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Italy to expel 700 terr suspects
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Page 4: Opinion
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Europe
Mysterious Cyprus Plane Crash Similar to General Zia Crash
Googling to find any similar events to the Cyprus plane crash, I found precisely one, the crash that killed General Zia of Pakistan. In 1988 General Zia's plane flew out of a clear blue sky straight into the ground.

Vanity Fair ran an in depth article the next year and here is the interesting bit.

Having ruled out all the mechanical malfunctions that could cause a C-130 to fall from the sky in that manner, the American team left it to the Board to conclude "the only other possible cause of the accident is the occurrence of a criminal act or sabotage leading to the loss of control of the aircraft".

This conclusion was reinforced when an analysis of chemicals found in plane's wreckage, done by the laboratory of Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco in Washington, found foreign traces of pentaerythritol tertranitrate (PNET), a secondary high explosive commonly used by saboteurs as a detonator, as well as antimony and sulfur, which in the compound antimony sulfide is used in fuses to set off the device. Using these same chemicals, Pakistan ordinance experts reconstructed a low-level explosive detonator which could have been used to burst a flask the size of a soda can which, the Board suggested, probably contained an odorless poison gas that incapacitated the pilots.

But this was as far as the Board of Inquiry could go. It had not had autopsies done on the remains of the crew members to determine if they were poisoned. It acknowledged in its report that it lacked the expertise to investigate criminal acts. What was needed was criminal investigators and interrogators. It thus recommended that the task of finding the perpetrators by turned over to the competent agency, which meant, as one of the investigators explained to me, Pakistan's intelligence service--the ISI.

I also spoke to an American chemical warfare expert about poison gases that could have been used. He explained that Chemical agents capable of knocking a flight crew, while extremely difficult to obtain, are not beyond the reach of any intelligence service, or underground group with connections to one. He also pointed out that a gas capable on insidiously poisoning a whole flight crew (and leaving the pilot's fingers locked on the radio switch) had been used in neighboring Afghanistan. According to the State Department's special report 78 on "Chemical Warfare in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan," which he sent me, corpses of rebel Muejadeen guerrillas were found still holding their rifles in firing positions after being gassed. This showed that they had been the victims of "an extremely rapid acting lethal chemical that is not detectable by normal senses and that causes no outward physiological responses before death." This gas manufactured by the Soviet would have done the trick. But so would American manufactured "VX" nerve gas, according to a scientist at the U.S. Army chemical warfare center in Aberdeen, Maryland. "VX" is odorless, easily transportable in liquid form, and a soda-sized can full would be enough, when vaporized by a small explosion, and inhaled, to causes paralyzes and loss of speech within 30 seconds. According to him, the residue it would leave behind would be phosphorous. And, as it turned out, the chemical analyzes of debris from the cockpit showed heavy traces of phosphorous.
Posted by: phil_b || 08/16/2005 02:42 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  very interesting.
Posted by: 2b || 08/16/2005 8:08 Comments || Top||

#2  here's a new tidbit:
Coroner: 6 Alive When Greek Plane Crashed
NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2005
ATHENS, Greece - At least six of the 121 people aboard a Cypriot plane were alive when the aircraft crashed while on autopilot, a coroner said Monday, as authorities raided the airline's offices and struggled to explain the actions of the pilot and crew.

The results of the first six autopsies shed some light on the final minutes of Helios Airlines Flight ZU522, which crashed Sunday into a hillside in suburban Athens, killing all 115 passengers and six crew members. But they failed to answer all the questions.
Posted by: 2b || 08/16/2005 8:32 Comments || Top||

#3  oops. sorry. Don't know what happened there! link

Posted by: 2b || 08/16/2005 8:33 Comments || Top||

#4  There was some famous golfer's jet a few years ago that ran out of air and didn't respond and the windows were iced over and they either shot it down or debated it. This sounds like the same thing.
Posted by: rjschwarz || 08/16/2005 11:01 Comments || Top||

#5  That would be the 1999 crash of a Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart. In the Stewart crash, investigators concluded that crew members were incapacitated because they didn't obtain oxygen when the cabin lost pressure.
Posted by: Steve || 08/16/2005 11:18 Comments || Top||

#6  Didn't the latest crash indicate that some passengers were frozen and that the pilot and copilot were slumped over? Maybe I'm off here but it sounds similar.
Posted by: rjschwarz || 08/16/2005 13:03 Comments || Top||

#7  Latest coroner reports say that most passengers were still alive (read heart and lungs working) when the plane hit ground.

