Archived news and commentary: August 25 - 31, 2003

2003/09/29 - 2003/10/05
2003/09/22 - 2003/09/28
2003/09/15 - 2003/09/21
2003/09/08 - 2003/09/14
2003/09/01 - 2003/09/07
2003/08/25 - 2003/08/31
2003/08/18 - 2003/08/24
2003/08/11 - 2003/08/17
2003/08/04 - 2003/08/10
2003/07/28 - 2003/08/03
2003/07/21 - 2003/07/27
2003/07/14 - 2003/07/20
2003/07/07 - 2003/07/13
2003/06/30 - 2003/07/06

Sunday, August 31, 2003

News and commentary:

"Confessions of a Terrorist" (Johanna McGeary, TIME, 2003/08/31)
An article on the "Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle" as depicted in Gerald Posner's "Why America Slept": "When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle.
Zubaydah, writes Posner, said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom's longtime intelligence chief. Zubaydah said bin Laden "personally" told him of a 1991 meeting at which Turki agreed to let bin Laden leave Saudi Arabia and to provide him with secret funds as long as al-Qaeda refrained from promoting jihad in the kingdom. The Pakistani contact, high-ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali Mir, entered the equation, Zubaydah said, at a 1996 meeting in Pakistan also attended by Zubaydah. Bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then in the military but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (isi), to get protection, arms and supplies for al-Qaeda. Zubaydah told interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was "blessed by the Saudis."
Zubaydah said he attended a third meeting in Kandahar in 1998 with Turki, senior isi agents and Taliban officials. There Turki promised, writes Posner, that "more Saudi aid would flow to the Taliban, and the Saudis would never ask for bin Laden's extradition, so long as al-Qaeda kept its long-standing promise to direct fundamentalism away from the kingdom." In Posner's stark judgment, the Saudis "effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start of the decade." Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named. ...
Washington, reports Posner, was shocked when Zubaydah claimed that "9/11 changed nothing" about the clandestine marriage of terrorism and Saudi and Pakistani interests, "because both Prince Ahmed and Mir knew that an attack was scheduled for American soil on that day." They couldn't stop it or warn the U.S. in advance, Zubaydah said, because they didn't know what or where the attack would be. And they couldn't turn on bin Laden afterward because he could expose their prior knowledge."

"Still Time to Avoid Failure" (Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, from the 2003/09/08 issue)
"Last Friday’s bomb blast in the shiite holy city of Najaf, presumably by Baathist terrorists, might mark the beginning of internal violence among various groups in Iraqi society. If so, we may be in for a hellish ride. Iraq has one of the most violent histories of any country on the globe. ...
Keeping peace in a country like this cannot be easy. That is why the Bush administration’s attempts to do so unilaterally and on the cheap have been such a disaster. In a remarkable interview last week, Gen. John Abizaid, head of the Central Command, told The New York Times that he needed more troops. This seems to contradict what Donald Rumsfeld said two days earlier, which could be a sign of more internal wrangling, or could mark the beginning of a turnaround. ...
Abizaid’s interview is a powerful admission that on the two most important postwar issues — the number of forces and the nature of the occupation — the Bush administration got it badly wrong. The only question now is, will the administration finally recognize its errors? It might already be too late to achieve a great success in Iraq. But it is not too late to avoid a humiliating failure." (See also: "General in Iraq Says More G.I.'s Are Not Needed" (Eric Schmitt, The New York Times, 2003/08/29))

"Policy Lobotomy Needed" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2003/08/31)
"In short, we are at a dangerous moment in Iraq. We cannot let sectarian violence explode. We cannot go on trying to do this on the cheap. And we cannot succeed without more Iraqi and allied input.
But the White House and Pentagon have been proceeding as if it's business as usual. ...
Our Iraq strategy needs an emergency policy lobotomy. President Bush needs to shift to a more U.N.-friendly approach, with more emphasis on the Iraqi Army (the only force that can effectively protect religious sites in Iraq and separate the parties), and with more input from Secretary of State Colin Powell and less from the "we know everything and everyone else is stupid" civilian team running the Pentagon. ...
I don't know what Mr. Bush has been doing on his vacation, but I know what the country has been doing: starting to worry. People are connecting the dots — the exploding deficit, the absence of allies in Iraq, the soaring costs of the war and the mounting casualties. People want to stop hearing about why winning in Iraq is so important and start seeing a strategy for making it happen at a cost the country can sustain."

"Why We Must Win" (John McCain, The Washington Post, 2003/08/31)
"A recent visit to Iraq convinced me of several things. We were right to go to war to liberate Iraq. The Iraqi people welcome their liberation from tyranny. A free Iraq could transform the Middle East. And failure to make the necessary political and financial commitment to build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, empower our enemies and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny.
If we are to avoid a debate over who "lost" Iraq, we must act urgently to transform our military success into political victory. ...
Let there be no doubt: Iraq remains the central battle in the war on terror. We must succeed in Iraq because every bad actor in the Middle East -- Baathist killers, terror's sponsors in Iran and Syria, terror's financiers in Saudi Arabia, terror's radical Shiite and Wahhabi inciters, the terrorists of al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, Hamas and Hezbollah -- has a stake in our failure. They know Iraq's transformation would be a grave and perhaps fatal setback to them.
Iraq must be important to us because it is so important to our enemies. That's why they are opposing us so fiercely, and why we must win."

"Tough choice for civilization" (Yehezkel Dror, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/31)
"It is the West's inner weakness that makes terrorist attacks at least partly effective. The fanatical threats and aggression by countries such as North Korea find the West unable to protect itself and humanity. Only a willingness to use its superior power will allow the West to confront and eliminate modern barbarism.
This lack of nerve and verve on the West's part, this inner weaknesses, takes a number of forms:
"Motivated irrationality." Our hopes and values distort our understanding of the atrocious nature of terrorism. We approach the barbarians with ideas about democratization, equitable settlements of disputes, and, say, reducing poverty. Such an approach may be highly moral, but it is unrealistic and wrong.
Such Western values, while worthy, cannot be promulgated in the foreseeable future. They are irrelevant to the deep psychological and cultural roots of true believers willing to engage in mass killing. ...
The challenge posed by barbarians armed with weapons of mass killing is fundamentally not criminal or military but social, cultural and civilizational. The ability of fewer and fewer to kill more and more constitutes a rupture in history, one that has produced a radically new geostrategic reality. Plainly, the barbarians' willingness to kill and be killed provides them with an initial advantage.
That is why significant changes in Western civilization are essential to cope with this threat and preserve our core values. As Toynbee pointed out, the lack of verve and nerve has been known to prevent the self-transformation that must be undergone if Western civilization is to survive."

"The demonology of SE Asian Islamists" (Michael Danby, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/31)
"As justification for their murderous acts in Bali, two of the known perpetrators, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim and Imam Samudra, have focused their rhetoric on revenge "against the Jews," despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there are no Jews in Indonesia. ...
Their own declarations show them to be in the grip of an anti-Semitic paranoia every bit as fanatical as that which gripped Russia in the 19th century or Germany in the 1930s. They are convinced that the Jews are plotting to take over Indonesia, and indeed the world the Jews already control the United States and Australia, they insist and subvert Islam and, indeed, all religion.
Throughout the recent trials of the Bali bombers, the salience of Jew-hatred in the demonology of the Islamic terrorists has been clearly and widely exposed by the bombers through their burst into the media. Amrozi said the rationale for the Bali bombing was 'because of the evil plan of the United States, the Jews and their allies to colonize [and] to destroy religions.'"

"Revealed: How Kelly article set out case for war in Iraq" (Kamal Ahmed, The Observer, 2003/08/31)
"A remarkable article by Dr David Kelly, published for the first time today, reveals the government scientist's true views ahead of the war on Iraq and his expert assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
In a development which could have a major influence on the Hutton inquiry, Kelly said that, although the threat was 'modest', he believed military action was the only way to 'conclusively disarm' the country.
He also argued that there was evidence Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons and regime change, the policy of the United States, was the only way to stop the Iraqi dictator.
The article was written for a major report on Iraq being compiled a few weeks before the war. Kelly had agreed to write it anonymously, but the piece was never published." (See also: "'Only regime change will avert the threat'" (David Kelly, The Observer, 2003/08/31): "Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use. ... After 12 unsuccessful years of UN supervision of disarmament, military force regrettably appears to be the only way of finally and conclusively disarming Iraq. ... The long-term threat, however, remains Iraq's development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction - something that only regime change will avert.")

