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John Kerry's Sucking Some Lemons by Now (Updated)

"Gottca!" 

ABC Highlights Role of NewsBusters In Getting Kerry Story Out

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on October 31, 2006 - 19:00.

This evening's edition of ABC's World News Tonight highlighted the role NewsBusters played in getting out the story of John Kerry's controversial comments on education and "getting stuck in Iraq."

Video here.

NewsBuster Warner Todd Huston was among the first in the blogosphere to break the story. As ABC senior national correspondent Jake Tapper described how "the Republican PR machine roll[ed] into high gear . . . and conservative blogs had a field day" two images of NewsBusters appeared on-screen, including one showing Huston's story.

http://newsbusters.org/node/8742
___________________________________________________________________________
Kerry: It Was a 'Botched Joke'  (Joke is on Kerry)
By Nathan Burchfield
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
October 31, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) says comments he made Monday that appeared to imply that American troops were uneducated were a "botched joke" intended to insult President Bush.

At a news conference in Seattle Tuesday, Kerry refused to apologize and accused Republicans of distorting his comment in a "classic GOP, textbook Republican campaign tactic."

His comment was "clearly a remark that was directed at this administration."

Kerry said Republicans "know precisely what I was saying, and they're trying to turn this because they have a bankrupt policy."

At a campaign stop in California for gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, Kerry said Monday: "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Kerry's comment drew a strong reaction from conservatives, with some accusing him of "smearing" the troops by calling them uneducated.

In Tuesday's news conference, Kerry said most of the criticism had come from people who "never wore the uniform." One of the leading voices requesting an apology, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is a Vietnam War veteran.

Criticism also came from the national commander of the American Legion, the nation's largest veterans' group.

"While the American Legion shares the senator's appreciation for education, the troops in Iraq represent the most sophisticated, technologically superior military that the world has ever seen," Paul A. Morin said in statement.

Morin said there is "a thing or two that they could teach most college professors and campus elitists about the way the world works."

"A generation ago, Sen. Kerry slandered his comrades in Vietnam by saying that they were rapists and murderers," Morin added. "It wasn't true then and his warped view of today's heroes isn't true now."

In Seattle, Kerry highlighted his own military background.

"If anyone thinks that a veteran would somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq and not the president ... they're crazy," Kerry said.

While refusing to apologize, Kerry did offer praise for American soldiers, saying "this is the finest military ... that we've ever had."

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=/Politics/archive/200610/POL20061031d.html
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You Bet This Is The Finest Military!

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Photo, caption below.
Soldiers from the 463rd Military Police Company, attached to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, pull security at the Saab al Bour Police Station, Oct. 27, 2006. U.S. Army photo by Spc. C. Terrell Turner
Iraqi, U.S. Soldiers Work to Save Saab al Bour
Residents begin to return as soldiers conduct missions against
suspected terrorists and work to quell violence.
By Spc. C. Terrell Turner
1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division

CAMP TAJI, Iraq, Oct. 31, 2006 — As international headlines report sectarian violence across Baghdad and the cities in the surrounding region, Iraqi Security Forces and Multi-National Division – Baghdad soldiers at Camp Taji, north of Baghdad, are working together to re-establish a level of security that will allow local residents to return safely to Saab al Bour.

During Ramadan, terrorist cells and rival Shia and Sunni factions pushed the level of violence to unprecedented levels and forced local residents to flee to nearby Khadimiya and other areas.

Soldiers from the 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, led the way in responding to the violence by aggressively conducting missions against suspected terrorists with mounted and dismounted patrols as well as providing counter-fire against mortar attacks.

The Joint Coordination Center, located at the Saab al Bour Police Station, houses the combined forces of 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment soldiers, Iraqi army soldiers and Iraqi police officers. Formerly part of a local government complex, the location now is the central command and control location for the coordination and mission execution in the greater Saab al Bour region. MND-B soldiers periodically rotate from Camp Taji to work at the JCC.

The soldiers said they felt their efforts were paying off.

“The numbers of attacks have decreased. This is my third time out here, and it’s been pretty quiet,” said Capt. Matt Cooper, assistant intelligence officer, Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 7th Squadron., 10th Cavalry Regiment.

Cooper describes his job as “trying to paint a picture of what’s going on for the commander.”

In addition to that mission, Cooper said he seeks to develop the cities demographics to get a better block-by-block picture of the Shia and Sunni living in the town.

“The local nationals are starting to call the tip lines a lot more,” he said. “We send out as many patrols as we can to respond, but their level of trust in us is definitely starting to increase”

Maj. Anthony Nichols, senior Military Transition Team advisor, 1st Tank Battalion, 2nd Tank Brigade, 9th Iraqi Army Division, makes the JCC a daily stop between his patrols with his soldiers to compare notes.

“We captured 18 bad guys over the last 10 days,” he said. “I think we are having a large amount of success with keeping them from consolidating and establishing themselves in the city. The most effective strategy is to go where they think you won’t go.”

As violence within Saab al Bour grew, health care providers departed and left residents with few options outside traveling long distances for emergency health care. Soldiers from 7th Squadron., 10th Cavalry Regiment, responded by establishing a clinic inside the JCC for soldiers, Iraqi Security Forces and local nationals needing emergency medical assistance.

“We’ve treated about 35 local nationals for trauma injuries here,” said Staff Sgt. Robert Rushworth, aid station noncommissioned officer, HHT. “Anything life threatening means we call a medevac (medical evacuation), or if they are stabilized, the Iraqi police takes them to Khadimiya. The people know that we are here to help them when they get injured. Sometimes when the IPs go into town to respond to an incident, they bring the people here.”



Staff Sgt. Richard Giardine, medic, Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, prepares an IV Oct. 15 at the Saab al Bour Medical Station, north of Baghdad. Soldiers from the 1st BCT have set up a patrol base to help curb sectarian violence that is plaguing the city. U.S. Army photo

As violence drops off in the city, the local clinics are reopening and Rushworth and his staff are seeing fewer patients.

“We had eight cases the other day, but that was an exception more than a normal day.” 

MND-B dominance over the airspace above and around Saab al Bour helps keep the number of mortar and rocket attacks to a minimum.

Fire Support Teams at a local observation point in the area coordinate with ground patrols to provide reconnaissance and coordinate air support from AH-64D Longbow Apache attack helicopters. This provides the 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, the opportunity to immediately react and retaliate against mortar fire.

“Before we started, there were a lot more mortar attacks,” said Sgt. Bernard Walla, fire support team chief, Troop B, 7th Squadron.

Recently, a patrol working with the fire support team pursued three fleeing suspected terrorists. An Apache spotted the men near the mortar site and reported their location to the patrol. After firing on the patrol, one of the suspected terrorists was killed and two were taken into custody.

“It’s getting better,” he said. “That was a very good example of the fire support teams working together.” 

Bryan said he currently conducts three to four patrols a day around the city, rotating on and off with another unit, for around-the-clock security in the area.

“It’s hot out here sometimes, but it’s not too tough working out here,” said Pfc. Francisco Camacho, a forward observer with HHT. “We hear mortars and gunfire periodically but lately, this past week, it has been getting better.”

As the people of the city return, Bryan sees them as hopeful but cautious.

“We make sure to stop and talk to people while we are on patrol,” he said. “They’re trying to be hopeful, but it’s been tough for them. They need electricity, food and money, but the main thing they need is the mortars to stop being fired in to the city and for snipers to stop firing on civilians. For us, that means establishing more of a presence around Saab al Bour to stop the insurgents from attacking residents.”

http://www.defendamerica.mil/articles/oct2006/a103106dg1.html

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A Letter to John F. Kerry, American Soldier

 "You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."   John F. Kerry


From a Free Republic.com member who goes by the name pabianice
 
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The Left and Liberal Democrats Hate America and Wish to See It Fall As Much As Their Friends The Europeans (Four Articles Show Why)

Hillary Clinton,  John Kerry,  Nancy Pelosi,  and most other Democrats are in a time warp, they still loath America just as they did during the years of Vietnam War protesting, they see America just as the Europeans and the rest of the world as " the despicable enemy".  Thirty-some years later they still want peace and love, they still champion the so-called underdog and the deprived, the discriminated against, everywhere in the world they give all nations, all tyrants, all dictators, all terrorist and their enablers the benefit of the doubt, but their brethren American such as George W. Bush, The Commander in Chief or our American soldiers in Iraq,  American homeland security, the American middleclass and their families'  financial futures,  these they put  in the cross hairs of a gun, a no vote, a filibuster, because they are fair game for killing.  

These fat cat Democrats know nothing of earnestness, hard work, genuine helpfulness, the want of security and peace of mind when they sleep at night.  They know nothing  but contempt for these American wants and needs, they know nothing but contempt for everything that they believed in thirty-some years ago. Their good intentions are warped from years of insidious hate mongering. They lie, then lie about their lies, and do it so often  and as Bill Clinton, so well, they  no longer recognize the truth or what is right or wrong or even what has been for generations the  "American  way". They don't have a clue to what is American and what is a time honored American value.

These four articles clearly make the point better than I can so I copied and pasted them here.  

America is alive and well, it is the rest of the world that is sick! If the Democrats can't see how good they have it here in the country that they are  bent on destroying and running into the ground, they should go elsewhere, Europe perhaps, or better yet to their friends the terrorist in the Middle East and live and breathe there.


"You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.
  Stupid remark by John F. Kerry on October 30, 2006  (Someone said later it was suppose to have led into a joke!)
 

From While Europe Slept
by Bruce Bower

"Like their American counterparts, Europe's '68-ers were mostly middle-class university kids, children of postwar prosperity who came of age protesting the Vietnam War and decorated their bedrooms with posters of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison  (and in some cases, Mao and Ho Chi Mihn). The transatlantic similarities are many.  But there are important distinctions.  For one thing, the Europeans had another key formative event in additions to Vietnam: the May 1968 general strike by French Students and workers, which paralyzed France and nearly brought down the government of Charles DeGaulle.  This experience not only gave students an exaggerated lifelong sense of their own power and importance; it also established a postwar French custom of resorting to crippling, pointless strikes at a drop of a chapeau in response to just about anything."
______________________________________________________

The European and American Left
since 1945
by Andrei S. Markovits
Dissent Magazine, Winter 2005

The Orthodox Period: 1945-1968

The Heterodox Period: 1968-1979

It would not be an exaggeration to say that virtually all the tenets defining the left during the "orthodox" period were substantially challenged, if not superseded, by events during the legendary sixties. Thus, it is not by chance that in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, the "'68ers" (achtundsechziger, soixantehuitards) have attained near mythical status, and generated a considerable nostalgia, in the postwar histories of these countries' left-wing politics. Be it the events at Berkeley, Columbia, and the National Democratic Convention in Chicago for the United States; "the events" in Paris; Italy's Hot Autumn; or the politics of confrontation embodied by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) and the Student Socialist Organization (SDS) in the Federal Republic, there developed a clear challenge to the existing lefts in each of these societies.

For the first time in the history of the left, the essential impetus for this development came not primarily from Europe but from the United States. Concretely, these changes were anchored in two major struggles that informed American politics at the time: the civil rights movement at home and the Vietnam War abroad. Both of these developed into absolute icons for all lefts in the world. Mainly carried by students and not by the traditional subject of the left-that is, the industrial working class-this massive transformation of the discourse of the left was deeply anchored in the cultural climate of the United States, which the rest of the world, particularly Europe's students and its young generally, embraced with enthusiasm. One cannot understand the rise of the New Left in Paris, Berlin, Milan, and London without understanding the massive influence of American rock 'n' roll, folk music, protest songs and poetry, and the civil rights movement's tactic of the "sit in." Posters of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jerry Garcia, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Allen Ginsberg adorned the homes of thousands of European New Leftists alongside such other icons as Che Guevara and, of course, Ho Chi Minh. On both sides of the Atlantic, this generation was equally formed by the first seemingly democratic and impromptu rock festival held in the muddy fields near Woodstock, New York, and by one of Europe's foremost intellectual émigrés who, unlike others in his immediate milieu, proudly remained in America while becoming one of this country's most challenging critics. I am talking about Herbert Marcuse, whom many have-quite rightly-called the New Left's most influential thinker. The deep American roots of the New Left in Europe, both in form and substance, are beyond debate.

In notable contrast to the subsequent time period, which entailed a paradigm shift, the New Left challenge developed within the Marxist paradigm-though it was profoundly threatening to the existing world of socialist politics. If the subsequent era was to transcend socialism and develop some sort of post-socialist politics, New Leftists in the period I have labeled "heterodox" wanted a "true" socialism, freed from what they viewed as related perversions: social democracy in the West and Leninism/Stalinism in the East (though some New Leftists were mesmerized by Leninism in its Maoist version).

The authority that parties of the established left enjoyed during the orthodox period eroded in this decade of heterodoxy. On the intellectual level, the New Left offered a radical critique of the politics of the hegemonic parties. On the institutional level, there emerged small, but intellectually influential parties to the left of the traditional social democratic and communist parties in terms of their programs as well as their strategic approaches. Though small in actual numbers, these parties represented the legacy of the "68-ers" in the left's "party space"-a standing challenge to the orthodox left. The Parti Socialiste Unifié in France might perhaps be the best example of this genre: small in number of voters, members, and officeholders, but important in intellectual influence.

On the other hand, the relationship between parties and unions changed substantially. Several points are worthy of mention in this context:

1. Everywhere in Europe there occurred at this time a clear politicization of the unions. They expanded their horizons from the confined world of industrial relations and shop-floor affairs to include issues of "grand politics" hitherto left to the respective "sister" (or "mother") party. Unions catapulted themselves into a position of quasi-equality with "their" parties. On the one hand, they entered into various macropolitical arrangements with employers and the state that gave labor an active role in economic management. Even though often defensive in nature (and also demobilizing), these neocorporatist arrangements signaled a new union strength. In addition to this activism "from above," the unions also engaged in an activism "from below." Largely propelled by a restive rank and file that wanted to cash in on its superb position in a tight labor market, the unions bargained for the most impressive "quantitative" and "qualitative" gains attained by labor at any time in the fifty-plus years of the postwar period. Even though these two activisms clashed with each other, they emanated from the same optimism, power, and self-confidence that redefined the role of unions inside the European left during this period.

2. This, of course, led the unions to distance themselves from their respective parties. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Italy, where the three union confederations (allied with different parties) discovered that as many things united as divided them. Similar, though not as effective, distancing maneuvers on the part of unions also occurred in Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Austria. Only in France did the old transition-belt model between the Communist Party (PCF) and the communist-dominated trade union federation (CGT) remain largely intact. There too, however, independent union power figured significantly in the discourse of the left, particularly because the former Catholic union, sporting the new acronym CFDT, shed its former clericalism and became one of the most vocal advocates of the New Left.

3. Central to this activism was the role of hitherto marginal elements within the labor movement. Although labor's core-that is, male, skilled, industrial workers-also participated in the general mobilization, it was often its lesser skilled, female, and foreign colleagues who were the political vanguard at the grass roots and on the shop floor. Add to this group a substantial presence of tertiary-sector "intellectual" workers, and the new working class had become a politically meaningful reality.

4. There was also a noticeable "intellectualization" of the labor movement. Through the influx of a large number of academic researchers, many of whom were veteran "68-ers," the unions developed a more sophisticated theoretical approach to problems that until then remained largely beyond their purview. Union leaders always had a very ambivalent relationship to left-wing intellectuals, but now a "march through the institutions" on the part of New Left activists changed organized labor's mentality to a noticeable degree.

But something wholly new also happened at this time: the rise of left politics outside of any established institutions, parties, or unions. It was in this milieu that the new meaning of "leftism" in Europe and the United States was forged. It was at this critical juncture-the decade between 1968 and 1978-that tendencies developed whose influence persists to this day, in Germany especially, but also in Europe generally. In my article "The Minister and the Terrorist" (Foreign Affairs, November-December, 2001), I described four groupings that emerged at this juncture within the New Left.

