Convicted terrorist Ilych Ramirez Sanchez, known world-wide as “Carlos the Jackal,” though serving a life sentence, was permitted by the enlightened government of France to give an interview in 2004 broadcast by French M6 television.

In that interview, Sanchez argued that his crimes were justified and that there were no innocent victims of terrorism. He also expressed satisfaction over the September 11 attacks in the United States and allegedly laughed that “the Great Satan got it up the arse.”

French prosecutors sought a fine of E20,000 ($34,022) for these remarks. But, at the end of the judicial proceedings, French courts only fined him E5000 ($8505), finding that his arguing that terrorism was justified did constitute a crime under French law, but his expressions of pleasure at the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States represented only a personal reaction, and were not justiciable.

Guardian – Telegraph (Australia) – Reuters

The Telegraph reports:

A senior lieutenant to Osama bin Laden has told US interrogators that the al-Qa’eda leader’s big mouth was a security liability.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also complained that the schemes bin Laden approved lacked destructive ambition….

..Mohammed, held in American custody at an unknown location since his capture in Pakistan three years ago, portrays himself as a brilliant terrorist manager.

Throughout the discussion, he is almost contemptuous of the wealthy bin Laden, who held the purse strings.

According to Mohammed, bin Laden lacked inspiration and vision. The Saudi failed to understand the basic security requirements of terrorist plots, such as keeping silent about impending attacks. Mohammed cites bin Laden’s decision to inform a group of visitors to his Afghan headquarters that he was about to launch a major attack on American interests.

Then he told trainee terrorists at the al-Farooq training camp “to pray for the success of a major operation involving 20 martyrs”.

Mohammed and a fellow terrorist manager, Mohammed Atef, who was later killed in an American air attack, were so concerned that they asked bin Laden to shut up.

The men “were concerned about this lack of discretion and urged bin Laden not to make additional comments about the plot”.

Published in the Philadelhia Daily News, from John A. Lucas, a lawyer in Knoxville, Tenn., who is a West Point graduate and was an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam, where he earned four Bronze Stars.

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Hat tip to Brylun at YARGB.

Wretchard also puts the situation right now into its true perspective.

..look at the picture that is usually trumpeted in the popular press twenty four hours a day, which normally consists of the same stories — ‘today two American soldiers died, bring the number of deaths to’ or ‘newly discovered memos show that in the days leading up to the war’ or ‘defects in body armor have shown that’ — with variations for dates. It is almost intentionally repetitive, designed to convey a narrative that has no sense; no beginning; no end…

..Zarqawi understood that he would get nowhere trying to fight the USA, especially when the new Iraqi Army came on line. He knew that if he was to win he had to play a game where the odds were more in his favor. But Jill Carroll and the MSM pretend not to understand that the Sunni insurgency has lost the campaign. They think Zarqawi is still playing the same old game. The game he gave up. So they continue to say things like: “I think it makes it very clear, it makes very clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones who will win in the end in this war, I think it makes very clear that even with thousands of troops and airplanes and tanks and guns that that doesn’t mean anything here on the ground in Iraq as it shows over time, maybe how many months over time or however (sic) months are left in the occupation that it’s pretty clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones that will have the victory left at the end of the day.”

Does anyone actually think that the Mujahedeen (Sunni insurgency) is going to be able to expel the US Armed Forces and reimpose their former dominion over the Kurds and the Shi’as? No? but people say it all the time though they don’t stop to think what it means. Jill Carroll apparently believes it….

..A realistic assessment should include what has already been gained and what is left to gain. Some people think the Belmont Club is guilty of unwonted optimism simply because it is willing to accept what Zarqawi has practically admitted: that the Sunni insurgency is militarily beaten — and that the struggle for the political outcome is now underway. And some readers may believe that I’ve gone all “gloomy” because I think the political outcome still hangs in the balance. But that is nothing more than stating a fact. Yet the essential difference is this: it’s in context. Those who have done some rock climbing know that while it is important to grope for the next handhold along the line of climb it is equally important to remember the footholds you have already won. Forget where you are standing and you are lost. Unfortunately, much of the regular media coverage is almost designed to conceal where where we are standing and where we have to go. There is no context, as Bill Roggio once put it on a television interview. For most casual listeners of the news the US is trapped in a featureless and starchy soup, with no beginning or end. The War on Terror becomes portrayed as a shapeless shroud from which it is imperative to escape at all costs.

And that’s sad because as Baron von Richthofen said, “Those who are afraid to take the next step will have wasted their entire previous journey.”

Victor Davis Hansen casually refutes everything passing for received wisdom about the Iraq war in the cultural echo-chamber of the liberal elite.

Opponents of the war in Iraq, both original critics and the mea culpa recent converts, have made eight assumptions. The first six are wrong, the last two still unsettled.

1. Saddam was never connected to al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11.

2. There was no real threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

3. The United Nations and our allies were justifiably opposed on principle to the invasion.

4. A small cabal of neoconservative (and mostly Jewish) intellectuals bullied the administration into a war that served Israel’s interest more than our own.

