Ex-Gitmo detainee arrested on terror ties
Asif Shahzad ASSOCIATED PRESS
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan A terrorism suspect recently detained in Pakistan is the same Swedish national once held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, police said Monday. He and others in his group were reportedly trying to join al Qaeda in the country's lawless tribal areas.
The development appeared to underscore the difficulty with predicting the path that detainees at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will take upon their release, with the Pentagon having acknowledged that a small but notable percentage of one-time inmates have joined, or rejoined, militant groups.
Dera Ghazi Khan police Chief Mohammad Rizwan told the Associated Press that authorities made the identification after interrogating the man, Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali. A copy of his Swedish passport obtained by the AP showed that his face matched that of previously published photos of the man held at Guantanamo.
"I do confirm that he is the same person. He is a very dangerous man," Chief Rizwan said.
Ghezali was arrested on the outskirts of Dera Ghazi Khan, a southern Pakistani town, on Aug. 28 along with a group of foreigners including seven Turks and three other Swedes who lacked proper immigration stamps.
A Swedish man with the same name was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and held for two years at Guantanamo. The United States released him in 2004.
Ghezali -- born in Sweden to a Finnish mother and Algerian father -- was reportedly part of a group of 156 suspected al Qaeda fighters arrested in 2001 by Pakistani authorities while fleeing Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains. Ghezali, who is believed to be 30 years old, has denied ties to al Qaeda and said he was in the region only to learn more about Islam.
The other Swedes arrested were identified as Munir Awad and Safia Benaouda and a young boy who was apparently their son, according to a police report obtained by the AP through the Interior Ministry.
Benaouda and Awad are the same names of two people who also have been in the news before.
A Swede named Safia Benaouda, then 17, was held by Ethiopian authorities after being taken into custody along the Somalia-Kenya border in 2007. She told a Swedish newspaper that she was interrogated for weeks by white foreigners and asked about extremism in Sweden. A man named Munir Awad was identified as her fiance.
The Benaouda who was held in Ethiopia is the daughter of Helena Benaouda, chairwoman of the Swedish Muslim Council.
In Sweden, where the arrests have made headlines, Helena Benaouda told the tabloid Expressen over the weekend that she had not been able to reach her daughter, whom she thought was in Saudi Arabia.
"She is supposed to be in Mecca to celebrate Ramadan. But now I haven't been able to reach her by telephone, and as a mother and grandmother I am now very worried," she was quoted as saying. "If it turns out that this is my daughter, I will obviously seek an explanation to this."
Showing posts with label Al Qaeda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Al Qaeda. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
'Revenge of the Shoe Bomber'
From the Thursday Wall Street Journal:
Revenge of the ‘Shoe Bomber’
The terrorist sues to resume his jihad from prison. The Obama administration caves in.
By DEBRA BURLINGAME
Last May at the National Archives, President Barack Obama warned that “more mistakes would occur” if Congress continued to politicize terrorist detention policy and the closure of Guantanamo Bay. “[I]f we refuse to deal with those issues today,” he predicted, “then I guarantee you, they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future.”
On June 17, at the Administrative Maximum (ADX) penitentiary in Florence, Colo., one of those albatrosses, inmate number 24079-038, began his day with a whole new range of possibilities. Eight days earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver filed notice in federal court that the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which applied to that prisoner—Richard C. Reid, a.k.a. the “Shoe Bomber”—were being allowed to expire. SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly, issued by the attorney general when “there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury” to others.
Reid was arrested in 2001 for attempting to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with 197 passengers and crew on board. Why had Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to renew his security measures, kept in place since 2002?
According to court documents filed in a 2007 civil lawsuit against the government, Reid claimed that SAMs violated his First Amendment right of free speech and free exercise of religion. In a hand-written complaint, he asserted that he was being illegally prevented from performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.” Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed 247 people.
In December 2008, the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss Reid’s lawsuit. It cited the example of ADX inmate Ahmed Ajaj as an illustration of “the dangers inherent in permitting a group of inmates, of like mind in their opposition to the United States, to congregate for a prayer service conducted in a language not understood by most correctional officers.”
While imprisoned for passport fraud in 1992, Ajaj assisted in the plans to destroy the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, making phone calls to Ramzi Yousef and speaking in code to elude law enforcement monitoring. Ajaj tried to get his “training kit” to Yousef, which included videotapes and notes he had taken on bomb-making while attending a terrorist camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Reid’s own SAMs on correspondence had been tightened in 2006 after the shocking discovery that three of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers at ADX, not subject to security directives, had sent 90 letters to overseas terrorist networks, including those associated with the Madrid train bombing. The letters, exhorting jihad and praising Osama bin Laden as “my hero of this generation,” were printed in Arabic newspapers and brandished like trophies to recruit new members.
When setting restrictions on inmate religious practice, the Bureau of Prisons need only meet a reasonableness standard, a very low bar in the case of Muslim terrorists. Justice would easily have prevailed against Reid’s lawsuit; nevertheless it dropped the security measures on Reid after he missed 58 meals in a hunger strike that required medical intervention and forced feeding in April.
On July 6, Justice Department lawyers informed the court that Reid will be given a “new placement” in a “post-SAMs setting.” Whether that entails stepped down security in a different unit or transfer to a less secure facility, the Bureau of Prisons won’t say, and Justice refuses to comment.
Mr. Obama likes to observe that “no one has escaped from supermax,” but if Reid is moved from ADX Florence, he will be the first convicted terrorist to use the First Amendment to sue his way out.
What drove the Obama administration’s decision to cave in to Reid’s demands? The president after all has repeatedly pitched supermax and the federal prison system as a secure alternative to Guantanamo, citing the fact that it handles “all manner of violent and dangerous criminals.” Yet the last thing he needs, as his administration engages in its hasty effort to shut Gitmo down by a fast-approaching deadline, is for lawyers and human-rights activists to use a hunger-striking, near-death prisoner to launch a propaganda campaign fashioned right out of the Gitmo detainees’ playbook. Lawyers who shamelessly compared Gitmo to Nazi concentration camps would think nothing of casting supermax as the next “symbol of America’s shame” and a “rallying cry for our enemies.”
From the outset of his administration, Mr. Obama has been trying to thread the needle between national security policy and his ideological affinity with civil liberties lawyers and human-rights activists, meeting with and consulting them prior to making detainee-related decisions. Though his executive order shutting Guantanamo closely followed the blueprint provided by Human Rights First, leaders of key organizations were stunned when he revealed in an awkward, off-the-record meeting the day before his public announcement at the National Archives that he planned to continue President George W. Bush’s policy of preventive detention.
Michael Ratner, whose human rights organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed the first successful detainee lawsuit in 2002, called Mr. Obama’s proposed U.S. detention scheme a “road to perdition” and nothing more than a plan to “repackage Guantanamo.” Leaders of the so-called Gitmo bar appear poised to launch a flurry of legal challenges the moment the last departing detainee’s feet touch U.S. soil.
In January, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado issued a statement saying that conditions at supermax are “simply another form of torture” worse than Gitmo which “make a mockery of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’” Last month, the ACLU filed a civil lawsuit mirroring Reid’s religious rights claim on behalf of two terrorism inmates held at the Communications Management Unit inside a medium security prison in Terre Haute, Ind.
One of those inmates is Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen serving a 10-year sentence for diverting Muslim charity money to militant Islamic groups in Bosnia and Chechnya. The other, Randall Royer, is serving 20 years for his role recruiting young Muslims in the “Virginia Jihad Network,” a group that used paintball games in 2000-2001 to train for holy war.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly suggested that the security challenge of bringing more than 100 trained and dangerous terrorists onto U.S. soil can be solved by simply installing them in an impenetrable fortress. This view is either disingenuous or naïve. The militant Islamists at Guantanamo too dangerous to release believe that their resistance behind the wire is a continuation of holy war. There is every reason to believe they will continue their jihad once they have been transported to U.S. soil where certain federal judges have signaled a willingness to confer upon them even more rights.
The position of civil rights activists with regard to these prisoners is plain. “If they cannot be convicted,” says ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer, “then you release them.”
Meanwhile, in order to appease political constituencies both here and abroad, the Obama administration is moving full steam ahead, operating on the false premise that giving more civil liberties to religious fanatics bent on destroying Western civilization will make a difference in the Muslim world. In a letter sent to his father as he began his hunger strike, Reid provided a preview of how he will exercise his newly enlarged free speech rights, calling Mr. Obama a “hypocrite” who is “no better than George Bush.” His lawsuit remains active while the Department of Justice works out a settlement that satisfies the man who declared, “I am at war with America.”
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the National September 11 Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Revenge of the ‘Shoe Bomber’
The terrorist sues to resume his jihad from prison. The Obama administration caves in.
By DEBRA BURLINGAME
Last May at the National Archives, President Barack Obama warned that “more mistakes would occur” if Congress continued to politicize terrorist detention policy and the closure of Guantanamo Bay. “[I]f we refuse to deal with those issues today,” he predicted, “then I guarantee you, they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future.”
On June 17, at the Administrative Maximum (ADX) penitentiary in Florence, Colo., one of those albatrosses, inmate number 24079-038, began his day with a whole new range of possibilities. Eight days earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver filed notice in federal court that the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which applied to that prisoner—Richard C. Reid, a.k.a. the “Shoe Bomber”—were being allowed to expire. SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly, issued by the attorney general when “there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury” to others.
Reid was arrested in 2001 for attempting to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with 197 passengers and crew on board. Why had Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to renew his security measures, kept in place since 2002?
According to court documents filed in a 2007 civil lawsuit against the government, Reid claimed that SAMs violated his First Amendment right of free speech and free exercise of religion. In a hand-written complaint, he asserted that he was being illegally prevented from performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.” Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed 247 people.
In December 2008, the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss Reid’s lawsuit. It cited the example of ADX inmate Ahmed Ajaj as an illustration of “the dangers inherent in permitting a group of inmates, of like mind in their opposition to the United States, to congregate for a prayer service conducted in a language not understood by most correctional officers.”
While imprisoned for passport fraud in 1992, Ajaj assisted in the plans to destroy the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, making phone calls to Ramzi Yousef and speaking in code to elude law enforcement monitoring. Ajaj tried to get his “training kit” to Yousef, which included videotapes and notes he had taken on bomb-making while attending a terrorist camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Reid’s own SAMs on correspondence had been tightened in 2006 after the shocking discovery that three of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers at ADX, not subject to security directives, had sent 90 letters to overseas terrorist networks, including those associated with the Madrid train bombing. The letters, exhorting jihad and praising Osama bin Laden as “my hero of this generation,” were printed in Arabic newspapers and brandished like trophies to recruit new members.
When setting restrictions on inmate religious practice, the Bureau of Prisons need only meet a reasonableness standard, a very low bar in the case of Muslim terrorists. Justice would easily have prevailed against Reid’s lawsuit; nevertheless it dropped the security measures on Reid after he missed 58 meals in a hunger strike that required medical intervention and forced feeding in April.
