Posted by: Mac ||
03/14/2007 17:45 Comments ||
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#2
Interesting link Sneaze. From Yeslam Bin Laden indicted and ordered for trial (update 2) A year ago, I filed a criminal defamation complaint against Yeslam Bin Laden in the High District Court of Paris, France, after he had made various defamatory statements during an interview published in November 2005.
On February 5, 2007 the French investigative judge issued an Order for Trial stating that Yeslam Bin Laden has been indicted and that he is now ordered to appear on trial, an interesting development coming after years of legal harassment against me from Osama Bin Ladens half-brother.
...
AFP (Agence France Presse)
Bin Ladens half brother to be tried for complicity of slandering
PARIS Feb 16, 2007
Businessman Yeslam Binladin, half-brother of the chief of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network Usama Bin Laden, is ordered for trial before the correctional Court of Paris for complicity of slandering towards an investigator working for the families of the victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Very good.
Posted by: ed ||
03/14/2007 18:38 Comments ||
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#3
ed:
Website owner, Jean-Charles Brisard, is lead investigator for the 9-11 lawsuit parties. I have the names of the law firms somewhere in my files, but I know that 2 were lead firms in the successful class action suits against Big Tobacco. The 9-11 firms are heavy hitters in the litigation business; the fact that they approached Brisard is a good tell. He is the Euro-media go-to guy on terrorism. Ramadan and mob shouldn't be screwing with him. However, I hope they do. I will break out the cognac if Ramadan goes to jail.
Website owner, Jean-Charles Brisard, is lead investigator for the 9-11 lawsuit parties. I have the names of the law firms somewhere in my files, but I know that 2 were lead firms in the successful class action suits against Big Tobacco. The 9-11 firms are heavy hitters in the litigation business; the fact that they approached Brisard is a good tell. He is the Euro-media go-to guy on terrorism. Ramadan and mob shouldn't be screwing with him. However, I hope they do. I will break out the cognac if Ramadan goes to jail.
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Leadership: His popularity plummeting, Jacques Chirac announced on Sunday that he'll step down as France's president. Some say his legacy will be 'mixed,' but not us. No, it was pretty much rotten all the way through.
As his time in office winds down, get ready for some melancholy retrospectives about what Chirac 'meant.' But remember: Despite his claims to the contrary, the man was no friend of the U.S. and at times acted with open contempt toward our values and global responsibilities.
Nor will he be missed in France. The 74-year-old Gaullist has been in public life for more than 40 years, the last 12 as president a period during which France waned in influence and clout.
A big reason has been an economy that, when measured in output per person, lagged not only the U.S., but also the European Union 15 and the much broader 26-nation OECD. Worse, unemployment has remained shockingly high, with 8.4% of all French having no work vs. 7.4% for all of Europe and 4.5% in the U.S.
French companies simply don't hire if they can avoid it. They face too many rules, too many trade barriers that make crucial imports costly and, worst of all, a crippling 35-hour workweek that Chirac accepted from his governing partners, the Socialists.
Last year, Chirac had a chance to lift the cloud over France's stagnant economy by making some minor changes to the country's labor laws. But when thousands of protesters took to the streets, he backed down, favoring his future over his nation's.
Chirac has also failed in managing France's relationship with the world especially the U.S. During his term, France acquired a reputation for being an unsteady and unreliable partner. Indeed, at times France has behaved more like an enemy than a friend.
Before the first Gulf War, France at Chirac's urging helped to arm Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and even began building its nuclear program. Chirac knew full well that Saddam's ultimate goal was anything but peaceful. But there was money to be made.
In the run-up to the second Iraq War, France worked behind the scenes to thwart the U.S. move to depose Saddam. At the time, France made it seem like principled opposition. Turns out that France was among those nations that cheated on the U.N.'s oil-for-food program with Iraq. French politicians and companies pocketed billions of dollars in cash from Saddam while Iraqi children suffered from malnutrition and poor health care.
Starting in 2003, Chirac disastrously pushed to weaken the U.S., part of his bid to counter our post-Cold War global dominance. His idea was to create a giant EU superstate to directly compete. But when he called a referendum on the idea of a sweeping EU constitution in 2005, it went down to resounding defeat. His fate was sealed.
When radicalized Muslim 'youths' took to the streets to riot two years ago, burning thousands of cars, Chirac had basically no response leaving his rivals, like Nicolas Sarkozy and even the Socialist Segolene Royal, to talk tough. They did, and the public liked it.
By last year, Chirac's stock had fallen so far that his big plan to 'restore' Gallic pride was no joke to create a government-funded alternative to Google. Ah, the glory of France.
