Archived news and commentary: August 2 - 8, 2004

2004/09/27 - 2004/10/03
2004/09/20 - 2004/09/26
2004/09/13 - 2004/09/19
2004/09/06 - 2004/09/12
2004/08/30 - 2004/09/05
2004/08/23 - 2004/08/29
2004/08/16 - 2004/08/22
2004/08/09 - 2004/08/15
2004/08/02 - 2004/08/08
2004/07/26 - 2004/08/01
2004/07/19 - 2004/07/25
2004/07/12 - 2004/07/18
2004/07/05 - 2004/07/11
2004/06/28 - 2004/07/04

Sunday, August 8, 2004

News and commentary:

"Sudan: Israel supporting Darfur rebels" (UPI/The Washington Times, 2004/08/08)
"The Sudanese government Sunday accused Israel of supporting rebels in the troubled Darfur region in western Sudan.
Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters in Cairo his government had "information that confirms media reports of Israeli support."
Ismail, who is taking part in an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers to discuss the Darfur crisis, said he was "sure the next few days will reveal a lot of Israeli contacts with the rebels."
He pointed out that the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. had 'started his talk about the Israeli barrier (at the U.N.) by speaking on Darfur and what the Arabs are doing there, as well as moving the Jewish communities to spread what is being said about Darfur.'"

"The Terrorism to Come" (Walter Laqueur, Policy Review, from the August 2004 issue)
"For the first time in human history very small groups have, or will have, the potential to cause immense destruction. In a situation such as the present one there is always the danger of focusing entirely on the situation at hand — radical nationalist or religious groups with whom political solutions may be found. There is a danger of concentrating on Islamism and forgetting that the problem is a far wider one. Political solutions to deal with their grievances may sometimes be possible, but frequently they are not. Today’s terrorists, in their majority, are not diplomats eager to negotiate or to find compromises. And even if some of them would be satisfied with less than total victory and the annihilation of the enemy, there will always be a more radical group eager to continue the struggle. ...
Today even small groups matter a great deal precisely because of their enormous potential destructive power, their relative independence, the fact that they are not rational actors, and the possibility that their motivation may not be political in the first place.
Perhaps the scenario is too pessimistic; perhaps the weapons of mass destruction, for whatever reason, will never be used. But it would be the first time in human history that such arms, once invented, had not been used."

"Iraq Seeks Arrest of Prominent Politicians" (Jamie Tarabay, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/08/08)
Chalabi I: "Iraq has issued an arrest warrant for Ahmad Chalabi, a former governing council member, on counterfeiting charges and another for Salem Chalabi, the head of Iraq's special tribunal, on murder charges, Iraq's chief investigating judge said Sunday.
The warrant was a new sign of the fall of Ahmad Chalabi from the centers of power. Chalabi, a longtime exile opposition leader, had been a favorite of many in the Pentagon but fell out with the Americans in the weeks before the U.S. occgupation ended in June.
His nephew, Salem Chalabi, heads the tribunal that is due to try Saddam on war crimes charges. ...
The warrants, issued Saturday, accused Ahmad Chalabi of counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars — which had been removed from circulation following the fall of Saddam's regime last year, he said.
Ahmad Chalabi appeared to have been hiding the counterfeit money amid other old money and changing it into new dinars in the street, he said.
Police found the counterfeit money along with old dinars in Ahmad Chalabi's house during a May raid, he said.
Salem Chalabi was named as a suspect in the June killing of the Haithem Fadhil, director general of the finance ministry."