I call the first group the "Westerners." Germany's current foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, is exhibit A. This group, though vehemently against the war in Vietnam, totally supportive of third world liberation movements, and bitterly opposed to Western-as well as West German-capitalism, began to reorder the hierarchy of its negative preferences. Crucial in this reordering was that tyranny rather than capitalism was put at the top of the list. Put positively, at the top now was not the emancipation of the working class or even the liberation of third world peoples from imperialism, but rather democracy, due process, constitutionalism, and human rights. For reasons that probably have more to do with the personal psychologies and histories of the relevant individuals than with macro-sociological factors such as class background, education, religion, geographic origin, and gender, the Westerners successfully differentiated between American culture (which they loved, as is evident from Fischer's well-known admission that Bob Dylan had a greater influence on his life than Karl Marx) and American politics in the world (which they disliked). Above all, they did not develop a visceral hatred of all things American. And they also began to look at the Holocaust as a development sui generis and not merely as an epiphenomenon of what the rest of the German left then still called-and continues to call-"fascism" rather than National Socialism. As a consequence, the Westerners committed a major blasphemy in the eyes of the rest of the left. They argued that the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany could-and did-on occasion produce good things, such as a stable and democratic order in Germany and Europe; and that liberal democracy, though capitalist, was indeed preferable to tyranny, even of the people's republic kind. They saw the West also as an occasional force of liberation and emancipation, not only as one of repression and exploitation. Lastly, members of this group upheld the value of universalism-already at this time a ready target for various relativizing particularisms that came to define other groups on the left, to which I now turn.

The second group I call the "Third Worldists." They considered imperialism the most important political issue of the day and rejected everything that the developed world stood for, including Western values and industrial modernization. The Third Worldists would later constitute the bulk of the "Fundamentalist" (or "Fundi") wing of the German Green Party and fight a bitter rearguard action against what they believed to be the sellouts by Fischer and his "Realos." During the 1970s, the Third Worldists believed that the Federal Republic was second only to the United States in its objectionable character. They detested its parliamentary institutions, disdained its market-based economy, hated its role as a driving force in modernization's inevitable destruction of the environment, and feared any manifestation of nationalism, which they saw as a harbinger of the ever-looming "fascistization" of German politics and society. They were vehemently anti-Zionist (although not necessarily anti-Semitic) and found in the Palestinians an emblem of noble suffering and anticolonial resistance.

The third group were the "orthodox Marxists," who located the source of the Federal Republic's ills not in industrial modernization but in capitalism. In contrast to all other New Leftists, members of this group considered the industrial working class not only a worthy ally but as an "objectively necessary" part of any major social transformation. Adherents of this tendency reached deep into the SPD and some German trade unions, notably the metal workers', printers', journalists', writers', and bank employees' unions. They also developed cozy relations with East Germany, whose Marxist-Leninist system they regarded with tolerant admiration if not outright enthusiasm. This group's strength explains why serious criticism of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet bloc was unpopular in parts of the German left well into the 1980s-so much so that the Polish Solidarity movement was often denounced by German unionists and social democrats as retrograde and reactionary. (During his JUSO [youth organization of the SPD] days, the current chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, was closest to this wing of the New Left.)

I call the fourth and last remaining group the "neo-Nationalists." The New Left focused mainly on opposing the war in Vietnam, demonstrating solidarity with developing-world liberation movements, and transforming bourgeois society. But in Germany it also had a nationalist component provoked by the country's division and limited sovereignty. Left-wing nationalism has a long history in Germany (National Bolshevism and the Strasser wing of the National Socialists are two cases in point), and it is hardly surprising that such feelings were represented among the '68ers as well. Nationalist sentiment grew over the controversy surrounding the 1983 deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles on German soil and was later intensified by German unification. By the mid-1990s, in fact, a substantial number of '68ers had completed a journey from extreme left to extreme right, with the constant factor being their hatred of the West. Today, this antimodernist, anti-Western sentiment is alive and well throughout Europe among those on the extreme right and left who invoke nationalism in their opposition to globalization. The two most prominent German radicals to undergo such a shift are Horst Mahler and Bernd Rabehl. Along with two other prominent ex-leftists, Mahler-now the far right National Democratic Party's official legal counsel-recently declared that the '68er movement had been "neither for communism nor for capitalism, neither for a Third-Worldist nor for an Eastern or a Western community of values." Instead, it had been "about the right of every Volk to assert its national-revolutionary and social-revolutionary liberation." In this view, the Germans were no exception. Already then, the main root of Germany's trouble lay in its solid anchoring in the West-controlled by that double-headed evil, the United States and world Jewry. In marked contrast to the Third Worldists, adherents to this path developed an anti-Zionism that could barely, if ever, be differentiated from anti-Semitism.

This is also the period when the left's enmity against Israel, begun in the wake of the Six Day War of June 1967, became a salient issue for its politics, its identity, and also its internal divisions. Indeed, I would argue that perhaps the most defining gauge of where somebody stood politically, how she/he saw the world, was that ubiquitous triangle of Israel, the Jews, and the United States. Roughly speaking, to the Westerners, the plight of the Jews was a serious issue, which meant that they developed a much more favorable view of Israel than did the other three groups. To the Third Worldists and the orthodox Marxists, the plight of the Jews-though real-remained unimportant, massively subordinate to the plight of third world peoples (to the Third Worldists) and of workers (to the orthodox Marxists). In the nationalist camp, by contrast, the plight of the Jews was either never acknowledged or even viewed with outright contempt. It is here that the nexus between the völkisch left and the völkisch right, which manifested itself so vigorously in the streets of many German and European cities in the spring of 2002 and again in 2003, was forged. (continued)

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/The%20European%20and%20American%20Left.htm

********************

Consistency
by
Chris Arnell

Consistency can be a good thing. The democrats have been amazingly consistent since the 60’s. Unfortunately, for most Americans, democrats have been consistently wrong. The left has been consistently wrong about war, appeasing tyrants and dictators instead of confronting them. The left has been consistently wrong about taxes. In favor of taxing anything that is not nailed down. However, more than anything, liberals have consistently misread and misjudged the American People.

During the 60’s, the left was opposing America’s involvement with Vietnam. Ignoring facts that were as obvious then as they are today, Communism was choking the life out of a country that was in desperate need of our help and on a humanitarian level, we needed to be there. Vietnam was slowly becoming another Stalinist country with none of the freedoms or privileges we demand in our own country. Why was attacking Bosnia in the 90’s acceptable but fighting communism in the 60’s was not? Bosnia was a lesser threat to the U.S. than a Communist Vietnam. The end goal of Bosnia was not to take over the United States unlike the communist movement in Vietnam that was a small part of a larger scheme.

In the 70’s liberals decided the next thing to oppose would be any progress that involved cutting down a tree. It did not matter that logging companies had been replenishing the forests by implementing strict replanting policies. Chaining oneself to a tree became the vogue. At the time of this writing, there are more trees in the United States than at its founding in 1776. If there are more trees now than there were then, why are so many democrats so uptight? After all, thousands of cities have grown from nothing and yet we have more trees. We would not be in nearly as good a shape as we are if nobody cared and nobody was trying.

Throughout the 80’s, the common Democratic theme was that Reagan was wrong. Reagan was wrong in believing in lower taxes even though lower taxes help spur a technology boom that carried on through the 21st Century. Microsoft, Apple, and IBM all started in garages and grew into bigger and better companies thanks in part to a realistic and fair tax code that certainly didn’t start in the Carter Administration. In addition, we were assured that Reagan was an idiot. These Reagan is an idiot updates came via The Media, late night talk shows, and many elected democrats. Regarding the Soviet Union, Reagan was opposed on nearly every issue by pacifist liberals. The left not learning from the experiences of Neville Chamberlain, who failed to see the ever-increasing threat of Nazism, continued to seek appeasement instead of strength.

While controlling the White House for much of the 90’s, liberals avoided discussing the onslaught of terrorist activity against the U.S. by talking about Dotcoms, 30 year olds retiring early, and the sitcom Friends. It is ironic that democrats love to take credit for a booming economy that was built on inflated, hyped-up companies that had no real business plan except that they were Dotcoms. Ignoring over half a dozen attacks against the U.S. including the first attack on the World Trade Center and numerous attacks against U.S. Interests abroad there was no increase in the military budget, no questions about the competence of the CIA or the FBI, and no need to check with the United Nations on any military operations involving foreign countries.

From 2000 to 2006, anti-war protesters, communist dupes, U.N. loving Senators, and Hollywood idiots, also known as, “The Democrat Party” wailed loudly against almost every attempt that the U.S. made to protect itself from Islamic terrorism. Democrats have shown more contempt towards our military than toward Jew-hating, civilian-killing, women-suppressing Islamic terrorists. Democrats didn’t like the Patriot Act, they didn’t like monitoring phone calls originating from outside the U.S. from suspected terrorists, they are against any interrogation techniques that might upset the Muslim community, and yet Democrat Senators have the audacity to ask why we were not better prepared against terrorism. If liberals would treat Islamic nuts as they treat tobacco companies then we might actually be safer against future attacks.

********************
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http://www.carnellknowledge.com/2006/06/14/news-41/
Consistency
Filed on 06/14/06 by Chris Arnell
www.carnellknowledge.com


What happens when young revolutionaries go grey?

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young for Europe’s radical upheavals of 1968 was (with apologies to William Wordsworth) very heaven!

The young radicals of ’68 grew up (or rather didn’t grow up) to become some of Europe’s most influential leaders, as Bruce Bawer notes in a review of Paul Berman’s new book, Power and the Idealists:

“Remarkably, after the protests were over, an extraordinary number of ’68ers—those who’d stood on the barricades denouncing the system—ascended into positions of political and cultural power, shaping a New Europe (and an EU) in which the anti-Americanism of the barricades became official dogma. Paul Berman’s absorbing, elegantly written Power and the Idealists recounts the political journeys of three of the most influential of these ’68ers. Joschka Fischer, once head of the militant group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), became German foreign minister in 1998. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May ’68 Paris demos, now sits in the European Parliament. And Dr. Bernard Kouchner, boy Communist, went on to found Doctors Without Borders in 1971 and to serve as an EU and UN official. The ultimate point of Berman’s 100-page opening chapter is that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo compelled these three to move ‘from radical leftism to liberal antitotalitarianism’—that is, to reject their longtime view of the U.S. as the world’s supreme menace and support NATO action against Milosevic. Many ’68ers, Berman suggests, made the same move.”

But the realignment did not survive the U.S. invasion of Iraq:

“Of Berman’s trio, only Kouchner supported the invasion of Iraq; Cohn-Bendit, Fischer, and nearly everybody else on the European left opposed it, in most cases fiercely. Berman claims that this posture was ‘tactical’—in principle, he insists, the left continued to stand for ‘liberal antitotalitarianism.’”

Bawer thinks that the brief flirtation with U.S. policies had more cynical roots. He argues that the goal of the book is to present his ’68 trio as “models of reflective and principled interventionist leftism” at a time when the left’s “hatred of George W. Bush has blinded them to the iniquities of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam, et al., not to mention the best interests of people who’ve suffered under tyranny.”

Instead of creating heaven, the young ideologues of ’68 built a European social democracy that is “a kind of fundamentalism, rigid and doctrinaire, yielding what Swedish writer Johan Norberg calls ‘one-idea states’—nations where an echo chamber of insular elites calls the shots, where monochrome media daily reiterate statist mantras and shut out contrarian views, and where teachers and professors systematically misrepresent the U.S. (millions of Europeans believe that free public schools, unemployment insurance, and pensions are unknown in America).”

Posted by Charlotte Hays
http://www.iwf.org/inkwell/archive.asp?start=1/1/2006&end=1/7/2006


Three Radicals, Inside Europe's Leftist Elite

A few years back, after a prolonged immersion in American Protestant fundamentalism (I was writing a book), I moved from the U.S. to Western Europe, ready to bask in an open, secular, liberal culture. Instead I discovered that European social democracy, too, was a kind of fundamentalism, rigid and doctrinaire, yielding what Swedish writer Johan Norberg calls "one-idea states"—nations where an echo chamber of insular elites calls the shots, where monochrome media daily reiterate statist mantras and shut out contrarian views, and where teachers and professors systematically misrepresent the U.S. (millions of Europeans believe that free public schools, unemployment insurance, and pensions are unknown in America). The more I saw of the European elites' chronic distrust of the public, and the public's habitual deference to those elites, the fonder I grew of the nasty, ridiculous rough-and-tumble of American democracy, in which every voice is heard—even if, as a result, the U.S. gets capital punishment and Europe gets gay marriage.

How did Western Europe come to be ruled by monolithic ideologues? Short answer: the "'68ers," which is what Europeans call those who came of age in the radical movements of the 1960s, revering Mao and reviling the U.S. as Nazi Germany's successor. Remarkably, after the protests were over, an extraordinary number of '68ers—those who'd stood on the barricades denouncing the system—ascended into positions of political and cultural power, shaping a New Europe (and an EU) in which the anti-Americanism of the barricades became official dogma. Paul Berman's absorbing, elegantly written Power and the Idealists recounts the political journeys of three of the most influential of these '68ers. Joschka Fischer, once head of the militant group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), became German foreign minister in 1998. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May '68 Paris demos, now sits in the European Parliament. And Dr. Bernard Kouchner, boy Communist, went on to found Doctors Without Borders in 1971 and to serve as an EU and UN official. The ultimate point of Berman's 100-page opening chapter is that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo compelled these three to move "from radical leftism to liberal antitotalitarianism"—that is, to reject their longtime view of the U.S. as the world's supreme menace and support NATO action against Milosevic. Many '68ers, Berman suggests, made the same move.

Berman's first chapter is based on "The Passion of Joschka Fisher," an August 2001 New Republic essay. Days later came 9/11, in whose aftermath the notion of the European left as a newfound bastion of "liberal antitotalitarianism" would be increasingly hard to buy. For even if a significant number of '68ers did switch sides over Kosovo, the wars in Afghanistan and (especially) Iraq switched most of them back. Of Berman's trio, only Kouchner supported the invasion of Iraq; Cohn-Bendit, Fischer, and nearly everybody else on the European left opposed it, in most cases fiercely. Berman claims that this posture was "tactical"—in principle, he insists, the left continued to stand for "liberal antitotalitarianism." My own observations strongly suggest that most '68ers never really embraced "liberal antitotalitarianism" in the first place; yes, European governments felt obliged to go along with the Kosovo and Afghan invasions, but the academic, journalistic, and bureaucratic elites protested both operations vociferously (only to drop their opposition down the memory hole when those efforts succeeded).

Berman's goal is clear: At a time when many leftists' animosity toward George W. Bush has blinded them to the iniquities of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam, et al., not to mention the best interests of people who've suffered under tyranny, he wants to hold up Fischer, Cohn-Bendit, and Kouchner as models of reflective and principled interventionist leftism. Fine. One problem here, alas, is that all three of these men have, in their time, done things that raise serious questions about their principles and powers of reflection. Fischer, for example, brutally beat up a cop at a 1973 Frankfurt street protest; Cohn-Bendit hid a fugitive whose group had helped coordinate the 1972 Olympics murders. While reporting candidly enough on these and other episodes, Berman prefers to see them (with excessive generosity) as eminently forgivable missteps made in their youth by men who have since developed a mature wisdom deserving of emulation. Whatever. Bottom line: he's out to convince readers that if they stop cheering George Galloway and linking arms with Islamofascists at antiwar rallies and instead join his trio in (as he sees it) supporting "liberal antitotalitarianism"—i.e., siding with freedom against oppression—they'll still be able to call themselves leftists. It's ironic: Berman's New Republic article recounted the supposed awakening of the European left; to read the book that's grown out of it is to be intensely aware of just how many leftists are still sound asleep.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=25924

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Attack on Hornets Nest of Taliban bypassed because CIA & DoD feared civilian casualities.