On July 6, Justice Department lawyers informed the court that Reid will be given a “new placement” in a “post-SAMs setting.” Whether that entails stepped down security in a different unit or transfer to a less secure facility, the Bureau of Prisons won’t say, and Justice refuses to comment.
Mr. Obama likes to observe that “no one has escaped from supermax,” but if Reid is moved from ADX Florence, he will be the first convicted terrorist to use the First Amendment to sue his way out.
What drove the Obama administration’s decision to cave in to Reid’s demands? The president after all has repeatedly pitched supermax and the federal prison system as a secure alternative to Guantanamo, citing the fact that it handles “all manner of violent and dangerous criminals.” Yet the last thing he needs, as his administration engages in its hasty effort to shut Gitmo down by a fast-approaching deadline, is for lawyers and human-rights activists to use a hunger-striking, near-death prisoner to launch a propaganda campaign fashioned right out of the Gitmo detainees’ playbook. Lawyers who shamelessly compared Gitmo to Nazi concentration camps would think nothing of casting supermax as the next “symbol of America’s shame” and a “rallying cry for our enemies.”
From the outset of his administration, Mr. Obama has been trying to thread the needle between national security policy and his ideological affinity with civil liberties lawyers and human-rights activists, meeting with and consulting them prior to making detainee-related decisions. Though his executive order shutting Guantanamo closely followed the blueprint provided by Human Rights First, leaders of key organizations were stunned when he revealed in an awkward, off-the-record meeting the day before his public announcement at the National Archives that he planned to continue President George W. Bush’s policy of preventive detention.
Michael Ratner, whose human rights organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed the first successful detainee lawsuit in 2002, called Mr. Obama’s proposed U.S. detention scheme a “road to perdition” and nothing more than a plan to “repackage Guantanamo.” Leaders of the so-called Gitmo bar appear poised to launch a flurry of legal challenges the moment the last departing detainee’s feet touch U.S. soil.
In January, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado issued a statement saying that conditions at supermax are “simply another form of torture” worse than Gitmo which “make a mockery of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’” Last month, the ACLU filed a civil lawsuit mirroring Reid’s religious rights claim on behalf of two terrorism inmates held at the Communications Management Unit inside a medium security prison in Terre Haute, Ind.
One of those inmates is Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen serving a 10-year sentence for diverting Muslim charity money to militant Islamic groups in Bosnia and Chechnya. The other, Randall Royer, is serving 20 years for his role recruiting young Muslims in the “Virginia Jihad Network,” a group that used paintball games in 2000-2001 to train for holy war.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly suggested that the security challenge of bringing more than 100 trained and dangerous terrorists onto U.S. soil can be solved by simply installing them in an impenetrable fortress. This view is either disingenuous or naïve. The militant Islamists at Guantanamo too dangerous to release believe that their resistance behind the wire is a continuation of holy war. There is every reason to believe they will continue their jihad once they have been transported to U.S. soil where certain federal judges have signaled a willingness to confer upon them even more rights.
The position of civil rights activists with regard to these prisoners is plain. “If they cannot be convicted,” says ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer, “then you release them.”
Meanwhile, in order to appease political constituencies both here and abroad, the Obama administration is moving full steam ahead, operating on the false premise that giving more civil liberties to religious fanatics bent on destroying Western civilization will make a difference in the Muslim world. In a letter sent to his father as he began his hunger strike, Reid provided a preview of how he will exercise his newly enlarged free speech rights, calling Mr. Obama a “hypocrite” who is “no better than George Bush.” His lawsuit remains active while the Department of Justice works out a settlement that satisfies the man who declared, “I am at war with America.”
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the National September 11 Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Free Press Cartoonist Tortures the Truth
Detroit Free Press editorial cartoonist Mike Thompson gives us a two-fer this Sunday by both blogging and illustrating his feelings about what he terms “CIA torture.”
Maybe we can call this treatment of readers, "inkboarding." I know I often have the feeling I'm drowning in deliberately misleading journalism.
On his Freep blog he writes:
Maybe we can call this treatment of readers, "inkboarding." I know I often have the feeling I'm drowning in deliberately misleading journalism.
On his Freep blog he writes:
This country thought it important enough to investigate and prosecute a president for leaving his DNA all over some intern's dress, but will take a pass when it comes to investigating and prosecuting illegal acts of torture and potential war crimes?
What is wrong with us?
I don't know about "us," but as for Thompson, what is wrong with him--if his cartoon is any indicator--is he lacks a serious enough grasp of the most basic facts to be trusted with "investigating and prosecuting" anybody.
Sure, artistic license is okay when you draw political cartoons. Sometimes you have to exaggerate the truth to make it easier for some people not to miss it. But when you track back that exaggeration, it has to go back to an actual truth. Especially when the cartoon is intended not so much to poke fun or ridicule, but to accuse actual persons of "war crimes."
Spattered blood, burning coals, tongs, chains, rotting skeletons? (OK, maybe Conyers does dress up that way, but I wouldn't know).
Now you may happen to hold the high moral view that waterboarding is the pinnacle of human cruelty, the descent to which, regardless of the urgency of circumstances, earns the United States automatic excommunication from that greater community of decent nations that includes Cuba, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, France, and China. But your high moral view doesn't give you the right to simply make up facts because they match the emotional shock you claim to feel.
That Thompson believes he can simply insert any image he wants to illustrate the term "torture"--no matter how barbaric an image and outside the wildest charges ever concocted by critics of the war against jihad--is exactly why the Left can never be trusted to fairly go at "investigating and prosecuting." They aren't interested in investigating, only prosecuting.
The truth is that the Left has been shouting, and reporting, and especially misreporting, about U.S. "torture" of terrorist detainees since 2003. The Democratic Congress has been threatening war-crimes trials since 2006. Almost every pertinent detail about the handling of these few al-Qaeda terrorists has been disclosed, reported, decribed, analyzed, and digested. I know because I've been following it every step of the way. As have some exceptionally smart people like Andrew McCarthy. There is really nothing left to investigate.
But when the Democrats don't get the result they want, they just keep repeating demands for more investigations. Believe me, if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, there'd still be a sitting Watergate Committee.
And it isn't only the "CIA torture" that Thompson's misnformed about. He still thinks repeating that "Clinton was impeached for having sex" is a going argument. (What am I saying? It is still a going argument! A poll of C-SPAN callers found this the second most likely thing to be said by Democratics, closely following "Bush lied us into this war.")
As should be obvious by now, the release of no amount of information will actually change the minds of any of the stooges, like Mike Thompson, who actually believe there is evidence of medieval-era torture dungeons with bloody walls, racks, and breaking wheels. To minds so willing to believe only the worst, and so incapable of processing what actually happened, investigations are a waste of time, and an invitation to criminalizing political opinions that vary from those on the Left.
Friday, March 13, 2009
No More 'Enemy Combatants'
This decision by the Department of Justice released today outlining a new standard for terrorist detainees is disappointing:
The definition does not rely on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief independent of Congress’s specific authorization. It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. It provides that individuals who supported al Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial. And it does not employ the phrase “enemy combatant.”
Aside from the needless announcement (in my opinion, as it has nothing to do with the submission to the court) that the phrase “enemy combatant” is a thing of the past, the new definition is more ominous because it marks a President ceding to the Congress, and to the timorous authorities that codify the international laws of war, the independent authority as Commander-in-Chief to decide what to do with captured fighters that every American president has enjoyed since George Washington.
It isn’t in the nature of executives to surrender constitutional power. No matter how benevolent a game they talk prior to election, every president ends up jealously guarding, and expanding where he can, the prerogatives of the executive branch. There’s nothing wrong with it: it was meant by the Founders to be that way. They understood the president would always test the limits of his power and may need to be checked, and they knew that the legislative branch in wartime would dither as usual, just when quick command decisions are imperative.
Our system of government hates a vacuum just as much as nature does. The authority that Obama is surrendering as Commander-in-Chief will immediately be absorbed and expanded upon, somehow, by Congress--which is now under the control of a majority of people who never took the jihadist war we’re defending against seriously. Now that he’s surrendered it in the first few weeks of his first year in the White House, he will never get it back without a horrendous fight.
What I’ve seen of President Obama doesn’t make me believe he’s any less hungry for power than any other President--far from it. Is it possible that he has just shot off one of his own presidential appendages (I won’t speculate which one) out of sheer ideological obtuseness our being in a desperate global war, and not just a persistent cycle of international crime?
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Trained Murderers Treated Poorly, We're Shocked to Learn
Do you know what a muscle hijacker is? That's a young Muslim male, not necessarily that big, but bulked up from weightlifting, who's equipped with special training from Al Qaeda, a dull ache for his 72 virgins, and a boxcutter. And he’s perfectly at home with the idea of slicing the throat of a 120 lb. female flight attendant so that the terrified passengers hostage to him, and to his maniac partners in the cockpit, don’t do anything stupid the last few minutes before they’re incinerated:
After al-Qahtani missed his big chance on 9/11, he skeedadled to Afghanistan to make jihad there, and got himself arrested in December 2001 and sent to Gitmo.
While there, he was identified as the “last member” of the 20-man hijacking team sent to attack us on 9/11. Al-Qahtani admitted he’d met bin Laden several times, had received terrorist training at AQ camps, could identify top AQ leaders, and had been sent by KSM to be a part of the 9/11 attack. Of absolutely no surprise to anyone, intelligence officials wanted to know everything he knew, and did what they could to get him in a talking mood. America still didn't know if we were going to get hit again.
At the New York Times, Reuters, the AP, and the Washington Post, they don’t like to use the term “muscle hijacker” when they describe al-Qahtani. They prefer “detainee,” maybe because it starts with a “D” and sounds more like “defendant,” as in, you have the right to remain silent.
The reports yesterday, originating with Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, describe how a “top Bush administration official. . . concluded” that the U.S. military tortured al-Qahtani. (“Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official”).
The official, Susan J. Crawford, is a retired judge appointed to review Guanantamo cases for prosecution.
The stories are misleading. Read them carefully enough and you can piece together that everything the interrogators did was legal at the time. Nor is it Crawford’s assignment either to act as a factfinder on issues of detainee treatment, nor to issue legal findings on what is or isn’t torture. (Andrew McCarthy explains this much better than I could here.)
Look at these stories and see how they try to lead the reader. Whaaa!, al Qahtani is only a “detainee” (not a fighter trained to slaughter innocent civilians). Whaaaa! Al Qahtani has been subjected to “degrading and abusive” interrogation (after it was learned he was inside with UBL and KSM only months after 9/11). Whaaaa!, he was told that his mother and sisters were “whores.” (He was trained to cut the throats of flight attendants and passengers). Whaaaa!, he was forced to wear a bra and had a thong placed on his head during interrogation. Whaaaa!, he was scared with a dog. He was even “hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.”
Okay, I admit it. That’s pretty tough stuff.
Until you remember that the record also shows the heart rates of 3,000 victims of al Qahtani's friends dropped to zero beats per minute on the morning of 9/11.
I'd hate like hell to think cops were treating defendants this way. But I have no problem at all with out military and intelligence warriors getting busy with these sworn enemies of life.