"Target: America" (Bill Powell, TIME, 2004/08/08)
"Intelligence and law-enforcement officials familiar with the material recovered in Pakistan told TIME that the discs revealed far more detailed, wide-ranging and current research and planning by a terrorist group than have so far been made public. Though the surveillance information on the discs was done mostly in 2000 and 2001, one disc contained an updated photo of the Prudential Plaza building that was added to the al-Qaeda file in January of this year. The discs also detailed the operatives’ extensive reconnaissance of the design, construction and layouts of four other sites: the New York Stock Exchange, the Citigroup building and the Washington headquarters of both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The plot’s specificity is alarming. A surveillance report noted that the windows behind the six columns at the front of the N.Y.S.E. building made it appear "a little fragile," while another concluded that attacking the IMF and the World Bank structures would be "tricky" because of the heavy security surrounding them. The terrorists reported that the Citigroup building, "like the World Trade Center, is supported on steel, load-bearing walls, not on a steel frame." The operatives recommended employing "usual methods" and specifically discussed using a heavy gasoline truck or an oil tanker to attack facilities. The computers also contained surveillance of helicopter ports in New York City as well as cockpits and controls of helicopters, suggesting that al-Qaeda has investigated the possibility of using them for an airborne attack. "This new information is chilling in tone, dramatic in its detail and very professional," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "It was done by someone who clearly knew what he was doing." (Note: The full article can also be found here.)

"The Extremities of Nicholson Baker" (Leon Wieselter, The New York Times, 2004/08/08)
A review of Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," in which the main character fantasizes about assassinating the president:
"The striking thing about Jay's analysis of the war -- that it is the consequence of George W. Bush's religiosity, and servility before American corporations, and alliance with neoconservatives who are ''not humble enough before the mystery of a foreign country'' -- is that it is not Jay's alone. The same account is familiar from newspapers and television shows and Web sites everywhere. In a sense, Baker has slandered the opposition to George W. Bush by representing it with a disordered mind bent on murder. In this season of ferocity, therefore, it is worth insisting that Bush-hatred is generally not a plot to kill the president. Yet the discussion of Bush-hatred, and of Baker's book, cannot be concluded with a polite absolution. For the virulence that calls itself critical thinking, the merry diabolization of other opinions and the other people who hold them, the confusion of rightness with righteousness, the preference for aspersion to argument, the view that the strongest statement is the truest statement -- these deformations of political discourse now thrive in the houses of liberalism too. The radicalism of the right has hectored into being a radicalism of the left. The Bush-loving mob is being met with a Bush-hating mob. Liberals are forgetting why liberals are not radicals. (Also: "The signs of the degradation are everywhere. In a new anthology of anti-Bush writings by distinguished journalists and commentators and a senator (Kennedy) and a congressman (Dingell), the pages are ornamented with exhilarating anagrams such as ''The Republicans: Plan butcheries?'' and ''Donald Henry Rumsfeld: Fondly handles murder.'' The back cover thoughtfully calls Rumsfeld a ''war pig.'' In an advertisement that proudly lists ''recent contributors,'' The New York Review of Books suddenly names Noam Chomsky, who has not appeared in its pages in decades; but this is the glory in which the journal apparently wishes to bask again. Al Gore denounces Abu Ghraib as ''the Bush gulag,'' and Moveon.org publishes a huge ad instructing that ''The Communists had Pravda. Republicans have Fox.'' And so on. All this is not much of a height from which to fall to the juxtaposition of pictures of Bush with pictures of Hitler in a recent concert by Black Sabbath, to gloss a song also called 'War Pigs.''' See also: "Assassination Porn" (Timothy Noah, Slate, 2004/08/05))

"The Stealth Nuclear Threat" (Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, from the 2004/08/16 issue)
"Over the last two years, thanks to tips from Iranian opposition groups and investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, it has become clear that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. In the words of the agency, Iran has "a practically complete front end of a nuclear fuel cycle," which leads most experts to believe it is two to three years away from having a nuclear bomb. ...
That's where things stand now, with the clock ticking fast. If Iran were to go nuclear, it would have dramatic effects. It would place nuclear materials in the hands of a radical regime that has ties to unsavory groups. It would signal to other countries that it's possible to break the nuclear taboo. And it would revolutionize the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Egypt would feel threatened by Iran's bomb and would start their own search for nuclear technology. ...
Last month the Brookings Institution conducted a scenario with mostly former American and European officials. In it, Iran actually acquires fissile material. Even facing the imminent production of a nuclear bomb, Europeans were unwilling to take any robust measures like the use of force or tough sanctions. James Steinberg, a senior Clinton official who organized this workshop, said that he was "deeply frustrated by European attitudes." Madeleine Albright, who regularly convenes a discussion group of former foreign ministers, said that on this topic, "Europeans say they understand the threat but then act as if the real problem is not Iran but the United States."

