In a New Year’s tour d’horizon of warfare and violence across the globe, Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page concludes that, apart from the quality of media reporting, things have been getting better.

Worldwide, violence continues to decline, as it has for the last few years. ...

All this continues a trend that began when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union no longer subsidized terrorist and rebel groups everywhere. The current wars are basically uprisings against police states or feudal societies, which are seen as out-of-step with the modern world. Many are led by radicals preaching failed dogmas (Islamic conservatism, Maoism), that still resonate among people who don’t know about the dismal track records. Iran has not picked much of the lost Soviet terrorist support effort. Hezbollah and Hamas, the Madhi Army and a few smaller groups, and that’s it. Terrorists in general miss the Soviets, who really knew how to treat bad boys right.

The War on Terror has morphed into the War Against Islamic Radicalism. This religious radicalism has always been around, for Islam was born as an aggressive movement, that used violence and terror to expand. Past periods of conquest are regarded fondly by Moslems. The current enthusiasm for violence in the name of God has been building for over half a century. Historically, periods of Islamic radicalism have flared up periodically in response to corrupt governments, as a vain attempt to impose a religious solution on some social or political problem. The current violence is international because of the availability of planet wide mass media (which needs a constant supply of headlines), and the fact that the Islamic world is awash in tyranny and economic backwardness. Islamic radicalism itself is incapable of mustering much military power, and the movement largely relies on terrorism to gain attention. Most of the victims are fellow Moslems, which is why the radicals eventually become so unpopular among their own people that they run out of new recruits and fade away. This is what is happening now. The American invasion of Iraq was a clever exploitation of this, forcing the Islamic radicals to fight in Iraq, where they killed many Moslems, especially women and children, thus causing the Islamic radicals to lose their popularity among Moslems.

Peggy Noonan describes conversation at a mostly Republican Christmas gathering in Occupied Virginia within the Beltway:

There was no grousing about John McCain, and considerable grousing about the Bush administration, but it was almost always followed by one sentence, and this is more or less what it was: “But he kept us safe.” In the seven years since 9/11, there were no further attacks on American soil. This is an argument that’s been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. It is unknown, and perhaps can’t be known, whether this was fully due to the government’s efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can’t be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can’t know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn’t come together because of their efforts.

But the meme will likely linger. There’s a rough justice with the American people. If a president presides over prosperity, whether he had anything to do with it or not, he gets the credit. If he has a recession, he gets the blame. The same with war, and terrorist attacks. We have not been attacked since 9/11. Someone—someones—did something right.

But here is a jittery reality: We are living through the time of two presidents. Or, if you choose to see it that way, the time of no president, with one on his way in but not arrived, and the other on his way out and without full authority. Histories will be written about this moment, and about the administration’s work with the president-elect’s office. But it is jittery because criminals calculate, they look for opportunities and vulnerabilities. This is a delicate time, with a transition of power, a profound economic crisis, and a nation feeling demoralized around the edges.

We received a reminder of the gravity of the situation this week, with the bipartisan congressional report saying the odds are high the world will see a biological or nuclear terror attack in the next five years. It said, “America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing,” and “the risk that radical Islamists—al Qaeda or Taliban—may gain access to nuclear material is real.”

Commission co-chairman Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and an adviser to Mr. Obama’s transition team, was sober in a Q&A with Newsweek. He said he was most surprised at the risk of biological weapons because of “the ubiquitous nature of pathogens”—anthrax, or a resurrected infectious agent such as the one that produced the 1918 influenza epidemic, which has been re-created in the laboratory.

The report hasn’t received the attention it deserves, nor have its recommendations. Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, accused the commission of playing the “fear card” and trying to imitate the Bush administration in alarmism and bellicosity. Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat and former senator, would have none of it. “Our adversaries are gaining greater capabilities,” he said.

Why does Congress prepare such reports? To inform, and to win support for new plans. To show they are doing something. And to be able to say, in the event of calamity—forgive my cynicism—that they warned us. This hasn’t been the first such report. It won’t be the last. But it comes at a key moment for Mr. Obama, because it gives him a certain amount of cover to be serious about what needs to be done. What’s at stake for him is two words. When Republicans say, in coming years, “At least Bush kept us safe,” Democrats will not want tacked onto the end of that sentence, “unlike Obama.”

Staff members of the Taj Motel Palace Hotel saved the lives of many guests, sometimes shielding them from bullets with their own bodies.