That would exclude frozen bodies. You can't have it both ways.

The SMS about the "freezing" were fake.
Posted by: True German Ally || 08/16/2005 13:28 Comments || Top||

#8  Update: Pilot 'alive when plane crashed'
Posted by: Rafael || 08/16/2005 14:39 Comments || Top||

#9  The Payne Stewart crash was sudden decompression. This was definitely not sudden decompression (despite the media speculation). Its either carbon monoxide in the AC or deliberate poisoning. I'll wager the authorities know already and the fact they haven't announced says its poisoning.
Posted by: phil_b || 08/16/2005 15:56 Comments || Top||

#10  I'm getting burned out with all the speculation. I think I will wait on National Geographic's "Moments from Disaster" episode to come out. If anybody can solve this disaster, its the "Big Bang" theorists at NG.
Posted by: Poison Reverse || 08/16/2005 16:08 Comments || Top||

#11  BTW, the media is reporting it will take 2 weeks to do the toxicology tests. That's complete BS. Testing for poisons (non-biological) should only take a few hours at most. The authorities will know by now, if they were poisoned and by what.
Posted by: phil_b || 08/16/2005 20:26 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
The 'Official' John 'Liveshot' Kerry Website
Local radio host Howie Carr has been ragging on Massachusetts' junior Senator for like 20 years, and there's his latest effort, nor does Senator Oldsmobile escape Howie's wrath.
Posted by: Raj || 08/16/2005 15:17 || Comments || Link || [4 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "Senator Oldsmobile" link has MOAM (Mother of All Meters.)
Posted by: Poison Reverse || 08/16/2005 16:28 Comments || Top||


I still fight oppression
Another non-idiotarian view from an assumed leftist.
The liberals who say I have deserted the left should ask themselves where they stand on Islamism

Nick Cohen

Looking back on how his generation covered up the crimes of communism in the 1930s, WH Auden explained that he and his friends weren't true communists but fellow travellers. At home they defended civil liberties and stood up for freedom of speech. Abroad, they tolerated atrocities precisely because they didn't impinge on them.
'Our great error,' said Auden, 'was not a false admiration for Russia but a snobbish feeling that nothing which happened in a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment could be of any importance: had any of the countries we knew personally, like France, Germany or Italy, the language of which we could speak and where we had personal friends, been one to have a successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc, we would have screamed our heads off.'

To speak of the 'Auden generation' is to perpetuate a myth of the Thirties. The majority of the population, including the majority of Labour supporters, never read an Auden poem or hitched a ride with communism. What is meant is the 'progressive' middle-class left: publishers, authors, academics, teachers, liberal journalists, the odd lawyer and odder advocate of various forms of alternative life styles. People like me, in short.
In their later years, most tried a defence which Auden was too honest, and too filled with disgust at his younger self, to advance. Our priority was fighting fascism, the excuse-making ran. We were faced with a psychopathic movement of the extreme right which was dripping in blood. It looks bad now that we went along with Stalin, but we were socialists and he called what he was doing socialism, and in any event we had other priorities.

Today's middle-class left is made up of the same types as 70 years ago. The faults of small-mindedness and self-righteousness and the virtues of instinctive suspicion of the British establishment and sympathy for the British underdog haven't changed either. What's new is that no one truly believes in socialism. When Tony Blair goes we will have the first Labour leadership election without a serious left-wing candidate. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine what a serious left-wing candidate would look like and what his or her programme might be.

I'm sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance? But his criticisms would have little impact. It's like a religion: the contradictions are obvious to outsiders but don't disturb the faithful. You believe when you're in its warm embrace. Alas, I'm out. Last week, after 44 years of regular church-going, the bell tolled, the book was closed and the candle was extinguished. I was excommunicated.