"Rumors of Bin Laden's Lair" (Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, Newsweek, from the 2003/09/08 issue)
Rumors is the word: "In April, shortly after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the Qaeda leader convened the biggest terror summit since September 11 at a mountain stronghold in Afghanistan. The participants included three top-ranking representatives from the Taliban, several senior Qaeda operatives and leaders from radical Islamic groups in Chechnya and Uzbekistan, according to a former Taliban deputy foreign minister. He got the details from a Taliban colleague who was there. Bin Laden, in a fiery mood, appointed one of his most trusted lieutenants, Saif al-Adil, to be Al Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq. The leader handed the Egyptian-born al-Adel a letter of introduction, asking all religious leaders, businessmen and mujahedin to give him any support possible. Al-Adel left Afghanistan immediately. A few weeks later he was reported to be in neighboring Iran, where he is said to be under house arrest. The Taliban official nevertheless insists, contrary to American intelligence assessments, that al-Adel made it to Iraq and is organizing anti-U.S. operations.
At the same meeting bin Laden said he was working on "serious projects," another ranking Taliban source tells Newsweek. "His priority is to use biological weapons," says the source, who claims that Al Qaeda already has such weapons. The question is only how to transport and launch them, he asserts. The source insists he doesn’t know any further details but brags: 'Osama’s next step will be unbelievable.'"

"300,000 Iraqis Join Shiite Funeral March" (Sameer N. Yacoub, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/08/31)
"More than 300,000 Muslims began a two-day, 110-mile march to the holy city of Najaf on Sunday to mourn a cherished Shiite leader who was assassinated in a car bombing that killed at least 85 people.
The faithful beat their chests and called for vengeance as they slowly followed a flatbed truck carrying a symbolic coffin for Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a moderate cleric and Saddam Hussein opponent. Authorities said they could only find al-Hakim's hand, watch, wedding band and pen.
"Our revenge will be severe on the killers," read one of the many banners carried by mourners."

"Iraqis arrest 19 with terror ties in mosque blast" (Tarek al-Issawi, AP/The Washington Times, 2003/08/31)
"Police have arrested 19 men — many of them foreigners and all with admitted links to al Qaeda — in the car bombing of a mosque in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf that killed 85, a senior Iraqi investigator said yesterday.
Two Iraqis and two Saudis grabbed shortly after Friday's attack on the Imam Ali shrine gave information leading to the arrest of the others, said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Those arrested include two Kuwaitis and six Palestinians with Jordanian passports. The remainder are Iraqis and Saudis, the official said, without giving a breakdown.
Initial information shows the foreigners entered Iraq from Kuwait, Syria and Jordan, the official said, adding that they belong to the rigid Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam.
"They are all connected to al Qaeda," the official said."

"U.S. and Iraqis Talk of Forming a Large Militia" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2003/08/31)
"Stung by Friday's deadly car bombing, American and Iraqi officials said today they were discussing forming a large Iraqi paramilitary force to help stabilize the security situation.
The officials said the force could consist of thousands of Iraqis already screened by the political parties for prior affiliations with Saddam Hussein's government. Some Iraqi officials said that such a militia could ultimately take control of Iraqi cities from American soldiers.
Some Iraqi officials said a force of several thousand men, most of whom had military experience, could be ready in little more than a month."

Saturday, August 30, 2003

News and commentary:

"Culture of shame" (Matthew Leeming, The Spectator, from the 2003/08/30 issue)
A review of Asne Seierstad's "The Bookseller of Kabul": "I really thought I had made it when I went to give a talk at my old Oxford college. But when I got there I discovered that there had been an attempt to have me banned. I was accosted by a dusky beauty in the quad who, practically incoherent with indignation, told me that this was because I produced 'the worst kind of neo-colonial travel writing'. In other words, I had once described an arranged Afghan marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man as 'legitimised rape'. I thought I had rather understated the horror of it.
My thought-crime was 'Orientalism', the depiction of eastern cultures as strange and inferior to the West, rather than portraying them as both equally bad. In future I will give any cultural relativist this book. It explains what it is like to be an Afghan woman. The answer is that it is even more ghastly than I had supposed. ...
For those of us who think that religious belief is a mental illness, this book provides plenty of clinical detail. The symptoms in Afghanistan are pretty florid. 'Anyone who prints Rushdie's books should be put down,' opines one publisher. Men with long hair were taken to the Ministry of Morality to have it cut. All men with shaved beards were to have their ears and noses cut off. This kind of Islam is not compatible with democracy. Islam is the truth and, if reality conflicts with Islam, it is reality that must change. Like political ideology, it is a substitute for thought. The book describes unsparingly the sort of brain-death that revelation induces. ...
Of the 16 billion people who have been born since homo became sapiens, I doubt if more than 500 million have lived in a world free of belief in magical causation or the threat of arbitrary imprisonment and death at the hands of religious police for thought-crimes. ... We have the Enlightenment to thank for this, the moment when the West achieved intellectual maturity (or rediscovered that of the classical world) and reduced religion to a matter of opinion and turned the mullahs into comic turns like Rowan Williams. The Orientalist witch-smellers and postmodernists at Oxford have the Enlightenment in their sights. It is a sobering thought that whole cultures and educated elites can commit intellectual suicide."

"North Korea Ends Disarmament Talks" (Joseph Kahn and David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 2003/08/30)
"North Korea declared today that it saw no purpose in continuing nuclear talks with the five nations it met in Beijing this week and was left with no choice but to strengthen its nuclear deterrent. ...
The North Korean announcement today - delivered first at the Beijing airport as negotiators left the country, then in a statement issued in North Korea - sharply contradicted a Chinese announcement as the talks concluded on Friday that all sides had agreed to further talks within two months. As always, it was unclear if North Korea was bluffing, but administration officials in Washington and several Asian diplomats said there was significant danger that the crisis would intensify."

"4 With al-Qaida Ties Held in Iraq Blast" (Tarek Al-Issawi, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/08/30)
"Iraqi police have arrested four men in connection with the bombing of Iraq's holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, and all have links to al-Qaida, a senior police official told The Associated Press on Saturday.
The official, who said the death toll in the bombing had risen to 107, said the four arrested men — two Iraqis and two Saudis — were caught shortly after the car bombing on Friday. ...
The police official, who led the initial investigation and interrogation of the captives, said the prisoners told of other plots to kill political and religious leaders and to damage vital installations such as power plants, water supplies and oil pipelines. ...
The police official said the men arrested after the attack claimed the recent bombings were designed to keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces would be unable to focus attention on the country's porous borders, across which suspected foreign fighters are said to be infiltrating."

"The View From Iraq" (Ahmad Chalabi, The Washington Post Outlook, from the 2003/08/31 issue)
"Saddam Hussein has been removed from power, yet he continues to inflict terror on the Iraqi people. There is no question that his network of loyalists carried out the car bomb attack that killed Ayatollah Syed Mohammed Bakr Al Hakim and scores of others in Najaf on Friday. By assassinating this respected Shiite religious leader, Hussein has succeeded in inflaming the country. Southern Iraq is in turmoil, and the people's shock, sadness and anger risk boiling over. ...
Hussein did not have a military strategy to confront forces on the battlefield. What he did have was a post-defeat strategy to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. forces and the Iraqi people. His ultimate aim is twofold: to turn the Iraqis against their liberators and to create a "body bag problem" for the Bush administration. He thinks he can force an eventual U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and has often pointed to Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia as examples of America's inability to withstand casualties."