Even Crawford gets this, though she’s too confused to know the difference between war and law enforcement:
"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "
According to KSM, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] Abu Turab even had the trainees butcher a sheep and a camel with a knife to prepare to use knives during theMohammed al-Qahtani is a muscle hijacker. And he was anxious to do his part to slaughter a Barbara Olson, or a Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, and to make Todd Beamer or Jeremy Glick’s wives into widows. Al-Qahtani was the twentieth 9/11 hijacker, and the only thing that kept him from doing his part that day was an immigration agent who spotted him as hinky and sent him back to Dubai.
hijackings. The recruits learned to focus on storming the cockpit at the earliest opportunity when the doors first opened, and to worry about seizing control over the rest of the plane later. The operatives were taught about other kinds of attack as well, such as truck bombing, so that they would not be able to disclose the exact nature of their operation if they were caught. According to KSM, the muscle did not learn the full details-including the plan to hijack planes and fly them into buildings-before reaching the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report, Ch. 7.3.
After al-Qahtani missed his big chance on 9/11, he skeedadled to Afghanistan to make jihad there, and got himself arrested in December 2001 and sent to Gitmo.
While there, he was identified as the “last member” of the 20-man hijacking team sent to attack us on 9/11. Al-Qahtani admitted he’d met bin Laden several times, had received terrorist training at AQ camps, could identify top AQ leaders, and had been sent by KSM to be a part of the 9/11 attack. Of absolutely no surprise to anyone, intelligence officials wanted to know everything he knew, and did what they could to get him in a talking mood. America still didn't know if we were going to get hit again.
At the New York Times, Reuters, the AP, and the Washington Post, they don’t like to use the term “muscle hijacker” when they describe al-Qahtani. They prefer “detainee,” maybe because it starts with a “D” and sounds more like “defendant,” as in, you have the right to remain silent.
The reports yesterday, originating with Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, describe how a “top Bush administration official. . . concluded” that the U.S. military tortured al-Qahtani. (“Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official”).
The official, Susan J. Crawford, is a retired judge appointed to review Guanantamo cases for prosecution.
The stories are misleading. Read them carefully enough and you can piece together that everything the interrogators did was legal at the time. Nor is it Crawford’s assignment either to act as a factfinder on issues of detainee treatment, nor to issue legal findings on what is or isn’t torture. (Andrew McCarthy explains this much better than I could here.)
Look at these stories and see how they try to lead the reader. Whaaa!, al Qahtani is only a “detainee” (not a fighter trained to slaughter innocent civilians). Whaaaa! Al Qahtani has been subjected to “degrading and abusive” interrogation (after it was learned he was inside with UBL and KSM only months after 9/11). Whaaaa!, he was told that his mother and sisters were “whores.” (He was trained to cut the throats of flight attendants and passengers). Whaaaa!, he was forced to wear a bra and had a thong placed on his head during interrogation. Whaaaa!, he was scared with a dog. He was even “hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.”
Okay, I admit it. That’s pretty tough stuff.
Until you remember that the record also shows the heart rates of 3,000 victims of al Qahtani's friends dropped to zero beats per minute on the morning of 9/11.
I'd hate like hell to think cops were treating defendants this way. But I have no problem at all with out military and intelligence warriors getting busy with these sworn enemies of life.
Even Crawford gets this, though she’s too confused to know the difference between war and law enforcement:
"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "
Saturday, November 22, 2008
An Open Letter to Osama's Number 2 (With Apologies to Toilet-Training Toddlers Everywhere)
Look here, Mr. Zawahiri, a lot of us were able to overlook that whole 9/11 thing. That was probably understandable, what with us helping Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from being overrun by Saddam Hussein, and what with us being infidels and little Eichmans, not to mention all the rest of your group’s very valid criticisms of our nation.
But calling our new president a “house negro”? (“Al-Qaida's No. 2 insults Obama”). Saying our Messiah isn’t as cool as Malik al-Shabazz (Malcolm X)?
This is 2008 America, pal, and those are fighting words.
From here out there’ll be no more ineffective unilateral cowboy diplomacy. Now you're going to have a mess of groups mad at you, instead of only Dick Cheney and George Bush. To start with, Rev. Al Sharpton, who happens to have a worldwide copyright on the term “house negro”©, (along with such equally valuable expressions as “No Justice”© and “No Peace”©).
The intellectual property litigation alone is going to make your boss wished he's stayed in Saudi Arabia building 10-car garages .
My point is, if you thought Obama’s campaign threats to hunt you and Osama down were scary, just wait until the ACLU gets the case.
Trust me. If there’s anyone who can zero in on people with strong religious views and drop a bomb on them--no matter how well hidden you are--it’s those cats.
May Allah have mercy on you, 'cause I wouldn't give a potful of number 2 for your chances now.
But calling our new president a “house negro”? (“Al-Qaida's No. 2 insults Obama”). Saying our Messiah isn’t as cool as Malik al-Shabazz (Malcolm X)?
This is 2008 America, pal, and those are fighting words.
From here out there’ll be no more ineffective unilateral cowboy diplomacy. Now you're going to have a mess of groups mad at you, instead of only Dick Cheney and George Bush. To start with, Rev. Al Sharpton, who happens to have a worldwide copyright on the term “house negro”©, (along with such equally valuable expressions as “No Justice”© and “No Peace”©).
The intellectual property litigation alone is going to make your boss wished he's stayed in Saudi Arabia building 10-car garages .
My point is, if you thought Obama’s campaign threats to hunt you and Osama down were scary, just wait until the ACLU gets the case.
Trust me. If there’s anyone who can zero in on people with strong religious views and drop a bomb on them--no matter how well hidden you are--it’s those cats.
May Allah have mercy on you, 'cause I wouldn't give a potful of number 2 for your chances now.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Saddam's Terrorist Ties Coming to Light
From yesterday's New York Sun:
Report Details Saddam's Terrorist Ties
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 14, 2008
WASHINGTON — A Pentagon review of about 600,000 documents captured in the Iraq war attests to Saddam Hussein's willingness to use terrorism to target Americans and work closely with jihadist organizations throughout the Middle East.
The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.
The report, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," finds that:
• The Iraqi Intelligence Service in a 1993 memo to Saddam agreed on a plan to train commandos from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat and was founded by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
• In the same year, Saddam ordered his intelligence service to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia." At the time, Al Qaeda was working with warlords against American forces there.
• Saddam's intelligence services maintained extensive support networks for a wide range of Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations, including but not limited to Hamas. Among the other Palestinian groups Saddam supported at the time was Force 17, the private army loyal to Yasser Arafat.
• Beginning in 1999, Iraq's intelligence service began providing "financial and moral support" for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.
• In 2001, Saddam's intelligence service drafted a manual titled "Lessons in Secret Organization and Jihad Work—How to Organ ize and Overthrow the Saudi Royal Family." In the same year, his intelligence service submitted names of 10 volunteer "martyrs" for operations inside the Kingdom.
• In 2000, Iraq sent a suicide bomber through Northern Iraq who intended to travel to London to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi, at the time an Iraqi opposition leader who would later go on to be an Iraqi deputy prime minister. The mission was aborted after the bomber could not obtain a visa to enter the United Kingdom.
The report finds that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who is wanted by the FBI for mixing the chemicals for the 1993 World Center Attack, was a prisoner, and not a guest, in Iraq. An audio file of Saddam cited by the report indicates that the Iraqi dictator did not trust him and at one point said that he thought his testimony was too "organized." Saddam said on an audio file cited by the report that he suspected that the first attack could be the work of either Israel or American intelligence, or perhaps a Saudi or Egyptian faction.
The report also undercuts the claim made by many on the left and many at the CIA that Saddam, as a national socialist, was incapable of supporting or collaborating with the Islamist al Qaeda. The report concludes that instead Iraq's relationship with Osama bin Laden's organization was similar to the relationship between the rival Colombian cocaine cartels in the 1990s. Both were rivals in some sense for market share, but also allies when it came to expanding the size of the overall market.
The Pentagon study finds, "Recognizing Iraq as a second, or parallel, 'terror cartel' that was simultaneously threatened by and somewhat aligned with its rival helps to explain the evidence emerging from the detritus of Saddam's regime."
A long time skeptic of the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq and a former CIA senior Iraq analyst, Judith Yaphe yesterday said, "I think the report indicates that Saddam was willing to work with almost any group be it nationalist or Islamic, that was willing to work for his objectives. But in the long term he did not trust many of the Islamist groups, especially those linked to Saudi Arabia or Iran." She added, "He really did want to get anti-American operations going. The fact that they had little success shows in part their incompetence and unwilling surrogates."
A former Bush administration official who was a member of the counter-terrorism evaluation group that analyzed terror networks and links between terrorists and states, David Wurmser, said he felt the report began to vindicate his point of view.
"This is the beginning of the process of exposing Saddam's involvement in Islamic terror. But it is only the beginning. Time and declassification I'm sure will reveal yet more," he said. "Even so, this report is damning to those who doubted Saddam Hussein's involvement with Jihadist terrorist groups. It devastates one of the central myths plaguing our government prior to 9-11, that a Jihadist group would not cooperate with a secular regime and vice versa."
The report concludes that Saddam until the final months of his regime was willing to attack America. Its conclusion asks "Is there anything in the captured archives to indicate that Saddam had the will to use his terrorist capabilities directly against the United States?" It goes on, "Judging from Saddam's statements before the 1991 Gulf War with the United States, the answer is yes." As for after the Gulf War, the report states, "The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam's 'coercion' tool box." It goes on, "Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces." The report does note that it is unclear whether Saddam would have authorized terrorism against American targets in the final months of his regime before Operation Iraqi Freedom five years ago. "The answer to the question of Saddam's will in the final months in power remains elusive," it says.
Report Details Saddam's Terrorist Ties
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 14, 2008
WASHINGTON — A Pentagon review of about 600,000 documents captured in the Iraq war attests to Saddam Hussein's willingness to use terrorism to target Americans and work closely with jihadist organizations throughout the Middle East.
The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.
The report, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," finds that:
• The Iraqi Intelligence Service in a 1993 memo to Saddam agreed on a plan to train commandos from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat and was founded by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
• In the same year, Saddam ordered his intelligence service to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia." At the time, Al Qaeda was working with warlords against American forces there.
• Saddam's intelligence services maintained extensive support networks for a wide range of Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations, including but not limited to Hamas. Among the other Palestinian groups Saddam supported at the time was Force 17, the private army loyal to Yasser Arafat.
• Beginning in 1999, Iraq's intelligence service began providing "financial and moral support" for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.
• In 2001, Saddam's intelligence service drafted a manual titled "Lessons in Secret Organization and Jihad Work—How to Organ ize and Overthrow the Saudi Royal Family." In the same year, his intelligence service submitted names of 10 volunteer "martyrs" for operations inside the Kingdom.
• In 2000, Iraq sent a suicide bomber through Northern Iraq who intended to travel to London to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi, at the time an Iraqi opposition leader who would later go on to be an Iraqi deputy prime minister. The mission was aborted after the bomber could not obtain a visa to enter the United Kingdom.