The officiating bishop was Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman and a friend of long-standing, who delivered his anathema in the Guardian. The immediate heresy was a piece I'd written about how difficult the courts made it to deport suspected Islamist terrorists. As I'd campaigned to protect asylum seekers in the past, Wilby used the article as damning evidence of 'a rightwards lurch'. The old bat didn't understand that genuine asylum seekers are the victims of the world's greatest criminals - four million fled Saddam Hussein - not criminals themselves.

Even if he'd grasped that the Mail was wrong and real refugees weren't villains, I doubt it would have made a difference. My mortal sin had been to question 'harshly the motives of the anti-war movement', and to that I had to plead guilty.

The least attractive characteristic of the middle-class left - one shared with the Thatcherites - is its refusal to accept that its opponents are sincere. The legacy of Marx and Freud allows it to dismiss criticisms as masks which hide corruption, class interests, racism, sexism - any motive can be implied except fundamental differences of principle. Wilby went through a long list of what could have motivated mine and similar 'betrayals'. Perhaps we became right wing as we got older. Perhaps we wanted to stick our snouts into the deep troughs of the Tory press. Perhaps taking out a mortgage committed us to the capitalist system or having children encouraged petit bourgeois individualism of the most anti-social kind. Generously in light of the above charge sheet, he plumped for the conclusion that our restless minds just got bored with the 'straitjacket' of left-wing thought. We left the slog of building a better world to the decent plodders.

Generous to me, and over-generous to allegedly left-wing thought. What he and a large part of the mainstream liberal-left don't and won't confront is that they have become the fellow travellers of the psychopathic far-right. Many emotions have been stirred by the grisly spectacle - anger, scorn and incredulity among them - but boredom, no, never boredom.

As in the 1930s, there's little doubt that few apart from George Galloway and others in the gruesome leadership of the anti-war movement were keen on saluting Saddam Hussein. The reason why one million people marched through London without one mounting a platform to express solidarity with the victims of fascism was that it never occurred to them that there were people in Iraq who shared their values.

It felt like nit-picking to point this out at the time. Wars are usually worth opposing, especially capricious wars advocated by a slippery Prime Minister in alliance with a repellent US President. But arguments have their own dynamic. If you start by refusing to look Baathism or Islamism in the face, the logic of blaming everything on Tony Blair and George W Bush pushes you into making ever more excuses for the extreme right.

Auden noticed a retreat from universal principles in the 1930s - communism was fine in 'semi-barbaric' Russia but would have been a screaming outrage in a civilised country. He should have been alive today. With no socialism to provide international solidarity, good motives of tolerance and respect for other cultures have had the unintended consequence of leading a large part of post-modern liberal opinion into the position of 19th-century imperialists. It is presumptuous and oppressive to suggest that other cultures want the liberties we take for granted, their argument runs. So it may be, but believe that and the upshot is that democracy, feminism and human rights become good for whites but not for browns and brown-skinned people who contradict you are the tools of the neo-conservatives.

On the other hand when confronted with a movement of contemporary imperialism - Islamism wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar - and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal to boot, they feel it is valid because it is against Western culture. It expresses its feelings in a regrettably brutal manner perhaps, but that can't hide its authenticity.

The result of this inversion of principles has been that liberals can't form alliances with the victims of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or Iraq any more than the Auden generation could form alliances with the victims of Stalinism.

This isn't simply about international relations. Who is going to help the victims of religious intolerance in Britain's immigrant communities? Not the Liberal Democrats, who have never once offered support to liberal and democrats in Iraq. Nor an anti-war left which prefers to embrace a Muslim Association of Britain and Yusuf al-Qaradawi who believe that Muslims who freely decide to change their religion or renounce religion should be executed. If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to suggest the same treatment for renegade Christians all hell would break loose. But as the bigotry comes from 'the other' there is silence.

Perhaps it will break soon. There always was far more disquiet on the left at this 'rightwards lurch' than the Guardian or Radio 4 admitted. If my emails are a guide, the London bombs have added a practical reason for breaking with the consensus: now they're trying to kill us. Even if people think that the Iraq war has made Britain a bigger target, they are still confronted with a fascistic cult of murder and self-murder which allows no compromise.