"Tariq Ali's Middle East canards" (Jim Nolan, The Age, 2003/08/30)
Nolan on Tariq Ali: "The UN, he tells us, is viewed by Iraqis as "one of Washington's more ruthless enforcers" since it supervised the sanctions that were directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children.
This was the favourite whopper retailed by the Saddam propaganda machine. Of course we now know that the food-for-oil program was diverted into Saddam's oil-for-palaces program. The tragedy was all Saddam's own work. He cynically starved his own people to garner the kind of credulous support he still appears to enjoy from the likes of Ali.
But the most bizarre claim by Ali is the casting of the Iraqi dead-enders as a heroic and doughty "resistance" - as if by the mere invocation of the word "resistance", the murderers of UN workers morph into their moral opposites.
The readers of the popular press are only treated to what might be called Ali lite. The true believers, however, are privy to the full-strength version. Consider the following samples from the May-June edition of the New Left Review.
According to Ali, the 2001 assault on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon was "a gift from heaven for the (Bush) Administration".
Neither were the recalcitrant Europeans spared the invective. Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is described as "cadaver-green" sincerely hoping for the "rapid collapse" of Saddam's army.
Even the sainted Kofi Annan is described as the "African Waldheim" and "the dumb-waiter for American aggression". You get the picture." (See also: "Occupied Iraq will never know peace" (Tariq Ali, The Age, 2003/08/27) and "Re-colonizing Iraq" (Tariq Ali, New Left Review, from the May-June 2003 issue))

"Officers' Sept. 11 Accounts: Catastrophe in the Details" (Kevin Flynn and Jim Dwyer, The New York Times, 2003/08/30)
"DETECTIVE R. P. MENDENHALL
In the plaza of the trade center: 'When we arrived back at the intersection, Detective deMello brought to my attention that large portions of aluminum chaff were being whipped around by the wind. Someone asked me a question, and as I turned to answer I heard Detective deMello scream, and as I turned a portion of the sheet metal had fallen and struck a man standing alongside the building and decapitated him. It was at this time that we noticed that people had begun jumping from the towers. Several of these people were on fire. We began a count, but stopped at 14. This was repulsive and a wave of shame came over us because we couldn't help them.'" (See also: "'They're Jumping Out of Building One' - Newly Released Trade Center Transcripts Provide Real-Time Narrative to Sept. 11 Attacks" (Joel Achenbach and Brooke A. Masters, The Washington Post, 2003/08/29))

"'To Know This Is to Know Evil Itself'" (Daniel Williams, The Washington Post, 2003/08/30)
"The relief the people of Najaf felt at the fall of Saddam Hussein was shattered when, suddenly, they were in the clutches of an invisible enemy. Most remained calm, in a seeming unwillingness to give into their enemy, who they asserted was only trying to drive the Shiites into a frenzy.
"To know this is to know evil itself," said Sabah Ali. ...
Among Shiites gathered at Teaching Hospital, the prime suspect in the bombing was Saddam Hussein. Years of executions, disappearances and mass killings left no doubt in some minds. "He has killed imams before. He has killed many Shiites," said Saed Hussein Hammami, whose 12-year old son received a cut in his scalp that took 10 stitches to close. "Saddam doesn't fear God."
A few visitors and mourners blamed Wahhabis , the Sunni Muslim sect to which Osama bin Laden belongs. Sunnis and Shiites have been historical and sometimes bloody rivals.
One Shiite imam, who had rushed down from Baghdad, blamed the United States, at least indirectly. "They should be responsible for security and they do not do their duty," he said as he made the rounds of bloodied beds on the second floor surgical ward."

Friday, August 29, 2003

News and commentary:

"Flames and smoke engulf cars..."
(AP Photo/APTN/Al Manar, 2003/08/29)
"Flames and smoke engulf cars after a car bomb exploded next to the Imam Ali mosque in the holy city of Najaf, 102 miles, 165 kilometers, south of Baghdad killing at least 75 people including Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most important Shiite clerics and injured 140 others. Top left reads: Exclusive Al Manar."

"Iraqi history is back" (Martin Sieff, UPI, 2003/08/29)
"The devastating bomb attack that took the lives of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and at least 74 other people at the Ali Imam mosque in Najaf, Iraq, on Friday grimly confirmed warnings and themes we have been sounding over the past year in UPI Analysis columns. First and foremost, it teaches that Iraq history is back. ...
The history of Iraq before the 35-year-long night of the Baath Republic descended upon it should have provided ample warning that once the lid was lifted off, those long decades of repression, more years of terrorism, assassination and massacre were only too likely to follow. For they were what had gone before. ...
Friday's frightful bombing in Najaf, coming so soon as it does after the destruction of the U.N. compound in Baghdad and the murder of the chief U.N. envoy within it, serves notice that the bullet, the knife and the bomb are reigning again in Baghdad, just as they did during all those four long decades of supposedly enlightened British rule. U.S. policymakers should cease laboring under the delusion that they are about to change it."

"Ayatollah Hakim's last sermon" (BBC News, 2003/08/29)
Extracts from the sermon delivered by Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim prior to his death:
"The Baathist regime (of Saddam Hussein) targeted the Marjiya (the leading Shia religious leaders) and carried out acts of aggression against the Marjiya: it killed al-Barzachi, al-Gharawi and Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr and targeted al-Sistani and Bachir al-Najafi (leading Marjiya).
The men of the ousted regime are those who are now targeting the Marjiya.
The occupying forces have not fulfilled their legal obligations, which is to be condemned, and we condemn this attitude and we hold the occupying forces responsible for the lack... of security in the country.
From the start we declared publicly that they (the occupying forces) should let Iraqis take responsibility for security in the country and we said that an Iraqi force of the faithful should be established to take charge of protecting the holy places of Iraq because the occupying forces cannot approach them.
Until this situation changes, there will be no security in Iraq."

"Shiites report top leader among bombing victims" (CNN.com, 2003/08/29)
"A car bomb outside the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, Iraq, killed dozens of people including the Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, the Shiite leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Shiite officials said.
Officials at the Najaf Teaching Hospital said the blast killed at least 75 people, burning many beyond recognition. The hospital was treating at least 142 wounded people, officials said.
More dead and wounded probably were taken to other hospitals, officials said.
Mohsen Hakim, at the SCIRI office in Tehran, Iran, told CNN that Hakim and his entourage had left the mosque at about 2 p.m. (6 a.m. EDT), after Friday noon prayers and were walking toward their cars when two cars beside them exploded. It wasn't clear whether the cars that exploded were the ayatollah's cars." (See also: "Profile: Ayatollah Hakim" (BBC News, 2003/08/29))

"'Real' Deputy UK Premier Quits Amid Iraq Storm" (Lyndsay Griffiths, Reuters, 2003/08/29)
"Tony Blair's top aide and pugnacious media handler Alastair Campbell announced his resignation on Friday in a shock decision that comes amid the worst crisis of the British premier's six-year rule.
Campbell had been expected to quit later this year but the timing of his announcement - while both he and Blair are enmeshed in a high-stakes inquiry into whether Britain hyped the case for war in Iraq - caught political observers unawares.
Few had expected the 46-year-old media manipulator to quit while he and his boss face their toughest test yet, with big questions hanging over their role in nudging the nation to join Washington in a war that few Britons backed."

"ElBaradei: Iran Was Shopping on Nuclear Black Mkt" (Reuters, 2003/08/29)
"The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said in comments aired on Friday that Iran had shopped for nuclear components on the international black market and called on Tehran to be more "proactive" and "transparent."
In an interview on the BBC television program Hardtalk, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei also said that Iran's nuclear program had been going on far longer than the agency had realized.
Although he was not certain of the countries that made the equipment Iran had acquired on the black market, ElBaradei said he had a "pretty good idea" which ones they were.
"It could be one country, it could be more than one country," ElBaradei said. "They (Iran) told us they have got a lot of that stuff from the black market. It is through intermediaries. It is not directly from the country."
Media reports have named Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state that has refused to sign the nuclear 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as one of countries whose nuclear technology Iran is believed to be using."

"Put the Iraqis in Charge" (Bernard Lewis, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/08/29)
"During the last few months the fear has often been expressed in Europe and America that democracy cannot succeed in Iraq. There is another, greater, and more urgent fear in the region - that it will succeed in Iraq, and this could become a mortal threat to the tyrants who rule most of the Middle East. An open and democratic regime in Iraq, inevitably with a Shiite majority, could arouse new hopes among the oppressed peoples of the region, and offer a corresponding threat to their oppressors. One of these regimes, that of Iran, purports to be Islamic, and was indeed so in its origins, though it has become yet another corrupt tyranny.
Some of these regimes are officially classified as our friends and allies, and dealing with them presents a number of problems. There are no such problems in dealing with Iran, an avowed enemy, and undoubtedly a major force behind the troubles in Iraq, in Palestine and elsewhere. Some have argued that the remedy is to "build bridges" to the present regime in Iran. Even if successful, the best that such a diplomacy could accomplish would be to establish the same kind of friendship with Iran as we have with Saudi Arabia - hardly model. More realistically, such overtures could certainly achieve two immediate results - to earn the contempt of the government and the mistrust of the people. The calculation of the present regime in Iran is well known, and dates back to the first Gulf War. If Saddam Hussein had possessed nuclear weapons, the Americans would have left him alone, and he would have kept Kuwait and probably other places too. It was then that the mullahs decided that they must have these weapons, which would enable them to enjoy the same kind of immunity as North Korea. They are working desperately to that end, and the Middle East situation will take a significant turn for the worse if they are given the time to achieve it. Opinions may differ on how to handle them, but surely the worst of all options is the line of submissiveness, which can only strengthen the perception of American weakness."

