Reuel Marc Gerecht On The Bombing & Death Of CIA Operatives In Afghanistan

Al Qaeda's intelligence operations are far more sophisticated and of a much better quality than anyone could have guessed.

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'Pressuring Israel, While Wooing Iran'

To my mind, John Bolton is the smartest, most astute foreign policy commentator. His recent article in the NY Post reminds those who forgot.

All the other regional problems would still exist even if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got his fondest wish and Israel disappeared from the map: Iran's nuclear-weapons program, its role as the world's central banker for terrorism, the Sunni-Shiite conflict within Islam, Sunni terrorist groups like al Qaeda and other regional ethnic, national and political animosities would continue as threats and risks for decades to come.

Instead, the US focus should be on Iran and the manifold threats it poses to Israel, to Arab states friendly to Washington and to the United States itself - but that is not to be.

President Obama argues that he will deal comprehensively with the entire region. Rhetoric is certainly his specialty, but in the Middle East rhetoric only lasts so long. Performance is the real measure - and the administration's performance to date points in only one direction: pressuring Israel while wooing Iran.

In this article, Bolton points out the obvious: Obama & Europe pressure Israel because they are the most reasonable party in this debate. I mean, they could try and put the screws to Hamas & Hezbollah, but those guys only respond to one type of pressure--the type of pressure they then artfully manipulate to make themselves appear to be the injured party (read: placing military/missile installations under & near schools & hospitals; wait for Israel to do something about it; cry "civilian massacre" and "humanitarian crisis"; watch as the liberal mainstream media & useful idiots in the US & Europe dutifully repeat this manufactured & farcical reality).

The other point I want to draw out is this: Just because the aggressor repeats their rationale for wanting to exterminate a country lots and lots of times does not make what they say true. Whatever their imagined insult emanating from the existence of Israel, rest assured that this is pure pretext.

That's not to say that the average Arab-on-the-street doesn't believe it to be so--in fact, I know they do--their mind-slave-masters in control of Iran, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc., count on it.

So long as these grievance groups (they operate from basically the same public relations play book as Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson--only with violence added to the mix) can keep the focus on Israel, the United States, & (insert latest conspiracy involving Western powers), the oppressed populace will continue to ignore the fact that their "leaders" pocket all the "aid" (see Yasser Arafat) that comes from the West they are supposed to hate so much. Meanwhile, for them, everything remains the same--no peace, no prosperity, no democracy, no nothing.

These conflicts and imagined grievances are not for the benefit of the average Palestinian, they are to keep tyrants in charge and money in their pockets.

Want to know why there's no peace in the Middle East?

Ask yourself: Who has the most to lose were peace to break out between Israel and her neighbors?

Now you know why.


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Close Guantanamo, Release Terrorists For 'Rehabilitation,' Reap Consequences (UPDATED)

Did you think President Bush was keeping these guys in Gitmo for fun?

Maybe to jab Democrats in the eye?

Just because he could?

Rehabbed terrorist continues being terrorist, bombs Americans.

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order that President Barack Obama signed that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

The lesson, as always: These guys aren't plain old criminals.

You can't treat them as such.

25 January 12:08am BST: And they come out of rehabilitation angrier and more determined than ever to be terrorists, rather than peace-loving, productive, members of society.

Two men released from the US "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a jihadist website, the SITE monitoring service reported.

One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official told AFP.

Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an Al-Qaeda field commander. SITE later said he was prisoner No. 333.

Honestly, I don't think Obama really intends to close Gitmo--that is to say, shut down the Bush administration's "enemy combatants" designation and treat these guys as regular criminals.

I don't think he's dumb enough to just ship them off to Jack Murtha's local minimum security prison. So far, what he's said and done (nothing, yet) on that front has been done to placate the angry lefties.


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And They Say Conservatives Are International Narcissists

In Bill Kristol's latest column about the Mumbai attacks, he takes University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum to task

Consider first an op-ed article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times by Martha Nussbaum, a well-known professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. The article was headlined “Terrorism in India has many faces.” But one face that Nussbaum fails to mention specifically is that of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic terror group originating in Pakistan that seems to have been centrally involved in the attack on Mumbai.

This is because Nussbaum’s main concern is not explaining or curbing Islamic terror. Rather, she writes that “if, as now seems likely, last week’s terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that’s more bad news for India’s minority Muslim population.” She deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”

So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?