"We could see their children playing soccer in the courtyard." An attack was bypassed because "CIA and the Department of Defense... [feared] civilian casualties and [harming] U.S.-Pakistani relations." (below)

"An al-Qaeda command center is uncovered in Bajaur, Zawahiri is believed to be in the region, and Pakistan still wants to cut the Bajaur Accord. " The Fourth Rail (below)


Zawahiri Was Target in U.S. Attack on Religious School in Pakistan

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/zawahiri_was_ta.html 
All ABC NEWS articles can be retrieved from this page

October 30, 2006 1:15 PM

Alexis Debat Reports:

Pakistan_rubble_zawahiri_nrAyman al Zawahiri was the target of a Predator missile attack this morning on a religious school in Pakistan, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.

ABC News has learned the raid was launched after U.S. intelligence received tips and examined Predator reconnaissance indicating that al Qaeda's No. 2 man may have been staying at the school, which is located in the Bajaur region near the village that is thought to be al Qaeda's winter headquarters.

Despite earlier reports that the missiles had been launched by Pakistani military helicopters, Pakistani intelligence sources now tell ABC News that the missiles were fired from a U.S. Predator drone plane.

Between two and five senior al Qaeda militants were killed in the attack, including the mastermind of the airliners plot in the U.K., according to Pakistani intelligence sources.

No word yet on whether or not Zawahiri was killed in the raid, but one Pakistani intelligence source did express doubt that Zawahiri would have been staying in a madrassa, which is an obvious target for strikes against militants. That source, however, did express confidence that Pakistani intelligence is closing in on Zawahiri's location.

One of the clerics who is believed to have been killed today, Maulana Liaquat, was one of the two main local leaders believed to be protecting Zawahiri.

Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News they believe they have "boxed" Zawahiri in a 40-square-mile area between the Khalozai Valley in Bajaur and the village of Pashat in Kunar, Afghanistan. They hope to capture or kill him in the next few months.

Alexis Debat is an ABC News consultant.

Up to 80 Killed in Attack on Religious School in Pakistan

October 30, 2006 11:50 AM

Rahimullah Yusufzai Reports:

Pakistan_attack_nr_1Up to 80 people were killed this morning in Pakistan's Bajaur region, which borders Afghanistan, when a seminary was attacked with missiles.

Reported to be among the dead is Maulana Liaquat, who ran the religious school and was one of the leaders of a pro-Taliban organization of Pakistani tribal clerics. Villagers said most of the others killed were students ages 15- to 25-years-old.

Today's attack comes on the day that pro-Taliban militants were scheduled to ink a peace agreement with the government of Pakistan, in which the militant tribal groups would have agreed not to shelter foreign refugees and not to cross the border into Afghanistan. Some of the dead from today's attack are reportedly Afghans.

The pro-Taliban organization, called Tanzim Nifaz Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM), is headed up by Maulana Faqir Mohammad, who is wanted by Pakistani authorities for allegedly sheltering al Qaeda- and Taliban-linked foreign militants. He was not at the school at the time of the bombing, but later showed up at the scene and made a speech blaming the United States for organizing the attack and killing innocent madrassa students. He also accused the Pakistani government of helping the U.S. launch the attack.

Eyewitnesses to today's attack said two missiles were fired from an unmanned Predator plane at around 5:00 a.m. local time. They said the drone had been flying overhead all night.

The Pakistani military, however, has said it was their helicopters, not a U.S. drone, that fired the missiles.

Villagers said they have recovered around 80 bodies so far. "The bodies were burnt. Pieces of flesh were strewn all over the place. Rescuers were picking up body parts from here and there," said Mushtaq Khan, a journalist who was at the scene.

The village where the seminary was located is just a few miles from Damadola, where a U.S. missile attack in January killed 13 people. That attack was ordered following reports that al Qaeda top deputy Ayman al Zawahiri was visiting the village to dine with local tribal militants.


Al Qaeda's Winter Headquarters

October 27, 2006 8:41 AM

Alexis Debat Reports:

Osama_winter_nrU.S. intelligence sources tell ABC News they are "dismayed and alarmed" by published reports that nine men arrested last year during a raid on "al Qaeda's winter headquarters" have been released. 

The nine men are family members of a local cleric, who is wanted by Pakistan for providing "extensive help and protection" to al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahiri, intelligence sources tell ABC News. 

Pakistani intelligence officials believe Zawahiri is hiding somewhere in a 40-square-kilometer area of Bajaur, near the Afghan border.

"Al Qaeda's winter headquarters" was a high-walled compound located near the village of Shin Kot, about eight miles from the Afghan border, U.S. and Pakistani sources tell ABC News.

A U.S. intelligence source said CIA and special forces had the compound under such close surveillance, "We could see their children playing soccer in the courtyard."

According to that source, al Qaeda's operational commander, Abu Faraj al Libbi, was among those staying at the house.  He was captured elsewhere in May 2005.

The CIA and the Department of Defense decided not to raid the compound, fearing civilian casualties and harm to U.S.-Pakistani relations.

The "winter headquarters" compound was later burned to the ground by Pakistani officials.

Two Articles From The Fourth Rail

Bajaur: An al-Qaeda Command Center

October 28, 2006

http://billroggio.com/archives/2006/10/bajaur_an_alqaeda_co.php

An al-Qaeda command center is uncovered in Bajaur, Zawahiri is believed to be in the region, and Pakistan still wants to cut the Bajaur Accord

As we noted earlier this week, the release of nine al-Qaeda suspects in Bajaur is just the precursor to Pakistan surrending the tribal agency to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. According to an American intelligence source, the released al-Qaeda weren't just 'family members of Maulana Faqir Mohamed, they are actually staff members and functionaries of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammed (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Sharia), a radical Islamist group with close ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda that sent Pakistanis to fight the Americans during Operation Enduring Freedom.

Bajaur has long been believed to be a command and control hub for al-Qaeda and the Taliban entering Afghanistan in the north east into Kunar province.

Alexis Debat reports that Bajaur hosted al-Qaeda's "headquarters" during the winter of 2005-06. The headquartes was located in the town of Shin Kot, which just south of Damadola, where a U.S.predator strike targeted, and missed Ayman al-Zawahiri but killed five senior al-Qaeda commanders, including Abu Khabab, al-Qaeda's chief of WMD program.

The Shin Kot compound was under heavy observation, and according to Mr. Debat's source, "We could see their children playing soccer in the courtyard." An attack was bypassed because "CIA and the Department of Defense... [feared] civilian casualties and [harming] U.S.-Pakistani relations." The failure to strike at Shin Kot highlights the difficulty the U.S. and NATO face with the al-Qaeda safe havens that exist along the Afghan-Pakistani border. According to Mr. Debat, "the "winter headquarters" compound was later burned to the ground by Pakistani officials," however an American intelligence source informs us that members of Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammed burned down the compound to destroy any evidence.

Mr. Debat notes one other important piece of intelligence that calls into question the motivations of the Pakistani government in considering a surrender in Bajaur. Mr. Debat states that "Pakistani intelligence officials believe Zawahiri is hiding somewhere in a 40-square-kilometer area of Bajaur, near the Afghan border." In an interview with Brian Ross, Pakistani spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan was emphatic that high value targets would be hunted, after stating just days before they could indeed live in 'peace' in the region. "If someone is found there, we will see what is to be done... Pakistan is committed to the war on terror, and of course we will go after any terrorist found to be operating here," said Sultan.

If Pakistani intelligence believes Zawahiri is in a 40 square kilometer region in Bajaur, why negotiate terms that would send troops back to the barracks and allow the Taliban and al-Qaeda to openly run the local administration of the region?



Pakistan Releases over 2,500 Taliban, al-Qaeda

September 15, 2006

http://billroggio.com/archives/2006/09/pakistan_releases_ov.php

Pakistan follows the truce to the letter and releases thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda members captured since 2001

The Pakistani government is living up to its commitments on the "Waziristan Accord," and has emptied the prisons of Taliban and al-Qaeda who have been captured since the fall of 2001. The "Waziristan Accord" calls for the Pakistani government to "release prisoners held in military action and would not arrest them again," and that is exactly what is happening.

The Daily Telegraph discloses that Pakistan has released over 2,500 Taliban and al-Qaeda, although an American military intelligence source estimates the number is higher. The Pakistani military has in the past put the number of al-Qaeda and Taliban captured at around 500-700.

The Daily Telegraph then tracks down some of those released. The resultant interviews give the impression those released were somehow incorrectly identified as jihadis. A "young Tajik who entered Pakistan last year to study... at a madrassa in Peshawar... was shot in the side by Pakistani police as he tried to escape when the madrassa was raided." A "37-year-old Algerian... worked in the honey business when he was arrested last year." Al-Qaeda was deeply involved in the "honey business" and use this and other industries to mask their terror financing. A "Bangladeshi who has an American degree in engineering, admitted helping the Taliban against US-led forces in Afghanistan five years ago" was released to the al-Khidmat Foundation. The Daily Telegraph fails to recognize the al-Khidmat Foundation is in fact the Makhtab al-Khidmat, or the MAK, which was founded by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and was used to funnel men and material into Afghanistan. The MAK is on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List.

But beyond the three low level operatives interviewed are a host of senior and mid level al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives. A sample of those released included the following individuals, including the killers of journalist Daniel Pearl:

Ghulam Mustafa: "He was once close to Osama bin Laden, has intimate knowledge of al-Qaeda's logistics and financing and its nexus with the military in Pakistan."

Maulana Sufi Mohammad: "Maulana Sufi Mohammad was Faqir Mohammed's first jihadi mentor who introduced him to militancy in Afghanistan in 1993. Sufi Mohammad was one of the active leaders of Jamat-e-Islami (JI) in the 1980s. He was the principal of the JI madrassa in Tamaergra, a town in the northwestern part of NWFP. He was an instinctive hardliner and in due course developed differences with JI and left them in 1992 to form Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammed [TNSM]." Sufi Mohammad organized Pakistanis to fight jihad in Afghanistan and along with the TNSM fought in Kunduz November of 2001.

Mohammad Khaled: A brigade leader who led the Taliban in against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. ""It is a difficult time for Islam and Muslims. We are in a test. Everybody should be ready to pass the test - and to sacrifice our lives," said Mohammad Khaled.

Fazl-e-Raziq: A senior aide to Osama bin Laden, and "an ethnic Pakhtoon resident of Swabi district of the North West Frontier Province."

Khairullah Kherkhawa: The former Taliban governor of Herat.

Khalid Khawaja: "Khalid Khawaja is a retired squadron leader of the Pakistan Air Force who was an official in Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, in the mid 1980s. After he wrote a critical letter to General Zia ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1977 till 1988, in which he labeled Zia as hypocrite, he was removed from the ISI and forced to retire from the airforce. He then went straight to Afghanistan in 1987 and fought against the Soviets along side with Osama Bin Laden, developing a relationship of firm friendship and trust. Khalid Khawaja’s name resurfaced when US reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and subsequently killed. Pearl had come to Pakistan and met Khalid Khawaja in order to investigate the jihadi network of revered sufi, Syed Mubarak Ali Gailani."

Mansour Hasnain: A member of the group that kidnapped and murdered Danny Pearl. He also was "a militant of the Harkat-al-Mujahedin group, is one of those who hijacked an Indian Airlines jet in December 1999 and forced New Delhi to release three militants -- including Omar and Azhar."

Mohammad Hashim Qadeer: "Suspected of being one of [Daniel] Pearl’s actual killers, was arrested in August 2005 and has notable al-Qaida links" and "ties with the banned extremist groups Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen and Jaish-e-Muhammad."

Mohammad Bashir: Another Pakistani complicit in the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Aamni Ahmad, Hala Ahmad and Nooran Abdu: Facilitators/couriers, and wives of al-Qaeda members. "Pakistani authorities arrested 23 Arabs, including two children, suspected of links to Osama bin Laden, officials said Wednesday. All of them sneaked into the country from Afghanistan in recent weeks. The suspects include three women, identified as Aamni Ahmad, Hala Ahmad and Nooran Abdu, who are believed to be relatives of bin Laden. An interior ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the arrests were made in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan."

Gul Ahmed Shami & Hamid Noor: Al-Qaeda foot soldiers who fought in Afghanistan. "I want to be the next Osama bin Laden," said Shami in 2001. "Allah is with us. The Americans have technology but they don't have the courage to face death, which we do. I will be there until my death if need be. I know I probably won't come back," said Hamid.

These “miscreants” and “foreigners” are said to be streaming back to al-Qaeda's new safe haven of the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, and reconstituting al-Qaeda's organization.

As the Pakistani government lives up to their end of the “Waziristan Accord,” the Taliban and al-Qaeda have broken it repeatedly. Anti-Taliban clerics and tribal leaders have been shot and beheaded in Waziristan. A government official was also kidnapped in Waziristan, and a reporter was murdered in Dera Ismail Khan. The Taliban flaunts the terms of the truce and expends into neighboring agencies, and the Pakistani government continues to look the other way.

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Muslims Toast Paris Riot Anniversary With Molotov Cocktails

All of Europe is clutched by fears of radical Islamic terrorism within each country's borders, as this spate of articles clearly show.

Gangs Attack Buses Ahead of Anniversary of Paris Riots

By John Lichfield in Paris, Published: 27 October 2006

Three buses have been attacked and burnt by gangs of youths on the outskirts of Paris as tensions deepen before the anniversary today of the outbreak of three weeks of violent riots in poor French suburbs.

In one incident, a driver and his passengers were forced to leave a bus at gunpoint in Bagnolet, just east of Paris, early yesterday. The bus was then driven through a barrier into a housing estate and burnt.

In other attacks, west and south of Paris, on Wednesday night passengers scrambled off buses after they were set alight with inflammable liquid or molotov cocktails. A fourth bus, or coach, was burnt while empty and parked.

The attacks, and another incident in which youths stoned cars on a busy dual carriageway south of Paris, suggest youth gangs in some suburbs are making a deliberate attempt to provoke new clashes with police.

This hardly comes as a surprise. One of the French internal security services, the Rénsignements Generaux, warned this week that "most of the conditions" which produced "collective violence" in poor, multi-racial suburbs across France last year remained unchanged.

But local mayors and youth workers are hopeful there will be no more than a few scattered outbreaks of "anniversary" violence. Outside the Paris area, there has been little trouble. Most of the deprived housing estates around the capital - including those in and near Clichy-sous-Bois where last year's disturbances began - have been relatively calm.

The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has given instructions that police should avoid entering the "territory" of youth gangs in the days approaching the anniversary. He has also criticised a series of "12 months on" articles and programmes in the French media as an invitation to resume rioting.

All the same, a heavy-handed police raid with racial overtones, in Evry, south of Paris, appears to have been at least partially responsible for the outbreak of bus burnings. Police entered a café on Monday and demanded to see the papers of the middle-aged customers of African and north African descent. Argument broke out and police used tear gas and made several arrests. A bus was burnt by youths in the nearby estate that night in retaliation for what they called an "attack on our fathers". The more recent bus attacks seem to have been more planned, "copy-cat" incidents.

Last year's riots started after two youths, aged 17 and 15, were electrocuted in a power sub-station at Clichy-sous-Bois, north-east of Paris, while fleeing police. Over the next three weeks, the car-burning and attacks on public buildings - by brown, black and white youths - spread to the suburbs of almost every large town or city in France.

The government has since promised hundreds of millions of euros investment in deprived estates and new measures to prevent job discrimination against people of Arab or black origin. Activists and social workers claim little has been done to reign in the casual racism of many of the police deployed in the banlieues, or suburbs.

There are also signs of divisions in the government on how to treat the anniversary. M. Sarkozy believes it should be ignored. He is reported to have criticised bland, anniversary comments by the Equality Minister, Azous Begag, inviting his colleague to "learn to shut his mouth".

The Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, also chose to defy the Sarkozy doctrine of silence yesterday and held his monthly press conference in the heart of the outer Paris banlieues, in Cergy-Pontoise. He promised "immediate and exemplary" punishment of the youths involved in the bus attacks.

The Independent, United Kingdom
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1932739.ece


Somber France marks riots anniversary

By Francois Murphy 1 hour, 22 minutes ago

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France (Reuters) - Hundreds of people marched in silence through a rundown Paris suburb on Friday to mark the anniversary of two deaths which triggered the worst riots to hit the French capital in nearly 40 years.