"Islam Uber Alles" (Stephen Brown, FrontPageMagazine, 2003/08/29)
"According to the German intelligence agency, the Office for the Defense of the Federal Constitution, Muslim fundamentalists intend to establish their own political party that will take part in German elections. Their aim is eventually to have representatives sitting in the Bundestag (the German parliament); and, to that end, they are urging their followers to acquire German citizenship, so they will then be eligible to vote. About 500,000 Muslims from among Germany's three and a half million Muslim population currently possess voting rights in the Federal Republic. ...
A sermon recorded at a mosque in Bavaria, outlined in an intelligence report, confirms the German agencies' findings. After first calling America and Britain "devils" and Israel "a bloodsucking vampire", its venomous contents continued as follows:
"The Europeans were once our slaves; today it is the Muslims. This must change. We must drive the unbelievers into deepest hell. We must stick together and hold our peace until the time comes. You can't see anything yet, but everything is being prepared in secret. You must hold yourself in
readiness for the right moment. We must exploit democracy for our cause. We must cover Europe with mosques and schools." ...
The ODFC estimates there are currently about 30,000 Muslim fundamentalists in Germany who are prepared to use violence. Otto Schilly, interior minister for Germany's ruling federal Socialist Party, said they formed the largest number among the 57,500 members of foreign extremist organizations present in his country in 2002. Two hundred of these Islamists are considered so dangerous that they warrant permanent police surveillance, according to Manfred Klink, an official in the Federal Crime Office (Germany's FBI). Klink made this statement at a conference for federal German crime investigators last month."

"'They're Jumping Out of Building One' - Newly Released Trade Center Transcripts Provide Real-Time Narrative to Sept. 11 Attacks" (Joel Achenbach and Brooke A. Masters, The Washington Post, 2003/08/29)
"Under a court order, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey late today released roughly 1,800 pages of transcripts, covering about 260 hours of recorded telephone calls and radio transmissions made in the immediate aftermath of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.
The new transcripts, based on reel-to-reel tapes recovered from the wreckage of 5 World Trade Center weeks after two aircraft flew into the towers, provide a vivid, chaotic, real-time narrative of what happened that morning.
Confusion is epidemic. There are repeated rumors that rockets have been fired from the Woolworth Building. Someone claims terrorists with explosives are fleeing through New Jersey in a Ford van with New York tags. People are in shock. Several callers to police, unaware of what is happening, report burglar alarms going off in the towers.
In the initial moments, almost everyone struggles to comprehend the dimensions of the catastrophe.
MALE: Yo, I've got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building onto . . . in front of One World Trade.
FEMALE: Sir, you have what jumping from buildings?
MALE: People. Bodies are just coming from out of the sky . . . up top of the building.
FEMALE: That's a copy." (See also: "Fresh Glimpse in 9/11 Files of the Struggles for Survival" (Jim Dwyer, The New York Times, 2003/08/29) and "Hope and Heroism Turned to Horror on a Fateful Day" (Kevin Flynn, The New York Times, 2003/08/29))

"Targeting Iran" (Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times, 2003/08/29)
"Israel has ready a plan to bomb Iran's Bushehr nuclear-power plant should the Persian Gulf coast facility, now under construction, begin producing weapons-grade material, an insider tells us.
This source says Israel has mapped out a route its jet fighters would take to destroy what is designed to be a two-reactor plant. A successful strike would ensure that the radical Tehran regime does not develop nuclear weapons. Iran has tested 600-mile-range ballistic missiles that can reach Israel and carry nuclear, biological or chemical warheads."

Thursday, August 28, 2003

News and commentary:

"North Korea Says It Plans to Test Nukes" (Yuri Kageyama, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/08/28)
"North Korea told a six-nation conference that it has nuclear weapons and has plans to test one, a U.S. official said Thursday. However, other participants said delegates agreed on the need for a second round of talks.
The remarks by North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong Il set a negative tone at the conference and raised questions about the success of the negotiations, which were scheduled to conclude Friday morning.
Kim at one point accused delegates from Russia and Japan of lying at the instruction of the United States when they tried to point out positive aspects of the American presentation, according to a U.S. official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Kim said the North intends to formally declare it has nuclear weapons, has the ability to deliver them, and intends to conduct a test, the U.S. official said.
The North Korean said his country was maintaining its position because the United States clearly had no intention of abandoning its hostile policy toward North Korea, the official said.
The statements, coming on the second day of a three-day conference, startled the delegates and left the Chinese representative visibly angry, the official said."

"Blair defiant at Iraq inquiry" (CNN.com, 2003/08/28)
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has told an inquiry that if a report accusing his government of "sexing up" intelligence on Iraq had been true, it would have merited his resignation.
Blair gave evidence Thursday at a judicial inquiry into the apparent suicide of weapons expert David Kelly at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. ...
Referring to the BBC allegation that the Iraq dossier had been exaggerated, Blair said: 'This was an absolutely fundamental charge. This was an allegation that we had behaved in a way which ... if true would have merited my resignation.'"

"Hearings begin for 19 detainees" (Stewart Bell, National Post, 2003/08/28)
"Suspected members of a Canadian al-Qaeda sleeper cell who may have tested explosives and plotted attacks were told yesterday they will have to remain in custody for at least another month. ...
Canadian immigration intelligence officials say a network of 31 Muslim men has been living illegally around Toronto, pretending to be foreign students enrolled at a bogus school called Ottawa Business College. ...
Documents seized from their apartments suggested they may have been scouting Canadian landmarks such as Toronto's CN Tower and law courts, as well as buildings in the United States.
There were also suspicious kitchen fires at apartments inhabited by the men, once while the fire alarm had been disconnected. Officials said the men may have been mixing and testing explosives.
The allegations, and the implied the parallels to the Sept. 11 hijackers, have raised concerns that a terrorist cell may have infiltrated Canada with the intention of carrying out attacks in Canada and the United States." (See also: "Canada Arrests 19 in Case with Sept 11 Parallels" (Reuters, 2003/08/22))

"Academic Credentials" (Joe Sabia, CornellDailySun/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/08/28)
"Racially segregated dormitories and racial quotas are not enough for Cornell anymore. Like a porn addict needing increasingly explicit images to get his next "fix," the University administration has quenched its craving for racial division by appointing Cynthia McKinney — a disgraced former congresswoman from Georgia — as a visiting professor under the Andrew Dickson White Professors-at-large Program.
McKinney was widely regarded as one of the most incompetent members of Congress by Democrats and Republicans alike. As a prominent member of the ultra-Leftist Congressional Black Caucus, McKinney often spewed incoherent conspiracy theories about Jews and whites plotting to murder people and prevent her re-election. ...
So why is Cornell hiring a former congresswoman who is at best incompetent and at worst an appeaser of international terrorism? Clearly, the McKinney hire is a political payoff to the Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC). Prof. James Turner, Africana studies, invited McKinney to speak at Cornell this summer, recommended her hire, and has sponsored funding for her appointment. Rather than hire an ideologically balanced professor — or, heaven forbid, a conservative! — the administration once again caved to radical Leftists who use race to their political advantage.
The anti-American policy positions that made Cynthia McKinney so unpalatable to the American people will make her a perfect fit for Cornell's Leftist faculty. She'll blend in quite nicely with her fellow professors. In fact, she might even tilt Cornell rightward. But after the splash surrounding McKinney's hiring has worn off, where will Cornell go for its next race-baiting fix? Prof. Farrakhan, anyone?" (See also: "What actually happened to Pfc. Jessica Lynch?" (Brendan Nyhan and Bryan Keefer, Spinsanity, 2003/05/28), "Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Administration Plot" (Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post, 2002/04/12) and "Cynthia McKinney: Today's Hanoi Jane" (Debbie Schlussel, WorldNetDaily, 2001/10/19))

"Time to ban Hamas" (Oliver Kamm, oliverkamm.typepad.com, 2003/08/28)
"Last week the Bush administration banned five charities that serve as financial conduits for the terror group Hamas, based in the West Bank and Gaza. The British government is now pressing the EU to enact an outright ban on Hamas's 'political wing':

A British official told BBC News Online that joint action by the EU would be best but that Britain could act by itself if necessary. The military wing of Hamas is already banned in the EU but there has been resistance to the idea of preventing its political wing from operating. A decision was last discussed by the EU in June but was put off. The timing was not felt to be right given the promising state of the peace process at that time.