London Times:

They were heroes in cummerbunds and overalls. The staff of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel saved hundreds of wealthy guests as heavily armed gunmen roamed the building, firing indiscriminately, leaving a trail of corpses behind them.

Among the workers there were some whose bravery and sense of duty led them to sacrifice their own lives, witnesses said.

Prashant Mangeshikar, a guest, said that a hotel worker, identified only as Mr Rajan, had put himself between one of the gunmen and Mr Mangeshikar, his wife and two daughters.

“The man in front of my wife shielded us,” Mr Mangeshikar said. “He was a maintenance section staff member. He took the bullets.” For the next 12 hours, before Mr Rajan was finally taken out of the hotel, guests battled to stop the bleeding from a gaping bullet wound in his abdomen. It is not known if he lived.

Read the whole thing.

José Guardia is blog-tracking events and has the best collected news links.

Day 3

First link collection

Let’s see, Bush’s war policy was wrong, because sophisticated people knew that al Qaeda is a Sunni organization, and neither secular Ba’athists, like Saddam Hussein, nor Shiites, like the mullahs controlling Iran, would ever under any circumstance cooperate with or assist al Qaeda.

The Telegraph:

Fresh links between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and al-Qaeda have been uncovered following interception of a letter from the terrorist leadership that hails Tehran’s support for a recent attack on the American embassy in Yemen, which killed 16 people.

Delivery of the letter exposed the rising role of Saad bin Laden, son of the al-Qaeda leader, Osama as an intermediary between the organisation and Iran. Saad bin Laden has been living in Iran since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, apparently under house arrest.

The letter, which was signed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, was written after the American embassy in Yemen was attacked by simultaneous suicide car bombs in September.

Western security officials said the missive thanked the leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for providing assistance to al-Qaeda to set up its terrorist network in Yemen, which has suffered ten al-Qaeda-related terror attacks in the past year, including two bomb attacks against the American embassy.

In the letter al-Qaeda’s leadership pays tribute to Iran’s generosity, stating that without its “monetary and infrastructure assistance” it would have not been possible for the group to carry out the terror attacks. It also thanked Iran for having the “vision” to help the terror organisation establish new bases in Yemen after al-Qaeda was forced to abandon much of its terrorist infrastructure in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

There has been intense speculation about the level of Iranian support for al-Qaeda since the 9/11 Commission report into al-Qaeda’s terror attacks against the U.S. in 2001 concluded that Iran had provided safe passage for many of the 9/11 hijackers travelling between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia prior to the attacks.

Scores of senior al Qaeda activists – including Saad bin Laden – sought sanctuary in Iran following the overthrow of the Taliban, and have remained in Tehran ever since. The activities of Saad bin Laden, 29, have been a source of Western concern despite Tehran’s assurances that he is under official confinement.

But Iran was a key transit route for al Qaeda loyalists moving between battlefields in the Middle East and Asia. Western security officials have also concluded Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have supported al-Qaeda terror cells, despite religious divisions between Iran’s Shia Muslim revolutionaries and the Sunni Muslim terrorists.

Bernardine Dorhn

Last night, Barack Obama denied launching his political career in the living room of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn prior to his first run for the Illinois State Senate in 1995.

That denial must be based upon quibbling over the difference between a formal announcement at a Ramada Inn, September 19, 1995, and an “introduction” to prominent liberal Hyde Park democrats over coffee at Chez Ayers whose specific date is uncertain but which occurred around very much the same time. Lynn Sweet.

The precise chronological order of Obama’s 1995 campaign events is obviously less important than the question of his association and long term relationship with terrorists and the nature of their crimes.

WorldNetDaily quotes an FBI informant:

While defenders of unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers cling to the rationalization that he never killed anyone during a spree of bombings in the 1970s, his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, built and planted the bomb that killed a San Francisco police officer in 1970, an FBI report claimed. ...

While Ayers himself has never been implicated in a death among the high-profile bombings of the Capitol, the Pentagon and several other targets of the Weather Underground he served as a leader, it’s not true that there were no fatalities associated with the attacks.

On Feb. 16, 1970, Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell of the San Francisco Police Department was killed by shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb planted on a window ledge at the force’s Park Station. The pipe bomb was filled with heavy metal staples and lead bullet projectiles. Another officer, Robert Fogarty, received serious wounds to his face and legs, and was partially blinded in the attack.

