UPI is publishing a puzzling report alleging that the 43 year old German archaeologist recently kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq is really a German Intelligence agent:

WASHINGTON — Susanne Osthoff, the German archaeologist kidnapped by Iraqi gunmen on November 25 and released before Christmas was connected with her country’s intelligence service, the BND, and had helped arrange a meeting with a top member of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, possibly Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi himself, according to well informed German sources.

The sources on January 7 confirmed German press reports that the 43-year-old woman had worked for the BND in Iraq on a freelance basis, and had for some time even stayed in a German intelligence safe house in Baghdad.

A convert to Islam and a fluent Arabic speaker, Osthoff had lived in Iraq for over a decade, and was at one time married to an Iraqi.

Archeology is a classic intelligence cover: T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) posed as an archeologist in the Middle East in the early part of the last century. But archeology is Osthoff’s real profession. One Washington-based German source said Osthoff had been working on arranging a rendezvous with an Al Qaeda member on behalf of a German intelligence agent in Iraq.

Germany is believed to have paid a ransom for Osthoff’s release, consisting, at least in part, of the release of the Hizbullah terrorist Mohammed Ali Hamadi, who murdered US Navy diver Robert Dean Strethem in 1985.

Upon her release, Osthoff gave a peculiar and incoherent interview on German public television, dressed in a black Islamic head covering concealing everything but her eyes, in which she expressed sympathy for her kidnappers and asserted that she had been well-treated.

Ralph Peters, in the New York Post, tells democrats and their MSM allies promoting the ersatz NSA scandal:

Stop lying. Show us the victims.

Name one honest citizen who has been targeted by our intelligence system. Name one innocent man or woman whose life has been destroyed. Come on, Nancy. Give it up, Howard. Name just one.

Can’t do it? OK. Let’s dispense with the partisan rhetoric and reach for the facts:

Has a single reader of this column suffered personally from our government’s efforts to defend us against terrorists? Have any of your relatives or even your remotest acquaintances felt our intel system intrude into their lives?

That’s what I always ask the group-think lefties. Not one has ever been able to answer “Yes.”

The same big-lie politicians attacking the president’s efforts to uncover plots against America by monitoring terrorist communications will be the first to shriek that the War on Terror has failed when we’re attacked again.

They want it both ways: Drop our defenses, then blame Bush when terrorists strike

Primary Colors author, Joe Klein, writing in Time, predicts that democrats will inevitably pay the price for their partisan games-playing on issues of National Security:

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, engaged in a small but cheesy bit of deception last week. She released a letter, which quickly found its way to the front page of the New York Times, that she had written on Oct. 11, 2001, to then National Security Agency director General Michael V. Hayden. In it she expressed concern that Hayden, who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about the steps he was taking to track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, was not acting with “specific presidential authorization.”

The release of Pelosi’s letter last week and the subsequent Times story (“Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show”) left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn’t exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, “Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it’s all fruit.”

A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are “fruit,” and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent…

It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.

There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

…liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo’s family in the right-to-die case last year.

But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.

The Mirror is reporting on warning information being distributed in British military camps in Iraq:

AL-QAEDA is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to documents revealed to the Sunday Mirror.

Terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their “kill rate” from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe.

Under the heading “HIV/Hepatitis” the document states: “There is evidence that terrorists might be deliberately recruiting volunteers with diseases that are spread by blood transference.”

Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered fragments from a suicide bomber could penetrate the skin of a victim 50 metres away and infect them.

Stephen F. Hayes in the Weekly Standard reveals that a treasure trove of up-to-now unreleased captured Iraqi documents and photographs provide clear refutation of one cornerstone position of critics of the US invasion — the belief that the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein would never work with radical Islamist organizations:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis…

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million “exploitable items” have been thoroughly examined. That’s 2.5 percent.

Apparently, opinions on releasing the material were fiercely divided within Congress and the Bush Administration. Many were eager to release nearly all of the massive collection of information, but some influential officials of the Defense Department, having been burned before, feared that the

mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. “There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to ‘prove’ that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”

He probably already told the New York Times, and now he wants to tell Arlen Spector and a room full of salivating democrats all about it. Chances are this is a tactic of desperation, a final gesture expressing the futile hope that Congress is going to save him from being prosecuted for breaking the law and gravely injuring National Security. The Washington Times reports:

A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower (sic – should be: “traitor”) who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

“I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

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And here’s the supposedly conservative Washington Times in lockstep with the rest of the MSM, calling this character a “whistleblower” instead of calling him leaker and a traitor.

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RussTice 1

RussTice 2

Russ Tice 3

Russ Tice Letters to Congressional Intelligence Committees

National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

Sibel Edmonds

Liberty Coalition

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AJStrata links MacRanger, who suggests an explanation for the behavior which led to Tice being fired:

this Tice guy was harassing this poor woman. What set him off is a mystery. But I bet you she either showed him up once and embarrassed the hell out of him, or he had some ‘feelings’ for her and was not happy when he was rebuffed – most likely in an embarrassing way.

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Tom Maguire, meanwhile, has also been covering all this.

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Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Mark Steyn, in the course of a New Criterion essay on Der Demographic Untergang das Abendslandes, mentions in passing:

one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as “al-Kanadi.” Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda—plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada’s principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they’re on the wrong side (if you’ll forgive me being judgmental) but no can argue that they aren’t in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shoot-out with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren’t doing our bit in this war!

In the course of the fatal shoot-out of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn’t fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government healthcare. “I’m Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights,” declared the widow Khadr. “I’m demanding my rights.”

As they always say, treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr’s death it seems clear that not only was he providing “aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies” but that he was, in fact, the Queen’s enemy. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment, and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr’s claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to “diversity.” Asked about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, “I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.”