The report finds that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who is wanted by the FBI for mixing the chemicals for the 1993 World Center Attack, was a prisoner, and not a guest, in Iraq. An audio file of Saddam cited by the report indicates that the Iraqi dictator did not trust him and at one point said that he thought his testimony was too "organized." Saddam said on an audio file cited by the report that he suspected that the first attack could be the work of either Israel or American intelligence, or perhaps a Saudi or Egyptian faction.
The report also undercuts the claim made by many on the left and many at the CIA that Saddam, as a national socialist, was incapable of supporting or collaborating with the Islamist al Qaeda. The report concludes that instead Iraq's relationship with Osama bin Laden's organization was similar to the relationship between the rival Colombian cocaine cartels in the 1990s. Both were rivals in some sense for market share, but also allies when it came to expanding the size of the overall market.
The Pentagon study finds, "Recognizing Iraq as a second, or parallel, 'terror cartel' that was simultaneously threatened by and somewhat aligned with its rival helps to explain the evidence emerging from the detritus of Saddam's regime."
A long time skeptic of the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq and a former CIA senior Iraq analyst, Judith Yaphe yesterday said, "I think the report indicates that Saddam was willing to work with almost any group be it nationalist or Islamic, that was willing to work for his objectives. But in the long term he did not trust many of the Islamist groups, especially those linked to Saudi Arabia or Iran." She added, "He really did want to get anti-American operations going. The fact that they had little success shows in part their incompetence and unwilling surrogates."
A former Bush administration official who was a member of the counter-terrorism evaluation group that analyzed terror networks and links between terrorists and states, David Wurmser, said he felt the report began to vindicate his point of view.
"This is the beginning of the process of exposing Saddam's involvement in Islamic terror. But it is only the beginning. Time and declassification I'm sure will reveal yet more," he said. "Even so, this report is damning to those who doubted Saddam Hussein's involvement with Jihadist terrorist groups. It devastates one of the central myths plaguing our government prior to 9-11, that a Jihadist group would not cooperate with a secular regime and vice versa."
The report concludes that Saddam until the final months of his regime was willing to attack America. Its conclusion asks "Is there anything in the captured archives to indicate that Saddam had the will to use his terrorist capabilities directly against the United States?" It goes on, "Judging from Saddam's statements before the 1991 Gulf War with the United States, the answer is yes." As for after the Gulf War, the report states, "The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam's 'coercion' tool box." It goes on, "Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces." The report does note that it is unclear whether Saddam would have authorized terrorism against American targets in the final months of his regime before Operation Iraqi Freedom five years ago. "The answer to the question of Saddam's will in the final months in power remains elusive," it says.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
'A Man Needs an Education These Days, If He Ever Hopes to Blow Up Some Jews'
Speaking of high-tech terrorists, the Free Press ran some comments Talal Chahine, the fugitive owner of the extinct La Shish restaurant chain, made in 2006. He made his comments from his Lebanese fastness, in answer to federal prosecutors claiming he has links with Hezbollah. (“Chahine's response to Hizballah claims”).
Chahine denies supporting terrorism, of course. He was only participating in a fundraiser for al- Mabarrat, to help out the orphans. (The orphans of suicide terrorists, that is). But Chahine doesn’t seem to believe there is much terrorism out there, anyway. It's exaggerated, like Communism during the Cold War.
"The war on terror is becoming the modern-day equivalent of McCarthyism. I strongly believe that the war against terrorism will not be won with a bullet, bomb or missile but by somehow giving hope to those people in the world who are without hope, and this can only be achieved by better communication and education."
We hear this a lot. Impoverished Msulims from throughout the Middle East, Africa, and sout Asia leave home and trek to Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq to blow themselves up in an act of depseration over their living conditions back home. Cure poverty, and you'll cure terrorism, it's said.
Yet it keeps turning out that better communication, education, and literacy don't seem to be quieting things down.
Chahine may not have heard, for instance, about Al Qaeda’s al-Sahab production company, the one that’s garnered such impressive notice from AP writer Kathy Gannon. (“AP Writer Bullish on Al Qaeda”).
It’s not poor people without hope or education joining up at all, (it never really was), but computer-savvy PhDs and professors. And as for better communication, that’s exactly how Al Qaeda’s winning recruits over--with slick videos.
Instead of using all this literacy and education and high-quality communication to win the war against terrorism, terrorists are using all these tools to recruit even more fighters to win their war against the West.
Chahine denies supporting terrorism, of course. He was only participating in a fundraiser for al- Mabarrat, to help out the orphans. (The orphans of suicide terrorists, that is). But Chahine doesn’t seem to believe there is much terrorism out there, anyway. It's exaggerated, like Communism during the Cold War.
"The war on terror is becoming the modern-day equivalent of McCarthyism. I strongly believe that the war against terrorism will not be won with a bullet, bomb or missile but by somehow giving hope to those people in the world who are without hope, and this can only be achieved by better communication and education."
We hear this a lot. Impoverished Msulims from throughout the Middle East, Africa, and sout Asia leave home and trek to Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq to blow themselves up in an act of depseration over their living conditions back home. Cure poverty, and you'll cure terrorism, it's said.
Yet it keeps turning out that better communication, education, and literacy don't seem to be quieting things down.
Chahine may not have heard, for instance, about Al Qaeda’s al-Sahab production company, the one that’s garnered such impressive notice from AP writer Kathy Gannon. (“AP Writer Bullish on Al Qaeda”).
It’s not poor people without hope or education joining up at all, (it never really was), but computer-savvy PhDs and professors. And as for better communication, that’s exactly how Al Qaeda’s winning recruits over--with slick videos.
Instead of using all this literacy and education and high-quality communication to win the war against terrorism, terrorists are using all these tools to recruit even more fighters to win their war against the West.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Sneeze Alert: Al Qaeda Fleeing Baghdad
If you read your Saturday’s Detroit News in a hurry, you may have missed this 72-word paragraph in the Nation/World Briefs:
Iraq premier: Al-Qaida is on the run
BAGHDAD -- Iraq's prime minister said Friday that U.S. and Iraqi troops have chased al-Qaida in Iraq out of Baghdad in the year since a security crackdown began, and he promised to pursue insurgents who have fled northward. Underscoring the rising violence in northern Iraq, a double suicide bombing targeted Shiite worshippers as they left weekly prayer services in the city of Tal Afar, killing at least four people and wounding 17, officials said.
I like the way this notice saves its “underscoring” not for the ongoing and unheralded success of coalition forces in Iraq, but for the “rising violence in northern Iraq"--which is only rising because a routed AQ has no place left to go.
Iraq premier: Al-Qaida is on the run
BAGHDAD -- Iraq's prime minister said Friday that U.S. and Iraqi troops have chased al-Qaida in Iraq out of Baghdad in the year since a security crackdown began, and he promised to pursue insurgents who have fled northward. Underscoring the rising violence in northern Iraq, a double suicide bombing targeted Shiite worshippers as they left weekly prayer services in the city of Tal Afar, killing at least four people and wounding 17, officials said.
I like the way this notice saves its “underscoring” not for the ongoing and unheralded success of coalition forces in Iraq, but for the “rising violence in northern Iraq"--which is only rising because a routed AQ has no place left to go.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Measures of Progress in Baghdad
This Thanksgiving Day feel-good story has everything.
“Americans are our protectors and saviors,” said the killer of Al Qaeda’s “White Lion” in Baghdad.
It gets better.
“You can move freely in Amariyah at any time of the day or night,” Abul Abed said. “You can even see women without head scarves, wearing tight jeans!”
From last Thursday's Chicago Tribune:
New boss turns the tables on Al Qaeda
Ex-Sunni insurgent becomes U.S. ally
By Liz Sly, Tribune foreign correspondent; Nadeem Majeed contributed to this report
November 22, 2007
BAGHDAD
The once-dreaded Al Qaeda in Iraq stronghold of Amariyah has a new boss, and he's not shy about telling the story of the shootout that turned him into a local legend and helped change the tenor of the Iraq war.
Earlier this year, Abul Abed, a disgruntled Sunni insurgent leader, began secret talks with the Americans about ending Al Qaeda's reign of terror in this run-down, formerly middle-class Baghdad neighborhood, renowned as one of the city's most dangerous. He had been gathering intelligence on the group for months.
One day in late May, he said, he decided it was time to act.
He hailed the car carrying the feared leader of Al Qaeda in the neighborhood, a man known as the White Lion, on one of Amariyah's main streets. “We want you to stop destroying our neighborhood,” he told the man.
“Do you know who you are talking to?” said the White Lion, getting out of his car. “I am Al Qaeda. I will destroy even your own houses!”
He pulled out his pistol and shot at Abul Abed. The gun jammed. He reloaded and fired again. Again, the gun jammed.
By this time, Abul Abed said, he had pulled his own gun. He fired once, killing the White Lion.
“I walked over to him, stepped on his hand and took his gun,” Abul Abed, which is a nom de guerre, said at his new, pink-painted headquarters in a renovated school in Amariyah, as an American Army captain seated in the corner nodded his head in affirmation of the account. “And then the fight started.”
It was the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda in Amariyah. The next day, a firefight erupted. Al Qaeda fighters closed in on Abul Abed. Most of the 150 men who had joined him fled. Holed up in a mosque with fewer than a dozen supporters, Abul Abed thought the end was near.
“The blue carpet was soaked red with blood,” he recalled. Then the imam of the mosque called in American help.
A friendship was born.
Now Abul Abed, a swaggering former major in the Iraqi army and reputedly a top leader in the influential Islamic Army insurgent group, reigns supreme in Amariyah -- with considerable help from the U.S. military.
Still wearing the White Lion's pistol tucked into his belt, he commands his own 600-member paramilitary force, called the Knights of Mesopotamia. He receives $460,000 a month from the U.S. military to pay, arm and equip them. They wear crisp olive green uniforms with smart red and yellow badges bearing the Knights' horse-head logo. They are well-armed, and some have flak jackets.
But they don't really need them. Since the Knights drove Al Qaeda out of Amariyah after a two-month battle, the neighborhood has become largely safe.
“You can move freely in Amariyah at any time of the day or night,” Abul Abed said. "You can even see women without head scarves, wearing tight jeans!"
An 'Awakening' in Iraq
Men like Abul Abed have helped change the face of the war. Following in the footsteps of the late Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the tribal leader who led the Sunni revolt that drove Al Qaeda from the base of its operations in Iraq’s Anbar province, more than 70,000 people, most of them Sunnis, in 148 groups have joined in the so-called Awakening, or Sahwa, movement, according to the U.S. military, turning against Al Qaeda and turning to the Americans for help.
Since Abul Abed's fight in Amariyah, some of the most feared Baghdad neighborhoods, including Abu Ghraib, Fadhil, Ghazaliyah, Dora and Adhamiyah, have followed suit, forming their own brigades of Knights, welcoming the U.S. military and receiving U.S. money.