The thing to watch for with fellow travellers is what shocks them into pulling the emergency cord and jumping off the train. I know some will stay on to the terminus, and when the man with the rucksack explodes his bomb their dying words will be: 'It's not your fault. I blame Tony Blair.'

My advice to my former comrades is to struggle out of your straitjackets and get off at the next station. It would be good to see you on this side of the barrier.
Posted by: anonymous5089 || 08/16/2005 01:55 || Comments || Link || [4 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "communism was fine in 'semi-barbaric' Russia but would have been a screaming outrage in a civilised country. He should have been alive today." He has fixed his archaic Leftist politics. Pity he didn't fix his archaic language structure. Nitpicking aside, he gets it. I wonder how representative he is and what effect further atrocities unfolding will have.
Posted by: phil_b || 08/16/2005 8:43 Comments || Top||

#2  I also note that the world is divided into "left" and "right", with no mention of those who don't fit into that scheme. Ironically, those who embrace dichotomies as their world view have more in common with each other, than whatever the dichotomy is that they embrace. It could be described as a form of mental retardation, of either an intellectual inability to grasp "shades of grey", or the emotional unwillingness to do so. The extremists of this "polar world-view" also have a high incidence of schizophrenia and paranoia. Again, the actual division they embrace is almost unimportant: Moslem-Infidel; Leftist-Rightist; even the very exclusive dichotomies, such as "Us vs. Them", "our team vs. the other teams", "our tribe vs. not our tribe", "our ethnic group vs. their ethnic groups".
Posted by: Anonymoose || 08/16/2005 9:23 Comments || Top||

#3  too right, anonymoose.

I might be extreme right on refugees, Iraq and Islamism, but extreme left on nuclear power and nuclear waste.

And I might be in the middle on health care and education.

People aren't left or right about everything, they just make up their minds on issues according to the facts before them. I hate that dichotomous view, too.

Has anybody got a working link to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali rant on Islamism and Iraq? It was on LGF, but the link won't work. Great rant on how women will have LESS rights under then new Iraq constitution than under Saddam as they've let Islamic considerations taint it.

They have refused to state that men and women will have equal rights in the constitution.

That constitution is FUBAR. We should have insisted on some basic groundrules: separation of mosque and state, equal rights for woman and men being two of them.
Posted by: anon1 || 08/16/2005 12:49 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Deadly tale of incompetence
via Tim Blair

IT STILL SEEMS all so close.

Here, on Route 23, bathed in the August morning sun and only a short drive from Route 80 and the Willowbrook Mall, a roadside motel bears silent witness to a police bust that might have been. For a year before the 9/11 attacks, the Wayne Inn was home to Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaida mastermind behind the hijacking plot that killed almost 3,000 people.

In those horrific weeks after the attacks, the official story line was that U.S. counterterror officials had no idea who Atta was before that murderous plot unfolded - or where he was before 9/11. Only after the attacks could authorities track Atta's movements. Now that story seems to be false.

Federal officials confirmed last week that a year before the attacks, a top-secret military intelligence team was following Atta and three suspected terrorists who turned out to be hijackers. The intelligence operatives tried to sound an alarm but were rebuffed by government lawyers who feared possible legal complications of using military spying techniques to keep tabs on foreign visitors in the United States with legal visas even though they might be terrorists. A former member of the military intelligence team told me in an interview that it had enough data to raise suspicions. "But we were blocked from passing it to the FBI."

The connect-the-dots tracking by the team was so good that it even knew Atta conducted meetings with the three future hijackers. One of those meetings took place at the Wayne Inn. That's how close all this was - to us and to being solved, if only the information had been passed up the line to FBI agents or even to local cops.

This new piece of 9/11 history, revealed only last week by a Pennsylvania congressman and confirmed by two former members of the intelligence team, could turn out to be one of the most explosive revelations since the publication last summer of the 9/11 commission report. The information not only undermines key commission findings that Atta and others were undetected, but it again raises a question that continues to haunt the 9/11 tragedy:

Why is our government so incompetent?

To understand that question, it's important to understand how close counter-terror officials came to finding Mohammed Atta. And once you understand the closeness, you have to wonder how anyone could mess up so badly with information that was so tangible?