Dohrn, then living in a Weather Underground cell on a Sausalito, Calif., houseboat, has long been suspected of involvement in the bombing.

An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Ayers, then a high-ranking leader of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn’s husband), told him Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb.

Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there. In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group’s Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself.

Grathwohl recounted in his report that Ayers complained to other Weather Underground operatives that they were not contributing enough to the bombing campaigns, pointing out that Dohrn built the bomb and planted it herself.

Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, SFPD, murdered February 16, 1970

older photo of MV Iran Deyanat in different paint

After Somali pirates hijacked the Iranian freighter MV Iran Deyanat (aka Deyant or Dianat) on August 21, 2008, as ransom negotiations proceeded, in late September, reports of strange illnesses striking down the pirates began appearing in the international press.

South Africa Times 9/28:

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

ShiratDevorah offers the following explanation:

The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) – a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on September 10, shortly after the ship’s hijacking.

According to the U.S. Government, the company regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent United Nations sanctions to facilitate weapons proliferation for the Iranian Ministry of Defense. The MV Iran Deyanat departed Nanjing, China, July 28, and, according to its manifest, planned to sail to Rotterdam, where it would offload 42,500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by an unidentified “ German client”. The ship has a crew of 29 men, including a Pakistani captain, an Iranian engineer, 13 other Iranians, 3 Indians, 2 Filipinos, and 10 Eastern Europeans, stated to be Albanians.

The MV Iran Deyanat was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates – 50 onboard and 50 onshore. The Somali pirates attempted to inspect the ship’s seven cargo containers but the containers were locked. The crew claimed that they did not have the “access codes” and could not open them. Pirates have stated they were unable to open the hold without causing extensive damage to the ship, and threatened to blow it up. The Iranian ship’s captain and the engineer were contacted by cell phone and demanded to disclose the actual nature of the mysterious “powdered cargo” but the captain and his officers were very evasive. Initially they said that the cargo contained “crude oil” but then claimed it contained “minerals.” Following this initial rebuff, the pirates broke open one of the containers and discovered it to be filled with packets of what they said was “a powdery fine sandy soil” ....

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore. ...

Although American intelligence and government sources are maintaining a strictly observed silence, the same does not apply to the Russians and so it is that we learn the real story of the MV Iran Deyanat. She was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

Given the large number of deaths from the questing Somali pirates, it should be obvious that when the contents of the ship’s locked cargo containers finally descended onto the land, the death toll would be enormous. This ship was nothing more nor less than the long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel. Not the expected rocket attacks (which could be intercepted by the Israelis) but an even more deadly and unexpected attack by sea. It is very interesting to note that the Israeli government has in the past few weeks, been loudly demanding that the United States establish a naval blockade of Iran.

On October 10, Iran evidently having paid the required ransom, the Deyanat was released, and allowed to depart. It sailed apparently in the direction of Muscat.

Effective anti-Obama ad highlighting his Bill Ayers connection. Now running in Virginia.

1:01 video

29-year old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, a Canadian citizen from Ottawa of Somali origin, was found deceased in his room at the Burnsley Hotel in downtown Denver, about four blocks from the State Capitol.

The cause of death remains to be determined, but the pound (.45 kg.) of Sodium Cyanide found by authorities next to the body may provide an important clue.

A suspicion person might conjecture that the late Mr. Dirie was visiting Denver in connection with some kind of plans related to the upcoming Democrat Party Convention, taking place August 25-28, and that the unlucky, or possibly maladroit Mr. Durie, while examining or otherwise manipulating the cyanide compound he had brought along for reasons of his own, met with an unhappy accident when he breathed in its vapors or somehow contacted the very dangerous chemical with his bare skin.

Mr. Dirie’s death (now being described as a suicide) somehow reminds me of the 2005 “suicide” of Joel Henry Hinrichs III, an engineering student with a Pakistani roommate who mysteriously chose to kill himself with a bomb containing the highly unstable and explosive compound triacetone triperoxide, in the very near vicinity of a football stadium where a game was being played with more than 80,000 people in attendance.

Fascinating, isn’t it, the way some people choose to commit suicide using very much the kinds and quantities of materials suitable for use in mass terrorism attacks in locations suspiciously close to suitable targets?

CBS News:

Al Qaeda has successfully established a network for recruiting boys as young as 12 from across central Asia as it seeks new volunteers to enlarge its team of prospective suicide bombers and militants fighters, senior security officials from the Middle East have revealed to CBS News.