Abul Abed is coy about his insurgent connections. He gave his real name as Saad Erebi Ghaffouri al-Obaidi, though he is known across Baghdad as Abul Abed. U.S. officials, Amariyah residents and Sunni leaders say he was a prominent commander in the Islamic Army. He described himself as a former Iraqi army major who "went into business" after the regime fell. He won't say what business.
But he acknowledged that many of his men once fought Americans and now work closely with them.
“They recognize that they made a big mistake,” he said. “They realize that they were on the wrong path and that they wasted many chances with what they did.”
The implications of creating this network of trained, armed paramilitaries loyal not to the government but to an assortment of local strongmen have yet to be played out. U.S. officials said they are relieved that the revolution within the Sunni community has helped to sharply reduce the number of attacks. According to the military, attacks in Iraq fell 55 percent between March and October.
The U.S. wants to absorb the Sunnis who have joined the Awakening movement into the Iraqi security forces, but so far the Shiite-led government has hesitated, concerned that they will one day turn against the government. If the government continues to frustrate the Sunnis, U.S. officials are concerned their new allies could go back to the insurgency.
“That's the big intangible that makes me nervous,” said Col. Martin Stanton, who oversees the reconciliation and engagement effort. If there is no progress on getting the paramilitaries regular jobs with the security forces and delivering services to Sunni areas, Sunni frustrations will continue to mount, he said.
“The question is, what's the break point? ... How long before people start getting sick of it and start checking out?” he said.
‘Americans are our protectors’
Abul Abed said the Sunni revolution has gone too far for that.
“Americans are our protectors and saviors,” he said.
The real enemy of Iraq, he says, now is Iran. He pulled out his mobile phone to show pictures he has saved of the bodies of his four brothers, who were kidnapped and murdered in 2005 by what he suspects was a Shiite death squad with ties to Iran. One of them had a nail driven into his head. Another was missing a hand.
“Even animals wouldn't do that,” he said, his face darkening. “Iran is so deeply infiltrated in Iraq, the problem here still cannot be solved. Iran wants to demolish us. If the Americans leave, then you can count Iraq as a second Tehran.”
“Americans are our protectors and saviors,” said the killer of Al Qaeda’s “White Lion” in Baghdad.
It gets better.
“You can move freely in Amariyah at any time of the day or night,” Abul Abed said. “You can even see women without head scarves, wearing tight jeans!”
From last Thursday's Chicago Tribune:
New boss turns the tables on Al Qaeda
Ex-Sunni insurgent becomes U.S. ally
By Liz Sly, Tribune foreign correspondent; Nadeem Majeed contributed to this report
November 22, 2007
BAGHDAD
The once-dreaded Al Qaeda in Iraq stronghold of Amariyah has a new boss, and he's not shy about telling the story of the shootout that turned him into a local legend and helped change the tenor of the Iraq war.
Earlier this year, Abul Abed, a disgruntled Sunni insurgent leader, began secret talks with the Americans about ending Al Qaeda's reign of terror in this run-down, formerly middle-class Baghdad neighborhood, renowned as one of the city's most dangerous. He had been gathering intelligence on the group for months.
One day in late May, he said, he decided it was time to act.
He hailed the car carrying the feared leader of Al Qaeda in the neighborhood, a man known as the White Lion, on one of Amariyah's main streets. “We want you to stop destroying our neighborhood,” he told the man.
“Do you know who you are talking to?” said the White Lion, getting out of his car. “I am Al Qaeda. I will destroy even your own houses!”
He pulled out his pistol and shot at Abul Abed. The gun jammed. He reloaded and fired again. Again, the gun jammed.
By this time, Abul Abed said, he had pulled his own gun. He fired once, killing the White Lion.
“I walked over to him, stepped on his hand and took his gun,” Abul Abed, which is a nom de guerre, said at his new, pink-painted headquarters in a renovated school in Amariyah, as an American Army captain seated in the corner nodded his head in affirmation of the account. “And then the fight started.”
It was the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda in Amariyah. The next day, a firefight erupted. Al Qaeda fighters closed in on Abul Abed. Most of the 150 men who had joined him fled. Holed up in a mosque with fewer than a dozen supporters, Abul Abed thought the end was near.
“The blue carpet was soaked red with blood,” he recalled. Then the imam of the mosque called in American help.
A friendship was born.
Now Abul Abed, a swaggering former major in the Iraqi army and reputedly a top leader in the influential Islamic Army insurgent group, reigns supreme in Amariyah -- with considerable help from the U.S. military.
Still wearing the White Lion's pistol tucked into his belt, he commands his own 600-member paramilitary force, called the Knights of Mesopotamia. He receives $460,000 a month from the U.S. military to pay, arm and equip them. They wear crisp olive green uniforms with smart red and yellow badges bearing the Knights' horse-head logo. They are well-armed, and some have flak jackets.
But they don't really need them. Since the Knights drove Al Qaeda out of Amariyah after a two-month battle, the neighborhood has become largely safe.
“You can move freely in Amariyah at any time of the day or night,” Abul Abed said. "You can even see women without head scarves, wearing tight jeans!"
An 'Awakening' in Iraq
Men like Abul Abed have helped change the face of the war. Following in the footsteps of the late Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the tribal leader who led the Sunni revolt that drove Al Qaeda from the base of its operations in Iraq’s Anbar province, more than 70,000 people, most of them Sunnis, in 148 groups have joined in the so-called Awakening, or Sahwa, movement, according to the U.S. military, turning against Al Qaeda and turning to the Americans for help.
Since Abul Abed's fight in Amariyah, some of the most feared Baghdad neighborhoods, including Abu Ghraib, Fadhil, Ghazaliyah, Dora and Adhamiyah, have followed suit, forming their own brigades of Knights, welcoming the U.S. military and receiving U.S. money.
Abul Abed is coy about his insurgent connections. He gave his real name as Saad Erebi Ghaffouri al-Obaidi, though he is known across Baghdad as Abul Abed. U.S. officials, Amariyah residents and Sunni leaders say he was a prominent commander in the Islamic Army. He described himself as a former Iraqi army major who "went into business" after the regime fell. He won't say what business.
But he acknowledged that many of his men once fought Americans and now work closely with them.
“They recognize that they made a big mistake,” he said. “They realize that they were on the wrong path and that they wasted many chances with what they did.”
The implications of creating this network of trained, armed paramilitaries loyal not to the government but to an assortment of local strongmen have yet to be played out. U.S. officials said they are relieved that the revolution within the Sunni community has helped to sharply reduce the number of attacks. According to the military, attacks in Iraq fell 55 percent between March and October.
The U.S. wants to absorb the Sunnis who have joined the Awakening movement into the Iraqi security forces, but so far the Shiite-led government has hesitated, concerned that they will one day turn against the government. If the government continues to frustrate the Sunnis, U.S. officials are concerned their new allies could go back to the insurgency.
“That's the big intangible that makes me nervous,” said Col. Martin Stanton, who oversees the reconciliation and engagement effort. If there is no progress on getting the paramilitaries regular jobs with the security forces and delivering services to Sunni areas, Sunni frustrations will continue to mount, he said.
“The question is, what's the break point? ... How long before people start getting sick of it and start checking out?” he said.
‘Americans are our protectors’
Abul Abed said the Sunni revolution has gone too far for that.
“Americans are our protectors and saviors,” he said.
The real enemy of Iraq, he says, now is Iran. He pulled out his mobile phone to show pictures he has saved of the bodies of his four brothers, who were kidnapped and murdered in 2005 by what he suspects was a Shiite death squad with ties to Iran. One of them had a nail driven into his head. Another was missing a hand.
“Even animals wouldn't do that,” he said, his face darkening. “Iran is so deeply infiltrated in Iraq, the problem here still cannot be solved. Iran wants to demolish us. If the Americans leave, then you can count Iraq as a second Tehran.”
Monday, October 22, 2007
Why We Need an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week
I believe it was Oscar Wilde who said something like, “lots of people think a thing, without thinking it through."
And, by way of example, and just in time for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, Detroit’s most prominent columnist, sports writer, and author, Mitch Albom, has decided to raise alarms about the TSA’s failure to spot fake bombs or bomb parts during test screenings. (“This failure should sound the alarms”).
I’m hardly going to minimize the seriousness of the TSA’s failures. I think airport screening should be privatized, but that’s for another post, or someone else’s. Obviously, it’s not acceptable to have this kind of a failure rate.
But it's Albom’s utter failure to see any bigger picture that reveals his own failure—or unwillingness—to think the thing through. And to me his narrow point of view is just as scary as what's got his nose out of joint: that, "six years after the fact, we still have disinterested agents.”
Disinterested agents? How about disengaged commentators?
First off, when it comes to placing the blame for our current high level of national expense, worry, war-making, alerts, inconvenience, and so on, he writes "we can blame ourselves.”
Read for yourselves, and you will see that Albom nowhere places the blame for 9/11, or all the other related things he’s unhappy about, on Islamic terrorism.
Yet where he really goes wrong is when he equates the TSA’s failures to spot test bombs as:
a straight line to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania six years ago.
Can you imagine how our lives would be different if those 19 hijackers had been stopped? Think about every security issue you now face in daily life, think about the economic drain on this nation, think about the war, the lives lost, the political hate, and all of it goes back to how those men got on those planes.
So you would think, before throwing hundreds of billions at a conflict in Iraq, the first, the biggest, the most obvious use of money and effort would be at the real ground zero of the Sept. 11 terrorism plan -- the airports.
Except Ground Zero of Islamo-Fascism is not America's airports. It is the Islamic world that has embraced radical jihad. If all of the nineteen hijackers had been caught, and all of 9/11’s victims spared, we would still be facing a hostile Islamic world.
9/11 wasn't hatched by these 19 in the airport, it was hatched by al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And al Qaeda, and its sister radical Islamic terror armies, were hatched in the heart of the umma. Don't blame this on boxcutters. They are only tools in the hands of thinking enemies.
Albom may as well say that if the U.S. Armed Forces had done a better job anticipating the signs of a Japanese surprise attack in December 1941, and thwarted it, all of the trouble of World War II would have been spared.
Of course, America's role in the World War wouldn’t have been over that easily even if we had stopped the attack on Pearl Harbor: there still would have been the menace of Imperial Japan’s expanding war, and Hitler’s depredations in Europe, and both Axis powers having already laid plans that included us--whether we willingly decided to go to war or not.
So sooner or later, with or without Pearl Harbor, we were going to be in it. Our islolation was an illusion. The Axis who started all the fuss weren’t going to stop until enough of us made up our minds to stop them.
Now Albom apparently believes that if 9/11 had been prevented, we could have drawn a big sigh of relief, and then gone right back to what we were doing before without all this bother and waste of time over a so-called war on terrorism. (As I recall, what Democrats were doing on 9/10/2001 was still re-breathing into brown paper bags over the 2000 election in Florida).
Yet I can't imagine how merely preventing 9/11 would have been the end of radical jihad's efforts to kill Americans. And I can't imagine that we would all be safer, more prosperous, and doing fine, if we had stopped this single attack.
Think about this.