5. Saddam could not be easily deposed, or at least he could not be successfully replaced with a democratic government.

6. The architects of this war and the subsequent occupation are mostly inept (“dangerously incompetent”) — and are exposed daily as clueless by a professional cadre of disinterested journalists.

7. In realist terms, the benefits to be gained from the war will never justify the costs incurred.

8. We cannot win.

In the cultural echo-chamber of the liberal establishment, the justification for the US invasion of Iraq has been thoroughly exploded, its results labeled and inventoried in the lumber room of disaster, and a suitable location for the headmount of George W. Bush’s presidency selected on the wall above the foreign policy pundits’ bar.

The president’s poll numbers are decidedy unattractive, and Republican candidates are approaching the 2006 elections with the forlorn air of Emperor Valens’ legions advancing to meet the Gothic cavalry at Adrianople.

One of the highlights of last Sunday’s Times was Paul Berman‘s oleaginous review of Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads, a coat-reversal-cum-grovel appearing in public with a dust jacket.

It looks so much better to place one’s moment of conversion at a period in the past when the fortunes of the side one is rejoining did not appear quite so propitious as they do at present, and Fukuyama takes care to supply a story of his gasping aloud at the deluded optimism of the Neoconservative company he found himself in at a speech delivered by Charles Krauthammer in 2004.

Unfortunately for Fukuyama, Krauthammer reads the Sunday Times Book Review, and is only too eager to decline the role of strawman and debunk Fukuyama’s convenient account of feckless and provocative Neocon bragging.

It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as “a virtually unqualified success.” He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world’s most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.

One can only advise members of the liberal foreign policy establishment to listen very carefully at all their upcoming speeches over the next few years. You never know, the tide may turn in favor of the Bush Administration, and the United States, and you might hear Francis Fukuyama gasping again.

There is a regular Intel source who publishes on Free Republic as “Fedora.” Fedora’s latest offering is a partial translation of one of the captured Iraqi documents, which amusingly testifies to the Baathist regime’s recognition of CNN as a sympathetic venue for the distribution of false information injurious to the US-led Coalition cause. Fedora writes:

In this Iraqi document ISGQ 2004-00224003 dated February 7 2001, there was a discussion in upper echelon of the Iraqi intelligence about mass graves in Southern Iraq and how to shift the blame to the Coalition forces and make it look like these mass graves as the results massacres committed by the Coalition forces back in 1991 during Desert Storm Operation. What is also interesting about this document is that it mentions how to give the priority of covering the story to CNN so it will have an effect on the international arena as the documents says.

I did a partial translation of the document highlight the statement related to CNN in bold letters in the body of the translation. The rest of this 3 pages document that I did not translate will go into further deception on how to make big military funerals for the people in the mass graves though out all the Iraq provinces and how high level state officials will participate in these funerals.

Beginning of the Partial Translation

The Republic of Iraq

The Intelligence Apparatus

Date: 7/2/2001

No 1687

In the Name of God the Merciful the Most Compassionate

Secret

To the respectful Mr. Director of the Fourth Directory

Your letter secret and immediate numbered B 264 on 2/4/2001

1. No information is available to us about the Mass Graves in the Southern Region.

2.We see to achieve the observation the following matters:

A. Inspect the graves to confirm the existence of Nuclear Radiations.

B. Were they buried alive or their death was by suffocation.

C. Are they military personnel or civilians.

D. Are there tombstones that carry the names of the martyrs

E. Identify accurate marks and proofs of the graves and the possibility to reach it quickly and identify it.

3. We do not agree that the declaration about it through a direct Iraqi media in the first stage at least and not to cause public and party reaction so that the subject will take as a priority an international interest, and we should work on the following direction during this stage:

A. Leak the news through reliable sources.. News agencies or Satellite stations.. and that there is confusion, and indications from the members of the Coalition forces about the existence of mass graves civilians and military personnel in the South of Iraq.

B. The attempt to search for soldiers from the Coalition forces in a serious way to mention these truth through the agencies.

(1-3)

C. Ask some of the friendly countries with good technology to find these graves and for sure it will be asked from some news agencies in these countries to humanly participate in this effort and in case it is discovered there will be media reactions internationally and foreign and this media must be given a big space to repeat it and leak it to take its natural form of influence on the countries that made this bad deed and give it to the international general opinion.

D. Not to dig these grave by the Iraqi side… and it is possible to make a dialogue with the CNN channel to give them a priority on this subject to have an influence over the international arena and it will be accepted more than the Iraqi media.

End of Partial Translation

Alex Nunez details a sudden outbreak of MSM introspection:

Three years’ worth of negative stories from Iraq, filed without even a cursory attempt to show balance, have finally come back to haunt the MSM. The media people see this, and that’s why they’re trying to address the matter now by talking about the “perception” of bias on their part. That they’re talking about it at all shows just how worried they are.

The narcissists in the elite media are coming to realize, finally, that the average American no longer sees them as credible providers of information, and they can’t handle it. After all, what good are their monolithic soapboxes if people simply tune out what they’re saying from them?