We'll leave it to historians to put Chirac's incompetence and dishonesty into deeper perspective. Let's leave it at this: Chirac has been a disaster for his country and for Europe, and left France's ties with the U.S. in tatters. Quite a legacy.
#1
No. A Petainist falls. Not even that. A Lavallist falls: Petain wished for an allied victory and tried to resist Nazi demands. Laval was Germany's man in Vichy.
On January 26, 2007, I appeared on Fox News Channels Hannity and Colmes program to discuss a January 8, 2007 meeting between the Attorney General of the United States and various Muslim and Arab groups, some of which have a long history of supporting terrorist groups and extremist ideologies. In response to a question from Alan Colmes about the importance of good relations between Attorney General Gonzales and the Muslim community, I stated, [b]ut when you say the Muslim community [the Attorney General] is anointing them representatives of the Muslim community, when in fact there are many others who support the war on terrorism, who don't tell their members not to cooperate with the FBI, who don't support Hamas and Hezbollah, unlike members of this group. So, in fact, I think it's wrong to confer legitimacy on those very organizations that inhibit cooperation with the FBI, that support Hamas or justify Hezbollah, and who are radical in terms of portraying the war on terrorism as a war against Islam.
On February 16, 2007, MPACs lawyer sent me a letter demanding an apology for my allegedly [f]alse statements about the Muslim Public Affairs Council on Hannity and Colmes. The letter demands that I immediately issue a public apology and cease and desist from making false statements about MPAC, and that MPAC is willing to pursue all available legal remedies should I not comply with MPACs demands.
And what are the allegedly false statements MPAC is claiming I made? That MPAC told its members not to cooperate with the FBI, and that MPAC are the ones radicalizing their community. Now lets analyze those charges by looking at MPACs own words. Rest at link.
Posted by: ed ||
03/14/2007 07:29 ||
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Link ||
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The U.S. is in serious discussions with commanders of the Mahdi Army to lay down their arms, an intelligence officer directly involved in Iraq operations told Pajamas Media Tuesday.
The American intelligence official spoke under the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
The Mahdi Army, a predominantly Shia Muslim force led by Moqter al-Sadr, has terrorized Sunnis into fleeing certain Baghdad neighborhoods and has been linked to Iran. Al-Sadr has disappeared from the Iraqi capital and is widely believed to have holed up in Iran. Al-Sadrs family and senior officers are believed, by elements of American intelligence in Iraq, to have left with him.
With al-Sadrs paymasters gone many mid-level commanders are unpaid. And so are the fighters under them. (In the Mahdi Army, commanders are responsible for the financial well-being of the men under their command.) Some have resorted to extortion, robbery and violent crimes. They are desperate for money. And they are also being hunted by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers throughout Iraq.
This has created a unique opportunity for American and allied troops, intelligence sources say.
Through intermediaries known in spook-speak as assets a handful of Mahdi Army leaders have approached allied forces and begun negotiating.
The source did not say whether immunity from criminal liability or the promise of payments were under discussion.
If these negotiations bear fruit, the Mahdi Army could be well on its way to being dismantled, commander by commander, fighter by fighter.
#1
FOX > Mahdi Army is steadily dis-integrating since Sadr left for Iran + over 700 fighters have been killed or captured, mostly killed, by IGA-US mil ops. More and more Mahdi Army and other aligned Radical Islamists fighters/members are giving up their weapons and turning informant. ANOTHER VICTORY = FAILURE FOR DUBYA.
#2
If the U.S. can continue in it's effort with dismantling the Mahdi army, it will be one less thorn for coalition forces to contend with in Iraq.
I am sure on the other hand, that the Iranian government will be disappointed at being denied a chance of creating a greater Iran with the Shiites running the show bordering its country.
Unfortunately, for the coalition and allied Iraqi forces they still have other Shia's allied with Iran, Al Qaeda and their allies, and the former Baathists.
One step forward in any case, is a step in the right direction for stability. The locals need to continue the efforts and put aside their difference despite religious and tribal differences if they really want to avoid bloodbath that is still pervasive. A country will cease to exist if it citizens wipe themselves out.
#3
On the plus side, apparently SOCOM watched the Iranians sloppily set up deals with little OPSEC for a long time prior to being given the okay to break up their little parties. So we have a pretty good idea who is in their pocket and can migrate them away from positions of power, by talking to their more nationalistic bosses.
Not able to sleep, I pulled from the sleeping bag and used a small red light to walk from the long dark tent into the Baghdad night. Inside had been dark, but outside the moon was so strangely bright that I crept quietly back into the tent, aisles flanked by sleeping bodies, and felt through my gear for the camera before creeping back outside.