"Diplomacy Fails to Slow Advance of Nuclear Arms" (David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 2004/08/08)
"American intelligence officials and outside nuclear experts have concluded that the Bush administration's diplomatic efforts with European and Asian allies have barely slowed the nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea over the past year, and that both have made significant progress.
In a tacit acknowledgment that the diplomatic initiatives with European and Asian allies have failed to curtail the programs, senior administration and intelligence officials say they are seeking ways to step up unspecified covert actions intended, in the words of one official, "to disrupt or delay as long as we can" Iran's efforts to develop a nuclear weapon."

"U.S. Says Man Had Ties to Plot to Disrupt Vote" (David Johnston, The New York Times, 2004/08/08)
"A Pakistani man whose arrest provided information about the reconnaissance of financial institutions in New York, Newark and Washington was also communicating with Qaeda operatives who the authorities say are plotting to carry out an attack intended to disrupt the fall elections, a senior intelligence official said Saturday. ...
The arrest last month of the Pakistani, Mohammed Naem Noor Khan, had already prompted a search in the United States, Britain and other countries to locate the people behind the surveillance, which took place three or four years ago. Now the authorities say Mr. Khan's arrest is also helping them unravel a threat to carry out an attack this year inside the United States."

Saturday, August 7, 2004

News and commentary:

"British charity suspends press officer: Accused of writing anti-Muslim articles" (Patrick E. Tyler, NYT/IHT, 2004/08/07)
More on the Will Cummins affair: "The British Council, which promotes culture and learning around the world, has suspended one of its press officers after it emerged that he was the suspected author of a series of newspaper commentaries attacking Muslims and denouncing "the black heart of Islam."
The council, whose official patron is Queen Elizabeth II, operates as the cultural arm of British diplomacy in 110 countries. A spokesman for the organization said Friday that Harry Cummins, a press officer, was suspended from his post on July 29 after The Guardian newspaper identified him as the likely author.
"All of us who work for the British Council are appalled that our organization should in any way be associated with the deeply offensive content of these articles," the spokesman said. In one of the articles, the author stated, "All Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics." Another commentary asserted, "It is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object." David Green, the British Council's director general, has written to the Muslim Council of Britain saying, "There is no place in the British Council for people who utter such hateful utterances." ...
In Britain, the commentaries attacking Muslims appeared on the opinion pages of the conservative Sunday Telegraph newspaper under the byline of Will Cummins. Harry Cummins, the British Council press officer, could not be reached for comment. He has denied being the author of the articles. A journalist at the Telegraph said that Cummins had since "disappeared" and that some Telegraph journalists want him to take responsibility for writing the articles under a pseudonym." (See also: "British Council anti-Islam probe" (BBC News, 2004/08/03))

See also:
"Muslims are a threat to our way of life" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/25)
"The Tories must confront Islam instead of kowtowing to it" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/18)
"We must be allowed to criticise Islam" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/11)
"Dr Williams, beware of false prophets" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/04)

"Unmasking of Qaeda Mole a U.S. Security Blunder - Experts" (Peter Graff, Reuters, 2004/08/07)
Leak I: "The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its "orange alert" this month has shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have set back the war on terror.
Reuters learned from Pakistani intelligence sources on Friday that computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, arrested secretly in July, was working under cover to help the authorities track down al
Qaeda militants in Britain and the United States when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.
"After his capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz."
Last Sunday, U.S. officials told reporters that someone held secretly by Pakistan was the source of the bulk of the information justifying the alert. The New York Times obtained Khan's name independently, and U.S. officials confirmed it when it appeared in the paper the next morning.
None of those reports mentioned at the time that Khan had been under cover helping the authorities catch al Qaeda suspects, and that his value in that regard was destroyed by making his name public." (See also: "Captured Qaeda Figure Led Way to Information Behind Warning" (Douglas Jehl and David Rohde, The New York Times, 2004/08/02))