You read the last sentence right: the EU felt that cracking down on front organisations for terror would be inimical to a negotiated peace. I throw up my hands in disbelief." (See also: "UK likely to ban Hamas political wing" (Paul Reynolds, BBC News, 2003/08/26))

"The pity of France" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/28)
"This is an angry column, and perhaps in a year or two I will regret some its language. But I will also make an effort to recall that in the month it was written, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad vied for the credit of murdering 21 Orthodox Jews, and France refused to cut off the sources of funding to either group. I will recall, too, that at the French Cultural Center in east Jerusalem, which is affiliated with the French Consulate, student poems celebrate the "pure blood of the martyrs," and these are posted for everyone to see. ...
We are talking about a country that insists on its "exception," which is only true in the sense that it actually conforms to every caricature about it: vain, cowardly, conniving, intellectually superficial, self-deceiving, politically and socially corrupt, with low moral standards (except when it comes to standing in judgment over the rest of the world), fundamentally anti-American and pervasively anti-Semitic.
But I understate.
This is country where last year one in five voters - that is, 5.8 million people - gave their ballot to a Holocaust denier. This is a country where the Council of State recently ruled that Maurice Papon, the Vichy official who deported Jews to Auschwitz by the thousands before going on to bigger and better things in the Fifth Republic, just had his pension reinstated after serving a two-year jail sentence."

"Hoping We Fail" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/08/28)
"In more fundamental terms, how can pacifists and socialists believe that war might rout evil and offer hope to millions of oppressed? How might unilateralism achieve what internationalism could not? How could crass, naïve Yankees barrel and bluster into the complexities of the Middle East to solve problems sophisticated, nuanced Europeans had struggled with for centuries?
In short, our failure is essential to confirming the entire European view of how the world should work. ...
All this hysteria and unrest should come as no surprise given the ambition of our endeavor, which is no less than a war of civilization to end both terrorism and the culture and politics that foster it. Still, let us ignore the self-interest of contemporary parties and reflect on the very scope of American audacity. In little more than three weeks, and coming on the heels of an amazing victory in Afghanistan, the American military defeated the worst fascist in the Middle East. Surrounded by enemies, and forced simultaneously to conduct the war against terrorism in dozens of countries and restore calm on the West Bank, the United States nevertheless sought to create consensual government and order under legal auspices in weeks — rather than the decades that were necessary in Japan and Germany, where elections took years and soldiers remain posted still. The real story is not that the news from Iraq is sometimes discouraging and depressing, but that it so often not — and that after two major-theater wars we have lost fewer people than on that disastrous day in Beirut 20 years ago, and less than 10 percent of the number that perished on September 11."

"The Islamization of France" (Jean-Christophe Mounicq, Tech Central Station, 2003/08/28)
"If Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilization" theory is right, France is on the front line. With at least six and maybe eight million Muslims living in its territory among a total population of 60 million, France is the most "islamized" Western country. ...
As nearly every Western country absorbs a fast growing Muslim minority, every Westerner should look closely at France. A French failure to integrate Muslims could lead to a general European and Western failure. ...
So what percentage of Muslims is fundamentalist? From Algeria to Turkey, when Muslims are free to vote, Islamists regularly win 30 to 40 percent of the votes. In France... the result was no different. In May 2003, the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, organized elections for a Representative Council of French Muslims. The Islamists of the UOIF (Union des Organisations Islamistes de France) won over 40 percent of the votes. ...
Was the victory of the Islamists really a surprise given the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism, mainly instigated by young Arabs, in France? After 9/11, in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris, many blew their automobile horns loudly. After the beginning of the new Intifada in Israel, thousands shouted openly "death to the Jews" in Strasbourg. During the Iraqi war, thousands waved portraits of Saddam, Israeli flags with Nazi emblems and Bush portraits with Hitler's moustache. ...
Last July, Sarkozy passed a bill intended to control immigration networks and to stop some Muslim customs: polygamy, excision, repudiation and forced marriage. One hopes that he will be more successful than with the election of his Islamic council. If the Islamization of France goes on it will accelerate the clash of civilization."

"Leave it to America" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2003/09/30 issue)
"The Canal Hotel turned out to be a perfect microcosm of the UN: a group of naive internationalists refusing to take the murkier characters prowling the corridors at face value and concerned only to keep the US at arm's length. Yet for Kofi Annan, the French, the Democratic party and the world's media, the self-inflicted insanity of what happened to the UN in Baghdad apparently demonstrates the need for Washington to hand over more control of Iraq to the blue helmets because 'they've got far more experience in these kinds of situations.'"

"Columnist in Leading Egyptian Government Daily: U.S. Forces in Iraq Strip the Flesh from Their Victims' Corpses" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 559, 2003/08/28)
"Egyptian columnist Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud, who has spoken sympathetically of Adolf Hitler and whose articles appear occasionally in the Egyptian government daily Al-Akhbar, published an article titled "May the Cannibals be Cursed!" The following is the article in full: ...
'Every place that it destroys, annihilates, and plunders treasure and oil [from], America does no less than what primitive cannibal tribes did in the prehistoric era!! ...
The blood spilled in most of the countries of the free world – the hero Iraq, the courageous fighting African Liberia from which America seeks to remove French protection, and Afghanistan, whose poor and ordinary citizens gave the arrogant American forces a drink from the bitter [cup] of defeat and humiliation, [the same cup from which] they drank, to intoxication, in their war in Somalia. In addition, we must never forget the fierce whipping the Americans took in Vietnam; American military honor was dragged like a floor rag through the Vietnamese swamps!
The fight against America will be continued, Allah willing, by the peoples waging Jihad against the original pirates and criminals [i.e. the Americans] – or, to be more precise, against the cannibals and the human corpse-disembowelers!!'" (See also: "Columnist for Egyptian Government Daily to Hitler: 'If Only You Had Done It, Brother'" (MEMRI, SD# 375, 2002/05/02))

Added in archive:
"From Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac" (Jean-Claude Casanova, Le Monde/The Radical, 2003/08/17)

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

News and commentary:

"Amina Lawal waits with her child Wasila..."
(AP Photo/Saurabh Das, 2003/08/27)
"Amina Lawal waits with her child Wasila in a courtroom, in Katsina, northern Nigeria, Wednesday Aug. 27, 2003. Lawal, who has been indicted by lower and upper Shariah courts and sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, is appealing for a reversal of verdict at Shariah Appeals Court."

"Nigerian stoning appeal heard" (CNN.com, 2003/08/27)
"Tears of fright in her eyes, a 32-year-old Nigerian single mother cuddled and nursed her young daughter in a sweltering Islamic appeals court Wednesday as lawyers pleaded she be spared death by stoning for bearing the child out of wedlock.
Heavily veiled and draped, Amina Lawal appeared overwhelmed by the crush of riot police, journalists and rights workers as she arrived for a case that has sparked international campaigns on her behalf. ...
An Islamic court convicted Lawal in March 2002 following the birth of her baby, more than two years after Lawal and her husband divorced.
Judges ordered her buried up to her neck in sand and stoned. While appeals continue, courts have ordered Lawal's execution postponed until her child - now nearly 2 - is weaned." (See also: "God will get me through, says mother" (Janine di Giovanni, The Times/ropma.net, 2002/11/13), "The Next Hotbed Of Islamic Radicalism" (Paul Marshall, The Washington Post, 2002/10/08) and "The War on Women" (Lashawn R. Jefferson, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/08/22))

"The Magnificent 19 - That divided the world on September 11th"
(Al-Muhajiroun, August 2003)

"Honoring the 9/11 hijackers" (Lisa Myers, NBC News, 2003/08/27)
"As the two-year anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, a very unusual ceremony is being planned in London. Critics say the event will celebrate the tragedy and the hijackers who killed thousands that day.
Wednesday, on the streets of London, there was a jarring poster, extolling the 9/11 hijackers as the "Magnificent 19." It features a picture of each of the 19 hijackers, the smoking World Trade Center towers and Osama bin Laden. It's all the work of a radical Islamic group known as Al-Muhajiroun.
In an interview with NBC News, the group's spiritual leader, Sheik Omar Bakri, says the hijackers deserve to be honored.
"The word magnificent is to attract if you like really the attention of the people to those particular 19 Muslims who in our eyes we see as Muslims what really they are — they are more than magnificent," Sheik Bakri said. "In our eyes, they are the people who sacrifice their own life and that's the most valuable thing and they offer it. It must be for a good reason. It must be for divine reason."
Al-Muhajiroun is hosting a conference in London next month commemorating the second anniversary of the attack, saying 'many Muslims worldwide will be celebrating the comeuppance of the U.S.A.'" (See also: "Al Muhajiroun is Throwing a Party" (Little Green Footballs, 2003/08/22) and "Bush & Blair choke on the fallout from September the 11th" (Al-Muhajiroun, 2003/08/17): "Two years on then, it seems that during their customary 1 minutes silence in NewYork and elsewhere on September the 11th 2003, Muslims worldwide will again be watching replays of the collapse of the Twin Towers, praying to Allah (SWT) to grant those magnificent 19, Paradise. They will also be praying for the reverberations to continue until the eradication of all man-made law and the implementation of divine law in the form of the Khilafah - carrying the message of Islam to the world and striving for Izhar ud-Deen i.e. the total domination of the world by Islam.")