Osama bin Ladin would still be running al Qaeda from Afghanistan, and the Taliban would still be ruling in Kabul and Kandahar; Saddam and his sons would still be tormenting Iraq, and revving up his nuclear program, (because there's no way sanctions would have lasted until 2007); the Saudis would have continued with their export of Wahhabism, without benefit of the closer, if imperfect, scrutiny there's been because of 9/11; Iran would still be run by crazy mullahs, and now in an arms race with Iraq; the Syrians would still be occupying Lebanon; the wall of separation between American domestic law enforcement and national security would still be up.
Last but not least, if it weren't for the magnificent response of the coalition since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq, and determination to roll up and interfere with terrorism around the world, the last American response to terrorism the Islamists would have had to go by to judge our resolve would have been the weak inaction we showed following the bombing of the USS Cole.
So why does a bright and otherwise thoughful writer like Mitch Albom get it so backwards, figuring that jihadist terrorism didn't bring us 9/11, but it was 9/11 that brought us jihadist terrorism?
I don't know. But if that's what he really thinks, then he needs to go back and think about it again. And this time he needs to think about it all the way through.
And, by way of example, and just in time for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, Detroit’s most prominent columnist, sports writer, and author, Mitch Albom, has decided to raise alarms about the TSA’s failure to spot fake bombs or bomb parts during test screenings. (“This failure should sound the alarms”).
I’m hardly going to minimize the seriousness of the TSA’s failures. I think airport screening should be privatized, but that’s for another post, or someone else’s. Obviously, it’s not acceptable to have this kind of a failure rate.
But it's Albom’s utter failure to see any bigger picture that reveals his own failure—or unwillingness—to think the thing through. And to me his narrow point of view is just as scary as what's got his nose out of joint: that, "six years after the fact, we still have disinterested agents.”
Disinterested agents? How about disengaged commentators?
First off, when it comes to placing the blame for our current high level of national expense, worry, war-making, alerts, inconvenience, and so on, he writes "we can blame ourselves.”
Read for yourselves, and you will see that Albom nowhere places the blame for 9/11, or all the other related things he’s unhappy about, on Islamic terrorism.
Yet where he really goes wrong is when he equates the TSA’s failures to spot test bombs as:
a straight line to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania six years ago.
Can you imagine how our lives would be different if those 19 hijackers had been stopped? Think about every security issue you now face in daily life, think about the economic drain on this nation, think about the war, the lives lost, the political hate, and all of it goes back to how those men got on those planes.
So you would think, before throwing hundreds of billions at a conflict in Iraq, the first, the biggest, the most obvious use of money and effort would be at the real ground zero of the Sept. 11 terrorism plan -- the airports.
Except Ground Zero of Islamo-Fascism is not America's airports. It is the Islamic world that has embraced radical jihad. If all of the nineteen hijackers had been caught, and all of 9/11’s victims spared, we would still be facing a hostile Islamic world.
9/11 wasn't hatched by these 19 in the airport, it was hatched by al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And al Qaeda, and its sister radical Islamic terror armies, were hatched in the heart of the umma. Don't blame this on boxcutters. They are only tools in the hands of thinking enemies.
Albom may as well say that if the U.S. Armed Forces had done a better job anticipating the signs of a Japanese surprise attack in December 1941, and thwarted it, all of the trouble of World War II would have been spared.
Of course, America's role in the World War wouldn’t have been over that easily even if we had stopped the attack on Pearl Harbor: there still would have been the menace of Imperial Japan’s expanding war, and Hitler’s depredations in Europe, and both Axis powers having already laid plans that included us--whether we willingly decided to go to war or not.
So sooner or later, with or without Pearl Harbor, we were going to be in it. Our islolation was an illusion. The Axis who started all the fuss weren’t going to stop until enough of us made up our minds to stop them.
Now Albom apparently believes that if 9/11 had been prevented, we could have drawn a big sigh of relief, and then gone right back to what we were doing before without all this bother and waste of time over a so-called war on terrorism. (As I recall, what Democrats were doing on 9/10/2001 was still re-breathing into brown paper bags over the 2000 election in Florida).
Yet I can't imagine how merely preventing 9/11 would have been the end of radical jihad's efforts to kill Americans. And I can't imagine that we would all be safer, more prosperous, and doing fine, if we had stopped this single attack.
Think about this.
Osama bin Ladin would still be running al Qaeda from Afghanistan, and the Taliban would still be ruling in Kabul and Kandahar; Saddam and his sons would still be tormenting Iraq, and revving up his nuclear program, (because there's no way sanctions would have lasted until 2007); the Saudis would have continued with their export of Wahhabism, without benefit of the closer, if imperfect, scrutiny there's been because of 9/11; Iran would still be run by crazy mullahs, and now in an arms race with Iraq; the Syrians would still be occupying Lebanon; the wall of separation between American domestic law enforcement and national security would still be up.
Last but not least, if it weren't for the magnificent response of the coalition since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq, and determination to roll up and interfere with terrorism around the world, the last American response to terrorism the Islamists would have had to go by to judge our resolve would have been the weak inaction we showed following the bombing of the USS Cole.
So why does a bright and otherwise thoughful writer like Mitch Albom get it so backwards, figuring that jihadist terrorism didn't bring us 9/11, but it was 9/11 that brought us jihadist terrorism?
I don't know. But if that's what he really thinks, then he needs to go back and think about it again. And this time he needs to think about it all the way through.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
View of Situation From Iraq the Model
Al-Qaeda's War of Villages
Apparently this is the latest chapter in al-Qaeda's war manual in their war against the Iraqi people and the coalition; raiding remote peaceful villages, burning down homes and slaughtering both man and beast.
This campaign I will call a campaign of self-destruction. For probably a year al-Qaeda was trying to build their so called Islamic State in Iraq and several times they declared parts of Baghdad or other provinces as the capital of that state.But now that they have been losing one base after another their objective changed from adding more towns and villages to the "state" to destroying the very same towns and villages! Obviously it's all about making headlines regardless of the means to do that!
This change in plans began to take face with the battle between al-Qaeda and the joint forces on September 6-7 in Hor Rijab and then the massacre that followed in the same spot a week later and finally the attacks on other villages north, south and east of Baghdad in the last week or so.
Actually first I'd like to recommend reading a good post by Jules Crittenden about the flawed timing of this Little Tet.
Anyway, our interest today is more about the field situation and strategy than about timing since the latter seems to be not so friendly to al-Qaeda. Well, actually timing is very important here too but at a rather different level.
In my opinion al-Qaeda found itself forced to start this villages war. It wasn’t a choice as much as a last resort because villages are among the few fighting spaces that al-Qaeda can still utilize as large cities become increasingly difficult for them to operate in.They know that without engaging the enemy-that's us by the way-their existence and influence would end and I'm almost positive that they feel bitter about having to fight this way.
In order to fight a "good" guerilla war one has to stay in fluid state, have no permanent bases or barracks, no distinguishable uniform and above all one should be able to always have civilians around so as to deter the enemy-that's again us-from attacking out of concern about collateral damages and casualties among innocent civilians.
No one questions the fact that no army in the middle east, and I doubt there are any elsewhere, that can engage and defeat the US military power in open terrain, in other words in a case of two traditional armies fighting on traditional battlefield.
The last factor is exactly what al-Qaeda is sacrificing by waging this war on villages;
But how can we make advantage of this situation? The greatest challenge I guess would be to have an alarm and information system through which the nearest available troops could be notified when an attack begins so they could interfere and repel the attack. This might be logistically difficult to establish in a short time since villages are usually far from the cities. In fact I worked in some such villages and I know that most of them are outside the administrative divisions or "civil planning" of provinces therefore they lack their own government offices and departments which means the nearest hospital, fire department, even phone and above all police station could be many miles away.
But even then if the troops fail to arrive in time to intercept the attack, which would be truly sad, the long distance that al-Qaeda fighters would have to travel to go back to their base would require them to lose precious time since they have to rely only on ground transport on mostly exposed terrain while the troops very often have the advantage of the much faster air transport.
In the worst case scenario what's left of a village if the attack is not intercepted would be only al-Qaeda fighters and the remains of what used to be a village. Now isn't that the perfect target for the countless aggressive fire units of the US military?
Now please let's put emotions aside for a while because this is war we're talking about and if sacrifices cannot be avoided we should make sure the enemy pays the heaviest price possible.
If reaction is quick enough-and timing here is of crucial importance-the hunt would be great and the results would be spectacular.
Again, of course it would be much more pleasant if the attacks can be prevented or repelled but since I doubt there's such an alarm system we could at least make benefit of the gap in time that immediately follows the action of the attackers taking advantage of faster transportation means and the old principle in combat that says the enemy can be best attacked immediately after he makes his move.
For the duration of the war on al-Qaeda in Iraq so far, the most frustrating fact for soldiers and military commanders has been that they were asked to identify terrorists who move like ghosts, separate them from civilians and kill or capture them and that's a truly difficult mission. That's partly because a soldier would have to be careful when and where each bullet he fires would hit. But when the ghosts are identified, isolated and far from any friendly objects/personnel a pilot could drop even as gruesome a weapon as a napalm bomb and rest assured that even if it misses the enemy which is quite unlikely, it couldn't hurt a friend.
That's why I think the troops should seize each and every such opportunity (which are technically moments during which the crippling rule of engagement become much more flexible) and strike as hard as they can once they are sure the battlefield falls in the category we just described.
Apparently this is the latest chapter in al-Qaeda's war manual in their war against the Iraqi people and the coalition; raiding remote peaceful villages, burning down homes and slaughtering both man and beast.
This campaign I will call a campaign of self-destruction. For probably a year al-Qaeda was trying to build their so called Islamic State in Iraq and several times they declared parts of Baghdad or other provinces as the capital of that state.But now that they have been losing one base after another their objective changed from adding more towns and villages to the "state" to destroying the very same towns and villages! Obviously it's all about making headlines regardless of the means to do that!
This change in plans began to take face with the battle between al-Qaeda and the joint forces on September 6-7 in Hor Rijab and then the massacre that followed in the same spot a week later and finally the attacks on other villages north, south and east of Baghdad in the last week or so.
Actually first I'd like to recommend reading a good post by Jules Crittenden about the flawed timing of this Little Tet.
Anyway, our interest today is more about the field situation and strategy than about timing since the latter seems to be not so friendly to al-Qaeda. Well, actually timing is very important here too but at a rather different level.
In my opinion al-Qaeda found itself forced to start this villages war. It wasn’t a choice as much as a last resort because villages are among the few fighting spaces that al-Qaeda can still utilize as large cities become increasingly difficult for them to operate in.They know that without engaging the enemy-that's us by the way-their existence and influence would end and I'm almost positive that they feel bitter about having to fight this way.
In order to fight a "good" guerilla war one has to stay in fluid state, have no permanent bases or barracks, no distinguishable uniform and above all one should be able to always have civilians around so as to deter the enemy-that's again us-from attacking out of concern about collateral damages and casualties among innocent civilians.
No one questions the fact that no army in the middle east, and I doubt there are any elsewhere, that can engage and defeat the US military power in open terrain, in other words in a case of two traditional armies fighting on traditional battlefield.