The moon, so bright and sharp, draped crisp penumbra-less shadows from the tent ropes, casting sharp stripes across the gravel. As the moon followed its natural path into umbra, the fact that a complete lunar eclipse would unfold in mere hours had escaped my attention.
Helicopters roared through the midnight, low overhead, most burned no visible lights. As the helicopters disappeared and Saturday drifted into Sunday, I stood alone in the moonlight watching the tents under the stars, and photographing the various light sources mixing and flowing together.
#1
Around the world, dangerous American soldiers will close in on men tonight and kill them in small battles that will never be spoken of. [Odd stories appear frequently on the internet with rumors of who really was responsible.] Al Qaeda turned it on, but is powerless to turn it off.
Nearly all of America and Europe believe Iraq is a lost cause, but there is hope here and it lives in the thousands of stories about this place that are never told because they have not been witnessed by our media, or at least not reported.
Huge amounts of blog-energy go into attacks on mainstream media war coverage that might be better spent ignoring the irritant and offering alternative sources. The common cause might be better served by well-informed bloggers searching all sources for the reports that get it right and driving readers to those. Verlaine & others -- You know the forest & trees, the rest of us have only seen the forest, dimly through the fog of war & from a great distance.
#5
This is pretty far down in the Yon article but here's some good news:
Today, LTC Erik Kurilla, formerly commander of the Deuce Four and totally recovered from his last gunshot wounds, is now commander of 2nd Ranger Battalion.
Posted by: Matt ||
03/14/2007 16:23 Comments ||
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#6
Yon is doing fine work reflecting the bravery and prowess of our troops. We have the most courageous and technically competent military the world has ever seen. They do marvelous things. The fact that the MSM has for so long shown nothing but negativity about them SCREAMS that they hate this country. Any objective observer would look at these men and women and think, "What a great story that everyone would be on pins and needles to read about."
When we win this war, AS WE WILL, future generations will look back on the media coverage and wonder why more of the MSM execs weren't tried for treason.
Posted by: Mac ||
03/14/2007 18:24 Comments ||
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#7
Or beaten to within an inch of death by anonymous patriots who have run out of patience.
In the last week, two news items caught my attention. News item No. 1: Dateline Abu Dhabi The Louvre Museum is selling the use of its name for a museum in Abu Dhabi for $520 million, and will rent out some of its art exhibits and provide technical museum management services for another $747 million.
News item No. 2: Dateline Dubai The Halliburton Corp. is moving its worldwide corporate headquarters to the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai. It will keep most of its staff in Houston, will maintain its legal incorporation in the United States, will remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but will list its shares on a Middle East exchange also.
Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, these items would have given rise to Third World screeching about Western cultural and economic imperialism. But today it is French and American whining that greets these moves.
Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat, threatened hearings on the Halliburton move (birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, Waxman gotta threaten hearings), while Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, complained that Halliburton was somehow trying to cheat the American taxpayers (even though Halliburton is going to continue to pay its corporate taxes to the IRS and anyway Dubai doesn't tax corporations that site in their city. Hmm? No taxes as an inducement to increased business activity. There's an idea to which Mr. Leahy probably hasn't given sufficient thought.)
Rather than hold hearings or construct phantom conspiratorial tax evasion theories, Mr. Waxman, Mr. Leahy and their fellow ilk might consider that, since Congress won't permit American oil companies to drill for the more than 140 billion barrels of recoverable oil that exists under American ground and in our coastal waters, it only makes sense for oil-drilling companies to go where oil drilling is permitted.
I wouldn't blame Halliburton if it moved all its assets out of a country (that would be the United States) that slanders its good name rather than appreciates its world-class, vitally needed skills. What a pity if Mr. Waxman and his fellow anti-capitalists soon won't have Halliburton to kick around any more.
Meanwhile, various offended Frenchmen are complaining that renting out the Louvre brand name debases the greatest museum in the world and is a national insult. In a possibly related story reported last month by the BBC, the staff at the Louvre had gone on strike, demanding a bonus for the stress of looking after the Mona Lisa and other popular masterpieces: "Attendants are demanding a bonus because they suffer more stress. The stress is clearly linked to the number of visitors What's unbearable is the constant hubbub of the crowd, especially in the really popular rooms," said a Louvre attendant who didn't want to be named.