(emphasis added)

Lots of pundits want to paint last week's attacks as something other than what they really were: Terrorist attacks by "a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, 'backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.'"

They have essentially the same "maximalist" aims as their friends in al-Qaeda--elimination of Islam's "existential" enemies (the United States, UK, India, Israel) and establishment of a global caliphate.

The motivation for these attacks was no more complicated than that.

It's as nose as the Anne on plain's face.

(h/t Scott L.)


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Inconvenient Questions

A question posed in the comments section of a recent blog by our beloved critic and friend of this blog, Raisin, prompted us to write a series of questions that ended up far larger than we intended. These, then, are a series of inconvenient questions we, in turn, would like to pose to the liberal-left (or angry left or loony left, whatever), netroots, Democrats in Congress and certain Republican Senators. You'll excuse us if they are (mostly) rhetorical.

We start, therefore, with Raisin's question.

Must we or anyone watch every film Moore produces? Who is Michael Moore that every American should watch and value his opinion? Does anyone believe that the lies of earlier films give this one or any future film any degree of credibility whatsoever? Do you really believe that 9/11 was a Bush/CIA/Mossad/Oil conspiracy to get us into a shooting war? Do you really believe that Bush lied about intelligence to get us to go to war? And this, despite the overwhelming amount of intelligence supporting his decision? And the overwhelming support of everyone in Congress (including the dems)? And the overwhelming popular support?

Should we listen to Moore or anyone else just because he hates President Bush and opposes the current war? Is that enough? Is our credibility standard so low? Is it possible that we are so disenchanted with the current administration that we will listen to anyone who opposes Bush? Is this why the loony left likes Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez or believes Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad, simply because they too hate George W. Bush?

Has the Patriot Act denied you any freedoms or infringed on your privacy? Have you or anyone you know lost any of their civil rights? Has the economic boom of the last 4 years put you in a tighter financial spot than you were in under Clinton? Have Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" made you poorer? Has free trade cost you your job?

So, you didn't think we should have gone to war, do you think leaving now will erase that "mistake?" Do you really think things will get better? That Al-Qaeda wont thrive in the vacuum or launch new terror attacks from its new hom in Iraq? Or Iran? Or that Shiites wont kill Sunnis and Sunnis kill Shiites? Or that the Kurds wont declare independence and cause war with another American ally, Turkey? In sum, do you honestly believe that American withdrawal wont result in complete regional chaos?

Do you really believe that the loss of life in Iraq since the war began will be anywhere near the loss of life if American troops withdraw prematurely? Have you learned nothing from America's history of retreat in Vietnam, Beirut, or Somalia? Do you think that the EU or the UN will help guarantee world peace and safety--like they did in Rwanda (oh wait, bad example) or finally did in the former Yugoslavia (oh wait, that was largely the US that solved that "european" problem) after more than 250,000 people had been killed or they are now doing in Darfur? For those of you who think we should be doing more in Darfur: how can you ignore the logic of your argument in favor of intervening in Darfur while also arguing for withdrawal in Iraq? Aren't we even more responsible to the people of Iraq?

Do you really believe that European hate of America is anything new, that it started with George W. Bush? Are you familiar with the "peace" movement of the '70's and '80's? Or perhaps the opposition to Reagan's attempts to win the Cold War? Or, to take another tack and put you in their shoes, if you owed your WWI and WWII liberation (and subsequent loss of power and prestige) and winning of the Cold War and the brunt of fighting Islamofascism to another country and people, wouldn't your initial gratitude also turn into resentment?


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Dennis Miller on Harry Reid 6/10/07

Like hip hop, we were introduced to Dennis Miller and his "rants" by our friend Michael J Mouncer. We listened to Miller with our beloved debate coach, AP government teacher and committed liberal, Chuck Hammaker-Teals. As the lone conservative in that triumvirate, we took a lot of flak for a lot of things. This was back when Bill Clinton's "peccadillos" were all the rage, you know, back when al-Qaeda was plotting 9/11 and America's demise.

Counting Miller, we guess that triumvirate was really a fearsome foursome. And like many other former libs, Miller woke up to reality in the post-9/11 world and joined the forces of liberty, justice, and the American way. All three (Hammaker-Teals, Mouncer, Miller (in spirit)) remain friends. We're glad the political numbers have evened out a bit since 1999.

Hey MJ, still a big Miller fan?

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