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Hat tip to PJM.

Captured along with three other Italians working in Iraq as private security guards, then murdered by terrorists in April of 2004, Fabrizio Quattrocchi ruined the video his executioners were recording. Instead of allowing himself to be put to death cowering like a sheep, Quattrocchi pulled the hood from his face, faced the video camera, and said defiantly: Adesso (or ora) vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano! [Now I will show you how an Italian dies!].

He was shot in the back of the neck, but Al Jazeera never broadcast the video, claiming hypocritically that it was “too gruesome.” His fellow hostages were liberated by US forces.

Fabrizio Quattrocchi behaved in reality the way we only expect to see human beings today behave on stage, in plays like Lion in Winter:

Richard: He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.

Geoffrey: Why, you chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.

Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

On March 20, 2006, Fabrizio Quattrochi was awarded posthumously the Medaglia d’Oro al Valor Civile [Gold Medal for Valor by a Civilian] by the Italian Govenment.
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Hat tip to Winds of Change via Pajamas Media.

Harmee Sooden, Jim Loney, Norman Kember

The “Christian Peacemakers,” held captive since last November, rescued yesterday by Coalition forces, have declined to provide information on their captors, reports the Telegraph.

The three peace activists freed by an SAS-led coalition force after being held hostage in Iraq for four months refused to co-operate fully with an intelligence unit sent to debrief them, a security source claimed yesterday.

The claim has infuriated those searching for other hostages.

Neither the men nor the Canadian group that sent them to Iraq have thanked the people who saved them in any of their public statements.

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The moonbats were apparently actually kidnapped by criminals, hoping to obtain a ransom, rather than by politically motivated insurgents.

It emerged that about 50 soldiers, led by the SAS, including men from 1 Bn the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, as well as American and Canadian special forces, entered the kidnap building at dawn.

A deal had been struck with a man detained the previous night who was one of the leaders of the kidnappers. He was allowed a telephone call to warn his henchmen to leave the kidnap house. When the troops moved in and found the prisoners alive, they also let him go as promised.

In the course of discussing the likeliness of an attack on US soil involving WMD in years to come, J.R. Dunn proposes reliance in emergencies on ordinary people, as the Swiss already do, but recognizes that the direction of intellectual fashion opposes such a policy.

One of the few heartening things about 9/11 was watching people appear from all across the country to aid and assist the city of New York. Firemen, policemen, and ordinary people got into their cars and drove sometimes thousands of miles, simply to lend a hand. That is the response we’d be looking to harness. There is nothing more American than this, and the fact that no effort has been made to take advantage of it is difficult to fathom. Consider what the Katrina farce would have been like with such an organization in place. (A 4th-Generation Warfare enthusiast would call this a “network-centric solution”, by the way; which is fine.)

Of course, it won’t happen. It is straightforward, it’s workable, and it utilizes the American traditions of competence, community, and initiative. But it’s also against the spirit of the age, the rebirth of Big Government, the drift toward centralization and bureaucracy. In this paradigm, the U.S. citizenry is viewed not as a resource, as a reservoir of talent, ability, and good will, but as part of the problem, to be cajoled, hoodwinked, and manipulated into doing what the bureaucrats think is necessary. The results can be seen in Louisiana.

For the foreseeable future, we’ll be stuck with organizations that respond to disasters by sending truckloads of ice from one end of the country to the other. Perhaps at some point such an idea will be considered, after the monster bureaucracies have fumbled the ball another four or five times.

J.R. Dunn concludes pessimistically a must-read, and highly intelligent, article at the American Thinker:

The first point to understand concerning future Jihadi plans for the U.S. is that the Bush Doctrine is dead, insofar as it involves preemption of terrorist threats. It will remain in formal effect for the balance of Bush’s second term, and may be activated in a campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. But when George W. Bush leaves office, it will be a dead letter. Politics no longer ends at the water’s edge, and relentless attacks by the political opposition, along with unbridled media criticism, have rendered the concept radioactive. No candidate of either party will dare lay claim to it after the current administration leaves office.

The second point is that most of the defensive programs put into place following 9/11 are also under threat. Many of them, including the Patriot Act, telecommunications surveillance, and the domestic nuclear-detection program, will be abandoned by a new administration, and the rest will be emasculated.

That is all the opening that the Jihadis will need.

It’s necessary to point out — it never seems to arise in public debate – that the U.S. has been safe for the past five years solely because of active security efforts. There is no other reason — not laziness on the part of the Jihadis, not the bravery of New York Times reporters, not the guardianship of the UN. American efforts have been successful both overseas in disrupting Jihadi plans at the source (it’s difficult to put a bomb together when you’re being chased by a Predator drone) and here in the United States. Some of the stories — the Lackawanna, Portland, and Lodi cells, “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, and the Republican convention bombers, are known to the public, and some of us have seen things that strongly suggest that others have been picked up in secret. Jihadi groups in the U.S. have either been broken up, forced underground, or have fled the country completely.

Yet at the same time, every security program introduced during the period was greeted with protest in the media, in Congress, and among the intelligentsia….