The story begins a year before the attacks. A top-secret team of Pentagon military counter-terror computer sleuths, who worked for a special operations commando group, was well into a project to monitor al-Qaida operations. The 11-person group called itself "Project Able Danger." Think of them as a super-secret Delta Force or SEAL team. But instead of guns, they relied on advanced math training as their key weapons. And instead of traditional spying methods or bust-down-the-door commando tactics, the Able Danger group booted up a set of high-speed, super-computers and collected vast amounts of data.

The technique is called "data mining." Total Information Awareness ring a bell? The Able Danger team swept together information from al-Qaida chat rooms, news accounts, Web sites and financial records. Then they connected the dots, comparing the information with visa applications by foreign tourists and other government records. From there, the computer sleuths noticed four names - Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

All four turned out to be hijackers. Atta and al-Shehhi took a room at the Wayne Inn. They rented a Wayne mail drop, too, and even went to Willowbrook Mall. Al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi took rooms at a motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack.

What is interesting about this information now is that a CIA team, working separately from the Able Danger Team, had set its sights on al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The two were already on a CIA terror watch list and still had managed to obtain U.S. visas. The CIA feared al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi might try to slip into the United States. But the CIA lost track of them after they left a terror meeting in Malaysia in early 2000 for Bangkok. Worse, the CIA waited until the summer of 2001 to tell the FBI that two suspected terrorists had visas to enter the United States - and might be here. The CIA may have lost track, but VISA didn't.

The story of the lack of cooperation between the CIA and FBI is well-known Thank you very much Jamie Gorelick! - and well-documented by the 9/11 commission. But the story is even more troublesome with the revelation that even before the CIA knew of suspected terrorists trying to enter the United States that the Able Danger team had its own set of information. Imagine what might have happened if Able Danger was cooperating with the CIA and the FBI.

On the phone last week, the former Able Team member I interviewed told a depressing story of that cooperation that never took place. His story, he says, tells us just how close U.S. officials could have come to breaking up the 9/11 plot before it unfolded. But there was one problem: The U.S. government did not want to hear what this sleuth and his 10 teammates had to say - before and even after the 9/11 plot.By mid-2000, the Able Danger team knew it had important information a bout a possible terrorist plot. Because of a peculiar series of computer links that went through Brooklyn, the team began referring to the four future hijackers as the "Brooklyn cell." Their movements and communications were raising too many suspicions.

The Able Danger sleuth, whose interview with me was arranged by the staff of Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., asked that his name not be revealed so he could maintain his top-secret counter-terror role. He emerged from the shadows of spying and intelligence analysis last week because he wanted to set the record straight.

One of his targets is the 9/11 commission. The commission's staff, he says, ignored him when he approached them on two occasions to spell out Able Danger's work. Another target are Pentagon lawyers. The sleuth says he and other Able Danger team members became so concerned during the summer of 2000 that they asked their superiors in the Pentagon's special operations command for permission to approach the FBI. Their superiors approached Pentagon legal experts. Those experts turned down the request.

Sticking to his partisan, Republican roots, Rep. Weldon singles out the Clinton administration for being too lax. He also blames the 9/11 commission for a possible coverup. The bipartisan 9/11 commission denies any coverup. But it also went out of its way to avoid pointing fingers at the Clinton or Bush administrations. The deeper question is whether this desire to avoid blame also led the commission to ignore important facts.

"They definitely blew it," Weldon said of the commission's failure to look into the Able Danger's work and the legal issues it raises. "The question is whether it was deliberate." We may never know. The commission says it may be a victim of the very same problem it sought to expose - that there is not enough sharing of information among federal counterterror officials.

Perhaps just as alarming, even the Able Danger team understood its limits. When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred. Kudos to government and military lawyers. You let the 9/11 terrorists and Mullah Omar go when they were in the crosshairs. Interrogations are such a joke that Iraqi Baathists joke that they would pay 5000 Dinars a night to stay at Abu Graib. I hope you are insufferably proud of yourselves. Why? If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn't it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm? When I posed that question in my interview with the Able Danger team member, he fell silent. Listening on a speaker phone, a congressional staffer interrupted: "Have you ever seen what happens to whistleblowers?" Again, the Able Danger member had no answer.

