laden lorries, targeted hotels just after 1am on Saturday morning. One ploughed into the Ghazala...

July 27, 2005

Egypt Starts Looking Inward For Answers

The bombings at Sharm el-Sheikh appear to have had one remarkable result -- the Egyptians have stopped making excuses for terrorism. Even their official media now openly acknowledge that their culture has created the elements for terrorism to thrive, especially the autocratic nature of their government: Stunned by terror attacks in a Red Sea resort, Egyptians are in a remarkably frank debate about whether mosques and schools and the government itself should be blamed for promoting Islamic extremism. Even pro-government media say authorities have created a climate where young people are turning into radicals and suicide bombers. In a country more used to hearing general condemnations of terrorism, critics on Wednesday were angry and specific hammering at instances where they say the government allowed mosque preachers or state media to promote intolerance. ... "There is no use denying. ... We incited the crime of Sharm el-Sheik,"...

Dafydd: Stupid Republican Tricks II (Update from Captain Ed)

Today, the Failed Millennium Bomber was sentenced for his attempt to "bomb LAX" (Los Angeles International Airport), a terrorist act that if successful, would have probably killed hundreds of people. Ahmed Ressam was caught, as he drove off a ferry from British Columbia, by an alert Border Patrol agent, who found a "trunk full of bomb-making materials." As Hugh Hewitt said a few moments ago, "this guy is Mohammed Atta, except he missed!" So what did this chappie get for this attempted heinous attack? According to AP -- SEATTLE (AP) - The man convicted of plotting to blow up the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium was sentenced Wednesday to 22 years in prison. Ahmed Ressam got a lighter sentence than prosecutors had requested, reflecting his cooperation in telling international investigators about the workings of terror camps in Afghanistan. In fact, it's really not even twenty-two years:...

July 28, 2005

Further Collapse Of AQ Bombing Cell

British investigators have now added nine more people to the list of those arrested after the botched bombings of July 21, where all four bombs failed to detonate properly and left a treasure trove of evidence for police. Police confirm that they have arrested 20 suspects, including one of the erstwhile bombers: Anti-terrorist officers arrested nine men in raids early Thursday in connection with the botched July 21 attacks on London's transit system, bringing to 20 the number of people police have in custody, including one of the alleged bombers. Scotland Yard police headquarters said the nine were arrested under the Terrorism Act at two properties in the neighborhood of Tooting, in south London. The arrests follow a significant breakthrough on Wednesday, when authorities in the central England city of Birmingham arrested one of the four men suspected of carrying out the failed attacks Yasin Hassan Omar, 24. He...

Stop Me Before I Violate Godwin's Law!

Dick Durbin disgraced himself and the Senate by comparing our detention facility at Guantanamo Bay with the deathcamps of Auschwitz and the killing fields of Pol Pot, and the resulting chorus of derision should have warned anyone else from following suit. Some people cannot learn from experience, however. Today's violation of Godwin's Law comes from the Washington Post, with Richard Cohen giving us the worst of theatrical reviews and political analogies in a single column: I need to be very careful here, to say precisely what I mean and leave nothing to chance. I have just seen the play "Primo," which is performed by a single actor, Antony Sher, with material taken from Primo Levi's incomparable "If This Is a Man," the book that made the obscure Italian chemist an international literary sensation. It is an account of his time spent in Auschwitz. I could not help but think of...

AQ Religious Firebrand Gets 75 Years

A New York court sentenced Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad to seventy-five years in prison for providing funds, arms, and assistance to al-Qaeda and Hamas. A jury convicted the sheikh despite one of the government witnesses setting himself on fire earlier this year in protest of what he felt was unfair treatment by the US government: A Yemeni cleric who claimed to have ties with Osama Bin Laden has been sentenced to 75 years in prison in New York. Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad was convicted on charges of conspiring to support the al-Qaeda network and Palestinian militant group Hamas. At a meeting with two FBI informants in Germany, he was recorded promising to funnel more than $2m (1.1m) to Hamas. He was arrested by German police in January 2003 and extradited to the US. For each of five counts, Moayad received 15-year sentences, each to be served consecutively. Contrast this...

Was Menezes In Britain Illegally?

The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the man shot in the London Tube after fleeing pursuing plainclothes police, took a strange turn this afternoon. The British Home Office released a statement that his visa had expired, and that the indefinite-leave stamp entered into it di not match that used on the date shown: The student visa of Jean Charles de Menezes expired two years before he was shot by police, the Home Office says. Officials said they wished to end speculation over his immigration status but added it was "not intended" to influence any investigations. A passport stamp apparently giving him indefinite leave to remain "was not in use" on that date, added officials. Home Office officials quickly noted that they did not intend to make a judgment on the validity of the lethal force used in his capture. However, it does shed some light on why Menezes may...

July 29, 2005

Disengagement From Reality

Today's Washington Post publishes a column from an Al-Jazeera reporter who got miffed that Israel denied her entry from Gaza so that she could attend a reception in the West Bank. After that experience, Laila el-Haddad tells us that Israel's pullout from Gaza amounts to nothing more than a plan to keep the West Bank under its thumb, and that Israel's protection of its borders is the biggest obstacle to peace in the region: I spent eight hours at Gaza's Erez border crossing with Israel last month, waiting for Israeli approval to attend a reception in the West Bank, only to be denied entry based on dubious "security reasons." I'm a Palestinian mother of a stir-crazy 16-month-old boy, a journalist and a Harvard graduate. I'm not sure exactly what's threatening about me, though my son might disagree, if he could sit still long enough to do so. Being Palestinian is...

Shots And Explosions Heard In London Raid (Updates: Captures!)

Londoners have heard shots and explosions -- as many as six -- coming from a raid which British authorities say is connected to the July 21 bombing investigation: Officers carrying machine guns and wearing gas masks moved in and a loud explosion was reported in the Ladbroke Grove area. ... Witnesses said the police swooped at 11.30am and sealed off Tavistock Road and the adjoining crescent. Tavistock Road runs close to Westbourne Park Tube station where the man who attempted to blow himself up on a train near Shepherd's Bush on July 21 got on to the network. Agence France-Presse reports that the six explosions came from the Notting Hill region, apparently part of the same raid. Further details to follow ... UPDATE: Police arrested two women in a queue at a transport station in London, in "dramatic fashion," as the Telegraph puts it in its update. Fox News reported...

July 30, 2005

Passing A Test In Uzbekistan

One of the most important military bases operated by the US sits in Uzbekistan, which borders on Afghanistan. It provides strategic access to the northern part of Afghanistan, with good roads to Mazar-i-Sharif, plus long runways for heavy-load military flights. It opened shortly after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and has been considered essential to our operations. Unfortunately, that base will no longer remain in our control, as the Uzbeks have delivered an eviction notice to the US: Uzbekistan formally evicted the United States yesterday from a military base that has served as a hub for combat and humanitarian missions to Afghanistan since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pentagon and State Department officials said yesterday. In a highly unusual move, the notice of eviction from Karshi-Khanabad air base, known as K2, was delivered by a courier from the Uzbek Foreign Ministry to the U.S....

Jimmy Insults American Military On Foreign Soil

At one time, people considered Jimmy Carter the most successful ex-president, building a far better reputation through his philanthropical work than he ever did in his single term in the White House. However, over the past ten to fifteen years, his meddling in foreign policy and continuous left-wing stridency has dimmed the luster of his charitable efforts. Despite being out of office at the time, he may wind up most responsible for North Korea having nuclear weapons. One would think that would give him a legacy unmatched in recent times. Today he did what most of us thought impossible -- he actually made his reputation worse. Carter took an opportunity to castigate the American military for its treatment of terrorist detainees while traveling overseas ona visit to our most strategic ally: Former President Carter said Saturday the detention of terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base was an embarrassment...

July 31, 2005

London Arrests Seven More As Bombing Cell Collapses

British investigators captured another seven suspects in a raid earlier today connected to the July 21 bombing attempts. Even though Britain and Italy feel that they have all four would-be bombers in custody, they continue to raid locations and make arrests, indicating that their earlier captures may have resulted in a wealth of new intelligence: Police arrested seven people Sunday during a raid on an apartment in southern England, bringing to 21 the number in custody in the relentless hunt for accomplices in the failed July 21 transit bombings. Investigators determined to prevent further attacks also were probing possible ties between two of the bombing suspects and Saudi Arabia, British newspapers reported. Police were searching for anyone who may have recruited and directed the attackers and built the explosives. Police arrested the six men and one woman during a search of two buildings in Brighton, on the southern coast, said...

August 3, 2005

Islamic Jihad's Bad Aim A National Scandal: PA

Now we know what it takes to get Palestinian terrorists to stop killing Israelis long enough to allow them to withdraw from the Gaza Strip -- terrorists with bad aim killing Palestinian children. Islamic Jihad announced that it will observe a cease-fire intended to allow Israel time to get out of Gaza after they killed a 5-year-old Palestinian boy in a botched missile attack in Beit Hanoun: A major Palestinian militant group promised Wednesday it would fire no more rockets at Israelis during Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, after a barrage inadvertently killed a 5-year-old Palestinian boy. ... There was no claim of responsibility for the assault Tuesday night, which was aimed at a large gathering of Israeli withdrawal opponents in the town of Sderot just over the Gaza border. Instead, the rudimentary rockets hit a house in the Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, killing...

Terrorists Murder Author, Blogger Steven Vincent

The BBC reports this morning that author and blogger Steven Vincent was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists near Basra. His female Iraqi translator survived the kidnapping, but the terrorists dumped Vincent's bullet-ridden body outside of the city within hours of his kidnapping: The pair were kidnapped by five gunmen in a police car as they left a currency exchange shop, Lt Col Karim al-Zaidi said. "Both were later shot, but Vincent was killed, while the girl [translator] is alive," said Mr Zaidi. Mr Vincent was shot several times in the head and body, said Mr Zaidi. The translator, Nour Weidi, was seriously wounded. This death hits closer to home for me. Steven had appeared on our radio show several months ago when his book In The Red Zone first came out. While Steven supported the general war effort in Iraq, his writings did not fall into the category of cheerleading...

August 4, 2005

Europe To Radical Islamists: Bye-Atollah

Europe appears to finally have awakened to the threat of radical Islam within its own borders after the series of London bombings conducted by home-grown Islamist terrorists. Governments throughout the Continent have decided to start expelling radical imams glorifying jihad and inciting their congregations to violaence: Countries across Europe are working to expel radical Islamic clerics who glorify and condone acts of terrorism, in hopes of stemming the tide of extremism among impressionable Muslim youth. France deported an imam to his native Algeria on Friday for incendiary sermons at mosques in Paris, and at least eight more extremist clerics are expected to be banished in the coming weeks. Italy expelled eight fundamentalist Palestinian preachers on Tuesday for not holding proper residency permits, Italian news agency ANSA reported. The British Home Office announced recently that it will introduce an anti-terror bill that criminalizes "indirect incitement of terrorism," and is creating a...

August 5, 2005

Building A Case Against Iran?

MS-NBC reported last night that American military forces captured a large shipment of shape charges, the kind of explosives used against American military forces by Iraqi terrorists. Sources within the military and intelligence communities told the network that the charges originated with Iran, an allegation that could have potential to escalate already-existing disputes between Washington and Teheran: U.S. military and intelligence officials tell NBC News that American soldiers intercepted a large shipment of high explosives, smuggled into northeastern Iraq from Iran only last week. The officials say the shipment contained dozens of "shaped charges" manufactured recently. Shaped charges are especially lethal because theyre designed to concentrate and direct a more powerful blast into a small area. Theyll go right through a very heavily armored vehicle like an M1-A1 tank from one side right out the other side, says retired U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey. Military officials say theres only one...

American Muslims: Fatwa Was CYA Only

After a band of Islamic scholars in America issued much-heralded fatwa against religious violence last week, the media cheered its message as a concrete example of mainstream Muslim opposition to terrorism. However, the edict generated considerable skepticism among analysts, which noted several technical problems with the specific wording, arguing that the fatwa had enough gaps to justify all but the most egregious acts of terrorism. Now the Washington Times reports that the command has failed to satisfy even American Muslims, who sound similar criticisms: The fatwa condemning religious extremism recently issued by American Muslim groups was so broad it was meaningless, and should have denounced specific terrorist groups including al Qaeda, critics within the U.S. Muslim community say. ... Muqtedar Khan, a political scientist at the University of Delaware and author of "American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom," said it appeared the main aim of last week's fatwa was protecting...

August 6, 2005

Dafydd: Crystal Gaza

Israel is just about to evacuate the settlers from Gaza, by force if necessary. Most observers are tearing their hair out, seeing nothing but bad coming from this. The argument -- and it's perfectly logical, as far as it goes -- is that by withdrawing the settlers and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) which is primarily there to defend them with checkpoints, searches, and restrained shows of force, a power vacuum will be created. The Palestinian Authority will of course be too weak to maintain its power, so Hamas (and perhaps Hezbollah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad) will seize control instead. (Though Al-Qaeda has also now staked a claim to Gaza, and the strip may turn into a decidedly uncivil civil war instead of smoothly transitioning to Hamas.) Thus, Gaza will inevitably become a new base for militant Islamists, say those opposing the pullout. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posts the...

The New Gitmo Catch-22

Critics of the detention of unlawful combatants at Guantanamo Bay apparently cannot find any reasonable solution for handling terrorists acceptable. After announcing the approval of a new facility for Gitmo detention based on a model county jail system in Michigan to ease the concerns of human-rights activists, the same people complained about the planned release of 200 current detainees to their home countries for further processing: In a few years, Pentagon officials say, the detention center at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, will have undergone a radical transformation. The sprawling detention site known as Camp Delta, with its watchtowers, double-wide trailers housing rows of steel cells and interrogation rooms will be mostly demolished. Instead, a sharply reduced inmate population of those the military considers the most hard-core will inhabit two nearby hard-walled modern prisons. The newest of those, which is still under construction, is modeled on a modern county jail in Michigan...

Muslim Elder Warned British Authorities About London Bomber

An elder at a London mosque tried to involve British authorities two years ago when a group tried to disrupt its moderate congregation through intimidation and preaching of radical Islam, CNN reports today. One of the leaders of the radical group went on to join the terror cell responsible for the July 21 bombing attempts on the London transportation systems: A leader at a mosque visited by one of the London July 21 bombing suspects says he warned police that Hamdi Issac was dangerous more than two years ago. An elder at the Stockwell Mosque in south west London says he wrote to a senior police officer urging him to help deal with a group of young people who had been "harassing" and intimidating the moderate Muslims. Toaha Qureshi, one of the mosque's Trustees, told CNN that Issac -- the alleged Shepherds Bush attempted bomber currently fighting extradition from Italy...

August 7, 2005

'Just Following Orders' Is Never A Defense

The New York Times runs a sympathetic article on the plight of Mohamed Yousry in its Regional section this morning. Yousry worked as a translator for Lynne Stewart, the attorney representing "The Blind Sheikh" behind the first World Trade Center attack -- and he got convicted of providing material assistance to terrorists along with Stewart and Ahmed Abdel Sattar. The Times tells us that Yousry remains defiant and bemused by his conviction, claiming that he only followed orders from Lynne Stewart: Mr. Yousry's lawyers, David Ruhnke and David Stern, showed in court that he took no actions on his own to help the sheik politically and did his translation work based on instructions he received from Ms. Stewart and other lawyers for Mr. Abdel Rahman, a blind Muslim cleric who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for conspiring to bomb landmarks in New York City. Mr. Yousry's case...

Insurgents Not Happy With Current Management

American forces in Iraq have intercepted a letter from a local terrorist leader from the Mosul area to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The letter does not claim glorious progress against the infidel invader; instead, it complains about the quality of leadership in Northern Iraq and the decreasing effectiveness of the al-Qaeda effort: A letter apparently written by a rebel leader to terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi decries the insurgency's leadership in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a hotspot in the war. Security forces seized the letter last week in a raid on a safe house that netted arrests and other items. Task Force Freedom, based in Mosul, issued a copy of the letter and a statement about it Saturday. The letter, from an insurgent named Abu Zayd, who calls himself "emir of Farming reform battalion on the west side," cited the incompetence of Mosul's emirs and the disobedience of other...

Tancredo Is Too Late

Rep. Tom Tancredo received a deluge of criticism after suggesting that the US might target Mecca in the event of a nuclear attack on America. According to the British newspaper, the Independent, radical Islam may have made that strategy moot. The cities of Mecca and Medina have suffered the fate of the Buddhist monuments of Afghanistan under the Taliban, and for much the same reasons: Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots. Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades. Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage. It is...

August 8, 2005

Saudis Warned Brits Of An Impending Attack

Yesterday, the Observer reported that the Saudis officially warned Britain that it had word of an attack on London weeks ahead of the July 7 bombings. Its intelligence services had monitored the cellphone of a terrorist leader in its country and had told Britain of the existence and activation of an Islamist cell within the UK: Saudi Arabia officially warned Britain of an imminent terrorist attack on London just weeks ahead of the 7 July bombings after calls from one of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives were traced to an active cell in the United Kingdom. Senior Saudi security sources have confirmed they are investigating whether calls from Kareem al-Majati, last year named as one of al-Qaeda's chiefs in the Gulf kingdom, were made directly to the British ringleader of the 7 July bomb plotters. One senior Saudi security official told The Observer that calls to Britain intercepted from a mobile...

This Is Not Your Father's Oldsmobile

The American military made some significant progress today when it discovered a facility in western Iraq used for building car bombs. Marines found a total of eleven unexploded devices in a town in the Anbar province where terrorists have planned and executed suicide attacks on Iraqi and American forces: U.S. Marines discovered a car bomb factory Monday in a western Iraqi town near where 20 members of the American unit were killed last week, the U.S. military said. Six vehicles rigged with explosives were found in the hideout in the northern part of Haqlaniyah, one of a cluster of towns in western Anbar province long believed to be a stronghold of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters. "All of the rigged vehicles were destroyed and secondary explosions were observed by the Marines," a Marine statement said. U.S. and Iraqi forces also found five roadside bombs Monday on a road in Haqlaniyah,...

August 9, 2005

A CNN/AQ Connection In Turkey?

MEMRI provides a bit of shocking information from Turkey in its latest dispatch of Arabic translations for the West. A Turkish terrorist group has launched a newspaper in Istanbul, Kaide ('al-Qaeda' in Turkish), which it distributes across the entire country: The Turkish political weekly Tempo, along with some major Turkish daily newspapers including Milliyet,Aksam and Cumhuriyet, reported that the Islamist Turkish terrorist organization Great East Islamic Raiders Front (IBDA-C) has begun publishing a new weekly, Kaide ("Al-Qaeda" in Turkish) which openly praises its namesake and idolizes Osama bin Laden. Kaide, which looks like an Al-Qaeda bulletin and includes all Al-Qaeda announcements, is published legally in Istanbul and sold at newsstands across Turkey. ... The Turkish weekly Tempo interviewed Kaide executive Ali Osman Zor in Kaide' s offices in the Kasimpasa neighborhood of Istanbul. Following are excerpts: [3] "[] Even the plain fact that Al-Qaeda has an office in Kasimpasa, in...

August 10, 2005

Al-Qaeda Tries To Split The West

After seeing the effect that the Madrid bombings had on the Spanish electorate, it appears that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have gone on a public-relations campaign to undermine Western resolve in the war on terror. In today's Daily Standard, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross points out the changing rhetoric of AQ leadership that now seems tailored to the tastes of the war's critics, promising a truce (hudna) for the simple act of abandoning Southwest Asia and North Africa for good: AFTER AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI released a new videotape on August 4, the media focused on how he placed the blame for the last month's terrorist attacks in London on Tony Blair's shoulders and threatened even greater carnage in the future. Less noticed but no less important is al Qaeda's changed tactical approach to the West: They are now attempting to convince Westerners that they are worth negotiating with and can be appeased. Zawahiri...

August 11, 2005

A Disgusting Smear On A Brave Man

The death of Steven Vincent by terrorists in the town of Basra has caused a number of people to turn their attention from the difficulties surrounding Baghdad and the Zarqawi-led foreign band of lunatics operating in that area to the British zone in the south. Before his murder, Vincent wrote about the Shi'ite radicals slowly infiltrating the power structure and their ability to conduct vigilante missions against their former Ba'ath masters, with the British either unable or unwilling to confront them. Now The Scotsman reports that British authorities have started spreading a story that the already-married Vincent got killed for offering a dowry for his Iraqi interpreter, offending the local Muslims, instead of his writing about the ongoing corruption and violence in Basra: AN American journalist who was shot dead in Basra last week was executed by Shiite extremists who knew he was intending to marry his Muslim interpreter, it...

Dafydd: Why Markets Sometimes Fail

As many of you know, Hugh Hewitt has been on holiday for the past several days. His guest host today (or at least for this first segment) is someone named Jerry-something; I didn't catch the name, and I'm not familiar with him. But he raised an interesting question... one that he seemed incapable of answering, alas, for the answer seems pretty clear to me. He asks the standard question about Iraq: "are we winning?" But he is drawn to the negative response, no we're not, by an interesting line of reasoning: he notes that oil hit a high today, and he deduces (rather, he surmises) that international investors are beginning to be convinced that we're losing and are going to lose. And as he points out, "markets are usually right." But that facile pronouncement at the end is insufficient; it requires deeper thought: why are markets usually right? And under...

Continue reading "Dafydd: Why Markets Sometimes Fail" »

August 12, 2005

Separatists Demand Independence For Southern Iraq

The political situation in Iraq took a difficult turn while the country awaits the draft constitution from its first popularly-elected Assembly in decades. Shi'ites invoking the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini demanded a secession of southern Iraq in order to form an Iranian-influenced puppet state and used Najaf as the protest staging point: Waving posters of Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, thousands of chanting Shiite Muslims signaled approval for a call Thursday by their leaders for a separate Shiite federal state in central and southern Iraq. The demand by one of the government's dominant Shiite religious parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, came five days before a draft of Iraq's new constitution is due. The call, which triggered immediate protests by Sunni Muslim leaders and some Shiite officials, capped increasingly assertive moves by the party to influence the new Iraq as it takes shape. ... "This was a...

August 13, 2005

WMD Found In Iraq

The Washington Post reported while I was in flight to Nashville this afternoon that American troops discoverd over 1500 gallons of chemicals believed to be intended to attack US and Iraqi forces by Islamist terrorists. The warehouse in Mosul had eleven different kinds of precursor agents and appears to have only recently been stocked: Combined, the chemicals would yield an agent capable of "lingering hazards" for those exposed to it, Boylan said. The likely targets would have been "coalition and Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi civilians," in part owing to the difficulty anyone deploying the chemicals would have had in keeping the agents from spreading out over a wide area, he said. Military officials did not immediately identify either the precursors or the agent they could have produced. "We don't want to speculate on any possibilities until our analysis is complete," Col. Henry Franke, a nuclear, biological and chemical defense...

August 14, 2005

Former Taliban Reconcile Themselves To Democracy

The Washington Post reports that the amnesty program in Afghanistan continues to show success. Not only have large numbers of former Taliban supporters surrendered themselves to the new, democratic Karzai government, a few of them have reassimilated to the point where they have declared themselves as candidates for elections. The reconstructed former Islamists have had to understand that Afghanis do not want a return to the seventh century as a prerequisite to serious candidacy: "The Taliban are like a medicine for Afghanistan that has expired," said Khaksar, 42, a white-bearded religious scholar who is running in parliamentary elections scheduled for September. "They want people to live like in the time of our Holy Prophet. I am in favor of how he lived, too. But it's impossible to bring that time back. The people of Afghanistan need something new." It was a surprising assessment from a man who was once a...

August 15, 2005

Iraqi Constitution May Proceed Without Unanimity

The AP reports this morning that Sunni intransigence may result yet again in political irrelevancy for their constituency, at least at the moment. The failure of the expanded Sunni contingent of the committee drafting the new Iraqi constitution to compromise on federalism and other issues has forced the Shi'ite and Kurdish committee members to threaten to send their draft to the National Assembly on a two-thirds vote rather than the unanimous consent that everyone wants: With the deadline for the new constitution just hours away, Shiite and Kurdish leaders signaled they were prepared to submit the draft to parliament Monday even over Sunni Arab objections. Shiite lawmaker Hassan al-Sunnaid said there were "no deadlocks" and that the draft would be submitted to the National Assembly by the evening deadline. After al-Sunnaid spoke, however, Sunni Arab members Kamal Hamdoun and Haseeb Aref said there was no agreement on federalism and...

Iraqis Extend The Constitutional Deadline

The Iraqi National Assembly has extended the deadline for the constitution for a week, creating a window for further negotiation but possibly setting precedent for ignoring whatever the committee produces: Iraqi leaders failed to meet a key deadline Monday to finish a new constitution, stalling over the same fundamental issues of power-sharing including federalism, oil wealth and Islam's impact on women that have bedeviled the country since Saddam Hussein's ouster. Just 20 minutes before midnight, parliament voted to give negotiators another seven days, until Aug. 22, to try to draft the charter. The delay was a strong rebuff of the Bush administration's insistence that the deadline be met, even if some issues were unresolved, to maintain political momentum and blunt Iraq's deadly insurgency. "We should not be hasty regarding the issues and the constitution should not be born crippled," said Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, after the...

August 18, 2005

Another 72-Virgins Moment In Saudi Arabia

Saudi security forces found and killed another al-Qaeda leader in the desert kingdom today. The Saudis conducted a series of seven raids, the last of which turned up Saleh Mohammed al-Aoofi, whom they killed in a gun battle: Al-Qaida's leader in Saudi Arabia was killed Thursday during clashes with police in the western city of Medina, the Interior Ministry said. Saleh Mohammed al-Aoofi was among six al-Qaida militants reported killed during police raids on numerous locations in the holy city and the capital, Riyadh, security officials told The Associated Press. Al-Aoofi, a Saudi in his late 30s, and another militant were killed during one of seven police raids in Medina, the Interior Ministry said. The Saudis have done a remarkable job in cleaning up al-Qaeda leadership since AQ attacked foreigners in Riyadh in May 2003. Shortly after that attack, the Saudis listed 26 known terrorist leaders wanted by their security...

Dafydd: An Atta By Any Other Name

The Able Danger argument du jour is whether the group actually had Mohammed Atta's name, or whether they had "merely" identified his al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn... as if that makes all the difference. Oh, well, if they didn't have his actual name, then busting up the cell and arresting everyone wouldn't have made any difference, right? That cell contained not only Atta but several other eventual 9/11 hijackers. If the FBI had gotten the information, they would -- one hopes -- have surveilled the cell and eventually broken it up. Atta would have either been captured with the rest or forced to flee with a manhunt on his heels; he likely would have used one of his many aliases to flee the country. He may have been caught, or he may have ended up in Iraq. Because of the cell structure of al-Qaeda, the other hijackers left in the United...

August 19, 2005

Terrorist Attack On US Navy Misses Target

Terrorists launched a missile attack on American Navy amphibious craft from the 5th Fleet, but missed and hit a warehouse instead, killing at least one Jordanian: Unknown assailants fired at least three missiles from Jordan early Friday, with one narrowly missing a U.S. Navy ship docked at port, an attack that killed a Jordanian soldier. One missile fell close to an airport in neighboring Israel, officials said. The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, said two American amphibious ships were docked in Aqaba when a mortar was fired toward them. The vessels later sailed out of port as a result of the attacks, U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Cdr. Charlie Brown told The Associated Press in Bahrain. Jordanian soldier Ahmed Jamal Saleh was fatally wounded when the mortar sailed over one of the U.S. ships and slammed into a warehouse, a Jordanian security official said on condition of anonymity because...

Dafydd: Jamie Gorelick's Other Job (Update From Captain Ed)

A commenter, vnjagvet (does that stand for Vietnam JAG veteran?), on my previous post, Dafydd: An Atta By Any Other Name, discovered a very interesting and provacative connection between the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense (under the Clinton administration) that may have a very strong bearing on the Able Danger scandal. As noted earlier by many, many people, Jamie Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general (number two in the department) under Janet Reno, is widely credited, if that's the word I want, with explicating the wall of separation between intelligence and criminal investigations in a 1995 memo to FBI Director Louis Freeh and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White. From the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, Gorelick's Wall: (paid subscription probably required) At issue is the pre-Patriot Act "wall" that prevented communication between intelligence agents and criminal investigators--a wall, Mr. Ashcroft said, that meant "the old national intelligence system...

Dafydd: She Does Not Speak For Them

Please note: this post is by Dafydd ab Hugh, not by Captain Ed. I speak only for myself, as we all should; I don't know how the Captain feels about this. Just bear it in mind. Whenever anyone has the temerity to object to anything Cindy Sheehan says, no matter how objectively bizarre, unAmerican, and repugnant it may be, the usual suspects jump on chairs, pull up their skirts, and howl that criticism of any kind against Mrs. Sheehan is forbidden unless you, too, have lost a child in the Iraq War. This is one of the weasel clauses (number four, in fact) noted by Tom Bevan over on Real Clear Politics that are used to stifle opposition to the Left's opposition. (The actual permalink is here; but at the moment, you get a server error. It's the top item in the regular Commentary page, but eventually, you should use...

August 21, 2005

Sachi: So Who Does Cindy Sheehan Speak For?

Ever since Cindy Sheehan started protesting in Crawford Texas, the mainstream media has been portraying her as the voice of grieving mothers. She has absolute moral authority, as Maureen Dowd of New York Times, puts it. Newspaper articles and television shows claimed that a flock of people, including parents who lost children in Iraq, had gathered in Crawford, Texas to show their support for Sheehan. According to AP, "By Thursday, about 50 people had joined her cause, pitching tents in muddy, shallow ditches and hanging anti-war banners; two dozen others have sent flowers." On CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, the announcer said "Within days, the numbers grew along this Texas roadside. Other parents who had lost sons and daughters to the war, seasoned antiwar protesters, ... all made Cindy's cause their own." Surprisingly though, neither of these two sources showed any grieving mother (or father) who supported Sheehan. Don't get...

August 22, 2005

Sunnis May Miss The Boat Again

Another deadline approaches for the Iraqis to create a draft constitution for approval by the National Aassembly, and this time the Shi'a and the Kurds do not intend to let Sunni intransigence to derail the process. A broad agreement on the text has apparently been reached between secular and religious Shi'ite factions and the Kurds, while the Sunnis who have dragged their feet during the entire process now want unanimity before it goes to the Assembly: A Shiite negotiator said Monday a draft constitution would be presented to Iraq's parliament, but a key Sunni Arab delegate said talk of a deal was premature and he doubted an agreement was possible by the midnight deadline. ... One of the top Sunni Arab negotiators, Saleh al-Mutlaq, told Al-Arabiya television that he was "surprised by these statements" from the Shiites. "There are still major points of disagreement," al-Mutlaq said. "I don't think we...

August 23, 2005

Zarqawi Network Claims Jordanian Attack

The spokesman for the Zarqawi/al-Qaeda network in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack last week on two American Navy amphibious craft, rocket attacks that missed their targets and killed a Jordanian military officer instead: The Internet statement was signed Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, the spokesman for Al-Qaida in Iraq. That group is headed by the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for a rash of kidnappings, killings and attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq. Jordan said Monday it had arrested a Syrian, one of four men allegedly involved in the attack. The captured man's two sons and the Iraqi leader of the group were believed to have escaped to Iraq, officials in the Jordanian capital said. The Jordanian statement said the four were part of an Iraqi-based terrorist organization, which the government did not identify. The government has received several warnings in recent months, however, that Aqaba had become a primary target...

Britain's Domestic Terrorists Win Round By Graverobbing

Animal-rights terrorists in Britain have forced breeders of laboratory guinea pigs to shut their business down in a last-ditch effort to get the body of their relative returned to them. Last fall, graverobbers stole the body of Gladys Hammond from her churchyard grave and extorted the Hall family to stop assisting the medical-research industry to have it returned to them, which they have now reluctantly agreed to do: David, John and Chris Hall said that Darley Oaks farm in Newchurch, Staffs, would close by the end of the year. Their family, friends and business associates have been subjected to a six-year campaign of terror and intimidation that culminated last October in activists digging up and stealing the remains of Chris Hall's 82-year-old mother-in-law, Gladys Hammond, from St Peter's churchyard in Yoxall, Staffs. Animal rights supporters celebrated the announcement but it was condemned by scientists as a triumph for mob rule...

August 24, 2005

Recruitment: A View From The Front

Yesterday, after a series of conflicting numbers on recruitment and re-enlistment got bandied about in the media and the blogs (including CQ), I received an e-mail from a commanding officer of a unit stationed in the Middle East. This officer wanted to let me know how he thinks recruitment and re-enlistment has affected his unit, and based on his three decades in the service, how it compares to other periods. I know his name and unit, but as he wants to make clear that he speaks only for himself and not as a representative of his branch of the service, I am leaving his name and specific rank out of the e-mail. I wanted to make a point your post "WaPo Trots Out The Chickenhawk Smear". Some people probably don't understand the difference between recruitment and re-enlistment. Both have their values, but are separate and distinct, and complement each other....

New Report On CIA Given To Congress

The long-awaited inspector general's report on the performance of the CIA has arrived at Congress, more than two years after Congress demanded a review of the agency's performance prior to 9/11. The Intelligence Committees in both chambers will unseal the report and decide what information to declassify for wide dissemination, possibly as early as today: Porter J. Goss, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, delivered a long-awaited internal report to Congress on Monday night that is said to give a harsh assessment of the agency's performance before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mr. Goss, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee before his appointment last year as head of the C.I.A., hand-delivered two copies of the classified report to staff members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. The copies of the report, which is several hundred pages, were placed in committee safes and were not to...

August 25, 2005

Italians Hid Iraqi 'Insurgents'

The AP reports that the Italian Red Cross hid four Iraqi terrorists in exchange for the release of two Italian aid workers last year -- who promptly turned around and promoted their cause once they returned to Italy. The Italian government did not share this information with the US, and allowed the Iraqis to go free once they received the medical treatment they needed from their wounds sustained fighting Coalition forces: Italy's Red Cross treated four Iraqi insurgents and hid them from U.S. forces in exchange for the freedom of two Italian aid workers kidnapped last year in Baghdad, an official said in an interview published Thursday. Maurizio Scelli, the outgoing chief of the Italian Red Cross, told La Stampa newspaper that he kept the deal secret from U.S. officials, complying with "a nonnegotiable condition" imposed by Iraqi mediators who helped him secure the release of Simona Pari and Simona...

Michael Yon's Must-Read

Many people have wondered what happened to war reporting. We had a glimpse of it during the actual invasion of Iraq, when over 700 journalists imbedded themselves in the fighting units and gave straight reporting on the action they witnessed. After the fall of Saddam, however, "embeds" found themselves viewed with disfavor, supposedly biased towards the troops, and the number of reporters attached to fighting units dropped to less than three dozen. One of those who remained is free-lancer Michael Yon, who publishes his work in blog form at Michael Yon: Online Magazine. A Special Forces veteran, Yon brings unique perspective about the war in Iraq through his words and pictures. What's so unique? His objectivity and immediacy. Try reading his latest article, "Gates of Fire", and find out why Yon may emerge as the best reporter of the war. Tom Elia at The New Editor notes a passage that...

AP: CIA Reports Wants Heads To Roll

According to confidential sources with access to the secret CIA inspector-general's report, the classified document just released to Congress calls for disciplinary action against senior CIA officials. The new CIA director, Porter Goss, must weigh those recommendations against the disruption that a series of disciplinary reviews would cause in the middle of a war: The CIA's independent watchdog has recommended disciplinary reviews for current and former officials who were involved in failed intelligence efforts before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, The Associated Press has learned. ... The proceedings, formally called an accountability board, were recommended by the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson. It remains unclear which people are identified for the accountability boards in the highly classified report spanning hundreds of pages. The report was delivered to Congress Tuesday night. Following a two-year review into what went wrong before the suicide hijackings, people familiar with the report say Helgerson...

French Intelligence: Asia Next Big AQ Target

France's counterintelligence chief told the Financial Times that al-Qaeda's next attack against Western interests will likely fall on Asia, probably in Japan, Singapore, or even Sydney, Australia. A serious attack could destabilize the Far East economy, sending ripples throughout the global markets and creating the fear and withdrawal that Osama bin Laden wants to produce: In an interview with the Financial Times newspaper Friday, Jean-Louis Bruguiere added that several Asian countries are less prepared than Britain or the United States for such an attack. "We have elements of information that make us think that countries in this region, especially Japan, could have been targeted" by the Al-Qaeda network, the investigating magistrate said. "Any attack on a financial market like Japan would mechanically have an important economic impact on the confidence of investors. Other countries in this region, such as Singapore and Australia, are also potential targets." Despite the threat, he...

August 26, 2005

The Mom-He-Hit-Me-Back Accusation

Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of destabilizing the shaky cease-fire that has more or less accompanied the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip with a strike against a leader of Islamic Jihad, the New York Times reports. Oddly, Abbas fails to mention that the strike followed rocket attacks on Israel in both the north and the south: The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, accused Israel on Thursday of undermining peace efforts with an undercover military raid in the West Bank city of Tulkarm in which five Palestinians were killed. Israel said all five were "armed wanted terrorists," including an Islamic Jihad leader who had orchestrated two suicide bombings, but Palestinians said three of the dead were unarmed teenagers. Israel's evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank improved the atmosphere recently, but a series of violent incidents has prompted renewed recriminations. On Wednesday night a 21-year-old Jewish...

August 28, 2005

Releasing Terrorists From Abu Ghraib, Killing Their Travel Agent

CNN reports that the Coalition appears quite proud to announce that they have released over 1,000 detainees from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad at the request of the Iraqi government. The statement from the Multi-National Forces sound all the right themes about sovereignty and cooperation while ignoring the risk to their soldiers that such releases have caused. However, CNN uses the announcement to bury the lead, as it appends yesterday's Centcom announcement that American forces killed a major figure assisting the movement of terrorists to the end of the article (and Confederate Yankee scooped CNN on this development yesterday): Meanwhile, a man described as a "major facilitator of foreign fighters and suicide bombers into northern Iraq" was killed by coalition forces Thursday in Mosul, the U.S. military said Saturday. Abu Khallad, a Saudi national, was found after intelligence sources and tips led Multi-National Forces to his location in Mosul. "Upon...

A Parting Gift For The Israelis

If people expected that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, during which they used armed force to send their citizens back into Israel in order to leave the territory to the Palestinians, would result in a gesture commensurate with the Palestinian desire for peace, today's news confirms this. A Palestinian bomber wounded 21 Israeli civilians in Beersheba, near Gaza, in a suicide-bomb attack on a bus this morning: Twenty-one people were wounded Sunday, two seriously, in a suicide bombing at a central bus station in the southern Israeli town of Beersheba, Israeli officials said. ... There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which took place three days after Israeli troops killed five Palestinians. The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad has vowed retribution for that incident. ... Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned what he called a "terrorist attack" and called for "calm and restraint in spite of the...

August 29, 2005

Sunnis Gamble And Lose On Constitution

Despite two extensions and the outreach effort that allowed outsized representation on the drafting committee, in the end the Sunnis would not show enough flexibility to complete an agreement on the new Iraqi constitution. The National Assembly has decided to exercise democracy over consensus and send the draft to a vote, a decision that threatens once again to marginalize the Sunnis unless they participate in the electoral process: Iraqi leaders completed a draft of a permanent constitution Sunday after three months of negotiations that left Sunni Arabs unsatisfied, setting up a potentially divisive nationwide referendum on the document to be held by Oct. 15. Members of the committee that convened in May to write the document ended their official duties by signing the draft and sending it to the National Assembly, where it was read aloud to members. Some Sunnis, who had unsuccessfully sought the elimination of a clause allowing...

August 30, 2005

Data Mining Attacks Privacy: Congress

In one indication as to why the Pentagon might have wanted to keep the existence of Able Danger from becoming public, Congress has determined that data-mining presents a danger to privacy, although so far no one has demanded an end to the practice. The GAO reports that a sample of five agencies using the technique routinely violated safeguards intended to protect citizens from unnecessary incursions by the government: None of five federal agencies using electronic data mining to track terrorists, catch criminals or prevent fraud complied with all rules for gathering citizen information. As a result, they cannot ensure that individual privacy rights are appropriately protected, congressional investigators said Monday. The agencies' lapses either "increased the risk that personal information could be improperly exposed or altered" or "limited the ability of the public including those individuals whose information was used to participate in the management of that personal...

August 31, 2005

Dafydd: the Tragedy of Hysteria

This is truly stunning: more people were just killed by a lemming-like panic on a bridge in Baghdad than have been slain in any suicide bombing in Iraq (and far more than were killed by Hurricane Katrina). Sometimes, you just don't know what to say. UPDATE: Alas, the estimated death toll from Hurricane Katrina has been raised dramatically; estimates vary, but it will likely be significantly greater than thought yesterday. There is enough tragedy to go all around, and then some....

September 1, 2005

Terrorism Defined (Stupidly)

The Guardian (UK) reports that the Israeli defence ministry has decided that taking a gun on a bus and mowing down several civilians as a form of political action doesn't qualify as terrorism. Does that sound strange in a country that suffers more terrorist attacks than any other? It should, and the explanation only makes it stranger: Four Arab Israelis shot dead by a soldier opposed to the closure of the Gaza Strip settlements are not victims of "terror" because their killer was Jewish, Israel's defence ministry has ruled, and so their families are not entitled to the usual compensation for life. The ministry concluded that the law only recognises terrorism as committed by "organisations hostile to Israel" even though the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the killings by Private Eden Nathan Zaada, 19, as "a despicable act by a bloodthirsty terrorist." He shot dead four people on a bus...

Gaza Pullout Gets Diplomatic Results

Israel's pullout of the Gaza Strip has resulted in a new and important diplomatic development, the AP reports this morning. Pakistan has publicly met with the Israelis at a bilateral meeting sponsored by Turkey, and the two nations appear headed towards diplomatic recognition: The foreign ministers of Israel and Pakistan, a Muslim country that has long taken a hard line against the Jewish state, met publicly for the first time Thursday, a diplomatic breakthrough that follows Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The meeting in Istanbul was at the initiative of Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and was expected to be followed by confidence building measures, such as a relaxation of Pakistan's ban against travel to the Jewish state, an Israeli official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. ... Pakistan was encouraged by Israel's evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, which...

September 3, 2005

Hamas: Nobody Does Terror Like We Do

Now that the Israelis have pulled out of Gaza, the politics of the region will hinge on who gets the most credit for their withdrawal. Hamas has started the competition by revealing their once-secretive military wing and claiming credit for a long string of terrorist activity, apparently believing that this will bolster their popularity among the Palestinian people: Hamas' secretive military wing emerged from hiding Saturday, naming commanders and detailing how they attacked Israelis as part of a competition with the Palestinian Authority over who will get credit for Israel's pullout from Gaza. ... On Saturday, a defiant Hamas delivered a new challenge to Abbas, who has come under increasing international pressure to disarm the group after the Israeli pullout, but is reluctant to do so. On its Web site, the Hamas military wing, Izzedine al Qassam, laid bare its command structure for the first time, posting names of seven...

September 5, 2005

Islamists Conduct Pogrom Against Christians In West Bank

The city of Taiba, long a center for Christians in the West Bank, came under attack from Islamist terrorists last night as well as other Christian villages nearby. Shouting Muslim slogans such as Allahu akbar!, torched houses and businesses and drove Christians from their beds, all because one nearby Muslim family murdered their daughter for allegedly having an affair with a Christian man (h/t: Lkrut33): Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched. The incident began on Saturday night and lasted until early Sunday, when Palestinian Authority security forces interfered to disperse the attackers. Residents said several houses were looted and many families were forced to flee to Ramallah and other Christian villages, although no one was injured. The attack on the village of...

September 8, 2005

Sunnis Join The Political Process

After getting burned by a badly-advised boycott of the first free elections in Iraq for decades, the Sunnis have apparently decided not to repeat their mistake from last January. The Washington Post reports that Sunni voter registration has skyrocketed in Iraq, as the nation debates the current proposition for its new, permanent constitution: Voter registration soared in some Sunni Arab parts of Iraq as Sunnis mobilized to try to vote down a draft constitution they believe will divide the country, according to figures released Wednesday at the close of registration for the Oct. 15 referendum. ... The surge in voter registration in the heavily Sunni west signaled the minority's belated entry into the country's political process. Most Sunnis stood on the sidelines of the Jan. 30 national elections that seated the transitional government, which was charged with drafting the constitution. As a result, Sunnis were left with diminished political leverage...

September 9, 2005

The Syrian Safety Valve

The BBC reports that Syrian forces attacked Islamist militants in the northeastern part of its country, killing one and wounding a number of others, coming on the heels of an earlier battle which killed five Islamist terrorists. The area where the fighting took place appears near to where Iraqi and American forces complain of unfettered border-crossing of terrorists into Iraq, but that apparently did not play into Syria's calculations as much as self-preservation: Syrian security forces have clashed with Islamist militants in Hasaka, north-eastern Syria, killing one and detaining two others, reports say. ... The incident came days after Syrian forces killed five alleged members of the militant group Jund al-Sham in a gun battle in the north-west. The authorities accuse the group of planning bomb attacks in Damascus. The group's activities have been monitored by security forces since it said it had carried out a bomb attack on the...

Taiba Pogrom Part Of Long-Term Persecution

The pogrom at Taiba, where Islamists chased frightened Christians from their homes and burned buildings to the ground two days ago, came as part of a concerted effort by Muslim extremists to drive Christians out of the Holy Land, the Telegraph reports this morning. Christian leaders who expressed frustration over broken promises from Yasser Arafat now say that current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas won't even return their calls: Christians in the Holy Land have handed a dossier detailing incidents of violence and intimidation by Muslim extremists to Church leaders in Jerusalem, one of whom said it was time for Christians to "raise our voices" against the sectarian violence. The dossier includes 93 alleged incidents of abuse by an "Islamic fundamentalist mafia" against Palestinian Christians, who accused the Palestinian Authority of doing nothing to stop the attacks. The dossier also includes a list of 140 cases of apparent land theft, in...

September 11, 2005

Could 9/11 Happen Again?

The United States extensively revamped airport security after 9/11, intending on taking away commercial airliners as weapons of opportunity for al-Qaeda terrorists. In the four years since the attacks, we have yet to see another attempt to hijack flights in the US to use as guided missiles for massive suicide attacks. We believe that we have successfully blocked that modus operandi for the future, forcing terrorists to try something else instead. A new book by Annie Jacobsen, Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again arrived in the mail on Friday, which may cause us to rethink our sense of security. Jacobsen originally wrote about this in Women's Wall Street last year, shortly after the flight which she claims experienced a dry-run at another hijacking attempt, or possibly a "probe", a mission to test response and gather intelligence about potential defensive in-flight measures. At the time, I remained a...

Flight 93 - The Flight That Fought Back

I just finished watching Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. This well-made docu-drama recalls immediately the fear and dread that we all felt on 9/11, making excellent use of real recordings, interviews, and recreations to piece together a credible narrative of the last 30 minutes or so of the lives of 40 American heroes. I want to thank Ask Jeeves for sponsoring the commercial-free presentation of the film. Both the First Mate and I had tears streaming down our faces during the more personal moments that the families chose to share with the nation. I also want to thank the Discovery Channel for their presentation of this film on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, especially given what the broadcast networks decided to put on the air tonight. I won't bother to link to any of them, but one network ran repeats, another ran a four-year-old heist movie; not one...

Remembering 9/11: The Pentagon

Note: This post will ride second all day long. Keep scrolling for new posts. When the First Mate and I went to the Pentagon this past Fourth of July, we got a wonderful guided tour from a CQ reader who gave up half of his holiday to take us through the entire building. The Pentagon has so much history and so many fascinating stories, but by far the most moving portion came at the beginning of the tour. The Pentagon has a memorial to the lives that ended on 9/11/01, as the third attack plane plowed into the very place where we now stood. I wrote about this during our vacation, but I want to share with you all of the pictures I took of the memorial. This image actually comes from another memorial inside the Pentagon, one that lists the name of the dead from the US Navy. My...

Remembering 9/11

Note: This entry will ride on top all day. Keep scrolling to see new posts. Last year I wrote my remembrance of my personal 9/11 story, one I think that duplicates what most people experienced on that day. On the fourth anniversary of the worst attack on American soil since the Civil War, I think I'd like to focus on the post-9/11 experience -- how it changed me and how it continues to do so. Prior to 9/11, politics played a small role in my life. While I followed the news and had my opinions, I rarely involved myself in political issues. In younger days, I eventually learned that politics quickly transformed into a kind of bloodsport that didn't have any appeal to me. I preferred quiet conversation, and that required me to remain silent even when others around me openly expressed their own opinions. Oddly enough for those who...

September 13, 2005

Tick Tock, Bashar

America has sent a strong signal to the Assad regime in Damascus that our patience has almost run out on their unwillingness or inability to stop the flow of Islamofascist terrorists into Iraq. The New York Times notes the diplomatic shot across Syria's bow from the US envoy to Iraq, Zalmay Khalizad: Mr. Khalilzad, in remarks to reporters in Washington, made it clear that the United States believed that Syria was providing assistance to insurgents operating in Iraq and that such help might have increased. Government-controlled Syrian newspapers "glorify the terrorists as resistance fighters," he said. Syrian authorities "allow youngsters misguided by Al Qaeda - from Saudi Arabia, from Yemen, from North Africa - to fly into Damascus International Airport," attend training camps and then cross into Iraq, he contended. ... "Our patience is running out," said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. This pressure comes at a bad time for the...

Iraqi Forces Training Faster Than Expected?

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani surprised Washington and the press corps with his suggestion that Iraqi security forces have rebounded well enough that the US could consider a significant withdrawal by year's end, perhaps a drawdown by as much as one-third if all goes well. That statement might unsettle such critics of the administration such as Joe Biden, who claimed that the US bungled the training of Iraqi troops and as recently as January insisted that Iraq only had 4,000 trained soldiers: Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in an interview yesterday that the United States could withdraw as many as 50,000 troops by the end of the year, declaring there are enough Iraqi forces trained and ready to begin assuming control in cities throughout the country. After the White House and Pentagon were contacted for comment, however, a senior adviser to Talabani called The Washington Post to say Talabani did not...

September 14, 2005

Get Dead Soon!

The terror rumor mill has spit out yet another Osama-is-sick announcement, although this one comes from a named source, Reuters reports. The London Arabic newspaper quotes an American colonel in Kabul as stating that the US knows that Osama bin Laden has urgently sought medical attention recently, although he declined to say how he knew or what kind of health problems the terror leader might have: Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is in poor health and is seeking medical attention, the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat said on Wednesday, quoting a U.S. officer in Afghanistan. "Osama bin Laden is trying to obtain medical attention," Colonel Don McGraw, director of operations at the Combined Forces Command in Kabul, told a group of British reporters, including one from al-Hayat, it said. "He (McGraw) refused to say what the Qaeda leader is suffering from or whether it is the same kidney disease which...

The Point Of War Monuments

Michelle Malkin writes about the proposed Flight 93 memorial to the heroism of the 40 civilians who fought the first battle of the War on Terror and beat the terrorists in her weekly Townhall column today. She takes on the pacifist tone of the entire memorial as well as the Islamic symbolism in its most prominent feature, the Crescent of Embrace, which immediately created a firestorm of controversy: These were Americans who refused to sit down and be quiet and allow Islamic terrorists unfettered control over the flight stick of history. These were doers, not hand-wringers, who engaged in a violent and valiant struggle against evil. I remind you of all this because the official Flight 93 memorial unveiled last week is now embroiled in overdue public controversy. Funded with a mix of public money and private cash (including a $500,000 grant from Teresa Heinz's far-left Heinz Endowments), the winning...

Great Moments In Palestinian Self-Government

Yasser Arafat once replied to a question about his ubiquitous costume of battle fatigues that if the world gave him a state, he would wear a suit. He wanted to convince the world that the Palestinians would transform themselves into a stable, self-governing electorate once they ceased living under Israeli rule. They have their chance in Gaza, but unfortunately for those who bet millions on Arafat's predictions, the Palestinians show little evidence of desiring stability or self-government at all, including the so-called Palestinian Authority: Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses on Tuesday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip. American Jewish donors had bought more than 3,000 greenhouses from Israeli settlers in Gaza for $14 million last month and transferred them to the Palestinian Authority. Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, who brokered the deal, put up...

Flight 93 Memorial Will Be Modified

Our feedback has apparently caused some second thoughts on behalf of the Flight 93 memorial board and its selected designer, Paul Murdoch. Murdoch has agreed to consider modifications to his design that will address the concerns of his critics, probably by renaming the Crescent of Embrace: The architect of the memorial to a plane downed in western Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, said Wednesday he would work to satisfy critics who complained that it honors terrorists with its crescent-shaped design. Designer Paul Murdoch said he is "somewhat optimistic" that the spirit of the design could be maintained. "It's a disappointment there is a misinterpretation and a simplistic distortion of this, but if that is a public concern, then that is something we will look to resolve in a way that keeps the essential qualities," Murdoch, 48, of Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview. ... "We called it a 'crescent'...

More Great Moments In Palestinian Self-Government

In another splendid example of the status of the Palestinian society and their readiness to join the circle of nations, their security forces stood by and watched as the terrorist group Hamas blew a hole in the wall separating Egypt and Gaza in broad daylight. The attack allowed Palestinians to stream into the Sinai despite Egypt's denial of a breach at the border: Hamas militants have destroyed a section of a concrete barrier erected along the Gaza-Egypt border. Palestinian and Egyptian troops have been trying to shore up the barrier to stop Palestinians crossing into Egypt after the withdrawal of Israeli troops. In chaotic scenes, thousands of Palestinians have streamed over the border in the last few days without undergoing official checks. Despite this, Egypt says that its Gaza border is officially closed. Militants from Hamas cleared an area before setting off explosives that blew away a section of the...

September 17, 2005

An 'Irregularity' On Flight 17 (Update: Nothing But Us Birds)

See update below. A tip came to several bloggers tonight about an alleged attack on a domestic flight in the US, one that had not yet been reported in the media. Little Green Footballs posted the first notice of the rumors earlier today, but Michelle Malkin has spoken with the airline involved, America West. The tipster told us that a surface-to-air missile had been fired at a flight earlier this week (Thursday, as it turns out) coming out of New York, but had missed. The shot presumably came from the swamps of New Jersey nearby JFK. Phil Gee, an associate manager of media relations, told Michelle that the captain reported an "irregularity" but continued his flight uneventfully to Phoenix. The FBI interrogated all passengers and crew, but Gee would not say whether anyone reported seeing a missile. "Nothing is confirmed," Michelle reports as his response. America West denies one element...

September 18, 2005

Iraq Parliament Approves Constitution

Tiring of unending demands for change from its Sunni minority, the Iraqi National Assembly approved the proposed constitution with a few added amendments intended on attracting Sunnis despite the intransigence of their representatives: Iraq's parliament signed off on revisions to the country's draft constitution Sunday as a leading lawmaker declared that acceptance of the new charter was a matter for the people, not the parliament. Hussain al-Shahristani, deputy National Assembly speaker, said the new text was given to the United Nations, which will print 5 million copies and distribute them to Iraqis before the Oct. 15 national referendum on the new basic law. The original draft was not voted on by parliament, and al-Shahristani did not call for legislative approval of the amendments. "The vote on this ... is the right of the people, not their representatives," he said. The changes to the document included an apparent bow to demands...

September 19, 2005

Afghanistan Elections A Smashing Success

The Afghanis have conducted yet another successful election, with millions of its citizens casting votes despite the threats of violence from former Taliban remnants. In fact, security held up well for the voting, with only a few isolated incidents of violence: Afghans embraced democracy by the millions yesterday, with voters undaunted by weeks of violence and threats of terrorist attacks to cast ballots for the first elected parliament in decades. The vote went smoothly, with only a handful of incidents involving gunfire or militant attacks at the 6,200 polling stations. "We are going to vote for the people who will do something for the country, not just for us," said Yosof Khan, dressed in the traditional loose-fitting garb and turban donned by members of his nomadic Kuchi tribe for centuries. Mr. Khan gestured to a throng of bearded men who nodded in agreement outside tents pitched amid desolate mountain peaks...

September 23, 2005

Sistani Backs Constitution

The most influential of Shi'ite religious leaders in Iraq urged his countrymen to vote in support of the newly proposed constitution next month when the plebescite will take place. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani gathered his aides and ordered them to campaign on his behalf to get people to the polls to vote "yes" on the referendum: Two officials in the Shiite Muslim hierarchy in Najaf said Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called senior aides together and told them to promote a "yes" vote among the faithful during the Oct. 15 national referendum on the constitution. ... In Amman, Jordan, about 150 Iraqi Sunni clerics and tribal leaders called for the rejection of the constituion, warning the charter would lead to the fragmentation of Iraq. The local leaders from Iraq's insurgency-torn Anbar province, the country's Sunni heartland, met for a a three-day conference in the Jordanian capital for security reasons. Having Sistani on...

Terror Arrest In Manchester?

London police had to Taser a suspect at Manchester's airport after attempting to detain him following suspicious activity with a mysterious package: A man has been arrested under terror laws at Manchester Airport after the discovery of a suspect package. Greater Manchester Police used a Taser gun after the suspect resisted arrest. ... Police had been called to the airport at about 8.30am after a man was seen acting suspiciously on the airport apron close to stand 26. "Police attempted to arrest the men who struggled with officers. A Taser was then used to detain the man," police said in a statement. "The army bomb disposal unit were called to examine the package which was found on the apron...." The London Telegraph reports that the police will treat this as a terror investigation. More details will likely come later today....

September 24, 2005

Hamas Blows Its Load, Israel Blows Its Top

Hamas learned yesterday and this morning that it plays a dangerous game with damgerous weapons. During a triumphal celebration of the end of the Israeli occupation in Gaza, a number of their homemade Katyusha rockets exploded, killing 15 and wounding 80 in the crowd, mostly children. Hamas and their partners, Islamic Jihad, also lobbed a few over the border into Israel, which caused Israel to mobilize its ground forces and promise a "crushing response". First, the New York Times reported on the explosions at the Hamas rally: A pickup truck carrying rockets exploded on Friday at a large Hamas rally as the group paraded its weapons through a densely packed refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. At least 15 people were killed and dozens were wounded, Palestinian medical officials said. The powerful blast sent a plume of white smoke into the sky and unleashed pandemonium in the sprawling Jabaliya refugee...

September 25, 2005

Palestinians Discover Self-Delusion Not Contagious

The Palestinians acted surprised when Israel responded to the launching of dozens of Katyusha rockets at their cities by bombing Gaza and arresting hundreds of Hamas terrorists, an act that the Palestinian Authority refuses to contemplate. As the Israeli response to the Palestinian provocation became clear, the PA proved its disconnection from reality by warning that the cease-fire might not hold if Israel didn't stop its retaliation: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ordered "unrestricted" military strikes against Palestinian militants after rocket attacks from Gaza. Overnight Israeli aircraft launched a series of air raids, injuring several people, and arrested more than 200 suspected militants in the West Bank. Israel has also taken the unprecedented step of posting artillery pieces on the border with Gaza, and practice-firing. Palestinians warned the moves could force a ceasefire to collapse. As I wrote yesterday, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza brought an entirely new set...

Hamas: Oops. Our Bad.

The BBC reports that Hamas has cried "Uncle!" in its first-ever outright war against Israel after two days of one-sided fighting. Hamas now says it will refrain from launching rockets out of Gaza after watching the IDF pound Gaza in an unprecedented show of force, with the Israelis no longer handcuffed by the standards of occupation: The Palestinian militant organisation Hamas has announced an end to rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip. At least 30 rockets have been fired at Israel in recent days, following Israel's withdrawal from Gaza earlier this month. In response to the rockets, Israel resumed its policy of targeting militant leaders in air strikes. On Sunday, an Israeli missile strike killed two Islamic Jihad militants, including a top commander. At a cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered "unrestricted" strikes against Palestinian militants. ... Overnight on Saturday, Israeli forces launched air strikes against alleged...

September 27, 2005

Courage!, Say The Cowards

Just when we thought the anchorman model for news broadcasts had died out, leave it to al-Qaeda to bring it back on the Internet. The Washington Post reports this morning that al-Qaeda has begun its own news program, bypassing such outlets as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, which edited its copy in the past, and going out directly to the world on an Internet stream: An Internet video newscast called the Voice of the Caliphate was broadcast for the first time on Monday, purporting to be a production of al Qaeda and featuring an anchorman who wore a black ski mask and an ammunition belt. The anchorman, who said the report would appear once a week, presented news about the Gaza Strip and Iraq and expressed happiness about recent hurricanes in the United States. A copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, was placed by his right hand and a rifle...

Zarqawi Losing More Aides

Iraqi terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lost another key aide this weekend with the death of Abu Azzam, the US confirmed last night. Abu Azzam died in an American raid on a Haditha safehouse: A man believed to be al Qaeda's No. 2 operative in Iraq has been killed, a U.S. Defense Department official confirmed to CNN. Abu Azzam was a "significant" figure in the al Qaeda network in Iraq, the official said. ... Just last week, U.S. and Iraqi officials announced that two men described as top al Qaeda leaders in the northern city of Mosul were captured during a September 5 raid. One of those captured in that raid was said to be responsible for supervising and directing the day-to-day operations of the group, and was responsible for numerous attacks against Iraqi security and coalition forces. Officials hailed the capture as a blow to al Qaeda's operation in...

September 29, 2005

Pataki Nixes Controversial Freedom Center At Ground Zero

Governor George Pataki, buoyed by a late alliance with Hillary Clinton on the issue of the memorial, has ordered the removal of the controversial International Freedom Center from Ground Zero. The 9/11 memorial site had generated a storm of heated debate about the appropriate manner or remembrance for the thousands of dead from the worst foreign attack on American soil, and some had grave concerns that the IFC would amount to little more than a rationalization of the terrorists' actions. In response, the IFC has declared itself defunct, refusing any other site as inappropritae: Governor Pataki pulled the plug yesterday on the International Freedom Center, the museum planned for ground zero that aimed to weave the events of September 11 into a historical movement toward freedom around the globe. The governor asked the state agency in charge of the site, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, to work with the freedom...

October 1, 2005

Another Terrorist Attack On Bali?

It appears that Islamists have chosen the popular resort destination of Bali once again as a target for terrorist attacks. A series of explosions have left at least eight people dead, including tourists, in the Indonesian area: Bombs exploded almost simultaneously Saturday in two tourist areas of the Indonesian resort island of Bali, killing at least eight people and wounding 13 others, police and hospital officials said. The victims included foreign tourists. The blasts at Jimbaran beach and a bustling outdoor shopping center in downtown Kuta "were clearly the work of terrorists," police Maj. Gen. Ansyaad Mbai, a top Indonesian anti-terrorism official, told The Associated Press. Other reports quote higher casualty figures, but none provide solid links yet. I will update as this becomes clearer. It also may not yet be over -- some of these reports imply more than two attacks. It has the earmarks of al-Qaeda operations, which...

What's That Bulge Under The Burqa, They Wondered

Security forces in Afghanistan arrested a Taliban commander wanted in the string of bombings that unsuccessfully attempted to derail elections in the newly liberated and democratic nation. Gafar attempted to hide in plain sight from the American and Afghani soldiers who rooted him out: U.S. and Afghan forces arrested a Taliban commander suspected in bomb attacks against coalition forces during a raid on central Afghanistan home, where he tried to conceal his identity by dressing as a woman, police said Saturday. The commander, known as Gafar, was arrested Wednesday in Andar district of Ghazni province, southwest of the capital, Kabul. A U.S. military statement said he was a "key enemy commander" behind attacks on Afghan and U.S. forces in the province carried out with homemade bombs, rockets and small-caliber handguns. ... During the raid, the suspect tried to conceal his identity by dressing as a woman with a veil and...

Palestinian Elections Produce Murky Results

Local elections in the West Bank produced results quirky enough for both Fatah and Hamas to claim victories in the 104 municipalities polling yesterday. Even the media coverage seems confused, as the New York Times suggests that the results favor Hamas while the Washington Post argues the opposite. The difference between the two comes from the lack of representation for Hamas in many of the elections, while Fatah had candidates in all localities. The Post's Scott Wilson takes the macro view: The Palestinians' ruling Fatah movement won a majority on 51 municipal councils in elections held Thursday in 104 West Bank towns and villages, according to official results scheduled to be released Saturday that show the rival Hamas movement taking clear control of 13 councils. Thursday's vote was the third round of municipal elections in the Palestinian territories. Voting in the Gaza Strip, where Israel recently ended its 38-year presence,...

October 2, 2005

Al-Qaeda Behind New Bali Bombings That Killed 26

Indonesia claims it has evidence that al-Qaeda planned and executed yesterday's bombings on Bali that killed 26 people and wounded more than 100 others. Counterterrorist investigators claim that two "fugitive" AQ masterminds still want to hit more soft targets -- in other words, civilians: Indonesia said Sunday it suspected two fugitives linked to al-Qaida masterminded the suicide bombings of crowded restaurants in tourist areas of Bali that killed at least 26 people and injured more than 100. The nation's president, meanwhile, warned that more terrorist attacks are possible. ... Maj. Gen. Ansyaad Mbai, a top Indonesian anti-terror official, identified the two suspected masterminds of Saturday's bombings as Malaysians alleged to be key members of the al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terror group. They are also accused of orchestrating the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, as well as two other attacks in the Indonesian capital in 2003 and 2004. The nightclub bombings, which also...

October 3, 2005

Balinese Wonder: Why Us?

After having now been the target of al-Qaeda terrorist attacks at least four times over the last three years, the people of Bali openly wonder why Islamist terrorists have focused so much of their efforts on them. The French press service AFP reports that anger has risen among the Balinese as they survey the damage from this latest atrocity: Anger is mounting over the latest bomb attacks by Islamic extremists in Indonesia, where yet again most of the dead have been locals and most of the damage has hit local businesses. ... "Why is it only us? Why is Bali again the target of bombs?" asked I Gede Wiratha, the head of the Bali chapter of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Wiratha said strong rumors were circulating in predominantly Hindu Bali that witnesses heard one of the suicide bombers shouting "Allahu Akbar" or "God is great" before blowing...

Fatah And Hamas Start The Civil War

The New York Times reports that the Palestinian Civil War may have already begun, less than a month after the withdrawal of the Israelis, as a series of gun battles tore through Gaza City after the ruling Fatah government attempted to disarm Hamas terrorists. The results from the first confrontation attempted by the Palestinian Authority against its internal nemesis left one police officer dead and dozens of people wounded, overflowing the local hospital: Palestinian police officers and Hamas gunmen waged running gun battles on Sunday night in Gaza City. The shooting began when the police tried to confiscate illegal weapons. At least two Palestinians were killed, including one policeman, and about 40 people were wounded in the fighting, the worst internal Palestinian violence since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last month. Last week, the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, began enforcing a prohibition against militants carrying weapons in...

October 5, 2005

US To 'Ally': Please Stop Teaching People To Hate Us

The Saudis have come under fire repeatedly since 9/11 for their sponsorship of radical Wahhabbism and incitement of violent jihad in their madrassas at home while selling themselves as dedicated anti-terrorists abroad. It turns out that they have been selling more than that here in the US, according to the New York Sun, and the US government has finally spoken publicly to embarrass the Saudis into changing course: The American government is demanding that Saudi Arabia account for its distribution of hate material to American mosques, as the State Department pressed Saudi officials for answers last week and as the Senate later this month plans to investigate the propagation of radical Wahhabism on American shores. The flurry of activity comes months after a report from the Center for Religious Freedom discovered that dozens of mosques in major cities across the country, including New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, were distributing...

Iraq Reverses Controversial Rule Change

The Iraqi National Assembly has reversed itself after heavy UN criticism and US pressure forced it to reconsider an electoral rule change that almost precipitated another Sunni boycott. The parliament earlier passed a law that changed the threshold for rejection of the proposed constitution from two-thirds of all votes to two-thirds of all voters, a bar so high that its attainment would be impossible under almost any circumstances: After a brief debate and with only about half of its 275 members present, the assembly voted 119-28 to restore the original voting rules for the referendum, which will take place Oct. 15. Washington hopes a "yes" vote in the referendum will unite Iraq's disparate factions and erode support for the country's bloody insurgency. ... The original rules, now restored, mean that Sunnis can veto the constitution by getting a two-thirds "no" vote in three provinces, even if the charter wins majority...

October 7, 2005

Al-Qaeda Strategic Planning Found By Coalition

An important document from al-Qaeda's Number Two leader and strategic thinker, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Iraqi minion and terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has given the coalition important insight into the planning and long-range thinking of the terrorists, in and out of Iraq. The letter makes clear that AQ wants much more than the Americans to leave Iraq, and that they see our withdrawal as a necessary condition for their ultimate success, not an end in itself: The United States has obtained a letter from Osama bin Laden's deputy to the leader of Iraq's insurgency that outlines a long-term strategic vision for a global jihad, with the next phase of the war to be taken into Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, according to U.S. officials. ... The letter of instructions and requests outlines a four-stage plan, according to officials: First, expel American forces from Iraq. Second, establish a caliphate over as much...

How Many Bali Bombings Before Indonesia Takes It Seriously?

Bali has found itself an al-Qaeda terrorist target four times over the past three years, thanks to its majority Hindu population and its proximity to Australia and its tourists. However, it also appears that Jemaah Islamiyah gets a boost from an Indonesian government that turns a blind eye to its terrorism against its own people: In Bali, one of Southeast Asia's most-wanted fugitives slips away hours before a police raid. In central Indonesia, an Islamic school started by the reputed spiritual leader of the region's most feared militant group operates undisturbed by authorities. The group he allegedly inspires has not been outlawed. Philippines authorities, meanwhile, suspect members of the same group al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah could be planning to reopen training camps for Islamic fighters and are busy fund-raising in the Middle East for further terror attacks. The Oct. 1 bombings in Bali the second on the resort...

October 9, 2005

Catch-And-Release Program Should Only Apply To Fish

The Yemen government doesn't seem to take terrorism quite as seriously as we do, according to the London Telegraph. Their idea of handling terrorism goes even less further than the notorious law-enforcement approach that the United States tried during the decade prior to 9/11. Yemen takes a debate approach instead -- and it's about as effective as one might think: A pioneering scheme to fight Islamist terror by encouraging jailed extremists to rethink their grasp of the Koran is under fire after claims that some of its "converts" have taken up arms again. The project, launched in Yemen three years ago by an Islamic scholar, Judge Hamoud al-Hitar, has been followed closely by the British Government, which has twice invited him to lecture senior anti-terrorism officials at Scotland Yard. The effectiveness of his technique - a theological "duel" in which he and the prisoners quote Koranic texts at each other...

October 12, 2005

Will The Changes Be Enough?

The Iraqis followed their pattern of thirteenth-hour breakthroughs on political issues yesterday by reaching agreement with some Sunni groups on additions to the proposed constitution that goes to the voters on Saturday. However, confusion arose overnight as to whether the National Assembly needed to approve those changes and how to inform the voters of the new text of the measure that they will approve or reject: Iraqi political leaders said they had agreed to an important last-minute change in the draft constitution on Tuesday evening in exchange for a promise by some prominent Sunni Arab leaders to give public support to the document in the nationwide referendum on Saturday. The change would create a panel in the next parliament with the power to propose broad new revisions to the constitution. In effect, the change could give the Sunnis - who were largely shut out of the constitution-writing process - a...

Rice Gets Surprise Agreement On Central Asian Base

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has managed to surprise Central Asia and reverse the momentum of base closings in the region by changing Kyrgyzstan's stance on its American military base. The New York Times reports that Rice convinced the new Kyrgyz government to allow the US to continue its operations for as long as we need to maintain operations in Afghanistan: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meeting with the new leaders of Kyrgyzstan, reached agreement on Tuesday on long-term rights to maintaining an air base here for servicing military aircraft on missions to Afghanistan. The United States and allied forces may continue to use the base, adjacent to the international airport here, "until the situation in Afghanistan is completely stabilized," President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev said at a news conference. Last July, Kyrgyzstan, along with three other Central Asian states and Russia and China, issued a statement calling on the United...

October 14, 2005

More Sunnis Accept Constitution And Pay An Immediate Price

The new agreement on the Iraqi constitution gained momentum in Sunni circles late yesterday on the eve of the plebescite for approving the bedrock law of the permanent government. The Sunni split had immediate consequences, as terrorists attacked the political offices of the latest Sunni party to endorse the new constitution for tomorrow's polling: A day after Iraq's parliament approved the final version of the country's draft constitution, and two days before Iraqis were to vote on it in a nationwide referendum, members of the Sunni Arab minority were as divided as their leaders Thursday over what to do: vote yes, vote no, or not vote at all. Since changes were still being made to the document as late as Tuesday night and no revised copies had been distributed, "I have no idea what the main benefits of the new constitution are," said Waad Shakir Mahmoud, 45, owner of a...

Islamists Fail To Take Nalchik, American Media Fail To Recognize Enemy

The Washington Post reports that the "rebels" attacking Nalchik in a coordinated offensive yesterday and today have failed to hold any territory in the city and that Russian troops have taken the upper hand in the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria: Early Friday, Russian special forces stormed a police station in southern Russia where eight militants were holding five hostages. The hostages, including police officers, were freed and all eight militants were killed as they tried to flee in a van, Russian officials said. Around 8.30 a.m. local time Friday, another three gunmen were killed in a downtown Nalchik souvenir store where they had barricaded themselves with two hostages on Thursday. The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported that two hostages were freed. Russian officials said the militants in the store refused to talk to the security forces that had surrounded them. The exact death toll remains unclear, but may top 100...

October 16, 2005

Iraqis Appear To Approve Constitution -- With Some Sunni Support

The Iraqis appear to have delivered a huge statement to the Zarqawi-led insurgency and naysayers around the world, convinced that the Iraqis would not accept democracy "imposed" on them. Even in areas where the AP describes turnout as lower than expected, it reported it in the high 50s, a showing that would receive favorable reviews for an American presidential election: Iraq's landmark constitution seemed assured of passage Sunday after initial results showed minority Sunni Arabs had fallen short in an effort to veto it at the polls. The apparent acceptance was a major step in the attempt to establish a democratic government that could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Opponents failed to secure the necessary two-thirds "no" vote in any three of Iraqi's 18 provinces, according to counts that local officials provided to The Associated Press. In the crucial central provinces with mixed ethnic and religious populations, enough...

October 17, 2005

BBC Reluctantly Reports On Chechen Islamists

Last week, I pointed out that the American media seemed intent on keeping their readers in the dark about the nature of the conflict in the Caucasus. Not one of the newspapers or broadcasters noting the attack on Nalchik ever mentioned the fact that the so-called Chechen "rebels" did not represent a nationalistic group of freedom-loving Chechens, but instead are Islamist terrorists at least loosely associated with al-Qaeda. The BBC reports today that the leader of this band of terrorists, Shamil Basayev, makes it pretty plain what kind of organization he runs in his statement of responsibility for the attack on Nalchik: In his statement on the Kavkaz Center website, which was couched in Islamic terms, Shamil Basayev said that 217 "mujahideen" had attacked Nalchik, targeting police stations and military installations as well as the airport. ... "Our losses were high because five days before the operation there was a...

October 18, 2005

Chalk It Up To A Costly Rehearsal

The city of Baltimore found itself in the same predicament that New York faced a few weeks ago -- a thinly-sourced but unsettlingly specific terrorist threat forced the city to decide whether to disrupt a major urban area and risk looking foolish, or ignore it and risk the deaths of hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. New York found out after snarling its subway system and causing perhaps millions of dollars in economic disruption that the threat turned out to be a hoax. Baltimore hasn't reached that conclusion yet, but the action they took turned out to either be completely effective or unnecessary: Federal agents were questioning "a couple" of people Tuesday in connection with a terror threat that prompted Baltimore authorities to temporarily close one of two downtown tunnels under Baltimore Harbor and restrict traffic through the other, U.S. officials said. The restrictions were put in place out of what...

October 19, 2005

US, France To Isolate Syria Over Hariri Assassination

The alliance of France and the US against Bashar Assad and the Syrian government continues at the UN, where the unlikely partnership will press the Security Council to force Syria to account for its role in the murder of Rafik Hariri: The United States and France are planning to introduce two U.N. resolutions next week aimed at holding Syria to account for meddling in Lebanon and for its alleged links to the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, according to several sources close to the diplomacy. The moves would be the toughest international action ever taken against Syria and would be designed to further isolate President Bashar Assad, who for the first time is getting the cold shoulder from key Arab governments such as those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Western envoys said. The impending actions will be "the perfect storm for Damascus," said a Western diplomat at...

October 20, 2005

Zarqawi's Moneyman Gets Pinched In Baghdad (Updated!)

Fox News reports this morning that Iraqi security forces have arrested a nephew of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Yasir Sabawi Ibrahim, after the Syrians kicked him out of their country earlier this month. The Iraqis say that Ibrahim ran the money end of the Iraqi insurgency as well as contributed to the Zarqawi network's funding, and served as a chief liaison between the two organizations: Yasir Sabhawi Ibrahim (search), son of Saddam's half brother Sabhawi Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, was arrested in a Baghdad apartment, several days after Syrian authorities forced him to return to Iraq, the officials told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Cairo. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to deal with the media. One of the officials, who works as a coordinator between Iraqi authorities and U.S. military intelligence, described the purported financier as the most dangerous man in the urgency....

October 21, 2005

Syria Knew About Hariri Assassination Plan: UN

The UN report into the assassination of Rafik Hariri accuses Syria's Assad dictatorship of knowledge of the plot before its execution, and also points a finger at long-time Syrian stooge Emile Lahoud, the current president of Lebanon. Lebanese officials expect the findings to cause some uproar in Beirut and have already deployed security forces to keep the peace: Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated with the full knowledge of Syrian security officials and their Lebanese allies, according to a U.N. report that also casts suspicion on Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. ... Syrian President Bashar Assad earlier this week denied that Damascus had any connection to the assassination. But the report paints a detailed portrait of involvement by senior members of Syria's security and political apparatus and will give weight to efforts by Washington, Paris and London to sanction Syria in the U.N. Security Council. The U.N. investigation notes...

October 22, 2005

Abu Mazen, The Man Of Peace?

President Bush offered a strange endorsement to the beleaguered Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in a little-noticed Rose Garden address this week. Two who did notice are Scott Johnson at Power Line and Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal, and both take exception to the characterization. Bush's assertion that the terrorist formerly known as Abu Mazen -- the man behind such atrocities as Black September, the kidnapping and murder of Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 -- is a "man devoted to peace" in the same week that gunmen from his own Fatah faction are believed to have murdered two PA policemen responding to a coffeeshop argument sounds seriously out of touch with reality. As Stephens explains, the culture of violence has helped to create the Palestinian Authority as we know it, and Abbas' leadership of the autocracy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (such as it is, under the...

October 23, 2005

My, We're A Welcoming People

After 9/11, we asked ourselves how nineteen Islamofascist terrorists could have made their way into the United States and infiltrated our society. We found out that our visa system had so many holes in it that we could not begin to guess how many more may have set up residence in America, just waiting to attack us from within. Sixteen of these terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, the last three of which didn't even need to go to an American facility to get their visas; instead they received the key documents from their travel agents under the Visa Express system. After 9/11, we demanded an end to such programs, especially with Saudi Arabia, which supplies an inordinate amount of the Islamist radicals to the al-Qaeda cause. This supposedly has been the American policy since the attacks, and as far as any public statements, that policy has never been reversed. Or...

October 24, 2005

Galloway Falls Into Perjury Trap

After appearing before a Senate panel earlier this year, British politician George Galloway boasted that he had cleaned the floor with Senator Norm Coleman during a debate on the Oil-for-Food program. Now it appears that the banty Scot should have simply kept his mouth shut, as witnesses have appeared to contradict his testimony and corroborate evidence that Galloway took kickbacks and bribes from Saddam Hussein in the months before the invasion of Iraq: An anti-war British lawmaker gave false testimony to Congress when he denied receiving U.N. oil-for-food allocations from deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a Senate investigative panel said Monday. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., chairman of the subcommittee, and his investigators presented evidence that they say shows British lawmaker George Galloway's political organization and his wife received nearly $600,000 from the oil allocations. ... Coleman, a critic of the United Nations, said his panel's evidence shows that Galloway personally...

October 25, 2005

Iraq Constitution Passes

The Iraqi people select their constitution via direct democracy -- the first Arabic people to do so in a free and fair election: Iraq's landmark constitution was adopted by a majority of voters during the country's Oct. 15 referendum, as Sunni Arab opponents failed to muster enough support to defeat it, election officials said Tuesday. Results released by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq showed that Sunni Arabs, who had sharply opposed the draft document, failed to produce the two-thirds ``no'' vote they would have needed in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces to defeat it. Nationwide, 78.59 percent voted for the charter while 21.41 percent voted against, the commission said. The charter required a simple majority nationwide with the provision that if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces rejected it, the constitution would be defeated. More Iraqis voted in this second election since the fall of...

October 27, 2005

What Victory Against Terror Looks Like

The Sunnis of Iraq have increasingly decided that the time has come to enter the political process and to give up violence as a means of political change, the Washington Post reports this morning. Ghath Abdul-Ahad follows the path of a former Ba'athist insurgent, Abu Theeb ("Father of the Wolf") as he transforms himself into somewhat of an evangelist for democracy: For weeks before Iraq's constitutional referendum this month, Iraqi guerrilla Abu Theeb traveled the countryside just north of Baghdad, stopping at as many Sunni Arab houses and villages as he could. Each time, his message to the farmers and tradesmen he met was the same: Members of the disgruntled Sunni minority should register to vote -- and vote against the constitution. "It is a new jihad," said Abu Theeb, a nom de guerre that means Father of the Wolf, addressing a young nephew one night before the vote. "There...

Danish Plot Uncovered -- Has Bosnian Ties

Denmark arrested four Muslims tonight in an investigation of planned suicide bombings in Europe -- a plot that has ties to Islamofascists in Bosnia. The Danes rounded up over two dozen people as part of the conspiracy, but only kept the four in custody: Police arrested four Danish Muslims Thursday on suspicion of belonging to a terror network planning a suicide attack in Europe, officials said. The suspects, all males between 16 and 20 years old, were ordered held in jail while police investigate the allegations, police spokesman Joern Bro said. He said at a news conference that the network had planned to carry out the suicide attack in Europe. "It seems the plan was going into a closing phase," said Bro, declining to provide further details. The Danes linked this investigation to an unnamed Balkans ring of terrorists; the arrest of three other terrorists in Sarajevo appears more than...

October 29, 2005

Islamists Smuggled SAMs, WMD Into France

According to the London Telegraph, European counterterrorist agencies now hunt a group of Islamofascist terrorists with "links to al-Qaida" that successfully smuggled surface-to-air missiles as well as chemical and biological weapons into France. The missiles, they fear, will serve as the next phase of terrorist attacks on commercial air service, possibly outside one of the major French airports such as Orly: French and Algerian extremists with links to al-Qa'eda bought the Russian SA-18 Grouse missiles from Chechens in 2002 and smuggled them via Georgia and Turkey, according to French anti-terror sources quoted in Le Figaro. Both missiles and several of the extremists are reportedly still at large. French anti-terrorism investigators learned of the missile terror plan while interrogating a Jordanian al-Qa'eda operative close to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the Islamic terror group in Iraq. Adnan Muhammad Sadik, alias Abu Atiya, is now being held by the Jordanian authorities....