Friday, August 6, 2004

News and commentary:

"Tough Italian Journalist Turns Eye on Self" (AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/08/06)
"Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist known for ruthlessly grilling her subjects, says she detests interviews but has granted one herself — to herself — because she is dying of cancer.
The Milan daily Corriere della Sera published the slim volume, "Oriana Fallaci Interviews Oriana Fallaci," as a supplement to its newspaper Friday. ...
Fallaci writes that she stopped taking care of herself, including having medical tests and seeing oncologists, on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terror attacks against the United States.
She said she needed to spend all her time writing and translating two books that have since been published and which, in her typically blunt style, reflect scathingly on society, including the differences between Christian and Islamic culture.
The second of the two, "The Strength of Reason," came out this spring. In it, Fallaci accuses the Roman Catholic Church of being too weak before the Muslim world, and Europe of selling itself to Islam "like a prostitute."
Two years earlier, her best-selling essay "The Rage and The Pride" drew accusations that Fallaci was inciting hatred against Muslims.
In her work published Friday, Fallaci, a former war correspondent, says, 'The West, Europe, Italy, is sicker than I am.'"

"U.S. Says 300 Fighters Killed in Najaf Battle" (Khaled Farhan, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2004/08/06)
"U.S. Marines said Friday they had killed 300 fighters loyal to a firebrand Iraqi Shi'ite cleric in fierce clashes that pose a stern test for an interim government struggling to stamp its authority over the country.
A spokesman for Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr denied that many fighters had been killed in the holy city of Najaf in the past two days.
He said 36 militiamen had died in several Iraqi cities from clashes that have fueled fears of a new rebellion of radical Shi'ites. By late Friday, Najaf was quiet, residents said.
The fresh fighting marks a major challenge for U.S.-backed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and appears to have destroyed a two-month-old cease-fire between U.S. forces and Sadr's Mehdi militia.
"The number of enemy casualties is 300 KIA (killed in action)," Lieutenant Colonel Gary Johnston, operations officer for the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said at a military base near the city, 100 miles south of Baghdad.
"The Marines are here and I think you know how they operate. If you kill a marine, the Marines are going to fight back."
Johnston said two Marines had been killed and 12 wounded."

Thursday, August 5, 2004

News and commentary:

"Pakistan Helps Britain Thwart Heathrow Attack" (Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2004/08/05)
"Pakistan provided information leading to the arrest of 12 terrorism suspects in Britain and may have thwarted a plot to attack London's Heathrow airport, sources in Islamabad told Reuters Thursday. ...
British newspapers said the 12 included a senior al Qaeda figure called Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eisa al-Hindi and that he was believed to be plotting an attack on Heathrow airport.
An unidentified senior U.S. official quoted in the New York Times described Hindi as of serious interest to Washington.
A senior Pakistani government official said maps of Heathrow were found on computers of Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, arrested three weeks ago and described by intelligence sources as an al Qaeda communications expert.
"The entire crackdown in London is based on the information extracted from him," the official told Reuters. 'Maps of Heathrow airport were found from his computer which was one of their targets.'"

"Assassination Porn" (Timothy Noah, Slate, 2004/08/05)
A review of Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," in which the main character fantasizes about assassinating the president:
"Much of Checkpoint mimics leftist myopia so deftly that I felt sure it was meant as intentional parody. ... But I had to revise that view after reading Baker's interview with David Gates in the Aug. 9 Newsweek:

It's easy to sneer at Limbaugh for confusing a novelist with a character — would he do the same with Stephen King? — but Checkpoint did, in fact, originate in Baker's own fury, grief and helplessness over Iraq. "I was plodding along, writing my little books," he says, "and then suddenly this thing speared into my life and it just took me over." He lost a month of 2003 to his obsession with the news, swore off Google News and blogs — he now has a Post-It on his screen saying ONLY E-MAIL—and finally wrote the first draft of Checkpoint in April 2004, during the siege of Fallujah, because he could think about nothing else. As he typed, he found himself weeping.