"You can really feel the anger and the suffering of the people who live in Clichy-sous-Bois," said Soumeya Ata, who traveled to the suburb north of the capital from the southwestern town of Pau to attend the commemoration.

Around 1,000 mainly young people from immigrant families marched through the high-rise suburb, where the riots erupted after the electrocution deaths of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna. Witnesses said the teenagers died while fleeing police.

Marchers, many sporting T-shirts with the slogan "Dead for Nothing," passed the electrical substation where the two died and their families wept as they laid flowers at its gate.

Organizers called for quiet reflection to mark the tragedy, although some television crews pulled out after they were threatened by local youths.

Tensions remain high in France's rundown suburbs, where poor job prospects, racial discrimination, a widespread sense of alienation from mainstream society and perceived hostile policing touched off an orgy of violence 12 months ago.

"Nothing has changed," marcher Rafika Benguedda, a 21-year-old student, said despondently.

An upsurge in attacks on buses ahead of the anniversary prompted Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to draft in extra police late on Thursday after transport chiefs warned they could pull services if the arson continued.

Sarkozy is moving to toughen sentences for attacks on police and law and order could again play strongly in 2007 presidential elections in which the interior minister, the conservative frontrunner, is expected to run.

NO CHANGE

Sarkozy has downplayed the anniversary of the 2005 riots -- the worst since student riots in 1968. "I also have to look after the people who aren't burning things, who aren't smashing up things," he said after visiting farmers out of Paris.

The government has sought to play down anniversary talk and highlighted the 420 million euro ($531.6 million) it has earmarked since the riots to improve life in the suburbs.

"Things are better, less bad," government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope told France Inter radio.

However, while national unemployment has fallen steadily since last year, local officials saw little progress.

"What is being done in order to ensure Clichy does not have three times as many unemployed as the rest of France?" asked Olivier Klein, the Socialist deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois.

Police unions too are ringing alarm bells. They say 14 officers a day are hurt and that police face an urban guerrilla war in the tinderbox suburbs that ring most major French cities.

Several officers have been hospitalized with injuries from beatings after being apparently lured into traps by gangs of youths in recent weeks.

In the first six months of 2006, some 21,000 cars were burned and 2,882 attacks recorded against the police, fire and ambulance services.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/france_suburbs_violence_dc
Yahoo News


Germans feel the clutch of terrorist threat
61% surveyed believe Islamic extremists are targeting nation

Eric Geiger, Chronicle Foreign Service, Thursday, October 26, 2006

 10-26) 04:00 PDT Munich, Germany -- Early this month, Ibrahim R, an Iraqi who has lived in Germany since 1996, became the first person to be arrested for allegedly disseminating propaganda over the Internet for a foreign terrorist group.

The 36-year-old immigrant posted videos and tape recordings of Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri threatening the West in an online chat room. German officials have pledged to monitor more Islamic Web sites and make more arrests.

In years past, the harsh response by officials in Lower Saxony state might have spurred criticism of state violation of privacy laws. But many Germans no longer see the war on terror as a British-American problem over Iraq.

"The case of that Iraqi suspect just proves we are not living in a safe island anymore," said Heinz Bruckmoser, a retired mechanical engineer from Duesseldorf. "It ties in with that failed train attack."

In July, Islamic extremists tried but failed to blow up two trains in northern Germany. If successful, they could have killed hundreds of people. The plot not only triggered a heated debate on national security but also sparked an upsurge of fear in a nation with some 3.5 million Muslims residents.

"We are threatened by terrorism, and that threat has never been so close," Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said after the attempted train attacks. "This time we were lucky."

According to a survey this month by the Demoskopie Institute, the nation's leading pollster, 61 percent now believe Germany is a target for Islamic militants.

Such fears lay behind the Berlin Opera House's cancellation of Mozart's opera, "Idomeneo" after an anonymous threat over a scene that included the severed head of the prophet Muhammad. In less publicized, seemingly absurd reactions, a local school in the central German town of Dillenberg ordered a gymnasium to be darkened when Muslim girls work out there, while law enforcement officials in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia ordered a woman to change the name of her horse from "Muhammad" to "Momi."

False bomb alerts have become an almost daily routine at many train stations. Sprawling railroad terminals in major cities, including Hamburg, Bonn, Koblenz and Mannheim, have been temporarily sealed off.

"We keep getting calls from worried citizens about what they presume to be terrorist activities," said a Hamburg police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with department policy.

Last month, a two-year dialogue program initiated by the interior minister to integrate German Muslims into mainstream society began between prominent Muslims and government officials

But anti-Muslim sentiment appears to be growing. "We are already beginning to knuckle under to Islam," said a recent headline in Bildzeitung, Germany's largest-circulation newspaper, protesting the number of mosques being built in the downtowns of German cities.

Two Lebanese students studying at German universities were identified in August as the main suspects in the failed train attacks. Yousef Mohammed El Hajdid, 21, was arrested in the northern town of Kiel, while 19-year-old Jihad Mamad was detained in Lebanon. Both were identified by video cameras installed at all train stations.

No formal charges have been filed, but investigators say both harbored deep hatred toward Israel, and the West.

And while authorities stress that the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population opposes violence, the domestic intelligence agency Verfassungsschutz, or Guardians of the Constitution, has classified 32,000 Muslims as "Islamic radicals," including 4,000 described as "violence prone."

Manfred Murck, a top official of the agency in Hamburg, recently said that 30 of Hamburg's 100 mosques are being monitored for "suspicious activity," including the Al-Khuds mosque where Mohammed Atta and his Hamburg cell met daily before the Sept. 11 attacks. These mosques serve as meeting places for "clandestine agencies for Islamic extremist networks," Murck said.

Elmer Thevessen, a senior editor at ZDF national television network who has worked on numerous documentaries on terrorism, says the most likely converts to radical Islam in Germany are, like elsewhere in Europe, young, second-generation Muslims.

"They often feel isolated, don't know where they really belong, and often feel contempt for their immigrant parents, accusing them of being interested only in earning a decent living and adapting to German life," Thevessen said.

Thevessen says they are influenced by radical ideas spread on the Internet and Arabic language satellite TV networks such as Al-Manar, operated in Lebanon by Hezbollah.

"Thanks to Al-Manar, we know all about the horrible crimes committed by Israeli soldiers in Lebanon -- the murders of small babies and old sick people -- and the massacres by American soldiers of pregnant woman in Iraq and Afghanistan," said a young man who gave his name only as Mustafa as he played soccer in a parking lot in Freilassing, a commercial center in southern Bavaria.

Norbert Schneider, head of the Broadcasting Regulation Authority in North Rhine-Westphalia state, said he finds Al-Manar's programs "sordid" and "very alarming." While Al-Manar is banned in the United States and from a French-based satellite distribution network, there is no legal basis to stop its programs being broadcast in Germany. "They operate in a lawless sphere, and there is nothing we can do about it," said Schneider.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/26/MNGD3M08NA1.DTL&feed=rss.news
San Francisco Chronicle

Fear of Religious Conflict in Belgium

26 October 2006

BRUSSELS - More then six citizens in ten fear an increase in religious tensions in Belgium according to a survey by Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

A "pessimistic" attitude in contrast with the overall "moderate attitude" of Belgians towards religions, notes the evening paper.
The majority of interviewees supported a 'respectful criticism' of religions, meaning that criticism can be expressed so long as personal religious beliefs are respected.

But not all Belgians follow this moderated view: 23 percent are opposed to all critics of religion, half as much as the French notes Le Soir, while 16 percent assume a highly critical standpoint, three times more then in France.

Eric de Beukelaer, spokesman of Belgium's Francophone Bishops, said he was satisfied with the results.

"All religions can be criticised, but there are limits," he said, emphasizing the difference between "criticising" and "offending someone in his or her conviction."

The CAL, the Centre for Secular Action (Centre d’Action Laïque), agreed, although its president, Philippe Grollet said that 23 percent of Belgians thinking religion should not be criticised is "too much."  He deplores such attitudes which leave no space for debate.

Abdelmajid Mhauchi, Belgians representative of the European Muslim Network, said that Belgium has a long history of conflict between Seculars and Catholics and has learnt to respect religious liberties. "As a Muslim" he said "I accept critics of Islam … but I cannot tolerate mockery and provocation."

About 60 percent of Belgians accept the presence of religious signs and symbols in public life. A minority of 36 percent admit the wish to see these symbols and signs confined to the private sphere. This view is reflected in France's law which bans the public display of ostentatious religious symbols in republican intuitions such as schools and tribunals.

Here, too, religious institutions and organizations expressed satisfaction with these figures. Philippe Grollet of CAL pointed out that although people should be allowed to display signs of their religion, "those who represent the government (secular and neutral by definition) and the public authority – magistrates, policemen, teachers etc – should remain neutral."

 Despite these reasonable views, 60 percent of the people interviewed predict an increase in tensions between Christians and Muslims with Flemish men being the most pessimistic.
 
Only 7 percent of the interviewees forecast a decrease of tensions in Belgium. In this respect, Brussels is the Belgium capital of optimism with 12 percent predicting a decrease in tensions.

Copyright Expatica news 2006

http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=24&story_id=33960
Expatica


Norwegian imams criticised

The Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion, Bjarne Haakon Hanssen, is disturbed over what he calls extreme attitudes expressed by imams in Norway, - among other things denying the existence of Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

Hanssen's reactions come after several central imams in Norway have denied the possibility that Muslims carried out the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11th 2001.

They have also alleged that Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden have been "invented" by the US in order to legitimize the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

- These are extreme views. What makes this particularly serious, is that these who are aking these statements are central imams, who are advisers to other Muslims.

It was imam Zulqarnain Sakander Madni who first made the surprising statements, and he has later received support by other imams in Norway.

Imam Syed Ikram Shah of the World Islamic Mission also ruled out the possibility of Muslims being behind the attacks on September 11th, pointing to the fact that Islam does not allow the murder of innocents.

The Minister of Social Inclusion is afraid of the reactions such statements will create in the Norwegian society, and he fears that this may increase the distance between immigrants and native Norwegians.

Spokesman for the Islamic Council of Norway, Mohammed Osman Rana, says he is also shocked, but he is shocked by the outcry the statements from imams have created. He points to the fact that there is freedom of expression in Norway.

He speaks out against Hanssen's criticism, and says the Minister should remember that (according to Rana) a third of all US citizens also doubt the official explanation of what happened in the time prior to September 11th 2001.

Awais Mushtaq, spokesperson for the Muslim Student Association in Norway, also backs the views expressed by the imams, NRK reports.

(NRK)

Rolleiv Solholm

http://www.norwaypost.no/cgi-bin/norwaypost/imaker?id=28088
Norway Post

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Photo Urging American-Muslims To Vote For Democrats

 

See Article "American-Muslim TV Network Host Urges Votes for Democrats" on this Blog for more photos Urging American-Muslims to Vote Democrat!
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Free Republic Bloggers Scrutinize 2001 Iraqi DOC and Find WMD Program

 

2001 Iraqi Document: Saddam Approved the Re-Use of Nuclear Equipments (Important Translation).

Pentagon/FMSO website for Iraq Pre-war documents http://70.168.46.200/ ^ | In what is so far the most important evidence of Saddam personal involvement in re-building Iraq nuclear program , document CMPC-2003-012331.pdf dated January 2001 indicates that during a meeting between Saddam and the Staff of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization Saddam was asked by the Organization Staff to give his permission for re-using the infamous “ Degussa Vacuum furnaces ” that were used in the previous and prohibited Iraq nuclear program. These furnaces can be used to melt uranium and other nuclear related activities.

The Degussa Vacuum furnaces were supplied to Iraq in the 1980’s by a German firm (Degussa AG based in Frankfurt Germany) and these furnaces later on became the subject of investigations of the German firm in the early 1990’s where the company claimed that they did not know that Iraq would have used them in its nuclear program. The New York Times had an article in 1998 titled “An Iraqi Defector Warns of Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Research” where the Degussa furnaces were mentioned as part of “previous” Iraq nuclear program and the controversy surrounding the sale of these furnaces and the investigations later on(link: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/iraqi_defector.html ). The irony is that this is not only a New York Times article but also it was written by JUDITH MILLER and JAMES RISEN once of the worst accusers (liars) that the Bush administration lied about Iraq WMD.

Also the Degussa furnaces supplied to Iraq were mentioned in articles written by David Albright (An American nuclear scientist) explaining how the Degussa furnaces were used in the “previous” Iraqi nuclear program. Mr. Albright wrote the article to Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” back in 1992-1993 and you find the links about these articles ( http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=apr92albright , http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=dec93albrighta> ).

Again this document carries a lot of importance since it proves without any doubt that Saddam was directly involved with his nuclear scientists to re-build their nuclear program. President Bush in a speech dated October 7 2002 mentioned that Saddam has held numerous meetings with his nuclear Scientists and this quote from President Bush speech: The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" -- his nuclear holy warriors (Link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html ).

The translation will include memos. The first one is from Senior Deputy Minister of Iraq Military Industrialization Committee to the Chairman of Iraq Atomic Energy Organization asking him to allocate the Degussa Vacuum furnaces, the second memo a reply from Iraq Atomic Energy Organization saying that they will do so and that they got the approval of Saddam Hussein to re-use these equipments.

Beginning of the translation of memo 1 of CMPC-2003-012331.pdf

In the Name of God the Most Merciful the Most Compassionate

The Republic of Iraq, The Presidency of the Republic, The Military Industrialization Committee

Number 2/4/83

Date: 25/1/2001

Secret and Confidential

To: The Atomic Energy Organization- The Office of the Chairman

Subject: Allocation of Degussa Vacuum Furnaces

Please approve the allocation of the mentioned furnaces and quantity (2) with its accessories because of our dire need for it to implement the works and projects tasked to our committee. And we empower engineer Samir Ibrahim for follow up and receiving.

With regards

Signature

Air General

Marahem Sa’aab Al Hassan

Senior Deputy Minister for Military Industrialization

25/1/2001

End of translation of memo 1

Beginning of translation of memo 2 of CMPC-2003-012331.pdf

Mr. Respected General Director

Subject: Allocation of Vacuum Furnaces

Regarding the letter of the Senior Deputy Minister of the Military Industrialization numbered 2/4/83 on 25/1/2001 I would like to clarify the following:

1. We do not have primaries about the subject.

2. There was a communication with the Energy Organization about the furnaces and it was revealed that the furnaces were delivered to the Physics Department in the Atomic Energy Organization upon the instruction of Mr. Chairman of the Energy Organization to take advantage of these equipments ( During the meeting with the President The Leader God protect and shepherd him and the Organization Staff asked his Excellency to take advantage of these equipments) and these equipments were received two moths ago by the Physics Department.

The furnaces do not have the seal of the Agency but it was among the equipments of the previous program that were included in the list prepared by the agency.

Signature

29/1

Shaker Hamed.

End of translation of memo 2


From the New York Times article in August 15 1998 by Judith Miller and James Risen titled “An Iraqi Defector Warns of Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Research”

“Dr. Jorg Streitferdt, in-house counsel for Degussa, AG, based in Frankfurt, Germany, which owned Leybold at the time, said the companies did sell some equipment that ended up in Iraq's nuclear program, and were later subjected to a series of investigations, including a criminal inquiry by Germany.

He noted that Degussa was exonerated on the charges of selling vacuum furnaces to Iraq, largely because West Germany did not require export licenses at that time for such sales. Though Degussa executives suspected that Iraq might use the equipment for military purposes given the ongoing Iran-Iraq war, he added, they did not know that Iraq wanted it for a nuclear program.

"DeGussa and Leybold did not know what the equipment was for," Streitferdt said. "The whole world did not know what Iraq was about to do. We have learned our lesson and now have very tough internal controls on our exports."

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/iraqi_defector.html

___________________________________________________________________________

This is from the US nuclear scientist Dr. David Albright in his article to Bulletin of Atomic Scientist in 1993:

"According to the Report of the Thirteenth IAEA On-Site Inspection in Iraq, the inspectors found two oxidation furnaces made by Degussa, and some ancillary equipment, including vacuum pumps and control systems, that were manufactured by Leybold, a German firm. Iraq had used a small oxidation furnace for research and development. A production-size furnace was still in packing crates. The inspectors found a chart at the furnace site that recorded temperatures and time periods consistent with Stemmler's process.