News of al Qaeda venturing into the former Soviet central Asian republics with a population that has a largely Muslim heritage marks a significant addition to reports earlier this year that the hardline group had recruited young boys in the Pak-Afghan border region.

Last May, a senior Pakistani security official showed a rare video clip to CBS News documenting a boy, barely 12 years old, using a machete to severe the head of a middle-aged man whom militants probably suspected as being a spy for the U.S.

Liberal woolymindedness reaches even more impressive depths of absurdity in Britain than in the US, as we see when prominent Al Qaeda terrorists cannot be extradited to any of a variety of countries anxious to try and punish him, and an impotent justice system can do no better than house arrest.

So scrupulous in protecting the interests of terrorist is British justice that newspapers like The Guardian are forbidden even to name the beneficiary of this systematic insanity.

The hiding place of a leading terror suspect was inadvertently released by Justice Ministry officials last night after he was freed from jail under unprecedented bail conditions. The man, who can be identified only as U, was released from Long Lartin, Worcestershire, after the appeal court ruled there was no reason to hold him indefinitely as he could not be deported to his native Algeria.

The media has been prohibited from publishing his address, or even identifying the town where he is to reside. When the Ministry of Justice supplied journalists with copies of his bail conditions, however, the document included his exact address in the south-east of England. ...

U settled in Britain in 1994 and moved to Afghanistan two years later, where he is said to have forged links with Osama bin Laden. He is accused of presiding over a pre-9/11 al-Qaida network of north African terrorists who trained in Afghanistan in the mid-90s, and has links with men convicted of offences in this country and abroad. Ahmed Ressam, convicted of a plot to blow up Los Angeles International airport on New Year’s Eve 1999, was carrying U’s telephone number when he was arrested with 60kg (130lb) of explosives on the Canadian-US border.

Attempts to extradite U to the US collapsed when Ressam refused to give evidence against him. Prosecutors in France and Germany said telephone intercept evidence indicated U was the driving force behind a plot to bomb a Christmas market in Strasbourg the following year.

The Counterterrorism Blog, of course, operates outside the United Kingdom, and therefore is free to identify the lucky jihadist as Abu Doha.
————————————————
The Independent:

Among those who became a regular visitor to the Four Feathers and to the Finsbury Park mosque in north London was Abu “The Doctor” Doha, who has since been identified as al-Qa’ida’s main recruiter in Europe. Mr Doha, now 37, was a senior figure in an Algerian terror group called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC).

According to the head of the French internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, Mr Doha’s arrest at Heathrow airport in February 2001 as he tried to board a flight to Saudi Arabia came “a little too late”. Mr Doha, he said, was the “principal catalyst” in establishing a network of Islamic terrorists in London.

Before the Algerian was arrested, he organised travel for recruits to al-Qa’ida’s camps in Chechnya and Afghanistan where training included the production of chemical weapons, such as ricin. The recruits have since formed Europe-based cells, financed by fraud and adept at creating false travel documents.

London disciples of Mr Qatada and Mr Doha included Djamel Beghal, a French- Algerian since arrested for masterminding a plot to blow up the US Embassy in Paris, and Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan held in America as the “20th hijacker”, suspected of planning to take part in the 11 September attacks.

AKI (Italy) reports the appearance on a jihadist web-site of an alarming video.

A new video called “Nuclear Terrorism” has been posted on the worldwide web calling for jihadists to use nuclear or chemical weapons to strike the west.

A simple jihadi propaganda video or a dangerous message to a sleeper cell in the west? That is the question raised by the video and no-one has yet claimed responsibility for it.

“Strike civilians in the west without mercy using weapons of mass destruction” is one of the calls made in the 39-minute video.

The question now being asked is whether the video is presenting a coded message or signalling an imminent terrorist attack.

Read the whole thing.

Christopher S. Carson, in Front Page Magazine, supplies background and details on Al Qaeda’s nuclear plot against America.

The latest audio message from al-Qaeda, reportedly from Osama bin Laden himself, is only the most recent confirmation that the jihadist threat to the West remains real and deadly serious. But the fact that it could take the form of nuclear terrorism should be most worrying to citizens and policy makers alike.

Where a nuclear attack once may have been beyond the capacities of stateless terrorists, that is no longer the case. ...