Exactly why a person would take a job as a public attendant in the world's most visited museum if crowds of people stress him out is beyond my ken, but it probably has something to do with the singular work habits of your typical Frenchman habituated to over a thousand years of worker disgruntlement. Perhaps they seek out jobs for which they are uniquely unfit precisely so they can complain about their jobs.
But if Frenchman don't like to work at the Paris Louvre, I can't help wondering how many Muslims will want to visit the Abu Dhabi Louvre. After all, most Muslims are deeply offended by representational art, which is why Islamic art is magnificent in its patterns and colors and calligraphy, but is a void when it comes to portraiture. And, in case the Abu Dhabi Louvre renters haven't noticed, Christian-European representational oils are the strongest part of the Louvre's magnificent collection. Even as a mere brand name knock-off (like Ralph Lauren putting his haute couture name on rags to be sold to fashion-hapless suburban mall bumpkins), one wonders how much cache the Louvre brand holds for your average infidel-hating Middle Easterner.
Of course, having a local Louvre in Abu Dhabi will be quite convenient for Halliburton CEO David Lesar working in nearby Dubai. But even if he and his staff are great museum enthusiasts, their patronage can't possibly support a billion-dollar museum. Still for Abu Dhabians, as it was for American tycoon widows of the 1920s, there is something pleasurable about buying up the treasures of Europe from groveling Europeans greedy for a piece of your new wealth. Europeans have been selling off and living off their patrimony for quite a while now. There is a lot of ruin in a civilization.
But as America is now driving its productive assets and people (such as Halliburton) away, we shouldn't be too smug. By the way, New York's Guggenheim Museum will be opening its Abu Dhabi museum in 2012.
#1
Another "We believe in Free Markets/Change, ergo Nothing must change" article. Michaelangelo + Goya, etal. were great but the Art World now needs display room for the Newbies.
. . . I dont mind the conspiracy guys and the all-about-oil obsessives. Im cool with the fellows who say, well, America sold Saddam all his weapons anyway: its always fun to point out that, according to analysis by the International Peace Research Institute of Stockholm, for the years between 1973 and 2002 the American and British arm sales combined added up to under 2% of Iraqs armaments or less than Saddam got from the Brazilians.
Thats all good fun. But what befuddles me are the callers who arent foaming and partisan but speak in almost eerily calm voices, like patient kindergarten teachers, and say things like I find it very offensive that your guest can use language thats so hierarchical - i.e., repressive Muslim dictatorships are worse than pluralist western democracies - and We are confronting violence with violence, when what we need is non-violent conflict resolution thats binding on all sides i.e. well, i.e. whatever.
Half the time these assertions are such enervated soft-focus blurs of passivity, theres nothing solid enough to latch on to and respond to. But, when, as they often do, they cite Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, I point out that were not always as fortunate to find ourselves up against such relatively benign enemies as British imperial administrators or even American racist rednecks. King and Gandhis strategies would not have been effective against fellows who gun down classrooms of Russian schoolchildren, or self-detonate at Muslim weddings in Amman, or behead you live on camera and then release it as a snuff video, or assassinate politicians and as theyre dying fall to the ground and drink their blood off the marble. Come to that, King and Gandhis strategies would not have been effective against the prominent British Muslim who in a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin announced that the Prophet Mohammeds message to infidels was I am here to slaughter you all. Good luck with the binding non-violent conflict resolution there.
And at that point theres usually a pause and the caller says something like Well, thats all the more reason why we need to be even more committed to non-violence. Or as a lady called Kay put it: We have a lot of work to do then so that some day a long way down the road they wont want to slaughter us.
There may, indeed, come a day when they wont want to slaughter us, but it may be because by that day theres none of us left to slaughter. She had just told me that were all in this together. I dont care if youre Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist. Good for you. Unfortunately, they do care. In Gaza, in Sudan, in Kashmir, in southern Thailand, they care very much. But the great advantage of cultural relativism is that it absolves you of the need to know anything. For, if everythings of equal value, why bother learning about any of the differences?
On the whole I prefer those Americans who tune out the foreign-policy bores for wall-to-wall Anna Nicole Smith coverage: at least theyve got an interest ask them about the latest scoop on the identity of the father of her child and theyll bring you up to speed. By contrast, a large number of elite Americans are just as parochial and indifferent to the currents of the age; the only difference is that they choose to trumpet it as a moral virtue. And you cant avoid the suspicion that, far from having a lot of work to do, a lot of us are heavily invested in a belief in pacifism because it involves doing no work at all apart from bending down once every couple of years and slapping the CO-EXIST bumper sticker on your new car.
Or as I said somewhat tetchily to one caller, Life isnt a bumper sticker.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/14/2007 06:21 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
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