Not much distancing irony in evidence there. In the interview, Baker refers to Jay almost affectionately as "this eccentric guy."
Even where Baker conveys that Jay and Ben are spouting nonsense, you get the feeling that we're supposed to groove on it. Even Jay's urge to assassinate is Bush's fault:

Jay: …And the prisons. The mockery on the guards' faces. It's like when he was governor of Texas, smirking over the executions. The man's personality trickles down through the entire military hierarchy and makes everyone meaner and nastier.
Ben: Including you.
Jay: Including me.

Indulging such thoughts is like the guilty pleasure liberals who know better take in watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. What makes Checkpoint a work of pornography isn't that its characters debate killing George W. Bush. What makes it pornography is the shameless way it panders to its readers' crudest beliefs. Jay and Ben's debate about something that's plainly wrong serves to disguise their complete agreement about every facet of the Bush administration and the Iraq war. It isn't a debate at all. The strumming and stroking in Vox were much more edifying." (See also: "Target: The President" (David Gates, Newsweek, from the 2004/08/09 issue)) and "A Novel's Plot Against the President: Character Fantasizes Bush Assassination" (Linton Weeks, Washington Post, 2004/06/29))

Wednesday, August 4, 2004

News and commentary:

"Conference call with Khaled Abu Toameh on the situation in the Palestinian Authority" (Access|Middle East, 2004/08/04)
Jerusalem Post journalist Khaled Abu Toameh on Arafatism:
"As I have said, the situation today in the West Bank in Gaza can be characterized as total chaos, lawlessness; the Palestinian Authority almost is non-existent in the eyes of many Palestinians. The only role of the Palestinian Authority today is to pay the salaries, but on the ground the Palestinian villages and cities are being controlled by rival militias, by rival security forces, and in some cases by rival families, so there is a complete breakdown of the Palestinian Authority security infrastructure.
The Palestinian Authority is no longer capable of enforcing law and order in the presence of all these security agencies and in the presence of the many rival militias that are roaming the streets of the West Bank and Gaza. All this has affected Yasser Arafat's status. It has damaged some of his prestige and standing both locally and in the Arab world. For the first time, we have Palestinian and Arab editors and writers openly calling on Yasser Arafat to step aside. ...
One has to note that the problem today … is no longer Yasser Arafat the person. The problem today as many Palestinians will tell you is Arafatism. Arafat did not come to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip alone — he came with several hundred or thousand cronies, all these officials around him who are his students, who will continue his legacy even after he dies.
There is a possibility that after Arafat retires or dies, we might get all these people around him; and then you haven't really achieved much change. Because it’s as if you are getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but keeping the Ba’ath Party in power."

Tuesday, August 3, 2004

News and commentary:

"British Council anti-Islam probe" (BBC News, 2004/08/03)
Via Robert Spencer, who notes: "This was bound to happen, given today's climate. I'm amazed that the articles were published at all. But the question is, what did Will Cummins say that was actually false? Does Osama bin Laden not have a black heart? And are not his views shared by millions? Doesn't the truth matter anymore?":
"The British Council has suspended a press officer in an investigation into allegedly anti-Muslim newspaper articles. Harry Cummins has denied writing a series of opinion columns in the Sunday Telegraph under the pseudonym Will Cummins. ... A spokesman, Christopher Wade, said the organisation disassociated itself from the "deeply offensive" content of the articles." (See also: Little Green Footballs.)