‘Jafer the Pilot” is the nom de guerre of U.S. citizen Adnan el-Shukrijumah. Young, intelligent, fluent in multiple languages and a trained jet pilot who had apparently been in flight schools with Mohammed Atta, Shukrijumah had studied and worked with other jihadis at the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at McMaster University in Canada. But one day all the terrorists disappeared from campus forever.

John Loftus of WABC news reported on November 7, 2003, that in the immediate wake of Shukrijumah and his fellow travelers’ disappearance, 180 pounds of uranium ended up “missing” from the reactor. Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, who interviewed Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11, reported bin Laden saying that one of the founders of al-Qaeda, Anas el-Liby, had helped the Pilot haul out the stash of uranium.

McMaster U. has always insisted that no material was ever missing from the reactor, but instead claims that low-grade radiological material did turn up missing from their pharmacological/medical labs at the time. Paul Williams, author of The Day of Islam, published the Loftus-Mir assertions in his book and elsewhere. For his trouble, he was promptly sued by the University for $4,000,000. The suit is still pending. ...

(Shukrijumah) was seen again in Mexico in late August 2004, near “terrorist alley” in Sonora, the main thoroughfare for illegal aliens into the United States. [The violent street gang MS-13 (Mara Salvatruchas)] was the Pilot’s new supply chain and courier of nuclear material for the bombs he was setting up. ...

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has documented 15 incidents of theft and smuggling of small amounts of separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium confirmed by the nations involved. But these 15 cases represent the tip of the iceberg of what has actually occurred. So there is always just approaching the right people and buying it—not an easy task, but not an impossible one either. ...

In February 2006, Russian citizen Oleg Khinsagov was arrested in Georgia (along with three Georgian accomplices) with some 100 grams of 89 percent enriched HEU, claiming that he had kilograms more available for sale. We can’t know how many thefts that occurred were never detected. Dr. Bunn told Senator Lieberman that “it is a sobering fact that nearly all of the stolen HEU and plutonium that has been seized over the years had never been missed before it was seized.”

The Pilot doesn’t need too much HEU for his seven-city destruction plan. For one “simple” gun-type design HEU bomb, roughly 50 kilograms of HEU would be needed – roughly the size of a six-pack.

The Pilot could also try hitting up a HEU-based research facility, like his old alma mater McMaster University, although McMaster apparently didn’t employ HEU per se. But some 130 research reactors around the world still do use HEU as their fuel.

Or has he already? The Washington Post, right before last Christmas, reported a strange story. Sometime in the night of November 8, 2007, two coordinated teams of armed men attacked the Pelindaba nuclear facility in South Africa, where hundreds of kilograms of weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) are stored.

One of the teams was chased off by the guards, but the other team of four gunmen disabled the perimeter alarms, went to the emergency control center and shot a worker in the chest. Bleeding out, the worker was still able to sound the first alarm.

He might not have bothered. The attack team then spent 45 minutes inside the perimeter, without anyone harassing them. What they did next is unknown to the public. The team promptly disappeared through the same hole they had cut in the fence. South African officials later arrested three individuals, but soon released them. The South African government has since been close-lipped about what really happened last November, and it has refused earlier U.S. offers to remove the HEU at Pelindaba—if indeed any remains after the attack. We don’t even know how much HEU, if any, was spirited away.

But surely the point is not whether the Pilot hit this specific facility. It is that he could well have—or dozens of others like it. We do know that if a 10 kiloton A-bomb, somewhat smaller than the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima, is set off at ground level in midtown Manhattan, the death toll would be perhaps half a million people. We could expect roughly $1 trillion in direct economic damage from this one bomb alone. Multiply this by seven bombs, and we can expect the wholesale depopulation of America’s cities in fear, incalculable economic devastation, and the end of the country as we currently know it.

Read the whole thing.

Ben Smith reports, but fails to recognize or understand, that Hillary Clinton has managed to identify the United States’ key foreign policy aim: the destruction of the OPEC oil cartel, which represents a monstrous and increasingly burdensome tax upon the economies of the West levied by a collection of backward dictatorships and parasitical Third World regimes. The incomprehensibly vast wealth transfers effectuated by this artificial manipulation of the pricing of a basic world commodity have not produced the enlightenment and content prosperity of its beneficiaries, but has instead emboldened them to promote religious intolerance and hostility toward the West, while enabling them to fund the arming and training of a new Order of Assassins, a series of militant bands of murderous fanatics bent on suicidal violence aimed at innocent victims in Middle Eastern countries and South East Asia as well as Europe and the United States.