India Rocked By Terrorist Explosions

Islamic terrorism appears to have visited India, a nation that has had traditional tensions with Muslims on and within its borders but has championed Palestinian cause, in the form of several bombings today. Reuters reports that more than 50 people have died in the attacks, and that the United States had issued a warning to its citizens in the country shortly beforehand about potential al-Qaeda attacks: Three powerful bombs ripped through New Delhi markets packed with families and shoppers on Saturday ahead of the biggest Hindu and Muslim festivals of the year, killing over 50 people and wounding scores more. ... At least 51 people were killed in the blasts which occurred within minutes of each other, said an aide to Delhi state Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. Fifty-four people were injured, the aide said. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared it an act of terrorism, while adding it was too early...

Arab States Wanted Iraq War

A news report from The Australian and Al-Arabiya indicates that the United States had negotiated a peaceful exit for Saddam Hussein from Iraq -- but that the Arab League torpedoed the deal, leading to the Iraq War in March 2003 (h/t: Daily Scorecard): Deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had secretly accepted a last-minute plan to go into exile to avert the 2003 Iraq war, but Arab leaders shot the proposal down, Al Arabiya television reported today. UAE President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan made the proposal for Saddam to go into exile at an emergency Arab summit just weeks before the US-led war began in March 2003. But the 22-member Arab League, led by Secretary-General Amr Moussa, refused to consider the initiative. "We had got the final agreement from the different parties, the main players in the world and the person concerned Saddam Hussein within 24 hours," Mohammed...

October 30, 2005

Syrian Power Brokers Start To Disperse

As more pressure gets applied to the Bashar Assad regime to answer for the assassination of Rafik Hariri, it looks like the impulse to run has become irresistable for some members of the autocracy. The New York Times reports that Assad's wealthy and powerful cousin, Rami Makhluf, has fled Syria for the UAE as the country becomes more dangerous for those who prop up the erstwhile opthalmologist on his creaky throne: During a United Nations investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri that threatens the power of President Bashar al-Assad, a first cousin who is one of the most powerful businessmen in Syria has left the country. While it remains unclear why the president's cousin, Rami Makhluf, left - his allies say he is in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, working on the expansion of his business empire - many people with close connections to the ruling Baath...

We've Heard This Before

The Palestinian triangle offense continues apace in Gaza. They have gone to their usual Plan B when they get caught at it -- they declare that one of the three factions has agreed to cease attacking Israel, and expect the Israelis and the rest of the world to celebrate it. Today, that comes in the form of a statement assuring observers that Islamic Jihad has agreed not to shoot rockets into Israel, but that wasn't what started the Israeli response that killed several IJ leaders this past week: Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip have agreed to halt rocket attacks on Israel, Palestinian Interior Ministry officials said Sunday. The halt in rocket fire comes after days of airstrikes and artillery fire by the Israeli army aimed at the Islamic Jihad militant group. Palestinian officials said the declaration was expected to bring an end to the Israeli attacks. The Interior Ministry...

November 2, 2005

The Palestinian Version, However, They're Fine With

Sometimes, it really appears that people have an unending capacity for unintentional satire. Take for example the Guardian (UK) on a new, non-lethal Israeli tactic against the Palestinians. The newspaper reports on the UN's disapproval of sonic attacks on Palestinian strongholds in Gaza during the engagements caused by Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks after the Israeli disengagement: Israel is deploying a terrifying new tactic against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip by letting loose deafening "sound bombs" that cause widespread fear, induce miscarriages and traumatise children. The removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip opened the way for the military to use air force jets to create dozens of sonic booms by breaking the sound barrier at low altitude, sending shockwaves across the territory, often at night. Palestinians liken the sound to an earthquake or huge bomb. They describe the effect as being hit by a...

November 6, 2005

You Have To Break A Few Humans To Prevent An Omelette

Dafydd at Big Lizards notes this Robert Novak column blurb about an exchange regarding ecoterrorism at the US Senate last week. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) interrogated ecological activist Dr. Jerry Vlasak about the aims of the radical environmental movement. Novak has the key, chilling exchange that reveals the utter lack of perspective that produces ecoterrorists: Dr. Jerry Vlasak of North American Animal Liberation was quoted as saying at an animal rights convention: "I don't think you'd have to kill, assassinate too many. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, or 10 million non-human lives." Questioned by Inhofe whether he was "advocating the murder of individuals," Vlasak replied: "I made that statement, and I stand by that statement." That, however, gives only part of the story. Americans for Medical Progress has more of the transcript, which oddly does not appear readily...

November 7, 2005

French Riots Come After Multiple Warnings Of Islamist Attacks

The riots in France have little connection to the Islamist terrorist offensive against the West, if the American media coverage gives any indication. However, alert CQ reader Mr. Michael points out that both American and French media sources warned of coordinated Islamist action against France in the weeks before the riot. Agence France Presse even had a quote from the maligned Nicolas Sarkozy noting the imminent nature of the threat in its 9/27 dispatch: An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday. "The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month. "France is our enemy number one, the enemy of...

November 8, 2005

The Ramadan Offensive?

The Islamists appear to have coordinated a worldwide attack plan for Ramadan celebrations this year. While France burns in riots originating out of mainly Muslim ghettoes, Australia barely escaped a large-scale attack on its transportation systems yesterday, making over a dozen arrests just after the passage of a new anti-terrorist law that made the detentions possible: Police arrested 17 terror suspects in Australia's two biggest cities Tuesday in raids authorities said foiled a plot to carry out a catastrophic terror attack. A radical Muslim cleric known for praising Osama bin Laden was charged with masterminding the plot. More than 500 police backed up by helicopters were involved in raids across Sydney and Melbourne, arresting eight men in Sydney and nine in Melbourne and seizing chemicals, weapons, computers and backpacks. ... "The members of the Sydney group have been gathering chemicals of a kind that were used in the London Underground...

November 9, 2005

AQ Targets Amman, Kills Muslims (Updated!)

A series of three bombs exploded almost simultaneously at American-owned hotels in Amman, Jordan today, killing over 50 people. Given the nature of the attack -- multiple bombs, suicide-based attacks, targeting the tourist industry -- experts believe that al-Qaeda staged the terrorist attack, probably Abu Musab al-Zarqawi from across the border in Iraq: Suicide bombers carried out nearly simultaneous attacks on three U.S.-based hotels in the Jordanian capital Wednesday night, killing at least 57 people and wounding 115 in what appeared to be an al-Qaida assault on an Arab kingdom with close ties to the United States. The explosions hit the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn hotels just before 9 p.m. One of the blasts took place inside a wedding hall where 300 guests were celebrating. Black smoke rose into the night, and wounded victims stumbled from the hotels. ... A U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition...

November 12, 2005

Al Qaeda And Bomber's Remorse

The Scotsman reports that al-Qaeda finds itself on the political defensive after the bombings of three hotels in Amman, Jordan touched off massive anti-Islamist demonstrations. AQ supposedly has found itself surprised by the hostility of the Jordanians after bombing three of its hotels in its relatively peaceful capital: AFTER years of al-Qaeda terror attacks in which thousands have been killed, many of them Muslims - the people they wish to recruit - voices of dissent are starting to be heard in the Middle East. As moderate Muslims dare to protest at daily death tolls, even the prospect of one of Osama bin Laden's most feared cohorts, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, being handed over is being discussed. ... At first al-Qaeda announced that "a group of our best lions" had carried out the attacks to punish Jordan for supporting "the Jews and Crusaders". Then late at night it posted a second statement...

November 16, 2005

US Exports Its Southern Border Solution To Gaza

The Palestinians and the Israelis reached an agreement on the control of the Gaza border with Egypt yesterday, thanks to American pressure on both parties -- on Israelis to capitulate, and on Palestinians to not laugh with merriment over the final arrangements: Israel and the Palestinians settled Tuesday on the final details of a border agreement for Gaza that gives the Palestinians almost unfettered control of their border with Egypt. In the works for weeks, the U.S.-mediated agreement followed marathon negotiations Monday night that included Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice delayed a planned trip to Asia to ensure the two sides signed the deal, U.S. Embassy spokesman Stewart Tuttle said. She had said she would not leave without an accord. ... European Union representatives on the ground will monitor compliance, as will a joint Israeli-Palestinian-European control room, according to the agreement. Goods coming into Gaza from its revamped border...

Jay Rockefeller And The Run Of Logan's Writ

My new Daily Standard column comes out today, and I wrote about the stunning admission from ranking Senate Intelligence Committee Democrat Jay Rockefeller that he discussed American terror-war strategy with terrorist sponsor Bashar Assad. While the column does not call for a charge of treason, it does ask how Rockefeller can possibly avoid an indictment for a violation of the Logan Act: If Rockefeller discussed war plans with Assad while the United States had begun military operations against global terrorist organizations, which Assad has been known to fund, surely it is a major breach of the senator's duties? The Logan Act, a piece of rarely enforced legislation, may be pertinent[.] I wrote this article before reading Bill Bennett's column in National Review. I would go farther than Bennett suggests; at the least, I think the full Senate should consider expulsion just on the basis of his admission. In going to...

November 17, 2005

Democrats Keep Shifting Towards Surrender

Rep. John Murtha pushed the national argument on the Iraq War further towards the International ANSWER/MoveOn agenda this afternoon by demanding an immediate start of an American retreat from Iraq, declaring that American soldiers do not have the capability to defeat terrorists. He based his conclusion not on the facts on the ground, but apparently his experience in Viet Nam, which he tossed around like a West Point degree all afternoon long: One of Congress' most hawkish and influential Democrats called Thursday for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, sparking bitter and personal salvos from both sides in a growing Capitol Hill uproar over President Bush's war policies. "It's time to bring them home," said Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, choking back tears during remarks to reporters. "Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty." The comments by the Pennsylvania lawmaker,...

November 18, 2005

What Could Be More American Than A Vote?

Man, I take a vacation and the place falls apart. I'm watching C-SPAN right now, looking at a procedural vote to allow a motion on withdrawing American troops from Iraq, as demanded by Rep. John Murtha yesterday. With two minutes left, it looks like the Democrats will successfully block the motion, keeping Congress from taking a vote and making the Democrats go on record about troop disposition. Instead of stupid suggestions about amendments to bills constituting no-confidence motions, the Democrats have been given a chance to vote on a real no-confidence motion. Unsurprisingly, they are running away like cowards. In fact, time just ran out on the vote and the procedural motion may have just passed, but only just. It looks like they're holding the vote open a few more minutes ... 8:44 CT - It's been 203-203 for the last couple of minutes -- which would, I believe, equate...

November 19, 2005

Try To Forget The Two Bombers Who Showed Up Uninvited

Maybe Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has the capacity for embarrassment after all. When thousands of Jordanians erupted in anger at the slaughter of two families celebrating a wedding, it clearly showed that the terrorist mastermind had made a huge error in judgment. Yesterday, Zarqawi attempted to mitigate the PR disaster he created among Muslims by releasing a tape insisting that he never meant to target wedding celebrants, even as the mother of bride passed away from her severe injuries: In the past, al-Zarqawi has defended Muslim civilian casualties in attacks by his suicide bombers in Iraq, saying they were justified because the attacks are part of a "jihad" against U.S. occupiers and their Iraqi allies. "God ordered us to attack the infidels by all means ... even if armed infidels and unintended victims women and children are killed together," he said in an audiotape released in May. But he...

November 22, 2005

Did Murtha Urge Retreat From Somalia?

Newsmax reported yesterday that Rep. John Murtha, the former Marine who sent Washington into a firestorm last week with a demand to withdraw American forces from Iraq, has a history of demanding retreats. They claim that Murtha himself took credit for the withdrawal of American forces from Somalia following the "Black Hawk Down" incident, a withdrawal that allegedly inspired al-Qaeda's leaders to pursue active attacks on American assets around the world: After terrorists attacked U.S. troops in Mogadishu, Somalia 12 years ago, anti-Iraq war Democrat, Rep. John Murtha urged then-President Clinton to begin a complete pullout of U.S. troops from the region. Clinton took the advice and ordered the withdrawal - a decision that Osama bin Laden would later credit with emboldening his terrorist fighters and encouraging him to mount further attacks against the U.S. ... Two weeks later, after 18 U.S. Rangers were killed in the battle of Mogadishu,...

Murtha On The Record On Somalia

Earlier today, I posted about John Murtha's stance on Somalia based on a Newsmax article. Various CQ readers have had an opportunity to research the subject further, and have discovered several references to the cut-and-run position Murtha urged on the Clinton adminstration -- advice it took, and helped to create the paper-tiger reputation that led to a decade of escalating attacks on the United States. These remarks come not from Newsmax but from Nexis searches of mainline press and from the Congressional Record itself. Let me be clear on one point. In 1993, many people espoused the cut-and-run position from Somalia, among them Curt Weldon, one of the most vociferous hawks on Iraq. In fact, it does not stretch the imagination at all to call that position one of the more bipartisan efforts in the 103rd Congress. The difference is that in the eight years between our run from Somalia...

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November 23, 2005

As The Iraqis Stand Up ...

The Washington Post reports that soon after the last round of Iraqi elections concludes, American commanders in Iraq plan to drop three of the 18 brigades deployed in Iraq, in favor of the burgeoning Iraqi security forces. One brigade would transfer to neighboring Kuwait as a rapid-reaction force, and the other two brigades would simply never arrive to relieve two slated to return to the United States in the first quarter of 2006: Barring any major surprises in Iraq, the Pentagon tentatively plans to reduce the number of U.S. forces there early next year by as many as three combat brigades, from 18 now, but to keep at least one brigade "on call" in Kuwait in case more troops are needed quickly, several senior military officers said. Pentagon authorities also have set a series of "decision points" during 2006 to consider further force cuts that, under a "moderately optimistic" scenario,...

72 Virgins Not Enough?

One of the more interesting aspects of this Islamofascist war on the West concerns the fanatical way in which their lunatics willingly commit suicide just to kill others, especially non-combatants. That tactic appears very popular among the hoi polloi of the Islamists, but the leadership apparently doesn't buy into the whole "72 virgins" incentive they shovel out to their minions. The Israelis discovered this tonight when a key Islamic Jihad leader surrendered to them earlier: A top Islamic Jihad militant surrendered to Israeli soldiers early Thursday, witnesses said, after a daylong siege during which army bulldozers knocked down the four-story house where he was hiding. Dozens of troops surrounded the building in the town of Jenin in the hunt for Iyad Abu Rob. Witnesses said Abu Rob, a senior commander of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank, emerged from the wrecked house after midnight and was taken away by...

November 24, 2005

WaPo Misrepresents Murtha As 'Hawk'

The Washington Post does a poor job on its most recent portrait of Jack Murtha, painting him as a "hawk" who only recently converted to a withdraw position on Iraq. From the headline ("The About-Face of Hawkish Democrat Murtha") through the first several paragraphs of the Shailagh Murray article featured on Page 2, it purports to show Murtha as a Democrat who supported Bush's position on Iraq until two weeks ago, when in truth Murtha has a long track record of pressing for precipitous withdrawals on military engagements going back to Somalia, and even Murray reports late in her article that Murtha's latest position doesn't represent any "about-face" at all. Here's what Post readers will see if they only take in the first three paragraphs: Of all the Democrats calling for an end to the Iraq war, Rep. John P. Murtha is an anomaly. Unlike Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.)...

November 25, 2005

Jemaah Islamiyah Went To Plan B In Bali

Indonesian and Australian security forces now believe that Jemaah Islamiyah bombed the resort hotels in Bali as a backup plan to their original target: the memorials for the 2002 attacks. JI planner Azahari Husin originally planned to use a suicide bomber to kill the high-level dignitaries attending the event, as well as the families of the original victims, in a sick twist to an already demented story: Southeast Asian extremist network Jemaah Islamiyah planned to bomb a memorial service in Indonesia for those killed in the 2002 Bali attacks but was deterred by high security, a report said Friday. The Islamic militants instead chose to attack tourist spots on the Indonesian resort island two weeks ahead of the anniversary, carrying out three suicide bombings on restaurants popular with westerners on October 1 and killing 23 people, the Australian newspaper said. Citing intelligence sources in Indonesia, the paper said that master...

November 26, 2005

Biden, Democrats Ask The Wrong Question

Senator Joe Biden writes an op-ed for today's Washington Post that gets the entire war on terror fundamentally wrong -- and demonstrates why the Democrats have entirely failed to provide any leadership on Iraq and the wider war. Along the way, Biden slices off half-truths out of context to argue for the worst possible spin on Iraq, and ignores the tremendous progress that has been made by Coalition forces in developing Iraq into a democracy. First, Biden postulates that the primary issue of a military deployment is when it will end: The question most Americans want answered about Iraq is this: When will our troops come home? We already know the likely answer. In 2006, they will begin to leave in large numbers. By the end of the year, we will have redeployed about 50,000. In 2007, a significant number of the remaining 100,000 will follow. A small force will...

November 27, 2005

Another Item For Which To Give Thanks

The Cindy Sheehan Traveling Road Show appears to have lost its steam, according to multiple sources this weekend. The protest camp shut itself down outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, TX this afternoon after drawing less than 200 protestors over the holidays -- probably fewer people than Bush invited to the ranch for Thanksgiving dinner. The protestors won't return for Christmas but promise to come back at Easter: Dozens of war protesters packed up their tents and left their campsite in a field near President Bush's ranch Sunday, vowing to return during Easter for a third vigil if U.S. troops are still in Iraq. The weeklong protest, which coincided with Bush's Thanksgiving holiday visit to his ranch, drew about 200 people. It was a continuation of the August demonstration led by California mother Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq last year during combat. Power Line has a picture...

November 28, 2005

The Missing Element Of Blame For Ignorance On Iraq

The Washington Post carries an interesting argument from Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institute on the divergence of military and civilian opinion on the war in Iraq, a separation that he calls dangerous in the long run for American political discourse. O'Hanlon acknowledges that the support for the war in Iraq among military personnel goes far beyond the normal top-level cheeriness down to at least the mid-level officer corps, and wonders why that doesn't translate to better civilian support: In recent months a civil-military divide has emerged in the United States over the war in Iraq. Unlike much of the Iraq debate between Democrats and Republicans, it is over the present and the future rather than the past. Increasingly, civilians worry that the war is being lost, or at least not won. But the military appears as confident as ever of ultimate victory. This difference of opinion does not amount...

Prayers Needed For Hostage

One of the Brits kidnapped in Iraq this weekend is a family friend of a local blogger, Ben at Hammerswing75: Mr. Kember is a good friend of my parents and a longtime member of my Granny's church, Harrow Baptist. I remember seeing him a few years ago when I was stopped by in England to visit my Gran. We were at the church and he came over for some conversation. "I remember when you were this tall", putting his hand down by his knees. He is an extremely nice man who went out of his way to be friendly. His wife Pat, who possesses an equally wonderful character, must be in absolute shock. My parents have asked for my prayers. There will be many. I, in turn, am asking for yours. I hope that there will be many. Let's take a moment and pray for the hostages, and pray for...

November 29, 2005

Lieberman Says Iraq Going Well As Army Continues Growth

Despite the recent shrieks of hysteria coming from the Democratic caucus in Congress, one of their most respected members says that the American-led Coalition has Iraq in "pretty good shape" and expects that troop drawdowns can begin late next year or early 2007 as long as progress continues. Senator Joe Lieberman took the opportunity to actually travel through Iraq, and his recommendation follows the administration's plan to key troop withdrawals based on the buildup of the Iraqi army, and not on calendar due dates as suggested by Joe Biden last week: Senator Lieberman of Connecticut, fresh from a two-day visit to Iraq over the Thanksgiving holiday, said yesterday he was hopeful American forces could begin a "significant" withdrawal by the end of next year or in 2007. "The country is now in reach of going from Saddam Hussein to self-government and, I'd add, self-protection," the Democrat said in a conference...

November 30, 2005

Air Marshal Reserves Too Expensive: Congress

After approving a program to cross-train customs and immigration agents as reserve air marshals for deployment during heightened alerts, Congress quietly abandoned the program over a year ago as a "waste of resources," the GAO revealed yesterday: The plan was first disclosed in September 2003 by Tom Ridge, then Homeland Security secretary. Ridge announced that the air marshals would be combined with immigration and customs agents in the same agency so agents in both could be cross-trained and used for aviation security. The move would allow more than 5,000 armed federal law enforcement agents to be deployed on commercial aircraft, he said. "This realignment offers a sweeping gain of additional armed law enforcement officials who will be able to provide a 'surge capacity' during increased threat periods or in the event of a terrorist attack," Ridge said at the time. By October 2004, Homeland Security had cross-trained some immigration and...

Read My Lips: No New Timetables

George Bush made his case clear today in a largely uneventful speech at Annapolis today simply by repeated the same plan he has enumerated for the American public for over two years. Bush told the midshipmen at the Naval Academy that the war in Iraq can and would be won before we consider pulling out any of our troops, and that the only timetable for redeployment will be the success of the mission ... period: President Bush gave an unflinching defense of his war strategy on Wednesday, refusing to set a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals and asserting that once-shaky Iraqi troops are proving increasingly capable. Democrats dismissed his words as a stay-the-course speech with no real strategy for success. Bush recalled that some Iraqi security forces once ran from battle, and he said their performance "is still uneven in some parts." But he also said improvements have been made...

December 1, 2005

American Intervention Creates Balkan Islamists?

The Left has long held up the Balkans intervention as a model for American intervention -- low footprint, low investment, and practically ignored, although like the Iraq War, also unsanctioned by the UN and actively opposed by Russia and China. They claim that the use of overwhelming force in Iraq has created a "training ground for terrorists" and that American troops only add to the recruitment of more terrorists. I expect, then, an explanation of how this differs from the recruitment and training of mujaheddin in Bosnia, where Islamists have built cells specifically to infiltrate heavily Caucasian nations for terrorist activities: In particular, Islamic radicals are looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces to watch for potential terrorists. "They want to look European to carry out operations in Europe," said a Western intelligence agent in Belgrade, the...

The Folly Of Propaganda

Sincerity, filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn once said, was the most important quality for an actor; once one learned to fake it, everything else came easy. Unfortunately, in real life credibility is a commodity that cannot withstand fakery once exposed. The question for the Pentagon in the past day is whether Army and/or Marine Corps brass have paid off Iraqi newspapers to carry articles written by American servicemen under false pretenses as news stories for the Iraqi public, trying to spin the war to American advantage: As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials...

December 3, 2005

Just Doing Business The Iraqi Way (Updated And Bump)

The military has come forward to explain its actions in the so-called propaganda scandal that erupted earlier this week, the AP reports in a late-breaking news item on ABC. Army spokesman LTC Barry Johnson told Congressional leaders and later the media that the program described in separate articles in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times had not intended for the articles in question to be offered clandestinely under anyone else's by-line. Instead, the contractor, Lincoln Group, had been tasked to pay for advertising and editorial space -- apparently the practice in the nascent Iraqi press -- and offer the articles openly as written by American military personnel to get their stories out to ordinary Iraqis: Military officials for the first time Friday detailed and broadly defended a Pentagon program that pays to plant stories in the Iraqi media, an effort the top U.S. military commander said was...

Another 72-Virgins Moment In Pakistan

The Pakistani army reports that one of Osama's lieutenants has hit his jackpot of 72 virgins Thursday after getting blown up with four of his colleagues in North Waziristan. Abu Hamza Rabia, a co-equal of Abu Faraj al-Libi in the AQ executive and rumored to be the fifth-highest ranking member of AQ, ran international operations for Osama bin Laden: Abu Hamza Rabia, an Egyptian credited with heading al Qaeda's international operations, was among five militants killed in an explosion at a house where they were hiding in North Waziristan on Thursday. Musharraf, arriving in Kuwait on an official visit, confirmed Rabia had been killed. "Yes indeed, 200 percent. I think he was killed the day before yesterday if I'm not wrong," Musharraf told reporters. While officials said the blast was caused by explosives stored in the house for bomb-making, residents said a helicopter fired rockets into the house at a...

The Flypaper Strategy Sticks Around

Kevin Brock, the Deputy Director of the new National Counterterrorism Center, told the AP that al-Qaeda has not established a "significant operational capability" in America since 9/11 -- and the only attempted AQ operation since then fell apart due to the incompetence of its cell leader. Brock also said that while the American effort to secure itself must remain vigilant due to the changing nature of the Islamist threat, the actual effort of terrorist operations have been directed elsewhere: Brock said he doesn't believe the invasion and war in Iraq can be blamed for the threat reports that come into his center each day. "That would be too simplistic," he said. "There is too much of a diverse nature to these threats." Had the U.S. not invaded Iraq, Brock said, terrorists would still carry out attacks. "But now they are mostly carried out in Iraq. That is where most of...

December 4, 2005

Rice To Europe: We're At War, You Fools

Condoleezza Rice will confront European queasiness with covert operations head-on during her tour of EU nations this week, according to the London Telegraph, by staunchly defending American transit of suspected terrorists on CIA chartered flights that sometimes refuel in EU nations. The revelation of such flights and secret detention centers in Eastern Europe caused some consternation among Europeans, who have protested the practice: Condoleezza Rice, the United States Secretary of State, will urge European governments to back off in the continuing row over alleged secret terrorist detention camps in Eastern Europe and clandestine CIA "prison plane" flights. Dr Rice, who begins a four-country European tour tomorrow, is preparing a "robust" defence of American treatment of terror suspects, as Washington belatedly comes out fighting on the controversy, senior European diplomats told the Sunday Telegraph. Although Dr Rice is keen to improve diplomatic relations with Europe, she will use her visit to...

December 7, 2005

The Brown Pants Party

In my latest Daily Standard column, I argue that the Democrats have in their desperation finally come up with a war strategy -- only they had to reach back 140 years to find it. "Rally Round the (White) Flag, Boys!" notes the discomforting and embarrassing similarities of the Democrats' current stance on the war in Iraq and their take on the Civil War in 1864: Not even during the Vietnam War did a major American party position itself to support abject retreat as a wartime political platform. For that, one has to go back to the Civil War, when the Democrats demanded a negotiated peace with the Confederate States of America and a withdrawal from the South. Celebrating the popularity of former General George McClellan, who had come from the battlefield to represent a party whose platform demanded a negotiated settlement (which McClellan later disavowed), the Confederates assumed that the...

December 8, 2005

Not One Of Langley's Finest Moments

The CIA should find itself embarrassed by the article in today's New York Sun on how CIA flights in Europe got exposed. The explanation unearthed by Josh Gerstein shows little imagination and even less care in covering the tracks of what supposedly amounted to a top-secret operation, and should concern Americans about the competence of the CIA in protecting wartime operations: In May 2004, the Swedish show reported on the CIA's involvement with the expulsion of two men from Sweden to Egypt in December 2001. The tail number of an aircraft involved in the transfer led quickly to information about at least six other occasions on which the same small Gulfstream V jet was used to move prisoners from various locations to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. "Once we had the identity of the plane, which we were able to find out in many ways - a plane...

December 9, 2005

Boston Muslim Group Major Al-Qaeda Fundraiser: Treasury Dept

The Treasury Department has identified the Islamic Society of Boston and its founder, the now-imprisoned Abdurahman Alamoudi, as major financial contributors to the al-Qaeda network and a conduit for Saudi funds to radical Islamist terrorism. The New York Sun's Meghan Clyne reports that the politically-connected Muslim group has several connections to terrorism, not just al-Qaeda -- revelations that will prove embarrassing for both political parties: In July, Alamoudi was cited in a Treasury Department press release designating the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a U.K.-based Saudi oppositionist organization, led by Saad al-Faqih, as providing material support for Al Qaeda. MIRA "received approximately $1 million in funding through Abdulrahman Alamoudi," the statement said. "According to information available to the U.S.Government," the statement continues, "the September 2003 arrest of Alamoudi was a severe blow to Al Qaeda, as Alamoudi had a close relationship with Al Qaeda and had raised money for...

Rice Gets Europe On Board War Policy, Media Shrugs

Condoleezza Rice has reversed what the media tried hard to blow up into a crisis between the US and its European partners by challenging their commitment to security and their unfounded suspicions of illegal activity by American interrogators of captured terrorists. European leaders have given Rice a resounding vote of confidence. The Washington Post dutifully reports this -- on page A16: European foreign ministers attempted to make peace with the United States on Thursday over the controversy concerning treatment of terrorism suspects, with many saying they were satisfied with visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's explanations of U.S. policy. ... Some ministers, such as Bernard Bot of the Netherlands, had indicated they still had deep concerns over U.S. policy, despite a week-long effort by Rice to defuse the tensions. But afterward, ministers reported that they were satisfied with the U.S. position. "Secretary Rice has covered basically all of our concerns,"...

Iraqis Take Another Step Towards Freedom

The Iraqis took a major step forward today towards freedom when the plain folks of Ramadi captured and handed over a major al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Amir Khalaf Fanus, known as "The Butcher of Ramadi": Iraqi citizens turned over a high-ranking Al Qaeda member known as "the Butcher" to U.S. forces in Ramadi Friday a military statement said. Amir Khalaf Fanus was No. 3 on the 28th Infantry Division's High Value Individual list for Ramadi, wanted for murder and kidnapping in connection with his affiliation with Al Qaeda in Iraq. "He is the highest ranking Al Qaeda in Iraq member to be turned into Iraqi and U.S. officials by local citizens," Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool said in a statement released from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. "His capture is another indication that the local citizens tire of the insurgents' presence within their community." The critics of the war have long...

December 10, 2005

Hamas: Peace Is Too Boring

The terrorist group Hamas, which has emerged as the most popular political group with Palestinians over the past year, has shifted its position on truce with the Israelis again. Khaled Meshaal, Hamas' leader, claims that the truce has Hamas ... well, rather bored: The leader of Hamas said Friday his group was growing weary of its pact with the Palestinian Authority to avoid conflict with Israel. "There is no room for truce. I say to our brothers in the [Palestinian] Authority that we are witnessing political stagnation," Khaled Meshaal said in a fiery speech at a rally in the Syrian capital of Damascus. "I say it loud and clear, we will not enter a new truce. Our people are preparing for a new round in this struggle," Meshaal said. Hamas much prefers blowing up women and children in pizzerias than the actual work of statecraft, ie, building political consensus and...

Will Zarqawi Stand Down During Elections?

The United States and the UK have prepared themselves for a massive security effort for the upcoming Iraqi elections, which will replace the interim government with its first democratic, constitutional four-year Assembly and executive and promote Iraq to the ranks of the liberal democracies. Some Sunni leaders think that the security effort may prove superfluous, as they have convinced themselves that even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has given up on intimidating the now-committed Sunnis from participating in the electoral process. Jonathan Steele at the Guardian reports that the same problem faces the native "insurgencies": Their candidates have been assassinated, their party offices attacked, but hopes are mounting among Iraq's Sunni Arab politicians that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, will not make a serious effort to disrupt next week's national elections. Despite threatening to block previous votes, this time the Jordanian militant, believed to be responsible for most...

Double Plus Good At The Weekly Standard

The upcoming issue of the Weekly Standard has two excellent articles that provide people with absolutely essential information on the war in Iraq. First is Stephen Hayes' report on the documents that the DIA refuses to release under a Freedom of Information Act request which appear to refute the conventional narrative of the war. Hayes has gained access to the index for these documents, but even though the documents remain unclassified, the DIA refuses to release them or to provide access for Hayes: FOR THE SECOND TIME IN recent weeks the Department of Defense has denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the program designed to review, translate, and analyze...

December 11, 2005

Native Terrorists Warn Zarqawi: Back Down For Elections

The London Telegraph reports that the Iraqi "insurgencies" may come to loggerheads this week when the Iraqis go to the polls. The native Iraqis have made it clear to the Zarqawi faction that they intend to provide a clear road for Sunni voters to cast their votes and get the representation they need in the new, regular National Assembly: Iraqi insurgents have signalled a major shift on January's parliamentary elections, urging Sunni Arabs to vote and warning al-Qa'eda militants not to attack polling stations. Ba'athist loyalists boycotted Iraq's last set of elections and intimidated would-be voters out of participation. Now guerrillas in the volatile Anbar province say they are prepared to protect voting stations from al-Qa'eda fighters. Ali Mahmoud, a former army officer and rocket specialist under Saddam's Ba'ath party, said: "We want to see a nationalist government that will have a balance of interests. So our Sunni brothers will...

December 12, 2005

Did Syria Notch Another Murder On Its Guns?

Another anti-Syrian Lebanese politician died in a car-bomb attack this morning, a day after the UN heard the latest report on the last victim of Syrian assassination, Rafik Hariri. The circumstances provide an eerie sense of deja vu in the case of this journalist-turned-MP: Gebran Tueni, a prominent politician and journalist, was among those killed in a car bomb attack in Lebanon, police have said. Mr Teuni's armoured SUV car exploded as it was driving through the mainly Christian Mekalis area of east Beirut. Three other people also died and 10 were wounded in the blast. Mr Tueni, 48, was a well-known journalist and fierce critic of Syria. He was elected to parliament in this year's election. Tueni had only just returned to Lebanon from Paris, where he had published his anti-Syrian newspaper in hiding from Assad's security forces. The 48-year-old journalist had been back in his native country for...

The Eighty Percent Lie

A new poll by ABC/Time shows that the Iraqi polling numbers tossed around by Democrats for the past month in defense of their cut-and-run "strategy" were bald-faced lies. The Oxford study underwritten by the network and news magazine determined that not only has Iraqi optimism increased dramatically throughout 2005, more than half of those polled believe that the US should stay in Iraq until Iraqi security services have been fully trained: An ABC News poll in Iraq, conducted with Time magazine and other media partners, includes some remarkable results: Despite the daily violence there, most living conditions are rated positively, seven in 10 Iraqis say their own lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve in the year ahead. Surprisingly, given the insurgents' attacks on Iraqi civilians, more than six in 10 Iraqis feel very safe in their own neighborhoods, up sharply from just 40 percent in...

December 13, 2005

Has Abbas Gotten Serious?

The Palestinian Authority has done something remarkable the past few days; they have arrested dozens of islamic Jihad operatives in response to attacks on Israel, a unique demonstration of authority that PA president Mahmoud Abbas had long avoided: Masked Palestinian security forces have arrested dozens of Islamic Jihad activists in a series of overnight raids across the West Bank in recent days — an operation the Palestinian Authority says is aimed at bringing those behind attacks on Israel to justice. However, the biggest crackdown on militants since Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas took office a year ago has netted only low-level operatives, and some suspect the goal is to appease the United States and Israel rather than crush the militant group. At the same time, analysts and Israeli security officials said the arrests have sent an important message to the Palestinians — and Israelis — that militant groups can no longer...

Has The War Turned The Corner ... At Home?

The blogosphere has long resigned itself to the lack of coverage given by the Exempt Media to positive developments in Iraq. While we have read about increasing enthusiasm for voting on the milblogs and some of the secondary professional media outlets, the market leaders such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post have almost exclusively focused on body counts and bombings while ignoring everything else. When the Gray Lady sees fit to start reporting that even the Sunni of Saddam's hometown have committed themselves to democracy in the upcoming elections, it might indicate that defeatism has finally jumped the shark: The guerrilla war found fertile ground in Tikrit, and defiant Sunni Arabs boycotted the elections in January. But turnout in the parliamentary elections on Thursday is expected to be high, reflecting the shift in attitude of many Sunni Arabs toward the American-engineered political process....

December 14, 2005

Syria: Assassinated MP A 'Dog', Says Israel Runs US

The Syrian regime of Bashar Assad will not comply with any more investigations into a continuing series of political assassinations in Lebanon of anti-Syria politicians, if the reaction of their UN ambassador gives any indication. Speaking in closed session, Fayssal Mekdad compared murdered MP Gibran Tueni to a 'dog' and blamed Israel for the suspicion under which the Assad regime finds itself: Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Fayssal Mekdad, likened slain Lebanese legislator Gibran Tueni to a dog yesterday and indicated that Israel leads American policy on his country. American and French officials, meanwhile, vowed support for Lebanon, but shied away from pushing for sanctions against Syria in the aftermath of yet another damaging report on that country's role in Lebanon. America's U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, said he would ensure that international pressure on Syria is "unrelenting." When asked why he did not refer specifically to sanctions, which the...

Europe Botching Afghanistan Duties

When we first went into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban, the action had the backing of Europe, which promised its support for the effort and its aftermath. The operation got handed to NATO in a move lauded by the American media as a model of how we should have handled Iraq. Now it appears that NATO has botched the mission, with the various European countries that pledged their support to help build the newly democratic nation reneging on their promises, according to The Scotsman: BRITAIN is set for a U-turn on its commitment to send thousands of troops to fight in Afghanistan next year, with some in the army now questioning whether the mission should be abandoned altogether. Military commanders say that lessons have not been learned from the run-up to the Iraq war and that political prevarication has left them unable to make adequate preparation for the mission,...

Nation On The Edge Of Forever

Day is dawning at this moment in Iraq -- Election Day, when the Iraqis freely select their first constitutional government in decades. Some estimate a turnout of ten million voters in the elections today, and while the biggest concerns will be about security, no one believes it will discourage anyone from making their way to the polling booth. Just the same, like a broken record, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued his traditional Election Day threat, making the even seem more official: With Iraqi exiles starting to cast their ballots, including in Zarqawi's home town of Zarqa in Jordan, a statement issued by his branch of al-Qa'eda announced "a blessed conquest to shake up the bastions of non-believers and apostates and to ruin the 'democratic' wedding of heresy and immorality". There were sporadic shooting and bombing attacks at polling stations yesterday, and several candidates have been killed in recent weeks. But overall...

December 15, 2005

Iraqis Turn Out In Droves, CNN Reports, While Negotiated Truce Holds

At this point in the Iraqi election polling, it appears that the day has provided a smashing success for democracy. Christiane Amanpour of CNN reported moments ago from Baghdad that the turnout in Sunni areas has been surprisingly high, compared to what she experienced in the last two elections. Here's a rough transcript of her report, coming at midday in Baghdad, talking live with anchor Soledad O'Brian: SO: What are you seeing there? CA: Well, Soledad, we are at a polling place at a school not far from our office here in Baghdad, which has been turned into a polling station. There are police outside, there are Iraqi Army outside. These people have been maintaining the security -- in fact, they have been sleeping at these polling stations for several days before the election. .... All day, it's been quite a steady stream of people coming to vote. In Baghdad,...

Have We Gotten The Message Now?

It will take weeks for the accurate count of votes cast in today's Iraqi elections to get finalized, but one common strain has come through in all reports during this historic day -- the Iraqis stood together as never before in their history. For a variety of reasons and motivations, all factions except the foreign terrorists of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi embraced the ballot over the bullet for the first time since the British cobbled together the nation of Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. Millions of Iraqis from all factions -- ethnic, secular, geographic -- turned out despite the dangers of the Islamofascist lunatics that would rather kill Muslims than see them vote for their own leaders, and in defiance of the skeptics around the world who claim that Iraqis simply aren't worth the bother of liberation. Look the people with purple-stained fingers in...

December 16, 2005

Palestinians Choose War, Again

As long as we're talking democracy, we can check in on the results of another recent round of elections in the Middle East. In the Palestinian territories, the results of recent municipal voting show that the terrorist group Hamas has gained significantly over the slightly-less-terrorist ruling party of Fatah. Hamas won over 70% of the vote in this last round of local elections before the parliamentary elections which will determine which set of terrorists runs the West Bank and Gaza Strip: The Hamas militant group won local elections in the West Bank's largest cities, according to preliminary results released Friday, dealing a harsh blow to the ruling Fatah party just six weeks ahead of a parliamentary poll. Hamas swept more than 70 percent of the vote in the West Bank city of Nablus, highlighting the fierce challenge posed by the group to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, which suffered...

NSA Snoops And PATRIOT Acts = 4 Years Of No Attacks?

Many in the blogosphere have commented on the two big stories of the day -- the New York Times revelation of the NSA operation to conduct warrantless wiretaps on international communications, and the filibustering of the extension of the Patriot Act. I have read the Times article in depth and read some of the commentary on the leak, including the Power Line demand that the leak get treated the same as the Valerie Plame fiasco-in-progress. I predicted the PATRIOT Act filibuster earlier this week, and considering this new story, am not surprised in the least to see it succeed. Let's review what the Times has to say on their big scoop, on which they sat until the day after the Iraqi elections: Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the...

December 17, 2005

Sunni Leader Predicts Secular Coalition For Iraq

One of the Sunni political leaders expected to compete for leadership positions in the next Assembly has predicted that Shi'ite religious parties will not win enough seats to form a government and pledged to work with secular Shi'a and Kurds to create the new executive in the first four-year Iraqi National Assembly, the AP reports this morning. He also acknowledged the efforts by native insurgents to stand down during the election to allow the political process to overtake violence, an effort that most hope will bring an end to the terrorist attacks in Iraq: A leading Sunni politician on Saturday reaffirmed his party's commitment to being part of a coalition government and thanked insurgent groups for refraining from attacks during this week's parliamentary elections. Adnan al-Dulaimi, a former Islamic studies professor who heads a Sunni Arab bloc expected to have a voice in the new National Assembly, said a power-sharing...

Those 3K Iraqis Sure Do Get Around

The three thousand trained Iraqis that Joe Biden says comprises all of the independent Iraqi security forces have a very full plate, according to the latest from the Washington Post. The American forces have already begun tasking Iraqi battaliions -- those that Biden says don't exist -- with holding territory in the most contentious parts of Iraq, and they are finding them succeeding in doing so: The U.S. military is scaling back combat forces in regions of Iraq's Sunni Triangle that were once fiercely contested, freeing thousands of troops to shift to other trouble spots or to go home without being replaced, according to senior military officials. The U.S. drawdown in parts of central Iraq is a new and important indicator of commanders' confidence in Iraqi security forces in a region long ravaged by lethal insurgent attacks. In Iraq's east-central Diyala province, for example, the U.S. military expects by next...

The FISA Act And The Definition Of 'US Persons'

One of the critical points argued in regard to President Bush's angry pushback on the NSA leak is that his executive order violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). People have the impression that FISA requires warrants from the FISA judge, but that isn't what FISA says at all. In fact, FISA gives the government wide latitude in warrantless surveillance of international communications even when one point originates in the US -- as long as the person in the US does not qualify as a "US person": (i) “United States person” means a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as defined in section 1101 (a)(20) of title 8), an unincorporated association a substantial number of members of which are citizens of the United States or aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or a corporation which is incorporated in the United States, but does not...

December 18, 2005

Sunnis Want Cooperation With US

Events in Iraq this year have convinced the Sunnis that cooperation with the United States gives them the best option for political strength in the new democracy and now want to build on the temporary truces that led to an almost violence free election this week, the Washington Times reports today. Sunni leaders understand now that they will need to participate fully in the new political structure if they hope to see the central region of Iraq freed of American soldiers, but want to negotiate their cooperation with explicit actions from American forces as well: Key Sunni Muslim leaders in Iraq's violent Anbar province have concluded that their interests lie in cooperating with the United States, and they are seeking to extend a temporary truce honored by most insurgent groups for last week's elections. But at the same time, they are demanding specific steps by the U.S. military, including a...

Powell: CIA Never Told Administration Of WMD Doubts

Colin Powell has dropped a water balloon on his friends of the Left and their "Bush Lied, People Died!" cri du coeur during a BBC interview due to be aired within hours. Mark in Mexico caught this early report of Powell's revelation that the American intelligence agencies never gave the White House any contradictory intelligence to the prevailing wisdom that Saddam Hussein had retained and hidden his WMD stocks and capability throughout the twelve-year quagmire of UN impotence, corruption, and failing containment: THE US administration was never told of doubts about the secret intelligence used to justify war with Iraq, former secretary of state Colin Powell told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday night. Mr Powell, who argued the case for military action against Saddam Hussein in the UN in 2003, told BBC News 24 television he was "deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had...

December 19, 2005

Standing Tall In Tal Afar

The London Telegraph highlights the American success in at least one previous terrorist stronghold in Iraq -- the city of Tal Afar. Americans wouldn't know this from their own media, but the Telegraph reports that Tal Afar has been transformed by the American destruction of the Zarqawi-led terrorists there, through rebuilding and cultural sensitivity that has made the Americans more popular than ever: In the low-slung concrete buildings of Tal Afar, a city built on dirty sand and mud, George W Bush sees the potential for military success in Iraq. ... In Tal Afar, according to the president, military success had been followed by the restoration of law and order and the implementation of reconstruction projects to give "hope" to its citizens. Visiting the city, nestled near the Syrian border in the north-west of the country, there is no doubt that something has been achieved. Unlike in Fallujah, another Sunni...

Who Let These Dogs Out?

Someone in the Iraqi Interior Ministry has some explaining to do, according to the AP. An Iraqi lawyer says that two dozen of Saddam's henchmen have been let out of prison and have fled the country, including two notorious leaders of Saddam's biological-weapons programs: An Iraqi lawyer said Monday that about 24 former top officials in Saddam Hussein's government have been released from jail in Iraq, and some have left the country. A legal official in Baghdad said Rihab Taha, known as "Dr. Germ," and Huda Salih Ammash, known as as "Mrs. Anthrax," were among those released. Iraqi officials did not immediately confirm the information. No other details have come out as yet. If true, it could either mean a jailbreak with help from Ba'athist sympathizers within the outgoing Iraqi government, or it could also indicate some kind of plea deal. The latter seems rather unlikely, especially since the top...

Saving The Lives Of Our Enemy

With all of the cheap talk floating around the media about how the US supposedly tortures its prisoners -- all based on the common-sense refusal of the US to tell the world what specific limits we place on interrogation -- local columnist Katherine Kersten provides us with a reminder of what it really means to be an American soldier. In her Star-Tribune article, Kersten highlights local Army medic Sgt. Joe Buhain of Rochester and his dedication to saving lives on the battlefield, regardless of which side his patients fought: What do you do if you are an Army medic and you are asked to provide medical care to an Iraqi terrorist who has just killed or maimed some of your buddies? Staff Sgt. Joe Buhain of Rochester knows the answer. ... Buhain, 35, found it emotionally taxing to treat terrorists who had detonated explosives under coalition Humvees or killed innocent...

December 20, 2005

Germany Frees Terrorist Wanted By US

The Germans continue their cluelessness in the war on terror by releasing not just any known terrorist serving out a life sentence, but one wanted by the US for the murder of a Navy diver in 1985. The AP reports that German diplomatic sources confirm the release of Mohammed Ali Hammadi back to Beirut and his Hizbollah cohorts despite an outstanding extradition request from the United States: Germany has secretly released a Hizbollah member jailed for life for killing a U.S. Navy diver and returned him to Lebanon despite an extradition request from the United States, Lebanese political sources said on Tuesday. They said Mohammad Ali Hammadi, convicted of killing Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight to Beirut and sentenced to life without parole, was flown back to Beirut last week Diplomatic sources in Germany confirmed Hammadi's release. In case anyone wonders how...

Have Islamists Begun Using Chemical Weapons?

The Scotsman reports tonight that dozens of Chechnyans have been hospitalized in what looks like a nerve-gas attack in the region where Islamists have surpassed nationalists in a terror war against the ruling Russians. As in nearby Beslan, the attack took place at a school and children comprised the bulk of the victims: AT LEAST 45 people, most of them children, have been hospitalised in the Russian region of Chechnya with an illness that doctors say might be nerve-gas poisoning. Pupils, teachers and workers began reporting breathing trouble and headaches on Friday at a school in the town of Starogladovskaya, emergency workers said. As of yesterday, 38 children and seven teachers had been hospitalised, said Oleg Ugnivenko, a spokesman for emergency situations ministry. Preliminary investigation points to an unspecified kind of nerve gas, said emergency workers and Chechen government officials. This preliminary report, if confirmed, will certainly cause many people...

December 21, 2005

Hamadi Held In Beirut

In a move proving that the new government of Lebanon has more sense and more courage than Berlin, the terrorist that tortured and killed an American Navy diver in 1985 got arrested almost immediately on his arrival. Acting in concert with US intelligence, Lebanese officials detained Mohammed Ali Hamadi and will hold him while they consider a request for his extradition to the US: The Lebanese killer of a U.S. Navy diver was in custody in Beirut yesterday, according to U.S. officials who decried his release from a German prison last week and pledged to bring him to the United States for trial. ... Kenneth Stethem, the petty officer's older brother, called the release "absolute injustice," and called on the Bush administration to "bring to bear all of its resources to demand an explanation from the German government as to why he was released." U.S. and German officials said Berlin...

Undermining The War Effort

My new Daily Standard column, "Fit to Print?", focuses on the New York Times' supposed scoop that the NSA intercepts foreign communications, blowing a top-secret program that formed a vital part of American defense against terrorist attacks. They followed it up with yet another "scoop" that the FBI investigates domestic terrorism. Unless the Gray Lady plans another "scoop" about how the Highway Patrol conducts warrantless searches when it conducts field-sobriety checkpoints, I'd say it has run out of material for its anti-Bush smears at the moment. Why did the Times decide to run with this story, after sitting on it for a year? The Times editors must be asking themselves that question after seeing legal experts shred their arguments about domestic spying, but also by the reaction from the President himself: ... With the Patriot Act up for renewal, the current headlines finally provided a political context that would make...

Zarqawi Starts Arranging Next Front For Al-Qaeda

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may have seen the writing on the wall in Iraq and started looking for greener pastures -- or perhaps more yellow. As the Iraqis increasingly take the terrorists on themselves, Zarqawi has decided to open a more promising front: A wave of arrests across Europe has thrown new light on a European terrorist network being developed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most prominent insurgent in Iraq. A growing number of terrorism investigations in Britain, Germany, Bosnia, Denmark and most recently Spain and France are linked to the man who has masterminded countless suicide bombings in Iraq, personally beheaded hostages and bombed three hotels in his native Jordan. Some of the suspected networks appear to be involved only in supporting his operations in Iraq. But counter-terrorism officials are worried that Zarqawi could be planning to use his base in Iraq to start attacking Europe. Security officials are particularly...

December 22, 2005

Hamadi Bails Out Of Beirut Custody

The long wait for American justice for the murder of Robert Stethem will have to go longer, it seems. Lebanese officials released Stethem's torturer and murderer from their custody yesterday, noting the lack of extradition between Lebanon and the US: U.S. officials yesterday said the killer of a U.S. Navy diver had been released from "temporary custody" in Lebanon but refused to rule out bringing him to the United States by force. ... Hamadi, a member of the Hezbollah guerrilla group, was taken into custody upon returning to Lebanon after his release from a German prison Thursday. He had served 18 years for hijacking a TWA plane to Beirut and fatally shooting Petty Officer 2nd Class Stethem, who was 23 when he was killed. "What I can assure anybody who's listening, including Mr. Hamadi, is that we will track him down, we will find him, and we will bring him...

December 23, 2005

Daschle: Democrats Clueless On 9/12, Too

Former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle writes an op-ed in today's Washington Post (which the Post covers as a news item on page A04, just in case its readers miss it) claiming that the declaration of war granted to Bush after 9/11 specifically limited his war powers. It's a must-read, if only to demonstrate that either the Democrats have to be the worst historical revisionists still received by polite society or have been truly clueless about the nature of the war on Islamofascist terror since its start. Daschle actually makes a case for both in his essay: On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to...

Rumsfeld: Starting The Stand-Down

Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Fallujah to address the American troops now holding the once-notorious insurgent stromghold, proclaiming enough progress had been made that the baseline American deployment to Iraq would decrease to 15 brigades, rather than the 17 brigades delpoyed prior to the increased election security details: Just days after Iraq's elections, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday announced the first of what is likely to be a series of U.S. combat troop drawdowns in Iraq in 2006. Rumsfeld, addressing U.S. troops at this former insurgent stronghold, said President Bush has authorized new cuts below the 138,000 level that has prevailed for most of this year. Rumsfeld did not reveal the exact size of the troop cut, but Pentagon officials have said it could be as much as 7,000 combat troops. The Pentagon has not announced a timetable for troop reductions, but indications are that the force could be...

December 26, 2005

Terrorism, Russian-Style?

Dozens of Russian shoppers fell ill in St. Petersburg shops when gas canisters with timing devices released a garlic-smelling gas, but Russian authorities insist that the attack does not constitute terrorism: A gas smelling of garlic hurt dozens of Russian shoppers when it was released into a supermarket on Monday in the city of St Petersburg, but police ruled out a terrorist attack. Two other shops of the handyman store chain Maksidom were evacuated at the height of the pre-New Year shopping period, after rescue workers found two other suspicious canisters fitted with timing devices. Local media quoted officials as saying the gas was probably released by criminals trying to blackmail the stores' managers. They ruled out an attack such as those launched by Chechen rebels against civilians. ... Local media quoted prosecutors as saying the gas was methyl mercaptan, a compound added to domestic gas to give it its...

Have The Russians Started The Great Game Again?

The London Telegraph reports that MI-6 may have kidnapped Pakistani nationals in Greece after the London subway bombings this summer. Media reports have already forced the Greek intelligence services to recall agents from Kosovo, and the alleged victims have named a high-level British diplomat who may face the same fate: Amid growing controversy, the magazine Proto Thema said at the weekend that those who took part in the alleged abductions included a man listed as a senior diplomat at the British embassy in Athens as well as several named Greek officials. A Government "D" notice requests British newspapers not to name MI6 officers, even if they are identified abroad. However, the name given by Proto Thema matches that of a man identified as a British intelligence officer on the internet and in allegations made by the renegade MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson. ... Seven of the 28 Pakistanis have testified before...

December 27, 2005

More Genocide Evidence Found In Iraq

The BBC reports that yet more evidence of Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Shi'a came to light today, as workers attempting to restore water service to Karbala discovered a mass grave containing the remains of men, women, and children. The grave contains what the BBC refers to as "rebels" from the 1991 uprisings against Hussein following the defeat of Saddam's forces in Kuwait, but one has to wonder why they would call the children rebels: A mass grave has been discovered in the predominantly Shia city of Karbala south of Baghdad, Iraqi police said. Dozens of bodies have reportedly been found, apparently those of Shia rebels killed by Saddam Hussein's army after its defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. The Shia revolt was crushed and as many as 30,000 people were killed, many of them buried in mass graves. The remains were uncovered by workmen digging a new water pipe...

Poland Stands By The Coalition

A hearty round of applause, please, for our allies in Poland who understand the necessity of guarding freedom and democracy. Despite an earlier indication that the Poles would stick to a withdrawal timetable that would have seen their 1500-troop contingent leave Iraq within a few weeks, Poland announced instead that it would maintain its forces in Iraq throughout 2006 in keeping with a request from the new Iraqi government: Poland's government says it has taken the "very difficult decision" to extend its military deployment in Iraq until the end of 2006. The new conservative government's decision reverses the previous leftist administration's plan to pull troops out in early 2006. Poland, a staunch ally of the US, has about 1,500 troops stationed in Iraq. ... But Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, elected in October's parliamentary elections, has asked the Polish president to keep them there for another year. "This is a...

December 28, 2005

Who Didn't See This Coming?

After the release of hostage Susanne Osthoff -- and her return to Iraq after the Germans negotiated for her freedom -- the market has suddenly turned brisk for German hostages: A former German ambassador to Washington and four members of his family were reported missing and apparently kidnapped Wednesday while vacationing in a remote part of Yemen. It was the latest in a string of tourist abductions in the Arabian desert. Juergen Chrobog, ambassador from 1995 to 2001, his wife and three adult sons were declared missing by the German Foreign Ministry. In Yemen, government officials said the family had been taken hostage by tribesmen who regularly seize Western tourists as bargaining chips in dealings with the government, according to news service reports from Sanaa, the capital. Great move, Germany. I think you're about to learn a hard lesson in market economics as well as the folly in negotiating with...

December 29, 2005

UN: Iraq Vote Valid

The American-led effort to conduct the election in Iraq has produced a valid, democratic result according to UN election monitors, dealing the Sunnis a blow in their efforts to extort more seats than they won at the ballot box from nervous Shi'ite and Kurds. The New York Times reports that the UN has declared that there exists no justification for any re-run: Craig Jenness, a Canadian who led the United Nations' election coordination effort in Iraq, said his agency believed that the elections "were transparent and credible." He added that although all complaints must be weighed thoroughly, "we at the U.N. see no justification in calls for a rerun of the elections." The assertion, made at a news conference in Baghdad, brought bitter denunciations from some Sunni Arab political leaders, who swore to continue pressing their claims that ballot box stuffing and other fraud had distorted the election results. ......

December 30, 2005

Losing Their Position

The Saddam regime had long adopted the Palestinian cause as a means of championing a pan-Arabic political movement, one that he thought would carry him to the throne of a secular caliphate that would control Southwest Asia and North Africa. He paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and feted Palestinians inside Iraq as well, giving them privileges he denied to native Iraqis. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the Palestinians cheered -- and when the US ejected him from Kuwait and eventually from power, the Palestinians protested. Now they complain that life has gotten much more difficult without their patron to give them their customary handouts: For years, Saddam Hussein harbored a small population of Palestinians in Iraq, trotting them out to cheer whenever he went to war -- which he routinely justified as essential to Arab nationalism and the Palestinian cause. Shiites and other Iraqis looked glumly at his wards,...

Justice Department To Follow Plame Precedent

"The fact is that al Qaeda's playbook is not printed on Page One and when America's is, it has serious ramifications. You don't need to be Sun Tzu to understand that." -- Thomas Duffy, White House spokesman The New York Times will soon wish it hadn't pushed so hard for a criminal investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame's identity on the basis of national security violations. The Justice Department has now decided to act on the NYT's publication of a top-secret NSA program in exactly the same manner for much clearer damage to national security, and the NYT's James Risen and Eric Lichtblau find themselves in the Judith Miller Hotseat in this case: The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the disclosure of classified information about a domestic surveillance program authorized by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, officials said today. Justice prosecutors will examine whether...

December 31, 2005

Rendition Started Under Clinton

After months of debate about the Bush administration's supposed support of torture through the "rendition" policy of sending captured terrorists to their nations of origin for questioning, it turns out that the policy did not start with the Bush administration after all. Former CIA operative and now-author Michael Scheuer, who wrote a lengthy criticism of the Bush administration's war policy in 2003 in part for not being aggressive enough, has revealed that the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" policy began in 1995 under President Clinton: The CIA's controversial "rendition" program to have terror suspects captured and questioned on foreign soil was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counterterrorism agent told a German newspaper. Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way...

Syrian VP Confirms Assad Threatened Hariri

Former Syrian VP Abdel-Halim Khaddam confirmed in an interview yesterday with al-Arabiya that Bashar Assad threatened to "break Lebanon" on the head of Rafik Hariri after the latter refused to submit to orders to circumvent Lebanese law and extend President Emile Lahoud's term of office. Khaddam makes clear that Assad and his security advisors made numerous threats to Hariri during the meeting, which upset the Lebanese billionaire and patriot so much that he left with a nosebleed: The meeting in Damascus referred to by Mr. Khaddam occurred on Aug. 26, 2004, when Mr. Assad bluntly ordered that the Lebanese Parliament amend the Constitution to extend the term of his ally, President Émile Lahoud. Mr. Hariri, a billionaire who had almost single-handedly rebuilt the center of Beirut after 15 years of civil war, objected. The meeting lasted just 15 minutes. According to both the United Nations report and previous accounts by...

January 1, 2006

Open Season On Hostage Appeasers In Yemen

A pattern appears to have developed among hostage-takers in the Middle East -- a growth in market-based decisions, if you will. Yemeni tribesman have discovered that it pays to kidnap people whose governments cut deals with terrorists in order to free hostages. The latest example comes just hours after the Germans negotiated the release of a former diplomat and his family. Now tribesman have kidnapped a group of five Italians and expect the Yemeni government to negotiate their release: Tribesmen kidnapped five Italians in northern Yemen on Sunday, a day after the government negotiated the release of five Germans held hostage, security officials said. The Italians were kidnapped just hours after Yemen's president pledged to hunt down the "outlaws" taking hostages. The Italians were seized in the northern province of Ma`rib, security officials said. The kidnappers belonged to the al-Zaydi tribe and wanted the government to release eight tribal members...

More Desperation At The Gray Lady

The New York Times leads with yet another update on its NSA-intercept program, which has shown more holes than substance once subjected to review. Its latest installment proves no different, as the paper attempts to pump a bit of adrenaline back into the story with the breathless headline, "Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program". It sounds very damning, until readers make it through the entire article -- and realize that Eric Lichtblau and James Risen once again fail to even allege a single act of wrongdoing. Here's the core of the story: A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of...

Scheuer-Die Zeit Interview Translated

Melchior at Simplicius Redivivus has begun translating the entire Die Zeit interview with former CIA operative Michael Scheuer, and has posted part one of five at his blog. Melchior has read the entire interview and alerts me that the DZ chat gives a significantly different view of the rendition program than what has been reported by the American media: ZEIT: Who invented the system of "extraordinary renditions"? Scheuer: President Clinton, his security advisor Sandy Berger, and his terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tasked the CIA in Fall 1995 with destroying al-Qaida. We asked the President: what should we do with the people we've apprehended? Clinton: that's your concern. The CIA objected: we aren't prison guards. We were again told that we should solve the problem somehow. So we developed a procedure, and I was a member of this task force. We concentrated on al-Qaida members who were wanted in their home...

The Triangle Strategy End Game

Predictably, the Palestinians have called an end to the "truce" with Israel as the latter has continued to respond to the provocations supplied by Islamic Jihad. In this case, however, the notorious triangle strategy of the Palestinians has backfired on Mahmoud Abbas, as his own al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has betrayed his leadership and aligned itself with Islamic Jihad: Palestinian armed groups ended a year-long truce with Israel yesterday in a move which could lead to new violence and derail elections in the West Bank and Gaza already threatened by lawlessness and political infighting. The so-called "cool down" by militants has been frequently interrupted by rocket attacks launched from Gaza, and Islamic Jihad has continued to carry out suicide bombings on Israeli targets. From the Israeli side, the "cool down" or truce has been non-existent. IJ terrorists have launched rockets from Gaza since Fatah and Hamas supposedly agreed to stop the...

January 3, 2006

Sunnis And Kurds Near Political Arrangement

The growth of political dealmakiing grows in Iraq, as the largest Sunni group announced that it had reached preliminary agreement with the Kurds to create a framework for a coalition government, one they could implement as soon as the election commissions review the voting process from last month' elections. The move would provide either a sizable addition to a coalition government, or a stable opposition bloc to the Shi'ite plurality within the National Assembly and could induce the insurgency to recede as Sunni influence in the new government grows: The largest Sunni Arab political group in Iraq unexpectedly moved toward agreement with Kurdish leaders Monday on a broad framework for a coalition government. The group, the Iraqi Consensus Front, said it would abandon claims that national elections last month had been rigged once international election monitors finish their review of the allegations. The move drew a rebuke from other Sunni...

Congress Told Of Expanded NSA Efforts In 2001

Despite recent protestations of Congressional outrage over the NSA program to intercept international communications from known and suspected al-Qaeda assets inside and outside of the US, it turns out that more members of Congress were told of the program than have let on. General Michael Hayden briefed members of both intelligence committees in October 2001 specifically to detail how the NSA would expand its reach in regards to FISA -- and the only concern given at the time was whether the NSA had gotten the proper presidential authority to proceed: Congressional intelligence committees had at least a hint in October 2001 that the National Security Agency was expanding its surveillance activities after the 9/11 attacks, according to a letter released Tuesday by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. The California Democrat had raised questions to Gen. Michael Hayden, then the NSA director, about the legal authority to conduct the eavesdropping work....

January 4, 2006

Palestinian Gratitude

After having their daughter give her life in a misguided attempt to assist Palestinians in keeping their weapon-transit tunnels open, Rachel Corrie's parents might have labored under a perception that the Palestinians might have some gratitude for their sacrifice ... or at least prove themselves worthy of her death on their behalf. Instead, to show just how civilized they can act when they have their own territory, members of the ruling Fatah faction tried to kidnap the Corries as they also blew up part of the Gaza-Sinai border, killing two guards: PALESTINIAN society disintegrated further yesterday as gunmen from the ruling Fatah movement tried to kidnap the parents of an American activist who died trying to halt the demolition of Gaza homes, while other militants destroyed part of Gaza's border wall with Egypt - killing two guards. Both actions, and the takeover of seven government offices in the town of...

January 7, 2006

Saddam Trained Terrorists By The Thousands

Stephen Hayes continues his signal work on behalf of Americans, pressing a recalcitrant government to fully disclose the millions of documents uncovered in Iraq that paint quite a different picture of the Saddam regime than the media has reported. Finally able to gain access to the data but not the documents, Hayes writes in this week's Weekly Standard that the US has plenty of evidence that Saddam had deep connections with terrorists -- having trained thousands of them himself: THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials. The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra,...

January 12, 2006

The Split Widens

The German magazine Der Spiegel reports today on the developing factional rift between the different insurgent groups in Iraq. Increasingly, the native insurgents have concentrated their efforts not against the Americans but against the foreign-based terrorists of al-Qaeda, having belatedly come to the conclusion that the true danger of long-term foreign domination comes from Zarqawi's lunatics: [T]he split within the insurgency is coinciding with Sunni Arabs' new desire to participate in Iraq's political process, and a growing resentment of the militants. Iraqis are increasingly saying that they regard Al Qaeda as a foreign-led force, whose extreme religious goals and desires for sectarian war against Iraq's Shiite majority override Iraqi tribal and nationalist traditions. ... According to an American and an Iraqi intelligence official, as well as Iraqi insurgents, clashes between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Iraqi insurgent groups like the Islamic Army and Muhammad's Army have broken out in Ramadi,...

January 13, 2006

#2 AQ BBQ Residue?

American media sources report that al-Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may have been killed in an attack on a suspected AQ safe house in Pakistan earlier this evening. Estimates of the dead after the American air strike on the compound in Damadola, a remote village near the Afghan border where both he and Osama bin Laden had been rumored to have hidden themselves away from both US and Pakistani forces. ABC News reports: Today, according to Pakistani military sources, U.S. aircraft attacked a compound known to be frequented by high-level al Qaeda operatives. Pakistani officials tell ABC News that al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, may have been among them. U.S. intelligence for the last few days indicated that Zawahiri might have been in the location or about to arrive, although there is still no confirmation from U.S. officials that he was among the victims....

January 14, 2006

AQ #2 Not Residue, Locals Say

The AP reports that two senior Pakistani officials now say that the people killed in the missile attack on Damadola were locals, not AQ leadership, and that the attack resulted from mistaken intel. The forensics on the bodies that were retrieved have not yet been completed, but the locals claim that the dead were a family of jewelers and not AQ terrorists: Al-Qaida's second-in-command was the target of a U.S. airstrike near the Afghan border but he was not at the site of the attack, two senior Pakistani officials said Saturday. At least 17 people were killed. ... The senior Pakistani officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that the CIA had acted on incorrect information, and Ayman al-Zawahri was not in the northwestern village of Damadola when it came under attack. Al-Zawahri is ranked No. 2 in the al-Qaida terror network, second only to Osama bin Laden. "Their information...

Is AQ An Equal Opportunity Employer?

One of the documents revealed yesterday in the case of Jose Padilla, now that his case has been transferred to civilian court, was an application to join al-Qaeda. The government found his application -- known to AQ as a "mujaheddin data form" -- in Afghanistan shortly after the October 2001 invasion that pushed the Taliban from power and set AQ leadership running for the hills. It comprises one part of the evidence that the DoD is willing to use publicly in order to gain a conviction against Padilla for conspiracy to commit terrorism: After the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to oust its Taliban rulers, authorities found a locker full of applications to join al Qaeda's holy war overseas. Among the alleged applicants: José Padilla, the former ''enemy combatant'' who once lived in Broward County. A prosecutor produced the alleged document for the first time Thursday in Miami federal court, where...

January 16, 2006

Non-Fatal Combat Casualties Down Over A Quarter In 2005

USA Today reports that a key measure of combat dropped significantly in Iraq last year, showing that the number of attacks on US troops fell significantly in Iraq between 2004 and 2005: The number of U.S. troops wounded in Iraq fell by more than a quarter in 2005 from a year earlier, Pentagon records show. Military officials call that a sign that insurgent attacks have declined in the face of elections and stronger Iraqi security forces. The number of wounded dropped from 7,990 in 2004 to 5,939, according to the Defense Department. There hasn't been much change in the number of deaths, however. Pentagon figures show 844 U.S. troops were killed in the Iraq war during 2005, compared with 845 in 2004. The DoD attributes the steady number of combat deaths with the use of more sophisticated and powerful bombs by the enemies in Iraq. These result in more deaths...

Katzenbach Wants To Disarm America For Repentance Of His Own Sins

Today's LA Times contains an essay from former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, writing on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day to do penance for his sins against the martyred civil-rights leader. It is a curious kind of penance, however, that rationalizes Katzenbach's sins while forcing the entire nation to do his penance for him. Katzenbach played a key role in the FBI tapping of King's telephones in the 1960s, but now -- forty years afterwards -- wants to eliminate wiretaps altogether while we're at war with Islamist terrorists: In October 1963, Hoover requested Atty. Gen. Kennedy to approve a wiretap on King's telephone. At that time, taps had to be approved by the attorney general and did not require court approval in the form of a warrant. The basis for the tap was King's close association with Stanley Levison, who Hoover said was a prominent member of the Communist...

January 18, 2006

Pakistanis Concede Terrorists Among Damadola Dead

The Pakistanis now concede that despite its initial denials, the airstrike on the house in Damadola from unmanned CIA drones killed a number of AQ terrorists that had come to dinner in the village of Damadola. At first they insisted that the dead comprised nothing but local civilians, but yesterday changed their claim: The provincial government said Tuesday that in addition to 18 civilians, four or five foreign militants were killed by the American airstrikes on the village of Damadola on Friday, but that their bodies were removed from the scene by companions. In all, 10 to 12 militants had been invited to a dinner in the village that night, it said. The findings, the first official statement that militants had been among those killed, were from a preliminary joint investigation at the scene by government agencies. The initial investigation found the attack was "directed against some foreign terrorists who...

The Bomb Maker Who Missed Dessert

After the CIA dropped a bomb on a compound in Damadola, Pakistani sources tried to play off that the American attack had killed a family of jewelers as they sat down to dinner. Tonight we find out that one of the gems who didn't make it to dessert was none other than chief al-Qaeda WMD and explosives expert Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, the terrorist leader who trained shoe bomber Richard Reid: ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe that al Qaeda's master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week's U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan. Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was identified by Pakistani authorities as one of four known major al Qaeda leaders present at an apparent terror summit in the village of Damadola early last Friday morning. The United States...

January 19, 2006

Osama Bin Trucin'

Osama bin Laden finally came up for air this afternoon with an audio tape that alternately threatened and cajoled the American people to end the war on terror. Bin Laden claimed that attack preparations continue to proceed apace regardless of our efforts to stop them, but offered a "long-term truce" if we promised to withdraw from the Middle East and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan: Osama bin Laden warned in an audiotape aired Thursday that his fighters are preparing new attacks in the United States but offered the American people a "long-term truce" without specifying the conditions. ... The CIA has authenticated the voice on the tape as that of bin Laden, an agency official said. The al-Qaida leader is believed to be hiding in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Beyond confirming that bin Laden remains alive, the tape could be aimed at projecting an image of strength to...

January 20, 2006

The DoJ Defends The Administration On Intercepts

Raw Story acquired a draft of an official Department of Justice memorandum that gives the legal justifications for the warrantless NSA intercepts authorized by the President. Raw Story has the PDF as a link on its site, but in the interest of splitting the bandwidth investment, I'll host it here as well. Readers who have followed the story here as well as at Power Line or The Volokh Conspiracy won't find anything terribly surprising, but those who have not followed the actual legal arguments might find themselves surprised just how much supporting precedent exists for the authorization and subsequent approvals by the Attorney General. The text of the summary includes these arguments: As the President has explained, since shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he has authorized the National Security Agency (“NSA”) to intercept international communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al...

Jawa Report Celebrates 2nd Blogiversary ... In Style

How many weblogs get a chance to celebrate an anniversary by helping to catch a would-be Islamist terrorist? Well ... at least one! Congratulations, Rusty, and happy 2nd blogiversary!...

Is This Zawahiri's Eulogy?

A Islamist website posted an audiotape today of a recording by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the first since a Hellfire missile took out at least three of his lieutenants last week. A new tape would have confirmed a miss against the attack's primary target, but the tape contains no references to current events. In fact, the only references made in the tape were to martyrs of the battles that immediately followed 9/11 and from the invasion of Iraq in 2003: An audiotape from al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, was posted Friday on an Islamic Web site, but U.S. officials said the recording does not appear to have been made recently and may even date back years. In the audiotape, al-Zawahri read a poem praising "martyrs of holy war" in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. The tape made no mention of a Jan. 13 U.S. airstrike in Pakistan that was targeting al-Zawahri and...

January 21, 2006

Iraq Elections Force Compromise

As expected, the Shi'ites have won an overwhelming plurality in the National Assembly from their elections last month, but failed to carry an outright majority. Instead, Iraqi political leaders will try to fashion a national-unity coalition that includes Shi'ites, Kurds, and Sunnis, the latter of whom imrpoved their showing to finish second: The first official results in Iraq's landmark December elections showed Friday that the Shiite and Kurdish coalitions once again dominated the voting, but came up just short of the two-thirds majority needed to form a government on their own. Sunni Arab parties won 58 of the new Parliament's 275 seats - the second-largest bloc of seats - giving them a much stronger political voice than they had before. That raised hopes that the Sunnis, who dominate the insurgency, might choose the political process over violence, and underscored the looming question of what role they would play as Iraq's...

January 22, 2006

US To Pakistan: Either You Do It Or We Will

The US intends on sending Pakistani PM Shaukat Aziz back home with a message that should have been clear from the action two weeks ago in Damadola -- either Pakistan has to get serious about taking out al-Qaeda leadership or we will do the job ourselves, regardless of national borders: US leaders are expected to call for more intensive efforts by Pakistan to flush out Osama bin Laden in meetings with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz here this week. Believed hiding in northwestern Pakistan, Al-Qaeda chief bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri taunted President George W. Bush last week in new messages, glorifying the terror network's bloody actions and warning of more to come. ... Another US concern is the jump in suicide bombings and roadside blasts in Afghanistan, attributed to an influx of foreign militants across the Pakistan border, said Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a private US intelligence firm....

January 24, 2006

Bush Offered Blair An Out For Iraq

George Bush offered Tony Blair a pass on participating in the invasion and liberation of Iraq, afraid of the political effect it would have on the British PM's stability, Bush revealed yesterday in a speech at Kansas State University. The London Telegraph reports on Bush's statement for the benefit of British voters: President George W Bush has revealed he offered Tony Blair the chance not go to war in Iraq, but the Prime Minister turned it down. Mr Bush said he made the offer amid concerns about the stability of the Labour Government in the months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. "He [Blair] was worried about his Government and so was I, and I told him one time, 'I don't want your Government to fall, and if you're worried about it just go ahead and pull out of the coalition so you save your Government'," said Mr...

Europe Finds Nothing But What It Reads In The Papers

An investigative panel researching the supposed "rendition centers" in Europe alleged by American newspapers has turned up no evidence of their existence -- but still filed a report consisting of newspaper clippings from the US to support continuing their efforts, a report that even Europe couldn't countenance: An inquiry by the Council of Europe into allegations that the C.I.A. has operated secret detention centers in Eastern Europe has turned up no evidence that such centers ever existed, though the leader of the inquiry, Dick Marty, said there are enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation. The report added, however, that it was "highly unlikely" that European governments were unaware of the American program of renditions, in which terrorism suspects were either seized in or transferred through Europe to third countries where they may have been tortured. Drawing from news reports, Mr. Marty contended that "more than a hundred" detainees have...

January 25, 2006

Palestinians Split Vote Between Terrorist Organizations

It's not like the Palestinians gave themselves much in the way of choice for their first Parliamentary elections in ten years, but in a surprise, the hardline Hamas terrorists took a bigger slice of the vote from the more moderate terrorists of Fatah in today's vote. Exit polling shows that Hamas will likely trail Fatah by a handful of seats in the new assembly, forcing the new government into the uncomfortable position of adding Hamas to its cabinet when most peacebrokers consider them part of the problem: Hamas fared better than expected in Palestinian elections Wednesday, exit polls showed, raising the prospect that the ruling Fatah Party might be forced to form a coalition with the Islamic militant group that calls for Israel's destruction. The outcome could put Mideast peacekeeping at risk. Fatah had said before the first parliamentary contest in a decade that it would rather team with small...

January 26, 2006

Welcome To War

Exit polling turned out to be optimistic for the now-defunct Palestinian Authority, dominated by Fatah since its founding by Yasser Arafat. The supposedly reformed terrorist kept the government as a sinecure for his PLO comrades, and made sure that any elections held in the occupied territories only served to confirm his power and that of his faction, Fatah. Those days are over. Hamas has won a majority in yesterday's election, taking perhaps as many as 80 seats in the new Parliament, and claiming a mandate for its insistence on armed conflict with Israel: Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei has announced his resignation, saying Hamas must form the next government following the parliamentary elections. ... Hours before official results were due to be released, Fatah officials privately admitted that Hamas had won. Hamas claimed it had won at least 70 seats in the 132-member parliament, while EU election observer Richard Howitt...

How Many Buttons Will This Story Push?

Colombian authorities have broken up a counterfeit ring that manufactured passports for al-Qaeda and Hamas terrorists, used by the lunatics to enter the United States, according to the Colombian attorney general in charge of the investigation. The first hint that the ring existed came when three Iraqis traveled to Colombia on faked Israeli passports in 2002: Colombia has dismantled a false passport ring with links to al-Qaida and Hamas militants, the acting attorney general said Thursday after authorities led dozens of simultaneous raids across five cities. The gang allegedly supplied an unknown number of citizens from Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and other countries with false passports and Colombian nationality without them ever stepping foot in the country. An undisclosed number of those arrested are wanted for working with the al-Qaida terror network and the militant Palestinian group Hamas, said acting Attorney General Jorge Armando Otalora. The counterfeit Colombian, Spanish, Portugese...

January 28, 2006

Hamas: No, We Weren't Kidding

As the world pontificated about how the responsibility of governing would prove a moderating influence for Hamas and that the West would wind up having to come to terms with the terrorists as statesmen. The only fly in that ointment is Hamas itself, which had to reaffirm today for the doubters that, once again, it really does hate Israel and wants to see it destroyed: Militants from Fatah and Hamas capped a tense and emotional day with violent clashes on Friday, while a Hamas leader said the group had no intention of recognizing Israel's right to exist or changing its charter, which calls for Israel's destruction. "Why are we going to recognize Israel?" said the leader, Mahmoud Zahar. "Is Israel going to recognize the right of return of Palestinian refugees? Is Israel going to recognize Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital?" ... Until now, Hamas has refused to take part...

...And Generalissimo Franco Is Still Dead

The AP updates us on the process of moderation that Hamas has undertaken: Following their resounding election victory, the Islamic militants of Hamas met the question of whether they will change their stripes with a loud "no": no recognition of Israel, no negotiations, no renunciation of terror. But the world holds out hope that international pressure can make them more moderate. At stake is the future of Mideast peacemaking, billions of dollars in aid and the Palestinians' relationship with Israel, the United States and Europe. Hamas' victory — winning 76 of 132 parliament seats in Wednesday's election — has created a dizzying power shift in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, overturning certitudes and highlighting the failure by Palestinian leaders, Israel and the international community to ease growing desperation in the Palestinian territories. The AP gets its editorial voice into a news report with that last paragraph, blaming Israel and...

January 29, 2006

If It Walks Like A Duck ...

The Arlington police department has a strange idea of what terrorism means, according to this report from the Star-Telegram. Police found two "sophisticated" pipe bombs in a hotel room rented by a man who died in an Arlington hospital, but deny that the man was a terrorist. CQ readers can make up their minds from this description: Management at the InTown Suites, an extended-stay hotel in the 1700 block of Oak Village Boulevard, called 911 about 6 p.m. Friday to report a duffel bag filled with ammunition and two pipe bombs in the room of a man who died at an Arlington hospital about two days ago, Deputy Fire Marshal Darin Niederhaus said. ... The pipe bombs were about 15 inches long, about 3 inches in diameter and connected to each other by 10 to 12 feet of wire. The bombs were filled with black powder, gunshot pellets and enough...

Munich Mastermind: 'I Regret Nothing'

One of the first terrorist attacks to achieve global attention came in 1972 at the Munich Olympics, when Palestinian terrorists held 11 Israeli athletes hostage for two days, trying to pressure Israel into freeing captured comrades. The incident ended tragically, with all 11 Israelis murdered by their captors at the airport during a botched attempt to rescue them. The man who organized the terrorist attack, Mohammad Oudeh, told a German that he doesn't have any remorse for his acts: A former Palestine Liberation Organization guerrilla who was one of the masterminds of the 1972 terrorist attack on the Munich Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed said he "regrets nothing" about the incident. Speaking to Germany's Spiegel TV in an interview released Saturday, Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud, said it was up to Palestinians to "fight as long as it takes Israel to recognize our rights." "I...

January 30, 2006

Why Don't We Just Give Each Other A Big Hug?

John Arquilla, identified as a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, CA, demonstrated an almost childlike naiveté in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday. He argues that Osama bin Laden sincerely offered us a truce, and that we should have gladly accepted it: When the audiotaped proposal was made 10 days ago, the White House dismissed it out of hand. That was a politically logical move, given the need to appear tough on terror at all times. An image of strength and determination may be particularly important in the months ahead because Republican Party leaders have put security issues at the heart of their 2006 congressional election campaign strategy. But there are reasons why bin Laden's overture should be carefully weighed and thoughtfully debated. The moral imperative that should drive us is a sincere desire to end the long suffering of the people...

Forgetting The Lessons

Debra Burlingame, the sister of one of the pilots murdered on 9/11, writes in today's OpinionJournal about the way we have changed our attitude about 9/11 and the failures of law enforcement and intelligence to "connect the dots" that could have prevented part or all of the terrorist plot. She rails against the politicization of the PATRIOT Act and the NSA intercept program, which the 9/11 Commission not long ago called on the administration to provide: The Senate will soon convene hearings on renewal of the Patriot Act and the NSA terrorist surveillance program. A minority of senators want to gamble with American lives and "fix" national security laws, which they can't show are broken. They seek to eliminate or weaken anti-terrorism measures which take into account that the Cold War and its slow-moving, analog world of landlines and stationary targets is gone. The threat we face today is a...

Hamas: Send Us Money, But Don't Tell Us What To Do

Hamas made a plea today for continued funding of the Palestinian government it now heads by Western nations, but refused to reconsider its stand on the destruction of Israel: A Hamas leader asked the international community on Monday not to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority, insisting the money would go toward helping the Palestinian people and Hamas was willing to have its spending monitored. ... He spoke ahead of Monday's meeting of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators — the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — to discuss the repercussions of Hamas' election victory. The United States and European nations have said they will cut off aid to a Hamas-led government unless the group recognizes Israel, renounces violence and adheres to interim peace deals with Israel. ... Haniyeh urged the West to reconsider cutting off aid, saying it must recognize the result of the...

February 1, 2006

Egypt To Hamas: Recognize Israel

Egypt has stepped into the Palestinian morass with both feet today, warning Hamas that they expect the election winners to recognize Israel and adhere to previous accords -- and they have instructed Mahmoud Abbas to delay asking Hamas to form a new government until Hamas agrees: Two top Egyptian officials called on Hamas to recognize Israel, disarm and honor past peace deals Wednesday, the latest sign Arab governments are pushing the militant group to moderate after its surprise election victory. Separately, an Israeli Foreign Ministry official said that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has told Egyptian officials he would hold off on asking Hamas to form the next Palestinian government until Hamas renounces violence. The Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, cited Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as saying that Abbas had made the decision after a meeting with Egyptian leader...