Stemmler told me that he had not contactedDegussa . According to company officials, the contact was made by H and H and Iraqi procurement agents. The sale of the furnaces was arranged by H and H, although H and H personnel did not appear to know what the technical requirements of either the furnace or the ancillary equipment were. During meetings at the two companies, the Iraqis were more informed about the technical specifications than were the H and H people.

Degussa and Leybold officials say they did not realize that the equipment was going to be used to manufacture centrifuges.They said that the personnel involved in filling the original orders from MAN were no longer with their companies, and that the employees who filled the Iraqi order had no experience with centrifuges. Urenco and MAN stopped manufacturing maraging steel rotors several years ago, eliminating their need for large oxidation furnaces."

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=dec93albrighta>

___________________________________________________________________________

Iraq's arms report to the United Nations shows that more than 80 German companies have done business with Baghdad since the 1970s and that some have contravened a UN embargo, according to a German newspaper.

In its Tuesday edition, the daily Tageszeitung said that the companies included public and private research laboratories and firms which supplied whole systems or components for weapons of mass destruction.

Citing what it claimed were parts of the report, the newspaper said some of the 86 companies that had been doing business in Iraq since around 1975 had continued to do so at least up until 2001.
___________________________________________________________________________

Googled "vacuum furnace radioactive" and found this about how to produce tritium. Hmm.

That is why this document is very important.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

http://www.exportcontrols.org/centpart3.html


Iraq's Acquisition of Gas Centrifuge Technology

Part III: Treason and Wrap-up

In the early 1990s, Karl Heinz Schaab was investigated for violating export control laws. He was convicted of illegally exporting centrifuge rotors to Iraq in 1993, a minor conviction at the time. In late 1995, after receiving new information about Schaab's activities with Iraq, the German government re-opened its criminal investigation of him.

Following the defection of Hussein Kamel in August 1995, Iraq decided to reveal extensive information about its entire nuclear weapons program. A key new revelation was the extent of assistance by Schaab and his colleagues. When the senior Iraqi gas centrifuge expert, Adel, was asked why Iraq decided to reveal so much new information about Schaab, he explained that he thought Schaab was in jail and already exposed. Some Germans who knew Adel have questioned his reason, believing instead that Adel was ordered by top Iraqi leadership to expose Schaab. Adel and the other members of the Iraqi gas centrifuge program had been highly committed to protecting their German sources of assistance.

In July 1996, Schaab, who had become aware that he was likely to be charged with treason, fled to Brazil. In December 1996, he was arrested in Brazil where he was held pending a decision from the Brazilian courts about his extradition. In March 1998, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled in Schaab's favor and he was freed.

Despite winning his case, Schaab was unhappy in Brazil and wanted to return to Germany. He retained the services of a new German defense lawyer, Michael Rietz, who recommended that he return to Germany and voluntarily turn himself in with the intention of pleading guilty to at least some of the charges. Rietz believed that he could convince the court to give Schaab a relatively short prison sentence as a result. Schaab returned to Germany on September 24, 1996 and was arrested the same day. After serving a few months in prison, he was freed pending trial.

In February 1999, the government filed treason charges against Schaab. The charges were as follows:


Having disclosed a national secret to a foreign power or one of its middlemen, he caused the threat of a "severe impairment" of the external security of the Federal Republic of Germany. The treason took place in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Iraq. In many of these acts, the defendant acted together with the now deceased Bruno Stemmler.
Having violated a regulation of the German Foreign Trade Law, the defendant compromised the security of the Federal Republic of Germany, perturbed the peaceful cohabitation of nations, and considerably harmed the international relations of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The prosecutor viewed Schaab as committing a wide range of acts of treason. He believed that the charge of treason applied not only to overtly classified documents but also to a range of classified information and components that Schaab provided.

In June 1999, the court, with the agreement of the prosecutor, limited the charges to Schaab's supply of classified documents to Iraq for the supercritical centrifuge. The court viewed these documents as state secrets whose unauthorized release constitutes treason.

The charges were limited in part because of weaknesses in German law. Schaab had acted solely for financial reasons and did not intend to betray his country such as traditional communist or East German spies. According to Rietz, Schaab's case was the first one of its kind, and the law was not written with this particular situation in mind.

In making its treason case for the supercritical centrifuge documents, the prosecutors faced another problem. Almost all the individual designs and documents of the supercritical centrifuge were marked VS-Nur Fuer Dienstgebrauch (classified-official use only) or unclassified. However, the prosecutors argued successfully in the end that together these documents carried a much higher level of classification, namely VS-Vertraulich (classified-confidential).

The court established that Schaab was fully aware of the classification rules at MAN. He had received authorization to handle secret centrifuge information in 1972, giving him access to all centrifuge information in his department that was stored in a safe. Until 1980, he also managed his department's filing of classified information and accepted the delivery of classified components.

The court ruled that the documents had to be kept secret because they would enable Iraq to develop devices to make weapon-grade uranium, which could be used in nuclear weapons. The delivery of documents for the supercritical gas centrifuge created the real threat that Iraq would succeed in manufacturing weapons-grade uranium. Many of the parts were also directly usable in the subcritical centrifuge that was the main focus of Iraq's program.

The court stated that the development of weapons of mass destruction by a dictatorial regime, such as Iraq, which has made provisions for the manufacture of long-distance ballistic missiles, strengthens this regime's potential threat of attack. The court ruled that in this eventuality, and the resulting shift of the balance of powers, countries such as Germany would be severely impaired in their capability to defend themselves against attacks and disturbances from outside, ruled the court.

Before returning to Germany, Schaab had decided to plead guilty with the goal of receiving minimum time in jail. Because he had served 15 months in a Brazilian jail, he and Rietz reasoned that a guilty plea could lead to a decision by the court not to incarcerate him further beyond his initial three-month imprisonment after he returned from Brazil.

This strategy worked and Schaab did not serve another day in prison. He was sentenced to five years in prison. However, his time was reduced for prior time spent in Brazilian jail, which was weighted at three times that spent in German jail because of the extreme oppressive conditions of his imprisonment. In addition, the German legal tradition of not serving the last one third of a sentence meant that Schaab left the court a free man.

However, he had to pay a total of 80,000 Deutsche Marks (DM) in fines and other fees. He did not have to pay the roughly 100,000 DM the German government spent trying to extradite him from Brazil.

The court decided on such a lenient prison sentence because it determined that this case did not warrant a judgement of severe treason under the law. In principle, the court believed that the high potential risk posed by supplying the treasonous material speaks for the assumption of an exceptionally severe case. For Iraq, the technical value of the material disclosed by the defendant was considerable. This held true, even though the documents themselves delivered by the defendant did not provide adequate knowledge for the development and manufacture of a gas centrifuge for the production of weapon-grade uranium.

Further, Schaab had often assisted the Iraqis in an on-going business endeavor aimed as supporting the Iraqi gas centrifuge project. The court also held this against Schaab.

However, several important circumstances spoke in favor of the defendant. The court accepted that Stemmler, and not Schaab, originated the plan to sell the drawings and documents. In addition, Schaab acted in a period of time when his company was suffering economically, and the defendant had not previously been convicted of a major offense. As mentioned above, his conviction of selling Iraq carbon fiber rotors was viewed as minor.

Also in his favor, Schaab confessed to the deed, which helped the prosecution reconstruct the extent of his assistance to Iraq, and he regretted his actions. He even surrendered himself to the proceedings despite a refusal of extradition. In addition, he was deemed particularly sensitive to confinement in prison because of his age and impaired health.

There was speculation that another reason for the lenient sentence was to save further embarrassment to MAN, other German companies, and ultimately the German government. Rietz had vowed to fight the charges if the sentence was not reduced. The resulting long and public court fight could have revealed substantially more information about weak security procedures at MAN and elsewhere, possibly revealed other embarrassing information, and perhaps led to the release of sensitive or secret information.

Nonetheless, few doubt that Schaab has suffered enormously for his crimes. He experienced financial troubles when his actions became publicly known. His business on the whole has failed. He continues to suffer public humiliation.

Rationalization and Self-Delusion

Because Stemmler and Busse died before Kamel defected, they were never brought to justice. If they had lived, they would likely have been charged, perhaps also with treason.

During numerous interviews in the early 1990s with one of the authors, Stemmler claimed that he broke no laws. He admitted repeatedly that he provided centrifuge assistance but he denied the information was classified. However, it is clear that he certainly did provide classified information and documents. Because Stemmler is dead, he can no longer defend himself from allegations that he broke the law. Nonetheless, his stated justifications for his actions provide insight into his actions.

Stemmler said he felt justified cooperating with Iraq. When he first became involved with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the United States seemed to be supporting Iraq, and had done so throughout its protracted war with Iran. After the war ended, Iraq, then considered a friend of the West, was involved in a massive rebuilding program. Stemmler said he "never had the impression that Iraq was against the United States."

In addition, the Iraqis told him that their "only desire [was] to make nuclear fuel" for civil purposes. In interviews, Stemmler often said that an Iraqi centrifuge cascade using these centrifuges could have produced only low-enriched uranium, not the highly enriched material needed for an atomic bomb. In reality these centrifuges can produce HEU when hooked in a cascade. When confronted by this seeming inconsistency, Stemmler shrugged.

He often expressed skepticism of Iraq's ability to operate centrifuges or build a centrifuge plant, implying that his assistance did not matter. For example, Stemmler said it is a "long distance from design to a practical machine."

Even in interviews, though, Stemmler was inconsistent in evaluating his own contribution to the Iraqi program. At times he tried to minimize the importance of his assistance. He said that he did not provide the most modern specifications. In some cases, he said, he tried to give them minimal information that was not usable for their specific machine. At other times, he said he believed he had helped to improve the Iraqi centrifuge design.

Stemmler and the other Germans were all successful scientists, technicians, or businessmen. They did not start their cooperation with Iraq intending to break any laws. It is doubtful that they wanted to help Iraq build nuclear weapons.

But they all desperately needed money for themselves or their companies. In addition, Iraq was subtle in its recruitment methods, trying to encourage the Germans to believe that the assistance was somehow legitimate or deserved. Certainly, Iraq never said the assistance was to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, this group of well-respected Germans did break the law. They lied to their own government about their activities. Several knowingly provided classified information to Iraq, which is now viewed as treason in Germany.

At the same time, several tried to deny knowing what Iraq intended to do with their assistance. But all of them must have realized at some point the true purpose of their assistance. Instead of stopping their assistance, they concocted various arguments to rationalize their actions. The arguments, several mentioned above, included:

The assistance was intended only for a university program involved in research and teaching;
The centrifuges would have been for the production of only low enriched uranium for civil reactors and not for nuclear weapons;
Iraq could never have successfully have built a gas centrifuge, so the assistance did not matter;
The specific centrifuges supplied could not have made weapon-grade uranium;
Iraq was a bulwark against Iranian fundamentalism, even though the Iraqi regime was acknowledged as odious;
The German government knew about the business but did not care. Why should the suppliers?
At some point, these centrifuge experts appear to have lost the ability to reflect honestly about their efforts. Finally, they started to lie to themselves.

The German export control system was so weak in the late 1980s, that lying was easy to do. The official investigation that started in 1989 did little to discourage their activities. In fact, it may have inadvertently made them feel invulnerable or immune to police action. Given the huge financial payments Iraq was providing, they had little incentive to stop. Iraq assisted in their self-delusion by not mentioning the true purpose of the items. The Iraqis tried to create a structure where suppliers would provide what they wanted, but never put the supplier in a position to ask the hard questions about the true purpose of their items.

Another factor that served to insulate these Germans was the resistance of their colleagues to reveal their activities to authorities. Germans, among others, are raised to view tattling as morally objectionable. However, this resistance against tattling is perhaps greater in Germany because of the legacy of the Nazi times and widespread disapproval of the Stasi use of informers.

Still, these mitigating factors do not fully explain their actions. Rietz, Hinze's and Schaab's lawyer, says that certainly some people will simply knowingly violate laws for financial gain. But most will not. He says that Iraq made the first steps toward these illegal actions both easy and lucrative. The weak German, Austrian, and Swiss export control systems eased the Iraqi task considerably.

By the time the participants understood the true purpose of their assistance, they were deeply involved. Retreating at that point would have been difficult and risky for most people. Rietz recommends that the time to reflect and stop would have been early in the process. "Once the train leaves the station," he said, "it is hard to get off."

Risks Ahead

Prior to the Allied bombing campaign in January 1991, Iraq never succeeded in producing significant amounts of enriched uranium in its gas centrifuge program. It did run single machine tests for many months in 1990 and accomplished a considerable amount in creating an infrastructure to build and operate centrifuges. Inspectors believe that in early 1991 the Iraqi centrifuge team was close to the point at which it could build and operate a centrifuge with confidence. For more on the program's accomplishments, click here.

Iraq acquired, and still possesses, a remarkable amount of classified and sensitive information about gas centrifuges. It gained considerable experience in gas centrifuges and has had over a decade to ponder its weaknesses and strengths.

Iraq poses a risk in that its centrifuge information could pass to irresponsible agents or other nations, some of which may be seeking nuclear weapons. Even advanced nations would find Iraq's centrifuge information useful to their civil nuclear programs. Few countries have information about 3-meter Urenco centrifuges.

The most frightening risk is that Iraq will reconstitute its centrifuge program to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. It would find reconstitution relatively easy to do, although its chances of success would depend on foreign procurement and international intervention.

This is Part III of Case Studies of Illicit Procurement Networks for Iraq

EMIS Procurement
Matrix Churchill
H+H Metalform
Iraq's Acquisition of Gas Centrifuge Technology
Part I
Part II
Part III
Schaublin
SMB
Karl Otto Brauer
Banca Nationale de Lavoro

Found at http://www.exportcontrols.org/secret.html


Ttranslation efforts.  and follow up on the German issue.

 Realize that Iraq has it's own uranium mines located mostly within the belt of phosphate mines in upper western al Anbar. Many are along the belt just south of the Syrian border from east of the Jordanian border eastward across those high land areas to the Ephrates river around al Quim area. Yes there is a East/West railroad system going the horizontal length of the upper al Anbar province just south of the Syrian border.

And  DO REMEMBER, some three hundred tons of yellow cake where found within the nuclear storage facilities in Salmon Pack area where the Hawatiha nuclear plant is located (the one where the 1981 Israeli air raids on the Osirik nuclear plant took place).

Saddam had every intention of fully resurrecting his nuclear weapon programs in full once the sanctions where lifted, and the heat was off.

And understand. Uranium Hexaflouride gas is produced from chemical processes done after yellow cake is subjected in high temperature ovens and milling process, via. a acid process.
Of course the HF6 is then stored in special tanks and used to feed gas centrafuges to extract the U235.
I continue to wonder why this administration has not drummed into the American public so many facts that are so readily available. If a very clear picture was painted long ago, the Demorats would not have a leg to stand on.
 


These Degussa furnaces were the focus of intensive investigation of the German firm who sold them to Iraq in the 1980’s and the German firm admitted that they did not know that Iraq was going to use it for its nuclear program. The Degussa furnaces were not meant to bake cookies and for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization to personally ask Saddam Hussein permission to use it and Saddam approval means a lot.


When combined with everything else, the gun may not have been 'smoking', but it was loaded and the hammer was cocked, and it was being flourished offensively.

The world told Saddam to drop said weapon several times.

If this incident occurred between a thug and any police agency, the police would have been justified in shooting him dead.

It may only be one document, but it is one of several thousand.

The second memo (memo 2) refers to a meeting between Saddam and the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization that was held months before the MIC asked for the Degussa furnaces, and it was in that early meeting that the Saddam approved the Atomic Energy Organization to use the furnaces and it was given to their “Physics Department” to use it according to the memo 2.