Destroy OPEC, and you cut the Gordian Knot. You eliminate Terrorism at its source by removing its funding. You also simultaneously revitalize the economies of every country in the entire productive world by extracting a major parasite that has been feeding upon its vitals.

Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious “speculators,” and made that—along with her push for a gas tax holiday—central to her closing message in Indiana.

It’s a potent message, like the attack on “Wall Street money brokers,” with deep roots in American politics. It’s also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.

Kiss Obama goodbye, lefties. Hillary is going to run on this one, and he will be toast.

And John McCain had better move rapidly to adopt the same policy, or he could also be in deep trouble.

The most striking image is just a little over a second long, the blast of an IED beginning to impact two soldiers in American battle dress.

Campaign strategists of the democrat party are clearly the kind of people who see nothing wrong in using the image of a successful enemy attack on US forces for partisan political advantage.

It would never occur to these people that the image (taken from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which can be found around 1:35 into the trailer*) they are using is exploiting the pain and suffering (and possibly the deaths) of their fellow citizens incurred in the course of defending them.

• Hat tip to LGF Commenter MacGregor

This precise image could just as easily appear in an al Qaeda propaganda video accompanied by howls of Allahu Akbar!

0: 35 video

The cowards will certainly pull this one when the storm of outrage breaks over their heads, so here’s a link to a copy on YouTube.

Maybe it’s time to change the symbol of the democrat party from the jackass to something even more appropriate:

John Hinderaker at Power-Line is explaining just who they really are.

Part One

Part Two

If you were going to run for a seat on your local school board, would you launch your first political campaign at these people’s house?

In another notable instance of official cowardice and incompetence, the US military continued a pattern of appeasing and condoning Iraqi treachery and corruption by acquiescing to the decision of two Iraqi judicial committees to award amnesty to AP photographer & terrorist Bilal Hussein.

AP gloats.

Earlier posts.

They should have released him long ago, having first secured his hands and affixed a rope around his neck, of course.

Peter Carr, Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, responded to Glenn Greenwald’s request for clarification as follows:

In a question-and-answer session after his Commonwealth Club speech last week, Attorney General Mukasey referenced a call between an al Qaeda safe house and a person in the United States. The Attorney General has referred to this before, in the letter he sent with Director of National Intelligence McConnell to Chairman Reyes on February 22, 2008. In that letter, contained in this link [.pdf], the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence explained that:

“We have provided Congress with examples in which difficulties with collections under [Executive Order 12333] resulted in the Intelligence Community missing crucial information. For instance, one of the September 11 hijackers communicated with a known overseas terrorist facility while he was living in the United States. Because that collection was conducted under Executive Order 12333, the Intelligence Community could not identify the domestic end of the communication prior to September 11, 2001, when it could have stopped that attack. The failure to collect such communications was one of the central criticisms of the Congressional Joint Inquiry that looked into intelligence failures associated with the attacks of September 11. The bipartisan bill passed by the Senate would address such flaws in our capabilities that existed before the enactment of the Protect America Act and that are now resurfacing.”

This call is also referenced in the unclassified report of the congressional intelligence committees’ Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

Greenwald spills buckets full of indignation and continues beating his accusatory tom-tom, being absolutely in love with the notion that he has found a deliberate falsehood he can explode to the embarrassment of the evil Bush Administration, and he has a pretty good echo of his theory (accepting it as proven gospel) going in a number ( 1, 2, 3) of the standard cages making up the left blogosphere’s monkey-house, but (sorry, Glenn!) he has actually proven absolutely nothing.

At best (from Greenwald’s point-of-view), the Attorney-General offered an inelegantly-phrased hypothetical open to misinterpretation. On the other hand, it is not impossible at all that there really was a phone call from an al Qaeda safe house which was not intercepted because of legal red-tape. In which case, Mr. Greenwald is going to be very sorry that he has so heavily invested in this story.

Still developing.

Original story.

Back in March, as this New York Sun 3/27 story indicates, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in a speech arguing for Congressional support for FISA, seemed to indicate that the absence of a warrant prevented US surveillance of a crucial pre-9/11 phone call from a safe house in Afghanistan to someone in the United States.

Attorney General Mukasey, in an emotional plea for broad surveillance authority in the war on terror, is warning that the price for failing to empower the government would be paid in American lives. Officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about,” Mr. Mukasey said yesterday as he took questions from the audience following a speech to a public affairs forum, the Commonwealth Club. “We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. “We got three thousand. ... We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure.