Cohen: We Won't Get Fooled Again

Hamas apologists insist in the media, and in comments to this blog, that the US has it all wrong. The Palestinians didn't elect Hamas because of their stance on terror; they elected them to clean up government and start delivering services promised by Fatah. Count Richard Cohen among the unconvinced: While it is probably true, as everyone says, that Hamas won the recent Palestinian elections not because it promised to wipe out Israel but because it promised to pick up the garbage in Gaza City (all politics is local, etc.), it is also true that the prospect of increased violence did not deter the average Palestinian from voting for Hamas. We have seen this sort of thing before, and it is not very comforting. The rule -- the only rule -- is to take zealots at their word. History speaks on this matter. If you asked a random German in,...

French Publisher Sacks Editor For Publishing Muslim Cartoons

After getting kudos from free-speech activists for its courage, the French magazine Soir reversed itself and sacked its managing editor for publishing Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. The owner fired his editor in order to placate the rage of French Muslims: France Soir and Germany's Die Welt were among the leading papers to reprint the cartoons, which first appeared in Denmark last September. The caricatures include drawings of Muhammad wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb, while another shows him saying that paradise was running short of virgins for suicide bombers. France Soir originally said it had published the images in full to show "religious dogma" had no place in a secular society. But late on Wednesday its owner, Raymond Lakah, said he had removed managing editor Jacques Lefranc "as a powerful sign of respect for the intimate beliefs and convictions of every individual". Mr Lakah said: "We express...

February 2, 2006

All He's Missing Is The Umbrella

Jimmy Carter made another of his frequent appearances on behalf of thugs and terrorists yesterday, this time arguing for acceptance of Hamas on the Larry King show. The former President told King that Hamas has a "good chance" of becoming a non-violent organization: Hamas deserves to be recognized by the international community, and despite the group's militant history, there is a chance the soon-to-be Palestinian leaders could turn away from violence, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday. Carter, who monitored last week's Palestinian elections in which Hamas handily toppled the ruling Fatah, added that the United States should not cut off aid to the Palestinian people, but rather funnel it through third parties like the U.N. "If you sponsor an election or promote democracy and freedom around the world, then when people make their own decision about their leaders, I think that all the governments should recognize that administration and...

The Gazan 'Freedom Fighters'

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip sent a message to Europeans that belies the latter's belief in the desire for freedom in the former. Gunmen forced the EU office in Gaza City to close and warned that it will remain shut until the EU apologizes for several publications running caricatures of Mohammed and Muslims this week: Palestinian gunmen Thursday shut down the European Union's office in Gaza City, demanding an apology for German, French and Norwegian newspapers reprinting cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammad, Palestinian security sources said. The gunmen left a notice on the EU office's door that the building would remain closed until Europeans apologize to Muslims, many of whom consider the cartoons offensive. ... Masked members of the militant groups Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian's former ruling party, Fatah, fired bullets into the air, and a man read the group's...

February 3, 2006

The Sun Rose In The East Today, Too

Another day brings yet another statement from Hamas that they will never recognize the "Zionist state that was established on our land," making it ever more difficult to insist that the terrorist group will moderate their position. The good news? They've offered Israel a hudna: Defying international pressure, the militant Islamic group Hamas said on Friday it will never recognize Israel but might be willing to negotiate terms for a temporary truce with the Jewish state. Khaled Meshaal, the top leader of Hamas which won last week's Palestinian parliamentary election by a landslide, made the offer to Israel via a column titled "To whom it may concern," published in the al-Hayat al-Jadida newspaper. "We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist state that was established on our land," Meshaal, the Damascus-based head of the political and military wings of the militant Islamic group, wrote in the column. ... They...

The Cartoon Network

Muslims around the world have banded together to violently protest the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed and other aspects of Islam, threatening attacks on Europeans and their newspapers if apologies do not come soon, the Guardian (UK) reports. European leaders have taken their normal stance in defence of Western freedoms; they're apologizing for them: Europe's political elite were scrambling last night to contain the furore across the Arab world at the publication of caricatures of Muhammad, with leaders stressing that freedom of the press did not mean freedom to cause offence. With newspaper editors in half a dozen countries unrepentant at the decision to republish cartoons depicting the prophet, EU commissioners stepped in to berate the press and try to calm Muslim anger. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark, where the cartoons were first published last autumn, said in an interview with al-Arabiya television that there had been...

Marching To Dhimmitude

The State Department has decided to give its opinion of free speech as it applies to the publication of cartoons satirizing Islam and Mohammed in Europe. Surprisingly, the department that represents America and its ideals of freedom abroad has decided to take this opportunity to scold the publishers rather than the angry mobs calling for violence: Washington on Friday condemned caricatures in European newspapers of the Prophet Mohammad, siding with Muslims who are outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion. By inserting itself into a dispute that has become a lightning rod for anti-European sentiment across the Muslim world, the United States could help its own battered image among Muslims. "These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims," State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must...

February 4, 2006

The Contrived Cartoon Network

It appears that the controversy over the Prophet cartoons has been somewhat artificially enhanced by Muslim imams in Denmark, according to the London Telegraph. Numerous readers and commenters have pointed towards this article by Charles Moore, who reports that not only did these cartoons appear months ago, but the Danish imams included a few more than European newspapers never printed in order to fuel the outrage of their followers: The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had. It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said...

Just Your Average Political Party

The AP covers the inner working of Hamas and inadvertently shows the folly of recognizing Hamas as a political party instead of the terrorist group that it is. In a piece titled "How Hamas Works," the wire service explains the management process of the new Palestinian majority in Parliament. In the first two sections, titled Who Makes Decisions and Supreme Leader, the AP reviews the Hamas by-laws and their command structure. It's the third section that grabs the reader's attention: WHO DIRECTS ATTACKS: The general guidelines and policy on attacks are first approved by the political leadership, but the military wings then have autonomy in carrying them out. The overall commander of Hamas forces in the West Bank and Gaza is Mohammed Deif. Subordinate to him are district and local commanders. Hamas units are organized into cells with a maximum of seven members. That, and the fact that local commanders...

February 5, 2006

USS Cole Mastermind Escapes

Interpol officials have now verified that a number of convicted al-Qaeda operatives escaped from a Yemeni prison by digging a tunnel -- and included among them was the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole: A man considered a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 sailors in a Yemeni port in 2000 was among 23 people who escaped from a Yemen prison last week, Interpol said Sunday. ... Interpol said in a statement that at least 13 of the 23 escapees were convicted al-Qaida fighters, who escaped via a 140-yard-long tunnel "dug by the prisoners and co-conspirators outside." Yemeni officials confirmed to Interpol that a man considered a mastermind of the Cole attack, identified as Jamal al-Badawi, was among those who escaped. Al-Badawi was among those sentenced to death in September 2004 for plotting the USS Cole attack. Two suicide bombers blew up an explosives-laden boat...

Israel Pays The Danegeld

The Israelis have decided to rely on the technicality that Hamas has not yet taken over the government of the Palestinian Authority to make its payment of tax revenues to the PA, an amount that comes to $54 million. Israel had held the money for a week while deciding whether to allow one of its intractable enemies access to funds that will likely go to financing more attacks on its citizens: Israel agreed to make a crucial payment of $54 million in tax and customs revenues to the Palestinians, but officials said future transfers will be halted once Hamas militants form the next Palestinian government. The decision was taken shortly after a flare-up of violence. Israeli forces pounded the northern Gaza Strip with missiles and artillery fire, killing three Palestinian militants. Hours later, a Palestinian assailant killed one woman and wounded four other people in what police called a politically...

February 6, 2006

Hamas Signals For More Violence

As if its daily pronouncements about refusing to change its goal of Israeli annihilation, Hamas gave a more tangible sign of its support for war against the Israelis yesterday: Ismail Haniyeh, the front-runner to be the next Palestinian prime minister, appeared yesterday at the graveside of three Fatah militants in what was seen as a signal of continued support for armed resistance. Mr. Haniyeh postponed a vital trip to Cairo to attend the funerals for the three men, who were killed Saturday night in an Israeli helicopter strike. It is highly unusual for a Hamas leader to attend the funeral of fighters from the rival Fatah movement. "These killings will increase the citizens' unity, and boost their steadfastness and their resistance against the Zionist occupation," said the Hamas leader, who walked with the cortege amid intermittent gunfire and the blaring martial music in praise of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades....

Well-Planned Spontaneity

The ruckus over the Prophet cartoons continued to inspire violence over the weekend, with two Danish (Lebanon, Syria) and one Norwegian (Syria) consulate burnt down in Southwest Asia, victims of angry mobs. The idea that these mobs formed spontaneously and erupted in anger gets disputed by today's Guardian (UK), which calls the protests the result of some "well-planned spontaneity": It was one of those unpredictable Lebanese Sunday mornings. The ski slopes in the mountains overlooking Beirut would have been crowded with skiers enjoying the brilliant winter sunshine. Walkers were out along the Corniche, strolling in designer tracksuits. Downtown, the chic restaurants were preparing for lunchtime. And there were a few men on scooters riding around town broadcasting an imminent protest. It wasn't long before the heavily-laden coaches and minivans began to arrive from Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. They were all full of young, often bearded men who wore...

Who's Sorry Now?

Instapundit links to a new website, We Are Sorry, that has issued an apology to Denmark and Norway for the rioting and the violence directed at them by mobs of Muslims around the world. Purportedly set up by moderate Muslims, the website makes a well-written and eloquent apology to those harmed by the protests over a series of editorial cartoons: We whole-heartedly apologize to the people of Denmark, Norway and all the European Union over the actions of a few, and we completely condemn all forms of vandalism and incitement to violence that the Arab and Muslim world have witnessed. We hope that this sad episode will not tarnish the great friendship that our peoples have fostered over decades. ... Anyone offended by the content of a publication has a vast choice of democratic and respectful methods of seeking redress. The most obvious are not buying the publication, writing letters...

February 7, 2006

Saddam And WMD: Case Re-Opened?

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence wants to reopen a question on what it calls "postwar" intelligence that both Congress and the administration would prefer to remain closed -- whether Saddam Hussein had WMD in late 2002. Its chair, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, says that mounting evidence and testimony point to Saddam's possession of the banned weapons prior to the final UN debates on the invasion, and that untranslated documentation holds the answer: The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were...

German Revolving-Door Justice Strikes Again

The Germans seem to have a problem in keeping terrorists behind bars. For the second time in as many months, Germany has freed a convicted terrorist, this time a man connected to the 9/11 attacks. Mounir el Motassadeq will walk out of prison for the second time, freed by German appellate courts: Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ordered the 31-year-old Moroccan released from prison where he had been serving a seven-year sentence following a conviction by a Hamburg court. Carsten Grote, a Hamburg judicial spokesman, did not give a reason for the release and did not indicate when Motassadeq would be let free. Authorities have long suspected Motassadeq of having belonged to the Hamburg terror cell led by Mohammed Atta. He arrived in Germany in 1993 and learned German in the university town of Münster before attending a technical university in Hamburg and eventually getting a job at the same school....

February 9, 2006

Saudis Snub Danes; Will Americans Endorse It?

Judith Klinghoffer notes that the Saudis have snubbed the Danes by disinviting them to the Jeddah Economic Forum to be held in the Saudi city this weekend. Arab News reports that the JCCI disinvited the Danish delegation after the publication of the Prophet cartoons by private Danish newspapers -- four months later, actually -- although apparently no other European countries have been barred despite their media republishing the editorial cartoons: The organizers of the Jeddah Economic Forum 2006 decided yesterday not to invite the Danish delegation at the annual event. The organizers made the decision in the wake of Muslim anger over the publication of the blasphemous caricatures published by a Danish newspaper on Sept. 30. ... The Council of Gulf Countries’ Chambers and the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce & Industry have praised the positive reaction by businessmen in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in responding to the...

Fear Factor

My column in the Daily Standard appears today and discusses the differing treatment of Muslim and Christian outrage and the consequences they portend. Entitled "Fear Factor", it notes that the threat of violence encourages a certain "respect" from Western media that does not appear when non-violent groups protest the mocking of their religion: The differing reactions of Muslims and Christians to perceived slights is worth examining. ... THERE IS the curious website We Are Sorry, which appeared this week attempting to apologize on behalf of moderate Muslims for the violent response to the cartoons. The apology on the site not only sounds sincere, but gets to the heart of freedom of speech ... These are powerful words that would go a long way to healing the breach between the Muslims in the street and the Western world--if they truly represented the viewpoint of moderate Islam. Unfortunately, we cannot tell that,...

Stalemate On NSA Program Abating

The standoff between Congress and the White House has apparently started to slowly subside, as members in both houses assuage themselves by drafting new legislation to broaden Congressional oversight on the agency's actions. Meanwhile, a key Democrat admits that the program's reality did not match the hyperbole spouted by its opponents after a White House briefing yesterday: Responding to congressional pressure from both parties, the White House agreed yesterday to give lawmakers more information about its domestic surveillance program, although the briefings remain highly classified and limited in scope. Despite the administration's overture, several prominent Republicans said they will pursue legislation enabling Congress to conduct more aggressive oversight of the National Security Agency's warrantless monitoring of Americans' phone calls and e-mails. Recent disclosure of the four-year-old program has alarmed civil libertarians and divided the GOP, with many Republicans defending the operation and others calling for more information and regulation. Yesterday,...

Surrendering To The Enemy

The Telegraph reports that the EU may not have the stomach to stand up for free speech, despite the best efforts of several newspapers on the Continent. Ironically, the EU commissioner for justice, freedom, and security wants European news organizations to adopt a voluntary pledge of censorship to send a message of sensitivity to Muslim concerns: Franco Frattini, the European Union commissioner for justice, freedom and security, revealed the idea for a code of conduct in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. Mr Frattini, a former Italian foreign minister, said the EU faced the "very real problem" of trying to reconcile "two fundamental freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion". Millions of European Muslims felt "humiliated" by the publication of cartoons of Mohammed, he added, calling on journalists and media chiefs to accept that "the exercising of a right is always the assumption of a responsibility". He...

February 10, 2006

Kinsley's Not Surrendering (Update: Neither Is Krauthammer)

Michael Kinsley at the Washington Post understands the stakes involved in the controversy surrounding the Prophet cartoons. He points out the spectacular flop of a cartoon depicting Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler circulated by European Muslims as a tit-for-tat response to their outrage over the Jyllands-Posten editorial cartoons, and argues that the Muslims aren't demanding equality in any case: Meanwhile, whatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. ... By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these...

February 11, 2006

Russia Offers Talks With Hamas

Vladimir Putin broke with most Western nations by inviting Hamas to the Kremlin for talks after their election. Despite the united front that most nations had taken on insisting that Hamas recognize Israel's existence and forswear terrorism before gaining any diplomatic standing, the Russians have decided to invite the Islamists to Red Square for talks. Now France has endorsed the Russian initiative, leaving the US and other European nations surprised: France on Friday endorsed Russia's decision to hold talks on the Middle East conflict with Hamas, the radical Islamist Palestinian group, saying the discussion "can contribute to advancing our positions." Other European countries distanced themselves from the French statement, which appeared to be in defiance of the American and European view that Hamas is a terrorist organization and therefore should not be officially recognized. Israel condemned it. ... The United States considers Hamas a terrorist group, and American officials are...

Carter Spied, And Then He Lied

Despite former President Jimmy Carter's pointed jabs at the Bush administration over the NSA surveillance program this past week, it turns out that Carter has more familiarity with warrantless eavesdropping than he let on. Today's Washington Times reports that Carter and his Attorney General authorized warrantless electronic surveillance on two suspected espionage agents, one of whom was an American citizen: Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies. "Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign. ... But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general,...

February 12, 2006

'We Are Being Pissed On'

CQ reader Peter A in Denmark sends this rather sharp editorial from the Danish newspaper at the center of the Prophet cartoons controversy, and also translates it into English for us. It speaks to the voices of moderation that extol free speech while at the same time scold Jyllands-Posten for exercising it. The author, Per Nyholm, wants the world to know that if freedom of speech has to come with a huge "but" attached to it, it's not freedom at all. I'm posting the translation in its entirety: We are being pissed upon by Per Nyholm I think it was the long departed H.C. Hansen, one of last century's great Danish statesmen who once - while the communists were demonstrating in front of Christiansborg [Ed: the seat of parliament] - threw his gaze across the palace square and remarked: "I will not be pissed upon." Then he did what was...

Al Gore Sells Out To The Saudis

Earlier this week, I pointed out that the Jeddah Economic Forum had disinvited the Danes after their publication of the Prophet cartoons. Arab News reported that Al Gore and Steve Forbes had agreed to appear at the JEF prior to Denmark's exclusion, and several bloggers wondered whether they would endorse the Saudi position and attend after such a move. Not only did Gore attend, but he sold out the US in order to suck up to the Islamists: Former Vice President Al Gore told a mainly Saudi audience on Sunday that the U.S. government committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that most Americans did not support such treatment. Gore said Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in "unforgivable" conditions. The former vice president said the Bush administration was playing into al-Qaida's hands by routinely blocking Saudi visa applications. "The thoughtless way in...

February 13, 2006

Democrats Backpedal On NSA Program

Having failed at turning the NSA program to surveil international calls connected with suspected terrorists into a "domestic" spying scandal, Democrats have reversed course and now want the program to continue but under new Congressional rules. The reversal has shown that President Bush's offensive against the critics, starting with his immediate acknowledgement of authorizing the program, has once again damaged the Democrats on national security and has pushed them to settle the issue quickly: Two key Democrats yesterday called the NSA domestic surveillance program necessary for fighting terrorism but questioned whether President Bush had the legal authority to order it done without getting congressional approval. Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) said Republicans are trying to create a political issue over Democrats' concern on the constitutional questions raised by the spying program. At...

The Traveling Imams

CQ reader Peter A in Denmark sends a translation of a new Jyllands-Posten article that delves into the origins of the Cartoon Wars that have raged around the world for the past two weeks. The true reasons for the manufactured outrage turn out to have more connection to other Danish actions than just the cartoons. The proper context shows that the Muslims in Denmark and elsewhere have much more of an agenda than simply protecting the Prophet from satire and their religious sensibilities from criticism. Be sure to read it all. JYLLANDS-POSTEN Sunday, February 12, 2005: THE TRAVELLING IMAMS They said they would send delegations on a tour of the world to convince Moslem countries to participate in a "defense" of the prophet Muhammed. Instead it turned into an attack. The Danes were described as "infidels", who would neither recognize Islam or allow Mosques to be erected. Since, the battle...

February 14, 2006

Playing Hardball With Hamas

The US and Israel plan on undermining the Hamas-led Palestinian legislature with a series of actions, including embargoes, cessation of aid, withholding of tax receipts, and throwing as much red tape as possible in order to grind economic activity to a halt in the territories. They aim to force a collapse in Hamas' popularity and cause a new election: The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats. The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement....

February 15, 2006

Dream City

Michael Totten visited the Kurd region of Iraq and took some pictures that may surprise people. I know what I picture in my mind when I think of the region, and it's nothing like Totten depicts: In no country are Kurds closer to realizing their dream of freedom and independence than they are in Iraq. They are wrapping up the finishing touches on their de-facto sovereign state-within-a-state, a fact on the ground that will not easily be undone. And they’re transforming the hideously decrepit physical environment left to them by Saddam Hussein – a broken place that is terribly at odds with the Kurdistan in their hearts and in their minds – into something beautiful and inspiring, the kind of place you might like to live in someday yourself. I wouldn't mind living in the house that he photographed. Be sure to check out what freedom has meant for Iraqi...

Saddam Tapes To Air On Nightline

ABC News will review the Saddam tapes that prompted the House Intelligence Committee to re-open its investigation into the WMD programs in Iraq last month. The late-night news show Nightline will broadcast a special report, bumping a scheduled broadcast on premature births. Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz report that Bill Tierney has provided the tapes and the translations that he personally performed on them: ABC News has obtained 12 hours of tape recordings of Saddam Hussein meeting with top aides during the 1990s, tapes apparently recorded in Baghdad's version of the Oval Office. ABC News obtained the tapes from Bill Tierney, a former member of a United Nations inspection team who translated them for the FBI. Tierney said the U.S. government is wrong to keep these tapes and others secret from the public. "Because of my experience being in the inspections and being in the military, I knew the significance...

'The Factories Are In Our Minds'

The report by ABC News met the expectations set by its earlier report, which I linked earlier. While what they aired did not mention any transported WMD, the partial transcripts released by ABC certainly suggests that Iraq had intentions of deceiving inspectors and reconstituting its programs at the earliest possible moment: As for the nuclear, we say we have disclosed everything but no. We have undeclared problems in nuclear as well, and I believe that they know. There are teams working with no one knowing about some of them. ... I go back to the question of whether we should reveal everything or continue to be silent. Sir, since the meeting has taken this direction, I would say it is in our interest not to reveal. Not just out of fear of disclosing the technology we achieved, or to hide it for future work. No. The game has gone on...

February 16, 2006

Another Success Story

The Washington Post has an excellent article on the adaptations made by the US military to gain ground against the insurgencies in Iraq. Unfortunately placed on page A14, this in-depth look at the adjustments made by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tall Afar shows that the US military has conducted thoughtful analysis of their successes and failures and continue to adapt tactics and strategies as a result: The last time the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment served in Iraq, in 2003-04, its performance was judged mediocre, with a series of abuse cases growing out of its tour of duty in Anbar province. But its second tour in Iraq has been very different, according to specialists in the difficult art of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign -- fighting a guerrilla war but also trying to win over the population and elements of the enemy. Such campaigns are distinct from the kind of...

Is This Our New Security Initiative?

Michelle Malkin points out a disturbing turn of events in the war on terror: the surrender of port management to Arab-based firms. A little-known oversight panel at Treasury has approved a $7B deal which will put the state-owned Dubai Ports World in charge of six major American ports: The Bush administration on Thursday rebuffed criticism about potential security risks of a $6.8 billion sale that gives a company in the United Arab Emirates control over significant operations at six major American ports. Lawmakers asked the White House to reconsider its earlier approval of the deal. The sale to state-owned Dubai Ports World was "rigorously reviewed" by a U.S. committee that considers security threats when foreign companies seek to buy or invest in American industry, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, run by the Treasury Department, reviewed an assessment from U.S....

February 17, 2006

Good Thing We Kept The Receipt

The Bush administration has stuck to its hard line against Hamas and the terror group's insistence on opposing Israel's existence and support for terrorism. In a rather unusual move, the US requested and received a refund on the American aid held in escrow for the Palestinian Authority: The Palestinian Authority has agreed to return $50m (£28.7m) of American aid following a request from Washington. The US State Department said that it did not want the money going to a Hamas-led government that refused to recognise Israel. The US has already said that it is reviewing all aid to the Palestinians in light of Hamas' election victory. As proof that it is serious, it has asked for $50m of aid to the Palestinian Authority to be returned. A small portion of the money had already gone towards economic activity in the territories, but the Palestinian Authority agreed to send back what...

February 18, 2006

Congress Wants An Escape Hatch

Having tried and failed to shut down the NSA surveillance program -- a failure due to the American public's desire to track the international communications of suspected terrorists with or without warrants -- Congress has had to settle for an encroachment onto what has always been executive wartime powers. Due to the current political climate and a desire to move on with the program, the White House has signalled that it will respect reasonable oversight conditions of Congress. Now, however, Congress has decided that the political cost of owning the surveillance program might be too high and has decided to punt the entire responsibility to a group of appointed secret judges instead: The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, breaking ranks with the president on domestic eavesdropping, says he wants a special court to oversee the program. Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record), R-Kan., said he is concerned that...

Drug Ring Within Air Marshals?

The New York TImes reports that federal air marshals have been charged with drug smuggling, and one of those indicted has indicated that a much wider drug ring operates within FAMS: Testimony on Thursday at the arraignment of two federal air marshals charged with using their credentials to engage in a cocaine smuggling conspiracy suggested that the case might involve other marshals as well. Stuart Maneth, an agent with the inspector general's office of the Homeland Security Department, testified that one of the suspects had told the authorities that after their arrest last week, he was warned by his co-defendant against "giving up other F.A.M.'s." The accused — Shawn R. Nguyen, 38, and Burlie L. Sholar III, 32 — were taken into custody after an informant delivered to Mr. Nguyen's home in Houston what the authorities described as 33 pounds of cocaine, to be smuggled to Las Vegas, and $15,000...

Hamas Claims Its Terrorist Mandate

At today's swearing-in ceremony for the new Palestinian parliament, President Mahmoud Abbas called on Hamas to honor previous agreements with Israel and commit to negotiations for settling the dispute between the two peoples. Hamas, despite the Western gloss as having a mandate for social programs and austerity, responded by declaring a different mandate: In a speech at the opening of parliament, Mr Abbas said the new government must recognise past peace deals with Israel and commit itself to pursuing statehood through talks, but he stopped short of setting conditions for forming a cabinet. He said: "The presidency and the government will continue to respect our commitment to the negotiations as a strategic, pragmatic political choice.["] ... Mr Abbas's words won applause from Fatah lawmakers but not from Hamas members. "We were elected on a different political agenda," said Mr Haniyeh as sessions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, joined...

February 20, 2006

Carter: They Know Not What They Did

Jimmy Carter takes an opportunity to explain to us why the United States and the world should not take the Palestinians at their word and cut off their funding after electing an Islamist terrorist group to a majority government. One month ago he was certifying the election as fair, and now today he argues that it makes no difference at all: Although Hamas won 74 of the 132 parliamentary seats, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas retains the right to propose and veto legislation, with 88 votes required to override his veto. With nine of its elected members remaining in prison, Hamas has only 65 votes, plus whatever third-party support it can attract. Abbas also has the power to select and remove the prime minister, to issue decrees with the force of law when parliament is not in session, and to declare a state of emergency. As commander in chief, he also...

Sounds Good To Me

Osama bin Laden apparently told the West in his tape released last month that he would never be taken alive -- a scenario that fits quite nicely with US plans: Osama bin Laden promised never to be captured alive and declared the United States had resorted to the same "barbaric" tactics used by Saddam Hussein, according to an audiotape purportedly by the al-Qaeda leader that was posted Monday on a militant website. The tape appeared to be a complete version of one that was first broadcast Jan. 19 on Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite channel, in which bin Laden offered the United States a long-term truce but also said his al-Qaeda terror network would soon launch a fresh attack on American soil. "I have sworn to only live free. Even if I find bitter the taste of death, I don't want to die humiliated or deceived," bin Laden said, in the...

February 21, 2006

Bush Raises The Stakes

The controversy over the sale of P&O to DP World took a high-tension tone after George Bush drew a line in the sand with Congress. He defended the decision by CFIUS to approve the transfer of port management to the nationalized UAE operator, and threatened to cast his first veto to save the deal from an increasingly hostile Congress: Brushing aside objections from Republicans and Democrats alike, President Bush endorsed the takeover of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports by a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates. He pledged to veto any bill Congress might approve to block the agreement. The president on Tuesday defended his administration's earlier approval of the sale of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to Dubai Ports World, despite concerns in Congress it could increase the possibility of terrorism at American ports. The sale — expected to be finalized in early March...

February 22, 2006

Prophet Cartoons Polarizing Muslims

The New York Times reports that the cartoons that dared to criticize Islam and Mohammed have created a polarization not just between Islam and the West, but within Islam itself as well. More and more, moderate Muslims have noticed the damage done to the image of their faith by the crowds of lunatics burning embassies and killing people around the world, and they struggle to hold a mirror to the faithful: In a direct challenge to the international uproar over cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, the Jordanian journalist Jihad Momani wrote: "What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?" In Yemen, an editorial by Muhammad al-Assadi condemned the cartoons but also lamented the way many Muslims reacted. "Muslims had an opportunity to...

February 23, 2006

The War Of The Golden Mosque

Insurgents blew up the golden dome of the Askariya mosque, destroying one of the holiest shrines in the Shi'a sect and potentially winning a long-running battle to pull Iraq into a sectarian civil war. In the aftermath of the bombing, carried out by terrorist commandos, Shi'ite militias killed at least 19 people as they attacked dozens of Sunni mosques in retaliation: THE revenge attacks started within minutes of the devastating dawn blast that wrecked the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shia shrines in Iraq. By the end of the day, as thousands of Iraqis spilt out on to the streets in protest and more than 90 mosques lay damaged or destroyed, Iraq’s political and religious leadership was struggling to avert a full-blown civil war. At least eighteen Sunnis, including three clerics, were reported murdered. The reprisal attack on al-Quds Sunni mosque in western Baghdad was typical. Residents...

No Making Fun Of Making Fun In Islam

The Cartoon Wars just got sillier, if one can imagine such a development. Malaysia has now sanctioned a newspaper for publishing a cartoon that satirizes the protest over the Prophet cartoons, calling the cartoon "inappropriate": Malaysia has reprimanded one of its biggest daily newspapers for printing a cartoon lampooning the global controversy over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. The government's move has fanned a hot debate in this mainly Muslim country about where to draw the line between press freedom and respect of religion, because this time it involves a newspaper closely aligned with mainstream Muslim opinion. The English-language New Straits Times had defended its right this week to publish the cartoon, which featured a street artist offering "caricatures of Muhammad while you wait." But the government, a prominent voice in the Islamic world, felt it crossed the line and its internal security ministry had given the daily three days...

February 24, 2006

Dubai Deal Postponed And Rethought

The fallout from the Dubai deal continues to mount after a week of protest over the transaction. The UAE has offered to delay the completion of its purchase of P&O to allow Congress to review the deal, while Americans have their first real debate over port security and operations since 9/11 -- not that one existed much before that, either. Like most controversies, this one has had its share of hyperbole and hysteria, but the debate has been educational. The questions about how port operators affect security needed to be aired, but in some ways the curt answers have left an incomplete picture. The administration's accurate answer that port security would remain in the capable hands of the Coast Guard and Customs service (a part of DHS now) clarified the role of the port operator, but left the impression that the companies filling those roles have nothing to do with...

Sammenhold And Sitzpinklers

Michelle Malkin gives us a vocabulary lesson for today, as Chrsistopher Hitchens organizes a rally to support free speech: The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended...

February 25, 2006

The Difference Between Bush And Conservatives

Today's opinion piece by William F. Buckley, the father of American conservatism, highlights the difference between traditional conservatives and the Bush Administration's efforts in foreign policy, along with a host of other arenas. While the Left has railed about conservatives -- especially the dreaded neocons, a term that has an accusatory hint of "Zionist" to it -- they have missed the true historical parallels between the post-9/11 policy and that of an American president of almost a century earlier. Buckley puts pen to paper to declare the American intervention in Iraq a failure, a position which undoubtedly many leftists will hail as a new schism on the right: One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially...

Cancel The Hysteria

I guess we can cancel the civil war -- Moqtada al-Sadr has reached a truce with Sunni leaders to stop the attacks on the mosques: THE movement of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, alleged to have played a role in the anti-Sunni violence over the last few days, publicly made peace with political and religious Sunni leaders overnight. Four sheikhs from the Sadr movement made a "pact of honour" with the conservative Sunni Muslim Scholars Association, and called for an end to attacks on places of worship, the shedding of blood and condemning any act leading to sedition. The agreement was made in the particularly symbolic setting of Baghdad's premier Sunni mosque Abu Hanifa where the Shiite sheikhs prayed under the guidance of Sunni imam Abdel Salam al-Qubaissi. The meeting was broadcast on television and the religious leaders all "condemned the blowing up of the Shiite mausoleum of Samarra as much...

February 26, 2006

Well, Let's Not Have That

The Palestinians might hate Jews, but they have a firm grasp on the concept of chutzpah. The Washington Post notes that the Palestinian Authority has now decided that American aid is an entitlement despite the rise of Islamist terrorists to power in the territories, and they warn of a "backlash" if that money doesn't show up on time and in full: A senior U.S. diplomat told Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday that the Bush administration would provide humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians even after the radical Islamic group Hamas forms a cabinet in the coming weeks. ... But Palestinian officials who met with Welch, the most senior U.S. official to visit the West Bank since Hamas's victory in parliamentary elections last month, said the pledge did not guarantee the continuation of U.S. development funds. The United States provided more than $400 million in development aid to the Palestinian territories...

The Religion Of Pieces

Europe, and especially France, is sitting on a time bomb with its growing and insulated Muslim population. We may have already seen the first signs of explosion with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, but his death is not an isolated incident. Mark Steyn notes that anti-Semitic violence is growing, while the news media of Europe remains mostly silent about it: In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go...

February 27, 2006

Kissinger On Hamas

Henry Kissinger writes a lengthy op-ed today in the Washington Post about the effect that Hamas' election to power has had on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. (Has Henry ever been accused of brevity?) He demonstrates his brilliance once again here, arguing that Hamas needs an Ariel Sharon, a man who will publicly break with long-held policies in order to grab a chance for peace, before Hamas can expect anyone to take them seriously: The emergence of Hamas as the dominant faction in Palestine should not be treated as a radical departure. Hamas represents the mind-set that prevented the full recognition of Israel's legitimacy by the PLO for all these decades, kept Yasser Arafat from accepting partition of Palestine at Camp David in 2000, produced two intifadas and consistently supported terrorism. Far too much of the debate within the Palestinian camp has been over whether Israel should be destroyed immediately by...

Exit The Bagman

Iraqi security forces have captured a senior member of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Syrian financier that provided a significant portion of the money for the foreign insurgency: Iraqi security forces announced on Monday the capture of a senior al-Qaida in Iraq figure, and the U.S. ambassador said the risk of civil war from last week's sectarian violence was over. Violence throughout Iraq killed 36 people Monday, as fierce fighting broke out between Iraqi commandos and insurgents southeast of the capital. But sectarian clashes have declined sharply since the bloodletting that followed the destruction of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra, and Baghdad residents returned to their jobs after three days of a government-imposed curfew. ... The captured al-Qaida figure was identified as Abou al-Farouq, a Syrian who financed and coordinated groups working for Iraq's most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, according to an Interior...

February 28, 2006

Did The Germans Aid The War Effort?

The Guardian (UK) reports that a classified US military report states categorically that German intelligence provided the Coalition with vital information on Saddam Hussein's plans for the defense of Baghdad. This has long been rumored to be true, and the additional evidence has the Germans backpedaling at home: Germany's government faced renewed pressure to order an inquiry yesterday after fresh evidence emerged that Germany supplied military intelligence to the United States in the run-up to the Iraq war. A classified US military study states categorically that the Germans provided details about Saddam Hussein's plans for the defence of Baghdad. Since the spy issue first arose last month, the Berlin government has been repeatedly forced on the defensive. It issued a denial yesterday. A copy of the US study was obtained by Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent of the New York Times, who has co-written Cobra 11: The Inside Story of...

The New Totalitarian Threat

Agora translates a self-titled "Manifesto" against the latest in a series of global threats to freedom and liberty: radical Islamism. The manifesto has twelve signatories, including such leading lights (and targets for Islamists) as Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, and more. The declaration deserves the widest possible publication: Together facing the new totalitarianism After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are...

March 1, 2006

Bush Visits Afghanistan

George Bush made a surprise stop on his tour of South Asia today as he flew into Kabul to meet with Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, as well as the American troops stationed in the newly-liberated country: US President George W. Bush arrived in Afghanistan for his first visit since US-led forces toppled the Taliban regime in 2001. Bush made the surprise stopover, landing at the US military base at Bagram north of Kabul, as he headed to India to begin a maiden trip to South Asia. He flew by heavily armed helicopter to the capital where he was given a red-carpet welcome by an honour guard before talks with President Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace. Bush apparently wanted to be present at the opening of the new US embassy in Kabul, taking place today, in addition to paying his first state visit to the nation. The stopover on the...

False Notes On Civil War Fears

The New York Times issues a warning about an impending civil war in Iraq that sounds a couple of false notes. Its editorial this morning attempts a historical review of the Iraqis that misses a couple of germane points while it scolds the administration indirectly for causing the problem by toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq has moved perilously close to civil war. Everyone who knows anything about the tortured history of that country, cobbled together from disparate parts by British colonial officials less than a century ago, has always dreaded such an outcome. Fear of civil war stayed the hand of the first President George Bush, when he turned back American troops and left Saddam Hussein in power. It generated much of the opposition to the current President Bush's invasion in 2003. Yet many critics of the invasion, including this page, believed that the dangers from civil war were so dire...

Sooner Suicide Later Turns Out To Be Botched Attack

Mark Tapscott has stayed on the story of Joel Hinrichs, the Oklahoma University student who blew himself up outside the football stadium, long after the FBI dismissed it as a suicide brought on by depression. His vigilance has paid off, as it now appears that the FBI jumped to an erroneous conclusion and that Hinrichs meant to kill a lot more people than just himself: The FBI reported in November that 0.4 pound of TATP was found inside Hinrichs' apartment. TATP is the most unstable explosive known and is "the explosive of choice" in the Middle East, Mauldin said. "It is so volatile, even a small amount on the tip of a finger will explode if it comes within 8 inches of a match," Mauldin said. Investigators also found a quantity of acetone and hydrogen, components necessary for manufacturing TATP, inside the student's apartment. ... Officers also removed "a lot"...

March 2, 2006

Europe Puts On Its Blinders

In a spectacularly misguided effort, the European Union has released a report scolding members for allowing the CIA and other American agencies to operate unfettered on the Continent in its search for Islamofascist terrorists, failing to mention at all the fact that so many can be found there: Europe has become "a happy hunting ground" for foreign intelligence agents looking to kidnap terrorist suspects, the leader of the continent's top human rights group said Wednesday, urging European governments to crack down on operatives working for the CIA and other spy services. Terry Davis, chairman of the Council of Europe, also criticized several European countries for not being more forthcoming about whether they have helped the CIA carry out extralegal counterterrorism operations on their soil. These include the secret detention and abduction of suspected members of al-Qaeda. "I strongly support cooperation between Europe and the United States of America on all...

March 3, 2006

...And Generalissimo Franco Valiantly Remains Dead

Russia incurred the criticism of the West by inviting Hamas to the Kremlin, arguing that engagement with the terrorist group would alllow them to moderate their stance towards Israel. Hamas, in turn, used its diplomatic opening today to announce that it will never recognize Israel's existence: Hamas' political leader, on a groundbreaking visit to Russia, rejected on Friday any discussion about the militant group's refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, dealing a setback to Moscow's efforts to persuade it to soften its stance. "The issue of recognition (of Israel) is a decided issue," said Hamas' exiled political leader, Khaled Mashaal, upon arrival in Moscow for talks with Russian officials. "We don't intend to recognize Israel." ... After arriving in Moscow, Mashaal accused Israel of blocking the Mideast peace process and said Israel's "occupation" of Palestinian lands will top the agenda in the Moscow talks. "No conditions will be put...

Visiting TortureWorld

Michael Totten has returned from a trip to Iraq, where he toured one of Saddam's torture facilities -- this one apparently specifically designed for Kurdish victims. He posts several pictures (work safe) and writes eloquently about his experiences: Suleimaniya is the most liberal city in Iraqi Kurdistan, partly because of its long-standing and deep ties to nearby Iran, one of the most culturally liberal countries in the Middle East. The Iraqi Kurds I met who have been to Iran wanted me to know – and they want you to know, as well – that the distance between the Iranian people and their hideous regime is galactic. I heard the same refrain over and over again: "Persians are just like us." In other words, they are liberal, secular, pro-Western, and fed up with tyrants. "Iranians love America," the Kurds told me. "They have nothing to do with Ahmadinejad." All the way...

Other Than That, He Seemed All Right

CNN published an interview with the managers of a flight school here in Eagan, MN -- CQ's home port -- that tipped the FBI to Zacarias Moussaoui and his bizarre behavior. Tim Nelson and Hugh Sims describe Moussaoui's behavior in terms that hardly paints the al-Qaeda operative as a James Bond type: He spoke fluent Arabic but rusty English. He had plenty of cash, but didn't seem like the playboy type. He said he wanted to learn to fly a jumbo jet simply to impress his pals. But when al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui asked a flight instructor how to turn off the oxygen and transponder on a jet, two managers at the flight school had a hunch something was up. That hunch may be the reason that Moussaoui -- the only person indicted in the U.S. in connection with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- is awaiting a...

March 4, 2006

The Gray Lady Gets It (Mostly) Right

As much as we use the editorial board at the New York Times as a punching bag on this blog, and deservedly so, we have to note when the get the big issues right -- and today is that day. The Times makes an excellent argument today on aid to the Palestinians that could have been written here, with one minor exception: America cannot bankroll a Hamas government that preaches and practices terrorism, denies that Israel has any right to exist, and refuses to abide by peace agreements signed by previous Palestinian governments. That should be blindingly obvious. America is engaged in a global armed struggle against terrorism. It is firmly allied with Israel and is committed to Israel's survival. Hamas won the recent Palestinian election fair and square. American officials, who say they are so forcefully committed to the cause of expanding democracy in the Middle East, should not...

Do The Gitmo Detainees Have A Case?

The Pentagon released its documentation on the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after a lengthy court battle to keep the information classified. The DoD released transcripts of the tribunals for each of the detainees rather than a list of those held at the prison: After four years of secrecy, the Pentagon released documents on Friday that have the names of detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration had hidden the identities, home countries and other information about the men, who were accused of having links to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. But a federal judge rejected administration arguments that releasing the names would violate the detainees' privacy and could endanger them and their families. The release resulted from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press. The names were scattered throughout more than 5,000 pages of transcripts of hearings at Guantánamo...

Iraq: No Timetable

The president of Iraq stated that American forces will remain in Iraq as long as necessary to ensure stability, undercutting arguments that the Iraqis want the Americans out: President Jalal Talabani on Saturday underscored the need for a unity government in Iraq after a spasm of sectarian killing and said he had been assured U.S. forces would remain in the country as long as needed — "no matter what the period." His comments came after a bomb exploded at a minibus terminal during morning rush hour in a southeastern Baghdad suburb, killing seven people and wounding 25, one of a string of explosions in the capital and elsewhere. ... Talabani spoke to reporters after meeting with Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command. The terrorists in Iraq want to drive the US out of Iraq in order to destabilize the new Iraqi security forces and initiate a dissolution of...

Challenging The Gitmo Study

Earlier today I posted about the release of documentation of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay and a study performed by one of the attorneys representing two of the accused terrorists. Mark and Joshua Denbeaux had a group of Seton Hall law students review more than 5,000 pages of material about the 517 detainees left at Gitmo and provided an analysis which I noted in the post. That analysis raised questions about the necessity of detaining some of these individuals. In a quick review, I read through about a dozen Summaries of Evidence. In each one, the government presented at least an argument for some act of hostile intent as shown by the presence of Paragraph 3b. According to the study, I should have noticed at least a few without such allegations. That's not a large enough sample with which to draw a conclusion, but it will take weeks at this...

March 5, 2006

Are We Leaving Iraq?

The London Telegraph reports that the US and British forces in Iraq will be withdrawn within twelve months. Sean Rayment writes that sources within the British government have made it known that both countries will withdraw back to their bases over the coming months in preparation for a full withdrawal in 2007: All British and United States troops serving in Iraq will be withdrawn within a year in an effort to bring peace and stability to the country. The news came as defence chiefs admitted privately that the British troop commitment in Afghanistan may last for up to 10 years. The planned pull-out from Iraq follows the acceptance by London and Washington that the presence of the coalition, mainly composed of British and US troops, is now seen as the main obstacle to peace. According to a senior defence source directly involved in planning the withdrawal, Britain is the driving...

Gitmo Study Project Under Way

Last night, I issued a call for a blogswarm study of the newly-released documentation on the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to determine the validity of an analysis done by attorneys representing two of the detainees. So far, we have had a large number of volunteers, and around a third of the documents have been assigned. I'm still getting volunteers, but more are needed, so be sure to send me a note if you're willing to participate. Put "Gitmo project" in the subject line and be sure to include a link to your blog, if you have one. I've already received one survey back from Slightly Loony at JamulBlog. He included the following note: After scanning this summary it was obvious that, as I expected, there was not enough information to reach an independent judgment. So I adopted this attitude as I read: I accepted the statements of fact as...

Islam, Islam Uber Alles

In case anyone still has any illusions about the intent of radical Islamists, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made it clear when meeting with government officials on his state visit to Malaysia. The Russian news agency Itar-Tass reports his remarks: Islam will soon be the domineering force in the world, placing first in the number of its followers among all other religions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed this confidence here at the end of his state visit to Malaysia. Following a meeting with Sultan Jamalullail I, the supreme head of the federation of nine states where Islam was proclaimed the state religion, he pontificated: “The world will be in the hands of Islam over the next few years.” I wonder what the Iranian equivalent of the "Horst Wessel Song" might be? (hat tip: CQ reader Jim O)...

March 6, 2006

Going To Yale Instead Of To Jail

The news that a former Taliban official has enrolled at Yale had many people scratching their heads, wondering what the Ivy League university's admissions department was thinking when they allowed Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi to attend classes. The former deputy foreign secretary of the brutal regime claimed that he had grown up since the fall of the Taliban and wants to pursue his continuing education. However, as John Fund notes, the 27-year-old Islamist apparatchik has not exactly turned over a new leaf: He does say that some of his views have changed. "I was very young then," Mr. Rahmatullah, now 27, told the Yale Daily News last week. "At that age, you don't really have the same sensibilities that you may have later." He has told fellow students he now believes in free speech and the right of women to vote. He told the New York Times the Taliban were bad...

EU: Oslo A Singular Commitment -- For Israelis Only

The European Union has never been terribly friendly to Israel, and now they want to push the Israelis into a unilateral commitment to follow Oslo, even while Hamas refuses to commit to the agreement. An EU Commissioner insists that the Israelis continue tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority, even though those transfers only started under the treaty that Hamas refuses to recognize: Israel should release customs duties of 60 million euros ($72 million) per month to the Palestinian Authority's interim government, the European Union's head of external relations said in an interview on Monday. "It would be important that the Israelis are paying out what is actually Palestinian money -- the customs duties," the European Commission's Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in an interview with Austria's daily newspaper Der Standard. Israel has decided to stop handing over the customs revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority following the victory in...

Gitmo Project Still Under Way

We still have more room for our blogswarm study of the documentation released by the DoD on the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. See this post for details!...

Iran Gives US A Casus Belli, If We Want It

ABC News reports tonight that Iran has shipped improved explosive devices capable of defeating the body armor employed by US soldiers to the insurgents in Iraq. Brian Ross will tell ABC's World News Tonight that Iran is "knowingly killing US troops", according to former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke: U.S. military and intelligence officials tell ABC News that they have caught shipments of deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border. They are a very nasty piece of business, capable of penetrating U.S. troops' strongest armor. What the United States says links them to Iran are tell-tale manufacturing signatures -- certain types of machine-shop welds and material indicating they are built by the same bomb factory. "The signature is the same because they are exactly the same in production," said explosives expert Kevin Berry. "So it's the same make and model." U.S. officials say roadside bomb attacks against American forces in Iraq...

March 7, 2006

Taliban and AQ Taking A Beating In Pakistan

It looks like President Bush's visit to Pakistan may have paid off, as Musharraf appears to have re-energized his campaign in Waziristan against al-Qaeda and the Taliban remnants that have taken refuge there. In a protracted battle near the Afghanistan border, Pakistani forces have killed scores of the Islamist terrorists: Pakistani security forces battled pro-Taliban rebels holding out in a town near the Afghan border on Monday, killing 19 of them as the toll from three days of clashes rose to more than 120, the military said. The rebels launched attacks on government positions in Miran Shah on Saturday as President Bush met Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in the capital. The fighting has raged since. ... Militants launched attacks and seized government buildings Saturday in Miran Shah in revenge for a government attack Wednesday that killed 45 fighters. The toll from the first day of fighting rose from 46...

Can We Call This Terrorism Yet?

Terrorism, in its most objective definition, is the use of violence or the threat of violence against civilian populations in order to advance a political or religious philosophy. Under this definition, doesn't the admission of Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar make his attempt to murder dozens of people with his rented SUV an act of terrorism? So far, the FBI and prosecutors still won't say: University of North Carolina graduate from Iran, accused of running down nine people on campus to avenge the treatment of Muslims, said at a hearing Monday that he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah." Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar was accused of driving a sport-utility vehicle through the Pit, a popular campus gathering spot, injuring nine people Friday. None of the victims was seriously hurt. University Police Chief Derek Poarch said Taheri-azar told investigators he intentionally hit people to "avenge the deaths of Muslims...

March 8, 2006

Why We Spy

For those who profess outrage at the use of the NSA's intercept program on international communications, the ABC news report on the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui explains why our intelligence services should not get hamstrung by the law-enforcement mentality when the US is under attack: The number 050-520-9905 is what several of the 9/11 hijackers dialed to establish contact with Mustafa al Hawsawi, a senior al Qaeda member in the United Arab Emirates. Prosecutors said today that Hawsawi was one of the key financial contributors and travel coordinators for several of the 9/11 hijackers, and that the 9/11 investigation shows that Mohammed Atta was in regular contact with him in the weeks before the attack. In laying out for the jury the specifics of how the 9/11 plot was hatched, prosecutors showed the jury a series of money transfer orders and records of calls to Hawsawi from Mohammed Atta, which...

A Spoonful Of Panic Helps The Majority Go Down

House Republicans on the Appropriations Committee abandoned the effort by the White House to give the Dubai Ports World deal a second, more thorough security review and voted 62-2 to amend an emergency appropriation bill with language specifically making any attempt to engage DP World in port operations illegal. The GOP joined all of the committee Democrats in slamming the door on any further negotiations with the UAE port-management firm: In an election-year repudiation of President Bush, a House panel dominated by Republicans voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to block a Dubai-owned firm from taking control of some U.S port operations. By 62-2, the Appropriations Committee voted to bar DP World, run by the government of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, from holding leases or contracts at U.S. ports. Bush has promised to veto any such measure passed by Congress, but there is widespread public opposition to the deal and the...

Update On The Gitmo Study

The CQ Blogswarm Study Group have been busy this week, reviewing the source documents on the Guantanamo Bay detainees and filling out the Excel spreadsheets with the data needed. I have already discovered one unsettling fact -- the documents provided by the DoD only include 122 SOEs, not 517. The Denbeaux study appeared to claim that it had 517 SOEs, but unless they received them separately from the DoD (which is certainly possible, since Mark Denbeaux represents two of the detainees), their researchers apparently attempted to reverse-engineer the SOEs from the testimony. Our study group did not do that. The SOEs will eventually be reviewed by nine volunteers, with each SOE reviewed by three different people. They will count the listings in Paragraph 3 to determine how many hostile acts and connections to terrorism can be found, and I will use the average of all three as the number used....

March 9, 2006

From Dafydd: Captain Ed's Gitmo Project, Tribunal Set 28

Posted by Dafydd Captain Ed has been collecting victims to review -- I'm sorry, requesting volunteers to review the unclassified case files of various detainee tribunal hearings. He wants us to determine if there is good reason in these files to still be holding these people in Guantanamo Bay, or whether it appears as though a miscarriage of military justice has occurred. This post will be cross-posted to Big Lizards; abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The first point to make -- and it's a biggie -- is that we only get to see the unclassified information. The tribunals are also given access to classified evidence from the case files. Clearly, the most damning evidence would most likely be present only in the classified evidence, as that is where all the intel from American and Coalition agents, witness identifications, and classified documentary evidence is kept. So I cannot really...

The Smart Move For Everyone

Dubai Ports World has just put an end to the controversy generated over its purchase of P&O and the operations contracts held in six major American ports. They have agreed to sell the American business to a "US entity", allowing all of the hot air to escape this debate: A Dubai-owned company said Thursday it is giving up its management stake in some U.S. ports, a move made as congressional leaders warned President Bush that both the House and Senate appeared ready to block the takeover. ... "Because of the strong relationship between the United Arab Emirates and the United States and to preserve that relationship, DP World has decided to transfer fully the U.S. operation of P&O Operations North America to a United States entity," DP World's chief operating officer, Edward H. Bilkey, said in the statement that Warner relayed to other senators. The announcement did not specify which...

A Dreadful Interlude For All Involved

With the announcement that Dubai Ports World will sell off its American contracts acquired during the purchase of P&O, the embarrassing episode appears to have drawn to a close. Some people failed to get the message even after John Warner delivered it on the Senate floor, however. Harry Reid, who acted like a petulant child denied his dessert, insisted that a Senate vote be held on a deal that no longer existed so that Senate Democrats could express themselves. Saying that the "devil is in the details", the Senate Minority Leader angrily told a press conference that the Republicans insisted on up-or-down votes on judicial nominees and the Democrats want the same for their legislation -- ignoring that Reid has blocked votes for a dozen nominees, and none of them were as dead as the DPW takeover of American port operations. Reid is just the latest person to make a...

Madrid Bombings Not Al-Qaeda Operation

The Spanish investigation into the March 11 bombings in Madrid has concluded that the planners and perpetrators were home-grown Islamists and not connected to al-Qaeda, the AP reports tonight. The assignment of this action to AQ came in the days after the bombing, when the terror network supposedly claimed responsibility for the attack. However, the reality is apparently somewhat murkier: A two-year probe into the Madrid train bombings concludes the Islamic terrorists who carried out the blasts were homegrown radicals acting on their own rather than at the behest of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, two senior intelligence officials said. Spain still remains home to a web of radical Algerian, Moroccan and Syrian groups bent on carrying out attacks — and aiding the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq — a Spanish intelligence chief and a Western official intimately involved in counterterrorism measures in Spain told The Associated Press. The...

March 12, 2006

Insurgent Split Into Gang Warfare In Anbar

I missed this report yesterday in the London Telegraph, but it bears repeating -- especially since it didn't get any attention from the American media today. Native insurgents and Iraqi civilians have apparently declared war on the al-Qaeda insurgents led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They have achieved significant victories against the foreigners, driving them out of Anbar and forcing them back to the border ... the Iranian border: Insurgent groups in one of Iraq's most violent provinces claim that they have purged the region of three quarters of al-Qa'eda's supporters after forming an alliance to force out the foreign fighters. If true, it would mark a significant victory in the fight against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'eda in Iraq, and could partly explain the considerable drop in suicide bombings in Iraq recently. Wait! Suicide bombings in Iraq have dropped considerably? Our media hasn't told us this. I wonder...

March 13, 2006

Yale's Response To Alumni Critics: 'Retarded'?

John Fund wrote about the former Taliban official now enrolled at Yale, Sayed Ramatullah Hashemi, last week in an article critical of Yale's admission of the Islamist. After Fund wrote about the subject, others openly criticized Yale for its acceptance of a man who participated in one of the most brutally oppressive governments in recent history, and some of those critics are alumni of Yale. In response, Yale Law School's assistant director of giving (which means, in the Orwellian lingo of academia, receiving) sent an e-mail to two alumni asking them if they had suffered brain damage: Mr. Surovov, a Yale alumnus who has worked in its development office for three years and is on the board of the Yale Club of New Haven, wrote Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber at their private email addresses with the subject heading: "Y [sic] do you hate Yale." Here is his email in...

March 14, 2006

AQ #2 Seen In Lodi Before 9/11

An informant for the prosecution in the case of the alleged Lodi al-Qaeda cell says that AQ's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited in the Lodi area in the late 1990s as the local mosque established itself as a center for radical Islamists. Naseem Khan, the prosecution witness that has testified to the activity inside the mosque, picked out the Egyptian doctor-turned-terrorist leader from a photo during his initial interrogation: In a surprising twist, the FBI informant in the terrorism case against a Lodi man and his father said in federal court Monday that he encountered Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader in the small Central Valley farm town a few years before the Sept. 11 attacks. Defense attorneys for Hamid Hayat and his father, Umer, said outside court that the statement by the government's key witness raised serious questions about the informant's credibility. And a former president of the Lodi...

March 16, 2006

Iraq Papers: Al-Qaeda In Iraq In 2002 In Recruitment Drive

John Negroponte has finally begun releasing the captured Iraqi Intelligence Service papers that the US has held since Baghdad fell almost three years ago, after pressure from the White House and Congress. In one of the first releases by the intelligence chief, the papers reveal that not only did al-Qaeda exist in Iraq before the invasion but that they had an active and successful recruitment program to bring new Iraqi fighters to Afghanistan: The Bush administration Wednesday night released the first declassified documents collected by U.S. intelligence during the Iraq war, showing among other things that Saddam Hussein's regime was monitoring reports that Iraqis and Saudis were heading to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks to fight U.S. troops. The documents, the first of thousands expected to be declassified over the next several months, were released via a Pentagon Web site at the direction of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte....

Not Another Independent Commission ...

Congress, having learned nothing from the debacle of the 9/11 Commission, has launched yet another independent investigatory body in an effort to avoid political responsibility. The latest effort in futility will focus on the war in Iraq and even comprises some of the same people from the laughably inept panel on 9/11: Congress unveiled an independent panel on Wednesday assigned to study the U.S.-led war in Iraq and to make policy recommendations for both Capitol Hill and the White House. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group -- led by former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton -- is designed to focus "fresh eyes" on the war debate from people who "love their country more than their party," said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Virginia, during a Capitol Hill news conference. ... "Our purpose is to undertake a bipartisan, forward-looking assessment of the current and prospective situation...

Unlocking History At Leavenworth

The documents released by John Negroponte and hosted on a military website at Leavenworth promise to rewrite the long history of Iraq and its place in the war on terror. Just the first few documents have shown links between Saddam's regime and terrorism, including a strong reference to the 9/11 attack by Saddam's own intelligence service. ABC News has begun their own translation of the key documents, as have others in the blogosphere. Let's start with the document that mentions 9/11, a report from the IIS regarding a conversation with a Taliban official: Our source in Afghanistan No 11002 (for information about him see attachment 1) provided us with information that that Afghani Consul Ahmad Dahestani (for information about him see attachment 2) told him the following: 1. That Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan are in contact with Iraq and it that previously a group from Taliban...

March 17, 2006

Hamas Double-Talks As Fatah Takes A Powder

The new prime minister for the Palestinian Authority, Hamas activist Ismail Haniyeh, hinted at recognition for Israel but only if it gave up Jerusalem and returned to the 1948 borders -- but had earlier said that the Palestinians would only support a long-term truce under those conditions and not a lasting peace. Meanwhile, Fatah has decided to let Hamas run the government on its own, opting out of any power-sharing agreement: Asked in an interview with CBS News aired Thursday if he could foresee a day when he would be invited to sign a peace agreement with Israel, Ismail Haniyeh replied: "Let's hope so." But Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in a landslide in January, has rebuffed Israel's conditions for talks, namely, that the group disarm and recognize the Jewish state's right to exist. Haniyeh told CBS that Hamas wouldn't meet those conditions for talks unless Israel "recognized a...

Gitmo Study Nears Completion

I have received most of the surveys back from the blogswarm that undertook a review of the newly-released documents regarding the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Most of the study's volunteers have remarkably similar comments about the information provided in the documents. The Denbeaux study which prompted this blogswarm reached a number of conclusions that appear now to be highly subjective assumptions. For instance, the Duke wrote after his review: There is simply little information here on actual evidence to determine many of these. I feel the "something major is missing" syndrome in play in almost every one of them. I am attaching my CSRT review, however, I am doubtful that we are actually proving anything here without more information. If the information contained in these brief interviews is the basis for the recent report on these, then it is woefully inadequate for such purpose. Some found some strange stories in the...

March 18, 2006

Operation Swarmer Not Intended As 'Torch II'

Sometimes the press demonstrates such incompetence as to be actually dangerous. The coverage of the latest effort in Samarra in clearing out the terrorists is just the latest example. Operation Swarmer is a significant operation in its scope but mostly for its composition; the Iraqi forces comprise the main battle group of the contingent of 1500 troops and have performed well under the lead of the 101st Airborne. Since its beginning, however, the press has both hyped the operation and attempted to tear it down as a publicity stunt by the White House. Described as the biggest air assault in three years, the press completely misunderstood this as the biggest air strike since the beginning of the war. As Dafydd ab Hugh reports on his Big Lizards blog, the two are completely different military terms: In an article in today's Time Magazine, Brian Bennett and Al Jallam claim that Operation...

More Connections Between Saddam And Al-Qaeda

Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard has long pressed for the release of millions of Iraqi intelligence documents captured by the US when Baghdad fell. He argued for years that the trove of correspondence would shed light on critical disputes about the Iraq war and the actual threat presented from Saddam Hussein and his genocidal regime. Hayes gambled that the IIS hid much more than the American media reported -- and it turns out that Hayes has won his bet. New documents released show that the Iraqis funded the Abu Sayyaf terrorists in the Philippines, a band of bloodthirsty Islamists with strong ties to al-Qaeda: ON JUNE 6, 2001, the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines sent an eight-page fax to Baghdad. Ambassador Salah Samarmad's dispatch to the Secondary Policy Directorate of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry concerned an Abu Sayyaf kidnapping a week earlier that had garnered international attention. Twenty civilians--including...

March 19, 2006

Returning To Camp Nama And Abu Ghraib, Again And Again

The New York Times never misses an opportunity to re-tell a story if it makes the American military or the current administration look bad, and today it rehashes an oft-told story of prisoner abuse in Iraq that attempts to do both. Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall build a strawman or two along the way as well: The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away. Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to...

The Karni Crossroads

A vital trade route for Gaza has taken center stage this morning in the media as both the AP and the Washington Post focus on the passage as a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. The Karni trade route has been closed for months despite the work of Condoleezza Rice to broker an agreement between the PA and Israel to maintain the flow of goods and money, an example of the catch-22 that the Palestinians have inflicted on themselves in this conflict. The AP reports: With Palestinians facing a dire shortage of bread, milk and other essentials, U.S. officials summoned Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to an emergency meeting Sunday to resolve a standoff over Gaza's main cargo crossing. But the Palestinian's economic misery was liable to deepen as Hamas militants sworn to Israel's destruction prepared to formally present their new Cabinet to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas later in the day. The...

My Psycho Sons

Fathers usually beam with pride when their sons decide to go into the family business and follow in their footsteps. Saddam Hussein must have positively burst with joy when his son Qusai helped devise the defense of Baghdad in the last days of his regime. One of the documents found among the cache captured when Baghdad fell reports an order from Qusai to put Kuwaiti POWs -- apparently from the 1990 invasion that prompted the first Gulf War -- around critical military facilities in order to use them as human shields: Presidential Office/ Special Office The Secretary: Re / Kuwaiti POW’s Regarding the execution of Mr. President, Commander Saddam Hussein’s (God protect him) orders, according to the decision of the Revolutionary Command Council on Friday, March 4, 2003. Transfer all Kuwaiti POW’s / a total of 448 captured Kuwaitis who are located at the Al-Nida Al-Agher Prison and the Intelligence...

How Innocuous Were Those Tapes, Anyway?

Not long ago, ABC News broadcast a number of tapes that recorded meetings of Iraqi officials before the American invasion, including Saddam Hussein and his inner circle. After the tapes aired, the general opinion was that the tapes had some historical and contextual interest but provided no smoking guns on Saddam's instransigence. The DoD and DNI have now posted transcripts of all the tapes, and the information contained within them may change that evaluation. Ray Robison has begun a blogswarm to highlight the review of the documents. Be sure to read his ongoing commentary on the transcripts. For instance, page 6 of this document shows that Saddam was kept informed of the status of three German scientists working in the employ of Saddam: We still have two issues Sir (Saddam-RR). Very simple. What the doctor said about the experts. There held in Germany. They have detailed knowledge of our weaponry....

March 20, 2006

American Death Rate In Iraq Lowest In Two Years

Handwringers in the press have turned Iraq into Viet Nam, calling it a quagmire so often that the repetition has become numbing. However, according to a study done by USA Today of military data, the casualty rate for US troops has dropped to its lowest level in two years, while the Iraqi forces show increasing engagement against the terrorists: U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data. The decline in U.S. deaths comes as Iraqi casualties are the highest since the U.S. military began tracking them in 2004. In the past month, nearly five times as many Iraqi forces and civilians were killed as troops in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, U.S. military data show. The shift from spring 2004,...

The EU Never Learns, And Neither Does The BBC

The European Union has transferred sixty-four million euros to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority after briefly withholding the funds because of Hamas' refusal to accept agreements in place that recognize Israel's right to exist. They gave the money with a warning that the next time it might stop if Hamas doesn't change, a warning that failed to impress Hamas at all: The European Union has handed over 64m euros (£44m) in aid to help the poorest Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. But it said that future aid depended on the incoming Hamas government showing a commitment to work for peace, saying the group was "at a crossroads". The EU is due to give another 60m euros to cover official salaries and energy expenses for the Palestinian Authority. EU commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner underscored the EU's rock-solid stance that they would cut off Hamas ... eventually ... sometime ... just watch...

March 21, 2006

What Happens When One Picks The Losing Horse

The Palestinians enjoyed the benificence of Saddam Hussein during the regime's long and brutal rule over the Iraqi people. Perhaps singular among Arab tyrants, Saddam gave the Palestinians privileges denied to Iraqis while funneling money to the suicide bombers that continually attacked Israel during the intifadas. In turn, the Palestinians gave Saddam's Iraq their unquestioning support, publicly siding with him when his tanks overran Kuwait and brutalized that nation for months, and celebrating the 9/11 attacks in street demonstrations of ululating joy -- until a frightened and embarrassed Yasser Arafat told them to shut the hell up. Their special treatment caused plenty of resentment among Iraqis during Saddam's regime, and now that Saddam has been removed from power, the Palestinians feel a lot less welcome in the new Iraq: More than 100 Palestinians fleeing violence in Baghdad and seeking refuge in Jordan have been denied entry by Jordanian border officials...

March 22, 2006

That Wall May Come In Handy After All

According to speculation among security officials from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, al-Qaeda has begun to infiltrate Gaza and the West Bank in an attempt to open a new front in the war on terror. Both have reason for concern over this development, but while the Palestinians continue to elect terrorists to office, Israel continues to provide an effective defense against them: Signs are mounting that al-Qaida terrorists are setting their sights on Israel and the Palestinian territories as their next jihad battleground. Israel has indicted two West Bank militants for al-Qaida membership, Egypt arrested operatives trying to cross into Israel and a Palestinian security official has acknowledged al-Qaida is "organizing cells and gathering supporters." ... Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon have established contacts with al-Qaida followers linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, according to two Israeli officials. Al-Zarqawi...

March 23, 2006

Spanish Insurgency Hangs It Up

The decades-long insurgency of Basque separatists has come to a sudden end, with the insurgent group ETA announcing an end to its operations. According to the London Times, the Basque terrorists have quit in the face of Spanish disgust over the tactics used by al-Qaeda as well as being thwarted by Spanish democracy: AFTER four decades spent purveying death, Eta was finally put out of business by someone else’s act of terrorism: the bombing of Madrid commuter trains by Islamic fanatics in March 2004. By then the organisation was already a fading force, but those attacks created such revulsion against terrorism in Spain that they destroyed any residual support for Eta’s violent tactics. The Times draws a comparison to the exhaustion of the ETA and that of the IRA in Northern Ireland, and even has a Gerry Adams quote to toss into the story. However, the exhaustion has come from...

Quick Links

Two must-read posts on the war on terror, which I don't have time to adequately address -- and since the posts themselves are so good, I don't need to do so: Michelle Malkin discovers the quality of gratitude among the groups whose representatives have been rescued by special-forces teams. Short answer: there is none. All Things Beautiful asks the question, Who is Mohammad-Ali Ramin and why should we pay very close attention to what he has to say? As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's philosopher and architect of the coming Caliphate, we may want to get to know him a little better, and Alexandra gives us a good look at the Iranian Angel of Death. Be sure to read them both. UPDATE: Michael Ledeen writes about Alexandra's post: Both Ahmadi-Nezhad and his tutor are Shi'ites, she says at some length that they are Wahabi Sunnis. That's a pretty big mistake. I'd have to...

More Evidence Of Connections

ABC may not be covering Saddam Hussein's trial very well, but it has provided excellent coverage of the newly-released Iraqi Intelligence Service documents captured by coalition forces after the dictator's fall from power. Earlier today it added two more significant documents to those it had already translated, and the new material shows more evidence of Iraqi cooperation with al-Qaeda: Two Iraqi documents dated in March 2003 -- on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion -- and addressed to the secretary of Saddam Hussein, describe details of a U.S. plan for war. According to the documents, the plan was disclosed to the Iraqis by the Russian ambassador. The first document (CMPC-2003-001950) is a handwritten account of a meeting with the Russian ambassador that details his description of the composition, size, location and type of U.S. military forces arrayed in the Gulf and Jordan. The document includes the exact numbers of tanks,...

March 24, 2006

Russia, Unmasked

Thanks to the release of the captured Iraqi Intelligence Service documents, we now know that the former superpower and our supposed partner in the war on terror instead has allied itself with our enemies -- namely, the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein. The Pentagon confirmed this evening that intelligence gathered during Operation Iraqi Freedom shows clearly that Russia passed vital intelligence to Saddam before and during the war, including our plans for capturing Baghdad: Russia had a military intelligence unit operating in Iraq up through the 2003 U.S. invasion and fall of Baghdad, a Russian analyst said Friday as the Pentagon reported Moscow fed Saddam Hussein's government with intelligence on the American military. Iraqi documents released as part of the Pentagon report asserted that the Russians relayed information to Saddam through their ambassador in Baghdad during the opening days of the war in late March and early April 2003, including...

March 25, 2006

Feingold Campaigns For Retreat From Iraq -- In Iraq

We used to say that American politics stopped at the water's edge, a reminder that we confine our policy debates within our own borders and project a united front abroad. That splendid tradition died a few years ago, starting with Jimmy Carter's open conflict with Bill Clinton in North Korea and Haiti and escalating during the war on terror. However, American politicians have at least understood that when traveling to the war zone, the troops and the public expect them to stick to supportive statements and not engage in protests against our mission. At least, they used to understand that -- but Wisconsin Senator and 2008 presidential hopeful Russ Feingold decided to make his visit to Iraq a soapbox to bolster his anti-war credentials: The increasingly rancorous public debate in the United States over the war spilled into Iraq during a news conference Saturday with two visiting lawmakers who are...

March 26, 2006

Live By The Sword ...

Moqtada al-Sadr escaped an assassination attempt this morning in Baghdad: A mortar attack hit the compound of Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful Shiite cleric and militia leader on Sunday, injuring one guard and a child, a top Sadr aide said. Sadr was inside his house at the time of the attack but escaped injury, aide Mostafa Yacoubi said. Two 82mm mortar rounds hit the Shiite cleric's compound, which is in a neighborhood controlled by Sadr's forces in the northeast of the Shiite holy city of Najaf. One round struck by the front gate, injuring the guard and a neighborhood child, Yacoubi said. Yacoubi gave no details of any casualties inside Sadr's house, except to say Sadr was not wounded. The mortar got launched from a neighboring house; apparently the neighborhood isn't entirely pleased with Sadr and his Mahdi militia. Sadr issued a statement calling for calm and restraint from revenge, advice...

March 27, 2006

Telling Us What We Already Knew

The New York Times reports on leaked notes from a US-UK White House summit in January 2003 that shows both George Bush and Tony Blair determined to remove Saddam Hussein and to put an end to the twelve-year quagmire that kept Saddam in power. Like most of the Gray Lady's reporting on the war (except for the estimable John Burns), this supposed revelation rehashes what we already know, with a thin veneer of hyperbole: In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war. But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was...

Hamas Wants Dictation, Not Talks

Hamas steps up its public-relations campaign today by insisting that it wants peace talks with the rest of the world even while it rules out negotiating with and recognizing the one nation that has a real stake in the outcome. The new Prime Minister of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, Ismail Haniyeh, insisted that Hamas truly wants peace while remaining defiant about their goal of the destruction of Israel, while another Hamas apologist scolds the US in the Boston Globe for refusing to deal with terrorist organizations. Haniyeh announced that he wants the Western Powers to listen to their demands for a "just peace": Hamas's prime minister-designate, Ismail Haniyeh, told parliament that the new government, expected to win a vote of confidence on Tuesday or Wednesday, would be ready for a dialogue with the "Quartet" of mediating powers. ... "Our government will be ready for a dialogue with the Quartet ......

Moussaoui: I Would Have Hit The White House

Zacarias Moussaoui stunned a courtroom today when he confessed, or rather proclaimed, that he intended on participating in a fifth hijacking on 9/11 and destroying the White House before his capture in August 2001. Disputing the intelligence given by 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Moussaoui told the court that he had repeatedly lied to the FBI to protect the operational integrity of the 9/11 plot and to confuse American investigators afterward: Zacarias Moussaoui testified in Federal District Court here today that he knew of Al Qaeda's plans to fly jetliners into the World Trade Center and that he was to have piloted an airliner into the White House on Sept. 11, 2001. Taking the stand before the jury that will determine whether he is put to death or spends the rest of his life in prison, Mr. Moussaoui related in calm, measured language that he was to have been accompanied...

March 28, 2006

The Fukuyama Two-Step

Francis Fukuyama has made headlines once again for abandoning the neoconservativism that he once espoused. His change of heart came, he says, when he attended a speech two years ago that treated the Iraq War as an unqualified success, and realized that he had nothing in common with this movement. Interestingly, it's taken him a while to come public with this information -- say, just about the time that public support for the war has ebbed -- and he does so just as his new book is being released. Of course, Fukuyama has every right to change his mind, as well as be stunningly and laughably wrong, such as when he insisted that we had come to the "end of history" fifteen years ago. What he lacks is an honest rendition of why he changed his mind, as Charles Krauthammer (the man who spoke at that fateful event in 2004)...

March 29, 2006

Palestinians Celebrate Likud Collapse

At least one group of people got enthusiastic about the Israeli elections: Several officials in Ramallah expressed satisfaction with the results of Tuesday's election in Israel, especially the fact that the Likud Party had lost much of its power. "We're happy to see that [Binyamin] Netanyahu has suffered a humiliating defeat," a top official told The Jerusalem Post. "We hope that Kadima and Labor will join forces to advance the peace process and end the conflict." Apart from their schadenfreude at the woes of Netanyahu, the Palestinians didn't care who won the election, at least not publicly. Official after official quoted in the Jerusalem Post shrugged it off, claiming that all Israeli politicians are more alike than not. The officials, mostly Hamas but also PA president Mahmoud Abbas, warned Olmert about a unilateral implementation of his border plan, saying it would lead to chaos. The Palestinians have the solution to...

March 30, 2006

Canada First To Cut Off Hamas

The Canadians became the first nation besides Israel to formally cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority after its Hamas-controlled government officially took power yesterday. The nation's Foreign Affairs Minister, Peter MacKay, announced that Canada would not support terrorists regardless of whether they win elections or not: Canada has become the first country after Israel to cut funding and diplomatic ties to the Palestinian Authority over the new Hamas government’s refusal to renounce violence. ... “As you know, Hamas is a terrorist organization — listed in this country — and we cannot send any direct aid to an organization that refuses to renounce terrorist activity, refuses to renounce violence.” The news shocked pro-Palestine groups who fear aid will be cut to those living in squalid refugee camps. ... “The stated platform of this government has not addressed the concerns raised by Canada and others concerning non-violence, the recognition of Israel,...

Jill Carroll Released By Captors

After three months as a hostage, AP reporter Jill Carroll has been released to American forces in the Green Zone, the news service reports (via Stop the ACLU): Kidnapped U.S. reporter Jill Carroll has been released after nearly three months in captivity, Iraq police and the leader of the Islamic Party said Thursday. She was reported in good condition. Carroll, a freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped on Jan. 7, in Baghdad's western Adil neighborhood while going to interview Sunni Arab politician Adnan al-Dulaimi. Her translator was killed in the attack about 300 yards from al-Dulaimi's office. "She was released this morning, she's talked to her father and she's fine," said David Cook, Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor. Police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said was handed over to the Iraqi Islamic Party office in Amiriya, western Baghdad, by an unknown group. She was later...

April 1, 2006

You Can Help Defend Free Speech

The excellent Canadian magazine Western Standard now faces a lawsuit from an Islamic cleric in Calgary for publishing the Prophet cartoons in its coverage of the massive riots around the world earlier this year. The suit was presented in "human rights court", an apparent dodge in which to silence criticism of radical Islam's political goals through the squelching of legitimate satire. The cost of defending the lawsuit may prove too much for the magazine, estimated at $75,000. CQ readers can assist the Western Standard in its fight for free speech. The information for their legal defense fund can be found here. If we want to prevail against the forces that would silence us and force us to live in dhimmitude either of their making or ours, now is the time to be heard....

April 2, 2006

Lighting A Fire Underneath Them

Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made an unannounced visit to Iraq today in order to send an unusually public message to the political factions that have stalemated the formation of a new government. Both bluntly told the press that they want to press for a unity government now, not two months from now, in order to end the political vacuum that has Iraqis losing patience with their national assembly: The top U.S. and British diplomats told Iraqi leaders on Sunday they cannot afford to "leave a political vacuum" and must work quickly to form a new unified government. The surprise visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw highlighted the allies' growing impatience with the Iraqis' failure to set up a governing coalition nearly four months after elections. Rice told reporters she and Straw conveyed the same message to each of the...

April 4, 2006

Able Providence Background

Earlier today, I wrote about the funding of a new program the promises to use the "engine" of Able Danger to develop leads on potential terror cells, both here and abroad. The new program, Able Providence, wants to produce data as a shared resource for all intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, placed under the joint supervision of the DNI and the Joint Chiefs. For those of us who have followed the Able Danger effort and worried that a vital effort had been abandoned, this is exceptionally good news. However, it is not a shock, as the intelligence-community magazine Government Community News (GCN) wrote a little-noted article about the Able Providence proposal last October: A draft proposal floating behind closed doors would reconstitute and improve upon a former Army data-mining program called Able Danger. Able Providence, as the new program has been dubbed, would establish “robust open-source harvesting capabilities” to give military...

April 5, 2006

Able Providence: Bypass But Inform Bureaucracy

One of the Able Providence briefing slides shows that the Pentagon did learn something from the 9/11 Commission debacle and the subsequent ruination of the American intelligence community -- don't trust the bureaucracy. In a graphic designed to show the flow of information out of the new data-mining project in the war on terror, this note conspicuously appears: Bypass but inform bureaucracy. That directive aims at the action-validation process, which under the current DNI would have to go through multiple levels of bureaucrats, thanks to the 9/11 Commission recommendations that slapped an entirely new bureaucracy on American intelligence. Able Providence would go to the Joint Chiefs and/or the DNI directly for approval on field ops, with an AP "away team" coordinating with the AP team at home. This is a much-improved model over the existing morass of intel agencies. Someone's listening and learning. NOTE ON SOURCING: A few commenters have...

April 6, 2006

Saddam Targeted American Assets For Terrorism (Update)

One of the most contentious issues of the Iraq War is whether the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein served as a distraction from the war on terror or as an integral part of the overall war itself. This is no mere academic question; the answer not only impacts the political future of those who supported and opposed the invasion, but also has real implications for the American resolve to stay in Iraq to see the effort through to completion. A new document from the captured Iraqi files in Baghdad now appears to show that Saddam Hussein's regime not only had ties to al-Qaeda and financed terrorist efforts but also explicitly attempted to recruit people to attack American interests. According to Laurie Mylroie, page 6 of the document is a memo from the command of an Iraqi air force base asking for volunteers for suicide missions: In the Name of God...

April 7, 2006

Guest Post From A Gold Star Mother

CQ is honored to lend its platform to Merrilee Carlson, whose son Michael died in the service of our country in Iraq. Merrilee is the chair of Minnesota Families United, which wants to get the media to use the anniversary of the liberation of Iraq on April 9th to focus on the good works performed by Michael and his comrades. Update: I was quite remiss in not linking to Patrick from Ankle Biting Pundits for arranging this blogosphere effort. Sorry, Patrick! My Son Died to “Liberate People from Oppression” in Iraq I was recently on captainsquarters reading your commentary about Jack Shafer’s study about slanted journalism. As for me, I don’t know what the reasons are, but I do now that many Americans have seemed to lose our resolve in the War on Terror, at least partly because of a steady diet of media negativism. My son, Michael, served and...

April 9, 2006

The Timing Of The Iraqi Air Force Memo

Now that we have established the translation of the memo from the Iraqi Air Force general to all units requesting volunteers for suicide missions against American "interests", the timing of the memo appears to fit into a disturbing sequence in the months prior to 9/11. This memo is dated March 17, 2001, less than six months prior to the coordinated al-Qaeda attack on the US, at a time when the AQ plotters and pilots appeared to be in close proximity to Iraqi intelligence agents in Europe. In a series of posts I wrote last year, I pointed out activity in Germany by the Iraqi Intelligence Service that the 9/11 Commission missed. Specifically, the Germans arrested two IIS agents in late February for their operation of an espionage ring in their country. Their intelligence estimate in 2002 would later claim that Iraq had reached out to extremists Islamist groups to coordinate...

Iraqi Liberation Day

Today is the third anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and in honor of the efforts of our troops, Captain's Quarters has an interview with Merrilee Carlson. Merrilee is a Gold Star mother from Minnesota who has led the effort to support the troops through Minnesota Families United, a chapter of the national support group. Merrilee wrote a guest post for CQ on Friday, and that evening I interviewed her about a range of subjects on the war and the support coming from the home front. The interview is available for download here. It's about twenty-five minutes and will download slowly. Later I will post the transcript, but for now I'd like Merrilee to speak with her own voice. Don't forget to sign their letter when you visit their website....

April 10, 2006

Taliban Reveals Islamofascist Strategy

The Taliban once again confirmed what little military strategy that Islamofascist terrorists can muster when faced with professional troops in the field in an interview with the Canadian Press wire service. Their spokesman informed reporters from Canada that the terrorists only needed to kill enough Canadians to make the nation weary enough of war to withdraw: As MPs gather in Ottawa to discuss Canada's more combative role in southern Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official and coalition commanders painted two disparate images Sunday of where the war is headed. In a weekend interview with The Canadian Press, insurgent spokesman Qari Yuosaf Ahmedi said the Taliban are convinced the resolve of the Canadian people is weak. As suicide attacks and roadside blasts increase, the public will quickly grow weary, he said. “We think that when we kill enough Canadians they will quit war and return home,” Mr. Ahmedi said in an interview,...

April 11, 2006

Palis To UNSC: They Keep Hitting Us Back

The Palestinians have appealed to the UN Security Council to stop Israel's efforts to target the leadership of terrorist organizations that conduct attacks on Israel. They want the UNSC to restrain Israel while they do nothing to restrain the terrorists operating in their territory: The Palestinians called on the U.N. Security Council Monday to take urgent action to stop what it called an escalating military campaign by Israeli forces that has led to a dramatic increase in Palestinian casualties in recent days. The Palestinian U.N. observor, Riyad Mansour, said in a letter to the council that at least 17 Palestinians have been killed since Friday and scores more wounded in a barrage of military attacks and "extrajudicial executions." Mansour told reporters that Arab nations would meet to decide what action its members want the Security Council to take. The options range from holding an open meeting on the latest upsurge...

Speaking Of Security ...

... perhaps someone might want to keep the plans for Air Force One off the Internet....

April 12, 2006

Did Carroll Get Ransomed?

ABC News will air an interview with Sheikh Sattam al-Gaood, a crony of Saddam Hussein and a supporter of the native insurgency in Iraq, who claims to have disbursed a ransom paid for the release of reporter Jill Carroll from terrorists: The man behind Jill Carroll's release tells ABC News in an exclusive interview that kidnapping the American journalist was a mistake. Sheikh Sattam al-Gaood reveals what it took to free her — and why he supports the insurgency. Al-Gaood was one of three people specifically thanked by Carroll's family after her release. He was once one of Saddam Hussein's closest business associates, and now says he is a proud leader of the Iraqi insurgency. "They are defending their country," he said in an interview at his summer house outside Amman, Jordan. "They are an honest resistance. And sometimes they do mistakes." The "mistake", as al-Gaood puts it, was kidnapping...