"Bali bomber thanks anti-war protesters" (Cindy Wockner, Herald Sun, 2003/08/27)
"The man who helped mix the deadly one-tonne Bali nightclub bomb Sawad, alias Sardjiyo, yesterday said he wanted to thank the Australian people who had supported his cause during recent Australian anti-Gulf War protests.
And fellow bomb-mixer Abdul Ghoni urged Australians against forming friendly alliances with America.
The pronouncements of the two Bali bombing suspects came as they and the evidence against them was handed from Bali police to prosecutors.
"I want to thank the Australian people who supported our cause when they demonstrated against the policies of George Bush. Say thank you to all of them," Sawad said.
Ironically, from a terrorist accused not only of the Bali bombing but of church bombings and the bombing of an ambassador's residence in Jakarta, Sawad claimed he had a message of peace for the world.
"For all human beings to stop now in this world, destroy all of the destructive weapons . . . if there were no weapons then peace can be created," he said."

"A War We Are Winning" (Austin Bay, StrategyPage.com, 2003/08/27)
"For real freedom fighters, Iraq's two battlefields are one common struggle. Occasionally reporters glimpse Al Qaeda's and Saddam's direct links, the Ansar al-Islam gang in Kurdistan being the most obvious. However, the division between secular and religious anti-American terrorists is - as scholar Faoud Ajami said this week in The Wall Street Journal - a "distinction without substance." Saddam's Baath loyalists and bin Laden-inspired Islamo-fascists always understood politically free people were their common foe.
Which brings us to the birthplace. Iraq is the birthplace of something every committed human rights advocate should praise -- a free land escaping murderous tyranny. Baathists and Islamo-fascists are both old-time autocrats, the control freaks of the past trying to kill the future in its crib.
It's an exhausting and bloody birth, and understandably, given the legacy of murder and theft. Yet Iraq is on a time-line for an elected government. ...
August has been a hot and horrid month in Baghdad. Fascist and Islamo-fascist thugs are testing the collective will of America, the Iraqi people, Britain, and their coalition allies.
There will be more wretched months. It's war.
It's also a war we are winning."

"Terror Stings Its Pal, the U.N." (Alan Dershowitz, Los Angeles Times, 2003/08/27)
"For more than a quarter of a century, the U.N. has actively encouraged terrorism by rewarding its primary practitioners, legitimating it as a tactic, condemning its victims when they try to defend themselves and describing the murderers of innocent children as "freedom fighters." No organization in the world today has accorded so much legitimacy to terrorism as has the U.N.
Consider the following: ...
• The U.N. has for years refused to condemn terrorism unequivocally, while encouraging and upholding "the legitimacy of the struggle for national liberation movements" against "occupation" — in other words, the use of terrorism against innocent civilians to resist occupation. This has sent the message to aggrieved groups that terrorism is legitimate. ...
The bottom line is that the U.N. has served as an international megaphone for the perverse message that any people who feel that they are occupied have the right to resist occupation by randomly murdering innocent civilians anywhere in the world.
Now the chickens have come home to roost. Some Iraqis, who feel that they are now occupied, have taken the U.N.'s message to heart and are engaged in a "national liberation movement" of the kind long praised by the U.N. and are using the tactics rewarded by the U.N. against that very organization.
Now that the victims of "national liberation terrorism" are U.N. employees instead of Jewish babies, maybe the U.N. will finally come to its senses and understand that by legitimating and rewarding terrorism, they have created a Frankenstein monster that can be turned against any nation, organization or group. Unless there is a change, no one will be safe from this U.N.-created, -fed and -rewarded monster that threatens the entire world." (Note: Found via Shark Blog.)

"Islamist Terror Comes to India's Streets" (Swapan Dasgupta, The Wall Street Journal/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/08/27)
"The Bombay blasts have heralded the entry of global Islamist terror into India. For the moment, the diabolical objective of provoking a Hindu backlash against the Muslim minority has not succeeded. But if the campaign persists, public pressure in an election year will force the government to consider retaliation against what is regarded in India as the epicenter of Islamist terrorism - Pakistan. Like the suicide bombers of Hamas, Bombay's terrorists may have already derailed a fragile peace process involving India and Pakistan."

"The foreign media's failure" (Michael Freund, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/27)
"On behalf of the people of Israel I would like to thank the foreign media for enlightening us about the true nature of Hamas.
After years of being targeted by stabbings, shootings and suicide bombings, Israelis had naively begun to think that the Islamic Resistance Movement was in fact a terrorist organization out to spill Jewish blood.
Thank goodness, then, for those intrepid journalists out there who have made it their task to set us straight by informing us that not all Hamas murderers are necessarily bad. They would have us believe that some Hamas murderers can be "moderates," too.
Take, for example, last week's reports on Israel's elimination of Hamas mastermind Ismail Abu Shanab. An item on the CNN web site referred to Abu Shanab as "a moderate member" of the group, while Time magazine labeled him a "political leader" who was "considered rather moderate at that." ...
Entitled "Slain Hamas leader known as moderate," (there's that "M" word again), the AP item had this to say about the late Mr. Abu Shanab: "While he backed the Hamas position that there is no place for a Jewish state in the Middle East, he was known as one of the group's more sober minds."
In other words, Abu Shanab may indeed have wanted to destroy the State of Israel and murder all five million of its Jewish citizens, but don't let that fool you because he had a "sober" mind." (See also: "Spurious Statements" (HonestReporting, 2003/08/26) and "Killing of Hamas leader ends truce" (Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 2003/08/22))

"Hamas Leader Rantisi: The False Holocaust - The Greatest of Lies Funded by the Zionists" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 558, 2003/08/27)
"Dr. 'Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Rantisi, a top Hamas activist in the Gaza Strip, wrote an article titled "Which is Worse – Zionism or Nazism?" for the Hamas weekly Al-Risala. The following are excerpts from the article: ...
'For example, Jewish associations and organizations have filed lawsuits against famous French philosopher Roger Garaudy, who in 1995 published his book 'The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics' in which he disproves the myth of the 'gas chambers,' saying, 'This idea is not technically possible. So far, no one has clarified how these false gas chambers worked, and what proof there is of their existence. Anyone with proof of their existence must show it.' ...
It is no longer a secret that the Zionists were behind the Nazis' murder of many Jews, and agreed to it, with the aim of intimidating them [the Jews] and forcing them to immigrate to Palestine. Every time they failed to persuade a group of Jews to immigrate [to Palestine], they unhesitatingly sentenced [them] to death. Afterwards, they would organize great propaganda campaigns, to cash in on their blood. ...
When we compare the Zionists to the Nazis, we insult the Nazis – despite the abhorrent terror they carried out, which we cannot but condemn. The crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against humanity, with all their atrocities, are no more than a tiny particle compared to the Zionists' terror against the Palestinian people. While disagreement proliferates about the veracity of the Zionist charges regarding the Nazis' deeds, no one denies the abhorrent Zionist crimes, some of which camera lenses have managed to document.'"

"Bremer: Iraq Effort to Cost Tens of Billions" (Peter Slevin and Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post, 2003/08/27)
"Iraq will need "several tens of billions" of dollars from abroad in the next year to rebuild its rickety infrastructure and revive its moribund economy, and American taxpayers and foreign governments will be asked to contribute substantial sums, U.S. occupation coordinator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday.
Bremer said Iraqi revenue will not nearly cover the bill for economic needs "almost impossible to exaggerate." ...
Covering a range of topics, Bremer described a "massive undertaking" to get Iraq functioning again. He said the project will take years and countless billions of dollars, but he described conditions in Iraq as better and more hopeful than the media often suggest. "I keep reading stories about it's a country in chaos. This is simply not true," Bremer said. 'It is not a country in chaos, and Baghdad is not a city in chaos.'"