See also:
"Muslims are a threat to our way of life" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/25)
"The Tories must confront Islam instead of kowtowing to it" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/18)
"We must be allowed to criticise Islam" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/11)
"Dr Williams, beware of false prophets" (Will Cummins, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/07/04)

"Careful what you Bush for" (Spengler, Asia Times, 2004/08/03)
"Two predictions:
1) George W Bush will win a second term as president of the United States.
2) He will be sorry he did. ...
Dubya will be the president who led the US into a world civilizational war, although it is more precise to say that civilizational war led the US into it. Many will be the night during his second term that Bush will wish he were still in Texas, and still drunk.
In his own unassuming fashion, Bush is a world-historical figure in Georg Hegel's sense of the term — never mind that he does not know who Hegel was. A more thoughtful man would recoil in horror at the choices before him and fade into paralysis, like the unfortunate president James Buchanan in 1859. ...
By analogy, if Washington were to sit on its hands until Iran, Pakistan and other Islamic states developed nuclear weapons, the inevitable future conflict would be ruinous beyond imagination. Europe's demographic collapse and the replacement of European Christians by Middle Eastern and North African Muslims present an even deadlier long-term threat.
Washington will choose preemptive war. Narrow-minded but principled, trusting no one's judgment but his own, petty and ruthless, George W Bush is the man of the hour. The Weltgeist will give him a second term."

"British Arrest 13 in Anti-Terror Sweep" (Beth Gardiner, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/08/03)
"Police conducted anti-terrorism raids in London and several towns Tuesday, arresting 13 people believed involved in preparing terrorist acts.
London's Metropolitan Police said the afternoon and evening arrests were "part of a pre-planned, ongoing intelligence-led operation."
The men were detained "on suspicion of being concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism," the police statement said, without elaborating.
The arrests did not appear to be linked to information Pakistani authorities recently said they had uncovered about threats to Britain and America.
The police said the arrests were in northwest London, suburban Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire and in Lancashire, northwestern England. The Lancashire raid was in the town of Blackburn and the Hertfordshire arrests were in Luton, police said."

Monday, August 2, 2004

News and commentary:

"Transcript: Detailed background briefing by senior intelligence officials on new terror threats" (Drudge Report, 2004/08/02)
"SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL: ... When I went through the information over the past 36 hours the type of information that has been acquired about the target sets here in the United States demonstrates that al-Qaeda is meticulous in its efforts; it is patient in its efforts, and since 9-11 there has been an effort made to ensure that they have the information that they need in order to carry out attacks. ...
There is extensive information now available on the information they've been able to acquire regarding the other facilities in the area, whether they be religious establishments, schools, libraries, hospitals, police departments, fire departments; talks about the different access measures, as far as whether or not there's a physical desk or intercom systems; types of surveillance activities or counter-surveillance activities such as cameras; good places to go to meet employees; good places to go to acquire additional information; the types of traffic patterns that are near buildings; the different types of vehicles that in fact can enter different types of parking facilities; the incline that is used, that exists, as one enters an underground parking facility; the different types of materials that in fact should be brought into different types of vehicles and to address whether or not certain materials can, if detonated, cause, in fact, buildings to collapse; the placement of such devices and bombs to maximize the damage to the architecture of the building. ...
So again, from the standpoint of intelligence availability on different types of targets and my experience, the amount of detail available here is such that really provides the different types of organizations involved tremendous insight into what, in fact, al-Qaeda is contemplating and what they already have identified in terms of means of attack." (See also: "Background Briefing by Senior Intelligence Officials" (DHS, 2004/08/02))

"Diplomat dodges sex attack probe" (Pat Hurst, The Scotsman, 2004/08/02)
"A Saudi man who allegedly carried out a sex attack on an 11-year-old girl has been freed by police after claiming diplomatic immunity.
The 41-year-old allegedly carried out an indecent assault on the youngster in west London last week.
He was arrested and taken to a local police station but claimed diplomatic immunity.
Detectives then had to release him and take no further action as diplomats cannot be prosecuted in the country they are staying in.
The alleged assault reportedly happened during a party at the home of a fellow diplomat, who works at another embassy in London." (See also: "Saudi 'paedo' is freed" (Mike Sullivan and Gary O'Shea, 2004/08/02))