April 13, 2006

Assumptions At ICE May Prove Hazardous To Our Health

The DHS agency in charge of immigration enforcement makes a strange assumption in a case that sounds like a big problem in the war on terror. After shutting down a conspiracy that smuggled dozens of people from India and Pakistan into the US, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that none had any connection to terrorism. Read the AP's description of this smuggling ring and decide for yourselves: U.S. and Canadian authorities announced Wednesday that they have broken up a human smuggling ring suspected of illegally shepherding dozens of Indian and Pakistani nationals into Washington state from British Columbia. To date, a federal grand jury in Seattle has indicted 14 U.S. and Canadian men for their roles in the alleged scheme. Twelve had been arrested as of Wednesday. Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle, said investigators on both sides of the border have...

April 14, 2006

Don't I Know You From Somewhere?

After having doors slammed in their face and their cash flow cut off, Hamas has decided to recognize Israel under its 1967 border: According to a Thursday report on Al-Jazeera, the Hamas government will recognize Israel if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders. Hamas officials close to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh expect Haniyeh to announce the change in the organization's platform in the next few days, Army Radio reported. This would appear to vindicate the hard line approach taken by the US and surprisingly echoed by the EU. Hamas had threatened to get its cash needs fulfilled by other countries in the region, especially Iran, after having the West wash its hands of the Palestinians when they elected Hamas into power. It now looks as though Hamas had its bluff called and perhaps once again proved the historical disregard that Arab nations have always had for the Palestinians....

Shiites Agree To Attend Assembly Session

A political crisis in Iraq has been averted, with Shi'ites reversing their earlier position and now agreeing to attend the National Assembly when it meets on Monday. The largest faction in the Iraqi parliament had previously insisted that until key ministerial positions had been filled, the session should not open and they would refuse to participate: Leaders of Iraq's Shiite political alliance said Friday that they will attend next week's parliament session even if they haven't reached agreement on nominations for the top posts in the next government. Members of the alliance will meet this weekend to discuss the posts — including the position of prime minister, which has been the core of the long-standing stalemate, said Sabah al-Saedi, a Shiite politician. He said alliance members would attend the parliament session, scheduled for Monday. "We will meet Saturday and Sunday to discuss the matters of the prime minister nomination and...

Now This Looks Like Civil War

The evacuation of Israel from Gaza has left behind a vacuum which both Fatah and Hamas have tried to fill ahead of the other. Now Joshua Mitnick reports that both have started setting up rival military bases in the first stage of what looks like an impending civil war in the Palestinian territories: Militant squatters loyal to rivals Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are turning open lots in the Gaza Strip into ad hoc military bases, a development that some fear will lead to open warfare between rival Palestinian factions. Leaders at the camps say they are acting in the name of the Palestinian uprising against Israel, but the growing presence of what are essentially guerrilla training camps comes at a time of growing instability in Gaza. "Everyone is showing their strength under the umbrella of the resistance," said Tawfik Abu Khoussa, a former spokesman of the Palestinian Interior Ministry....

Zarqawi Retreating?

General John Vines, the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, told a policy conference that al-Qaeda terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has conceded defeat in Iraq and has begun pulling out, thwarted in his attempt to bring down the elected Iraqi government by his own heavy-handed tactics. Vines told the group assembled at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that the bloodthirsty and indiscriminate tactics and targeting of AQ's terror network in Iraq has galvanized Iraqi opinion against Islamofascism and has isolated the foreign network under Zarqawi's command: Al Qaeda in Iraq and its presumed leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, have conceded strategic defeat and are on their way out of the country, a top U.S. military official contended yesterday. The group's failure to disrupt national elections and a constitutional referendum last year "was a tactical admission by Zarqawi that their strategy had failed," said Lt. Gen. John R. Vines,...

The Russian Betrayal Series (Collect Them All!)

Russia has once again undercut the alliance against Islamofascist terror. After meeting with Hamas while the West tried to isolate the terrorists, Russia has now announced that it will supply the funding that the US and EU cut off to pressure Hamas to recognize Israel and abide by existing agreements: Russia has said it will grant the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority urgent financial aid, in opposition to the policy of the EU and the US. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the pledge to authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a telephone call, Moscow said. The US and EU cut off aid after Hamas took power on 30 March because the militant group refused to renounce violence or recognise Israel. ... A Russian foreign ministry statement said: "Mahmoud Abbas stated his high appreciation of Russia's intent, confirmed by Sergei Lavrov, to grant the Palestinian Authority an urgent financial aid in the nearest future."...

Ignatius Makes A Case

I have struggled the past couple of days about what I think regarding the full-court press by former generals calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. When Rumsfeld took the job as Defense Secretary prior to the war on terror, I fully expected that some generals would retire and fire broadsides at him for his plans to overhaul the DoD. Rumsfeld is a radical innovator, and the changes he proposed to transform the American military from a Cold War barrier to a nimble and flexible rapid-response force in the new global environment was bound to make old-school brass very uncomfortable. The generals that now speak out against Rumsfeld are from that part of the military most likely to have objected to his reforms. Also, the criticisms they have levelled at the SecDef have more to do with the policy of the administration than with Rumsfeld's performance in carrying them out, although not...

April 15, 2006

Get This Lunatic A Blogger Account!

The Washington Post reports that al-Qaeda's executive officer spends his time tapping out e-mail screeds to current and former associates and using the Internet to broadcast his interpretations of Islam and global politics to the Ummah, exhorting them to remain true to the Islamist cause and scolding them when they step out of line. In fact, the description of Ayman al-Zawahiri by Craig Whitlock sounds uncomfortably familiar to bloggers: In January 2003, one of the two most wanted men in the world couldn't contain his frustration. From a hiding place probably somewhere in South Asia, he tapped out two lengthy e-mails to a fellow Egyptian who'd been criticizing him in public. "I beg you, don't stop the Muslim souls who trust your opinions from joining the jihad against the Americans," wrote Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy leader of al-Qaeda. He fired off the message even though it risked exposing him. "Let's put...

April 16, 2006

Will We Trade Pollard For A Terrorist's Release?

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Israel will open negotiations with with the US to release convicted spy Jonathan Pollard in exchange for the release of convicted Palestinian terrorist and Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti: Officials in Jerusalem claimed on Saturday that the US would free imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in exchange for Israel releasing jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti. According to Army Radio, Israel is set to offer the proposed prisoner swap deal in the next few months, following the unfolding anarchy in the Palestinian Authority. Seemingly, Israel intends to use Barghouti's release to strengthen the Fatah movement against the background of the much criticized rule of the new Hamas-led Palestinian government. In 2004 Israel suggested a similar move but the initiative was rejected by the US government. Jerusalem officials predict that on this occasion the White House will accept the proposal. This may be one of the dumber...

Palestinian Choices Bring Tough Consequences

The Gaza Palestinians have begun to experience the consequences of electing terrorists to govern their territories, as the Guardian (UK) reports this morning. Hamas has refused to renounce violence, recognize Israel, or agree to abide by previous agreements, and so the Western nations on which the Palestinians rely for economic aid have responded by cutting off the money that pays their bills, including salaries. This has caused the Palestinians to grumble about their new leadership and to openly defy the government Hamas leads: Karni is officially closed because the Israeli army has declared a security alert for the Jewish Passover holiday. Yet it has barely been open this year. The effect is a paralysis of Gaza's commerce and severe shortages of basic foods. Not that the locals are in a position to buy what food there is. There is little money because the European Union, Canada and the United States...

April 17, 2006

Another Example Of The Triangle Offense

Tel Aviv got hit by a suicide bomber this morning, an attack claimed by Islamic Jihad that killed at least six people in a fast-food restaurant. The terrorist group that had sent rockets into Israel from Gaza pledged a "non-stop" offensive against Israelis in the latest example of the Hamas-Fatah-IJ triangle strategy: A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up near a fast-food restaurant in a bustling commercial area of Tel Aviv during the Passover holiday Monday, killing six people and wounding at least 35. ... The Islamic Jihad militant group claimed responsibility in a telephone call to The Associated Press. The attack came a day after the group had pledged to carry out more attacks. Hamas and other militant groups have been observing a ceasefire with Israel for more than a year, though the new Hamas-led Palestinian leadership has refused to condemn attacks against Israelis. Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility...

Hamas: Blowing Up Civilians Eating Falafel Is Self-Defense

The Hamas-led Palestinian Authority underscored the nature of their regime when they praised the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, calling the murder of at least nine civilians and the maiming of dozens "self defense": Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas -- whose Fatah Party was ousted in January parliamentary elections -- condemned the Tel Aviv terrorist attack. But Hamas -- the group that came to power -- called the bombing justified. ... Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinian people "are in a state of self-defense." "We assure our Palestinian people of the right to defend themselves, and this operation is surely a natural reaction to the continued Zionist crimes carried out against our Palestinian people," said Zuhri. Mahmoud Abbas rejected the argument and condemned the bombing, but the Palestinians under Fatah management never lifted a finger to disarm the terrorist groups or to stop suicide bombers from targeting Israeli civilians....

April 19, 2006

More On Able Providence

Mike Kasper has done a remarkable job in delving into the Able Providence story. Be sure to read his latest analysis here....

April 23, 2006

Making Excuses For The Leaks

An interesting offshoot of the exposure of senior CIA officer Mary McCarthy as a leaker is the excuse-making that has accompanied it. Even those who oppose leaks in general have found ways to rationalize her unauthorized disclosures in some manner, as the Washington Post report by Jeffrey Smith and Dafna Linzer shows. The Post doesn't hold a candle to the rationalizations offered by the New York Times in a piece hilariously headlined, "Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by the Rules," indicating that the Gray Lady has decided to go the route of full irony. The Post starts off by characterizing the attitude of former intel officials as opposed to leaks, but .... Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism expert who worked briefly for McCarthy at the CIA in 1988, said yesterday that if McCarthy were really involved in leaks, she may have concluded that the investigation was "a whitewash,...

April 24, 2006

The Inspector Gets Inspected

The New York Times reports that the Inspector General of the CIA, a position appointed by the President, submitted to polygraph testing in the wake of the leaks coming from the intelligence agency. John Helgerson, who supervised Mary McCarthy until the agency discovered that she leaked classified material to the media, experienced the awkward position of being cleared by the people who work for him: The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran intelligence officer last week included a highly unusual polygraph examination for the agency's independent watchdog, Inspector General John L. Helgerson, intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation said Sunday. The special polygraphs, which have been given to dozens of employees since January, are part of a broader effort by Porter J. Goss, the director of the C.I.A., to re-emphasize a culture of secrecy that has included a marked...

A Funny Way To Wage War Against The West

Three bombs exploded simultaneously in the tourist resort of Dahab in Egypt, killing at least 35 people and injuring scores more. The attack comes on the heels of a new Osama bin Laden tape warning the world that al-Qaeda would attack Westerners and Western interests around the globe -- which may confuse the many Egyptians in Dahab this afternoon: Three powerful explosions rocked the Egyptian resort town of Dahab last night killing at least 35 people and wounding hundreds, many of them foreigners, in the third terrorist attack on the Sinai Peninsula in the last 18 months, Egyptian officials said. ... It is the height of the tourist season in Sinai, and police said bombs ripped through the central part of the city, packed with thousands of people eating dinner and strolling through the open-air markets shortly after nightfall. A restaurant, a market and a hotel were hit in timed...

A Funny Way To Wage War Against The West

Three bombs exploded simultaneously in the tourist resort of Dahab in Egypt, killing at least 35 people and injuring scores more. The attack comes on the heels of a new Osama bin Laden tape warning the world that al-Qaeda would attack Westerners and Western interests around the globe -- which may confuse the many Egyptians in Dahab this afternoon: Three powerful explosions rocked the Egyptian resort town of Dahab last night killing at least 35 people and wounding hundreds, many of them foreigners, in the third terrorist attack on the Sinai Peninsula in the last 18 months, Egyptian officials said. ... It is the height of the tourist season in Sinai, and police said bombs ripped through the central part of the city, packed with thousands of people eating dinner and strolling through the open-air markets shortly after nightfall. A restaurant, a market and a hotel were hit in timed...

Denial And Distraction

Mary McCarthy denies having supplied Dana Priest with the information used to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning story on secret CIA detention centers in eastern Europe, according to her friend Rand Beers. NBC reported earlier this evening that Beers has acted as McCarthy's spokesperson and relayed her denial to the press, although that denial isn't exactly complete: The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, “categorically denies being the source of the leak,” one of McCarthy’s friends and former colleagues, Rand Beers, said Monday after speaking to McCarthy. Beers said he could not elaborate on this denial and McCarthy herself did not respond to a request for comment left by NEWSWEEK on her home answering machine. A national security advisor to Democratic Party candidate John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Beers worked as the head of intelligence programs on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff and later served as a top...

April 27, 2006

Specter Threatens To Starve NSA

Senator Arlen Specter has threatened to introduce a bill stripping the National Security Agency of funding for surveillance of overseas communication unless George Bush agrees to a wider briefing on the program. Specter says he doesn't plan to vote for the bill, but that yanking the pursestrings is the only tactic left available to him to bring the White House to Congressional heel: Noting that Congress holds the power of the purse, a frustrated Senate chairman threatened to try to block money for President Bush's domestic wiretapping program. Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Thursday he delivered a message to Bush that cut to the heart of the debate over executive power. "I made the point that the president doesn't have a blank check," Specter said about their meeting Wednesday. "He didn't choose to engage me on that point." Without a pledge from Bush to provide more information on...

April 28, 2006

Southern Border Crossings Not Just For Workers Any More

Thomas Joscelyn reports that transcriptions of Guantanamo Bay hearing uncovered plots by two different Islamist terror groups to send its volunteers into the United States through Mexico, exploiting the border we seem unwilling to credibly secure: The detainee explains his travels thusly: I did not take a boat from one country to another. I did take a small boat to cross rivers inside Mexico. I do not know all the countries I went to. I did take a plane from Pakistan to Guatemala. From there I traveled by foot and vehicle to Mexico. The most intriguing aspect of the transcript concerns the allegations surrounding the smuggler responsible for getting the detainee across the border. The government alleges: The smuggler responsible for the above-mentioned vessel has close business ties with an individual known to help coordinate smuggling operations for members of Hizballah and al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya; Hizballah and al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya are known...

April 30, 2006

The Sugar Ray Strategy In Reverse

When an enemy changes strategy to play to your strength, it indicates either desperation or unbridled folly -- both of which augurs nothing but good news. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now will indulge this desperation or folly in fighting the Americans. The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq has decided to abandon suicide missions in favor of military operations, according to the London Times, due to a lack of volunteers for the former: THE leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is attempting to set up his own mini-army and move away from individual suicide attacks to a more organised resistance movement, according to US intelligence sources. Faced with a shortage of foreign fighters willing to undertake suicide missions, Zarqawi wants to turn his group into a more traditional force mounting co-ordinated guerrilla raids on coalition targets. Al-Qaeda is sending training and planning experts to help to set up the force...

May 1, 2006

Another Reason To Thank Canada

One point I missed in my review of United 93 yesterday is one of the lesser-known complications of our actions in grounding air traffic on 9/11. In the movie as in real life, FAA operations manager makes the decision to ground all aircraft immediately, ordering every plane in American airspace to land at the nearest airport. Despite the fact that it will cost the airline industry billions (and later created a large federal bailout package), Sliney knows it's the right action to take, and every plane in America was on the ground by 12:06 PM on 9/11. One of the consequences of closing American airspace was the denial of landing rights to all inbound international flights. Sliney's decision made it necessary for those flights to return home, or if that could not be safely done, then to find somewhere else to land besides the US. Sliney had no idea if...

May 2, 2006

Even The Law-Enforcement Model Gets Panned

A New York Times report shows that even a law-enforcement model for conducting the fight against terrorism will not satisfy some people. William Rashbaum reports on the testimony of a paid informer who reported conversations and activities at a Brooklyn mosque to New York detectives, which led to the unraveling of a plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station: The paid police informer who is the central witness at the trial of a Pakistani immigrant charged with plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station testified yesterday that he collected a wide range of information on his visits to two city mosques, from the tenor of the sermons to how many people attended the services. The informer, Osama Eldawoody, 50, secretly recorded roughly two dozen conversations about the plot with the immigrant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, in the summer of 2004 — many of them incriminating. He was questioned...

May 3, 2006

Moussaoui Gets Life In Supermax

A jury declined to give Zacarias Moussaoui the death penalty for his refusal to tip federal officials about the 9/11 terrorist plot, even after they found him legally responsible for at least one death in connection to the attack. The jury unanimously chose the lesser sentence of life without the possibility of release in the only criminal trial resulting from the worst attack on American soil: A federal jury decided today that Sept. 11, 2001, conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui should be sentenced to life in prison, rejecting government arguments that he should be executed for his role in the deadliest terrorist strike on American soil. "America, you lost. I won!" Moussaoui yelled as he was escorted from the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria after the verdict was read. He clapped his hands as he left. ... U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema is scheduled to formally sentence Moussaoui at 10 a.m....

May 4, 2006

France Wants Moussaoui Back

The French have apparently not let the ink dry on the jury submission from yesterday's sentencing recommendation in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial before starting to interfere with its implementation. Le Monde reports today that French officials have contacted the US in hopes of transferring Moussaoui to France in order to serve his sentence (h/t: CQ reader Leo T): Un éventuel transfèrement de Zacarias Moussaoui en France, contre qui un jury américain a requis la prison à perpétuité, pourrait être examiné dans le cadre de conventions judiciaires avec les Etats-Unis, a affirmé jeudi le ministère des Affaires étrangères français. "La France et les Etats-Unis d'Amérique sont liés par deux conventions sur le transfèrement des personnes condamnées, une convention bilatérale du 25 janvier 1983 et une convention du Conseil de l'Europe entrée en vigueur le 1er juillet 1985", a déclaré à la presse le porte-parole du Quai d'Orsay, Jean-Baptiste Mattéi. My high-school...

May 5, 2006

Danish Resolve Stiffens Over Cartoon Threats

Denmark responded yesterday to the many attempts at intimidation directed at their country since the publication of the editorial cartoons portraying Mohammed, announcing that they plan to maintain their deployment in Iraq to defy the terrorists: Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said yesterday that the furor over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad had "strengthened our resolve for the long haul" and that Danish troops would remain in Iraq. In an interview with The Washington Times in his Copenhagen office, Mr. Rasmussen brushed off a Danish television report of plans to cut Denmark's 530-man deployment in Iraq by nearly one-fifth in July. "It is clearly our intention to stay in Iraq as long as we are requested by the Iraqi government, as long as our presence is based on a U.N. mandate, and as long as we believe we can make a positive difference on the ground," the center-right Danish...

May 7, 2006

Israel Saves Abbas

In a strange, ironic twist, Israel saved Mahmoud Abbas from assassination at the hands of Hamas, the London Times reports this morning. The armed wing of the "political party" had planned on murdering Abbas on a visit to his office in Gaza before Israeli intelligence discovered the plot and stopped Abbas from walking into the trap: A HAMAS plot to assassinate Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has been thwarted after he was tipped off by Israeli intelligence. Hamas’s military wing, the Izza Din Al-Qassem, had planned to kill Abbas at his office in Gaza, intelligence sources said. Abbas, who became president of the Palestinian Authority last year after the death of Yasser Arafat, was formally warned of the danger by the Israelis and cancelled a planned visit to the territory. The murder plan is the clearest sign yet of the tensions inside the Palestinian Authority between Hamas, which swept to...

Bush: We'll Close Gitmo Jail

George Bush told a German interviewer today that he wants to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay but must await a Supreme Court decision on how to try the remaining detainees. Reuters reports from the transcript of the television station ARD that Bush insists that detainees will get their day in court: President George W. Bush said on Sunday he would like to close the U.S.-run prison at Guantanamo Bay -- a step urged by several foreign leaders -- but was awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on where suspects held there might be tried. ... Bush was asked by the German public television station ARD how the United States could restore its human-rights image following reports of prisoner abuse. "Of course Guantanamo is a delicate issue for people. I would like to close the camp and put the prisoners on trial," Bush said in comments to be broadcast on...

May 9, 2006

The World According To Mahmoud

The letter hailed as a potential breakthrough in the Iranian nuclear impasse turned out to contain no new initiatives towards a resolution to the crisis, according to various news reports quoting Condoleezza Rice and a number of unnamed sources within the administration. In fact, it never mentioned Iran's nuclear program directly, instead attempting to give George Bush a perspective on history from an Islamist perspective. The New York Times reports that the letter didn't make much of an impression: The letter, described in Tehran as the first direct communication from an Iranian leader to an American president since 1979, was said by the spokesman to analyze "the roots of the problems" with the West. But American officials said it was a meandering screed that proposed no solutions to the nuclear issue. ... American officials said the letter, which was not released, was 16 pages in Persian and 18 pages in...

May 11, 2006

Needles, Haystacks, Phone Calls, And NSA

Today the blogosphere has focused on the supposedly new revelation by USA Today reporters that the National Security Agency has built a database of telephone records from the exchanges of most (not all) major phone providers in the United States. The NSA collected basic information on origination and destination on millions of phone calls, both domestic and international, creating a database of call records that data miners can exploit to determine calling patterns when intelligence and law-enforcement agencies suspect a phone of being used for terrorist purposes: The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY. The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of...

May 12, 2006

British Court Refuses To Extradite Hijackers

A British court insisted that nine hijackers from Afghanistan should receive asylum rather than deportation for their takeover of a flight in order to escape the Taliban. The High Court even penalized the Home Office for its insistence on prosecuting the deportation: Nine Afghan asylum seekers who hijacked a plane at gunpoint to get to Britain should have been admitted to the country as genuine refugees and allowed to live and work here freely, the High Court ruled yesterday. In a decision that astonished and dismayed MPs, the Home Office was accused of abusing its powers by failing to give the nine formal permission to enter Britain, in breach of their human rights. ... The judge ordered the Home Office to pay legal costs on an indemnity basis - the highest level possible - to signify his "disquiet and concern". So far, the whole affair, including legal fees, asylum processing...

May 14, 2006

Michael Yon Interview

I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing intrepid independent journalist Michael Yon, back in the US after another tour of Iraq and a short stint in Afghanistan. I had hoped to catch Michael a couple of weeks ago, but the timing never worked out quite right -- and we almost missed each other tonight by accident when we had some confusion due to time zone differences. Fortunately, we made our connection and we spoke for about a half-hour earlier this evening. I've podcasted our interview in three parts. In section 1, Michael and I discuss his impressions of Afghanistan. Michael only spent about a fortnight in Afghanistan, operating completely on his own, without embedding among US or Western forces. He had little good news for us about his limited experience there. The nation still operates on a tribal basis, only now the poppy harvest has hit record numbers, which fuels...

May 16, 2006

Hatch: Courts Informed Of NSA Programs

Senator Orrin Hatch answered charges surrounding the NSA surveillance programs by revealing that at least two FISA judges have been kept informed of at least the NSA phone call database. The revelation answers critics of the Bush administration's efforts to use datamining to detect terrorist sleeper cells: Two judges on the secretive court that approves warrants for intelligence surveillance were told of the broad monitoring programs that have raised recent controversy, a Republican senator said Tuesday, connecting a court to knowledge of the collecting of millions of phone records for the first time. ... Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said that at least two of the chief judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had been informed since 2001 of White House-approved National Security Agency monitoring operations. "None raised any objections, as far as I know," said Hatch, a member of a special Intelligence Committee panel appointed to oversee the NSA's work....

May 17, 2006

The Smoke Trail, Explained

The Pentagon authorized the release of video and stills taken from a security camera that captures the attack on 9/11 by the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, after a FOIA lawsuit by Judicial Watch. The released images do not show all that much more than what we saw on television in the aftermath of the attacks, which disappointed those who hoped the new footage would stamp out the various paranoid conspiracy theories about the attacks. Two bloggers have posted screencaps of the video and noticed something odd. Both Allahpundit at Hot Air and Kevin at Wizbang! remark on the smoke trail evident in the right-hand side of the frame in the moments before the attack. A few commenters (not the bloggers themselves) say this is evidence that the attack was a missile and not a fully-loaded 767, and offer by way of further proof the long-standing assertion that the...

May 18, 2006

Murtha Leaping To Conclusions

Rep. John Murtha has decided to skip the investigation and leapt directly to conclusions regarding allegations that US Marines shot and tossed grenades at Iraqi civilians in revenge for an ambush suffered by their unit in Haditha: Rep. John Murtha, an influential Pennsylvania lawmaker and outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, said today Marines had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood” after allegedly responding to a roadside bomb ambush that killed a Marine during a patrol in Haditha, Iraq, Nov. 19. The incident is still under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and Multi-National Forces Iraq. The Marine Corps originally claimed that a convoy from the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, hit a roadside bomb that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, and the ensuing firefight killed 15 Iraqi civilians — casualties the Corps at first claimed were killed in...

May 21, 2006

Saudis Renege On Reform

After 9/11, the Saudis publicly acknowledged that their education system promoted radicalism in Islam and indoctrinated hatred among their children from the earliest days of their schooling. The Saudis promised to reform their system, spending millions of dollars on expensive advertising campaigns in the US to paint themselves as friends to America and the West and promoting an image of reform and moderation. President Bush held hands (in the Arabic tradition) with a Saudi prince in order to help promote that image of friendship. Did they actually reform that system? According to the Washington Post, nothing changed in the slightest: A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom's religious studies curriculum "encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the 'other.' " Since then,...

May 23, 2006

Moussaoui's Character Witness

A new tape from al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden hit the internet earlier today, and the Tall Sheikh apparently wants everyone to know that he's keeping up with the news. In fact, he decided to offer testimony, albeit belatedly, in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. Osama announced that Moussaoui had no connection to the 9/11 plot, and if Osama thought Club Fed's latest guest had any knowledge of their plans, he would have cancelled the operation immediately: Osama bin Laden purportedly said in an audio tape Tuesday that neither Zacarias Moussaoui — the only person convicted in the U.S. for the Sept. 11 attacks — nor anyone held at Guantanamo had anything to do with the al-Qaida operation. "He had no connection at all with Sept. 11," the speaker claiming to be bin Laden said in the tape posted on the Internet. "I am the one in charge of the...

May 26, 2006

Galloway: Assassinations Justified

George Galloway told an interviewer for the magazine GQ that an assassination of Tony Blair would have justification considering Blair's political positions and decisions, providing the latest in a series of embarrassments for the British Parliament. Galloway also embraced Cuba's Fidel Castro on Cuban television, pronouncing the dictator as a lion among monkeys: The Respect MP George Galloway has said it would be morally justified for a suicide bomber to murder Tony Blair. In an interview with GQ magazine, the reporter asked him: "Would the assassination of, say, Tony Blair by a suicide bomber - if there were no other casualties - be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq?" Mr Galloway replied: "Yes, it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it - but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical...

Haditha Makes Abu Ghraib Look Like A Picnic (Update)

When the story on Abu Ghraib broke, the coverage and hyperbole regarding the supposed "atrocities" at the notorious prison blew the abuses far out of proportion. As many remarked at the time, no one died from wearing panties on their heads, and the pathetic perpetrators of the abuses found themselves tried, convicted, and sentenced to justifiable prison terms. Abu Ghraib was an embarrassment arising from a lack of unit discipline. Haditha, on the other hand, turns out to be a real atrocity, the kind of shameful event that will justifiably haunt the US for years: Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found. An administrative inquiry overseen by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell found that several infantry Marines fatally shot as many as 24 Iraqis and that...

May 29, 2006

Times: 20 Terrorist Plots Active In Britain

The Times of London reports that MI-5 and the police have found themselves stretched to the limit from a score of active terrorist bomb plots. The Home Secretary has told the nation that so many Islamist conspiracies are afoot that the security agencies have no time to participate in an inquiry regarding the Tube bombings last year: TWENTY “major conspiracies” by Islamist terrorists in Britain have been uncovered by the security services, John Reid, the home secretary, has disclosed. ... Reid revealed the existence of the plots — far more than have previously been reported — at a meeting with some of the victims’ relatives and survivors of the attacks last week. He failed to give further details but the claim appears to fit in with briefings by MI5 which suggest that as many as 1,200 potential terrorist suspects may now be in the UK. One of the operations is...

Decoration Day

Our national holiday of Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, proclaimed by General John Logan in 1868 to honor the dead of both sides of the Civil War. It later changed names, but the purpose of the day remains a recognition of the last full measure of devotion on the part of America's true heroes. Today, CQ thanks and honors all of those who have fallen in our country's service, and the families they left behind. In honor of all of them, I present you the story of SFC Paul Smith, a recent Medal of Honor recipient. The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress, March 3, 1863, has awarded in the name of Congress the Medal of Honor to Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith United States Army For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call...

May 30, 2006

Canada: The Terrorists Among Us

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has informed Parliament that many veterans of al-Qaeda's initial war against the Soviet Union live in Canadian cities, and that some have trained since then in terrorist camps: Canada's spy agency says potential terrorists already reside in Canadian cities. The deputy director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said Monday that there are many people currently living in Canada who fought with al-Qaeda during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. And Jack Hooper says those same people have since trained in al-Qaeda terrorist training camps. The testimony to the Canadian Senate came during hearings on the nation's mission in Afghanistan and how it could affect their domestic security, and that answer does not give much confidence in the status quo. The Globe & Mail did not give any more specifics about Hooper's testimony, nor did it even report whether Hooper had more discrete data on the...

May 31, 2006

German Women Volunteer For Suicide Bombings

We noted with alarm the recent interview with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his attempt to inflame Germans against the West by blaming their post-war humiliation on Jews. Apparently Ahmadinejad's attempts to provoke German fringe-dwellers have a ready audience, as Der Spiegel reports that three German women had to be tracked down and arrested after proclaiming their readiness to act as suicide bombers in Iraq: SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that German intelligence agencies have prevented three German women from travelling to Iraq in recent weeks. The women, who have close contacts to the Islamist scene in Germany and at least one whom has converted to Islam, came to the attention of intelligence agencies after one of them had announced on an Internet site that she intended to blow herself and her child up in Iraq. After the Web posting were spotted, Germany's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies mounted an intense...

June 2, 2006

The Next Battle Of Islam

Yousef Ibrahim reports that the next clash between secular Muslim governments and jihadist radicals may come in Tunisia. His column in today's New York Sun describes the efforts of that moderate nation to "rationalize" Islam, and the portents for violent backlash this program carries: The next confrontation between secular dictators and Islamic jihadists in the Arab world may happen in Tunisia. The country's interior minister, Hedi Mhenni, has spoken of plans to issue an electronic identity card to Muslim worshippers, pairing them with the mosques nearest to their homes in what he termed "the rationalization of religion." The crudely named initiative is an effort to restrict the political activities of Islamic fundamentalists, who for decades have used mosques as a staging ground to recruit, organize, and launch potential jihadists at home and abroad. When it comes to battling fundamentalists, nothing done by Tunisia's president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali -...

Iraq Syndrome?

Daniel Henninger warns of the impending war fatigue in his column today for the Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal. Instead of Viet Nam Syndrome, we will increasingly shut out news rather than allow ourselves to react to it -- and that will spell the end of the American prosecution for the war on terror: In El Paso, Texas, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, whose death from a roadside bomb is the event said to have precipitated the Marine shootings at Haditha, said simply: "I don't even listen to the news." This may be the widespread reaction as the Haditha story overwhelms all else--enough, I don't want to hear about it. And there begins the Iraq Syndrome. Some elements of the newly ascendant Democratic left may welcome it, but no serious person in American politics should. The Vietnam Syndrome, a loss of confidence in the efficacy of American military...

June 3, 2006

Good War? Ain't No Such Thing

Frank Schaeffer gains a scoop in his Washington Post column by relating an incident in the British zone of control, an account of brutality and a potential war crime related by an eyewitness to the incident: "I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating a civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with the chair; treatment which the [civilian], his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called on a private and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?' The private's reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don't mind if I do, sir.' "I received confirmation . . . that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death [those] who attempted to...

Canada Discovers Terrorist Plot

Canadian authorities rounded up seventeen suspected terrorists in a series of raids overnight, and have unraveled a plot to attack multiple targets in the Toronto area: Media reports Saturday alleged that the suspects engaged in terror training camps north of Toronto. It was further alleged that a group were plotting to attack targets in Toronto including the headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. ... The Canadian Security Intelligence Service aided the RCMP and officers from Toronto, Peel and Durham in detaining the suspects, described by an undercover officer involved in the operation as “terrorists, the ones who hate the West.” The ethnicity of the group was not clear. A well- placed police source said they are Muslims, but not Arabs, and unconnected to anti-terrorism raids that occurred simultaneously in Britain yesterday. Quoting anonymous sources, CBC said the targets of the raid are suspected of connections with al-Qaeda. A Canadian...

Canadians Used Internet Monitoring To Stop Terror Attack

The Canadian intelligence service monitored Internet communications to identify and track the homegrown jihadists rounded up in last night's raids, according to the Toronto Star. The investigation began two years ago when agents cracked passwords and gathered communications from the group: Last night's dramatic police raid and arrest of as many as a dozen men — with more to come — marks the culmination of Canada's largest ever terrorism investigation into an alleged homegrown cell. The chain of events began two years ago, sparked by local teenagers roving through Internet sites, reading and espousing anti-Western sentiments and vowing to attack at home, in the name of oppressed Muslims here and abroad. Their words were sometimes encrypted, the Internet sites where they communicated allegedly restricted by passwords, but Canadian spies back in 2004 were reading them. And as the youths' words turned into actions, they began watching them. According to sources...

Broad Strata?

The politically-correct whitewash of the Canadian terror cell has already begun in earnest. The Globe & Mail reports that the RCMP has decided to emphasize the fact that the suspected terrorists came from a "broad strata" of Canadian society: From an unmarried computer programmer to a university health sciences graduate and the unemployed, the 17 suspects charged in a foiled terrorist plot represent a “broad strata” of Canadian society. “Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed,” RCMP assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said Saturday. ... Most of the group, who were remanded into custody until their next court appearance on Tuesday, wore street clothes although some appeared in white jump suits. The majority sported the traditional Muslim male beard. [emphasis mine -- CE] The RCMP and all of the Canadian government can keep talking about broad strata all day long, but the seventeen have this much in common: they...

June 4, 2006

RCMP Went Undercover For Raid

The Toronto Star reports this morning that the RCMP itself sold the Toronto terror cell the three tons of ammonium nitrate it planned to use for devastating attacks on Canada. The Mounties moved to capture all of the suspects as soon as the deal for the fertilizer concluded: The delivery of three tonnes of ammonium nitrate to a group suspected of plotting terrorist attacks in southern Ontario was part of an undercover police sting operation, the Toronto Star has learned. The RCMP said yesterday that after investigating the alleged homegrown terrorist cell for months, they had to move quickly Friday night to arrest 12 men and five youths before the group could launch a bomb attack on Canadian soil. Sources say investigators who had learned of the group's alleged plan to build a bomb were controlling the sale and transport of the massive amount of fertilizer, a key component in...

This ... Is GJN

As more information comes to light about the terror cell in Toronto smashed by Canadian authorities, the picture emerging is that of a global jihadist network that apparently does not require professionalism or guile to join. As this episode shows, any group of Muslims filled with enough hate for motivation can work through the Internet and a system of mosques to find like-minded terrorist wannabes and the resources to make their dreams come true: A Canadian counter-terrorism investigation that led to the arrests of 17 people accused of plotting bombings in Ontario is linked to probes in a half-dozen countries, the National Post has learned. Well before police tactical teams began their sweeps around Toronto on Friday, at least 18 related arrests had already taken place in Canada, the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh. The six-month RCMP investigation, called Project OSage, is one of several overlapping probes...

June 5, 2006

The Broad Strata And Its Narrow-Minded Origins

The supposedly "broad strata" of society whence the Canadian terror cell sprang had an unusually narrow base: a single mosque in Mississauga. The eldest of the cell and apparently its ringleader, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, sat on the mosque's board and led prayers while organizing this conspiracy to attack Canadian targets: Several of the people arrested by Canadian authorities in a huge counterterrorism sweep over the weekend regularly attended the same storefront mosque in a middle-class neighborhood of modest brick rental townhouses and well-kept lawns. The eldest of the 17 Canadian residents arrested in the sweep, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, was described by his lawyer as an active member of the mosque, the Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, though not its leader. "He's on the board, he's there regularly, but he's not an imam," said Anser Farooq, the lawyer representing Mr. Jamal and three other people from this Toronto suburb...

June 6, 2006

Hearings Today For The Canadian Suspects

Seventeen suspects arrested this weekend as part of the terrorist roundup in Toronto will have their first court hearing today, where Canada will formally charge them with conspiring to detonate at least one bomb. Zakaria Amara, the 20-year-old student and father, will be identified as the man who bought the material, and another five as his primary accomplices: Government lawyers will allege 20-year-old Zakaria Amara, a university student and father of an 8-month-old daughter, was the man who purchased three tonnes of ammonium nitrate for bomb attacks on Canadian soil, sources have told the Star. Court documents released yesterday claim Amara and another five suspects were involved in the bomb plot. All 17 suspects in what police are alleging is a home-grown terrorist cell are expected to appear in a Brampton court today for the start of their bail hearings. More details have come out in the last twenty-four hours....

June 7, 2006

RCMP Foiled A Dozen Plots

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have stopped a number of attacks from occurring in Canada, sometimes by disrupting networks when arrests could not be made, the Globe & Mail reports this morning. This semi-covert action rarely gets acknowledged but has kept the nation safe from terrorist attack and demonstrates again that the professionals have kept their eye on the ball: The RCMP has quietly broken up at least a dozen terrorist groups in the past two years, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail. "We have completed 12 disruptions of national-level terrorist groups across the country," the Mounties say in briefing notes prepared for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day. Disruptive tactics -- sometimes as simple as letting targets know they are under close surveillance -- are used to prevent a terrorist attack when the police do not have enough evidence to lay criminal charges, the RCMP and the...

June 8, 2006

British Arrest Two Terror Suspects At Airports

What's better than capturing a terror suspect in an airport? Getting two of them. The London Times and the New York Times both reporton the British double play, as an American got captured at Heathrow and a Brit at Manchester: An American citizen who once lived in New York was indicted yesterday on charges of conspiring to send money and military gear to associates of Al Qaeda to use against United States forces in Afghanistan, federal prosecutors said. The defendant, Syed Hashmi, 26, was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London on Tuesday night as he was trying to board a flight to Pakistan, according to the United States attorney's office in Manhattan. Prosecutors said he was carrying a large amount of cash. He was jailed pending extradition proceedings. The conspiracy alleged in the indictment was based in London, law enforcement officials said, but Mr. Hashmi, who had been living in...

Zarqawi Dead In Coalition Air Strike

(Note to CQ readers: This post will be time-stamped to ride on top through most of the day, in order to post updates. Scroll down for newer posts.) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the driving force behind the foreign insurgency in Iraq, died in an air strike at a safe house while holding a meeting with his lieutenants. The announcement from Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki came early this morning, and subsequent reports detail the identification through scars and fingerprints: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and kidnappings, has been killed in an air strike, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday, adding his identity was confirmed by fingerprints and a first-hand look at his face. It was a major victory in the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the broader war on terror. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said...

Bomb On Head Equals Knife In Back

So much for loyalty among terrorists. CNN now reports that the Coalition mission that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came as a result of betrayal within the ranks of his own organization. The Pentagon also confirmed that US and Iraqi forces raided a total of 17 sites based on the intelligence gathered for weeks before today: Betrayal inside his al Qaeda in Iraq terror group led to success in a painstaking U.S.-led operation to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the U.S. military said on Thursday. The most wanted man in Iraq died in a U.S. airstrike Wednesday evening when two 500-pound bombs slammed into a safe house near Baquba, according to U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell. "Last night was the first time that we have had definitive, unquestionable information as to exactly where [al-Zarqawi] was located, knowing that we could strike that target without causing collateral damage to other Iraqi civilians...

Wishing Them All The Best

It turns out that Western politicians do not have a monopoly on spin. The leftovers at al-Qaeda in Iraq put a message out on their website today congratulating Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on his great victory today in allowing two bombs to fall on his head. No, I'm not kidding: As the U.S. military announced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death, al-Zarqawi’s lieutenants did the same, with a statement on his own Web site, with a highly positive spin. “We are bringing the good news of the martyrdom of our Sheikh,” reads the site. “What hit us is a blessing to our nation. ... It will encourage us to continue waging Jihad.” Jihadi bulletin boards and chat rooms were quickly overwhelmed. Al-Zarqawi’s photo was posted, adorned to glorify his death. One posting said: “Zarqawi’s blood will serve as fuel to burn the invaders and the apostates.” If that's how they feel about it...

The Swiss Get In On The Act

Switzerland just got its first big public win in the war on terror, overshadowed on the day American forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other al-Qaeda in Iraq targets and Israel took out #2 on their own hit parade. The Guardian (UK) reports that the Swiss foiled an airliner attack on El Al last December, and announced arrests in the case today: A terrorist cell plotted to shoot down an Israeli airliner over Switzerland but was foiled by intelligence services, Swiss prosecutors said yesterday. Seven people of north African origin are under arrest in connection with the alleged plot, said a statement from the federal prosecutor's office. Officials declined to give further details. Israeli media reported last month that terrorists had planned a rocket attack on a plane operated by the Israeli airline El Al last December during takeoff from Geneva. A series of arrests began last month around Zurich...

June 9, 2006

Two Editorials On Western Delusion

Almost five years into the war on terror, we still have yet to see Western governments take domestic threats seriously, and two editorials make excellent points in that regard today in response to the revelation of the Toronto terror cell this week. The Examiner talks about the "broad strata of delusion" in how security checks get conducted in the age of Islamist terror: Here’s something to think about while standing in line at the airport. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police official described the 17 recently arrested members of an alleged terrorist cell as representing “the broad strata of our community.” The more we learn about these individuals, their recent activities and their alleged plans, the more the RCMP’s description looks like evidence of a dangerously common delusion among many Westerners, especially those in positions of authority where the demands of political correctness too often make it impossible to speak honestly...

The Famous Last Words No One Heard

So Abu Musab al-Zarqawi didn't die instantly from the bombing of his safe house in Baquba two days ago, as it turns out. He lived long enough to know who killed him: Major-General Bill Caldwell said that he had learnt early yesterday that al-Zarqawi had survived the initial airstrikes on his two-floor breeze-block hideout. “We did, in fact, see him alive,” General Caldwell said. “He mumbled something but it was indistinguishable and it was very short.” US medics tried to save the life of the most-wanted man in Iraq, but it was too late, General Caldwell added. “Zarqawi attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher,” he said. “Everybody resecured him back on to the stretcher but he died almost immediately from the wounds he’d received. “He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am...

Guess Who Wanted To Fly In New Zealand?

New Zealand authorities found out that an eager young student pilot might have more on his mind that just cruising through South Pacific clouds. The country deported Rayed Mohammed Abdullah Ali, an undeservedly obscure cast member from the 9/11 plot who told the Kiwis that his dream was to fly a commercial airliner: A Saudi Arabian linked to one of the September 11 hijackers spent four months in New Zealand before being expelled as a national security risk. The United States-qualified pilot, Rayed Mohammed Abdullah Ali, was admitted to New Zealand in February on a student visa, saying his dream was to become a commercial airline pilot and that he needed an English language qualification to assist. Today the Weekend Herald reveals that on May 29 police and immigration officials raided Ali's Palmerston North home and deported him. ... The Government claimed last night that Ali had lived and trained...

June 10, 2006

Terror Experts Agree: Zarqawi Death A Significant Blow To AQ

The Washington Post leads with an analysis of the impact from the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq this week, and the news sounds much better than some of the talking heads on television would lead viewers to believe. Zarqawi's death will not only degrade his own AQI network, but will have a tremendous impact on terror networks worldwide, according to analysts: The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could mark a turning point for al-Qaeda and the global jihadist movement, according to terrorism analysts and intelligence officials. ... Some European and Arab intelligence officials said they had seen signs before Zarqawi's death that the number of foreign fighters going to Iraq was already waning. For recruitment efforts, the importance of Zarqawi's death "cannot be overestimated," Germany's foreign intelligence chief, Ernst Uhrlau, told the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Guido Steinberg, an expert on Islamic radicalism at the German Institute for...

Gettin' Wild With The Zarqmeister

My, the stories I miss when I'm away! It turns out that the US military didn't just kill a terrorist monster Thursday, but also a major party monster. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi apparently brought out the beast in his women, according to the clothing found in the rubble of his safe house in Baquba: The ruins of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s house are strewn with a random jumble of wreckage -- magazines, a leopard-print nightgown, a religious slogan and a few hints at the violent career of Iraq’s most wanted man. What is left of the “safe house” where the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq lived suggests that he and his companions lived there with few luxuries. Apparently, it didn't take much for Zarqawi to get relaxed. Besides the latest from Victoria's Secret for his women (well, we assume for his women), Zarqawi seemed a bit obsessed with the culture he hated...

Zarqawi Said Beaten To Death By Witness Who Could Not Have Seen It

The AP has caused quite a stir today by publishing an uncorroborated account by a supposed eyewitness to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The witness, identified as Mohammed, says that Americans beat and stomped Zarqawi until blood flowed from his nose and he died: The Iraqi, identified only as Mohammed, said he lives near the house where al-Zarqawi was killed. He said residents put a bearded man in an ambulance before U.S. forces arrived. "When the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha, then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose," Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead. Interesting. Of course, Reuters reported earlier tonight that the house could not be seen from any of the local houses, screened...

June 11, 2006

Canadian Imam: We Failed Our Youth

Canadian imams spoke out for patience and trust in the Canadian justice system and told their congregants that they themselves failed their children. Other Muslims protested the Canadian efforts to round up suspected terrorists in their community: Imams across the GTA urged families and communities to take more responsibility for shaping the minds of young Muslims, following the arrest of 17 young men and boys on terrorism-related charges last Friday. In Mississauga, North York and Scarborough, they spoke to thousands gathered for Friday afternoon prayers, some addressing concerns about backlash, others urging the community to have faith in the Canadian justice system to provide a fair trial. "There is nothing wrong in saying we failed our youth," said Imam Munir El-Kassen at the Toronto and Region Islamic Congregation in North York. "We did not fail them intentionally, but our community was in a formative stage and our youth searching to...

June 12, 2006

The Beat Didn't Go On

Contrary to the AP's uncorroborated witness who claimed that American servicemen beat Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to death, an autopsy performed on his corpse reveals that the al-Qaeda leader died from injuries consistent with close encounters to two 500-lb bombs. This should put an end to a very strange episode where people accused soldiers of murdering a man by beating him instead of blowing him up: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived for 52 minutes after a U.S. warplane bombed his hideout northeast of Baghdad, and he died of extensive internal injuries consistent with those caused by a bomb blast, the U.S. military said Monday. Col. Steve Jones, command surgeon for Multinational Forces, said an autopsy concluded that the terrorist leader died from serious injuries to his lungs. An FBI test positively identified al-Zarqawi's remains. ... "Blast waves from the two bombs caused tearing, bruising of the lungs and bleeding," he said. "There...

June 13, 2006

Bush To Baghdad, Post To Desperation

George Bush paid a surprise visit to Baghdad and the newly-formed constitutional government of Iraq. Keeping the news secret until he landed in Baghdad, he delighted the new Prime Minister, who greeted him enthusiastically: President Bush arrived in Baghdad this afternoon for a face-to-face meeting with new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- an effort, the White House said, to get a clear sense of the premier's priorities and how the U.S. government could help his government succeed. The White House originally had said Bush was scheduled to be at Camp David and to hold a video-conference with Maliki this morning. Instead, without telling the Iraqi government or all but his closest advisers, the president slipped out of Washington last night and made the 11-hour trip to Baghdad International Airport, landing at 4:08 p.m. Baghdad time (8:08 a.m. EDT). ... "Good to see you," Maliki said to the president, who...

Key Bali Bombing Player Released In Indonesia

Indonesian authorities have released the cleric who gave his blessing to the bombings in Bali that took over 200 lives in 2002, mostly Australian tourists. Scores of Islamists greeted him enthusiastically at the gates as their spiritual leader: Authorities released militant cleric Abu Bakar Bashir from prison on Wednesday, and about 150 of his supporters jubilantly greeted him with shouts of "God is great!" The 68-year-old cleric, an alleged key leader of the al-Qaida-linked Southeast Asian militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, had served 26 months in prison for giving his blessing to the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists. Bashir's supporters gathered at Jakarta's Cipinang prison for his release, which came about 45 minutes earlier than expected. "God is great!" they shouted. Bashir has maintained his innocence of the charges, but an Indonesian court found him guilty of the crime. In a sentence that...

June 14, 2006

Post Editors: Bush Iraq Visit An Important Boost

The Washington Post editorial board recognizes the value in yesterday's surprise visit to Baghdad by George Bush. In its unsigned editorial today, the Post applauds the message that Bush delivered by his presence as well as his words -- and the Post has a few words for John Kerry as well: PRESIDENT BUSH delivered an important demonstration of American support for Iraq's new democratic government in his visit to Baghdad yesterday. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki represents the best and maybe last hope that a national government can stem sectarian bloodshed, defeat Islamic terrorist organizations and die-hard defenders of Saddam Hussein, and make economic recovery possible. He has formed a unity cabinet, appointed a well-qualified defense minister and spelled out the right agenda, including an imminent campaign to pacify Baghdad with tens of thousands of Iraq's newly trained troops. But Mr. Maliki desperately needs international help to turn the tide of...

Afghan Delegation: Gitmo 'Humane'

A delegation from Afghanistan spent ten days at the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay and pronounced conditions at the facility 'humane': The head of the delegation, Abdul Jabar Sabhet of the Interior Ministry, said the delegation was given the chance to speak freely with all 96 Afghan prisoners about their living conditions. Sabhet said there were "only one or two" complaints. "Conditions of the jail was humane. There were rumors in this country about that. It was wrong. What we have seen was OK," he said. Sabhet's assessment comes five days after the suicides of three detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. Much has been made of the three suicides last week at Gitmo. While any suicides should be investigated, it is plain to see that the men involved took their own lives as a protest, a means of generating publicity for the overall cause. The US...

Baghdad Crackdown Gets Results

Iraqi forces set out to crack the country's toughest security problem in a mission launched today, and the early returns look promising. CNN reports that the security forces freed hostages and captured several terrorists as the violence dipped in the Iraqi capital: Iraqi troops Wednesday uncovered a kidnapping ring, seized weapons -- including three rockets -- and defused two roadside bombs after beginning a security clampdown on the often lawless streets of Baghdad. In the first day of the new government's push to restore order in the capital, Iraqi troops also enforced a curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. and issued a weapons ban for civilians. Four insurgents were detained at one checkpoint after three people emerged from a car "screaming for help," said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "We found eight people that had been kidnapped now for four days that we were...

June 15, 2006

Cut And Run Gets Run Out Of Senate

Both houses of Congress spent today debating the Iraq War and the troop deployment, and the Senare voted on a bill presented by the GOP caucus that mirrored John Kerry's amendment to the defense authorization bill calling for a withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of the year. When the rhetorical dust had settled, the motion failed by a whopping 93-6 vote, embarrassing Democrats who have stepped up calls for exactly such a withdrawal: The Senate rejected a call for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq by year's end on Thursday as Congress erupted in impassioned, election-year debate over a conflict that now has claimed the lives of 2,500 American troops. The vote was 93-6 to shelve the proposal, which would have allowed "only forces that are critical to completing the mission of standing up Iraqi security forces" to remain in 2007. ... The...

Other Than Strapping On A Bomb Vest, Of Course

Newly freed Indonesian Islamist Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual leader of the Bali bombers that killed 202 people, might appear to be the best authority on salvation in ... well, anywhere or any time. However, that did not keep Bashir from advising world leaders to convert to Islam or face eternal damnation: A reputed leader of an al-Qaida-linked terror group blamed for deadly bombings across Indonesia on Thursday accused President Bush and Australia's prime minister of waging wars against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Militant cleric Abu Bakar Bashir also called on Bush and Prime Minister John Howard to convert to Islam, saying it was "the only way to save their souls." I doubt that either Blair or Bush will take the oportunity to act in accordance with the wishes of a terrorist leader and murdering thug who exhorted his followers to commit mass murder in the name of said...

June 16, 2006

House Joins Senate In Defeating Cut-And-Run Strategy

One day after a near-unanimous vote against retreating from Iraq in the Senate, the House also rejected the cut-and-run strategy, although this time on a mostly party-line vote. Forty-two Democrats joined all but five Republicans in refusing to abandon the democratic Iraqi government before the Maliki government wants us to go: The House of Representatives voted, 256 to 153, today in favor of a resolution promising to "complete the mission" in Iraq, prevail in the global fight against terrorism and oppose any "arbitrary date for withdrawal" of American troops. The nonbinding but politically significant resolution was approved with just three Republicans voting against it and 42 Democrats voting for it. The measure also expresses gratitude for the valor and sacrifice of American and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and congratulates the new Iraqi government. This morning's vote, coming after an emotional and partisan debate, was a victory for President...

June 17, 2006

Nailing AQ's Hacker/Blogger In Chief

The Toronto Star has the story this morning on the British capture of al-Qaeda's chief online resource, Irhabi007, and how badly the discovery has impacted the entire AQ operation. His arrest eight months ago allowed Western nations to make almost 40 arrests around the world, including important links to the 17 Canadians arrested in Toronto last month: On a cold night last October, police stormed a West London apartment and found Younis Tsouli at his computer, allegedly building a Web page with the title "You Bomb It." Initially, the raid seemed relatively routine, one of about 1,000 arrests made under Britain's terrorism act during the last five years. The more eye-popping evidence was allegedly found in the London-area homes of two accused co-conspirators: a DVD manual on making suicide bomb vests, a note with the heading "Welcome to Jihad," material on beheadings, a recipe for rocket fuel, and a note...

June 18, 2006

Time: AQ Called Off NY Gas Attack

Time Magazine reported yesterday that an inside mid-level source in al-Qaeda informed the US that the terrorist network built a device that would have turned New York's subway tunnels into a gas chamber that could have killed hundreds in an attack. Inexplicably, AQ's #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri called off the attack in 2003, but American analysts proved the design of the weapon could easily have worked: It was time to call on Ali. His handler contacted him through an elaborate set of signals, and a meeting was set up. cia operatives mentioned to him the names of the captives in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and the existence of the mubtakkar designs. Ali said he might be able to help. He told his cia handlers that a Saudi radical had visited bin Laden's partner al-Zawahiri, in January 2003. The man ran the Arabian Peninsula for al-Qaeda, and one of his aliases was...

June 19, 2006

The Left Can't Tell Between Victory And Defeat

The problem in the debate over the war in Iraq has suddenly clarified itself thanks to two people on the Left who demonstrate that their side has no idea what a successful military decision looks like. Between John Murtha and Frank Rich, both of whom argue that Iraq is a disaster, Somalia is either a brilliant tactical decision or a stunning loss for America -- and this within hours of each other. On yesterday's Meet The Press, where Murtha followed the John Kerry strategy of criticizing Karl Rove's weight rather than his positions (I guess this kind of ad hominem insult attracts voters on the Left), Murtha has this to say about Somalia: REP. MURTHA: He’s, he’s in New Hampshire. He’s making a political speech. He’s sitting in his air conditioned office with his big, fat backside, saying, “Stay the course.” That’s not a plan. I mean, this guy—I don’t...

Haditha: No Cover-Up, But No Determination On Central Allegations

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier that the DoD investigation into the circumstances of the civilian deaths in Haditha show no attempt at a cover-up. Instead, the report appears to point towards poor investigative technique on the part of Marine officers allowed faulty information to flow back to CENTCOM: The general charged with investigating whether Marines tried to cover up the killing of 24 civilians in Haditha has completed his report, finding that Marine officers failed to ask the right questions, an official close to the investigation said Friday. Nothing in the report points to a "knowing cover-up" of the facts by the officers supervising the Marines involved in the November incident, the official said. Rather, he said, officers from the company level through the staff of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force in Baghdad failed to demand "a thorough explanation" of what happened in Haditha. In an official announcement about...

June 20, 2006

Oh, Those Brave And Honorable Jihadis!

The Times of London reports on the latest defensive tactic by the brave and honorably Islamists in Afghanistan when facing Western forces. Instead of just hiding among and targeting civilian populations in their terrorism, now they have started seizing women and children to use as human shields when running away from NATO/Coalition forces under fire: TALEBAN fighters used women and children as human shields as they tried to escape into the mountains of Afghanistan, British troops claimed yesterday. The tactics were revealed in the first account by those who fought in one of the main battles faced by the men of 3 Para and the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Helmand province, where 3,300 British troops are stationed. The Taleban’s use of human shields happened during a six-hour battle that began when British troops arrived in a remote area to flush out a suspected Taleban hideout. They came under attack seven...

June 21, 2006

Post Takes The Law-Enforcement Approach

The Washington Post editorial board, which has demonstrated an above-average comprehension of the dynamics of a war on terror, gets it wrong in their lead editorial today. The Post scores the Bush administration for failing to provide trials for master terrorists it captures, calling the lack of such a "shambles": SEPT. 11 MASTERMINDS Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, along with numerous other infamous al-Qaeda figures, have been in American custody for years. So has Mohamed Qatani, who was allegedly to be the 20th hijacker. None has faced trial for his crimes. Nor have any of the hundreds of lesser foreign detainees captured in the war on terrorism. Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration's plans for bringing the enemy to justice are a shambles. This failure has been one of the most easily avoidable blunders in the war on terrorism. ... The administration is correct...

DHS: AQ Planned More Aviation Attacks

ABC News reports this morning on a Homeland Security document that describes at least three plans to attack America and its allies via commercial aviation. The DHS analysis notes the "ingenuity" of al-Qaeda planners even though US security efforts stopped all of the plots: Al Qaeda terrorists were planning to use cameras to disguise bombs and flash attachments as stun guns in a disrupted hijack plot that targeted the U.S. east coast, Britain, Italy and Australia, U.S. officials say. The plot was one of three previously unknown al Qaeda hijack plots disrupted before they could be carried out, according to a Department of Homeland Security report obtained by ABC News. The report, a strategic assessment on U.S. aviation, says despite security improvements, "DHS continues to receive information on terrorist threats to the U.S. aviation industry and to the Western aviation industry worldwide." The previously secret plots include one in which...

Zawahiri Speaks, Again

Al-Qaeda's second in command, Egyptian terror mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri, released another videotape today. Unlike his past missives, this release appears aimed at Afghanis rather than Westerners, with Zawahiri speaking in Pashtun and Farsi and skipping the English subtitles: In the video, al-Zawahiri, speaking in Arabic, addresses his message to the people in Afghanistan and talks about what he terms "crimes against the Afghan people by the Americans." He claims to have recorded the message, which lasts 3 minutes and 44 seconds, the day after deadly riots in Kabul on May 29. He calls on young men in Kabul's universities to defend their homeland against what he called invaders. Zawahiri missed the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the collapse of the AQ network in Iraq. He also recorded it prior to the completion of the Iraqi government, an event that even apart from Zarqawi's death would have ruined Zawahiri's month....

June 22, 2006

More On The WMD

But not much more, as most media outlets chose to ignore the Santorum/Hoekstra press conference on WMD discovered in Iraq since 2003. The Washington Post put the story on page A10: Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered. "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said. ... Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction soughtin Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Of course, what the Post and Dafna Linzer missed from this analysis is that the pre-1991 WMD was the subject of the cease-fire agreement and the UN sanctions that Saddam...

Domestic Terrorism Raids In Miami

UPDATE X: Val at Babalu Blog rightly calls me out for suggesting that the Cuban-American community may have been involved as nothing more than sheer speculation, via e-mail. I apologize for that; it's what happens when calculating all of the potential vectors of "domestic terrorism" without thinking things all the way through. Blogs have the important quality of immediacy, but some immediacy shouldn't get committed to pixels, as it were. I have tremendous admiration for the Cuban-American community and their struggle against the fascist dictatorship of Fidel Castro, and I blew it by my insinuation that they present a potential danger to our country on the basis of no information at all. Please accept my apologies. It won't happen again ... but if it does, Val's going to call me on the carpet, and I'm grateful for that. Also noting this was Liberal Catnip and The Florida Masochist, the latter also by e-mail. They're all correct.

June 23, 2006

Miami Indictment Released

The government has released the indictment for the seven men arrested in Miami last night, and the charges levied do not mince words. The government will charge the men with "levying war against the government of the United States": A federal indictment against seven men revealed Friday details of what the government said was a plan intended to "kill all the devils we can." The mission was intended to be "as good or greater than 9/11," beginning with the destruction of Chicago's Sears Tower, according to court documents obtained Friday by CNN. Named in the grand jury indictment is Narseal Batiste, who allegedly told a federal undercover agent, who he thought was a member of al Qaeda, that he was organizing a mission to build an Islamic army to wage a jihad in the United States. The document says that Batiste "recruited and supervised individuals in order to organize and...

Miami Terror Press Conference Live Blog

9:36 CT - Starts with Alberto Gonzalez statement regarding homegrown terrorists. Toronto, Madrid, and London bombings were not sleeper cells, but turned on their own country ... 9:39 - The Haitian immigrant was in the US illegally. Hmmm ... wonder if Congress will do anything about that? 9:42 - John Pistole, Deputy Director of the FBI, joins Gonzalez. I wonder why Mueller didn't attend the press conference? 9:44 - Gonzalez won't answer whether all known cell members have been arrested; he won't comment, says investigation is ongoing. 9:45 - Asked whether the group had explosives and weapons stockpiled, Gonzalez stated that sufficient actions had occurred to press the case now rather than wait for them to arm themselves. 9:47 - Asked if they really thought these people could have pulled off a terror attack. Gonzalez replied they didn't get the materials and the weapons they wanted, but that we can't...

ACLU, Right On Schedule

The ACLU has jumped into the fray over the publication of national-security efforts to trace financial transactions of suspected terrorists and their organizations in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal this morning. To no one's great shock, the ACLU has leveled more accusations of malfeasance against the Bush administration: "The revelation of the CIA's financial spying program is another example of the Bush administration's abuse of power. The invasion of our personal financial information, without notification or judicial review, is contrary to the fundamental American value of privacy and must be stopped now. It seems the administration feels entitled to flip through all of our checkbooks. How many other secret spying programs has the Bush administration enacted without Congress, the courts or the public knowing? We need a full accounting of what information has been demanded by the U.S. government, how they have used...

June 25, 2006

CIA Officer Writes Book About Being Overruled

We will soon have another new book from a disgruntled former CIA officer about his experiences of being overruled by the Bush administration, and he has received the traditional Page 1 launch in the Washington Post. Tyler Drumheller's upcoming tome on his work in the WMD program will highlight his participation in the mobile-labs controversy and with "Curveball", the discredited Iraqi defector, and the Post uses that as its lead this morning: While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found. Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in extensive interviews repeated...

Taliban Calls For Truce

The Taliban in Afghanistan has proposed a month-long truce in order to reach a permanent arrangement with the Pakistani government. The Waziristan region has seen fierce fighting involving Pakistani troops, and as the Americans and Canadians press an offensive in Afghanistan, the two-front war has taken its toll on the Taliban: The militants, also known as local Taleban, have set the government four main conditions. They want a withdrawal of army troops from the region within a month, and the removal of all new check posts from North Waziristan, their spokesman Abdullah Farhad told the BBC. He also demanded the restoration of salaries and jobs and other incentives for local tribes and the release of tribesmen arrested during military operations against al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters in the region. The governor of North Western Frontier Province, Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, said a decision on these conditions would be taken in talks...

June 26, 2006

Terrorists Use Crank Calls To Soldiers' Families

In one of the strangest developments in the war on terror, terrorists in Iraq have begun making crank calls to the families of British soldiers using technology that hacks into their cell phones while they call home. The Times of London describes this odd tactic, which has their Defence Ministry steamed: WIVES and family members of soldiers fighting in Iraq have received telephone death threats from insurgents. Their numbers were obtained by Iraqi hackers from soldiers’ mobile telephones using an electronic device. Disclosure of the threatening calls emerged after an investigation by the Royal Military Police into complaints from soldiers. The threats range from claims that a husband or son is dead or will be killed in Iraq to verbal abuse, according to reports. ... The extent of the problem emerged at the weekend in a restricted Army document issued to soldiers of the London Regiment, a Territorial Army unit...

June 27, 2006

Saudi Visas Double In 2006

The Jerusalem Post revealed earlier tonight that a study of State Department figures show that visas granted to Saudis have doubled in 2006. The State Department stated that we are "pleased" at the increase: For the first time since the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the US State Department has begun to sharply increase the number of entry visas granted to Saudi Arabian nationals seeking to visit the United States, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Figures obtained by the Post reveal that after three years of steady decline, 2005 saw the number of US visas issued to Saudis remain relatively stable, while this year the number has more than doubled. In an e-mail to the Post, Amanda D. Rogers-Harper, a spokeswoman for the US State Department, confirmed that as of June 10, a total of 18,683 non-immigrant US visas had been issued to Saudi citizens since...

June 28, 2006

9/11 Commission Chair: 'A Good Program Is Over'

Byron York interviewed Thomas Kean, the 9/11 Commission chairman, on the revelation of the covert terror-finance intelligence operation in the New York Times last week. Kean tells the National Review's White House correspondent that he tried to talk Bill Keller out of publishing the story, and pronounces the program dead as a result of Keller's decision: Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, was briefed several weeks ago about the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance program, and after the session, Kean says, “I came away with the idea that this was a good program, one that was legal, one that was not violating anybody’s civil liberties…and something the U.S. government should be doing to make us safer.” Kean tells National Review Online that the New York Times’s decision to expose the terrorist finance effort — Kean called Times executive editor Bill Keller in an attempt to persuade him not to...

Iraqi Oil Production Hits New Post-War High

The production of oil in Iraq has reached a post-Saddam high of 2.5 million barrels a day, with a quarter of the production going to domestic use. The AP reports that the Iraqi production system has survived sabotage and political chaos to move forward to its current production levels: Iraq is producing an average of 2.5 million barrels of oil a day, its highest level since the war began in 2003, an oil ministry spokesman said Wednesday. Assem Jihad said 1.6 million barrels are being exported daily from the southern port of Basra, while 300,000 are being pumped from the northern city of Kirkuk to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The other 600,000 barrels produced daily are for domestic use, he said. ... Jihad also said new measures were being implemented and he was optimistic that the situation would improve. "We hope to add 200,000 to 300,000 (barrels per day)...

June 29, 2006

Canada Balks At Swift Program

The backlash from the Times continues today, this time in Ottawa. Canadian politicians have expressed concern over the use of SWIFT data to track terrorist financing, giving the floundering Liberals an issue to exploit against the ascendant Conservatives: Bank of Canada governor David Dodge knew in 2002 that the U.S. government wanted data from an international banking organization for use in its war on terror. ... Like other central bankers around the world, Dodge does not appear to have raised any red flags in the past four years. John McCallum, finance critic for the federal Liberals, said Canadians should be worried if personal information was sent to the CIA. It would fly in the face of Canadian law and banking practice, said McCallum, a senior executive with Royal Bank of Canada before joining former prime minister Paul Martin's cabinet as minister and secretary of state for financial institutions. ... No...

Bush Loses On Hamdan

The Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Bush administration, ruling that the US cannot stage military trials for detainees captured in the war on terror. The court ruled 5-3 to overturn the appellate court ruling on Hamdan, relying oddly on the Geneva Convention although the enemy in this war does not qualify for its protections: The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees. The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions. The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison in Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against U.S....

Jihad -- A Family Affair

The Globe & Mail has a disturbing look at the family life of some of the Toronto terror cell broken up by Canadian authorities. Although the particular strain of Islam espoused by terrorists does its best to oppress women, it turns out that the wife of the cell leader believed so much in holy war that she wanted to make it a condition of their marriage: When it came time to write up the premarital agreement between Zakaria Amara and Nada Farooq, Ms. Farooq briefly considered adding a clause that would allow her to ask for a divorce. She said that Mr. Amara (now accused of being a leader of the alleged terror plot that led to the arrests of 17 Muslim men early this month) had to aspire to take part in jihad. "[And] if he ever refuses a clear opportunity to leave for jihad, then i want the...

June 30, 2006

I Was A Teenage Maniac

The Globe & Mail continues its in-depth look into Canada's home-grown terrorists and how they became radicalized while living in a tolerant, multicultural Western society. Yesterday the G&M reviewed the case of Nada Farooq, the wife of Zakaria Amara, one of the cell's ringleaders. Today they focus on Amara himself: More than anything, Zakaria Amara wanted to serve God. But it was never easy, especially not while living in Canada. During the summer of 2004, the then-18-year-old felt disgusted by women who were immodestly dressed. For the same reason, he couldn't watch television. He and his wife Nada Farooq stopped going to movies. One of his devout friends in England sent him a desperate e-mail asking for help in beating an addiction to pornography. But the forces tugging at Mr. Amara -- who now stands accused of being one of two leaders in a terrorist plot -- in the years...

July 1, 2006

Osama: Baghdad Is The Center Of The War

Osama bin Laden apparently has a different take on the global war on terror than many in Congress. While we have heard arguments about how Iraq provided nothing more than a diversion, the gaining strength of the new representative Iraqi government has convinced Osama of the critical need to stop it. In his Internet address to the faithful jihadis, Osama urges them to put all of their efforts to pull down the new democracy in Southwest Asia lest his entire life's work collapse: Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden urged Iraqi militants in an Internet message Saturday to continue fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, or else "all the capitals in the region will fall to the crusaders." ... The message urged militants in Iraq to continue their fight. "Stay steadfast and don't leave Baghdad, otherwise all the capitals in the region will fall to the crusaders," said the message. "Your...

July 2, 2006

Pakistan To Establish Diplomatic Ties With Israel: Expatriates

The war on terror has taken some interesting turns, but none quite as intriguing as having one of the original Islamist states establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. In the wake of two missives from Osama bin Laden, likely from a hideout in Waziristan, the Pakistanis intend on establishing relations with the so-called Zionists: Full diplomatic relations between Israel and Pakistan will be established in a short period of time, a group of Pakistani expatriates living in the US predicted last week during a visit to Jerusalem. An eight-member delegation from the American Muslim Peace Initiative came to Israel as guests of the American Jewish Congress's Council for World Jewry, which has been working to improve ties between Israel and the 160 million Muslims of Pakistan. The two organizations were instrumental in bringing about an historic meeting between the foreign ministers of Israel and Pakistan last year in Istanbul and a...

Zarqawi Buried In Secret

The Iraqi government announced that it has buried Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in or near Baghdad in a secret location and will not return his body to his family. The Jordanian government had bloked his return, but his family as well as Osama bin Laden had demanded that the Americans turn his remains over so that he could be buried near his family in Zarqa: Mouwafak al-Rubaie would not say when the Jordanian-born militant, who was killed June 7 in a U.S. airstrike northeast of Baghdad, was buried, or give any specifics on the location of the grave. The U.S. military confirmed the burial but declined to give details. "The remains of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi were turned over to the appropriate government of Iraq officials and buried in accordance with Muslim customs and traditions," the military said in an e-mailed statement. "Anything further than that would be addressed by the Iraqi...

Mosque Raided In Pittsburgh's North Side

The FBI raided a North Side mosque in Pittsburgh on Friday as part of an unspecified "criminal investigation". The residence that served as both a Koranic school and a mosque is not a part of the mainstream Islamic Council of Greater Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette reports (via Anthony at Irishspy): The raid began around noon when authorities shut down the intersection of Boyle and Hemlock streets, residents said. The activity centered around a three-story green house located in the 1300 block of Boyle Street. It is home to the Sankore Institute and Light of Age Mosque, which doubles as a school for people seeking to learn the Koran and Islamic religious teachings. FBI spokesman Jeff Killeen confirmed that the FBI was at the home. Mr. Killeen referred questions to Margaret Philbin, the U.S. attorney's spokeswoman, who said that the FBI executed a search warrant at the home yesterday morning or afternoon....

July 4, 2006

Bin Laden Unit Closes At CIA

Reflecting a different approach to the war on terror, the CIA has closed its Alec Station unit that dedicated itself to the capture of Osama bin Laden, the New York Times reports today. The unit had focused entirely on Osama for over a decade, long before the 9/11 attacks and even the al-Qaeda chief's infamous fatwa against the United States: The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday. The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said. The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to...

July 5, 2006

The Vatican Discards Appeasement Policy Towards Muslim Nations

The Vatican has begun to dismantle the policy of appeasing Muslim governments that oppress Christian minorities, an approach that reached its zenith when Pope John Paul the Great kissed the Qu'ran. The Vatican will instead insist on protecting Christian minorities in the ummah as Islamists increasingly targets them for abuse and worse: 'Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It's our duty to protect ourselves." Thus spoke Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican's supreme court, referring to Muslims. Explaining his apparent rejection of Jesus' admonition to his followers to "turn the other cheek," De Paolis noted that "The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century...and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights." De Paolis is hardly alone in his thinking; indeed, the Catholic Church is undergoing a dramatic shift from a decades-old policy to protect Catholics living...

July 6, 2006

France: Gitmo Detainees Provide Needed Intel

The French government has found itself in the uncomfortable position of defending Guantanamo Bay's prison after a court discovered that their investigators interrogated detainees at the American detention center. Reuters reports that government lawyers argued that their interrogation helped to prevent terrorist attacks on France: Responding to the report that French intelligence agents had interviewed six men on trial in France for links with a network plotting terrorist attacks while they were held at Guantanamo, the French Foreign Ministry said it had made no secret of three visits to the camp between 2002-2004. "These missions, which were of an administrative nature, were aimed at identifying precisely French citizens who might have been at Guantanamo and at assessing their situation in a general manner," it said in a statement dated Wednesday. It added that the aim was also to gather information needed to allow France to prevent terrorism and that representatives...

July 7, 2006

Holland Tunnel Target Of Zarqawi Network (Updated)

The New York Daily News reports that terrorists planned to detonate a large explosive device in the Holland Tunnel, flooding Manhattan's financial district and causing a disaster on the scale of New Orleans. The FBI discovered the plot while monitoring Internet communications, leading to the arrest of at least one terrorist in Beirut and got leads pointing towards the involvement of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before he assumed room temperature: The FBI has uncovered what officials consider a serious plot by jihadists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in hopes of causing a torrent of water to deluge lower Manhattan, the Daily News has learned. The terrorists sought to drown the Financial District as New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina, sources said. They also wanted to attack subways and other tunnels. Counterterrorism officials are alarmed by the "lone wolf" terror plot because they allegedly got a pledge of financial and tactical support...

One Year Ago: The London Bombings

Today marks the first anniversary of the Islamist attack on London's transportation systems, killing dozens and injuring many more. At the time our family were in Washington DC on vacation, wondering whether terrorists would try coordinated attacks in DC or New York City at the same time. We spent extra time around the television, watching the terrible aftermath of the attacks. At the time, I wrote: If AQ thinks that they can frighten Blair and the British out of the war on terror by bombing London, I believe they are quite mistaken. Another lunatic used terror on Londoners on a much more massive scale for years at a stretch, thinking that the same kind of attacks would panic the British into surrendering, or at least into withdrawing from the conflict. The Blitz did neither. It hardened British resolve to stamp out the cancerous philosophy of fascism and to destroy the...

One Year Ago: The London Bombings

Today marks the first anniversary of the Islamist attack on London's transportation systems, killing dozens and injuring many more. At the time our family were in Washington DC on vacation, wondering whether terrorists would try coordinated attacks in DC or New York City at the same time. We spent extra time around the television, watching the terrible aftermath of the attacks. At the time, I wrote: If AQ thinks that they can frighten Blair and the British out of the war on terror by bombing London, I believe they are quite mistaken. Another lunatic used terror on Londoners on a much more massive scale for years at a stretch, thinking that the same kind of attacks would panic the British into surrendering, or at least into withdrawing from the conflict. The Blitz did neither. It hardened British resolve to stamp out the cancerous philosophy of fascism and to destroy the...

ABC: AQ Planned 5th Anniversary Celebration

According to a new ABC News report, the conspiracy revealed earlier today to target the PATH trains intended on carrying out their attack on September 11th, 2006. The al-Qaeda-connected terrorists planned on giving New Yorkers a reminder on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks -- and it may still be in motion: Federal law enforcement officials tell ABC News a plot designed to use 15 to 20 suicide bombers on one commuter train as close to Sept. 11 as possible was well underway. ... "This is a plot that would have involved martyrdom, explosives and certain of the tubes that connect New Jersey with lower Manhattan," said Mark Mershon, Assistant Director-in-Charge of the FBI New York Field Office. "We're not discussing the modality behind that." But law enforcement officials say the plotters had already accessed detailed blueprints and drawings of the PATH tunnels, available on the internet. And like...

July 10, 2006

The Butcher Of Beslan Bites It

The man who proudly proclaimed his responsibility for an atrocity that saw hundreds of Russian children murdered assumed room temperature earlier today. Chechen "warlord" (terrorist) Shamil Besayev died in a battle between his forces and the Russians in nearby Ingushetia: FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev said on Monday that Basayev, who claimed responsibility for the 2004 Beslan school attack in which 331 people, half of them children, were killed, was planning an attack to coincide with Russia hosting the G8 summit of world leaders this weekend. CNN's Matthew Chance said the killing was a massive victory for the security services and a huge blow for the rebel leadership. Basayev, together with other Chechen fighters, was killed in Ingushetia, a region neighboring Chechnya, where rebels are battling for independence. The CNN report includes a pretty good review of Basayev's career as a terrorist. He also claimed responsibility for a seizure of a...

Hoekstra Scolds White House On Transparency

Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed yesterday that his committee got briefed on a "significant" intelligence program only after a whistleblower revealed its outlines to Congress. The New York Times reports on Hoekstra's revelations: The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that the Bush administration briefed the panel on a "significant" intelligence program only after a government whistle-blower alerted him to its existence and he pressed President Bush for details. The chairman, Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, wrote in a May 18 letter to Mr. Bush, first disclosed publicly on Saturday by The New York Times, that the administration's failure to notify his committee of this program and others could be a "violation of law." Mr. Hoekstra expanded on his concerns in a television appearance on Sunday, saying that when the administration withholds information from Congress, "I take it very, very seriously." ......

Hoekstra Scolds White House On Transparency

Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed yesterday that his committee got briefed on a "significant" intelligence program only after a whistleblower revealed its outlines to Congress. The New York Times reports on Hoekstra's revelations: The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that the Bush administration briefed the panel on a "significant" intelligence program only after a government whistle-blower alerted him to its existence and he pressed President Bush for details. The chairman, Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, wrote in a May 18 letter to Mr. Bush, first disclosed publicly on Saturday by The New York Times, that the administration's failure to notify his committee of this program and others could be a "violation of law." Mr. Hoekstra expanded on his concerns in a television appearance on Sunday, saying that when the administration withholds information from Congress, "I take it very, very seriously." ......

Can Someone Put Adults In Charge Of Security?

Let's play a game, like Cops and Robbers but somewhat less complicated. (I never could memorize the Miranda rights declaration when I was a kid, and all my friends got released on technicalities.) We'll call this game Airport Security, where if you screw it up, a few hundred people can die a terrifying death. In this game, you're the security professional, and this is what you see: [A] man with a Middle Eastern name and a ticket for a Delta Airlines flight to Atlanta shook his head when screeners asked if he had a laptop computer in his baggage, but an X-ray machine operator detected a laptop. A search of the man's baggage revealed a clock with a 9-volt battery taped to it and a copy of the Quran, the report said. A screener examined the man's shoes and determined that the "entire soles of both shoes were gutted out."...

July 11, 2006

Bombs Across India

It looks like al-Qaeda or an Islamofascist offshoot has decided to add another nation to its blood enemies. Instead of attacking Western targets, terrorists set off a wave of bombings across India today, attacking civilian transportation in several cities and killing scores of people: Suspected Islamist militants killed seven people, six of them tourists, on Tuesday in a series of grenade attacks in Srinagar, police said, the most concerted targeting of civilians in months. In the bloodiest strike, a grenade was thrown inside a bus in Srinagar, near the city's famous mountain-ringed Dal Lake, killing the six holidaymakers and wounding seven. Four other people were also hurt. ... At least 40 people were killed in seven blasts on the suburban rail network in India's financial capital Mumbai on Tuesday, television channel CNN-IBN said, quoting police. India's Home Secretary said that no terrorist group had taken responsibility for the strikes, but...

Geneva Convention For All Detainees: Pentagon

The Finanical Times reports that the Department of Defense has issued a major policy change, explicitly applying the Geneva Convention to GWOT detainees for the first time. After the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan, many expected the Bush administration to fight the court's interpretation of Article 3 in Congress, but apparently Bush has decided to concede the point: The White House confirmed on Tuesday that the Pentagon had decided, in a major policy shift, that all detainees held in US military custody around the world are entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. The FT has learned that Gordon England, deputy defence secretary, sent a memo to senior defence officials and military officers last Friday, telling them that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions – which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial – would apply to all detainees held in US military...

July 13, 2006

Tribunals Out, Courts-Martial In: McCain

John McCain says the Bush administration has given up on military tribunals for captured terrorists and agreed to courts-martial instead, reversing course with Congress. The change would match the language of the Geneva Conventions for treatment of POWs, signalling a shift in detainee status as well: Citing recent meetings with Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, and other top administration officials, McCain said the White House would not insist upon legislation authorizing military commissions established by the Pentagon. "At that time, I was under the impression that that was the administration's position," McCain said. "I hope that hadn't changed." Such a promise would contradict testimony heard earlier this week from administration officials, who told lawmakers that Congress should not turn to the Uniformed Code of Military Justice because it would grant terrorists too many freedoms and would be unpractical on the battlefield. In their testimony, officials representing the Defense...

July 14, 2006

Did Pakistani Intelligence Plan India Bombings?

Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, has long been rumored to have deep connections to Islamist radicals, including al-Qaeda and almost certainly helped prop up the Taliban during their years in power. Now the Hindustan Times reports that the ISI had some operational connection to the Mumbai bombings of 7/11, potentially broadening the scope of the conflict between Pakistan and India: Forty-eight hours after bombs ripped through Mumbai, the needle pointed to Pakistan. Intelligence agencies on Thursday confirmed that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was the “mastermind” of the blasts that killed about 200 people. The Mumbai Police, meanwhile, identified the trio who planned and executed 11/7: Rahil, Zahibuddin Ansari and Faiyaz, linked to the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Of them, Rahil had reportedly made an abortive bid to trigger a blast at Byculla railway station on March 11 — the eve of the anniversary of...

The Unlikeliest Spy Against The Islamists

CQ reader jiHymas refers us to a fascinating account about the insider who nailed the Toronto 17, the Islamist terror cell that had attempted to purchase three tons of ammonium nitrate to conduct attacks on Canada's infrastructure. Meet Mubin Shaikh, a Muslim who campaigned for allowing sharia courts in Canada's Muslim communities and who supports the jihads in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet this Canadian drew the line on attacks on his fellow citizens: This is the story of the 18th man, the civilian mole and devout Muslim paid by CSIS and the RCMP to infiltrate Mr. Ahmad's circle and thwart an alleged plot to blow up those targets. Over a series of discussions with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Shaikh detailed his motives for bringing down the alleged terrorist cell. Above all, violence in Canada in the name of Islam cannot be tolerated, said Mr. Shaikh, who says he has...