"Bush: U.S. won't relent in terror war" (CNN.com, 2003/08/27)
"President Bush is working to win support from those who question his handling of the war and reconstruction of Iraq, saying the fight is essential to the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
"Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles," Bush said Tuesday as the number of Americans who have died in postwar Iraq topped the death toll during major combat. ...
"Our only goal, our only option, is total victory in the war on terror," said Bush, who received a standing ovation when he appeared on stage. 'And this nation will press on to victory.'" (See also: "President Delivers Remarks to 85th American Legion Convention" (The White House, 2003/08/26))

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

News and commentary:

"'Protocols' still inspire anti-Semites a century later" (Herb Keinon, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/26)
"On August 26, 1903, the reactionary St. Petersburg newspaper Znamya began publishing in serial form The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet that purported to detail a secret plan for world domination concocted by an international Jewish conspiracy.
"Today I can assure you that we are only within a few strides of our goal," it reads. "There remains only a short distance and the cycle of the Symbolic Serpent that badge of our people will be complete. When this circle is locked, all the States of Europe will be enclosed in it, as it were, by unbreakable chains."
Today, on the 100th anniversary of its publication, the Protocols is no outdated historical document moldering in academic libraries. It continues to be widely disseminated and read, in bookstores and on the Internet, in anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi circles, and increasingly also in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
Copies were displayed at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Last year, officials of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad's party gave out translated copies of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic book The International Jew, inspired by and containing excerpts of the Protocols, to delegates at the annual United Malays National Organization conference in Kuala Lumpur. A mini-series based in part on the Protocols was aired on Egyptian television last autumn and again this summer." (See also:"'You know very well that the Zionists control everything'" (Mårten Barck, Watch, 2001/10/21) and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - David Dickersons's linkcollection on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)

"The Anti-Anti-Americans" (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, from the 2003/09/01 issue)
Gopnik on French "anti-anti-Americans", who "can be counted on the fingers of one hand (with room left over for a thumb and a pinkie)". Here on Bernard-Henri Lévy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?":
"B.H.L.'s purely political, or forensic, conclusion is that it is naïve to speak of Al Qaeda as an independent terrorist organization. At most a band of Yemenis and Saudis, the Al Qaeda of American imagination and fears — the octopus of terrorism capable of bringing tall buildings down in a single morning — is largely controlled by the Pakistani secret service, he says, and he concludes that Pearl was kidnapped and murdered with its knowledge. Pearl was killed, B.H.L. believes, because he had come to understand too much about all of this, and particularly about "the great taboo": that the Pakistani atomic bomb was built and is controlled by radical Islamists who intend to use it someday. ...
"I am strongly anti-anti-American, but I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I'd seen in Pakistan," Lévy said. "Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher — an old-fashioned secular tyrant, who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mass destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical — he's just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon."...
'The real issue, which the Americans don't see, is that the Arab Islamist threat is partly manageable," he went on. "One can see solutions, if not easy ones, to the Israeli-Palestinian question, to the Saudi problem. The Asian Islamist threat, though, is of an entirely different dimension. There are far more people, they are far more desperate, and they have a tradition of national action. And they have a bomb. Even North Korea is less dangerous than Pakistan — a Stalinist country with a defunct ideology and a bomb is infinitely less dangerous than a country with a bomb and a new ideology in the full vigor of its first birth. That is the real nexus of the terrorism, and fussing in the desert doesn't even begin to address it.'"

"Providing a Better Life for the Iraqis" (David Mattson, Insight on the News, 2003/08/26)
"Despite liberal punditry and electioneering rhetoric to the contrary, say regional specialists at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, the evidence is turning in favor of the administration. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the allied temporary government in Iraq, has made astounding progress in humanitarian efforts as well as in developing autonomy and democracy for the Iraqi people, according to sources that have been on the ground there. "I was expecting chaos and anarchy, and that's not what I found at all," says CPA official Tom Basile, who recently arrived in Iraq. ...
In the intervening months, despite the systematic looting and sabotage of urban infrastructure and continued operations by Ba'athist terrorists hiding among the population, there has been remarkable improvement, say observers inside the country. Many of Iraq's 240-plus hospitals and clinics have been rehabilitated and are operating above prewar levels. ...
According to official and private sources with whom Insight spoke, the results and progress made through planning by the U.S. government, and specifically the CPA and NGOs, already have saved many lives and improved the situations of millions of formerly hungry and desperate Iraqis. Local areas have begun to accept democratic processes and are learning to work with the Governing Council."

"Enriched uranium found in Iranian nuclear facility" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/26)
"UN inspectors have found traces of highly enriched uranium at an Iranian nuclear facility, a senior diplomat said Tuesday, citing a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The find, contained in a report prepared for the agency's board meeting next month, heightened concerns that Tehran may be running a secret nuclear weapons program.
Agency inspectors found "particles" of highly enriched uranium that could be used in a weapons program at the facility at Natanz, said the diplomat, who covers agency activities."

"Origin of 45-min claim revealed" (Matthew Tempest and Chris Tryhorn, The Guardian, 2003/08/26)
"The origin of the disputed 45-minute claim on Iraqi weapons came from a secret intelligence report dated August 30, the Hutton inquiry heard today.
The claim that Iraq could deploy "chemical and biological munitions" within 45 minutes was made in a classified email issued by a member of the joint intelligence committee (JIC) - but with both sender and recipient blacked out for security reasons.
It was distributed to Downing Street and Whitehall staff six days later on September 5 as new drafts of the September 24 dossier were being prepared.
The email stated that "forward deployed storage sites of chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 45 minutes".
That revelation, presented on day nine of the inquiry by John Scarlett, the chairman of the JIC, appears to blow out of the water the original suggestion by BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan that the claim was made up.
Mr Scarlett also denied that it was inserted at the behest of No 10."

"A Deal With North Korea? Dream On" (Nicholas Eberstadt, The Washington Post, 2003/08/26)
"Even President Bush, no fan of the Kim Jong Il regime, has expressed "optimism" that the crisis can be resolved by diplomatic means, a sentiment that seems to be widely shared. Unfortunately, it amounts to little more than diplomatic wishful thinking.
North Korea is entirely unlikely to be talked out of its nuclear weapons program. This happens to be one of those sorry international disputes in which the most desirable outcome is also the least likely. Indeed, the practical obstacles to securing an irreversible and verifiable end to Pyongyang's nuclear program through diplomatic negotiations alone are not just formidable, they are overwhelming. ...
It's entirely possible that Western negotiators will return from Beijing next week talking about "signs of progress." Diplomatic atmospherics are among the many scarce goods that Pyongyang presumes to regulate and ration. But any genuine progress toward a diplomatic resolution of the nuclear impasse cannot be expected without fundamental - even revolutionary - changes in outlook and policy on the part of North Korea's leadership. None of the options Washington and its allies face in North Korea is pleasant - but the time has come to face them squarely, without diplomatic illusion."

"On Being Borked" (Daniel Pipes, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2003/08/26)
"In the months since President Bush nominated me to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, confirmation etiquette has obliged me not to talk about my nomination. I thus found myself having to remain mute as opponents said what they would about me.
For five months, I quietly endured Sen. Edward Kennedy borking me as someone not "committed to bridging differences and bringing peace" and a Washington Post editorial criticizing me as "a destroyer" of cultural bridges, among other slings. ...
...I strenuously draw a distinction between the religion of Islam and the ideology of militant Islam; "militant Islam is the problem. moderate Islam is the solution" has virtually become my mantra. But these are novel and complex ideas. As a result, my enmity toward militant Islam sometimes gets misunderstood as hostility toward Islam itself. ...
I believe this distinction - between Islam and militant Islam - stands at the heart of the War on Terror and urgently needs to be clarified for non-specialists. The most effective way to do so, I expect, is by giving voice to the Muslim victims of Islamist totalitarianism.
Come to think of it, that sounds like the sort of activity that the U.S. Institute of Peace might wish to consider undertaking as part of its mission to "promote the prevention, management and peaceful resolution of international conflicts."
Proposing projects like this is one reason why I look forward to serving on the USIP board." (See also: "Bush Appoints Daniel Pipes to Think Tank" (AP/The Guardian, 2003/08/22))

"The UN murderers must never be allowed to achieve their aim" (William Shawcross, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/08/26)
"The murder of Sergio Vieira de Mello and his many United Nations colleagues on August 19 is a catastrophe. It is the international version of September 11, and it makes it infinitely harder for the UN to help in the reconstruction of an independent Iraq. Which is just what the murderers intended.
The numbers of dead bear no comparison. But the evil men who carried out this attack murdered more UN officials than in any other assault upon the organisation since it was created after the Second World War.
Just as September 11 was an attack upon America, August 19 was an attack, by the same sort of people, on the international system. ...
If the international effort to build a decent, democratic Iraq fails, the men who carried out September 11 and August 19 will have won a terrible victory. The only fitting memorial to Sergio and all those brave men and women who were murdered with him can be success in Iraq.
It is not only essential, it is possible."