The last factor is exactly what al-Qaeda is sacrificing by waging this war on villages;
But how can we make advantage of this situation? The greatest challenge I guess would be to have an alarm and information system through which the nearest available troops could be notified when an attack begins so they could interfere and repel the attack. This might be logistically difficult to establish in a short time since villages are usually far from the cities. In fact I worked in some such villages and I know that most of them are outside the administrative divisions or "civil planning" of provinces therefore they lack their own government offices and departments which means the nearest hospital, fire department, even phone and above all police station could be many miles away.
But even then if the troops fail to arrive in time to intercept the attack, which would be truly sad, the long distance that al-Qaeda fighters would have to travel to go back to their base would require them to lose precious time since they have to rely only on ground transport on mostly exposed terrain while the troops very often have the advantage of the much faster air transport.
In the worst case scenario what's left of a village if the attack is not intercepted would be only al-Qaeda fighters and the remains of what used to be a village. Now isn't that the perfect target for the countless aggressive fire units of the US military?
Now please let's put emotions aside for a while because this is war we're talking about and if sacrifices cannot be avoided we should make sure the enemy pays the heaviest price possible.
If reaction is quick enough-and timing here is of crucial importance-the hunt would be great and the results would be spectacular.
Again, of course it would be much more pleasant if the attacks can be prevented or repelled but since I doubt there's such an alarm system we could at least make benefit of the gap in time that immediately follows the action of the attackers taking advantage of faster transportation means and the old principle in combat that says the enemy can be best attacked immediately after he makes his move.
For the duration of the war on al-Qaeda in Iraq so far, the most frustrating fact for soldiers and military commanders has been that they were asked to identify terrorists who move like ghosts, separate them from civilians and kill or capture them and that's a truly difficult mission. That's partly because a soldier would have to be careful when and where each bullet he fires would hit. But when the ghosts are identified, isolated and far from any friendly objects/personnel a pilot could drop even as gruesome a weapon as a napalm bomb and rest assured that even if it misses the enemy which is quite unlikely, it couldn't hurt a friend.
That's why I think the troops should seize each and every such opportunity (which are technically moments during which the crippling rule of engagement become much more flexible) and strike as hard as they can once they are sure the battlefield falls in the category we just described.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Brown Starts Off on the Wrong Foot--Or Is That the Right Knee?
I'm missing Tony Blair already.
In what has to be the absolute worst way to deal with the terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Britan’s brand-new Prime Minister Gordon Brown “has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in connection with the terrorism crisis.”
According to the Daily Express, (“BROWN: DON'T SAY TERRORISTS ARE MUSLIMS”),
“The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase 'war on terror' is to be dropped.
“The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more 'consensual' tone than existed under Tony Blair…..Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language.
“'There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,' the spokesman said. 'It is important that the country remains united.'"
Remain united? Doesn't that assume the country's Muslim and nonMuslim populations are already united, are integrating well, which is in serious doubt.
Brown’s spokesman also “confirmed that the phrase ‘war on terror’ – strongly associated with Mr Blair and US President George Bush – has been dropped.
"Officials insist that no direct links with Muslim extremists have been publicly confirmed by police investigating the latest attempted terror attacks. Mr Brown himself did not refer to Muslims or Islam once in a BBC TV interview on Sunday.”
Maybe not, but Brown already said elsewhere on Sunday that “the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is Al Qaeda and people who are related to Al Qaeda.” (“Doctor Arrested in Australia in Failed Car Bombings”).
We can still say that Al Qaeda is an Islamic terror organization, right?
Then there are the names of the arrested individuals known so far: Bilal Abdullah, Khalid Ahmed, Sabeel Ahmed, Muhammad Haneef, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, and Asha’s wife, (whom the Daily Mail describes as “burka-wearing”).
Khalil Ahmed, one of the men in the Glasgow attack, set himself on fire after the crash, and was shouting “Allah, Allah,” as he was being detained.
A former member of a radical Islamic group who knew another of the suspects from there, Bilal Abdullah, said Abdullah had once “berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough, showing him a beheading video and warning this could happen to him. He also said he had a number of videos of al-Qaida's former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last year.”
In an incomprehensible contradiction Brown vowed the British people will never yield to terrorism, and he “used an interview with the BBC's Sunday AM to tell Al Qaeda: 'The message that's got to come from the British people is that as one we will not yield, we will not be intimidated.
"And we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life."
Well, Mr. Brown, is it Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism you are defying, or some other terrorist movement unrelated to Muslims?
This just isn't making sense. Amir Taheri comments in the New York Post (“’Islamophobia’ Idiocy”):
“Prime Minister Gordon Brown keeps repeating that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam - but, at the same time, keeps inviting ‘Muslim community leaders’ to Downing Street to discuss how to prevent attacks. If the attacks have nothing to do with Islam, why invite Muslim ‘leaders’ rather than Buddhist monks?”
Had the perpetrators of these bombings remained even temporarily unknown to investigators, it might have been at least imaginable for Brown and his government to take a position that prematurely blaming it on Muslims would be unfair.
But given that Brown himself immediately described this as an Al Qaeda attack, that two of the key suspects are named after Mohammed, that one was arrested in her burka, that one attempted self-immolation while calling on Allah, and that British security has all but admitted the suspects were known from terror watch lists tracking Muslim radicals, then the only possible reason for Brown banning references to Muslim terrorism is naked appeasement.
Which never works.
Watch and see if the pattern that emerged after the first London Tube bombings two years ago, as described by Melanie Phillips in her book, Londonistan, repeats itself:
"Instead of gaining a clear-eyed understanding of the ideology that so threatens it, Britain has thus been subverted by it. Instead of fighting this ideology with all the power at its command, Britain makes excuses for it, seeks to appease it--and even turns the blame that should be heaped on it on itself instead. After the [July 2005] London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid ‘Islamophobia,’ the thought-crime that seeks to surpass legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression. Consequently, Muslim denial of any religious responsibility for the bombings was echoed and reinforced by government ministers and commentators, who sought to explain the Islamist terror in their midst by blaming, on the one hand, a few ‘unrepresentative’ extremists preachers and, on the other, Muslim poverty and discrimination--even though the bombers came from middle-class homes and had been to university."
In this case, because it is impossible to hide that the London and Glasgow terrorists were medical doctors and, undeniably, not impoverished victims of oppression or war, offical denial must come by way of an all-encompassing blanket form. No connection with Muslims here!
This is a very bad sign for the war against jihad in the UK.
In what has to be the absolute worst way to deal with the terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Britan’s brand-new Prime Minister Gordon Brown “has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in connection with the terrorism crisis.”
According to the Daily Express, (“BROWN: DON'T SAY TERRORISTS ARE MUSLIMS”),
“The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase 'war on terror' is to be dropped.
“The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more 'consensual' tone than existed under Tony Blair…..Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language.
“'There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,' the spokesman said. 'It is important that the country remains united.'"
Remain united? Doesn't that assume the country's Muslim and nonMuslim populations are already united, are integrating well, which is in serious doubt.
Brown’s spokesman also “confirmed that the phrase ‘war on terror’ – strongly associated with Mr Blair and US President George Bush – has been dropped.
"Officials insist that no direct links with Muslim extremists have been publicly confirmed by police investigating the latest attempted terror attacks. Mr Brown himself did not refer to Muslims or Islam once in a BBC TV interview on Sunday.”
Maybe not, but Brown already said elsewhere on Sunday that “the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is Al Qaeda and people who are related to Al Qaeda.” (“Doctor Arrested in Australia in Failed Car Bombings”).
We can still say that Al Qaeda is an Islamic terror organization, right?
Then there are the names of the arrested individuals known so far: Bilal Abdullah, Khalid Ahmed, Sabeel Ahmed, Muhammad Haneef, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, and Asha’s wife, (whom the Daily Mail describes as “burka-wearing”).
Khalil Ahmed, one of the men in the Glasgow attack, set himself on fire after the crash, and was shouting “Allah, Allah,” as he was being detained.
A former member of a radical Islamic group who knew another of the suspects from there, Bilal Abdullah, said Abdullah had once “berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough, showing him a beheading video and warning this could happen to him. He also said he had a number of videos of al-Qaida's former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last year.”
In an incomprehensible contradiction Brown vowed the British people will never yield to terrorism, and he “used an interview with the BBC's Sunday AM to tell Al Qaeda: 'The message that's got to come from the British people is that as one we will not yield, we will not be intimidated.
"And we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life."
Well, Mr. Brown, is it Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism you are defying, or some other terrorist movement unrelated to Muslims?
This just isn't making sense. Amir Taheri comments in the New York Post (“’Islamophobia’ Idiocy”):
“Prime Minister Gordon Brown keeps repeating that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam - but, at the same time, keeps inviting ‘Muslim community leaders’ to Downing Street to discuss how to prevent attacks. If the attacks have nothing to do with Islam, why invite Muslim ‘leaders’ rather than Buddhist monks?”
Had the perpetrators of these bombings remained even temporarily unknown to investigators, it might have been at least imaginable for Brown and his government to take a position that prematurely blaming it on Muslims would be unfair.
But given that Brown himself immediately described this as an Al Qaeda attack, that two of the key suspects are named after Mohammed, that one was arrested in her burka, that one attempted self-immolation while calling on Allah, and that British security has all but admitted the suspects were known from terror watch lists tracking Muslim radicals, then the only possible reason for Brown banning references to Muslim terrorism is naked appeasement.
Which never works.
Watch and see if the pattern that emerged after the first London Tube bombings two years ago, as described by Melanie Phillips in her book, Londonistan, repeats itself:
"Instead of gaining a clear-eyed understanding of the ideology that so threatens it, Britain has thus been subverted by it. Instead of fighting this ideology with all the power at its command, Britain makes excuses for it, seeks to appease it--and even turns the blame that should be heaped on it on itself instead. After the [July 2005] London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid ‘Islamophobia,’ the thought-crime that seeks to surpass legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression. Consequently, Muslim denial of any religious responsibility for the bombings was echoed and reinforced by government ministers and commentators, who sought to explain the Islamist terror in their midst by blaming, on the one hand, a few ‘unrepresentative’ extremists preachers and, on the other, Muslim poverty and discrimination--even though the bombers came from middle-class homes and had been to university."
In this case, because it is impossible to hide that the London and Glasgow terrorists were medical doctors and, undeniably, not impoverished victims of oppression or war, offical denial must come by way of an all-encompassing blanket form. No connection with Muslims here!
This is a very bad sign for the war against jihad in the UK.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
30% of American Muslims Willing to Touch Al Qaeda With a Ten-Foot Poll
As most of our well-informed readers are already well aware, according to a Pew Research Center poll of American Muslims just published, 26% of young American Muslims polled say suicide bombings in defense of Islam can be justified, and only “40% of all Muslims say they believe Arabs were behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”
The Pew report has in only one day devolved into two stories: the story of the results themselves, and the story of the media spin. For instance, the headline of the online version of Niraj Warikoo's Detroit Free Press’s article reporting the poll, (“Younger U.S. Muslims more likely to support suicide bombings, poll shows” ) changed from yesterday to today so as now to read “Nearly 80% of U.S. Muslims call suicide bombings unjustifiable,” a clearly more chipper heading. Maybe the change is explained by the optimist copy editor coming in overnight to relieve the pessimist copy editor.