July 17, 2006

Canada To Terrorists: Fly The Friendly Skies

Canadian officials may want to rethink their policies on flight security. The Toronto Sun reports that Canada will not block people from flying in, out, or within Canada just for the tiny little detail of belonging to a terrorist organization: Being a member of a terrorist organization won't necessarily land someone on Canada's no-fly list, The Canadian Press has learned. Proposed criteria would limit inclusion on the roster to those who pose "an immediate threat to aviation security," Transport Canada internal briefing notes say. Draft regulations, disclosed by a source familiar with details of the plan, confirm the no-fly list will be tightly focused and reviewed every 30 days to keep it up to date. "You cannot be put on the list on the sole basis that you're a member of a 'terrorist group,'" the source said. "In addition, you have to be a demonstrable threat to aviation safety." Even...

July 20, 2006

Neutrality Is No Defense

The Swiss have learned that their traditional neutrality, which has kept them safe from centuries of European wars, will not have the same deterrent value in a war against Islamofascist terrorism. Their federal police have reversed previous assessments of the risk to the nation from terrorism and declared Switzerland a "jihadi field of operation": For centuries, this Alpine nation has successfully relied on a strict policy of political neutrality to insulate it from the wars, invasions and revolutions that have raged outside its borders. These days, a new threat has emerged: one from within. As they have elsewhere in Europe, Islamic radicals are making inroads in Switzerland. Last month, Swiss officials announced the arrests of a dozen suspects who allegedly conspired to shoot down an Israeli airliner flying from Geneva to Tel Aviv. In a related case, a North African man has been charged with organizing a plot from Swiss...

July 21, 2006

Italy Arrests Four AQ-Linked Terrorists

The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant reports that Italy has arrested four Algerian terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda. Italian security forces arrested the men in the Veneto region, but conducted numerous house searches in northern Italy as part of a larger investigation: ROME - De speciale antiterreureenheid van de Italiaanse politie heeft vrijdagochtend in de regio Veneto vier Algerijnse terreurverdachten opgepakt. Op tal van plaatsen zijn huiszoekingen verricht. De politie-actie strekte zich ook uit over de regio's Lombardia en Emilia-Romagna. De vier zouden deel uitmaken van een Italiaanse cel van de Salafistische Groep voor Prediking en Strijd (GSPC), die in verband wordt gebracht met Al Qa’ida. Ze worden verdacht van het financieren van terreur, het rekruteren van strijders en het regelen van valse identiteitspapieren en werkvergunningen. Get all that? Neither did I, but that's why I read Michael van der Galien's post at Liberty and Justice. The story has not hit...

First Arrests In Mumbai Bombings

Indian authorities have made the first arrests in the series of bombings in Mumbai that killed almost 200 people on July 11th. Described as lower-level operatives, the security forces hope that their new suspects will lead them to the masterminds of the plot: Police in India have arrested three men in connection with a series of bombings that killed more than 180 people in the city of Mumbai (Bombay) last week. The police have detained more than 300 suspects but these are the first arrests in the case. Two of the men were detained on Thursday in the northern state of Bihar and the third later in Mumbai. ... The BBC's Zubair Ahmed in Mumbai says it is not clear how significant the arrests are. The three accused are suspected to have played minor roles in the blasts, but a senior police officer told the BBC that the arrests might...

Maybe He Should Just Get A Blog

ABC News reports that Islamist web sites have announced that Osama bin Laden will have a new message out in the next few hours or days. Apparently, Osama bin Watchin' CNN: A new Osama bin Laden message from al Qaeda's as-Sahab Institute for Media Production is to be released soon, according to IntelCenter, which monitors extremist websites. Sites have begun to advertise a new message. In his message, bin Laden will reportedly address events in Gaza and Lebanon. This message has been expected and is consistent with new efforts in 2006 by al Qaeda's senior leadership to be responsive in their messages to current developments. This impulse comes from a deep-seated need to prove to his followers that Osama bin Breathin'. Whenever Osama goes off the air for more than a few weeks, rumors start to fly that the al-Qaeda chieftain has kicked the bucket. In order to combat the...

July 22, 2006

A 'Continuum Of Civilianality'?

Alan Dershowitz has made a career out of his contrarian rhetoric. Usually a firebrand liberal, he caused a huge controversy -- and enjoyed it -- when he suggested after 9/11 that torture may have some necessity in the fight against Islamofascist terrorists. He continued challenging conventional wisdom today in a Los Angeles Times column that called into question the status of civilians in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories: THE NEWS IS filled these days with reports of civilian casualties, comparative civilian body counts and criticism of Israel, along with Hezbollah, for causing the deaths, injuries and "collective punishment" of civilians. But just who is a "civilian" in the age of terrorism, when militants don't wear uniforms, don't belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian populations? We need a new vocabulary to reflect the realities of modern warfare. A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis...

July 28, 2006

Draft Bill On Detainee Trials Outlines Procedures

The Washington Post reports on the initial drafts from the Bush administration for their proposal to Congress for authorized military tribunals for detainees in the war on terror. The tribunals will use the template from our criminal justice system, with necessary modifications in accordance with fighting an ongoing war. The result shows the problems with holding tribunals while hostilities continue, for both testimony and thresholds of evidence. Here are the parameters the White House will propose to Congress: Rationale The draft states that using the federal courts or existing military court-martial procedures to try suspects in the war on terrorism -- described formally as "alien enemy combatants" -- is "impracticable" because they are committed to destroying the country and abusing its legal processes. Routine trial procedures would not work, it states, because suspects cannot be given access to classified information or tried speedily. Service members involved in collecting evidence cannot...

August 1, 2006

Unhappy Days Are Here Again

National Review's Michael Ledeen takes us on a trip in the Wayback Machine, but unlike the journeys of Peabody and his boy Sherman, Ledeen notices that we arrive back in the present: Certainly there is lots of bad news, most of which confirms what we already knew: The Western world hates Israel; the taboo on anti-Semitism is off; the Western world has been P.C.’ed to the edge of death; there is no stomach for fighting the war against Islamic fascism. Sounds like the Thirties to me. ... Then, too, the mounting power of what became the Axis was ignored. As my father often reminded me, a few months before Pearl Harbor, at a time when Nazi armies were long since on the march, the draft passed by a single vote. Apologists for Hitler and Mussolini were legion, and some of our leading intellectuals were saying that American democratic capitalism was...

The Dictator's Islamist Dodge

Daniel Freedman, who runs the excellent New York Sun blog It Shines For All, takes an interesting look at the disincentives for dictators to defeat Islamofascism in the American Spectator. Freedman reports that the real threat to Pakistan's military dictatorship comes not from Islamists but from Democrats, led by former PM Benazir Bhutto. However, Pervez Musharraf has plenty of motivation for painting the Islamist threat as the biggest threat -- and for making sure that he never quite beats them: THIS RESPONSE TO A PERCEIVED Islamist "threat" by the West is based on the premise that if the dictator falls, Islamists, rather than democrats, will take power. An apparent "threat" therefore ensures that the dictator won't be pressured to introduce reform and will be showered with aid. Take Egypt's Hosni Mubarak: He's backtracked on democracy reforms and imprisoned democracy activists. Yet he receives $1.7 billion a year in American aid....

August 8, 2006

Does This Sound Familiar?

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Eleven foreign students from a Muslim nation get off a plane in New York, walk down the street, and turn into a national security problem (via Flopping Aces): U.S. authorities are searching for 11 Egyptian men who arrived in the United States last month but failed to turn up at Montana State University for a scheduled academic program. According to the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, the men were among a larger group of students who arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York from Cairo on July 29 with valid visas. FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko said there is no threat associated with the men. A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the men are between 18 and 22 years old. Now we have eleven young Muslims from a country known for...

August 10, 2006

British Shut Down Heathrow As Terror Attack Thwarted

British officials of MI-6 have taken twenty-one suspects into custody and have closed Heathrow Airport to inbound traffic as part of a sweep that stopped a massive terrorist attack. The UK went to its highest terror alert as they unraveled what appears to be a home-grown plot: A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said. It is thought the plan was to detonate explosive devices smuggled in hand luggage on to as many as 10 aircraft. Police were searching premises with 21 people in custody after arrests in the London area and West Midlands. ... According to BBC sources the "principal characters" suspected of being involved in the plot were British-born. BBC home affairs correspondent Andy Tighe said police sources had told him they had found "interesting items" which...

Why Don't We All Consider A Little STFU?

One of the benefits of spending most of the day unable to post -- besides actually getting work done at the office -- is that I can spend a little time gaining perspective on the events of the day. Today that means reviewing the coverage of the foiled plot by Islamists in the UK to bomb a series of commercial flights, an operation that could have killed almost as many people as al-Qaeda did on 9/11. The discovery of the plot and the arrests of the terrorists should have been a cause for celebration -- but instead, people decided to spend the day taking partisan swipes at each other. Almost no one appeared immune from this impulse. George Bush gave a short and to-the-point statement regarding the necessity of fighting terrorism and managed to avoid partisanship, instead focusing on working together to achieve security. Even before that, though, it seemed...

August 11, 2006

Remember The Geography

In the initial reaction to the successful investigation that prevented a massive terrorist attack on the United Kingdom's air industry, people have begun to search for some favored hobby horses. Some point to a Time Magazine article describing the takedown of the terrorist plot , which includes the nature of the assistance America lent to the counterterrorist effort: Britain's MI-5 intelligence service and Scotland Yard had been tracking the plot for several months, but only in the past two weeks had the plotters' planning begun to crystallize, senior U.S. officials tell TIME. In the two or three days before the arrests, the cell was going operational, and authorities were pressed into action. MI5 and Scotland Yard agents tracked the plotters from the ground, while a knowledgeable American official says U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group's communications. Most of the suspects are second or third generation British...

A US Connection To British Airline Plot?

A British Muslim's concern about an acquaintance in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in London led authorities to uncover the massive plot against the UK's airline industry, the Washington Post reports this morning. The tip led investigators to Pakistan and back, and perhaps to the US: It all began with a tip: In the aftermath of the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings on London's transit system, British authorities received a call from a worried member of the Muslim community, reporting general suspicions about an acquaintance. From that vague but vital piece of information, according to a senior European intelligence official, British authorities opened the investigation into what they said turned out to be a well-coordinated and long-planned plot to bomb multiple transatlantic flights heading toward the United States -- an assault designed to rival the scope and lethality of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings. ... A law enforcement bulletin...

Washington Editorials On Bombing Plot: The Serious And The Silly

Two editorials in Washington newspapers show the difference between serious thinking and silly whining in the aftermath of the bombing plot discovery in Britain yesterday. While the Washington Examiner argues that some profiling should be considered along with the massive inconvenience to all travelers with the new security rules placed in effect yesterday, the Washington Post complains about first-class passengers paying for expedited service. The Examiner wonders when American airports will get serious regarding the specific threats we face: A key to their ability to crack the conspiracy was the ability to sneak and peek — that is, to enter suspected plotters’ homes covertly to gather information. U.S. law enforcement officials are not permitted to carry out such operations, except as provided under Section 213 of the Patriot Act. The ACLU is doing everything in its power to hamper or otherwise force the repeal of part or all of that...

August 12, 2006

The Pakistan Problem, And The Return Of FISA

The revelation of the massive terrorist plot on British airlines shows that Islamofascist terror has once again centered in Pakistan, and that the Pakistani government may or may not be up to the task of confronting it. The ISI cooperated in this instance, but Western intelligence has little faith that they will remain consistent in this effort: U.S. and European officials described Pakistan yesterday as the hub of a plot to down transatlantic flights, saying the young British men allegedly behind the planned attacks drew financial and logistical support from sponsors operating in Karachi and Lahore. At least 17 suspects in British custody for the aviation plot have family ties to Pakistan, and several had traveled there in recent months to seek instructions and confer with unknown conspirators, intelligence officials said yesterday, discussing several elements of the investigation on the condition of anonymity. Pakistan's government, portraying itself as a reliable...

August 13, 2006

British AQ Leader Seized?

The Times of London reports that one of the men rounded up in the collapse of the airliner plot this week is the head of al-Qaeda in the UK. The Times does not identify him by name, but apparently MI-5 knows him well: SECURITY sources believe that a man arrested in last week’s anti- terror raids in Britain is Al-Qaeda’s leader in this country. Home Office officials say that one of those arrested is suspected not only of masterminding the foiled plot to bring down up to nine transatlantic airliners, but also of involvement in other planned atrocities over the past few years. They believe that he was instrumental in sending the ringleader of at least one previous British terror plot for training at a camp in Pakistan last year. He is described by counter-terrorist officials at MI5 as the senior figure in a British terror network involving Kashmiri, north...

August 14, 2006

Chertoff: No Connection And No Distraction

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told news interviewers yesterday that the terror plot uncovered in Britain this week had no American connections, but that the investigation would still continue to pursue leads if they led in our direction. He also cautioned against complacency and assured Americans that the plot's exposure had not provided a distraction for his department: There is no evidence that terrorists were working within the United States as part of a plot to detonate explosives on airliners, but U.S. officials remain vigilant after last week's arrests in Britain and Pakistan, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday. Appearing on several Sunday-morning television talk shows, Chertoff warned that it is clear in the wake of the foiled terrorism operation that enemies of the United States "still want to carry out spectacular plots" and have been developing innovative ways to skirt security. "As we speak right now, we have...

The Youngest Suicide Bomber

British officials have begun questioning a Muslim couple arrested in the terror-plot roundup this week about their plans to exploit their six-month-old baby in order to sneak explosives on board an international flight. Abdula Ahmed Ali and his wife Cossor intended on using baby bottles to sneak liquid components of a bomb onto an airplane, allowing their infant to become the world's youngest suicide bomber: Scotland Yard police are quizzing Abdula Ahmed Ali, 25, and his 23-year-old wife Cossor over suspicions they were to use their baby's bottle to hide a liquid bomb. The theory is one of the reasons security chiefs are now insisting mothers taste babies' milk at check-in desks before allowing them to take bottles aboard flights. ... Police in England have reportedly recovered bottles containing peroxide, including some with false bottoms, from a recycling centre close to the homes of some of the arrested suspects. It...

Mackinac Bridge A Terror Target?

Michigan authorities have detained three Texans of Arabic ancestry while they investigate their unusual interest in the Mackinac Bridge and disposable cell phones. A Wal-Mart employee tipped police when the three bought 80 of the phones, and when police caught up to them, they had over a thousand of the untraceable phones in their possession: If the hundreds of prepaid cellular telephones found in the minivan seemed odd, the pictures of the Mackinac Bridge were downright troubling to Tuscola County law enforcement officials who have charged three Texas men with terrorism-related crimes. The phones plus photographs and videos of the 5-mile-long bridge led authorities to believe that the men -- two brothers and a cousin, all of Middle Eastern heritage -- were targeting the iconic structure linking the Upper and Lower peninsulas, according to a law enforcement official familiar with details of the case. While the bridge pictures might have...

August 15, 2006

British Sky Plot May Have 9/11 Connection

German authorities are investigating a possible link between the captured terrorists of the recent airliner plot and a key figure in the Hamburg cell who worked with Mohammed Atta on the 9/11 attacks. Said Bahaji, a computer expert who helped plan 9/11, may have provided the same assistance to these suspected al-Qaeda terrorists: German authorities are investigating contacts between a Briton being questioned over the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airlines and a key figure in the September 11, 2001, terrorist cell. Intelligence sources said that, at Britain’s request, they were examining possible links between the suspect and Said Bahaji, the computer expert in the Hamburg cell that planned the suicide hijackings in 2001. Bahaji shared an apartment in Hamburg with Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, and Ramzi Binalshibh, the planner of 9/11. He fled Germany for Pakistan a week before the attacks in New York and Washington and...

August 16, 2006

Did Torture Break The British Sky Plot?

According to the Guardian, Pakistani intelligence agents used torture to break Rashid Rauf, one of the plotters involved in the plot to attack transatlantic flights and kill thousands of travelers. Not surprisingly, the newspaper decries the use of this intelligence by Western forces and accuses the British and Americans of outsourcing torture in order to keep our hands clean: Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the...

Flight Drama Somewhat Overblown

When I returned home after my minor surgery today, the story of the transatlantic flight dominated the news. I could not blog on it at the time due to the condition of my hand, and I recalled thinking that might not be a bad thing. I suspected that the news reports would turn out to be overblown, and I was right: Two fighter jets were scrambled Wednesday to escort a London-to-Washington flight to an emergency landing in Boston after a disturbance in which passengers said a woman in a jogging suit paced up and down the aisle, peppering her incoherent mutterings with the word "Pakistan." The federal official for Boston's Logan International Airport said there was no indication of terrorism, but passengers said they were unnerved by the woman and by the military response, just a week after authorities in London said they foiled a terror plot to blow up...

August 17, 2006

Pakistan: British Sky Terror Plot Started With AQ #3

Pakistani sources indentify al-Qaeda's #3 man as the originator of the plot to attack airliners in Britain in perhaps the largest-scale plot since 9/11. Abu Faraj al-Libbi personally directed the terror conspiracy and used Rashid Rauf as the main liaison between AQ leadership and the British cell: Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who after Osama bin Laden and the Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri, is suspected of being al-Qaida's third in command, has been named by Pakistani security sources as the main planner of the alleged plot, according to Dawn, a daily newspaper. He has also been accused of being in a plot to assassinate Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, and was arrested last year and turned over to the US. A security official said: "There was a mastermind, there was a planner, and there were the executioners." He claimed the al-Qaida link to the alleged plot in Britain had been established and that it...

Profiling Profiles

Taking a page from Israeli security forces, the US has started using a technique for screening at airports that focuses on the people rather than the methodology to stop terrorism. Although currently only an experimental program, the technological escalation of the British sky plot will pressure the Transportation Security Administration into deploying this across all airports: As the man approached the airport security checkpoint here on Wednesday, he kept picking up and putting down his backpack, touching his fingers to his chin, rubbing some object in his hands and finally reaching for his pack of cigarettes, even though smoking was not allowed. Two Transportation Security Administration officers stood nearby, nearly motionless and silent, gazing straight at him. Then, with a nod, they moved in, chatting briefly with the man, and then swiftly pulled him aside for an intense search. Another airline passenger had just made the acquaintance of the transportation...

August 18, 2006

Martyrdom Videos Found In Suspects' Computers

The latest meme to emerge is that of skepticism of the British sky terror plot on the part of some bloggers. Arguments heard when the feds busted the amateurish Miami conspiracy earlier this summer have arisen -- that the supposed conspirators had no capability to carry out such a wide-ranging plot, or more often that the plot came from Pakistani torture and the desire of George Bush and Tony Blair to change the subject. The discovery of martyrdom videos on the laptop computers of some suspects appears to throw cold water on the conspiracy theories: Police investigating an alleged plot to bring down airliners have found several martyrdom videos in the course of their searches, the BBC has learned. Unofficial police sources said the recordings - discovered on laptop computers - appear to have been made by some of the suspects being questioned. Scotland Yard has refused to comment on...

August 19, 2006

Market-Based Profiling

The Daily Mail reports on a flight in Britain that remained on the ground due to the demands of its passengers that two Arabic passengers get ejected. The incident shows that citizens will start imposing their own solutions to flight safety in the absence of demonstrably intelligent security while attempts at attacks continue: British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed. The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic. Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it. The...

August 20, 2006

Rudderless Research At DHS

For those who wonder why British passengers lacked so much confidence in airport security that they boycotted a flight out of Malaga, this report on counterterrorism research here in the US provides an explanation. Spencer Hsu writes about the bureaucratic disaster behind the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, and it sounds like the first chapter in a future bipartisan report on the next catastrophic terrorist attack: The federal research agency in charge of countering emerging terrorist threats such as liquid explosives is so hobbled by poor leadership, weak financial management and inadequate technology that Congress is on the verge of cutting its budget in half. The Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate has struggled with turnover, reorganizations and raids on its budget since it was established in 2003, according to independent scientists, department officials and senior members of Congress. At the same time, the Bush administration's overriding focus on...

August 21, 2006

The Hippocratic Oaf

A doctor faces charges of supporting terrorism in Manhattan for having taken an oath of membership into al-Qaeda and pledging his medical services to fellow terrorists. Dr. Rafiq Sabir and his attorneys argue that his Hippocratic oath requires him to attend to all who are ill or injured, and therefore he has done nothing wrong: Dr. Sabir, of Boca Raton, Fla., is one of four co-defendants charged with a loosely connected plot to aid Al Qaeda that prosecutors made public last year. In a Bronx apartment in late May 2005, Dr. Sabir swore fealty to Osama bin Laden and pledged to provide medical assistance to jihadists who were wounded while training, a criminal complaint charged. But in a recent court filing, Mr. Sabir's attorneys, Edward Wilford and Natali Todd, argue that the prosecution is unconstitutional because it impinges on a doctor's ability to practice medicine. "As a medical doctor, Dr....

August 22, 2006

We Still Wait And Hope

Up to now, I have not mentioned the kidnapping of Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and his free-lance cameraman, Olaf Wiig, due to missing the story initially and the lack of developments afterward. Eight days later, the kidnappers have not taken public responsibility nor issued demands -- and that is the kind of no-news that actually is news, as Centanni's colleague Michelle Malkin notes today on her blog: Fox News Channel reporter Steve Centanni and freelance cameraman Olaf Wiig are still missing. It has now been more than a week since their kidnapping at gunpoint in Gaza by unknown terrorists. FNC top management, the journalists' families, and Palestinian journalists continue to press for their release. Following up on my post late Sunday night, some media types are now musing that one possible reason the story is not getting the attention it deserves is that there aren't any "new" developments to...

Airline Data Still Out Of Reach Five Years After 9/11

The US and European governments want to gain greater access to customer data from airlines and reservation companies to detect patterns and connections that might identify terrorists before they strike. Predictably, civil libertarians have objected as they have in the past, even with the exposure of the latest terror plot against transatlantic flights. Does this sound like a chapter in a future post-attack commission report? A proposal by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would allow the United States government not only to look for known terrorists on watch lists, but also to search broadly through the passenger itinerary data to identify people who may be linked to terrorists, he said in a recent interview. Similarly, European leaders are considering seeking access to this same database, which contains not only names and addresses of travelers, but often their credit card information, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and related hotel or car reservations....

August 23, 2006

Fast-Food Jihadists In Britain

Der Spiegel provides an extensive look at the background of the British conspirators who plotted attacks on international flights, now detained by the UK. After repeatedly noting neighbors' evaluation of the young men as "nice boys", DS makes an interesting point about the twisted perspective of homegrown jihadis: About 100,000 people live in this idyllic commuter town, which seems to have preserved many of the more pleasant aspects of old England without ignoring the present. When the British Empire disintegrated, about 15,000 Pakistanis moved to High Wycombe, which would eventually boast one of the island's first ethnic Asian mayors. The town is widely seen as a "successfully integrated community." But for at least one resident of High Wycombe, Jennifer Baker, the world is no longer what it once seemed. Baker lives at Number 17, Hepplewhite Close. Late in the night of August 10, several police cars stopped in front of...

Another Sky Plot Foiled?

Initial reports of trouble on airliners nearly always turn out to be something less threatening, although sometimes just as strange, as the Catherine Mayo incident a week ago proved. Today, however, a diverted flight and the quick action of air marshals appear to have stopped some sort of mid-flight mischief between Amsterdam and Mumbai: Twelve passengers were in custody Wednesday after a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Mumbai, India, returned to Amsterdam with a fighter jet escort, Dutch police said. ... Some of the passengers pulled out cell phones during the flight and appeared to be trying to pass the cell phones to other passengers, a U.S. government official said. In addition, some passengers unfastened their seatbelts while the light requiring they be fastened was still illuminated, the official said. That was enough for U.S. air marshals aboard the DC-10 to break their cover. Flight attendants ordered the passengers to...

Dueling Nuclear Surprises

The Jerusalem Post hints that Iran will unveil a nuclear "surprise" in the next few weeks, but the Israelis may have beaten them to it. This comes as the fragile consensus at the UN Security Council on Iranian defiance appears to have unraveled: A senior official in Teheran said Wednesday that in the next few days, a "surprise" was expected regarding Iran's nuclear program, Al-Jazeera reported. Teheran's apparent refusal to suspend uranium enrichment set the stage for a showdown at the UN Security Council later this month. Given the hype over the supposedly apocalyptic impact of August 22nd, it's difficult to get too excited over this latest assertion. The only surprise that Iran could possibly unveil is a functional nuclear device -- and many already figure they have at least a few. Perhaps the only way we could be surprised is if the Iranians renounce the uranium enrichment that has...

August 24, 2006

Why Not Just Give Him A Toll-Free Hotline?

The efforts of Islamist terrorists to exploit the Internet has been well known for years. Many of the conspiracies we have uncovered since 9/11 have either originated in chat rooms or forums, and the use of e-mail and anonymous Usenet articles for terrorist communication has become widespread. Groups like al-Qaeda maintain official websites to post statements and videos as well as commands to the faithful. Knowing all of this, Indonesia allowed the mastermind of the first Bali bombing to have unfettered Internet access during his prison sentence, giving him the means to raise funds for another attack on the same area: ONE of the plotters of the deadly Bali bombings in 2002 raised funds for a second attack on the island via an internet connection from his cell on death row, a senior Indonesian policeman admitted yesterday. Imam Samudra, who has been sentenced to face a firing squad for his...

A Creepy Coincidence

It turns out that the Northwest Airlines flight that may have had terrorists on board also had another passenger with 9/11 connections. Tim Nelson, who originally tipped off the FBI about a suspicious flight student in my town named Zacarias Moussaoui, had a business-class seat and told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the flight: A Northwest Airlines plane flying from the Netherlands to India was escorted back to the Amsterdam airport by Dutch F-16 fighter jets Wednesday, and police arrested 12 passengers whose behavior had aroused the crew's suspicion. Coincidentally, among the 149 passengers aboard Northwest Flight 42, which originated at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport on Tuesday, was Tim Nelson, the tipster who first alerted the FBI to Al-Qaida operative Zacarias Moussaoui's odd behavior at a Twin Cities flight school five years ago. ... Nelson said he was with a flight crew for a Northwest subsidiary, Classic Aviation, en route to...

August 25, 2006

Conspicuous No More

After years of criticism and demoralization of the federal air marshal service (FAMS), its management finally has allowed their agents to dress in a manner that doesn't make them stick out like sore thumbs among airline passengers. Effective September 1 but likely already unofficially adopted, FAMS will allow air marshals to dress as casually as agents deem necessary: Dana A. Brown, director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, said in a memo to air marshals that the dress code revisions will take effect Sept. 1 and replace a policy that some air marshals criticized for being so strict that they stood out on some flights. Brown told air marshals in the memo that the policy was being amended to "allow you to dress at your discretion." He added that the new policy was designed to let air marshals blend in while concealing their weapons. ... The previous dress code generally...

August 26, 2006

Centanni And Wiig Unharmed: Hamas

Kidnapped journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig are alive and unharmed, Palestinian officials told the AP today. Yesterday, the Hamas government spokesperson said that he expected "good news" in the next two days: Palestinian officials said Saturday they expect to have "good news" about two kidnapped Fox News journalists within two days and believe the hostages are unharmed. ... On Friday, the Palestinian interior minister suggested some progress has been made in securing the hostages' freedom. Ghazi Hamad, the government spokesman, added Saturday: "I hope that we can hear good news within the coming two days." Hamad did not give the basis for his assessment. The Interior Ministry spokesman said the journalists are apparently unharmed. "The information available to us is that they are fine, " said Khaled Abu Hilal. He said authorities were not negotiating with the kidnappers. "I want to clarify that the efforts are not negotiations," he...

August 29, 2006

The Terrorists Who Come Out Of Nowhere ... Or Did They?

Germany's foiled bomb plot involved terrorists who defied any attempts at interdiction -- two seemingly normal Muslism students who suddenly turned radical. Only design flaws kept Jihad Hamad and Youssef el Hajdib from creating another Madrid or London scenario in Germany's mass-transit system, and German authorities still have no clue how to identify the next do-it-yourself jihadis: But who in fact is Hamad? An Islamist who deliberately learned German at a language school in Tripoli so that he could enter the country as a student, essentially under the radar of counterterrorism officials, and calmly go about preparing an underhanded terrorist attack? Or did a young man, hungry for education, arrive in Germany on Jan. 2, 2006 and, for some unknown reason, suddenly and without attracting attention, turn into a killer? By last Friday, investigators still hadn't found answers to these questions. ... The arrest of Youssef Hajdib, 21, promptly set...

September 1, 2006

FBI Investigates Terrorism Leads, Film At 11

The very next nine-day wonder of protest is about to break open, as King Banaian notes at SCSU Scholars. The Los Angeles Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education both report on a defunct FBI program that investigated suspected terrorists and accomplices by reviewing data on federal grants for higher education. Not surprisingly, the LA Times gets a significant fact incorrect almost immediately: The Education Department acknowledged Thursday that at the request of the FBI, it had scoured millions of federal student loan records for information about suspected terrorists in the five years since the Sept. 11 attacks. The data mining — known as "Project Strike Back" — was intended to determine whether terrorism suspects had illegally obtained college aid to finance their operations through identity theft or other means. Project Strike Back did not involve data mining, no more than a check of a driver's license during a traffic...

An Exclamation Point On The Plame Denouement

The Washington Post's editorial board takes a shot at Joe Wilson, one of their anonymous sources three years ago, as the full impact of the discovery of Richard Armitage as the Valerie Plame leaker takes effect. The editors place the blame for Plame's unmasking where it always belonged -- on Wilson himself: [I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility...

September 2, 2006

New British Terror Sweep Nabs 14 Suspects

British security forces arrested 14 people in a terror sweep they say is unrelated to the foiled sky-terror plot, the BBC reports. The arrests appear to focus on a madrassa in East Sussex: Armed police have arrested 14 men following anti-terror raids in London, including 12 arrests at a restaurant in the Borough area. Two people were held elsewhere in the city in what police said was an intelligence-led operation. Police said the arrests were not connected to the alleged transatlantic jet bomb plot or the 7 July attacks. An Islamic school near Tunbridge Wells has also been searched as part of the same operation. The Jameah Islameah property, on Catt's Hill near Crowborough, East Sussex, is an Islamic teaching facility for boys aged between 11 and 16. The school only had nine students at its last inspection, which seems very noteworthy considering the size of the facility. The school...

September 3, 2006

Lebanon Unity Dissolving?

The war in Lebanon has fractured what little unity existed in the post-Syrian government in Beirut. While political differences got submerged in the fighting, they have returned with even more vigor after the catastrophe in the sub-Litani region. Various factions now threaten to contest for power in or out of the political system: But now, two weeks into a shaky cease-fire between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israel, some of the big names of Lebanese politics are moving back onto the political stage. The result has been an open round of bitter political infighting and backbiting. Figures from various factions have attacked one another in newspapers and on talk shows. The most vociferous has been General Aoun, who called this week for the resignation of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his cabinet. ... Mr. Siniora refused to resign, saying: “Let these politicians rest. The government is staying, staying, staying.” In almost the...

The American Lord Haw Haw

The release of a new video from Ayman al-Zawahiri has caused a minor sensation with its inclusion of Adam Gadahn, an American convert to al-Qaeda jihadism, demanding the conversion of America to Islam. The video shows Gadahn, now called Azzam the American, speaking in American patois and counseling surrender to the terrorist group: It was the second time Gadahn appeared in the same video with al-Zawahri. In a July 7 video marking the one-year anniversary of the terror attack on London commuters, Gadahn appeared briefly, saying no Muslim should "shed tears" for Westerners killed by al-Qaida attacks. But Saturday's video — and the length of Gadahn's speech — suggested al-Qaida has found in him someone who can directly address the American people in idiom they are familiar with. ... Gadahn delivered a lecture on Islam and the "errors" in Christianity and Judaism. He also said the United States is losing...

September 4, 2006

Tourists Shot, One Dead, In Jordan Attack

A British tourist died today and five other tourists seriously wounded when a Jordanian gunmen opened fire, reportedly shouting Allahu Akbar! ("God is great!) as he attacked: A gunman has shot dead a British tourist in the center of Amman and wounded five tourists and a Jordanian tourist police officer, Jordanian officials said. The casualties included the British man who died, two other wounded Britons and the Jordanian, Jordanian government spokesman Nasser Judeh said. One Dutch person, an Australian and a New Zealander were also wounded. Police and intelligence sources said four of the tourists are women and the Dutch citizen is a man. ... "This is a cowardly terrorist attack, which we regret took place on Jordanian soil," Interior Minister Eid al-Fayez told reporters at the scene, according to The Associated Press. "This operation is considered a terrorist act unless the man is found to be deranged," he said....

NATO Presses Advantage Against Taliban

The new offensive against the Taliban remnants in Afghanistan, Operation Medusa, has dealt a severe blow to the forces of Mullah Omar. Over 200 Taliban fighters have died in the fighting, while NATO has only suffered four combat deaths: More than 200 Taliban fighters have been killed in a major Nato offensive in southern Afghanistan, along with four Canadian troops. Operation Medusa, launched by alliance and Afghan forces in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province, involved hundreds of troops, backed by warplanes and helicopter gunships. A Nato spokesman said: "Reports indicate that more than 200 Taliban fighters have been killed since Operation Medusa began early on Saturday morning." He added that Afghan soldiers had captured more than 80 other Taliban. The Canadians have fought with tremendous courage and energy in this NATO effort. The attempted revival of the Taliban has necessitated such efforts, five years after their loss of Afghanistan...

September 5, 2006

Nine Terror Suspects Arrested In Denmark

In what appears to be a new front in the war on terror, Denmark has arrested nine suspected terrorists in Odense after tracking them for "some time": Danish police have arrested nine suspected terrorists, the country's security intelligence service says. The suspects, believed to be all men under the age of 30, were picked up during overnight raids in Odense, Denmark's third largest city. The men had been under surveillance for some time and were detained on suspicion of planning terror acts. ... He said the suspects "had acquired material ... to build explosives in connection with the preparation of a terror act". The Danish security services had no clear indication of a target or a timeframe for their attack. However, it wouldn't be too difficult to imagine why terrorists have decided to add Denmark as another theater of operations. After all, the controversy over the editorial cartoons depicting Mohammed...

Syria Doubles Down With Another Assassination Attempt

A roadside bomb has seriously injured the lead investigator into the assassination of Rafik Hariri and killed four of his bodyguards near the seaside city of Sidon in Lebanon. The remote-controlled bomb seems very similar to the means used to assassinate Hariri: A bomb blast near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon has seriously wounded a senior intelligence officer and killed four of his aides and bodyguards. Officials said Samir Shehadeh's was hit by a remote-controlled bomb as he drove past the village of Rmeileh. Col Shehadeh was an investigator into the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in early 2005. ... The bombing comes two weeks before the UN chief investigator is to submit a report on his latest findings in the Hariri investigation to the UN. Shehadeh had an inkling of an attack. The bomb actually hit the car in which he would normally ride, but instead...

Prosecutors Get Tough On Stewart Sentencing

The AP reports on a brief submitted by prosecutors arguing for a long prison sentence for convicted terrorist enabler Lynne Stewart. They dismiss defense claims that Stewart mistakenly crossed the line from zealous defender to an unwitting accomplice who deserves no jail time for her error: Stewart's "egregious, flagrant abuse of her profession, abuse that amounted to material support to a terrorist group, deserves to be severely punished," prosecutors wrote in a document submitted Thursday to a judge. Her lawyers have argued that Stewart should receive no prison time, arguing that a harsh sentence would frighten other lawyers from representing notorious clients and that Stewart's three decades of distinguished work for indigent clients should speak louder than a single serious mistake. The prosecutors see it differently. "Stewart did not walk a fine line of zealous advocacy and accidentally fall over it; she marched across it and into a criminal conspiracy,"...

September 6, 2006

Wonder Why It's Been A Quiet Five Years On The Home Front?

George Bush gave a long-overdue speech on the American efforts to use intelligence and captured terrorists to keep the US homeland safe from attack. He announced the transition of detained high-value terrorists from secret holding facilities to Guantanamo Bay in preparation for military tribunals, once Congress approves the legal framework for such a process, and related the myriad links discovered through their interrogation: Within months of September 11, 2001, we captured a man named Abu Zubaydah. We believed that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained and that he helped smuggle Al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. ... During questioning, he, at first, disclosed what he thought was nominal information and then stopped all cooperation. Well,...

September 8, 2006

The Retrospectives Begin

As we get closer to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, expect to see more retrospectives about the event and its aftermath. Yesterday we received the DVD for United 93, the special two-disc edition, in the mail. Because we had seen it before and I wanted to catch the Pittsburgh game, we decided to watch the movie itself over the weekend. However, we did watch the documentary on the bonus disk, "Chasing Planes", which retells the efforts made by air traffic controllers and the military to defend the nation from a threat none of them had ever imagined. It uses clips from the movie (mostly where the principals played themselves), but also features fascinating and chilling interviews with the controllers and pilots. It's excellent, well worth the small additional cost of the two-disk edition. Also, I'd like to remind people that the Minnesota premiere of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The...

The Phase II Reports

I spent my lunch break in a teleconference regarding the release of two reports from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- the so-called Phase II reports. These came from further investigations by the SSCI into the differences between pre-war intel and post-war findings, and specifically focused on two areas of inquiry. The first covered the general accuracy of pre-war intel on WMD and Iraqi connections to al-Qaeda. The second report analyzes the information given to American intelligence by the Iraqi National Congress, headed at the time by Ahmed Chalabi, who currently serves in Iraq's National Assembly. This telecon was "on background" and involved senior Republican staffers on the Hill, and it was pretty strange. For one thing, I found it less than enlightening. They covered the data in very broad strokes, basically giving us a quick rundown of what they saw would create the most controversy -- but didn't...

Phase II 'Accuracy' Report Proves Joe Wilson A Liar

The Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence Phase II reports may take some time to process, reading the source data rather than just relying on the conclusions, but I've found one interesting nugget already. In the WMD accuracy report, a significant passage demonstrates the falsity of one leftist talking point (page 16, emphases mine): On February 4, 2003, the U.S. government provided copies of the Niger uranium documents to the IAEA with talking points which stated, "two streams of reporting suggest Iraq has attempted to acquire uranium from Niger. We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding specific claims. Nonetheless, we are concerned that these reports may indicate Baghdad has attempted to secure an unreported source of uranium yellowcake for a nuclear weapons program." The two streams of reporting refer to the intelligence reports from the foreign intelligence service and a CIA intelligence report reflecting the findings of a former...

September 9, 2006

Blogger In Fight For His Life

Michael van der Galien writes about his Liberty and Justice co-blogger Isaac Schrodinger and his legal fight to avoid deportation from Canada to Pakistan. Isaac is a Muslim apostate; he has provided a consistent critical voice against radical Islam, seeing the dangers of its totalitarian nature. Now, however, Canada has started deportation hearings [not quite -- see update below] against Schrodinger, and he is trying to claim refugee status. He's having a difficult time convincing Canadian authorities of the danger he faces if compulsorily returned to his native Lahore. Their immigration office is not convinced that Isaac will suffer any harm if deported, and he's frantically trying to assemble evidence. If you have any objective reporting on the fate of apostates in Pakistan, now would be a good time to contact Isaac or Michael at Liberty and Justice. I think we understand Isaac's danger, even if Canadian authorities do not....

Bikinis For Freedom!

Meet the woman who drives Pakistanis crazy -- although not like you'd think: Mariyah Moten entered a beauty contest at a Chinese resort, representing Pakistan (and rather nicely, I'd say). She won an award for the attracting the most photographers at the resort in Beihai. She entered herself as a Pakistani, although she moved out of the country eight years ago to live in the US. For some reason, Pakistanis find her loyalty to them infuriating: Stunning Mariyah Moten, 22, won the 'Best in Media' title - for being the most photographed and interviewed contestant - at the pageant in the Chinese resort of Beihai. But furious Pakistani authorities say she did not have permission to represent the country, where many women only go out in public covered in a veil. They are now threatening the model, who grew up in Pakistan but holds a US passport after she moved...

September 10, 2006

How About Another Huge Wave Of Saudi Students?

In a move that has more complexities than it seems on the surface, the US and Saudi Arabia have announced a big increase in the number of college students coming from the West's oil partner to campuses near you. Five times more students will get admitted to American universities -- and, of course, America -- than will have been in the country before: Thousands of students from Saudi Arabia are enrolling on college campuses across the United States this semester under a new educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah. The program will quintuple the number of Saudi students and scholars in the United States by the academic year's end. And big, public universities from Florida to Oregon are in a fierce competition for their tuition dollars. The kingdom's royal family -- which is paying full scholarships for most of the 15,000 students -- says the...

MEMRI Shows Muslim Coverage Of 9/11 And Its Aftermath

Hot Air points readers to an excellent 43-minute documentary by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), hosted by Ron Silver, about the coverage and analysis of 9/11 in the Muslim world. It's an excellent perspective on the widespread paranoia and denial that conspiracy theorizing has brought to the ummah. If you want the short version, here it is: the Jews did it. In fact, some of the assertions made in this video sound uncomfortably similar to rhetoric emanating from far-Left circles. Also, Allahpundit also recommends this CBS site, which has unedited clips of 9/11 coverage. You'll see many scenes that the broadcast networks had excised for the last five years....

September 11, 2006

Poison Pregnancy

Ayman al-Zawahiri released a message to the West last night reminding everyone of the nihilism of radical Islam and its central role in the 9/11 attacks, and warned of more to come. The new message, complete with subtitles, warns that Islam is in the family way again: A lengthy statement from al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks calls on Muslims to step up their resistance against the United States. "Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster," al-Zawahiri says in a statement posted on the Internet late Sunday. "And the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events, with Allah's permission and guidance." The video appeared on the Web site for Al-Sahab, the terror network's production company, said counterterrorism expert Laura Mansfield. Al-Zawahiri calls on Muslims to fight U.S. allies in Somalia, where...

September 12, 2006

Syria Foils Attack On US Embassy

Syria shot four men trying to detonate a car bomb outside the US embassy in Damascus, killing three and wounding the other, the BBC reports. One bomb detonated but so far no American casualties have been reported: A bomb attack on the US embassy in Damascus has been foiled by local security forces, Syrian officials say. Attackers tried to drive two cars at the embassy compound but three men were killed by guards and a fourth was captured, the interior minister said. One car bomb went off but a second failed, he told Syrian state TV, adding that it was being examined for clues. A member of Syria's security forces was also killed but there are no reports of US casualties. The attack started as the perpetrators ran towards the embassy compound, firing automatic weapons and shouting religious slogans, witnesses reported. They threw grenades at the wall and at some...

September 13, 2006

NATO Chief: Members Not Pulling Their Weight

NATO's Secretary-General has publicly scolded member nations for reneging on their commitments to supporting the mission in Afghanistan, apparently despairing of getting the promised level of troops. The rebuke comes as a demonstration of a consistent refusal of Europe to fight the war on terror, even against the Taliban of Afghanistan, which most Europeans concede was a necessary step after 9/11: THE political head of Nato appealed yesterday for alliance members to provide hundreds more troops for the mission in southern Afghanistan. With most of the fighting burden falling on the shoulders of the British, US, Canadian and Dutch troops in the South, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Secretary-General of Nato, said that some countries had failed to live up to their promises on troop numbers. In an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he said that he could not accept a scenario in which Nato members...

September 15, 2006

A Bad Start For Al-Qaeda?

For the fifth anniversary of 9/11, al-Qaeda's executive officer Ayman al-Zawahiri celebrated by publishing a video that threatened a new phase in the group's offensive against the West. In this new effort, the Egyptian terror leader told viewers that AQ would now target Gulf states, including oil facilities, that cooperated with the infidels. Foiled attacks on a Yemeni refinery and a Canadian-Yemeni storage facility appears to have launched the AQ offensive, but both failed to achieve their mission objectives: Suicide bombers tried to strike two oil facilities in Yemen with explosives-packed cars, but authorities foiled the attacks and four bombers and a security guard were killed, the government said Friday. Friday's attacks happened 35 minutes apart, targeting a Yemeni oil refinery in the northeast province of Mareb and a Canadian-Yemeni oil storage facility at the Dubba Port in Haramut province — scene of a 2002 attack on the French tanker...

Now This Is Surrender

Pakistan has removed all doubt about its tenacity in fighting terrorism. The London Telegraph reports that Pervez Musharraf has released thousands of Taliban fighters caught in the five years since the US drove their government out of Afghanistan: Pakistan's credibility as a leading ally in the war on terrorism was called into question last night when it emerged that President Pervez Musharraf's government had authorised the release from jail of thousands of Taliban fighters caught fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan. Five years after American-led coalition forces overthrew the Taliban during Operation Enduring Freedom, United States officials have been horrified to discover that thousands of foreign fighters detained by Pakistan after fleeing the battleground in Afghanistan have been quietly released and allowed to return to their home countries. Pakistani lawyers acting for the militants claim they have freed 2,500 foreigners who were originally held on suspicion of having links to al-Qa'eda...

Since When Has Geneva Protected Our Troops?

The arguments employed by the opponents of George Bush's plan to establish specific definitions for Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions make one argument over and over again, and rarely get challenged on it. They claim that any redefinition or apparent backsliding on the Geneva Conventions will put our own troops at risk; Colin Powell made the same argument yesterday. However, they fail to explain how the GC has ever protected American troops during wartime: Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s former secretary of state, sided with the senators, saying in a letter that the president’s plan to redefine the Geneva Conventions would encourage the world to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” and “put our own troops at risk.” ... Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, warned the administration against taking on Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war. “They’re...

The Pope's Real Threat

Many people have written about the controversy over Pope Benedict's recent remarks at the University of Regensburg, where he quoted a medieval emperor about the barbarity of forced religious conversions. In a replay of the Prophet Cartoon madness, Muslims only escalated their rhetoric after the Vatican apologized for any offense the quotation may have given followers of Islam. Despite apologizing Wednesday for quoting Manuel II's words from 1391 (but not for its argument against violence in religion), Muslims burnt effigies of the Roman Catholic leader and staged demonstrations around the world: Protesters took to the streets in a series of countries with large Muslim populations, including India and Iraq. The ruling party in Turkey likened Pope Benedict XVI to Hitler and Mussolini and accused him of reviving the mentality of the Crusades. In Kashmir, an effigy of the pontiff was burnt. At Friday prayers in the Iranian capital, Teheran, a...

September 16, 2006

Pope Apologizes For Being Prophetic

Pope Benedict XVI apologized more clearly for any offense taken from his speech by Muslims that decried violence in relgious proselytization, as Muslims burnt two churches in the West Bank. Benedict now says that he hoped Muslims would understand the core meaning of his speech, which appears extremely unlikely: In a statement read out by a senior Vatican official, the Pope said he respected Islam and hoped Muslims would understand the true sense of his words. ... The BBC's Christian Fraser in Rome says the speed with which the Vatican has reacted shows just how seriously it views the situation. Reading the statement, new Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said the Pope's position on Islam was in line with Vatican teaching that the Church "esteems Muslims, who adore the only God". "The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to...

JAGs Were Not Coerced

After the White House produced a letter signed by the leaders of the Pentagon's lawyers supporting a clarification of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Republican Senators opposed to the effort accused the Bush administration of coercing the statement. The New York Times reports today that the signatories did not get forced into signing anything: The lawyers, known as judge advocates general, had been pivotal players in years of debate over detention, interrogation and prosecution. They had repeatedly sparred behind the scenes with Mr. Haynes, the top civilian lawyer in the Defense Department. This summer, the judge advocates general emerged in public after the Supreme Court struck down a Bush administration plan to take an important role in opposing parts of a White House effort to resurrect military commissions for terrorism suspects in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But at the meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Haynes sought to enlist the...

September 17, 2006

The Religion Of The Peace Of Surrender

In what could only be described as a depressingly predictable escalation, Somalian Islamists shot an elderly Catholic nun in the back three times, killing the woman who had served as a nurse to Mogadishu's poverty-stricken people. It came as Pope Benedict XVI offered an apology for using inflammatory language while Muslim activists and leaders around the world proclaimed it insufficient: An Italian nun was shot dead at a hospital by Somali gunmen Sunday, hours after a leading Muslim cleric condemned Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks on Islam and violence. The nun, who was not immediately identified, was shot in the back at S.O.S. Hospital in northern Mogadishu by two gunmen, said Mohamed Yusuf, a doctor at the facility, which serves mothers and children. The nun's bodyguard and a hospital worker were also killed, doctors said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, and it was not...

An Open Letter To Pope Benedict XVI

To His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI: I went to church angry today for the first time in quite a while, perhaps since 9/11. We are called to humble ourselves when we worship God, and while I'm far from being the world's best example of Catholicism, I usually prepare myself by recalling my sins and my flaws before Mass begins -- not usually a difficult task, I'm afraid to say. Unfortunately, today my anger got the best of me, and I struggled through an otherwise excellent service by our pastor. Why should this be so? Before I went to Mass, I read about the senseless murder of Sister Leonella Sgorbati, who got shot three times by Islamists in Mogadishu, where she worked as a volunteer nurse to the Somalian poor. The shooting came in response to the outrage and violence that sprang from protests over your speech last week at the...

September 19, 2006

War On Rome?

Muslim extremists continued to offer threats and violence in response to a speech by Pope Benedict XVI that warned against violent conversion. The Washington Times rounds up the most notable developments from thre previous day, in which Muslims around the world followed the Prophet Cartoon playbook almost to the letter: Elsewhere, Iran's supreme leader called for more protests over the pontiff's remarks and protests broke out in South Asia and Indonesia, with angry Muslims saying Benedict's statement of regret a day earlier did not go far enough. In southern Iraq, demonstrators carrying black flags burned an effigy of the pope. In London, police increased patrols near churches and began an inquiry into remarks by Anjem Choudhary, a well-known extremist who had called at a rally outside Westminster Cathedral on Sunday for the pope to be "executed." The 39-year-old lawyer also had organized a rally earlier this year sparked by cartoons...

Well, Who's Slapping Whom?

I looked forward to E.J. Dionne's take on the latest outrage to spread through the Muslim world regarding the exercise of Western free speech and criticism, with both of us being Catholic but coming from different perspectives on the world. He weighs in today in a column that surprisingly blames Benedict for his rhetorical selections and blaming him for "slapping" Islam: What went wrong here? First, if you read his intellectually interesting lecture, you'll see the passage on Islam was not truly essential to the pope's argument. Indeed, he argued at least as strongly against a liberal Christianity in which "the subjective 'conscience' becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical" and in which Jesus is reduced to being "the father of a humanitarian moral message." (Those quotation marks around the word "conscience" reflect the pope's skepticism of individual moral choice unguided by the church's teachings.) But then why did...

September 20, 2006

The Arab Nuclear Race Begins

The Iranian pursuit of nuclear power (at the least) has spurred interest across Southwest Asia in keeping up with the Persians. Der Spiegel reports that other states in the region that had spurned interest in nuclear research have now openly debated its value: As Iran tries to buy time in its dispute with the international community over its nuclear program, the Arab world's interest in atomic energy is apparently growing. The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Abdul Rahman al Attiyah, recently called on the "Arab nation" to work "together on a nuclear program," to prevent being left behind as others in the region -- namely Iran, which is Persian and sometimes at odds with its neighbors -- pushed ahead with atomic research. Attiyah's call points to a shift in policy. Arab governments in the past have criticized both Iran's nuclear ambitions and Israel's (officially nonexistent) atomic program, while...

Lord Carey Delivers The Real Thing

For those who insist that Pope Benedict XVI delivered an insult to Islam by pointing out the evil of violent conversion in the use of a single quote from a 600-year-old text, Lord Carey will send them into hysterics. The former Archbishop of Canterbury told an audience at Newbold College that Islam itself is creating a clash of civilizations and praised Benedict for his efforts to bring the conflict to the surface: THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech. Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole. “We are living in...

September 21, 2006

The Futility Of 'Clarifications'

The Pope offered yet another clarification of his comments at the University of Regensburg, attempting to ease the rage of Muslims around the world following his criticism of violence in religious conversion. The repeated attempts to appease Islamists have begun to create a different reaction from non-Muslims, as the New York Times' Ian Fisher reports from Rome: Three days after saying he was “very sorry” about the reaction to his remarks, delivered last week in Germany, Benedict sought to clarify them again. “This quotation, unfortunately, was misunderstood,” he said, alluding to protests and attacks on churches by offended Muslims. “In no way did I wish to make my own, the words of the medieval emperor.” “I wished to explain that not religion and violence, but religion and reason, go together,” he said. He added that he hoped he had made clear his “profound respect for world religions and for Muslims.”...

September 22, 2006

Armitage Threatened To Bomb Pakistan

Richard Armitage, it turns out, has a big mouth. We found out this month that he leaked the information on Valerie Plame's identity to Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, a fact that destroyed the myth that Bush allies leaked it to the pair as a vendetta against Joe Wilson. Now it turns out that Armitage told Pakistan that the US would bomb them "back to the Stone Age" if the former Taliban ally did not accede to American military demands in the aftermath of 9/11: The Bush administration threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age" after the September 11 attacks if the country did not cooperate with America's war on Afghanistan, it emerged yesterday. In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan's intelligence...

Let's Give It A Rest

Earlier today, Fox News released a clip from an upcoming interview with Bill Clinton on Fox News Sunday. Chris Wallace taped the interview this week, discussing Clinton's new global initiatives, but also asked him about the controversy arising from the ABC movie, "The Path to 9/11". As Hot Air reported earlier, Clinton's angrily responded to the suggestion that he had done little to take out Osama bin Laden in the years of his presidency by noting that the "right-wingers" (as he called them) hadn't done anything in the eight months prior to 9/11. "I failed, but I tried," he fumed at Wallace. We can argue for years about how much he tried, and for what reasons. In fact, we have -- for five years -- and it's time to give it a rest. The rise of Islamofascism didn't occur just on Clinton's watch, and his presidency was not the only...

September 23, 2006

Typhoid Osama? Well, Maybe

A leak from French intelligence hit the wires late last night and spread rapidly around the world. The information: Osama bin Laden died in a cave of typhoid last month. However, questions about the reliability of that intel have already prompted the French to admit that they have no confirmation of Osama's death: France said a report that Osama bin Laden died this month of typhoid was unconfirmed, and launched an inquiry into how a preliminary intelligence brief detailing the assertion was leaked. President Jacques Chirac stressed to journalists that "this information is in no way confirmed." He added Saturday that he was "surprised" that the French newspaper l'Est Republicain had published an excerpt from a French secret service note relaying information from Saudi Arabia's intelligence service. ... The note by the DGSE service, dated September 21 and published Saturday by l'Est Republicain, stated that Saudi intelligence officials "are now...

September 25, 2006

Pope Benedict Demands Reciprocity

Pope Benedict XVI met with envoys from several Muslim nations today, greeting them warmly and emphasizing the need for dialogue between the faiths. He did not offer another apology for his remarks at Regensburg two weeks ago, but he did remind the envoys that they have not fulfilled their responsibilities in ensuring freedom of religious practice for Christians: Pope Benedict XVI told Muslim diplomats Monday that ''our future'' depends on dialogue between Christians and Muslims, an attempt to ease relations strained by his recent remarks about Islam and violence. The pontiff quoted from his predecessor, John Paul II, who had close relations with the Muslim world, when he described the need for ''reciprocity in all fields,'' including religious freedom. Benedict spoke in French to a roomful of diplomats from 21 countries and the Arab League in his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills near Rome. After his...

September 26, 2006

Swift Program Auditor Found No Abuses

The independent auditing company hired by the government to review the intel program that gathered data from the Swift banking concern found no abuses. The New York Times buried the lede at the seventh paragraph -- the end of the seventh paragraph -- in a story that focuses on European complaints about the legality of the program even while they decline to end it: The program, started by the Bush administration weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, allows analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence agencies to search for possible terrorist financing activity among millions of largely international financial transactions that are processed by a banking cooperative known as Swift that is based in Belgium. The European Union panel will not call for the program to be stopped, officials said. But it is expected to recommend that additional safeguards be put in place to check how financial...

Taliban Assassinates Womens-Rights Campaigner

Taliban assassins shot and killed one of Afghanistan's leading reformers for womens' rights , Safia Ama Jan. It isn't as if Jan was sunbathing at the time, either -- they shot her through her burka on her way to her job as Kandahar's Womens' Affairs director: Suspected Taliban gunmen shot dead a leading women's rights campaigner in Kandahar yesterday in the latest assassination of a government official in the restive southern provinces. Women's Affairs director, Safia Ama Jan, was killed on the city outskirts as she left for work yesterday morning. The assailants shot her four times in the head, through a burka, before fleeing. Ms Ama Jan, 56, has been an advocate for women's rights in Kandahar, the former Taliban headquarters, since the fundamentalists were ousted five years ago. Her murder appeared to mark a return to a strategy of intimidation and assassination after the defeat of Taliban fighters...

Time To Release The NIE

The National Intelligence Estimate leak to the New York Times has given the Democrats yet another election-time club with which to beat Republicans, the Washington Post reports. The selective quotes have made their way into campaign speeches criticizing the Iraq War, and they hope to use them to maximum effect in their fading hopes of capturing either chamber of Congress: A classified National Intelligence Estimate, completed in April but disclosed in news reports over the weekend, offers the U.S. intelligence community's first formal evaluation of global trends in terrorism since the April 2003 invasion of Iraq. U.S. officials said the report concludes that the Iraq war has fueled the growth of Islamic extremism and terror groups, but White House officials responded that the reports reflected a selective and distorted interpretation of the study. Democratic lawmakers said the NIE finding undermines Bush's frequent claim that the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government...

September 27, 2006

Fat Lady Sings For Berlin Opera That Depicts Mohammed

How does the West lose the war against radical Islamists? One small surrender at a time. The lastest retreat comes from Germany's Deutsche Oper Berlin, which cancelled a performance of a Mozart opera due to its depiction of the decapitated heads of Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. Guess which one caused the furor (via The Moderate Voice): The Deutsche Oper Berlin yesterday said it had decided "with great regret" to cancel a planned production of Mozart's Idomeneo after city security officials warned of an "incalculable risk" because of scenes dealing with Islam, as well as other religions. Kirsten Harms, the director of the Deutsche Oper, said that the Berlin state police had warned of a possible - but not certain - threat and that she decided it would be in the best interest of the safety of the opera house, its employees and patrons to cancel the production. After its premiere...

September 28, 2006

Senate Approves Detainee Bill By Wide Margin

The Senate got bipartisan support for the passage of the White House's comprehensive terrorist prosecution bill this evening, putting an emphatic stamp on a victory for the Bush administration. In the end, the bill garnered 65 votes and Bill Frist fought off attempts to bury the bill in amendments: The Senate on Thursday endorsed President Bush's plans to prosecute and interrogate terror suspects, all but sealing congressional approval for legislation that Republicans intend to use on the campaign trail to assert their toughness on terrorism. The 65-34 vote means the bill could reach the president's desk by week's end. The House passed nearly identical legislation on Wednesday and was expected to approve the Senate bill on Friday, sending it on to the White House. The bill would create military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects. It also would prohibit blatant abuses of detainees but grant the president flexibility to decide what...

September 29, 2006

Musharraf Deal In Waziristan Prompting More Attacks

The deal between Pervez Musharraf and the tribal leaders of Waziristan looks more and more like a surrender rather than a partnership against terror. The British newspaper The Guardian reports that American military sources indicate that attacks from Islamists in the border regions have more than doubled since the deal was announced: Taliban attacks along Afghanistan's southeastern border have more than doubled in the three weeks since a controversial deal between Pakistan and pro-Taliban militants, the US military said yesterday. Pakistan's military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, had promised the agreement with militants in North Waziristan would help to bring peace to Afghanistan. But early indications suggest the pact is having the opposite effect, creating a safe haven for the Taliban to regroup and launch fresh cross-border offensives against western and Afghan troops. A US military spokesman, Colonel John Paradis, said US soldiers had reported a "twofold, in some cases threefold" increase...

September 30, 2006

Has Pakistan Changed Sides?

Yesterday I noted the increase in cross-border attacks in Afghanistan in the three weeks since Pervez Musharraf signed a peace deal with the tribal chiefs in Waziristan and released thousands of captured Islamists. Today, the government of India now says that the train bombings in Mumbai this past July had the support of Pakistan's ISI: Mumbai police Commissioner A.N. Roy said an intensive investigation that included using truth serum on suspects revealed that Pakistan's top spy agency had ''masterminded'' the bombings. Roy said Pakistan's Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence, or ISI, began planning the attacks in March and later provided training to those who carried out the bombings in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. ''The terror plot was ISI sponsored and executed by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba operatives with help from the Students Islamic Movement of India,'' Roy said at a news conference to announce the completion of the investigation. Lashkar is a Pakistan-based Islamic militant...

October 1, 2006

Al-Qaeda Home Movies

The Times of London has new video of the 9/11 hijackers from more than a year prior to the attacks. Unlike other martyrdom videos that have been released, these tapes appear to have been less formal affairs. Without a soundtrack for some reason, no one can be sure what al-Qaeda's intent was in taking them, but they look more like home movies than anything produced for a specific purpose: It is the first time that a videotape has appeared of Mohammed Atta — who flew an American Airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center — at a training camp in Afghanistan. It fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States. Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in...

Look Forward For Security

Richard Clarke takes to the pages of the New York Times to deliver a lesson that everyone should have learned after 2004. The controversial former counterterrorism chief reminds Americans that we cannot secure the nation through blame games, and that the time has long since passed for us to exercise hindsight and start looking forward: For most Americans the history is clear and well told in the 9/11 commission report: Almost 3,000 people were killed. In the years before that terrible day, the Clinton administration prevented some attacks and tried to destroy Al Qaeda and its leadership, but was unable to do so, in part because the institutional bureaucracy did not believe the magnitude of the threat. As for the Bush administration, it deferred action on Al Qaeda until after 9/11, and then took a number of steps in response, including invading Iraq, but was also unable to destroy Al...

A Graphical Depiction Of The Challenge In Afghanistan

With Pervez Musharraf appearing to retreat in the war on terror and Hamid Karzai demanding results, the situation in Afghanistan and the Waziristan region appears to be inexplicably troublesome of late. Musharraf and Karzai have more trouble than just borders in this situation, though, and what we are now seeing may be a nationalist movement that has escaped Western attention until now. The Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis explains the problem, and Swaraaj Chauhan at The Moderate Voice produces an interesting map to underscore his point. In order to understand the difficulties, Margolis argues, one has to understand the tribalism in play: Tribal politics lie at the heart of their dispute. The 30 million Pashtuns (or Pathans), the world’s largest tribal society, are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan by an artificial border, the Durand Line, drawn by divide-and-conquer British imperialists. Pashtuns account for 50-60% of Afghanistan’s 30 million people. The Taliban...

The Al-Qaeda Video, More Watchable Than Before

My friend John from Power Line spent the better part of today cleaning up and re-editing the captured video from the al-Qaeda training facility. (I blogged about it this morning.) John's efforts can be viewed through this Power Line News link. Be sure to check it out -- if the earlier Times of London version gave you downloading headaches, John's version should play much more smoothly....

October 2, 2006

Frist Didn't Surrender To The Taliban

An earlier AP report on Bill Frist and comments he made on the status of Afghanistan had some Republicans reaching for their hemlock, but as it turns out, Frist claims that the report misquotes his remarks. Here's what the AP reported: U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government. The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means. "You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished we'll be successful." ... The senator said he had been warned to expect...

October 3, 2006

UK Says No Way To Guantanamo Nine

With all of the international cries for the US to release the remaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it may surprise some that not everyone wants to take back the terrorists we have detained for the past five years. The UK has rejected the return of nine British subjects at Guantanamo, objecting to American demands for ongoing security aimed at keeping the freed detainees from rejoining the jihad: The United States has offered to return nearly all British residents held at Guantánamo Bay after months of secret talks in Washington, the Guardian has learned. The British government has refused to accept the men, however, with senior officials saying they have no legal right to return. Documents obtained by the Guardian show US authorities are demanding that the detainees be kept under 24-hour surveillance if set free - restrictions that are dismissed by the British as unnecessary and unworkable. Although all are...

October 6, 2006

Nuclear Terrorism Or Better Enforcement?

A disturbing report in the Times of London raises the question about whether terrorists have increased their efforts to find nuclear material, or whether the West has improved its ability to stop them. Confirmed incidents of nuclear trafficking have increased sharply since 2002, with most of the material falling into the "dirty-bomb" category: SEIZURES of smuggled radioactive material capable of making a terrorist “dirty bomb” have doubled in the past four years, according to official figures seen by The Times. Smugglers have been caught trying to traffick dangerous radioactive material more than 300 times since 2002, statistics from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) show. Most of the incidents are understood to have occurred in Europe. The disclosures come as al-Qaeda is known to be intensfiying its efforts to obtain a radoactive device. Last year, Western security services, including MI5 and MI6, thwarted 16 attempts to smuggle plutonium or uranium....

Missing The Low-Hanging Fruit

In all of the heat surrounding the NSA warrantless surveillance program and SWIFT banking intelligence, we seem to have lost track of the uncontroversial communication taps allowed by law. The Washington Post reminds us in an editorial that we have no bar to reviewing prisoner communications, and yet the imprisoned terrorists already in our custody have little problem sending mail to their jihadist friends unmolested: THE BUSH administration has pushed aggressively for expanded surveillance powers, military commissions and rough interrogation techniques. When it comes to fighting the war on terrorism, just about anything goes. Except, that is, those routine steps with no civil liberties implications at all that might significantly interrupt terrorism -- such as, say, reading the mail of convicted terrorists housed in American prisons. The federal Bureau of Prisons, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote, "does not read all the mail for terrorist and other high-risk inmates...

October 7, 2006

Security Barriers Passe'?

The near-ubiquitous concrete pillars in front of buildings in American cities have quietly started to disappear, even in high-risk terrorist targets in New York. The New York Times reports that building owners have begun removing them as their efficacy came under question in dense urban centers: They started appearing on Manhattan streets immediately after September 11: concrete and metal barriers in front of skyscrapers, offices and museums. Some were clunky planters; others were shaped artfully into globes. They were meant to be security barriers against possible car or truck bombers in a jittery city intent on safeguarding itself. But now, five years later, their numbers have begun to dwindle. After evaluations by the New York Police Department, the city’s Department of Transportation has demanded that many of the planters and concrete traffic medians known as jersey barriers be taken away. So far, barriers have been removed at 30 buildings out...

October 8, 2006

The Compounded Tragedy Of Dahianna Heard

Dahianna Heard became a widow this past March, when her husband Jeffrey got killed in an ambush delivering supplies to American troops near Fallujah. Jeffrey worked as a contractor in Iraq after serving in both the Army and the National Guard. She and her one-year-old son will have to live without him, and in a particularly cruel twist of fate, will have to do so while being deported back to her native Venezuela: Dahianna and Jeffrey Heard often talked of their life after the war as a dream they would live together: buy a house, raise a family, travel abroad. But Jeffrey, a Casselberry contractor for a security company supporting U.S. troops in Iraq, was shot to death this spring during an ambush of his convoy near Fallujah. Now his wife, a Venezuela native raising their 1-year-old son, faces possible deportation. One reason: They hadn't been married long enough. She...

October 16, 2006

Stewart To Claim Uncontrolled Emotion Defense

Lynne Stewarts faces sentencing today for acting as a conduit for terrorist Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheikh" who helped organize the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. She transmitted his commands to his followers while in an American prison, helping to launch a terrorist network, and Stewart got convicted for providing material support. She has spent most of the intervening time traveling the nation and speaking out against the government, claiming she did nothing wrong and that the Bush administration wanted to silence her. Now, however, the New York Sun reports that she will change her tune significantly for her sentencing hearing: The New York lawyer who was convicted of material support for terrorism after carrying messages for her client, terrorist sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, is scheduled to be sentenced today to as much as 30 years in prison. She and her allies are...

Do We Have Another 9/11 Figure?

Reuters and a Spanish newspaper have claimed that the US has another 9/11 conspirator in custody. Mustafa Setmarian allegedly trained the 9/11 attackers in Afghanistan and helped plot the Madrid bombings, and El Pais reported yesterday that he has been transferred to US custody: A suspected Al Qaeda leader accused of being involved in the Sept. 11 attacks and planning the 2004 Madrid train bombings has been imprisoned in a secret U.S. jail for the last year, Spain's El Pais newspaper reported Sunday. Mustafa Setmarian, 48, a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistani and European security service officials told the newspaper. ... The capture of Setmarian, the alleged founder of Al Qaeda's Spanish network, was reported in May of this year. The Spaniards would like to get their hands on Setmarian, and...

Why The War On Terror Can't Be A Law Enforcement Action

Today's sentencing of Lynne Stewart, who turned herself into a conduit for an Islamic terrorist who had already conspired to attack the United States once, demonstrates the fecklessness of pursuing terrorists through the civil courts. A federal judge sentenced Stewart to 28 months in prison for assisting Omar Abdel Rahman in activating his terrorist network while the US held him in custody -- and then temporarily released her on her own recognizance: A firebrand civil rights lawyer who has defended Black Panthers and anti-war radicals was sentenced Monday to nearly 2 1/2 years in prison — far less than the 30 years prosecutors wanted — for helping an imprisoned terrorist sheik communicate with his followers on the outside. ... The judge said Stewart was guilty of smuggling messages between her client and his followers that could have "potentially lethal consequences." He called the crimes "extraordinarily severe criminal conduct." But in...

October 18, 2006

Dershowitz Experiences The Clinton Double-Standard First-Hand

Alan Dershowitz, writing in the New York Sun, complains of a double standard applied by the media to him and Bill Clinton. Dershowitz elicited a wave of criticism and outrage when he argued that American law should set up a narrow exception to the laws against torture in order to allow accountability for it. However, when Bill Clinton made the exact same argument during an NPR interview, the media never bothered to report it: In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Mr. Clinton was asked, as someone "who's been there," whether the president needs "the option of authorizing torture in an extreme case." This is what he said in response: "Look, if the president needed an option, there's all sorts of things they can do.Let's take the best case, OK.You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have...

Mullahcracy: Fast Internet Connections Threat To Islam

The Iranian mullahcracy has made some strange decisions regarding access to information, but if they wanted to alienate their younger generation, they may have hit on the perfect way to do so. Iran's government has banned Internet access speeds above 128 kilobytes per second, roughly equivalent to twice the speed of dial-up, in order to keep Western culture from polluting the Islamic Republic: Iran's Islamic government has opened a new front in its drive to stifle domestic political dissent and combat the influence of western culture - by banning high-speed internet links. In a blow to the country's estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran's telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining...

October 19, 2006

BBC: Al-Qaeda Back, Aiming At Britain

Some have speculated that the al-Qaeda terror network has dissipated, spent after a series of attacks on Western capitals and financial centers and the American destruction of their proxy state in Afghanistan. However, security sources tell the BBC that AQ has managed to reorganize itself and reorient their strategy to make the UK their primary target -- and they're training on the home team's turf: Al-Qaeda has become more organised and sophisticated and has made Britain its top target, counter-terrorism officials have told the BBC. Security sources say the situation has never been so grim, said BBC home affairs correspondent Margaret Gilmore. They believe the network is now operating a cell structure in the UK - like the IRA did - and sees the 7 July bomb attacks "as just the beginning". The cell-structure organization is nothing new; AQ used the same organization in Europe and the US before 9/11....

Clinton Has Company

A day after Alan Dershowitz noticed a profound double standard on the debate over limited use of torture, it turns out that neither Dershowitz nor Bill Clinton represent an extreme in thinking on its use. A new BBC/PIPA study shows that a third of people worldwide believe that torture should be an option when interrogating terrorists in certain circumstances: Nearly a third of people worldwide back the use of torture in prisons in some circumstances, a BBC survey suggests. Although 59% were opposed to torture, 29% thought it acceptable to use some degree of torture to combat terrorism. While most polled in the US are against torture, opposition there is less robust than in Europe and elsewhere. More than 27,000 people in 25 countries were asked if torture was acceptable if it could provide information to save innocent lives. Some 36% of those questioned in the US agreed that this...

October 20, 2006

House Intel Leaker Found?

A number of CQ readers pointed out a report last night in the Los Angeles Times that indicates that the House Intelligence Committee may have found the New York Times' source for their national-security scoops. An unnamed Democratic staffer to the commitee has been suspended pending an investigation: House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic staff member because of concerns he may have leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to The New York Times last month. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press Thursday night, Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., a committee member, said that an unidentified staffer requested the document from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before the Sept. 23 story about its conclusions. The staffer received the National Intelligence Estimate on global terror trends on Sept. 21. "I have no credible information to say any classified information was leaked from the committee's minority staff, but...

October 23, 2006

The French Intifada Continues

The AP continues its reporting on the slow-motion uprising in the Muslim ghettoes in France, where the police insist that violence against them has become organized by Islamist radicals. Calls that draw police and even fire department response wind up as ambushes, with rocks, baseball bats, and even teargas deployed against them: On a routine call, three unwitting police officers fell into a trap. A car darted out to block their path, and dozens of hooded youths surged out of the darkness to attack them with stones, bats and tear gas before fleeing. One officer was hospitalized, and no arrests made. The recent ambush was emblematic of what some officers say has become a near-perpetual and increasingly violent conflict between police and gangs in tough, largely immigrant French neighborhoods that were the scene of a three-week paroxysm of rioting last year. One small police union claims officers are facing a...

November 3, 2006

More Serious About Border Security?

The Washington Post reports that the US intends on screening every person who enters the country, regardless of method, in an attempt to identify potential terrorists. The new program will use the data to build terrorist profiles and will retain the data for decades: The federal government disclosed details yesterday of a border-security program to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years. The details, released in a notice published yesterday in the Federal Register, open a new window on the government's broad and often controversial data-collection effort directed at American and foreign travelers implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. While long known to scrutinize air travelers, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to apply new technology to perform similar checks on people who enter or leave the country...

November 8, 2006

I Question The Timing, And The Sanity

One day after voters spanked Republicans in the midterm elections, George Bush turned a two-year commitment to Donald Rumsfeld into a "heckuva job, Rummy," before the last ballots have even been counted. Rumsfeld resigned his post as Secretary of Defense after almost six years on the job, and Bush will nominate Robert Gates to replace him: Donald Rumsfeld will resign as Defense Secretary in a stunning consequence of yesterday's midterm election results which demonstrated American dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq. President Bush has chosen Robert Gates, president of Texas A&M and former CIA director, to replace him. Gates represents a change in direction for the Pentagon . He has a reputation for a pragmatic approach to foreign policy. In George H. W. Bush's administration, Gates served as deputy to National Security Council director Brent Scowcroft, who has been a sharp critic of the current President Bush's Iraq policy. His...

November 10, 2006

Troops Fear The Loss Of Rumsfeld

American troops concerned with the loss of Donald Rumsfeld spoke to Martin Fletcher of the Times of London, worried that the new Secretary of Defense would pull them out of Iraq before they could complete the mission: Half of America and the upper echelons of the US military may be cheering Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation from the post of Defence Secretary, but there was no rejoicing yesterday among those most directly affected by his decisions: the frontline soldiers in Iraq. Troops expressed little pleasure at the departure of the man responsible for their protracted deployment to a hostile country where 2,839 of their comrades have died. Indeed, some members of the 101st Airborne Division and other troops approached by The Times as they prepared to fly home from Baghdad airport yesterday expressed concern that Robert Gates, Mr Rumsfeld’s successor, and the Democrat-controlled Congress, might seek to wind down their mission before...

Not Going To Bite

My good friend John Hinderaker links to a CBS report about the latest entertainment coming from al-Qaeda this evening, as do some of our mutual friends in the conservative blogosphere, that hails the Democratic midterm victory as a "reasonable" move. Abu Hamza al-Muhajir had plenty to say in the new videotape released from an undisclosed location in Iraq, but the wonder is that anyone pays any attention to it. Here's the portion in question: The terror group also welcomed the U.S. Republican electoral defeat that led to the departure of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and vowed to continue its fight until the White House is blown up. In the tape, al-Muhajir praised the outcome of Tuesday's elections in which Democrats swept to power in the House and the Senate, in large part due to U.S. voter dissatisfaction over the handling of the war in Iraq. "The American people have...

November 13, 2006

The Fugitive, Captured

The US got embarrassed last year when four captured al-Qaeda terrorists escaped from a military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. The leader, Abu Nasir al-Qahtani, has been rumored to have appeared all over Southwestern Asia. Tonight the BBC reports that American forces have recaptured Qahtani, near Khost: US and Afghan forces say they have captured a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure in eastern Afghanistan. The man - named as Abu Nasir al-Qahtani by unidentified US officials and a Pakistani newspaper - is said to have been captured in the city of Khost. US military officials said last week that a known al-Qaeda operative had been arrested in Khost. Mr Qahtani escaped last year from the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan with three other suspected militants. The American military captured five other terrorists along with Qahtani in Khost, the BBC reports. US forces will not publicly confirm the identities of their detainees, but...

November 21, 2006

A Familiar Refrain In Lebanon

Once again, a politician opposed to Syrian hegemony in Lebanon has been assassinated, and again the victim hails from a family with a long history of supporting Lebanese independence. Pierre Gemayel, whose brother Bashir was also assassinated in 1982, died in a suburban hospital after a shooting: Prominent anti-Syrian Christian politician Pierre Gemayel was assassinated in a suburb of Beirut on Tuesday, his Phalange Party Voice of Lebanon radio station reported. The shooting will certainly heighten the political tension in Lebanon, where the leading Muslim Shiite party Hezbollah has threatened to topple the government if it does not get a bigger say in Cabinet decision-making. Gemayel was rushed to a nearby hospital, according to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. and the Voice of Lebanon, the Phalange Party mouthpiece reported. The party later announced that he was dead. Gemayel, the minister of industry and son of former President Amin Gemayel, was a...

November 23, 2006

Two Sites For Lebanon Updates

I'll be putting the blogging aside for the most part today, but fortunately two bloggers will stay on top of developments in Lebanon. First, make sure to keep watching Michael Totten. He's spent enough time in the Middle East to have a clear perspective on events there, especially in Lebanon. If you missed Hugh's show yesterday, be sure to catch the podcast of at least the first hour, as Totten delivered important context for understanding the political currents in Lebanon. The other blog to watch is Rick Moran's Right Wing Nuthouse. He's committed to keeping up on developments today, including the funeral of Pierre Gemayel, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of protestors. The speakers have demanded Hassan Nasrallah acknowledge that Hezbollah does not represent the majority of Lebanese, a direct challenge to Nasrallah's open bid for power. The Cabinet of Fuad Siniora have now holed themselves up in a...

November 24, 2006

Empty Seats Defy The Realists

In the last few months, many in the US have been urging the Bush administration to open direct talks with Syria and Iran on security issues in Iraq, among other issues. They have stated that we have to engage with Syria in order to stabilize Lebanon as well as Iraq. However, Michael Young of the Beirut Daily Star writes in the London Times that Syria's record of assassinations in his country should signal the US that no partner for stability and democracy exists in the Assad regime: In recent weeks the idea that the United States and the UK should “engage” Syria, but also Iran, to stabilise Iraq has been all the rage. On Tuesday, in an east Beirut suburb, Lebanon’s industry minister, Pierre Gemayel, showed what the cost of engagement might be. The scion of a prominent Christian political family was assassinated in broad daylight. This was the latest...

November 28, 2006

Hezbollah Training The Mahdi Militia?

For those who see the situations in Lebanon and Iraq as a continuum of the same Islamist efforts for regional control, it will come as no shock to learn that Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army receives training from Hassan Hasrallah's Hezbollah. It might come as more of a shock that the New York Times actually reports it, as well as the role Iran plays as a facilitator between the two: A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr. The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said. Iran has facilitated the link between Hezbollah and the Shiite militias in Iraq,...

Hardly Innocent

We have experienced the birth of a new phrase in victimology -- flying while Muslim. The six imams kicked off of a US Air flight here in Minneapolis have gone on tour with this phrase at the ready, doing a "pray-in" at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington DC yesterday. However, details from the airline and its other passengers point towards a much different conclusion, one that understandably worried all involved: Witnesses said three of the imams were praying loudly in the concourse and repeatedly shouted "Allah" when passengers were called for boarding US Airways Flight 300 to Phoenix. "I was suspicious by the way they were praying very loud," the gate agent told the Minneapolis Police Department. Passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security...

Bush Can't Designate Terror Groups: Judge

A federal judge barred the Bush administration from specifying organizations that support terrorism for the purpose of freezing their assets and keeping funds from terrorists. US District Court Judge Audrey Collins blocked the administration from freezing the assets of the PKK and the Tamil Tigers, two rather obvious terrorist groups: A federal judge struck down President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday. The Humanitarian Law Project had challenged Bush's order, which blocked all the assets of groups or individuals he named as "specially designated global terrorists" after the 2001 terrorist attacks. "This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era." The case centered on two groups, the Liberation Tigers,...

November 29, 2006

NSA Program Has Impressive Safeguards

After all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the last year regarding the NSA's warrantless surveillance program on suspected terrorists abroad and their calls into the United States, the agency has now formally briefed the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board on the program. Members now claim that the government has worked hard to protect the privacy of American citizens: After a delay of more than a year, a government board appointed to guard Americans' privacy and civil liberties during the war on terror has been told the inner workings of the government's electronic eavesdropping program. Members say they were impressed by the protections. ... Board members said that they were impressed by the safeguards the government has built into the NSA's monitoring of phone calls and computer transmissions, and that they wished the administration could tell the public more about them to ease distrust. "If the American public,...

Syria Planned Wave Of Political Assassinations In Lebanon

The Lebanese newspaper Al-Mustaqbal reports today that Lebanon has uncovered a network of assassins in their nation, trained and funded by Syria, that targeted three dozen Lebanese lawmakers. To no one's great surprise, the network exploited Palestinian refugee camps as training centers and had connections to a Fatah splinter group (via It Shines For All): The Lebanese security forces exposed a network which planned to assassinate 36 senior anti-Syrian Lebanese officials, the Lebanese newspaper al-Mustaqbal reported Wednesday morning. ... According to the report, the investigation revealed that the network trained in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and planned to execute a plot initiated by the Syrian government to assassinate 36 senior Lebanese officials. According to the newspaper, the Syrian intelligence appointed a group belonging to the Fatah-Intifada organization to implement the plan. ... The detainees, a Syrian and a Saudi, noted that they were part of a 200-member network which...

December 1, 2006

Why Haven't We Done This Yet?

We have long since understood that heightened security is a requirement in the post-9/11 world. What we want, however, is effective security, especially at airports, not just silly procedures that do nothing to reveal real threats. Instead of time-consuming and random patdowns, we would want something more efficient that will check everyone for contraband in an efficient manner. According to USA Today, we have had this capability for almost four years now, but have not deployed it because of privacy concerns: The federal government plans this month to launch the nation's first airport screening system that takes potentially revealing X-ray photos of travelers in an effort to find bombs and other weapons. Transportation Security Administration screeners at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport will test a "backscatter" machine that could vastly improve weapons detection but has been labeled a "virtual strip search" by the American Civil Liberties Union. Backscatter can show...

December 3, 2006

The Meaning Of Rumsfeld's Leak

Many bloggers have written about the leaked Rumsfeld memo published by the New York Times on Friday and confirmed by the Pentagon later the same day, but no one has a better political analysis than Andy McCarthy at NRO's The Corner. Calling this the herald of a "train-wreck" two years of lame-duck status for the Bush administration, McCarthy shows exactly how this will be seen by the people who comprise it: The memo itself is extraordinarily interesting, even to us non-military types, especially given (a) how little regard Sec'y Rumsfeld seems to have for a lot of the strategy either currently being employed or likely to be proposed by the Iraq Study Group; and (b) how Rumsfeld seems a lot more interested in quick strike capability against al Qaeda and Iran elements than having U.S. forces enmeshed in Iraq's sectarian infighting. ... If high officials — in wartime, no less...