"Shiite Clerics Clashing Over How to Reshape Iraq" (Neil MacFarquhar, The New York Times, 2003/08/26)
"The clerics who hold sway over Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority are locked in a violent power struggle pitting the older, established ayatollahs counseling patience with the occupation against a younger, more militant faction itching to found an Islamic state.
The militants are suspected of carrying out a series of attacks, including one over the weekend, engineered to eliminate or at least unsettle Najaf's religious scholars just as Shiites feel their moment has come. ...
In one corner sit the senior ayatollahs clustered around Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, all betting that it is only a matter of time before the United States delivers a democratic state that the Shiites can dominate through sheer numbers.
Arrayed against them are more activist opponents of the American-led occupation who back Moktada al-Sadr and who believe that Shiites should aggressively pursue an Islamic state modeled on clerical rule in Iran." (See also: "Bomb Meant for Top Cleric Kills 3 Guards" (Neil MacFarquhar, The New York Times, 2003/08/25))

Monday, August 25, 2003

News and commentary:

"Report: U.S suspects Iraqi WMD in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley" (World Tribune.com, 2003/08/25)
"U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have finally been located.
Unfortunately, getting to them will be nearly impossible for the United States and its allies, because the containers with the strategic materials are not in Iraq.
Instead they are located in Lebanon's heavily-fortified Bekaa Valley, swarming with Iranian and Syrian forces, and Hizbullah and ex-Iraqi agents, Geostrategy-Direct.com will report in Wednesday's new weekly edition.
U.S. intelligence first identified a stream of tractor-trailer trucks moving from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon in January 2003. The significance of this sighting did not register on the CIA at the time.
U.S. intelligence sources believe the area contains extended-range Scud-based missiles and parts for chemical and biological warheads. ...
The CIA now believes a multi-million dollar deal between Iraq and Syria provided for the hiding and safekeeping of Saddam's strategic weapons.
Not surprisingly, U.S. inquiries in Beirut and Syria are being met with little substantive response, U.S. officials said."

"Taliban fighters killed in Afghanistan" (CNN.com, 2003/08/25)
"Backed by U.S. warplanes and Special Operations troops, Afghan forces attacked Taliban fighters Monday in southeastern Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan officials said.
Afghan officials said more than 40 Taliban fighters were killed in the attack, while the Pentagon put the death toll at 14. No U.S. or Afghan casualties were reported. ...
The fighting occurred in the province of Zabol, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of Kabul. Afghan troops had been building up over the weekend after raids by an estimated 200 to 300 Taliban fighters left 14 people dead in the area, Afghan officials said."

"Twin blasts cause Bombay carnage" (BBC News, 2003/08/25)
"At least 50 people have been killed after two powerful explosions struck the Indian city of Bombay, police officials have told the BBC.
Over 130 people were injured, many seriously, in the near simultaneous blasts, in the country's commercial capital, also known as Mumbai.
One explosion, reportedly caused by a car bomb placed in a taxi, happened at the Gateway of India, the city top tourist attraction, police say.
The other explosion, also a car bomb, took place in a busy jewellery market near the Mumba Devi temple in central Bombay.
Witnesses described scenes of chaos as the blasts shook buildings, leaving mangled cars and trails of blood and glass strewn across the city's streets. ...
The Indian Government said it is not yet known who carried out the attacks, although it has been hinted that outlawed student Islamic groups could be involved.
Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani said that the Students Islamic Movement of India (Simi), acting with the support of Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, was to blame for a string of other attacks in Bombay in recent months."

"France: No proof Hamas and Islamic Jihad are terror groups" (The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/25)
This is totally beyond belief: "France voices objections to placing Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the European Union's list of terror organizations, ynet reported Monday.
Diplomatic advisor to President Chirac, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, is quoted to have said to the Israeli ambassador in France, Nissim Zvilli, that there is no proof that these two organizations are terror groups. "If we find that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are indeed terror groups opposed to peace, we may have to change the EU's stand," said Gourdault-Montagne. 'However, we mustn't limit ourselves to one, clear cut, position.'" (See also, for example: "The Genocidal Hamas Charter" (David G. Littman, National Review, 2002/09/26))

"Tête-à-têtes With Terrorists" (Tim Cavanaugh, Reason, 2003/08/25)
An interview with Jessica Stern, author of "Terror In the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill":
"Reason: These are cases where people are reacting to the U.S. as an enemy. But in Afghanistan it was a matter of our assisting in the creation of something that later became an enemy. What is something we're creating right now that looks like a good solution but could come back to bite us?
Stern: For the moment we're creating chaos, although our intention is to create a functioning, liberal democracy. The likelihood that we're going to pull that off anytime soon doesn't seem very high to me. I actually think the best argument against the war in Iraq was made by one of its biggest supporters, Kenneth Pollack in his book The Threatening Storm. He argued that it's imperative to go in there, but that if we don't do it right we're going to make it worse. And we're not doing it right. Or at least, we can see the Pentagon was very surprised by the chaos.
I continue to believe many of the arguments for the war. I'll be very surprised if we don't eventually find evidence of weapons of mass destruction; my prejudice is that Iraq was doing everything possible to reconstruct that program. And I'm no longer skeptical of the links between bin Laden and Saddam; I don't buy that bin Laden considered Saddam such an infidel that he would never cooperate with him. I think this debate about the sixteen words is silly. Well, let me take that back: I think it's important because it tells us something about this administration's regard for the truth, but it's not something that would make me change my opinion.
But because so much of the value of bio-weapons rests in expertise rather than in actual materials, and because nuclear materials may actually have been spread as a result of the war, I'm not persuaded that we'll be effective in knocking out the WMD. And whatever loose cooperation between al Qaeda and supporters of Saddam existed before will be strengthened."

"Beirut, Baghdad" (Fouad Ajami, The Wall Street Journal/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/08/25)
"A battle broader than the country itself, then, plays out in Iraq. We needn't apologize to the other Arabs about our presence there, and our aims for it. The custodians of Arab power, and the vast majority of the Arab political class, never saw or named the terrible cruelties of Saddam. A political culture that averts its gaze from mass graves and works itself into self-righteous hysteria over a foreign presence in an Arab country is a culture that has turned its back on political reason. ...
For our part, America cannot - must not - do another Beirut. We must put Iran and Syria on notice that a terrible price will be paid by those who would aid and abet terror in Iraq. It was those regimes that drove us out of Lebanon. They had waged a war in the shadows. They must be told that a different America - driven by a sense of righteous violation after Sept. 11, 2001 - has turned up in their midst. This was never destined to be an easy mission. As it plays out, we shall learn much about Iraq. And in no small measure, we shall learn about ourselves."

"That old-fashioned Jew-hatred" (Alan M. Dershowitz, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/25)
"Now a new blood libel against the Jews has been issued by a cardinal of the Catholic church who, according to James Carrol, who writes about Catholic matters for The Boston Globe, is "one of a small number of likely candidates to succeed Pope John Paul II."
Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, who is the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has been telling anyone who is willing to listen that "the Jews" are to blame for the scandal surrounding the sexual misconduct of priests toward young parishioners!
The Jews? How did Cardinal Rodriguez ever come up with this ridiculous idea? Here is his "logic." He begins by asserting that the Vatican is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. It follows, therefore, that "the Jews" had to get even with the Catholic Church, while at the same time deflecting attention away from Israeli injustices against the Palestinians.
The Jews managed to do this by arranging for the media which they, of course, control to give disproportionate attention to the Vatican sex scandal. Listen to Rodriguez's own words:
"It certainly makes me think that in a moment in which all the attention of the mass media was focused on the Middle East, all the many injustices done against the Palestinian people, the print media and the TV in the United States became obsessed with sexual scandals that happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago.
Why? I think it's also for these motives: What is the church that has received Arafat the most times and has most often confirmed the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian state? What is the church that does not accept that Jerusalem should be the indivisible capital of the State of Israel, but that it should be the capital of the three great monotheistic religions?"
Rodriguez then goes on to compare the Jewish-controlled media with "Hitler," because they are 'protagonists of what I do not hesitate to define as a persecution against the Church.'"

"Al Qaeda Plots Sept. 11-Style Attack in Britain" (FOX News, 2003/08/25)
"Numerous reports indicate that America's staunchest ally is a possible target for a major, 9/11-style attack by Al Qaeda.
Sunday's London Telegraph reported that the FBI had uncovered intelligence suggesting Al Qaeda is plotting to hijack an airplane in Britain and fly it into an important building in the next two months.
Airlines operating in Britain — including British Airways and other leading carriers — have been put on alert about the potential terrorist scheme, according to the Telegraph. Planes leaving from London's two main airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, are the most likely targets, the newspaper reported. ...
The Department of Homeland Securi