There has been little media coverage of what seems to be possibly a major story, but the left blogosphere has erupted today with attacks on Mukasey for allegedly lying, led by “the left’s most dishonest blogger” Glenn Greenwald himself.

Reading General Mukasey’s comment as reported in the Sun, I was not certain myself whether he was referring to a real incident or merely to a hypothetical, but the major counter-offensive being mounted this morning by the left’s big gun liars seems to indicate that it could very well be the former.

Greenwald’s attack in Salon is being followed up by the leading leftwing Congressional representatives, these days operating on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers (D-MI), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Bobby Scott (D-VA), sending Mukasey an accusatory letter, demanding that he explain his March statement.

Mr. Mukasey may simply reply that he was only speaking hypothetically of course. Developing.

Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin neglected to go down to the county courthouse and file a signed and notarized partnership agreement. Instead, Iraq’s government covertly supplied funding and weapons and provided training facilities, medical treatment, and sanctuary to individual terrorist leaders and to a confusing array of variously named and affiliated terrorist groups.

Deniability is, of course, precisely why governments, like that of the former Baathist regime of Iraq, employ surrogate non-state actors as instruments of violence against Western states. If Iraq attacked the United States openly, the legitimacy of a full-scale US military response would have been unquestioned. Because actual attacks are committed by a handful of individuals affiliated with obscure jihadist entities, leftwing members of the US Intelligence Community always find themselves conveniently able to maintain that no definitive proof linking a sponsoring state like Iraq is available.

Michael Tanji explains how the game is played.

There is perhaps no clearer example of why the U.S. intelligence community has such a serious credibility problem than the recently released report on the relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and terrorist groups. Media outlets friendly to the meme that there was no such connection were leaked a copy of the report and latched on to the statement that there was no “smoking gun” linking Saddam and al-Qaeda. Clearly, however, none of those reporters bothered to actually read the report or ask any critical questions.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of Islamic terrorism who read the early headlines and then read the report cannot help but come away with a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism and had we not gone to war with Iraq after 9/11, it would still be a focal point in our fight against Islamic terror. That Saddam and bin Laden never shook hands—presumably the only “smoking gun” that the most obtuse analysts of this subject would accept—is hardly the point. ...

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than documents from Saddam’s own intelligence service, which confirm that the regime was funding the group Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the early 1990s. Led by Ayman al Zawahiri, the EIJ eventually morphed into what most observers call “core” al Qaeda. Zawahiri became al Qaeda’s second in command when al Qaeda was formed in the late 1980s. Saying Iraq was not supporting al Qaeda, when there was no meaningful distinction between the EIJ and al Qaeda, strains credulity.

Therein lies the problem: this report—and every assessment dealing with intelligence or national security matters—is crafted with such extreme precision in an impossible quest to be “right” that they end up being absurdly wrong. This quest for false precision skews our understanding of very clear and simple truths. This is part of the reason why so many policymakers of all political persuasions hold intelligence in such disdain. The books and articles that document Saddam’s relationship with terrorist groups that were published before this report was issued are numerous and draw largely the same conclusions that this review of classified material shows. Secrets are only valuable if they tell you something meaningful that you didn’t already know.

This is a problem that is endemic in the intelligence community and particularly bad in agencies that have taken a beating in recent years for providing incomplete information about the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD programs. To compensate, agencies caveat their work to the point that ten different people reading the same report will come away with at least nine different interpretations of the report’s findings. By not making unambiguous calls about what is known and more importantly what is unknown, intelligence agencies don’t serve their consumers; they confuse and infuriate them.

Ambiguity, a permanent feature of Intelligence, becomes in the hands of the sophists of the Intelligence Community’s anti-Bush establishment a very effective tool for undermining policy. By utilizing a 100% standard of certainty, requiring unimpeachable and totally disinterested first-hand witnesses of excellent character, and clear documentary evidence, it becomes possible to exculpate both pre-2003 Iraq and today’s Iran of any role in terrorism or efforts to acquire WMD at all, and thereby to delegitimize the Bush Administration’s casus belli.

Miguel A. Guanipa, in the course of analyzing Obama’s vulnerabilities in the presidential campaign, debunks the conventional leftwing meme that it is American action which produces terrorism, the contemporary political equivalent of the medieval belief in the spontaneous generation of pests and vermin from decaying matter.