December 6, 2006

'Allahu Akbar Was Just The Opening Act'

Debra Burlingame has written on airline security topics ever since her brother, American Airlines Capt. Charles Burlingame, died in the 9/11 attack at the hands of Islamist terrorists. Today she takes on the topic of the "flying imams" of Minneapolis in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: Given that Islamic terrorists continue their obsession with turning airplanes into weapons of mass destruction, it is nothing short of obscene that these six religious leaders--fresh from attending a conference of the North American Imams Federation, featuring discussions on "Imams and Politics" and "Imams and the Media"--chose to turn that airport into a stage and that airplane into a prop in the service of their need for grievance theater. The reality is, these passengers endured a frightening 3 1/2-hour ordeal, which included a front-to-back sweep of the aircraft with a bomb-sniffing dog, in order to advance the provocative agenda of these imams...

December 8, 2006

Wannabe Jihadi, Take 2

Six months ago, the FBI took down a ring of wannabe jihadis with large aspirations for terrorism and small mental capacities to conduct it. Apparently, they discovered another benighted aspirant to radical Islam in the person of Derrick Shareef, whose brilliant cunning allowed him to get caught in a sting before he ever bought his first hand grenade: A man has been arrested by federal agents on charges of planning to set off hand grenades at an Illinois shopping mall on Dec. 22 as part of his plan to commit "violent jihad" against civilians. Derrick Shareef, 22, of Rockford, was arrested when he carried out a rendezvous with an undercover agent in a parking lot to trade a set of stereo speakers for four grenades and a handgun. Federal officials said he planned to place the grenades in garbage cans at the CherryVale shopping mall in Rockford, about 90 miles...

December 11, 2006

Connecting A Few Dots With The Flying Imams

Kathryn Kersten decides to do what her employer has thus far refused through its news division and report on the terror connections of the Flying Imams. In her latest Star Tribune column, Kersten notes the affiliations of the six imams who got booted from a US Air flight for their suspicious behavior: Who are the parties involved here, who seem so interested in linking airport security with racial bigotry? The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the imams' legal representative, is an organization that "we know has ties to terrorism," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in 2003. And the Muslim American Society, which is also supporting the imams? It's the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Chicago Tribune, which called it "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group." How about Omar Shahin, the imams' spokesman and also president of the North American Imams Federation? He is a native of...

December 14, 2006

Judge Upholds Detainee Law

In an important victory for the Bush administration, a Clinton appointee to the federal bench upheld the new detainee law that bars Guantanamo prisoners from using American civil courts to challenge their detention. The same judge, James Robertson, first ruled against the Bush administration in 2004, necessitating the new law Congress passed this year and upheld in this latest decision: A federal judge dismissed yesterday a challenge from Osama bin Laden's driver over his more than four years of detention at the Guantanamo Bay military prison, saying a new anti-terrorism law approved by Congress this fall removes the lower court's jurisdiction in the matter. U.S. District Judge James Robertson is the first to rule on the controversial Military Commissions Act (MCA), which authorizes military trials of alleged enemy combatants and removes their right to try to bring their cases before federal judges. Robertson dismissed Salim Ahmed Hamdan's petition because he...

Egypt Rounds Up Muslim Brotherhood

Speaking of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian government has decided that the Islamist group has overstepped itself once again and has arrested scores of its leaders. One of the detainees is a top lieutenant to MB leader Muhammed Akef: One of the top leaders of Egypt's opposition Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been detained. Police also rounded up about 10 other prominent members and dozens of students in dawn raids. Khairat al-Shatir is one of two deputies to Brotherhood leader Muhammad Akef, and was taken from his home in north-eastern Cairo, the capital. The group is officially banned, but its supporters make up parliament's largest opposition group and it is tolerated. This reminds me of the joke about mixed feelings, which involved seeing one's mother-in-law going over a cliff in one's new Cadillac. Having Cairo crack down on an opposition political group is not good news, except when it...

December 15, 2006

As If They Need An Excuse

The deteriorating health of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "blind sheik" imprisoned for his role in planning the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, has touched off a terror warning by the FBI: The health of terrorist cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheik, is deteriorating renewing fears that his death in prison could trigger an attack on the United States, officials said Thursday. There is no credible indication that an attack on the U.S. is imminent, said several law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation. ... Officials said the bulletin served merely as a reminder that Abdel-Rahman had called for retaliation by terror sympathizers if he died in prison. It cited a May 1998 news conference in which al-Qaida members distributed his last will and testament, in which Abdel-Rahman pleaded for followers to "extract the most violent revenge"...

December 20, 2006

Do We Need A Bigger Military?

President Bush reversed course from his six-year effort to make the military smaller and more nimble by saying that America needs a more robust military. In an interesting interview with the Washington Post, Bush also backtracked from his earlier insistence that the US is winning the war in Iraq: President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists. As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared,...

December 21, 2006

Two Essays From Right And Left

Two worthy essays written today should get your attention. First, we have our good friend and fellow CQ reader Michael Ledeen writing about the meaning of the recent vote in Iran. I wrote about the precarious political position in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad finds himself, and Michael goes into more detail at the American Enterprise Institute: The first step toward understanding the Iranian “elections” is that they weren’t. Elections, that is, at least in our common understanding of the term, namely the people vote and the counters count those votes and so we find out what the people want. That’s not what happens in Iran, where both the candidates and the results are determined well in advance of the casting of ballots. Yes, people get mobilized and go to the polls and mark their ballots and put them in the ballot box. But then Groucho comes into play: “I’ve got ballots....

December 22, 2006

Zawahiri To Democrats: You're Not All That

Al-Qaeda's number two nutcase sent a new message to the West as expected, and this time he had a special message for the winners of America's last election. Ayman al-Zawahiri wants Democrats to understand that they owe a debt of thanks to radical Islamist terrorists for their control of Congress, and he expects some gratitude ASAP: "The first is that you aren't the ones who won the midterm elections, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost. Rather, the Mujahideen -- the Muslim Ummah's vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq -- are the ones who won, and the American forces and their Crusader allies are the ones who lost," Zawahri said, according to a full transcript obtained by ABC News. Zawahri calls on the Democrats to negotiate with him and Osama bin Laden, not others in the Islamic world who Zawahri says cannot help. "And if you don't refrain from the...

December 23, 2006

Lufthansa Bars Air Marshals On Flights

If you're flying betwen the US and Europe, you may want to avoid flying Lufthansa. According to Der Spiegel, the German airliner has begun denying Germany's air marshals the expensive seats near the cockpit where they can protect the flight crew -- and often refuses to give them any tickets at all: The officer swore an oath of secrecy on becoming a sky marshal, so his name can't be revealed -- in fact no sky marshal has spoken about his work since the German government created the jobs in October 2001, shortly after 9/11. "Inspektion 6," the sky-marshal unit of the Federal Police Authority at Frankfurt airport, is the most secretive German police organization next to the elite GSG9 force. But the situation for sky marshals has never been as depressing as it is now, says the officer and a one of his colleagues. Official figures claim that 200 police...

The Deadbeat Does Not Go On

Some of the mystery surrounding the odd departure of Turki al-Faisal as Saudi ambassador to the US has begun to unravel. The Washington Post reports that Turki left millions in unpaid bills and found himself undercut by Bandar bin Sultan, his predecessor, as Bandar apparently conducted higher-level diplomacy than Turki: Eighteen months ago, Prince Bandar bin Sultan ended a legendary 22-year career as the face of Saudi Arabia in the United States. Word at the time was that he was bored, preferring his palatial Aspen, Colo., lodge to Washington. As it turns out, however, Bandar has secretly visited Washington almost monthly over the past year -- and is at least as pivotal today in influencing U.S. policy as he was in his years as ambassador. Last week, his successor, Turki, abruptly resigned from the post -- partly, sources close to the royal family said, because of Bandar's back-channel trips to...

Major Blow For Taliban

The Taliban has taken a body blow in its continuing war with NATO and democratic Afghan forces. Coalition forces killed their chief of operations, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, in fighting near the border this week: A top Taliban military commander described as a close associate of Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar was killed in an airstrike this week close to the border with Pakistan, the U.S. military said Saturday. A Taliban spokesman denied the claim. Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani was killed Tuesday by a U.S. airstrike while traveling by vehicle in a deserted area in the southern province of Helmand, the U.S. military said. Two associates also were killed, it said. There was no immediate confirmation from Afghan officials or visual proof offered to support the claim. A U.S. spokesman said "various sources" were used to confirm Osmani's identity. Osmani, regarded as one of three top associates...

December 24, 2006

Pre-Emption, Ethiopia-Style

Ethiopia decided to join the war on radical Islamist terror by launching a series of airstrikes on jihadi-held sectors of Somalia this morning. The new front will complicate the Islamists' attempt to consolidate the power they seized a few months ago in Mogadishu: Fighting escalated in Somalia Sunday as Ethiopian planes and helicopter gun ships attacked Islamist targets in several central provinces. One area that came under heavy attack was the town of Baledweyn, 220 miles south of the capital Mogadishu, the Shabelle Media Network of Mogadishu reported. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's information minister said his country had launched "self-defensive measures" against the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, known as the UIC. On Saturday, the UIC issued a worldwide call for Islamist fighters to join the jihad, or holy war, in Somalia. The situation in the Horn of Africa has been unstable for years, and the Islamist triumphs this year...

December 26, 2006

Islamist Forces Retreating In Somalia

Ethiopian advances have forced the Islamists in Somalia to fall back, abandoning some of their bases and towns. Their reverses prompted the weak Somalian government to offer amnesty for surrender, but the Islamic Courts Union has thus far refused: Islamic fighters were in a tactical retreat Tuesday, a senior Islamic leader said, as government and Ethiopian troops advanced on three fronts in a decisive turn around in the battle for control of Somalia. Somalia's internationally backed government called on the Council of Islamic Courts to surrender and promised them amnesty if they lay down their weapons and stop opposing the government, spokesman Abdirahman Dinari said from Baidoa, the seat of the government. ... Islamic troops withdrew more than 50 miles to the southeast from Daynuney, a town just south of Baidoa. The retreat along the western front follows the bombing by Ethiopian jets of the country's two main international airports....

NSA Wiretaps 17-1 In Court

The fight over the NSA warrantless surveillance program has continued quietly in federal courtrooms, and perhaps part of the reason for the quiet has been the results. The NSA has won seventeen challenges to the program thus far: Defense lawyers who had hoped that the public disclosure a year ago of the National Security Agency's wiretapping program would yield information favorable to their clients are being rebuffed by the federal judiciary, which in a series of unusually consistent rulings has rejected efforts by terrorism suspects to access the records. In at least 17 criminal cases, federal district judges nominated to the federal bench by presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush have ruled against requests to force the government to tell defendants, most accused of terrorism-related crimes, whether the NSA eavesdropped on them without a court warrant. ... Still, even in cases in which the NSA program...

December 27, 2006

Maybe They Were Serious

The Pakistani agreement with tribal chiefs in the North Waziristan region called into question Pervez Musharraf's will to fight the Taliban he once supported in Afghanistan, now that they have most likely crossed the border into his nation to use it as a launching pad for cross-border attacks. That question may have found an answer in Musharraf's latest proposal: Pakistan has told its army to examine a plan to fence off and mine part of its long and porous border with Afghanistan, a move likely to further fuel tensions between the two countries. Foreign secretary Riaz Muhammad Khan told a press conference yesterday that safe-transit passages along the newly fortified stretches of the 1,490-mile border would allow the cross-border movement of both Afghans and Pakistanis. However, he gave no timetable for carrying out the work. Pakistan is not a signatory to the anti-landmines Geneva Convention and other international agreements that...

Will Assad Flip?

The Washington Times reports this morning that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad might be considering a change in foreign policy that would move him out of the Iranian orbit and closer to the other Arab states. Recent visits to American allies in the region and a snub towards Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has observers buzzing with anticipation: Recent visits by Syrian President Bashar Assad to U.S.-allied Yemen and the United Arab Emirates are prompting speculation that Syria is seeking to leave the Iranian orbit and pursue closer ties with the West. Such a move would fulfill a major recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, which suggested it might be possible through diplomacy to pry Syria away from Iran. ... Mr. Assad's talks in Yemen 11 days ago reportedly dealt with regional issues, including the infighting in the...

December 28, 2006

Islamists Disappear From Mogadishu

In a lightning-fast collapse, the Islamists in Somalia have apparently disappeared. The largest city in the nation has erupted in gang warfare as tribal chiefs retracted their support for the radical Islamist forces that just days ago issued a call for jihadis around the world to attack Ethiopia: The Islamist forces who have controlled much of Somalia in recent months suddenly vanished from the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, residents said Wednesday night, just as thousands of rival troops massed 15 miles away. In the past few days, Ethiopian-backed forces, with tacit approval from the United States, have unleashed tanks, helicopter gunships and jet fighters on the Islamists, decimating their military and paving the way for the internationally recognized transitional government of Somalia to assert control. Even so, the Islamists, who have been regarded as a regional menace by Ethiopia and the United States, had repeatedly vowed to fight to...

January 1, 2007

Too Far?

The London Telegraph reports on a new series of requirements for travelers from Europe to the US which appear to push the boundaries of privacy further than ever. An agreement with Brussels will now require all European carriers to make passenger credit accounts and other information available to American security officials before the passengers can get clearance to enter the US: Britons flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington. By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account. The extent of the demands were disclosed in "undertakings" given by the US Department of Homeland Security to the European...

Islamists Bug Out Of Somalia

Radical Islamists have given up their last stronghold in Somalia, chased out by the Ethiopian Army that has spent the last two weeks crushing them. The Ethiopians and the Somialian transitional government liberated Kismayo as the Islamists beat a hasty retreat towards Kenya: Somali government troops backed by Ethiopian tanks and fighter jets captured the last major stronghold of a militant Islamic movement Monday, while hundreds of Islamic fighters — many of them Arabs and South Asians — fled the town. To cheering and waving crowds, well-armed troops drove into Kismayo after clearing roads laced with land mines that had been left by an estimated 3,000 hard-line Islamic fighters fleeing a 13-day military onslaught by government troops backed by Ethiopian tanks and MiG fighter jets. "We have entered and captured the city," Maj. Gen. Ahmed Musa told The Associated Press while riding aboard a truck into Kismayo, where the Islamic...

January 2, 2007

Lufthansa Bars Air Marshals From Flights

Note: This post originally ran during the Christmas holiday, and is being repeated for those who may have missed it. If you're flying betwen the US and Europe, you may want to avoid flying Lufthansa. According to Der Spiegel, the German airliner has begun denying Germany's air marshals the expensive seats near the cockpit where they can protect the flight crew -- and often refuses to give them any tickets at all: The officer swore an oath of secrecy on becoming a sky marshal, so his name can't be revealed -- in fact no sky marshal has spoken about his work since the German government created the jobs in October 2001, shortly after 9/11. "Inspektion 6," the sky-marshal unit of the Federal Police Authority at Frankfurt airport, is the most secretive German police organization next to the elite GSG9 force. But the situation for sky marshals has never been as...

Canadians Among The UIC

A handful of radical Islamists fleeing the collapse of their grip on Somalia have fallen into Kenyan custody as they attempted to cross the border. Two of the ten captured carried Canadian passports, the CBC reports: As many as two Somali Islamic fighters who claim to be Canadian were among 10 fighters arrested by Kenyan police, according to separate reports Tuesday. The 10 were arrested on Monday at the Liboi border crossing in Kenya as they tried to flee Somalia, the Kenya Daily Nation reported. Two were reportedly carrying Canadian passports, while the remaining eight were said to have Eritrean passports. According to the newspaper, all 10 militants were being detained in the Kenyan town of Garissa. It is not known whether they have been charged. Canada Press reported just one of the men held a Canadian passport. Still, Canadian authorities have to wonder how many more of the UIC...

January 3, 2007

In Mogadishu, It's Miller Time

The end of the radical Islamist grip on Somalia has had many words written about it, but the images and sounds coming from the nightclubs of Mogadishu cement the reality of freedom for young Somalians. Playing music that would have been banned by the Union of Islamic Courts and showing dance moves that would have brought beatings or worse from the Islamist moral enforcers, Somalians danced in celebration and defiance: There was not a hijab or niqab in sight as clubbers at the Global Dance Hall worked up a sweat to gangsta rap and Kenyan hip-hop. Instead, women shook their hair and stole glances at the men lining the wall. Quite what Mogadishu’s Union of Islamic Courts would have made of the occasional flash of ankle beneath the long dresses is anyone’s guess. But no one cared as they celebrated their new freedom. For six months this liberal northern corner...

January 5, 2007

Monuments To Monsters

No one ever accused Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi of good taste or mental stability: With much of the Arab world up in arms over the hanging of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on Saturday, it didn't take long for Libya to jump into the fray. The government in Tripoli announced on Thursday that it was planning to erect a statue of Saddam, depicting him standing on the gallows. He will join a similar monument to the Libyan freedom fighter Omar Mukhtar, a national hero who was executed in 1931 after fighting against the Italian occupation. "The revolutionary committees have decided to erect a statue of Saddam Hussein standing beside Omar Mukhtar on the gallows," the government said in a press release. Following Saddam's execution, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi declared three days of mourning and flags on government buildings were flown at half mast. One day prior to Saddam's death, Gadhafi...

January 8, 2007

What's Next For Somalia?

After the expulsion of the Islamist government in Mogadishu and their flight through Kismayo into dissipation, the question remains as to how to rebuild Somalia into a viable state. The clan rule that has led to fifteen years of chaos will return unless the transitional government can take control of the streets without appearing to be an Ethiopian puppet state. Meanwhile, the Islamists still want a piece of Somalia's future: The road ahead for Somalia begins in places like Kismayo, dusty, chaotic, forlorn wrecks of cities where the list of dire needs like food, water, shelter, a fire department, law, order — and hope — is so overwhelming that people just shake their heads and smile when asked where they would begin. In just two weeks, the Somali political world has been turned upside down, bringing ambitious governance and reconstruction issues into focus for the first time in 16 years....

You Can Run But You Can't Hide, The Extended Dance Mix

Perhaps al-Qaeda figured that the US had focused so much on the 9/11 attacks that it had forgotten about one of its earlier attacks on American assets. If so, the terrorists have just discovered that both elephants and donkeys have long memories in America. The US Air Force has attacked the UIC remnants fleeing the Ethiopian Army in southern Somalia, targeting at least two AQ leaders that masterminded two suicide-bombing attacks on American embassies in 1998: A U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports exclusively. The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, Martin reports. Those terror attacks killed more than 200 people. The AC-130 gunship is capable of firing thousands...

January 9, 2007

Free Speech Does Not Include Terrorism

Yesterday, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from seven men charged with supporting terrorism through fund-raising for terrorist-linked organizations. The appeal came after the 9th Circuit had rejected the defense argument that their contributions to the MEK represented free speech: The Supreme Court refused Monday to block the trial of seven Los Angeles residents charged with raising money for an Iranian opposition group that was designated a "foreign terrorist organization" by the U.S. government. Lawyers for the seven had argued the charges were unconstitutional because they had a free-speech right to raise money for a political group. That claim was rejected by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which noted the Iranian opposition group -- the People's Mujahedeen, also known as the MEK -- had a record of supporting assassinations and bombings. "Sometimes money serves as a proxy for speech, and sometimes it buys goods and services...

Jordan Foils Terrorist Plot

Jordanian forces have killed one al-Qaeda operative and captured another in an operation that foiled a pending terrorist attack against the Hashemite Kingdom: Police killed one suspected al-Qaida member and detained a second in a crackdown Tuesday that foiled a terrorist plot against Jordan, the state news agency and officials said. ... A unit comprised of elite police and intelligence forces stormed the cell's hideout because of "information on plans by al-Qaida targeting the Jordanian arena," Petra said, quoting an unidentified security official. It did not elaborate. Security officials told The Associated Press that the two men opened fire at the special security forces that came to arrest them. Police shot one man dead, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the operation was under way. The other man is in police custody, they said. The dead man is presumed to be a Palestinian, as he entered...

January 10, 2007

China Has Its Islamists Problems ... Maybe

China usually works hard to avoid admitting internal conflicts in their workers' paradise, so when they go public with operations against any kind of dissidents, it's significant. Beijing announced today that they had conducted a military operation against a terrorist training camp in its Xinjiang province, close to Central Asian republics struggling with al-Qaeda and other Islamists. However, as with all pronouncements by China, not all is as it seems: China revealed the depth of its fear of Islamic-linked violence yesterday when police disclosed that they had killed 18 terrorists and captured another 17 after a fierce battle at a secret training camp in a remote northwestern region. It was the first time that China had announced the discovery of such a camp in its territory. Officials said that they had uncovered links between the activists and international terrorist groups, hinting at connections to al-Qaeda. The clash in the Pamir...

Somalia: Target Destroyed

The US airstrikes have scored a success against one of their intended targets. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who planned the attacks on American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed over 200 people (mostly Africans), died in the US attack on Islamists fleeing Somalia in the wake of their collapse against the Ethiopians: The suspected al-Qaeda militant who planned the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa was killed in an American airstrike in Somalia, an official said Wednesday. "I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage," Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president's chief of staff, told The Associated Press. "One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead." ... Mohammed allegedly planned the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 225 people. He is also suspected of planning the car bombing of a beach...

January 12, 2007

Terrorist Attack On US Embassy In Greece

The American embassy in Athens got hit by an RPG fired from across the street. Instead of the usual Islamist sources, this attack came from a Golden Oldie of terror -- the rabid European Marxist type: Suspected leftist guerrillas fired a rocket at the U.S. embassy in Athens on Friday but no one was hurt in the blast, police and government officials said. In the most serious attack against the mission in 10 years, the small rocket launched from across the street shattered windows and woke up nearby residents in the central Athens area at 5:58 AM (0358 GMT). "There are one or two anonymous phone calls which claim that the Revolutionary Struggle was behind the attack," Public Order Minister Byron Polydoras told reporters outside the embassy. "Most likely, it is an act by local perpetrators." The leftist guerrilla group has emerged as the most serious domestic threat since the...

NATO Scores Big Against Taliban In Ambush

NATO forces surprised Taliban remnants in an overnight raid, killing 150 and putting a major dent in an expected offensive from the Islamist forces. For the first time since Pervez Musharraf signed a peace deal with Waziristani tribal leaders, Pakistan took part in the attack: Nato Forces in Afghanistan claimed yesterday to have thwarted a major Taliban border incursion from Pakistan by killing up to 150 insurgents in a night-time operation. As part of what was thought to be a precursor to a Taliban spring offensive, Nato officials said that two columns totalling some 200 insurgents crossed into the Afghan border province of Paktika on Wednesday night. Pakistani forces were informed of the movement of Taliban fighters and the Pakistani military claimed that it bombed and destroyed trucks used by the Taliban on its side of the border. If so, it was the first military action by the Pakistani military...

January 13, 2007

Final Islamist Collapse In Somalia (Updated)

The final organized base of the Union of Islamic Courts fell to Ethiopian and Somali forces last night, completing the lightning rout of what had been an ascendant radical Islamist force. Ras Kamboni had been the last organized redoubt for the UIC, and now they have fled into to forests on the Kenyan border: Somali government troops backed by Ethiopian soldiers have captured the last stronghold of the Union of Islamic Courts, the defence minister says. Col Barre Aden Shire said the town of Ras Kamboni, in south-eastern Somalia, fell after several days of fighting. Remnants of the militia are now reported to be hiding in dense forest along Somalia's border with Kenya. Ethiopia has led a military campaign against the Islamists, who controlled much of Somalia for six months. For those six months, people pointed to their tightening grip on power and determined that nothing could stop the wave...

January 15, 2007

Pakistan Hits Al-Qaeda Hideouts

Pakistan has scored more hits on al-Qaeda operations, this time in South Waziristan. Their army announced the successful missions tonight, which resulted in several AQ casualties: Pakistan's army destroyed three suspected al-Qaida hideouts in an air strike near the Afghan border on Tuesday, killing several members of the terror group, an army spokesman said. The military carried out the operation in South Waziristan tribal region after receiving information that 25 to 30 al-Qaida members were hiding there, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan. "We believe most of them were killed, but we don't have a body count," he said. Unfortunately, the Pakistanis do not believe than any high-value targets were among those killed. Although Pervez Musharraf signed a deal with North Waziristan to keep the army out, no such agreement exists with South Waziristan. Tribal leaders there have not agreed to Musharraf's demands, and so he has kept the...

January 16, 2007

Rule #1: Don't Negotiate With Terrorists ... But That's Just The First Rule

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero came to office on the backlash against his predecessor for blaming the Basque separatist group ETA for the 3/11 Madrid bombings in 2004. After his election, he pulled Spain out of the Iraq coalition and then announced that he would honor the ETA cease-fire and negotiate with the Basques. However, after ETA killed two people in a bombing at the airport in Madrid, Zapatero found himself having to apologize for his naivete: "All Spaniards heard me say on December 29 that I had the conviction that things were better for us than five years ago and that in a year's time things would be even better," Mr Zapatero told a special session of the Spanish parliament. "Although it is not frequent among public leaders, I want to recognize the clear mistake I made before all Spanish citizens." Despite allegations that he had been "fooled" by...

January 17, 2007

Another Blow To Al-Qaeda

The Philippine franchise of al-Qaeda took a heavy blow yesterday, as the government announced that it had killed one of the leaders of Abu Sayyaf. If confirmed, the terrorists will have lost their leader and chief organizer within a span of weeks: The Philippines said on Wednesday that troops had killed the top planner of the country's most deadly Islamic militant group in a clash at a rebel jungle camp in the southwest. Abu Sulaiman, one of the top five leaders of the Abu Sayyaf militant group and who is believed to have links with al Qaeda, was killed in a gunbattle on Tuesday on the island of Jolo, military chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon told reporters. "We are confident that with the death of Sulaiman, who is actually the number one planner, most of the activities of the Abu Sayyaf will continue to go down," Esperon said. Late last month,...

A Guest Of The ISI

Mullah Omar has eluded capture ever since the end of the Taliban's regime in November 2001, presumably hiding in the mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border while conducting a war against the democratic government that replaced his bloody and barbaric rule. Now a captured Taliban spokesman has pinpointed him specifically to a compound run by the Pakistani intelligence service: Taleban leader Mullah Omar is living in Pakistan under the protection of its ISI intelligence agency, a captured Taleban spokesman has said. The spokesman, Muhammad Hanif, made the apparent confession to Afghan agents who videotaped the questioning. Mr Hanif is seen sitting in a dimly-lit room telling agents that Mullah Omar is in the city of Quetta. Correspondents confirm the voice is his. The Pakistanis are in full denial mode, but the Afghan security service has a full-press distribution effort in promoting this video. They are intent on showing that the...

Climbdown On Warrantless Surveillance (Updated And Bumped)

The Bush administration has apparently concluded that fighting to retain the warrantless surveillance program with a Democratic Congress would eventually be unsuccessful, and today announced that the presidential authorization for the program would not be renewed. Instead, the Department of Justice will transfer oversight responsibility to the FISA court, effectively ending the controversy over one of the most contentious counterterrorism projects adopted since 9/11: The Justice Department, easing a Bush administration policy, said Wednesday it has decided to give an independent body authority to monitor the government's controversial domestic spying program. In a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said this authority has been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and that it already has approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to al-Qaida or an associated terror group. The court orders approving collection of...

January 18, 2007

British Special Forces Capture Taliban Commander

A senior Taliban commander finds himself in British hands today after a lightning raid on his home by SAS commandos. Without firing a shot or losing a man, the SAS plucked Mohammed Nabi from his fortified house: A team of SAS soldiers captured a key Taliban commander yesterday in a lightning raid on a heavily-fortified compound in southern Afghanistan. Without a shot being fired, the force of fewer than 30 elite soldiers, backed by Afghan troops, achieved "total surprise" and seized Mohammad Nabi in the early hours of the morning near Gereshk, in Helmand province. Nabi is believed to be a key commander in the Taliban insurgency in the neighbouring province of Kandahar. The compound, which had been under observation by Nato forces for around two weeks, was typical of the heavily-fortified homes favoured by the Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan, which often boast battlements and watch towers. Initially, the...

Toronto 18 Wanted To Start 'Chechnya-Style Resistance'

The 18 men arrested in Toronto this summer intended to shelter two suspected Islamist terrorists from the United States and start a resistance in northern Ontario based on the Chechnyan uprising. Canada's National Post interviewed the mole who infiltrated the group and discovered the extent of their plans against their own nation (via Newsbeat1): A group of young Toronto men were planning to harbour two Americans accused of terrorist activity and protect them by setting up an armed "Chechnya style resistance" in northern Ontario against law enforcement officials, a police informant who infiltrated the alleged local extremist cell said in a CBC news program. Mubin Shaikh, a former army cadet and paid police mole, revealed last night on The Fifth Estate that he helped look for a safe house in Opasatika, Ont. for two Atlanta men who authorities say were planning a terrorist attack in the United States. The U.S....

January 25, 2007

When The Germans Call Us Surrender Monkeys ....

... then we should really re-examine our testicular fortitude. Der Spiegel excerpts passages from Henryk Broder's new book on the Western response to radical Islamism, pungently titled, Hurray, We're Capitulating! The book has not yet been published in English, but DS gives us a translation on their English-language site. It cogently and somewhat angrily notes the low points in Western dhimmitude: Objectively speaking, the cartoon controversy was a tempest in a teacup. But subjectively it was a show of strength and, in the context of the "clash of civilizations," a dress rehearsal for the real thing. The Muslims demonstrated how quickly and effectively they can mobilize the masses, and the free West showed that it has nothing to counter the offensive -- nothing but fear, cowardice and an overriding concern about the balance of trade. Now the Islamists know that they are dealing with a paper tiger whose roar is...

February 2, 2007

Canadian Office In London Shut Down In Terror Probe

A Canadian mission in London has been evacuated after someone noticed a suspicious package outside: The Canadian High Commission in central London has been evacuated and surrounding streets closed after a suspect package was found, a police spokesman said. "A suspect envelope has been found ... we are checking it out at the moment," a police spokeswoman told AFP Friday, adding: "The roads in the immediate area have been closed off as a precautionary measure." The lockdown extends to parts of Trafalgar Square, where the commission offices are located. No further details have yet been released. These kinds of discoveries are almost always false alarms. However. the British are doing the right thing by securing the area as they investigate the package. Has Turner Broadcasting started promoting the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie in Britain? Just asking ......

February 3, 2007

Nasrallah Admits Hezbollah Funded, Run By Iran And Syria

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah told an Egyptian interviewer that Iran and Syria fund, train, and control his organization as an effort to spread radical Shi'ite Islam throughout the region: "Iran assists the organization with money, weapons, and training, motivated by a religious fraternity and ethnic solidarity," Nasrallah said. "And the help is funneled through Syria, and everybody knows it." The Hizbullah leader added that his organization is ready to accept assistance from any Arab or Islamic party, like Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Responding to accusations that his organization acts as "a state within a state," Nasrallah said that the current Lebanese government has yet to fulfill its obligation of securing the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, and getting Israeli-occupied land back. Accordingly, Nasrallah said that the people, or part of the people, are free to try and realize those goals by themselves. This comes as little surprise to...

February 4, 2007

AQ To British Cells: Let The Beheadings Begin

Britain's latest success against radical Islamist terror may have heralded the beginning of a major offensive by al-Qaeda against the West. Cells in the UK have received instructions to start kidnapping victims, make tapes of them pleading for their lives, and behead them: ISLAMIC terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week. The “strategic” assassination instruction was issued by Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Iraq to dozens of their followers in this country. It was uncovered by MI5 last autumn, senior security sources say. As a result police are on standby for multiple attempts by terrorists to kidnap and then behead people across Britain. MI5 is conducting a counter-terrorism surveillance operation to prevent such an attack. The alleged attempt to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier or...

February 8, 2007

Jordan, The Knights Of Justice, And Days Of Skepticism

The Guardian has an interesting look into Jordan's efforts to fight radical Islamist terrorism from the rather unique position of a Muslim monarchy. After a deadly attack on a hotel killed 60 people, mostly from a wedding reception, Jordan formed a task force with the dramatic name, The Knights of Justice. Their mission is to find and destroy al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups operating in Jordan, but they may have a tougher mission in convincing Jordanians of the necessity of the task: In November 2005 events provided proof that Jordan was not immune to the fallout of the war next door. Three Iraqi al-Qaida suicide bombers slaughtered 60 people, many of them wedding guests, in coordinated attacks on three hotels. It was the worst terrorist atrocity the country had ever suffered. A fourth Iraqi, a woman, was captured with her bomb's trigger mechanism jammed. She has been sentenced to death....

February 12, 2007

Leftist Terrorist Gains Early Release

My, how quickly five lifetimes fly by! The notorious Baader-Meinhof terrorist Brigitte Mohnhaupt has won parole from Germany and will be released shortly. Despite involvement in nine murders and being sentenced to five life terms, a German court has decided that she poses no risk to society: A former member of the Baader-Meinhof gang is to be freed on probation after serving 24 years for her involvement in kidnappings and murders in the 1970s. A German court ruled that Brigitte Mohnhaupt, 57, qualifies for early release after serving a minimum proportion of her five life sentences. The group, also known as the Red Army Faction, were behind kidnaps and killings in West Germany. ... The BBC's Steve Rosenberg, in Berlin, says she was once described as the most evil and dangerous woman in West Germany. Well, that was back at the tail end of an era that still believed in...

February 13, 2007

Squatter Madrassa Tests Musharraf's Mettle

In his on-off-on campaign against radical Islamist terrorists, the actions of Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf sometimes call into question his tenacity against militant Islam. He faces another such moment in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, as hard-line imams have build a madrassa illegally on public land. They have threatened a wave of terrorism if Musharraf dismantles it, drawing a line in the sand at the heart of Pakistan: A children's library in Pakistan's capital Islamabad has become the frontline of a tense standoff between President Pervez Musharraf's government and Islamist extremists. Scores of burka-clad female students are occupying the public library in protest at plans to demolish Jamia Hafsa, a religious school that houses 7,000 students but was illegally built on public land. The protesters, aged between seven and 30, have threatened to violently resist any police operation to end their sit-in; some have threatened to become suicide bombers. ... The madrasa...

Has Osama Died?

Hot Air noted a new message from al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, which pledges allegiance to Mullah Omar and the Taliban. He urges Muslims to unite behind Omar, but makes no mention of his AQ chief Osama bin Laden, who has gone silent for a long period of time: In a message released Monday, al Qaeda's No. 2 leader called on Muslims to unite under Taliban leader Mullah Omar, stop trying to form secular governments and instead follow strict Islamic Sharia law. The message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top aide to al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, appeared on an Islamist Web site. ... Al-Zawahiri pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar and called on all his followers to reject animosity and differences and come together under Mullah Omar's banner. Mullah Omar is the elusive, shadowy Taliban leader who slipped away in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. The...

February 14, 2007

Leftists Terrorists Rounded Up In Italy

The Italians prevented a literal blast from the past when they arrested 15 remnants of the Red Brigades overnight. The group may have seemed defunct, but apparently at least one cell remained operational, and it planned to attack their "capitalist" target, a Milan newspaper, in the near future: It began with the chance discovery in a Milan basement of a very unusual bicycle. Chief Superintendent Giuseppina Suma described how, following a tip off, police had examined the bike and found "a minute camera in the front light and a radio transmitter under the saddle". It was the start of a three-year investigation that led this week to more than 80 raids in four Italian cities and the arrest of 15 people for alleged offences that seemed like echoes of an anguished past. Italians opening their newspapers yesterday could be forgiven for thinking they had fallen into a time warp and...

France Rounds Up AQ Suspects

France has conducted a series of raids overnight that have netted eleven suspected al-Qaeda terrorists. The investigators followed the men over the last few months as an off-shoot of a wider counterterrorism mission: French counterterrorism police arrested 11 suspects as part of efforts aimed at dismantling an alleged al-Qaida-linked recruiting network to send radical Islamic fighters to Iraq, police officials said Wednesday. Nine suspects were detained in and near the southern city of Toulouse before dawn Wednesday, following the arrest of two others at Orly airport in Paris who had just been sent home by Syrian authorities, police said. Two of the suspects, mostly aged in their 20s, had sought to enter Iraq through neighboring Syria, but were detained by police there and remanded into French custody, police said. An investigation was continuing. This ring did not just work to send jihadis to Iraq. They also found evidence that the...

February 15, 2007

Bush At AEI

Since I'm under the weather today, I figured I'd watch President Bush give what's billed as an "important address" in the global war on terror to the American Enterprise Institute. 9:07 - He invokes Jeane Kirkpatrick and endorses the policy of the "universality of freedom". I'd say he will return to the focus on democratization ... 9:10 - He says he welcomes debate on wartime strategy, but that we should all agree that it is better to fight terrorists overseas on their turf rather than here on ours. Bush also went into a review of the cells discovered in other nations, and that those examples should prompt us to recognize that terrorists have not given up. 9:12 - Bush chose the surge strategy because it provides the best chance of success in Iraq. He's arguing why success is important, but that may no longer be the operative question. His critics...

February 18, 2007

Hatred Fails To Derail Friendship Express

Terrorists bombed the Friendship Express, a new train service between Pakistan and India commemorating their peace treaties, killing 64 and wounding many more. Two blasts tore through two passenger cars, leaving a trail of destruction: Explosions aboard an Indian passenger train bound for Pakistan killed at least 64 people and wounded 50 early Monday, and explosive devices have been found, according to railway officials. Two blasts ripped through two passenger coaches, as the Samjhauta Express passed through Panipat, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of New Delhi, said Northern Rail spokesman Rakesh Saxena. Three unexploded bombs were found near the train tracks, Saxena said. The train eventually continued to Pakistan without the two destroyed cars. The bombers may have killed dozens of people, but they could not stop the Friendship Express. With any luck, this will serve as an analogy for the entire war on terror....

February 19, 2007

Rice: US Disappointed By Waziristan Truce

Spring in Afghanistan usually means another Taliban offensive, and NATO forces expect an unusually energetic effort from the radical Islamists this year. The truce given by Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf to the tribes of Waziristan has given the Taliban more latitude in building up their forces for the offensive, a situation that Condoleezza Rice finds disappointing: Fears that Taliban militants are preparing to launch a spring offensive from Pakistan's tribal areas are straining relations between President Pervez Musharraf and his US-led allies. American officials are increasingly vocal about the dangers of Taliban safe havens inside Pakistan and in particular North Waziristan, one of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal agencies, where General Musharraf struck a controversial peace deal last September. American generals say cross-border incursions have soared since then. On Friday Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, spoke of "problems and disappointments" with the situation in Waziristan. Pakistan is hitting back at...

AQ Making A Comeback In Waziristan, Part II

Following up on the story I posted below on Condoleezza Rice's "disappointment" with Pakistan over its truce with tribal leaders in Waziristan, the New York Times reports on how that truce has allowed not just the Taliban but also al-Qaeda to make a comeback. A series of blows to AQ by the US and its allies had relegated Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to mostly inspirational roles among jihadists. Now Zawahiri, at least, has become much more operational, thanks to the breathing room provided by the Musharraf deal: Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once-battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials. American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman...

February 20, 2007

Rush To Judgement?

The National Republican Congressional Committee took donations over several years from someone representing himself as Michael Mixon. Mixon donated over $15,000 to the NRCC before his actual identity as Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari became known -- and before Alishtari got indicted as a terrorist financier. Now the GOP campaign group has to decide what to do with the money, and so far, they seem to be getting it all wrong: A New York man accused of trying to help terrorists in Afghanistan has donated some $15,000 to the House Republicans' campaign committee over three years. Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari pleaded not guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to charges that include terrorism financing, material support of terrorism and money laundering. From April 2002 until August 2004, the man also known as "Michael Mixon" gave donations ranging from $500 to $5,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee,...

February 23, 2007

Our Ethiopian Partners

Ethiopia just finished off the radical Islamists who attempted to seize control of Somalia, but that has just been their latest efforts to thwart Islamist terrorism. The US has worked closely with the Ethiopians to combat the spread of al-Qaeda in Africa, or at least we did until the New York Times reported it this morning: The American military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, including the use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, according to American officials. The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants’ positions and information from American spy satellites with the Ethiopian military. Members of a secret American Special Operations unit, Task Force 88, were deployed in Ethiopia and Kenya, and...

February 24, 2007

The Lateral Transfer, NATO-Style (Updated)

Tony Blair's decision to draw down British forces in Basra after handing security responsibility to Iraq gave critics of the war in Iraq some dubious ammunition with which to attack it and the Bush administrations new surge strategy. However, the British troops won't be cooling their heels in London or anywhere else in the UK. Blair has to send the same number of troops he's drawing out of Basra into Afghanistan, thanks to a failure of our NATO allies to reinforce the effort to defeat the Taliban: An extra battle group of up to 1,500 British troops is to be sent to Afghanistan to take on the Taleban over the next few months, the Government will announce on Monday. The extensive reinforcement, bringing the number of British troops in Afghanistan to about 7,000, has been agreed with Nato after alliance partners failed to offer more infantry units to fight in...

February 26, 2007

Appeasement Doesn't Work, Part 37B

Thailand has struggled with a Muslim insurgency for the past several years, with radical Islamists pushing for the upper hand in a nation more associated with Buddhists. After recent political turmoil, the government decided to appease the terrorists and attempt conciliation. Big mistake: Some are already calling it war, a brutal Muslim separatist insurgency in southern Thailand that has taken as many as 2,000 lives in three years with almost daily bombings, drive-by shootings, arson and beheadings. It is a conflict the government admits it is losing. A harsh crackdown and martial law in recent years seem only to have fueled the insurgency by generating fear and anger and undermining moderate Muslim voices. A new policy of conciliation in the past four months has been met by increased violence, including a barrage of 28 coordinated bombings in the south that killed or wounded about 60 people on Feb. 18. ......

Bush To Musharraf: Try Harder

Pervez Musharraf insisted that the peace deal he signed with tribal chiefs would not interfere with the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. No one really bought it, but the Bush administration put the best face on it in order to keep Musharraf in the fold. Now that seems to have ended, and the White House has decided on a different, tougher approach to the Pakistani president: President Bush has decided to send an unusually tough message to one of his most important allies, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces become far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda, senior administration officials say. The decision came after the White House concluded that General Musharraf is failing to live up to commitments he made to Mr. Bush during a visit here in...

Controversial For Showing The Truth

The documentary Obsession has finally started to receive attention for its presentation of the indoctrination of Arabs into an Islamist mindset, thanks to programs shown on state-run television in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other countries in the Middle East. The New York Times reports on the controversy the documentary has created on college campuses: When “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” a documentary that shows Muslims urging attacks on the United States and Europe, was screened recently at the University of California, Los Angeles, it drew an audience of more than 300 — and also dozens of protesters. At Pace University in New York, administrators pressured the Jewish student organization Hillel to cancel a showing in November, arguing it could spur hate crimes against Muslim students. A Jewish group at the State University of New York at Stony Brook also canceled the film last semester. The documentary...

February 27, 2007

The Assassination Attempt Misses

Dick Cheney made an unannounced visit to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan after a stop in Pakistan to tell Pervez Musharraf that the US needs him to fight the al-Qaeda and Taliban forces organizing in Pakistani territory. As if to underscore that message, a suicide bomber attacked Bagram while Cheney visited, killing 10 people outside the base but leaving Cheney unharmed: A suicide bomber killed up to 10 people outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan in an attack aimed at visiting Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday, but Cheney was not hurt in the blast. An American soldier and a South Korean who was part of the U.S.-led coalition were killed, as was a U.S. government contractor whose nationality was unknown, officials said. NATO put the toll at four, including the bomber, and 27 wounded. Local police said 10 people died. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the bomber...

The Assassination Attempt Misses

Dick Cheney made an unannounced visit to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan after a stop in Pakistan to tell Pervez Musharraf that the US needs him to fight the al-Qaeda and Taliban forces organizing in Pakistani territory. As if to underscore that message, a suicide bomber attacked Bagram while Cheney visited, killing 10 people outside the base but leaving Cheney unharmed: A suicide bomber killed up to 10 people outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan in an attack aimed at visiting Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday, but Cheney was not hurt in the blast. An American soldier and a South Korean who was part of the U.S.-led coalition were killed, as was a U.S. government contractor whose nationality was unknown, officials said. NATO put the toll at four, including the bomber, and 27 wounded. Local police said 10 people died. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the bomber...

March 1, 2007

Move Over, Omar

The Taliban have a new commander and a new public face for their terrorism. Mullah Dadullah has become the new rock star of the jihad in Waziristan, and his emergence could portend an especially tough spring for Afghanistan and its NATO defenders: If Osama bin Laden likes being in the global spotlight, he's likely a bit depressed in his hideout these days. The leader of the al-Qaida terrorist organization hasn't made an appearance on the evening news for quite some time. What's more, the Taliban no longer need bin Laden as a figurehead. Western intelligence agencies warn that the Taliban now have "their own star" in their struggle against Western soldiers and the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. The new nightmare from the Hindu Kush Mountains is called Mullah Dadullah. He sports a pitch black beard, always wears a military jacket and these days, he is omnipresent in the...

March 2, 2007

Pressed, Pakistan Comes Up With A Taliban Chief

A little pressure from the United States seems to have refocused Pakistan on their end of the war. Within days of the highest-level visit by the US in a long time, Pervez Musharraf's security forces captured a major Taliban figure -- in a city where Pakistan had insisted that al-Qaeda and the Taliban had no organization: The former Taliban defense minister was arrested in Pakistan on Monday, the day of Vice President Dick Cheney’s visit, two government officials said Thursday. He is the most important Taliban member to be captured since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The man, Mullah Obaidullah, was a senior leader of the Afghan insurgency, which has battled American and NATO forces with increasing intensity over the last year. He is one of the inner core around Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. The leadership is believed to operate from the relative safety of Quetta,...

March 4, 2007

Not Much More On That Al-Qaeda Story

Several people e-mailed me the link to the report at ABC's The Blotter about a supposed attack on an al-Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan over the last few days. The attack targeted an unnamed member of AQ leadership, and some speculated it might be Osama himself: For the past two days, U.S. and NATO forces have been conducting a major attack against a compound in a remote area of Eastern Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden or another senior al Qaeda leader may be hiding, ABC News has learned. According to eyewitnesses and local reporters in Kunar province, Coalition forces launched a fierce attack on a small enclave in the village of Mandaghel, approximately 17 miles from the border with Pakistan, on Friday afternoon. Warplanes pounded the positions ; U.S. special forces and Afghan National Army soldiers moved in shortly afterwards. The assault appeared to meet stiff resistance from militants at the...

March 6, 2007

Privacy Board: Terror Surveillance Program Protects Civil Rights

After over a year of supervising two of the most controversial programs adopted by the Bush administration after 9/11, a review panel has given both a clean bill of health on civil-rights protections. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Board will announce next week that the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program and the Swift banking transaction monitoring operation contain enough checks and balances to ensure that Americans will not fall victim to their own government: A White House privacy board is giving its stamp of approval to two of the Bush administration's controversial surveillance programs — electronic eavesdropping and financial tracking — and says they do not violate citizens' civil liberties. ... After operating mostly in secret for a year, the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Board is preparing to release its first report to Congress next week. The report finds that both the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program and the...

NATO Beats The Taliban To The Punch

The much-anticipated spring offensive by the Taliban just found itself eclipsed by the late-winter offensive of NATO. The West launched a large operation that aims to push the Taliban out of Helmand province, where the Taliban have scored their only success at regaining territory: NATO-led troops launched an offensive against Taliban militants Tuesday in a volatile southern Afghan province where hundreds of militant fighters have amassed. The operation, which will eventually involve 4,500 NATO troops and 1,000 Afghan soldiers, was launched at the request of the Afghan government and will focus on the northern region of Helmand province, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said. "Our first maneuver elements reached their positions at approximately 5 a.m. this morning," said Maj. Gen. Ton van Loon, ISAF's southern commander. Dubbed Operation Achilles, the offensive is NATO's largest-ever in the country. But it will involve only half the number of soldiers who fought in...

March 7, 2007

Former Sailor Arrested For Selling Secrets To Al-Qaeda

A former Navy sailor and recent convert to Islam has been arrested for espionage, ABC News is reporting tonight. Paul Hall, now known as Hassan Abujihaad, sent information about Navy warships in the months following the attack on the USS Cole -- an attack that killed 17 of his former fellow sailors: A former U.S. Navy sailor has been charged with allegedly passing military secrets about U.S. Navy movements through waters in the Middle East to al Qaeda-related Web sites during the spring of 2001, just months after the USS Cole was attacked in Yemen. Hassan Abujihaad, formerly known as Paul R. Hall, allegedly passed information about U.S. Navy warship movements in the Straits of Hormuz in April 2001 while he was a member of the Navy. The information passed along contained details about vulnerabilites of U.S. vessels -- including susceptibility to small boat attacks by terrorists. Abujihaad was arrested...

March 8, 2007

Democratic Senate To Relax Visa Requirements

I decided to do a little lunchtime blogging, and the first item I see is this Examiner column by Charles Hurt outlining the Democratic priorities on national security -- relaxing visa requirements to enter the US. Harry Reid took all of about six weeks after capturing the majority for the first time since the 9/11 attacks to demonstrate his party's understanding of security priorities, and a few Republicans appear to be supporting him, including George Bush: The Senate’s anti-terrorism bill would relax visa requirements for foreign travelers coming to the United States, a move that some worry will leave the country more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. “Nineteen murderers got into the U.S. because of lax scrutiny of their visas,” Rosemary Jenks of the nonpartisan Numbers USA said, referring to the terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “Now the Senate wants to eliminate visas for millions more people.”...

March 9, 2007

Congo Uranium A Go-Go

With the world focused on two potential nuclear proliferators and an ongoing Islamist terrorist threat, one might believe that nations with nuclear materials would take security a bit more seriously these days. Unfortunately, one would be wrong, at least in Congo. The Democratic Republic of Congo arrested its nuclear chief after the government found 100 bars of enriched uranium missing from their stocks: The head of the Democratic Republic of Congo's dilapidated and poorly guarded nuclear reactor plant has been arrested on suspicion of illegally selling enriched uranium, following the disappearance of large quantities of the material. The commissioner general for atomic energy, Fortunat Lumu, was detained on Tuesday along with an aide. Congo's state prosecutor, Tshimanga Mukeba, said Mr Lumu was being questioned about the disappearance of unspecified quantities of uranium in recent years. Mr Mukeba said Mr Lumu was suspected of "orchestrating illicit contracts to produce and sell...

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Gets Hearing Today

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of the 9/11 attacks, gets a hearing to determine his status at Guantanamo Bay today. The US will review his case to determine whether he should remain in custody and face a military tribunal under the process approved by Congress last year: Hearings begin today at Guantanamo Bay for a group of 14 terrorist suspects including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged September 11 mastermind. No lawyers or reporters will be present at the hearings so the only account of the outcome will come from the US military. Also going on before the hearings panels include Abu Zubaydah, a senior aide to Osama bin Laden, and a man known simply as Hambali, who is alleged to have orchestrated the 2002 Bali bombings. ... The Centre for Constitutional Rights, which is organising the defence of hundreds of Guantanamo detainees including Khan, said it was "outrageous" that...

Musharraf Deal Bad For Pakistanis, Too

With the deal between Pervez Musharraf and the Waziris widely acknowledged as a problem for the US and NATO in Afghanistan, some forget that Pakistanis also suffer from its effects. The Los Angeles Times reports on the ascendancy of the extremists and terrorists in Pakistan since Musharraf signaled a retreat on his prosecution of the war on terror, and what that means for moderates opposed to jihadism: For weeks, there had been whispers that Akhtar Usmani, a young teacher at a Muslim religious school, was speaking out against the growing presence of Islamic militants in his home in the tribal area of Waziristan. Then one day last week, the schoolteacher's corpse, with the head severed from the torso, was found in a bloody sack dumped beside a desolate road. A note on his mutilated body called him a spy for America. Such grisly reprisal killings have become a recurring feature...

US Enters Pakistan On Bin Laden Hunt

The US has sent CIA special operations units into Pakistan to hunt down fresh leads on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, the London Telegraph reports. The action comes just a few weeks after American officials presented Pervez Musharraf with evidence of AQ's growing presence in Waziristan and demanded action to destroy them: America is stepping up its hunt for Osama bin Laden by dispatching additional CIA operatives and paramilitary officers to Pakistan to kill or capture the al-Qa'eda leader. US officials said that the mission is intended to intensify the pressure on the terrorist leader, who turns 50 tomorrow, and perhaps force him into making a mistake. He is widely believed to be hiding in the region bordering Afghanistan. Satellite photographs and details of communications intercepts were given to President Musharraf of Pakistan last week by Stephen Kappes, deputy director of the CIA, as part...

March 10, 2007

FBI, DoJ Broke The Law

FBI Director Robert Mueller had to concede that his agents had broken the law in obtaining personal information from American citizens and residents. He took responsibility for the incidents in front of a hostile Senate committee that condemned the sloppiness at Justice: Bipartisan outrage erupted on Friday on Capitol Hill as Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, conceded that the bureau had improperly used the USA Patriot Act to obtain information about people and businesses. Mr. Mueller embraced responsibility for the lapses, detailed in a report by the inspector general of the Justice Department, and promised to do everything he could to avoid repeating them. But his apologies failed to defuse the anger of lawmakers in both parties. “How could this happen?” Mr. Mueller asked rhetorically in a briefing at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Who is to be held accountable? And the answer to that...

March 14, 2007

Taliban Forcing Musharraf's Hand

The agreement reached between Pervez Musharraf and the tribal leaders of Waziristan appeared to allow the Pakistani leader to back away from the war on terror. Unfortunately, Islamist terrorists don't have the habit of respecting boundaries, and now they have begun to use their new autonomy for attacks in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan: Along the Afghan border, not far from this northwestern city, Islamic militants have used a firm foothold over the past year to train and dispatch suicide bombers against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. But in recent weeks the suicide bombers have turned on Pakistan itself, carrying out six attacks and killing 35 people. Militant leaders have threatened to unleash scores more, in effect opening a new front in their war. Diplomats and concerned residents see the bombings as proof of a spreading “Talibanization,” as Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, calls it, which has seeped into more...

Gray Lady Uses Skirts To Hide CAIR

The New York Times runs a remarkable article today on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), painting the group as a victim of bigotry and anti-Islamist fear. Neil MacFarquhar uses the latest controversy over Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell's arrangement for the use of a House conference room by CAIR to cast criticism of the group as wholly unfounded: With violence across the Middle East fixing Islam smack at the center of the American political debate, an organization partly financed by donors closely identified with wealthy Persian Gulf governments has emerged as the most vocal advocate for American Muslims — and an object of wide suspicion. The group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, defines its mission as spreading the understanding of Islam and protecting civil liberties. Its officers appear frequently on television and are often quoted in newspapers, and its director has met with President Bush. Some 500,000 people receive the...

KSM: I'm The Mastermind Behind AQ

The military tribunal of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed turned into a brag-fest, as the captured terrorist took credit for almost every attack al-Qaeda has attempted. His admitted work goes back to 1993 and the first attack on the World Trade Center, and extends to planning assassination attempts against world leaders from Pope John Paul II to Jimmy Carter (via Hot Air): Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confessed to that attack and a string of others during a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a transcript released Wednesday by the Pentagon. "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," Mohammed said in a statement that was read during the session, which was held last Saturday. Mohammed claimed responsibility for planning, financing and training others for attacks ranging from the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center to the attempt by...

Cut And Run 3.0 On Display At The Victory Caucus

The Democratic plan to lose the war in Iraq has been transcribed by NZ Bear at The Victory Caucus. NZ also has a link to a PDF scan of the document, but the gist of the bill is captured in his transcription. The heart of its unconstitionality can be found in Sections 1902 and 1903: Sec. 1902 (a) Congress finds that it is Defense Department policy that Army, Army Reserve and National Guard units should not be deployed for combat beyond 365 days or that Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve units should not be deployed for combat beyond 210 days. Congress may also find that the executive branch sets that policy and its parameters for implementation. The Constitution gives Congress no authority to either deploy troops or to undeploy them, only to give the executive the authority to conduct war and the power of the purse to end it....

March 16, 2007

KSM, The Dissolute

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's declaration of involvement in dozens of al-Qaeda attacks, actual and planned, comes as no surprise to those who have followed his career. The London Telegraph paints a picture of a man who joined the jihad for fun rather than faith, and whose life is filled with examples of excess: In contrast to most of al-Qa'eda's senior leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed liked to indulge in the sins of the Western civilisation that his movement is devoted to wiping out. In the mid-1990s, while plotting the hijacking and bombing of a dozen US airliners and, to a lesser extent, the assassination of Pope John Paul II, he frequented nightclubs and pole-dancing bars in Manila with some regularity. In Kuala Lumpur he reportedly buzzed a high-rise building in a helicopter where one of his numerous girlfriends was staying, ringing her from the cockpit and telling her to look out of...

March 18, 2007

Are American Funds Supporting Jihadis?

Joel Mowbray, the syndicated columnist whose writing occasionally appears at Power Line (and who I met at CPAC), has an article in today's OpinionJournal that reports on how an American-financed Arabic television channel has started broadcasting jihadist content. Al-Hurra, which started off as an Arabic equivalent to Voice of America, has shifted its perspective towards Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah rather than the moderation we expected: Fighting to create a secular democracy in Iraq, parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi had come to rely on at least one TV network to help further freedom: U.S. taxpayer-financed Al-Hurra. Now, however, he's concerned. The broadcaster he had seen as a stalwart ally has done an about-face. "Until now, we were so happy with Al-Hurra. It was taking stands against corruption, for human rights, and for peace. But not anymore." Stories that he believes cry out for further investigation, such as recent arrests of those accused of...

KSM: Game Over

After the release of the transcript from the Guantanamo tribunal of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, many people expressed skepticism about his claims of involvement in so many terrorist plots. Some even postulated that Mohammed had fallen prey to American torture, even though he denied acting under duress during the hearing, or that he had gone insane during his American detention. However, the one Western journalist to have interviewed the al-Qaeda mastermind believes that Mohammed understands he has come to the end of his run as a terrorist, and now wants to establish a record of his legacy as a reaction to his current impotence: He lived for this spotlight, the chance to say: “Look at this spectacular operation I pulled off against the most powerful nation on earth.” But he is not a fantasist. KSM is a guy who enjoys plotting and being in the field. He could be the head...

Gathering Of Eagles Round-Up

Michelle Malkin has a great round-up on the Gathering of Eagles counterprotest yesterday in Washington, DC: It was a breath-taking, historic, and emotional day in Washington, D.C. You won't know it if you tune in to the usual MSM channels. But new media--bloggers, conservative documentarians, Internet activists, FReepers (giant thread here), citizen journalists, photojournalists, and talk radio hosts--turned out in full force to participate and cover the Gathering of Eagles counter-protest. Thousands upon thousands turned out despite freezing temperatures and hairy travel conditions. We met bikers who drove up all night from Huntsville, Alabama; a retired NYC firefighter who arrived here at 2am; college students who traveled from Massachusetts; a Vietnam veteran's wife who bought plane tickets at the last minute from San Francisco; and countless participants who arrived as part of Move America Forward's cross-country caravan. A pure, grass-roots effort, the Gathering of Eagles' volunteers matched the massive Soros-funded...

March 19, 2007

Time To Create A Domestic Intelligence Agency?

Has the time arrived to divorce the counterterrorism functions from the FBI and create a new agency dedicated to the task? Richard Posner believes that we have long needed to do just that, and to follow the lead of other nations in separating law enforcement from intelligence work within our borders: Detecting terrorist plots in advance so that they can be thwarted is the business of intelligence agencies. The FBI is not an intelligence agency, and has a truncated conception of intelligence: gathering information that can be used to obtain a conviction. A crime is committed, having a definite time and place and usually witnesses and often physical evidence and even suspects. This enables a criminal investigation to be tightly focused. Prevention, in contrast, requires casting a very wide investigative net, chasing down ambiguous clues, and assembling tiny bits of information (hence the importance of information technology, which plays a...

The Butchers Of The Taliban

The Taliban continue their terrorism of the Afghan people, but in the case of three men helping NATO forces in Nuristan, they have shown a brutality that goes beyond terrorism and into diabolical cruelty. Taliban fighters caught the three men after they helped a supply run in the eastern province and maimed them in a most heinous way: Taliban militants have hacked off the ears and noses of three Afghan drivers captured helping American forces. Fighters mutilated the three men seized after delivering fuel to a US base in the eastern province of Nuristan on Saturday. "After downloading their supplies into a coalition base in Nuristan, they were heading to Kunar," said Ghulamullah, the deputy chief of police in Nuristan, who uses only one name. "On their way the Taliban stopped them and cut off their noses and ears." It is the first time that such a barbaric punishment has...

March 21, 2007

Taliban And Al-Qaeda At War In Wana?

It's getting to the point where people need a scorecard in Waziristan to keep all of the players straight. A battle broke out today between Taliban elements in Waziristan and Uzbeki terrorists from al-Qaeda who overstayed their welcome in the Pakistani mountains: Nearly 50 people have been killed after rising tension between local tribesmen and foreign militants in north-west Pakistan erupted into fierce fighting. Heavy shelling has raged since Monday near Wana in the South Waziristan tribal area close to Afghanistan. Most of those killed were militants from Uzbekistan suspected of links with al-Qaeda, officials said. At least two children also died in the crossfire. ... Uzbek militants had largely kept themselves to themselves and were not linked to al-Qaeda's anti-Western agenda, but in recent months they are reported to have become more involved in local disputes, says the BBC's Aamer Ahmed Khan in Islamabad. Reports suggested that Taleban and...

Afghans Dealt For Italian Journalist

Yet another Italian journalist has his freedom thanks to deal-cutting with terrorists. Hamid Karzai's government released five captured Taliban fighters in order to free Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who had been kidnapped two weeks earlier and watched his driver get decapitated: The Afghan government admitted yesterday it had struck a deal with Taliban kidnappers to secure the freedom of an Italian hostage. An Italian aid agency said Daniele Mastrogiacomo, a journalist with La Repubblica newspaper, was freed only after five Taliban militants had been released from prison. President Hamid Karzai's spokesmen admitted a deal had been made but refused to elaborate. ... Gina Strada head of the Italian non-governmental organisation Emergency, which runs a hospital in Lashkar Gah, told La Stampa that President Karzai had authorised the release despite protests in his own government. "The Afghan government was not a big help," she said. "[The Italian ambassador] spent hours and hours fighting...

March 22, 2007

London Bombers Going Down

British authorities have arrested three men in connection to the London subway bombings on July 7, 2005. According to reports, they caught two of them just before the suspects boarded a flight to Pakistan: Three men have been arrested in connection with the July 7, 2005, bomb attacks on the London transport network, British police said in a statement. Two men, aged 23 and 30, were held at Manchester airport in northern England shortly before 1 p.m. GMT on Thursday as they were due to catch a flight to Pakistan, New Scotland Yard said. A third man, aged 26, was arrested hours later at a house in the nearby city of Leeds. Police were searching five addresses in the Leeds area as well as a flat and business premises in east London, the statement said. "The three men were arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts...

April 1, 2007

More Counterintelligence Computers Missing

An internal audit has discovered that twenty computers have disappeared from a critical counterintelligence agency tasked with protecting America's nuclear secrets. Fourteen of the computers contained classified material, marking yet another in a string of embarrassments for the Department of Energy: The office in charge of protecting American technical secrets about nuclear weapons from foreign spies is missing 20 desktop computers, at least 14 of which have been used for classified information, the Energy Department inspector general reported on Friday. This is the 13th time in a little over four years that an audit has found that the department, whose national laboratories and factories do most of the work in designing and building nuclear warheads, has lost control over computers used in working on the bombs. Aside from the computers it cannot find, the department is also using computers not listed in its inventory, and one computer listed as destroyed...

Republicans Join Pelosi In Undermining Foreign Policy

Three House Republicans paid a visit to Bashar Assad today to open up their own diplomatic channels. strengthening Syria's hand against the US and providing cover for Nancy Pelosi's attempt to do the same: U.S. House members meeting with President Bashar Assad Sunday said they believed there was an opportunity for dialogue with the Syrian leadership. The U.S. House members, who included Virginia Republican Frank Wolf, Pennsylvania Republican Joe Pitts and Alabama Republican Robert Aderholt, also said they had raised with Syrian officials the issue of stopping the alleged flow of foreign fighters from Syria to Iraq. In a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, the congressmen said they had talked about "ending support for Hezbollah and Hamas, recognizing Israel's right to exist in peace and security, and ceasing interference in Lebanon." "We came because we believe there is an opportunity for dialogue," the statement said. "We are...

April 4, 2007

Chertoff: 'Clean-Skin' Terrorists The Big Threat

Michael Chertoff tells the London Telegraph that the US and the West has to do more to protect themselves from "clean-skin" terrorists -- those born in the West who become disaffected enough to align themselves with radical jihadists. He also insists that the US has "every right" to toughen its visa policies, a move that has been unpopular in Europe: In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Michael Chertoff, who arrives in Britain tomorrow for talks with John Reid, the Home Secretary, said the US was determined to build extra defences against so-called "clean skin" terrorists from Europe. "We need to build layers of protection, and I don't think we totally want to rely upon the fact that a foreign government is going to know that one of their citizens is suspicious and is going to be coming here," he said. Mr Chertoff insisted that the US required additional information,...

Why Foreign Policy Belongs In The Executive Branch

The Jerusalem Post notes that the Israeli Prime Minister's office had to issue a "clarification" after Nancy Pelosi attempted to deliver a message from Ehud Olmert to Syria's Bashar Assad. The PMO's statement contradicts Pelosi and points up the problems when amateurs attempt to involve themselves in sensitive diplomacy: The Prime Minister's Office issued a rare "clarification" Wednesday that, in gentle diplomatic terms, contradicted US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's statement in Damascus that she had brought a message from Israel about a willingness to engage in peace talks. According to the statement, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert emphasized in his meeting with Pelosi on Sunday that "although Israel is interested in peace with Syria, that country continues to be part of the Axis of Evil and a force that encourages terror in the entire Middle East." Olmert, the statement clarified, told Pelosi that Syria's sincerity about a genuine peace...

April 5, 2007

American Taliban Wants Reduced Sentence (Updated)

Johnny Walker Lindh wants the Hicks treatment, his lawyer announced today. Lindh, whose capture in Afghanistan after 9/11 made headlines, pled guilty to lesser terrorism charges rather than face charges that could have resulted in the death penalty. Now that the Australian at Guantanamo Bay, David Hicks, got a better deal, Lindh wants a second bite at the apple: The lawyer and parents of American-born Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh asked President Bush to commute his 20-year prison term, citing the case of an Australian man who was sentenced to less than a year for aiding terrorism. Lindh, 26, was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 by American forces sent to topple the Taliban after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was charged with conspiring to kill Americans and support terrorists but pleaded guilty to lesser offenses, including carrying explosives for the now-defunct Taliban government. Lindh's lawyer and father said...

April 6, 2007

Another Case Of Provocative Behavior

Michelle Malkin notes another case of provocative behavior in an airport that recalls the Traveling Imams incident here in the Twin Cities. Two women, one of whom was on probation for waving a fake grenade, have been arrested for suspicious behavior near Dallas' Love Field: Dallas police and federal terrorism officials are investigating two women, both dressed in camouflage pants under their traditional Muslim robes and scarves, who were seen conducting what appeared to be surveillance and acting suspiciously at Dallas Love Field. One of the women, Kimberly "Asma" Al-Homsi, 42, of Arlington, who is on probation for a 2005 Garland road rage incident involving a fake grenade, is said to have long-range assault rifle and explosives training, according to a Dallas police intelligence bulletin issued March 5. "I'm a trained sniper and proud of it," Ms. Al-Homsi said in an interview Thursday after first refusing to comment on whether...

April 8, 2007

The Friends Of Asma Al-Homsi

Dallas police have begun investigating Amsa al-Homsi and Aisha Abdul-Rahman Hamad for allegedly provocative acts at and near Love Field airport in Dallas. Security cameras captured both women, dressed partly in camouflage, acting suspiciously in the airport, apparently deliberately pacing off distances inside the terminal. Later, al-Homsi was seen watching aircraft take off with binoculars near the runway at an air museum, sitting on the hood of her car. Currently on probation for threatening people with a fake grenade, al-Homsi has other, more significant connections that creates some suspicion for her motives in these incidents. It turns out that one of her close friends was Osama bin Laden's personal secretary: One of the subjects of a Dallas police intelligence bulletin, Asma Al-Homsi, says she's known convicted terrorist Wadih el Hage and his wife for more than two decades. Mr. el Hage, a former Arlington resident and naturalized U.S. citizen, was...

April 11, 2007

Some Are More Precious Than Others

The Italian government endured international criticism for freeing five Taliban fighters last month for one of its journalists after his abduction. When Romano Prodi got Afghanistan to deal for Daniele Mastrogiacomo's release, Prodi defended their actions by noting that "the life of a person is very precious," and that the exceptional circumstance "will never happen again." The Italians proved they were as good as their word by apparently leaving Mastrogiacomo's translater behind -- for the Taliban to murder: The government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi came under fierce attack on Monday after the Taliban said it had killed an Afghan hostage who was a colleague of the Italian journalist freed last month in a prisoner swap. That journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo of La Repubblica, was freed on March 19 in exchange for five Taliban fighters released by the Afghan government. Italy had lobbied Afghanistan to make a deal. At the time,...

The Taliban Offensive: Red On Red

The Taliban had promised that their 2007 spring offensive would have the West's forces reeling backwards and out of Afghanistan. Someone's reeling, but it isn't NATO or Pakistan. The Taliban has a different fight on its hands -- more like a civil war: When spring came and the snows began to melt in the mountains of Waziristan, Pakistani troops braced themselves for the seasonal upsurge in fighting along the porous border with Afghanistan. But, when it came, Pakistani soldiers were surprised, and relieved, to see the Taleban loyalists and the militants linked to al-Qaeda who seek sanctuary in this lawless region firing rockets and mortars not at them but at each other. For the first time since 2001, the Waziri tribesmen who probably harboured Osama bin Laden and remain loyal to the Taleban are fighting against the foreign militants in their midst. In the past two weeks an estimated 250...

April 12, 2007

And Then What?

Joe Biden wants American troops to intervene in Darfur in order to prevent the genocide that is occurring there: Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic presidential candidate, called Wednesday for the use of military force to end the suffering in Darfur. ''I would use American force now,'' Biden said at a hearing before his committee. ''I think it's not only time not to take force off the table. I think it's time to put force on the table and use it.'' In advocating use of military force, Biden said senior U.S. military officials in Europe told him that 2,500 U.S. troops could ''radically change the situation on the ground now.'' ''Let's stop the bleeding,'' Biden said. ''I think it's a moral imperative.'' Interesting. Is this the same Joe Biden who wants to pull out of Iraq and let similar forces conduct their own version...

April 13, 2007

Gitmo Ex-Detainee Undermining Afghan Government

One of the captured Taliban detained at Guantanamo Bay has returned to Afghanistan -- and appears to be taking up where he left off. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef got handed to the US by Pakistanis after the fall of the Taliban government, and now that he has returned to Afghanistan, he wants Hamid Karzai toppled and a "unity government" installed: Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, has been released from Guantanamo. Though under close observation by the government, he's already creating a stir in Kabul. The black-bearded mullah's expression betrays disgust and rage. "The people don't want (President Hamid) Karzai's government, and they don't want foreigners here in Afghanistan either," says Abdul Salam Zaeef. ... Zaeef has in no way renounced the teachings and attitudes of his former companions. Why shouldn't chopping off hands and the public execution of women in stadiums be acceptable forms of...

It's Time To Play Family Feud!

The situation in Waziristan has become so complicated that one needs a scorecard to know the players. Now the Pakistani government says their army has allied themselves with Taliban-supporting tribes in their fight against al-Qaeda elements in the mountains -- even though AQ supports the Taliban in its fight with the Afghan government: President Pervez Musharraf made a tacit admission yesterday that the Pakistani military has entered into a marriage of convenience with pro-Taliban tribesmen. The tribesmen have been fighting foreign militants linked to al-Qa'eda, who are resident in the country. Pakistani military officials had denied direct involvement in fighting between the tribesmen and the foreigners, who have taken shelter in the lawless area of South Waziristan. However, during a visit by The Daily Telegraph to the region this week Pakistani commanders made it clear that they support local militants who are fighting Central Asians, mainly Uzbeks. All of this...

April 14, 2007

Traveling Imams Want Kramer And Costanza

James Zumwalt, a former Marine and an anti-terrorism activist, calls for legislation protecting ordinary Americans who report suspicious behavior, regardless of whether their information uncovers a terrorist plot or not. His New York Times opinion piece references the TV show Seinfeld as an example: IN an echo of the final episode of “Seinfeld,” which involved a violation of a “good Samaritan law” that required a witness to a crime to come to the victim’s assistance, a recent lawsuit in a United States federal court demands consideration of a related law — with real-life application — to protect good Samaritans. The incident that gave rise to the claim occurred last Nov. 20 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Six Muslim religious leaders, or imams, were removed from a domestic US Airways flight after fellow passengers and airline personnel became concerned about what they deemed suspicious behavior. ... While the imams may or...

April 15, 2007

Denying 'Hot Pursuit' In Waziristan

Pervez Musharraf has unequivocally stated that Pakistan will not allow US forces to operate in Pakistani territory, not in joint patrols or for any other reason. This conflicts with the more blunt assertion from the US, which noted that American forces will follow retreating Taliban and al-Qaeda forces across the Afghanistan border in "hot pursuit" cases (via TMV): President General Pervez Musharraf has rejected "absolutely and totally" the prospect of a joint US-Pakistan military operation to pursue retreating insurgents inside Pakistan. "The whole population of Pakistan will rise against it," he told CBS news channel in an interview. Musharraf hit out at his Afghan counterpart, saying he was "very angry" at criticism of Pakistani progress in fighting cross-border terrorism. Karzai's reasons for anger at Musharraf seem readily apparent; he wants Pakistan to do more in fighting the terrorists that hide in Pakistan and attack in Afghanistan. Musharraf's anger comes from...

April 18, 2007

Islamists Gone Wild!

The introduction of shari'a law to Nigeria did not stop a band of radical Islamists from massacring thirteen people in a Kano police station yesterday. The attack follows a similar incident in Sharada, and precedes the upcoming national vote that will pit Islamists in the north with Christians in the south: A mob killed 13 people in an attack on a police station in the northern Nigerian city of Kano yesterday, four days after unidentified gunmen shot dead a hardline Muslim cleric. Police said that the mob, suspected of belonging to a radical Islamic sect, burnt the police station in the Panshekara district and killed the officer in charge, his wife and 11 other officers. The sect killed a divisional police officer in an attack in the Sharada district last week. Kano is one of 12 northern Nigerian states that introduced Sharia in 2000. The move alienated Christian minorities and...

April 26, 2007

Syrians Riot Over Rigged Elections

Bashar Assad has some riots on his hands after an attempt to hold a rigged election in Syria. He had to bring in the army to put down protests in the north, and apparently the army fired live rounds into the crowds: Violent protests broke out in northern Syria amid accusations of vote rigging following Sunday's parliamentary elections. Five protesters were left seriously injured, including three men who suffered gunshot wounds and remain in hospital, after the army was brought in to quash the demonstrations. There are unconfirmed reports that two people were killed. Anti-riot police and security forces were called to the main road linking the north-eastern cities of Raqqah and Deir Ezour on Tuesday afternoon, where 700 tribesmen staged a sit-in and destroyed nearby poll centres. Protesting later spread to the centre of Raqqah when a further 3,000 people gathered near the Governor's home. Six people were injured...

April 27, 2007

Saudis Avoid Their Own 9/11

Saudi Arabia has arrested over 170 suspected terrorists, including foreign-trained pilots, to end a plot against their oil fields. The terrorists allegedly planned to use commercial airliners to smash into the oil facilities and disrupt the entire global economy: Police arrested 172 Islamic militants, some of whom had trained abroad as pilots so they could fly aircraft in attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil fields, the Interior Ministry said Friday. A spokesman said all that remained in the plot "was to set the zero hour." The ministry issued a statement saying the detainees were planning to carry out suicide atttacks against "public figures, oil facilities, refineries ... and military zones" — some of which were outside the kingdom. "They had reached an advance stage of readiness and what remained only was to set the zero hour for their attacks," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Mansour al-Turki told the Associated Press in a...

US Nabs Top AQ Commander (Updated)

We caught Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi in transit to Iraq a week ago, but the news has just been released. Apparently al-Masri hasn't cut the mustard, as al-Iraqi meant to take over al-Qaeda operations in Iraq and push back against the joint US-Iraq effort (via Mac at Heading Right): The United States has taken into custody a top al-Qaeda operative who plotted to assassinate Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and other officials, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday. Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi, who was taken to the US navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba about a week ago, was intercepted while trying to reach Iraq to take over Al-Qaeda operations and to plot attacks from there against western targets outside Iraq, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. He is "one of Al-Qaeda's highest ranking and senior operatives at the time of his detention. He is associated with leaders of extremist groups allied with...

April 28, 2007

Tenet A Little Foggy On The Details

I haven't had the chance to read the book by former CIA chief George Tenet, which Harper Collins will release next week, but it has generated its share of controversy. His top-level insider's account of the pre- and post-9/11 efforts against terrorism have current Bush administration officials unhappy -- and in at least two cases, pointing out deficient fact-checking. Tenet misidentifies a key figure in an argument he makes about how back-channel analyses started, and then neglects to mention his own analysis: Mr. Tenet also directs scorn at the Pentagon intelligence analyses by Douglas J. Feith, then undersecretary of defense for policy. He describes his fury in August 2002 as he watched a slide show by Mr. Feith’s staff at C.I.A. headquarters suggesting “a mature, symbiotic relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said C.I.A. officers came to call such reports, in a play on words, “Feith-based analysis.” In an...

April 29, 2007

'The Effect On The Taliban Has Been Dramatic'

The London Telegraph reports on a new tactical aggressiveness from American troops in Afghanistan which has the Taliban rocked back on its heels and unable to press forward with its expect spring offensive. The new tactics involve the heavy use of helicopter gunships and a merciless push to finish engagements. A senior Taliban commander has found exactly what that means (via Hot Air): Caught in the middle of the Helmand river, the fleeing Taliban were paddling their boat back to shore for dear life. Smoke from the ambush they had just sprung on American special forces still hung in the air, but their attention was fixed on the two helicopter gunships that had appeared above them as their leader, the tallest man in the group, struggled to pull what appeared to be a burqa over his head. As the boat reached the shore, Captain Larry Staley tilted the nose of...

May 2, 2007

Army To Milbloggers: About Face

The US Army has promulgated a new set of rules for operational security that puts restrictions on the ability of soldiers to write about their experiences in combat theaters. In fact, the change will be so restrictive as to have the practical effect of eliminating active-duty milbloggers, and silencing the voices from the front who have most actively promoted the war effort (via Michelle Malkin): The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say. Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the...

May 3, 2007

Milbloggers Safe? (Bumped)

Yesterday, Wired reported on new Army operational-security regulations that would have meant an end, for all practical purposes, to milblogging from the front lines. Today, the Washington Times' Jon Ward asked Tony Snow about the new OpSec regulations, and the White House says the change is "overreported". Here's the video, and a transcript of the key portion: Q: A follow-up, a second question would be, the Pentagon has required all military bloggers to seek approval for their blogging and their -- I think also their e-mail. Some bloggers and military and conservative commentators have said the government is shutting down -- MR. SNOW: Well, that's -- from what we -- from what we understand, that is being overreported a little bit in the following sense. First, I'm not sure that that is operational, that request. No. 2, to the extent that they have asked -- and I would refer you...

May 4, 2007

Reality-Based Communities

Rasmussen has a new poll that measures the paranoia level in America, and unsurprisingly, BDS sufferers exhibit more than almost any group. When asked the question "Did Bush Know About the 9/11 Attacks in Advance?", almost as many Democrats say Yes as say No (via Memeorandum): Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure. Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view. Overall, 22% of all voters believe the President knew about the attacks in advance. A slightly larger number, 29%, believe the CIA knew...

May 8, 2007

Cheering For The Other Side (Update: A Hoax)

Please read update below. Usually I address silly or misleading comments within the thread itself, or an update to the original post. However, in reference to the foiled plot against Fort Dix by a cell of jihadists captured yesterday by the FBI, I found one comment so asinine that it deserves its own thread. Commenter iraqwarwrong wrote: Ok so, let, me get this straight. Were allowed to go over there and kill like a whole hunk of them every day, but they're not even allowed to come here and try to kill are soldiers? Newsflash- soldiers is waht are for killing in war's. That's legimate targets. Well, duh. So was the Pentagon on 9/11 but that didn't give al-Qaeda the right to attack it (and the use of civilian aircraft violated the rules of war, too). The military is a legitimate target during wartime ... by an opposing military in...

Justice: Islamist Plot To Attack Fort Dix (Updated)

The US Attorney's office in New Jersey says that a raid yesterday netted six radical Islamists in the Garden State before they had a chance to conduct a terrorist attack. Their target -- Fort Dix (via Hot Air): Six people were arrested on Monday in connection with an alleged plot to murder soldiers at Fort Dix, the U.S. attorney's office said. Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey, said the men are from the former Yugoslavia and were planning to "kill as many soldiers as possible." Five of them lived in Cherry Hill, he said. Drewniak said the six were scheduled to appear in federal court in Camden later Tuesday to face charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. servicemen. During a secret meeting, the men allegedly attempted to purchase AK-47s from an arms dealer working with the FBI and were arrested in New Jersey after...

May 9, 2007

Hitler-Stalin For The Terror Age

Steven Stalinsky notices a strange trend in international relations in today's New York Sun. A marriage of convenience has begun to grow between two factions that seem entirely incompatible in all respects but one: Over the past year, multiple international conferences have featured leaders of the anti-global left and Islamist groups working together. Go to any anti-war or anti-globalization demonstration in the West and chances are you will see the flags of Hezbollah and Hamas waved by people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. And at some of these meetings, members of such radical Islamist groups as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah have enjoyed starring roles. The roster of Islamist-left alliances quietly grows every day: Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky praises Hamas and denounces America on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television. London Mayor Ken Livingstone invites a leading Islamist, Sheikh Yosef Al-Qaradawi, who is known for supporting suicide attacks, to...

May 11, 2007

Imminent Terrorist Attack In Germany?

ABC News reports today that American and German security agencies have gone on high alert for a terrorist attack. The target -- US military personnel or the German tourist industry: U.S. and German officials fear terrorists are in the advanced planning stages of an attack on U.S. military personnel or tourists in Germany. Law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com that U.S. air marshals have been diverted to provide expanded protection of flights between Germany and the United States. "The information behind the threat is very real," a senior U.S. official told ABC News. German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble told reporters, "The danger level is high. We are part of the global threat by Islamist terrorism." Of particular concern, according to U.S. and German law enforcement officials, is Patch Barracks, the headquarters for U.S. European Command, near Stuttgart. This is an unusual warning, both in its existence and its...

May 13, 2007

Top Level Taliban Commander Reaches Room Temperature

The improbably named Mullah Dadullah, almost certainly the most important field commander in the Taliban, died while fighting NATO forces in Helmand. Coalition forces showed the body to reporters, who immediately recognized Dadullah's amputation and black beard: Afghan government officials showed the body of Mullah Dadullah, the top operational commander for the Taliban insurgency, to reporters here Sunday morning, saying he had been killed in a joint operation of Afghan and coalition forces. Mr. Dadullah, an amputee, was recognizable in part from his missing leg and black beard. He had been shot in the head and in the stomach. He was one of the most wanted Taliban leaders, responsible for numerous assassinations, beheadings and terrorist campaigns, and was thought to be behind many of the suicide bombings that have killed or wounded hundreds of Afghans in the last year and a half. He was seen as probably the most important...