Which brings us to this haunting question: Is silence a form of incompetence or it is just the way things are?
Posted by: ed || 08/16/2005 07:20 || Comments || Link || [3 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred."

"First, kill all the lawyers." --Henry IV, William Shakespeare
Posted by: The Angry Fliegerabwehrkanonen || 08/16/2005 7:54 Comments || Top||

#2  An earlier Able Danger article from Jack Kelly: Able Danger disabled
Posted by: ed || 08/16/2005 8:14 Comments || Top||

#3  "When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred."

There are times you need to have the guts to shortcircuit and go to a higher instance and/or to disobey orders. It was not by listening the advice of the ship's lawyer that Nelson won the battle of Copenhague.
Posted by: JFM || 08/16/2005 10:32 Comments || Top||

#4  Wayne Inn was home to Mohammed Atta

Wayne. The middle name and hotel of choice of America's finest mass murderers.
Posted by: Seafarious || 08/16/2005 11:06 Comments || Top||

#5  If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn't it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm?

Who would have listened? None of our elites were prepared to listen then, it took 9/11 to change everyone's mindset, including mine.

I think everyone is missing the larger point of Able Danger. If they were able to spot Atta and Co. before 9/11, I wonder who they have found since and if their capabilities and resources have grown? Finding the terrorist cells still seems to me to be the hardest part of counter-terrorism. It is encouraging that the super-geeks knew how to pull back the curtain even before 9/11 when few gave a damn. Just as the Alan Turing types broke open parts of the Enigma machine/systems before WWII with little bureacratic support and money, the super-geeks spotted the purposeful operational Jihadi needle in the haystack of daily human chaos on what seems to me a small budget. Who knows what they can do now. Well done to the geeks as far as I am concerned. Never mind running with the info. I want them concentrating on getting it. That remains the hard part. The rest of us sub-par intellects can handle busting the doors open. Just let them alone to see through the doors.
Posted by: Zpaz || 08/16/2005 13:26 Comments || Top||

#6  Part of the problem is data mining sounds like snakeoil. It's hard to convince people it actually works. I'm impressed they fingered Atta, but I'm not surprised they weren't taken seriously.
Posted by: phil_b || 08/16/2005 22:17 Comments || Top||


International-UN-NGOs
Will the "peace movement" recognize the true peacemakers?
Liberal blogger "The Bull Moose," who I usually cannot abide, says something quite profound. Slight EFL-ing to eliminate an embedded block quote and get to the punchline; emphasis added.

The Moose salutes the peace activists of the Israel Defense Forces.

There is much talk of peace in the world, but little action. That is why it is so significant when a state takes concrete steps to attempt to bring reconciliation. Israel is doing just that this week as her troops remove their fellow citizens from Gaza settlements.

The significance of this move are profound for the soldiers and their leader. . . .

Regardless of what you think about the Gaza pullout, it is a political and military risk for Sharon and the State of Israel.

Don't expect, however, for Sharon and Israel to get credit for this courageous move from the world's capitals or from their carping critics. They will only be satisfied when Israel completely succumbs to the demands of Islamic extremism. While tyranny and exploitation reign from North Korea to Syria to Saudia Arabia to the Sudan, it is always Israel who is the target of the ire of groups like the Mainstream Protestant divestment movement or even a grieving mother in Crawford.

Those on the left who lionize Cindy Sheehan should realize that they are promoting someone who apparently subscribes to the most odious notion that a cabal of Jews who were defending Israel's interests led us to war. While we can sympathize with her profound loss, progressives should reject her extremist arguments.

Not that they will.

There was once a time that the progressive movement championed Israel as a bastion of democracy in the tyrannical Middle East. That changed in the aftermath of the 67 war when Israel was victorious against the Arab armies that sought to eliminate her existence. Then the left turned their sympathies to the Palestinians who were never welcomed in the Arab world. Meanwhile, Israel integrated hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands into the fabric of society. Arabs have used Palestinians as tools in a public relations war against Israel and to divert attention from their corrupt rulers.

This week, Israelis begin the painful process of sacrificing for peace. Will the world's peace movement celebrate their courage? The Moose is not holding his breath.
Posted by: Mike || 08/16/2005 12:37 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "Will the "peace movement" recognize the true peacemakers?"