Also the Degussa furnaces were not going to support a major industrial output like melting metals to manufacture hundred if not thousands of shells that Iraqi Army needs. In fact the Iraqis were manufacturing or importing these shells and not depending on any Degussa furnace to be part of the production effort.
__________________________________________________________________________

That memo indicates the furnaces were received by "the Physics Dept" in November 2000. Here's some other things going on in 2000 [there's much more if you add Joe Wilson's Niger adventures to the mix ] :

Spring 2000 : (CIA DIRECTOR TENET REPORTS THAT BIN LADEN HAS BEEN TRAINING HIS OPERATIVES IN THE USE OF BIOLOGICAL & CHEMICAL TOXINS) George Tenet, director of the CIA reports to a panel of experts that Osama bin-Laden has been training his operatives in the use of chemical and biological toxins.-- via "Bio-Chemical Weapons & Saddam: A History, " Various Sources , 02-20-03 , by PsyOp

MAY 2000 : (IAEA FINDS IN JORDAN A MACHINE ORDERED BY IRAQ WHICH IS RELATED TO URANIUM ENRICHMENT ) The IAEA said that in May the agency found a filament-winding machine ordered by Iraq that had arrived in Jordan. The agency said the system was part of Baghdad's clandestine uranium enrichment program. The machine and its spare parts were destroyed, the agency said..” - Source : Middle East Newsline 10/18/00

MAY 3, 2000 Wednesday : (CONGRESSIONAL BRIEFING : THREE UN OFFICIALS - HANS VON SPONECK, DENIS HALLIDAY & SCOTT RITTER CALL FOR THE LIFTING OF SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAQ - US REPRESENTATIVES DENNIS KUCINICH, JOHN CONYERS & CYNTHIA MCKINNEY ALSO CALL FOR THE LIFTING OF SANCTIONS) Washington, DC - Three former senior UN officials denounced and called for the lifting of economic sanctions against Iraq at a congressional briefing on Wednesday, May 3.
Former UN Humanitarian Coordinators in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday, and former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, called on the US government to abandon its policy economic sanctions against Iraq. Despite their diverse backgrounds, all three agreed that economic sanctions are the principle cause of the humanitarian disaster in Iraq, and dismissed claims that American policy is not to blame. US Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), John Conyers (D-MI) and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) also called for the lifting of sanctions.
Former UN weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter debunked what he called “the myth” of a threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which typically cited as a reason for maintaining sanctions. Calling himself "an unlikely ally in this matter," Ritter said that "a lot of the blame for this perception can be laid at my doorstep." But, Ritter said, “the reality is that when you judge Iraq’s current weapons of mass destruction capabilities today, they have none.” ------- Former Senior UN Officials Denounce Iraq Sanctions at Congressional Briefing Press Release American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee May 4, 2000

2000 summer : (IRAQ STILL POSSESSES ANTHRAX & MUSTARD GAS AT THIS TIME; UN INSPECTORS ARE NOT PRESENT IN IRAQ; ALSO, IRAQ TRAINED DOZENS OF TERRORISTS INSIDE ITS BORDERS- See CNS Iraqi IIS Memos/Docs) Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com [before Oct 4, 2004], show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders. ------- "Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties," by Scott Wheeler, CNSNews, October 4, 2004

JUNE 2000 : (FORMER IRAQI GENERAL RECEIVES VIDEOTAPE OF IRAQI SECURITY FORCES RAPING A FEMALE FAMILY MEMBER) A former Iraqi general reportedly received a videotape of security forces raping a female family member. He subsequently received a telephone call from an intelligence agent who stated that another female relative was being held and warned him to stop speaking out against the Iraqi Government.-- via "Bio-Chemical Weapons & Saddam: A History, " Various Sources , 02-20-03 , by PsyOp

JULY 6, 2000 : (THIS IS THE DATE ON A DOCUMENT - A LETTER- FROM IRAQI AMBASSADOR TO THE HOLY SEE / TO NIGER , WISSAM AL ZAHAWIE - CONCERNING A PROPOSED URANIUM TRANSACTION THAT WAS LATER FOUND) Italy had [long after the fact] handed over cables from al-Zahawie to the Niger government announcing the trip, and other documents had pointed to his [Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See, Wissam al Zahawie's] presence in Niger. But the inspectors [in January 2003] were particularly interested in a July 6, 2000, document bearing al-Zahawie's signature, concerning a proposed uranium transaction. The inspectors refused to show him the letter, he says, but al-Zahawie was sure he had never written it.
"If they had such a letter, it had to have been a forgery," he says [in 2003]. The tell-tale signs of the forgery were quite obvious, he stresses. [* How would he know if they refused to show it to him?] Diplomatic procedure typically called for official notes between Iraq and other governments to feature a government seal, but they are typically unsigned; correspondence between an ambassador and other dignitaries would be signed but would have no seal. The letter in question had both, the inspectors admitted. [* according to later interview of Zahawie, who may not have been telling the truth] "I realized the forgery when they asked this," al-Zahawie notes. "And when I left, I thought I had told them all there was to know. ----------"Saddam's Niger Point-man Speaks," By HASSAN FATTAH/LONDON, Time, Wednesday October 5, 2003, via hassanfattah.com , Copyright © 2003 Time Inc. All rights reserved., Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

AUGUST 2000 : (REPORTS THAT IRAQ IS FINANCING SCUD MISSILES IN SUDAN, WITH NORTH KOREAN HELP, FOR FUTURE USE BY IRAQ) "……The U.S. intelligence community fears new reports may indicate Iraq is financing construction of a Scud missile assembly plant in Sudan, enlisting North Korea’s help, ABCNEWS has learned. …….. Sources say North Korean personnel would build and run the plant, with the assembled Scuds to be held in Sudan for Iraq’s future use — a prospect that worries U.S. officials. ……The intelligence community has two separate reports that indicate such a deal is in the works. If they prove true, it raises significant concerns that Saddam Hussein is back in business trying to make Scud missiles, although outside Iraq. ….." - ABCNews 8/10/00 Barbara Starr

AUGUST 21, 2000 : (IRAQI GOVERNMENT PURCHASES 5 KG OF MUSTARD GAS, GAS MASKS, FILTERS & RUBBER GLOVES) The purchase order for the mustard gas includes gas masks, filters and rubber gloves. ... The documents [ - See CNSNewsIraqDocs]show that Iraqi intelligence received the mustard gas and anthrax from "Saddam's company," which Tefft said was probably a reference to Saddam General Establishment, "a complex of factories involved with, amongst other things, precision optics, missile, and artillery fabrication." ...The Jaber Ibn Hayan General Company is listed as the supplier of the safety equipment that accompanied the mustard gas order. Tefft described the company as "a 'turn-key' project built by Romania, designed to produce protective CW (conventional warfare) and BW (biological warfare) equipment (gas masks and protective clothing)." ------- "Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties," by Scott Wheeler, CNSNews, October 4, 2004

SEPTEMBER 6, 2000 : (IRAQI GOVERNMENT PURCHASES THREE VIALS OF 'MALIGNANT PUSTULE' aka ANTHRAX, ALSO STERILIZATION & DECONTAMINATION EQUIPMENT) But the documents [ - See CNSNewsIraqDocs]obtained by CNSNews.com [in 2004] shed new light on the controversy. They detail the Iraqi regime's purchase of five kilograms of mustard gas on Aug. 21, 2000 and three vials of malignant pustule, another term for anthrax, on Sept. 6, 2000. The purchase order for the mustard gas includes gas masks, filters and rubber gloves. The order for the anthrax includes sterilization and decontamination equipment. (See Saddam's Possession of Mustard Gas)
The documents show that Iraqi intelligence received the mustard gas and anthrax from "Saddam's company," which Tefft said was probably a reference to Saddam General Establishment, "a complex of factories involved with, amongst other things, precision optics, missile, and artillery fabrication."
"Sa'ad's general company" is listed on the Iraqi documents as the supplier of the sterilization and decontamination equipment that accompanied the anthrax vials. Tefft believes this is a reference to the Salah Al-Din State Establishment, also involved in missile construction. (See Saddam's Possession of Anthrax) ------- "Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties," by Scott Wheeler, CNSNews, October 4, 2004

SEPTEMBER 16, 2000 Saturday () NEW YORK (News Agencies) - The Clinton Administration notified Congress that it intends to grant $4 million to the Iraqi opposition, in hopes of toppling Saddam Hussein. U.S. plans to give $4 million to Iraqi opposition
An American official said that after a meeting between Madeleine Albright and Iraqi dissidents in New York on Thursday [Sept 14, 2000] that the U.S. will contribute to fund a newspaper, radio transmitters and other media operations.
An additional $268,000 was given to the Iraqi National Congress for administration. But none of the funding will be used for military action.
Foes of the Iraqi government asked Albright during the meeting to work on tightening international supervision over an Iraqi indirect account, which is used for oil revenue deposits coming from the Oil For Food program. This account, kept in Banque Nationale De Paris, contains $8 to $9 billion, and although Iraq doesn't have full control over the account, the government decides who gets contracts funded by the money.----- "Clinton Administration Grants $4 Million To Iraqi Opposition," News Agencies, Saturday, September 16, 2000

OCTOBER 2000 : (OIL FOR FOOD PROGRAM SWAPS BANKS, YANKING BILLIONS FROM THE US ECONOMY) ...the trust account where the oil revenues were kept, at a French bank, at Iraq's insistence Billions were yanked from the US economy, I believe in October 2000, and sent to France at "Saddam's" insistence. I could never believe a bigger deal was never made over it.-----13 posted on 02/19/2004 7:24:51 PM PST by VA40

OCTOBER 18, 2000 : (REPORT THAT INSPECTORS HAD DESTROYED A DEVICE WHICH WAS FOUND IN MAY IN JORDAN; IT WAS DESTINED FOR IRAQ'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM ) “… International inspectors have found and destroyed a system ordered by Iraq for its secret nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report that despite the eviction of United Nations weapons inspectors in December 1998 the agency has managed to foil Iraqi plans to build nuclear weapons. The IAEA said that in May the agency found a filament-winding machine ordered by Iraq that had arrived in Jordan. The agency said the system was part of Baghdad's clandestine uranium enrichment program. The machine and its spare parts were destroyed, the agency said..” - Source : Middle East Newsline 10/18/00

OCTOBER 2000 : (USS COLE BOMBING) The U.S.S. Cole, a modern warship is crippled and nearly sunk by suicide bombers piloting a dinghy packed with explosives. 17 Sailors are killed and scores injured.-- via "Bio-Chemical Weapons & Saddam: A History, " Various Sources , 02-20-03 , by PsyOp

OCTOBER 27, 2000 : (JESSE HELMS & BENJAMIN GILMAN WRITE LETTER TO US SEC OF STATE MADELAINE ALBRIGHT CONCERNING VIOLATIONS OF SANCTIONS ON IRAQ) WASHINGTON (October 27) – U.S. Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (20th-NY), Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, sent the following letter today to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright concerning sanctions against Iraq:

October 27, 2000
Dear Madam Secretary:

We suspect that you are extremely concerned, as we certainly are, about the increasing number of sanctions-violating flights into Iraq. Needless to say, it is not surprising that these flights have been initiated by Russia and France, both of which are permanent members of the Security Council.
Following the lead of Russia and France, other countries have likewise flown into Iraq. Among these countries are recipients of significant amounts of U.S. foreign aid. This, Madam Secretary, is outrageous.
Since August, Russia has permitted three direct commercial flights to Baghdad, requesting permission for only two of those flights from the U.N. Sanctions Committee. We understand that Russia does not view these flights as sanctions violations.
In your testimony last month before the Foreign Relations Committee, you emphasized that this is not the U.S. position; specifically, you made clear that the United States believes "that these flights need approval, and . . . I think that absent any new kind of consensus, the [Sanctions Committee] will continue . . . to operate under practices of the last 10 years, that these flights require approval, not just notification."
Sanctions are a vital tool in denying Saddam Hussein the funding and supplies necessary for him to pursue weapons of mass destruction. Vigilance is all the more urgent, given the absence of weapons inspectors in Iraq for nearly two years.
Being fully committed, as we are, to ensuring that this despot does not develop the weapons to threaten the United States, our allies, or our interests, we acknowledge that this will be increasingly difficult if Saddam’s neighbors (and our allies and aid recipients) continue to violate the sanctions intended to protect them.
Madam Secretary, two points:

1) In your view, absent permission from the sanctions committee, do these flights constitute sanctions violations? And

(2) Under the terms of Section 534 of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act of 2000, do you agree that no assistance should be provided to nations in violation of U.N. sanctions on Iraq?

Please let us hear from you as to how Section 534 applies to the countries in violation of UN sanctions, and in particular to Russia and Egypt, two flagrant violators who receive billions in U.S. foreign aid.
We urgently need your response, Madam Secretary.

Sincerely,
(signed) (signed)
JESSE HELMS , BENJAMIN A. GILMAN

NOVEMBER 2000 : (DEGUSSA FURNACES RECEIVED BY PHYSICS DEPT...) See CMPC-2003-012331.pdf

DECEMBER 23, 2000 : (IRAQ : WMD : DEFECTOR SAYS IRAQ RESTARTED ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM TWO YEARS AGO, IN AUGUST 1998) "... SADDAM HUSSEIN has ordered his scientists to resume work on a programme aimed at making a nuclear bomb, a defector warned yesterday. The Iraqi dictator, whose efforts to make atomic weapons were thwarted by United Nations inspectors after the Gulf war in 1991, revived the plans two years ago, the defector said. Scientists who had previously worked on the weapons programme were made to return to their duties in August 1998, four months before Saddam expelled the inspectors.... According to Salman Yassin Zweir, a design engineer who was employed by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission for 13 years, the instruction came in a document marked "top secret" which identified a research centre on Al-Jadriya Street, Baghdad, as the headqarters of the new operation. .....Zweir was arrested and tortured after refusing to go back to the programme. He escaped to Jordan, where he spoke for the first time last week after being reunited with his wife, who was also tortured, and their two sons, aged seven and six...." - Source : Times of London 12/23/00


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1725141/posts?page=47

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Al Qa'ida in Iraq Situation Report IZ-060316-01

 

Al Qa'ida in Iraq Situation Report IZ-060316-01
Captured Zarqawi Network Letters from Iraq (Posted 20 April 2006) ^
http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony_docs.asp

IN THE NAME OF GOD, MOST GRACIOUS MOST MERCYFUL So this is the reality we’re living in al-Anbar in general, and Ramadi in particular, that is the head Sheiks of some tribes, and symbols of the Islamic Party, sat with the Americans in Jordan, and other places, to fight terrorism and its people.

The Sheiks started teaching people about these ideas, this conspiracy is led by two sides, the first is the heads of the tribes, the second is the leaders of the Islamic Party and mosques speakers, so they announced their war on the Mujahidin, it increased during the elections for the new constitution, their danger was so great, that hundreds of people volunteered in the police and the army, and thousands of people participated in the elections, renouncing their religion, and listenning to the erratics.

After we took a look at the situation, we found that the best solutions to stop thousands of people from renouncing their religion, is to cut the heads of the Sheiks of infidelity and erratic. Before we start reviewing the events that accured here, we ask two questions:

First: If there were people who are raping thousands of muslim women taking their honor, and stealing muslim money and land, and other people who don’t rape or steal, but they take the religion away from thousands of muslims, what’s more important, religion, or honor and land? What we learned from muslim scholars is that robbing the religion from muslims, is greater than robbing their honor and land, god said “turmoil is greater than murder”, and for those devils, their danger is greater than who rapes, or rob and steal money or land.

Second question: Why did we announce and started fighting the Shiites and police from the start, even thought most of the Jihadist sectors and the public didn’t understand what we want, and didn’t know the importance of starting with those, so what’s the objection on killing and executing the Sheiks now and without a notice, with continiuing making people understand it, just like we did by killing the police then, were people satisfied with us?

Actually lot of the public thinks that who killed the police is Badr organization or gangs from Iran ! and that who’s killing Shiites is hired by Israel and the U.S. to start an ethnic war and so on.