May 14, 2007

Musharraf Beset On All Sides

A dangerous life for a military dictator has grown even more precarious this weekend. Pervez Musharraf, who has fought Islamist extremists looking to assassinate him, now faces a burgeoning battle with democractization activists angered by his suspension of the chief justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court (via Memeorandum): Clashes between government supporters and opposition activists flared for a second day Sunday in the country's largest city, bringing the weekend death toll to about 40. The clashes in the southern city of Karachi were prompted by a judicial crisis that has gripped the country since March 9, when the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, suspended Pakistan's chief justice for alleged abuses of office. Since then, protesters have frequently taken to the streets to rally against what they see as an attempt by Musharraf to snuff out fledgling democratic institutions and ease his way to another term. On Saturday, the judge, Iftikhar Mohammed...

May 21, 2007

AQ Starts Trouble In Lebanon

Terrorist attacks and the government's response have killed more than 30 people in Lebanon overnight. At least one of the factions has ties to al-Qaeda, and some believe Syria may have quarterbacked these latest uprisings in an attempt to undermine the Lebanese government: Government soldiers Sunday battled members of an Islamic group at a refugee camp near the Syrian border and in a nearby coastal city, with at least 33 people killed in the worst bloodshed here in almost a year. A bomb went off before midnight in an affluent Christian neighborhood of Beirut, killing one woman and injuring five other people, relief workers said. It was unclear whether the explosion was connected to the earlier fighting in the north. The heavy, daylong combat stoked fears among many Lebanese that neighbor Syria was involved and trying to foment unrest at a crucial time. Throughout the day, Lebanese soldiers shelled the...

Ballbuster

Oh here she comes Watch out boy, she'll chew you up Oh here she comes Shes a maneater... The legend of Condoleezza Rice grows. Not only has she shown herself as a tough diplomat, she also can add "maneater" to her list of accolades. Apparently, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shaukat Aziz, fancies himself as a man who can bring any woman to her knees inside of two minutes through his charm and good looks. He looked forward to meeting Rice for this purpose, according to a new biography of the Secretary of State: The book describes in excruciating detail how Shaukat Aziz allegedly tried to impress Rice when she visited South Asia in March 2005, according to the newspaper. Aziz "tried this Savile Row-suited gigolo kind of charm: 'Pakistan is a country of rich traditions,' staring in (Rice's) eyes," the biography's author Marcus Mabry writes, citing participants at the...

May 22, 2007

Terrorist Attack In Ankara?

It appears that someone detonated a bomb at a shopping mall in Ankara, Turkey's capital. Four people have died and dozens more injured in the blast: Four people died and 56 were injured in an explosion in the Turkish capital of Ankara, Mayor Melih Gokchek told CNN Turk. Police believe the most likely cause of the "major" explosion in the middle of a shopping district Tuesday was a bomb. Ankara's governor, Kamal Onal, initially said the blast appeared to be an accident, but later said it could have been a bomb. Police sources are telling CNN Turk that the explosion happened in a bus station in the middle of the Ulus shopping district in Ankara. CNN Turk reported that the explosion occurred at the entrance of a building described as a seven-story shopping center. It occurred during the rush hour and when the area was packed with people. The Turks...

May 23, 2007

The Brain Drain At The Top

The Taliban's offensive operations have ground to a halt due to a lack of mid-level commanders, and the loss of their highest-ranking military general has their troops despondent, the Telegraph reports. They had planned for a big push this spring to reverse their fortunes against the NATO coalition, but instead they have been set back on their heels with not much hope for future of their fight: The Taliban's much-vaunted spring offensive has stalled apparently due to lack of organisation after dozens of middle-ranking commanders were killed by British troops in the past year, according to military sources. The death last week of the key Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah at the hands of American special forces has harmed the Taliban's morale to the point that local commanders are having to tell their troops to "remain professional" despite the loss. ... A spring offensive was ordered by the Taliban leadership based...

American Muslim Youth And Suicide Bombing

The Pew Research Center completed an exhaustive survey of American Muslims and found a disturbing trend among younger Muslims. As ABC reports, as many as 1 in 4 Muslims under the age of 30 belive that suicide bombings can be justified in defense of Islam: While nearly 80 percent of U.S. Muslims say suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam can not be justified, 13 percent say they can be, at least rarely. That sentiment is strongest among those younger than 30. Two percent of them say it can often be justified, 13 percent say sometimes and 11 percent say rarely. "It is a hair-raising number," said Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, which promotes the compatibility of Islam with democracy. He said most supporters of the attacks likely assumed the context was a fight against occupation a term Muslims often use...

May 27, 2007

Flight 327: More To The Story

In the summer of 2004, I noted the story of a musical band traveling on one-way tickets between Detroit and Los Angeles. Anne Jacobsen revealed the terror she felt on that flight in a Women's Wall Street column, eventually turning her recollections into a book. At the time, she was derided as a panic-stricken hysteric. Now, the Washington Times reports, the FBI thinks she may have been right about it being a terrorist dry run for another attack: Thirteen Middle Eastern men were traveling together as a musical group, 12 carrying Syrian passports and one, a lawful permanent resident of the United States of Lebanese descent, purchased one-way tickets from Detroit to Los Angeles. Six of the men arrived at the gate together after boarding began, then split up and acted as if they were not acquainted. According to air marshals, the men also appeared sweaty and nervous. An air...

May 30, 2007

Dry Run Confirmed

A declassified report confirms that Annie Jacobsen accurately recounted suspicious activities on a Northwest flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in the summer of 2004, and that a number of Syrians attempted a dry run for a terror attack. Eight of the 12 had already been flagged for criminal or suspicious behavior, and the apparent leader was involved in a similar incident later as well: A newly released inspector general report backs eyewitness accounts of suspicious behavior by 13 Middle Eastern men on a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004 and reveals several missteps by government officials, including failure to file an incident report until a month after the matter became public. According to the Homeland Security report, the "suspicious passengers," 12 Syrians and their Lebanese-born promoter, were traveling on Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on expired visas. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended the visas one week after...

June 2, 2007

US Navy Sends Message To Somali Islamists

A small group of Islamists suddenly appeared in a remote Somali village, attempting to set up a new base of operations. Local authorities assume they escaped from the trap at Ras Kamboni, bringing guns and small boats, and almost immediately picking fights. They thought the dense foliage around their position made them safe from concentrated attack. The US Navy has disabused them of that notion: At least one U.S. warship bombarded a remote, mountainous village in Somalia where Islamic militants had set up a base, officials in the northern region of Puntland said Saturday. ... A local radio station quoted Puntland's leader, Ade Muse, as saying that his forces had battled with the extremists for hours before U.S. ships arrived and used their cannons. Muse said five of his troops were wounded, but that he had no information about casualties among the extremists. A task force of coalition ships, called...

JFK Terror Plot Foiled

The FBI has three people in custody in the fourth domestic terror conspiracy stopped in less than a year, and are seeking a fourth suspect. The quartet planned to use a jet-fuel line to attack John F Kennedy Airport in New York, according to sources close to the investigation: Three people were arrested and one other was being sought Saturday in connection to a plan to set off explosives in a fuel line that feeds John F. Kennedy International Airport and runs through residential neighborhoods, officials close to the investigation said. The plot, which never got past the planning stages, did not involve airplanes or passenger terminals, according to the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the arrests had not yet been announced. ... According to sources, the suspects have been identified as: Russell Defreitas, Abdul Nur, Kareem Ibrihim and Abdul Kadir. Last summer, the...

June 4, 2007

CAIR Named As Terrorist Supporter

Federal prosecutors have named the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an unindicted co-conspirator in support of the terrorist group Hamas. CAIR joins Islamic Society of North America and The North American Islamic Trust as accused terror-supporting organizations in the case against The Holy Land Foundation's officers, as well as 300 other individuals and entities: Federal prosecutors have named three prominent Islamic organizations in America as participants in an alleged criminal conspiracy to support a Palestinian Arab terrorist group, Hamas. Prosecutors applied the label of "unindicted co-conspirator" to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust in connection with a trial planned in Texas next month for five officials of a defunct charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. While the foundation was charged in the case, which was filed in 2004, none of the other groups was. However,...

June 5, 2007

Another Probe?

Boston's WBZ-TV reports on an unusual disturbance on a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Boston's Logan Airport. Police detained two men after they exhibited bizarre behavior -- and two other passengers took action to subdue them: Before the flight even took off, [Bob] Hayden said a man, who appeared aggravated, was walking up and down the aisle of the plane. The flight attendant had to force him into his seat after asking him to do so a few times. Hayden said after the aircraft finally got in the air, he noticed there was some sort of commotion. The same man had started screaming and fell into the aisle. Initially, Hayden said he thought the guy was having a heart attack, but he quickly realized the incident might have been staged. According to Hayden, two flight attendants helped the man back into his seat where he continued to yell for the...

June 6, 2007

A Victory On The Judicial Front

Today's Wall Street Journal reveals more about the offensive against the US in the war on terror -- on the judicial front. Last week, the Islamic Society of Boston withdrew its lawsuit against critics of a land deal, but not before the discovery process turned up proof of the critics' allegations of terrorist ties to the IS. At Heading Right, I discuss how this lawsuit turned out to be a big bluff, an attempt to use the American judicial system into silencing critics of Islamist groups. This dovetails with the Flying Imams' attempts to silence tipsters by creating an environment of legal intimidation. Be sure to read the whole thing. I first covered the lawsuit in December 2005....

June 8, 2007

A Modest Proposal Of Dhimmitude

The blogosphere has spent most of the morning scratching its collective head over an op-ed article at Time Out London. It purports to outline all of the beneficial aspects of an Islamist takeover of London, and castigates those who believe in a "hysterical, right-wing nightmare" of dhimmitude. People are unsure whether the author, Michael Hodges, is either a capitulationist or a satirist non pareil. You decide: On the surface, Islamic health doesn’t look good: the 2001 census showed that 24 per cent of Muslim women and 21 per cent of Muslim men suffered long-term illness and disability. But these are factors of social conditions rather than religion. In fact, Islam offers Londoners potential health benefits: the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim. The regular washing of the feet and hands required before prayers promotes...

June 9, 2007

JFK Plot Larger Than First Thought

Last night, law enforcement sources told the AP that the investigation into the terror plot to blow up JFK Airport in New York City has expanded beyond the four men now in custody: The investigation into the thwarted plot to bomb Kennedy International Airport is widening beyond the four men in custody, with more suspects sought outside the U.S. for their suspected roles, a law enforcement official said Friday. The defendants identified last weekend were "just a piece of it," the official told The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because of not being authorized to speak publicly. "We are definitely seeking more players. We are targeting others overseas." The official declined to provide details about the possible suspects, or in what countries they are being sought. All of this is preliminary, and many times investigations go down channels that turn out to be dead ends. However, the men...

June 11, 2007

CAIR Lost 90% Of Its Membership

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) refers to itself as America's largest Islamic civil-rights organization. Perhaps they still are, although that may say more about the state of Islamic groups than it does about CAIR. According to tax records gleaned by the Washington Times from a Freedom of Information Act request, CAIR has lost 90% of its membership since 2001: According to tax documents obtained by The Times, the number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to less than 1,700 in 2006, a loss of membership that caused the Muslim rights group's annual income from dues to drop from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35. The organization instead is relying on about two dozen individual donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR's budget, which reached nearly $3 million...

June 12, 2007

Pakistani Military To End Musharraf's Rule?

Analysts have begun warning that Pervez Musharraf may not remain in power much longer, and that the American effort against Islamist terror groups may suffer as a result. The Pakistani strongman looks decidedly less strong at this point, and some question whether the Pakistani Army remains loyal at the moment, let alone in the future: As a political crisis boils in Pakistan, American analysts both inside and outside the government are expressing new doubts that President Musharraf will be able to hold onto power through the summer. Over the past month, the military regime in Islamabad has faced a rising threat of violent jihadis in its capital, as well as the struggle between the president and the suspended chief justice of the country, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. The twin challenges have led some analysts in the American intelligence community to begin questioning whether Pakistan's military, traditionally General Musharraf's most reliable ally,...

June 18, 2007

Pakistan Endorses Suicide Bombing -- For Assassinating Authors

A high-ranking Pakistani minister endorsed suicide-bombing attacks on British author Salman Rushdie after he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. The move comes as the White House endorsed Pervez Musharraf as an ally against terrorism (via Memeorandum): Pakistan on Monday condemned Britain's award of a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie as an affront to Muslim sentiments, and a Cabinet minister said the honor provided a justification for suicide attacks. "This is an occasion for the (world's) 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, said in parliament. "The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the 'sir' title," ul-Haq said. This points up a well-known problem among Muslims, even those considered somewhat moderate and cosmopolitan. They refuse to...

June 24, 2007

Steyn: We Haven't Learned A Thing

Mark Steyn follows Tim Rutten's excoriation to their punditry brethren in today's Orange County Register, making Southern California the champion of free speech by default. Steyn looks back on the success of the radical Islamist strategy of intimidation and wonders why the West still can't buy a clue: This is where we came in two decades ago. We should have learned something by now. In the Muslim world, artistic criticism can be fatal. In 1992, the poet Sadiq Abd al-Karim Milalla also found that his work was "not particularly well-received": he was beheaded by the Saudis for suggesting Muhammad cooked up the Quran by himself. In 1998, the Algerian singer Lounès Matoub described himself as "ni Arabe ni musulman" (neither Arab nor Muslim) and shortly thereafter found himself neither alive nor well. These are not famous men. They don't stand around on Oscar night, congratulating themselves on their "courage" for...

June 25, 2007

The AQ Seal Of Approval

Al-Qaeda's second in command endorsed the Hamas coup in Gaza today, calling Muslims around the world to support the establishment of shari'a in the Strip and terrorist attacks against the US and Israel. It represents a shift for AQ, which has criticized Hamas in the past for its engagement in the Palestinian Authority, but Hamas has already started to distance itself from Ayman al-Zawahiri: Al-Qaida's deputy leader called on Muslims worldwide to back Hamas with weapons, money and attacks on U.S. and Israeli interests, urging the Palestinian militant group on Monday to unite with al-Qaida after its takeover of Gaza. The Internet audio message from Ayman al-Zawahri, who is Osama bin Laden's top deputy, marked a major shift by al-Qaida, which in the past criticized Hamas for joining a government with the U.S.-supported Fatah faction. The audiotape appeared aimed at exploiting Hamas' gains and could fuel fears among Arab countries...

June 26, 2007

Afghanistan's Turn

The defeat-and-retreat chorus that won control of Congress in last year's midterms told America that we needed to withdraw from Iraq in order to fight "real terrorists" in Afghanistan.. They derided the Bush administration's policy to fight terrorists in Iraq, claiming that the fighting there served as a distraction from the true war on terror being fought against the Taliban. They pledged to focus on the latter and destroy the terrorists that attacked America. Well, that was then. This is now: When they won control of Congress in November, Democrats pressed their case to withdraw troops from Iraq and refocus on Afghanistan, but some are growing impatient with U.S. operations in Afghanistan as well. A few congressional Democrats go so far as suggesting that the Pentagon should pull out of Afghanistan now, while others say that troop withdrawal will be addressed after the military is out of Iraq. Rep. Neil...

June 29, 2007

Car Bomb (Dud) In London (Update: Jihadists Had Spree In Mind)

UPDATE III, AND BUMP TO TOP: ABC News reports that Germany has arrested two men who came from the Pakistani camp that served as Jihadi U, and believe that they have also been targeted. Also, authorities say this bears all the hallmarks of an Al-Qaeda operation: Last year, al Qaeda operative Dhiren Barot was convicted by a British court for a plot to use limousines to carry similar bombs as those defused today to similar targets as the nightclubs allegedly targeted today. In his own personal manual, Barot described how the cylinders, "if carefully orchestrated can be as powerful as exploding TNT," and "are easily available to the general public," designed for a "synchronized, concurrent (back-to-back) execution on the same day and time." Videos posted on al Qaeda Web sites also show in full detail how to rig propane and butane cylinders as powerful bombs. And today's explosive devices --...

June 30, 2007

Another Terror Attack? (Update & Bump)

UPDATE II: ABC News reports that the US warned the UK of an imminent attack at Glasgow two weeks ago. That makes today's incident a likely case of Islamist attack: U.S. law enforcement officials received intelligence reports two weeks ago warning of a possible terror attack in Glasgow against "airport infrastructure or aircraft," a senior US law enforcement officials tells the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The intelligence reports also warned that airports and aircraft in the Czech Republic could be the targets of al Qaeda-connected terrorists. ... A US official told ABCNews.com that the intelligence reports led to the assignment of Federal Air Marshals to flights into and out of both Glasgow and Prague. If the US had picked up intel on this attack, it shows that we have our ear fairly close to the ground -- and that AQ has lost a lot of its competence and capability. The same...

July 1, 2007

Brits Hold 4 In Glasgow Attack

The attack on a Glasgow airport apparently resulted from an Islamist conspiracy, as suspected yesterday in its aftermath. British authorities have four people in custody, including two arrested in Chesire: Early Sunday, after a day of fast-moving developments, the London police announced that two people had been arrested in Cheshire, in northwest England, “in connection with the events in London and Scotland.” The arrests were in addition to those of the two occupants of the blazing car at Glasgow Airport. A witness to the attack said on BBC television that one of the car’s occupants had been ablaze from head to foot, and as he struggled with the police, “was throwing punches and shouting ‘Allah, Allah.’ ” Britain’s threat level is now at “critical,” meaning another attack is considered imminent. The threat has not been as high since last year, after authorities discovered what they called a plot to attack...

Jihadicko

What are the causes of terrorism? Many would have them as poverty, a lack of education, and little exposure to Western values. It's rather interesting, then, that two of the five terror suspects rounded up by the UK in the wake of three mostly failed attacks are doctors working in their National Health System: Two of the five terror suspects being held in the wake of the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow are hospital doctors working in the UK. The majority of the five terror suspects being held in police custody in connection with bomb attacks in London and Glasgow are not British and at least one is still at large, according to Sky sources. Sky sources believe one of the men arrested at Glasgow airport and a 26-year-old man arrested on the M6 with a 27-year-old woman in Cheshire are both doctors. Sky Crime Reporter Martin Brunt...

July 2, 2007

London Bombers Drove To Glasgow

CNN now reports that the Glasgow attack was staged by the same men who drove the car bombs in London. British authorities have arrested two more men in connection with the series of failed attacks, and they have concluded that al-Qaeda planned and launched the attacks: Authorities suspect the two men who rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into Glasgow's airport on Saturday are the same people who parked two car bombs in central London a day earlier, security sources told CNN. ... One of the suspects, who is in critical condition at Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is a doctor at the hospital where he is being treated for severe burns, according to the woman who owns his rental house. It is believed that he shared the house on Neuk Crescent Street in the small Scottish village of Houston, about 3 kilometers (2 miles) from Glasgow's airport, with the other suspect...

July 3, 2007

Jihadicko Expands

The curious inclusion of working physicians in the latest Islamist attacks in Britain has expanded. British investigators have announced three more doctors as suspects in the conspiracy behing the attacks, and another doctor in Australia has been arrested: At least three physicians were identified Monday among suspects arrested in Britain's failed car bomb attacks, and authorities announced three new arrests including a doctor in Australia as the investigation spread overseas. British media reports said at least five of the detainees in Britain were physicians. British police confirmed a Palestinian doctor and Iraqi physician were among those held, while Australian officials said an Indian doctor working there had been detained in the case. .... Hours after police announced the arrests of two more people in the Glasgow area, officials said an eighth suspect was detained "abroad by local authorities" Monday. Australian authorities later said he was arrested at the airport in...

CBS: Attacks An Al-Qaeda Sleeper Operation

CBS News reports this morning that the attacks in Britain started with a proposal by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to infiltrate the West. At least one of the attackers got their training in Zarqawi's organization, and the use of doctors was a deliberate part of the deception: British intelligence services increasingly believe that the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow bare the fingerprints of al Qaeda in Iraq, CBS News has learned. Intelligence sources tell CBS News that the people behind the attempts were directly recruited by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the present leader of the terror group's Iraq franchise. ... Sources tell CBS News that al-Muhajir recruited the men between 2004 and 2005, while they were living in the Middle East, upon orders from then-al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Muhajir was told to recruit young men who could easily move into Western countries, assimilate and lay low...

July 5, 2007

Doctors Without Scruples

The Telegraph reports that three radical Muslims conducted an Internet forum which issued threats against the US and UK -- and warned that doctors would form the next assault wave. The three, who have pled guilty to making terrorist threats on the Internet, warned that 45 doctors would attack Jacksonville strip clubs and naval harbors: A group of 45 Muslim doctors threatened to use car bombs and rocket grenades in terrorist attacks in the United States during discussions on an extremist internet chat site. ... One message read: "We are 45 doctors and we are determined to undertake jihad and take the battle inside America. "The first target which will be penetrated by nine brothers is the naval base which gives shelter to the ship Kennedy." This is thought to have been a reference to the USS John F Kennedy, which is often at Mayport Naval Base in Jacksonville, Florida....

July 7, 2007

We Did What?

According to the New York Times, Donald Rumsfeld declined to take action against an al-Qaeda site and capture its leaders two years ago because it would have taken too many troops inside Pakistan to accomplish the mission. The Pentagon decided that they wouldn't be able to get permission from Pervez Musharraf to send hundreds of special-forces troops into Waziristan, and apparently left the camp alone (via Hot Air): A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials. The target was a meeting of Al Qaeda’s leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations. But the mission was called...

July 8, 2007

Getting Closer To Omar

Pakistan announced the capture of senior Taliban figures, including two close aides to Mullah Omar, just a few hours ago. Security forces captured four high-value targets in two raids in the city of Quetta: An Afghan intelligence source told the BBC four senior associates of Mullah Omar were being held after operations by Pakistani security forces. The arrests took place in two areas of the city of Quetta in western Pakistan. The source said those arrested included two men responsible for Mullah Omar's letters and communications. They have been named as Mullah Jahangir and Mullah Mohid. Others now in detention are said to be Mullah Nazir, who was Taleban commander in the southern Afghan province of Urozgan, and Mullah Tahir, the former Taleban commander for the capital, Kabul. Pervez Musharraf survived another assassination attempt this week and has a few dozen radical Islamists surrounded at the Red Mosque. It seems...

July 10, 2007

Pakistan Seizes Red Mosque, Captures Foreign Fighters

After a week-long standoff with what they thought were home-grown radicals, Pakistani security forces finally raided the Red Mosque today. An attempt at a last-minute negotiation with the chief cleric foundered when the imam admitted that foreign fighters had joined his forces and the government refused to give them clemency: Pakistani troops seized Islamambad's Red Mosque on Tuesday and attempted to flush out the remaining militants entrenched inside a women's religious school in fierce fighting that left at least 50 militants and eight soldiers dead, the army said. The troops stormed the mosque compound before dawn. Eight hours later, they were still trying to root out the well-armed defenders said to be holding about 150 hostages. Officials said at least 50 women were allowed to go free from the complex. Some 26 children had earlier escaped. ... Amid the sounds of rolling explosions, commandos attacked from three directions about 4...

The Honor Of Enemies

Richard Cohen writes about his discovery of a photograph from 9/11 that he had put out of his mind, but that CQ readers have probably never forgotten. The picture showed Palestinians joyfully celebrating the mass murder of 3,000 Americans in four terrorist attacks, the final one aborted by the victims themselves before the plane could reach its final destination. Cohen correctly diagnoses their hatred of America -- and then explains why we can't address it: Still, the chief reason for the cheering on Sept. 11 was U.S. support for Israel. Sometimes that support has been mindless and sometimes it has been over the top, but fundamentally it is based on certain truths. The first is that Israel is a legally sanctioned state, created by the United Nations in 1948 and recognized soon after by most countries, including -- amazingly enough -- Cold War adversaries the United States and the Soviet...

July 11, 2007

AQ Cell On The Way To The US?

ABC News reported last night that US officials believe that an al-Qaeda cell is either coming to America, or has already arrived, to conduct a terrorist attack. In reviewing some of the communications from the failed attacks in Britain, analysts believe they have uncovered other coded messages in e-mail traffic that points to an attack here, although the White House denies that they have any evidence of an imminent threat: Senior U.S. intelligence officials tell ABC News new intelligence suggests a small al Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here. The White House has convened an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday afternoon to deal with the new threat. ... Law enforcement officials say the recent failed attacks in London have provided important new clues about possible tactics. And officials say the London attackers use of the Internet left important clues that are...

AQ Opens A New Front

The management of al-Qaeda has obviously not learned much from history. They want to open a new front in their assault on humanity, this time in Pakistan, over the military's seizure of the Red Mosque: Al-Qaida's deputy leader issued a video Wednesday calling for Pakistanis to wage a holy war against their government in retaliation for the attack by Pakistan's army on the Red Mosque in Islamabad. Ayman al-Zawahri's 4-minute, 24-second address focused entirely on the clashes between Islamic students and Pakistan's army at the mosque. Zawahiri spends a lot of his time on recruitment these days. Just a few days ago, he asked volunteers to go to Iraq to fight the Americans there, and to tell Iraqis to play nice with his foreign terrorists. He's also tried to get lunatics to attack European and American targets. Now he wants to add a front in Pakistan, where he can keep...

July 13, 2007

Going All In?

It looks as if Pervez Musharraf has decided to go all in against the extremists in Pakistan. After the assassination attempt and the siege at the Red Mosque, Musharraf told his nation that he would fight the extremists madrassa by madrassa if necessary: President Pervez Musharraf pledged to combat Muslim extremists across Pakistan yesterday as furious crowds demonstrated against the storming of the Red Mosque and two suicide bomb attacks left six dead. In a televised address to the nation, Gen Musharraf said that those inside the mosque and its adjacent madrassa, or Muslim college, were "terrorists" who directly threatened Pakistan's security. They had also tarnished Islam's reputation as a tolerant and peaceful religion. "What do we as a nation want?" he asked. "What kind of Islam do these people represent? In the garb of Islamic teaching they have been training for terrorism. They prepared the madrassa as a fortress...

July 14, 2007

Pervez Goes North

Pervez Musharraf has sent his army north towards the frontier, apparently modifying a truce he made with the radical Islamists controlling the region. The agreement appears to be over as groups in Waziristan began calling for jihad against Musharraf after the siege and capture of the Red Mosque: Thousands of troops were deployed to Pakistan's northwestern frontier to try to dissuade outlawed Islamic militants from launching a holy war against the government for its bloody attack on a radical mosque, military officials said Saturday. As the troop movements proceeded in at least five areas of the North West Frontier Province, a suicide bomber struck in another region of the border, his explosives-laden vehicle killing at least eight soldiers in a military convoy, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arhad said. ... "With help from local tribal elders, we are trying to ensure that militants lay down their arms, and stop issuing...

News Flash: Jihadists Threaten America!

I missed this breaking news story at ABC yesterday, but apparently radical Islamists want to attack America. The dean of Jihadi U, where grade inflation has apparently threatened their accreditation, now says that we will see much more massive attacks in the US this summer: As senior intelligence and law enforcement officials met again today in the White House Situation Room to deal with the "summer terror threat," a top terror commander said an attack was coming that would dwarf the failed bombings in London and Glasgow. Taliban military commander Mansour Dadullah, in an interview broadcast on ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson," said the London attacks were "not enough" and that bigger attacks were coming. "You will, God willing, be witness to more attacks," he told a Pakistani journalist in an interview conducted just four days ago. Dadullah presided over a graduation at a jihadi training camp in...

Maybe He's Only Mostly Dead

Osama bin Laden made a big splash today in the media by appearing in his first video in over a year. He looks sprightlier than ever -- but that's because he took off a few years through recycling: Osama bin Laden stresses the importance of martyrdom for Muslim causes in a videotape that purportedly contains a 50-second message from the al Qaeda leader. ... The videotape was made in the last four weeks, but the clips appear to be old, said Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs. There is no indication of where it was shot, and CNN cannot verify its authenticity. ... Bin Laden was one of several men appearing and speaking on the tape. They include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a U.S. airstrike June 7, 2006. Jihadist websites have been pushing rumors of a new message...

July 15, 2007

Red Mosque An Al-Qaeda Operation

The Times of London reports today that the Red Mosque leadership -- now reaching room temperature in Islamabad -- took orders from al-Qaeda's senior leadership. Pakistani intelligence officials found letters from Ayman al-Zawahiri to the two brothers who ran the mosque, and that eighteen foreign fighters joined the mosque just before it took hostages and set up the standoff: AL-QAEDA’S leadership secretly directed the Islamic militants whose armed revolt at the Red Mosque in Islamabad ended last week with more than 100 deaths after it was stormed by the Pakistan army. According to senior intelligence officials, the troops who finally took control discovered letters from Osama Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. They were written to Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz, the brothers who ran the mosque and adjacent madrasah. Government sources said up to 18 foreign fighters -- including Uzbeks, Egyptians and several Afghans -- had arrived weeks before...

Waziristan Tribes To Musharraf: It's On

Events over the last few days have indicated that Pervez Musharraf has rethought his hands-off deal with radical Islamists in Waziristan. After the Red Mosque siege and seizure, the Waziris have apparently concluded the same thing. Today they announced that the Waziri tribes would wothdraw from the agreement and, in effect, declared war on Pakistan: Pro-Taleban militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan region say they have ended their truce with the government. In a statement issued in Miranshah, the main town, the militants accused the government of breaking the agreement. It came as Pakistan deployed more troops in the area fearing "holy war" after the storming of the militant Red Mosque last week that left 102 dead. More than 50 Pakistanis, including soldiers and police recruits, have died in three attacks in the last two days. The announcement was more or less a formality. The Taliban and al-Qaeda had obviously unleashed...

July 16, 2007

A Tale Of Two Cities

The City Journal has a fascinating look at the counterterrorism operations in the nation's two largest metropolitan areas, New York and Los Angeles. Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, compares and contrasts the approaches both take in protecting their residents from terrorist attacks. Differing geography, laws, and culture make the effort unequal in ways that Angelenos may not know -- but which could put them at a much higher risk: Three time zones, 3,000 miles, and a cultural galaxy apart, New York and Los Angeles face a common threat: along with Washington, D.C., they’re the chief American targets of Islamic terror. And both cities boast top cops, sometime rivals—the cities are fiercely competitive—who know that ensuring that a dog doesn’t bark will determine their legacies. After investing millions of dollars in homeland security, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York and Chief William J. Bratton of L.A....

July 17, 2007

NIE: AQ Still Top Threat

The Associated Press reports that the national intelligence estimate says that al-Qaeda remains the biggest terrorist threat to the American homeland. The NIE also warns that Hezbollah in Lebanon may also start planning attacks on America in the near future if it thinks we may attack Iran, and that non-Muslim terrorists may soon join the fray: The terrorist network Al-Qaida will likely leverage its contacts and capabilities in Iraq to mount an attack on U.S. soil, according to a new National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the American homeland. ... Al-Qaida is likely to continue to focus on high-profile political, economic and infrastructure targets to cause mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, economic aftershocks and fear. "The group is proficient with conventional small arms and improvised explosive devices and is innovative in creating new capabilities and overcoming security obstacles." The group has been able to restore key elements it would need...

July 19, 2007

Invade Pakistan?

The co-chair of the Iraq Study Group has a suggestion for George Bush that he apparently believes to be novel -- invade Pakistan. Lee Hamilton apparently thinks that Bush hasn't thought of the idea before now (via Memeorandum): U.S. forces should go into Pakistan to rout al Qaeda from the safe haven it has found in the mountains on the border with Afghanistan, a co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group said. Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who also served as the vice chairman of the 9/11 commission, says the Iraq war distracted the United States when it had al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on the run in the tribal region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He says it's now time to finish the job. "This has to be carefully calibrated, worked out with the Pakistanis, but I am very concerned that you have a safe haven in Pakistan today where they...

Democrats Abandon National-Security Tipsters

The Washington Times reports that the John Doe law, which would protect tipsters who provide information about potential national-security threats, has run into a buzz saw in Congress. Democrats want the language removed from a Homeland Security bill in the House, and removed quietly. Republicans in the House have called foul. At Heading Right, I question how Democrats can posture as responsible guardians of national security while throwing citizen tipsters to the litigating wolves. Given that the intimidation of torts began here, my interest is somewhat more than academic, especially since I travel more often than before. It’s precisely this kind of disincentive, applied to law enforcement and intelligence, that created the walls that led to the failures resulting in the 9/11 attack. Read more about this at Heading Right, and also Michelle Malkin, The Corner, and Hot Air....

July 20, 2007

Jihadi, USA

McQ at QandO did a little digging at MEMRI and discovered a disturbing development. As the NIE noted, jihadist websites provide both indoctrination and operational capabilities for jihadists around the world. It should be in America's interest to get these sites shut down. Who do we have to invade for victory on this front? Apparently, Texas, Nevada, New Jersey, and Washington: Today, in a briefing on Capitol Hill hosted by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia and Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, MEMRI's president Yigal Carmon spoke about Islamist/Jihadi websites. The briefing was based on a study prepared by MEMRI which highlighted the fact that all Islamist/Jihadi websites are hosted directly or through subservers by Western - primarily American - Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The...

July 22, 2007

Waziristan Erupting

Despite Pervez Musharraf's attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, the Waziristan region continues to erupt with Islamist violence. Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists set off bombs and started firefights that wound up costing them at least 19 fighters today: Islamic militants detonated bombs close to military convoys and attacked government positions in Pakistan's restive northwestern tribal region, sparking gunfights that left 19 insurgents dead, government officials said Sunday. The fighting was the latest in North Waziristan since militants announced the termination of a peace agreement with the government last week following a deadly military raid on a radical mosque in the Pakistani capital. The tensions have raised concerns over the threat posed by Islamic militants to the military-led government of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Since the July 10 raid on Islamabad's Red Mosque, suicide attacks and shootings have killed at least 289 people in Pakistan, mostly in the...

IBD: Why Do Democrats Want To Help Terrorists?

Investors Business Daily's editors wonder why Democrats in Congress want to make it easier for terrorists to attack our transportation infrastructure. That's the result of their below-the-radar attack on the John Doe protections that the House passed in the transportation bill in a bipartisan vote, but which Democrats have removed in the conference report: Were it not for the courage and sacrifice of the passengers of United Flight 93 who forced their plane into a Pennsylvania field, many in Congress might not be here today, with a gaping hole where the U.S. Capitol still stands. We wonder if this fact is appreciated by those trying to block final passage of the so-called "John Doe" provision protecting from legal action those who report suspicious behavior on airplanes. Today's passengers have an advantage. They know what can happen. They know what to look for. They will not be taken by surprise, and...

July 23, 2007

Fear-Mongering? No, CYA

The Director of National Intelligence says that no operational al-Qaeda cells are known to exist in the US, although individuals appear to be raising funds for AQ's efforts here. But Admiral Michael McConnell says he worries about sleeper cells, terrorists he doesn't know exist -- and a former CIA officer says he's not just whistling Dixie: McConnell says small numbers of al Qaeda operatives are in this country raising funds. But he said he knows of no al Qaeda cells in the country that are capable of launching a strike at this time. "I worry that there are sleeper cells in the U.S.," McConnell said. "I do not know." Michael Scheuer, who once ran the CIA's al Qaeda desk, says the Bush administration is not merely fear mongering. "The intelligence community is being very frank about what it knows so it doesn't get Shanghaied or blamed for something that wasn't...

Victory Caucus Relaunches

The Victory Caucus has its new website up and running, and NZ Bear has applied his talents towards expanding the information on Iraq and Afghanistan to put data in easy reach. Want to know the statistics on weapons-cache discoveries? A handy graph on the main page tells you that the success rate has skyrocketed this year. Another graph details the decline in sectarian violence since the start of the surge. NZ has linked blogs, official military sources, and news feeds into one daily stop for all readers. Be sure to bookmark it! UPDATE: Don't miss Michael Yon's tribute to the recently-departed General Wayne Downing: As a warrior of renown in the Special Operations community, Downing might have been expected to keep his knowledge clandestine. But as a scholar of COIN, Downing knew the powerful role that media must play in fighting the Great War on Terrorism. And so he became...

Oh Hell, Why Not Add Another Front?

Al-Qaeda continued its efforts to disenchant yet another region with a declaration of war against North Africa today. Despite their general inability to prevail in Iraq, successfully detonate explosives in Britain, and do anything else in the US, AQ warned Muslims to stay away from their own government buildings on the south side of the Mediterranean: Al-Qaeda threatened in an Internet statement on Monday to escalate attacks against the "enemies of Allah" in North African countries, warning Muslims to stay away from government sites. "The Mujahedin (holy warriors)... have many hidden surprises for the enemies of Allah in the countries of the Islamic Maghreb, which will come in an escalating sequence," said the Al-Qaeda Movement in the Islamic Countries of the Maghreb. "We call upon all our Muslim brothers to stay away from the centres of the infidels and official apostates, as well as security (gatherings) of army and police,"...

July 24, 2007

Former Gitmo Prisoner In Suicide Bombing

The US has released hundreds of detainees from its Guantanamo Bay prison under pressure from human-rights groups, demanding an end to the detention of suspected terrorists captured mainly in Afghanistan. The US has warned that releasing these prisoners will result in their return to terrorism, creating more danger for civilians and for the military still working to bring an end to the Taliban and their allies, al-Qaeda. More than a few have been captured a second time or killed in battle with Western forces. This time, the terrorist committed suicide by grenade rather than get captured alive in an attempt to take a couple of his enemies with him: A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner wanted for the 2004 kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in Pakistan blew himself up with a grenade during a clash with security forces on Tuesday, officials said. One-legged Taliban militant Abdullah Mehsud killed himself to avoid...

July 25, 2007

TSA: Dry Runs Indicate Terrorist Attack Near

The Transportation Security Administration has issued a bulletin that confirms that an uptick in suspicious incidents indicate that a terrorist attack on airliners may be close at hand. The items seized by TSA include clay-like substances, potential IED components such as wires and switches, and cell-phone components that could be used as remote triggers (via Michelle Malkin): Airport security officers around the nation have been alerted by federal officials to look out for terrorists practicing to carry explosive components onto aircraft, based on four curious seizures at airports since last September. The unclassified alert was distributed on July 20 by the Transportation Security Administration to federal air marshals, its own transportation security officers and other law enforcement agencies. The seizures at airports in San Diego, Milwaukee, Houston and Baltimore included “wires, switches, pipes or tubes, cell phone components and dense clay-like substances,” including block cheese, the bulletin said. “The unusual...

July 26, 2007

I Miss Tony Blair Already

In their rush to distance themselves from Tony Blair and the alliance with the Bush administration, Gordon Brown's new government has already demonstrated a talent for undermining the war on terror. David Miliband, on his first visit to Pakistan, praised Pervez Musharraf for the Waziristan accord that has allowed al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup: Differences between British and American strategy in dealing with Taliban militants emerged yesterday during the Foreign Secretary’s first visit to Pakistan. David Miliband, the newly-appointed Foreign Secretary, emphasised that a purely military solution to violence in Pakistan’s tribal areas would not alone quash the insurgency. ... Pakistani officials underscored the difference in approach between the two allies by stating that Britain understood that political agreements were also needed to bring peace. Well, perhaps they should ask themselves if retreating from their own territory in Waziristan bought Pakistan any relief? All it did was allow the...

July 27, 2007

Red Mosque Redux (Update: Explosion Kills Several)

After radical Islamists seized hostages and holed up in the Red Mosque, Pakistan conducted a seige for days before finally raiding it, killing dozens. In the aftermath, the radicals staged violent protests and suicide attacks against Pervez Musharraf and his military. Now radicals have once again seized the mosque in an extortion attempt to get their comrades released: Hundreds of students have occupied Pakistan's Red Mosque as it reopened for prayers, demanding the return of its arrested pro-Taleban cleric. Security forces stood by as protesters raised a black flag, and clambered onto the roof of the Islamabad mosque to daub it with paint. ... The students chanted slogans against President Pervez Musharraf and pushed journalists out of the building. Musharraf has tried patching up the truce he had negotiated with radicals in Waziristan after the first Red Mosque standoff. This apparently is their answer. Despite having released most of the...

Violent Jihad's Author To Recant?

The Guardian reports that the philosophical founder of modern terrorist jihad has apparently experienced a change of heart. Sayid Imam al-Sharif, the man behind the assassination of Anwar Sadat and whose writings led an entire generation of radical Islamists to terrorism, now says that the theological underpinnings of such actions are completely faulty and should be discarded: Sharif, a surgeon who is still known by his underground name of "Dr Fadl", is famous as the author of the Salafi jihadists' "bible" - Foundations of Preparation for Holy War. He worked with Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian doctor and now Bin Laden's deputy, before being kidnapped in Yemen after 9/11, interrogated by the CIA and extradited to Egypt where has been serving a life sentence since 2004. Sharif recently gave an electrifying foretaste of his conversion by condemning killings on the basis of nationality and colour of skin and the targeting of...

Add Who To The Club?

Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed membership to the nuclear club for a surprising candidate nation. Given this country's track record -- and specifically that of its leader -- Westerners might find themselves shocked over the suggestion. After all, it has been less than three years since we stripped him of his membership card, and now France wants to reinstate it. At Heading Right, I look at that track record, and look at Sarkozy's assertion that we risk a "war of civilizations" unless we give terrorist-supporting dictators nuclear power. It seems that Sarkozy has allowed his country's mercenary interests to supercede the world's security interests....

July 28, 2007

Pakistan Reforming?

The London Telegraph reports that Pervez Musharraf has reached an accommodation with moderate opposition figure Benazir Bhutto that will kick-start Pakistan's dormant democracy. While the final arrangements remain in limbo, especially the choice of Prime Minister, it promises to further marginalize the radical Islamists if successful: President Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan’s exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, have struck an outline power-sharing deal to run Pakistan, ministers said. Under the reported agreement, struck late on Friday night, Gen Musharraf would step down as commander in chief of the country’s armed forces but would be able to retain the presidency. Mrs Bhutto would be permitted to return to the country to stand in parliamentary elections, and the constitution would be changed to allow her to become prime minister for a third term. The "present crisis of religious militancy" has forced the hand of Musharraf. A supporter of the Taliban during his...

July 29, 2007

War In Waziristan

Pervez Musharraf, who has just concluded a political alliance with moderates and reformers in Pakistan led by Benazir Bhutto, has opted for war in Waziristan. Now convinced after the Red Mosque incident that the radical Islamists want to "Talibanize" Pakistan, he has started to move his army into Waziristan -- and the radicals are screaming for a civil war: President Pervez Musharraf sees it as the centre of a campaign to “Talibanise” Pakistan. Spurred on by Washington, he has abandoned a truce with Waziristan’s Islamist guerrillas and ordered his army to root them out. There are believed to be about 8,000 gunmen – a mix of foreign Al-Qaeda volunteers, Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Islamists and local Waziris whose families have for centuries fought off any attempt to impose outside rule on this area. In modern times, even map-makers have been shot to hide the region’s mysteries from the outside world. Last...

July 30, 2007

Bhutto: Musharraf Must Resign From Army

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto says she's prepared to share power with Pervez Musharraf, but only if he resigns from the military and becomes a civilian. That may complicate a tenuous deal Musharraf made with Bhutto that strengthened his hand against the radical Islamists, and it may leave him out of power entirely within months: Pakistan's exiled opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, has said she can share power with President Pervez Musharraf, but only if he quits as army chief. Ms Bhutto's comments, in a television interview, followed a secret meeting with General Musharraf on Friday in the United Arab Emirates. Confirmation of the encounter by a cabinet minister intensified media speculation on the future of Pakistan's troubled government. "Deal done, sealed," said one newspaper headline. But there was little hard information about what transpired in the meeting, which followed months of quiet negotiations. The sticking point appears to be...

July 31, 2007

Lieberman On Offense On Iran, Iraq

The Hill interviewed Senator Joe Lieberman about his unique position in the upper chamber, and how he sees the debate on Iraq and Iran. Lieberman castigated his former colleagues in the Democratic caucus as excessively partisan and unwilling to meet the threats posed by America's enemies: Lieberman, the Democrats’ 2000 vice presidential nominee, insists he is not actively considering joining the Republican Party. But he is keeping that possibility wide open as his disenchantment grows with Democratic leaders. The main sticking points are their attempts to end the war in Iraq and their hesitation to take a harder line against Iran. “I think either [Democrats] are, in my opinion, respectfully, naïve in thinking we can somehow defeat this enemy with talk, or they’re simply hesitant to use American power, including military power,” Lieberman said in a wide-ranging interview with The Hill. “There is a very strong group within the party...

August 8, 2007

Imagine There's No Headlines

Imagine, if you will, that two young Muslim men got arrested for carrying explosives in their car. Imagine that they got arrested within a few miles of a military base where terrorism detainees are being held. Imagine that their neighbors told reporters about deliveries of oxygen bottles with an unusual level of comings and goings for a couple of single men on their own. At Heading Right, I try to imagine why this very real incident isn't making national headlines. Don Surber has more as well....

August 9, 2007

Musharraf: No State Of Emergency

Rumors swirled yesterday that Pervez Musharraf would declare a state of emergency, postponing upcoming elections and ruling even further by decree to deal with the rise of radicalism in Pakistan. Agence France-Presse now reports that Musharraf has decided against that declaration, despite pressure from key aides to do so: Embattled President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday decided against imposing a state of emergency in Pakistan to cope with growing security and stability concerns, a senior government official told AFP. The military ruler, facing the greatest challenge to his leadership since he seized power in a 1999 coup, decided against the move -- which would have postponed next year's elections -- after conferring with aides, he said. "The president has rejected the suggestions to declare a state of emergency as proposed by his political allies," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Musharraf had been working towards a deal with former...

August 10, 2007

At What Price Unity?

Stu Bykofsky thinks he knows what ails America, and he's got the cure. What America needs most, Bykofsky writes in the Philadelphia Daily News, is unity -- as provided by our friends in al-Qaeda: ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I'm thinking another 9/11 would help America. What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing? A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically - thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq - that we have forgotten who the enemy is. It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O'Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children. Iraq has fractured the U.S. into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourage our enemies. We are deeply divided and division is weakness. Not only does...

Dirty Bomb Threat In New York

New York City has deployed radiological detectors throughout the subway system and at bridges and tunnels tonight in response to a threatened terrorist attack. The city has not raised its alert status yet, but the attack was specific for tonight (via One Jerusalem): New York city police increased security throughout Manhattan on Friday and at bridges and tunnels in response to what they called an "unverified radiological threat," but said the city's alert status remained unchanged. The New York Police Department said in a statement it has increased the deployment of radiological sensors on vehicles, boats and helicopters and had set up vehicle checkpoints in lower Manhattan and at bridges and tunnels. Police confirmed the increased security was in response to receiving information that a dirty bomb may go off around 34th street in Manhattan on Friday evening. The Empire State Building, New York City's tallest building, Madison Square Garden...

August 11, 2007

TSP Cut By 75% In Earlier FISA Ruling

Now we know why the Democrats caved on the FISA adjustment earlier this month that allowed the warrantless surveillance to proceed at the NSA on international communications. The same reporters that blew the program's cover in December 2005 now report that a FISA decision earlier this year forced the NSA to get warrants on purely international calls that happened to pass through American telephony switches. That reduced surveilled traffic by 75%, which forced Congress to act: The prelude to approval of the plan occurred in January, when the administration agreed to put the wiretapping program under the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court is charged with guarding against governmental spying abuses. Officials say one judge issued a ruling in January that allowed the administration to continue the program under the court’s supervision. A ruling a month or two later — the judge who made it and its...

August 13, 2007

Gaddafi Reneging On Nuclear Disarmament?

Moammar Gaddafi agreed to end his nuclear-weapons program in 2003 after Saddam Hussein's groveling surrender in a spider hole, a program that had developed enough to produce weapons-grade plutonium. American and British negotiators won the release of the hardware Saddam produced for the program, and the international community agreed to end its diplomatic isolation on the assurance that Gaddafi would come completely clean on its nuclear capabilities. The French went too far, offering two weeks ago to take Libya nuclear again -- and now it turns out that they don't need to do so: Nuclear experts claim that Libya is sitting on a stockpile of almost 200 barrels of uranium despite agreeing in 2003 to dismantle its nuclear programme, The Daily Telegraph has learned. The revelation that Libya allegedly has not yet complied with the international agreement to get rid of its supply of uranium will be a particular blow...

The New Terrorists

Molotov cocktails left on doorsteps. Bombs placed under cars at the homes of targets. Death threats in public communiques. Are these new tactics for al-Qaeda or Hezbollah? In fact, they're part of the new offensive by animal-rights activists targeting the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, and only incompetence has kept them from scoring their first kill (via Mitch): THE HOME OF DR. ARTHUR ROSENBAUM isn’t hard to find. He lives a few blocks south of Sunset Boulevard, near the UCLA campus, in a white two-story house with a front yard jammed with aspen trees. There is a short driveway on the side of the home, and during the evening, a bright, white light illuminates the carport. If someone wants to sabotage the doctor’s car under the cover of night, a flashlight isn’t needed. On Sunday, June 24, just that kind of person struck. Rosenbaum, a highly regarded pediatric ophthalmologist...

August 14, 2007

A Micro-Lesson On Appeasement

Rudyard Kipling understood the futility of appeasement. In his poem "Danegeld (AD 980-1016)", he wrote the oft-quoted words, "once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane." Now appeasement has a more modern lesson, thanks to a woman in Brunswick who thought she could outwit burglars by giving what they wanted: A cottage owner in Germany tried to ward off burglars by leaving canned foods on her doorstep, but robbers found the offerings so tasty that they broke into the house to get second helpings, German police said on Tuesday. The woman who owns the cottage and adjacent garden in Brunswick, western Germany, had left a note for potential burglars not to bother breaking into her cottage but to help themselves to the canned foods on her doorstep, police said. "The polite appeal that they treat themselves apparently just increased the appetite of the hoodlums,"...

August 15, 2007

ABC: 'Clusters' Of Homegrown Terrorists Greatest Threat

ABC News reports that the greatest terrorist threat to the American homeland does not come from the Middle East, but from the Northeast. The report by the New York Police Department's Intelligence Bureau appears to conflict with an FBI analysis that considered the home-grown threat minimal, but provides the names of the mosques and prisons where the risk is greatest: U.S. law enforcement officials say they have identified more than two dozen "clusters" of young Muslim men in the northeast United States who are on a path that could lead to homegrown terror, ABC News has learned. "Any one of those clusters may be capable of carrying out a terrorist action that will result in fatalities," Rand Corporation terrorism expert Brian Jenkins tells ABC News. In a report to be made public today, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly concludes the 9/ll attacks were an "anomaly" and the most...

No Time To Investigate Treason?

The Washington Times reports that the immigration service has failed to investigate employees who allegedly have assisted radical Islamists in gaining false identification so that they can conduct terrorist activities here in the US. An internal report claims that a lack of resources has kept the USCIS from conducting proper investigations, but the severity of the crimes and their consequences should have demanded some reprioritization (via CQ reader Stoo): A criminal investigations report says several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees are accused of aiding Islamic extremists with identification fraud and of exploiting the visa system for personal gain. The confidential 2006 USCIS report said that despite the severity of the potential security breaches, most are not investigated "due to lack of resources" in the agency's internal affairs department. "Two District Adjudications Officers are allegedly involved with known (redacted) Islam terrorist members," said the internal document obtained by The Washington...

Hostaging For Dummies

Apparently it takes a lot of instruction for terrorists to conduct a successful kidnapping. Accordingly, jihadists set up a website in Texas to instruct their minions and wanna-bes on how to prepare for abduction and hostaging. MEMRI gives the Cliff Notes version (via the Jawa Report and Memeorandum): The popular Islamist-jihadist forum www.alhesbah.org, hosted by RealWebHost in Texas, U.S., recently posted an anonymously written document from 2003 titled "The Excellent Summary of the Rules of the Art of Kidnapping Americans." The 60-page guide describes each stage of the kidnapping, explaining how to select the target and then how to follow him, seize him, transport him to a safe location, and hold him there, as well as how to conduct negotiations. The guide also explains how to execute the hostage should negotiations fail. ... Next, the guide explains how to transport the hostage to the hideout. It recommends using a vehicle...

New Assault On Tora Bora

The US has launched a new assault on Tora Bora tonight, partnering with Aghan soldiers in the region where al-Qaeda had once been based. The reasons for the new attack was not clear, although the Pentagon told reporters that the area has the ability to hide militant bases: Hundreds of US and Afghan soldiers have returned to launch a new attack on the last known hideout of the fugitive al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. They have launched an air and ground assault in the Tora Bora region, near the border with Pakistan. .... A US military spokeswoman, Captain Vanessa Bowman, said the assault was launched against targeted positions: "The targets were carefully chosen to pinpoint enemy positions and eliminate the likelihood of harming innocent civilians." "This region has provided an ideal environment to conceal enemy support bases and training sites, as well as plan and launch attacks aimed at terrorizing...

August 16, 2007

Pakistan Provided Military Support To The Taliban

Pakistan has insisted since 9/11 that it never provided military support to the Taliban before that date, let alone afterwards. Pervez Musharraf insists that Pakistan only provided diplomatic recognition and economic ties to the oppressive regime until the US ejected them from Afghanistan after the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. The Guardian reports that Musharraf may have lied through his teeth to save his rear end: The Pakistani government gave substantial military support to the Taliban in the years leading up to the September 11 attacks, sending arms and soldiers to fight alongside the militant Afghan movement, according to newly released US official documents. Islamabad has acknowledged diplomatic and economic links with the Taliban but has denied direct military support. The US intelligence and state department documents, released under the country's freedom of information act, show that Washington believed otherwise. The suspicion has lingered that some elements of...

Verdict Reached In Padilla Case (Update: Guilty)

A federal jury has reached a verdict in the trial of Jose Padilla, the accused "dirty bomb" terrorist whose case called into question the tactics of the Bush administration in fighting the war on terror. The announcement will come at 2 pm ET in Miami (via Michelle Malkin): A verdict was reached Thursday in the trial of Jose Padilla and two co-defendants charged with supporting al-Qaida and other violent Islamic extremist groups overseas. The jury verdict was scheduled to be read at 2 p.m. EDT before U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke in Miami's downtown federal courthouse, according to an announcement from her chambers. The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for about a day and a half following a three-month trial. Padilla, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi face possible life in prison if convicted of all three charges in the case. The Bush administration portrayed Padilla,...

August 17, 2007

US, UK Want Benazir Back

The US and UK have pressured Pervez Musharraf to form a political alliance with former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in order to create an anti-extremist political front. However, Musharraf has had trouble finding common ground, and Bhutto herself is not keen on pulling Musharraf's bacon from the fire: America and Britain are seeking to broker a power-sharing deal between Pakistan's president, Gen Pervez Musharraf, and the exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. A senior Western diplomat said that the two nations were exerting pressure on Gen Musharraf to broaden his political base by bringing Ms Bhutto into his -government. They are anxious to ensure that the general, a key ally in the US-led war on terror, retains his hold on power after the worst political crisis of his eight-year rule. Last week Gen Musharraf, who has clashed with Pakistan's supreme court over plans to stand for re-election while remaining head...

What Did We Learn From Padilla?

The New York Times provides an interesting analysis of the Jose Padilla conviction, one that essentially credits the Bush administration with a victory. The jury convicted Padilla in almost no time at all, saying that the evidence was overwhelming -- and yet the question remains as to why the administration didn't just put Padilla on trial from the beginning: In a significant victory for the Bush administration, a federal jury found Jose Padilla guilty of terrorism conspiracy charges on Thursday after little more than a day of deliberation. Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who became one of the first Americans designated an “enemy combatant” in the anxious months after Sept. 11, 2001, now faces life in prison. He was released last year from a long and highly unusual military confinement to face criminal charges in Federal District Court here. The government’s chief evidence was a faded application form...

August 18, 2007

Two Projects Supporting The Troops

I received a couple of e-mail requests reminding me of projects designed to support the troops directly. First, Jim at Thinking Right has made it to about 25% of his goal on his Project Letters From Home. Jim wants to put a letter into the hands of every Marine in the unit he selected. He needs 1,000 letters and he's received about 240 so far. Be sure to check out Jim's efforts and pitch in any way you can. The second project is a little different. Gina Elise wants to provide a little traditional diversion for hospitalized veterans and active-duty servicemen, so she's produced a pin-up calendar, evoking memories of World War II. Pin-Ups for Vets is co-sponsored by the American Legion post in Lake Arrowhead, California and the proceeds go to support hospitalized veterans. The web site may not be entirely safe for work, depending on the tolerance level...

August 19, 2007

Are You Sure You Want An Islamic Reformation?

Often pundits will exclaim that what Islam needs is a Reformation. Diana Muir reminds us in today's Washington Post about what the Christian Reformation produced in the short run -- and convincingly argues that we may already be in the middle of an Islamic counterpart. In fact, that's the problem: The Protestant Reformation did precede the things these men admire about modernity in the West, including women's emancipation, political liberty, scientific breakthroughs, the wealth and opportunity created by the Industrial Revolution, and permission to think freely regarding God. But all this came later, and the Reformation was only part of what brought them about. The Reformation was a time of intense focus on God and what He requires of people. As a movement, it was enthusiastic, narrow and far from tolerant. It and the Counter-Reformation brought two centuries of repression, war and massacre to the West. It's unlikely that anyone...

August 20, 2007

About The Petraeus Date

Earlier today on a blogger call, Senator John McCain said he believed that Harry Reid had scheduled General David Petraeus to brief the Senate on September 11th. I reported this on my live-blog at Heading Right, and so did Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot. It got picked up by a CQ commenter in the earlier thread, but it's easy to make more of this than it is. First, the Senate will have limited dates available for Petraeus, on account of tight schedules for both Petraeus and Congress. The fiscal year runs out at the end of the month, and budget appropriations will go down to the wire and beyond. Reid and Nancy Pelosi need to keep as much floor time available as possible for those fights, including the war supplemental debate, which has to have the input from Petraeus first. The previous week will consist mostly of organizing motions...

August 21, 2007

CIA Report Slams Tenet

The long-awaited CIA Inspector General's report on the failues that led to 9/11 has been released, or at least its redacted executive summary was published this afternoon. The report puts the blame for the agency's lack of preparation squarely on George Tenet, arguing that although he defined the danger facing the US from al-Qaeda, he failed to organize the CIA to effectively fight it: Former CIA Director George Tenet did not marshal his agency's resources to respond to the recognized threat posed by al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency's inspector general concluded in a long-classified report released today. The report, which Congress ordered released under a law signed by President Bush this month, also faulted the intelligence community for failing to have "a documented, comprehensive approach" to battling al-Qaeda. Tenet, now a professor at Georgetown University, heavily criticized the report as "flat wrong" in a lengthy statement, saying...

August 23, 2007

Did Clinton Lie About Targeting Bin Laden?

It appears that Bill Clinton may have exaggerated his record when it came to strategizing against Osama bin Laden. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball take a look at the Inspector General's report of the pre-9/11 intelligence failures at the CIA and find an interesting nugget. Despite Clinton's angry assertion to Chris Wallace in last year's controversial Fox interview, he never gave the CIA an assassination order regarding bin Laden (h/t: CQ reader Mark): The report also criticized intelligence problems when Bill Clinton was president, detailing political and legal “constraints” agency officials felt in the late 1990s. In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to kill...

August 24, 2007

I Guess The P-I Missed This, Too

ABC News reports that a number of suspicious incidents have been reported on ferries in the state of Washington, according to the FBI. Accordingly, they have issued warnings to local law enforcement and alerted the Coast Guard to heighten their awareness in the area: There have been a number of suspicious incidents this summer aboard Washington state ferries, which prompted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Coast Guard to increase security along the ferry lines and to issue a warning to law enforcement. "On several occasions since May 2007, members of the public and employees of the Washington State Ferry (WSF) have reported a number of suspicious activities aboard state ferries," said the note, sent out Wednesday to state and local law enforcement by the chief intelligence officer at DHS. The warning was issued as the hunt continues for two potential suspects that were observed on multiple Washington...

Politicizing Terror

One of the accusations commonly tossed at the Bush administration is that they politicize the war on terror. Critics use every warning from the White House about elevated threat levels to claim that the administration wants to get some sort of political boost from the announcement. It reached its nadir when Madeline Albright and Teresa Kerry both claimed six weeks before the 2004 election (see update below) that Bush had Osama bin Laden locked up and would announce it as an October Surprise, the dumbest and least-realized political meme ever. Now Hillary Clinton has decided to play the same game, with a silly analysis of who would benefit from a terrorist attack on the US (via Memeorandum): Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday raised the prospect of a terror attack before next year's election, warning that it could boost the GOP's efforts to hold on to the White House. Discussing the...

August 28, 2007

A Writer Surrenders

CQ readers may never have heard of Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladeshi writer who finds herself without a nation at the moment, but she has a similar dilemma as the more famous Salman Rushdie. Nasrin fled Bangladesh for her life after writing a critique of Islam, and now India may expel her for the same reason: In the second week of August, she was physically assaulted by a Muslim religious group at the launch of a translation of one of her controversial novels in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. A week later, in Calcutta, Muslim clerics issued a "death warrant," threatening to kill Ms. Nasrin - who is Muslim, although a critic of Islam - if she did not leave the country. This week Forward Bloc, part of the leftist block supporting the Indian ruling alliance, announced that it would press for Ms. Nasrin's expulsion from the country, senior FB...

The Threat In Soft Focus

The US knows that al-Qaeda has a plot in the works to attack America. We know some of the tactical details. However, we don't know enough to generate a specific threat warning or to raise the threat level, according to the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, John Scott Redd. At Heading Right, I take a look at the "warning" Redd gives, and find it unsurprising. Redd gives an honest assessment of the threat and the reason for not elevating the warning level, which conspiracy-minded folks might actually understand. The threat he describes in the interview, and which Newsweek mistakenly underscores as the lede, is not the biggest threat to American security Redd discusses. Be sure to read the post and the interview....

August 29, 2007

Major Taliban Engagement Ends In Rout

Taliban forces ambushed American and Afghan troops in Kandahar province today -- and now probably wish they hadn't. They killed one Afghan soldier and wounded three others, but lost over 100 men when the Americans called airstrikes down on their position: More than 100 Taliban insurgents and allies have been killed in a major battle with US-led troops in southern Afghanistan, according to the US military. The fighting erupted after a convoy of Afghan and US coalition forces came under attack in Shah Wali Kot district in Kandahar province and called in air support. There were no civilian casualties reported but one Afghan security force member was killed and three foreign troops and three Afghan soldiers were wounded. The Taliban continues to prove wildly inept at actual warfare. They lost 100-1 in this engagement -- when they had tactical surprise and presumably the best ground. In any rational armed force,...

More On The Seattle Ferry Story

As more news outlets look into the story of the pair wanted for questioning by the FBI after a series of incidents on Seattle ferries, the more details start sneaking out about their odd behavior. CNN reports on the story today, and unlike the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the pictures of the two men accompany the story: Members of the public and ferry workers reported the men to authorities after the two were seen pacing in areas of the boat, including a cargo hold, as if trying to measure distances, FBI Special Agent Larry Carr said Tuesday. The men were also seen about two months ago taking photographs of the ferries -- including restricted areas -- and studying an emergency evacuation poster. The men were spotted on multiple ferries and ferry routes, Carr said. Initially, in the Seattle P-I's report, the men were asking unusual questions on the one ferry. ABC's follow-up...

August 30, 2007

Chemical Weapons Souvenirs At The UN

I visited New York City when I was eleven years old, and one of the places we visited was the United Nations building. People could buy souvenirs there and all over the Big Apple about the UN. I'm betting that they didn't sell phosgene vials as souvenirs then or now, however: ABCNews has learned that United Nations weapons inspectors discovered six to eight vials of a dangerous nerve gas, phosgene, as they were cleaning out offices at a U.N. building in New York Thursday morning. Federal authorities said the office, in a U.N. building near headquarters, was being evacuated and the White House had been notified at 10 a.m. New York police and fire officials said federal authorities had not notified them of any problem at the U.N. building, as of 11 a.m. First, phosgene isn't technically a "nerve gas", although it certainly qualifies as a chemical weapon. Phosgene chokes...

August 31, 2007

I Guess They Weren't Fireworks After All

The two University of South Florida students arrested in Goose Creek have been indicted on explosives and terrorism charges, the AP reports today (via Michelle Malkin): Two Egyptian students at the University of South Florida were indicted Friday for carrying explosive materials across states lines and one of them was charged with teaching the other how to use them for violent reasons. Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 24, an engineering graduate student and teaching assistant at the Tampa-based university, faces terrorism charges for teaching and demonstrating how to use the explosives. He and Youssef Samir Megahed, 21, an engineering student, were stopped for speeding in Goose Creek, S.C., on Aug. 4, where they have been held on state charges. For some reason, this story got a lot of pushback in the blogosphere. Here at CQ, several commenters derided the notion of its importance, claiming that the students only had fireworks in...

September 2, 2007

Lebanon Wins Battle Of Nahr El-Bahred

The Lebanese Army finally defeated an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Palestinian refugee camp at Nahr el-Bared, a battle which started three months ago. Locals threw rice at the soldiers in celebration as the army occupied the camp: Lebanese troops took control on Sunday of a Palestinian refugee camp where they had been battling militants for more than three months, killing at least 31 fighters who tried to flee, security sources said. Twenty-three more fighters from the Fatah al-Islam group were captured, 12 of them wounded militants detained after the army took over the Nahr al-Bared camp in north Lebanon, a security source said. "The battle is over. The Lebanese army has seized the last positions of Fatah al-Islam in the camp," a senior security source told Reuters. "Most of the terrorists were killed today. The others have been captured. A few might have escaped but the army is hunting them...

Taliban: Seoul Paid $20 Million For Hostages

The Taliban just released 19 South Korean missionaries that they abducted in Afghanistan weeks ago. While Seoul and NATO have remained quiet about the nature of the negotiations that resulted in their release, the Taliban have proudly proclaimed that they got over $20 million in exchange for the hostages. Guess what they want to do with the cash? SOUTH Korea paid Afghanistan's Taliban more than $20m (£10m) to release 19 missionaries they were holding hostage, a senior insurgent leader said yesterday, vowing to use the funds to buy arms and mount suicide attacks. The freed hostages flew out of Afghanistan on Friday to Dubai en route to South Korea. ... "We deny any payment for the release of South Korean hostages," an official at South Korea's presidential Blue House said in response to the Taliban claim. But the Taliban disagreed. "We got more than $20m from them [the Seoul government],"...

9/11 Remembrances: How Much Is Too Much?

It's doubtful that any newspaper outside of New York City could raise this question, but the Times asks whether we should set aside the anniversaries of 9/11 as a collective mourning date for the nation. How long should the remembrances dominate the day, and how many years should the city and nation conduct the familiar ceremonies of grief? Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It began before the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying. “I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf life?” said Charlene Correia, 57, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass. “We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.” Some people prefer to see things...

September 3, 2007

Wake Us When It's Over

The Janjaweed have had so much success in Darfur that they have decided to go into overtime by attacking each other. The Arab tribes that have pushed out the Christians and the animists from Darfur have started a civil war amongst themselves -- and the latest victims have headed for the same refugee camps as the people they earlier victimized themselves: Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands. In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of...

September 4, 2007

Denmark -- The Next Target

Police in Denmark have arrested eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Copenhagen as they have apparently foiled a terrorist attack. The men, ages 18 to 29, were found in raids at eleven addresses -- and authorities found more than just the men: Danish police have arrested eight people with alleged links to al-Qaeda on suspicion of planning a bomb attack. The eight suspects arrested late on Monday in Copenhagen form part of a terror cell with links to a senior al-Qaeda figure, police said. The suspects, aged between 19 and 29, were of Afghan, Pakistani, Somali and Turkish origin, police said. Police report that the men had been under surveillance for quite some time. They had begun producing an "unstable explosive" in a densely-populated area in preparation for an attack. They had lived in immigrant neighborhoods, but six of the eight have Danish citizenship. It's not the first time Denmark has...

Pakistan Hit By Bombs, Political Intrigue

A pair of bombs killed two dozen people in Rawalpindi today, striking at the heart of military power in Pakistan. The terrorist attack comes at the same time as Pervez Musharraf began rounding up political dissidents supporting an exile who plans to return soon: A pair of explosions during rush hour early Tuesday killed at least 24 people and injured scores more in the city of Rawalpindi, home to Pakistan's military. One of the bombs struck a bus apparently carrying government employees, and the other exploded in a busy market area near the nation's military headquarters. Such attacks are highly unusual in Rawalpindi, which is one of Pakistan's largest cities, and also one of its most secure because of the heavy presence of security personnel. The bus blast seemed to be the more deadly of the two, with the vehicle all but destroyed, according to witnesses. Officials said the bus...

September 5, 2007

Germans Stop Terrorist Plot Against Ramstein

German security forces arrested three terrorists this morning in an apparent plot to attack an American military base. The cell had acquired a large amount of bomb-making materials and had trained in Pakistan to carry out their mission: Three suspected Islamic militants were arrested for allegedly plotting "imminent" and "massive" attacks on the Ramstein Air Base, a major U.S. and NATO military hub, and Frankfurt's busy international airport, German authorities said Wednesday. German federal prosecutor Monika Harms said the three — two of whom were German converts to Islam — had trained at terror camps in Pakistan and procured some 1,500 pounds of hydrogen peroxide for making explosives. And a top legislator said the group could have struck "in a few days," noting a "sensitive period" that includes the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. ... The three suspects — two Germans, aged 22 and 28, and a 29-year-old Turk...

Musharraf's Options Narrowing

Pervez Musharraf sees fewer and fewer options for remaining in power, and he may decide to declare an emergency despite pressure from the US and the West. The warning of de facto martial law comes as Musharraf negotiates with Benazir Bhutto for her return and her alliance against the extremists that Musharraf once courted: A top adviser to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf acknowledged Tuesday that the general's options for staying in power are increasingly bleak and said that a declaration of emergency is being considered as a way of keeping him in office. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, said that while a complete military takeover under martial law had been ruled out, a state of emergency that would allow for the postponement of elections for up to a year and the curtailment of individual liberties was still on the table. "Martial law is a very...

September 6, 2007

An Autumn Offensive?

Taliban elements have stepped up attacks on NATO forces in Kandahar and Helmand provinces over the last week. They have ambushed British and American forces in fairly large numbers, sometimes throwing hundreds of their fighters into the battles. The new autumn offensive appears more vigorous than the fizzled spring offensive -- but every bit as disastrous: International and Afghan troops backed by air power killed scores of Taliban militants as heavy fighting intensified across southern Afghanistan, officials said Thursday. The latest bloodshed in the insurgency-hit southern desert provinces of Kandahar and Helmand took the rebel toll in recent days to more than 350, while two British troops have also died. More than 40 Taliban fighters were killed in a 12-hour battle on Wednesday with US-led coalition forces in Kandahar's Shah Wali Kot district, where rebels appeared to have regrouped in recent weeks, the coalition said. A small group of rebels...

Russia Could Lose Uranium Source

Australia's John Howard warned Russia that uranium sales could end if Russia does not take steps to guarantee that their product doesn't wind up in Iran or Syria. Following on the heels of Der Spiegel's exposure of Russian machinations to get German equipment to Bushehr, an Australian rejection could make it difficult for Putin to act as an energy czar in Asia: Australian Prime Minister John Howard said on Thursday he would tell Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would not approve the sale of uranium to Moscow if there was any possibility it could be resold to Iran or Syria. Howard said he would put Putin "through the ropes" when he meets him on Friday in Sydney on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific leaders' forum. ... Australia, with 40 percent of the world's reserves of uranium, exports the mineral to 36 nations and hopes to sign a deal with...

Only His Hairdresser Knows For Sure

Osama bin Laden will release a new video for the sixth anniversary of the 2,996 murders he ordered on September 11th, 2001. What does a psychopathic mass murderer have to say that has any interest to the world? Apparently he needs to debut his new facial hair style: Osama bin Laden will release a new video in the coming days ahead of the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in what would be the first new images of the terror mastermind in nearly three years, al-Qaida's media arm announced Thursday. Analysts noted that al-Qaida tends to mark the Sept. 11 anniversary with a slew of messages, and the Department of Homeland Security said it had no credible information warning of an imminent threat to the United States. Still, bin Laden's appearance would be significant. The al-Qaida leader has not appeared in new video footage since October 2004, and he...

September 7, 2007

Anti-Semitism Is As Anti-Semitism Does

Clinton administration official Jeff Robbins wonders in today's Wall Street Journal why people like Jimmy Carter, Stephen Walt, and John Mearsheimer seem so obsessed with American Jews exercizing their right to political speech, and so silent about the influence of Wahabbist petrodollars competing in the same arena. The former American delegate to the highly anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Commission points out that Saudi Arabia drops millions of dollars and leverages political clout through its commercial partners to pursue its anti-Israel agenda, and yet these three (among many others) quake with fear when American citizens organize to refute it: If the charge that American Jews are able to stifle criticism of Israel is simply silly, the leveling of the charge that there is something nefarious about Jews urging support for the Jewish state raises questions about whether Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have descended into a certain ugliness. And the tactic of...

The Wolves At London's Door

The Times of London has done some digging into the lines of control for the city’s mosques and finds a disturbing development. Almost half of them have come under the leadership of the same radical sect that spawned the Taliban, and the new leader has called for the shedding of blood in a jihad against the West. Ironically, Britain has subsidized the indoctrination of these jihadists that produce 80% of their homegrown Islamic clerics. At Heading Right, I ask how bad the situation has to get when even Pakistanis complain about British Muslim extremism. Will Western nations surrender to the extremists by refusing to defend themselves, or will they act to curtail the influence and spread of deadly and seditious organizations? Britain appears to be the test case....

Osama Video Featuring Fake Beard?

ABC News reports that some intelligence analysts believe that the newly-trimmed and blackened beard featured in the upcoming Osama bin Laden video may be false. It could indicate that Osama has hotfooted it to a country where a beard would make him stand out from the crowd, which would require a phony for his videos: Intelligence sources tell ABC News they believe the expected video message from Osama bin Laden is authentic, recently produced and evidence the al Qaeda leader is still alive. U.S. authorities now say they have a transcript which they say is aimed at potential suicide bombers who he urges to carry out missions against the West. ... "It does look oddly like he is wearing a false beard," Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official and now ABC News consultant, said. "If we go back to the tape three years, he had a very white...

Osama Scolds Democrats For Not Surrendering

ABC News has the transcript of Osama bin Laden's newest video, and as Hot Air notes, it blasts Democrats for not following through on their promises of dhimmitude: “People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven’t made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there.” Osama has a couple of options for Americans to completely surrender to al-Qaeda and stop the terrorism against our people: “The first is from our side, and it is to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you.” The second is to...

September 8, 2007

Deadline For Terrorism: September 15th

The terrorists arrested in Germany had a deadline for their attack on Ramstein Air Base and the Frankfurt airport, given to them by their al-Qaeda masters: September 15th. Why that date, rather than the more obvious 9/11 anniversary? AQ has more current politics in mind: Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack U.S. installations in Germany had orders to act by Sept. 15 and knew police were hot on their trail before their arrest, a magazine said on Saturday. The plan was foiled on Tuesday when police arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk in the biggest German police operation in 30 years. According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by German police. Congress set a deadline on September 15th as...

September 10, 2007

Not Exactly The Red Carpet For Sharif

Pakistan's exiled former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, returned in triumph today. Triumph turned to a ticket to Saudi Arabia in less than eight hours, however, as Pervez Musharraf had Sharif deported shortly after his arrival: Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan from a seven-year exile, hoping to campaign against the country's U.S.-allied military ruler, but was immediately charged with corruption and deported to Saudi Arabia hours later. On his arrival from London, black-uniformed commandos surrounded Sharif inside his plane; he was taken into custody and charged, then then spirited to another plane and sent to Jiddah, where he was whisked away in a convoy from the airport, witnesses said. In Islamabad, the government defended its decision to deport Sharif in defiance of a Supreme Court order saying he had the right to return to Pakistan, claiming it was in the "supreme interest" of the country. Sharif's deportation came...

Second Bin Laden Tape?

ABC News reports that Osama bin Laden has a second tape released last week, recorded at the same place as the first. The new tape references 9/11 more explicitly than the last: A second tape from Osama bin Laden was recorded in the same location as the video released last week. People in the intelligence community who have seen the tape feel it is directly related to the 9/11 anniversary since the al Qaeda leader introduces the prerecorded martyr video of one of the 9/11 hijackers, Waleed al Shehri. Waleed al Shehri was one of the hijackers on American Airlines flight 11 that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. What would that mean? Did Osama look over his notes after the first tape and say, "Damn, I forgot to read pages six and seven!" Was Osama having a senior moment? Perhaps, though, this tape may provide...

September 11, 2007

California Jihadi Gets 24 Years

The first of the California jihadis to get convicted on terrorism charges received a 24-year sentence yesterday. Hamid Hayat traveled to Pakistan to learn terrorism in al-Qaeda training camps in order to kill Americans, and it turned into a family business: A California man convicted last year of aiding terrorists and lying to the F.B.I. was sentenced on Monday to 24 years in prison. The man, Hamid Hayat, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, was solemn and attentive in court on what was his 25th birthday. He showed little reaction as an assistant translated the proceedings and stern words of Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. of Federal District Court into Urdu. “Hamid Hayat attended a terrorist training camp,” Judge Burrell said, “and returned to the United States, ready and willing to wage violent jihad when directed to do so, regardless of the havoc such acts could wreak on persons and...

Strike Three?

A bomb-sniffing dog in Ankara helped Turkish authorities stop a massive terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. A van full of explosives in a parking garage would have devastated the center of the large city, and it would have served as a counterpoint to the messages released by Osama bin Laden in the past week: Police in Turkey's capital, Ankara, have prevented a large bomb from exploding, the city's governor said. Sniffer dogs detected a van stuffed with explosives in the centre of the city, preventing a "possible catastrophe", Governor Kemal Onal said. ... Ankara's governor said a large quantity of explosives had been left in the van which had a false licence plate. It was parked in a multi-storey garage in Kurtulus, a densely populated area of central Ankara. This would make three terrorist attacks thwarted in the past week. Earlier, German and Danish authorities rolled up Islamist...

McConnell v. New York Times

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told the Senate that the NSA caught the terror cell poised to strike at Ramstein Air Base in Germany because of the NSA’s expanded powers. The New York Times reports that the detection predates the new FISA legislation, and therefore McConnell was mistaken, but the Times forgets the purpose of the legislation in that analysis. At Heading Right, I supply the missing context that eludes Eric Schmitt in his reporting. It shows the new FISA legislation as a requirement for effective counterterrorism activity, and in fact proves that Congress absolutely needed to reinstate the NSA's authority to capture the kind of communication in real time that led to the discovery of the terrorist targeting Ramstein's air base -- and our men and women in the armed forces....

Remembering 9/11

Where were you six years ago? That morning, I went to work early, as I usually did, to eat breakfast at the office and take my time preparing for my day in the call center. That doesn't usually involve television, and any websurfing I did took place before 7 am CT. By the time the first plane took off from Logan Airport, the normal routine of measurement review and staff meetings had already started for me. The first time I heard that anything was wrong on that day was a phone call from the First Mate. She told me about the first plane crash, and at first I assumed it had been caused by poor visibility in New York. A co-worker then told me about news of a second crash, and I knew that we had been hit by a terrorist attack. As I wrote three years ago: Work came...

Guest Post: Senator James Inhofe

Captain's Quarters welcomes back Senator James Inhofe for a guest post regarding the testimony of General Petraeus. Thank you, Ed, for the opportunity to once again address your readers. This site is a valuable resource for Americans who want to support our troops and get the truth about our progress in Iraq. Just recently, we entered our fifth year of engagement in Iraq. I think it is safe to say it has stretched on longer than many of us anticipated at its onset. However, we have seen significant signs of progress as a result of General Petraeus’s troop surge strategy. Iraqi cities which used to be terrorist strongholds such as Ramadi and Fallujah are now not only secure, but kept secure by Iraqi security forces. Iraqi citizens are participating in "Neighborhood Watch" programs and circle undetonated roadside bombs with orange spray paint to warn passersby. And our troops are developing...

September 12, 2007

What Did Israel Bomb In Syria? (Update: A Second Osirak?)

The US has confirmed that Israel did overfly Syria and dropped munitions as Syria had accused. The US remained coy about the nature of the strike and its intended target, but the area in which the strike occurred indicates a push back against weapons transfers to Hezbollah: A US official has confirmed that Israeli warplanes carried out an air strike "deep inside" Syria, escalating tensions between the two countries. The target of the strike last Thursday remained unclear but Israeli media reported that a shipment of Iranian arms crossing Syria for use by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon was attacked. ... Another theory gaining ground yesterday was that Israel was deliberately attacking the Russian-made Pantsyr air defence system recently bought by Damascus. The sale includes provision for the Pantsyr system to be shipped on to Iran and it is possible the Israeli attack was co-ordinated with America to probe...

IBD: Americans Not In A 9/10 State Of Mind

Last week, CIA director Michael Hayden warned Americans against complacency in the war on terror, as six years have passed without an attack on the US homeland. Hayden worried that Americans may already have regressed to a 9/10 state of mind. Investor's Business Daily conducted a poll to determine whether Hayden has cause for concern, and found out that we remain resolute in our fight against terrorists: • 70% of Americans believe we should not quickly pull out of Iraq o Includes 73% of Democrats (more than the 71% of Republicans) • 69% believe we should increase surveillance of terrorists o 61% believe we should wiretap suspected terrorists without a court warrant • 63% believe we should not release prisoners from Guantanamo Bay IBD conducted the poll between September 4th and 7th, as the nation prepared for the testimony of General David Petraeus and as the Democrats launched their attack...

September 13, 2007

Admitted AQ Leader Goes To Gitmo

Like Mark Twain, the demise of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay may have been somewhat exaggerated. The US has transferred nineteen captured terrorists to Gitmo this year, including the latest from Afghanistan. Only identified as "Inayatullah", he admitted to running an al-Qaeda organization in Iran: An Afghan national accused of links with al-Qaeda has been transferred to the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the Pentagon has said. The man, named only as "Inayatullah", was captured during operations in Afghanistan, a Pentagon statement said. The US military say he admitted being the leader of al-Qaeda in Zahedan, Iran and planned and directed al-Qaeda terrorist operations. ... "Inayatullah met with local operatives, developed travel routes and coordinated documentation, accommodation and vehicles for smuggling unlawful combatants throughout countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq," the Pentagon said. Guantanamo Bay serves a useful purpose, whether people want to acknowledge it...

German Government: Truthers?

The German public television channel ZDF recently ran a documentary on 9/11. According to Henryk Broder in Der Spiegel, the program took an unusual approach, but unfortunately one that seems all too familiar now to Americans, and Broder wonders whether people have become too stupid to comprehend objective reality: Everything, as it happens, is relative. Three hairs in a bowl of soup are three hairs too many, while three hairs on someone's head are relatively few. Even the oldest jokes about this theory of relativity, the ones that wouldn't even get a laugh out of drunken fools, suddenly become precious pearls of humor to those who saw Tuesday's ZDF documentary titled "Sept. 11, 2001 -- What Really Happened." Some might say the documentary was relatively harmless compared with the wildest conspiracy theories that have been circulating since the attacks, such as the one claiming that 4,000 Jewish New Yorkers who...