Does a bear sleep in a Memory Foam™ bed?
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut || 08/16/2005 15:53 Comments || Top||

#2  "Will the "peace movement" recognize the true peacemakers?"

We all know that war has *never* solved anything. Other than ending slavery, fascism, nazism and communism, and kicking the asses of numerous rat bag dictators and tyrants, of course.
Posted by: SteveS || 08/16/2005 19:14 Comments || Top||

#3  /sarcasm Steve, dammit! For our short-bus readers
Posted by: Frank G || 08/16/2005 20:14 Comments || Top||


How many Annans does it take to change a light bulb?
Posted by: JerseyMike || 08/16/2005 10:19 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Three: one to take a percentage on the bulb, one to take a percentage on the ladder, and one to take a percentage on the labor. How many Sevans does it take to change the bulb in the elevator?
Posted by: Darrell || 08/16/2005 11:47 Comments || Top||

#2  I wouldn't know. These days, I don't go near them.
Posted by: Benon Sevan || 08/16/2005 11:56 Comments || Top||

#3  How many Annans does it take to change a light bulb?

This question cannot be answered. All known Annans are on their cell phones calling around looking for a place of assylum, and without extradition treaties...
Posted by: BigEd || 08/16/2005 16:50 Comments || Top||

#4  but with Michelin 5-Star hotels...
Posted by: .com || 08/16/2005 16:59 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
"FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS...
...and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence".
---John Adams
Long, nice blog entry on regressive, escapist worldview.
Posted by: anonymous5089 || 08/16/2005 01:51 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Reality just is. The measure of a human is the wisdom and maturity, or the lack, to acknowledge it without distortion, accept it without caveat, and live with it clearly in mind. Success or failure in this is a personal issue that defines whether or not one is a trustworthy adult or a fuckwit infantile moonbat lost in fantasy.
Posted by: .com || 08/16/2005 9:26 Comments || Top||

#2  Great article. Just what I needed after watching the last 2 weeks of "whoa is us" from everything on the MSM, from reporters covering the non story of Cindy Sheehan, to last nights episode of "Six Feet Under".
However, one historical discrepancy to note:

Throughout World War II images of Pearl Harbor were shown in newsreels regularly. The scene of the USS Arizona listing and burning was seared into every moviegoers mind.

It is my understanding that pictures of Pearl Harbor were not not published for close to nine months as the powers that be didn't want to show the devastation due to morale issues. The first glimpse of the Arizona was often by US Servicemen entering Pearl Harbor on the way to the Pacific Theater. This is one of the reasons it is always emotional when US Naval vessels line up the sailors when passing the Arizona.
It wasn't until the US built up a little momentum (Doolittles raid, maybe?) that pictures started to be released.

I agree totally with the article however: The decision to NOT show the video footage of the jumpers may have been appropriate at the moment, but should have been seared in everyones minds by now. If the footage of the jumpers were somehow damaging to BUSHHitler, you know we would have seen them over and over again by now.
Posted by: Capsu78 || 08/16/2005 9:30 Comments || Top||



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Two weeks of WOT
Tue 2005-08-16
  Italy to expel 700 terr suspects
Mon 2005-08-15
  Israel begins Gaza pullout
Sun 2005-08-14
  Hamas not to disarm after Gaza pullout
Sat 2005-08-13
  U.S. troops begin Afghan offensive
Fri 2005-08-12
  Lanka minister bumped off
Thu 2005-08-11
  Abu Qatada jugged and heading for Jordan
Wed 2005-08-10
  Turks jug Qaeda big shot
Tue 2005-08-09
  Bakri sez he'll be back
Mon 2005-08-08
  Zambia extradites Aswad to UK
Sun 2005-08-07
  UK terrorists got cash from Saudi Arabia before 7/7
Sat 2005-08-06
  Blair Announces Measures to Combat Terrorism
Fri 2005-08-05
  Binori Town students going home. Really.
Thu 2005-08-04
  Ayman makes faces at Brits
Wed 2005-08-03
  First Suspect in July 21 Bombings Charged
Tue 2005-08-02
  24 Killed in Khartoum Riot


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