From what we saw, the damage caused by those erratic infidels (Tribes Sheiks, The Islamic Party) is more dangerous than the Shiites and the peaceful police as people call them. You Sheik announced war on those, with the opposings of many sectors and scholars of decision making. The brothers now are wiping out the heads of infidelity, as soon as they started, and never claiming responsibility, we found among us who wants to make fuss about it, and regretfully some of the brothers with us in the organization (al-Qa’ida) see it as nonsense, and god is my witness.

My Sheik, here’s some of the events that happened in Ramadi:

1- Sheik Nasr al-Fahdawi, Sheik of AlbuFahd tribe, was nominated to be the governor of Anbar, this man worked so hard fighting the (Tanzim)organization, with all he’s got, from money to power, and reputation in Ramadi, so we tried this with him: First, we backed off during the elections, they had checkpoints, using tens of his tribesmen who started checking cars, they violated our brothers many times, they even announced it, then our brothers attacked the field leader, the brain behind people revolting at al-Anbar in AlbuFahd, so the brothers raided his house in the middle of the night wearing the national guards uniform and driving similar cars, they took him and killed him thank god.

The next morning his households and neighbors started talking to the tribe saying it was the national guards, they added that they heard some of them speaking English, meaning that the Americans are the ones who took Abu Dhari (Sheik Nasr al-Fahdawi), no one claimed responsibility for his killing, thank god.

2- Around the same period, our brothers on the other side of Uphrate river, killed Jasim al-‘Awwad in al-Malahima and AlbuHazim, he’s considered as important as Abu Dhari in AlbuFahd, he’s a big spy / agent, invited Americans to his house for big dinner parties many times, regardless, our brothers didn’t claim resposibility for killing him.

3- After our brothers killed three of the infidels in AlbuFahd, some of them claimed he’s for Jihad, at the same time, protects with his soldiers the election centers, and encourages people to volunteers in the police force and the Iraqi army, and it was the second hit for Nasr al-Fahdawi.

In the morning infidels announced in their satellite channels that Nasr al-Fahdawi welcomed Ibrahim al-Ja’fari in Ramadi, then by noon, they announced his assasination, thank god. Then there was a complete change of events than is was before thank god, cousins of Sheik Nasr came to the Mujahidin begging, announcing their repentance and innocense, saying we’re with you, we’ll do whatever you want. The turmoil is over, our brothers now are roaming the streets of AlbuFahd without any checkpoints.

For the other tribes, their reaction was as follows: 1- Sheik of al-Bubali tribe in al-Jazira, Sheik Sarhan, who’s one of the traitors, and every time one of their traitors gets killed, he shows outrage and packs his tribe with their guns against the brothers, after the cleaning in AlbuFahd, the brothers killed three of the spies in his tribe, and for the first time there was no reaction against the brothers, but instead he came to them, asking for forgiveness, and he’s ready to cooperate.

2- Sheik of Albu’Ubaid (Salah al-Dhari), who slaughtered thirty sheeps in one dinner party, where he invited heads and Sheiks of tribes in Ramadi, to encourage their youth to join the police and the national guard, and that’s two days before the murder of Sheik Nasr al-Fahdawi, after that he announced his repentance at the mosque twice infront of Albu’Ubaid tribe, denouncing who joins the police and army, and sorry for all he’s done, without any pressure or threats from the brothers, also the brothers didn’t announce the claim for any of the killings.

When Mazhar al-‘Alawani a candidate for the elections was murdered, his pictures were all over Ramadi, where the entire Albu’Alwan tribe was supporting him, proud of him, one day before the elections, the brothers killed him while he was visiting Ramadi, no one from his tribe openned his mouth, instead they got more scared and weaker.

The same with the killing of Muhammad Saddak the Sheik of AlbuJlayb tribe, and president of al-Anbar revolutionists, who released statements in mosques and markets, promising to eliminate who he called Sheiks of sodomite and thift, and agents for the Zionists, like our brother Abu Mustafa Midhatt, our brother Abu Khattab, and Sheik Abu al-Harith al-Shar’i, and many others, this vicious organization (al-Anbar revolutionists) attempted to assasinate our brother Abu Khudayr, in Ramadi, when armed men shot him, was injured in the thigh. Sheik Muhammad Saddak said himself that he’s nominated for the position of the interior minister, and Sheik Nasr al-Fahdawi for the governor of Anbar, like the Americans promised him, and Abu Raghghal al-Dulaymi and others thank god, his was eliminated by the brothers inside the city of Baghdad, until now no one knows who killed him in Baghdad, with all that, our policy is to eliminate the heads of infidelity without any announcements.

As for the heads of the Islamic Party, our brothers been monitoring them for so long, but ignored them during the elections, then their vicious role appeared, with their call to form police and army after the elections, we found that the main thinker behind the Party’s ideas is Sheik Abd al-Ghafur al-Kubaysi the Imam and speaker of of al-Shafi’i mosque in Ramadi, and made his mosque the center of all the Party’s meetings, with all that, he didn’t stop fighting the brothers with his speeches at the mosque, so the brothers assasinated him near his house, after he left the mosque going home, and there was no reaction by the Islamic Party or people, except that they raised signs condemning the killing.

The same thing exactly happened after the killing of Abu Bilal in Ramadi, the manager of the media office at the Islamic Party as it was announced in some media sources, he disallowed and torn any Jihad related posters on the walls, he was caught in the act by the brothers, they beat him and arrested him, he routed out lots of the Party’s leaders, like Abd al-Ghafur al-Kubaysi, and their conspiracies against the Tanzim (al-Qa’ida organization), he was ill, got transferred to a hospital where he later died, there were no puplicity to his death by people, expect condemning it by the corrupted satellite channels.

We did not follow this policy until we ran out of time, from past experience where we let things go, like Kataib al-Hamza (Hamza brigades), and AlbuMahal tribe in al-Qaim, where we should’ve eliminated them then, but what happened happened, also Muhsin Abd al-Hamid etc… and you Sheik said that yourself god bless you, also in Fallujah where brothers neglected on killing the heads of infidelity, and what happened also happened.

Now we have Kabisah, this small village announced this week that 130 policemen volunteered from there, next day they started working, it was secretly prepared from before, and the Islamic Party was behind recruiting those policemen, like we proved.

Our state council forbids from targeting Sunni police, or killing and eliminating the infidels and traitors without going back to the council, and you know that assasinations are about good apportunities, and monitoring a person could take days or weeks. The best solution is to cut the head of the snake.

We say that the brothers are following this method, that’s what we learned from you and promised you, I said that this is Abu Bakr’s period, toughness toughness, we in Iraq will defend the muslim nation, and Jihad is everybody’s responsibility, don’t miss it.

Other groups pretends that they never killed an Iraqi or Sunni in particular, and that its goals are patriotic, what we know about our Jihad, that it’s Jihad of faith, and what you stated over and over before my Sheik about the method of the group, and the honorable resistance in many of the speeches to our brothers and people, in fact Sheik we are joyous for forming the state council, although we say, to save this blessed work, which we pray to god that Islam and muslims would benefit from it, everyone should agree on our policy in the war against the renegade, without these restrictions we have at the state council.

We have no problem with you saying for us to give the name of the person before killing him, but we owe god, this will only be a delay for us, and time is not on our side, and for you to say to kill him outside his city, sometimes it take months before the person leaves his city, like if it’s in Baghdad for example, that’s difficult, and time is not on our side, we waited to cut the heads of the renegades in Hit, then 130 renegades came out to us for the reason that we didn’t destroy the Islamic Party there, but we’re working on it, for example we didn’t kill Nasr al-Fahdawi at his home in al-Sajriyah, but the guys waited for him until he got out of the Ramadi province.

We need premission for these names: 1- Sheik Hatim Abd al-Razzaq Mu’jil al-Ka’ud, Sheik AlbuNimr tribe. 2- Sheik Anwar Abd al-Razzaq al-Kharbit, AlbuKhalifah. 3- Sa’id Nattah, one of AlbuJlayb Sheiks. 4- Maj. Gen Sa’ab al-Rawi. 5- Dr. Muhammad Mahmud Latif, Prince of the movement. 6- Maj. Gen. Khalid ‘Arrak Hutaymi. 7- Mamun al-‘Alwani, al-Anbar governor, attached to you the security report in Ramadi.

8- Zahir Muhammad ‘Awwad al-‘Ubaydi, manager of Sunni endowment, for attending the last meeting with al-Ja’fari, also for attending a conference in Jordan, that was presesnted to you, he’s one of the people calling to form the police and national guard, we’ll kill him outside al-Ramadi zone, when he goes to the government building.

We have restrictions on beheading the heads of the Islamic Party members, the Sheik of the tribes, and renegages, present it to the council if you prefer: 1- There must be time priorities.

2- Must differenciate between the infidels, which is in the public eyes, and who works behind the scenes, as a mastermind.

3- Must differenciate between who’s in the village, where relations are stronger, than it is in the city, where there’s different people with different ideas. 4- Differenciate between an area where there are brothers have interests in (financial – religious), and area they don’t.

5- Differenciate between who’s in a position where he’s liked and respected, and another who’s not.

6- There’s who we prepare for him in few steps, like bringing him down through the media, then kill him, or kill his assistant who does the work for him, and see his reaction, then kill him, or fight him through the media, until his publicity is dead.

7- First kill the corrupted and the ones with negative effects , before the ones who try to guide people, and has a positive effect.

8- Differenciate between targets in the Islamic Party, or the Ba’ath Party, who proved their failur to people in running the nation, and Sheiks and leaders of the tribes where most people especially in villages love and respect them, the first kind’s reaction is lefting signs and comdemning, the second kind blames, and sometime opens a front against us.

9- Whoever we can’t kill, and can’t reach, we shhould at least warn or threaten him so he could back off at least. 10- I case there was a tribe who’s not obaying, and their renegade is abvious, the Mujahidin release a statement to expose them, with mass media, then do vicious military operations against them, so they would be a lesson to others.

11- If the targer was decent, and has good reputation, but he’s a hypocrite, only teases the Mujahidin, we kill him gradually, by killing his big supporters.

12- We should make the public and the ignorant know clearly about our policy fighting the renegades, so they won’t side with them for their fight against the Mujahidin.

13- Priority in killing those who are damaging to us and mulims, before the ones who are not.

With stating this to you, we know your intend, whenever we meet with you, you tell us that this is the right way, but we want this in writing by the state council, so all of our members would observe it, but if it’s not writtin it will go away after you’re gone, if you die of get killed, the council after you inshallh (in god’s well) will stay on good grounds, where the fate of an entire nation depends on it, god is the protector of his religion, let’s have a big role in it, we ask god to keep us guided not lost.

OPINION:
Interesting read especially when you've just read, "Worst City in al-Anbar Province - Ramadi, hands down." From: A Marine's Eye-View of Fallujah (Unclassified)

"The provincial capital of 400,000 people. Killed over 1,000 insurgents in there since we arrived in February. Every day is a nasty gun battle. They blast us with giant bombs in the road, snipers, mortars and small arms. We blast them with tanks, attack helicopters, artillery, our snipers (much better than theirs), and every weapon that an infantryman can carry."

"Every day. Incredibly, I rarely see Ramadi in the news. We have as many attacks out here in the west as Baghdad. Yet, Baghdad has 7 million people, we have just 1.2 million. Per capita, al-Anbar province is the most violent place in Iraq by several orders of magnitude. I suppose it was no accident that the Marines were assigned this area in 2003."

A Marine's Eye-View of Fallujah (Unclassified) Defense Tech. Org ^ [September 26, 2006] A marine in Fallujah posted earlier today at:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1724995/posts

These bad guys aren't wiz-kid, military, Seventh Ave. media savvy, advertising geniuses, read their logic. Hasn't the US government anybody who can think like these guys (terrorist) and beat them to the punch in their plans for evil doing?

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American-Muslim TV Network Host Urges Votes for Democrats

 

American-Muslim TV Network Host Urges Votes for Democrats
Newsmax ^ | October 22,2006 | Newsmax Staff
http://news.newsmax.com/?yWYajq2FRTOAg9.oAmkGZGRKDXy

Bridges TV, the first English-language American-Muslim TV network, is expanding into six states and creating a potential audience of nearly 2 million.

The network, which began broadcasting in the Buffalo, N.Y., area in November 2004, offers a mix of entertainment, sports, news, and documentaries.

Its mission statement declares that the network seeks “to improve the image of Muslims in the United States" and to "offer a unique perspective on the Middle East and the war on terrorism."

But in a recent interview, one of its hosts criticized the “Jewish lobby” in the U.S. and called on American Muslims to vote for Democrats in November.

Other examples of the network’s “unique perspective” include these offerings, according to The New York Sun: A religious figure who appeared on Oct. 3 asserted that Muslims have a duty to increase the percentage of Americans who are Muslims from 2 percent to 50 percent, and recommended that Shariah, or Islamic law, be implemented in American courts.

The next day, Bridges TV aired a speech by Muslim scholar Jamal Badawi, who in an interview raised questions about who was really behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and suggested that Americans could be responsible for car bombings in Iraqi markets.

That same day, Imam Mohammad Alo Elahi was a guest on a news program, “Talking Points.” According to his Web site, Elahi was a spiritual leader in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian navy, and has met with the spiritual adviser of the Hezbollah terror organization. On Oct. 5, listeners heard an anti-Jewish, anti-Christian sermon that included the call, “May God destroy them!”

A Koranic verse broadcast on Oct. 9 praised martyrdom. One of the stars of Bridges TV is Donald “Skip” Conover, a co-founder of the health care company CBay Inc. He hosts and produces a show called “Words Matter,” and was the subject of an article in the Saudi daily Arab News in September.

In the article, Conover discussed the power of the “Jewish lobby” and called on Muslims to vote for the Democrats, the Sun reported.

“I have news for the Muslim community,” he said. “All American politicians are in the pocket of the Jewish lobby today because they control a lot of money, and they spend a lot of money in politics.

“If the Muslims of America believe that they don't want Bush to have a free hand for the next two years, then the Muslims of America need to get organized and make sure they get out to vote for Democrats for both the House and the Senate. Every Muslim in the Middle East who has a relative in the U.S. should get the message across to their relatives. They need to make sure that all their friends vote against Bush.”

Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, writes in the Sun: “Bridges TV claims that its ‘major purpose’ is ‘to build bridges between American Muslims and other Americans.’ After viewing the channel, I find this highly unlikely.”


Thank you Sky Pilot for the Lovely Pic and Tongue-in-Cheek Blurb! (Below)

VOTE DEMOCRAT


Thank you george76, lovely thought



Thank you Prime Choice, quite cute!


Thank you grampa Dave! He could use some help from the Democrats.
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A Marine's Eye-View of Fallujah (Unclassified)

 

A Marine's Eye-View of Fallujah (Unclassified)
Defense Tech. Org ^ | September 26, 2006 | A marine in Fallujah
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/cat_war_update.html

A  Marine's Eye-View of Fallujah

All: I haven't written very much from Iraq. There's really not much to write about. More exactly, there's not much I can write about because practically everything I do, read or hear is classified military information or is depressing to the point that I'd rather just forget about it, never mind write about it. The gaps in between all of that are filled with the pure tedium of daily life in an armed camp. So it's a bit of a struggle to think of anything to put into a letter that's worth reading. Worse, this place just consumes you. I work 18-20-hour days, every day. The quest to draw a clear picture of what the insurgents are up to never ends. Problems and frictions crop up faster than solutions. Every challenge demands a response. It's like this every day. Before I know it, I can't see straight, because it's 0400 and I've been at work for twenty hours straight, somehow missing dinner again in the process. And once again I haven't written to anyone. It starts all over again four hours later. It's not really like Ground Hog Day, it's more like a level from Dante's Inferno.

Rather than attempting to sum up the last seven months, I figured I'd just hit the record setting highlights of 2006 in Iraq. These are among the events and experiences I'll remember best.

Worst Case of Deja Vu - I thought I was familiar with the feeling of deja vu until I arrived back here in Fallujah in February. The moment I stepped off of the helicopter, just as dawn broke, and saw the camp just as I had left it ten months before - that was deja vu. Kind of unnerving. It was as if I had never left. Same work area, same busted desk, same chair, same computer, same room, same creaky rack, same . . . everything. Same everything for the next year. It was like entering a parallel universe. Home wasn't 10,000 miles away, it was a different lifetime.