The Home-Officing Jihad

Austrian security officials arrested a group of radical Islamists for suspected terrorist activity yesterday in Vienna. These terrorist suspects went high-tech, as their contributions to global jihad appear limited to the Internet: According to information obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, one of those arrested is the presumed head of the German-language Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), founded in fall 2005. Its model was the international GIMF, which came into being sometime around 2002 -- originally only in Arabic -- in order to redistribute al-Qaida material on the Internet. ... Austrian authorities revealed on Thursday their belief that the suspects arrested were in direct contact with al-Qaida over the Internet. According to Erik Buxbaum, Austria's general manager for public security, Austrian terror specialists followed events 'live' while the groups communicated. E-mail traffic was observed, and the group of young Muslims was kept under observation as part of a "large bugging operation" code-named...

September 17, 2007

The Vanishing Al Hamed

A North Korean ship that purportedly reflagged itself as South Korean to evade Western investigators has disappeared from view after the Israeli strike on Syria last week. The Al Hamed delivered what the Syrians classified as cement in the days before the strike, and an Israeli tracer says the ship has not been seen since: A suspicious North Korean freighter that re-flagged itself as South Korean before off-loading an unknown cargo at the Syrian port of Tartous is at the centre of efforts today to investigate Israel's recent airstrike on Syria. An Israeli on-line data analyst, Ronen Solomon, found an internet trace for the 1,700-tonne cargo ship, Al Hamed, which showed the vessel started to off-load what Syrian officials categorised as "cement" on Sept 3. This was three days before Israeli jets attacked a site in the north eastern desert of Syria, not far from its border with Iraq. Since...

September 18, 2007

Musharraf Will Resign From Army

Pervez Musharraf has apparently cut a deal with Benazir Bhutto for her return to Pakistan and his future in politics. His representatives told the Supreme Court that Musharraf would resign as army Chief of Staff if re-elected to the presidency and govern as a civilian. This could remove the last obstacle to ending Bhutto's exile and strengthen the Pakistani moderates: Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf will give up his post of army chief if he is re-elected president and he will be sworn in for a new term as a civilian, his lawyer told the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The promise to stand down as army chief removes a major objection to Musharraf's proposed re-election by October 15. ... Giving up the army role would undoubtedly dilute Musharraf's power in a country that has been ruled by generals for more than half the 60 years since it was founded. But it...

The Islamist Plot Against The US

The trial of the Holy Land Foundation has produced some interesting insights into the strategies of our radical Islamist enemies. A document from the Muslim Brotherhood organization in the US describes how it planned to undermine and destroy American democracy and replace it with an Islamic theocracy, which is by turns both traitorous and ridiculous (via Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, and Rick Moran): A 1991 strategy paper for the Brotherhood, often referred to as the Ikhwan in Arabic, found in the Virginia home of an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, describes the group's U.S. goals, referred to as a "civilization-jihadist process." "The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious...

September 20, 2007

AQ Video: Crusaders Admit They're Losing

Ayman al-Zawahiri tells the mujaheddin that the US finds itself losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, all appearances to the contrary -- and that our politicians admit our defeat. The new al-Qaeda video includes Mohammed Atta's last recorded words as well as the usual stream of AQ propaganda: Al-Qaida's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri said the United States was being defeated in Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in a new video released Thursday, the latest in a series put out by the terror network. ... "What they claim to be the strongest power in the history of mankind is today being defeated in front of the Muslim vanguards of jihad six years after the two raids on New York and Washington," al-Zawahri said, speaking in what appeared to be an office, with shelves of religious books and an automatic rifle leaning against them. "The Crusaders themselves have testified to their defeat in...

Congress Should Protect The Telecoms

Newsweek has a special web report from Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball regarding a "secretive" effort to lobby Congress by the telecommunications industry. Since Congress passed FISA legislation essentially endorsing the warrantless surveillance of communications from abroad, the ACLU and other groups have targeted the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) that cooperate with the NSA in order to shut down the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Now the telecom industry wants immunity from these lawsuits: The nation’s biggest telecommunications companies, working closely with the White House, have mounted a secretive lobbying campaign to get Congress to quickly approve a measure wiping out all private lawsuits against them for assisting the U.S. intelligence community’s warrantless surveillance programs. The campaign-which involves some of Washington's most prominent lobbying and law firms-has taken on new urgency in recent weeks because of fears that a U.S. appellate court in San Francisco is poised to rule that the...

Come To Jihad, What's Old Is What's New

Infidels come from the strangest places! Osama bin Laden found a lot of them very close to home. In his latest video, OBL declares a holy war on Pervez Musharraf and the military clique ruling Pakistan, after his siege of the Red Mosque produced plenty of martyrs: Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden called on Pakistanis to wage a holy war against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in a new recording released Thursday, saying his military's siege of a militant mosque stronghold makes him an infidel. The storming of the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July "demonstrated Musharraf's insistence on continuing his loyalty, submissiveness and aid to America against the Muslims ... and makes armed rebellion against him and removing him obligatory," bin Laden said in the message. ... The message, titled "Come to Jihad," was the third from bin Laden this month in a flurry of videos and audiotapes marking the...

September 22, 2007

Pope Benedict Exposes Islamic Extremism

Poep Benedict XVI has returned to the traditional role of defender of the faith yesterday by challenging the inflexibility of Islam, which will not set well with Muslims. He demanded the end of second-class status for Christians in Muslim nations, and also insisted that Muslims have the legitimate right to convert to Christianity without fear of execution: Benedict XVI attacked Muslim nations where Christians are either persecuted or given the status of second-class citizens under the Shariah Islamic law. He also defended the rights of Muslims to convert to Christianity, an act which warrants the death penalty in many Islamic countries. His comments came almost exactly a year after he provoked a wave of anger among Muslims by quoting a Byzantine emperor who linked Islam to violence. Yesterday, near Rome, the 80-year-old pontiff made a speech in "defence of religious liberty", which, he said "is a fundamental, irrepressible, inalienable and...

September 24, 2007

Pervez' Pervasive Problems

Today brings lots of news from Pakistan, and almost all of it bad. Pervez Musharraf has cleared a legal hurdle for his election bid, but he has thrown political opponents of all stripes in jail to prepare for it. American intel sources tell the Los Angeles Times that he has backed away from pursuing al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against him, as he realizes that Osama's popularity outstrips his own in Pakistan: Political turmoil and a spate of brazen attacks by Taliban fighters are forcing Pakistan's president to scale back his government's pursuit of Al Qaeda, according to U.S. intelligence officials who fear that the terrorist network will be able to accelerate its efforts to rebuild and plot new attacks. The development threatens a pillar of U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, which has depended on Pakistan to play a lead role in keeping Al Qaeda under pressure to reduce...

September 25, 2007

Would A Columbia Appearance Have Avoided WWII?

One of the sillier defenses of yesterday's appearance by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University came from the man who initiated the Ahmadinejad speech. Over the weekend, John Coatsworth, acting dean of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, suggested that had Columbia invited Adolf Hitler to Columbia in 1939, he would not have underestimated the will of the American people and would have avoided declaring war on the US. Bret Stephens addresses this in today's OpinionJournal: Let's assume, however, that Hitler had used the occasion of his speech not just to dissimulate but to really air his mind, to give vent not just to Germany's historical grievances but to his own apocalyptic ambitions. In "Terror and Liberalism" (2003), Columbia alumnus Paul Berman observes the way in which prewar French socialists--keenly aware and totally opposed to Hitler's platform--nonetheless took the view that Germany had to be accommodated and that the...

September 26, 2007

Taliban Loss Ratio Worsens To 165:1

The Taliban launched two large-scale ambushes on Afghan and NATO forces in Helmand and Uruzgan provinces this week. Mullah Omar may have wanted to see his metrics improve from the 100-1 loss ratio in Kandahar last month. Well, those numbers certainly changed -- from humiliating to catastrophic: Two battles killed more than 165 Taliban fighters and a U.S.-led coalition soldier in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday as President Hamid Karzai prepared to discuss the escalating violence with President Bush in New York. One of the clashes began Tuesday when several dozen insurgents attacked a joint coalition-Afghan patrol with machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades near the Taliban-controlled town of Musa Qala in Helmand province, with Taliban reinforcements flowing in all day, a coalition statement said. The coalition returned artillery fire and called in fighter aircraft, killing more than 100 of the Taliban fighters, the coalition said. One coalition soldier was killed...

September 29, 2007

Taliban Changes Tactics, Karzai Offers A Deal

The Taliban has seen itself decimated in attempting straight-up fights against Western forces. Some have wondered why Mullah Omar doesn't just adopt the tactics of al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and focus on suicide bombings. Apparently, Omar has decided to do just that, and one of his terrorists killed 30 people in Kabul this morning: A Taliban suicide bomber wearing an Afghan army uniform set off a huge explosion Saturday while trying to board a military bus in the capital, killing 30 people, most of them soldiers, officials said. Hours later, the Afghan president offered to meet personally with the Taliban leader for peace talks and give the militants a position in government. ... Saturday's explosion ripped off the roof of the bus and tore out its sides, leaving a charred hull of burnt metal. It was reminiscent of the deadliest insurgent attack in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001...

October 2, 2007

Maybe This Time He Means It?

Pervez Musharraf, facing a parliamentary revolt after winning his legal petitions to run for the presidency on Saturday, named his replacement as army chief of staff today. Musharraf has made promises to step down in the past, but never has gone quite so far as to name his successor: Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has named his successor to take over as army chief, the military says. The appointee is former head of intelligence Lt Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, military spokesman Maj Gen Waheed Arshad told the BBC. Gen Musharraf will resign as head of the army if he wins presidential elections on Saturday, his lawyers say. The choice of Kiani will reassure Musharraf's Western allies. Kiani has a reputation as a hard-core Musharraf loyalist, which will hopefully keep military policy stable in the transition to civilian government. Kiana has run the army's intelligence service, which gives him even more credibility...

October 4, 2007

Will The Saudi Fatwa Stop The Jihadis?

Michael Jacobson at the excellent Counterterrorism Blog reports that the most influential cleric in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia has published a fatwa ordering would-be jihadists to stay at home rather than travel for holy war. Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Asheikh appears to have contradicted Saudi government insistence that their subjects have not contributed to the terrorism in Iraq, and may embarrass the royal family into making a better effort at stopping the traffic in terrorists (via Instapundit): Earlier this week, Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Asheikh – the most senior Wahhabi cleric in Saudi Arabia -- released a rather surprising religious edict. In this fatwa, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia instructed Saudis not to leave the Kingdom to participate in jihad – a statement directed primarily at those considering going to Iraq. Al-Asheikh said that he decided to speak up, “after it was clear that over several years Saudis have been leaving for jihad” and...

Settlement Imposes Silence

The families of the 9/11 victims at the World Trade Center and Pentagon who sued American Airlines have settled their suits against them. American Airlines and other contractors involved in security will pay an undisclosed sum to the victims and pledge to continue improving security. However, they will also avoid having to admit any negligence, and the evidence will remain sealed -- which seems inimical to the plaintiffs' stated motives. At Heading Right, I explore why this settlement bothers me. The families of 9/11 have the right to act in their own self-interest, but their continued insistence that the truth means more to them than money seems at odds with the sealed depositions. What did they learn? How did the airline and airport fail on 9/11, if they did at all? These particular families are not the only people with standing on 9/11. If the depositions revealed failures, we should...

October 5, 2007

Selective Leaking At The New York Times: Another War At Home?

On Wednesday, I received a proof copy of Kenneth Timmerman's new book, Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender, which tells the tale of the alleged war against the Bush administration within the CIA and State Department. Timmerman is always a fascinating read, but I just haven't had the chance to get to the book yet. Yesterday's leak by the New York Times on confidential memos on interrogation techniques reminds me that I have to get to it, as does their follow-up today: The disclosure of secret Justice Department legal opinions on interrogation on Thursday set off a bitter round of debate over the treatment of terrorism suspects in American custody and whether Congress has been adequately informed of legal policies. Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded to see the classified memorandums, disclosed Thursday by The New York Times, that gave the Central Intelligence Agency...

October 6, 2007

A Look Back At Interrogation History

The Washington Post has an article which reminds us that history continues to reveal itself even after we think the story has been told in its entirety, especially in small but intriguing ways. The veterans of PO Box 1142, a highly secret operation which interrogated high-value Nazi detainees, have just begun to speak about their experiences after honoring their commitment to silence for six decades (via Memeorandum): The veterans of P.O. Box 1142, a top-secret installation in Fairfax County that went only by its postal code name, were brought back to Fort Hunt by park rangers who are piecing together a portrait of what happened there during the war. Nearly 4,000 prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, were brought in for questioning for days, even weeks, before their presence was reported to the Red Cross, a process that did not comply with the Geneva Conventions. Many...

October 7, 2007

Democrats Respond On FISA

The Democrats have proposed a different approach to FISA reform for its February renewal. The initiative they have floated would remove the requirement for individual warrants for foreign communication passing through American switches by granting a year-long "umbrella warrant". It still leaves telecom providers vulnerable to lawsuits for cooperating with the NSA, a sticking point that will create another heated debate: House Democrats plan to introduce a bill this week that would let a secret court issue one-year "umbrella" warrants to allow the government to intercept e-mails and phone calls of foreign targets and would not require that surveillance of each person be approved individually. The bill is likely to resurrect controversy that erupted this summer when Congress, under White House pressure, rushed through a temporary emergency law that expanded the government's authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil without a warrant. The Protect America Act, which expires in...

October 8, 2007

Nuts On The Run

Amir Taheri believes that an assassination in Syria reveals how desperate al-Qaeda has become. His column in today's New York Post reviews the life of the late and unlamented Muhammad Gul Aghasi, who helped channel foreign jihadists into Iraq through Syria until his untimely demise at the hands of unknown assailants ended his distribution business for AQ (via Newsbeat1): UNKNOWN gunmen murdered Muhammad Gul Aghasi - one of the key "theologians" of al Qaeda - at a mosque in northern Syria last month. Candidates for the fiery preacher's killing include rivals within his own radical group, agents of the Americans - and his Syrian hosts. Whatever the truth, this is bad news for the already ailing al Qaeda. Born in 1973, Aghasi, who was of mixed Kurdish-Turkmen ethnic stock, studied Islamic theology in Damascus in the 1990s before traveling to Pakistan, where he established contact with the Taliban and al...

October 9, 2007

Leak Destroys Obelisk Penetration

UPDATE: The WaPo story says that Katz sent this to the White House on 9/7, but the ABC transcript is dated 9/6. Maybe that's why ABC credited "intelligence sources" rather than "senior White House officials" in its report. Apparently, the US already had the tape before SITE offered it to the White House. (Via Hot Air) The leak of Osama bin Laden's video to the news media last month has shut down an important private penetration into al-Qaeda's communication network. SITE, run by an Israeli whose father was murdered by Saddam Hussein, shared the video with American intelligence on a confidential basis. Hours after its release to the public, observers watched as AQ shut down its Obelisk network as the terrorists realized it had been compromised: The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance...

October 12, 2007

AQ Breach Not 'Fatal'

Eli Lake at the New York Sun follows up today on the exposure of private efforts to penetrate al-Qaeda's global Internet network. An independent analytical group that has focused on AQ operations now says that the damage was not as bad as first thought: One of the world's foremost authorities on Al Qaeda says that last month's compromise of the intelligence community's penetration of the terrorist group's Internet communication system was a serious blow, but that, ultimately, the damage was not fatal. The head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, Rohan Gunaratna, said in an interview yesterday that the damage done on September 7, when ABC News published online quotes from a transcript of Osama bin Laden's first speech in three years, was "reparable." But he also called it a "serious breach." "This has happened from time to time," Mr. Gunaratna...

October 15, 2007

Conversation With A Suicide Bomber

Aaron Klein, author of Schmoozing With Terrorists, met with a suicide-bomber recruit in Jenin to discover what drives volunteers to kill civilians in the name of Allah. Tomorrow, WND plans to publish excerpts from the book's first chapter in which Klein relates his conversation with Ahmed, as well as with Ahmed's recruiter, Abu Ayman, the head of Islamic Jihad in Jenin. Here's a taste of what we can expect in the interview: AHMED: The will to scarify myself for Allah is the first and most major reason. It is true that the Zionists are occupying our lands and that it is our religious duty to fight them, including through suicide attacks. The goal is not the killing of the Jews, but that this is the way to reach Allah. The goal is satisfying Allah and his instructions. No money interests, nothing. No brainwash, no pressure; it is my decision. All...

October 17, 2007

Genocide Resolution Losing Steam

The bill condemning Turkey for the Armenian genocide of 1915 has begun to lose support and may not have enough Democrats on board to pass. A group of Democrats will hold a press conference later today asking House leadership to table the motion in light of the disastrous impact it might have on our military efforts in Iraq and our relationship with the one Muslim democracy in the Middle East: Worried about antagonizing Turkish leaders, House members from both parties have begun to withdraw their support from a resolution supported by the Democratic leadership that would condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians nearly a century ago. Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure over the last 24 hours, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some representatives made clear that they were heeding warnings from the White House, which has...

October 18, 2007

Feds Not Doing Homework On Virginia Madrassa?

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommends that Congress take action to shut down a notorious Saudi-financed school in Virginia for teaching hatred and intolerance. Its report notes that schools in Saudi Arabia routinely use textbooks that contain inaccurate and hostile interpretations of Judaism and Christianity, and that these same texts are used in the Virginia madrassa. But are they, and did the USCIRF bother to check before filing its report? A private Islamic school supported by the Saudi government should be shut down until the U.S. government can ensure the school is not fostering radical Islam, a federal panel recommends. In a report released Thursday, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom broadly criticized what it calls a lack of religious freedom in Saudi society and promotion of religious extremism at Saudi schools. Particular criticism is leveled at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school serving nearly 1,000...

October 21, 2007

The Kosovo Card

The US has tired of NATO waffling on their commitment to Afghanistan. Robert Gates has decided to end the US participation in Kosovo if our European partners refuse to meet their obligations in Afghanistan, transferring over 1100 soldiers from the Balkans to the fight against the Taliban: U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates will consider shifting U.S. troops from Kosovo to Afghanistan next year if NATO allies do not fulfill their commitments, U.S. government officials said. Gates, in Ukraine on Sunday to ask eastern European countries for help in the war, had first considered laying the threat before NATO defense ministers this week at a meeting in the Netherlands, senior U.S. officials said. But upon the advice of senior military officers, the Pentagon chief has extended the U.S. commitment to Kosovo to summer 2008. If NATO allies have not sent more troops, trainers and equipment to Afghanistan by then, Washington will...

October 22, 2007

Holy Land Trial Debacle?

The trial of Muslim fundraisers accused of channeling monies to terrorists has ended in confusion and probable mistrial. Immediately after announcing an acquittal on most charges, three jurors repudiated the verdicts, creating havoc in the courtroom: Jurors found three former leaders of a group that was once the nation's largest Muslim charity not guilty of funneling illegal aid to terrorists, but the panel was sent back to deliberate on the other defendants after three jurors said the verdicts read in court were wrong. Because of the confusion, the judge has not officially accepted those verdicts, which aquitted chairman Mohammed El-Mezain on all counts and two other defendants on most: Mohammed El-Mezain, the group's New Jersey representative, and Abdulrahman Odeh; and fundraiser Mufid Abdulqader. ... When jurors came into the courtroom earlier Monday, the judge read the verdicts, but three jurors said those findings were not correct. U.S. District Judge A....

Imperialist Osama, Losing The War

According to ABC News, Osama has begun singing a different tune in his latest missive to the ummah. Bin Laden's video and audio messages usually contain plenty of triumphalism for Islamists, but in a new message to his fellow terrorists, he sounds a little more desperate about their prospects: Showing apparent signs of concern over events in Iraq, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden urged insurgents to "unite your lines into one" in an audiotape played on al Jazeera Monday. "Don't be arrogant," bin Laden warned. "Your enemies are trying to break up the jihadi groups. I urge you all to work in one united group." People familiar with bin Laden's voice say the tape appeared to be authentic, although there was no reference to any event that would indicate when it was recorded. Bin Laden's message comes at a time when U.S. strategy to split Iraqi insurgent groups from...

October 24, 2007

Osama's New Jihad

Osama bin Laden has decided to expand his jihad to his old hangout of Sudan, according to the latest tape from the al-Qaeda leader. He has called for a holy war against the "occupation" of Darfur by the UN, demanding that Muslims in the country attack the peacekeepers once they arrive: Osama bin Laden has issued a fresh call for a "holy war" against a new 26,000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur, which will include British support staff. In a new audiotape, the al-Qa'eda leader also said Muslims in Sudan and its neighbours must target the Khartoum government for agreeing to the deployment. "This is a brazen occupation, and only an infidel apostate seeks it or agrees to it," bin Laden said, according to a new translation of comments made on Monday. "It is the duty of the people of Islam in the Sudan and its environs, especially the Arabian Peninsula,...

October 25, 2007

Al-Jazeera, Tool Of The Infidel

How desperate have the Islamist terrorist nutcases become? They have flooded al-Jazeera with threats and obloquy after hearing AJ broadcast the latest tape from Osama bin Laden. They refuse to acknowledge the pleading from their leader that signals his dejection, claiming that the Arabic news agency misrepresented the message: Al-Qaida sympathizers have unleashed a torrent of anger against Al-Jazeera television, accusing it of misrepresenting Osama bin Laden's latest audiotape by airing excerpts in which he criticizes mistakes by insurgents in Iraq. Users of a leading Islamic militant Web forum posted thousands of insults against the pan-Arab station for focusing on excerpts in which bin Laden criticizes insurgents, including his followers. Analysts said the reaction highlighted militants' surprise at bin Laden's words, and their dismay at the deep divisions among al-Qaida and other Iraqi militants that he appeared to be trying to heal. "It's not about Al-Jazeera, it's about their shock...

October 28, 2007

The Taliban Ambush -- A New Oxymoron

The Taliban staged another ambush outside of their main remaining stronghold at Musa Qala on encircling NATO forces -- with predictable results. Once again proving that surprise doesn't guarantee success, the Taliban forces lost 80 fighters, while the Coalition casualties remained at zero: Taliban fighters opened fire on Saturday with machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades on the joint coalition and Afghan army patrol from a trench near Musa Qala in Helmand province, the most important town held by insurgents. "The combined patrol immediately returned fire, maneuvered, and employed close air support resulting in almost seven dozen Taliban fighters killed during a six hour engagement," the U.S. military statement said. Such large pitched battles are relatively rare in Afghanistan, where the Taliban prefer to "shoot and scoot" before air strikes can be called in. But analysts say the insurgents are expected to fight hard to defend Musa Qala, in the north of...

A Complication Of Imprecision

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter -- and the State Department finally has discovered this truth. In a long-overdue act, State has forgiven the "terrorism" of the Hmong and Montagnards who fought so bravely beside us in Southeast Asia, allowing them to enter the country and allowing those already here to become legal residents. Not for the first time, imprecise language in war and government created unintended consequences: One of the trickier battles in the war on terror has been the legal identification of friends and enemies. Under current U.S. law, people who provide "material support" to terrorists are deemed terrorists themselves -- even if the groups they're helping are freedom fighters, agitating for causes that the U.S. government supports. This has caused hardships among two worthy peoples to whom the U.S. owes a debt of gratitude: Hmong refugees from Laos and Montagnards from Vietnam. The Hmong and...

October 29, 2007

When The Saudis Say You're Not Serious ....

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah will arrive in Britain later today, but he helped amplify the controversy surrounding his state visit before he sets foot in London. He accused the British government of ignoring intelligence from the Saudis that could have prevented the London transit bombings in 2005, and claimed that the UK has not taken terrorism seriously: Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah accused Britain of not taking terrorism seriously enough Monday, hours before arriving in London for a controversial state visit. In a BBC interview prior to his arrival, the king said his country had given Britain information which could have prevented the 2005 London suicide bombings, in which 52 innocent people died, but the authorities had failed to act on it. ... Asked about the terrorist threat, the king told the BBC through an interpreter: "I believe most countries are not taking this issue too seriously including, unfortunately, Great Britain....

October 30, 2007

Project Valour-IT -- A Cause Made For The Blogosphere

The annual Project Valour-IT fundraising competition began this weekend -- and this ship forgot to leave the dock! Soldier's Angels conducts an annual drive to raise funds for a great cause, one that seems tailor-made for the blogosphere. Project Valour-IT purchases voice-activated laptops for wounded soldiers, allowing them a vital tool for productivity and self-confidence. It would be difficult to think of a better way for bloggers and their readers to provide assistance and show gratitude for the sacrifices made by our men and women in the military. Last year, Captain's Quarters joined the Marine Corps team [see update below]. This year, however, I've decided to join the Navy (and see the world!) The Navy team has gotten off to a slow start, much like this blog, so I'm hoping for fair winds and a big push from the readers. Donate what you can to a great cause! UPDATE: Apparently,...

Silver's Surrender Strategy

Ron Silver joins the blogosphere at Pajamas Media today by offering what he thinks would be a winning strategy for the war on terror -- surrender. In a satirical look at making the world like America, Silver offers a six-step plan to boost our popularity by simply giving terrorists what they want: The presidential electoral cycle is upon us. That means conventions. Conventions have platforms. I propose a platform that will make the world like us again. Just like they always did. It may take 12 steps to get clean and sober, but only 6 to make the world realize just how super the U.S. can be. The strategy? Give Andalusia, aka Spain, back to the Islamists, as well as the Balkans and eastern Europe. It used to be theirs anyway, and this can be like reparations! Withdraw from the Pacific, since we just annoy the Chinese. Get rid of...

October 31, 2007

Madrid Mastermind Walks

The Spanish court trying the remaining suspects in the deadly Madrid bombings convicted the actual perpetrators today, sentencing them to gaudy terms that wind up being no more than 40 years each. The man who planned the attacks, and whose voice could be heard on wiretaps bragging about it, won an acquittal: One of the accused masterminds of the 2004 Madrid terror bombings was acquitted of all charges today by a Spanish court in the culmination to a politically divisive trial over Europe's worst Islamic militant terror attack. Rabei Osman, a 35-year-old Egyptian, allegedly bragged during a wiretapped phone conversation that the attacks, which killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800, were his idea. Twenty-eight people were charged in the attacks. Four lead defendants in the bombings were found guilty of murder and other charges, each handed sentences that stretched into the thousands of years in the day of...

SERE Instructor: Waterboarding Is Torture

With the subject of torture at the forefront of the confirmation hearings for Michael Mukasey, whether waterboarding qualifies has become the stumbling point. Senator John McCain has insisted that it does constitute torture and therefore should explicitly be illegal, while others argue that it should be kept as a non-lethal and safe form of interrogation for terrorists, especially in so-called ticking bomb scenarios. Proponents often argue -- as I have in the past -- that the commando forces of our military waterboard volunteers for their units as part of their training at Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE). Today, however, one of the instructors who deliver that training speaks out in the New York Daily News to affirm McCain's interpretation -- and to denounce its use as an interrogation technique. Malcolm Nance of the blog Small Wars Journal insists that the technique is lethal in all but the most...

November 2, 2007

Maybe They're Re-Enactors

The Islamists in Pakistan's Swat region have taken some tough blows in the past few days, losing over 70 fighters while their leader, Maulana Fazlullah, ran off to avoid the Pakistani Army. They desperately need some good publicity and a way to undermine military morale. Capturing dozens of soldiers would certainly do the trick -- but faking it might be easier: Islamic militants said Friday they had freed 48 government troops after they surrendered during fighting in northwestern Pakistan, a region increasingly falling under the control of extremists who are challenging Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. ... They escorted journalists to two-story concrete building in the town of Charabagh to show off 48 men said to have surrendered during the fighting. Most were described as paramilitary troops from the Frontier Corps, and were freed later. "We have surrendered to these mujahedeen," said Barkat Ullah, 24, who, like other captives, was...

November 4, 2007

Taliban Removal Saving 90,000 Children Per Year

The removal of the Taliban ended the brutal application of shari'a law that resulted in executions, mutilations, and oppression for Afghanistan's adults. Now a new study by Johns Hopkins University shows that the destruction of the Taliban saves thousands of children every year through access to modern medicine. The mortality rate for children under five years of age dropped by 25% in the five years since 2001: Close to 90,000 children who would have died before age 5 in Afghanistan during Taliban rule will stay alive this year because of advances in medical care in the country, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday. The under-5 child mortality rate in Afghanistan has declined from an estimated 257 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2001 to about 191 per 1,000 in 2006, the Ministry of Public Health said, relying on a new study by Johns Hopkins University. The U.N. and aid agency...

November 5, 2007

Waterboarding And SERE School: Upcoming Post

Last week, I linked to Malcolm Nance's article on waterboarding and torture in the New York Daily News, and the comment section erupted in debate. Two criticisms got repeated airings in the comments section: that Nance had not properly described waterboarding, and that he had violated confidentiality agreements in discussing SERE training. Since last week, I have contacted two sources on the subject, one a SEAL for over 30 years and the other a former SERE instructor. In the next day or so, I will have a lengthy post in response to this issue. It's safe to say that both sources found Nance's column appalling, and for similar reasons -- and had a lot more to say about the current debate. Keep your eyes open for more on this topic soon here at Captain's Quarters....

November 6, 2007

Death To Israel Is Just Step One Of Al-Qaeda Manual

Ray Ibrahim has painstakingly translated hundreds of previously unreleased al-Qaeda documents that he found in a search of the Library of Congress. His efforts led to the publication of The Al Qaeda Reader, published in August. He told a recent George Washington University audience that these documents address jihadis directly and have a much different message than the propaganda AQ aims at the West (via Newsbeat1): The documents address many ideas supported by Al Qaeda, such as suicide bombings and violence against the west. Bin Laden and his allies use Muslim beliefs and laws to show that these actions are acceptable in certain cases, Ibrahim said. He said the documents offer three options for non-Muslims - submit to Islam, live under Islam or die. "The bottom line is the West is damned if they do and damned if they don't unless they accept the three choices," Ibrahim said. ... In...

Time For The F-22

The Pentagon has grounded its mainstay of air defense after an F-15 fighter disintegrated in flight during a training mission in Missouri. The pilot survived, but the F-15 fleet may not. Most of the 688 aircraft have already lived far beyond their design life, but Congress has shown great reluctance to spend the money necessary to upgrade to the F-22: The Air Force has grounded its entire fleet of F-15s, the service's premier fighter aircraft, after one of the planes disintegrated over eastern Missouri during a training mission, raising the possibility of a fatal flaw in the aging fighters' fuselage that could keep it out of the skies for months. Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, ordered the grounding Saturday after initial reports indicated that the Missouri Air National Guard fighter plane had broken apart Friday in midair during a simulated dogfight. The pilot ejected...

November 10, 2007

'We Can't Afford To Look Back 1,400 Years'

Six weeks ago, terror struck the archipelago nation of the Maldives, a popular tourist resort nation comprising hundreds of islands in the Indian Ocean. A bombing attack and a riot involving radical Islamists in the same week have put this sleepy, hospitable, moderate Muslim nation on the front lines of the war on terror, and they are not at all happy about it. They face the loss of their standard of living if the radical Islamists succeed in pushing the Maldives back to the 7th century: On Sept. 29, the two faces of the Maldives collided when a homemade bomb exploded in a park in the capital, Male, wounding 12 tourists, threatening the critical resort industry and sending the clear message that even this remote corner of paradise is not immune to terrorism. The attack, and a bloody confrontation days later between police and masked Islamic extremists armed with harpoons,...

November 12, 2007

Nigeria Busts An Al-Qaeda Ring

The war on terror shifts to Nigeria today, as the African nation announced it has captured a ring of al-Qaeda terrorists red-handed with explosives. Investigators cast a wide net and captured alleged terrorists in three different states. The men have suspected links to the Nigerian Taliban, unaffiliated with the Afghanistan/Pakistan version that got chased out of power following the 9/11 attacks: A group of militants with suspected links to al-Qaeda in northern Nigeria has been arrested according to Nigeria's internal security service. A State Security Service spokesman said men in three states were detained and explosive-making devices were found. Nigeria has not suffered a terrorist attack and despite occasional arrests of suspected Islamic militants there is no evidence of al-Qaeda in Nigeria. In September, the US embassy warned Nigeria is at risk of a terror attack. A group of Islamic militants were found with fertiliser and explosive-making devices, following investigations...

November 13, 2007

Waterboarding: Two Other Perspectives

Earlier, I wrote about the practice of waterboarding after reading a piece in the New York Daily News by Malcolm Nance. Nance, who served as an instructor at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE), wrote that he considered the practice to be torture, without question, and therefore illegal. Given his description of the practice, I thought he made a good argument. A number of commenters questioned Nance's conclusions, description, and qualifications, and I decided to get a second opinion. Fortunately, I have a resource for more information on this issue. Captain's Quarters readers will remember Mike the SEAL, who has served this nation in several capacities, including as a decades-long member of the elite commando team as well as a first responder in his community. Mike wrote several extensive posts here at Captain's Quarters while overseas in various capacities in 2004 and 2005. I'm fortunate enough to count...

November 14, 2007

US Attorney: Mukasey Had It Right

Mary Jo White, the former US Attorney that won convictions against the Blind Sheikh and his gang of radical Islamist terrorists in the first attack on the World Trade Center, writes that new Attorney General Michael Mukasey had it right when he refused to issue a blanket interpretation of waterboarding as illegal. She explains that Congress has not made it that simple, and that the Judiciary Committee unfairly placed the responsibility on the executive branch. White insists that no easy answers exist on interrogative techniques. At Heading Right, I agree with White, who argues much the same point I have over the last few weeks. White complains about the ambiguity that Congress has created and argues that Mukasey can't be held responsible for Congress' failure to provide a yes-or-no option to their question. White understands what happens when ambiguity reigns at the juncture of intelligence, law enforcement, and questions of...

November 18, 2007

The Altered Calculus Of Risk

The Times of London has a fascinating look at the war on terror from the perspective of Tony Blair. The former British Prime Minister still believes that the US and the UK acted correctly in removing Saddam Hussein, and in fact it matched his own long-stated policy of pre-emptive action in defense of the West when obvious threats arose. The calculus of risk changed dramatically after 9/11, a change that most people still fail to understand (via Memeorandum): It was 9/11 that created the political bond. “The moment I saw what was unfolding and realised the scale of it,” Blair told me, “I felt a really deep sense of mission.” It was clear to him immediately, he said, what it was he had to do. With Bush showing, in those early days, a restraint and a focus that hadn’t been expected of him, Blair toured the world helping to put...

November 19, 2007

The Nonexistent Ballad Of Jihad Jane

In another era, Nada Prouty might have had songs written about her. In this era, one struggles to find newspaper coverage of the woman the New York Post has dubbed Jihad Jane. Prouty has pled guilty to a number of charges stemming from her attempts to retrieve classified information on Hezbollah while working at the FBI and CIA -- and that may not be the extent of the damage from Jihad Jane: FBI fraudster Nada Nadim Prouty not only used a sham marriage to get jobs with access to secret terrorist intelligence - her current husband is a State Department employee who has held sensitive posts in Middle Eastern embassies, The Post has learned. Her third hubby, Gordon Prouty, 40, now works for the State Department in Washington, a spokesman confirmed Friday night. He had been stationed at American embassies in Egypt and Pakistan. A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd,...

Britain Tackles Domestic Terror

The British have always had a soft spot for animals, and have led the movement to treat them as humanely as possible. For that reason, the British have long shown tolerance for terrorist tactics of animal-rights activists, including bombings, blackmail, and character assassination. According to Der Spiegel, that appears to be changing. A new countering movement has rapidly gained favor among the British, who may have had their fill of terrorists altogether: The British are waging a new war on terror, but this one is at home and is one in which they appear to be gaining the upper hand. When it comes to animal experiments, militant groups like the Animal Liberation Front, founded in 1976, have long enjoyed extensive support and a monopoly on opinion rarely questioned in public. Even when they resorted to extreme measures like setting fires or sending letter bombs, they could consistently bank on a...

November 23, 2007

Uttar Pradesh In Coordinated Terror Attack

The largest state in India suffered a series of bombings that appeared coordinated and targeted at the legal system. Five attacks occurred within minutes of each other, a hallmark of al-Qaeda plots: At least 10 people were killed and more than 50 injured today in as many as five nearly simultaneous bomb blasts outside court houses in three cities in northern India, the authorities said. All were in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state. The first blast went off in the state capital, Lucknow, at 1:05 p.m., just outside the entrance to the city court house, near a bicycle stand used by lawyers to park their bikes. Noone was killed. Television stations broadcast images of lawyers, dressed in their formal legal uniform of black suits, high collars and white ties, fleeing from the area, which was devastated by the blast. Two more explosions went off within five minutes. One...

November 24, 2007

Just North Of South

BBC correspondent Brian Barron gives his impressions of Yemen in a dispatch today that suffers from a little too much soul-searching over the lack of soles. Barron seems preoccupied with his feet and less interested in reporting on the impulses that pushes Yemen to the forefront of the war on terror. After he finally finds a "decent pair of British size 10", the issues facing Yemen finally come into focus: Piety prevails today. Yemen seems in the grip of an almost feverish bout of mosque building. One Sanaa columnist reckons 50,000 mosques have risen across the nation, compared with 12,000 new schools. ... To the north lie rich neighbours like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, though Yemen remains one of the world's poorest countries. To the south, just across the Gulf of Aden, lies the failed state of Somalia and troubled Ethiopia. With corruption allegedly on a huge scale,...

November 25, 2007

The Turkish Laundry

The Times of London has an intriguing article today based on a series of interviews with a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative currently detained near Istanbul. Louai al-Sakka could be the biggest terrorist of which no one has heard, or an egomaniacal lunatic given to flights of fancy. If the former, he may hold the key to a number of AQ plots, including 9/11, and show how AQ uses Turkey as a terrorist laundromat (via Memeorandum): Since being convicted as an Al-Qaeda bomb plotter last year, Sakka has decided to reveal his alleged role in some of the key plots of recent years, providing a potential insight into the unanswered questions surrounding them. His story is also one of a globetrotting terrorist in an organisation that is truly multinational. He is an enigma and, despite his involvement in three terrorist outrages involving British citizens, he is virtually unknown in this country. By...

November 26, 2007

The Islamist Plot To Attack -- Arizona?

The Washington Times serves up a nice, juicy slab of red meat to conservatives today with an exposé of an Islamist plot to attack the US through Mexico. According to Sara Carter, Fort Huachuca had to change its security procedures after determining that radical Islamists had forges an alliance with Mexican drug cartels to attack it. The US has detained Afghans and Iraqis in Texas after detaining them in connection to the plot: Fort Huachuca, the nation's largest intelligence-training center, changed security measures in May after being warned that Islamist terrorists, with the aid of Mexican drug cartels, were planning an attack on the facility. Fort officials changed security measures after sources warned that possibly 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists were to be smuggled into the U.S. through underground tunnels with high-powered weapons to attack the Arizona Army base, according to multiple confidential law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington...

November 29, 2007

Former Soviet Uranium For Sale In Slovakia

Slovakian authorities arrested three men in connection to a plot to sell radioactive material that could have formed the core of a terrorist weapon. Two Hungarians and a Ukrainian tried to sell almost a pound of uranium powder that would have served as the center of a so-called "dirty bomb", one that would spread radioactive material to contaminate inhabited areas. So far, the target of the trio's marketing remains unclear: Two Hungarians and a Ukrainian arrested in an attempted sale of uranium were peddling material enriched enough to be used in a radiological "dirty bomb," Slovak authorities said Thursday. First Slovak Police Vice President Michal Kopcik said the three suspects, who were arrested Wednesday afternoon in eastern Slovakia and Hungary, were peddling just under a pound of uranium in powder form that investigators believe came from somewhere in the former Soviet Union.... It remained unclear to whom the suspects were...

Give Up, And We'll Consider It A Deal

Osama bin Laden seems rather desperate to get the Western nations out of Afghanistan. In a new audio tape partially released by al-Jazeera, Osama tells Europeans that the American-led invasion of Afghanistan was unfair, because Mullah Omar's government didn't know about the 9/11 plot. Osama insists that he kept it very quiet: Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden called on the Europeans to stop helping the United States in the war in Afghanistan, according to excerpts of a new audiotape broadcast Thursday on Al-Jazeera television. Bin Laden said it was unjust for the United States to have invaded Afghanistan for sheltering him after the 9/11 attacks, saying he was the "only one responsible" for the deadly assaults on New York and Washington. "The events of Manhattan were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance's aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, and I am the only one responsible for it. The Afghan...

November 30, 2007

More Bad News For Democrats On War

If Democrats hoped to ride a wave of discontent on the war to electoral victory in 2008, they may face a harsh awakening. New Rasmussen polling released yesterday shows a surge in confidence among American voters in the war, reaching its highest levels in two years. A small plurality now believes that Iraq will continue to improve, a far cry from just four months ago: The latest Rasmussen Reports tracking poll finds that 47% of Americans now say the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror (see crosstabs). That’s up from 43% a month ago and reflects is the highest level of confidence measured since December 2005. Over the past 35 months, confidence in the War on Terror has been higher than today only twice, in November and December 2005. The 47% who believe the U.S. and its allies are winning is up significantly from earlier in...

December 5, 2007

Paintballing With The Stars Of The Jihad

The BBC paid for a paintball trip that included men now accused of training Islamic extremists for terrorism. The British television network included the activity in its "Don't Panic, I'm Islamic" reality series that poked fun at Western Islamophobia. In this case, however, the "joke" is on the Beeb (via Memeorandum): The BBC funded a paintballing trip for men later accused of Islamic terrorism and failed to pass on information about the 21/7 bombers to police, a court was told yesterday. Mohammed Hamid, who is charged with overseeing a two-year radicalisation programme to prepare London-based Muslim youths for jihad, was described as a “cockney comic” by a BBC producer. The BBC paid for Mr Hamid and fellow defendants Muhammad al-Figari and Mousa Brown to go on a paintballing trip at the Delta Force centre in Tonbridge, Kent, in February 2005. The men, accused of terrorism training, were filmed for a...

December 7, 2007

CIA Channels Rose Mary Woods (Updated & Bumped)

The CIA finds itself under fire today after the New York Times forced Director Mike Hayden to admit that the agency destroyed two videotapes in 2005 showing terrorists undergoing waterboarding. The agency had previously denied any such tapes existed to all but a handful in Congress. Now the revelation could have far-reaching consequences, including on the conviction of Zacarias Moussaoui: The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials. The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose...

Reyes, Hoekstra Call Shenanigans On Hayden

Michael Hayden tried last night to defuse the controversy over the 2005 destruction of videotapes depicting the waterboarding of al-Qaeda terrorists by claiming that the CIA had worked with Congress in doing so. Not so fast, say Silvestre Reyes and Pete Hoekstra. Hoekstra chaired the House Intelligence Committee and Reyes took over Jane Harman's position on the committee -- and neither have any recollection that the CIA notified them at all: The CIA did not tell Congress about the destruction in 2005 of videotapes recording aggressive CIA interrogations of two Al Qaeda suspects until this year, the top two members of the House Intelligence Committee said in an angry letter Friday to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. Anticipating an upcoming New York Times article revealing the destruction, Hayden said in a memo to employees on Thursday that congressional oversight committees had been notified about the existence of the tapes and...

December 8, 2007

Tape Destruction Decision Compartmentalized

The decision to destroy the tapes of interrogations that included waterboarding two al-Qaeda terrorists came from the director of the clandestine services of the CIA and in opposition to requests from both Congress and the White House. Jose Rodriguez, the Director of Operations, made the decision without consulting the CIA's attorneys or the DCI, Porter Goss. While a member of Congress and head of the House Intelligence Committee, Goss had demanded that the CIA retain all such recordings: White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday. The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was...

December 9, 2007

Pelosi Briefed On Waterboarding In 2002, No Objections

The CIA briefed four Congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, on the controversial practice of waterboarding over five years ago. Not only did no one object to the practice during the September 2002 briefing, but one attendee asked the briefer whether the technique was tough enough: In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk. Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no...

Musa Qala Leaders Captured

NATO and Afghan forces captured two Taliban leaders in Musa Qala, the only city held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Their capture comes amid the long-awaited push to liberate Musa Qala and end its ten-month loss. The Taliban has been forced into the city center, and the coalition forces have patiently kept up the pressure: Two senior Taleban leaders have been captured in heavy fighting for the southern town of Musa Qala, the Afghan defence ministry has said. Afghan and Nato forces are trying to recapture the town, the only major centre in Taleban hands. ... The heavy blows from the ground and the air seem to have forced the Taleban to pull back closer to the centre of Musa Qala, but they say they withdrew from two frontline villages because of civilian casualties there. Nonetheless, Taleban commanders have said they will defend the town from fortified positions covered by...

December 10, 2007

NATO Enters Musa Qala

NATO forces, accompanied by Afghan troops, made it to the center of Musa Qala today. The Taliban have retreated to the city center, pressed in on all sides by a long-awaited NATO offensive on the only major piece of ground held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The liberation of the city will come after 10 months of Taliban rule: Afghan troops Monday entered the town of Musa Qala which had been captured by Taliban rebels 10 months ago and become a key insurgent base, the NATO-led force said. "The ANA (Afghan National Army) have entered the district centre. They are in the centre of the town," a spokesman for the NATO-led force, Major Charles Anthony, told AFP. The Afghan defence ministry issued a statement saying the Afghan and NATO troops had entered the Musa Qala district, of which the town is the centre, and had started cleaning up operations. Musa...

The Idiot Who Torpedoed The Holy Land Foundation Trial

I believe in the jury system, I really do. An overwhelming amount of the time, juries get it right, proving the wisdom of the common individual. No system achieves perfection, as we saw with the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and now we have another example in the strange mistrial in the Holy Land Foundation prosecution. Michael Fechter interviewed several of the jurors, and found the reason why a jury refuted its own reported verdicts -- an out-of-control juror who thinks Hamas and the founding fathers of this nation have a lot in common (via Memeorandum): While several jurors favored acquittals, just one out of the 12 did most of the knocking down. In fact, interviews with three HLF jurors - speaking publicly for the first time - suggest that juror William Neal's stridency may have changed the trial's outcome. Neal even claimed credit for steering jurors away from convictions in...

Is Waterboarding Torture Or Necessity? Yes

ABC News has an explosive interview with one of the men who interrogated al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah -- and he admits to waterboarding him. John Kiriakou says that he thinks waterboarding is torture, but that its use saved countless American lives and stopped perhaps dozens of attacks: A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary. In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds. "The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline." "From that day on, he answered...

December 11, 2007

Algerian Bombings Leave Dozens Dead

Two bombings rocked Algiers today, killing at least 27 people. The bombs targeted the Algerian capital's judiciary and UN refugee offices, and at least one of the explosions came from a suicide attack. That puts suspicion on the al-Qaeda affiliate, the GSPC: Two bomb attacks in the Algerian capital -- one on the UN refugee agency office and one in front of the Supreme Court -- killed at least 27 people Tuesday, officials and other sources said. Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni said a suicide bomber was used in at least one of the two attacks -- the latest in a series this year which have mostly been claimed by Al-Qaeda. "The death toll is very high," the minister told reporters. Zerhouni said a suicide bomber triggered the explosion outside the Algiers office of the UN Higher Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the attack. The GSPC (now calling itself al-Qaeda in...

Did The Gray Lady Get The Story Wrong?

The story of the CIA's tape destruction took another twist today. Earlier, Mark Mazzetti had written that the destruction of the tapes angered the CIA's legal counsel, John Rizzo. Today, Mazzetti and Scott Shane report that the CIA's attorneys gave permission to destroy the tapes of interrogations that included waterboarding: Lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting interrogations of two lieutenants from Al Qaeda, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode. The involvement of agency lawyers in the decision making would widen the scope of the inquiries into the matter that have now begun in Congress and within the Justice Department. Any written documents are certain to be a focus of government investigators as they try to reconstruct the events leading up to the...

Time For The CIA To Go?

Christopher Hitchens proposes a radical solution to the problem of spin-cycle NIEs and interagency feuding. Rather than continue with efforts to reform the intelligence community, Hitchens argues for the elimination of the CIA and rebuilding our intel efforts from the ground up. It seems like a radical step during a time of war, but the agency may now have angered enough people on both sides of the aisle to make it possible: And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the...

December 12, 2007

Another Assassination In Lebanon, Another Syrian Hit?

Has Bashar Assad struck again? A car bomb killed a Lebanese Army general expected to take command of the military in the settlement over the presidency. It recalls the string of assassinations against anti-Syrian political figures, most notably Rafik Hariri, that almost certainly have their origin in Damascus. However, this case may be somewhat different: A car bomb attack killed one of Lebanon's top military generals and at least two others Wednesday, the military and state media said, putting even more pressure on the country's delicate political situation. The target of the attack, Brig. Gen. Francois Hajj, a top Maronite Catholic in the command, was considered a leading candidate to succeed the head of the military, Gen. Michel Suleiman, if Suleiman is elected president. Hajj, 55, also led a major military campaign against Islamic militants over the summer. The blast is the first such attack against the Lebanese army, which...

Taliban Fail In Fallback

The Taliban lost their grip on the only significant Afghan territory they held, Musa Qala, earlier this week. Most of their forces withdrew rather than fight the combined NATO and Afghan forces that took back the Helmand city. Their effort to shift to a fallback position in Sangin, a neighboring town, has also failed: Afghan soldiers backed by NATO air power killed more than 50 Taliban fighters during a two-day battle with militants who tried to attack a southern Afghan town near the one they were routed from this week, Afghanistan's Defense Ministry said Wednesday. Afghan soldiers fought the insurgents in Sangin, a town in Helmand province that neighbors Musa Qala, which Taliban fighters had controlled since February before abandoning it this week in the face of an offensive by Afghan, British and U.S. forces. "When the terrorists were defeated in Musa Qala, they escaped to Sangin and started firing...

Hoekstra: Hayden's Got Some 'Splainin' To Do

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) tells Eli Lake that the CIA's explanations for the destruction of interrogation tapes and the reversal of the NIE conclusions on Iran haven't satisfied him at all. CIA Director Michael Hayden testifies today before Hoekstra's House Intelligence Committee, and he shouldn't expect many softballs from the ranking Republican. Hoekstra wants to know why the intelligence community has dashed its credibility: Following a 90-minute closed-door hearing yesterday in the Senate, Mr. Hayden told reporters that he laid out narrative for why the tapes were destroyed. But because both the recording and the destruction took place before he became director of the CIA, he could not provide all the answers to the questions from the Senators. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Rockefeller, a Democrat of West Virginia, said yesterday questions remained unanswered. Mr. Hoekstra also told The New York Sun that he told...

Fixing FISA

The new Attorney General takes to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to call for immediate action to solidify FISA reforms. Michael Mukasey emphasizes the critical nature of FISA in the war on terror and lauds the compromise legislation passed almost unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee. However, that bill has now stalled, thanks to attacks from the Left against Democrats who supported it, and Mukasey wants to see it passed: The Senate Intelligence Committee's bill is not perfect, and it contains provisions that I hope will be improved. However, it would achieve two important objectives. First, it would keep the intelligence gaps closed by ensuring that individual court orders are not required to direct surveillance at foreign targets overseas. Second, it would provide protections from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that have been sued simply because they are believed to have assisted our intelligence agencies after the 9/11 attacks....

December 13, 2007

Fair-Weather Friends

The intelligence community suspected that the fervor to protect the nation from terrorist attack would fade as they succeeded in doing so. That conundrum has proven true, as the agency takes fire for intel methods that had consensus support in the months after the 9/11 attack. It continues as the newspaper most responsible for anti-intelligence backlash now reports on the effect they've had on national security efforts (via Memeorandum): For six years, Central Intelligence Agency officers have worried that someday the tide of post-Sept. 11 opinion would turn, and their harsh treatment of prisoners from Al Qaeda would be subjected to hostile scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution. Now that day may have arrived, after years of shifting legal advice, searing criticism from rights groups — and no new terrorist attacks on American soil. The Justice Department, which in 2002 gave the C.I.A. legal approval for waterboarding and other tough interrogation...

December 14, 2007

The Quiet Victory Of Musa Qala

The NATO/Afghan coalition won an important victory this week in Musa Qala, held by the Taliban for almost ten months. Not only did they eject the Taliban from their one strategic position in Helmand, they also shut down an important source of funds for their continued fight against the democratic government in Kabul. Although the victory got plenty of play in the blogosphere, Investors Business Daily notices that it barely received a mention from the mainstream media: Far from just an important Taliban command post, Musa Qala was also a training base for both Afghan and foreign Islamist militants. Azimi has said hundreds of foreign terrorists had gathered there. That makes this week's victory a big win in the global war on terror. On top of that, though, is the fact that the town was home to as many as 70 heroin labs, profits from which were used to fund...

Congress Does Half The Right Thing -- In The Dark

Congress has finally authorized spending for the Iraq war without the demand to end the success of the Petraeus strategy. On a 90-3 vote in the Senate, the defense authorization bill finally left Congress and will make its way to the White House, with the money itself still not appropriated. That may take another Friday evening to produce: The Democratic-led Congress authorized more Iraq war spending on Friday, sending President Bush a defense bill requiring no change in strategy after failing again to impose a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals. The defense policy bill, approved 90-3 by the Senate, also expanded the size of the U.S. Army and set conditions on the Bush administration’s plan to build a missile defense system in Europe. The measure already had passed the House and now goes to Bush, who is expected to sign it into law. It authorizes Pentagon programs expected to cost...

December 15, 2007

The Terrorist Plot No One Talked About

A terrorist conspiracy to attack military sites and synagogues developed among prison Muslims for years, and yet hardly any mention of the conspiracy made the news. The Los Angeles Times picks up the story no one else seems interested in reporting, noting that two of the accused have pled guilty to the conspiracy: Two members of a prison-based Islamic terrorist cell that authorities say was poised to attack military sites, synagogues and other targets across Southern California pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to conspiring to wage war against the United States. The plot, which police stumbled upon during a routine investigation into a gas station holdup, represented one of the most realistic terrorism threats on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, experts said. The case also raised concerns about whether the country's prisons could serve as recruiting centers for Islamic extremists. As the defendants entered their pleas, prosecutors made public...

December 17, 2007

Dr. Ayman Takes Your Calls After A Word From Our Bloodthirsty Sponsor

Ayman al-Zawahiri has decided to expand his horizons yet again. Once a doctor, then a terrorist leader with a world-wide following, Dr. Zawahiri now fancies himself a talk-show host. At the end of his latest missive of hatred and mass murder, Zawahiri has offered to tell us everything we want to know about radical bloody jihad but are afraid to ask ... in person: Expanding its use of the Internet, al Qaeda now is asking that online users submit their questions -- even "hostile" ones -- to its No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri. And like any other blogger, Zawahri says he is prepared to engage. He made the offer on a video posted on a jihadist Web site Sunday touting Britain's withdrawal from Basra as a success for insurgents there. ... At the end of the video, entitled "A Review of Events," a written message invites individuals, organizations and...

Telecom Immunity Gets Bipartisan Support

The FISA reform bill that contains immunity for telecommunication companies that assisted the NSA on national security hurdled a procedural obstacle today on a clear bipartisan vote. The Senate invoked cloture on the bill with 76 votes, sixteen more than needed to proceed to a vote this week. Although some Democrats will attempt to attach amendments that will derail telecom immunity, the effort appears all but lost: President George W. Bush's demand for immunity for telephone companies that participated in his warrantless domestic spying program won an initial victory on Monday in the U.S. Senate. On a vote of 76-10, far more than the 60 needed, the Democratic-led Senate cleared a procedural hurdle and began considering a bill to increase congressional and judicial oversight of electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists. It includes a provision to grant retroactive immunity to any telecommunications company that took part in Bush's spying program --...

December 19, 2007

Ayman Al-Desperate

Just two days after begging for questions at the end of his last jihadist rant, Ayman al-Zawahiri has decided to flack for interviews. The number-two man in al-Qaeda has put out a request for interviews from journalists, conducted through the Islamist forums that AQ's media arm, al-Sahab, maintains: Al-Qaida has invited journalists to send questions to its No. 2 figure Ayman al-Zawahri, the first time the terror network has offered an "interview" with one of its top leaders since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. The invitation — issued by Al-Sahab, the group's media arm on an Islamic militant Web site — is the latest in al-Qaida's increasingly sophisticated efforts to get out its message. Al-Sahab has dramatically increased the number of messages it has issued this year, and its videos have shown more complex production. The statement, first posted Sunday, invites "individuals, agencies and all media"...

December 20, 2007

Al-Qaeda Philosopher: Zawahiri Is A Snitch

The man who gave al-Qaeda its philosophical justifications for murderous jihad has repented, and wants Muslims to stop the jihad. Eli Lake at The Sun reports on the story of Sayyed Imam al-Sharif, the man who literally wrote the book on radical Islamist terrorism, and who now serves a life sentence in Egypt for his crimes. Sharif has decided that the 9/11 attacks have been a "catastrophe" for Muslims, and that the war against America has created a huge problem for Islam: One of Al Qaeda's senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a "catastrophe for all Muslims." In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden for deceiving the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and for insulting the Prophet Muhammad by comparing the September 11 attacks to the...

December 21, 2007

Was Libya Framed For Pan Am 103?

Nineteen years ago, a Pan Am flight took off from London to bring 259 people to New York, 179 of them Americans. It never made it past Scotland, where the plane exploded, killing all aboard. A trial in Scotland placed blame on Libya, and found a man guilty, despite mounting evidence that the trial had at least gotten the conspiracy wrong -- and did so under pressure from the American government. Jeff Stein at CQ Politics lays out the fascinating story: Back in 1988, Iran was immediately suspected of authoring the mass murder, in retaliation for the accidental downing of one of its own airliners by a U.S. Navy warship in the Persian Gulf a few months earlier. U.S. intelligence agencies, in overdrive to find the culprits, quickly compiled evidence that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, had carried out the plot on behalf of...

December 22, 2007

Australia Remains Steady On Afghanistan

When Kevin Rudd replaced John Howard as Australia's Prime Minister, Americans wondered whether the Labour PM would prove as strong as his predecessor on the war against radical jihad. In Afghanistan, Rudd put those questions to rest as he committed Australia to success as part of the NATO coalition: Australian PM Kevin Rudd has told Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a visit to Kabul he is committed to the "long haul" in Afghanistan. Mr Rudd also visited some of the 1,000 Australian troops in Uruzgan province. Mr Rudd, who has said he will pull out combat troops from Iraq, stressed he was committed to reconstruction and stability in Afghanistan. The decision to withdraw Australia's remaining 550 combat troops from Iraq surprises no one. Rudd and Labour had campaigned on a promise to do just that. Rudd, on a trip to Iraq this week, pledged to leave personnel in place to...

December 26, 2007

Talking With The Taliban?

Just two weeks after Gordon Brown promised that his government would not negotiate with the Taliban, their intelligence services started talks about legitimizing them as a militia in Afghanistan. The Telegraph reports that MI-6 and SIS opened negotiations with Taliban envoys despite Brown's denial. The Afghan government has also expelled two diplomats for meeting with the Taliban: Agents from MI6 entered secret talks with Taliban leaders despite Gordon Brown's pledge that Britain would not negotiate with terrorists, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. Officers from the Secret Intelligence Service staged discussions, known as "jirgas", with senior insurgents on several occasions over the summer. An intelligence source said: "The SIS officers were understood to have sought peace directly with the Taliban with them coming across as some sort of armed militia. The British would also provide 'mentoring' for the Taliban." ... The delicate balance in Afghanistan was underlined as it emerged that...

December 31, 2007

Sarkozy A Little Smarter Than The US Congress

Nicolas Sarkozy has suspended diplomatic relations with Syria over its murderous interference with Lebanon. France's action to isolate Syria comes as two American Congressmen flew to Damascus to kowtow to the Assad government and force Israel to give up the Golan Heights. The bipartisan duo could learn something from French fortitude: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Sunday that his country will hold no more discussions with Syria until Damascus shows its willingness to let Lebanon elect a new president. Lebanon's Western-backed government and pro-Syrian opposition have been unable to overcome their disagreements to follow through with the election, and many Western countries have accused Damascus of interfering in the process - a claim Syria denies. "I will not have any more contact with the Syrians until... we have received proof of Syria's intention to let Lebanon designate a president of consensus," said Sarkozy at a press conference in Cairo after...

January 6, 2008

When Azzam Gets Marched Home Again, Hurrah!

Maybe in a way, we are lucky to have Adam Gadahn as this war's Lord Haw Haw. The misfit from Garden Grove can communicate in a manner clear to most Americans, which at least has the virtue of avoiding misunderstandings. Gadahn, now known as Azzam al-Amriki, warned George Bush that al-Qaeda will provide their own welcome for his tour of the Middle East, but otherwise channeled Baghdad Bob: Al-Qaida's American spokesman urged fighters to meet President Bush with bombs when he visits the Middle East, according to a new video posted on the Internet Sunday. U.S.-born Adam Gadahn also tore up his American passport as part of a symbolic protest in the nearly hour-long rhetoric-dominated tape — al-Qaida's first message of the new year. ... "We felt it necessary to address the American people and explain to them some of the facts about these critical and fast-moving events," said Gadahn,...

January 15, 2008

Rudy: Don't Blame Us For Terrorism

The New York Times editorial board recently offered a critique of Rudy Giuliani and his views on the causes of terrorism. Following Giuliani's assertion that al-Qaeda's hatred has nothing to do with American foreign policy but springs from a virulent strain of Islam that cannot abide anything outside of its precepts, the Times scolded Giuliani for ignoring the complaints of radical Islamists as a cause for their violence. Thomas Joscelyn rebuts this criticism with some history, and some facts: Raymond Ibrahim explains the difference between our enemies’ propaganda and their real motives in his excellent book, The Al Qaeda Reader. Ibrahim says the theme of our enemies’ propaganda is “always the same.” In its messages to the West, al Qaeda says it “is merely retaliating for all the injustices the West, and the United States in particular, has brought upon Muslims.” However, the rationale al-Qaeda offers in its theological treatises,...

Embassy Targeted In Lebanon

It looks like terrorists have begun targeting Americans again in Lebanon. Fortunately, the bomb didn't kill any American personnel at the embassy in Beirut, but four Lebanese died in the explosion: An explosion targeted a U.S. Embassy vehicle Tuesday in northern Beirut, killing four Lebanese and injuring a local embassy employee just ahead of a farewell reception for the American ambassador, U.S. and Lebanese officials said. In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said two embassy employees — including the driver — were in the vehicle damaged in the blast, which could be heard across the Lebanese capital and sent gray smoke billowing near the Mediterranean coast. The driver was slightly wounded and the other staffer is fine, McCormack told reporters. He said no American diplomats or American citizens were in the car. We've seen terrorist attacks on Americans in Beirut before. The most famous of these killed 241 Marines...

January 16, 2008

Did The Buck Stop With Rodriguez?

The videotapes containing interrogations of al-Qaeda terrorists, including depictions of waterboarding, got destroyed because the man who ordered the action believed he had "implicit support" to do so from the CIA, according to his lawyer. Jose Rodriguez acted on requests from the CIA station chief in Bangkok to resolve the status of the tapes before the chief's retirement. After consultations with CIA lawyers and other officials in the agency, Rodriguez believed he could act to destroy the tapes and all of the evidence they contained: In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda members. The tapes had been sitting in the station chief's safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for...

Former Congressman An Al-Qaeda Fundraiser?

The war on terror has brought many strange stories to the fore, but perhaps none so strange as the indictment of Mark Deli Siljander, a former Michigan Congressman indicted for helping to shift funds to Islamist terrorists. Siljander represented the Islamic American Relief Agency and took $50,000 in fees later determined to have been stolen from USAID, and helped get it funds that federal investigators say went to the Taliban: A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al Qaeda and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan. The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists....

January 22, 2008

The Bin Laden Peace Initiative

It's not what you'd think. One of Osama bin Laden's sons -- a former member of al-Qaeda -- has gone public in urging his father to end his terrorism and focus on peace. Omar says more and more Muslims agree: Omar bin Laden has a message for his father, Osama: "Find another way." The son of the most-wanted man in the world spoke Sunday to CNN in a quiet, middle-class suburb about an hour outside Cairo, Egypt. Omar bin Laden, who works as a contractor, said he is talking publicly because he wants an end to the violence his father has inspired -- violence that has killed innocent civilians in a spate of attacks around the world, including those of September 11, 2001. ... He said that's not just his own message, but one that a friend of his father's and other Muslims have expressed to him. "They too say...

Israel, Home Of The WOPR

Doesn't anyone remember the movie War Games? Apparently not in Israel, where they have decided to research "thinking machines" as a controlling mechanism for a missile defense system. Faster than anyone can say Cyberdyne, the system would respond to a catastrophic attack by ensuring the death of Israel's attackers, even if the human beings at the controls get incapacitated: Israel has been hit in recent years by thousands and thousands of rockets, mortar shells, and missiles. And that could be just a preview of the onslaught Iran may one day unleash. So Israeli military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators. "It will be designed for... autonomous operations,' Brig. Gen. Daniel Milo, commander of Israel's air defense forces, tells Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome. And in the event of a "doomsday" strike, Opall-Rome...

January 25, 2008

Telecom Immunity Moves Forward In The Senate

The Bush administration won a legislative victory yesterday when the FISA bill that excluded immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the NSA failed spectacularly in the Senate, leaving the path open to the immunity approach endorsed by the White House. The version without telecom immunity only garnered 36 votes in the upper chamber despite the Democrats' endorsement of it. Twelve of their members joined 48 Republicans in voting against it: The Senate signaled in a key vote yesterday that it supports giving some of the nation's largest telephone companies immunity from dozens of privacy lawsuits related to a federal domestic eavesdropping program initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In a lopsided 60 to 36 vote -- with 12 Democrats joining Republicans in the majority -- the Senate rejected a version of the proposed legislation sponsored by Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. That bill omitted immunity for the telecommunications...

January 27, 2008

Terror Plot Foiled

Arrests in Spain stopped a string of terrorist bombings across Europe, according to Australia's Daily Telegraph. At least the fourteen men arrested plotted to hit transportation centers in Spain, Portugal, France, and Germany, an operation that would have been credited to al-Qaeda and Pakistani warlord Baitullah Mehsud, the man behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto: A GROUP of alleged Islamist extremists were planning a wave of suicide attacks across Europe before they were detained in Barcelona last weekend. The group intended to carry out three attacks in Spain and one each in Portugal, France and Germany, an unnamed man who infiltrated the group told top-selling daily El Pais. The report comes one day after Spanish judicial sources said that three of the six members of the group, who allegedly planned to blow themselves up, were still at large. The preferred targets were public transportation networks, especially metro systems because of...

January 28, 2008

Osama's Pen Pals

Nothing brightens the day of the average psychotic terrorist leader than to get a handwritten letter from his idol, Osama bin Laden. According to Newsweek, Osama's been lettering, sending a few personal missives to terrorist leaders in al-Qaeda and the Taliban. His pen-pal activity intends to keep morale high among the troops, and may indicate that his morale has improved as well: Osama Bin Laden appears to be reasserting his influence among the Afghan and Pakistani tribal leaders upon whom he's depending for survival. Since December, the Qaeda chief has personally penned at least five brief letters, written in Arabic on white stationery, to the region's militant commanders. For the Taliban's Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, the latest correspondence is the second he's received this year from the "Sheik," as bin Laden is known among jihadis. The first was a letter of condolence after the death of Dadullah's notoriously brutal elder brother,...

When Pervez Met Ehud

Did they or didn't they? That may sound like a question from a paparazzi magazine, but in diplomatic circles, it could mean life or death. After a chance encounter in the lobby of a Parisian hotel, Pervez Musharraf and Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak reportedly held a second, 20-minute meeting to discuss fears of an Iranian nuclear-weapons program: Pakistan's president held a rare and secret meeting with Israel's defense minister in a Paris hotel last week, and the Iranian nuclear program figured high on the agenda, Israeli defense officials said Monday. The two states have no diplomatic ties, and their officials rarely meet. But Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak saw each other by chance at the Hotel Raphael in Paris on Jan. 22, where they both were staying, the officials said. They then held a scheduled 20-minute meeting the following day, the officials said. ......

January 30, 2008

Osama, Ayman, Or Joe Camel?

Which target got a million-dollar missile in the rear yesterday? ABC News reports that Pakistani officials believe they killed someone high up the al-Qaeda food chain with a missile strike yesterday, but they're not saying who it might be. Hopes have been raised in the past, but usually have wound up either killing lower-level figures or, as George Bush famously noted, a camel and a ten-dollar tent: Pakistani intelligence sources say they believe a "high-value" al Qaeda target was killed in a missile strike yesterday in the country's tribal region bordering Afghanistan. U.S. officials said there was no indication that the target was Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al Zawahri, but one senior official told ABCNews.com the strike was aimed at one particular figure. "We don't know whether we got him yet, we are sorting through it," the official said, indicating the intended target was a top leader...

February 8, 2008

Shari'a: The Borg Of Jurisprudence

The Archbishop of Canterbury has endorsed the adoption of shari'a in Britain, calling it "inevitable". Most of the British beg to differ, and Rowan Williams now finds himself at the center of a multicultural meltdown: The Archbishop of Canterbury was embroiled in a fierce political and religious row last night after he called for aspects of Islamic sharia law to be adopted in Britain. Dr Rowan Williams said that it "seems inevitable" that elements of the Muslim law, such as divorce proceedings, would be incorporated into British legislation. His comments were immediately attacked by Downing Street, religious groups and MPs from all sides. The head of the equality watchdog denounced his claims while several high-profile Muslims also criticised Dr Williams. The Archbishop forgot that Britain operates under a representative government, not a theocracy. The adoption of shari'a would obliterate that system and place the UK under the thumb of imams...

February 12, 2008

Danes Break Cartoonist Murder Plot

Danish police conducted a series of pre-dawn raids that broke a conspiracy to murder an editorial cartoonist. Both Danish citizens and foreign nationals plotted to kill Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists that created critical images of the Muslim prophet Mohammed two years ago as part of a series in defense of free speech and open criticism. The cartoons set off riots throughout the Islamic world, and produced death threats to all of the artists who participated: Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested several people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago. The arrests were made in pre-dawn raids in Aarhus, western Denmark, "to prevent a terror-related murder," the police intelligence agency said. It did not say how many people were arrested nor did it mention which cartoonist was...

Senate Approves Telecom Immunity

The Senate handily defeated an attempt to strip immunity for telecommunications providers from their version of FISA reform this morning, and approved the overall legislation. The amendment to strip telecom immunity only garnered 31 votes, far short of even a simple majority. The bill now goes to the House, which has resisted the immunity provisions: The Senate voted Tuesday to shield from lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. After nearly two months of stops and starts, the Senate rejected by a vote of 31 to 67 an amendment that would have stripped a grant of retroactive immunity to the companies. President Bush has promised to veto any new surveillance bill that does not protect the companies that helped the government in its warrantless wiretapping program. ... In a separate voice vote Tuesday, the Senate expanded the...

A Walk Down Terrorist Memory Lane

Debra Burlingame invites Wall Street Journal readers to take a stroll down Memory Lane, to a time when murderous terrorists gained presidential pardons instead of relentless pursuit. This didn't happen a long, long time ago in an administration far, far away, but actually less than ten years ago. In 1999, with Hillary Clinton pursuing a seat in the Senate, Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 Puerto Rican separatists whose organization had committed a whopping 146 bombings and more armed robberies: On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he "will not rest until justice is done." Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members...

February 13, 2008

Going Out In The Appropriate Manner

Scratch one terrorist from the FBI's Most Wanted list. An explosion killed Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh, one of the planners of the 1983 bombings in Beirut that killed 241 Marines and another 63 people at our embassy in Lebanon. He also took part in the 1985 TWA hijacking that resulted in the beating death of Navy diver Robert Stethem: A senior Hezbollah commander implicated in some of the most high-profile international terrorist attacks of the last 25 years has died in an explosion in Syria, Hezbollah TV said Wednesday. Imad Mughniyeh was suspected by Western intelligence agencies in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, as well as the truck bombing that year of the U.S. Marine barracks there, an attack that killed 241 people and preceded the U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon, according to a CNN report from 2001. The FBI listed Mughniyeh...

Solidarity

Danish newspapers have demonstrated solidarity with Kurt Westergaard and Jyllands-Posten today. After the arrests of conspirators determined to assassinate the editorial cartoonist, the other newspapers in Denmark today have reprinted the cartoon that aroused the ire of Muslims in the first place. They want to make the point that no one can intimidate them into silence: Newspapers in Denmark Wednesday reprinted the controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed that sparked worldwide protests two years ago. The move came one day after Danish authorities arrested three people who allegedly were plotting a "terror-related assassination" of Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonist behind the drawings. Berlingske Tidende, one of the newspapers involved in the republication, said: "We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper always will defend," in comments reported by The...

February 14, 2008

Ban On Waterboarding Wins Approval

The Senate narrowly passed a ban on waterboarding as part of their intelligence bill, setting up a showdown between Congress and the White House on limitations for interrogation techniques. The bill clearly states approved and disapproved procedures, ending the ambiguity that has created much of the controversy over whether anyone has ever broken the law in interrogating terrorist suspects. And surprisingly, one of the figures at the head of the controversy opposed the bill: The Senate voted yesterday to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics used by the CIA, matching a previous House vote and putting Congress on a collision course with the White House over a pivotal national security issue. In a 51 to 45 vote, the Senate approved an intelligence bill that limits the CIA to using 19 less-aggressive interrogation tactics outlined in a U.S. Army Field Manual. The measure would effectively ban the use of simulated...

France To The Rescue?

The Canadians have performed magnificently in Afghanistan, but they need more resources. They have asked NATO, in coordination with the US, to provide more troops to their front-line position, and have threatened to withdraw entirely unless Europe starts sharing the load. Help may come from the least-likely source, according to an anonymous French military official: In American military parlance, it's gut-check time for NATO in Afghanistan, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy appears ready to answer allies' calls for more forces to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida. As early as Thursday, Sarkozy's top brass is to present him with a variety of options, from sending special forces to more trainers for Afghan troops, a French military official told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity, because the decisions will ultimately rest with Sarkozy. Sarkozy isn't expected to announce a final decision until the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in...

The Terrorist Group Renaming Program

The House will allow the current FISA legislation to lapse rather than address the differences between the their version of the extension and the one passed by the Senate on Tuesday. Democrats wanted yet another three-week extension to kick the can down the road again, and petulantly dropped consideration when both opponents and advocates of the Senate plan refused to agree. Now they're saying the lapse in the FISA legislation will have no effect -- as long as no new terrorist groups arise (via Memeorandum): Democrats insisted that a lapse would have no real effect. The expiration of the powers “doesn’t mean we are somehow vulnerable again,” said Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The lapsing of the deadline would have little practical effect on intelligence gathering. Intelligence officials would be able to intercept communications from Qaeda members or other identified terrorist groups...

February 15, 2008

House Democrats Leave Security On The Table

Yesterday, I interviewed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy about the fight over FISA reform on Heading Right Radio. McCarthy, who helped put Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and several others in prison for their role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, argued that the expiration of last year's FISA reform will put the NSA in the unusual position of having to seek warrants for communications with both endpoints outside the US, not involving American persons at all. He explains this at Human Events today: In 2007, a ruling of the court created by the ill-conceived 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) required the intelligence community to seek court permission before monitoring terrorists operating outside our country -- that is, outside the jurisdiction of United States courts. Actually, Andy and I disagreed on this; I'll come back to it in a moment. Let’s say al Qaeda operatives in Iraq...

Who Is Killing All Of The Great Jihadis Of The Ummah?

First Umad Mughniyeh takes the 72-virgin ride with a Bashar Assad Special. Now Ayman Atallah Fayed gets blasted in the most literal sense of the word. Both men were high-ranking members of terrorist groups arrayed against Israel. Coincidence? A powerful blast went off in the house of a senior Islamic Jihad activist Friday, killing him, his wife and daughter, along with three neighbors, medics and an Islamic Jihad spokesman said. Islamic Jihad claimed Israeli warplanes struck the home of Ayman Atallah Fayed. Israel denied it had launched any airstrike in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza where Fayed lived. Hamas police said the cause of the blast was not clear. Witnesses reported seeing fragments of what looked like locally produced rockets at the scene, suggesting the house may have been used to store arms. Of course, the explosion could have something to do with the fact that Fayed had...

February 16, 2008

The Final Atrocity

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned and helped execute the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans. He also planned the 1993 World Trade Center Attack, the attacks in Bali and Kenya that killed hundreds more, and attacks that never had the chance to take place thanks to his capture and interrogation by American intelligence agents. We know this because KSM himself openly brags about his atrocities as a point of pride. Now some have decided to help him commit his final atrocity -- by painting himself as a victim: On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM...

February 17, 2008

Suicide Bomber Kills 80 At Afghan Dog Fight

The Taliban continues to step up its use of suicide bombings, and today they got more successful than they desired. The bomber killed the militia commander the Taliban targeted, but they also killed scores of civilians, which has them rattled enough to hesitate in taking credit for the attack: A suicide bombing at an outdoor dog fighting competition killed 80 people and wounded scores more Sunday, a governor said, in what appeared to be the deadliest terror attack in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Officials said the attack apparently targeted a prominent militia commander who had stood up against the Taliban. He died in the attack. Several hundred people — including Afghan militia leaders — had gathered to watch the event on the western edge of the southern city of Kandahar. Witnesses reported gunfire from bodyguards after the blast; it was not immediately clear if the...

February 18, 2008

The Democratic Sell-Out

Robert Novak pulls together the politics of the Democratic refusal to call the Senate's bipartisan FISA reform bill to the House floor last week. Instead of taking a vote that Blue Dog Democrats has assured her would pass on that bill, Pelosi tried embarrassing the White House by voting for a 21-day extension to the current reform bill -- and that failed, with some Blue Dogs opposing it along with the Republicans, as well as some hard-Left Representatives that oppose FISA reform outright. Why did Pelosi tube the bill that would have easily passed and therefore extended the protections passed by a Democratic Congress last year? Lots of reasons, and they're all green: The recess by House Democrats amounts to a judgment that losing the generous support of trial lawyers, the Democratic Party's most important financial base, would be more dangerous than losing the anti-terrorist issue to Republicans. Dozens of...

February 20, 2008

The Reward For Courage: Homelessness

Last week, this blog stood in solidarity with Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and the rest of the newspapers in Denmark who reprinted his cartoon after police uncovered a conspiracy by radical Islamists to murder him. Now Westergaard has gained a reward for his courage in confronting radical Islam and demanding freedom of speech -- homelessness. Der Spiegel tells the story: Draw a picture offensive to Muslim extremists, and you might find yourself without a roof. Ask Kurt Westergaard, one of the twelve Danish cartoonists whose autumn 2005 Muhammad caricatures lead to violent protests throughout the Muslim world. He was booted from his police-protected hotel room on Feb. 15 for being "too much of a security risk." And now the 73-year-old cartoonist and his wife are without a place to live. Westergaard was forced to leave his actual residence in November after the Danish security and intelligence agency, PET, informed him...

Nothing To Fear But ....

Apparently, Benjamin Baines has a sense of historical irony. The man from Clearwater, Florida hollowed out a copy of the book Fear Itself, hid a boxcutter in it, and then attempted to get it onto a flight out of Tampa. He now faces ten years in prison: A 21-year-old Clearwater man was arrested at Tampa International Airport this weekend after security personnel found a box cutter in a hollowed-out book, authorities said. If convicted, Baines faces up to 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine for a federal charge of attempting to board an airplane with a concealed dangerous weapon. He is currently serving a 30 day sentence after pleading guilty Monday to a state misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon. About 7:30 a.m. Sunday, airport security ran Benjamin Baines Jr.'s backpack through an X-ray machine and saw the image of a box cutter, according to...

February 22, 2008

The Beginning Of Jihad On American Soil

When did radical Islamist terrorists first strike in the United States? Some may guess 9/11; others paying more attention would say 1993, in the first attack on the World Trade Center. The second guess comes closer, but in fact it began in Manhattan in 1990, with an assassination that has largely been forgotten. Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the terrorists that conducted the 1993 attack, reminds us of the first Islamist terrorist attack in the US: At the time, the most radical proponent of Jewish migration to Israel was Rabbi Meir Kahane, who in the late 1960’s had founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in New York. The JDL had been responsible for several terrorist attacks against Soviet targets in the United States, attacks ostensibly aimed at coercing the Soviets to free Russian Jews to move to Israel. After emigrating to Israel himself, Kahane was elected to the Knesset, occupying a...

February 25, 2008

Can You Hear Me Now? Not In Afghanistan

The Taliban has made some strange demands before, but the latest has everyone scratching their heads. They now want cell-phone networks to go dark at night, and if they refuse, the Taliban will begin blowing up cell phone offices and masts: The Taleban have threatened to blow up telephone masts across Afghanistan unless mobile phone companies agree to switch off their signals at night. They say that US and other foreign troops are using the signals to track down insurgents. The Taleban have warned the masts and offices of the mobile companies will be destroyed unless their demands are met. The Taliban want the signals shut down between 5 pm and 3 am local time. Apparently, the Taliban does not like the lower rates during evening hours, or they just can't find enough people to fill in their Friends & Neighbors plan. Maybe if they didn't keep killing them, the...

February 26, 2008

Mubarak To Assad: Lebanon Is Your Fault

Egypt's Hosni Mubarak gave an indication that he may not attend next month's Arab Summit due to the interference of Syria into Lebanon's politics. In an interview broadcast initially in Bahrain, Mubarak said that the political crisis in Lebanon had its roots in Damascus, and that Bashar Assad needs to end his interference. Otherwise, the summit would be pointless: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Syria was part of the problem in Lebanon, calling on Damascus to help resolve the 15-month crisis before hosting an Arab summit next month. "The summit will be held in Syria and Syria is linked to the Lebanese problem. Therefore I hope that Syria would solve the problem," Mubarak said in remarks aired on Al Arabiya television on Tuesday. "We should not be (in Damascus) resolving a problem that Syria is a party to," Mubarak said during a visit to Bahrain as part of tour of...

'We Welcome Being Terrorists': 15 Years Ago

Andrew McCarthy has an excellent column today on the fifteenth anniversary of the radical Islamist declaration of war against the United States. In one hour or so, exactly fifteen years will have passed since the first attack on the World Trade Center, a truck bomb that intended to demolish the symbol and home of American economic power. It would take eight more years for the terrorists to finish the job, but their intent was clear from the beginning: Only a few weeks before the bombing, the blind sheikh, who had been in constant communication with his co-conspirators, had attracted a crowd of followers at a Brooklyn rally. “God has obliged us to perform jihad,” he thundered. “The battalions of Islam and its divisions must be in a state of continuous readiness . . . to hit their enemies with strength and power.” The “enemies at the foremost of the work...

France Getting Closer To Combat Deployment

Earlier this month, I wrote that Nicolas Sarkozy might consider showing some leadership in Europe by bolstering France's combat participation in Afghanistan. Le Monde reported earlier today that Sarkozy has all but committed the troops to the front lines: France may send hundreds of ground troops to east Afghanistan where NATO-led forces are fighting al Qaeda-backed insurgents, Le Monde newspaper reported on Tuesday. It said the move would be part of a new Afghan policy being worked out by President Nicolas Sarkozy and his advisers. France has about 1,900 soldiers under NATO's Afghan command, most of them based in relatively calm Kabul, and Le Monde said the fresh troops would be deployed outside the capital. "Their destination would be zones of potentially fierce fighting, preferably the eastern region of Afghanistan close to the tribal areas of Pakistan," it said. Early last year, France withdrew 200 special forces soldiers who had...