That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick “home team” or “enemy,” according to taste. The Canadian Prime Minister is a typical late-stage western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that’s the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife’s got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

The Telegraph reports:

Gazing through the telescopic sight of his M24 rifle, Staff Sgt Jim Gilliland, leader of Shadow sniper team, fixed his eye on the Iraqi insurgent who had just killed an American soldier.

His quarry stood nonchalantly in the fourth-floor bay window of a hospital in battle-torn Ramadi, still clasping a long-barrelled Kalashnikov. Instinctively allowing for wind speed and bullet drop, Shadow’s commander aimed 12 feet high.

A single shot hit the Iraqi in the chest and killed him instantly. It had been fired from a range of 1,250 meters (1367 yards), well beyond the capacity of the powerful Leupold sight, accurate to 1,000 metres.

“I believe it is the longest confirmed kill in Iraq with a 7.62mm rifle,” said Staff Sgt Gilliland, 28, who hunted squirrels in Double Springs, Alabama from the age of five before progressing to deer – and then people.

“He was visible only from the waist up. It was a one in a million shot. I could probably shoot a whole box of ammunition and never hit him again.”

Later that day, Staff Sgt Gilliland found out that the dead soldier was Staff Sgt Jason Benford, 30, a good friend.

The insurgent was one of between 55 and 65 he estimates that he has shot dead in less than five months, putting him within striking distance of sniper legends such as Carlos Hathcock, who recorded 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam.

M24 Rifle manufactured by Remington.

Leupold scopes.

Carlos Hathcock.
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Isn’t it ironic that the British Telegraph is covering this remarkable feat of American arms, and the American so-called “newspaper of record” is too busy betraying its country to cover such a story?

ShrinkWrapped nails it.

It seems that almost every day the New York Times prints another story that is destructive to our war effort and threatens to damage its (the Times’s) swiftly declining, now almost negligible, credibility. Today’s example is a story, Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda, in which the reporters reveal that the United States, as part of our war effort in Iraq, used the traditional means of money to get opinion leaders in the Iraqi Sunni communities to come over to our side. This is not really news, but the story is prominently featured on the front page of the Times, it appears, primarily because it can damage our war effort, and endanger people who are working with the American forces in Iraq. If the story had been leaked by a foreign national spying on the United States, no one would question whether or not they deserve, at the least, a long jail term, but since the information is printed in the pages of the New York Times, we are all supposed to ignore the harm it can do and let it slide.

This is not an important story in the greater scheme 0f things. The Times campaign of leaks and innuendo which seems to have the goal of disarming the United States in a global (partly informational) war against Islamic fascists who want nothing more than to kill large numbers of infidels and destroy our country has been ongoing for months, perhaps years, and there have been many more dangerous stories, like the leaks about the NSA program that the Times has recently been bruiting about. No, the issue with this story is not its power to harm our interests, though it can and will, but the fact that it is such a minor story of so little import, without even a patina of justification based on the supposed concerns over civil liberties that so much of the left uses to legitimize their opposition to American self-defense. It begs the question: why would the Times print such a minor story on the front page at such a time?

The primary job of the editors of the New York Times, indeed, of any news organization, is deciding which stories among the plethora of news they collect everyday, deserves to be printed. Of even greater import, which stories should be on the front page. These are the stories that the derivative news organizations all the way down the line to the local news casts and local papers, will feature as their important news stories of the day. When the Washington Post and the Times printed stories about the NSA program to monitor communications, they could justify their breaches of national security by believing that civil liberties concerns trump national security concerns, and that any risk they might run in printing the stories was worth the benefit that would accrue from the American public knowing what was being done in their name. So far, the American public doesn’t buy their justification, if the polls are accurate, but at least they can claim to be standing on principle in printing the stories.

A story about using the time honored approach of bribing tribal leaders and religious leaders to support our policies, in a part of the world where this has been standard operating procedure for centuries, is a non-story, which can only harm our war effort and can in no way be justified by high minded rationalizations of supporting our civil liberties. This is anti-war, anti-American, behavior, and as such, adds to a mounting body of evidence that the Times has lost its way.

We missed this earlier. Gateway Pundit assembles an interesting collection of charts and data.

Hat tip to Dr. Sanity’s Canival of Insanities.

On October 26th, editorial cartoonist Mike Lukovich published the above cartoon in the Atlanta Constitution. Danielle Ansley, a 17 year old 11th grade high school student, produced the following reply, which Lukovich and the Constitution had class enough to publish yesterday.

Today’s latest Washington Post leak, brought to you again by Dana Priest, confidante of choice to Pouting Spooks everywhere, amusingly fails to provide a definition for GST, the super-secret program which is the topic of the leak du jour.

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

The bed-wetting segment of the Blogosphere is, as usual, shocked and outraged at further revelations of US inhumane treatment of terrorist latrunculi, the contemporary equivalent of the pirates, brigands, and outlaws, traditionally viewed in Western law, and conventionally treated by any lawful authority as hostes humani generis, “the common enemies of mankind.”

And they are fascinated by the riddle of the meaning of the mysterious initials.

Typical examples:

American conventional leftie profmarcus posts: bonus question: what does gst stand for…?

Sopping-wet Brit blogger WIIIAI complains the WaPo refers to this program as GST, but its crack reporters failed to crack the riddle of just what that might stand for.

Since the WaPo let them all down, I will suggest: “General Staff — Terrorism” or “General Services — Terrorism,” as opposed to “Get Serious (about) Terrorism,” as the language behind the initials, and note the interesting facet of the story, that for the first time in a very long while, one of our anonymous sources is behaving as if he thinks he might possibly have something to worry about if his disclosures proceeded too far beyond some particular point.