"Video Shows Iraqi Militants Killing Man" (Tarek Al-Issawi, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/08/02)
"Militants have shot dead a Turkish hostage kidnapped in Iraq, according to a video posted on the Internet. ...
The video shows a man identified as a Turk kneeling in front of three armed men. The man reads a statement in Turkish, identifying himself as Murat Yuce from Ankara, the Turkish capital. He says he works for a Turkish company that subcontracted for a Jordanian firm.
"I have a word of advice for any Turk who wants to come to Iraq to work: 'You don't have to holding a gun to be aiding the occupationist United States ... Turkish companies should withdraw from Iraq," he says.
At the end of the statement, the leader of the three presumed kidnappers takes out a pistol and shoots the Turk in the side of the head. The Turk slumps to the ground, and the kidnapper shoots him in the head twice more. Blood is seen on the ground next to his head.
A black banner on the wall behind the kidnappers identifies the group as the Tawhid and Jihad, which is led by the Jordanian militant linked to al-Qaida, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."

"Top Iraqi Cleric Condemns Church Bombings" (Omar Sinan, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/08/02)
Churches III: "Iraq's top Shiite Muslim cleric on Monday condemned as "hideous crimes" the coordinated bomb attacks on five churches in Baghdad and Mosul that killed 11 people and marked the first major attacks Iraq's minority Christians since the insurgency began.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani said in a statement that the Sunday assaults on Christian churches "targeted Iraq's unity, stability and independence."
The unprecedented attacks against Iraq's 750,000-member Christian — hitting four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul — appeared to confirm community members' fears they might be targeted as suspected collaborators with American forces amid a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.
Many of Iraq's Christians have already fled to neighboring Jordan and Syria to escape violence in the insurgency-wracked nation."

"Bombs Explode Near Churches in 2 Iraqi Cities" (Somini Sengupta and Ian Fisher, The New York Times, 2004/08/02)
Churches II: "At least one church, in a Christian enclave in the Karada neighborhood of downtown Baghdad, was struck as the priest was giving communion. Next door, a Muslim family of five was killed by the blast, which was powerful enough to rip a row of bricks from the top floor of the building and shatter the windows in a courtyard well down the block. A hospital official said a Muslim passer-by also was killed in one of the blasts. ...
Minutes before the Syrian Catholic church was struck, another car bomb exploded in front of the nearby Armenian church during Mass. And inside a seminary compound in Doura, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad, two cars loaded with explosives blew up. A fourth blast was set off across town in an enclave called New Baghdad when a car carrying explosives crashed into the car in front of it and blew up yards from a Catholic church but in front of a mosque. ...
About the same time Sunday evening, in Mosul, about 220 miles north of Baghdad, parishioners were leaving Mass at a Catholic church when a car bomb detonated. An American military report said the blast was caused by a bomb in a four-door Toyota Supra."

"Captured Qaeda Figure Led Way to Information Behind Warning" (Douglas Jehl and David Rohde, The New York Times, 2004/08/02)
"The unannounced capture of a figure from Al Qaeda in Pakistan several weeks ago led the Central Intelligence Agency to the rich lode of information that prompted the terror alert on Sunday, according to senior American officials.
The figure, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, was described by a Pakistani intelligence official as a 25-year-old computer engineer, arrested July 13, who had used and helped to operate a secret Qaeda communications system where information was transferred via coded messages.
A senior United States official would not confirm or deny that Mr. Khan had been the Qaeda figure whose capture led to the information. But the official said "documentary evidence" found after the capture had demonstrated in extraordinary detail that Qaeda members had for years conducted sophisticated and extensive reconnaissance of the financial institutions cited in the warnings on Sunday." (Note: The full article can also be found here.)

Added in archive:
"Guess who forgot Sudan" (Amotz Asa-El, The Jerusalem Post, 2004/07/29)

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

› AOTW Archive



From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

› From 2001/09/11 -



Monthly index

December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

› From September 2001 -



Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



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