Most Surreal Moment - Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. I had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

Most Profound Man in Iraq - an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines (searching for Syrians) if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."

Worst City in al-Anbar Province - Ramadi, hands down. The provincial capital of 400,000 people. Killed over 1,000 insurgents in there since we arrived in February. Every day is a nasty gun battle. They blast us with giant bombs in the road, snipers, mortars and small arms. We blast them with tanks, attack helicopters, artillery, our snipers (much better than theirs), and every weapon that an infantryman can carry. Every day. Incredibly, I rarely see Ramadi in the news. We have as many attacks out here in the west as Baghdad. Yet, Baghdad has 7 million people, we have just 1.2 million. Per capita, al-Anbar province is the most violent place in Iraq by several orders of magnitude. I suppose it was no accident that the Marines were assigned this area in 2003.

Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province - Any Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician (EOD Tech). How'd you like a job that required you to defuse bombs in a hole in the middle of the road that very likely are booby-trapped or connected by wire to a bad guy who's just waiting for you to get close to the bomb before he clicks the detonator? Every day. Sanitation workers in New York City get paid more than these guys. Talk about courage and commitment.

Second Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province - It's a 20,000 way tie among all the Marines and Soldiers who venture out on the highways and through the towns of al-Anbar every day, not knowing if it will be their last - and for a couple of them, it will be.

Best Piece of U.S. Gear - new, bullet-proof flak jackets. O.K., they weigh 40 lbs and aren't exactly comfortable in 120 degree heat, but they've saved countless lives out here.

Best Piece of Bad Guy Gear - Armor Piercing ammunition that goes right through the new flak jackets and the Marines inside them.

Worst E-Mail Message - "The Walking Blood Bank is Activated. We need blood type A+ stat." I always head down to the surgical unit as soon as I get these messages, but I never give blood - there's always about 80 Marines in line, night or day.

Biggest Surprise - Iraqi Police. All local guys. I never figured that we'd get a police force established in the cities in al-Anbar. I estimated that insurgents would kill the first few, scaring off the rest. Well, insurgents did kill the first few, but the cops kept on coming. The insurgents continue to target the police, killing them in their homes and on the streets, but the cops won't give up. Absolutely incredible tenacity. The insurgents know that the police are far better at finding them than we are. - and they are finding them. Now, if we could just get them out of the habit of beating prisoners to a pulp . . .

Greatest Vindication - Stocking up on outrageous quantities of Diet Coke from the chow hall in spite of the derision from my men on such hoarding, then having a 122mm rocket blast apart the giant shipping container that held all of the soda for the chow hall. Yep, you can't buy experience.

Biggest Mystery - How some people can gain weight out here. I'm down to 165 lbs. Who has time to eat?

Second Biggest Mystery - if there's no atheists in foxholes, then why aren't there more people at Mass every Sunday?

Favorite Iraqi TV Show - Oprah. I have no idea. They all have satellite TV.

Coolest Insurgent Act - Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.

Most Memorable Scene - In the middle of the night, on a dusty airfield, watching the better part of a battalion of Marines packed up and ready to go home after six months in al-Anbar, the relief etched in their young faces even in the moonlight. Then watching these same Marines exchange glances with a similar number of grunts loaded down with gear file past - their replacements. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said.

Highest Unit Re-enlistment Rate - Any outfit that has been in Iraq recently. All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here - all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a 'Band of Brothers' who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat experience than any Marines in the history of our Corps.

Most Surprising Thing I Don't Miss - Beer. Perhaps being half-stunned by lack of sleep makes up for it.

Worst Smell - Porta-johns in 120 degree heat - and that's 120 degrees outside of the porta-john.

Highest Temperature - I don't know exactly, but it was in the porta-johns. Needed to re-hydrate after each trip to the loo.

Biggest Hassle - High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and "battlefield" tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no affect on their preconceived notions of what's going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they've been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

Biggest Outrage - Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest offender - Bill O'Reilly - what a buffoon.

Best Intel Work - Finding Jill Carroll's kidnappers - all of them. I was mighty proud of my guys that day. I figured we'd all get the Christian Science Monitor for free after this, but none have showed up yet. Talk about ingratitude.

Saddest Moment - Having the battalion commander from 1st Battalion, 1st Marines hand me the dog tags of one of my Marines who had just been killed while on a mission with his unit. Hit by a 60mm mortar. Cpl Bachar was a great Marine. I felt crushed for a long time afterward. His picture now hangs at the entrance to the Intelligence Section. We'll carry it home with us when we leave in February.

Biggest A-- Chewing - 10 July immediately following a visit by the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Dr. Zobai. The Deputy Prime Minister brought along an American security contractor (read mercenary), who told my Commanding General that he was there to act as a mediator between us and the Bad Guys. I immediately told him what I thought of him and his asinine ideas in terms that made clear my disgust and which, unfortunately, are unrepeatable here. I thought my boss was going to have a heart attack. Fortunately, the translator couldn't figure out the best Arabic words to convey my meaning for the Deputy Prime Minister. Later, the boss had no difficulty in convening his meaning to me in English regarding my Irish temper, even though he agreed with me. At least the guy from the State Department thought it was hilarious. We never saw the mercenary again.

Best Chuck Norris Moment - 13 May. Bad Guys arrived at the government center in the small town of Kubaysah to kidnap the town mayor, since they have a problem with any form of government that does not include regular beheadings and women wearing burqahs. There were seven of them. As they brought the mayor out to put him in a pick-up truck to take him off to be beheaded (on video, as usual), one of the bad Guys put down his machinegun so that he could tie the mayor's hands. The mayor took the opportunity to pick up the machinegun and drill five of the Bad Guys. The other two ran away. One of the dead Bad Guys was on our top twenty wanted list. Like they say, you can't fight City Hall.

Worst Sound - That crack-boom off in the distance that means an IED or mine just went off. You just wonder who got it, hoping that it was a near miss rather than a direct hit. Hear it every day.

Second Worst Sound - Our artillery firing without warning. The howitzers are pretty close to where I work. Believe me, outgoing sounds a lot like incoming when our guns are firing right over our heads. They'd about knock the fillings out of your teeth.

Only Thing Better in Iraq Than in the U.S. - Sunsets. Spectacular. It's from all the dust in the air.

Proudest Moment - It's a tie every day, watching my Marines produce phenomenal intelligence products that go pretty far in teasing apart Bad Guy operations in al-Anbar. Every night Marines and Soldiers are kicking in doors and grabbing Bad Guys based on intelligence developed by my guys. We rarely lose a Marine during these raids, they are so well-informed of the objective. A bunch of kids right out of high school shouldn't be able to work so well, but they do.

Happiest Moment - Well, it wasn't in Iraq. There are no truly happy moments here. It was back in California when I was able to hold my family again while home on leave during July.

Most Common Thought - Home. Always thinking of home, of Kathleen and the kids. Wondering how everyone else is getting along. Regretting that I don't write more. Yep, always thinking of home.

I hope you all are doing well. If you want to do something for me, kiss a cop, flush a toilet, and drink a beer. I'll try to write again before too long - I promise.

Semper Fi,

September 26, 2006

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Soldier survives attack; captures, medically treats sniper (CNN Sniper Video?)

 

Soldier survives attack; captures, medically treats sniper (Is This The CNN Sniper Video?)

Soldier survives attack; captures, medically treats sniper (Video)
http://www.talkshowamerica.com/2005_07_10_talkshowamerica_archive.html
Talk Show America ^ | (History) July 5, 2005 |
Army Times.com via Talk Show America

During a routine patrol in Baghdad June 2, Army Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, hiding in a van just 75 yards away. The incident was filmed by the insurgents.

Tschiderer, with E Troop, 101st “Saber” Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was knocked to the ground from the impact, but he popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position.

After tracking down the now-wounded sniper with a team from B Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Iraqi Army Brigade, Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs and gave medical aid to the terrorist who’d tried to kill him just minutes before.

See the video of the attack.

Read the account of the incident from the 256th Brigade Combat Team (Click On Link to get pdf story files

http://www.armytimes.com/content/editorial/pdf/at_sniper071505.pdf
http://www.armytimes.com/content/editorial/pdf/at_sniper071505.pdf

256th BCT Soldier survives sniper attack Spc. Chris Foster

256th Brigade Combat Team PAO

BAGHDAD -- Being able to react to and maintain control of a situation in a combat environment can be a difficult task for Soldiers. They must be able to quickly react and assess a situation, in order to ensure their survival and the safety of those around them. “Stay alert, stay alive” is the reminder that is driven into the minds of Soldiers since the first day of basic training and echoes throughout their military careers.

This axiom was driven home for at least one Soldier on June 2. Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a native of Mendon, N.Y., and a medic with E Troop, 101st “Saber” Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, during a routine patrol in west Baghdad.

While Tschiderer was relaying information to the truck commander of his M114 Humvee, an enemy sniper team prepared to engage him from inside of a cushioned silver van being used as a mobile sniper’s nest. This nest was lined with numerous bed mattresses to muffle the sound of a Dragonoff sniper rifle fired through a hole just big enough for the shooter to engage his target of choice.

Tschiderer was knocked to the ground from the sudden impact of the sniper’s bullet. The bullet only seemed to have fazed this Soldier as, adrenaline pumping, he sprang right back up in order to take cover and locate the enemy’s position.

The sniper was unsuccessful in his mission, due to the stopping force of the Tschiderer’s daily wardrobe, his protective body armor, which saved his life. “I knew I was hit, but was uncertain of the damage or location from the hit,” Tschiderer said. “The only thing that was going through my mind was to take cover and locate the sniper’s position.”

“The shot came from my 12 o’clock position from a silver van parked across an intersection about 75 meters from my location.” said Tschiderer.

After Tschiderer alerted his fellow Soldiers of the enemy location, they immediately began to pursue the terrorists.

Due to his heroic actions and quick decisions, Tschiderer located the enemy while he took cover and alerted the rest of his team on patrol. As the Saber team engaged and disabled the sniper’s position, two terrorists fled on foot, leaving a blood trail that came from the wounds of the enemy sniper.

A cordon and search was immediately set up and Tschiderer assisted his team in the search of the two terrorists. The driver of the silver vehicle was detained by a team from B Co. 3-156th Inf. Bn. while Tschiderer and a team from B Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Iraqi Army Brigade, continued to follow the blood trail which led them to the yard where the wounded sniper lay in pain.

As Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs, he gave medical aid to the wounded terrorist—the same one who’d tried to take his life.

BAGHDAD -- Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a native of Mendon, N.Y., and a medic with E Troop, 101st “Saber” Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, during a routine patrol in west Baghdad.

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Islamic Terrorist Want Your Head and Your Children's Heads Too.

"Nicholas Berg screamed as one of the executioners wielded a large knife. The man sawed off Berg's head while the other captors shouted "Allahu Akbar!" Arabic for "God is great" "(1)

This is the reality of terrorism. It's bloody and gruesome and perpetrated on innocent Americans and Iraqis alike. Americans have to see the horror and believe what they see. Don't think it can't happen here.

It's time for a gut check.

You must admit this torture of Nicholas Berg and all his fellow beheaded and bodies burn victims, is a thousand times worst than having a dog snarl at you, or women's panties put over your head as was said to be torture tactics on the prisoners of Abu Ghraib.

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/POW_beheaded.htm

http://inhonor.net/videos/uped/fl_video.php?f_num=66500

A Thought Posted by Anonymous on 2006-09-27 17:11:46 after viewing the video.

"That makes me so angry as an American! Every bleeding heart liberal should watch this and realize if they could they would do that to every American. They hate our way of thinking and want nothing more than to kill us. That is why we have got to take it to them. Sitting on the sidelines and waiting to get in the game is no longer an option. "

Thank you Bernard Goldberg for the first two chapters of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, and the chapter on the difference between the so-called torture committed at Abu Ghraib and the explicit torture of Berg's, Johnson's and Pearl's beheadings and the killing and desecration of the contractors bodies..
 
I realized today that I ought to put myself through the horror of watching Berg's beheading video so that I get a grip on reality, why we are in Iraq and what the War On Terror is all about. President Bush couldn't repeat enough times today during his press conference as to why we are fighting the War on Terror in Iraq.
It could be 11 Americans here who could be killed, blown up by a car bomb, while waiting for Josef's Bakery to open here in this country as it happened yesterday in Iraq to 11 innocent Iraqis.
 
It seems that viewing the horrific September 11 morning videos in anniversary real time (NBC) on September 11, 2006 didn't do much good in the Democrat and Liberal camps. Is it because they did not see the blood and guts? 

 Maybe they, and any American who thinks it can't happen here, needs to be inundated, before the election, with more vivid reminders of the gruesome details of Islamic terrorist and watch these videos and not turn away. 


(1) "Video shows beheading of American captive" by Bill Nichols of USA TODAY
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"...Capture some dogs of the Christians so that we can liberate

IRAQ: AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ'S NEW LEADER ISSUES MESSAGE

Baghdad, 28 Sept. (AKI) - The proclaimed heir to al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has urged his supporters to capture foreigners and use them as bargaining chips to free a Muslim cleric in the US. "I call on every holy fighter in Iraq to strive during this holy month (Ramadan)... to capture some dogs of the Christians so that we can liberate our imprisoned sheikh," said the speaker, identified as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, referring to sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, in jail in the US since 1995 for the attack two years earlier on World Trade Centre.

In the message, the al-Qaeda leader called on the Iraqi Ulema and on tribal chiefs to join the insurgency.

The 20-minute long audio file - "Come to a Word that is Just Between Us and You" (Surah Imran, verse 64, the Koran) - was posted on Thursday to jihadi internet sites by the Mujahadeen Council, an umbrella group of eight Iraqi armed Salafite formations, including al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The message dates from the first day of Ramadan, 23 September, and besides threatening foreigners, it also seeks to win support from leading Sunni clerics ."We are your brothers, but you have left us" said al-Muhajir, addressing the Ulema Council.

'We are not apostates, we are just men who want to save the Islamic nation from ignorance."

"Today the struggle is harder and for this we are today asking you to join our path, we need you" the speaker said.

In November 2004, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, accused the Ulema, or Muslim scholars, of having "betrayed the mujahadeen" (fighters in the Holy War) in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The last part of the speech by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir is dedicated to the heads of the Sunni tribes in the restive al-Anbar province who on Wednesday met Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki announcing their support for the legitimately elected government of Baghdad.

"To the tribal leaders who are on our side and help us economically and with manpower I say Allah will reward you ...but to those who are with the traitors and the occupiers I saw that certainly you may earn money and important positions but the truth is with Allah. We ask them to return to their faiuth and they can do so only if they repent."

(Ham/Aki)

Adnkronous International

Sep-28-06 17:35

http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.345181510&par=0

Opinion:

I want to know why in all the reporting of this particular news item which I saw in print or heard via TV and radio from the Main Stream Media this weekend, why were the specific words of of the quote

"capture some dogs of the Christians so that we can liberate our imprisoned sheikh," not reported to the world and the American public?

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir is intending on capturing Christians (possibly also innocent Iraqi Christians) holding them hostage and most likely cutting their heads off, murdering them, because there will be no hostage swap for imprisoned sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman (mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.

Is Abu Hamza al-Muhajir not inciting a Holy War between the religions, a war between Christians and Muslims by calling for these kidnappings to occur during the holy month of Ramadan. Where is there no outcry from Muslims around the world that this man does not speak for them and the religion of Islam, nor for all its people of faith. Where is the protesting and the cries from Christians around the world for an apology?

And where is the apology from the Islamist? Or do they all regard al-Muhajir as a renegade who should be allowed speak and lead thousands to do a secret bidding of ridding the world of Jews and Christians.

Why do I think they are under the delusion that there is justification in an "eye for an eye" and their "right makes might" or even vice versa.

But my most adamant question is: Why is this face of Islamic Fascism not being exposed to America and the Judadic-Christian world with the exact words he used to call upon the holy faithful of Islam to spead terrorism.

Why has the MSM been silent on this?

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