Month: November 2006

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 planned to execute the plan. The two were arrested by Lebanese security forces after they were suspected of a criminally-motivated murder at the al-Badawi refugee camp. According to the report, the investigation revealed that the Syrian government, through this plan, carried out the most blatant violation of United Nations Resolutions 1559 and 1701 and interfered in internal Lebanese issues.

The newspaper reporting this belongs to the Hariri family, the same as Rafiq Hariri, assassinated by the Syrians. Without a doubt, the Hariris have a pressing interest in assassinations, and this may help save lives, if proven out. The capture of the two operatives of the network, a Syrian and a Saudi, tends to bolster the report.
Syria has a big problem now. They had the benefit of Hezbollah’s survival against Israel for some momentum in their efforts to twist internal Lebanese politics. However, Nasrallah’s power play over the last two weeks and the assassination of Pierre Gemayel have the Lebanese outraged over interference from Damascus. They have already marched in the streets, and now with this covert operation exposed, Lebanese democracy activists will once again have the momentum to go after Hezbollah and end Syrian hegemony.
This once again shows the folly of engagement with the Syrian regime. They have been one of the biggest supporters of terrorism for many years, as their relationship with Hezbollah clearly demonstrates. Now they have been caught trying to assassinate dozens more Lebanese officials, an act of war for which Syrian should suffer severe consequences. What exactly do we have to discuss with these evil dictators, except the terms of their surrender?

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, especially civil libertarians like myself, could be more informed about how careful the government is to protect our privacy while still protecting us from attacks, we’d be more reassured,” said Lanny Davis , a former Clinton White House lawyer who is the board’s lone liberal Democrat.

The hysteria surrounding this program might finally start receding, as long as these remarks get some significant play. After all, having a former Clinton aide wish he could reveal more about a secret program to reassure people of the good work done by it rather than to torpedo the Bush administration should raise some eyebrows among the paranoid. Former Reagan counsel Alan Raul went even further, telling John Solomon that he believes that the public underestimates the level of concern and dedication for civil liberties in the federal government.
Once again, the public’s support for a tough but necessary program has been reinforced by its careful execution by the NSA. This should not surprise anyone, as even the New York Times acknowledged that they had no information that the agency broke any laws or violated anyone’s civil rights when they broke the story. All they had were “concerns” about the program’s legality from their anonymous tipsters.

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, which seeks a separate homeland for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, and Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, a political organization representing the interests of Kurds in Turkey.
U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins enjoined the government from blocking the assets of the two groups. The same judge two years ago invalidated portions of the Patriot Act.

Collins, a Clinton appointee, gained notoriety two years ago when she became the first federal judge to strike down provisions of the Patriot Act. Interestingly, she found that act, passed by Congress, also to be too vague to be constitutional. In that case, one of the plaintiffs was — the PKK again, which got its terrorist designation not from the Bush administration under the Patriot Act or this executive order, but by Madeline Albright’s State Department in 1997.
Nor was that the first time Collins has had a problem with anti-terrorist legislation. During the Clinton administration, she struck down the 1996 anti-terrorism law passed by Congress in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Collins seems to have trouble reading the law, finding all counterterrorism legislation too vague to be understood. Perhaps the problem lies with Collins more than the laws themselves.
John Stephenson wrote about this ruling at Collins’ cheerleaders earlier today:

I should really just stop right there. The ruling is praised by a lawyer for terrorist sympathizing, Center For Constitutional Rights! The Center for Constitutional Rights is openly anti-American and pro-terrorist. Groups suspected of ties to terrorism give money to CCR. The granddaughter of the executed Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg works there! At its 2004 annual convention, the CCR honored attorney Lynne Stewart, an open supporter of terrorism, indicted by the Justice Department for abetting the terrorist activities of her client, the “blind sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman.
A lawyer from this organization praising this decision says just about all we need to know about the ruling.

As the song says, you can tell the man who boozes by the company he chooses. This pig needs to get up and quickly run to the Court of Appeals, where we can hope for a few jurists who don’t have terrorists’ interests at heart.

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 since the attacks — two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin.

And here’s some information that the national news media seems to have missed — the men sat in seats not assigned to them, including the first-class seats that the imams claimed to have acquired through an upgrade:

The imams who claimed two first-class seats said their tickets were upgraded. The gate agent told police that when the imams asked to be upgraded, they were told no such seats were available. Nevertheless, the two men were seated in first class when removed.

That would normally be enough to get any flight delayed while the seating arrangements got straightened out, especially if passengers deliberately take seats other than those assigned to them. However, the men kept interfering with the boarding process by going back and forth to talk amongst each other. Their seating pattern — again, not that assigned by the airline — positioned them at every egress point from the aircraft.
And those seat-belt extenders? Once they received them from the flight attendants, the imams put them under their seats, and not on the seat belts that purportedly would not fit them. Anyone who saw that would understandably wonder why the imams requested them in the first place, especially the flight crew, which has primary responsibility for flight security.
Small wonder, then, that US Air kicked them off the flight. Two pilots from other airlines confirmed that they would have done the same thing under the same circumstances. One pilot indicated that the repositioning of the group within the plane has been identified as a terrorist probe technique.
The imams did not intend on conducting a terrorist attack. Instead, they have conducted an attack on American security protocols, first by staging this ridiculous event to heighten their status as victims, and second to expose the kind of activities that airlines view as suspicious. In doing so, they have created an environment where the airlines will second-guess their own security procedures, becoming hypersensitive to political correctness instead of focusing on suspicious behaviors. The imams will have made us all less safe if their act becomes a hit.
Unfortunately, members of Congress seem more intent on pandering to the victimology rather than supporting the airlines for doing their job. Sheila Jackson-Lee and newly-elected Muslim Keith Ellison both took the time to acknowledge how humiliating it had to be for the six men ejected from the flight, rather than how stressful it must have been for the passengers and crew of the US Air flight that the imams used to gain their notoriety. I guess they figure that it’s better to be sorry than safe.

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, the official said. Syrian officials have also cooperated, though there is debate about whether it has the blessing of the senior leaders in Syria.

So what have the Hezbollah “trainers” taught the Mahdis? The usual: “weapons, bomb-making, intelligence, assassinations, the gambit of skill sets,” all of the basics for creating the kind of stable, secure Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised Nouri al-Maliki on his trip to Teheran yesterday.
Quite obviously, Iran and Syria (who also figures prominently in the Hezbollah-Mahdi arrangements) do not have any interest in moderation and democracy in the region. The Syrians want to control the Mediterranean side of Southwest Asia, and the Iranians want to promote radical Islamist fervor — preferably of the Shi’ite flavor, rather than the Wahhabi al-Qaeda strain. Their every step indicates that they want to see the nascent democracy in Iraq undermined for the same reasons we want it to flourish: a successful democracy in Iraq will mortally destabilize their own regimes and their grip on power.
That is why notions of engagement with these two notorious terrorist-supporting states should be a non-starter. Nothing they have done indicates that they see the Middle East in terms other than completely hostile to our interests or the interests of liberty and self-determination, even where one might make an argument that the two diverge. The only items that Iran and Syria want to discuss with us regarding Iraqi democracy are the terms of our surrender and retreat. So-called “realists” want to endorse diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria but fail to acknowledge that reality in any manner, making them even more Utopian than the so-called neocons who want to work towards the ultimate goal of ending Iranian and Syrian hegemony through terrorism.
At one time, we decided to fight the war on terrorists and their state sponsors in order to end the use of terrorism as a technique for extortion. Now many want to acquiesce to Iranian- and Syrian-sponsored terrorists in order to more quickly surrender.