Meanwhile, over at the Detroit News, today's edition of Gregg Krupa’s story had the interesting half-headline “Most Muslims are moderate, but.”
That isn't a typo: it really ends with the word, "but." This headline was also a re-do of the previous day’s, which read, “Survey: Muslims largely assimilated in U.S.”
Perhaps at the News the pessimist editor relieved the optimist editor. Or maybe the News headline writer simply recognized that it was ludicrous to report that 26% of young American Muslims endorse suicide bombing under a headline suggesting that this state of affairs qualifies American Muslims as “largely assimilated.”
Krupa’s story, which was better written, included this reaction from one local Muslim leader:
“'Our tradition leaves no place and no justification for suicide bombings,' said Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, the leader of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights. 'I think that if other Americans read this stuff they'll say, "Wow, and they are right next door."'Elahi said. 'But I am 17 years in this country and I haven't faced any young individuals who say it is OK in Islam to have a suicide bomb and to support suicide bombings.'"
Clearly, Imam Elahi was not part of the Pew survey team, or he would have faced about 273 members of the sample population telling him exactly that.
The 26% number is going to be well worked over by the time I post this, and I have nothing of interest to add. What is more shocking to me anyway is the percentage of all Muslims (as downplayed by the Free Press’s Niraj Warikoo), that, of all Muslims polled, “only 40% said they believe Arab men carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” Stated another, and more logical way, the same result ought to be stated 60% of Muslims polled do not believe Arab men carried out the attacks.
60%. That represents a significant majority of American Arabs. Which raises a few questions for me.
Number one, If Arab men did not carry out the attacks, what kind of men did? Or do they simply not believe that the attacks ever took place? (The poll results do not indicate how many American Muslims get their information from Rosie O’Donnell.)
Number two, If 60% of all American Muslims do not believe that Arab men carried out the 9/11 attacks, then how does that translate into their support, or lack of support, for America’s war on Al Qaeda, which is directly linked to the terrorist group’s 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
In partial answer, there is this interesting finding: according to the poll, “Only 5% of U.S. Muslims expressed favorable views of the terrorist group al Qaeda, though about a fourth did not express an opinion.”
No opinion on Al Qaeda?
Really now, since I’m not obliged to follow any rules of statistics nor any other social science, I’ll just take the liberty of adding the coy 25% who have never given AQ any thought to the 5% admitted AQ admirers, which rounds up to a neat 30%. I don’t think this is so unfair, especially considering that 60% of Muslims polled do not believe Arab men carried out the attacks, which pretty much means Al Qaeda did not do it.
And, of course, if Al Qaeda didn’t do it, then UBL and the Taliban were innocent, at least of 9/11, and did not deserve to be chased out of Afghanistan by the USA. It turns out that this conclusion actually does track nicely with the Pew result that “a third” of respondents thought the US was “wrong” to invade Afghanistan.
Which raises one more question, namely, why doesn't this sizeable minority translate into more than 5% AQ admirers? For forty years we have been given to understand that the victim status of Palestinians at the hands of Israel so stirred the chords of sympathy of all the world’s Muslims, that the Palestinian cause has been a bottomless well of justification fueling wave after wave of terrorist armies and terrorist atrocities around the world.
So why isn’t AQ also viewed with sympathy and admiration as a victim group, similarly mistreated by the world on the false charge that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks?
Polls are designed to tell us about what Americans think, but I can’t help becoming alarmed about what they tell us about what Americans know, think they know, or don’t know, about fundamental historical facts. And I use the term “historical” in its broadest sense, to describe not only prominent events that happened long ago, like Pearl Harbor or Ghettysburg, but also to include things that happened practically yesterday, (on an historical scale), like the Congressional authorization to go to war in Iraq, or the overwhelming consensus on the evidence of Al Qaeda’s guilt for the attacks on 9/11—things that most of us concerned actually lived through--and about which millions of Americans, and not only Muslim Americans, suddenly are displaying the most shocking ignorance now.
In other words, much more troubling to me than the opinions revealed in these polls is the predicate credulity, ignorance, and disinformation that can only explain such opinions.
The Pew report has in only one day devolved into two stories: the story of the results themselves, and the story of the media spin. For instance, the headline of the online version of Niraj Warikoo's Detroit Free Press’s article reporting the poll, (“Younger U.S. Muslims more likely to support suicide bombings, poll shows” ) changed from yesterday to today so as now to read “Nearly 80% of U.S. Muslims call suicide bombings unjustifiable,” a clearly more chipper heading. Maybe the change is explained by the optimist copy editor coming in overnight to relieve the pessimist copy editor.
Meanwhile, over at the Detroit News, today's edition of Gregg Krupa’s story had the interesting half-headline “Most Muslims are moderate, but.”
That isn't a typo: it really ends with the word, "but." This headline was also a re-do of the previous day’s, which read, “Survey: Muslims largely assimilated in U.S.”
Perhaps at the News the pessimist editor relieved the optimist editor. Or maybe the News headline writer simply recognized that it was ludicrous to report that 26% of young American Muslims endorse suicide bombing under a headline suggesting that this state of affairs qualifies American Muslims as “largely assimilated.”
Krupa’s story, which was better written, included this reaction from one local Muslim leader:
“'Our tradition leaves no place and no justification for suicide bombings,' said Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, the leader of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights. 'I think that if other Americans read this stuff they'll say, "Wow, and they are right next door."'Elahi said. 'But I am 17 years in this country and I haven't faced any young individuals who say it is OK in Islam to have a suicide bomb and to support suicide bombings.'"
Clearly, Imam Elahi was not part of the Pew survey team, or he would have faced about 273 members of the sample population telling him exactly that.
The 26% number is going to be well worked over by the time I post this, and I have nothing of interest to add. What is more shocking to me anyway is the percentage of all Muslims (as downplayed by the Free Press’s Niraj Warikoo), that, of all Muslims polled, “only 40% said they believe Arab men carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” Stated another, and more logical way, the same result ought to be stated 60% of Muslims polled do not believe Arab men carried out the attacks.
60%. That represents a significant majority of American Arabs. Which raises a few questions for me.
Number one, If Arab men did not carry out the attacks, what kind of men did? Or do they simply not believe that the attacks ever took place? (The poll results do not indicate how many American Muslims get their information from Rosie O’Donnell.)
Number two, If 60% of all American Muslims do not believe that Arab men carried out the 9/11 attacks, then how does that translate into their support, or lack of support, for America’s war on Al Qaeda, which is directly linked to the terrorist group’s 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
In partial answer, there is this interesting finding: according to the poll, “Only 5% of U.S. Muslims expressed favorable views of the terrorist group al Qaeda, though about a fourth did not express an opinion.”
No opinion on Al Qaeda?
Really now, since I’m not obliged to follow any rules of statistics nor any other social science, I’ll just take the liberty of adding the coy 25% who have never given AQ any thought to the 5% admitted AQ admirers, which rounds up to a neat 30%. I don’t think this is so unfair, especially considering that 60% of Muslims polled do not believe Arab men carried out the attacks, which pretty much means Al Qaeda did not do it.
And, of course, if Al Qaeda didn’t do it, then UBL and the Taliban were innocent, at least of 9/11, and did not deserve to be chased out of Afghanistan by the USA. It turns out that this conclusion actually does track nicely with the Pew result that “a third” of respondents thought the US was “wrong” to invade Afghanistan.
Which raises one more question, namely, why doesn't this sizeable minority translate into more than 5% AQ admirers? For forty years we have been given to understand that the victim status of Palestinians at the hands of Israel so stirred the chords of sympathy of all the world’s Muslims, that the Palestinian cause has been a bottomless well of justification fueling wave after wave of terrorist armies and terrorist atrocities around the world.
So why isn’t AQ also viewed with sympathy and admiration as a victim group, similarly mistreated by the world on the false charge that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks?
Polls are designed to tell us about what Americans think, but I can’t help becoming alarmed about what they tell us about what Americans know, think they know, or don’t know, about fundamental historical facts. And I use the term “historical” in its broadest sense, to describe not only prominent events that happened long ago, like Pearl Harbor or Ghettysburg, but also to include things that happened practically yesterday, (on an historical scale), like the Congressional authorization to go to war in Iraq, or the overwhelming consensus on the evidence of Al Qaeda’s guilt for the attacks on 9/11—things that most of us concerned actually lived through--and about which millions of Americans, and not only Muslim Americans, suddenly are displaying the most shocking ignorance now.
In other words, much more troubling to me than the opinions revealed in these polls is the predicate credulity, ignorance, and disinformation that can only explain such opinions.
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Last Days for Al Qaeda in Iraq?
Blogger Pat Dollard has this guardedly optimistic view of coalition progress against Al Qaeda in Iraq. ("Diyala Is The New Anbar"):
Here's an excerpt, but you should read the whole thing:
Terrorists are parasites. They rely on a host body to support them. Now they can terrorize a host body into providing them support, but that will only go so far. Ultimately, the host body must be somewhat sympathetic to the terrorists, or else, by sheer dint of numbers, the members of the host body will be able to reject the terrorists. These two principles explain the entire history of Al Qaeda’s reign over Al Anbar. Al Anbar, like Al Qaeda, is a Sunni entity. The people of Al Anbar were sympathetic enough to Al Qaeda that they provided them sanctuary, support and even manpower - which is to say, the very lifeblood that this parasite required. Finally, the Sunnis of Al Anbar had enough of the bleak and empty future, and very bloody present, that comprised the entirety of Al Qaeda’s offerings. And so the host body rejected the parasite. The parasite is now in its last possible refuge, the mixed Sunni/Shiite Triangle of Death & Diyala Province areas, just south and northeast of Baghdad, respectively. My time in Iraq started there, and will likely end there. Along with Al Qaeda’s.
Here's an excerpt, but you should read the whole thing:
Terrorists are parasites. They rely on a host body to support them. Now they can terrorize a host body into providing them support, but that will only go so far. Ultimately, the host body must be somewhat sympathetic to the terrorists, or else, by sheer dint of numbers, the members of the host body will be able to reject the terrorists. These two principles explain the entire history of Al Qaeda’s reign over Al Anbar. Al Anbar, like Al Qaeda, is a Sunni entity. The people of Al Anbar were sympathetic enough to Al Qaeda that they provided them sanctuary, support and even manpower - which is to say, the very lifeblood that this parasite required. Finally, the Sunnis of Al Anbar had enough of the bleak and empty future, and very bloody present, that comprised the entirety of Al Qaeda’s offerings. And so the host body rejected the parasite. The parasite is now in its last possible refuge, the mixed Sunni/Shiite Triangle of Death & Diyala Province areas, just south and northeast of Baghdad, respectively. My time in Iraq started there, and will likely end there. Along with Al Qaeda’s.
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