With the irreverent chutzpah of a snickering 8 year old tattler telling on his older sibling, Obama indulged an excitable crowd of adoring fans with the rather overused and unproven refrain that—contrary to McCain’s beliefs—Al Qaeda was not present in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. ...

To suggest that American intervention begets more terrorism denotes a subtle endorsement of the novel diplomatic principle that a policy of retreat and noninvolvement would automatically yield better relations with the consistently volatile potentates of Middle Eastern regimes. This simple-minded sequitur continues to galvanize radical leftwing Democrats, who are already sold on the proposition that there is an inverse link between the number of terrorists in the world and the level of what is generally considered by them to be America’s modest record of charity and good will through its international relations role.

It is true that terrorism did not make the headlines as frequently when the United States remained basically uninvolved in the political affairs of countries that harbored terrorist organizations. This does not mean that the latter were heretofore virtually nonexistent and suddenly sprang up in response to the United States’ unjustified military intervention in other countries’ affairs.

This is not only a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for the existence of terrorism, it also dishonors the sacrifices of those who have the courage to be proactive about it, and what is worse, it casts them as the culprits in front of a global audience.

By effectively engaging the terrorists, America has simply forced them to expose their clandestine operations, which only the ill-informed would deny have long been in existence. Until they reached an apex of sorts on September 11, 2001, the media had decided that such operations scarcely merited their attention. Since then, simply recycling the same old tune, that it is our fault terrorism has become such a problem around the world, no longer represents a viable argument against intervention anytime the sitting president perceives a clear threat to national security.

AFP reports a major study over six years including 50,000 interviews on three continents of Muslim attitudes by the Gallup organization establishes that 93% of Muslims are moderates who disapprove of the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 and other subsequent terrorist attacks. “Only seven percent of the billion Muslims surveyed—the radicals—condoned the attacks on the United States in 2001, the poll showed.”

Robert, at Jihad Watch, notes that 7% of 1.3 billion Muslims means that there are only 91 million Jihadists for us to worry about.

CNN:

An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

FLAG Telecom, which owns one of the cables, said repairs were expected to be completed by February 12. France Telecom, part owner of the other cable, said it was uncertain when repairs on it would be repaired.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the cables off Egypt were likely damaged by ships’ anchors.

The loss of the two Mediterranean cables—FLAG Telecom’s FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecommunications companies—has snarled Internet and phone traffic from Egypt to India.

Officials said Friday it was unclear what caused the damage to FLAG’s FALCON cable about 50 kilometers off Dubai. A repair ship was en route, FLAG said.

Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst with TeleGeography, said the FALCON cable is designed on a “ring system,” taking it on a circuit around the Persian Gulf and enabling traffic to be more easily routed around damage.

Schoonover said the two cables damaged Wednesday collectively account for as much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East, so their loss had a much bigger effect.

Al Jazeera on outage impact on India

The outages extend from Egypt to Ceylon, and inevitably provoke suspicion of this being the result of deliberate attack on communications by some rogue state or terrorist group.

Too funny to be true, but true anyway.

London Times:

The BBC funded a paintballing trip for men later accused of Islamic terrorism and failed to pass on information about the 21/7 bombers to police, a court was told yesterday.

Mohammed Hamid, who is charged with overseeing a two-year radicalisation programme to prepare London-based Muslim youths for jihad, was described as a “cockney comic” by a BBC producer.

The BBC paid for Mr Hamid and fellow defendants Muhammad al-Figari and Mousa Brown to go on a paintballing trip at the Delta Force centre in Tonbridge, Kent, in February 2005. The men, accused of terrorism training, were filmed for a BBC programme called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, screened in June 2005.

The BBC paid Mr Hamid, an Islamic preacher who denies recruiting and grooming the men behind the failed July 2005 attack, a £300 fee to take part in the programme, Woolwich Crown Court was told. ...

Nasreen Suleaman, a researcher on the programme, told the court that Mr Hamid, 50, contacted her after the July 2005 attack and told her of his association with the bombers. But she said that she felt no obligation to contact the police with this information. Ms Suleaman said that she informed senior BBC managers but was not told to contact the police.

Ms Suleaman told the court that Mr Hamid was keen to appear in the programme. She said: “He was so up for it. We took the decision that paintballing would be a fun way of introducing him.

“There are many, many British Muslims that I know who for the past 15 or 20 years have been going paintballing. It’s a harmless enough activity. I don’t think there is any suggestion, or ever has been, that it’s a terrorist